As the dark waters of the Rhein vaporized into thin blue mist and the golden sun rose over the gods awakening on Valhalla, my mind clicked away like a calculator; I became obsessed with the idea. I was sure I knew how to steal a great deal of money, and I wanted to test it out at once.
Though there are no intermissions in Das Rheingold, when you have an opera box, you can, like royalty, come and go as you please. I had only to pop across the street to my office at the bank data center. I threw my soggy cape around my soggy gown and dripped my way down the marble steps and out into the Wagnerian night.
The streets were still shiny and wet, and the macadam looked like licorice. The lights of the passing cars reflected from the pavement’s surface and, through the mist, gave me the eerie impression that they were driving upside down underwater.
I felt as if I were drowning, too. My spirits had been given a thorough soaking; I was sinking into the cesspool of my own career, going down for the third time. My manager was the dark cloud churning the waters.
Earlier that evening, when I’d dropped by my office after a long day of harrowing meetings—ready now to head off to the opera—I’d found the lights turned off, the draperies drawn, and my boss sitting in darkness behind my desk. He was wearing sunglasses.
My boss was a senior vice-president of the Bank of the World—you can’t get much higher than that. His name was Kislick Willingly III. And though my staff had created many imaginative names to call him behind his back, to his face most people called him Kiwi.
Kiwi had come from the heartland of America, the part I think of as the Interior, and he’d planned to be an engineer. A slide rule always hung from his belt, and he wore short-sleeved shirts with a plastic “pocket-saver” full of pens. He kept a mechanical drafting pencil there, in case he was called upon to draft something, and a gold fountain pen, in case he was called upon to sign something. He also carried colored markers so that when an idea struck him, he could dash into the nearest office and illustrate his thoughts on a wax board.
Kiwi was normally a cheerful and enthusiastic person, and he’d acquired his elevated position and salary by cheerfully and enthusiastically stabbing a great number of his colleagues in the back. In the banking business, this combination of enthusiasm and treachery is called “political savvy.”
Kiwi had been on his high-school football team, and he still had the capacity to consume large quantities of beer; his stomach had expanded accordingly, so his shirttail often hung out of his pants as he barreled down the halls, off to sign something important.
His mother had insisted he give up football, beer, and the fantasy of becoming an engineer, and pursue a career in accounting—so he became a CPA. But he was unhappy as an accountant, which, I believe, brought out his dark side.
That dark side was something to be reckoned with, for Kiwi truly descended into states of darkness when he was thwarted or felt he couldn’t have his own way. He’d take to wearing tinted sunglasses in the office and mirrored sunglasses on the street. He’d draw the draperies and turn out all the lights, conducting meetings in blackout mode. People like me can feel quite uncomfortable when forced to converse with a disembodied voice.
When such moods came over Kiwi, he’d slip into other people’s offices, where he’d turn out the lights and sit in silence, in what he called a “state of incognito.” It was in such a state that I’d found him in my own office earlier that evening.
“Don’t turn on the lights, Banks,” he muttered in the dark. “No one knows I’m here—I’m incognito.”
“Okay,” I said. And since his voice came from the chair behind my desk, I fumbled about for a seat across the room. “What’s up, Kiwi?”
“You tell me,” he replied petulantly, holding something aloft, large and rectangular, that I could just make out in the gloom. He tapped it with his finger. “This proposal, I believe, is your work?”
Kiwi could be unpleasant if he felt an employee had overstepped his bounds—especially if it meant the employee might get a share of the limelight Kiwi himself liked to bask in. I had, in fact, sent out a proposal to all of senior management only that morning, suggesting we beef up security on all computer systems that handled money and requesting the funds to do it.
I hadn’t consulted Kiwi, since I knew he would reject any idea that wasn’t his own. And the idea of security would never ignite his limited imagination; it wasn’t glitzy or glamorous enough to advance his career—it was just good business. So I had end-run Kiwi by sending out the proposal without telling him first, and now he knew it. But I knew something he didn’t, which made me smile secretly in the darkness—that was that any day, soon now, I would no longer be under his thumb.
Except for the formality of a background check and a written offer, I’d been technically accepted as director of security investigations for the Federal Reserve Bank—the insurance provider for every federally chartered financial institution in America. In a few weeks, I’d be assuming that responsibility—a job that would give me more clout
