Crown Jewel

by Christopher Reich

  Simon was up, too, and a half step behind. A dozen people ringed the table. All remained glued to the spot, their expressions as immobile as their feet. The cheat shoved the man nearest him hard enough to topple him into the woman behind him. The two fell unceremoniously to the floor. He dashed through the gap between them and out the door, heading toward the staircase that descended to the main floor. Simon gave chase, leaping over the two, pausing at the top of the stairs before vaulting the balustrade and landing in the center of the blackjack table eight feet below. He jumped to the floor, cutting off the cheat’s path. Seeing his escape ruined, the man slowed. He started left, then went right, then stopped altogether.

  Simon crashed into him before the man could make it a step. Simon led with his shoulder, aiming for the sternum but striking the man’s collarbone, feeling it crack as they hit the floor. The man grunted, his face inches from Simon’s, and Simon saw that he had bad teeth and worse dental work, and his breath reeked of the brandy Alexanders he’d been drinking all night.

  But if Simon expected him to give up, he was mistaken. A knee to the groin signaled his resistance, followed by a head butt glancing off the bridge of Simon’s nose. Stunned, breathless, and momentarily paralyzed, Simon was unable to stop the man from climbing to his feet. In desperation, Simon threw out a hand and grasped hold of his ankle. Unfortunately, it was the wrong ankle and belonged to a horrified Asian woman. The woman screamed and her cry roused Simon. He was on his feet as the cheat navigated his way through the crowd of gamblers.

  By now security had mobilized in response to the incident. Two men in maroon jackets blocked the only path out of the casino. The cheat spun and pointed at Simon. “It’s him,” he said in accented English whose origin Simon would only place later.

  The guards hesitated long enough for the cheat to lash out with a cosh, striking the first man squarely on the jaw, dropping him, before backhanding the second, the cosh caroming off his temple. His route to the entrance clear, the cheat bolted. He grabbed at the door handle, pulling it toward him, unaware that Simon was close behind. In England, exit doors pivot outward. The door didn’t budge. At that moment, Simon had him. He grabbed the collar of his jacket and yanked the man backward. Ready for a blow, he ducked as the cosh cut a path above his head, noting that a nail extended from the business end of the leather cudgel. Simon thrust an open palm upward, landing it on the man’s jaw, snapping his head backward. His other hand latched on to the man’s wrist. He dropped to a knee, wrenching the wrist and the arm attached to it, with all his might. There was a pop—loud as a champagne cork—as the shoulder dislocated. The man cried out. The cosh dropped into Simon’s hand and he spun it so the nail was facing outward. It was a killing weapon.

  “No!” a man shouted. “Simon, stop!” It was Ronnie, the casino boss, emerging from his private office across the floor, barreling toward him.

  Simon didn’t hear him, or didn’t want to. He wanted to punish the man, to hurt him badly. Turning, he lashed out toward the cheat’s undefended face.

  A woman screamed. It was Lucy. He saw her from the corner of his eye.

  The nail stopped a millimeter from the man’s eye.

  “You got lucky,” said Simon, throwing the man against the wall. “Say thank you to the lady.”

  The cheat said nothing. His silence riled Simon all over again and he hit the man in the stomach. “I won’t ask again.”

  The man fought for his breath, his eyes cursing Simon. His gaze shifted, focusing on something…or someone.

  Simon began to turn as a fist slammed into his kidney. It was a professional punch, knuckles first, delivered with force and accuracy. A second punch followed to the opposite side, harder still.

  Simon bent double at the waist, tears fouling his vision. That was that. He was officially out of the game. TKO.

  He dropped to one knee, aware of a commotion around him—Ronnie going after the cheat and his secret accomplice—but not much else. He tried not to move, the pain exquisite and relentless. He heard Lucy shout, “Stop him! Don’t let him leave! Come back, you fucking thief!”

  They left Les Ambassadeurs an hour later. Simon walked out the front door, pushing it, not pulling, under his own power. His car was brought up and he held the door for Lucy, declining her offer to drive. Once behind the wheel, he made a circuit of Sloane Square and headed east toward Lower Grosvenor Place.

