Nightwork

'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.