Young Isaac had been born in Paris, and soon after his birth, his mother died under circumstances that could only be described as suspicious.
Those who knew the old Count Nemeroff knew that there was nothing suspicious about it. His wife was a trollop, of noble birth, but a trollop nonetheless, and upon finding himself cuckolded, Nemeroff had simply poisoned her.
There was almost no Nemeroff fortune left, the Russian revolution having taken care of that. But his mother left young Isaac and his father a comfortable amount of money, which his father found decidedly uncomfortable.
The old man and the boy then began to live the life of wanderers, travelling continuously from year to year, from one pleasure capital of the world to the next. And everywhere there were beautiful women for Count Nemeroff, to provide him with the funds to at least imitate his former life style.
Young Isaac grew to hate them, with their brittle faces and alabaster skins, and their staged, identical, musical laughs. He hated them as rivals for his father's affection. He hated them most when he saw them slip envelopes into his father's pockets and he hated the look on his father's face when he opened the envelope and counted the cash it contained, when in their carriage on the way back to their hotel.
Isaac was eight years old when he became a thief. He had already been well-grounded in the important currencies of the world: diamonds were best, gold next, other precious metals, stones and American dollars following somewhat after that.
He specialized in diamonds.
While he was supposed to be at poolside at some rich woman's villa and his father was inside tending to her needs; when he could hear the laughter and the sighs floating softly through a window; he would leave the pool and wander the house. A pin here. A ring, there. A brooch. He avoided necklaces because he thought their absence would be too quickly noted. He gave no thought as to what he would do with his booty. He carried the pieces in a shaving kit which he kept in his suitcase, and which his father never opened, thinking its possession merely a young boy's affectation.
When he was a few years older, he rented a safe-deposit box in a Swiss bank and began keeping his jewellery there. Upon each of their subsequent trips to Switzerland, he would take out one of the pieces, break the jewels from their mountings and sell them to a diamond dealer.
Isaac, though only twelve, was already over six feet tall, and seemed to grow so rapidly that his clothes were always ill-fitting. He was conscious of his wrists extending from his sleeves and his ankles visible below his cuffs when he went to see the first diamond merchant on the list of names he had copied from a telephone book.
The merchant, a kindly-appearing old man with a walrus moustache, had looked at Isaac, at his long, sad face, at his ill-fitting clothes and had laughed aloud and put Isaac out of his office. Years later, Isaac bought the firm, hired accountants for the sole purpose of finding errors in the books, and through criminal and civil actions in the courts hounded the former owner into suicide.
But he had to go no farther than the second name on his list to find a merchant who would buy his stones. He was paid $10,000 American dollars, one-tenth of what the flawless diamonds were worth. He was happy to get it. The cash went into a numbered bank account.
By the time he was fourteen, he had stolen more than a million dollars in jewellery, and had more than one hundred thousand American dollars in his account.
His father was still penniless, still trading his genitalia for meals, still apologetic to Isaac that he could not provide him with all the things a young boy should have in life. Isaac only smiled.
Then came the second world war and suddenly his father's fortunes improved.
While he had no money of his own, his life had been spent with the international moneyed set and in a war of shifting alliances and backroom power plays, access to the moneyed class was important, important enough for Count Nemeroff to become a sought-after man.
He became a messenger, a negotiator, a promoter for all sides.
He ran guns to Spain, inventing the technique of selling the same shipment to both sides, then leaving the shipment in the middle of the field equidistant from both camps, letting the two sides fight for them. He sold information to the British; he arranged for opium to be gotten into Europe from China; he dealt with the American Mafia to make inroads into Italy's government.
And in 1943, he died of a massive cerebral haemorrhage.
Governments on both sides mourned; they were truly grieved. He was indispensable; was able to do for governments the things government could do not for themselves. How could he be replaced?
They had not counted on young Isaac, however. He had been a good student. He kept track of the names and the power and the predilections of the people with whom his father had dealt and at his father's graveside, even as the old count was being shovelled into earth, he let it be known that the Nemeroff family would still be doing business at the same old stand, in the person of the fourteenth Baron Nemeroff.
They scoffed at first; he was too young. But as their problems mounted and grew more complex, at last—in desperation—they turned to Isaac. And he delivered, even better than his father had done.
But where his father had been content to work for cash, for money on the barrelhead, Isaac was not. He already had money; he sought power-power to do things, to build things.
From France, in return for a favour, he demanded a controlling portion of a chemical factory, whose operation was critical to the late war effort and for which he had managed to make available the raw materials.
From Germany, he accepted part-ownership of a munitions factory, and so widespread was his influence that when Germany lost the war, his claim to ownership was not disputed by the allies.
His empire spread. At nineteen, he was not only a millionaire many times over, but a conglomerate-controlling scores of businesses and with influence in scores more.
He had selected those businesses with care. The chemical factory in France would one day handle the processing of heroin; the German munition's factory would provide guns for guerrilla wars, and non-traceable weapons for those willing to pay the price.
He was driven by a lust never to be poor again, and, beyond that, to have power. Power that no stroke of bad luck-no matter how long, no matter how deadly-could diminish. He would never be in the position of grovelling as his father had grovelled before those painted women whose money was able to cover their shallowness and stupidity. This Baron Isaac Nemeroff would never accept an envelope.
He never had to. And when peace came and governments no longer had need of his power and influence, he looked for a new field of endeavour to replace war. He selected crime.
He would never steal again; he was beyond that. But he would become an ombudsman for international crime. If there was a problem to be solved, he would solve it.
If weaponry were needed, he could produce it. If political influence were required, he could exert it. If judges had to be made to see the light of sweet reason, he could give them very good and ample reasons to do so. When drug shipments were bogged down because of periodic governmental crackdowns, Nemeroff could move them.
He was not in crime, but he was of crime. He refused to accept the label of criminal. He told himself he was a management analyst, providing a service to the highest bidder. And while it was unlikely, he told himself he would have done the same job for any legally-established government which had retained him.
He rarely dealt with any criminal leader directly. But it seemed that most problems of and for crime had a way of ending up on the desk of some obscure company in this city or that. And behind the desk, a bright-eyed young man would promise to "look into it," and within only a few hours, he would report back to his client that "Baron Nemeroff said that you may have it," or "Baron Nemeroff said to do it for you as a favour." Heroin would move, guns would be produced, judges would be bribed and crime would move on as smoothly as before.