The Last Match Read online

  The bad hours were when she went out on the town with one of her quick-turnover boyfriends. I’d have to wait around maybe five or six hours outside some casino with no cigarettes, no aperitif money, no coffee money and no nonsense about knocking off and coming back later, James. I did the full stretch every time, listening to the fun and games going on inside the casino, wishing for a smoke and meditating on the strengthening effects of adversity. Sometimes I could bum a mégot or a cup of jus de chaussettes from one of the other galley-slaves waiting for his boss, but not too often. French chauffeurs, like other people, are not inclined to lay out for coffee and cigarettes regularly to a guy who doesn’t lay out once in a while in his turn.

  I spent many a bare and empty evening that way while she lived the gay, carefree life of the glamorous Riviera with some of the most obvious fortune-hunting phonies you could find even in that part of the world. They were real prize packages, most of the guys who took her out. I learned a few tricks of the trade just by observing where they went wrong with Reggie. Not that any of them was ever right with Reggie, but they kept getting wronger and wronger the longer they worked at it. All of them were so convinced of their own irresistibility to females that her impervious-ness to their magnetic charms and overwhelming sex appeal drove them ape. Sooner or later they would make the mistake of a heavy pass, often enough in the car.

  Those were my only moments of enjoyment. I’d hear Reggie’s fine right hand whistle into action, the crack of her fist on the guy’s chin, his grunt of surprise and pain. Then I would say respectfully, over my shoulder, “Does madame wish me to hurl the crumb-bum into the street?” She’d say, as cool as ever, “I’ll let you know if I need assistance,” and that would usually be the end of it. They rarely invited a second pop on the button. I knew why, too.

  I had to move in only twice. Both times the guys had had too much to drink. One was a Belgian, easy to handle; a nothing. I pulled him out of the car, kicked his ass and told him to piss off while he was able to. The other was Italian and a gutter-fighter. He’d been around. When I pulled him out of the car he let me do all the work without argument until he got his feet on the ground, then belted me on the back of the neck with his locked hands and brought his knee up as my face went down to meet it. His knee got me smack on the chin. It was my own fault for thinking he was going to be a soft touch, like the Belgian. The knee in the chin stiffened me, but at that it was a lot better than a knee in the nose. He’d have flattened it like a squashed tomato.

  I woke up on the ground with my head in Reggie’s lap and a flic shining a flashlight on us. He thought I was drunk and had made a pass at Reggie myself. Her dress was torn at the shoulder. We got him straightened out after a while. Reggie said she didn’t want to bring charges, and declined to give the guy’s name. The flic shrugged, helped me up, found my uniform cap, asked if I was in shape to drive, shooed away a small crowd that had gathered in the street and went his way. Reggie and I went ours.

  My head ached like hell, and I felt cheap. The guy had handled me too easily. Reggie may have sensed something of my feeling, because after I’d been driving for a while she said, “I’m sorry he hurt you, Curly.”

  That made me feel a whole lot no better. I went on driving. A while later she said, “Thank you for trying to help,” and a moment after that, “But I did say I’d ask for help if I needed it, and I didn’t ask. I can take care of myself.”

  “What were you going to do, let the clown strip you naked before you were ready to yell?” She, the headache and the cheap feeling all combined to make me mad.

  “Don’t be impertinent!”

  “I’m impertinent for taking a knee in the face from a guy who’s trying to rape you? Madame, if I may say so without disrespect, you are without doubt—”

  “I don’t want to hear your view about my actions! Please attend to your driving.”

  I thought she sounded a good bit more independent and sure of herself than she really was. Back there on the ground, when I had woken up with my head in her lap and there’s light shining on us, her face had been white and scared. She had looked lost, abandoned, bereft; I don’t know how to say it exactly. It was one time I saw her with her defenses down. Just a quick glimpse into the dungeon before the gates closed again.

  I’d been her bond-servant for about five weeks, on good behavior all the time, when I was approached by a smooth character in a leather jacket like those worn by the motards who had been in the sneezer with me in Marseille. I was standing my usual evening watch outside a boîte in Juan-les-Pins, hungry for a cigarette and a cup of coffee. It was a cold night, with a colder drizzle coming down. Sitting in the car to keep warm, I saw this guy park a big Jaguar and get out. Without any hesitation he came over to the Mercedes-Benz to offer me a cigarette.

