The Darlings (15 page)

At the end of the day, both men were aware of the fact that a good banker was more valuable than a good friend. If Nikos wasn't yet bankrupt, he had Carter to thank for it. Carter had been managing Nikos's money since his days at JPMorgan. At the start, their professional relationship was as uncomfortable as it had been at Harvard. It had been an unpleasant coincidence that Carter was put on the Kasper account as a junior banker at JPMorgan. At the time, the account was too big, and Carter was too junior, for him to protest the arrangement. Carter had done what he did best: swallow his pride and put his nose to the grindstone.

Long ago, Carter had accepted that he held only a guest pass to the world of the very rich, and, unlike men like Nikos, he would have to earn his keep in order to stay. But that changed when he went into business with Alain Duvalier. Alain was a great investor, but he was difficult to work with, hotheaded and always right. He liked his cars too fast and women too young, just generally a little “too too,” as Ines liked to say with a roll of the eyes, for a white-glove place like JPMorgan Private Banking. He had more than one enemy in the upper echelons of senior management.

Carter moved in on him the moment he heard Alain had been passed over as head of asset management. Everyone was talking about it. Carter knew exactly how to play it. Alain had expensive tastes and a well-developed ego; he would operate best in an environment where he could be his own boss. At Delphic, Alain could have everything he wanted: an office in Geneva; a big cut of the equity; and best of all, total freedom to do business as he pleased. Carter would bring in the clients and stay out of his hair. They would make perfect partners.

Alain was expensive, but worth every penny. Among other things, he was the reason Delphic was in business with Morty Reis. Carter was never quite sure of the connection, but it had something to do with their sisters being friends. Whatever it was, Carter was grateful for it. If delivering Morty was the only thing Alain had ever done for him, it was enough. In their first five years of business, RCM knocked it out of the park. On average, the fund returned 14 percent annually, an untouchable record. The press began to call. Clients turned up on Carter's doorstep. Many of Carter's old JPMorgan clients who had originally been too risk averse to put money in a new venture came to him, hat in hand.

Nikos and Althea Kasper didn't, but they agreed to have lunch with him. They met at the Four Seasons. At the time, Carter could barely afford the lunch tab much less conceive of moving the Delphic headquarters to the fancy offices just upstairs. Carter remembered vividly how cool Nikos had been at that initial lunch. While Althea was enthusing about the fund's performance (the only thing that ever animated Althea was the prospect of more money), Nikos took a call in the lobby. When he returned to the table, he offered a tepid congratulations, as though he was talking to a sixth grader who had won the science fair. He picked at his steak tartare as though it bored him. It was half eaten when Carter paid the bill.

No matter. Carter walked away from that lunch two million dollars richer. Over the next ten years, Nikos and Althea migrated 60 percent of their combined net worth over to Delphic. They brought their father in and several friends. They invited Carter to dinners, for golf, for Fourth of July.

As Carter stood stretching at the Kasper gate, pain radiated down his left side. He couldn't identify its locus. At first he thought it was a cramp, but as he stretched, the pain rolled upward like a wave. Soon it filled his torso and he found it difficult to breath. His head spun from the lack of air and he could feel tears forming at the corners of his eyes.

I'm having a heart attack
, he thought, and lay down in the grass by the side of the road.

He closed his eyes and felt the grass shoots pricking at the back of his neck. The ground was wet and hard. He wondered how long it would be before a car passed by. A driver would stop if he saw him like this.

A plane passed overhead. Carter wondered where Julianne was, if they had gotten her home from Aspen. He would have to call Sol and check. Ines had been merciless about Julianne the night before. Carter winced as he replayed their conversation. Ines was disarmingly direct. She said what others were thinking but dared not say (Recently: “Oh please, Althea Kasper is more than a man-eater, she's a bull-dyke lesbian”; “I didn't get to where I am by being nice.”). Ines could be callous, even cruel, but she was almost never wrong.

About Julianne, Ines said: “Tell me it wasn't your first thought.”

She was right. The possibility that Julianne had killed Morty had occurred to Carter right away. He had dismissed it, admonishing himself for even considering it. Julianne wasn't capable of that, and in her own way, she did seem to care for Morty. Carter wouldn't allow himself to think anything else. Still, while Carter would never say so out loud, there was a certain cold logic to it.

“And if he did kill himself, she pushed him to it,” Ines had said. “Their marriage was empty. You know that as well as anybody.”

