They were very useful.
Arthur ambled between the reclining lounges, examining the pristine swimming pool and the glistening Mediterranean Sea, when he noticed a man with a laptop perched on his thighs sitting over on the shaded side of the pool. He was bent over, craning his neck and peering at the screen, curled around the computer as if he were staring intently at it, though one couldn’t be sure due to the mirrored aviator sunglasses and black fedora he wore.
And yet, the man’s glasses, his hat, the tightly wound posture, the can of Red Bull beside him, and that subtle twitch when a seagull fluttered to the deck near him—
Arthur recognized that guy.
He wandered over, nodded at a few acquaintances on the way, and settled into the empty deck chair beside the man to wait until he was noticed.
It took a while.
Not hours, certainly, but Arthur waited for several minutes with his hands interlaced behind his head, his eyes closed and reveling in the warmth of the French Riviera sun on his face while he waited for the guy to look up. The sun was so much more intense down here than at home in England, even in the winter. It felt divine on his skin.
Long minutes passed.
The guy was still engrossed in his laptop.
When Arthur tired of being circumspect, he used his phone’s glass screen to flash a bright reflection of the sun into the guy’s eyes. Despite the man’s mirrored sunglasses, it startled him, and he gripped the computer to look over at Arthur, pissed off. “Hey!”
Arthur turned to him. “Oh, sorry. I didn’t see you there. Just checking a text—Good Lord. Twist, is that you?”
The guy took off his sunglasses, revealing eyes as crystal blue as the immaculate swimming pool just beyond their feet and with depths of indigo that even the Mediterranean Sea that stretched around them couldn’t achieve. A brush of dark hair was visible under the brim of his black hat. “Arthur? Arthur Finch-Fucking-Hatten?”
Arthur laughed and stuck out his hand to shake. “How the hell are you, Twist?”
“Fine. And don’t call me that. It’s not nice to make fun of people with speech impediments.”
“She didn’t have a speech impediment. You encouraged her to use that baby talk with you. Serves you right to have that moniker stick to you, Tristan.”
During their senior year, if memory served, the girls at school really started calling him Twist as if there were some other meaning for it, but that was none of Arthur’s concern.
“What the hell are you doing down here, Arthur? Shouldn’t you be holed up in your manor house for Christmas or something? I heard some woman finally lost her mind and married you.”
Tristan “Twist” King’s accent was typically Midwestern American, as unremarkable as a field of corn. They’d both been frequent denizens of Le Rosey’s computer lab, though Twist had attended only upper school at the boarding school. He’d been a scholarship student from the US. He hadn’t been shuffled off to boarding school at around five years old like the rest of them had. Some of the students at Le Rosey did not associate with scholarship students, but Arthur wasn’t that type of snob.
Though Tristan had asked him his business, Arthur didn’t want to broach the subject of Maxence quite yet. “What’s that you’re working on?”
Tristan shrugged. “High-frequency trading. Monaco has 5G. I’m killing it.”
Arthur grinned at him. “Nice. Are you staying around here?”
“I’ve been here for a year, give or take.” He gestured to his gray trousers and blue blazer. “I’m just living on my boat and sucking up the 5G. My routines are so fast that they’re destroying NYC. In another year, I’ll be, well, like everyone we know.”
“Since you’ve been around here, what’s the news these days?”
Small lines creased the skin between Tristan’s eyes for an instant, and he said, “Rainier Grimaldi’s dying.”
Maxence’s uncle, again. “Does everyone know that?”
Tristan stole a guilty glance at the edge of the parapet, suggesting a reference to the regular people down below. “Everybody at the yacht club knows.”
But not the Monegasque citizens and tourists on the street. “News hadn’t traveled to Britain.”
“Not even among us? That’s kind of shocking. A lot of Monaco people have been arriving within the last few days because they assume there’ll be a Council of Nobles meeting within a week or two. The yacht club is humming. It’s usually dead until noon around here.”
Council of Nobles? Must be a Monaco thing. “They’re keeping it very quiet.”
