Accidentally Good

Tommy Thomson was tall and broad, white over the temples, always tanned, with real white natural uncapped teeth and an undyed mustache. He was a Scot, and he had been married five times. He was a yachtsman, when he had a yacht, and sometimes he drove a Daimler, sometimes a Bentley. Occasionally he walked, depending on what cash his marital status merited. This depended on the wealth of his women.

Tommy was a bum. But Tommy was a bum who remembered my last name. And this was important to me. I used to see him now and then, in bars along the Riviera, in the Middle East, Majorca, particularly at the Marfil in Barcelona--all of the places where I could dispose of my line of bathtubs, toilets and other appliances. And Tommy never forgot my name. I liked him for that. And I liked him because he always called me "Joseph" instead of just "Joe."

The Marfil was run by a gentleman named Miguel, with an assistant named Pepe, and it was located, aptly enough, at the end of an alley called the Pasaje de la concepción. The Marfil served a free lunch if you wanted it, mainly octopus, and often you would see a billion dollars' worth of bankers there quarreling over five cents with the dice cup. Every time I went to Barcelona, I visited the Marfil, looking for a sale--and hoping to run into Tommy.

I dropped in not too long ago and there was Miguel and there was Pepe and Tony and Pepita and Paco and all the rest of them--but no Tommy Thomson.

"¿Qué pasa?" I said to Miguel. "Where is Don Tomás?"

"What are you drinking?" asked Miguel. His face was very sad.

"The usual. Double whiskey. What has passed with Don Tomás?"

"This is in honor of the house," Miguel said, pouring a triple. "Ay, what a tragedy." He handed me my drink and then poured himself a stronger one. He raised his glass.

"A Don Tomás," he said. "Pobre. He finally became a decent man. Decency killed him."

"A story goes with this?"

"Si, señor. A tragic story. When we clean the house we will go to another place and I shall relate. At this moment it is too noisy to relate a proper tragedy. Poor Don Tomás. He should have remained a sinver güenza, a bum."

Miguel never closed his place until 11 P.M. So this gave me time to sit for a while there at the bar and think about Tommy.

• • •

Tommy was a cross between Errol Flynn and Freddie McEvoy, combining the best and worst qualities of each, looking like both and living like a corporation embracing both. It is doubtful if his name actually was Tommy Thomson, but he was an authentic Scot. I met him in Tangier a great many years ago, when Tangier was as wicked as its reputation. At that time he was a smuggler. He smuggled anything you could smuggle, from cigarettes to whiskey to kef and, I suspect, women. He smuggled by way of Gibraltar and Majorca to mainland Spain, mostly. He had his own schooner--a boat as long as Flynn's Sirocco--and his associates were two ex-Nazis on the lam, one half-bred English gentleman, an itinerant Turk, a snub-nosed Irish refugee, an Australian faggot and two Lesbians, only one of whom was French. His company also included a couple of Arabs with their hands in the Customs, a purely formal function that only served to facilitate movement of contraband from a duty-free city to other lands in which whiskey and cigarettes commanded premium prices.

Tommy was a gambler, and one night I saw him win a 14-year-old Arab girl in a poker game. Her name was Leila Nakhla, and she was very pretty, if slightly pocked from either an old family inheritance or a recently acquired malaise. (Tommy lost her a few weeks later to a former British chorus boy who called himself Count Something-or-other. A king full beat Tommy's queen full, but he made up the deficit with an arrangement of hashish candy.)

I saw Tommy in Monte Carlo, in the casino, well before the Greeks bought it, and he was with a very pretty French girl. I offered a small hello--a very small hello, because I never did know when Tommy was operating big and I never wanted to become an irritant when he was operating big. For all I knew, Tommy was about to marry into the shipping business--or open his own casino with an anticipated largess.

"Joseph!" Tommy gave me the big warm hand. "Come meet my girlfriend. This is Mademoiselle--what was the name again, ma chérie?"

"Gisèle," ma chérie said, and Tommy shrugged.

"Gisèle and I just met. And I have stopped gambling. I took a pretty good clobber at the tables in the last month. Then I met Gisèle and I am now taking her to dinner. Purely friendship. And no gambling. All I have is seventy pounds, because what I had left after the clobbering I sent back to England, where soon I shall join it."

