Catherine took a week off from the Holborn Bank and flew to New York to visit her father. She slept on the couch of his post-prison apartment in Flushing and was pleasantly surprised to see that he was not miserable, that he was adjusting to his new life. He had part-time work as a bookkeeper for a Sri Lankan immigrant who owned a piano moving company that may or may not have been officially licensed. He had joined the New York City Trivia League and played Wednesday nights at a bar on 38th Avenue. He also seemed to be in some sort of relationship with a middle-aged Chinese woman named Karen whom Catherine saw twice while she was there, but he didn’t tell, and she didn’t ask. As for money, he had taken his Social Security early, and he was surviving.

Catherine did not see or talk to Pleski in Geneva before she left for New York, and, back at the bank, there was still no word from him. There was cash in his account, and, now that Barnstable was gone, when she moved to invest it (with other clients’ funds) in the Central Asian mining company warrants, nobody objected. Had Barnstable been lying about Compliance’s concerns, or had he been playing some game of his own? No way to tell. Even better, when her new boss queried her about the missing half of her DAX straddle, she told him she had devised the strategy with Barnstable and that Barnstable was supposed to make the part of the trade that was missing. Hadn’t he done so? (She was shocked, shocked.) No, said the manager, who didn’t seem surprised. Apparently, Barnstable had been generally regarded as even less competent than Catherine had suspected. So the DAX loss was written off as a posthumous Barnstable fuckup, unrecoverable and best forgotten. Which left Catherine free and clear—and a little surprised, but not unpleasantly so, at how easily the lie had come to her.