The croupier swung the capstan and spun the ball which emitted a low humming tone as it whirled.
The croupiers were not as indifferent as they seemed. That was a role that they played to perfection. In fact, they were anything but indifferent to whether the bank won or lost. They were given instructions to attract players, to keep a close eye over the bank’s interests and for their services were awarded prizes and premiums.
“Rien ne va plus!” was the signal that no more stakes could be put on the table.
When the wheel stopped, the number was called out: “Rouge – dix-huit!” Then the long rakes of the croupiers shot out from every part of the table, threading their way in and out of the masses of gold, silver and bank notes with extraordinary rapidity and well-practised manipulation.
A small fortune was swept into the bank until the table was almost bare. All done with the precision of a machine, without a single mistake, and hardly completed when the stakes of those who had won were added to in a shower of golden coins. It took a croupier in Monte Carlo a year to learn his business, but when he had mastered it, no magician could provide a more startling exhibition. No single coin rolled off its appointed square, but fell flat and motionless within an inch of the stake at which it was aimed.
Within no time at all, the stakes were again being spread over the board, for the next coup.
Despite the assumed indifference of the gamblers, one who could stand back from the concentrated play could observe the greed of the collective gaze at the table with its scattered louis d’or and streams of gold and the constant chink, chink of the money. So near, yet so far away, torturing those losers who were reduced to playing for the smallest stakes, praying for the lucky break . . . standing watching the play for some sort of pattern, some hint, some sign, even some superstition that would postpone their own personal destination of zero. The colour, the number to bring them back from the dead. Surely, in this game of chance, there was one small certainty?
“Messieurs! Faites vos jeux!”
The room was always crowded and the atmosphere quivering with the tension so common and peculiar to the act of gambling. It seems that down through generations the act of throwing money on chance has that effect. As it should, for why should people expect that acquiring money without toil should be free from some form of nervous retribution?
Aristocracy rubbed shoulders with women of ill repute and men laughed heartily with beautifully attired cocottes from Paris or stars of the film or stage. From such wealth and glamour, robbers, conmen and thieves are never very far away, all bathing in the glow of the light of the greatest casino in Europe and probably the world, for a brief time escaping the vicissitudes of the world outside and indulging in a collective fantasy.
Among the crowd the casino police moved silently, incognito, watching out for the pickpockets and swindlers who infiltrate the salons, and always present to settle the inevitable disputes that break out when gamblers are at play.
“Messieurs, faites vos jeux!”
Here, women and men seized by the demon of speculation, an addiction as powerful as that to drugs and drink constantly cast their nets into the sea of chance, despite all the odds against retrieving a fortune.
The red and black wheel spun, the little ivory ball clicked over the numbered spaces, slowly lost its impetus and, after spinning about unevenly, made a final jump and fell with a loud click.
“Zero!” cried the croupier.
The casino for all its glamour, fashion and innate excitement could, by the very nature of its ability to break a man by transforming his wealth to nought in instant, provide a motive for desperate even deranged behaviour. And desperation can drive a man or woman to extremes that in their previous life would have been beyond contemplation. In the matter of gambling, no different than any other human activity that becomes an obsession, there is a generational amnesia: however long they stretch back in history, or however harsh the consequences, lessons are not learnt.
Fortune, right back to the days of antiquity, was represented by a symbol that never lost its relevance in the passing of millennia. The Roman image is that of Fortuna, with the wheel which she blindly turns, emblematic of the endless changes in life between prosperity and disaster. It was the personification of luck in the Roman religion. She might bring good luck or bad, and could be represented as veiled or blind.
In Shakespeare’s Henry V are the prose lines:
“Fortune is depicted as blind, with a scarf over her eyes, to signify that she is blind. And she is depicted with a wheel to signify – this is the point – that she is turning and inconstant, and all about change and variation. And her foot, see, is planted on a spherical stone that rolls and rolls and rolls.”
Not much different from the roulette wheel in Monte Carlo.
Legend or myth claimed that François Blanc said he had sold his soul to the Devil for the secret of roulette, the total of the wheel numbers adding up to 666. Whatever about that, there was plenty to occupy the devil’s disciples in this strange and exotic place where extravagance and well-disguised penury mingled, where beauty and depravity were not far removed and where sanity and insanity were quickly interchangeable.
Beside the glamour, the fashion, the trappings of wealth, lurked men and women of notorious reputation, and others waiting to be damaged by ill-met association. Foreigners were preferred – one among them a certain Emma Levin, the Swedish widow of a Danish stockbroker. There congregated Russian Archdukes and their mistresses, South American women awash with jewels, and other great figures of doubtful fame. The scent of expensive perfume was everywhere and rumours abounded – rumours of orgies and satiation of illicit appetites of all kinds – men with men, women with women and the interchange of both. The so-called noble mixed with the most depraved, depravity being a dubious badge of honour in this seemingly most glamorous of worlds. There were fancy-dress parties and the enactment of dubious and ancient rites. There were few of the collected mob whose reputations had not been sullied in one way or another in their past lives. The whiff of odious vice and scandal was ever-present.
