The Last Match Page 17

  Also on the credit side, I had nearly a hundred and fifty dollars worth of cruzeiros that I had saved from my blackjack winnings. This was very close to the amount that had been in the money-belt strapped around Miserable’s skinny waist when she walked off the jaula. Looking at it philosophically and from the bright side, my year and a half in camp had repaid me for my unwise investment in her escape. I had also put on about fifteen pounds, after first sweating off almost the same amount. The additional weight was all solid meat, no fat.

  In Santarem I took passage on another jaula going downstream. I figured a big seaport like Belem would hold promising opportunities as soon as I’d acquired some decent clothes and grown enough hair to hide the fact that I had just matriculated from college. Arriving in Belem, a pretty city with wide streets and avenues shaded by mango trees, I walked, just for the pleasure of a passeio of my own choosing, from the docks to the Praça do República in the center of town; a mile or more.

  It was late afternoon, the mangos were ripe, many had fallen to smash on the pavement beneath the trees. Bees buzzed happily around the pulp of the fruit. They left me alone, I left them alone. But while I was walking I heard a rattling sound in the branches over my head and looked up in time to see a big mango coming my way. I caught it, my supper, straight from heaven.

  It was a good sign, I thought. At least it showed that my reflexes were still quick. I could probably still shift into getaway gear as quickly as ever, although if I couldn’t sell the simple citizenry of Belem a gold brick or two without repercussions I wasn’t half the slicker I thought I was. All in all I was feeling quite euphoric that afternoon when I sat down on a shaded bench in the Praça, kicked my chinelos off so I could scratch the bites on my feet and ankles with my toenails, and began to eat my mango. Life was worth living, even in Belem’s heat and humidity.

  A mango is a messy meal to cope with manually. That job is best attempted while you are stark naked in a bathtub, because then if the slippery fruit pops out of your grip, as it most often does, no real harm is done either to you or it. In whatever circumstances you take a mango on hand to hand, however, you are going to get the fruit on your face. It’s impossible not to. You have to burrow into it and gnaw the pulp off the pit. I was well burrowed in and gnawing when a pair of attractive female legs passing my bench came to an abrupt stop, in front of me. Dead, as if their owner had run into something impassable.

  I went on gnawing. The legs, their shoes and the bottom part of a short white skirt spelled Class loud and clear. They did not belong within the ken of an unshaven scabby bum sitting on a park bench eating a gratis mango. Whatever they stopped for, it wasn’t me. But then a voice I had heard before—although never with the same timid, uncertain, questioning, shocked, incredulous, almost frightened, tone to it— said, whispered rather, “Curly!” and I looked up from my supper into the startled, unbelieving face of Nemesis. The Honorable Regina Forbes-Jones.

  “Curly!” she said again, in the same choked incredulous whisper. “Curly!”

  My first thought, so help me, was of the warrant she had sworn out for my arrest in France. I guess it’s true that the guilty flee where no man pursueth, or however it goes. Quite spontaneously, without reflection, myself as startled as she was, I said, “Oh, for God’s sake, Reggie. Halfway across the world for a lousy suit of clothes? You’re crazy!”

  “Curly!” she said again; inaudibly this time. I saw her lips form the word, although no sound came. She was thinner that I remembered her, and had lost some of her Mediterranean suntan. Otherwise she looked the same; as chic and patrician and cool of appearance in tropical white as I was hot, sticky and sloppy.

  “Curly!” she said, or tried to say, again. Her eyes had a stunned look, as if she had been hit hard on the head. Then, as I watched, her face crumpled, the eyes filled with tears and she began to bawl. Not noisily, but with a little whimpering sound. She put her hands over her face and made mewing noises behind them like a cat locked in a closet.

