The Eight Page 3

  “I!” said Valentine. She swallowed hard, for her throat had suddenly become very dry. “But Reverend Mother, I am not … I do not …”

  “What you try to say is that you are scarcely a pillar of responsibility,” said the abbess, smiling despite herself. “I am aware of this, and I rely upon your sober cousin to assist me with that problem.” She looked at Mireille, and the latter nodded her assent.

  “I have selected the eight not only with regard for their capabilities,” the abbess continued, “but for their strategic placement. Your godfather, M. David, lives in Paris, the heart of the chessboard which is France. As a famous artist, he commands the respect and friendship of the nobility, but he is also a member of the Assembly and is considered by some to be a fervent revolutionary. I believe him to be in a position to protect you both in case of need. And I have paid him amply for your care to provide him a motive to do so.”

  The abbess peered across the table at the two young women. “This is not a request, Valentine,” she said sternly. “Your sisters may be in trouble, and you will be in a position to serve them. I have given your name and address to some who have already departed for their homes. You will go to Paris and do as I say. You have fifteen years, enough to know that there are things in life more crucial than the gratification of your immediate wishes.” The abbess spoke harshly, but then her face softened as it always did when she looked at Valentine. “Besides, Paris is not so bad a place of sentence,” she added.

  Valentine smiled back at the abbess. “No, Reverend Mother,” she agreed. “There is the opera, for one thing, and perhaps there will be parties, and the ladies, they say, wear such beautiful gowns—” Mireille punched Valentine in the ribs again. “I mean, I humbly thank the Reverend Mother for placing such faith in her devout servant.” At this, the abbess burst into a merry peal of laughter that belied her years.

  “Very well, Valentine. You may both go and pack. You will leave tomorrow at dawn. Don’t be tardy.” Rising, the abbess lifted two heavy pieces from the board and handed them to the novices.

  Valentine and Mireille in turn kissed the abbess’s ring and with great care conveyed their rare possessions to the door of the study. As they were about to depart, Mireille turned and spoke for the first time since they had entered the room.

  “If I may ask, Reverend Mother,” she said, “where will you be going? We should like to think of you and send good wishes to you wherever you may be.”

  “I am departing on a journey that I have longed to take for over forty years,” the abbess replied. “I have a friend whom I’ve not visited since childhood. In those days—you know, at times Valentine reminds me very much of this childhood friend of mine. I remember her as being so vibrant, so full of life.…” The abbess paused, and Mireille thought that if such a thing could be said of so stately a person, the abbess looked wistful.

  “Does your friend live in France, Reverend Mother?” she asked.

  “No,” replied the abbess. “She lives in Russia.”

  The following morning, in the dim gray light, two women dressed in traveling clothes left the Abbey of Montglane and climbed into a wagon filled with hay. The wagon passed through the massive gates and started across the back bowls of the mountains. A light mist rose, obscuring them from view as they passed down into the far valley.

  They were frightened and, drawing their capes about themselves, felt thankful that they were on a mission of God as they reentered the world from which they had so long been sheltered.

  But it was not God who watched them silently from the mountaintop as the wagon slowly descended into the darkness of the valley floor below. High on a snow-capped peak above the abbey sat a solitary rider astride a pale horse. He watched until the wagon had vanished into the dark mist. Then he turned his horse without a sound and rode away.

  PAWN TO QUEEN’S FOURTH

  The Queen Pawn openings—those which start with PQ4—are “close” openings. This means that the tactical contact between the opposing forces develops very slowly. There is room for a great deal of maneuvering, and it takes time to come to grips in fierce hand-to-hand fighting with the enemy.… Positional chess is of the essence here.

  —Complete Book of Chess Openings

  Fred Reinfeld

  A servant overheard in the marketplace that Death was looking for him. He raced home and told his master he must flee to the neighboring town of Samarrah, so that Death would not find him.

