Conspiracy Theory(16)

The printer was finished printing. There was a pile of paper in the well at the top of the machine. David thought he was getting a headache. He sometimes loved his job and sometimes hated it, but he did truly and always hate the peripheral obligations, of which this evening would be one. It helped a little, but only a little, to know that Tony wasn’t any happier about this than he was himself.

He got the papers out of the well: three collated hard copies, one for his desk, one for his file, and one for the attaché case he carried with him everywhere. The rule was the more important the man, the fewer the papers he carried. Only middle-management nobodies without a chance in hell of rising in the hierarchy schlepped two reams of paper with them every time they headed for their cars. His attaché case wouldn’t have held two reams of paper if he’d wanted it to. He felt almost guilty giving it this single thin file, but there was nothing he could do about it. He had to talk to Tony about the numbers and he had to talk to him tonight. It would at least help pass the time at this idiotic party if he could spend a few minutes talking reality among the potted palms. The whole mess made him wish he would never have to marry. There were only two choices, in marriage, for people like him. Either he got married to a woman like Charlotte, or he got married to one of those women for whom ambition was more important than plastic surgery. In either case, he would be miserable.

He dropped one of the copies in his attaché case and closed up. He picked up the other two to leave on Adele’s desk when he passed it. He had his own assistant, but in this case it made more sense to give the work to Tony’s, since she had been coordinating this particular project from the beginning. Maybe Adele lived in an ordinary American house, or had, when she was growing up. David knew she went out to Delaware on holidays to visit her sister, who lived there, doing David did not know what. His own family had been reduced over the years to his mother and his two sisters—and nowhere near enough money to keep any one of them. His mother lived in Paris, on the Avenue Haus-mann, in a “small” apartment that had a reception room large enough to stage a cocktail party for five hundred, if she should ever want to stage a cocktail party. She wouldn’t. His sisters were both married to investment bankers and living on the Main Line, in houses exactly like the one they had all grown up in. He was here at the bank, finding out, firsthand, how impossible it was to live decently and amass a safety net at the same time.

He turned off the lights in his office. There were cleaning ladies who came through and turned the lights off, but for some reason he felt guilty for making them do what he could easily do himself. He went down the hall to Adele’s big desk and dropped the copies there. He went back out and down to the reception area, pulling his gloves on as he moved. It had been cold for a week and it was going to get colder.

“I know what’s bothering you,” Anne had told him, when he’d gone out there to take her to lunch last month. “You’ve been there and done that. Your life looks exactly like your father’s. You’re drowning in boredom and at the very, very bottom of your soul, you think you’re going to hell. And I don’t mean that figuratively.”

No, David thought, he didn’t mean it figuratively, either. There was a circle of hell Dante had failed to notice. It was the one full of old boys from Exeter and Hotchkiss and St. Paul’s, who had never for a moment thought beyond their own small circle of self-doubt, and yet who were constantly in danger of falling out of it, of not having the resources, of not being able to keep up.

The phone began to ring almost as soon as he was in the elevator. He took it out of his pocket and switched it on. “Yeah,” he said. “Is something wrong?”

“Just a little nervousness on my part,” Tony said, “and the simple fact that I’m ready to kill Charlotte, which is nothing new. What’s the word?”

“All bad.”

“How bad?”

“You’re looking at eight to fifteen thousand layoffs, more likely the latter. In the month before Christmas. As soon as possible.”

“It can’t be pushed back after the first of the year?”

“Not if Price Heaven expects to survive. Which it shouldn’t, because even with the layoffs, they’re going to be on very shaky ground.”

“How exposed are we?”

“We’ve loaned them a total of two and a half billion dollars—not too bad, but not chump change, either.”

“How much of it do we lose if Price Heaven goes West?”

“Pretty much all of it. Oh, we do have some secured loans in the bunch, but not nearly enough. We’ve bought into way too much of their paper. I told you last July—”