  I didn’t have a handkerchief to offer her, or anything else that would serve except the sleeve of a dirty shirt. Not knowing what to do or what it was all about, but feeling contrite because of what I had apparently said to bring on the storm, I stood up and went over to her. To apologize or something. I’m not quite certain what, except that I had no intention of laying a finger on her. In the first place I was too dirty and sweaty and smelly to touch her, in the second place I remembered the boff on the chin I had got the other time I tried it as well as her promise of what I would get if I ever tried it again, in the third place I just didn’t have it in mind in the first place. What happened in Belem’s Praça do República and thereafter did so because she made it happen, and if I’m a cad and a rotter for saying it, so be it. The truth is the truth. Not that I didn’t cooperate after we were launched.

  I said, “Ah, Reggie, look, I didn’t mean—” but got no further. The Honorable Regina took her hands from her face. With her eyes tightly but ineffectually closed against the tears that continued to leak from them, she reached blindly to grab me around the neck with both arms like an anaconda immobilizing its breakfast. Clinging to that anchorage, she plastered her clean tropical whites against me as if she was trying to fit her buttons into my buttonholes and began babbling, “Curly Curly Curly I thought you were dead I thought you were dead!” She didn’t even pause for punctuation. She did take one deep breath before she hitched another reef in her headlock, then began to kiss me. Her lips were warm and soft and trembly; salty with the salt of her tears, sweet with the taste of the mango on my mouth. It’s God’s truth, the whole truth, nothing but the truth, may I buy the Brooklyn Bridge five times over if it’s not. She kissed me so long and hard and uninterruptedly through the three-eighths of an inch of stiff beard that it irritated the skin of her chin and around her hps, so that she had to wear special makeup for days afterward to hide what looked like heat rash. Tie that for a greeting from a former employer who has a warrant out for your arrest.

  As might be expected, I was less than prepared for the reception, but I refrained from fighting her off. A gentleman’s stature as such is not measured by the length of the stubble on his chin or the sweat-stains on his only shirt, and no gentleman would twist a lady’s wrists to win release from circumstances like those. To tell the truth, I hadn’t been properly kissed for so long that I enjoyed the novelty. As long as she wanted to keep it up, I was willing to hold still even if I got boffed for it afterward.

  When she did let go of my neck at long last, it was not to boff me but to take hold of my arm and start tugging me across the praça. She had stopped crying, although the evidence of tears was plain on her face.

  So was the mango. Her eyes and nose were red as well as the skin of her face where I had sandpapered her.

  “What?” I asked, unable to think of anything more coherent as she continued to haul at my arm.

  All she could say, kind of desperately, was, “Come! Oh, please come!”

  “Wait for my shoes!” It wasn’t exactly what I meant to say, but it was at least understandable. She paid no attention, just kept hauling away at my arm and saying desperately, “Come, oh, please come!” She was still teary, although no longer tearful.

  I went where she dragged me. Short of breaking her fingers one by one to get free, there was nothing else I could do. It wasn’t far, just across the street from the praça to the Hotel Grande.

  The Grande was then and may still be for all I know the best hotel in Belem, a big pretentious-looking place. A number of people, mostly tourists from their appearance, sat around sidewalk tables under an awning killing time the way people do at sidewalk tables all over the world; with a drink or a coffee at their elbows, reading a paper, writing postcards to the home-folks, gossiping or just watching the passersby. Whatever they were doing, they lost interest in it when the Honorable Reggie in her chic tailored whites, her lipstick smeared and with second-hand mango on her face, came sniffling across the street from the pra�
�a dragging by the arm a large, ragged, dirty, barefoot, smelly bum with a prison haircut and a stubble of beard, also with smeared lipstick. We may not have stopped traffic, but we sure focused a lot of stares.

  Reggie paid not a bit of attention to the gawpers. Still telling me to come along, still tugging to make sure I did, she dragged me into the hotel lobby, over to the desk to get her key, into an elevator, out of it again several floors higher up and into an old-fashioned but elegant and roomy suite where a couple of clattery window air-conditioners had wrung the humidity out of the air and were keeping it cool and dry. It was a welcome change from O Caldeirão. Even though I still didn’t know which way was up.

