Union Atlantic (29 page)

“Where are you?”

“The Ritz.”

“Oh, my God. You’re with him! That is
so
hot. I mean I should probably be worrying about you as a friend or whatever, but that guy is smokin’. It’s so much easier for you guys. The boys in my art history class don’t even look at me they’re so busy checking each other out. They were comparing underwear brands yesterday. But what’s with the hotel?”

“He’s negotiating some kind of deal. They stay here all night.”

“And he asked you to come with him?”

Nate hesitated, not wanting to disappoint Emily by upending the image behind her playful envy. Besides, what sense could he make of his circumstance if it didn’t conform in part, at least, to other people’s more ordinary arrangements? How could he explain to her that despite all he and Doug had done they had never actually kissed?

“Do you miss Jason?”

“That drooling pothead? Maybe. I did meet this one guy in Intro Psych. He’s German, so at least he knows how to have a conversation. I don’t know. This English professor last week, he handed out the syllabus and told us we’d be reading nineteenth-century novels with heroes and heroines our age or not much older, and he asked if we thought our feelings were important enough to write books about. So this one kid said, how could his feelings matter if they didn’t have any consequences, like marriage or kids or your reputation? Of course, he looked like he was on meds, but it riled my roommate up enough to insist our feelings about politics mattered. Which I sort of agree with. But who wants to read a novel about some vegetarian’s journey to an antiwar stance?”

“Doesn’t it depend on how intense they are?” Nate asked, a little jealous that Emily got to spend her time considering such things.

“What do you mean?”

“Your feelings. I mean if they’re intense enough, they have consequences, right?”

“You’re really gone on this guy, aren’t you?”

Just then he heard a knocking at the door. “I gotta go,” he said. “He’s back.”

“Okay, lover boy. Take care of yourself.”

When Nate opened the door he was dumbfounded by the sight of Mr. Holland. For a moment the two of them beheld each other in bewildered silence.

“Nate. Hi there. This is Doug Fanning’s room, isn’t it?”

“Yeah,” he said, unable to conceive of any reason he would be staying at the Ritz-Carlton on his own dime.

Stepping past Nate, Mr. Holland entered the room, looking about with a befuddled expression, which fell away as he took in the unmade
bed and the clothes on the chairs and Nate’s knapsack lying on the floor.

Unlike Mrs. Holland, who rarely managed to hide her aggression toward Jason’s friends, Mr. Holland had always greeted them warmly. He seemed cheered by the idea that his son had friends at all, as inattentive parents often were, relieved by some vague notion of their child’s social success. He was friendly in a general way. But he suffered from no lack of focus now.

“Is Jason with you? Is he in the hotel?”

Nate realized he was being offered an escape route. If he could rope Jason into the story somehow and then get to him before his father did, he might save himself. But he couldn’t put the pieces together quickly enough.

“Actually … I know Mr. Fanning. From Finden.”

“From Finden? I see.”

He glanced at his watch, as if recalculating the odds on a particularly complicated bet. Nate understood that he wouldn’t be asked to explain himself any further, and that this was probably a bad thing. “Well,” Mr. Holland said, “I need to see Doug. So if he drops by, maybe you could tell him I’m downstairs.”

He was already back through the door when he turned, as if halted by the belated awareness that their acquaintance required some parting pleasantry. “Anyhow,” he said, “say hello to your parents for me.”

A
S THE CAR
came to a stop in front of the hotel, Doug’s phone rang.

“Are you in the building yet?” Holland asked.

“Yeah, I’m here. Are we closing the deal with Taconic?”

There was a pause and it sounded as if Jeffrey were holding his hand over the receiver. “So, yeah,” he said. “Good that you’re here. Just sit tight, another forty-five minutes, an hour maybe. I just have to go over a few more things with the lawyers and then we’ll all meet in the ballroom.”

“What’s going on?”

“Nothing. The deal’s fine. I just want you close at the end, that’s all.”

A liveried bellhop opened the car door and Doug passed through the revolving glass into the lobby. Beyond the elevator bank, to the right of the front desk, two heavyset white guys in navy-blue wind-breakers were talking quietly to the hotel manager. They had wires in their ears and walkie-talkies on their belts. They weren’t secret service and they didn’t look private. FBI, maybe. Definitely federal.

