Jericho sighed. “I think my liver’s gotten flabby. I’m not doing well this morning.”
Mitchell sat on the couch and held his head between his hands, a picture of how miserable Kingston felt but would not let on.
All right, they had a year.
That year startedtoday.
Thus, they needed to sop up the poison in their systems and get a damn move on.
Kingston hoisted himself off the couch, stretching the stiff muscles that wrapped his arms and thighs, and wandered over to one of the staff members to ask 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.
Poor guy, working on New Year’s Day. Kingston hoped this overpriced country club was paying him at least double. They could damn well afford it.
As Kingston wandered back, Mitchell’s head wobbled on his neck like it was about to fall off. “You guys know that Gabriel Fish is going to win this, right? He never makes a bet that he doesn’t know he will win. The Shark will tear us to pieces, and Last Chance, Inc. will sleep with the fishes.”
Not unless Kingston was dead at the end of the year.
Jericho said, “There are four of us and only one of him. We have an eighty percent chance of winning this.”
Mitchell shook his head. “I took macroeconomics at Le Rosey with that guy. You guys were in the other semester. He won theWeimar Republic Simulation.”
That made them all shut up.
Le Rosey’s extensive business curriculum included a semester of macroeconomics during their junior year of high school. Every semester, that sadistic econ instructor designed a new unwinnable scenario to test the students’ steely character and the ice-cold nerves required to recover at least some assets in an impossible situation.
No one ever won.
The underlying point was to keep Le Rosey alumni from jumping out of the skyscraper windows when the stock, bond, and real estate markets crashed simultaneously, as they sometimes did.
Mitchell’s semester had been dealt the Weimar Republic Simulation, a scenario that still lived in infamy at the boarding school as a particularly fiendish test, but the professor hadn’t called it that, of course. She’d made up some stupid name for her fictional country, so they hadn’t known it was based on Germany between the world wars.
Morrissey asked, “How the hell did The Shark do that? It’s not on a computer, so you can’t reprogram it and cheat.”
Mitchell said, “Gabriel knew his history better than the rest of us. Dr. Barney devised something devious every year, but the Weimar Republic year was theworst.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 a bear market. The Shark borrowed money at set interest rates from everybody else andbought gold.”
Ah, gold, the suckers’ bet in every economic situation except the rare, almost singular instance of hyperinflation.
Mitchell continued, “When everybody’s notes came due at the end, he sold ten percent of his gold and paid us 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 keptmillions.Hewasthe Weimar Republic, paying First World Warreparations 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.”
Just as The Shark had destroyed his classmates during the simulation, he would do it again, but this time with real money.
Mitchell said, “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. “Wearegoing to lose if we just roll over and take it. We may not be able to worktogether,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.”
Mitchell 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, scratching his beard. “Swindlers make you thinkyouare stealing fromthem.They can’t hustle you if you play the game with ethics and morals. 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’ll 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 whyoneof us can’t win.”
Kingston wasn’t convinced. They’d vetted hundreds of companies and pickedfive.And they hadn’t been limited by the type of businesses they’d selected.
Mitchell grumbled, “Golf. Why does it always have to be golf?”
Match had never taken to the sport like the rest of them had, like Kingston surely had. Of the four of them, he had the lowest handicap and the most contacts in the golf industry.
As a matter of fact, he knew of several golf-related companies that were ripe for the picking.