And there was also an undercurrent of desperation, because gambling in the casino was not the simple preoccupation of those who had the capital to fritter away. There were those whose existence and future absolutely depended upon the roll of a wheel, the throw of a dice, the fall of a card. Such was life in the great Casino of Monte Carlo. In addition, a stroke of ill fortune, an unseemly incident, could consign any of them to official, societal and actual oblivion.
A succession of sharp taps, as the little ball was tossed hither and thither, furiously jumping from one side to another, flung back for an instant upon the sloping side of the basin, returning to its mad career over the slots. And then a sudden final click as it fell to rest. The hyperventilating audience were, as always, reduced to silence. Not far away lay the ghosts of the hostages to the misfortune inherent in devotion to this ritual.
For some the disaster that accompanies great loss under this gilded roof was too much to bear. In one room there was a seat called The Suicides’ Chair, for over the preceding years no less than ten men and women who were occupiers had taken their lives and were buried in secret in the Suicides’ Cemetery. One man who had lost a quarter of a million in a month threw himself under the Paris Rapide train at the long bridge over the Var.
The cemetery is situated in a small overgrown piece of land, not a long distance away, because there is no such thing as real distance in Monaco. There is the hidden graveyard; nobody then knew where it was. And in that forlorn plot lay the bodies of nameless gamblers who had sacrificed all their happiness, honour, life to the ebony basin. More than evidence, if it were needed, about the fear and desolation that existed among the glamour under the gilded roof of the Casino. The chronically addicted who lost great sums were allowed to apply to the administration for a viatique (from Latin viaticum meaning ‘provisions for the journey’) – sufficient sums to pay expenses to any destination a
fter losing everything. It was never refused but many preferred to take the short trip to the little cemetery.
At Monte Carlo, the talk was always of a run of sequences, the times zero-trois had turned up, how little one ever won on en plein or thirty-six. The yellow cards of admission were monthly granted to those who were approved by the committee of inspection who judged by appearance whether one had money to lose. That, of course, was not always possible – the very art of the gambler is to disguise the mind’s construction in the face.
Nonetheless even the best of them with the greatest of resources could have all that they possess reduced to zero by the gaming tables and the roulette wheel. It is an old adage that a fool is easily parted from his money. It was all the more applicable when the purse was threadbare from the start.
A lot of the women were more prone to gamble and prepared to go to the last throw. The smart women from Paris, Vienna or Rome never lost the head. They gambled discreetly. The fashionable cocottes seldom lost much, and always kept their eyes on the men. If they lost they generally secured a loan from someone, no doubt in return for a reciprocal favour, not of the monetary kind. It was an old adage that when people went to Monte Carlo, they left their morals at home. There was little caution in the wind that blew over the polished parquet of the elegant sales-de-jeu in the casino.
APPOINTMENT WITH DEATH
Emma Erika Levin was one who revelled in the atmosphere of Monte Carlo, the lure of the roulette wheel, and the fun of attracting men from 18 to 80 – anyone who could remove the money from her account or the jewels from her neck. She was surrounded by them but unaware of her danger in her blind love for the world of excitement, her caution cast aside by the death of her husband and the release of her inheritance. Eighteen years previously she had married a Jewish stockbroker Leopold Levin of the firm Levin & Sons with offices in Copenhagen and Berlin. Her husband had died two years previously and left her well off. Her new-found freedom and life indicated that she had led a closed and conservative existence under the eye of the older man. Her previous life therefore had made her a very unsuitable candidate for the society of Monte Carlo – or a very suitable one from the point of view of the many predators who lurked there.
A couple whose acquaintance she would make had arrived in the Principality the previous October to stay for the season: Sir Vere and Lady Goold. They had taken up residence at Villa Menesini with a young pretty woman who was introduced to neighbours as their niece. According to a chemist and Englishman, Mr Reilly, who knew him as a regular customer, Sir Vere was a quiet unassuming man, well spoken, and Reilly let it be known that the couple were well off and had taken a suite in the villa for the whole season.
Lady Goold was French but spoke English fluently. The couple mixed with the best society and were frequently seen at the tables in the Casino. The villa they lived in was close to the Carlton, the celebrated night restaurant along the new road which runs parallel but below the Boulevard des Moulins. The villa was a large building let out in ten suites and the Goolds lived on the fourth floor. The niece, Mademoiselle Giroudin, was about 25 years of age and was friendly with the daughters of English doctors who practised in Monte Carlo. The couple visited the chemist shop and always paid their bills regularly. There was nothing much more known about them at the time.
They were, it would emerge, devotees of the house where Lady Fortune’s spinning wheel ruled her subjects, all slaves to the game of chance, watching her wheel turn with a rapt mixture of hope and fear.
There, Sir Vere and Lady Goold subjected themselves to the vagaries of the Wheel of Fortune until the arrival at zero prompted a gamble of somewhat different consequence in August of 1907.
6
LE TRAIN
MARSEILLES, AUGUST 1907
In the early morning of August 6th, shrouded in steam, the 5.38 a.m. train from Monte Carlo pulled up at the designated platform of Gare de Marseilles Saint-Charles. It was the height of the tourist season and the platform was thronged with disembarking passengers and marked by the feverish activity of the overworked porters.
