Текст книги "A Fatal Debt"

Автор книги: John Gapper

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Текущая страница: 14 (всего у книги 18 страниц)

Henderson hardly moved, and his expression was unchanged, but he coughed once and then deflected his face slightly to the left to address the man behind him. “Andrew, I think Dr. Cowper has some things to say in private. Would you mind?”

The man replaced the cap on his pen, folded his notebook, and left the room without a word. When he’d gone, Henderson smiled at me again, just as broadly but this time with the warmth turned down to a low simmer.

“Dr. Cowper, forgive me, but I’m going to ask a question. Why are you here?”

“I was curious.”

That answer seemed to amuse him, and the skin crinkled around his eyes. Then his face turned watchful again. “I’m told that you’re no longer Mr. Shapiro’s physician and your job at Episcopal is in doubt,” he said, tapping a finger on his chair.

“You’re right,” I said. I didn’t know how he knew, but I supposed he was in a position to find out, and there was no point in lying.

“So I surmise that you don’t feel you have a lot to lose. If you’ll forgive the description, you’re a loose cannon. Correct?”

I saw that beneath his veneer of calm, I had him worried. Maybe he believed I was losing control and was ready to denounce him.

“Perhaps,” I said, nodding.

“I’m going to indulge you for a few minutes, between the two of us, to satisfy your curiosity. You tell me why you think Marcus died.”

“I think that Grayridge was in trouble and Greene needed a white knight. Something was wrong with these mortgage bonds-the Elements. You were at Rosenthal and he trusted you. Maybe you told him to merge with Seligman to cripple a competitor. By the time Seligman got into trouble, you were here. You bailed out the bank and then you ensured that Greene took over.”

“And his death?”

“Mr. Shapiro found out what had happened, I don’t know how exactly. It made him so angry that he killed Greene. He couldn’t get to you.”

Henderson tapped his finger contemplatively as he thought it over and then smiled again. He didn’t seem particularly upset by me accusing him of conspiracy to defraud Seligman and the U.S. government.

“It’s a gripping theory. You think there was some kind of plot involving Rosenthal, do you? You’re not the only one. It’s a fine institution and it produces a great many people who go into public service. They sometimes face this kind of accusation, which is long on gossip and short on evidence. We are, sadly, used to it.”

As he spoke, his voice rose and there was a flash of passion in his eyes for the first time. He looked more upset by my doubting Rosenthal than by my accusation against him, as if the bank were like a country and came before self. We, he’d said.

“When the president appointed me,” he went on, “I shed all my ties to Rosenthal and sold my stock in the firm, which was not a good investment decision, let me assure you. There are many conflicts of interest on Wall Street, and if people don’t deal with them in the appropriate manner, they’re out of business. Mr. Greene and I once worked at the same firm. Is that all you’ve got?”

“I think it’s more than that.”

“Not from what you’ve said. You don’t have any evidence, merely the imaginings of a psychiatric patient. As I told the Senate, the board chose Marcus without consulting me. But you know what, Dr. Cowper? I’d have done exactly the same thing in their shoes. He was a great banker and a fine leader. Shapiro …”

He paused as if he had a lot of thoughts on the subject of Harry that he didn’t want to go into. There was a contemptuous glint in his eye, and he stood to end our meeting as he finished his sentence.

“Was never stable.”

It was the “never” that stayed with me. As the Acela looped northward to New York after I’d been shown off the premises by a still-silent Andrew, I sat by the window wondering what it had signified. The Maryland coast gave way to the boarded-up row houses of Baltimore and North Philadelphia while it rattled in my brain. Except for that word, I might have accepted defeat, but something bugged me about it. I was certain Henderson had ejected Harry and put Greene in the job, but he wouldn’t have done it just because Greene was an old colleague at Rosenthal. That would have been crude, and Henderson was subtle.

He’d known Harry for a long time, though. That was what his final words told me. There was history there-an echo of the past.

