The French Kiss Read Online Free PDF

for it. Solange and Brigitte were their names, and it was they, a few centuries back, who’d introduced the partouze to my corner of Southern California, along with other French exports like goat cheese and Cahors wine and, on special occasions, some of the best dope Marseille had to offer. The partouze , in case you don’t know it, is a venerable French pastime. All it takes is cars and couples and a quiet place where x number of same can park undisturbed. It’s like musical chairs, only nobody loses, and so popular in France that partouzes have been known to create traffic jams in the Bois de Boulogne at three in the morning. Anyway, we used to hold them out my way in Santa Monica, and then when the sun came up on the surf we’d run the girls back down the freeway to where the 747’s dip in low out of the smog like big pregnant birds and off they’d go, half-stoned, into all that wild blue yonder us groundlings never saw, and leaving old homebody Cage to count his doubloons by the hearth.
    Of the doubloons, I should say, there were sufficient at the time. My card says B. F. Cage, Public Relations, but the way I worked it, this meant mostly the gathering and suppression of information. Other people’s dirty laundry in sum, and there was enough of it in Mansonland to keep a man of relatively simple tastes in Heinekens till the last of the 747’s came home to roost. But then something came along which made further toil and sweat superfluous. It was very sweet and dirty and I’ve told the ins and outs of it elsewhere, but suffice it that I hit a bonanza, a bona fide Bell Fruit jackpot. With the result that when the girls ganged up on me on one of those crazy rides down to the airport, there was literally nothing to hold me back. Solange, I remember, was whispering sweet nothings about life in Paris while Brigitte kept her hand on the throttle even after I’d turned off the motor, and the movie on the flight was Elliott Gould in The Long Goodby .
    I set up shop in the bridal suite of a small hotel off St. Germain-des-Prés, but as much of my time was spent in a picturesque little pad up near the Observatory in Montparnasse. Whenever Solange and Brigitte took off on the Tahiti run, Josiane and Sabine flew in from Anchorage with a suitcaseful of king crabs. The weeks turned into months, the months into centuries. The loving was mutual, sometimes communal, and I never looked back. For all I knew the biddy at my old answering service was still taking messages and the Mustang still tethered in the parking lot at L.A. International, racking up $5 a day for the concessionaires.
    End of idyll, one slick wet night when I came back to the hotel to find a bulky florid-faced gent waiting for me in the bar. His name was Bernard Lascault, he had the afternoon Le Monde spread out in front of him, and he seemed impressed by the fact that he’d gone to so much trouble to seek me out. The name meant nothing to me, though the organization of which he was Président-Directeur Général did vaguely. It was called Arts Mondiaux. He pronounced organization with the British eye , and his accent was as impeccably Savile Row as his clothes, and when I told him I wasn’t in the market to buy paintings, he laughed at the back of his nose the way they used to before the Empire went under. But his way of getting to the point was strictly Latin.
    A half-hour and a couple of Glenfiddiches later, I was still waiting for him to get to it. In the meantime I’d been served up a pretty heavy lecture about the international art trade. The gist of it was that the market had been going up and down like a yo-yo. New money had come in, new sources had opened up, and the pros had lost control. The big curators and collectors of Europe and America had been pushed aside by total strangers, and I suppose it didn’t help any that some of the total strangers paid in yen while others faced Mecca in the morning