The Last Match Read online

  He shut up as if he’d been shot. He wasn’t looking at me, but over my shoulder at someone who had just come into the bar. His face had the same kind of sick look on it as the face of the warehouse checker in Tangier when The Boar gave him the hard eye. I turned around to have a look for myself and stared straight into those same chill Corsican goat-turds that had curdled the checker’s blood.

  He recognized me immediately, for all the months that had passed and the expensive British threads that clothed me. He looked pretty prosperous himself, as befitted the heroin king of the Marseille waterfront. His suit was a bit on the gangstaire side, flashy, but the big diamond he wore on his pinky looked like the real article. He came up to the zinc and ordered a Pernod.

  Jean-Pierre’s hands were shaking as he put out the bottle, the glass and a carafe of water. Whatever he had been about to tell me further about the Corsicans, he had almost told it at the wrong moment.

  “You?” The Boar said to me in his expressionless, scar-tissued voice, holding up the bottle.

  “I’m drinking whiskey,” I said. “Nothing but the best for me, nowadays. Thanks, anyway.”

  “Give him another whiskey.” The Boar said it without bothering to look at Jean-Pierre. “You’re doing all right, eh?”

  “I’m doing all right.”

  “That your Mercedes outside?”

  “I drive it.”

  “What’s your truc?”

  “No truc. I’m legitimate. Like Jean-Pierre here.” “Who’s keeping you?”

  I didn’t bang him for several reasons. One of the best was that anyone who banged on The Boar was going to get himself killed. It was enough to make the other reasons unimportant. Besides, he hadn’t meant the crack as an insult. In his vocabulary it was actually a kind of compliment. It implied that I was smart enough to arrange for somebody else’s money to support me; in his dung-drop eyes, a commendable accomplishment.

  I said, “Oh, I flit around. Flower to flower.”

  “Ever flit as far as Marseille?”

  “Not lately. Not since the violon.”

  “I’ve got business going in Marseille. I could use an

  American with a front like yours to carry merchandise aboard American ships.”

  Jean-Pierre slid the whiskey in front of me, sloshing part of it on the bar. He was still shaky.

  I took the time to finish my old drink and start on the new one while I thought of the right thing to say. It wasn’t going to be a wisecrack, and it wasn’t going to reflect my honest opinion of people who deal in heroin. He had no more sense of humor than a rattlesnake, but his Corsican code of honor, if you call it that, demanded at least one cut throat in answer to a slight. Jean-Pierre mopped at the bar; seeing no evil, hearing no evil, speaking not at all. He would have been happy to go into the kitchen and hide under a stove.

  I said, “Well, thanks. Maybe some day. Right now I’ve got a poulet who doesn’t give me much time off.”

  “There’s money in it for you.”

  “I’ve got all the money I can use. Thanks anyway.”

  “Nobody ever has all the money he can use. Any time you want to work for me again, this one knows how to get in touch with me.” ‘This one’ was Jean-Pierre, to whom he bent a finger telling him he was now being called upon to speak. “Anything new?”

  “No, sir. Nothing.”

  “Make a call once a week anyway. I don’t like to come by here for nothing.”

  “Yes, sir. I tried to call a couple of days ago, but—”

  “Merde. Someone is always at the number I gave you. Next time, get through.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  The Boar left us. He hadn’t said hello, he didn’t say goodbye, he didn’t pay for the drinks he had ordered, mine or his own. He put his glass down and walked out. Nobody said him Nay.

  I said to Jean-Pierre, who still looked sick, “You were telling me about Corsicans?”

  He finished what he had to say about Corsicans in six words, of which the least virulent was con. In French this is by no means the equivalent of ‘con’ as in swindle, or con as in chile con carne. After that he shut up like a clam.

  About a week after that Reggie’s father died. Suddenly and unexpectedly. She had to go back to England for the funeral and to do something about the estate of which she was either sole heir or principal heir. She wouldn’t know which it was until the will was read, but she stood to come into a bigger potful than she already had. I put her on the plane at Nice airport.

