The Last Match Read online

  His cap dropped from his fingers, his eyes froze and glazed, his mouth fell open, he stopped breathing as he went into instantaneous shock. Boda had come down from the roof. Thanks be to Allah I always insisted on the robe, even though it wasn’t exactly what you would call Boda-concealing. Naked, she’d have turned him to stone.

  I got a chair under him before his knees buckled. He was beginning to breathe again, shallowly.

  “Boda, dear,” I said, “this is Mr.—what did you say your name was, sir?”

  “What?” He didn’t look at me. He couldn’t have seen me if he had. He was temporarily blinded.

  ‘Your name. What’s your name?”

  “My name? Oh, yes. My name. Of course. My name. Uh, Uh? My name, yes.”

  He didn’t know. I said, “Mr. Uh Uh, meet Boda. Boda, sweetheart, go put on some water for tea. Then put on some clothes, lots of clothes. Then stay the hell out of here until I call you.”

  “Yes, Carly.” She gave Mr. Uh Uh one of her slow beautiful smiles and went away.

  When she had withdrawn from his line of vision he began slowly to come around, although he looked dazed and drawn for some time afterward. He wouldn’t ever have seen anything approximating Boda among his files of mugshots. While he was still semi-conscious I pumped him for the answers to a few vital questions. Not about who had put him up to the bluff, I knew who that was and that she would have paid plenty to buy him. What I wanted to find out were things about himself; his private life, family connections, habits, inclinations and so on. I’m sure he never remembered the questions afterward, or his replies to them.

  When I had learned what I wanted to know I went to the kitchen and made tea, bringing it back myself. I was sure if Boda came close enough to him to offer a tea-tray he’d go into shock again. I wanted him reasonably conscious and able to think, a little at least. It’s hard, impossible to con a mark while he’s unconscious.

  The details of what I had in mind aren’t important, if they aren’t already so obvious as to need no explanation. He never had a chance. Every time he’d show signs of returning rationality I’d expose him to Boda for the necessary length of time to put him under again without putting him out. I thought I’d overdone it the day I let him accompany us to the beach and she, as usual, dropped her robe as soon as we came down off the esplanade. He barely survived the Boda-ray radiations.

  I never let him know I had a new passport coming up. I told him I didn’t have any papers at all, and wasn’t it going to be pretty hard for him to take me back to France without documentation of some kind? Still dazed by Boda in the honey-colored flesh, he let drop that he had my old passport, the one Reggie had pinched. We could leave any time.

  It confirmed what I was pretty sure of anyway, that the hand of Nemesis was reaching again. Her instrument of retribution, however, was as malleable as warm goose-grease. I begged him not to say the ugly words. I couldn’t bear to face the hideous reality of the moment when I would have to go off to jail leaving poor Boda alone and helpless in a sink of iniquity like Tangier. I had Mr. Uh Uh figured as a regular churchgoer.

  He was. When I confessed further that Boda and I weren’t married, he was horrified, shocked, aghast. Particularly after I had pointed out that when I was gone she wouldn’t have even the dubious protection of a marriage certificate between her and the wolves.

  “What?” he said. “You mean that poor child has nowhere to turn? No family, no friends to shelter her, no guardian soul—”

  “—no money, and no papers,” I finished. “Only me. Nobody in the world else.” I sighed unhappily. “I just can’t bear to think what’s going to happen to her when I’m gone. Poor kid.”

  “But—but—but—but—”

  “Exactly, sir.” He sounded just like a toy motorboat. But there was nothing at all phony about his distress and concern. Mr. Uh Uh was a kind man, as well as badly smitten Boda-wise.

  After that I had no problems. He was so horrified by the thought that his action in taking me back to France would expose Boda to several fates worse than death that he was about ready to call the whole thing off and go home. I didn’t want that to happen—yet. When my new passport came through at last I had a short private talk with Boda.

  “Boda, dear,” I said. “I have to leave you. This is goodbye. Mr. Uh Uh will remain. He is a good, honest, decent man, unmarried and unburdened by family responsibilities. He doesn’t know it yet, but he will take care of you and love and cherish you for the rest of your life if you allow him to do so. Are you with me so far?”

