The Last Match (24 page)

Reggie was still paying the bills and jotting the amounts down in her little account book, so I didn’t have to take anything out of the pot to live on. Life was so smooth and the living so easy at the Villa Parfumée that it was dull. I had everything anybody could ask for, just for the asking; a loving woman, a comfortable home, a Mercedes-Benz to drive, money, plenty of food and booze, all the entertainments I could use— my God, it was as bad as driving a bus. Sometimes I got so damned bored with it I thought of signing my investments over to Reggie and shipping out again. Not as a fireman this time, that would be no improvement, but on deck. Reggie would miss me, probably, but I’d come back in time. Probably. Or maybe not. We didn’t have any contract of cohabitation, express or implied. I had suggested that we get married, three or four times by then, because I thought she expected it of me. The answer was always a firm Nyet.

“No, love,” she would say, always giving me a nice kiss and a pat to take the sting out of it. “When I marry it will be for love. Not to an unscrupulous fortune-hunter.”

“Goddamn it, Reggie,” I said, the last time she gave me that same brush. “I’m not after your goddamn money! I don’t want your goddamn money! I’ve got money of my own. You say you love me, but when I try to tell you I—”

“Don’t try. And please don’t swear at me.”

“I’ll swear all the bloody hell I like whenever I goddamn well feel like it, at you or anyone else! And if I goddamn well want to say I goddamn well lo—”

She shut my mouth the way I had shut hers when I was depriving her of her virginity in a hotel room in Belem. It was a real sweet loving lovely kiss.

“I do love you, Curly,” she said afterward. “I’ll always love you, whatever you do. I just don’t want you to lie to me about important things.”

“Goddamn it all to hell and hack!”
I yelled.
“I’m going to ship out! The hell with you!”
and went somewhere else. I really
was
going to ship out, on the first available ship. I didn’t give a good goddamn where it went. I’d even sign on as a fireman, by God, if I had to. I couldn’t take the Honorable mulehead Regina for another ten minutes.

Somewhere about this time I ran into Jean-Pierre, my old
pote
and jail-mate. He had put on a good bit of lard since I saw him last, and was doing business behind the
zinc
of a bar-and-grill in Golfe Juan, where I had gone to look at a piece of property. Watering the scotch as usual, I assumed. But after we had greeted each other and bought each other a drink, one of the waiters working the tables in the place called him
‘patron’
while bringing him the money to settle an
addition.

I said, “Nobody in his right mind would let you handle the cash if you
weren’t
the patron, so I guess you have to own the joint. Whom did you rob?”

He grinned, shaking his head. A couple of extra chins he had grown wobbled when he did it.

“Got lucky at the casino one night,” he said. “And drunk. Too drunk to quit while I was ahead, so I got further ahead. I put it into this place quick before I could lose it back. Got a real good buy. The
mec
who had it before me died, and his widow wanted to unload.”

“I’ll bet she unloaded more than she’d counted on.”

“Not a bit. I gave her a fair deal. I’m legitimate now, Curly. Those bullets the Spanish bastards shot at us that night with The Boar—remember?—scared the piss out of me. I didn’t like the
violon
too well, either.”

“How legitimate is legitimate?”

“Oh, I push a little contraband booze, a few cigarettes, change a few black-market dollars, maybe pass a word to the right people now and then when I hear a pigeon flying around loose. It’s good for business. But that’s all.”

“No H? For The Boar, maybe?”

He gave me a sharp look. “Not on your life. The
flics
beat you up for that first and lock you up for it afterwards. I told you, I’m legitimate. Even if I wasn’t, I wouldn’t have any more to do with those stinking Corsican bastards than I have to. Let me tell you about Corsicans, Curly. Of all the low-down rotten dirty cutthroat scum in the world—”

He shut up as if he’d been shot. He wasn’t looking at me, but over my shoulder at someone who had just come into the bar. His face had the same kind of sick look on it as the face of the warehouse checker in Tangier when The Boar gave him the hard eye. I turned around to have a look for myself and stared straight into those same chill Corsican goat-turds that had curdled the checker’s blood.

He recognized me immediately, for all the months that had passed and the expensive British threads that clothed me. He looked pretty prosperous himself, as befitted the heroin king of the Marseille waterfront. His suit was a bit on the
gangstaire
side, flashy, but the big diamond he wore on his pinky looked like the real article. He came up to the
zinc
and ordered a Pernod.

