The French Kiss (20 page)

He started to answer back, something about how he was changing that, but then he stopped in midstream.

“Let's cut the bullshit, Cage,” he said. “Where is he?”

“Like I told you, Johnny boy,” I answered, “I don't have the foggiest.”

I thought he was going to slug me. He didn't though. He turned on his heels and went out, and one of the muscle took up guard duty outside the door and the other inside, facing me, though after a while they changed places, to make it more interesting.

All in all, it wasn't much of a performance. I mean, if you're going to try to scare information out of some one, you've got to follow through. Instead Johnny Vee left me to my thoughts, and the more I thought, the more it occurred to me that something must have gone wrong, that they had some other use for me—a notion that got all the stronger the longer I waited. So that when they finally got around to the rough stuff, I was pretty sure they were only funning.

Though I didn't know it at the time, I had help too … from the least likely source.

Because all that morning the phone kept ringing in the main house. Each time it rang, the technicians went to work, trying to trace it. And they did too, apparently. Only once she was calling from the Champs Élysées, another time from a café over by the Odéon, another time from the Gare du Nord. The Professor was really jumping around town that morning, without rhyme or reason, and every time she dialed Chantilly, she changed the rules of the game. Maybe somewhere buried in the archives of the Service de la Répression des Fraudes Artistiques you could still find the tapes of those conversations, though I'd be inclined to doubt it, but they must have been something to hear. Because if Cookie Lascault thought at one point that she was going to be able to have her cake for twelve thousand bucks, she was dead wrong. The certainty must have changed into hope, and then the hope too went up in an explosion of vengeance and vilification. Along the way the price kept shifting too, and so did the method of payment. At the next-to-the-last call, Cookie was to come herself, alone, with cash in a suitcase. Apparently she agreed to that too, at least over the phone. But Helen Raven had the last word, and if I wasn't there to listen in, I can still imagine the gist of it:
Suppose I decide not to sell it at any price! Suppose that's my price: no price!

I learned some of this from Johnny Vee. I couldn't say exactly at what stage in the negotiations he came back into the woodshed, only that they must have taken a sour turn by then. If Cookie Lascault hadn't panicked yet, she was at least willing to let him try it his way. Not that he sullied his own hands. We had a brief question-and-answer period, not a very satisfactory one from his point of view, and then he simply loosed the muscle on me. There wasn't much I could do about it. I covered up while I could, and took it, the kind of classic impersonal battering the mob teaches its boys in kindergarten.

They propped me up on a stool when they were done and held me there. I was swallowing a mixture of blood and saliva, but when my tongue worked its way around my teeth, they were all present and accounted for. Funning, like I said. Johnny Vee leaned over me and asked me again where the picture was. I looked up at him, grinning through the tears, and told him to go fuck himself. He gave me a shot himself then, for the folks back home, but I hardly felt a thing, and when he turned and went out again, I knew in some weird way that things were looking up.

The second wait was shorter than the first. Through the open door I saw him standing in the sunlight, some halfway across the lawn. He shouted something to the muscle outside the door and motioned with his arm. They delivered me to him.

The sun felt good. A light breeze dried my sweat, and walking took some of the wobble out of my legs. Johnny Vee led me inside, into a deep-pile bathroom with scented soap, gold-leafed spigots and towels as soft as cashmere. I looked at my face in the mirror. One of the eyes was almost closed. I did what I could about the rest of it, even making a few passes with an electric razor provided for guests, and though the result mightn't have won any beauty contests, well, I'd seen worse.

“Let's go, Cage,” said Johnny Vee.

He was standing near the door, his arms folded across his chest. I went up to him. Under the circumstances it couldn't have been much more than a love tap, but I let him have it anyway, high on his alligator snout. Just for fun.

He took it like a man.

Breakfast was long since over. The company had moved into the drawing room, the one with all the paintings I'd seen on my first visit, and Cookie Lascault was slumped in that same high-backed white chair that molded around her body.

