Step Aside, I'm the King of Capital novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Ring
Tristan proposes at the Crane Foundation gala, Lavinia dismisses him for the mysterious Mr. S, and he pulls his two million dollar pledge in front of the treasurer; then Mr. S walks in, and Tristan knows his face.
I went down on one knee in the middle of the Allegheny Grand ballroom, and three hundred people stopped chewing.
The ring was an old-cut diamond in a plain gold band.
Lavinia had pointed at it through a pawnshop window when we were twenty-four, and I had remembered for seven years.
"Lavinia Crane," I said. "I came home to ask you one thing."
The string quartet trailed off in the middle of a bar.
Someone at the next table raised a phone.
Lavinia looked at the ring.
Then she looked past me at the doors.
"Get up, Tristan," she said.
"Tell me yes or no first."
"It's no." She didn't lower her voice. "Mr. S is coming tonight, and he asked me to sit at his table."
I thought I had misheard her.
"Mr. S," I said.
"Everyone's heard of him." She lifted her chin. "He built Halden Row from nothing. He's never even been photographed in a room like this."
"I know," I said.
"You don't know anything. You work in a back office in London."
That was what I had told her.
I had said it six years ago, at an airport, with my passport in my hand.
Her father leaned back in his chair at the head table.
He ran the Crane Foundation, and his name was on the building and the dinner and the ice sculpture.
"Back office," he said. "Is that filing, son? Do they give you a stapler?"
The ballroom laughed.
Not everyone, but enough of them.
Lavinia laughed too, a small one behind her glass.
I stood up and closed the ring box.
My knee hurt, and that was the only thing I felt.
"All right," I said.
I took out my phone.
It was one in the morning in London, and Ottilie answered on the first ring.
"Boss?"
"The Crane pledge," I said. "Pull it."
There was a short silence on the line.
"All of it?"
"All two million. Now."
"Done," she said, and the line clicked.
Lavinia was still smiling.
"Who was that?" she said. "Your landlord?"
"My office."
At the third table, the foundation's treasurer looked down at his own phone.
It had buzzed against his plate.
He read the message and read it again.
The color left his face from the top down.
Earlier that evening the emcee had thanked an anonymous donor for the two million dollar lead gift that paid for the whole night.
The treasurer stood up so fast his chair fell over.
"Sir," he said to her father. "The wire reversed."
"Reversed?"
"The Halden Row gift. It's gone. It's all gone."
Her father's glass stopped halfway to his mouth.
"That's impossible," he said. "That's Mr. S's own charitable arm."
He turned his head slowly and looked at me.
I put my phone back in my pocket.
"Back office stuff," I said.
Lavinia's smile slid off her face.
"What did you do?"
"I made a phone call," I said. "You should have asked me what I do."
"Tristan, you're not funny. That's a joke. Tell him it's a joke."
"You said no," I said. "I was listening."
I turned to go.
I had reached the end of the table when the double doors at the back of the ballroom swung open.
Every head in the room turned at once.
A hush went across the floor.
"Ladies and gentlemen," the emcee said, and his voice cracked with joy. "Mr. S."
A tall man came in, buttoned into a camel suit.
His black hair was slicked back with silver at the sides, and his teeth were very white.
People stood.
Lavinia's hand flew to her hair.
I knew the walk before I saw the face.
I had taught it to him in a rented studio in Soho six years ago, with a cheap mirror and a cup of bad coffee.
The man in the camel suit was Sullivan Greer, an out-of-work actor I had hired for forty thousand pounds a year.
He crossed the floor to Lavinia's table, and his smile never changed.
Then his eyes found me.
For one second the smile went out.
Sullivan lifted two fingers at his side.
Two men in dark suits peeled off the wall and started toward me.
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