Jean-Pierre’s hands were shaking as he put out the bottle, the glass and a carafe of water. Whatever he had been about to tell me further about the Corsicans, he had almost told it at the wrong moment.

“You?” The Boar said to me in his expressionless, scar-tissued voice, holding up the bottle.

“I’m drinking whiskey,” I said. “Nothing but the best for me, nowadays. Thanks, anyway.”

“Give him another whiskey.” The Boar said it without bothering to look at Jean-Pierre. “You’re doing all right, eh?”

“I’m doing all right.”

“That your Mercedes outside?”

“I drive it.”

“What’s your
truc?”

“No
truc.
I’m legitimate. Like Jean-Pierre here.” “Who’s keeping you?”

I didn’t bang him for several reasons. One of the best was that anyone who banged on The Boar was going to get himself killed. It was enough to make the other reasons unimportant. Besides, he hadn’t meant the crack as an insult. In his vocabulary it was actually a kind of compliment. It implied that I was smart enough to arrange for somebody else’s money to support me; in his dung-drop eyes, a commendable accomplishment.

I said, “Oh, I flit around. Flower to flower.”

“Ever flit as far as Marseille?”

“Not lately. Not since the
violon.”

“I’ve got business going in Marseille. I could use an

American with a front like yours to carry merchandise aboard American ships.”

Jean-Pierre slid the whiskey in front of me, sloshing part of it on the bar. He was still shaky.

I took the time to finish my old drink and start on the new one while I thought of the right thing to say. It wasn’t going to be a wisecrack, and it wasn’t going to reflect my honest opinion of people who deal in heroin. He had no more sense of humor than a rattlesnake, but his Corsican code of honor, if you call it that, demanded at least one cut throat in answer to a slight. Jean-Pierre mopped at the bar; seeing no evil, hearing no evil, speaking not at all. He would have been happy to go into the kitchen and hide under a stove.

I said, “Well, thanks. Maybe some day. Right now I’ve got a
poulet
who doesn’t give me much time off.”

“There’s money in it for you.”

“I’ve got all the money I can use. Thanks anyway.”

“Nobody ever has all the money he can use. Any time you want to work for me again, this one knows how to get in touch with me.” ‘This one’ was Jean-Pierre, to whom he bent a finger telling him he was now being called upon to speak. “Anything new?”

“No, sir. Nothing.”

“Make a call once a week anyway. I don’t like to come by here for nothing.”

“Yes, sir. I tried to call a couple of days ago, but—”

“Merde.
Someone is always at the number I gave you. Next time, get through.”

“Yes, sir.”

The Boar left us. He hadn’t said hello, he didn’t say goodbye, he didn’t pay for the drinks he had ordered, mine or his own. He put his glass down and walked out. Nobody said him Nay.

I said to Jean-Pierre, who still looked sick, “You were telling me about Corsicans?”

He finished what he had to say about Corsicans in six words, of which the least virulent was
con.
In French this is by no means the equivalent of ‘con’ as in swindle, or
con
as in
chile con carne.
After that he shut up like a clam.

About a week after that Reggie’s father died. Suddenly and unexpectedly. She had to go back to England for the funeral and to do something about the estate of which she was either sole heir or principal heir. She wouldn’t know which it was until the will was read, but she stood to come into a bigger potful than she already had. I put her on the plane at Nice airport.

We didn’t have much to say to each other while we waited for her flight-call. I was thinking that the gap between us was going to be wider now that she was stinking rich instead of merely rich. She may have been thinking along the same lines. After a silence between us that lasted a good ten or fifteen minutes, she said abruptly, “Don’t forget your promise.”

“What promise?”

“The one you made in Belem.”

“I’m sorry. I just don’t remember what it was. Give me a hint.”

“Wherever you go, whatever you do, wherever you are, whatever you have done—”

“I’m not going anywhere, Reggie. You’re going. To England. Remember?” I took her by the arms to make her look at me, which she seemed disinclined to do. “I’ll come with you, if you want. We don’t have to live together. I’ll be just another guy you met over here, passing through.”

“No. I don’t want that. I wouldn’t want to see you if I couldn’t love you.” She was still reluctant to look at me, for some reason. “Promise that you won’t forget your promise.”

