Thrilling Cities

by Ian Fleming

  The atmosphere of this dark and ancient place is powerful but not inimical. One feels that many mysterious things were indeed enacted here, but that they were for good and not for evil. Apparently the Christians, when they came, were also sympathetic and treated the shrine with respect. Otherwise one suspects they would surely have destroyed it.

  A couple of hundred yards from the hillock, on which stand the ruins of the Temple of Apollo and the Temple of Zeus and beneath which is the shrine, is a large tunnel through the mountainside leading down to the neighbouring Lake Avernus. This tunnel was used as an ammunition store by the Germans, who blew up the central section during their retreat.

  The whole area is amazing and made me wish for the first time in my life that I had bent my head more faithfully to my Aeneid.

  One final word to the visitor to Naples – don’t bother to go up Vesuvius, or at any rate not by the motor road. There is absolutely nothing at the top but a few muddy bubbles and. wisps of steam coming from the fumaroles in the crater, and anyway the volcano was due to erupt again that year – an even stronger reason for leaving it alone. But the reason I particularly counsel against it is that lava – that beautiful word that is almost the name of a girl – is harsh, brittle, smelly, black and, above all, immensely dull. It is true that my wife found a rare orchid on the lower slopes under the young umbrella pines, but the great pile of dead lava that is Vesuvius oozes a kind of mental depression that requires many drams of Lacrimae Christi, the wine grown at the foot of the mountain, to repair.

  I have tried to analyse the dismal effect Vesuvius had on both of us and I think it comes from the fact that lava is totally lacking in ‘anima’, the quality that seems to inhabit all terrestrial materials down to the comparatively friendly clinker of coal. There may be friends of lava whom I have offended by this indictment, and there may be varieties of the stuff that can be put to some lowly purpose, such as pumice stone for taking nicotine stains off your fingers, but in my experience lava is the bottom stuff in the world.

  The fact that Naples is largely paved with this hellish material and that the town, inundated from time to time with fire and brimstone, stands at a major gateway to the underworld, perhaps explains why this exciting, rewarding, vivid city yet verges so nearly on the infernal.

  It is, of course, only coincidence that Al Capone, on January 15th, 1899, first saw the light of day at Afragola, a suburb of Naples, almost exactly half-way between the centre of Naples and the crater of Vesuvius.

  INCIDENTAL INTELLIGENCE

  NAPLES

  Hotels

  Five-star: Hotel Excelsior, Hotel Vesuvio, Hotel Royal, all on the waterfront overlooking the Bay of Naples. Royal, the newest with attractive, brightly furnished, studio-type rooms and windows.

  Two-star: Hotel Torino (Via A. Depretis 123), and Hotel Nuova Bella Napoli (Piazza Garibaldi), by the central railway station. Pensione-type, low-priced accommodation not recommended in Naples.

  Restaurants

  The American travel guide, Fielding, summed up Neapolitan cuisine: ‘It ranges,’ he wrote, ‘from high mediocre to just plain lousy.’ I cannot improve on that.

  Every visitor to Naples ends up at one of the three Santa Lucia quayside restaurants, the Transatlantico, La Bersagliera, or Zi Teresa. There’s nothing to choose between them. Food is indifferent, waiters rude, strip-lighting hideous, and musicians play non-stop, except for a pause to push a plate in your face.

  As good food as any in Naples, including sea-food specialities, such as pasta with clam sauce (spaghetti alla vongole), fritta mista (mixed fried fish dish), is to be found in restaurants of the three big hotels, Excelsior, Vesuvio and Royal, with the Royal especially recommended.

  If you have transport, it’s worth the fifteen-minute drive to Le Lucciole restaurant at Capo Posilipo. Lovely seaside position, excellent seafood. If you are looking for a real Neapolitan pizza, try D’Angelo – lovely view above Bay of Naples.

  Night-clubs

  Best advice about average Naples night-spots is – stay away from them. Safest places are the Royal Club (winter) and Royal Roof (summer) in the Royal Hotel, and the club in the Hotel Vesuvio. The Caprice Club is also a normal night-club run on international lines.

  Things not to miss

  It is in every guide book, but some visitors unfortunately still miss a visit to the Naples National Museum. Unlike many of Naples attractions, this is first class. Contains finest of the treasures excavated from Pompeii and Herculaneum.

