The Darlings (25 page)

At the end of dinner, Carter rose to his feet and clinked his glass. “Thank you all for being here,” he said, looking at Ines. She was staring away from him, into a mid-distance. She smiled faintly, tartly, like an actress aware that she was being photographed from afar. “I would like to take a moment to remember those who are not with us tonight, and to thank God for those who are.” He bowed his head. “During times like these, it's easy to forget how blessed we've been. But Thanksgiving is a time of reflection. More than ever, I'm grateful for the blessing that is my family.”

Carter breathed in and glanced around the table. His children stared off in different directions. Only Sol looked directly at him, and offered him a kindly smile. Carter acknowledged it with a nod and then slipped silently back to his chair. Soon, Carmela appeared with a pie, and the room grew loud again with chatter.

THURSDAY, 9:20 P.M.

F
inally, Ines was in bed, the kids were upstairs, Marion was pulling out of the driveway. The distant sounds of Carmela and John picking up the dishes, clinking the pots against the steel sink rim as they set them to soak, had stopped. Sol closed the library door behind them and looked at his friend. Carter looked as though he had aged fifteen years overnight. It made Sol tired just to look at him. He was fighting off exhaustion himself, it filled his body, settling in his temples, his joints, his chest cavity like groundwater. It was hard to believe that after twenty years in business together, they might have reached the end of the line, but it was beginning to feel that way.

“Any update on the body search?” Carter said, once Sol had taken a seat.

“No. I spoke to the chief of police before coming over. They haven't found anything. The storm's made it nearly impossible for them. The wind's creating some kind of cross current in the river.”

Carter nodded. “Are we moving forward with the memorial service?”

“Julianne's coming around to it. She still wants it to be a proper funeral, but—” He shrugged, the gesture finishing off the sentence. They were all doing a lot of that lately: shrugging, gesturing, implying, alluding their way around the indelicate realities of the situation in which they now found themselves. “But realistically, we may never find anything. Especially the way it's going. We're now talking about Wednesday of next week.”

“I should call her.”

“You don't need to. She understands you have a lot on your plate.”

“This must be horrific for her.”

“Of course. But I think you're better off focusing on yourself for now.”

Carter fidgeted in his chair, unable to relax. After a moment he said, “Did you get ahold of Eli?”

“I did. We've spoken a few times. Not to say he owes me a favor, but—you know. He's going to be actively involved.”

“All right. Good. That can only help.” Carter settled back into the chair.

Sol frowned. The way Carter relaxed, his arms behind his head, irked him. Eli could help, but he wasn't a miracle worker. “Here's the situation,” he said gruffly. “We know Robertson's going to make a run for governor. And he's under heavy pressure to crack down on the financial industry. Someone's head's going to end up on a stake.”

Carter sat up again. “So they're going to make an example of me.”

“They're going to make an example of somebody. They can't afford not to. RCM investors are going to lose billions of dollars, and at a time when the country is enraged about Wall Street corruption. Not to mention the government's systemic failure to prevent it.”

“I'm not a fucking moron, Sol. I'm aware of what's going on. Morty caused this, so they would go after him, but since they can't, they're going after me. Is that the gist?”

Sol sighed and pushed his glasses on top of his head. They kept slipping off the bridge of his nose; either they had stretched out from overuse or he had actually lost weight in his face. He had lost weight everywhere in the past few months. He usually wore sweaters to cover his paunch, but now the paunch was gone and his sweater was awkwardly large, collecting in rolls around his midsection. “Not just you. That's my point. You and anyone at the firm who may have had any involvement. And the folks at the SEC who should have paid more attention.”

“Eli said this? Without you pressing the point?”

“Yes. He mentioned Adrian and Paul by name.”

Carter bristled. “Paul got there two months ago. He barely knows where the printer is.”

“It won't matter what their actual involvement was. It's a family firm, Carter. They'll go after the family in any way they can. Look at the Adelphia trial. They went after the father and both sons. John Rigas got twenty years. The good news is that the NYAG's office isn't aware of any”—Sol searched for a benign word—“
relationships
at the SEC. If it were, however, to, hm, come to light that there was any connection between Delphic and the SEC that wasn't entirely above board, quite frankly, all hell would break loose. I don't think this is something I need to explain, but I think we're at the point where we need to speak frankly, here, no?”