“I promise, I promise, I promise, I promise, I promise, I promise. What’s this all about, anyway? I’ll be right here waiting when you get back. All you have to do is let me know—”

Her flight-call came booming out of the box before the conversation could go any further. I took her as far as I could go, the check-in gate, and kissed her goodbye. She hung on to me for a moment as if she were a barnacle hanging to a rock.

“I’ll love you until I die, Curly,” she said into my ear. I think she was crying, although she turned away from me so fast I didn’t get to see her face. “Whatever happens. Goodbye.”

With that, she was gone. She didn’t look back. I thought, Now I wonder what that was all about, she’s only going to be gone a month or two or three, she plays it like “Kathleen Mavourneen.”

It didn’t bother me long. The warm, welcome wave of relief from restraint that came over me when I had waved her plane off from the observation deck and watched it fade safely into the distance was wonderful. I felt as if I’d just come out of O Caldeirão again. Reggie was a doll, but a demanding doll. Sweet, loving, attentive, attractive, at once a lady and a good lay but as inexorable as a glacier in having her way. Marriage to her would be a fate worse than death, no question about it. At least in a
de facto
arrangement such as ours I could walk out whenever I wanted to. I would, too. Some day. In the meantime, I was free, free, free, free of her for at least a month, maybe two or three months. To do whatever I wanted.

I’d gotten a better idea than the Lord Haw Haw bunco. François André wasn’t the type to be taken in by that, and François André was the fattest pigeon in the south of France with the possible exception of Onassis, Niarchos and a couple of maharajahs. He may have been even fatter than they were. Just the thought of plucking his feathers brought my theretofore languid pulse-rate up. I didn’t know just how I was going to do it, but he was well worth a flim-flam tailored to fit him.

André is dead now. He led a long, full and satisfying life turning himself from a penniless barrel-maker’s boy into a multi-multi-multi-millionaire. He was something of a con man himself. He used to boast that he got his start by betting that he could roll a barrel in a straight line although the other guy couldn’t. Suckers who saw how easy it looked when he did it—it
is
easy, if you’ve been doing it since you were six—financed his initial venture into professional gambling during the years when games like roulette were illegal in France, therefore unregulated and untaxed. Young François, who was big for a Frenchman, long-legged and fast on his feet, ran a crossroads roulette game in a suitcase. Some said that his habit in later years of always carrying an umbrella outdoors, rain or shine, stemmed from the days when the umbrella opened up into a roulette layout with two or three extra zeros on it to sweeten the house percentage. He could set up for business in two minutes, fold up and run from the
flics
in thirty seconds.

From the crossroads game he went on to start a bootleg casino on the outskirts of Paris, from there onward and upward until he owned and/or operated casinos in Cannes, Juan-les-Pins, Aix-les-Bains, La Baule, Deauville and several other places. He also owned hotels, nightclubs, sports grounds and other ancillary properties in these popular resorts, and banked two highly profitable
circles
privés
,
private gambling clubs, in Paris, where casino gambling is still outlawed. He was literally so wealthy he didn’t know what his wealth amounted to.

“How can I possibly say?” he told me when I asked the question. “It changes from moment to moment. Since we have been talking I may have won or lost a milliard of francs.”

A
milliard
is what we could call a billion, and a billion francs in those days was worth something in the neighborhood of a quarter of a million dollars. It was nice to know the old boy had that kind of money to spare without hurting. A
milliard
or two would satisfy my ambitions nicely.

I said, “But day by day you are of course richer rather than poorer. Is that a fair statement?”

“Of course. I will give you without charge the one infallible system for consistently winning at roulette, young man. Operate the wheel.”

I got to ask him personal questions like these by producing credentials to show I was a freelance writer on assignment from a well-known American magazine to do a biographical piece about him. The credentials took a bit of forgery, but they looked good when I finished them. I hired a photographer and went through channels until I got to the office André was then occupying, a plain little barely furnished cubbyhole up under the eaves of the winter casino in Cannes. His only watchdog there was a little old moth-eaten secretary, male, in a smaller ante-cubbyhole who somehow gave the impression that he wrote letters with a quill pen. I thought it strange that a man who was such an obvious target for crooks like me should be so easily accessible, but later found out he wasn’t as easy as I had thought. André was a wily old boy, past eighty when I knew him but shrewd and sharp as a tack with a mind as quick as a rat-trap. He still had his own hair, teeth, hearing and eyesight, all without artificial aid.