The Last Match (28 page)

He made a comeback. Not a big one as far as I know, and certainly not to the point where he was into the Greeks as big as before, but a pretty fair recovery. I watched him pile a few more millions on top of the working capital I had got for him, then left the
tout va
table feeling that I had done my daily good deed.

André was pleased with the news when I reported it. I had been avoiding him since the pounding I had taken from Odile’s friends, not wanting to confess that if I had sabotaged her his way instead of my own it wouldn’t have happened to me. My face looked a lot better, my teeth had been repaired, I could see out of both eyes. Some of the discoloration still remained. When I had finished reporting he said, “You did well. What happened to your face?” “I fell off a roulette wheel.”

He looked at me sharply from under his shaggy eyebrows, but only said, “They do spin a bit rapidly at times. Tell me, young man. You have done me two favors, I suspect at some cost to yourself. What do you think your reward should be? Within the limits of my purse, you understand.”

He’d promised me a reward, and I knew that whatever it cost short of the contents of the French National Treasury he could afford it. What I hadn’t expected was to be asked to name it myself. I thought fast and hard.

“Would this piece of property you have acquired include a small island or two, sir?”

“I believe so. Even one or two fairly large islands, I am told. I have not seen the land myself, only photographs of it.”

“A small island would do me nicely.”

He gave another sharp look from under the eyebrows. “You may have your choice of the availabilities. Will you tell me
why
you want an island?”

“Well, sir, it seems like a good investment if you are going to develop the coast off which the island lies. Aside from that, I’ve always wanted an island of my own. Like Onassis.”

“A yacht to go with it, perhaps? A tame opera singer? A fortune to spend?”

“No, sir. I’ll take care of the small incidentals myself. Just the island.”

“Very well. You shall have it. Go select the one you want and let me know.”

That night I wrote Reggie a longer letter than usual. Nearly a whole page. I told her I had a surprise for her which I would give her when she came back to the Villa Parfumée, that I had had some dental work done, that the
bonne
was fine, I was fine, I missed her, best regards.

The surprise was to be the island. There isn’t a hell of a lot you can give an heiress as rich as the Honorable Regina. (I added a postscript to the letter: Are you still an Honorable, or did your father’s death change your status? Are you an earl or female equivalent thereof?) But I was pretty sure she didn’t own any islands, and the value of the one she would get from me would more than repay what I owed her little black account book. Furthermore, it was honestly come by—more or less—and the fruit of my own efforts rather than her capital. I felt real good about it when I flew over to Olbia, hired a launch and went island-cruising.

Six days later I’d made my choice. It had about twenty-five acres of land with a nice little land-locked bay, several good small beaches, a couple of good springs, a hill and a fine growth of the wonderful fragrant
maquis
that grows on Corsica and Sardinia, redolent of sage, thyme, arbutus, fennel, rosemary, heather and other aromatics. No buildings, no people, rabbits so tame they sat up on the hill and watched me without alarm, many birds including quail calling in the
maquis,
shellfish in the sea, signs of
sangliers
in the withered bushes they had ripped up with their tusks to get at the edible roots. The
sangliers
would have to go, they were too dangerous for Reggie on a small island, but the rest of the livestock contributed to the wild charm of the place. I planted a sign-post on the beach that said,
ISOLA
REGINA
, the hell with any name it had had before that, then went back to France feeling like—like—I don’t know what I felt like. But I felt
good.
Better than I had ever felt in my whole life. Briefly.

After the dental work was finished I had gone back to the Villa Parfumée, given the
bonne
a plausible story to account for my still-battered face and read the mail that had accumulated for me. All from Reggie, four pages a day and I love you at the end. Now there was another week’s accumulation. I sorted the letters into order by their mailing dates and read through the usual driddle until I got to the last letter.

It was almost as short as my longest one to her. It read:

Dear Curly—

You sound in good spirits and health. I am happy for you. I’m sure I’ll be surprised and pleased by your surprise for me.

