John Gapper - A Fatal Debt

It had been Harry’s desk.

Underwood was standing on the rug, waiting for recognition of where we were to dawn on me. “What can you see from there?” he said.

I looked around me, casting my eyes across the empty office and then out of one window. “Rockefeller Center?”

He snorted. “Nothing. That’s what you can see. Fuck all.”

“What do you mean?”

“The guy was in his own world, cut off from what was happening, just his few cronies up here with him. The first thing Marcus did was to move down to the trading floor, get a proper grasp of what was going on.”

“Where you are now?”

“Someone’s got to keep the place going. Maybe I’ll keep the job-they’ll give it to me if they’ve got any sense. Marcus wanted to gut this whole floor, put some real revenue earners up here, but he hadn’t gotten around to it.”

I walked toward the window to look out at the view, a glittering panorama of the lower wedge of Manhattan. Underwood took my place behind the desk, pushing the chair back and planting his polished shoes on the surface. One of his heels grazed Nora’s photo, shifting it by an inch.

“So you’re saying he shouldn’t have agreed to the merger? He should have known there’d be problems?”

He shrugged. “Sure looks like it to me. Harry had got too grand. He thought he’d be able to lord it over Marcus. He was a fool-that guy knew more about making money than anyone I’d ever met. He was a great salesman, one of the best.”

“He wasn’t honest with Mr. Shapiro, though, was he? Didn’t tell him everything he should have.”

Underwood laughed out loud. “What should he have told him, Ben? This is Wall Street, for God’s sake. Harry wasn’t a widow or orphan. He was paid $45 million, he had a Gulfstream. There were bankers being paid millions of dollars to advise him. If you want me to feel sorry for him, you’re out of luck.”

“I suppose so,” I said doubtfully.

“Listen, what’s the biggest deal you’ve ever done? You’ve sold a house, haven’t you? So did you tell the buyers everything or did you cover up a few cracks? I bet you did. It’s their job to find them. That’s why they have an engineer.”

That wasn’t far from the truth, in fact. My mother’s house had some dampness, but we’d replastered it smoothly enough not to be obvious when we’d sold it after her death. That had allowed me to buy my apartment in New York.

“Caveat emptor,” I said.

“Right. Buyer beware. I was Marcus’s banker, and Harry got his own people to advise him, a woman he should have known wasn’t very good. She didn’t work hard enough or ask the right questions. That wasn’t our fault.”

I tried to look amused at his and Greene’s achievement in having deceived Harry and his female banker.

“Does she still work here?” I said.

He grinned. “No, she decided to leave, before we got rid of her. That was smart. She wouldn’t have lasted long.”

As he spoke, he reached into his pocket and pulled out his BlackBerry, the same one I’d seen him using on the Gulfstream.

“Okay, I’ll be there soon,” he said, and tucked it away again. “Well, Ben, I think that our excursion is over. I hope you learned something.”

I once witnessed an accident, a hit-and-run in which a car went through a red light and struck a woman before accelerating away. After she’d been taken away in an ambulance, the cops at the scene interviewed me and another passerby. The thing I remember best was that although we had no reason to lie and wanted to tell them exactly what had gone on, my version was completely at odds with his.

I told them the driver had ignored a red light. He said it was amber. The driver was a woman. No, it was a man. The cops who took it all down weren’t riled. They looked as if they expected a mixed-up version of the event. It was bad enough when we were doing the best we could to be honest. When people want to bend the truth, it’s a wonder anyone agrees on anything.

The scene that Anna had witnessed from the dune in East Hampton fit Underwood’s story. If Lauren had messed up the deal, had failed to realize that Grayridge was in much worse trouble than Greene admitted, that accounted for Harry’s distress.

Although Underwood was the type to lie for his own advantage, I didn’t see what his motive would be here. He hadn’t had to tell me about Lauren, and his contempt had looked genuine in the moment. He hadn’t even mentioned her name, just gloated about her in passing. If his rival had been male, I wouldn’t have known whom he’d meant. Yet one thing he’d said-she hadn’t worked hard enough and hadn’t noticed the flaw in Greene’s bank-made no sense to me. I didn’t think she’d told me the whole truth, but I believed she’d been honest about how she worked.

I’d seen the contempt in her face for Underwood and the men with whom she competed. Lauren had ascended Seligman on sheer merit-doing her job relentlessly, sweating the details, and leaving nothing to chance. I work harder, I hear more , she’d told me. I knew she’d have dug up every scrap of information before signing off on the deal. The woman who’d warned me not to ask difficult questions was not lazy, or vague, or willing to let things slide. If she hadn’t foretold the looming disaster, she’d had a reason.

After stashing my things in the locker at Riverhead, I was led inside without needing to have my hand stamped. This time, an officer guided me down a hallway into a wedge-shaped area lined with cubicle-like rooms just large enough for two people to sit. It was the place where lawyers came to meet prisoners, and they’d allowed me in as a psych. A guard sitting at a desk pointed me to a room with two chairs and a table squeezed inside. Once I’d waited a couple of minutes, I heard the guard greet someone and Harry came in, dressed in a dark green jumpsuit rather than the yellow for the visiting room. He stared at me as if I were a bug he’d tried to squash that was still buzzing around.

“You’re back,” he said.

“I am.”

I felt uneasy, although the officer sat just on the other side of the door. It looked as if he’d kept up his visits to the gym. His face was leaner and his arms were muscled under the short-sleeved jumpsuit. Wherever he ended up after this-a psychiatric hospital or a prison-he’d be able to take care of himself. After everything that I’d been through since I’d come to Riverhead the first time, it was disorienting to see him again. On my first visit, I’d gotten some inkling that something was wrong with his version of events, but I hadn’t known what it could be. Now I could feel myself getting close to the truth.

“What do you want?” he said disdainfully.

I’d come for a reason-to gain an introduction. I needed him to say something to me, but I couldn’t let him know what it was or why it mattered. The idea had come to me as I’d thought about what Lauren had told me. She’d told me I was in danger and that I should take care. It had struck me later that I wasn’t the only one at risk. The man in front of me had killed someone-he was dangerous. That had its uses, for it released me from some of the duties that constrained me. The only thing it required was to get him to lose his temper, which I didn’t think would be hard.

“Tell me why you killed Mr. Greene,” I said.

“I can’t remember what happened. I told you that.”

“I don’t think it had anything to do with the settlement or the plane. You were angry that Greene had deceived you before the merger. He’d hidden the truth about his bank. He’d made a fool of you.”

Harry didn’t move, but I felt something alter inside him, like the click of a thermostat just before the boiler fires up. There was a faint glow in his eyes now, the same ember I’d seen in the psych ER. I attempted to fan it into flames.