Heads You Win Read online

  On Friday evening he was seated in his place thirty minutes before the curtain was due to rise. He placed his order, but told Jacques he wasn’t in a hurry.

  The two of them entered the dining room just after eight o’clock, and Jacques didn’t even look in his direction as he accompanied his guests to their usual table. He continued to read the international Wall Street Journal, as he needed her to be aware that he was alone.

  Jacques waited until their main courses had been cleared before the curtain rose for the second act, when Jacques walked back on stage to play his cameo role. He bent down and whispered in her ear.

  “Did you notice who’s sitting at the next table, madam?”

  “If you mean the elderly gentleman with his back to me, I can’t say I did.”

  “It’s George Soros. He always gives me a share tip whenever he stays, and it usually doubles in value by the time he returns.”

  “He’s a regular then?”

  “He stays with us once a year, madam, just for the week. A chance to relax, somewhere no one will recognize him.”

  “I won’t have a dessert tonight, Jacques,” she said. “And neither will my husband.”

  Todd looked disappointed, because he always enjoyed the bitter chocolate roulade, but he knew that look.

  “As you wish, madam,” said Jacques. As he passed the next table, he filled the guest’s glass with water, the sign that he had performed his role and was leaving the stage.

  A few moments later, Todd got up and discreetly left the dining room. The diner at the next table turned a page of his paper, and continued reading. Evelyn stood up, pushing her chair back until it bumped into his.

  “I’m so sorry,” she said as he turned around.

  “Not at all,” he said, rising from his place and giving her a slight bow.

  “Good heavens, are you who I think you are?”

  “That would depend on who you want me to be,” he said, smiling warmly.

  “Mr. Soros?”

  “Then my cover is blown, madam.”

  “Evelyn Lowell,” she said, returning his smile.

  He bowed again. “I had the privilege of knowing your father,” he said. “A fine man, from whom I learned a great deal.”

  “Yes, dear Papa. I wish he was still alive so I could seek his advice on a problem I have.”

  “Perhaps I might be of assistance?”

  “Oh no, I wouldn’t want to impose…”

  “My dear lady, it would be an honor to advise the daughter of James Lowell, and perhaps in some small way repay his kindness over the years. Please, join me,” he said, pulling back the chair next to his.

  “How kind of you,” said Evelyn as she sat down.

  “Jacques, a glass of champagne for the lady, and I’ll have my usual.” The maître d’ hurried away. “Now, how can I help, Ms. Lowell?”

  “Evelyn, please.”

  “George,” he said, as he sat back and allowed Evelyn to take her time telling him everything he already knew between sips of champagne, while he enjoyed a brandy.

  “Not an uncommon problem when it comes to inheritance,” he said once she’d come to the end of her tale. “Especially when rival siblings are involved. It’s known as the fifty-fifty dilemma.”

  “How interesting,” she said, hanging on his every word.

  “There is a simple solution, of course.”

  “And what might that be?”

  “First, I must ask you, Evelyn, can you keep a secret?”

  “Most certainly I can,” she said, placing a hand on his thigh.

  “Because we’ll need to work closely together over the next few days, and I wouldn’t want anyone, and I mean anyone, to know the source of what I’m about to divulge, even your husband.”

  “Then perhaps it might be wiser to go up to your room where we won’t be disturbed,” she said, moving her hand a little farther up his thigh.

  This certainly wasn’t something Bob had anticipated, but if that’s what it took …

  * * *

  The last time Alex had been this nervous was on the battlefield in Vietnam. And just as then, the waiting was the worst part.

  His first anxiety was that no one would turn up to hear him speak. When Nelson Mandela, George Soros, and Henry Kissinger are also on the menu, you have to accept that at best you’re the dessert. However, the organizers assured him that “Russia’s Role in the New World Order” was the dish of the day, and that most of the delegates had been ordering it.

  When an attendant knocked on the door of the speakers’ room and told him it was time to make his way backstage, Alex didn’t even have the nerve to ask how the house was looking. When he could finally bear it no longer, he peeked through a gap in the curtain, to find that the organizers hadn’t exaggerated. The hall was so packed that some of the delegates were sitting in the aisles.

  Klaus Schwab rose to introduce him, and opened his remarks by telling the delegates that Alex Karpenko had been among the leading investment bankers in the burgeoning Russian republic for the past decade, closing deals that had stunned his more cautious rivals who’d been left in his wake. Lowell’s had brought a new meaning to the words “risk reward ratio,” having secured at least one deal that had made a thousand percent profit in its first year, while at the same time raising the wages of every one of the company’s workers.

  “In the days of the gold rush,” said Schwab, “you needed to climb on the bandwagon and head west. In today’s Russia, it’s a private jet, and you have to head east.”

  Alex was relieved that Schwab didn’t also mention that he had once escaped from Saint Petersburg in an ambulance, but not before his wallet had been emptied by a rent boy and an off-duty paramedic.

  The applause was friendly when he emerged from behind the curtain to take Schwab’s place at the podium. The kind of reception that hints, we’ll wait and see how the speech goes before we pass judgment.

  Alex looked down at row upon row of expectant faces and made them wait for a moment before delivering his opening line.

  “Whenever I address my local Lions club, a student forum, or even a business conference, I’m usually fairly confident that I’ll be better informed than anyone else in the room. I accepted this invitation without realizing that everyone else in the room would be far better informed than me.”

  The laughter that followed allowed him to relax a little.

  “Lowell’s Bank has been working in Russia with the local people for the past ten years, and Mr. Schwab kindly described us as one of the leaders in the field. The same bank has been doing business in Boston for over a century, and we are still thought of as upstarts. However, in the context of Russian investment banking, we are regarded as part of the establishment after only a decade. How can that be possible?

  “Less than fifty years ago, Stalin ruled over one of the largest empires on earth. When he died in 1953, he was mourned as a national hero and statues of him were erected in even the smallest of towns. The people referred to him affectionately as Uncle Joe, and around the world his name was mentioned in the same breath as those of Roosevelt and Churchill. But today you will be hard-pressed to find a statue of Stalin anywhere in the former Soviet Union, other than in his hometown.

  “After Stalin, there followed a series of unelected despots who had sheltered in his shadow for years: Khrushchev, Kosygin, Brezhnev, Andropov, and Chernenko, all of whom clung on to power until they died or were forcibly removed from office. And then suddenly, almost without warning, that all changed overnight when Mikhail Gorbachev appeared on the scene and announced the birth of glasnost. A simple translation being, the policy or practice of more open consultative government and a wider dissemination of information.

  “From March 1990, when Gorbachev became the first elected president of the Soviet Union, the country began to change rapidly, and for the first time entrepreneurs were able to operate without the restrictions of a centralized command economy.

  “However, the people