There were five copies of The Harridan Report spread out across his desk, including a copy of the one Charlotte had shown him just before she died. David didn’t think he had ever known anybody, real or imaginary, as solemn and humorless as Michael Harridan. It was frightening to think of that man in the world. Maybe that was because that man wasn’t in the world. He was part of all of us. He was part of the people who ran the banks and the people who hated them. He was part of the pundits and part of the audience that checked their stocks online every day at lunch when they had a little free time at the office. He had gone out to the Trade Center with Adele and looked at the rubble there. Then he’d come back to the office and found a picture on the Internet of that church that had been bombed in Philadelphia. In the end, it came down to the same thing, it all came down to the same thing, too many people taking too many things seriously when they didn’t mean anything at all. Nothing meant anything at all. You worked and worked. You stayed up late and came in early and canceled dates and family dinners. You did all the things you were supposed to do and then it ended here, with you feeling like a piece of tired fruit suspended in Jell-O.
That was it, David thought. He wasn’t feeling panicked. He wasn’t losing his head in a crisis. He was simply passing into another phase, where nothing was urgent except the need to shut out all the noise that cluttered up his life.
Next to the copies of The Harridan Report on his desk were the summary sheets of his report on Price Heaven. The type on their pages was smaller and less bold than that of Michael Harridan’s rag, and far more difficult to read. Here was the skinny on Price Heaven: It was an old and venerable company, probably too old and too venerable. Its image was antiquated. Its facilities were Stone-Aged. Two years ago, it had come to the bank with a cash shortfall and a need to modernize. Six months after that, it had begun to hemorrhage money. It was still hemorrhaging money, although not quite in the same way as it had been, since the bank had stopped all payments to creditors, even itself. Now it was only hemorrhaging money in its stock price. He could write the facts down in a hundred million different ways, but they would always come down to the same thing, and they would always result in the realization that there was nothing anybody could do now about Price Heaven. The board had a decent argument when they said he should have seen this coming when he first recommended the loan. There was nobody better suited to seeing it coming besides himself. He had a decent argument when he said that he had not been responsible for granting the loan, and that it wasn’t his recommendation, but Tony’s, that had swayed the board. It wasn’t an argument they wanted to listen to, because Tony was dead. He had this terrible, ugly urge to tell the truth, the kind of urge he knew he must never give in to, if he expected to have a life when the dust settled and Price Heaven had finally gone out of business.
There was a knock on the door and Adele came in, bustling. “They’re almost ready downstairs,” she said. “Are you absolutely sure you want to hold this in the lobby? I know the conference room is too small, but that lobby looks so much like a stage set for a Depression movie about evil bankers. I wish you’d let me get somebody to take down the chandelier.”
“It would be a waste of money to take down the chandelier,” David said. “And the lobby is the only place big enough. We won’t be completely screwing up anybody who wants to come in and out, will we?”
“No, of course not. We’ve got one newsstand that’s going to be out of business for the duration. And there are a lot of people down there. That surprises me a little, do you know? I didn’t think the Price Heaven collapse was that big a story.”
“Tony’s dead,” David said. “Charlotte’s dead. Maybe the press has finally made a few connections.”
“Do you think they’re dead because of Price Heaven?” Adele asked. “That doesn’t seem right to me. I mean, what did Charlotte have to do with Price Heaven?”
David gestured to the copies of The Harridan Report on his desk. “She didn’t have anything to do with it rationally. These people aren’t rational.”
“Oh, that thing. I found some of those in the wastebasket a little while ago and read them. Complete lunacy. Is that what the police think, that Tony and Charlotte were murdered by somebody like that?”
“I don’t know what the police think.”
“No, of course you don’t. I don’t know why I should think you would. Maybe it’s just that I always think you know everything. Are you sure you’re all right? You’ve been behaving in the oddest way all day, as if you were sleepwalking. And with a press conference due to go off in less than fifteen minutes—”