The Legacy

Hal Demeter, a mild, pleasant young man, with the kind of pleasant-seeming American face you pass in the street without noticing, lived in a good apartment on East 68th Street without child or wife, cat or dog—no companionship, in fact, except for a recurring bad dream. To the married, family-surrounded man, dreams come as a kind of trap door through which he can vanish into a land of his own endless luck or endless misery; but to the solitary man, they are a kind of society. Hal's dream was perfectly realistic without being real.

While reading late at night, he often fell asleep on the green-silk-covered sofa in his living room, slipping not into any fantasy country but simply back again into (continued on page 224) The Legacy (continued from page 135) the same room, with the lights on, the same book or magazine by his side and the same dressing gown covering his body. The door would open and Krieses, whom he knew perfectly well, would come in and, as he always had, would sit down abruptly in the chair by the window. Krieses would look just the same as usual—the stiff white pelt on his head, those sorcerer's eyes in a heavy, peasant face. Memory—though he couldn't quite put a finger on it—told Hal clearly that Krieses had gone insane, but there was not a bit of it here and now. The old man filled and lighted his pipe and spoke in the familiar way.

He said, "Young Hal"—one of the affectations Hal had never liked—"I suppose you're aware of the fact that you're now one of the richest men in this country and possibly in the world."

Hal kept silent, dreading to have to go through this again.

"I don't know how many millions you're worth—probably you don't know yourself at this point, but, as they used to say in my day, your fortune is staggering. Eh? Isn't that true? Admit it." It always occurred to Hal that Krieses never conversed with people—he just kept shoving them. Before he was through with any conversation, no matter how trivial, he had always forced some kind of confession. Krieses' idea of a good talk was one or two suspects and a wall to push them up against.

"That Swiss company you own must be one of the heaviest things in Europe. If you collected all the stock you own in American firms, in one place, you'd make the big mutual funds look like odd-lotters. Wouldn't you, son? Wouldn't you? Why, if they formed a club of the ten biggest men in the country, maybe the Rockefellers wouldn't get in, but there you'd be—little Hal D., sitting right up near the head of the table, the kid wonder nobody ever heard of."

Hal wanted to say, "Get out; I know you; you're dead. Get out and leave me alone," but his voice wouldn't work.

"These past eight years you've gone through the market like a reaping machine, haven't you? Except for a couple of fumbles at first, before you had it figured, you haven't had a single bust. Well, son, I don't know every little corner you've got covered, but I know the main story. You and I are the only ones who know it, isn't that right?" His slow, battering voice was like a headache that can't be driven away. Hal tried to close his eyes, but they wouldn't close.

"And I taught it all to you. Admit it! I taught you." Krieses leaned forward in his chair and pointed the stem of his pipe at Hal's head. "Hal, the day is coming when I'll drop in here—just like this evening—and ask you to pay what you owe me. And you'd better be ready."

Krieses always paused after that and tamped his pipe in a leisurely way. Then he'd get slowly to his feet and, looking around the room, seem to stare at the wall above Hal's desk. "I see that you've still got Battledore's pistol hanging up there," he'd say. "Pretty thing, but you do have to be careful about loading it." Krieses always shut the door, which locked behind him as he left.

Then Hal would wake up, dreading to look at the chair where his night visitor had sat, dreading himself, and frightened. He sometimes went to the telephone with the notion of calling Elena, but he always stopped short with a kind of premonition that the receiver would be lifted and he would hear the old man's voice: "Young Hal, I've been waiting for you to call."

Instead, he'd pour himself a glass of whiskey or take a Nembutal and go to bed, trying to drug the rest of the night into nothing. But before he went toward the bedroom door, he always walked over and touched the wall above his desk, to make certain that the antique pistol was really no longer there but locked away in his wall safe in the study.

• • •

On graduation day in 1960, Hal Demeter had walked away from his Amherst room leaving all his books still on the shelves and all the dead trappings of four years of college behind him. He joined no graduation parties, said goodbye to not a single professor or friend, but got into his old car and drove to New York. He felt that the world had been created for him on that day. Except for his elderly guardian up in Hartford, he had no family and no ties. He had $500 in his pocket. John Kennedy was going to be elected President in the fall. The earth's great bull market lay before him.

With the right word from his guardian, Hal had got a job as a margin clerk at Merrill Lynch—which simply meant that he watched stock quotations and sent out telegrams to customers. When a stock declined to a specified figure, those who had bought on borrowed money either had to write another check or be sold out. It was a fascinating job, because, even as a wage slave, Hal was now close to the greatest fascination of the world. He developed an enormous memory for the minutest fluctuations of the stocks he watched. Moody's Industrials was his serious reading and for light fare in the evening, he read Barron's, The Wall Street Journal, Forbes and Business Week. On the evening of his 21st birthday, his guardian, Andrew Winship—a gray, genteel New England voice far, far away—called to wish him well.

"I hope you've found a decent and suitable apartment, my boy?" Hal thought frantically. Decent? He hadn't noticed.

"I guess so, sir. It has two rooms." Then he collected another detail. "It's on Thompson Street and you have to walk up three flights to get to it."

"I hope you have made some friends? Young people ought not to be alone too much in a big city. Very tiresome."

"Oh, yes. Yes, of course, sir." Hal couldn't remember having a single conversation that wasn't functional; not a useless word for months.

"Well, you must go over and make yourself known to Boyne Parker at the Chase Manhattan. Bonehead and I were classmates, class of 1912, you know. He knows all the right people and he'll show you a good time."

"Please don't worry about me, Andrew," Hal said. He wondered if Bonehead Parker were still on duty at the bank at the age of nearly 70. But he inquired no further.

Once reminded of it, Hal did feel a little lonely. So, instead of eating a sandwich at his desk, he began to go to the Board Room for lunch. The Board Room was a dingy luncheonette with "popular prices," as advertised—and unpopular food. It did have two or three tables where, Hal found, every noon there sat some hungry young men like himself—and a few girls, too—swallowing the poor food automatically but feasting and gorging on facts and statistics.

The first time he joined them—he couldn't resist entering their argument on Dow theory—they simply made room for him without looking at him and continued. A swarthy young man—Hal subsequently learned his name was Dave Cohen—had taken the conversation, like an intercepted pass, and was running with it. Hal was astonished at his fluency and his rapid command of figures. He was impressed with the way the square-faced blond guy across the table picked Cohen up on what he called "obvious and palpable errors." Hal began to feel that he was getting into the college he had never found at Amherst.

It was a college, and an intelligence network, too. The young men and girls were scattered in various law, brokerage or investment offices around Wall Street. Dave Cohen, Joyce Flynn, Murray Marks, Don Fino, Pat Lindbloom—and there was a very pretty blonde girl, quieter than the rest. Hal finally found out that her name was Elena Marsh. All of them were obsessed with the game; like Hal, they had taken jobs not for future advancement but to be where the action is. Each was shrewd and quick-minded. And they were excellent spies.

Hal often saw, as the pea soup slowly jelled and the grease oozed from the hamburgers, a deal that took his breath away. It would begin with an interesting bit overheard that morning at a bank. Somebody else would throw in a fragment that he had happened to see in a letter on an important desk not his own. An obscure article that had appeared in The Wall Street Transcript a month ago. A likely rumor about certain inside buying. Another piece or two. A few statistics quoted from memory. Suddenly, the whole design would take form in front of their eyes. Immediately, everybody began to pull out what cash he could spare and put it in the center of the table.

