The Palace Read online

  A British actor famous for his blue eyes, tousled hair, and beguiling stutter placed a hand on Lucy’s arm, nuzzling her with far too much familiarity. Simon couldn’t hear what he said to her. It didn’t matter. The actor was older than her by three decades. Simon whispered a few words of his own into the actor’s ear and the man dropped his hand as if he’d been shocked.

  “But that was—” Lucy said.

  “Yes, it was.”

  “And he wanted to—”

  “I’m sure he did.”

  “Mr. Riske! There you are!”

  Simon turned and found himself face-to-face with a short, pudgy, bald Asian man of indeterminate age. Thirty? Fifty? It was impossible to tell. “Samson, hello. And please, call me Simon.”

  “I missed you at the auction.” Indonesian accent by way of Oxford. At least, that’s what he’d told Simon.

  “Too rich for my blood, I’m afraid.”

  “You? I doubt that.” Samson Sun was dressed entirely in white—suit, shirt, tie, even his shoes—his one contrasting feature the round, black-framed eyeglasses that were his trademark. Sun turned to Lucy, the top of his head reaching her chin. “And who’s this lovely creature?”

  “My friend, Lucy Brown. Lucy, say hello to Samson.”

  “A pleasure, I’m sure.”

  Behind the pebble lenses, Sun’s eyes stayed on Lucy a beat too long. “What’s this, then, Miss Brown? A present for your host?”

  Lucy’s mouth worked, but no words came out.

  “Actually, you gave it to her,” said Simon.

  “Me?”

  “A door prize.”

  Sun returned his attention to Lucy. “Please join me,” he said, gesturing to a table at the back of the room. “You may find some new clients.”

  “Thank you, but we wouldn’t want to interrupt.” Simon placed a hand on Lucy’s elbow as his eyes scanned the room for trouble.

  “Not at all. Perhaps Miss Brown would like to meet the cast of my movie.” He took Lucy’s hand. “Are you an actress by any chance?”

  “An actress? Me? Course not.”

  Sun had come to Cannes as the producer of a movie called The Raft of the Medusa. The film was based on a true story of a group of African refugees whose boat had sunk as they made the crossing from Libya to Italy and had spent three hellish weeks adrift on a makeshift raft, nearly all of them perishing. Several of the survivors played themselves in the movie. Simon spotted them seated at Sun’s table.

  “Next time,” said Simon. Then: “You’ll be in Cannes the entire festival?”

  “Naturally,” said Sun. “Our film is to be shown closing night. A prestigious honor.”

  “Congratulations. We’ll see you on the Croisette. And thank you for the invitation. Great party.”

  “Good night, Mr. Riske. And good night, Miss Brown. I hope to see you again.”

  Simon guided Lucy across the floor, past a vodka bar carved entirely from ice and tended by pretty blondes clad in string bikinis and faux-fur shapki. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw that Sun had returned to his table, taking his place at the center of his entourage. A moment later, a commotion as two security guards arrived at his table. One was Pierrot, no longer unconscious nor on the floor of Sun’s bedroom.

  Time’s up.

  Simon ducked out a side door, Lucy in tow, and onto the fantail. He glanced over the rear safety railing. Two RIB tenders—twenty feet long, rigid inflatable hull, dual Mercury outboards—sat moored to the floating dock, crew in white tunics and navy-blue shorts at the ready. Somewhere belowdecks there was a miniature submarine as well (for pleasure? escape?), but Simon was no Captain Nemo. He was, however, a good Marseille boy who’d spent enough hours making trouble on the docks of the Vieux-Port to know the difference between a half hitch and a reef knot, and how to drive anything with a motor, on land or sea.

  “This way,” he said, setting off to the crew’s ladder, which descended to the floating deck. “If anyone asks, you’re sick. You need to get to a hospital straightaway.”

  “I am?” said Lucy. “I mean, yes, I am.”

  “Quick learner.”

  Simon reached the bottom of the ladder, offering Lucy a hand. “The lady needs to get to shore,” he said to the mate. “She’s ill.”

  “The boat will dock in forty minutes. We’re returning to port due to the weather.”

  “Too long,” said Simon, palming the mate a wad of one hundred euro bills—he didn’t know how many.

