A thought came to him. His blood began to race in his veins. He decided that Tommy had not properly scared her. Look at her promenading alone on the streets as if nothing had happened. Her arrogance was brazen, offensive. Ratka did not want her feeling so safe, so free to pursue her every inclination. The princess needed to be taught her place. He knew how. He’d done it many times before.
He would teach her respect.
And fear.
Chapter 28
Simon entered the Casino de Monte-Carlo a few minutes past eight. He crossed the gallery, his shoes echoing off the marble floors, the main salle de jeux in sight. He had a mental picture of what to look for. The criminals would be working in teams. One to film the cards as he or she cut them, several at a table, all of them receiving instructions on how to wager. They would do their best to blend in. Nothing flashy. If anything, the opposite, like the bland man at his table last night…the wallflower who’d ended the evening on a two-hundred-million-dollar yacht. If they had cocktails, they would not be drinking them.
They were professionals. And they were killers. Vincent Morehead had spotted them and Vincent Morehead was dead. Simon would do well not to forget it.
Once upstairs, he took the first open seat he found. The minimum bet was five hundred euros. He unbuttoned his jacket and cleared his throat noisily, waving an arm to signal a server. With ceremony, he opened his wallet and counted out five thousand euros, slapping them on the baize tabletop. The dealer gave him his chips and Simon spent time arranging them. He ordered a Campari and soda and began his play.
Two men were dead. It was imperative that Simon be sharp-eyed and observant while at the same time appearing to be indiscriminate and in his cups. Law enforcement came in many shapes and forms, but drunk was not one of them.
A woman to his right had the shoe. She was sixty, corpulent, and as red as a lobster, with gold jewelry around her neck and wrists and fingers, and probably her toes, if Simon dared to look. Every player ponied up the minimum bet. Four other players sat at the table, all men. The woman dealt the cards. Two hands. Two cards each, all faceup. A six and seven for the house—banco—or three. A king and a two for the player—punto—or two.
At this point, everyone was permitted to increase their bet, either on the punto or the banco. The odds were more or less even between the two hands. Simon bet two hundred euros on banco, the woman holding the shoe. The other four players all bet on punto. The first two men bet two hundred euros, the second two a thousand euros.
The woman dealt the cards. One more to each hand.
Punto drew a six, giving them an eight.
Banco drew a four, giving it a seven.
Punto won.
As the woman had lost, rules called for her to pass the shoe. The next player declined and the shoe returned to the house. A new hand was dealt.
A pattern quickly developed. Two of the four players (not the woman, who was German and informed Simon that her name was Brünnhilde and that she was unmarried) always bet the same amount on one hand. The winning hand.
Simon made sure not to mimic their bets or to pay undue attention to anyone except his new object of desire, Brünnhilde from Hamburg. He played a dozen hands, winning and losing equally. Time came to reshuffle the shoe. A new stack of 416 cards—eight decks pre-shuffled—was loaded into the shoe.
This was the moment Eightball Eddie had told Simon to watch for.
The dealer offered the shoe to the player who had won the most money on the last hand and gave him a yellow cutting card. The player—middle-aged, dark hair, casual but elegant attire, eyeglasses—pulled the shoe closer and ran the edge of the cutting card over it in an upward direction. It was a quick motion—zip and it was done. Then the man slipped the card into the center of the shoe. The dealer took the shoe and cut the cards accordingly. Next he burned the first ten cards, dealing them into a pile and consigning the pile to a slot in the table, never to be seen again. After this, the dealer played two dummy hands to conclusion and consigned these cards to oblivion as well.
All this Simon watched with passing interest, pretending to be concerned with Brünnhilde’s tall tales and making sure that they both had a fresh cocktail before play restarted. In fact, his eye never left the man who had cut the cards. Vikram Singh had been correct. Simon had not been able to observe any behavior that might tip him off that the man was cheating. No sign of a camera. No artfully concealed earpieces. Most important, there was no pinging in his own earpiece to signal the presence of a camera. In fact, he realized belatedly, there was no sound at all. He rose too quickly, nearly spilling a drink, then asked to be dealt out of the next hand.
