Crown Jewel

by Christopher Reich

  Gigi, a young sous-chef from Dakar, arrived carrying a white paper bag. “You have the best fed dog in town,” she said. “There’s filet, lamb, and foie gras, ground up together just like he likes it.”

  “Peter Tosh is very grateful.” Peter Tosh was Vincent’s two-year-old black mutt, whose natural dreadlocks made him a dead ringer for the famed reggae artist.

  “I’m free Saturday,” said Gigi. “In case he’d like to thank me in person.”

  Vincent took the bag. “I’m fairly certain he would.”

  “‘Fairly’?” Gigi put her hands on her hips in mock anger.

  Vincent smiled. “Saturday. Good night.”

  “Sleep well.”

  Vincent tucked the bag underneath an arm and left the building. The employee exit opened onto a deserted landing next to the Fairmont parking lot and looked over the famed chicane of the Monaco Grand Prix. Vincent did not own a car. He lived two kilometers up the hill, just over the French border. Normally, he enjoyed the walk. The fresh air was a relief after being cooped up inside for nine hours. He spent the time planning what to make himself for supper. (Employees were forbidden from helping themselves to leftovers.) Tonight, however, his appetite had left him. Darker thoughts held his concern.

  He set off up the hill, walking faster than usual. He’d identified two of them for certain. It was their eyes that gave them away. The eyes and the way they handled the shoe. The “shoe” was the rectangular device that shuffled the eight decks of cards and from which hands of baccarat were dealt. One of the men always grabbed it from the top and dragged it toward him with no regard for the tabletop. He had enormous hands, and one—the left—had a nasty scar running across it. The other man used both of his hands on the shoe, his touch as delicate as if he were handling nitroglycerin. His hands were as tapered as a pianist’s.

  Vincent had seen both of the men at least three times. Except for their eyes and hands, their appearances couldn’t have differed more. One day blond hair, the next brown. One day glasses, the next none. One day a mustache, the next a beard. Vincent had devoted his entire professional life to the gaming industry. It was not the first time he’d spotted cheats. But these…these were a cut above. They were professional criminals. They frightened him.

  At this time of night, the streets were deserted, the only sound the pitter-pat of his leather-soled shoes. He continued past the botanical garden, checking over his shoulder at regular intervals. The more he pondered his position, the more frightened he grew. Naturally, he’d told his shift boss, but nothing had been done. When he’d asked to speak with the investigator sent by the company’s board of directors, he’d been told to be quiet. And then, tonight, he’d spotted the two men again.

  Vincent was in a quandary. Whom should he obey? His boss or the Boss? He took a breath and asked for guidance. The answer came freely. Every person—man, woman, or child—had only one Boss.

  Vincent lengthened his stride, his fear leaving him. First thing in the morning he would go to the police. It was decided.

  “Hey you—black boy.”

  Vincent froze. The voice had come from behind him. He turned. He recognized the man. He’d been at his table just prior to closing. The man with the widow’s peak and the nose of a hawk.

  “Yes?”

  Vincent felt a rush of wind behind him. Something very hard struck his head. Darkness enveloped him.

  Chapter 6

  A fingernail etched its way down Simon’s bare chest.

  He woke.

  Tania lay beside him, propped up on an elbow, studying the latticework of scars crisscrossing his torso. Another nocturnal companion had once commented that it looked as though he’d been worked on with a saw, a shiv, and a soldering iron.

  “Work, too?” she asked.

  “Pleasure.”

  “Liar.” She stopped at a dark circular lesion on his shoulder. She sat up, the mood broken. “This is a bullet wound.”

  “Is it?”

  “And so is this.” The second was on his hip, a gulp away from a more important area.

  “It can’t be,” said Simon.

  “My first husband was a soldier. He had a few just like these. Is that where you got them? Military?”

  “God, no.”

  The inquisitive hand continued its tour, tracing a berm of scar tissue below his ribs that had bleached bone white over the years. “My second husband was a surgeon. These wounds were not tended to by a professional.”

  “You can say that again.”

