chapter 11
Later that same night, the head of data security called Doug to inform him that an e-mail had been sent to compliance referencing McTeague. Doug instructed him to erase it before it could be opened. He had just logged on to the bank's server to pull up Evelyn Jones's personnel file when his doorbell rang.
It would be Nate again. Over the last several weeks, he had become a regular visitor. The first time he'd appeared, at ten thirty sharp, standing on the front steps all doe-eyed and expectant, Doug had been watching a Red Sox game and he'd seen no harm in letting the kid sit on the couch beside him while he finished up his correspondence for the day. After that, Nate had turned up almost every night the Sox played, content to drink a beer and follow the score as Doug worked. When the game was over he would go on his way. Even if they didn't say much to each other - in fact, especially if they didn't say much - a few hours of having another person in the house felt all right. He wasn't the kind of company you had to entertain.
Then, a week ago, while Doug was napping through the seventh-inning stretch, Nate had reached his hand over and rested it on Doug's thigh.
A ballsy move for a kid that nervous, but then he'd had a few more beers than usual.
Years ago, down in sleeping quarters, sailors had now and then whispered come-ons or run a hand along Doug's arm as he lay in his bunk. He'd never taken up their offers. The idea of it had done nothing for him: two guys getting each other off.
But something in the tentativeness of Nate's gesture made him curious how it would play out and so he'd kept his eyes closed and let the kid's hand move up over him. The mechanics were awkward at first but having someone else jack him off for a change didn't feel half bad. Afterward, Nate had left soon enough, no reciprocation required. Which seemed reason enough to keep him around. That and his access to Charlotte Graves.
The bell rang again and Doug rose to answer it.
"You're here," Nate said.
"Yep," he replied, remaining in the doorway, letting the boy wonder if he'd be let in this evening. From that first day that he'd crept into the house, something in Nate's demeanor had goaded Doug on - his lack of defense, a vulnerability the shyest women lacked. It was a provocation of a sort, such weakness.
"Martinez is pitching," he said, hopefully. "Are you watching?"
"I'm busy," he said. "But go ahead. Turn it on, if you want."
He spent the next hour reading up on Evelyn Jones. Her performance reviews were stellar. If you believed her supervisor, she was the patron saint of settlements, but given that man's doddering liberalism Doug had no idea if he meant it or simply felt a historical obligation to praise his imagined inferiors. Doug trusted more the traders' comments, who to a man reported that she was cleaner and faster than most anyone else who had handled their work. Around midnight, he called Sabrina and told her to do a public records search. As the game was ending, he finally closed his laptop.
Nate was sitting cross-legged beside him, the sleeves of his oxford shirt rolled up past the elbows of his slender arms.
"You're not a baseball fan, are you?" Doug said.
"What do you mean?"
"Before you started coming over here, you didn't follow it."
"Sometimes I did."
"What is your deal, anyway? Don't you have somewhere to be? Out with your friends or something?"
Nate looked into the mouth of the bottle he'd been drinking from. "I like being here."
"Why?"
He shrugged. "I just do."
"Well, I got to get some sleep. Time for you to go."
"Would you mind ... I mean, it's okay if you would, but would you mind if maybe ... I stayed over?"
"Where? On the couch?"
"Okay," he said, his eyes brimming with fear and longing. "If that's what you want."
"Jesus. Come on, then," Doug said, leading him up the stairs to the bedroom.
What Nate wanted, and what Doug let him do once he had turned out the light, was to lay his head down on Doug's stomach and take his dick in his mouth. He had never really touched Nate before but he palmed the top of his head now, guiding his motion. It had been a long time since he'd been given a blow job and though the boy was no professional his eagerness helped.
Afterward, he couldn't sleep, not with Nate in the bed beside him. He tried for a while before fetching his computer from downstairs and starting in on more work. A box in the corner of his screen showed the Nikkei continuing to drop. Eventually, after nodding off for an hour or so, he got up and showered.
When he came back into the room to dress, Nate had woken and rolled over onto his back, his face blurry with sleep, his cheek marked by the creases of the pillowcase.
"What time is it?" he asked.
"Quarter to six. I'm going to work. You should get up."
He rubbed his eyes with his knuckles and sat upright in his frayed T-shirt and boxers, his fuzzy, unshaven jaw giving him even more of a grunge look than usual. He smelled of pot most nights and had that laconic, hangdog look that stoners wore.