"A stupid question, perhaps," I said. "But if you're not gambling, what are you doing here in the casino?"

Again Tommy shrugged.

"You know how it is. Sentimental gesture. Twenty quid buys dinner and gets me out of town. So with my remaining fifty I shall have the one final throw. This is kind of a self-cure. I'm going to miss the clicking sound when the croupier says, 'Rien ne va plus,' and that dirty little ball falls into a slot. But I am going straight. I might even go to work. This is what you might call a farewell to arms. For last luck, the lass gets half."

He turned to the girl.

"Gisèle. Quel âge avez-vous?"

"I am twenty-four," the girl said. She was not such a one as you would expect to find out on the night with Tommy Thomson, unless he was about to leave town with no future in the arrangement. This was a goodbye girl if I ever saw one.

"Well," Tommy said, "do me a favor, Joseph. Hold my twenty pounds, and we shall give it one last riffle on Gisèle's age with the fifty. If twenty-four comes up, we will have roughly two thousand pounds as a souvenir of this lovely principality where the Rolls-Royce bears license RXK 1. A kiss for luck, chérie. Garçon! A drink for my friends!"

Tommy walked over to the roulette board and looked at it as though he were about to shoot his dog, his horse and his mother.

"Don't molest yourself with chips," he said to the banker. "Just put the fifty pounds on number twenty-four. For luck. It is the age of the lady."

"C'est très romantique," the croupier said, before he spun the wheel. "Betting fifty pounds on a lady's age." The ball bobbled, then came to rest. Rouge. Numéro 28.

Another shrug from Tommy.

"This just isn't my year," he said.

"Let's have a spot of haggis before I chase the plane."

I looked at chérie. She was crying, the mascara was dripping. Fifty pounds is only fifty pounds, and I figured she well might better this score in two nights of honest toil. Women are very unattractive when they cry in public.

Tommy looked at her as if she were some species of bug.

"I lost five thousand quid this week," he said. "What's to cry over about a lousy fifty when I've quit gambling anyhow?"

"But I lied, I lied, I lied! My age is actually twenty-eight! And I told you I was only twenty-four!"

Tommy looked at me and shrugged for the fourth time.

"Sweetie," he said, "you just blew half of two thousand pounds, according to the odds on the number." Then, to me: "Give me the twenty back."

I gave him the money. He peeled off two fives. Then he turned to the girl: "Ma chérie. This will get you home. But for God's sake, remember that a gambler is not interested in anything but vital statistics."

He turned to me. "You travel a lot, Joseph. What is your recommendation for the best hamburger joint in Prince Rainier's province?"

• • •

I will not bore you with Tommy's marriage to the heiress who had the house in the Casbah because the dope was easier to come by there, but he sold the wedding-present polo ponies for a fair price. We will not hash over the aging movie actress who was more broke than Tommy thought when he made an honest woman of her. Skip the widow who planted the house detective in the bar to make friends with Tommy when Tommy was taking a sabbatical from the widow. We may even forget the tape recorder on this one.

This is, after all, as Miguel was saying later in some joint in the barrio chino, a love story.

"Sabe, señor, nobility is like a suit. A suit off the rack. Some people it fits, some it does not. Nobility did not fit Don Tomás. You remember the last wedding?"

"I remember it."

Of course I remembered the wedding. How could I forget it? Only one other man in history, this Freddie McEvoy, ever knocked his bride stiff at the altar. It made all the brighter British papers and even got some space on the AP wire. Freddie's beloved, Claude, who was being protected by a rich Frenchman, gave back all her jewels, bonds, stocks, shares and a piece of a racing stable to prove to her keeper that she was marrying Freddie for love. This disenchanted Freddie, and he cooled his bride with a short right before they left the church. When Freddie carried Claude over the threshold, it was not sentimental. She still hadn't regained consciousness.

"Mas o menos, the same applied to our poor friend." Miguel took another bite out of his Fundador. "You knew he played a very good piano?"

"This I did not know. But I played some poker with him and he played a very good cinch bet."

