The Stiff Upper Lip

by Peter Israel

  The news hit me like a ton. It was like somebody had just told me: Hey fella, the world’s not round, it’s a cube and right over here’s where you fall off. I’d been flim-flammed all right; and beaten to an omelette for my pains, but right then I couldn’t think by whom. Oh sure, by a blonde, but also by a spade called Roscoe, and maybe Odessa too, defunct, and in addition by everybody who came into my head, from the Bobby Goldsteins, father and son, to old Mrs. Hotchkiss in the Third Grade. By everybody and nobody in sum, and they were all there in my head, having a fine old rampage, and I coulnd’t put any of it together then, there was too much noise from the party inside.

  Dédé Delatour was trying to tell me something. It had to do with his partners in California, Johnny Vee and friends. Something to the effect that I wasn’t part of their organization, that they hadn’t hired me after all. Oh, but they knew me all right, our paths had crossed before. And Delatour was asking me some question, asked it more than once. But the numbness was leaving my lips now, and they felt big like rubber tires, and somewhere between them and my brain there must have been an accident because the traffic was piled up for miles in both directions.

  “I asked them what they wanted me to do with you,” Delatour was saying. His eyebrows were up. It looked like they were held there by sky-hooks. “Alors …? Don’t you want to know what they said?”

  By way of answer, he had his arm out, fist extended. Then he inverted his fist in the classic gesture: thumb down.

  Hail Fucking Caesar.

  He seemed to find this a real rib-tickler. He threw his head back and roared.

  Around in there, somehow or other, the choreography changed. Don’t ask me how, but one minute the table was between us and the next it wasn’t and we were both on our feet and Dédé Delatour was glad-handing me like we’d just met.

  It was crazy, kind of. We were both about the same height, but I had the impression I was standing on my ankles.

  “Don’t worry about it, mon vieux,” he was telling me. “I like you too much for that. I think I’m really starting to like you. Besides, California is … what? Nine hours, ten thousand kilometers away? A long way off. We can take care of our own affairs, can’t we. Besides, if they don’t want Adlay, I do. Isn’t that right? I think I want him more than you do, more even than the police. Isn’t that right?”

  “That’s right,” I said.

  It was crazy, like I said.

  “Alors, mon vieux. We’re going to find’ him, aren’t we? You and I? I’ll be looking for him too, of course, but I’ve the feeling you’ll be the one who’s going to find him, yes I do. And that you’ll bring him to me. Yes?”

  He actually put his arm around my shoulder. Then he motioned to the Belmondo, who was holding up the wall next to the door. The Belmondo stuck his cannon inside his belt and stood aside, and Dédé Delatour walked me to the door in his dressing gown, with his arm around my shoulder.

  “Then it’ll be time for us to have another talk,” he said, patting me. “I’ll be looking forward to it, mon vieux. About Adlay’s future, yes? But about yours too.”

  I don’t know how I got out of there, less about how I got home. Only that I did.

  The desk clerk at the hotel had some messages for me, plus an unpleasant piece of news for which he kept trying to apologize. He also wanted to know if I wanted him to call a doctor.

  I told him to forget about the apology. Also about the doctor.

  All I wanted to do was go to bed.

  This I did.

  7

  They were there when I woke up. The one called Frèrejean was mucking around at my dresser. The other was just coming out of the bathroom in his shirt sleeves. He had one sleeve rolled up, like he’d been checking the drains. Neither one of them so much as blushed when they saw me looking at them.

  I was lying on top of the bed with all my clothes on. I’d been dreaming. It was one of those dreams where you make up a story to make the pain go away, and it does, but then when the story’s over, the pain comes back, so you have to make up another story. Only this time Monsieur le Commissaire Frèrejean was standing by my dresser and the plumber was just coming out of the bathroom, and the pain was back and throbbing, and there was no other story.

