The French Kiss (6 page)

“But what about the painting?” I said. “I still don't see …”

Putting the glasses back on, he leaned back heavily in his chair.

“Suppose I were to tell you, Monsieur, that there wasn't a contingent of police within two kilometers of your friend's party last night?”

I mulled that one over. The more I mulled it, the less I could suppress a smile. Because if someone had set me up, which was what it was beginning to look like to me, at least I had company.

Dedini, though, didn't see the humor in it. His eyes went small behind the specs and his lips tight like a prune.

“If they weren't the police,” I said, “then who were they?”

He didn't answer, though somehow I got the impression he knew. I thought back to the ones I'd seen. They'd looked enough like Law to me, and they'd been well organized. Maybe too well? In any case, I hadn't been the only one who'd been fooled. There'd been the
tout-Paree
, and the press too.

“We want to talk to your friend Dove,” said Dedini. “Where is he?”

He stared at me. I stared back.

“I don't know,” I answered. “You've got the same address I do.”

He ran the fingers of both hands through the gray stubble of his hair. He didn't say the word this time, but you could see it in the disgusted look on his face. “Scum,” and I guess for Monsieur le Commissaire it meant everybody, present company included.

Just then we were interrupted. There was a knock, then the door to Dedini's office opened and a tall, dapperly dressed figure looked in from the corridor. He glanced at me without recognition, then crooked his finger and called to Dedini in a clipped peremptory voice.

The commissaire's jaw tightened. He got up and his lumbering body disappeared into the corridor. I could hear several voices arguing at once, but all I heard Dedini say was
“Oui, Monsieur”
and
“Non, Monsieur,”
and when he came back he looked like he'd been taken by the collar and shaken inside out.

Two bloodhounds were with him.

“Let's go,” Dedini snapped at me. He stopped only to grab another sandwich off his desk. Chomping at it, he led the way.

It had started to rain again, that chill spring drizzle, and the sky was going dark ahead of time. I spotted the Giulia parked where I'd left her, but if I'd've had a notion, the shift in the odds would have put it from my mind. It had been three to one in Dedini's car. Now, on the canal bank, it was more like two dozen, give or take a few.

What was it I said: one part fishing expedition and one part stall? But all the time the stall, if that's what it was, had been going on at the Quai des Orfèvres, the fish had been lying at the bottom of the Canal St. Martin. The Law claimed they'd gotten another anonymous tip, but I still like to think it was one of those old anglers on the canal banks who'd gotten his first bite of the century out of those polluted waters and knew something had to be wrong.

By the time we got there that particular lock had been drained to knee depth and the fish hauled onto the dirt bank. They'd covered him with a blanket. Three men in high rubber boots stood guard over him along with Monsieur le Commissaire Ravier, his turtle head scrunched against the elements, while behind them a squadron of uniformed gendarmes kept the curious at bay and the quay traffic circulating around the police vehicles.

It was a big one too, and as black as Italian coffee. He hadn't been in the water long enough for the body to have mildewed, but the whole right side of his face had been staved in, starting with the eye. By a club, you'd say, or even an irate mastodon, though as it turned out a single bullet had done the damage, a big and crashing one fired at close range.

I had no trouble recognizing him. It was Thor all right, the same oversized brother who'd kingkonged me at the party, again at the studio. Sometime after that, while I bad-tripped up on the loggia, somebody had taken him out with a Paris-isn't-Chicago elephant gun and dumped him conveniently into the canal. He didn't look like he knew what had hit him either, lying there soggily in the drizzle, and while I shed no tears over him, I felt no particular gratitude toward his murderer.

“I suppose you never saw him before,” said Dedini.

“I've seen him,” I said. “I don't know his name, but he was the one who slugged me last night. Both times.”

The commissaire was holding the blanket up in one hand. He let it drop.

“Who killed him, Monsieur?”

“I have no idea,” I replied.