  We didn’t have much to say to each other while we waited for her flight-call. I was thinking that the gap between us was going to be wider now that she was stinking rich instead of merely rich. She may have been thinking along the same lines. After a silence between us that lasted a good ten or fifteen minutes, she said abruptly, “Don’t forget your promise.”

  “What promise?”

  “The one you made in Belem.”

  “I’m sorry. I just don’t remember what it was. Give me a hint.”

  “Wherever you go, whatever you do, wherever you are, whatever you have done—”

  “I’m not going anywhere, Reggie. You’re going. To England. Remember?” I took her by the arms to make her look at me, which she seemed disinclined to do. “I’ll come with you, if you want. We don’t have to live together. I’ll be just another guy you met over here, passing through.”

  “No. I don’t want that. I wouldn’t want to see you if I couldn’t love you.” She was still reluctant to look at me, for some reason. “Promise that you won’t forget your promise.”

  “I promise, I promise, I promise, I promise, I promise, I promise. What’s this all about, anyway? I’ll be right here waiting when you get back. All you have to do is let me know—”

  Her flight-call came booming out of the box before the conversation could go any further. I took her as far as I could go, the check-in gate, and kissed her goodbye. She hung on to me for a moment as if she were a barnacle hanging to a rock.

  “I’ll love you until I die, Curly,” she said into my ear. I think she was crying, although she turned away from me so fast I didn’t get to see her face. “Whatever happens. Goodbye.”

  With that, she was gone. She didn’t look back. I thought, Now I wonder what that was all about, she’s only going to be gone a month or two or three, she plays it like “Kathleen Mavourneen.”

  It didn’t bother me long. The warm, welcome wave of relief from restraint that came over me when I had waved her plane off from the observation deck and watched it fade safely into the distance was wonderful. I felt as if I’d just come out of O Caldeirão again. Reggie was a doll, but a demanding doll. Sweet, loving, attentive, attractive, at once a lady and a good lay but as inexorable as a glacier in having her way. Marriage to her would be a fate worse than death, no question about it. At least in a de facto arrangement such as ours I could walk out whenever I wanted to. I would, too. Some day. In the meantime, I was free, free, free, free of her for at least a month, maybe two or three months. To do whatever I wanted.

  I’d gotten a better idea than the Lord Haw Haw bunco. François André wasn’t the type to be taken in by that, and François André was the fattest pigeon in the south of France with the possible exception of Onassis, Niarchos and a couple of maharajahs. He may have been even fatter than they were. Just the thought of plucking his feathers brought my theretofore languid pulse-rate up. I didn’t know just how I was going to do it, but he was well worth a flim-flam tailored to fit him.

  André is dead now. He led a long, full and satisfying life turning himself from a penniless barrel-maker’s boy into a multi-multi-multi-millionaire. He was something of a con man himself. He used to boast that he got his start by betting that he could roll a barrel in a straight line although the other guy couldn’t. Suckers who saw how easy it looked when he did it—it is easy, if you’ve been doing it since you were six—financed his initial venture into professional gambling during the years when games like roulette were illegal in Fran
ce, therefore unregulated and untaxed. Young François, who was big for a Frenchman, long-legged and fast on his feet, ran a crossroads roulette game in a suitcase. Some said that his habit in later years of always carrying an umbrella outdoors, rain or shine, stemmed from the days when the umbrella opened up into a roulette layout with two or three extra zeros on it to sweeten the house percentage. He could set up for business in two minutes, fold up and run from the flics in thirty seconds.

  From the crossroads game he went on to start a bootleg casino on the outskirts of Paris, from there onward and upward until he owned and/or operated casinos in Cannes, Juan-les-Pins, Aix-les-Bains, La Baule, Deauville and several other places. He also owned hotels, nightclubs, sports grounds and other ancillary properties in these popular resorts, and banked two highly profitable circles privés, private gambling clubs, in Paris, where casino gambling is still outlawed. He was literally so wealthy he didn’t know what his wealth amounted to.

