Team Saddlebag cracked up again.

  “He’s a good bullshitter,” said Shellnutt, “but when he gets around to the part about spreading out the interest payments, he’s straining so hard you can see daylight underneath his shoes.”

  They all cracked up again.

  “Talk about trying too hard,” said one of the fellows from Legal, Tigner Shanks, who was perched on the back of a club chair. “Remember the workout session? Remember when he started talking about that fucking plantation of his? I thought he was gonna start crying.”

  “He wasn’t crying,” said Shellnutt. “He had such a hard-on for that boffable bimbo sitting next to him, Miss Peaches, it was stretching the skin on his face.”

  Cracked up again, they did, they did, these victorious warriors. Why do they turn everything into sex? wondered Peepgass. Dicks, hard-ons, boffable bimbos, horizontal stewardesses, fucking this and fucking that … They were educated people talking about loans, buildings, and food warehouses, but they had to reduce it all to sex, or sex and shit … Well, he was a fine one to feel superior, wasn’t he …His life was coming apart because some ditzy little horizontal Scandinavian notions buyer was filing a paternity suit …

  “One thing I gotta ask you, Harry,” said Tigner Shanks. “How did you have the—what made you decide to put Croker through the lender’s cactus? Remember that? I mean, you already had the saddlebags, you’d already given the guy the unidigital salute”—Shanks extended the middle finger of his right hand, and Harry’s Squadron cracked up again—“the guy was about to explode, he was already getting ready to leave the room, and you pulled the lender’s cactus on him! I mean, Harry, if you wanna know the truth, I couldn’t believe it! I just about shit!”

  Harry rocked back a little farther in his swivel chair and smiled and shrugged. “I don’t know … I guess I figured, with a guy like that, who thinks the whole world sways to his big swinging dick, you gotta be absolutely sure you get your point across. You know, one time Curtis LeMay—the general?—one time Curtis LeMay appeared before a Senate committee asking for ten thousand nuclear warheads for the Air Force, and one of the senators, Everett Dirksen, says, ‘I thought you told us that with six thousand warheads you could reduce the entire Soviet Union to cinders. Why should we give you ten thousand’ And LeMay says, ‘Senator, I wanna see the cinders dance.’”

  Team Saddlebags exploded, blasted off, orbited, experienced a hundred dawns and sunsets in ten seconds as the boys spun around their peerless leader.

  Yeah, well, it was great stuff, all right, and he, Peepgass, had enjoyed the demolition of Charlie Croker along with all the rest; but for him the triumph had already grown cold. Maybe he was an accepted member of the mighty Team Saddlebags, and maybe he wasn’t, but it wasn’t his triumph, in any event. It was Harry’s. It was the Workout Department’s … and as Harry’s Squadron yahooed, exulted, cracked wise, and cracked up, Peepgass grew steadily more depressed … It wasn’t that he envied Harry, or not exactly. The workout people were riding high right now because the bank needed them so badly, what with so many big loans having tanked. But that didn’t mean Harry was going anywhere. Elsewhere on this floor, in the CEO’s office, the workout artistes were looked upon as special cases, like a special unit in football. No, Harry had a big salary and a big office, but it was important to Peepgass to believe he wasn’t going anywhere, because neither was he, Peepgass. Only forty-six years old, and already he’d reached a dead end in the banking maze! And at forty-six there was no retracing your steps!

