A Calculated Risk

by Katherine Neville

  “You might do well to follow him in the bidding, as I have,” replied his acquaintance coolly. “It’s been my experience, he is usually right.”

  When at last the news of Waterloo reached London, it was soon learned that the young man had indeed cornered the market on consols—at less than ten percent of the face value.

  The man who’d questioned his reasoning found his young colleague entering the exchange alone one morning.

  “I say, Rothschild,” he said, clapping him heartily on the shoulder, “you’ve done quite well in these consols of yours. It’s said you’ve made over a million pounds in profits in less than a day!”

  “Is it?” said the other.

  “It’s always said that you Jews have a talent for sniffing out opportunities for money, and that’s why you have such large noses!” The man, whose bulbous red nose was larger by far than that of his companion, laughed. “But what I must know—from the horse’s mouth as they say—is just this: Was it really Jewish intuition? Or did you know before all of London that Wellington had the battle in hand?”

  “I knew,” said Rothschild with a cold smile.

  “You knew! But how the devil … did a little bird tell you?”

  “That is precisely correct,” Rothschild replied.

  A NIGHT AT THE OPERA

  Rheingold! Rarest gold!

  O, might only thy purest magic waken again in the waves!

  What is of value can only dwell in the waters!

  Base and vile are those enthroned above!

  —The Lament of the Rhein Maidens,

  Richard Wagner,

  DAS RHEINGOLD, Act I.

  SAN FRANCISCO

  More music has been written about money than about love—and often, with a happier ending and a catchier tune. Poverty might cause some to sing the blues, but wealth and greed seem to call for something on a larger scale: grand opera.

  I knew well to what heights the souls of men were inspired by the theme of money. I was a banker. But to use the appropriate gender, I should call myself a “bankette”—a computer jock, and the highest-priced woman executive at the all-powerful Bank of the World.

  If I hadn’t been making so much money, I couldn’t have afforded my box seat at the San Francisco Opera. And if I hadn’t been sitting in that opera box that dreary night in November, I would never have come up with the idea. The idea was how to make more.

  Grand opera is the last refuge of the wild capitalist. Nobody crazy enough to pay for it would dream of missing it. It’s the only form of entertainment where so much money can be spent to see so much money being spent on so little entertainment.

  It was a month before Christmas in the winter of the great rains; the rains washed even the fog away, and brought down mountains of mud, clogging the roads and bridges. Only fools would have ventured forth in weather like that. Naturally, the opera house was packed when I arrived.

  I was dripping, literally, in velvet and pearls. There was no parking near the opera, so I’d had to slosh through water holes like a guerrilla in combat training. I was late and I was mad as a wet hen; neither condition had to do with the foul weather.

  I’d just had a run-in with my boss. As usual, he’d shot me down—this time, in a way I was unlikely to forget. I was still trying to swallow my anger as I raced up the marble steps. The third bell was sounding as the white-gloved usher unlocked the door to my box.

  Though I’d had the same seat for three seasons, I came and left so quickly I had time only for a nodding acquaintance with the others who shared the box. They were the sort who yelled bravi instead of bravo. They’d memorized every libretto and they always brought their own icer of champagne. If only I’d had time for that sort of commitment to anything at all but bloody banking.

  I’m sure they thought it curious that I often arrived late and always alone. But as soon as I’d arrived at the bank ten years earlier, I’d learned that neither social life nor romance fared well in the pressure-cooker world of high finance. A bankette had to keep her eye on the bottom line.

  I made my way to the front seat just as the lights were dimming, and sank into the upholstered chair. In the darkness, someone had the kindness to pass me a glass of champagne. I sipped the bubbly and hiked at my décolletage, which was drooping soggily as the curtain was rising.

  The opera that evening was entirely appropriate to my mood: Das Rheingold, one of my favorites—the first of Wagner’s massive, overwritten works in the Ring of the Nibelungenlied. It begins with the theft of precious gold from the depths of the Rhein. But the entire, four-opera Ring elaborates the ageless tale of corruption among the gods—who are so greedy they’re willing to sacrifice their own immortality for a choice piece of real estate called Valhalla. At the end of the Ring, the gods are destroyed, and the palatial Valhalla goes up in a burst of flame.

  I looked out over the glittering footlights into the murky blue depths of the Rhein. The dwarf Alberich had just stolen the gold, and the foolish Rhein maidens were splashing after him, trying to get it back. I gazed down over the audience: ghostly in jewels and satins and velvet, they seemed to float through cavernous treasure vaults deep beneath the river’s floor. Actually, I realized, the San Francisco opera house itself strongly resembled an enormous bank vault—and that was precisely when the idea struck me: I knew as much about stealing as that wretched dwarf did! After all, I was a banker. And after today’s events, I had plenty of motivation to do so.

  As the dark waters of the Rhein vaporized into thin blue mist and the golden sun rose over the gods awakening on Valhalla, my mind clicked away like a calculator; I became obsessed with the idea. I was sure I knew how to steal a great deal of money, and I wanted to test it out at once.

