The Last Match Read online

  I planned first to jump ship in Panama and look around for action there among the military personnel in the Zone. (Soldiers aren’t too bright or they wouldn’t be soldiers. Not professionals, anyway.) I couldn’t make Panama. We never tied up there. We were either out in the stream waiting our turn at the Canal or making the transit all the time. Buena Ventura, the first Pacific port we hit after that, was hot, sweaty and unpromising for a man of my achievements; a banana-port. You can’t con a bunch of bananas. The next port, Guayaquil, was the same only sweatier. I stuck it out as far as Callao, the end of my career in the merchant marine. There I did a pierhead jump, came down running for dry land and, as it turned out, within a whisker of running right into the Peruvian calabozo. Not because of the pierhead jump, and not on account of Nemesis. From sheer bonehead stupidity.

  Chapter Eight

  Callao is the most important seaport in Peru. It isn’t much of a place in itself, outside of docks, wharves, warehouses, whorehouses and the other incidentals. But the port is only a few miles from Lima, the country’s capital and largest city, and a tranvia connects the two. You can get up to Lima from Callao in a matter of minutes and disappear in the crowd in less than that. That’s what I did. I had to leave behind everything I couldn’t wear or stuff in my pockets without looking too obvious when I went ashore. It cost me a suitcase and a few other possessions, but they were a small price to pay for freedom from the black gang; a release to which I was not entitled, strictly speaking, until the ship got back to Baltimore. The First would be yelling for my balls on toast and the captain would hate me because his ship would have to pay a fine for leaving me behind. They had my sympathy, but my servitude no longer. I was free, free, free!

  Lima held promise, I could sense it right away. Of course I was in the country illegally, without a Peruvian visa in my passport and with no visible means of support, but no matter. I didn’t plan to go anyplace where an examination of passports might be called for. As for means of support, mine were what you could call invisible but well tried.

  I tied up with a guy, an American, who was trying to make a living out of the Spanish Prisoner bunco but not doing too well at it. We got together in a bar that was popular with the resident gringo colony. He panhandled me for a beer and a sandwich. He was on the shorts, although not, as I learned in time, as short as all that. He was saving what money he had for postage. When he had got around the beer and sandwich he tried for another handout; a hundred soles, pally? I said I might, just possibly might, hold still for a hundred sol bite if he told the right kind of tale for it.

  He was a tall, skinny redhead with freckles, name of Al Schmidt. Smitty. He’d come to Lima the same way I had, by jumping ship. At heart he was a frustrated writer, always talking about the great novel he was going to turn out as soon as he could get down to it. In the meantime one of his few assets was a typewriter, a Smith Corona portable. He hadn’t hocked it because he was using it to write come-on letters to a sucker-list he had acquired in some way he didn’t choose to talk about. All the addresses on it were in the U.S.A., mostly in small towns but never two in the same town. It looked like a good enough list. He just wasn’t getting the responses from it he thought he should be getting.

  “Damn it, Curly,” he said, after we had felt each other out long enough to recognize a fellow member of the brotherhood. “I can’t figure it. I ought to be getting at least a nibble from one in five. I’m not even pulling one in ten. Or one in fifteen. It’s discouraging. I just can’t figure it.”

  “Let me see the letter,” I said.

  He showed it to me.

  The Spanish Prisoner swindle is an old one. The original letter was supposed to have been written by a prisoner in a Spanish penitentiary, therefore the name. Any country will do, as long as it’s reasonably distant from the marks you send the letter to. Smitty’s read something like the following (I’m recreating it here not from memory but because it always reads pretty much the same, subject to local variations):

  Dear Sir:

  A person who knows you and who has spoken very highly about you has made me entrust you with a very delicate matter on which depends the entire future of my dear daughter as well as my very existence.

  I am in prison, sentenced for bankruptcy, and 1 wish to know if you are willing to help me save the sum of $285,000 U.S. Cy. which I have in bank bills hidden in a secret compartment of a trunk that is now deposited in a customhouse in the United skates.

