The Last Match Page 18

  I said, “Wait a minute. All this must have cost you a potful of money.”

  “Of course it did, silly. A bloody fortune.” “All for me?”

  “All for you. I had to hire detectives to discover where you were, where you were supposed to be. After the fiasco in Tangier I never let them go any further than that, but followed them to look for you myself. In Lima the police had lost interest in you, but regained interest when I offered a large enough reward. They finally traced you to Iquitos, and I went there. I learned that a man answering your description had bought pas-, sage to Belem on a riverboat, almost two years ago—”

  “It’s only a few weeks over eighteen months, but go on.”

  “I flew here, it’s been about a month now, but there was no trace of you, no indication that you had ever arrived. And I heard horrible things about the Amazon jungle, about men who had disappeared in it, been lost, captured by Indians, other things. I began having nightmares, horrible dreams in which I could see you, things happening to you, being done to you—”

  I shut her up again. Her voice had gone thin and she was talking too fast. Holding her tightly, I could feel her heart banging in her ribcage behind the beautiful breasts. When it had quieted down a bit, I let her talk again.

  “So then I saw you sitting in the park, eating a mango and scratching yourself with your toes,” she went on. “For a moment I thought it was another dream. But then I knew you were real, alive, that I had found you at last, and I did what I had been promising myself for two and a half years I would do right away, without hesitation, if I ever got you back. So here we are. Where have you been? Where did you disappear? After Iquitos, I mean.”

  I’d been waiting for the question, mulling over various answers to it while she talked. One of them was the truth. But getting myself into O Caldeirão the way I had was such a dumbheaded thing to do that I was ashamed to confess it, and besides she would have read romantic overtones into my gesture toward poor bedraggled Miserable. Since she knew the police had been after me in Lima anyway, I told her that the Brazilian fuzz had put me away as a favor to their Peruvian buddies.

  She listened without comment until I finished talking. When I said, “That’s all. I’ve been out long enough to grow the beard I’ve been scratching your face with; four days. I’ve got no papers, no money to amount to anything, no shoes since you lost mine for me, no other clothes but the ones you stripped off me in your unseemly haste, and no immediate prospects. However, within the next few days I’ll con one of the local suckers out of his life savings and be back in business. Will you marry me?”

  “Bloody likely. Bloody likely story, too. It rings just enough of the truth to sound plausible. Except for the picture of you performing honest labor for a year and a half, even under compulsion.”

  “If you’ll kindly take a look at the calluses on my hands—”

  “I don’t have to look at the calluses on your hands. They’re imprinted all over me. You probably got them dealing dishonest vingt-et-un to your fellow prisoners.”

  It was odd how close she could come to the truth without hitting it bang on. For lack of a better retort, I said, “They don’t call it that here. It’s vinte-e-um.”

  It sounded kind of lame even to me. Somehow I had a feeling that the Honorable Regina Forbes-Jones was back in the pitcher’s box again, and I was catching for her.

  Chapter Eleven

  Whatever doubts I may have had about it vanished in the morning. I was soaking in a hot tub, examining my bug-bites and enjoying the caress of real soap, when she got on the horn and began wreaking her will on the hotel desk.

  The Honorable Reggie wouldn’t have been too bad at the bunco game herself. After ordering practically everything there was in the kitchen sent up for our breakfast, she said, “Lord Forbes-Jones has just returned from a trip into the bush. His kit has been misplaced. Please have a hairdresser and someone to do his nails here exactly one hour after breakfast has been served. Also the best available tailor—a British tailor, if possible—and a cobbler to take his foot measurements. His Lordship will also wish to order shirts, hose, underwear and the other things. Please attend to it. Exactly one hour after breakfast has been served, mind.”

  From the luxury of the tub I yelled, “And a doctor! His Lordship has tick heads.”

  “You’ve what?” her phony Ladyship called back.

  “Tick heads. They ought to come out, if I’m going to look pretty for you.”

  “What in heaven’s name are tick heads?”

  “The heads of ticks. Just say you want a doctor, doll. The intimate details aren’t necessary.”

