The French Kiss (11 page)

She didn't contradict me.

Only it had gone wrong. And I was beginning to see why.

“What happened, Binty? Did Al get greedy? How many Blumenstocks has Rillington turned out? Or was it simply that Al decided to go it alone?”

She hesitated, biting down on that lower lip.

“He's got some property that belongs to us,” she said. “We want it back.”

“Who's
us
?” I said. Then, when she didn't answer: “I bet you do. Including Helen Raven and Rillington?”

She hesitated again. Then she nodded.

“That's right,” she said, “them too. Though not for the reasons you think. Al's out, Cagey. We're not going to let him take us all down with him. There's more at stake. There's the whole … well, call it what you want to.”

I could see that too.

“And so? Don't tell me you want me to find him for you?”

She nodded again.

There was one of those pungent silences.

“It's not like before,” she said, averting her eyes. “I asked you to save his neck then. All right, maybe that
was
for my sake. But this time it's strictly business. Whatever happens to Al is strictly his look-out. We're ready to pay you anything you want, in dollars or francs, here or in the States. We're ready to cut you in if that's how you want it.” She smiled at me. “If you're not too pure, that is.”

This was the third time somebody had tried to hire me that week, and each time the price had gone up. It was very flattering. Probably I should retire more often.

“One thing I've been trying to figure out,” I said, “is how Lascault got to me in the first place. I mean, I've been out of action a long time, ever since I got to Paris, yet he knew where to find me and all about my unsavory past. How well do you know Bernard Lascault?”

“We've talked.”

“About what to do about Al?”

“Yes, that.”

“And so you put him onto me, is that it?”

“Yes I did. Maybe it'll surprise you, Mister B. F. Cage, but I've managed to keep tabs on you.”

She looked across at me. Unconsciously she ran her hand through the strands of hair to one side of her face. Then she grinned.

I guess I was surprised.

“All these years,” she added softly.

I heard her inhale.

I don't know how to describe what happened next, or how it came about. Probably I shouldn't try either. All I can say is that one minute I was sitting there in my bathrobe, drinking coffee, brainstorming away and fairly crackling with wit and acrimony, and the next we were both on our feet, and there wasn't any breakfast table between us, much less half a decade. She came up to about level with my collarbone. That hadn't changed either. I don't think either of us said much of anything. Her head tilted back. She looked up at me with that shining female expression in her eyes and just a twinkle behind it that said I know that you know that we know that it's all a bunch of shit.

I took her by the scruff. I kissed her, in French.

And so, to put it succinctly, a conversation that had started in the bathtub ended up in bed. And where it had been all wrong one minute, the next it was all right.

Or almost.

EIGHT

Because there's always a kicker to it, isn't there?

Or, to be exact, the absence of one?

For if I'd had a lovely erection sprouting in the sitting room, by the time we got between the sheets, lo and behold, it was long gone. And not all the devices known to the advanced class at Masters & Johnson would bring it back.

A disconcerting development, to say the least.

“It's like everything else,” said Binty, holding my bedraggled member in her hand and shaking her head, “they just don't make 'em like they used to.”

She bent over it, her hair in her face.

“Don't give it a second thought, little chap,” she told it. “He's just worried about his reputation. Besides, we'll get you in the end, just leave it to Binty.”

She kissed it on the head. Then she pushed me back down, and snuggled into my shoulder, and started tracing plans on my chest.