Inside the restroom, he locked himself in a stall and examined the Zippo-shaped camera hunter. The operating light was not on. He depressed the switch. The green light burned brightly. A low-level hum filled his ear. Cursing his ineptitude, he replaced the device in his pocket—carefully this time.
Ready to get down to business, he headed back to the table. Something strange happened on the way. The steady hum was replaced by a pinging noise not dissimilar to sonar. The pinging grew more rapid, faster still, until it reached a steady pitch. The strange part was that this happened as he walked past the table in the gaming room next to his.
Simon continued walking and the pulse slowed, only to increase again as he neared his table, turning once again to a steady tone as he passed the dark-haired man who had cut the cards a few minutes earlier.
Not one camera, but two.
“I’m back,” Simon said to the players in a jocular tone as he retook his seat. “We can all start again. I, for one, now intend to win!”
There were smiles all around. Brünnhilde welcomed him back with a bibulous hug.
Play resumed.
Simon gambled for another half hour. He recognized the cheaters’ methods and bet with the winners each time. He left the table with ten thousand euros, double his stake. He calculated that the cheaters, if it really was them, had won over one hundred thousand.
He continued to the next room and assumed a position by a back wall, watching the man he’d identified as holding the camera. After a while, the man left the table and visited the restroom. Simon kept his distance. When the man emerged, Simon was right there on his way in, jostling him only slightly as he passed.
Inside the bathroom, he washed his hands, counting to twenty before leaving. He made a beeline for the main staircase and was outside in the fresh night air a minute later. He had placed tracking devices on four persons, two of whom he knew for certain were part of the team robbing Lord Toby Stonewood and the Société des Bains de Mer of millions, and two others he suspected of being their associates.
On top of that he had one new wallet to shore up his research.
He didn’t dare look at it until he was back in the confines of his hotel room.
For now, he had another pressing matter.
Chapter 29
It was a thirty-minute walk from the hotel, and Vika was careful to stay on the populated track, following the sidewalk down the hill, then losing herself in the procession of pedestrians taking an evening stroll along the promenade. It was only when she left the seafront and traversed the three blocks uphill to the Boulevard du Larvotto that she found herself alone and the narrow streets quiet and desolate. She covered the distance as briskly as she could, without jogging or in any way betraying her anxieties. She checked over her shoulder and looked at reflections in storefront windows to see if anyone was following. She was a longtime fan of John le Carré’s novels and could match George Smiley’s tradecraft, if not Toby Esterhase’s. To her relief, she saw no one, and as she entered the lobby of the Château Perigord, stopping to look behind her a final time, she felt rather foolish, like the victim of a practical joke.
The Château Perigord was a twenty-story apartment building on the Boulevard d’Italie, overlooking the sea. In Monaco, people didn’t rent apartments; they owned them. Twenty-five years earlier, Vika’s mother
had purchased a three-bedroom flat on the top floor. Papa had recently died, and like many wealthy Europeans facing onerous taxes, Mama had fled to Monaco. Her mother claimed that she needed a fresh start, a chance to build a new life with new friends in a new place where the press didn’t follow her from morning to night and it didn’t rain every day but Sunday. Things had not gone well since.
Vika rode the old elevator to the top floor. The hall carpets were the same color, the little tables and decorations unchanged since her last visit a decade before. The building had smelled tart and antiseptic then—like a hospital, she’d always remarked—and it still did.
She stopped in front of the door and removed a set of keys, each with a colored fob. Red was for Marbella, green for Pontresina, blue for Barbados. There were ten of them. And black for Mama’s place in Monaco. Vika needed several tries to get the key into the lock. Her hand was trembling, not out of fear but another emotion she disliked every bit as much.
Vika stepped inside, leaving the door open behind her. If anything happened, she wanted someone to hear her scream. The apartment was dark as a crypt. She flipped on the lights and observed that the curtains were drawn. They were blackout curtains, velvet, the color of blood. Daylight was the drinker’s enemy.
