“Look what I found coming along the trail,” Tor was saying, moving to me through the hot steamy water. He held a small wild orchid in his hand, and twined it in my hair.
“How marvelous,” I said. “Perhaps I could transplant a few to my place in San Francisco when I return.”
Tor looked at Georgian in mock puzzlement and raised his brow. “She thinks she’s going back there,” he said, “and you’ve let her proceed with this fantasy? Doesn’t she know she’s been kidnapped to Treasure Island?”
“It’s your turn to deal with the gray flannel mind,” she told him. “And it’s your turn not to peek—I’m getting out of this hot tub.”
We turned away, and after a moment heard Georgian calling from the upper slope, turned to see her purple-and-yellow robes fluttering about her like a butterfly.
“Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do!” she called with a grin, and disappeared over the rim.
“What wouldn’t Georgian do?” Tor asked with a smile.
“Very little that I can think of,” I said.
“Perhaps then, we should try one of those things she would do,” he suggested. “Hmm. I suppose we could float around here and talk about sex all day.”
I laughed, but I was having trouble concealing the fact I was quite upset, seeing Tor suddenly like that on the trail—after my isolation all these months. My emotions were jumbled together and tangled like skeins of yarn, and I knew why.
For twelve years the two of us had had a mental rapport so powerful that, I had to agree with Tor, it often seemed like a psychic umbilical cord. Then two months of heady competition and danger, followed by a weekend of lovemaking so powerful—so magnificent—I could hardly bear even now to think of it.
And then nothing. No phone call—no letter—no cheery card: “Having a swell time in Bora-Bora; wish you were here.” He’d abandoned me to a plot of my own devising, and gone about living his own adventure as if I’d never existed. Now all at once, I thought furiously, with one third-person phone call, he’d expected me to come running back into his arms. I was even angrier with myself, that I’d done as instructed.
“I’m sorry I wasn’t here when you arrived,” he said, as if he’d read my mind. “There’s no place I’d rather have been—but something urgent happened.…”
He came over to me, moving through the black waters, put his hands on my face, and bent to kiss me, pulling his wet fingers through my hair and sliding his hands down my back.
“Your skin is like silk—I can’t bear not to touch you,” he said softly. “You’re like a slippery golden eel.…”
“An eel?” I laughed. “That’s not very seductive.”
“You’d be surprised what the thought does to me,” he said with a smile.
“I can tell what it’s doing to you,” I assured him. “But you were going to tell me about something urgent in Paris.”
“It’s the hot water,” he said, closing his eyes. “All thoughts have fled—strength is seeping from my mind.”
“Yes, I can tell where it’s marshaling its forces,” I agreed. “But shouldn’t we climb out of here and find some mossy spot to lie down? Or is that too pragmatic?”
“Have you never made love in a pool of water?” he asked, his lips on my throat and moving lower.
“No—and I don’t plan to,” I assured him, feeling weak despite all effort. “I think it would be difficult, complicated, and uncomfortable. I might drown trying to figure out how.”
“You won’t drown, my dear,” he said. His hands and tongue were moving over me until I shuddered and grasped his hair with wet hands. “Believe me,” he murmured, “you were designed for it.”
As we walked back to the house, Tor’s shirt still unbuttoned and trouser legs rolled up, his coat tossed over a shoulder and his tie and socks stuffed in the pockets, he turned to me with a smile.
“Wet and disheveled and barefoot—who’d think a bank vice-president could look so ravishing?”
“Don’t you mean ravished?” I smiled back. I had never felt so drained and warm and peaceful in my life.
As we came to the house we could see Georgian, Lelia, and Pearl, all below us on the parapet. They were in bathing attire, sunning themselves and sipping Chartreuse. They rose as we came down the trail.
“All my little poulets have arrived—time for the déjeuner,” said Lelia, bringing out a big platter of sandwiches: long crusty baguettes stuffed with tuna, calamata olives, purple onions, sliced sweet and hot peppers. We helped ourselves to the sloppy fare, washed down with icy pitchers of beer.
