The Last Match Read online

  I had to go after her. In those days I had principles; a few, anyway. She flatly refused to take the money back. I could call it a loan, if I wanted to, but I had to keep it. And no gambling.

  So what do you do around a gambling casino if you can’t gamble? It ended with her taking me home in a car she had rented for the day to her hotel in Cannes, there to install me in a room of my own and buy me the best dinner I had eaten in Europe, with a bottle of Gewürtztraminer that must have set her back at least ten bucks. She said she was celebrating her birthday.

  “Although I’m not going to tell you which one,” she said girlishly. “So don’t ask me.”

  “The twenty-first, I’ll bet,” I said. “They wouldn’t let you into the casino if you were any younger. I’m sorry I didn’t know about it sooner. I’d have bought you a present. With your money.”

  “Oh, please. Let’s not talk about money.” She put her hand over mine on the table. “Dear boy. You’ve made me very happy today.”

  Like that, I was a gigolo. See how things can creep up on you when you’re not looking?

  Her name was Mrs. Emmaline Stokes; a widow. She wasn’t crazy mad jealous of me at all, just motherly. As a matter of fact she was kind of proud of me because the girls gave me the eye all the time. We never slept together. At first I thought that was what she wanted of me, but when I made a few exploratory passes she reacted as if I had suggested incest. She was lonely, she was rich, she liked having a good-looking young man paying attention to her. Particularly a young man whose language she could understand. It didn’t matter that I was more of the age and temperament to be interested in the fifty thousand cute poupettes of all sizes, shapes, colors and nationalities bulging their bikinis all the way from Menton to St. Tropez, not to mention a somewhat smaller group untrammeled by bikinis or anything else who congregated in an open-house nudist rookery on the Île du Levant. Emmaline dear was satisfied with me as an acceptable escort, and wanted nothing more. She bought me the wardrobe I needed, evening clothes, an expensive wristwatch, a gold cigarette case, other things, and supplied me with the money to take her places. She never required an accounting, or questioned expenditures, or embarrassed either of us by making me ask for money when I ran out. She was a kind, generous woman, and I liked her. Ours was the relationship of a Boy Scout helping a nice little old lady across the street to the gambling hell.

  Then I met Nemesis. It wasn’t her real name, but I didn’t know her real name when she first pointed the accusing finger of retribution at me, and I got to think of her that way before I knew anything about her.

  I was sunning myself on the beach in front of the Martinez, Emmaline dear’s hotel in Cannes. She had gone back to the hotel to call on Uncle John, as she put it with maidenly modesty. I was lying on my back with my eyes closed when I became aware that a shadow had fallen on my face. I opened my eyes and looked up at this girl, woman—she was about my age, in the mid-twenties—looking down at me. She wore a rubber bathing-cap with the ear-tabs turned up so she could hear, a bathing suit on the conservative side by local standards, and she was easy to look at. Nothing to make a man leap to his feet and lunge, but all right.

  “Hello, Curlilocks,” she said. “Where’s your mother?”

  She had a British accent to spread on a crumpet. It was a kind of hoity-toity drawl that sounded as if she were inwardly amused about something secret.

  “If you mean the lady whose company I’m keeping, she isn’t my mother. She went where ladies can’t send someone else to go for them. She’ll be back in a few minutes.”

  “I was afraid of that.” She smiled at me, and I must say she had lovely teeth. A lot of Englishwomen don’t. “Is that your natural hair, or do you do it up in curlers?”

  “I give myself home permanents,” I said. “I’m one of the Toni Twins.”

  I didn’t know why she was giving me the needle, but after two years under a tough top sergeant I was cal lused to needling. She didn’t bother me too much.

  “I’ll wager you curl the hair on your chest, too.”

  “As anyone can see at a glance. Now push off and go pester someone else, will you? I’m sleeping.”

  I closed my eyes. She said, in the same hoity-toity drawl, “You contemptible little spiv!”

  I opened my eyes again, wondering, What the hell? I’d never seen her before, to recognize. She might have been around, but she wasn’t the type to catch my eve easily.

  “What’s a spiv?” I asked her.

  “You are. A wretched spiv.”

  With that she walked down to the water, fixed her ear-tabs, fastened her chin-strap, dived in and swam out to a float anchored off the beach. She swam easily and well, a kind of inwardly amused drawl although of course I mean crawl.

