The Last Match Read online

  Bernard was to weigh in here with indignant objections on behalf of la belle France. His country was also negotiating for the super-bomb, also stood in need of dollars, and also suffered from a weak and unstable currency. Surely a patriot like M. le Marquis would not turn his back on his own patrie to do business with a lousy nigaud like Franco when he could profitably sell his dollars right there at home. M. l’Inspecteur would personally guarantee a far better price in francs; a return of at least fifty percent on M. le Marquis’ entire investment.

  Bernard was to get quite worked up about the possibility that the marquis might do business with Franco when la belle France needed the dollars so badly. If the marquis had the brains to point out that it had been Bernard’s suggestion that he do business with Franco in the first place, we would both assure him that the existence of the super-bomb had changed things drastically. Europe could now be successfully defended against Communism on both sides of the Pyrenees—if enough money could be raised to arm both sides of the Pyrenees with the new super-weapon.

  The gaff went in there; slick, smooth and easy. M. le Marquis didn’t have to have the brains to figure that if he could command a guarantee of fifty percent profit on the money he had already sunk in his patriotic ventures why couldn’t he get the same fifty percent on a further, larger amount? I would plant the idea in his bird brain by suggesting that, in view of his faithful, unremitting and lonely defense of Europe against the Menace while the AEC was tardily getting around to fusion-fission (or was it fission-fusion? He wouldn’t remember either), the U.S. Treasury might, just possibly might, permit him to make additional investments in dollar credits which he could also sell to his beloved patrie at a profit. No doubt M. l’Inspecteur would also personally guarantee the same return on those?

  M. l’Inspecteur would indeed, unhesitatingly and unequivocally. He would further personally guarantee, on his parole d’honneur, that M. le Marquis would receive not only a fifty percent return on his money but the Legion d’Honneur; not the mere ribbon of a lousy Chevalier, either, but the médaille of a full Officier. Perhaps, even—although this, regrettably, M. 1’Inspecteur could not personally guarantee—perhaps even the baton of a Maréchal! With a public kiss of gratitude from M. le President de la République! Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité and cost-plus patriotism, with the elegant chords of La Marseillaise thundering in the background.

  “The boob will be wetting his pants with eagerness before we finish,” Bernard said. “You hold back a little at the end to keep him hanging on the hook. While I’m throwing in the iron-clad guarantees you keep saying that you can’t promise anything absolutely definite, you can speak for the AEC but you don’t have authority to speak for the Treasury. You think they’ll play along, you’re pretty sure they can be persuaded, but you’ll have to send off a couple of cables to make absolutely certain. You don’t want to raise M. le Marquis’ hopes too high prematurely, see? But you’re pretty sure it will work out as you’ve said it might work out, and you’ll let him know in three or four days.”

  “It might be a good idea for me to suggest that I’m confident enough about it to ask you to start making preparations to take his collection of playthings down to Marseille, where they can be loaded aboard an American ship. We’ll need a heavy guard, complete secrecy, not a word to anybody about anything—”

  “Right. Right. You’re thinking like a pro already. We’ll make him swear to keep his lip buttoned, even to his wife. And not a word from either of us to suggest that it might be a good idea for him to start liquidating his other investments so as to have the braise ready to turn over to you when you come back with the glad news from Washington. He’ll think of that himself. His mind works that way. He’ll want to start drawing that fifty percent just as fast as he can.”

  I said, “You really think he’s dumb enough to believe he can take francs out of a bank, buy dollars with them, sell the dollars back for francs again and make fifty percent on the deal?”

  He laughed.

  “Mon gars,” he said. “The pigeon is greedy. And the greedier you get, the dumber it makes you.”

  He spoke a profound truth. He just failed to realize how profound it was.

  Finding the right kind of American clothes for an AEC man presented a small problem that held us up for a couple of days. Plenty of American men’s clothes were wandering around the Cote that any good strong-arm could liberate any night, but most were either too sporty-looking, or formal wear. One evening during the period we were marking time while Bernard’s friends cased the field, Reggie wanted to be driven to Monte Carlo.

