The Last Match (29 page)

BEA
FLIGHT
078
ETA
1410
PLEASE
MEET
PLANE
SURPRISE
SURPRISE
SURPRISE
LOVE
YOU
ALWAYS
REGGIE
.

Holy Mother of God, I thought. She’s bringing the slob
with
her!

That did it, once and for all. If she thought for a minute I was going to chauffeur her and that chinless bucktoothed dishwater-colored son of a bitch around the way I’d chauffeured her around when she had me on a leash, she could think again. Let Athol worry about Lady Athol-to-be. Or was she already Lady Athol? Jesus, I could just picture the three of us at the airport: “Lord Athol, may I present the man I love? Curly, this is my husband, Lord Athol. Charmed I’m sure. Up yours, too.” The woman was crazy, that’s all. She had to be crazy. She
deserved
someone like Athol.

Friday, her arrival date, was the day after I got the message in Marseille and the day after the repairs to the car were finished. I could easily have made it to the airport in plenty of time to meet BEA 078 in the afternoon. Instead, I called Rose the night before from a bar where a jukebox blared background music, let her think I was drunk and told her I was too busy to meet the plane. I’d probably be home in a day or two, maybe three, I said, and hung up. If she wanted to report to Reggie that I was carousing in a Marseille whorehouse, it was all right with me. Then I tried to get drunk but only managed to get sodden.

I slept late the next day, most of the morning, and took my time about driving back to Mougins in the afternoon. I wanted to be sure Reggie and the slob were there when I nonchalantly walked in after a night of debauchery. I hadn’t shaved or bathed, my eyes were bloodshot, my shirt was dirty, anybody could see I’d been having a whole lot of fun. I even took along a bottle of cognac so I could belt a couple at the last minute and breathe booze-fumes on them. With care and forethought I planned how I would walk in, say an indifferent “Hi” to her, sneer at her choice of a husband and walk out of her life forever. Screw everybody, everything and all combinations of both.

It was raining, not heavily but steadily, when I reached the villa. Even in the drizzle I could smell the fragrance of the blooming flower fields. For some reason, it was terribly depressing. A car I didn’t know, a Peugeot, was parked in the graveled turn-around in front of the house. Rose’s bike, which she pedaled into the village most mornings to do her marketing and kept stabled in a shed near her kitchen entrance the rest of the time, lay in the middle of the path that went around to the back of the house. It looked as if she had started to go into town, changed her mind and gone back into the house. But it was totally unlike her to leave the bike like that, even if it hadn’t been getting rained on.

To postpone the moment when I would have to face Reggie and the slob long enough for my two belts of Dutch courage to take effect, I picked up the bike, wheeled it around to its shed, stabled it and banged through the kitchen door good and loud to step a few preliminary rounds with Rose before moving on to the main bout.

Rose was beyond tattling on me. She lay on the floor of her kitchen in a lake of bright blood that stained most of the linoleum she had always kept clean and well-waxed. She was on her back, her mouth open in a frozen scream. Her throat had been slit. Not slashed across, but pierced in the way you pierce a man’s throat with a pig-sticker to slice the main blood vessels and cut his windpipe so he can’t yell for help before he bleeds to death. A steak knife, one of the villa’s own, lay in the blood near her outstretched hand. She had got it out before she died, but it had done her no good.

Jean-Pierre was there, too. He hadn’t been able to get his steak knife out. It stood hilt-deep from his back, thrust upward and inward under the left shoulder blade to split his heart. I could see enough of his face, cheek down on the linoleum, to identify him. He had bled less than Rose, although enough.

A photograph of the kitchen and bodies, in black and white, later appeared under the headlines on the front page of
Nice-Matin
for Saturday, February 14, 1959. I’ll always remember the date, for various reasons including the fact that it was Valentine’s Day as well as for the events narrated here. Just as I’ll always remember the scene in the kitchen as it photographed itself on my eyeballs in vivid Technicolor an instant before a familiar inflectionless voice from somewhere not within the scope of my vision said,
“Vas-y.
Straight ahead, through the door.”

He never joked, he never made threats, he just gutted people when they crossed him. The wild boar with the razor-sharp tusks. I walked straight ahead as instructed, even though by a circumvention I could have avoided stepping in the stickiness of the blood on the floor. I was scared absolutely silly, both for myself and for what I might find on the other side of the door when I went through it.

