The Stiff Upper Lip (2 page)

Her lips went tight then and her head back, like she'd just been slapped. Apparently Valérie Merchadier wasn't used to being turned down.

“No,” she snapped scornfully, “you're not interested. Not when you have all your airline hostesses to play with.”

In this detail, though, her research was a little behind the times. The fact was that since the ugly episode I've referred to, I'd pretty much taken to going to bed alone nights.

I stood up and reached inside my jacket for my wallet, a little startled to find that it was there again.

She didn't move.

“You mean you're not even going to offer me another drink?” she asked, looking up at me.

“No.”

“All right!” she said angrily. She picked up the
Herald
and brandished it at me. “What do I have to do to prove myself to you? Do you want me to find him for you? Robert Harcourt Whatever-His-Name-Is? Will that do,
Mr. Benjamin Franklin Cage
?”

This was the last surprise in her tote bag, but it packed quite a wallop. “B.F.” is as far as most people have ever gotten in deciphering my name.

“Could you manage it in your lunch hour?” I said, playing for laughs, but not, to judge, with much success.

“Forty-eight hours,” she replied tartly. “If I produce him within forty-eight hours, will you hire me?”

I didn't answer. Instead I slipped a fifty-franc note under my Glenfiddich glass and ran for my life.

I can't say I spent the next two days waiting for her to show. Still, some of what she'd said had struck a nerve. Fact: my dice
had
gone cold. If I'd come to Paris on a fluke, more or less, nobody (fact) had forced me to stay. Fact: I liked the place, mostly, only (fact) it had proved tough to crack in my particular specialty, which has to do, broadly speaking, with the gathering and suppression of information. Not that Paris is any less needful of services such as mine. On the contrary, the fix is in here like nowhere I've ever been. But the French have their own way of washing their dirty laundry and that includes keeping outsiders away from the bidet. Which (fact) had reduced me momentarily to certain stopgap measures, like running a lost-and-found for Americans, over- and underfed.

The rub was that “momentarily” has a way of becoming “indefinitely” without your noticing it.

So?

So I noticed it.

I did some busy-work on the Bobby H. affair. Bobby R. wanted the Law kept out of it—apparently his number-one son and heir had a history—but I did some discreet questioning in that direction. I renewed the want-ad for another week. I called the detective agency I'd retained and gave them a pep talk.

All of which I expected would produce nothing. In this I wasn't disappointed.

Oh yes, and one night I got laid. And (fact), in her spare time she did work for Air France.

The voice didn't bother introducing itself on the phone.

“Are you going to be there for another hour?” she said.

Maybe a part of me had been waiting for her at that. And maybe another part of me was relieved that she'd missed her two-day deadline. If only by half an hour or so.

“Well,” I said, glancing at my watch, “it's my lunch hour, remember? I've got a lot of crimes to solve. I …”

“Stay where you are, Cage,” she interrupted. “Just stay right there.”

I started to answer, but the line was already dead.

An hour later, give or take a few minutes, the phone rang again. It was the desk clerk. He sounded a little doubtful about it, but I had two visitors, was it all right to send them up?

Yes, I said, it was all right to send them up.

She'd changed for the occasion, and I could see why the clerk had hesitated. The hat was gone and her hair hung lank to her shoulder blades. She wasn't wearing any make-up, not that that did her any harm, but her jeans looked like they'd been chewed dry. She had on an equally wrinkled work shirt that was unbuttoned to the navel and over it one of those scraggly skin vests of dubious, if animal, origin. The boots had given way to a pair of scuffed black clogs. All that remained from her Café Flore outfit was the black tote, but it too had been knocked around to fit the costume.

The young man with her was of a piece. Allowing for the fact that his hair had thatched out and that he needed a shave, he fit the description I'd had pretty well. He was a tall, skinny kid with freckles and glasses and tired eyes. He wore a pair of rubber sandals that might have once belonged to Michelin radials, jeans, and a neckless baseball shirt with UCLA on it. Put the two of them together and they could have passed for just another couple in that international youth fauna that crawls around under the Paris cobblestones.

