LA VIE EN ROSE
The grass was brown, dormant; a small group of desultory tourists was clustered around a towering modern sculpture in the middle of the park nestled between Avenue de Verdun and Boulevard Jean Jaurès. Nice in the off-season was a quiet town. Year-rounders went about their daily routines to the steady, measured tempo of beach towns in winter. Jordan felt as if he could have been in Hyannis or Down East except there were palm trees and carved marble where the scrub pines and bleached shingles should have been. The sculpture was an early Venet, a simple arc in black steel canted like the keel of a ship climbing a wave, fighting its way through punishing surf to reach the calmer seas beyond.
Jordan cut through the formal gardens and past the Monument du Centenaire to the Promenade des Anglais, the main drag along the beach. Traffic was light, so he jaywalked across the street, scarcely pausing on the grassy median. The pedestrian promenade was easily as wide as a two-lane country road. In the summer it would be packed with sun worshippers from all over Europe jostling one another with their canvas beach bags, umbrellas and the ubiquitous rolled straw beach mats one could buy at every sandwich shop or from the African vendors who plied the promenade, but now it was nearly deserted. A cluster of light-blue-painted wooden chairs stood facing the sea, angled as though a group of restless ghosts had just pulled them up for a chin-wag.
A stiff onshore breeze numbed Jordan’s left ear even as the low sun warmed his face. The Côte d’Azur lived up to its billing, the sea was a striking pale blue under a mostly cloud-filled sky with ribbons of a deeper blue glimpsed behind. The sun was just beginning to sink pinkly into a distant huddle of sullen clouds. The tawdry ball lights of the Casino Ruhl were already on. The casino occupied the ground floor of the Méridien Hotel. Its pink awning and dated decor seemed sad to Jordan, like a faded beauty with too much makeup caught in the daylight.
He crossed at the crosswalk and walked purposefully into the sprawling casino. There was only the Ruhl and the Palais, so he’d leave tonight for the richer hunting grounds to the west—Cannes, Saint-Tropez and Aix-en-Provence. Inside the Ruhl, Jordan made straight for the cage. He walked up to the open window and pulled out his bank card.
“Two thousand, please,” he said, sliding the card under the thick glass partition.
“Yes, sir,” the cashier, a young man with bad skin and thin spiky hair, said, swiping the card. “How would you like it, Mr. Butler?”
“Two five hundreds and ten hundreds, please.”
“Yes, sir.” The cashier expertly stacked two piles of green chips with a muted click and swept them into the transfer box. Then he took two black chips from his drawer and slid them in, along with the bank card and a printed receipt. He sealed the box on his end, which unlocked the outer door. Jordan opened it and gathered up the contents.
“Merci,” he said, nodding to the cashier.
“Merci, monsieur,” the cashier replied, resetting the box.
Jordan walked through the casino, eventually settling on a Vingt-et-un table whose primary virtues were the two dark-haired girls giggling and playing from a shared stack of chips, and the unobstructed view of the surveillance camera on the ceiling.
When he sat at the table, his demeanor changed. He became animated and voluble. It took him three glasses of champagne and forty minutes to lose all of his green chips. He flirted artlessly and shamelessly with the two women. They turned out to be Italian, in Nice for a wedding. When he doubled down on an eleven with the dealer showing six and then lost his last green, he spread his hands as if to say, What can you do? and headed somewhat unsteadily back toward the cage. The black chips never left his pocket.
After two and a half hours he had lost three thousand euros and had ten black chips in his pocket. He went back to the cage and cashed out, keeping his head down and his back to the ceiling camera. Five minutes later he was back on the boardwalk. The cold night air cleared his head. The clouds had passed and an impossibly large moon, days from full, hung just beyond the bobbing yachts anchored offshore. A gentle surf lapped at the smooth round stones that stood in for sand along this stretch of the Mediterranean. Jordan walked down another quarter mile to the Palais.
The Palais was a grand white edifice, more in the modern Vegas mold than its faded cousin. The floor rang with the digital cacophony of the slot machines. There was no central cage; the sheer scale of the place seemed to ensure security. The cashiers were in a discreet row on the far side of the casino. Jordan went up to the first open window and bought five thousand, all but a thousand in five-hundred-euro chips.
He ordered a scotch and soda from one of the circulating waitresses and wandered through the casino. He had never understood gambling. From the pensioners at the slots slowly bleeding out their life savings, to the wild-eyed shooters at the craps table, to the tight-jawed poker players waiting for the cards to turn, Jordan had always felt a deep sympathy for gamblers. They struck him as addicts, no better than skid row drunks or junkies in a shooting gallery. They had that same hollow look; the vulgar luxury of the setting only seemed to highlight the despair.
He squandered a few hundred at a crowded roulette table and actually won almost a thousand playing reckless Vingt-et-un. After a couple of hours he was basically even.
Nonetheless he went back to the cashier for another five thousand. After swiping his card, the cashier looked at her screen and with an apologetic smile and said, “I am so sorry, Mr. Butler, the bank wishes to speak to you. Would you like to speak with them, or perhaps another card...?”
She let the question hang. “No, I’d like to speak with them. I’m sure it’s fine,” he said.
“Very good, sir, just a moment.” She dialed, and after a minute on hold, she spoke in quick efficient French for a moment, nodded and, cupping the mouthpiece, handed him the phone under the decorative bars of the window.
It was a cordless handset so Jordan stepped away from the window. “Hello, this is Justin Butler,” he said.
“How are you, Jordan?” said a dry, familiar voice. There was no delay; it sounded as if he were down the street. Sam. Jordan panicked for a second and looked around, expecting to see him leaning against a slot machine flanked by his thugs. He wasn’t. “I wouldn’t have pegged you for a gambler,” Sam was saying.
Jordan recovered quickly. “Clearly I’m not,” he said, making his voice sound as if he was tipsy but trying to hide it, channeling late-night adolescent returns to waiting parents. “I’ve been losing.” He laughed a little nervously.
“I see that,” Sam said.
“Not that much, though,” Jordan said. “A few thousand, maybe. I thought I had plenty of money. You said I did.”
“You do, Jordan,” the patient voice went on, “but not infinite.”
“Yeah, yeah, I know. I’m just trying to have fun. Making friends, seeing the country.”
“I see. All right, well, enjoy. Just make sure your travels don’t take you outside of the country, please.”
“I know. I know the rules.” There was a moment’s silence. “You’re not here, are you?”
“No, I’m not. Please pass me back to that lovely young lady, won’t you?”
“O-okay, um, thank you,” Jordan stammered and passed the phone back. The cashier listened, nodded and clicked off.
“You’re all set, Mr. Butler. What denominations, please?”