A Fatal Debt (25 page)

I wondered whether the flattery had been too obvious as Underwood gazed at me. But it turned out that Lauren had been right about something else: male investment bankers have big egos. He stood and beckoned to me.

“You want to know how Harry fucked up? I’ll show you,” he said.

Underwood and I left the elevator on the thirty-fifth floor. It led to a softly furnished lobby like an English drawing room, with a grandfather clock in a corner, its mechanical ticks echoing in the empty space. There was little sign of life, nobody sitting at the oak reception desk
near the elevator. After the glass-and-steel floor, it felt as if I’d stepped into a Walt Disney version of the nineteenth century. There were no doors or electronic panels to impede us here, just a long, dimly lit corridor, visible through a mahogany arch. As we walked, I saw dark rectangles marked on the walls, each illuminated by a brass wall lamp.

“Harry kept the Old Masters from the art collection up here. They’re in storage now. I don’t want them,” Underwood said.

He opened a wooden door at the end of the hallway and led me into a small space, with two empty desks next to each other, then through another into an enormous office. It was a shock to enter after the gloomy hallway, for it was filled with light from two sides. It was on the corner of the building, facing south toward Times Square to one side and Rockefeller Center and the East River to the other.

I looked around the room. There was a wooden desk bearing two neat piles of paper and a computer with a twin screen. It was still blinking figures and graphs, although it looked as though it hadn’t been used for a long time. On the side by the hallway, there was a recessed alcove lined with books, like a kind of tiny library with a sofa and chairs, where the occupant had received guests. A Persian rug, an antique by the look of its muted threads, dominated the floor.

I walked behind the desk to look out at the room from that angle. Two framed photographs stood on the desk—one of a boy, a college student, perhaps, wearing the bulky pads and bright purple shirt of a hockey player. Other players had flanked him, you could see, but they had been cropped out to leave only his face, staring out cheerfully from under a helmet. The other was a portrait of Nora, looking happier than I’d known her.

It had been Harry’s desk.

Underwood was standing on the rug, waiting for recognition of where we were to dawn on me. “What can you see from there?” he said.

I looked around me, casting my eyes across the empty office and then out of one window. “Rockefeller Center?”

He snorted. “Nothing. That’s what you can see. Fuck all.”

“What do you mean?”

“The guy was in his own world, cut off from what was happening, just his few cronies up here with him. The first thing Marcus did was to move down to the trading floor, get a proper grasp of what was going on.”

“Where you are now?”

“Someone’s got to keep the place going. Maybe I’ll keep the job—they’ll give it to me if they’ve got any sense. Marcus wanted to gut this whole floor, put some real revenue earners up here, but he hadn’t gotten around to it.”

I walked toward the window to look out at the view, a glittering panorama of the lower wedge of Manhattan. Underwood took my place behind the desk, pushing the chair back and planting his polished shoes on the surface. One of his heels grazed Nora’s photo, shifting it by an inch.

“So you’re saying he shouldn’t have agreed to the merger? He should have known there’d be problems?”

He shrugged. “Sure looks like it to me. Harry had got too grand. He thought he’d be able to lord it over Marcus. He was a fool—that guy knew more about making money than anyone I’d ever met. He was a great salesman, one of the best.”

“He wasn’t honest with Mr. Shapiro, though, was he? Didn’t tell him everything he should have.”

Underwood laughed out loud. “What should he have told him, Ben? This is Wall Street, for God’s sake. Harry wasn’t a widow or orphan. He was paid $45 million, he had a Gulfstream. There were bankers being paid millions of dollars to advise him. If you want me to feel sorry for him, you’re out of luck.”

“I suppose so,” I said doubtfully.

“Listen, what’s the biggest deal you’ve ever done? You’ve sold a house, haven’t you? So did you tell the buyers everything or did you cover up a few cracks? I bet you did. It’s
their
job to find them. That’s why they have an engineer.”

That wasn’t far from the truth, in fact. My mother’s house had some dampness, but we’d replastered it smoothly enough not to be
obvious when we’d sold it after her death. That had allowed me to buy my apartment in New York.

“Caveat emptor,” I said.

