Nightwork

I thought for a moment, trying to be honest with myself. 'I guess I never thought about it one way or another. I guess you could say it never occurred to me to ask myself if I was either admirable or unadmirable.'

'I find you dangerously modest, Douglas,' Fabian said. 'At a crucial moment you may turn out to be a dreadful drag. Modesty and money don't go well together. I like money, as you can guess, but I am rather bored by the process of accumulating it and am deeply bored by most of the people who spend the best part of their lives doing so. My feeling about the world of money is that it is like a loosely guarded city which should be raided sporadically by outsiders, non-citadins, like me, who aren't bound by any of its laws or moral pretensions. Thanks to you, Douglas, and the happy accident that led you and myself to buy identical bags, I may now be able to live up to my dearest image of myself. Now - about you — Although you're over thirty, there's something -I hope you won't take this unkindly - something youthful, almost adolescent - unformed, perhaps - that I sense in your character. If I may say so, as a man who has always had a direction, I sense a lack of direction in you. Am I unfair in saying that?'

'A little,' I said. 'Maybe it's not a lack of direction, but a confusion of directions.'

'Perhaps that's it,' Fabian said. 'Perhaps you're not yet ready to accept the consequences of the gesture that you have made.'

'What gesture?' I asked, puzzled.

'The night in the Hotel St Augustine. Let me ask you a question. Supposing you had come across that dead man, with all that money in the room, before your eyes went bad, while you still were flying, still were playing with the idea of marriage - would you have done what you did?'

'No,' I said. 'Never.'

'There's one thing you can always depend on,' Fabian said. 'The wrong man will always be in the wrong place at the right moment.' He poured some more wine for himself. 'As for me - there never was a time in my whole life that I would have hesitated for a second. Well, all that's in the past. We want to move as far away as possible from the original source, to cover it up, so to speak, with so much fresh capital, that people will never speculate about just how we started in the first place. Don't you agree?'

'In principle, yes,' I said. 'But just how do you propose to do it? We can't depend upon buying winning horses every day....'

'No,' Fabian said. 'I must admit, we have to regard that as unusual.'

'And you've told me you're never going to play bridge or backgammon again.'

'No. The people I had to associate with depressed me. And the deception I had to practice made me a little ashamed of myself. Duplicity is unpleasant for a man who, by his own lights, would like to have a high opinion of himself. I sat down every night with the cold intention of taking their money away from them and nothing more - but I had to pretend to be friendly with them, be interested in them and their families, enjoy dining with them.... I really was getting too old for all that. Money...' He pronounced the word as though it were a symbol for a problem in mathematics that had to be solved. 'To get the most pleasure out of money, it is best not to have to think about it most of the time. Not to have to keep on making it, with your own efforts or your own luck. In our case, that would mean investing our capital in such a way as to ensure us a comfortable income over the years. By the way, Douglas, what is your notion of a comfortable yearly income?'

'Fifteen, twenty thousand dollars,’ I said.

Fabian laughed. 'Come, come, man, raise your sights a little.'

'What would you say?'

'One hundred at least,' Fabian said.

That'll take some doing,' I said.

'Yes, it will. And entail some risks. From time to time it will also take nerve. And no matter what happens, no recriminations. And certainly no more stilettos.'

'Don't worry,' I said, hoping I sounded more confident of the future than I actually was. 'I'll go along.'

'We share all decisions,' Fabian said. 'I'm saying this as a warning to both of us.'

'I understand. Miles,' I said, 'I'd like something in writing.'

He looked at me as though I had slapped him. 'Douglas, my boy... he said sorrowfully.

'It's either that,' I said, 'or I'm getting out right now.'

'Don't you trust me?' he asked. 'Haven't I been absolutely honest with you?'

'After I hit you over the head with a lamp,' I said. Tactfully, I didn't bring up the subject of the six-thousand-dollar horse that had actually cost fifteen thousand. 'Well, what's it to be?'

'Putting something in writing always leads to ugly differences of interpretation. I have an instinctive distaste for documents. I prefer a simple, candid, manly handshake.' He extended his hand toward me across the table. I kept my hands at my sides.

'If you insist.' He withdrew his hand. 'In Zurich, we'll put it all into cold legal language. I hope neither of us lives to regret it.' He looked at his watch. 'Lily will be waiting for us for lunch.' He stood up. I took out my wallet to pay for the wine, but he stopped me and dropped some coins on the table. 'My pleasure,' he said.

15

'Well, done and done,' Fabian said as he and I left the lawyer's office and stepped out into the slush of the Zurich street. 'We are now bound together by the chains of law.' The agreement between us had just been notarized and the lawyer had promised to have us incorporated in Liechtenstein within the month. Liechtenstein, I had discovered, which imposes no taxes and where corporate income and outlay are closely guarded state secrets, had an irresistible attraction for lawyers.

There were to be two shares outstanding in the corporation - one owned by Fabian, the other by myself. There was a simple justification for this that I did not understand. For some reason which had to do with the intricacies of Swiss law, the lawyer had appointed himself president of the corporation. We had to choose a name for it and I had offered Augustine Investments, Inc. There had been no dissenting votes. Various fees had been paid.

Fabian had gallantly volunteered to include in the agreement the clause guaranteeing me the right to withdraw my original seventy thousand dollars at the end of a year. We had been to the private bank where Fabian already had a numbered account, and we made it a joint one, so that neither of us could take out any money without the consent of the other.

We each deposited five thousand dollars in our own names in an ordinary checking account in the Union Bank of Switzerland. 'Walking-around money,' Fabian called it.

If either of us were to die, the full assets of the company and the balance in the bank went to the survivor. 'It's a little macabre, I know,' Fabian had said to me as I read the clause, 'but one can't afford to be finicky in matters like this. If you have any misgivings, Douglas, I could point out that I'm considerably older than you and can be expected to be the first to leave the scene.'

'I realize that,' I said. I didn't tell him that it had occurred to me as I read the document that it also offered him the temptation to push me off a cliff or poison my soup. 'Yes, it's very fair.'

* * *

'Are you satisfied now?' Fabian asked, as we picked our way around a puddle. 'Do you feel protected?'

'From everything,' I said, 'except your optimism.' We had been in Zurich six days under a gray and sullen sky and in those days Fabian had bought twenty thousand dollars more worth of gold, had been in and out of the sugar market, on margin, in Paris, twice, and had acquired three abstract lithographs by an artist I had never heard of, but who was going to skyrocket, as Fabian put it, in the next two years. As he had told me, he did not like to allow money to lie idle.