imitating Belmondo imitating Bogart is one too many, like a story that loses something in the retelling. For instance, the one who was holding the gun had a cigarette stuck in his mouth, but the cigarette was unlit, and when the time came for us to go and him to crush it under his heel, on Marie-Josèpheâs floor ⦠well, it was just a waste of a cigarette.
The one without a gun worried me more. They usually do. He was a quiet wimp of a guy with an odd way of bobbing and weaving his head, and I put him down for a knife-and-scissors specialist. The Belmondo did most of the talking, but it was the little guy who shook me down, and when we left Marie-Josèpheâsâgoing for a conversationâthey saidâthe little guy led the way, with me in the middle and the Belmondo making with the cannon behind me.
Marie-Josèphe may have had every reason to be scared, but she didnât show it. She looked past me like I was just another trick, and her last words were for them.
âI didnât tell him a thing,â she said.
They had a black 504 parked at the rue de IâOuest end of the alley. A driver sat behind the wheel, reading France Soir . The Belmondo got in front with him, the wimp in back with me. Sure enough, when I looked across, the wimp had a shiv out in his palm. The blade was open, and it ran past the end of his fingertips. He grinned when he saw that Iâd noticed it. Meanwhile the Belmondo had stuck another cigarette in his mouth. This one he lit. It was the brown-paper kindâBastos or Celtiqueâand it stunk like cheap grass.
I made a try or two at the conversation we were supposed to have, but nobody was in a talking mood. We drove out of the warren of streets onto the avenue du Maine, then up through the traffic to the Alésia church, then across to René Coty and up toward the Pare Montsouris. The park is one of those keep-off-the-grass Paris showplaces, with enormous spreading trees and swans floating on the lake and a small nineteenth-century observatory up on the hill, and all that mars it is that the old Sceaux line, now a branch of the Métro, runs through an open gully up the middle of it. We drove into the sun along the west edge of the park, then abruptly onto a cobbled street that curved up between rows of handsome, ivy-covered private homes. They would have belonged in a well-heeled suburb. But this wasnât a suburb, it was Paris, meaning you had to be better than well-heeled to live there. Enough better, say, to keep a couple of stiffs outside your front door in another 504, just in case you needed the parking space.
To judge, Didier âDédéâ Delatour was doing just fine. Iâd never had the pleasure, but I knew the name. Dédé Delatour was Mafioso modern-style, meaning the kind itâs considered chic to have at your dinner table or in your neighborhood discothèque. His above-board wealth came from being a âsportsman,â meaning he owned a racing stable as well as a piece of several go-go gambling joints on the Côte dâAzur. What went on below the surface nobody knew for sure, but heâd been connected to enough shady operations to give Parisian thrill-seekers just the right kind of shiver. Whatâs more, he was good-looking in a dark, Mediterranean sort of way, with the Mediterranean accent to go with it, and, to top off the image, back in the past heâd done time. Not a lot, but time.
This made him the genuine article.
I was ushered upstairs in a hexagonal salon with a view down onto a garden that had a well-tended lawn, tall stone planters, and assorted statuary on pedestals. My escort was dismissed, and Dédé Delatour himself came on, self-assured and affable and flashing of tooth, in a dark flannel suit that was cut just a little tight, as though to remind you of the macho and muscle which had put him where he was. He gave me a glad hand and a sentence or two of pretty approximate
The one without a gun worried me more. They usually do. He was a quiet wimp of a guy with an odd way of bobbing and weaving his head, and I put him down for a knife-and-scissors specialist. The Belmondo did most of the talking, but it was the little guy who shook me down, and when we left Marie-Josèpheâsâgoing for a conversationâthey saidâthe little guy led the way, with me in the middle and the Belmondo making with the cannon behind me.
Marie-Josèphe may have had every reason to be scared, but she didnât show it. She looked past me like I was just another trick, and her last words were for them.
âI didnât tell him a thing,â she said.
They had a black 504 parked at the rue de IâOuest end of the alley. A driver sat behind the wheel, reading France Soir . The Belmondo got in front with him, the wimp in back with me. Sure enough, when I looked across, the wimp had a shiv out in his palm. The blade was open, and it ran past the end of his fingertips. He grinned when he saw that Iâd noticed it. Meanwhile the Belmondo had stuck another cigarette in his mouth. This one he lit. It was the brown-paper kindâBastos or Celtiqueâand it stunk like cheap grass.
I made a try or two at the conversation we were supposed to have, but nobody was in a talking mood. We drove out of the warren of streets onto the avenue du Maine, then up through the traffic to the Alésia church, then across to René Coty and up toward the Pare Montsouris. The park is one of those keep-off-the-grass Paris showplaces, with enormous spreading trees and swans floating on the lake and a small nineteenth-century observatory up on the hill, and all that mars it is that the old Sceaux line, now a branch of the Métro, runs through an open gully up the middle of it. We drove into the sun along the west edge of the park, then abruptly onto a cobbled street that curved up between rows of handsome, ivy-covered private homes. They would have belonged in a well-heeled suburb. But this wasnât a suburb, it was Paris, meaning you had to be better than well-heeled to live there. Enough better, say, to keep a couple of stiffs outside your front door in another 504, just in case you needed the parking space.
To judge, Didier âDédéâ Delatour was doing just fine. Iâd never had the pleasure, but I knew the name. Dédé Delatour was Mafioso modern-style, meaning the kind itâs considered chic to have at your dinner table or in your neighborhood discothèque. His above-board wealth came from being a âsportsman,â meaning he owned a racing stable as well as a piece of several go-go gambling joints on the Côte dâAzur. What went on below the surface nobody knew for sure, but heâd been connected to enough shady operations to give Parisian thrill-seekers just the right kind of shiver. Whatâs more, he was good-looking in a dark, Mediterranean sort of way, with the Mediterranean accent to go with it, and, to top off the image, back in the past heâd done time. Not a lot, but time.
This made him the genuine article.
I was ushered upstairs in a hexagonal salon with a view down onto a garden that had a well-tended lawn, tall stone planters, and assorted statuary on pedestals. My escort was dismissed, and Dédé Delatour himself came on, self-assured and affable and flashing of tooth, in a dark flannel suit that was cut just a little tight, as though to remind you of the macho and muscle which had put him where he was. He gave me a glad hand and a sentence or two of pretty approximate
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