The Innocents

by Francesca Segal

  Later, when Lawrence’s BlackBerry began to trill on the sideboard Adam, who was closest to it, peered at the number.

  “It’s the switchboard.” He handed it to Lawrence who was among a group listening to a very tiny old man tell a story, confused and hilarious, about buying a beagle in Frankfurt in 1929.

  Lawrence took it, mouthing “sorry, sorry” at Jaffa and heading for the hall. Michelle looked disapproving. It was a work call—of course he should take it, she thought, without the need for an apology. Michelle had turned back to hear the beagle punch line when Lawrence’s voice was suddenly audible in the hallway.

  “Shit.”

  His family exchanged worried glances. Lawrence did not believe in profanities. Adam had last heard him swear when Arsenal lost to Barcelona in Paris in the final of the 2006 Champions League. Adam and Lawrence had gone over with Rodney Wilson; Barcelona had scored twice in the last fourteen minutes. Then, Lawrence had said “bollocks.” It was possible he’d even said it twice. Now Jaffa half rose to go to him but Ziva checked her with a glance.

  “Leave him to talk, Jaffale.”

  Lawrence returned to the dining room looking pale.

  “Nothing to worry about,” he said before Jaffa could ask him. “But one of our clients has had … a bit of a situation. Adam, I’m sorry but I’m going to have to ask you to come back to the office with me.”

  Adam had been on his feet as soon as his father-in-law returned, scanning his face for clues. Lawrence bent over his wife and kissed the top of her head. “Nothing to worry about,” he said again, “but I think it’s going to be a late one. I’ll call later if I can with an update but don’t forget to set the alarm when you go to bed. Happy birthday Ziva, so sorry to run.”

  Kisses were exchanged; Rachel and Jaffa in almost perfect synchrony tipped some desserts into plastic bags (Rachel the brownies, Jaffa the meringues) and pressed them fervently on the men. Adam demurred, with no idea of the emergency he was about to attend to; Lawrence accepted them in order to speed up their departure. Once in the car he threw them on the backseat and said to Adam, “I don’t actually believe what’s happened. Shit. I can’t actually believe it.” Lawrence swearing again was more unsettling than almost any other development.

  “What happened?” Adam’s first thought had been of Ellie; his panic had been steadily rising.

  “Ethan Goodman.”

  Adam breathed freely again until Lawrence said, “He’s lost everything, Adam. Everything. Not just his own investments—everything.”

  “God. What do you mean? How?”

  “I just—I don’t know anything. But it’s all gone. His fund’s collapsed, or it was with an Austrian bank that’s collapsed—I don’t know. Tony was saying something about the forint, but we’d never have done anything as risky as investing in Hungary so I don’t understand how it’s happened. Ethan doesn’t take risks. My staff. The pensions! This has to be a mistake.”

  Adam was unable to keep the horror from his face and then felt immediate regret that his first reaction had not been more supportive, or at least more calming.

  “It has to be a mistake,” he echoed. “Substantial losses maybe, but he can’t have lost everything. Tony’s panicking.”

  But if it wasn’t a mistake it was horrendous. His father-in-law would be ruined. The money they held for clients would be safe, but GGP’s debts would be crippling. Fatal. They would have to sell the company for pennies.

  Ethan had taken on the GGP Pension Fund as a favor when Lawrence had been looking for safe, reliable fund managers. Adam remembered the conversation—it had been more than five years ago and all three of the GGP founding partners had been elated by the move. Surely it wasn’t possible for a pension fund to just disappear? An inventory of GGP employees began to form in Adam’s mind: those with families, those who’d recently bought houses, were pregnant or were approaching retirement. He began to imagine them in a line, men and women in single file stretching away into the distance. The futures of each one and all their dependents had been entrusted to Ethan Goodman. Along with his own fund, Ethan had managed the GGP Pensions and the savings of one or two private individuals—not people with a lot of money, but those whom Ethan had gone out of his way to help. And what help it turned out to be! Adam was fairly certain that Ari Rosenbaum’s father had given his money to Goodman and—

  “Poor, poor Ziva,” Lawrence said, just as Adam’s realization dawned. She would lose everything.