"Don't you have school?"
"It's senior week," he said, yawning.
A lifetime of doing only girls and now Doug had got himself into this. A hand job or two was one thing - a convenience - but now the kid was blowing him. The way he looked at Doug in the closet mirror was almost worshipful, his need clinging in a way that a girl wanting Doug to call her never had. He felt implicated somehow, and it galled him.
"Do you mind if I ask you something?"
"What?" Doug said.
"Have you ever done this before?"
"Done what?"
"Been with a guy."
"I got an idea," Doug said, pulling a tie off the rack and quickly knotting it. "Let's skip the conversation part. Okay? Let's keep it simple."
___________
DOWNSTAIRS, he was about to open the front door when something caught his eye through the window.
"Unbelievable. Just look at that."
Charlotte Graves and her two hounds were standing beside the garage, the woman leaning down to gather twigs which she deposited in a plastic shopping bag dangling from her wrist, while the dogs sniffed impatiently at the grass. In the gray dawn, the three of them looked like figures in a dream, a nightmare in fact, as if the world had been emptied by plague, leaving only these ragged scavengers.
"Feel like saying hello to your tutor?"
"No. She's just walking them. She'll keep moving."
"You bet she will."
Doug crossed the circle of the driveway before she noticed his approach. Startled, she stood sharply upright, yanking the dogs to attention. The Doberman bared his teeth and snarled.
"What do you think you're doing here?"
"You're up earlier than usual," she said.
"You realize you're trespassing. Your property is a hundred yards that way," he said, pointing her back up the hill.
She grinned. "The interesting thing is, Mr. Fanning, not only am I not trespassing, but you are. It's a strange bit of law, but there it is - I didn't write it. You'll understand soon enough. Soon enough," she said.
"You're mad. You're totally mad."
"So I'm often told. These days, even my dogs might agree with you. But they're like you. They don't know who they are. Or rather, they're pretending to be people they aren't, which I suppose amounts to the same thing."
"Listen to me," he said, moving a step closer, causing the mastiff to start barking, saliva dripping from his black gums.
"Samuel! Quiet!" she scolded. Amazingly enough, the animal obeyed. "They're usually not so boisterous at this hour. That's why I walk them early: my mind's clearer than theirs." A light rain had slickened the grass and was slowly dampening Doug's jacket. "I can see things more lucidly at this time of day," she said. "For instance, why did you build this house? To support a belief about yourself, about the life you're living? To give that belief a concrete form in the hope the building would make it true? Isn't that the idea? And isn't it false? Wouldn't you say that honesty - not of the rule-following kind but of the clear-eyed-apprehension-of-the-world sort - wouldn't you say it requires us to give up those childish equivalencies: the doll for the person, the object for the dream? If a person couldn't do that, it might suggest a lack of inner resources, don't you suppose?"
"You have no idea who I am," he said. "You think I'm like every other person in this town living in a new house, but you're wrong. I have as little time for them as I do for you. And I'll tell you something for free - you're as obvious as they are. You just happened to get here first so you think that gives you some divine right to have it all to yourself."
As he spoke, the Doberman squatted and proceeded to dump a pile of steaming shit onto the lawn.
"Oh, I do apologize. Honestly. That's very rude of him. Bad, Wilkie! Never on the grass! I got him from the pound, you see, and he's never taken well to instruction. It's hopeless now, of course," she added. "You simply can't imagine."
"Listen," he said, telling himself to just let the dog shit go, just let it go, "this lawsuit of yours, you're going to lose, so why not do us both a favor and just drop it. I didn't come after you. But if you keep this up, I will."
Suddenly, both dogs lunged leftward, catching Charlotte off guard and forcing her into a run as they chased after a tabby cat Doug had never seen before. Their speed was too much for her and she stumbled at the edge of the driveway, her feet slipping on the wet grass, her hand and shoulder and then thigh coming down hard onto the pavement. Freed from her grasp, the dogs dashed forward, disappearing around the corner of the house.
"Great!" he shouted. "Another f*cking lawsuit!"
Miserably, he walked toward her prone figure, though by the time he reached her, she'd sat up and was brushing grass from the arm of her jacket. Rain ran off her forehead, down her nose, and into her eyes. She looked utterly lost at that moment, as helpless as a child. He was about to reach a hand down to help her up when he saw Nate jogging across the circle.
