I had completed the re-edit of my narrative about Kyree's journey and was feeling satisfied with my journalistic efforts, but by the time I was finished, the Sun was low in the sky and I was starving. On reflection, I realized that I had skipped lunch, but that was something that happened to me regularly. It seems that when I become absorbed in whatever task is occupying me, mundane things like food and sleep are often forgotten.
I considered just going up to the hotel restaurant on the roof, but it occurred to me that it was only a short walk to the Enghien-les-bains Casino that was just up the street next to the lake with the same name. During my morning run, I had circled the lake four times so had run past the casino entrance on each of those laps.
As far as I knew, the impromptu public transit strike that had been called just this morning was still in effect in the City of Paris and I idly wondered what effect that would be having on casino attendance and the ability of the staff to get to work. I assumed that the 'high rollers' would be there since I thought that most of them were not reliant on the Paris Public Transportation System.
I arrived in Paris two days ago to, hopefully, finalize the negotiation to acquire a French company that had been on our wish list for a while. It had been my pursuit of this very company that had prompted my last visit to France, during which I received a mysterious invitation to join the Freyja Club. As I looked back on everything that has transpired since, I just silently shook my head thinking about the capricious nature of fate. I needed a shower and a shave which were quickly dispatched and I put on a charcoal suit with one of the paisley yellow 'power ties' that seemed to be the current fashion du hour.
By U.S. standards the Casino was small and intimate since it had none of the background clatter of its American cousins. Slot machines had not yet become a fixture and as I entered through the elegant foyer, I saw that most of the high-ceilinged main floor was filled with table games; blackjack, roulette, poker, and baccarat. I could see half a dozen bar enclosures and a large restaurant off to one side. A wide marble staircase led to the second floor where I knew I would find smaller and more private rooms where the serious money was. I am not a high-stakes gambler, and I doubted that I would see any of those. A man was playing a grand piano near the center of the room, and it seemed that the soft music created an inviting ambiance.
I decided to take a circuitous route around the floor to end up at the restaurant. Since I had never been here before I had no sense of whether the transit strike had an effect or not. The crowd wasn't bustling but I thought it was probably close to normal for a Sunday evening. I had stopped a couple of times to watch people at one of the roulette tables and was making my way down an aisle flanked on both sides by blackjack dealers when I suddenly stopped.
Sitting at one of the tables was a woman that looked familiar. Because of the nature of my work, I've trained myself in the art of remembering people; their names, our association, and of course their looks, and I immediately knew that I had met this woman before and not long ago. Sometimes it takes me a moment for the tumblers to fall into place, particularly when I encounter someone out of where I would normally expect to see them, but even with her clothes on, it wasn't hard for me to recognize Lily, the hostess from the Freyja Club.
She was sitting at a table with two other people, but it didn't appear to me that they were together. She was playing with a small stack of chips in front of her and smoking a cigarette. She was dressed in a conservative gray business suit with a fluffy red blouse and red heels, one of which was dangling erotically from her toes. Her tan legs didn't seem to be encumbered by nylons and I paused to admire her shapely calves. In addition to her chips and an ashtray, there was some kind of mixed drink on a napkin in front of her. It seemed she'd just gotten the wrong card because she threw her hand down in disgust and picked up the glass.
It was at that point that I slid onto the seat next to her. Lily glanced in my direction and I could immediately see her struggling with the same mental confusion that I had just gone through myself as she tried to place a familiar face. I chuckled and said, "Hey, I know the feeling, I was wondering where I'd seen you too." At the sound of my voice, Lily immediately recognized my American English and that seemed to be all she needed to solve the puzzle.
"You're the American from the club." No sooner were the words out of her mouth before Lily quickly looked around to see if she had been heard. I knew she shouldn't have mentioned the club, even if she hadn't used the full name. If anything is critical to the ongoing survival of the Freyja Club, it's its obsession with keeping its very existence secret. "Good memory," I replied.
The blackjack dealer pointed in my direction as if to ask if I was playing, but I waved her silent question away. I explained to Lily that I was staying in the hotel down the street and had walked over to just stretch my legs and get a bite to eat. I mentioned that after our brief encounter the previous evening in the club that I had unwittingly gotten involved with the argument between Anita and Marc. Lily cocked her head and asked, "Was that you that called Danielle?"
When I nodded yes, she confided that when Danielle had walked back to her office after meeting with me, she'd stopped by Lily's station and had used her terminal to write a note on my file. She couldn't tell me the exact words, but it was a note to staff warning them not to discuss anything with me about the operation of the Freyja Club. "Why do you think she wrote that," Lily asked and I said that I thought it might have been due to the fact that she'd just been bitten by my curiosity.
