Union Atlantic

Chapter 15

From the window of his office on the tenth floor of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Henry Graves looked down over the crowds rushing westward along Liberty Street and up Nassau toward the Fulton Street station. Those who hadn’t already been let out early for the Columbus Day weekend moved with more than their usual haste toward the buses and subways that would drain them from the city by the tens of thousands, emptying them into Jersey, Westchester, and Long Island, where supermarket inventories had already dropped a few points and the local banks had balanced their sheets for the week and sent their people home.

Downstairs, the Open Market Desk would trade Treasury bills for another half hour but the volume would be light. Soon Fedwire would settle, clearing everything from corporate bond sales to the credit card purchases of the secretaries and mutual fund salesmen hurrying now along the street below. Over the weekend when these people went to the movies or the mall they would swipe their cards through magnetic strips and thus do what for centuries had been the sole province of kings and parliaments: they would create money. Short money to be sure, but money nonetheless, which until that moment had never appeared on a balance sheet or been deposited with a bank, that was nothing but a permission for indebtedness, the final improvisation in a long chain of governed promises. And as they slept, the merchants’ computers would upload their purchases and into the river of commerce another drop of liquidity would flow, reversing their commute, heading back into the city to collect in the big, money-center banks, which in the quiet of night would distribute news of the final score: a billion a day shipped to Asia and the petro states.

Behind him he heard his secretary, Helen, enter and turned to see her carrying a bouquet of lilies in a crystal vase. A beam of the expiring sun shot through the globe of water in her hands, spraying light across the dark portraits over the couch and dancing briefly on the paneling.

“Who on earth are those from?”

“Me,” she said, clearing a place on the coffee table. She was a tall woman and had to bend nearly to a right angle to adjust the stems, her hand reaching up to brush her graying hair behind her ear. Most women her age at the bank had cut theirs short and wore skirts and jackets of a uniform blue or black. Helen, who was English, looked more like a tenured scholar in some branch of the humanities, dressed in formless cotton trousers, a turtleneck, and a red cardigan.

“What for?”

“It’s your birthday.”

“Oh. I suppose it is. That’s kind of you. Unnecessary, certainly. But kind.”

“They were supposed to arrive hours ago but they should last awhile,” she said, stepping back to appraise her arrangement. The phone on her desk rang and she returned to the other room to answer it.

Down below, the last rays of sun passed over the heads of the pedestrians to fall evenly across the wall of a building at the corner of Liberty and William, which until recently had displayed a mural of Seurat’s La Grande Jatte—a set painting for, of all unlikely things, a Hollywood movie shot in the financial district. They had left it up after the production and Henry rather enjoyed having the mural there to remind him of the original, a painting he tried to visit whenever business took him to Chicago. One habit of his, at least, of which his sister would approve.

Two months ago, back in August, Charlotte had found a new cause for her paranoia: what she claimed to be the theft of documents from the house, as if they hadn’t simply been swallowed up in the general chaos. She’d gone so far as to call the police to request an investigation, which they quite reasonably declined to open, this in turn only heightening her sense of persecution. Concerned that her rate of deterioration was increasing, Henry had got in touch with a neighbor, whom he’d asked to phone if she saw anything awry. The woman had called four times since. First it was a dozen saplings delivered in burlap wrap and left to die in the sun; then branches stacked at the end of the driveway to prevent cars reaching the house; after that, the collapse of one section of the barn roof, through which rain now poured; and finally, the dogs howling at all hours. Last week, he’d gone ahead and hired a home aide. While at a conference in Basel, he’d got a call on his cell phone from her saying Charlotte had barred her at the door and told her never to return.

“You don’t have a lot of options,” his lawyer had told him. “If she gets violent, we can talk.”

“Are you expecting someone?” Helen called from the other room. “There’s a woman downstairs. She says she made an appointment.”

He knew there had been a reason for him to tarry here on a Friday afternoon but he hadn’t been able to recall what it was.

“Yes,” he said. “That’s my fault. I forgot to mention it.”

A few minutes later, Helen showed Evelyn Jones into his office.

With some reluctance, she placed her handbag on the coffee table and, flattening the front of her skirt onto her thighs, perched on the edge of the couch.

“Can we get you something? Coffee, water? Or something stiffer for that matter?”

“Oh, no, I’m fine, really.” She looked about the room with what struck Henry as genuine marvel. “It’s not what I was expecting,” she said. “This building.”

“Yes, it’s a bit unusual for the neighborhood. It’s modeled on a Medici palace. You saw the wrought iron? Rather fanciful, I suppose. But the idea of a central bank was still new back in the twenties. I think they wanted to make a statement. You’re sure I can’t offer you anything to drink?”

“No, thank you. I know you’re busy. I’m probably interrupting.”

“No, just wrapping up the week. I’m not traveling for once, which is a blessing.”

He remembered now that when she first left a message a week ago he’d guessed it was an inquiry about working at the Fed, which while a rather direct approach wouldn’t be unheard of and would account for her nerves. But noticing her rigid posture and pursed lips he wondered if there wasn’t something more than that to her visit.

“We get them from the Met,” he said, following her eyes to the paintings. “We loaned them a bar of gold back in the seventies for some show or other and they’ve been kind enough to let us borrow from their basement ever since. The one problem being my predecessor decided the appropriate policy would be to hang only paintings by artists from the Federal Reserve’s Second District, a somewhat limiting condition when it comes to the history of art. But there we are.”

“I shouldn’t be here,” she said. “I shouldn’t have come.”

“Not at all,” he said genially, beginning to perceive the outlines of the thing. “Do you have another appointment after this?”

“No,” she replied, surprised by the question.

“So you’re not in a rush?”

She shook her head.

“I tell you what. Since this is your first visit here, allow me to show you something.”

He stood up before she had the opportunity to decline, holding his arm out to guide her back through his office door.

“Helen, I’m just going to take Ms. Jones downstairs. We won’t be long.” He led her along the arch-ceilinged hallway, their footsteps silent on the thick carpet. “Did you fly down?” he asked, as they stepped onto the officers’ elevator.

“No, I took the train.”

“Yes, it’s far more civilized than a plane these days.” He allowed a few floors to pass before observing, “When they built this place they dynamited their way a few stories into the bedrock of the island. It was one of their great precautions. Turns out it was the only foundation strong enough to bear the weight.”

The elevator doors slid open and they made their way down the windowless passage to the security officer’s desk.

“Charles,” he said, “are the tours over for the day? I was going to show this young woman around.”

“It’s all yours, sir,” he said, leading them through the ten-foot, cylindrical airlock and into the antechamber. “Will you need any help with the stock, sir?”

“No, I think we’re fine,” Henry said. He unlocked the inner gate with his own key and ushered Evelyn into the vault, clicking the gate shut behind them. At the center of the room stood the metal scales still used to test the purity of the gold. Beside the scales were two pairs of magnesium shoe clips worn to protect the officers’ feet lest they should drop a bar in transit and crush their toes.

“We’re eighty feet below the sidewalk here. Thirty feet below sea level. Go ahead,” he said, gesturing toward the rows of floor-to-ceiling metal cages that lined the walls, numbered but otherwise unmarked. “Have a look.”

His guest glanced at him first, inquisitively, as if an elaborate trick might be afoot, but then succumbing to curiosity she approached one of the cages containing dark-yellow bars ten feet high and twenty deep. After a moment, she turned to look down the aisle, taking in the sheer number of separate compartments.

“It’s the largest accumulation of monetary gold in the world,” he said. “In fact, it’s a decent-size chunk of all the gold ever mined.”

“And all this belongs to the government?”

“No. The Treasury keeps our reserves at Fort Knox and up at West Point. The vast majority of what you see here is owned by foreign central banks. Most countries in the world deposit with us. We’re just the custodians. When governments want to do business, they call up and we move the gold from one cage to another.”

“They trust us that much?”

“For these purposes, yes.”

She passed on to another compartment and gazed at the wall of shining gold.

“The tours come to the outer gate here every day. I think last year we had twenty-five thousand visitors. People love to look at it. It reminds me of something Galbraith said: ‘The process by which banks create money is so simple the mind is repelled. A deeper mystery seems only decent.’ I suppose this is what’s left of the mystery. And yet this,” he said, indicating with a sweep of his hand the whole contents of the vault, “barely matters. Add it up and it’s no more than eighty or ninety billion worth. The wires clear more than that in an hour. All anchored to nothing but trust. Cooperation. You could even say faith, which sometimes I do, though it’s certainly of an earthly kind. Without it you couldn’t buy a loaf of bread.

“Of course as my sister never fails to remind me, the bigger ethical question is what people — what governments do with their money. Whether they buy medicine or food or arms. But there are conditions of possibility for doing any of these things. Whichever choices we make. The system has to work. People have to trust the paper in their wallets. And that starts somewhere. It starts with the banks.”

Her fingers curled around the bars of the cage she stood before.

“I guess you know why I’m here,” she said.

“Yes. I think I do.”

AT THE END of August, Evelyn had paid $390,000 for a shingle cottage on a tree-lined street out in Alden. The kitchen at the back was a bit dark in the mornings but it had a view of a dogwood and a rhododendron in the yard. Upstairs was a bathroom and two bedrooms with dormer windows that made the rooms feel smaller than their dimensions but comfortable nonetheless. She’d always pictured moving into such a place with a husband, but with Aunt Verna’s encouragement, she hadn’t allowed that image to stop her.

On the new commute home, she passed a video store and often stopped to pick up a DVD, a comedy or romance, which she’d watch with dinner.

Years before, in college, she’d taken a literature course and they had read a lot of James Baldwin, among others. Though she couldn’t remember what book it came from, one line in particular had always stuck with her. People pay for what they do, Baldwin had written, and more, for what they have allowed themselves to become. And they pay for it simply, with the lives they lead.

On the one hand, this sounded harsh, as if people were forever letting themselves go, as Aunt Verna would say, and being punished for it with their own misery. That was one way to hear it. But there was a democratic spirit to it as well, a sense that life consisted of the distance traveled, for good or ill. In which case, her guilt at having all that she did while her brother had got nothing lacked a purpose. Experience provided its own justice. From where it would come, no one could predict.

Two weeks ago at church, she’d stayed after for coffee. There, she’d seen a boy of nine or ten, thin with a high forehead, whom she had noticed back in June passing out programs at Carson’s funeral. She’d noted him at the time because she didn’t recognize him and she’d wondered who had placed him there at the door if not a member of the family. He appeared afraid when she approached him and said it wasn’t the minister who had invited him to help that day.

“I came on my own,” he said. “Did I do something wrong?”

She assured him that he hadn’t. She was just curious, she said. Had he known Carson?

“He used to let me hang out with him. When he had calls to make in the park. He’d ride my scooter sometimes. The thing is … see … the thing is, I seen him shot. I was across the street when they did it. There was two of them. And then quick-like, there was people calling the ambulance and all that. But I seen him lying up in there before they came, his face all shot up, and all these bills on the floor, I don’t know why they hadn’t taken the money or nothing, but there was all this cash, his I guess. But when I came back a couple minutes later it was gone, so I guess someone musta took it.”

Yanked from the dimensionless efficiency in which she’d dwelt since the day her brother died, Evelyn had seen vividly for the first time the image of her brother’s corpse, of his shot brain smeared on the tile.

The next day she didn’t go to work. In fact, she ended up staying out half the week, in that new house of hers, in which she suddenly felt herself to be a stranger.

Coming to see Henry Graves, she’d known that eventually he would ask her why. Why was she telling him what she knew?

He put the question to her once they had ridden the elevator back upstairs and returned to his office.

“I must tell you,” he said, “in all my years here I’ve never had someone come through the door to report their own institution. I confess I’m curious.”

