The French Kiss (23 page)
Authors: Peter Israel
I remember I was flexing and counting my fingersâthere were ten of them, and they seemed to work all rightâwhen Dedini walked in the door.
He'd dressed for the occasion, meaning that he had on the same baggy gray suit but also a little ribbon stuck in the buttonhole of his lapel. Probably it had to do with what he'd done during the war. I didn't ask. His jaw was set, square and heavy, and when the Frontier Air Police functionary started to follow him in, he told him to fuck off, politely but firmly.
He was carrying one of those cardboard dossiers that ties with a strap. He sat down behind the empty desk in the office, put the dossier down in front of him, took out his rimless glasses, adjusted them to his nose, unbuckled the dossier. Only then did he look at me.
“Eh bien, Monsieur Cage”
he said.
“Voilà .”
He handed across a sheaf of papers. Actually there were three sets, each several sheets long, and each held together by a small ring with a red ribbon tied through it. I flipped through them. The second two were copies of the first, and the signature places on the last pages were blank. I turned back to the original and read it through, slowly and carefully.
It was a clever piece of work. By itself it wouldn't have made all that much sense, but if you knew the events as they'd happened, you could guess the official version this “deposition” would go to support. There were few outright lies in it. The Lascaults were never mentioned. As for me, I was just an old friend of the Doves.
Clever, like I say.
I looked at Dedini. He looked at me.
“Suppose I don't sign it,” I said.
“If you don't sign it, Monsieur,” he answered, “you'll be in New York at three o'clock, I believe. Local time.”
I hesitated. Then:
“You offered me a deal, Monsieur le Commissaire. Maybe you'd like to forget it, but I haven't. I delivered them all to you: the Doves, Helen Raven, even Rillington. Now you're welching on your deal.”
His jaws tightened, and the scum expression came back strongly. What he said is hard to translate, but it was the only time he let his hair down with me, and I'll give it a try.
“You son of a bitch,” he said. “If it wasn't for me, my intervention, they'd have had you on the first flight out yesterday morning. If ⦔
I got the feeling he had a lot more to add, maybe twenty-eight years' worth, but he caught himself, broke it off. He removed his glasses, wiped them, put them back on. Twenty-eight years of service. He glanced at his watch.
“It's the same to me whatever you do, Monsieur. You have five minutes to make your choice.”
In fact, it didn't take me that long. The images came and went in a hurry. Al Dove and Binty were in them, and Johnny Vee, and surfers catching a big wave off Newport, and Freddy Schwartz sopping up his sauce, and palm trees and golfers, and the smog backing up against the hills behind Santa Anita. All these on the one hand. And on the other? The stale smell of Gauloises, the sour fruity taste of white wine, traffic jams and Bernard Lascault, the rain dripping on the eaves in Montparnasse, that special feel of French scruff rubbing against your leg. The past vs. the present. “Purity,” American-style, vs. a certain kind of built-in corruption that must go back as far as Charlemagne. What was it some Frenchman had said to me?
The only difference between us, Monsieur, is that you wash your hands after you urinate, and I before
.
“You got a coin, Monsieur le Commissaire?”
“What's that?” he said, creasing his eyebrows.
“Never mind,” I answered. “It's just that I'm tired of making choices.”
I fished in my pockets and came up with one of those precious twenty-centime pieces. I examined it. One side was the profiled bust of a dame with
“République”
running up her nose and
“Française”
down her hair. The back side had the number “20” on it and up above, a little off-center,
“Liberté Egalité Fraternité
.”
“The lady says I stay, the number says I go.”
I flipped it in the air, and it landed on the desk.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1976 by Peter Israel
Cover design by Mimi Bark
ISBN: 978-1-4532-9363-8
This 2015 edition published by
MysteriousPress.com
/Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
345 Hudson Street
New York, NY 10014
EBOOKS BY PETER ISRAEL
FROM
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AND OPEN ROAD MEDIA
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