The Game in Europe -Travel and gambling for money and fun
Stephanie had been to London and Paris during a trip to Europe when she was in college. She had not been to any part of Europe since. Too much school and work.
Amsterdam was beautiful and fascinating with all the canals and old buildings. The art museums with painting of Rembrandt, Vermeer and the other old masters set her to comparing the people in the paintings to people that she might meet on the street in Reno. Many of the people in the paintings looked like people she could see today except that they were dressed in black and white, big dresses or short pants with stockings, had big hats, and wore things around their necks that looked like air filters. Stephanie thought the people in the pictures would have been horrified by what people wore in Reno now. Would they have any more right to judge us than we have to judge them?
Spielmann told them of the history of some of the people in the pictures. Many of the noble woman had been married off to men they had never met in order to secure alliances. Merchant or middle-class women had been married to secure business deals. "And the women were expected to be perfectly faithful while the men could have mistresses," Catherine interjected.
"Yes, that is pretty much true," Spielmann allowed.
"Sounds like an awful form of slavery to me," Catherine said. "I think I'd have preferred to be a nun in a monastery, at least if the Abbess didn't concern herself too much about girl on girl action."
"There were periods in the Middle Ages and Renaissance in which married noble women were unofficially allowed to have lovers, at least people looked away," Spielmann said. "In fact, many of the great romantic love stories involved noblewomen and their lovers. The idea that people were expected to be in love with their spouse is pretty much a 19th century concept. Through the ages, sex, love, children and marriage might or might not go together. Regarding marriage, prior to the 19th Century most people could have sang with Tina Turner 'What's love got to do with it'."
The casino they visited was near the red-light district in Amsterdam. Spielmann talked business with the manager of the casino while Charlotte showed Ashley, Catherine and Stephanie around. Stephanie felt she was in a Zoo. The women in the windows in the brothels did not upset her. It looked like they spent most of their time waiting. Was that Stephanie future? She did not think so.
Men glanced at Stephanie, Ashley and Catherine with lust in their eyes, but the three had dressed with just barely enough modesty to make clear that they were not prostitutes. The men were focused on something that they could buy easily without having to woo or explain.
Going south, they rode on roads parallel to the river up the Rhine in two vans that Spielmann rented in Amsterdam. At Bad Neuenahr, they were met by two men in their early 30s, Jan Zocker and Marc Spielmann. Marc, unsurprisingly, proved to be related to Rolf Spielman, a son of an older half-brother. Both Spielmann and Zocker were tall blond, educated in the best business schools, and in the casino business. Stephanie thought Zocker looked like a young Bruno Ganz and Marc looked more like Peter Graves from Mission Impossible. Marc wore the privileges of his wealth and sex without modesty. Zocker was confident but did not reek of old money.
Without overtly starring at Ashley, Catherine, and Stephanie, Jan and Marc did not make any effort to hide that they were carefully observing all the women carefully both above and below the neck.
Bad Neuenahr was still recovering from the 2021 flooding ("Unser Stadt wird wieder bunt"), but the beautiful old spas and casinos were worth seeing. The Spielmanns were able to give an outside and inside tour to the three American women. They even saw the ruins of a Roman Villa in Ahrweiler. Catherine jokingly asked Charlotte if she had been attracted to ancient history because of her affinity for Messalina the wife of Emperor Claudius.
Charlotte answered that it was Agrippina the Younger, sister of Caligula and mother of Nero, who is associated with the Rhineland Roman settlements and that she is sometimes credited with founding the City of Cologne. "Also, the picture of Messalina as an insatiable nymphomaniac is more based on ancient male fantasy and modern porn movies than solid history. Anyway, I would not have wanted to be Messalina who was murdered in her 20s. On the other hand, you should read Procopius Secret History on the Empress Theodora. She seems to have known how to party, at least with geese."
Charlotte left Catherine and others to learn for themselves what Theodora did with geese.
