One Night in Monaco

by Blair Babylon

  A bit of sediment floated at the bottom of the fragrant tea. “That’s all that is in there, just those things?”

  Gen was being exceptionally careful of what she ate, even though Arthur assured her that all Finch-Hatten babies were healthy and enormous, even during plague years. He had records.

  Issouf had set his tray aside and counted on his long fingers. “Yes, just ginger, turmeric, and mint. My wife drinks this tea, and we have five healthy children. Very healthy. Do you want honey?”

  The thought of gestational diabetes loomed every time Arthur assured her how absolutely enormous Finch-Hatten babies were. “No, thank you, on the honey. The tea smells great as it is.”

  Issouf pressed his lips in a tight smile, obviously pleased.

  Gen added a substantial tip as she signed the room charge and passed it to him, and Issouf smiled a little wider as he tucked the receipt in his shirt pocket.

  He seemed to consider things for a moment, his bulbous eyes glancing at the plaster curlicues on the ceiling before he mentioned offhandedly, “I am sorry that I overheard you talking earlier. You are here to look for a man named Maxence?”

  “Um, yeah,” Gen said while exchanging glances with Rox. “Maxence Robert.” She sipped the tea, which was mild and herbal. She could definitely taste the mint and ginger, and it felt like her stomach settled as soon as it touched her tongue. Dang. The man with five kids did indeed know how to make a pregnancy tea. “Wow, that is great. Ginger, turmeric, and mint?”

  Issouf nodded. “But they must be fresh. No powders. I muddled the mint leaves and the ginger and turmeric roots in a mortar and pestle before steeping them, and then strained the tea. About this Maxence you mentioned, I feel I should not press, but one of your husbands inquired at the desk whether Maxence Grimaldi had stayed here or at another Four Seasons property yesterday.”

  Roxanne rolled her eyes. “Casimir. He’s a bull in a china shop when it comes to cross-examining witnesses.”

  That was true. Arthur was exceedingly well-trained in every type of operational security and could have gotten the information without dropping Max’s surname. Gen asked Issouf, “Do you know something that would help us?”

  Issouf pressed his lips together, shushing himself, which Gen had learned from Arthur meant that she needed to pay very close attention to what he said next. She leaned forward in her seat and sipped her tea.

  He sighed just a little, a resignation. “The desk declined to answer, citing our usual discretion. It is true that we are very discreet as to which guests are staying in the hotel and with whom.”

  Gen refrained from snickering at his insinuation. Hey, would you look at that? Arthur’s British training was working. She said, “The hotel’s discretion is legendary.”

  “But it seemed, from your conversation, that there was a problem with your Maxence, the one you’re looking for.”

  “Yes, he’s missing. We’re worried about him, and we’re worried enough to fly here in the middle of the night to find him.”

  “Because he’s here for an accounting convention.”

  “Something like that.”

  “If there were a Maxence of some last name staying here at the Hotel de Paris as a guest, we would know whether he had returned to the hotel this night and around what time.”

  Gen raised one eyebrow at Rox, who was watching Issouf intently. Gen said, “We are concerned about his safety. We’d appreciate anything you could tell us.”

  “We keep track of whether our guests are in or out of the hotel in order to provide them with superior service.”

  “The hotel is also legendary for its superior service,” Gen agreed and sipped the tea he had provided. She had not realized how nauseated she had been until this tea had driven the queasiness away. Wow.

  Issouf continued, “I may have inquired about whether he was seen while your tea was steeping.”

  Gen waited, and Roxanne did, too. As Roxanne had been a paralegal for years, she was excellent at knowing when to talk and when to let the defendant speak. She had been Casimir’s best and only paralegal for years, and he extolled how they worked together as a team at every opportunity.

  Issouf gathered himself and said, “A man by the name of Maxence has checked into one of our largest suites in the hotel—”

  Yeah, that totally sounded like their Maxence.

