The Stiff Upper Lip (11 page)

I repeated it.

Her voice relaxed then. That was passing strange. Anybody listening in with the right equipment could have long since traced the call, but it didn't seem to bother her. Unless, that is, she was calling from outside the country. She chattered on. She was filled with solicitude about what I was going to do that night. I said I thought I'd go to bed. She said if I went to bed then, I'd be wide awake at three in the morning and nobody to talk to. She said I should take a cold shower, eat a proper meal, and go to the flicks. Hadn't I said I'd never missed a Di Niro flick? She said there was a Di Niro flick playing in the Latin Quarter, original version, I'd have plenty of time for the midnight show if I got started. Then leave a call for eight, and I could make St. Quentin in an hour and a half maximum.

“O.K.?” she said.

“I'll give it some thought,” I answered.

There was a moment's pause.

“O.K.,” she repeated. Then, in French: “
Je t'embrasse, Cage. A demain
.”

I heard a catch in her voice, but I had no way of telling if that was genuine or not.

“I embrace you too, baby,” I said in English.

I ran the conversation through after I hung up. Then I checked the movie schedule, took another shower, and washed the excess Glenfiddich out of my pores. Sure enough,
Taxi Driver
was playing again in the Latin Quarter, original version. I'd missed it, first time around. It had gone over big in Paris.

The thing was: I'd never seen a De Niro flick.

9

I got to the theater a little after eleven. It was one of those four-in-one jobs on a little street just off the Boulevard St. Michel. There was no line waiting for
Taxi Driver
. It had turned colder during the day, there was a chill wind swirling papers in the gutters, and, like the lady had said, the next showing was at midnight.

I looked around for a restaurant. There's no shortage in that neighborhood. Every other storefront calls itself one, but the best you can say about them is that theirs is not the cuisine that made France famous. Finally I went into a self-styled Greek joint, meaning mainly that the remains of some animal were turning on a spit in the window. I ordered a steak and French fries, a green salad, and waited for something to happen. Nothing did. The steak and French fries showed up about half an hour later, minus the salad, and in the end I left most of them for the next customer.

Back at the theater, the
Taxi Driver
line had begun to form. I saw nobody I recognized. I got on at the end and became, thereby, part of the captive audience.

Don't get me wrong, I've got nothing against panhandling. I've been stopped on the street and told my share of hard-luck stories, and if the youth of this world are so up against it that they want to try their luck on me, there's at least a chance I'll kick in. But that I should have to listen to their fake Dylan voices for the privilege and their one-chord guitars, well, like they say, there's always TV.

The pair of troubadours working the
Taxi Driver
line were quaint enough as such couples go. The guy had on a thick wool cap pulled down over his ears, a wool sweater that looked like his kid sister might have knitted it, a pair of hugger jeans, and sneakers with no socks. He stamped his feet a lot, though whether to keep time or because of the cold was hard to tell. The girl was a little bit of a waif in a long, shapeless cotton dress and goatskin vest, and at a distance she looked like it was way past her bedtime. Less so, close up. What was quaintest about them, though was their instruments. The girl's was a recorder. The guy's might have been a recorder too, except that somebody had bent the end of it into a curve. With disastrous results for the tone. I felt like taking up a collection to get them to stop, and put them down mentally for a couple of kids from the sticks who'd decided to try their luck in the big town and needed somebody to tell them they weren't going about it the right way.

Finally the ticket window opened and the line started forward. By this time the guy with the bent recorder was playing alone, bareheaded. The girl was working the line with his cap. When she got to me, I fished in my pocket, annoyed but resigned, and dropped in a franc. Instead of moving on, though, she jammed the cap against my chest.

“I already gave,” I said in French.

She glanced up at me briefly and spoke, low but clear, then turned away to the people behind me.

I'd expected some wisecrack about Parisian cheapskates. What I got, though, came out in flat American English.

“When the flick starts,” she'd said, “go to the john.”