Carter offered a silent nod, glancing away into the fireplace.

“Look, in a nutshell, here's what Eli can offer you. Our side is maintaining the position that Alain was the one responsible for the RCM relationship, and he was responsible for any due diligence failures on Delphic's end. You're just a sales guy, and Eli gets that. Still you're the CEO, so we've got to work this so that you're playing on their team. I've expressed to them that you're just as shocked and outraged as they are by the situation. You've spent years building this business and it's devastating to your investors. Blah blah blah. And you're happy to facilitate their investigation in any way, even into members of your own firm. Understood?”

“Where the fuck is Alain?” Carter said. Suddenly, he was seething. He rose to his feet. “I mean, tell me. On holiday with his girlfriend? He hasn't returned one fucking phone call.”

He wandered over to the fireplace. At his feet was a brass bucket that Ines decoratively filled with firewood every autumn. He picked up a twig and began to pull the bark from it, allowing small brown shards to litter the carpet. He stripped it bare, exposing its smooth, creamy interior and then tossed it into the fireplace. “He's such a fucking coward to disappear.”

“He's in Switzerland somewhere, where he'll stay, if he's smart,” Sol said. Carter's pacing had always irritated him. It was like watching a zoo animal, caged and restless. “I imagine he's under advisement from counsel not to speak to you. From my perspective, you're better off not having any contact. He's the adversary now.”

“When did his flight leave, do you think? An hour before the news broke? Two? It's like he knew. Somehow, he knew.”

I am losing him
, Sol thought, as Carter dismembered another twig
.
Carter's mental state had deteriorated since the previous evening. He looked terrible. He seemed not to have slept, which was unfortunate. Sol worked backward in his head; Carter had likely been awake for over forty-eight hours. The fatigue combined with the emotional toll of Morty's death had begun to eat away at his reasoning capabilities. They would have to move swiftly now, and at some point, before they met with Eli, Carter would have to get some rest.

Sol had seen this before. When faced with indictment or bankruptcy or guilty verdicts, clients became emotional and erratic, shifting from anger to quiet acceptance and then back again, sometimes in the course of minutes. Physical and mental exhaustion only exacerbated it. Over years of practice, Sol learned how to stay in control in highly stressful situations. He often thought it was this that allowed him to be a great negotiator. It wasn't always easy. Clients often lashed out at him, even though it was, of course, the client who had brought them there in the first place.

“It doesn't matter,” Sol said. “The point is, he's in Europe. Which is fine for us. In fact, it's better because it makes him look guilty as hell.” There was a small part of Sol that felt bad about ramming this plan through without giving Carter the time to reflect on it. By the time it was over, Carter would have sold Alain, his friend and business partner of twenty-plus years, down the river, and there would be no looking back. Other casualties were possible, too; Paul, for example, wasn't outside the strike zone. But Sol quieted these thoughts. There was only one person whose interests he had to protect, and that was Carter. The call was tough, but it was clear.

“So that's it, then. We don't wait to hear from Alain, we don't even consider approaching this as a partnership.”

“Listen to me. You're the CEO of Delphic. Either one person is going to take the fall, or several will. But if it's just one, that one is you. So it's you or him. Start getting used to that.”

Sensing Carter's hesitation, Sol sighed and took a seat on Carter's desk, one foot swinging off the edge. “As a kid,” he said, “we used to drive down to the Jersey Shore for the day. My brothers were bigger than me, so I usually wasn't allowed to go in the ocean with them unless it was a white flag day, you know, completely calm. I was a pretty husky kid, totally unathletic, so I was actually perfectly content to stay under the beach umbrella with a book. But pride's a pretty powerful propellant. So I used to beg and plead with my mom—
I'm old enough, let me go, too, let me go, too—
until one afternoon, she gave in. So then I was stuck. My brothers used to just jump right in and swim out to the breakpoint, and then they would ride the waves in on these body boards we had. But I was scared, so I stayed close to the shore. When a big wave finally came, I just froze, totally paralyzed. I ended up getting pulled into the vortex at the center of the wave and it held me under until I blacked out. I washed up on shore like a dead crab. It took the lifeguard three minutes to revive me. Scared the shit out of my mother. After that she used to say to me, ‘Inaction is action, Sol, inaction is action.' I like to think about that every time I'm making a tough call. Diving in is no fun, but it's a hell of a lot better than drowning.”

