Adam Haslett - Union Atlantic

On the far side of the pool area a footbridge led over the sand and the shallow water to a jetty that formed the outer edge of the marina. He crossed it and walked alongside the yachts and cigarette boats attached to their moorings with chains that glittered dimly beneath the dock lights.

In the summers, he and Betsy had always gone up to Maine, to Port Clyde. A night in the mainland cottage, a day getting the boat out of storage, two weeks on the island. The same every year. Just as he rode the same train to work that his father had ridden. His father who’d worked for Roosevelt’s SEC, back in its early days, who had been a scourge to penny-stock fraudsters and pyramid schemers, arriving home each night with a briefcase full of pleadings and depositions, rarely back in time for dinner. He’d believed with fervor in the rules he’d enforced, in the idea of the government as the good leveler of the field. In 1944, he’d driven a Sherman tank through the streets of Paris to cheers. Back in the States, he’d spent his whole career going after securities fraud as if it were an insult to the country. How dare anyone think they were above the democratic rule of law that he had fought to defend. Fair procedure meant everything to him. He’d been delighted when Henry chose to go to law school, though he would never have argued for or against it. Of the Federal Reserve, however, he’d always been a bit suspicious, given how badly it had failed in the Depression. And then it wasn’t exactly democratic either, with men from the private sector controlling the regional banks, appointing officers like Henry. An essential public function — the conduct of all monetary policy — handled beyond the public eye, by unelected officials. Of that his father had been wary.

“You have to remember,” Henry could recall his mother saying, sipping her gin and tonic at the dinner table across from their father’s empty chair, “your father is a man of principle.”

Henry had followed his father’s lead in never interfering with his sister’s life, even after the disaster of her affair with Eric. The old man had always hewed to his line about being proud of his daughter’s independence. The principled position. But then he wasn’t around anymore.

Tires were lashed to the thick wooden posts at the end of the dock, where the dark water sloshed up against them. How was it that after all these decades his sister could still draw him back in? He’d thought once that having his own family would be a barrier of sorts, and for a while it had been, when his daughter, Linda, was a child. But it hadn’t lasted long. In her way, Betsy had always resented his sister, and he couldn’t entirely blame her. It wasn’t that they saw so much of her in any given year. It was something else. Something about the nature of her claim on Henry.

“Your marriage should be donated to the Smithsonian,” Charlotte had said to him once.

He should have been insulted, but he’d always enjoyed her wit.

As he turned back up the jetty toward his room, his cell phone began to vibrate.

WHATEVER SUSPICIONS he’d harbored about Taconic’s management were quickly confirmed by his conversation with Fred Premley. It turned out the bank had been hemorrhaging cash on the swap for nearly a month. Clearly news had leaked into the overnight market. Which meant the problem was already worse than its notional value. If he’d been doing his job, Premley would have approached Henry’s staff two weeks ago and borrowed from the Discount Window. But he was trying to attract a buyer for his company, so he’d avoided that public sign of distress. Instead, he’d just held on, hoping circumstance would save him. They had never met, but from the orotund tone of his voice, Henry could just picture the double chin. This was the kind of Business Roundtable chump who spent his lunchtime decrying government intrusion and now found himself on a cell phone in the middle of the night pleading with the government to save him. In the morning, there would be teams of examiners at the doors of his office, but right now they had to patch something together. After listening to his prevarications for a few minutes, Henry made it clear a specific request would be required.

“Well, then,” Premley said, “I guess I’m asking if the Discount Window would loan us the one seventy.”

Henry glanced at the fax Helen had sent through. Taconic had forty million in its reserve account.

“You might have got that, Mr. Premley, if you’d approached us in a timely fashion. But you’ve left it a bit late, wouldn’t you say?”

There was a pause on the line.

“You’ll get thirty,” Henry said, “and that’s generous.”

“You’re serious.”

He said nothing.

“What about the rest?” Premley asked.

Henry had reached the limit of his official, public authority. From here on, they entered the informal realm. “The rest will need to be restructured,” he said. “Tonight.”

“I don’t disagree, but my VP he tells me Union Atlantic’s been holding out for hours. They don’t want to refinance.”

“That’s hardly surprising under the circumstances.”

He let the silence that followed hang there on the line between them. He needed to soften Premley up with fear so that he would accept the harsh terms Union Atlantic would offer once Henry placed his call to Holland. He said nothing for another moment or two, time enough, he figured, for the man to begin wondering about his own liability once the shareholder litigation began.

“Tell Cannistro to set up the transfer for the thirty million and keep this line open, all right, Mr. Premley? We’ll see what we can do.”

Turning on the television back in his room Henry saw that Frankfurt and Paris were down in early-hours trading. He pressed the Mute button and closed his eyes for a minute. The back offices in London were starting their day now and would begin to notice that Union Atlantic’s payments were being held up. A call or two out to the trading desks where the young jocks sipped their coffee, stroking the fantasy of the one-day killing, and the lines would start to hum, bank stocks getting ready to head lower at the bell. He could see the sheen on the hard black plastic of the phones that would start to ring, the five-screen stations at Roth Brothers feeding Reuters and Bloomberg, the digital glide of ticker tape high along the wall, servers linked, nested, and cooled on the floor below, batching for export the first of the day’s reports to the redundant facilities in Norfolk or Hampshire, windowless steel barns surrounded by fence and barbed wire.

“Remarkable how total the distraction can become, no?” Charlotte had said a few months ago in one of their loopy conversations. “Just don’t forget yourself in the midst of it all.”

Lifting his eyelids, he gazed at the figures running along the bottom of the silent screen. On his BlackBerry, he found the number for Mark Darby, his counterpart at the Bank of England, and left him a voice mail telling him there had been a glitch, that Union Atlantic’s accounts would settle before the start of business in New York. Darby would get the word out and if all went well, in the next hour London might still open smoothly.

“Isn’t there some regulation against men our age being up at this hour?” Jeffrey Holland asked in that warm, charming voice of his, after Helen finally patched him through. He knew perfectly well that Henry had at least ten years on him, and thus, true to form, the question doubled as a compliment. Henry figured it was the poor compensation that had kept Holland out of politics.

“Not to my knowledge, but I’m sure Senator Grassley would introduce a bill if you put a word in his ear.”

Holland chuckled. He’d helped nix a reporting provision the Fed had wanted in the latest markup of the finance bill.