Evelyn drew herself up to deliver her piece. But what came to mind were not the words she’d prepared but the look on her aunt Verna’s face when she’d told her about her latest promotion, how her eyebrows had risen, her eyes brimming, her whole face opening up as her shoulders let go, as if for all the world she’d been told, as in a dream, that she were free from a burden she’d never thought to imagine gone. It was a look Evelyn had seen before, at each stage of her accomplishments, and each time it nearly broke her. She could never tell Verna how routine her job was, how bureaucratic and spiritually thin. That would be cruel. But then so, in its way, was coming here to blow the whistle. Once the lawyers got involved, who knew what would count for the truth? She had pieces of evidence about what McTeague and Fanning had done but she wasn’t, after all, the person in charge. As best she could tell, the protections for a person in her position weren’t worth the paper they were written on. It wasn’t only her hopes she was jeopardizing by being here.

Henry Graves’s welcoming expression had been replaced by a more sober, businesslike concern.

“I can’t say for sure,” she said. “You’re probably wondering if it’s because I have some grudge against Fanning. I don’t care for him but that’s not why I’m here. Maybe I’m just tired of worrying.”

“My staff is going to need to debrief you,” he said. “If it’s okay with you, I’d like to do that right away.”

She nodded and he reached for a phone on the side table. As he talked with his deputy, Evelyn looked about the office again. It was smaller than many occupied by the senior executives at Atlantic Securities and without the views. Perhaps she was only imagining it, then, this sense of imperturbable calm and yet it seemed manifest to her sitting there encased in those heavy stone walls, the gilt-framed paintings looking down from the wall, as the grandfatherly white man in his jacket and tie took the situation in hand.

She wondered if this were the feeling that so many people out there in the country hungered for: a sense of continuity, gone or never present in so many lives.

Give me one thing that won’t change. Just one.

Daddy will take care of the money.

The dealers whose henchmen had shot Carson knew the need for this feeling as well as anyone, and they used it every day. But here in the undying realm of the central bank no violence was required. Here the aristocrats of bureaucracy guarded money’s permanent interests. Part of her wanted never to leave this room with its promise of the cessation of all struggle. And yet to recognize this longing was to see herself as a traitor. To what, she wasn’t entirely sure. Life perhaps. Or the belief in it.

“We’re all set,” Henry said, putting down the phone. “Are you ready?”

Chapter 16

“Where are you?” Sabrina asked.

“I don’t know. Twenty-eight, maybe. Twenty-nine.”

“Wow,” she said. “If you’re not careful, you might actually become interesting.”

From the office where he had wound up, Doug could see over Four Point Channel and across the corner of the harbor to the new federal courthouse with its slanting glass façade and a row of flags out front, fluttering in the breeze.

“So here’s the deal,” Sabrina said. “Holland wants you at the Ritz for the deal closing with Taconic; McTeague’s called three times; you’ve got a message from Mikey to contact him ASAP; the guy you hired to erase our e-mails says someone’s messing with his program; some official-sounding Chinese guy from the Singapore Exchange wanted to confirm your mailing address at eight this morning; Evelyn Jones is on vacation; and some kid named Nate called to say he was waiting for you ‘in the room.’ Which I’m not even going to touch. You think just maybe you could turn your phone on?”

In the last few weeks, Doug had begun to wander like this. Using the stairs, he’d head down to floors of the tower he’d never visited before, the reception areas distinguishable only by the pallor of the ferns and the colors of the abstract paintings hung over the leather chairs. Departments whose staff he could once have recited by name had doubled or tripled in size, filling whole floors. Nodding at the smiling secretaries, saying the occasional word to the middle managers surprised in the corridor, all of them as ignorant as could be of how untenable the bank’s predicament had become, he’d wind up in the office of someone down in consumer credit or government relations who was out for the day, and there he’d sit in the quiet with the door closed and his phone off, trying again and again to order his thoughts.

Through July and August the Nikkei index had shed another twelve hundred points; the Japanese Ministry of Finance, criticized for their earlier intervention, had done nothing to prevent the slide. McTeague’s losses had ballooned. They were larger now than the value of Atlantic Securities itself.

But then again, hardly anyone knew. If some deputy department head occasionally bothered to e-mail Doug, inquiring about loans from one division after another to an obscure subsidiary named Finden Holdings, he didn’t bother to reply. Even Holland seemed to have voided the problem from his mind, entertaining clients at Red Sox games and the Boston Pops and now finalizing the stock-only purchase of Taconic, the bank that had fallen on hard times back in the spring.

Union Atlantic’s customers still drew on lines of credit and made payments on existing loans. The insurance subsidiary still wrote policies and, after initially projecting large, 9/11-related losses, looked as if it might actually show a modest profit. People all over the country still opened checking accounts and paid bills and withdrew tens of millions in cash. On the Asian exchanges, there were rumors of a huge bet on the Nikkei but people figured it was a hedge fund in Connecticut or London, because, after all, banks wouldn’t expose that much of their own capital.

Indeed, the larger the problem grew the more routine the management of it had become. What had started as a crisis had turned into a condition. And then, just as the condition surpassed any previously imaginable level of acceptable seriousness, it seemed to vanish altogether, as if too big to see.

“You there?” Sabrina asked.

“Tell Holland I’m on my way.”

“What about the rest?”

“Tell that computer geek to work his shit out. I want those e-mails gone.”

“So dramatic. Can I shred something?”

“Piss off.”

“Maybe I’ll become one of those cooperating witnesses. I could write a memoir. I’m so sick of Franco. I had this whole idea about how to generate a subtle, almost perverse sympathy for him, but it all seems ridiculous now. I slept with this schlep in Watertown the other day. I tried taking his grandmother seriously, but in the end she was just an old Fascist. Who knows? My therapist says—”

Doug pressed End. He hadn’t moved his gaze from the courthouse façade. He had been in the building only once, with the general counsel for a hearing in a shareholder suit. Washington had spared no expense for the judges. From the marble floors to the courtrooms rimmed in arabesques of pink-and-blue pastel, you could be forgiven for expecting exhibitions of modern art rather than juries and sentencings.

To check the markets, he switched on the television in the corner, searching for the business channel. But before he reached it, he came upon those images that were constant now on cable news: the satellite photos of the Iraqi desert, still after still of warehouses and outbuildings surrounded by nothing but sand. Like all of them, this report was being narrated by some retired member of the brass paid to opine on the nature of the weapons hidden beneath all those roofs and tarps. Soon the screen cut to B roll of aircraft carriers and naval destroyers, as the old soldier described the slow but steady buildup of hardware in the theater. The segment ended with a shot of a tanker moving low in the water, as the news anchor, in a voice that somehow managed to blend excitement and resignation, reminded the audience of America’s vital interests in the region.

Lately, Doug couldn’t sleep for watching this stuff. And he knew Vrieger would be watching it too. Watching the endless repetition of facts and speculation and probable lies, the consumption of which at least partially numbed the helplessness of seeing it unfold at such distance and so inexorably. The two of them had spoken the previous week and Vrieger had told him that he was all set, headed to Virginia soon for training, the invasion apparently scheduled for March but plenty of contractors needed already for logistics and security, hundreds of them flowing into Kuwait each week.

In the small hours of the morning, Doug would lie awake staring at the maps with the fancy graphics of arrows sliding toward Baghdad from north, south, and west, as the commentators prattled on: neo-cons smugly suffering lesser minds, while their opponents expressed incredulity at the ignorance of the American people for supporting the idea of such a war; and then there were Doug’s favorites, the young, pro-war liberals, so fresh-faced and eager to prove they weren’t weak or queer. But whoever the commentators were, the reports seemed always to return to the endless stock footage of tanks kicking dust and missiles blasting hot off the decks of cruisers. Which carried Doug back, over and over, to standing on the deck of the Vincennes, that furnace wind blowing off the fouled waters of the Gulf, clogging the ship’s every pore with sand, and to the cursing of the Iranian thugs in the speedboats spit over the radio waves, and to watching the coordinates of the jetliner’s altitude rise across his monitor.

In the hours before dawn, when he finally managed to turn off the news, a mild delirium often took sway, a semiconscious but still-un-resting state, in which unremembered moments floated up into his senses, strangely complete in air and texture, almost dreamlike in their exactitude. Like sitting on the vinyl backseat of his uncle John’s station wagon between his cousins Michael and P.J. with the windows rolled down, thrilled to be out of his mother’s apartment and on the way out to the Cape, the voice on the radio calling the game as the miles of scrub pine blurred green across his eyes; and later, the deep, ineffable happiness of returning to his cousins’ house, a beautiful dusk place full of shouting and motion and the clutter of sports gear and toys, his uncle and aunt’s orders barked and ignored, Michael not turning off the hose but letting the water run all the way to the bottom of the drive, where they built their hurried dams for the pleasure of watching them overrun, glimpsing in his cousins’ casual disregard of their father’s rebukes the freedom that came with bossy parents — to resist, to push back against a strength and solidity your petty acts could never overcome.

Or waiting out in front of the apartment, out in the cold air for his mother, after snow had fallen, wanting not to be late again to Mass because then everyone would turn to look at them; making a snowball with his bare hands as he waited for the sound of her footsteps on the stairs; watching her walk to the car in her black wool coat and blue dress, her once-a-week face made up with blush and lipstick; his hand burning on the frozen pack in his fist, seeing her breath and his, wishing his snowball were hard enough to smash the windshield but knowing it wasn’t; and then entering the car, going back into that silence that wasn’t even punishment or rebuke but simply her way of getting by, the air from the whining defroster cold on his face at first, its stale plastic scent soon erased by the sharper smell of his mother’s cigarette.

Like taunts, these memories were, the past trying to claim him back at his weakest moments.

If he could just sleep, he kept thinking, then his concentration would return. He could switch off the news and his brain would stop shaking loose these useless recollections and he could focus again on the problem at hand.

He headed down into the lobby and out to the car waiting to take him to the Ritz. On the way there, he dialed Mikey.

“I don’t know how you got those papers,” Mikey said, “but they did the job. You won. That Graves Society’s a joke. She stopped making donations three years ago. And their taxes — anyway, the court tossed Cushman’s order out. Charlotte Graves isn’t getting title to anything.”

“Does she have an appeal?”

“To God, maybe.”

“Good. I want you to call the broker and get the house listed.”

“Didn’t you hear what I said? You beat her.”

“Yeah, I heard you. But I need it listed. I want the asset in cash.”

“I just won your fucking appeal for you! I spent a year building you a house for Christ’s sake. You picked the investment, we cleared the land, you got your mansion. Now just live in it for a few years, would you? Turn a real profit.”

“I appreciate all you did. I’ll have Sabrina handle the broker if you want.”

“Who the hell are you?”

“I’m your friend, Mikey. But the situation, it’s changed.”

FROM THE HOTEL WINDOW, Nate could see a young couple down at the Arlington Street gates in shorts and sun hats. They paused to consult a map as their children ran ahead to gawk at the statue of General Washington mounted on his horse, his bronze eyes casting a permanent gaze up Commonwealth Avenue. Beyond the gates, in the Boston Public Gardens, the branches of the weeping willows swayed over the edge of the pond.

As he watched the man drop down on one knee to photograph his wife and children gathered beneath the statue, Nate dialed Emily’s cell phone again, impatient for her to answer. Two months ago, she’d left for college and they’d spoken on the phone most weeks since. But for the third time that day her line went straight to voice mail. As he was about to hang up, his handset beeped and he saw that she was calling in.

“So you’re on it as well?” she said. “The other two have been calling me all day telling me how deeply important all our friendships have been, Jason waxing on about how much he loves me all of a sudden. It’s so mid-nineties. They’ve never been to a rave in their life. You guys are all going to wake up depressed with jaw aches.”

“I’m not on Ecstasy. I’m not with them.”

“So what’s with all your calls? What’s the emergency?”

“Nothing,” he said. “I was just checking in, seeing how it’s going up there. Is your roommate still a hassle?”

“I don’t believe you’re not in a crisis, but whatever. We can talk about that in a minute. To answer your question, yeah, she’s definitely a problem. The whole vegan, bisexual, anti-NAFTA, Nader-voter situation I could more or less deal with if she’d just keep it to herself. You’d think she’d at least shut up when she meditated, but no, that’s when she chants. And she has the gall to warn me about the false consciousness of cynicism. She’s a cross between a Hari Krishna and a Stalinist. It’s obviously just an aggressive formation against whatever void of boomer parenting she suffered, but I don’t see why I should have to cope with it.”