Somebody handed him a manila envelope. It contained the so-called last effects of the corpse. He pulled out a passport, examined it, handed it to me. It was a green American Eagle job, and though the ink had run and some of the pages were stuck together, you could still make out: Name: JONNISON DAVIS; Birthdate: August 1, 1947; Birthplace: CALIFORNIA, U.S.A.

California, U.S.A. I shook my head.

“It's a big country back there,” I said, “and California's the biggest piece of it. No, I never heard of him before.”

We went back to the Quai des Orfèvres. Monsieur le Commissaire Ravier wanted a crack at me, but homicide wasn't art fraud. Homicide was strictly Police Judiciaire. That meant that Monsieur le Commissaire Ravier could go fingerpaint. That meant back to the same dusty office with the single grime-streaked window giving onto the courtyard, and murder made Monsieur le Commissaire Dedini happy as the proverbial pig in sunshine, the more so because he had a live body to go with the dead one.

The French Law, you see, have a nasty little wrinkle going for them. It's called the
garde-à-vue
. What it means is that they can hold you for twenty-four hours for no reason at all, and the twenty-four can go to forty-eight in cases involving “national security,” which, the way I understand it, can include stealing a loaf of bread. You get zero phone calls. They don't have to tell a soul, not even your mother, and if they've got to take you before an examining magistrate after the time limit, they can lock you up and throw away the key in the meantime. Furthermore, the examining magistrate doesn't even have to be convinced you've committed a crime. He can order you held as a witness, and if there's the slightest doubt about your skipping town, not all the legal talent in Paris can get you out. Preventive detention, it's called, and according to Dedini, examining magistrates were used to cooperating fully with the Police Judiciaire in regard to preventive detention.

“Now, Monsieur,” said the commissaire, swinging his spectacles in a heavy hand and creaking his chair, “I want to hear your story again from the beginning.”

We went through it all again. Through the grimy window I saw some lights go on in offices across the courtyard. Later on they went out again. The normal working Paris slobs were going home. But apparently Dedini wasn't a normal working Paris slob. Apparently I wasn't either. For just that once, much as I hate to admit it, I wouldn't have minded being one. My nausea had worn off, but in its place was a cold, sore, and empty feeling. I'd had enough, and more than enough of that expression that came into the commissaire's gaze. You could call it his scum look, but I'd seen it before on functionaries of all sorts. It's bitter and smug at the same time, and maybe wearing it is the only satisfaction people like that get in their work, but it was pretty clear in Dedini's case that scum included not only me but himself too probably, and Madame Dedini if there was one, and all the little Dedinis.

We reached the point in my story where Jonnie Davis sent me down for the long count.

“Then somebody trussed me,” I said, “and dumped me on the loggia, and maybe they shot me full of puke for good measure.”

“Who?”

“How do you expect me to know? Maybe Davis did it himself. Maybe Al Dove did it.”

“Why?”

“I've been trying to figure that out all day. I think probably somebody doesn't like me. I think I was in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

“And then what happened?”

“All right,” I said, “let's try it your way. Then I untied myself; then I pulled a cannon out of my underwear and shot Davis in the eye; then I loaded him on my shoulder, carried him to the canal, and dumped him in; then I went to Al Dove's, where the phony police were playing gin rummy, and swiped the phony painting; then I went back to the studio and tied myself up again; in between I emptied out the closets and swallowed the cannon whole; then I went to sleep.”

The rimless specs were back on his nose. He looked at me over the tops of them. It was in his eyes then, and the sag of his jowls, the droop of his shoulders, the tone of his voice. Loud and clear. Scum, meet scum.

I dropped the name of Bernard Lascault in his lap.

It wasn't that he jumped up and faced the Arc de Triomphe the minute he heard it. From all I could tell, the name meant nothing to him. He wrote it down on a pad of paper. He drew a circle around it. Who was Bernard Lascault? he wanted to know. I told him. And what was my connection to him? I told him that too. But the more I told him, the more the expression went out of his face. Finally he picked up the telephone, dialed an inner office number, and by the way he said it as well as the words, I could tell he was talking up the totem pole all right:

“Excuse me for interrupting you, Monsieur. I need to see you immediately.”

