Offerings (15 page)

Steve reached out and took Kate’s arm. He said they should leave before the meeting deteriorated further.

“You Americans are too busy making your own history to study that of others.” Marta walked to the window and raised her arm. “If you want to learn something of history, before you head to the airport, walk through the ghetto, past the homes where the Jews of Barcelona lived for hundreds of years before they were expelled. There’s even an American twist to the story, so you might enjoy it.” Kate raised her eyes to Marta’s. “They were forced out of their homes the same year Columbus sailed from here to find your country.”

Kate rose from the chair. She opened the door, offered still another apology. Marta’s back was turned, but she would not let herself be silent on this point. She faced the window. Kate wanted to get into the elevator and away from Steve before he had a chance to join her, but the carriage was on another floor. He took her arm. She twisted away from him. He started complaining about what a hash she’d made out of the meeting, but Kate wanted none of it. The moment the elevator opened to the lobby she bolted out the door and crossed the street to the screams of car horns.

With Marta’s last questions pounding at her brain—
Are you a Jew? Do you know what it means to suffer?
—Kate crossed the Placa Nova and sought the shelter of the Cathedral.

TWENTY-FOUR

Kate arrived at the lawyer’s meeting at Greene Houseman directly from an early morning debriefing at Drake where Ed was easily prepared to accept both Steve’s characterization of the Hirsch family as opportunistic money grubbers and his spinning of their meeting in Barcelona to keep open the chance of a deal being done without their cooperation. Ed hadn’t merely brushed aside Kate’s opposition to the idea; he asked whose side she was on.

Larry Wolf sat at the head of the large cherry conference table. Oil portraits of Devon Greene and Malcolm Houseman with their crisp white shirts, blue suits and stern countenances were on the wall. A bank of windows looked out on the huge American flag draped on the façade of the stock exchange.

Larry was a short, tightly compacted man who bounced around on the balls of his feet in a way that reminded Kate of the elves in Mack’s Christmas videos. He wore a blue button-down sweater over a white shirt and regimental tie. Andrew Butler sat to his left.

Kate was asked to sit at the end of the table opposite Larry. She had five or six gray or blue suits and regimental ties (and one bow tie she found distracting) on either side of her. Their business cards were arrayed in front of her, but she doubted she would enter them into her address book.

Larry asked her to shut off her BlackBerry and cell phone so the meeting would be free from distractions. She couldn’t resist scrolling through her messages one final time. The latest email in the queue arrived while introductions were being made. It was from a law firm in Washington Marta and Eric hired giving her a ten-day deadline to disclose the painting’s owner before they would file a formal request with the US State Department and of course let every possible media outlet know Steve Reed, Kate Brewster, and Drake Carlson were complicit in aiding and abetting a war crime perpetrated against the Hirsch family.

As she took her first sip of coffee before the inquisition into her all-too-brief conversations with Jack Carpenter began, Kate felt as though her eyes were being plucked out by a flock of birds.

The questioning was kicked off by Caitlin Hennessey, a woman with a wrestler’s neck and shoulders to match and a seeming predisposition not to accept at face value anything Kate might say. She stood behind her chair before speaking. Her cavernous voice suited her mountain of a body.

“Kate.” She paused. “May I call you that?”

Kate nodded. Kate, Caitlin. Were they cut from the same cloth? Kate was about to find out.

“It costs fourteen thousand dollars to fly a Gulfstream Four from Westchester to Pittsburgh and back. Who paid for the trip you took with Jack Carpenter?”

Fourteen thousand dollars. It was an attention-grabbing number. The woman was good. She knew how to put Kate back on her heels. “I’m not sure.”

Kate stopped before saying anything more. She was trying to remember whether she offered to reimburse Jack or Amigo, or whether she even wondered who picked up the tab. Common courtesy suggests that was the right thing to do, even under the strained circumstances of the flight, but could she make that statement to someone who had the right to deny to defend her if she misrepresented? Had she become so accustomed to being treated like royalty that driving a couple of miles from her house and getting onto a luxury jet was the norm? The plaintiffs’ lawyers would throw her to the wolves.

