Arthur turned to him. “Oh, sorry. I didn’t see you there. Just checking a text—Good Lord.Twist,is that you?”
The guy took off his sunglasses, revealing eyes as crystal blue as the immaculate swimming pool just beyond their feet and with depths of indigo that even the Mediterranean Sea that stretched around them couldn’t achieve. A brush of dark hair was visible under the brim of his black hat. “Arthur? Arthur Finch-Fucking-Hatten?”
Arthur laughed and stuck out his hand to shake. “How the hell are you, Twist?”
“Fine. And don’t call me that. It’s not nice to make fun of people with speech impediments.”
“She didn’t have a speech impediment. You encouraged her to use that baby talk with you. Serves you right to have that moniker stick to you, Tristan.”
During their senior year, if memory served, the girls at schoolreallystarted calling him Twist as if there were some other meaning for it, but that was none of Arthur’s concern.
“What the hell are you doing down here, Arthur? Shouldn’t you be holed up in your manor house for Christmas or something? I heard some woman finally lost her mind and married you.”
Tristan “Twist” King’s accent was typically Midwestern American, as unremarkable as a field of corn. They’d both been frequent denizens of Le Rosey’s computer lab, though Twist had attended only upper school at the boarding school. He’d been a scholarship student from the US. He hadn’t been shuffled off to boarding school at around five years old like the rest of them had. Some of the students at Le Rosey did not associate with scholarship students, but Arthur wasn’t that type of snob.
Though Tristan had asked him his business, Arthur didn’t want to broach the subject of Maxence quite yet. “What’s that you’re working on?”
Tristan shrugged. “High-frequency trading. Monaco has 5G. I’mkillingit.”
Arthur grinned at him. “Nice. Are you staying around here?”
“I’ve been here for a year, give or take.” He gestured to his gray trousers and blue blazer. “I’m just living on my boat and sucking up the 5G. My routines are so fast that they’redestroyingNYC. In another year, I’ll be, well, like everyone we know.”
“Since you’ve been around here, what’s the news these days?”
Small lines creased the skin between Tristan’s eyes for an instant, and he said, “Rainier Grimaldi’s dying.”
Maxence’s uncle, again. “Does everyone know that?”
Tristan stole a guilty glance at the edge of the parapet, suggesting a reference to the regular people down below. “Everybody at the yacht club knows.”
But not the Monegasque citizens and tourists on the street. “News hadn’t traveled to Britain.”
“Not even among us? That’s kind of shocking. A lot of Monaco people have been arriving within the last few days because they assume there’ll be a Council of Nobles meeting within a week or two. The yacht club is humming. It’s usually dead until noon around here.”
Council of Nobles? Must be a Monaco thing.“They’re keeping it very quiet.”
“Evidently. Maxence must have been told about it though, because he arrived here a day or two after Rainier’s stroke. He’s been sitting with his uncle in the hospital every day for weeks. We grabbed lunch a while ago. We were going to do it again yesterday, but he went up to Geneva for the day. Weird. But he called me after supper and said he was heading down to the casino for the night. Micah saw him there. He’s around here, too, somewhere. We were talking this morning before I logged on. Anyway, Micah talked to him for a few seconds, and he said Max had a little bit of a fat lip and some scrapes near his eye like he’d been in a bar fight or something.”
“He got in a fight at the casino?” Damn, Arthur should have seen that on the security footage.
“Micah said it was scabbed over, so it couldn’t have happened right then. Maybe earlier in the day.”
Arthur blandly waited for Tristan to go on, his hands clasped between his knees as he leaned forward.
Tristan finally did. “I don’t know why Max came back here at all. With Rainier out of commission, Pierre might actually have him knocked off, assuming Estebe Fournier doesn’t get to him first after last night.”
Here we go.“Estebe Fournier?” Arthur asked him, frowning and feigning confusion. “He was a few years ahead of us, right?”
“Yeah, that one. Estebe thinks Maxence ran off with his wife. He was stomping around the club at two o’clock in the morning, threatening everyone and saying that he was going to cut off Maxence’s head and drop it in the ocean for the sharks to eat.” Tristan grimaced. “Security finally led him off. He was wasted, and I don’t think even half of it was booze.”
“Do you think he meant it?” Arthur asked.
“I think he thought he meant it. I hope Max isn’t around. Estebe said he was sending his goons after him, and he was going to find Max before dawn and kill him.”
The Mediterranean sun suddenly felt uncomfortably hot on Arthur’s scalp and shoulders. “Thank you so much, there, Tristan. I appreciate that.”
“Are you looking for Max?”
