I glanced around quickly to be sure no one had overheard. It had taken Tor no time at all to get my dander up. How could he put me on the defensive like that? It was rather as though he could read my mind, and knew what would get to me quickest.
“Let’s discuss the menu instead,” I suggested coolly.
“I’ve already ordered,” he informed me, twirling the bottle in the ice. “As I’ve always said, children should never be—”
“I’m thirty-two, and a bank vice-president,” I informed him, trying not to sound huffy, “and I’ve chosen a few meals on my own. I’m a full-grown woman now—not your little protégée—so you can stop the sage philosophe routine.”
I couldn’t understand what it was about Tor that raised such irritation in me. I’d known again—the moment I saw him rising to greet me—that he was the reason I’d left New York ten years ago, not some tempting offer from the Bank of the World. Like my grandfather, Tor was the quintessential artisan in search of a lump of clay; he’d said as much, hadn’t he? Was it my fault that I wanted to be the sculptor of my own fate?
But after that little diatribe of mine, he was watching me with a strange expression; I couldn’t read it.
“So I see,” he said cryptically. “Quite right, you are a grown woman. So that’s what’s changed—it had never occurred to me.” He paused for a moment. “I see I shall have to revise my plans.”
What plans? I wanted to ask—but I bit my tongue as the lemon sole arrived. I made idle chitchat through the rest of the meal, trying to come to terms with my mixed and indefinable feelings. The fish course was followed by veal chops with tiny vegetables, a salad of soft buttery lettuce, and finally, fresh strawberries—a luxury at this time of year—with thick Devonshire cream.
Tor had been strangely silent throughout the meal. I felt like a blimp, since despite my demurral I’d held up my end of the table—and I turned away when Tor tried to poke a strawberry, dripping with cream, into my mouth.
“I don’t need to be force-fed,” I protested. “I’m not a plant—nor a child, either.…”
“We’ve established that,” he said curtly, pouring some coffee from a small silver pot. “Since we’re here on business, now’s the time. Why don’t you show me your scheme?”
I pulled the thick folder from my bag, and handed it to him. One by one, he unfurled the pastiched charts Charles had produced for me. He ran his fingers over the crude lines that depicted risk against stolen dollars.
“Good Lord, what did you run these on—a dinosaur?” he asked, glancing up at me.
He pulled from his pocket a tiny machine, smaller than a calculator—a pocket microcomputer of the type they’d mentioned in the press; they weren’t yet on the market. Tapping in a few numbers, he studied the results closely.
As he was so embroiled, scratching numbers on a scrap of paper and glancing back and forth between the machine and my charts, I flagged a passing waiter and ordered a crème caramel with extra burnt sugar.
Tor glanced up at me briefly in disgust.
“I thought you couldn’t eat another bite,” he said.
“It is woman’s prerogative to change her mind,” I pointed out.
But when the dessert arrived, without looking up from the charts, he stuck out a spoon and helped himself to some of the gooey custard. He glanced up with a naughty expression.
“I’ve always been secretly amused by your desire to have everything your own way,” he admitted.
He tapped his pencil on the charts before him.
“According to these figures, you must pull off this theft of yours within a limited window of two months—no more. And the maximum you could hope to steal would be around ten million.” He picked up his cup and sipped the coffee.
“I suppose you think you can do better?” I said sarcastically.
“My dear young woman,” Tor said with a smile. “Did Strauss know how to waltz? It seems you’ve forgotten all you once learned under the baton of the master.”
He leaned forward until his face was close to mine, and looked me straight in the eye.
“I can steal a billion dollars in two weeks,” he said.
The waiter was hovering around, refreshing our coffee and swishing crumbs from the tablecloth with a flourish. Tor asked for the check, and paid it on the spot, as I fumed in silence.
“You told me you wanted to help me—not try to up the ante!” I hissed as soon as the waiter had left. “You said if I showed you my plan, you might improve on it; that’s why I’m here!”
