The Last Match (2 page)

When MacCullin came out of hock and returned to the hotel I got him alone and bent his ear.

“Mac, pal,” I said. “Listen. I don’t know what’s with your wife, but there’s nothing between us. I’ve never even spoken to her. Honest.”

“You’re a liar. She told me—”

“Hear me and read me. I don’t care what she told you, there’s nothing in it. I give you my solemn word of honor. If that isn’t enough for you, figure it out for yourself. Would I be playing around with your wife in the same hotel where I’ve got a woman of my own? She’s mad crazy jealous of me, and if I even looked at another doll she’d cut me right off at the pockets. I’d have to go to work. You wouldn’t want that to happen to a pal, would you?”

“You’re not living together,” he said suspiciously. “Not in your room you’re not. I looked around.”

“She has to maintain appearances.” I gave him the old man-to-man eye. “You know how it is, an older woman and a young guy like me. Your must have seen us together; a nice looking lady, dresses well, maybe a bit on the plumpish side—”

“I thought she was your mother.”

“And you were going to shoot the boy of a nice lady like that? Shame on you!”

“I wasn’t really trying to shoot you,” he said lamely. “I just wanted to scare you.”

“You scared me. Don’t do it again, please, buddy, huh? You’re going to have to pay for the bulletholes, too, you know.”

“I won’t do it again. I really thought she was your mother. I’m sorry.”

We shook hands and had a drink on it in the bar. I looked at myself in the mirror over the back bar and wondered if I’d do better without a profile.

One of the curses of my formative years was an overdose of prettiness. It is mine no more, thank God, age and a receding hairline being as erosive as they are, but mention of this early failing is necessary because of what it did to my youth. As a child I was a lady-killer at the age of six. Women loved my mop of brown curls, my brown calf’s eyes with the long curly lashes they all envied me for, my cute button nose, all the rest. (The cute nose got unbuttoned in later years, but even that didn’t change things much.) With the cunning of the deceptive little bastard I was I learned to capitalize on these assets, and did so at every opportunity. My parents should have drowned me, but didn’t.

As an adolescent I was an unmitigated young prick, like most adolescents, but a prick with charm I had cultivated since childhood. Girls were easy for me, including other guys’ girls. This led to trouble from time to time with one of the other guys, who would feel justified in trying to beat on me. I was big enough to beat back, bigger than the average, so I didn’t take as many lickings as I was entitled to. In college I began to grow up some, learn different values, but the twig had been bent and the tree was so inclined. Women, including other guys’ wives, were as easy for me as girls had been. I even developed a talent for slickering husbands out of beating on me when they should have been beating on me. I became, in short, a college-trained con man; amateur skill, but with all the qualifications to turn professional at any time. Two years of compulsory servitude in the army only deferred my eventual blossoming in the full flower of fulfillment; first, briefly, as a gigolo, later an off-and-on jailbird, in time and with experience as a hustler, bunco steerer and peddler of phony gold bricks.

All this is less by way of
mea culpa
than to explain how and why things happened as they did. When I had finished my two years of army service, during which I perfected various techniques for violating the rules against fraternizing with the cooperative
f
räuleins
of West Germany, I took my discharge there, got a passport in Frankfurt and bummed my way around Europe on the cheap while my severance pay lasted. I ended up on the French Riviera because I had heard you could sleep comfortably on the beaches there even in wintertime. (You can’t.) My cash was about finished.

In Monte Carlo I decided to turn it back into a bankroll by investing it in
le jeu de craps-game.
I’d done all right with dice in the army and during the summers I worked as a roustabout for carnie shows, but a house game is not the same as bouncing the bones on a blanket. Monte Carlo’s
jeu de craps-game
chewed me up and spat me out, bloodless, in about half an hour. I didn’t even have cigarette money left, or bus fare to get out of town.

That didn’t bother me much. I had tapped out before without dying of it. I was young, healthy, able-bodied. Something would turn up. I went out into the casino gardens overlooking the Mediterranean, hoping to find a long cigarette butt. (Casinos are too fast about replacing used ashtrays with clean ashtrays, I suppose for fear that a smoldering butt may burn the green felt.) A lady who had been watching the game— and me, as I was aware—followed me out.