Sometimes the collection was enough to buy ten or twenty shares, sometimes it bought only two or three. But almost every time, the bet was a winner. If the profit was large enough, they divided it equitably; if it was small, they used it for a dinner—at some other restaurant. Out of these minor windfalls and his $60 a week, Hal began to save enough for some ventures of his own. Also, he lost his head enough to start taking Elena out every week or so.

When Hal first asked her where she came from, she said, "I'm trying not to be from Pontiac, Michigan." She had quit MSU in her junior year and had come to New York at just 19. Like Hal, she lived in a grim cubbyhole apartment; she read Barron's just as avidly as he did; she believed the same thing; she breathed the same air. If not golden, it was at least the gilt-edged air of hope.

To Hal and to everyone else involved, the Board Room days were ones of excitement, initiation and impatience. Poor as they were, they lived on the elusive scent of fortune, and they were inseparable. Thus, Hal was astonished when Don Fino—a nervous, sharp-faced boy who had been something of a math prodigy at Stanford—stopped appearing. Nobody seemed to know quite what had happened to him, though there was some vague talk that he had been lured away to a job in Washington, "or something kind of hush-hush, anyway." It seemed incredible.

Then one day Dave Cohen was no longer at his place at the table. And by the end of the week, they had to assume that he, too, had pulled out. A telephone call to his apartment house confirmed that Dave had left suddenly, giving his parents' address in Baltimore as the place to forward mail. That was a major loss—not only because Dave had been ingratiating, clever and a nonstop talker but because his job at Investor's Mutual had produced some invaluable pieces of information.

The fog really settled in when Pat Lindbloom vanished a few weeks later. That just about finished the investment pool and, during one more-or-less silent lunch, Hal could see that the few remaining members all seemed to be having second thoughts about themselves.

"Well, it is tough to get along on sixty or seventy dollars a week when you could be building yourself a career nest in some nice, big corporation, I guess," Elena said.

"I'm sticking," said Hal. "And don't you desert, either." But one Thursday, when Hal came home from work, there was a note from Elena on his bed.

"Hal, dear," it said in her neat, girls'-school printing, "don't be sore. I've left. Don't try to get in touch right away—but I promise you'll be hearing from me soon." He tore it up and spent the evening walking aimlessly around the East Village, kicking any loose thing in his way and damning her. Elena, to be sure, hadn't much to lose by leaving. She had been a chalk girl for a small Wall Street commodity house, and her bottom-rung job had been no more than marking quotations on a blackboard all day long. But Hal had never dreamed that Elena would be a quitter, too. He'd just assumed that what all of them used to call green fever was as strong in her as in himself.

He worked listlessly for the next few weeks and avoided the Board Room. Then, on a Friday, one of his worst days since the death of the circle, he came dragging up the stairs to his apartment with a bag of groceries under his arm—and found Elena there. He dropped the bag in his doorway.

"Hal, dear!" she said and kissed him. She pulled away quickly. "Leave that stuff. Pay your rent. Grab those bags and let's get out of here." Hal looked at his studio couch and saw that she had packed all his clothes into his two beat-up suitcases.

"Elena, you've gone off your rocker. What in the hell are you doing? I'm not going anywhere."

"Don't argue," she said, "I'm parked by a fire hydrant. Think of it as a fun-and-games weekend if you want to, but move. I'll explain in the car. This is your chance of a lifetime, ol' buddy—it's like buying IBM in 1933."

Those last words had a deep emotional effect on Hal. He moved. He grabbed the bags and lumbered down the stairs. He put $30 into the hand of the astounded superintendent. Elena got the car away from the curb and down the street just as a punitive-looking cop appeared from the other direction.

Her driving, though it had plenty of dash and spirit, lacked a certain finesse, and it wasn't until they got out of the Manhattan traffic that Hal began to be calmer. "Wow! Fun and games all the way," he said. "Is this what you meant?"

"You have to admit that I didn't hit anything."

"I do. And now you have to admit what this kidnaping is all about."

"Well, first, we're headed for Greenwich. I think. I'm not too good at directions. If we get there, we are going to be house guests at the elegant landed estate of Mr. Sol Krieses. You recognize that notorious name, I hope?"

"Sure. The wizard. A legend in his own time. I've heard the tag line 'As wise as Solomon and as rich as Krieses.' Now, little girl, drop the funny jokes and pull up at the first comfy-looking motel that happens along here. I'm hungry. And I need about four vigorous martinis."

"No motel," she said. "We're quality folk now. I'm not kidding. We are going to Krieses'. But first I'm going to tell you a nice story. Shut up and listen...."

Obviously, Elena had the tale pretty well in hand and—with a few interruptions to curse other drivers—she related it fluently. It began not with Krieses but with that fantastic figure of the past, Abel R. Battledore, the great lone-wolf plunger of the bad old days before the SEC. He was the villain of a hundred true, false and mixed stories about corner schemes and panics. He had been, more often than not, incredibly successful—and his monument was the 1933 Securities Act, which many people said was designed in an effort to put him out of business. He changed the whole course of the market in the years between 1900 and 1933. The day after Black Tuesday in 1929, when billions of dollars in market value was wiped out of common stocks in one wild afternoon, The New York Times threw its heaviest artillery against him. The editorial laid the crash to Battledore's short selling. A few years later, when Battledore killed himself, most people thought that the Times had ruined his life. Actually, Elena said, the truth may have lain somewhere else. When he died, the old man owned more than he ever had before.

Krieses was his bright young man, a protégé Battledore had picked up someplace. Nobody knew quite what that involved, because Battledore had been rumored to be homosexual—but then, there were few things that Battledore hadn't been accused of. At any rate, Krieses—brilliant, secretive, a born manipulator of money in his own right—had been a fitting heir.

Battledore had left him almost nothing tangible, which was Battledore's way. There was a small portfolio and a little cash. But the legacy that didn't appear in the will was Krieses' education in market alchemy, the superb mystery of how to turn paper into gold and gold into more paper, as the magic line on the chart dipped and rose. He prospered.

Krieses was one of those rare, solitary men who have no friends. He never gave advice, never asked for it and never listened to it when it was offered him. He worked through agents. He would not talk to the press. Predictably, the adjective "mysterious" usually prefaced his name in newspaper stories.

By the time Elena had nearly finished, they were in Greenwich. "I get it." Hal said. "He wants to find out all about that fifty-dollar killing I made in Chrysler the other day. That's why he's asked us up here."

"Oddly enough," she said, "there's some truth to that. I work for Krieses. And he's going to offer you a job, too."

She turned into a long driveway that led through trees and finally ended in a gravel semicircle before a massive Victorian house with a huge porte-cochere. A liveried servant was waiting to put the car away when they got out, and another took the bags. They walked into a marble-floored hallway tall enough and full of enough carved wood. Hal thought, to make a fair-sized cathedral. Someone guided them through a door. The room was paneled in dark oak and it deepened away far beyond the light of a few table lamps. In front of a two-story stone fireplace with a carved escutcheon sat an easy group of young men and girls drinking and talking. Dave Cohen, Don Fino, Pat Lindbloom, Murray Marks, Joyce Flynn and the rest of the original group. The whole Board Room circle getting pleasantly drunk like millionaires. Dave saw him first and yelled, "Yonder peasant, who is he?" In a minute, they were all laughing, shaking hands, slapping Hal on the back.

