as the thought of running off with a married woman soured in Casimir’s mouth. His parents had problems with infidelity to the point where the two of them grinned icily for cameras but had not spoken directly to each other in years. If they’d had a solid marriage, it’s possible that they wouldn’t have dumped him in boarding school at the age of six, though extenuating circumstances had contributed to that decision.
He must have gone quiet, because Roxanne took his hand and squeezed it. He smiled down at his wife.
Arthur nodded. “Simone didn’t seem like the type to stray when we were in school, either. She was serious. I thought she might become a doctor before she got married and seemed to give everything up. Also, as I was watching the surveillance video, Simone wasn’t skipping through the crowd to meet a long-lost friend. She sprinted across the room toward Maxence with desperation, trying to reach him before she was caught or stopped. It may have been genuine or feigned. I couldn’t tell.”
Roxanne settled back in her chair. “Maxence has always been happy to be anyone’s knight in shining armor.”
“Indeed,” Arthur said, picking up his cup to sip his tea again.
“Where’s she from again?” Roxanne asked, picking up her phone.
“Mauritius,” Casimir supplied, and then he asked, “Remember that gray field mouse that came into the dorms at Le Rosey? It took Maxence a month to tame it, and then he kept it as a pet. It was the only pet at school, and people wanted to hold it. We were so starved for anything warm and furry.”
Arthur nodded, doubtlessly thinking of his dog, Ruckus, at home, a gift from Maxence.
Casimir remembered, “It got fat on the cafeteria scraps and lived in that shoebox, and it came when he called it.”
“She,” Arthur said, smiling. “Her name was Violet.”
“Yeah, Violet. He rescues everything and everybody. He’s got a complex.”
“And he likes to keep pets, too,” Arthur said, one eyebrow rising just slightly.
They did not need to continue that line of conversation. Casimir was painfully aware that he was the stodgy, vanilla one and didn’t particularly like to discuss his friends’ sex lives. He was Dutch, not a Dane. “Anyway, we are agreed that if Maxence thought Simone was in danger or distress, he would leap to play Sir Galahad.”
“Probably not Galahad,” Arthur muttered. “More like Lancelot, bedding the queen at his first chance.”
“Oh, come on,” Gen said, smirking at her husband. “He wouldn’t poach me.”
“I don’t think he’d plan to, but I don’t leave you alone with him for a reason.”
Gen shook her head. “And yet he thinks he wants to be a—”
Arthur said, “He won’t. It’s not his nature. I don’t think they’ll take him.”
“But where is he?” Casimir asked, knowing every minute might be important if Pierre or Estebe Fournier were on Max’s tail.
“Genoa,” Roxanne said, looking at her phone screen. “He took her to Genoa, Italy.”
Arthur raised an eyebrow at her, while Casimir grinned. His Roxanne was pragmatic, organized, and a certified genius at researching any question, legal or real-life. He said, “Pray, tell us.”
Roxanne held up her phone, which showed a mostly blue map on the screen. “If he took her to the airport in Nice, France in one of those whirring, flying-death contraptions—”
She meant a helicopter, Casimir assumed.
“—he’d be back by now. He would’ve returned to Monaco and been back in the casino by one in the morning, probably looking for someone else to spend the night with, but he wasn’t. The airport in Nice is too obvious, anyway. Pierre and Estebe probably both have teams waiting for them in Nice, so they must not have gone there because those guys are still following us. So, what’s the next airport over, one where they wouldn’t be looking for him? Genoa, Italy. There’s a connecting flight to Mauritius at eleven o’clock this morning. He’s putting her on a plane in ten minutes.”
“We could wait for him to return with The Last Toy at the yacht club,” Arthur said, “but those brutes would follow us and be waiting, too. We need to slip away from them and find Maxence before they do to warn him about Estebe and Pierre. It’s a two-hour drive to Genoa, at a minimum. We’d never get there in time, and he might be almost back here before we got there. We need something faster.”
“Not another damn helicopter,” Roxanne said.
“I have an idea,” Casimir said, flipping over his phone and tapping the screen.
“Even in a