“I need you to cover for me,” Nate said.

“Cover for what?”

“I told my mother I was going to visit you. I’ve been gone a bunch lately and I think she’s starting to suspect. I just don’t want her to worry, you know?”

“Where are you?”

“The Ritz.”

“Oh, my God. You’re with him! That is so hot. I mean I should probably be worrying about you as a friend or whatever, but that guy is smokin’. It’s so much easier for you guys. The boys in my art history class don’t even look at me they’re so busy checking each other out. They were comparing underwear brands yesterday. But what’s with the hotel?”

“He’s negotiating some kind of deal. They stay here all night.”

“And he asked you to come with him?”

Nate hesitated, not wanting to disappoint Emily by upending the image behind her playful envy. Besides, what sense could he make of his circumstance if it didn’t conform in part, at least, to other people’s more ordinary arrangements? How could he explain to her that despite all he and Doug had done they had never actually kissed?

“Do you miss Jason?”

“That drooling pothead? Maybe. I did meet this one guy in Intro Psych. He’s German, so at least he knows how to have a conversation. I don’t know. This English professor last week, he handed out the syllabus and told us we’d be reading nineteenth-century novels with heroes and heroines our age or not much older, and he asked if we thought our feelings were important enough to write books about. So this one kid said, how could his feelings matter if they didn’t have any consequences, like marriage or kids or your reputation? Of course, he looked like he was on meds, but it riled my roommate up enough to insist our feelings about politics mattered. Which I sort of agree with. But who wants to read a novel about some vegetarian’s journey to an antiwar stance?”

“Doesn’t it depend on how intense they are?” Nate asked, a little jealous that Emily got to spend her time considering such things.

“What do you mean?”

“Your feelings. I mean if they’re intense enough, they have consequences, right?”

“You’re really gone on this guy, aren’t you?”

Just then he heard a knocking at the door. “I gotta go,” he said. “He’s back.”

“Okay, lover boy. Take care of yourself.”

When Nate opened the door he was dumbfounded by the sight of Mr. Holland. For a moment the two of them beheld each other in bewildered silence.

“Nate. Hi there. This is Doug Fanning’s room, isn’t it?”

“Yeah,” he said, unable to conceive of any reason he would be staying at the Ritz-Carlton on his own dime.

Stepping past Nate, Mr. Holland entered the room, looking about with a befuddled expression, which fell away as he took in the unmade bed and the clothes on the chairs and Nate’s knapsack lying on the floor.

Unlike Mrs. Holland, who rarely managed to hide her aggression toward Jason’s friends, Mr. Holland had always greeted them warmly. He seemed cheered by the idea that his son had friends at all, as inattentive parents often were, relieved by some vague notion of their child’s social success. He was friendly in a general way. But he suffered from no lack of focus now.

“Is Jason with you? Is he in the hotel?”

Nate realized he was being offered an escape route. If he could rope Jason into the story somehow and then get to him before his father did, he might save himself. But he couldn’t put the pieces together quickly enough.

“Actually … I know Mr. Fanning. From Finden.”

“From Finden? I see.”

He glanced at his watch, as if recalculating the odds on a particularly complicated bet. Nate understood that he wouldn’t be asked to explain himself any further, and that this was probably a bad thing. “Well,” Mr. Holland said, “I need to see Doug. So if he drops by, maybe you could tell him I’m downstairs.”

He was already back through the door when he turned, as if halted by the belated awareness that their acquaintance required some parting pleasantry. “Anyhow,” he said, “say hello to your parents for me.”

AS THE CAR came to a stop in front of the hotel, Doug’s phone rang.

“Are you in the building yet?” Holland asked.

“Yeah, I’m here. Are we closing the deal with Taconic?”

There was a pause and it sounded as if Jeffrey were holding his hand over the receiver. “So, yeah,” he said. “Good that you’re here. Just sit tight, another forty-five minutes, an hour maybe. I just have to go over a few more things with the lawyers and then we’ll all meet in the ballroom.”

“What’s going on?”

“Nothing. The deal’s fine. I just want you close at the end, that’s all.”

A liveried bellhop opened the car door and Doug passed through the revolving glass into the lobby. Beyond the elevator bank, to the right of the front desk, two heavyset white guys in navy-blue wind-breakers were talking quietly to the hotel manager. They had wires in their ears and walkie-talkies on their belts. They weren’t secret service and they didn’t look private. FBI, maybe. Definitely federal.

Doug considered walking back onto the sidewalk and hailing a cab. But if they were here for him, how far would he get? Not today or tomorrow, but next week or next month? He would need time to arrange things, on his terms.

As soon as he entered the room upstairs, Nate came up off the bed, all eagerness and alarm.

“I kept trying your phone,” he said. “I didn’t know where you were.”

Doug tossed his briefcase on the couch and crossed to the window. Nothing unusual down on the street. No squad cars or agents. He regretted now having let Nate come here but when he’d told him he would be staying in the city for a while, he’d practically begged. He had arrived with a suitcase and a bag of books, as if they were on vacation together.

As a practical matter, Nate had been expendable as soon as he’d delivered the files back in July. And yet in the months since they had spent as much time together as ever. Doug had kept telling himself that getting off helped him sleep. That Nate was just experimenting, and he was just killing time. But the more he used the boy’s body, the more frustrated he’d become.

“You shouldn’t be here,” he said.

“Why? Is something the matter?”

The collar of his faded blue polo was tucked under on one side and his hair, as usual, was a mess.

“What did you do?” Doug said, sliding his thumb down Nate’s smooth cheek. “Shave?”

“Yeah. You think I’m too scruffy. It’s my Ritz-Carlton look.”

He took hold of Doug’s hand and guided it down to his hip. “You look good in that suit,” he said, stepping in close, their faces just a few inches apart.

His gall rising, Doug turned Nate around and pushed him forward onto the bed.

“After this,” he said, “you’re leaving. You understand?”

When Nate had removed his shirt and jeans, he rolled onto his back.

“What are you doing?”

“I never get to look at you,” Nate said.

Doug grabbed him by the backs of the knees and pressed his thighs to his chest, bending him open. Holding him down like that, he fiddled with his own belt and trousers, amazed and repulsed by the endlessness of the boy’s need. He spit in his hand and entered him with a single jab. Nate winced, his eyes watering, but Doug kept going. This was the thing — why he had kept him around. To tackle a male body, one like his own boyish self, to push it and get at it, his dick and this fucking just a means to the end. To fuck weakness, to pummel it.

Even as he seemed about to cry, Nate kept his eyes open, staring straight at him. Doug reached his hand down to cover the eyes, but with surprising force Nate peeled the hand back and kept looking. It was unbearable. He jabbed harder, pushing air from Nate’s lungs, forcing him to gasp for breath. And still he wouldn’t look away. A surge of nausea rose up through Doug’s body as he hovered over him, threatening to drain all his energy, making him wish for a moment that those eyes were the barrels of guns that would finish him here and now. But time kept on and he was sweating and Nate came on his chest and stomach and Doug emptied himself into him and pulled out. And then Nate, spread-eagled on the bed, arms out to the sides, looked once again as he had before, like a lamed foal awaiting its owner’s merciful bullet.

Doug wiped himself off and pulled his trousers up, watching Nate rise from the bed and disappear into the bathroom. The ringing of the shower water blended with the ringing of his phone, which he ignored.

Nate was quiet when he returned, dressing with his back to Doug, who flipped on the TV in search of news.

A few minutes later, from over his shoulder, Doug heard him say, “I got you something.”

“What do you mean?”

“A present.”

“What for?”

“I don’t know. I felt like it.” Coming around to Doug’s side, he handed him a small wrapped box. Doug removed the gold ribbon and tore away the paper. Inside the case was a pair of black-and-silver cuff links.

“You’ve got all those cuff shirts. But you always wear the same links.”

Doug closed the case and put it aside.

“This game,” he said, “it’s over.”

“It’s not a game to me.”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about. You’re a kid. You think that what you feel matters.”

“It does.”

“I’m doing you a favor. You can’t see it now, but I am. You want to be defenseless all your life? You want to be the chump? You like sleeping with guys — fine. But take your heart off your fucking sleeve.”

Standing up, Doug grabbed his jacket and briefcase from the couch and walked out of the room, slamming the door behind him.

At the entrance to the ballroom, a security guard asked him for ID.

“You’re not press, right? There’s no press allowed.”

Teams of lawyers were arrayed around an enormous oblong table, their seconds seated behind them like congressional aides. The young associates whispered in their bosses’ ears, as a guy in suspenders at the head of the table read aloud from a paragraph of the contract projected on a screen behind him.

Save for occasional naps on their hotel beds, the lawyers had been in this room for three days straight, fighting over the details of the acquisition, down to the last indemnification.

At a desk in the far corner of the room, Holland’s secretary, Martha, was typing furiously on her laptop.

“Where’s Jeffrey?” he asked her.

“Doug,” she said, seemingly alarmed by his appearance. She pointed to her right. “It’s the second door down. Good luck.”

Another security guard, this one a man Doug recognized from the office, opened the door for him and he entered the windowless antechamber. The two men from the lobby, still wearing their blue windbreakers, sat on folding metal chairs. They stood as he entered; he heard the door close behind him.

“Douglas Fanning?” the older of the two asked, as his partner removed a pair of handcuffs from his belt.

“Yeah,” Doug said. “That’s me.”

Chapter 17

Across from Henry, Holland rested his elbows on the table and leaned forward, interlacing his meaty fingers, the extra flesh of his neck pinched by his shirt collar.

“First guy I ever worked for,” he said, “could rattle off every loan on his book, quote you the rate, and tell you who was past due, all without so much as glancing at a balance sheet. Sean Hickey. Manager for Hartford Savings. He told me to forget whatever they’d taught me and learn to read a man’s face. That was the training. To sit beside him in meetings with the local entrepreneurs and give him my thumbs-up or thumbs-down. I picked the ones with the flash — the talkers. He rejected every one of them. You’re thinking short, he’d say. You want steady. All that seems like a hundred years ago. It’s a trader’s game now, a pure trader’s game.”

The Bierstadt canvas hanging on the wall behind Union Atlantic’s chairman and CEO depicted an untouched Yosemite in early fall or late spring, the verdant grass and mountain lake beneath the peaks struck by columns of sun descending from a gap in the clouds. Half Dome was capped with snow melting into falls that ran off the lower cliffs, the fine mist emanating from the cascades of water giving the painter away for the Romantic he was, that mystical, German idealism struck here in a grander key on the subject of the American West.

Thirty-eight million, Henry thought. That’s what Holland had earned last year. And if the board forced him out, he’d collect twice that.

Through the doorway into the private dining room, a waiter in a black suit and tie approached, a plate in each hand.

“Cracked native lobster tails, gentlemen, served with poached organic eggs, papaya salsa, and Old Bay hollandaise sauce. Fresh ground pepper with your breakfast, sir?”

“No, thank you,” Henry replied, unfurling his napkin.

“I appreciate you coming here this morning,” Holland said. “I don’t know if I ever told you, but I voted for you back when I was at Chase, when I was on your board. We were glad to have you for the job.”

Henry had known as much. Holland would have preferred the appointment of a colleague from the private sector, someone more instinctively friendly to the industry’s interests. But once others had coalesced around Henry, he’d taken a friendly approach.

“You worry in the right way,” he said. “Which is important.”

If the FBI and the U.S. attorney’s office had had their druthers, they would have staked out Union Atlantic for months in order to build their case all the way up to Holland. But given the size of the problem, Henry hadn’t been able to wait. He had come through the front door, as it were, only forty-eight hours ago, and straightaway Holland had offered Fanning and his trader up on a platter. The bank had been running its own internal investigation, he claimed, which showed Fanning involved in rogue activity and attempts to cover his tracks. Given that Holland’s lawyers were themselves former federal prosecutors, former banking regulators, and former IRS commissioners, he knew the drill well enough: hide nothing, or at least appear to hide nothing.