  Not since his first year at Linklaters had Adam worked through two consecutive nights at the office. They were seeking to obtain a freezing injunction against the Goodman Funds and he was almost cross-eyed with exhaustion, fueled only by caffeine, adrenaline, a fierce urge to protect Lawrence, who was looking a decade older with each day that passed, and an even fiercer urge to punch Ethan Goodman and keep punching him until he was on the floor and screaming for mercy. Then, he imagined, he might move on to kicking him in the face. That his train for Paris had departed that morning without him on it was a frustration that he did not yet have the emotional resources to address.

  Goodman had begun proceedings to liquidate his two ailing investment funds, the Goodman ABS Fund and the associated Fairman Fund, and as a result had lost, personally, many millions. The Goodman ABS Fund had been in trouble for a while and as the Fairman Fund had a 40 percent stake in it, it could not continue to trade once the Goodman ABS closed. Understanding the interdependent entities was more challenging than it should have been, made even more so by the fact that Lawrence had so far been unable to get hold of Ethan Goodman himself.

  “It looks like the banks that lent him money will get it back but there’s almost nothing for the investors. You know, it wasn’t just me and Tony who wanted this; the trustees jumped at this opportunity back then. They were all in favor, and now they’ve had collective amnesia. If one more person asks me why I wanted to invest with that schmuck,” said Lawrence, taking off his glasses and pinching the bridge of his nose as if to stave off a headache, “I think I’m going to throw myself out of this window.” He was standing at the back of his office staring out blankly at Marylebone beneath them, rocking back and forth on his heels as if he were on the ledge itself and about to do just that. Michelle’s vision had become a reality—very late the previous night Adam had moved himself into Lawrence’s office so that they did not need to bother picking up the phone to speak. The other GGP partners, Tony Gould and Jonathan Pearl, were each in their own adjacent rooms, and Kristine had come in to answer their now incessant phones. Adam was the only other employee yet to be included in the council of war. It was Saturday night.

  Lawrence turned back in to the room. Neither man had shaved since Thursday morning and his father-in-law’s beard, Adam noticed, was coming through gray. Had it always been? He couldn’t remember him anything other than clean-shaven. For a moment he tried to imagine Lawrence when they had first met almost a decade and a half ago, but that long-ago Lawrence appeared as a child’s memory, unchanged and unchanging, always substituted with a current image so that Adam’s devious unconscious could deny the alteration. The thought of Lawrence getting older was an intensely painful one.

  Two phones began to ring outside. Kristine was trying, valiantly, to answer every call. It had been impossible to work since the news had become public—either it was a GGP employee hysterical that Ethan Goodman’s fail-safe investments had failed or it was a friend, full of pity and offering to help. Questions from the frantic staff were heartrending, and they had no answers to them. Was it really possible that everything was gone? What would happen to the company? To their mortgage? Would they have to sell their house? Would their husband have to come out of retirement? Lawrence had begun by taking all of these calls himself, speaking for hours to his senior associates, his mail room men, the secretaries, until Tony and Jonathan had intervened. Every hour on the phone was an hour in which he was unable to look for a solution. Equally disruptive were the well-meaning friends—was there anyt
hing they could do? Did Lawrence need a loan? Advice? A barrister? An accountant? A break in the countryside to clear his head (this from a concerned and paternal Rupert Sabah)? Their support was touching but their pity was, Adam could sense, intolerable. It was these charitable offers that finally led Lawrence to cede his mobile to Kristine.