  “—and did not return to his suite last night, as far as we know. No front desk staff noted his reentry into the hotel, and his suite’s elevator keycard was not utilized.”

  Roxanne twitched in her chair.

  Gen did not jump up, though she wanted to. “Do you have any idea what time he left the hotel yesterday?”

  “About eight o’clock. He had a light supper in his room before he left. He appeared to be dressed for the casino or another formal event. He walked in the direction of the casino when he left.”

  She asked, “Have there been any sightings of him in the meantime?”

  “Not at the hotel, at least not that I was able to discover.”

  “Thank you,” Gen said, her tone earnest. “We really appreciate the information.”

  “I can put his suite on the earliest rotation for housekeeping as a welfare check,” Issouf said.

  “I would greatly appreciate that,” Gen told him. “What time?”

  “We could go in at six in the morning,” Issouf said.

  “Great,” Gen said. “We would really appreciate that. Rox, shall we get some sleep?”

  Issouf led them to their rooms, asking whether they needed anything at all until their luggage arrived, and he didn’t even roll his eyes at their obvious lying about the luggage, so they begged toothbrushes and some large tee-shirts from him. He smiled primly and seemed pleased to help.

  Yeah, service at five-star hotels was good.

  As soon as Gen sat down on the couch in the living room area of her suite to kick her shoes off, knocking rattled the door. A voice stage-whispered from the hallway, “It’s Rox! Let me in!”

  Gen waddled over to the door and opened it. Her feet were puffy, and red lines criss-crossed over her arches.

  Roxanne blazed in. “We have to tell the guys that Max was here and now he’s not. Does your cell phone work?”

  “I think so.” Gen checked her phone. “It says it’s roaming, but I think I have a connection.”

  “I don’t even have that,” Roxanne fretted. “We have American plans. We added European minutes every month, but it doesn’t work in Monaco. They’re a walled garden.”

  “Oh, yes. Monaco isn’t part of the all-European-access plan, but we have proper European plans because Arthur is over here so much. It should work on roaming.” She tapped a few buttons, and the call buzzed through.

  “Don’t!” Roxanne said. “The roaming charges must be insane. I’ll just go find them.”

  “Oh, no!” Gen said, almost disconnecting the phone and then stopping herself. She considered her cell phone, Arthur’s enormous English manor house, his London Knightsbridge flat, the jewelry he’d given her and the art he owned, his sports cars, and his petty cash bank accounts that he didn’t bother to keep track of ran that to seven figures. “We probably don’t have to worry about one day’s worth of roaming charges anymore, do we?”

  Roxanne blinked her large brown eyes. “I guess not. It’s weird to just fritter away money like that, though. I mean, roaming charges.”

  “I know. It still feels weird,” Gen said as the phone connected to the line with a solid beep. “It’s fast.”

  “Monaco is the first country in the world to go all 5G,” Roxanne said.

  “Yeah,” Gen snorted. “What did they need to cover all of this teensy country with 5G, two household routers and a couple of repeaters?”

  Roxanne flopped down on the couch. “I suppose I could have asked Issouf for the hotel’s wifi password.”

  Arthur’s phone line went to his voicemail.

  Gen hung up. “He’s not answering. We can tell them later.”
>
  Chapter Five

  The Lobby

  Casimir

  A middle-aged white man wearing a black tux stumbled toward the glass-and-gold exit of the Monte Carlo casino. Federal-blue circles clung under his eyes, and his black tie dangled from his collar.

  Beside him, a bedraggled woman, clad in a forest green dress just a shade lighter than her sable skin, clung to his arm. She appeared to be in her early forties, though her exaggerated cheekbones and jawline suggested pharmaceutical-grade filler, so she might have been anywhere from forty-five to seventy. They appeared to be holding each other up. She took a slug from a magnum of champagne clenched in her fist.

  A CLOSED sign hung from the golden bars of the cashier’s cage on the side of the room.

