“Then go on your own Long March.” Faith pointed at the tents. “Take them all with you.”
“And come back to what?” Old Cat again smiled at her. “See? We’ve gone in a circle.” His smiled faded. “And I’m trapped inside of it.”
Faith searched inside herself for an argument that would dissuade him, but found none. Now she felt foolish in bringing students to China. She didn’t understand it. Didn’t understand the man standing in front of her. And had nothing to offer him.
But as she looked up at him, there was something that seemed even worse. He was a man without a family, and now no chance to have one, a man who would have no descendants to burn incense and to close their eyes and to bow and to remember him on the anniversary of his death.
Old Cat furrowed his brows, then raised a forefinger and said, “Jian-jun told me that the other name for the one that Christians call the Devil is the Prince of This World.” He lowered his hand. “I think now we both can see why.”
Faith looked past him and through the thin dark smoke at the fading orange moon above the city and felt the whole of the world’s evil shudder through her. She wanted to reach out to him again, this precious man, but she knew he’d withdraw from any gesture of comfort.
Old Cat pointed at the generator building. “Go. Wake Ayi Zhao and Jian-jun and collect your things. The van will be here in fifteen minutes. Your students are already inside.”
“What about Wo-li and his wife? ”
Old Cat lowered his voice and leaned down toward her.
“They have escaped.”
He then cocked his head toward the south.
“Perhaps you will encounter them along the road as you drive toward Chongqing.”
CHAPTER 51
Listen to me.” Former United States president Randall Harris pounded the podium with his fist. “Relative Growth isn’t a Ponzi scheme.”
Despite the grainy picture of the old television and the tinny sound, Gage sensed that Harris didn’t believe what he was saying. Maybe because it echoed in tone Richard Nixon’s “I’m not a crook” proclamation during the Watergate scandal.
Gage was watching from the dining table of a vacation cottage in La Ciotat, east of Marseilles, belonging to the parents of a colleague of Tabari’s. The house was anchored to an oak-treed hillside high above a narrow fishing port lined with tiny night-lit restaurants and slowly rocking trawlers. Lying before him was Hennessy’s cell phone, along with the SIM and memory cards and his notebook. All were drying by the warmth of a space heater.
Gage hoped CNN International would stay with the press conference until the end.
Harris gestured toward the two ex-presidents standing behind him to his left, then said, “We… are… not… crooks.” And then toward the heads of the Big Four accounting firms to his right. “And these men and women aren’t Arthur Andersen and they are in no way willing to betray their clients and shareholders and the public in pursuit of fees.”
The camera drew back in time to catch the hand of The Nation’s Ivan Kahn shooting up from the crowd of reporters seated in the room. His body followed it upward and he began speaking.
“Then there really are assets of two trillion dollars held by Relative Growth?”
Harris ignored the questioner, but answered the question from his prepared remarks.
“We’ve spent over fifty million dollars to obtain four independent audits of the holdings of the funds.”
Kahn cut him off. “That just means you kept moving money around so it would be counted over and over.”
Harris now acknowledged him.
“What paper are you with?” Harris asked, his face flushing. “The Socialist Workers Gazette?” He paused, then jabbed a forefinger at Kahn. “I told you, the assets are there.”
“Then open your books.”
“So everyone in the world can imitate us? So every day trader in the world gets the results of hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of research for free? “ Harris raised his forefinger. “Our advantage over others-our only advantage-in the world of finance is our ability to identify opportunities and capitalize on them before anyone else even figures out they exist. Opening our books is the same thing as revealing our trade secrets.”
Harris glanced back at Lucille Nonini, head of AccountCorp Worldwide. “You want to take this? “
Nonini stepped up next to Harris.
“We’ve looked at the books,” Nonini said. “And we did a lot more than that, more than any accounting firm or group of accounting firms ever has. In a matter of a week, we fielded five thousand accountants throughout the world who took simultaneous snapshots of all of the funds’ holdings. There was no opportunity to move money around or transfer assets from one account to another.”
Harris leaned over the podium and pointed at Kahn.
“The kind of false accusations that you and others have made triggered redemption demands by our clients and the only way to dissuade them was to disclose more about our investment strategy than even our investors have the right to know.”
A couple of reporters laughed. Others shook their heads.
Harris’s face flushed and he pounded the top of the podium. “Investors have a right to a share of our profits, not to our methods.”
“What about off-balance-sheet liabilities like Citibank hid in structured investment vehicles?”
Harris shook his head and glared down as though he was about to throw aside the podium and jump Kahn.
“Read… my… lips. There’s nothing-nothing-that’s not included on our balance sheet.”
Harris thinks he’s telling the truth, Gage thought, but it couldn’t be true. There was no way they could’ve kept paying out dividends unless they were doing it with other investors’ money. Not throughout the massive economic upheavals of the last decade. And calling them chaos funds, as Harris and Minsky usually did, wasn’t an explanation, it was just a label, a marketing gimmick.
The camera operator seemed to anticipate that the next question would come from Kahn and framed his face.
Kahn glanced at the camera, the attention seeming to act as an invitation.
“What about liabilities? “ Kahn asked.
Harris rolled his eyes and said, “What do you think the bottom line of an audit is composed of? It’s assets minus liabilities.”
“That’s not what I meant and you know it. I’m asking about liabilities arising out of complex derivatives. If no one has developed a method of pricing them, then how can anyone estimate the liabilities that arise out of holding them? “
Minsky walked forward. Harris stepped to the side.
“We’re a hedge fund,” Minsky said, “and hedging means, among other things-and without giving away our trade secrets and intellectual property-that we take countervailing positions. One part of the economy goes down, another goes up. One currency depreciates, another appreciates.”
Minsky smiled as though he was dismissing a waiter who’d splashed the water onto the tablecloth as he poured it from a pitcher.
“In any case,” Minsky said, “they’re not all that complex and therefore not that hard to value.”
A camera again focused on Kahn’s face, but he remained silent. Gage didn’t think he was alone in seeing in Kahn’s eyes not the aggression he’d displayed before, but a kind of dread. Minsky’s answer had been too simple, his manner had been too slick, and if he was lying, Relative Growth would someday collapse and take the world economy with it. The camera drew back, displaying Kahn standing alone, like a man at the seashore watching an approaching tsunami.
Gage looked from them to the drying notebook and the SIM and memory cards and suspected that the
