Ton-Ton Detroit reached for the purse, held it close to his eyes for a couple of seconds, then turned and flung it out over the water as far as it wanted to go. It traveled a wide arc against the blurred zone where the horizon should have been, spinning horizontally like a plate, and landed far enough away he couldn’t hear the splash. When he turned back, Clay’s face had drawn so tight the bones were sticking through the skin and Ton-Ton Detroit made ready to trip him off the breakwater if he decided to lunge. However, in a few seconds Clay had relaxed.
“They put a flic on l’Escalier de la Plage already,” Ton-Ton Detroit said. “I wouldn’t be surprised if you found one just about anywhere else it might occur to you to try.”
Clay sagged back against the wall, crossing his shiny black shoes in front of him. He took the cigarette out of his mouth and stared at the long tube of ash on the end. There wasn’t even enough breeze to blow it off of there.
“All right, uncle, it’s your beat,” he said. “If you think the thing’s too hot, it’s too hot, I guess. Can’t be too careful in this business, right?”
Behind his sunglasses, Ton-Ton Detroit squinched his eyes tight shut. Clay pushed himself upright off the wall and brushed a little white dust off the tail of his coat.
“Dig you later, uncle, I guess,” he said. “And just keep me in mind if you have any ideas.”
When Ton-Ton Detroit still did not answer Clay shrugged and started away toward the harbor with his head tucked in and his hands pushed deep in his pockets. Once he was good and gone, Ton-Ton Detroit lit a Gauloise Blonde, but it tasted stale and gritty to him now. It was already hot and the day was still suffocatingly calm. When he looked up for the mountains he saw only a blank. He readjusted the radio, gazing out over the pale tinny water. Time for the science program; les informations had passed. He hoped that the purse wasn’t planning to come floating back up to the breakwater; it would give the flics an edge on him if it did, since they knew he hung around the place.
Mindy had come to the conclusion that until she managed to get to a store, her white beach pajamas were the best thing she had going. She didn’t bother to put a top on underneath. Daddy gave her the oh God look when she went out the door but she didn’t think he’d really noticed or he would have pitched more of a fit. That was it, she was cool till lunch or later, since he’d have to stick close to Mom all day.
So naturally all the beaches were pebbles, of course they wouldn’t have heard of sand yet in France. She explored a little way down the shore, but let’s face up to it, rocks were rocks, and there really wasn’t any place better than the section below where the stairs came out. You could rent time on deck chairs here and there, she saw, but her cash flow was a little constricted at the moment and she’d rather hold on to what she had for maybe a couple of long-drinks that night. It wasn’t particularly crowded and she found a decent-looking spot and spread her towel on it, pounding the gravel in a few key places as if that might make it a little softer. Actually it wasn’t as bad as it looked once you got it all kind of adapted to your bod. She stepped out of her white trousers and folded them neatly for later and then sat down and rolled off the blouse. Shazam, first time ever on a topless beach, not counting skinny-dipping at night, but it didn’t look like any applause was going to start up right away.
She put the blouse away in her bag and started giving herself a long slow coat of cocoa butter, checking out the area on either side while she rubbed it in. You could tell the French women must come here all the time because none of them had the ghost of a strap mark, but apart from that Mindy felt well ahead on points so far. Most of the others had stretch marks if you looked close enough, and seemed at least a little droopy up top, and they all seemed to have little kids along with them, which probably explained why they looked a little run-down. The guys, well, first of all most of them looked like husbands, and none of them were that great to start with. The basic trouble with French guys was like hardly any muscles, they all seemed to have those little chicken-wing arms, not that it seemed to slow them down much. Actually there were a couple of hunkier ones stretched on platforms back up by the steps, but some way or other they seemed kind of out of it, lying there still as statues carved out of meat.