  The mate glanced at the money. The film festival. Movie people. Rogues. Rule breakers. He answered without hesitation. “Come aboard.”

  Simon helped Lucy onto the nearer tender. A high-pitched whistle sounded as he placed his foot onto the gunnel. Pierrot was leaning over the railing above their heads, hand pointed at them. “Keep them here,” he shouted as he made his way to the ladder.

  Simon jumped into the cockpit, tearing off his bow tie and throwing it into the sea. The engine was idling. The mate stood onboard, mooring rope in hand, looking confusedly between Pierrot and Simon. The tender’s skipper—eighteen, crew cut, yet to have his first shave—confronted Simon. “Sir, I can’t—”

  “Get off,” said Simon.

  “Yes, sir.” The skipper and the mate both stepped around him and boarded the Yasmina.

  Simon put the tender into reverse, spinning the wheel to port, then sliding the throttle forward. The nose rose. Wake spread behind the boat. Pierrot and another guard clambered aboard the second tender. Simon increased his speed. The sea was rising, wind from the Maritime Alps scudding across the surface, stirring up whitecaps, sending spirals of spume into the air.

  Simon killed the running lights. The speedometer read 25 knots, and he was astonished to see the markings went to 80. “Hold on,” he called over his shoulder. “This is going to get bumpy.”

  He shoved the throttle forward. The twin outboards roared. The hull slapped the water with force. Instead of heading toward shore and safety, however, he steered in a straight line, retracing the Yasmina’s path.

  “Where are you going?” shouted Lucy.

  Simon ignored her. He looked over his shoulder. A quarter of a mile separated them from their pursuers. He searched the water to either side of the boat, looking for a head, an arm, any sign of the man he’d thrown overboard. There. He spotted him, the man no longer wearing a jacket, his white shirt visible. He was on his back, struggling.

  Simon cut the engines and made a tight circle. “Give me a hand.”

  Leaning over the gunnel, he grabbed the guard’s collar and, with Lucy’s help, hauled him aboard.

  The guard lay at Lucy’s feet, coughing seawater, exhausted. “Merci,” he managed, weakly.

  Simon freed the man’s pistol from his shoulder holster and threw it into the water. “Stay,” he said to his face. Then to Lucy: “Watch him. If he moves a muscle, shout.”

  Simon removed his own jacket and tossed it to the guard, telling him in French to cover up.

  He retook the wheel. A hundred yards separated him from his pursuers. Rain began to fall in earnest, wind freshening by the minute. He turned the boat toward shore and hit the throttle for all it was worth. The nose jumped precipitously, knocking him to his knees. It wasn’t a tender, it was a Cigarette in drag.

  Across the bay, boats were making for port. On shore, dock lights blinked red. Danger. Storm conditions.

  Simon scanned the coastline. He couldn’t go to Cannes or Antibes. Sun’s security team would have radioed ahead to arrange a welcoming committee. He fumbled in his pocket for his phone. Under M he dialed a number he’d sworn never to call again. A familiar voice answered.

  “Ledoux. What now?”

  “Where are you, Jojo?”

  “It’s nine o’clock on a Wednesday night. Where do you think I am? In the middle of ten plates of moules-frites.”

  Jojo Matta was a lousy hood and a gifted cook. Once, a very long time ago, they’d worked together committing all manner of illegal acts. Last yea
r Jojo had helped Simon with a small problem in Monaco. As payment, Simon had helped Jojo open a restaurant in Juan-les-Pins, a leafy hamlet adjacent to Antibes.

  A spit of land extended into the bay to his right, the peninsula that separated the Bay of Cannes and the Bay of Nice. At its very tip, barely visible, two lights burned red. Maybe, he thought.

  “Jojo, how long to get to Eden-Roc?”

  “People like me don’t go to the Du Cap unless we’re lifting something.”

  “Du Cap” for the Hôtel du Cap, built in 1870, long home to wealthy Europeans, cosmopolites, and their hangers-on.

  “Tonight you do.”

  “I’m in the middle of a shift.”

  “You own the place. Your sous-chef can fill in. Be there in twelve minutes.”

  “Get lost. I’m not your errand boy.”

  “Who paid for your restaurant? I’ll yank it. Watch me.” There was only one way to talk to a gangster.

  “That’s not fair.”

