Offerings (2 page)

But what Peter wore to work today and what he’d be wearing to work in the middle-of-fucking-nowhere China didn’t matter either. And neither did the fact that Kate’s day had started eighteen hours ago with Ed’s can-you-pop-into-my-office bullshit and then morphed into putting together a pitch book that probably would be too little too late. The only thing that counted at the moment was that her little boy was being run into the ground by monsters.

“I tried to get Mack to sleep,” Peter said, “but he wanted you. Everything’s going to be okay now, Mack. Mommy’s here.”

Peter handed Mack a small red Lego car they’d been playing with. Mack and his Legos. When he was thirteen months old, he swallowed two of Sarah’s. Peter had called Kate from the ambulance and told her to come straight to the hospital when her plane landed. She was fogged in at O’Hare. She refused to get on a plane until she heard from Peter that the doctor in the emergency room had made everything right. When she called her mother to tell her what was going on and said she was going to quit her job at Greene Houseman on the spot to spend all of her time with her children, her mother laughed, said Mack would be just fine, children survive far worse. Kate had been the most competitive kid in everything she’d done since she was about six, and it would take a whole lot more than two Lego blocks to get her to drop her career.

Kate led Mack into the solarium. They nestled into the soft beige love seat.

“I can’t stop crying, mommy.”

Kate pulled the brown fur throw blanket that was jumbled over the arm of the chair around them. She kissed Mack’s fingers. She stroked his hair and pressed him against her as hard as she could. His hair had the lemon scent of his shampoo. Mack was her quiet child, her second, her last, her baby. His fears were much closer to the surface than Sarah’s.

“You’ve nothing to worry about, Mack. We’ll be safe here for a long, long time.” Kate found a blue Kleenex in her pocket, wiped Mack’s nose, and then her own.

“So many stars above, so many cities at the bottom.” Kate began singing “
Ach Spij Kochanie,”
the song her grandmother had always sang to her, and that Kate’s mother had sang to Sarah and Mack when they went to bed.
“Stars are giving signs to cities that children must go to sleep...
”

Mack’s head was still against her chest. “That song makes me think of Grandma.” Mack inhaled and said he missed her. Kate missed her too. Until a couple of months ago, she’d had the luxury of flying her mother in to be around the children during times when her work demands were too great. Now would have been the perfect time to call in the cavalry, but with her mother gone, Kate had to create new ground rules. Whining quotas. Time limits for tantrums. Frequent flyer points on Brewster Air (redeemable for ice cream, movies, video games, and extra TV time) for self-discipline. It was like house-training two new puppies.

“I don’t want anybody to take me out of my house.” Mack’s voice was growing softer.

Kate looked around the room. The Chippendale desk. The Persian carpet they bought in Istanbul. The early nineteenth-century poplar corner cupboard stocked with Meissen porcelain. There was an original oil by Fernand Leger above the mantel. Peter had outbid a Saudi prince at the Langley Spring auction in London the year before. Kate always thought the story of how he came to own the painting gave him more pleasure than the picture itself; three women, distorted the way all Cubists slice up their figures, sitting nude on red stools on a checkered tile floor.

Mack whispered his fear again. Kate wondered if it was more than a demon-in-the-closet sort of fright. The house had been through two bankruptcies and one divorce since a stock trader named Cameron Dortmund built it for his wife Lucille and their boys Martin and Simon. They lived in it exactly nineteen days before he was wiped out by the crash of 1929. Peter laughed at the supposed curse. The day Kate and Peter took the title, Ascalon closed at thirty-seven and a half. He thought the price would rise forever, so instead of selling any of his shares, Peter pledged two hundred and fifty thousand to get the cash to buy the house and another two hundred thousand to buy the Leger.

The stock closed today at under a dollar. They’d made such a large bet on Ascalon they had little to fall back on beyond what Kate could earn.

Kate took another look at the Leger. In the morning, she’d make some calls to find out whether they could sell it to give themselves some breathing room.

THREE

Two days later, Kate was in Colorado.

