FIVE
Arrived in this place on Friday morning last. Mr. John Vettner and crew, from New Madrid, from whom we learn, that they were on shore five miles below the place on Friday morning the 7th instant, at the time of the hard shock, and that the water filled their barge and sunk it, with the whole of its contents, losing every thing but the clothes they had on. They offered, at New Madrid, half their loading for a boat to save it, but no price was sufficient for the hire of a boat. Mrs. Walker offered a likely negro fellow for the use of a boat a few hours, but could not get it.
The town of New Madrid has sunk 12 feet below its former standing, but is not covered with water; the houses are all thrown down, and the inhabitants moved off, except the French, who live in camps close to the river side, and have their boats tied near them, in order to sail off, in case the earth should sink. It is said that a fall equal to that of the Ohio is near above New Madrid, and that several whirls are in the Mississippi river, some so strong as to sink every boat that comes within its suck; one boat was sunk with a family in it. The country from New Madrid to the Grand Prairie is very much torn to pieces, and the Little Prairie almost entirely deluged. It was reported when our informants left it, that some Indians who had been out in search of some other Indians that were lost had returned, and stated that they had discovered a volcano at the head of the Arkansas, by the light of which they traveled three days and nights. A vast number of sawyers have rissn in the Mississippi river.
Russelville, Kentucky, Feb. 26
“Damn. Look at that. River’s sure high.” Viondi paused at the top of the crumbling concrete ramp.
Nick Ruford passed him and kept walking down the ramp. “There’s floods up north, you know.”
“Hadn’t heard,” Viondi said.
“Haven’t been watching the news, huh?”
“Been workin’ double shifts remodeling those old buildings down on Chouteau. Ain’t had time to watch the news.”
Nick paused at the water’s edge. The swift river rippled purposefully across the boat ramp, as if it resented the presence of the concrete. There was a splash as the wake of a tow-boat raised a wave that splattered Nick’s shoes. He stepped back.
Viondi Crowley walked down the worn ramp in his sandals, paused to put down his creel, then stepped into the water, washing the dust from his big, square toes.
“River’s a cold motherfucker today,” he said.
“Careful. Or you’ll fall on your ass.”
The towboat’s wake slopped water over Viondi’s ankles. He backed out of the river, shook the Mississippi off his feet.
“Hand me the soap,” he said.
The Mississippi ran blue here— thirty miles above where, at St. Louis, the Missouri dumped half the mud of the Midwest into the Father of Waters. Long wooded islands stretched down the river, though at the moment most of them were half submerged, willow branches trailing listless in the flood. Two towboats were in sight, both pushing long tows against the current. The sound of their powerful diesels whined distantly off the water.
Nick looked out at the sparkling waters, felt the sun on his face. A mild wind stirred the hairs on his neck. He took a breath, tried to relax. Tried to make himself relax. And then wondered why it was so hard.
It’s not like he had a job to worry about. Or a home. Or a family.
Hell, relaxing should be easy. So why wasn’t it?
He looked down as Viondi held the bar of soap in one big hand and carved it into chunks with his pocket knife. He retained two of the soap chunks, put the rest in their original wrapper, then put the wrapper in his pocket.
He reached out a hand, and Nick mutely handed him the fishing rods. Viondi baited them both with chunks of soap, then handed one to Nick.
“Better cast off the ramp,” he said. “With the river this high, there’s bound to be snags everywhere else.”
Viondi stepped away to give himself some casting room, then brought the rod back over his shoulder and let it fly out. The reel sang as the baited line flew out over the river. There was a splash as it struck the water.
Relax, Nick told himself. You should relax. Fishing is the most relaxing thing in the world.
He cast into the water, his movement more awkward than Viondi’s. The hook and its chunk of soap landed about twenty feet from where Nick intended. He had come to fishing late in life— his father, as he was growing up, had always thought the son of a general had more important things to do. Nick’s sports had been wrestling and track, and he’d been expected to stay on the honor roll for academics as well. There’d been Scouting— if a general’s son couldn’t make Eagle Scout, there was obviously something wrong with them both. And afterward there had been more school, and family, and his job with McDonnell.
Where did fishing fit into all that?
He hadn’t gone fishing in his life until he met Viondi.
“Hey, Nick,” Viondi said, as he reeled in. “What do you call a woman who can suck a golf ball through a garden hose?”
Nick looked at Viondi’s grin. “What?” he said.
“‘Darling.’”
A reluctant laugh pushed itself up from Nick’s diaphragm. “Where you hear these?” he asked.
Viondi retrieved his lure, cast again. “There’s this rich white lady, see, goes to the doctor. And the doctor sits her down and says, ‘You’re in good health. And in fact I want to compliment you on the fact that your pussy is the cleanest I’ve ever seen.’
“And the lady says, ‘It better be, I got this colored man comes in twice a week.’”
Nick’s laugh bubbled up like a spring.
“Made you laugh twice in a row!” Viondi said. “Gold star for me.”
Nick wished he knew some good jokes he could use to answer Viondi’s. But Viondi was the only person who ever told Nick jokes.
“Where do you get these from?” Nick asked weakly.
“Work. Niggas gotta keep themselves amused working eighteen hours a day.” Viondi’s eyes narrowed as he looked at the water. “Strike,” he advised.
