She bunched her florid cheeks into a conspiratorial grin and whispered a warning. “You-know-who is looking for you. And he’s pissed. He’s been bellowing around here for the last half hour.”
I grinned back at her. Cardinal rule of deal-making: be nice to the receptionists and secretaries because they were the gatekeepers who got you in the door and they always knew the gossip and the score. But I also had a special relationship with Michelle, garnered from having her work late over the past several months to run the mountains of word processing from an unruly stack of contracts that always required urgent overnight revision for sending back to Singapore. Slugging it out four or five hours after closing to process the endless email between our attorneys and the Singapore attorneys, she had become close enough to be trusted without being so close that she was a threat.
I shrugged. “What else is new?”
“One more week until my vacation starts is what’s new.”
“And you have something sinful planned, I hope.”
“Next weekend my girlfriend and I fly to Miami and hit that cruise ship. And we’re gonna go wild.”
I played along, made a face of scandalized goofiness. “I’ll watch for the coverage on CNN.”
That brought a giggle from her, a puff of glee that melted as soon as it hit the air.
On its tender ripple, I launched myself past her.
Several times at the weary finish of our late evenings I had taken her to dinner in appreciation of her dogged commitment. Each time I had carried away a sadness that would not wash away from how fiercely she generated her cheerfulness over margaritas, telling of evenings soaked up with watching her favourite television programs, talking on the phone for hours to her girlfriends. And then also her oblique references to nights when she had gone home with men, knowing they would never stay an extra hour or call the next day. Listening to her, I had felt in her voice how their silence settled on her like cold rain, and I had struggled to conceal my artless pity for how hurtful it must be for her to live in the loneliness left over from men who rejected her because she was overweight. That sadness, safely arms-length from my own, was one of the few emotions I had allowed myself to trust, let myself feel. Now, every time I saw her, I felt guilty that, beneath my listening to her dinner chatter, I had borrowed her emotions, spending them like some counterfeit currency to sustain myself through the gaps in my own life.
Walking, I stuffed the message slips in my pocket, shucked my overcoat, tossed it onto a chair through the open door of my office as I passed. Conserving my energy by avoiding the endless detours of catching up to telephone calls, faxes, and emails. Heading determinedly to the end of the hall, walking unannounced into the end office.
I paved my entrance with, “Morning, Kyle.”
“Paris,” Kyle acknowledged tightly. “Nice of you to show up.”
“I was here until midnight most of last week. I needed a day to catch up. Left you a voice memo.”
“I’m not talking about the hours.”
“Neither am I.”
“Don’t I fuckin’ know it.” Dropping his reaction, unclothed by any qualification or pretence, into the several feet that separated us, was Kyle exercising his implicit licence of senior partner. Politeness reserved for valuable clients; competence our focus here. Kyle bounced his pen against a sheaf of loose correspondence and computer reports fanned across his desk. Chafing.
I fingered Kyle’s favourite tactic: launch an uncomfortable and expectant silence, then seek to gain advantage by out-waiting me so any comment or explanation I offered could be immediately attacked and criticized.
I held back, letting the mounting seconds worm into him.
I watched him slide forward in his chair to close the distance between us; his lips pulled tight, the sparse grey wires of hair brushed against his receded hairline. I began to feel pinched in by his aggression.
In the grinding stillness, I studied Kyle warily, hoping to pluck some leverage for my defence from any careless body language; yet I was unable to come up with anything except, as usual, how poorly his suit jacket puckered around his shoulders and elbows. I was reminded that Kyle, staring down sixty, pumped weights for an hour a day at his health club with a personal trainer kept on the firm’s payroll; regularly competing in the masters division of power-lifting contests even though he was often the shortest man at any business meeting or conference table. The lone un-retired founding partner of the firm, his authority and his emotional intensity, like his physical prowess, were lumped in his bulky upper body. His business and political power was hoarded in an untidy Rolodex, daubed and dog-eared and mulishly preserved in an age of computer databases, guarding a hefty roster of influential people he had accumulated and cultivated over several decades.
Under Kyle’s fixed and unblinking stare, I made a display of leaning in the doorway casually, knowing from experience that much of my own competence emanated from projecting an illusion that I possessed a limitless reservoir of confidence.
Kyle broke first. “Where the hell were you when everything started to hit the fan yesterday?”
I stepped sideways, deflecting his words, settled into an armchair for effect. “I was three days ahead of it.”
“How?”
“I started the whole party rolling in Singapore and Bangkok Friday night before I went home for the weekend.”
“Why?”
“Why do you think?”
“No,” Kyle insisted. “Why now?”
“Because the deal was completed a week ago. A month ago. There was no need to do anything more. No need to wait any longer.”
“You start this deal over six months ago, then you miss half the meetings and let the deal stall until a month ago. Now you suddenly decide you’re going to jump back in and the deal can’t wait another month.”
“I should have let it fail?”
“You should have waited.”
My instincts warned me not to respond and risk being towed into the current of Kyle’s antagonism.
Kyle tightened his elbows into his sides. Loading for punches. “Do you know the drain on our treasury position yesterday?”
“I can guess.”
“Are you sure you can guess that big?”
“Then you tell me.”
“Our treasury department’s been flooded all night with emails and SWIFT messages from Bangkok Commercial Bank requesting settlement on the bond issue no later than March tenth. That’s three weeks. How much do we need?”
I leaned forward to demonstrate that I was immune. “Come on, Kyle. Don’t act like some cop came out of a speed trap and surprised you with a traffic ticket. You know that this Bangkok Commercial Bank deal has been our primary focus for the last couple of weeks. We’ve gone through ten meetings on strategy, hundreds of hours of crunching the numbers and working out the margins.”
“How much of the bond issue did you buy?”
“More than expected.”
“How much?”
“The whole issue.”
“So, Paris, you’re telling me we need a hundred million?”