The Last Match Page 3

  I didn’t learn all the details there on the beach, of course. The Hon. Reggie wasn’t the type to break down and spill her troubles to a peasant in public. But she had her invitation and her new gown—it had cost a real bundle, as was obvious when I saw her in it— and she was hard up for an escort. Boyfriends she had plenty of, although she would never have called them that. Guys who had taken her out, would do it again if she gave them the chance, but would prefer to take her in. She couldn’t stoop to a last-minute call for rescue in that direction, nor appeal to a gentleman of her class if there had been any around. There weren’t. There wasn’t anyone around she could turn to in a last-minute emergency. Except little old contemptible me.

  So I got the nod, along with an icy lecture on behavior, manners, how to clean my nails and a few other niceties. I still had the evening clothes Emmaline dear bought me, not yet having reached the point where I would have to hock them to eat. Reggie had an elegant black-and-chrome Mercedes-Benz she didn’t use very much. She gave me a wad of franc notes with which to hire a chauffeur for the evening and meet other expenses. (“I’ll expect a strict accounting, mind you.” “Yes, ma’am.” “And if you say yes, ma’am, to me once again this evening, I’ll scream!” “It won’t be necessary to scream, ma’am. I’ll call you Reggie, Hon.”) We took off for the doings, after I had gallantly presented her with an expensive corsage I bought with her money. I thought she would appreciate the gesture when she found it on the expense account.

  Chapter Two

  It was quite a gala, the charity ball. I don’t know how much the poor benefited from it, but I had a hell of a time. I looked and felt sharp in Emmaline dear’s dinner clothes, the champagne was plentiful and good, the food was superb, the music was the kind I liked to dance to, and Reggie knew the moves. I’m strictly a club-fighter on the dance floor. With another stum-blebum, I stumble too. With a good dancer, I’m a lot better. Reggie was thistledown on her feet, and she never made a misstep. She presented me to some other women she knew at the party and I danced with them while she danced with other men who came up to ask her. She didn’t have to sit any of the dances out unless she wanted to, and I was kept circulating. But dancing with the other dolls wasn’t like dancing with Reggie. It was an odd thing. She was just as cool, as remote and withdrawn from me as ever, and yet somehow, when she was in my arms, she seemed to—well, fit there. She made me feel big and strong and chivalrous. I wanted to do something for her, damn it. The poor little rich girl was such a sad sack inside her dungeon, she made me sad for her. All that money, and no fun.

  Part of it was the champagne, of course. But not all of it. For one crazy moment, out there with her on the dance floor, holding her in my arms, I thought of sticking my lips against her ear and telling her the old three-word tale that hooks so many of them. It would have been pure con, the worst possible gesture I could have made, but I considered it. Very briefly. I considered a lot of other approaches less briefly while we danced. Nothing sensible came to me.

  We drank quite a lot. It was good champagne, as noted. Along about two or three in the morning she wanted a breath of fresh air, so we went out into the gardens overlooking the sea. There was a big moon, stars, the scent of flowers, a nice setting. Other couples were there enjoying it, too, but they weren’t in our laps. We leaned against a balustrade hanging over a cliff and smoked a cigarette.

  While I was trying to think of something pleasant and harmless to say, she said thoughtfully, “Curlilocks, d’y’know, you could really make something of yourself, if you tried.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” I said.

  She didn’t notice it. She said, “You have looks, intelligence, a good bit of personal charm, a fine body— you should be ashamed of yourself.”

  “I am,” I said. “I truly am. All those things working for me, and no sex appeal.”

  “I suppose you have even that, for a certain type of woman. Obviously you have. I think it’s a good part of your trouble, actually. Women have always made things too easy for you. What you need is the challenge of adversity. It would strengthen your character.”

  “If you say so, ma’am. You’re paying the check.”

  In the moonlight she managed to look down her nose at me, although it’s difficult to do when you’re half a foot shorter than the person you’re looking down on. “You should be ashamed of that, too.”

  “I am,” I said. “And if I weren’t, you’d sure arrange to make me feel that way, wouldn’t you? Let’s go in and drink up some more of your money.”

  She really made me sore. Here I’d been thinking all evening of ways to do something nice for her, and all she wanted to do was throw darts.

  It was around four A.M. when I took her back to her hotel. The chauffeur had been hired for the night, but I paid him off, told him to park the car and blow. My pension was within walking distance. Then I took Reggie to her room, said good night, thanked her for a lovely evening at her door and was ready to trundle off to beddy-bye when she said crossly, “Oh, come in, do! It’s still early.”

  I should have backed off and run for the fire escape right there. But I was tired, full of champagne and slow on the uptake. Also, as she had said, women had always made it too easy for me. I’d been invited into ladies’ bedrooms before then and come out of them without serious scarring. I didn’t think for a minute that she was inviting me in for the reason some ladies invite gentlemen into their bedrooms at 4 A.M. If I had just clung to that conviction, which was one hundred percent correct, I’d have been better off.