I have a surprise of my own for you. I have decided to marry. Legal and other pressing reasons have caused me to modify the strong views I have long held on this subject, as you know. I have given it a great deal of thought and am not to be dissuaded. Even if you truly wished to dissuade me.

I expect to return to France in about three weeks to say goodbye to a way of life which, in its fashion, has been one of the most rewarding I have ever known.

I’ll love you always.

Reggie

P. S. No, I am no longer an Honorable, as you put it, or anything other than plain Miss Forbes-Jones. It is one of the reasons I have come to the decision you now know.

It was like getting slugged with the
casse-tête
all over again. I was really stunned. How do you figure a doll like that, telling you in one breath she’s going to marry some prick called Simon or Eustace or Percy, in the next that she’ll love you forever? I’ll bet I read that letter forty times, trying to make some kind of sense out of it, but all it said was just what it said. She would love me always, and she was going to marry a jerk who had stabbed me in the back when I wasn’t looking.

The next three weeks are kind of hazy in my memory. The highlights I do remember aren’t among my most treasured recollections. I spent a lot of time in the casinos going from bar to baccarat game and back. I lost more money than I could afford, had to sell a couple of my good options before they were ripe, got involved in several brawls. Not at the baccarat table or because of the options but with guys whose girls I took or tried to take away from them. I was still being hustled by every high-class
poule
working the Riviera, but I didn’t want any popsy who could be had for the taking. I wanted somebody who was hanging on some other guy’s arm, as my girl was hanging on some other guy’s arm. More often than not the arms would start swinging, I’d swing back, and yo-heave-ho. If it started out in one of André‘s places the other guy would go out on his can. Anyplace else, we’d both go out on our cans and finish the brawl in the gutter. Sometimes I’d lick the other guy, sometimes he’d lick me, but I never won anything in any real sense. Even when I took the doll home with me to the Villa Parfumée for fun and games. In Reggie’s bed, as a matter of principle.

I didn’t try to hide anything from the
bonne,
Rose. She was stiff with disapproval and spoke to me only when there was no possible way to avoid it. I’m pretty sure she would have quit except that she wanted to be around when Reggie got home so she could tell on me. The hell with you, I thought. Go ahead and blab all you want. The hell with Reggie, too. The hell with everything. She’d love me always, and she was going to marry some shit named Tony or Roger or Reginald or Cuthbert. Probably some kind of puky peer.

That’s
what it was, by God. It came to me in a flash. She didn’t want to be just plain Miss Forbes-Jones, she wanted to be a Lady. She was always pretending to be a Lady, now she had a chance to grab off the real thing. I hoped she got stuck with somebody named Lord Athol. It would serve her right. Lady Athol, hah. The hell with them both. I hope they ended up knee-deep in little Athols.

During those three weeks she wrote only occasionally, maybe half a dozen times in all. No more four-page letters, either. Half a page or a page at most. She said she was terribly busy trying to get “things” in order. There was a lot to do before she could get married. She sure seemed to be hot to get hitched to that Athol character. I pictured him with buckteeth, no chin and dishwater-colored hair parted in the middle. How anybody of Reggie’s taste, discrimination and sensitivity could fall for a slob like that—but she
couldn’t
have fallen for him, damn it. She loved
me.
She said so regularly in every letter, however sketchy it was otherwise. The hell with her and her love.

I didn’t write her at all. Screw writing. Screw Reggie. Screw everybody. Screw everything.

Then, about a week before she was due—she still hadn’t given me a definite date—I cracked up the Mercedes-Benz. No overwhelming damage, either to the car or to me, but a ruined fender, a bashed-in headlight, chromium ripped loose, bumper twisted, things like that. It was raining and I’d had too much to drink at Jean-Pierre’s bar, where I’d gone to vent my indignation at the lousy world. Jean-Pierre had no choice but to listen to me cry into my drinks, as long as I paid for the drinks. I paid for too many, that’s all.