That night, a long, long way from the luncheonette, the circle ate roast beef in a baronial dining room. But the conversation wasn't much different in tone—Cohen trying to talk them all down, Lindbloom trying to barricade him with occasional hard facts. At last, with everybody taking a voice and the whole thing sounding like a madrigal at times, the story got told. Krieses—who had all his meals served in his own sitting room on the second floor—was a very odd guy. None of them knew him yet. Strangely enough, he seemed to know all about them. As far as they could determine, Dave said, Krieses must have come across the circle by chance.

It was known that Krieses disliked Wall Street. Years ago, he had owned a seat on the stock exchange, but nowadays he went to Lower Manhattan only infrequently. And, Fino put in, didn't it stand to reason that a guy like that would avoid fancy restaurants, where he'd be recognized? Wasn't it more likely that he'd drop around the corner to an obscure short-order joint? And what could be more obscure than the Board Room?

Of course, of course, Joyce Flynn said, all that could be deduced. Krieses must have dropped in on a day when they were especially brilliant—assembling all those crumbs, threads, stray fingerprints and pieces of crumpled carbon paper into an inspiration. Had it been their Time Inc. day? No, Dave interrupted, it was obviously the day they psyched Revlon.

But it didn't matter which. It was clearly one of their better moves. Murray Marks' theory—much disputed—was that old Krieses had decided to amuse himself with a few thousand dollars. He'd overheard the whole conversation, had been impressed with the way their logic worked and had gone out immediately and bought National Knackwurst or whatever it was they'd picked—and some days thereafter found that he had a winner.

Whether that notion was true or not, one thing was certain, Dave said. Old Krieses researched every one of them right down to the label in the third-best suit. Then he must have decided to buy the team. In his typical secretive way, he had kidnaped them one by one and brought them up here to Greenwich. What was the deal? Just the old Board Room operation brought up to the big time. Yes, it was a lot different now. Instead of having to gather stray pieces of research, they now had access to the Krieses library, which comprised everything about the market that ever got into print. Instead of coming up with those dog-eared ones or fives for their buying pool (three days' subway fare or half the weekend groceries), they'd recommend the investment of millions. But Hal wanted to know how they could ever manage it without the old intelligence system. Out here in Greenwich, they were cut off, weren't they? No, said Dave, not at all. Krieses had a system of his own. He paid very well. In his network he had the kind of people who didn't have to sneak a look at a confidential letter, simply because the letter was addressed to them in the first place. Hal didn't have to worry about that.

The wine was good; the brandy was old and mellow; the evening ended late. When Hal finally went to bed in a neat Victorian bedroom in the north wing of the house, there came a tap at his door, a rustle of nylon in the dark and a familiar touch.

• • •

At breakfast the next morning, there was an envelope beside Hal's plate. It contained a memo, at the top of which was printed "From Krieses." Hal was requested to "appear at Mr. Krieses' study at nine o'clock."

The second-floor study was approached through a business office that looked like any other, with desks and filing cabinets and three secretaries at work. One of them let him through the heavy oak door, and he found himself in a pleasant, high-ceilinged room bright with sunlight from a French door opening onto a balcony. Evidently, Krieses had just finished his breakfast at a small white-linen-covered table. Now he was sitting at an elegant but unbusinesslike escritoire, reading the second section of the Times. He looked up with a half-smile to examine his new capture—and it was in that attitude that Hal always remembered him.

Krieses began to speak almost at once; it was a contradiction to hear that rather musical, deep voice, with some trace of an ancient accent, come from the oxlike, thick man. "Mr. Demeter, how-d'ye-do, and please sit down. I don't like nonsense in business, and so you don't have to tell me anything about yourself or offer any references. I know all that. Now, I am going to offer you a job. I don't have to describe what it is, because your friends will already have told you.

"First I am going to tell you what you get—and you can stop right there if it doesn't suit you. The first year, your salary will be one hundred dollars a week, and you will have an expense account. You will work as part of a small team on certain investment projects. You and the others will share ten percent of any profits when we sell. I'll take any losses myself. Now?"

Hal nodded, somewhat dazed. For him, this was almost a religious experience.

"It isn't an armchair job. You and the others will have to travel. You'll look at plants and size up industries. You'll go down to the Street, to Chicago, San Francisco, Detroit, even overseas. You'll use your brains to put together every hunch and every scrap of information you get. The minute you have something, you bring it to me—you'll get a fast answer, yes or no. If it's yes, then you really get to work."

By this time, the pleasurable haze had evaporated from Hal's mind. He'd got into Krieses' quick tempo.

"And that means you'll establish accounts in your own name all around the country and begin to buy and sell. The project will have a master plan—aimed at what we calculate we can get out of it. At the same time, you're going to be very sensitive to every change in the wind. And I don't mean when it starts to blow up from the other direction; I mean just the first few minutes, when the early breezes begin to stir the leaves. Do you get that? If you do, I'm finished. Do you want to ask me anything?"

"One dumb question," Hal said slowly. "Why us? Why did you take my friends and me? You can hire all kinds of experts."

Krieses never really smiled. Sometimes you noticed a little fissure in the rock—as Hal did now. "That isn't dumb," he said. "It's such a smart question I shouldn't answer it. But I'm going to answer anyway, because I give you credit for asking it; but I don't think you're clever enough to know whether I'm lying.

"I'll say this—you're a bright bunch of kids; but what I care about is the fact that you're totally carnivorous. Experts settle for a good salary and a house in the suburbs. I want people who are going to make the big try. Either they're going to be Morgan-Ford-Rockefeller-Mellon-God or they're going to kill themselves trying. I'm buying a ticket to watch a play. Now, tell me if you think I'm telling the truth."

"Half true," Hal said stubbornly.

The rock split again for just an instant. "I like you," Krieses said. "OK, the other half. When I was a kid, I was picked out of the gutter by a great man who knew a secret nobody else knew. I have learned it. I want somebody in the next generation to learn it."

When Hal came out into the hallway, Elena was waiting for him. "I can't say that I got the job," he told her. "It got me."

She smiled, took his arm and began showing him around the house. At the end of this wing—which was mostly assigned to offices and Krieses' living quarters—was the library. He was introduced to Miss Anderson, the full-time reference librarian, and shown around. It was an old-fashioned great-country-house sort of library in its looks—with high shelves, ladders that ran on a rail, a second-floor balcony and a small spiral staircase. But the collection was hardly old-fashioned. On the magazine shelves were all the important financial publications. The bookshelf sections on economics, politics, industry, scientific developments, world commerce—all seemed to contain the best and most recent works.

Hal saw the teletype room, the room with copying machines and microfilm projectors, and he looked into the various offices. His own was just next to the library and its window looked out on a sunlit garden and two tennis courts beyond. "Every morning, when we wake up," Elena said, "we always look around and say to ourselves, 'Then it is really true.'"

The cocktails in the big drawing room and the welcome dinner for Hal were the first and the last of that kind of social frivolity. Krieses had named the place Bourse House, which was plain enough and yet unintelligible to most Americans (there were a good many telephone callers who asked for "Mr. Bourse"). Life at Bourse House was a paradox. There were magnificently stocked bars on every floor, and yet the only sign of indulgence was an occasional pair having a tense business discussion over highballs in the afternoon. The well-equipped kitchen was run by a good chef and a staff of three; it could produce the most elegant meal. Yet frequently, dinner in the great dining room would be served to only two or three—the rest had a sandwich and a bottle of beer brought up to their offices. The gardens were superbly tended, but people seldom walked there. The tennis courts and the big swimming pool were sometimes used by the chauffeur, some of the maids and the two guards, but that was all.