  It wasn’t unusual. What was unusual, she was alone when I picked her up at the hotel. No guy. I figured we’d gather him up somewhere along the way, but no, she had no escort that evening unless he was waiting for her in Monte Carlo, and besides she wasn’t the type of girl to go out with characters who didn’t call for her at her own door. Mine not to reason why, or volunteer small talk about things that were none of my business. I pointed the Mercedes-Benz in the right direction and drove.

  When we were coming into Nice she said, “Take the Grande Corniche, please.”

  I said, “Yes, madame,” and took the Grande Corniche. It’s not the fastest road between Nice and Monaco, but it offers the most spectacular scenery. During the day you can see all the way over into Italy, the hills of Corsica as well if the day is clear. At night you look down on the sparkling lights of Cap Ferrat, Beaulieu, Villefranche, Eze, and, if the American Sixth Fleet happens to be in the roadstead at Villefranche, a whole bunch of brightly lit-up battle wagons looking like toy boats far below. At any hour of the day or night the Grande Corniche gives you your money’s worth of view. The trouble is, if you let your mind wander from your driving to the spectacular scenery you’re as liable as not to end up participating in the scenery, and it’s a long way down. The Grande Corniche is that kind of a road. I kept my attention focused on my driving and left the enjoyment of the view to the Honorable Regina.

  We never got to Monaco, although we had a fine view of the lights of the whole principality spread out below us when, nearing La Turbie, Reggie said, “Can you pull off the road here, Curly?”

  “Not here, madame. There’s no room. A bit farther on, I think.”

  “As soon as you can, then.”

  I said, “Yes, madame,” thinking, What gives? Even if she did have to make a hurried trip into the bushes, she’d have strangled first before letting me know she was pressée. Whatever else might be on her mind, she wasn’t pressée for the bushes. Maybe she just wanted to look at the moon. It wasn’t as full or as spectacular as it had been on the night she busted me on her balcony, but it was pretty spectacular. Maybe she wanted to bust me again, for exercise.

  I pulled off the road and parked as soon as I could manage it. After we’d sat there for a while she said, “Turn off the lights, please.”

  “I have to leave at least the veilleuses burning, madame. It’s the law.”

  “And you’re always law-abiding, aren’t you?”

  It was a crack, and yet it wasn’t a crack. She sounded more depressed than sarcastic. I switched off everything but the veilleuses and offered no comeback.

  After a while she said, “Would you like a cigarette?”

  “I’ve given up smoking.” I hadn’t, but the hell with it. I’d smoke my own cigarettes on my own time, not hers. She was a little late with the handouts.

  She lit a cigarette. When it would have been about half-smoked she said abruptly, “You can’t believe that I’m doing this for you own good, can you? That I don’t hate you, or wish you ill?”

  I said nothing to that, either. She said, still depressed, not in temper, “I asked you a question.”

  “You also told me on another occasion that you did not want to hear my views about your actions.”

  “I want to hear them now.”

  “I’d rather not express them.”

  I could hear her sigh. I thought she started to say som
ething more, but changed her mind. I said, “But if madame wishes, I’ll be glad to tell her of my experiences in the army.”

  She was an intelligent girl; more than intelligent enough to know I wasn’t talking to hear the enchanting sound of my own voice. She listened, smoking quietly.

  I said, “I served two years in the United States Army. Not voluntarily. I was drafted. I had a tough regular Army sergeant who made a point of being hard on us draftees. I think he was the toughest sergeant in the whole army. He gave us extra pack drill, extra calisthenics, extra field drill, extra everything he could load on to us. He kept saying it was for our own good. To make soldiers of us lousy civilians.”

  “Curly, I—”

  “Please, madame. There’s not much more to the story. I never complained. Anybody who did complain suffered for it. He called them whiners, conscript crybabies, other things, and thought up extra extras especially for them. I took all he could hand out for two years, because I had no choice. Then, when I got my discharge and had all my clearances, my civilian clothes on me again, I called him out of a bar where he was having a beer with his pals, all regular army sergeants, and while they stood around and watched, madame, I beat the hell out of him. With my fists. For his own good. So he would be able to appreciate the viewpoint of us lousy civilians. But I didn’t hate him, or wish him ill.”

