The Stiff Upper Lip

by Peter Israel

  “Where he wasn’t wanted.”

  That too lay there a moment.

  “Please remember, Monsieur,” Dédé Delatour said evenly, “our relationship is based strictly on le basket. You supply the players, we arrange for contracts and payments. It is a small business now. It could be a much bigger one.”

  “Could be?”

  “Will be.” The flash came back into his eyes. “We are creating something from the bottom,” he said, gesturing, “The European project is getting people excited. The right people. We will have our European league. It will take time, that’s all. We must all be patient. But once this little … episode … is out of the way, our control can only emerge reinforced.”

  “Yes,” I said. “But meanwhile there’s a problem.”

  “What problem?”

  “Hadley.”

  “That’s what I don’t understand.”

  “Somebody has been setting him up for Grimes’ murder.”

  “Setting up …? Ah, yes, the police. I heard you spent yesterday afternoon with them yourself.” The idea seemed to amuse him. “You were the one who discovered the body, weren’t you?”

  “That’s right.”

  “An unfortunate coincidence.”

  “Maybe so, maybe not. But was it a coincidence that somebody tipped the police off to Hadley?”

  “Did they? Perhaps that was just a little joke.” He chuckled at it. “Our police have no sense of humor.”

  “Neither did Grimes when he was slit ear to ear.”

  “I don’t see …”

  “Simply that Grimes was murdered with a knife, and one of your boys seems pretty handy with the cutlery.”

  “You mean Jeannot?”

  “I don’t know his name. The little guy. And here’s another coincidence that may or may not be one. The woman Hadley was with at the time. Now she claims she never saw him yesterday.”

  “What woman is that?”

  “Come on, Monsieur Delatour. Her name is Marie-Josèphe Lamentin.”

  “Ah, you mean Greemse’s whore?” He dismissed her with a waving gesture. “That one will say whatever she is told to say, Monsieur.”

  The message, then, was clear enough. Whatever the real reasons for Odessa Grimes’ murder, it had been used as a warning. Against me, presumably, and the people I presumably worked for. For a minute there I thought I had Roscoe all but off the hook.

  All but.

  “Now, Monsieur,” said Dédé Delatour, “I’ve answered your questions. I’ll tell Jeannot you made the connection, it will flatter him. And rest assured, the whore can be taken care of, and also, if need be, the police. But I, in turn, have something to ask you.”

  “Go ahead,” I said.

  “Why haven’t you disposed of Adlay?”

  It was the $64,000 Special, the one we’ve all been waiting for, and, logical as it may have been from Delatour’s point of view, I had no ready answer.

  “Hadley is our business,” I said finally, keeping my voice level.

  “Yes, of course,” with a magnanimous wave. “Just as Greemse was ours. But who is our, Monsieur? Who is us?”

  There was suddenly nothing for me to say or do. It was his hand, and his to play.

  “I mean, I’ve heard what Adlay did to you people. Revenge lasts a long time, and in our business there’s only one way that revenge is exacted, isn’t that so? Yet you’ve kept him alive, and that I don’t understand. Unless, that is …”—with a knowing smile—“… Adlay’s concubine has had something to do with it?”

  Marie-Josèphe, I noticed, was Grimes’ whore, whereas Valérie got off as Hadley’s concubine, but I had no time to dwell on the semantic implications.

  “A resourceful bitch,” said Dédé Delatour with a certain savor. “Right down to her hideaway. Who would ever think of looking in Neuilly for an American nigger who measures two meters?”

  “You’re pretty well informed,” I said.

  “It’s my business,” he answered. And so it was, and I was duly impressed. But then he had to go and lay it on, in true macho style. He gave me a run-down on the last few days, not only of Roscoe Hadley’s movements and his concubine’s, but also of mine. Which touched my professional nerve. I mean, I like to think I can spot company with my eyes shut and plugs in my ears.

  “Then what now?” said Dédé Delatour.

  “That’s our business,” I repeated.

