Dree shook her head, flipping her blond curls around her face. “My grandpa tried to teach some of my friends and me to play Twenty-One, but my mom caught us and yelled at him for corrupting our morals. She told the pastor, and he had a talk with grandpa about ‘the young and impressionables.’”
“Do you want to try a slot machine?”
She shook her head, her curls almost vibrating. “I’m afraid I’d lose the money.”
Maxence laughed, found a hundred-euro bill in his wallet, and fed it into a slot machine.
“No, no, don’t!”
He tapped the button to spin the wheels, and the machine rattled and paid out a hundred and fifty euros.
“Oh, that’s dangerous,” Dree said, shaking her head. “I can see how people become addicted to that.”
The décor of the room called theSalle des Amériqueswas orange-red and the ubiquitous gold, though the walls were a softer brown. Slot machines blazed blue and violet and clanged incessantly. He told her, “The slot machines are some of the most lucrative gaming in the casino. Most of Monaco’s income now comes from tourism and billionaires seeking to escape income taxes, but in my grandfather’s time, almost all of Monaco’s treasury was funded by the casino.”
After they toured the public areas, Maxence led her deeper into the casino.
She said, “I love the arched doors, but this room seems familiar.”
Dark wood paneling lined the walls to about eight feet, where subtle gold and sage green accents took over and soared to the ceiling five stories or more above.
Maxence said, “This is theSalle Médecin. It used to be James Bond’s special haunt to play baccarat and roulette, but now the space is more often used for galas, tournaments, and private events.”
“This is amazing.”
When Maxence looked down at Dree, her eyes were sparkling with wonder. “I’m glad you think so.”
They walked out of the rear doors onto a wide terrace and wandered through the small botanical gardens back there. Finally, they came to a white railing that overlooked the sapphire harbor filled with superyachts, cruise ships, and hundreds of smaller watercraft.
Dree sighed and shuffled closer to him, and Maxence looped his arm around her shoulders and pulled her against his side again. Before he even noticed what he was doing, he leaned down and kissed her forehead.
He shouldn’t be too affectionate because that might lead to misunderstandings, but it was fun to play for a while.
It was a lot of fun to play for a while.
Dree pointed downward from the terrace on which they stood. “What’s that?”
A peninsula jutted out into the Mediterranean Sea, and a rainbow mosaic had been tiled onto the roof of a large hexagonal building. “That’s the Auditorium Rainier III. The Philharmonic plays there a lot, and it holds a lot of different cultural events. That mosaic on the roof is called the Hexa Grace. The auditorium has only been there for a little while. Before that, there was a sporting club.”
“Oh?”
Maxence stared into the air drenched with sunshine. “When I came home to Monaco for school vacations, I ran around the casino and the other gardens. When I was a boy, and I must have been pretty young, there were pigeon nests on the casino roof, hundreds of them. I went up there as a child to count the eggs and watch them hatch.”
For absolutely no good reason, Maxence kept talking.
“They were homing pigeons. They always came back. Generations of pigeons laid their eggs up there, hatched, and grew up. And there were traps up there.”
Dree frowned, confused. “Traps? I’m surprised they didn’t have spikes up there to make them go away.”
He nodded, even though he wasn’t surprised. “After the birds were trapped, the cages were taken down to the sporting club. There, they were stuffed into a tunnel. It must have been terrifying in there, dark and hot and crowded. The Riviera gets steamy in the summers. They must have been praying for God to free them. When they reached the other end, the birds emerged and flew into the sky, where the hunters were waiting with their shotguns.”
Her small gasp disappeared into the breeze. “Max, you’re going to give me nightmares.”
“Some of them escaped. Some were only winged.” His mouth kept talking like his soul was trying to fly into the air and away over the sea. “But those that survived, like all pigeons, returned to where they were hatched, which was the roof of the Monte Carlo casino, where the traps were waiting.”
She blinked. “Oh, my God. Wait, so when people shoot shotguns at those ceramic disks they call ‘clay pigeons,’ they usedreal pigeons?Like, thebirds?”
“That is what it refers to.”
