The Darlings (2 page)

“You're working him too hard, Dad,” Merrill said.

“Yes, well. It's been an interesting two months, hasn't it, Paul? Opportune time to come over to the investment side.” Carter laughed lightly. Though he was, as always, perfectly groomed, behind his glasses his eyes were small and seemed rimmed with fatigue. His hair was thinner, too; a little more white than silver these days. He wore it well, but for those who knew him, the change was perceptible. The market collapse had come at a bad time for Carter. Word around the office was that he would've retired at the end of the year if the markets had stayed on course. Now he was working more of a junior analyst's schedule than a CEO's, seven days a week, sometimes sixteen hours at a stretch.

“Lily and Adrian look as though they're leaving,” Merrill said, looking over Paul's shoulder. “I'm going to go tell them we may not make it to the after-party. Don't talk shop while I'm away.” She flashed them a sweet smile and then was gone.

Father and son-in-law stood together in comfortable, familiar awkwardness.

“This is a nice event,” Paul offered as they surveyed the landscape.

“Isn't it?” Carter nodded vigorously. He seemed grateful for the introduction of a topic. Paul found that casual conversation with Carter often felt like a high-wire act, and it was even more difficult now that they worked together. To discuss work felt overserious, anything outside of work, frivolous. He sensed that Carter felt similarly unsure of how to navigate their new dynamic.

“Ines put a lot of effort into this,” Carter volunteered. “It was hard to get people to open their wallets this year. They lost all the corporate tables, too—Lehman always used to take one and AIG and, of course, Howary. It's amazing to think that all those firms are actually gone now.”

Paul nodded. He remembered seeing his old boss, Mack Howary, at this same event the previous year. He had been holding court at the Howary LLP table, entertaining a few clients and their wives. Mack was grotesquely fat and very loud for a lawyer, and his ego was still soaring from a recent write-up in
Barron's
that had crowned him as one of “the Street's most influential power players.” Mack had waved Paul over and introduced him (“One of our rising stars,” he had said to the table), but only after he saw Paul standing with Carter Darling and Morty Reis, the founder of Reis Capital Management.

Paul wondered where Mack was tonight. He had heard rumors that he was under house arrest at his estate out in Rye, a piece of property so enormous that it didn't really seem like much of a restriction. Howary LLP had gone under only ten weeks before, fewer than two months after Mack had been indicted for six forms of tax and securities fraud. It had been a swift fall from grace. For more than a decade, Howary LLP had been the golden child of Wall Street law firms. Mack, the firm's founding partner, was one of the few attorneys who enjoyed almost mythical status among young associates and law students. Paul had seen him pack a lecture hall at NYU, students sitting on stairwells just to hear him speak about structured transactions. When Paul had interviewed as a second year law student, associate positions at Howary were by far the most coveted.

Howary had always been an unorthodox sort of place. With only 150 attorneys on staff, it was a small shop, but it punched way above its weight. The firm specialized in corporate tax and capital markets transactions, advising clients on derivatives and structured products offerings, cross-border equity deals, privatizations of public companies. It was a sophisticated, highly lucrative practice, and Howary was the best in the game.

Unfortunately, it turned out that Mack was really more of a corporate tax evasion specialist than anything else. The authorities had been watching him for years, waiting for him to make a mistake. When one of his largest clients admitted to laundering close to a billion dollars of Colombian cartel money through a bank in Montserrat, the end was swift and merciless. Within days, the IRS, the Department of Justice, and the New York State Attorney General's office were picking through everyone's desks like vultures, subpoenaing files, desktops, expense reports, e-mails, anything that wasn't nailed to the floor. Client work stopped entirely. Assisting the Feds became a twenty-four-hour seven-days-a-week job. Paul slept nights on a couch in his office, going home only to shower and kiss his sleeping wife. Though the end terrified him, he was grateful when it finally arrived. It had been like manning the deck of a sinking ship.

