The Darlings (28 page)

Paul got up and poured himself more coffee. “Want some?” He held up the pot.

Carter nodded. “We don't have to talk about it if you don't want.”

“No, it's fine.” Paul put the pot down on the counter. “We spoke just after the wedding. He saw the announcement in the
Times
. He's a bank teller out in Westchester, actually.” He paused, took a sip of coffee. “When he left us, my mother told Katie and me that he was going to be a banker in New York. She made it sound really impressive, like it was a big opportunity. That was what I told all my friends: My dad's a banker in New York.”

“With your brains, I would've thought he was a mathematics professor.”

Paul shrugged. “Well. The apple fell far from the tree.”

“Trust me, I get that.” Carter leaned backward and stretched. “It must have been hard for you. Growing up without a father.”

“It was, especially in the beginning. After a while, you learn to cope. I know you understand.”

“I do. It's a formative experience, losing a parent. Particularly at a young age. It sets you apart from your peers. I was ten when my dad died. And twenty-one when I lost my mother. I had hoped she would have been there to see me graduate from Harvard.”

Paul nodded. “It was hard on my mom, not having my dad there for my graduation. It was one of the few times she cried about him.”

“We have a lot in common, you and me,” Carter said. When the light hit his face, Paul could see the pronounced bags beneath his eyes, and the delineated sagging of his cheeks. He looked tired. Carter stared out at the now-empty lawn, the brightening sky, and the sleeping trees. It didn't seem as though he was looking at anything in particular.

“I never asked you what went on at Howary, Paul,” Carter said. “I could have, when you came to see me about a job. I could have pressed you on it. But I didn't. You know why? Because I knew you were like me: Family would always come first. To me that meant you would never do anything stupid; you would never have done anything to jeopardize your position. You couldn't afford to get fired. For Merrill's sake, if not for yours. So you played it safe, never skirting the edge of common sense. Which is why you lasted as long as you did, all the way through this fall. Am I right?”

“I think so,” Paul said. “I'm glad to hear you know I didn't do anything wrong. A lot went wrong, certainly.” Paul wanted to say more, but didn't. He had suffered silently through months of questions: from friends, from his mother, from those incidental acquaintances like Raymond, his doorman, and Leo, the guy who shined his shoes.

What had happened at Howary?

They all had to know, right?

How could you work there and not know?

It didn't matter whether the questions were concerned or accusatory, gossipy or well-meaning; Paul couldn't answer any of them. It wasn't that he didn't want to, though most of the time, he didn't. But he simply couldn't. A simple, “I knew” or “I didn't know” didn't suffice. The lines of what he knew, and what he had relegated to some shadowy place of semirecognition had blurred long ago.

And what should he have known? Well, who could answer that? Though he was closer to all the players than anyone—he had been Mack's junior guy, after all—he still couldn't identify who was responsible and who wasn't. Really responsible, not just “look the other way” responsible. They all were, in some larger sense. And yet, while he knew this was a wholly indefensible position, he felt that somehow none of them were, either. Just like the guys at Lehman or Bear Stearns or AIG. Just like the guys at Delphic. They just went with something. They rode the bull as long as they could. It became a game, a contest; the only rules that governed were what made you money and what didn't. All Paul did was hang the hell on and try not to get thrown.

It was such a delicate web of decisions. He remembered the big ones, of course. Those he revisited again and again as he was falling asleep, and when awake, chastised himself for not doing differently. But Paul knew that it was the small decisions, those tender tipping points as inconsequential as what sandwich you ordered for lunch (
your boss ordered the same one; you spoke of it; later, he became your mentor
), whom you e-mailed that day (
e-mails remain forever, lingering on firm servers just waiting to be taken out of context
), or what route you took home from work (
you were running late that day and so you decided to split a cab with a co-worker instead of taking the subway
), these were the fibers of the noose with which they had hanged themselves. Not just Howary. Everyone on Wall Street.

“Well, now,” Carter said. “I never said you did nothing wrong.”

“What?”

Carter gave Paul a disquieting look. Paul felt the way he did the second after a bad deal went through; he wasn't sure how, but he knew he'd been had.

“I never said you did nothing wrong,” Carter repeated. “I said that you would never do anything stupid. There is a difference.”

Paul bristled. “Forgive me, but what's the difference?”

“Don't get defensive. You and I are cut from the same cloth, Paul. We put our family first. That means we play by the rules.”

“Right,” Paul said, trying to understand where this was going.

“We stay in the game so that we can provide for our family. That's the smart thing to do. The problem arises when the game is being played with rules the rest of the world doesn't understand. The mortgage business, for example. Everybody in the business knew the rules. Everyone was playing by them. Problem was, the little guy on Main Street didn't, so the little guy got burned. Same story for tax pass-throughs in the Caymans. Right?”

“Well,” Paul said, crossing his arms, pulling back from the counter. “There were rules that weren't being followed. There were shell companies that no one was even writing down. Money getting moved just to move it, to make it disappear. That kind of shit shouldn't have happened.”

“Fine. But you weren't doing that. Right?”

“Never. I wasn't crazy enough to be doing that.”

