When a handsome swindler working the French Riviera meets a beautiful heiress on the beach at Cannes, sparks fly. But so do bullets—and soon he’s forced to flee the country with both the police and the heiress on his trail.
From the casinos of Monaco to the jungles of Brazil, from Tangier to Marrakech to Peru, the chase is on. And not even a veteran of Monte Carlo’s baccarat tables would dare to place odds on where it will end . . .
“A master hand at dangers and hair-raising near misses.” —San Francisco Chronicle
“The pulp era may have been over, but Dodge was still writing like it was in full swing, peppering the story with snappy patter. . . . Great fun.” —Booklist
When a handsome swindler working the French Riviera meets a beautiful heiress on the beach at Cannes, sparks fly. But so do bullets—and soon he’s forced to flee the country with both the police and the heiress on his trail.
From the casinos of Monaco to the jungles of Brazil, from Tangier to Marrakech to Peru, the chase is on. And not even a veteran of Monte Carlo’s baccarat tables would dare to place odds on where it will end . . .
“A master hand at dangers and hair-raising near misses.” —San Francisco Chronicle
“The pulp era may have been over, but Dodge was still writing like it was in full swing, peppering the story with snappy patter. . . . Great fun.” —Booklist
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Overview
When a handsome swindler working the French Riviera meets a beautiful heiress on the beach at Cannes, sparks fly. But so do bullets—and soon he’s forced to flee the country with both the police and the heiress on his trail.
From the casinos of Monaco to the jungles of Brazil, from Tangier to Marrakech to Peru, the chase is on. And not even a veteran of Monte Carlo’s baccarat tables would dare to place odds on where it will end . . .
“A master hand at dangers and hair-raising near misses.” —San Francisco Chronicle
“The pulp era may have been over, but Dodge was still writing like it was in full swing, peppering the story with snappy patter. . . . Great fun.” —Booklist
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781626816046 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Diversion Books |
| Publication date: | 09/01/2018 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 319 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
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CHAPTER 1
The guy who was waiting for me in my room merely wanted to blow my head off, that's all. To teach me a lesson, as it turned out. He used a little short-barreled revolver, a thirty-two I think it was, but he didn't know how to hold it to keep the barrel from flipping up every time he pulled the trigger. The kick of the shots lifted the bullets over my head or over my shoulder or somewhere else that wasn't into me. He got off three of them before I could do anything about it.
There's something to be said for combat training even if there's nothing at all to say for the rest of the schooling they give you in the U.S. Army. After you've been bounced hard enough and often enough by experts because you're not reacting fast enough, your reflexes tend to sharpen up. And when you're scared silly by a gun going blam, blam, blam in your face they get even sharper. Given a window to jump out of I'd have been gone with the wind like a soaring rocket. But the guy stood between me and the escape in that direction, and in the other direction I had just trapped myself by closing a hotel-room door behind me before putting on the lights so he could see to pot me. In the circumstances there wasn't much to do except throw my room key in his face and go for his ankles before he fired number four.
It worked. He was small, middle-aged, nothing much to handle. I took the gun away from him and sat on his chest. He began to cry.
He looked and was dressed like an American. I thought I might have seen him someplace before. He didn't have the kind of face to remember. After my heart had eased back down my throat to where it belonged, I said, "What did you want to go and do that for?"
"Mildred," he blubbered, the tears puddling in his eyes. "Sh-she's going to l-leave me, and I l-l-love her."
"Who's Mildred?" I shook the live shells out of the revolver to put them in my pocket where they wouldn't kill anybody.
"Don't you dare mock me, damn you!" He was both indignant and tearful at the same time, but more indignant than tearful.
"No, honest. I don't know any Mildreds."
"You're a liar!"
"All right, I'm a liar. I still don't know any Mildreds. If I let you up, will you please tell me what it's all about without pulling a knife?"
He gulped. It sounded affirmative. "But you're still a liar."
"I conceded that. I still don't know any Mildreds."
I gave him a hand to pull him to his feet. He said automatically, "Thank you." I said, "You're welcome. Here's your pistol. It isn't loaded."
"Thank you," he said again. He was a polite little murderer, I must say.
The cops were there within a few minutes after the shooting. The hotel was one of the best in Cannes, on the Croisette, and there were always a couple of flics out in front to keep the crowds moving whenever somebody important checked in, like a movie star. Before they hauled him away I made another attempt to find out what it was all about. All I could get from him was that Mildred had said she no longer loved him and was going to leave him. It was all my fault. So he had decided to shoot me, to retain her love. Simple.
