someone’s got to do it. Where were we? Oh, Harry. Yes, poor old Harry, my boss and protector. Without him, I’m not sure how long I’ve got left at Seligman. I don’t imagine the new guard will approve of our little jaunt. I’d hoped to keep this under wraps, but fat chance now.”
We’d passed north of Tower Bridge and were coasting along by the Thames with Canary Wharf ahead. Felix pointed at it through the windscreen.
“See there? Second tower from the left, a third of the way up. That’s where I worked twenty years ago. We were the only ones in the building, it felt like. Desolate bloody place. The London end was in an awful mess. New York sent Harry over to pull the Brits into shape. God, he nearly screamed the place down. It was a shock for the others, but he took a liking to me.”
“Did you like him?”
“Strangely, I did. He’s a warm-blooded creature, Harry, not a reptile like some of them. He’s got a heart.”
Felix thumped his chest with a fist, on the spot where most people imagine the heart to be. Then, as the golden fish on the roof of Billingsgate Market swam by, he reached out and traced a pattern on the window with one finger.
“You know Harry’s mistake?” he asked. “He reckoned he’d rebuilt Seligman single-handedly-which he more or less did. He thought he could rescue Wall Street and America, too, could take on anything. He stopped watching out for trouble because he thought he couldn’t be beaten. Mind you, he wasn’t the only one who was smoking his own dope. Turns out none of us are as smart as we thought.”
As he spoke, we swung left past some blue concrete blocks and a security barrier on the edge of City Airport. Just ahead, parked in front of a low building, was a small white jet with two engines perched next to its tail and large oval windows running the length of its fuselage. The driver halted next to a man wearing a yellow over-jacket and carrying a clipboard. I was back where I’d arrived that morning, in Harry’s Gulfstream IV.
Harry’s jet felt only distantly related to the regular kind, like a Thoroughbred horse next to a donkey. As we taxied over to the runway and lined up behind a turboprop, I sat in a leather armchair with a cup of coffee beside me in a cork-lined holder. The cabin was covered with gold fittings, from the air-conditioning nozzles to the edges of the walnut panels. Michelle, the blond attendant who’d been my only companion on the way over, hadn’t bothered to give us a safety demonstration. I’d latched my seat belt instinctively, but neither Felix nor the two bankers in the rear, immersed in BlackBerrys, had bothered. Together, we occupied a third of the aircraft’s dozen seats.
“Tell him to cut the bullshit and talk to me. I thought we had this deal done,” the senior-looking one hissed into a phone as the Gulfstream aligned itself at the start of the long runway. “They said they would offer thirty-one, so why don’t they offer thirty-one? … No, you’re not listening … No.”
He kept talking as the engines fired, but I was lost in the adrenaline rush of takeoff. Instead of the rumbling, straining effort to pick up speed of a passenger jet laden with fuel for an Atlantic crossing, we galloped along the tarmac so rapidly that my head was pushed into the rest. Then we were up and off. As we twisted over Canary Wharf, the city scrolled up the window, making me light-headed. We rose so fast, with a goldfish bowl view of sky and city, that my brain jammed with data.
The jet punched through clouds into clear light, our rate of climb hardly slackening. Across from me, Felix glanced at the
“Nice, isn’t it?” said Felix, glancing over.
“I could get used to it.”
The coffee had awakened me, and my sense of being safely coddled was fading, squeezed out by anxiety at the way I was being absorbed into the Shapiros’ world. By the time I’d worked out what Nora had meant by her offer, it had been too late. A car had been dispatched to take me to Teterboro Airport, just across the Hudson, for the flight to London. There had been no schedule to keep. The Gulfstream had soared into the night sky, bearing Michelle and me, as soon as I’d waltzed through security.
That night I’d slept on a bed made up by Michelle, without sound or motion to disturb me. The pilots guided the Gulfstream through the skies as she watched over me. I’d felt like a lotus-eater in a gilded world that I might not have the energy to leave. Even as I luxuriated, it troubled me. Psychiatric treatment has a frame. The patient must turn up on schedule and pay the check on time-he must make a commitment to his cure. We didn’t let the wealthy dictate their terms any more than the Medicare brigade, yet here was I, drifting away from the protocol with every step I took to help Harry.
“We’re above the turbulence here,” Felix said. “Concorde used to fly this high, but now it’s the guys with their own jets. Come on, I’ll introduce you.”
He led me three paces down the aisle to the bankers. The older, more talkative one was tall, and his swept- back blond hair was graying at the temples but luxuriant. His face was long and watchful, and he had chiseled features that should have been handsome but were slightly too perfect. Sitting by him was a man in his early thirties, wearing a suit, dark tie, and spectacles. He was viewing a spreadsheet on a laptop computer, and he nodded at me silently, in the manner of a junior partner.
“Ben, this is John Underwood,” Felix said, indicating the older man.
“Good to meet you, Ben,” Underwood said. “This is Peter Freeman, he’s on my team.” He gestured toward the younger man. “Felix, I thought we were going to Teterboro. What’s all this about Bangladesh?”
“Not Bangladesh. Bangor. Maine,” Felix said patiently. “We’re going through customs there to drop Ben on Long Island. It’s quicker. No one else around.”
It was the first I’d heard of Long Island-I’d assumed I would return to New York-and it added to my unease.
Underwood turned to me. “I didn’t catch your second name, Ben,” he said.
I hesitated. I didn’t want more people to know who I was or my connection to Harry. It was already too open a secret for my liking.
“Ben’s a friend,” interjected Felix. “Let’s grant him his privacy.”
“Ben the mystery man, then,” Underwood said, a glint in his eye.
“John’s a fig banker to the stars and confidant of our new chief executive,” added Felix, making both sound suspicious.
“Fig?” I asked.
“Financial Institutions Group,” said Felix. “A banker who advises other bankers. Go figure.” He shook his head. “So here we all are, a happy band of brothers. It sounded as if you were having some trouble there, John.”
“Unfortunately, yes. Deals that used to take weeks go on for months now. Nothing’s simple anymore.”
Freeman tapped a pile of documents. “I’ve found something on the recap,” he said to Underwood. “We might be able to shed the tax liability.”
“Two bankers devise a clever way to avoid tax,” Felix whispered to me. “What could go wrong? We should leave these wizards to it.”
After an hour, Michelle laid out some plates of meats and cheeses, and Felix sipped a glass of red wine as he read. I took a nap. Soon Maine’s greensward appeared below, with its ridged coastline and leopard-skin lakes, as if God had picked up Cornwall and splattered it on the other side of the Atlantic. The aircraft floated over a pine forest and a small town dotted with the blue circles of backyard pools before settling gently on a runway.
We had Bangor Airport to ourselves. Apart from a couple of USAF air tankers sitting by corrugated steel hangars, there were no other aircraft in view. We taxied across to the terminal and halted. Michelle opened the front door, and Felix carried on reading without acknowledging that we were no longer in the air. Then a van drove up and a chubby official with a buzz cut entered the cabin.
“Hello, Officer Jones,” Felix said, reading his badge. “What’s the weather doing today?”
“Going up to about seventy, I believe,” the man said, leafing through Felix’s passport. He pronounced “about” as “aboot,” and I figured we must be close to the Canadian border. Having glanced at our papers, he went to the back to give the bags a cursory glance.
“How are you enjoying the flight, Ben?” Underwood asked, approaching up the aisle and placing his arms on two seats to examine me better.
“I wish I had one of these myself.”