He listened a moment, then hung up. He sighed, got up heavily from his desk, and without so much as a glance at me, lumbered out of the office.

He was gone quite a while. When he came back, his face was gray and his jaw set like a cinder block. He didn't look at me, and what he had to say was addressed, in two short sentences, to one of the bloodhounds:

“They're waiting for him. Get him out of my sight.”

It was within the same complex of buildings, but you'd never see a street cop in those carpeted corridors or the offices with those spacious paneled ceilings and crystal chandeliers and the flunkies to hold the ashtrays of the powerful even as they stubbed out their Murads. Most of it was dark by then, but the bloodhound led me through a paneled anteroom, and I saw Commissaire Ravier, pale and impassive, waiting just inside a pair of open doors. Behind him stood the tall, dapperly dressed man who'd summoned Dedini out of his office earlier in the day.

There was a third presence too, though I didn't make him out at first. He sat in shadow behind a small and ornate desk. We weren't introduced. I never saw him again after that night, and it wasn't till I ran across his picture in a magazine that I identified him. Suffice it to say that the ministry he ran had nothing to do with the Law.

I was ushered to a chair near the desk. The bloodhound stayed outside. Ravier and the dapper man remained standing, and it was the dapper man who did the talking.

“We've been trying, Monsieur,” he began, “to determine your exact role in an affair which has certain rather delicate aspects. According to our first analysis, it was thought that you were simply an innocent participant. This analysis, it now appears, was false. Would you review your role for us please?”

This I did, including Bernard Lascault. I was getting pretty good at it.

“Then according to this latest version,” he said when I was done, “you were engaged by a third party to investigate Dove's activities. Is this version now final and complete?”

“Yes it is.”

“I take it you're a … what do your compatriots call it? … a
private eye
?”

“Not exactly,” I said, but the distinction didn't seem to interest him.

“Why didn't you tell us this in the first place?”

“I didn't consider it relevant to your investigation. I also felt a certain obligation to my client.”

His eyebrows went up in a sort of shrug, then dropped back into place.

“The Police Judiciaire, Monsieur, consider you something of a fool. We on the other hand are inclined to credit you with a certain intelligence.”

“That's very flattering,” I said. “But who's
we
?”

“We? Why the police in general. Or if you prefer,” with a glance at Ravier, “le Service de la Répression des Fraudes Artistiques in particular.”

There was an imperceptible stirring in the shadows to my left. My questioner seemed to take it as a sign of impatience. At some point he'd picked up a cardboard folder, tied shut with a ribbon. He'd tapped it in his palm while he spoke. Now he dropped it back on the desk and squared it with his fingers.

“The dossier is closed, Monsieur,” he said to me.

It came out very flat, neat, and that was all there was.

A pause.

“You mean that was a dummy you found in the canal?” I asked. “And the stolen painting's been returned?”

He shrugged again with his eyebrows.

“The police will continue to investigate these matters in their own way. They need no longer concern you. You are free to go. As far as you are concerned, you went to the Dove reception, and when the turbulence broke out, you left and went home.”

I was home all right, on familiar turf. Commonly known as the cover-up. Only it felt passing strange to be on the receiving end.

“And what happened after that?” I asked. “Suppose somebody asks me what I did all day?”

“We think you are resourceful enough to handle such an eventuality.”

“But suppose I decide to tell the truth?”

He looked as though this hadn't occurred to him. One eyebrow went up all by itself. He held it there a moment. I admired his control. Then it dropped.

“Perhaps you are forgetting something, Monsieur. France is extremely … flexible as far as foreign guests are concerned. Despite a long tradition of hospitality, there have been moments in our history when undesirable foreigners have been given twenty-four hours to leave the country. I see no reason why this couldn't be arranged in your case.”