  “You’re not taking me home,” said Lucy. “Not after all that.”

  Simon kept his eyes on the road. He was in no mood to take orders. His side ached like hell. He’d washed up and used the men’s room. As expected, there was blood in his urine. It wasn’t the first time. If it persisted, he’d see a doctor. His head throbbed and there was a noticeable knot above the bridge of his nose. Hoping to keep it from swelling, he’d pressed an old fifty-p coin against it for a minute, then given up. Que será, será. But it was his pride that hurt worst of all. He’d brought the operations of London’s best gaming house to a halt only to allow the cheats who’d robbed him of twenty thousand pounds to escape. The loss was hypothetical. The cheats hadn’t been able to pocket their ill-gotten gains. Ronnie had returned his original stake. Somehow, the thought did little to console him.

  “I’m too excited to sleep,” Lucy went on. “We absolutely must do something. Where shall we go?”

  “It’s eleven o’clock,” said Simon. “You’re twenty-three years old. You have work tomorrow. If I hear you set foot outside your door before six a.m. tomorrow, you can find yourself another job.”

  Lucy looked at him as if he’d slapped her. “What?”

  “You heard me.”

  “You have no right,” she exclaimed. “I can do whatever I choose.”

  “Feel free.”

  Simon continued across town, thankful that traffic was only bad, not miserable. All the way Lucy carped and complained, but he said nothing more until they arrived at her flat. “Here we are. Go upstairs. Get into bed and go to sleep. It’s been enough of a night for both of us.”

  Lucy unclasped her safety belt. She motioned as if she was going to start up again, then thought better of it. “Not fair,” she said, then climbed out of the car.

  To her credit, she did not slam the door.

  Maybe she was finally growing up.

  Simon waited until she was inside and had disappeared into the vestibule before slipping the car into first and making a U-turn. His home and business lay in southwest London, a stone’s throw from Wimbledon. It was a thirty-minute drive in the best of conditions. Tonight, it would be double that. But traffic didn’t play into Simon’s thinking. Not a whit.

  He was too jacked up to go home. Nothing revved his juices more than a little physical violence, even if he had been on the losing end of it. All measure of good sense had gone out the window the moment he’d given chase to the cheat. At that instant, his world had boiled down to him versus the bad guy, good versus evil, though it was a question of his ego run riot, not anything so grandiose as maintaining the universe’s order. Mess with me and you’re going to pay. It was as simple as that. It was not a motto by which to live any kind of successful life. But at that moment, Simon hadn’t cared about mottoes, or, to tell the truth, anything, except catching the thief and inflicting punishment upon him.

  Two hours later, those same wild and ungoverned impulses raced through his blood. If he’d been hard on Lucy, it was because he feared she shared his affinity for mayhem. He couldn’t control himself, but he could control her. He was a hypocrite. So what?

  Simon pointed the car north toward Covent and the City. He rolled down the window, enjoying the warm, fetid air, the scent of the River Thames hidden somewhere inside the exhaust and grit of central London. He was navigating to that part of the map where borders lay undefined and lands undiscovered, to the dangerous and beckoning area labeled “Where Dragons Lie.”

  Simon Riske headed into the night.

  Chapter 3

  Eight hundred miles to the south
, on the rocky shoreline of a postage stamp–size country, in a casino far larger and far more famous than Les Ambassadeurs, a team of twelve professional criminals entered the Casino de Monte-Carlo between the hours of nine and ten p.m. Nine were men and three women, at least to look at.

  Every casino in the world deployed facial-recognition software. In cases of suspected cheating, customers’ faces were compared against photographs contained in criminal databases, both national and international. Prior to arrival, the team members had spent hours altering their appearances. They employed the finest in makeup and disguises: hairpieces, facial prostheses, false mustaches and beards, contact lenses, dental implants. A professional makeup artist with twenty years’ experience in the motion picture industry oversaw their transformation. It was not the team’s first visit.