  After supper that night, there was a knock upon the door. The master opened it and saw Death standing there, in his long black robes and hood. Death inquired after the servant.

  “He is ill in bed,” lied the master hastily. “He is too sick to be disturbed.”

  “That’s odd,” said Death. “Then he is surely in the wrong place. For I had an appointment with him tonight at midnight. In Samarrah.”

  —Legend of the Appointment in Samarrah

  NEW YORK CITY

  DECEMBER 1972

  I was in trouble. Big trouble.

  It began that New Year’s Eve, the last day of 1972. I had a date with a fortune-teller. But like that fellow with the appointment in Samarrah, I’d tried to flee my own fate by avoiding it. I didn’t want some palm reader telling me the future. I had enough problems in the here and now. By New Year’s Eve of 1972 I had completely messed up my life. And I was only twenty-three years old.

  Instead of running off to Samarrah I had run off to the data center atop the Pan Am Building in midtown Manhattan. It was a lot closer than Samarrah and, at ten P.M. on New Year’s Eve, as remote and isolated as a mountaintop.

  I felt as if I were on a mountaintop. Snow swirled around the windows that overlooked Park Avenue, the large, graceful flakes hanging in colloidal suspension. It was like being inside one of those paperweights that contain a single perfect rose or a small replica of a Swiss village. But within the glass walls of the Pan Am data center lay several acres of gleaming state-of-the-art hardware, humming softly as it controlled the routing and ticketing of airplanes all over the world. It was a quiet place to get away and think.

  I had a lot of thinking to do. Three years earlier I’d come to New York to work for Triple-M, one of the largest computer manufacturers in the world. At that time Pan Am had been one of my clients. They still let me use their data center.

  But now I had switched jobs, which might well prove to be the biggest mistake I’d ever made. I had the dubious honor of being the first woman ever hired into the professional ranks of that venerable CPA firm Fulbright, Cone, Kane & Upham. And they didn’t like my style.

  “CPA,” for those who don’t know, stands for “certified public accountant.” Fulbright, Cone, Kane & Upham was one of the eight biggest CPA firms in the world, a brotherhood appropriately dubbed “the Big Eight.”

  “Public accountant” is a polite name for “auditor.” The Big Eight provided this dreaded service for most major corporations. They commanded a lot of respect, which is a polite way of saying that they had their clients by the balls. If the Big Eight suggested during an audit that their client spend half a million dollars improving his financial systems, the client would be foolish to ignore the suggestion. (Or to ignore the fact that his Big Eight audit firm could provide the service for him—at a fee.) These things were implicitly understood in the world of high finance. There was a lot of money in public accounting. Even a junior partner could command an income of six figures.

  Some people might not realize that the public accounting field is certified male only, but Fulbright, Cone, Kane & Upham sure did, and that placed me in something of a jam. Because I was the first woman they’d ever seen who wasn’t a secretary, they treated me as if I were a commodity as rare as the dodo bird—something potentially dangerous that ought to be scrutinized with care.

  Being the first woman anything is no picnic. Whether you’re the first woman astronaut or the first woman admitted to a Chinese laundry, you must learn to accept the usual razzing, sniggering, and ogling o
f legs. You also have to accept working harder than anyone else and getting a smaller paycheck.

  I’d learned to act amused when they introduced me as “Miss Velis, our woman specialist in this area.” With press like that, people probably thought I was a gynecologist.

  In fact, I was a computer expert, the best transportation industry specialist in New York. That’s why they’d hired me. When the partnership of Fulbright Cone had looked me over, dollar signs had rung up in their bloodshot eyeballs; they saw not a woman, but a walking portfolio of blue-chip accounts. Young enough to be impressionable, naïve enough to be impressed, innocent enough to turn over my clients to the sharklike jaws of their audit staff—I was everything they were looking for in a woman. But the honeymoon was brief.

  A few days before Christmas I was completing an equipment evaluation so a big shipping client could purchase computer hardware before year end, when our senior partner, Jock Upham, paid a visit to my office.

