Episode on the Riviera by Mack Reynolds

Author:Mack Reynolds [Reynolds, Mack]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-4405-6315-7
Publisher: F+W Media
Published: 2012-12-16T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Five

Tuesday, August 9th

Carla Rossi was bending over him, shaking his shoulder frantically, her voice shrill with concern.

“Steve, Steve, what has happened to you? Carla looked out the window, and here you are on the ground.”

He tried to return to life and reality. It was dawn. His jaw felt broken and there was still nausea in his belly. As poorly as his mind was functioning he was able to think, wryly, What am I suffering from most, that sock in the stomach or pure hangover?

He sat up and felt his jaw, waggled it back and forth. He looked up at the contessa. She was dressed in negligee, nightgown and bedroom slippers. For the sake of the usual banter they carried on between themselves, he tried to whistle and found he couldn’t; his face was too swollen.

Steve said, “I had just parked the car. Somebody was hiding, somewhere. He managed to knock me out before I even so much as saw him.”

She stooped and picked something up, recognized it and handed it to him. It was his wallet.

Steve came to his feet and inspected it. It was devoid of money — both the five thousand dollars’ worth of new francs that he had held in reserve for Conny Kamiros, and whatever he might have had left after his night on the town. He groaned to express both his physical and mental anguish.

Carla said worriedly, “Come into the kitchen, Steve. We’ll clean you up, get some coffee into you. Then Carla will phone the police. Did you lose much?”

“At least twenty-five thousand francs,” he said bitterly. He decided that the jaw wasn’t broken but, Christ, it hurt.

She clucked in sympathy. “About fifty dollars in your American money.”

He grunted in self-deprecation. “Twenty-five thousand new francs, Carla. Five thousand dollars.”

She stopped and stared at him, her eyes wide. “Carla doesn’t understand. What were you doing with so much money, Steve?”

“Like an ass, I was carrying it around waiting for Conny to come back from Switzerland, so I could pay him what I owed him. I won it Saturday night at the Casino.”

They were in the kitchen of the villa. It was still early morning. The contessa was the earliest riser at the Pavilion Budapest. Even after an evening-long party, she was always up and around before the servants. She took a clean towel from a drawer, moistened it at the sink and dabbed at his face, clucking her tongue in sympathy as she worked.

The contessa moaned softly, “Steve, Steve, five thousand dollars. So much money! And I have heard the rumors going around. Conny has insisted that you repay him a loan he made you.”

Steve Cogswell grunted disgustedly. He imagined the story was being circulated by the gossip route all up and down the coast. Even his supposed friends were probably secretly pleased by his come-uppance dished out by Conny Kamiros. Steve’s romantic activities weren’t always well received either by husbands or lovers of the Riviera’s more attractive glamour girls or by those women themselves whom he had bedded and then deserted.

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