23

A quotation from John D. Rockefeller, inscribed on a long panel, greeted me as I walked into the New York Public Library’s business branch on Madison Avenue the following morning: Next to knowing all about your own business, the best thing to know is all about the other fellow’s business. That was what I’d come for. I’d thought of Harry talking about Greene that day on the beach, scraping sand from a seashell as he spoke. I knew a guy who’d run private equity in Europe for Rosenthal. Marcus Greene, he’d said.

I went downstairs to the electronic center and located a free terminal. The first place I looked was the Rosenthal amp; Co. site, looking back at its past annual reports for a biography of Henderson. There was his meteoric career at Rosenthal, joining the bank in New York in the 1970s, rising to run its fixed-income division and then becoming chief executive. Along the way, one foreign job: chairman of Rosenthal International, 1990 to 1994. Henderson had been Greene’s boss in London at the same time that Harry had been posted there by Seligman. The City of London’s a small place, I thought. Even more of a club than Wall Street. It looked as though they had all been there for the same purpose-to prove themselves overseas before returning to New York in glory.

I started reading old copies of Euromoneyfor anything that linked them further. It was like the Vanity Fairof the City of London, with admiring interviews with bankers in odd corners of financial markets, adorned with heroic photos. As I read about the 1990 property crash, some of the material became familiar. Euromoney’s idols had been the vulture funds that had picked through the wreckage of the banks’ lending mistakes. I’d been a teenager then, and the only crash I’d noticed was my parents’ divorce. But even I could observe, in the tale of burst bubbles and real estate blunders, that history had repeated itself.

I found two articles in which Greene was quoted-one a description of the Canary Wharf bankruptcy in which Rosenthal was involved along with almost every other bank I’d heard of. Later on, things got more cheerful, with talk of recovery and the writing back of Latin American debt. There was some excitement about the new credit derivatives market in London.

I soon got bored and flicked through photos of bankers dressed in black ties to receive prizes at risible award ceremonies-Bank of the Year, Asset-Backed Issue of the Year. I saw the younger Henderson, shaking a hand or standing in a group of bankers, wearing his smug smile, his hair a mottled gray. As I flicked through the pages, I came across a photo of another prize awarded to Rosenthal and Seligman jointly. On the left were Henderson and Greene and their people, and on the right was the Seligman crew, led by Harry. Harry looked like another man, not just in age but also in his beaming pleasure-you could tell that this silly award had meant a lot to him.

And nearby, Harry, by Henderson’s shoulder, dark-haired and youthful yet unmistakable, stood Felix.

Even now, as I look back at the mistakes I made-the way I had misunderstood Harry when he’d first come to the ER, the way I’d slipped easily into the world of wealth-the thing I’ll always regret is what I did next. Primum non nocere, we were taught in medical school: First, do no harm. Even in psychiatry, where nothing is so obviously mistaken as a surgeon cutting out the wrong body part or leaving a patient bleeding, some things are dangerous.

The worst is to push a patient past his limits, confront him with something so painful that he can’t cope. I don’t know if it made a difference-maybe the events were rolling inexorably toward their end. If it had all happened without me, though, I wouldn’t blame myself. I should examine my motives, but I’ve done it many times and I’ve come up short.

Every job has rules-barriers stopping abuse or even an appearance of it. They become wired into you, so you don’t have to think when you get close to the border. You hold back like a dog with an electric collar that gives it a shock if it passes across a buried wire. I’ve seen them standing there, barking wildly yet constrained from pursuit. I think of myself having crossed that border anyway, unable to hold back, only to find out what happens when you transgress. I’m more circumspect now-careful not to go past the line or even to approach it. I stay at a safe distance, warning those who pass me by but staying inside the wire. If we’d all stuck inside our limits, I’d still be a psych at Episcopal and Harry would still be a rich guy with his name on a plaque.

When I called, Felix picked up almost immediately, as if he’d expected it, and made no protest. If I’d thought more, I’d have realized that was a sign in itself. I told Felix about the people I’d met and what I’d discovered, and he listened silently.