  At ten p.m., after the last of the team had entered, each member moved to a predetermined workstation in the high rollers’ rooms on the casino’s second floor, where the game of baccarat was played. Each player began with a bankroll of ten thousand euros. They played quietly and conservatively. They did not drink. They did not seek the attention of the beautiful women drifting in and out of the rooms. They did not on any occasion speak to the dealer. And never ever did they place wild or outlandish wagers. Nothing was remarkable about the players except one thing: they won.

  And they won.

  And they won.

  By two a.m., the last member of the team had departed the premises. Once outside, members dispersed according to plan after discreetly turning over their winnings. Their combined initial stake of one-hundred-twenty-thousand euros had grown to four million.

  A little after two, a thirteenth man entered the casino. His name was Ratka. Just Ratka. This was not his real name. He had taken it from a false passport he had used many years ago. In fact, the passport was so poor in quality it had attracted the attention of a border agent in Geneva, Switzerland. At the time, Ratka had just escaped from a prison in Orbe, in the mountains east of the city. During his flight, he had killed a guard and blinded another with his own fingers. He was arrested on the spot and returned to another, more secure facility. He escaped again but took on the name inscribed in that passport. Sometimes it was necessary to remember a mistake in order to prevent repeating it.

  Ratka was forty-nine years old. He stood an inch over six feet tall. His hair was black, abundant, and swept off his forehead to reveal a violent widow’s peak. His face was doughy and pale, cleaved in two by a large crooked nose very much like a hawk’s beak. His eyes were narrow and deep set and so brown as to be black. He wore a blazer and an open-collar shirt left open to display a gold cross nestled in his chest hair. He was not an attractive man, but he radiated a dark energy.

  Like the other members of the team, Ratka climbed the stairs to the second floor and made his way to the salle de jeux. He had not come to gamble, or at least not to win. One of the team had claimed that a dealer had recognized him and possibly another member. The dealer was a longtime casino employee, but not a friend of Tintin, who was in their pocket. Ratka needed to see the man to decide on a course of action. So close to the end—in spitting distance of more money than he had ever imagined possible—he could not allow anything or anyone to jeopardize their hard work.

  Ratka found a seat at the dealer’s table. He ponied up a thousand euros and played a few hands. He won. He lost. He was as helpless to the fates as the others at the table. All the while, he kept his eye on the dealer. Time had given him an unbreakable faith in his ability to know a man’s heart. He needed only a few minutes to ascertain if a man was hard or soft, if he was loyal or traitorous, if he could be turned or if he could not.

  The dealer was a black man. His name was Vincent Morehead and he was a native of Saint Croix, the Virgin Islands. All this Tintin had told them. Morehead was single with no family, either in France or at home. Not that any such sentimental considerations entered into Ratka’s decision-making. If you were not a Serb, he had no feelings for you.

  After a while, it came time to reshuffle the shoe. The dealer offered it to Ratka. Ratka ran the cutting card along the deck, but his eyes remained on Vincent Morehead. He slid the card into the deck. Morehead pulled the shoe back across the baize tabletop. Their eyes met. In that instant, Ratka knew that Morehead knew, not only about the two men he’d recognized, but possibly more.

  Ratka played awhile longer, then left the table, tossing Morehead a twenty-euro chip for his trouble. He ignored the dealer’s “Merci, monsieur.”

  Outside, Ratka walked the short distance to the Café de Paris and took a seat in a booth at the rear of the restaurant.

  “Well?” asked a colleague.

  Ratka stared at the man. “Well,” he said.

  Chapter 4

  The club was called Libertine, if it had a name at all, and it occupied the underground premises of an abandoned abattoir and meat market in King’s Cross. It was a dank, cavernous space dominated by towering brick arches that divided the club into three areas: dance floor, bar, and pitch-black netherworld that all were advised never to set foot in. The music was too loud, driven by a relentless backbeat, and meant to turn even the most docile guest into a frenzied partygoer. Spotlights raked the entire floor like klieg lights policing a concentration camp.