  I could hear the lid of the ashtray in the seat-arm where she was sitting open and close. Nothing more, until she said, in the same depressed tone, “Take me back to the hotel, please.”

  “Yes, madame. Shall I return by way of the Moyenne Corniche?”

  “I don’t care. Any way you like.”

  “Thank you, madame.”

  I drove her back to the hotel. No conversation en route.

  The next day, I think it was, I got my American clothes. I wasn’t going to give Reggie any remote chance of seeing me in them, any more than Bernard gave the Nice cops a chance to catch him in the uniform he had been cashiered out of. We met by agreement in Antibes, where he had taken a room at a convenient distance from the marquis’ villa on the Cap. He had already got my false papers; where, he didn’t say and I didn’t ask, any more than I had asked where my new wardrobe came from. The papers, like the clothes, looked pretty good. We climbed into his big Jag and set out for the field of enterprise.

  The marquis was a slight, extremely good-looking man, snappily dressed in tailor-made sport clothes, clearly vain of his appearance and so gullible that he didn’t even want to look at my phony identification. It was enough that his good friend M. l’Inspecteur vouched for me. After all, if he couldn’t trust M. l’Inspecteur and M. l’Inspecteur’s judgment, whom could he trust? Bernard and I both agreed with the implication, but also we both insisted that I be allowed to produce my bona fides for his inspection. Soviet spies had been known to pretend to be what they were not, as we were sure M. le Marquis was aware. A man could not be too careful. He immediately got a hunted look, as if he was about to peer fearfully over his shoulder, and said he certainly was aware of such things. But he was so vain that he wouldn’t admit he didn’t understand what my false credentials said when he tried to read their English wording.

  The marquise was somewhat sharper, I suspected, although not much sharper. Not if she had let her husband hock her jewels to pay for his second sandbox. I didn’t offer to show her my papers. I had a feeling she would have sneered at them because they weren’t written in French. She was the haughty type; as vain, I thought, of the title she had acquired by marriage as the marquis was of his good looks, expensive wardrobe and handsome villa. I’d like to have seen Reggie put the marquise down, just for the hell of it. She wasn’t any better-looking than she was sympathique, either. I found that odd. With his looks, title, money and the rest, the marquis should have rated a French beauty queen at least. But his wife’s looks were none of my concern. Only his money.

  She wasn’t invited to join our little conference group. The marquis made it pretty clear that we men could get along without her while we talked business. We really did get together to talk in a locked room with drawn blinds, as Bernard had said we would. So Soviet agents could not read our lips through binoculars, as he explained to me with proper solemnity. Bernard had a special gadget he carried around to detect bugging, hidden tape recorders, secret television lenses and other sensors in a room before it was used for confidential conversation. It was an ordinary voltmeter hooked up to a flashlight battery with an inconspicuous button he could press when he wanted it to “detect.” He checked the room out carefully with it, showing us how he got readings from legitimate telephone wires, a TV set and the like but nothing that wasn’t strictly as it should be. The marquis took it all in like a kid watching a cops-and-robbers movie. Then we got down to nos moutons.

  The pitch went over beautifully. M. le Mark reacted exactly as he was supposed to. He showed self-satisfied gratification at words of praise and appreciation from the AEC, dawning horror when he sensed the import of my news about the fusion-fission bomb; trembling shock followed by sustained agony when he saw his money going, going, gone down the drain; pathetic eagerness to believe, believe, that I might, just possibly might, be able to save it for him, perhaps not with the profit on top he had hoped for but at least without that awful loss; all-consuming, poorly concealed greed at the prospect of turning an even larger profit than he had dreamed of; finally, the puffed gratification of a selfish bastard at the thought of the great big public honor that would come to him simply for making that great big profit for himself at his country’s expense. It was a real pleasure to do dirty business with a cheap son of a bitch like M. le Marquis.