  They were in no rush. The plumber put on his suit jacket and they went into the sitting room and waited while somehow or other I got myself into the bathroom. I surveyed the victim rockily. All in all, you could say that Delatour’s muscle had done a pretty professional job. My left eye was mostly closed, and the skin around it had already started to turn blue. Otherwise there wasn’t much visible, and when I pried my lips apart, my teeth were standing in ranks, all present and accounted for. No broken bones either, only forget-me-nots of hurt whenever I breathed or swallowed. I took a hot shower, then a cold one, and did what I could to repair the damage. Then I dressed, slowly, and by the time I got out into the sitting room I was feeling some approximation of human.

  Also hungry-human.

  It was the middle of the afternoon. Mentally I tipped the desk clerk for having held them off that long.

  “Is it going to take a while?” I asked them.

  That would depend on me.

  “Well, long or short, I’m going to eat something. Do you want anything?”

  They would accept coffee, yes, but nothing else, thank you. I ordered up coffee for three and sandwiches for one, plus various other things that came into my mind while I pictured the sandwiches. But when the waiter brought it all up, about all I could get past my swollen gullet was the Glenfiddich.

  “Well,” I asked them, “did you find anything interesting, looking around? Or were you just browsing?”

  “Where is Adlay, Monsieur?” Frèrejean countered blandly. “Where is Valérie Merchadier?”

  Them too. It was getting to be a refrain.

  “I take it you’d have found them if they were here.”

  “That’s not what I asked you, Monsieur.”

  “I know it’s not what you asked me. I also know you gave me twenty-four hours to produce him. Well? I failed.”

  “You led us a merry chase, Monsieur,” said Frèrejean imperturbably. “Now it’s over. You will please answer my question.”

  “I don’t know where they are.”

  “You did yesterday, didn’t you?”

  “That’s right. Until early afternoon.”

  “Where were they?”

  I gave him the Neuilly address. Not that it would do him much good now.

  He jotted it down in a pocket-sized notebook.

  “Then what happened?”

  “Then I went off to try to prove Hadley hadn’t killed Odessa Grimes. I ran into a little trouble. I’d told them to stay in the apartment. They didn’t. I haven’t seen them since.”

  “You realize, I presume, that at the least you can be charged with obstructing a police investigation?”

  This pissed the hell out of me. There I was staring at them out of one eye, and like it would have been clear to anybody but a blind Mongoloid that I hadn’t been obstructing anything lately except with my face. But they either couldn’t see it or wouldn’t

  “Go ahead,” I said. “Charge me.”

  Up to this point Frèrejean had done the talking, but the next question came from the plumber.

  “Did you?” he asked.

  “Did I what?”

  “Did you prove he didn’t kill Odessa Grimes?”

  “Yes. At least to my own satisfaction.”

  “How?” This from Frèrejean again.

  “When Grimes was killed, Hadley was otherwise occupied.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means that he was fucking a woman.”

  “Valérie Merchadier?”

  “No. Her name is Lamentin. She was Grimes’ girl friend, at least some of the time. Marie-Josèphe Lamentin. You may have some trouble getting her to admit it. About Hadley, I mean. I did. But, then, your methods are better than mine.”

 
I spelled the name, started to give the address. But Frèrejean wasn’t writing.

  “We already talked to her,” he said. “She corroborates what you’ve said. She’s given Adlay his alibi.”

  An interesting, if surprising, piece of information. Assuming, as I did, that Dédé Delatour had set Roscoe up, then something had happened in the last twenty-four hours to change his mind.

  “When did you talk to her?” I asked.

  “That’s no concern of yours,” Frèrejean replied. “The question remains: if Adlay can prove his innocence, why has he run away?”

  “I don’t know. Roscoe’s a big boy. Maybe he’s afraid you won’t give him the chance. He can read the papers too. Or maybe there are other people who want him as much as you do.”

  “What people?” asked the plumber.

  “What people what?”

  “Want Hadley?”

  “Dédé Delatour, for instance,” I said, with a casual shrug. If I expected surprise from them, though, I didn’t get it Frankly, I didn’t expect it On the other hand, they didn’t even make a show of asking me who he was.