  Afterwards go for a real black Neapolitan espresso coffee or an ice-cream in one of the cafes in the glass-roofed arcade, the Galleria. Here is real, living Naples, but watch your wallet and your handbags.

  Colourful, too, is a visit to the fishermen’s quayside at Mergellina, a seaside suburb, where sea-food is eaten from open-air stands as aperitifs – clams, mussels, sea-urchins, with Capri white wine.

  CAPRI

  In good weather in the summer months Capri may now be reached in twenty-five minutes by helicopter (seven services a day, £3 day return), or hydrofoil boat, the Aliscaft, in thirty minutes, single 18s. (ninety-minute boats, 3s. 6d. single).

  Hotels

  Five-star: Hotel Quisisana, La Ptneta; at Anacapri, Caesar Augustus (April to October), built on sheer cliff-edge with fabulous view over the Bay of Naples. All one- and two-star Capri hotels are comfortable enough for a short stay if the larger hotels are full.

  Restaurants

  La Pigna, Da Gemma. Best restaurant, and you won’t find it in most guidebooks but some of the best cooking south of Rome, is Da Pietro, managed by a colourful Scottish emigrant, Gloria. A stone’s throw from Gracie Fields’ La Canzone del Mare, where food is good but very, very expensive. At Da Pietro food and wine are good, reasonable; specialities, cheese pancakes, sea-food salads, fresh grilled fish and lobsters.

  Night-clubs

  Number Two, a damp, dank, jazz-smoke-filled cellar, nearest thing to a Paris bôite in Italy.

  13

  MONTE CARLO

  ‘NEUF. ROUGE. IMPAIR Et Manque.’ The moment’s silence, the rattle of the losing chips being raked across the baize, the buzz of comment and then the sharp French voices firing their next bets at the cold, patient croupiers, and the echo from the croupiers to confirm the bets and help them remember. ‘Finale quatre par cinq louis.’ ‘La derniere douzaine par cinq mille.’ ‘A cheval’, Transversale pleine’, ‘Carre’ … all the noisy abracadabra of one roulette table among six others. And then the hubbub from the chemin-de-fer, and the baccarat, and a whisper of music from somewhere in the distant background. And yet the greyhaired, donnish-looking man I was watching never looked up or seemed to pay any attention to what was going on around him. He sat very quietly and calmly at an empty chemin-de-fer table with his back to the room and stared with a chess-player’s concentration at a huge sheet of paper spread out in front of him and occasionally jotted something down on it or consulted a chronometer which stood beside it.

  As I watched him, a woman in black satin, anywhere between fifty and a hundred years old, with badly dyed hair and a care-worn face, broke away from the nearest table and came and stood beside him. He did not look up as she opened her bag and put a handful of one- and five-hundred-franc chips on the table beside the chronometer. She stood there obediently while he made a series of calculations with a ballpoint pen. Minutes passed. The man made some more calculations. He consulted the chronometer. He selected some chips from the pile beside him and said a few words without looking up. She took the chips and walked swiftly to the nearest table. I followed her. She put six chips of a hundred francs à cheval on 6/8, 10/11, 13/16, 23/24, 27/30, 33/36. Or rather she said, ‘Tiers du cylindre sud-est,’ to the croupier. He didn’t look up, but took the chips and placed them. He knew her voice. Sixteen came up. She was paid 1,700 francs on her 13/16 à cheval and lost five hundred on the others. She picked up the chips and her stake and went back silently to the man with the chronometer. I moved away from the table so
that I could have a last look at them and fix them in my mind. They suddenly looked tragic and dedicated, like people who think the earth is flat.

  I was screwing up my courage to go and talk to them when a girl’s voice containing in equal proportions sarcasm, curiosity, envy, and pleasure at finding a friend from England, brought me back to earth.

  ‘Well, I suppose you’ve broken the bank.’

  ‘No,’ I said shortly, although I was pleased to see her, ‘I haven’t.’

  ‘Why don’t you shoot out the lights with your .38 Police Positive with the sawn barrel? Then we could grab some chips and make a dash for the door.’

  I pretended not to hear. She followed my eyes. ‘What’s that old man doing over there?’

