A Calculated Risk

by Katherine Neville

  “Perfectly. Let us proceed,” the other replied.

  The Landgrave choked on the water, pushed the glass away, and threw down another mouthful of brandy instead.

  “What is it the great chess master asks me to sacrifice next”—he sneered—“for the sake of winning the game?”

  “Nothing,” said Meyer politely. “You may now place his king in check.”

  Both men’s eyes widened as they stared at the board.

  “Aha!” cried the Landgrave at last, picking up his bishop and moving it down. “Check!” he cried, leaning back with a gloating expression.

  “Be advised,” Meyer commented calmly, “that a check is not a mate, although it’s true that for each action he takes, you now have an appropriate counter. The laws of chess are as beautiful as those governing the universe—and as deadly.”

  As the two men made their moves under the guidance of Meyer Amschel, the Landgrave became progressively more cheerful. At last, the general himself leaned back with a smile of approval—though he saw he had lost the game.

  “My dear Red-shield,” he said to Meyer, “this is the most refreshing game of chess I’ve ever played—and the most enlightening. I confess, though I play every day of my life, your mind seems ten moves ahead of mine. I’d find it most enlightening if you’d conduct a postmortem analysis of our game so I might learn what I might have played to bring about a different result.”

  So Meyer Amschel remained at the board until the wee hours, instructing the two older men on the variety of moves—which he called combinations—that each might have played at each juncture in their game.

  Only when the sun was rising over the river Main did the three men rise wearily from the board and make their way to bed. The Landgrave paused on the stairway to place his beefy hand on the shoulder of the little chess master.

  “Rothschild,” he said, “if you can maneuver money as well as those little ivory pieces, I predict you’ll make me a very rich man.”

  “The Landgrave is already a rich man,” Meyer Amschel pointed out.

  “An accident of fate. But you are born with another kind of wealth—a quality the world will recognize a hundred years from now. I’m not a clever man, but I’m clever enough to recognize someone who knows more than I—and to make use of him.”

  “With such a recommendation, sire,” said Meyer Amschel, “perhaps it will not require a hundred years.”

  THE ZEN OF MONEY

  Money, which represents the prose of life, and which is hardly spoken of in the parlors without an apology, is in its effects and laws as beautiful as roses.

  —Ralph Waldo Emerson

  MONDAY, NOVEMBER 30

  At eight A.M., Tor walked into the New York Public Library and asked for directions to the business section. The woman who gave him instructions looked after him with a sigh as he headed toward the marble steps. Men of his appearance rarely came to the information desk of the public library.

  Tor bounded up the steps, dressed in a charcoal suit of Italian gabardine. His pale gray pin-striped tie with a tiny touch of mauve was held in place by a gold stickpin that precisely matched the design of his cuff links. Several heads turned as he swung down the corridor into the business section. Inside, he asked the librarian where he could find the Standard and Poor’s and the Moody’s directories. She pointed to the appropriate shelves.

  In the back of the stacks, Tor lifted the heavy volume of Moody’s from the shelf and flipped through to the more recent issues, which had already been bound. Turning to municipal bonds, he thumbed through several pages until he found what he’d been seeking.

  Glancing quickly about, he turned back to the book, pulled a sharp penknife from his pocket, and cut the page from the volume. He folded the page carefully and slipped it back into his pocket along with the folded knife. Then he returned the book to the shelf, thanked the librarian, who was still staring at him, and left the library.

  Less than an hour later, Tor entered the offices of Louis Straub discount brokers, on Maiden Lane. As he swung through the glass door he saw a room filled with brokers leaning over their phones, their ties loosened, jackets tossed casually over the backs of chairs. Secretaries and clerks ran from desk to desk, dropping papers into file baskets and leaving off phone messages. The floor was pandemonium.

  The girl at the front desk was chewing gum and painting her nails while carrying on a busy telephone conversation. She interrupted her activities to ask Tor impatiently if there were anything she could do for him.

