Free Loser Takes All by Graham Greene

young man, in this chair. Twenty years of years.’
    â€˜It’s not only great minds that think alike. But the bank will never be broken by a thousand-franc system marked on the envelope Infallible.’
    â€˜I’ll prove you wrong. I’ll make you eat that packet. Fetch me the five million.’
    â€˜I’ve told you my terms.’
    Backward and forward and sideways moved the hands in that space to which illness confined him. They ran like mice in a cage – I could imagine them nibbling at the intolerable bars. ‘You don’t know what you are asking. Don’t you realize you’d control the company if you chose to side with Blixon?’
    â€˜At least I would know something about the company controlled.’
    â€˜Listen. If you let me have the five million tonight, I will repay it in the morning and give you half my winnings.’
    â€˜There won’t be any winnings with your system.’
    â€˜You seem very sure of yours.’
    â€˜Yes.’
    â€˜I might consider selling the shares for twenty million plus your system.’
    â€˜I haven’t got twenty million.’
    â€˜Listen, if you are so sure of yourself you can take an option on the shares for fifteen million now. You pay the balance in twenty-four hours – 9 p.m. tomorrow – or you forfeit your fifteen million. In addition you give me your system.’
    â€˜It’s a crazy proposal.’
    â€˜This is a crazy place.’
    â€˜If I don’t win five million tomorrow, I don’t have a single share?’
    â€˜Not a single share.’ The fingers had stopped moving.
    I laughed. ‘Doesn’t it occur to you that I’ve only got to phone the office tomorrow, and Blixon would advance me the money on the option? He wants the shares.’
    â€˜Tomorrow is Sunday and the agreement is for cash.’
    â€˜I don’t give you my system till the final payment,’ I said.
    â€˜I shan’t want it if you’ve lost.’
    â€˜But I need money to play with.’
    He took that carefully in. I said, ‘You can’t run a system on a few thousand francs.’
    â€˜You can pay ten million now,’ he said, ‘on account of fifteen. If you lose, you’ll owe me five million.’
    â€˜How would you get it?’
    He gave me a malign grin. ‘I’ll have your wages docked five hundred a year for ten years.’
    I believe he meant it. In the world of Dreuther and Blixon he and his small packet of shares had survived only by the hardness, the meanness and the implacability of his character.
    â€˜I shall have to win ten million with five million.’
    â€˜You said you had the perfect system.’
    â€˜I thought I had.’
    The old man was bitten by his own gamble: he jeered at me. ‘Better just lend me the five million and forget the option.’
    I thought of the Gom at sea in his yacht with his headline guests and the two of us forgotten – what did he care about his assistant accountant? I remembered the way he had turned to Miss Bullen and said, ‘Arrange for Mr Bertrand (he couldn’t bother to get my name right) to be married.’ Would he arrange through Miss Bullen for our children to be born and our parents to be buried? I thought, with these shares at Blixon’s call I shall have him fixed – he’ll be powerless, I’ll be employing him for just as long as I want him to feel the sting: then no more room on the eighth floor, no more yacht, no more of his ‘luxe, calme et volupté ’. He had taken me in with his culture and his courtesy and his phoney kindness until I had nearly accepted him for the great man he believed himself to be. Now, I thought with a sadness for which I couldn’t account, he will be small enough to be in my hands, and I looked at my ink-stained fingers with disrelish.
    â€˜You see,’ the Other said, ‘you don’t believe any