The French Kiss (10 page)

As it was, he got discovered.

Her name was Judith Springberg, people in the know called her “Cookie,” and even I had heard of the family, if not this particular member. Like most jews who crossed the ocean early enough, the Springbergs had made their pile more than once, and in more than one way. Later on, the sources of their loot went mostly anonymous—it's safer that way, for taxes as well as anti-Semitism—but for all those Springberg heirs to devote their lives to the best causes, you know they've got it stashed away somewhere.

In any case, Cookie Springberg's chosen cause was Art. Or rather: Artists. To hear Elliott Grunen tell it, she'd been born with a checkbook between her legs and at one time or another she'd tried to buy them all. She too was a habitué of the Cedar Tavern scene; she too had gotten to be a legend in her own time. But once they'd used her, once they'd been fed and sheltered and sucked and suckled by Cookie Springberg, the artists left her dry, with nothing to show for it, so the legend went, but a shrill voice and jangled nerves and, along the way, a collection that would have had most museum directors slavering outside the service entrance of her mansion.

She was thirty-six and John Blumenstock twenty-eight when they got married. Put charitably, it was love at second sight; put Elliott Grunen's way, they were each other's last hope. Because if Cookie Springberg bought Blumenstock, she also made him. Overnight the good painter became the great young American painter. Even what had worked against him before turned to glamour in her hands. That he was shy or private made him a man of mystery. That he'd stuck to Abstract Expressionism when others had dropped it made him courageous. That he was Midwestern Protestant made him vintage American, like corn on the cob. Suddenly here was a genuine home-grown product, tailor-made for the media. His first one-man exhibition, in the right gallery on New York's 57th Street, was sold out before it opened.

They stayed together some six years, a fertile period as far as his work was concerned. But then, at least according to the official history, John Blumenstock blew it all. He took to booze, then to dope. He wrecked one friendship after another, and what little work he did was sheer fad-following. The villain of the piece, the one responsible for his downfall, was an aggressive and opportunistic young art critic. Her name? Helen Raven. It was Helen Raven who'd pushed him into disastrous experimenting, Helen Raven who'd run through his fortune, Helen Raven who'd driven him in the end to suicide. Because if the cause of death had gone down in the books as accidental, it was common knowledge that Blumenstock had driven his car off a bridge in a drunken rage, and the fact that Helen Raven had been the one to survive, with only a face scarred for life once they'd finished picking the windshield out of it, was just the last irony in the tragedy.

The only trouble with the official history, as passed on by Elliott Grunen, was that its author was Cookie Springberg Blumenstock. Because from what I knew as well as some of the things Grunen said, there were other ways of looking at it. In any case, for several years after his death, Helen Raven had had to fight in the courts for possession of the late Blumenstocks. Cookie was his widow, and since he'd left no will, she claimed the entire estate. It had been a bloody battle, it must have been an expensive one, and the winner had come away with a handful of paintings nobody wanted. Because if Helen Raven had managed to prove ownership, at least to the satisfaction of her judges, Cookie had thereupon set out to discredit the late work in every way she could, as only she could.

“But were they any good?” I asked Elliott Grunen.

“The late Blumenstocks?” He made a face. “Careless, I'd say. Of course he'd gone representational. They were interesting. He had tremendous vitality, even then. Of course I've only seen one. In recent years, that is.”

“The one that's been in the papers?”

“That's right. The self-portrait. Of course I was there the other night.” (And of course it was like him to let you know such things.)

“But that one's a fake, isn't that what they're saying?”

He smiled knowingly. “Of course a lot of things are called fake these days. If it's a fake it's a very good one.”

“How many are there?” I asked him.

“How many of what?”

“Of the late Blumenstocks.”

“I wouldn't know. Only a few. I don't think anyone knows exactly. Of course Helen Raven would, she lived with him. But since when are you into art? I wouldn't have thought it was your bag.”

His smile veered off into condescension …

“It's not,” I said. “I was more interested in Cookie.”

… to disappear into surprise. “Oh? You mean the eminent Mrs. Lascault?”

“That's right,” I said, grinning back at him. “I just met her this afternoon.”