  She passed on the order, but she was still curious. I had to show her. Ticks are inescapable in the Amazonian bush. They aren’t very big when they grab on to you, but they get to be as fat as plums after they’ve drunk enough of your blood. This they do by sinking their heads into your flesh, very often going for the groin and what they refuse to recognize as the private parts. If you’re careless about pulling them off, or scratch them loose by accident in your sleep, the head remains under your skin and festers.

  I had half a dozen of them in me that the doctor had to go after with a scalpel. Then I was shaved, shampooed, cologned, massaged, pedicured—no fooling; I felt like a pet poodle—measured, fitted, clothed, shod and turned out looking exactly like a freshly sprung convict made up as a British lord.

  Trying to fit into the part, I picked up the phone to order something, I forget what it was. I said, “Lord Forbes-Jones heah,” to the operator in my best imitation of Reggie’s accent and delivery. She jumped up.

  “A peer doesn’t identify himself as such in conversation,” she said critically. “You’re simply Forbes-Jones. And do please refrain from affecting that atrocious accent. It’s grotesque. If you want anything, I’ll order it for you.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” I said. “May I use my own judgment about wiping my nose, or are you going to do that for me, too?”

  “I only meant to say—”

  “I’m saying now. You listen. I’m not on probation to you anymore, Reggie, and I’m not going to be your stooge. I appreciate your feeling for me, and what you’ve done, and why you’re doing it. I’m grateful to you. But I’m going to pay you back for all this lettuce and mayonnaise you’ve hung on me, and until I do I’m still my own man.” “Curly, I only want—”

  “I know what you want. I’m trying to tell you that I’m not it and I won’t be it. Get it through your obstinate head. If you want me, stop shoving. Otherwise you’re going to shove me right out of bed.”

  Her face went white and stiff as she listened to me. I suppose it was the only time in her life she had held still for a slap in the mouth like that. But she took it, and it was she who said “I’m sorry” first. I apologized in my own turn. The subject was dropped, for the time being.

  She asked me, in a nice way, if I would please go back to France with her. Before the slap in the mouth she’d have told me we were going back to France. We discussed the pros and cons. I brought up several objections, which she knocked down. The warrant had been withdrawn, my minor connection with the de Lille swindle had apparently not come to light—at least she hadn’t heard of it, as she would have if it had been known—and no charges were outstanding against me. When I said I had no passport, she said I did, too. The old one she had pinched in France. She’d carried it everywhere she went since getting it back from Mr. Uh Uh. It had expired but was renewable.

  While I was getting it renewed at the consulate, she got us plane tickets for Paris, after first making sure I knew she was doing it and approved of her schedule. I had no real objection to France as long as I wasn’t going to be flung back into the violon as soon as I got there, but somehow I had a feeling that the Honorable Regina was being entirely too sweet and obliging and dutiful to His Lordship’s wishes since His Lordship had pinned her ears back. I can’t say I had any solid grounds for complaint in any direction, though. Anything I wanted from her or o
f her was mine without hesitation. We had a tacit understanding that a day of reckoning would come, but it was never again discussed after our tête à tête.

  There are various ways to get to Paris from Belem by air. I don’t know that she picked the route that went by way of Cayenne, in French Guiana, deliberately. I suspect that she did, for the moral effect it would have on me when the plane came in low over Devil’s Island for its landing and I could look down on the sorry sons of bitches doomed to die there. Not every transporté sent to l’Île du Diable during the years it functioned as a penal colony was a lifer. But a lot of them were, and escape from it was just about as tough as escape from O Caldeirão. Sitting there in the plane—first class, no less—in my snappy British tailoring, with a good-looking heiress who loved me at my side, cute dolls running up and down the aisle to gratify my every whim whenever I raised a languid hand and Devil’s Island as an object lesson to remind me of the wages of sin, I’d have been a thorough horse’s ass to contemplate returning to a life of crime, wouldn’t I?

  I was a horse’s ass. I had figured out a new con, with Reggie’s help, before we reached Paris.