  “So I’d have thought. But it occurs to me now that maybe you need help with Adlay. It wouldn’t be difficult. Unless, that is—much as I’d hate to think it—that he was trying to make a separate deal with you?”

  I shook my head.

  “Alors …?”

  There it was again, inviting an answer.

  The ploy I tried may have been a dumb one, but it was the only one in sight.

  “It may be,” I said, staring at him, “that we don’t want to dispose of him. It may be that we have other uses for him.”

  He didn’t take to that, not at all. The eyebrows went up thickly, and at the same time his brow tensed.

  “What uses?”

  “Suppose,” I said reflectively. “Just suppose all we want is for him to go on playing basketball?”

  It was a dumb ploy, as I say, in that it was dangerous, and dangerous because I could only see half the implications. But the half I could see had distinct possibilities. Like what it might mean, when the small business of le basket became big and the betting began and the fix went in, to have an experienced fixer like Roscoe Hadley already seeded into the game, at star level, with the right kind of control on him. I was pretty well convinced that Dédé Delatour could be made to see it too, and not only Dédé Delatour but, if necessary, the California Connection that supplied him with basketball bodies. And even—given his precarious circumstances—Roscoe Hadley.

  But then the telephone had to go and wreck it.

  It was an intercom system, giving off an intermittent buzz instead of a ring, and the apparatus was on a small desk in a corner of the room by the window. I could only see Delatour’s face in profile when he answered, but it was clear from his tone that somebody had fucked up. Badly. Whoever was at the other end of the line apparently wasn’t the one who’d fucked up, but he had to take it as if he was. And Dédé Delatour knew how to dish it out all right. When he was done, he listened a moment, his mouth tight, then barked an order and banged down the receiver. Or started to. Then he pulled it back, jabbed a call button, ordered, “Come up here now!”

  Then he laid the receiver down. Gently. Then gently took a cigar from a humidor while he gazed down on the garden, and ran the cigar back and forth under his nose, and put it down.

  Gently.

  When he turned back to me there was a crooked smile on his face, not the one he wore at dinner tables. I realized it was his way of telling me the fuzz was off the peach.

  The message registered, but too late. By then the door to the room had opened and the Belmondo came in. He closed the door behind him and stood next to it. He had his cannon out, and at a nod from his boss, he pointed it at me.

  “I don’t get it,” I said. “In fact, if you ask me, this is a hell of a way to treat a partner.”

  “You’ve been telling us fairy tales,” snapped Dédé Delatour.

  “Fairy tales?” I said. “I don’t have the foggiest idea what you’re talking about.”

  The eyebrows again, up, but not for long. The smile again, the crooked one. It cracked the skin on his cheeks.

  “I don’t understand what your game is. Yet. But do you really want me to believe you don’t know what’s happened?”

  “Believe what you want,” I said, feeling his tension.

  “Your friends. The nigger and the blonde bitch. While we’ve been talking. They’ve gone, disappeared. We’ve lost them.”

  Dédé Delatour was quick on his feet, quicker with his hands, and I didn’t have time to duck. He came at me with two slaps, forehand and backhand, short, sharp, and stinging.
>
  I caught them flush in the face. I saw stars all right, white on a black field, then black on a white, and the next thing I saw, when I started forward, was the Belmondo coming in from the side, gun barrel high.

  Also the last thing, for a while.

  Give me a V for Valor if you must, but the Belmondo was quick too, and he hit harder than he was supposed to in the script.

  6

  I never did like being flim-flammed by well-heeled blondes. Neither, I guess, did Dédé Delatour. The thing was: I had nothing by way of compensation. Whereas Dédé Delatour had me.

  I had plenty of time to think about the injustice of this, that long night in his dungeon. At least during the early parts of it. After a while, I didn’t think about much of anything.

