PART THREE 6 страница

He walked over and handed me one of the glasses of Scotch. I put the folder down on to the couch and took the glass from him. He held his up. Then a phone rang somewhere in the room.

‘Shit. ’

Van Loon put his glass down on the coffee table and went back in the direction he’d just come from. The phone was on an antique writing desk beside the drinks cabinet. He picked it up and said, ‘Yeah? ’ There was a silence and then he said, ‘Yeah. Good. Yeah. Yeah. Put him through. ’

He covered the phone with his hand, turned to me and said, ‘I’ve got to take this call, Eddie. But sit down. Have your drink. ’

I smiled briefly in acknowledgement.

‘I won’t be long. ’

As Van Loon turned away again, and receded into a low-level murmur, I took a sip from the whisky and sat down on the couch. I was glad of the interruption, but couldn’t figure out why – at least not for a few seconds. Then it occurred to me: I wanted time to think about Ginny Van Loon and her little rant about the stock market and how it had reminded me so much of the kind of thing Melissa might have said. It seemed to me that despite obvious differences between them, the two women shared something – a similar, steely intelligence, as well as a style of delivery modelled on the heat-seeking missile. By referring to her father at one point as ‘Carl Van Loon’, for instance, but at all other times as ‘Daddy’, Ginny had not only displayed a sophisticated sense of detachment, she had also made him seem silly and vain and isolated. Which – by extension – was precisely how I now felt, too.

I told myself that Ginny’s comments could be dismissed as the cheap and easy nihilism of an overeducated teenager, but if that was the case, why was I so bothered by them?

I took a tiny plastic sachet from the inside pocket of my jacket, opened it and tapped a tablet out on to the palm of my hand. Making sure that Van Loon was facing away from me, I popped the tablet into my mouth and washed it down with a large gulp of whisky.

Then I picked up the folder, opened it at the first page and started reading.

The files contained background information on a series of small-to-medium sized businesses, from retail chains to software houses to aerospace and biotech companies. The material was dense and wide-ranging and included profiles of all the CEOs, as well as of other key personnel. There was technical analysis of price movements going back over a five-year period, and I found myself reading about peaks, troughs, points of resistance – stuff that a few weeks earlier would have been rarefied, incomprehensible fuzz, Mogadon for the eyes.

But just what did Carl Van Loon want? Did he want me to state the obvious, to point out that the Texas-based data-storage firm, Laraby, for example, whose stock had increased twenty thousand per cent over the last five years, was a good long-term investment? Or that the British retail chain, Watson’s – which had just recorded its worst ever losses, and whose CEO, Sir Colin Bird, had presided over similar losses at a venerable Scottish insurance company, Islay Mutual – was not? Was Van Loon seriously looking to me, a freelance copywriter, for recommendations about what stocks he should buy or sell? Again, I thought, hardly – but if that wasn’t the case, then what did he want?

After about fifteen minutes, Van Loon covered the phone again with his hand and said, ‘Sorry this is taking so long, Eddie, but it’s important. ’

I shook my head, indicating that he shouldn’t be concerned, and then held up the folder as evidence that I was happily occupied. He went back to his low-level murmuring and I went back to the files.

The more I read, the simpler, and more simplistic, the whole thing seemed. He was testing me. As far as Van Loon was concerned I was a neophyte with a fire in my belly and a lip on me, and as such just might find this amount of concentrated information a little intimidating. He was hardly to know that in my current condition it wasn’t even a stretch. In any case, and for something to do, I decided to divide the files into three separate categories – the duds, the obvious high-performers and the ones that weren’t instantly categorizable as either.

Another fifteen minutes or so passed before Van Loon finally got off the phone and came over to retrieve his drink. He held it up, as before, and we clinked glasses. I got the impression that he was having a hard time suppressing a broad grin. A part of me wanted to ask him who he’d been on the phone to, but it didn’t seem appropriate. Another part of me wanted to ask him an endless series of questions about his daughter, but the moment didn’t seem right for that either – not, of course, that it ever would.

He glanced down at the folder beside me.

