Casino, Chapter 1
Rene, the not-quite-saucy matron in the uniform across the table screws her little French lips sideways without betraying herself by eyebrow inflection and tosses an eight of diamonds just shy of the white rectangle on green felt before my friend Ivan.
“Quinze,” she says, unwincingly. That’s 15, if you didn’t know.
No nervous eye flick, no drawn out fingered chip manoeuver, Ivan cuts an even line through the air 6 inches above his earnings, now totally wagered on this exceptionally poor hand.
A quick flip from Rene reveals 14 before her. “Quatorze pour la maison, alors,” she tweaks another, “ah, c’est tout pour moi.” The queen of spades.
Laquer faced, Ivan collects. He returns to me, just behind, my hands full of diamonds in a low stakes poker game.
“I fold,” I intone, throwing down, face up, a five-card flush. The gray-hair to my right gasps. I leave her my few remaining chips.
Ivan leads, I follow silently. Under a crystal chandelier, through two golden doors, across a marble foyer, and out the revolving door, lapping in slow circles, waving in hot midsummer air.
“Monsieur, un taxi?” murmurs the bellman as we descend the front steps, around the circular drive and, alongside the waterfalls, up to the main street above. Only on ducking around a building, a crystal store, does Ivan flinch.
“Holy shit!” he yelps, now shaking the bills in his hands wildly, that cool gamblers resolve lost somewhere between the alabaster columns and the platinum gilding. “This is like,” he shuffles the bills hurriedly, “200 euro!”
I begin to undo my tie. “Holy shit is right,” my shoes are off now. “Here, open this.”
I toss Ivan our fashionable black valise case, inside which is the weary traveling wear of two impoverished students. I double check for CCTV cameras before removing my pants.
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A wall of glass overlooking a jewel blue Mediterranean and Ivan, the one eyed Russian with a absurd glint in his smile braces himself against a stainless steel column. “Hit me.”
I hesitate. He yells louder. “Hit me!” Skin hits skin gives way to blood and bone. I can feel it in my fingers, he can feel it in his face.
“Again,” he says, wrapping his arms backwards around the column. The stainless steel is molded into tiny chevrons. “Again!”
I wipe off my knuckles and find it hurts less this time. The sun reflecting across the sea lights up his face like a neon sign for a waterbed store- milky blue with streaming red lettering.
He staggers around for a moment while I turn to look at the boats. There are hundreds of them, lined along the dock, some more than 30 meters long, and all owned by impressive looking socialites in well tailored suits. They bob gently when there is a breeze, which is hardly ever.
“Hand me that towel,” Ivan says, and I pull one out of my pack. Never travel without a towel.
A few gentle dabs to his precious little face and Ivan is right as rain, plus a bit of a bruise along his left, eyeless, side. This train station is nestled in a river carved gorge, set in the mountainside, with a river at the foot, tracks along the top, and a wall of glass enclosing the lobby in between. From outside, it looks like a seamless wall of soaring glass set right into the rock face, culminating in a dried up riverbed at the foot. From inside, it looks like a quasi-industrial mini-mall that had an interior avalanche. Standing right at the glass face is like looking past a sharp precipice into a plated picture of paradise.
The place is deserted, except us and a blind lady on a bench, now clutching her bag and walker close to her. We take the elevator down to the street.
We don’t even speak French, so two underdressed obvious Americans, one still bleeding from the face, gives us away quite well. Ignoring for a moment the pristine beauty of this place, and ignoring further the absolute opulence of it, we’re just here because we overslept. The train was supposed to take us from Nantes to Nice, because we only visit places that are alliterative. That’s how we got to France in the first place- a flight from Prauge to Paris. Paris to Orleans (ok, assonance) to Normandy to Neufchateau to Narbonne to Nantes. But we both fell asleep on the train and didn’t get off until we were woken by the conductor, and kicked off in Monte Carlo. So much for alliteration.
“The problem with the French,” Ivan enlightens me, “is that they all stopped smoking.” He lights up as we sit at the farthest table outside of a café, hoping that they don’t notice us. “Want one?”
He asks every time. “I always say no,” I say, waving him off.
“Good,” he responds, crumpling the box. “This is my last one.”
I consider the twists of smoke against the yacht antennae on the harbor. “The most expensive city in the world,” I say. “And not a euro left.”
