“Is that a threat?”
“Don’t be ridiculous. The point is, you’re letting the situation get to you. That’s not how it has to be.”
“Oh really? And what do you propose?”
Doug had never seen him so frightened. Most all of what Holland had achieved in life had flowed from the bottomless well of his self-confidence, a great, social largesse that made everyone in his orbit feel as if they’d been selected for the bright and winning team. Contemplating a failure of this magnitude undid the premise of him.
“We keep feeding him money for now,” Doug said. “We keep the positions off our books, on his phony clients. And we wait. Sell what and when we can and wait for the rest to turn around. We keep our nerve. That’s what we do.”
“That’s your plan? Double the entire bank down on a single bet and hope for the best? I expected more out of your scheming mind.”
“You have another idea?”
“Fraud. That’s your answer? You’re suggesting we commit fraud? You want me to stand up at the shareholders’ meeting and with all the other great news add that things are going fine and dandy in foreign operations?”
“It’s your call,” Doug said, wandering over to the bookcase. “We can sell. I can call Hong Kong right now. If you’re lucky, you’ll get to retire with some fraction of what you’ve got and be remembered as the guy who built a powerhouse and ran it into a ditch. And once they start digging and reporting and trying to understand what really happened — and they will — the shareholders will sue you anyway, and maybe the Feds will too. That’s one option: be the upstanding guy. But that’s not the advice you hired me to give you. I’m here because you wanted to win.”
Doug took down from the shelf a vintage leather-bound edition of de Gaulle’s memoirs only to find that the pages remained uncut.
“You know what I’ve been thinking lately?” he said.
“I shudder to think,” Holland said.
“About how things are changing. The old compact. Between government, companies, the news. The basic assumptions about how everyone behaves. Most people have some vague sense of it. They feel a kind of undertow and they’re scared by it. But they don’t see how fundamental the shift is. They don’t see it because they’re too busy surviving or lamenting whichever piece of the old assurances they happen to be losing. So they get sentimental, wishing the tide wouldn’t come in. At least that’s what the losers do. You can do that. Or you can admit what we’ve always been up to. And then you can focus on the bigger picture.”
“And what might that be?”
“Influence. Power over information. Control. Something bigger than rules or good taste. The more permanent instincts. You know what I’m talking about. You even get off on it. It’s just the appearance of it that bothers you.”
“You’re a piece of work. You really are.”
“You think you get all this for free?” Doug said, gesturing at the paintings and the antique furniture.
“Who the fuck do you think you are? Free? I was making loans before you were born.”
“Sure. And every year the interest rate got better, didn’t it? Government caps came off, and you could charge twenty-five percent on Joe Six-Pack’s credit card, and get him to pay you for the privilege of keeping his money.”
“What are you? Some kind of Socialist now?”
“I’m nothing,” Doug said. “I’m just saying, you take the advantage you can get. That’s how you got what you have.”
“Yeah, with one difference. It was legal.”
Doug smiled, leaning back against the bookcase. “That’s right,” he said. “And the governed have consented and all is well in the hearts of the people.”
Holland sank onto the bench in the window, all his fretful motion spent. As he stared over the darkened field from where Doug had come, the two of them listened to the sound of trumpets from the tent outside, their high, shiny notes rising on the night air.
EARLIER, AS CHARLOTTE and Henry had approached the gates, they’d been confronted by the expressionless faces of the guards.
Don’t be fooled, Wilkie whispered. They’re not here to protect you. And I know what you’re thinking — that it’s always a conspiracy with me. But just remember, they said I was paranoid, that I’d invented all that business of a plot against my life, but you know now how the FBI listened in on me, how they followed everything that went on in the Brotherhood, and I’m supposed to believe your white government didn’t know there were gunmen there at the hall waiting to kill me? You’ve been uppity, Charlotte. You’ve thwarted one of their kind. Now watch, he said. They will take your protectors from you.
And so they did, insisting the dogs be tied up to a tree. No animals allowed. They would be given plenty of water, they said, the more barrel-chested of the two claiming to be a lover of dogs.
You come to Sodom and leave your minister tethered at the gate? Sam asked, despairingly, his pompous head thick with sweat. God’s grace may be infinite, woman, but to think that He should give us help against sin without our asking and crying and weeping to Him for His help; to think that God should save us and we never set apart any time to work out our own salvation. What reason have we to believe such things? God is in Ill terms with you. He visits you not with His great consolations. Despite what you think of your victory, all things are against you; the things that appear for your Welfare, do but Ensnare you, do but Poison you, do but produce your further Distance from God.
God is a character, Charlotte thought, as she handed the leashes over to the men. A well-rounded character in a well-rounded book.
And she and Henry continued on up the hill, the ministers’ voices fading behind them.
Just three days earlier, after her vindication had been called out from the judge’s bench for all to hear, she had taken Henry for a walk up to the nursery to pick out saplings for planting once the mansion had been leveled. But all he could summon was a barely disguised disappointment at the result, as if returning five acres to their property and nature’s way were more burden than triumph. Sam and Wilkie, however, had been the larger disappointment. All spring she had calmed herself with the thought that once the strain of arguing her case was over, the dogs would relent. After all, it was for them, as well as herself, that she had fought so hard to beat the intrusion back.
Instead, their berating of her had grown incessant, their talk traitorous, reminding her that in siege warfare, it didn’t matter how high or thick your city walls were if the enemy’s agents were within.
And so just when she’d thought she might at last turn her eye to the future, Charlotte had found herself once more having to call up memories in defense: how quiet it had been in the woods, say, on a late afternoon in August as the thunderheads gathered and you could see up beyond the pale evergreen and birch, where against the powder-gray sky the black-and-orange wings of butterflies danced in the last shelves of light, fair creatures of an hour that she might never look upon more. — then on the shore
Of the wide world I stand alone, and think,
Till Love and Fame to nothingness do sink.
“They were the same age, you know?” she said, as Henry glanced into the drinks tent.
“Who?”
“Keats and Eric. When they died. Twenty-five. Though of course Keats had written a good deal more and of much finer quality. But there we are. Correspondences — they keep you company.”