Due Diligence: A Thriller (8 page)

They looked at the Captain.

“How fast does he want to do this deal?” asked the Captain eventually.

“Fast,” said Stanzy. “As fast as it can be done. The parties are already talking. I’ll be frank with you, Bob. If we don’t drive this as hard as we can, we may as well stop now. If Wilson gets the faintest sniff that we’re not two hundred percent commited, he’ll go somewhere else. He’s not going to wait around for us. And with this deal on the table, he won’t have trouble finding someone to do it for him.”

“He’ll have trouble fighting them off,” murmured Golansky.

Frank Nardini nodded.

There was silence again.

The Captain cleared his throat. “Pete, I just want you to be able to tell me there isn’t something wrong here, there isn’t some kind of Enron sitting under this company. That’s all I’m asking. Just tell me there isn’t some kind of dirty stuff going on and they’re not paying us a big forty-bip fee so we don’t look too closely at anything they’ve been doing.”

Pete Stanzy smiled. “I’m no auditor, Bob. The auditors say she’s clean.”

“They said that about Enron,” muttered Rubinstein.

“Can you tell me that?” said the Captain. “Can you tell me there’s nothing that’s going to come out when this deal goes public? Pete, no matter how big this deal is, Dyson Whitney can’t afford to be involved in anything like that. If we get into litigation … Look, we’re not that strong. We’re just keeping it together. You know that. If we get into litigation, the deal flow will dry up completely and it’ll be the end of us. I’m not exaggerating.”

“Bob,” said Stanzy seriously, “this is a great, robust American company that’s taken its business model and exported it to a dozen countries around the world. Let’s get this straight. Louisiana Light is a success story. It’s a growth story. And Mike Wilson is a great leader. A visionary leader. Now he’s about to make this company even bigger and stronger by making an acquisition that creates an awesome growth platform and may well change the dynamics of the entire industry on a global level. That sounds like a pretty good story to me.”

“And me,” said John Golansky.

“Exactly,” said Stanzy. “This is the kind of deal Dyson Whitney should want to be involved in. In fact, I’d say more than that. Given where we are today, from our own perspective, it’s the kind of deal Dyson Whitney can’t afford
not
to be involved in.”

Stanzy stopped himself from saying anything else. First rule of making a pitch, he knew, was never to oversell. And this was as much of a naked pitch as anything he had ever said at an investor roadshow.

The Captain frowned. At heart, he was a deal maker. A play like this got him tingling down to the end of every last fiber. And there was no way the bank could turn away a fee like this. It was inconceivable.

He looked around the table, giving the others a last chance to speak up. No one did. Bruce Rubinstein hesitated for a moment, then looked away. He was on thin ice with the Captain. There were only so many times he could challenge him.

“All right,” said the Captain. “Looks like we’re agreed.” The frown disappeared and he broke into a grin. “Well done, Pete. Go out there and make it happen.”

*   *   *

At about the time that the mandate committee was breaking up in the Dyson Whitney boardroom, a limousine delivered a slim, dark-haired man in his late thirties to the American Airlines terminal at JFK. He had one small carry-on bag and a briefcase. He checked in at a business-class counter and went to the executive lounge to wait for his flight to be called.

From time to time, as he waited, he looked around with a slightly furtive air, as if to see whether anyone had noticed him.

At last he heard his flight number and got up to board.

Seven hours later, eight
A.M.
local time in London, he disembarked at Heathrow Airport. A driver was waiting with a sign saying
MR TOM BROWN
. The driver took him through the morning traffic to a hotel in Kensington, overlooking Hyde Park, where a room was booked for him under the same name.

His name wasn’t Tom Brown. It was Lyall Gelb, chief financial officer of Louisiana Light.

10

Donato’s was an old-style neighborhood Italian place with red-and-white–checkered cloths and wax-encrusted Chianti bottles on the tables. Real wax-encrusted Chianti bottles, from years of candles burning down, not the kind someone’s made by purposely melting candles to give the place a homely look. Ercole, who was about sixty, took the orders, opened the wines, and generally ran the place. His wife, Teresa, did the cooking, with help from a Mexican guy called Esteban, who did the chopping, the cleaning, and the washing. Teresa wouldn’t let him near the pots. They had a waiter called Ricky. He was an old guy, silver-haired, but everyone called him Ricky, as if he were a kid. And that was it. Ercole and Teresa closed in August, and everyone took a month’s vacation. First of September, the doors opened again.

