The Angel Esmeralda Part 15

"You know his brother's name. Howard Bradway."

"One of the hedge-fund musketeers," he said.

Norman was searching his memory for visual confirmation. I pictured what he was picturing. He was picturing my uncle Howie, a large ruddy man, barechested, in aviator gla.s.ses, with a miniature poodle huddled in the crook of his arm. A fairly famous image.

"A family tradition. Is that it?" he said. "Different companies, different cities, different time frames."

"They believed in right and wrong. The right and wrong of the markets, the portfolios, the insider information."

"Then it was your turn to join the business. Did you know what you were doing?"

"I was defining myself. That's what my father said. He said people who have to define themselves belong in the dictionary."

"Because you strike me as somebody who doesn't always know what he's doing."

"I pretty much knew. I definitely knew."

I could hear Norman unraveling the improvised cellophane wrap on his little jar of fig spread and then using his finger to rub the stuff across a saltine cracker. On visitors' days his lawyer smuggled a jar of Dalmatian fig spread into the camp, minus the metal cap. Norman said he liked the name, Dalmatia, Dalmatian, the Balkan history, the Adriatic, the large spotted dog. He liked the idea of having food of that particular name and place, all natural ingredients, and eating it on a standard cafeteria cracker, undercover, a couple of times a week.

He said that his lawyer was a woman and that she concealed the fig spread somewhere on her body. This was a throwaway line, delivered in a monotone and not intended to be believed.

"What's your philosophy of money?"

"I don't have one," I said.

"There was the year I made a s.h.i.tpile of money. One year in particular. We could be talking, total, easy nine figures. I could feel it adding years to my life. Money makes you live longer. It seeps into the bloodstream, into the veins and capillaries. I talked to my primary-care physician about this. He said he had an inkling I could be right."

"What about the art on your walls? Make you live longer?"

"I don't know about the art. Good question, the art."

"People say great art is immortal. I say there's something mortal in it. It carries a glimpse of death."

"All those gorgeous paintings, the shapes and colors. All those dead painters. I don't know," he said.

He lifted his hand toward my bunk, up and around, with a splotch of fig preserves on half a cracker. I declined, but thanks. I heard him chewing the cracker and sinking into the sheets. Then I lay waiting for the final remarks of the day.

"She's talking directly to you. You realize this, using the girls."

"I don't think so, not even remotely."

"In other words this never occurred to you."

"Everything occurs to me. Some things I reject."

"What's her name?"

"Sara Ma.s.sey."

"Good and direct. I see her as a strong woman with roots going back a long way. Principles, convictions. Getting revenge for your illegal activities, for the fact you got caught, maybe for joining your father's business in the first place."

"How smart I am not to know this. What grief it spares me."

"This sneaky-pretty woman in your words. She's reminding you what you did. She's talking to you. Abu Dhabi, Abu Dhabi. Hang Seng, Hong Kong."

All around us, entombed in cubicles, suspended in time, reliably muted now, men with dental issues, medical issues, marital issues, dietary demands, psychic frailties, sleep-breathing men, the nightly drone of oil-tax schemes, tax-shelter schemes, corporate espionage, corporate bribery, false testimony, medicare fraud, inheritance fraud, real estate fraud, wire fraud, fraud and conspiracy.

They started arriving early, men crowding the common room, some carrying extra folding chairs, snapping them open. There were others standing in the side aisles, a spillover of inmates, guards, kitchen staff, camp officials. I'd managed to squeeze into the fourth row, slightly off-center. The sense of event, news in high clamor, all the convergences of emotional global forces bringing us here in a wave of complex expectation.

A cl.u.s.ter of rain-swept blossoms was fixed to one of the high windows. Spring, more or less, late this year.

There were four common rooms, one for each dorm, and I was certain that all were packed, inmates and others collected in some odd harmonic, listening to children talk about economic collapse.

Here, as time approached, Feliks Zuber rose briefly from his seat up front, raising a weary hand to quiet the settling crowd.

I noticed at once that the girls wore matching jackets. This was new. The picture was sharper and steadier, in color. Then I realized they were seated at a long desk, a news desk, not an ordinary table. Finally the scripts-there were no scripts. They were using a teleprompter, delivering lines at fairly high speed with occasional tactical pauses, well placed.

"Greece is selling bonds, raising euros."

"Markets are calming."

"Greece is moving toward a new austerity."

"Immediate pressure is relieved."

"Greece and Germany are talking."

"Votes of confidence. Calls for patience."

"Greece is ready to restore trust."

"Aid package of forty billion dollars."

"How do they say thank you in Greek?"

"Efharisto."

"Say it again, slowly."

"F. Harry Stowe."

"F. Harry Stowe."

They exchanged a fist-b.u.mp, deadpan, without looking at each other.

"The worst may be over."

"Or the worst is yet to come."

"Do we know if the Greek bailout will do what it is designed to do?"

"Or will it do just the opposite?"

"What exactly is the opposite?"

"Think about markets elsewhere."

"Is anyone looking at Portugal?"

"Everyone's looking at Portugal."

"High debt, low growth."

"Borrow, borrow, borrow."

"Euro, euro, euro."

"Ireland has a problem. Iceland has a problem."

"Have we thought about the British pound?"

"The life and death of the British pound."

"The pound is not the euro."

"Britain is not Greece."

"But is the pound showing signs of cracking? Will the euro follow? Is the dollar far behind?"

"There is talk about China."

"Is there trouble in China?"

"Is there a bubble in China?"

"What is the Chinese currency called?"

"Latvia has the lat."

"Tonga has the ponga."

"China has the rebimbi."

"The rebimbo."

"China has the rebobo."

"The rebubu."

"What happens next?"

"It already happened."

"Does anyone remember?"

"Market plunges one thousand points in an eighth of a second."

"A tenth of a second."

"Faster and faster, lower and lower."

"A twentieth of a second."

"Screens glow and vibrate, phones jump off walls."

"A hundredth of a second. A thousandth of a second."

"Not real, unreal, surreal."

"Who is doing this? Where is it coming from? Where is it going?"

"It happened in Chicago."

"It happened in Kansas."

"It's a movie, it's a song."

I could feel the mood in the room, a pressing intensity, a need for something more, something stronger. I remained detached, watching the girls, wondering about their mother, what she had in mind, where she was leading us.

Laurie said softly, in a lilting voice: "Who do we trust? Where do we turn? How do we ever get to sleep?"

Kate said briskly, "Can computer technology keep up with computerized trading? Will long-term doubts yield to short-term doubts?"

"What is a fat-finger trade? What is a naked short sale?"

"How many trillions of dollars pledged to bleeding euro economies?"

"How many zeros is a trillion?"

"How many meetings deep in the night?"

"Why does the crisis keep getting worse?"

"Brazil, Korea, j.a.pan, Wherever."

"What are they doing and where are they doing it?"

"They're on strike again in Greece."