Now he looked out at the early morning downtown New York traffic and felt almost infinitely tired. He hated staying overnight in Philadelphia in the middle of the work week. He hated the morning commute, even on the Amtrak express. He hated not being able to get to his own things in his own closet in the only place he’d ever called home without ambiguity, the apartment he kept on Riverside Drive that had exactly one bedroom, no room for guests, no room for family, no room for expansion. Mostly, he hated the feeling of disorientation it gave him, so that his timing was off for the rest of the day. Maybe that was his problem. Some part of him was back there with Charlotte dying in her own driveway and Marianne shrieking like a gored pig and the police sirens in the distance, all of it seeming so familiar that he thought he would never be able to think of Tony’s place again without those sirens. He was, he decided, going slowly crazy. He looked up and down the street, which still seemed tense and cramped to him in the wake of September 11. He went into the building and across the high-ceilinged prewar lobby and into the ornate elevator. There were too many people in the halls, rushing in late to work, rushing around trying to get set up for the day. He rode the elevator to the twenty-fifth floor and got out again. He went down the hall to his own office and put his attaché case on his desk. He seemed to be the first one here besides the secretaries. He usually was. The secretaries were all hushed and agitated, and he didn’t blame them.
He unbuttoned his coat, but didn’t take it off. He walked over to the wall of windows and looked out on the financial district. He’d always liked this view. He still liked it, in spite of the fact that it had been … altered … somewhat in the destruction last year. He heard the door open behind him but didn’t turn around to see who it was.
“I saw you come in,” Adele said. “You didn’t have to come in. God, David, we’d all have understood if you’d wanted to take a day off.”
“I’ve still got Price Heaven up the wazoo,” he said. The view was altered, but not altered enough, that was the problem. He couldn’t see enough. “Get a coat on and come for a walk with me. Just for ten minutes.”
“A walk? Where are we going? The office just opened—”
“There are other people to handle the phones. You don’t do much of that anyway. Come take a walk with me. I want to go see it.”
“See what?”
“Ground Zero.”
“Good God, David, why?”
“I haven’t seen it yet, did you know that? Everybody else has been over there to take a look, but I never have. On the day it happened, the first I knew that there was something going on was when the windows blew out. All these windows. They just popped, suddenly. I was sitting at my desk going over the risk cost figures for the loan to the government of Peru, and suddenly snap snap snap. It was the oddest thing.”
“I think you should have stayed home,” Adele said. “I don’t think you’ve got your head on straight this morning. I know you didn’t like her much, none of us did, but that doesn’t mean you aren’t affected by the way she died. You knew her a long time.”
“Do you know Tony’s sister, Annie Ross?”
“Mrs. Wyler? I’ve met her a few times, why?”
“She thinks I’m turning on, tuning in, and about to drop out. She thinks I’m emotionally detached from banking.”
“Are you?”
“No. At least I don’t think so. At least, it’s not the banking. I know how this looks to people, you know. I hear all the jokes on Leno. Here we are, the heartless bank, making Price Heaven fire six thousand people right before Christmas. And I’ll admit, the timing is not stellar. If it were up to me, the physical year would end on August thirty-first and then these layoffs wouldn’t always coincide with the holidays, but Adele, the thing is, they’d still happen. They’d have to happen. And getting that damned fool CEO of theirs to take a cut in salary and bonuses wouldn’t keep a single extra person on the job.”
“I thought the idea was to get that damned fool CEO of theirs to resign.”
“It is. We’re going in on that today. But do you know what you get when you don’t have people like me, people like Tony, people like the bank—when you don’t have us coming in and forcing these things? Everything just jogs along getting worse until the business collapses completely. Or they get themselves a government bailout and then it jogs along even after it’s dead, and the money that could have been used to put life into a new and viable enterprise isn’t available, because we’re putting it into keeping a gigantic dinosaur alive and for what? For sentiment? It’s not even good sentiment. The collapse is going to come, no matter what. Staving it off just makes the mess bigger when it’s over.”