“Our investigation suggests the trip was billed to Amigo and you never reimbursed any portion of the cost. Do you have any reason to suspect that wasn’t the case?” Kate shook her head. Two questions in (three, if asking Kate whether Caitlin could call her by her first name counted) and Kate was behind the eight ball.

“What did Amigo get in return for flying you to Pittsburgh in November?” And so the game was on; the relentless step-by-step twisting of the most benign facts, the molding and massaging of the truth that is the lawyer’s stock-in-trade. Kate pulled herself up in her chair. She inhaled and folded her hands in front of her.

“Your job as Ascalon’s banker was to maximize its value to the shareholders, is that correct?” Caitlin asked.

“My job was to guide it through opportunities that presented themselves, with an eye toward shareholder value, yes.” Kate was not among friends. She had to watch every word. She was as pleased with that answer as she could be, but as Caitlin rustled the papers in front of her Kate knew she had little time for either self-satisfaction or self-reflection.

Caitlin took two steps toward Kate. All eyes were on her. “I find it hard to believe—offensive, actually—that Jack Carpenter would raise the topic of Amigo’s interest in Ascalon when he was flying you to see your dying mother, so I’m not going to ask you questions about the ride itself.” Caitlin was playing the good cop for the moment. Kate exhaled, but only slightly. She presumed the bad cop wasn’t far away. “But I do want to focus on your subsequent contacts.”

One of Caitlin’s colleagues closed the blinds. Another dimmed the lights. The two television screens mounted on opposite walls lit up. It was a Cecil B. DeMille production designed both to blow Kate’s mind and to let her know Caitlin would be one or two steps ahead of her the entire day. One screen had Kate’s phone records, the other emails from her Greene Houseman mailbox. Caitlin scrolled through them with a clicker in her right hand while she leaned against a credenza across from the windows.

She began walking Kate through the evidence trail, call by call, email by email, always pressing her for more details than she could remember, always registering Kate’s lack of precision as evasion, or worse. The lawyers splayed around the table were like a human lie detector, their arms recording Kate’s answers in broad strokes as if they were monitoring her brain waves. Kate responded slowly, respectfully. The nice part about not lying in these situations is that you don’t have to remember the story you’re manufacturing. Good or ill, the best Kate could offer was the truth.

No one from Greene or Drake had said the carrier would do anything but let both firms swim on their own. With expectations so low, there were no surprises as the morning wore on, none of Marta Hirsch’s fury at having to justify her claim to Steve Reed, nothing but the understanding that everyone in this room had to go through this charade so each side could say it had done its diligence.

Caitlin was a meticulous cross-examiner, working from a typed list of questions she marked with a yellow highlighter when it was time to move to the next topic. She was polite, but relentless, for over two straight hours until she was distracted by the white-coated waiters from Greene’s catering staff who wheeled in lunch. Although the day was far from over, Kate had already spent much more time talking about Jack Carpenter than she ever did actually talking with him.

“I feel as though we’re walking down memory lane, seeing you both in the same room at the same time,” Caitlin said, deciding which sandwich to choose at the table where lunch had been spread out. Clive and Larry were on either side of her. “Prowrap and Metrasonics. Boy, did we all have some fun on those deals.” The expression on the lawyers’ faces suggested they didn’t share the same fond memories.

Kate knew the Prowrap deal. It was one of Greene’s public offerings, where the company awarded some no-bid contracts to the founder’s son. When the stock dipped the investors complained they should have been told about that cozy relationship. She knew the name Metrasonics only from the days Ed and Jack were courting her and sharing war stories as part of the wooing.

Kate hardly felt like facing an afternoon’s worth of questions on a full stomach. She picked a slice of cucumber off the salad bowl, wiped her fingers on a napkin, and reached for a chocolate chip cookie. Andrew came to her side and rubbed her back with his left hand.

“You’re holding up pretty well, all things considered,” he said.

“I’ve had more fun. This is why I didn’t go to law school. Battling innuendo has never been my strong suit.”

Andrew laughed. “I always thought of you as an empiricist. I was the guy on our team who made up the stories, remember? How was your trip?”