Reggie was there. Unmurdered. Tied to a chair with what looked like several of my neckties, gagged with another. The gag was a tight one, stretching her lips at the corners, and her eyes were full of pain. Not fear. Nevah feeyah, as she might have said if she’d been able to say anything. The stiff British upper lip is a wonderful thing when you’ve got it. My own upper lip was fluttering in the breeze like a loose windowblind.

There was no sign of the Athol character about, dead or alive, or baggage that could have been his. Hers, which I recognized except for a purse that had been emptied and tossed aside and one of those pencil-thin rolled British umbrellas, was dumped in a corner of the room as if it had been thrown there without much care for the arrangement. I still hadn’t been invited to turn around, or told to do anything else but march through the door. I marched, conscious of the stickiness of my shoe soles as well as the cause of it until I stood in front of Reggie’s chair.

The room we were in we called the sunroom because it got a lot of sun in the morning when there was sun to be had. Two walls were of glass, overlooking the villa’s garden and the road that went down to the village, up over the hills to Grasse. The place had originally been a conservatory. We used it as a breakfast room, after having Venetian blinds installed to cut down some of the glare and give us privacy. With the blinds drawn, as they were when I came into the room from that awful slaughterhouse of a kitchen with a gun pointed at my kidneys—I didn’t have to see it, I could sense it with the antennae of the hairs standing stiff on the back of my neck—you could see out without being seen. The sunroom with its tiled floors impervious to blood, sweat, tears and prayer was an even better place to slit a brace of throats than the kitchen.

“Untie the gag,” the inflectionless voice said behind me. “No tricks.”

I untied the gag, having some trouble with my fingers. They fluttered like my upper lip. Reggie worked her mouth to ease the discomfort of her lips, then tried to smile. It wasn’t a success.

“Hello, love,” she said. “You look dreadful. Been out on the tiles?”

“Speak French,” The Boar said. “You talk.” This was to Reggie. “You listen,” was for me, although how we were supposed to know which order was which I can’t say. But we knew.

Reggie said, “We communicate better in English.”

“French,” The Boar said. “Keep it short.”

“Very well. He wants a hundred thousand pounds to let me go. That’s over a milliard of francs. I haven’t got that much money, either in francs or in pounds. I can raise it through my bankers in London by liquidating securities, but they won’t act on an oral authorization. They won’t release that much cash without a proper receipt, either. I’ve already discussed it with them by telephone. You’ll have to go to London and get the money for me.”

I gave her an incredulous stare.

like that. I suppose maybe the responsibilities of incipient parenthood had something to do with it. I turned around to face him and said, or tried to say, “No.” A Bon defying death to protect the mother of his young.

The trouble was, I didn’t have enough lion in me to get it out. But I did face him, and made no move to obey his order.

Behind me Reggie sucked in her breath. He had a gun all right. Held at just the right height to give me an extra navel if he twitched his finger, and at the right distance to discourage any foolhardy ideas I might have about trying to get it from him before he could use it. But the villa wasn’t so isolated that a gunshot might not attract the attention of the neighbors, as he would have figured when he did Rose and Jean-Pierre in the way he had, and he needed me; for a while at least. One hundred thousand pounds worth. Until I got that for him and unless I did something directly to endanger him, he just couldn’t afford to shoot me. Any more than he could afford to shoot Reggie.

I can’t say I was as confident of my reasoning as it sounds in the writing. I defy anybody to be confident while standing bellybutton to bellybutton with a gun in the fist of a killer who has just cut the throats of two people. But the fact of their deaths and my survival when he could have got me quickly and quietly with a stab under the short ribs as I stormed into the kitchen spoke for itself. I had a while to live yet. If I didn’t challenge his security, and did nothing stupid.

“Be reasonable,” I said, having sold myself the bill of goods. “She isn’t going to ask for a bang in the mouth and the gag put back by screaming. I’ll get the

“It has to be done, love. We’re in no position to bargain. I’m into my fifth month, and it’s not a good time to be bashed about. Or even tied to a chair for too long.”

“You’re in your fifth month of what?”

She really did smile, this time. It was wan, but it was real.