“Mr. Cage,” Valérie said while I closed the door behind them, “Mr. Goldstein.”

We didn't shake hands. Bobby H. slumped into a chair without an invitation. Valérie stayed on her feet.

“Bobby,” she said, looking down at him, and though she was in profile I could see her bite her upper lip a second before continuing, “I hate to break the news to you this way, but Mr. Cage was hired to find you. By your old man.”

The message didn't seem to register. She repeated it. He glanced up at me, then at her. Uncomprehending, then comprehending. Whatever she'd told him, it clearly hadn't been that. He squinted. Then he took off his glasses, closed his eyes, and rubbed at them with his fingers. Then he started to laugh, still rubbing. Then he stopped laughing.

“No shit,” he said. He gazed up at her, shaking his head.

“I'm sorry, Bobby,” she said, “but that's how it is.”

He looked at me again, like he was seeing me for the first time. Maybe he was measuring his chances. In any case, he put his glasses on again, then sank back into the chair. And laughed again. And stopped laughing again.

“You cunt,” he said to Valérie, shaking his head again.

I expected some kind of plea, but I didn't get it.

“O.K.,” he said to me flatly. “Like you've found me. So what do we do now?”

“Now we call your old man,” I said.

“And then what?”

“That's up to him.” I glanced at my watch. “The only trouble is: it's a little early, with the time change.”

“What time is it?”

“In Connecticut? About six forty-five in the morning.”

“Oh, that's not too early, you know? He'll be up. He wouldn't miss the seven-twenty train, not in a blizzard. He'll be drinking his cocoa now. Would you believe that? His stomach can't take coffee in the morning. Well, go ahead, then. Call him.”

He gave me the number for good measure.

My telephone is on an end table just past the couch. I went over to it and sat down.

“What are you?” said Bobby H. “Some kind of private eye?”

“More or less.”

“What they call a shamus?”

“They used to.”

“Then tell me one thing. How much is he paying you?”

It wasn't any of his business what I was getting paid. On the other hand, I thought it might do him some good to find out what he was worth, if only to his father.

I told him.

“The cheap mother,” he said. He repeated the figure, sneered at it. “I'll tell you what, Mr. … Excuse me, what did you say your name was?”

“Cage,” I said.

“I'll tell you what, Cage,” he said, grinning at me suddenly. “What would you do if I doubled it?”

“And paid me in what?” I asked. “Brown sugar?”

“Brown sugar” is what they call the happy dust they're peddling these days on the street corners of Europe.

“Like whatever you want,” said Bobby H. coolly.

I thought about it, but not for very long.

“One client per family,” I said, picking the receiver off the hook.

“Put it down, Cage,” Valérie said.

“
Oui, Monsieur
?” the hotel operator was saying.

“I want to call overseas, to the U.S.A. The number's …”

“I said put the phone down, Cage.
Now!
”

For the past minute or so, I'd let Valérie out of my sight. I'd made the same kind of mistake before. Now I turned toward her. God knows what else she carried in the black tote, but now she had a miniature and snub-nosed popgun in her hand. It was pointed at me. It didn't look very serious. On the other hand,
she
did.

I glanced at Bobby H. He didn't seem to know any more about what was going on than I did.

“Of all the goddam things,” I said, or some such immortal remark.

“
J'écoute, Monsieur
,” said the hotel operator in my ear.

“Never mind,” I told her, “I'll call back later,” and hung up the phone.

I sat there a minute. Nobody moved. Then I stood up.

“All right,” I said to Valérie, “suppose you put away the popgun and tell us what the hell this is all about.”

“I'm good with popguns,” she said to me levelly. “You take another step and I'll have to put a hole through your kneecap. Now stand where you are. You, Bobby,” she ordered, not taking her eyes off me. “Search him.”

“But I thought …”

“I said
search
him!”