Hal found himself racing, even when there was no reason to race. After his shower and shave inthe morning, he would dress with frantic speed, mumble "Demeter—toast and black coffee in my office" into the telephone and stride down the long, carpeted hallway that led to the south wing. Once it occurred to him that he had been in his office from eight in the morning until two the next morning. He had talked to Denver, Los Angeles, Boston, Birmingham and Zurich. But, except for food orders to the kitchen, he had spoken to not a soul in the house. On business trips, he never stayed overnight in a hotel if he could help it; he always got a night flight back. When he did see Fino and Joyce—the two others in his team—it was for a concentrated hour, with no extra words and no unbusinesslike chatter. Except for two or three shared nights, he had rarely seen Elena since the first day. He missed her. But otherwise, life was perfect.

On the other hand, it was not always easy to understand. Hal had come in March and it was now nearly September. During that time, his team had been trading increasingly large amounts of stock, in recent weeks a volume in six figures. After they had made their initial recommendations to Krieses, he would issue the command to buy so many shares of this at such and such a price—then without warning would order that the stocks be sold. Very early, Hal began to think that Krieses might be working by the rules of a system, and occasionally he thought he had an insight into some part of its structure. The orders often seemed so arbitrary, though, that Hal's pieces of theory never fitted together. And there were even stranger things.

One peculiar set of circumstances came to a dramatic point on an afternoon when his team was having its daily meeting in the small conference room on the first floor. They came in to find a memo from Krieses—time-stamped five minutes before—requesting them to phone buy orders through their accounts in Cleveland, Chicago and Memphis. The shares they were instructed to purchase were those of a large paper company on which the team had furnished a negative report.

"Jumping Jesus!" Fino said, "can't he see how overvalued that stuff is? Earnings were way off last year and they dipped into surplus to pay the dividends. Management is senile and confused. And that rumor about mineral finds on the Canadian timberland is fraudulent. A deliberate plant."

"I know, I know," Hal said, "it's all down in black and white. I'm going to tell him." Furious, he ran out of the room and up the stairs to Krieses' office. "I want to see Mr. Krieses right now," he told the secretary.

"I'm sorry, Mr. Demeter, but he's resting and can't be disturbed. He has left a note for you, though," she said.

Hal tore the envelope open. The memo read: "I know, I know, son, but I have my reasons. Do it." It was signed "K." Three minutes later, they began to phone the orders.

Two days later, the stock started to slip. There were some follow-up news stories about the nonexistent mineral riches. During the next week, it sank like a leaky rowboat, gradually but surely. All of them lost a good deal of sleep over the calamity and they were hardly cheered when Krieses phoned Hal to sell out. He asked the old man for an interview.

"Mr. Krieses," he said, "in the past six months, our team has bought around twenty-five million dollars in stocks for you. We've been able to sell for close to twenty-six point four million. I'd like to point out, respectfully, that these transactions all followed the advice of my team. However, it wasn't followed in regard to that lousy paper company—and we took a four-hundred-thousand-dollar bath right there."

If a stoneface can ever be said to be amused, Krieses was amused. "You seem to have made around thirty-three thousand dollars yourself," he answered. "And you haven't lost a penny, young Hal. I'm touched by your loyalty."

"It's more that I just hate to look stupid," Hal said.

"The wisest trick in the world is to know how to look stupid at exactly the right time. A lesson that every smart young man stubbornly resists learning. Learn it, Hal," Krieses said.

After that dialog, Hal went outdoors and took a long walk, hardly noticing where he wandered. Into the complicated system of ideas he had built up, he was trying to admit a quite simple and antagonistic idea. It seemed plain to him that all of Krieses' decades of shrewd dealing had ended up not in an instinctive art for using the market but in something else—a patterned formula. That, according to everything Hal knew, was preposterous.

Of course, method works, up to a point. The Board Room circle had shown that. And there were indexes—those arcane economic and market statistics that the trade papers call "barometers" and by which you can predict with some degree of accuracy the general behavior of stocks. But you can't invest in stocks in general—you have to pick specific ones. And no matter what the barometers said about stocks in general, any given stock or group of stocks can wander off in the opposite direction, And sometimes the barometers themselves go bad.

No, the game was a random one, like roulette. Hal would agree that the laws of probability would finally work out in roulette—but the trouble was that they'd reach the mathematical balance long after you were bankrupted by your system and, probably, dead.

Suddenly, the source of his thinking struck him. Wasn't it, he thought, because he had not the slightest belief in predestination? Wasn't it because he saw life itself as a random activity and the stock market as the epitome of life's randomness? Undeniably, Hal viewed riches as a way of proving himself. In a world that values, above all other things, material wealth, what better way to prove one's own worth than by accumulating more wealth than anyone else? The caliber of the competition only increased Hal's desire to win. At the end of the game, when everyone counts the paper in front of him, Hal would have the biggest pile.

This is why Hal thought the notion of a stock-market formula was preposterous. If a formula could work, then stocks are not random: They are predictable. And if they are predictable, then the game goes not necessarily to the better player but simply to any imbecile who has the tools—or whatever it takes—to predict them.

At this point in his walk, Hal sat down under an oak tree and lighted a cigarette. As the flame flickered in front of his eyes, he had an interior flash of recollection that came to him almost as if from a previous life. The science of statistics, he remembered, had isolated certain formulas that could predict random activity. One of them was the formula that governed what physicists call Brownian movement. In an empty room, gas molecules move completely at random. But if you let them move long enough, you can predict quite accurately how they will disperse. Not that you can say that molecule X will move from here to there—but you can say that any defined part of the room will have approximately so many molecules in it. Since molecules move at random, it's theoretically possible that all the air in a room might suddenly cluster in one corner. And at that point, we'd suffocate. But that has never been known to happen. When we take a breath, we expect that air will be present to breathe. And it always is.

Hal took another step. If the random activity of the stuff we breathe always turns out to be predictable, why shouldn't stocks be the same? There was really no practical analogy here; it all depended on supposing that the market was a life created by its own nature—and that Krieses had divined the natural laws.

This thought contradicted much of what Hal had accepted, up to now, as truth. But Hal was a flexible philosopher. The personal implications of the idea of a formula he could consider later. Now he had to examine its practical consequences. He went home as fast as he could. It was late afternoon by this time. He ordered drinks sent up to his room and he stopped by to get Joyce and Don.

When they were settled, he told them about his conversation with Krieses and he added, "A little while ago, I began to suspect that he works by the rules of a formula. And now I think I'm sure of that."

"You know, I've been thinking that myself," Joyce said, "Trouble is, the formula tells him to drop half a million for no good reason at all."

"I'm not so sure now," Hal said, "I begin to have the notion that it's more complicated than we imagine—that the formula has losses built into it."

"Oh, crap," Fino said.

"Relax," Hal said. "Look, we deal with just one range of stocks—the listed ones from S to Z, Safeway to Zenith. Out of those, we give most of the play to things like United Air Lines, Standard of New Jersey and TRW. OK? In other words, we're running just one county in the empire. Sometimes we get orders from the central government that hardly make sense in our own little area. But we don't know what goes on in all the other counties and we don't know the strategy that directs the empire as a whole. Maybe one year we have to burn some of our crops because there's a vast surplus in other parts."