  Only Adam had kept his own phone. He had not wanted to overload Kristine, he’d said, but in truth he hadn’t wanted her to answer if Ellie called him, though he was almost certain that she wouldn’t and hoped, in fact, that she wouldn’t. He had only the strength remaining to help Lawrence. Rachel too had added a bewildering dimension to the last few days by sending him provocative text messages in which she promised to reward all his hard work just as soon as he got home. He did not have the energy for her either. Whether it was the thought of her man soldiering at the front like a hero that was doing it for her he didn’t know, only that his wife seemed to have rediscovered her sex drive at the last moment in the world when he could think about sex.

  “We’ve got to find a way. This is people’s lives. It’s an insult to tell them I don’t know anything but I don’t, I don’t know any more than they do. And they’re all calling. Everyone’s calling us. I have to be able to tell them something. We’ll have to have a meeting on Monday morning with everyone and tell them—what? What can I tell them? Why the hell won’t he speak to me? Why …” Lawrence shook his head. “Why the hell hasn’t he called me back? Surely he couldn’t have seen this coming or he’d have told us. I mean, it wasn’t some harebrained high-risk investment, it was a pensions fund, for God’s sake. I understand that people make mistakes but a real man, a mensch, shoulders his responsibilities and faces people and at least explains.”

  Adam hurt for Lawrence, still resolute in his determination to see the best in everyone. It had been glaringly obvious since the beginning of this fiasco that Ethan Goodman, while he was many things—stupid, cowardly, irresponsible, possibly even criminally negligent—was not a mensch. A mensch would not have gambled with the money of people who didn’t have it to lose.

  “And what about this Brooke business?” Lawrence continued. “Do you believe that Brooke didn’t know any of this was happening? What husband doesn’t at least warn his wife that their lives are about to fall apart?” Jaffa knew Lawrence’s movements as clearly as if he wore a tracking bracelet—he himself made sure of it. That Ethan’s wife had been, the rumors alleged, as ignorant as the rest of them seemed unfathomable to him. But that was apparently the case. Brooke Goodman was in shock, people said, rigid and silent upstairs in the house on the Bishop’s Avenue that they would soon be forced to sell. Neither Ethan nor Brooke had been seen to leave the house since the news broke.

  Adam considered the question. “I think she really didn’t know. I think he’s that big of a putz,” he said. It was what his instinct told him and he felt strangely protective of poor Brooke Goodman, trapped in her collapsing golden cage with a man who had just told her, out of the blue, that he had ruined her life.

  “Yes. A putz he certainly is.” Lawrence sat down at his desk, resuming the position that he’d been in for most of the past two days, hunched over, his head in his hands. Beside him was the e-mail that the Goodman Fund had circulated to its investors, the only communication Ethan Goodman had offered anyone: “I have been working ceaselessly in recent days, investigating all feasible methods by which to alleviate this current crisis. The situation has been further strained by the recent and well-publicized alterations to the circumstances of the credit providers who have resorted to draconian terms, without considering the creditworthiness of firms in each individual case. I am devastated for my investors by this unavoidable liquidation.”

  Goodman was no doubt devastated—and certainly in financial terms. It looked as if he had put several million pounds of his own money into the funds in recent days in a desperate attempt to prevent a fire sale and to keep them trading but it had, in the end, made no difference. This had not made anyone feel any happier.

  Lawrence was reading the e-mail for the hundredth time when Kristine appeared in the doorway dressed in a sort of black woolen muumuu, covered in Hawaiian orchid prints in pale peach and dove gray. She had insisted on coming in, and her presence lent a reassuring normality to one of the strangest working days they’d ever had.

  “You should eat,” she directed. Adam and Lawrence laughed; she sounded as if she were speaking from Jaffa’s lips. “I’m going to order something in for you lot. Tony and Jonathan haven’t eaten either. What about Lebanese from Fairuz?”

  “Perfect, thanks.”

  “Half an hour in the conference room. You’ll all be there.” She had raised her voice for this last statement so that the other two partners could also hear—they would not get away with starving themselves on her watch, financial crisis or not.

  “You should go, Kristine, honestly. It was so kind of you to come in on a Saturday, and it’s getting late.”