  As soon as I send you some undeniable evidence, it will be necessary for you to come here and pay the small expenses incurred in connection with my legal process so the embargo on my suitcases will be lifted. One of these suitcases contains a baggage-check that was given to me at the time of checking my trunk for North America. The trunk contains the sum mentioned above.

  To compensate for your trouble I will give you the THIRD PART OF SAID SUM. My darling daughter, aged 19, a former Miss Peru, will accompany you to North America to assist you in claiming this award.

  Fearing that this letter may not come to your hands, I will not sign my name until I hear from you and then I will entrust you with my whole secret. For the time being I am only signing, “A.”

  Due to serious reasons of which you will know later, please reply VIA AIR MAIL or WIRE. I beg you to treat this matter with the most absolute reserve and discretion.

  I cannot receive your reply directly in this prison, so in case you accept my proposition, please air mail your letter to a person of my entire trust who will deliver it to me safely and rapidly. This is his name and address:

  Juan Lopez

  Calle Marañon 14

  Lima, Peru

  Too obviously a con? It’s been worked successfully for over a century, and it will go on working successfully as long as there are people around who are venal, greedy and dumb. Smitty’s letter had flaws, several of them. But they could be corrected easily enough, and I had the money he lacked to send copies of the letter out in quantity. There was a score to be made out of it. Several scores, if it was done right.

  When I had read the letter, I said, “What’s in it for me, if I tell you what’s wrong with it?”

  “Aw, come on. Look, I’m not even making for cakes. Don’t be like that.”

  “Suppose I tell you what’s wrong and guarantee you’ll get one in five nibbles if you make the right changes?”

  “For that, pally, I’ll cut you in on the gravy. When it starts to flow, of course.”

  “It will flow. Fifty-fifty?”

  “Hell, no. I’ll give you a quarter.”

  “Half. I can sit down and write my own letters as easy as not.”

  “Not without a sucker-list you can’t, pally. I’m sitting on that. I’ll give you a third.”

  We settled for a sixty-forty split of all proceeds.

  I said, “All right. You write pretty good English for a Peruvian convict, don’t you? Not even a split infinitive in the whole thing.”

  “What’s a split infinitive?”

  “Never mind what it is. It’s a mistake more Americans make than don’t make, including the educated ones. Where did you learn your English, señor A?”

  “I’m an educated man. That’s why I’m in charge of the prison school.”

  “With unlimited access to a typewriter.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Same having an American keyboard. I wonder how an American typewriter found its way into a Peruvian prison school?”

  “Hey, wait a minute! You can’t tell—”

  “The hell I can’t tell. Spanish-speaking typewriters have an ñ and an accent key. You’ve had to do ‘López’ and ‘Marañon’ by hand. Any banana-head can smell the glue on this piece of flypaper.”

  “Most suckers wouldn’t notice that about the typewriter.” He didn’t like what I was telling him. It hurt his professional pride.

  “A sucker worth conning is a sucker worth conning well. This whole thing ought to be written in pencil on cheap copy-pape
r, the kind you find in a prison school. It ought to contain a few, not many, grammatical errors, too. The way it is now, it’s too slick, too smooth. You didn’t write it. Where did you get it?”

  “Never mind where I got it, pally.” (I figured he had pinched it and the sucker list from someone else, although I may be doing him an injustice.) “You think you can do better?”

  “Certainly I can do better. But the letter I write you will have to be copied by hand in pencil. No more typewriting.”

  “My God, how many handwritten letters do you think I can put out in a day?”

  “Twenty-five, maybe. If you don’t have to waste time panhandling. I’ll put up for groceries, and I’ll work with you. That’s fifty letters in all. Wait until we’ve worked two or three weeks on that schedule, and you’ll begin to see results. You’re just wasting stamps, sending this thing out.”

