The Last Match by David Dodge Page A

own voice. She listened, smoking quietly.
    I said, “I served two years in the United States Army. Not voluntarily. I was drafted. I had a tough regular Army sergeant who made a point of being hard on us draftees. I think he was the toughest sergeant in the whole army. He gave us extra pack drill, extra calisthenics, extra field drill, extra everything he could load on to us. He kept saying it was for our own good. To make soldiers of us lousy civilians.”
    “Curly, I—”
    “Please, madame. There’s not much more to the story. I never complained. Anybody who did complain suffered for it. He called them whiners, conscript crybabies, other things, and thought up extra extras especially for them. I took all he could hand out for two years, because I had no choice. Then, when I got my discharge and had all my clearances, my civilian clothes on me again, I called him out of a bar where he was having a beer with his pals, all regular army sergeants, and while they stood around and watched, madame, I beat the hell out of him. With my fists. For his own good. So he would be able to appreciate the viewpoint of us lousy civilians. But I didn’t hate him, or wish him ill.”
    I could hear the lid of the ashtray in the seat-arm where she was sitting open and close. Nothing more, until she said, in the same depressed tone, “Take me back to the hotel, please.”
    “Yes, madame. Shall I return by way of the Moyenne Corniche?”
    “I don’t care. Any way you like.”
    “Thank you, madame.”
    I drove her back to the hotel. No conversation en route.
    The next day, I think it was, I got my American clothes. I wasn’t going to give Reggie any remote chance of seeing me in them, any more than Bernard gave the Nice cops a chance to catch him in the uniform he had been cashiered out of. We met by agreement in Antibes, where he had taken a room at a convenient distance from the marquis’ villa on the Cap. He had already got my false papers; where, he didn’t say and I didn’t ask, any more than I had asked where my new wardrobe came from. The papers, like the clothes, looked pretty good. We climbed into his big Jag and set out for the field of enterprise.
    The marquis was a slight, extremely good-looking man, snappily dressed in tailor-made sport clothes, clearly vain of his appearance and so gullible that he didn’t even want to look at my phony identification. It was enough that his good friend M. l’Inspecteur vouched for me. After all, if he couldn’t trust M. l’Inspecteur and M. l’Inspecteur’s judgment, whom could he trust? Bernard and I both agreed with the implication, but also we both insisted that I be allowed to produce my bona fides for his inspection. Soviet spies had been known to pretend to be what they were not, as we were sure M. le Marquis was aware. A man could not be too careful. He immediately got a hunted look, as if he was about to peer fearfully over his shoulder, and said he certainly was aware of such things. But he was so vain that he wouldn’t admit he didn’t understand what my false credentials said when he tried to read their English wording.
    The marquise was somewhat sharper, I suspected, although not much sharper. Not if she had let her husband hock her jewels to pay for his second sandbox. I didn’t offer to show her my papers. I had a feeling she would have sneered at them because they weren’t written in French. She was the haughty type; as vain, I thought, of the title she had acquired by marriage as the marquis was of his good looks, expensive wardrobe and handsome villa. I’d like to have seen Reggie put the marquise down, just for the hell of it. She wasn’t any better-looking than she was sympathique, either. I found that odd. With his looks, title, money and the rest, the marquis should have rated a French beauty queen at least. But his wife’s looks were none of my concern. Only his money.
    She wasn’t invited to join our little conference group. The marquis made it pretty