Doug considered walking back onto the sidewalk and hailing a cab. But if they were here for him, how far would he get? Not today or tomorrow, but next week or next month? He would need time to arrange things, on his terms.

As soon as he entered the room upstairs, Nate came up off the bed, all eagerness and alarm.

“I kept trying your phone,” he said. “I didn’t know where you were.”

Doug tossed his briefcase on the couch and crossed to the window. Nothing unusual down on the street. No squad cars or agents. He regretted now having let Nate come here but when he’d told him he would be staying in the city for a while, he’d practically begged. He had arrived with a suitcase and a bag of books, as if they were on vacation together.

As a practical matter, Nate had been expendable as soon as he’d delivered
the files back in July. And yet in the months since they had spent as much time together as ever. Doug had kept telling himself that getting off helped him sleep. That Nate was just experimenting, and he was just killing time. But the more he used the boy’s body, the more frustrated he’d become.

“You shouldn’t be here,” he said.

“Why? Is something the matter?”

The collar of his faded blue polo was tucked under on one side and his hair, as usual, was a mess.

“What did you do?” Doug said, sliding his thumb down Nate’s smooth cheek. “Shave?”

“Yeah. You think I’m too scruffy. It’s my Ritz-Carlton look.”

He took hold of Doug’s hand and guided it down to his hip. “You look good in that suit,” he said, stepping in close, their faces just a few inches apart.

His gall rising, Doug turned Nate around and pushed him forward onto the bed.

“After this,” he said, “you’re leaving. You understand?”

When Nate had removed his shirt and jeans, he rolled onto his back.

“What are you doing?”

“I never get to look at you,” Nate said.

Doug grabbed him by the backs of the knees and pressed his thighs to his chest, bending him open. Holding him down like that, he fiddled with his own belt and trousers, amazed and repulsed by the endlessness of the boy’s need. He spit in his hand and entered him with a single jab. Nate winced, his eyes watering, but Doug kept going. This was the thing—why he had kept him around. To tackle a male body, one like his own boyish self, to push it and get at it, his dick and this fucking just a means to the end. To fuck weakness, to pummel it.

Even as he seemed about to cry, Nate kept his eyes open, staring straight at him. Doug reached his hand down to cover the eyes, but with surprising force Nate peeled the hand back and kept looking. It was unbearable. He jabbed harder, pushing air from Nate’s lungs, forcing him to gasp for breath. And still he wouldn’t look away. A surge of nausea rose up through Doug’s body as he hovered over him, threatening to drain all his energy, making him wish for a moment that those eyes were the barrels of guns that would finish him here and now. But time kept on and he was sweating and Nate came on his chest and stomach and Doug emptied himself into him and pulled out. And then Nate, spread-eagled on the bed, arms out to the sides, looked once again as he had before, like a lamed foal awaiting its owner’s merciful bullet.

Doug wiped himself off and pulled his trousers up, watching Nate rise from the bed and disappear into the bathroom. The ringing of the shower water blended with the ringing of his phone, which he ignored.

Nate was quiet when he returned, dressing with his back to Doug, who flipped on the TV in search of news.

A few minutes later, from over his shoulder, Doug heard him say, “I got you something.”

“What do you mean?”

“A present.”

“What for?”

“I don’t know. I felt like it.” Coming around to Doug’s side, he handed him a small wrapped box. Doug removed the gold ribbon and tore away the paper. Inside the case was a pair of black-and-silver cuff links.

“You’ve got all those cuff shirts. But you always wear the same links.”

Doug closed the case and put it aside.

“This game,” he said, “it’s over.”

“It’s not a game to me.”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about. You’re a kid. You think that what you feel matters.”

“It does.”

“I’m doing you a favor. You can’t see it now, but I am. You want to be defenseless all your life? You want to be the chump? You like sleeping with guys—fine. But take your heart off your fucking sleeve.”

Standing up, Doug grabbed his jacket and briefcase from the couch and walked out of the room, slamming the door behind him.

At the entrance to the ballroom, a security guard asked him for ID.

“You’re not press, right? There’s no press allowed.”

Teams of lawyers were arrayed around an enormous oblong table, their seconds seated behind them like congressional aides. The young associates whispered in their bosses’ ears, as a guy in suspenders at the head of the table read aloud from a paragraph of the contract projected on a screen behind him.