“What are you doing later?” was all he asked.

Felix’s apartment was on Riverside Drive at the end of a street in the nineties that sloped down from West End Avenue. It ended on a quiet spot along the drive above the Hudson, illuminated when I arrived by a full moon. That moon picked out the buildings in New Jersey and a tanker riding low in the river, leaving a glittering wake. The night was quiet apart from the moan of cars and roar of trucks on the parkway. I gazed down at Riverside Park for a while, taking in the view and wondering if I should head back home. Having come so far, I was frightened by the prospect of at last finding out what had been hidden within Seligman-not just the financial deceptions, but also the broken relationships.

Then I saw Felix. He was standing a hundred yards away, his hands in the pockets. He hadn’t seen me and I walked toward him, waiting for him to look up, but I was within three yards before he showed any sign of noticing. At the last minute, he looked at me and nodded in acknowledgment.

“Shall we go inside?” he said quietly.

We walked across to his building, passing a Latino deliveryman wobbling the wrong way up the drive on a bicycle with no lights. It was the first time I’d known Felix to be quiet, and it felt alien, as if he’d had a stroke and lost the use of his larynx. He still hadn’t spoken by the time we got to his apartment, which was decorated in an ornate, gloomy way, with heavy curtains and furniture. He went into the kitchen and took a whiskey bottle from a cupboard.

“Single malt?” he said joylessly, as if it were medicine.

After he’d sloshed out two measures, he led me to his living room, where he lounged in an armchair with a knee across one of the arms. With his sweater riding up above his pants, he looked thinner than when I’d last seen him in my apartment. I wondered if he’d been eating properly or if drink had become his diet. I remember worrying briefly for him. I’d seen too many people dose their anxieties with drink, and it only made them worse. But I had always imagined Felix as so capable, so good at navigating a world of powerful people, that I wasn’t as concerned as I should have been. I didn’t think of him as in need of help: I’d relied upon him to help me. He raised his glass and the ice tinkled.

“Faithful servants,” he toasted.

“Your family’s away?”

“Yes, the wife decided to extend her stay there, put the kids in school for a while. It’s for the best, I’d say.”

He looked down at his glass, the rims of his eyes red, trying halfheartedly to make his life’s disintegration sound like a strategy.

“I saw a photo of you together in London-Harry, Marcus, Tom Henderson,” I said. “You worked at Rosenthal. You never told me that.”

“I didn’t realize you wanted my CV. Next time I’ll know.” He smiled flatly. “I guess Harry underestimated you. Unusual methods for a doctor, I’ve got to say.”

“What is it about Rosenthal, Felix? Why is everyone so obsessed with the place?” I said. “Henderson seems to love it.”

He smiled. “It’s hard to describe. So much of Wall Street is dog-eat-dog. We looked out for each other. If someone got in our way we were brutal, but there was camaraderie to it. We didn’t think we were the best. We knew it. Once you’ve been there you’re always part of it. I guess I’ve worked at Seligman twenty years now. If you cut me open, it would still say Rosenthal inside.”

“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.

24

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.

“Hey, Joe,” I said lightly. “I thought you’d fired me.”

“Hell, no. I’m still here. I just thought you’d want a lawyer who could do a better job for you, that’s all. I spoke to your father. He told me you guys had talked and I didn’t want to get in the way. Have you seen the news?”

“What news?” I said.

I think I knew immediately. I’d stepped irretrievably beyond the psych’s frame and I’d feared what could result, although I’d tried to block it out.

“Turn on the television. Try CNN.” His voice sounded strained and I hurried across the room to obey him.

It felt like being transported back to my gym that Sunday morning. There was no helicopter this time, but the anchors were babbling just as incoherently about a death, and the scene was similar as well-a street in a Long Island beach town where a reporter stood, her back to a cordon. There was a ticker at the bottom of the screen, this time with the headline SELIGMAN TRAGEDY. I sat down unthinkingly and found I was still holding the phone. My brain couldn’t make sense of it.