  He grumbled some, dragging his feet. Twenty-five handwritten letters a day was too much like work for his taste. He wasn’t a true artist, just a journeyman pigeon-plucker. But he was smart enough to look facts in the eye when they were shoved down his throat, and he came around. I drafted a new letter, adding a few syntactical errors of the kind that might be made by an educated Latin with $285,000 U.S. Cy. in a trunk and a ravishingly beautiful nineteen-year-old daughter. Then I moved in with Smitty—he had plenty of room, although I had to buy my own bed—after stocking his place with food and drink so we wouldn’t have to take too much time off for meals. Together we went on the nine-to-five, just as if we were office workers. Yet, somehow, that kind of nine-to-five didn’t bore me silly, as an office job would have done. What we were working at was more—constructive, I guess you’d say.

  I made one bad mistake. More correctly, I perpetuated in my letter a mistake in Smitty’s letter that cooked us. We were probably already cooked before I moved in on the operation. Smitty was Juan Lopez, of course, and the Calle Marañon address was his own. He should have rented a post-office box or used some other address for a mail-drop. I ought to have seen the need for this immediately, and the danger it exposed us to every time we sent out a letter. I didn’t even give it a thought. We were sitting ducks when the law moved in on us.

  Actually, Smitty was the sitting duck. I got away by luck and because he gave me the chance to do it at some cost to himself. We had been working for ten days or so, grinding away to make our quota of fifty letters a day. Because we had no refrigerator, I usually took time off before lunch to go out and buy the perishables we couldn’t keep in the room; eggs, butter, meat, cold beer, that kind of thing. This particular day I was out when the chontes hit us. Coming back to the room from the market with my loaded shopping basket I turned a corner and found myself walking squarely into the open arms of La Julia, as a police paddy wagon is affectionately referred to by the crooks of Peru. The doors of the barred cage where La Julia’s passengers ride stood wide for me. She didn’t have a Welcome mat out, but her message was unmistakable.

  On second view, a couple of delayed heartbeats later, I saw that the paddy-wagon was not reaching to embrace me but had been parked in just the right place to receive a guest or guests flung down the two flights of stairs from Smitty’s room. I couldn’t see if anyone was behind the wheel, but a uniformed cop was resting his pants against a fender while he cleaned his nails. He looked bored and sleepy. He paid no attention to me.

  I kept moving in the direction I was pointed. It took a lot of will-power, but one sure way to interest the cop would have been to drop the shopping basket, turn around and run like hell in the other direction, screaming. The urge was strong to do it. I came on, figuring to pass the paddy-wagon with a cheerful nod to the cop, perhaps a gay little whistle if I could get my lips puckered; go on around the corner, dump the groceries and shift into getaway gear as soon as I was out of sight.

  Before I got as far as the paddy wagon Smitty came stumbling out on the sidewalk. Wearing las esposas, a native Peruvian term for handcuffs, and with the arm on him. A tough-looking Latin character in plain clothes supplied the arm. Another similar tough character followed along behind them.

  Smitty’s lips were split and bleeding. One eye showed the beginning of a respectable mouse where he had been hit, and his clothes looked as if he had been going around with the cops on the floor. I stopped short. I either had to push my way by him and the two tough characters on the sidewalk, circle out in the street to get by the roadblock or stand there and gawp. I gawped.

  It wasn’t easy. Smitty hadn’t looked my way yet. When he did—but I didn’t want to think about that. Or anything else. Like the passport with my picture in it that I had hidden in my mattress upstairs.

  About then, Smitty looked my way. He had to look my way because the two hard guys in plain clothes were shoving him toward the door of the cage. When he saw me, he didn’t change expression by so much as the flicker of an eye. But he began to balk and hold back, struggling against the superior weight and strength of the two plainclothesmen.

  “You can’t do this to me!” he yelled. “Lousy spics! I want to see a lawyer! I demand that my embassy be notified! I demand—”

  That was as far as he got with his demands. The guy who had the arm on him smashed him hard across the mouth with the back of his free hand. He must have been wearing a ring or rings, because Smitty’s lips began to spurt blood like a cut artery.