They were silent for a few moments. Finally, Fino said slowly, "And if you know what the whole map looks like, there's no reason you couldn't be emperor just as well."

That was precisely what Hal had been leading to, but he preferred to have the conclusion come from one of the others. In fact, it was not a conclusion but the first link in a new chain of ideas.

Joyce Flynn said, "Call it a map, then. A treasure map. The key to the formula. We all have a piece of it. We all have worked together before. Now we have the kind of organization at our disposal that we never dreamed of then. But the important thing is that all of us now have some capital to play with."

"And, if you were thinking along those lines," Hal said, "you might even imagine a shadow empire, imitating all Krieses' moves. Wherever he invests, there might also be a second account, duplicating his transactions in another name. But there would have to be absolute honesty about the money itself. Not a penny could ever be dipped out of the big one to help the little one."

"One reservation," Fino said. "The shadow empire would avoid those deals all of us agree to be certain losses. We don't know that your theory about the built-in loss is right. Anyway, the little empire couldn't afford them."

• • •

During the following week, Bourse House was somewhat more gregarious than it had been before. Three people might be seen walking on the far edge of the artificial lake. Two men might be out on the tennis courts, dressed in white and apparently getting a little exercise. A small group got up a noontime picnic in the old apple orchard. Hal had insisted that all approaches be made in small groups and that they look as normal as possible. The main thing was to keep Krieses from suspecting.

Just as Hal had hoped, no one was opposed; most of them were enthusiastic. It was a little like the conspiracy of the old Board Room days and, though they were gratified by the steady appreciation of their bank accounts as they worked for Bourse House, the rigid system dictated by the old man irked them all. Dave Cohen had once said, "There's nothing more contemptible in the whole world than a little millionaire." And they'd all agreed. Under Krieses, they could become little millionaires.

Gradually, with the absolute discipline of a good espionage network, they began to put the scheme into practice. Hal had been appointed the untitled director, and reports from all teams flowed in to him. The reports were kept absolutely skeletal and functional. As much as possible was committed to memory and passed on orally. What couldn't be handled that way was disguised as a Bourse House report—with only a word misspelled someplace in the first paragraph as a key to denote it as a Board Room paper.

Hal worked harder and later than ever. The early success of the scheme seemed to give him—seemed to give all of them—more drive than ever. It wasn't long before they were delighted to see another of Krieses' obvious miscalculations—in a company that processed food on the West Coast—come to the expected failure, while their selected good bets did handsomely. Strangely enough, with all his new knowledge of the entire Krieses game, Hal was still unable to decipher any more of the system. With some relief—because it didn't fit into his world view—he began to abandon his notion of the master formula. It seemed more and more that Krieses was simply a shrewd speculator who was bound to profit in any market, simply because he had a lot to invest and because he spread his investments around. Don Fino argued persuasively that this was exactly the case.

One Monday, Hal had to take a trip to Washington. He had been exhausting himself over the past week and, when he got on the shuttle to return from Washington late in the day, he slept through the whole short trip. As usual, a Bourse House car met him at the airport and he slept again during the ride to Greenwich. It was late when he finally arrived and Bourse House was dark except for the dim hall lights. As he let himself in, he suddenly remembered a piece of work that had to be done before his meeting with Fino and Flynn the next morning and, somewhat against his sleepy will, he decided to go to his office and put down a few notes.

He went softly along the corridor of the south wing, taking care not to disturb the total silence of the house. He had a kind of superstitious respect for silence itself and, pushing his typewriter aside, he wrote the notes in longhand, then rose and started for his own room. But just as he began to slide his door open, he heard the quiet opening of another door down the hall, and he paused. Some instinct suggested to him that this was Krieses' office door, and he immediately wondered who might be coming out of the old man's office at this time of night. He left his door ajar and peered through the crack.

In the dimly lit hall, he could see a woman. She was shutting the office door with immense care—and she was obviously not Miss Miner, the old man's chief secretary. Miss Miner, he was sure, did not wear that kind of short, transparent nightgown with a filmy sort of robe pulled over it. He was even surer that Miss Miner, under her daily woolens, did not possess the charming rounded effects that he could half see. A romantic lady spy?

She came down the hall silently and into the scope of the low night light that burned just a few yards away from where he was standing. She was Elena. And what she was carrying in her hand was not anything stolen from Krieses' office but a gossamer bit of underclothing—her own. Hal felt sick and furious. But instead of making him jump out to take hold of her, as he wanted to do, the anger and the exhaustion made him dizzy. He could only put his forehead against the door frame until the dizziness passed. When he looked up again, she was gone.

A few minutes later, Hal must have gone back to his own room, pulled off most of his clothes and fallen on his bed; but he hardly remembered doing that, he was so worn out and dazed by what he had seen. It was afternoon when he awoke. He got up, bathed and then ordered something to eat. As his mind slowly began to function, he tried to work out some logic for the emergency. The first thing was to shut off his personal feelings. He had never really formed any clear idea of what Elena meant to him or of what he meant to her. They'd enjoyed the harmony of sex and the harmony of ambition, but he'd never thought beyond that. Now, what he'd been too simple to see had been shown to him—Elena had an ambition far beyond the gradual one the conspiracy offered. And she was willing to go to bed with the old toad just to further it. He got in touch with Fino as quickly as he could and they met in a grove of pines on the far side of the artificial lake.

As Fino sat down on the ground, Hal said, "I've found out—never mind how—that Elena has been seeing Krieses secretly. It looks to me very much as if she may have given our little scheme away. In any case, we can't take chances."

Fino looked at him, astonished. But he knew something about Hal's relationship with her and he didn't question the news. With a bitter expression, he stared at the lake for a moment. Then he said, "All right. We need a quick survival plan. We're dead if the old man can prove anything." This was one of the characteristics Hal liked best about everybody in the Board Room group. They had never wasted a moment placing blame or mourning losses. They moved on instantly to the fact of the changed situation. That was the mark of professionals.

The notion of piecing together Krieses' formula, if it existed at all, had to wait. The first order of business was suspending the shadow empire, and Fino and Hal outlined the plan for liquidating its holdings. Fino took the assignment of passing out the orders to the others and Hal said that he'd try to find out what Elena had told the old man. Hal's assumption was that Krieses would never do anything so direct as calling them all in and firing them; rather, it would be a much more serpentine kind of revenge. The most likely thing would be that Krieses would determine the stocks in which his assistants were most heavily committed, then quickly dump his own holdings in those. If he liquidated suddenly, he could run the prices down sufficiently to ruin the shadow empire.

Foreseen, that could be guarded against. Hal's own assignment, he thought as he walked slowly back to the house, was considerably harder. He couldn't accuse Elena directly. If she had betrayed them, that would be the surest way of letting Krieses know that they were now alerted.

As the twilight settled outside his windows, he sat in his room with a drink and tried to make some fragments of an idea fit together. If he were to get a third person to tell Elena some interesting piece of information about some investment, with the proviso that it be kept secret.... And if he should then put a watch on during the night to see if she carried it to Krieses.... But that was hardly practical. She could always see Krieses by perfectly normal appointment during the day.

Hal ordered a sandwich and sat for a long time, trying to think of Elena as no more than an enemy who had to be dealt with and trying not to think of her in other ways. Finally, he dozed in the chair.

