Free Kane & Abel (1979) by Jeffrey Archer

stopped refining his system. He would always back his profits and cut his losses. Once a stock had doubled in price he would sell half of his holding, trading the stock he still held as a bonus. Some of his early finds, such as Eastman Kodak and Standard Oil, went on to become national leaders. He also backed Sears, a mail-order company, convinced it was a trend that was going to catch on.
    By the end of his first year he was advising several of the masters, and even some of the parents.
    William Kane was happy at school.

9

    W LADEK WAS the only person still alive who knew his way around the dungeons. During those carefree days of hide-and-seek with Leon he had spent many happy hours hidden in the small stone rooms, safe in the knowledge that he could return to the castle whenever it suited him.
    There were four dungeons in all. Two of them were at ground level. The smaller of these two was dimly lit by a thin glimmer of sunlight through a grille set high in the stone wall. Down five steps were two more stone rooms that were in perpetual darkness with little air. Wladek led the Baron to the small upper dungeon, where he immediately slumped in a corner, staring silently and fixedly into space; the boy appointed Florentyna to look after him.
    As Wladek was the only person who dared to stay in the same room as the Baron, the remaining twenty-four servants never questioned his authority. Thus, at the age of nine, he took on the day-to-day responsibility for his fellow prisoners. The new occupants of the dungeons, reduced to miserable stupefaction by incarceration, appeared to find nothing strange in a situation that had put a young boy in control of their lives. In the dungeons Wladek became their master. He split the servants into three groups of eight, trying to keep families together wherever possible. He moved them regularly in a shift system: eight hours in the upper dungeon for light, air, food and exercise, eight hours working in the castle for their captors, and eight hours given over to sleep in one of the lower dungeons.
    No one except the Baron and Florentyna could be quite sure when Wladek slept, as he was always there at the end of every shift to supervise the servants as they moved on. Food was distributed every twelve hours. The guards would hand over a skin of goat’s milk, black bread, millet and occasionally some nuts, all of which Wladek would divide into twenty-eight portions, giving two portions to the Baron without ever letting him know.
    Once Wladek had the new shift organized, he would return to the Baron in the smaller dungeon. To begin with he expected guidance from him, but the fixed gaze of his master was as implacable and comfortless as were the cold eyes of the constant succession of German guards. The Baron had not spoken from the moment he had been made captive in his own castle. His beard had grown long and matted, and his burly frame was beginning to decline into frailty. The once proud look had been replaced with one of resignation. Wladek could scarcely remember his soft-baritone voice, and accustomed himself to the thought that he would never hear it again. After a while he fell in with what appeared to be the Baron’s unspoken wishes, and always remained silent in his presence.
    While he had lived in the castle before the arrival of the German soldiers, Wladek had so much to occupy him that he never had time to think about the previous day. Now he was unable to recall even the previous hour, because nothing ever changed. Hopeless minutes turned into hours, hours into days, days into months. Only the changing of the servants’ shifts, and the arrival of food, darkness or light, indicated the passing of the time, while the shortening of the days, and the appearance of ice on the dungeon walls, heralded the changing season. During the long nights Wladek became aware of the stench of death that permeated even the farthest corners of the dungeons, only slightly alleviated by the morning