Murder in Monte Carlo Read online

  Although he appeared to be jovial at all times, some of his friends say that when he was suspended from the Exchange because of a judgment obtained against him, he felt this keenly and protested that an injustice had been done him. The judgment was settled and he was reinstated. But another judgment was filed against him and he was crowded close to the wall. He sold his seat and filed a petition in bankruptcy. He gave the proceeds of the sale of his seat to his creditors, whose claims amounted to $191,000 and then retired to an obscure desk in the office of a brokerage in Exchange Place.

  Yesterday when a Times reporter called at his home to inquire about the manner of his death, the place seemed a typification of the end of its owner. The lack of cash resources showed pathetically. The houses adjoining were spick and span, with velvety lawns and well-trimmed hedges and well-kept paths. The once bright abiding place of the popular yachtsman “Bill” Alley showed the unmistakeable signs of genteel poverty. His two young sons, bright little chaps, were playing ball on the untrimmed lawn, not realising their loss.

  He is survived by his widow and two sons. He was 55 years old.

  A report was current yesterday that Mr Alley killed himself so that his widow could collect the $10,000 insurance gratuity that the Stock Exchange provides for its members. Although Mr Alley had sold his seat on the Exchange, the transfer of his seat had not been made. The change in its possession will take place tomorrow.

  Losses in the casino, especially in that Mecca of gamblers Monte Carlo, resulted in the same brand of desperation.

  On August 9th, the New York Times reported a double suicide attempt:

  Woman Suicide an American

  Mrs Buckingham Brought a Fortune

  to Her Husband

  He Refuses Food

  Special Cablegram

  Rome, August 8th

  The identity of the couple who attempted suicide at Castellamare, the woman dying and the man surviving, has now been established. The man, John Buckingham, who is now in hospital in Naples where he is constantly watched, is an Englishman, an engineer. His wife was a Miss Jenny Ensign, a native of Massachusetts, and lately of New York, whence she brought a considerable fortune. This fortune was entirely lost in gambling at Monte Carlo.

  The couple drank a mixture of laudanum and arsenic, leaving a letter saying they wished to die together.

  Since the death of his wife, Buckingham has made two attempts to jump out of the window. He refuses to take food.

  Meanwhile in Marseilles another tragedy was unfolding which had its origins in the gilded halls of the Monte Carlo Casino.

  2

  LA GUILLOTINE SÈCHE

  The air is thick and heavy, the sky black as ink. A genuine day of death and burial.

  How often there recurs to my mind that exclamation of Schopenhauer, at the spectacle of human iniquity:

  “If God created the world, I would not be God.”

  Dry heat; the rainy season is near its end. I am covered with sores from the stings of mosquitoes and other insects. But all this is nothing! What are my physical sufferings as compared with the horrible tortures of the soul? Only infinitesimal. It is the aching head and heart which cry aloud with grief.

  Such wild, fierce anger sometimes fills my heart against all human iniquity, that I could wish to tear my flesh, so as to forget, in physical pain, this horrible mental torture.

  They will certainly end by killing me through repeated sufferings, or by forcing me to commit suicide to escape from insanity.

  ALFRED DREYFUS: Five Years of My Life 1894-1899

  FRENCH GUIANA, 1908

  The insufferable sun was high in the noonday sky, blazing down on the baked surface of the earth. Omnipotent, untouchable, dispensing the largesse of its unforgiving rays, merciless and unrelenting. All exposed melted; the rest, when they could, scuttled anywhere there was refuge of a shadow and when allowed clung to the base of the tall trees. The very trees that were to be felled by the blunt edges of their axes, cheating themselves of succour.

  The skin, the brain boiled under the daily attention of that blinding orb in the sky. Other people in safe places would have raised their bodies to it in admiration and supplication. Not here. Here there was no protection other than the flimsy straw hat which offered no resistance to the constant whiplash of nature, all its contrasts in this part of the world extreme.

  The dry season or the wet season made no difference; it was simply the replacement of one form of suffering by another. Standing stock-still might have offered a little relief but the effects were amplified by the hourly and daily exertion of felling, cutting and stacking wood to meet the insane daily quota.

  In the intense heat, water sweated from every pore, and when the monsoon had its say, water poured into every pore, the whiplashes of a different but no less merciless nature. The punishing exertion was both physically and mentally debilitating. Every withered muscle creaked at every rise and fall of the axe, the flaccid legs groaned with weakness; the heart lurched and palpitated, the eyes stung in the glare and were blinded by the salt of perspiration. If there were a purpose to the work, a tangible objective, some even tiny incremental gain, some small comfort could have been derived. There was none.

  The stomach emitted its gurgling from lack of nourishment, the black coffee of the morning long absorbed, the meagre midday ration quickly gone – nothing but emptiness, pain and degradation the daily sustenance. On top of it, the constant attack of the insects, the mosquitoes biting into every inch of exposed flesh, the sliding snakes a frightening threat. And then the trooping back to the ghastly huts and the prospect of the fear of the long darkness of the night.