I bought my ticket and went inside. I had a few minutes to think over the pros and cons of it. The lights were on and they were showing some commercials on the screen, like for chocolates that wouldn't melt in your hand, while a couple of usherettes patrolled the aisles with their candy baskets, trying to peddle the stuff. They weren't getting much business. Down in front to the left of the screen were twin doors with a neon sign above, saying: “
SORTIE
—
TOILETTES
.”

The theater filled up as much as it was going to. The usherettes disappeared with their baskets. I glanced around for people who might have seemed more interested in me than the screen. I didn't spot any. This didn't mean a thing. Then the curtains closed on the commercials, and the lights went out, and then they parted again on the first images of a cabbie weaving through traffic in nighttime New York.

The guy who'd been playing the bent recorder was waiting for me just inside the twin doors. He had his cap back on.

“Follow me,” he said, and he took off down a deserted cement corridor.

I ran after him, but he was quicker with his feet than with his instrument. I thought I heard footsteps behind us. The cement corridor forked off into another one, then up a flight of stone steps. I took them two at a time, chased by the image of the Law and Delatour's wimp sprinting behind me, and by the time I got to the top the recorder player had already banged open the metal exit door with his shoulder and was holding it open for me, panting and gesturing.

“You ever ride on one of these things?” he shouted at me.

We came out into the shadows, around the corner from the theater entrance. Parked on the sidewalk was a shining Yamaha 350. The girl who'd been with him before was nowhere in sight.

“Where are the helmets?” I hollered back at him.

“Fuck the helmets!” he answered, and jumping into the saddle, he tromped on the starter. I climbed on behind him, grabbed him around the waist, and off we went in a roar of wind and engine.

The truth is that, back in my ill-spent youth, I'd mucked around with the two-wheelers for a while, but out where I came from the roads were long and mostly straight, and paved with macadam, and you could see the bumps coming up a mile away. Whereas in Paris, half the gutters are still cobbled, and at the intersections that don't have lights it's priority to the right, which means, practically, first come first served. Then too, I'd never ridden behind a death-defying nut like Billy Wheels. He stopped for nothing, moving or stationary, dark or lit, and he gunned at the red lights, and though there was no way we could have been tracked short of helicopters, we were way over on the other side of Boulevard Arago before he deigned to turn on his headlight, and he didn't slow down then either. It was Paris-By-Night all right, but a wild, tire-squealing, squeeze-your-nuts version, with the wind blasting you off your perch and the lights of the night city zooming in on you like flying saucers on a kamikaze run.

We came out somewhere around the Porte de Gentilly. They're building big out that way, and the dark high-risers loomed in on us like tomorrow's dinosaurs. Then it was the Périphérique, the autoroute that circles the city. We went under it, and into the southern suburbs, and quickly I was lost. Totally lost.

Maybe that was the point.

Out beyond the Périphérique, Paris gives way to a ring of what were once small towns—Malakoff, Montrouge, Ivry—but now form an undistinguished magna of warehouses, small industries, and cheap housing, old and new. It's where the onetime Paris proletariat now mostly hangs out, and as nowhere a place as you could hope to find.

Maybe that was the point too.

We wove and swerved through unlit streets, and emerged finally on a block of small one-family houses, known locally as pavilions. My driver slowed, then stopped, and balanced us with one foot in the gutter.

He didn't turn off the engine.

“Here's where you get off,” he said over his shoulder.

“What about your?”

“I've got to pick some people up.”

Lucky them, I thought.

“Go on,” he said, “walk right in. They're waitin' on you.”

I got off unsteadily. It was nice to be still alive, but the nerve ends in my pins were jumping like they weren't so sure.

“Who's they?” I called after him.

By then, though, he was already at the corner, and I watched the red of his taillight disappear into the blackness.

The pavilion in question was a small cube of a house with the shutters pulled to and blacker than the suburban night. It was separated from the street by a fence and a narrow yard. The fence had a gate in it. The gate was open. I walked in, through creepers and vines and an undershrubbery that as near as I could tell was mostly garbage. Somewhere a cat yowled, and far off I could hear traffic. Then there was a scurrying in the undergrowth, like I'd disturbed the local night life. And then nothing.

