CHAPTER 105 — Closing Time (2)

Monday.

GFC DAY.

A day of prophecy come true.

In a pair of comfortable shorts and slippers, wearing a formless, made-in-Japan crop top, Euphemia Fontaine, the [Prophet of Profits], made her way down the marble steps, step by step, trying not to slip.

The first step had been Bear Stearns, the warning shot, back in March, which everyone chose to ignore because the going was good, and JPMorgan had swallowed the loss without blinking an eye.

The next step had been in July. IndyMac, a bank people did not know existed, was gone in a single day, with regulators circling it like sharks by Friday afternoon, and depositors around the block told their money was gone.

Then came the First National Bank of Nevada. The same week, the same holding company buried First Heritage by Friday closing. Then Columbian Bank and Trust, out in Topeka, was gone by the end of August; then Integrity Bank in Georgia, yet no one blinked.

Silver State in Henderson fell in the first week of September.

Then came a Sunday, when two foundational institutions tumbled. Fannie and Freddie, same day, taken into conservatorship, which meant nationalisation, which meant the bailouts were already rolling.

After that came Merrill, in a fire sale, overnight, absorbed into Bank of America before it collapsed so no one could breathe in the asbestos dust.

Then down came the Roman column that broke the camel’s back. Lehman. A hundred and fifty-eight years, and it was filing for bankruptcy. No buyer. No bailout. Announced six hours before Eppie’s dainty little feet landed at the bottom of the steps at 10 AM.

Juliana Vaughan had been having breakfast since six. The TV had been brought out, and she was surrounded by papers. And a corded telephone. And two mobiles, one for the Met’s Fiscal Officers, the other for the Vaughan Estate’s fund managers.

Eppie slipped into an empty chair, smiling.

It was a grand feeling, and a terrible one, to know that they had stood at the precise junction between profit and disaster, as if by predestination. Juliana Vaughan was studying her, watching her like she was some kind of creature from a lake, a female one, who had held up a sword, and told a boy to make a kingdom of Christ around a round table. Across this very table Eppie had said the words September in June, and now the world was on fire, only she and Vaughan sat on a vast store of untouchable water, wondering what to do with the excess.

“Good morning,” Eppie said.

“Good morning, Euphemia.” Vaughan gave her cup a quarter-turn on its saucer. “Sit. Nora has done the eggs the way you liked.”

Eppie sat. George set a plate down with two poached eggs, both gooey, next to smashed avocado on sourdough, topped with a sprinkle of pepper and garlic salt.

They ate for a while, in no hurry.

“The Met is clear,” Vaughan spoke slowly and absently to the centrepiece, which was a bronze sculpture of a writhing serpent in the hands of Hercules, wrought in the Baroque style. “Not all of it. About two-thirds. A committee is a slow animal, and can only lead it to water and hope that it will drink.” Another quarter-turn of the cup. “We’re sitting on the short end of the Treasury curve. We have earned some, lost some. But far more importantly, on balance, we have kept… ourselves intact.”

Juliana sipped her tea.

“I was questioned, you know, extensively, for moving our investments into T-bills, and the insurance…”

“Are they singing a different song now?” Eppie grinned.

“They won’t shut up.” Vaughan glanced at her phone. “Some of them think that I have been visited by Midas.”

Eppie kept grinning.

“I told them I was visited by a stray, mischievous Maneki Neko…”

Somewhere in the hall, the grandfather clock did its quarter-hour chime.

“Did you…” Eppie asked for the second half, the half that mattered.

“The family money did far more than merely survive,” Vaughan said. “If it weren’t for our next step, we would be extensively investigated.”

Eppie set her fork down.

Vaughan continued to speak.

“I moved what could be moved, in July, after hearsay from my house cat,” Vaughan said, in exactly the tone used for passing the French butter. “And then I insured the remainder.”

Ah… Eppie nodded. That’s a great way to get around the freaking Feds.

“The Estate had been holding a great deal of paper issued by institutions you told me wouldn’t exist by Christmas, and rather than dump it and look like a lunatic, I paid America’s largest insurance institutions a fee, every quarter, to stand behind it.” Her hands came together on the cloth.

Eppie licked her lips. “How much?”

“Ten million. Over the summer. All in.”

“And how much comes back?”

