Crown Jewel

by Christopher Reich

  Simon guided the Daytona into a service station. The Ferrari’s V12 engine gave him fifteen miles a gallon tops, and its small tank demanded that he stop frequently. Taking his time, he cleaned the windscreen, checked the tire pressure, then walked into the mini-mart. It wasn’t his practice to leave a client’s car unguarded, even for an instant, but circumstances dictated otherwise. He picked up a soda and chips, moving as deep into the store as he could while still able to keep an eye on the road outside. A minute passed. He spotted a Renault gliding off the highway and driving past the service station. A lone man in the cockpit: dark hair, sunglasses, vigilant. Simon exited the mini-mart as the Renault returned for a second look. The timing couldn’t have been better. Seeing Simon, the driver jumped on the gas pedal and disappeared around the corner. It was a mistake on his part and gave Simon the proof he needed.

  He was being followed.

  Simon climbed into the Ferrari and returned to the highway. It was his turn to put a foot on the gas and he took the car well over the speed limit, enjoying the engine’s confident growl as the needle stormed past 120 miles per hour. It wasn’t long before he spotted the silver Audi in the slow lane ahead of him.

  Years had passed since the last time he’d been followed. Back then it was the Marseille flics, and he’d make a game of leading them on wild-goose chases through the city and the surrounding hills. It was a point of pride that he could outdrive them.

  “Let’s have some fun,” Simon said to himself.

  He zipped past the German coupe without a backward glance.

  Game on.

  Barely a minute later, the Audi reappeared in his rearview. Simon eased off the gas, daring the Audi to come closer, but the driver slowed, not yet willing to give up all pretense.

  “Have it your way.”

  He accelerated once again. The Audi matched his speed.

  In the distance, a sign announced the exit for Grenoble, a small city at the base of the French Alps. Simon’s route called for him to continue south through Avignon and Aix-en-Provence before dipping down to the coast and following the autoroute to Nice and then onward to Monaco. There was another route, however, a back way through the mountains. Though longer by several hours, it was more suited to his current purpose.

  At the last instant, Simon guided the car into the left lane and headed in the direction of Grenoble. The Audi followed as Simon passed through the city and left the highway altogether, beginning a long, curvy ascent into the Alps. The road narrowed from four lanes to two, slimming further to a winding track barely wide enough for a car to pass another. Every ten or fifteen minutes, he’d arrive at a village or hamlet and reduce his speed as he navigated past a bakery and a butcher and one or two general stores. The peaks of the surrounding mountains came into view, many covered with snow. The air grew cooler. The wind picked up. It was on a long series of hairpin switchbacks that he spotted the Renault lower on the mountain.

  He arrived at the Col du Ciel, elevation eight thousand feet, and was forced to slow to a crawl. A tractor dragging wagons of freshly cut and baled hay occupied the lane ahead. The Audi drew up behind him. He checked over his shoulder. The driver was dark-haired and swarthy, aviator sunglasses shielding his eyes. A stream of oncoming traffic scotched any chance of passing the tractor. In a minute, the Renault pulled up behind the Audi. A mouse and two cats waiting to pounce.

  Then the tractor stopped altogether, its rear signal indicating that it wished to turn across lanes.

  Simon had made a mistake. He was caught in a box. He could not drive forward. He could not retreat. A guardrail ran along the right-hand side of the road, and beyond that a vertiginous precipice, a fall of a thousand feet. A stone wall bordered the other side of the road.

  Simon looked in the side-view mirror as the driver of the Audi climbed out of his car. He kept his hand close to his leg, but the pistol was evident all the same, as was his intent.

  Simon was trapped.

  Oncoming traffic cleared out and the tractor began its laborious turn. Simon had no weapon, nothing with which to defend himself. He popped the clutch and put the car into first gear, his heel digging into the gas pedal. The Ferrari’s rear wheels spun madly. Rubber burned road. Smoke rose into the air accompanied by a terrific screech. Taken by surprise, the driver reacted instinctively, jumping back a step. It gave Simon the moment he needed. Dropping the clutch, he shot the Ferrari forward, ramming the trailing hay cart, sending bales flying and filling the air with dried grass.

