A Fatal Debt (7 page)

Sitting on the lawn, gazing out to sea, was Harry.

The girl walked toward a small sign by the side entrance that read
SERVICE
. I wasn’t sure whether it was a comment on our status or just the easiest way to go, but she led me into a light-filled, slate-surfaced kitchen with big stainless-steel appliances. She went over to a brushed-steel intercom on the wall and prodded a button.

“Nora, your guest is here,” she said, hardly louder than her normal speaking voice, and gestured to me to pass by her through another door.

On the far side was a large living room with two white sofas facing each other across a broad wool rug with a geometric pattern in gray and black. There was a low table on which sat an antique brass
sculpture of a hand grasping a ball. Above was a light housed in a globelike shade studded with colored tiles that looked like a piece of art. The room led out onto a veranda facing the lawn with a long wooden table, set with white napkins and glass candleholders like a ship’s lanterns. The whole thing was perfectly ordered and restful, an aesthetic intelligence behind it.

After I’d stood there by myself for a minute, Nora entered from the far side. She wore a pale linen shift with an embroidered front and linen pants, and she looked far more at ease than she’d been at the hospital. She walked across to me and, before I could shake hands with professional formality, kissed me on the cheek. It left a pleasant impression of soft skin and expensive scent.

“How is your father? I’ve been worried about him,” she said, gesturing to me to take a seat on one of the sofas. It seemed unlikely that she really had, since she’d never met him and she hardly knew me, yet she sounded genuine.

“He’s doing okay, thank you. I think he’ll recover all right if he follows his doctor’s advice.”

Nora smiled knowingly. “Getting middle-aged men to do what they’re told can be hard, can’t it?”

I found her hard to argue with, but I felt the need to restore some of my authority after the manner in which I’d been brought there. I tried to sound stern.

“It was kind of you to arrange the flight, but I’d expected to see Mr. Shapiro back in New York, as we’d agreed.”

Nora gave an embarrassed grimace. “I’m sorry. Harry wanted to come here to rest, and I didn’t want to agitate him. I hope you understand. Would you like to see him now?”

I walked through the living room to the conservatory and onto the lawn. It was a blissful sensation to step straight out of that ordered house into an infinity of nature and ocean, with the breeze blowing in my face. Harry had his back to me and was reading a book through half-moon glasses. As I reached him, he looked up and studied my face for a while. His own was tense but less agitated than before.

“Sit down,” he said.

There were chairs at the table, all of them soft and cushioned. I looked around for a solid seat—something suggesting formality—but there was none in sight, so I sank into one of them. I tried to compensate by perching forward on the edge with my hands clasped.

“Move around so I can see you,” Harry instructed.

I dragged my chair over to the spot he’d indicated and found myself squinting at him with the sun in my eyes. It was an old maneuver of his, I suspected. It irritated me, but it was at least encouraging that Harry was getting his game back.

“How have you been feeling, Mr. Shapiro?” I asked.

He had a cup of tea resting on the arm of his chair, and he pulled at the string of the bag a few times while he mulled the question. Then he laughed bitterly. “I’ve had better weeks. You try being locked up, having your razor taken away every morning, and someone shining a flashlight in your room during the night.”

“Patients often find the precautions difficult, but there are reasons for them.”

“Maybe for some people. Not for me.”

He did some more stage business with the tea bag and gazed away from me out to sea. He was talking faster than in hospital, which was a good sign—the psychomotor retardation was easing as his brain started to function better.

“How are you feeling?”

“I’ve slept some more.”

“You haven’t had any thoughts of death?”

He glanced at me with a creased brow, as if he couldn’t grasp what I was getting at. Then he frowned, gazing down at the lawn.

“I’m not going to kill myself.”

He hadn’t looked me in the eye, but it was at least a firm declaration of the kind he hadn’t given before. A good thing. Harry levered himself upright and looked across the lawn to where a row of flower beds lined the edge of the dune. “Let’s take a walk,” he said, striding to a break in the beds, through which lay a wooden platform.

