The problem with inheriting a fortune, Tommy Calloway had decided, was that nobody ever asked if you wanted it.

He stood in the mirror of his Fifth Avenue apartment and studied the man staring back at him. Twenty-five years old, dark hair that refused to lay flat, eyes that looked older than they had any right to be. The reflection wore a silk dressing gown that had cost more than most Americans earned in a year. Tommy hated it. He hated everything about it.

"Mr. Calloway?" The voice belonged to Charlie, his agent and occasional companion in the art of not doing anything useful. "The boys are waiting. Vanderbilt Jr. is here, and he brought those girls from the Cotton Club."

Tommy closed his eyes. "Tell them I'm not coming down."

"But sir, Mr. Vanderbilt specifically asked to discuss the radio investment—"

"Tell him I'm not interested in radio. Tell him I think wireless transmission is a fad. Tell him I'm putting all my money into something much more sensible."

"Like what, sir?"

Tommy opened his eyes and looked at the mirror again. "Into nothing. Absolutely nothing."

The letter from his uncle Cornelius had arrived two months ago, delivered by a lawyer with a face like a disappointed owl. Cornelius Calloway had made his fortune in steel and lost his soul in the process. He had died alone in a room full of money, and his last act had been to curse the one nephew he had ever tolerated.

"To Thomas," the letter read, "I leave my entire estate, estimated at one million dollars. But let it be understood: every dollar he earns will make his soul uglier. This is not a threat. It is a description of reality. I have watched the boy grow, and I have seen the greed in him, coiled like a spring. He will take my money and he will multiply it, and he will become exactly what I always feared he was."

Tommy had read the letter three times. Then he had read it again. Then he had sat in his uncle's study for an hour, staring at the Persian carpet and trying to decide what to do.

The decision had come to him quickly, with the clarity of someone who has nothing to lose except a fortune he never wanted.

"I will spend it," he told the empty room. "I will spend every cent of it, and I will spend it so recklessly that by the time I am thirty, I will be poorer than when I inherited it. And then I will be free."

Free. The word tasted strange on his tongue. Free from what? From the curse, certainly. But also from the expectation, from the weight of a name that meant something in Wall Street and something less in everything else.

He went downstairs and found Vanderbilt Jr. waiting in the parlour, a young man with the smooth, untroubled face of someone who had never been denied anything. Around him sat three women whose beauty was of the modern variety—short hair, short skirts, and an expression that suggested they knew exactly what they were worth and exactly how to get it.

"Calloway," Vanderbilt said, rising. "Good of you to join us."

"Vanderbilt," Tommy replied, sinking into a chair. "I've made my decision about the radio company."

Vanderbilt raised an eyebrow. "And?"

"I'm selling my shares. All of them. At half price."

The three women stopped talking. Vanderbilt's expression shifted from curiosity to something closer to alarm. "Half price? Tommy, that company is worth—"

"I am aware of what it is worth," Tommy said. "I am also aware that wireless transmission is a passing fad. The idea that we can send information through the air without wires is charming, in a scientific sort of way. But it will never be practical. Never."

He said this with absolute conviction, because he believed it. He wanted to believe it. If wireless transmission was worthless, then selling his shares at half price would be a perfectly rational decision.

It would also lose him fifty thousand dollars in a single transaction.

"Tommy," Vanderbilt said slowly, "I think you're making a mistake."

"Probably," Tommy agreed cheerfully. "But I intend to make plenty of them."

He sold the shares. He lost the money. And within six months, the radio company—now owned by a consortium of investors who had bought Tommy's shares at half price—became the foundation of an entire industry.

Tommy watched this development with the detached horror of a man watching his house burn down while everyone else applauded the fire.

"It's a fad," he told Charlie over dinner at the Stork Club. "A passing fancy. Nobody needs wireless radio."

"Tommy," Charlie said, picking at a plate of escargot, "you just lost fifty thousand dollars. Are you sure you want to keep talking about how worthless the investment was?"

"I'm sure of everything," Tommy said. "Except the part where I'm suddenly the talk of every cocktail party in Manhattan."

He was right about that. The press had caught wind of his "bold" decision to sell radio shares, and the financial pages were full of speculation about Calloway's "strategic vision." Nobody knew he had sold at half price. Nobody knew he had called wireless transmission a "passing fad." They only knew that he had walked away from a company that was now worth ten times what he had sold it for.

"Genius," Charlie said, reading a newspaper headline aloud. "'Calloway Sees the Future: Dumps Radio for 'More Sensible' Investments.'"

"I didn't dump it for anything," Tommy said. "I dumped it because I thought it was worthless."

"Same thing, really," Charlie said. "People love a man who knows what he's talking about, even when he's talking nonsense."

Tommy tried other strategies. He bought a private yacht and immediately sank it in a storm off Long Island. He invested in a chain of speakeasies that served watered-down gin and played music so loud it gave customers headaches. He hired the most expensive band in New York and made them perform at a party that lasted exactly three hours and cost forty thousand dollars.

Each disaster was followed by a triumph.

The yacht sinking made national news and earned him a medal from the Coast Guard for "bravery in the face of adverse conditions." The speakeasies became notorious for their "authentic Prohibition experience" and drew crowds from every borough. The three-hour party was hailed as "a masterclass in exclusivity" and tickets for the next one sold for five hundred dollars a head.

Tommy sat in his apartment one night and stared at the ceiling, wondering if his uncle's curse was real.

Not the part about his soul getting uglier. That, he suspected, was just Cornelius being Cornelius—a man who had spent his life measuring everything in dollars and having no concept of anything else.

But the part about losing money. The part about every attempt to dissipate his fortune being twisted by the machinery of American capitalism into an act of genius.

Was it possible that the universe itself was conspiring against him? That every time he reached for failure, it handed him success on a silver platter?

He thought about this for a long time. Then he thought about the forty thousand dollars he had wasted on the three-hour party. Then he thought about the yacht, which he had loved even though he would never admit it.

"Damn you, Cornelius," he said to the ceiling. "Damn you and your stupid curse."

The ceiling did not answer. It never did.

Outside, New York City hummed with the energy of a million people who believed that tomorrow would be better than today. Tommy lay in bed and listened to the sound of traffic on Fifth Avenue, wondering if he was the only person in the city who knew that tomorrow was going to be worse.

Not because of the money. Because of the truth he was beginning to understand: that in a world where everything could be turned into profit, even the desire to lose everything could be turned into a strategy.

And if that was true, then he was not free at all. He was trapped in a cage of his own making, a golden cage built from his father's money and his uncle's curse and his own desperate, impossible wish to be nothing.

The traffic kept humming. The city kept growing. And Tommy Calloway, heir to a million dollars and prisoner of a curse that might have been real, closed his eyes and tried to sleep.

---END_OF_STORY---

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