The guide finally arrived. His hair and skin were stained the same color by the sun. The veins in his forearms and calf muscles formed ridges. When he sensed how distracted she was, he did not even try to flirt with her. Besides, he was rattled by what had happened the day before: six dead in an avalanche—two guides and an American family of four.
“It’s all about reading the mountain. Climbing isn’t the hardest part. Those Americans went up there hoping for the best. That’s no way to climb a mountain. You have to be so overprepared that you know you will never fall. Any path can be dangerous. They can all disappear in certain weather conditions. Nothing is guaranteed. All the seasoned guides know how to read the weather and the elements. But it’s what they do with that information that matters. The guides get seduced into pleasing their clients. And some of these rich Americans offer bonuses if they succeed in the climb. And it’s serious money. My friends with a kid or two find it hard to turn down. They tell me it keeps them from worrying about money, it gives them a cushion in case they want to do something else. But they’re never going to do anything else. I tell them not to think that way—that they’re perversely taking more risk now that they have a kid. If anything, they should take less risk. But they don’t see it that way. You only need one person to make a bad decision for everyone else to follow. They assume if one person goes, then it must be safe.”
He shook his head and stirred two packets of sugar into his espresso.
“But the truth is, it’s a really big mountain, and most of the people who climb it don’t even know or understand what the dangers are. An avalanche doesn’t just come out of the blue. We all knew what the conditions were and we’ve all heard that sound before—the sound of an avalanche coming down the mountain. It gets louder and louder—like a freight train that never stops. The two guides knew they shouldn’t have risked it. But their clients had flown all the way from New York, and it was the only time they could all make it, and the father put a lot of pressure on them to go. He wasn’t the type who was accustomed to people not doing what he wanted. And those two guides—if they had been honest with themselves and their clients—would have said it wasn’t safe to go, but instead they convinced themselves—‘Well, just this once, if we’re quick we can get up and down.’ Whatever they said, they should have known they had said it one too many times.” As he spoke, it was as if he were trying to work out the exact equation of how a guided tour could have ended in six deaths.
“And now you have an American family with their two college-age sons dead and two guides leaving behind their wives and three small kids. It’s easy to get complacent—no matter how many times you’ve been up there. Just because you got down safely doesn’t mean the odds are in your favor. You have to believe each time you go up, it’s a new mountain, and you have to assess the risks as if you’ve never been up before. Complacency is your enemy. You have to be prepared for the time when your hand slips, you almost have to be expecting it, so nothing can take you by surprise. And you should never go up there unless you know with complete honesty that you’re sure it will be okay, because even then there’s a chance it won’t. And if you go up expecting something or knowing there are odds that something can happen, then you’re already doomed. You have to be able and willing to recalibrate when conditions change. It’s a belief in yourself that nothing can happen to you, and that belief is only legitimate if you are being honest with yourself. My friends would still be here if they hadn’t accepted the money waved in front of them.”
Helen kept shifting to thoughts about Christopher and herself as if her mind were a record needle that kept jumping tracks. Maybe the death of his father from an accident that could have been avoided had taught Christopher the lessons the guide now offered. They were embedded deep inside of him. He was prepared for anything. But she was not. Was she not like those Americans who had perished? Had she been too precipitate in marrying him? Had she blindly followed him—hoping for the best? The guide had said, “Any path can be dangerous. They can all disappear in certain weather conditions.” It wasn’t the investigation that had made things difficult. The difficulty had been there all along. Their love had broken away piece by piece—like the warnings before an avalanche. She had not been careful enough. She had assumed she had to do nothing to protect it. Perhaps she hadn’t been prepared for marriage to him. But what did that mean exactly? Maybe as a couple you could only survive if you acted like a climber on a mountain.
As she went through security at the Geneva airport the following morning, she saw Nick van Asten on the other side, threading his belt through his jeans. She hadn’t seen him since the day he wrote his number on her wrist. She called his name and was reprimanded by the security guard. Nick heard her and waited for her to come through. He kissed her hello and checked her boarding pass. She had hoped they were on the same flight, but they were headed in opposite directions.
“My flight leaves before yours, but I’ll walk with you,” he said. He had been visiting his sister in Geneva.
“I didn’t know you had a sister.”
“Twin, she works as a translator for UNICEF.”
They sat down at Helen’s gate. She told him about her interview with the professional mountain climber. He took her hand and turned her wrist over. “You should have called me. I would have come and taken pictures for you.”
“I don’t think you would be in our budget. My guess is they’ll use some pretty standard images, probably ones they already have.”
“Did you see the series the Guardian did on Calais? It could have been ours, with better photos and better writing.”
He said he had been asked to replace a BBC photographer who had gotten injured in Afghanistan. He had a week before he was due to meet his group. He was flying to Islamabad and then catching a flight to Quetta where he was meeting up with another photographer and driving north across the border to Kandahar.
