“Elements?” I said.

“Yeah. Don’t ask me why. The guy who ran the origination desk was into chemistry.” He laughed grimly. “It was like alchemy in reverse. The substance the Elements turned into was shit.”

“So if the Elements were Mr. Greene’s responsibility, why didn’t the bank fire him when they went wrong? Why you?” I asked innocently.

Harry stared at me. “Now that isa good question. You’re asking the wrong guy, though. I mean, look.” He waved expansively at the tiny room. “Does this look like the Federal Reserve? Or the Treasury?”

“Who should I ask? Tom Henderson?”

Harry’s eyes registered that I knew something. “Maybe.”

“You told me you wanted your bank to be like Rosenthal but they wouldn’t allow it. I thought that was a strange thing to say, but I did some research. I found out that Henderson was at Rosenthal before the Treasury. You told me that Greene worked there, too. That’s a coincidence, isn’t it?”

Harry laughed bitterly. “Is it? That’s all you need to know about Wall Street, not the math about CDOs. Rosenthal runs the place, it always has. Why do you think Henderson is Treasury secretary? Count how many Treasury secretaries they’ve had. They’ve got Washington stitched up.”

I’d heard lots of people say Wall Street was a cabal. To hear one of its own saying that, even in jail, was different. Was Harry paranoid? I wondered again. There was something almost possessed about him, but perhaps he’d been driven to obsession. I thought of Henderson on the C-SPAN video, his quality of controlled calm.

“I went to my board, told them all the problems we’d had with Grayridge, how he’d landed us with all that crap. I didn’t know the full story then. I …” He paused and seemed to think better of what he’d been about to tell me. “They didn’t listen. They’d all had calls from Henderson saying he wanted me out.”

“Could he do that?”

“He could do whatever the hell he wanted. They needed the Treasury’s money. They were cowards.”

We’d reached the moment for which I’d come to Riverhead.

“So Mr. Greene’s dead but Mr. Henderson’s doing just fine, isn’t he? What does that make you feel?” I said.

Harry grimaced, then got up and walked a couple of paces to the door, looking through the pane of glass set into it to check on the guard outside. Then he turned to face me with his back to it, his face fervent.

“You know what I feel, Doctor?” he said contemptuously. “I feel like doing to him what I did to Greene.”

He’d given me what I’d come for-a threat to Henderson. It was all I needed and I didn’t want to spend any more time there, although I’d learned some other useful things. I signaled to the guard and got up, leaving Harry staring bitterly after me. The road was clear when I drove out of the lot, but I stayed well below the speed limit until I was a long way clear of Suffolk County. I didn’t want to be hauled off to Yaphank again.

Somewhere on the journey from New York to Washington, D.C., maybe around Chesapeake Bay, you cross the border into the South. The air turns softer, the humidity rises, and you are deposited off the Acela at Union Station into another country entirely, with its slow cabs and steadier, more baroque manners than its Yankee cousin.

It was a bright June day, with all of the city’s monuments shining in the sun, and I stood for a few minutes gathering my thoughts on the paved section of Pennsylvania Avenue, where tourists massed in groups next to the White House railings. I was at the edge of the strip opposite the eight Greek columns of the Treasury, its granite facade drab and gray next to its iridescent neighbor.

I’d arrived early, having caught the early train out of New York, and I pulled a dollar bill from my pocket to look at it. On it were the crumpled face of George Washington, the Treasury seal in green, and Tom Henderson’s scrawled signature. To the left, over the Bon the Federal Reserve Bank of New York seal, was a promise in uppercase letters: THIS NOTE IS LEGAL TENDER FOR ALL DEBTS, PUBLIC AND PRIVATE. I’d come to ask about a fatal debt.

Having climbed the steps and passed security, I was directed up a stone staircase to the third floor. I set out along a dim corridor, checking a piece of paper on which I had scrawled the number of the room. When I looked up, I saw to my surprise the man I’d come to visit. He was standing by himself about fifty yards down the corridor, gazing at me kindly. On the C-SPAN video, I’d seen senators melt in his presence, but I hadn’t grasped why until that moment. He stood in socks with a gentle smile on his face as if he had all the time in the world. He looked completely relaxed, his shoulders at ease and his face soft and knowing, like a beneficent monarch. As I reached him, he stepped forward one pace to squeeze my hand.

“Dr. Cowper, I presume,” he said, pronouncing my name correctly and smiling wryly at his own Victorian reference.

He led me into a high-ceilinged room with ornate plasterwork and a chandelier that looked as if it could do with a dust. It was a drawing room, I guessed, with drapes that hung in folds and Louis XV-style chairs arranged by a mahogany table. As we entered it, a young man appeared. He was plump, with a bland smile and rimless glasses-impossible to pick out in a crowd. Henderson waved me to an armchair and sat opposite, while his new companion perched a few feet behind him like a stage prompt.

Sitting there, with the weight of history and authority bearing down on me, I felt sweat on my forehead. Some impulse had brought me there, a determination not to let Greene’s deception die with him, but my pretext for coming felt awfully thin.

“You wanted to see me,” Henderson said.

“Thanks for sparing the time.”

He nodded self-deprecatingly, as if half an hour of his time were an expensive gift he’d decided to bestow on me. The other man looked on silently.

“As I mentioned when I called, I’m a psychiatrist in New York and Harry Shapiro was one of my patients. He told me a number of things that may come out in evidence at a trial, but there is one matter that I don’t think can wait.”

Henderson said nothing, but cocked his head slightly to one side, his Buddha-like smile unchanged. I’ve no idea where you’re going with this, but I’m fascinated to see how you’ll finish, said the smile.

“I’ve just seen Mr. Shapiro in the Riverhead Correctional Facility, where he is being held on murder charges. He told me that he wishes you harm because he blames you as well as Mr. Greene for his predicament. Given that he’s already confessed to one killing, I must take that seriously. Have you heard of the Tarasoff case?”

Henderson pursed his lips and shook his head a couple of times as if he’d not only not heard of it, but saw no reason to care.

“It involved a woman called Tarasoff who was killed by a therapy patient after he’d told his psychiatrist that he intended to do it,” I said. “The courts held that therapists have a duty to protect anyone they suspect might be harmed by their patients. The normal rules of confidentiality are waived. That’s why I’m here.”

It wasn’t really the reason, of course. Harry was no immediate danger to Henderson. But it had given me a plausible excuse to demand to see him and to watch how he reacted to the other things I wanted to say.

Henderson nodded. “Thank you, Doctor. However, I’m not sure what the rush was. Shapiro’s in jail, isn’t he? He doesn’t present much of a threat to anyone at the moment, does he?”

“I still felt that I should come. Mr. Shapiro told me a number of things about what he thinks happened as a result of the merger between his bank and Mr. Greene’s. He believes that he was deceived.”

Henderson gazed at me, looking innocently bemused. He had an intimidating quality that had nothing to do with threats or with overt aggression, like Harry. It was subtler than that: a benign puzzlement that anyone could question his version of the truth unless they were misguided or malign.