Nick had reeled his lure close to the shore; he looked down to see a dark shadow in the clear water, an engulfing mouth that opened startlingly wide before closing on the slice of soap and darting away. Nick jerked the rod to set the hook, felt the fish resist, heard the whine of the reel as the fish took the line out. Viondi cranked his reel to get his own line out of the way.
“Big ol’ catfish,” Viondi said, after they landed the fish. He laid the gasping fish on the fresh-cut grass he’d put in his creel, then smiled up at Nick. “Soap gets ’em every time.”
Viondi was a plumber. He ran his own plumbing company with about a dozen employees, and Nick had made his acquaintance when he’d hired Viondi to replumb his old house back in Pine Lawn. He and Viondi had hit it off. Manon hadn’t liked Viondi as much as Nick had. She thought Viondi was crude and irresponsible. “How can he be irresponsible,” Nick had pointed out, “when he’s running a successful company?”
“He’s irresponsible in his personal life,” Manon said.
Nick had to admit that this was true. Viondi was either working or playing, either pulling double shifts with his crew, or at a party that could last for days. Nick wasn’t quite certain how often Viondi had been married, but he’d heard reference to at least three wives, and he’d had children by at least three women, not necessarily the same women as his wives.
And Viondi looked like such a roughneck. He was big, with wide shoulders and big biceps and a short-cropped beard. He looked as if he could tear apart a human being with his large bare hands. Just Viondi’s looks made Manon nervous.
For weeks Nick would leave messages on Viondi’s answering machine without a reply, and then he’d know Viondi was working. But then he’d get a call, and Viondi would want Nick to pile with a few other friends into Viondi’s Buick and drive off for a weekend’s debauch in Memphis, or a road trip to Chicago, or to spend some time at the Greenville Blues Festival.
Or sometimes the call was just to go fishing on a Wednesday morning. A Wednesday like today.
Whatever the call, it had been easier for Nick to say yes once Manon had gone home to Toussaint.
A pair of freshwater gulls wheeled overhead in hopes that someone would clean a fish and give them the remains. Viondi rebaited Nick’s hook with another piece of soap. “You heard from Arlette?”
Nick’s heart sank. Just when he’d started feeling good.
“Yeah,” he said. “She’s going to France in a couple weeks.” Nick frowned at the river. “I’m not going to get to see her till, maybe, Christmas.”
“Shit. That’s tough. Your old lady ain’t cutting you no slack at all.”
Nick found himself wanting to defend Manon. “Well,” he said, “it’s an opportunity, you know. Going to France.”
“Arlette needs a daddy more than she needs a trip to France,” Viondi said. “I’ve kept all my kids in my life, no matter what else happened.” He finished baiting the hook and let it fall. Nick cast, heard the splash, saw the pale chunk of soap sink into the rippling water. Viondi cast, dropped his hook precisely. One of the gulls dipped toward the splash, then decided it didn’t want to eat soap. Viondi began reeling in.
“Why don’t you go down to Arkansas,” he asked, “see your girl?”
Nick’s heart gave a little jump at the thought. “My old car wouldn’t make it,” he said automatically. It needed new engine and transmission seals that he couldn’t afford. When he drove it, even the driver’s compartment filled with blue smoke.
“Take the bus.” Viondi gave him a severe look. “It’s not like you’ve got anything critical to do in St. Louis.”
Nick thought about it for a long, hopeful moment, calculating how much it would cost, how long he could afford to be away. As Viondi said, it wasn’t as if he had anything important here, a job or anything.
There wasn’t a hotel in Toussaint, he’d have to stay at the boarding house run by Manon’s aunt.
Man, Nick thought, Manon would be pissed.
He thought about Arlette’s eyes lighting at the sight of the diamond necklace.
“Tell you what,” Viondi said. “I could use a little R and R down in N’awlins. I’ll drop you off in Toussaint on the way.”
Nick looked at him. “What about those buildings on Chouteau?”
“Nearly done. I’ll let Darrell finish the job.” Darrell was Viondi’s eldest son. “Do him good to have a little responsibility for a change.” Viondi smiled. “I’ve got a weekend’s worth of work first, though, that can’t do without me. How about I pick you up on Monday?”
Hope rose in Nick, but he found that he was wary of hope these days. He didn’t want this to disappear.
“You sure about this?” he asked. “I mean, this is pretty sudden.”
Viondi shrugged. “It’s like I’m always telling you, man, you want a flexible schedule, you get a job like mine. Work hard, play hard, die with your boots on.” He looked at Nick. “It’s not too late for you, you know. I’m bidding up a big contract, could use a new apprentice.”
“Well,” Nick said “it may come to that.”
Viondi grinned. “Hey,” he said. “You know why God invented golf?”
Nick shook his head. “No idea,” he said.
“So that white folks could dress up like black people.”
A few more hours of this, Nick thought, and he might even start to relax.
*
As he drove around the bend and the plant came in sight around the pine thicket, Larry Hallock lifted his eyes automatically to the huge cooling tower and found something wrong. His eyes checked in their movement and returned to the tower, the elegant concrete hyperboloid curves whitened by the morning sun.
Something was missing. The plume of steam that normally floated above the tower.
Larry was annoyed with himself. He knew that. He knew that the reactor had been shut down for refueling, something that happened every eighteen months or so. He knew that there would be no plume of steam when the reactor wasn’t in operation.
But he’d got used to the steam plume being there, perched above the tower. Eighteen months was just long enough for him to forget how the plant looked when the reactor was shut down.
