The Alternative Detective (Hob Draconian) (9 page)

“That depends,” I said, “entirely upon whether or not you are armed.”

“Make no mistake,” he said. “I am armed.”

“That’s easy enough for you to say,” I said. “But am I just supposed to take your word for it?”

“All right,” the voice said. “Turn on ze light.”

I complied. The overhead light revealed a man of middle years and sinister mien. His face was sallow and pocked. Blue stubble showed beneath his jaundiced skin like the bristles of a steel brush poking through an olive-drab bedsheet. He was wearing a long black overcoat and a black fedora. He looked like an intellectual dressed up as a thirties gangster; the sort of thing the French do so very well. In his right hand, a blued steel automatic winked wickedly.

“I’ll assume it’s loaded,” I said. “There is such a thing as carrying credulity too far. Where are we going, and are you going to keep that pointed at me in the street?”

“It will be in my pocket,” the guy said, pocketing the automatic. “Don’t make me fire, thereby ruining two suits of clothes, to say nothing of your health.”

And so out we went into the June night.

Paris is well known to be an exciting city, especially when you walk through it with a gun in your ribs. Thoughts of escape ran through my mind like small gray rabbits. What was to prevent me from suddenly breaking into a sprint, running up an alley, into a theater, or a bar, or a sex shop, or even ducking into the gendarmerie past which our footsteps were now leading us. Reluctantly, I put aside the idea. The black swans of caution brought me back to my senses: any sudden movement on my part could touch off this galoot’s adrenalin-charged reflexes. If there were a hair trigger beneath his tensed trigger finger, a sudden move on my part might cause him to shoot me even before he had time to decide not to. And of course, he could probably get away with it since no one pays attention to noise in Paris unless it is loud enough to be a bomb or repetitive enough to be a machine gun.

And so I walked on. And as I walked, I thought. One of the advantages of taking an evening stroll with a gun in your ribs is the way it promotes a very real appreciation of even the most evanescent sensory pleasures, such as the sight of an old friend on the sidewalk, his face painted white, mimicking people.

“Hi, Arne,” I said as we passed, hoping he’d read the note of desperation in my voice.

Arne made an exaggerated bow, stuck his hand into his right hand pocket in imitation of my abductor and fell into step beside and slightly behind us. What a time for him to play the fool! Arne’s face took on an expression of worried evil. His eyes slunk back and forth. He did furtiveness to perfection, and my abductor didn’t like it. He made a menacing gesture at Arne. Arne returned the gesture with exaggeration.

That was my chance. During the few moments that this byplay took, I managed to slip away.

Or rather, I
would
have managed to slip away if I hadn’t noticed, in the crowd, the indisputable plum shape, dark blue suit and red carnation of Mr. Tony Romagna.

I decided that I was faced with too many mysteries and that I’d better solve at least one of them immediately.

“Put away that silly gun,” I said to my abductor. “Lead me to wherever you’re taking me.”

“I am just supposed to trust you?”

“That’s right.”

He gave me an ironic look, but he did take his right hand from his pocket.

“You know,” he said, “they told me you were a little different.”

“I suppose I am,” I said.

“What they didn’t mention is that you are downright silly. My name is Etiènne. Come and meet the boys.”

And so we marched onward into the night of terminal ironies and faint transparent ecstasies, the accordion-haunted night of Paris, our lady of the roasting chestnuts.

ETIÈNNE

18

EtiÈnne was a little nervous. It may have been his first abduction. But he was working hard to stay cool. “Come on,” he said, “we’ll take a cab. And don’t try to kid around with me. I still ’ave ze gun.”

A taxi stopped and we got in and Etiènne gave an address in the thirteenth arrondissement near the Porte d’Italie. No sooner were we underway than we heard something growling from the front seat, passenger side. Then we noticed the large black French police poodle sitting there. It was looking at us hard with its glittery attack dog eyes and making those scary sounds dogs make when they peel their lips back over their teeth and come on like King Kong having a seizure.