“Lelia baked the bread herself,” Pearl told me, “in a stone oven we rigged from an old fire stove downstairs. She can do my cooking any day. But I’ll bet this little jaunt has already put ten pounds on me.”
“We do not talk of this—we talk of affaires now,” said Lelia, turning to Tor. “What of these men who are wishing to buy our business?”
Buy their business? So that was how they planned to win! They could pay off those loans and make a tidy profit—then return the stolen bonds with no one the wiser as to how they’d been used. In fact, they’d stolen nothing—just borrowed bank money and paid it back. No one need ever know that the collateral had been “borrowed” for three months from the Depository Trust. Any profit they made in the interim was like having a loan without using collateral at all.
“Who are the buyers?” I asked, when I understood what was afoot.
“Mystery candidates,” whispered Georgian. “No one but Thor knows who they are or where they’ve come from. Frankly—it’s scary. After all, there are loads of unsavory types out there who’d love to get their hands on a business like this. We might even be in their way!”
“May I join in this chat?” Tor asked irritably. “After all, I conducted this deal—the results are hardly a mystery to me.”
Georgian sat, duly chastened, as he went on: “I’ve been in negotiation with an international group of businessmen for quite some time,” he informed us.
“How much time?” I asked.
“Since I attended that meeting at the SEC—where the bankers refused to take stock of their own stocks. That’s when I started this plan—”
“But that was before you owned the island or even had the bonds,” I pointed out. “It was before you met Lelia or Georgian or Pearl.… It was before we had our bet!” I cried.
“Quite so,” he said with his dazzling smile. “But I believe in planning ahead, my dear—and I knew you’d come around.”
I was so infuriated, I felt my fists clenching. That bastard had won unfairly. He’d planned the whole thing and found buyers for the sale, before we’d even loaded the starting gun. If he thought I’d put myself in bondage to him for a year after that, he had another think coming!
“Who are these guys—and how did you find them?” asked Pearl, interrupting my thoughts.
“They’re well connected, with real estate holdings and plenty of financial clout. But that’s not all they have in common,” said Tor. “I found their names from the same place True found those on your list: Charles Babbage gave them to me!”
“Good Lord!” cried Pearl. I snapped around to stare at Tor as the realization struck me, too. “I know what those names have in common—not only their social rank. If I’m not mistaken, most were members of the Vagabond Club!”
“Bull’s-eye,” said Tor with a smile. “I thought you’d appreciate that.”
“That means Lawrence is in on this, too?” I asked.
“I’m afraid so,” Tor answered me. “And that’s the problem I encountered in Paris. You see, after four months of negotiation, these charming gentlemen don’t want to pay up.”
So that’s what that memo on parking was all about! That bastard Lawrence was getting the bank to park money—illegally—in a tax haven he planned to buy himself! Using the power of his position for personal financial gain was identical to insider trading! I had to laugh bitterly at the irony of it all. I’d chosen the sleaziest f
olks I knew—in a sort of private joke—as a place to tuck my illegally gotten cash. Now I learn they’d been plotting to do something even more nefarious themselves! What a thin line was walked by men of fine affairs, I thought.
But the worst irony of all was one that could be truly appreciated only by me: What Lawrence had done to Tor and the others was almost precisely what had happened to my grandfather nearly twenty years ago. Take someone’s brilliant idea, nurtured with sweat and tears, and rip it from under him like a rug, milking it for all it’s worth until you bleed it dry. There had to be a way to retaliate.
“That snake,” said Pearl when Tor had finished explaining where he’d left things with Lawrence. “If we don’t redeem those bonds within two weeks, he’ll redeem them for us—as our creditor—and then we’re really screwed.”
“Oui,” agreed Lelia, “they are making the screwings in us like a nail.”
“I don’t think that’s what she meant, Mother,” said Georgian.
“But it’s close enough,” Tor agreed.
