The Last Match Read online

  “Liar!” her husband howled. “Intransigeante! Stubborn witch! Unnatural woman!”

  “Simpleton!” she yelled back, not diverting her attention from us but taking a crack at him in passing more or less the way a polo player takes a crack at the ball as he rides past it at full gallop. “Gull! Booby! Jobard! Listen to me well, messieurs—”

  We listened to her. I would just as soon have turned and run long before she finished, but Bernard stood solidly between her and me without moving. I will say for him, he had nerve. Too much nerve and not enough judgment was his trouble, I guess. I listened to her tell him, as clearly and bluntly as anybody was ever told anything, that he was not going to get another centime out of the marquis if he worked at it until doomsday. All the money they had left was hers, her dot, and her husband could not touch it without her written consent. And that he would never, never, never receive, we could assure ourselves.

  All the time she was ticking us off the marquis kept screaming an obbligato of insults, curses, demands, even tearful pleas before he gave up. I mean he actually cried, big tears of self-pity because she was depriving him of all the goodies he had been promised. Bernard paid no attention to him at all, his wife only enough to call him a contemptuous name or two or three now and then. I never realized how rich the French language is in invective until I listened to Madame la Marquise de Lille du Rocher name her husband for what he was and phony Inspecteur Bernard for what he was without interrupting or repeating herself for the best part of ten minutes. Apparently, she hadn’t made up her mind where I stood, except in a general way. I hoped she would never get around to specifics.

  When she had said all she had to say, Bernard gave her a slight military bow. He had been standing at stiff attention all the time she was lacing into him. I hid as much of myself as possible behind his back. The marquis sniffled and wiped his nose, too crushed to fight any further.

  “Have you quite finished, madame?” Bernard asked coolly.

  She matched him manner for manner, now that she had finished blowing her buttons. Once more the haughty marquise, she said, “That depends on you, monsieur. If you leave this house now, never to bother me or my husband again, then I have finished. What you have already stolen from us is not too much to pay to keep my husbands incredible stupidity from public knowledge. But if you ever molest us again in any way, then no, monsieur. I have not finished with you by any means.”

  Bernard bowed again, turned on his heel and motioned me to precede him from the villa.

  “I regret that it was necessary for you to witness this disgraceful scene, monsieur,” he said. “Please do not believe that all Frenchwomen are viragos.”

  As a parting shot, it fizzled. The marquise said, “Or that all Frenchmen are scoundrels and thieves, monsieur. Or fools.”

  The marquis snuffled on, a broken reed.

  I was sweating like a pig by the time we got back to the Jag. The day wasn’t hot, either. When Bernard had started up and we were safely clear of the villa, I mopped my wet face and neck.

  “Merde alors,” I said shakily. “At least we’re safely out of it.”

  “Safely out of what?” Bernard said. “That woman is completely crazy. I’ve got to see a lawyer.” “You’ve got to see a what?”

  “A lawyer. I never heard of a Frenchwoman having control of her dot. It’s her husband’s, to do with as he likes. Otherwise why would a man marry a hag like that, eh?”

  “You mean—you can’t mean—my God, man, you aren’t still going to try to get it, are you?”

  He looked at me briefly, coldly, unsmiling, then back at the road. The Jag purred along smoothly. Not as smoothly as Reggie’s Mercedes-Benz, but smoothly enough. Like a jail door closing, say.

  “We are still going to get it,” he said, slightly emphasizing the ‘we.’ “Tomorrow I will contemplate a new strategy to aid Monsieur le Marquis in his valiant struggle against the Communist threat. Today we have lost a battle, not the war.”

  He didn’t know it, but he had just lost something else, too. Me.

  He really did have four others working with him on the swindle, as he had said. They were tried with him when the roof fell in. I read about it in the papers, from a safe distance.

  Chapter Five

  Another thing about Tangier in the bad old days. You didn’t need papers to get in. So many different national powers shared the administration of the international zone without sharing each other’s police powers that nobody bothered to keep track of the fleet of small craft that ran in and out of the bay without lights on moonless nights. Aboard one of those, you didn’t even have to know your own name.