Rob and Greg discovered the place when they were at law school together at Columbia. They hadn’t been friends at first. Greg’s background was well-to-do with family money on both sides. His father was a partner with a big advertising firm, they had an apartment in Manhattan and a house on Long Island, and Greg had gone to a fancy private school and then through Princeton. Rob, on the other hand, was working nights at a deli on Ninth to supplement his scholarship. But in their second year they shared a seminar course in torts and found themselves hanging out. Two more years of shared all-nighters studying for law exams cemented the friendship. After law school, Greg had joined the DA’s office. Wall Street didn’t interest him. Greg would tease Rob a little, asking him how a job at Roller Waite was going to help fulfill his great urge for social justice. Rob teased him back, saying it was easy to go work at the DA’s office when your salary was only the icing on the cake of your trust fund. Besides, Rob didn’t know that prosecuting a succession of pimps, thieves, and drug pushers had much to do with social justice. It seemed to him it had more to do with the opposite.

Greg had been with his girlfriend, Louise, for about a year and a half. Louise was a thin woman with a large head, wide-boned face, and black hair cut straight across the forehead. She had a strange, striking beauty. Or maybe it was just unusualness. She did some kind of art thing in the Village with textiles and rubber that she never deigned to explain very clearly, obviously believing that people like Rob and Emmy would never be able to appreciate its true cosmic significance. Neither of them much liked Miss Snookums, as they called her between themselves. But Greg was besotted with her. He still was, unfortunately, because it had been clear for a while to anyone else that Louise was cooling toward him. Whatever had initially attracted her to Greg was gone. She had never exuded a lot of warmth, but her brusqueness toward him was worse each time Rob and Emmy met up with them. It was getting embarrassing to see it.

Emmy had rescheduled the dinner for Wednesday night. Rob picked her up in a cab on the way uptown to the restaurant. Work was still going on in the war room, but Rob told Sammy he needed a couple of hours and that he’d be back, then he’d stay until whatever time it took. Cynthia had done the same thing the previous evening, so Rob figured he could as well.

The cab ride was the first time they’d had together in days. Emmy told him about a manuscript she wanted to bid for. It was a story about a woman’s struggle to cope with her son’s mental illness, and Emmy thought it was beautifully written—honest, moving, without sentimentality—and would hit a spot with a female readership, maybe even turn out to be a bestseller. More important, she loved it. She desperately wanted to be its editor, but there was interest from other parties. The bidding had turned into an auction and she didn’t know if Fay Pride, the editorial director at Lascelle Press, was going to let her put in a high enough offer.

“Doesn’t she like it?” asked Rob.

“She likes it, but I don’t think she sees the potential like I do. And this woman can write, Rob. She can really write. There’s going to be more. Personally, I wouldn’t be bidding for just the one book. I’d be offering her a two-book deal.”

“And you don’t think you’ll get it?”

“I don’t know. We could have had it all to ourselves, that’s what’s so frustrating. The agent came to us first, thinking we’d be the perfect home for it, which we are, but Fay took so long deciding that the agent took it out to the market and now she says she’s got four publishers interested. When that happens, the price gets crazy. And you know us at Lascelle—we don’t do crazy prices.”

They arrived first. Ercole came out from the back, beaming. He seated them and went to get a bottle of wine. Verdicchio, the wine of his home region in Italy.

“Cheers,” said Rob. “Here’s to that book. Let’s hope you get it.”

“Cheers,” said Emmy, and raised the glass to her lips.

Rob put his glass down. He glanced at Emmy.

“What?” she said.

“Nothing.” He leaned over and kissed her.