Because she was all full of plans, was Binty. She had it all worked out. The way she had it figured, the Blumenstock deal could still go through, once they got the paintings back. Cookie Lascault had proven a more formidable customer than anyone had expected—that was partly Al's fault, he'd overplayed his hand—but Cookie Lascault could kick and connive all she wanted, she'd pay in the end. Bernard would see to it. Bernard knew how to bring her around. Besides, said Binty, the Blumenstock deal was only small potatoes compared to the overall operation. The overall operation was what counted. It had to go on. She and Bernard had been talking about that for some time. The setup was intact, and it was pretty near foolproof. A beautiful setup, said Binty. The only trouble was that, with Al out of the way, there was a beautiful vacuum right in the middle of it. The beautiful vacuum had to be filled. She'd already talked to Bernard about that too, Binty had. She had an idea of her own, a pretty crazy idea maybe but he'd had nothing against it in principle. She didn't think the California people would either. She didn't want me to say anything either way, not now, not yet. She knew I was too pure, but what was pure any more? She knew I was a loner, that I'd never worked for anybody else, but it wouldn't be like working for anybody else. The partners were silent, they kept their hands off. She knew I was retired too, Binty did, but she thought that was ridiculous. Was I going to spend the rest of my life in a hotel suite and screwing around with a bunch of sexpots from the airlines? Besides, what did a bunch of sexpots from the airlines have on a red-blooded California girl like her?

By this time she was back up on her knees, the sheet thrown back. She rocked forward onto her hands. Her head came up over mine, the hair spraying down along her cheeks. Her eyes fixed mine, and I could see the glitter of laughter in them.

“Hooooo,” she said mockingly, “you really think I mean it, don't you? Well
don't
you? And why not? D'you think it's so farfetched? You'd be good at it, we'd make a fortune! Only d'you think I'm going to spend the rest of
my
life pining away in California while you're here? Man, you must be out of your cottonpickin'
mind
!”

She boxed me in the face with her titties, then when I snapped for them, danced them out of reach, like plums on a tree. She whooped and yelled and dared me to come play, until I grabbed her wrists and pulled her down on top of me, her body suddenly writhing and slithering in my arms. Pound for pound, she was as strong as they come. She bit and fought, she scratched and hollered and kneed, she didn't give a
damn
about the overall operation, all she wanted was
me
, all she'd ever wanted was
me
, why didn't I
know
that, why was I such a
dummy
? Until, exasperated, I rolled her, pinning her small body under mine, kissing her, because it wasn't playtime any more but one thing leading to another, until she freed her hands and reached …

… with, however, the same disconcerting result.

“What is it, Cagey?” she said, panting for breath below me. “You're not
that
out of practice, are you?”

Then the skin crinkled near her eyes. She smiled up at me. It didn't matter, she said, she'd still get me in the end. Then she pulled me back down to her and breathed in my ear. She licked. She licked some more, and around to my mouth, into it, out, back to the ear. A little later she started to giggle.

“Well the least you can do, you big bastard,” she whispered, “is tell me what the B. F. stands for. You never would, 'member? I've decided there are only two things it could be: Benjamin Franklin and Big Fucking. So come on, tell me now, which one is it?”

I started to laugh too. Yeah, I remembered. Then suddenly, without warning, I felt something letting go inside me while she held me fast, five years' worth of it and maybe a lot more. It was like a ship sliding down the rails at a launching. I felt it go all right, with a whooosh, and nothing I could or wanted to do to stop it.
Splash
. And what do you know? When the answer came burgeoning up from where it had been stuck between our bodies, it was big as life and twice as ambitious.

It was afternoon by the time we left the hotel. Afternoon, I should say, of the following day. In between we stopped the world. We sent out for Glenfiddich and champagne, oysters and chicken Kiev. We had strawberries flown in from California and baklava from a bakery I'd heard about in downtown Beirut. We ate it all in bed, in no particular order or position, although if you've never had oysters fed to you while you're flat on your back, I suggest you try it the next chance you get. At some point Freddy Schwartz called. I told him to call back in the morning, and when he called back—it must have been the morning—I unplugged the phone, stuck it in an envelope, stamped it, and sent it to him by the hotel carrier pigeon. And you could say:
Whoa, Boy! Wa-hoa there! You've been there before, remember
? And sure, I remembered all right. Only the last time it had gone on for a week, give or take a few days, and it had ended with Binty saying to me (in bed, it's true):
My darling man, there's something you've got to do for me
. Whereas this time we put it on a strictly business basis.