  The hand slipped under the covers and probed a more sensitive area.

  Simon’s eyes widened. “I’m afraid to ask what your third husband did.”

  “I don’t have a third husband,” said Tania, her fingers proving very skilled indeed. “Yet.”

  Simon gasped.

  “And so?” she demanded archly. “Answer my questions.”

  “Never.”

  Tania straddled him, pinning his wrists to the bed. She was surprisingly strong for a lithe, naked woman half his size. “This is your last chance. Confess.”

  Simon struggled, or pretended to. He enjoyed these games. “You’ll have to do worse things than that if you expect me to talk.”

  She kissed his neck, her breasts grazing his chest. “I don’t expect you to talk, Mr. Riske.”

  “You don’t?”

  “No,” she replied, with relish. “I don’t.”

  “Then what do you expect me to do?”

  “Why Mr. Riske, I expect you to—”

  Simon’s phone buzzed. Tania looked at it.

  “To what?” asked Simon, willing the phone to its own special circle of hell.

  “To—”

  The phone buzzed a second time and she snatched it from the nightstand. “D’Art,” she said, reading the name off the screen.

  The phone buzzed again. Simon told her to answer it. Tania sat up, tucking her hair behind her ear and assuming her best secretarial posture. “Good morning, Simon Riske’s office. Mr. Riske is currently occupied with an important client. May I take a message?”

  “Do pardon me, ma’am,” came a ruffled baritone voice. “I’m sorry to disturb you…your…um, oh, good Christ, is he there?”

  Simon, who’d heard every word, gently took the phone. “Tell me this is important, D’Art.” He threw off the sheets and walked to the window. Peeling back the curtain, he saw that it was a sunny morning with a few billowy white clouds low in the sky. “I’m listening.”

  “Heard you lost twenty thousand pounds last night.”

  “He was cheating. And where’d you hear that?”

  “Toby Stonewood.”

  “Lord Toby Stonewood?” Lord Toby Stonewood, Duke of Suffolk, was one of the richest men in England and the owner of Les Ambassadeurs.

  “One and the same. He requests a moment of your time.”

  “Regarding?”

  “A private matter which he would like to discuss with you face-to-face.”

  Simon looked toward the bed, where Tania lay all too invitingly. She had put on her oversized reading glasses and was politely checking her own phone. Simon liked the professorial look. “How’s this afternoon? Say, two?”

  “How’s this morning? Say, now?”

  Simon’s dreams of playing school with Tania were fading fast. “Now?”

  “Unless you’d like to tell Lord Toby to come back later yourself.”

  Simon studied the curve of Tania’s back, the nape of her neck. The problem with having sex with an absolute stranger was that it was never very good the first time. The second time, however, was always vastly improved.

  “You have an hour,” said D’Art.

  Simon turned back toward the window and spoke under his breath. “Give me an idea how serious this is. One to ten.”

  “Eleven,” said D’Artagnan Moore.

  “I knew you were going to say that.”

  Chapter 7

  Vincent Morehead came to.

  He lay on a cold floo
r. It was bright and as his eyes focused he saw a great multicolored glass chandelier above him. He blinked furiously, and for a moment he thought he was back in the casino, or in the lobby of a fancy hotel. He didn’t know which. No hotel in the city had anything so ornate.

  Someone was standing near him. A shoe was inches from his face. He gazed up and recognized the man who’d sat at his table before closing. The man who’d called him “black boy.” Another man stood beside him. Vincent spun his head and saw that he was encircled. He was too groggy to count how many there were. Eight…ten…twelve?

  Vincent pulled himself to his feet, only to stumble into the arms of one of the men. The man shoved him and Vincent stepped back into the center of the circle.

  “Why…” he began, and though it was difficult to form words, he knew why and was afraid.

  It was then he saw that the men all held lengths of pipe, some longer, some shorter. Lead pipes. The big, hawk-faced man tapped his pipe on the floor. The others followed suit.

  “Tigars,” they began to chant. Tee-gars.

  The room echoed with the word and the percussive taunts.

  “Tigars.”