  The road was clear.

  Away.

  Simon’s relief was short-lived. The Audi closed in rapidly, the Renault lagging behind it. It was not their proximity that rattled him, or the realization that the driver had wanted to kill him. It was the man’s identity. He looked remarkably like the devil who’d rescued his larcenous colleague in Les Ambassadeurs with an expertly placed punch to Simon’s kidney.

  This wasn’t about Toby Stonewood.

  It was about revenge for losing a large sum of ill-begotten money.

  Simon drove aggressively as the road began its descent from the mountain pass, one curve following another. The Ferrari was a high-performance automobile…in its time…but it was no match for a late-model German sports car. The Audi stayed on his tail, closing in perilously on the short straightaways. Simon could not keep his distance for long. On the next section of straight road, the Audi could ram him. Controlling the Ferrari would be problematic. Either he’d crash into opposing traffic, leaving him defenseless against a determined man with a pistol, or careen through the flimsy guardrail and plummet down the mountainside.

  He found neither option appealing.

  A sign announced the village of Diablerets-les-Monts. Simon brought up the map on his phone, darting glances at the screen. Five hundred meters ahead, there was a turnoff to the right that required him to make a hairpin turn before straightening out, like Bo-Peep’s staff. By the look of the terrain, it either ascended or descended a slope.

  Either way, he had to make a move.

  Simon threw the car into third gear, redlining the rpms. The Ferrari shot ahead. A distance of ten meters opened between him and his pursuer. The road veered left. A stone wall climbed the opposite side. To his right the slope fell into a grassy cleft. He glimpsed a stream and forest and several wooden huts.

  He spotted the turnoff and continued to accelerate. He was going too fast. There was no chance he could hold the turn. Surely he’d end up off the road, dead in a ditch. None of it mattered. He had one chance and he had to take it.

  When he was certain that he could not make the turn, that he would crash through the red and white wooden railing, he braked very hard and spun the wheel to the right. The rear of the vehicle slid out. He held the steering wheel tightly, fighting the car’s urge to straighten. No power steering. Only will and muscle. He threw the car into second gear and floored it. The Ferrari straightened out. The nose dove and Simon guided the car down a steep dirt track.

  Behind him, the Audi started its turn even later. Too late. It failed to negotiate the hairpin curve. The car splintered the guardrail and tumbled down the hill, turning over several times, coming to a stop on its roof.

  The Renault blew past ten seconds later, unaware of what had happened.

  Simon ran to the Audi. The driver was conscious but groggy, bleeding profusely from a gash in his forearm. Simon freed him from the car and dragged him into the grass. There was no time to look for a first aid kit. He took off his shirt and tore off a sleeve, using it to fashion a tourniquet around the man’s upper arm.

  “What’s your name?” Simon asked as he worked.

  The man muttered a few words in a language Simon didn’t recognize, but the gist of it was easy enough to understand. He was not expressing his thanks. Simon patted him down, fighting off the man’s perfunctory attempts to stop him. He opened the man’s wallet and took out the driver’s license. Goran Zisnic, age twenty-eight, resident of Split, Croatia. “I’ll keep this,” Simo
n said, slipping the license into his pocket. He dropped the wallet in the grass. “Stay put. I’ll call an ambulance.”

  Simon returned to the Audi and located the pistol. He didn’t like guns. He dropped the clip, flicked the bullets one by one into the stream, then threw the weapon into the woods.

  “I don’t ever want to see you again,” he said, giving Mr. Goran Zisnic a not-so-friendly pat on the cheek. “Ciao.”

  He was fairly certain they said that in Croatia, too.

  Simon caught up to the Renault in the next village. Rounding a curve, he spotted the car parked next to a convenience store a hundred meters further on. He slammed his heel on the brake, nearly giving himself whiplash and narrowly averting bloodying his nose on the steering wheel. Quickly, he backed up so as to be out of sight. There was no place to hide, no side streets to conceal his approach, so he jogged along the edge of the road, doing his best to keep out of the man’s line of sight.

