on the honey-colored and scarlet-inlaid marble floors.
At the next table, two women wearing black dresses were eating pastry and gossiping in French. Gen spoke enough French to eavesdrop but not enough to have a proper conversation.
Gen and Roxanne nibbled and relaxed, and Gen eased her flat shoes off her heels to give her swollen toes more breathing room.
One of the two women sitting at the table beside them said, “I think he’ll have a black eye, which means he’ll be in a foul mood. Last time Pierre and Maxence brawled like that and Pierre had a black eye, he demanded that a make-up artist come in every day and cover it up.”
“When was the last time this happened?” the other woman asked. “It seems like it happens often. Maxence seems volatile.”
“Pierre could make a saint snap and try to murder him,” the first woman laughed. “And I think it’s that Maxence is a better boxer than Pierre. No wonder Flicka Hannover left Pierre and disappeared.”
Gen caught her breath.
Roxanne asked, “What?”
Gen shook her head at Roxanne, flipping her fingers in the air, and kept listening to the two women.
Roxanne set her pastry down and leaned back in her chair, listening.
“And then Maxence stormed out,” the first woman said. “I heard he checked into the hotel near the casino and stayed at the roulette tables all night long.”
The other woman laughed. “That wouldn’t surprise me. When he was young, he used to lose so much money in that casino, not that it mattered in the slightest.”
They both laughed.
They talked about other things. Gen kept listening to them, but the topic of Pierre and Maxence’s fight didn’t come up again.
Another topic did, though.
The second woman said, “Did you see that battleship off the coast this morning?”
“I heard it is the third-largest yacht in the world after those Saudi ones. Some French billionaire owns it. I heard he is running guns in it.”
“Great, now we have an arms smuggler with contraband in our waters as well as the usual assortment of criminals.”
“I’ve heard Interpol is going to raid him.”
“Interpol never raids anybody in Monaco. It’s one of the benefits of citizenship here. That and no income taxes.”
“I heard he and his wife were in the casino last night. She was alone in the main rooms, while he gambled away three million dollars.”
A raucous snort of laughter. “And he won’t get that back.”
“These people think there’s no one watching, that we in service don’t count and don’t see.”
“No,” the second one said wistfully. “They know we see. They just don’t care because they think we’re nothing.”
After they left, Gen recounted it to Roxanne, who had only heard some of it.
“We have to tell the guys,” she said. “Let’s get going.”
Chapter Ten
Yacht Club de Monaco
Casimir: After breakfast
Though it was still quite early, billionaire yacht owners and their uniformed staff bustled around the Yacht Club de Monaco. At seven-thirty in the morning, the sun had just cleared the horizon, but the owners sipped champagne and ate an elegant breakfast in the dining room or around the pool, if they were so inclined. Some yacht owners were still asleep in their fifth homes or hotel rooms in Monaco while their staff slept in bunks on the boats.
The yachts’ crew members had been awake and working for hours. Some of the crew were cramming a granola bar in their mouths while they readied the ships to sail for some days at sea or, if a voyage was not planned, washed the yachts’ hulls, swabbed the decks, and coiled the ropes into pleasing knots so as not to embarrass their billionaire owners in front of the other billionaires.
Casimir and Arthur strolled down the sidewalk and approached the yacht club.
Arthur was in his hail-fellow-well-met persona, casual and extraverted with a loose-limbed, careless gait while he walked, one of his masks that Casimir knew well. Caz also knew that the true Arthur behind all the myriad ways that he presented himself was a sober, quiet man who took his loyalties and his friendships very seriously. He was the pinnacle of Rudyard Kipling’s admonishment that man should keep his head when all about him were losing theirs.
Casimir also had a fair idea of what Arthur’s real job must be, other than managing the estates and properties owned by his earldom.
But that was a topic for another day.
They strode down the street called the Quai Louis II, a small side-street directly on the water, toward the entrance of the yacht club. The sea lapped