“Treasury’s views are clear,” Henry said. “They want Union Atlantic saved.”
“And you’re thinking otherwise?”
“They took the mandatory reserves of the third-largest institution in the country and essentially walked them into a casino.”
“You don’t have to convince me. You could lock these people in solitary and they’d find a way around the regs.”
“So what would letting them go look like?” Henry said.
“A bloodbath. They’ve got business in a hundred countries. Counterparties up and down the food chain. They’re ten percent of the municipal bond market. They’ve got more credit cards than Chase. And they’re overweighted in mortgage securities. They’re the definition of systemic risk. And we’re barely out of a recession. It’d be malpractice to let them fail. You know it as well as I do.”
“You’re usually the skeptic.”
“Just ’cause a body’s got lung cancer doesn’t mean you can take out the lungs.”
Henry called Helen and told her to contact the CEOs of the major commercial and investment banks and inform them that their presence would be required at a meeting in the boardroom the following morning.
The last time Henry had orchestrated a private-sector rescue was when Long-Term Capital Management, a Greenwich hedge fund, had blown up during the currency crisis in the late nineties. At the time, the chairman of the Fed had publicly distanced himself from Henry’s actions, suggesting the market ought to have been left to settle the matter.
Tonight, however, when Henry phoned down to Washington, he received no such objection. Before Henry even made the request, the chairman granted him the board’s authority to employ loan guarantees should they be needed to cement a deal.
“Everything I’m seeing suggests it’s isolated,” the chairman offered.
“A rogue-trader situation. The worst I’ve seen, certainly. But it’s important to remember the specifics. There’ll be some posturing on the Hill. They’ll want to score points with the press, but it’ll die down, eventually. We just don’t want to give anyone too much of a platform on this.” He paused, wheezing slightly. “You think Holland knew?”
“Yes.”
“Well,” he said, passing over the answer, “you’ve got whatever backing you need.”
By the time Henry had finished his calls and spoken with his counterparts in London and Tokyo it was after midnight. Helen had reserved a room in case he didn’t want to make the trip to Rye and back and he decided to use it. He walked the short distance up lower Broadway to the Millenium Hotel through emptied streets, past the shuttered shoe stores and fast-food restaurants. The air was unusually muggy for October and full of dust kicked up by a wind off the Hudson. Plastic grocery bags and the pages of tabloids rolled along the sidewalk and into the intersection, where the cross draft lifted them into the air like tattered kites, yanked and spooled by invisible hands.
Realizing he had eaten no dinner, he ordered a sandwich from room service and ate it sitting at the desk that looked down over the pit where the twin towers had stood, the ramps and retaining walls and construction-company trailers floodlit the whole night through.
The last city of the Renaissance. That’s what Charlotte had called New York on the evening of September 11, when he’d phoned her from Basel to let her know that he was all right, that he was out of harm’s way. “Banking and art. They’ve been growing up together in cities for five hundred years. And they’re bombing the pair of them.”
He’d thought it generous, that she should link their worlds up like that, as if in peril, at least, they might stand side by side.
A few weeks ago, speaking to Helen about his sister, she’d
suggested he consider bringing Charlotte to live with him in Rye. Rather than paying a facility, he could hire someone to help. It was the town they had grown up in together, after all. She would say no, he imagined, but still, he would offer. Tomorrow, after his meeting, he would call her and suggest it.
E
ARLY THE NEXT MORNING,
he returned to the office. Despite the secretaries’ protests that their bosses’ jets couldn’t possibly take off on such short notice, by midmorning the heads of the nation’s eight largest banks had collected in the boardroom on the tenth floor of the Fed, just as Henry had requested. There he let them wait, these men who waited for nothing and for no one.
“They’re not a patient bunch,” Helen said, returning to Henry’s office from her walk down the hall to tell the captains of finance it would be a little while longer before the meeting began.
“Best to keep them nervous. Is Holland downstairs?”
She nodded.
“And our friend, is he here yet?”
“He’s right outside.”
“All right, then. Show him in.”