  A word about the well-heeled blonde, though. She was born Merchadier, and if the name means nothing to you, to the average Parisian it’s as familiar as his morning croissant. Valérie’s father was just the latest in a long line of Maîtres Merchadiers who have pleaded before the French bar, with consistent success and celebrity and, in the case of Valérie’s father, a penchant for unpopular causes. Valérie’s mother was a Yankee beauty who’d surfaced in Paris after the war and stayed long enough to find a husband, bear a child, and win a handsome alimony settlement which, in the time-honored way of Yankee beauties, she’d subsequently cashed in for a title. Valérie grew up, thusly, on the estate of a Scottish laird. She was back in Paris, though, in time for the barricades of May ’68, took simultaneous degrees in Law and Political Science, then was shipped off to Harvard Law School, which she quit after a year to run off with a youth variously described as a radical anarchist, a communard, and a garage mechanic. This exotic venture foundered somewhere south of Katmandu, where there were no garages and the money ran out and the (respective) families had to be prevailed upon for plane tickets to their (respective) homes. Ever since, Valérie had kicked around the world, though mostly around Paris, where she was as at home with the chic discothèque crowd at Chez Castel as in the joints north of Les Halles, where the coffee has mud at the bottom and the kif, as it’s called, is flown in daily from Casablanca. Kicking around, in addition, with a series of unpopular causes of her own, who had as common denominator a certain talent between the sheets.

  A daughter of the century, in sum. If you want to add that she had a living-up-to-papa hang-up, well, that’s your privilege. As it would be to say that among her “unpopular causes” would have to be listed black basketball players from the streets of Los Angeles.

  My last words to her had been to keep Roscoe in the Neuilly apartment till she heard from me. Her last words to Delatour’s Neuilly stake-out had apparently been “Haut les mains,” which means “Reach for the sky” in local jargon. How she’d spotted him, or coaxed him up to the apartment, I could only guess. Like Delatour had said, she was a resourceful bitch. But by the time they were finished with him, Roscoe had apparently slam-dunked him into the bathtub and they’d taken all his toys. Including his car keys.

  So much for last words.

  Dédé Delatour’s dungeon wasn’t really much of a dungeon. It was a downstairs room with a window fronting on the garden. There weren’t any bars on the window, and all that separated the garden from the street beyond it was a spiked wrought-iron fence. It would have been easy for me, when I came to, to go out the window, jump the fence, and head off into the beautiful Paris night. The only trouble was that when I came to, my hands were tied behind a chair and my ankles to the chair legs and Dédé Delatour’s muscle were taking turns beating out the “Marseillaise” on the only body I had.

  I won’t go into the more sordid details. It’s not the first time it’s happened to me. Hoods the world over seem to take naturally to beating up on people—it’s good, I guess, for their muscle tone—and there’s not much difference in techniques. Suffice it to say that they hurt, particularly Jeannot, the little wimp, and that it was a long, long night. But there wasn’t much for me to do but say “Ouch” and tell them whatever fairy tales I could think of and pass out when they got carried away in their enthusiasm.

  The best of my fairy tales was that we’d all been caught up in a big misunderstanding, that whatever they wanted to do with Roscoe Hadley was fine with me, only that they should count me out, I had a lost-and-found service for overfed Americans to worry about and no special interest in basketball or the dope traffic or Odessa Grimes’ murder or whatever it was that had got their boss so exercised. But the truth has a way of paling under such circumstances, meaning that they didn’t go for that one overly. Whereas the one they wanted to hear—about where Hadley and the girl were—I didn’t know. This pissed them off, and whenever the little wimp got really pissed off, he’d pull my chair back by pulling my hair and belt me in the mouth, or now and then in the Adam’s apple.

  A long night, like I say.

  It ended. Even the longest ones do.

  Put it that Dédé Delatour didn’t like eating his breakfast alone.

  When they took me back upstairs, I remember, he was drinking coffee in a raw-silk dressing gown. The dressing gown was wine-colored. There was a tray on a coffee table and two silver pots on the tray, one for coffee, one for milk, and a plate with some crumbs on it. Dédé Delatour, looking fresh like a flower, was lighting up his first cigar of the morning. He was his old affable self again. Whereas for me, I hurt so much, all over, that it was a kind of relief not to feel a thing below my wrists and ankles.

  “Did you have a good night?” he asked when I’d been dumped on the divan across from him.