  I found out soon enough. Not to put too fine a point on it, Reggie ravished me. Ruthlessly, repeatedly, un-stintingly and without hesitation the minute she got me behind closed doors. I have already admitted that I cooperated willingly in the effort once we got started, but she did take me by surprise. Before I knew what was happening to me, to us that is, it had happened and was on its way to happening again. And again. And again. After eighteen months in dead storage except for a cabocla now and then, my fires were banked but ready to blaze forth when fanned. Reggie was a great little fanner. Behind the cool patrician front lurked a whirlwind, a cyclone, a tornado, a hurricane. She didn’t even give me time to shave, or bathe, or dab cologne on my earlobes, gestures you’d think a lady of her background and breeding would insist upon. I got around to those things about sixteen hours later, the following morning.

  Long before morning came I made a discovery. It was kind of startling. As noted, I was charged up and full of fire after being too long without a genuine woman, and when the wraps came off I didn’t pay a hell of a lot of attention to anything but the immediate lusts of the flesh. Reggie didn’t really give me a chance even to be considerate about it, or gentle. But after I’d glutted the flesh satisfactorily I had to get up to go into the bathroom, and the evidence of what had taken place was plain; on me, on Reggie when I went back to look at her, in the bed. She had bled a lot. At least it looked like a lot to me, who had never before participated in the defloration of a virgin.

  I said, “Reggie, for Christ’s sake! I—you—I—you—” “Do stop gabbling,” she said. She was lying on her back with her forearm over her eyes, smiling in a kind of relaxed, secretive way. “What is it you’re trying to say?”

  “You—I—you—I—”

  She moved her forearm to look up at me. I was waving my arms at her, at myself, at the bed. She said indifferently, “Oh, that. I suppose I really should do something about it, shouldn’t I? Give me a kiss first and I’ll take steps.”

  I gave her a kiss, still not knowing what in hell to say. The thought that smooth, sleek, sophisticated woman-of-the-world Reggie might be virginal had never—I just hadn’t thought about it. I hadn’t even thought about Reggie for so long that—well, it was all pretty rattling, to have a woman like that drop out of the past like a mango falling from a tree and practically force her virginity on me within ten minutes after our meeting.

  She knew I was rattled, too. She took me by both ears to hold me stooped over her in a kissing—and observant—position. She had beautiful breasts; erect, pointed, symmetrical, lily-white in contrast to the still-remaining pigmentation of the rest of her suntanned skin.

  “Curly, love,” she said gently. “I swore I would make it happen like this if I ever found you again, and that if I didn’t find you no one would have me. I found you. That’s all. Now we’ll not talk about it further.”

  She got out of bed. We did not talk about it further.

  But we did talk about a lot of other things before morning came. We also ate from time to time, meals that Lady Forbes-Jones ordered sent up to the room along with several bottles of indifferent but well-chilled Chileno champagne, the best the hotel could offer. I hadn’t had anything cold to drink for over a year and a half. Or slept in a bed instead of a string hammock, or felt cool air blow on my skin. With Reggie unbelievingly in my arms, no mosquitoes gnawing at me, and no need to roll out before sun-up, it was all an incredible, impossible pipe-dream, but wonderful as long as it lasted.

  She lay with her head on my shoulder, nibbling my ear while she talked to it. Several times I suggested that I would smell better if she would let me up long enough to take a hot bath (another first for me since jumping ship at Callao, the best part of two years earlier). She wouldn’t let me go even that long. For a girl who had never had any practice at it, she was damn near as insatiable for me as I was for her. Even the roughness and stiffness of the bristly beard that was sandpapering her face didn’t hold her back.

  “I’ve waited too long already,” she said, when I suggested that shaving was in order as well as a bath. “More. More. More.”

  “Just as a matter of curiosity,” I asked, when I had got my mouth back. “How long have you been carrying this torch for me?”

  “How long have I been what?”

  I had to translate. It wasn’t an Americanism she knew. She said, “I don’t know, actually. I suppose ever since I saw you on the beach at Cannes with that frightful old American harridan you were sleeping with. Otherwise I wouldn’t have spoken to you as I did, would I?”

  “She wasn’t a frightful old harridan. She was nice and kind and generous. And I wasn’t sleeping with her, whatever you believe. Ours was a platonic friendship.”