Henry stood to welcome his guest. Prince Abdul-Aziz Hafar wore a double-vented tweed jacket of a fine English cut, along with a dark-red silk tie and a red paisley pocket square, giving him the appearance of a dapper country gentleman, more likely in the market for a yearling than a bank. He greeted Henry with a handshake and a slight bow.
“You’ve timed your troubles well,” he said in his lilting British accent. “I’m here to see my son for his fall break. That’s what you call it, no?”
“Indeed,” Henry said, showing him to the couch.
“My cousin tells me Citibank’s the one to buy into, but then he would say that, given how much of the damn thing he already owns. We’re not as freewheeling as we used to be, you know. Now that we’ve set up our sovereign funds. We have all sorts of advisers. So I do hope you haven’t invited me to a charity event.”
“No,” Henry said. “I think you’ll find there are still things of value here.”
He had just handed the prince an outline of the arrangement he envisioned and that he would soon lay out for the men gathered at the far end of the hall, when he heard the phone ringing on Helen’s desk. A moment later, she knocked on the door.
All color had left her face. “You have to take this,” she said. “It’s about Charlotte.”
Chapter 18
You been misled
, Wilkie’s stentorian voice proclaimed.
You been had. You been took. And now you’re trapped. You’re double-trapped. You’re triple-trapped. And what are you gonna do? You gonna sit-in? You gonna picket? You gonna march on Washington? Or are you gonna stand up and make some justice happen?
Light from beneath the shade illuminated his dull black coat; it was morning and he was hungry.
For years, the two of them had slept in the living room. But no longer. They did as they pleased now, climbing on furniture, the bed even, waking her at all hours, there whenever she opened her eyes.
See it’s like when you go to the dentist and the man is going to take your tooth. You’re gonna fight him when he starts pullin’. So they squirt some stuff in your jaw called Novocain to make you think they’re not doing anything to you. So you sit there, and ’cause you got all that Novocain in your jaw you suffer peacefully. Blood running all down your jaw and you don’t know what’s happening. ’Cause someone has taught you to suffer peacefully, law-abidingly—their rules, their game—and you’re surprised they win every time? Is your mind that weak, that soft? What you need is a do-it-yourself philosophy, a do-it-right-now philosophy, an it’s-already-too-late philosophy
.
He approached the bed and as he stretched his jaw open Charlotte could see down the minister’s pink gullet.
I’ve said it once and I’ll say it again: Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. Moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue
.
“Quiet,” she pled. “There’s no need to convince me.”
For days she’d meant to get to the store to buy herself and the dogs some food, but having no appetite herself she’d forgotten, there being no room left in her mind anymore, it seemed, for anything but her single purpose.
Stepping out of bed, she crossed the room, the dogs following her to the closet. A dress didn’t seem appropriate for this day. Something more practical was in order. She chose a pair of gardening corduroys and a pullover she’d patched at the elbows.
Sam started in where he’d left off the night before, shaking his head with that self-satisfied disappointment of his.
I see that the devils are swarming about you this morning, like the Frogs of Egypt, here in the most retired of your chambers. And yet, like the sinner you are, you welcome them
.
Slave owner!
Wilkie shouted.
White devil! Get your filthy paws off the woman’s conscience. She’s seeing at last that it’s time for action. Time to swing up on some justice
.
The Blood of the Soul of this poor Negro here lies upon you
, Sam said, not deigning to speak directly to his dark companion,
and the guilt of his Barbarous Impieties, and superstitions, and his neglect of God, if you are willing to have nothing done toward the salvation of his soul. Despite what you think, to convert one Soul unto God is more than to pour out Ten Thousand Talents into the Baskets of the Poor
.
You listen to me, you cracker spook
, Wilkie said,
I’m not going to be taken
in by your love-thy-servant nonsense. If a man speaks the language of brute force, you can’t come to him with peace. Why good night, he’ll break you in two, as he has been doing all along. You have to learn how to speak his language and then he’ll get the point. Then there’ll be some dialogue. There’ll be some communication. There’ll be some understanding
.