  “Yes, Carly. I wish you weren’t going away, though.”

  “So do I. I have no choice. After I have left, Mr. Uh Uh will ask you to go back to France with him. You are to agree. If he asks you to be his petite amie, you are to agree to that. I don’t think he will. Most probably he will ask you to marry him. You are to agree to that, too. You are to agree to everything he asks you to do, because what he asks you to do will be for your own good and happiness and, I suspect, his as well. Is this all quite clear?”

  “Yes, Carly.” She did me the signal honor of blinking back the tears that were in her glorious blue eyes. It was more than she had done for Jim or—I hoped—the German on Ibiza. “When are you leaving?”

  “Soon. I can’t tell you the exact moment. First I have to get from here to Cairo, where I am going. Cairo, in Egypt. Say it after me.”

  “Cairo, in Egypt.”

  “Good. When I am gone, not before, I want you to answer any questions Mr. Uh Uh asks you, honestly and to the best of your recollection. That’s all. Now kiss me goodbye, because I may not have time to say goodbye when I take off.”

  “Yes, Carly. But I wish—”

  I shut her up in the most effective way I knew. The kiss lasted from about half an hour after Kadoosh’s departure until we heard her come in the next morning and begin uncurtaining herself.

  The rest of it was cut and dried. I had only to gather up what was under the floorboards, fold the bills into a money-belt I strapped on next to my skin, stick my passport into the coat of my AEC suit and take off for Rabat and points west via the World’s Most Experienced Airline. Mr. Uh Uh would know that Boda was too simple and too fine a girl to lie about my going to Cairo. It should divert him long enough for me to confuse my trail in the other direction. I didn’t think he would come after me, but if he did I’d just as soon Interpol looked for me in Egypt instead of some place else. I left the mourner’s outfit behind so he would have something to show Reggie for the money he would have cost her.

  The next few months were uneventful. Duller than ditchwater, to tell the truth. I went back to the U.S., held a job as a bank-teller for a while and quit. Being caged up with all that cash belonging to other people gave me hives. I bought a car with part of the money in the money-belt, a real sporty convertible, but I didn’t have a girl to occupy either the front seat or the back seat with me, except now and then. After Boda, girls— ordinary girls—didn’t have quite what it takes. I don’t mean to suggest I was ever in love with Boda. Falling in love with Boda would be pretty much like falling in love with a beautiful woman in a moving picture. She just didn’t have the emotional depth to appreciate the fact that she was loved, or reciprocate love. I was fond of her, and I wished her well, but that was it. I thought she was probably doing very well with Mr. Uh Uh, as I had arranged it. She had just spoiled lesser girls for me, somehow.

  I traveled around the country a lot, searching for something. I didn’t know what it was. It wasn’t easy money. The marks were so thick and eager at every crossroad they didn’t even offer a challenge. This was at a time when the franchise food chains were beginning to boom and spread out—Colonel Sanders Finger-lickin’ Fried Chicken, Aunt Jemima Pancakes, those things—and every small-town capitalist in America wanted a slice of the pie in his community. A franchise could return a whole lot of steady money on a relatively small investment. I had a few sets of fake credentials printed up saying I represented several of the mos
t successful chains, and I worked the towns with populations of fifteen to twenty thousand or thereabouts. The chains themselves weren’t trying to promote franchises in towns of under twenty-five thousand. They thought that was the minimum necessary for a successful operation. Maybe it was, for them. I sold franchises to johns like the village idiot, president and board chairman of the local bank he was, a real shrewd type, who offered me a bribe of a thousand dollars within half an hour after seeing my phony papers. Just to guarantee that he would get preference over the potential competition.

  “Cash,” he said, with a conspiratorial wink. “No checks.”

  “That’s very generous of you, sir,” I said. “But I can’t positively guarantee anything. My job is simply to scout the field, select a promising prospect like yourself, accept a deposit as evidence of good faith and forward my recommendation to headquarters. The contracts are all drawn up there. The most I could do for you—”

  “Your recommendation is the basis of the contract, ain’t it?”

