He turned first left, then right, then left again, reaching each intersection at increasing speed, feeling more and more reluctant to slow down for pedestrians or traffic. Now that he’d decided to do this, he wanted to get it done. He saw only one homeless man on his way. The man was young and completely a mess. He was filthy. His trousers were literally in rags, in strips that hung down from his knees like abstract expressionist curtains. In spite of the wind and the cold and the time of day, he had his member out, waving in the wind. He was pissing on the tires of every car parked at the curb.
This is the truth, Ray Dean told himself. I am not able to solve the homeless problem. Nobody is able to solve the homeless problem. The homeless are not a problem. They are a fact of life.
He made one more turn, and then there it was, the one building in Philadelphia he was usually careful to avoid: the Markwell Ballard Bank. It was not the kind of bank people used to open checking accounts or savings accounts or nip into to get a little money. It had no tellers, no customer lines, no little bank of deposit slips next to the door. In fact, the door wasn’t a commercial door, open to the public. It was locked, and to get in you had to ring a bell and be admitted by a doorman.
Ray Dean rang the bell. The doorman peered out the plate glass of the window and then opened up.
“Mr. Aldy,” he said. “It’s been a long time. I hope you’re doing well.”
“I’m doing fine, Fitz. Is Cameron up there waiting for me?”
“Mr. Reed has been in his office for an hour,” Fitz said. “Everybody still hopes you’ll come into the business, you do know that, don’t you? We’re all waiting for you.”
“If you go on waiting, you’ll get like Rip Van Winkle,” Ray Dean said. “I’ll go on up. I hope you have an unexciting day.”
“Every day is unexciting except the ones where the president comes to visit or the protestors camp out on the street, but there isn’t going to be that kind of thing today. I bought myself pepper spray if the protestors come back.”
Ray Dean half ran to the stairs and started up, four flights, he didn’t care. He really was restless today. He made it up all three flights in record time, and without becoming breathless. All that running he did was obviously paying off. He went through the fire doors into the fourth-floor lobby and saw Cameron Reed pacing back and forth in front of the receptionist’s desk, as if he had nothing at all else to do. The receptionist didn’t look pleased.
“Aldy,” Cameron said. “I dropped everything. What’s the emergency?”
Ray Dean had half a mind to say “murder” right here where everybody could hear it, but he didn’t. He knew what Cameron was really worried about.
“It’s just something I need,” he said, edging Cameron toward his office door. “Let’s go into your office and be private. Really private. Turn off the intercom.”
“Margaret knows everything, Aldy, you know that. I don’t keep anything from Margaret.”
“Turn off the intercom,” Ray Dean said again. “I mean it, Cameron, this is private.”
Cameron looked anything but pleased, but Ray Dean hadn’t expected him to be pleased, so he didn’t worry about it. They went into the office and shut the door behind them. Cameron went over to the bank of buttons on his desk and flipped one up. He told Margaret that he was going to be “off-line” for a few minutes. Then he flipped the switch the other way again.
“The other one, too,” Ray Dean said.
“I don’t know—”
”—The other one too,” Ray Dean insisted. “Come on, Cam, don’t do this. I grew up in offices like this. Granted, not the Philadelphia ones, but they’re all alike. My father is a paranoid nutcase.”
“Your father is a great man.”
“The two things aren’t mutually exclusive. Flip off the other one.” Cameron looked away for a long moment, then pulled out a drawer and fiddled with another set of buttons.
“Of course,” Ray Dean said, “I don’t put it past the old lunatic to have had this whole place bugged like the Moscow embassy, but that will have to do in the way of precautions. Let me ease your mind and tell you that I still have no interest in coming into the family business. You’re welcome to be heir apparent to my father’s endless obsession with all things financial, except that I really appreciate it when you send me the dividend checks. Okay?”
Cameron visibly relaxed. “Okay,” he said.
“It should have occurred to you that if I’d changed my mind about that, I’d have talked to my father first. We do talk, you know. We talk a lot. If he gets bored, don’t be surprised if he decides to solve the homeless problem all by his own self. I want you to do something for me. I want you to run a financial check. Not the kind the credit card companies run before they give somebody a card; a real one. The kind you’d give to somebody the bank was thinking of loaning a couple of hundred million dollars.”