Rob knew he was lucky to have Emmy. Being with her had always felt easy. But recently there was something between them. When he went to Cornell for his MBA he had already been with Emmy for a year. He had subletted his own apartment and would stay with her whenever he came to the city, even though it would probably have been natural to give up his apartment entirely. It would have been even more natural to give it up and move in with her after he finished his MBA and came back to New York to start his job at Dyson Whitney. His apartment was too small for two and Emmy had a nice place in one of the old brownstones on the Upper West Side. It belonged to her grandmother, who lived in Florida. He was pretty sure Emmy was expecting him to move in, but he never opened the question and somehow they never really had a proper discussion about it. A couple of times he mentioned something about how it would be kind of odd for him to live in a place that belonged to her grandmother, and Emmy said she didn’t see why it was so odd, but she never pushed the conversation to where it could have gone, and neither did he. He wasn’t sure if it was only him who was avoiding it or if it was Emmy as well. Either way, he had always been relieved whenever they got close and it didn’t go the distance. Because when you talk about moving in with someone, you’ve got to talk about what it means. Where it’s heading. The big question. And he didn’t know if he was ready for that.

So when he had come back to the city a couple of months earlier, he had ended up moving back to his own place on West Thirty-ninth Street. In name, at least, because he spent about 90 percent of his time at Emmy’s anyway. But that wasn’t the same as having talked about it. And so now there was this thing, this unresolved question waiting to be dealt with, where it had never felt that there was anything between them before. Most of the time everything was still great, but sometimes, when Rob looked at her, he caught a certain look in Emmy’s eye and he was sure she was thinking about it. He had evaded it, and she knew he had. He knew the frustration was building up in her. It was going to come out. It had to, at some point. Probably when he least wanted it to.

He just wished it weren’t there. If there hadn’t been this thing between them, everything with Emmy would have been perfect.

Greg and Louise arrived. Ercole fussed over them. Greg gave Emmy a kiss and Louise turned a cheek to Rob. Ercole was pouring them each a glass of wine.

“Did you come in the car?” asked Rob.

“Cab,” said Louise brusquely.

Greg had just gotten a new car, a blue BMW Z4. For the past few weeks he hadn’t talked about anything else. Louise refused to let him drive her, as if to take all the pleasure out of it for him.

“Parking,” said Greg, shaking his head and putting on a smile. “It’s a killer.”

“I bet it is,” said Rob.

“So you had to blow us off Sunday night.” Greg lifted his glass. “Cheers to that! Looks like we’ve lost you to your new job.”

Rob laughed. “Cheers.”

“What was happening on Sunday? Better be good.”

“It’s just this deal I’m working on.”

“Just this deal,”
said Greg. “Listen to him. How long have you been waiting to be able to say that, huh? How long?”

Rob grinned.

“You guys should feel honored,” said Emmy. “This is the first night off he’s had in a week.”

“Sure is a privilege,” muttered Louise.

“Hey, baby, come on,” murmured Greg.

Louise looked away.

Ercole came back with menus. Rob always had the same thing, spaghetti with meatballs followed by the veal scaloppine. Greg always started with the marinara.

“So, what’s this deal that’s keeping you so busy?” asked Greg after they’d ordered.

“I can’t say,” said Rob.

Greg looked at him doubtfully.

Rob smiled. “I’ll tell you when it’s finished.”

“Everyone’ll
know
when it’s finished,” said Greg. “What’s the point of being friends with a hotshot investment banker? We want to know now!”

Rob shook his head.

“He won’t even tell me,” said Emmy.

“Does he talk in his sleep?”

Emmy laughed.

Louise got up. “I gotta pee,” she said, and headed for the bathroom.

She took her time. When she came back, Ricky came out with their first courses on a tray. He shook a little. Teresa never filled the soup bowls right to the top.

“Who’s having the meatballs?” he said.

“Ricky, who always has the meatballs?” said Rob.

“I always ask,” said Ricky fastidiously. “Ladies first. Who’s having the minestrone?”

Emmy put up her hand.

“Okay. A minestrone for the lovely lady.” He put the soup down, shaking it all the way to the table. “And asparagus … for the other lovely lady. And a marinara … and the meatballs …
Buon appetito!
”

“
Grazie,
Ricky,” said Rob and Greg, putting on the most flamboyant Italian accents they could muster. Ricky shook his head, waving his hand dismissively, and shuffled off.

Rob and Greg grinned at each other.