She stared at him. “Hide twelve and a half million? Are you out of your mind?” Charlie spoke out loud as calculations rattled frantically in his skull. “Not that much. Just eight or nine. We can’t hide all of it, they’ll be expecting some loss. So we give them a loss, okay? Just help me make it an acceptable loss—three or four million, something like that. And put the rest of it—where?” His mind spun through a mental list of his clients.
Megan stared at him. “Charlie, that’s fifteen ways illegal.”
“What drives markets?” Charlie asked. “FIG. Fear, Ignorance, Greed. The directors at Tennessee Planters are ignorant of the securities marketplace. They really don’t understand what I’m doing. I have to stroke Dearborne every second to get him into line, and I can’t stroke all of the directors all of the time. Once they see our current position, fear will take control of their minds. They’re going to try to take charge of TPS, and ignorance and fear will have them doing the wrong thing. We don’t dare panic them. If they panic, they could order me to liquidate, and those millions of losing positions will turn into millions of real losses.”
Charlie could tell from the look on Megan’s face that she understood all too well what might happen.
“What have we got in the error account,” Charlie said, “a couple hundred thousand dollars? Just put the losses there instead of the real account. Who’s going to check the error account?”
“The figures in the error account get reported just like everything else,” Megan said. “All Dearborne or anyone else has to do is just call it up on the screen.”
Good, Charlie thought. She was responding to the problem. She was starting to think of ways to do what he needed.
“We can’t put it in my account. My profile is too high.” He looked at Megan. “Your account?” Megan’s answer was a flat stare.
“Right,” Charlie said. “So we put the loss in one of my client accounts. Sanderson—no, he’ll smell something wrong. Caldwell.” He grinned. “Caldwell. Caldwell’s on vacation. He won’t even notice. And he has sufficient collateral to cover any margin calls.”
“He’s not going to notice millions of losses? This won’t attract his attention?”
“Issue a correction once we’re in the black. I’ll call Caldwell and tell him it was a computer error.”
“Charlie,” Megan said, “I dassant do this for you.” The Ozarks was beginning to seep into her voice.
“These sorts of mistakes happen every day. You know they do.”
“Not for this much money. And it’s my job to catch just this sort of error.”
“Just till Monday,” Charlie said. “Dearborne plays golf every Monday at one o’clock.” Megan’s eyes flashed. “How’s Monday going to make a difference?” she demanded.
“The rally was over, I could tell,” Charlie said. “The momentum was gone. People are going to have the whole weekend to reevaluate their positions. Prices are going to fall on Monday.” He hoped.
He leaned forward over Megan’s desk, fixed her with his blue eyes. “Just till tee time, that’s all I ask. Then you can issue a correction. Dearborne won’t even look at it, he’ll just see Monday’s totals after the markets close.”
Megan bit her lip. “This is how Nick Leeson lost Baring’s,” she said.
“No!” Charlie shouted. Anger seemed to flash his blood to steam. He pounded a fist on the desk. “Nick Leeson lost Baring’s because he was a fucking incompetent traderl” He thumped his own chest. “I am a fucking great traderl I am the lord of the fucking trading jungle!” He realized Megan was leaning back, away from his anger. What he saw in her eyes wasn’t fear, it was distaste. She hated weakness, he reminded himself. Hated fear, hated panic.
Charlie lowered his voice, tried to catch his breath. He had to make it all logical, all reasonable. He reminded himself that he was asking her to go clean against her training and instincts. Not to mention the law. It was her job to balance the books. It was something she took pride in. Now he was telling her not to balance them, to shove a colossal loss under the rug. He had to keep talking, to keep Megan working on the problem, see it from his point of view.
“I just need to get over this little bad patch, that’s all,” he said. “Just help me with this.” He felt sweat running down his face. “After this is done, we can relax. Call the caterers, get some duck, some veal. Call a masseuse over to the house, make sure we’re good and relaxed. Open a bottle of Bolly. We can have a quiet weekend together.” He looked at her. “It’s your money, too, sweetheart.” She looked at the screen. Gnawed a nail. Then bent over her keyboard, her lacquered nails rattling on the keys.
“Caldwell better be on vacation,” she said.
“You’re brilliant!” Charlie cheered.
“No, I’m not,” she said. “I’m just crazy.” She looked at him darkly. “But not as crazy as you.”
SIX
At the little Prairie, thirty miles lower down, [the steam-boatmen] were bro’t to by the cries of some of the people, who thought the earth was gradually sinking but declined to take refuge on board without their friends, whom they wished to collect. Some distance below the little Prairie the bank of the river had caved in to a considerable extent, and two islands had almost disappeared.
The Reverend Noble Frankland looked into his wife’s sitting room. “Time to go, sweetie pie,” he said. Sheryl looked up from her work. “Just a second, teddy bear,” she said. Sheryl used tweezers to pick up a tiny piece of paper, no larger than the head of a pin, dip it carefully in glue, and then place it carefully in the eye of an angel.
She was doing her art. Sheryl had been working at this project for longer than the twelve years of her marriage to Frankland.
Her chosen medium was postage stamps. Sheryl bought them by the thousands, the more colorful the better, and cut them up into tiny pieces each the size of a snowflake. These she glued onto bolts of black-dyed linen in designs representing scenes from the Book of Revelation. The pictures were amazingly intricate, like those miniature paintings drawn with three-hair brushes, but the scale of the work was enormous. The entire work was over fifty feet long, and Frankland had never been permitted to see all of it, though occasionally he’d caught glimpses of it over Sheryl’s shoulder as she worked. Just the bits he’d seen took his breath away. Horsemen and angels, the saved and the damned, the Whore of Babylon and the City of God, all blazing in the brightest of colors, all shown in the most exacting detail. When Sheryl depicted a demon, she showed it to the pockmarks on its skin and the gleam of wickedness in its eyes. You could practically smell the garlic on its breath.
No commercial artist could ever produce work like this. The labyrinthine detail combined with the huge scale would have defeated any attempt to profit from such a work. Only a person inspired to devote her life to the work could possibly assemble such a thing.