  “I’d like to open a new account,” he told her with a wry smile. “That is—if you’re not too busy.”

  She blushed, and put the caller on hold, then pushed her intercom button.

  “Mr. Ludwig,” she said into the intercom as her voice echoed across the floor. “New account at the front desk. Please pick up.”

  “He’ll be here in a minute,” she told Tor, returning to her phone conversation. Tor glanced over the floor.

  Louis Straub was the largest discount broker in the nation. The firm handled enormous volumes of securities for those who didn’t need help in planning their portfolios or estates.

  Five years earlier, a young man named Louis Straub had seen a need in the United States for a brokerage house that handled stocks and bonds as if it were a supermarket—where clients could pick out what they liked themselves, and the brokers would simply ring up the sale. They didn’t give coffee or personal attention to their clients. The whole transaction at Louis Straub was so quick and clean that often a broker could not even remember his clients’ faces. That was why Tor had come here.

  Mr. Ludwig, a small, balding man, came through the swinging gate and shook Tor’s proffered hand almost without looking at him.

  “You’d like to open an account, Mister …”

  “Dantes. Edmund Dantes,” Tor said. “Yes. Actually, it’s open and shut. I’d like to buy some bonds as Christmas gifts for my nieces. I’ve made a list of what I want.”

  “So will it be a cash transaction? We take credit cards or personal checks, if you have two forms of ID.” He was leading Tor across the floor to a small messy desk at the back of the room.

  “I’ll give you a cash deposit, we’ll choose the bonds, then after you tally it up, I’ll bring you a cashiers’ check in about half an hour.”

  “We can’t purchase anything until we have the money or a line of credit established, you understand,” said Ludwig.

  Tor nodded, and handed him the torn page of Moody’s, with a collection of bonds circled on it.

  “You have a lot of nieces,” said Ludwig, looking at Tor with a faint smile.

  “I do this every Christmas,” Tor replied. “Usually, my broker handles it for me, but it’s late in the season and he’s just gone on vacation. They’re very sweet girls; I’d hate to miss Christmas.”

  Ludwig looked at Tor as if he were wondering just how old these girls were—and how closely related. But he bent his head to the sheet and began tapping numbers into his calculator.

  “Without checking our computer, I can’t tell you exactly what’s available or what the buy-in rate will be,” he told Tor. “But it looks as if you’re talking about fifty thousand dollars, max, for these bonds, Mister … ah …”

  “Dantes,” Tor repeated. “Fine. My office is at Thirty Park Avenue—the Cristo Corporation—if you need to reach me. Why don’t you start working on the list, and I’ll be back with a check for fifty thousand at ten-thirty. If there’s any variance in price, you can credit me or give me a check for the difference.”

  “Okay,” Ludwig agreed. “Do you mind my asking a question? It seems you’ve picked one of each type of bond here—you’ve got dozens of different types. I mean, why not just give your nieces one each of a few different kinds? It’d make things much faster and simpler if I could buy blocks of multiples at a time. You could still give them separate certificates.”

  “I just don’t think that Susie would like to have the same bonds as Mary
Louise,” Tor said.

  Besides—he could hardly give the real reason why he needed to buy an individual bond of each type. He was already on his feet to head for the door.

  “See you within the hour,” he said.

  He crossed the floor, swung through the gate without a nod at the chatting receptionist, and headed for a restaurant near his bank. The bank wouldn’t open until ten, but it didn’t take long to draw up a cashiers’ check. And then they’d be in business.

  While Tor was sipping a coffee in a small café off Wall Street and waiting for the bank to open, Georgian was getting out of a taxi in front of a massive concrete building in the Bronx.

  The building was surrounded by high mesh fences with barbed wire at the top, and there was a guard gate. About every hundred feet along the perimeter of the fence, a guard stood watch with a German shepherd. All the guards wore guns in hip holsters, and they all looked up attentively as Georgian approached the guard station.

