The Last Match (33 page)

Reggie’s warm placid voice on the transceiver said, “It’s nothing serious, love. Pietro was out planting lobster pots and a wave tossed the boat on a rock. There’s a bit of a hole in it, but he says he’ll have it repaired by morning. Why don’t you stay the night there, have a good rest and come over tomorrow? I’ll tell Pietro to be there early.”

“I think maybe I’ll do that. I’m kind of tired. Everything all right? How are the kids?”

“Everything is fine with everybody. Your daughter is going to be a rugby player. She’s kicking me like mad.”

“I’ll be there to let her kick me in the morning. Anything else? Anything you want me to bring?”

“Just yourself, love.”

“O.K. Can I say it?”

“If it’s true. No lies, mind.”

Can you imagine, this from a woman whose very existence was a living lie, as I had not yet learned but was about to learn? Innocent, credulous, trusting fool that I was, I said the words she had inveigled out of me. She said, “I love you too, Curly. Good night.”

I spent the night in Olbia, slept later than was usual for me—on the island I got up with the birds, there was always so much to do—had a good breakfast and went by the post office to pick up the mail. Ordinarily this was done by the Sardinians who drove the launch, since I was always in too much of a hurry to catch the plane for Rome going in one direction, too late to find the
ufficio postale
open when coming from the other. So it was mere chance that it was 1 rather than my double-dealing wife who first saw the long official-looking envelope addressed to Miss Regina Forbes-Jones by somebody in Her Britannic Majesty’s Inland Revenue Service, forwarded from the Villa Parfumée. I know damn well I’d never have seen it otherwise. Because in it was the revelation of Reggie’s perfidy; irrefutable, undeniable, unbelievable. Almost unbelievable, anyway.

If anyone chooses to ask why I took it upon myself to open my wife’s personal mail without her permission, the answer is, I wanted to protect her. I wasn’t going to let her see the letter at all if it contained what I thought it contained. England’s Inland Revenue Service is the equivalent of the U.S. Internal Revenue Service, and when you receive official letters from either authority their content is always the same; taxes and trouble. Reggie’s father had died broke and in debt, she was broke except for the five thousand quid I still owed her. Inland Revenue Service certainly wasn’t writing to say Happy Birthday. The letter looked, smelled and felt like an assessment for death duties on an estate from which she hadn’t benefited, and I was damn well going to take care of it in my own way without letting it upset her or my rugby-playing daughter-to-be. Inland Revenue could stay the hell inland where it belonged. I was my own majesty on Isola Regina. I opened the letter.

I can’t quote it verbatim. I only read it about a dozen times before I re-sealed it with care so I could give it to that fraud Reggie when I got home. I do remember a figure of something more than twenty-eight hundred pounds, because the pound was then worth
$2
.80
and twenty-eight times twenty-eight is a multiplication you can approximate in your head without too much trouble. Put the decimal where it belongs and you’ve got a product of nearly eight thousand. Dollars, that is. Not an assessment but a rebate. Of death duties overpaid on the estate of Lord Forbes-Jones. In accordance with Miss Forbes-Jones’ instructions the money had been deposited to her credit with Barclay’s Bank, Ltd., King St., Covent Garden, London, W.C. 2. The rebate represented final settlement of the estate’s tax liability, Inland Revenue begged to remain Miss Forbes-Jones’ obedient servant or some such formal mildew, and I was a bigger, fatter and easier pigeon than any sucker I had ever buncoed in my whole professional career.

