“But what would we do with Alina?”
“What did you do with her while you were working for Wulfie?”
Dieter tried not to shrink in his skin. “Gretchen stayed home with her.”
She glared at him. “And what did you do with her after Gretchen betrayed you with another man and stole all your money?”
He deserved that one. “Daycare and nannies.”
“Yes,” Flicka said. “I found appropriate daycare and nannies for her.”
Oh, yes. Flicka had interviewed and hired Suze Meier and two other nannies, and she had arranged for the morning pre-school Alina had attended, too. “That’s true.”
“I’ll find a daycare. Lots of babies do it. It’s like boarding school, but shorter. She’ll be fine.”
“But I can’t just skulk around a restaurant, watching you wait on tables like a stalker,” Dieter said.
“So you won’t skulk,” she told him. “It’s a casino. People spend lots of time in casinos. Casinos want you to spend lots of time there. That’s why there are no windows or clocks anywhere. You can play cards. Surely Wulfram taught you how to count cards at blackjack.”
“The Welfenlegion plays Texas Hold’em or Seven-Card Stud, not blackjack. Wulfram cheats at blackjack.”
She rolled her eyes. “Counting cards is not cheating. It’s just math. Good God, Dieter. Wulfie even taught me how to count cards. Get a deck, and I’ll teach you. Then you can guard me and take some money out of the Monaco Casino, too. That’ll be your job.”
“We don’t have a deck of cards,” he pointed out. They owned almost nothing, give or take a few changes of clothes, and now even his Rogue Security account was unavailable.
Flicka sighed. “This is Las Vegas. Surely, there’s a pack of cards in one of these drawers, somewhere. I’ll order some supper delivery,” she waved a sheaf of her waitressing money at him, “and teach you how to count cards in blackjack. It’ll take ten minutes.”
“I believe you’re enjoying this.”
She grinned at him. “You have no idea how much.”
The Principal Export of Switzerland Was War
Flicka von Hannover
Dieter told me a story
to help me sleep that night.
Flicka lay curled on her side of the bed, her knees almost touching her chest.
A dresser hunched by the far, dark wall, beyond where Dieter was lying on the other side of the bed. The dark waistband of his pajama pants traced a line between the white sheet that covered his legs and hips and the pale tee shirt that stretched over his broad chest.
The dim light from the open door to the bathroom reflected in Dieter’s gray eyes. His hand lay upturned on the sheet between them.
He said, “Come on.”
Flicka willed her arm to move. Her hand floated through the air and alighted on his palm.
“Good,” he said.
Flicka stared at her hand lying on his. He didn’t grab her, didn’t trap her. She sucked a deep breath into her lungs, but her arm began to tremble. “How did Alina like the flight?”
“She rode on my lap and giggled the whole way, pointing at the flight tracker. At one point, she swam over the two very tolerant grandmothers sitting beside us to look out the window.” He smiled and adjusted his head on the pillow. “It didn’t seem to bother her.”
“That’s good,” Flicka said.
His fingers closed a little, but he didn’t grab her.
She said, “I’m sorry.”
“I can sleep on the couch if you’d prefer.”
Then she would be alone in the bed and cold. The whitewashed walls would crowd inward. “Please don’t.”
He nodded.
“I’ll get better,” she told him.
“I’m your bodyguard,” he said. “You ran to me because I could protect you, and you were right to. Back in France, we just—” He drew a breath, obviously buying time. “We might have gotten carried away.”
“So you didn’t want that?”
His fingers curled around hers. “Of course, I did, but it’s all right if you don’t want to do anything more, either right now or later. I’m here to protect you. I’m neither your boyfriend nor your sex therapist.”
She smiled a little.
“But you should talk to someone about this, a real therapist, the normal kind. Not the sex kind. They don’t really have those, right?”
“Just at those ranches advertised in that hotel magazine.”
“What?”
“Nothing.”
“You should talk to a real therapist.”