  “How can I possibly say?” he told me when I asked the question. “It changes from moment to moment. Since we have been talking I may have won or lost a milliard of francs.”

  A milliard is what we could call a billion, and a billion francs in those days was worth something in the neighborhood of a quarter of a million dollars. It was nice to know the old boy had that kind of money to spare without hurting. A milliard or two would satisfy my ambitions nicely.

  I said, “But day by day you are of course richer rather than poorer. Is that a fair statement?”

  “Of course. I will give you without charge the one infallible system for consistently winning at roulette, young man. Operate the wheel.”

  I got to ask him personal questions like these by producing credentials to show I was a freelance writer on assignment from a well-known American magazine to do a biographical piece about him. The credentials took a bit of forgery, but they looked good when I finished them. I hired a photographer and went through channels until I got to the office André was then occupying, a plain little barely furnished cubbyhole up under the eaves of the winter casino in Cannes. His only watchdog there was a little old moth-eaten secretary, male, in a smaller ante-cubbyhole who somehow gave the impression that he wrote letters with a quill pen. I thought it strange that a man who was such an obvious target for crooks like me should be so easily accessible, but later found out he wasn’t as easy as I had thought. André was a wily old boy, past eighty when I knew him but shrewd and sharp as a tack with a mind as quick as a rat-trap. He still had his own hair, teeth, hearing and eyesight, all without artificial aid.

  “So, young man,” he said, when I first presented myself and my phony credentials. He called all males jeunes homines, all females jeunes filles, regardless of their age. “You want to interview me. Of what possible interest could I be to your readers?”

  “A man who has come as far as you have from such an unpromising start in life as yours, sir, is the epitome of the American idea of success. We are great admirers of success.”

  “How do you know of my beginnings, and how far 1 have come?”

  “The basics of your career are a matter of public-knowledge, sir, as you must be aware. My readers would like to know more of the details.”

  “You will let me see what you write before it is published?”

  “Of course. I will also want photographs, but I have a man to take those. Any time at your convenience.”

  “Very well. Where shall we begin?”

  “To answer that, sir, I’d need to know how much of your time I may have.”

  “As much as you like.” He waved a hand indifferently. “I have little else to do with it. Few activities but the accumulation of more money than I can possibly use are still left open to me.”

  I must say I liked the old boy’s attitude about money, although the truth is I didn’t get even one lousy milliard of it. I didn’t even come close. But the stimulation and satisfaction of a good swindle are as much in the preliminaries to the grab as in the grab itself; in some ways, more so. Setting up the store, telling the tale, sinking the gaff, teasing the mark down to the finishing wire, all these things call for the exercise of artistry, adaptability, sound judgment, ingenuity, applied psychology, steady nerves, showmanship, gall, further talents. While the operation is going on you’re like a gambler in a game where the stakes are high enough to make you sweat. Win or lose, one thing you don’t get is bored. I’m not now talking about tired old cut-and-dried cons like the Spanish Prisoner bunco, the Wire House, the Envelope Switch, the Money-Making Machine, hocuses that always follow the same pattern. They still work and will continue to work because Barnum underestimated the boob birthrate by about ninety percent. A good con is one you build to order around a mark who isn’t a natural-born sucker but a shrewd, successful, hard-headed wise old fox like François André and while I didn’t get his money I got a hell of a lot of enjoyment out of figuring ways and means to take it away from him. Since my plans never got off the ground, or even shaped themselves fully in my mind before I had to give them up, there’s nothing more to be said about what they might have been.

  However, as a start I had to know a whole lot about him that I didn’t know; his strengths, weaknesses, idiosyncrasies, vanities, traits of character, the other things. I got him started talking about himself easily enough, but he began as far back as he could remember, when he was rolling barrels higher than himself. To cover the next seventy-five years even sketchily would have taken seventy-five years. I asked him please to stick to the dramatic highlights of his career.