Even simpler was the fact that I really didn't know any Mildreds. I checked up on the guy while the cops had him — they took the pistol away, fined him and turned him loose three days later — and learned that he was registered at the hotel with his wife. MacCullin, their name was. The concierge pointed the wife out to me, a so-so number with orange hair and a figure that had seen better days.
I did, too, know her, although not by name. We had been fellow guests at a party somewhere, Eden Roc I think it was, where everybody had had more than enough to drink. Mildred and I ended up in a garden for fun and games under the stars. Nothing serious came of it; a spell of catch-as-catch-can wrestling, heavy breathing, shared lipstick, that was it. The garden was too crowded with other wrestlers for anything more. I may have told her, I probably did tell her as anyone but a cad would tell a lady he's been grappling with, that I would love a return bout in more sheltered circumstances, but that was the end of it. I didn't ask if she had a husband, she didn't volunteer the information, nobody jealous came looking for her. Now she had fingered me to him for reasons of her own I didn't want to know about.
When MacCullin came out of hock and returned to the hotel I got him alone and bent his ear.
"Mac, pal," I said. "Listen. I don't know what's with your wife, but there's nothing between us. I've never even spoken to her. Honest."
"You're a liar. She told me —"
"Hear me and read me. I don't care what she told you, there's nothing in it. I give you my solemn word of honor. If that isn't enough for you, figure it out for yourself. Would I be playing around with your wife in the same hotel where I've got a woman of my own? She's mad crazy jealous of me, and if I even looked at another doll she'd cut me right off at the pockets. I'd have to go to work. You wouldn't want that to happen to a pal, would you?"
"You're not living together," he said suspiciously. "Not in your room you're not. I looked around."
"She has to maintain appearances." I gave him the old man-to-man eye. "You know how it is, an older woman and a young guy like me. Your must have seen us together; a nice looking lady, dresses well, maybe a bit on the plumpish side —"
"I thought she was your mother."
"And you were going to shoot the boy of a nice lady like that? Shame on you!"
"I wasn't really trying to shoot you," he said lamely. "I just wanted to scare you."
"You scared me. Don't do it again, please, buddy, huh? You're going to have to pay for the bullet holes, too, you know."
"I won't do it again. I really thought she was your mother. I'm sorry."
We shook hands and had a drink on it in the bar. I looked at myself in the mirror over the back bar and wondered if I'd do better without a profile.
One of the curses of my formative years was an overdose of prettiness. It is mine no more, thank God, age and a receding hairline being as erosive as they are, but mention of this early failing is necessary because of what it did to my youth. As a child I was a lady-killer at the age of six. Women loved my mop of brown curls, my brown calf's eyes with the long curly lashes they all envied me for, my cute button nose, all the rest. (The cute nose got unbuttoned in later years, but even that didn't change things much.) With the cunning of the deceptive little bastard I was I learned to capitalize on these assets, and did so at every opportunity. My parents should have drowned me, but didn't.
As an adolescent I was an unmitigated young prick, like most adolescents, but a prick with charm I had cultivated since childhood. Girls were easy for me, including other guys' girls. This led to trouble from time to time with one of the other guys, who would feel justified in trying to beat on me. I was big enough to beat back, bigger than the average, so I didn't take as many lickings as I was entitled to. In college I began to grow up some, learn different values, but the twig had been bent and the tree was so inclined. Women, including other guys' wives, were as easy for me as girls had been. I even developed a talent for slickering husbands out of beating on me when they should have been beating on me. I became, in short, a college-trained con man; amateur skill, but with all the qualifications to turn professional at any time. Two years of compulsory servitude in the army only deferred my eventual blossoming in the full flower of fulfillment; first, briefly, as a gigolo, later an off-and-on jailbird, in time and with experience as a hustler, bunco steerer and peddler of phony gold bricks.
All this is less by way of mea culpa than to explain how and why things happened as they did. When I had finished my two years of army service, during which I perfected various techniques for violating the rules against fraternizing with the cooperative fräuleins of West Germany, I took my discharge there, got a passport in Frankfurt and bummed my way around Europe on the cheap while my severance pay lasted. I ended up on the French Riviera because I had heard you could sleep comfortably on the beaches there even in wintertime. (You can't.) My cash was about finished.
In Monte Carlo I decided to turn it back into a bankroll by investing it in le jeu de craps-game. I'd done all right with dice in the army and during the summers I worked as a roustabout for carnie shows, but a house game is not the same as bouncing the bones on a blanket. Monte Carlo's jeu de craps-game chewed me up and spat me out, bloodless, in about half an hour. I didn't even have cigarette money left, or bus fare to get out of town.