Kate wasn’t about to cover that ground a second time in one morning. “I can’t believe this bundle of nonsense about Jack being interested in Ascalon and me slowing down a deal that never existed in the first place really could get all the way to a jury.”

Andrew chose not to press his question.

“It will be a long, tough slog. We put on a game face, but there isn’t a banker alive who enjoys being undressed in public.”

Andrew moved closer to Kate. “Let me change the subject slightly. I’ve heard about the internal battles at Drake. Don’t bother asking me how. But you might want to look at the two deals Caitlin just mentioned and then keep looking at the deals Steve promoted over the past two years.”

Andrew always led by suggestion rather than by direction. He wanted to be seen as guiding his people, not criticizing whether they were pursuing the right strategy. It was a management skill—an art, really—he learned from Malcolm Houseman himself.

The gentle way he offered his hint reminded Kate of their years together, but the context was odd. His message was hard enough to understand without trying to grasp his motive. Andrew moved to the other side of the room. If he wanted either questions or further conversation he would have stayed next to Kate.

Kate wasn’t sure what she might find if she followed Andrew’s lead. Still, she learned over the course of their time together to trust Andrew’s instincts. Andrew made it to the top of the heap and then stayed there because he knew what fights to pick. Steve might have dropped the ball. There might be something buried in the record that hadn’t been brought to the attention of the Drake board. Maybe Andrew was throwing her a safety net in the race they were running. Maybe she needed a weapon to balance the harm of this lawsuit.

Once the questioning resumed at a little after two, Kate was able to put part of her brain on autopilot so she could spend the rest of the afternoon thinking about Andrew’s suggestion while giving the same robotic answers over and over to the sixth, seventh, and eighth lawyer who needed to assure his name would appear in the transcript so he could justify his hourly fee.

TWENTY-FIVE

Kate emailed Peter to say she’d be home late. She shut her door and opened Drake’s trading files.

Metrasonics was one of six companies Drake took public between April and July in 1998. The stock was priced at eleven for the opening, but shot to nineteen later in the morning and stayed there for three weeks before leveling off at around twelve. The initial buyers were the usual suspects, the brokerage houses that played with the incendiary names, with a few pension funds thrown in for good measure.

Metrasonics took nine months to run out of cash and to implode. Some shareholders complained the offering had been manipulated to set the price artificially high. Drake settled for a few million without admitting liability. There was nothing particularly surprising about a banking firm throwing a few dollars at the plaintiffs to get them to move onto other prey. She still didn’t understand why Andrew sent her on this expedition. It was eight o’clock. If she left now she might have a few minutes with Sarah. But she decided to look into other deals.

Kate mapped out the board members of the companies Steve took to market. There were a couple of common names, but nothing to suggest why Andrew said what he had. Each deal had different law firms and different accounting firms doing their parts. On the surface, it was all vanilla. She unlocked her door. She walked to the kitchen for a cup of tea. The office was empty, except for the techies who came around when no one was working to make certain the systems were doing what they were designed to do. Kate splashed some water on her face to keep herself awake.

Back at her desk, she thought of calling Andrew, but that would be an admission of failure on her part. She’d always been able to work through the thorniest of puzzles. Steve’s deals were no different. She just needed to persist.

Kate opened a spreadsheet program. She began filling it with the hourly trading records of each offering. She might have laughed at the ridiculous way the prices rose on the first day of trading if her own scars weren’t quite so fresh.

Ascalon, after all, opened at eighteen and closed at twenty-six on its first day as a public company. By four-thirty that afternoon it was worth a great deal more on paper than Caterpillar, where Peter’s father spent his entire career attaching wheels to axles so his two boys and one girl would have a roof over their heads and a college education.

At dinner the night they had gathered to toast the success of the offering, Peter’s father had said his son made more in the first seven hours of Ascalon’s existence as a public company than he would have made if he worked for four hundred years without a vacation. Peter had flown the whole family—parents, brother and sister, and all of their children—to Paris on the Concorde that weekend, put them up at the Plaza Athenee. He had the maids fill Kate’s bath with warm milk and strawberries. The air was so rarified and the future so certain it all seemed to make perfect sense.