Maybe they were all gay or something; anyway, it was pretty early still. Mindy stretched out on her back and shut her eyes, breathing in the sweet smell of the warm cocoa butter. The sun seemed hotter on her breasts than anywhere else, if she wasn’t imagining it, and for a minute she felt just a little self-conscious, but pretty soon she forgot all about it and started to daydream. When she woke up she’d broken a sweat from the sun and she sat up to check for sure she wasn’t burning; she had an okay poolside tan from California but it would be dumb to end up with a pair of blistered tits. Time to see what the water was like, but hey, walking barefoot on these rocks was no joke, she didn’t see how the French people could hack it. Way out near the line of buoys were some people lying on another diving raft, but Mindy was only a couple of steps in before she knew she’d never make it, man, it already was making her eyeballs hurt and she was barely up to her knees. She could tell the shelf dropped off a few feet more right in front of her because there was this fat lady swimming right by, with a bathing cap on and also a pair of flip-flops—so that was how you got over the rocks. Farther out, a guy with a snorkel popped out of the water, and he was also wearing a wet suit, and she would bet he needed it.
Well, okay, forget about swimming. Blue had never been her color. She turned around and went mincingly back toward her towel. More people had showed up while she’d been napping, but they all still looked like little families and stuff, and surprise! but all of them were French. Nobody seemed to be cruising at all, it was kind of an antisocial scene, everybody just rooted to their own patch of gravel. The French boys seemed to all hang out up there on the promenade, slouching around on their bikes and like that; she wondered how they kept those great tans without ever coming down to the beach.
Well, once she had her moped she could probably make it to Monaco, for sure there’d be something more going on there. Mindy dropped to her knees and then stretched out on her stomach, but it was tougher trying to lie on that side, every little rock seemed to be out to get her from under the towel, and after a minute she had to sit back up. Yep, she was starting to get just a little bit bored, should have brought a magazine or something, she wished she’d remembered the radio. Back home she had a mini-TV, but she’d been told it wouldn’t work over here for some reason. She stared down the beach; even with sunglasses it was getting too bright. One of those black street peddlers, or beach peddlers, whatever, was coming along the strand her way, repeating a phrase in a kind of low grumble.
“Regardez-moi ça, messieurs, mesdames, c’est pas cher, regardez, c’est pas cher …” Ton-Ton Detroit came to a halt, his sandals about an inch back from the fringe of Mindy’s towel.
Mindy rose to her knees to peer at his stuff. The jewelry was okay but too heavy for her, and though the radios were kind of neat she already had a radio back in the apartment. She couldn’t quite remember the French word for “purse.”
“Uh,” she said, pointing, “montrez-moi ça.”
“Ees a booteeful purse,” Ton-Ton Detroit said, turning up his French accent as far as it would go and unhooking the thing from its little strap.
“Hey, you speak English?” Mindy said.
When she all of a sudden remembered she was topless she almost blushed, but she didn’t think she had all the way, and she was tan enough in the face she didn’t really believe it would show all that much.
“Onlee a leetle,” Ton-Ton Detroit said. The Americans usually liked it better that way. “Vayree good deal, onlee one hundred frawncs.” He grinned at her from one ear to the other.
Mindy snapped up the flap of the purse and peeked inside at the lining. Cute idea, snakeskin, but it looked fakey close up and she could tell at a glance the stitching was junk. And a hundred francs was practically twenty
bucks, for God’s sake. She didn’t feel a bit embarrassed anymore, she felt sort of cool and Continental, and she knew she was maintaining just fine.
“Non, merci,” she said, flopping back on her towel. “Je ne l’aime pas.”
In spite of all the omens, Ton-Ton Detroit had sold more this morning than the morning before, though that didn’t make him feel any better, since he now had to look for the bad luck to strike him from some unknown direction. By noon he was still not very hungry and he walked back toward Menton on the street behind the hotels, hoping his appetite might improve. On his left-hand side the midi rush hour traffic buzzed and roared, all the people fighting their way back home for lunch. Since he had a little extra money Ton-Ton Detroit went into La Régence and ordered one of their cheaper salads, but his mouth remained obstinately dry and he might as well have been kneeling down to eat grass for all the taste the lettuce had. On his way out he paused at the zinc for a glass of red wine, which made him feel a little better by the time he reached the street.