Joining him, I saw that it marked the top of a stairway leading
down the dune onto a line of cracked, weathered planks. The planks formed a rolling path up and down the sand and sea grass until they ran out after thirty yards, leaving only a sandy path the rest of the way to the beach. It would have been a wonderful place for children playing hide-and-seek, an amorphous territory between habitation and nature. We walked down the steps in silence: it was so narrow that I had to follow behind him.

He had the beach to himself. In the distance, where the road off which Anna had turned to reach the house ended, a woman in a head scarf was throwing sticks for her dog. Apart from her there were only sand and waves, crashing on the beach and throwing up spray. The sand near the dune was fine and hard to walk across, but down by the ocean’s edge it formed a smooth, solid surface. When Harry reached that area, he started to walk westward.

“Tell me more about what happened,” I said as I followed him.

It was hard to keep up with his long strides, and his renewed sense of purpose reassured me. He remained silent for about three hundred yards and then grunted a couple of times as if preparing to say something. The disadvantage of walking by him was that I couldn’t see his face to observe his reactions, but it provided detachment, like an analyst’s couch. The silence extended as we walked, and then he halted, facing the sea, where tiny waves foamed into the sand.

“It could have been a great deal,” he said. “A great deal. It wasn’t a sure thing, they never are, but if the market hadn’t tanked, it would have worked out fine. There was no way I could have known. I couldn’t have known.”

He gazed at the horizon, and he seemed to be responding bitterly to the voices in his head. I had no idea what he was talking about. Then he bent down to pick up a shell and scraped sand off the underside with his thumb as he spoke.

“It was about a year ago, I guess. Things were going so well for Seligman, it was great. There were rumblings over subprime and some hedge funds had closed, but it felt like our time had come. We’d turned that little place into something. You know what I’d always
wanted it to become? I wanted us to be like Rosenthal. They were never going to let it happen. I know that now.”

Even I had heard of Rosenthal & Co.—everyone had. It was the one Wall Street bank that had escaped the housing crisis, had come through the crash without collapsing or even being bruised. Everyone seemed to admire it, or be jealous of it, or think it had some unfair advantage. I didn’t know the difference between one bank and another, but I could grasp what had driven Harry. There was an outfit like that in every field—the place for which everyone wants to work. Episcopal was the Rosenthal of New York medicine, or so we convinced ourselves and so the patients believed.

“I knew a guy who’d run private equity in Europe for Rosenthal. Marcus Greene,” Harry said. “Knows his stuff. Hard-assed on deals, would squeeze you for a dime, but I thought he was a good guy. Nora was friends with Margaret, his wife. We’d see them on weekends out here. They’ve got a place over in Sagaponack.

“Greene left Rosenthal in the mid-nineties and started his own firm. He called it Grayridge, after a hill in Georgia he knew as a child. So he says, anyway. Felix thinks Greene made it up. He’s never met anyone who’s heard of the place. It was good timing, when LBOs and hedge funds were getting big. A decade later, he was a billionaire. He had the Rolling Stones at his fiftieth birthday. It was fun,” he added wanly. “He calls me one day, supposedly to chat about CDS clearing or something. ‘You know, Harry,’ he says, ‘it’s time for us to talk. I think Seligman and Grayridge would make a great fit.’ I thought it was a terrific idea, it could put us up there with Rosenthal, so I said, ‘Sure, Marcus, we’ll take a look.’ I’d heard talk that things weren’t going well for him. They might be in trouble.”

“What did you find?”

“I’ll tell you what I thought I saw: a firm that had grown too rapidly and had a few problems, but nothing we couldn’t handle. We’d close down a couple of funds, inject maybe a billion in capital, and have a good business. Plus, we wouldn’t have to pay a premium, and there wouldn’t be any messing about with who was in charge. Marcus
would take the number two spot and we’d see how things went from there.”

“It didn’t work out?”

Harry sighed. We had reached a rivulet that ran down from a pond behind the dunes and couldn’t go farther. He scored a curve in the sand with the toe of one shoe, and the bottom of the tiny trench filled with water like the moat of a sand castle.

“We did the deal, but the market went bad and it turned out Grayridge had bonds on its books that Greene hadn’t told me about. Mortgage paper that everyone thought was safe. We held the triple-A, for fuck’s sake, stuff the ratings agencies loved. It all turned to junk and we lost billions. I felt like I was being dragged down, like I was drowning. You don’t know what it feels like to see everything you’ve built falling apart.”