  About then Emmaline dear came back from Uncle John’s place and plopped down on the sand beside me.

  “Who’s the girl you were talking to?” she asked, with no particular curiosity.

  “I don’t know. I never saw her before. I’d just as soon never see her again, too.”

  “Why?”

  “She called me a wretched spiv.” “A spiv?” “A spiv.”

  “Well, I don’t think that was very nice of her, whatever it means.” She patted my hand comfortingly where it lay on the sand. “Dear boy.”

  I found out what a spiv was from Cedric, the Martinez’ head bartender. He was British. According to him, spivs were originally by-products of World War II, when England was on short rations for everything and black-marketeering was big business. Spiv was the name for a black marketeer. When black markets went out, spivs moved into other lines of business the way mobsters in the U.S.A. went into other lines of business when Prohibition was repealed. Spiv came to mean any kind of grifter at all, although usually with an overtone of small-time attached. A peanut-pincher, as they say around the carnie lots. A cheap chiseler, in effect.

  That hurt my feelings. It’s bad enough when a strange female you’ve never seen before walks up to you out of nowhere and accuses you of curling your hair, but to call you a cheap chiseler as well is too much even for army calluses. She rankled on me every time I thought of her, which was too often. I took to looking for her whenever Emmaline dear and I were out on the town. Often I saw her around; gambling indifferently or dancing with some guy at one of the boîtes—her escorts tended not to last long, two or three or four evenings at the most before a new one took over—or sunning on the beach, most often alone. She saw me too. But she never gave any sign of recognition or, what was even more rankling, interest. Damn the woman, what did she think she was made of, anyway? Marble?

  Then Emmaline dear had to go back to Pawtucket or wherever it was. Something was cooking with her investments. I think she would have liked to take me avec, as the French say, but she still had family living at the old homestead. To come back from wicked, wicked France with a gigolo half her age would not have been the thing at all. She cried in a motherly way when we parted, promised to write and slipped me a check for a thousand dollars U.S. You couldn’t go far on the C6te d’Azur with a thousand bucks even in those days, but you could eat for a while. While I was still eating I began to toy with the idea of moving in on Nemesis as a new den-mother. She was a challenge as well as a ranklement.

  Her name was Reggie Forbes-Jones. The Honorable Regina Forbes-Jones, to give it full treatment. The Honorable meant there was a title in the family. Her father was an earl or something of the kind. She never talked much about him, or the fact that her family was loaded. I found out these things on my own, through Cedric and others. She was British by birth and inclination, but spent six months or more of each year on the Cote d’Azur partly to escape England’s foul winters, partly to avoid high British taxes on her respectable private take-home. She was fairly tall, had an attractive face and figure without being a howling beauty or a sexpot, dressed with a lot more chic than most Englishwomen I have known and could freeze you as stiff as an icicle with the haughtiest look ever cast down an arist
ocratic nose at a commoner. I’d seen her put a frost good enough for a daiquiri on Josef, maître d’hotel at the Carlton in Cannes for twenty years, a man who had been absorbing the evil eye from kings, queens and Greek multi-millionaires for decades without turning a hair. She was patrician no end, and she let you know about it without telling you so in so many words.

  Aside from all this, she obviously had money, she wasn’t ugly, she wasn’t too old and she needed taking down a notch or two. One afternoon I fired the opening shot across her bows where she was sunning herself on the beach, alone as usual.

  She lay on her stomach, her eyes closed, her shoulder-straps unfastened, her brown skin gleaming with tanning oil. She had a nice smooth back and shoulders.

  I lay down beside her, unobtrusively.

  “Why am I a wretched spiv?” I asked the ear nearest me.

  She opened her eyes to give me a cool, unenthusi-astic look of appraisal.

  “Because it’s in your nature to be a wretched spiv, probably,” she said. Actually it came out more like ‘prob’ly’, and she slurred over syllables in many other words the way upperclass British do, but I’m not going to try to do her phonetically. “Now that you know, you may leave.”

  “It’s a public beach. If I molest you, you can always call the police.”

  “A gentleman would not make it necessary for a lady to call the police to free herself from his unwelcome presence.”

  “I’m not a gentleman. I’m a wretched spiv, remember? Would you like me to oil your back? All the grease seems to have been rendered out of you.”