He passed by the old Indian mound that archaeologists, somewhat to the inconvenience of the facility’s designers, had insisted remain on the property. The front parking lot looked full. One of the concessions the power company had made to the locals when they’d acquired the site was that one-third of the plant workers had to come from the immediate area. As there were relatively few nuclear engineers and qualified power plant managers in rural Mississippi, the Poinsett Landing plant was blessed with a large and splendidly equipped janitorial, maintenance, and machine-shop force.
The parking lot was unusually full as workers busied themselves with maintenance and preventative maintenance while the reactor was cold, so Larry turned the Taurus down the fork in the road that led behind the plant, toward the river hidden behind the long green wall of the levee. The long morning shadow of the cooling tower reached across the grass and fell on him as he drove, and in the air-conditioned silence of the car, he felt a chill.
*
Larry’s feet rang on metal as he climbed the ladder that led up the maintenance truss that ran up the curved roof of the primary containment building. He tilted his head back in the bright yellow hood of the clean suit he wore and kept on climbing. The structure smelled of emptiness and wet concrete. Masses of concrete and steel loomed around him. Below, in addition to the water-filled chamber and the crane, the building was filled with a chaos of tanks, pipes, valves, conduit, ductwork, electric motors, girders, accumulators, and bundles of cable. All of it on a massive scale, dwarfing the suited figures of the crane operators.
Jameel, the foreman who was supervising operating the refueling machine, looked up as Larry passed overhead, then gave a wave. Larry waved back.
“How ’bout the Cubbies?” Larry called down. Jameel was from Chicago and maintained a dogged loyalty to the National League’s perennial losers.
“Two in a row!” Jameel shouted. He gave the thumb’s-up sign.
“Guess they didn’t need Gutierrez after all!”
Jameel made a face. He had complained long and hard about the Cubs’ preseason trade.
The refueling was relatively simple, but the scale of it was always impressive. Larry enjoyed his visits to the containment structure, and since the reactor was shut down, and everyone else going through routine maintenance checklists, he had nothing more urgent at the moment than to suit up, enter the containment building, and play tourist.
The bright yellow clean suit he wore, complete with boots and gloves and a hood over his head, had nothing to do with protecting himself from radiation— the water flooding the space above the reactor would do that. The suit was to keep him from contaminating the water with one of his accidental byproducts, such as, for example, a hair. The demineralized water that was used to cool the reactor and its fuel was carefully maintained in order to make certain that it gave no chemical or mechanical problems.
The refueling machine began to hum as chains rattled in. Larry put his hands on the rail, looked down. The machine was large and moved back and forth on tracks placed over the water-filled refueling cavity. Its operators sat atop it, peering into the watery depths below.
Glimmering in the glow of floodlights, the squat silver-metal form of a fuel assembly began its descent into the reactor. Its glittering image was broken by the refraction of the little wavelets in the pool. The chains ceased to rattle, and the sound of the engine died. Electric motors gave brief whines. Jameel signaled to another of his crew. There was a subdued metallic clang, and then chains began to rattle again as the hook that had lowered the fuel assembly into the reactor withdrew.
The refueling process was nearing its end. Over eight hundred fuel assemblies needed to be moved— most were just moved within the reactor, but a third had to be replaced completely, the old assemblies moved through an underwater channel to the Auxiliary Building for storage, while new assemblies were carried the other way.
With an urgent hum of electric motors, the refueling machine began to move, sliding on its tracks toward the fuel channel, where it would pick up another fresh fuel assembly for movement into the reactor.
Larry smiled down at the operation and thought of horses.
Even with his fifty-five years and his degree in nuclear engineering, Larry Hallock still considered himself a cowpuncher. He had been raised on a ranch near Las Vegas, New Mexico, a long, rambling adobe building, built over generations, with a tin roof and a homemade water tower. Every summer afternoon, as the thermals rose from the valley floor, cool air would flow down from the Sangre de Cristo Mountains and bring with it the scent of the high meadows, the star flowers, white mountain daisies, and purple asters, the flowers that flourished in the brief growing season at ten thousand feet. For Larry, this was the perfume of paradise. Sometimes, even now, he woke from a dream with the scent in his nostrils.
When he was fourteen, his father had called him, his brother, and his sister into the little office from which he ran the ranch business, the mud-walled room with its old rolltop desk, well-thumbed ledger books, and Navajo rugs. His blue eyes gazed at them all from his leathery face.
“Do you love this business?” he asked. “Do you want to ranch for the rest of your lives?”
All three siblings nodded.
“Well, then,” their father said, “you better all go to college and become professionals, because it’s the only way you’re going to be able to afford to keep this place alive.”
They had taken their father’s advice to heart. Larry’s younger brother Robert was a doctor in Santa Fe. Larry had become a nuclear engineer. Both considered themselves cowboys at heart, and spent as much time as possible in New Mexico doing ranch work. And their older sister Mimi, who still lived on the ranch, commuted in her Chevy pickup truck to her law practice in Las Vegas. She had raised her children to carry on after her, which was more than Larry had managed— his daughter worked in biostatistics, whatever those were, in North Carolina’s Research Triangle, and his son studied Chinese literature at the University of Chicago. Both places were a long way from New Mexico, and when Larry thought about it he felt a breath of sadness waft through his heart.