“Surprise, surprise,” she said. “Haven’t you noticed?” “Haven’t I noticed—?”

“That’s all,” The Boar said. “Put back the gag.”

Reggie said nothing. She wouldn’t stoop to plead with a pig like him. But her eyes pleaded, with me. I stood there, a pillar of salt, taking it all in with my mouth open; the soft new fullness of her throat, the new swell of the beautiful breasts, the boastful beginning bulge of the belly that had always been trim and flat. I got it in about a second and a half. Another second and a half after that I had counted back five months and put the finger on the contemptible bastard who had knocked up the Honorable Regina Forbes-Jones higher than the Tour Eiffel. Me! She was carrying
my
child! And with my child in her—

“Put back the gag,” The Boar said again.

I heard him, but the command didn’t register. My head was still going round in cartwheels.
My child!
But then what—why—who—where—how the hell— that Athol character…?

“Put back the gag,” The Boar said again.

That time, I caught it.

I caught something else, too. He had told me three times to do something I hadn’t done, and I was still alive. Your mind can shift gears awfully fast at a time

money for you as long as nothing happens to her or the baby she’s carrying. If anything does happen, all bets are off.”

No response. But he didn’t tell me again to put back the gag.

“I’ll help you get out of the country afterward, too,” I said. “You’ll need all the help you can get for that. You’re a cop-killer now. You know what that means.”

He knew. D.O.A., when the
flics
caught up with him. French cops feel about cop-killers the way other cops feel about cop-killers.

Still no reaction, for all of half a minute. His pocked face showed nothing of what he was thinking, just fatigue and strain. Then he said abruptly, “For a time. But no talking, and no tricks.”

“I must say something,” Reggie spoke up. “I have to use the toilet.”

She must have been really desperate to say it like that. But as fastidious as she always was about such things, she was above all a realist. She went on talking about it while she had a chance to talk.

“I have to use it at least as often as every two hours, sometimes more often. It’s because I’m pregnant. If you’d lock me in the bathroom instead of tying me up like a—”

“No,” The Boar said. “You stay there.” “But I’ve just told you—”

“Untie her,” The Boar said. “Take her to the
pissoir.
Leave the door open. No talking, no tricks. Bring her back.”

I did what I could to give her an illusion of privacy, standing with my back turned in the open doorway while she did what she had to do. Then I tied her to the chair again, as directed. The Boar tested the knots afterward to make sure I hadn’t fudged them. I hadn’t. I wanted her immobilized and out of the way while I thought further about guns and things. I was still scared, but not scared silly. There’s a difference.

The Boar’s flashy clothes weren’t so flashy anymore. They were stained with what looked like paint, engine oil and something else. Blood, undoubtedly. He wore a clean shirt I recognized as my own, and one of my neckties. Some time that day he had shaved and laid a thick layer of pancake makeup over his pig’s face to diminish the conspicuousness of the pockmarks. My raincoat, enough too long for him to hide the disreputable appearance of his clothes, with a beret I carried in one of the coat pockets, had been tossed on a chair. His shoes were muddy and, like mine, tracked blood on the tile of the sunroom whenever he went to the window to peer cautiously up and down the road, as he did every few minutes. He smoked constantly, lighting one Gauloise from the butt of another before tossing the butt on the tiles to step on it. The butt tended to cling to his shoe sole until it disintegrated.

His diamond pinkie ring was gone; the price, possibly, of escape from Marseille. He’d have to buy his way out of France now. It would cost a lot of money; the money I had to live long enough to get for him. After that, no reason at all for me to survive. Or Reggie. Or her baby—
my child!
(It flashed in my brain like a neon sign every time I thought it.) Poor Reggie, who had to pee for two every two hours on the hour or oftener, tied to a chair in the power of a monster, trying to smile to show that the old British upper lip was still stiff, there’ll always be an England, chin up, old boy, good show—it was pointless even to consider the possibility that he might let us survive our immediate usefulness to him. When the usefulness would end in Reggie’s case was something I didn’t want to think about. But I dared not leave her without protection, even a protection as inadequate as mine was in the circumstances. Come what may, somehow, some way, I had to con that cutthroat Corsican son of a bitch out of control of the situation in which we were trapped.