The heat was at its maximum but he felt too listless to try to evade it. It was not the right time of day for people to buy things, so he climbed to the stone catwalk inside the harbor wall and spread himself like a lizard in the full glare of the sun. The heat of the wall soaked into his back, and as he began to feel more comfortable and sleepier he let his feet slide slowly forward until they dangled slackly between the posts of the steel railing. In the shade of his sunglasses, his eyes narrowed to slits. The entire spread of the harbor was almost too bright to be visible, and on the beach beyond it the sunbathers lay fixed to the ground as though particular beams of light had nailed each of them down.
The only movement was a steady trickle of people going back and forth along the concrete ramp that led up into the town, and there was a place where it was blocked by a lump of people clogging an area shaded by several trees. Ton-Ton Detroit’s eyes came open a little wider when he saw that Clay was at the center of this thickening crowd. The boy had set up a stack of old boxes and his hands were flying across the lid of the top one, light and nervous as a couple of bats. His movements were so rapid and ardent that from this distance his whole body seemed to shimmer. It looked like he might be doing pretty well too; at least he had a good enough crowd to draw pickpockets.
Ton-Ton Detroit leaned forward a little more, hooking his elbow up around the guardrail. For Clay the game must just be starting to get sweet. The cards spun and flashed crazily along the lines his fingers stroked, catching the light when he turned them face up. A hundred-franc note looked almost pink at this distance and Ton-Ton Detroit thought he could see quite a few of them changing hands. The boy might make out all right if only he knew when to quit. Ton-Ton Detroit would have given him about fifteen more minutes, but as it turned out he got almost twenty before the flics arrived. The shovel-nosed car rolled slowly to the end of the parking and stopped just in front of the Cocteau Museum. It was the same pair who had rolled him over early that morning—the one who’d dumped his bag was slightly bowlegged, the other tall and razor-faced. Both wore short-sleeved white shirts with little pleats on the pockets, and their browned forearms swung out to a stiff clicking beat as they moved up toward the edge of Clay’s crowd. Still caught up in the heat of his game, Clay didn’t seem to have noticed them yet. Ton-Ton Detroit thought in an abstract way of giving a shout, but he didn’t think his voice would carry so far, and besides, he doubted he was going to miss Clay all that much either, if something should happen to cause him to leave.
What Clay could have used was a whole boatload of things he just hadn’t got and didn’t see coming: a fresh jacket with no scrape marks down the sleeves, a crowd that spoke English, more money to lose and above everything else some kind of a partner, a dude to get the betting started and then watch down the street once the action warmed up. But the only one he’d been able to think of was old uncle, and the man didn’t appear inclined to be helpful, so Clay hadn’t even felt like he wanted to ask.
This would be as close to the bone as he’d ever cut it, and he’d had some doubts about whether he should try it at all, but the short of it was, he didn’t have all that much left to try. If that one guy he’d already hit was average, he’d need to do around ten more like him to make enough for a flight, and it did seem like that would be really pushing it. He’d figured out that you probably didn’t need all that many words to run a simple game of three-card monte, and he’d spent a few minutes with a dictionary, standing up in a store, to check out the couple he thought he should know. After that there was nothing much to it but grab a few boxes out back of a restaurant and stack them waist high in the likeliest spot.
“Trouvez le rouge, trouvez le rouge.” Clay figured he could get by with that and Pariez cent and handle the rest in pantomime. It should work out if he could just get it started, but now was the moment he most needed a shill. If he looked up, he could see old uncle perched high up there on the wall of the harbor; why couldn’t he come down here where he might be some use? Clay made the cards flash and flicker and dance, finding the rhythm, fondling the beat. People were just glancing at him and going on by, man, they must think he had time enough to stand there all day. There were enough of them, but none of them stopped, and it was hot as the devil even here in the shade, his face was already running with sweat.
“Trouvez le rouge, trouvez le rouge …” Okay, so it wasn’t the most exciting line of patter. But stop for me, somebody, come on, just one. He faced the cards up, aces all: the spade, the club and the lucky diamond. A couple had just now halted in front of him—thank you, Lord—old lady in a blue-striped cotton dress, old guy with gold teeth in a cockeyed denture and silver hair swept back in a sporty wave. Come on, sport, bet me one.