  A dozen Christmas trees dressed identically in white ribbons and gold glitter stood in the lobby, narrowing the room. The ceiling still soared several stories above them, a riot of caramel marble, polished wood, and gilded scrollwork.

  Casimir van Amsberg strode through the room and grinned at the two dealers who were standing at a poker table, one of whom bent to rest his head on his arms.

  Arthur’s footsteps stomped softly on the thick carpeting half a step behind him. Casimir caught a glimpse of Arthur’s dark sleeve swinging in his peripheral vision.

  Casimir called out to the dealers. “Hey! Can I have a word with you?”

  The slumped guy lifted his head, clearly exhausted, and blinked at Casimir. He was an Asian guy, probably Chinese from his features, and a lipstick mark stained his collar. His straight, black hair fell in his eyes, and he brushed it away.

  “I don’t want to play blackjack, I promise,” Casimir said as he approached. The official operating hours of the Monte Carlo casino are from two o’clock “until the last table closes,” which can be anytime from midnight (rarely) until dawn.

  That day, it was nearly dawn.

  Casimir asked, “Um, what language? English, Français, Nederlands, Español?”

  The other casino staff member standing at the table, a tall and thin Black guy with the generous features of West Africa, was wearing a small insignia pin on his tux jacket that meant he was a pit boss. “English or French. Okay with that, Lee?”

  The other dealer nodded, and his head drooped lower.

  “I am looking for a friend,” Casimir said, sticking to English.

  The pit boss straightened. “I’m sorry, sir. If that wasn’t your friend,” he pointed to the couple staggering out the door, “then I don’t think we can help you. Hundreds of people come through the casino every night. I’m not terribly good with faces. Lee?”

  Lee struggled to lift himself and braced his arms on the table. He gestured toward a couple of closed-circuit cameras on a pole beside his table. One was directed downward to focus on the cards. One was pointed at the chairs where patrons would sit. “You can ask the police to review the security footage. They’ll need a warrant. The courthouse is up in Monaco-Ville, behind the palace. It doesn’t open until nine o’clock.”

  “I’ll look into that. I think my friend was here earlier, and he may have come back. Are they still recording?”

  Lee flipped his fingers at the darkened light on the top of the camera. “We turn off the table cams when we declare the casino is closed, but the house cameras are still on.”

  Casimir regarded the obsidian half-globes embedded in the ceiling, as they are in every casino around the world. “Could we look around the casino? Maybe he’s sitting at a slot machine or having a drink somewhere.”

  They pointed toward a hallway in the back of the room and gesticulated while explaining the rather complicated route to walk the entire casino complex, which also included a theater that housed the Opéra de Monte-Carlo and the office of Les Ballets de Monte-Carlo.

  Casimir feigned having trouble with the directions, so they walked him over to the hallway, still pointing, both of them telling him the directions again, first in English and then in French because, evidently, the English wasn’t cutting it.

  Still, Casimir discussed the directions with them, and then he asked whether the security cameras covered every room and which parts of the casino were less surveilled. Perhaps his friend was still there. Were any tables still open? Or slot machines?

  The discussion grew longer, with more pointing and multiple languages, and they paced into another room as the guys woke up a little more.

  Things became more complicated. There was indeed a bank of slot machines with little camera coverage, and a white-haired East Asian lady had fallen asleep back there, her golden tokens spilling off her red silk dress and onto the blue carpet on the floor.

  The three men carefully woke her and made sure she was all right, just napping, and helped her into a taxi back to her hotel before they once again turned to the question of whether Casimir’s friend has also escaped notice.

  By the time the dealer and the pit boss had chaperoned Casimir around the casino and discussed these very important matters with several security personnel who were still on the casino floor, he was sure they had forgotten Arthur had been with him at all.