“We’ve got to get those stolen bonds out of his hands, before he learns what they are,” said Pearl, turning to me. “I’ve been giving this some thought. Have you and Tavish earned enough—if you transferred the money you’re kiting—to pay off our loan?”
I knew what she was saying—I’d known from the first time Tor mentioned the idea—and it was more than dangerous. Stealing money from a bank to cover a personal debt in a foreign country wasn’t the same as using “borrowed” bonds to secure a loan you were going to pay back. If I got caught before we could put the money back—it would be international fraud on a really major scale.
But Tor cut in—his voice strangely detached. “I can’t accept that,” he said. “After all, I’m the one she has a wager with—not the rest of you. We’re still competing. If I accept money at this point, it’s tantamount to losing the bet.”
“But a moment ago, you told us you were about to lose your shirt anyway,” I said, exasperated. “Why won’t you admit it’s done? This miserable bet has already cost me plenty—my job, my career, maybe my independence—everything I’ve worked for all my life—”
“Perhaps you’d care to hear what I’ve worked for?” he cut in with bitterness. “Honor and integrity, a fair day’s wages for a fair day’s work, justice in the marketplace so that people of honor and value are rewarded, and that those without honor are always, always punished.” He paused and looked at me with a coldness I’d never seen. “What you work for is Lawrence.” He turned away in anger.
“It’s cruelly unfair of you to say that,” I protested, in shock. But all at once, I knew he was totally right.
Why had I been so hung up about working for Tor? What sort of independence would I really be losing in that—the freedom to play cat and mouse with people like Lawrence and Karp and Kiwi—winning small triumphs while losing my life, my ability to produce, as Tor would say? What was I really, but the cleverest rat in the maze?
“I don’t care about winning,” I told him, pacing about, as my three friends sat riveted, looking at us helplessly. “I got into this bet for the same reasons you did—to show there were cheats and wastrels and liars rife through the whole financial industry. I’m not going back to the bank when it’s through, regardless how the bet winds up. I want to stay here and help you beat them. But I don’t know how—without giving you the money to cover those loans—”
“It’s too late for that,” said Tor. “Far, far too late.”
“I don’t want my friends to wind up in jail when I have the means to help,” I said. “Besides—you helped me when I needed it.”
“Indeed?” said Tor. “Is that what you think? Perhaps I did just the reverse.”
He stood up unexpectedly and left the terrace as Pearl and I looked at each other in surprise.
“What was that all about?” asked Georgian. “She offers to save our asses and he declines because of a ‘gentleman’s wager.’ Doesn’t sound too damned gentlemanly to me!”
“This is because you have not the ears to hear inside the heart,” Lelia pointed out calmly. “The divine Zoltan—he feels he does wrong when he brings Verity into this wager—when he helps her to continue onward in it, despite that she was losing at first. If not for that ‘help,’ she might be safely free from all which happens now. And we—we are her friends—he feels guilty because of us, too. We must make him to understand that we are all grown human beings. What we have done, we do freely of choice.”
She was right, of course; that explained the frustration and anger he must feel—but it didn’t solve the problem. I rose and went off to find Tor. It took half an hour or more of wandering through the woods and down to the stony shore before I saw him—still in his wrinkled city shirt and rolled trousers—sitting glumly on a rock beside the sea.
“So you just can’t stop competing,” I said. Coming up with a smile, I took a seat on his knee. “Too proud to accept a nickel of my dough.”
“If it were really ‘your dough,’ as you so charmingly put it, I couldn’t be more delighted to be a kept man,” he said, sounding less than convincing. “But when you offered to put yourself in federal penitentiary for twenty years to help me out—I really felt I should draw the line. Did you find that too harsh?”
“Okay, so it’s war then,” I said, still smiling. “What’s your next step, if I may ask?”
“Damned if I know,” he said, absently kissing my wrist as he gazed at the water. “I’ve been trying to come up with an idea ever since this happened. I was too clever by half, and it may cost us all our freedom. It’s amazing that I, of all people, could be taken off guard by a double-cross such as this.”
