The Last Match (31 page)

Nerves had begun to jerk all over me. My heart was going thud, thud, thud in my chest, my mouth was dry, my palms were wet, my knees were shaky, I’d never felt so scared, unheroic and short of
audace
in my life. A con man isn’t built for direct action in the face of a gun. It’s against his principles. And I had only moments to go, seconds perhaps, God only knew, I surely didn’t, before I would have to act, instantaneously and irretrievably. Quick, or dead. It was too much, I couldn’t take it. I was going to give myself away by wetting my pants.

The fear of it, the imminence of the disclosure, was so real that I sidled over to the chair where the raincoat had been thrown. It put me no farther from him than I had been before, and the coat would hide what was about to happen to betray me if the big boom didn’t come fast. Thud, thud, thud, said my craven heart as I reached for the coat.

“Leave it,” The Boar said tensely. He was watching me like a hawk. I mean a pig. He knew, sensed, that something was cooking. He didn’t know what it was, but he was ready for it.

“It’s raining,” I said, foolishly.

“Leave the coat,” he said. “Take the umbrella. Get out of here. Now.”

He took the three steps that were between him and Reggie’s chair and began slapping her again. Methodically, back and forth, forehand and backhand, looking at her only once to get the range, his little goat-turd eyes as steady on me afterward as the pistol muzzle was on my belly, smack-smack, smack-smack, smack-smack, her head rolling loosely back and forth with the blows. Her eyes were closed, no sound came from her. She had to be unconscious after the first few smacks, he hit her so hard, but I wasn’t. I couldn’t take it. I knew he was going to keep it up until I left the house.

Someone with more guts than Chickenshit Curly might have jumped him then and there, taken a chance, risked a bullet to stop it. I wasn’t the man. The oven wasn’t going to cooperate, the pilot light had gone out, something else had gone wrong, I was licked. He beat me by beating Reggie, as he knew he could. I said something, I don’t remember what it was, something to indicate capitulation, I hate to think I said, “Please!” to the dirty son of a bitch although I probably did, begging him to stop as I turned away to pick up the umbrella. The oven let go just as I got the umbrella handle in my hand.

If I did say “Please!” to The Boar, as I suspect I did, it was the last word he ever heard. He may not even have heard that one, the explosion followed so fast. An enormous thundering
BLAM
of sound and fury shook the house, set the kitchen door swinging with a gust of hot air, slammed something heavy against the wall between kitchen and sunroom (the oven door again, as it turned out), shattered glass. The Boar was fast and alert. He had spun around to face the kitchen door, his gun leveled at it, ready to take on whatever was coming at him, before the boom of the blast died. I got him hard across the wrist with the steel ferrule of the umbrella, knocking the pistol from his hand. He saw me coming out of the corner of his eye and tried to swing the gun back to bear on me, but the extra reach provided by the umbrella was all I needed. Whether or not I broke his wrist was something I never bothered to find out. He tried to scoop up the gun from the tiles with his other hand, but I had the umbrella ferrule jammed into him by then, forcing him back until I could get the pistol myself. If the ferrule had had a sharp point I’d have killed him like that, as a
sanglier
is killed for sport, with a lance in his pig’s guts. As it was, I shot him four times at a range of one umbrella length.

The cops would have given him more if the pleasure had been theirs, as I would have given him more except that the gun held only four loads. They were enough. It was a medium-caliber pistol, heavy enough to knock his body back against the kitchen door before it collapsed. It jammed the door open; half of him in the kitchen with Rose and Jean-Pierre, half remaining in the sunroom. I went to Reggie, found I still held the gun and umbrella when I started to untie her, threw them away, got the ties and the bloodstained gag off her and began rubbing her wrists. I couldn’t think of anything else to do except to babble at her, pleading with her to wake up. “Reggie! Reggie! It’s all over, everything is all right, hear me, honey, read me, the son of a bitch is dead, Reggie, please come out of it, you’re all right, I love you honest and true, honest, cross my heart I do, I’ll never leave you, I’ll never run away, please wake up, Reggie doll, it’s all over, there’s nothing to worry about, you’re safe, I’m safe, the baby is safe, all God’s chillun are safe,” I don’t know what the hell more of the same kind of gabble until her head lifted at last, her eyes opened and slowly, painfully from the bruised and swollen lips she spoke the words of love I was longing to hear: “I have to go to the toilet.”