  Though there are no intermissions in Das Rheingold, when you have an opera box, you can, like royalty, come and go as you please. I had only to pop across the street to my office at the bank data center. I threw my soggy cape around my soggy gown and dripped my way down the marble steps and out into the Wagnerian night.

  The streets were still shiny and wet, and the macadam looked like licorice. The lights of the passing cars reflected from the pavement’s surface and, through the mist, gave me the eerie impression that they were driving upside down underwater.

  I felt as if I were drowning, too. My spirits had been given a thorough soaking; I was sinking into the cesspool of my own career, going down for the third time. My manager was the dark cloud churning the waters.

  Earlier that evening, when I’d dropped by my office after a long day of harrowing meetings—ready now to head off to the opera—I’d found the lights turned off, the draperies drawn, and my boss sitting in darkness behind my desk. He was wearing sunglasses.

  My boss was a senior vice-president of the Bank of the World—you can’t get much higher than that. His name was Kislick Willingly III. And though my staff had created many imaginative names to call him behind his back, to his face most people called him Kiwi.

  Kiwi had come from the heartland of America, the part I think of as the Interior, and he’d planned to be an engineer. A slide rule always hung from his belt, and he wore short-sleeved shirts with a plastic “pocket-saver” full of pens. He kept a mechanical drafting pencil there, in case he was called upon to draft something, and a gold fountain pen, in case he was called upon to sign something. He also carried colored markers so that when an idea struck him, he could dash into the nearest office and illustrate his thoughts on a wax board.

  Kiwi was normally a cheerful and enthusiastic person, and he’d acquired his elevated position and salary by cheerfully and enthusiastically stabbing a great number of his colleagues in the back. In the banking business, this combination of enthusiasm and treachery is called “political savvy.”

  Kiwi had been on his high-school football team, and he still had the capacity to consume large quantities of beer; his stomach had expanded accordingly, so his shirttail often hung out of his pants as he barreled down the halls, off to sign somet
hing important.

  His mother had insisted he give up football, beer, and the fantasy of becoming an engineer, and pursue a career in accounting—so he became a CPA. But he was unhappy as an accountant, which, I believe, brought out his dark side.

  That dark side was something to be reckoned with, for Kiwi truly descended into states of darkness when he was thwarted or felt he couldn’t have his own way. He’d take to wearing tinted sunglasses in the office and mirrored sunglasses on the street. He’d draw the draperies and turn out all the lights, conducting meetings in blackout mode. People like me can feel quite uncomfortable when forced to converse with a disembodied voice.

  When such moods came over Kiwi, he’d slip into other people’s offices, where he’d turn out the lights and sit in silence, in what he called a “state of incognito.” It was in such a state that I’d found him in my own office earlier that evening.

  “Don’t turn on the lights, Banks,” he muttered in the dark. “No one knows I’m here—I’m incognito.”

  “Okay,” I said. And since his voice came from the chair behind my desk, I fumbled about for a seat across the room. “What’s up, Kiwi?”

  “You tell me,” he replied petulantly, holding something aloft, large and rectangular, that I could just make out in the gloom. He tapped it with his finger. “This proposal, I believe, is your work?”

  Kiwi could be unpleasant if he felt an employee had overstepped his bounds—especially if it meant the employee might get a share of the limelight Kiwi himself liked to bask in. I had, in fact, sent out a proposal to all of senior management only that morning, suggesting we beef up security on all computer systems that handled money and requesting the funds to do it.

  I hadn’t consulted Kiwi, since I knew he would reject any idea that wasn’t his own. And the idea of security would never ignite his limited imagination; it wasn’t glitzy or glamorous enough to advance his career—it was just good business. So I had end-run Kiwi by sending out the proposal without telling him first, and now he knew it. But I knew something he didn’t, which made me smile secretly in the darkness—that was that any day, soon now, I would no longer be under his thumb.

  Except for the formality of a background check and a written offer, I’d been technically accepted as director of security investigations for the Federal Reserve Bank—the insurance provider for every federally chartered financial institution in America. In a few weeks, I’d be assuming that responsibility—a job that would give me more clout over the financial industry than any female banker in America, perhaps in the world. And naturally, the first task I would set myself in that position would be to ensure that major money-center banks like the Bank of the World had adequate security to protect their investors’ deposits.

  The proposal I’d sent out today was just to get the ball rolling. And once I was at the Fed, Kiwi could hardly turn down my suggestions, as he had with every improvement I’d proposed in the past.

  “The proposal is mine, sir,” I admitted, still smiling to myself in the darkness. “I know that security is a subject very close to your heart.” So were gas pains, I thought.

  “Quite true.” His voice in the dusk had a tone I didn’t care for. “Which explains my surprise when I learned you’d put together a proposal without consulting me. I might have helped; after all, it’s a manager’s job to grease the wheels for his staff.”

  Translated, this meant that I worked for him, not the other way around, and that he knew more important people at the bank than I, whose wheels he could grease. But not for long—as I tried to remind myself while he ranted on. I was gloating so, that I nearly missed it when the hammer fell.