Bobby H. came up behind me and went through my pockets, tossing the items he found on the couch. If I'd had a switchblade hidden in my rectum he wouldn't have found it, but otherwise he did a pretty creditable job.

Anyway, I don't own a switchblade.

“No weapons,” he said when he was done. “Not much of anything, you know?”

“Bring me his wallet.”

This was getting to be a habit. Bobby H. took my wallet over to her. She went through it, leaving everything but the cash. This she held out in a wad to him.

“Here, take it,” she said. “Count it.”

He did. It came to a little over a thousand francs.

“Take it if you want,” she said. “It'll pay for your time.”

“But I thought …”

“I said take it,” she repeated peremptorily. “Then split. I'll hold him here for half an hour. Then you're on your own.”

He stuffed the money into a jeans pocket.

“But listen, Val, don't you want me to …”

“Half an hour,” she repeated. “Don't ask questions. I'll explain it later. Just split!”

And so he split, did Bobby H.

She waited, listening, until the elevator door opened and shut in the hallway. Then she walked slowly across the space between us, stopping a step in front of me.

The popgun was still pointed at my chest, but I saw the vertical creases on either side of her mouth.

“How am I doing,” she said softly.

“Not bad for a beginner,” I said, but …”

She closed the remaining space between us. The popgun lowered as she came, and then I couldn't see it any more. She put her arms around my neck. She went up on tiptoe, her body climbing up mine, and she kissed me slowly, tonguing, like time had gone out of style.

Not bad for a beginner.

Later on, I asked her how she'd found Bobby H. This brought out the even white teeth as well as the vertical dimples, and the skin crinkled seductively around her eyes.

“Secrets of the profession,” she said.

“
Touché
,” I said. “But why bring him up here if you were going to let him go?”

“I didn't know that ahead of time. It only occurred to me once we were here.”

“What changed your mind?”

“You both did.”

I didn't get it. She didn't strike me as the typè to have gone soft on Bobby H.

“Didn't he offer you double what his father had?” she said.

“That's right.”

“And you turned him down. Were you just being moral? Or was it that the price wasn't high enough? Supposing, though, that we let him go and the double became triple. Or more.”

“What makes you think that? What makes you think he won't just disappear again.”

“He can't.”

“Why not?”

“For one thing, he's making too much money.”

I'd been right about that, as it turned out. Bobby H. was aptly named, even if the sugar trade wasn't really his action.

“That's for one thing,” I said. “What else?”

“Well, for another,” she said, smiling up at me, “he thinks he's in love with me.”

But later still she said: “Now let's talk terms.”

She was sitting up in bed, smoking a cigarette, the sheet pulled up to her waist and the sweat drying on her breasts.

“What terms?” I said, stoking my pipe.

“The terms of my employment. We agreed that if I delivered Bobby to you, you'd hire me.”

“
I
agreed to no such thing. Besides, I seem to remember that you undelivered him.”

She eyed me sexily.

“Oh, come on, Cage, stop being so tough and intractable and hard to get.”

I eyed her in return, not to be tough and intractable, but because something had just struck me, call it an insight, and I was looking for corroboration.

“Look,” I said. “You've put on quite a show. The best. But you can't tell me you went to all that trouble just to get a job.”

She sighed.

I lit a match, lit the pipe, shook the match out.

“How did you guess?” she said quietly.

“Secrets of the profession,” I replied. “But maybe you'd better tell me the rest of it.”

“O.K.,” she said, her eyes holding mine. “The rest of it is that I want you to keep someone I know from getting killed.”

2

I'm trying to think of an American equivalent. It was a little like running into a skirt in Los Angeles who was freaked out on bicycle racing. And not Tour de France bicycle racing either. More like the Tour de Rhode Island. Imagine, if you can, a red-blooded, liberated American female who couldn't tell Kareem Abdul Jabbar from Doctor J. but could rattle off the first ten finishers in last summer's Tour de Rhode Island.