Home > Under Parr(2)

Under Parr(2)
Author: Blair Babylon

Match dropped the contract on the table. “AG Lydia Dickman witnessed it, and so did Senator Harkness.”

Jericho’s knees went weak, and he sat back down on the couch. The other guys were all leaning back and staring at the ceiling. “The Shark got a Supreme Court justice, a sitting senator, and the Attorney General of the United States to witness his contract with us?”

They were never going to be able to break that contract. The best they could do would be to tie it up in the courts, making themselves the laughingstock of all their friends and probably getting them thrown out of every club and business group they were in, and then they would bankrupt themselves fighting it.

He asked, “What the hell was the bet?”

Match read from the document. “It says, ‘The five wagerers will each purchase a golf venture and strive to increase its value. The golf venture with the highest net percent increase of value will win the bet, and each of the four losers will pay the one winner one hundred million dollars each.’”

Kingston rubbed his hand over his heavy pectoral muscle. “This is a cinch. Only one of us has to beat him. We can write a side contract amongst ourselves to work together. I mean, jeez, guys. We own and run a successful venture capital firm. This is what we do. We can outplay The Shark if we work together.”

“Nope,” Match snarled through his clenched teeth. “The contract states that ‘No wagerers may work together, nor give aid, comfort, advice, or information to the other wagerers upon pain of forfeit.’”

“So, we can’t work together,” Morrissey said, “and we can’t help each other. We can’t even tell each other how we’re doing.”

Match continued reading, “‘The wager will end one year from this date on New Year’s Eve when the four wagerers will meet back here at the Narragansett Club with financial evaluations of the golf ventures.’ And then he specifies financial firms and accounting standards because The Shark wouldn’t leave that to chance.”

“And we’ve only got one year to do this,” Jericho said. “Most of our developments don’t start to pay out for a least two. We’re not a pump-and-dump firm. Did he put something in the tequila? Is that why we were all so stupid as to sign this?”

Kingston was scrolling through his cell phone. “Oh, no. I have a video.”

They crowded around Kingston’s phone and watched themselves laughing while they crouched over that very coffee table to sign each one of the five copies of the contract the night before. The immense windows looking out over the snow and ocean were black with the night outside. The black-tie crowd clustered around them was laughing and toasting their wager.

Jericho said, “At least it looks like we held our liquor pretty well.”

Morrissey nodded. “One of the benefits of going to boarding school for thirteen years is an iron liver and an impressive ability to hide how drunk you are, especially during class.”

Jericho’s skull ached like someone had inserted a blowfish in his brain. “I think my liver’s gotten flabby. I’m not doing well this morning.”

Kingston, always slightly more compassionate than the others, staggered over to one of the staff members and asked for four glasses of ginger ale and if it was possible to get some dry toast. The staff person trotted into the kitchen at the back.

Match was shaking his head. “You guys know that Gabriel Fish is going to win this, right? He never makes a bet that he doesn’t know he’s going to win. The Shark is going to tear us to pieces, and Last Chance, Inc. is going to sleep with the fishes.”

Jericho shook his head, which he learned was a mistake because his brain sloshed around the inside of his cranium. “There are four of us and only one of him. We have an eighty percent chance of winning this.”

Match shook his head. “I took macroeconomics at Le Rosey with that guy. You guys were in the other semester. He won the Weimar Republic Simulation.”

That made them all stop talking and think. Students at the Le Rosey boarding school took one semester of macroeconomics during their junior year of high school. Every semester, the instructor designed a new version of the Kobayashi Maru test, an unwinnable scenario designed to test character and the stone-cold nerves required to recover some assets in an impossible situation. Their year had been dealt the Weimar Republic Simulation, a scenario that still lived in infamy at the boarding school as a particularly fiendish test.

Morrissey asked, “How the hell did The Shark do that? It’s not on a computer, so you can’t reprogram it and cheat.”

“Gabriel knew his history better than the rest of us. Dr. Barney came up with something devious every year, but the Weimar Republic year was the worst. At the very beginning, the rest of us hadn’t figured out that the fake country of Sardoninnica was actually the Weimar Republic, and our savings and capital were about to die a horrible death in the grip of hyperinflation. We thought she was doing the 1929 US stock market, so we put our money in bonds and lent it at interest, which is what you do in bear market. The Shark borrowed money at set interest rates from everybody else and bought gold. When everybody’s notes came due at the end, he sold ten percent of his gold and paid them back with the worthless, inflated money. Basically, he borrowed a hundred dollars when a hundred dollars was worth something, invested it in stuff that inflated along with the market, and then paid everybody back a hundred and five dollars each but kept millions. He was the Weimar Republic, paying First World War reparations to France and England with hyperinflated dollars that weren’t worth the paper they were printed on, and the rest of us were German citizens who got suckered into using our retirement savings to buy a loaf of bread.”

They all thought about that for a minute, wondering how The Shark was going to rig this game to win.

Match shook his head again. “If we work together, we lose. If we don’t work together, he’ll beat us. He’s as ruthless and relentless as a tiger shark, and he just suckered us all.”

Morrissey stood up and clenched his fist. “We are going to lose if we just roll over and take it. We may not be able to work together, but we can at least consult on each other’s ventures and make sure we maximize each one of them. Surely, one of us can beat him.”

Match shook his head. “You didn’t see him in that macro class. He made us all think that we were the smart ones, loaning him money at a guaranteed interest rate because we all thought it was the 1930s stock market crash like it had been the year before.”

“So that means he’s a con man,” Jericho said, ignoring the headache swelling in his skull. “Swindlers make you think you are stealing from them. If you play the game with ethics and morals, they can’t hustle you. You can’t trick an honest person. So that’s how we’ll play it. Each of us will go out and buy a ‘golf venture,’ and we’re going to run it to the best of our abilities. We’re going to invest and create value, and we’re going to be the best damn businessmen we can be. We’ve got a great track record with Last Chance, Inc. We’ve taken five companies from deep red balance sheets to profitability in the five years we’ve been running it. There’s no reason why one of us can’t win.”

Match grumbled, “Golf. Why does it always have to be golf?” He struggled with the game more than the rest of them. They’d all become quite good golfers in high school. Many deals are made on golf courses and ski slopes, and Le Rosey boarding school prepares its students, the heirs of billionaires, to be ready to make a deal anywhere.

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