  I thought he was another chauffeur at first, until I tasted the cigarette. It was American; the two hundred and fifty franc kind. Chauffeurs smoke Gitanes, or Gauloises Bleus.

  “Keep the pack,” he said, speaking with a strong Niçois accent. “Go for a drink?”

  “Of what?” He definitely wasn’t any chauffeur.

  “Coffee with cognac.”

  There wasn’t a thing in the world right then I wanted more than a coffee-cognac to go with that good American cigarette. Still, ministering angels who climb out of big Jags bearing gifts like those are objects of suspicion to people with suspicious minds. I said, “What’s the rest of it?”

  “Can I get in the car? I’m getting wet out here.”

  “If your mind is on a stickup, pote, forget it. The car is too conspicuous, and I’m too flat.”

  He grinned. His teeth flashed white in the light from the boîte’s marquee. Good bouncy jazz was coming from inside. Reggie and her guy would be occupied for a while yet.

  “No stickup,” he said. “Just a simple little swindle.”

  “How simple?”

  “Your part, very simple. A piece of cake. Let me get in the car while my pants are still dry.” His leather coat was beginning to glisten with the moisture on it.

  “If you’re figuring to swindle my boss, unh-unh. She’s too sharp.”

  “Not your boss. A real easy mark. Do you want the drink or don’t you?”

  “Get in the car,” I said. “But be ready to blow the minute I give you the nod. My boss has a prejudice against crooks. And leave the bottle behind when you leave.”

  It was good coffee-cognac, very warming to the stomach. So was the prospect of picking up a bit of braise, dishonestly or otherwise. As I have pointed out before now, it was Reggie’s cruel and inhuman treatment that forced me into a life of crime. Otherwise, who knows? I might have become a bishop.

  The mec in the leather jacket was too cagey to tell me any more than he had to, that first meeting. He played his tickets as close to his chest as he could, like any other cautious hustler. Later he had to show more of his hand to bring me into the game. The first night, all I learned was what I told him I would have to know if we were to go any further; his name, his track record and how come he had picked me out of the grab-bag. The answers to those questions were satisfactory enough. They had to be, and he knew it.

  He was a cashiered cop, a Niçois, name of Albert Bernard. He had been busted off the force for embezzlement of police funds. I don’t suggest that all Niçois cops are crooks, just the one I happened to know. He and some pals had got hold of a pigeon and had been plucking him for more than a year. But their gimmicks were wearing thin, and they wanted to set up a new one using an American. I was the American they had in mind, for a piece of the action. The two motards, pals of Bernard’s, had vouched for my dishonesty, good appearance and willingness to participate in a fricfrac if it was crooked enough. Bernard and I made a deal; tentative at first, firm when I knew more about what I was doing.

  The de Lille du Rocher swindle got so much publicity when it was exposed that I can write about it now as if I saw the whole picture while I was involved in it. Actually I never did. I guess
nobody ever saw the whole picture as it really was, unless it was Bernard. The truth was so incredible that it got distorted in the re-telling, like a juicy bit of scandal full of belly laughs and incredulities; so fantastic that it made headlines not only in France but all over the world. It was written up in Paris-Match and several other European periodicals as well as the American issue of Reader’s Digest. Later it was turned into a TV production by one of the U.S. national networks. Each reporting was a little different from the other, in its details. The substance of the flim-flam, my part in it anyway, was always reported with reasonable accuracy. Except for my right name. That part nobody found out to tell, and I was long gone when the pot aux roses was découvert, as the French newspapers had it.

