Union Atlantic Page 0,52

their ability to pick up the rules of games to come, but also seemed to embrace them, taking a kind of hushed, understated pleasure in the well-groomed display of their credentials; those were the ones whose obedience you could count on, their fear of scarcity already marshaled into conservative ambition. Cressida had shown none of this, arriving in an ill-fitting pantsuit clearly borrowed for the day, her resume on plain white paper, just as Evelyn's had been at the first bank she interviewed with.

She had wondered in the year since she'd hired Cressida if sympathy were a form of nepotism, a favoring of emotional kin. With the exception of a few mistakes at the beginning, the kind anyone might make, she had performed well. It seemed to Evelyn that her vote of confidence had done what it was supposed to do, encouraging the young woman to rise to the occasion. It was just that she couldn't dislodge the thought that she had chosen Cressida for her company as much as for her fit.

"Which trader?" she asked.

"McTeague."

She took the account sheet from Cressida and glanced quickly at its contents. Trading floors were chaotic places and in the course of a day there were always a few botched transactions that had to be placed in house accounts to be resolved once the market closed. Some traders didn't get around to working out these "fails" for a day or two. McTeague, however, often took weeks, carrying over millions of dollars in scrub positions. Because he had been put in charge of the back office in Hong Kong he was his own boss on accounting matters. All Evelyn could do was complain to him about his laxness, which she'd done several times to no avail. Nonetheless, the data on this sheet had to be a mistake; it showed McTeague's house account holding an un-reported loss of three hundred and forty million dollars.

"Who gave you this?"

"Sabrina. Same as usual."

"This came out of Fanning's office?"

Cressida nodded.

Evelyn had never met Doug Fanning but she had been in the same room with him a couple of times at company functions and she had seen him operate. He got a lot of mileage with the staff out of his apparently casual approach to people, which, because of his unofficial status as second-in-command of the entire holding company, struck people as unusually egalitarian. He had championed, in prominent fashion, the renovation of the second floor as a free, company-wide gym, and was known for walking the halls after his workouts still in his shorts, setting the phones of the husband-hunters flashing with gossip. And yet for all his show it wasn't the usual cocky, know-it-all, young banker's affect that came through. There was something different about him, something Evelyn recognized: the extra effort of the uninvited. She didn't quite trust him.

Which was why, rather than call Fanning to alert him of what she'd discovered, she instead tried Brenda Hilliard upstairs in compliance. If this was a misappropriation of funds, that department would have to be notified, regardless of who McTeague reported to. She got Brenda's voice mail. By then it was after nine o'clock and most everyone had gone home, the whine of the vacuum cleaner starting up at the far end of the hall. She decided to send Brenda a quick e-mail, saying she needed to talk to her in the morning.

As she and Cressida left the sealed quiet of the lobby through the revolving doors and emerged onto Congress Street, the cooler night air swallowed them, carrying with it the hum and rush of the expressway. They turned onto Purchase Street, a few taxis tapping their horns for a fare, black women in business suits in this part of town apparently good enough for their services; ignoring them, they crossed the plaza in front of the Boston Fed and made their way into South Station.

Evelyn had never felt comfortable with co-workers outside the office and strangely only the more so with Cressida, to whom so much else might be said. Above all she didn't want to disappoint the girl by seeming weak. Cressida had been the one, Evelyn felt sure, who had organized the office to send flowers to Carson's funeral, in addition to the flowers she herself had sent.

"Have you heard anything yet?" Cressida asked, as they paused at the top of the stairs leading down to the T. "From the police, I mean."

When was it, Evelyn wondered, that she had started to believe that she had