Then she took in the living room.
Vika covered her mouth as her eyes jumped from the messy coffee table to the upended chair to the shattered brandy glass. There was an empty bottle of Wyborowa, the Polish vodka her mother drank like Perrier, lying underneath the dining room table. Advancing carefully, as if she were barefoot and avoiding the broken glass, she grabbed the neck of the bottle and set it on the table. Her first reaction was that she needed to call Commissaire Le Juste. There had been a fight. A battle royale, from the looks of things. Any rational person would come to the same conclusion. Here at last was the evidence Vika needed.
But when she put her hand on her mother’s telephone, she paused.
A fight or the normal state of affairs for a raging alcoholic?
Vika woke in her bed and sat up.
Music from Mama’s party carried through the rafters below and into her room. She put her feet on the floor and felt the pounding rhythmic beat in her stomach. It was too loud. Frightened, she padded down the broad staircase of the grand chalet, eyes blinking back the bright light, trying to make sense of the confusion of bodies, the colorful sweaters and blouses dancing and mingling and she wasn’t sure what else.
There was a tall man wearing a silver fur jacket standing on the onyx coffee table, making circles and swinging a hand in the air. It took Vika a moment to realize that Mama was on the table, too, dancing with him.
Vika made her way through the merrymakers and tugged at her mother’s skirt. “You’ll wake the boys.”
Her mother betrayed no surprise at seeing her ten-year-old daughter at three in the morning standing in her flannel Lanz nightgown, rubbing the sleep from her eyes. “Come, Victoria!” she shouted over the music. “Come dance with us.”
“Mama, it’s late.”
“Quatsch,” her mother laughed. Nonsense. “The party is only getting started. Your mama is forty years old. Can you believe it?” Her mother turned her head away and addressed her friends, arms spread wide. “Ich bin vierzig!” she half sang, half yelled, then dissolved in a fit of laughter. I’m forty.
Vika tugged her skirt again and her mother came down off the table. Instead of taking her back to her room and tucking her in, she led her daughter around the spacious den, with its floor-to-ceiling windows and large fireplace and arolla pine walls decorated with dozens of bleached ram horns, and introduced her to her friends.
“This is Rolf. This is Michael. This is Katya.”
Vika shook their hands as she’d been taught, making a little curtsy each time, sure to lift the hem of her nightgown off the floor.
Finally, her mother led her to the man in the fur coat. “And this is Gunther. He’s going to be your father one day.”
“Good evening, Princess Victoria,” Gunther had said, bowing. “It is an honor to meet you.”
He was tall and tanned brown, with long silver hair. He was a famous man in Germany. They called him a playboy. Once he had been married to a famous French movie star.
“I don’t want another father,” Vika had said, upset.
“Don’t listen to your mother,” Gunther had said. “I can never take your father’s place.” He leaned closer. “Your mama is a bit drunk. It is her birthday, so we must forgive her.”
“She’s forty,” said Vika.
“I’m fifty,” said Gunther. “A dinosaur.”
Vika smiled.
“Do you know what I do when I’m not dancing?”
“You do the bobsleigh.” She saw that he was wearing a sweater with the badge of the St. Moritz Bobsleigh Club.
“Besides that.”
Vika shook her head.
“I take photographs. I’m going to take one of you.”
“But I’m not pretty.”
“But you are. And very serious.”
“Not tonight.”
“Another time.”
From across the room there was a shriek and a glass shattered. Then laughter, much too wild for Vika’s liking. Her mother had tripped over a chair and cut herself. She was crying.
“Back to bed with you,” said Gunther, putting one enormous hand on the small of her back. “Don’t worry. I’ll look after your mother.”
As Vika climbed up the stairs to her room, she made out the words of the song.
“Let’s dance, the last dance. So let’s dance, the last dance…tonight.”
A fight or a party?
