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question.

"So you're not in a rush?"

She shook her head.

"I tell you what. Since this is your first visit here, allow me to show you something."

He stood up before she had the opportunity to decline, holding his arm out to guide her back through his office door.

"Helen, I'm just going to take Ms. Jones downstairs. We won't be long." He led her along the arch-ceilinged hallway, their footsteps silent on the thick carpet. "Did you fly down?" he asked, as they stepped onto the officers' elevator.

"No, I took the train."

"Yes, it's far more civilized than a plane these days." He allowed a few floors to pass before observing, "When they built this place they dynamited their way a few stories into the bedrock of the island. It was one of their great precautions. Turns out it was the only foundation strong enough to bear the weight."

The elevator doors slid open and they made their way down the windowless passage to the security officer's desk.

"Charles," he said, "are the tours over for the day? I was going to show this young woman around."

"It's all yours, sir," he said, leading them through the ten-foot, cylindrical airlock and into the antechamber. "Will you need any help with the stock, sir?"

"No, I think we're fine," Henry said. He unlocked the inner gate with his own key and ushered Evelyn into the vault, clicking the gate shut behind them. At the center of the room stood the metal scales still used to test the purity of the gold. Beside the scales were two pairs of magnesium shoe clips worn to protect the officers' feet lest they should drop a bar in transit and crush their toes.

"We're eighty feet below the sidewalk here. Thirty feet below sea level. Go ahead," he said, gesturing toward the rows of floor-to-ceiling metal cages that lined the walls, numbered but otherwise unmarked. "Have a look."

His guest glanced at him first, inquisitively, as if an elaborate trick might be afoot, but then succumbing to curiosity she approached one of the cages containing dark-yellow bars ten feet high and twenty deep. After a moment, she turned to look down the aisle, taking in the sheer number of separate compartments.

"It's the largest accumulation of monetary gold in the world," he said. "In fact, it's a decent-size chunk of all the gold ever mined."

"And all this belongs to the government?"

"No. The Treasury keeps our reserves at Fort Knox and up at West Point. The vast majority of what you see here is owned by foreign central banks. Most countries in the world deposit with us. We're just the custodians. When governments want to do business, they call up and we move the gold from one cage to another."

"They trust us that much?"

"For these purposes, yes."

She passed on to another compartment and gazed at the wall of shining gold.

"The tours come to the outer gate here every day. I think last year we had twenty-five thousand visitors. People love to look at it. It reminds me of something Galbraith said: 'The process by which banks create money is so simple the mind is repelled. A deeper mystery seems only decent.' I suppose this is what's left of the mystery. And yet this," he said, indicating with a sweep of his hand the whole contents of the vault, "barely matters. Add it up and it's no more than eighty or ninety billion worth. The wires clear more than that in an hour. All anchored to nothing but trust. Cooperation. You could even say faith, which sometimes I do, though it's certainly of an earthly kind. Without it you couldn't buy a loaf of bread.

"Of course as my sister never fails to remind me, the bigger ethical question is what people - what governments do with their money. Whether they buy medicine or food or arms. But there are conditions of possibility for doing any of these things. Whichever choices we make. The system has to work. People have to trust the paper in their wallets. And that starts somewhere. It starts with the banks."

Her fingers curled around the bars of the cage she stood before.

"I guess you know why I'm here," she said.

"Yes. I think I do."

AT THE END of August, Evelyn had paid $390,000 for a shingle cottage on a tree-lined street out in Alden. The kitchen at the back was a bit dark in the mornings but it had a view of a dogwood and a rhododendron in the yard. Upstairs was a bathroom and