  “Bloody likely.”

  “You certainly managed to conceal your true feeling

  for me.”

  “I didn’t know what my true feeling for you was. I couldn’t believe, I refused to believe, that I was hopelessly smitten with a common gigolo, a horrid little spiv, a—a—”

  “You needn’t continue. I understand.”

  She nibbled my ear for a while before she said, thoughtfully, “I couldn’t. Understand, I mean. For a long time. All I wanted to do was hurt you because somehow you were hurting me. Until the night of the charity ball, remember? When you kissed me?”

  “I remember that you kissed me right back with a right hook and promised you’d put me in jail if I ever touched you again. I’m touching you.”

  “So you are, aren’t you? I was upset. That kiss infuriated me. You were so smug and sure of yourself, so—so—confident. As if I were some common little shop-girl you had honored with your company for the evening, and would now take to bed. What was even more humiliating, I—”

  She stopped. For a long moment she said nothing. I said nothing. Then, barely whispering, she said, “It was frightful! I wanted you to take me to bed. That’s when I knew.”

  The air-conditioners clattered on, sending a breeze of cool dry air to fan the bed. I reached out my free arm for the champagne glasses, gave her hers, picked up my own.

  “A la tienne,” I said. “I’m sorry I made you unhappy. I never meant to.”

  “A la tienne. You’re making me happy now. The other doesn’t matter. Remember the night on the Grande Corniche?”

  “I remember.”

  “I wanted you that night so dreadfully that I hurt. I had made up my mind to seduce you. In the car, in a ditch, by the side of the road, anywhere. But I just couldn’t bring myself to—to—”

  She never did get to finish the sentence. She was humbling herself beyond reason. I shut her mouth the best way I knew how and tried to prove to her by good works what she would never allow me to try to put into words, then or later.

  Because the Honorable Reggie, however deeply smitten, enamored, infatuated or just plain torch-bearing, was still the Honorable Reggie, nobody’s fool.

  She knew what I was, what I had been, most probably what I would continue to be in spite of her best efforts; a hustler. Whatever I told her, whatever I promised, whatever I swore to, she wasn’t going to believe it. Trying to tell her that I felt about her the way she felt about me was useless. She knew better, and she disliked being gulled, as she put it, about a matter as important to her as our relationship with each other.

 
“I don’t want to hear it, Curly,” she said, that first afternoon when we became lovers with all the love on her side. “Lie to me about other things, if you must, but not that. You don’t have to he about it. It’s enough for me that you’re alive and in my arms. Promise me just one thing, only one, truthfully, and I’ll forgive you a thousand lies. Please.”

  “I promise. What is it I promise?”

  “Wherever you go, whatever you do, whatever trouble you get into, please let me know that you’re still alive. You don’t have to tell me where you are, or whom you are with, or what you are doing or have done; just that you are alive. Don’t just disappear. I couldn’t stand it again, thinking you were dead, that I’d never see you again. I-I-I can’t tell you—”

  She choked up. I said, “I promise, I promise, I promise, I promise. Please stop it.”

  All in all, it was a hell of a situation; to be in bed with a lovely woman who loved me enough to bare her soul as well as her body for me but refused to listen to anything I had to offer in return. All my talents as a bunco artist weren’t enough to sell her the simplest little bunco in the world. It made me feel downright inferior. Just as the doggedness of purpose with which she had set out to find me when I left France made me grateful she hadn’t been coming after me with a gun.

  She had tracked me easily enough to Tangier. The juge in Marseilles had issued a warrant and put her on to Interpol when she had asked for his help, although he himself wasn’t particularly interested in pulling me in, and warned her that the warrant was no good outside France. She didn’t care. The Milquetoast who came after me in Tangier was an Interpol clerk she had bribed to try to con me during his summer holiday. She knew nothing about him, and nothing at all about Boda. It had been a good bit more difficult for her to track me back to the States, but she’d managed it about the time I shipped out for South America. More than a year went by after that before she picked up my trail again in Lima, where my passport had surfaced.