That didn't bother me much. I had tapped out before without dying of it. I was young, healthy, able-bodied. Something would turn up. I went out into the casino gardens overlooking the Mediterranean, hoping to find a long cigarette butt. (Casinos are too fast about replacing used ashtrays with clean ashtrays, I suppose for fear that a smoldering butt may burn the green felt.) A lady who had been watching the game — and me, as I was aware — followed me out.
The shores of the south of France are littered with a flotsam of lonely women, cast up there by divorce, widowhood, dissatisfaction with the availabilities, other reasons. They are Americans or British, in large part, and they all have a fair amount of money; enough to run with the company they keep. You can see half a dozen of them around the roulette tables in any casino on an average night. Because they are both rich and lonely they are fair game for the kind of guy who is on the make for a moneyed mama. I wasn't one of these, and I'm pretty sure the lady knew it. She may have had some idea that I was going to blow my brains out, as in those stories you read, mostly fiction, about desperate gamblers broken on the wicked wheels of Monaco. She came over to where I was sitting on a bench looking despondent only because I was casing the ground around the bench for usable butts, my head and shoulders down.
"You lost all your money, didn't you?" she said.
I said, "Yes, ma'am. Although it wasn't much to lose."
"You needn't keep your chin up for me, poor boy. I know how you must feel. Here."
She had opened her purse while she was talking. She took out a thick wad of mille notes — this was in the days of the old franc, when French money had big figures on it although not much more buying power than it has today — and shoved it at me. "Take it. I won it this afternoon."
"You can lose it just as easy tomorrow afternoon, ma'am. Thanks all the same."
"Take it," she insisted. "Only promise me you won't gamble with it."
I couldn't read her at all. Here's this dame, middle-aged, not good-looking, not bad-looking, a motherly type, well dressed, obviously in the bucks, pushing money at me she'd won gambling but didn't want me to gamble with. I said, "Lady, thanks very much. I appreciate your offer, but I can't take your money. Even if I did, I'd gamble with it."
"Don't talk back to me, boy," she said. "I'm old enough to be your mother." And damned if she didn't drop the wad of bills in my lap and start back toward the casino.
I had to go after her. In those days I had principles; a few, anyway. She flatly refused to take the money back. I could call it a loan, if I wanted to, but I had to keep it. And no gambling.
So what do you do around a gambling casino if you can't gamble? It ended with her taking me home in a car she had rented for the day to her hotel in Cannes, there to install me in a room of my own and buy me the best dinner I had eaten in Europe, with a bottle of Gewürtztraminer that must have set her back at least ten bucks. She said she was celebrating her birthday.
"Although I'm not going to tell you which one," she said girlishly. "So don't ask me."
"The twenty-first, I'll bet," I said. "They wouldn't let you into the casino if you were any younger. I'm sorry I didn't know about it sooner. I'd have bought you a present. With your money."
"Oh, please. Let's not talk about money." She put her hand over mine on the table. "Dear boy. You've made me very happy today."
Like that, I was a gigolo. See how things can creep up on you when you're not looking?
Her name was Mrs. Emmaline Stokes; a widow. She wasn't crazy mad jealous of me at all, just motherly. As a matter of fact she was kind of proud of me because the girls gave me the eye all the time. We never slept together. At first I thought that was what she wanted of me, but when I made a few exploratory passes she reacted as if I had suggested incest. She was lonely, she was rich, she liked having a good-looking young man paying attention to her. Particularly a young man whose language she could understand. It didn't matter that I was more of the age and temperament to be interested in the fifty thousand cute poupettes of all sizes, shapes, colors and nationalities bulging their bikinis all the way from Menton to St. Tropez, not to mention a somewhat smaller group untrammeled by bikinis or anything else who congregated in an open-house nudist rookery on the Île du Levant. Emmaline dear was satisfied with me as an acceptable escort, and wanted nothing more. She bought me the wardrobe I needed, evening clothes, an expensive wristwatch, a gold cigarette case, other things, and supplied me with the money to take her places. She never required an accounting, or questioned expenditures, or embarrassed either of us by making me ask for money when I ran out. She was a kind, generous woman, and I liked her. Ours was the relationship of a Boy Scout helping a nice little old lady across the street to the gambling hell.