“Evidently. Maxence must have been told about it though, because he arrived here a day or two after Rainier’s stroke. He’s been sitting with his uncle in the hospital every day for weeks. We grabbed lunch a while ago. We were going to do it again yesterday, but he went up to Geneva for the day. Weird. But he called me after supper and said he was heading down to the casino for the night. Micah saw him there. He’s around here, too, somewhere. We were talking this morning before I logged on. Anyway, Micah talked to him for a few seconds, and he said Max had a little bit of a fat lip and some scrapes near his eye like he’d been in a bar fight or something.”
“He got in a fight at the casino?” Damn, Arthur should have seen that on the security footage.
“Micah said it was scabbed over, so it couldn’t have happened right then. Maybe earlier in the day.”
Arthur blandly waited for Tristan to go on, his hands clasped between his knees as he leaned forward.
Tristan finally did. “I don’t know why Max came back here at all. With Rainier out of commission, Pierre might actually have him knocked off, assuming Estebe Fournier doesn’t get to him first after last night.”
Here we go. “Estebe Fournier?” Arthur asked him, frowning and feigning confusion. “He was a few years ahead of us, right?”
“Yeah, that one. Estebe thinks Maxence ran off with his wife. He was stomping around the club at two o’clock in the morning, threatening everyone and saying that he was going to cut off Maxence’s head and drop it in the ocean for the sharks to eat.” Tristan grimaced. “Security finally led him off. He was wasted, and I don’t think even half of it was booze.”
“Do you think he meant it?” Arthur asked.
“I think he thought he meant it. I hope Max isn’t around. Estebe said he was sending his goons after him, and he was going to find Max before dawn and kill him.”
The Mediterranean sun suddenly felt uncomfortably hot on Arthur’s scalp and shoulders. “Thank you so much, there, Tristan. I appreciate that.”
“Are you looking for Max?”
“I’ll pass it on to someone who is.”
Tristan looked off to the side, his eyes the color of the sea’s fathoms. “He’s a good guy, and Estebe’s an asshole.”
“Good luck with your trading,” Arthur said as he sauntered away.
“Don’t need luck in high-frequency,” Tristan called after him. “That’s the whole point!”
That was true, but Arthur was too distracted to debate the finer points of computer-based commodities trading just then. He had to find Casimir to tell him about Fournier.
Caz didn’t seem to be in the pool area.
With a quick glance over the parapet again, he saw Casimir standing on the sidewalk below, talking to some girls on one of the yachts.
Good, they needed to go.
Arthur trotted down the stairs and nodded to the security guard as he passed. The guy ignored him.
As he hit the street, he returned to his usual, lordly demeanor, lest someone see him hurry and guess his information or his errand.
Casimir walked up to meet Arthur on the quay beside the dock, the boats creaking their ropes and nudging against their protective floats. Styrofoam squealed as boats ground against it, and the salty scent of the sea filled Arthur’s nose and lungs as he breathed slowly, casually, as if nothing were amiss.
When he reached Casimir, Arthur kept a low voice and told him, “I
saw Twist Campbell up there. Everyone here knows about Rainier’s stroke. It’s common knowledge in the jet set that he’s been in hospital for weeks, and people are starting to arrive for the inevitable. Max was spending his days at Rainier’s bedside, except for yesterday. Yesterday, they said he went up to Geneva.”
“We knew that,” Casimir said, bending his head near Arthur’s. “You told me your friends got a visual on him at the Geneva airport.”
“He got back yesterday late afternoon and was in the casino by nine o’clock, looking rough.”
“Rough?” Casimir repeated. Jesus, when Maxence went on a real bender, sometimes his health suffered.
“Like he’d been in a fight, Twist said.”
“Jesus. What the hell does that guy get himself into?” Casimir updated Arthur on what he’d found out, that Pierre had taken his yacht out in the very wee hours of the morning and hadn’t returned yet. “Last night, did you talk to Pierre personally or just his toadies?”
Arthur shook his head. “Just security personnel. They said Pierre told them to call me.”
“Maybe he told them when to call, and then he took the yacht out to the open sea.”
