Returning to the hotel concierge desk, Harvard obtained from Georgette Manon another note of credit for an additional twenty thousand dollars. “Good luck again, monsieur,” she said, smiling.
“Thank you again,” he said, returning the smile.
Entering the casino again, Harvard saw Adriana Marshall, in a gold lame evening gown, playing boule at the same table at which he had played earlier. Even sitting in the same chair. And the same short croupier, Habib, was still spinning the wheel. Adriana appeared to be alone, which he found mildly surprising. Quickly ignoring her presence, in case she was bad luck, he got his rack of chips and walked into the Trente-et-Quarante area and took a seat.
Trente-et-Quarante, or Thirty-and-Forty, is a card game in which 312 cards are dealt a few at a time from a highly polished wooden sabot, or shoe. Face cards are considered tens, aces are ones, and all other cards keep their numbered value. The cards are laid out faceup in a single row until the points total at least thirty-one but not more than forty. A second row is then dealt below the first row, again until the point value of the cards reaches thirty-one but no more than forty. Players bet on which row will come closest to thirty-one. They may also bet on couleur: that the first card of the first row will be the same color as the first card of the second row; or inverse: that the colors will not be the same. All winning bets are paid even money.
Determined to quickly recoup his earlier losses, Harvard bet heavily for a full hour — and for the second time that evening lost his entire rack of chips.
At the concierge desk again, Harvard obtained a note of credit for forty thousand dollars, instead of twenty.
“I do hope monsieur’s luck changes,” the dark-haired young woman at the desk said, rather self-consciously.
“So do I,” Harvard replied curtly.
They did not exchange smiles this time.
Crossing the casino floor for the third time, Harvard noticed that Adriana was still at the same boule table, but with a different croupier on duty. He thought nothing of it until he was standing at the cashier’s cage getting his chips — a double rack this time. That was when he saw the Arab croupier, Habib, standing nearby, pointing Adriana out to a somewhat flat-faced Anglo with a head of tightly curled black hair, and wearing a leather coat over a turtleneck. The man nodded and surreptitiously passed an envelope to Habib, who quickly put it in his inside coat pocket. Probably some gigolo, Harvard thought, staking out an American rich girl brought to his attention by a casino employee with a profitable little sideline.
With his new chips, Harvard walked over to the Baccarat area, his face set with the grim determination he felt to break his unbelievable losing streak. Settling into one of the plushly upholstered chairs, he began to place conservative bets while getting the feel of the table.
As with Trente-et-Quarante, six decks of cards were used in Baccarat. Face cards and tens had values of zero; aces were one point; all other cards counted for their number value. The object of the game was to get as close to nine as possible with either two or three cards. Amounts of ten were subtracted from a player’s total. In Harvard’s first hand, he was dealt an eight and a nine, for a total of seventeen, minus ten, which gave him a value of seven. He chose not to draw a third card, and lost when the dealer hit a six, a four, and an eight, for a score of eighteen, minus ten, for a winning eight.
That was the first of twenty-four consecutive hands that Harvard lost at Baccarat. On the twenty-fifth hand, he pushed in all the chips he had left, a bet of nearly six thousand dollars, and lost again.
Stunned, he left the table. Walking ahead of him as he approached the foyer was the flat-faced man he had seen having Adriana Marshall pointed out to him by the boule croupier. Harvard scarcely noticed him, nor was he aware that Adriana herself was only a dozen yards behind him, also walking toward the foyer.
Outside, as Harvard waited to cross the boulevard back to the Hotel de Paris, the flat-faced man stopped at the casino entrance and signaled the driver of a Porsche four-seater parked nearby. The Porsche pulled up to the entrance just as Adriana Marshall came out the door.
Traffic on the boulevard stopped and Harvard crossed to the hotel.
Behind him, Adriana Marshall was quickly and quietly forced into the Porsche by the flat-faced man, and the car sped off around the corner, away from the busy boulevard.
At three o’clock the next afternoon, Harvard woke from a drunken sleep with a crushing headache and barely enough strength to make it into the bathroom to gulp down four aspirin, take off the underwear in which he had slept, and stand under a moderately cold shower until his mind began to clear. A while later, in a thick terrycloth hotel robe, he made it out to a couch in the sitting area and began trying to regroup.
On the table in front of him were his canceled notes of credit which had, one by one, come back to the hotel concierge for payment. Tallying through them, Harvard learned that his losses for the night totaled one hundred eighty-eight thousand U. S. dollars. Groaning audibly, he rested his head back as the last few hours of the previous evening started surfacing in his memory.
After losing forty thousand dollars at baccarat, he had made his fourth trip to the hotel for another note of credit. “Make this one for the entire amount I have left,” he instructed.
“The full one hundred twenty thousand, monsieur?” Georgette Manon asked, with a slight, troubled frown.
“Yes, yes, the entire amount,” he replied impatiently.
“Monsieur must be having a very bad run of luck,” she commented sympathetically.
“Aren’t you observant,” Harvard said with an edge. He glanced at his watch. “Would you mind hurrying?”
He had gone back to the casino. At the entrance, he passed several police cars and saw a number of gendarmes and security personnel moving anxiously about. Ignoring them, he had returned to the gaming tables.
In a matter of less than two and a half hours, by the time the chimes sounded to close the casino at two A.M., Harvard had lost an additional one hundred eight thousand dollars. Returning the scant few chips he had left to the cashier’s cage, he had received a credit for twelve thousand dollars, left the casino, and walked down the busy boulevard to the first bar he came to. There he had begun drinking. By three-thirty he was swacked. Staggering out of the bar, he managed to walk down to the waterfront where, after discussing his problem for a few minutes with a luminous full moon, he eventually lay down on the bench he was sitting on and passed out. Sometime around dawn, a police patrol found him, discovered a Hotel de Paris key card in his pocket, and called the concierge there. Two bellmen were dispatched and Harvard was returned to his room, undressed, and put to bed in his underwear.
As he sat mulling over his incredible bad fortune, the buzzer at his door sounded briefly and seconds later the door opened and Georgette Manon came in, with a room service waiter who went about setting up a breakfast table.
“The maid came in and heard your shower,” Georgette said. “I had notified her to advise me when you woke up. Are you all right, monsieur?”
“Yes, I’m just dandy,” he replied in a raspy voice.