"Ms. Graves, are you okay? Are you all right?"
He knelt beside her and put his arm around her back.
"Who's that?"
"Can you move? Can you move your legs?"
She nodded and as Doug looked on, Nate dipped his shoulder under her arm, put a hand around her waist, and raised her off the wet ground.
"She needs a doctor. We have to call an ambulance."
"No, no," she said. "Don't be silly. I'm fine." She pushed the hair out of her eyes and straightened her skirt. "Those beasts will get no dinner."
"You need to be x-rayed."
"Heavens, no. Once you get into one of those hospitals you never get out." She looked shaken but appeared steady enough on her feet.
"So," Doug said, "just to be clear, you've been offered medical attention and you're declining it, correct?"
Nate glared at him but said nothing.
"All right, then. I guess Nate here will get you home." And with that he strode off, leaving the two of them huddled together in the early-morning drizzle.
AS SOON AS Doug entered Evelyn Jones's office an hour later, he realized he'd need a plan B. Whatever the origin of her immunity - intelligence, race, lesbianism perhaps, fact-based suspicion, some combination of these - his default MO would get him nowhere here. And yet she had to be won over. A bit of bad accounting was one thing. It could be papered over once he'd got an explanation from McTeague. But throwing the compliance department into investigative mode before he knew the facts - that wasn't an option.
"You mind if I close the door?" he asked.
"Be my guest."
Memos were tacked squarely to the bulletin board, binders arranged neatly beneath a row of five clocks, each labeled for the city whose time it kept. Along the front of her desk sat two small picture frames, their backings to Doug. Sabrina's sleuthing had turned up the fact that she'd been absent for her brother's funeral just a day or two ago.
"So," he said, leaning back in his chair, his eyes wandering the lunar white boards of the dropped ceiling. "It looks as if Jim Lowry is moving over to community relations. Which will leave his position vacant. Is that a job that interests you?"
He allowed the silence that followed to stretch on a few moments.
"Vice president. For operations? Are you serious?"
"Yeah. I've been in this office two minutes, and I can tell for a fact you'd be better at the job than he is. Besides, your evaluations have it written all over them. And I know from the look on your face you know that's true. Most of those a*sholes out there - they're cattle, pension seekers, cowards. Leadership, though. That's the question, right? The one the hiring committee would ponder judiciously before taking dead aim at mediocrity and finding the mark as sure as the men who hired them. Leadership. How f*cking debased that word has become, don't you think? Excuse my language. Seminars in swanky hotels where the lemmings take dictation from some retired guru hack. We pay for this shit too, we pay for them to fly off and learn the seven principles of how to manipulate your underlings and keep them cheerful as you do it. Millions a year."
Evelyn Jones neither nodded nor looked away, her attention even and unremitting.
"There's another thing we both know," he said. "You get a big promotion and people - not to your face, of course - say, That figures. Right? African American woman, big corporation, diversity initiative. They do the cultural math and that's what they think. Now, that would piss me off if I were you because you're good at your job. And frankly, while I know a lot of the staff around here think of me as the friendly type, when it comes to management, I don't give a shit who anyone is. I want the machine to work. Because the best parts of it, I built them. That's why I want you to have Lowry's job. And I'd make sure people understood that."
"We're being honest here, Mr. Fanning? Is that the idea?"
"Absolutely. But if you give me a second, I think I know what you're thinking: 'Last night I discover a gaping hole in one of Fanning's trader's scrub accounts and this morning he's in my office offering me a vice presidency. How easy does he think I am?' Am I in the ballpark?"
"Yes," she said, resting back in her chair. "You are."
"McTeague f*cked up. Thanks to you, I spent last night on the phone figuring out what happened. It was a favor for a client. I've spoken to him about it, and it'll be worked out. Now, just to be clear," he said, "do I want compliance getting their nose in this? No. Do I read employee e-mail, including yours? Obviously. If you don't already, you will once you move into operations. You'd be negligent not to."
"So you're asking me to keep quiet about a possible loss of three hundred million, not to mention a reporting violation?"