  Chapter Six

  The Cage

  Arthur

  Lord Arthur Finch-Hatten, the Earl of Severn, sat on the carpeted floor inside the cashiers’ cage, behind the counter and out of sight, with his keyboard and tablet rig plugged into one of the casino’s computers with a thin, black snake of a cord. His long legs were crossed at his ankles, and he precariously balanced the tablet on his thighs.

  Somewhere beyond the walls strewn with green Christmas garland and the gilded bars of the cage, Casimir was chatting with the casino employees as they walked into the rabbit warren of rooms, their voices rebounding from the ornate crown moldings and crystal chandeliers dangling from the high ceilings.

  A lone slot machine trilled in the odd silence.

  Arthur had already disabled the surveillance cameras in and around the cashiers’ cage with a few taps on his keyboard. However, if the monitors in the security station had fuzzed to black, it would have been a telltale giveaway that someone had hacked their system. Instead, Arthur had grabbed a minute of footage from the cams inside the cashier’s cage, from when it had been unoccupied just ten seconds before he’d picked the side door lock and broken in. He’d looped forty seconds plus or minus five seconds of that image into the security cameras’ feeds. Thus, the security personnel in the booth were viewing a picture of a nice, empty, safe cashier’s cage on their video monitor, and the little trembles and bobbles of the image seemed random. Human brains are amazingly efficient at picking up patterns, so a perfect forty seconds would have looked odd. Arthur estimated he had at least a few minutes before the security personnel noticed anything amiss.

  Perhaps there were a few extra minutes of leeway, considering what an excellent diversion Casimir was creating. Lawyers are born performers. The good ones are, anyway. Arthur was married to one of the best litigating attorneys in London, in his opinion, and a lord’s opinion is never humble. As Arthur’s fingers flew over his silent keyboard, he smiled at the thought of his Gen arguing her cases before judges in her ridiculous white wig and black robes.

  In his earbuds, several of his friends chattered gleefully about the hack.

  A tiny wire with a camera aimed at his tablet’s screen protruded from one of his earbuds and bounced near his eye when he swallowed. His friends—nobody liked being called hackers or spies—were commenting on the casino’s rather good security firewalls and having a great time. Most of their hacks these days were formulated to penetrate military intra-webs or terrorists’ dark web meeting grounds and were a matter of life and death.

  An innocuous hack into a casino’s security system to look for a missing person felt like the larks they used to pull off in their teens back in the dorms of Institut Le Rosey, the Swiss boarding school they’d attended. Le Rosey catered to the most elite billionaire parents in the world and was the most expensive dumping ground for inconvenient children who
interfered with jet-set lifestyles.

  This had somewhat been the case for Arthur. After his parents had been killed in a car accident when Arthur was very young, Arthur’s grandfather, the Earl of Severn, had packed Arthur off to Le Rosey, ostensibly to learn the ways of the extremely wealthy from others of their kind as he had. It had been a lesson in the British stiff upper lip for his heir to the earldom as his grandfather had seen it. He had never been a nurturing sort of parent, anyway, from some things Arthur remembered his father saying.

  Not that his father should have criticized anyone’s parenting.

  Casimir’s parents had sent him to the Le Rosey boarding school to protect him from rabid paparazzi who had become obsessed with him for truly despicable reasons. He had some other family, an older sister and her children, younger siblings, and his estranged parents.

  But Maxence?

  Maxence’s parents had merely found it inelegant to have their two sons cluttering up their mansions, so they had shipped both Maxence and his older brother, Pierre, to Le Rosey as soon as each turned five years old. Managing nannies was such a bore for people like them.

  Thus, the three wayward heirs had quickly become best friends, which was why Arthur had gotten a phone call when Maxence had gone missing and why his next move was to call Casimir.

  After all, who else would get a phone call about Maxence? Max’s father had died of something cardiovascular years ago, and his mother’s death due to diet pills had been hushed up only a year later. There was an aunt or two somewhere, but they were generally uninterested.

  As for women, well—