The Last Match (6 page)

“I think we might even fly the tricolor from the leading truck, to lend distinction to our passage,” The Plank said.
“Allons enfants de la patrie, le jour de gloire est arrive.”

He went forward humming
La Marseillaise.

I began to relax after that. Everything was lovely. Not the least of the loveliness was the fact that everybody involved in the operation would be anxious to move the stuff out of the
calanque
and get it rolling as quickly as possible. Jean-Pierre and I would not have to unload the whole cargo without help, as we had loaded it. In fact—enjoying another of my own
mégots
which The Boar had generously allowed me to consume—I felt rich, lucky and euphoric.

Talk about adversity. As they say in the funny papers—POW!

We arrived off the French coast in the middle of the night, hanging well offshore still without lights while The Boar talked briefly on the cutter’s radiophone. French territorial jurisdiction extends twenty kilometers into the Mediterranean. You’re legally a
contra-bandiste
the moment you take untaxed cigarettes, booze or anything else across the twenty-kilometer line. As such you are subject to the full penalties of the law, which are horrid. The state confiscates not only your cigarettes, if that is what you are smuggling— they are then sold by
R
é
gie Nationale,
the French National Tobacco Monopoly, for its own profit—but also your boat, your equipment, your shirt, whatever else you have in your possession and your freedom while the
juge d’instruction
decides what to do with you. Everything else involved in the venture, for example the trucks and small boats waiting to move the loot from the landing ground, is also forfeited, and fines are assessed based on the value of the gross take. Of course you never have anything left to pay the fines with, but still the loss of all those valuables must be painful to those who lose them.

The Boar took no chances. He stood off well outside the twenty-kilometer limit until he was ready to go, about three
A
.
M
. Then he went in hard and fast; lights out, throttles open, straight as a homing pigeon to the haven of the agreed-upon
calanque
and the warm welcoming arms of the Marseille cops waiting for us there.

Looking back, I suppose there was something mildly humorous about the beef that arose later between the Marseille police, who confiscated the motorcycles of the two
motards
along with the other loot, and the Nice police, who owned the machines and wanted them back. The humor of it didn’t strike me for a long time. Before we went into the
calanque
The Boar signaled ashore with a blinker, got the right blinks back and pulled the cutter up as pretty as you please exactly where the
flics
were ready to jump aboard. They had guns and flashlights poked in our faces before the motors had even been cut.

Guns and flashlights in my face didn’t scare me half as much as I would have been scared if I had been the guy who sold out The Boar. When they put the bracelets on him he asked one question only, in his expressionless way: “Who did it to me?”

“Ferme ta gueule!”
one of the
flics
said, cracking him on the chin with an elbow. It’s a trick French cops have, useful when they’ve got a gun in one hand and a flashlight in the other. They can keep both pointed at you and knock you down at the same time. This one didn’t knock The Boar down, but he got the message. His
gueule
stayed strictly
fermée
from then on. He wasn’t the type to talk much when talking served no purpose.

The engineer said
“Merde alors”
in a resigned way when they handcuffed him. I didn’t say anything. All of a sudden I had forgotten how to speak French. Jean-Pierre babbled a lot without saying much. The

Plank was the only one of us who attained any real eloquence.

That was when the five of us were loaded into a truck that already held the rest of the catch, including the two
motards.
The Plank tried to go for them, cuffs and all, but caught a bang on the ear from one of the cops in the truck with us that knocked him over. Not down, just over. The truck was too full for him to go down all the way; just to his knees. Kneeling there, in an attitude of reverent prayer, his hands more or less clasped before him by the stricture of the handcuffs, he called the
motards crottes de chameaux, fils de putains,
and assorted kinds of
merde
and
espèces
de cons morbides
as well as a number of other colorful names which I would rather not translate even if I could speak French. The
motards
shrugged, lifting their hands to show their own bracelets. The Plank finally ran out of air to curse them with. I wondered if maybe they were the double-crossers The Boar had asked about, wearing the cuffs and taking the ride in the truck with the rest of us to prove that they, too, were innocent victims. If so, I hope they never went back into police work again, unless it was in an armored car.

