John Gapper - A Fatal Debt

“Why did you leave, then? You told me you were at Seligman when Harry came over from New York.”

“Not exactly. It was a mission Tom gave me. Rosenthal was a smaller place then, a partnership without a lot of capital. We’d got involved in Canary Wharf with Seligman and we were overextended. A lot had to be fixed. Then Harry came to town, swaggering about and making threats. Tom didn’t want him to blow it all up. They needed someone to watch him. Harry had taken a shine to me and he offered me a job. He adored the idea of stealing from Rosenthal.”

“You said you liked him,” I said.

“Rosenthal can be a cold place and Harry was warm. Tom laughed, thought it was a great idea. That’s the kind of thing that amuses him. Someone else thinking they’re getting a bargain when they’re doing what he wants. ‘Come back when we’re done,’ he said. I wish I had, but I never did. We fixed the deal. We even got a prize. I got Harry to go along with some things they needed and he never realized. His time in London worked out well and he got the top job with Seligman. I thought it was over, but Tom thought Harry owed them.”

“Even twenty years later?”

“They’re patient-they wait a long time to get a return. When Marcus got into trouble, Tom thought it was time for Harry to repay the debt. He called me, made it sound like it was my duty to help Marcus. Patriotic duty, duty to Rosenthal, I don’t think he sees a distinction. Harry was hot to trot, loved the idea. The only problem was Marcus’s balance sheet.”

“The Elements,” I said.

Felix’s eyes widened. He had been talking in a confessional, faraway tone, but as I spoke the words he became alert.

“Who told you about that? Lauren, I suppose.”

“Who?” I said as blankly as I could.

“Harry’s girlfriend,” he said reproachfully. “You know that, Ben. So did I.”

“How did you know?”

Felix rose a little unsteadily, picked up our glasses, and made his way back to the kitchen to refill them. I heard him twist off the cap of the whiskey bottle and the icemaker spit chips. Looking around the apartment with him gone, I saw a door leading to one of the bedrooms. It was ajar, and through the gap I saw a child’s bed with a line of stuffed animals on one pillow, blankly awaiting her return. She must have left without them, trusting she’d be back. He came back into the room, handed me my glass as he walked by, and sat down again.

“Harry told me one night when we’d had a few drinks,” he said. “We were in China to beg from a state-owned bank with a pile of money. We’d flown in on the Gulfstream and had dinner, just the two of us. We went to a bar that was full of Korean call girls and Russians in tracksuits, the usual Silk Road crap. We sat and drank moonshine. He was bursting with it. He had to tell someone. Next thing I knew, he’d put Lauren on the Grayridge deal. Love’s blind.”

“She wasn’t, though.”

“Nope. There were huge losses on the Elements already-running into the billions. Greene tried to hide it from Harry, but she spotted it. She’s a smart cookie, that woman. I couldn’t have figured it out, I’ll tell you.”

I’d known that Underwood’s story couldn’t be correct. Lauren wouldn’t have missed it. If she’d been Harry’s adviser, it would only have been a matter of time before she found the weakness at the heart of Greene’s bank.

“How would you hide billions of dollars? I don’t understand.”

“Beats me. I’m no rocket scientist. Anyway, Greene was on to her before she could tell Harry. They keep the documents for mergers on computers these days. There used to be a data room in the lawyers’ offices, but it’s all online now. The bankers on the buy side have a security key and they download what they want. Most of it’s deadly dull, but you’re supposed to look at everything just in case.

“Trouble is, it leaves a footprint. The sellers know what you’re interested in. Underwood knew Lauren was suspicious about the Elements from the amount of material she’d downloaded, and he told Greene. Greene came here one night. He said the merger was at risk and I had to fix Lauren somehow. He was sitting right where you are. ‘We’ve got to screw the bitch,’ he said. Charming man.”

“So you told him.”

It all made sense, suddenly-it reconciled the kind of person Lauren was with what she’d done. She hadn’t drifted off at the end of an affair or failed to notice what was wrong. She’d known everything, but Greene had blackmailed her.

Felix nodded, his head down. His face looked red and swollen, as if something were welling up inside. “Tom talked me into it. Marcus told Lauren he’d make the affair public if she didn’t keep quiet and leave. That’s what she did. She didn’t tell Harry about the Elements and he only found out after it was too late.”

I thought of Lauren telling me how her career would have been ruined if others knew of her relationship with Harry. Stupid , she’d called it, but the word hardly described the disaster it had caused. Then I remembered what Anna had witnessed-the two of them together in East Hampton, his head in her hands. Lauren must have just told Harry what Greene had done and why she’d abandoned him. It wasn’t hard to understand what happened next.

Of all the lies I’d heard, I found this one the most shocking. Felix was Harry’s friend, but he’d abandoned him. “Why did you do it, Felix?” I said.

“Because Tom was right,” he said slowly. “Harry thought he could match Rosenthal, but I didn’t believe him. He’d been fine for Seligman in the good times, but it wasn’t like that anymore. The markets were falling and I was frightened. I’d been there before. If Marcus was in charge of the place, Rosenthal would be behind him and Treasury, too. I had all my money tied up in the stock. I couldn’t afford to lose it.”

“You betrayed him for money?”

It was a harsh thing to say, tougher than I should have been, and I think about it still. I wish I could take those words back. My excuse is that I was angry, not only that he’d deceived me but that he’d broken Harry’s trust in a heartbeat, hardly thinking about it. I felt as if I’d struggled to keep other people’s secrets and had suffered for it, while he’d just looked after himself.

“Oh, Ben,” he said reproachfully, “what do you think we are, you and I? We’re helpers and servants. They say ‘whistle’ and we pucker up our lips and blow. Harry was in Tom’s way and I moved him for his own good. What would you expect me to do? I tried to make it up to Harry afterwards.”

“What did you do?”

Felix gazed into his whiskey, his eyes as cloudy as the spirits, and gulped it down. “That’s a story for another night,” he said.

“Take care of yourself, Felix,” I said, getting up.

“Too late for that.”

When I reached Riverside Drive, I walked toward the George Washington Bridge in the clear night. I’d traveled as far as I could and found out all I could about Greene’s death. For a long time, I’d kept some hope alive that it might save me, but I’d abandoned it now. Greene had deceived Harry and blackmailed Lauren, but he was in the ground and beyond justice. There was no evidence of Henderson doing wrong: in fact, there wasn’t evidence of anything unless Lauren and Harry talked. She’d gone out of her way to hide her actions, and he wouldn’t admit to murder.

It was time to find myself another job.

My first reaction when I heard Joe’s voice was relief. I thought he had abandoned me, but he didn’t sound annoyed. His voice was friendly, but low and sober, as if he didn’t want to startle me. It was two days after my encounter with Felix, and I’d thought a lot since then about how he’d betrayed Harry. I’d wanted to despise him, but the feeling hadn’t stuck-his excuse about us being servants rang uncomfortably true.