He was remembering a grulla mare named Low Die that he had ridden when he was maybe twelve. She would set down wonderfully on her hocks, but for some reason she would not fall off to the right as well as she fell off to the left. When she spun to the left it was a thing of beauty, but when he wanted her to cut right, for some reason her coordination fell apart, and there were strange, unpredictable hesitations in her movement. It was almost as if she were afraid to turn right.
Experience suggested that such a fault might be the result of a spinal injury or deformity. But after a thorough examination it was concluded that Low Die’s spine was in perfectly fine shape.
So Larry had worked that strange horse patiently for weeks. He would work her first on moves that she could do well, moves in which she had confidence. He would praise her lavishly for every successful maneuver. Then he would run her for a while, so that she’d get tired and not think so much, just respond to the touch of his feet and hands.
And then he’d start turning Low Die in wide circles to the right. And the circles would get smaller and smaller until, eventually, she was falling off to the right just as he wanted.
That was how you solved a problem. You broke it down into pieces, and you solved the pieces one at a time. With patience, you could get anywhere, even into the dimwitted brain of a horse.
Low Die. A beautiful cutting horse. He’d ridden her for years.
“You see that homer in the Red Sox game?” Jameel called up from his post on the refueling machine.
“Oh yeah,” Larry said. “A thing of beauty.”
In Larry Hallock’s estimation, the problems involved in managing nuclear power were not dissimilar to those involved in training a horse. The universe operated by certain principles, and these principles could be applied anywhere, by anyone of sufficient skill and intelligence. The statement of a problem contained within itself the elements of its own solution. You needed to break the problem into its parts, to work on each in its turn. You needed patience and a sense of perspective. Humor didn’t hurt, either. Sometimes you found yourself turning circles, as Larry had when he was training Low Die, but you needed to realize that even when you were turning in circles, you were still getting somewhere.
Poinsett Landing was a complex system, and its complexities were increased by its massive scale. The statistics themselves were vast enough to strain the imagination. The power station required a dozen years to build, 1,800 miles of electrical wire, 100 miles of pipe, 125 miles of conduit, 16,000 tons of steel, 29,000 tons of rebar, and nearly 150,000 cubic yards of concrete. The reactor vessel, the steel pressure cooker in which nuclear fission took place, stood eighty feet high, its sides were over eight inches thick, and it weighed two million pounds. It sat in a steel-and-concrete containment structure twice as high as the reactor vessel, three and a half feet thick and sheathed with stainless steel, built so strongly that it could withstand the 300-mile-per-hour winds of a tornado, or even the impact of a Boeing 747 being deliberately crashed, by suicidal terrorists, into the building from above.
But when you got right down to it, a nuclear power station, with all its vastness, was a very simple system compared to a biological organism such as a horse. Its size was a measure of its relative inefficiency— it was enormous because people hadn’t worked out how to generate power with the compact efficiency of a biological organism. Animals, with their complex organization and chemistry, their mobility and intelligence, were marvels of concentrated efficiency. They were brilliant engineering. By comparison, Poinsett Landing Power Station, complex as it was in certain ways, was simplicity itself.
Which was good, as far as Larry Hallock was concerned. An animal, be it a human being or a horse, was intricate enough so that when something went wrong with it— a broken leg, cancer, mental illness— it was difficult to fix. The problems at Poinsett Landing were, by comparison, simple.
Take the problem of Poinsett Landing’s site, for example.
The massive containment building, with its huge steel nuclear reactor, its three-foot-thick concrete walls sheathed with steel, had presented a particular problem to the plant’s designers. A large, heavy building requires a large, stable foundation. The best foundation of all is solid bedrock.
But bedrock is at a premium in the Mississippi Delta. The land consists of layers on endless layers of mud laid down by repeated floodings of the great river. The mud can extend thousands of feet below the level of the land. There is no bedrock on which to safely build large structures and anchor them against the dangers of their own weight.
But the Delta land was cheap, much cheaper than elsewhere. With the plant requiring two thousand acres of land, the price of the land was a prime consideration in the plant’s cost. The plant’s designers were asked to solve the problem of building the huge, heavy structure on land that would not support it.
The engineers simply built their own bedrock beneath the containment structure, a huge mat of concrete laced with a webwork of steel. This pad was twelve feet thick and sat in the rich Delta land like a paving stone, and it supported the vast two-million-pound weight of the reactor vessel, the steel-and-concrete containment structure, and the control facility, which leaned against the featureless containment building like a child clinging to his mother’s hip.
It was a tried and true technique, Larry knew, often used in areas like Miami Beach, where large buildings had to be constructed on shifting sand. It had the advantage of simplicity. The huge pad would be there forever: after it had been set in the Delta soil, no one would ever have to think about it again.
“Waaal,” Larry Hallock said, “let’s get this sucker warmed up.” He stood behind his metal desk, perched on its platform above the rest of the control room. The lights and indicators, which were on panels above the operators’ heads, were at eye level for Larry. He scanned them, noted the orderly rows of green and red lights, nothing amiss.
The room looked like the headquarters of a James Bond villain. Metal surfaces, control panels, thousands of buttons, displays with blinking lights. All painted in avocado green and harvest gold, the signature colors of the 1970s, the decade in which the room was designed and built.
Larry wondered if a more recent control room would be painted different colors. Would a nineties control room, he wondered, be Hunter Green?
A box from Dunkin’ Donuts on one of the computer monitors near the door spoiled the illusion of a supervillain’s retreat. Larry helped himself to a chocolate doughnut.