When Howary LLP folded, it got less press than it might have in normal market conditions. But it was the fall of 2008. Next to Freddy, Fanny, Lehman, AIG, Merrill Lynch, the loss of a 150-person law firm was a paper cut on a carcass. Still, the shot of Mack in cuffs outside his Park Avenue pied-à-terre graced the cover of every newspaper on the newsstands. The other partners simply disappeared to houses in Connecticut or Florida or the Caribbean, where they hunkered down and waited for the storm to pass. Some took other jobs, but most didn't; no one wanted to hire a Howary partner. The Howary name reeked of illegitimacy. It was the stuff of cocktail party chatter, another Bear Stearns or Dreier. The associates were unceremoniously dismissed via e-mail. Not knowing what else to do, Paul had gotten drunk and gone to the movies. He still dreamed about it sometimes, waking up in a cold sweat.

The first night he was unemployed, Paul couldn't sleep. Merrill was cradled tightly in the crook of his arm, and as her breath rose and fell against his skin, he ran the numbers in his head, over and over, until light crept across the ceiling. He had been well paid at Howary. Extremely well paid in fact, but the problem was that they lived well, too. He could sustain their lifestyle for six months. That wasn't long; he could see the sand running through the hourglass. After that, he would have to cut back substantially, draw from Merrill's trust fund, or he would have to find a job. The former two options made him sick with worry. The latter would prove nearly impossible. The Street was crawling with the unemployed. None of the big law firms would touch a Howary associate with a ten-foot pole. Seven years of practice had positioned him decently well for an in-house job at a hedge fund, but the vast majority of those funds had either blown up or battened down the hatches. It was a bleak situation.

A few days after the pictures of a handcuffed and angry Mack became tabloid fodder, Paul got a call from Eduardo Galleti, an old classmate from Harvard Law. Eduardo had been a JD/MBA at Harvard, and was one of the smartest people Paul had ever met. They studied for finance classes together and quickly became drinking buddies. When Eduardo found out that Paul was interested in Merrill, he offered to teach him Portuguese. “Latin women, they want to know they can bring you home to Mom,” he said one night over beers. “To get in good with a Brazilian mom, you've got to speak her language.” By the end of law school, Paul spoke Portuguese with reasonable facility, though he wasn't sure if this, or anything he did, would ever impress Ines.

Though Eduardo had been a groomsman in Paul and Merrill's wedding, they had lost touch during the intervening years, both bogged down by family obligations and grueling work schedules. They e-mailed from time to time. Paul had heard that Eduardo had recently taken a senior position at Trion Capital, a private equity firm in the city that invested heavily in Latin America. The firm was doing well, one of the few that was actually expanding. Though he wasn't feeling particularly sociable, Paul took the call.

“Hey, man,” Eduardo said when Paul answered. “Glad you picked up. Figured your life is pretty crazy right now.”

“That's one way to put it. Good to hear from you, sir.”

“Listen, I heard about Howary. I don't know what you're thinking in terms of next steps, but I've got an out-of-the-box proposal for you. We're building up Trion's office down in São Paulo. I'm moving down there myself next month and taking a small team with me. We could use an attorney who understands international tax and has an accounting background, and it's gotta be someone who speaks Portuguese. Not perfect, but you know, passable. Merrill's fluent, isn't she? Anyway, if you're interested, come on down to the office.”

Eduardo's voice always had an infectious clip to it; fast and enthusiastic, as if not a minute could be wasted. Paul's heart rate quickened as he considered the possibility of escaping New York altogether. He had always wanted the chance to live abroad, and this job sounded like a dream opportunity.
São Paulo!
The thought exhilarated him. It took him only a moment to dismiss the idea. Eduardo was right—Merril was fluent—but still, she would never go for it. He didn't even want to ask her. New York wasn't just a city to Merrill, it was a part of her being. Though he told Eduardo that he would sleep on it, Paul's mind was made up by the time he hung up the phone.