  Monsieur le Marquis Alain de Lille du Rocher was a pigeon beyond invention. If he hadn’t been real he would have been unimaginable. The disclosure of the way he had been repeatedly buncoed over a period of more than a year won him no sympathy, only howls of laughter at his unbelievable credulity. After the first few days of the trial of Bernard and the other crooks who had milked him he never showed up in court again, but went into hiding with Madame la Marquise. He was a man of about forty; very wealthy by inheritance, very simple by nature, and very fearful of the Red Menace. In his view, Communism was a far greater threat than hellfire and damnation. Those might cost him his eternal soul and condemn him to perpetual torment, but the Communists menaced his moneybags, a matter of far greater importance to him. He was very greedy as well as the other things.

  One of the people who overheard his anxious and repeated whinnies about the Communist menace was ex-cop Bernard. Bernard still had his cop’s uniform and an impressive chestful of war ribbons, some of which may have been legitimate. He passed himself off to M. le Marquis as Inspector Bernard of the Sûreté Nationale or some such official body. With no effort at all, M. l’Inspecteur sold M. le Marquis a gold brick that was made not of gold but of uranium, much more valuable than gold, and far, far more useful in the constant fight that la belle France and other powers were waging against the Communist threat.

  As Bernard told the tale, the Powers were stockpiling an arsenal on the south side of the Pyrenees for use against the fearful possibility—nay, probability— that the Red hordes would overrun western Europe and the north side of the mountains and have to be fought back from the bastion of Spain. Generalissimo Francisco Franco, Defender of the Faith, was prepared to pay forty thousand dollars for the uranium brick, which Germany was equally prepared to sell to France for only twenty-five thousand dollars. (Approximate dollar equivalents of old French francs here. So many millions and billions of those were involved that the figures lose meaning.) Unhappily the French national treasury was fresh out of francs, pour le moment seule-ment, vous comprenez? Would not M. le Marquis, as a patriotic Frenchman and dedicated anti-Commie, like to step into the gap with the twenty-five in cash, accept delivery of the uranium as his security, drive it to the Spanish border and there meet with the Spanish emissaries who would pay him the forty for his precious package, C.O.D. Old pote Inspector Bernard would arrange all the details.

  M. le Marquis was fairly slobbering with eagerness to cooperate before Bernard had even finished sinking the gaff. It took him only a day or two to raise the twenty-five thousand. For the money he got a hefty lead box marked, in red, Danger! Ne Pas Ouvrir! He and the marquise, who was a dutiful wife and went along with her husband on most things, drove the box to St. Jean-de-Luz, near Biarritz, and there waited four days for the Spanish emissaries to appear. They might have been waiting still had not Bernard, who had been keeping an eye on them through a confederate to be sure they did not open the box prematurely or otherwise discover that it was full of genuine Mediterranean beach sand, decided that M. le Marquis would hold still for another trimming. He tolled them back to the Cote d’Azur to hide the uranium in the garden of the Marquis’ villa on the Cap d’Antibes until Soviet agents, who had prevented the rendezvous at St. Jean-de-Luz and were on the trail of the lead balloon for themselves, could be sidetracked. He then sold M. le Marquis another, larger, package of uranium. For $75,000. With the same tale.

  “I don’t believe it,” I told Bernard, when he had got that far along with the story. “You’re conning me now. Nobody can be that dumb.”

  “I didn’t believe it myself,” he confessed. “My original idea was simply to take him for the twenty-five big ones and fade before he woke up. But then the boob sat there at St. Jean-de-Luz for four days and nights without even feeling the gaff, and when I pulled on the line he came so trustingly I didn’t have the heart not to try to pop him again. He practically wept with gratitude when I let him have the second box of sand. He hocked his wife’s jewels to get up the grisbi that time.”

  “He can’t have much left, then. What do you need me for? I don’t get it.”

  “It keeps coming in. He has a fat regular monthly income from investments. I’ve been letting him pay in installments for a third package of uranium and a couple of containers of heavy water, you know the stuff they use to make atom bombs with?” Bernard grinned, his teeth very white in his swarthy good-looking Niçois face. “It was heavy, all right. I loaded the containers myself. But now he’s getting restless. He wants to see some of the profits before he invests further. That’s where you come in.”

  “I have a feeling it’s where I ought to get out. But go on with the tale. I’m still listening, for the time being.”