‘So did you get a chance to look through any of that stuff? ’

‘Yes, Mr Van Loon, I did. It was interesting. ’

He knocked back most of his drink in one go, placed the glass on the coffee table and sat down at the other end of the couch.

‘Any initial impressions? ’

I said yes, cleared my throat and gave him my spiel about eliminating the duds and the high-performers. Then I recited a shortlist I’d drawn up of four or five companies that had real investment potential. I especially recommended that he buy stocks in Janex, a California biotech company, not based on its past performance, but rather on what I described, in a breathless rush, as ‘its telling and muscular strategy of pursuing intellectual-property litigation to protect its growing portfolio of patents’. I also recommended that he buy stocks in the French engineering giant BEA, based on the equally telling fact that the company seemed to be shedding everything except its fiber-optics division. I supported what I had to say with relevant data and quotes, including verbatim quotes from the transcripts of a lawsuit involving Janex. Van Loon looked at me in a curious way throughout, and it didn’t occur to me until I was coming to the end that a possible reason for this was because I hadn’t once referred back to the folder – that I had spoken entirely from memory.

Almost under his breath, and looking at the folder, he said, ‘Yeah. Janex… BEA. They’re the ones. ’

I could see him trying to work something out – calculating, eyebrows furrowed, how much of the folder it might be possible to read in the length of time he’d been on the phone. Then he said, ‘That’s… amazing. ’

He stood up and paced around the room for a bit. It was clear now that he was calculating something else.

‘Eddie, ’ he said eventually, coming to a sudden halt and pointing back at the phone on the antique writing desk, ‘that was Hank Atwood I was talking to there. We’re having lunch on Thursday. I want you to come along. ’

Hank Atwood, the Chairman of MCL-Parnassus, was routinely described as one of the ‘architects of the entertainment-industrial complex’.

‘Me? ’

‘Yes, Eddie, and what’s more, I want you to come and work for me. ’

In response to this I asked him the one question that I had promised Kevin I wouldn’t ask.

‘What’s going on with Atwood, Mr Van Loon? ’

He held my gaze, took a deep breath, and then said, clearly against his better judgement, ‘We’re negotiating a takeover deal with Abraxas. ’ He paused. ‘By Abraxas. ’

Abraxas was the country’s second-largest Internet service provider. The three-year-old company had a market capitalization of $114 billion, scant profits to date, and – of course – attitude to burn. Compared to the venerable MCL-Parnassus, which had assets stretching back nearly sixty years, Abraxas was a mewling infant.

I said, barely able to contain my disbelief, ‘Abraxas buying out MCL? ’

He nodded, but only just.

The kaleidoscope of possibilities opened up before me.

‘We’re mediating the deal, ’ he said, ‘helping them to structure it, to engineer the financials, that kind of thing. ’ He paused. ‘No one knows about this, Eddie. People are aware that I’m talking to Hank Atwood, but no one knows why. If this got out it could have a significant impact on the markets, but it’d also most likely kill the deal… so…’

He looked straight at me and let a shrug of his shoulders finish the thought.

I held up my hands, palms out. ‘Don’t worry, I’m not talking to anyone about this. ’

‘And you realize that if you traded in either of these stocks – tomorrow morning down at Lafayette, say – you’d be contravening the rules as set down by the Securities and Exchange Commission…’

I nodded.

‘… and could go to prison? ’

‘Look, Carl, ’ I said, deciding to use his first name, ‘… you can trust me. ’

‘I know that, Eddie, ’ he said, with a hint of emotion in his voice, ‘I know that. ’ He took a moment to compose himself and then went on. ‘Look, it’s a very complex process, and right now we’re at a crucial stage. I wouldn’t say we’re blocked exactly, but… we need someone to take a fresh look at it. ’

I felt the rate of my heart-beat increase.

‘I’ve got an army of MBAs working for me down on Forty-eighth Street, Eddie, but the problem is I know how they think. I know what they’re going to tell me before they even open their mouths. I need someone like you. Someone who’s quick and isn’t going to bullshit me. ’

I couldn’t believe this, and had a sudden flash of how incongruous it all seemed – Carl Van Loon needing someone like me?

