Union Atlantic (27 page)

Downstairs, the Open Market Desk would trade Treasury bills for another half hour but the volume would be light. Soon Fedwire would settle, clearing everything from corporate bond sales to the credit card purchases of the secretaries and mutual fund salesmen hurrying now along the street below. Over the weekend when these
people went to the movies or the mall they would swipe their cards through magnetic strips and thus do what for centuries had been the sole province of kings and parliaments: they would create money. Short money to be sure, but money nonetheless, which until that moment had never appeared on a balance sheet or been deposited with a bank, that was nothing but a permission for indebtedness, the final improvisation in a long chain of governed promises. And as they slept, the merchants’ computers would upload their purchases and into the river of commerce another drop of liquidity would flow, reversing their commute, heading back into the city to collect in the big, money-center banks, which in the quiet of night would distribute news of the final score: a billion a day shipped to Asia and the petro states.

Behind him he heard his secretary, Helen, enter and turned to see her carrying a bouquet of lilies in a crystal vase. A beam of the expiring sun shot through the globe of water in her hands, spraying light across the dark portraits over the couch and dancing briefly on the paneling.

“Who on earth are those from?”

“Me,” she said, clearing a place on the coffee table. She was a tall woman and had to bend nearly to a right angle to adjust the stems, her hand reaching up to brush her graying hair behind her ear. Most women her age at the bank had cut theirs short and wore skirts and jackets of a uniform blue or black. Helen, who was English, looked more like a tenured scholar in some branch of the humanities, dressed in formless cotton trousers, a turtleneck, and a red cardigan.

“What for?”

“It’s your birthday.”

“Oh. I suppose it is. That’s kind of you. Unnecessary, certainly. But kind.”

“They were supposed to arrive hours ago but they should last
awhile,” she said, stepping back to appraise her arrangement. The phone on her desk rang and she returned to the other room to answer it.

Down below, the last rays of sun passed over the heads of the pedestrians to fall evenly across the wall of a building at the corner of Liberty and William, which until recently had displayed a mural of Seurat’s
La Grande Jatte
—a set painting for, of all unlikely things, a Hollywood movie shot in the financial district. They had left it up after the production and Henry rather enjoyed having the mural there to remind him of the original, a painting he tried to visit whenever business took him to Chicago. One habit of his, at least, of which his sister would approve.

Two months ago, back in August, Charlotte had found a new cause for her paranoia: what she claimed to be the theft of documents from the house, as if they hadn’t simply been swallowed up in the general chaos. She’d gone so far as to call the police to request an investigation, which they quite reasonably declined to open, this in turn only heightening her sense of persecution. Concerned that her rate of deterioration was increasing, Henry had got in touch with a neighbor, whom he’d asked to phone if she saw anything awry. The woman had called four times since. First it was a dozen saplings delivered in burlap wrap and left to die in the sun; then branches stacked at the end of the driveway to prevent cars reaching the house; after that, the collapse of one section of the barn roof, through which rain now poured; and finally, the dogs howling at all hours. Last week, he’d gone ahead and hired a home aide. While at a conference in Basel, he’d got a call on his cell phone from her saying Charlotte had barred her at the door and told her never to return.

“You don’t have a lot of options,” his lawyer had told him. “If she gets violent, we can talk.”

“Are you expecting someone?” Helen called from the other room. “There’s a woman downstairs. She says she made an appointment.”

He knew there had been a reason for him to tarry here on a Friday afternoon but he hadn’t been able to recall what it was.

“Yes,” he said. “That’s my fault. I forgot to mention it.”

A few minutes later, Helen showed Evelyn Jones into his office.

With some reluctance, she placed her handbag on the coffee table and, flattening the front of her skirt onto her thighs, perched on the edge of the couch.

“Can we get you something? Coffee, water? Or something stiffer for that matter?”

“Oh, no, I’m fine, really.” She looked about the room with what struck Henry as genuine marvel. “It’s not what I was expecting,” she said. “This building.”

“Yes, it’s a bit unusual for the neighborhood. It’s modeled on a Medici palace. You saw the wrought iron? Rather fanciful, I suppose. But the idea of a central bank was still new back in the twenties. I think they wanted to make a statement. You’re sure I can’t offer you anything to drink?”