“What happened? What’s going on?”

“Have you heard of this guy? Felix Lustgarten,” he said, pronouncing the second half of the name with a soft t, like garden. “He worked with Shapiro, they say he was a friend. He just killed himself, walked into the sea off Southampton. They just fished him out. I got a call at dawn from Baer. He’s gone crazy.”

“Oh God,” I said weakly.

“Ben? … Are you there?”

I’d slumped forward with my head in one hand and the phone in my left, and I heard his voice only faintly. It felt as if someone had blown a dog whistle nearby, sending a high-pitched whine through my brain. I should have known it. I should have stopped him, I thought. He was close to suicide. Of course he was. I remembered how I’d walked out of his apartment in a fit of pique because of what he’d done, without stopping to help as my profession required. Why hadn’t I stayed to save him? He’d sat in front of me, drinking, confessing. How much louder could he have cried for help? Then I had another thought. Suicide? Last time, it was a murder. I went through this with Harry and he came back to life. I tried to believe that Felix would rise again, too.

“Ben!” It was the distant voice of Joe in the receiver, yelling so loudly that he finally broke through.

“I’m fine,” I said, struggling to pull myself around. “It’s a bit of a shock. I knew him. He was the one who came with me in the Gulfstream. I saw him a couple of days ago. He was a decent man.”

“Where did you see him?” Joe said, sounding tense. His estimation of me as a client had clearly tumbled farther, if that were possible.

“In his apartment on the Upper West Side. He asked me over for a drink.”

“Do you know why he did this? Did he tell you anything?”

As he asked the question, I saw from the corner of my eye the television screen turning another color, and I looked up to see them playing the tape of the hearing in Washington. Felix’s face had been circled in red to identify him as he sat behind Harry and Greene. That’s how he’ll be remembered, I thought-the man in the background. I recalled his defeated expression as he’d raised his glass to me. Faithful servants, he’d said.

I wondered if I should tell the truth, but I excused myself with the thought that it would defile Felix’s memory without doing me any good.

“Nothing important,” I lied. “He seemed okay.”

That might have been it but for Gabriel, who was waiting for me when I left my office for lunch three days later. He sat on the sofa by the elevators, under a notice board on which some guides to mood disorders were pinned. He drew my attention because he was lounging easily-not like an anxious patient or a parent who was waiting for a child in treatment-and because I vaguely recognized him. As I walked by, I saw him scan my badge and look at my face, appraising me with narrow eyes. Then he got to his feet.

“Dr. Cowper? My name is Gabriel Cardoso. We had a friend in common, I think. Felix Lustgarten.”

He spoke unhurriedly, in a rich voice with an accent I wasn’t sure about-it sounded Spanish. Gabriel, that’s it. I remembered him standing on the balcony of his TriBeCa apartment at his party on the night of Greene’s death. I’d been talking to Lucia before we’d left together, and she’d pointed him out. I recalled his air of detachment, as if he didn’t know most of the guests but enjoyed having them fill the place.

“I was saddened by his death,” he went on. “We were not close friends, I would say, but we were once colleagues. He was a man I liked.” He gave the impression that he didn’t say it lightly: he had standards.

“I’m sorry, too. I’d just gotten to know him. Shall we?”

I gestured at the sofa and took a seat-I didn’t know how long I would want to stay. Gabriel reached into a jacket pocket and pulled out an envelope with his name and, I assumed, address scrawled on the front. Inside were two sheets of paper, well thumbed, and a small metal block: a computer flash drive.

“I got this in the mail yesterday,” he said, frowning. “It’s a letter from Felix, and he’d enclosed this.” He held the drive between thumb and finger. “There are a bunch of documents on it. I looked at them last night and found them interesting. Disturbing, in fact. Felix asked me to show them to you. Just you, no one else.”

I looked at the drive, now nestling in Gabriel’s hand. Felix had given no indication of having this in mind, and I couldn’t understand why he had sent an emissary from beyond the grave.