"Do not joke about a departed friend. Don Tomás fell in love with the mistress of a rich Filipino. He expected a decent settlement when she left the Filipino. The woman--I believe her name was (continued on page 146)Accidentally Good(continued from page 140) Blanca or maybe Marisol--refused to accept a duro from the Filipino and she did not tell Don Tomás until they stood before the registrar, after they had pledged their troth. It can be said in favor of Don Tomás that he removed her glasses before he hit her in the chin, because Don Tomás was always muy caballero."

"Where does the piano come in--after the bruise?"

"Don Tomás went to work for a wage. He got a job playing a piano in"--Miguel moved his shoulders slightly--"you might call it a night club. Here. In Barcelona. And this girl, this Blanca or Marisol, sat by his side every night until four in the morning, lighting his cigarettes and bringing him a drink from time to time. If she disappeared, we chose to think that she was going to the ladies' room, and you know how long some ladies take to repair themselves when they go to the ladies' room. In any case, they prospered."

"You mean he was actually pimping for his wife?"

"I do not like the word chulo," Miguel said stiffly. "Until four in the morning is a long time to play the piano. A lady may well become weary of hearing Malagueña twenty times in the same evening. A man may become weary of seeing the lady constantly at his side while he plays Malagueña twenty times a night, six nights a week. Perhaps he welcomed a small vacation from her. And in Barcelona piano players do not make much money."

"So where does the love, the nobility, fit?" Getting a Spaniard to come to a point is as difficult as selling toilets in a town that has no steady supply of running water.

"Ah!" Miguel beamed. "It came suddenly, like the spring. History has a way of repeating itself. Don Tomás was always a lover of the sea. To love the sea means a boat. Once a former smuggler has a boat, he becomes a gambler and a smuggler again. Also, his fingers were weary of Malagueña, and his throat was dry from night-club cigarette smoke. From his wife's frugality, resulting from those frequent trips to the damas, Don Tomás was able to make a payment on a small yacht--only a forty-footer with one small auxiliary motor--and with only his wife, this Blanca or Marisol, for crew.

"But he knew some interesting people in several places, and a small investment can be made into a big investment if one practices personal economy and sobriety and holds the working overhead to a minimum. I must say that Blanca or Marisol was a strong and willing girl, and she crewed well. She could lift boxes of whiskey and cases of cigarettes and smaller parcels of various other commodities as well as any man. With Don Tomás' assistance, she could even manage a case of rifles for the Algerians or Moroccans, and ammunition for the Turks.

"They prospered. Before long, Don Tomás traded in the little boat for a bigger boat, and expanded his operation to such things as machine guns, grenades and other vital necessities to the fight for freedom. The bigger boat was a one-hundred-footer, so now Don Tomás needed a crew. He found the crew in Tangier, where you can always find somebody who needs unsteady work for a good reason and whose name is always the name of somebody else.

"This crew was not of the old days, when people were actually trustworthy--former SS men, deserters from the Foreign Legion--really dependable people, if only because they had prices on their heads. Don Tomás' crew was four, including, I am told, a cross-eyed Syrian cook. This crew was the kind of crew that might tend to conspiracy if the end were worth the trouble."

"But what was she really like?"

Miguel kissed his fingers and blew the kiss away.

"Ah, Don José, she was like a breath of fresh air in a bar that has seen too many people. I do not know how to describe--perhaps you remember the early Dolores Del Rio? If you could combine the early Dolores Del Rio with the early Ingrid Bergman, and forget which color was her hair, that is what she was like. She could love a man and have a baby and plow a field and win a war. And she loved Don Tomás. You could see it in the eyes when she sat by his side and lit his cigarettes and brought him his drink."

"Dolores Del Rio is a Mexican brunette," I said. "And Ingrid Bergman is a blonde Swede. It's a hard combination. What did she look like?"

"She looked like a woman. Like the women of all ages and all natures and all countries. She was not so big as small, not so small as big."

"What color were her eyes?"

"Blue or green or brown or black. Depending."

"Background?"

Now it was Miguel's turn to shrug.

"I think the Japanese beat her husband to death in the old war. I think she told me she went for three years eating rosebuds and grass for the main meal, and I think there was something about a baby that died from hunger and a father that the Japs shot. Quién sabe? Always with women a different story, according to the mood. But she was dama--all lady. In any case, she had this Filipino protector before she left him for Don Tomás."

"And why did she leave this Filipino protector?"