“I can’t,” she said. “We don’t have health insurance here. Counseling is expensive, really expensive, and we don’t have the money. It’s ridiculous. First, someone committed a crime against me, and now I would have to go into debt because it’s driving me crazy.”
The hurt in his eyes saddened her, and he said, “I’ll get you back home as soon as it’s safe. I promise. Or I’ll get the money somehow so you can start here.”
She forced her fingers to grip his palm, even though her skin was crawling and she was starting to shake. “What are you going to do, rob a bank?”
“Now that’s a suitable job for a mercenary,” he said, “not counting cards.” He had done passably well at learning to count, but Flicka suspected that her and Wulf’s weird eidetic memories made it easier to learn how.
“I thought you weren’t a mercenary,” she said. “Every time I’ve called you that, or a soldier of fortune, or whatever, you and Wulf have been so adamant that you aren’t. I’ve never seen what the problem is.”
“That’s because you’re German,” Dieter said, “and I’m Swiss.”
“Oh, it’s the Swiss neutrality thing, again,” she said.
“Yes, it’s the Swiss neutrality thing. There’s a law against any Swiss citizen being a mercenary.”
“Because it might break your precious neutrality.” The shakes hadn’t taken hold of her too much, and she managed to smile a little more at him. “You have the oldest buildings in Europe because no one bombed you during World War Two.”
“Have you ever read our Constitution?” he asked.
“Only Wulf took out Swiss citizenship. I didn’t.”
“We must refrain from engaging in war, not allow belligerent states to use our territory, and not supply mercenary troops to belligerent states.”
“That makes sense. Switzerland never fights in wars, so you can’t be mercenaries. The Swiss would probably stand in the middle of a battlefield with your hands up, proclaiming your neutrality while bullets and bombs whiz by. You’d make terrible mercenaries.”
Dieter rolled his head on the pillow, shaking his head no. “It’s because we’re the best mercenaries in the world, and we’re too dangerous to be let loose.”
Flicka laughed. “Think that much of yourself, do you?”
“It’s the absolute truth. The Swiss were heavily involved in all the medieval land grab wars, fighting hard for the new Swiss Confederacy. Back in the Middle Ages, we became very good at winning wars. So very good, that it became a thriving business. Are you sure you care about this?”
Flicka tightened her hand on his, holding on. “Keep talking to me.”
“All right. I knew all of this from learning our history when I was a child, but I studied it more at university when I took that military history degree in London.”
That was an interesting admission from the man with no childhood or past, that he had learned Swiss history, our history, as a child. “So you speak from authority.”
His hand curled more tightly around hers, and his smile reached his eyes. “In the early Middle Ages, Switzerland was a poor country, very poor. Because the Alps dominate our topography, we could not farm to any sustainable level. There’s just no flat land, anywhere. We had no colonies to strip-mine faraway lands and send back gold. Because Switzerland is landlocked, we don’t have a seaport for trade. We weren’t farmers or traders, but we were large, stro
ng men, suitable for military service. The one thing that we could do was to fight and win wars better than anyone else. We had to import food, cloth, and all materials, so Switzerland’s principal export was war.”
Flicka smiled at her very large, strong Swiss mercenary.
“We had some serious setbacks, however. In the Battle of Marignano in 1515, the French and Venetians arrived on the battlefield with artillery and armored cavalry, and we were armed only with pikes and spears. We were losing the medieval arms race. That was our first step toward neutrality, and we stepped back from involvement in Europe’s major wars. We did, however, rent ourselves exclusively to France as cannon fodder.”
Flicka asked, “Is that why they haven’t won a battle since you guys became neutral?”
“Now, now, your German roots are showing.”
Flicka touched her blond hair. “I don’t have any roots. It’s natural.”
Dieter smiled a little more at her joke. “Yeah, I know it’s natural. The problem was that, even though we only served as mercenaries for French masters, we still had the problem we had been having for centuries. Sometimes we ended up on both sides of the battle, fighting our fellow Swiss mercenaries.”
