The Stiff Upper Lip (20 page)

Jesus.

That was a first for me.

Around here is where everything gets blurry. Somebody was roaring close by—a god-awful sound—and it took me a while to realize it was me. In the street the Pontiac was burning like a torch, and somebody somewhere was shouting my name. That was Valérie, but by logic that could only have come later. Because I also heard sirens, all at once and all around,
WA
-
WOO
-
WA WA
-
WOO
-
WA
like they make them in France, and suddenly from out of nowhere there were men running up the street, a helmeted horde of them, with padded vests and faces shielded in plexiglass, and gas bombs exploding and rifles cracking again, and when I said before that the war was over, I was dead wrong.

All I can do now, though, is try to put it down in its logical sequence.

It was the Law, of course. They were late, and no matter how they managed to gum it over in the subsequent investigations, they could only have been late on purpose. It had to be. You just don't organize and deploy a force like that in two minutes. In addition to the Police Judiciaire and the Anti-Gang Brigade there were C.R.S. too, the Compagnie Républicaine de Sécurité, those para-military parapolice shock troops the state calls out on the great occasions, like when the students riot or the peasants start flinging cow pies at the Elysée Palace. In other words, Leduc's battalions were to be caught in turn, the trappers trapped, but only after their dirty work was done, and no, Virginia, there was no way it could have happened so neatly without it having been planned.

It couldn't have been just Nico's doing either. The press made a big deal out of him later—“Nicholas van den Luyken, the Netherlands aristocrat”—and to hear them tell it, it was the Dutch boy and the dikes all over again. For Nico, it turned out, hadn't stopped at Frèrejean. He'd also called the Dutch Law, and then he'd called enough people in the hierarchy of the Dutch government to make sure the Law did its job. For all I know, he also called the Secretary General at the U.N. The result, anyway, was an immediate and full-scale investigation by the Amsterdam police, who shared their findings with their French colleagues, who, reacting with superhuman zeal and alacrity, arrived at the Pare Montsouris in time to hand Organized Crime its biggest setback since Eliot Ness put in for retirement.

Sic.

All in all, it made a nice story, with a big international angle. The nicer because they managed to make it stick.

But I had another version, even though I never could have proved it. It was in what Bobet had said. It was in the way the Law lost interest in the Grimes murder once Roscoe was cleared; in the way the Atherton story had been “leaked” to the press; in the fact that the Law had showed late at the Place Clichy shoot-out. There are times when the Law always shows late, the more so in a society run by influence, and, looked at this way, it was pretty clear that Bobet had been working us, me and Valérie and Roscoe, as surely as if we'd been on his payroll. In other words, from the Law's point of view it was a case of “Got it, bear! Got it, dog!” and we'll come in to mop up the blood and win the gold stars.

Ugly if you like, but highly efficient when you're short-handed.

Let's take it back, then, to the scene in the street. I remember standing in the shadows of Delatour's house, dazed and disoriented, staring at flames and thinking somebody was calling my name. Then, without any transition, there were lights flashing all over the place and whistles, sirens, and bombs sputtering and hissing in the gutters and men charging through the swirls of smoke with rifles at the ready and plexiglass shields over their faces. I could hear the beating blades of a helicopter, and already, like no time had passed, Leduc's men were coming out of their hiding places, those that could stand or stagger, and choking, puking, their hands over their heads and a lot of years in front of them to recover from the shock. I was amazed that so many of them were still alive. It was like somebody had turned the lights on in the theater before the curtain, and if the gas played havoc among the innocent people in the neighborhood, at least they would live to tell their grandchildren about it. I stood there, transfixed, taking it in without realizing what was happening. But it was a fine performance—the best—and if it had taken the Law the better part of that day to set it up, they had the street cleaned out in a matter of minutes.

Except that they missed one man.

Valérie was shouting at me all right.

“Cage! For God's sake,
stop
him!”

I saw her then, standing in the middle of the gutter. The smoke half-enveloped her and tears streamed from her eyes. She had one hand over her face and the other extended, pointing. She too was choking from the gas, but I caught her message.

