The ball fell on red numbers four times in succession. I went to a change booth and bought four thousand-franc, oblong chips. Returning to the table, I placed one of the oblongs worth forty dollars on black. The ball rolled against the spin of the wheel, and finally dropped into the groove of a black number. A croupier raked another oblong chip against mine and I picked both of them up and left the table. I had won forty dollars in one play, and that completed my particular system for beating the Casino. It was not very often that I won my forty dollars on the first play, but quite often I was one bet ahead of the Casino before I lost my four or five oblongs.
And whenever I was that one bet ahead — I quit. I never attempted to gamble my limited funds against the Casino’s almost unlimited ones. And I remembered being told by one of the biggest gamblers of the Riviera that if all those who played at the Casino played as I did, it would be pretty tough for Monte Carlo. It was betting small money against big money, betting that the Casino would go broke before they did, that made it easy for the Casino.
As usual, I was pleased. I cashed in my chips and looked around for the scarred one. In the large salon I failed to see him immediately. When I did see him I strolled over to the table where he had seated himself. He had seven or eight hundred dollars worth of chips before him, and he was playing thousand-franc oblongs on the line between two numbers. He won once while I was watching, and his face was expressionless. The world’s greatest gambling casino did not awe him now; he was gambling. And it was easy to see that he was accustomed to gambling.
He won again, just before I left, but he did not smile. The pay-off was eighteen oblongs for his one. Seven hundred and twenty dollars. And it was his second eighteen-for-one win in several minutes.
Outside the Casino I stood for some seconds and thought about the passport I’d seen. I decided that the scarred one was a crook and did not care to take a chance.
Either the passport he had was a bad one and he didn’t wish it to get in Monte Carlo records, or it was a good one and he was afraid of a leak somewhere. Or he was afraid of something that might happen in the future, and a checking up at the Casino might follow.
Showing a passport at the border was something else again. And there was just the barest possibility that my scarred friend was a big shot, and might have been recognized and not allowed to play. That has happened at Monte Carlo. The Casino authorities are very careful about some details, and, as every one knows, they are very careless about others.
I forgot about him while driving the Grand Corniche. The day was very hot; there was not a breath of wind. At Nice I stopped at the Frigate bar for a champagne cocktail, and at a little beach between Nice and Cannes I got damp trunks from the rear of my small car and had another swim. Then I drove on again, wondering if Remmings on the way back home from Genoa were sober yet. I decided that he probably was not.
It was a bit cooler when I drove round that point of land to the east of Cannes. The town lay in a semicircle; the waterfront was crescent-shaped before me. On the far side were the Esterel Mountains coming down to the sea. It was a nice sight. A harsh horn from behind caused me to pull to the right of the road along the Croisette, and with a rush and another burst from its horn, a great yellow machine went past. I recognized the machine and the chauffeur, and caught a glimpse of the scarred man in the rear seat. He was grinning broadly, and I guessed that he d won quite a bit. But why hadn’t he stayed on, playing his winning streak to the limit?
The Grand Hotel was along the Croisette a distance beyond the spot where I should have turned off to my small hotel. But I didn’t turn off. I drove on slowly, and a square or so from the Grand I passed the big yellow machine, moving slowly. The chauffeur was grinning.
I sat in the car near the Grand and smoked a cigaret. When I went inside there was no sign of the scarred one, but my friend the proprietor was about. We went into his little office and talked about other things and then about the scarred one. Yes, he’d arrived. Traveling very light in a hired car. Just two bags, without many seals. His name was Anthony Senna; he was from New Orleans, in America. He had a room with bath, but not facing the Mediterranean.
I raised my eyebrows and my friend smiled at me.
“It was not a matter of money, I think,” he said. “It was a matter of wind.”
“Wind?”
My friend the proprietor nodded.
“Monsieur Senna, he does not like the wind,” he explained. “It keeps him awake of nights, it annoys him. And when there is a mistral, as you know, there is wind. Much wind.”
There was certainly much wind when there was a mistral. For three or six, and on rare occasions for nine days there was the wind. It blew straight in from the Mediterranean, out of a cloudless sky. It spread sand all over the Croisette — the curving road along the beach, with the fashionable bars and shops. It ripped awnings and sent smart yachts behind the concrete seawall to the tiny harbor. It battered ten-foot waves over the sand, and the spray from them was salty on your lips, a square from the Croisette. And all the time the sky was blue.
And the scarred one who had stated in Monte Carlo that his name was Thomas Burke, and in Cannes that it was Anthony Senna, did not like the wind. This one who had cold eyes when spoken to, and who cut spaghetti with a knife in a dirty, waterfront eating place in Genoa, and who played thousand-franc chips at Monte Carlo — the wind kept him awake at night.
“He stays here for some little time?” I asked my friend.
The proprietor shrugged.
“On the Riviera, who can tell how long one stays?” he countered. “But I have given him a room on the top floor, on the corner, facing the rear.”
“On the corner, facing the rear?” I repeated, puzzled.
I said that because one of the peculiar things about top floor corner rooms at the Grand was that they had only the two windows at the rear. There was no side window. And there was no room next to them, but rather very large linen closets. The rooms were apt to be hot at this time — very hot.
The proprietor nodded, and I said—
“I suppose he looked at some other rooms?”
My friend seemed a little surprised at my interest. But then we talked often of unimportant things — of things that seemed unimportant to us, and yet very important to others.
“Monsieur Senna looked at several rooms and selected the one at the east corner,” the proprietor told me.
“Well, in event of a mistral, he will hear only a little wind there,” I said.
And my friend agreed.
“The walls are very thick, and the window screens quite tight. He will hear only a little of the mistral,” he agreed.
A telegram from Paris took me to St. Raphael the next day. I was searching for a German by the name of Schmidt, who had stolen many marks from a small town bank somewhere near Berlin, and who the Paris office of the agency with which I was connected had heard was in the French Riviera town. The office had heard incorrectly, though the Schmidt at St. Raphael slightly resembled the German thief. He was a good fellow, this Schmidt, and after we had stood each other a few rounds of drinks I left him and drove over the Esterel Mountains toward Cannes. It had started to blow, and when I took my machine over the highest stretch of road, with the Mediterranean almost a thousand feet below, the car rocked from the gusts of wind.
“Mistral,” I said. “The beginning of one.”
And I thought about my friend with the scar on his chin and the warm eyes that got so suddenly cold. I drove pretty fast and reached Cannes around four. The wind was increasing; awnings were being hauled in and yachts were steaming into the small harbor, behind the concrete breakwater. Sand was swirling in eddies across the Croisette. The two most patronized of the beach bars, the Miramar and the Chatham, were deserted — it was three hours before cocktail time.