  “Twelve minutes, Jojo.”

  Without warning, the windscreen shattered. Something struck one of his engines. The men were firing at him.

  “Lie down,” he called over his shoulder. Lucy didn’t need telling. She was already flat on her belly.

  The other tender had shortened the distance between them. Visibility was deteriorating. Rain fell in sheets, the wind a pernicious force, howling like a banshee. Lightning flashed nearby, a bolt running from heaven to sea. For a moment, the bay was illuminated, vessels of all kinds frozen in place by the burst of white light.

  Simon saw his path.

  Directly ahead, another mega-yacht, the Eclipse—five hundred feet, shark’s snout, a radar globe like a Christmas ornament—Abramovich’s before he sold it to an Emirati prince. A small armada had grouped off its port side, five motor yachts, give or take. He steered toward the immense vessel, speed 40 knots despite the wild bucking. He hugged the giant boat, starboard side, aware of its crew gesturing madly at him…then he was past it, spinning the wheel to port, cutting across its bow, perilously close, a 180-degree turn. He straightened out the tender, coming back along the Eclipse’s port side, darting in and among the smaller vessels. He cut his speed. The only sound, rain pummeling the vessel, as loud as a corps of drummers. They were a shadow bobbing on the waves, black on black.

  He caught the other tender’s lights rounding the Eclipse’s bow, turning toward them, slowing, confused, its prey lost.

  Suddenly, the rescued guard was on his feet, arms waving. “Pierrot! Over here! Pierrot!”

  Simon turned to see Lucy on her feet, driving her shoulder into the man, sending him toppling into the sea. “And this time you can stay there!” she called.

  Simon hit the throttle and the tender sped away, the man lost among the whitecaps.

  The guard shouted for help. A spotlight from another boat searched the water and found him.

  By then, Simon and Lucy were far away, headed in the opposite direction, out to sea.

  The second tender picked up their colleague. A moment later, it headed away, returning to the Yasmina.

  Simon guided the boat to the dock by the Eden-Roc. A man dressed in a chef’s smock, soaked to the bone, caught the mooring rope.

  “I thought you were in trouble,” he said as Simon cut the motor.

  “I was. Now I’m not.”

  Jojo offered Lucy a hand. She stood unsteadily on the dock, shivering. Simon followed, taking the mooring rope and fastening it to a cleat. They climbed the stairs and walked along a gravel path beneath the pines. Jojo had parked in a lot at the base of the hotel’s driveway. It was the same beat-up Peugeot he’d driven last year.

  “Keys are in the ignition,” he said.

  Simon opened the door for Lucy. She fell into the passenger seat, wet and exhausted. He closed her door and went around to the driver’s side. “I’ll leave it at the airport,” he said to Jojo. “Keys in the fender.”

  “First place anyone will look.”

  “Get there early.”

  “Tomorrow’s my day off.”

  “Then I guess you’ll have to take your chances.”

  “Hey,” said Jojo, looking back toward the Eden-Roc. “How much do you think I can get for the tender?”

  D’Artagnan Moore called as they left the hotel lot and drove along Boulevard J. F. Kennedy toward Antibes. “Get it?”

  Simon handed Lucy the phone. “Tell him—”

  He saw the car for a second, maybe less. Far too short a time to react. It was a Citroën panel van, the driver intoxicated, blowing through the red light, striking Simon’s car on the passenger side at a speed of 70 kilometers per hour. Simon’s last thought was for Lucy. She had not put on her safety belt.

  He felt the blow, heard the sickening crash of metal colliding with metal, saw the lights of the van inside his car, the world suddenly a terrible blinding white.

  Then darkness.

  Chapter 2

  Ko Phi Phi

  Andaman Sea, Thailand

  Six thousand miles away, overlooking another fabled beach, this one situated on an island off the southwestern coast of Thailand, Rafael de Bourbon was suffering his third nervous breakdown of the day.

  The first had come shortly after he arrived at the hotel, a few minutes past seven, and involved a malfunctioning septic tank. The second was brought on by a faulty air-conditioning unit. The third had as its cause a loose gasket that had cut all water pressure in the kitchen and was the most serious, for this was the first thing the inspectors would check upon their arrival. Hotel inspectors always started in the kitchen. Should he be unable to bring back the pressure, any chance of receiving a permit to operate the Villa Delphine in time for its first guests’ arrival would go out the window.

