The Stiff Upper Lip

by Peter Israel

  “Not much. They call him Loulou in the underworld. He’s old, an old-style caïd. He was in the Resistance, or so they say.”

  “What’s a caïd?”

  “A boss. It’s an Arab word.”

  “The same as ‘big bonnet’?”

  “In a way.”

  “Is Delatour one too?”

  “No. There’s a difference.”

  “He’d like to be, though, wouldn’t he?”

  “Yes.”

  “And Leduc would be somebody he’d have to muscle out of his way?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you know he was dealing in dope too? Leduc, I mean?”

  “No.”

  It stood to reason, though. The drug traffic in France isn’t organized by any one person, and Dédé Delatour had come up with a pretty clever scheme to push his way in. Only Leduc had subverted part of the scheme, by bank-rolling Odessa Grimes himself. So Delatour had had to punish Leduc, by way of Odessa’s murder, and Leduc had retaliated, I figured, by giving Atherton to the Law. (“We have our sources of information,” Bobet had said.) Whereupon Delatour had upped the ante drastically, as befit a caïd-on-the-make, and now there was Leduc blood splattered all over the streets of Paris.

  So far, it appeared, all the escalation had been on Delatour’s part. But unless I missed my guess, or the Law stepped in first to stop it, the next move was up to Loulou Leduc.

  I’ve referred to my modus operandi. What I had in mind, broadly speaking, was the gathering and suppression of information, a technique I used to be pretty good at in my California days. The way it looked to me on the rainy road to Amsterdam, Roscoe had two things going for him: one was his body; the other was what he knew, or could be made to appear to know. I was hopeful of using the second to save the first. In the meantime, though, until such time as we could make a deal, it seemed like a good idea to keep the body at Nico van den Luyken’s.

  Roscoe thought so too.

  Valérie may have thought otherwise, but it was hard to know what she thought that morning, other than that she was down on the male sex in general. Not that you’d have known it to look at her. She was wearing a skirt-and-sweater combination in a dusty-rose jersey wool, with a long tunic to match, dark leather boots, and white trench-coat, and her hair glistened blond in the gray air. I thought again about Nico’s resources and complimented her on the fit of her clothes.

  “They ought to fit,” she said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “They’re mine,” she said, her jaw jutting firmly forward.

  The drawer opened, the drawer closed.

  End of conversation.

  We came into Amsterdam off the Hague-Rotterdam autoroute and wound our way across the canals into that old and seedy part of town around the Zeedijk which is fobbed off to the tourists as the Sailors’ Quarter. It’s pretty colorful of a summer night, when the red-lit whores display their offerings in ground-floor windows, and maybe you could even find a bona-fide seaman among the nocturnal flotsam of tourists and international youth, but on a gray morning in late fall, with the rain falling again in wind-driven gusts and the cobbles awash in sodden debris, well, you’d settle for Wallace Edner too.

  Wallace Edner had the build and the stoop of Roscoe, but his playing days were already over. Lines as deep as gullies surrounded his mouth, and the blood that speckled his eyeballs looked like it had come to stay. We found him in the same saloon where Roscoe and Valérie had tracked him down. It was a mock-Western joint where the dust gathered like tumbleweed under the bar rail and the daylight had to fight its way in. At the back end of the bar, Wallace Edner was just emptying a shot of whiskey into his mid-morning schooner of beer.

  “Good morning, Wallace,” I said.

  He looked at me, gloomy and red-eyed, then at Valérie. If he recognized her right off, though, he didn’t show it.

  “We want to see Mr. Lee,” I said.

  “Mr. Lee?” he said. “Now, which Mr. Lee would that be?”

  He took an experimental sip from the glass mug. He swallowed, grimacing a little, then, when that stayed down, helped himself to a larger slug.

  “I didn’t know there was more than one,” I said.

  “There’s lots of Mr. Lees,” he answered.

  I took out a hundred-florin note, worth about forty U.S. dollars, and laid it on the bar. I ordered another round for Wallace Edner, and beers for Valérie and me. The beer was better than passable, but Wallace Edner pushed his aside and simply added the second shot of whiskey to the schooner in front of him.

