The Debt

by Glenn Cooper

  ‘It’s dangerous to laugh – in my condition,’ Henry rasped. ‘Marcus is a piece of work – isn’t he?’

  Cal smiled and offered only a ‘no comment’.

  ‘But what’s to say the bank – couldn’t demand payment for a good – loan?’ Henry asked. ‘Marcus won’t fold his tent easily.’

  ‘The pope has had his lawyers look at this – on a hypothetical basis, of course – and they’ve told him that a loan of this age, with jurisdictions that don’t even exist anymore, likely negotiated under duress, would be tied up in court until the other side of forever and probably would never be payable.’

  ‘Unless the pope wants to pay it,’ Gail said.

  ‘Exactly,’ Cal said.

  ‘How would he pay?’ Henry asked. ‘I’m no expert – but I can’t believe the Vatican – has that kind of liquidity.’

  ‘He’s got some ideas,’ Cal said cryptically.

  ‘So look, I’m not going to make – any promises here,’ Henry said. ‘My wife’s smarter than me. She’ll be able to tell you – all the upsides and the downsides to this idea. But there’s time for that.’ He paused to take a sip of water through a straw. ‘First things first. If you need to get into – the Sassoon archives – you have my permission.’

  The pale young man was kinetic with excitement.

  ‘Are you shitting me? Are you shitting me?’ was all he could say as his father, Marcus Sassoon, debriefed him on the extraordinary conversation he’d had earlier in the afternoon.

  Albert Sassoon was in his late twenties and had been made a vice-president after only two years at the bank, a promotion that caused other young employees, some far more qualified, to howl, ‘naked nepotism,’ behind his back, of course.

  ‘I am not shitting you,’ Marcus said.

  ‘This is the answer to our prayers,’ Albert said.

  ‘Be quiet,’ Marcus said. ‘Grab your coat. Let’s take a walk.’

  Outside on the tree-lined street, the wind kicked up what few autumn leaves remained. It hadn’t yet snowed in New York City but there was a threatening chill to the air.

  ‘I told you I’m worried about listening devices,’ Marcus groused.

  ‘You swept your office last month,’ Albert said.

  ‘That was last month. I don’t trust Gail as far as I can throw her.’

  ‘OK, we’re good now,’ Albert said. ‘About our problems. Twenty-seven-fucking-billion dollars! One little spadeful of that fills in the two-hundred-million-dollar hole in our books. The rest of that truckload of cash turns us into one of the best-capitalized merchant banks in the world. Always wanted to join the club. Never figured to get there.’

  ‘What club?’

  ‘Nine zeroes.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Get with it. Billionaires.’

  ‘Don’t count your chickens,’ Marcus said. ‘This Donovan character’s got to find the contract first.’

  ‘If we need to, we ought to send every damn employee into the basement to help him.’

  ‘Maybe you should roll up your sleeves too,’ Marcus said. ‘He’s starting tonight.’

  The young man thought that was amusing. ‘C’mon, Dad. I’m your son, not a damn worker bee.’

  FOURTEEN

  The private archive of the Sassoon Bank spanned the interconnected basements of three townhouses. The offices that Cal had visited that afternoon were in the middle townhouse that comprised the executive offices. The two that flanked it were packed to the rafters with lower-level employees.

  When Cal arrived in the early evening to begin his work he was met by a woman named Consuela Gomes who introduced herself as the Sassoon archivist. Gomes, short and brassy, explained that hers was only a part-time position as there wasn’t all that much to do. Her day job was as an associate librarian at New York University. Years earlier she had seen an advertisement for the position in a library journal, and needing some extra income, she’d applied.

  ‘Honestly, I don’t spend more than ten hours a month uptown,’ she told him. ‘When I took over from their previous archivist, the job required more time because the systems and procedures needed upgrading. I mean there wasn’t even a good fire-suppression system in place and there was mold. Nuts and bolts type of things. I made it a little more state-of-the art but once that was done, it’s only a matter of sorting through new documents every month and deciding what to keep and where to put them.’

  ‘How many archivists have there been?’

