As we reached the corner, Underwood led me into a glass box office with windows looking out over Broadway and panels giving onto the trading floor to the interior. A blind was pulled down one of the four panels, but the others remained open, so he could watch everything that was going on outside and those who were interested could observe us, like animals in a zoo. There were photographs of his family on one ledge, but the room was otherwise free of personal touches, as if he were a short-term tenant who might be evicted at any moment.
He waved me to an armchair on the side with a vista of the open floor. A woman walked in and gave him a pile of papers that he perused with a frown before handing it back. Then he came and sat by me, grinning.
“So, Ben. How can I help?” he said.
I didn’t like Underwood any more than the first time we’d met. He was like a primate in expensive clothes that might tear me limb from limb. He emanated barely contained aggression and contempt for the mortals who didn’t exist in his elite world of corporate wheeler-dealing. I wondered if it was an act to intimidate opponents or if he really was like that. There was something of that quality about the whole place. He was the leader now, but I could imagine a pack of those traders crashing through the door at his first sign of vulnerability.
“When we talked before, by the plane, I remember you saying it was Mr. Shapiro’s fault, everything that had happened to him, before Mr. Greene’s death. I wanted to know what you meant,” I said.
Underwood let out a breath and laughed flatly. “That’s a long time ago. I don’t know what I might or might not have said back then, when Marcus was still alive. I don’t remember you telling me much, Ben. Not even your name, as I recall.”
“I didn’t. Things were different then.” I didn’t see any reason to apologize for that, to him of all people. “Look. Mr. Underwood. John. Could I ask you something? How much do you know of my involvement?”
“I’ve seen the documents and I’ve talked to the Greene family. It’s not a happy story, is it? There are accusations against this bank as well as you, and I need to be careful what I say. I don’t know if we should be talking. Margaret is a good friend of my wife’s.”
I leaned forward in my seat. If I was to get anything from him, he had to believe I wasn’t a threat. Despite his familial references to the Greenes, I suspected that he didn’t care too much about them now that Marcus, his boss and patron-the man who could influence his career-was dead. I’d adapted my pitch from something Lauren had said.
“When we met before, Mr. Shapiro was my patient, as you know. I couldn’t say anything about him. You’ll understand that as a banker. You can’t talk about the clients you’re working for. I can’t tell you anything that was said to me in confidence, and I’m not asking you to do it either. But my career is in jeopardy and I’m trying to understand why Mr. Shapiro killed Mr. Greene. Can you help me?”
Underwood nodded as if I’d made some sense. “I would have thought that was obvious,” he said, wrinkling his nose. “The merger went wrong. Harry was unstable and blamed his own failure on Marcus. He shot him. End of story.”
“But why did it go wrong? That’s the part I don’t yet understand. I’m not a financier. All this”-I waved my hand at the glass panels giving onto the vast, hushed trading floor-“mystifies me. It’s your world.”
I wondered whether the flattery had been too obvious as Underwood gazed at me. But it turned out that Lauren had been right about something else: male investment bankers have big egos. He stood and beckoned to me.
“You want to know how Harry fucked up? I’ll show you,” he said.
Underwood and I left the elevator on the thirty-fifth floor. It led to a softly furnished lobby like an English drawing room, with a grandfather clock in a corner, its mechanical ticks echoing in the empty space. There was little sign of life, nobody sitting at the oak reception desk near the elevator. After the glass-and-steel floor, it felt as if I’d stepped into a Walt Disney version of the nineteenth century. There were no doors or electronic panels to impede us here, just a long, dimly lit corridor, visible through a mahogany arch. As we walked, I saw dark rectangles marked on the walls, each illuminated by a brass wall lamp.
“Harry kept the Old Masters from the art collection up here. They’re in storage now. I don’t want them,” Underwood said.
He opened a wooden door at the end of the hallway and led me into a small space, with two empty desks next to each other, then through another into an enormous office. It was a shock to enter after the gloomy hallway, for it was filled with light from two sides. It was on the corner of the building, facing south toward Times Square to one side and Rockefeller Center and the East River to the other.
I looked around the room. There was a wooden desk bearing two neat piles of paper and a computer with a twin screen. It was still blinking figures and graphs, although it looked as though it hadn’t been used for a long time. On the side by the hallway, there was a recessed alcove lined with books, like a kind of tiny library with a sofa and chairs, where the occupant had received guests. A Persian rug, an antique by the look of its muted threads, dominated the floor.
I walked behind the desk to look out at the room from that angle. Two framed photographs stood on the desk-one of a boy, a college student, perhaps, wearing the bulky pads and bright purple shirt of a hockey player. Other players had flanked him, you could see, but they had been cropped out to leave only his face, staring out cheerfully from under a helmet. The other was a portrait of Nora, looking happier than I’d known her.
It had been Harry’s desk.
Underwood was standing on the rug, waiting for recognition of where we were to dawn on me. “What can you see from there?” he said.
I looked around me, casting my eyes across the empty office and then out of one window. “Rockefeller Center?”
He snorted. “Nothing. That’s what you can see. Fuck all.”
“What do you mean?”
“The guy was in his own world, cut off from what was happening, just his few cronies up here with him. The first thing Marcus did was to move down to the trading floor, get a proper grasp of what was going on.”
“Where you are now?”
“Someone’s got to keep the place going. Maybe I’ll keep the job-they’ll give it to me if they’ve got any sense. Marcus wanted to gut this whole floor, put some real revenue earners up here, but he hadn’t gotten around to it.”
I walked toward the window to look out at the view, a glittering panorama of the lower wedge of Manhattan. Underwood took my place behind the desk, pushing the chair back and planting his polished shoes on the surface. One of his heels grazed Nora’s photo, shifting it by an inch.
“So you’re saying he shouldn’t have agreed to the merger? He should have known there’d be problems?”
He shrugged. “Sure looks like it to me. Harry had got too grand. He thought he’d be able to lord it over Marcus. He was a fool-that guy knew more about making money than anyone I’d ever met. He was a great salesman, one of the best.”
“He wasn’t honest with Mr. Shapiro, though, was he? Didn’t tell him everything he should have.”
Underwood laughed out loud. “What should he have told him, Ben? This is Wall Street, for God’s sake. Harry wasn’t a widow or orphan. He was paid $45 million, he had a Gulfstream. There were bankers being paid millions of dollars to advise him. If you want me to feel sorry for him, you’re out of luck.”
“I suppose so,” I said doubtfully.
“Listen, what’s the biggest deal you’ve ever done? You’ve sold a house, haven’t you? So did you tell the buyers everything or did you cover up a few cracks? I bet you did. It’s theirjob to find them. That’s why they have an engineer.”