“No, thank you. I know you’re busy. I’m probably interrupting.”

“No, just wrapping up the week. I’m not traveling for once, which is a blessing.”

He remembered now that when she first left a message a week ago he’d guessed it was an inquiry about working at the Fed, which while a rather direct approach wouldn’t be unheard of and would account for her nerves. But noticing her rigid posture and pursed lips he wondered if there wasn’t something more than that to her visit.

“We get them from the Met,” he said, following her eyes to the paintings. “We loaned them a bar of gold back in the seventies for some
show or other and they’ve been kind enough to let us borrow from their basement ever since. The one problem being my predecessor decided the appropriate policy would be to hang only paintings by artists from the Federal Reserve’s Second District, a somewhat limiting condition when it comes to the history of art. But there we are.”

“I shouldn’t be here,” she said. “I shouldn’t have come.”

“Not at all,” he said genially, beginning to perceive the outlines of the thing. “Do you have another appointment after this?”

“No,” she replied, surprised by the question.

“So you’re not in a rush?”

She shook her head.

“I tell you what. Since this is your first visit here, allow me to show you something.”

He stood up before she had the opportunity to decline, holding his arm out to guide her back through his office door.

“Helen, I’m just going to take Ms. Jones downstairs. We won’t be long.” He led her along the arch-ceilinged hallway, their footsteps silent on the thick carpet. “Did you fly down?” he asked, as they stepped onto the officers’ elevator.

“No, I took the train.”

“Yes, it’s far more civilized than a plane these days.” He allowed a few floors to pass before observing, “When they built this place they dynamited their way a few stories into the bedrock of the island. It was one of their great precautions. Turns out it was the only foundation strong enough to bear the weight.”

The elevator doors slid open and they made their way down the windowless passage to the security officer’s desk.

“Charles,” he said, “are the tours over for the day? I was going to show this young woman around.”

“It’s all yours, sir,” he said, leading them through the ten-foot, cylindrical airlock and into the antechamber. “Will you need any help with the stock, sir?”

“No, I think we’re fine,” Henry said. He unlocked the inner gate with his own key and ushered Evelyn into the vault, clicking the gate shut behind them. At the center of the room stood the metal scales still used to test the purity of the gold. Beside the scales were two pairs of magnesium shoe clips worn to protect the officers’ feet lest they should drop a bar in transit and crush their toes.

“We’re eighty feet below the sidewalk here. Thirty feet below sea level. Go ahead,” he said, gesturing toward the rows of floor-to-ceiling metal cages that lined the walls, numbered but otherwise unmarked. “Have a look.”

His guest glanced at him first, inquisitively, as if an elaborate trick might be afoot, but then succumbing to curiosity she approached one of the cages containing dark-yellow bars ten feet high and twenty deep. After a moment, she turned to look down the aisle, taking in the sheer number of separate compartments.

“It’s the largest accumulation of monetary gold in the world,” he said. “In fact, it’s a decent-size chunk of all the gold ever mined.”

“And all this belongs to the government?”

“No. The Treasury keeps our reserves at Fort Knox and up at West Point. The vast majority of what you see here is owned by foreign central banks. Most countries in the world deposit with us. We’re just the custodians. When governments want to do business, they call up and we move the gold from one cage to another.”

“They trust us that much?”

“For these purposes, yes.”

She passed on to another compartment and gazed at the wall of shining gold.

“The tours come to the outer gate here every day. I think last year we had twenty-five thousand visitors. People love to look at it. It reminds me of something Galbraith said: ‘The process by which banks create money is so simple the mind is repelled. A deeper mystery seems only decent.’ I suppose this is what’s left of the mystery. And yet this,” he said, indicating with a sweep of his hand the whole contents of the vault, “barely matters. Add it up and it’s no more than eighty or ninety billion worth. The wires clear more than that in an hour. All anchored to nothing but trust. Cooperation. You could even say faith, which sometimes I do, though it’s certainly of an earthly kind. Without it you couldn’t buy a loaf of bread.