The nearest place where I could get a proper repair job was Marseille. I drove there and ran into a police roadblock that had the whole port cordoned off, as far as I could make out. The cops were stopping only cars coming from the city, but they were checking those out carefully. They weren’t answering any questions I heard asked, just going about their business. I asked no questions myself. Screw the cops, too. The hell with everything. I would have felt terrible even without the constant hangover that rode with me those days.

There were more cops in the city, police cars dashing about giving those hee-haw noises they emit in Europe in place of sirens, uproar everywhere. I took the car to the shop where it was to be fixed and turned it over to a mechanic.

He said he thought I could have it by the next afternoon, if the repair parts were in the stockroom. He couldn’t say without checking. About the
bagarre
in the streets, he knew no more than I did.

“The flics,
they are always boiling up a shit-storm over something,” he said, indifferently. “Me, I ask no questions and keep my nose clean.
On se d
é
fend.”

One defends oneself. With the implication attached. Screw everybody else. It was a philosophy that closely fitted with my own.

I went to a lousy hotel, had a lousy dinner with a lousy bottle of wine, read a couple of lousy newspapers before going to sleep in a lousy bed with rocks in the mattress. According to the papers, the
bagarre
had been a well-planned, widespread strike by the police against Marseille’s heroin traffic. Several hundred kilograms of the finished product had been taken, a whole lot more of the unprocessed morphine base, much processing equipment, more than two hundred and fifty people jailed. Among them was noticeably not a Corsican criminal known to police and the milieu as Le Sanglier, uncrowned heroin king of the Marseille waterfront. (No ‘allegeds,’ ‘reputeds,’ or ‘rumoreds’ for the French press. They call a crook a crook.) The king’s reign had ended with the seizure of a large stock of the drug in a warehouse where he had been accumulating it for overseas shipment. His own arrest was predicted within a matter of hours. He had shot two policemen, killing one, in making an escape from the warehouse. One of his own mob had been killed by the police when Le Sanglier used him as a shield in his getaway.

I would have been such a pretty carrier pigeon for you, Le Sanglier, I thought. Me and my American front. Screw you, too. I went to bed and slept miserably.

They hadn’t caught up with him by the time the morning papers came out, but it was nothing to me. I had troubles of my own. The parts the mechanic needed to put the Mercedes-Benz back in shape weren’t in his stockroom. They had to be ordered. Might take a week before the car was ready, the mechanic said.

Reggie was due back in a week or less, although I still didn’t know the date. I phoned the Villa Parfumée. Rose’s voice was as icily disapproving as ever when she said that no word had come from her mistress. I explained that I was tied up in Marseille, gave her the number of the hotel where I was staying and told her to call me as soon as she heard anything. Over a hundred miles of telephone wire, without saying a word about it, she managed to convey her conviction that I was calling from a cheap waterfront whorehouse.

Screw you, too, I thought, hanging up. A cheap waterfront whorehouse was just about right for my mood, but somehow I couldn’t bring myself to it. I was too depressed and miserable and crestfallen, I guess you might say Reggie had hit me where it hurt, in my masculine pride. I was good enough for an earl’s daughter to love, she couldn’t help loving me because you can’t do anything about love. I just wasn’t good enough for her to marry. So goodbye, Curly love, I’ll adore you forever but that’s all of it. It would have been different if I’d given her the brush, of course. I’d walked out on plenty of girls before her, and if they’d wept in their pillows about it afterwards,
tant pis.
A girl here, a girl there, who cares? Reggie was no different from the others. But for
her
to leave
me,
and for a silly slob like that Athol prick—

Misery, misery. Groan, groan. Grinding of teeth. Gloom.

The job on the Mercedes-Benz took four days. I called the villa every morning to learn if she had sent word of her return. I didn’t trust Rose to call me as I had told her to. For three mornings, nothing. On the fourth day, a cable had arrived from London.

It was in French, the easiest way to get a telegram delivered in France without garbling. Rose could read it to me. Translated, it said:
ARRIVE
NICE
F
RIDAY