Then I met Nemesis. It wasn't her real name, but I didn't know her real name when she first pointed the accusing finger of retribution at me, and I got to think of her that way before I knew anything about her.
I was sunning myself on the beach in front of the Martinez, Emmaline dear's hotel in Cannes. She had gone back to the hotel to call on Uncle John, as she put it with maidenly modesty. I was lying on my back with my eyes closed when I became aware that a shadow had fallen on my face. I opened my eyes and looked up at this girl, woman — she was about my age, in the mid-twenties — looking down at me. She wore a rubber bathing-cap with the ear-tabs turned up so she could hear, a bathing suit on the conservative side by local standards, and she was easy to look at. Nothing to make a man leap to his feet and lunge, but all right.
"Hello, Curlilocks," she said. "Where's your mother?"
She had a British accent to spread on a crumpet. It was a kind of hoity-toity drawl that sounded as if she were inwardly amused about something secret.
"If you mean the lady whose company I'm keeping, she isn't my mother. She went where ladies can't send someone else to go for them. She'll be back in a few minutes."
"I was afraid of that." She smiled at me, and I must say she had lovely teeth. A lot of Englishwomen don't. "Is that your natural hair, or do you do it up in curlers?"
"I give myself home permanents," I said. "I'm one of the Toni Twins."
I didn't know why she was giving me the needle, but after two years under a tough top sergeant I was callused to needling. She didn't bother me too much.
"I'll wager you curl the hair on your chest, too."
"As anyone can see at a glance. Now push off and go pester someone else, will you? I'm sleeping."
I closed my eyes. She said, in the same hoity-toity drawl, "You contemptible little spiv!"
I opened my eyes again, wondering, What the hell? I'd never seen her before, to recognize. She might have been around, but she wasn't the type to catch my eye easily.
"What's a spiv?" I asked her.
"You are. A wretched spiv."
With that she walked down to the water, fixed her ear-tabs, fastened her chin-strap, dived in and swam out to a float anchored off the beach. She swam easily and well, a kind of inwardly amused drawl although of course I mean crawl.
About then Emmaline dear came back from Uncle John's place and plopped down on the sand beside me.
"Who's the girl you were talking to?" she asked, with no particular curiosity.
"I don't know. I never saw her before. I'd just as soon never see her again, too."
"Why?"
"She called me a wretched spiv."
"A spiv?"
"A spiv."
"Well, I don't think that was very nice of her, whatever it means." She patted my hand comfortingly where it lay on the sand. "Dear boy."
I found out what a spiv was from Cedric, the Martinez' head bartender. He was British. According to him, spivs were originally by-products of World War II, when England was on short rations for everything and black-marketeering was big business. Spiv was the name for a black marketeer. When black markets went out, spivs moved into other lines of business the way mobsters in the U.S.A. went into other lines of business when Prohibition was repealed. Spiv came to mean any kind of grifter at all, although usually with an overtone of small-time attached. A peanut-pincher, as they say around the carnie lots. A cheap chiseler, in effect.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The Last Match"
by .
Copyright © 1973 David Dodge.
Excerpted by permission of Diversion Publishing Corp..
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
The Barnes & Noble ReviewHere's an unexpected treat for pulp noir aficionados: More than 30 years after the passing of David Dodge (author of 1952's To Catch a Thief, et al.), The Last Match -- a previously unpublished novel lost among his papers after his death and unearthed decades later by a research librarian -- is being released by Hard Case Crime!
Narrated by a handsome, self-assured con man who never reveals his true name, the novel begins in southern France in the mid-1950s. Prowling the beaches of Cannes for a rich mark, the smooth-talking American sets his sights on a pretty British aristocrat, the Honorable Regina "Reggie" Forbes-Jones. But the sharp-tongued heiress ("She had a tongue like a riding crop, and she used it") sees right through his scam and promptly dismisses him. Yet after "Curly" (Reggie's nickname for him) gets himself arrested, Reggie inexplicably bails him out. Years later, Curly is released from a Brazilian jail after another botched job, only to be tracked down by the Honorable Miss Forbes-Jones again. Is it true love, pure hate, or something in between?
While The Last Match seems a little dated in some respects (specifically the unrealistic characterization of certain female characters), the meat of Dodge's final novel is pure pulp noir. Featuring a cast of cold-blooded grifters, scam artists, con men, and femmes fatales, this tightly plotted, globe-hopping adventure will have readers guessing until the very last pages just who is playing whom. A heartfelt afterword by the author's daughter makes this not only an unearthed treasure but also a touching tribute. Paul Goat Allen