“And I have improved upon it,” he said, still smiling his catlike smile. “There are many problems with this plan of yours. So I’ve developed one of my own—a superior model, if I may say so. I’ve always believed, you see, that it’s easier to steal really large sums of money without using a computer at all!”
“Oh no—you’re not suckering me into this one,” I told him, gathering my charts together. “If you think I’m crazy enough to steal a billion dollars without using a computer, you’re out of your mind.”
“Don’t be absurd,” said Tor, putting one hand over mine on the table, to temper my haste. “Of course I don’t think so; I wasn’t suggesting you do anything of the sort! Naturally, I was speaking of myself.”
I froze, and looked at him—his eyes dark fires, his nostrils flared, like a pawing Thoroughbred before the starting gun. I should have been warned—I should have known that look—it had cost me plenty in the past. But I couldn’t resist my curiosity.
“What do you mean, yourself?” I said cautiously.
“I’d like to propose a little wager,” he said. “We each steal the same amount of money—you, with a computer, and I, without. In effect, I’ll be like John Henry with his little hammer, and you’ll be the great steel-driving engine—a timeless test of man against machine, soul against steel!”
“Very poetic,” I admitted. “But not too bloody practical.”
“John Henry won his bet, as I recall,” Tor said smugly.
“But he died doing it,” I pointed out.
“We all die sooner or later; it’s simply a question of timing,” Tor explained. “Better to have one big death than many little ones—wouldn’t you agree?”
“Just because I’m mortal doesn’t mean I want to choose my burial plot this afternoon,” I told him. “This started as a little caper to prove the bank’s security doesn’t work. You said you’d help me, but it seems you want to turn it all into an international financial scam. A billion dollars? I think you’ve flipped your lid.”
“Do you imagine that those bankers you work with are the only ones who aren’t nice people?” he said seriously. “I deal almost daily with the SEC, with the commodities, mercantile, and securities exchanges. I know things about their behavior that would make your blood run cold. The best help I can give you, my lovely soubrette, is to expand your horizons—as I intend to do right now.”
He stood up unexpectedly, and held out his hand to me.
“Where are we going?” I asked as we put on our coats and headed toward the door.
“To have a look at my etchings,” he said mysteriously. “It seems you’re a girl who needs to be seduced into action.”
Within the warmth of the taxi, heading downtown, Tor turned to me.
“I want to show you my part of the wager,” he said, “so you’ll see just how serious I am.”
“I’m giving the money back, you know,” I told him. “Not even taking it—just moving it around where it can’t be found for a while. All I want is to see their faces when they can’t find it. So, even if I agreed to this ridiculous bet of yours, what would be in it for you?”
“What’s in it for me, as you so charmingly put it, is quite the same as for you—and something more. Not only do I want to see their faces, I want them to clean up their act.”
“Who’s ‘they’?” I asked, with sarcasm. “You haven’t mentioned where this billion of yours would be coming from.”
“Haven’
t I?” said Tor with a smile. “Why, let me correct that, then, my dear: I thought I’d hit the Big Board—the New York Stock Exchange and the American as well.”
They always say there’s a thin line between genius and insanity—and I thought Tor had crossed it. But then, taken in perspective, my own little scheme was hardly the product of a mind spilling over with sober judgment. It seemed I was getting in deeper by the hour.
We were dropped off in lower Manhattan, in the maze of the financial district, where shimmering mist from the nearby river hung suspended in the narrow canyons, between buildings that seemed to touch the sky. Before us was a glass and concrete edifice that loomed forty stories above Water Street, with the number “55” in bold letters on the front.
“Inside this building are my etchings,” Tor said with a smile as he rubbed his hands together against the cold. “Or perhaps I should say ‘engravings’—this structure houses the majority of stocks and bonds traded on all the major exchanges over the last thirty years.
