The Last Match (25 page)

“So, young man,” he said, when I first presented myself and my phony credentials. He called all males
jeunes homines,
all females
jeunes filles,
regardless of their age. “You want to interview me. Of what possible interest could I be to your readers?”

“A man who has come as far as you have from such an unpromising start in life as yours, sir, is the epitome of the American idea of success. We are great admirers of success.”

“How do you know of my beginnings, and how far 1 have come?”

“The basics of your career are a matter of public-knowledge, sir, as you must be aware. My readers would like to know more of the details.”

“You will let me see what you write before it is published?”

“Of course. I will also want photographs, but I have a man to take those. Any time at your convenience.”

“Very well. Where shall we begin?”

“To answer that, sir, I’d need to know how much of your time I may have.”

“As much as you like.” He waved a hand indifferently. “I have little else to do with it. Few activities but the accumulation of more money than I can possibly use are still left open to me.”

I must say I liked the old boy’s attitude about money, although the truth is I didn’t get even one lousy milliard of it. I didn’t even come close. But the stimulation and satisfaction of a good swindle are as much in the preliminaries to the grab as in the grab itself; in some ways, more so. Setting up the store, telling the tale, sinking the gaff, teasing the mark down to the finishing wire, all these things call for the exercise of artistry, adaptability, sound judgment, ingenuity, applied psychology, steady nerves, showmanship, gall, further talents. While the operation is going on you’re like a gambler in a game where the stakes are high enough to make you sweat. Win or lose, one thing you don’t get is bored. I’m not now talking about tired old cut-and-dried cons like the Spanish Prisoner bunco, the Wire House, the Envelope Switch, the Money-Making Machine, hocuses that always follow the same pattern. They still work and will continue to work because Barnum underestimated the boob birthrate by about ninety percent. A
good
con is one you build to order around a mark who isn’t a natural-born sucker but a shrewd, successful, hard-headed wise old fox like François André and while I didn’t get his money I got a hell of a lot of enjoyment out of figuring ways and means to take it away from him. Since my plans never got off the ground, or even shaped themselves fully in my mind before I had to give them up, there’s nothing more to be said about what they might have been.

However, as a start I had to know a whole lot about him that I didn’t know; his strengths, weaknesses, idiosyncrasies, vanities, traits of character, the other things. I got him started talking about himself easily enough, but he began as far back as he could remember, when he was rolling barrels higher than himself. To cover the next seventy-five years even sketchily would have taken seventy-five years. I asked him please to stick to the dramatic highlights of his career.

He said, “Well, once I bluffed four kings in a poker game. Is that a dramatic highlight?”

“Yes, sir,” I said. “It certainly is. But I wouldn’t call four kings exactly a bluffing hand.”

“No, no. Four real kings, all at one of my tables. Belgium, Portugal, Denmark and Sweden.” He laughed at the memory. “I had a small pair, as I remember. At least two of Their Highnesses had better hands. But they couldn’t believe that a poor barrel-maker’s boy would have the temerity, the brass, to challenge them without an adequacy to challenge with, and I took their money by throwing in an enormous bet any one of them could have had with a call.
Lèse
majesté
,
they would have said if I had let them know the truth. Of course I never did.”

“You sound like a fine poker-player, sir.”

“Experienced, you could say. I will give you another gambling secret that may be of value to you, young man. It is:
L’audace, l’audace, et toujours l’audace.
If you do not have the courage to risk whatever must be risked to win the stakes of the game, then you are best off out of it. Because a bolder player, which is to say a better player, will beat you every time if you play against him long enough.”

“It sounds like good advice from an expert, sir.”

“Thank you.” He smiled at me in a gentle, friendly way. “But let us return to the subject of bluffing, which holds a strong fascination for me. What are you going to say when I tell you that I know your credentials are false and you are in no way what you have represented yourself to be? Eh?”

This small bombshell fell in my lap after I had been interviewing him steadily for three days, several hours each day, and my photographer had taken up several further hours of his time with picture-snapping. Andre had at all times been gracious, cooperative and charming. He was
still
gracious, cooperative and charming, by God. At least if he felt otherwise inside he didn’t show it. He was quite a man, the old barrel-maker’s boy, as well as one hell of a poker player.