  I went to see Jean-Pierre. He had a new job watering scotch in a bar in Juan-les-Pins. So that he wouldn’t see how pressé I was to leave France in a hurry, I let him think I had dropped in for old time’s sake and a spot of chitchat. When we had compared notes and lied to each other for a while about this and that, I said, “The Boar back in business?”

  “The Boar is never out of business. He just switches his bets.”

  “What’s he betting on now? Cigarettes again?”

  Jean-Pierre’s eyes flickered here and there around the bar before he answered the question. “Keep it to yourself. La hache.”

  That’s what I thought he said, at first. I didn’t get it. La hache, the axe or hatchet, has no meaning in the argot that I knew of. Then I realized that what he had actually said was la H. Meaning the big H. Meaning Heroin. Meaning keep it to yourself, pote. He was a horse’s ass even to talk about it. But he couldn’t resist talking when he had someone interested listening to him, and I was interested. I even bought him drinks to keep him going.

  Back in the fifties a kilogram of pure heroin could be had for around $2,500 in Marseille. It was worth more like $11,000 or $12,000 in the New York wholesale market, a whole lot more than that retail when it had been cut a few times. The morphine base came from the Middle East, mostly from Turkey and Iran, and was processed in a number of small factories in and near Marseille; in stores, waterfront warehouses, factories, barns, everywhere. It still is. Heroin-making might be called Marseille’s cottage industry. The colorful Corsican peasants who brought so much of the glamour to the glamorous Riviera during its post-war years have always been up to their ears in the traffic, naturally. So also, from time to time, have been cuddly young airline stewardesses who smuggled the stuff into the U.S. in their girdles and brassieres, seafaring men who brought it in in their sea-bags, honest taxpayers and tourists who hid it in toothpowder cans, bath powder boxes, medicine jars, cameras, hollow heels, or carried it taped to their bodies or even carefully packaged for insertion into their bodies. ‘Carefully’ in the preceding sentence means with extreme care, because if you have a substantial container of pure heroin concealed in your rectum or vagina and the container ruptures, you are going to die in a hurry although perhaps not in as much of a hurry as you might wish for. For all its risks the traffic has always been big in Marseille, and profitable.

  According to Jean-Pierre, The Boar had made himself a stake to get started in the H-trade by pulling off a couple of crimes américains. Le crime américain is what the French call kidnapping in honor of American ingenuity and adaptability in perfecting if not inventing the snatch. The Boar’s methods were very simple, requiring neither confederates nor a division of the grisbi. He would grab the man he wanted, tie him to a chair and apply enough uninterrupted unrestrained brutality to break his victim’s resistance. The victim would thereafter cooperate in whatever steps were necessary to place his liquid assets in The Boar’s hands, and be released with a warning not to identify his kidnapper to the police or he would die. One of the victims at least had failed to heed the warning. He had died. Half a dozen Corsicans had taken an oath that The Boar had been playing pétanque with them at the time of the murder as well as at the time of the snatch, and he had got off. Since he picked other gangstaires like himself to extort from, the cops couldn’t have been more unconcerned unless
all the hoods in the south of France, Corsican and non-Corsican, had chosen up sides and wiped each other out.

  I said, “What about The Plank?”

  “He copped it during a jewelry-store job in Nice. Four or five months ago.”

  “Stiff?”

  “As a plank.”

  Jean-Pierre thought that was pretty funny, although he stopped grinning when I said, “Did he or The Boar ever catch up with the mec who shopped us in the calanque?”

  “Not that I know of. I’d have heard about it if they had.”

  “I’ll bet The Boar gets him sooner or later. I wouldn’t want to be around to get splashed by the blood when he does.”

  “Neither would I.”

  A customer began rapping on the bar for service about then. When Jean-Pierre had waited on him and come back, I said, “Anybody else you know running cigarettes these days?”

  I thought I had slipped it into the conversation casually enough, but he gave me a sharp look, smelling money. “Why?”