  Jock was over sixty, tall and lean and contrivedly youthful. He played a lot of tennis, wore crisp Brooks Brothers suits, and dyed his hair. When he walked he sprang forward on the balls of his feet as if he were going for a net shot.

  Jock sprang into my office.

  “Velis,” he said in a hearty, backslapping voice, “I’ve been thinking over this study you’re doing. I’ve argued with myself about it, and I think I’ve finally figured out what was bothering me.” This was Jock’s way of saying that there was really no point in disagreeing with him. He’d already played devil’s advocate with both sides, and his side, whichever he’d set his heart on, had won.

  “I’ve nearly finished it, sir. It’s due to the client tomorrow, so I hope you don’t want any extensive changes.”

  “Nothing major,” he told me as he gently set the bomb down. “I’ve decided that printers will be more critical to our clients than disk drives, and I’d like you to change the selection criteria accordingly.”

  This was an example of what’s referred to in the computer business as “fixing the numbers.” And it is illegal. Six hardware vendors had submitted sealed bids to our client a month earlier. These bids were based upon selection criteria that we, the impartial auditors, had prepared. We said the client needed powerful disk drives, and one vendor had come up with the best proposal. If we decided now, after the bids were in, that printers were more important than disk drives, it would throw the contract in favor of another vendor, and I could guess just which vendor that might be: the one whose president had taken Jock to lunch only that afternoon.

  Clearly something of value had passed under the table. Perhaps a promise of future business for our firm, perhaps there was a little yacht or sports car in it for Jock. But whatever the deal, I wanted no part in it.

  “I’m sorry, sir,” I told him, “but it’s too late to change the criteria now without the client’s approval. We could call and tell him we want to ask the vendors for a supplement to the original bid, but of course that would mean they couldn’t order the equipment until after New Year.”

  “That won’t be necessary, Velis,” said Jock. “I didn’t become senior partner of this firm by ignoring my intuition. Many’s the time I’ve acted in my clients’ behalf and saved them millions in the blink of an eye, without their ever knowing about it. It’s that gut-level survival instinct that has put our firm at the very top of the Big Eight, year after year.” He flashed me a dimpled smile.

  The odds that Jock Upham would do something for a client without taking full credit were about the same as the proverbial camel squeezing through the needle’s eye. But I let it pass.

  “Nevertheless, sir, we have a moral responsibility to our client to weigh and evaluate sealed bids fairly. After all, we are an audit firm.”

  Jock’s dimples disappeared as if he’d swallowed them. “Surely you can’t mean that you’re refusing to take my suggestion?”

  “If it’s only a suggestion and not an order, I’d prefer not to do it.”

  “What if I made it an order?” said Jock slyly. “As senior partner of this firm, I—”

  “Then I’m afraid I’d have to resign from the project, sir, and turn it over to someone else. Of course I’d keep copies of my working papers in case there were questions later.” Jock knew what that meant. CPA firms were never audited themselves. The only people in a position to ask questions were people from the U.S. government. And their questions regarded illegal or fraudulent practices.

  “I see,” said Jock. “Well, I’ll leave you to your work, then, Velis. It’s clear I’ll have to make this decision on my own.” And he abruptly turned on his heel and left the room.

  My manager, a beefy blond fellow in his thirties named Lisle Holmgren, came to see me the very next morning. Lisle was agitated, his thinning hair disheveled and his necktie skewed.

  “Catherine, what the hell did you do to Jock Upham?” were the first words out of his mouth. “He’s as mad as a wet hen. Called me in this morning at the crack of dawn. I barely had time to shave. He says he wants you put in a strait jacket, that you’re off your rocker. He doesn’t want you exposed to any clients in the future, says you’re not ready to play ball with the big boys.”

  Lisle’s life revolved around the firm. He had a demanding wife who measured success in country club fees. Though he might have disapproved of it, he toed the party line.

