A Calculated Risk by Katherine Neville (best time to read books .txt) 📗

be controlled by hand. Then you can mix your color to perfection. You will not destroy the delicate nuances of your engraving.”

“Where would I find a press like that?” asked Georgian.

“I have one here, which I can lend or sell to you, Miss Heyer. It is quite old, but in extremely good order. How will you be going home? It’s possible that we could squeeze it into a very large taxi. And I believe two people could carry it down the steps to the walk. If you do not have to go up five flights at the other end …”

The phone was ringing, and Lelia was turning over piles of cushions on the sofa trying to find it. At last, she dug it out and answered breathlessly.

“Allo? Allo?” she cried into the receiver. Then, after a moment, she said, “Oh no! Oh merde! Oui—he is here. Yes, I will make him to come at once. But you are complètement fou, my chéri.”

“What I can’t figure out,” said Tor, coming in from the kitchen with floury dough all over his hands, “is how you always get the raisins to puff up in the strudel if you’re putting them between two layers of dough—What’s wrong?”

Lelia was standing there, regarding him with stricken face.

“It is Zhorzhione,” she said, replacing the phone in its cradle with a sigh. “You must to go and fetch her.”

“Where the hell is she?” he said, wiping his hands on the cloth tied around his waist. “It’s nearly five o’clock—she was due back at noon. Has something gone wrong?”

“Oui. She is waiting at the Staten Island ferry for you to fetch her.”

“Why doesn’t she take the subway uptown?” he asked.

“She is at the ferry landing on Staten Island,” said Lelia.

“Then why doesn’t she take the ferry and then take the subway?”

“Because, mon cher ami, there was no one to help her on and off of the ferry with her printing press.”

MERGERS

Money in itself cannot grow.

—Aristotle

FRIDAY, DECEMBER 4

I didn’t see Georgian or Tor for the rest of the week. They’d been so mysterious and secretive about their plot—but they assured me they would reveal all at dinner on Friday night, before I returned to San Francisco. Meanwhile, I had work of my own to do.

New York was full of banks, and my secretary, Pavel—who loved making long-distance calls—had apparently phoned every one of them to put on my itinerary. Though my visits to these security divisions had been set up to camouflage my jaunt to see Tor, now that he was my competitor in a wager—no longer my adviser—the rules had changed as well as the stakes. Since I was here in New York anyway, a bit of boning up on security might not hurt at all.

Mr. Peacock at United Trust was near the end of my list, but he had nothing new to tell me, so I managed to weasel out of my luncheon date with him. I needed some time alone to think. But when I went to my last planned appointment, I was in for a big surprise.

There must be a hundred thousand people in New York named Harris, so I was taken by surprise when I found that the Harris in charge of Citibank security was one of my old pals—the Bobbsey Twins!

Ten years earlier—the last time I’d seen him—he’d been slightly overweight, with unkempt hair, loose shirttails, and cigarette ashes sprinkled over his belly. Time and money had clearly worked in his behalf.

As he rose from behind his elegant rosewood desk to greet me, I noted his well-trimmed silver sideburns, his cashmere blazer and rep tie, and the rack of expensive foreign pipes gracing his bureau.

“Harris!” I cried as he came around to embrace me warmly. “What on earth are you doing working here? When I spoke with Charles last week, you were at the data center uptown—”

Harris put a finger to his lips and glanced through the window in his office door.

“Rather bad show, if they got wind of it,” he told me. “I’m regarded as something of the high official. I say—have you any luncheon plans? Perhaps we could get away and have a chat.”

So Harris grabbed his camel overcoat and a fringed silk scarf and we headed off to the Four Seasons—a slight upgrade from the bocci court where we’d dined in days of yore.

The building that housed the Scientific Data Center hadn’t changed much in the past ten years, as I learned when we taxied up there after lunch. It was charred as if it had been gutted by fire. The copper wires in Charles’s core banks must be green by now, I thought, if they were still keeping the windows ajar to “cool him down” with Queens factory fumes.

Brits like the Bobbsey Twins always addressed one another by surname; a bit confusing, since their names were the same. As teckies, they’d resolved this problem by calling each other by subscripts: Harris Sub One and Harris Sub Two. And so I still thought of them.

When we entered the data center, Harris1 was standing, his back to us, embroiled with a machine that had many moving parts and seemed to be folding and stuffing envelopes. The noise was deafening.

The room itself seemed slightly cleaner than in the past. Charles Babbage sat at center, squat and happy as a pasha surveying his harem. He’d been painted a cheerful sky blue, and was sporting an old Brooklyn Dodgers baseball cap, perched atop his console. Even in this disguise, he was easy to recognize.

“Blimey, if it isn’t Verity Banks!” Harris1 cried, when he turned to catch sight of me. “Charles, look up, lad—your mother’s here!”

“Turn off that infernal racket!” yelled Harris2. “I can’t hear myself think.”

Harrisi1 switched off the envelope stuffer and came over to us, beaming. He, too, looked remarkably well, in his tweedy jacket with leather elbow patches and a heathery turtleneck sweater. He’d grown a salt-and-pepper beard, and seemed every inch the country gent.

“You’ve