“We’re set,” Wilbur said, having, from his lower perspective, just scanned the displays himself.
“Let’s give ’er the spur,” Larry said.
You didn’t want to start up a nuclear reactor with a bang. It would take almost a full day to get the reactor on line, to first increase temperature within the reactor, then start pushing steam through the turbine to generate enough power to put on the grid.
It was like handling a big horse, one that could stomp you flat just by accident, just because you weren’t paying attention. You just wanted to give it a little kick with your heels, get it moving without startling anyone, least of all yourself.
It was tricky enough so that Larry wanted to be in the control room for the procedure, just in case Wilbur, who was the control room operator and would be giving the orders, needed some backup. Larry was the shift supervisor, in charge of everything going on at the plant during his shift. Wilbur was in charge of the reactor under Larry’s supervision.
Larry and Wilbur watched the displays as boron carbide control rods were partially withdrawn from the reactor, as neutrons began to multiply and the chain reaction began. The scent of roses floated through the control room: Larry had bought a massive vase of yellow roses for his wife, who had a birthday today. He moved the roses out of his line of sight, sat in his wheeled metal chair, and thought about putting his boots up on his desk, but decided not to.
Larry put a hand on the scarred metal surface of his desk and felt a little tremor through his fingertips. Pumps, distant but powerful, steam moving through massive pipe. Valves tripped open as pressure built.
Words floated to Larry as he watched the displays. Something about Ole Miss and the Rose Bowl.
No day was complete without talk of football. Not in Mississippi.
One of the operators interrupted the talk of the gridiron in order to make a report. “Holding at ten percent.”
Ten percent was one of the check points, where all concerned would be looking at their instruments to make certain that everything was operating normally.
Larry scanned the displays over the operators’ heads. Everything looked fine.
“You going to do anything special for your wife’s birthday, Mr. Hallock?” Wilbur asked.
“Tonight we’ve got reservations at the Garden Court in Vicksburg.”
“Getting some of that Creole food, huh? It’s too hot for me.”
Larry grinned. “You best not try New Mexico chile, then.”
“I don’t even put pepper on my grits in the morning.”
Larry looked at the displays, at the lights shifting, red and green.
“Bland is boring,” he said. “Me, I like a little spice in my life.”
“Everything checks, Larry,” Wilbur said. “Still holding at ten percent.”
“Waaal,” Larry said, “let’s goose her a little.”
Boron carbide rods slid smoothly out of the reactor. Neutrons turned water to steam. Steam shot under unimaginable pressure through massive thirty-six-inch pipes.
Larry put his boots on the desk and thought about horses.
*
Four shocks of an Earthquake have been sustained by our town, and its neighborhood, within the last two days. The first commenced yesterday morning between two and three, preceded by a meteoric flash of light and accompanied with a rattling noise, resembling that of a carriage passing over a paved pathway, and lasted almost a minute. A second succeeded, almost immediately after, but its continuance was of much shorter duration. A third shock was experienced about eight o’clock in the morning, and another today about one.
Savannah, Dec. 17
Perfume floated into the Oval Office from the Rose Garden. The economics briefing book, with its tasteful white plastic cover and presidential seal, had migrated from the President’s footstool to the top of his desk in the West Wing. The London meeting of the G8 countries was only a week away. The President was now immersing himself in figures concerning gross domestic product, financial markets, foreign direct investment, prices and wages, output, demand, jobs, commodities, exchanges, and reserves.
Fortunately the President liked this kind of detail work. Facts and statistics were easy compared to trying to manage Congress, foreign leaders, or for that matter the arrogant turf warriors of his own party.
He had a number of proposals he wanted to make at the G8 conference. Proposals having to do with the removal of trade barriers, pollution control, expansion of the information infrastructure, practical assistance to Third World countries. Proposals that only the leader of the world’s primary superpower could make.
If only, he thought, goddam Wall Street didn’t stab him in the back while he was off in London trying to get things done.
The President’s phone buzzed, and he reached for it while trying to absorb a graph on current-account balances. Oil-producing states, he saw, were benefiting from a slight rise in the cost of fossil fuels.
“Judge Chivington for you, sir,” said his secretary.
“Thank you. Put him on, please.”
“Mr. President! Rosalie told me you called!” the judge bellowed. He was not the sort to moderate his voice merely for the telephone.
The President switched to the speaker phone and put the handset in its cradle. “I’m cramming for the G8 conference,” he said.
“That will relieve the voters, sir,” the judge said. “People worrying about employment and meetin’ the mortgage are going to be encouraged as all hell when they turn on their televisions and see the President talking to the French economic minister about the price of brie.”
The President smiled, leaned back in his chair, and was about to put one foot up on the corner of his desk when he remembered that this massive and colossally ugly item was made from the timbers of the HMS Resolute, God alone knew why, and had been a gift of Queen Victoria, the reasons for which seemed pretty damned obscure, too, but that this meant the desk was therefore a valuable antique that did not deserve to have his heel marks on it. He reluctantly put his shoe back on the floor.
I am a prisoner of history, he thought. Damn Jackie Kennedy anyway. He spun his chair about to face the tall windows and the Rose Garden.
“My views on the price of brie,” he said, “are going to be taken more seriously if they come from the representative of the strongest economy in the world.”
“Ah,” the judge said. “So you reckon this is an inconvenient time for Wall Street to have the jitters.”
“That is correct.”
