The Last Match Page 9

  Later, when she got to be mine and I had reached the point where I could look somewhere else than at her, I used to watch the people on the beach when she walked along it. It was like watching the audience at a well-fought tennis match in slow motion. All the heads simultaneously turning left as the ball goes in that direction, simultaneously right as it comes back, you’ve seen it? Not only the heads of the mecs on the beach but of their poupettes, too. All of them trying to poison her with their eyes because she had so much more of everything than one woman is entitled to. I don’t think she was ever more than vaguely aware of the effect she had, either on the mecs or on the poupettes. If she was, it didn’t matter to her one way or the other. She was like the moon in that, if you’ll excuse another celestial simile. If men wanted to worship her or bitches howl at her, it made no difference. She sailed along in her own track regardless.

  About the third or fourth morning I had been a member of the slow motion tennis-game gallery as she passed, the guy who trailed along to pick up her robe emerged from her penumbra and came over to where I was lying on the sand.

  “Hi,” he said, squatting on his heels and picking up a handful of sand to dribble through his fingers. He was as recognizably American as peanut butter and jelly. “My name’s Jim something or other.”

  “Hiya, Jim,” I said. “Some people call me Curly.”

  “Yeah,” he said, with no interest at all in what people called me. “I’ve seen you watching my girl.”

  “Your girl?”

  His use of the possessive pronoun to apply to a phenomenon like the honey-colored atomic bomb shocked me. It seemed kind of sacrilegious, in a way. But there could be no question about whom he meant. There was only one girl immediately visible to the masculine eye. She was lying in the sun, flat on her back with her eyes closed. ‘Flat’ isn’t the right word to describe Boda lying on her back, either. She lay supine, let’s say.

  “My girl.” He moved his head in her direction. “Or hadn’t you noticed me? Most guys don’t.”

  “To tell the truth, I haven’t paid you much attention. Are you trying to make something out of something, or something? Sure, I’ve watched her. Anybody who didn’t would have to be blind.”

  “Don’t get excited. I’m not trying to make anything out of anything. How would you like to take her over?”

  I had to gulp. I couldn’t think of anything to say, right off. He didn’t look or act like a pimp, and besides who ever heard of anyone pimping for an empress? For that matter, who ever heard of anyone taking over an empress, except maybe an emperor? I finally said something, I forget what it was, while trying to figure what the gaff would be when it came. He had begun to tell his tale, squatting there beside me on the beach drifting sand through his fingers and looking upset.

  He had got Boda from a German on Ibiza the same way he was offering her to me, as a free gift. The German had brought her to the island from Denmark for the summer but now had to go elsewhere without her. Reasons not explained, any more than Jim’s were for having to go elsewhere without her. The German, apparently a decent enough fellow, seemed to have been fond of Boda and concerned that when he left her she might take up with the wrong kind of guy. Somebody who wouldn’t treat her right, might even try to exploit her terrific drawing power at the male box office. He had hand-picked his successor, Jim, from among the availabilities on the island, and told Boda she now had a new boyfriend. There had been no argument from her.

  “She isn’t stupid or anything,” Jim said. “Hell, she speaks four languages. You can’t do that and be stupid. But she just doesn’t seem to give a damn about thinking for herself, or much of anything else. All she ever wants to do is lie in the sun, eat, drink, sleep and make out. She never says much, she never gets mad, she gives no trouble and she does whatever she’s told without backtalk. That’s why I’m worried about her.” He threw a handful of sand away. “She’s too easy. One of these Ay-rab characters gets hold of her, or any of the other sons of bitches that stink up this place—you see what I mean? I can’t just turn her loose and leave her on her own in a dump like Tangier. But I’ve got to leave.”

  “So you picked me to take over,” I said. “Just from seeing the nobleness of my character shining from my face among all the others here on the beach. I’m underwhelmed.”

  He tossed another handful of sand away as he stood up.