  “How long?” shouted Rafael from beneath the industrial sink.

  “Thirty minutes,” responded his wife, as calm as a Sunday morning.

  “You’re sure?”

  “It’s only a pipe. No one keeps a hotel from opening because of a gasket.”

  Rafael finished tightening the gasket and slid from beneath the sink. “I’m not taking any chances. This time we’re going to do things the right way.”

  “By the book,” said his wife, as if reciting a family rule. Her name was Delphine—a French name for an English rose, he liked to say. Delphine was thirty-four years old, lean and blond, an intelligent beauty, and holder of a First in economics from Cambridge.

  “By the book,” said Rafael, sealing his declaration with a kiss to his wife’s lips.

  Rafael Andrés Henrique de Bourbon—“Rafa” to anyone who’d known him long enough to share a beer—was six years his wife’s senior, a tall, rangy Spaniard with cropped black hair, eyes that glittered like obsidian, and a trimmed beard he’d borrowed from Satan himself. In fact, “devilish” was an adjective often connected with his name, for better or worse. Stretching, he toweled the sweat from a torso covered with tattoos. There was a Madonna and child he’d gotten after a night of carousing in Rome. A Maori war band around his left arm he’d gotten in Christchurch. And a Russian Orthodox crucifix on his back he couldn’t remember where he’d gotten, or why. There were sixteen in all, and he was eager to find a reason to add another.

  “Watch out, darling,” he said as he freed the cleaning nozzle. A torrent of pressurized water shot into the sink, spraying them both. Rafa shouted with joy. “Strong enough to strip a barnacle from a ship’s hull. The Villa Delphine will have the cleanest plates on the island.”

  He switched off the water and replaced the nozzle in its holder. “Time to shower. A filthy hotel owner does not make a good impression.”

  “Stop,” said Delphine, taking his hands in her own. “I want to tell you something.”

  “Can’t it wait?”

  “No,” she said, giving his hands a tug. “It cannot.”

  Rafa stepped closer, looking into her clear blue eyes, amazed as always that a woman as beautiful, educated, kind, and selfless had decided
to marry a man like him. A man far from beautiful, hardly educated, kind when it suited him, and selfless never. “Sí, mi amor.”

  “I want you to know how proud I am of you.”

  “For screwing up so many times?”

  “For never giving up.”

  Sincerity. Was anything more painful to a Castilian? “Please.”

  Another tug to remind him who was boss. “I know things haven’t gone as smoothly as we would have liked since we left Geneva.”

  “Smoothly? No, they have not gone smoothly.”

  “I want you to know, it’s all right,” said Delphine. “I never expected you to be perfect. What I love about you…maybe the reason I married you…is because you never give up. Never. I don’t know that I’ve ever seen you not get back on your feet. It’s who you are. These past years, sure we’ve made a few mistakes.”

  “I’ve made a few—”

  “We’ve made a few. But look at what you’ve built here. It’s magnificent. None of that matters anymore. Right now, right here, I’m the happiest I’ve been in a long, long while.” She put his hands to her lips. “Thank you for not giving up.”

  Rafa took his wife in his arms and held her to him. After a moment, he put his mouth to her ear and whispered, “Sweetheart, may I ask you something?”

  “Of course, my darling,” she said, head to his chest. “Anything.”

  “How long until they get here?”

  The Villa Delphine was indeed magnificent. Built on the last open plot of land atop the hill separating the island’s two beaches, the hotel was a masterpiece of whitewashed concrete and limestone offering thirty guest suites, a dining room overseen by a Michelin-starred chef, a spa, two swimming pools, and the island’s only tennis court.

  It was Rafa’s first foray as a hotelier, but not as an entrepreneur. Since fleeing Europe, he had opened a Mexican restaurant in Kuala Lumpur, a chain of tanning salons in Singapore, and a spin studio in Jakarta. Each had launched amid a flurry of great expectation and high hopes only to quickly and spectacularly crash. If his current maxim was “By the book,” formerly it was “Cut every corner” and “Don’t sweat the small stuff.” Time, experience, and the demise of his personal finances had dictated a change in ethos. The Villa Delphine was Rafael de Bourbon’s last stand.