  The first blow struck Vincent in the calf and knocked his leg out from under him. He fell to the ground. A man dashed at him, swinging the pipe at his head. Vincent raised a hand to protect himself. The pipe shattered his forearm. Before he could scream, another blow struck his ribs, then his shoulder. He collapsed on the floor, no longer aware of anything except the bright light above him and the agony that held him in its relentless grip.

  “Tigars.”

  Blows rained down. He writhed and screamed and prayed to be saved. Not to live, but to die and be spared such pain.

  “And so,” came a commanding voice, echoing across the room. “What have you done to our new friend?”

  The chanting stopped. The blows ceased. The circle parted.

  A man Vincent had not seen earlier but knew from sight stepped closer. He crouched and took Vincent’s jaw in his hand, lifting his head so they could look at each other face-to-face.

  “I hear you are an observant one. Too observant, perhaps. You guessed our game. Bully for you.”

  “Won’t…talk…swear,” Vincent managed. He was crying. He couldn’t help it.

  “You can be sure of that,” the man replied, to a chorus of laughter. “You are a strong one, aren’t you? Won’t do you any good. One man alone cannot prevail against a dedicated force. I’d ask you to stand, but that would be rude of me, given your circumstance. Let’s settle for sitting up.”

  Vincent only half understood the words. The world was fading in and out, pain the only constant. Arms grasped his torso and shifted him to a sitting position, and when he howled in complaint they held him there. “No,” he said. “I won’t…tell…I…” His thoughts slipped away. He remembered being on a beach at home, feeling the warm sand sift through his fingers. His eyes rose to the colorful glass chandelier. Murano glass, he thought hazily. He’d visited the factory once.

  “…problem with you boys,” the man was saying to the others, “is that you don’t hit hard enough. In my day, we had plenty of practice. We learned how to cripple a man, how to blind him. Mostly, we just knocked their brains out. To do real damage, like we used to do to the tough guys who wouldn’t talk, you need leverage and torque. You have to hold the pipe like so.” He shrugged. “Well, maybe, it’s better if I just show you.”

  Ratka threw him a pipe, and the older man twirled it deftly before taking firm hold of one end.

  Leverage and torque, thought the older man as he drew back his arm and took aim. Leading with his hip and then his shoulder, he brought the pipe around in a wide, whiplike motion and with all his might struck it against Vincent Morehead’s temple.

  “And that, my friends,” he said, standing over the lifeless body, “is how you do it.”

  Chapter 8

  Simon arrived at the headquarters of Lloyd’s of London fifty-nine minutes later.

  “What took you so long?” With a grunt, D’Artagnan Moore rose from a couch running along the wall of his office.

  “I hope we didn’t entice you to break any laws,” said a handsome, ruddy-faced man with thinning gray hair, also standing.

  “No more than usual,” said Simon, with a polite smile.

  Moore crossed the room. He was a bear of a man, six and a half feet tall, three hundred pounds, with a shaggy black beard tickling the top of his bow tie, the rest of him adorned in the finest Highland tweed, despite the fact that the weather people had forecast a day of record heat.

  “Had a good night, did you?” asked Moore, sotto voce, as he shook Simon’s hand. “She certainly sounded lovely.”

  “I made it here, didn’t I?”

  “And you’ll be glad you did.”

  D’Artagnan Moore was a registered insurance broker, one of the most respected in the trade. His clients included shipping companies, art museums, airlines, vineyards, and other entities, public and private, offering products, services, and commodities that defied ordinary classification. It was barely ten, but he held a tumbler of scotch in one of his hands.

  “Thought you waited till the sun was above the yardarm,” said Simon.

  “My client is suffering a bout of nerves. Have to keep him company. Shall we?” D’Artagnan Moore led Simon across the office. “Simon Riske, meet Lord Toby Marmaduke Alexander Stonewood, Duke of Suffolk.”

  “It’s a pleasure, Your Grace,” said Simon.

  Toby Stonewood’s handshake was dry and firm. “Not sure if I should be afraid.”

