David smiled. He wrote the phrase
comfortable in her skin
on one of his cards.
FORTY-FOUR
As much as she hated being around Bill Dickstein a second time, Kate agreed with Caitlin on the strategic advantage of her sitting through Jack Carpenter’s deposition. He might feel less inclined to go off on some tangent from the truth if Kate instantly could lean over toward Caitlin and send her directly into a line of questioning to bring Jack back into the same zip code as reality. And the meeting with David Blakely convinced her she needed to put a stake in the heart of the litigation as far in advance of the shareholder meeting as possible.
Jack whispered into Kate’s ear. “I know this is just business and you hate this as much as I do.” Kate rubbed Jack’s elbow. He was in a chatty mood because he was so nervous. She’d seen this before. “My mother always said I should be nice to the people I met on the way up because I’d meet them again on the way down. Sorry about this, Kate.”
Jack started the whole fairy tale about her subverting the Amigo talks because he needed to say something to keep his creditors out of his shorts, and he willingly took a shot at Kate in the process, but at that moment he was the same schnook of a guy who celebrated Amigo’s offering with a dinner at White Castle. While his sliders cost the same thirty-nine cents as everyone else in the place, he was probably the only one there worth three hundred million dollars.
Dickstein put Kate’s right hand in both of his and showed so many teeth Kate thought he might be imitating Cesar Romero. She was afraid he might try to kiss her.
Caitlin watched the whole introductory scene from the place at the table she’d staked out as her territory. She turned to Kate when she finally took the seat next to her. “If NYU ever decides to offer a course in smarmy, Dickstein could be an adjunct professor. He knows his case is toast, so watch for signs today he’s greasing the wheels for a gracious exit. He’s already looking for his next mark, the way pickpockets survey tourists at the Vatican.” Caitlin had been dealt the perfect hand.
Jack was asked to sit at the end of the table. The videographer put a small microphone in the lapel of his jacket and futzed with the lights. Everything about the man made Jack uncomfortable.
It was Kate’s idea to videotape the deposition. She knew Jack’s vanities, his humiliation over the fact that Amigo’s creditors seized both the plane and the seventy-foot sailboat docked outside his villa on Nevis, his fear the house in Greenwich was next on their list, his weight, the fact he couldn’t stop biting his nails, his doubt about whether Betsy would stay with him the way Kate stayed with Peter and Joanie stayed with Karl when their bottom fell out. Jack confided all that in Kate until the lawyers started prowling around his every word and made her off-limits.
“Mr. Carpenter, let me show you every email you sent in the two weeks after you flew Ms. Brewster to Pittsburgh.” Caitlin pushed a large pile of paper in Jack’s direction. “Could you tell us why there’s not one word about Ascalon in any of those emails?”
Kate was happier watching Caitlin go through Jack’s emails than she’d been watching her go through her own.
Dickstein objected. Jack mumbled some non-answer. The point of the question was obvious. No one who thinks he’s got a genuine leg up on a half-billion-dollar acquisition sits on that information without firing up his lawyers and accountants and bankers.
Amigo had made an acquisition about eighteen months earlier. A small data management company from Raleigh. Caitlin next pulled out Jack’s email trail from that deal. The noise he made about that prospect made his silence about Ascalon all the more telling.
Caitlin asked if he became a Trappist monk or took a vow of silence in the year and a half between the two deals. Dickstein objected. Jack fumbled and mumbled, and the pattern for the deposition was set.
The beads of sweat that began to show on Jack’s brow and on his upper lip reminded Kate of the tapes she’d studied of the Kennedy-Nixon debate in her class at Wharton on rhetoric and oratory and dealing with the media. Business degrees at one time may have been about statistics and production and planning and strategy, but now they were also about crisis management and looking good in front of a camera.
Kate thought that might prove to be one of her more valuable courses, for when she prevailed against Mike Conklin her picture would be on the front page of every business newspaper or website or television show in the country, perhaps beyond, as the woman who finally broke into the upper echelon.
FORTY-FIVE
Kate waited until Sarah and Mack were busy with their homework, poured a glass of wine for herself and one for Peter and asked him to join her in the solarium. Summer was fading. A brusque wind shook the windows. And Peter would be gone in eight days. She wanted their last bit of time together to be civil, even hopeful, but there was family business that couldn’t be avoided.