  It was a bad place in a bad part of town frequented by bad people. Simon felt completely at home.

  “What’ll it be?”

  “Brandy Alexander,” said Simon.

  “No Jack?” The bartender was tall, raven-haired, and direct in her gaze and her manner. Her name was Carmen. She was Spanish, from Madrid and proud of her Castilian lisp.

  “Not tonight.”

  She leaned in, dark eyes on his, confident in their desired effect. “Mixing things up, eh?”

  He motioned her closer. “Carmen?”

  “Yes, Simon?”

  “Get me my damned drink.”

  Carmen’s face dropped. “Cabrón,” she said.

  Leaning an elbow on the bar, Simon turned and surveyed the room. It was a busy night, even for Libertine. The dance floor was packed edge to edge, decidedly more women than men. There wasn’t a suit or a tie to be seen, so he loosened his own and stuffed it in his pocket. Score one for the enemy.

  Carmen returned, slamming the drink on the bar as if it were a court summons. “Brandy Alexander for Señor Riske.”

  “Salud.” Simon raised the glass and drank half of it in a go. His eyes watered, and after a moment, the throbbing in his forehead went away. He thought back to the poker table and wondered how many times the cheat had slid a card from his sleeve to win a hand—the answer was “Too many”—and how he’d missed it. The more he thought about it, the more he marveled at the cheat’s prowess and his preparation. Not just the practice required, but his foreknowledge of how they ran the game at Les Ambassadeurs. Then there was the matter of his drinking. He had to have quaffed four or five brandy Alexanders just while Simon was at the table.

  Simon looked at the frothy concoction set on the bar in front of him. It was too sweet for his taste, but there was no doubting its potency. How the man had maintained his sleight of hand after downing several of these was beyond him.

  The DJ was playing Pet Shop Boys and Soft Cell, music from his salad days in Marseille. He finished the drink and ordered another. Effective, indeed.

  “’Bout time.”

  “Excuse me?” said Simon to the blond woman who’d placed a very pretty hand on his arm.

  “That you took off that tie.” She was his age, coiffed hair, with a touch of pink lipstick, plenty of mascara, and a little black dress that might even embarrass Lucy. A diamond the size of a grape adorned her ring finger, and she wore pavé bands above and below it to let you know she played her games in better circles than you. She touched the knot on his forehead and her lips puckered in a measure of sympathy. “Darling, what happened?”

  “Work.”

  “What do you do?”

  “This and
that.”

  “You’re too smart to be a bouncer, and besides, they don’t wear Zegna suits.”

  “You noticed.”

  “Not just the suit.”

  “I’m flattered.”

  “My name is Tania.”

  “Hello, Tania.”

  She waited for his name and when he didn’t give it, she tried harder. “Buy me a drink?”

  Simon waved Carmen over. “The lady will have a—”

  “A gin martini. Boodles, please. Ice-cold with three olives.” Carmen responded attentively, and Tania reached out to her as she was leaving. “By the way, what is the gentleman’s name?”

  “Riske with an e.”

  “Sounds dangerous. Does he have a first name?”

  Carmen regarded Simon with a barely concealed scowl. “When he looks like that, does it matter?”

  “Know her, do you?” asked Tania.

  “In passing.”

  Tania ran a loving hand along his arm, her beautifully manicured fingers dancing higher and higher. “I don’t suppose you’re going to tell me what really happened to you?”

  Simon put a hand around her waist and drew her close. Her eyes were blue and sparkled nearly as much as her jewelry. But behind the makeup and the jewelry, he saw that she was tired and lonely, and he liked her the more because of it. “Maybe,” he said. “If you can convince me.”

  Tania pressed herself against him. “Oh?” she said. “Have any ideas?”

  “A few.”

  Chapter 5

  Vincent Morehead changed out of his uniform and walked to the employee entrance at the rear of the casino, making his usual stop in the kitchen.

  “Early morning pickup,” he called across the service counter.