Again, Ines was right.

Eventually, the pain in his side subsided and all Carter felt was the numbing cold of the air around him. When he heard the sound of car tires on gravel he popped to his feet. He brushed dirt from his leg. Thirty yards away, a car pulled out of a driveway. The driver turned to the left and disappeared down Lily Pond Lane, unaware of the man who had been, for the past ten minutes, lying by the side of the road. Charged with embarrassment, he sprinted to the house, not stopping until he had reached the safety of his own front porch.

Carter's BlackBerry was vibrating against the kitchen counter as he swung open the screen door. Bacall let out a yowl and barreled toward his knees, his nails clicking against the tiles. Carter shushed him halfheartedly and rubbed his head, just behind the ears, while he tried to scroll through his e-mails.

“Everyone is asleep, kiddo, except for you and me,” he said affectionately. He loved this dog. Their loyalty to each other was absolute. Ines would never love Bacall the way Carter did; at her core, she wasn't a dog person. Bacall knew which side his bread was buttered on. His leg thumped furiously as Carter hit the exact spot behind the ear that sent him into throes of canine ecstasy.

Carter retreated to his office, allowing Bacall to follow before he shut the door behind them. Bacall nested in his tartan dog bed while Carter turned on his computer and plugged his BlackBerry into its dock. He looked at the clock: 7:30 a.m. on the dot. He had about twenty-nine minutes before Ines began banging things inexplicably in the kitchen. She hated it when he closed his office door.

When she answered the phone, he said, “Is it too early?”

She said, “Where the fuck have you been? I've been calling you.” Then she chuckled, reprimanding herself. “I'm sorry,” she said, her voice softened. “Forgive me. It's early.”

He had intended to be cold with her. She should be expecting that; he hated it when she called him repeatedly. And yesterday, a three-ring circus of a day. If she had given it twenty seconds of consideration, she would have come up with a hundred reasons not to call. He would be with Ines. He would be with his kids. He would be driving to East Hampton. He would be frantically wrapping up preholiday business. He would be fielding calls from Sol, the media, portfolio managers, Merrill, Lily, Ines, clients, clients' wives, his secretary, Sol's secretary, Morty's secretary. He would be calling emergency meetings and scheduling flights and setting up wire transfers. He would be alone in the bathroom, shedding private tears for his friend.

But then he had heard her voice, and his anger had lifted like fog. She always did that to him, which is why he kept going back to her for more.

“How are you?” she said. She was the first person who asked and meant it. Everyone else, including his wife, meant: “How is the fund?”

“Well, not good. I don't begin to know how to answer that question. How are you?”

She said, “I'm a fucking mess. But that's obvious. The hardest part of this is knowing I can't be with you.”

“I know. I hate that, too.”

“Look, let's just avoid platitudes. I know you're probably at a loss here, too, but what do we do?”

Carter leaned back in his chair and inhaled deeply. Eyes closed, he stopped breathing; the world went pleasantly blank. For a moment, he wondered if he could will himself dead.

Then Bacall let out a yowl and Carter's eyes opened.
No
, he thought,
still here. Just barely
.

“We still don't know why he killed himself,” he said. “All I can think is why the fuck would he do this to me? Not to himself, but to me. I know. I'm a selfish bastard.”

“Everyone's a selfish bastard. And God forgive me for saying this, but Morty's the most selfish bastard of all. It's a very selfish thing to do, suicide.”

Suddenly, Carter realized he was angry. He hadn't been able to identify it before, but the furious surge of energy that had been coursing through his body since yesterday was anger. Not at the situation, but at Morty himself. How could Morty have done this? Morty never made a move without a cost-benefit analysis. He would have precisely calculated the collateral damage of this decision. To Julianne, to Carter and Alain, to countless others whom Carter couldn't even begin to name. He would have weighed it against whatever demons were driving him. And then Carter saw it: Morty was on one scale; everyone else was on the other. He had decided in favor of himself.
Selfish fucking bastard. I was your friend.

He sat up, feeling impatient with the conversation. “Look,” he said, “I feel like the world's come down around my ears. I know it has for you, too, but I'm just going to have to take things minute to minute, and make decisions one at a time so that I don't do anything stupid. It's going to be intense for a while. For how long? I don't know. Let's say the foreseeable future. And I don't think it's smart for us to talk during this period. Much less be together, which is out of the question.”