“We need to talk about the Leger.” Kate waited until she had Peter’s attention. “The Saudi prince you outbid at Langston’s called Connie Meyers. He said he’ll pay five and pick up half her commission. We need to give that very serious consideration.”
Peter sipped his wine. He ran his finger around the rim of the glass. “I’m sure he read about the bankruptcy. Everyone in the world is watching me implode.”
Ascalon had sold itself out of bankruptcy two weeks before. Cass was off in Kenya, shooting pictures of rhinos at Lewa Downs. Mindy jetted off to London to trade gold futures for Barclays. Peter shipped his clothes to the middle of fucking nowhere. It was as though she was married to a soldier about to be sent to Afghanistan. It wasn’t some bomb planted along the side of a road that might rip their marriage apart. It was time, distance, the uncertainty of it all.
“I won’t debate the embarrassment part or even ask you to feel good about this, Peter. I’m past all that. I’m just being realistic.” Kate had already run the math. They would net slightly under three hundred thousand after paying Connie’s commission and Peter’s loan at B of A.
“If this were a movie, they’d be running scenes of the life we lived under the final credits. Damn. What a disaster,” Peter said. He wanted to keep the painting, but had nothing to trade. He was a man wondering whether to topple over his own king and to concede checkmate or to suffer the humiliation of his opponent’s hand entering his territory one last time.
“Peter, don’t. Let’s not have our last few days together tainted by talking about what might have been. Let’s just get through this.”
“We should have unloaded some of the stock when we had the chance.”
“Peter, no remorse.”
The comment hardly slowed him down. “We should have hedged the downside, like Mark Cuban did. The outfit that bought his company failed in the dot com bust and he’s sitting on a billion dollars and an NBA team.”
“I’ll say it again. Don’t go there, Peter. Going over that ground isn’t going to do either one of us any good.” She moved to the side of the room. “C’mon, Peter. We’ve only got one week left.”
Kate resisted reminding Peter that when she’d asked him if he were willing to squirrel away some of the seven million dollars’ worth of his shares he’d cashed in six months after the offering, he’d questioned why she doubted Ascalon’s promise, his stewardship, and in his ability to deliver their future.
You’re my wife, not my banker, Kate.
But they blew through that concern just like everyone around them. The world had shifted on its axis and entered a new paradigm. Peter was a junkie to his newly discovered paper profits. Kate was his enabler. And now she was the one telling him to look forward.
“Every time I look at that blank space above the mantle I’m going to be reminded of my failure. If we’re able to keep the house. If Conklin beats you in the tender offer I’m not even sure that’s possible,” he said. Kate chose not to debate the point.
She decided to fill that space with a copy of Monet’s
Poppies near Argenteuil
, which they had bought from a woman with bright red hair and a green scarf who’d set up her easel in front of the original at the Musee d’Orsay on the last trip they took to Paris before Kate became pregnant with Sarah. That, at least, might cause Peter to think of a pleasant moment in their lives if he ever looked above the mantle again.
“Time, Peter. Maybe we both just need some time to think about what comes next.”
Peter couldn’t care less about inspirational talks. He was still scavenging around for blame. “Let me ask you a question, Kate. We’ve both given our depositions, so I guess the record is closed. What did Jack really say about the Amigo bid on his plane that day?”
Kate sprang from her chair. “Are you suggesting I’ve been lying to you all along? That I’d perjure myself? Goddamn it, Peter. Stop that kind of talk right now.” She slapped her hand on the mantelpiece. “You’re leaving next week and the only thing you want me to think about for the next eighteen months is that you think I’ve lied to you? How can we possibly build on that? Are you going to throw away everything we’ve built on the basis of some fiction? How do we explain that to Sarah and Mack?”
“Kate, stop.....” Peter tried to summon some words but he really had no place to retreat. Kate found herself ready to launch into him a second time when she heard a tapping on the door.
“Peter, don’t you ever say anything remotely like that ever again. Not to me, not to your buddy Karl Maxwell. Not to anyone.”
She held her thumb and index finger a couple of inches apart. “I’m this close to getting blown out by Mike Conklin. And there’s no such thing as a record being closed because our depositions are over. If Dickstein found out about that comment he’d skewer us.”