“And your economic advisors tell you that they can’t be absolutely positive about it, but it looks as if the market has entered an uncertain period.”
“Correct.”
“And that while they can’t be definite about it, because the indicators are as yet unclear, it may be possible that the bull market is due for a correction.”
“Something like that.”
“And that the last thing you want, hoss, is for Dow Jones to drop four or five hundred points when you are talking to the French economic minister about the price of brie, because that would blow your credibility to hell and gone.”
“I think that is about the gist.” The President nodded. “Judge, you have a remarkable ability for summing up.”
“And therefore, sir, you want me to talk to Sam.”
“If you could. He is your friend.”
“Lots of people are my friends, Mr. President,” the judge said.
The President smiled his brilliant telegenic smile— even though there was no one to see it, the smile was still an essential part of his repertoire— and put the tiniest trace of syrup into his voice. “If the chairman of the Federal Reserve Board could be said to have a friend,” he said, “that friend is you.”
There was a moment’s hesitation, and then the judge spoke. “Have you talked to him yourself, Mr. President?”
“I have.”
“And what has he told you?”
“He said that the bull market might be due for a correction, and that he was monitoring the situation and would act, if necessary, at the appropriate time. But that a mere downturn in stock prices was not a case, strictly speaking, for intervention.”
“I take it, sir, that you pointed out the importance of the economic summit?”
“I did my best. He suggested, first, that this unsettled period in the markets might end before the conference begins, and might in fact end in a big upswing. Also, he said that it would be better for the conference if plans were made on a basis of actual conditions and not, as he put it, ‘false optimism.’”
“Damn,” the judge said. “Sam’s really being a hardass, isn’t he?”
The problem was, the President knew, that there was little for a president to shine at anymore. The Cold War was over and foreign policy had come down to mediating agreements between various competing ethnic groups that the electorate hadn’t heard of and didn’t care about. The arrogant blown-dry busybodies in Congress had ignored, watered down, or eviscerated every domestic policy initiative undertaken by the Executive Branch. For over twenty years, in every administration, every budget sent by the President to Congress had been declared dead on arrival. They couldn’t decide on their own what to do, jerked this way and that by lobbyists and opinion polls, but they were certain they didn’t want the President doing anything, either.
So like it or not, the President’s job now came down to two things: he had to be seen to make money for people, and he had to be seen to be caring about their problems. He had to go to meetings like the G8 summit and return with promises of jobs and increased prosperity. And he had to be able to listen to people who were in the midst of hard times, and he had to look concerned. The people wanted a president who Cared, and so the President spent a lot of time, in day care centers or drug rehabilitation clinics or veterans’ hospitals, doing his job of Caring. There were no more issues, there were no more real conflicts in politics, it had all become soap opera. The President had to pretend to everyone that the soap opera mattered.
And, as his press secretary Stan Burdett always remarked, it was no good Caring if he weren’t seen to be Caring, and no good making money for people if he weren’t making money for everyone, and furthermore seen to be doing it.
The President just wished he could appoint a Cabinet Secretary for Caring and have done with it.
“I’m not asking for much,” the President said. “What’s wrong with boosting investor confidence?”
The judge thought silently for a long moment. “Mr. President,” he said, “I’ll talk to Sam about it.”
“He’s always been a loyal Party man,” the President said. Until, he did not need to add, Sam had been made the nation’s chief banker, at which point he had given up politics for a Higher Calling, rolling the bones and gazing at chicken entrails in the name of the High God of Interest Rates.
“True,” the judge said. “Very true.” His voice boomed out. “Sir, I’ll do as you ask.”
“Thank you, Judge.”
“You’re very welcome, Mr. President.”
“How about some golf next week?”
“You’re very kind, sir. I would like that very much.”
The President smiled. “I’ll have my flunky call your flunky.”
The President snapped off the speaker phone, picked up the briefing book, and leaned back in his chair.
He had been raised on the history of presidential greatness. Franklin Roosevelt fighting the Depression and Hitler, Lincoln freeing the slaves and seeing the country through its greatest crisis, Jack Kennedy staring down the Soviets over Cuba, Lyndon Johnson creating programs to eradicate poverty and establish civil rights.
And now the President couldn’t even ask the chairman of the Federal for a favor, but had to get a friend to ask it for him.
A prisoner of history, he thought again.
He considered putting his feet up on the desk, but refrained.
*
Once the slide began, the market fell faster than even Charlie had anticipated. Charlie and TPS, even with all their money committed to Charlie’s positions, weren’t big enough to shift market prices very far, but once big traders like Citi and Morgan Stanley started moving into short positions, the balance changed. Once the smart money moved, the stupid money trotted after— too late, as usual— and the really smart money tried to make profit out of both.
Charlie began to wonder how many beta-test versions of Carpe Diem were out there.
He stayed at his desk for the entire trading day, fueled by pots of coffee and takeout food brought in by his secretary. He traded constantly, making hedges, shoring up his position. He was afraid to take a pee break for fear that he’d miss something and lose money.
After each trading day was over he went to the back room to help Megan with the long task of reconciliation. The TPS back room wasn’t really set up for trading at this volume, and Charlie’s trades were so many, and so frantic, that toting up the figures sometimes took them late into the night.
And Dearborne was on Charlie’s neck every minute. Charlie hadn’t thought that Dearborne was going to be this involved, but apparently the banker had figured out that it was his future at stake as well as Charlie’s, and every night he waited in his office for the reconciliation figures to be transmitted to him. If they were late, he called Megan’s office to ask when they could be expected.
