A Fatal Debt

After they’d left, I made some tea and sat at the kitchen table, thinking about what Pagonis had said. Maybe I’d been foolish to provoke her-it had made her go and dig up something to use against me-but she’d probably have discovered it anyway. What else does she have up her sleeve? I wondered. She’d seemed very confident it was worth putting me in front of a grand jury, despite Joe’s belief that Baer wouldn’t risk it.

I thought back to that day on the beach. Perhaps Pagonis was right: Harry had given me a clue about his intentions and I hadn’t realized it. All I remembered was feeling happy that he was less depressed and volatile. Maybe there was another way to interpret his mood: he’d made up his mind to kill Greene by then, so he was less oppressed by anxiety.

I closed my eyes and tried to think back. The waves had rolled along the beach, and Harry had walked back toward the house as if defeated. Why had he been sure that his life was ruined? I thought. Depressed people often think that, but they have their own logic. They feel trapped by something or someone, unable to break free. Who had Harry believed was trapping him? It had to be Greene, surely. His dead body was proof of that. I pictured Harry standing despairingly at the foot of the dune stairs as he’d told me of Seligman’s collapse.

I lost everything. They ruined me, he’d said.

Not him, not Greene alone. They. Who were they? I wondered. Were they simply the fates that everyone blames when things go wrong, or had it been someone in particular? Who had he been thinking of when he’d said the words? I remembered him sweeping his hand across his throat-that violent gesture and his tortured face.

Treasury demanded a sacrifice, he’d said.

There was something else-something I’d heard recently-that those words reminded me of. It had been in this room, not long ago. Then I remembered. I went into the living room to retrieve my laptop from my desk and brought it to the kitchen. After firing it up, I found my way to the C-SPAN archive and the Senate committee hearing I’d been halfway through. When I’d spotted Anna at the end of the tape, they’d been about to grill the Treasury secretary.

I clicked on the second video of the morning’s proceedings and saw the earlier witnesses walking jerkily offscreen-Greene with Underwood at his side, raising his head in what looked like a laugh. There was a pause while the senators went out of the room to vote. Finally, another group of officials and advisers started gathering in the front row of seats behind the witness table, and one official replaced Harry’s and Greene’s nameplates with a sign that read SECRETARY OF THE TREASURY.

As I slowed the video, a man in his sixties walked into the shot. He was handsome and tanned, his face comfortably lined and shrewd. His movements were spare and he clasped his hands as the photographers took shots, looking born to the limelight. When he was introduced, he bowed his head, acknowledging the panel’s seniority and status. His opening statement was brief, and he leaned back to take questions as if eager to chat.

It was a tricky audience-the Democrats were unhappy because Wall Street had been bailed out, and the Republicans were just angry-but he was unfazed.

“Secretary Henderson, I appreciate your public service, but I must ask why on earth you think Wall Street deserves $700 billion for getting us in this mess?” asked the twitchy senator I’d seen before.

Tom Henderson rearranged the papers before him with his long fingers, his gestures delicate and precise, and gave an exasperated laugh.

“Senator, that’s a fine question,” he said. “The truth is that the banks did not deserve our money. We would have preferred for them to learn a lesson they wouldn’t easily forget. You may remember I used to work on Wall Street myself, and I can tell you, people who made such errors suffered a far deal more.”

I used to work on Wall Street myself. Curious, I pulled up another tab on the browser and searched for his biography on the Treasury website. “Before his nomination, Secretary Henderson served as chairman and chief executive officer of Rosenthal amp; Co., where his career began in 1968,” it read. Rosenthal was the bank that had recruited Greene, the place Harry had tried to emulate, and the one that had come through the financial crisis unscathed. Treasury made sure of that, Harry had said.

I clicked back to Henderson’s watchful face, and then I knew. That was what Harry had meant. “They” was Greene and Henderson’s alma mater, the pinnacle of Wall Street’s inner establishment that Harry had both admired and despised. He’s always felt like an outsider to Wall Street, not part of the club. When he was pushed out, he imagined that everyone was laughing at him. Those had been Felix’s words. Why hadn’t I thought of it before? Harry had told me himself: I wanted us to be like Rosenthal. They were never going to let it happen. I know that now.

Perhaps he’d been imagining it. Harry was depressed and angry, and he believed his bank had been stolen from him. Many people came through Episcopal’s psychiatry wards with similar delusions, believing that someone was out to get them. Their villain was often the government. Just because Harry had thought the Rosenthal alumni, including the Treasury secretary, had ruined him, that didn’t prove it was true. It didn’t make much difference, though. Harry had believed that and he’d killed Greene as a result.

The twitchy senator was still talking as I restarted the tape.

“Why did you bail them out with our money, then?”

Henderson smiled imperturbably. “Our responsibility was to stop the financial system from collapsing because of Wall Street’s errors. It was for these banks’ boards to determine what action was taken as a result of the mistakes. Some CEOs lost their jobs, as you’ve heard.”

The chairman passed the questions to a Republican I had not seen before, a boyish puritan with round glasses who looked as if he’d been bullied at school by jocks and was now taking it out on others. He had a reedlike, insinuating voice.

“From what we heard, Mr. Shapiro didn’t know what was going on in his own bank. I bet you’re glad he was fired.”

“That was the board’s decision, as I’ve said.”

“They were right, though, weren’t they?”

“I believe Seligman Brothers now has sound leadership in place,” Henderson said coolly. “That’s all I’d say.”

Henderson’s face filled the screen as I clicked off the video. Either he or Harry had not been honest. Harry had insisted to me on the beach that the Treasury had wanted his head, but the man in charge had just blithely denied it-it had been a decision of the Seligman board, and he had been a mere bystander.

I didn’t trust Harry and this was the first time I had even caught a glimpse of Tom Henderson, but I looked at his bland, practiced expression of innocence and I thought: You’re lying.

17

My job is to be nice to annoying people-people in strange states, who aren’t acting right, who have problems that stop them from relating properly to others. There’s no one so hard to be with as a depressed person locked within himself. We’re like friends, but friends who don’t get bored or frustrated and try to change the subject.

That’s my way of looking at it, even if it’s low-paid work by the standards of medicine. Spending forty-five minutes listening to someone for $400 sounds okay, but it isn’t plastic surgery-style wealth. So my profession is drifting away from it, leaving it to psychologists with their happy-talk cognitive behavioral therapy, using checklists to persuade people that they worry too much. It’s more efficient to practice genetic medicine and hand out pills in fifteen-minute sessions to alter people’s brain chemistry. This patient has the short arm of the transporter gene, so she’s got serotonin imbalance. Give her a re-uptake inhibitor and she’ll be good to go. If that doesn’t work, try another brand or combine it with a lithium booster. There’s an entire algorithm of combinations to try before you have to admit defeat.

Some residents want to forget all about therapy, and there’s not much evidence that it works, although no drug company will fund the research, so who knows? Should we leave people in misery because their moods can’t be measured scientifically? It’s a matter of personality-the psych’s, I mean, not the patient’s. Therapy suits me