  “If you move a finger in my direction I’ll have you arrested.”

  Our conversation continued along those lines for the next few days. During that time I learned why she had developed such a low opinion of me. It was because I had been Emmaline dear’s pretty boy, taking her money and stringing her along by pretending that I loved her. She was convinced that I had been sharing Emmaline dear’s bed. I couldn’t persuade her otherwise. She would not believe that our relationship had been what it really was, a kind of amiable companionship; nourished by Emmaline dear’s bank account, as I was readily willing to admit, but with no real harm to it or her. In her view I remained a contemptible little spiv (six inches taller and about sixty pounds heavier than she was) as well as a few other things she didn’t like. She had a tongue like a riding crop, and she used it.

  I hung on, took my whipping, ate crow and fought back. Although she did truly turn out to be the finger of Nemesis in the end, in a paradoxical way it was she who pushed me into a life of crime, bless her. I might even have suffered the indignity of a steady nine-to-five job if she hadn’t been so tough to crack. But the more she cuffed me around and showed her contempt for what she thought I was, the more determined I became to force the moat, smash the portcullis and invade the baronial castle of the Honorable Regina Forbes-Jones. I thought I just might be able to bring it off. As much as she lashed at me with her riding-crop and however scornful she might be of my morals, behavior and ways of life, she was interested in me as a person. Otherwise there was no reason for her to have picked me as a whipping-boy from among the crowd of other gigolos steering their poulets around Cannes, or for letting anyone as loathsome as I was hang around her even on a public beach. It stood to reason. And what mere woman could resist old Charming

  Charlie when he really got down to it and went to work on her?

  She could, by God. She wouldn’t yield an inch.

  “If anywhere in your nefarious spiv’s head you have any faint hope of diddling me as you diddled that silly old fool who was keeping you,” she told me one day, “give it up. You’re wasting your charm on barren soil.”

  She wasn’t the type to bandy vulgar words with canaille. ‘Diddle,’ to her, meant to swindle, nothing more. I said, “Whatever gave you the idea that I might want to diddle you?”

  “The oily way you keep trying to ingratiate yourself speaks for itself.”

  “I’m not trying to ingratiate myself. I enjoy your company. Your subtly witty conversation sends me.”

  She sniffed. “I fail to find yours in any way amusing. Do you prefer my company to that of—those, for example?”

  ‘—those, for example,’ with another, unexpressed, sniff of disapproval, were a couple of bonbons wiggling down the beach in elaborate ignorance of the attention they were getting from the boys. Both were young, cute, stacked like the proverbial brick outbuilding and wearing as little as they could get by with even in Cannes. On the make for a pickup.

  “Of course I do,” I said. “Otherwise I’d be with them instead of you, wouldn’t I?”

  “Not bloody likely.”

  “Why not bloody likely?”

  “Because I have money and they don’t. Come off it. Do you think I’m simple?”

  “I think you’re simply scrumptious.”

  “Oh, do go away, please! You bore me.”

  It wasn’t until I’d been taking my lumps from her for a couple of weeks that I began to see what made her as thorny as she was, and why she was going to be tougher to take than I thought. It wasn’t just me she was lashing out at. I’ve already said she never talked much about herself, but a successful bunco-steerer has to be a good psychologist as well as the other things. Inside her aloof patrician shell Reggie was a sad and lonely girl. Her trouble was too much money. I never knew the details of her upbringing and family background, but somewhere along the line she’d been heavily indoctrinated with the idea that the world was full of men like me, out to take her. She had looks, youth, intelligence, poise, pedigree and at least a normal woman’s wish to be loved for herself alone by a member of the opposite sex. Her fortune, and the further fortune that was to come her way when her old man died, cursed her. No matter how honest the devotion might be in a man’s eyes when he looked at her, she saw, or suspected, dollar signs in them. I mean pound sterling signs, of course, but the idea is the same. Her money poisoned her outlook on life.

  And of course the Cote d’Azur was the worst of all possible places to look for a cure for her kind of illness. It’s a natural gathering ground for grafters, grifters, chiselers, hustlers, flimflam artists, fortune hunters, sharpshooters, bunco-men, fakes, phonies and hocus-pocus operators of one kind or another. Those who haven’t the grisbi are there to get it from those who have. Some of the most successful getters in the business are the smooth, handsome, charming, cultivated, clean-cut, attractive, highly eligible no-good playboy bums whose only ambition is to marry or otherwise get next to a woman with a potful of money and live happily forever afterward at her expense. (Never mind about me and Emmaline dear. That was only temporary.) It was the reason Reggie’s boyfriends always faded so quick. The more charming and attentive they were, the less faith she had in their sincerity.

