Arthur said, “I tried calling Maxence again, and it’s still going straight to voicemail. Either he’s turned his phone off, or he’s not in range of a cell phone tower.”
“Damn.” Casimir tapped his screen and held it up to his ear.
“Trying Max again?” Arthur asked, his voice as dry as a bored English lord.
“Of course, I am. Just in case he turned it back on after the five hundred other times we’ve called him.”
Arthur said, “I’ll take a look into the casino’s surveillance to see if anything pops up.”
Casimir said, “Yeah, you start there.”
Gen looked down and tried to keep from grinning. Though she was pretty sure that Casimir suspected what Arthur’s job was, it could be referred to only obliquely.
Men in black suits were holding open the doors to the heliport’s terminal for them.
The only way around the chain-link fence enclosing the helicopter landing pads to the parking lot was through the tiny terminal or box office or whatever they called the small building with the closed vendor windows that usually sold helicopter tickets, if one didn’t own a helicopter, of course. They trotted through the building with its huge posters of Monaco and France and out the front door.
As Gen was walking through the doorway, Arthur paused and asked one of the guys, an eastern-European-looking fellow with a dark hat, “Does Pierre know Maxence is missing?”
The man glanced at his partner, who shrugged, before answering, “Yes.”
“Did he order Quentin to call us?”
Another glance between them and a non-committal shrug. “Yes.”
“Wait just a minute,” Gen told Arthur while they were inside the terminal and dashed into a ladies’ room. Roxanne followed her inside because she was solid that way. Rox was, however, still recovering from helicopter-induced terror and too busy holding up the tile wall with both hands for chitchat.
By the time the two women emerged, black cars were waiting in the circular driveway outside.
Arthur steered Gen toward one, while Casimir and Roxanne walked to the other. Arthur opened the car door and helped Gen in, then walked around to the other side and folded himself inside, dropping a small, black backpack on the floor.
Gen asked Arthur, “What was that about Pierre?”
Arthur inclined his head toward the chauffeur. “Nothing, I’m sure.”
Right.It wasn’t nothing at all, but Arthur didn’t want to say anything in front of the driver, who was assuredly either Monegasque military or Pierre’s private bodyguard staff and would narc as soon as they were out of the car.
ByPierre,Gen meant Maxence’s older brother, Pierre Grimaldi. Gen had never met Pierre, but she’d heard a lot about him. The darkly handsome man had been plastered all over the society and gossip pages his whole life.
Recently, the tabloids had become obsessed with Pierre, ever since his famous socialite wife, Flicka von Hannover, had dropped out of sight. No one could quite agree on whether Flicka was actuallymissing.She’d been spotted a month or so ago in Las Vegas. Conflicting reports in the press battled it out as to whether she had divorced Pierre or whether the US courts didn’t have jurisdiction, but no one had seen her since.
She whispered to Arthur, “Have they found Flicka yet?”
He shook his head, frowning. Overhead streetlights shone in the windows and touched his black hair.
“Do you know anything about that?” she asked.
A shrug.
Oh, well.She’d get him to tell her later.
The car zoomed through the streets and tunnels of Monaco toward the Monte Carlo casino, and Arthur tucked his arm around her. “Are you all right?”
“Fine.”
The car careened around a corner, and she flopped a bit in the seat.
“You there,” Arthur called to the driver in the front seat. “Slow down.”