  She drew herself up, offended. “Kind of me to come in on a Saturday? Lawrence, the world has gone mad and you’re talking as if you’re at tea with the queen. Of course I’d be here. And I’m going nowhere for the time being, thank you. I’ll stay till ten, when you’ve eaten and hopefully the phones have quietened down a bit. I’ll do my part. It’s all our pensions that man has lost in any case. We should all muck in.”

  It was then that Lawrence, to Adam’s horror, began to cry. He couldn’t be certain, for Lawrence had returned to the window and had his back turned to them. But he had lowered his head and his shoulders were shaking and it felt to Adam, watching helplessly, as if he were witnessing the destruction of the Temple.

  He exchanged glances with Kristine and she left, closing the door behind her. When he heard it shut Lawrence turned to face him, exhaling heavily. He looked exhausted and rumpled somehow, not simply his clothes but all of him.

  “What am I going to do?” he asked Adam. “We have thirty-seven employees and the pension fund … We made that decision, Tony and I. We thought we were doing something safe. He’s such a community-minded man, or we thought he was such a community-minded man,” he corrected himself, “a responsible man, a father, a great philanthropist, and honestly it seemed as if we were doing the right thing. And you know the most ridiculous part? We had to beg him to take the fund. Do you remember? Beg him. He didn’t want to do it, he was so modest and kept saying he wasn’t a fund manager, he’d just done some favors for some friends, we really had to schmooze him to do it. The trustees all approved it. Thirty-seven pensions, for which I am personally responsible. And now there’ll be a takeover. What am I going to do?”

  “Surely they’ll recover it somehow. Surely he still has something of his own, in America or something.”

  “Maybe. I only hope”—Lawrence rubbed his eyes again—“I only hope that we get this done in time before he actually starts getting rid of assets. He wouldn’t—I’m sure he wouldn’t. He wouldn’t. But without picking up the bloody phone to me, he’s left us absolutely no choice. God, this is a mess. Poor man. What a mess he’s made.”

  Adam had abandoned his shirt the day before and was now in the Thierry Henry Arsenal T-shirt from his gym bag, but the office still felt stifling. Rachel had offered to bring him things from home but he’d lied and said he had everything he needed to avoid the interruption. He considered, briefly, whether it would be more restful to stay at work again rather than to go home and fend off his inexplicably randy wife. She would also, God help him, want to talk about all of this. It was exhausting just thinking about it. But it was not something he had to decide yet—many hours lay ahead before any of them could consider going home.

  Tony Gould came in, wearing jeans and an ancient Bristol University sweatshirt. Until yesterday Adam had rarely seen Tony without a tie.

  “Affidavit’s looking good, I think. It’s going to be monstrously big. Kristine’s got dinner set up. Fancy stopping for a bite?” Tony asked.

  “Yes.” Lawrence pushed
back his chair and threw down the sheaf of Goodman ABS Fund statements that he’d been poring over, the same documents he’d been reading with forensic care all day in order to draft the application for the freezing injunction. The others had all been doing similar, painstaking examinations in a frantic bid to complete the supporting affidavit setting out the assets and the imminent threat of their dissipation.

  “Good man. Might be the last time the company credit card works, might as well go wild on the expense account. I’ll tell her to order extra baba ghanoush. Let’s go crazy.” Tony put a weary arm around Lawrence. Adam was glad Tony had come back in as he seemed to be the only one who could raise even a fleeting smile from Lawrence.

  Lawrence laughed and shook his head, patting Tony on the shoulder. “Why not? Nothing like baba ghanoush to take the sting out of financial ruin.”

  Adam followed them to the conference room watching the two men as they walked, talking softly, still with their arms round one another, old friends who had supported each other through school and university and marriage and children and were now, together, facing the challenge of their lives.

  Adam was gratefully inhaling a lamb kebab when Kristine burst in, thrusting a phone at Lawrence. Lawrence set down the piece of grilled chicken that had been halfway to his mouth.