Maud

Maud is fifty-one and deals roulette in a casino above the harbour in Monaco, and like everyone in this section she is invented, the table and the casino with her. The witness with the longest record of her is the camera in the ceiling over her table, which has had her in frame five nights a week for eleven years. It holds the most complete account of Maud that exists, and it misses the point, as cameras do. This is its version.

It knows her hands best. Narrow and unhurried, a plain steel watch turned to the inside of the wrist, no rings on duty. It has watched them send the ball one way round the wheel and the wheel the other, clear the losing chips off the layout in one long sweep, and pay the winners in stacks that leave her fingers already counted. When she steps away from the table she turns both palms up to the ceiling. That is the rule in every casino. She does it as though it were a courtesy to this camera in particular.

It knows the top of her head. Silver, cut straight at the jaw, and in eleven years of looking down at a wheel not one hair has been caught out of place.

It knows the players better than they know themselves. The man who touches the felt twice before every bet. The woman who plays her late husband’s birthday and nothing else. The regular who will not sit down until somebody else has lost. The camera has watched Maud see all of it and has footage of her never once smiling at any of it. That is the job, and her face at the wheel gives exactly as much as the wheel does.

Hers is the one table in this world where money sits in plain view, the reverse of everything our guide to etiquette says about money at the table. The chips are how the room gets away with it. Nobody has to say a figure.

It has noticed, without understanding, that she will not deal with her left cuff turned back, that she steps up to the table right foot first, and that at the start of every shift she touches her waistcoat pocket once. It cannot see what is in the pocket: a one-franc coin from the year she started dealing, which has been through four waistcoats.

It logged one irregularity last winter. A regular of nine years stopped coming, and for a month she kept his end of the layout clear of her own stacks. The camera filed it under procedure. A person would have recognised it as mourning.

At five, when the shift ends, she looks straight up into the lens, the only person in the building who ever does, and nods to it as one colleague to another. Then she walks out of frame. Monaco has no page in our City Index yet, and it is a town that likes to be photographed going home. Nothing photographs her. She walks along the harbour in the first grey light with her collar up, and the only camera that knows her is the one that is not allowed to say what it saw.