The Last Match Read online

  The Boar had an odd expressionless voice, without much inflection. I think one of his Corsican amici had tried to cut his throat but succeeded only in damaging his vocal cords. In a later year I saw this happen in Brazil, where a guy pushed a bamboo pig-sticker three inches into another guy’s throat during a fight without doing much more damage than a tracheotomy. An inch to either side of the gullet he’d have caught an artery or a major vein. The Boar had a scar where it would have happened to him, and his odd voice might have been the result of scar tissue on his larynx. He never raised it or strained it in any way. He didn’t need to.

  The warehouse checker was reasonable about it, and patient enough, but a Frenchman himself and therefore a pighead. He said, “Observe, mon vieux. I am paid a wage because I know how to count. I have checked goods out of this warehouse for fifteen years to earn my wage. I do not look at the girls’ tits when I should be minding my business, nor count that which does not pass before my eyes. If you wish you may unload the boat and we will count again.” (I felt my spine go at that.) “Otherwise the transaction has been completed. C’est fini. Bon soir et bon voyage.”

  “Two more cases,” The Boar said in his funny voice, although by “funny” I don’t mean in any way comical. He never joked, laughed, smiled or showed any visible sign of enjoyment that I ever noticed. He may have done so while he was killing people.

  “I don’t make mistakes,” he said. “Other people make mistakes.”

  He was standing on the cutter’s deck, the warehouseman on the wharf. The tide was so low, and the cutter so heavily laden, that The Boar’s head was about at the level of the warehouseman’s knees. He talked to them, or maybe to the guy’s feet, not bothering to crane his neck until the warehouseman said impatiently, “Dis donc, don’t be a stubborn fool, man. You have the mégots you paid for—”

  The Boar looked up then. I couldn’t see his face. I was standing behind him. But just the reflection of it, so to speak, in the warehouseman’s eyes was enough to scare me at second-hand. The warehouseman stopped talking with his mouth open, looking sick. In the same dead, expressionless voice The Boar said, “Nobody cheats The Boar.”

  That was the end of the debate. He jerked his thumb at Jean-Pierre and me, motioning us up onto the wharf.

  We went where the thumb indicated, up on the wharf and into the warehouse. The checker kind of tottered along after us. Jean-Pierre and I had each picked up another case of cigarettes and were on our way back to the cutter before he caught up with us. If he saw us or the cigarettes go by, all he registered was a No Sale. He still looked sick, as if he had taken a good stiff kick in the balls.

  The Plank showed us how he wanted the stuff stored, most of it as deck-load stacked and lashed and covered with a tarpaulin to make head-high breastworks around the wheelhouse except for such peepholes as were necessary to navigation; another breastwork around the high-test drums, another along both thwarts building up at the stern to higher than waist level. He knew his job, The Plank did. When Jean-Pierre and I finally collapsed of bone-weary fatigue after personally transferring the contents of one whole warehouse to the cutter, we were able to poop out behind the security of the prettiest fortification you ever saw sandbagged with Lucky Strikes, Camels, Chesterfields and other popular carcinogens. A spray of machine-gun fire wouldn’t do the merchandise any great good, but the tobacco would still be there and saleable, even if shredded, and the slugs weren’t going to come through the thickness of a double tier of tight-packed cigarette cartons nearly a yard through. I felt some better about making the run for home and mother when I realized what we had constructed for ourselves.

  We got out of Tangier that night around 1 A.M., winding up easily as we went across the bay. The Boar had the heavily laden cutter doing twenty knots or better by the time we cleared the end of the breakwater. He had sensibly picked a moonless night for the enterprise, counting on speed and darkness for insurance, and ran without lights as soon as we were in open sea. The cutter’s engines were finely tuned, well-balanced and well-muffled, first-class power plants. The Boar was no fool when it came to business, or looking out for Numéro Un.