Things may have been looking up, but you'd never have known it from her. Well, you could say, a dame her age isn't likely to get any better as the day goes on, but to look at her then you'd have to wonder if she was going to make it till tea-time. Her hair had gone scraggly, her eyes dull, and her skin had that shiny pallor to it that made you think inevitably of Hammond organs and Forest Lawn. Maybe Johnny Vee's boys had worked me over pretty good, but they had nothing on whoever'd done it to her—a realization, I confess, that perked me up considerably.

“I want to talk to Mr. Cage,” she said when I came in. “Alone.”

There was some objection to this.

“Out,” she ordered. “All of you. I want to talk to him alone.”

She waved in the direction of the doors. They started to file out. Then she changed her mind.

“You stay,” she said, pointing at her husband. “I may need you.”

Bernard Lascault stayed. When the others had left he sat down. So did I.

“I've had a harrowing morning, Mr. Cage,” said Cookie Lascault. “There's been enough shilly-shally. I want that painting. I want it now.”

It hurt too much to raise an eyebrow, but I couldn't resist a few choice remarks. About the sale she'd been supposed to be negotiating, for one thing, and the Alligator for another.

She dismissed them with a deprecating gesture.

“You already know what I think of … of Helen Raven,” she said. “The events of this morning have only confirmed my opinion. I needn't go into it further. As for what they've done to you, I'm not sorry. You probably had it coming to you. You'll live. But I want that painting. Now. You said you know where it is. I assume you can go get it.”

Just like that, with one snap of the fingers

I thought about it briefly.

“Yes, I might be able to,” I answered.

“Then do it,” she said. “I have no conditions.”

I grinned at her, feeling my skin crack, but she hadn't meant it as a joke.

“Well I might have a few,” I said.

“Name them. Be quick about it.”

“Money, first of all.”

“How much?”

“Well, the last time we met, you were talking about half a million francs.”

“That was for three paintings.”

“I know. And circumstances keep changing, don't they? I'd say half would be fair. Say, two hundred and fifty thou …”

“Go get my checkbook,” she interrupted. Even though she didn't call him by name, he knew who she was talking to.

But I shook my head.

“Cash,” I said. “No offense intended, but I'll take it in cash.”

For the first time that day, I saw some expression in Bernard Lascault's face. Call it consternation.

“Two hundred and fifty thousand francs!” he objected. “We don't have that much in the …”

“Go get it,” she interrupted imperiously. “As much as we have. Bring it to me.”

He was gone quite a while. I like to think he had to slit open their conjugal mattress. But when he came back, it was with one of those old-fashioned brown leather briefcases, and the briefcase was stuffed to the gunwales with printed legal tender, courtesy of the Banque de France.

He put it on the coffee table between us.

“How much is in there?” she asked him.

“A little over 160,000,” he said.

“Is that all we have?”

“That's all, at least until …”

“We'll call it 160,000. You'll have to take the rest in a check, Mr. Cage. Ninety thousand francs. Once you've delivered the painting.”

Haggling to the end. I would have grinned at her in appreciation, but it hurt me to grin. Besides, I had other conditions to fulfill.

The first was purely technical. I had no intention of coming back to Chantilly if I could help it, and I wanted the Giulia delivered to my hotel. I tossed Bernard Lascault the keys. To my surprise, he caught them.

Then there was the little matter of my letter from the Prefecture of Police.

“You may not know anything about this either, Mrs. Lascault, but I'm walking around with a twenty-four-hour expulsion notice in my pocket. It runs out at midnight tonight. I want that lifted.”

“It will be,” she said.

“Who'll take care of that? You or Bernard?”

“I will,” her husband put in.

“Once the painting's been delivered, of course,” she said. “Is that all?”

“Not quite. I don't want any of Johnny Vee's boys coming along for the ride. Or your friends from the police either. When I get the painting I'll let you know where to pick it up, but in between I want a free hand. Is that clear?”