“Right. Buyer beware. I was Marcus’s banker, and Harry got his own people to advise him, a woman he should have known wasn’t very good. She didn’t work hard enough or ask the right questions. That wasn’t our fault.”

I tried to look amused at his and Greene’s achievement in having deceived Harry and his female banker.

“Does she still work here?” I said.

He grinned. “No, she decided to leave, before we got rid of her. That was smart. She wouldn’t have lasted long.”

As he spoke, he reached into his pocket and pulled out his BlackBerry, the same one I’d seen him using on the Gulfstream.

“Okay, I’ll be there soon,” he said, and tucked it away again. “Well, Ben, I think that our excursion is over. I hope you learned something.”

I once witnessed an accident, a hit-and-run in which a car went through a red light and struck a woman before accelerating away. After she’d been taken away in an ambulance, the cops at the scene interviewed me and another passerby. The thing I remember best was that although we had no reason to lie and wanted to tell them exactly what had gone on, my version was completely at odds with his.

I told them the driver had ignored a red light. He said it was amber. The driver was a woman. No, it was a man. The cops who took it all down weren’t riled. They looked as if they expected a mixed-up version of the event. It was bad enough when we were doing the best we could to be honest. When people want to bend the truth, it’s a wonder anyone agrees on anything.

The scene that Anna had witnessed from the dune in East Hampton fit Underwood’s story. If Lauren had messed up the deal, had failed to realize that Grayridge was in much worse trouble than Greene admitted, that accounted for Harry’s distress.

Although Underwood was the type to lie for his own advantage, I didn’t see what his motive would be here. He hadn’t had to tell me about Lauren, and his contempt had looked genuine in the moment. He hadn’t even mentioned her name, just gloated about her in passing. If his rival had been male, I wouldn’t have known whom he’d meant. Yet one thing he’d said—she hadn’t worked hard enough and hadn’t noticed the flaw in Greene’s bank—made no sense to me. I didn’t think she’d told me the whole truth, but I believed she’d been honest about how she worked.

I’d seen the contempt in her face for Underwood and the men with whom she competed. Lauren had ascended Seligman on sheer merit—doing her job relentlessly, sweating the details, and leaving nothing to chance.
I work harder, I hear more
, she’d told me. I knew she’d have dug up every scrap of information before signing off on the deal. The woman who’d warned me not to ask difficult questions was not lazy, or vague, or willing to let things slide. If she hadn’t foretold the looming disaster, she’d had a reason.

A
fter stashing my things in the locker at Riverhead, I was led inside without needing to have my hand stamped. This time, an officer guided me down a hallway into a wedge-shaped area lined with cubicle-like rooms just large enough for two people to sit. It was the place where lawyers came to meet prisoners, and they’d allowed me in as a psych. A guard sitting at a desk pointed me to a room with two chairs and a table squeezed inside. Once I’d waited a couple of minutes, I heard the guard greet someone and Harry came in, dressed in a dark green jumpsuit rather than the yellow for the visiting room. He stared at me as if I were a bug he’d tried to squash that was still buzzing around.

“You’re back,” he said.

“I am.”

I felt uneasy, although the officer sat just on the other side of the door. It looked as if he’d kept up his visits to the gym. His face was leaner and his arms were muscled under the short-sleeved jumpsuit. Wherever he ended up after this—a psychiatric hospital or a prison—he’d be able to take care of himself. After everything that I’d been through since I’d come to Riverhead the first time, it was disorienting to see him again. On my first visit, I’d gotten some inkling that something was wrong with his version of events, but I hadn’t known what it could be. Now I could feel myself getting close to the truth.

“What do you want?” he said disdainfully.

I’d come for a reason—to gain an introduction. I needed him to say something to me, but I couldn’t let him know what it was or why it mattered. The idea had come to me as I’d thought about what Lauren had told me. She’d told me I was in danger and that I should take care. It had struck me later that I wasn’t the only one at risk. The man in front of me had killed someone—he was dangerous. That had its uses, for it released me from some of the duties that constrained me. The only thing it required was to get him to lose his temper, which I didn’t think would be hard.

“Tell me why you killed Mr. Greene,” I said.

“I can’t remember what happened. I told you that.”