  “I picked you because you’re American, you’re not queer, you haven’t a girl of your own with you and your ass is hanging out a yard,” he said unemotionally. “There’s a job goes along with her, if you know how to hold a job. But forget it. I’ll look around.”

  The next day, same time, same place, I went over to where he was sitting on the sand beside her. She was lying in the sun with her eyes closed, as usual. Being that close to her made me feel lightheaded. I squatted down in front of Jim and began to drift sand through my fingers as he had done the day before.

  “Any pigeons?” I asked.

  “What do you care?” he said. “Bugger off. Go get run over. I’m busy.”

  “About that job with the fringe benefits. Can we talk?”

  “Why?”

  “I’ve been giving it some thought. I figured that since you know my ass is hanging out you can’t be trying to screw me for something I haven’t got. You’re trying to con me into taking some kind of fall for you, but I believe I can be had. On the terms you offered. Can we talk?”

  “We can talk,” he said. “She doesn’t hear anything she isn’t told to listen to.”

  “More and more I believe I can be had. Tell me about the job. About her, I know enough already.”

  That’s the way Boda and I set up housekeeping. Along with her and the job I got the little apartment she and Jim had been sharing on the hill behind the Grand Socco, with three weeks rent paid in advance. There were enough groceries and wine in the place so that with what I had left of my francs we could get by until my first payday. Jim was in a hurry to be on his way to wherever he was going, so I moved in the same day he moved out. He explained to Boda how it was going to be with us from then on. She listened to what he had to say, smiled her big slow beautiful smile at us both, kissed him goodbye, kissed me hello—it made my ears vibrate like twin tuning-forks, at least they felt that way—and that was it. What man and crazy fortune hath brought together let no creep cast the first stone at. While it lasted I made her happy, and she made me happy, and no harm was done to anyone.

  The job was writing come-on letters, ropers, to American suckers who had taken the first bait of the American and French Bank of Tangier. The A. & F. B. was a bucket-shop operation that eventually folded its tents like the two Ay-rabs who ran it and quietly stole away with other people’s assets worth around

  $4,000,000 when Morocco took over Tangier in 1956. Until that time bucket-shop operations were as unrestricted as other expressions of individual enterprise like prostitution, counterfeiting, dope-peddling and cigarette smuggling. I wrote my persuasive prose on a letterhead that showed a large impressive stone building vaguely resembling a Federal mint or other reliable institution, its roof topped by a forest of flagpoles bearing the flags of various countries including the Stars and Stripes prominently displayed front and center. If the Johns who got the letters chose to believe that the A. & F. B. operated out of a building like that, nobody held them back. The actual store was two dingy rooms of a three-story walkup on a side street off the Rue de la Liberté.

  What the bank, if I may use the term loosely, did for its living was advertise in various periodicals here and there around the world the advantages of investment in Tangier. The ads offered a selected group of favored prospects the highest interest rates in the world, “safety-security,” freedom from income tax and other benefits. That none of the pitch was in any way true is neither here nor there. Many of the eager inquiries from the selected list of prospects who read the ads came from the U. S. of A., which in my experience has a larger saturation of easy marks per square acre than
any other country in the world. Perhaps this is so because Americans tend to believe what they see in print until it’s proved to be demonstrably false, whereas Europeans among others know damn well it’s all a pack of lies even when it’s proved to be demonstrably true. My job, as an American knowing the American language and American ways of thought, was to compose convincing follow-up letters individually tailored to gaff the marks who had written in. The Ay-rabs spoke Arabic, French and Spanish, as everyone does in Tangier except tourists, and fair English. Their English just didn’t have that old homespun apple-pie sincerity to grab the American sucker. Mine did, as I found out with modest pleasure at the discovery of a new talent. I wrote letters that would have drawn blood from a turnip without making it unhappy.

  It was piecework, paid inadequately but in cash by the letter rather than nine-to-five rates. Boda and I had plenty of time to spend together on the beach and in the sack. I mention this only to try to give some insight into her character. She was as magnificently animal in her appetites as she was magnificent to behold, and wholly content with life if those appetites were satisfied. Very much like a large beautiful golden cat.