  He needn’t have worried. The driver was engrossed in a phone conversation. The window was open, and judging by his tone of voice, he was angry. Simon grabbed the phone out of his hand and tossed it away. The driver protested, but the shout was muffled by Simon’s hand on his throat. When the man went for his gun, Simon caught him by the wrist and wrenched it violently. The ulna snapped like a dry twig.

  The man whimpered and Simon used the opportunity to slip the man’s wallet from his jacket. Ivan Boskovic, age twenty-six, also from Croatia. Quite the Balkan party. He took the pistol and stuffed it in his waistband.

  “Ivan, I’m going to keep your phone so you don’t call any of your friends and tell them what happened. Your buddy is back about ten kilometers. He had an accident. Don’t worry, I sent a doctor to look after him. Keys, please?”

  Ivan Boskovic was a quick learner. Knowing he was in the presence of a superior foe, he handed over the car fob without protest.

  Simon jogged back to his car. Along the way, he dumped the pistol into a sewer grate and chucked the car fob who knows where.

  It was another three hours to Monaco.

  He floored it.

  Chapter 13

  The clock showed the time to be ten minutes past six as Simon guided the car off the Grande Corniche and down the winding road into the principality of Monaco. Traffic slowed and he needed twenty minutes to make the descent to the hotel—a distance of a half mile. The French word for a traffic jam was bouchon, or cork. If that was the case, this cork belonged to a bottle of Lafite Rothschild. Every car in sight was a Bentley, BMW, or Porsche, all polished to a showroom buff.

  He kept the windows rolled down, the air warm and pleasant against his skin. He’d visited Monaco on several occasions during his time working as a private banker. He looked at the attractive men and women strolling along the sidewalks and they brought to mind his former clients. The people he’d served for years, as not only a financial advisor but much more.

  He saw them here now, dawdling on the steps of the hotel in tan poplin trousers and untucked Lacoste shirts and Italian loafers and Swiss watches. The outfit went for women, too. (No Rolexes allowed, thank you, unless it was the stainless Cosmograph Daytona worn by Paul Newman that had recently fetched a million dollars at auction.)

  He heard them speaking French and Italian and German, laughing with an aloof, resentful manner. It was difficult to manage the travails of owning homes in three countries and garages filled with exotic automobiles, of caring for snotty children who only called when they wanted money or favors, or both. He smelled them, too, citrusy colognes and flowery perfumes and their unbearably strong mints to camouflage their smoker’s breath.

  In a way, these people had been Simon’s family, and he’d come to know their foibles better than they did themselves. His duties began at safeguarding their money and quickly ran to matters nonfinancial. For a deposit of one hundred million dollars, the client received not only the finest financial advice but a personal concierge to cater to his or her every whim.

  He reserved tables for them at the finest restaurants and found them rooms at the right hotels—the right rooms, mind you. Every five-star palace had a few rooms where you wouldn’t put your drunk Uncle Harry. Simon made airline reservations, planned safaris, arranged for jewelry to be appraised and art to be authenticated. Once he was charged with tracking down a bracelet lost in Paris the week before. The client had no idea where. Simon found it. He recommended the right doctor, and if the client didn’t have time to visit, he procured a prescription for the right pharmaceutical, invariably Xanax for women and Viagra for men, and he could provide the number of a discreet agency to help put the latter to the test.

  In short, he did everything he was asked to the best of his ability. He stopped at murder. And yes, he’d been asked to arrange that, too.

  The Place du Casino was shaped like a horseshoe, with the casino at its head, the Hôtel de Paris to the right (as one approached), and the Café de Paris with its esplanade of open seating facing it across an expanse of lush grass and topiaries. The Casino de Monte-Carlo, built in the mid-1800s atop a dramatic promontory overlooking the Mediterranean, was a grand Beaux Arts castle, painted an eggshell cream with ornate balconies, Grecian statues on recessed plinths, and a wrought iron porte cochere to welcome its guests. The entire area was a monument to wealth and the overwhelming magnificence of money for money’s sake. Then again, thought Simon, what was one to expect when you crammed sixteen thousand millionaires into one square mile of territory?