“So, Helen, parallel or converging lines—you and me? The way we keep meeting has to be converging, no?”
“You read my article.”
“I did. I read all the articles of future collaborators. It was good—the way you refract what’s in front of the reader and then turn it at an angle to a larger, more abstract topic.”
“I didn’t know I did that.”
“You do. It’s good. No one else does that. I’d like to see what we could do.” He checked the screen in front of her gate. His flight was boarding. He took her number and kissed her good-bye. “I’ll call you when I’m back.”
“Nick,” she said, “be safe.” He had lost his swagger. She could tell he was apprehensive about what was in front of him. She watched as he jogged through the clusters of travelers until she couldn’t see him anymore.
When she handed in her piece, she told David that she had tried to stay away from the controversial topic, but all the guide’s comments veered back to the subject as if it were an unavoidable magnetic field. And she thought that readers, given the recent tragedy, would want to know more in order to protect themselves from danger.
Chapter Thirty-Five
London
Over the weeks and months, Helen watched him dress in the early morning when it was still dark outside—shirt, socks, trousers, cuff links, shoes, tie, and jacket—the same gestures repeated day after day, week after week, month after month—gestures of normalcy—yet there was nothing normal about where Christopher found himself. He was thinking about the moves in a battle—defections, legal briefs, responses, preparations. He was dealing in an area not his own, so he had to find fluency while still constructing a defense. The only time she had ever seen him look at himself was when he was shaving, and even then he was always looking somewhere else. Not only did he not see himself, he did not see her. She felt as if she had been disappearing little by little over the two years they had been married. She wanted to ask him who he thought he had met three years ago in Bermeja, as a way of confirming who she had been. Could she not remember? Could she have los
t so much of herself that she would be unable to recover what she had lost? But they were past the point of conversation. He had no patience for such questions. He would not see the point. All his energy and focus were devoted to defending himself and his firm. She no longer included herself in that equation.
By early spring she noticed that they had received none of the invitations from the prior season—invitations that always came six months in advance. The last time she’d had Sunday lunch with her family, she had gotten angry when Louis told her she was fortunate they didn’t have children, the assumption being she would leave Christopher. Did she support him because she believed he had done nothing wrong? Or was she just being stubborn in her refusal to consider he could be guilty? She wasn’t even sure herself anymore. Maybe she had been looking at their marriage from the wrong place. But where was the right place to stand? Maybe it had nothing to do with where you were standing but what you were prepared for.
Chapter Thirty-Six
London
Two weeks after Easter, Christopher returned home shortly after midnight from a meeting with Nigel. Helen, who rarely waited up for him, was sitting in bed flipping through issues of Country Life. She still liked to look at the listings of properties for sale in London and in the country, even though she knew they would never be theirs.
“This is unexpected,” he said, kissing her and then collapsing in the armchair at the far side of the room.
“I couldn’t sleep.” She spoke as if picking her words from broken glass. “I just thought it would be nice to wait up for you.” She gathered her knees in her arms. She wished he would come over and sit down next to her on the bed.
“I have bad news. The SFO is bringing formal charges.” He wrestled with his tie. “Nigel says there’s a document detailing a transaction I authorized with Philippe Pavesi that was a sham.”
“A sham? What does that mean?”
“I don’t know.”
“What did Nigel say?”
“He said it has something to do with quote ‘a trade lacking market risk.’”
“How?”
“I don’t know yet. I rarely got involved with the trading side. When I learned about Philippe and Marc’s scheme for the pension funds of Italian companies, I didn’t feel comfortable with it and I raised some red flags. We agreed going forward that Marc would get a letter from a top firm, in effect blessing each transaction. And as far as I know, he did that.” He shook his head as if to erase what he had said. “So these charges don’t make any sense to me. A while back, Philippe brought up a tax straddle idea that had gotten shut down in the U.S. that he thought could work in Europe, but I killed that idea. I don’t see how I could be accused of having anything to do with trading or with Philippe. I don’t think I’ve spoken to him in over a year.”
“What did Nigel say?”
“He doesn’t know. They aren’t giving him any sense yet of what they’re alleging constitutes fraud.”
“When did they say you did this?”
“They aren’t being any more specific. I’ve told you everything I know.”
“What can you do?”
“Nothing until we get the charges.”
“Why didn’t you call me?”
“There’s nothing to do. Nigel said I should be very careful about emails and speaking on phones.”
“You mean they’re bugging your phone?”
“Don’t know, but probably.”
“But you don’t have anything to hide?”
“Of course not—but anything can be taken out of context—misconstrued. It’s not worth the risk.”
“How bad is it?”
“Very bad. I could go to jail.”
“You didn’t do it, did you?”
“No, Helen.”
“Then how did it happen?”
