Graveland: A Novel

by Alan Glynn

  But is that what Frank Bishop wants to hear?

  Probably not.

  In any case, it’s only a theory—pieced together from her conversations with Val Brady and others, from what she’s read and from her general feel for these things, her instincts as a journalist.

  And she may be wrong about all of it.

  Besides, he didn’t ask for her opinion.

  “Well,” she says, deciding to simply lay out the facts for him, “I did speak to a few people at Atherton. But remember, when I went there I didn’t have any names, and Lizzie’s only came up at the very end, which is why I went chasing after you.” She stops and glances for a second down at her grilled chicken sandwich. “It was what I found in the library, and in the archives, that led me to Julian Coady’s name. And this was stuff that more or less underpinned what they were about, what they did. In an ideological sense.”

  Frank looks at her. “Ideological? Really?”

  “Well … yeah.” Ellen is aware that a lot of the big-name protest groups have been dissociating themselves from anything to do with the Coadys and Lizzie Bishop, almost as if the whole thing were an embarrassment to them. Much has been made—in certain quarters—of the list of demands and how naive, or generic, or even just derivative, it was. But actually, on reflection, there was nothing that Ellen came across in the Atherton Chronicle pieces, in the radio interviews, in the opinions expressed on the Stone Report or by Farley Kaplan, that was in any way inconsistent with mainstream activist thought. The only dividing line—apart maybe from tone, and register, and levels of paranoia—was the question of whether or not the use of violence could be justified, and that question was as old as the hills. She turns and looks out the window, at a passing limo, a black streak of light on the avenue. “I don’t know,” she then says. “They certainly put a lot of thought into what they were doing.”

  “They?”

  Ellen hesitates, then picks up her sandwich and takes a bite out of it.

  “Yes,” she says, chewing and nodding. “Look, there were three of them. They were in that apartment together, and for a week. During which time two, nearly three, assassinations were carried out. That didn’t just happen. They talked about this stuff, they planned it. And probably for months.” She puts her sandwich back on the plate, realizing that she’s straying here from hard fact, drifting back to opinion. But it’s difficult not to do. “Alex and Lizzie were a couple, Frank. And Alex and Julian were brothers. In and out of each other’s lives. However misguided it was, what they did was planned. It also didn’t come out of thin air, it was based on … stuff they were exposed to. Ideological stuff. They weren’t just going around shooting people randomly. This was a program.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Ellen pauses, thinking. She picks up a french fry.

  Dips it in ketchup.

  He’s staring at her, waiting.

  In all the coverage of the shootings she’s read, seen, or heard, the victims have been referred to simply as Wall Street bankers—they’ve been lumped together into one easily identifiable, monolithic group.

  But—

  Her coverage, if she’d gotten to do any, would have been more specific, more nuanced.

  “What do I mean?” she says. “They had a program worked out. Of assassinations. They weren’t just randomly shooting bankers. They wanted one from each of the three pillars of the system … one guy from an investment bank, one guy from a hedge fund, and one guy from a private equity firm. They got two and narrowly missed the third, the private equity guy.”

  She pops the french fry into her mouth.

  Frank continues staring at her. She wants to nod at his chicken sandwich and say, Come on, eat up, but the moment isn’t right.

  “How do you know this?” he says quietly. “Are you guessing?”

  “No.”

  She’s guessing to some degree—about the dynamics in the apartment, about what went on between Julian and Alex and Lizzie. But she’s not guessing about their overall plan. She explains to Frank about ath900 and Farley Kaplan’s interview on What Up?

  He seems stunned. It’s a level of detail he hasn’t heard from anyone else.

  “The cops,” he says, “the authorities, the FBI, they’ve all been really cagey about telling us anything.”

  “That’s pretty normal, I’m afraid. But this is stuff I came across by myself.” She picks up her iced tea and takes a sip. “The FBI possibly doesn’t even know any of this yet. They came to the case by a different route. They had an informant, apparently. Inside the group Julian was associated with. We just happened to converge.”

