The Last Match

by David Dodge

  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 défend.”

  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 FRIDAY

  BEA FLIGHT 078 ETA 1410 PLEASE MEET PLANE SURPRISE SURPRISE SURPRISE LOVE YOU ALWAYS REGGIE.

  Holy Mother of God, I thought. She’s bringing the slob with her!

  That did it, once and for all. If she thought for a minute I was going to chauffeur her and that chinless bucktoothed dishwater-colored son of a bitch around the way I’d chauffeured her around when she had me on a leash, she could think again. Let Athol worry about Lady Athol-to-be. Or was she already Lady Athol? Jesus, I could just picture the three of us at the airport: “Lord Athol, may I present the man I love? Curly, this is my husband, Lord Athol. Charmed I’m sure. Up yours, too.” The woman was crazy, that’s all. She had to be crazy. She deserved someone like Athol.

  Friday, her arrival date, was the day after I got the message in Marseille and the day after the repairs to the car were finished. I could easily have made it to the airport in plenty of time to meet BEA 078 in the afternoon. Instead, I called Rose the night before from a bar where a jukebox blared background music, let her think I was drunk and told her I was too busy to meet the plane. I’d probably be home in a day or two, maybe three, I said, and hung up. If she wanted to report to Reggie that I was carousing in a Marseille whorehouse, it was all right with me. Then I tried to get drunk but only managed to get sodden.

  I slept late the next day, most of the morning, and took my time about driving back to Mougins in the afternoon. I wanted to be sure Reggie and the slob were there when I nonchalantly walked in after a night of debauchery. I hadn’t shaved or bathed, my eyes were bloodshot, my shirt was dirty, anybody could see I’d been having a whole lot of fun. I even took along a bottle of cognac so I could belt a couple at the last minute and breathe booze-fumes on them. With care and forethought I planned how I would walk in, say an indifferent “Hi” to her, sneer at her choice of a husband and walk out of her life forever. Screw everybody, everything and all combinations of both.

  It was raining, not heavily but steadily, when I reached the villa. Even in the drizzle I could smell the fragrance of the blooming flower fields. For some reason, it was terribly depressing. A car I didn’t know, a Peugeot, was parked in the graveled turn-around in front of the house. Rose’s bike, which she pedaled into the village most mornings to do her marketing and kept stabled in a shed near her kitchen entrance the rest of the time, lay in the middle of the path that went around to the back of the house. It looked as if she had started to go into town, changed her mind and gone back into the house. But it was totally unlike her to leave the bike like that, even if it hadn’t been getting rained on.

  To postpone the moment when I would have to face Reggie and the slob long enough for my two belts of Dutch courage to take effect, I picked up the bike, wheeled it around to its shed, stabled it and banged through the kitchen door good and loud to step a few preliminary rounds with Rose before moving on to the main bout.

  Rose was beyond tattling on me. She lay on the floor of her kitchen in a lake of bright blood that stained most of the linoleum she had always kept clean and well-waxed. She was on her back, her mouth open in a frozen scream. Her throat had been slit. Not slashed across, but pierced in the way you pierce a man’s throat with a pig-sticker to slice the main blood vessels and cut his windpipe so he can’t yell for help before he bleeds to death. A steak knife, one of the villa’s own, lay in the blood near her outstretched hand. She had got it out before she died, but it had done her no good.

  Jean-Pierre was there, too. He hadn’t been able to get his steak knife out. It stood hilt-deep from his back, thrust upward and inward under the left shoulder blade to split his heart. I could see enough of his face, cheek down on the linoleum, to identify him. He had bled less than Rose, although enough.

  A photograph of the kitchen and bodies, in black and white, later appeared under the headlines on the front page of Nice-Matin for Saturday, February 14, 1959. I’ll always remember the date, for various reasons including the fact that it was Valentine’s Day as well as for the events narrated here. Just as I’ll always remember the scene in the kitchen as it photographed itself on my eyeballs in vivid Technicolor an instant before a familiar inflectionless voice from somewhere not within the scope of my vision said, “Vas-y. Straight ahead, through the door.”

  He never joked, he never made threats, he just gutted people when they crossed him. The wild boar with the razor-sharp tusks. I walked straight ahead as instructed, even though by a circumvention I could have avoided stepping in the stickiness of the blood on the floor. I was scared absolutely silly, both for myself and for what I might find on the other side of the door when I went through it.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Reggie was there. Unmurdered. Tied to a chair with what looked like several of my neckties, gagged with another. The gag was a tight one, stretching her lips at the corners, and her eyes were full of pain. Not fear. Nevah feeyah, as she might have said if she’d been able to say anything. The stiff British upper lip is a wonderful thing when you’ve got it. My own upper lip was fluttering in the breeze like a loose windowblind.

  There was no sign of the Athol character about, dead or alive, or baggage that could have b
een his. Hers, which I recognized except for a purse that had been emptied and tossed aside and one of those pencil-thin rolled British umbrellas, was dumped in a corner of the room as if it had been thrown there without much care for the arrangement. I still hadn’t been invited to turn around, or told to do anything else but march through the door. I marched, conscious of the stickiness of my shoe soles as well as the cause of it until I stood in front of Reggie’s chair.

  The room we were in we called the sunroom because it got a lot of sun in the morning when there was sun to be had. Two walls were of glass, overlooking the villa’s garden and the road that went down to the village, up over the hills to Grasse. The place had originally been a conservatory. We used it as a breakfast room, after having Venetian blinds installed to cut down some of the glare and give us privacy. With the blinds drawn, as they were when I came into the room from that awful slaughterhouse of a kitchen with a gun pointed at my kidneys—I didn’t have to see it, I could sense it with the antennae of the hairs standing stiff on the back of my neck—you could see out without being seen. The sunroom with its tiled floors impervious to blood, sweat, tears and prayer was an even better place to slit a brace of throats than the kitchen.

  “Untie the gag,” the inflectionless voice said behind me. “No tricks.”

  I untied the gag, having some trouble with my fingers. They fluttered like my upper lip. Reggie worked her mouth to ease the discomfort of her lips, then tried to smile. It wasn’t a success.

  “Hello, love,” she said. “You look dreadful. Been out on the tiles?”

  “Speak French,” The Boar said. “You talk.” This was to Reggie. “You listen,” was for me, although how we were supposed to know which order was which I can’t say. But we knew.