“But you saw it. And there was an unspoken code that, well, you turn a blind eye. Right? I mean, what would be the point of challenging the system?”

“That's just it,” Paul said, slightly exasperated. “You can point to Deal A and say, ‘that shouldn't have happened,' or Deal B, and say ‘that shouldn't have happened,' but what does a guy in my position do? Challenge one? I'd get fired. Challenge them all? I'd get banished from the industry. Then what? Nothing has changed.”

Now Paul was fired up, cylinders blazing. “You want to ask me if I knew?” he said. “Sure, I knew. Some of it. Not all of it, but yeah, some. But at some point, you put your head down and say to yourself, if someone else wants to go off the reservation, that's his fucking problem. And you know what? I was wrong. Because now it's everybody's problem. So that's what you wanted to hear: I knew. Think less of me?”

Carter chuckled. “No, son. I think more of you.” He grinned at Paul. He looked sort of wild-eyed and delirious, and it crossed Paul's mind that he might be having a breakdown. Maybe they all were. Carter hopped to his feet and paced across the kitchen floor, and Paul could hear the faint pulsing sound of music—
was that the B-52's?
—emanating from the pocket of Carter's running pants. His iPod had been playing this whole time, Paul realized, so faintly that he had edited it out as white noise.

“You do what's right for your family. You do it even if down the road the rest of the world is going to chastise you for what you did. I told you son, we're the same. I had a shitty father growing up, too, and as soon as I was able I took one look at him and said, ‘That's not the kind of man I want to be.' And I haven't been. I provided for my girls. I've given Merrill and Lily the world. The fucking
world
. They're going to call me greedy: the media, the lawyers, all of our so-called friends. Starting tomorrow or Monday. Maybe for the rest of my life. But they won't get it. Greedy? I was
selfless
. One hundred fucking percent.”

The words hung in the air, and the kitchen felt cold and silent. The sun was almost up now, but it still felt like twilight, an in-between hour. For the first time since Paul had met him, for the first time since he had heard his name, in fact, Paul didn't want to be Carter Darling. He didn't want to be a Darling at all.

And yet, with a sinking feeling, he knew Carter was right. They were the same. One hundred fucking percent.

“What are you going to do?” Paul asked. He spoke as quietly as he could, as if they were inside a china teacup. The world felt so fragile that the very reverberations of his voice might crack it. “What are we going to do?”

“It's very simple,” Carter said, and they both took a seat at the kitchen table.

When Alexa picked up the phone, she sounded bleary. It was still early.

“You awake?”

“Barely. Shit. Stayed up late last night.”

“Crazy Thanksgiving festivities?”

She laughed wryly. “Hardly.” She paused. “They suspended David,” she said. “He's not supposed to go into the office. He's shell-shocked and we've been scrambling. So it's been an, uh, busy morning in our house.”

Paul was silent. Finally he said, “On Thanksgiving? That's very . . . unchristian.” He had a tendency to make jokes when he was nervous.

She laughed again, her voice was rough and raw. If he hadn't known better, he would have thought he had woken her. “Yeah, well. They basically told him to take an extended holiday. You know, until they've done an internal investigation into him. It's not looking good. They're already teeing it up so that they can blame him. I told you these weren't nice people.”

“Did they—did she—did she say for what, exactly?”

“Not really. Something to the effect of his mishandling the RCM investigation. ‘Operating outside of marching orders': I think that was the exact phrasing. Which he was, of course, because his marching orders were to shut the thing down. Whatever. You can tell I'm still seething.” She sighed loudly. Then she said, “Are you going to come in and talk to David today? He's meeting with Matt Curtis, our guy at the NYAG, later on today. You should be there. David's working on his resignation statement now.”

Paul paused and closed his eyes. Then he dove in, knowing that what he was about to say was something he would reflect on for the rest of his life.

“I'm coming into the city,” he said. “But to be with the family. I'm sorry, but I'm just not in a position to talk to David. Particularly if he's not with the SEC anymore.”

He was met with silence, which wasn't surprising. For a moment, he wondered if Alexa had hung up. “You have to understand,” he said. “This is about family.”

Then she said, “Don't be stupid, Paul. If you come in and talk to the NYAG with us now, you won't go down with the rest of them. You know that.”

“I understand what you're saying. But I'm standing behind my father-in-law. You can't take a whole firm down based on the mistakes of a few people.”

“You're making a mistake.”

“I have to go, Alexa. Good luck to you, and to David. Try to stay focused on the real enemy here, all right?” His heart was pounding wildly in his chest. He wanted to leave the door open, just a crack, but he was out of time.

“I hate thinking of you among them,” she said. “I hate it.”

But he had already hung up.

Paul headed straight back to the bedroom. He wanted nothing more than to crawl into bed beside his wife and hold her. But when he opened the bedroom door, he saw that the sheets had been pushed back and Merrill was gone. He sat on the edge of the bed and put his face in his hands, wondering if he had made the wrong decision. The stress of the last three days poured over him and he felt submerged in it, as though he were being carried, like flotsam, off on a great tide. The shore looked farther and farther away.