In the Light of What We Know: A Novel

by Zia Haider Rahman

  Sounds unpleasant, I said, but immediately regretting that I might appear to be passing judgment on him for taking part in it.

  It’s not about pleasant or unpleasant. Business teaches you that. It doesn’t matter a hoot what you think of what the customers want or what you think of the customers, for that matter. The only thing that counts is delivery. You got to deliver.

  The senator leaned forward. I think Crane’s a damn fool.

  Has he signed up?

  Not yet. I want you to talk to him. He’ll listen to you. He likes you—I like you—we go back a long way.

  I’m not sure my advice would count for much.

  Forrester glanced at me.

  Let’s order lunch, he suggested.

  What’s good?

  Our focus shifted. Forrester made some recommendations, and, with the waiter dispatched, resumed talking.

  I have a great deal of admiration for your grandfather. That man was born for business. And I mean real business, manufacturing, oil refining, shipping, not finance, like mine—you know what I mean. No, he actually made things. He must be getting on?

  In his eighties but still works a full day.

  I’d have been surprised to hear anything else. Your grandfather made me a lot of money once.

  He’s a good businessman.

  A great businessman. And he knows a thing or two. BCCI is before your time.

  I’ve read about BCCI. The Arab bank that collapsed.

  I had money in it. Your grandfather advised me to get out before it fell apart.

  And how did he make you money?

  Saving money is the same as making money. That piece of sound advice was worth a pretty penny.

  I didn’t ask if my grandfather had been paid for it. I did, however, think of Payne and JPMorgan’s reserve capital that was now freed up thanks to EBRD’s credit default swap. To save money is to make money.

  Don’t get me wrong. I have no fear for my boy’s safety. Crane can’t think they’ll treat him like the rest. He’s the son of a goddamn United States senator and one who’s on the Senate Armed Services Committee, for Christ’s sake. Do you think we’d ever go to war if the boys we sent out to fight for us were the sons of Wall Street or Capitol Hill? Hell no! No amount of Kuwaiti oil would be enough. Crane’s going to be mollycoddled in some backwater of intelligence or given a military attaché position in Bermuda so that he can drink rum on the beach and hammer the ambassador’s pretty second wife.

  What is your concern, if I may ask?

  The senator grinned at me.

  I want Crane to get on. He’s had a fine education and he’s got a decent head on him. He needs to make a go of things. We’re not put on this earth to fuck around. We have to make something of our lives. Crane’s had all the privileges, and it’s time he used those privileges to good effect.

  What do you have in mind? I asked.

  He could do anything he wants. He could go to Wall Street, Christ knows there are more than a few bankers who owe me, or he could try his hand in politics. There’s plenty of governorships he could aim for. Heck, the boy’s got an Ivy League degree and a JD; why doesn’t he do something with that head of his? I’d fund his campaign if he wanted to run for office in New York. Attorney general, why not? Or if he wanted to go back to New Jersey, I’ve got enough leverage with both the Democrats and the Republicans to get him appointed AG. He’s got all these options and he wants to throw them away for some half-assed idea of … I don’t know what.

  I can talk to Crane, but as you say, he’s not stupid and I can only—

  Talk to him about all the options he has. I know the boy respects you. I’ve been following your career, and I think you’re on to something with these collateralized debt obligations. You have a talent. You know, the ratings agencies are still trying to figure out how to rate these things. I believe in you. And if you apply yourself, you can get Crane to hold off signing up and instead spend a couple of years on Wall Street or the Hill. He can get a job as counsel to one of the Senate committees. Just try something first. Jesus wept, he’s fresh out of law school and he’s thinking of going into the Marines. What a waste!

  I’ll see what I can do.

  That’s all I can ask. Now tell me about these CDOs I keep hearing about.

  Forrester’s direct manner gave the impression of a man following items on a mental agenda for the conversation. For my part, when I accepted his invitation to lunch, I did not have in mind to discuss the CDO business. Until then, my team had been focused on getting one of the larger and longer-established ratings agencies on our side. But right there in the Yale Club it hit me that maybe Forrester and his agency had more to gain. Mentioning that my grandfather once helped him out was a nice touch, as if to suggest he was now going to take a hit in order to repay a favor, when the truth was that, if anything, any ratings agency that agreed to rate my CDOs stood to make more than a tidy sum. They’d get their fee, and if there was more business in the pipeline, they’d be milking a new cash cow. It was merely a question of getting them over their initial wariness.

  As Forrester and I moved on to coffee, he listened attentively while I described the products we’d developed. From time to time, he interjected with technical questions, testing the limits of my own understanding. The man had done his homework. If it was hard to price these things accurately—which is to say price them relative to other securities—then it was no less difficult to assess their creditworthiness, and to assess the credit rating they should be given by the likes of Forrester’s agency.

  You do know I don’t have anything to do with the agency anymore? asked Forrester.

  I came here at your invitation, I reminded him.

  The business is now at arm’s length from me. I’m in the Senate and a man can’t serve two masters. I got to tell you, I don’t even have a seat on the board. But if the agency has a sense of how you’re pricing these things, I’m sure it’d help them get a handle on the credit.

