John Gapper - A Fatal Debt

Henderson stood by a padded bench next to one of these walls of ashes. Opposite the stack was a glass wall that overlooked the lawn where Felix had just been buried. I could see the mourners still lingering by the graveside, but I knew we were invisible to them.

“Hello again, Dr. Cowper. Look at all these names.” Henderson was tracing a finger over the glass face to the cubicles that lined the stack. “Pui Wah Choi. An Ying Qu. Chinese mainland or Taiwan, I wonder? A fascinating place, Green-Wood. My wife insisted on us taking a trolley-bus tour once. All the mausoleums for the well-to-do of the nineteenth century. Now it’s the Chinese from Sunset Park in vases.”

“It’s very striking,” I said, unsure of where all this was leading.

“And now one Englishman, too. Although Felix had become an American citizen, I think.” He sat on the bench and crossed his legs. One of his pants legs rode up and I saw a long sock, the touch of a gentleman. “I wrote a testimonial letter for him a couple of years back, when the Rosenthal name helped. Homeland Security would probably deport you now.”

He lapsed into silence, seemingly in no hurry to get to the point. Something had gone out of him-the menacing authority I’d witnessed in Washington. He looked deflated and unhappy.

“It’s a tragedy,” I prompted.

“A terrible one. I always liked Felix. We were together in London, you know, a long while back. Why did he … do this?”

I looked at him, trying to discern if there was an accusation there, but the question seemed guileless.

“Perhaps he felt remorse for betraying Harry,” I said.

I didn’t say what I meant, but Henderson nodded as if there were no need for us to pretend with each other.

“He’d told you about that, did he? He must have been unhappy. I want you to believe one thing. Whatever was done …” He grimaced, as if the habit of deflecting responsibility had become so deeply ingrained in him that he had to force himself out of it. “Whatever I did, was meant for the best.”

Who gave you the right to choose Harry’s fate? I thought. It angered me, his halfhearted regret. He’d played with people, and he’d believed he was allowed to do it because his bank ruled Wall Street.

“You told me how great Rosenthal was-what a fine institution-but you didn’t save Seligman, you used it,” I said. “Greene’s dead and now Felix is, too. Harry could be in jail for the rest of his life. You can’t justify that.”

He frowned and the lines in his forehead were deep and heavy-it was an old man’s face. “Not with two deaths, no. I’ve talked to the president. I’ve told him it’s time for me to step down. I hope that’s enough for you.”

It was an appeal for clemency. He knew what Felix had disclosed, and he didn’t want me to publish it. I hadn’t decided what to do with the document that had been bequeathed to me, but I wasn’t willing to let him rest easy.

“Not really,” I said.

“You think about that. I have to go now,” he said, offering me his hand to shake. “Be well, Dr. Cowper.”

He went out of a far entrance toward Felix’s grave, and I retraced my steps along the path to the cemetery entrance, pausing at a stone cross in memory of a Scottish woman who’d died in the 1800s. As I crested the brow of the hill, I looked down to see Nora standing by her car with Harry. The prison officer had let him approach her, and he was leaning down to meet her lips briefly with his. Then he was led away and she stood alone for a few seconds, dabbing her eyes, before she climbed into her car and drove away.

As she did, I saw a driver open the door of a limousine parked near the arch for a woman to get out. She was in her fifties, tall and imposing, with a gaunt face and thin, upturned nose, and she was bearing a bouquet of purple and white flowers, arrayed in matching colored paper tied with twine. It looked like the kind of casually expensive arrangement you found in Manhattan. She’d timed her entrance so that the Shapiros were no longer around, and she walked up the path into the cemetery. After she’d passed me by, I turned to follow, for I’d recognized her. She was the woman in the Senate video who’d placed her hand on Anna’s arm.

We walked in lockstep, me twenty yards behind her, toward Felix’s grave. The path was hard underfoot, and I heard the scrunch of her heels striking the ground as she walked. The place was emptying and a group of workmen was getting ready to start an excavator and tip the earth back into Felix’s grave. It felt too exposed to follow her all the way there, so I sat on a bench nearby and watched from a distance. As she approached, she squatted briefly to examine the flowers by the grave and then put her own bouquet by the others. She straightened up again and I examined her face. It was blank and unmoving, as if it had been an act of duty or she were an envoy. Then she started the trek back along the path. I hid my face from her by looking at my phone as she passed, letting her walk out of sight.

I sat for a while to make sure that no one else was coming. The workmen were standing talking near the grave, a couple of them smoking. In the distance, I heard cars starting up and the buzz of electronic chatter-either the Secret Service readying to leave or the television crews spreading the news. Then I walked across the grass. My heart was thudding and my mouth was dry, although no one seemed to be watching. I reached the border to the grave, where the grass had been pounded by feet into mud, and bent to look at the flowers she’d left. There was a mauve envelope pinned to the bouquet, and I slipped the card from inside.

“To Felix,” it read. “In memory. Margaret Greene.”

The temperature had risen in the previous few days, the heat of Washington moving north and bringing hints of a humid summer to come. The nights were warmer, and that evening I went to a window that led onto the fire escape that snaked down the side of my apartment building. Sitting on the sill, I thrust my legs over and rested them on the platform. I could hear sirens course through Union Square and the nighttime buzz of the city.

I had poured myself a glass of bourbon, and as I’d added ice, I’d thought of Felix on our last night. Faithful servants , had been his toast, but now I wondered if he’d been faithful to anyone at all. I’d trusted him, but so had everyone else: Harry, Nora, Henderson, the Greenes. Seeing Margaret Greene’s note had made me wonder if he’d told me the truth, even at the end. Felix had betrayed Harry because he’d believed in Henderson-or the bank he personified-but he’d tried to compensate. That’s what he’d told me.

They’d come to mark his passing. Margaret Greene had cared enough to be driven there and place her memento on his grave. Everyone was willing to forgive him, so why had he killed himself? His sin didn’t seem enough to warrant despair. The only absentee had been Anna. She’d left Nora to drive her car herself. On the subway ride back to Manhattan-Felix had thoughtfully chosen to get buried near the N line-I remembered the line in the psalm: “My soul fleeth unto the Lord before the morning watch.” That was the last sight I’d had of her, walking along the beach. Now I realized what she’d hidden from me.

I’d never bothered to find out about the Greenes before. All the stories I’d heard about them had made them seem impersonal, hostile forces rather than people. But I had rectified that when I’d returned home, reading the newspaper stories around the time of his death that I’d ignored before. Greene hadn’t been a nice man-almost no one I’d talked to had much good to say about him. He was single-handedly breaching the motto that you shouldn’t speak ill of the dead. But outside of Wall Street he’d been human. He’d married a woman and had a family. They had brought up children together.