‘I’m offering you a real chance here, Eddie, and I don’t care… I don’t care who you are… because I have a feeling about this. ’

He reached down, picked up his glass from the coffee table and drained what was left in it.

‘That’s how I’ve always operated. ’

Then he allowed the grin to break though.

‘This is going to be the biggest merger in American corporate history. ’

Fighting off a slight queasiness, I grinned back.

He held up his hands. ‘So… Mr Spinola, what do you say? ’

I struggled to think of something, but I was still in shock.

‘Look, maybe you need a little time to think about it – which is OK. ’

Van Loon then reached down to the coffee table, took my glass in his other hand and as he walked over to the drinks cabinet to get refills, I felt the strong pull of his enthusiasm – and the ineluctable pull of an unlooked-for destiny – and knew that I had no choice but to accept.

I LEFT ABOUT AN HOUR LATER. Disappointingly, there was no sign of Ginny in the hallway as Van Loon ushered me out of the apartment, but by that point I was in such a state of euphoria that if I’d had to talk to her – or, for that matter, to anyone else – I probably wouldn’t have made much sense.

It was a cool evening, and as I strolled down Park Avenue I cast my mind back over the previous few weeks. It had been an extraordinary time in my life. I wasn’t hindered by anything or inhibited in any way, and not since my early twenties had I been able to look to the future with such energy, and – perhaps more significantly – without that debilitating dread of the ticking clock. With MDT-48, the future was no longer an accusation or a threat, no longer a precious resource that was running out. I could pack in so many things between now and the end of next week, say, that it actually felt as if the end of next week might never come.

At Fifty-seventh Street, waiting for a ‘Don’t Walk’ sign to change, a strong sense of gratitude for all of this welled up inside of me – though gratitude directed towards whom in particular I didn’t know. It was accompanied by an acute sense of exhilaration, and was quite physical, almost like a form of arousal. But then moments later, when I was half-way across Fifty-seventh Street, something weird happened – all of a sudden these feelings surged in intensity and I was overcome with dizziness. I reached out for something to lean against, but there wasn’t anything there and I had to stumble forward until I got to a wall on the other side of the street.

Several people skirted around me.

I closed my eyes and tried to catch my breath, but when I opened them again a few seconds later – or what seemed like a few seconds later – I jolted back in fright. Looking around me, at the buildings and at the traffic, I realized that I wasn’t on Fifty-seventh Street any more. I was a block further down. I was on the corner of Fifty-sixth Street.

It was the same thing that had happened the previous evening in my apartment. I had moved, but without being conscious of it, without registering that I had moved. It was as if I’d suffered a minor blackout – as if I’d trip-switched forward in some way, or click-clicked forward like on a faulty CD.

The previous evening was because of not having eaten – I’d been busy, distracted, food had taken a back seat. At least, that was the assumption, the rationalization.

Of course, I hadn’t eaten since then either, so maybe that was it. A little shaken, but not wishing to dwell too much on what had happened, I walked slowly along Fifty-sixth Street towards Lexington Avenue in search of a restaurant.

I found a diner on Forty-fifth Street and took a booth by the window.

‘C’n I get you, hon? ’

I ordered a Porterhouse steak, rare, french fries and a side salad.

‘To drink? ’

Coffee.

The place wasn’t busy. There was a guy at the counter, and a couple in the next booth up, and an old lady putting on lipstick in the next one up from that.

When the coffee arrived, I took a few sips and tried to relax. Then I decided to concentrate on the meeting I’d just had with Van Loon. I found myself reacting to it in two different ways.

On the one hand, I was beginning to feel a little nervous about taking up his job offer – which involved a nominal starting salary and some stock options, with whatever real money I made being on commissions. These would be from any successful deals that I recommended, brokered, negotiated, or, in the gnarled syntax befitting my current thought processes, participated in any phase of the negotiating of – like the MCL-Abraxas deal, for instance. But on what basis, I asked myself, had Van Loon been able to offer me such a deal? On the entirely spurious basis, perhaps, that I even had the slightest notion of how to ‘structure’ or ‘engineer the financials’ of a big corporate deal? Hardly. Van Loon had seemed to understand pretty unequivocally that I was an impostor, so he couldn’t be expecting that much from me. But what, precisely, would he be expecting? And would I be able to deliver?

