No.
“No,” I said. My eyes came at last into focus. His cigarette was nearly burned down, his glass empty. Mine appeared untouched, so I reached out and took a swallow, grimacing at its temperature, before I met his even gaze. “You’re wrong. She was little more than a child when she started, with a sister to support and a career criminal for a father, and she did what she had to. She is no longer that person. Whatever brought her to Monte Carlo, it was not to rob the rich.”
He smiled, as he crushed out his cigarette. And it was a true smile, not a patronising expression—I knew those well enough, God knows. “I hope,” he said, “that you are right. In the meantime, shall we carry on with this performance of our own?”
“Sorry, what performance is that?”
“The one you are dressed for.”
“I dressed for the Casino, in case I needed to go in.”
“Exactly. A place I have seen Mrs Hudson enter twice.”
“She’s not in there now, is she?” I was alarmed at the idea of appearing to be tracking her down.
“Not that I have seen.”
“I don’t know, Holmes. Can’t we just go have dinner instead?”
“Afterwards. It may not prove necessary, to provide ourselves with the masks of English fools, but you will find the Casino an interesting experience. Although—I don’t suppose you brought your passport?”
“I always have my passport when there’s a chance of meeting up with you, Holmes. One never knows when we’ll be bolting for the nearest border.”
“I trust that bolting will not be on the agenda for this evening.” He returned his slim cigarette case to an inner pocket. “But since you have your papers, my good wife, and since it will not only permit us to establish ourselves here, but grant you a view of what keeps Monaco afloat, I propose that we spend the evening in the Monte Carlo Casino.”
I opened my pocket-book to retrieve the emeralds I had brought, just in case, and bent so Holmes could fasten them around my neck. I then stood, slipping my arm through his.
“Proposal accepted, husband mine. Let us go and lose some money.”
Holmes and I crossed the paving stones to the Casino de Monte-Carlo, that nineteenth-century enthusiasm of Beaux-Arts balustrades and statuary, cornices and draperies, friezes and sashes and all the decorative flourishes under the heavens. Its portico was ornate, its light fixtures as intricate as its doorways and leaded windows and—in short, this was a façade that, were it rendered in icing-sugar, would have made the perfect Society wedding-cake.
It was not huge, as these sorts of places go, merely an impressive gem in a delicate setting. The height of its entrance stairway was nicely judged: raised enough from the pavement to separate its fortunate guests from the hurly-burly of the streets, yet low enough not to intimidate—or to challenge the unfit. The cost of our clothing earned us the doorman’s bow—or so I thought, until I realised that it was Holmes he was saluting. A coin disappeared into the man’s palm, and he greeted Holmes with an accented “Welcome back, sir” as he drew open the door with a gesture worthy of royalty and ushered us into an expanse whose very air smelled expensive.
“Russian?” I asked Holmes when we were inside.
“A baron, who broke the bank here back in 1910.”
“Before the bank broke him,” I commented. No doubt one of the “relics” Sara had mentioned, given small pensions by an appreciative Casino.
“Seven out of ten Russian names on the Casino files in 1914 died of violence,” he pointed out. “Give me your passport, I’ll register you with the Commissariat.”
He walked across the elegant foyer to the discreet window, a husband vouching for his wife. This made me think of Mrs Hudson, and it dawned on me that I hadn’t told Holmes anything about my days in Antibes. He didn’t know that I’d met her on the beach, that I knew about her interests here, that she looked well and happy.
Unless…?
No, I’d have spotted him lurking in the distance. Which meant that I knew something he did not. And since it is on such minor pleasures that marriages are made, I was smiling when I moved to join him at the Commissariat’s window.
Would-be guests of the Casino were required to fill out a sort of membership card. Holmes had done his earlier, which simplified my own. While he exchanged a sheaf of banknotes for the gambling counters used on the tables—no mere jetons, but plaques that started at 100 francs—I moved into the entry to study this temple to the gambling arts.
