The Embezzler Read Online Free Page A

personal loans.
    Wicked? Certainly, by all the ancient laws. But those laws were passed when little children were hanged for stealing spoons. The first thing that a fiduciary of our era requests is that he be given the broadest possible powers. And he is promptly given them. Fluidity is what people seek. My customers showered me with powers of attorney. They did not want a bailee or a trustee out of some dry volume of Blackstone. They wanted Guy Prime, and the reason they wanted Guy Prime was that he knew his market. Had I not been adviser to Herbert Hoover in the first days of panic and the voice of de Grasse Brothers on the big board? Was not my firm known to the wags on the floor of the exchange as "Jesus Christ, Tom, Dick and Harry"? I had trained my own ship, picked my own crew and set my own course. In the roughest financial seas of our century I had kept her off the shoals, and I would have continued to do so had people only let me. Why should I weep for the money they lost in my wreck? It was the price they paid for the luxury of sending me to jail.
    The group at the bar now opened to greet me. My opinion was sought about Karl Vender, a rough-and-tumble character who had made a killing in the Insull collapse and who had recently purchased one of the old estates in the neighborhood. Would he make a proper member? I thought so. It was one of my functions to pass on the new people.
    "My father as a young bachelor in the 'seventies used to call on Commodore Vanderbilt," I told the attentively listening group, when Pierre had handed me the white brimming glass of my first Martini. "Of course, the ladies of the family did not accompany him. The Vanderbilts were not then what they are today, and the old boy's house was full of clairvoyants and charlatans and even worse. But Father always said that a bachelor could go anywhere, except, of course, to a fag party." Here I paused, raised my glass for a sniff and then drank off half the contents at a gulp. "He told me an interesting thing about Vanderbilt. The old pirate was not naturally coarse. He only pretended to have come from a low social milieu to magnify his success and to irritate his children. He made a tableau for history, and history bought it. I suggest that Vender may be doing the same."
    George Geer had joined the group and was watching me with the respectful look of a prospective son-in-law. He was then twenty-six, a smaller, slighter, handsomer version of his father, under whose exacting supervision he toiled at de Grasse. He was informally engaged to my daughter Evadne, and everybody took for granted that I was delighted. Perhaps I should have been. He was honorable and industrious, and would probably one day be as big a man as his father. Yet at the moment he was an unpleasant reminder of the bonds sitting in that same father's vault. Rex had always condescended to me, and now his boy had to have my girl.
    I left the bar, carrying my drink, and, putting my free hand on George's elbow, propelled him to a table. "Tell me something, fella. I know you have your father's memory. Do you happen to recall how many America City bonds I put up for my loan at your shop?"
    "I think it was three hundred and fifty thousand, sir. I can check it for you right away. There's always someone in the office."
    "No, no, don't bother." As I stared at George's face and made out the gathering mist of surprise in his bright eyes, I realized that an astonishing thing had happened. I had momentarily lost control. I was paralyzed, and in my paralysis I was perfectly aware that I could not afford it, that I had to smile, to cough, to whistle, to do anything to check that young man's growing astonishment. I even had a sudden shocking glimpse of a future in which such dissimulation might always be necessary, a future that was separated from all my past by the scarlet band of this very moment.
    "Is there something wrong, Mr. Prime?"
    "Nothing, George, nothing at all. Only I think I'll go back to