A Fatal Debt (27 page)

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.

M
y 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.