The low foyer opened into an atrium like a jewel-box, two storeys high. Marble columns supported balustraded galleries under an ornately worked glass ceiling, its light making the room feel larger than it was. The last hour of daylight hid the shabbiness of chipped paint and worn carpeting, and brought a warm gleam to the gilt that overlaid the wall garlands, the ceiling cartouches, the pillar capitals, and any other surface that had held still long enough to be garnished. Art Nouveau piled atop Belle Époque, leaving no surface without ornamentation.
It ought to have been dizzying, if not actually qualm-inducing, but for some reason, it was not. Perhaps I was merely distracted? But when we had finished with the attendant’s card and set off into the sequence of rooms that made up the Casino, I found myself gawking like a farm-girl come to Times Square.
It was not what I’d expected. According to my tattered, pre-War guide—at any rate, reading deep between its lines—the Casino had been founded by a glib hustler who talked his way into the good graces of Monaco’s royal family, and was hired to pattern a casino on the lucrative one in Bad Hamburg. However, I’d been to Bad Hamburg, and this was an entirely different exercise in design. Despite its formality, and perhaps because of its air of smoke-stained dilapidation, it felt oddly intimate, less a business than a private club or home (though a home designed by Inigo Jones and furnished by a century of colonial pillage). The opulence here was on a human scale, the chairs around its gaming tables designed for comfort, in colours that soothed rather than stimulated. The whole seemed designed to confirm one’s taste and sense of “belonging.” A place to settle the moneyed classes into long sessions at the tables, leaving behind the crass worries of daily life, international politics, and looming bankruptcy—and, to ease the nouveau-riche class into feeling they were moneyed. A quite brilliant piece of architectural psychology.
“Russell, stop gawping like a child at a shop window,” Holmes murmured.
I suppose my pleasure was a bit blatant, so I tucked away my expression, replacing it with a sort of languid and approving curiosity.
I had little taste for gambling—money, that is, though one might say that my entire life has been a wager against chance—and few substantial skills when it came to cards. Of course, a woman may always act as a decorative accessory on a male arm, but unless I wished to hover at a distance while Holmes had all the fun, I needed to stick to games that demanded no more skill than laying gaming tokens onto the table.
So the roulette wheels it was. As with everything else under the Casino roof, the machines were perfect: gleaming mahogany, a polished bronze spindle at its centre, and an ivory ball that hopped crisply along the numbers until it chose one to nestle into. Simple, hypnotic, and—when combined with the Casino’s discreet and free-flowing alcohol—potentially devastating to one’s bank account.
Several of our table-mates had note-books in which they built or adapted their systems, jealously guarding their pages from nearby eyes. I, on the other hand, spent my first hour losing enough to see an undergraduate comfortably through Oxford, dismissing every loss and laughing happily at every win. Holmes came out slightly ahead of me, but at my next wager, with my last worn jeton before me on the table, I won. Then won again, and again after that. Seeing my pile grow before me, I experienced the first pang of the gambler’s hunger. I did my best to lose it all, but by the end of the evening—we had planned on dinner at 9:00—I
had nearly four times the counters I started with.
Weirdly fascinating. Utterly compulsive.
On one level, I was aware of being sucked in by the spin and drop—a seduction that had begun the moment I walked up the Casino steps—but that made it no less real. If anything, the challenge of resisting made the act that much more irresistible. The money didn’t matter: the spurt of triumph at winning did. The entire world narrowed down to a small ivory ball and the blur of black and red, slowing to receive it.
At 9:30, Holmes finally laid a hand on my arm and more or less dragged me away. On the steps outside the Casino, the clean air was like a slap on the face. I may have even swayed a little. Some time later, I realised that Holmes’ fingers were still wrapped around my upper arm.
“Well,” I said. “That was…interesting.”
“Is it not?”
“How much did I win?”
