21
THE BILLIONAIRE
trance.
Then he noticed a little round child’s table with an empty picture frame,
and Sally said:
“You come to our house less and less all the time, Johnny. I wait for you,
but you don’t come. Why don’t you give me your picture, and I’ll put it in
this little frame. I’ll look at your picture, and that way it will be more fun for
to wait for you.”
When Johnny came to say goodbye to the little house and to Sally, he left
his photo there. He and his parents were moving to another country house.
***
John Heitzman, multi-billionaire, lay in bed in his suite and smiled as he re-
called more and more details about the time he’d spent as a child with the
little girl Sally. Only now did he realize that this little girl had loved him. He
was her first love, and her love was childish, reckless and unrequited. Maybe
he had loved her, too, or maybe he had just liked her. But she had loved him
in a way that, most likely, no one else in his whole life ever had, and so now,
reminiscing about the little house he’d built in the garden and about his
time spent with Sally, even now, pleasant warm feelings arose in him. These
feelings warmed his body, and he felt good.
He saw Sally only once more after he moved away, eleven years later. But
this encounter… Some new feelings stirred throughout his body. John Heitz-
man even raised himself up a bit in bed. His heart began pumping blood
through his veins with ever greater force. That meeting… He’d forgotten
about it. He never gave it any thought… But right now he couldn’t think of
anything else, and the very thought of it agitated him.
He went back to the estate where he’d spent his childhood eleven years