“I don’t know. We’re meeting tomorrow morning to go over the evidence the prosecutors have. I can only think that someone in the firm set me up.”
“But who could it have been? Do you think it was Marc?”
“I don’t know.”
“Who else could it have been?”
“I don’t know.”
“How about your friend Dan?”
“Dan O’Connor?”
“Can’t he help you?”
“He would if he could, but he doesn’t know the laws and regulations of European markets. He only knows the U.S. This is going to go fast. He wouldn’t be able to get up to speed in time.”
“God, Christopher, why aren’t you furious?”
“I don’t have the luxury of being furious.”
“Where are you going?”
“To my study.”
“Please just come to bed.”
“Helen, I have to get out of this situation. I’m the only one who can do it. How can you not understand that?”
Chapter Thirty-Seven
London
The trial was set for October. Helen knew Christopher was fighting for his life.
Even when he was talking to her, his mind was always circling, watching for a piece of overlooked evidence, trying to stay ahead of the SFO, trying to anticipate any bad news by finding it first. As she watched him, she had a sense of doom, as if he were preparing for something he would not be able to vanquish. They had lost the ability to make a connection. There was an invisible distance between them. She had allowed herself to believe it was the investigation. When it was over, in what condition would she find her marriage? She would help him in any way she could, but after it was over, she wasn’t sure she could find a reason for staying. Hope was beginning to feel foreign.
Within two months of the trial, Christopher and Marc were not speaking to one another. Marc remained in Milan, and Christopher did his best to keep the firm going, but as soon as his competitors learned of the charges, they began picking off clients and associates one at a time. When he came home and told Helen of the latest defection, she would become outraged at the disloyalty, and he would just shrug and say he couldn’t blame them. They had families and mortgages. The worst moment came when Jack Greigson, the vice president Christopher had put in charge while he prepared for his trial, was hired away by Eric.
“Charlotte’s husband?”
He nodded.
“How can he do that?”
“As you know, a year and a half ago, he was interested in buying our firm. This is a cheaper way of doing it. Our firm is nothing more than people. And he’s probably of the view that if he doesn’t hire Jack, someone else will.”
“But not to come to you and tell you?”
“Yeah, well, this industry isn’t known for having choirboys.”
“What are you going to do?”
“Call all those who are still at the firm and try to keep them from leaving.”
“How are you going to do that?”
He didn’t answer. Her questions took up energy and advanced nothing. He didn’t have time for any thinking that wasn’t strategic. He didn’t have the luxury of spending energy and focus on what were, in the end, irrelevant facts. Whether Eric or someone else had hired Jack away, it didn’t matter. What mattered was that Jack was leaving. Christopher had to appoint someone to take his place—fast. Most of his senior people had already left. Those who remained were either too junior or just not able enough to keep everything together while he was preparing for his trial.
Chapter Thirty-Eight
London
It was as if a bad storm had been barreling toward them with warnings of tidal surges and high winds, and all they could do was prepare and wait. But in the last stretch, it had changed its path and brushed past them, and when it was over, all was left still and swept clean. Christopher got the news from Nigel. The SFO was dropping the charges. All the trades checked out. “They went out on a limb, suspecting they would find a number of sham transactions.”
“What about that document—the one detailing the sham transaction I allegedly authorized with Philippe?”
“It
certainly wasn’t helpful, but there never was a trade. Contemplating an illegal trade—not doing it, well, that’s not grounds for conviction. You’ll never be able to prove it, but it does look as if Marc or someone closely associated with him was trying to frame you.”
“But it doesn’t make sense, because you said all along I would be liable for anything illegal Marc did, so in framing me, he would have framed—Jesus, it was a ruse.” The suddenness of Christopher’s insight made his voice sound brittle.
“What was a ruse?”
“Why didn’t I see this before?”
“What? See what?”
“That document. It was a decoy. A diversion. It’s so clear now.”
“What’s clear?”
“What Marc was up to. It all makes sense now.”
“What do you mean? All the trades were legal.”
“No, not that. He must have anticipated the potential for an investigation. When I first became concerned, I met him in Milan. Philippe laid out an aggressive trading strategy involving tax straddles that he knew I wouldn’t approve. It was predicated on breaking the spirit of the law, and I felt the temptation to fix trades would be too great—I didn’t want to worry about it. I have to believe that he did that to divert us and possibly the prosecutors, if it ever came to that.”
“Sorry, Christopher, I’m not following you.”
“The illegal activity wasn’t on the trading side. It was never about the trading—the trades were all legal. That’s why none of it made sense. It was on the investment side. It’s who’s behind the names—that’s what Marc didn’t want us to discover. That document was devised precisely to send the SFO and all of us running down the wrong path—away from Philippe and Muñoz. It’s why Muñoz left early from that house party.”
A Theory of Love Page 16