Graveland: A Novel (29 page)

The reason that Howley was now bringing the story to Blanford’s attention, however, was quite different. In the current climate, any hint of another such scandal could easily destroy a company like Eiben, and at the very least they’d be stung for a couple of billion in fines.

So what he wanted to do was scare the shit out of him.

Phase one.

And it worked.

As far as Blanford was concerned the whole thing had come out of the blue, leaving him not only scared but also confused and compliant, which was just what Howley wanted, because without having to offer an explanation, or mention Vaughan by name, he was then able to suggest that Blanford take a close look at any clinical trials Eiben might be conducting on new drugs for geriatrics.

And to get back to him on it ASAP
.

Simple as that.

Howley isn’t even sure where this might lead, but he feels he’s being proactive. He doesn’t want any surprises.

He doesn’t like surprises.

The Bloomberg guy leaves, and Howley calls Angela in. He has a few minutes before his next meeting, and he wants to see how far along she is with her list of office designers.

12

B
Y
T
UESDAY EVENING
F
RANK HAS SKIMMED THROUGH MOST OF THE BOOKS HE BOUGHT.
They’re lying on the bed or in small piles on the floor, probably about fifteen in all. He acquired them in three separate spurts of enthusiasm (or delusion?)—each trip out from the hotel to the Barnes & Noble on Fifth Avenue a desperate attempt to shore up his developing but still fragile understanding of the financial crisis, each new title he came across a hit from the crack pipe, an opening up of possibilities, a tingling promise of illumination. On his last trip out he also stopped off at a liquor store and got himself a bottle of Stoli.

Promises, promises.

The one book he keeps coming back to—although there’s no real prospect that he’ll get to grips with it right now, or possibly ever, because the damn thing is over eight hundred and fifty pages long—is Murray Rheingarten’s
The Dominion of Debt: Financial Disambiguation in an Age of Crisis
. Over and over he reads the blurb and the press reviews and the introduction and the chapter headings, he flicks through its capacious, deckled pages, its dense, labyrinthine prose, catching random names and phrases, picking up the sense each time, tantalizingly—like having a word on the tip of your tongue—that deep inside here somewhere, if only he could find and unravel it, is the key to the whole thing, the answer. He feels if he could only persevere, and concentrate, and
focus,
he could extract from these endless blocks of print an explanation of what happened to everyone that will explain what happened to Lizzie.

Some of the other books are easier, or seem so at first
—Wall Street Crash (And Burn)
,
Money Down
,
Goldman Sachs and the End of the World
—but with most of them it doesn’t take Frank long to see that they’re too specialized, too technical, too detailed in an area he doesn’t
quite
need to go to. These books vie with one another for the accolade “clearest account so far of the crisis,” but twenty pages into each one and you’re predictably neck-deep in jargon and graphs, in credit default swaps and bogus triple-A-rated securities.

What got him started on this was something Ellen Dorsey said the other night. They were standing outside that diner on Ninth Avenue, about to go their separate ways, when he remarked one more time that he just didn’t understand what Lizzie had been thinking.

“Maybe it wasn’t such a mystery,” Ellen said. “I mean, look at that list of demands they made. They were pissed off at the bankers and the money guys. Like a
lot
of people. And once you follow that stuff, or try to understand it, which Lizzie and the others had obviously been doing, it’s hard not to …
respond
. I guess it’s just a question of how you choose to do it.”

Walking back to the hotel, Frank turned this over in his mind. Is that really what Lizzie had been thinking? She was angry? She was
indignant
? It was hard for Frank to see his daughter in this way—as someone who was independent, informed, and politically aware. Possibly because of the divorce and the years of minimal contact, his image of her was stuck back in the early teen years.

She was his little girl.

Sweet, smart, spiky … vulnerable, but also belligerent—a dangerous combination, but what Frank had to face now was that these were characteristics Lizzie had obviously carried with her into adulthood, and that if he wanted to understand her, it would have to be on
her
terms.