  “I guess I lost my head last night,” I said sarcastically. “I refused to throw a bid. I told him he could turn it over to someone else if that was what he wanted.”

  Lisle sank down on a chair beside me. He didn’t say anything for a moment.

  “Catherine, there are a lot of things in the business world that may seem unethical to someone of your age. But they aren’t necessarily the way they look.”

  “This one was.”

  “I give you my word that if Jock Upham asked you to do something like that, he had his reasons.”

  “I’ll bet. My guess is that he had thirty or forty grand worth of good reasons,” I told him, and went back to my paperwork.

  “You’re slashing your own wrists, do you realize that?” he asked me. “You don’t screw around with a fellow like Jock Upham. He won’t go quietly back to his corner like a nice boy. He won’t roll over and play dead. If you want my advice, I think you ought to march up to his office right now and apologize. Tell him you’ll do anything he asks, stroke his feathers. If you don’t, I can tell you right now, your career is finished.”

  “He wouldn’t fire me for refusing to do something illegal,” I said.

  “He wouldn’t have to fire you. He’s in a position to make you so miserable you’d wish you had never set foot in this place. You’re a nice girl, Catherine, and I like you. You’ve heard my opinion. Now I’ll leave you to write your own epitaph.”

  That was one week ago. I had not apologized to Jock. I had not mentioned our conversation to anyone. And I’d sent my bid recommendation to the client the day before Christmas, according to schedule. Jock’s candidate had not won the bid. Since then, things had been very quiet around the venerable firm of Fulbright, Cone, Kane & Upham. Until this morning, that is.

  It had taken the partnership exactly seven days to figure out to what form of torture they’d subject me. This morning, Lisle had arrived in my office with the glad tidings.

  “Well,” he said, “you can’t say I didn’t warn you. That’s the trouble with women, they never listen to reason.” Someone flushed the toilet in the “office” next to mine, and I waited for the sounds to die away. A premonition of the future.

  “Do you know what reasoning after the fact is called?” I said. “It’s called rationalizing.”

  “Where you’re going, you’re going to have plenty of time to rationalize,” he said. “The partnership met bright and early this morning, over coffee and jelly doughnuts, and voted on your fate. It was a close toss-up between Calcutta and Algiers, but you’ll be happy to know that Algiers won. Mine was the deciding vote. I hope you appreciate it.”<
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  “What are you talking about?” I said, getting a cold, clammy feeling at the pit of my stomach. “Where the hell is Algiers? What does it have to do with me?”

  “Algiers is the capital of Algeria, a socialist country on the coast of North Africa, a card-carrying member of the Third World. I think you’d better take this book and read up on it.” He threw a large volume on my desk and continued. “As soon as your visa’s approved, which should take about three months, you’ll be spending a lot of time there. It’s your new assignment.”

  “What have I been assigned to do?” I said. “Or is this just a general exile?”

  “No, we actually have a project starting over there. We get work in lots of exotic places. This is a one-year gig for some minor Third World social club that meets occasionally to chat about the price of gasoline. It’s called OTRAM or something. Just a minute, I’ll look it up.” He pulled some papers out of his jacket pocket and leafed through them. “Here it is, it’s called OPEC.”

  “Never heard of it,” I said. In December of 1972 not many people in the world had heard of OPEC. Though their ears were soon to be unplugged.

  “Neither have I,” Lisle admitted. “That’s why the partnership thought it was such a perfect assignment for you. They want you buried, Velis, just as I said.” The toilet flushed again, and with it all my hopes went down the drain.

  “We received a cable from the Paris office several weeks ago asking if we had computer experts in the field of oil, natural gas, power plants—they’d take anyone we had, and we’d get a fat commission. No one on our senior consulting staff was willing to go. Energy is simply not a high-growth industry. It’s considered a dead-end assignment. We were about to cable back that we had no takers when your name came popping up.”