As already mentioned, I read the letter about a dozen times. It took me that long to interpret its significance. When you get a refund of something like eight thousand dollars in overpaid death duties, it means that a greater amount of death duties, most probably a hell of a lot greater amount of death duties, was originally paid by the estate of the deceased; in this case, Reggie’s daddy. This in turn means that the duties were imposed on a large and valuable estate with enough liquid assets in it to pay Her Britannic Majesty’s tax bill in cash, since taxing authorities do not accept baled hay in place of legal tender and entailed real estate is neither taxable to the estate of a life tenant nor subject to lien for the debts of the life tenant’s estate. It followed that a goodly portion of said liquid assets had still to remain with the heir or heirs of Lord Forbes-Jones, deceased, since death duties, however high, never absorb one hundred percent of the estate on which they are imposed. Reggie’s story about the entail may or may not have been true as far as it went, but she had lied flatly about everything else. My wife, already rolling in the stuff when I married her, was a goddamn heiress with more money than she knew what to do with beyond shoveling it into Barclay’s Bank, Ltd., King St., Covent Garden, London, W.C. 2, where it was undoubtedly regularly invested for her in gilt-edged securities to make her even richer day after day after day unto the last syllable of recorded time. While I, credulous chump that I was, worked my fingers to the elbows fourteen and fifteen hours a day, Sundays and holidays not excepted, to make both ends meet for her, myself, two and seven-ninths kids and another still to come. I had been diddled, conned, flim-flammed, hocused, swindled, hustled, hornswoggled, gaffed, gimmicked and played upon like a marimba to make me marry her and bend my proud neck to the domestic yoke.

This horrid realization came to me fifteen years ago, give or take an offspring or two. Reggie and I have the quota we set for ourselves; two boys, two girls, all good kids sound of wind and limb, not too hard to look at and with signs of dawning intelligence. The boys are in prep school in England, and I must say that when they come home for holidays, vacations and long weekends their manners are a lot better than mine were when I was in their age bracket. They call me “Sir,” believe it or not. The prep school requires it of them, not I, but for a man who never made it higher than pfc. in the U.S. Army, “Sir” from the yard-birds falls sweetly on the ear.

The girls, who spend five days a week in a boarding school in Rome, are less respectful to their old man. They call me Ricci, short for
ricciuto,
meaning “curly” in Italian. All in all, you could say I’ve got it made. A good family, a good home, a good life, still a lot to be done with Isola Regina but a good future with it and for it, everything good. Except for the festering secret locked away in my bosom that my wife, the mother of my children, the woman I love in spite of all and am stuck with for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness as in health, all the rest of the marital manacle, is a living lie, a bunco-steerer in sheep’s clothing. A female Elmer, in short.

Of course, I can’t let her get away with it forever, although in fifteen years I have so far been unable to figure out a gaff to hook her with. If I can work a good clean artistic con maybe I’ll give Daddy’s fortune back to her afterward, just for the
beau geste.
God knows she’s never had any need for it nor, as far as the evidence goes, spent a penny of it. Even the five thousand quid I paid her lies untouched in a bank account I opened in her name. When I ask her, as I do from time to time when I’m not too busy with other domestic problems, why she doesn’t spend some of it on herself, she smiles with the lazy contentment of a female spider digesting its mate and says, “Curly, love, what could I possibly want that you haven’t given me?”

It always makes me think, in a discouraged way, of old François André‘s comment: If a mark isn’t greedy for something he hasn’t got, it’s impossible to sucker him. But I’ll get her yet; some day, somehow. Meanwhile, would any of you ladies or gentlemen like to draw the first match?

My father wrote
The Last Match
over thirty years ago in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, where I now live. He was no longer up to traveling—he died here in 1974—and had always taken seriously the standard advice to authors that they write about what they know, and so he wrote
The Last Match
out of his head, skimming through the memories of a lifetime, combining fact and fiction, real-life personalities and invented characters, landscapes and lovers and lifestyles to his heart’s content.

A lot of it I remember myself. We played the match game together, he and my mother and I, when I was eight years old and we went down the Amazon on a wood-burning steamer called the
Morey.
It was just like the one in
The Last Match,
and the purser’s name was Buchisapo too.

I know that because I read it in a book. When he wasn’t writing mysteries my father was putting together travel books, a whole series of autobiographical accounts of the trips we took when I was a little girl. I have such a well-documented childhood that at times I’m not sure whether a thing really happened or it’s just something I read in a book, but I know Buchisapo was real because I have a photograph of us together on the
Morey.

