All That He Requires(11)
“‘But I trusted you,’ I said.
“He said, ‘Only a fool trusts another man’s word without anything to back it up.’
“I started to cry. I told him that if I paid him, I’d go bankrupt.
“‘Why should I care?’ he said. ‘That’s your problem, not mine. You should have thought about that before you sold the property to me.’”
My mouth dropped open even farther. Besides parents outright abusing their children, and redneck dads leaving three-year-olds inside cars while they went inside strip clubs – which I had only ever read about in newspapers – this was the most insane thing I’d ever heard. “What?”
“Oh, it gets better. The next time we played, I sold him a property and made him sign a contract, and he still screwed me over. When I pointed to the contract, he asked, ‘And who’s going to enforce it?’ So I ended up going bankrupt again.”
I shook my head in disbelief. “That’s… that’s absolutely unbelievable…”
Connor smiled grimly. “My father never loses. In Monopoly or in real life.”
“Why did you keep playing with him?”
He shrugged. “I didn’t know any better. I just thought that was how the game was played. Plus, I was only eight years old. I guess I wanted him to play with me no matter what – to pay me some sort of attention – so I just kept on coming back for more.”
“He did that to an eight-year-old?” I asked in horror.
“Well… maybe I was nine. It’s hard to remember.”
Connor kept on eating like nothing was wrong – and then he looked up and realized I had an expression on my face like I’d just heard about somebody killing puppies. He smiled consolingly. “It’s not that big a deal.”
“Not that big a deal?! Connor, your dad’s a psychopath!”
“I think you mean a ‘sociopath.’ And… yeah… probably. He definitely has sociopathic tendencies, that’s for sure. Love of power for power’s sake, and lording it over other people. Total lack of empathy for others. But… no matter how horrible all this sounds, I learned some of the most valuable business lessons of my life from those games with my father.”
“Like what?!”
“Like never trust another person’s word. Always be able to back up your agreements by some form of leverage. Always watch your back. Destroy your enemies when you have the chance, to make sure they don’t recover and destroy you later.”
This was unbelievable. “You can’t live life like that!”
“I said business lessons, not life lessons. It’s not the same.” Suddenly his face grew dark, and he stared off into the distance. “Unless you get involved with someone who treats your relationship like a business.”
My stomach dropped. “I would never do that!”
His eyes found mine as he came back to the present, and his expression lightened. “I wasn’t talking about you. I know you would never do that.”
“Where was your mother in all this?”
He shrugged again and returned to his food. “If she wasn’t running her charity balls and dinners, then she was telling me to stop being a whiner and beat my father if I was so upset.”
“Jesus,” I murmured.
“Poor little rich boy, right? Rich people problems.”
“Child abuse isn’t ‘rich people problems.’”
He frowned like I’d just suggested something incredibly outlandish. “My parents didn’t abuse me.”
“Maybe not physically, but emotional abuse is still abuse.”
He waved off my comment with one hand. “Lots of people have it way worse than I do. I turned out fine. No harm done.”
I wondered about that.
Then I thought of something else I knew about him: according to some E! show I’d seen on the Dubai, Connor was the youngest son of the Templeton family.
“Don’t you have older brothers or sisters?”
“One older brother. Vincent.”
“How much older?”
“Five years.”
“What about you guys?”
“What about us?”
“Weren’t you close?”
He made a face like Naaah. The way you might answer if somebody asked if you wanted ketchup on your hotdog. “Not really.”
“Why not?”
“Well, I didn’t see much of him during the school year.”
“He didn’t go to boarding school?”
“Oh, yeah, he did. But he kept getting thrown out, so my parents kept shipping him around the world to new schools. So I only saw him during summers and Christmas. And not much then.”
“Why’d he get thrown out?”
“Sex, alcohol, drugs, bad grades – the usual.”
“Um… don’t take this the wrong way… but I thought you were the black sheep of the family.”
Connor laughed. “I am.”
“If your brother did all those things and isn’t the black sheep, what the hell did you do?!”
“Vincent shaped up after college. Well, law school, really.” Connor’s voice became tinged with the slightest hint of bitterness. “He figured out which side his bread was buttered on, and he buckled down and became a perfect little heir to the throne. Me… I was pretty much a good kid until my late teens, and then I really pissed off my family.”
“What did you do?”
“Well, I quit college my freshman year, for one. That didn’t go over well.”
“Why’d you quit?”
“The way I looked at it, the world was full of limitless opportunities, and here I was stuck freezing my ass off in boring classes, just like every other boring school I’d ever been in.”
“Where’d you go to college?”
“Harvard.”
Of course.
“What’d you do once you quit?”
“Ha – there’s a fun story. I told my father I wanted out. He said ‘no, absolutely not.’ We had a big fight, I made some grandiose claims about how I could succeed better and faster than any of my ivory tower professors and clueless peers… and he made a bet with me.”
“What was it?”
“He’d stake me, to the tune of ten million dollars, and I could go out and have three years to make something of myself.”
“Ten million dollars?!” I yelped.
Connor smirked. “And here you were, thinking my father was such a bad guy.”
“Well… maybe I misjudged him…”
Connor shook his head. “No you didn’t. Ten million was nothing to him. It would be like you giving your kid the change under your couch cushions to go start a business.”
“Oh.”
My mind was spinning.
That must be a hell of a couch in the Templeton household.
“And for a mere pittance, he was buying my soul. It really was a deal with the devil. If I succeeded, then I owed him the original ten million, plus 75% of all profits as my primary investor. If I failed, then I agreed to go back to school. After graduation, I would enter whatever position in the family business that my father deemed fit.”
“What did you do?”
“I agreed, with the proviso that we cap the buyout at twenty million. Meaning if I could give him $17.5 million, that was it, we were done, and I kept the rest – plus my freedom.”
“What did he say?”
“He laughed – after all, remember, he thought I was going to crash and burn, and then he’d own me. But, being the consummate negotiator that he is, he wouldn’t do the deal for less than $30 million – meaning I would owe him $25 million to get out from under his thumb. The original ten, plus 75% of the 20 million in profit.”
“That doesn’t seem fair,” I protested.
“That’s another lesson I learned in Monopoly. In business, nothing is fair; you get what you negotiate for.”
“So what did you do?”
“I took the deal.”
“What happened?”
“I crashed and burned spectacularly,” he grinned.
“You lost ten million dollars?” I gasped. “In three years?”
“No – in nine months. I gambled recklessly on several enterprises, all of which tanked.”
“You?! But you’re, like, a business genius! How did that happen?!”
“Well, I was trying to lose the money.”
“WHAT?!”
“It was my form of adolescent rebellion. Anyway, that’s what my mother’s shrink told me at a Christmas party one year.”
“What did you do?!”
“I told him to stick to analyzing my mother and leave me out of it.”
“No, I mean – ”
“I know what you meant. I went back to my father and told him I’d lost the money.
“He said, ‘Well, now you’re going back to Harvard.’
“And I said, ‘No I’m not.’
“And he said, ‘We had an agreement!’
“And I said, ‘Do you have it in writing?’”
My mouth fell open. “Did he?!”
Connor burst out laughing. “No, he didn’t. I think it was the only time in his entire life he didn’t sign a contract – because he totally underestimated me. He thought I’d never learned a thing from him. You should have seen his face. Especially when I said, ‘And since you don’t, how are you going to enforce the agreement?’”