“But would he dump Maxence’s body over the side himself? Wouldn’t he just have that oaf of his, name of Sault or something, do it for him? Or maybe he sank the whole yacht to disguise that he’d had Maxence killed.”
Casimir considered this. “Let’s get the girls. We should figure out whether Pierre is out with that yacht or if he’s somewhere in Monaco. If he is here, we need to talk to him. That bastard has something to do with this. I just know it.”
Chapter Twelve
Port Hercule
Maxence: Just before midnight
Maxence held out his hand in the darkness, beckoning Simone with a twitch of his deeply callused fingers. “Come on.”
The distance from the casino to the Yacht Club de Monaco wasn’t far, but he was sucking wind. Though much of the route was sharply downhill, he’d been carrying Simone in his arms for most of it. She couldn’t keep up with his long stride because she was wearing those ridiculous, sexy high heels.
The sprint had overheated him, so as soon as he’d set her on the quay, he’d rolled his shirt sleeves up to his elbows despite the wintry night, exposing his thick forearms to the chilly air.
Light from the sodium streetlights at Port Hercule glowed mustard yellow on his tanned skin and the wavelets frosting the dark sea. The stiff December breeze flapped his tuxedo shirt against his arm and whipped his hair around his jaw and ears. “Hold onto me. Don’t fall in the water.”
Behind Simone, the Yacht Club de Monaco rose in the air like a beached cruise ship, slim decks stacked on each other. One end was rounded like the stern of a ship, and the other was slimmer, suggesting a pointed bow. The swimming pool on the top floor allowed members to bask in the Mediterranean sun during the daytime.
Presumably, one needn’t wear the dress code-mandated blue blazer and slacks while swimming in the pool.
Presumably.
The yachts in the slips around the club were varied in their styles, from the snowy-white, explorer-type yachts that resembled miniature cruise ships to the sleek, gunmetal-gray motor yachts that looked like floating spaceships. The latter were fortified to defend their billionaire owners from the pitchfork-wielding rabble.
Or, you know, boats, Maxence reminded himself.
Boats.
He needed to concentrate on Simone’s plight.
On the dock, Simone stood on the sidewalk and stared at his yacht. The wild wind picked at the red scarf he’d snatched for her in the casino, and it fluttered away, floating until it dropped into the water. She clutched Maxence’s tuxedo jacket around herself, holding the lapels closed over her white dress. “This isn’t going to work.”
On the cliffs around the harbor, high-rise buildings from five to fifty stories, lit with bright yellow windows and decorated in red and green lights, loomed beyond the yacht club and the main thoroughfare. More hotels and apartment buildings packed together on the mountain terraces and rolling streets in the distance.
Ropes mooring other yachts to the docks creaked like haunted houses, and the lapping water clicked on the boats’ hulls.
“We can’t take a boat!” she whispered loudly. “Estebe has a bigger boat. He’ll catch us!”
“His boat, The Colossus, is a mega-superyacht,” Maxence told her as he tugged her hand. She stepped up the three stairs of the gangplank. “The Last Toy, on the other hand, is a modified Pershing 88 motor yacht. If it were any faster, it would be a cigarette boat. My brother won’t mind if I borrow her for a bit.”
His brother, Pierre, would definitely mind and probably throw a tantrum, but Maxence did not give a flying shit about what Pierre thought.
“Estebe will find us,” Simone said, looking around as if she thought the men chasing her might have already located them. The sidewalk leading around the bay had only a few people strolling or staggering back to their hotels or yachts, though. “If he catches us out on the water, I don’t know what he’ll do to me. At least there are people around on land.”
“Simone, if you want to get back to your family, come on.” He poured intensity into those last two words, trying to get her on the damn boat.
Simone sucked in a deep breath. Her eyebrows bunched together in worry, but she squeezed his fingers and climbed aboard the boat.
“Let’s go. Gita!” Maxence called into the yacht. “We need to cast off right now!”