The shores of the south of France are littered with a flotsam of lonely women, cast up there by divorce, widowhood, dissatisfaction with the availabilities, other reasons. They are Americans or British, in large part, and they all have a fair amount of money; enough to run with the company they keep. You can see half a dozen of them around the roulette tables in any casino on an average night. Because they are both rich and lonely they are fair game for the kind of guy who is on the make for a moneyed mama. I wasn’t one of these, and I’m pretty sure the lady knew it. She may have had some idea that I was going to blow my brains out, as in those stories you read, mostly fiction, about desperate gamblers broken on the wicked wheels of Monaco. She came over to where I was sitting on a bench looking despondent only because I was casing the ground around the bench for usable butts, my head and shoulders down.

“You lost all your money, didn’t you?” she said.

I said, “Yes, ma’am. Although it wasn’t much to lose.”

“You needn’t keep your chin up for me, poor boy. I know how you must feel. Here.”

She had opened her purse while she was talking. She took out a thick wad of
mille
notes—this was in the days of the old franc, when French money had big figures on it although not much more buying power than it has today—and shoved it at me. “Take it. I won it this afternoon.”

“You can lose it just as easy tomorrow afternoon, ma’am. Thanks all the same.”

“Take it,” she insisted. “Only promise me you won’t gamble with it.”

I couldn’t read her at all. Here’s this dame, middle-aged, not good-looking, not bad-looking, a motherly type, well dressed, obviously in the bucks, pushing money at me she’d won gambling but didn’t want me to gamble with. I said, “Lady, thanks very much. I appreciate your offer, but I can’t take your money. Even if I did, I’d gamble with it.”

“Don’t talk back to me, boy,” she said. “I’m old enough to be your mother.” And damned if she didn’t drop the wad of bills in my lap and start back toward the casino.

I had to go after her. In those days I had principles; a few, anyway. She flatly refused to take the money back. I could call it a loan, if I wanted to, but I had to keep it. And no gambling.

So what do you do around a gambling casino if you can’t gamble? It ended with her taking me home in a car she had rented for the day to her hotel in Cannes, there to install me in a room of my own and buy me the best dinner I had eaten in Europe, with a bottle of
Gewürtztraminer
that must have set her back at least ten bucks. She said she was celebrating her birthday.

“Although I’m not going to tell you which one,” she said girlishly. “So don’t ask me.”

“The twenty-first, I’ll bet,” I said. “They wouldn’t let you into the casino if you were any younger. I’m sorry I didn’t know about it sooner. I’d have bought you a present. With your money.”

“Oh, please. Let’s not talk about money.” She put her hand over mine on the table. “Dear boy. You’ve made me very happy today.”

Like that, I was a gigolo. See how things can creep up on you when you’re not looking?

Her name was Mrs. Emmaline Stokes; a widow. She wasn’t crazy mad jealous of me at all, just motherly. As a matter of fact she was kind of proud of me because the girls gave me the eye all the time. We never slept together. At first I thought that was what she wanted of me, but when I made a few exploratory passes she reacted as if I had suggested incest. She was lonely, she was rich, she liked having a good-looking young man paying attention to her. Particularly a young man whose language she could understand. It didn’t matter that I was more of the age and temperament to be interested in the fifty thousand cute
poupettes
of all sizes, shapes, colors and nationalities bulging their bikinis all the way from Menton to St. Tropez, not to mention a somewhat smaller group untrammeled by bikinis or anything else who congregated in an open-house nudist rookery on the
Île
du Levant.
Emmaline dear was satisfied with me as an acceptable escort, and wanted nothing more. She bought me the wardrobe I needed, evening clothes, an expensive wristwatch, a gold cigarette case, other things, and supplied me with the money to take her places. She never required an accounting, or questioned expenditures, or embarrassed either of us by making me ask for money when I ran out. She was a kind, generous woman, and I liked her. Ours was the relationship of a Boy Scout helping a nice little old lady across the street to the gambling hell.

Then I met Nemesis. It wasn’t her real name, but I didn’t know her real name when she first pointed the accusing finger of retribution at me, and I got to think of her that way before I knew anything about her.