  She didn’t know she was helping me, but the come-on was a fake identity as a British peer, the getaway gimmick a disappearance of the British peer into the identity of an American G.I. (She had brought my army papers with her, too.) I set myself to studying her accent and diction from then on to be able to bring off the imitation convincingly. I could speak good French, pretty good Spanish, Occupation Army German, jailhouse Portuguese and gutter Arabic as well as American. I didn’t think it would be too hard for me to learn to speak English as well.

  In France we set up housekeeping in a pleasant little villa Reggie rented in the hills back of Mougins, a few kilometers from the Mediterranean shore. A lot of flowers are grown in that area for the perfume factories in Grasse—carnations, roses, tuberoses, jasmine, others—and we were right across a back road from the flower fields. When they had freshly blossomed and were ready for gathering, early in the morning, they were pretty heady. The villa was rather too close for my comfort to the Cap d’Antibes, where the Marquis and Marquise de Lille du Rocher had their villa, until I learned that the horselaughs engendered by the trial had driven them from the Cote. Bernard and his pals had been put away for a solid rap, so no trouble would be coming from that direction. All in all it seemed that I had found le filon, as the French say of someone who has stumbled onto a good thing.

  There was one fly in the otherwise enjoyable ointment. That was Reggie’s obduracy. She had stopped pushing her muscle at me since I cut her down for it in Belem, but her views and attitudes hadn’t changed a bit. She was still determined to make something out of me I wasn’t and didn’t want to be; a silk purse, you might say. Fighting her on those—or any—grounds was like fighting a feather mattress. She took all my best shots, absorbed them, smothered them and was unaffected by them. No matter how much I screamed, howled and protested that I wanted to live my own life, make my own mistakes, win my own prizes and pay my own penalties, she was bound and determined to set my feet in the path of righteousness. Not religious righteousness, nothing like that. She was irreligious as I was. Legal righteousness. Economic righteousness. Moral righteousness. The old nine-to-five straight and narrow.

  She didn’t care a groat, as she put it, what the neighbors thought about our living together without any pretense of being married. As a matter of fact our neighbors, being French, wouldn’t have cared a groat themselves, if they’d thought about us at all. But Reggie didn’t want anybody to get the idea she was keeping me as a house pet. She was keeping me, of course, in a way; she paid all the bills and gave me spending money. But everything was noted in an account book she kept of my indebtedness to her, and our agreement still stood. She would get her money back in time.

  I planned to raise the grisbi with the British Peer swindle I had figured out, as soon as I was ready for it. My Lord Haw Haw delivery was getting better every day, although I never let her catch me practicing it.

  She had different ideas, naturally.

  “I’m going to lend you five thousand pounds,” she said. “It’s not a gift, mind, and you’ll have to pay me some kind of interest on it when you’re able to. We’ll talk about that later. You can put it into anything you like, just so long as it’s honest.”

  “How about a baccarat game?” I asked. “That’s reasonably honest.”

  “Don’t be flippant. You have a good mind, Curly love. Please use it intelligently for both of us.”

  “Uh huh,” I said. “Yes, ma’am. I’ll invest in a shoe store. I always wanted to sell shoes. Look up the girls’ legs and all. Boy!”

  “You’re not old enough to be a dirty old man. You’re a dirty young man.”

  What I bought was Riviera real estate. There wasn’t even much of a gamble in it. All the French capital that was then being repatriated from Indochina, Algiers, Morocco, Tunisia and other former overseas colonies was looking for a new place in the sun to settle down. A lot of it found its way to the Cote d’Azur. Property values, which had been depressed by France’s troubles abroad, doubled, doubled again, doubled again after that and still rose. A lot of landholders took their profits too soon, then kicked themselves as more profits accumulated for the buyers. I took profits as fast as they could be realized, but I didn’t kick myself for it afterward. By turning them over quickly without ever taking title I made Reggie’s five thousand pounds do the work of fifty thousand. Sometimes I’d buy, sell and re-buy an option on the same piece of property two or three times, ride it up a way each time, sell off, get onto something else and maybe go back to look at the first piece again after a while. If it sounds screwy, so is the in-and-out trading by which smart operators make killings in a steadily rising stock market. I made a killing. Not an enormous one, but a nice pile of braise that kept right on snowballing.