It was almost dawn when Air France took off and the Giulia and I drove home down the Rue d'Assas. The way it looked to me, Al Dove and Helen Raven had joined forces to shake Cookie Springberg Blumenstock Lascault's money tree, conceivably with Bernard Lascault's help. Only Cookie Lascault wasn't having any part of it, and maybe she'd even gone so far as to hire her own private army of phony Law to prove the point. From what I'd gathered, the portrait of her and Blumenstock probably wasn't a fake, but it had been pretty astute to call it one in public—a million and a half francs' worth of astuteness, if you wanted to look at it that way. I hadn't seen it that afternoon, but I was willing to bet it was already somewhere in the Chantilly mansion, and the only reason Al Dove still had a shot at half a million francs was that she wanted the other ones that went with it.

Well, I said to the Giulia on the way back to the hotel through the quiet streets, good luck to them all.

Sure I said it. Sure, sure, and triple sure.

But there was another element in the equation. Freddy Schwartz had mentioned it. He hadn't been the only one. It had been on my mind that night in Montparnasse even after Grunen left, and it came again in the silent pre-dawn, and again when I woke up later on. Like I've said, not even all the skills of Josiane and her mates had ever managed to erase it altogether. So that I had no call to be surprised, and in fact I wasn't. Only shook. The big shakes, the ones inside that you never get rid of entirely.

I was, of all places, lying in my tub. It was a big tub, big enough for me and all my rubber ducks and sailboats, and the water came out so hot it all but peeled the enamel off the tiles. I'd ordered breakfast, and when the knock came at the door, I figured it for the chambermaid with the tray. And so it was. But she wasn't alone, and the voice in the bathroom doorway spoke to me across a gulf of five years:

“Hello, Cagey. Will you tell her to bring another pot of coffee?”

The skin at the back of my neck prickled and tingled. I called out to the chambermaid. I heard her
“Oui, Monsieur,”
and then the door to my suite shut.

I turned around.

She was about as I'd pictured her in my mind, so much so it was uncanny. The last time I'd seen her, in fact, she'd been asleep in a bed, the sheet tangled over her, but I'd carried around another image of her, a pretty corny one at that but you live with what you live with. The image was of palm trees blowing in the wind. I saw her with her back into the wind, and the wind blowing her hair off the neck and spraying it forward around her face. I don't know where it came from—there's not much wind in L.A. and less in a hotel bathroom in St. Germain-des-Prés—but that's what I saw again, in the doorway … for a split second.

There wasn't much to her. There never had been. The only difference I could detect were some lines around the eyes when she smiled. They did her no harm. She was wearing an off-white raincoat, unbuttoned, with the belt hanging loose on either side and her hands in her pockets.

“Have I changed that much?” she said, one cheek lifting in a sheepish sort of grin.

“No, Binty,” I answered. “Not at all, I'd say.”

“You're not doing so bad yourself,” she said, laughing. There was that too, the laugh that was pitched lower than her voice, husky, pleasing if you go for husky laughter.

I had once.

By this time I was standing up in the tub and reaching for a towel. I told her I'd be with her in a couple of minutes, that the chambermaid would bring her coffee, that we'd have breakfast together. But she stayed in the doorway, watching me while I shaved. She always had—that is to say, during that week or so of her life—and she knew, I suppose, that I'd remember, and that the memory would unnerve me whether I showed it or not. It did, and I didn't.

We had breakfast in the sitting room, I in my bathrobe and nothing else, Binty Dove in her raincoat with a sweatshirt and a pair of jeans underneath. Or rather: I had breakfast and Binty Dove watched me eat.

Binty Dove said: “I suppose you're surprised to see me, Cagey.”

“Not really. I'd heard you were in Paris.”

“Who told you?”

“A little birdie.”

“And do you know why I've come to see you?”

“More or less. You want me to bail Al out of trouble again.”

The laugh again, husky. “You don't forget, do you.”

“Sure I forget. Like just until this min …”

“Or bear grudges either.”

“No, of course not. No grudges. You did what you wanted to do. You saw how to do it and you did it.”

