A Calculated Risk

by Katherine Neville

  “I see,” said Tor, squinting a bit from the glitter of the spectacles. He paused as the waiter arrived with the scotch and departed. “And the thirty million you committed to? After all, you’re buying a successful business, not just a chunk of rock with a view.”

  “We’ve reconsidered,” said Lawrence. “After all, you operate under a shady legality—any country nearby might claim that rock—now that it’s got some measure of value—to cut in on the action. We know they did in the past, though perhaps not with the same tenacity as was done with Cyprus. We’ve no assurance that what we’re buying will continue to thrive. But to expedite things, as your creditors, we’ll give you one million in cash to keep us from making a public display in court—and as well, we’re willing to waive those prepayment penalties you seem to have gotten yourself into on those loans.”

  “One million instead of thirty—that’s far from the bargain you struck,” said Tor in cold anger. “Your proposal is unacceptable.”

  “It’s not a proposal,” Lawrence told him, washing down his scotch. “It’s final. One million is plenty; we’re asking nothing of you but a smooth transition—your name on the dotted line.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Tor with a bitter smile. “I’m not the right chap for you, under these revised circumstances. You should have let me know. I came here with power of attorney, thinking you planned to honor your commitments. But the key investors whom I represent couldn’t guess you would break your word.”

  “This has nothing to do with honor—it’s simply business,” said Lawrence. “My colleagues expect to assume control of your operation in roughly a week. You must bring your investors around by then, or we’ll attach your property in court the first time you make a wrong move on any loan in any country.”

  Tor knew there was little advantage in pointing out that their loans weren’t secured by the island or the business. Lawrence wasn’t a fool—he’d have noticed the callable bonds by now, and the fact there’d been no move yet to redeem them. Coupled with Tor’s request to accelerate this deal, even a blind man could see that they couldn’t cover those loans without selling out. He had to do something to play for time and cover himself.

  “There’s only one investor that counts—the principal and genius behind our whole enterprise,” he told Lawrence with a smile. “If you can defer your trip by a week—say March thirty-first—perhaps I’ll have time to discuss and gain consensus on these new terms of yours.”

  “Very well,” Lawrence agreed, standing up to depart. “But not a moment longer. Who is this principal, anyway? It’s the first I’ve heard mention of him.”

  “It’s the Baroness von Daimlisch,” said Tor. “I think you might find her quite a challenge—but then, who knows?”

  LIQUIDATING ASSETS

  Money is like a reputation for ability—more easily made than kept.

  —Samuel Butler,

  THE WAY OF ALL FLESH

  I was at home, changing from my work clothes, when I got the call from Tavish in New York.

  “Hi there, my former boss,” he greeted me. “How’s things around the bank—same old bloodbaths and political assassinations?”

  “Count yourself fortunate you’re in nirvana,” I told him. “How’s Charles Babbage doing?”

  “Keeping track of all our investments very well, thank you,” he said. “I didn’t tell you—but some of those bonds of Dr. Tor’s were on the call list last week. They never asked for our help, though. And now it seems they’ve other plans altogether.”

  “How do you know?” I asked, excited. It was nearly ten weeks since I’d heard a word from any of them. They might have dropped off the earth.

  “They’re operating in a veil of mystery, as usual,” he told me. “But I just got this cryptic communiqué from Pearl—no way to reply yes or no—just a one-way plane ticket to Greece. For you.”

  “I beg your pardon?” I said.

  “Pearl has wired a whole packet of info to Charles here,” Tavish was saying. “Times, schedules, money, tickets, instructions—I’ll overnight-express them to you. You’re to leave next Friday. Don’t pretend you haven’t enough vacation accrued—I’ve accessed your personnel files! Nor do Charles and the Bobbseys and I need you to carry on our end of things. Though Charles Babbage gets nothing out of all this, I’ve already won more than I could ever have hoped! You see, Dr. Tor’s wired me the offer of a job with his own firm! He claims that my brilliant programs saved his life that night at the data center—though I hardly believe that. You understand, Mademoiselle Banks, that this is the fantasy of my life come true—and I know I owe it all to you.”