He told me—or I think he did. The sum meant nothing, although I could have recited precisely how often I had won, and with which numbers. As the flush faded from my skin, I noticed people walking past, the street-lamps in the little garden before me, the good clean odour of salt air. I pulled my wrap up around my shoulders, and shivered in the warm air.
“Stop up your men’s ears with wax, that none of them may hear,” I murmured.
“Pardon?”
“Holmes, please don’t ask me to do that again.”
“Why not? You won handily.”
“Exactly. I feel as if I’d washed down a pound of chocolate drops with a bottle of champagne.”
He laughed. “You’re hungry. Come.”
“Where are you staying?” I hadn’t thought to ask before, though I’d assumed it was in the hotel adjacent to the Casino. But when we had crossed the Casino forecourt, he led me past the Hôtel de Paris and down a side street to another, equally grand Belle Époque façade that bore the name Hôtel Hermitage. Being dressed already meant that we could go directly to its restaurant—one of its restaurants, I suspected—and fortify the inner woman.
My heart sank a bit when the wine steward came bustling over and greeted Holmes as a long-lost brother, a sign of impending lengthy discussion and negotiation. Fortunately, Holmes noticed my face five minutes into the recitation of virtues, and said that we’d have that, and the lady was ready to order.
We gave our orders, ate some bread, and I then returned to the topic that had bothered me since I’d taken that breath of fresh air. “Holmes, do not let me become a casino addict.”
He raised an eyebrow. “Do you currently find yourself craving a return to the roulette wheel?”
“God, no.”
“Then I do not think you need to worry. More wine?”
I was not convinced. Still, Holmes did have enough experience with addictive habits to recognise any such tendency in his wife. “If you say so. And no, I won’t have any more, thanks. Though if I’m to face a taxi drive back along the coast, maybe I should drink myself unconscious.”
The hovering wine steward nearly dropped the cobwebbed, dust-encrusted bottle he had exhumed from the depths. He could not have looked much more shocked had I expressed an interest in being served his bouncing baby son for my dinner. When he had refreshed our glasses, he placed the wine back into its nest, moving it a little further out of my reach before he wandered off, bereft.
Holmes waited until he was out of earshot before saying mildly, “As you like. Although when I checked in, I did mention that my wife might be joining me.” Nothing about him suggested that it mattered one way or the other to him—nothing but the quiet humour in the back of his eyes that traced a feather-light finger all the way down my spine.
I cleared my throat. “Well. I should hate to disappoint the management.”
“No doubt the hotel could find you a toothbrush. Along with any sort of clothing you might desire, from chain mail to chador.”
“True. Money may not buy happiness, but a good hotel can smooth out any bumps in the road.”
I did not fool him one whit. But then, neither did I believe his apparent lack of interest in my preference. A plate appeared. I took up my fork and knife. “Why choose the Hermitage?”
“It is a hotel that respects the privacy of its guests. Also, I deemed it marginally less likely that I would walk down a hallway and encounter someone who knew me.”
I glanced around at the elaborate walls, the sparkling crystal and gilt overhead, the rich detail in the polished column. “Why? It seems a very nice place.”
“It is. Merely not the first choice for an English visitor.”
“Because of its Russian name?”
“Because of its Russian guests—historically, at any rate. Before 1917, the Hermitage was a favourite with the Romanovs and their friends. And you will have noticed the voices, even now.”
I nodded as if I had been paying attention to the accents from the adjoining tables. “Would this be where the Russians I met last night are staying?”
“Your friend Vasilev himself has taken a house here, but the others, certainly. Including those who come to Monaco to do business with Basil Zaharoff.”
I dropped my fork. “Zaharoff? The munitions dealer?”
“Basil Zaharoff—or more correctly, Vasileios Zacharias Zaharoff. Known as Sir Basil, although he has no more right to that title than any other he’s claimed, including Count and Prince. ‘Man of Mystery,’ ‘Merchant of Death,’ ‘The Richest Man in Europe.’ His intimates, of whom there are a surprising number, call him Zedzed.”
