Adam Haslett - Union Atlantic

He tried to speak but she put a finger to his lips. “Listen. My life here, it’s not your fault. And I want you to know, I don’t regret it. None of it. I want you to understand that. I know I haven’t made it easy on you. That I’ve been a burden at times. But I’m all right. And listen … Daddy, he would have been proud of you. Strange to say that after all this time, but it’s true. He would have been proud.”

“There’s no need to be maudlin,” he said, stilling a tremble in his throat.

“You sound like me … We’ve done all right, the two of us,” she said, squeezing his arm. “We have.”

His phone rang in his jacket pocket.

“It’s okay,” she said. “These people — they need you. Go ahead.”

“This is not the end of this. You can’t stay here.”

“I know,” she said, turning them back toward the garden. “I know.”

AT JUST AFTER six o’clock that evening, Henry stepped from his cab onto Liberty Street and passed through the black gates of the New York Fed. Upstairs, in a conference room, his team had assembled and were already well into discussions with the exchange authorities in Hong Kong and Osaka. On Henry’s instructions, the Bank of Japan and the Japanese Ministry of Finance had been notified of the likely sell-off of Atlantic Securities’ massive position in Nikkei futures. Meanwhile, the head of open-market operations in New York was reviewing plans for the coordinated provision of domestic and international liquidity in the event it was needed in the days ahead.

“You decided yet what you’re going to recommend?” Sid Brenner asked, as Henry took a seat at the back of the room and pulled out the notes he’d written on the flight into LaGuardia. At his imploring, the assistant U.S. attorney assigned to the case had seen to it that Fanning and McTeague had been taken into custody as quietly as possible, but news of the arrests had begun to get out, shortening his time for maneuver.

“Treasury’s views are clear,” Henry said. “They want Union Atlantic saved.”

“And you’re thinking otherwise?”

“They took the mandatory reserves of the third-largest institution in the country and essentially walked them into a casino.”

“You don’t have to convince me. You could lock these people in solitary and they’d find a way around the regs.”

“So what would letting them go look like?” Henry said.

“A bloodbath. They’ve got business in a hundred countries. Counterparties up and down the food chain. They’re ten percent of the municipal bond market. They’ve got more credit cards than Chase. And they’re overweighted in mortgage securities. They’re the definition of systemic risk. And we’re barely out of a recession. It’d be malpractice to let them fail. You know it as well as I do.”

“You’re usually the skeptic.”

“Just ’cause a body’s got lung cancer doesn’t mean you can take out the lungs.”

Henry called Helen and told her to contact the CEOs of the major commercial and investment banks and inform them that their presence would be required at a meeting in the boardroom the following morning.

The last time Henry had orchestrated a private-sector rescue was when Long-Term Capital Management, a Greenwich hedge fund, had blown up during the currency crisis in the late nineties. At the time, the chairman of the Fed had publicly distanced himself from Henry’s actions, suggesting the market ought to have been left to settle the matter.

Tonight, however, when Henry phoned down to Washington, he received no such objection. Before Henry even made the request, the chairman granted him the board’s authority to employ loan guarantees should they be needed to cement a deal.

“Everything I’m seeing suggests it’s isolated,” the chairman offered. “A rogue-trader situation. The worst I’ve seen, certainly. But it’s important to remember the specifics. There’ll be some posturing on the Hill. They’ll want to score points with the press, but it’ll die down, eventually. We just don’t want to give anyone too much of a platform on this.” He paused, wheezing slightly. “You think Holland knew?”

“Yes.”

“Well,” he said, passing over the answer, “you’ve got whatever backing you need.”

By the time Henry had finished his calls and spoken with his counterparts in London and Tokyo it was after midnight. Helen had reserved a room in case he didn’t want to make the trip to Rye and back and he decided to use it. He walked the short distance up lower Broadway to the Millenium Hotel through emptied streets, past the shuttered shoe stores and fast-food restaurants. The air was unusually muggy for October and full of dust kicked up by a wind off the Hudson. Plastic grocery bags and the pages of tabloids rolled along the sidewalk and into the intersection, where the cross draft lifted them into the air like tattered kites, yanked and spooled by invisible hands.

Realizing he had eaten no dinner, he ordered a sandwich from room service and ate it sitting at the desk that looked down over the pit where the twin towers had stood, the ramps and retaining walls and construction-company trailers floodlit the whole night through.

The last city of the Renaissance. That’s what Charlotte had called New York on the evening of September 11, when he’d phoned her from Basel to let her know that he was all right, that he was out of harm’s way. “Banking and art. They’ve been growing up together in cities for five hundred years. And they’re bombing the pair of them.”

He’d thought it generous, that she should link their worlds up like that, as if in peril, at least, they might stand side by side.

A few weeks ago, speaking to Helen about his sister, she’d suggested he consider bringing Charlotte to live with him in Rye. Rather than paying a facility, he could hire someone to help. It was the town they had grown up in together, after all. She would say no, he imagined, but still, he would offer. Tomorrow, after his meeting, he would call her and suggest it.

EARLY THE NEXT MORNING, he returned to the office. Despite the secretaries’ protests that their bosses’ jets couldn’t possibly take off on such short notice, by midmorning the heads of the nation’s eight largest banks had collected in the boardroom on the tenth floor of the Fed, just as Henry had requested. There he let them wait, these men who waited for nothing and for no one.

“They’re not a patient bunch,” Helen said, returning to Henry’s office from her walk down the hall to tell the captains of finance it would be a little while longer before the meeting began.

“Best to keep them nervous. Is Holland downstairs?”

She nodded.

“And our friend, is he here yet?”

“He’s right outside.”

“All right, then. Show him in.”

Henry stood to welcome his guest. Prince Abdul-Aziz Hafar wore a double-vented tweed jacket of a fine English cut, along with a dark-red silk tie and a red paisley pocket square, giving him the appearance of a dapper country gentleman, more likely in the market for a yearling than a bank. He greeted Henry with a handshake and a slight bow.

“You’ve timed your troubles well,” he said in his lilting British accent. “I’m here to see my son for his fall break. That’s what you call it, no?”

“Indeed,” Henry said, showing him to the couch.

“My cousin tells me Citibank’s the one to buy into, but then he would say that, given how much of the damn thing he already owns. We’re not as freewheeling as we used to be, you know. Now that we’ve set up our sovereign funds. We have all sorts of advisers. So I do hope you haven’t invited me to a charity event.”

“No,” Henry said. “I think you’ll find there are still things of value here.”