In the months and years ahead, at a cost of millions, the matter of Holland’s own culpability would be the subject of multiple lawsuits, civil and criminal, with teams of his attorneys vetting every discovery request of every party, the lives of associates in some corporate firm devoted to nothing else, billing thousands of hours as they went, as the perfectly straightforward question of what he had known and when was fed into the numbing machinery of modern litigation, there to be digested at a sloth’s pace. Young lawyers would buy condominiums or town houses with their bonus checks, employing architects and builders and decorators who would, in turn, spend a little more themselves on cars or vacations or flat-screen TVs, though that particular trickle from the economy of distress would barely register against the job losses bound to come with the restructuring of Union Atlantic Group.

But all that was for later. Personally, Henry suspected Holland had approved of the Finden Holdings arrangement and the proprietary trading scheme it had facilitated as a way to save his share price. But it would serve no practical end to indulge in an airing of his views. What Henry needed was a functioning institution capable of playing its role as the situation unfolded. If Holland was the man who could deliver that, then so be it. Others would decide his fate.

“It’s a sad case, really,” Holland observed. “Doug was a bright guy. If anything, I probably promoted him too quickly. I blame myself for that. Obviously the pressure got to him. He lost his judgment. I don’t know if you heard about the other stuff … I hesitate to mention it. But it seems he might have gotten into some trouble with this kid, a boy actually, might even have been underage, I’m not sure. Surprised the hell out of me. I’d never seen any indication of that. But I guess it fits the pattern. You deceive people in one part of your life, and if you get away with it, it just takes over.”

He paused here, trying to gauge his progress with Henry. Apparently doubtful of his headway, he pressed on.

“Off the record,” he said, “there’s a good chance this’ll make your sister’s life easier. I don’t think Doug will be out there in Finden much longer. He’ll have to pay his lawyers with something.”

This had occurred to Henry, though he had said nothing about it to Charlotte. Only a few days ago she had learned that her legal victory had been reversed. The news had struck her hard. Winning that case had at last justified her crusade, not only against Fanning and the town but against her larger enemy: that general encroachment of money and waste and display. Having it taken away had crumpled something in her. Her hectoring voice had grown subdued. When he’d once more mentioned the idea of moving, she had made none of her usual protests. Knowing that he was going to be in Boston, he’d asked Helen to set up an appointment at the assisted-living home that Cott Jr. had recommended, and he and Charlotte were scheduled for a visit there that afternoon.

What good would it do now to share the news of Fanning’s downfall? It would only give her false hope. Even if the man were forced to sell, the house itself wasn’t going anywhere.

He took a bite of lobster, letting his lack of response to Holland speak for itself.

“Fanning’s not my concern,” he said eventually. “Perhaps we could proceed to business?”

“Of course.”

“Let me start by saying that if you or your board is under the impression that Union Atlantic is too big to fail, you’re mistaken. There’s no question here of a bailout. If you go under, the markets will take a substantial hit, but with enough liquidity in the system we can cut you loose. I hope you understand that.”

This, of course, was a bluff. Henry had already begun receiving calls from the Treasury Department. The secretary was confident, his deputies said in their transparent euphemism, that the Federal Reserve shared his concern about market stability. Translation: the White House is watching this one. The administration, while opposed under free market theory to the government rescue of a failing corporation, didn’t want to see Union Atlantic fall apart. There were perfectly prudential reasons for this, many of which Henry agreed with, but the chatter coming out of the executive branch at the moment suggested another concern: the argument for the invasion of Iraq was hitting its stride now, and an event of this size could change the domestic and congressional equation. They didn’t want distractions. That was the gist of it. By all means avoid the appearance of rewarding speculators — no moral hazard — but now’s not the time for stringency.

Would he feel the satisfaction of justice done if an operator like Holland were brought to heel? Of course. Who wouldn’t? But whatever spleen the liberals liked to vent on the captains of industry, there were certain hard facts that had little to do with individual actors. Five hundred points off the Dow was one thing. Disruption of the credit markets was another. Dry up the lending system and the losses would no longer redound to the investor class alone. The man working for the Texas theme-park company that had been bought out with leveraged debt it could no longer service would lose his paycheck soon enough. As a general matter, particularly in the mouths of politicians, Henry disliked the use of personal anecdotes to illustrate the workings of the economy. They were almost always a distortion, a falsely simple story of cause and effect. Truth lay in the aggregate numbers, not in the images of citizens the media alighted upon for a minute or two and then quickly left behind. Currency devaluations created more misery than any corporate criminal ever would. What the populist critics rarely bothered to countenance was the shape of things in the wake of real, systemic collapse. In Argentina, the middle class was picking through garbage dumps. The failure of Union Atlantic wouldn’t deliver the country there, but then again, these were uncertain times. And whose risk was that to take?

“I don’t think anyone’s talking about a bailout,” Holland said. “We’re talking about capital injections. I think you’d agree, the brand has value, not to mention assets. All we’re looking for is a way to reassure potential investors.”

“You’re talking to the Emirates?”

“Among others, yes. We’ve got some interest in Singapore as well. The issue is the timing. I’ve got seventy-two hours to make a margin call. That’s not very long to roll out a sales pitch. If Citi or Morgan or someone of that scale were to come on board, even in a symbolic way, it would make a big difference.”

Holland dipped his head to one side and gave a slight roll of the eyes, a gesture that combined genuflection with a modicum of fatalism. He was nothing if not a good actor. His fellow CEOs, who thrived on their relative appeal in the eyes of various corporate boards, were circling to watch the kill, despite what would be in the enlightened self-interest of their own companies — that is, to prevent a broader crisis. Meanwhile, the big foreign investors sensed opportunity but didn’t want to be taken for fools. What Holland needed was Henry’s back-channel cajoling and if not the Fed’s cash, at least its imprimatur on the deal to save the bank. The loan he wanted was one of gravitas and prestige.

“And what if we say no?” Henry said, setting his silverware down on his plate. “What if I get on the phone and instead of suggesting the ‘community’ rally around to protect one of its own, what if I tell them you’re an awfully bad bet and that in the end the market will do its job and decide what you’re really worth? And if that’s a dollar a share then so be it. What then?”

For the first time since they had sat down, Holland’s big politician’s guile fell away and he leveled at Henry a cold stare, his act of forthrightness and contrition gone.

Henry’s instinct had been right: Fanning was too close to this man for Holland not to have been involved. He had been Holland’s instrument.

“What then?” Holland echoed, in a slower, more deliberate voice. “Well, I guess I’d wonder if that was the outcome our government actually wanted.”

“Really? Are you suggesting the Fed lacks independence? Are you suggesting we take our marching orders from the political branches?”

Holland leaned back from the table. “Come off it, Henry. I’ve spoken to Senator Grassley’s people. I know what you’re hearing from Treasury. So what’s with the civics lesson?”

In his mouth, the phrase sounded almost dirty. Incredible, Henry thought. Here he was, Henry Graves, the gray pragmatist, accused of naïveté. It made him wonder. Could it be that despite all the legalized venality he’d witnessed over the years, despite even what he would have said of himself not ten minutes ago, that he actually was naïve? That some kernel of protest had survived in him? What would that even mean? That after forty years he should stand up and say to the system he’d spent his life protecting, I disagree? Stability doesn’t save anyone. Regulation is just a ruse to cover up organized theft and it convinces no one but the public. He didn’t believe this. And yet like some wide-eyed undergrad, like the philosophy major he’d once been, he felt an urge. A longing even. One he barely recognized.

A secretary appeared and handed Holland a note. He read it in a single glance and then crushed the paper in his fist.

“Make that forty-eight hours,” he said, shoving his plate aside. “Singapore wants its margin Thursday morning.”

Holland stood and signaled for the waiter to clear the table.

“Is that really what you want, Henry? You want to see us fail?”

IN THE CAR on the way out to Finden, Helen phoned to update Henry on the calls he’d missed during his meeting: two from the FDIC, an agency terrified of a bank the size of Union Atlantic winding up on its books; another from the Office of the Comptroller, whose examiners had been caught flat-footed; and two more from Treasury.

“And the chairman phoned,” Helen said. “He spoke to the chief of staff over at the White House about an hour ago.”

“I’m sure he did.”

“What am I supposed to tell him? That you’re unavailable? It’s rather implausible, under the circumstances.”

“Just buy me a few hours. I’ll be on a plane by four.”

He directed his driver through the center of Finden and out Winthrop Street to the house. As they came up the driveway he saw his sister wielding her clippers on a fallen branch of the old apple tree in the front yard. She didn’t notice the car at first and turned only when she heard his door closing. Fragments of leaves covered the front of her fleece sweater and some had caught in the strands of her hair.

“What on earth are you doing here?”

“I called you about it — our appointment. Over at Larch Brook. I told you I’d be coming.”

The dogs trotted over and sniffed at Henry’s waist.

“We had a tremendous rain last night,” she said. “This all came down in the wind. Sounded like a shotgun being fired. Woke me right up. You used to climb this tree, do you remember?”

“Charlotte. We’re supposed to be there in twenty minutes. Wouldn’t you like to change first?”

She set her clippers down. Crushed and rotting apples lay all about her on the grass.

“This was the tree you wanted to build your fort in, but Mommy thought it would be an eyesore. Which is why you built it down by the river. Did I tell you there were still planks of it left when they cut down the woods? The dogs and I went by it every morning.”

“No, you didn’t mention it,” he said. “We really should be going. I’ve got the car here waiting.”

“I have an idea. Why don’t we go for a walk? There’s something I want to show you.”

“We don’t have time.”

“It’ll only take a minute.”

Closing his eyes momentarily, he tried to marshal his patience. Every hour counted at this stage of the crisis. The markets were relentless, the system more fragile than most people imagined. Duty called now more than ever. But Charlotte … she had something to show him.

And so he followed her, around the far corner of the house, past the woodshed and into the garden. For years, she’d maintained the bushes and flower beds and small trees that their grandparents had planted. Recently, however, her attention had wandered. Thistle had taken root along the foot of the evergreen hedge and the beds were covered in ground ivy. A bench where his father used to sit and read the paper on August evenings rotted at the edge of the path down which they walked now toward the rear of the garden.

Henry wanted to be gone from here, once and for all. To be done, at long last, with the decay of this place. How Charlotte could stand living here all these years, he’d never understood.

When they reached the field at the back, Charlotte led him down the far side of the hedge, through the dead grass, and came to a stop in front of a skeletal bush six or seven feet high and quite wide, a collection of upright, arching branches, its leaves and flowers long since gone.

“What is it?”

“It’s a lilac,” she said. “The funny thing is, after all this time, I only discovered it a few years ago. It had been hiding here behind the hedge. It’s the same shape as the one we had at home in the yard. In the springtime, don’t you remember? You used to love to play inside it. To chase me. To listen to me sing.”

How insupportable, he thought, to remember in the way she did. The present didn’t stand a chance against such a perfectly recollected world.

Just then, to his shock, Charlotte stepped toward him and taking his face in her chapped hands touched her lips to his. Smiling, her watery gray eyes impossibly close, she said, “I’m not going to visit that place, Henry.”

He tried to speak but she put a finger to his lips. “Listen. My life here, it’s not your fault. And I want you to know, I don’t regret it. None of it. I want you to understand that. I know I haven’t made it easy on you. That I’ve been a burden at times. But I’m all right. And listen … Daddy, he would have been proud of you. Strange to say that after all this time, but it’s true. He would have been proud.”

“There’s no need to be maudlin,” he said, stilling a tremble in his throat.

“You sound like me … We’ve done all right, the two of us,” she said, squeezing his arm. “We have.”

His phone rang in his jacket pocket.

“It’s okay,” she said. “These people — they need you. Go ahead.”

“This is not the end of this. You can’t stay here.”

“I know,” she said, turning them back toward the garden. “I know.”

