Free The Stiff Upper Lip by Peter Israel Page A

next to it. He had his cannon out, and at a nod from his boss, he pointed it at me.
    â€œI don’t get it,” I said. “In fact, if you ask me, this is a hell of a way to treat a partner.”
    â€œYou’ve been telling us fairy tales,” snapped Dédé Delatour.
    â€œFairy tales?” I said. “I don’t have the foggiest idea what you’re talking about.”
    The eyebrows again, up, but not for long. The smile again, the crooked one. It cracked the skin on his cheeks.
    â€œI don’t understand what your game is. Yet. But do you really want me to believe you don’t know what’s happened?”
    â€œBelieve what you want,” I said, feeling his tension.
    â€œYour friends. The nigger and the blonde bitch. While we’ve been talking. They’ve gone, disappeared. We’ve lost them.”
    Dédé Delatour was quick on his feet, quicker with his hands, and I didn’t have time to duck. He came at me with two slaps, forehand and backhand, short, sharp, and stinging.
    I caught them flush in the face. I saw stars all right, white on a black field, then black on a white, and the next thing I saw, when I started forward, was the Belmondo coming in from the side, gun barrel high.
    Also the last thing, for a while.
    Give me a V for Valor if you must, but the Belmondo was quick too, and he hit harder than he was supposed to in the script.

6
    I never did like being flim-flammed by well-heeled blondes. Neither, I guess, did Dédé Delatour. The thing was: I had nothing by way of compensation. Whereas Dédé Delatour had me.
    I had plenty of time to think about the injustice of this, that long night in his dungeon. At least during the early parts of it. After a while, I didn’t think about much of anything.
    A word about the well-heeled blonde, though. She was born Merchadier, and if the name means nothing to you, to the average Parisian it’s as familiar as his morning croissant. Valérie’s father was just the latest in a long line of Maîtres Merchadiers who have pleaded before the French bar, with consistent success and celebrity and, in the case of Valérie’s father, a penchant for unpopular causes. Valérie’s mother was a Yankee beauty who’d surfaced in Paris after the war and stayed long enough to find a husband, bear a child, and win a handsome alimony settlement which, in the time-honored way of Yankee beauties, she’d subsequently cashed in for a title. Valérie grew up, thusly, on the estate of a Scottish laird. She was back in Paris, though, in time for the barricades of May ’68, took simultaneous degrees in Law and Political Science, then was shipped off to Harvard Law School, which she quit after a year to run off with a youth variously described as a radical anarchist, a communard, and a garage mechanic. This exotic venture foundered somewhere south of Katmandu, where there were no garages and the money ran out and the (respective) families had to be prevailed upon for plane tickets to their (respective) homes. Ever since, Valérie had kicked around the world, though mostly around Paris, where she was as at home with the chic discothèque crowd at Chez Castel as in the joints north of Les Halles, where the coffee has mud at the bottom and the kif , as it’s called, is flown in daily from Casablanca. Kicking around, in addition, with a series of unpopular causes of her own, who had as common denominator a certain talent between the sheets.
    A daughter of the century, in sum. If you want to add that she had a living-up-to-papa hang-up, well, that’s your privilege. As it would be to say that among her “unpopular causes” would have to be listed black basketball players from the streets of Los Angeles.
    My last words to her had been to keep Roscoe in the Neuilly apartment till she heard from me. Her last words to Delatour’s Neuilly stake-out had apparently been “ Haut les