They both nodded.

“Then there's just one other thing,” I said. “I want one of you to go along with me. To protect your interests, if you want to look at it that way.”

Bernard Lascault started to protest. I guess he thought I meant him.

“Who?” said Cookie Lascault, cutting him off.

“Mrs. Dove,” I answered.

SEVENTEEN

At that you have to give them credit. I'm talking about the so-called oppressed sex. The next time one of them starts laying the sob story on you, complete with equal job opportunities, you tell her about Cookie Lascault.

And Binty Dove.

Once we'd left the village, I stopped the van. Then she pushed her shades up onto her head and threw her arms around me. I winced, and she drew back, and tears welled in her eyes, big real ones, and the tips of her fingers grazed my wounds.

“My God,” she said. “What did they do to you, you poor baby?”

“Oh, they were only fooling around,” I said. “They just got a little carried away.”

“I couldn't stand it,” she said. “When they took you away, I couldn't stand it. But what was I to do?”

“Yeah,” I said. “It was like that this morning too. At Bernard's apartment.”

“You mean you were
there
?”

“That's right. I was out in the street. I guess it was a lucky thing I showed up early, honh?”

“Oh Cagey, I was so scared.”

“Sure,” I said. “I could tell that from down the block. I was dying to tell you everything was all right. Only there didn't seem any way, under the circumstances.”

“But what was I to do, Cagey? Ever since they got here last night, Johnny and the others. I was so scared. I wanted to warn you, but how could I? They never let me out of their sight.”

“And yesterday afternoon, before they got here? You were scared then too, weren't you?”

“Of course I was. I had no idea who was following us. Then when you went off like that … and he came after me …”

“And you couldn't go back to the apartment, could you?” I finished for her. “Obviously. Because that's where the paintings were. So you took him out to L'Isle-Adam where you knew you could lay a trap on him. Or get help. Right?”

She didn't answer.

Like I say, there's a form of honesty in silence.

Then I asked her—just for the record, because God knows it didn't matter anymore—when she'd gotten to Paris. She didn't answer that either.

“But that night after Al's party?” I said. “In the studio? You were there then, weren't you, Binty?”

Her chin dropped, and the wet cheeks.

“Yes I was, Cagey. I was there.”

We drove off then. She asked me if I was sure I could drive. I said I'd always wanted to see how the Renault van handled. It did all right too, in a trucky sort of way. But she wasn't finished talking, not by a long shot. The important thing was: we were free. We were free, weren't we? Free at last, with all those awful things behind us? She didn't know how I'd swung it, how I'd convinced them to let us go, and she didn't care. The important thing was that it was done, behind us, and all we had to do was forget it. And we would forget it, wouldn't we? Yes we would. She would see to that.

But of course she cared. Just a little. She'd seen the briefcase too, and she either knew or guessed what was in it.

“How'd you do it, darling?” she asked. This was on the autoroute. “How'd you talk them into letting us go?”

“Oh,” I said, “I can be a pretty persuasive fellow when I want to be.”

“But where are we going? Where are we going now?”

“Well, first we've got some property of yours to collect. Remember?”

“You mean the painting? My God, can't we just forget about it? Why don't we just go around Paris and keep on going? What's to stop us? They'll never find us. Eventually they'll give up trying. We can send them a postcard telling them where it is. That's all they care about.”

“What about the Law?”

“Well what about it? There's nothing they can prove.”

Maybe so and maybe not. Though I was inclined to give her the nod.

“Well where do you want to go, Binty?” I asked. “Somewhere where there are palms and soft breezes?”

She didn't get the reference. There was no reason she should.

“Why not?” she answered. “Why the hell not? Or some place where it's freezing cold and there's ice on the pine cones! Hot or cold, what difference does it make? Don't you understand? All I want to do is be with you, you dummy, don't you understand that?”