  “Oh, I’ve got another thousand dollars or so looking for work. Provided it’s nice safe work, of course.”

  He wouldn’t cooperate until I’d promised him ten percent of the profit. With that settled, he sent me to Merde Alors, who had a job on a boat then tied up in Antibes harbor. Merde Alors was as grumbly as ever, but he passed me along to a pal on a contrabandier that was about to take off for Tangier.

  I got a job aboard her by swearing I knew all there was to know about cigarette-buying. The captain questioned me a bit, but he didn’t know beans about it himself and I gave him all the right answers, at least as far as he knew. He said, Veddy well, I could work my way. He was British. The boat was a pretty white yacht with two masts; a ketch, I think, nautically speaking, but with enough auxiliary power to move her when the wind failed. She wasn’t in the same class with The Boar’s cutter, because she couldn’t have out-raced a Spanish patrol-boat or a pirate with a two-day head start. Her captain didn’t seem to think anything like that would be necessary. Whether he was the boat’s owner or just borrowing it in the owner’s absence I never knew, but what he seemed to have in mind was taking her into Tangier under her own name and registry, loading her up with cigarettes and sailing her back to France without let or hindrance from anybody. I was glad I wasn’t planning to go back with him.

  Packing wasn’t going to be a problem. I could get everything I owned into a small bag and cram Reggie’s mourner’s outfit in on top. I figured that pinching the suit made up in part for her theft of my papers. I also had the equivalent of a little less than a hundred dollars in francs from Bernard’s advance. Where he was headed, he wouldn’t be needing it.

  He didn’t call on me for help with the new scheme for the marquis before the yacht sailed. If he had, I’d have got out of it some way. I carried out my usual Reggie-routines right up until H-hour of D-day. Just before we pushed off, I dropped my resignation in the mail.

  It read:

  Dear Hon. —

  Sorry to have to take off so abruptly, but I never gave my parole to you or the juge, remember? Please try to believe, for your own happiness, that all men are not as contemptible as your ever untrustworthy —

  Spiv

  Then I went aboard the yacht.

  We trudged across the Mediterranean, mostly under sail, until we raised the Algerian coast five days later, then turned westward for Tangier. The captain didn’t even put into Gib to fuel up, not that fueling up would have done him any good. He was a real pigeon. I don’t know what happened to him and the yacht. When we docked at the darse in Tangier and I had helped him secure the mooring lines, I went below to get my bag, walked down the gangplank and started off.

  The captain was on deck. “Hoy!” he called after me. “Where the devil do you think you’re going?”

  “Your guess is as good as mine,” I called back. “Thanks for the ride.”

  Well, His eye is on the sparrow, as they say, and when He isn’t too occupied with the sparrow’s affairs I know He watches me. Within ten days I had acquired a job and a blonde poupette named Boda, a Dane. I got them both from the same guy. He was an American; Jim something or other. I forget what the something or other was, and Boda said she never knew. She was that kind of poupette.

  The way it happened, the first thing I did after getting off the yacht was to go to the U.S. legation down in the medina and apply for a passport. I said that mine had been stolen from me, the truth. But I had memorized the number and date of issue, those being the two things you have to know about a passport when you are asked unless you want to consult it every time you check in at a European hotel or border crossing, and of course I remembered my army serial number as well as the date of my discharge in Germany. They could check on me easily enough. They said they would get right on it. However, for various reasons it might be some time before a new passport could be issued. I said that time was what I had a whole lot more of than money, left my address and went away.

  Most of Tangier, south and east of the darse and its warehouses, is fronted by a fine, white, wide curving beach. Because the beach is in the bay and protected in large part by the breakwater it hasn’t much to offer in the way of surf. But it’s a fine place to paddle around, sun yourself and watch the coming-out parties. In Morocco, which was then and still is now to an extent a French protectorate (read Tangier for Morocco here, since they should have been and were in time integrated), at least half of the women you see in the street are Moslem. They dress universally in a long enveloping blue-gray hooded haik, with a litham, face-veil, concealing the lower part of the face; everything hidden from view but the eyes and the upper part of the nose. They remind you of a Pullman sleeper after the berths have been made up for the night, all curtains except for the eyes peering at you through the slits. The color of the curtains doesn’t vary much, although the quality of the material going into them may, and you can sometimes guess something, not much, about the wearer’s social status by her shoes if you catch a glimpse of them under the draperies. But walking toward one of those animated duffle-bags on the street you can’t tell from thirty feet out if she’s one of the Sultan’s wives out for a stroll or a poule who will pitch at you as you pass with, ” ‘Allo, bébé. Feefty dirhams, eh?”

