Free The Last Match by David Dodge

he got a hefty lead box marked, in red, Danger! Ne Pas Ouvrir! He and the marquise, who was a dutiful wife and went along with her husband on most things, drove the box to St. Jean-de-Luz, near Biarritz, and there waited four days for the Spanish emissaries to appear. They might have been waiting still had not Bernard, who had been keeping an eye on them through a confederate to be sure they did not open the box prematurely or otherwise discover that it was full of genuine Mediterranean beach sand, decided that M. le Marquis would hold still for another trimming. He tolled them back to the Cote d’Azur to hide the uranium in the garden of the Marquis’ villa on the Cap d’Antibes until Soviet agents, who had prevented the rendezvous at St. Jean-de-Luz and were on the trail of the lead balloon for themselves, could be sidetracked. He then sold M. le Marquis another, larger, package of uranium. For $75,000. With the same tale.
    “I don’t believe it,” I told Bernard, when he had got that far along with the story. “You’re conning me now. Nobody can be that dumb.”
    “I didn’t believe it myself,” he confessed. “My original idea was simply to take him for the twenty-five big ones and fade before he woke up. But then the boob sat there at St. Jean-de-Luz for four days and nights without even feeling the gaff, and when I pulled on the line he came so trustingly I didn’t have the heart not to try to pop him again. He practically wept with gratitude when I let him have the second box of sand. He hocked his wife’s jewels to get up the grisbi that time.”
    “He can’t have much left, then. What do you need me for? I don’t get it.”
    “It keeps coming in. He has a fat regular monthly income from investments. I’ve been letting him pay in installments for a third package of uranium and a couple of containers of heavy water, you know the stuff they use to make atom bombs with?” Bernard grinned, his teeth very white in his swarthy good-looking Niçois face. “It was heavy, all right. I loaded the containers myself. But now he’s getting restless. He wants to see some of the profits before he invests further. That’s where you come in.”
    “I have a feeling it’s where I ought to get out. But go on with the tale. I’m still listening, for the time being.”
    What he wanted of me was my clean-cut American front and a dash of good old-fashioned American razzle-dazzle. He knew quite a lot about me and my situation; that I was on probation to Reggie, that she kept me on a tight leash both financially and in other ways, that my evenings were occupied by her comings and goings and my mornings by the regular groomings I was required to give the Mercedes-Benz. He also knew that she almost never used the car during the day, and that I was mostly free in the afternoons if you can call it freedom when you have nothing to spend but your time, and no one to spend it on. Reggie had warned me not to try to pick up, or let myself be picked up by, anything in any way, shape or form female. Or else. But she hadn’t said a word about not letting myself be approached by a crooked ex-cop with big ideas.
    “I think he’s probably got half a million or so, maybe more, that he can get his hands on in a pinch,” Bernard said. “That’s what I’m after now. The works, all at once. As much as we can get of it, anyway. All you have to do is persuade him to liquidate his investments and turn the money over to you.”
    “That’s all, eh?”
    “I tell you, it will be a breeze. I’ve got it all worked out. The chump will fall all over you.”
    “And after him the cops, no doubt. Assuming that I’m interested in taking part, as I’m pretty sure I’m not, what’s in it for me?”
    He was a hard bargainer. He claimed that there were four others besides himself to be cut in on the take, although I never met any of them. Furthermore, the gang had heavy working expenses to come off the top, so forth and so on, ho hum. All