Nightwork

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.

Fabian had discussed all our deals with me and had patiently explained the working of the commodity markets, where fluctuations were so erratic that fortunes could be made or lost in the space of an afternoon and where we had done incredibly well in sugar between Thursday and Friday. I understood, or pretended to understand, our convoluted operations, but when asked for an opinion could only leave decisions up to him. My own naiveté shamed me and I felt the way I had as a small boy in an arithmetic class when I was called on by the teacher for a question which every pupil but myself was prepared to answer. It all seemed so complicated and dangerous that I was beginning to wonder how I had been able to survive in the same world as Miles Fabian for thirty-three years.

By the end of the six days I wasn't sure anymore that I could stand the daily wear and tear on my nerves. There was cold sweat on the palms of my hands every morning.

As for Fabian, nothing seemed to disturb him. The bigger the risk he was taking, the more serene he became. If there was one lesson I would have liked to learn from him, it was that. For the first time since I was a child, I began to suffer from my stomach. As I swallowed Alka-Seltzer after Alka-Seltzer, I tried to tell myself that it wasn't nerves, but the rich food that we were eating twice a day in the fine restaurants of the city, and all the wines that Fabian kept ordering. But neither he nor Lily, nor Lily's sister Eunice, complained of any distress, even after a most elaborate dinner at the Kronen-halle, a Helvetian monument to hearty food and Swiss digestion, where we had smoked trout, saddle of venison with Spatule and preiselberry sauce, washed down first with a bottle of Aigle and later a heavy Burgundy, followed by slabs of Vacherin cheese and a chocolate soufflé.

I was beginning to worry about my weight, too, and my trousers were getting uncomfortably tight around my waist. Lily didn't change by as much as an ounce, remaining gloriously slender, although she actually ate more than either Fabian or myself. Eunice, who was chubby and cuddly, remained chubby and cuddly. Fabian, by some miracle, was losing weight, and looked much the better for it, as though the sudden injection of money into his life had drastically improved his metabolism. No matter how much he ate and drank his eyes remained clear, his skin an even healthy pink, his gait springy, his mustache bristling with virility. Generals who had endured long years of peacetime obscurity must react similarly. I thought, when suddenly put in command of armies for enormous, bloody battles. Looking at him, I had the gloomy presentiment that. like a private in the ranks, I was going to do the suffering for the two of us.

Eunice had turned out to be a pretty, pleasant girl with an upturned nose, vulnerable blue eyes, the flowery coloring of a springtime mountain meadow, a sprinkling of freckles, a figure that would have been more fashionable in the age of Victoria than it was in the 1970s, and a soft, almost hesitant manner of speaking that was the result, it was easy to imagine, of the crisp and authoritative speech of her older sister. It was hard to conceive of her going through the Cold-stream Guards, as Lily had suggested, or any other regiment.