The Last Match (30 page)

The Boar said, “Pick up the phone. Call the airport at Nice. Ask for information.”

I picked up the extension phone we kept by the breakfast table, called the airport and asked for information. Information about what, the other end of the line wanted to know? I passed it along.

“Put the phone on the table,” The Boar said. “Move back against the wall.”

When I had done that he took the phone to ask his own questions; never taking his eyes from me, never permitting the pistol to waver from its unblinking stare at the part of me a bullet would hurt most. I listened to his end of the conversation, learned what I could from it, and tried to figure a gaff to hook him with. It was no good. My mind wouldn’t track. I just couldn’t seem to think my way around, over, under or behind that damn alert gun.

I like to believe that it was solely my concern for Reggie and what she carried inside her that made me decide to go for broke. Other reasons could logically have influenced me, although I don’t remember whether they occurred to me then or later. My chances of walking into a London bank, handing over a note and walking out again unmolested with the cash equivalent of more than a quarter of a million dollars were non-existent. The bobbies would have the arm on me faster than you can say Old Bailey, shake me down, bust me open and put the whole story on the wire to the Sûreté Nationale within an hour. Even a hog’s mentality like The Boar’s should have been able to see that. Of course, he was desperate, and knew he was going to die the moment the law caught up with him unless he got out of France first. His death would be fine by me. But I didn’t want him to die in a hail of bullets poured into the Villa Parfumée while Reggie sat there helplessly gestating our joint effort, most probably being used as a shield by the son of a bitch. So you might say that even if this reasoning did help me decide, it was still my feeling for her and her baby—
our child!
—that made me decide to try for the gun.

Having bravely made up my mind to it, I got the shakes all over again when The Boar made a reservation in my name for the first available plane to London. The time-clock had begun to tick.

“BEA has a flight at seventeen-thirty hours,” he said, hanging up the phone. “Check-in is from an hour to half an hour before the flight. It will take you half an hour to get there. Toss me your watch.”

I tossed him the watch, first checking the time. Twelve minutes to four. One hour and forty-two minutes to takeoff. Less a minimum half-hour wait after check-in and a minimum half-hour to get there. Forty-two minutes left at the outside to put together the most important con of my life. Her life. Our lives.

The watch had an expandable band, no clasp or fastener. Getting it on his own wrist didn’t cause the pistol barrel to waver perceptibly. If he’d had a watch of his own at one time, it must have gone the way of the pinkie-ring. Engraved on the back of the one he now wore were the words:
To Curly from Reggie. I’ll love you always,
and the date of my last birthday. I mean my
latest
birthday. It didn’t help the shakes at all to think about last birthdays. Forty-two minutes. Nearer forty-one now. Still no new thoughts. Tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick. I couldn’t hear my watch running, but I could feel it.

“Get moving,” The Boar said. “Your ticket is at the BEA window.”

“There’s plenty of time,” I said. “Let me take her to the
pissoir
once more first.”

“She doesn’t have to go. Move.
Vite!”

“Just to make her more comfortable.”

I’ve said before that he never made threats. Like his piggish namesake, he acted where a dog might have growled a threat or a rattlesnake buzzed a warning. When I still argued after his second order he took a single quick step toward Reggie and slapped her so hard in the face with his free hand that he almost knocked her to the floor, chair and all. The pistol remained unwaveringly pointed at me.

“Move,” he said.
“Vite!”

The cracking blow had spun Reggie’s head away from me, so that for a moment I couldn’t see her face.

I was just as glad. My own would have looked sick. I knew what was going to follow, what had to follow.

Still without moving, I said, “The—”

He hit her again, backhand this time, just as hard as before but with knuckles on it. Her head snapped around. Her mouth had been knocked open and lopsided by the force of the blow, but she never let out a whimper. I may have. I don’t remember. Her lip began to leak blood while I watched, and her eyes made me cringe. They were full of fear as well as pain now. I’m certain it was not so much fear for herself as fear of what might happen to her baby if she were bashed about, as she had said it. But the eyes held no recrimination, no reproach for what I was submitting her to.
I’ll love you always, Curly.