  “Shut up,” the guy said, in good American. Top sergeant American. “You’ll get a lawyer and hear from your embassy as soon as you give us the name of your buddy. Not before. Get in there.”

  “I told you, I haven’t got a buddy,” Smitty said thickly. I think his mouth was bleeding on the inside, too. “I’m on my own.”

  “Pendejo. Cojudo. Liar,” the cop said, and smacked him again. Blood sprayed the air between them in a fine mist. “Get in there before I lose my temper.”

  He gave Smitty a hard shove that slammed him forward into the cage. The cop who had been leaning against the fender cleaning his nails all this time came around to close the door of the cage and lock it. I gawped.

  The plainclothesman who had done the smacking said something to his partner in Spanish. I couldn’t hear what it was. His partner nodded and went back into the building where Smitty’s room was. The tough guy looked at me.

  “What do you want?” he said, hard.

  I said, “Gee, I don’t want anything. I was just looking. What did he do?”

  “None of your business. Friend of yours?”

  “I’ve seen him around, in the street. I live over that way.” I pointed over that way, swinging my basket of groceries into view so he could see I was a respectable housewife coming home from the market. “What did he do?”

  “None of your business. Beat it. Move along.”

  “Yes, sir,” I said. “I’m moving.”

  The paddy-wagon passed me before I reached the corner. Smitty’s blood-smeared face looked at me from the barred opening in the top of the cage door. I said, “Thanks, pally. Good luck,” as he went by; not saying the words aloud, just mouthing them. If he caught it, I couldn’t tell. He was already too far away.

  I blew town fast. The evidence in Smitty’s room that two people had been living and working there was undeniable, and they had a stakeout on it. Sooner or later they’d find my passport, if they hadn’t found it already, and begin stretching nets. I meant to be long gone before that happened. I still had a fair amount of cash in the money-belt, which I never took off except to bathe. That and the clothes I was wearing were my travel outfit.

  It was getting to be a normal thing for me not to have a passport. I reasoned that if I could get off a ship without producing identity papers in a Peruvian seaport, I ought to be able to get aboard a ship the same way. The trouble was, the cops were going to find my Thomas Polack seaman’s book along with my other papers when they mined the mattress, and that could lead to a stakeout of every port where I might possibly ship out.

  Looking back, I realize I was attributing entirely
too much importance to myself as a wanted criminal. I must have been pretty small peanuts in the eyes of the Peruvian law; probably too small to bother with for more than a day or two. At the time, I could hear the bloodhounds baying at my heels across the width and breadth of the country. I played it tight and cute. There was one seaport where I was pretty sure they wouldn’t look for me. Iquitos.

  Iquitos is more of a river-port than a seaport, strictly speaking; twenty-three hundred miles up the Amazon from its mouth, on the jungly eastern side of the Andes. But the river is so big and so deep even that far upstream that ocean-going vessels can and sometimes do go there. Used to, anyway. Iquitos began to die when the Amazon rubber boom collapsed around the beginning of the century, and the town hadn’t much commercial or mercantile importance left when I got there. But there was some river traffic between it and Belém on the Atlantic, because there were—and still are—no roads or trains in the part of the world. Even today, you either get to Iquitos by river, or you take a plane. Although why anyone would want to get to Iquitos unless he was on the lam is something I’ve never been able to figure out.

  I took the first plane I could get aboard, first sending up special delivery prayers that the cops hadn’t yet explored the mattress. I wasn’t picked up at the airport. In Iquitos I asked around; about ships, and about the formalities of getting across the border into Brazil. It appeared that there was none of either on the river, at the moment. You simply made yourself a raft or a dugout, got aboard and floated downstream until you were where you wanted to be; Peru, Colombia or Brazil, it made no difference. No sweat. Well, sweat, yes. The Amazon River valley is pretty much of a steambath all the time, lying as it does within three or four degrees of the equator over most of its length. But no problems with the authorities. I was home free. I thought. Little did I dream of what was to betide, as the betrayed virgin says in the true-confession magazines.