AT JUST AFTER six o’clock that evening, Henry stepped from his cab onto Liberty Street and passed through the black gates of the New York Fed. Upstairs, in a conference room, his team had assembled and were already well into discussions with the exchange authorities in Hong Kong and Osaka. On Henry’s instructions, the Bank of Japan and the Japanese Ministry of Finance had been notified of the likely sell-off of Atlantic Securities’ massive position in Nikkei futures. Meanwhile, the head of open-market operations in New York was reviewing plans for the coordinated provision of domestic and international liquidity in the event it was needed in the days ahead.

“You decided yet what you’re going to recommend?” Sid Brenner asked, as Henry took a seat at the back of the room and pulled out the notes he’d written on the flight into LaGuardia. At his imploring, the assistant U.S. attorney assigned to the case had seen to it that Fanning and McTeague had been taken into custody as quietly as possible, but news of the arrests had begun to get out, shortening his time for maneuver.

“Treasury’s views are clear,” Henry said. “They want Union Atlantic saved.”

“And you’re thinking otherwise?”

“They took the mandatory reserves of the third-largest institution in the country and essentially walked them into a casino.”

“You don’t have to convince me. You could lock these people in solitary and they’d find a way around the regs.”

“So what would letting them go look like?” Henry said.

“A bloodbath. They’ve got business in a hundred countries. Counterparties up and down the food chain. They’re ten percent of the municipal bond market. They’ve got more credit cards than Chase. And they’re overweighted in mortgage securities. They’re the definition of systemic risk. And we’re barely out of a recession. It’d be malpractice to let them fail. You know it as well as I do.”

“You’re usually the skeptic.”

“Just ’cause a body’s got lung cancer doesn’t mean you can take out the lungs.”

Henry called Helen and told her to contact the CEOs of the major commercial and investment banks and inform them that their presence would be required at a meeting in the boardroom the following morning.

The last time Henry had orchestrated a private-sector rescue was when Long-Term Capital Management, a Greenwich hedge fund, had blown up during the currency crisis in the late nineties. At the time, the chairman of the Fed had publicly distanced himself from Henry’s actions, suggesting the market ought to have been left to settle the matter.

Tonight, however, when Henry phoned down to Washington, he received no such objection. Before Henry even made the request, the chairman granted him the board’s authority to employ loan guarantees should they be needed to cement a deal.

“Everything I’m seeing suggests it’s isolated,” the chairman offered. “A rogue-trader situation. The worst I’ve seen, certainly. But it’s important to remember the specifics. There’ll be some posturing on the Hill. They’ll want to score points with the press, but it’ll die down, eventually. We just don’t want to give anyone too much of a platform on this.” He paused, wheezing slightly. “You think Holland knew?”

“Yes.”

“Well,” he said, passing over the answer, “you’ve got whatever backing you need.”

By the time Henry had finished his calls and spoken with his counterparts in London and Tokyo it was after midnight. Helen had reserved a room in case he didn’t want to make the trip to Rye and back and he decided to use it. He walked the short distance up lower Broadway to the Millenium Hotel through emptied streets, past the shuttered shoe stores and fast-food restaurants. The air was unusually muggy for October and full of dust kicked up by a wind off the Hudson. Plastic grocery bags and the pages of tabloids rolled along the sidewalk and into the intersection, where the cross draft lifted them into the air like tattered kites, yanked and spooled by invisible hands.

Realizing he had eaten no dinner, he ordered a sandwich from room service and ate it sitting at the desk that looked down over the pit where the twin towers had stood, the ramps and retaining walls and construction-company trailers floodlit the whole night through.

The last city of the Renaissance. That’s what Charlotte had called New York on the evening of September 11, when he’d phoned her from Basel to let her know that he was all right, that he was out of harm’s way. “Banking and art. They’ve been growing up together in cities for five hundred years. And they’re bombing the pair of them.”

He’d thought it generous, that she should link their worlds up like that, as if in peril, at least, they might stand side by side.

A few weeks ago, speaking to Helen about his sister, she’d suggested he consider bringing Charlotte to live with him in Rye. Rather than paying a facility, he could hire someone to help. It was the town they had grown up in together, after all. She would say no, he imagined, but still, he would offer. Tomorrow, after his meeting, he would call her and suggest it.

EARLY THE NEXT MORNING, he returned to the office. Despite the secretaries’ protests that their bosses’ jets couldn’t possibly take off on such short notice, by midmorning the heads of the nation’s eight largest banks had collected in the boardroom on the tenth floor of the Fed, just as Henry had requested. There he let them wait, these men who waited for nothing and for no one.

“They’re not a patient bunch,” Helen said, returning to Henry’s office from her walk down the hall to tell the captains of finance it would be a little while longer before the meeting began.

“Best to keep them nervous. Is Holland downstairs?”

She nodded.

“And our friend, is he here yet?”

“He’s right outside.”

“All right, then. Show him in.”

Henry stood to welcome his guest. Prince Abdul-Aziz Hafar wore a double-vented tweed jacket of a fine English cut, along with a dark-red silk tie and a red paisley pocket square, giving him the appearance of a dapper country gentleman, more likely in the market for a yearling than a bank. He greeted Henry with a handshake and a slight bow.

“You’ve timed your troubles well,” he said in his lilting British accent. “I’m here to see my son for his fall break. That’s what you call it, no?”

“Indeed,” Henry said, showing him to the couch.

“My cousin tells me Citibank’s the one to buy into, but then he would say that, given how much of the damn thing he already owns. We’re not as freewheeling as we used to be, you know. Now that we’ve set up our sovereign funds. We have all sorts of advisers. So I do hope you haven’t invited me to a charity event.”

“No,” Henry said. “I think you’ll find there are still things of value here.”

He had just handed the prince an outline of the arrangement he envisioned and that he would soon lay out for the men gathered at the far end of the hall, when he heard the phone ringing on Helen’s desk. A moment later, she knocked on the door.

All color had left her face. “You have to take this,” she said. “It’s about Charlotte.”

Chapter 18

You been misled, Wilkie’s stentorian voice proclaimed. You been had. You been took. And now you’re trapped. You’re double-trapped. You’re triple-trapped. And what are you gonna do? You gonna sit-in? You gonna picket? You gonna march on Washington? Or are you gonna stand up and make some justice happen?

Light from beneath the shade illuminated his dull black coat; it was morning and he was hungry.

For years, the two of them had slept in the living room. But no longer. They did as they pleased now, climbing on furniture, the bed even, waking her at all hours, there whenever she opened her eyes.

See it’s like when you go to the dentist and the man is going to take your tooth. You’re gonna fight him when he starts pullin’. So they squirt some stuff in your jaw called Novocain to make you think they’re not doing anything to you. So you sit there, and ’cause you got all that Novocain in your jaw you suffer peacefully. Blood running all down your jaw and you don’t know what’s happening. ’Cause someone has taught you to suffer peacefully, law-abidingly — their rules, their game — and you’re surprised they win every time? Is your mind that weak, that soft? What you need is a do-it-yourself philosophy, a do-it-right-now philosophy, an it’s-already-too-late philosophy.

He approached the bed and as he stretched his jaw open Charlotte could see down the minister’s pink gullet.

I’ve said it once and I’ll say it again: Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. Moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.

“Quiet,” she pled. “There’s no need to convince me.”

For days she’d meant to get to the store to buy herself and the dogs some food, but having no appetite herself she’d forgotten, there being no room left in her mind anymore, it seemed, for anything but her single purpose.

Stepping out of bed, she crossed the room, the dogs following her to the closet. A dress didn’t seem appropriate for this day. Something more practical was in order. She chose a pair of gardening corduroys and a pullover she’d patched at the elbows.

Sam started in where he’d left off the night before, shaking his head with that self-satisfied disappointment of his. I see that the devils are swarming about you this morning, like the Frogs of Egypt, here in the most retired of your chambers. And yet, like the sinner you are, you welcome them.

Slave owner! Wilkie shouted. White devil! Get your filthy paws off the woman’s conscience. She’s seeing at last that it’s time for action. Time to swing up on some justice.

The Blood of the Soul of this poor Negro here lies upon you, Sam said, not deigning to speak directly to his dark companion, and the guilt of his Barbarous Impieties, and superstitions, and his neglect of God, if you are willing to have nothing done toward the salvation of his soul. Despite what you think, to convert one Soul unto God is more than to pour out Ten Thousand Talents into the Baskets of the Poor.

You listen to me, you cracker spook, Wilkie said, I’m not going to be taken in by your love-thy-servant nonsense. If a man speaks the language of brute force, you can’t come to him with peace. Why good night, he’ll break you in two, as he has been doing all along. You have to learn how to speak his language and then he’ll get the point. Then there’ll be some dialogue. There’ll be some communication. There’ll be some understanding.

Oh, who can tell, Sam called out, his indignation rising, but that this Poor Creature may belong to the Election of God! Who can tell, but that God may have sent this Poor Creature into your hands, Charlotte, that so One of the Elect may by your means be Called and by your Instruction be made Wise unto Salvation! The Blackest Instances of Blindness and Baseness are admirable Candidates of Eternal Blessedness. Though it be caviled, by some, that it is questionable Whether the Negroes have Rational Souls, or no, let that Brutish insinuation be never Whispered any more. They are men not beasts. Withhold knowledge of the Almighty from them and they will be destroyed.

At her heels they raged, traipsing after her down the hallway, down the back stairs, and into the kitchen, to the window above the sink full now of dishes.

Over the grass a morning mist hung. Its tendrils stretched under the maples and down the hill. Ten minutes or more she stood there waiting, until at last she saw Fanning come out of his front door, dressed not in a suit today, as he usually was, but in jeans and a sweatshirt. She watched with relief as he got in his car and drove up to the road. She was not, after all, in the business of killing.

Yesterday, after saying her goodbyes to Henry, she had seen in her mind’s eye the mansion burning, and felt, in anticipation, its heat on her skin, the heat she remembered from the bonfires they used to have in the back field when they came up for Thanksgiving and dragged the fallen branches out of the woods and burned all the raked leaves, only how much greater would the heat be when it was an entire house consumed, wood and nails and glass and a thousand substances besides? Again now, she saw the fire, and then the charred frame and then that, too, crumbling, and from the blackened earth saplings rising, drinking sun and rain, thickening in nature’s time to the testaments of endurance that trees became, shading again the river and the trout, the cardinals and the blue jays and the orange-winged butterflies flitting through a summer dusk, when she and Henry had played by the riverbank before being packed in the car and driven back to Rye, only years later to discover, at night in her dorm room, Milton’s pentameter describing what the two of them had lost:… whereat

In either hand the hastning Angel caught

Our lingering Parents, and to th’ Eastern Gate

Led them direct, and down the Cliff as fast

To the subjected Plaine; then disappeer’d.

She let the tap water run until it chilled the bones of her fingers and then she filled a glass for herself and the dogs’ bowls. They lapped them quickly dry and were back at her side in no time.

They say overcome your enemies with your capacity to love. What kind of an idea is that? Wilkie asked. He’s not going to be overcome by your love. I’ve never called on anybody to be violent without a cause.

There is a court somewhere kept, where your pride shall be judged, Sam warned. And it is not here in the False Church of this earth.

“I have not for one day believed in your God.”

No, sure. And so in Great Folly you shall one day wander down to the Congregation of the Dead.

She took a box of matches from the ledge of the stove and beneath the sink found a canvas bag.

Sam and Wilkie followed her into the breezeway.

To concentrate just once more, she thought. That’s all that it would take. And indeed, as she stepped down the ramp onto the floor of the barn, she began to feel as she’d imagined she would, reading those stories in the papers over the years of the environmentalists and the anti — free traders who broke the law in the name of some greater justice, the anticipation of the act clarifying experience, rescuing it from the prison of language, the inward purpose blessing the otherwise desultory with meaning. And yet, for that very reason, she’d always considered such extremism adolescent. Too simple. Willful in its ignorance of the world’s complexity. And so deadly earnest. And yet how judgmental she had been. What, after all, was wrong with earnestness? Weren’t Fanning and his kind earnest? Weren’t all the polluters earnest, the physical and the cultural? And did anyone ever impugn or mock them for it? No one ever thought to. Avarice was never shackled by a concern for authenticity. It didn’t care about image or interpretation.