“What’s the matter with ze dog?” Etiènne asked.

“It is, perhaps,” the driver said, “that one of you gentlemen has a gun, n’est-çe pas?”

The dog meanwhile was working herself into an hysterical lather. Her fur stuck out like electrified fleece and yellow globules of what looked like corrosive sublimate ran down her fangs, while her eyes flashed green and red, the devil’s stoplight.

Etiènne made a quick decision and said, “Yeah, I got a gun, so what?”

“It is indifferent to me,” the driver said, shrugging, of course, “but the dog, she does not like it.”

“Well, can’t you speak to her or something? A man has a right to have a gun; it has nothing to do with ze dog; do you understand?”

“One is not dense, m’sieu,” the cab driver said. “It deranges me to have to admit that while your reasoning is sound, your grasp of the essentials is imperfect. A dog cannot be reasoned with, and so, in her implicit stubbornness, she must be considered part of the given, implacable environment rather than a malleable player. To simplify matters, it would please the dog if you put your gun very carefully on the front seat. I will return it to you at the conclusion of the journey and everyone will be satisfied.”

Etiènne didn’t feel that
he
would be satisfied, but there wasn’t a whole lot he could say about it, especially to a Parisian taxi driver with a police poodle riding shotgun for him.

Etiènne leaned past the dog’s bristling wedge-shaped head, the blazing eyes never leaving his hand, and put the gun gently on the front seat. He sat back, but the dog continued to glare at him.

Etiènne endured it as long as he could, then said, “I did what you suggested; must she continue to stare that way?”

“Pay it no attention, m’sieu,” the taxi driver said. “She means nothing by it; it is merely her way.”

Etiènne stared straight ahead as we drove through the night-bright streets of the city of paradox, shaking his head slightly. I heard him mutter to himself, “Faked out by a dog. How about that?”

And then we were at the address he had indicated. Etiènne paid off the driver, retrieved his automatic, and we stood together on the pavement as the taxi drove away.

Etiènne watched it for quite a while even after it was out of sight. I waited for a while, then said, “So what happens now?”

Etiènne gave a start like a man awakened out of a dream, or perhaps into one, and said, “I don’t know.”

“What do you mean, you don’t know?”

“I mean I can’t remember ze address. Let’s get a drink. I’ve got to pull myself together.”

JEAN-CLAUDE

19

We found a bistro near Tolbiac. There I stood Etiènne to a cognac and I had an Orangina. Etiènne hadn’t really forgotten where he was going. It was just the sort of statement that a man of his excitable though deeply repressed nature was apt to make.

I learned a little about him in the Gauloise-laden smoke of the bistro filled with laughter and accordians. He was a Corsican, but, unlike so many of his fellows, not tough. On the basis of his looks and the island’s reputation, he was always being given jobs like this. It wasn’t what he would have chosen, but then, which of us has much choice in these matters?

We walked a couple blocks on Masséna, then turned left onto the Avenue de Choisy for a few blocks, then stepped into the Chinatown that has sprung up around here. Sprawled beneath a group of high-rise buildings named after composers and painters—Puccini, Picasso, Rembrandt, Cézanne—were innumerable small shops and restaurants, where you can get Vietnamese, Laotian and Cambodian cuisine, most of it tasting like Chinese food would taste if you added fish oil to it. The little open-air markets in this vicinity were filled with oddly shaped vegetables and improbably colored fruits. The tall, modern buildings were filled with Boat People, so I’ve heard, resettled by the French for those who could claim French nationality from the old Indochina days. It’s said that the police stay out of this district; the Indo-Chinese (or whatever overall generic term they’re called by) police themselves. Occasionally a body falls out of one of the upper levels, a defaulter on gambling debts usually. Skyscraper justice, they call it.

We cut through back streets to the Avenue d’Ivry, past a mixture of oriental eating places and Algerian couscous joints. Etiènne took me into an alley that led into a cobblestoned courtyard. Apartments opened on three sides of the courtyard. We crossed to one and Etiènne tapped on the door.