My father wrote about what he knew right from the start. In the late 30s he was working as a CPA in San Francisco and my mother was an editor at Macmillan. She bet him five bucks that he couldn’t write a decent mystery, so he wrote a novel about a San Francisco CPA named Whit Whitney who gets involved in a murder. It was called
Death and Taxes,
not surprisingly, and Macmillan, also not surprisingly, published it in 1941.

After three more Whit Whitney books—he was writing at night and holding down a Navy desk job in San Francisco during the war—he decided to leave the Navy and see the world. Our first trip got us as far as Guatemala, and because we were green and inexperienced travelers that book was called
How Green Was My Father.
A few countries and a few books later came
20,000 Leagues Behind the 8 Ball,
in which we went down the Amazon.

We started that trip in Arequipa, Peru, where we lived for a couple of years and where he wrote
Plunder of the Sun
(reprinted last year by the estimable folks at Hard Case Crime, as a matter of fact), a Peruvian thriller about buried Inca gold. Hollywood turned it into a Mexican thriller about Aztec gold, starring Glenn Ford and Patricia Medina (whom my father referred to as the Latin Alan Ladd because she had only two expressions). After decades in oblivion, it’s being re-released on DVD this year. I may even take a look at it myself.

The Last Match’s
Peruvian escapades also gave my father a chance to revisit his late teens, which he spent in the merchant marine on a ship sailing back and forth to Chile. He started out as an oiler, he told me, and patiently explained the difference between an oiler and a wiper and a fireman. He had a blurry blue propeller on his left arm, a lifelong souvenir of the night he and his drunken buddies decided to tattoo themselves with knitting needles and wound up in jail in Antofogasta. My mother hated that tattoo, but he was proud of it and refused to get rid of it.

By 1950 we were in the south of France, where we settled just as a cat burglar started sneaking over rooftops into the bedrooms of the rich and famous and making off with their jewels. When the burglar knocked off the villa next to ours my father figured there had to be a novel in it somewhere and wrote
To Catch a Thief
which went on to greater glory as a Hitchcock film starring Grace Kelly and Cary Grant.

Most of the stories he tells in the Cote d’Azur section of
The Last Match
are true, sort of. He really did interview François André, the barrel-maker’s son who wound up owning most of the casinos in France, although their conversation probably didn’t go quite as it does in the book. And the story about the gullible French aristocrat who is persuaded to pony up a fortune to help his government defend itself against the Red Menace is entirely true, although my father changed the poor guy’s name, probably to protect him from further ridicule.

The North African sections are pretty accurate too, bolstered by the year my parents spent in Casablanca in the early 60s. The American and

Foreign Bank of Tangier was notorious, and there really was money to be made smuggling cigarettes across the Mediterranean.

As for the fictional characters? They’re based on earlier fictional characters, by and large. Reggie is little more than a recycled Francie Stevens—Grace Kelly’s unforgettable ice queen from
To Catch a Thief
—with a British accent. Le Sanglier appears as Le Borgne in
To Catch a Thief
both of them based on a real-life Corsican cigarette smuggler called The Plank. And the nameless hero? The crook who tells the story? Oh, he’s just David Dodge, I think, dreaming of long cons. My father—the most scrupulously honest man I’ve ever known—loved the whole world of con men and bunco rackets and professional card sharks, and worked them into his books over and over again.

There’s one aspect of
The Last Match,
though, that troubles me. At this distance, three decades later, it’s appallingly sexist. What can one say about our hero’s relationship with Boda the sex symbol—or for that matter with leading lady Reggie and her entirely * implausible virginity? All the hero’s relationships with women—including that dismal battered wife he rescues from the Nazi on the Amazon—strike me as profoundly bogus. How could my father—a liberal to his bones who encouraged me to strike out in any direction I wanted, and so attached to my mother that he died ten months after she did—come up with these broads? Even thirty years ago I think I would have been offended. Now all I can say is: Hey, Papa, we’ve come a long way, baby.