Read Online Union Atlantic by Adam Haslett - Free Book Online Page B

each day. Simply put, Henry Graves was in charge of the biggest pumping station in the plumbing of global finance. His most vital function was to keep money moving. To do it quickly. And, above all, to do it quietly.
    Which meant making sure a situation didn’t become a crisis. Taconic’s problems, small as they were in the scheme of things, couldn’t be allowed to spread. The bank’s ultimate failure, if that’s what it came to, would pose little systemic risk. In receivership, it would be broken up and sold. But in the short run, a nonpayment of this size could cause trouble for Taconic’s creditors. A resolution, however temporary, was needed before the morning bell.
    “Who do you owe the money to? Who’s your counterparty?”
    “Union Atlantic.”
    Henry’s thought was one of relief. At least they were dealing with a known quantity, and a bank under his supervision. Union Atlantic meant Jeffrey Holland. A bit glib, a bit of a showman. In it for the sport of the deal. Not Henry’s favorite banker, but he could be reasoned with. He and his wife, Glenda, had showed up at the same hotel inBermuda where Henry had taken Betsy just after she’d gotten sick. The four of them had eaten dinner together out on the terrace one evening. They’d sent a huge arrangement of flowers to the funeral.
    The other line started to ring and he told Cannistro to hold.
    “Did that jackass get a hold of you yet? What an idiot, huh? An upstate strip-mall bank betting on Chávez! Did you get a load of that? What a goddamn mess.”
    Sid Brenner, head of payment systems. The master plumber, as they called him, the man with his fingers on the dials. You could count on two hands the number of people capable of programming the network that wired that trillion a day through the market. Most of them worked at IBM. Sid had been with the Fed thirty-five years, starting just a few months before Henry. Born in Crown Heights, he lived there still—three kids, one an officer in the Israeli army, the other two professors. Any day of the week he could have walked down the Street and made five times what the Fed paid him, but he never had.
    “We’ve got time,” Henry said, a half-truth they would let pass between them. “I’ll get on the phone. We’ll work it through.”
    “None of my business, but if you give these jerks a free ride, I’ll wring your neck. They should be lucky to get a loan at eight percent.”
    “I’ll talk to Holland. Did everything else settle?”
    “Yeah, just a gaping hole in Taconic’s reserve account.”
    “What’s your sense of who else knows at this point?”
    “About the swap in particular? Not so many. That they’ve been scrambling for money for eight hours? Not exactly a secret.”
    Henry woke his secretary, Helen, at home and asked her to set up the calls with Holland and Taconic’s management, as soon as the car reached them.
    As they were about to hang up, she asked, “Are you all right?”
    He crossed the room and pulled the curtains aside. Through theglass he could see down to the beach, where the lights from the hotel reached the tranquil water’s edge. He slid the door open and stepped onto the balcony, the night air heavy with moisture.
    Like Sid, Helen had been at the Fed for decades, starting out as Henry’s assistant in the counsel’s office and moving with him to the presidency. When they were together, priorities sorted themselves in the space between them with little more than a glance or nod. She could interpret the nuance of a bank officer’s evasions as readily as the nervous chatter of some freshman analyst. He disliked involving her in personal matters but ever since Betsy had died four years ago, he’d found it impossible to meet his own standard of segregating entirely work and private life.
    “Did my sister call?”
    “No. There’s been no word.”
    He rested his forearms on the railing, feeling in the thickness of his head the pitched forward slowness of jet lag. The flight