“Entirely dependent on how many of them go under,” Vaughan said, “and as of this morning, one of them has.” She looked at the folded paper without touching it. “We’re up fifty, I’d think, by October. If nothing else fails, it will be considerably more. The gamble is that if the insurance itself goes bankrupt before it pays me, I’ve just burned ten million.” Vaughan poured her tea, perfectly controlled, until the brimming cup was perfectly level. “Will it fail? My Maneki Neko?”

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Eppie shook her head, a little fatalistically. AIG would be saved. Three-quarters of a million homes would foreclose, and no one would learn the lesson. Thanks to that, the next bubble would blow past the puny billions of 2008 into the trillions. “It’s too big to fail.”

And she was right.

Give it a week, and the government would have to choose whether to catch the economy or let it learn. The answer, alas, was all too predictable. Still, Eppie hadn’t told Vaughan any of it. Her not-mentor had asked a rhetorical question—progressive as he was, Gore remained Wall Street’s staunch ally, just like his former President, Clinton.

She looked up and found herself being watched.

“You’re not surprised,” Vaughan said.

“No, ma’am.”

“Your not-teacher may have made, on a cat’s instruction, somewhere in the region of a hundred million dollars. If the Feds knew, they would dissect that head of yours.”

Eppie ate her egg.

“Euphemia.”

It was a tasty egg.

“I wonder,” Juliana Vaughan said, slowly, and there was something new moving under the dryness now, a sense of being disturbed. “How much it would take to move you.”

Give me ten million right now and watch me spontaneously combust. Eppie stirred her yolk into the avocado.

She looked out the window.

The statue of Michelangelo’s The Dying Slave was still there, yearning for rapture.

“Come here,” her not-mentor said.

Eppie gently stowed her cutlery and moved her tiny body over to the woman with the soft grey eyes.

Juliana Vaughan got to her feet, which took a moment and which she permitted no one to assist with, and put both arms around Eppie, so that her hands met behind her back, and held her there, imprisoned, between her hands and her bosom.

It wasn’t a society embrace.

It wasn’t the cheek-to-cheek at a Gala.

It was a motherly embrace.

A proud embrace.

A thankful embrace.

Eppie stood very still inside it, allowing her warmth to suffuse Vaughan’s shivering body.

“Thank you, Euphemia,” Vaughan said, into her hair, beside her ear. “For the Met. And for the trust. If we had lost half of it, I seriously don’t know what I could have done to keep the Met’s programs. Not… just the foreign programs, our domestic ones as well.”

Eppie found herself hugging her not-mentor back. “I think you would have managed fine.”

“I would not have. I would have found myself unable to leave this house.”

Vaughan let go by degrees, held Eppie out at arm’s length—dry-eyed, but only just. “Finding you at LAPA was the best choice I have ever made in my life, other than marrying Mr Vaughan, of course.”

Eppie laughed.

“Now.” Vaughan read her like a book. “I can see in your face that you want to ask something of me. Ask away. What can the Dame of the Met, the keeper of the Vaughan fortune that had just survived a crisis, do for you?”

“A fund for artist—”

“Done,” Vaughan said. “I’ve already given instructions. All proceeds will go toward a fund for local NYC artists of all stripes, but especially those whose grants and projects will be cancelled or put on hold. We’ll take care of it and more. There is MORE than enough. I mean YOU, Euphemia. What do YOU want?”

Eppie considered it.

She considered [The Ghost Light] and [Holy Theatre], and she considered Mio, and the plays she had in her head. She thought of a bare bulb burning at the centre of an empty stage… and she knew just what to do.

“A theatre,” she said. “I’ve a few ideas I need performed.”

Vaughan didn’t laugh. Didn’t blink. Didn’t ask what she meant by it.

She picked up the newspaper at last, unfolded it properly, and turned to the second page.

“I’ll keep an eye out,” she said. “The real estate prices on Broadway are coming down fast… real fast.”

Monday.

Eppie woke to the sound of her phone and her computer chiming at the same time.

This meant, in a mundane, normal way, that her next [Quests] had arrived.

So, what’s next, pussycat? Eppie asked herself.

It was time to talk to Cooper about the next step of her theatre plans.

As well as absolving herself of her dropout status…

And… maybe a morning show?

... with her fishes...