“Of course as my sister never fails to remind me, the bigger ethical question is what people—what governments do with their money. Whether they buy medicine or food or arms. But there are conditions of possibility for doing any of these things. Whichever choices we make. The system has to work. People have to trust the paper in their wallets. And that starts somewhere. It starts with the banks.”

Her fingers curled around the bars of the cage she stood before.

“I guess you know why I’m here,” she said.

“Yes. I think I do.”

A
T THE END
of August, Evelyn had paid $390,000 for a shingle cottage on a tree-lined street out in Alden. The kitchen at the back was a bit dark in the mornings but it had a view of a dogwood and a rhododendron in the yard. Upstairs was a bathroom and two bedrooms with dormer windows that made the rooms feel smaller than their dimensions but comfortable nonetheless. She’d always pictured moving into such a place with a husband, but with Aunt Verna’s encouragement, she hadn’t allowed that image to stop her.

On the new commute home, she passed a video store and often stopped to pick up a DVD, a comedy or romance, which she’d watch with dinner.

Years before, in college, she’d taken a literature course and they had read a lot of James Baldwin, among others. Though she couldn’t remember what book it came from, one line in particular had always stuck with her. People pay for what they do, Baldwin had written, and more, for what they have allowed themselves to become. And they pay for it simply, with the lives they lead.

On the one hand, this sounded harsh, as if people were forever letting themselves go, as Aunt Verna would say, and being punished for it with their own misery. That was one way to hear it. But there was a democratic spirit to it as well, a sense that life consisted of the distance traveled, for good or ill. In which case, her guilt at having all that she did while her brother had got nothing lacked a purpose. Experience provided its own justice. From where it would come, no one could predict.

Two weeks ago at church, she’d stayed after for coffee. There, she’d seen a boy of nine or ten, thin with a high forehead, whom she had noticed back in June passing out programs at Carson’s funeral. She’d noted him at the time because she didn’t recognize him and she’d wondered who had placed him there at the door if not a member of the family. He appeared afraid when she approached him and said it wasn’t the minister who had invited him to help that day.

“I came on my own,” he said. “Did I do something wrong?”

She assured him that he hadn’t. She was just curious, she said. Had he known Carson?

“He used to let me hang out with him. When he had calls to make in the park. He’d ride my scooter sometimes. The thing is … see … the thing is, I seen him shot. I was across the street when they did it.
There was two of them. And then quick-like, there was people calling the ambulance and all that. But I seen him lying up in there before they came, his face all shot up, and all these bills on the floor, I don’t know why they hadn’t taken the money or nothing, but there was all this cash, his I guess. But when I came back a couple minutes later it was gone, so I guess someone musta took it.”

Yanked from the dimensionless efficiency in which she’d dwelt since the day her brother died, Evelyn had seen vividly for the first time the image of her brother’s corpse, of his shot brain smeared on the tile.

The next day she didn’t go to work. In fact, she ended up staying out half the week, in that new house of hers, in which she suddenly felt herself to be a stranger.

Coming to see Henry Graves, she’d known that eventually he would ask her why. Why was she telling him what she knew?

He put the question to her once they had ridden the elevator back upstairs and returned to his office.

“I must tell you,” he said, “in all my years here I’ve never had someone come through the door to report their own institution. I confess I’m curious.”

Evelyn drew herself up to deliver her piece. But what came to mind were not the words she’d prepared but the look on her aunt Verna’s face when she’d told her about her latest promotion, how her eyebrows had risen, her eyes brimming, her whole face opening up as her shoulders let go, as if for all the world she’d been told, as in a dream, that she were free from a burden she’d never thought to imagine gone. It was a look Evelyn had seen before, at each stage of her accomplishments, and each time it nearly broke her. She could never tell Verna how routine her job was, how bureaucratic and spiritually thin. That would be cruel. But then so, in its way, was coming here to blow the
whistle. Once the lawyers got involved, who knew what would count for the truth? She had pieces of evidence about what McTeague and Fanning had done but she wasn’t, after all, the person in charge. As best she could tell, the protections for a person in her position weren’t worth the paper they were written on. It wasn’t only
her
hopes she was jeopardizing by being here.