Obviously, 'Mom' had bought both presents. She smiled and looked on happily as both boys eagerly tore open their packages, revealing identical Swiss Army knives, shiny and beautiful and intricate, complete with all the attachments. Everyone cheered again.

'I really wanted one!' said Mark.

'Me, too!' said Damien, as Mark gave him an affectionate shove.

The boys decided to use their birthday knives to cut the cake, but before they did, Damien used his knife to remove one of the male skaters from the winter scene on top. And then both he and Mark plunged their knives deep into the cake, as everyone cheered them on.

***

The next morning, bright sunlight bounced off the ice on Lake Geneva, bathing the scene in a brilliant glow that refracted into all the shimmering colors of the rainbow. Nature, left to her own devices, had come up with a daytime light show more wondrous than the one Richard Thorn had paid for the night before.

Branching off from the lake, and winding into the surrounding woods, was a river, which was wide at the mouth, then narrowed substantially the deeper it penetrated into the forest. The river was frozen too, and it was here that the hockey games were played. The banks alongside made natural boundaries, keeping the action of the game within a fairly well-defined area.

By afternoon a hockey game was underway, the two teams made up primarily of executives from Thorn Industries. But there were two small ringers on the teams: Mark on one side, Damien on the other, the other boys from the Academy cheering them on.

On the surface the outdoor winter game was all good clean fun; only an executive with antennae as well attuned as Buher's, sensitive to the infinite complexities which affect the emotional temperature of every passing moment, was aware of what was really at stake.

Buher could have pointed out, for instance, that corporate decisions were not made in board rooms; they were only ratified there. They were made at cocktail parties and on squash courts, and, nowadays, most especially on tennis courts. A good backhand was worth three years at Harvard Business School. If you could play well, you got to play with the right people. If you were charming enough, ingratiating enough, and bland enough, your tennis partners would come to consider you their friend, and would therefore prefer to do business with you than with some rank outsider. Careers were made like that. Any Hollywood writer could explain about playing tennis with Jack and Warren and Bob; any ambitious Washington bureaucrat from the Kennedy days could tell about playing squash with Bob MacNamara.