  “You’ve talked to Delatour?” asked the plumber.

  “That’s right, can’t you tell? Suffice it that it wasn’t my idea.”

  It was around then that I began to realize the plumber wasn’t just a plumber. For one thing, he could get around the H in Hadley without making it seem like he was blowing out the candles on a birthday cake. Then there was a kind of deference between the two of them that suggested equality. I mean, the plumbers in France have strictly walk-on, non-speaking parts, and you’ll never find a mere police inspector taking over the conversation when his boss is in the room. Also, when the Police Judiciaire want to talk to you, they like the homier atmosphere of the Quai des Orfèvres, whereas Bobet, as his name turned out to be, was sufficiently at home in my hotel suite. In other words, Bobet wasn’t Police Judiciaire, and with his next question I could make a fair guess at placing him.

  “What do you know about the drug traffic in France, Monsieur?”

  For the record, the official name of his branch goes like this: L’Office Centrale de la Répression du Trafic Illicite de Stupéfiants. Translated literally, that’s The Central Office for the Repression of the Illicit Traffic of Stupefiers. To put it in simple English, Bobet was a nark.

  “Come on,” I said, grinning lopsidedly at him. “You don’t mean to tell me you found some grass in my underpants!”

  I guess it wasn’t much of a gag. I was the only one grinning, and it hurt me to grin.

  The truth was, though, that I didn’t know a hell of a lot about the drug traffic in France. From what I’d read and heard, it sounded fairly flourishing, except that latterly the action had begun to play havoc with the balance of payments. By which I mean that if the French narks, with some help from the Americans, had managed to put a lid on the export of the made-in-Marseille varieties, mainly heroin, from an import point of view the joint was as wide open as a slab of Gruyère cheese. And this despite some penalties if you got nailed that made the American statutes look positively permissive.

  Bobet largely confirmed this. In fact, to hear him tell it, France was the only country in the world with a dope problem.

  “France is a hexagon, Monsieur,” he said. “We have three thousand kilometers of land frontiers with six different countries. Four of them are members of the Common Market, which complicates our task immeasurably. Thirty-seven million foreigners visit France each year. You may enter France by air, sea, train, road, or on foot. We control what we can, when and where we can, but our service is understaffed, and our colleagues in the customs are overworked.”

  “Well,” I said, “I’m sorry to hear that, with all the unemployment too. But if you’ve got it in mind to offer me a job, I’m afraid I have other plans.”

  Again, not a smile.

  “Under these circumstances,” Bobet went on, “we’re not interested in the couriers, the street pushers, the middlemen. We can’t afford to be. Cut off a branch and the tree continues to grow. Rather it’s those at the top we’re after, the organizers, the financiers, the …”

  “The big bonnets?” I said. “Isn’t that what you call them in French.”

  “The big bonnets, yes. The trouble is that this takes time, time and effort, lengthy investigations which often lead us outside the confines of the hexagon. Unfortunately, our counterparts elsewhere aren’t always as cooperative as they might be.”

  This was the same old song I used to hear in the States: We could close down the dope trade in a week if we only had a little help from——(Thais) (Turks) (French) (Mexicans) choose one.

  “Tell me,” I said. “Is Dédé Delatour a big-enough bonnet?”

  “For example,” Bobet continued, “we know that Grimes was involved in the traffic. We knew it for some time, but we decided not to intervene. We hoped he might lead us further. Now his death has precluded that possibility and complicated the situation.”

  “By which you mean that Monsieur le Commissaire here needs a murderer?” I glanced at Frèrejean, but if he resented the allusion, he didn’t show it “If so, I’ve got a pretty solid candidate.”

  “We also have reason to believe that Hadley was involved,” Bobet said, “a conclusion justified by several proven facts in our possession. In addition, they were teammates and they traveled a great deal together, not only inside but outside the hexagon. We even have one specific instance: a flight from Charles de Gaulle to Schiphol Airport, Amsterdam, less than two weeks ago. Grimes and Hadley were known to be carrying a considerable sum of liquid French currency. We know where they took it, and to whom it was paid.”