  Not even exhaustion provided relief. No such small mercy allowed in this man-made hell and intentional collaboration with nature. Nothing but darkness visible for the condemned.

  He had been only there for a couple of weeks and the mental and physical torture was worse than anything he had feared; he felt already broken in mind and spirit. Everyone here was a prisoner of his own actions and conscience, everyone had expected punishment – but not one of such merciless construction. The purpose of its creation was to condemn the inmates to slow death by carefully planned increments. Little surprise the penal colony had been given the sobriquet of La Guillotine Sèche – ‘The Dry Guillotine’.

  However monstrous the crimes of the inmates, and his fitted this category but many others did not, this fate was beyond belief in the evil of its intent. Here was a retribution that even Robespierre’s Reign of Terror could not match. The communication of the administration’s past and present iniquities spread quickly among them in a very short time after their arrival. Which had the effect of obliterating every last vestige of hope that might be entertained.

  Death bad, but death without hope incomprehensible.

  The regime spared neither young nor old and even the most vigorous of constitution would be reduced to a physical wreck within six months. The climate alone without intervention could efficiently lead to mental and bodily deterioration. But the intervention of labour, harsh living conditions and awful food accelerated the process. There was no escape from the grand design to eliminate the convicted wretches of French justice.

  He wasn’t a young man, and older than his years as a result of the dissipated habits of his life. The drinking, the constant excitement of gambling, the pressures of failed business ventures and the inevitable consequences of his final gamble, the dreadful crime, had already taken their toll on his once athletic body. Not to mention the ravages all that produced in his mind.

  The ‘wet guillotine’ would have provided the appropriate resolution. This by the process of law was denied him. Instead he was condemned to hell on earth, a place that Satan, it had been said, could not have invented. A hell that was amplified in the waking moments of night by the haunting remembrance of things past, phantoms ever present in the rafters of the hut like the bloodsucking bats. He was an educated man, intelligent, from the best of backgrounds, an aristocr
at from a line dating back to and beyond the Crusades. Therefore he once had infinitely better expectations in life than any of his fellows . . . had he not been fatally attracted to the Wheel of Fortune.

  But who knows the future? Least of all a gambling man who will throw the last dice in the hope that in that gesture the future will be assured, which of course is rarely the case. He, now in the throes of the consequence of his last throw, was the classical example. There was nothing at the time to tell him where it would end. It was beyond his imagination.

  The nights were as terrible, in their own fashion worse than the days. Sleep was no more than snatched moments. There was a constant shifting of painwracked bodies, recovering from the exertions of the intolerable labour of the day. The groans and moans of men, itching and scratching the sores inflicted by the insects. The gurgling of those gripped by fever and illness and the fetid stench of human odours. All in the shadow cast by the oil lamp in the central isle. It was a time infused by the dire expectation of the rigors of the following day, the inescapable reflection on the past and terror of what lay ahead.

  There was no relief from fear, tension and anxiety in this brutal existence. No inch of room to block it out from the constantly racing mind, the fever of the now ever-present, the fever of the past ever ready to pounce. His old body would determine how long he lasted but his mind was lucid and he knew that this would remain, until the last, a far greater affliction. That and the ghost of memory, reminding him of the curse of life. He had yet to fully grasp what brought him to this pass, a member of the colony of the damned. Where it had all begun now escaped him, but no doubt the longer he survived this abyss, the more it would become clear.

  In past centuries many members of his illustrious family had experienced the vicissitudes of fate and survived, reputation ultimately untarnished. Reputation, the one thing that would always defeat the worms of the grave. And he, he alone, had with one awful act destroyed not only his reputation but that of generations. He had already searched in vain for some small clue to the chink in his personality that had led to his downfall. He had inherited a God-given talent for sport, he had received an education that had befitted his status in the Anglo-Irish aristocracy. So why?

  During his time of incarceration in France before the passage to this hell, he had incessantly read the Bible and Milton to somehow assuage the enormity of his act. It had, he now realised, been an exercise of escape from and denial of the consequence of his murderous nature. His desperation at that time did not excuse him. He denied, he lied and then he confessed. He blindly attempted a pathetic rehabilitation in the comfort of his civilised cell. It had all been for nought. Like the many times he had bet on zero on the roulette wheel, it had rolled on, like everything else in his cursed journey under the sun.

  The infernal bell rang at half past five in the morning. Another call to the savage routine of labour in the jungle. He pulled his aching limbs from the hard board and lined up to receive in the battered tin cup the half pint of coffee that was to sustain him until the paltry lunchtime ration. The stench of the night had not abated. If anything, in the cold light of the morning, it was worse. That was always the way. He watched his wretched companions tie the towels around their thin, wasted midriffs and collect the straw hats. He averted his sight, as much as he could, from the sights of deprivation – the foul evidence of disease, the yellow stains of dysentery colouring the skeletal legs, ribs breaking through the diminished torsos, the eyes sunken into the large-seeming heads, the crazed look of the hopeless. All watched over by the well-fed guards, with bellies tumbling over their trousers, ready to inflict more punishment whenever necessary.