  ‘It was Henry’s grandfather who decided to make some sense of all the documents that had been consolidated in New York from Sassoon offices in London and Paris. He hired quite a notable man, Conrad Wilkins, who got his start at the JP Morgan Library in the 1920s. Wilkins was the one who sorted through all the initial material and organized it. Let’s see, there’ve been four others between Wilkins and me. I’m the first woman, for what it’s worth.’

  She summoned an elevator at the rear of the building and took it to the basement level. The elevator door opened to darkness and Gomes hit a switch that turned on row after row of overhead lighting. They waded through the stacks until they arrived at an open-plan space at the front of the building.

  ‘Command central,’ she said, pointing to her desk and computer terminal. ‘The bathroom’s over there. In the unlikely event the power goes out, there’s survival gear in the top right drawer of my desk: a flashlight and a bottle of scotch. If you drink any, please replace it.’

  ‘You’re not staying?’ Cal asked.

  ‘I’ve got to make dinner for my helpless husband who thinks an oven is as complicated as a nuclear reactor and make sure my girls do their homework and don’t scratch their eyes out. Typical night at the Gomes house.’

  ‘I’m sorry to put you out.’

  ‘Not a problem. I’ve got to run but let me give you a quick lay of the land. I’ll be back after ten to see how you’re getting on.’

  The organization of the archive was straightforward. The oldest documents were in basement shelves farthest to the west, the newer ones in the middle and east basements. The floor-to-ceiling shelving was industrial steel, the kind used in warehouses, with fairly narrow spacing between sets of shelves. Once Gomes left, Cal headed to the oldest section to get his bearings.

  He knew that the bank had been founded in 1794 by Herschel Sassoon, the son of a Parisian textile broker. Out of curiosity he opened the first box of documents labeled for that year. Immediately he saw a memo from the archivist, Conrad Wilson, dated 1927, addressed to the chairman of the bank, George Sassoon. It flagged the letter as the earliest known correspondence related to the Sassoon Bank, and noted that the letter’s author was none other than the founder of the Rothschilds Bank, Mayer Amschel Rothschild. The letter itself was curt. Rothschild appeared to be responding to a letter written to him by his smaller rival, Herschel Sassoon, requesting an introduction to the paymaster in the army of Napoleon Bonaparte. The request was declined in a courtly brush-off, implying that the Sassoon Bank should make its own way in the world.

  Moving forward in time, Cal soon found himself in the mid-nineteenth century, the era of brothers Claude and Mayer Sassoon. Unfortunately, the material was voluminous and Cal became further perturbed when he discovered that the document boxes were rife with chronological misfilings. He’d have to work his way through nearly two full rows of shelving. One thing quickly became abundantly clear. The bank was extremely busy during this period. There were hundreds upon hundreds of loan contracts and letters of credit, all for much smaller denominations than the Vatican loan.

  Since the loan contracts he sought were from 1848 Cal concentrated on that period, carefully sorting through ledger books and file boxes from the late 1840s until he began to note something disturbing. A number of the documents from this period showed signs of fire damage – charred edges, half-burned and curled pages – and were tainted by the faint but noxious odor of ancient smoke.

  An hour into the search he’d found no s
ign of what he was looking for. Then, sitting on the wooden chair he’d been dragging around from shelf to shelf, reading through a box of papers, he thought he heard something toward the rear of the basement.

  He listened hard but heard nothing more until something different materialized, the sound of footsteps.

  ‘Hello?’ he called out. Hearing no reply, he tried calling louder. ‘Hello?’

  A husky voice replied. ‘Hello, where are you? Professor Donovan?’

  ‘I’m over here.’

  A man in a black sports jacket appeared, Gail’s chauffeur.

  ‘Mrs Sassoon asks if you would care to join her for dinner,’ the man said. ‘She’s waiting in the car.’

  ‘She knows I’m working,’ Cal said, checking the time.

  ‘She does and she apologizes for the interruption. She told me to tell you it was entirely optional.’

  There was little question he had to accept so he placed the file box on the chair, left a note for Gomes in case she returned before him, and followed the chauffeur to the elevator.

  The restaurant she chose was Milos Café, a quick drive at this time of night. The maître d’ greeted Gail unctuously and showed them to a high-profile table where she continued her apologies.

