300 Days of Sun by 300 Days of Sun -

Author:300 Days of Sun - [-, 300 Days of Sun]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

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It occurred to Alva that the rich in the palace hotels of Estoril, bathing and dressing and drinking cocktails in the warm summer evenings, were doing very much what they would have been doing in other circumstances. The Bartons were, too, as they walked to the neon-lit casino from their backstreet

pension.

When they arrived Michael spent five minutes talking to a man, then giving a note to a cigarette girl. It might have meant something, or not. When she asked, he said, “Word is that the Duke and Duchess of Windsor are in town.”

“The English king?”

“Who gave up his throne for the American divorcee who looks like a wooden peg doll.”

Alva questioned this with a tilt of the head.

“The girl said we missed them,” said Michael. “They’ve gone again.” He usually looked uncomfortable in a tuxedo, but tonight the formal attire seemed to accentuate the keenness in his expression, the liveliness of his eyes, when he was onto a story. Intelligence agents from all sides were mingling among the international clientele, and he could now confide in his wife. “The Nazi intelligence chief is Albert von Karsthof. He’s a regular at the casino. Just another superior thug. Women, gambling, drinking, as pleasant a war as can be found. Some of the German women, especially the beautiful ones, will pose as neutral Swiss nationals in order to seduce Allied service personnel. Some of them pass messages by placing chips on certain numbers on the roulette table. It might be a code number, or just as easily a room number.”

“It must be a very expensive method,” said Alva. “Black twenty-nine,” she reminded him. “What did it mean?”

“That wasn’t anything—I was just muddying the waters to see what happened.”

“You shouldn’t have involved me.”

“No, I shouldn’t have.”

Alva watched a young woman with a voluptuous figure and a lascivious face painted with bright lipstick, too bright. Two men in suits came up on either side of her, nodded without smiling, and led her away. What was that about? An old woman, with a lined, leathered face leaned in to talk to a man but looked over his shoulder as she did so, with one large unblinking eye, like a reptile biding its time. Alva thought she saw Ronald Bagshaw, but she might have been mistaken.

Under the dazzle of the chandeliers, she sensed foreign dust, shaken from clothes and baggage, remnants of thousands of lost places thickening the air. The glazed expressions of the men and women standing around the tables never varied whether they won or lost, their fortunes resting elsewhere, in visas and scraps of documents on the cusp of expiration.

Clack, clack, clacketty: the ball rolled in the roulette wheel.

“Yet the players pray to the Holy Ghost,” said Alva.

“What?”

“I overheard someone. Espírito Santo.”

Michael laughed. “They talk about him all the time here. Doesn’t mean what you think.”

“No?” There didn’t seem that much room for doubt.

“Espírito Santo? Many of them also call him Ricardo, and they rely on him all right. Ricardo Espírito Santo is a banker.

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