  There’s a lengthy silence here, during which Frank, head down, seems to be processing what Ellen has told him.

  “Come on,” she says, taking her chances. “Eat up.”

  He glances at the sandwich, and shrugs.

  “You look like shit, Frank. If you don’t take care of yourself you’re going to get sick.”

  He raises his head. “The private equity guy?”

  “Yeah?” She gives a quick, puzzled shake of her head. “What about him? Scott Lebrecht. Black Vine Partners. The one that got away.”

  “Black Vine Partners. What do they do?”

  Ellen is the one who shrugs this time.

  “I don’t know. Private equity. LBOs. Asset stripping. They buy companies with debt, fire the employees, dump their pension funds, suck all the cash out, and then … skedaddle. It’s not how they’d portray it, but…”

  There is another silence. She studies his face, his eyes. He’s lost in thought.

  She nudges his plate across the table, just an inch or so.

  “Don’t want to sound like your mother, Frank, but Jesus, eat something, will you?”

  He looks at her, then nods. “Yeah, okay.” He lifts the sandwich up off the plate and takes a bite.

  She does the same.

  They eat in silence for a while, chewing solemnly, gazing out at the passing traffic on Ninth Avenue.

  * * *

  The next morning, Howley has his meeting with the producer from Bloomberg, and they set things up for late on Friday afternoon. It’ll be a wide-ranging interview with, by agreement, no holds barred, but no real surprises either. He intends to mount a general and fairly robust defense of private equity, he’ll talk up some deals that are in the pipeline, and he’ll lay out his position vis-à-vis any prospect there might be of an IPO. He’s done TV before and knows what they want, knows what tone to adopt. He’s not one of the flamboyant guys, he’s not charismatic, so it’ll be a question of slipping his message in under a cloak of unprepossessing middle-aged baldness and cautious, dense, meandering syntax.

  It’s a reflex thing, but Howley feels he should be running all of this by Vaughan. He’s not going to, of course. They’ve moved beyond that—or, at any rate, are in the process of doing so.

  Apropos of which, lunch with Paul Blanford yesterday proved to be very interesting. Howley knew Paul years ago through a Pentagon connection, and although they hadn’t been friends exactly or done any formal business together, enough of a mutual impression remained for Howley to be able to get Blanford’s attention and then bear down fairly heavily on him. The fact that Oberon once owned Eiben-Chemcorp certainly made things easier—but without the personal link Howley wouldn’t have been able to cut quite as straight to the chase with Blanford as he did. He circled the issue for a while and then dived in by expressing “deep concern” about a possible breach of protocols at Eiben that had just been brought to his attention. It was in relation to a particular set of clinical trials, he said, and this was especially worrying in the light of a recent DOJ investigation into how pharmaceutical companies were carrying out these very sorts of trials.

  Blanford was dumbfounded and wanted to know more. He wanted to know exactly what Howley was talking about.

  Howley wasn’t about to oblige at this point, but what he did was remind Blanford that Eiben-Chemcorp was no stranger to this kind of thi
ng. There were various instances he could have cited here, most of them taking place long before Blanford’s time. In the early days of Triburbazine, for example, there was a damaging product liability trial involving a Massachusetts teenager who murdered her best friend and then killed herself; there was the botched takeover of Mediflux amid allegations of research results being suppressed; and there was the more recent scandal of widespread résumé fraud by a CRO hired by Eiben. But what Howley chose to cite instead was something he himself had read about just days earlier in Vaughan’s “black file”—those disturbing rumors from about ten years ago of a so-called smart drug called MDT-48 being leaked onto the streets with rather alarming consequences. The reason Vaughan had brought this story, among others, to Howley’s attention was to illustrate what a bad idea going public would be. Back then the Oberon Capital Group had sold Eiben-Chemcorp in the full knowledge that these rumors were about to break, and had then brazenly shorted the buyer’s stock—hardly the kind of trading practices that would bear much public scrutiny.

