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

Louis Stanislaus Xavier, Comte de Provence. He was known to all Europe as Louis XVIII—King of France—deposed by the usurper Napoleon Bonaparte one hundred days earlier.

But such information was power only if used quickly and effectively. Braving ruin and fear of death in the channel, the young man had arrived here, at the London Stock Exchange, only hours before the news of the French defeat at Waterloo. But by the end of several hours’ trading, he’d bought so many devalued consols that he’d attracted much attention.

“I say—what is the Jew up to today, buying all these consols?” one exchange member commented to another. “Has he not heard the news of Blücher’s defeat at Ligny? Do you suppose he thinks a war can be won with half an army?”

“You might do well to follow him in the bidding, as I have,” replied his acquaintance coolly. “It’s been my experience, he is usually right.”

When at last the news of Waterloo reached London, it was soon learned that the young man had indeed cornered the market on consols—at less than ten percent of the face value.

The man who’d questioned his reasoning found his young colleague entering the exchange alone one morning.

“I say, Rothschild,” he said, clapping him heartily on the shoulder, “you’ve done quite well in these consols of yours. It’s said you’ve made over a million pounds in profits in less than a day!”

“Is it?” said the other.

“It’s always said that you Jews have a talent for sniffing out opportunities for money, and that’s why you have such large noses!” The man, whose bulbous red nose was larger by far than that of his companion, laughed. “But what I must know—from the horse’s mouth as they say—is just this: Was it really Jewish intuition? Or did you know before all of London that Wellington had the battle in hand?”

“I knew,” said Rothschild with a cold smile.

“You knew! But how the devil … did a little bird tell you?”

“That is precisely correct,” Rothschild replied.

A NIGHT AT THE OPERA

Rheingold! Rarest gold!

O, might only thy purest magic waken again in the waves!

What is of value can only dwell in the waters!

Base and vile are those enthroned above!

—The Lament of the Rhein Maidens,

Richard Wagner,

DAS RHEINGOLD, Act I.

SAN FRANCISCO

More music has been written about money than about love—and often, with a happier ending and a catchier tune. Poverty might cause some to sing the blues, but wealth and greed seem to call for something on a larger scale: grand opera.

I knew well to what heights the souls of men were inspired by the theme of money. I was a banker. But to use the appropriate gender, I should call myself a “bankette”—a computer jock, and the highest-priced woman executive at the all-powerful Bank of the World.

If I hadn’t been making so much money, I couldn’t have afforded my box seat at the San Francisco Opera. And if I hadn’t been sitting in that opera box that dreary night in November, I would never have come up with the idea. The idea was how to make more.

Grand opera is the last refuge of the wild capitalist. Nobody crazy enough to pay for it would dream of missing it. It’s the only form of entertainment where so much money can be spent to see so much money being spent on so little entertainment.

It was a month before Christmas in the winter of the great rains; the rains washed even the fog away, and brought down mountains of mud, clogging the roads and bridges. Only fools would have ventured forth in weather like that. Naturally, the opera house was packed when I arrived.

I was dripping, literally, in velvet and pearls. There was no parking near the opera, so I’d had to slosh through water holes like a guerrilla in combat training. I was late and I was mad as a wet hen; neither condition had to do with the foul weather.

I’d just had a run-in with my boss. As usual, he’d shot me down—this time, in a way I was unlikely to forget. I was still trying to swallow my anger as I raced up the marble steps. The third bell was sounding as the white-gloved usher unlocked the door to my box.

Though I’d had the same seat for three seasons, I came and left so quickly I had time only for a nodding acquaintance with the others who shared the box. They were the sort who yelled bravi instead of bravo. They’d memorized every libretto and they always brought their own icer of champagne. If only I’d had time for that sort of commitment to anything at all but bloody banking.

I’m sure they thought it curious that I often arrived late and always alone. But as soon as I’d arrived at the bank ten years earlier, I’d learned that neither social life nor romance fared well in the pressure-cooker world of high finance. A bankette had to keep her eye on the bottom line.

I made my way to the front seat just as the lights were dimming, and sank into the upholstered chair. In the darkness, someone had the kindness to pass me a glass of champagne. I sipped the bubbly and hiked at my décolletage, which was drooping soggily as the curtain was rising.

The opera that evening was entirely appropriate to my mood: Das Rheingold, one of my favorites—the first of Wagner’s massive, overwritten works in the Ring of the Nibelungenlied. It begins with the theft of precious gold from the depths of the Rhein. But the entire, four-opera Ring elaborates the ageless tale of corruption among the gods—who are so greedy they’re willing to sacrifice their own immortality for a choice piece of real estate called Valhalla. At the end of the Ring, the gods are destroyed, and the palatial Valhalla goes up in a burst of flame.

I looked out over the glittering footlights into the murky blue depths of the Rhein. The dwarf Alberich had just stolen the gold, and