  ‘He’s working on a system,’ I said. ‘It’s based either on astronomy or the movement of the earth on its axis. He’s not interested in what came up on the last throw. He just backs a third of the board according to the precise time of day. He thinks the turn of the steel cylinder is affected by magnetic fields, or gravity or something. He won handsomely on the only coup I watched.’

  ‘He must be mad,’ said my friend. ‘All one needs is capital. It’s hopeless playing with only ten mille.’ (It was the age of the old francs.)

  ‘Ten mille is a hundred even-chance bets at the hundred-franc roulette table,’ I said prosily. ‘Nowadays all English people moan about not having enough capital to gamble with. It’s just a question of what units you bet in and how much you want to make. You’re just a scattercash.’

  ‘I suppose James Bond’s got an infallible system,’ she said frostily. ‘Why don’t you let other people in on his secret? Tell me, or I’ll never speak to you again.’

  This is the gist of what I told her – what I believe to be the only way of gambling with a capital of ten pounds with a reasonable prospect of making the price of a good dinner, with the pleasure of staking a bet at many turns of the wheel and with the excitement of joining in that technical expertise which is part of the attraction of a casino.

  The first rule, I told her, is to get a seat at the roulette table. This is achieved by getting to the casino early, say at nine o’clock in the evening, or in the afternoon. The formalities of getting into the casino need not deter you. All you need is your passport and a respectable suit or frock (except at Deauville and the Casino de la Foret at Le Touquet where you may have to wear evening clothes, in which case there is Trouville, or the Casino de la Plage). Do not approach casinos with timidity or reverence. They are simply fruit-machines tended by bank clerks and mechanics. Be relaxed and confident. They are very pleased to have you come in and will be sorry to see you go. You are one of the few people who take trouble and you are going to win and stop when you have won. You are a person of free will and iron self-discipline who will beat the machine.

  You enter the casino and sit down at a roulette table. (If there is no seat available, give one of the uniformed attendants a hundred or two hundred francs and ask him to find you a seat, and one will be found.) Remember: a seat at the table is essential. Most people lose money in a casino because their feet get so tired they decide to fritter away a few chips and go to bed. If possible get a seat opposite the even chance, red or black, which you favour (because your hair or your eyes are red or black, or for any other reason). Settle yourself. Take out a card and a pencil and write the figures 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 down the page. You have been to the caisse just inside the swing-door and in your pocket or your bag you have ten pounds in chips of one hundred francs each. More than a hundred of them. Comparative wealth, with the minimum stake at a hundred francs. Pay no attention to the strident voices, gestures and emotions of the other players. Observe the chaos with interest and indulgence, secure in the knowledge of the symmetry of your own deadly system.

  Suppose, I explained to the girl, you have chosen red. (You can choose any of the six even chances and alter your choice at any moment if you wish, but personally I prefer to espouse either red or ‘impair’, or ‘passe’, and stick with it all the evening.) Your first bet, which you place firmly on the big red diamond a few inches away, is the sum of the top and bottom numbers on your list -5 plus 1, six chips of one hundred francs each. If you win, you cross out the 5 and the 1 on your list, and your next bet is the sum of the remaining top and bottom numbers of your column -4 plus 2. Whenever you lose, the amount of the loss is written at the end of the column. Your next and subsequent bets are always the sum of the top and the bottom numbers you have not scratched out. When (and if) all the numbers are scratched off, your win will amount to the sum of all the numbers in your original five-figure column – fifteen hundred francs or one good dinner.

  After successfully completing one round of the system you can, of course, play it again if you want to spend longer in the casino, but you should remember that the casino will beat you in the long run and that the sooner you can collect your profit of fifteen hundred francs and walk out the better. Since, I said to the girl, you are a gambler of free will and iron discipline it should be simple for you to resist temptation and go home to bed and dream of the menu of the excellent dinner the casino has just paid for.

  Above all, you must be patient, have courage when the going is hard and stick rigidly to your system and not fritter away chips on single numbers which are the date, or the number of buttons on your dress, or a message from another world. You are a professional gambler out to make a profit and get away with it.