The other thing he realized walking along Fifty-fourth Street was that he himself wasn’t really angry or indignant. This was probably because he knew next to nothing about the financial crisis. Sure, he’d read the papers and watched the news and shared a certain amount of received indignation, he’d rolled his eyes and passed remarks like everyone else, he’d been appalled at the numbers, he’d seen the ripple effect in the economy, he’d lost his motherfucking
job,
for Christ’s sake—but he hadn’t ever focused on what had actually been happening, he hadn’t tried to figure any of it out. When he was at Belmont, McCann he’d been too busy working, trying to hold on to his job, and after he got laid off he’d been too busy feeling sorry for himself and scrambling around to find a new source of income. In other words, like a lot of people, he’d been too inward-looking and self-absorbed to pay attention.

So when he got near the hotel he went into what was now his local Duane Reade and bought a few magazines, business titles—
Forbes
,
Fast Company
,
Bloomberg Businessweek
,
The Economist
—with the vague intention of boning up on the crisis. But it didn’t take him long—back in his hotel room, flicking through these glossy, ad-heavy mags—to understand that there was a closed lingo here, that a lot was taken for granted, and that he’d have to dig a little deeper. His laptop was in the apartment in Mahopac. There were one or two Internet cafés near the hotel, but they seemed really busy and touristy, and he couldn’t see himself sitting in one of those for too long—or in the business center here in the hotel lobby. What he did was go out and head for the Barnes & Noble on Fifth Avenue, where he stood for a while in front of what turned out to be a dedicated section, a display actually called “Understanding the Crisis.”

The weightiest and most hyped book here seemed to be
The Dominion of Debt,
so he picked that one up first, along with
Money Down
and a copy of Galbraith’s
The Great Crash, 1929
. Back in his room, he started reading, but was soon switching from one book to another, growing ever more impatient, constantly suspecting that he was reading the wrong one, that the books he’d
bought
were the wrong ones, that all the learning and illumination were happening somewhere else.

The next morning he went back to the Barnes & Noble, to the now altar-like “Understanding the Crisis” display, and loaded up on more tomes with urgent-sounding titles such as
Financial Catastrophe 101
and
Buddy, Can You Spare a Trillion Dollars?
The same thing happened, and he made a third trip in the afternoon—stopping at that liquor store on his way back.

Now, as evening settles in, he feels simultaneously gorged and empty. He admits he’s learned
some
stuff, but really, more questions are raised by what he’s been reading here than answers. He detects in himself a growing resentment, too, an anger even, about what he’s discovering. But there’s a muffled quality to it, a reticence. What’s driving him first and foremost is this obsessive curiosity, this burning need to know what Lizzie knew.

To see what Lizzie saw.

He hasn’t opened the Stoli yet, and he mightn’t.

He looks around the room.

These books and magazines are all very well, but what he could really use here is Internet access, high-octane hyperlinks to take him where he needs to go. Someone mentions Bretton Woods? Glass-Steagall? Jekyll Island? Fine, he can go there, follow the thread, not be confined to the impenetrable thickets of some forty-page chapter on collateralized mortgage obligations. Because it seems to Frank that the financial crisis of 2008—its origins stretching back over decades, its aftermath unfolding into the foreseeable future—is a huge, unwieldy subject, a web of interconnecting narratives that cannot be contained in a single text or contemplated at a single glance.

He thinks about this for a while and then just heads straight out. There’s a place he’s passed on Forty-eighth Street called Café Zero, and that’s where he goes. With so many free Wi-Fi hotspots around now, these dedicated Internet cafés are becoming a thing of the past—but this one is still pretty busy, and although he’s not comfortable here, he settles in at a table and starts surfing.

He goes to Google and types in “Glass-Steagall Act.”

In less than a tenth of a second more than two million results come up.

