Sidney Sheldon - Mistress of the Game

“Fine. You know what you’re doing. Call me once you’ve doubled my money.”

Gabe laughed. “I will.”

He was back in business.

Gabe and Dia called their new company Phoenix, because it had risen from the ashes of their old lives.

At first, everyone thought they were crazy. Fellow developers laughed in Gabe’s face when he told him Phoenix’s business plan.

“You’re out of your mind. None of the shack dwellers can afford a home. And anyone who can afford one isn’t going to want to live within twenty miles of those areas.”

Others went even further.

“You go home at night, the kaffirs’ll torch the place. Those shantytown kids have got nothing better to do. Who d’you think’s going to insure you in Pinetown?”

As it turned out, insurance was a problem. None of the blue-chip firms would give Phoenix the time of day. Just when Gabe was starting to give up hope, Lefu came to the rescue, introducing Dia to a boyfriend of one of her cousins who worked for an all-black building insurance agency in Johannesburg.

“The premiums are high.” Dia handed Gabe the quote.

“High?” Gabe read the number and felt faint. “This guy must have been high when he came up with this rate. Tell him we’ll pay half.”

“Gabe.”

“All right, two-thirds.”

“Gabriel.”

“What?”

“It’s our only option. He’s doing this as a favor to Lefu. As a friend.”

“With friends like him, who needs enemies?” Gabe grumbled.

They paid the full rate.

By the end of their first year, Phoenix was 700,000 rand in the red. They had built thirty small, simple prefab houses with running water and electricity and sold none. Gabe lost fifteen pounds and took up smoking. Dia, with one baby at home and a second on the way, remained inexplicably upbeat.

“They’ll sell. I’m working on it. Give me time.”

Gabe had worked out a financial model for shared ownership that he knew a number of the shanty families could afford. The problem was that none of them believed it.

“You have to understand,” Dia explained. “These people have been lied to by white men their entire lives. Many of them think it was white doctors who first spread AIDS here.”

“But that’s ridiculous.”

“Not to them. They think you’re trying to steal their money. The idea that they could afford a home-never mind a home with water and a roof that doesn’t leak-it’s totally alien to them. You may as well tell them you’ve found a way for them to live forever, or that you can turn horse manure into gold.”

“So what do we do?”

“You do nothing. Go away for a few weeks, take a vacation. Show one of your Polish teenagers something other than your bedroom ceiling for a change.”

Gabe shook his head. “No way. I can’t leave the business, not now.”

“I’m not asking you, I’m telling you,” said Dia. “Bugger off. I know what I’m doing.”

Gabe spent two weeks at Muizenberg, a local beach resort, with a girl named Lenka. Once the site of a famous battle between the British and the Dutch, Muizenberg was now the go-to resort for affluent Capeto-nians, an African version of the Hamptons.

“Gorgeous!” Lenka gasped as they strolled past the Victorian mansions on the promenade.

“Gorgeous!” she enthused, taking in the wide sandy beaches and turquoise water of False Bay.

“Gorgeous!” she cooed, when a spaniel puppy bounded up to Gabe on the beach and promptly urinated on his deck shoes.

After two days, Gabe was climbing the walls. One more “gorgeous” and he’d be forced to try to hang himself with the hotel sheets.

I will never, ever go on vacation again with a girl with the IQ of a dog turd. Even if she does look like a movie star.

Muizenberg was dull. Deathly dull. But it could have been one of the Seven Wonders of the World and Gabe would still have hated it. His mind had never left Pinetown.

The morning he got back to Cape Town, he raced to the office. He hadn’t felt so nervous since the day he stood in the dock at Walthamstow, waiting to be sentenced.

“So?” he asked Dia breathlessly. “Did you make any progress?”

“A little.”

Gabe’s heart sank. A little? They didn’t need a little. They needed a bloody miracle. He’d have to give up the apartment. Move back to Kennedy Road. Or perhaps the time had come to go home home? To admit defeat and go back to Scotland? There was no work at the docks, but maybe…

“I sold them all.”

It took a moment for Dia’s words to sink in.

“But…I don’t…how…but…”

Dia teased him. “You know, after two weeks away, I’d forgotten how articulate you can be.”

“You…but… all of them?”

“Every last one.”

“How?”

“Faith, my friend. Faith.”

Gabe looked at him blankly. Dia explained.

“I went to see the pastor at my old church and asked if he would let me speak there. He wasn’t keen at first, but I persuaded him. Church meetings around here are packed.”

“What did you say?”

“The same thing you’ve been saying, but in their voice. I talked about my own childhood. About the kids I knew who died as a direct result of the appalling living conditions, the lack of sanitation. I tried to let them know that I’ve been where they are, that I’m one of them. People started asking questions. From then on, it was easy. I talked them through your model, explained the financing. The next day I moved to another parish, then another.

“I actually sold the last unit three days ago. But I figured it could keep. I didn’t want to ruin your holiday with the lovely Lenka.”

Gabe thought about the nightmarish last few days in Muizenberg and didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

“Aren’t you going to say something?”

Striding over to Dia, Gabe picked him up in a huge bear hug and danced around the room, whooping for joy.

“Gorgeous!” He laughed. “Dia Ghali, you are bloody gorgeous!”

THE DAWN OF THE NEW MILLENNIUM USHERED IN A PERIOD of great change in the business world. Companies that had once been seen as untouchable giants began to disintegrate, outpaced by minuscule dot-com start-ups. Greed was still the name of the game. But the rules of the game had changed.

On April 8, 1999, former housewares salesman Craig Winn became a billionaire…for a day or two. When his three-year-old Internet startup, Value America, went public, the stock price veered wildly from $23 a share to almost $75 a share, before settling at $55. The forty-five-year-old Winn went to bed that night with a paper fortune of $2.4 billion. Not bad for a company that had never made a profit-and never would.

Within a year, the share price had fallen to two dollars. Over half of Value America’s employees had been fired and investors had lost millions. In August 2000, the company filed for bankruptcy.

In boardrooms across America, CEOs of what were now termed “old-economy” companies-giants like Kruger-Brent-watched these developments with dismay. Everything was changing. While the dot-com boom burned itself out in a spectacular fireball of ignorance and greed, the sands of world power were also shifting. China and India were on the up. The dollar began to falter. In investment banking and pharmaceuticals, two of Kruger-Brent’s key profit sectors, companies were merging and acquiring one another faster than the analysts could keep up. In banking, many of the great names of the 1980s-Salomon Brothers, Bankers Trust, Smith Barney-disappeared literally overnight, swallowed up by bigger, often foreign, rivals. In pharmaceuticals, the likes of Glaxo and Ciba faded as new brands like Aventis and Novartis emerged. In car manufacturing, Ford went on an acquisition spree, buying Volvo and Mazda and Aston Martin, then turned on a dime and began selling, first Jaguar then Land Rover. Meanwhile, the prices of oil and land-real estate-continued to rise like floodwater. Every year, every month, economists predicted a correction, but it never seemed to come. Banks fell over themselves to offer cheap credit, pouring gas onto the flames of an already overheated market.