  “Normally, yes, sir. But—”

  “That’s good enough for me, son. Let’s make it fifteen hundred, and no arguments. I’ll send it over to your hotel in an ahnvelope this afternoon.”

  He did, too. I left town without even going back to bag him for the deposit he was burning to give me in addition to the bribe. When the marks start sending their money to your hotel in ahnvelopes, there’s no flavor in a flim-flam. It’s more fun shooting fish in a barrel.

  The snappy convertible made me too conspicuous, too easy to track. I got rid of it and traveled by common carrier: planes, trains, buses, taxis. Getting rid of the car gave me a brief inexplicable feeling of relief, as if I had just put down a heavy burden. I didn’t understand the feeling at the time and I still don’t. But I was restless, footloose, irritable, bad company even for myself. I wanted something I didn’t have, without knowing what it was.

  One gray Sunday morning I found myself on the Baltimore waterfront, for no particular reason. Baltimore is a depressing town at best, even when the weather isn’t gloomy, and I had my own private stock of megrims to keep me company besides. Mooching along the wharves wrapped in my private cloud of gloom, I breathed the salt-oil-paint-slush-garbage odor of the harbor and was suddenly hit with this overwhelming saudade for—something. I still didn’t know what the something was but I craved it. I had to have it. Saudade is a Portuguese word I didn’t know then but learned later in the same way I had learned my first words of Arabic; in the can. The word doesn’t translate exactly, but it’s close to nostalgia, homesickness, mal du pays, cafard, all those except that you can also have saudade for a plate of ham and eggs or a dill pickle. You can even have saudade for nothing in particular, as I had then. What it really was, or may have been, was a kind of anti-saudade for Baltimore and the pedestrian life I had been leading. I was in a trap and I wanted out.

  There was an old freighter, medium-sized and senescent but clean and well painted, tied up to the wharf near where I was strolling. She had the Blue Peter flying and a couple of tugs standing by, ready to go. Her gangplank was still out and her lines still fast, with men waiting on the wharf to cast off. Others were on deck ready to take the lines in. Otherwise no action except between a couple of guys who looked like they might be ship’s officers. One, wearing a greasy white cap, was standing at the head of the gangplank yelling up at the other, on the bridge. The one on the bridge, whose white cap was dingy rather than greasy, was yelling right back. Between them they were profaning the Sabbath with some of the crispest blasphemy I had heard in a long time. Nobody was around to appreciate them except me and the guys standing by the lines. They looked bored, as if they’d heard it all before.

  The guy at the head of the gangplank caught sight of me first.

  “Hey, you! On the wharf!” he yelled. “Come over here!”

  I said, “Who, me?”

  “Who the hell do you think I’m talking to? Myself? Get over here before I come down there and kick your ass for you!”

  “Coming, sergeant,” I said, forgetting for the moment that I was no longer in the army. The words and music were so familiar. “What did I do wrong?”

  “Nothing, yet. You will. Do you want to ship out?”

  Coming as it did on the heels of my attack of saudade, it caught me with my guard down. I said, “Man, there’s nothing I’d rather do more.” I didn’t mean I was ready to ship out; only that, the way I felt, the idea appealed strongly to me.

  “Can you oil a triple-expansion engine?”

  “Well, I haven’t worked at it lately, but given a little time to get my hand in—”

  “Shut up! Can you fire a Scotch boiler?”

  “Well, I haven’t done that either lately. But—”

  “Shut up! You can wipe, can’t you? Any dumb son of a bitch can wipe.”

  “I guess I can wipe, then. However—”

  “Shut up! Just my luck to draw a goddamn ladyfinger.

  How long will it take you to get your gear and your papers?” “My—?”

  “Shut up! That’s too long. I’ll give you forty-five minutes, not a minute over. If you’re not here ready to turn to in forty-five minutes, I’ll have your balls for breakfast. Now move, goddamn it!”

  “Yes, sir!”

