The Last Match by David Dodge Page B

clear that we men could get along without her while we talked business. We really did get together to talk in a locked room with drawn blinds, as Bernard had said we would. So Soviet agents could not read our lips through binoculars, as he explained to me with proper solemnity. Bernard had a special gadget he carried around to detect bugging, hidden tape recorders, secret television lenses and other sensors in a room before it was used for confidential conversation. It was an ordinary voltmeter hooked up to a flashlight battery with an inconspicuous button he could press when he wanted it to “detect.” He checked the room out carefully with it, showing us how he got readings from legitimate telephone wires, a TV set and the like but nothing that wasn’t strictly as it should be. The marquis took it all in like a kid watching a cops-and-robbers movie. Then we got down to nos moutons.
    The pitch went over beautifully. M. le Mark reacted exactly as he was supposed to. He showed self-satisfied gratification at words of praise and appreciation from the AEC, dawning horror when he sensed the import of my news about the fusion-fission bomb; trembling shock followed by sustained agony when he saw his money going, going, gone down the drain; pathetic eagerness to believe, believe, that I might, just possibly might, be able to save it for him, perhaps not with the profit on top he had hoped for but at least without that awful loss; all-consuming, poorly concealed greed at the prospect of turning an even larger profit than he had dreamed of; finally, the puffed gratification of a selfish bastard at the thought of the great big public honor that would come to him simply for making that great big profit for himself at his country’s expense. It was a real pleasure to do dirty business with a cheap son of a bitch like M. le Marquis.
    I told Bernard as much after we got away from the villa. He said, “Pigeons or pricks, what’s the difference? They all bleed the same kind of cash.” He was a great one for philosophical remarks.
    We stalled for three days. The wait made me jumpy.
    It was my first big con. Little cons, the kind you learn in the Army, do nothing to prepare you for the big time. I hadn’t yet learned that a properly gaffed mark worries a lot more about missing his big money-making opportunity than you do about his slipping the hook. That’s why a pro never hurries the grab, or pushes too hard on the gaff once it’s in. The longer you can wait after the gaffing to make the grab—within reason, of course, and with an eye on the exits—the less suspicious the sucker. Obviously if you were a crook, you’d be reaching for his pocketbook at the first possible opportunity. But let him linger, doubt, worry, have time to calculate his potential profits, hear a suggestion or two that the deal isn’t going to come off after all, sorry, pal, tough luck all around—brother, he’ll hand you his money with tears of gratitude in his eves when you give him the chance.
    Bernard knew all this. I didn’t. I thought we were taking unnecessary chances. I got snappy with my nice landlady, talked back to Reggie a couple of times when I shouldn’t have, built up a lot of tension. Reggie was a lot more tolerant of me than she had to be, although I didn’t realize it at the time. When I was just about as jittery as I could get, Bernard at last decided it was time.
    Harnessing up in his Antibes hideout, we went back to the villa. I had faked a very nice cable from Washington—in code, to deceive Soviet spies—saying that the AEC and the U.S. Treasury, in view of M. le Marquis’ long, sustained and continuing dedication to The Cause, had decided after great deliberation to go along with my recommendations. In a word, he was In. Up to and far beyond his délicieuses . I took with me a translation of the cable, in French, to gladden his greedy Gallic heart.
    When Bernard pulled the Jag up in front of the villa and we had got out, we