The original scheme, she told me, had been to sell three late Blumenstocks quietly, through Al Dove and Arts Mondiaux. Cookie Lascault had been the intended buyer from the beginning. Apparently the Professor was hard up for money, enough to sell to a hated rival and at whatever price they could get. But Al Dove had had a better idea, call it his Rillington promotion. Rillington was Helen Raven's lover as well as protégé, and a painter of enough talent to produce as many late Blumenstocks as the market would take, particularly with the dead man's mistress to vouch for them. For if Cookie Lascault ever got tired of buying, her reputation as a collector was such as to start a whole new vogue. So Al Dove had laid it on the Professor, and greed and vengeance had done the rest.

The first time anybody'd had an inkling of what he was up to, Binty said, came when the invitations to the party were sent out. That hadn't been in the game plan, but it had been too late to do anything about it except for Binty to put Bernard Lascault onto me. They hadn't even known Rillington himself was in Paris until I'd reported it to Commissaire Ravier, who'd reported it to Lascault. Lascault had thereupon panicked, which explained why the Law had given me such a hard time. Then he'd called Binty and Binty had caught the next plane. The ruckus at the party, they'd found out, had been Cookie's doing. The people who'd started it belonged to the same gang as the phony Law who'd ended it. The French called them “parallel police.” Actually they worked for one of the political parties, but in between elections and revolutions they hired out to the highest bidder, and it stood to reason that Cookie could afford to pay them well, given the million-and-a-half francs' savings she had in mind.

If Al Dove had gotten away in the confusion that night, he'd had to leave everything behind him. Everything, that is, except the contents of the Canal St. Martin studio, plus the painter himself and Helen Raven. That I'd been there too had been an inconvenience, but only a temporary one. All they'd had to do was make sure I didn't blow the whistle too soon. But Jonnie Davis had been a bigger obstacle. Binty didn't know what had happened, but she guessed that Jonnie Davis had balked at the last minute. His first loyalty, after all, was to the people in California, not to Al Dove. So Al Dove had shot him in the eye for his first loyalty and dumped him in the canal, and it had taken some doing for Bernard to convince the Law to sit on the corpse for a while.

As to Al's whereabouts, Binty thought that less of a problem than I did. For one thing, she doubted he'd have tried to cross a frontier with a vanload of paintings. For another, he'd have to try to make contact with Cookie Lascault sooner or later. They had that end pretty well covered, she said. A third possibility occurred to me too: that Al might have abandoned ship and taken off. But no, she didn't think that likely at all. It wasn't his style, she said. It wasn't Helen Raven's either. Besides, once the California people got wind of what had happened, it would behoove Al to have as much cash as he could get his hands on before he took off. Or tried to. No, Binty said, she was pretty sure he'd be holed up somewhere not very far from Paris, waiting to make his move. We had to find him first.

But when the time came to plug the world back in, she was the one who held back.

“It's funny,” she said, reaching toward me, “but now that I'm here … that we're here … I'm spooked about out there. Just a little. It seems such a long way off, Cagey. Why don't we just forget about it?”

“You can forget about it,” I said. I was standing by the bed, nude except for an unbuttoned shirt, and gazing down at her. “Stay here if you want. As long as you want.”

“Me?”

“That's right. But you hired me to do a job for you, remember? Sometime in the not-so-distant past, like last night? I think it's time I got started.”

“Wait a minute,” she said, suddenly jumping up. “You're not going alone. I'm going with you.”

I laughed at her. It sounded like something out of a movie, like the line the heroine was supposed to deliver when Randolph Scott buckled on his holster.

“It's too dangerous out there, baby,” I answered. “The Indians have pointed arrows.”

But she didn't laugh back. She started to get dressed with me. Around in there I began to feel a sort of twinge in my stomach.

“Look Binty,” I said, shaking my head. “I don't work that way. You'll have to dig up somebody else. I mean, I'll find Al for you, I'll deliver his head to you on a silver platter if that's how you want it, but I've got to do it my own way.”