  Through the glass inner wall of Harry’s office he could look through other glass walls, into other offices, in toward the very core of the forty-ninth floor. And everywhere he looked, he could see the eerie luminous rectangles of computer screens, and across those screens blipped the two hundred to three hundred billion dollars that moved through PlannersBanc every day. They were sailing, Harry, Tigner Shanks, Jack Shellnutt, Friedman, himself, the whole crew, on an unimaginably huge sea of money. But all that any of them could take out of that huge sea for themselves was a little jiggerful. He was a senior officer of one of the biggest banks in the country, and his salary was only $130,000 a year. Oh, he knew he could never say that word only out loud, certainly not back in San Jose to his father and mother or any of their friends. But the fact was, he was strapped! Federal and state taxes took almost $46,000. Mortgage payments on the house in Snellville took almost $34,000, and he couldn’t even live there since Betty had thrown him out. The apartment in Normandy Lea was costing him $7,920 a year, once he figured in telephone and utilities. The car payments, for Betty’s Buick Le Sabre and the Honda Excel wagon he was stuck with, came to $5,400. So there you had more than $93,000, leaving $37,000 for everything else, such as food, fuel, clothes—and the children, Brian and Aubrey, were outgrowing clothes every time you looked around—repairs, insurance, the orthodontist, not to mention (was it too much to ask!) going out to restaurants, having a little vacation in the summer, or whatever else senior corporate officers making $130,000 a year might reasonably expect to do. The hell of it was, without the roughly $55,000 a year Betty got from the securities her mother left her, they would have had to drastically lower their standard of living, which wasn’t all that great to start with. As for how he was going to pay for the $45,000 in legal fees he had already run up trying to fend off Sirja, he had no idea whatsoever, and there was a $400-an-hour deposition coming up—

  The computer screens beyond all the glass walls of the forty-ninth floor glowed and flared and popped out into CD-ROM patterns, and the little phosphorescent lines were skittering from left to right, when a burst of he-man gullet laughter brought him back into this room, Commander Harry’s command post.

  Harry and Shellnutt and Shanks and the boys were shaking with the mirth of their hearty wit and slapping their gaping manly thighs, and Peepgass wondered how on earth it had ever turned out this way. He was smarter than all the talent in this room put together. Then why had he taken such an unadventurous route at the bank? There was only one organizational chart at PlannersBanc, but there were two kinds of officers. There were line officers, and there were staff officers. The line officers were those who generated new business or otherwise created income for the bank. They were involved in marketing (such as originating big loans to entrepreneurs like Charlie Croker) or in investment banking or novel retail strategies, or workouts, like Harry. They were the officers Arthur Lomprey and the rest of them here on the forty-ninth floor were referring to when they used that grand-sounding term bankers. Only a line officer was a real banker. A staff officer wasn’t; a staff officer was something else; and there you had Raymond Peepgass. What was he actually? What was any senior loan officer? He was a referee, a monitor. He was supposed to monitor big loans to make sure they stayed within prudent boundaries.

  Prudent? It had been a struggle even to be prudent. In the 1980s Prudent hadn’t stood a chance; nor in the late 1990s. The boom was on, and the banking business had caught fire, and a wonderful giddy madness was in the air. The line officers from Marketing were pushing through loans, their “big sales,” with a pell-mell abandon. If you were a referee who insisted on detecting the madness and blowing your whistle, they just ran right over you, laughed at you, made you feel timid and old-fashioned. Like every other senior credit officer, Peepgass had signed off on tens of millions of dollars’ worth of loans with self-destruct written all over them … including Charlie Croker’s, rather than try to stand in the way of the stampede … But to tell the truth, that explanation, sad as it was, wasn’t the whole story. In fact, he had been swept up in the madness himself. Like many another bank officer, he had started getting a euphoric lift out of being part of the grand schemes and imperial visions of the Charlie Crokers of the world. John Sycamore may have been the high-flying line officer who had brought Croker to the bank and made the big sales, but Sycamore had had to come to him, Peepgass, for approval; and he, too, had become an advocate of this infinitely vital and charming back-country boy, this risk taker with a grand vision and an infallible touch. It had reached the point where he had become convinced that Croker had more than talent, know-how, and drive; that Croker also had a certain magical power that enabled him to pull off the impossible. And he, Peepgass, was somehow his partner. Croker and Peepgass, riding before the wind on the great sea of money!