The waitress arrived over with my steak and fries.

‘Njoy your meal. ’

‘Thanks. ’

Then – on the other hand – I had this clear vision in my mind of what a pushover Hank Atwood was going to be. I had read articles about him that used woolly terms such as ‘vision’, ‘commitment’, ‘driven’, and it just seemed to me that whatever the nature of that thing I had triggered in the others really was – I would have no difficulty in triggering the same thing in him. This, in turn, of course, would place me in a potentially very powerful position – because as the new CEO of MCL-Abraxas, Hank Atwood would not only have the ear of the President and of other world leaders, he would be a world leader himself. The military superpower was a thing of the past, a dinosaur, and the only structure that counted in the world today was the ‘hyperpower’, the digitalized, globalized English-language based entertainment culture that controlled the hearts, minds and disposable incomes of successive generations of 18 to 24-year-olds – and Hank Atwood, who I would shortly be making friends with, was about to be placed at the apex of that structure.

But then all of a sudden, without warning or reason, I’d swing back to thinking that Carl Van Loon was surely going to come to his senses and at the very least withdraw the job offer.

And where would that leave me?

The waitress approached my booth again and held up the coffee pot.

I nodded and she refilled my cup.

‘What’s the matter, hon? You don’t like your steak? ’

I glanced down at my plate. I’d barely touched the food.

‘No, no, it’s fine, ’ I said, looking up at her. She was a big woman in her forties, with big eyes and big hair. ‘I’m a just little concerned about the future, that’s all. ’

‘The future? ’ she repeated, laughing out loud and walking away with the coffee pot held up in mid-air. ‘Get in line, honey, get in line. ’

When I got home to the apartment, the little red light was flashing on my answering machine. I reached down and flicked the ‘play’ button and waited. There were seven messages – which was about five or six more than I had ever received on it before at any one time.

I sat on the edge of the couch and stared at the machine.

Click.

Beeep.

‘Eddie, this is Jay. I just wanted to let you know – and I hope you won’t be pissed at me – but I was talking to a journalist from the Post this evening, and I… I gave her your number. She’d heard about you and wanted to do a story, so… I’m sorry, I should have checked with you first, but… anyway… see you tomorrow. ’

Click.

Beeep.

‘It’s Kevin. ’ Long pause. ‘How was dinner? What did you guys talk about? Give me a call when you get in. ’ There was another long pause and then he hung up.

Click.

Beeep.

‘Eddie, it’s your father. How are you? Any stock tips for me? (Laughter. ) Listen, I’m going on vacation to Florida next month with the Szypulas. Give me a call. I hate these goddamned machines. ’

Click.

Beeep.

‘Mr Spinola, this is Mary Stern from the New York Post. I got your number from Jay Zollo at Lafayette Trading. Erm… I’d like to speak with you as soon as possible. Erm… I’ll try you again later, or in the morning. Thank you. ’

Click.

Beeep.

Pause.

‘Why you don’t call me? ’ Shit, I’d forgotten about Gennady. ‘… I have some idea for that thing, so call me. ’

Click.

Beeep.

‘It’s Kevin again. You’re a real jerk, Spinola, do you know that? ’ His voice was slurred now. ‘I mean, who the fuck do you think you are, eh? Mike fucking Ovitz? Well, let me tell you something about peop-’ There was a muffled sound at that point, like something being knocked over. A barely audible shhhiit followed, and suddenly the line went dead.

Click.

Beeep.

‘Look – just fuck you, OK? Fuck you, fuck your mother, fuck your sister. ’

Click.

That was it. End of new messages.

I got up from the couch, went into the bedroom and took off my suit.

Kevin I could do nothing about. He would have to be my first casualty. Jay Zollo, Mary Stern, Gennady and my old man I could deal with in the morning.

