Offerings (3 page)

“Who told you this?”

Peter took Andrew Butler’s business card out of the bowl. He held it in Kate’s direction. After Greene Houseman took Ascalon public it put Andrew on the board to watch its investment. It could hardly put Kate in that spot while she was sleeping with the president. She recognized Andrew’s handwriting on the back of the card.

Jack Carpenter testified in a deposition last week; he first approached Kate about the bid in November. Is that true? If so, I should have been told. The Board should have been told. If Kate sat on this information so she could take that deal with her to Drake, there will be hell to pay.

“This is bullshit.”

“Bullshit or the gospel, it’s ours now, Kate.”

Kate was less than five feet from Peter but he might as well have already moved to China.

“Peter, we can’t let this nonsense distract us,” she said. If there is any hope that someone else will be interested you’ve got to get Ascalon back on its feet. I’ve got to stay focused on keeping Steve Reed from cutting me out of inheriting Ed’s position at Drake or I’ll be scraping around for a job. You said you haven’t yet fallen through the ice, but we’re both about to. And we’ll take Sarah and Mack and this house and that debt weighing us down with us.”

“Mack!” Peter shouted.

Kate gripped the edge of the counter. “Don’t use the children as an excuse not to deal with this. Come on, Peter, we need to be there for each other on this. Completely.”

“His game starts in half an hour. Two minutes, Mack.”

“But I just made it to the sixth level,” Mack called from the family room.

“Crash and burn, fella. We’ve got to blow outta here.” He lowered his voice. “Crash and burn, kid. Welcome to my world.”

Mack walked back into the kitchen. “Mom, are you coming to my game?

“Of course, sweetie, but I’m going to take a shower first. I’ve been on an airplane all night. I’ll meet you there. You two run along.”

Even a few minutes of solitude would have been a gift. Kate was grateful when Peter scooped up Mack and took him out the back door without saying anything more about Ascalon.

Kate reread the note, turned it over, and ran her finger over the raised letters of Andrew’s name. She then read it a third time.

She waited until Peter’s car was out of the driveway before tearing Andrew’s business card to shreds.

FIVE

They made love that night. At least in the literal sense of the phrase. Kate played the aggressor, but all the tastes and smells and sounds of their first months were wasted on a man able only to think about Ascalon’s troubles.

Peter rolled off her and said, “Well, Kate. You now know how it feels to have sex with a man who lost virtually everything he had in less than three months.”

Kate lifted her head. “Peter, stop. You’re the same man I fell in love with years ago. The same great father to Sarah and Mack. We’ll get ourselves out of the hole we’re in. It may take some time, but we’ll be fine.” She was running out of ways to say the same thing over and over.

Peter shifted up onto his pillows. He put his hands behind his head. “I wish I could believe what you just said, but this feels so different. Look where I was a few weeks ago. And now you’re making lists of everything we won’t be able to afford and I’m listening to Chinese on Rosetta Stone.” He broke off his words. Kate didn’t want to hear another explanation of failure. She put her head on his chest and ran her right index finger over the bit of hair around his belly button.

In their early time together that gesture would have led to more. Peter would have returned the favor by running his finger across the top of her behind. She might have lowered her head or he might have pulled her on top of him; the details didn’t matter. Even after Sarah, after Mack. But Peter was right. This felt different. He kept his hands where they were, as though among the things he’d lost was the right to ask for more.

Kate rolled to her side of the bed. She switched on her light to its lowest setting, opened the top drawer of her nightstand, and fished through a wad of books and papers, hand cream and nail files, aspirin tins, rubber bands and Valentine’s Day cards until she dug out a small, cream-colored Cranes envelope. She took out the card and ran her finger around the coral border. She reached over the edge of the bed and put on the top of her pajamas, snowmen, sleds and flannel, even this close to Memorial Day. Kate didn’t like to feel cold. But she left the buttons open.