  “That narrows it down some,” he said, grinning. His mouth had a lot of metal in it, with gaps between. “What you say your name was?”

  “I didn’t,” I said. “I don’t know that it would mean anything to Mr. Lee. Just tell him I’m a friend of Loulou’s.”

  “Loulou’s?”

  “Leduc,” I said. “Monsieur Leduc, from Paris.”

  “I don’ know about any Ledook.”

  “That’s all right. I think Mr. Lee will.”

  “If we’re talkin’ about the same Mr. Lee.”

  “I think we are,” I said. “The one I’m talking about is in import-export.”

  He liked that. He repeated it, “import-export,” and the wrinkles carved his face and he laughed a gap-toothed laugh. Then he took another hefty swallow. Then he said:

  “What’s your shit, Mister?”

  “What do you mean?”

  He glanced at me, frowning a little.

  “What you buyin’? You don’ got to see the big man in order to buy.”

  “I didn’t say I was buying. I said I wanted to talk to Mr. Lee.”

  He liked that less. He said his Mr. Lee was a busy man, he didn’t have the time just to talk. In fact, he liked it so little that he wasn’t sure after all that his Mr. Lee and mine were the same Mr. Lee.

  I caught his message. It cost me another round of drinks and a new hundred-florin note to make him like it better.

  He went out into the street finally, ducking his head at the doorway. He was gone awhile. When he came back, we’d moved to a table, and he blinked his eyes in the dimness, swiveling his head till he found us.

  “You got wheels?” he said, standing over me. He rested the fingertips of one hand on the tabletop.

  “Yes. Why?”

  “It’s wet outside. A man don’ like to get wet. I tell you what. You bring yo’ wheels back about three, a bit befo’, I’ll take you to see Mr. Lee.”

  I glanced at my watch.

  “Three’s a long way off,” I said.

  “I tole you,” said Wallace Edner. “He’s a busy man.”

  We had time to kill. We killed some of it riding around the city in the Beetle, and more of it on foot. We changed some more of Bobby H.’s francs in a bank. We went to a shop I’d been to before on the Leidsestraat. I bought a pipe there and an umbrella across the street. For lunch we went to a famous downtown beef joint which is something like a hundred years old and five million steaks old. And all this time, from the moment we left the Zeedijk saloon, the tails stayed with us. There were two of them in a car, at least one on foot when we were walking, and they made no great effort at concealment. I didn’t like it particularly, but I wasn’t surprised. I mean, even in a city as wide open as Amsterdam, you didn’t just walk in and ask to see a leading dope merchant without arousing attention.

  We went back to the bar a little before three. Wallace was wrapped around another boilermaker, and, to judge from the boozy effluvium he gave off, he hadn’t even taken time out for lunch.

  I told him we were ready.

  He shook his head mournfully at me.

  I’d gotten it wrong, he said. We may have been ready, but I was the only one he was taking.

  “Roscoe’s girl stays here,” he said.

  The magic name had come up at last.

  Between the name and the way Wallace shrugged when I started to argue with him, my stomach jumped like a frog. It was one of t
hose what-have-I-gotten-us-into feelings, like when you’re up on the high bar and they’re taking the net away. But Wallace had set up the appointment for me only, and that was the way it was going to be.

  Else, he said, nobody was going nowhere.

  I looked at Valérie.

  “It’s O.K.,” she said, smiling at me. “I’ll wait for you here. The ones who’ve been following us all day will take care of me.”

  I hadn’t realized she’d spotted them too.

  The smile may have cost her an effort, but it was a nice smile. I managed to return it.

  The Prinsengracht is the last of Amsterdam’s inner ring of canals. A few hundred years back, in the heyday of the Dutch Empire, it had been a beehive of trade, but nowadays the narrow brick merchants’ homes are mostly banks and galleries and the boats on the tree-lined waterway are carting tourists. It was about the last place, in sum, you’d have expected to find someone in Mr. Lee’s line, although there was a nice irony in the idea that the old function of import-export had returned to the canals. Twentieth-century style.