Kate wished she could stop shouting at her husband, but the words just kept coming. “The last thing I need now is word leaking out that you thought the whole defense to the shareholder litigation was a sham. You may enjoy risking perjury charges, Peter, but I don’t. You may enjoy undermining everything I’m trying to do to hold this family together, but I don’t. Stop that kind of talk right now.”
“Mom?” Sarah’s voice had a frightened urgency to it. “I’m going to take Mack and Siena uptown for ice cream. Do you want us to bring you anything?”
Kate hesitated. “Listen to that, Peter. Sarah is protecting Mack from what we’ve become. Listen to what we’re doing to our children,” she said. “No, sweetie. Thanks. Be careful. I’ll pay you back when you get home.”
She heard her daughter take a step away from the door. “And thanks, Sarah. I mean that.”
“Kate, listen. All I’m saying...” Peter started.
“Let’s not talk anymore tonight, Peter. I’m afraid we’re going to say things we won’t be able to take back. I’m not prepared to start debating visitation rights because you can’t let go of what we’ve been through. You need to decide where you stand. Not tonight, though, Peter. Give that question the time and respect it deserves. Think of Sarah and Mack when you do. That’s the least you can do.”
Kate picked up her BlackBerry. “I’m telling Connie Meyers she can send a crew to pick up the painting as soon as she’s able to do so. Then I’m going to bed. I have a long day ahead of me tomorrow.”
FORTY-SIX
Kate had to travel to Boca Raton four days after Peter left for China.
Pat Dyson spoke in that lilting Canadian way of raising his voice at the end of his sentences. “Your numbers are compelling, Kate, but what I don’t understand is why, if what you’re saying has any truth to it, Mike hasn’t raised his bid or someone else hasn’t jumped into the fray. I know at least two German banks who have been salivating to break into the US M & A market for years. Why isn’t Drake a natural pickup?”
They’d hardly touched on Peter’s leaving.
Mack, how about a bit of a smile. I’m not going off to be executed.
A simple dinner. Just the four of them. And Siena, sitting in the backyard, listening to the cicadas chirp their summer goodbyes.
And you, my young concert musician, I want music when we Skype, and plenty of it. Tapes, CDs, web concerts. You Tube. Mack, you’re the photographer.
The paperwork for a five-hundred-thousand-dollar settlement of the Amigo allegations was working its way around to the various people who needed to sign off on it. One of the rags that gossip about doings in the law questioned whether Bill Dickstein was losing his touch, asked whether his cut of the settlement would pay for more than a couple of his suits. Kate had too many other things on her mind. She barely smiled when Caitlin emailed the article.
Kate’s team assembled a book dissecting and then reconstructing Drake a hundred different ways to justify a value nearly double Mike’s bid. “Foreign banks have too many regulatory hurdles and US shops worry about losing people. The real action is moving to the Caymans, which is why I’m assuming we need a bigger offshore footprint, Pat. I’m not content just tending the store Ed and Jack built, as Mike seems to be.” Kate was neither brash nor hesitant.
And Kate, I’m sorry I won’t be here for the vote, so here’s an early congratulatory toast,
Chris Franklin had emailed her the night before. Others were convinced Kate would come out on top, but she was reluctant to get ahead of herself. Old superstitions had crept back in. She hadn’t stepped on a crack in the sidewalk for weeks. She needed to stay focused on what Pat was asking her.
Pat managed money for a bunch of Canadians who wintered away from the heavy snows of Toronto and Montreal. They made their money in meatpacking and waste hauling, barges and steel, and now lived like dukes and duchesses with maids and gardeners and more rooms than they knew what to do with and a guy named Pat to manage their fortunes. He’d gone to B school with Mike, so his vote was iffy at best. It was a trip she couldn’t refuse.
Kate delivered her stump speech with the studied assurance of a candidate peaking in the polls just before the election. She would soon enough discover whether the voters shared her confidence. That part of her life seemed to be falling into place. The Mack part, the Sarah part, was strained.
Her plane was delayed. A mechanical issue. It was always something. Kate slumped in her seat, retrieved her phone from her bag, and pressed the button to call home. She could barely hear Mack’s voice.