The sit-down lawn mower, its paint cracked and axles rusting, stood where the family Jeep once had. Beyond it was the ladder to the loft, where the wooden tea crates full of Eric’s books were still stacked, having remained there ever since they’d followed Charlotte up from New York. She didn’t come in here much anymore, and for good reason.

Along with the cans of primer under the back shelf, she found tins of turpentine that she’d purchased a few years back, intending to call someone about doing the shutters and trim. She placed them in her bag with the matches.

My second wife, my dear friend Elizabeth, died of the measles on the afternoon of November 9, Sam started in again.

“For heaven’s sake, can’t you shut up!”

Ten days after giving me the twins, Eleazer and Martha. Oh, to part with so desirable, so agreeable a Companion, a Dove from such a Nest of young ones too! Oh! the sad Cup, which my Father appointed me! And when five days hence my maidservant succumbed, I tested the Lord’s patience by imagining the malignancy to have gone up over us. Then the twins died. The sixth and seventh of my children to be taken up by the Almighty. And when a week later Jerusha too fell sick I begg’d the Lord for the life of my dear pretty daughter. I begg’d that such a bitter Cup, as the Death of that lovely child, might pass from me. But she too went to our Savior. And I died in life unto this world as all sinners must preparing for the world to come, knowing the Lord is in thy Adversity! Fifteen children I fathered. Thirteen I buried. Such a record of woe as no man should have to bear, my cross but a dry sort of a tree. But never did I despair of the Lord’s infinite wisdom or cease in the business of Worship. And you stand here aggrieved by the bitter fruit of one sinful lust? One loss of a man not your husband?

“Damn you!” she shouted, pushing him aside with her knee.

Why it is useless for you to deny that it is in the shadow of his going that you have arrived here at this foolery, allowing your spirit to shape itself thus. What, after all, are your great Politics but a woe without end? What is your pessimistic liberal blather but the Bible’s own warning of the Apocalypse shorn of the just Consolation of Heaven? You have decried this world as any of the Lord’s preachers might, and lived as if in the End Times, yet every day you have succumbed to the pride of earthly wisdom, the pride of thinking of yourself as above the Savior’s flock. And in your condescension you violate your own philosophy of tolerance. Yes, yours is a metaphysical pride. The pride of human knowledge.

“Your children must have died of boredom,” she snapped, beginning to tremble.

How stupid to have no food in the house! Surely the weakness in her limbs came from hunger. Sam rubbed his wet nose at her waist, slobbering.

Among the rusting tools and old flowerpots she looked about for an implement in case she had to force a window. She found a trowel and added it to her supplies.

There are but a few sands left in the glass of your time.

Don’t listen to that old bigot, Wilkie said. Now’s your time to act.

Pushing the barn door open, she tried keeping the dogs blocked behind her, but they were too strong and they forced themselves by, running ahead down the driveway. The mist had cleared but overhead the sky was still a low ceiling of cloud, the nimbus of the sun visible only as a brightening patch of gray on the horizon.

Don’t go, he said.

Slowly, she turned, the membrane porous, time’s order shuffled.

Eric sat on the weathered oak bench by the ladder, leaning forward, his elbows resting on his knees, as young and beautiful as the night she’d met him.

Don’t go, he said. Stay here awhile.

“But if the man comes back … I’ll lose my nerve.”

You never did. You’ve always been beautiful to me, in that way. You never lost your conviction.

“I kept thinking of you.”

I know. I heard you. You were heard. And Nate, you were good to him. You have to remember: our love isn’t the only kind. You have loved, my darling. You have loved so much. I see it. I see it in you now. You’re beautiful.

“No,” she said. “Look at me. Look at what I’m about to do.”

But you won’t. I know you won’t. It’s okay. Close the door. Sam and Wilkie, you can let them go now. They’ll be all right.

“But there’s no one to feed them.”

Someone will feed them.

She feared he would disappear if she stepped closer. And so she remained still, blessed now, she understood. The dearest thread in that old fabric of being had loosened, letting him pass back through to her. And so at last she could tell someone, “It’s not the dogs’ fault — the things they shout. They’re in me, the ministers. The puritans and the slaves. God help me,” she said, tears leaking from her eyes. “I tried to love my country.”

As it should be loved.

“But weren’t we fools?”

Yes. Loving fools.

She wiped at her dripping eyes. And when she looked again he was gone.

She stood motionless, gazing at the bench, at its bleached wood, still as stone. A mute object. Eternal in the perfection of its indifference. For the first time that morning, she noticed the clouds of her breath visible in the bitter air.

Heading back up the ramp, she crossed the breezeway, and stepped back into the kitchen. The fridge door hung open, its shelves holding nothing but a jar of pickles and a few bottles of soda water. In the drawer, greens rotted in a plastic bag. A sack of sprouted potatoes lay on the floor between the fridge and the counter. The counter itself was barely visible beneath the clutter.

Proceeding into the living room, she wondered how it was that she had never seen the mess. How long had she been living in this ruin? When, precisely, had the storm struck?

She sat on the one cleared spot of her sofa. She could hear the dogs barking at the door, clawing at it, trying to get back in, to get at her once more. Even at this distance, their voices reached her. They were no longer distinct and yet louder than ever. A roar that nearly drowned out the litany in her head, the one she’d lived by and with, her litany: Henry II and Magna Carta and Gutenberg and Calvin and Milton and Kant and Paine and Jefferson and Jackson’s rabble and Corot and Lincoln and Zola and Dickens and Whitman and Bryan on his cross of gold and the patterned fabrics in the paintings of Matisse and Walker Evans and Copland and Baldwin and King in Memphis, the chorus exploding in her, the ideas all that were left, a pure narrative drive using up the last of her.

It had to stop, she thought, reaching into her canvas bag. She could make it stop. She could at last exercise her will over history’s reckless imagination of her.

The open-faced books on the coffee table soaked up the turpentine like arid soil.

She thought to close her eyes as she struck the match and dropped it, but then that wouldn’t be right. She would watch.

Chapter 19

The press conference announcing the discovery of trading fraud at Atlantic Securities was held at the U.S. attorney’s office in lower Manhattan one morning in late October 2002, shortly before the opening bell on Wall Street. Minutes later, Jeffrey Holland, solemn but confident, stood before another lectern at Union Atlantic headquarters in Boston to inform the public that the authorities would have the company’s complete cooperation in investigating the matter. Risk-management safeguards had clearly broken down and would be overhauled with the help of an independent advisory committee chaired by a former head of the SEC, whose recommendations would be followed to the letter. After consultation with the board, it had been decided that the role of chairman and chief executive officer should henceforth be separate. In the months ahead, Holland would step aside as CEO to focus on the larger, strategic issues facing Union Atlantic Group.

A consortium led by JPMorgan Chase and the sovereign wealth fund of Abu Dhabi had agreed to purchase a twenty-billion-dollar stake in the troubled bank to secure its capital base, while the Dutch bank ING would be acquiring the Atlantic Securities division for a nominal sum in return for assuming a portion of its debt.

In early trading, the stock plummeted thirty percent but it began to recover soon after the Federal Reserve Bank of New York issued a statement saying the plan had the Fed’s full backing and that it stood ready to provide liquidity as needed in the event of serious market disruptions. The Treasury Department followed with a statement of its own.

When asked to comment on the mismanagement and near collapse of one of the largest financial institutions in the nation, the White House press secretary disagreed with the characterization of “near collapse,” saying it appeared to be a case of a few bad apples. The president, he said, was glad to see that the private market was responding appropriately to maintain its own stability and had full confidence that the regulatory authorities would continue to monitor the situation.

Doug watched these announcements unfold on a television mounted behind the counter of the diner in Saugus, where he had come to purchase a new passport. In order to make bail, he’d been forced to surrender his at the arraignment, along with the title to his house. After the hearing, the government had made it clear that McTeague and Sabrina were already cooperating. Which meant all Doug’s efforts at concealment were now evidence against him. If he stuck around for the two or three years it would take them to prosecute the case, and by some miracle managed to drag Holland down with him, he might get eight to ten, depending on the judge’s mood. But he had no intention of going to prison. Not in the name of bureaucratic punctiliousness about where to draw the line between aggressive investing and fraud. If other fools wanted to take the fall for that nonsense then let them. Doug had violated the spirit of the law years ago, if that’s how you chose to understand it, by commencing mergers not yet permitted. But then the law had changed, the profits had rolled in, and Holland had become a business hero. And now Doug was expected to do time for a bad bet on the Nikkei? You’d need to be a true believer or have a wife and kids to put up with that.

Opposite him in the diner booth sat a friend of a friend of Vrieger’s whom he’d been put in touch with about getting new identity documents. The guy was in his mid-fifties, dressed in a khaki fisherman’s vest, bifocals dangling on a chain around his neck. After he’d finished his milk shake and scrambled eggs and nattered on about the Patriots for too long, he handed Doug a thick, white envelope. “I hope your memory’s good,” he said, signaling for the check. “If you can’t remember who you’re supposed to be, you’re finished.”

On his return to Finden that morning, as he made the turn onto Winthrop, Doug was passed by a column of fire trucks. As he crossed the river, he saw flames coursing from the downstairs windows of Charlotte’s house on the hill; they had caught on the overgrown bushes and on the dry shingle, setting the whole side of the house on fire. He pulled into his driveway and jogged up the slope, watching smoke billow from her front door. As the firemen unwound their hoses, a fuel tank or gas line exploded in the kitchen, sending a ball of orange flame shooting across the back entryway and into the barn. The panes of the upstairs windows began to pop. The fire was consuming the ancient wooden structure like kindling, the whole edifice starting to crackle and sag. By the time the water had been tapped from the hydrant it was too late to do much more than contain the blaze.

“Was she in there?” Doug asked the fire marshal, who stood beside one of the engines in full protective gear, issuing the occasional order from his walkie-talkie.

“Her dogs seem to think so,” he said, at which point Doug realized the sound he’d been hearing all along was their howling. “Curtis,” the marshal called to a police officer, “get those animals in a squad car, would you? They’re driving me crazy.”

“Do you know what caused it?”

The man shrugged. “These old places burn fast, but not this fast. My guess is we’ll find some kind of accelerant.”

Up on the road, traffic had clogged as passersby stopped to marvel at the sight.

“Did you know the woman?”

“Yeah,” Doug said. “A bit.”

“Anything unusual lately? Anything we should know about?”

Before Doug could answer, a voice from the dispatch squawked an indecipherable bit of news over the marshal’s radio and he moved off toward a group of firefighters standing closer to the blaze.

Doug remained there for some time, standing beside the truck, watching as the flames crested and then slowly diminished, the house turning to ash and scattering into the dry air.

This, then, was her moment. Less public than the monk immolating himself on the street in Saigon, but a protest nonetheless. He didn’t feel pity. His neighbor had never sought that. A lone soldier against an army. That’s how she’d described herself to him. And a professional one, it turned out, choosing a battleground grave over the dishonor of retreat.

He stayed until after most of the trucks had left, leaving behind them only a few charred posts and the crooked, blackened tower of the chimney.

OF ALL THE NEWS he watched in the weeks that followed, of UN weapons inspectors and the sniper menacing the suburbs of the capital and the rise in housing prices and criminals being released onto the streets of Baghdad, the story Doug couldn’t get out of his mind was the one about the pilotless drones flying over the Empty Quarter, a vast swath of western Yemen, off whose shores the Vincennes had once sailed. Intelligence services wanted to know if the operatives of various radical networks had secreted themselves among the nomadic tribes, who were the only people to traverse that portion of the Arabian desert. Cable news made only a few mentions of it but on the Web he found more and lying in bed or on the couch downstairs he watched over and over the various clips of aerial footage that people had posted.

In that nowhere place, so appealing in its way, mountains of sand razor-backed by the wind enclosed barren valley floors covered with hundreds of identical hillocks each swept to a point. Shots from higher elevations revealed a broader pattern: lunar white pockmarks spread over the flats between the sand ridges which stretched across the landscape like the wrinkled hide of some beast too large for the human eye to see, its skin slowly ulcerating in the sun.