“Pariez cent.” Clay spread a hundred-franc note on the box top behind the cards, smiling steady as a corpse as he felt a fresh wave of sweat break over his forehead. The old cat smiled back at him, half his top teeth sliding the opposite way from the rest, but he wasn’t showing out any money. Oh man, Clay thought, if I had some more words. He flourished the cards as eloquently as he knew how to do it, still no action, but one more guy stopped, big heavy dude with a face that looked like it might just have been stepped on, black wraparound sunglasses hiding his eyes. He had a white bulldog hooked to him on a chain, and one fat mother dog it was too. Clay watched it sit down on the toe of the guy’s shoe and start licking all over its own smashed-in face, foaming clear slobber from the hot-pink inside of its mouth.
“Pariez cent.” A fresh breeze levitated his bill from the box and Clay caught it under his elbow, still working the cards. The guy’s face was like rock, but he was getting the message—thank you, Jesus—he was pulling out a bill. Clay nodded to him, stopped the cards and let him have the first one, gave him the red diamond his thick finger had pointed out.
“Pariez cent.” A couple more people had already stopped and behind them he could see there were more slowing down. Clay let the meaty guy have a second bill. He’d fibbed a little to old uncle back then; there’d been four hundred-franc notes in that purse, though he’d busted one for smokes, and food. He’d thought of running the game on fifties but the problem was it would have been much too slow, when something like three thousand francs was the best deal he could find on a flight to New York. He beat the guy back for the middle bill and then let him get it again on the next play. Up to ten people were standing there now, but still, this could get boring quick. Then he saw the silver-haired guy unwinding a bill from a money clip and at the same time another one landed on the front of the box, mashed under a hand he hadn’t matched with a face yet. Finally, they were catching on. He lost the first one and beat the next two, kicked back and started making his money.
The main thing on his mind now was time. Old uncle said the game wouldn’t go over at all around here, which made Clay think that at least he didn’t want to get caught. He thought he’d be good for a half hour or so of fairly fast action and then he’d be a lot better off
gone. When he’d guessed the time was nearly up he checked his wrist, but still no watch. Letting the cards stop for a second, he looked up to see if there might be a clock on a building somewhere, but he was facing the harbor and there was nothing that way but Ton-Ton Detroit, still roosting on the wall like a vulture. The old cat was in the perfect position; Clay only wished he had him signed up as a lookout. The silver-haired dude had a watch on anyway, and it said about ten after one. The crowd was good and thick and wrapping the whole way around him now, so anybody coming through it wouldn’t be able to see him right away. He thought he could give it five or ten minutes yet before he blew.
He’d been pushing the money down in his back pocket, where it was easiest to stuff it in quick. How much he had in there he had no idea, but a few more minutes and he’d get off somewhere and count. If it wasn’t all he hoped for, he’d take the train to Nice and see what kind of a thing he could put together over there. The crowd was packed in tight around the box now, it was getting hard to keep a handle on it all, every couple of minutes he had to wave them all back to make room for himself to breathe and keep working. The only one that wouldn’t move out was some kid that wasn’t even betting, a moon-faced brat with a little poodle strapped to him by a red leather leash. Clay had a foggy feeling he’d seen him around somewhere before, but he sure didn’t need to be seeing him now.
“Beat it, kid,” Clay said, wishing he’d looked up the French for that. “Go on, take off, get out of here.”
He made a disappearing gesture right under the kid’s nose, but the kid just stared up at him with his soft stupid eyes. He was mumbling some kind of I-don’t-know-what right along, though Clay had the feeling he was just talking to his dog. Where was that bulldog when you wanted him? It could have finished off this fluff of a poodle in half of a mouthful. The poodle had drifted around the corner of the bottom box and started licking its way up the side of his shoe. Clay gave it a light kick in the chops and the dog sat back on its haunches with an outraged yelp. Maybe that would get rid of the pair of them. When he turned his attention back to the game he could see a wedge opening in the rear of the crowd. What was coming that way he couldn’t quite tell, but people were making room for it like swimmers for sharks, and that was convincing enough for him. He kicked the stack of boxes over, letting the cards go flying with them, and took a couple of long strides back into the crowd behind him.
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