“Do you remember this?” she asked.
Desire overwhelms me.
Peter sent Kate the note to celebrate their first month together. Kate’s friend Alexis, a business school classmate, had introduced the two of them. She’d thought dinner with her cute computer engineer of a cousin might be a good break from six days a week and twelve hours a day of Kate plowing through spreadsheets for Citicorp, especially since Kate had been living in New York for eleven months and hadn’t gone on one date, much less slept with a man. “This is who you are, Peter. All the crap you’re going through isn’t going to change the way I feel about the guy who wrote me this note.”

“I paid two dollars for that card and another twenty-six cents for the stamp. I’m not sure I could afford that today.”

Kate spun around so she was facing Peter. “Don’t fall into the trap of measuring your self-worth by your net worth. I’ve seen way too many guys on the street think their bank balance is the only thing that matters in their lives. You’re making yourself crazy. Trust me on this, Peter, all this nonsense about the patent threat and your having to unload Ascalon will pass.”

“If we’re around long enough to be vindicated.” He stopped, inhaled, then touched her cheek with the back of his right hand. “Listen, I appreciate what you’re trying to do. I wish I could get all this stuff out of my head even for a minute. Maybe changing the subject will help. Tell me about Colorado.”

Kate buttoned the middle button of her pajama top. She pulled the sheet over her hips. She didn’t feel like talking about Majik half-naked.

“There’s probably nothing there, but in a way, the meeting was quite cool.”

“Cool? Does that mean you got the gig?”

“We don’t know yet. But what was odd was that the guy who owns the company has this very old and possibly very valuable painting in his office. For the life of me I couldn’t figure out what it was doing there or if it’s genuine. Gustave Courbet. Have you ever heard of him?”

Peter said of course. “Did you ask what it was doing there?”

“Hardly. I’d just met these people. And the meeting was all about our dog and pony show. The whole run-up to the meeting and all the travel was a real pain, but the time we spent in the room actually was kind of fun. I got to run the whole thing.” Kate moved closer to Peter. “And when they got to the point where they asked about hard numbers it was like a movie. I actually imagined myself as Lauren Bacall in some slinky white dress leaning over to whisper in Humphrey Bogart’s ear, telling this guy he could pocket thirty million.”

“Nice number.”

“He certainly loved it. I could see the color rise in his cheeks.”

“You bankers love that shit.”

“I wouldn’t call it shit. I’d call it seduction. Getting his attention was almost as much fun as getting yours.”

Kate slid her hand beneath the sheet covering Peter’s legs. She moved in further to kiss him and when he opened his mouth touched his tongue with the end of hers. He moved his right hand from behind his head and opened her button.

Kate wriggled out of her pajama top and smiled at the possibility that there was hope for the old boy yet.

SIX

Majik narrowed the field to two, Drake and Greene Houseman, and asked each of them to submit a full-scale underwriting proposal by Friday. Kate had about thirty seconds to consider what a delight it would be to go head to head and beat her old shop before plunging into the task of pulling everything together. Everyone agreed to meet by video conference Thursday morning to review the proposal. Ed, his brother Jack, and Kate were in New York. Steve was sitting next to Leslie Elliot, a junior in Drake’s San Francisco office, who’d helped on the project.

“Not to rain on everyone’s parade, but as we were going through this the one thing that hit me was how light the numbers are,” Kate said. She knew Ed didn’t want to hear that, but she saw no reason to waste everyone’s time tinkering around the margins with that problem staring them in the face.

“These are just projections. Move them up a notch or two,” Ed said. Kate could tell by the way Ed flipped through the pages that he hadn’t even read the draft.

“Wait a minute, Ed. Before we start massaging numbers let me show you something. Leslie, please pull up what you found about that painting.”

Ed looked at her as though some private had just countermanded a general’s order. Jack shrugged his shoulders.

“Kate, you’re going to be outvoted on this. Everyone but you is willing to sell this as a cash-flow deal.” Steve’s comment sounded professional enough but his tone was dismissive. It wasn’t about the deal; it was all about his taking Ed’s side.

Kate spoke up. “Ed’s right. If we work with the projections we can get the earnings to the point where they won’t be an embarrassment. Nobody’s going to sue us if Majik doesn’t hit its numbers.”