  We had to run the Straits of Gibraltar at their narrowest point, about ten miles or so west of Ceuta and the Rock, and the Spaniards had patrols working out of both sides, Algeciras as well as Ceuta. Their boats weren’t as fast as The Boar’s cutter, couldn’t touch it in a stern chase. Bullets could, as The Plank had remarked. It was something to think about, although of course not seriously with all those fine fortifications around us and all those well-nourished horses thrumming away below-deck.

  I don’t know where territorial limits end and the high seas begin in the Straits. I think they must be international waters open to all shipping, and I don’t think Spain legally had any right to patrol them as it did in those days. As a matter of international law, about which I don’t know too much, it seems to me that the mere fact of a load of a few tons of tax-free cigarettes legally bought and paid for aboard a boat is no basis by itself for persecuting the boat’s owners and/or operators before they have done anything to justify persecution. Like maybe smuggling the stuff ashore where they shouldn’t. Anybody who tries to relieve them of their lawful cargo by force and violence before that happens is no better than a

  Communist or a lousy hijacker, in my opinion. There we were, peacefully humming along through the night minding our own business and molesting nobody when force and violence burst at us without warning out of the nearby dark in the shape of a bright stitching of machine-gun fire laid squarely across the cutter’s bow. At the same instant the beam of a powerful searchlight snapped on to catch us in its glare, and a voice began yelling through a bullhorn warning us in three languages to heave to before they blew us out of the water. Some more of that adversity Reggie had been sure would make a man of me had just taken a hand in the strengthening process.

  Chapter Three

  As The Plank explained later, his voice trembling with honest indignation, the dirty salauds had cheated us by not following the rules. The Boar had been threading the channel of the Straits by instinct, the seat of his pants and the positions of the running lights of other craft within sight—including, The Plank said, what they both were pretty sure were Spanish patrol boats safely off to port and starboard. But the salauds also had another boat out, running dark as we were but undoubtedly with some kind of apparatus aboard that enabled them to pick us up and track us in the dark. A cochon’s trick, in The Planks words. The Boar, who was already getting just about everything out of the engines they had to give, jammed the throttles wide open, put the wheel over and went away from the searchlight, dodging and weaving the cutter as if it were a polo pony. He really knew how to handle that boat. But the cops aboard the other craft knew how to handle themselves, too. The searchlight beam stayed with us. Machine-gun slugs began to thud rhythmically into the cutter’s hull and stern breastworks of pure Virginia burley.

  Jean-Pierre and I were on deck when the fireworks started. We were still pooped from heaving the inventory but recovering nicely with a bottle I had bought in Tangier. We did not propose to share it with The Plank or anyone else, and we had gone aft to commune with it by ourselves. By good luck we were sitting behind the stern fortification figuring our profits, our heads well below the line of fire, when the serious shooting began. The Boar and The Plank were both in the wheelhouse behind their own bulwarks, and the high-test had its own protection, so there was no great damage on deck. The Spaniards were not, in spite of their promise, trying to blow us out of the water, as they could have done easily enough with any kind of deck-gun. They wanted the cutter and its load, not prisoners or corpses they would have to account for. But they kept machine-guns chattering at us, and I could feel the cigarette cartons at my back jerk, flinch and wince, or thought I could, as the slugs went into them.

  Actually there were more holes in the hull than in the merchandise when we made an inspection the next day, possibly because the guys wit
h the firepower had been trying to puncture the fuel tanks more than they had been trying to puncture us. But at the time it seem like an awful lot of lead all homing in on me, and while my mind kept telling me, You’re perfectly safe, you’re perfectly safe, you know they can’t come through all that tobacco, my cold stomach and the back of my cold neck and the rest of cold cowering me cringing there in the scuppers said, Pal, you have had it.

  It didn’t last for long, only about five hundred years before we pulled away out of range. During it all Jean-Pierre was as calm and collected as the calmest combat veteran you ever saw. He didn’t cringe and whimper and try to dig himself into a deck-seam the way I was doing. He took it all without turning a hair. In fact he was so cool and unperturbed and unmoving when I finally straightened up and wiped my clammy brow that for a moment I thought a slug had got him.