  I said to the girl, ‘But of course no system at roulette is infallible, and all of them, including this one, can be just ways of losing your money slowly. But on this system, even with a small capital, you will only be defeated by long adverse runs, which are uncommon, or by the downright bad luck of an unusual preponderance of the other colour during the session.

  ‘The main point about it is that, with this system, you get your money’s worth. If you lose, you shouldn’t lose quickly. Its best recommendation is that it is used by the little resident gambler in French casino towns where the locals are allowed to play. It’s really nothing more than a variation of the martingale or progression system – a very gradual form of doubling up. It’s called the Labouchère system.’

  Later that evening the girl came up to me. Her eyes were shining. ‘I’ve won a fortune,’ she said. ‘Come and have a drink.’

  ‘I told you it was a good system.’

  ‘You and your system!’ she said scornfully. ‘I hacked away at it for an hour. I backed red and too many blacks kept on coming up. Your system’s just another way of losing money, only it’s much harder work. Typical of James Bond to dream it up. He just wants the agony to last longer.’

  ‘Well, what happened?’ ‘I was down to my last thousand francs and I said to hell with it and put the thousand francs on my birthday. And it came up. What has clever Mister James Bond got to say to that?’ she said scornfully.

  ‘He might be unkind and suggest that you backed a number right down at the end of the last dozen,’ I said curtly.

  The night of this slightly fictionalized account of my first evening in Monte Carlo I myself did badly. I had taken all the necessary precautions – noting the number of my hotel bedroom, remembering the date of my wife’s birthday and, most essential of all, rubbing the horse’s knee of the equestrian statue of Louis XIV in the hall of the Hotel de Paris (all the bronze veneer has been rubbed off by generations of the superstitious and the knee now gleams like gold), but nothing had availed me. I put my misfortune down to a state of spiritual derangement caused by a group of noisy and mannerless Italian businessmen who had put me off my psychological stride at chemin-de-fer, and by the significant fact that, on sitting down to dinner, the two knives to the right of my plate had been crossed – a sure message that I would be out of luck that night.

  I am not by any means a passionate gambler nor a very audacious one, but I greatly enjoy the smoke-filled drama of the casino and the momentary fever of the game. The casino at Monte Carlo is not my favourite. For me the
casino at Beaulieu has the greatest charm, followed by Le Touquet, with, at the bottom of the list, Enghien les Bains outside Paris, which has the unenviable distinction, for a gambler, of making the highest annual profit of any casino on the Continent. The Monte Carlo casino is rather too much of a show-place and there is a railway-station atmosphere about the vast gaming rooms that, despite the glorious vulgarity of the decor (note, in the inner salon vert, the naiads on the ceiling; they are smoking cigars), is slightly chilling. The intimate surroundings of the Sporting Club, decorated, as the casino hand-out charmingly puts it, ‘par les peintres Warring et Gillows’, are far preferable, but this select enclave has strict winter and summer seasons and was closed at the end of May.

  Part of the trouble with the Monte Carlo rooms is that they were built in an age of elegance for elegant people, and the gambling nowadays has the drabness of a Strauss operetta played in modern dress. The Italians, Greeks and South Americans, who are by far the richest post-war gamblers, are almost totally without glamour and, if they support beautiful cocottes in the true casino tradition, they leave them at home so as not to be distracted from what used to be a pastime but has now become a rather deadly business of amassing tax-free capital gains. Monte Carlo and its casino were designed for flamboyants – for Russian Grand Dukes, English Milords, French actresses and an occasional maharajah, but now the beautiful stage is occupied only by the scene-shifters who have inherited it from a race of actors that is bankrupt or dispossessed.

  But the great money-making machine, tempering its rules of dress and deportment, and importing crap tables and fruit-machines to suit the modern taste, still hums efficiently and soullessly on – indifferent to the pockets from which the money is mined so long as the yield remains high. I say ‘soullessly’ because the official policy of the casino authorities seems to be to get down to business and forget the romantic myth. Nowadays, for instance, you cannot ‘break the bank’ at Monte Carlo. In the old days, each table started off with a large sum as capital and when this was exhausted the bank had been broken and, while more capital was fetched from the strong rooms, the table was draped in a black shroud and remained en deuil. Surely it was a pity to discard this charming custom, and, with it, the glorious objective of every gambler!