The Stiff Upper Lip

by Peter Israel

  “Now your turn, punk. Out! Nice and easy. Then wait for them. Then go ring the fucking bell.”

  I opened the door, ducked my head, and stepped out onto the curb. The house was dark, the shutters drawn. It was so quiet you could have heard Aznavour singing at the Olympia.

  If Aznavour was singing at the Olympia.

  I glimpsed Roscoe and Valérie coming around the hood of the Pontiac. Presumably the muscle was crouched by the fender behind them. Presumably there were others hidden in the shadows across the street, behind the parked cars. But I couldn’t see them.

  I turned, ducking my head back into the car.

  “What’re you, chickenshit, Johnny?” I said. “Aren’t you coming with us?”

  Maybe it was the taunt, maybe it was Valérie’s needling, maybe he’d always had it in his plan. I’ll never know. But he came out then. Oh, he came out all right, but too fast, ducking his head, gun arm first.

  I grabbed his arm and pulled with all my force, shouting, “GET DOWN! GET DOWN!” at the others.

  I heard him curse. He tripped, his body came lunging forward, and I swung from the heels.

  It had been a long time since I’d hit anybody as hard as I could. It felt good. Hell, it felt sensational! I was still shouting “GET DOWN!” and he skittered on the sidewalk and his body did a kind of crazy, arched catwalk bodies aren’t made to do, and it tees me off, even now, to have to admit I had help.

  The help could have come from the house or from across the street; it could even have been aimed at me. But I heard the crack of it, sharp like the snap of a whip, and it caught lohnny Vee smack in the crosshairs.

  Somebody, somewhere, had panicked and pulled the trigger. Johnny Vee went down. And if there were no bugles, that was all the signal anybody needed.

  I heard the shutters bang above me. I dove for cover. I hit cement hard and tried to crawl into it, and when I ran out of cement, I crawled into dirt, into plants, ivy, into brick, anywhere. Because by then the very roof of the world was falling on my head.

  There was somebody home all right. When that single shot cracked out, the whole building came alive in a firestorm as quick and lethal as World War III, like the house itself was one multibarreled gun trained on the street and pouring down a hail of lead on anything and everything, animate, inanimate, living, dead.

  At first, once Johnny’s “surprise” had blown, they had the edge too. The fire field was theirs, also the protection of the house, while the attackers in the street were pinned down behind improvised cover and forced to shoot uphill into a rain of terror. Their advantage, though, was shortlived. When equalized it was that Dédé Delatour was a fixed and immobilized target, attacked from the rear as well as the front. And what made it unequal was that Leduc’s hybrid battalions had weapons you can’t buy at your corner gun shop.

  Grenade launchers, for one.

  I hadn’t been around live grenades in a long time, not, in fact, since that other war I’ve referred to, the forgotten Big K, where everybody who could bugged out, and everybody who couldn’t shit his pants. I’d as soon not remember it. Suffice it that my instinct was the same: to burrow, to dig, digging into dirt and brick with my hands, feet, body, teeth, digging like a crazy mole. Because every time I lifted my head out of the muck, it was like the building, the street, the whole nutty world was shaking and cracking like a Jell-o mold caught in an earthquake.

  Nowadays they go in for some pretty sophisticated varieties: “offensive” grenades, and “defensive,” and grenades that only blind and deafen. These, though, were just the old-fashioned killing kind, and a couple of them bounced off the façade of the house and exploded in the street behind me. The world shook, all right, and I felt the heat when a car went up in flames. But some of them got inside through the windows, and when they went off, in a series of sucking, ear-splitting implosions, World War III, from a strategic point of view, was as good as over.

  I wasn’t there to see Delatour and a couple of others try to fight their way out through the stone statuary in the back garden, and I wasn’t there later when the Law tried to count the holes in their bodies. What I did see, though, like marionettes in some flickering dream, was grown men running out of the front door and being gunned down before they got to the sidewalk. And even one, his hands above his head and shouting, who was held upright for what seemed a long last lifetime by bullets stitching his body.

  The battle had become a pigeon shoot, sickening and deadly, and what was amazing about it was that one of them managed to get through.

  I saw him do it.

  He came through the doorway in a low, wisplike trajectory and flung himself into the shadows, to where your hero was getting up into a dazed crouch. He was more shadow than human, a little wimp of a shadow, and somehow the bullets missed. He was making an awful throat sound, caught between a whimper and a keening. He had his cutlery in his fist, ready to rip at the first human object he met. And the first human object was me.

  I’ve talked about self-preservation. I believe in it more than I do in heroics. I’d rather talk than fight, rather duck, rather dig, and this for the simple reason that, nine times out of ten, the medals got awarded posthumously. But there are moments, thankfully rare, when talking, ducking, digging do you no good. When the cornered rat brings out the cornered rat.

  Jeannot sprang at me. He got in one good swipe. It came from the bottom, and he aimed it low, and if I’d been standing still, he’d have opened me up from groin to chin. At that I heard a ripping sound, but if part of rip was my own skin, I hardly noticed. Because by then I had his neck in a lock; that was what I wanted. He slipped, and I slipped with him. He was strong for his size, as slippery as he was strong, and he slashed with the knife, and a couple of times he must have struck home, but that didn’t matter either. I had his neck. It wasn’t judo or kung fu; if you’ve got to give it a name, call it the old Yakima grapple, but it was what I wanted. And I squeezed with everything I had, squeezed with a guttural, dam-bursting emotion that was close to joy. And by and by the knife dropped out of his hand.

  When I let him go, he slipped out of my arms like a bag of stones.

  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 g
o 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.