I helped her into the bathroom, went to the kitchen to turn off the oven—it didn’t bother me one little bit to step on The Boar’s body—recovered my watch and phoned for the cops.
I
didn’t have to go to the toilet. I’d wet my pants, as predicted.
L’audace, l’audace, et toujours l’audace.

A tired device over-used by writers of whodunits is a scene at the end of the yarn in which the bad guy, who has somehow got the drop on the good guy with a gun or otherwise gained a temporary advantage, considerately explains to him—and the reader—all the twists, turns and convolutions of the plot theretofore unexplained. Gloating, so to speak, over his own cleverness before he knocks the good guy off and makes his getaway, triumphant. He never accomplishes this, of course. The good guy always manages to take him after the explanations are done with. Sometimes it’s the good guy himself who sums up for the bad guy, but the bad guy never seems to be able to turn the tables on the good guy afterwards. In either case, one or the other of them buttons all the loose ends of the plot up prettily before the final fadeout, and no questions remain unanswered.

In Reggie’s case and mine, the bad guy died before he could talk, others who might have known some of the ramifications were either dead or kept their traps shut for other reasons, the good guy—all right, all right, say what you like, compared to The Boar I am a model citizen—has already reported what he knows of the goings-on. Neither Reggie nor anyone else was able to explain how it was that The Boar and Jean-Pierre met her at the airport when I failed to do so, although my own loose talk to Jean-Pierre while I was in my cups, together with The Boar’s desperate need for getaway money superimposed on Jean-Pierre’s terror of him, could have been it. I never told Reggie this, and never will.

“I just don’t know, love,” she told me after things had settled down to near normal. The rain was over, the clouds gone, the sun brightly shining, the lark on the wing, the snail on the thorn, my love in my arms and I in my bed again. Not the same bed I had occupied with Reggie and a sequence of too many tarts at the Villa Parfumée. Neither of us ever went back there again once we got out of it. It was a good bouncy bed at the Negresco in Nice, a hotel that held no unpleasant memories for either of us. “They must have got it out of poor Rose, somehow. It makes me ill to think—”

“Don’t. Thinking about her does no good. Didn’t it occur to you that something funny was going on when they showed up and I didn’t?”

“Not a bit. Oh, I was disappointed that you hadn’t come to meet me, of course. When I came off the airfield I had my stomach stuck out as far as I could so you’d notice right away, but I supposed you’d somehow failed to get my wire. Then they said you had a bad cold and had asked them to come for me in your place. I knew that Jean-Pierre was a friend of yours, and the other one, the—the—” she shuddered, unable to put a name on him, “—was wearing your waterproof and beret. It wasn’t until—”

“Wait a minute. How did you know Jean-Pierre was a friend of mine?”

“Why, he was a bartender at the Martinez when you were living there with that revolting old American harridan. I used to see you talking together often.”

“You’ve seen me talking to a lot of bartenders. They weren’t necessarily friends. Come clean, doll.”

“I haven’t the faintest idea what you mean.”

“You know damn well what I mean. You say you knew Jean-Pierre and I were friends. We weren’t, only acquaintances and for a time business partners, then fellow jailbirds. What made you so sure we were something more?”

“I think I’m going to have an attack of the vapors.” She put her hand to her forehead in the hammiest gesture of ladylike debility you ever saw. “Let me go so I can lie on my back.”

“You’re going to have an attack of me if you don’t come clean, on your back or otherwise. Stop stalling.”

“The doctor says that during the fifth month—”

“Stop stalling. Tell me.”

She sighed, looked down at her stomach, took my hand to put it on the bulge and said, “Don’t forget what’s in there, lad. Mine is a delicate condition. I’m not to be shouted at or knocked about, remember? I have a small confession to make.”

“I’m waiting.”

She hesitated for another moment, her hand on top of mine, before she said, “I paid Jean-Pierre a respectable sum of lolly to make himself your friend.”

“Why, in God’s name?”

“Because I wanted him to entice you into the cigarette-smuggling operation with him. So you would be arrested and go to jail.”