  A line of cars crowded the curb in front of the Hôtel de Paris. Valets in cream jackets rushed here and there, welcoming guests, ferrying luggage, and moving the cars to the garage. Simon surveyed the scene impatiently. It had been an eventful drive and the prospect of waiting another ten minutes was unacceptable. He revved the engine—a caress of the accelerator was enough—and all heads turned toward the Ferrari. A valet at the front of the line abandoned his charge—a tall red-haired woman in a flowing electric-green outfit—and hurried toward Simon.

  Simon got out of the car and handed him the keys. “Riske. Checking in. I have a few bags in the trunk.”

  “Yes, sir,” said the valet, snapping to attention. “The reception is up the stairs and across the lobby to your left.”

  Simon slipped a hundred-euro note into the valet’s hand. “Keep it safe.”

  A shriek and the red-haired woman stormed up the line of cars, hands waving. “Che Cosa! You steal my valet,” she said to Simon. She was Italian and upset. “Give him back.”

  Simon held his ground. “Possession is nine-tenths of the law.”

  The valet kept his head down and continued removing Simon’s bags from the trunk.

  “I am Contessa Maria Borghese. You cannot take him from me.”

  “I’ll send him back as soon as he’s finished,” said Simon. “You can tell him who you are yourself. I’m sure he’ll be impressed.”

  The Contessa stepped closer. “You…you…are no one. Teppista americano! He only likes the car.”

  “At least I have something going for me. Arrivederci.”

  Head thrown back in contempt, the woman spun and returned to her car.

  “Ouch. That hurt.” A navy station wagon had pulled up behind him. A trim blond woman in a black leather jacket, T-shirt, and jeans stood by the driver’s-side door, a spectator to the event.

  “I get it all the time,” said Simon.

  “I’m not sure she’s entirely correct.”

  Simon noted that the station wagon’s license plates were German. KO for Köln, or Cologne. He had not detected an accent.

  “You are here for the Concours?” she asked. “Showing or driving?”

  “Driving. The time trial.”

  The woman cast her eye over the Daytona. “Is this your car?”

  “A friend’s,” said Simon. “More of a client, actually.”

  “You,” she said, looking at Simon with the same critical eye. “You belong with a Spider. The old one. Nineteen sixty-five, I think.”r />
  “A little above my pay grade, but thank you. I agree.” Simon smiled. The model was his favorite. He had a picture of one on his office wall. “I take it you are here for the Concours as well, then.”

  “Me?” She dismissed the thought with a shiver. “Never.”

  Simon discerned that she really meant “Never again.” The woman was his age, give or take, with golden skin and light brown eyes and high cheekbones that gave her an authoritative air. She was nearly as tall as he, with a sharp straight nose and slim, sharply defined lips. A striking woman rather than a beautiful one. He decided that he must get to know her.

  “The name is—”

  “Will you excuse me?” she said, looking past him.

  “Simon,” he rushed to say, but it was too late. She was gone, walking to the head of the line, shoulders set, chin raised to face any challenge. He kept his eyes on her, feeling something spark inside him. Something not entirely welcome.

  After a moment, he walked into the lobby, crossing the floor to the reception. The hotelier appeared to be expecting him. He informed Simon that he’d been given a suite on the third floor and repeated Lord Toby Stonewood’s promise that all expenses were on the house, including anything from the hotel’s restaurants and room service, as well as items in the hotel’s shops, but excluding the jewelry boutiques.

  “Naturally,” said Simon.

  The hotelier smiled and, in a slip of professionalism, vouchsafed that he must be “a very good friend of the hotel.”

  Someone chuckled and Simon noted that it was the blond woman from outside. She had taken up a position further down the desk and had overheard the remark.