A woman wearing loose white clothes emerged from the lower decks of the ship, dragging her feet because she was wearing bedroom slippers. “Monsieur Grimaldi? What are you doing here? It’s almost midnight, and we weren’t informed the boat would be leaving the dock.”
“We need to leave right now. Get Amnon up.”
Gita shouted back into the boat, “Amnon! We need you in the wheelhouse!” She asked Maxence, “Where are we going?” as she bent her knees to begin untangling the rope from the mooring on the dock.
Maxence thought quickly. “Genoa. Estebe would expect us to go to Nice, wouldn’t he, Simone? Nice is the closest airport, and it’s where we always fly into because it has the heliport with regular service to Monaco. He’ll put people at the heliport and the Nice airport, so we’ll go to Genoa in Italy. You can get a plane to Rome and then Mauritius from there.”
Simone stared at the other boats alongside The Last Toy, her eyes wide. “He’ll catch us.”
“How fast can that behemoth of his go?”
“I don’t know,” Simone said, still flustered. She gathered Maxence’s tuxedo jacket more closely around her, holding the coat tightly around her throat. “He said ten or twelve knots, sometimes.”
Maxence laughed. “The Last Toy is built for speed. She does forty knots or faster. We’ll leave him in our wake. We’ll be in Genoa in two hours. I doubt he could ready that beast to sail before we pull into the port in Italy.”
“It’ll take us a while to get up to cruising speed,” Gita told Maxence. “I’d allow three hours to get to Genoa, perhaps somewhat less.”
Simone told them, “The Colossus has four tenders. They’re practically little speedboats. They seat four and can hop over a wake.”
“But they don’t have the range,” Maxence assured her. “In half an hour, we’ll be in the open Mediterranean, out of sight of land. They won’t be able to find us in the dark. We’ll be in Genoa around three in the morning. You can catch the first flight to Mauritius. You’ll be home in time for a late supper.”
She paused, and her dark, lovely eyes lifted to stare into his. “I’ll be home by tomorrow night?”
“By tonight, actually,” he said, checking the screen on his phone to confirm that it was after midnight.
Phone.
On the off chance that Estebe Fournier knew that Simone had found Maxence, they might try to track his phone.
Maxence powered down his phone and shoved it back into his pocket. Try to
track that, Estebe.
He said, “It’s past midnight, so you’ll be home later today. The flight to Mauritius is just a little over twelve hours from Genoa.”
Gita yelled down into the bottom of the boat, and two other people arrived to help her with the ropes. A man ran up the stairs to the wheelhouse on the roof with its huge radar array on the very top of the large yacht.
A smile curved the corners of Simone’s mouth. A twinkle flickered in her eyes, and she began to look more like the Simone he remembered from high school instead of the frightened woman at the casino. She braced her fists on her hips, the sleeves of his tuxedo jacket falling over her hands, and asked him, “How do you know how long the flight to Mauritius is? Because you’re right.”
He laughed and flicked his fingers in the air, dismissing her too-prescient question. “One of those odd pieces of information you pick up when you’re globetrotting.”
Simone’s relieved smile widened. “I can’t thank you enough.”
“Come on. We’ll get you settled in one of the cabins. You must be exhausted. Being pregnant does that, I’ve heard.”
“You’ve heard right,” she told him. “And yes, I’d love to sleep.”
Crew members scurried around them, readying the ship for departure.
Maxence said, “You’ll need something to wear for sleep and probably something else for the plane tomorrow. Let’s see what Pierre left on the boat.”
Simone’s smile brightened, and she held out the heavy skirt of her white dress. “Otherwise, I’ll be the best-dressed passenger on the plane to Africa.”
He laughed. “People used to wear suits to fly, but I’ll bet the flight attendants haven’t seen many beaded evening gowns.”
“It’s Pamella Roland Couture,” Simone said. “Even I think a pink ombre, crystal-beaded gown a bit much for a twelve-hour airplane ride.”
Maxence squinted a little at the gown. “I thought your dress was white.”
Simone swished the hem back and forth, the lights from the yacht club glistening on the crystals.
One Night in Monaco Page 8