  As soon as I was out of sight of the freighter’s deck I moved more slowly, of course. No profaner of the Sabbath in a greasy cap could order me around like that, by golly. Who did he think he was, anyway? (He was the First Assistant Engineer, that’s who he was. On a steam freighter the First, if not God below decks, is his Vicar. God is the Chief.) But then I got to thinking, about this and that and the other thing, and I speeded up again. What the hell, why not? At least I’d be going somewhere, even if I didn’t know where it was. Instead of doomed to Baltimore, MD, on a gloomy Sunday.

  I made it back in forty-two minutes flat. Running, but as light as a soap bubble on my feet, buoyed by a wonderful feeling of freedom and escape. I had all my portable possessions in a suitcase, my papers in my pocket. The two guys in the white caps, now joined by another pair, were still yelling dirty words at each other. As soon as I hove in sight they all turned loose on me, piping me aboard with as warm a welcome as I have ever received anywhere. Somebody began yelling orders, winches rattled, lines began coming in, the tugs hooted signals at each other. We were on our way, wherever it might lead. I felt wonderful.

  A few initial complications arose in connection with my new employment. It turned out that the First wasn’t ordering me to get my passport, vaccination certificate and the other things when he sent me off after my papers. What he meant was my seaman’s book, union card and such. He almost went through the ceiling, I mean overhead, when he found out I didn’t have any.

  “A fink!” he yelled. “A goddamn fink you worked off on me! My God, the unions will strike the ship so hard her seams will open! You scab son of a bitch, if I’d known what was worming its way into my engine-room—”

  I cut in to remind him that I hadn’t wormed my way into anything; that he’d practically kicked my ass into his engine-room, promising to have my balls for breakfast if I wasn’t ready to turn to in forty-five minutes, remember? I said I was sorry I was a fink, but I hadn’t realized that I was going to qualify as one. I thought he just wanted some dumb son of a bitch who could wipe. A cool, rational summarizing of the facts.

  It didn’t tone him down any. But he did go into conspiracy with the captain, and between them they somehow came up with a seaman’s book and other documents to prove I was Thomas Polack, a paid-up member in good standing of the Firemen, Wipers, Watertenders and Oilers Union of America. I don’t know where the papers came from, or what had happened to the original Thomas Polack, but I signed on under that name. I could have been Thomas A. Edison as far as the union steward aboard the freighter cared. As long as my dues were paid up. They remained paid up during the entire period of my career in the U.S. merchant marine. Two months and four days. Enough for a lifetime, believe m
e.

  Have you ever been a fireman on an oil-burning freighter? The job of night watchman in a Quaker graveyard is mad riotous living by comparison. I made fireman after a week as wiper because the wiper they moved up to replace the fireman they moved up to replace the oiler who jumped ship in Baltimore was too dumb to handle the fire-room by himself. That means pretty God-awful dumb. Everything is under automatic control and self-tending except for a few small chores at the beginning of each watch like cleaning the oil-filters and the burners; maybe twenty minutes work if you drag it out. The rest of the time you do nothing at all except look at pressure gauges every now and then to see that everything is normal. It always is. Four hours on, eight hours off, night and day, seven days a week, from here to eternity; nobody to talk to, no reading material allowed, no portable radios because they wouldn’t work inside a ship’s steel hull even if you were allowed to have one on watch, which you’re not. Solitary confinement. In two months and four days I was stir-crazy.

  What saved a part of my sanity was the fact that many of the black gang were South Americans. The ship was headed for the west coast of South America by way of the Canal. After my first few watches in the fire-room I knew I’d be leaving it at the first opportunity. It seemed like a good idea to polish up my Spanish, which was rudimentary; the kind you pick up in Tangier while habitually speaking another couple of languages more often and more readily. I spent all my time off-watch trading English lessons—and cigarettes, when necessary—for Spanish lessons from the off-watch black gang, all my dead time below making up new sentences and phrases to learn as soon as I was topside again. A crash course like that, complete dedication of effort for a couple of uninterrupted months, is as good as a hitch in the violon for results. I spoke pretty good South American before I ever laid foot on the South American continent, or even eyes. Good enough to sucker the simple native with anyway, I was pretty sure.