“I don’t think it had anything to do with the settlement or the plane. You were angry that Greene had deceived you before the merger. He’d hidden the truth about his bank. He’d made a fool of you.”

Harry didn’t move, but I felt something alter inside him, like the click of a thermostat just before the boiler fires up. There was a faint glow in his eyes now, the same ember I’d seen in the psych ER. I attempted to fan it into flames.

“You weren’t the only one he screwed,” I said.

Harry’s eyes narrowed as if he could hardly believe what I’d just said. Then he levered himself to his feet, leaning over me with his eyes a few inches from mine. I was shocked by their animal intensity. This was the Harry I’d always known was there: the ferocious one that Greene must have seen in his last seconds. I glanced through the glass
panel in the door for help, but the guard was still absorbed in his paper.

“What the fuck do you mean by that? You should mind your own business. Why don’t you listen?” he hissed.

I tried to hold his gaze, but it wasn’t easy. Lauren had warned me to take care, and I knew then she was right. I’d always thought that Harry fell into another category from schizophrenics who were dangerous, but now I wasn’t sure.
He really is violent
, I thought—
he didn’t just put it on in the Wall Street jungle
. He stood over me for thirty seconds with his hands planted firmly on the table. Then his stare softened and he sat down, breathing unevenly.

“You don’t know what you’re talking about. You don’t know anything,” he said, as if reassuring himself.

“Tell me, then. What went wrong?” I said. “When we spoke in East Hampton, you said it was to do with mortgage bonds.”

His jaw was still clenched, but the question seemed to settle him, as if it were comforting to be back on finance and not fencing off hints about Lauren.

“Interested in Wall Street, are we?” he said, his voice like battery acid. “You wouldn’t understand that stuff even if I told you.”

“Try me.” I’d given up trying to be polite.

He gazed pointedly at me, as if I’d forced him to show that I was out of my depth, but he started talking. I wasn’t really interested in mortgages—I wanted to talk him down from his fury for a while before we got to the subject I was there for—but I tried to keep up with him as he spoke.

“Grayridge was into mortgage securitization. They took subprime mortgages from Texas and California and they bundled the paper into CDOs. They made money with that, so they got into synthetic CDOs, built from credit default swaps. I’m not going to try explaining that to you. They had a bunch named after elements. Cobalt, Gallium, Radon.”

“Elements?” I said.

“Yeah. Don’t ask me why. The guy who ran the origination desk
was into chemistry.” He laughed grimly. “It was like alchemy in reverse. The substance the Elements turned into was shit.”

“So if the Elements were Mr. Greene’s responsibility, why didn’t the bank fire him when they went wrong? Why you?” I asked innocently.

Harry stared at me. “Now that
is
a good question. You’re asking the wrong guy, though. I mean, look.” He waved expansively at the tiny room. “Does this look like the Federal Reserve? Or the Treasury?”

“Who should I ask? Tom Henderson?”

Harry’s eyes registered that I knew something. “Maybe.”

“You told me you wanted your bank to be like Rosenthal but they wouldn’t allow it. I thought that was a strange thing to say, but I did some research. I found out that Henderson was at Rosenthal before the Treasury. You told me that Greene worked there, too. That’s a coincidence, isn’t it?”

Harry laughed bitterly. “Is it? That’s all you need to know about Wall Street, not the math about CDOs. Rosenthal runs the place, it always has. Why do you think Henderson is Treasury secretary? Count how many Treasury secretaries they’ve had. They’ve got Washington stitched up.”

I’d heard lots of people say Wall Street was a cabal. To hear one of its own saying that, even in jail, was different. Was Harry paranoid? I wondered again. There was something almost possessed about him, but perhaps he’d been driven to obsession. I thought of Henderson on the C-SPAN video, his quality of controlled calm.

“I went to my board, told them all the problems we’d had with Grayridge, how he’d landed us with all that crap. I didn’t know the full story then. I …” He paused and seemed to think better of what he’d been about to tell me. “They didn’t listen. They’d all had calls from Henderson saying he wanted me out.”

“Could he do that?”

“He could do whatever the hell he wanted. They needed the Treasury’s money. They were cowards.”