“I feel pretty strongly about this, Steve.” Kate made certain her voice had conviction because she was about to throw down the gauntlet. “If you’re going to run the book, we can leave everything as it is and I wish you luck. But I’m not going to tarnish the integrity I’ve worked years to build trying to convince the people I know this is anything more than cotton candy.”

Leslie looked as though she wanted to be anywhere but in the middle of this cat fight.

Ed picked up the control to the monitor and told Steve he was putting them on mute. His face was twisted and red. “Who the hell do you think you are to talk like that? You haven’t produced ten cents’ worth of revenue since you walked in the door and now you’re trying to kill a genuine prospect at a time when we’re painfully low on inventory?”

“The market is still finding its bearings, Ed. Nobody is sourcing much of anything at the moment.” Kate hated having to defend herself on that point, but Ed was holding the cards.

“Steve was nimble enough to find this deal. And oh, by the way, the lawyers now are telling me we might get sued because you slowed down some deal I never heard of, so think long and hard before you sit here in front of a first year and say you won’t try to sell a deal I’ve directed you to work on,” Ed said, rolling the control around in his hand. He turned to his brother. “Remind me why we thought Kate might be the right person to run this place?”

“Eddie, please.” Jack’s fingers were spread apart and he was pushing them toward the floor, as if he were telling everyone to lower the volume.

“Ed, if you have something to say about me, say it to me directly,” Kate said. “We needn’t pretend I’m not in the room.”

However tempting it might have been to stake out the moral high ground, Kate’s job now was to bring the meeting to some semblance of a normal close. “Please. Let’s get back on the call and wrap this up. Go off mute. I only have one or two more questions.” If Peter’s stock had even one quarter of its top value she might have walked out of the conference room and headed straight to the elevator.

Jack looked to both Kate and Ed. “We haven’t won the deal yet, so let’s not worry about how we sell the story. Let’s just put forward the best set of estimates we can and see if we get the deal.” He sounded as though he were a father unable to stop two of his children from fighting.

Leslie described what was on the screen. It was a rider to Majik’s insurance policy. There was an artwork endorsement for five thousand dollars. “This is the only thing I found. It can’t be an original if that’s the only coverage, but it’s a very odd sort of painting to be sitting in a high-tech office, so it must have some story attached to it. I already asked Beth Parker for some details about it on my diligence list. Who knows? Maybe a ten-million-dollar painting has been sitting behind Chris’s desk all these years and nobody bothered to ask anything about it. He’s flying back from Seoul tomorrow. He’ll be back in the office Friday.”

Jack leaned forward in his chair, as if he understood the implications of what Leslie had just said.

Kate turned to Ed. “I’d like to talk to Chris about that painting. We’d have a lot more wind behind our sails with that on the balance sheet. At least it’s a hard asset.” If she were to be saddled with this albatross of a deal, she at least wanted the best possible bundle of facts she could muster.

Jack nodded his head and showed a tiny hint of a smile, which Kate took as his support for her suggestion. The gesture was little comfort in front of a hostile crowd.

Ed shoved the draft across the table to Kate. “We’ll talk later.”

Kate looked in Jack’s direction as a way of thanking him for not taking Ed’s side.

Ed got out of his chair and walked to the door. He turned toward Kate just before he disappeared into the hall. “Our business is very simple, Kate. We provide the brains and the guts to walk through walls for these stupid fucking companies that want to sell little pieces of themselves to every IRA in the country. Thank God they need us to navigate the territory for them. And by the way, where do you think all this money I throw around here comes from?”

There was no need to ask him to continue.

“We close deals, we get paid. We don’t close deals, we don’t get paid.”

SEVEN

Kate emailed the proposal to Chris later that afternoon and headed home for Sarah’s spring concert.

The orchestra played Appalachian Spring by Aaron Copeland. The children flagged a bit in some of the middle passages, but there were several moments when Kate closed her eyes and it was hard for her to believe the performers were no older than thirteen.

Sarah was in the first row, to the conductor’s immediate right, in a black Kate Spade dress. Her fingering of her cello was precise, her bowing measured.

Kate pressed closer into Peter as the applause reached a crescendo. “Look at Sarah, Peter. She was magnificent.”