One, Beraud, was given the task of bringing a large trunk to the baggage section where it was due, according to instructions, to be forwarded to London. Sweat sprouting on his forehead from stress and effort in the heat, he brought it to the appropriate section where he placed it on the last existing space on the bottom part of the large wooden rack. He noticed an unpleasant smell emanating from it and wondered what it contained. He then speedily returned to the platform to retrieve more luggage and suffer extra punishment for his now constantly aching bones.
Meanwhile station commissaire Louis Pons, famous for his punctilious follow-up and examination of his underlings’ work, was doing his rounds of the room, making sure that every bag and item of luggage was in the right section and placed correctly for quick and efficient removal. His devotion to duty was much lauded and he was personally proud of the performance of the service under his tutelage.
His team of porters did not resent or hate Pons because he was considered tough but generally fair. Everyone knew the lie of his land and knew never under any circumstance to get on his wrong side. So respected was he by his employers that his judgement was final. Beyond him there was no court of appeal.
His life outside his work was equally regimented. He tolerated no excess and in his life there was no room for the unexpected. When it turned up he dealt with it quickly and firmly, thereby keeping it at bay.
He noticed the recently delivered trunk and re-adjusted its position slightly to his own satisfaction. As he approached the next rack, he stopped in his tracks. Some instinct which he could not explain at the time, or afterwards, made him turn his attention to the trunk once more. The perennially prepared superintendent was not ready for the grim scenario which was about to unfold.
As he stood over the trunk, within centimetres of his gleaming black shoes he saw a small dark-red spot and then another fell on it and then another, forming a small pool. The origin seemed to be somewhere on the underside of the trunk. It looked like blood. Pons instantly recognised that to investigate it was not his business and momentarily was paralysed by a wave of anxiety which went from his toes to his stomach and then to his head and back to his stomach again. For him a most disturbing, unusual and unwelcome sensation.
How, he thought, would whatever might prove to be the explanation for this aberration reflect on his well-oiled operation and his department, hitherto run to within half a centimetre of perfection? He was no fool. Like at a port, all life passes through a train station, and quite a lot of unsavoury things can and did happen. Many of sufficient interest to the newspapers. The congregation of travellers were under the constant attention of a gaggle of robbers, pickpockets, conmen and prostitutes. Who in turn were the subject of observation of Pons, his security personnel and the undercover police. But all those eyes and all the precautions could not stem the whole tide of criminal intent. There had been numerous arrests made in the station, many unreported, and most of the rest attracting what could be described as cursory attention and a few paragraphs on the inside pages of the local newspapers. But a couple of incidents made the front pages – a stabbing after a row between two pimps, the arrest on a just-arrived train of a notorious fraudster. Pons winced at the memory and the perception that the wonderfully constructed station, so efficiently managed, accommodated within its august portals a den of iniquity.
In this instance, he recognised that if his dawning, anxious suspicion proved to be true, the local, national and the foreign press would come crawling like a plague of rats over his territory and, worst of all, his name would be dragged into reports. The object of newspapers, in his opinion shared by many, was to create sensation rather than further the cause of truth. It was of no comfort to Pons that he might be lucky enough to be portrayed in a favourable light. He detested the idea of such attention; his privacy meant everything to him. But as always, he knew, whatever his misgivings, he had to do his duty and p
roperly. There was no question of cleaning up and disposing of the now-coagulating pool which had formed under the rack.
But of course, the thought had, even for an unacceptable instant, crossed his mind.
The cacophony of noise, the hissing of the steam, the shrill whistles of the guards, the shunting thunder of the trains had departed Pons’ range of consciousness. He might as well have been solitarily confined in a cell, so occupied was he with his thoughts and the direction of his actions.
For a moment he felt dizzy with a confusion completely foreign to his experience. His palms became wet with a cold sweat and he felt his heartbeat soar uncomfortably. He took several deep breaths and pulled himself together, considering such panic intolerable.
The anxiety having receded, he took one more deep breath and removed a notebook and pencil from his inside jacket pocket. He bent down and from the tag on the trunk took a note of the details. The names of the owners, destination and their current address which caused Pons some inexplicable comfort.
He returned to his office, shut the door, sat at his desk and from the drawer removed his pipe, filled and lit it. Momentarily he relaxed in his chair, then began to mull over what he perceived as his two immediate choices. He must, he realised, bite the bullet.
He could contact the owners. What would they say? That the trunk contained fresh meat or slaughtered poultry. He laughed inwardly at an explanation so outlandish that he would have to instantly ignore it. Of course he would be offered a bribe which he would also not countenance. There was no one that could not do with more money. People could have enough of sex, drink and food but never of money. And Pons of all people, given his character and behaviour, believed that any unlimited need leads to destruction. He was happy with his salary and his legitimate percentage of his porters’ tips, on account of which he smoothed their daily passage. He kept them happy and the favour reaped a double return, cash and loyalty. A fair bargain. No whiff of corruption. Bribery was different in his book. Being bought meant being owned and Pons valued his independence. His employers acknowledged it as did his workers.
Murder in Monte Carlo Page 11
