The Fall of Princes Read Free

what’s going to happen,” he says. “We’re going to play a hand of poker. One hand. You win, you get a job. You lose, sayonara.”
    “Yes, sir.”
    “At the end of the game, you will be given your coat and you will leave. On your way out, you will be given a box. Inside the box, there will be a Montblanc pen. You will also be given a notebook. Once you leave, you will sign your name in the book. The ink will be either blue or black. All contracts are signed in blue ink.
    “We’re going to play an unusual version of showdown. Rare, but not unheard of. I am going to lay all fifty-two cards face up on the desk. Total transparency. That, too, is part of the culture you may or may not be entering. You pick first. You can pick any five cards you want. After we’ve drawn, we both can discard and replace as many cards as we want once we’ve seen both our hands. But I have to tell you, there is a hand, one hand, and only one hand, that will ensure that you win, no matter what I pick. Ready?”
    “Yes, sir.”
    We both stare at the cards, laid out so neatly, four straight rows of thirteen, on Napoleon’s desk. Suddenly, it comes to me. I wait, brow furrowed, then tentatively reach out, withdraw, and finally pick. I want to show uncertainty, although I know already I’ve won the bet. In less than a minute, I’ll be one of them. Is it even what I want? I don’t know. In that moment, I feel the music lessons, the life-drawing classes, the college theatricals. The self I had meant to be. I had wanted to be an artist, to express something that was inside me that needed to be said. The fact that I hadn’t a clue as to what that thing was didn’t deter me at all in the beginning. I worked hard and was terrible at everything. I wrote a bad novel, painted bad pictures, plodded through plays, parts I could speak but never inhabit, until I had had enough and I decided, if I couldn’t be eloquent, at least I could be rich. Beauty was too ephemeral and elusive. Money, that year, was the most tangible avatar of the zeitgeist, and not to grab it would be to miss the common experience of your generation. I thought it would protect me from the disappointment I felt in my own many and varied failures. I couldn’t be what I wanted to be, a maker of beauty, and so I took my father’s advice and went to business school, and caught it like a fever, the pulse of the money that was being made in my country, and I wanted in, because no place else would have me. I could, I thought, work among them and not become one of them. I was sensitive, poetic, and vulnerable to life’s beauty, and now I sat on the other side of a desk that once belonged to Napoleon, one draw of the cards away from the devil. I hated abandoning the dreams of my youth, but in that second, the one thing I want is to win. I draw four tens and the three of hearts. I would learn to play the cello when I was old and finished with all of this. Paint watercolors of seascapes out of season. Act in local theater companies, playing the small parts, the butler, the next-door neighbor, grease paint and footlight bows.
    The Man looks at me across the desk. He smiles, and draws a nine high straight flush, spades in a row, ostensibly beating my four of a kind. But I know and he knows he can’t get a straight flush higher than nine, because I have all the tens. I’ve blocked him by drawing them all. Nine is as high as he can go. He knows it, too, not that anything, anything, shows in his face. He’s done this hundreds of times.
    I discard everything but the ten of hearts, and draw the jack, queen, king, and ace of hearts for a royal flush.
    We stare at each other for a long time. The game is done. The cards are laid on the desk without a word from either of us.
    “That concludes the interview. Thank you for coming.”
    We stand, shake hands. He is either my new boss or just someone I met once in an ostentatious office in my youth.
    The secretary hands me a box wrapped in white