They threw us in the
violon
in Marseille. I had been smart enough not to bring my passport or any other documentation on the expedition, just in case. My identity papers, army discharge and the rest, were safe back in the
pension
in Cannes. Since I couldn’t speak two words of French I had time to think up what I was going to say in English before an interpreter showed up.

“What’s your name?” was the first question.

“Phineas T. Barnum.”

“Where do you live?”

“The Bronx, New York, U.S.A.”

“What street address?”

“Three thirty-three and a third Joe Doakes Boulevard.”

“What’s your business? When you’re not smuggling cigarettes?”

“I wasn’t smuggling cigarettes. I’m a simple, honest tourist—”

“What’s your business when you’re not smuggling cigarettes?”

“I just got out of the army. Before that I sold Bibles.”

“You what?”

“I sold Bibles. In a Bible store. The Bronx Biblical Basement.”

“Where’s your passport?”

“It was stolen from me in Tangier. So were my money, baggage and everything else I owned. That’s why I had to work my way to France on what I thought would be a yacht until I discovered to my horror, surprise and despair that—”

“Throw him back in the tank.” The
flic
who was feeding questions in French to the interpreter to relay in English yawned, nodding to another
flic
to show me back to my suite.
“The juge d’instruction
will enjoy talking to this one.”

In France they do not have trial by jury, habeas corpus, Bills of Rights or any of those effete refinements. The law is based on the Code Napoleon, which says in effect that you are guilty until judged innocent. The judging in the initial stages of a criminal investigation is done by what they call
a juge d’instruction.
He looks at the facts of the crime, he looks at the available evidence, he looks at you, he ponders, he concludes. While he’s concluding, you stay in the
violon
for as long as it takes, perhaps years if he can’t make up his mind easily. No bail. Sometimes he decides you’re innocent and turns you loose, say after you’ve been on ice for two years. You don’t get a refund of the two years, but you’ve been exonerated. Justice has triumphed. Sometimes, after the same two years, the
juge
decides that you’re guilty two years worth and turns you loose. You’ve served the same time as the innocent guy, but that’s because you were guilty, see? Justice has triumphed again. Sometimes the
juge
thinks you’re guilty more than two years worth. In that case he keeps you in escrow for as much longer as he thinks you have coming to you, or turns you over to a formal court for trial on the basis of his findings and recommendations.

Les juges,
I am told, are mostly fair. But they are also practical Frenchmen, and the practicalities in the cases of The Boar, The Plank and Merde Alors were their pressing needs to get back to work at their trade, namely gangsterism, if they were ever going to contribute their bit to
la patrie
and the French National Treasury. I don’t think anyone ever believed for a minute that they would pay one sou of the huge fines they owed, or a centime in income tax, anything like that. What they were expected to do, what they probably did as soon as they were released, was stick up a bank or a jewelry store for enough loot to buy another boat, if they couldn’t pinch one, and a new cargo of contraband. Sooner or later, maybe not the first time or the second time they tried it, the cops would get them again with another big windfall. And so on, without waste of
le juge’s
time or taxpayers’ money on free board and room for a trio of Corsican hoods. They were out of the
violon
and on their way back to their jobs within a week. Trusties, kind of, you might say. Everyone had a lot of confidence that they would be back.

Jean-Pierre and I were different.
The juge
didn’t think we would necessarily be back if we were turned loose. We didn’t have what it took to be real
gang-staires.
If he had known the Honorable Regina’s favorite word he’d have described us as a couple of spivs. He never questioned us together, and we never got to see much of each other in the
violon,
but I knew he was pumping Jean-Pierre at the same time and along the same lines as he was me because he knew things that only Jean-Pierre could have, I mean would have, told him.