  Instinctively, gloomily, he shook his head at the very thought. There was no denying it. Back then, in the palmy days, he had loved being around Charlie Croker. He was the one who had introduced Croker to Serena; or indirectly he had. In PlannersBanc’s Private Banking Department there had been a line officer named Frances Geistman, known sotto voce among the boys as the Ice Princess, of whom Shanks had once said, “She’s the only banker in Atlanta who can cut your nuts off and give you a hard-on at the same time.” The Ice Princess had dreamed up a new marketing strategy called the Art Investment Seminars. The art market in New York had picked itself up off the floor and was surging again, and Frances Geistman got the bright idea of luring big clients into the bank by offering to instruct them in the arcana of this hot and glamorous New York—style form of investment. Businessmen in Atlanta liked to affect indifference to New York and its fashions, but they also liked to show the world that they moved on just as fast a track as anybody else. And the lure? Here the Ice Princess, who was from New York, had demonstrated her sexual genius. As instructors she hired recent graduates of the New York University Institute of Fine Arts. The Institute seemed to graduate nothing but young, gorgeous, socially connected girls with boarding-school accents and tender loamy loins and legs that drove rich men wild. They matriculated in the Art Investment Seminars in droves. The girls cooed to them about Bruegel the Elder and Fischl the Younger and about short- and long-term auction variables. The courses were conducted, covertly, in conjunction with Gillray’s, the New York auction house. The bank lent money to its smitten seminarians and steered them to Gillray’s to buy art and sell it (and took commissions from Gillray’s going and coming) and set them up with deluxe VIP art tours of New York, while they were at it, and then moved in on them to get all their banking business, personal and corporate.

  There were so many stories floating around about the Ice Princess and her Art Geishas, Peepgass had dropped in on a few classes—and become as besotted as the worsted-suited marks themselves. Art! He tried to come on to one of the instructors, a little brunette named Jenny; and then another, a willowy redhead named Amy (Amy Phipps-Phelps!). Insofar as he could afford it, he became an habitué of the art world, going to the big gallery and museum openings in Atlanta, including fund-raising dinners at the High Museum, which he couldn’t afford. He wangled introductions to collectors and museum trustees—anything to get into the merry swim of Art’s sex, money, and glamour. He didn’t get very far with Jenny and Amy. The Geishas, if they wanted to fraternize, didn’t have to settle for a PlannersBanc staff officer making a pitiable $130,000 a year. There were far, far bigger fish right there in front of them at the bank, at the art seminars: Charlie Croker, for a start.

  It was Peepgass who had persuaded Croker to take a class and get the feel of this hot new investment opportunity. Croker had found the class a bore and a joke. He was interested in narrative art of men in action, by N. C. Wyeth, Howard Pyle, Frederic Remington, and Winslow Homer, and that was about it. But he found the instructor, Miss Serena Sharp, all he could ask for. Serena was bright and provocatively sarcastic. She had such a perfect young body, such loosely sprung hips, that even in a simple black minidress (her professional costume) she managed to look naked. Croker never went near the Art Investment Seminars again, but he went after Serena Sharp and divorced his wife of twenty-nine years and married her.

  Peepgass was amazed—mostly by the fact that the big tycoon had the nerve to shuck his old wife after all that time, just like that. He couldn’t have imagined summoning up the fortitude to leave Betty. Nevertheless, the great sexual itch of the 1980s had been spread to Raymond Peepgass. And then he had met Sirja.

  “What’ll he do next?”

  It was Shanks’s voice, in such a high-pitched whine that it cut right through the morose shell of his thoughts. Evidently he was talking to Harry, because Harry said, “Oh, that’s easy. He’ll try to hide the airplanes.”

  “That’s a safe fucking bet,” said Shellnutt.

  “An ordinary human being can’t imagine how tightly a shithead bonds with his airplanes,” said Harry.

  “Yeah,” said Shellnutt, “a shithead like Croker never heard of frequent-flier miles or standing still beside an X-ray box while some rent-a-guard making $7.50 an hour runs a Geiger counter up your inseam. Remember that shithead from Cybermax, Harry? Duber was his name, or something like that?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Fucking hoople sells his King Air, he claims. Turns out he sold it to his sister-in-law for a piece a paper.”

  “What’s a hoople?” asked Shanks.

  “Ten pounds a shit in a five-pound bag,” said Shellnutt. “So now every time he has to fly in here to see us, he has his fucking pilot fly the plane to PDK. He has a limo waiting to drive him in on the Buford Highway to Downtown, and then he gets a taxi to bring him here, so if anybody sees him arrive, he’s getting out of a jellybean driven by some guy named Jahmeed.”

