Abrams reddened. “You know what I mean.”
Viz caught on to what the real issue was for Abrams.
“You want to get laid, get laid,” Viz said. “It’s not like I’ll be sitting in your bedroom.” He sat down on the couch again. “You sleep with her before? ”
Abrams nodded.
“Then it ain’t no secret.” Viz pointed at the table. A couple of legal pads lay in front of Abrams, along with a stack of Federal Reserve research papers. “Don’t you have testimony to prepare? ”
Abrams opened his mouth to speak, as if to keep arguing the point, but closed it again in surrender. He then nodded and said, “I think it’s more of a public suicide.”
“Graham says you’re a straight shooter,” Viz said. “Makes it more likely that you’ll catch a ricochet. You want to try it out on a civilian?”
“You follow the markets? “ Abrams asked.
Viz shrugged. “Not really. I look at my retirement account statements, but Graham and his people make all of the decisions.”
“That bother you?”
“No. We’ve ridden out all of the…” Viz grinned. “What do you all call them? Corrections? I’m not sure what was being corrected, they all seemed like collapses to me.”
“And I think there’s going to be another one.”
Viz’s grin died. He didn’t like to hear from a Federal Reserve chairman that his retirement account was going to tank. He leaned forward on the couch.
Abrams turned fully toward him, resting his arm on the back of the chair.
“You know what an equity bubble is.”
Viz nodded. “Like the stock market in the late 1990s and the real estate market in the 2000s.”
“We now have a government debt bubble. We have about ten trillion dollars of treasury bonds and treasury bills out there, but they’re not worth that much. Not even close, because we can’t pay back all of the money. The only way we’d ever be able to is to turn over chunks of the country to the holders of the bonds.”
Viz pointed toward the window. “You mean hand over Central Park to the Chinese in exchange for the paper?”
“And Yosemite and Yellowstone and Ellis Island and Alcatraz.”
“What’s gonna happen when people figure that out?” Abrams smiled. “We’ll have what we used to call a correction.”
Viz thought for a moment. “But if you come out and admit that, then the whole thing-”
“Collapses.”
Abrams rose and walked toward Viz, stopping in the middle of the room.
“The year before the Berlin Wall fell,” Abrams said, “Graham told me a story he heard in Dresden.” He pointed upward. “A kid watching a circus asks his father, ‘What’s the man on the tightrope doing with that pole?’ The father answers, ‘He’s using it to balance himself.’ The kid then asks, ‘What if it gets away from him?’ And the father answers, ‘It won’t. He’s keeping it steady.’ ”
“Sounds like at least some people recognized that the Soviet Union was on the verge of falling,” Viz said.
“But not the CIA, not Reagan, not Bush, not Kissinger, not Rice, not Rumsfeld, not Cheney, not the State Department. Nobody. They all got it wrong. They were completely, even ideologically, oblivious.”
“But they all took credit for it when it happened.”
Abrams locked his hands on his waist. “This time around it will all be about blame.”
CHAPTER 37
Just before dawn, Gage walked from his hotel, past the sailboats tied up at their slips and east along Quai de Rive Neuve toward the head of the box canyon port. He bought a cup of cafe Americano at a boulangerie, then walked across the boulevard and stopped next to a small boathouse. From there he looked over the water toward the wall of stone and stucco buildings, extending from the thirteenth-century Fort Saint-Jean at the entrance to the harbor, up past the seventeenth-century city hall, and then past twentieth-century marble-faced apartment houses. He didn’t look over his shoulder, but felt the granite gaze of the Basilique Notre Dame de la Garde from atop a distant limestone hill.
As he sipped his coffee and watched the steam swirling above the cup, Gage wondered whether Tabari Benaroun was already at his desk in the Hotel de Police a few blocks beyond the facades of civilian life across the water, and what he was thinking, and whether his supervisors had pressed him about where he’d spent the last two days and who he had been with.
Gage was annoyed at where Tabari had decided to draw the line; his leaving unanswered how Hennessy had gotten to the coast trail and his showing-but-not-telling-draw-your-own-conclusions method.
At the same time, Gage recognized that he hadn’t been forthright with Tabari either. He hadn’t told the young detective, and had asked Benaroun not to tell him, about how Hennessy had arranged the meeting with Abrams, about how Abrams had given the signal that it would take place, and about the reason that they were meeting.
Anyone watching him and Tabari on the trail the previous day would’ve assumed they were hikers, perhaps concluding from their clothing that one was a local who was guiding a foreigner. Two men out early, before the boaters and rock climbers, when the air was still and the path untrodden and the shadows on the inlet walls were still waning and falling toward the sea That is, almost anyone.
Gage thought of Faith. She could recognize a rite of passage where a tourist would see only a native dance.
And Batkoun Benaroun. He could recognize money laundering where a bank clerk would see only a wire transfer.
And Viz. He could recognize countersurveillance where a pedestrian walking on Madison Avenue would see only a man reading a New York transit map.
Connected dots sometimes made not just a route, but a picture.
Gage wondered who was watching him and how, and what they were recognizing in the places and things that he could still only perceive as pieces of a puzzle scattered on a floor.
A church bell rang in the distance. The faint D-G-B notes were soon lost in the rush and rumble of the early morning traffic, but they repeated themselves in his mind with a vague familiarity that merged with his imaginings of Hennessy.
In the ringing bells Gage heard the first three notes of “Amazing Grace.” And they led him to thoughts of Hennessy’s blindness, and of his coming to see, and of what must have been a struggle for redemption, and of his wife and his daughter and the trail of tears that had led them into the emotional wilderness in which they now wandered.
Gage felt a heaviness in his chest as he rested his forearms on the wooden railing next to the boathouse. He stared down at the blue water, at the rocking boats and the reflections of the lightening sky and the buildings on the other side of the port.
Maybe he wasn’t so wrong when he implied to Ibrahim’s old friend in Boston that Hennessy’s family was his client. After all, for Abrams, Hennessy’s death was merely an episode in his life, while for Hennessy’s wife and daughter, it was the event that now gave their lives its meaning.
The hymnal notes sounded again and Gage remembered walking from his Saturday job at the local newspaper when he was fifteen years old to his father’s medical office in Nogales, Arizona, stopping on the sidewalk to listen to choir practice at the storefront Papago Baptist Church, the hymn sung in a low guttural Spanish. Then he thought of Hennessy’s wandering in a desert of his inadvertent design, one that was pooled with mirages and whose horizon receded as he had advanced.
Gage let the song fade to silence in his mind, then pushed off from the railing and continued along Quai de Rive Neuve. Soon he was enveloped by the diesel exhaust of buses and the salty-slimy stench of the fishmongers’