Carter didn't respond. Instead, he put his face in his hands. For a moment, Sol wondered if Carter was crying. He had to keep talking. One thing they couldn't do was stop and let paralysis set in. If they stopped moving, it would be over. “Look,” he said, “this story will break in less than sixty hours. I'm not throwing those hours away, and I'm not going to sugarcoat things for you in order to lessen the blow.”

Carter wasn't accustomed to getting told what to do by Sol or anyone else. Ordinarily, it would have angered him to be spoken to this way, but today he felt only crushing exhaustion. He fell back into the soft leather of the chair. For a few minutes he allowed himself to remain with his head propped up against it, unmoving.

He closed his eyes and saw Merrill. It was she who had, somewhat unexpectedly, haunted his thoughts these past few months, when everything was going to hell. Merrill, age six, her tiny face crumpled with determination as she begged him to remove the training wheels from her bicycle. Middle School Merrill, crying in the cab on the way home from an interschool dance, because the boy she liked had liked someone else. Merrill making pancakes in the kitchen in her Spence uniform. Merrill standing outside the courthouse after her swearing-in ceremony, looking impossibly adult in her crisp black suit. Like no other woman, Merrill had captivated him wholly since the day she was born.

He had been dying for years, he thought now, slowly, insidiously, without really even realizing it. This feeling had come over him once before, last spring. He remembered the exact date: May 2. The Dow had rebounded to 13,058 from a low of 11,900 or so fewer than sixty days before. And he had thought to himself when he heard that number:
That's it, that's the dead-cat bounce
. And then he thought, for no particular reason:
I'm dying. I know it
. Which was strange, because just that morning he had received a clean bill of health at his annual checkup. But he was right, at least about the first thing, because after that, the market unwound into a complete freefall, never again hitting the 13,000s. Ever since, he had behaved like a dying dog, sneaking off into the woods to be alone whenever he could. He had heard once that dogs did this so as not to show fear. He did it, he thought, out of cowardice.

“What is it you want me to do, then?” Carter asked. His voice had grown stronger, the tiredness washed away on a tide of determination. “How do we get this done?”

“They haven't committed to this. This is me and Eli talking. No one else.”

“I understand.”

“The plan right now is containment. We have to move with the NYAG's office so that by the time it comes out in the media, the ink on the deal is dry. Then you can at least rest easy knowing that they aren't going to go after you. The media still will. It's going to be a firestorm. They'll be outside your building, they'll run old pictures of your family. Pictures of the girls, riding horses, at their deb balls, that sort of thing, whatever they can find. And they'll dig up any dirt—and I mean any—that they can find, whether or not it is relevant to the case. We're thinking this will happen by Monday. Tuesday at the latest.”

“We have to prepare Ines.”

“Ines will get it. She's a businesswoman; we will have her prepped so that in the short term, you two will come out as a unified front. It won't be easy for her, but it's better in the long run. Neither of you want allegations of an affair out there in the press. Think about how that will make her look.”

Carter cut him off. “Quite obviously, I've thought about that. I'm not a complete boor.”

Sol shook his head. “I'm sorry, that came out wrong. All I meant to say was that you two have aligned interests on this one.”

The two men paused. After a second, Carter's shoulders dropped; it wasn't Sol he should be fighting. In fact, he should not be fighting at all. “All right, so Alain first,” he said. “I imagine they want his records, anything that shows he was the one running the relationship with RCM.”

“Yes, and I have associates working on that already. It shouldn't be hard to establish; we'll pull some things that really highlight what a long leash Alain was giving RCM. That he didn't even have access to their accounts, that he never cross-checked anything with their counterparties or with an outside broker. Basically, he handed them money and didn't ask questions. We've gotten RCM's accountants to tell us that Alain and his team never once went out to see them, so that's helpful, too.”

“Okay, and what about me? Where was I during all this? Not paying attention?”