Heads You Win Read online

  “Would he even recognize you if you ever turned up to one of his supervisions?” said Sasha.

  Ben ignored the comment. “What about you, Fiona, will you join me for another round?”

  “Much as I’d love to, Ben, I also need to get to bed. I don’t want to fall asleep during tomorrow’s Torts lecture.”

  “I’d join you,” said Ben, “but I’ve just spotted a group of Liberals who I need to butter up if I’m to have any chance of being elected to the committee.”

  “Remember to put in a good word for me,” said Fiona. “And don’t forget you’ll be disqualified from standing if you buy them a drink this close to the election.”

  “Ben’s right, you know,” she said to Sasha as they headed out of the Union bar and down the cobbled path to King’s Parade.

  “Right about what?”

  “That you should stand for the committee,” said Fiona. “You might not be elected first time, but you’d be putting down a marker.”

  “A marker for what?”

  “Higher office.”

  “I don’t think so. I’ll leave that to you.”

  “You should at least consider it. Because once you’ve decided which party you support, you could even end up as Union president.”

  “I thought that was the job you were after.”

  “I am. But as there’s a new president every term, why shouldn’t we both achieve it?”

  “I hadn’t considered standing for the committee,” said Sasha, “let alone president.”

  “Then it’s time you did. Are you going to walk me back to my college?”

  “Of course.”

  “You’re so wonderfully old-fashioned,” Fiona teased, as she took his hand.

  Once again Sasha was taken by surprise that it was a woman who’d made the first move. Queen’s pawn advances one square.

  As they walked hand in hand toward Fiona’s college, he couldn’t help thinking about Charlie. He knew she didn’t care much for the Union, and Fiona in particular.

  “Will you be able to find your way home, Sasha?” Fiona asked when they reached the entrance to Newnham. But before he could reply, she added, “Perhaps you’d like to come up to my room for a drink?”

  “How would I get past the porter’s lodge?” said Sasha, looking for a way out.

  Fiona laughed. “Come with me.” Once again she took his hand, and led him around to the back of the building. “You see the fire escape? The window on the third floor is my room. When you see the light go on, come up and join me.” Without another word she left him standing there.

  Sasha tried to collect his thoughts. He was thinking about going straight back to Trinity when the light on the third floor went on. She pushed the window open and smiled down at her unwitting Romeo.

  Sasha mounted the fire escape and climbed to the third floor. He scrambled inside, and saw Fiona standing by the bed, unbuttoning her blouse. She moved across to join him, slipped his jacket off his shoulders, and began to kiss his neck, his face, his lips. When he pulled away, he found she had already discarded her blouse.

  “But I thought you and Ben were an item,” said Sasha.

  “It suits my purpose for him to think so,” said Fiona, pulling him toward the bed. “But my only interest in Ben is his ability to pull in the Jewish vote.”

  Sasha immediately stood up and pushed her away.

  “What did I say?”

  “If you don’t know, Fiona, I wouldn’t be able to explain it to you.” He picked his jacket up from the floor and headed for the window. He looked back, and had to admit that even though Fiona couldn’t hide her anger, she still looked beautiful. It was after he’d climbed down the fire escape and was walking back to Trinity that he decided he would stand for the Union committee.

  15

  ALEX

  New York University

  When Alex ran out of money, he wasn’t sure whom he could turn to to bail him out.

  Most young men going to university as freshmen could take a few weeks to become accustomed to the routine before they settled in, but Alex didn’t have a few weeks. Bernie’s stall, as the locals still thought of it, was just about breaking even. Although Alex had found ways of cutting costs, the Wolfe at the door was still demanding his three hundred and twenty dollars a month—and, as he regularly reminded Alex, in advance, as agreed in the contract. But Alex didn’t have three hundred and twenty dollars, and if he couldn’t hand over the money by Monday morning, he would no longer have a stall. Whom could he possibly ask for another short-term loan?

  He sat at the back of the theater scribbling on a notepad. Those undergraduates seated around him assumed he was writing down the lecturer’s thoughts, but he was too preoccupied with how to hold on to the stall. He had assured Elena at breakfast that morning that his grades were always good enough to put him in the top half of his class, but knew he couldn’t share his other worries with her.

  “Could the Wall Street crash have been avoided, and should the financial experts have spotted the signs far earlier, or were they all just…”

  Alex looked down at his notes and thought about his options: Mama, Dimitri, Ivan. He considered each of them in turn. His mother only knew half the story, and it was the better half. She’d never met Mr. Wolfe, and only ever saw Ivan from a distance when he joined Alex for lunch at Mario’s. A shadowy figure whom she didn’t like the look of, she’d told her son on more than one occasion.

  Recently, Alex had begun to wonder if she might be right. Elena had assumed that Ivan worked in the market, although she’d never seen him there. She frequently made it clear that she hoped her son would not end up as a market trader, but would become a lawyer, or an accountant, with an air-conditioned office in Manhattan, who went home every evening to his wife and three children, and resided on the Upper East Side, rather than in Brooklyn.

  Dream on, Alex would have told her. But he knew she would never accept that he was one of life’s street traders who, when he put on a suit, became an entrepreneur. He struck a line through her name.

  Dimitri? He had proved to be a giver, not a taker. A man whose trust and generosity seemed to know no bounds. He had been responsible for Alex and his mother having a roof over their heads, and had supplied the original loan for his stall, which Alex still hadn’t repaid. To make matters worse, Dimitri was away at sea again and wasn’t expected back for another ten days.

  Alex still thought Dimitri was hiding a secret. But perhaps his mother was right, and he was simply one of the good guys. Alex reluctantly put a line through his name, leaving only one person on the list.

  Ivan. Their relationship had become increasingly fraught. His partner would often fly into a temper if Alex was even a few minutes late for a chess match, and recently Alex had begun to suspect that he wasn’t getting his fair share of the profits from their weekend games. Ivan never let him see what he’d entered in his notebook, and while the side bets were being placed his eyes were always covered with a blindfold.

  During the past year, Alex had learned very little about Ivan. He didn’t know what his day job was, other than that he ran a small import and export business on the side. Despite this, Ivan was fast looking like the only prospect of keeping his agreement with Mr. Wolfe.

  Alex slowly circled his name, and decided that as in chess, the best form of defense was attack. He would raise the subject of a loan during their lunch break on Saturday.

  “I want you to write an essay over the weekend,” said the lecturer, “on whether President Roosevelt’s first hundred days in office were the turning point…”

  That wasn’t how Alex planned on spending his weekend.

  * * *

  “Let me try and understand your problem,” said Ivan in Russian, as a large pizza was placed in front of him. “You are currently renting a stall—”

  “I have a five-year license.”

  “For three hundred and twenty dollars a month, and you’re only making a small profit.”

  “No