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"wanted to thank me for the time I was giving Tommy," and to make sure "Tommy knew

he was off the hook."

What, I asked, did Pettit's spirit have to say about Joe Gregory? The spirit wrote a word,

according to Fargiano:

"Deceived."

Dick Fuld?

"Covers his tracks better."

Fargiano said Pettit talked a lot about wishing he could have traded in his suit for a Tshirt and jeans; he also kept talking about "being in too deep, not able to get out" and

"creative accounting."

I asked about love. Fargiano said Pettit had lost his love a while ago.

"What about your girlfriend?" I asked.

The spirit laughed: "Bright kid. Bit self-absorbed, but she was so young--anyone would

have been tempted," and returned to the theme of drowning in things going wrong, and

not being able to get out. He used the word targeted repeatedly.

Fargiano told me he could see Pettit. He was outside, where he'd always wanted to be-never trussed up in a suit.

And then I said good-bye--to Fargiano and, feeling somewhat foolish, to Chris Pettit.

Dwelling again on the whole lurid tale, I picked up an old copy of Watership Down and

came upon a passage wherein Fiver, who has visionary powers, urges his fellow rabbits

to run, knowing that men are coming to kill them:

"Look!" said Fiver suddenly. "That's the place for us, Hazel. High, lonely hills, where the

wind and the sound carry and the ground's as dry as straw in a barn. That's where we

ought to be. That's where we have to get to."

Maybe, I thought, that is where Chris Pettit finally is.

A Note About the Sources

I lost count of the hours of interviews done for this book when my tape recorder--an oldfashioned AA-battery-charged machine that was the size of a pack of Ultra cigarettes-stopped working. By that point I was on tape 106; each of the tapes had 180 minutes of

interviews on them. And I was still only one -quarter of the way through.

To my horror, not only did I have to go back and reinterview those people the machine

had simply failed to pick up (it got spotty around tape 80), but I also had to learn how to

work a digital recorder--and I bungled that, too, on occasion.

Had the former U.S. Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson not recorded our conversation

himself, his insightful and refreshing candor would not have made it into these pages. So

I thank him not just for his time and his honesty, but also for handing over the recording.

I must also thank certain members of his team, who wish to remain anonymous and who

gave me many hours of their precious time. For one particular senior member of the

Federal Reserve, who showed astonishing patience and good humor as we redid one very

long conversation, I am most sincerely grateful. The same goes for certain people inside

Britain's Financial Services Authority.

Also to the many men and women of the former Lehman Brothers, and also of Barclays

Capital (BarCap), who underwent a second and sometimes a third grilling. The only

upside of my sorry incompetence was this: I think that by the end, I had got the story

down correctly. And I noticed that almost without exception, the stories remained

unchanged as they were retold--although the value for me was that they became more

detailed, and more emotional.

This gave me faith that the narrators were telling the truth--albeit as they saw it--and that

though I had not meant to reinterview people, the reinterviews became the heart of this

book.

It was in the reinterviews where people, perhaps relaxed, really opened up. While

retelling their stories, they let their feelings rip.

This was the point when I knew that this book would be different, that inside of Lehman

there was a soul--many souls, in fact--and that there was a reason people thought of the

firm as a person, that they dreamed "she" was alive even after "she" was dead.

It would be my job to explain that soul: to explain the real story of what and who

Lehman was and why Lehman died. It would be my job to take readers