He awoke to a rap on his door and, looking in that direction, he saw a white envelope slide under it. It contained a memo from Krieses: "I want to see you at 11 p.m." All of Hal's nerves suddenly pulled taut. Showdown.

Like an awkward amateur, he had underestimated the old master. Stupid Hal. He had been thinking two moves ahead, while the real player had swiftly run through the whole course of the game to checkmate. He put on his jacket, combed his hair and carefully tied his tie. In the mirror, his face looked white. He knew that he was about to be taught a disastrous lesson, and he knew that he was going to have to accept it without a word. Oddly enough, the only thought that gave him any comfort was the certainty now that he had lost against the most uncanny champion alive.

"Sit down, son," Krieses said in very ordinary voice. He was sitting in his study under the light of a single floor lamp, looking just as always. But it would be a mistake to think that he'd ever show any sign of anger or revenge. "Do you know what this is?" On the drum table beside Krieses, Hal saw an old-fashioned pistol. He felt a sudden paralysis of nerve. In none of his calculations had he ever imagined that the old man would kill. Hal nodded very stiffly.

"I don't think you do," Krieses said. "It's a collector's item of considerable value. It's a fine flintlock dueling pistol made by the famous Joseph Manton of London around the beginning of the 19th Century. A later owner had it converted to percussion cap. At any rate, it has a history, as well as a pedigree. It belonged to Battledore. Battledore got it from the elder Morgan, the old J. P., who got it from Fiske, the railroad man, who got it from one of the greatest—old John Jacob Astor himself. You might call it a financier's pistol. It has a pretty big bore, do you see?" Krieses pointed the muzzle toward Hal, and Hal sat frozen in the chair. "Battledore killed himself with it." Krieses said. Hal had never expected this awful kind of joking.

Then Krieses said, "It's the only thing in my will I have left to you." They were both silent for several minutes.

Finally, Krieses looked up from the thing on the table and said, "Do you want to ask me a question? I've had a sense that there's a question been bothering you for a long time."

Last request? Hal felt desperate. He had begun to try to estimate the distance between his own hands and the table and to wonder how good the old man's reflexes were. Perhaps throwing something first and then.... "I do have a question," Hal said. "I've been wondering for months about this—do you really have a system for the market? Or do you play by experience and instinct? Sometimes I think one way and then, when I see some losses that can't be explained, I think the other."

Krieses showed that odd, brief crack that Hal had always supposed he meant for a smile. "You worry about the fundamental questions, young Hal," he said. "Some people who do that are penniless philosophers. And the others who do it are very powerful men." As Krieses went on, Hal realized that his fears about the gun were ludicrous. He had let himself panic. The old man showed not the slightest sign that he had called Hal in for a denouement.

Krieses continued. "As for a system, let me say that an old teacher of mine inspired me to build one up. I did. Do I know whether there is such a thing as a perfect system? I don't. All I know is that I've been able to put together a complicated thing that seems to work just about every time. You've doubtless been trying to figure it out. And good luck to you. But I hope that you'll never get right to the center of it and discover the final secret. Stop before you do that, Hal. Money buys a lot of happiness, in spite of what fools say."

He had never known Krieses to be so meditative. There were gaps of two or three minutes in the conversation. Finally, Krieses said, "You know, I have the loveliest gardens for miles around and I don't care for flowers. I can ask for and get the best food, but I've never in my life really tasted what I was eating. I can buy anything, but I don't want anything."

"Isn't that a contradiction to what you just said, sir?" Hal asked.

"Not for me, it isn't," said Krieses. "And now it's getting late and I still have things to do. So good night, young Hal." He offered his hand and they shook very formally.

At two o'clock in the morning, Hal heard footsteps along the hallway and he got out of bed to see what was the matter. The bright lights were on in the south wing and people were shouting. He ran down to find a small crowd of servants around the door to the old man's office. He went inside, having had a premonition of what he would see. And he saw it. Krieses was still sitting in the armchair; the Manton pistol had fallen to the floor. Hal would never have dreamed that the old man had so much blood in him.

• • •

Some years later, Hal looked back on his actions of the subsequent few days with a certain amount of shame. It was true that everyone else behaved just as badly. But it was also true that Krieses had never shown personal affection for any of them. And it was true that all of his money was left to a couple of foundations. Yet, it was probably wrong that the servants were the only ones to appear at the simple graveside ceremony. The members of the Board Room group, by this time, were scattered in a dozen cities, quickly liquidating the shadow empire before the effect of Krieses' death could shake the main structure of their holdings. The Krieses-owned stock in their names would, of course, revert to the estate—the old man had made that certain with iron legal bindings before the enterprise had begun.

The final meeting of the circle was a cold ceremony. It was held in one of the Bourse House conference rooms and Dave Cohen acted as chairman. He stood behind a lectern and read the last financial report, giving an accounting of the profits from each transaction. Elena sat apart. None of them had spoken to her since the day of Krieses' death, and when it was necessary, Cohen referred to her as "Miss Marsh"—as if she weren't present.

When it was over, there was formal handshaking all around—it was as if strangers had met for an hour and, with their business concluded, were impatient to be off. All of them had a new life waiting somewhere else. No one said goodbye to Elena and, when they had filed out the door, she was left in the room, still seated in her chair.

Just as he was getting into his car, Hal stopped. He turned and went back to the house. Elena hadn't moved.

"They think you told Krieses what we were doing," he said. "They think the old man killed himself because he couldn't stand to see his students beat him."

"Neither one is true," Elena said, without any tone in her voice. "They're all money-making machines now. They couldn't understand anything human."

"I know that you didn't give us away; I believe you," Hal said, and paused. "Did Krieses tell you about his system—the puzzle we were never able to put together?"

Elena opened her handbag. "This note was in my mail the next day. He must have written it just before he died." On Krieses' familiar memo paper were typed the words: "I Took It With Me."

• • •

That night, Hal moved into a mid-Manhattan hotel. He rented an office and, within a few days, he was able to find a secretary and two assistants—young men he'd known in his Merrill Lynch days. Armed with the knowledge that Krieses had given him just before his death—that the old man did have a system—Hal set about devising his own. The mainspring of the formula Hal finally produced was strong and simple, based on many things he had learned from watching the Bourse House strategy. Among holding companies—those firms whose sole business is that of owning shares in other companies—there is a special type called closed-end investment trusts. Because their held shares have a very specific value—as reported in daily newspaper quotations—the value of shares in such trusts can be computed exactly, according to the trust's assets. Usually, however, the market doesn't value these trust shares precisely—they might have a price either higher or lower than their actual value. Hal suspected that there is a relationship between the premium or discount the market places on the value of these holding companies and the future course of the market itself.

Hal's discovery was a way of using this information to predict how the Dow-Jones Industrial Average—that famous measuring stick of the market's ups and downs—would perform. And it seemed to work. Looking back over the market for the past five years, he found that it would have been unerring. Thus, all Hal had to do was watch his formula; when it indicated "buy," he would purchase equal dollar amounts of all the 30 major companies included in the Dow-Jones. When the formula said "sell," he would dump all his shares and go short.

As Hal expected, this didn't have either the excitement of those educated guesses in the Board Room days or the kind of imperial flamboyance of the Krieses era. It also meant Hal would have to come up with a new view of the game itself—though he vowed to postpone this unpleasant effort, pending real proof of the formula's effectiveness.

