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Zachary’s expensive cut would have made the older man blanch. Growing up in a middle-class home in a strongly blue-collar neighborhood in Palisades Park, New Jersey, Zachary often saw flecks of paint in his dad’s hair, an occupational hazard for a painting contractor, and he wondered why his father took so little interest in his appearance and what it implied. When Zach worked summers for his dad, from the time he was fourteen through college and grad school, he always wore a baseball cap as protection against such paint splatters. He’d worried their presence would mark him as a mere day laborer. From an early age, Zach had set his sights high.
    A more profound disconnect between father and son was over what Zachary saw as Eli’s contentment and fundamental lack of ambition. Even as Zachary excelled at Yale as an undergraduate and at Harvard Law School, Eli plodded along in the paint business without any concern to make it grow. Still, his father felt entitled to deride his son’s inability to play baseball as well as he had, and had railed at his decision not to go into medicine as Eli had so vociferously voiced.
    As the years passed, Eli’s contempt for his son’s career choices only increased as Zachary abruptly abandoned his rather well-paid corporate law job in Manhattan to enter the financial world, and then, after ten years, quit his extremely lucrative job as an analyst on Wall Street. Zachary had tried to explain to an uncomprehending Eli that he had become bored and thought of Wall Street as a big con, believing there was much better money to be made and certainly more satisfaction in actually creating something, not just playing around with paper, betting on a rigged market with other people’s money.
    Zachary’s watch sounded a single soft chime, reminding him of the time and hence the proximity of their destination, and he swiveled in his seat to face the back of the plane. Halfway down sat Berman’s private assistant cum secretary, Whitney Jones. She looked right at Berman, ready for his instruction. In one of her straight-line Chanel suits, she was exquisite. Her black hair was pulled back from her face to show off her striking features, which combined the best of her African American father and Singaporean Chinese mother. For Zach, seeing her profile never failed to remind him of the famous bust of Nefertiti housed in the Neues Museum in Berlin. Berman merely tipped his head very slightly, and Jones, ever attentive, unclipped her seat belt. With an equivalent return nod, she stood. From previous instructions, she knew it was time to wake up their guests.
    Confident that everything was being taken care of, Berman turned his attention back to the view and to his reverie. “A day’s hard work is its own reward,” Eli Berman had probably said once a week over the course of his whole adult life. He was distressed that his son couldn’t seem to settle on anything and failed to appreciate what Eli had learned in the decades he had given to his paint business. Berman smiled. He far preferred being at 51,000 feet in a Gulfstream jet to any satisfaction gained from a day’s manual labor.
    Zachary absentmindedly played with his wedding band. The coming weeks were vitally important to his enterprise and billions of dollars were at stake, yet his wife and children, who should have been more involved in his triumph, were in New York City, barely aware of Zachary’s work and the role he was playing in the fantastic evolution of nanotechnology. Zachary had wanted children, or so he thought, but he found domestic life as humdrum as he’d found corporate law. Ever since he’d been a child he’d been addicted to challenge and creativity. He couldn’t stand status quo and predictability. He’d broken his wedding vows many times, even with Whitney Jones on a few occasions, and he’d come to think of his own family with little sentiment above and beyond the need to provide for them in an appropriate