I sat facing him across his desk, my notebook spread open in front of me, a pencil in my hand for note-taking. I closed the book, stuck it in my pocket, put the pencil away and stood up.

“I would say that my chances of convincing you that you are wrong are poor,” I said. “I’ll not waste any more of your time. Thank you for what you have given me, and good afternoon.”

“Sit down,” he said amiably. “You aren’t wasting my time. Or your own. What did you have in mind in mounting this masquerade?”

“I should think that would be obvious, sir. Your money.”

“That
is
obvious. By what means did you hope to take it from me?”

He was so pleasant, so frankly interested in what I’d been working up to, that I told him what there was to tell. Namely, not much, except that he’d looked like a good mark for a score if I could work out the right pitch. There wasn’t anything he could do with the confession that he couldn’t do without it. If he wanted to do anything.

He said, “Young man, there is a basic error in your psychology. To swindle anybody, it is necessary that you present him with a temptation. Your fish must have greed in his soul for the lure that will bring him into your trap. Is it not so?”

“If you mean to suggest that you can’t cheat an honest man—”

“I don’t. Honest men are cheated every day. My games are honest, and I have been cheated many times. My roulette wheels and card tables represent my greed for the money of the people who choose to play at them. They make me cheatable. They are the tangible evidence of my greed—as it once existed.” He was still gently amiable, still smiling, but somehow he managed to look sad. “I have no children. My wife is well provided for if I should die before she does. I am in good health and good appetite for a man of my age. I have more money than I can possibly count. With such great wealth, so few desires left to gratify, what can I possibly want that I do not possess? What can you tempt me with that you are able to give me, or even pretend to be able to give me?”

“Not a thing,” I said. “I see your point. I could never get your money today. I might have, years ago.”

He nodded. “Possibly. But it would have been difficult. I am always cautious. And never trusting.”

It had been mere mechanical routine for his protective force to begin running a check on me as soon as the old boy got word that I wanted to meet him. He had known that I and my credentials were phonies within twenty-four hours after I first entered his office. But he had been bored and curious at first, later hopeful of being able to use me in a scheme of his own if I lived up to his expectations. All the time I’d been getting into
his
character, he’d been getting into mine. Now he made his own pitch.

He said, “While I no longer have greed in my soul, I do have a peasant’s stubborn determination to cling to what is my own. That is bred in my bones. I would like to enlist your help in a venture for which a certain deviousness I detect in your character will be useful. You will be well rewarded, and I believe you may enjoy the occupation I have in mind for you. Will you cooperate with me, young man?”

I said, “Sir, I believe I am your pigeon. Before I commit myself, however, tell me the tale.”

What I really said was,
“Glissez-moi
l’appât
.”
(He spoke no English to amount to anything.) It means, Slip me the come-on, more or less, and is best said out of the side of the mouth without moving the lips. He smiled and told me the tale.

He had built the popular summer resort of La Baule, in Brittany, out of a fishing village, a sand dune and a fine empty beach. It had cost him a potful, but he gained large income-tax advantages from investing his profits in such projects, and of course they returned even larger profits to him in time. From his viewpoint, which I could easily understand, the project had been worthwhile for the enjoyment of doing it. It gave him an interest, and activity, other than watching the money roll in. It was a pleasure to him to roll the money out and see the town, his town, grow with his planting; its sproutings of casino, hotels,
boîtes
,
golf course, tennis courts, parks, pretty villas, all the incidentals. He wanted to do the same kind of thing on an even bigger scale with the Costa Smeralda, on the northeast coast of Sardinia; the so-called Emerald Coast. (He didn’t live long enough, but the project was ultimately carried out by the Aga Khan, young Karim.)

To do it as he wanted to do it, he had to buy the whole until-then undeveloped coast outright, and he knew damn good and well what would happen to prices if word got about that François André‘s millions were bidding for the land. He was willing to pay a fair price, even a generous price, but not a sky-high stick-up. What he wanted me to do, since I was already in the land-buying business, was front for him while ostensibly fronting for an American syndicate with plenty of dollars to put into land speculation but no firm ideas what or where the speculation should be.