I was sunning myself on the beach in front of the Martinez, Emmaline dear’s hotel in Cannes. She had gone back to the hotel to call on Uncle John, as she put it with maidenly modesty. I was lying on my back with my eyes closed when I became aware that a shadow had fallen on my face. I opened my eyes and looked up at this girl, woman—she was about my age, in the mid-twenties—looking down at me. She wore a rubber bathing-cap with the ear-tabs turned up so she could hear, a bathing suit on the conservative side by local standards, and she was easy to look at. Nothing to make a man leap to his feet and lunge, but all right.

“Hello, Curlilocks,” she said. “Where’s your mother?”

She had a British accent to spread on a crumpet. It was a kind of hoity-toity drawl that sounded as if she were inwardly amused about something secret.

“If you mean the lady whose company I’m keeping, she isn’t my mother. She went where ladies can’t send someone else to go for them. She’ll be back in a few minutes.”

“I was afraid of that.” She smiled at me, and I must say she had lovely teeth. A lot of Englishwomen don’t. “Is that your natural hair, or do you do it up in curlers?”

“I give myself home permanents,” I said. “I’m one of the Toni Twins.”

I didn’t know why she was giving me the needle, but after two years under a tough top sergeant I was cal lused to needling. She didn’t bother me too much.

“I’ll wager you curl the hair on your chest, too.”

“As anyone can see at a glance. Now push off and go pester someone else, will you? I’m sleeping.”

I closed my eyes. She said, in the same hoity-toity drawl, “You contemptible little spiv!”

I opened my eyes again, wondering, What the hell? I’d never seen her before, to recognize. She might have been around, but she wasn’t the type to catch my eve easily.

“What’s a spiv?” I asked her.

“You are. A wretched spiv.”

With that she walked down to the water, fixed her ear-tabs, fastened her chin-strap, dived in and swam out to a float anchored off the beach. She swam easily and well, a kind of inwardly amused drawl although of course I mean crawl.

About then Emmaline dear came back from Uncle John’s place and plopped down on the sand beside me.

“Who’s the girl you were talking to?” she asked, with no particular curiosity.

“I don’t know. I never saw her before. I’d just as soon never see her again, too.”

“Why?”

“She called me a wretched spiv.” “A spiv?” “A spiv.”

“Well, I don’t think that was very nice of her, whatever it means.” She patted my hand comfortingly where it lay on the sand.
“Dear
boy.”

I found out what a spiv was from Cedric, the Martinez’ head bartender. He was British. According to him, spivs were originally by-products of World War II, when England was on short rations for everything and black-marketeering was big business. Spiv was the name for a black marketeer. When black markets went out, spivs moved into other lines of business the way mobsters in the U.S.A. went into other lines of business when Prohibition was repealed. Spiv came to mean any kind of grifter at all, although usually with an overtone of small-time attached. A peanut-pincher, as they say around the carnie lots. A cheap chiseler, in effect.

That hurt my feelings. It’s bad enough when a strange female you’ve never seen before walks up to you out of nowhere and accuses you of curling your hair, but to call you a cheap chiseler as well is too much even for army calluses. She rankled on me every time I thought of her, which was too often. I took to looking for her whenever Emmaline dear and I were out on the town. Often I saw her around; gambling indifferently or dancing with some guy at one of the
boîtes
—her escorts tended not to last long, two or three or four evenings at the most before a new one took over—or sunning on the beach, most often alone. She saw me too. But she never gave any sign of recognition or, what was even more rankling, interest. Damn the woman, what did she think she was made of, anyway? Marble?

Then Emmaline dear had to go back to Pawtucket or wherever it was. Something was cooking with her investments. I think she would have liked to take me
avec,
as the French say, but she still had family living at the old homestead. To come back from wicked, wicked France with a gigolo half her age would not have been the thing at all. She cried in a motherly way when we parted, promised to write and slipped me a check for a thousand dollars U.S. You couldn’t go far on the C6te d’Azur with a thousand bucks even in those days, but you could eat for a while. While I was still eating I began to toy with the idea of moving in on Nemesis as a new den-mother. She was a challenge as well as a ranklement.