John Gapper - A Fatal Debt

He kept talking as the engines fired, but I was lost in the adrenaline rush of takeoff. Instead of the rumbling, straining effort to pick up speed of a passenger jet laden with fuel for an Atlantic crossing, we galloped along the tarmac so rapidly that my head was pushed into the rest. Then we were up and off. As we twisted over Canary Wharf, the city scrolled up the window, making me light-headed. We rose so fast, with a goldfish bowl view of sky and city, that my brain jammed with data.

The jet punched through clouds into clear light, our rate of climb hardly slackening. Across from me, Felix glanced at the Financial Times , looking bored, while the men to my rear resumed thumbing through their emails. We leveled out at forty-seven thousand feet in a layer of sky I’d first been introduced to on the flight over. It was a deep azure, and white tendrils spiraled lazily upward from the clouds below.

“Nice, isn’t it?” said Felix, glancing over.

“I could get used to it.”

The coffee had awakened me, and my sense of being safely coddled was fading, squeezed out by anxiety at the way I was being absorbed into the Shapiros’ world. By the time I’d worked out what Nora had meant by her offer, it had been too late. A car had been dispatched to take me to Teterboro Airport, just across the Hudson, for the flight to London. There had been no schedule to keep. The Gulfstream had soared into the night sky, bearing Michelle and me, as soon as I’d waltzed through security.

That night I’d slept on a bed made up by Michelle, without sound or motion to disturb me. The pilots guided the Gulfstream through the skies as she watched over me. I’d felt like a lotus-eater in a gilded world that I might not have the energy to leave. Even as I luxuriated, it troubled me. Psychiatric treatment has a frame. The patient must turn up on schedule and pay the check on time-he must make a commitment to his cure. We didn’t let the wealthy dictate their terms any more than the Medicare brigade, yet here was I, drifting away from the protocol with every step I took to help Harry.

“We’re above the turbulence here,” Felix said. “Concorde used to fly this high, but now it’s the guys with their own jets. Come on, I’ll introduce you.”

He led me three paces down the aisle to the bankers. The older, more talkative one was tall, and his swept-back blond hair was graying at the temples but luxuriant. His face was long and watchful, and he had chiseled features that should have been handsome but were slightly too perfect. Sitting by him was a man in his early thirties, wearing a suit, dark tie, and spectacles. He was viewing a spreadsheet on a laptop computer, and he nodded at me silently, in the manner of a junior partner.

“Ben, this is John Underwood,” Felix said, indicating the older man.

“Good to meet you, Ben,” Underwood said. “This is Peter Freeman, he’s on my team.” He gestured toward the younger man. “Felix, I thought we were going to Teterboro. What’s all this about Bangladesh?”

“Not Bangladesh. Bangor. Maine,” Felix said patiently. “We’re going through customs there to drop Ben on Long Island. It’s quicker. No one else around.”

It was the first I’d heard of Long Island-I’d assumed I would return to New York-and it added to my unease.

Underwood turned to me. “I didn’t catch your second name, Ben,” he said.

I hesitated. I didn’t want more people to know who I was or my connection to Harry. It was already too open a secret for my liking.

“Ben’s a friend,” interjected Felix. “Let’s grant him his privacy.”

“Ben the mystery man, then,” Underwood said, a glint in his eye.

“John’s a fig banker to the stars and confidant of our new chief executive,” added Felix, making both sound suspicious.

“Fig?” I asked.

“Financial Institutions Group,” said Felix. “A banker who advises other bankers. Go figure.” He shook his head. “So here we all are, a happy band of brothers. It sounded as if you were having some trouble there, John.”

“Unfortunately, yes. Deals that used to take weeks go on for months now. Nothing’s simple anymore.”

Freeman tapped a pile of documents. “I’ve found something on the recap,” he said to Underwood. “We might be able to shed the tax liability.”

“Two bankers devise a clever way to avoid tax,” Felix whispered to me. “What could go wrong? We should leave these wizards to it.”

After an hour, Michelle laid out some plates of meats and cheeses, and Felix sipped a glass of red wine as he read. I took a nap. Soon Maine’s greensward appeared below, with its ridged coastline and leopard-skin lakes, as if God had picked up Cornwall and splattered it on the other side of the Atlantic. The aircraft floated over a pine forest and a small town dotted with the blue circles of backyard pools before settling gently on a runway.

We had Bangor Airport to ourselves. Apart from a couple of USAF air tankers sitting by corrugated steel hangars, there were no other aircraft in view. We taxied across to the terminal and halted. Michelle opened the front door, and Felix carried on reading without acknowledging that we were no longer in the air. Then a van drove up and a chubby official with a buzz cut entered the cabin.

“Hello, Officer Jones,” Felix said, reading his badge. “What’s the weather doing today?”

“Going up to about seventy, I believe,” the man said, leafing through Felix’s passport. He pronounced “about” as “aboot,” and I figured we must be close to the Canadian border. Having glanced at our papers, he went to the back to give the bags a cursory glance.

“How are you enjoying the flight, Ben?” Underwood asked, approaching up the aisle and placing his arms on two seats to examine me better.

“I wish I had one of these myself.”

“Friends of mine do, but then they worry about the things sitting on the tarmac, costing them money. If it flies, floats, or fucks, rent it-that’s what I say.”

“Or just cadge a ride, eh, John?” said Felix. His BlackBerry rang. “I’m in Maine.… Yes, Maine. Checking out summer camps,” he said. My wife , he mouthed at me.

“You gentlemen have a good flight,” said Officer Jones, and he departed. I seemed to have passed through U.S. Customs and Border Protection while seated in a chair. Within a few minutes, we were aloft again and following the coast south.

“Felix, where are we going?” I said.

“Oh, didn’t I mention it? So sorry,” he said, turning his head to check what the others were doing. They were heads down in work again, and he spoke quietly. “Nora thought it would be best to take Harry back to East Hampton. I said I’d drop you there.”

“Okay,” I said, feeling control slipping from me but unable to stop it. Episcopal didn’t expect me back for a couple of days, so I was free to visit the Hamptons, but this was a further step into the unknown. I’d started by suspending my judgment to discharge Harry, and then I’d found myself on board his jet. Now I was being taken to him, when convention said we should meet at Episcopal.

“Is this really Mr. Shapiro’s jet?” I asked Felix.

“Not exactly. It belongs to the bank. We’ve got a few, although it’s awfully politically incorrect. But one of the Gulfstreams is the chief executive’s and Harry got to keep it for a year when he left. Smoothed the deal, you know. Mind you,” he said, nodding at the two bankers, “some people treat it as public transport.”

It was lunchtime as we headed over the ocean to Long Island, and there were few clouds. I saw the tip of the South Fork reaching into the Atlantic like a beckoning finger and the strip of sand lining the coast all the way to the Rockaways. An airstrip stood out below us, like an encircled gray “A” against the green.