“Whereas the moment our school starts losing money, it can fold up like a Halloween store on the first of November. Nobody ever finds out who the investors were, Marianne and I can slip away in the night, and everyone can pretend the place never existed. Everyone except the students who paid thousands of dollars toward a certificate—not even a degree, a certificate!—that will never be issued, unless the laser printer happens to still have some ink in the drum on our last day.”

“That’s not going to happen, bro. Your school—our school—is going to succeed! And even if it doesn’t, our students are positive-minded, resilient, optimistic people. With generally good credit.”

“Our students! We don’t have students. We don’t actually have anything—it’s all in your snake-people’s hands. GWGW has a sack of hamsters. That’s it.”

Mark didn’t reply.

“And that’s why people like you are so eager to sell things to people like them. You see them as easy marks. To you they’re a bunch of suckers.”

“Eric, listen to me,” Mark said evenly. “They are a bunch of suckers.”

“I know,” Eric sighed. “I know.”

“I mean, there are studies on it.”

“At least now I understand what they teach you in business school. How to use studies to find suckers.” He splashed his face with cold water, closed his eyes. Marianne had warned him, hadn’t she? But this was beyond the limits of her considerable paranoia. How would he explain it?

He looked in the mirror. His cheeks and chin were speckled with blood.

“Look, I have to take this other call,” Mark said. “Let’s do more on this another time.”

A hero, Regina called Davonte at dinner, beaming at him across the basket of rolls the waiter had been asked not to bring. She wore her hair down, in loose and shining waves she tucked behind one ear, and had on a dress that managed to be modest and snug at the same time. She wore simple pearl earrings, the same high, glossy pumps she’d worn on the tour. Eric wished he had saved someone today. He wished he had on a tie. He wished most of all that he’d never talked to Mark.

“I knew there was something about you,” Regina said. “When we stopped by Eric’s classroom and you were so passionately engaged in discussion.”

Davonte shredded his roll into fine crumbs, making a mess of his plate and the tablecloth. He was clearly uncomfortable talking about the rescue, which had been widely discussed around campus. Louis, the one-world-government novelist, had even given Davonte a gruff handshake.

“She probably would have been okay,” Davonte said. “The candy probably would have melted in her throat. Butterscotch is kind of soft.”