Silence.

I found the front door, listened, hunted for a bell, found none. I knocked. I listened some more. I knocked again, louder.

Nothing.

Maybe it was a surprise party.

I gave the doorknob a twist and a push.

The door gave, reluctantly at first.

I walked into a hallway. The hallway was dark, empty, but light diffused dimly out of an adjoining room. It came from a single bulb in the ceiling, but the bulb had been wrapped around with cloth and all that got through was a weak purplish glow. I could see layers of smoke hovering, immobile, in the glow. They were as thick as in the basement smoker of the old Yakima Elks Club, only the Yakima Elks never lit up stuff like this. The smell was thick, acrid, pungent, like grass burning on a prairie. You had a choice between a free high and asphyxiation.

I made out clumps and humps on the floor under the lowest layer of smoke. At first I took them for cushions, but they were human all right, single and clustered, frozen into the postures of the sleeping or the stoned. Then one of them stirred at my feet, a bent one that was held in place by the junction of floor and wall. It lifted a head, pointed an arm in a vague gesture.

“In there,” it said.

“In where?” I answered, my voice suddenly loud. This set off a stirring among the clumps, but the one that had directed me sank back into never-never land.

Across the room, I could pick out a thin pencil line of yellow light at floor level, with the outline of a door above it. I made my way over, careful to avoid stepping on the heads.

The bright light of the second room set my eyes to blinking. Apparently it had been the kitchen, back in the days when kitchens doubled as family rooms. And maybe it still was, because there was an old-style single sink in a corner, plus a cooker and sawed-off refrigerator, both old models. There were dishes in the sink too. But the homiest touch of all, in the junk and clutter, were two more Yamahas parked against the far wall.

In the center of the room, under the ceiling globe, was a big oval wood table that had seen better days. It was strewn with papers, some of them weighted by what looked like a toolbox.

Sitting behind the table, his glasses up in his hair, his head down, was one Robert H. Goldstein, better known to me as Bobby H.

“Better close the door, Cage, and sit down,” said Bobby H. He didn't look up. “I'll be with you in a second. Help yourself if you smoke the stuff. It's Dutch grade.”

He had a pocket calculator out on the table next to him and punched figures into it from small slips of paper, then transcribed the results into a long cardboard-bound ledger, then crumpled the slips of paper and dropped them onto the floor. On my side of the table were the remains of a loaf of hash about the size of a brick. It had been wrapped in aluminum foil, remnants of which were still folded over the end of it.

“Or stand up if you want,” said Bobby H., concentrating on his work.

I pulled out a chair and sat down. There was something about him that affected me that way. I took out my tobacco pouch, stuffed a pipe and lit up. He wrinkled his nose at the smoke. Later on, he said something to the effect that tobacco could kill you.

He looked about the same as the last time I'd seen him, a skinny Jewish kid with freckles and tired eyes. He had on the same neckless baseball shirt, with a red-and-black lumberjack over it. I knew he was twenty-four, but any law-shy saloonkeeper would have asked him for proof of his age.

“I hear my old man's upped the ante on me again,” he said, still not looking up.

I didn't say anything. I wondered idly how he knew.

“I talked to him, you know? I called the mother up. Like it was his birthday.”

He finished with the last of his slips, crumpled and dropped it, then pushed some papers together and piled them on top of the toolbox, then the ledger on top of the papers.

“The mother can't accept the idea that I'm making a bigger profit than he is.”

“What's all that,” I asked, gesturing at the pile. “Toting up the day's take?”

“Not just the day's,” he said with a laugh. “You let the paperwork pile up, it … But
hey!
”

He'd just glanced at me. Now he adjusted his glasses and took a closer look.

“Hey, man, you know you look like somebody's been working you over with a pick and a shovel?”