  It wasn’t a room but a suite, and elegant. A little balcony outside the windows of the sitting room overlooked the Croisette, with the empty beach and sea beyond. The big moon was farther over now, on the declining side, and spread a glittering moontrack across the water. The night was quiet, warm, and peaceful. A night for love, you might say, although I didn’t say it. Not even when she came to stand beside me where

  I was leaning on the rail of the balcony looking at the moon.

  She brought two fines with her. Damn fine fines they were, too, as I could tell by smelling mine when she handed it to me.

  “A nightcap,” she said. “At the end of a pleasant evening.”

  “A la vôtre,” I said, and put mine away at a gulp. It’s not the way to drink a true fine, which calls for sipping, but it is the way to drink a toast.

  I suppose the slug of good brandy on top of all the good wine could have made me a little foolhardy. That, and the moon, and the Mediterranean night, and the faint sweet lavender scent she wore, and the fact that I had been holding her in my arms most of the evening without argument while thinking chivalrous thoughts. I don’t remember having any further thoughts, chivalrous or otherwise, there on the balcony. I can’t even remember what happened to the brandy glasses, when I reached once again to take the Honorable Regina Forbes-Jones around the waist and pull her toward me with a gentle tug. She came easily and gracefully, unresisting, and I held her in my arms as I had held her at the ball. Only we weren’t dancing now. We were looking at each other’s face and eyes in the moonlight. I for one liked what I saw, all of a sudden. It must have been the booze.

  I didn’t say anything. There wasn’t anything I knew how to say. When I kissed her she still didn’t resist. She didn’t kiss me back, but she didn’t bite a chunk out of my lip, as she might have, or put up a struggle. She held still until I let her go. Then—wham!

  It wasn’t any ladylike slap, either. She doubled her fist and let me have it right on the doorbell. I had my mouth half open. I think I was going to try to say something then of what I felt for her, and the punch made me bite my tongue. It also lit up the night sky for a moment with more than a normal number of stars. When my ears stopped ringing she was saying icily, “—common little guttersnipe! If you ever have the temerity to touch me again I’ll see you in jail!”

  I was beginning to understand what she meant by the challenge of adversity. I took my sore tongue, my sore jaw and my shattered illusion
s out of there without any further encouragement from her. She had a nice right-hand punch. I don’t know about her left. I never put myself in a position where she could hit me with it.

  After that I didn’t see her for a while. I was engaged with some entrepreneurs in making a score. This was back in 1955, when Tangier still functioned as an international free port, before Morocco took it over. You could buy any kind of action you wanted in Tangier in those days; women, boys, dope, booze, free-market money both real and counterfeit, gold, contraband diamonds, anything else portable. There were no import duties, no taxes, no trade restrictions of any kind and not too much policing by the Belgian flics who were supposed to keep order around town. Americans, like other nationals of the governing powers, had extraterritorial rights, too. If you did get into trouble with the law in Tangier—it was pretty hard to do, but it could be done—the judge of your case was one of your fellow-countrymen, usually your own consul. Normally he’d pass sentence by telling you to haul ass out of town before nightfall and not come back. It was a nice setup all round, if you didn’t get stabbed in a back alley for your pocket-money. That could happen, too.

  One of the best buys in Tangier then was American cigarettes. A pack sold for the equivalent of about fifty cents U.S. on the black market in France and Italy. In case lots on the dock in Tangier you could buy the same pack for about eight cents. Since it was a run of only three days and three nights in a reasonably fast boat from Tangier to the French coast, a lot of smuggling went on. Much of the contraband was landed southeast of Marseille, where the shoreline is cut by dozens of little calanques, narrow inlets big enough to harbor a good-sized power boat where it won’t attract too much attention. I had a chance to ship aboard one of the contrahandiers as a deckhand and, if I wanted to invest my own money and take my own risks, become one of the minor partners in the venture. For services rendered, like swabbing the decks and heaving the trade goods.

  I heard about it from Jean-Pierre, a friend of mine who had been a sous-bartender at the Martinez until Cedric caught him watering the Scotch to make up for what he was pilfering. He had connections, including the kind necessary to convert Emmaline dear’s thousand dollar check into francs at the black market rate. He hadn’t clipped me too badly on the deal, so I knew he was fairly honest, for a crook. He thought, or hoped, that a wealthy playboy like me could be persuaded to spring the necessary investment and cut him in for a piece because he was such a sweet fellow. He was décavé, as they say. Flat. Stony.

  “Figure-toi,” he said, over a beer he had persuaded me to buy him. He spoke better English than I did French, but I preferred to practice my French whenever possible. Since I was putting out for the beer, he obliged me. The dollars-and-cents figures are my own translation of what he said in francs, to make it easier to follow. “Figure-toi. With a thousand dollars we buy twenty cases, twelve thousand packs. At retail, that’s six thousand dollars, five thousand clear profit. Even if we wholesale them to get our money back fast, we can get thirty-five cents a pack easy. Let’s see, wait a minute, that works out at—”

  “You wait a minute,” I said. “What’s all this about ‘we’ and ‘our money’? What are you planning to put up?”

  “Every sou I have in the world.” He looked hurt. I suppose the way he had looked when they caught him watering the Scotch.

  “How much is that?”

  “Three hundred francs.”

