Union Atlantic Page 0,51

a thought. The fact is, he was shot for money. For paper bills. That's what he died for. It's not what lived in the better parts of his soul, but it's what killed him. I'm sorry to say all this, I really am, because Carson was a beautiful young man and his heart was in the right place most of the time, but for those of us who are planning to go on, and I'll tell you ladies and gentlemen, I am one of them, we can't pretend and I don't think the Lord would want us to.

"The other thing I guess people always say is that a person is up in Heaven and that they're in a better place now, and I suppose that much I agree with. Carson is in heaven, and it's surely better than what we have down here. God bless his mother and his sister and may he rest in peace." Unclasping her hands, she stepped off the stage and Evelyn lifted her mother's bent form high enough to let her aunt pass back along the row to her seat.

The minister, taken aback by the tone and brevity of the family remarks, assumed his place again before the coffin and, wearing his best somber expression, led the congregation in a subdued rendition of "All to Jesus I Surrender."

THE FOLLOWING DAY, Evelyn returned to work. She had been employed at Atlantic Securities for eight years and after three promotions was now chief settlements administrator with her own office, albeit without a window. Her job, part of the firm's back-office operation, was to execute the delivery and receipt of assets. In order to take effect, each order that a trader shouted into a trading pit or placed with a dealer had eventually to move through the more orderly process of settlement - the actual transfer of money and instruments from one institution to another. This took place anywhere from hours to months after the initial promises had been made. Evelyn didn't make the decisions that led to the transfers, and she bore no responsibility for the loss or gain they represented, but without her approval no money changed hands.

Her first morning back, she concentrated as best she could on her screen, drawing her eyes over the initials of counterparties and clearinghouses, tapping in payment codes, her hands moving over the keypad with unthinking speed, toggling in and out of the software's fifty-odd forms. She found that her mind was able to float as she went, some well-grooved path in her brain slipping into the circle of automation. And she was thankful for that repetition; it was a kind of blessing, the way it allowed her to forget for spells of a few moments at a time.

As she was drawing up her final tallies for the day, her assistant, Cressida, knocked on her open door. She was a rather shy, single black woman, whom Evelyn had recruited from Boston College through the company's minority-outreach program. Evelyn had told her any number of times there was no need to announce herself, that she should just come in and say straight up what she needed, but Cressida had persisted in her apologetics. Having known such hesitancy in herself back when she first started out, Evelyn recognized it as the first, useless defense against criticism, one that excited precisely what it sought to deflect. There were businesses where deference would get her somewhere. Banking wasn't one of them. She wished she had it in her to drum the message home again, to set the girl straight once and for all, but she lacked the will this evening.

"It's about the house accounts," she said.

"You're going to have to remind me, darling. Come on now, sit down."

"From the Hong Kong office," she said, perching on the chair opposite Evelyn. "The unresolved trades. I'm not sure how you want me to enter them in the log." She looked at the paper in her hand as if ashamed of her admission.

At the college job fair, sitting across the folding table from her in the gymnasium, Cressida had worked so hard to strike a confident note, delivering her rehearsed lines about experience and interest like an actress unsure of her character's motivation. As a recruiter, Evelyn knew she was supposed to be sorting for focus and drive, weeding out the young men and women who seemed unsure of themselves, selecting instead those model minority students who not only grasped the rules of the presentational game, suggesting