He stopped and took a deep breath. There was a quiet pause. His words had tumbled out, emotional, uncontrolled. She had this effect on him. He spoke more freely to her than to anyone else. Some days this felt amazing. He loved the release, the heady rush of being with her. Now, any interaction with her seemed dangerously stupid.

“What does Ines know?” she said. She sounded matter-of-fact.

“Ines knows nothing. Well, I don't know; I think she has her suspicions. But she knows nothing from me. And it'll stay that way. I need her support right now, to be frank. Morty just turned a big spotlight onto the fund and onto me. I already have everyone from the
Wall Street Journal
to the attorney general's office knocking on my door and it's fucking Thanksgiving. I can't afford to be sloppy.”

“She may be more supportive if you're honest with her. I agree it's best not to tell her now. If she starts getting angry and asking questions, you may just want to come clean with her. She's a rational woman.”

As ever, she was gracious, poised. Despite the situation, he was aroused.

“Has the press called you?” he said.

“Yes. But I haven't spoken to anyone. Screw them. I'll make a statement when I'm ready.”

“Will you talk to Sol before you do that? I mean, just let him help you manage things. He knows how to deal with public attention.”

“I know. I'm not stupid. But right now there's no need for me to say anything about it, so I think my best strategy is to just stay quiet.”

“You're right. I'm being paranoid. I'm sorry. I want to be with you so badly. I know that's wrong, but I can't help it.”

She didn't respond right away. He wondered where she was. When they spoke, she was always on the cell phone so he never really knew. It was hard not to be able to picture her. He hated thinking that she would be spending Thanksgiving alone. The thought of it hurt him so much that he didn't dare to ask.
I'm a selfish bastard
, he thought.

“I don't know,” she said, finally. “I only know that what's moral is what you feel good after and what's immoral is what you feel bad after.”

He smiled. “Fitzgerald?”

“Hemingway, actually.”

“Clever girl,” he said. “Don't ever let anyone underestimate you.”

“I never do.”

“Clever, beautiful girl.”

“I have to go, Carter.”

“I know. I love you,” he said and hung up. It was, he thought, one of the only true things he had said in as long as he could remember. It had been true for years. He looked over at Bacall, who was asleep on his bed. Above him, an antique nautical clock ticked away with maritime efficiency. The house was waking and the children would begin to arrive soon.

The next call he made was to Sol.

THURSDAY, 7:50 A.M.

S
he hung up the phone and let her forehead drop into her palm.

Please don't ring again
, she thought.

For a few minutes, it didn't. The office was disarmingly quiet. She sat, eyes closed, face still, for as long as she could. Beneath the desk, her feet lay limp, neatly crossed at the ankles. She was wearing her old moccasins, the camel-colored ones that were scuffed around the heels. They were suede, soft as socks, the soles peeling at the edges. She only wore them with jeans, to walk the dogs in the morning or to pick up coffee at the deli, never to the office.

This morning, she had been too overwhelmed to change. What did it matter anyway? No one else would be in. It was Thanksgiving. The bleary-eyed security guard had seemed surprised to see her. He had reluctantly set down his coffee to turn on the bag scanner. He gave her a look that read
You're the reason I'm working on Thanksgiving.
Jane gave him a brisk nod, and for a second felt her eyes prick with tears from the cold.

Upstairs, the whole floor was dark. The printers hummed, still asleep. When she switched on the overhead fluorescents, they flickered for a few seconds, then filled the hallway with the a buzzing sound and threw off a dingy yellow light.

Her office was just as she'd left it, stacks of papers overwhelming the plastic in-box at the left-hand corner of her desk, Post-it notes stuck haphazardly to the frame of her computer screen. Each one insisted that she do something: Call someone back, review the division budgets, buy the special dog food the vet had recommended. She couldn't face them. She sat with her head cradled in one hand, cell phone still in the other, as though one small movement would break the silence and the office would spring back to life again. The only thing moving was her pounding, adrenalized, overcaffeinated heart.

When the phone rang again, a small wash of relief passed through her.

The only thing worse than being in the office on Thanksgiving was being in the office with nothing to do. She was used to the tightrope walk of work. One foot in front of the other; deliberate, measured movements under stress. All she had to do was not look down. Because if she did, she would see the chasm beneath her, empty and lonely, threatening to swallow her whole. Best not to stop moving.

“This is a helluva situation,” the voice barked when she answered.

“Happy Thanksgiving to you, too, Ellis.” she said.

