Conquest by Richard Wake

Author:Richard Wake [Wake, Richard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Amazon: B0CC9NYXGX
Goodreads: 193437162
Publisher: Manor and State, LLC
Published: 2023-07-23T07:00:00+00:00

Laurence Perrault owned the bottling company on Rue La Course. He was eating lunch with Michel La Rue, finalizing the details of the smuggling scheme, collecting his final envelope. Because Perrault’s terms were clear: cash up front, whether or not the heroin actually reached New York undetected. As he said, after sucking the broth out of a snail shell, “My risks end at the warehouse door.”

Michel disliked Perrault, disliked the smarminess that oozed from the man’s every pore. In business, Michel had come to believe that you could smell a weasel before you saw the actual evidence, and Perrault reeked. But he needed him, and so there they were at Le Stube.

The waiter had served the plates of sausages and mustard and pretzel bread, but Perrault would not let the snails go. As Michel worked on his entrée, the bottler was determined to get the final drops of juice and broth, and he didn’t seem to care how loud he was in the process, or if the repeated licking of his fingers was causing to two women at the next table to make faces that were half disgust and half pity.

“Nice place,” Perrault said, between sucks and licks. “Even if it’s not quite the Martin La Rue Special.”

“You know Martin?” Michel said, and then he immediately realized. “Wine importer, bottling company — of course, you know him.”

“Funny fucker,” Perrault said.

“But what’s the Martin La Rue Special?”

“Drinks and a light snack around the bar at Tangerine,” Perrault said. “Then, we dive into the main course in the back room.”

The bottler guffawed and half choked on some snail broth that went down the wrong pipe. Tangerine was a strip club in Pigalle. The light snack was likely a bowl of nuts or a hard-boiled egg and toast. The main course was likely more substantial. Michel wondered why Martin took his client to Tangerine and not to one of the family’s places. But then again, he didn’t really wonder, based upon the age-old principle that you really shouldn’t shit where you eat.

It took Perrault about 10 seconds to stop coughing, at which point he took a big swallow of wine and picked up the next snail.

“Really a funny fucker,” he said. “And good company. He always lets me take the first pick at Tangerine, even though we both favor the big asses. Just good people. He really thought our little scheme with the wine bottles was genius — he was very complimentary of you.”

Perrault sucked and Michel suddenly fumed, although he couldn’t let it show. He camouflaged his feelings with a throwaway line — “That Martin, he does love the big asses” — but he hated that his cousin knew that much about his business. Michel didn’t trust Martin or Henri, not as far as he could throw them. They couldn’t hide their jealousy of him, and if truth be told, Michel couldn’t hide his disdain for them and their old-fashioned gangster bullshit. Heroin was going to drive the business into the future, into the 1960s and beyond, and he knew it and they knew it.

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