Yanked from the dimensionless efficiency in which she’d dwelt since the day her brother died, Evelyn had seen vividly for the first time the image of her brother’s corpse, of his shot brain smeared on the tile.
The next day she didn’t go to work. In fact, she ended up staying out half the week, in that new house of hers, in which she suddenly felt herself to be a stranger.
Coming to see Henry Graves, she’d known that eventually he would ask her why. Why was she telling him what she knew?
He put the question to her once they had ridden the elevator back upstairs and returned to his office.
“I must tell you,” he said, “in all my years here I’ve never had someone come through the door to report their own institution. I confess I’m curious.”
Evelyn drew herself up to deliver her piece. But what came to mind were not the words she’d prepared but the look on her aunt Verna’s face when she’d told her about her latest promotion, how her eyebrows had risen, her eyes brimming, her whole face opening up as her shoulders let go, as if for all the world she’d been told, as in a dream, that she were free from a burden she’d never thought to imagine gone. It was a look Evelyn had seen before, at each stage of her accomplishments, and each time it nearly broke her. She could never tell Verna how routine her job was, how bureaucratic and spiritually thin. That would be cruel. But then so, in its way, was coming here to blow the whistle. Once the lawyers got involved, who knew what would count for the truth? She had pieces of evidence about what McTeague and Fanning had done but she wasn’t, after all, the person in charge. As best she could tell, the protections for a person in her position weren’t worth the paper they were written on. It wasn’t only her hopes she was jeopardizing by being here.
Henry Graves’s welcoming expression had been replaced by a more sober, businesslike concern.
“I can’t say for sure,” she said. “You’re probably wondering if it’s because I have some grudge against Fanning. I don’t care for him but that’s not why I’m here. Maybe I’m just tired of worrying.”
“My staff is going to need to debrief you,” he said. “If it’s okay with you, I’d like to do that right away.”
She nodded and he reached for a phone on the side table. As he talked with his deputy, Evelyn looked about the office again. It was smaller than many occupied by the senior executives at Atlantic Securities and without the views. Perhaps she was only imagining it, then, this sense of imperturbable calm and yet it seemed manifest to her sitting there encased in those heavy stone walls, the gilt-framed paintings looking down from the wall, as the grandfatherly white man in his jacket and tie took the situation in hand.
She wondered if this were the feeling that so many people out there in the country hungered for: a sense of continuity, gone or never present in so many lives.
Give me one thing that won’t change. Just one.
Daddy will take care of the money.
The dealers whose henchmen had shot Carson knew the need for this feeling as well as anyone, and they used it every day. But here in the undying realm of the central bank no violence was required. Here the aristocrats of bureaucracy guarded money’s permanent interests. Part of her wanted never to leave this room with its promise of the cessation of all struggle. And yet to recognize this longing was to see herself as a traitor. To what, she wasn’t entirely sure. Life perhaps. Or the belief in it.
“We’re all set,” Henry said, putting down the phone. “Are you ready?”
Chapter 16
“Where are you?” Sabrina asked.
“I don’t know. Twenty-eight, maybe. Twenty-nine.”
“Wow,” she said. “If you’re not careful, you might actually become interesting.”
From the office where he had wound up, Doug could see over Four Point Channel and across the corner of the harbor to the new federal courthouse with its slanting glass façade and a row of flags out front, fluttering in the breeze.
“So here’s the deal,” Sabrina said. “Holland wants you at the Ritz for the deal closing with Taconic; McTeague’s called three times; you’ve got a message from Mikey to contact him ASAP; the guy you hired to erase our e-mails says someone’s messing with his program; some official-sounding Chinese guy from the Singapore Exchange wanted to confirm your mailing address at eight this morning; Evelyn Jones is on vacation; and some kid named Nate called to say he was waiting for you ‘in the room.’ Which I’m not even going to touch. You think just maybe you could turn your phone on?”
In the last few weeks, Doug had begun to wander like this. Using the stairs, he’d head down to floors of the tower he’d never visited before, the reception areas distinguishable only by the pallor of the ferns and the colors of the abstract paintings hung over the leather chairs. Departments whose staff he could once have recited by name had doubled or tripled in size, filling whole floors. Nodding at the smiling secretaries, saying the occasional word to the middle managers surprised in the corridor, all of them as ignorant as could be of how untenable the bank’s predicament had become, he’d wind up in the office of someone down in consumer credit or government relations who was out for the day, and there he’d sit in the quiet with the door closed and his phone off, trying again and again to order his thoughts.
Through July and August the Nikkei index had shed another twelve hundred points; the Japanese Ministry of Finance, criticized for their earlier intervention, had done nothing to prevent the slide. McTeague’s losses had ballooned. They were larger now than the value of Atlantic Securities itself.
But then again, hardly anyone knew. If some deputy department head occasionally bothered to e-mail Doug, inquiring about loans from one division after another to an obscure subsidiary named Finden Holdings, he didn’t bother to reply. Even Holland seemed to have voided the problem from his mind, entertaining clients at Red Sox games and the Boston Pops and now finalizing the stock-only purchase of Taconic, the bank that had fallen on hard times back in the spring.
Union Atlantic’s customers still drew on lines of credit and made payments on existing loans. The insurance subsidiary still wrote policies and, after initially projecting large, 9/11-related losses, looked as if it might actually show a modest profit. People all over the country still opened checking accounts and paid bills and withdrew tens of millions in cash. On the Asian exchanges, there were rumors of a huge bet on the Nikkei but people figured it was a hedge fund in Connecticut or London, because, after all, banks wouldn’t expose that much of their own capital.
Indeed, the larger the problem grew the more routine the management of it had become. What had started as a crisis had turned into a condition. And then, just as the condition surpassed any previously imaginable level of acceptable seriousness, it seemed to vanish altogether, as if too big to see.
“You there?” Sabrina asked.
“Tell Holland I’m on my way.”
“What about the rest?”
“Tell that computer geek to work his shit out. I want those e-mails gone.”
“So dramatic. Can I shred something?”
“Piss off.”
“Maybe I’ll become one of those cooperating witnesses. I could write a memoir. I’m so sick of Franco. I had this whole idea about how to generate a subtle, almost perverse sympathy for him, but it all seems ridiculous now. I slept with this schlep in Watertown the other day. I tried taking his grandmother seriously, but in the end she was just an old Fascist. Who knows? My therapist says—”