  “Oh, Bobby—many thanks. I’m thrilled for you, of course. But Tor would never have offered to hire you if he didn’t mean everything he said. The credit’s yours—not mine—and congratulations! But why have they suddenly sent for me?” I asked. “They’ve waited months to phone—you’d think they’d wait another few weeks until Tor could say he’d won the wager.” Though, much as I’d wanted to beat Tor, the wager seemed a moot point now, compared with what we were up against.

  “Who knows why they called?” said Tavish cheerfully. “Perhaps they’ve already won!”

  I hadn’t thought of that. And as Tavish said, I was totally useless here. I’d racked my brains and rifled every system to try to get the goods on Lawrence, but apart from that one memo, I had nothing. Though parking might be illegal, I couldn’t prove he was pushing the bank to do it, based on that one scrap—nor could I ask Tor what he knew about it, if anything, since I didn’t know how to reach him! So I thanked Tavish for sending the stuff ahead, hung up, and stared at the walls awhile. Then I turned out all the lights and sat in darkness.

  I knew what was troubling me, of course. Less than four months after my night at the opera, I found myself alone—looking not at blank walls, but at a demolished life. I’d robbed two banks, abetted setting up a possibly illegal country—not to mention knocking over the entire securities industry—destroyed my career, and slept with my best friend, mentor, and competitor, who—for the three months immediately thereafter—had been listed among the missing. I felt I’d been socked in the gut by life. If this was the excitement Georgian was always touting, I confess I longed to return to the white womb of my former existence—the one Tor had called a mausoleum—the one that I’d thought was safe.

  But it was too late to turn back now, I knew, though I hadn’t a clue how to deal with Tor when I finally got to Greece. I’d lost the wager, it seemed—despite all his help—and I’d never been asked for the aid I’d expected to donate in return. Tavish said those bonds had been called—but no one had called me. Clearly, Tor didn’t need to stoop to conquer.

  But the worst part of all was the feeling of having lost everything because of this bet. My life had been sucked away—there was nothing left but Tor and a ticket to Greece. I sat there in darkness a very long time. Then I opened the small crystal box on the table, pulled out a match, and lit it. As I watched it slowly burn down in the dark, I imagined the bridge. And I smiled.

  The boat chugged with effort through the crystalline waters that looped like scattered ribbons through the dotted chain of isles. Silhouetted against the sea was the black cone of Omphalos, its rugged lava crust glittering like black diamonds where the waves struck, drenching the cliffs with spray.

  The shore was lined with a stately procession of cypresses, etched in charcoal against the chalk-white houses that clustered near the port. A small stone jetty curved into the sea. Within lay a few little fishing boats in red and blue. Waves silently lapped the quay.

  As my boat pulled into berth I saw Lelia seated on a stone wall beside the quay, waving to me, her parasol fluttering in the breeze. Her flowered muslin dress with billowing sleeves, the tawny hair tumbling in ringlets at her brow, the basket of flowers beside her on the wall—it was all so lovely, it made me want to weep.

  “Darlink,” she cried, rushing to me breathlessly when the gate was down and I could step
on land, “I was so worrying you would not come!”

  “Of course I’ve come,” I told her.

  I inhaled the dark aroma of her flowers. I wanted to see Tor.

  “Where is everyone?” I asked.

  “All working—tout le monde. Zhorzhione, she takes pictures of the island here, she find it so beautiful she cannot resist. Pearl is making the moneys for us, as always. And the lovely Zoltan—he is in France.”

  “In France?” I said, amazed that Tor would bring me all this way, and then be absent himself. “Well—let’s drop my bags at the hotel and see what the girls are doing.”

  “No hotel,” said Lelia, beaming in a very possessive fashion as she took my arm. The heels of my shoes kept getting stuck between the picturesque cobbles on the quay. “We have a château—a castle,” she was saying, “and I decorate it all myself. It is unique.”

  It was unique. But reaching it was an even more fascinating experience.

