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,