  I didn’t ask him how they knew, but he made it official by quoting the figures out of a notebook of his own. The sum was indeed considerable.

  Bobet put the notebook away and looked at me, dark eyes in a long, lean face.

  “The point is this, Monsieur,” he said. “We are obliged to move quickly now, and it is imperative that we talk to Hadley. In exchange we are ready, formally, to concede his innocence in the Grimes killing.”

  “Who is we?”

  “Myself and Monsieur le Commissaire Frèrejean, on behalf of our respective services. We are furthermore willing, if we are unable to guarantee total immunity from other prosecution, to take into consideration any cooperation he gives us.”

  Where I came from, this was called plea bargaining. A tricky business at best, because it puts you in the position of trusting the Law.

  “What about other kinds of immunity?” I asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Oh, say from Dédé Delatour, for instance.”

  The other times I’d mentioned Delatour, the conversation bad gone right on. It was obviously a no-no, like farting in public. But this time: silence.

  Finally it was Bobet, with a glance at Frèrejean, who broke it:

  “All right. Perhaps you had better tell us about your relations with Monsieur Delatour.”

  “I thought you’d never ask,” I said.

  I laid it on them then, with all the trimmings. The Glenfiddich helped. I mean, in hindsight I might have hesitated over certain details, because even if the man in question hadn’t bragged about it, it would have been obvious that a Mafioso of Delatour’s visibility would be plugged into the Law. In Paris, he would virtually have to be. But the forget-me-nots, you could say, were too fresh. I put it all in, then, including Delatour’s American connection, and while I was at it, I even offered up the candidacy of Jeannot, the wimp, for the murder of Odessa Grimes. Then, when I was done, I refilled my glass and lifted it in a toast:

  “If Delatour isn’t a big bonnet in the dope trade, Messieurs, may pure malt whiskey turn to milk.”

  Again: silence.

  Again Bobet, with a glance at Frèrejean, found something to say:

  “The drug traffic in France isn’t organized by any one person, Monsieur.”

  Sure, I thought, and you can grow grass in
a window box.

  “You’ve made some serious charges, Monsieur,” Frèrejean cut in. “Unfortunately, there’s not a one of them that would stand up before a court. Now, if Adlay is willing to cooperate with us, we will grant time full police protection.”

  “Full police protection,” I said. “For how long? For the rest of his life?”

  “For as long as is necessary.”

  “And Mlle. Merchadier?”

  “Mile. Merchadier too.”

  “And what about me?”

  “Yourself as well.”

  I wasn’t overly impressed. “You haven’t done much of a job of protecting me so far, Monsieur le Commissaire.”

  “You haven’t asked us, Monsieur.”

  If this was an attempt at irony, you’d never have known it from his expression.

  “And you still expect me to be able to deliver Hadley?” I said.

  Frèrejean shrugged.

  “Don’t forget, Monsieur Cage,” he said mildly, “you are here in Paris as a guest of France: This is a privilege which can be withdrawn at any moment.”

  It was an old threat. His colleague Dedini had used it on me before, had even taken me as far as the airport with it. But Dedini had done it with style, gruesome as the style was, whereas Frèrejean came on like pure modern functionaries, with all the gray indiffference of their breed.

  There it was, in any case. If I could find and produce Roscoe for them, then presumably I could go on living and working in Paris—under “full protection” to boot. Otherwise it was the airport at Roissy and a one-way ticket—if Delatour didn’t get to me first.

  Not much of a deal, but there it was.

  Bobet, though, had something to add, and I was pretty sure Frèrejean was none too happy about it. Suddenly, in fact, I felt a tension between them.

  “We’re going to take you into our confidence, Monsieur,” Bobet said, “We will rely on your discretion. It would be highly damaging to our work if this were known prematurely—by the press, for instance—but our counterparts in Barcelona are holding a man called Atherton, William. He was arrested yesterday, disembarking from an Iberia flight, airport of embarkation: Charles de Gaulle.”