“So I would be arrested and go to jail.”

Repeating it, I sounded stupid even to myself. I’d heard it but I couldn’t read it. The message failed to percolate. So I would be arrested and go to gibberish.

She patted my hand where it rested on the coining generation.

“Curly, love, I love you. I loved you then. I’ll love you forever. I saw the way you were going, with your looks, your charm, your good mind turned to bad ends, your— your—I couldn’t let it happen. I wanted to save you. For myself, actually, although I suppose I didn’t realize it at the time. Jean-Pierre was another spiv. I knew this from Cedric. I paid him, Jean-Pierre I mean, to entice you into the smuggling operation, then betray it to the police. So you would go to jail. So I could have you paroled to me. So I could try to make the man out of you I wanted you to be. Do you understand now?”

I understood enough of it to say, “My God, didn’t you realize the risk you ran, crossing people like The Boar and The Plank? If they’d known they’d have cut you to pieces with a dull knife.”

“I didn’t know who else would be involved, and I didn’t care. Besides, they could only have learned about it from Jean-Pierre. He couldn’t have given me away without giving himself away, and I knew that would never happen.”

She talked about it as calmly as if she were discussing tea at the Mayfair. I said, “Maybe it
did
happen. Maybe that’s why The Boar came after you, to slice you up after he’d squeezed the money out of you. Jesus Holy Christ, you make my blood run cold just talking about it. Of all the goddamn, hare-brained, feather-headed, nitwit—”

“That’s no way to talk to the woman you’re going to marry, love.”

“Who said I was going to marry you?”

“I did. I do. You are going to marry me and give our son a name.”

“It’s not going to be a son. It will be a girl who looks like her mama but has a lot more sense than to do the dumb things her mama does that her papa has to get her out of at the risk of life and limb.”

“It will be a boy, with lovely curls like his father. I’m going to call him Curlilocks.”

“If we ever do have a son, he’ll be called Curlilocks over my dead body. I’d just as soon name him Athol. Which reminds me. Whatever happened to him?”

“Whatever happened to whom?”

“Athol.”

“Who in the world is Athol?” she said, looking bewildered. She pronounced the name a good bit differently than I had done.

I had to explain how Athol had come into being in my mind as a tag for the weak-chinned, buck-toothed, dishwater-colored slob she was going to marry, or had said she was going to marry when she wrote me about it. She shook her head wonderingly.

“Curly, love, you’re daft. Who could I possibly ever think of marrying but you?”

“But you said—you kept turning me down—then you wrote me that letter—what the hell, you never said you were giving me the nod, just that you had changed your mind about marriage.”

“I sent you a letter saying I had changed my mind about marrying
you.
I had to change my mind, in the circumstances. I wouldn’t mind too much flaunting an illegitimate child in the face of London society, but he wouldn’t inherit. One has to be practical about such things, doesn’t one?”

“Don’t say ‘he’ like that. You are going to whelp me a daughter.”

“A son.”

“A daughter.”

“A son.”

“I will bet you five hundred thousand million dollars that our child will be a girl. Statistics are on my side. Besides, it’s common knowledge that great lovers produce girls.”

“How much is that in pounds?”

“Make it five hundred thousand million pounds.”

“Done!”

We shook hands on it. Somehow in bed like that, the handshake turned into an embrace, the embrace to spontaneous disregard for what the doctor had told her about the fifth month, whatever it might have been. As Reggie said, It was loverly to be home.

Later, while we were still in bed, too lazy and content to get up, she asked, “What’s your surprise for me, love? You’ve unveiled nothing new so far.”

“Well, it’s kind of like Mohammed and the mountain. I can’t bring it to you. I’ll have to take you to it to show it to you.”

“You can tell me about it, can’t you?”

“No, ma’am. It remains a surprise until you see it for yourself.”

“When?”

“In a couple of days, if you’re up to a bit of—
Jesus!”

I jumped a foot, straight up, from a supine takeoff. Almost as startled as I was, she said, anxiously, “What is it? What is it? What happened?”

“The little bastard kicked me!”

“Oh.” She smiled and relaxed. “He does that, now and then. He’s anxious to be born.”

“She.”

“He.”