  He said, “Well, once I bluffed four kings in a poker game. Is that a dramatic highlight?”

  “Yes, sir,” I said. “It certainly is. But I wouldn’t call four kings exactly a bluffing hand.”

  “No, no. Four real kings, all at one of my tables. Belgium, Portugal, Denmark and Sweden.” He laughed at the memory. “I had a small pair, as I remember. At least two of Their Highnesses had better hands. But they couldn’t believe that a poor barrel-maker’s boy would have the temerity, the brass, to challenge them without an adequacy to challenge with, and I took their money by throwing in an enormous bet any one of them could have had with a call. Lèse majesté, they would have said if I had let them know the truth. Of course I never did.”

  “You sound like a fine poker-player, sir.”

  “Experienced, you could say. I will give you another gambling secret that may be of value to you, young man. It is: L’audace, l’audace, et toujours l’audace. If you do not have the courage to risk whatever must be risked to win the stakes of the game, then you are best off out of it. Because a bolder player, which is to say a better player, will beat you every time if you play against him long enough.”

  “It sounds like good advice from an expert, sir.”

  “Thank you.” He smiled at me in a gentle, friendly way. “But let us return to the subject of bluffing, which holds a strong fascination for me. What are you going to say when I tell you that I know your credentials are false and you are in no way what you have represented yourself to be? Eh?”

  Chapter Twelve

  This small bombshell fell in my lap after I had been interviewing him steadily for three days, several hours each day, and my photographer had taken up several further hours of his time with picture-snapping. Andre had at all times been gracious, cooperative and charming. He was still gracious, cooperative and charming, by God. At least if he felt otherwise inside he didn’t show it. He was quite a man, the old barrel-maker’s boy, as well as one hell of a poker player.

  I sat facing him across his desk, my notebook spread open in front of me, a pencil in my hand for note-taking. I closed the book, stuck it in my pocket, put the pencil away and stood up.

  “I would say that my chances of convincing you that you are wrong are poor,” I said. “I’ll not waste any more of your time. Thank you for what you have given me, and good afternoon.”

  “Sit down,” he said amiably. “You aren’t wasting my time. Or your own. What did you
have in mind in mounting this masquerade?”

  “I should think that would be obvious, sir. Your money.”

  “That is obvious. By what means did you hope to take it from me?”

  He was so pleasant, so frankly interested in what I’d been working up to, that I told him what there was to tell. Namely, not much, except that he’d looked like a good mark for a score if I could work out the right pitch. There wasn’t anything he could do with the confession that he couldn’t do without it. If he wanted to do anything.

  He said, “Young man, there is a basic error in your psychology. To swindle anybody, it is necessary that you present him with a temptation. Your fish must have greed in his soul for the lure that will bring him into your trap. Is it not so?”

  “If you mean to suggest that you can’t cheat an honest man—”

  “I don’t. Honest men are cheated every day. My games are honest, and I have been cheated many times. My roulette wheels and card tables represent my greed for the money of the people who choose to play at them. They make me cheatable. They are the tangible evidence of my greed—as it once existed.” He was still gently amiable, still smiling, but somehow he managed to look sad. “I have no children. My wife is well provided for if I should die before she does. I am in good health and good appetite for a man of my age. I have more money than I can possibly count. With such great wealth, so few desires left to gratify, what can I possibly want that I do not possess? What can you tempt me with that you are able to give me, or even pretend to be able to give me?”

  “Not a thing,” I said. “I see your point. I could never get your money today. I might have, years ago.”

  He nodded. “Possibly. But it would have been difficult. I am always cautious. And never trusting.”

  It had been mere mechanical routine for his protective force to begin running a check on me as soon as the old boy got word that I wanted to meet him. He had known that I and my credentials were phonies within twenty-four hours after I first entered his office. But he had been bored and curious at first, later hopeful of being able to use me in a scheme of his own if I lived up to his expectations. All the time I’d been getting into his character, he’d been getting into mine. Now he made his own pitch.