  Then they were handed the tools of the useless trade, the blunt-edged axes, and trooped into the harsh light of the day. The monkeys ran and grunted in the trees, the exotic birds cried, the mosquitoes swarmed, and ants scurried and bit.

  Later, much later, the small exhausted army trooped back to the hut, collapsed on the boards and waited for the onset of the night. And waited for the next move of the administration. The next move would never be better; worse conditions were always waiting.

  All part of the grand design. One move of perceived rebellion, one attempted escape, led to another level of punishment and then another. If there were many mansions in heaven, there were equally as many in hell and just so in this French-designed Hades. All of the inmates were aware of the consequences of breaking the rules. It did not stop many of them doing it. Simply because anything, they thought, might be better than the brutal regime that they endured.

  As an older man, his mental and physical energy could not endure the huge effort that would be required to escape but he understood the ambition of youth to imagine some other alternative to the appalling reality of their lives and blighted future. If he had been a younger man, that would also have been his ambition. Even if he realised it was all but impossible. Such are the impulses of the young. But for him it was too late. He was resigned to his fate. He would die here.

  The fruits of his education came relentlessly back to torment him. His old tutor was an enthusiast of Milton and the poet’s words, once learnt, had never left him. As his situation now stood, they were all the more relevant.

  No light, but darkness visible.

  Served only to discover sights of woe.

  Regions of sorrow, doleful shades, where peace

  And rest can never dwell, hope never comes

  That comes to all; but torment without end

  Still urges, and a fiery deluge, fed

  With every burning sulphur unconsumed

  Such place eternal justice had prepared

  For those rebellious, here their prison ordained

  In utter darkness, and their portion set

  As far removed from God and light of Heaven

  As far from the Centre thrice to the utmost Pole.

  O how unlike the place from whence they fell!

  The words of this genius he accepted as being both descriptive of his state and an accurate account of the institution that had been created here to house the inmates, as if it had been taken literally from this blank verse poem of the 17th century. Could this have been in the minds of the architects of this place? Close enough matched.

  What can be worse

  Than to dwell here, driven out from bliss, condemned

  In this abhorred deep to utter woe!

  Where pain of unextinguishable fire

  Must exercise us without hope of end

  The vassals of his anger, when the scourge

  Inexorable, and the torturing hour,

  Calls us to penance?More destroyed than thus,

  We should be quite abolished, and expire . . .

  To perish rather, swallowed up and lost

  In the wide womb of uncreated night.

  Those words of Paradise Lost resonated and described accurately his experience and that of all his companions in the camp. And around every corner of the god-forsaken promontory were worse levels of torture awaiting. But the blind Milton was utilising his imagination to describe in words the House of Satan, never realising that man could match and better his wonderful creation. And within this construction there were even more states of punishment than its earthly architects, the Directorate of Napoléon III, could have anticipated. They sowed the seeds, but those seeds had produced weeds of ghastly growth that would turn them in their graves if their dark interment could possibly allow. “Hell is here,” as Marlowe observed, “nor are we out of it.” As an advocate of Cromwell, Milton should have known this. And here, in French Guiana, was the proof.

  These things constantly revisited his mind, as indeed all the moments of his time on this earth did, like a constant reel, replaying the chapters of his life that brought him to this frightful conclusion. It is a process that all mankind must endure, but rarely in such heightened circumstances. There are, in the so-called civilised world, opportunities to diminish or block out its effects, the embrace of some sort of induc
ed oblivion – drink, drugs or the ultimate choice of suicide.

  He had already weathered some of those alternatives, without success. He had frequently in the past been tempted by the final one but the thought of what would happen to his wife and his innocent niece had stopped him. The result of shunning the option had been worse and he regretted now that he had not taken it. The consequence he realised was far worse for both, quite apart from the inevitable path of his present suffering. It was still an option, though diminished now by opportunity. No. He must accept his punishment and endure it to the last moment, for the alternative would be proof positive of utter cowardice.

  He had been provided with great support and consolation by the Catholic chaplain in Marseilles prison who procured for him not only the Bible but other books that would help him prepare for his destiny in French Guiana, where he was to learn that such kindness by penal authorities was completely unknown. Among the books Paradise Lost, Alfred Dreyfus’s account of his incarceration in this same penal colony and, even more importantly The Consolation of Philosophy by Boethius, the sixth-century Roman. The priest assured him that of all his reading, excepting the Bible, Boethius’ work would provide him with the greatest help to understand and deal with his predicament. This was so, not just for its speculation on life and fortune, but because of his own obsession with that wheel of chance and the inviolable facts of his antecedents, his birthright from the start leading to a life of privilege and success. Nothing should have interfered with his path, but such paths can lead to perdition whatever the signs. History proves it, suggested the chaplain, and he must learn from that and hope to move to an acceptance of his fate. He offered this example of Boethius to demonstrate that to be born under a good star does not necessarily lead to a happy conclusion of life.