Flicka barely noticed when Dieter drew her hand a little closer to his chest.
He continued, “We held the Swiss Alps and the strategically important passes through the mountains for ourselves, but we pulled back within our borders. Our last major mercenary endeavors were serving as bodyguards for the French monarchy, hired by the last king, Louis XVI, and then we served France during the Napoleonic Wars, where we Swiss mercenaries crushed the Prussian-Saxon army during the Jena campaign. You know, the one commanded by Karl Wilhelm Ferdinand, the Duke of Brunswick.”
Flicka, a current Duchess of Brunswick-Lüneburg, rolled her eyes in her head. That military writer who had written the On War books that she had given to Dieter had served under Ferdinand during the Jena campaign. “Yeah, you’ve mentioned him once or twice.”
The back of her hand touched Dieter’s chest.
Panic rippled, but she tamped it down.
“The French turned on us and invaded Switzerland, breaking up the first confederacy,” he said. “So, when the Congress of Vienna met in 1814, partly to discuss the end of the French civil war but also to discuss how to stop the Swiss from killing everyone else in Europe, we made a suggestion: let us be neutral. If everyone recognized us as neutral, we would stop being mercenaries forever.”
“And so you’re not a mercenary,” she said, smiling.
“Certainly not. That would be illegal.” He lifted her hand and brushed his lips over her knuckles. “We’re still warlike as hell, though. Even now, every Swiss bridge and road is built with explosives in the base. The alpine mountain passes are mined. The Alps themselves are Swiss cheese, so to speak. Entire army divisions can shelter inside the caverns we’ve carved. If any country cares to test Switzerland’s defenses in a land war, it would go badly for them. We’re still the defenders of the Alps at heart. We’re still the deadliest warriors in the world.”
She nodded sleepily.
“Sleep now, Durchlauchtig. You have to work tomorrow.”
“You, too, Lieblingwächter.”
Flicka closed her eyes, but she listened.
Within minutes, his breath smoothed into sleep.
It took her a lot longer, almost an hour, but she slept, holding his warm hand.
Working For A Living
Flicka von Hannover
I didn’t recognize him at all.
I should have.
The next morning, Flicka found a well-reviewed, licensed daycare that was accepting children for the second shift, though she gasped at the price.
“How can Americans afford this?” she demanded of Dieter.
Dieter raised his hands in defense. “I didn’t make the system.”
“In Europe, there are creches for children so their parents can work. There are income supplements and state support. This will cost more than our rent!”
Dieter said, “I can’t stay home with her. I can’t let you wander around out there alone. If you don’t stay with her while I go work, then we have to send her to daycare.”
“I didn’t mean that, but jeez. This is insane.”
It was, however, a cute little daycare with mushrooms and ferns painted on the walls.
Flicka counted out nearly all her money from her tips the day before as a deposit for the week.
She blinked back tears.
She didn’t need to cry. She was on her way to work now, and she would get more tips. Smiling would probably help.
Alina walked right up to another baby and started babbling.
Flicka leaned toward Dieter. “She’s an extrovert.”
He nodded. “She is everyone’s best friend. I thought she loved me, but she loves everyone.”
“She loves you.”
He shook his head. “I’ve been away too much, and her mother left her with a sitter for hours every day, sometimes overnight. She doesn’t really know who I am.”
Over in the middle of the room, a little boy was playing with a car on the floor, and Alina was practically standing on her head, trying to make eye contact with him to get his attention.
“Dieter, you did what you needed to do. Wulfie needed you in Paris and Montreux so much. I don’t think either one of you realizes how much he depends on you. And Alina loves you. She curled up against you last night like a puppy.”
He shrugged. “Maybe.”
“Every parent must go through this. You can’t beat yourself up for it.”
“I suppose,” he said. “Come on. Let’s go. I think she’s fine.”