  Guessing the quality of the goods beneath the draperies is even more difficult, although provocative in its way. When one of the bundles came down to the beach to swim or sun itself, as happened with fair frequency, it drew the attention of all eyes as soon as it stepped on the sand. The litham always came off first, and was carefully furled. Next, the hood of the haik would be thrown back, so you could have a look at the face. Then, as the world watched and waited with bated breath, the duffle-bag would bend over, grab the bottom hem of itself and lift the curtain on the final act. It was something of a striptease, something like the unveiling of a monument. What usually emerged from under the yardgoods, on the beach that is, was not much. Moroccan women tend toward dumpiness and spread, a combination without eye-appeal even when wrapped in the French bikinis many of them wore when they got down that far. Besides, when you have cased the whole Cote d’Azur on the half-shell during the summer season, you are inclined to be a bit choosy about what you elect to look at. I was saving my eyesight for something worth the effort.

  When it came, it was well worth the wait. The French say, Il faut de toutes sortes pour faire un monde, and that’s what populated the laissez-vivre monde of Tangier back in the good old bad days; toutes sortes. Rich men, poor men, beggarmen, thieves and, naturally, a fair population of swindlers. I was still an apprentice, and on my uppers besides, but there were pros working in and out of Tangier who could have sold the White House to the President of the United

  States for cash. You had to keep your guard up at all times, even on your uppers, because you never knew how or when you were going to be roped.

  One morning I was sitting on the beach feeling depressed and downtrodden because I was almost out of money and faced the dreary
prospect of going to work if I wanted to continue eating. At the same time I felt pleased with myself because of a newspaper squib I had seen that morning reporting the arrest, in Antibes, of a gang of escrocs headed by one Albert Bernard, ancien agent de police. As he had said, the greedier you get, the dumber it makes you. While I was congratulating myself on my own superior intelligence for having pulled out before it was too late, Boda rose on my horizon. For the time being I lost all interest in other things.

  She was wearing a kind of loose beach-robe when I first saw her. I think the cops must have made it a condition of her stay in Tangier that she keep the robe on until she was actually on the beach. If she had let it drop from her on the esplanade of the Avenue d’Espagne the way she let it drop as soon as she reached the sand below the esplanade, traffic would have backed up for miles. I vaguely remember some guy appearing out of the shimmer of her penumbra to pick up the robe where she dropped it, but then he disappeared back into the penumbra again and was lost from view.

  Everything else was lost from view while Boda filled your eyeballs. To say of her that she was corn-silk blonde, blue-eyed and beautiful is like saying of the star-filled heavens that they are cute. She was breathtaking, awe-inspiring, as flawless a piece of sculptured Danish pastry as has ever been perpetrated. She was also fairly big for a girl, I mean tall. Maybe five-nine or thereabouts, a hundred and forty incredibly well arranged pounds. She carried herself like an empress, if you can imagine a blonde, blue-eyed empress tanned a rich golden honey color all over.

  I say ‘all over’ because even before I saw her all over, Boda in a bikini gave the impression of stark nudity. As a matter of fact she was the nakedest woman I ever saw even when fully clothed. Wearing two skimpy pieces of fabric that barely contained what they were supposed to contain, she was unbelievable. The word ‘contain’ isn’t exactly accurate as I have used it here. ‘Restrain’ doesn’t say it a lot better. She didn’t require restraint in any direction, only appreciation. ‘Detain’ is close but still not precise. Ordinary words didn’t apply with precision to Boda.