out.”
“Not that Grimaldi,” the other girl said, coming up to stand with her friend. She wore matching blue eye shadow and bright red lipstick, as well as her uniform shorts. “The other one, the hot one. We’ve been in and out of port here for the last few years. We saw him and his wife several times last summer, right after they were married.”
And his wife. After they were married.
“Oh, you mean that Pierre Grimaldi guy, not his uncle Rainier Grimaldi,” Casimir said.
“Right! That one,” the girl agreed, her shiny, red lips smiling more broadly at him.
Casimir looked over at the empty boat parking space as if he were measuring it. “Do you think a seventy-meter ship will fit in there? I have eight staterooms and some sporting stuff. I don’t want to block you in.”
“I don’t know? The yacht that’s usually there is about fifty or sixty meters. It looks like it has three or four cabins. It’s called The Last Toy.”
The Last Toy.
Bingo, just the information Casimir had been fishing for. “I’ll have to talk to the organizing people here. I thought we submitted our request for a berth three months ago online, but they say they never received it. Computers, right?”
They laughed. “Computers, yeah.”
Casimir thanked them and walked back to the club, where Arthur was just walking out.
Arthur sauntered into the sunshine with his hands in his pockets and lifted his head so that the breeze blew his black hair back from his face. He was the very picture of a composed Englishman, unruffled by whatever business he was attending to and nearly bored with how nothing challenged his serene competence.
Jesus, something must be horribly wrong.
Chapter Eleven
Inside the Yacht Club
Arthur
After Casimir had wandered off, Arthur surveyed the members of the yacht club and considered his next move.
A crystal-blue swimming pool and cabanas occupied the top floor of the Yacht Club de Monaco building. A parapet ringed the roof, a half-wall barrier to keep the drunks from toppling onto the busy thoroughfare on one side of the building or the small street and marina on the other.
It also served to keep the commoners below from observing their betters too closely.
It also shielded Arthur from the people who had been following them ever since they’d left the hotel that morning.
Arthur had counted two surveillance teams of at least three men each tailing them from the hotel to the yacht club. Considering how they moved and overlapped their coverage, he suspected they were two separate teams from two different sources and were not coordinating their efforts. He’d watched them from reflections in shop windows and an occasional glance over his shoulder with the camera on his phone.
At one point, one of the men from the Red Team, as Arthur had begun identifying them, had stepped in front of the Blue Team, and a scuffle had ensued.
Both groups had nearly lost Arthur and Casimir in the kerfuffle.
Interesting.
Arthur had decided not to lose them, as he didn’t want to alarm Casimir nor alert the surveillance teams that he’d spotted them. If it became important later, he could grab Casimir and slip away.
As Arthur wandered among the members of the yacht club, the sun and bright sky above shone as brilliantly blue as the pool, though the pool had a touch more teal to it. The Mediterranean Sea sparkled a purer blue in the marina and deeper azure as it spread to the horizon, and a mild breeze fluttered around the champagne flutes, saucers of fruit and cheese, and breakfast items on the tables between the reclining teak deck chairs.
Astrid-Gitte hadn’t had much to tell him. She was delightful, as always. Arthur was careful to maintain contact with his friends from school and high-society events.
They were very useful.
Arthur ambled between the reclining lounges, examining the pristine swimming pool and the glistening Mediterranean Sea, when he noticed a man with a laptop perched on his thighs sitting over on the shaded side of the pool. He was bent over, craning his neck and peering at the screen, curled around the computer as if he were staring intently at it, though one couldn’t be sure due to the mirrored aviator sunglasses and black fedora he wore.
And yet, the man’s glasses, his hat, the tightly wound posture, the can of Red Bull beside him, and that subtle twitch when a seagull fluttered to the deck near him—
Arthur recognized that guy.
He wandered over, nodded at a few acquaintances on the way, and settled into the empty deck