“The concept dates back to the 1960s, when the brokerage houses around the world were becoming overloaded with paper. There was so much work required to transfer stocks and bonds from one hand to another, they decided to put it all to a stop. Securities are kept in ‘street name’—the name of the brokerage firm that last traded them. Ownership is monitored by the same firm, and the physical instruments themselves are now put here. This is the most important financial building in New York; it’s called the Depository Trust.”
“All the securities traded in the United States are in this one building?” I said.
“No one knows exactly what percent is stored here—as compared with those stocks and bonds still in the hands of brokers, banks, or private individuals—but the effort has been to move them all here, for the sake of efficiency.”
“I can see why it’s a big risk; what if someone dropped a bomb here, for instance?”
“It’s a bit more complex than that,” he assured me as we walked around the side of the gigantic structure to have a better look. He brushed the first snowflake from my face, tossed his arm casually over my shoulder, and went on.
“I attended a meeting only last week, at the SEC. They’d gathered executives from large brokerage firms and money-center banks. The purpose of the meeting was to get these bankers and brokers to use a new computer system developed by the SEC that will track the physical location of securities.”
“Securities aren’t tracked by computer?” I said, amazed.
“The trading, yes—but not the physical location,” Tor informed me. “The SEC believes that five to ten percent of all the stocks out there in bank vaults, attic trunks—even inside the Depository Trust—are either fraudulent or stolen. If they could put them all on computer, they’d find out which were duplicates or otherwise fakes. They want a physical inventory—and they want it now.”
“Sounds like a great chance for everyone to clean house,” I agreed.
“Does it?” Tor said with raised eyebrow, looking at me in the darkening light. “Then perhaps you can explain why every single institution—without exception—turned it down.”
Of course, it didn’t take a genius to figure that one out. The SEC didn’t own the banks and couldn’t force them to conduct an inventory, even if they provided the system. And none of these institutions wanted it known how many of their own securities were worthless! So long as they pretended they were real, they could keep trading them, or use them as collateral for other things. Once they were proven fakes—bingo—they’d be holding an empty bag. I realized suddenly the extent of dastardly behavior rampant in the entire financial industry—just as Tor had said. And it really made me see red.
But I realized something else, too: I’d underestimated Tor by quite a margin, and I felt dreadful about it. Why did I have to be so bloody self-righteous, assuming that I was the only one on earth with principles, and the desire to carry them through? He was right when he’d said I needed to expand my horizons. Now I knew what I had to do.
I glanced up and caught him watching me as we stood there in the mist that had turned to lightly falling snow. He was smiling his old wry smile, and for just an instant, I felt suspicious again—as if he’d mapped out the cogs in my brain beforehand, and had known precisely how many revolutions it would require to get me to this point.
“So you accept the wager, then?” he said.
“Not so fast,” I told him. “If it’s a wager, and not just a double-whammy theft—shouldn’t there be some stakes?”
“I hadn’t thought of that,” he admitted, unsettled for a moment. “But you’re right. If we’re going through all these pains, I suppose there should be.”
He thought awhile as we walked arm in arm back up the empty street in search of a cab. At last, he turned to me and put both hands on my shoulders, looking down with an expression I couldn’t fathom.
“I have it,” he said with a mischievous grin I didn’t care for at all. “Whoever loses will have to grant the winner’s fondest wish.”
“A wish?” I said. “That sounds like a fairy tale. Besides—maybe the loser would be in no position to grant such a wish.”
“Perhaps not,” he said, still smiling. “I only know that you’d be in a position to grant mine.”
THE LIMITED PARTNERSHIP
Men of thin skin with a conscience all the time full of prickles, are out of place in business dickerings. A prickly conscience would be like a silk apron on a blacksmith.
It isn’t how you get your money, but what you do with it that counts.