Roscoe Hadley, incredibly, was on his feet, alive and running.

For a second I simply watched him. I saw him hurdle the hood of a car and, dodging, weaving, charge down the center of the street toward the swiveling blue lights and the crowd of police waiting at the bottom.

Then I took off after him.

17

I ran through the smoke, choking as I went. I remember the surreal mix-up at the bottom of the street: the jam of vehicles, the flashing blue lights, the jumble of guns and helmets and walkie-talkies, the C.R.S. packed in tight like a phalanx. They grow them big in the C.R.S. and they arm them to the teeth, and when this wild-haired Watusi came charging at them, all they had to do was hit him low, hit him high, and carry him off on their shields.

But they didn't.

He went through them like Julius Erving on the front end of a fast break, and nobody laid a hand on him. He dodged across the street that was jammed up with cars and men, and when he hit the spiked fence that borders the Parc Montsouris, he put one hand on the top railing and vaulted.

By then they'd seen him all right. One of them had a revolver out and pointed when I ran past.

“God Almighty, don't shoot!” I shouted at him in the din.

Maybe he heard, maybe he didn't. Somebody else was shouting, “Make way for the ambulances!” But there were more guns than one, and they hadn't all had the chance to use them, and when Roscoe soared over the fence, a whole fusillade of bullets followed him. And one of them winged him. At least one.

I saw him go down. He fell in a clump on the other side of the fence. But almost immediately he was up again, and running, and he disappeared into the darkness.

And I went after him. For Christ's sake, don't ask me now why I did it. When I went over the fence, I heard the bullets zinging past, but none of them struck home. Then I was down, and the impact sent a shock of pain up my side, and then I was up too, and pounding through the trees under the black sky.

They close the Paris parks at sundown. The custodians make a last sweep, put everybody out, then lock the gates till morning. Maybe there are bums and kids who venture in after dark, hurdling the fences, but the Parc Montsouris, the way I remember it that night, was totally deserted. Nothing but the shadows of the trees, and somewhere some lamps were glowing faintly, and behind me the noise of the battlefield.

And somewhere, up in front, Roscoe Hadley on one wing.

I came panting out of the trees and sprinted across a wide expanse of meadow. Off to the right was the ghostly shape of the old observatory. Then more trees and out onto a path than ran uphill, between a children's playground on one side and a darkened kiosk.

Somewhere on that upslope, though, I had to slow to a trot Then a walk. I was sweating like a pig. Every time I inhaled, pain cut through my side, and my shirt felt glued to the skin. It was like Jeannot's knife had pierced into my lungs and twisted when I breathed.

At the top of that hill, the path went across a small bridge. It gave you the impression of ending on the far side, where there was a stone parapet. Beyond the parapet, the terrain dropped off sharply.

I stopped. I held on to the bridge railing, trying to squeeze off the pain.

Then I spotted him.

I've mentioned the Ligne de Sceaux, or Sceaux Line, before. Sceaux is a suburban town to the south of Paris. An old railroad line runs out in that direction, and nowadays it extends beyond Sceaux all the way to the valley of the Chevreuse. They've long since integrated it into the Paris Métro system, but the tracks still cross the park through an open gully, then tunnel back underground after the Cité Universitaire station.

The footbridge I was standing on crossed over the tracks just at the beginning of the station. Down below stretched the platforms on either side, outbound to suburbia on the right, inbound to Paris on the left. Half-roofs slanted over the platforms, but the tracks were open, some ten meters down. Apparently he'd gone over the bridge balustrade and jumped onto the roof over the inbound platform. That part wasn't much of a drop. He was hunkered in the shadows like an animal, not far from where I stood, and cradling one arm.

Maybe he thought that was as good a place to hide as any. Maybe he was just taking five while he decided what to do next. It was hard to tell, and he wasn't telling.

We stared at each other.

“It's all over, man,” I said from the balustrade. “You've got nothing to worry about any more. The bad guys have shot each other to pieces, the good guys are about to become heroes. It's time to make a deal, Roscoe.”