I went into the bathroom, turned on the shower and stepped under the jet of hot water. I didn’t need these distractions and I certainly didn’t want to waste any time thinking about them. After my shower, I put on a pair of boxer-shorts and a T-shirt. Then I sat at my desk, took another MDT pill and started making notes.

In the dimly lit library of his Park Avenue apartment, Van Loon had sketched out the problem for me. The bottom line, predictably enough, was that the principals in the deal couldn’t agree on a valuation. MCL stock was currently selling at $26 a share, but they were asking Abraxas for $40 – a 54 per cent premium, which was way above the average for an acquisition of this kind. Van Loon had to find a way of either reducing the MCL asking-price or of justifying it to Abraxas.

He’d said that he would have some material couriered down to my apartment in the morning, relevant paperwork that I really needed to have a look at ahead of Thursday’s lunch meeting with Hank Atwood. But I decided that before any ‘relevant paperwork’ arrived I needed to do some research of my own.

I went online and skimmed through hundreds of pages of material relating to corporate financing. I learned the basics of structuring a takeover deal and examined dozens of case histories. I followed a trail of links throughout the night and at one point even found myself studying advanced, mathematical formulae for determining the value of stock options.

I took a break at 5 a. m. and watched some TV – re-runs of Star Trek and Ironside.

At around 9 a. m., the courier arrived with the material Van Loon had promised. It was another thick folder, containing annual and quarterly reports, analysts’ assessments, internal management accounts and operational plans. I spent the day wading through all of this stuff and by late afternoon felt that I had reached some sort of a plateau. I wanted the lunch with Hank Atwood to be happening now, and not in twenty hours’ time, but I had probably absorbed as much information as I was going to, so I figured that what I needed at this point was a little R & R.

I tried to get some sleep, but I couldn’t settle down – not even enough to doze for a few minutes, and neither could I bring myself to watch any more TV, so I eventually decided to just go and sit on a bar-stool somewhere, and have a couple of drinks, and chill out.

Before leaving the apartment, I forced myself to take a handful of diet-supplement pills and to eat some fruit. I also phoned Jay Zollo and Mary Stern, who I’d been fielding calls from all day. I told a distraught-sounding Jay that I’d been unwell and hadn’t felt like going in. I told Mary Stern that I didn’t want to talk to her, no matter who the hell she was, and that she was to stop calling me. I didn’t phone Gennady, or the old man.

On my way downstairs, I calculated that I hadn’t slept in nearly forty hours, and had probably, in any case, only slept a total of six hours in the seventy-two previous to that, so although I didn’t feel it and didn’t look it, I realized that at some level I must have been in a state of complete and utter physical exhaustion.

It was early evening and traffic was heavy, just like on that first evening when I’d come out of the cocktail lounge over on Sixth Avenue. I walked, therefore, rather than taking a cab – floated, in fact – floated through the streets, and with a vague sensation of moving through a kind of virtual-reality environment, a screenscape where colours contrasted sharply and perception of depth was slightly muted. Any time I turned a corner the movements I made seemed jerky and angular and guided, so after about twenty-five minutes, when I found myself lurching sideways all of a sudden and entering a bar in Tribeca, a place called the Congo, it was as though I were entering a new phase of play in some advanced computer game, and one with pretty realistic graphics – there was a long wooden bar to the left, wicker stools, a railed mezzanine at the back and enormous potted plants everywhere that reached right up to the ceiling.

I sat at the bar and ordered a Bombay and tonic.

The place wasn’t too crowded, though it would probably be filling up fairly soon. There were some people to my left, two women sitting at stools – but facing away from the bar – and three men standing around them. Two of these were doing the talking, with the others sipping drinks, pulling on cigarettes and listening carefully. The subject of conversation was the NBA and Michael Jordan and the huge revenues he’d generated for the game. I don’t know at what point it started again, exactly, that trip-switching forward thing, or click-clicking forward like on a faulty CD, but when it did I had no control whatsoever and could only observe, witness, each segment and each flash, as though each segment and each flash – as well as the greater, unrevealed whole – were happening to someone else and not to me. The first jump was very abrupt and came as I was reaching out to pick up my drink. I’d just made contact with the cold, moist surface of the glass, when suddenly, without any warning or movement, I found myself on the other side of the group, standing very close to one of the women – a thirtyish brunette in a short green skirt, not excessively slim, distinctive blue eyes… my left hand hovering somewhere in the airspace above her right thigh…