  You might ask, Why the hell didn’t the poor little rich girl give her money to the Salvation Army and find true love in the arms of the nearest shoe clerk? The answer is, I don’t know. Maybe she’d tried something of the kind and found that it didn’t work either. But from disliking her and wanting to do her down I began to feel sorry for her. Hers was not a baronial castle to invade and overthrow, but a dungeon to be breached.

  I won’t say her money didn’t interest me. Money has always interested me, whoever owns it. But that’s all I’m going to say about Reggie’s riches except that I never got any of them to keep. With Reggie herself, paradoxical though it may sound, I had an inside track. She knew I was a crook, a spiv and a hustler, therefore had no doubts about what I was after. Her defenses against me were established, tested and firm; so firm that she could tolerate my trying to bore through them. I never bored too hard or too persistently. She’d have taken my insolent peasant hide off in strips if I had.

  She never used my name. Sometimes I was Curly or Curlilocks, more often, You, there, or, Oh, it’s you again, or some other term of affection. In return I took to calling her Hon, which she detested. Not Hon as in honey but Hon. as in Honorable, only wi
th the “H” sounded instead of silent.

  Once she asked me how I had found out she was an Honorable, since she had never mentioned it. I told her I had done research on her.

  “Why?” she asked sharply. She reacted to something like that the way a barnyard chicken does to the shadow of a hawk wheeling overhead.

  “Oh, I thought we might be related somewhere along the line. My grandmother was a Forbes.”

  “Never fear,” she said, looking down her aristocratic nose. ‘Nevah feeyah’ is more like it. I know I promised not to try to reproduce her accent, but a lot of her frosty flavor is lost without it.

  “Still, wouldn’t it be neighborly if we turned out to be distant cousins or something, Hon?”

  “It would be unbearable. And stop calling me Hon. I’ve spoken to you about it before.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “And stop saying Yes, ma’am! You sound like a schoolboy.”

  “I used to be one, ma’am. Before they drafted me.”

  “What did you do in school? Rob lockers?”

  You know how it goes. Love talk.

  Then, by God, perseverance, pluck and American grit began to show signs of paying off. I’d never tried to speak to her anywhere except on the beach, and then only when she was alone. I had a feeling I’d be pushing too far too fast if I presumed upon our acquaintanceship to try to mingle socially without invitation. The time wasn’t yet ripe for that, and anyway our paths didn’t cross much off the beach. We traveled in different circles since I had moved from the Martinez to a cheap pension where the food was good. But one day while we were on the sand throwing the usual barbs into each other a chasseur came down from the hotel with a telegram for her. When she had read it she said in a tone of great annoyance, “Oh, dash it! How perfectly bloody!”

  “Blue blood, no doubt,” I said with courteous interest. “Somebody in the family?”

  It didn’t even rate a comeback, so I knew something fairly serious had happened. I suppose it really was fairly serious from her viewpoint. She had been stood up on a date; like any common shopgirl, as she might have put it. What was worse, the date was for the following evening and the occasion was the biggest social bust-out of the year on the Cote d’Azur: the charity ball at the Summer Sporting Club in Monte Carlo annually presided over by Prince Rainier and his lady-of-the-moment. (This was a year or so before Grace.) Everybody who was anybody in the Riviera rat-race was going; the ladies in their special-occasion diamonds, not the ordinary wash-day icing, with gowns created for the occasion; the men flashing all the decorations, medals, royal orders, crosses, bangers, gongs, ribbons and other chest ornamentation they were entitled to wear and some they were not. Admission was by princely command, champagne corks were said to pop like machine-gun fire, the dancing went on until dawn or later, and if you weren’t with it when the starting trumpets went ta-ra-ra-ta-ra you were socially extinct. Non-attendance meant either that you didn’t have the money to throw in the pot with the Onassises and the Niarchoses and the Benitez-Rexachs when the poorhouse plate was passed, or that you were persona non grata around Monaco.