Sally Spencer: Blackstone and the Wolf of Wall Street

‘What the hell are you doing here?’ he demanded.

Knox advanced further into the centre of the room. ‘You cheated me,’ he said. ‘You took all my money — and you cheated me.’

Holt shrugged his massive shoulders. ‘Nobody cheated you. You went into a business where you could either have made or lost money — and you lost it.’

‘But you didn’t lose, did you?’ Knox demanded, aware that a hysterical note was creeping into his voice.

‘No, I didn’t lose,’ Holt agreed. ‘I had the sense to get out in time.’

‘And you didn’t tell me.’

Another shrug. ‘Since when have I been your nursemaid?’

This was something very wrong about all this, Knox thought. When he had played out the scene in his mind — and he must have done that a hundred times — things had been quite different.

In the Knox mind-version, Holt jumps to his feet and rushes around the desk. And this is what Knox wants. Because it is not enough that the other man must die — he must know humiliation before that death.

Holt’s anger has swollen him to almost twice his normal size. He is like a raging bull that has sighted the red cape — like a ravenous lion springing at its prey. He knows that he can snap the puny intruder in two — as if he were no more than a twig — and that is just what he intends to do.

Knox waits until his enemy is halfway across the room — then produces the gun from his pocket.

Holt sees the revolver, and comes to an abrupt stop.

He is still like a raging bull, but now one that has the smell of its own death in its nostrils — still the ravaging lion, but now a lion which realizes it is no match for its intended victim. His arms drop uselessly to his sides and his eyes are suddenly filled with fear.

‘ What’s that?’ this fantasy Holt says in a trembling voice, as his eyes fix on the gun.

‘ You know what it is,’ the fantasy Knox replies, his own voice as firm and steady as the hand in which he is holding the weapon.

Holt sinks to his knees, his hands clenched in prayer.

‘ Please don’t kill me!’ he sobs. ‘Please! ’

And that is the moment at which Knox pulls the trigger.

That was what should have happened — but it hadn’t !

Holt was continuing to sit behind his desk.

Angry — yes.

Frightened — possibly.

But still sitting there !

Knox pulled out the revolver and pointed it at his enemy.

‘Put the gun away, before you hurt yourself,’ Holt said.

But the fear was in his eyes now — just as Knox had dreamed it would be.

‘Stand up!’ the man with the revolver said.

‘Why should I?’ Holt demanded.

Why indeed, Knox wondered.

Because, he supposed, that was how he had scripted it to be — how it was meant to be.

‘Stand up, and you may just live,’ he said. ‘Stay where you are, and I’ll kill you right now.’

Holt still made no move. ‘I’ll pay you back all the money you lost. I’ll pay you back double what you lost.’

For an instant, Knox almost gave way.

But only for an instant — because he knew that the moment he lost the upper hand, Holt would crush him.

‘I’m going to count to three, and if you’re not standing up by “three”, I will kill you!’

Slowly and reluctantly, Holt rose to his feet — to reveal that he was naked from the waist down.

‘What the. .’ Knox gasped.

And then he understood.

‘You got a whore under your desk,’ he said. ‘You’ve spent the money you stole from me on a whore !’

Holt forced a smile to his face.

‘Oh, not all of it,’ he said. ‘Even the best prostitutes are nowhere near as expensive as that.’

He was trying to make a joke of the whole situation, Knox realized. Because he knew it would make him seem more human — make him more difficult to kill.

But that wouldn’t work. In fact, it only made matters worse, because only a monster would rob two fine young men of their college education and then squander the money on a common prostitute.

‘If you still believe in God, then pray to Him now,’ Knox said, his finger already tightening on the trigger.

It was the woman’s scream which made his hand jerk — made the bullet he fired strike Holt not in his black heart, but only in the shoulder.

Big Bill rocked, but somehow managed to hold his ground.

And then the woman herself appeared — rising up suddenly from behind the desk and burying her head in Holt’s massive chest.

As if that would protect her!

As if she would have been worse off staying where she was!

Knox looked down at the gun in his hand, almost as if he were wondering how it had ever got there.

He couldn’t shoot again, he told himself, because the woman was in the way.

But even if she hadn’t been, he understood — deep down — he would not have fired a second time, because he had only ever been brave enough to loose off one shot, and that shot had already gone.

Despite his wound, Holt was struggling to get from behind the desk — to come at him just as he had done in the fantasy — but the woman was clinging on to him with all the strength that her fear had given her.

And suddenly, there was a fourth person in the room — a stocky young man in a nightshirt.

That’s George, Holt’s eldest son, Knox thought in the detached way of someone who has withdrawn from the drama and is now only part of the audience.

George Holt looked at his father and the woman, then at Knox, then at his father and the woman again.

‘Oh my God!’ he said in a voice which was almost a moan. ‘Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God. .’

‘For Christ’s sake, be a man for once!’ his father said harshly. ‘You see what the problem is. Deal with it.’

But George stood rooted to the spot — as if he couldn’t have moved even if he wanted to.

‘Deal with it!’ his father repeated.

And slowly — almost like a sleepwalker — George Holt turned to face the man with the gun.

There were still five bullets left in the chamber of the revolver, Knox thought. And at this range, he couldn’t miss. But he had no argument with George Holt. Besides, he was feeling very, very tired, and pulling the trigger seemed like just too much of an effort.

And so he stood there.

Watching as George crossed the room towards him.

Watching as George came to a stop and bent his elbow back to give the blow he was about to deliver more force.

Watching as the big fist came towards him — growing ever larger until it filled his whole world.

And then everything went black.

Seven years later

There were barmen who would have been uncomfortable about working in a saloon that was only a short step from Sing Sing Prison, but this particular one — Jack O’Toole — considered himself a student of human nature in all its manifestations, and saw the location almost as a bonus. He liked the fact that his customers were not the run-of-the-mill carpenters and plumbers who patronized most saloons, and prided himself on being able to spot which side of the law each of them had been drawn from.

The saloon had been busy that morning — it always was on execution days — but the rush had eased off somewhat by the time the two men came in, and as they walked across the room to the counter, O’Toole made one of his famously rapid assessments of them.

They were an odd pair, and that was for sure, the barman thought.

The older of the two looked around forty. He was over six feet tall, and thin as a rake, but there was a hardness emanating from his wiry frame which would make even the beefiest troublemaker think twice about tangling with him. He had a large nose which — the barman thought whimsically — he could almost have borrowed from the Old Testament, and dark eyes which were not actually blazing with righteousness and anger at that moment, but looked as if they could manage the trick quite easily. He was dressed in a brown suit that had seen better days and had a decidedly un-American cut.