He signs in six places. Dax countersigns, as CEO of Arendt and Oppenheim, and Marie Delder witnesses the authenticity of the documents as legal officer. He wonders how long they will take to file with the Liechtenstein authorities once he has sent back the documents after his father has signed. Some time, he would guess. The money will now be directed to two bank accounts in the Turks and Caicos and two in Switzerland and one in the Isle of Man before lodging itself, under various guises, in the bank’s retained-earnings account, where it will not be subject to scrutiny until the accounts are published in eleven months’ time; in the meanwhile the auditors can be relied upon to take these assets at face value in their interim report. The ratings agencies will receive some inside information by the usual channels as soon as possible about the healthy inflow of deposits. Dax, of course, knows that the money is to prop up the bank and he probably knows the disastrous hit they have taken on the sub primes and collateralised debt instruments they bought and the hedge funds they financed. The bank still owns – among many other useless CDOs – chunks of mortgages on an alligator farm in a swamp, two thousand worthless homes in Mississippi, a shopping mall in a town which has been flattened by a hurricane and a lakeside clapboard holiday development in Antigua which is currently underwater, so that, when the waters recede, the holiday homes will be pulp. He could let the last hedge fund go, but the bank would lose close to $500m. and the rating could slip to a point at which depositors could cause a run. The thing about banks – his father used to say – is that they should stick to what they know. He cited the scandals of Enron and WorldCom, and how the banks and the auditors were dazzled by the apparent success, even as the insiders were stealing $33bn. And now Tubal and Co. is stuck with $800m. of utterly useless and finely diced mortgages in territories they have never even visited. Not only that, but no one in the bank knew what the traders and hedgies were buying; they went along with them because they too were dazzled by the profits others had apparently made. Just before his stroke, his father heard about the mortgages, and tried to unwind the position, but it was too late. In a way his stroke came just in time.