  “I’m not the only one, Banks, who thinks you’re your own worst enemy. The head of marketing has read your proposal, too. How’s he supposed to advertise the fact that the bank needs to improve its security? What will our clients think if we say that? They’ll pull their money out and cross the street to another institution! We can’t waste funds on new systems like this, on things that won’t attract a new and expanded client base. This lack of concern for the business side of banking has forced me to explain to the Fed that you’re not the right candidate—”

  “Pardon me?” I snapped to attention. There was a cold, icy lump forming in the pit of my stomach. I was hoping I hadn’t heard correctly.

  “They phoned this afternoon,” he was saying as I gripped the arms of my swivel chair. “I’d had no idea you were being considered for a position like that, Banks. You Indians should really keep your chief more informed. But of course, after this proposal fiasco, I had to tell them the truth—that you’re just not ready.…”

  Ready. Ready? What was I—a goddamned whistling teapot? Who was he to decide what I was ready for? I was so numb with shock, I could barely breathe—let alone speak.

  “You’re a brilliant technician, Banks,” he was saying, in his let-me-rub-salt-in-those-wounds-for-you voice. “With proper guidance and a little patience, you could learn to be a halfway decent manager. But as long as you insist upon favoring sophistry over our grass-roots business needs, I’m afraid I can’t give you the backing you’d like.”

  I heard him shredding my proposal—slowly, deliberately—in the gloom. I was speechless with fury. I felt my hands shaking, and was grateful he couldn’t see them. Ten years, I’d worked toward this goal, and he’d crushed it all with a single phone chat. I counted to ten, and rose to leave; I’d never needed fresh air so badly in my life. I thought briefly of coshing his head with the bronze desk plate near my hand, but I wasn’t sure I could find him in the suffocating darkness—I might miss, and I’d already had enough disappointments for one day.

  As I reached the door he added, “I’ve bailed you out this time, Banks, and I’ve assured everyone you won’t lose your head again by churning out foolish proposals. Besides, our security doesn’t need improvement—our ship is as watertight as any in the industry.”

  So was the Titanic, I thought as I made my way to the executive powder room to change for the opera. I yanked the pearls out of my attaché case and tossed them on, staring all the while in the mirror at my drawn, white face.

  I was still fuming now, more than an hour later, as I pushed my way back through the glass doors of the bank data center and stalked across the polished granite lobby. The guards were standing and chatting behind the massive control panel that ran the mantraps and electronic cameras all over the building. I suppose they took me for a bedraggled drunk who’d careened in off the streets, because one of them started toward me in alarm.

  “Oh, that’s all right,” said the other, touching him on the arm. “That’s Miss Banks; she lives here, don’t you, ma’am?”

  I agreed that I did indeed live in a goddamned data center.

  That’s what was wrong with me, I thought as I squished across the lobby to the elevator bays: I had the social life of an adding machine. I’d spent every waking hour in the last ten years eating, drinking, breathing, and sweating high finance—cutting out of my life everyone and everything that might interfere with my obsession and my goals.

  But banking was in my blood; it was, after all, the family business. When my parents died, my grandfather—“Bibi”—had raised his granddaughter to be the first woman executive vice-president of a major financial institution. And now, in the space of a few short hours—during a self-elected opera entr’acte—I was likely, instead, to become the first female white-collar worker to knock over a world-class, money-center bank.

  Of course, I thought as the elevator doors swished shut and I ascended to the thirteenth floor, I wasn’t really planning on stealing any money. Not only do people question sudden wealth among bankers—because of my lofty position, for example, my own accounts were audited quarterly—but also, since I’d spent my life around it, money didn’t mean all that much to me. Because I moved so much cash each day, I’d developed an esoteric awareness of the transitory nature of money.

  It might sound odd to a nonbanker, but there are
two big mistakes most people make about the nature and well-being of money. The first is to assume that money has some kind of intrinsic (or at least established) value. It hasn’t. The second is that money can be physically protected by putting it in a bank vault or someplace for safekeeping. It can’t.

  To understand why not, you have to accept that money is nothing more than a symbol. The more money you move, and the faster you move it, the more symbolic it becomes: the harder it is to control its absolute value—or even its whereabouts. If big enough sums move from one place to another, and they move fast enough, they practically disappear.

  Then, too, only the methods change in theft—not the concepts or the motives. People have been stealing since long before money was invented. But the more portable wealth becomes, the easier it is to steal; when cows were the medium of exchange, thieves had a real problem. With the advent of computers, however, cash has become so portable it barely exists, except as an electronic blip. I think of our age in high-tech banking as the Dawn of Fiduciary Symbolism—the era when money has become nothing more than tiny dots of light bouncing off satellites in space.

  I should know how it worked; I was head of a group at the bank called Electronic Funds Transfer—or EFT. Our job was to move money, and there was a group like mine at every bank on earth that had a telex or a telephone. I knew what all these groups did, when they did it, and how they did it. I thought now that such knowledge might come in handy.

  Naturally, you can’t squeeze physical money through a phone line. The wire transfers we handled were just memos from one bank, authorizing another bank to take money out of the first bank’s “correspondent account”—like writing a check. Most banks keep such accounts with other banks they regularly do business with; but if they don’t, they must handle these transfers through a third bank where both hold accounts.