One afternoon while we were going through one of our Q-and-A sessions and I was having my usual stumbling difficulty in figuring out what his questions meant as filtered through the interpreter’s indifferent English, he said casually, “I’m thinking of letting your friend go.”

I got that on the interpreter’s first try. I said, “That’s good to hear, sir. When do we get out?”

“I said, your friend. Not you. You’ll be with us for a while yet.”

The uncomprehending look on my face was genuine enough when I heard that, first in French and then in English. (Incidentally, there is nothing like a stretch in jail where nobody else speaks your language to sharpen your knowledge of what is being spoken around you. I recommend the experience without reservation to anyone really in earnest about becoming a linguist. After a few weeks in the
violon
my French was as fluent and polished as that of any waterfront pickpocket in Marseille. I also came out with a fair working vocabulary of alley Arabic from a couple of Algerians who were doing time for a smash-and-grab.) “I don’t understand, sir. Jean-Pierre is just as—I mean to say, I’m just as innocent as he is. Why discriminate against me?”

“I’ve learned all I need to know from him. In your case, it’s rather more difficult. Because of the language difficulty, you understand.” He cocked an eyebrow at me. “What a pity you speak no French, eh?”

He was a shrewd old boy, and a decent fellow. I think he kind of liked me, in a disapproving way. I’m pretty sure he would have liked to disapprove of me less than he did. I thought, what the hell. Before the interpreter could translate his last comment, I said,
“Pas un seul mot.”

The juge
chuckled.

“I thought so,” he said, and told the interpreter, who looked shocked at what must have seemed to him pretty close to contempt of court, that he could leave. “Now would you like to tell me anything you have failed to tell me so far? Anything of the truth, that is to say.”

“I’d guess you have it all from Jean-Pierre already, sir.”

He nodded. “I think so. Jean-Pierre does not have your native intelligence. It is the main reason I am letting him go. I can only empty his dull mind, not reason with it. Yours I hope to be able to reach and influence. Do you realize the risks you assume, the dangers you are exposing yourself to, when you associate with cut-throat criminals like Le Sanglier and La Planche?”

“I think so, sir.”

“I think not.”

He went on to give me a father lecture on the evils of forming bad acquaintances. He didn’t put it on a legal plane or appeal to my sense of Christian morality. I’ll say that for him. He simply set out to scare the hell out of me, and did. In a way he, too, had a hand in nudging me into a life of crime, I mean the kind of life of crime I chose, because he sure nudged me away from further intimate association with Corsican hoods. The Boar had been put away for three murders and The Plank for one, as Jean-Pierre had said. But each had several unscored kills to his credit, known kills but without enough evidence left behind for conviction, plus a large number of probables. They killed business competitors, vendetta rivals, bank clerks who tried to kick off an alarm, innocent bystanders, all with equal indifference, as if they were mosquitoes. Human life,
the juge
said, meant nothing to them because they were not themselves human. They lived like jungle beasts. They would die like beasts when a stronger beast attacked them.

“As you can die simply by becoming known as an associate of either man,” he warned me. “To become a friend of Le Sanglier or La Planche is to make blood enemies of all his enemies, of which each has hundreds. Do you know why they were betrayed in the

calanque?”

“No, sir. Do you?”

“I do not. Neither do they. I suspect it was done for vendetta, in the hope that they would be killed, nothing more. No reward for the betrayal has been claimed or paid. Only France benefited from it in a material way. But some day, somehow, either Le Sanglier or La Planche or both will learn the identity of their betrayer, and then he will die more or less horribly depending on how much time they have to spare for him. If they and their friends and the people suspected of perhaps being their friends are not all brutally murdered first. Am I making an impression on you?”

“You are indeed, sir.” I wasn’t giving him any
blague,
either. I could practically feel those machine-gun slugs thumping into me instead of the cigarette cartons. Jerk, flinch, wince. “I give you my word I will associate with no more Corsican gangsters. Not voluntarily, that is.”