  We left the little village of whitewashed houses, red-tiled roofs, and fragrant lemon trees hugging the bay, and climbed the circuitous dirt path that crossed the mountain. Our rickety horse—something of a national treasure, according to Lelia—seemed to know the way himself, as he dragged our pony cart at his own leisurely pace, through silvery olive groves dotted with small, trickling streams. These fed the vegetation, which sprang everywhere: wild iris, periwinkle, blue, purple, and yellow, scattered through the dark green foliage. Good thing none of this was revealed on the auction gallery’s photo, or Omphalos wouldn’t have gone for the measly $13 million that was Lelia’s winning bid.

  Atop the cliff, at the brink of the volcano—at twelve hundred feet or more—we could see down the entire sharp face of black rock to the clear glassy water below, so transparent it seemed to be cut of aquamarine. Even at this distance I could make out schools of colorful fish moving among the shallow shoals. And at the edge of the farther point, there lay the castle.

  Lelia wasn’t exaggerating when she called it that. Made of ocher stone, it was encircled by crenellated walls enclosing the interior courtyard. Lelia said it was built by Venetians in the 1500s to defend the channel between the Turkish mainland and the more populous Greek isles. Though its past life was now a mystery, buried in the dust of centuries, she believed that Grimani—the powerful doge of Venice—might have spent his earlier years of exile in a place like this.

  When at last we embarked at the sea, I saw the sturdy base of the castle nearly submerged in water, and the tower looming above, its one narrow window facing out to sea.

  The moment we’d unloaded my things, I saw our horse swerve sharply away and trot off up the embankment.

  “Our transportation is getting away!” I cried, starting to hoof it after him.

  “Oh, he will come back,” Lelia told me with a laugh. “He go to the quai for the tourists when he is done—he is trained like a pigeon that always is going home.”

  Home? I suddenly felt alone—abandoned—as if I were at the very brink of the earth, about to step off.

  Lelia glowed with pleasure as she set the large platters of lamb and pilaf on the massive stone table. Pearl was helping her while Georgian sat on the parapet wall, her back to us, photographing the sea at sunset.

  Lelia had filled the stone urns with flowers and stuffed wax candles into every crack of the crumbling stone walls. Though the castle had no electricity, thanks to her efforts the parapet glittered extravagantly.

  Before us lay the sea, shaded from hot pink to dark vermilion in the waning light. The bloodred sun dropped below the cone of Omphalos, and the sea darkened to purple. A light dampness rose along the coast, but the candles contained us in their circle of warmth. I wrapped myself in the heavy uncombed-wool sweater Lelia gave me, and went to the wall where Georgian sat.

  “It’s so lovely,” I told her. “I feel I’d like to stay here forever and leave everything far behind.”

  “You’ll get over that,” Pearl said from behind me, “when you try to take your first bath with no plumbing.”

  “Or your first shit,” agreed Georgian. “After a while, you get tired of hanging your ass out over the seawall.…”

  “Please!” cried Lelia. “This is not the discussion romantique! Enough, Madame la Photographe. We must eat these dinners I am making here, no?”

  Georgian clambered down from the wall in her heavy mirror-embroidered caftan—Lelia was wearing one in peacock blue, and Pearl was splendid in, of course, emerald green—and we all drew together around the stone slab that served as our table as Lelia poured the wine into hobnailed glasses. I spooned some vegetables over my lamb as Pearl spoke.

  “Tomorrow I’ll take you to see what we’ve set up,” she said. “Tor should be back by then—we expected him today. But he phoned the office—the only switchboard on the island, I believe—and said there had been a slight glitch he needed to take care of.”

  “In Paris?” I asked.

  I was more than a little resentful that I’d come eight thousand miles at a snap of his fingers—just as I’d always suspected he expected of me—and he couldn’t be bothered to be here, too. But Pearl misunderstood my tone.

  “I’m sure there’s nothing serious detaining him,” she said. “He’s very thorough, as I’ve learned while working with him all these months. In fact, I must thank you for sending me on this boondoggle. It’s the best experience I’ve ever had—all packed into a few short months. It’s changed my life. When we go back, I’ll be able to do whatever I like. Not many people get that sort of chance.”