  The reason that Howley was now bringing the story to Blanford’s attention, however, was quite different. In the current climate, any hint of another such scandal could easily destroy a company like Eiben, and at the very least they’d be stung for a couple of billion in fines.

  So what he wanted to do was scare the shit out of him.

  Phase one.

  And it worked.

  As far as Blanford was concerned the whole thing had come out of the blue, leaving him not only scared but also confused and compliant, which was just what Howley wanted, because without having to offer an explanation, or mention Vaughan by name, he was then able to suggest that Blanford take a close look at any clinical trials Eiben might be conducting on new drugs for geriatrics.

  And to get back to him on it ASAP.

  Simple as that.

  Howley isn’t even sure where this might lead, but he feels he’s being proactive. He doesn’t want any surprises.

  He doesn’t like surprises.

  The Bloomberg guy leaves, and Howley calls Angela in. He has a few minutes before his next meeting, and he wants to see how far along she is with her list of office designers.

  12

  BY TUESDAY EVENING FRANK HAS SKIMMED THROUGH MOST OF THE BOOKS HE BOUGHT. They’re lying on the bed or in small piles on the floor, probably about fifteen in all. He acquired them in three separate spurts of enthusiasm (or delusion?)—each trip out from the hotel to the Barnes & Noble on Fifth Avenue a desperate attempt to shore up his developing but still fragile understanding of the financial crisis, each new title he came across a hit from the crack pipe, an opening up of possibilities, a tingling promise of illumination. On his last trip out he also stopped off at a liquor store and got himself a bottle of Stoli.

  Promises, promises.

  The one book he keeps coming back to—although there’s no real prospect that he’ll get to grips with it right now, or possibly ever, because the damn thing is over eight hundred and fifty pages long—is Murray Rheingarten’s The Dominion of Debt: Financial Disambiguation in an Age of Crisis. Over and over he reads the blurb and the press reviews and the introduction and the chapter headings, he flicks through its capacious, deckled pages, its dense, labyrinthine prose, catching random names and phrases, picking up the sense each time, tantalizingly—like having a word on the tip of your tongue—that deep inside here somewhere, if only he could find and unravel it, is the key to the whole thing, the answer. He feels if he could only persevere, and concentrate, and focus, he could extract from these endless blocks of print an explanation of what happened to everyone that will explain what happened to Lizzie.

  Some of the other books are easier, or seem so at first—Wall Street Crash (And Burn), Money Down, Goldman Sachs and the End of the World—but with most of them it doesn’t take Frank long to see that they’re too specialized, too technical, too detailed in an area he doesn’t quite need to go to. These books vie with one another for the accolade “clearest account so far of the crisis,” but twenty pages into each one and you’re predictably neck-deep in jargon and graphs, in credit default swaps and bogus triple-A-rated securities.

  What got him started on this was something Ellen Dorsey said the other night. They were standing outside that diner on Ninth Avenue, about to go their separate ways, when he remarked one more time that he just didn’t understand what Lizzie had been thinking.

  “Maybe it wasn’t such a mystery,” Ellen said. “I mean, look at that list of demands they made. They were pissed off at the bankers and the money guys. Like a lot of people. And once you follow that stuff, or try to understand it, which Lizzie and the others had obviously been doing, it’s hard not to … respond. I guess it’s just a question of how you choose to do it.”

  Walking back to the hotel, Frank turned this over in his mind. Is that really what Lizzie had been thinking? She was angry? She was indignant? It was hard for Frank to see his daughter in this way—as someone who was independent, informed, and politically aware. Possibly because of the divorce and the years of minimal contact, his image of her was stuck back in the early teen years.

  She was his little girl.

