Coming for Money. F.W. vom Scheidt

confidence in our finance industry. Biggest or smallest. Makes no difference to them. They are not about to let one ounce of public confidence, domestic or international, leak away.”

      Watching them as they waited for my response, I squinted suspiciously into midday sunlight that poured in abundantly from the wide windows behind Kyle. Watched their movements and expressions for evidence of disagreement. Waited for them to speak with any trace of indecision. Strove to dilute their authority.

      Ted Dwyer pushed himself to his feet with a refined groan, hobbled over to the corner of Kyle’s desk, his elderly eyes glassy and serene, and signalled an end to the discussion with an adept twist of his wrist to check his snug gold watch.

      The meeting was concluded. I had lost their confidence. I had lost their respect. And I had lost their support. Inside myself, in a place where I could not deceive myself with my own indignation, I was forced to recognize that.

      But I also knew, and had always known in that same place within myself, that I must reclaim the deal that had been stolen from me by BSA’s forfeit to Amsterdam Bank. Regardless of my ambivalent posturing during the meeting, I knew I had no other choice. I must redeem myself, somehow, if not to salvage my career from indelible misfortune, then simply because I could not endure the least splinter of further loss. It was, I sensed, taking all I had to travel through each day to its tattered close. Morning to night, my stamina was melting like thin ice, unable to outlast even the weak winter sun.

      “Well?” Kyle inquired.

      “Well,” I replied. I held in my objections, grinding down on them with my back teeth, waiting for Kyle and Ted to advance into the open, pronounce their penalty, expose their menace.

      “Well, my friend,” Dwyer declared, “looks like you’re going to have to get us some straight answers out of Bangkok and Singapore.”

      “Because you think I can change their minds?”

      “No,” Ted Dwyer asserted dryly, “because the Securities Commission will be demanding them. And when they’ve got you in their sights for a couple of indictments for slipshod transactions that’ve bankrupted this firm, you better have something very convincing to say in your own defence or you could be looking at a couple of years in prison.”

      * * *

      Retreating behind my closed office door, I tried to heed the demands of my circumstances.

      Like some stranger from outside the firm, I listened to the scraps of comments from colleagues as they passed by in the hallway. Their usually familiar voices seemed displaced, louder. Their babble swelled in my brain like a siren.