*   *   *

It’s a foggy night in the early spring of 1865 and he’s crossing the Brooklyn Bridge on foot—vaguely aware somehow that construction of the bridge will not in fact be commencing for another five years—when he bumps into a tall, gaunt man in a frock coat and a shiny top hat. Then, curiously, and without any warning at all, it’s 1915 and the two men are in an IRT train, rattle-tattling, lights flickering, hurtling over the bridge, the president fumbling in his pocket for a greenback—

Vaughan says, “Sir, I—I—”

“Sshhh … listen to me now, don’t … don’t tell anyone about…”

Hhhnnn
.

“Don’t—”

Hhhnnnn
.

He opens his eyes. Looks around.
Shit
. That was intense.

He shakes his head.

Vivid, lucid, almost hyper-real.

It was like …

He glances around the room, at the red leather armchairs, and the bookshelves, at the Persian rug and the Matisse. He holds up his old, soft, mottled hand and stares at it.

Like
this
 … like reality itself.

But it’s not only his dreams—ones he might have dozing off for ten minutes in the library, say, as he’s just done now, or denser, longer ones fresh in his head after waking in the morning—it’s his
memories,
too. These are more directed, and rational, which is hardly surprising, but they’re just as vivid and cinematic. He can glide back over past times and recall details he would never normally have access to. In the last couple of days, for instance, he’s had a flood of memories from the late 1950s—that office he had in the Century Building, with its art deco fittings, walnut and ebony throughout, and those baggy, double-breasted suits he used to wear. And that sterling silver cigarette case he had, that Kitty gave him … with the ribbed pattern on the outside and the gilt yellow swirled finish on the inside …

Shit.

When was the last time he thought about
that
?

In a reverie now, he stares into space.

Transported back.

Of course, in those days he was constantly at war with the old man.

He can just see him, striding into the office in his vicuña overcoat, declaiming, waving his cigar around.

The generally held view back then was that William J. Vaughan was a great man, a business titan of the old school who’d be a hard act for his son to follow. But really, what was so great about him? Apart from his one big coup in 1929, what did he ever achieve? The fact is that all through the thirties, forties, and fifties William J. oversaw the steady decline of the family business, undoing through recklessness and negligence everything his
own
father had ever done to build it up (before dropping dead during a recital in Carnegie Hall in 1938). And yet because he was this big personality who played golf with cardinals and fucked movie stars he was perceived by everyone to be a great success.

Vaughan sighs.

Enough.

He stands up out of the chair and straightens his jacket.

The ironic thing is that this … this
clarity
has only kicked in over the last few days, a week at most. It’s ironic because that’s more or less when he decided to call it a day. He’d been so tired, and sick most of the time, that it seemed pointless to continue. Everything was in place, and all he had to do was set things in train.

Which he did.

But then, as arrangements for the press conference were being finalized, this new medication he’s been on suddenly started to work—the dreams, the vivid memories, but also renewed energy and a general feeling of well-being. He wasn’t really going to go sailing in Palm Beach, that was just to yank Craig Howley’s chain, nor was he serious last night when he hinted to Meredith that he wouldn’t say no to a blowjob—
but
 … these ideas didn’t come out of thin air either.

He
is
feeling better and stronger.

And he doesn’t care one whit that the medication is untested, and possibly dangerous.

It’s worth it.

Because we’re all going to die, so what difference does it make? When he first got sick in his mid-seventies he figured, not unreasonably, that his days were numbered, that death was probably just around the corner. But it proved to be a long, wide corner, a half-moon crescent of a thing that just wouldn’t quit—and now, nearly ten years later, here he is, still alive, still breathing, still on various medications. The thing is, most of his friends and contemporaries are dead, he’s attended a lot of funerals, looked into a lot of graves, but if anything, his sense of his own mortality has blurred somewhat, and dimmed. It’s like,
alright, already,
he’s gone through the scary phase, worrying about it day and night, shitting himself over it—and now he’s come out the other side. If he’s still here, then he’s still here. He doesn’t want to have to waste any more time thinking about it.