Go home, Charlie urged him mentally as he heard the jangle of the phone. Go to the country club. Go anywhere!
But Dearborne hung on. “You’re going to give me that ulcer yet,” he told Charlie.
Charlie figured that if anyone was going to get an ulcer, it would be Charlie, and it would be Dearborne who gave it to him.
The market fell far enough so that Charlie was able to liquidate his position in treasury bonds, which gave him a great lump of profit that made him itchy. He could add it to the margin account, because he knew big margin calls would be inevitable as soon as the regulators noticed how exposed his positions were growing. He could use the money to further hedge his positions, which would lessen the risk of the big margin calls. Or he could buy more short positions, which, because it would make a lot more money in the long run, is what he really wanted to do.
But the smart traders don’t take those kind of risks on their own, Charlie thought. Not without covering their asses.
So he called Dearborne. “I just made you pots of money, guv,” he said.
“How big are the pots?” Dearborne asked.
Charlie told him.
“Nice pots!” Dearborne said, impressed.
It was a clumsy metaphor, Charlie thought, but he could run with it. “I can get you newer and nicer pots,” he said, “but there’s a risk.”
“Oh God,” Dearborne whimpered. “My ulcer’s really kicking up.”
“You don’t have an ulcer yet,” Charlie pointed out, and then explained his point of view.
“But if we buy all those unhedged positions,” Dearborne said, “what do we use to cover the margin calls?”
“That’s your department, guv,” Charlie said.
Dearborne groaned.
“In the words,” Charlie said, “of that great statesman, Ronald Wilson Reagan, stay the course.”
“You’re going to kill me,” Dearborne said.
“Trust me,” Charlie said. “I know what I’m doing.”
Charlie got his way. But as soon as he started putting the money on the market, the regulators noticed his vulnerability and began calling in margins, and he had to call Dearborne for money. Which led to even more anxiety on Dearborne’s part, and more phone calls.
“The margin calls are signs of success,” Charlie kept telling him. “It means the market is moving our way.”
But it wasn’t moving Charlie’s way all the time: it jittered up and down on an almost hourly basis. Charlie took advantage of the upswings to sell as many of his hedges at a profit as he could, then buy more short options. Which led to more margin calls, more aggravation. More phone calls from Dearborne.
On Thursday night Charlie drove home after reconciliation, planning on nothing more exciting than eating some Chinese takeout and having a long soak in the spa, only to find an urgent message from Dearborne on his answering machine.
“Turn on your TV!” Dearborne shouted from the tinny speaker. “The chairman of the Fed is on!”
The chairman wasn’t there when Charlie looked, so he switched to CNN and ate orange peel beef from the cardboard container while he waited for the financial report. Right at the top of the report was the chairman of the Federal Reserve, with a strange gnomic smile pasted to his face, announcing that the Fed was cutting interest rates a full point. Announcers were treating it as if the chairman had just turned water into wine.
Fuck, Charlie thought. Fuck I am so screwed ...
And then, as if on cue, the phone rang. Charlie didn’t answer. He just waited for Dearborne’s voice to come out of the answering machine.
It didn’t say anything that Charlie hadn’t already imagined.
*
The President choked on laughter at the sight of the chairman of the Federal Reserve making his announcement. The unnatural grin, on Sam’s reserved and owlish face, looked more like the product of a jolt of electricity than a result of fiscal confidence.
“I love it!” he whooped. “Damn, I am some kind of slick son of a bitch!”
The First Lady gave him an indulgent look from over her reading glasses. She sat in a lounge chair in their drawing room, a glass of sherry by one hand, briefing books in her lap. Her husband was not the only person doing homework for the economic summit.
“Sam’s peculiar behavior is not unanticipated, I gather?” she said.
“Judge Chivington gave him a little phone call. But I didn’t think it would work so soon, or so fast. And I sure as hell didn’t think it would work by a whole interest point.”
The First Lady looked down at her briefing book and with a marking pen drew a thick pink line along a critical factoid. “You think we can sustain this rally?” she said.
“Barring some unforeseen disaster.” He grinned at the television analyst who was urging fiduciary caution upon his audience. “I won’t have egg on my face at the economic summit, anyway.”
“Let’s just hope,” the First Lady said, returning her gaze to her briefing book, “there isn’t a market adjustment while we’re in London.”
“We’ll have to hope,” said the President, “that we’ve put it off.”
*
All day Friday, Charlie felt as if he’d fallen during the running of the bulls at Pamplona. Except that it was the bulls of Wall Street that were stomping him into the pavement, one sledgehammer hoof after another. Every kick to the kidney, every hoof to the spleen, and he was bleeding dollars. Buoyed by the Fed chairman’s apparent optimism, the market was on a big upswing, regaining practically all the ground it had lost over the last week.
Dearborne didn’t help, not with his panicky phone calls. “It’s false optimism,” Charlie said. “Stay the course.”
“Over thirty percent of Tennessee Planters’ capital is committed to backing your positions,” Dearborne said. “We are a risk-averse institution. You told me you’d be hedging every single minute.”
“I have hedged. I just cashed in ten million dollars’ worth of Eurodollar futures. I made you money!”
“You haven’t hedged enough. That’s what I’m saying.”
“Stay the course,” Charlie said. “It’s not as bad as you think.”
