Gail Bond’shusband, Richard, the investment banker, often worked late entertaining important clients. And none was more important than the American sitting across the table from him now: Barton Williams, the famous Cleveland investor.

“You want a surprise for your wife, Barton?” Richard Bond said. “I believe I have just the thing.”

Hunched down over the dinner table, Williams looked up with only slight interest. Barton Williams was seventy-five, and closely resembled a toad. He had a jowly, droopy face with large pores, a broad, flat nose, and bug eyes. His habit of placing his arms flat on the table and resting his chin on his fingers made him look even more like a toad. In fact, he was resting an arthritic neck, since he disliked wearing a brace. He felt it made him look old.

He could lie flat on the table, as far as Richard Bond was concerned. Williams was old enough and rich enough to do whatever he wanted, and what he had always wanted, all his life, was women. Despite age and appearance, he continued to have them in prodigious quantities, at all times of day. Richard had arranged for several women to drop by the table at the end of the meal. They would be members of his staff, dropping off papers for him. Or old girlfriends, coming by for a kiss and an introduction. A few would be other diners, admirers of the great investor, and so dazzled they had to come and meet him.

None of this fooled Barton Williams, but it amused him, and he expected his business partners to go to a little trouble for him. When you were worth ten billion dollars, people made an effort to keep you happy. That was how it worked. He viewed it as a tribute.

Yet at this particular moment, more than anything else, Barton Williams wanted to placate his wife of forty years. For inexplicable reasons, Evelyn, at age sixty, was suddenly dissatisfied with her marriage and with Barton’s endless escapades, as she referred to them.

A present would help. “But it better be damn good,” Barton said. “She’s accustomed to everything. Villas in France, yachts in Sardinia, jewelry from Winston, chefs flown in from Rome for her dog’s birthday. That’s the problem. I can’t buy her off anymore. She’s sixty and jaded.”

“I promise you, this present is unique in the world,” Richard said. “Your wife loves animals, does she not?”

“Has her own damn zoo, right on the property.”

“And she keeps birds?”

“Christ. Must be a hundred. We got finches in the damn sun room. Chitter all day. She breeds ’em.”

“And parrots?”

“Every kind. None talk, thank God. She never had much luck with parrots.”

“Her luck is about to change.”

Barton sighed. “She doesn’t want another damn parrot.”

“She wants this one,” Richard said. “It’s the only one like it in the world.”

“I’m leaving at six tomorrow morning,” Barton grumbled.

“It’ll be waiting on your plane,” Richard said.