“Give me a break, Jane. Happy Thanksgiving.”

Ellis Stuart. Ellis was Jane's counterpart in D.C. Technically, he was Jane's superior, but most days, they worked side by side. The power balance between them, always tender, was more delicate now than ever. In January, a new SEC head would be named, and Jane was the frontrunner. Ellis was slated to retire. Because this made him impartial, Ellis had been tapped to advise the president-elect on the nomination.

This was Ellis's swan song. Ellis had spent his entire career at the SEC, law school to retirement, “cradle to grave,” as he liked to say. While he had been grandfathered into a senior position, Ellis had been, for years, discounted by his colleagues as a dinosaur. The longer he stayed, the more restless the office had become with him. The junior attorneys greeted him like day-old bread, not palatable but not quite appropriate to chuck altogether. He had never really fully grasped e-mail and sent out missives with spelling errors or in all caps. He made the occasional off-color joke. And he hadn't run his own cases in years, which put him out of touch with the daily ins and outs of investigation and trial. At one time, Ellis had been a rising star, hungry and sharp, with the winningest record of any trial attorney at the SEC. But those days were long gone. They were remembered only dimly by the most senior attorneys, paid the same due as the playing victories of a college quarterback.

Now in his last months, Ellis found himself with the ear of the president-elect and the ability to shape the agency's future. Anyone with an outside chance of a promotion kowtowed to him, and the ones who didn't acknowledged him with a dutiful respect. The change in tenor wasn't lost on Ellis. He relished it. He talked louder, demanded answers sooner, made his presence known in meetings. He walked the halls with an infused swagger. Especially with Jane, Ellis took on a dictatorial tone. He took every opportunity to remind her that he was evaluating her, and that he would be up until the day the new chairman was announced. Nothing was certain.

Recently, Ellis had become the king of the status update. “Calling to check in on the status,” he would say, or more irritatingly, “Just a friendly status call!”

“I'm trying to manage it as best I can,” she said. “What can I tell you?”

“Tell me what's going on. Update me.”

Jane took a deep breath and fought the urge to smash the receiver against the side of the desk.

She said, “Ellis, it's 8:30 a.m. and it's Thanksgiving.”

“You told me to call you. You left me a message last night. Didn't you?”

Jane sighed. She had called him, but she hadn't told him to call her back. It was a preemptory strike voice mail, apprising him of the situation with just enough color so that he would feel looped in. She had hoped this would be enough to satiate him, at least through the weekend.

He wasn't going to let her off that easy.

“All right,” she said. “Here's what we know. We believe that Reis was running some kind of Ponzi scheme. We're not sure how long it's been going on, if RCM was ever a legitimate operation. We looked into it briefly in 2006, but nothing came of that. David Levin began an informal investigation a few months ago, but it wasn't well handled. Everyone in our group was focused on the mutual-fund sweep and the ball got dropped. So now, yes, it's a situation.” She was repeating what she had said in the voice mail, but she would be doing a lot of that over the coming days. Everyone was going to want to hear her version of the RCM investigation: the press, the attorney general's office, her superiors, her staffers, her friends. If she had to think every time she told it, it would exhaust her. She would tell it again and again until the words themselves lost their meaning. Might as well get it down pat now.

“When you say the ball got dropped, by whom? By Levin?”

“I don't think David handled the situation appropriately, no,” she said carefully. “He didn't convey the urgency of this investigation, to me at least. So I thought it was best to keep him staffed on the mutual-fund sweep. What he was doing on his own time with respect to RCM was outside of marching orders, and again, it wasn't properly elevated to senior management.” She hoped this came across as contrite but unapologetic.

“Would he say he dropped the ball?”

“What's that?”

“David Levin. If I asked him, would he say he dropped the ball?”

Jane squeezed her eyes shut. Her head hurt. Every time she pictured Ellis, he still had that ridiculous white mustache, even though he had shaved it off over a year ago. There was a part of her that pitied him. Their paths had crossed in the sky for a brief moment, before her star continued on its meteoric ascent upward and his slipped off into cosmic obscurity. He reminded Jane of a supernova, the brief and overwhelming burst of radiation that occurs shortly before the star itself fades to black.

Still, his support was crucial to her promotion, and they both knew it. For the moment, she was at his mercy.