Finally, the time for him to leave town arrived. The night before he left he took a drive, setting out along the golf course and then down a bit past the Hollands’ and beyond them the Gammonds’ old place, continuing on through the village past the green and the Congregational Church and the shops with their painted signs, turning at the intersection onto Elm and heading out to the state route.

There, uninterrupted woods ran either side of the highway for the first three or four miles until he reached the liquor store that still stood on the far side of the traffic light across from the muffler shop. It had begun to rain and the red of the traffic signal slid down his windshield in rivulets quickly cleared by the wipers, only to blur again as the signal turned green and he crossed the line back into Alden.

He glided through one light after the next, by the glowing signs for discount meals in the parking lots of the fast-food chains and passed the cinder-block furniture warehouses and the box-store plazas that they had knocked down the old malls to build, until eventually he reached Foley Avenue and turned off the strip. Half a mile down at the intersection with Main darkened storefronts stretched from one end of the block to the next: an insurance office, an empty showroom with a for rent sign in the door, a beauty salon whose faded posters advertised hair styles of the eighties. Across the street a convenience-store awning was illuminated by the bright yellow sign above the check-cashing office next door, its metal grate locked to the sidewalk.

Christmas decorations already littered the front yards of the ranch houses along Howard, the glowing Santas and plastic reindeer arranged like inflated toys on outsize playroom floors. As he reached Eames Street, the rain softened to a drizzle and then stopped. Up ahead he could see low traveling clouds, their yellow underbellies lit by the strip that lay just on the other side of the creek and the fences. Single-family homes petered out toward the end of the block where he noticed Phil’s Pizza had been replaced by a Brazilian restaurant still serving at this late hour.

The triple-deckers began on the other side of Miller, big clapboard rectangles with three front porches, stacked one atop the other, the angles on most of them no longer right, their posts sagging into the worn corners of the decking. Trash cans were lined up along the chain-link fences that fronted most lots beside the gated parking spaces. There were Christmas decorations here as well, string lights flashing slowly on and off in windows with the shades pulled and farther up Mrs. Cronin’s old wooden crèche, its figures two feet high and illuminated in front by a row of bulbs sheltered under a weathered strip of plywood.

He pulled to the curb and cut the engine. Up on the third floor of number 38 the lights in his mother’s apartment were still on. He pictured her as he had a thousand times: she would be into her second bottle by now, watching the evening dramas while whatever she’d managed to make herself for dinner lay half eaten on the table in front of her.

To climb those stairs, he thought. To take a seat in the chair opposite and let her pour him a drink.

She had done that sometimes the year before he left, because she’d wanted to keep him in the room with her, he being the only audience for her silence, the only person who might ask her to break it. Which he never had, having learned the power of reticence from her.

Whenever he’d been tempted over the years to get in touch with her he would recall what it felt like on those summer nights in the apartment when he’d sit shirtless across from her, his chest moist with sweat, able to clock almost exactly how long it would take before she would let slip some half-muttered remark about how fit he’d become, his baby fat all gone. Her son, the only romance she’d ever had, all grown up. And then he would remind himself that she had a phone if she wanted to call.

And yet here he was, drawn back by something, by the residue, perhaps, of all his dreams of her.

He drank a few of the beers he’d brought with him in the car, gazing into the street where he used to play hockey at dusk with his cousin Michael and the Fischer boys and Dave Cutty from up the road until his mother came out onto the front porch to call him inside.

THE DOOR TO the building had never been kept locked and wasn’t locked now. A new rug carpeted the stairs but the steps still creaked beneath his weight as he climbed them. On the third-floor landing, the same worn cable rug lay in front of his mother’s door, the same black umbrella stand there beside it.

He’d expected to have to wait a few minutes after knocking, his mother needing the time to rouse herself. But the door came open almost right away and he was confronted with a bearded man in his early sixties with a thatch of dark hair and a nose veined at the tip. He looked out at Doug through large, owl eyes that were clearly long since done being impressed. An ex-hippie, Doug thought, or an old biker.

“Is there some kind of problem?” the man asked, when Doug offered no greeting.

“It’s just someone I knew — she used to live here.”

“You talking about Cathy?”

“Catherine. Catherine Fanning.”

“Yeah. She lives here. What do you need with her?”

“I want to see her.”

“She’s out. You some kind of salesman? We’re not interested if you are.”

“No,” he said. “I’m her son.”

The man cocked his head back, eyeing Doug skeptically. “You don’t say? You’re with that bank, aren’t you? We saw something about that on the news.”

Doug nodded. Somewhat reluctantly, the man stepped aside to let him enter.

As if in a waking dream, Doug followed him down the hall, entering a living room he hardly recognized. The old corduroy couch and chair were gone, replaced by a dark-green upholstered living-room set and a glass-top coffee table. The carpeting had been torn up and the wood floors refinished. Walls whose paper had once been stained by the steam leaked from the heating pipes were now painted a clean off-white. There were no stacks of old newspapers. No piles of magazines. In fact, there was barely any clutter at all.

“You live here?”

“I do,” the man said, leaning against the kitchen doorjamb, his arms crossed over his chest. “I’ve lived here ten years.”

“Ten years?” But how could this be? Ten years?

“Where is she?” Doug asked.

“At a meeting,” the man said, the slight, righteous emphasis on the last word leaving little doubt as to the kind of gathering he meant. “You want coffee?”

“No.”

Turning to look behind him, Doug saw that the wall to his old bedroom had been torn out. A dining table now filled the space where his bed and bureau used to sit.

“She must be getting on better with the landlord than she used to,” he said. “He hated us.”

“She bought the place. Awhile back. Before I got here.”

Doug couldn’t help laughing. “Bought it? With what?”

“She keeps books for a construction firm. She’s done all right.”

“So what are you?” Doug said. “The dry-drunk freeloader?”

The visible portion of the man’s heavily bearded face squinched, as if he were swallowing something tart.

“I figured you were probably an asshole,” he said. “Personally, I don’t give a shit what kind of mess you’re in. But you should know something: your mother’s got fourteen years sober. She’s doing just fine. You coming here like this — that’s the kind of thing that can screw a person up. So if you’re here to cause some kind of trouble, you might want to think about leaving.”

He was about to make himself clear to the man, when he heard the front door open and then his mother’s footsteps coming down the hall. Standing where he was, all the way into the living room, she didn’t notice him at first. And so for just a few seconds he was able to watch her as she put down her suede handbag and removed her gloves, the indelible oval of her face aged and yet no different, a face too familiar to ever actually see anymore than you could see your own.

And then her eyes followed the man’s to Doug. She stood motionless.

“Douglas.”

“Hi there, Mom.”

“Cath—” the man began, but she interrupted him.

“It’s okay,” she said. “Why don’t you go out.”

“I can stay right—”

“It’s all right,” she said. “Go.”

He lifted his leather jacket off the back of one of the dining-room chairs and before disappearing up the hall, paused to place a hand on her shoulder, leaning in to kiss her above the ear.

After the sound of the door latch closing, his mother slowly unbuttoned her coat and turned to hang it on a mirrored rack that stood where Doug’s bedroom bookcase once had. She straightened the front of her blouse and tucked her hair behind her ears. At last, she looked straight at him. Under the blaze of her unvanquished eyes, he heard a ringing in his ears and felt his whole body go suddenly weightless, as if he’d lost sensation in everything but his head.

“You look well,” she said.

“So do you.”

“Will you sit down?”

“I’m okay,” he said.

How was it, he wanted to know, that after nearly twenty years she could seem younger than the day he left? Her black hair was silver and black now, the skin about her eyes had grown looser, the backs of her hands mottled. But to look into her face, to meet the green eyes that she had given him, sharper than he’d ever seen them, to see the color in her cheeks, was to witness an uncanny thing, as if in his absence she’d shed not gained the weight of time, a younger spirit living now in the older body.

“I should say … about Peter. He’s a good person. He’s been good to me.”

“Glad to hear it. Seems like you’ve done okay.”

“What I have,” she said, her voice careful and measured, “it’s enough.”

How often had he imagined her here, drunk and alone? How long had that vision turned at the back of his mind, a wheel never grasping the other gears, a ghost seeking its way back into the machine?

“I’ve been in Massachusetts awhile,” he said.

“I know.”

“This last year … this last year, I’ve been over in Finden.”

She nodded calmly, even gracefully, qualities he’d never even imagined in her before.

“Why don’t you come into the kitchen?”

He followed her there, keeping his distance, observing as if from afar her motions as she took a filter from the box and placed it in the top of the coffeemaker and poured the grounds into the holder. From the cabinet she took down a packet of cigarettes and offered him one. He declined and she lit hers with a match from the stove.

“I quit,” she said. “It’s just now and then …”

If only she had been here on her own. If only she had been on the old couch, by herself, he thought.

“I want you to know, the reason—”

“Don’t,” he said. “Don’t.”

She straightened, and then stubbed out into the sink the cigarette she’d just lit. One hand gripped the counter while the other floated up across her chest to grasp at her arm.

“I never wanted to trouble you. You going — I understood that. I wasn’t well.” She clutched her arm more tightly. “Won’t you at least sit down?” she said, pleading with him now.

He shook his head.

“Please.”

“I can’t stay.”

His brain had begun to numb, the light and sounds of the apartment hitting on a dullened surface.

Through the door to the other room he could see a sideboard standing where his desk had once been. A lace doily rested on its polished surface beneath a large bowl of fruit.

He had built the house in Finden for her. He saw this now. He had built it so that he could come here and rescue her. Drive her back across the town line, this time for good. What other purpose had the house ever really had? But the woman he’d come to save — she had left before he arrived. Replaced by someone different.

He watched her pour him a cup of coffee and edge it down the counter toward him, her shoulders slightly hunched, her breasts hanging a bit lower on her chest, her hips a bit wider than before, but the color in her face, the new life — it was unmistakable. She was happy.

“I came to say goodbye,” he said. “I never said goodbye before.”

“In the fridge … there’s meat loaf … I can make up a salad.”

“I have to go.”

“Or a pasta …” The tears leaked from the corners of her eyes as she spoke.

Doug walked from the kitchen into the hall, hearing her footsteps behind him.

I carried you, he wanted to say. Down this passageway, from our couch to your bed when you couldn’t walk, I carried you.

At the door, he felt her hand on his shoulder and he turned out from under it.

“Don’t,” he said.

“But where will you go?”

“It doesn’t matter.” In the doorway, he paused. “My place in Finden. It’s over by the golf course. A mansion along the river. You can’t miss it. You should go see it sometime.”

And with that he stepped back onto the landing and quickly descended the stairs.

Chapter 20

The bright fluorescence in the foyer of Emily’s dorm hit Nate like the glare of dawn and he squinted to avoid it. He heard Emily and her friends spill through the doors behind him, laughing. It was two in the morning and they’d been drinking since before dinner, roving through parties on campus and off.

“You can’t sleep there,” someone shouted, calling Nate off the bench where he’d taken a seat. He rose, trailing behind the others. Emily was toward the front of the group whispering something to her friend Alex. He was a slender boy, a bit shorter than Nate, his hair slicked up in the front with gel. Though he wore vintage T-shirts and hipster jeans and had that well-groomed dishevelment about him that suggested a perfect nonchalance, he’d seemed anxious to Nate ever since they’d met a few months ago, when Nate had come for his first visit, sometime before Christmas. Anxious in a way Nate recognized. Emily’s other friends had welcomed Nate as a part-time member of the scene, but Alex had mostly avoided talking to him.

Now he knew why. This evening Emily had told him that Alex had asked her what Nate’s status was — gay or straight, available or taken. “You’re fair game,” she’d said as they left the dining hall. “You might as well live here.”

Her dorm room was a social hub of sorts from where her hall mates came and went with their laptops and iPods and the occasional textbook or novel, which they would glance at between the trading of notes and music and IMing with friends across campus, attending to assignments in the down moments between jokes and gossip. They were like a troupe of nervous dancers working earnestly on their poses, shifting quickly from one to the next, until the weekend came, when they’d drink enough to undo all that practice.