“If he wanted me to see them, why did he send them to you?” I said.

“Ah, well … They require some explanation.”

It dawned on me then. When Felix had talked of Greene trying to hide the losses in the Elements, he’d said they were hard to grasp. He’d sent Gabriel to help me, I realized. I was touched by his posthumous gesture: he hadn’t just written me off after I’d walked out on him. Yet it worried me to be entrusted with this legacy.

“You’re a rocket scientist?” I said, remembering Felix’s words.

“I am indeed,” he said, beaming. “Do you have some time to talk? Maybe somewhere private. I will need a computer for this.”

I hesitated for a few seconds, but I didn’t really have a choice. I owed it to Felix in death, no matter what he’d done in life.

I could have wasted hours in Gabriel’s apartment just looking around. Maybe that’s how he spent his time, since he seemed to have plenty to spare. In the sunlight, with the view of Manhattan I’d seen from his balcony only at night, it was captivating. It was long and wide, with a dovetailing maze of rooms into which light spilled from high windows. A couple of rooms seemed devoted entirely to art, with blinds drawn to protect his collection of drawings. There was no sign that he shared it with anyone: it was just him in his monument to Wall Street wealth.

“You have an unusual name, Mr. Cardoso,” I said, making small talk as he slotted the flash drive into a computer in his study and tapped at the keyboard, manipulating a baffling array of numbers.

“It’s Portuguese,” he said, smiling. “I am originally from Brazil, you see. I came here to teach mathematics at NYU. Wall Street head-hunters kept calling me. Trading is all mathematics now, based on models. Traders don’t understand it properly, so they need people like me. Rocket scientists, like you said. Most traders don’t have a clue what they’re doing.”

He sounded pleasantly amused by the idea rather than outraged. I began to realize why he looked so bemused by his surroundings and his wealth. They had been handed to him through a twist of educational fate.

“You worked at Seligman?”

“Used to. I was pushed out last year by Marcus Greene, before Harry killed him.” He chuckled as if Harry had meted out retribution for him. “I wasn’t in Greene’s clique, eh? And I said some things he didn’t like, too loudly. But I was there long enough to be comfortable,” he said, waving to his apartment. “That’s how I know Felix, and Lauren Faulkner as well. Felix mentioned her, I think?”

I didn’t reply, but my silence didn’t seem to bother him because he kept talking as if he hadn’t noticed.

“You want to know how we became friends? I had a nice office off the floor at Seligman. Just a glass box, but I had a very comfortable chair in there, a leather armchair. You couldn’t see who was in it from outside, and Lauren would come by to take a nap. They work stupid hours, bankers. They don’t get enough sleep.”

“That’s funny,” I said. I tried to imagine the ever-alert Lauren curled up on Gabriel’s chair. It would have been a more relaxing time, I imagined, when she hadn’t been under such strain. It made her seem human-not the woman who’d threatened me.

“I remember us talking one evening, before the merger. She said she was looking at the Grayridge books. I told her to be very careful. Things were becoming difficult in the markets and I’d heard rumors. It was very complex stuff, you know. I offered to take a look with her, make sure it was all okay. I had the feeling something might not be right. A couple of days later, she was gone.”

“Didn’t you find that odd?”

“No one gets much warning on Wall Street, you know. They put a trash bag on your desk for your stuff and escort you from the building in case you steal something. It’s like you’ve been executed. The same thing happened to me. I didn’t know how bad things had been at Grayridge until I saw this.”

“These are the Elements?” I said, looking over his shoulder at the screen. I could see what Felix had meant: it was just a blur of numbers to me.

“This is Radon. Let me explain.”

Grayridge had sold the Elements through the Cayman Islands to investors trying to make money from the housing boom before it fell apart, Gabriel said. The mortgages had been bundled together and then divided into securities with differing amounts of risk in them. It wasn’t even that simple, because they were synthetic CDOs, built out of credit default swaps based on mortgages. They’d been a crazy mash-up of financial risk.