The Last Match Read Online Free PDF Page A

icily, “—common little guttersnipe! If you ever have the temerity to touch me again I’ll see you in jail!”
    I was beginning to understand what she meant by the challenge of adversity. I took my sore tongue, my sore jaw and my shattered illusions out of there without any further encouragement from her. She had a nice right-hand punch. I don’t know about her left. I never put myself in a position where she could hit me with it.
    After that I didn’t see her for a while. I was engaged with some entrepreneurs in making a score. This was back in 1955, when Tangier still functioned as an international free port, before Morocco took it over. You could buy any kind of action you wanted in Tangier in those days; women, boys, dope, booze, free-market money both real and counterfeit, gold, contraband diamonds, anything else portable. There were no import duties, no taxes, no trade restrictions of any kind and not too much policing by the Belgian flics who were supposed to keep order around town. Americans, like other nationals of the governing powers, had extraterritorial rights, too. If you did get into trouble with the law in Tangier—it was pretty hard to do, but it could be done—the judge of your case was one of your fellow-countrymen, usually your own consul. Normally he’d pass sentence by telling you to haul ass out of town before nightfall and not come back. It was a nice setup all round, if you didn’t get stabbed in a back alley for your pocket-money. That could happen, too.
    One of the best buys in Tangier then was American cigarettes. A pack sold for the equivalent of about fifty cents U.S. on the black market in France and Italy. In case lots on the dock in Tangier you could buy the same pack for about eight cents. Since it was a run of only three days and three nights in a reasonably fast boat from Tangier to the French coast, a lot of smuggling went on. Much of the contraband was landed southeast of Marseille, where the shoreline is cut by dozens of little calanques, narrow inlets big enough to harbor a good-sized power boat where it won’t attract too much attention. I had a chance to ship aboard one of the contrahandiers as a deckhand and, if I wanted to invest my own money and take my own risks, become one of the minor partners in the venture. For services rendered, like swabbing the decks and heaving the trade goods.
    I heard about it from Jean-Pierre, a friend of mine who had been a sous-bartender at the Martinez until Cedric caught him watering the Scotch to make up for what he was pilfering. He had connections, including the kind necessary to convert Emmaline dear’s thousand dollar check into francs at the black market rate. He hadn’t clipped me too badly on the deal, so I knew he was fairly honest, for a crook. He thought, or hoped, that a wealthy playboy like me could be persuaded to spring the necessary investment and cut him in for a piece because he was such a sweet fellow. He was décavé , as they say. Flat. Stony.
    “Figure-toi,” he said, over a beer he had persuaded me to buy him. He spoke better English than I did French, but I preferred to practice my French whenever possible. Since I was putting out for the beer, he obliged me. The dollars-and-cents figures are my own translation of what he said in francs, to make it easier to follow. “Figure-toi. With a thousand dollars we buy twenty cases, twelve thousand packs. At retail, that’s six thousand dollars, five thousand clear profit. Even if we wholesale them to get our money back fast, we can get thirty-five cents a pack easy. Let’s see, wait a minute, that works out at—”
    “You wait a minute,” I said. “What’s all this about ‘we’ and ‘our money’? What are you planning to put up?”
    “Every sou I have in the world.” He looked hurt. I suppose the way he had looked when they caught him watering the Scotch.
    “How much is that?”
    “Three hundred francs.”
    Three hundred francs was then, at the old rate,