Save for occasional naps on their hotel beds, the lawyers had been in this room for three days straight, fighting over the details of the acquisition, down to the last indemnification.

At a desk in the far corner of the room, Holland’s secretary, Martha, was typing furiously on her laptop.

“Where’s Jeffrey?” he asked her.

“Doug,” she said, seemingly alarmed by his appearance. She pointed to her right. “It’s the second door down. Good luck.”

Another security guard, this one a man Doug recognized from the office, opened the door for him and he entered the windowless
antechamber. The two men from the lobby, still wearing their blue windbreakers, sat on folding metal chairs. They stood as he entered; he heard the door close behind him.

“Douglas Fanning?” the older of the two asked, as his partner removed a pair of handcuffs from his belt.

“Yeah,” Doug said. “That’s me.”

Chapter 17

Across from Henry, Holland rested his elbows on the table and leaned forward, interlacing his meaty fingers, the extra flesh of his neck pinched by his shirt collar.

“First guy I ever worked for,” he said, “could rattle off every loan on his book, quote you the rate, and tell you who was past due, all without so much as glancing at a balance sheet. Sean Hickey. Manager for Hartford Savings. He told me to forget whatever they’d taught me and learn to read a man’s face. That was the training. To sit beside him in meetings with the local entrepreneurs and give him my thumbs-up or thumbs-down. I picked the ones with the flash—the talkers. He rejected every one of them. You’re thinking short, he’d say. You want steady. All that seems like a hundred years ago. It’s a trader’s game now, a pure trader’s game.”

The Bierstadt canvas hanging on the wall behind Union Atlantic’s chairman and CEO depicted an untouched Yosemite in early fall or late spring, the verdant grass and mountain lake beneath the peaks
struck by columns of sun descending from a gap in the clouds. Half Dome was capped with snow melting into falls that ran off the lower cliffs, the fine mist emanating from the cascades of water giving the painter away for the Romantic he was, that mystical, German idealism struck here in a grander key on the subject of the American West.

Thirty-eight million, Henry thought. That’s what Holland had earned last year. And if the board forced him out, he’d collect twice that.

Through the doorway into the private dining room, a waiter in a black suit and tie approached, a plate in each hand.

“Cracked native lobster tails, gentlemen, served with poached organic eggs, papaya salsa, and Old Bay hollandaise sauce. Fresh ground pepper with your breakfast, sir?”

“No, thank you,” Henry replied, unfurling his napkin.

“I appreciate you coming here this morning,” Holland said. “I don’t know if I ever told you, but I voted for you back when I was at Chase, when I was on your board. We were glad to have you for the job.”

Henry had known as much. Holland would have preferred the appointment of a colleague from the private sector, someone more instinctively friendly to the industry’s interests. But once others had coalesced around Henry, he’d taken a friendly approach.

“You worry in the right way,” he said. “Which is important.”

If the FBI and the U.S. attorney’s office had had their druthers, they would have staked out Union Atlantic for months in order to build their case all the way up to Holland. But given the size of the problem, Henry hadn’t been able to wait. He had come through the front door, as it were, only forty-eight hours ago, and straightaway Holland had offered Fanning and his trader up on a platter. The bank had been running its own internal investigation, he claimed, which
showed Fanning involved in rogue activity and attempts to cover his tracks. Given that Holland’s lawyers were themselves former federal prosecutors, former banking regulators, and former IRS commissioners, he knew the drill well enough: hide nothing, or at least appear to hide nothing.

In the months and years ahead, at a cost of millions, the matter of Holland’s own culpability would be the subject of multiple lawsuits, civil and criminal, with teams of his attorneys vetting every discovery request of every party, the lives of associates in some corporate firm devoted to nothing else, billing thousands of hours as they went, as the perfectly straightforward question of what he had known and when was fed into the numbing machinery of modern litigation, there to be digested at a sloth’s pace. Young lawyers would buy condominiums or town houses with their bonus checks, employing architects and builders and decorators who would, in turn, spend a little more themselves on cars or vacations or flat-screen TVs, though that particular trickle from the economy of distress would barely register against the job losses bound to come with the restructuring of Union Atlantic Group.