  “I’ve had worse,” I managed. My voice wobbled at a high pitch, like it had been changed back. My upper lip was novocaine-stiff.

  “How about some coffee?”

  It seemed like a promising idea. I nodded. Somebody poured me a cup and I leaned over to take it. I couldn’t handle the cup, though. It bobbled in my hand, and I spilled the lot on his mahogany. Nobody gave me a refill.

  “Now,” said Delatour, dispensing with the niceties, “what is your interest in Adlay?”

  “I don’t have any interest,” I said.

  Apparently this was the wrong answer. Delatour motioned with his cigar and somebody slapped me on the side of the head. For some reason, the slap helped straighten out my larynx. It hurt, my larynx, but I found I could use it.

  “I wanted to keep him from getting killed,” I said.

  “By whom?”

  “People in California. Your partners.”

  “Why did they want to kill him?”

  “You know why.”

  “I want to hear it from you.”

  I remember it hurting me to talk, and figuring that he knew it hurt. But whenever I muffed my lines, the cigar waved and there was a slap on the head. A double bind, I think they call it in psychology. In any case, the dialogue, minus slaps, went something like this:

  CAGE: He was once involved in an ugly business. Back in California.

  DELATOUR: What kind of ugly business?

  CAGE: Fixing games. He was a college basketball star.

  He and some other players were accused of fixing games.

  DELATOUR: Do you mean they lost intentionally?

  CAGE: No. It worked on points.

  DELATOUR: Points?

  CAGE: You bet a team to win by ten points. It wins by eight. You lose.

  DELATOUR: An interesting idea. A team doesn’t have to lose, it just wins by less?

  CAGE: That’s right.

  DELATOUR: And that’s illegal in America?

  CAGE: If you do it on purpose.

  DELATOUR: And Adlay did this?

  CAGE: They were accused of it. There was what’s called a grand-jury investigation. It made a lot of headlines. The other players all testified that they were innocent. It got them banned from basketball, but it kept them out of jail.

  DELATOUR: What about Adlay?

  CAGE: He was the one everybody was waiting for.

  The big fish. He was supposed to be t
he star witness.

  DELATOUR: What happened? Did he confess?

  CAGE: No. He didn’t show. He disappeared.

  DELATOUR: Disappeared? Why was that such a bad thing?

  CAGE: It meant he was guilty by implication. Also it gave the grand jury, and the public, the impression that certain people had helped him disappear. Such as your partners. This was very embarrassing to them.

  DELATOUR: I can see that. But what happened to him then?

  CAGE: He stayed disappeared. He left the country, changed his name, stayed away from basketball. Until now.

  DELATOUR: Until now?

  CAGE: Until now.

  DELATOUR: How long ago was it that this happened?

  CAGE: Four, five years.

  DELATOUR: But they—these people in California—still want him disposed of? After all this time?

  CAGE: You said it yourself: ‘Revenge lasts a long time.’

  This seemingly innocent quotation brought the cigar into motion again. It was Jeannot, the little wimp, who started for me. He was a tireless bastard. I can see him still, the flat head, the quick eyes in a small, impassive face, as he moved in to do what he did best. It freaked me out. I tried to ward him off and at the same time I hollered. And not only hollered but blubbered, stammered, yammered, and all the other things grown men aren’t supposed to do in public. And I shouted at Dédé Delatour:

  “If you don’t believe me, call them! For Christ’s sake, call them and ask! All you’ve got to do is pick up the fucking phone!”

  Delatour smiled at me—not the crooked one but the dinner-table special.

  He called off the wimp.

  “I already have, Monsieur,” he said. “Last night, I didn’t want to—one never likes to disturb one’s associates with trivial questions—but you obliged me to. With your fairy tales.”

  “All right!” I blurted out “And what did they say?”

  He shook his head from side to side, then leaned forward and stubbed out his cigar.

  “It’s all the same to them,” he said, straightening up. “Adlay—or whatever his name is—is old business.” The smile came back, bigger and flashing of teeth. “They don’t give a royal fuck what happens to him. As long as it happens in Europe.”