Free Union Atlantic by Adam Haslett Page B

hadn’t lasted long. In her way, Betsy had always resented his sister, and he couldn’t entirely blame her. It wasn’t that they saw so much of her in any given year. It was something else. Something about the nature of her claim on Henry.
    “Your marriage should be donated to the Smithsonian,” Charlotte had said to him once.
    He should have been insulted, but he’d always enjoyed her wit.
    As he turned back up the jetty toward his room, his cell phone began to vibrate.
    W HATEVER SUSPICIONS he’d harbored about Taconic’s management were quickly confirmed by his conversation with Fred Premley. It turned out the bank had been hemorrhaging cash on the swap for nearly a month. Clearly news had leaked into the overnight market. Which meant the problem was already worse than its notional value. If he’d been doing his job, Premley would have approached Henry’s staff two weeks ago and borrowed from the Discount Window. But he was trying to attract a buyer for his company, so he’d avoided that public sign of distress. Instead, he’d just held on, hoping circumstance would save him. They had never met, but from the orotund tone of his voice, Henry could just picture the double chin. This was the kind of Business Roundtable chump who spent his lunchtime decrying government intrusion and now found himself on a cell phone in the middle of the night pleading with the government to save him. In the morning, there would be teams of examiners at the doors of his office, but right now they had to patch something together. After listening to his prevarications for a few minutes, Henry made it clear a specific request would be required.
    “Well, then,” Premley said, “I guess I’m asking if the Discount Window would loan us the one seventy.”
    Henry glanced at the fax Helen had sent through. Taconic had forty million in its reserve account.
    “You might have got that, Mr. Premley, if you’d approached us in a timely fashion. But you’ve left it a bit late, wouldn’t you say?”
    There was a pause on the line.
    “You’ll get thirty,” Henry said, “and that’s generous.”
    “You’re serious.”
    He said nothing.
    “What about the rest?” Premley asked.
    Henry had reached the limit of his official, public authority. From here on, they entered the informal realm. “The rest will need to be restructured,” he said. “Tonight.”
    “I don’t disagree, but my VP he tells me Union Atlantic’s been holding out for hours. They don’t want to refinance.”
    “That’s hardly surprising under the circumstances.”
    He let the silence that followed hang there on the line between them. He needed to soften Premley up with fear so that he would accept the harsh terms Union Atlantic would offer once Henry placed his call to Holland. He said nothing for another moment or two, time enough, he figured, for the man to begin wondering about his own liability once the shareholder litigation began.
    “Tell Cannistro to set up the transfer for the thirty million and keep this line open, all right, Mr. Premley? We’ll see what we can do.”
    Turning on the television back in his room Henry saw that Frankfurt and Paris were down in early-hours trading. He pressed the Mute button and closed his eyes for a minute. The back offices in London were starting their day now and would begin to notice that Union Atlantic’s payments were being held up. A call or two out to the trading desks where the young jocks sipped their coffee, stroking the fantasy of the one-day killing, and the lines would start to hum, bank stocks getting ready to head lower at the bell. He could see the sheen on the hard black plastic of the phones that would start to ring, the five-screen stations at Roth Brothers feeding Reuters and Bloomberg, the digital glide of ticker tape high along the wall, servers linked, nested, and cooled on the floor below, batching for export the first of the day’s reportsto the redundant facilities in Norfolk or Hampshire,