They took a car over to the Monaco Casino, and Dieter went in to play blackjack while Flicka changed into her costume and started her shift.
By the time she started making the rounds at the gaming tables, the afternoon gamblers were well on their way to losing their money. Someone had to pay the casino’s electric bills.
She slipped between the people—mostly men gambling away their life’s savings and their children’s daycare money—taking orders for drinks.
Dieter sat at the far end at a blackjack table, playing hands and scowling.
One college-age man ordered an appletini. When he ordered another one, she talked with him a second or two and suggested a lemon drop. He loved it and tipped her two blue poker chips.
Another man told her to surprise him, so she surveyed him to see what he might like. He was a white man and significantly older than she was, perhaps in his early sixties. His thinning gray hair looked like it might have some blond in it—though in the multi-colored, flashing lightbulbs that carpeted the ceiling, it was hard to tell—but his eyes were a pale shade of light blue. He was slim, so he probably didn’t eat a lot of rich food, but he didn’t have the ripcord-tough body of a distance runner who burned off whatever they ate.
She ventured, “Maybe a wheat beer?”
“Delightful. Which kind, Weizenbier or Witbier?”
Flicka smiled because he knew the difference between the German and Dutch kinds of wheat beer. “I like Weizenbier. I don’t like coriander or orange in my beer, but you might.”
“Weizenbier sounds perfect.” He smiled at her, happy lines crinkling around his pale eyes.
“I’ll be right back.” She scrambled to put the order for the beer into the bar.
Dieter caught her on the way back. “Beer?”
“Sure,” she said.
“I think I’ll take it over at the Texas Hold’em table,” he said. “This table isn’t lucky for me.”
Which meant he was losing money at blackjack.
Money that they didn’t have.
Flicka plastered a smile on her face and nodded.
When she went back to give the guy his wheat beer, he tapped her arm with one finger. “Yes, sir?”
“Your name is Gretchen?” he asked her with a glance at the name tag pinned to her boob.
Oh, Hell, no, but she smiled. “Yes. It’s a family name.”
“It’s unusual in the States.”
“I’m originally from Germany,” she told him.
“You have an extraordinary accent,” he said. “Mostly British, but with some German and Swiss thrown in.”
She stopped and turned back to him. “Most people would have thought it was French, not Swiss.”
“I’m from Geneva. I recognize a Swiss accent.”
This European man was recognizing too many things. “I’m just a typical German peasant. I suspect living in the US for so long has changed my accent.”
“That must be it,” the man agreed. “I thought I was talking to a fellow Helvetian.”
She smiled her most brilliantly, hoping he would tip a fellow Helvetian more. “That’s so sweet.”
He presented his hand. “My name is Bastien.” The accent sounded more lilting French than steady German.
“Nice to meet you. I have to get back to work. Let me know if you need anything, okay?”
Another guy—now forever cemented in Flicka’s head as Bourbon Guy—ordered a top-shelf whiskey, a Maker’s Mark 46 Bourbon, and was going to pay out-of-pocket for it because the pit boss hadn’t comped him yet.
Flicka leaned in and told him, “Try the Buffalo Trace Bourbon. It’s a quarter of the price, and it’s made in the same distillery from the same mash. It’s highly underrated.”
Bourbon Guy drank that and was really happy about the cheaper booze. When the pit boss finally comped the poor man, she whispered to him, “The bartender has set aside a bottle of Maker’s Mark Bill Samuels Private Select under the counter. It’s the same finished bourbon as the Maker’s 46, but it’s cask strength. You should try that.”
Bourbon Guy was even happier and tipped her a green chip.
The crowd closed around her as she hustled off to other tables.
At the Texas Hold’em table, Dieter asked, “Another beer?”
His hoard of chips had grown, Flicka noticed, and there were definitely more there than they had scraped together that morning. He even had a small stack of black chips, which were worth one hundred dollars each.
In a Faraway Land Page 7