  Her simplicity of purpose and desire in life often complicated the lives of other people. We had a fatima—it’s what you call a bonne a tout faire in Morocco—named Kadoosh working for us. Kadoosh came to work in the morning in the usual Pullman-sleeper curtaining, top to bottom. Under the layer of draperies, which she removed on the job, she wore several other layers including long pink bloomers down to her ankles and a kind of elbow-length sweatshirt. Stripped down that way, you could see her face, neck and arms up to here. That was her whole display. Boda, on the other hand, was inclined to shed what little she wore in public, never more than slacks and a pullover over the bikini, as soon as she came into the apartment. Thereafter she’d go empressing around the place naked except for her slippers. Jim had warned me about this, and that they’d lost a couple of fatimas who couldn’t take it. On his advice, I adapted to a schedule by which Boda and I went to the beach in the morning. We came back to the apartment only in the afternoon when Kadoosh had finished her chores, re-curtained herself and gone home. After lunch Boda would sun herself again, minus the slippers now, in a kind of screened-off cubicle Jim had put together for her on the roof of the apartment house, while I got down to business writing letters to the suckers.

  I did all my work at home; partly because I never felt comfortable anywhere I couldn’t keep an eye on Boda at all times. Stupid she may not have been, but she was certainly simple. Or maybe I mean guileless. If I had left her alone in the apartment and a shifty-eyed character wearing handcuffs and an Oregon boot with a prison uniform had knocked on the door with word that I had told him to take her and everything else moveable in the apartment away with him that moment, the only question she might have asked would be, “Should I put some clothes on first?” But the situation presented no real difficulty. Jim had left me an old Spanish typewriter that worked fairly well, and the Ay-rabs didn’t care where I worked as long as I delivered clean copy.

  A difficulty with the small apartment when I was trying to get some work done was Boda herself. I’d be pounding away at the mill, grinding out my immortal prose for our daily cakes and ale. She’d come down from the roof in the robe I made her wear coming and going so she wouldn’t burn the neighborhood down. As soon as got inside she’d drop the robe to the floor the way she dropped it on the beach, then stand there. Not saying a word, as quiet as a mouse. Merely projecting herself at me like a high-powered laser beam until I could take it no longer. Human flesh and blood were not made to withstand Boda.

  I’d look up from the mill and say, surprised, “Oh, hello. I didn’t know you were here. I mean there.”

  “I don’t want to disturb you, Carly.”

  I never knew whether she couldn’t pronounce Curly right or thought my name was Carl, but no matter. The typewriter keys would be starting to melt just from the effect of the current flowing between us.

  “Oh, you’re not, you’re not! Believe me, dear. I’m just a little sweaty from overwork.”

  “What are you working at, Carly?”

  “Well, right now what I’m doing seems kind of nonproductive, but what I started out to do was bake a batch of cheese biscuits.”

  “You did not. You were writing a letter.”

  “Oh, I was not either.”

  “You were, too.”

  And so on, until I surrendered. She always won. Sooner or later, mostly sooner. I would spring out from behind the melting typewriter to grab myself an armful of naked toasty-brown honey-dipped sun-warm blonde empress, and no Caesar ever grabbed a finer one. Not that I’m going to go into the intimacies of my sex life, now or at a later date. But shacking with Boda was a pleasant experience while it lasted. Four golden enjoyable months before Nemesis caught up with me and I had to take foot in hand once again.

  I was beginning to lay up a fair hoard of savings from the job. At the legation they said things were moving along satisfactorily as far as they knew, and that they expected to be able to issue the new passport within a couple of weeks or thereabouts. I had a larger than average swatch of sucker letters to write, so I persuaded, ordered, Boda to leave me alone at least until four-thirty before ruining my day in her usual manner. I told her if she’d let me be long enough to get the letters finished I’d take her on a vacation from her wearing life of eating, drinking, sleeping, making love and lying in the sun. She thought that sounded nice, and fudged only a little now and then on the four-thirty whistle.