It’s going to be worse, he thought. Even though prices fell at the end of the day, as people started taking their profits, the S&P had gone up five whole percentage points.
After the markets closed, Charlie helped Megan with the process of reconciliation. Before they were completely finished, Megan sent her other employees home, then took Charlie into her office and closed the door. She looked at her monitor, and Charlie could see the green columns of figures reflected in her eyes.
“If you liquidate now,” she said, “your S&P futures will have lost sixty-two point five million dollars.” Charlie’s heart gave a lurch. “Sixty-two and a half,” she repeated. “Now you’ve purchased these options for forty million, and your Eurodollar hedges gives you another ten, but what’s going to happen to you first thing Monday morning is a twelve-and-a-half-million-dollar margin call. I’m amazed you haven’t got it already—probably the computers haven’t caught up to the day’s trading.” The strain of maintaining her low, cultured tones turned her voice husky. “If you don’t liquidate, my dear, your losses are unlimited.”
Charlie licked his lips. He could feel sweat breaking out on his forehead. “You’ve got to help me hide it,” he said.
She stared at him. “Hide twelve and a half million? Are you out of your mind?”
Charlie spoke out loud as calculations rattled frantically in his skull. “Not that much. Just eight or nine. We can’t hide all of it, they’ll be expecting some loss. So we give them a loss, okay? Just help me make it an acceptable loss— three or four million, something like that. And put the rest of it— where?” His mind spun through a mental list of his clients.
Megan stared at him. “Charlie, that’s fifteen ways illegal.”
“What drives markets?” Charlie asked. “FIG. Fear, Ignorance, Greed. The directors at Tennessee Planters are ignorant of the securities marketplace. They really don’t understand what I’m doing. I have to stroke Dearborne every second to get him into line, and I can’t stroke all of the directors all of the time. Once they see our current position, fear will take control of their minds. They’re going to try to take charge of TPS, and ignorance and fear will have them doing the wrong thing. We don’t dare panic them. If they panic, they could order me to liquidate, and those millions of losing positions will turn into millions of real losses.”
Charlie could tell from the look on Megan’s face that she understood all too well what might happen.
“What have we got in the error account,” Charlie said, “a couple hundred thousand dollars? Just put the losses there instead of the real account. Who’s going to check the error account?”
“The figures in the error account get reported just like everything else,” Megan said. “All Dearborne or anyone else has to do is just call it up on the screen.”
Good, Charlie thought. She was responding to the problem. She was starting to think of ways to do what he needed.
“We can’t put it in my account. My profile is too high.” He looked at Megan. “Your account?”
Megan’s answer was a flat stare.
“Right,” Charlie said. “So we put the loss in one of my client accounts. Sanderson— no, he’ll smell something wrong. Caldwell.” He grinned. “Caldwell. Caldwell’s on vacation. He won’t even notice. And he has sufficient collateral to cover any margin calls.”
“He’s not going to notice millions of losses? This won’t attract his attention?”
“Issue a correction once we’re in the black. I’ll call Caldwell and tell him it was a computer error.”
“Charlie,” Megan said, “I dassant do this for you.” The Ozarks was beginning to seep into her voice.
“These sorts of mistakes happen every day. You know they do.”
“Not for this much money. And it’s my job to catch just this sort of error.”
“Just till Monday,” Charlie said. “Dearborne plays golf every Monday at one o’clock.”
Megan’s eyes flashed. “How’s Monday going to make a difference?” she demanded.
“The rally was over, I could tell,” Charlie said. “The momentum was gone. People are going to have the whole weekend to reevaluate their positions. Prices are going to fall on Monday.”
He hoped.
He leaned forward over Megan’s desk, fixed her with his blue eyes. “Just till tee time, that’s all I ask. Then you can issue a correction. Dearborne won’t even look at it, he’ll just see Monday’s totals after the markets close.”
Megan bit her lip. “This is how Nick Leeson lost Baring’s,” she said.
“No!” Charlie shouted. Anger seemed to flash his blood to steam. He pounded a fist on the desk. “Nick Leeson lost Baring’s because he was a fucking incompetent trader!” He thumped his own chest. “I am a fucking great trader! I am the lord of the fucking trading jungle!”
He realized Megan was leaning back, away from his anger. What he saw in her eyes wasn’t fear, it was distaste. She hated weakness, he reminded himself. Hated fear, hated panic.
Charlie lowered his voice, tried to catch his breath. He had to make it all logical, all reasonable.
He reminded himself that he was asking her to go clean against her training and instincts. Not to mention the law. It was her job to balance the books. It was something she took pride in. Now he was telling her not to balance them, to shove a colossal loss under the rug. He had to keep talking, to keep Megan working on the problem, see it from his point of view.
“I just need to get over this little bad patch, that’s all,” he said. “Just help me with this.” He felt sweat running down his face. “After this is done, we can relax. Call the caterers, get some duck, some veal. Call a masseuse over to the house, make sure we’re good and relaxed. Open a bottle of Bolly. We can have a quiet weekend together.” He looked at her. “It’s your money, too, sweetheart.”
She looked at the screen. Gnawed a nail. Then bent over her keyboard, her lacquered nails rattling on the keys.
“Caldwell better be on vacation,” she said.
“You’re brilliant!” Charlie cheered.
“No, I’m not,” she said. “I’m just crazy.” She looked at him darkly. “But not as crazy as you.”