The Land of Steady Habits: A Novel by Ted Thompson Read Free Book Online Page B

Anders, who could feel, with the window cracked and his suit coat unbuttoned, the stale air of the office fly from him and with it the remnants of a meeting that had left him unsettled.
    It was silly, he knew, to get hung up on it. By any measure, he should have been celebrating. A deal he had sourced and pursued, despite the fact that it was considered around the office to be a total Hail Mary, had actually been approved, and there was a sudden surge of confidence in him among his superiors because of it. The deal was with an outfit called the Athena Property Group, whose executives wanted to turn the farmland at the northern edge of Kansas City into what they called a “neighborhood,” a campus platted with five hundred homes that, at least from the window of a regional jet as it descended into KCI, made geometric designs in the land that swirled and fractaled and reminded Anders of an abstract representation of snails.
    At the time, it was considered ludicrous to be sniffing around in housing, with interest rates high and inflation even higher (Brad French, his immediate supervisor, had told him he was playing Russian roulette with all the chambers loaded). But he’d stuck with it because, if you looked a little closer, the numbers were good. Despite every national trend, demand in this particular case was clear—Athena had already presold over a hundred plots to families moving up from the city—and so, as far as Springer was concerned, it had a chance to beat the market. Which was why he’d pursued it to begin with, why he’d risked being laughed out of the room, and likely why he’d found himself being considered for a second promotion in so many years.
    But the problem with Athena, the thing he was still trying to understand as the cab blew by Union Square, was that if you looked at the larger picture—specifically, the loans those hundred families were getting (almost all, it turned out, from the same thrift in downtown KC called Liberty Federal), not to mention the thin walls and cheap materials of the development—the whole thing became untenable. And it was untenable because, at a time when property values everywhere were evaporating, none of those loans had taken into account the possibility of those values doing anything but rising. It was all optimism, nothing else. He’d never seen a deal where no one on the other end seemed the least bit concerned about risk. He’d never heard of a deal like that. And yet when he’d brought it up in the meeting this morning, when he’d cleared his throat and mentioned that he was concerned about what kinds of loans all of these homeowners were getting, he was met with a kind of perplexed silence, a frankly embarrassing moment that was finally broken when Brad French, now the plan’s biggest proponent, asked him directly if he was changing his mind.
    And what the fresh air coming through the taxi window was washing from him was the nagging sense that even though he’d been the one to source the deal, and he’d been the one to fly out to KC and have steak with Jim Cranby, Athena’s cowboy-booted owner, and bring back a stack of financials packed with impressive numbers, he should have looked at Brad French and that whole table of senior vice presidents and said yes, he had, he’d changed his mind. But the reason he was even in the room, the reason that all those people, including his own boss, were letting him speak, was that he already owned this deal—it was his—and so his success and his pending promotion were already tied to its fate. It had even become how he was identified on the twenty-third floor. Because he was good at it, he knew that. For all the reasons to move to the financial center of the universe and build a career at a behemoth like Springer, none was as compelling as that. He was already a success. So if some little savings and loan in Middle America was going to lose its shirt, too bad. And though the houses seemed cheap and flimsy and