  I rented a car from a Frenchman who ran a garage on the Rue Victor Hugo as a front to move hot iron. All his cars were hot, but only on the European continent where they had been heisted. Not in Tangier. They’d be hot again as soon as he’d smuggled them into Morocco. As long as they wore Tangier plates and their papers weren’t examined too closely, they were reasonably legitimate. The one I got was the least expensive in the store, an old Citroen teuf-teuf that rattled a lot but seemed to run all right. Boda and I threw a few things into it and took off down the coast for Rabat, Casablanca and Marrakech, to see some of the country.

  It was a good time of year for Marrakech; late spring, before the hot weather that would turn the interior of Morocco into a fireless cooker. We rolled along merrily until we were about fifty kilometers from Marrakech. At that point the teuf-teuf began to show signs of acute senility. It was burning far too much gas, overheating badly and giving out with knock-bang-clank-whoosh instead of its familiar reassuring teuf-teuf. I nursed it, prayed to it, whispered words of love to it, at last brought it into town dying on its feet but game to the finish. The whole top half of the motor had burned up; valves, valve stems, plugs, gaskets, even the cylinder head. Everything above the block.

  The mechanic who tore it down looked at the wreckage, slapped his forehead with the flat of his hand and said something filthy in Arabic. The new cylinder head, valves and most of the rest had to be ordered from Rabat. It meant at least a week of waiting, more probably two weeks or even longer. I didn’t dare go back to Tangier without the teuf-teuf because then I would have to buy it at the hot-iron dealer’s price. Or else, pote. He had friends. I couldn’t afford his friends. Neither could I afford to keep Boda with me in even the cheapest hotel for two weeks or more on the money I had budgeted for the trip, and I didn’t want to let her go back to Tangier alone because I was afraid some Ay-rab would get her. But I had to send her back to Tangier because if we both stayed away twenty-four hours longer than I had told the fatima we would, she would conclude we had both been killed (mektoob, it is written) and start dismantling the apartment to hock the pieces. All in all it was a rum go, as the British say.

  I finally screwed up the courage to put her on a plane by herself. There was a once-a-week flight direct to Tangier, Allah be praised. She wouldn’t have to make any dangerous transfers or hang around airports in the public eye. I made her take off all her makeup and promise me not put it on again unti
l I got home. Then I made her hide all her corn-silk hair under a babouchka and promise not to take it off until she got home. Then I bought her a cheap kaftan to put on over the slacks and sweater she wore, and made her promise not to take that off until she got home. Her slacks and pullovaire weren’t particularly snug or provocative, because she never dressed to tease. She didn’t have to. She was provocative enough even in the kaftan, which covered her like a tent from wrists and ankles to the neck. I was scared silly for her when I pinned what money I could spare inside her underpants before taking her out to the airport to turn her over to the airplane stewardess.

  “My sister is kind of simple upstairs,” I told the stewardess. “Also she has fits when strange men speak to her. She’s very shy. Please take care of her for me. Put her in a seat with something motherly, deaf, dumb and blind, if you can.”

  “Don’t give your sister another thought, mon beau,” the stewardess said. She was a pleasant little French number. “I’ll see that she gets there. But why worry about one sister when there are so many of us?”

  She tipped me a wink and took over after I had kissed sister on the brow in a brotherly fashion. I took the opportunity to whisper “You stay in the apartment and do what I’ve told you until I get home or I’ll whack your behind until it glows like a red-hot stove. You hear?”

  “Yes, Carly,” she said. “Must I keep my clothes on even in the apartment?”

  “At all times. Night and day. Don’t go up on the roof, and don’t open the door to anyone but Kadoosh. Let her do the shopping for you.”

  “Yes, Carly.”

  My heart broke when the plane took off. I knew I’d never see her again. She was foredoomed. Poor, poor kid. Mektoob.