Chris Franklin, from his seat at the head of the table, spoke first. “Let me get right to the point,” he said, with a soft inflection. “We’ve talked to three sets of bankers this week and every one of them told us to stick to our knitting and to ride out the storm. They said the capital markets haven’t recovered to the point where they’re ready for someone as small as Majik. So, tell us something we haven’t already heard.”

Chris was a compact man, tightly coiled. Dusty blond hair curled away from his face. The way he kept moving from side to side suggested he’d prefer to be on the plant floor or in the design room or on the back of a horse. Kate guessed he might be somewhere in his mid-forties.

“There’s a large dollop of truth in what you just said, Chris, but look at the other side of the coin,” Kate said. Hedging her answer only would have assured defeat. “At the rate you’re burning through cash, Majik will trip its bank covenants by June and you’ll be bone-dry by July or August. Unless you’ve got a few million dollars sitting around, you don’t have the luxury of waiting for even a partial recovery of the market.”

Thrust and parry. It was Chris’s turn to react. Kate saw no reason to rush him. Her associate began rummaging through his book bag, to bring out the slick books she’d prepared. Kate raised her hand two inches off the table to hold him back.

“Why June?” Chris asked, leaning forward. The man seated to his right, short, square-faced, beady-eyed and balding, looked confused. To his left, Beth Parker underlined the word
June
on the pad in front of her.

Kate spun her laptop around. She invited Chris to scroll through her numbers. He moved to the center of the table, pulled it toward him, and looked over the top of his rimless glasses. Beth stood over his shoulder.

“It’s not just the cash burn. You’ve also got to factor into your thinking how your competitors have positioned themselves. Greatgames, Sony and Microsoft all have licenses with Disney or other major studios to exploit their characters. Wowaction just got a tie into Paramount for its summer films. I’m not telling you something you don’t already know, but there was a fire at the Kiyobe plant outside Seoul two weeks ago. It’s prioritizing shipments of its chips according to order size. Yours won’t be big enough to get their attention.”

The way everyone on Majik’s side of the table was leaning in Kate’s direction emboldened her to go a bit farther. “You need this cash to get the chips that’ll enable you to get your games on Wal-Mart’s shelves before Thanksgiving. Without that, you’re dead. You’re trying to focus on the equity markets, but the harsh reality is that in this lending environment, once you miss your sales targets your banks will abandon you.”

There were a few more slides on her deck, but Kate had scored all the points she needed.

Chris’s cell phone vibrated on the table where he’d set it. He apologized and said he hoped the interruption would be brief. Beth took the spot at the table where Chris had been sitting. She asked if she could email Kate’s slides to herself.

Kate took a small sip of water, fished her BlackBerry out of her bag, and moved to the other side of the room. She inched toward a painting behind Chris’s desk.

The painting was an oil on canvas of an Alpine scene sitting in a frame that had obviously been hand-carved. The corners and the middle of each side had a shell imprint surrounded by vines and flowers. She reached toward the lower right corner and touched the words
Gustave Courbet.
Her eyes followed a series of tiny brushstrokes across the middle of the picture.

“Kate,” Chris said after she had been standing near the painting for a couple of minutes. “Please clarify this for me.” She went to the side of his chair and began explaining how she’d crunched the numbers. Beth walked to the credenza, filled her coffee cup, turned directly toward Kate, and spoke before Chris had a chance to do so.

“If we have so little margin for error, I’m surprised you even bothered making the trip out here. You must see some potential or you wouldn’t have wasted your time. So tell me, what probability of success do you ascribe to the offering?”

Kate wasn’t surprised the women in the room seemed to be the only ones on their toes. Beth probably spent as much time keeping her kids’ heads on straight as she did for the men in this room. “Sixty-forty. Seventy-thirty if we’re lucky. The market’s got a long way to go, but it’s inching back. Families who’ve pinched pennies for the past couple of Christmases want to get their kids something new and different this year. There’s a lot of pent-up demand out there right now. The answer to your question depends in part on how much you believe in what you’ve got in the pipeline.”

“How big a raise can we pull off?” Beth asked, moving to Kate’s side as she spoke.

“Assuming the bleeding stops by Memorial Day, three-fifty, minimum. Closer to four if your Christmas orders beat my projections by more than five percent.”

Chris spoke up. “How much of our stock can the insiders sell?” At bottom, that was what all these presentations were about.