… and I was in mid-sentence…

‘… yeah, but don’t forget that ESPN was set up in 1979, and with $10 million of seed money from Getty Oil for Christ’s sake…’

‘What’s that got-’

‘It’s got every thing to do with it. It changed everything. Because of a shrewd business decision college basketball players were suddenly becoming household names overnight …

For a split second I was aware that one of the men – a chubby guy in a silk suit – was glaring at me. He was tense and sweaty and his eyes were drawn irresistibly to my left hand – but then… click, click, click … the barman was in front of me, waving his arms around, blocking my view. He looked Irish and had tired eyes that said pleeease, enough. Meanwhile, behind him – and only partially visible now – the chubby guy in the silk suit was holding a hand up to his face, trying to stop the flow of blood from his nose…

‘Fuck you, pal…

‘Fuck you …’

The cool evening air touched the hairs on the back of my neck as I staggered away from the barman and out on to the street. The woman in the short green skirt was there too, just inside the door, pushing away someone who was behind her. She said something I didn’t catch and then quickly manoeuvred herself around the barman, dodging his arms, but half a second later – inexplicably – she was linking arms with me a couple of blocks down the street.

Then we were in a cubicle together, a stall in the bathroom of a nightclub or a bar, and I was pulling away from her, withdrawing – her legs spread out against a backdrop of chrome, and white porcelain, and black tiles… her green skirt torn and dangling from the toilet seat, her blouse open, beads of sweat glistening between her breasts. As I leant back against the door, hurriedly doing up my trousers, she remained in position, with her eyes closed and head swaying rhythmically from side to side. In the background, there was some kind of pulsating music, as well as the periodic roar of electric hand-dryers and raised voices and manic laughter, and from the next cubicle what sounded like the flicking of lighters followed by sharp, rapid inhalations of smoke…

I closed my eyes at that point, but when I opened them a second later I was moving across a crowded dance floor – pushing past people, elbowing them, snarling at them. In another few moments, I was out on the street again, negotiating my way through more crowds and through heavy streams of traffic. Soon after that I seem to remember climbing into the familiar comfort of a yellow cab, sinking into the cheap plastic upholstery of the back seat and gazing out at the tawdry streaks of neon that stretched the city out, pulled it this way and that, like so many strands of multi-coloured chewing-gum. I also remember being acutely aware of my right hand, which was sore, throbbing in fact, from having punched that guy back at the Congo – something, incidentally, I couldn’t believe I’d done. At any rate, the next thing I knew I was in the lobby of an Upper West Side restaurant – a place I’d read about called Actium – insinuating, pushing, my way into another conversation with another set of complete strangers, this time half a dozen members of some local art-gallery crowd. Posing as a collector, I introduced myself as Thomas Cole. Like before, I perpetually seemed to be in mid-sentence – ‘… and already in eighteen hundred and four the Noble Savage has become the Demonic Indian, it’s there in Vanderlyn’s Murder of Jane McCrea, the dark, rippling musculature, the ogre’s raised tomahawk ready to strike at the woman’s head…’ I was probably as surprised by what I was saying as anyone else, but I couldn’t press pause, couldn’t do anything except endure it, and watch. Then it was click, click, click again and all of a sudden we were sitting around a table together having dinner.

To my left was an intense guy with a salt-and-pepper beard wearing a carefully crumpled linen jacket, probably an art critic, and to my right was a Bernice-bobs-her-hair type of woman with bony bits sticking out of her every time she moved. Directly opposite me was a heavy Latino guy in a suit who was talking non-stop. He spoke in English, but it was norteamericano this and norteamericano that, and in a fairly disparaging tone. I realized after a few moments that the man I was looking at was Rodolfo Alvarez, the celebrated Mexican painter who’d recently moved to Manhattan and undertaken to recreate, from notebooks, the destroyed Diego Rivera mural originally destined for the lobby of the RCA Building in 1933.

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