—Bouck White,
THE BOOK OF DANIEL DREW
I was certainly relieved I’d had the chance to hike on Wall Street after lunch. Even so, I could barely put away a quarter of the dinner Tor ordered at the Plaza dining room that night—saumon en papillote, duck à l’orange, soufflé Grand Marnier, to scratch the surface—as we finished ironing out the kinks in our bet.
Tor was unwilling to reveal what his wish might be, should he win the wager. And so, based upon prior experience with him, I thought it best to come up with more substantial terms for our stakes. The ensuing negotiation began over the salmon, not the coffee. It took hours; and afterward, although my head ached long before the cognac was served, I couldn’t remember the last time I’d had such fun.
Tor had always been able to explain anything with amazing clarity, but his mind itself was baroque. He was a master of complexity and intrigue, and loved to examine an issue from every possible viewpoint. I knew he’d dreamed up this wager as much out of boredom as moral indignation. As usual, life itself just wasn’t enough of a challenge.
“It’s far too simple,” he said off the bat, “just to walk off with a billion dollars; any hacker can do that. To make it really interesting, I think we should leave undefined the specific amount of the theft.”
“How can we tell who’s won, then?” I wanted to know.
“We’ll put a time limit on it—three months or so—perhaps a bit extra to plan the details. Then we take the money we’ve ‘borrowed’ … and invest it! This throws in the added challenge of speculation. So the issue is not who steals the most money, but who makes best use of it. We’ll target a reasonable sum. Whoever reaps the agreed-upon amount first will win.”
“Stealing a billion isn’t tough enough,” I commented, not expecting an answer.
But Tor was tapping away at his small machine. “Thirty million dollars!” he announced, looking up. “That’s how much you can make, with a decent return on a billion, in three months’ time.”
Without waiting to hear from me, he pulled out a pocket calendar. “Today is November twenty-eighth—nearly December,” he went on. “It should take me two weeks, as I said, for the actual theft, then the three months for the investment. With a few extra weeks to set up and prepare, I should be able to finish by … April first!”
“April Fools’ Day?” I laughed. “That seems more than appropriate. But what about me? Charles said I could
steal only ten million. How can I invest that to make thirty?”
“I’d never disparage Charles,” he said with that smile. “But I looked at your charts. As it happens, you asked him the wrong question—how many domestic wire transfers you could steal—a drop in the bucket! What about money from outside the United States?”
Good Lord, he was right! It was double the volume or more—but I hadn’t included those transfers in my study. Though I didn’t control systems like CHIPS or SWIFT—the government’s huge wire transfer networks—I certainly interfaced with them, and that money still moved in and out of our bank.
“I’m beginning to feel grateful to you,” I admitted, sipping my cognac with a smile. “It’s a deal, if we can agree on the stakes. I know what I want—I’ve thought this through all day. I want to be head of security at the Fed; I had the job, anyway, until my boss told them not to hire me. I know, with your contacts, you could get me the job back. But I won’t ask you to—unless I win, fair and square.”
“Very well,” he agreed with a grimace. “But my dear, as I told you twelve years ago, you don’t belong in a financial institution. Those people don’t know red from black—they think loans are assets and deposits are liabilities. You belong to me; I’ve invested too many years in you to watch you pumping out columned ledgers for bankers—a bunch of ignoramuses who can’t appreciate what they’ve got.”
“My grandfather was a banker,” I said with injured pride.
“Not really; he lost his shirt to men like these. Believe me, I know the story. What was he lacking—have you asked yourself? I doubt very much that intelligence or integrity is the answer.”
He motioned for the check as he continued, somewhat irritably.
“Very well—you’ll have what you want. But if I win—as I shall—I feel no compunction about collecting what I want: you’ll come to work for me, as you should have done long ago.”
“As what—Galatea, your flawless creation?” I said with a laugh, though I didn’t find it so awfully amusing. I’d escaped from this ten years ago; now again, I found myself staring it in the face. But even if I lost, I wasn’t going to be a patsy to Tor’s hubris for the rest of my life.