  In the month following my conversation with Forrester, Crane held off joining the military (though only for a year). In the same month, the senior tranche of the new CDOs, my CDOs, received a triple-A investment-grade credit rating from the agency Crane Morton Forrester II had established, as did the tranche of CDOs immediately below that. As simple as that. Business moves fast. So much for conflicts of interest. Let me point out, if it isn’t obvious already, that there’s some irony in the term conflict of interest: In practice there is seldom a conflict but rather a confluence, a mutually rewarding arrangement. I think that to Zafar it might have been the ugliest thing in the world, though I expect he would have added that it’s simply inevitable.

  16

  A Modest Proposal

  Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua.

  —Meaningless placeholding text, loosely derived from parts of Cicero’s De finibus bonorum et malorum and used by printers since the 1500s in order to direct attention to typesetting style rather than to content

  And the Gileadites took the passages of Jordan before the Ephraimites: and it was so, that when those Ephraimites which were escaped said, Let me go over; that the men of Gilead said unto him, Art thou an Ephraimite? If he said, Nay; Then said they unto him, Say now Shibboleth: and he said Sibboleth: for he could not frame to pronounce it right. Then they took him, and slew him at the passages of Jordan: and there fell at that time of the Ephraimites forty and two thousand.

  —Judges 12:5–6 [KJV]

  I have already explained that the first time Zafar saw Emily was when she was practicing her violin in the University Church at Oxford. He did not speak to her then and, by his account, she did not notice his presence. The second time he saw her, which was the first time they met, was that evening at the South Asia Society in New York in 1995. I recalled it vividly, and I brought it up with him. I told him I remembered Emily stealing glances at him, though he himself did not recall registering
this, and I remembered Hamid Karzai and an Afghan businessman I couldn’t avoid.

  He explained that it began there. A week after that evening, he said, I received a call at work from Emily. I hadn’t given her my number, but she remembered I worked in the same place as you. Emily reminded me of our meeting, of your introduction, as if I needed reminding. I did recognize her that evening; she was the same young woman I had seen playing the violin all those years earlier, but I would never mention that fact.

  She asked if I might be able to help in a small way. I remember that she didn’t at all use my name. In fact, it was only several months later that she began to say it, after I told her that if she mispronounced it, the worst thing that could happen was that I’d let her know.

  I have a friend, she said, who’s interested in banking, in derivatives trading. That’s what you do, isn’t it?

  Yes.

  He’s graduating from business school, and I wondered if you might be able to have a word with him, a sort of careers advice or chat about what you do. He can talk by phone, if you prefer, or he’ll meet you wherever you want, or in Wall Street, I’m sure.

  Do you think he needs help?

  There was a silence.

  He doesn’t know if derivatives trading is right for him.

  I do fixed-income derivatives. I don’t know anything about equities.

  What’s that?

  Equities or fixed-income derivatives?

  Both, she answered.

  Fixed-income derivatives are things like options on bonds, swaps, caps, floors, interest-rate derivatives. Equity derivatives are to do with stocks and shares. Banks run these things out of separate divisions, I said. I thought that perhaps it was not help that her friend wanted but a stepping-stone to an interview.

  I’m not sure what he wants to do—and I don’t think he is. Perhaps you could talk to him about fixed-income derivatives?

  How much mathematics has he studied?

  I’m not sure.

  You’re not sure or you don’t know?

  I don’t know.

  What was his degree in?

  He’s doing an MBA.

  His first degree?

  History.

  I don’t know any history graduates in fixed-income derivatives trading, not in this firm. Did he go to an American university?

  For business school?

  For undergrad.

  Why does that matter?

  If he did, he might have picked up enough mathematics in his minor.

  Oh, I see. No, he went to Oxford.

  There are plenty of jobs in banking that don’t require much mathematics—just none in fixed-income derivatives trading. I’m not sure I can help other than to repeat that he’d probably find the work very difficult. It’s not impossible, but if his classes at business school didn’t leave him with a working knowledge of the mathematics of derivatives, then he’ll first have to find the enthusiasm for a lot of hard work just to get up to speed, only after which he can figure out if he’d like the work. Perhaps you could explain this to him. Give him my number if he still wants to talk.

  Again, there was that silence.

  This all sounds rather fascinating, she said.

  Finance? I asked.

  Yes.

  Again, the silence.

  I’d like to learn more about it, she added.

  This time I was silent. I thought of recommending a book on finance.

  Perhaps we could meet for coffee? she asked.

  The business school student never called me.

  * * *

  But the beginning proper was in the following year in London: One day, no more than two months into the affair, when we stepped out of a restaurant in Brixton, I asked her to marry me. It is astonishing to think now that I asked her so soon, knowing not very much about her, really, and yet at the time I was of course convinced in the uttermost depths of my heart that this was what I wanted. Only later was I able to interrogate that conviction and trace the source of the certainty. I have always believed—and believed it so clearly that I should say that I have always known—that certainty is a subjective state, and no less so the certainty about other subjective states, so that when one is asked whether one is sure about anything, one can only answer: Yes, but I might be wrong. One could even go so far as to say that one is absolutely sure but that there always remains the qualification that one might be wrong, for, if nothing else, between the subjective state of certainty and the world presented to us there is the mediation of this laughably fallible perception.