  Sweet, smart, spiky … vulnerable, but also belligerent—a dangerous combination, but what Frank had to face now was that these were characteristics Lizzie had obviously carried with her into adulthood, and that if he wanted to understand her, it would have to be on her terms.

  The other thing he realized walking along Fifty-fourth Street was that he himself wasn’t really angry or indignant. This was probably because he knew next to nothing about the financial crisis. Sure, he’d read the papers and watched the news and shared a certain amount of received indignation, he’d rolled his eyes and passed remarks like everyone else, he’d been appalled at the numbers, he’d seen the ripple effect in the economy, he’d lost his motherfucking job, for Christ’s sake—but he hadn’t ever focused on what had actually been happening, he hadn’t tried to figure any of it out. When he was at Belmont, McCann he’d been too busy working, trying to hold on to his job, and after he got laid off he’d been too busy feeling sorry for himself and scrambling around to find a new source of income. In other words, like a lot of people, he’d been too inward-looking and self-absorbed to pay attention.

  So when he got near the hotel he went into what was now his local Duane Reade and bought a few magazines, business titles—Forbes, Fast Company, Bloomberg Businessweek, The Economist—with the vague intention of boning up on the crisis. But it didn’t take him long—back in his hotel room, flicking through these glossy, ad-heavy mags—to understand that there was a closed lingo here, that a lot was taken for granted, and that he’d have to dig a little deeper. His laptop was in the apartment in Mahopac. There were one or two Internet cafés near the hotel, but they seemed really busy and touristy, and he couldn’t see himself sitting in one of those for too long—or in the business center here in the hotel lobby. What he did was go out and head for the Barnes & Noble on Fifth Avenue, where he stood for a while in front of what turned out to be a dedicated section, a display actually called “Understanding the Crisis.”

  The weightiest and most hyped book here seemed to be The Dominion of Debt, so he picked that one up first, along with Money Down and a copy of Galbraith’s The Great Crash, 1929. Back in his room, he started reading, but was soon switching from one book to another, growing ever more impatient, constantly suspecting that he was reading the wrong one, that the books he’d bought were the wrong ones, that all the learning and illumination were happening somewhere else.

  The next morning he went back to the Barnes & Noble, to the now altar-like “Understanding the Crisis” display, and loaded up on more tomes with urgent-sounding titles such as Financial Catastrophe 101 and Buddy, Can You Spare a Trillion Dollars? The same thing happened, and he made a third trip in the afternoon—stopping at that liquor store on his way back.

  Now, as evening settles in, he feels simultaneously gorged and emp
ty. He admits he’s learned some stuff, but really, more questions are raised by what he’s been reading here than answers. He detects in himself a growing resentment, too, an anger even, about what he’s discovering. But there’s a muffled quality to it, a reticence. What’s driving him first and foremost is this obsessive curiosity, this burning need to know what Lizzie knew.

  To see what Lizzie saw.

  He hasn’t opened the Stoli yet, and he mightn’t.

  He looks around the room.

  These books and magazines are all very well, but what he could really use here is Internet access, high-octane hyperlinks to take him where he needs to go. Someone mentions Bretton Woods? Glass-Steagall? Jekyll Island? Fine, he can go there, follow the thread, not be confined to the impenetrable thickets of some forty-page chapter on collateralized mortgage obligations. Because it seems to Frank that the financial crisis of 2008—its origins stretching back over decades, its aftermath unfolding into the foreseeable future—is a huge, unwieldy subject, a web of interconnecting narratives that cannot be contained in a single text or contemplated at a single glance.

  He thinks about this for a while and then just heads straight out. There’s a place he’s passed on Forty-eighth Street called Café Zero, and that’s where he goes. With so many free Wi-Fi hotspots around now, these dedicated Internet cafés are becoming a thing of the past—but this one is still pretty busy, and although he’s not comfortable here, he settles in at a table and starts surfing.

  He goes to Google and types in “Glass-Steagall Act.”

  In less than a tenth of a second more than two million results come up.