  Nevah feeyah, as the Honorable Reggie would have said. He’d merely fainted; passed out cold at the sound of the opening shots. I brought him around with a couple of belts from the bottle, after first taking a couple myself for my nerves.

  After that it was clear sailing, fine weather and no particular sweat. We still had to keep a lookout for hijackers, but during the day we could outrun anything that showed on the horizon, and at night pirates would have had to have some pretty elaborate equipment to pick us up in the dark without lights. They’d have to catch us after that, too. It wouldn’t be easy in the open sea where The Boar had plenty of maneuvering room and all those horses under him. Just to be on the safe side, however, he or The Plank, whoever was at the wheel—they stood watch and watch—would stop the motors every now and then during the night to listen for anything on the water nearby. Nothing ever got close to us.

  As we drew closer to home base, both The Boar and The Plank, solid businessmen with a strong sense of responsibility to their own welfare, began visibly to relax and take it easy. The Boar, in what was for him practically a moment of benevolence, told Jean-Pierre and me we could smoke a mégot.

  “One of your own, not mine,” he said. Poekmarks on his pig face and little cold black eyes like Corsican goat droppings didn’t help him look any more big-hearted than he meant to be. “One, not two. And stay the hell away from the high-test while you’re smoking it.”

  Jean-Pierre and I said, “Yes, sir,” in chorus, grateful for small favors. Until then, the rule had been strictly defense de fumer at all times on deck since Gib, although both The Boar and The Plank smoked in the wheelhouse. We hadn’t been invited to join their club, and we didn’t try to form a clandestine club of our own. Dealing with durs like those guys, you do not risk your life for the sake of a quick puff. We each had one mégot, not two, and stayed the hell away from the high-test while we were smoking it.

  Even the sourpuss engineer, who only came topside for meals and whose usual response to a friendly Hello was, “Merde, alors,” began to act less grumpy than usual. I couldn’t read the reactions, and it bothered me. As far as I could see, the trickiest and most risky part of the operation, the actual smuggling of the goods ashore, was still ahead of us. I asked Jean-Pierre what he thought, if maybe somebody had something up his sleeve for us, but he didn’t think so. Neither did I, really. Our piddling twenty cases didn’t even qualify as worth thieving alongside the load the cutter was carrying, and as fall guys for something big we just weren’t believable. We finally got The Plank to tell us the reason for all the sweetness and light aboard the cutter as we went into the last leg of the trip.

  It was easy. The fix was in.

  “Not a thing to worry about, mes potes,” he said. “Ours is truly a piece of cake. Two of Nice’s best are with us in the assiette au beurre, right up to their deli-cieuses. They are to supervise the shore operations.”

  “Sergots?” Jean-Pierre said unbelievingly. The Plank grinned.

  “Motards, no less. We’ll truck the stuff away under escort.”

  You have to piger the argot used in Marseille’s milieu, underworld, to understand exactly what they were talking about. I didn’t piger all of it, but I got enough. Two motorcycle cops from Nice, moonlighting I suppose on their spare time, were involved in the smuggling up to their whatnots. They would presumably be ready, willing and able to take care of any necessary little details ashore like misdirecting their Marseille colleagues to the wrong calanque during the landing operations if anything of the kind became necessary. They would also be on hand in all their uniformed majesty to ride shotgun on our convoy of contraband when we drove it into Marseille, after loading it into the trucks that would be waiting for us at the calanque. It was a sweet set-up.

  “I think we might even fly the tricolor from the leading truck, to lend distinction to our passage,” The Plank said. “Allons enfants de la patrie, le jour de gloire est arrive.”

  He went forward humming La Marseillaise.

