The Last Match Read Online Free PDF

worth something less than seventy-five cents American. I said, “What did you have in mind for the profits from my thousand dollars and your three hundred francs? Something like a fifty-fifty split?”
    “Certainly not. I concede that you should have more than half. Say seventy-five twenty-five? I have to do the cooking aboard the boat.”
    “Say nine hundred and ninety-nine to one if you serve soup the same way you serve whiskey. Anyway, I haven’t got anything like a thousand dollars left. I’ve been living on it for a couple of months now. Let’s start over again.”
    As it worked out, I was able to get up a good part of the thousand by cashing in the gold cigarette case, the wristwatch and the wardrobe Emmaline dear had bought me, including my elegant evening clothes (still with stray bits of confetti in the pockets as a reminder of the charity ball and Reggie’s character-strengthening adversity). It left me stripped down to pretty much the assets I had on my back, but with those big profits to come on the investment I wasn’t worried. Jean-Pierre begged, borrowed or embezzled enough to sweeten his share of the pot a bit, and we went aboard the cigarette-runner in Marseille harbor.
    It was a converted British navy cutter with a souped-up engine and a false name that Jean-Pierre and I had to paint over its rightful registry as soon as we were at sea. Its captain was a hard-case Corsican who went by the name of Le Sanglier. A sanglier is a wild boar, of which both Corsica and Sardinia still have respectable populations. They are among the most dangerous, ugly and single-minded killers in existence if you challenge them. Some sportsmen choose to do so with a lance and a pal standing backup with a rifle in case the lance misses. A sanglier will not only rip your guts out with his tusks if he can get them into you, he will eat your guts afterward for lunch. To look at, this one was no exception. All he lacked was the tusks sticking up out of his lower jaw. He had been away three times for murder, according to Jean-Pierre.
    The mate—I guess you could call him that since he was the one who yelled at Jean-Pierre and me to get off our culs whenever anything had to be done aboard the cutter—was another Corsican, a relatively benevolent type who called himself La Planche; The Plank. He had only been away for murder once, which made him something of a sissy. All the gangstaires and hard characters doing business on the Cote d’Azur were Corsicans, great boys for a nice friendly vendetta with their pals when they weren’t knocking off other people. The Boar and The Plank were typical specimens. They were the ship’s complement except for Jean-Pierre, me and the engineer, who liked engines better than he liked people and mostly stayed below playing with his toys. If he had a name or nickname I never knew it, although I suppose the French cops did.
    We put out of Marseille, stopped briefly at Barcelona for some reason that took The Boar ashore for a while but was none of my business and did not make me nosy. I am never nosy in any way about the doings of tough mecs like The Boar and The Plank. Two days and three nights later we put in at Gibraltar to fuel up for business. We shipped what seemed to me like an over-large deckload of high-test gasoline, in drums, as well as topping up the cutter’s fuel tanks. I was still keeping my nose strictly to myself, but The Plank bought a couple of bottles of something while we were at Gib, and while he didn’t offer to share with his hardworking crew it made him talkative enough to explain why we needed all the extra essence.
    “Can’t always find it in Tangier,” he said. “Then you’re in trouble. The Spaniards, dirty bastards, they run customs patrols out of Ceuta. As if they owned the Mediterranean. Even when you’re beyond the territorial limit, they come after you. With machine guns, no less. There are also pirates who cruise around looking for honest commençants , to