  “I’m sorry if things got out of hand last night,” said Simon.

  “You did what anyone would have…and with reason.”

  “Only sorry we didn’t manage to snare him.”

  The Duke of Suffolk was tall and distinguished, the picture of the ruling classes, dressed in a double-breasted navy blazer with shiny gold buttons, white shirt, and a rep tie reserved for old Etonians, alumni of the poshest and most revered of British preparatory schools. A latter-day Wellington without the cockade hat, though if the tabloids were to be believed, he shared a similar reputation with the ladies.

  “No luck tracking him down?” asked Simon.

  “A clean escape, I’m afraid. And call me Toby. None of this ‘Your Grace’ nonsense. Can’t stand it.”

  Simon considered this, offering an agreeable smile. He’d worked with the wealthy and the more than wealthy for the past fifteen years. Smile aside, he’d learned better than to think of himself as an equal. Distance was to be recognized and respected. “Toby, then.”

  Pleased, Stonewood placed his empty glass on the side table. “How did you spot him?”

  Simon dragged over an armchair from D’Art’s desk and set it so that it faced the couch. Simon’s past was a closely guarded secret. Something about his having been a member of a criminal organization tended to frighten away prospective clients. “Let’s just say I have some experience with his type.”

  “As well as a sharp eye. You were a policeman, then?”

  “Not exactly.” He let the words linger and the suggestion of the truth with them.

  “We have cameras to keep an eye on all of our tables,” said Toby Stonewood. “Especially on players who win a bit too much and a bit too often. I think our security chief calls it ‘defying statistical averages.’ We didn’t catch it.”

  “Sometimes a human eye can see things a camera can’t.”

  “Did you know he was cheating the entire time?”

  “I knew I was losing too much. That put me in a bad mood.”

  “Whatever it was,” said Lord Toby, “your eye or your intuition, I need it.”

  The nobleman scooted to the edge of the sofa and fixed Simon with an earnest gaze. He explained that Les Ambassadeurs was not the only gaming establishment he owned. He was also the principal shareholder of the Société des Bains de Mer, the corporate entity that owned the Casino de Monte-Carlo, perhaps the most famous casino
in the world, located in the principality of Monaco.

  “I only wish our losses were limited to twenty thousand pounds,” Lord Toby went on. “Unfortunately, they’re far worse. I must ask that you keep what I’m about to tell you in this room.”

  “You have my word,” said Simon.

  “And he knows how to keep it,” said D’Art. “Lloyd’s of London’s trust in Simon is unmatched.”

  Lord Toby Stonewood stared at Simon long and hard, his flint-blue eyes unblinking. “Over the past nine months,” he began, “the casino has suffered losses on an unimaginable scale, nearly all of it from our baccarat tables. As you know, baccarat is almost entirely a game of chance. Over time, it’s weighted with a two percent advantage to the house. In theory, it is impossible for us to lose over any extended period…a day, a week, a month. Now, of course on occasion a high roller will put together a streak and take home ten, twenty million. But those are one-offs. Usually, he’ll come back and lose it. Still, somehow we’ve managed to lose nearly two hundred million dollars.”

  “Cheating,” said D’Art.

  Toby Stonewood nodded. “There’s no other answer.”

  “What did your security staff say?” asked Simon.

  “Couldn’t find it. Believe me, we’ve tried. I spent days with them in their operations center studying live feeds, tracking players we suspected. We have it all: facial-recognition technology, cameras to spot card switching, radio tracker in our chips. Even so, we came up empty-handed. It just appeared that too many people were winning. Nothing illegal in that. We brought in an expert in this kind of thing. Rooting out cheats.”

  “And?”

  Toby shifted in his seat, his complexion gone gray. “Yes, well,” he said uneasily. “He disappeared the next day. Turned up a week ago tangled in a fishing net off the coast of Villefranche.”

  “Are you still losing?”

  “On a daily basis. If this continues, the casino will be bankrupt in a month.”

  “Close down the tables,” said Simon.

  “Not an option,” said Toby. “We might as well shut down the entire place.”