  The front was a travel agency specializing in the Orient, and probably if you’d walked in off the street you actually could have bought a round trip to Rangoon. As for me, I was given the five-star reception. Two over-sized Easterners met me at the front door, a handsome brass-knockered affair, and led me up a narrow wood staircase with polished steps and polished mahogany banisters and polished brass knobs. The escorts were pretty polished too, and so was the way they frisked me before they ushered me into Mr. Lee’s office.

  This was a large room, with scrollwork on the ceiling, a Persian rug on the floor, a wood fire burning in the grate, and a view out over the canal. It had a massive wood desk which shone like a mirror, and several captain’s chairs grouped around the desk for visitors. The desktop was completely bare, except for Mr. Lee’s hands.

  It was hard to imagine him in a pigtail. From his clothes to his accent, he was pure Savile Row. He had on a dark-blue suit, a thin-striped blue-and-white shirt with white collar, a figured silk tie held in place by a pearl-topped pin. His cufflinks had pearls too, and the silk tips of a handkerchief protruded from his breast pocket. But what struck me even more was his age. Or lack of it. Even allowing for the proverbial inscrutability of his race, he couldn’t have been more than in his mid-thirties, and maybe a good deal younger. There wasn’t a line on his broad face. His eyes were dark and the whites clear, his hair jet black and straight. He had too a disconcertingly calm air, the kind you’d associate more readily with yellow-bearded ancients who’ve had their brains softened by the poppy. It was like when the world blew up around him, young Mr. Lee would still be sitting there, his hands folded on the gleaming desktop, waiting for business.

  “Good afternoon, Mr. Cage,” he said without moving. “Sit down.”

  I wondered briefly where he’d gotten my name. He answered it for me, in his way.

  “You’ve come up in several connections recently,” he said. “I thought we should meet.”

  “I did too,” I said. I sat down across from him. “In that case,” I went on, “we can dispense with the niceties. I didn’t come here to buy. I imagine you know that. I’ve got something to sell.”

  I waited for him to ask me what. He didn’t. Evidently the question was superfluous.

  “Roscoe Hadley’s silence,” I said.

  He answered without moving a muscle: “What makes you think I would be interested in that?”

  “I’m not sure you would be, directly. But some of your customers are.”

  “I do business with a great many people,” he replied.

  “Like Didier Delatour? Like Jean-Louis Leduc?”

  “Names,” he said blandly. “In fact, what my customers do and don’t do outside our transactions is not my concern.”

  “Isn’t it? Well, in case you haven’t heard, your French market’s in the process of going up in smoke. From what I hear, the streets of Paris are being turned into a battlefield. Is that no concern of yours?”

  The shrug, if there was one, was limited to his voice.

  “France is a turbulent country, Mr. Cage. It has been before, it will be again.”

  Sure, I’d come there on a long shot. There was nothing that obliged him to deal with me, and I knew it. But around about then his see-no-evil hear-no-evil style started to get under my skin.

  “Come on, Mr. Lee,” I said, “you’re a businessman, your business depends on stable markets like any other. It’s not my lookout, but if you ask me, you’ve let them do a pretty half-assed job of organizing France. Maybe you think now that you can wait till the smoke clears and trade with whoever survives, but you’re running a hell of a risk that nobody’s going to survive. Because, more than likely, the ones who aren’t dead are going to end up in jail.”

  “That might be true,” he said imperturbably, “or false. But I don’t see what it has to do with what you have to sell.”

  “Oh, no?” I answered. “I’d’ve thought you’d be better informed. In case nobody’s told you, Roscoe Hadley has been in the thick of it. He knows where the bodies are buried, the live ones as well as the dead. He knows who’s been running dope for Delatour, for Leduc as well. He’s got the network in his head, Mr. Lee, the basketball network but not just the basketball network, names and addresses, and not only in France. He’s even got yours, Mr. Lee. I’m here because he told me where to go. If you ask me, he’s got a lot to do with it, a whole lot, and if he spills it to the wrong people, he could put the dope trade in Europe back into the Dark Ages.”

