Four
For the third time that day Manfred Wallace inhaled the heady scent of victory. He leaned forward over the backgammon board and stared at the dice. Six and five. The gamble had paid off.
‘God damn it, Manfred.’
‘Language, Peter, I believe the Chairman’s within earshot.’
Peter Carlson arched his long neck. Sure enough, Wheaton Blake, Chairman of the club’s Card and Backgammon Committee, was seated near the bar, observing them from behind a glass of chilled white port. Peter gave a coy smile and received a guarded nod of the head in return from the Chairman: Apology accepted. This time.
‘You lucky bastard,’ muttered Peter under his breath.
Manfred didn’t believe in luck, or if he did, that it was the just reward of the skillful. Behind in the race almost from the first, he had played a faultless bar point holding game, gradually eroding White’s advantage. Still ahead, Peter had been obliged to break his midpoint first, exposing himself to a double hit.
This was the one moment Manfred’s bold stratagem had been geared towards—a pyrrhic victory or certain defeat to be determined by one roll of the dice. Ideally, he required six and five. He not only required them, he deserved them, he had earned them, they were his by right. The dice, it seemed, had agreed with him. Coming off the bar, Peter had tried valiantly to bring his two rear men home; but the game had slipped away from him along with the five hundred dollars riding on it.
‘Whiskey?’ asked Manfred.
‘Why not?’
Manfred caught the eye of a waiter polishing glasses behind the bar and the young man hurried over.
‘Two whiskeys and soda please, George.’
‘Just a needle for me,’ said Peter.
‘Of whiskey, sir?’
Peter shot him a look—soda, fool.
‘Ignore him, George, he’s sulking,’ said Manfred.
‘Ignore me, George, I’m sulking.’
George shed a helpless look and shuffled off. Peter pulled a checkbook from his pocket and began to write.
Manfred understood. It wasn’t the money, it was the losing. Not once, but twice; first at squash racquets, now at backgammon. The squash had also been a close-run thing. Evenly matched ever since their days on the varsity team at Yale, Peter’s fitness had dipped a little of late and Manfred had duly developed a hateful little dropshot. Their Thursday game was a regular fixture, and had been since the end of the war. Sometimes they played at the Yale Club down on Vanderbilt Avenue. More often than not the New York Racquet and Tennis Club was the chosen venue, as it was today. Built on a prime patch of Park Avenue, the vast building resembled a Florentine Renaissance palazzo, with rusticated arches and stone walls as thick as a prison, a prison designed to keep unsavory types out rather than in. The interiors were grand yet austere, the physical embodiment of the ideals of the gentleman sportsman, and members still stepped on to its hallowed courts clad in Brooks Brothers flannels, Oxford-cloth shirts and Indian cotton jumpers.
Peter handed over the check. ‘You’re going to have to make it up to me,’ he said.
Manfred smiled, reaching for one of Peter’s cigarettes and lighting it. ‘Jarvis Steel Company.’
‘Never heard of them.’
‘They’re based in Union, New Jersey. They make a range of tool steels, nickel bearing alloys, that kind of thing. They’ve paid dividends every year since 1903. Very sound.’
‘Very boring.’
‘A little. Till now.’
Peter leaned forward, intrigued.
‘Their metallurgical laboratory in Reading has just patented a corrosion-resistant alloy,’ Manfred went on. ‘They’re calling it Jarvis Number 10. I won’t bother you with the technical details. Let’s just say the results of the tests are, well, very impressive according to my man.’
‘You and your men,’ smiled Peter. ‘Where on earth do you find them?’
Manfred shrugged.
‘How much should I put in?’ asked Peter.
At that moment, George returned with the drinks. Manfred waited for him to leave before replying.
‘Forty thousand.’
‘It’s a lot.’
‘Not as much as the hundred you’ll make in a year, maybe two, not including dividends.’ Peter looked suitably impressed; one hundred thousand dollars was a lot of money even by his standards. It didn’t come close to the sum that Manfred’s family brokerage house had made that very morning.
It was Manfred, fresh from Yale, who had convinced the partners of Wallace, Greenwood & Company that they move into sugar when war ripped through Europe in 1939. Sugar was then selling at a paltry penny a pound. Prices had gone through the roof in the First War and there was every reason to suppose the same would happen again.
In all, Manfred and his father had spent a month in Cuba before settling on a producer just emerging from bankruptcy and controlled by the Federal National City Bank of New York. It was another six weeks before the firm formally took control of the operation. They spent heavily on processing and refining equipment, an investment which had more than paid its way by the time America entered the war in 1941. Sugar prices continued to rise, the business prospered, buoyed up by wartime demand for ethyl alcohol, readily produced from sugarcane molasses.
The foresight, the risk, the hard work had all been theirs. Eight years on, it was time to reap the rewards, a staggering seventy-six-fold return on their investment. The deal had been finalized that very morning—Manfred’s first victory of the day, indeed, his greatest to date. A few months shy of his thirtieth birthday, he was wealthier than he could ever have imagined. More importantly, though, for the grand design of his life, he had also made a lot of very influential people rich, and this was something they would never forget.
‘Excuse me, Mr Wallace.’ It was George again. ‘There’s a phone call for you.’
Manfred and Peter exchanged a look. No one ever phoned them at the club. It was a matter of principle.
‘It’s your father.’
‘My father?’
‘He says it’s important, sir.’
Manfred tamped out his cigarette and followed George to the bar. He paused for a moment before raising the phone receiver to his ear. Something had gone wrong with the deal. No. Impossible. It was signed and sealed, he’d witnessed it with his own eyes just hours before.
‘Father?’
His father’s voice, when it came, was not its usual stentorian self; no bark, no bite. ‘Manfred, I’m afraid I have some terrible news.’
Peter Carlson drained the last of his whiskey and turned in time to see Manfred replace the receiver on its cradle, groping for the surface of the counter to steady himself. His face was ashen, even the high color of his recent exertions on the squash court drained from it.
Peter hurried over. Manfred’s blank eyes seemed focused on some distant, imaginary horizon. ‘Manfred, are you all right?’ he asked. Only when he rested a hand on his friend’s arm did Manfred appear to register his presence.
‘My sister…she’s dead.’
‘What? How? I saw her at El Morocco’s only last night.’
‘Not Gayle. Lilly.’
‘Lilly?’
‘She drowned.’
Peter remained silent, not because he couldn’t think of anything to say, but because in the twenty-two years he had known Manfred Wallace he had never once seen him cry.