  ‘Really, it’s not a problem,’ he said again.

  When he helped her with her coat he saw she was showing a lot of cleavage. He had thought he’d smelled a whiff of alcohol on her breath in the car and the impression was confirmed when he got closer. This was feeling more like a date night than a business dinner, but he was here and there wasn’t anything he could do but keep it professional.

  She ordered a Manhattan and he went for his usual, vodka on the rocks.

  ‘The seafood here is amazing,’ she said.

  ‘If it was another Italian restaurant, I was going to shoot myself,’ he said.

  ‘Yes, of course. You were just in Italy.’

  ‘Actually I was more referring to the place I went to lunch today with Marcus’s son.’

  ‘You had lunch with Steven?’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘It was presented as a sine qua non. I’m supposed to write a letter of recommendation to Harvard.’

  She showed her shock in a charmingly theatric sort of way. ‘You met Steven and you’ll still be able to write a letter?’

  ‘Over the years I’ve become something of a letter-of-recommendation machine. He will be cast in as positive a light as humanly possible. I will honorably fulfill my promise to Marcus.’

  ‘Marcus is such a pig, isn’t he?’

  ‘Not going there,’ Cal said.

  She took a good hit of her drink, with a blithe, ‘Cheers,’ the instant the waiter put it down. ‘Well he is,’ she said, ‘and Steven is a creep. I’m so glad Henry’s son – well, our son, Julian, turned out well.’

  ‘Julian’s from an earlier marriage?’ Cal asked, gingerly wading into her domestic life.

  ‘Henry was married once before. Julian was an only child. He’s twenty-six now, only a little younger than I was when I met Henry. Hard to believe. I was only three years out of law school, an associate at Skadden in their corporate department. One of our clients was the Sassoon Bank and even though I was pretty junior on the team, Henry noticed me and made the partner include me on the important matters. You’d have to see pictures of him when he was in his fifties to understand how handsome and vigorous he was. There hardly seemed to be an age difference. Not like now.’

  ‘He looks pretty ill,’ Cal said.

  ‘It’s sad but it’s progressed slowly enough that we’ve all come to grips with it. He’s made his peace with the world, even made his peace with me.’

  Cal wasn’t about to ask her to explain but she chose to keep going, pausing only long enough to order another drink. To be polite, he did the same, though he needed to pace himself if he was going to do more work after dinner.

  ‘After he got his divorce and we got married he never wanted me to work. All my training went down the drain. I think he wanted more children but I couldn’t, and he didn’t have any interest in adopting or doing the surrogate thing. So all I had to do was be a part-time mother to Julian, whose mother had joint custody. She was bitter as hell and she poisoned the well. Julian and I never had a great relationship, although it improved after she died. He was fourteen and he moved in with us, of course. Anyway, where was I? Boredom. Being wealthy in this city is such a bore. Same functions, same charity balls and silent auctions, same people on same boards.’

  ‘I’ve heard my mother say similar things.’

  ‘Well, she’s delightful. I hope I’m half as well put together at her age. Sorry, I’ve lost the plot again.’

  ‘Boredom.’

  ‘Yes, boredom, thanks. So one thing one can do when one is bored is to fool around and I strayed from time to time in our marriage. That’s what Henry and I came to peace about. I haven’t been much of a nurse but I’ve become a dutiful wife and I’ve really thrown myself into the work of the Henry Sassoon Foundation, soon to be renamed the Henry and Gail Sassoon Foundation.’

  ‘Congratulations.’

  ‘Thank you. It’s not huge – only about fifty million – but we do important work. That’s why Henry and I are thrilled with the idea of Pope Celestine’s proposal. I wanted to have dinner with you, so you’d understand the depth of our interest.’

  ‘I’ll be sure to tell him.’

  ‘How is it you’re close to the pope? You’re not even Catholic.’

  ‘What makes you think that?’

  ‘Your mother, Cal. Remember the nice Jewish lady?’

  ‘My father was Catholic. I converted.’

  She let out a tipsy giggle.

  ‘What so amusing?’ he asked.

