1
Behind Every Great Fortune
Tristan
Tristan King walked back to his yacht after collecting his mail from the concierge of the Monaco Yacht Club.
The hollow thuds of his footsteps on the marina’s wooden floating sidewalks interrupted the lap of the sea on the boats and the catcalls of the seagulls above. Past the end of the walkway, a superyacht was heading out to sea, the roar of its engines churning and releasing the clean salt scent of seawater into the air.
Tristan flipped through the envelopes in his hands. Just the usual stuff was in the mail that day: a wedding invitation from an old boarding school friend that Tristan had confirmed by email a month ago, the new brochure from Le Rosey boarding school with campus updates, and a white cardstock mailer addressed to his legal name, Tristan Fortunato King.
It wasn’t often that Tristan saw his middle name all spelled out. At most, he usually got an F.
Weird.
Tristan climbed over the back gate onto the stern of his yacht home and made his way to the small deck on the bow.
Micah Shine, Blaze Robinson, and Logan Bell were lounging about, all of them recovering from hangovers earned at a wedding the night before.
Micah was lying on a towel on the teak deck with his hat over his face. “Anything interesting?”
“The usual.” Tristan sprawled on a lounge chair and leafed through the boarding school brochure.
Logan was sipping champagne from his coffee mug, having decided to medicate his hangover with the hair of the dog that bit him instead of coffee like the rest of them. “I have to admit, managing to coordinate Maxence’s wedding with celebrating the launch of Tristan’s successful algorithm strategy and Micah’s IPO was efficient. My grandfather would be proud, that old scoundrel.”
Tristan lifted his coffee mug to the sky in a salute to Logan’s grandfather. “His way of doing business certainly was efficient.”
“He never let minor details like international law get in his way,” Logan chuckled.
Blaze spooned more sugar into his coffee from the tray between the deck chairs. “You could get away with doing things like that in those days. Fifty years ago, the kinds of deals he made couldn’t be traced, not that I would ever speak ill of our malefactor.”
The four men chuckled at the nickname malefactor. Logan’s grandfather had called himself that on the few occasions the four of them had met with him.
Logan said, “My father still insists on calling him ‘that Svengali asshole’ and won’t speak his name. He insists he has no father, and my grandfather didn’t leave him anything in the will, either.”
Blaze stretched his arms above his head, the Mediterranean sun shining on his pale skin. “Who did he leave his money to then? I mean, if he could get plastered one night and write checks to each one of us for that kind of money, there must’ve been more of it, right?”
Logan snorted. “Yeah, there was a lot more of it. After his diagnosis, he spent a year trying to spend it all. I happened to meet his accountant over at his apartment on Fifth Avenue and expressed my concern about the rate he was spending it. Pindar laughed in my face and said that he wasn’t even coming close to spending the interest and rents. He said there was no way my grandfather could spend his fortune in a thousand years, even if the money quit coming in.”
Micah asked, his voice muffled from under his hat, “Logan, did you ever tell your father you accepted your grandfather’s money?”
Tristan sat back in his chair. He wouldn’t have asked that.
Logan shook his head, his eyes wide. “If I’d ever let on that I’d taken the old man’s money, my father would have disowned me as fast as his father disowned him.”
Tristan stared into the darkness of his coffee. “Then your father never knew about your grandfather’s lessons in capitalism he taught us, either?”
Logan cracked up at that, and Tristan suspected he wasn’t just hungover but still a little drunk. “No, those are our little secret, too. Jesus, those were bizarre, right? All those late-night video chats when he would ramble for hours about how Marc Rich might’ve made his money trading oil futures with the Ayatollah and violating US sanctions against Tehran, and Guo Wengui might have bribed Chinese government officials to buy shares in Minzu Securities below market value so he could control it. His story about Jay Gould kidnapping a financier to force him to invest in his railroad stocks was legendary. And William Randolph Hearst was such a criminal that he was the main character in a movie and the villain in a Broadway musical.”
Tristan said, “I’m not sure if he was trying to make us capitalists or revolutionaries.”
Micah lifted his hat and looked at them all. The sunlight shone on his odd, opalescent eyes, drowning out the gray and bringing out the blue and electric-green glitter. “I think he was trying to prepare us for the competition once we graduated from Le Rosey.”
Logan nodded. “The first time I brought you three to his New York penthouse and he gave us that lecture on bribing local officials to overlook bigger crimes, I knew he respected you. When I was a kid, the few times I saw him and my father together, my grandfather just berated my father about how he wouldn’t even sell corn futures if he was going to be a poor dirt farmer.”
“Even that first night when we were flying home from Switzerland for the winter holidays and got stuck at LaGuardia in the snowstorm,” Blaze said, “he was beginning to groom us to be his spiritual descendants, though I had no idea he was going to make us that offer when we graduated.”
Logan shook his head. “I was as shocked as the rest of you. From everything my father had said about him and everything that he had said about my father, I didn’t think he’d ever give me a red nickel, let alone loan each of us the kind of money he did.”