  I told Bernard as much after we got away from the villa. He said, “Pigeons or pricks, what’s the difference? They all bleed the same kind of cash.” He was a great one for philosophical remarks.

  We stalled for three days. The wait made me jumpy.

  It was my first big con. Little cons, the kind you learn in the Army, do nothing to prepare you for the big time. I hadn’t yet learned that a properly gaffed mark worries a lot more about missing his big money-making opportunity than you do about his slipping the hook. That’s why a pro never hurries the grab, or pushes too hard on the gaff once it’s in. The longer you can wait after the gaffing to make the grab—within reason, of course, and with an eye on the exits—the less suspicious the sucker. Obviously if you were a crook, you’d be reaching for his pocketbook at the first possible opportunity. But let him linger, doubt, worry, have time to calculate his potential profits, hear a suggestion or two that the deal isn’t going to come off after all, sorry, pal, tough luck all around—brother, he’ll hand you his money with tears of gratitude in his eves when you give him the chance.

  Bernard knew all this. I didn’t. I thought we were taking unnecessary chances. I got snappy with my nice landlady, talked back to Reggie a couple of times when I shouldn’t have, built up a lot of tension. Reggie was a lot more tolerant of me than she had to be, although I didn’t realize it at the time. When I was just about as jittery as I could get, Bernard at last decided it was time.

  Harnessing up in his Antibes hideout, we went back to the villa. I had faked a very nice cable from Washington—in code, to deceive Soviet spies—saying that the AEC and the U.S. Treasury, in view of M. le Marquis’ long, sustained and continuing dedication to The Cause, had decided after great deliberation to go along with my recommendations. In a word, he was In. Up to and far beyond his délicieuses. I took with me a translation of the cable, in French, to gladden his greedy Gallic heart.

  When Bernard pulled the Jag up in front of the villa and we had got out, we heard screaming coming from inside the house.

  “What the hell is that?” I said. I was still jittery.

  Bernard shrugged. “Je m’enfous. Maybe he’s beating up his broad. Business before pleasure, in all events. Let’s go.”

  A pretty but nervous bonne opened the door when we rang the bell. The screaming continued. Two women appe
ared to be screaming at each other in counterpoint. The bonne wasn’t sure whether she should let us in or not, but Bernard didn’t give her a chance to stand in the way of the Sûreté Nationale. He swept her aside with a wave of his hand and marched in. I followed him, jittering. The screaming did nothing for my nerves. And we were moving toward it, rather than away.

  It wasn’t two women. It was the marquis and the marquise, yelling at each other. Of the two, his voice was the shriller and more fishwifely.

  “Camel!” he was screaming, his face red with fury. “Cow! Vixen! Slut! Stupid beast! Species of a diseased bitch! I demand that you obey me!”

  “I spit on your demands!” she screamed right back. “Fool! Imbecile! Species of a retarded ignoramus! You lack even the sense to know when you have been foutu! Never in a thousand years! It is my money, my dot, and you may not touch it!”

  “Idiot!” he howled right back. “Sow! Whore! Disrespectful woman! What of your marriage vows!”

  She told him what he could do with her marriage vows. For a marquise, she had a good command of the argot.

  They hadn’t yet noticed our arrival. They were too preoccupied with each other. I had a feeling that an unobtrusive withdrawal was indicated for us, the sooner the better. I had taken Bernard by the arm to whisper the suggestion in his ear when Madame la Marquise caught sight of us in the doorway.

  “Aha!” she yelled, turning her attention to us. “So you have come for more blood! Vultures! Scavengers! Thieves! Jackals! Swine! Swindlers! Monsters!”

  “Madame—” Bernard began smoothly.

  It was the first, last and only word either of us said for some time. Boiled down to pure venom, the gist of what she had to tell us was that she had been saving up what she had to say (to Bernard—I got the benefit of what splashed off him) for over a year, ever since her husband had hocked her jewels. She had known even then that we were vultures, scavengers, thieves, etc., etc., etc., but had bowed to her husband’s wishes like the good French wife she was—