He didn't answer. He just looked at me out of the dark.

“You've taken a bullet in your shoulder,” I said. “In case you don't know, bullets that stay in the body have a way of festering soon enough. That's how you get gangrene. It's got to come out, the sooner the better.”

Something broke my concentration then. I thought it was behind me, but when I turned to my right, I could see lights bobbing through the trees at the base of the slope. The Law, I thought. From where he was crouched, Roscoe couldn't have seen, but maybe he sensed them coming.

Or something else.

He tensed in the shadows.

It was time to go get him, I decided. While the getting was good.

I swung my legs over the balustrade and dropped onto the roof. At the same time Roscoe rose and short-stepped out to the edge. At the same time the noise that had distracted me, more hum than noise, took form in my brain. There was a train coming up the gully, outbound from Paris.

Roscoe turned his head toward me. For once I could read his mind.

I clambered to my feet.

“Fuck it, man!” I called out to him. “If you're going to run, I'll help you! But not that way! You'll get killed!”

Kneeling, he took the lip of the roof in his hands, then let his body swing out over the tracks. One hand lost its grip almost immediately. He held on by the other, and I heard him grunt with the effort, but then I couldn't hear anything except the train coming in a rush.

I had a moment of panic when I reached blindly for him, but then the panic broke in a brainstorm of relief. The train was
outbound
all right! That meant it was coming on the far side, away from us! That meant the worst it would do was spit dust in his face.

THEN JUMP
,
YOU FUCKER
! my mind shouted at him.
JUMP
!
RUN LIKE A THIEF
!

I was almost on top of him when he let go.

The train reached the station. It came under me with a whoosh, and I felt the roof vibrating up into my knees.

But it wasn't stopping.

(Why the fuck wasn't it stopping?)

And it was on the wrong side, our side.

(Why was that?)

It surged through the station. Seconds later I heard a screech that never ended and the god-awful moan of an emergency horn. By then, though, incredibly, it had caught Roscoe on its front rim like a charging bull, and by the time it finished punishing his body, some hundred meters up the line, there was nothing left of him to die.

18

If I hadn't thought
JUMP
, he wouldn't have jumped.

Or if I hadn't chased him.

Or gone to Amsterdam. Or
Taxi Driver
. Or the Neuilly apartment. Or the St. Germain Drugstore that morning when I'd run out of tobacco.

Sure, and if pigs had wings, then we'd have to pluck feathers out of our morning bacon.

Dumb thoughts, in other words. Dangerous thoughts for somebody in my line.

Maybe that was the problem.

Fact: Even though I'd never gotten around to sending him a bill, Roscoe Hadley had been my client. Fact: I became a kind of instant hero, at his expense.

You could blame this last on the media, but the Law had a hand in it, and so did the popular taste for blood, crime, and sex. So, in her way, did my self-appointed partner. At the least, Valérie was used to celebrity. To judge, she also reveled in it, and the pictures they ran of her, in black, at Roscoe's funeral, were nothing short of stunning.

I missed the funeral. I watched it instead on the 8 O'Clock News, from a hospital bed. They made a hell of a couple, Valérie, live, and Roscoe, dead, and to heighten the poignancy, there were film clips of the mopping up at the Parc Montsouris. I saw Bobet too, and Frèrejean, and their boss, the Minister of the Interior, pushing his way between them to make sure the credit went where it was due. I even saw myself, in the hospital bed, naked to the waist except for bandages, and the newscaster was saying something like: “This intrepid American killed with his bare hands the killer who did this to him.”

Blood, crime, and sex, and they did it up big. Well, it had been a long time since the Paris Law had won such a clear-cut victory against the forces of evil. Or so it could be made to appear. Killjoy that I am, I didn't think the “organized dope trade in France” had been dealt a death blow. At least not a permanent one. Too many farmers in this happy-dust world of ours count on the poppy for their cash crop, and like all it takes to start a “travel agency” is a telephone and a little protection. I even said as much to the interviewer who came with the cameras, but, needless to say, they cut my spoken parts on TV.