“I did what I wanted to do?” she repeated, slowly. “And that's all?”

“That's all. That's all she wrote.”

She looked me in the eye. “You lousy son of a bitch,” she said flatly.

“Sure,” I said, “the guy who gets played for a sucker is always the lousy son of a bitch.”

“You weren't played for a sucker, Cagey. No, that's not true. You're right. You were, in a way. But I tried to explain. I wanted to explain.”

“After you'd walked?”

“I couldn't face you. But I called you. I don't know how many times I called.”

“I got the message.”

“But you didn't call back, Cagey. I even wrote you a letter.”

“Yeah,” I said, “but you didn't send me an invitation to the wedding.”

“Did you read my letter?”

“No,” I said. “I tore it up.”

It was the truth. I remembered doing it.

Her head dropped. She held her chin in her hand and her hair sprayed forward over her face. Maybe if we'd had it out five years before, I thought in passing, things would have been different. More likely, that was what she wanted me to think in passing. I had my doubts. A lot of things change in five years. So they say.

“Look, Binty,” I said. “You didn't come here to talk over old times. What's on your mind?”

She looked up at me, dry-eyed.

“Believe what you want to, Cagey,” she said. Her head was at a slight angle, but she fixed me with her eyes. “Al and I are washed up. Finished. All she wrote, like you said. For quite a while, believe it or not, it's been only business between us. Now that's gone too.”

She paused, as though waiting for a reaction.

“Gee,” I said gallantly, “that's a nasty break. But …”

“How much do you know about what he's been into lately?”

“Well, enough to say it sounds like a sweet little racket. I understand you're in it with him?”

“I have been.”

“As well as some other people he's dummied for in the past?”

“As well as some other people.”

“Well,” I repeated, “a sweet little racket. And maybe not so little at that.”

“No, not so little.”

She told me about it then. Essentially it was what I'd already gotten from Freddy Schwartz. The product mix was of hot art and cool all right, but they had a system of laundering the former so that anyone who did start asking the wrong questions would have a hell of a time coming up with the right answers. Very sweet. Al Dove was the front man, he'd made it work at the Paris end, while Binty minded the store in Beverly Hills. To her credit, she didn't fudge on the slimier parts. Nor did she brag when she laid their sales figures on me. She didn't have to. It was more like the chairman of the board delivering the annual report to the faithful.

No, I thought, not so little.

“It sounds pretty great to me,” I said. “A sweet operation. So what's gone wrong?”

“Al has.”

“How come? Don't tell me he's overextended himself again.”

“In a way. You know Al. His expenses went sky high. Then he started dabbling on his own. Badly. It was the wrong time. He lost his shirt.”

“Except that it wasn't his shirt?” She didn't answer. She didn't have to. “And then … don't tell me, let me guess. He found Helen Raven? Or was it Helen Raven who found him?”

“Al can be a very persuasive person. And Helen Raven's a very misguided woman.”

“Misguided? I'd have thought single-minded more than misguided.”

“She had some paintings to sell.”

“Which, the way I hear it, she hadn't been able to sell before?”

“That's right.”

“But Al saw a way of hyping them over here. The only trouble being there weren't enough of them, right? Which is where Rillington must have come in. Whose idea was Rillington, Binty?”

“Rillington was Helen Raven's student. He's also a very gifted young painter.”

“I bet he is. Particularly with the right teacher. But what was in it for him? He didn't do it just for love, did he?”

“Al offered to underwrite his career.”

“Ahh. Al's always been such a generous guy.”

She scowled at me. It was one of her best expressions, eyebrows down, mouth tight with the lower lip jutting.

“And you're so fucking pure,” she said. “You've always been so fucking pure.”

“Me? Pure?” It was my turn to laugh. “On the contrary, it all sounds very clever to me. You had a shortage of product so you found someone to produce it. The only person in the world who knew how many late Blumenstocks there were was Helen Raven herself. And with Helen Raven on hand to inspire the artist and authenticate the finished product, how could you go wrong? With, in addition, Cookie Lascault as the prospective buyer and her husband to grease the way?”