  ‘I converted too. I was a good little Protestant miss from Pennsylvania. There was no way Henry was going to get married unless I converted. But I’m guessing yours wasn’t forced. Why’d you do it?’

  ‘Occupational hazard,’ he joked. ‘I spent so much time in churches as part of my job it kind of crept up on me.’

  ‘No seriously, why?’

  ‘I think the tradition spoke to me, this two-thousand-year sweep of history that began with an itinerant preacher with a small following and grew to become a great religious and cultural force that shaped the world as we know it.’

  ‘Judaism has a tradition too. A longer one.’

  ‘It does but it’s decentralized. There’s no single person at the helm of the ship. I guess I was attracted to the idea of a central father figure guiding the spiritual priorities of over a billion people.’

  ‘Your mother told me you lost your father at a young age.’

  She was tipsy, wasn’t she? A little too personal considering the length of their acquaintance. ‘Thank you, Dr Freud.’

  That did the trick; she said she was sorry but asked instead, ‘What about faith? Are you a believer?’

  ‘Some days, more than others. What about you?’

  ‘I have a vague sense of God and I expect he’s only got a vague sense of me. You didn’t tell me how you got close to Pope Celestine.’

  ‘I did a consult for him. It involved a priest with the bleeding wounds of Christ. I’d written about stigmata.’

  ‘I remember the story. You were part of that?’

  He was telling her about it when the waiter came to take their order. When the waiter left, Cal said, ‘Anyway, the pope trusted my work and we’ve maintained a friendship of sorts, if one can be friendly in a conventional sense with a pope.’

  ‘What’s he like?’

  ‘He’s warm, he’s genuine, and most strikingly, he deeply cares about the little guy who no one else gives a damn about. What’s not to like about that?’

  ‘Well, I’m only a little fish in a very big pond but I’d like to think that our foundation does some good too.’

  ‘I’m sure it does. You mentioned your husband was enthusiastic about the pope’s idea for a l
arge foundation. What about Marcus? Does he have any connections with your foundation or other charitable ventures?’

  ‘Heavens no. Marcus is only about business.’

  ‘Wouldn’t he be an obstacle to doing a deal with the Vatican?’

  ‘Henry holds a majority interest in the firm. End of story. Not that there wouldn’t be concerns. But those could be overcome.’

  ‘What kind of concerns?’

  ‘The Sassoon Bank has a reputation for privacy. Our clients demand that. We’re not a commercial bank or an investment bank. We’re a merchant bank. Our clients are largely transnational, private entities that value our advisory and credit services and our ability to service them rapidly and discreetly. A major philanthropic association with the Vatican would surely thrust the bank into the spotlight so we’d have to think this through carefully. Still, I imagine that Julian will be supportive, and that would be important to Henry.’

  The food came and another round of drinks. When the plates were cleared, Cal begged off the dessert menu and said he still wanted to get in a few more hours of work.

  ‘You’re a hard taskmaster,’ she said, ‘on yourself.’

  ‘I’m on a tight schedule. I need to get back to Cambridge one of these days.’

  She paid the check and when they rose to leave she swayed enough that he thought it wise to steady her with an arm around the waist.

  ‘Sorry,’ she said. She was glassy-eyed from the Manhattans and whatever she’d had before she picked him up.

  ‘Not a problem.’

  The intimacy of his arm seemed to embolden her.

  ‘If you like I could drop you off at your hotel. We could have another drink. The archive will still be there tomorrow.’

  ‘That’s very kind of you,’ he said, letting go of her and checking to see if she stayed upright, ‘but I really need to get back to it.’

  The chauffeur let Cal back into the townhouse, where he descended to the basement. It was past ten o’clock but it didn’t look like Gomes had arrived yet; his note was still on her desk. He resumed where he’d left off and before long he finished the 1840s documents and moved into the 1850s, finding a similar scattering of fire-blackened papers. All of the material from this decade related to business originating in the Sassoon offices in London and Manchester. He kept his antennae out for any letters or contracts written by Jean Sassoon. After sorting through Jean’s papers in the state archives in Rome he was sure he’d recognize his handwriting in an instant. There were none.