  “So you plan to go back, then?” I said a bit sarcastically. “I thought it might be so idyllic here, you’d all want to stay forever!”

  “Not quite,” said Pearl, exchanging mischievous looks with Lelia. “We may all have to confront reality a bit sooner than we wish.”

  Georgian woke me at dawn—her favorite hour—so I could watch the sunrise. Not among my favorite sights.

  She was jostling me in the straw mattress that served as my bed on the floor of the tower. She threw a long, flowing caftan over my head and dragged me downstairs before my eyes were open.

  “Coffee,” I mumbled incoherently, groping for the railing.

  “You won’t need it,” she assured me, dragging me into the aching light of day. “Look at this magnificent day! Doesn’t it make your heart beat quicker to see nature in all its splendor like this? Doesn’t it thrill you just to be alive?”

  “Coffee would make me happy,” I managed to stammer. “My eyes hurt. I don’t think people were meant to see all this magnificence before breakfast.”

  “I’m taking you somewhere, and you’re not wriggling out of it,” she told me bossily. “After Tor returns from the mainland, we’ll all have lots of work to do. I may not get you to myself for some time.”

  She took me by the arm and led me along a footpath that traversed the slope and then dropped toward the sea. At the base, a hot spring gurgled from the rock into a small dark pool in the lava rock—an oval basin suspended between sea and sky—then overflowed and tumbled in a waterfall into the sea. Wildflowers and succulents clambered over the surrounding cliffs in brilliant colors and diverse shapes reminiscent of a tropical jungle, though this was a dry Aegean rock.

  Georgian, discarding her purple-and-yellow-striped caftan, had slipped into the black pool. The water churned foamy about her, and beads of water sparkled in her silvery hair. With the brilliant sapphire sea and darkly purpled Turkish cliffs in the distance behind her, she looked like a siren luring sailors to these rocks.

  As I stood there on the path above I suddenly had an awful flash of reality. I saw the bank—the fluorescent lights, forced air, controlled humidity, security passes, mantraps, and bullet-proof glass walls—in short, all the makings of a model prison environment. How had I spent ten years of my life that way, when this existed, too?

  “Stop daydreaming, lazybones, and get in,” Georgian was calling up to me. “This water comes from the volcano. When we got here, it wa
s still winter—I bathed in the steamy hot water as cold rains pounded on my head—yin-yang.”

  “I hope you took pictures,” I told her, coming down to dabble my toe in the water.

  “You can’t photograph magic, as I learned long ago,” she told me. “That’s your problem—you want everything white and flawless and perfect. And frozen in aspic. Thor and I have agreed the time has come to rattle your chain a bit.”

  “Oh really?” I said, yanking off my own robe and slipping into the bubbling pool. “Just what have you two cooked up?”

  “Why don’t you ask him? He’s stumbling down the hill just now.”

  I glanced up the slope, and sure enough, Tor was picking his way down the uneven terrain, looking out of place in a business suit and elegant Italian shoes that slipped on the rocky trail.

  “I’ve come upon a couple of ondines,” he called down to us, letting his eyes wander out over the vista. “I never knew this place existed! Lelia dropped me off from the boat and told me to go along this path. I must say—it was worth the hike. What a breathtaking sight!”

  This last he directed to me—not just the landscape—and I flushed a bit. I had to admit he looked lovelier than I’d wanted to remember these past lonely months. And now he was tanned and golden, his coppery hair tumbling to the collar of his white silk shirt. He was loosening his tie as he spoke.

  “I’ll join you if you promise not to peek. I must confess, I’m modest to the extreme around pretty young girls.…”

  Georgian, pleased at this description of herself, turned away with hands over her eyes as Tor undressed and slipped into the pool along with us. I wondered what she and Lelia had learned from Pearl about the change in Tor’s and my relations. It seemed clear they’d spent plenty of time plotting behind my back.