"Spanish blood. There comes a time when you resent a Malay infusion in your protector. Don Tomás was of the Western world."

I know when I am licked. I let Miguel continue, but I was making up the end myself, half listening, looking at the pretty girls hustling the drinks, hearing the castanets click, watching the crowd, occasionally concentrating on a throb of guitars, or noticing how the flamenco singer's neck muscles swell on a high Arabic glottal note.

"They were leaving somewhere to come to somewhere, because they had to leave the other somewhere..." Miguel stopped and signaled a waiter. "And then there was this mutiny..."

I was able to construct the picture, knowing Tommy pretty well.

Tommy would know how to deal with a mutiny. So after he killed the four crewmen--possibly with one of the machine guns he was taking to Algeria--he and his wife were left to handle the big boat alone.

Almost immediately, as Miguel reconstructed it, the Mediterranean turned temperamental. The Med is an unpredictable bitch and it has no tide. Like most unpredictable bitches, it is subject to violent change when the wind comes out of nowhere and builds mountainous waves out of what was sun-dappled, breeze-dimpled water five minutes earlier.

There was much sheet on this big boat, and you need men to cope with big canvas. All Tommy had was his wife, and a wife is not enough to handle a boat when the only surviving sailor is up in the rigging with a knife trying to cut lines to subdue canvas gone suddenly mad in a sea that is even madder. Thus, it is not unlikely that evidently an enormous wind-piled wave took the yacht broadside and hurled Tommy off the mast and into the sea.

If there was one thing that Tommy did better than smuggling or gambling or drinking or wenching or marrying, it was swimming. He was a passionate skin-diver--that dated back to his treasure-hunting days, before people started using aqualungs--and from the position of the wreck, when the rescue boats went out in the calm, the boat hit a reef no more than a mile offshore. Tommy could have made it to the beach with one hand tied behind him. His instinct for survival had always been very strong. I am assuming he was already ashore when he thought of the wife he had hit in the chin because she had given up her money for love; the wife who sat by his side when he played the piano; the wife who had helped him sweat crates of liquor and machine guns and God knows what else into little coves in the dark of the moon; the wife who was alone on a beam-ends boat.

He surely made the shore; that is (concluded on page 315)Accidentally Good(continued from page 146) known. Some local Arabs reported to the police that they saw a naked white man crawl up onto the beach and look backward to a foundering yacht. Then, they told the police, they saw him plunge back into the raging sea.

"It was a simple story of sudden love," Miguel said, pouring another tot of brandy. "Don Tomás made it back to the ship, although God knows how in that water. But he must have gotten aboard, because later they found his wife roped to a spar as the yacht lay flat on its side. When the rescue boats arrived, the woman was miraculously undrowned. But there was no sign of Don Tomás.

"I can only assume that Don Tomás secured his wife as best he could and then started to swim back again for help. Evidently he knew she could not swim. It was more or less a repetition of the sad case of the poor Señor McEvoy. Eventually what the fish had not consumed of his body washed up on the shore, together with the bodies of four other men. The fish had left enough of the other men for the coroner--or whatever they have in Algeria that passes for a coroner--to discover bullet holes in various vital places."

Spaniards can be infinitely maddening when they spin a tale. I looked at Miguel, grayed, handsome, calm, honest, impeccable, sober and obviously enjoying his brandy.

"What finally happened to the woman--the woman?" I asked with considerable irritation. "Come to the point."

"Women are very durable, or they would not be able to make children," Miguel said. "After a few days in the hospital, she was strong and fit again. Somehow she got enough money to come back to Barcelona. She worked--"

"At what?"

"Well," Miguel said, "ordinarily, you would have seen her sitting three stools down from Pepita. But last week the Filipino came into my place and saw her and took her back to Manila. It is nice to know that she has a protector again."

I raised my glass.

"A Don Tomás," I said.

"A Don Tomás." Miguel clinked his glass. "what a pity that such a fine bad man should die for being accidentally good."

The phrase bothered me all the way back to the hotel. But then I had to pack my sample case. I always pack at night before I leave for the next town, and the next day I had to catch a plane for Agadir. They had a bad earthquake down there, but are rebuilding now, and some new hotels are springing up. I figured there might be a few bathtubs needed in Agadir. Even earthquakes have certain advantages.