“I don't know what he'd say. I don't know why he didn't push harder. I got the sense that he was a little territorial about the investigation. It's not appropriate, but it happens, particularly with career-making cases like this one. He also may have simply misgauged the magnitude of it. He's got a lot on his plate right now.”

“Seems like you guys are stretched pretty thin.”

“We are,” she said curtly. “We're managing it as best we can.”

Ellis grunted. She heard what she thought was his feet swinging up onto the desk. She had seen him sitting like that before, feet on his desk, headset on, hands folded behind his head—like a telemarketer.

“It just seems to me,” he said, “that we're really going to look like assholes if we had someone on the case and it got lost in some sort of administrative black hole.”

She knew where this was going.

Her eyes bounced off the surfaces of her office: the industrial black shelves lined with case binders; the dismal putty-colored rug; the depressed-looking ficus in a wicker basket in the corner. Her Harvard Law School diploma hung slightly off-kilter, flanked on either side by her Harvard College diploma and a photograph of a young, dewy-eyed Jane with Justice O'Connor, for whom she had clerked in 1986. The tops of the frames were dusty, like everything else in the office. Her desktop hummed in front of her. Outlook was actively collecting unread e-mails. The light on her second line had gone on twice, pushed to voice mail. Jane's standard breakfast—a large black coffee and a cheese Danish from the twenty-four-hour deli—was churning angrily in her stomach.

“I know you're swamped up there,” Ellis offered. “I'm not saying anything's your
fault
. I'm just saying how it
looks
.”

“You're saying it looks like my fault.”

Ellis made a lip-sputtering noise, like a car exhaust. “It looks like
someone's
fault. I just think we have to be clear on what happened before the press comes knocking.”

“The press is already knocking. A statement doesn't need to be made until Monday, I don't think. I thought that was the consensus. I'll have one prepared by the weekend.”

“That's fine. I just think—I think everyone's going to be looking for someone to blame. I think very highly of you Jane, always have. I'd hate to see you take the fall for something like this.”

“Why don't you just say what you're going to say, Ellis?” Jane snapped. The little hairs on her arms stood at attention.

“Whoa there, Jane. I'm just saying protect yourself. What you do over the next few days—what you say and what you do in response to this situation—is gonna matter. You've got a lot of people who would like to see you succeed here. We need a real leader. Someone who's going to instill real confidence in the Commission. I think you'd be great. But you've got to make it very clear that what happened with the RCM investigation wasn't your fault.”

After she hung up the phone, Jane went to the bathroom and let the cold water run over her wrists. She stood with her eyes closed, hands turned upward, the delicate blue veins exposed beneath the frigid tap.

Get ahold of yourself
, she thought.

She was taking this David Levin business harder than she had thought. She had never much liked David. He was dating a woman in the office, and this bothered her. Admittedly, they were discreet about it, but it was still a distraction, for them and for everyone else in the office. Also, he dressed too casually. Jane had come across him wandering the hallways in jeans or scuffed Converse sneakers, not just on weekends but in the middle of the workweek. He never looked sheepish about it. Jane felt he was too old to be getting a lecture on either dating in the workplace or appropriate office attire. He was smart enough, she thought, to pick up on her tacit disapproval.

She thought about his Converse sneakers as the chill of the water began to set in. She thought about his relationship with Alexa Mason, and how she had come across them holding hands at a movie theater on the Upper West Side. It had been embarrassing and awkward, particularly for Jane because she was alone.

Then she thought,
This is neither here nor there. David is a good lawyer, one of our best.

You don't need to like or dislike him to fire him.

You need to fire him because it has to be done.

She had sacrificed so much already for her career. Years of perfect grades, of ninety-hour workweeks, of missed dates, of missed dinners. Years spent fielding questions about when she was going to get married and have kids. Worse still, the years after when the questions stopped because the answer was always the same. She had earned the position of chairman. Finally, it was right there for the taking. Whatever had to be done now, so be it.

David Levin would do the same, she thought, if the positions were reversed. Any man would. David Levin would sell her down the river without a second's hesitation if it meant he could save himself.

She imagined he would try to, if he hadn't already. But it was too late for him.

She turned off the tap. Flicking the drops from her wrists, she pushed back her shoulders and stood tall. She caught her reflection in the bathroom mirror. Her black hair came to a practical, blunt edge beneath her ears. Her cheekbones, once elegant in their definition, now read as gaunt.

You've earned this,
she said to herself
.

She forced a smile in the mirror and thought about the call she would get from the president when it was all decided.