“Really? I suppose there was a rivalry between the two of them. That’s now evident. I’m not sure how it affects me.”

I took a deep breath. “Mr. Shapiro claims that you placed pressure on the board to fire him because you and Mr. Greene were close as a result of having worked together at Rosenthal. He thinks Rosenthal was behind the whole thing.”

Henderson hardly moved, and his expression was unchanged, but he coughed once and then deflected his face slightly to the left to address the man behind him. “Andrew, I think Dr. Cowper has some things to say in private. Would you mind?”

The man replaced the cap on his pen, folded his notebook, and left the room without a word. When he’d gone, Henderson smiled at me again, just as broadly but this time with the warmth turned down to a low simmer.

“Dr. Cowper, forgive me, but I’m going to ask a question. Why are you here?”

“I was curious.”

That answer seemed to amuse him, and the skin crinkled around his eyes. Then his face turned watchful again. “I’m told that you’re no longer Mr. Shapiro’s physician and your job at Episcopal is in doubt,” he said, tapping a finger on his chair.

“You’re right,” I said. I didn’t know how he knew, but I supposed he was in a position to find out, and there was no point in lying.

“So I surmise that you don’t feel you have a lot to lose. If you’ll forgive the description, you’re a loose cannon. Correct?”

I saw that beneath his veneer of calm, I had him worried. Maybe he believed I was losing control and was ready to denounce him.

“Perhaps,” I said, nodding.

“I’m going to indulge you for a few minutes, between the two of us, to satisfy your curiosity. You tell me why you think Marcus died.”

“I think that Grayridge was in trouble and Greene needed a white knight. Something was wrong with these mortgage bonds-the Elements. You were at Rosenthal and he trusted you. Maybe you told him to merge with Seligman to cripple a competitor. By the time Seligman got into trouble, you were here. You bailed out the bank and then you ensured that Greene took over.”

“And his death?”

“Mr. Shapiro found out what had happened, I don’t know how exactly. It made him so angry that he killed Greene. He couldn’t get to you.”

Henderson tapped his finger contemplatively as he thought it over and then smiled again. He didn’t seem particularly upset by me accusing him of conspiracy to defraud Seligman and the U.S. government.

“It’s a gripping theory. You think there was some kind of plot involving Rosenthal, do you? You’re not the only one. It’s a fine institution and it produces a great many people who go into public service. They sometimes face this kind of accusation, which is long on gossip and short on evidence. We are, sadly, used to it.”

As he spoke, his voice rose and there was a flash of passion in his eyes for the first time. He looked more upset by my doubting Rosenthal than by my accusation against him, as if the bank were like a country and came before self. We, he’d said.

“When the president appointed me,” he went on, “I shed all my ties to Rosenthal and sold my stock in the firm, which was not a good investment decision, let me assure you. There are many conflicts of interest on Wall Street, and if people don’t deal with them in the appropriate manner, they’re out of business. Mr. Greene and I once worked at the same firm. Is that all you’ve got?”

“I think it’s more than that.”

“Not from what you’ve said. You don’t have any evidence, merely the imaginings of a psychiatric patient. As I told the Senate, the board chose Marcus without consulting me. But you know what, Dr. Cowper? I’d have done exactly the same thing in their shoes. He was a great banker and a fine leader. Shapiro …”

He paused as if he had a lot of thoughts on the subject of Harry that he didn’t want to go into. There was a contemptuous glint in his eye, and he stood to end our meeting as he finished his sentence.

“Was never stable.”

It was the “never” that stayed with me. As the Acela looped northward to New York after I’d been shown off the premises by a still-silent Andrew, I sat by the window wondering what it had signified. The Maryland coast gave way to the boarded-up row houses of Baltimore and North Philadelphia while it rattled in my brain. Except for that word, I might have accepted defeat, but something bugged me about it. I was certain Henderson had ejected Harry and put Greene in the job, but he wouldn’t have done it just because Greene was an old colleague at Rosenthal. That would have been crude, and Henderson was subtle.

He’d known Harry for a long time, though. That was what his final words told me. There was history there-an echo of the past.

23

A quotation from John D. Rockefeller, inscribed on a long panel, greeted me as I walked into the New York Public Library’s business branch on Madison Avenue the following morning: Next to knowing all about your own business, the best thing to know is all about the other fellow’s business. That was what I’d come for. I’d thought of Harry talking about Greene that day on the beach, scraping sand from a seashell as he spoke. I knew a guy who’d run private equity in Europe for Rosenthal. Marcus Greene, he’d said.

I went downstairs to the electronic center and located a free terminal. The first place I looked was the Rosenthal amp; Co. site, looking back at its past annual reports for a biography of Henderson. There was his meteoric career at Rosenthal, joining the bank in New York in the 1970s, rising to run its fixed-income division and then becoming chief executive. Along the way, one foreign job: chairman of Rosenthal International, 1990 to 1994. Henderson had been Greene’s boss in London at the same time that Harry had been posted there by Seligman. The City of London’s a small place, I thought. Even more of a club than Wall Street. It looked as though they had all been there for the same purpose-to prove themselves overseas before returning to New York in glory.

I started reading old copies of Euromoneyfor anything that linked them further. It was like the Vanity Fairof the City of London, with admiring interviews with bankers in odd corners of financial markets, adorned with heroic photos. As I read about the 1990 property crash, some of the material became familiar. Euromoney’s idols had been the vulture funds that had picked through the wreckage of the banks’ lending mistakes. I’d been a teenager then, and the only crash I’d noticed was my parents’ divorce. But even I could observe, in the tale of burst bubbles and real estate blunders, that history had repeated itself.

I found two articles in which Greene was quoted-one a description of the Canary Wharf bankruptcy in which Rosenthal was involved along with almost every other bank I’d heard of. Later on, things got more cheerful, with talk of recovery and the writing back of Latin American debt. There was some excitement about the new credit derivatives market in London.

I soon got bored and flicked through photos of bankers dressed in black ties to receive prizes at risible award ceremonies-Bank of the Year, Asset-Backed Issue of the Year. I saw the younger Henderson, shaking a hand or standing in a group of bankers, wearing his smug smile, his hair a mottled gray. As I flicked through the pages, I came across a photo of another prize awarded to Rosenthal and Seligman jointly. On the left were Henderson and Greene and their people, and on the right was the Seligman crew, led by Harry. Harry looked like another man, not just in age but also in his beaming pleasure-you could tell that this silly award had meant a lot to him.

And nearby, Harry, by Henderson’s shoulder, dark-haired and youthful yet unmistakable, stood Felix.