“I got a call from Eduardo today,” he said to Merrill casually that evening, as they were getting ready for bed.

“How is he?” Merrill replied. She pulled back the duvet and crawled in. “Oh, my God. Bed feels great. I'm beat.” She closed her eyes, her face peaceful.

“Seems like he's doing really well. He's at Trion Capital. Actually, he sort of offered me a job with them, but in the São Paulo office. He's moving there next month.”

Merrill opened her eyes. “Oh?” she said. She sat up. “What did you say?”

“I said thank you, and I'd think about it. Didn't want to be rude. I was going to call him tomorrow and say that, you know, we love New York and have no intention of moving.”

“Oh,” she said, and nodded thoughtfully. After a minute she slid back down and closed her eyes again. “Listen, did you still want to talk to Dad?” She sounded sleepy. “He's serious about the general counsel position, you know. He's gonna hire someone soon anyway, and I know he thinks you'd be great.”

She had floated this option by him a few days before. He had hedged, saying he wanted a few days to think about it. In another market, he wouldn't have considered it. Paul firmly believed, or he had up until then, that the only way to be a part of a family as powerful as the Darlings was never to take anything from them. Otherwise, they owned you. Of course Adrian had worked for Delphic for years. Paul imagined that Adrian didn't have a wealth of offers at other hedge funds in New York, but Carter graciously employed him as a salesman, putting him in front of clients at dinners or on the golf course where Adrian fit in best. It was a quiet yet obvious arrangement: Carter provided for Adrian, Adrian provided for Lily. It wasn't the kind of arrangement that sat well with Paul. But with São Paulo and unemployment as his other two options, working for Carter seemed like the obvious solution.

“Really generous of him,” Paul said. “ I'd like to. Very much. You sure this is okay?”

Merrill reached for his hand and squeezed it. “Absolutely,” she said. “I think it's a perfect fit.”

There was no Howary table at the New Yorkers for Animals benefit that year; no Lehman table, no Merrill Lynch table, no AIG table. Still, it seemed as though most of Manhattan was present. Paul had to hand it to Ines: She knew how to get things done.

“There's practically no floral budget,” Ines declared when she had been named committee chairwoman. “We'll have to get creative. Opulence is out, anyway.” She wasn't lamenting; Ines simply stated unpleasant facts with a sort of stoic fortitude. She was right, of course; no one wanted to see orchids at a five-hundred-dollar-a-plate charity event, not with the Dow hovering around 8,400. Instead, the tables had been sprinkled with tiny silver stars, which were turning up everywhere, stuck to lapels and elbows. Yet it looked festive somehow, not cheap. The food, too, was spartan but passable: chicken Marsala and some kind of wilted root vegetable. But then, no one really ate the food.

As he looked around the ballroom of the Waldorf Astoria, Paul wondered how many of the guests had also been laid off. Everyone appeared confident and relaxed, seemingly unaffected by the financial maelstrom. They laughed as they always had, exchanging stories about their children, swapping plans for the upcoming Thanksgiving holiday. The mood was slightly more somber than it had been the previous year, but not by much. The women had turned out in couture. Maybe it was last season, but Paul couldn't tell the difference. Necks still dripped with jewelry, the kind that spent the rest of the year locked away in a safe. Town cars and chauffeured Escalades idled their engines out front. Of course, it was all an illusion. It had to be. This was a finance-heavy crowd in a finance-heavy town. There wasn't a single person in this room—not a one—who could claim they weren't worried. They all were, but they were dancing and drinking the night away as they always had. They had to know the end was coming; it was probably already here. It was like the final peaceful moments at the Alamo.

“There's Bloomberg,” Carter said to Paul, tipping his glass in the mayor's direction. “Did you see him? Bill Robertson was here, too, but he left before the dinner started. Everyone's talking about how he'll run for governor in the fall.”