Union Atlantic Page 0,18

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 the glass 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 from Frankfurt had been ten hours, the drive up from Miami all stop-and-go traffic owing to a jackknifed truck that had torn the roof off one of those Volkswagen bugs, the whole scene bright as day under halogen floods.

A few weeks ago, after listening to one of Charlotte's tirades about the house next door, he'd raised the question of whether it might be time for her to move. She'd practically hung up on him and had replied to none of his phone calls since.

"I'm sorry you've had to deal with this," he said to Helen. "It's unprofessional of me."

"Don't be silly," she replied. "Do you need anything else? It could take awhile to get Holland at this hour."

"No. Just the account positions. And I suppose you better call down to D.C. and find out where the chairman is, just in case. I don't think we'll need him."

"By the way," she said. "Did you speak to the plumber about the leak at the house?" He had happened upon it the other evening in the back hall, a rust-colored sagging in the wallpaper over the side table. "It's not the kind of thing you can just forget about. You could get a burst pipe."

In which case, what? he thought. Water in the living room? A lake beneath the piano? He barely used the downstairs anymore, getting home after ten most nights and heading straight to bed. Even upstairs he'd withdrawn into one of the guest rooms, where he found it easier to sleep surrounded by fewer of Betsy's things. His wife's death had hit him with startling force for a month or two, during which his body ached from the moment he woke to the moment he went to sleep. But his job's demands didn't cease. And soon there were days when he thought of her less often; half a year later there were days he didn't think of her at all. This seemed wrong, inhuman even, that forty years of marriage could fade so easily through a slip in time. Did it mean he was a callous person? Unfeeling? Who was to judge? As for his private life now, the person he thought of, whom in a sense he'd always thought of, was his older sister, Charlotte. A woman Betsy had done little more than tolerate.

"If you give me the plumber's number," Helen said, "I'll call him myself."

"No," Henry replied. "It's all right. I'll see to it when I