I couldn’t grab it fast enough. It was a con without any of the risks or drawbacks of a con. Even Reggie couldn’t disapprove if I brought it off. I didn’t even care what kind of a score I made out of it for myself, it was that attractive. Sure, it would lack some of the spice of a real swindle, but on the other hand it had interesting fringe benefits. I sat down to write Reggie that I had a new and interesting land deal coming up, that I missed her, that I was well, that I hoped she was well and that our
bonne a tout faire
at the Villa Parfumée had had a toothache but was no longer complaining about it.

I couldn’t think of anything else to report. How the hell people manage to fill up four pages of stationery, letter after letter after letter, beats me. I wrote about twice a week, and all I had to say could have been put on the back of the stamp. Reggie wrote every day, acres of driddle about death duties and chancery courts and probate courts and entail and solicitors and her family estate down in dear old Kent and what people I’d never heard of were doing. Cecil and Bunny and Tony and Roger and Lord Poopsy and Lady Bickerstaff, Christ knows who or what else. She never repeated herself, either, except in her regular sign-off: I love you Curly. Once, only, I wrote back, I love you, too, Reggie. Her reply covered six pages instead of the usual four. The two extra ones crisped me like so much fried bacon for having the temerity to he to her in writing. It was even worse, she said, than lying to her orally.

I didn’t tell her about the fringe benefits of André‘s job because they would have been too hard to explain. His people had already done all the necessary spade work for me, working very quietly. The biggest and most important piece of the property he wanted for his project was owned by a wealthy Italian industrialist named Petruzzi. It had been in his family for generations without exploitation. He and his signora spent a lot of time on the Cote d’Azur, much of it in André‘s gambling rooms and other playground areas. Petruzzi was the kind of industrialist who let other people be industrious for him, although I don’t mean to imply he was any worse than the rest of us capitalists. Actually he was a nice guy, good company when I got to know him.

I did that easily enough at the baccarat tables. He was a nut for baccarat.
Tout va,
the big no-limit game.

His signora, Stefana, was also attractive in a kind of full-blown, spaghetti-fed way. She called me Cici, pronounced chee-chee, short for
cicisbeo.
The word is often used in Italy as roughly equivalent to gigolo, although strictly speaking a
cicisbeo
is a married woman’s public escort who may or may not be her lover in private as well. Because Stefi was easily bored by the gambling that had her husband hooked, she got her kicks out of pretending we were having a heavy affair behind his back. I would take her to some
boîte
to dance—at Petruzzi’s request; he wanted to play baccarat, she wanted to play something else—where she would cling fast and wiggle her crotch against me on the dance floor, croon Neapolitan
spumoni
in my ear and whisper, “Ah, Cici,
amore,
do you burn so with passion for me, then?” Glued to me the way she stayed glued when we danced, she knew damn good and well I was burning with something for somebody. It couldn’t very well be concealed from her. She was only teasing, it never went any further than that, but I could neither brush her off nor try to follow through. Staying on the right side of Petruzzi was too important. But Stefi had me charged up for action the way they charge a stallion on a horse-breeding farm with a brood-mare in heat to get him snorting for the lady who is going to get the real workout. When Odile came along—but events first, alibis afterward.

To assist me with Petruzzi, André gave me one of his personal cards. On it he wrote, in a beautiful clear flowing hand you would never think to associate with a

barrel-maker’s boy,
Le porteur est notre invit
é
.
That’s all but my God, what a passport it was. I couldn’t pay a check or a bill or buy a drink or a meal or anything else anywhere within the old man’s empire. Every casino has one or more spotters always watching the people who come in to play, on the lookout for sharpies and troublemakers but with an eye open as well for the big wheels. In France these housemen are called
physiognomistes,
and they never forget a face or its connotations. The first time I flashed André‘s card at one of his pleasure domes—it was the same winter casino in Cannes where he had his birdnest office up under the eaves—the receptionist’s eyes widened slightly before she bowed and said,
“Bienvenu, m’sieur.”
I don’t know what went on after that, but before I left the gambling rooms a couple of hours later everybody in the joint from the
caissier
to the
chasseurs
who empty the ashtrays knew I was with it, for it and of it. I couldn’t even tip the hatcheck girl, or the doorman who called me a cab. When you can’t do
that
on the Cote d’Azur, you are really riding a reserved seat on the gravy train.