On the third floor, people started splitting up, heading back to their rooms, someone calling out a reminder that they had to be up by eight to catch the chartered bus to New York for the protest. When Nate eventually pushed through the doors onto Emily’s hall, she had already slipped into her room.

“You coming with us tomorrow?” Alex asked. He was standing by his door, feeling in his pockets for his key.

“I guess so,” Nate said, his head moving gently forward and back in search of balance.

Less than forty-eight hours ago, he had been sitting in the back pew of Finden Congregational at Charlotte Graves’s belated memorial, listening to one of her colleagues, a former teacher of his, talk about how dedicated she had been to her students. And he’d listened to her former students as well, four or five of them, a woman who’d become a literature professor, a man who worked for the Geological Survey, people in their thirties and forties and fifties, all of whom spoke of how hard she’d been on them and how thankful they were for it. And when they were done, Charlotte’s brother had got up again and said how moved he was that the church was full and how Charlotte wouldn’t have believed it.

Ms. Graves would want him to go to the protest, he thought. The march to stop the war.

“Do you want a beer?” Alex asked.

“I should go to bed.”

“You’re welcome to come in if you want.”

Alex was trying to play it cool but the tightness in his voice gave him away.

Faggot, Nate thought, weakling. With a flick of his tongue he could murder some small piece of this boy. The little power gave him a sickening little thrill.

“So you’re inviting me in?” he asked, almost coyly, giving nothing away.

“Yeah. I am.”

The walls of his room were surprisingly bare. Just a few postcards tacked over the desk. Nate had expected art posters and political slogans but there was none of that. Books that didn’t fit on the overstuffed shelves stood in stacks along the floor and in piles by his computer. Above the bed was a small picture of Kafka.

Alex walked to the stereo and put on some Radiohead before getting them each a beer from the mini-fridge.

“Here,” he said, pulling out his desk chair. “Take this.” He sat opposite, on the edge of the twin bed. For a minute, the two of them sipped their last wasted drinks of the night, looking away at the walls and the floor and the bright vortex of the screen saver with its endlessly morphing patterns.

“I guess Emily probably told you that I asked about you. She’s not a big one for secrets.”

“That’s for sure.”

He wondered if he had appeared to Doug as Alex did to him now: bold and terrified at the same time.

“It’s okay,” Nate said. “It’s cool.”

“We don’t have to do anything if you don’t want to. I wasn’t angling for that. You just seem like a sweet guy. And I think you’re kind of cute, too.”

Nate examined the spines of the novels on the bookcase, amazed his legs were still capable of trembling after all he’d drunk.

“Thanks,” he said, taking another swig. Queer, he thought. Coward. Predator. Weakling. Monster. Only he couldn’t tell to whom the words were directed, Alex or himself. All he knew was that the derision moved in his blood like venom.

Just then he heard the music as if for the first time. As if his ears had been plugged and now the stoppers had come loose. The singer’s words were hard to make out beneath the wash of sound, but the plaintive tone was unmistakable, calling out through the dark orchestral swirl, the voice promising nothing but itself, no reassurance or escape, no comfort or caress, just testament to a longing that mere touch would never satisfy, the resonance of it reaching so much deeper into the past than touch ever could and so much farther into the future, calling the aching spirit from its hiding place, at least for a moment. And Nate saw then, in his mind’s eye, the form of his father’s corpse laid out on the floor in front of him, his garroted head resting to one side, his neck bruised from ear to ear, the poor, dear man. And lying there beside him, Ms. Graves, in her flannel skirt and cardigan, her gray hair brushed down over her ears and her eyes closed, the two of them hovering in the netherworld between the living and the forgotten dead.

“Can I ask you a question?”

“Sure,” Alex said.

“Is it okay if we kiss?”

Alex nodded, and Nate stood, stepping through the shadows at his feet to cross the space between them.

Chapter 21

At night, from his hotel balcony, Doug watched the Jaguars and Porsches cruise up and down Arabian Gulf Road blaring pop music as they glided by the armored cars that had appeared recently at intersections all over Kuwait City. According to the concierge, the American schools had announced an unscheduled six-week vacation and the ex-pats not here for the war were leaving with their children by the hundreds. But in the evenings along the promenade the Kuwaiti families still picnicked on the grass, enjoying the mild winter air and the views of the glittering towers up and down the waterfront, leaving their trash on the ground behind them for the municipal workers to collect — the Filipinos and Pakistanis, who came by in their minivans and green jumpsuits to spear the crumpled plastic bags and date wrappers and empty soda cans tipping and rolling in the breeze.

When he couldn’t sleep Doug walked the city, whose citizens seemed to stay up all night shopping in the twenty-four-hour supermarkets. There were American sailors about as well, up from the naval base for their sober nights out on the town. He did his best to avoid them, though he knew his chances of being detected here were small. He’d been careful, at first, sounding out other guests at the hotel about which contractors might be hiring, thinking he needed to avoid the firms working directly with the State Department. But soon he’d realized how far the demand for people outstripped the supply and just how many of the men here were themselves not so interested in anyone knowing much about their past. If you were an American and a firm wanted you, the background check was often skipped lest it prove inconvenient.

Passing through the streets of low-rise apartments he’d reach Al Taawun Street from where he could see over the resorts and the private compounds to the coast, the lights of skiffs and police boats mingling with the more distant signals of tankers headed south with their American escorts for the Strait of Hormuz.

In all his life he’d never had this much time on his hands; such idleness was a menace to him. In the hotel room, he felt caged but out walking there was nothing to do but think. Seeing the young sailors in their dress whites moving in packs along the sidewalks put him in mind of when he’d left for the navy and what he’d imagined lay ahead of him back then.

He’d ridden the commuter train into Boston with his suitcase and knapsack and crossing the dingy concourse of South Station boarded a Greyhound that had taken the better part of two days to carry him up to the Naval Station Great Lakes, there along the western shore of Lake Michigan.

Through the dead of night on that trip, as the other passengers dozed, Doug had put on his Walkman and watched the fencing alongside the highway tick by in the headlights, the flat expanses of Ohio and then Indiana stretching out in every direction, the farmland parceled into one forty-acre field after another, as dark and empty a landscape as his Eastern eyes had ever seen. With the signs for Gary and Chicago, lights appeared and soon the streets were bright with lamps above the barren parking lots and block-long warehouses. As the bus bounded over paved gorges of underpasses and empty surface roads, a panorama that made the Alden strip seem like little more than a candle’s light came into view: acre after acre of oil tanks and cylinders connected by masses of strut work and pipes running this way and that, white smoke jetting from valves up and down the tangle of steel, lit by thousands of naked yellow bulbs lining ladders and catwalks and above this vast tract of works, a giant orange flame billowing from the tip of a steel column like some temple fire undulating against the pale-yellow sky.

Before that trip, he’d never slept more than a single night away from home. He had signed up for the navy without ever having set foot on a boat. His first day out on a training vessel he kept thinking of the movie he’d seen on television as a kid about the sinking of the Bismarck and how when a ship was attacked and started taking on water, the sailors’ orders were to seal off the flooding compartments along with the men trapped inside them. When the whitecaps came up on the lake and the boat began rocking, he grew so nervous he thought he’d be sick. But then the boy next to him threw up. Doug watched with fascination the disdain in the eyes of the training officer as he handed the kid a brush and pail and told him to scrub. Gripping the rails, the others had looked on as their fellow recruit got down on his hands and knees, reaching for the streaks of his own vomit running over the deck.

He’d seen then that fear was a question of balance. As long as he saw more of it in the faces of those around him than he himself displayed — that is, as long as he had confidence — he would do more than survive. He would gain. Or so he’d imagined.

Kuwaiti civilians were no longer being allowed into the northern part of the country. Only the farmers and their foreign laborers were permitted to remain. The highway leading up to the border was said to be clogged with American convoys. It wouldn’t be long now, people agreed. During the day the government ran drills for possible Scud attacks and at the hotel restaurant in the evenings there were stories of UN staff departing and civilian contractors moving onto the American bases for protection.

Finally, Doug got the call from his new employer informing him of the date for his team’s departure. That night, he dreamt he was in the back row at St. Mary’s in Alden, listening to Father Griffin deliver his sermon, the congregation fixed in their seats and silent. All except his mother who sat in the front pew beside Nate. She leaned over to whisper words in the boy’s ear and Nate nodded in agreement. Then, as the sermon continued, the two of them stood and walked back down the aisle together passing Doug without so much as a glance. Right past him and out the doors of the church. Father Griffin kept speaking and the people kept listening and no one appeared to take any notice.

Walking through Dasman Square the next day, he thought he saw Nate among a group of sailors, and he followed them for a while, waiting for a chance to get ahead of them but when he did he saw that he’d been mistaken and that their faces were all as blank and remorseless as his own. Again in the evening, on one of the narrow streets by the vegetable market, he became convinced that a kid in jeans and a sweatshirt making his way through the crowd up ahead must be Nate. And yet for all his certainty, the person turned out to be a man in his late twenties, Scandinavian or German, a reporter or photographer who when Doug grabbed him by the arm wheeled about looking wide-eyed with terror, as if he expected at that very moment to be stabbed.

On the appointed morning, he took a taxi to the port, where alongside the warehouse that the security firm had rented a few GIs stood leaning against their Humvee, chewing tobacco and eyeing their older civilian charges with a mixture of envy and contempt. Inside, the armored Suburbans were being loaded with food and equipment. The drive to the border would take about two hours, depending on the convoy traffic. Each of the eight men — four Americans, two Brits, a Chilean, and an Australian — signed their final waivers and were issued satellite phones.

Doug traveled in the lead car, which kept a hundred yards back from the Humvee that led them speeding up the six-lane highway. For miles they saw nothing but sand and limestone gravel and the occasional paved lot of rusting oil drums. As they reached the outskirts of Al Abdaly, rows of greenhouses came into view, hundreds of them shimmering in the sun, and beyond them fields full of oblong tanks, which the driver said were filled with tilapia, grown here by the thousands using the same groundwater that irrigated the strawberries under all that glass.

“Fish in the desert!” the guy beside Doug said. His name was Bill Gunther and he was from Tennessee. He had three kids in grade school and said he was being paid more than he’d imagined possible.

They arrived at the border truck stop and could see across the line into Iraq, past the unmanned checkpoint and the demilitarized zone, where a UN watchtower stood empty. It would be six or seven hours before they crossed, just after nightfall. They kept close to the vehicles, listening to the distant grind of earthmovers working up and down the line of control, flattening the dirt berm to make way for the first wave of the invading army.

At dusk, they began to hear jets streaking overhead. Moving off, away from the others, Doug wandered over the road and down a path that led past a diesel station to a shipping warehouse, its lot empty and its cargo doors shut.

Along this stretch the electric border fence still stood; behind it were coiled rows of concertina wire set in front of a wide, deep ditch in the sand. The empty highway beyond these defenses ran from here to Safwan: the highway of death, where the American planes had made of the retreating conscripts a smoldering graveyard back in ’91.

Soon, thankfully, the idleness and the thinking would end and the present would once more absorb all Doug’s attention. As the sounds of the impending blitz grew louder, the image of his young mother came to him once again, the person he remembered, the person he’d kept close, walking back down the aisle of the church with Nate. He could make no sense of it.

“You coming with us or what?” Gunther called out to him. He’d been sent by the team’s leader to find their stray member. “Looks like the show’s just about started.”

To the north, a massive cloud of dust hung suspended above the roar of the advancing troops, artillery rounds starting to flash within it like lightning revealing the shape of a distant thunderhead. Soon would come the earsplitting shout of bombs.

Checking the holster of his flak jacket, Doug fingered the metal of his gun.

Under the rules established by the firm, none of them knew the identity of their client. They had been told only that it was not a government but a private entity, one that was paying top dollar. There were documents and a computer in the offices of the oil depot at Umm Qasr and someone wanted them secured.