“Well, technically five,” he says, rummaging through his pocket. “But I’m going to need another pack here real soon.” I grunt. “You know, Sartre smoked Galuases. The brand of a thinker, I say,” he says.
He spins his wrist in a gentle circle, considering the nature of being as encapsulated in a roll of dried leaf and tar. “Do you even know who Sartre was?” I ask, knowing the answer before he can even think about it.
“No,” he grins. For Ivan, one eye is enough to convey all the mischief that is normally only possibly with two.
“Jean-Paul Sartre was the French existentialist thinker who gained popularity in the 1920s because of this theory that man created his own meaning in life, and that one must be true, at all times, to one’s truest self, whatever self chosen version of a self that personage was to be.”
The cigarette burns to a nub and Ivan takes it just far enough to stay clear of his fingers. “But what is meaning,” he says, grinding the withered remains of his treat into the plastic table, “if you can’t mix it up a bit with some falsehood?”
A man approaches.
“Mesieurs, qu’est qu’on veux?” he says, dapper as a Frenchman should be. He is missing the stereotypical moustaches, though.
We look at him without comprehension. He understands. “To eat,” he says, “to drink?”
I look to the table and Ivan looks to his eyes. “No, thanks,” he says, shaking his head.
“Les tables sont pour les mangeurs du café,” he says. We stare. “Eaters only. Leave please.”
A stroll down the pier brightens our spirits.
“My father used to take me out, once a month,” I tell Ivan, who is probably not listening, “he had a sail boat, just maybe 10 feet long, and we’d scout all the little islands around the coast. I don’t know whatever happened to his boat.”
Ivan slows his pace and leans, conspiratorially, towards me. “That boat, four up from us,” he says, not looking at it, “the people in it just left.” The ramp from the shore to the boat rocks back and forth along the ground just a few meters ahead of us.
“I’d like to take a tour as much as you, I’m sure, but that’s–“
”Just a quick duck in. We could use the adventure.”
More conspicuously than we probably thought, we saunter onboard and take straight to the cabins. No cash on tables, no jewelry, nothing. Not that we’d ever broken and entered like this before. Well, not on a boat, at least.
“I got nothing, nothing portable,” I say, hands in pockets. When I turn around, though, Ivan is two steps ahead.
Hands in closet, he smirks at me. “Where are we?” he asks.
“Monte Carlo,” I say.
“And what one word in French do you know?” he asks.
“Uh, casino?” I say.
A plastic encased something is tossed into my arms.
“Grab that valise,” he says, indicating the black bag at my feet, “we’re going gambling.”
On the street I’m admiring the waterfalls. He’s trying to catch some choice views of the formal gowns parading the street as he power walks back towards me.
“First scout out indicates not good. It is ten euro just to get into the place,” he says, just slightly out of breath.
“What?” I ask incredulously, trying like hell to make this 6 foot man’s tuxedo fit my 6'5" frame.
“I don’t see another way in.” We’ve got nothing we can sell, except perhaps these tuxes, which I’ve made Ivan promise that we’ll return if we possibly can.
Meticulously dethreading my left sleeve hem, I look down the park following the flowing waterfalls with my eyes. A painter on a bridge just below us has a striking rendition of the casino on his canvas. Onlookers admire and ask if he has any work for sale.
“Kitchen?” I ask, now on to my right sleeve. The pants are as long as they are going to be, which is still not long enough. Good thing I caught on to the European tradition of wearing black socks all the time.
“Couldn’t find it. But I think I’ve got an idea. Let’s go.” Ivan starts for the door. I stop him with a pull to his collar.
“Not before we make this thing look like yours,” I say, pinching and bunching where I can. Ivan is, in a word, short. In two words, short and scrappy.
13 makeshift pins and a trash can rubber band later, Ivan is coasting, smooth as ice, right past the front doors, past the marble foyer, through the gold doors, and right under the crystal chandelier. At each juncture, I simply tell the bellmen or the guards, “I’m with him.”
We’re in. This was too easy.
But before I can say, “it’s a trap,” Ivan is up 15 euro at the blackjack table.
Three James Bondish hours later, but now with tuxes returned, we’re in the air to Montenegro. Alliteration, remember?
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