  “What’s a jellybean?” asked Friedman.

  “Oh, you know, a Chevrolet Caprice. All the taxis are Chevrolet Caprices, and they all look like jellybeans.”

  “It was worse than that,” said Harry. “Fucking guy, while he’s flying here from Cincinnati, he calls his secretary and tells her to look up the airline schedules and inform him as to what flight he’s supposed to be on right now and which one he’s going back on, in case anybody asks. The dickbrain, if he spent half as much time tending to business as he did worrying about his phantom itineraries, we might’ve gotten outta that one alive.” He gestured toward the Cybermax artificial heart up on the magnificent étagère. “What that shithead needed was a left-hemispherectomy.”

  “And a Vibram scrotum,” said Shellnutt.

  “Well, whattaya figure our chances are of coming outta Croker Global alive?” asked Friedman. He didn’t ask it of Peepgass, however, as Peepgass was quick to note, but of Harry.

  “In the current market?” said Harry. “You want my honest opinion? … Terrible. I’d love to foreclose on that big shithead, love to. They call up here two months ago and say they’ve ‘run into a situation.’ That’s such pure shithead stuff—‘We’ve run into a situation.’ That always means the same thing: they can’t make the next interest payment, let alone pay back principal. We’ve run into a situation …” Disgust dripped from the words. “Well, we don’t have a situation. We got a problem, a real nut-masher. We got a pile a commercial real estate here that’s leaking money all over the place, and we got seventeen wholesale food warehouses operating at a loss. The trouble is, you can’t just turn these places off and put locks on ’em and wait for a change in the economic cycle and then sell ’em. The buildings have tenants with leases. Lousy leases and not enough of them, but leases. And you close down a wholesale food operation, and it just dies on you. But if you try to keep it open when it’s losing money, it’s like opening a vein and hemorrhaging. The idea of taking over and running a bunch of buildings and a chain of food warehouses is not gonna put any stars on your shoulder boards on this floor.” Harry twirled his left forefinger in the air to take in the entire forty-ninth floor, meaning Arthur Lomprey and the rest of the top brass. “And there’s another thing. If we commence foreclosure proceedings against Croker, then suddenly we got a $500 million loss on the books. Right now those loans are posted as a $500 million asset. A half-a-billion-dollar loss would make a lotta people—It would not look good.” He paused, pursed his lips, and looked around the room significantly. “A half a billion,” he said, and then began nodding his head, as if to say, “You get the picture.”

  “The hell of it is,” said Shellnutt, “some of these properties are basically sound, or they would be if you could—”

  “Jesus Christ, Jack,” said Shanks, “you sound just like Croker.”

  “Well, I never said he was wrong, did I? All I said was, he’s a worthless, useless, lying conniving ball a shit who boffs stewardesses on his G-5 with our money.”

  “Oh,” said Shanks. “I don’t know how I ever got the idea you thought he was wrong.”

  “No, I mean you look at some a those early projects he did, like Buckingham Square, Wimberley Mall, Phoenix Center—there’s nothing wrong with the cost basis. They’re just overburdened with debt. But this last fiasco, Croker Concourse, that fucking building must a come out to a thousand dollars a foot! There’s no way you could make that back, period, much less make a profit and service your debt. If it cost exactly half of what it actually cost, fine. You’d be in good shape. But this way, you could keep it leased to capacity for thirty years and still never get your money back. How the hell these goddamned loans ever went through, I don’t know.” Then he added hurriedly, as if to spare Peepgass any embarrassment, “Johnny Sycamore was out of control there toward the end.”

  Shanks said, “Well, as Lenin once said—”

  Harry broke in: “Lenin had it easy. He didn’t have to clean up after a shithead like Charlie Croker.”

  Shanks, persevering: “As Lenin once said—”

  Friedman broke in and said to Harry, “I say we unload the shit as fast as we can and take the loss. There’s bankrupt property beginning to flood the market, and that’s gonna drive all the prices down. The longer we dick around with this property, the less we’re gonna get for it.”

  Shanks said, “As Lenin once said—”

  Harry broke in: “Like I said, I’d love to foreclose on that shithead, but we’d look so goddamned bad.”