Vika examined the room in a more skeptical light. A record album spun round and round on the turntable, Papa’s treasured Bang and Olufsen. She turned it off and when the album stopped spinning she read the name of the artist. It was Donna Summer’s greatest hits.
A party, then?
If so, why hadn’t Elena cleaned up? Vika felt a surge of anger at the Sicilian woman. She poked her head into the bathroom and winced. Someone had urinated in the toilet and failed to flush it. The kitchen was a mess. There was an empty wine bottle on the counter, dirty plates in the sink, and a serving dish with the remnants of prosciutto and melon. Grandmama’s crystal salt and pepper shakers lay on the floor like bowling pins, along with a soiled dish towel and several pieces of cutlery.
Vika stood very still and took another look at things. She recalled the voice mail. “He wants to know about the family…He scares me.”
Or was it a fight?
She was confused, unable to make sense of what had happened here. It came to her that she couldn’t answer.
“Damn you, Mama!” she shouted, overcome with emotion.
Ratka followed at a safe distance, amused at the woman’s clumsy countersurveillance methods. Again, he grew angry at Tommy for his rash actions. Maybe taking half a finger wasn’t enough. Still, at least he knew that she carried a pistol.
The woman left the beachfront and walked up the hill toward the apartment. Ratka turned up a block earlier and was in position to see her emerge onto the Boulevard d’Italie and enter her mother’s building. Through the windows, he could see that the lobby was an ornate two-story affair with mirrors everywhere and shiny stone floors. He saw her standing at the elevator bank. With mounting excitement, he studied her figure, enjoying the fit of her dress, her trim waist, her long, slender legs. He imagined her naked. Crying. Begging for him to be gentle. It had been too long since he’d taken a woman by force. The memory stirred his loins and awakened his darker instincts. The animal lurking within every man demanded release.
He hurried around the corner and down the steep alley off which residents entered the subterranean parking garage. He had a key for the maintenance door. Inside he navigated several corridors to the freight elevator. He had a smaller key for this. His heart raced as he rode to the top floor.
In his feverish mind, he saw his hands ripping
off her shirt, tearing off her brassiere, kneading her breasts. He hoped she screamed. He would slap her. He hoped she struggled. He would subdue her. He would control her absolutely.
The elevator slowed. The doors opened.
It had been too long.
Days of fire.
Civil war had been raging for over a year across the country previously known as Yugoslavia. Now it was every man for himself. Ratka viewed the conflict as the chance to assert the Serbian’s God-given ethnic superiority. An opportunity to cleanse the land of its Muslim neighbors. Islam was a race, not a religion, a filthy subhuman race that tainted their common flag and weakened their nation.
Ratka headed the Serbian Volunteer Force, known as the Silver Tigers, and though neither he nor the two hundred men who served under him were members of the military, they had been given uniforms, automatic weapons, jeeps, and even a half-dozen armored personnel carriers.
They had arrived in Srebrenica at dawn, after devastating the meager forces defending the city. The streets were deserted. White flags hung from windows. Ratka went building by building, home by home, ferreting out the men hiding in cellars and closets and beneath beds—cowards all—and corralling them into a pen in the town square. It was a maelstrom of emotion, the women screaming, children bawling, life and death played in operatic crescendos over and over again. He gave his men free rein to plunder, pillage, and rape. This was what it was like to conquer, to subjugate, to rule absolutely.
He chose the most beautiful woman for himself. She was the mayor’s wife, tall, statuesque, and, best, proud. The mayor was dead, dispatched by a bullet to the head from Ratka’s rifle. Her strength in the face of it all, her resolution, was like a last redoubt to be stormed. He ordered her into the bedroom, and when she refused, chin held high, defiance in her eyes, he hit her across the face with the muzzle of his pistol and dragged her inside by the collar. She fought him and her every shout and struggle aroused him further. He took her twice, and when he was done, all resistance had been bled from her. She lay on the floor as defiant as a used dishrag, whimpering, begging him to kill her. He refused. It gave him pleasure to know she would suffer to the end of her days.
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