I told her that I'd developed a reputation of sorts in my efforts to try to understand how the Freyja Club had not only survived into the modern age, but has expanded to twenty locations. The fact that it had been able to do so while maintaining total anonymity was, I thought, a nagging mystery that I wanted to solve. Lily shook her head and told me the same thing that Danielle had said, "Don't get too curious."
It seemed that the longer we talked the more Lily seemed to remember about me because, out of the blue, she asked, "Are you the man who wrote Danielle and Phillipe's biography?" I was amazed that Lily knew about that, but she told me that Danielle had shown it to her after I'd sent her my first draft. I replied, "Well, Phillipe is in it, but it was really mostly Danielle." "You're a talented writer" Lily said, "It was very... uh, arousing." Since I had chronicled Danielle's entire journey to the Freyja Club, I said that "I certainly hoped so."
Our conversation had warmed considerably in the last few minutes and I was feeling like Lily was someone that I'd like to get to know better. The other two people who had been playing at the table left, and with Lily engaging with me, the dealer just looked bored and kept reshuffling two decks of cards. On a hunch I said to Lily, "I'm starving, want to join me for dinner?"
Lily looked at me for a moment considering my invitation, but then told the dealer to lock her chips and turned and said, "Sure, lead the way." I slid off my chair and reached for Lily's hand to assist her. When our fingers touched, a small spark snapped and I immediately suspected that my leather shoes on the thick carpet was the culprit. Lily raised her eyes to mine and asked, "Are you this shocking with every woman?" I had no cogent reply, so we both just chuckled our way down the aisle toward the restaurant.
Only about a quarter of the tables were occupied, so Lily and I were seated in a little alcove next to a window that overlooked the lake. As before, the multicolored fountains were dancing and creating a mesmerizing display of aquatic art. Halfway around the lake, my hotel was brightly illuminated as well and I thought it was a perfect spot to have a meal. The fact that I had an unexpected companion was just icing on the cake. Like most everyone, I knew, I had thought the Gods of antiquity, whether they be Greek, Roman, or Norse, were just figments of fevered imaginations, but as I looked across the table at Lily's beautiful glowing face, I was beginning to think of Freyja as a real presence in my life and I wondered if that capricious Norse goddess had led us both here for some, as yet unseen, purpose.
After we ordered, I asked Lily about her presence, and in the space of the next hour, I peppered her with questions about how she came to be a hostess in the Freyja Club, her background, and, importantly, how she happened to be seated at a blackjack table just as I was walking by. I found that the longer we talked the more relaxed she seemed and soon the skills that she employed every day as a hostess to make whomever she was talking to feel welcome and interesting began to reveal themselves in her answers to my many questions.
I learned that the Paris club was always closed on Sundays and Mondays. Hence today was one of Lily's off days. I wasn't familiar with all of the clubs, but I knew that the ones I'd visited in the U.S. were closed on Mondays and Tuesdays, so obviously the shutdown days weren't universal. Lily lived in an apartment in Epinay-sur-Seine, which was about halfway toward St. Denis where the club was located. I knew the area was one of the most expensive and exclusive sections of the city, and when I must have raised my eyebrows in surprise, Lily laughed and offhandedly said that the club paid her enough that she could easily afford to live there. Not only that but she owned a 1981 Mercedes 450 SEL sedan that I knew cost over fifty-thousand dollars. I had discovered that the Freyja Club paid their staff exorbitant salaries as a way of securing their long-term loyalty, but for Lily to nonchalantly lay it out for me was quite an experience.
She told me that every Sunday she drove about forty minutes to Osny, a commune where she grew up, northwest of Paris, to visit her mother and take her to church. She told me that her family were devout Catholics and that it was the one day of the week that she cherished.
Just as I was processing what Lily had been telling me about herself, she leaned closer and asked me a question. "Are you religious?" I thought about this for a second before I replied, "I don't think of myself so much as religious as spiritual." Lily asked, "What's the difference?" I said that answering that question would probably be a long conversation, but I'd try to make it as short as possible.
By way of background, I told Lily that I had a unique set of experiences growing up that had shaped my opinions on the subject. My father had been a sergeant in the Air Force and even though I was only five years old, he had been posted to Japan in 1949 which was only four years after the United States had dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima and the ravages of war were still visible. The next year the Korean War started and B-26's flying combat missions took off and flew only a hundred feet over our house located at the end of the runway. Twelve years later I was boarding at a high school on an air base in France when the Berlin Wall went up and we were bracing for a possible nuclear exchange with the Soviet Union. These events, combined with exposure to people from all cultures and beliefs had a profound influence on how I viewed the world.