The formula was effective, and the money accumulated. Hal began to approach the level he had set for himself—$20,000,000 in investments—with a feeling of dissatisfaction. To be sure, he climbed above the scruffy "little millionaires." He had his own company, a board room of his own with a number of employees. His top-floor apartment was as elegant as a high-priced decorator could make it. He owned land and a beachhouse on St. Kitts and, when he felt restless, he flew to Paris for a weekend with a lovely and amiable girl who lived in an apartment Hal maintained there.

He had occasional parties and saw a few people—but he made sure that they were all people who couldn't tell a debenture from a hot dog. In fact, he knew no one. He heard occasional news of his old friends. Dave had done well in California and had bought a seat on the Pacific Coast Exchange. Pat Lindbloom had bought into a bank. Don Fino was now an executive in RCA—they occasionally had lunch together. But he had never been able to find out what had happened to Elena.

He had just come back from Boston one October day when he got the first signal that his system might be going awry. It was very faint and distant, and yet it was clear to Hal. On one large transaction, he had made somewhat less than he had calculated. It was not a great percentage—yet, it indicated something a little wrong with his formula, something peculiar.

Hal had long ago foreseen such a possibility and had prepared for it. He had made connections with a very discreet, highly specialized investigative service that operated only in the world of finance. When Hal went to see them, he gave them a list of the various brokers he used around the country and asked for a report on whatever specific transactions they may have made on their own.

The findings that were reported eight days later were ominous. When he had worked for Krieses, Hal had spread the investment accounts among about 30 brokers. When he had set up his own operation, he had reduced the list to a half dozen, the men he most liked and trusted. He had carefully kept all dealings separate and none of these men had any reason to know of any other Demeter account.

Nevertheless, just because he'd given each one a much greater portion of his trading, each would have a better idea of his deals. What the investigator had now uncovered was that somebody unknown—names didn't matter here—had pooled the knowledge available to his Boston broker and to his Chicago broker. Somebody was matching him order for order and even, from the evidence, helping others match his orders, too. They were sharing Hal's gains and fouling up the market. The extra players were cutting into the effectiveness of Hal's system.

The realization struck hard. Hal felt seasick, nauseated with his anger. He called for his car and had himself driven home from the office. Once in his apartment, he found that he was gasping for breath. The anger had changed to panic. It was the second time in his life he had been frightened, so frightened that he had no notion of what to do. He could feel himself sitting inert with dread in the study chair, and he could see Krieses' brown hand on the coffee table toying with the antique dueling pistol. And now someone was secretly using him, just as he had once used the old man.

He took several sleeping tablets, but it was some time before he could knock himself out. Just as the drug was finally taking effect, he had a queer, dreamlike sensation of climbing a long flight of stairs. He was carrying something heavy and, though he didn't really want to get to the top of the stairway, he had to plod on. Then he slept.

But in the early morning, when he slowly awoke, the strange sensation of that laborious climb was still with him. He shook his head and slowly sat up in bed; and as he did that, he came at last to the top of the stairway, to an open door and to someone who was waiting for him. He sat on the edge of his bed, too astonished to move.

Then he picked up the bedside phone and dialed a number. "I want Mr. Randall," he said. "Hello, Randall, this is Demeter. I want to tell you that I'm much pleased with that inquiry you did for me. Now I've got another request. I need to find and contact a certain Miss Elena Marsh, who used to work with me at Bourse House. I've lost track of her whereabouts, but she's undoubtedly still in the investment business somewhere. Give it top priority. Find her as soon as possible. I'll pay all you ask for speed and I'll give you a bonus if you get her here for an interview within twenty-four hours. What's that? Oh, tell her I want to offer her a top position. I'll better anything she's making now. In fact, she can name her own figure. Let me know as soon as you can."

"You sent your secret agents to kidnap me," Elena said, when she appeared at his door just after five that afternoon. "But, since I kidnaped you once, I agreed to come without a struggle."

She hadn't changed much in nearly six years. Her face was as fresh and handsome as ever. If there was any change, it was that she seemed slightly more hesitant, less confident than he remembered her.

He took her into the living room and made martinis. Then he showed her around the vast apartment, trying hard to be interesting about the antiques he didn't care for, the paintings somebody else had bought for him and the library full of leather-bound classics he had never opened.

When they were seated again on the sofa, Elena said, "Hal, I was really touched when that man Randall called with your message today. I thought we'd written each other off at the end of the Krieses thing. I don't know how you found out that I am down on my luck—pretty badly, at this point. But I'm grateful that you did. And I certainly could use a job."

Hal, who had expected to have to make all the difficult overtures, was neatly surprised. But he got over that quickly. "I owe you a lot, Elena," he said, "and this is the least I can do. I'm going to offer you a share in my operation. I've done extremely well, and so will you. Now tell me about yourself."

She proceeded to give him some idea of the past six years—she'd had some lousy breaks, she said. She'd been speculating in mercantile commodities on the unregulated exchanges—first very profitably in silver and then with successive setbacks in cocoa, sugar and platinum. Getting more and more desperate, she'd seen her Krieses-days capital dissipated in heavy losses.

Over a few more cocktails, Hal spoke about various incidental things in his own life, avoiding the crucial subject. Finally, he took her into the dining room, where an excellent dinner was ready for them. Hal customarily had his meals sent up from a hotel restaurant nearby, but tonight he had imported a cook. A very expensive cook.

Over brandy and coffee, he began to approach the subject. He didn't tell her how his system worked—she would probably figure that out herself eventually—but he did tell her everything else. She made one or two perceptive comments. At last he was ready to bring the story up to date and, as casually as he could, he said, "Now, there's a little turbulence showing up, and the first thing I want you to work on is a troubleshooting job." Then he gave her the details of the investigation and the imitative purchasing. He tried hard not to seem under pressure. "We've got to do something to counteract them. I've been thinking of easing those two brokers out, getting clear and setting up in other places."

He looked at her sharply. He was glad to see her shake her head, because he already knew that this, the only remedy that had occurred to him, was no good.

"They're not onto my system." Hal said. "All they suspect is what I once suspected about Krieses—that there is a system. In that case, you don't have to know what it is, you simply copy its moves."

Elena put her head in her hands. "Something you just mentioned. It's bothering me. Something I can't remember about the way Bourse House worked. It was a hypothesis, I think, that never came to anything."

"I once had a theory that Krieses' system was a myth—that he was no more than a very smart and very rich gambler. Do you mean that?" Hal asked. Elena shook her head. Hal had picked up the cork to the cognac bottle and he played with it as they sat silent. Then he dropped it. The cork rolled away. He got down on his knees and looked under the coffee table and under the sofa, but it was gone. "Write it off as a loss," he said.

She straightened up suddenly. "Losses!" she said.

"God bless you!" Hal said. "Losses! Krieses' mistakes!"

It was obvious, Elena said, that Hal had to take a few heavy losses. And the broker sheep would follow along and be sheared. Those losses, Hal said, would have to be mixed with a few modest gains. His system had to look—from the brokers' viewpoint—as if it had outrun its luck and had got into trouble. They were suddenly so drunk, not on the cognac but on the idea, that it seemed only natural to pull off their clothes and go to bed.

• • •

Just one year and three months later, when it was all over, Elena thought of what had happened as "the crash." It was the day her own DJA stepped into the open elevator shaft. Then she wondered why something that would have been human and personal to anyone else came so readily to her mind in the inanimate terms of the market. If you played the game long enough and hard enough, did you lose identity as a player and become part of the game itself?