He shuddered at the memory, and as I looked over at him, I understood for the first time what had brought him to Episcopal. Loss is hard on the psyche. We aren’t built to cope with it immediately: it takes a period of mourning. The worst thing is feeling trapped and helpless, unable to fight or flee. It made sense of everything—even Harry’s gun. Harry turned at the rivulet and started walking back. I followed, catching up after about ten yards.

“What did you do when you found out?”

“We had no choice. The share price had gone to shit and we were in trouble rolling over repo funding. Not just us—half the Street was in distress. I’ve never known anything like it. We ended up one weekend at the Fed begging them to help us out. They agreed to it, but Treasury demanded a sacrifice.”

He swept his right hand across his throat in a slitting gesture. As he did it, he closed his eyes and tightened his jaw, as if his hand were cutting his throat like a blade. He looked as if he were experiencing the agony of death.

“That’s when you lost your job?”

“I lost everything. They ruined me.”

“And all these losses. No one realized?” I said. I’d thought that
people who worked on Wall Street were smarter than that. It was the people like me who made stupid mistakes with money, not bankers.

“A couple of hedge funds made money out of it, and Rosenthal did fine, of course. Treasury made sure of that,” he said stonily.

I felt sorry for Harry at that moment, realizing what Felix meant by him having a heart. He radiated a baffled sense of loss, as if someone had stolen from him everything he’d had. He walked slowly up the path toward the steps without me. I stayed where I was to take in the view of the house, now arrayed on the dune above me. Nora was in the room where we’d talked earlier, reading a magazine on one of the sofas. Farther along, I saw a room with bookshelves lining one wall and a desk with a twin-screened computer. It had to be Harry’s study, where Nora had found him with the gun. By the time I got back up to the lawn, he was in his chair again, looking tired and downhearted.

I sat by him. “There are a lot of things I think it’s worth us talking about.”

“Analysis, you mean?” he said with an edge of contempt, either at me for being a psych or at himself for being vulnerable.

“I wouldn’t suggest therapy at this stage, more of a conversation, but a regular one, two or three times a week at first.”

“I guess that’s okay. I’ve got time. All I’ve got is time,” he said.

I walked back to the house. It was the third time I’d talked to him and the first time I’d felt better as a result. My discomfort about having discharged him from the hospital was easing, and I thought I was starting to gain some insight into his condition. There was even a prospect of getting Harry back to Episcopal and into treatment.
This could work out fine
, I thought.

I
found Nora in the kitchen talking to Anna, who was perched on a countertop in bare feet, crunching a green apple. “You two met before, didn’t you?” Nora said, and Anna nodded silently, her teeth embedded in the fruit.

“Anna kindly drove me here,” I said.

“I can take you back to the city, if you want,” Anna said, having finished her bite and lobbed the core into a trash bin. “I’m going to see a friend.”

“Are you sure, Anna?” Nora said. “It would be wonderful if you could. I know he wants to be back soon. You can take my car.” She stepped one pace to her right and draped an arm over Anna’s shoulders as if they were friends rather than employer and employee. “I can’t tell you how much I rely on her.”

Anna looked across the room at me with a cool, appraising stare that made me lower my eyes. The prospect of spending several hours in a car with her was unnerving, but she intrigued me more than I cared to show.

“I’ll wait for you outside,” she said, then slipped off the countertop and padded softly out of the room.

Nora waited until the door had closed behind her and then looked at me tensely. “How was he?” she said.

“Good, I think,” I said. “His mood seems to be improved and he’s agreed to see me on Monday. As long as he keeps taking his medication and comes to see me regularly, I think the prognosis is excellent.”

I hoped to reassure her after everything she’d suffered, but it was true. Harry didn’t seem to be chronically depressed, and there were already signs of life in him. With luck, he might be experiencing the only episode of his life, and the gamble I’d taken in discharging him would have paid off. He’d have to adjust to the loss of his job, but most people did that in time and the Shapiros weren’t exactly on the streets. Maybe I’d just launched a career as a therapist for Wall Street billionaires.