The Last Match (11 page)

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.

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.