It was mid-January and Elena was about to leave Paris on a night flight. She was early at the airport and, in the bar at Orly, she ran across Dave Cohen. A fatter, very prosperous, balding, somewhat less pompous Dave Cohen. With the second drink, he explained that he'd just been through a cutthroat divorce. He'd given himself a couple of weeks on the Côte d'Azur to try to heal.

Then, when their flight was called, they sat together, talking on through the dark hours about the past days at Bourse House and all that had occurred since. Elena found herself, high over the black Atlantic and enclosed in the strange monotone of the jets, breaking the silence she had sworn to herself.

"... I heard that you were back working with Hal," Dave was saying. "I still can't believe what happened. He was a monster of success. He made it like nobody else. Even Krieses."

"Hal wasn't a monster," she said sharply. "When I first met him, he was a good person, a good man."

"Well, he was a good computer," Dave said. "A mind that clicked twentyfour hours a day. And a heart like Fort Knox. I'll never forget how he outfoxed old Krieses. Then the old man killed himself. And with you—when the rest of us were willing to give you the benefit of the doubt, Hal dropped you cold."

"He found me again when I was broke. I was practically on the street—but Hal found me again and gave me a chance. He didn't have to. You don't understand." As she talked, Elena was once again standing in front of Hal's door, miserable and uncertain whether or not to ring. "I can't quite explain how he struck me when I saw him again," she said. "Gray. His hair was beginning to get gray, but that wasn't really it. It was as if he wasn't with you most of the time. Left for parts unknown. Oh, he was very polite. First he showed me around the apartment—rich furnishings, lots of books in leather bindings, Oriental antiques, a couple of Brueghels. Somebody seemed to have put them there when he wasn't looking. The place might as well have been empty."

At first, she'd thought it was something about seeing her again—a remoteness that incredible success might feel for failure. Then she began to feel that it was less definite than that, an internal transformation she could not even begin to comprehend.

"Suddenly something happened," she said. "We were having coffee and brandy after dinner and the young Hal came back again. Even his voice. It was astounding. You remember what an edge he used to have, that kind of uncanny anticipation? Well, as it came out, he was in danger for the first time in years. It was almost as if he had invited me back to get an audience for it. Somebody was fishing in his waters." She described the operation of the Boston and Chicago brokers.

"And he wanted you to help him?" Dave asked.

"I don't think so. Actually, that's what he pretended. He rigged the whole conversation around some talk about that elaborate system old Krieses was supposed to have had, until we came to the point when I had to say 'losses.' The Krieses system had been burglarproof because of its built-in losses. Hal must have had all that figured, but he wanted me to say it. For that, I got a good job, a share of the action and quite a lot of money. All for being the only one left in the world Hal could really talk to."

"So what happened with the brokers?" Dave asked. "You know, all that talk about Krieses' system is a lot of dreck. Money players are the most superstitious people I know. You either have the Midas touch or you don't."

"For those who believe in it, there is a system," Elena said slowly. "The rest of us will always be poor. Comparatively poor. We don't try to draw perfect circles freehand, because we know we can't. They know they can. What they don't know is that a perfect circle is a kind of zero."

Dave laughed and took Elena's paper cup. "You've lost me. Here, have another drink and tell me how the broker business came out."

So she told the story. The day after her return, she'd taken charge of the entrapment plan with a zest and command she thought she'd lost; and in about three months, it was over. Ryan, the Boston broker involved, followed the Demeter lead to buy very heavily in a profitable data-processing company in Southern California. What Ryan didn't know was that the shares he bought for Hal were being sold, in quantity, elsewhere. After a few weeks of wild swings, that stock began to plunge—and Ryan with it. In the meantime, Hal himself had phoned Alterheim, the broker in Chicago, to buy into a special situation in a Pennsylvania company that was rumored ready to make a breakthrough in irradiated-food research. Alterheim snapped at the bait. Hal made some more telephone calls. A week later, the Times carried a story about the work of an eminent scientist who'd been put in charge of the company's labs. The Chicago group plunged with more than $2,000,000; in small lots, the Demeter company began to sell through other brokers. Hal began selling short just about the time the eminent scientist, well paid for his furlough, returned to UCLA. That interesting fact was quickly followed by a rumor that the FDA was highly dissatisfied with the possible side effects of irradiated food. The stock, which had been at 86, dropped 20 points in a week. It leveled off at 22-1/2; in Chicago, Mr. Alterheim was in deep trouble.

It was Elena who formulated the policy that from then on, at least ten percent of the yearly Demeter profits would go into what they agreed to call "diversionary transactions." And it was Elena who insisted on perfect staffwork and who checked everything herself. She supervised the gradual decentralizing of Hal's assets and brokerage agents. She urged him to buy what turned out to be his most useful channel—the Swiss firm. His orders now filtered back from Juneau and San Juan, Cedar Rapids and Quebec. Brokers had watched the downfall of Ryan and Alterheim and had grown cautious. They put Hal down as a lucky eccentric.

After the story, Elena and Dave were silent for a long time. The plane droned on through the gradually lightening wastes of air toward the Newfoundland coast. In a kind of somnambulistic voice, Elena said at last, "You know, I have slept with only two men in my life. I've always had this thing about enormous wealth. I've always wanted it more than anything else, and I've always known I'd never really reach it. Well, women have a way of getting hold of their unattainable thing—whatever it is, talent, brilliance, money—for a little while, at any rate. They can make it part of them for the moment. Do you understand? That evening. I'd been talking with Krieses about some business or other and he took a drink with me. Then another. I don't think he often drank much. He didn't seem to know what was happening to him. I took him to bed.

"I know it sounds absurd to say. In those days. I had an obsession like that: I wanted to sleep with a billion dollars. It isn't absurd, though, when other women do it for much lesser things. So I did it. I got the old man to drink and I got him to bed."

Dave muttered something and stirred a little in his seat.

"You still don't know the secret?" Elena continued. "Let me tell you. A multibillion dollars isn't a man, it's a corpse. There is a system the rest of us can't imagine, and when the circle closes, it closes with death. I don't think you see what I mean, Dave. I'm not putting it well....

"I mean that once we'd fixed the brokers, Hal drifted off again into that kind of cloudland I'd seen the day I came back to him. He just lost interest—in me or the business or anything. He still played the game, but since he knew he was going to win, the game didn't have any meaning." She broke ofF and sat silent again for a while.

She began again in a near whisper. "Once we were in bed, Hal became lifeless. He dozed. Then he would mutter something. Then he would half sit up. I dozed, myself, and when I awoke in the middle of the night, the light by the bed was on and he wasn't there."

The first blaze of day had touched the wing and Elena shivered and put her hand in front of her eyes.

"Sitting there in the other room by the light of a table lamp. Wearing a dressing gown. Just sitting there silently, looking at the door as if waiting for someone to come in. That horrible antique pistol lying on the table. When I saw Hal like that, I screamed. It was the way the old man had sat that other night a long time ago.

"It was six months later that whatever click Hal was waiting for came. I knew it had to. They found him just as I've said. He had willed the pistol to me. I finally threw it down an incinerator."

Behind them, the sun had edged free of the Atlantic horizon and the plane was suddenly full of broken mirror reflections of light. Dave Cohen stirred restlessly and turned his sleeping face toward her.