Even as he seemed about to cry, Nate kept his eyes open, staring straight at him. Doug reached his hand down to cover the eyes, but with surprising force Nate peeled the hand back and kept looking. It was unbearable. He jabbed harder, pushing air from Nate’s lungs, forcing him to gasp for breath. And still he wouldn’t look away. A surge of nausea rose up through Doug’s body as he hovered over him, threatening to drain all his energy, making him wish for a moment that those eyes were the barrels of guns that would finish him here and now. But time kept on and he was sweating and Nate came on his chest and stomach and Doug emptied himself into him and pulled out. And then Nate, spread-eagled on the bed, arms out to the sides, looked once again as he had before, like a lamed foal awaiting its owner’s merciful bullet.
Doug wiped himself off and pulled his trousers up, watching Nate rise from the bed and disappear into the bathroom. The ringing of the shower water blended with the ringing of his phone, which he ignored.
Nate was quiet when he returned, dressing with his back to Doug, who flipped on the TV in search of news.
A few minutes later, from over his shoulder, Doug heard him say, “I got you something.”
“What do you mean?”
“A present.”
“What for?”
“I don’t know. I felt like it.” Coming around to Doug’s side, he handed him a small wrapped box. Doug removed the gold ribbon and tore away the paper. Inside the case was a pair of black-and-silver cuff links.
“You’ve got all those cuff shirts. But you always wear the same links.”
Doug closed the case and put it aside.
“This game,” he said, “it’s over.”
“It’s not a game to me.”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about. You’re a kid. You think that what you feel matters.”
“It does.”
“I’m doing you a favor. You can’t see it now, but I am. You want to be defenseless all your life? You want to be the chump? You like sleeping with guys — fine. But take your heart off your fucking sleeve.”
Standing up, Doug grabbed his jacket and briefcase from the couch and walked out of the room, slamming the door behind him.
At the entrance to the ballroom, a security guard asked him for ID.
“You’re not press, right? There’s no press allowed.”
Teams of lawyers were arrayed around an enormous oblong table, their seconds seated behind them like congressional aides. The young associates whispered in their bosses’ ears, as a guy in suspenders at the head of the table read aloud from a paragraph of the contract projected on a screen behind him.
Save for occasional naps on their hotel beds, the lawyers had been in this room for three days straight, fighting over the details of the acquisition, down to the last indemnification.
At a desk in the far corner of the room, Holland’s secretary, Martha, was typing furiously on her laptop.
“Where’s Jeffrey?” he asked her.
“Doug,” she said, seemingly alarmed by his appearance. She pointed to her right. “It’s the second door down. Good luck.”
Another security guard, this one a man Doug recognized from the office, opened the door for him and he entered the windowless antechamber. The two men from the lobby, still wearing their blue windbreakers, sat on folding metal chairs. They stood as he entered; he heard the door close behind him.
“Douglas Fanning?” the older of the two asked, as his partner removed a pair of handcuffs from his belt.
“Yeah,” Doug said. “That’s me.”
Chapter 17
Across from Henry, Holland rested his elbows on the table and leaned forward, interlacing his meaty fingers, the extra flesh of his neck pinched by his shirt collar.
“First guy I ever worked for,” he said, “could rattle off every loan on his book, quote you the rate, and tell you who was past due, all without so much as glancing at a balance sheet. Sean Hickey. Manager for Hartford Savings. He told me to forget whatever they’d taught me and learn to read a man’s face. That was the training. To sit beside him in meetings with the local entrepreneurs and give him my thumbs-up or thumbs-down. I picked the ones with the flash — the talkers. He rejected every one of them. You’re thinking short, he’d say. You want steady. All that seems like a hundred years ago. It’s a trader’s game now, a pure trader’s game.”
The Bierstadt canvas hanging on the wall behind Union Atlantic’s chairman and CEO depicted an untouched Yosemite in early fall or late spring, the verdant grass and mountain lake beneath the peaks struck by columns of sun descending from a gap in the clouds. Half Dome was capped with snow melting into falls that ran off the lower cliffs, the fine mist emanating from the cascades of water giving the painter away for the Romantic he was, that mystical, German idealism struck here in a grander key on the subject of the American West.
Thirty-eight million, Henry thought. That’s what Holland had earned last year. And if the board forced him out, he’d collect twice that.
Through the doorway into the private dining room, a waiter in a black suit and tie approached, a plate in each hand.
“Cracked native lobster tails, gentlemen, served with poached organic eggs, papaya salsa, and Old Bay hollandaise sauce. Fresh ground pepper with your breakfast, sir?”
“No, thank you,” Henry replied, unfurling his napkin.
“I appreciate you coming here this morning,” Holland said. “I don’t know if I ever told you, but I voted for you back when I was at Chase, when I was on your board. We were glad to have you for the job.”
Henry had known as much. Holland would have preferred the appointment of a colleague from the private sector, someone more instinctively friendly to the industry’s interests. But once others had coalesced around Henry, he’d taken a friendly approach.
“You worry in the right way,” he said. “Which is important.”
If the FBI and the U.S. attorney’s office had had their druthers, they would have staked out Union Atlantic for months in order to build their case all the way up to Holland. But given the size of the problem, Henry hadn’t been able to wait. He had come through the front door, as it were, only forty-eight hours ago, and straightaway Holland had offered Fanning and his trader up on a platter. The bank had been running its own internal investigation, he claimed, which showed Fanning involved in rogue activity and attempts to cover his tracks. Given that Holland’s lawyers were themselves former federal prosecutors, former banking regulators, and former IRS commissioners, he knew the drill well enough: hide nothing, or at least appear to hide nothing.
In the months and years ahead, at a cost of millions, the matter of Holland’s own culpability would be the subject of multiple lawsuits, civil and criminal, with teams of his attorneys vetting every discovery request of every party, the lives of associates in some corporate firm devoted to nothing else, billing thousands of hours as they went, as the perfectly straightforward question of what he had known and when was fed into the numbing machinery of modern litigation, there to be digested at a sloth’s pace. Young lawyers would buy condominiums or town houses with their bonus checks, employing architects and builders and decorators who would, in turn, spend a little more themselves on cars or vacations or flat-screen TVs, though that particular trickle from the economy of distress would barely register against the job losses bound to come with the restructuring of Union Atlantic Group.