Oh, who can tell
, Sam called out, his indignation rising,
but that this Poor Creature may belong to the Election of God! Who can tell, but that God may have sent this Poor Creature into your hands, Charlotte, that so One of the Elect may by your means be Called and by your Instruction be made Wise unto Salvation! The Blackest Instances of Blindness and Baseness are admirable Candidates of Eternal Blessedness. Though it be caviled, by some, that it is questionable Whether the Negroes have Rational Souls, or no, let that Brutish insinuation be never Whispered any more. They are men not beasts. Withhold knowledge of the Almighty from them and they will be destroyed
.
At her heels they raged, traipsing after her down the hallway, down the back stairs, and into the kitchen, to the window above the sink full now of dishes.
Over the grass a morning mist hung. Its tendrils stretched under the maples and down the hill. Ten minutes or more she stood there waiting, until at last she saw Fanning come out of his front door, dressed not in a suit today, as he usually was, but in jeans and a sweatshirt. She watched with relief as he got in his car and drove up to the road. She was not, after all, in the business of killing.
Yesterday, after saying her goodbyes to Henry, she had seen in her mind’s eye the mansion burning, and felt, in anticipation, its heat on her skin, the heat she remembered from the bonfires they used to have in the back field when they came up for Thanksgiving and dragged the fallen branches out of the woods and burned all the raked leaves, only how much greater would the heat be when it was an entire house consumed, wood and nails and glass and a thousand substances
besides? Again now, she saw the fire, and then the charred frame and then that, too, crumbling, and from the blackened earth saplings rising, drinking sun and rain, thickening in nature’s time to the testaments of endurance that trees became, shading again the river and the trout, the cardinals and the blue jays and the orange-winged butterflies flitting through a summer dusk, when she and Henry had played by the riverbank before being packed in the car and driven back to Rye, only years later to discover, at night in her dorm room, Milton’s pentameter describing what the two of them had lost:
… whereat
In either hand the hastning Angel caught
Our lingering Parents, and to th’ Eastern Gate
Led them direct, and down the Cliff as fast
To the subjected Plaine; then disappeer’d
.
She let the tap water run until it chilled the bones of her fingers and then she filled a glass for herself and the dogs’ bowls. They lapped them quickly dry and were back at her side in no time.
They say overcome your enemies with your capacity to love. What kind of an idea is that?
Wilkie asked.
He’s not going to be overcome by your love. I’ve never called on anybody to be violent without a cause
.
There is a court somewhere kept, where your pride shall be judged
, Sam warned.
And it is not here in the False Church of this earth
.
“I have not for one day believed in your God.”
No, sure. And so in Great Folly you shall one day wander down to the Congregation of the Dead
.
She took a box of matches from the ledge of the stove and beneath the sink found a canvas bag.
Sam and Wilkie followed her into the breezeway.
To concentrate just once more, she thought. That’s all that it would take. And indeed, as she stepped down the ramp onto the floor of the barn, she began to feel as she’d imagined she would, reading those stories in the papers over the years of the environmentalists and the anti–free traders who broke the law in the name of some greater justice, the anticipation of the act clarifying experience, rescuing it from the prison of language, the inward purpose blessing the otherwise desultory with meaning. And yet, for that very reason, she’d always considered such extremism adolescent. Too simple. Willful in its ignorance of the world’s complexity. And so deadly earnest. And yet how judgmental she had been. What, after all, was wrong with earnestness? Weren’t Fanning and his kind earnest? Weren’t all the polluters earnest, the physical and the cultural? And did anyone ever impugn or mock them for it? No one ever thought to. Avarice was never shackled by a concern for authenticity. It didn’t care about image or interpretation.
The sit-down lawn mower, its paint cracked and axles rusting, stood where the family Jeep once had. Beyond it was the ladder to the loft, where the wooden tea crates full of Eric’s books were still stacked, having remained there ever since they’d followed Charlotte up from New York. She didn’t come in here much anymore, and for good reason.