  She was wearing a dress that left little to the imagination: electric-red suede, and extremely short. She wore high black patent-leather boots, and over one shoulder was draped a slinky black wool cape.

  “Hi,” Georgian greeted the guard. “I hope I’m not late for the ten o’clock tour. I took the subway as far as I could, but then I had to take a taxi. I’m almost completely broke, and I’m frozen to pieces.”

  “That’s okay—the tour hasn’t started yet,” the guard told her. “It starts over there at the main entrance. You can step in here to warm up if you’d like, and I’ll have the cart come pick you up. They always expect a few stragglers at the gate.”

  “Oh, thank you so much,” said Georgian, stepping into the tiny booth as the guard picked up the phone.

  She pulled off her mittens with the Santa Claus faces on the backs, and rubbed her hands together as the guard spoke a few words into the phone. She observed through the glass walls of the booth that the other guards posted around the fence were glancing at each other with grins and nodding toward the booth. Her guard turned back to her.

  “So how come a girl like you is interested in touring a printing plant on a gloomy day like this?” he asked.

  “I had no idea how bad the weather would be,” Georgian replied, looking out at the overcast skies, heavy with the promise of snow. “I’m a student at the Art Students’ League, and I’ve wanted to come here on tour for ever so long. All my classmates told me you have the finest master engravers here on the entire East Coast.”

  “Oh, that’s certainly true,” agreed the guard. “U.S. Banknote is the oldest security printer in the country. We get lots of commercial engravers, and students like yourself, on tour here. When you go on the tour, you should introduce yourself to the engravers; they’d be happy to talk with you and show you what they’re doing. Whoops! Here comes the cart already, and I didn’t ask you to sign in. Just put your name and address on this log, if you don’t mind.” He handed her a clipboard with a sheet full of signatures.

  Georgian printed her name carefully: “Georgette Heyer.” Next to it, in the column that read “Company Name,” she printed: “Art Students’ League.” She was happy she didn’t have time to talk further with the guard; Georgian wasn’t even sure where the Art Students’ League was located.

  Waving her hand to the guard, she ran from the little glass booth, hopped into the small electric cart that was sitting before the gate, and rode away.

  “I had no idea,” Georgian said as she sipped the foam from her mug of beer and peered through the gloom of the darkened bar, “that U.S. Banknote printed so many different kinds of things! I’m so glad I went on the tour and had the opportunity to meet all of you wonderful gentlemen.”

  Around the brick-red Formica table sat five of the master engravers from U.S. Banknote, with large smelly sausage sandwiches half-devoured on the plates before them, and half-full steins of beer. They were all ogling Georgian with avid scientific curiosity, as if she were a new form of engraving tool.

  “Just think,” she ran on, “food stamps and postage stamps and travelers’ cheques and stocks and bonds—and even leather-bound books! But don’t you have to specialize in something? I mean, is each of you an expert in everything, or are some better at … intaglio printing, and others better at roto … roto …”

  “Gravure,” said one of the men, and the others laughed.

  Georgian looked flustered, and let her gaze, wide-eyed with admiration for all of them, wander around the table.

  “We all have specialties,” another engraver admitted. “We’re always happy to have you students come on these tours. Who knows but that some of you may become apprentices? The students of today are the master engravers of tomorrow.”

  They all nodded in agreement and ate their sandwiches and drank their beer.

  “But the field I’m really most interested in,” said Georgian, blowing on the foam of her beer, “is photoengraving. I’m studying photography, and what I’d like to do is turn one of my photographs into a really superb engraving. Do you do any photoengraving here?”

  “Not much,” one of the engravers admitted. “The people doing the best work in that field are the Japanese; their color lithography and engraving are incredible. They do the kind of thing you’re talking about. You ought to go to some of the museums in Manhattan and see what they’re turning out.”

