There was a surreal, Alice-in-Wonderland quality about the procession Goldstone led for three blocks to Davis Polk’s offices at Chase Manhattan Plaza. For Johnson, the whole thing had become a bad dream. He couldn’t shake the feeling they had left the real world behind in Atlanta. They had stepped through the looking glass to a place where reality was suspended, where the old numbers, the old rules, the old financial reasoning, simply didn’t apply. Money was paper, and paper was money, and people got paid $25 million for lying to you.