“—receipt,” I said, trying to keep it steady, hoping the single word would stop him. “Her signature. I can’t do anything without it.”

He heard it, he got it, but his hand was already lifted to smack her again. He smacked her again, as hard as before, before backing off. It would have been out of character for him to waste a blow already started.

The need for a receipt had slipped his mind. It was a good sign. He was under too much strain for his pig’s brain to function at its best. Maybe something else important would slip his mind in the next forty minutes, if I had as much as forty minutes left. How long could I stall him without subjecting Reggie to more punishment than she could take? Twenty minutes, maybe? Ten? Five? Two? God, give me a gaff of some kind to sucker him with. I just haven’t got the nerve to jump the gun cold without a gaff. Please. While there’s still time.

Following instructions, I brought a sheet of Reggie’s monogrammed notepaper, a pen and a small table, then untied one hand so she could write. Then I gagged her again, also as instructed, after first wiping the blood from her chin and mouth. Blood still leaked from her split lip. My face was only inches from hers, flushed bright red now from the force of the slaps, when I knotted the gag at the back of her head. It wasn’t the time to say what I wanted to say aloud, but I shaped the words with my lips. She couldn’t chew me out for it with a gag in her mouth.

She gave no indication that she read me. Her eyes were dim, dazed, frightened. I think for the first time she had begun to realize the kind of animal that had her in his cage, and how dismal her chances were of escaping it alive.

I held the paper unmoving on the table for her while she wrote. The Boar stood by the Venetian blinds where he could watch the road as he told her what to write. Outside, the drizzle continued steadily.

While I still stood between him and Reggie’s chair I said, “If I’m to get the money without trouble I have to shave and change my clothes. Slapping her won’t change that. Receipt or no receipt, no British banker is going to hand over a hundred thousand pounds to a
clochard
with a dirty shirt and a two-day beard.”

“Tie her again,” he said. The receipt was finished. “Leave the paper where it is. Step back.”

I thought he was going to hit her again, but all he wanted was to make sure the receipt was right. He knew enough English to spell it out as she had written it from his French dictation. It contained no trickery, simply acknowledged receipt from Barclay’s Bank, Ltd., King St., Covent Garden, London, of one hundred thousand pounds sterling in cash, chargeable to her account, to be paid to the bearer of the receipt without question, and was signed with Reggie’s normal signature. A little shakier than usual, understandably. How many minutes did I have left? The gaff, God, the gaff. Send it to me. I can’t think.

“D’accord,”
The Boar said, folding the receipt before looking at my watch. “Shave and change your clothes.
Vite!”

I shaved—my razor was still dirty with his hog bristles—and changed with as little
vitesse
as I could arrange under his watchful goat-turd eyes. The message came down from heaven, exactly as the mango had come down that day in Belem, when a lace snapped while I was putting on a pair of shoes unsoiled by mud or blood. Of such small things are fateful decisions made. I made mine while I fitted a new lace.

When I had finished dressing, The Boar tossed the receipt on the floor where I could pick it up without coming too close to him.

“On your way,” he said. “No more
blague.
Move.”

I moved, ahead of him and the pistol back to the sunless sunroom.
L’audace, l’audace, et toujours l’audace,
the old barrel-maker’s boy had said, that day in his office. If you don’t have the guts to play for the stakes of the game, then you don’t belong in it. Something like that. It would make a lovely epitaph.

He said, “Not that way,” behind me, but I kept on going until it was obvious that I was going on through the sunroom into the kitchen. At that point, he said, “Stop.” I stopped.

“The front door,” he said. “The other way.”

“I’m going to get her a glass of water before I go.”

“No.”

I turned around.

Reggie’s head had fallen forward so that her chin rested on her chest. Enough of the gag remained visible to show how the blood from her lip had stained it. Her whole body slumped with defeat. I couldn’t tell if she was conscious or unconscious, but I hoped she could hear me.