  I began to relax after that. Everything was lovely. Not the least of the loveliness was the fact that everybody involved in the operation would be anxious to move the stuff out of the calanque and get it rolling as quickly as possible. Jean-Pierre and I would not have to unload the whole cargo without help, as we had loaded it. In fact—enjoying another of my own mégots which The Boar had generously allowed me to consume—I felt rich, lucky and euphoric.

  Talk about adversity. As they say in the funny papers—POW!

  We arrived off the French coast in the middle of the night, hanging well offshore still without lights while The Boar talked briefly on the cutter’s radiophone. French territorial jurisdiction extends twenty kilometers into the Mediterranean. You’re legally a contra-bandiste the moment you take untaxed cigarettes, booze or anything else across the twenty-kilometer line. As such you are subject to the full penalties of the law, which are horrid. The state confiscates not only your cigarettes, if that is what you are smuggling— they are then sold by Régie Nationale, the French National Tobacco Monopoly, for its own profit—but also your boat, your equipment, your shirt, whatever else you have in your possession and your freedom while the juge d’instruction decides what to do with you. Everything else involved in the venture, for example the trucks and small boats waiting to move the loot from the landing ground, is also forfeited, and fines are assessed based on the value of the gross take. Of course you never have anything left to pay the fines with, but still the loss of all those valuables must be painful to those who lose them.

  The Boar took no chances. He stood off well outside the twenty-kilometer limit until he was ready to go, about three A.M. Then he went in hard and fast; lights out, throttles open, straight as a homing pigeon to the haven of the agreed-upon calanque and the warm welcoming arms of the Marseille cops waiting for us there.

  Looking back, I suppose there was something mildly humorous about the beef that arose later between the Marseille police, who confiscated the motorcycles of the two motards along with the other loot, and the Nice police, who owned the machines and wanted them back. The humor of it didn’t strike me for a long time. Before we went into the calanque The Boar signaled ashore with a blinker, got the right blinks back and pulled the cutter up as pretty as you please exactly where the flics were ready to jump aboard. They had guns and flashlights poked in our faces before the motors had even been cut.

  Guns and flashlights in my face didn’t scare me half as much as I would have been scared if I had been the guy who sold out The Boar. When they put the bracelets on him he asked one question only, in his expressionless way: “Who did it to me?”

  “Ferme ta gueule!” one of the flics said, cracking him on the chin with an elbow. It’s a trick French cops have, useful when they’ve got a gun in one hand and a flashlight in the other. They can keep both pointed at you and knock you down at the same time. This one didn’t knock The Boar down, but he got the message. His gueule stayed strictly fermée from then on. He wasn’t the type to talk much when talking served no purpose.

  The engineer said “Merde alors” in a resigned way when they handcuffed him. I didn’t say anythi
ng. All of a sudden I had forgotten how to speak French. Jean-Pierre babbled a lot without saying much. The

  Plank was the only one of us who attained any real eloquence.

  That was when the five of us were loaded into a truck that already held the rest of the catch, including the two motards. The Plank tried to go for them, cuffs and all, but caught a bang on the ear from one of the cops in the truck with us that knocked him over. Not down, just over. The truck was too full for him to go down all the way; just to his knees. Kneeling there, in an attitude of reverent prayer, his hands more or less clasped before him by the stricture of the handcuffs, he called the motards crottes de chameaux, fils de putains, and assorted kinds of merde and espèces de cons morbides as well as a number of other colorful names which I would rather not translate even if I could speak French. The motards shrugged, lifting their hands to show their own bracelets. The Plank finally ran out of air to curse them with. I wondered if maybe they were the double-crossers The Boar had asked about, wearing the cuffs and taking the ride in the truck with the rest of us to prove that they, too, were innocent victims. If so, I hope they never went back into police work again, unless it was in an armored car.

  They threw us in the violon in Marseille. I had been smart enough not to bring my passport or any other documentation on the expedition, just in case. My identity papers, army discharge and the rest, were safe back in the pension in Cannes. Since I couldn’t speak two words of French I had time to think up what I was going to say in English before an interpreter showed up.