Arthur felt like he should know which room it was. He’d come home with Maxence for summer vacations practically every year since he was thirteen. He really should know the Monte Carlo casino’s floor plan, even though some renovations had changed its footprint in the last decade.
A decade and a half.
Actually, nearly two decades had passed since the first time Arthur traveled with Max to Monaco for a school break.
That couldn’t be right, and yet the math seemed to be accurate.
Good Lord. That was unpalatable. Arthur was getting old.
He asked the ether, “Is that the north or south salon he was in?”
Racehorse said, “I don’t remember them well enough to tell them apart.”
Arthur was idly swiping his finger back and forth across the chronological scroll bar at the bottom of his screen, when the movement of the crowd changed.
Before, the movements of the crowd had been a random walk through the casino’s salon. There was a constant, slow swell and ebb as people meandered from one room to another, always in search of a new place and way to gamble.
Roulette players moved toward the poker tables.
Poker aficionados flowed toward the slot machines.
Slot machine patrons streamed toward the sports-betting rooms and roulette wheels.
The crowd’s movement seemed as aimless as dust motes billowing in the breeze.
And then, a Black woman wearing a sparkling white dress ran across the salon like a dark sword blade stabbing through the room. Her bare, ebony arms stretched ahead of her as she ran, all the more visible as her long, white dress frothed around her legs.
People recoiled, getting out of her way, or turned to see why she was rushing. The meat of the room was pulled toward her and sliced away.
The woman darted into the alcove where the facial recognition software had pinpointed Maxence had been standing. Her long skirt, darker near the hemline, fluttered as she moved.
Arthur whispered under his breath,“Wait.Who was that woman?”
Luftwaffe said, “I’ll see if I can get an image of her face and run it through the database.”
Vlogger1 asked, “Isn’t that Simone Maina?”
Racehorse muttered, “Who?”
Arthur nodded to indicate that he also wanted to know who that was. He assumed they were all watching him sitting there on the floor either by hacking into the surveillance system for themselves or by slipping into his tablet and watching him through the webcam.
Vlogger1 said, “Simone was two years behind me at Le Rosey, which would have put her in your class, Blackjack.”
Arthur nodded. He vaguely remembered her, but they had run in different circles. By high school, Arthur had spent his time in the computer lab, out and about with Max and Caz, or at home in England.
“We were on a field trip to Laos together during one of the school breaks. I liked her. She’s from Mauritius. It’s an island nation off the east coast of Africa in the Indian Ocean. Gorgeous island, from what she said. She said that the only reason she got into Le Rosey was because her parents put down that her first language was Tamil, which is from Southern India, because the spots reserved for Francophones were filled up with legacies like they always are. She didn’t speak a word of Tamil, though. I mean, like, I speak more Tamil than she does, and I’m Malayali. Or, you know, my parents are. She said her mom was part Tamil, part Chinese, and half Ethiopian, and her dad was from Trinidad and Tobago, I think. ‘Typical Mauritian, if there is such a thing,’ she said. Didn’t she marry some French guy?”
Luftwaffe asked, “Was she the girl who married Estebe Fournier?”
Vlogger1 said, “Oh God, I think she did.”
Arthur felt his brows lowering and strain between his eyes. Estebe had been a year ahead of them in school, but the whole campus had known he was a jerk. Arthur remembered Simone now. Everyone had been shocked that a guy like Estebe had gotten a woman like Simone, but Arthur had just assumed it was another example of the cliché that beautiful women liked assholes.
A few people—security men or bodyguards from their stiff movements and the officious way they were shoving people out of their way—followed Simone through the crowd but got hung up in the mass of people. They reached the alcove a few minutes later and walked into it.
Arthur rewound and ran it again.
No, those men had already been moving when Simone ran across the room.