“Look at her,” I said. “I’m going to bring her a glass of water and wash her mouth. Nothing you can do will stop me except a bullet, and that will finish your chances for escape. I won’t miss the plane. I told you I’d cooperate to get you the money as long as nothing happened to her or her baby. Those slaps are the last mistreatment she is going to take from you. Because if I come back to find that you haven’t fed her or given her water or taken her to the
pissoir
when she has to go, or have harmed her again in any way, you don’t get a centime. Don’t think I’m going to walk in here carrying it in a satchel for you to grab. We make an exchange; the money for the woman. In good shape.
Assure-toi.”

On that bold exit line I bravely turned my cringing back on him and went into the kitchen, letting the swinging door swing shut behind me. I knew it wouldn’t stay shut for more than a second or so, but that was all right, too. I wanted him to see that I was doing exactly what I had said I was going to do.

I had to pick my way carefully around the edge of things and over things to keep from getting blood on my clean shoes. One of the things I had to step over was Rose, her mouth still open in her last vain effort to scream with the knife in her gullet. She lay by the stove, which offered me a handhold as I stretched across her body without stepping on it. I got a glass from a kitchen cabinet, rinsed it at the sink, filled it, wiped its outside with a clean dishtowel, moistened half the dishtowel in warm water to serve as a washcloth, picked my way carefully back as I had come carrying glass and towel in one hand so the other would be free to accept the stove’s support again. The Boar watched me from the doorway, tracking me with the pistol as a compass-needle tracks north.

He had to back away, into the blood again, to keep his distance while I went through the swinging door ahead of him. I heard it swish shut behind us, open again, swish shut again, then the snap, snap of his blood-tacky shoe soles on the tiles behind me. Always at a cautious distance a bullet would cover faster than I could.

Reggie was as before, her head still slumped on her chest, her eyes closed. After I got the gag loose I had to hold her chin up with my free hand to clean it and her mouth. The bleeding had stopped, but her lips were bruised, swollen and dry. She drank greedily when I put the glass to her mouth. Her eyes remained closed. She was conscious but withdrawn, I think, down inside herself to where the baby was, there to crouch over it protectively against the awful things that were happening outside.

I gagged her again, quickly. She could have used more than a single glass of water, but I had already spent more time than I liked with my back toward the kitchen door and The Boar. The moment of truth was almost upon us. When it came I had to be ready, willing and able to move fast; quick, or dead.

What I had done in the kitchen was set a time bomb. Even in death Rose had served her mistress faithfully. Her body, lying as it did by the stove in front of which she had died, had provided me with the camouflage I needed to open the gas-jet of the oven. She had herself twice done this, inadvertently and unknowingly, by catching her apron pocket on the oven gas-valve and pulling it open while working at the stove. The oven had taken an unknown interval to fill with enough gas to leak as far as the pilot light on the top of the stove. The resulting explosion had weakened the hinges of the oven door the first time, blown it across the kitchen the second time, scared the hell out of everyone in the house both times. Rose most of all, of course. She hadn’t suffered injury in either blast, but she had been so shaken that Reggie had had to give her a couple of days off. After the second explosion I had tightened the screw that held the valve in its seat until it couldn’t be opened by accident. The next time Rose hooked it, it snapped her apron string just as Kismet had snapped my shoestring as a reminder. Of such small things are fateful decisions made.

What I didn’t know was how long it would take to happen. I had to stall until it did. But The Boar knew as well as I did that my bold words about brutality to Reggie were meaningless, and if he began banging her around again to force me to leave for the airport I would have to stand there and let her take it. I had less doubt about her ability to absorb punishment than about my own lesser ability to watch it happen. When you have just discovered, surprisingly, that you are hopelessly hooked, gaffed and grabbed by the woman who is carrying your child, you become damn sensitive to pain. Her pain, which can hurt you a lot worse than your own.

“Move,” The Boar said from where he stood sentry duty by the Venetian blinds. He had run out of cigarettes and was more wound up than ever. A nerve had begun to jerk in his left eyelid.
“Vas-y.
The sooner you get back with the
grisbi,
the sooner your woman gets out of the chair.”