Kate pushed back. “I haven’t fully worked through the numbers.”

Chris reached into the pocket of his shirt. He retrieved his phone and touched the screen to bring up a spreadsheet. “How much? Ballpark.”

Bankers use various metaphors to describe the point in the meeting when the principals ask how much they can put into their pockets. Her mentor at Greene, an M&A guru named Andrew Butler, called it the sexual side of capitalism. He said the image that always came to him at that instant was of Richard Burton dangling diamonds off his fingers before he placed them around Elizabeth Taylor’s neck. And now it was Kate Brewster’s turn to begin the seduction.

“Thirty million, easy.”

FOUR

Kate went straight from the meeting to the Denver airport for the redeye back to New York. Peter and Mack were in the kitchen when she walked in a little after eight. They were debating whether Mack should tuck in the shirt of his uniform before leaving for his Little League game.

Kate knelt down and put her arms around Mack. “Everything okay with you, big guy?”

The buttons on his uniform were all out of whack. He’d put the wrong button into the top hole and now he had more holes left to fill than buttons to fill them. Kate started both fixing and tucking in Mack’s shirt. He’d just brushed his teeth. His breath smelled of mint.

Kate lingered for a moment and then told Mack to look in her bag. Chris Franklin had given her two of Majik’s games. “Let me know how you like them this weekend and we’ll send him a thank you note.” She smoothed Mack’s hair, kissed him on both cheeks, and gave him a strong squeeze. He wriggled out of her arms. Kate thought he looked tired, but at least his eyes had gotten a bit of their sparkle back.

She walked to where Peter was standing in front of the stove. They kissed on the lips, but just barely. He tasted of grapefruit juice.

“Anything to report on the white knight front?” she asked. The expression on Peter’s face suggested she didn’t want to hear his answer. “I’m so sorry this trip took me away just when you needed me. I’m here now, though, for the next two days. I’m yours.”

Peter took a step away. “It’s been hell, Kate. Just hell. Every waking minute I’m either trying to convince some employee or customer not to bolt or begging for some private equity fund to take a look at me. The only thing I’ve got going for me at the moment is that none of my competitors are hiring or have any capacity, so I haven’t fallen through the ice just yet.”

“Want me to do some modeling?”

“I don’t know what good that will do. The perception that Ascalon is about to shutter its doors has overtaken the reality of what we still have to offer.”

“I’ll model lingerie if it will at least put a smile on your face.” Kate laughed. She took a step toward Peter but then stopped when his expression didn’t change a bit.

“I didn’t think things could have gotten worse, but of course they did. Let me show you something,” Peter said. He walked across the kitchen to the nook where they kept the phone and a Gien bowl they used as their message board. It was the bottom of a soup tureen, actually, that Kate and Peter had found in St. Remy the year before Sarah was born. The lid was so badly chipped they paid only a few Euros, but Kate loved the way the vines of Algerian Ivy wrapped their way through pink and yellow camellias and the hummingbirds having their way with them. For years, they’d used the bowl to hold the mail and notes to each other as they rushed past each other on their way up their corporate ladders. At one time they put in small bits of endearment, little notes with nothing but a scribbled heart, but that was so long ago.

Peter put both hands on the marble countertop. He seemed to be searching for the right words. Kate was reluctant to prod him.

“The blood in the water attracted the sharks, as it always does. There are rumors floating around that you torpedoed a deal with Jack Carpenter last fall that valued Ascalon at over four hundred million dollars because you were talking to Ed Roth and wanted to take the deal to Drake so it could earn the commission.” He sounded more resigned to the legal theatrics on the horizon than accusatory.

“That’s absurd.”

“We’ve learned in the past three days, Kate, that absurd carries the day. The two of us have lost over twenty million on paper since Tuesday and that’s without this self-dealing coming out.”

“Self-dealing?” Kate froze.

“Our shareholders were given a death sentence this week. Even if we don’t end up selling to the Chinese, they’re not going to get more than a buck or two a share. They’re going to look for somebody to blame for the money they lost. That means they’re looking for a way to sue you and Greene and Drake. And of course then they’ll say I was in on it with you to drag me into the mess.”