“And one I want to make. Do it by the end of the week. As before, I want total discretion, total anonymity. Is that understood?”

Majid nodded. Stavro said, “Good.” And he left.

“Still not one for small talk, is he?” Ron said.

“Did you expect him to engage in a conversation about your cheese eating? Ask your preference? Gruyère? Camembert?”

“I don’t like it,” said Ron. “That last trade that worked out so well? Tell it to the pipeline workers who got blown up.”

“You’re expecting another disaster?”

“The question is, is he?” Ron moved to the window. “His trades are fucking weird.”

“So, what, you think he’s going to sabotage a gigantic milk company? How exactly? Murder every cow in France?”

“I don’t know.” Ron looked down at the street. Stavro was nowhere in sight. “Maybe they’ll be struck by meteorites.”

Majid was quiet for a moment. He was pretty sure meteorites didn’t really come out of nowhere.

“We’re building up our capital,” he said. “We’ll do this one, then we’ll cut him loose.”

Karl

KARL

The banker’s name was Karl, and he didn’t like being a banker. He had wanted to be an architect, but the best Swiss universities had not cared what he wanted. He failed to gain admission to Zurich or Lausanne. He’d considered going to Lugano, even though that would have meant studying in Italian. But his fiancée, now his wife, had urged him to take the position her father offered him in his bank. It had turned out that he was pretty good at banking or, at least, good enough at banking at a bank where his father-in-law was chairman. Now, twenty years later, he was a senior executive whose responsibilities included the bank’s trading division. He still regretted not pursuing architecture—there were paths to it he had not explored, he had given up too soon. He had long since started regretting his marriage, too. But life had accumulated—children, assets, a house, a ski chalet. Dumping everything at forty-two to apply to architecture school with a bunch of twenty-year-olds was simply, clearly, not something he could do.

He could, however, tell this American to piss off.