“How did you leave it?” I asked.
“I played for as much time as I could, claiming Lelia was in charge and must be consulted. But they’re coming to the island in two weeks, and they’ll expect us to sign on the dotted line then—or have our assets attached in court.”
“Look, I already know Lawrence is a crook,” I told him, “but I can’t prove it with just one memo and circumstantial evidence—like the kind of clubs he belongs to. Not to mention that Lawrence covers his ass so well, he might hold a degree in paperhanging. But two weeks is better than nothing—and since it’s all we’ve got—I hoped you might not disdain my aid, if it only involved investigative reporting?”
“If you honestly feel as you’ve just said up there,” he told me, searching inside me with those incredible red-gold eyes, “then help me destroy them as they deserve. That’s what it’s all about.”
PART 4
LONDON
SEPTEMBER 1814
Two years after Meyer Amschel Rothschild’s death, almost to the day, the united heads of Europe met at Vienna to decide how they would divide up the European continent, now that the tyrant Napoleon had been incarcerated on the island of Elba.
In London, Nathan Rothschild was receiving another luminary in his chambers—one who’d helped put Napoleon on the rock.
“Lord Wellington,” said Nathan, “I understand that your wish has finally been granted, and that you are given permission to retire from the field of battle.”
“Yes,” said Wellington. “As I’ve often observed, anyone who’s ever seen a battle, even for a day, would not willingly choose to see one again, even for an hour.”
“And yet you do so well in a field for which you have no taste. Imagine, if you’d chosen something you’d loved, what you might have accomplished!”
“Yes, I can see that you are the living example of that, Rothschild. It’s said of you always that you love money better than anyone else has ever loved it. And now you’re wealthier than anyone—living or dead—has ever been—rich enough to have saved the British Empire from devastating ruin, and most of Europe as well.”
“Money has bought freedom and a way of life that even my father could not have imagined when he began,” agreed Nathan. “The power of wealth for good—or ill—should never be underestimated.”
“I understand that with Europe now free, you and your brothers are beginning something new, something that will give you even more control.”
“It’s a simple idea, really, and a service that has been provided by financiers informally for centuries. We call it a clearinghouse.”
“You’re changing money for the crowned heads of Europe—is that it?”
“That and far more,” said Nathan. “Until now banks have provided financing or interest on deposits. But henceforth, we’ll be able to change coin as required—even during wartime—without depressing the value of any currency. In effect, we will control the stability of currencies in this fashion.”
“It will be a great boon to the economy of Europe—a kind of common currency market,” agreed Wellington. “I admit, I’ve never been so astonished as when I left Spain after defeating the French army there. We entered France to meet Napoleon’s armies as they retreated from Russia—and the gold I received from you was sent through France—the country of the enemy—and in French coin! How did you work this miracle?”
“We persuaded the British government to spread the rumor that they were devaluing their own currency. As a result, the French permitted us to bring British gold into France, thinking that in doing so they were draining the enemy’s gold supply. We used it to purchase letters of credit drawn on Spanish banks. In this manner, we moved the money across international borders, avoiding both suspicion and taxation. My dear Wellington, one day governments will understand, as bankers do, that the purse strings are the only strings worth pulling. And a just government is one that supports a free economy.”
“Ah Rothschild, you’re a man of genius and ambition. I am only a poor soldier, sick to death of war. For myself—now that I’ve an annuity and a title, I long only for peace. I leave tomorrow for my estate in Ireland, where I’ll ‘tend my own garden,’ as Voltaire once advised us to do. And may there never be war again in our time. What has made you rich has made me weary.”
“Do not take too keenly to planting, is my advice,” said Nathan. “One never knows what the future may hold. My father was a chess player, you know. He always used to say that the best player was not the one who could see ahead; rather, he was the one who could adapt his strategy to the placement of the pieces at any given time. And that’s true of many things besides chess.”
A Calculated Risk Page 30