  “We don’t do much of that here at the plant,” added another, “because we deal primarily with security instruments—things that have cash value, like travelers’ cheques, where all the engraving plates have to be hand-etched. The printing has to be very sophisticated, so the instruments we produce will be hard to counterfeit. Sometimes, this takes as many as thirty colors on a single document. Surely you wouldn’t need to do anything that complex to engrave a photograph?”

  “I’d like to know how,” said Georgian. “Is there anyone you know who could show me?”

  “Actually,” said one of the men, “there is that Japanese photoengraver over on Staten Island. He works out of his own home. He does sophisticated stuff—some of it commercial, but mostly artistic. Do you recall his name, Bob? Remember—he was the guy who made that plate of a one-dollar bill a few years ago, and showed the bills in a gallery. The plates were such good counterfeits that the FBI came to his house and broke them! What was that guy’s name?”

  “Oh yeah,” said the other. “I remember—it was Seigei Kawabata.”

  TUESDAY, DECEMBER 1

  It was early afternoon when Georgian, completely enveloped in her bohemian black cape, got off the Staten Island ferry and hiked up the landing plank through the falling snow. She hailed the first taxi she saw, and gave the driver the address.

  She paid the driver and disembarked before an old gingerbread house on a tree-lined street. It didn’t seem the sort of spot where one would find a famous engraver; she’d expected something a bit more high-tech.

  Georgian went up the icy front walk, climbed the steps to the front porch, and rang the bell. After a few moments, she heard the sound of footsteps shuffling to the door. The door creaked open and a wrinkled little face peered out.

  “Mr. Kawabata?” said Georgian. The old man nodded, watching her carefully, but not opening the door any wider. “I’m Georgette Heyer; I telephoned you from the city. From the Art Students’ League.”

  Georgian smiled at him as sweetly as she could, but privately cursed him for keeping the damned door half-shut; she was freezing.

  “Ah yes,” said Mr. Kawabata at last, opening the door and ushering her inside. “The Art Students’ League—I lecture there myself quite often. Who are your instructors there? I’m certain I would know them. Would you care for some tea?”

  Georgian was forced to admit to Mr. Kawabata, over tea and cookies, that she was not a student from the Art Students’ League. She was in fact a commercial photographer who was thinking of going into photoengraving—but she did not want any of her competitors to know she was branching out into a new field. Even to her, this e
xcuse sounded flimsy, but Mr. Kawabata accepted it.

  “Mr. Kawabata, the engravers at U.S. Banknote told me you’d done a perfect engraving of a dollar bill. Is that true?” she asked as Kawabata was leading her through his maze of high-ceilinged Victorian rooms.

  Each room was immaculately clean, with hand-painted paper screens covering the tall windows, and beautiful pastel pots of paintbrushes clustered like art objects on the pale lacquered tables.

  “Yes,” replied Kawabata. “The government was very angry with me for that. After my gallery opening, they came to my house and conducted a thorough search, looking for other plates. They thought I was a professional counterfeiter, but I explained that I was merely attempting to show the state my art has achieved in the Western world. If you like, I will show you a print from that series that they did not confiscate.”

  Georgian agreed that she’d like that very much. Kawabata led her into a room overlooking a small Oriental garden—the only room whose windows were not covered with paper. The garden was beautiful, with its small pool and smooth black stones paving the walks between beds of carefully trained bonsai trees. The floor of the room was covered with willow matting, and hand-painted cushions were placed about the periphery.

  On one wall was a small engraving about one foot in diameter. The background was a dark plummy gray, beautifully textured. At the center of the engraving was a small apple on a table, and beside it, propped up on end to face the viewer, a perfect dollar bill. It looked as if it had been pasted, in collage, into the picture; the color was perfect, the lines were flawless.

  “This is magnificent,” murmured Georgian. She took a dollar bill from her handbag and compared it with the one in the print.

  “That is a photoengraving,” Kawabata replied in his soft-spoken voice. “I actually photographed the bill separately from the apple and the table, then I overlaid the two photographs. I did the plates separately. If you are interested, I will show you how it’s done.”