  And yet in those days I carried a conviction on which I could have sworn my whole life, sworn the lives of others, and so it seemed the most natural thing in the world to ask her to marry me. In those days, which seem so much longer ago than these ten years, I believed I loved her.

  Do you mean you now think you didn’t love her? I asked.

  Zafar didn’t reply.

  It’s an odd qualification, I explained to Zafar, to believe that you loved someone rather than just stating that you did. It suggests you’ve changed your mind—you now think you didn’t actually love her.

  And what, responded Zafar, is really the distinction? Perhaps I should simply say that I loved her. After all, I wouldn’t say that I believe this fruit tastes bitter or that I believe this milk smells sour. Isn’t love the same, simply the gift of the senses, an affect received by them, and in fact only a state in ourselves, one that we perceive? Like the knowledge we have of where, at any given moment, our limbs are, through the sense of proprioception. Yet therein is the mischief, for how much do our senses fail us, mislead us?

  I can’t get my head around this thing, he continued. We say love and somehow absolve ourselves of the question why? at the very moment of its greatest importance. If, when you say love, you refer to those physical signs in the presence of the beloved, if you mean the shortness of breath, the quickening of pulse, the dilation of pupils, and all the rest of it, then what use at all is it to say you love a person if any number of things—things that don’t make the beloved—can make you feel that ache for someone you really don’t know from Adam or Eve? If it springs from what you know about him or her, you know so little that in any other realm you would be a fool to form a judgment on such a flimsy premise, and yet you can fall in love with much less. All the same, I cannot deny that love and our conceit are everything.

  It seems impossible to escape the conclusion that I’m entitled to say only that I believed I was in love. I expect you’ll remember what Virginia Woolf famously said about love and self-deception: Of course love is the only thing that matters to us; just think of all the delusions we maintain in order to preserve it.*

  That day, before I asked her, Emily and I had had a pleasant lunch in an Italian restaurant. I’d ordered a bowl of carbonara and she a Florentine pizza. Emily left food on her plate; she always did. I have never been able to rid myself of the compulsion to eat everything, even long after the needs of the body are met, letting nothing go to waste.

  Emily and I were in Brixton, not New York, and, if anything, the portion sizes were on the small side. Nevertheless, Emily was leaving a good deal of food on her plate, setting pieces aside, and as I continued to watch her I realized that she was leaving all the parts of the pizza that came into contact with her hands. Emily never ate food she had touched. Often when she and I ate together I would think of all the meals I ate with my hands as a boy. At first I wondered why she never went to wash her hands before eating; it was my habit—the habit of someone who grew up eating with his hands—and when I mention that I’m doing so, it often encourages others to follow suit. I say this because, over time, I noticed that she never, not once, went into any bathroom away from home, though she did use bathrooms in hotels. When I thought about it, I imagined she’d never cleaned a bathroom in her life.

  Nor have I. You don’t hold that against me, do you?

  Do you remember Gandhi cleaned the latrines in his ashram? Zafar asked.

&n
bsp; In the movie?

  I don’t know why it bothers me so much, but I keep thinking about those fingers of hers. I’ve even imagined that Emily’s attitude toward what she’d touched was the attitude of women who in another age would have worn thin silk gloves. And I think of all the decent food, food that had done no wrong, that she left behind. Childhood poverty looms over one’s whole life. Its effect is felt even as the effect is separated from the cause, despite all the intervening events, even wealth and success. Growing up poor primes every emotion for a certain key.

  I remember, I said to Zafar, when we went out for supper in Manhattan back in the day. You used to get the leftovers to go, and when you passed a homeless guy, you’d hand it to him. You know what used to get me about that?

  What?

  That you noticed the homeless guy. Time and again, we’d be walking and talking, and yet you’d notice the homeless guy.

  The portions are so big in America.

  It was good of you.

  Just as eating everything on the plate is good?

  Yes. It is good.

  It isn’t. I wanted to rid myself of the need to eat everything on the plate, because the compulsion served no useful purpose; in fact, quite the opposite. Where there is plenty, eating more than you need at that moment is gluttony. The food is going to waste either in the landfills or in your own body. You’re damned either way, so why not just give it up and be done with the guilt and torment? I never chose to see the homeless man; I just did, and I did because however much I tried—however much I might have made the prospect impossible by acquiring degrees and getting paid stupid amounts of money in jobs that promised security—I could never shake off the certain belief that I was only one small misstep away from the same destitution. It’s stupid, but only if you think that it’s a rational thought or a conclusion to some kind of reasoning, which it isn’t. It’s just the way it is, among those things you carry forward into your life from childhood. Fighting it isn’t any good.

  Why would you want to rid yourself of that?

  What? The sheer terror of poverty? Why would anyone want to leave that?