Moby Dx: A Novel of Silicon Valley - Volume 1 Max Ebb

Chapter 35 Deauville

They, the Vidas, were not happy when Arianna announced a few days later that she no longer cared about having casino privileges and would put the whole affair, the fight with Max, behind her. She said she didn’t need an apology from him. She decided to show up at the lab and act like nothing had happened.

He wasn’t there. He had left without a word and yes, he was due back for a meeting the following Tuesday, but no one knew more than that. More hurt.

Of all the casinos in France, Trouville was his favorite and Deauville was his favorite to hate. It was to him the most luxurious, the most expensive, the most pretentious, and had the fewest like-minded men and places to meet them. To his professional colleagues, Arianna, or whoever would listen, he vented about the charming Anglo-Norman architecture and the manicured boardwalks.

“It’s a gambling theme park, phony to its bones. They paper over all the criminality and seediness that drives gambling. And people buy it! That’s the worst joke.” With his arms waving and his face animated, he would conclude with a shout, “Family friendly gambling, if ever there was an oxymoron, that has to be it!” How much of his rancor was resentment over the fact that he was excluded, he never let on.

Max had gone to Trouville on a mission to cool off and to make a real stake. Returning to the US to start a company, unless he had the backing of the two men he expected to be his fathers-in-law—and he didn’t want to count on that, no matter what he’d been told—he’d need money of his own. He’d need money of his own in any case if he wanted autonomy. Usually satisfied with winning ten thousand francs, this time he dreamt of winning more than ten times that.

When he returned from Normandy, Max told Arianna all about his trip. Later, much later, she concluded that his tale was as much lie as it was truth. She and I, aided by some old-fashioned shoe-leather detective work, pieced together our own version of events.

La mèthode had proven to produce winnings of a little less than one percent per hand, averaged over hundreds of hands. At Trouville’s tables, with their FF 2500 limits, that translated into something like a thousand francs an hour. Even playing around the clock for two days, he couldn’t expect to take in hundreds of thousands. But he had a plan.

His accumulated savings amounted to almost FF 90,000, or about $16,000. Combining half of that with what he figured he could get for the Fiat Tipo, if he needed to sell it, he’d have FF 75,000, enough to protect him against some long unfavorable odds, enough for him to eat better and stay in better rooms. He had a lot of things planned for that long weekend, among them being fucked harder and by better, more expensive fuckers.

Max went at it for a few hours, experimented with playing two hands at once, and after adding another FF 10,000 of winnings to to his bank, he decided to sell the car, for insurance. Placing a call on the hotel phone, he sold the car for FF 30,000, a real bargain for someone. At around two o’clock on a Thursday morning he crossed the Rive Touques and pulled into a quiet parking lot beside a marina, only yards away from a wall of buildings painted with the greeting Bienvenue à Deauville. Two guys from the nearby port city of Le Havre, two guys who never would have made it through Security in post-911 America, were waiting for him as he drove up. He left the car running while they inspected it. As he stood outside, one of them was behind the wheel and the other handed him a wad of bills. He counted it and found FF 20,000. “Heh,” Max said, “It’s light.”

“Putain de merde!” said the seated one while the other walked around to the passenger side. Reaching in to the still-open car, Max grabbed the driver, who then yanked on the door handle, bringing fast-moving sheet metal into the meat of Max’s arm. Max howled and recoiled, the door slammed shut, and the car squealed away, leaving Max groaning and bleeding.