  Reggie was still paying the bills and jotting the amounts down in her little account book, so I didn’t have to take anything out of the pot to live on. Life was so smooth and the living so easy at the Villa Parfumée that it was dull. I had everything anybody could ask for, just for the asking; a loving woman, a comfortable home, a Mercedes-Benz to drive, money, plenty of food and booze, all the entertainments I could use— my God, it was as bad as driving a bus. Sometimes I got so damned bored with it I thought of signing my investments over to Reggie and shipping out again. Not as a fireman this time, that would be no improvement, but on deck. Reggie would miss me, probably, but I’d come back in time. Probably. Or maybe not. We didn’t have any contract of cohabitation, express or implied. I had suggested that we get married, three or four times by then, because I thought she expected it of me. The answer was always a firm Nyet.

  “No, love,” she would say, always giving me a nice kiss and a pat to take the sting out of it. “When I marry it will be for love. Not to an unscrupulous fortune-hunter.”

  “Goddamn it, Reggie,” I said, the last time she gave me that same brush. “I’m not after your goddamn money! I don’t want your goddamn money! I’ve got money of my own. You say you love me, but when I try to tell you I—”

  “Don’t try. And please don’t swear at me.”

  “I’ll swear all the bloody hell I like whenever I goddamn well feel like it, at you or anyone else! And if I goddamn well want to say I goddamn well lo—”

  She shut my mouth the way I had shut hers when I was depriving her of her virginity in a hotel room in Belem. It was a real sweet loving lovely kiss.

  “I do love you, Curly,” she said afterward. “I’ll always love you, whatever you do. I just don’t want you to lie to me about important things.”

  “Goddamn it all to hell and hack!” I yelled. “I’m going to ship out! The hell with you!” and went somewhere else. I really was going to ship out, on the first available ship. I didn’t give a good goddamn where it went. I’d even sign on as a fireman, by God, if I had to. I couldn’t take the Honorable mulehead Regina for an
other ten minutes.

  Somewhere about this time I ran into Jean-Pierre, my old pote and jail-mate. He had put on a good bit of lard since I saw him last, and was doing business behind the zinc of a bar-and-grill in Golfe Juan, where I had gone to look at a piece of property. Watering the scotch as usual, I assumed. But after we had greeted each other and bought each other a drink, one of the waiters working the tables in the place called him ‘patron’ while bringing him the money to settle an addition.

  I said, “Nobody in his right mind would let you handle the cash if you weren’t the patron, so I guess you have to own the joint. Whom did you rob?”

  He grinned, shaking his head. A couple of extra chins he had grown wobbled when he did it.

  “Got lucky at the casino one night,” he said. “And drunk. Too drunk to quit while I was ahead, so I got further ahead. I put it into this place quick before I could lose it back. Got a real good buy. The mec who had it before me died, and his widow wanted to unload.”

  “I’ll bet she unloaded more than she’d counted on.”

  “Not a bit. I gave her a fair deal. I’m legitimate now, Curly. Those bullets the Spanish bastards shot at us that night with The Boar—remember?—scared the piss out of me. I didn’t like the violon too well, either.”

  “How legitimate is legitimate?”

  “Oh, I push a little contraband booze, a few cigarettes, change a few black-market dollars, maybe pass a word to the right people now and then when I hear a pigeon flying around loose. It’s good for business. But that’s all.”

  “No H? For The Boar, maybe?”

  He gave me a sharp look. “Not on your life. The flics beat you up for that first and lock you up for it afterwards. I told you, I’m legitimate. Even if I wasn’t, I wouldn’t have any more to do with those stinking Corsican bastards than I have to. Let me tell you about Corsicans, Curly. Of all the low-down rotten dirty cutthroat scum in the world—”