The Last Match (10 page)

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 appeared 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—

“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.

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.