The door swung open. A figure stood there, backlighted in the doorway. Even in silhouette, and after ten years, I could recognize Jean-Claude.

“Have any trouble?” Jean-Claude asked Etiènne.

“Yeah, some,” Etiènne said. “But it wasn’t his fault.”

“Come on in, ’Ob,” Jean-Claude said. “We have some talking to do. I’m glad you didn’t try to get away.”

“You could have saved yourself the theatricals,” I told him. “I was trying to find you, as a matter of fact.”

“I’m sure you were, ’Ob,” Jean-Claude said. “Come in and sit down.”

We were in a sculptor’s atelier. There were armatures of various kinds, buckets of clay, pieces of marble of various sizes. In neat racks on the wall were the tools a sculptor uses—mauls, chisels, those sorts of things. Jean-Claude gestured me to a seat. He sat down himself.

“Well, ’Ob,” he said, a twisted smile on his narrow face, “it’s been a long time.”

Jean-Claude’s suit was a blue and white pinstripe with sharp Italian lines rather than your natural-shoulder American look. His small, carefully trimmed black moustache might have tipped you off, too. It was quite unlike the big hairy macho soupstrainers that many Americans favor in emulation of their favorite pro football linebackers. Jean-Claude was unmacho in appearance, and yet you didn’t feel he was a negligible man.

We talked for a while of old times and new. Jean-Claude had just flown in from Cairo, where a deal involving small amounts of resinous substance had fallen through. Things weren’t going too well for him. His life had fallen apart in Biarritz last month, when he had broken up with Suzie. He had walked out on her in a fit of pique, before he had taken the precaution of finding someone else to live with.

I noticed the small black ribbon in his boutonniere and enquired about it. It was for his Uncle Gasparé, who had been fished out of the Seine last week at the foot of the Pont Alexandre. Gasparé had been wearing a long, black overcoat with a mink collar. His hands had been tied in front of him and there had been a bullet hole in the back of his skull. Gangster slayings in Paris tend to have a certain panache.

Your French criminal is the most style-conscious in the world. Parisian underworld chic is modelled on the novels of Whit Burnett and James M. Cain. A lot of the clothing is copied direct from what Edward G. Robinson wore in his 1930s movies. Every self-respecting hood in Montmartre or Belleville dresses up; when you get to be a
capo mafioso
, or whatever its Corsican equivalent is, style becomes really important. Rumor was that Uncle Gasparé had been overstepping himself.

Jean-Claude was about five feet nine, weighing around a hundred and twenty pounds, had frizzy black hair and a hairline moustache. He was your typical French-Spanish-Italian sort of man, obviously nervous and high-strung, doubtless intelligent in an esoteric sort of way and filled with many little foibles incomprehensible to the straight-thinking citizens of North America excluding Mexico.

“ ’Ob,” Jean-Claude said at last, “what in the hell are you doing back in Europe?”

“Why shouldn’t I be back? I’ve got nothing to be ashamed of.”

“You sold us out in Turkey, ’Ob. I’ve been waiting a long time to repay you for that.”

“Like hell I did,” I told him. “I saw Jarosik at the airport that day and I turned around and walked out. There was no way I could warn you or Nigel.”

“The way I’ve heard it, you set us up. You sold us out to Jarosik and the Turks.”

“That simply isn’t true. When I got back to Paris, I did everything I could. I hired lawyers, arranged bribes—”

“Big deal,” Jean-Claude said, twisting his lips into a characteristic sneer. “How much did the Turks pay you?”

“If I had done all that,” I said, “why would I be here now? I didn’t resist coming to see you. You can ask Etiènne.”

Etiènne nodded in agreement. “We took a taxi here and there was zis dog—”

Jean-Claude silenced him with a gesture. “How the hell should I know why you’re here now? Maybe you’ve gone even crazier than usual.”