“Dear God, what is that man doing here?”
“He has wintered in Monte Carlo since the Casino was young, back in the 1880s. I understand that he and his new wife are here as often as they are in Paris.”
“That can’t be good for Monaco’s reputation. Couldn’t the country…I don’t know. Disinvite him?” Basil Zaharoff was a Greek-born Russian who had become an agent for the Nordenfelt Guns company in the 1870s and built what was rumoured to be the third or fourth greatest personal fortune in the world. He was single-handedly responsible for some of the worst atrocities of the past half-century. Indeed, he had entered the vocabulary of wickedness with the eponymous Système Zaharoff, which functions thus: A political dispute is found that links emotional loyalties with economic competition. Hints and rumours are dropped on both sides, stirring the passions. Politicians are bribed and newspapers bought outright—again, on both sides of the dispute—to stoke the fears and resentments into open hatred and panic. Baseless rumours and accusations fly, wild campaigns on both sides escalate, riots take place, and finally war breaks out. At which point, both sides turn to Zaharoff to buy their competing armaments. The man was said to move the leaders of the world’s nations around like his personal chess pieces—and if Sara Murphy knew he lived in Monaco, that would explain her preference for Juan-les-Pins.
“They can’t disinvite him, no, although they do seem to expect him to keep up a respectable front while he’s here. Zaharoff is now the primary owner of the Société des Bains de Mer, which owns half the businesses in Monaco. Including the Casino.”
Revelations like this made me uncomfortably aware of how naïve I was, when it came to the world’s dark currents. “Holmes, I know that small places like Monaco have to survive somehow, but—Zaharoff? It must feel like having a poisonous snake under the settee.”
“They would tell you that compromises are necessary.”
The conversation was coming perilously close to our arguments over the dirty deeds his brother Mycroft considered a necessary part of preserving Britain from its enemies. I wasn’t about to resume that disagreement here and now. “Well, at least we didn’t give him any of our money at the tables this evening.” I reached for my cutlery, then hesitated. “Holmes, please tell me he doesn’t own the Hermitage, too?”
“Oddly enough, no. Not yet, at any rate.” My ap
petite had become less enthusiastic, but I took up my fork and knife, comforted by the minor reassurance that eating here would not contribute to a man who made his living through warmongering, blackmail, and wholesale battlefield slaughter.
“So, a Greek arms dealer essentially owns Monaco.”
“The man owns companies, land, and politicians all over Europe.”
“Have you had dealings with him?”
“Not directly, although we have met. Twice. The second time, I failed to notice his outstretched hand.”
“Then let us hope he doesn’t walk in before we’ve finished our dinner.”
“The man is old, and I believe his colleagues go to him, when there is business to discuss.”
“Good to hear.” Refusing a man’s proffered hand would have been a duelling offence, not so long ago. And so far as I knew, the man was only a decade or so older than Holmes: there could be plenty of venom left in the creature.
I pushed away all disquieting thoughts and addressed myself to my plate of excellent veal. When I had laid down my fork, the plate levitated off in one direction as my salad circled in from the other: Monaco’s sleight of hand was not confined to its casino. However, with my hollow innards no longer taking up the major part of my attention, I could now turn to other matters.
“Holmes, do you honestly suspect Mrs Hudson of being up to no good?”
“No,” he said.
The monosyllable was not quite as definitive as I might have liked. “No…but?”
He made a face. “Russell, I have known the woman since I was nineteen. Our years together began and ended with deaths—two deaths for which Clarissa Hudson was peripherally responsible. ‘Peripherally,’ ” he repeated sharply. I subsided. “For four and a half decades, she lived under my roof and walked a path that I set for her. This spring, had you asked me, I’d have agreed that she had changed. And yet the moment her past came back to her, she stepped up to meet it with precisely the kind of behaviour that characterised her youthful criminal history.”
Riviera Gold Page 9