  Three hundred francs was then, at the old rate, worth something less than seventy-five cents American. I said, “What did you have in mind for the profits from my thousand dollars and your three hundred francs? Something like a fifty-fifty split?”

  “Certainly not. I concede that you should have more than half. Say seventy-five twenty-five? I have to do the cooking aboard the boat.”

  “Say nine hundred and ninety-nine to one if you serve soup the same way you serve whiskey. Anyway, I haven’t got anything like a thousand dollars left. I’ve been living on it for a couple of months now. Let’s start over again.”

  As it worked out, I was able to get up a good part of the thousand by cashing in the gold cigarette case, the wristwatch and the wardrobe Emmaline dear had bought me, including my elegant evening clothes (still with stray bits of confetti in the pockets as a reminder of the charity ball and Reggie’s character-strengthening adversity). It left me stripped down to pretty much the assets I had on my back, but with those big profits to come on the investment I wasn’t worried. Jean-Pierre begged, borrowed or embezzled enough to sweeten his share of the pot a bit, and we went aboard the cigarette-runner in Marseille harbor.

  It was a converted British navy cutter with a souped-up engine and a false name that Jean-Pierre and I had to paint over its rightful registry as soon as we were at sea. Its captain was a hard-case Corsican who went by the name of Le Sanglier. A sanglier is a wild boar, of which both Corsica and Sardinia still have respectable populations. They are among the most dangerous, ugly and single-minded killers in existence if you challenge them. Some sportsmen choose to do so with a lance and a pal standing backup with a rifle in case the lance misses. A sanglier will not only rip your guts out with his tusks if he can get them into you, he will eat your guts afterward for lunch. To look at, this one was no exception. All he lacked was the tusks sticking up out of his lower jaw. He had been away three times for murder, according to Jean-Pierre.

  The mate—I guess you could call him that since he was the one who yelled at Jean-Pierre and me to get off our culs whenever anything had to be done aboard the cutter—was another Corsican, a relatively benevolent type who called himself La Planche; The Plank. He had only been away for murder once, which made him something of a sissy. All the gangstaires and hard characters doing business on the Cote d’Azur were Corsicans, great boys for a nice friendly vendetta with their pals when they weren’t knocking off other people. The Boar and The Plank were typical specimens. They were the ship’s complement except for Jean-Pierre, me and the engineer, who liked engines better than he liked people and mostly stayed below playing with his toys. If he had a name or nickname I never knew it, although I suppose the French cops did.

  We put out of Marseille, stopped briefly at Barcelona for some reason that took The Boar ashore for a while but was none of my business and did not make me nosy. I am never nosy in any way about the doings of tough mecs like The Boar and The Plank. Two days and three nights later we put in at Gibraltar to fuel up for business. We shipped what seemed to me like an over-large deckload of high-test gasoline, in drums, as well as topping up the cutter’s fuel tanks. I was still keeping my nose strictly to myself, but The Plank bought a couple of bottles of something while we were at Gib, and while he didn’t offer to share with his hardworking crew it made him talkative enough to explain why we needed all the extra essence.

  “Can’t always find it in Tangier,” he said. “Then you’re in trouble. The Spaniards, dirty bastards, they run customs patrols out of Ceuta. As if they owned the Mediterranean. Even when you’re beyond the territorial limit, they come after you. With machine guns, no less. There are also pirates who cruise around looking for honest commençants, to steal their goods. Even a good fast boat like this one, it can’t outrun a bullet, and they always aim for the fuel tanks, to cripple you. What we do is, we rig an auxiliary feed-line and pump for each engine so we can tap into a drum right away if we’re hit, tu piges? That way, we know we can keep moving. In this business, you keep moving or you’re out of this business.”

  He laughed at his own wit and had a pull at his bottle, not offering it around.

  “Jean-Pierre kind of forgot to mention the bit about the shooting,” I said. “Does anyone ever get killed?”

  “Oh, now and then, now and then. There’s no need for it, though. Not if you stow your cargo right.”

  He didn’t volunteer any further explanation, so I didn’t ask for one. But I found out what he meant when we tied up in the darse at Tangier, where the dockside warehouses are, and began to heave cases
of American cigarettes aboard.

  The Boar must have been heading up some kind of a syndicate operation, or else he had knocked off a bank lately. Jean-Pierre and I lugged cartons until our tongues were dragging and still they kept coming, wheeled out of the warehouse to dockside on a hand-truck and dumped there for us to load by hand. I lost count of the number of tons of tobacco we sweated aboard the cutter, but The Boar didn’t, not for a moment. Neither did the warehouse checker. Not at

  $60 a case, cash and carry. The trouble was, they didn’t check their tallies with each other until the loading was finished. At that point The Boar’s count was two cases short of the warehouse checker’s count.

  Cash and carry in this kind of trading means cash down first, on the barrelhead, carry only after the money has been counted. Any other kind of arrangement would mean quick bankruptcy for the sellers, dealing as they are with crooks and gangstaires who would think nothing of loading up and taking off without payment if they could get away with it. According to the checker, The Boar had received the merchandise he had paid for, and that was that. According to The Boar, he still had two cases coming. Difference of opinion. Clash of wills. Argument. Not for long, though.