  What he wanted of me was my clean-cut American front and a dash of good old-fashioned American razzle-dazzle. He knew quite a lot about me and my situation; that I was on probation to Reggie, that she kept me on a tight leash both financially and in other ways, that my evenings were occupied by her comings and goings and my mornings by the regular groomings I was required to give the Mercedes-Benz. He also knew that she almost never used the car during the day, and that I was mostly free in the afternoons if you can call it freedom when you have nothing to spend but your time, and no one to spend it on. Reggie had warned me not to try to pick up, or let myself be picked up by, anything in any way, shape or form female. Or else. But she hadn’t said a word about not letting myself be approached by a crooked ex-cop with big ideas.

  “I think he’s probably got half a million or so, maybe more, that he can get his hands on in a pinch,” Bernard said. “That’s what I’m after now. The works, all at once. As much as we can get of it, anyway. All you have to do is persuade him to liquidate his investments and turn the money over to you.”

  “That’s all, eh?”

  “I tell you, it will be a breeze. I’ve got it all worked out. The chump will fall all over you.”

  “And after him the cops, no doubt. Assuming that I’m interested in taking part, as I’m pretty sure I’m not, what’s in it for me?”

  He was a hard bargainer. He claimed that there were four others besides himself to be cut in on the take, although I never met any of them. Furthermore, the gang had heavy working expenses to come off the top, so forth and so on, ho hum. All that beach sand and heavy Mediterranean seawater must have cost them a pretty penny, as I pointed out during the negotiations. But we finally agreed on a percentage, a pitch and an advance; the first cash I’d had in my pocket since spending my all for cigarettes in Tangier. It was an odd feeling, to have a bit of pognon in the poche once again. I liked it. That it was crooked money didn’t bother me a bit.

  The pitch was simple enough, provided the pigeon was as simple as he had been made to sound. Bernard promised to produce an outfit of decent clothes, American clothes, and a set of fake papers to identify me as an agent of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission. After that M. l’Inspecteur Bernard of the Sûreté Nationale would present me to M. le Marquis, very hush-hush and off the record. Behind locked doors and closed blinds where we could not be overheard by lurking Soviet spies I would tell M. le Marquis that we—meaning the AEC—had heard of his noble efforts single-handedly to contain the flood of Communism in Europe. We wanted to congratu
late him for his public-mindedness, patriotism and selfless dedication to a worthy cause. However, I was the bearer of what might prove to be disturbing news to M. le Marquis. The AEC was now in control of an entirely new type of bomb involving the fission-fusion of the hydrogen atom. (Fission-fusion was my own invention. It had a fine scientific ring.) The new bomb was so incredibly more powerful than the old uranium firecracker that the old one was now obsolete. Generalissimo Franco, the customer M. le Marquis was counting on to take his packages off his hands after so many unhappy delays, was even then, like the French government, negotiating with the AEC for the new super-weapon. It was highly improbable that the Generalissimo would now be inclined to purchase M. le Marquis’ private stockpile as well even if the Spanish national treasury could stand the burden of the further expenditure on top of the high cost of the super-bomb. In the circumstances, it looked very much as if M. le Marquis might be going to have to eat his expensive collection. M. l’Inspecteur shared my regret but was equally helpless to do anything about M. le Marquis’ predicament. Unless, of course, hem, hem, I couldn’t say for sure, but it was barely possible—

  Bernard and I rehearsed the whole pitch until we had it down cold. The gaff was to go in only after M. le Mark had been allowed to bleed in agony for a few minutes, although if he held still for it even then he was a bigger chump than I had been promised. I would suggest that the AEC just might possibly be persuaded to take his inventory off his hands for what he had invested in it. M. le Marquis would receive a dollar credit for this amount with the U.S. Treasury, and would be free to negotiate as he chose with Generalissimo Franco for the credit. As so shrewd a businessman as M. le Marquis surely knew, Spain was not a rich country, nor was its currency highly regarded on world markets. To acquire the large number of dollars necessary for the super-bomb purchase, the Generalissimo would necessarily have to buy dollars wherever he could find dollars and at whatever price he was required to pay for them. As M. le Marquis would further easily perceive—