hundred seventy-one pounds?”
“Your losses were so severe that nothing remained in your accessible account to cover your final billing. That’s how much you still owe us. You still have a balance of nearly two thousand pounds on credit, but there’s a lien against it from a family called Chiswick, which claims you contracted with them to educate your son and then stole the boy away without paying in full.”
“My wife didn’t steal our own son!”
“They are seeking damages. I must say, your domestic affairs strike me as extremely untidy. Is that an American habit? I hope you’ll settle with your litigants so we can get our money.”
“My God. Are you monumentally incompetent, or simple thieves?”
“Insults will not help your situation. The decline of your portfolio results from political, financial, and competitive circumstances beyond our control. I can understand your disappointment, but I can assure you that, had we succeeded, you would have been a very wealthy man.” His expression was as animated as a corpse.
I instinctively reached for my tomahawk and regretted leaving it at home. “I risked my life and that of my family for that ten thousand pounds! This is the most outrageous financial burglary I’ve ever heard of!”
He winced as if I’d let wind at a recital. “It’s clear you don’t understand the financial-services industry, Mr. Gage. I sympathize that things did not progress as you’d hoped, but I can assure you we tried our very best. Your success would have been ours, too. And should you employ Tudwell, Rawlings, and Spence in the future, we’ll strive to do even better.”
“I’ll ruin you in the newspapers! I’ll bring suit! I’ll fetch my Jaeger rifle!”
Tudwell folded his hands. “Military barbarism may work on the American frontier or a Barbary pirate ship, Mr. Gage, but it has no place in the banks and courts of England. Should you seek bad publicity or legal complaint, you can rest assured of counter-litigation for defamation, late payment, and failure to respond to management inquiries while abroad in France. I could see legal proceedings extending years into the future, at a cost of several thousand pounds to us both. You will wait in a debtor’s cell for final resolution. Nor does it help that you’re a foreign American, with ties to the French, filing suit in England.”
I calculated the odds. “Money slips from me as if oiled.”
“It’s often more difficult to retain a fortune than make it in the first place. Have another biscuit.” His serenity was remarkable, but then he wasn’t the one being robbed. Lesser thieves get carted to Fleet Prison, but the biggest bastards get a peerage. I’d trusted him with my life savings, and it had vanished like smoke.
So why didn’t I throttle him? Because I feared, in my heart of hearts, that the Green Apple of the Sun had indeed been an emerald cursed by the ghost of Montezuma. Hadn’t Pasha Karamanli been cursed by me, Ethan Gage, while he wore it in his turban? Hadn’t Leon Martel died in pursuit of the stone? Hadn’t my own wife been carried away in a storm? Hadn’t it led to the kidnapping of my son? And hadn’t it set in motion a chain of events that now made me spy, turncoat, and a husband who’d once more lost his family?
Why is fate cruel? Because we’re meant never to get the things we think we want so we’ll pursue the things we truly need, like love and responsibility. That’s what I told myself, anyway. I’d always be Sisyphus on quixotic missions, trying to roll boulders uphill that cascaded endlessly down. Eve didn’t sin by eating a tempting apple. She sinned because she moved the fruit out of its rightful place, as I’d moved the emerald. It’s not the bite, it’s the disruption of harmony.
I could escape poverty only when I finished doing whatever it was that I was supposed to do. Which was entirely unclear, of course.
Back on the London streets, I consulted solicitors about suing. They in turn talked with barristers. Was there not some legal stratagem around Fate and God? They charged money I didn’t have to tell me that while I should certainly litigate, such an effort would occupy a good part of my remaining life.
“How much time again?”
“Several years. Before appeals.”
“And our chances?”
“We are optimistic yet realistic, hope leavened by caution.”
I forwarded their billing to Tudwell.
So I was desperate once more. I was a likely outlaw in France, separated from my fugitive wife and child by hundreds