  Whatever was true in this, or false, it visibly failed to move him.

  “All right,” I said angrily, pushing back my chair. “If you’re not interested, I’m going to keep looking till I find somebody who is. Even if it means the Law.”

  I stood up and headed for the door. I meant what I’d said. Whether Roscoe liked it or not. Whether I liked it or not.

  Sometimes you’ve got to take what you can get.

  “One moment, please,” his voice said behind me.

  I turned.

  The only change in his posture was that he’d unfolded his hands. They lay flat on the desk now, immobile, immaculate.

  “It is true that I’m not interested,” he said, following me with his eyes. “But in the event that I might know someone who is, what precisely is your proposition?”

  “I told you,” I said, still standing. “I’m ready to sell Hadley’s silence. To the highest bidder.”

  “What do you want in exchange?”

  “Immunity and protection,” I said. “For Hadley, for Valérie Merchadier, for myself.”

  “Immunity and protection from what?”

  “From the police, for one. And from your customers.”

  “How do you propose that these things be guaranteed?”

  “That’s for you to work out—or your customers. But it shouldn’t be too difficult. By way of an example, let me give you one element that might be part of the package. Supposing that all Hadley wants is to go on playing basketball in France. As long as he can do that and stay alive and well, then he’s happy, then everybody’s happy. Now let’s suppose, in addition, that he were to make out a deposition, a detailed one, concerning the drug trade, with all the names and addresses spelled out. Let’s suppose, even, that such a deposition already exists, in several copies, each one signed and witnessed and notarized, and that these copies are already in safe hands, with instructions, should anything happen to him, on where they are to be sent. Do you follow me?”

  It would be nice to say that he narrowed his eyes, bad-guy style. He didn’t, though. He simply looked at me, palms flat, inscrutable.

  “While we’re in the realm of hypothesis,” he said finally, “let me suggest another one.”

  “Please do,” I said.

  “Suppose that someone were interested in buying, not Hadley’s silence, but Hadley himself? With the same kind of immunity and protection you have talked about, for yo
u and the woman? As well as a cash payment, the sum of which would be a subject for negotiation?”

  It was my turn, then, to keep my lids up. And the grin off my face.

  We studied each other. He was waiting for me to answer. I let him wait.

  “How much, Mr. Cage?” asked the Chinaman.

  I shook my head.

  “No sale,” I said. “Hadley himself is not for sale.”

  He seemed to be considering that for a minute. Again he didn’t move, unless it was with a part of his body outside my line of vision.

  “You are a short-sighted man,” he said.

  “A dumb one, you mean,” an American voice blurted out behind me.

  It all happened so fast I can’t give the sequence of events. Maybe the Chinaman had a signal button under his feet, maybe he did it by thought waves. I hadn’t so much as heard the door open behind me.

  I recognized the voice as I turned, even before I saw him. By then, though, it was already too late.

  There was a desk between me and the Chinaman, but nothing but space between me and Johnny Vee and his muscle. Space and a blunt-nosed submachine gun.

  We stared at each other.

  “Hello, Johnny Boy,” I said. “You’re a long way from Malibu, aren’t you?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “And it always seems to be you that brings me over to this shithole.”

  The reference was to events that I’ve described elsewhere. I won’t go into them now. I’ve described him before too. He was good-looking, I guess, in a flashy, guinea way. He’d been born into the California mob and had risen steadily through the ranks, but more, I’d always thought, out of nepotism than by merit.

  I’d known him a long time. Suffice it that he’d never made the top ten on my Favorite Gangster list.

  “Lee and Vee,” I said, looking from one to the other, “a Chinese laundry with Italian pressers. But I must say,” focusing on the Chinaman, “I’d’ve thought you’d be more discriminating in the people you got involved with.”

  Mr. Lee didn’t answer.

  “You slant-eyed son of a bitch,” I said. “You were playing with me the whole time, weren’t you?”

  His only reaction was that he stood up.