"You're not keeping quiet. I'm his supervisor and I've been notified. What I'm saying is this is how the chairman's office wants to handle the matter. It's how I want to handle the matter. But part of you is still thinking, 'He's only here because he's got a problem and there wouldn't be any of this talk about a vice presidency otherwise.' That's not wrong, of course. It's just not the whole picture. The situation brought you to my attention, that's true, but the fact is I think the bank would make more money if we promoted you. And that's what we're here for, right? You're not a romantic about that, I hope - our purpose?"
"I'm not an innocent," she said. "If that's what you mean."
Doug leaned far enough forward to get a sidelong glance at the framed photographs. In one, a vacation shot, Evelyn and two other women smiled for the camera at an outdoor table under a parasol, a beach in the background. The one beside it appeared to be a family portrait: an older black woman in a blue dress seated in the middle, a much younger Evelyn standing over one of her shoulders, a boy of about fifteen resting his hand on the other.
"Is this your family?"
Her gaze hardened.
"No disrespect, Mr. Fanning, but I'm getting the sense that you already know more about me than I'd care to tell."
The offer of promotion had begun as a piece of improvisational bullshit but he was beginning to think it might not be a bad idea.
"I only ask because while I never had a brother - "
"Don't go there," she said. "You don't want to go there."
"Why not? Because we don't know each other? I'm not offering sympathy, if that's what you think. I just know enough to know remorse can f*ck with your ambition. And you shouldn't let it."
"You're one hell of a condescending a*shole."
Doug smiled at the pureness of her hostility.
"When can you start?" he asked.
He thought she might leap up and swat him across the face but instead she simply shook her head in wonder.
BY THE TIME Doug headed out for his lunch meeting with Mikey, Sabrina still hadn't been able to track down McTeague.
"Call me as soon as you hear from him," he told her, on his way out of the office.
He walked quickly up toward the Common, where the benches were full of legislative staffers and store clerks, eating their bag lunches. The gold dome of the State House glittered in the midday sun. After Manila or Seoul or New York, Boston had always appeared quaint to Doug, an unlikely town for the business he and Holland had created. The spirit of their venture would have made more sense in boom-towns like Phoenix or Charlotte. But they had worked well with the material at hand, letting the historical distinction of the place act as a kind of ambient reassurance, a patina of solidity worth tens of millions in advertising.
In a booth at the back of the restaurant, he found Mikey muttering into the wire that dangled from his ear. He was jotting notes along the side of his Herald, the far page of which had come to rest on a half-eaten plate of manicotti from which it sponged the pasta's thin red juice.
"You're late and you look like hell," he said. "Have a seat." Pushing the wire aside, he said, "I got an investigator following this orthodontist out in Weston. Guy owes a boatload of child support. Turns out all his money's going for OxyContin. I got to say if you met the wife you'd understand the painkillers. She's quite a human being. Third husband, fourth investigator. I'm just waiting for my guy to tell me he got the pictures of him coming out of the pharmacy."
He didn't have time for this, Doug thought, checking his Black-Berry only to find the Nikkei was down another hundred points.
All day from his office window he could see into the neighboring tower, where workers clicked away at their screens, filling their filing cabinets with endless records of prices and depreciations and liabilities likely to pay, until they no longer noticed the bargain struck between meaningless days and whatever private comforts they'd found to convince themselves the meaninglessness was worth it. But it was different if those workers were your muscles and tendons and by your will you directed their exertion, regulating the blood of cash. Then you weren't an object of the machine. You were something different: an artist of the consequential world. A shaper of fact. Not the kind of author Sabrina wanted to be - some precious observer of effete emotion - but the master of conditions others merely suffered.
That's what he didn't like about McTeague's freelancing like this. Doug wasn't in control.
"So," Mikey said, "we got this hearing with Miss Graves on Monday. You'll be there, right?"
"What for?"
"To give the victim a face," he said, waving the waiter over. "We don't want her getting a sympathy vote. Old-lady-against-faceless-enemy kinda thing. Trust me, this is what you pay me for."
"You told me it was bullshit. Now you make it sound like a tobacco trial."
"You'll be in and out in half an hour."
"I caught her trespassing this morning. Should we mention that to the judge?"
"Let her tie her own noose."