Rolf Spielmann, Marc Spielmann and Jan Zocker also had business in Bad Ems. The group walked around much of the town seeing remnants of the Roman empire and many 19th Century buildings built in connection with the spa. "Bad Ems," Spielmann explained, "is most famous for an incident that led to the Franco-Prussian War. Kaiser Wilhelm the First sent a telegram to Chancellor Otto von Bismarck from Bad Ems where Wilhelm was on vacation, reporting on demands from the French ambassador. Bismarck edited the telegram to sound a bit more belligerent and released it publicly. The French went crazy and declared a war that they lost horribly in a matter of months. Bismarck was a better gambler than most of the visitors to Bad Ems. He did not leave much to chance. He carefully provoked his opponents' action when he knew he could win.
"Didn't Kaiser Wilhelm start WWI?" Catherine asked.
"No, you are thinking of Kaiser Wilhelm II, Kaiser Wilhelm I's pompous ass grandson, who reminds me of a recent American president, but we won't discuss that on a vacation featuring business, games and sex," Spielmann responded.
"Is it true the Soviet Army raped about every woman in Germany they could get their hands on?" Catherine asked.
"My we are skipping through history a lot," Spielmann said, "but yes, there were many rapes in the east and Berlin in the months after the end of WWII, a different war. Other allied troops are also said to have been less than perfectly behaved in Germany."
"I saw Sargent York with Gary Cooper on WWI and All's Quiet on the Western Front, very different views," Stephanie said, "and also the Tin Drum, in which Red Army soldiers rape a German woman."
"Some would point out that the German Army committed many rapes in Russia," Jan Zocker said.
"That doesn't justify what happened in Germany," Catherine said, "It's not revenge for a Russian man to rape a German woman because a German man raped a Russian woman. German women didn't ask for Russian women to be raped and they did not get any benefit from that. What the Red Army did in Germany is just a different group of men carrying on the general male war against women."
"To change the subject slightly, we of the Sportsman's Club are religious about obtaining consent for everything done. If we sometimes seem demanding, we only make demands that we believe accord with the wishes of the woman involved, even if she does not know it, and that will not drive a woman out of the Club that we like," Rolf Spielmann said.
Continuing on, Spielmann said, "If you look to your right, you can see the Russian Orthodox church, built across the river in the 1870s because so many Russians came to use the spa and gamble. But I have to do business at the Spielbank built in the 1830s. It is worth seeing even if you don't want to play any of the machines or tables right now."
After they changed at the hotel, the women plus Marc and Jan went to the casino. Ashley had to gamble and lost money on a roulette table until she was almost physically pulled away. Stephanie and Catherine stuck to sightseeing.
By the end of the evening, it was clear that Ashley would be sleeping with Zocker and Catherine would be hosting Marc. This left Stephanie alone.
Bad DΓΌrkheim had another old spa, another beautiful casino, wine and Roman and monastery ruins. Stephanie enjoyed the sight-seeing, the history and the wine but was acutely aware that she was the only woman in the party sleeping alone.
Stephanie resolved to do something about her loneliness. After a lovely dinner, she dressed to the nines in the sexiest dress she had brought to Europe, dropped a whole pack of ten condoms into her purse, and went into the casino. Stephanie was gambling but not for money. She bought a glass of champagne and tipped the bartender and host enough so that no one took her for a call girl; or would not really care if she was.
After losing a trivial amount of money at a roulette wheel, Stephanie was pleased to find three tall handsome men in their 30s. They were together gambling at the wheel but looked like they might be interested in another type of action. She approached the one of them she liked best and asked if he might know of a game with better odds. His gaze down her decolletage made clear that he liked women.
They said they were three officers in the German army. There was some awkward jockeying for her attention when Stephanie said, "I think all four of us might have some fun together if you could suggest a place to go."
"What sort of place would you suggest?" the first man she'd approached asked.
"Well, maybe someplace we could bring a bottle of champagne and get comfortable."
It developed that two of them had an apartment in the area. The apartment was very nice but without any sign that the occupants were in the army. Each of the guys had a bedroom. Stephanie thought of taking it slow but decided that was a waste of time and kissed one man almost as soon as she entered the apartment. He began to undress her. She did not resist and soon she had one man between her thighs driving her insane with his tongue while another worked on her breasts.