The Dismal Science (10 page)

           
Love, Papi

He clicked
send
.

Then he got up and looked at the caller ID:
Unidentified Number
. He grabbed his coat and went out for a brisk walk through the neighborhood—pondering the chaos he'd wrought, turning it over and looking at it from different angles, searching for a way to comprehend it.

He was home again, a little after nine, when the woman from human resources called.

The conversation was mercifully straightforward. After some formalities, she said: “I'm sure you're not surprised, but I wanted to offer you early retirement.”

“Right, yes, that makes sense,” he said.

“We were hoping you'd be willing to accept a severance of two years full salary with most of the same benefits.”

“You—” he started, but stopped because he was shocked by the generosity of the offer. He withheld for a moment. If it seemed too good to be true, it was. “I'm wondering about the state of my pension.”

“Nothing has changed with your pension. You're retiring early. You'll receive two years of pay and benefits as if you were
an employee. In twenty-four months, you receive the package that you would have received had you retired then.”

This still didn't compute. “What do you want from me?” he said.

“We would also like you to sign an agreement that clarifies the scope and amplifies the terms of your existing nondisclosure agreement.”

He snorted and said, “I will not sign a gag clause.”

“I know, which is why we're not proposing that. You're free to speak or write about the Bank, as you please, but there will be limitations on what you're able to discuss. Basically, you'll be prevented from discussing specifics. I can fax over the agreement. We need you to avoid speaking to any more press until you've seen the contract. If you don't agree, the entire package is void, and you'll be fired.”

He was glad that he'd cut off that interview with the
Financial Times
. “I don't have a fax machine,” he said.

“We'll messenger it over. You'll have it by noon. Call me once you've read it. The deadline is five o'clock today. In the meantime, don't say anything to the press.”

When Leonora called fifteen minutes later, she was rapturous, beginning: “Oh my fucking God, Dad, what did you do?!” He hadn't heard her sound so pleased with him in years. In fact, he couldn't remember a time that she'd sounded so pleased with him.

He laughed and said, “I made some enemies.”

“Fuuuuuuck!” she drawled and then laughed, before saying, “Wow, Dad, you are a badass! Wow.
Wow
. Really, I can't believe you.” This almost made the whole thing worthwhile.

“I just couldn't—I couldn't let him be like that,” he said, ebullient and struggling with his false modesty.

She groaned in the way she did when she was impressed by something she had heard from one of her friends. “Jesus,” she said again. And then a certain stiltedness entered the proceedings, he could feel it, even in the silence—there was a stilted something, maybe just because she was so excited, but what did this burst of glee say about how she'd felt before? She exhaled. She laughed, sort of, and he sort of laughed too, but the moment was spoiling quickly from something that he couldn't quite see. Really, he didn't think it was funny at all, and maybe she knew that, maybe that's why her joy was failing so quickly. Still, as misinterpretations went, this was one he was prepared to accept.

“I should go,” he said.

“I love you,” she said.

“I love you, too,” he said and then hung up before it got any worse.

The waves of shame came and went, interspersed by successful and semisuccessful campaigns to assure himself that he'd done an honorable thing for Bolivia, for the Bank, a thing that would, in the long run, also benefit his life enormously. He'd obliterated one version of his life, yes, one that had endured for
a long time, yes, but in so doing had created space for something else. Something better than his previous occupation. He paced, didn't answer the phone. He forced himself to stop reading the e-mails, reading the comments on the article. At the crescendo of one particularly bad wave of shame, he found himself groaning aloud, his heart racing, while the phone rang and rang and rang.

Once it arrived, he read the agreement through as carefully as he was able, but his mind was addled by the panic and he found it too opaque to comprehend, so he called Eleanor Griffin, a lawyer who'd been close with Cristina—one of the few friends of hers he'd genuinely liked—and asked if he could drive it over to her office for a rush appraisal.

Vincenzo explained the circumstances, broadly, and then Eleanor glanced through and told him that his interpretation of the document seemed to be correct. He could not speak or write about any specific individuals or particular conversations that he had held in his professional capacity, but was free to talk generally about his impressions of the Bank. There could be no tell-all memoir, but there could, in theory, be a lecture tour about the Bank's rotten structures, she said. Eleanor was short, her head surmounted by a gigantic black mass of curls, which didn't add height so much as draw a black mark over her shortness; her skin was waxy and pure white—she was a bit bloated from forever sitting in large comfortable leather chairs and peering at documents on her colossal desk. Despite her deathly appearance, she
was a gloriously uncensored person, mordant and gaffe-prone, but smart enough to make it all quite winning, at least to Vincenzo's tastes. The kind of person who could be counted on to blurt out an expletive far too loudly during a funeral, which is exactly what she did during the service for Cristina. And while she'd seemed mortified at the time, Vincenzo had always wanted to thank her and assure her that it was hilarious, really, even if he hadn't found it in himself to laugh about it at the time.

With two hours left before the contract was void, Eleanor let him use the Wi-Fi in her office. His laptop gaping up at him, he checked his e-mail one last time, just in case—saw, with a considerable dollop of dread, that there were thirty-seven new messages. None of the messages, at a glance, looked relevant to the issue at hand, so, with an hour and forty minutes left, he called up the article online and found that there were 209 comments. He groaned.

“You good?” Eleanor said.

“Yes,” he said initially. “Not really,” he then admitted. He clapped his laptop shut and stuffed it in its nylon carrying case.

“You'll let me know if I can do anything else.”

He kissed Eleanor on her baby-soft cheek before hurrying out to the elevator.

Arriving at the World Bank headquarters, he parked in his spot on the red level and marched briskly over to the elevator. In the blurry brass doors, he could see how bizarrely his yellow trousers clashed with his sweatshirt and his coat, and he almost managed to feel embarrassed about that, too.

Teresa, the human resources woman he'd talked to earlier, stood when he entered. “Thank you for coming,” she said wearily, her thin-fingered hand extended. She had frosty blue eyes, long flaxen hair, and a feline languor in her movements. A tremendous scar ran the length of her jaw, as if to preemptively quash any doubts about her battle-readiness.

She offered him a seat, but he just pulled the signed document out from his bag and extended it to her.

“Thank you,” she said and sat down. She put the document on her desk and he stood there while she flipped through the boilerplate, scanning for addendums, he guessed. Then, seeing his signature on the last page, she looked up at him, said, “Well—we appreciate your understanding.”

She signed, in duplicate, and gave him one copy.

Then she stood up and they shook hands again. He was about to leave when she said, “We'll need your badge, actually.”

“Oh—of course.” He unclipped it from his breast pocket and handed it over.

She smiled a little drowsily, smugly, blinking too slowly, and looking at her grinning face, lovely as it was maimed, he wanted to punch her out.

“Fuck you,” he blurted, incapable of stopping himself.

She was taken aback, at first, and then her expression returned to where it was before as she apprehended, no doubt, that this was just who he was: it was why he'd done what he'd done. And it all made sense to her now, which only made him hate her more. She shook her head and did one of those oily smiles where the sides of her mouth were downturned, like a frown. She was enjoying this, in a way.

“No really, fuck you,” he said again.

She appeared startled, and he could see that he'd disrupted her day, at last. “Uh—” she stammered.

He shook his head, at once satisfied and sick with himself, then turned and left.