Glancing over Mikey's shoulder, Doug saw a guy at a table by the window, early twenties, dressed in expensively faded jeans and a sweater pre-patched at the elbows. He was leafing through a magazine, the white wires of his earphones trailing down into his pocket, a laptop open beside him. He saw these people everywhere now, these aging children who had done nothing, borne no responsibility, who in their bootless, liberal refinement would judge him and all he'd done as the enemy of the good and the just, their high-minded opinions just decoration for a different pattern of consumption: the past marketed as the future to comfort the lost. And who financed it? Who loaned them the money for these lives they couldn't quite afford with their credit cards and their student loans? Who else but the banks? And what was he reading? GQ or Men's Health? Some article telling him how to shave his nuts or pluck his eyebrows or sculpt his tender gut? His hair was carefully unkempt, shiny with product, a deliberately stray curl hanging down over his forehead.
"Now what do you want to eat?" Mikey said. "Pasta? Chicken Parm? What's it gonna be."
Last night, Nate had turned over in his sleep and nuzzled up against Doug, his arm coming to rest across his chest. For what seemed the longest time, Doug had remained still under that warm weight, wanting to shrug it off but unable to.
"I got to go," he said, seeing McTeague's number appear on the screen of his phone.
"What kind of a lunch is this? You just got here."
"Call me later," he said, heading back onto the sidewalk.
"Where the hell have you been?"
"I'm on vacation," McTeague said. "Finally. 'Cause you know, the funny thing is, I never took any vacation, not since I got out here. And that's the company rule - you have to take your paid vacation. Good, simple tool for risk management - make sure people take their holidays."
"Well, your timing's pretty shitty. Where the f*ck are you?"
"Macao. You ever been? It's like the Chinese Vegas. Casinos everywhere. Kind of butt ugly during the day but they get the fountains lit up at night. Turn on the neon, and it ain't half bad. Some real old-time glitter. And the bird markets, you should see the bird markets. You pick one out and they'll kill it on the spot and fry that sucker up for you."
"You're drunk."
"Not really. I mean, sort of. Getting started, I guess. Or maybe I'm in the middle. They have great girls too. You should check it out when you visit. They'll suck your cock for hours, if you want. They're all saving up for college."
In the background, Doug heard the screeching cheers of some Asian game show.
"Well, I'm glad you're getting your rocks off. I spent this morning in Evelyn Jones's office trying to explain your accounting. Is one of your hedge-fund buddies out of pocket? In which case, why didn't you call?"
"Let me tell you, Doug. What you and me did in Osaka - that was great. That was classic. I mean, when you recognized that Japanese deputy dude - amazing. The mistress, she was kind of complicated actually. I don't know if I ever told you. I thought she had me figured, at first. But enough booze, it doesn't really matter what you think anymore, right? You just do what you do and it doesn't matter what you think about it. So in the end I didn't even have to ask her. I just mentioned the guy - this is after we'd started f*cking, she's getting another drink - and she unloads on him, goes on and on about what a creepy shit he is and then she tells me straight up. The whole story about what the government's gonna do. You ask me, she knew exactly what she was doing - f*cking him over. But what a tip? I mean Jesus. We were thirty-five percent of profits last quarter. How can you walk away from a tip that big, right?"
Doug slowed on the path back across the Common.
"What are you trying to say?"
"Listen, Doug. I swear to you. I haven't stolen a dime. If you hadn't respected me so much, taken me in like you did, maybe I would have, you know? But being in so close with you, a higher-up, taking me under your wing, giving me this stage to play on, 'Don't worry about the middlemen,' 'Call me direct.' That's what you always said."
"So what the f*ck's the problem?"
"Doug. There are no clients. I made them up. From the beginning. All that money you've been funneling to cover their positions - it's ours. And it's still in the market."
He came to a halt in the middle of the pavement, forcing the young couple headed toward him to part their hands as they passed.
"You're lying," he said.
"I was in the money. Every contract. Every position. And you wanted to pull it all back. But I kept remembering what you told me: keep your eye on the big picture, don't let fear stop you, the models aren't always right. It was there for the taking. And you always said the losers were the people afraid of the risk. I was in the money, Doug. It was all profit. I was getting ready to hand you a windfall bigger than you'd even imagined, wrapped up in a bow. But when the market turned I just froze. And I had to keep asking for all that cash. To post margin, to keep the positions open. And you ... you kept feeding it to me."
Doug tasted the remains of his breakfast at the back of his throat and then in his mouth and he leaned over to vomit on the grass. A shiny feathered rook looked on in perfect indifference. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.
"You're lying," he said. "Tell me you're lying."