The Eastern Front(7)

David made a face. Again, the youngster's nature made it hard for him to state the truth bluntly.

Jeff, on the other hand, had no such compunctions left. Being married to Gretchen for four years had pretty well rubbed off whatever delicate sensibilities he'd ever possessed. "Hon, we've got a lot of enemies. Well, you do, anyway. Most of them don't have much against me except they've got to get past me to put you in the ground."

Gretchen looked at him, a bit crossly. "So?"

"So figure it out for yourself. If we buy an apartment building—depending on the size, of course, but let's figure twelve units, which is pretty standard in the quarters we'd be looking in—then we can set aside half the space for CoC people."

"What do you mean, ‘CoC' people—oh."

He grinned. "Yeah. As in ‘CoC people handpicked by Gunther Achterhof.' Good luck, anyone's got it in for you getting through that crowd."

David nodded. "That's what I was figuring."

Gretchen looked back down at the sheet. "I still don't really understand how it happened. And without us even knowing about it!"

Bartley looked a bit defensive. "Hey, we told your grandmother what was happening."

Jeff barked a jeering laugh. "Oh, right! And I'm sure you used simple and straightforward language that made lots of sense to Ronnie."

"Well . . ."

Gretchen shook her head. "Explain it to us again. In simple and straightforward language, this time."

"Well . . . Okay. This is simplifying a lot, you understand?"

"I can live with that," said Gretchen. "Whereas you may not, if you do otherwise."

Now, Bartley looked alarmed as well as defensive. "Hey, Gretchen! There's no call for that."

"Relax, David. She's joking." Jeff glanced at his wife. "I . . . think. Do your best."

The young financier cleared his throat. "The gist of it is that, way back when, my grandmother gave you guys some stock in the sewing machine company by way of a belated wedding gift. On account of Jeff's father and my mother were first cousins, which makes me and Jeff second cousins." He rattled off the precise family relationships with the ease of any person raised in a small town. "You remember?"

Jeff and Gretchen nodded simultaneously.

"Well, after that I guess you forgot about it."

"We were . . . ah, busy," said Gretchen.

"Holed up in Amsterdam under Spanish siege, to be precise," added Jeff. "So, yeah. Sewing machine company stocks were not something we thought about much. At all."

"Sure. But as you may have heard, Higgins Sewing Machine Company did really well. And when it went public, you wound up owning five thousand shares—which was two and half percent of the stock."

"The sewing machine company did that well?"

David tugged at his ear. "It did really well, yeah. But it wasn't just the sewing machine company. Since you weren't around we talked to Ronnie, and your grandmother told us to handle it however we wanted to." He looked defensive again. "She didn't seem interested when we tried to explain the ins and outs of it."

Jeff wasn't surprised. Depending on who did the explaining—Bartley was actually better at this than most of his partners—Gretchen's grandmother would have probably had as much luck with a short lecture on quantum mechanics. It wasn't that she was dim-witted. She wasn't at all; in fact, in her own way she had a very shrewd grasp of practical finance. But Veronica's idea of practical finance focused on tangibles like property and hard cash. The sort of stock speculations and currency manipulations that David specialized in wouldn't have meant much to her.

David went on. "So Sarah and I diversified your holdings. You've still got the five thousand shares in HSMC, but we invested all the earnings in other stuff. By now, you own sizeable amounts of stock in OPM—"

That was Bartley's own finance company: Other People's Money. He was not given to euphemisms, which Jeff found refreshing in a financier.

"—as well as several of the Stone chemical and pharmaceutical companies, Casein Buttons, Kelly Aviation, a little chunk of the Roth jewelry operations, a pretty hefty chunk of the new petroleum operations near Hamburg and an even bigger chunk of the port expansion projects—Hamburg's going to turn into a real boom town—and some railroad stocks. There are some other odds and ends, but that's the heart. Sarah and I didn't want to take too many risks with your money, so we invested most of it in stuff that was safe but reasonably profitable."

It was Jeff's turn to shake his head. "If these are the kinds of returns you get on ‘safe' investments, I'd hate to see what you get on something risky that pays off."