by Jack Fuller
“He’s a shark,” said Joyce.
“How is the fishing, by the way?” said Rosten.
“You hooked a Great White,” said Joyce.
“Can you hear me?” said Rosten. “I’m getting a lot of static.”
“I’m in the water,” said Joyce. “It’s snowing. Nothing is happening on the river. The phone rings. It’s bad news.”
“With Berry nobody can say we’re not serious,” said Rosten.
“Did you ever see him at one of his perp walks?” said Joyce. “Guys in perfect suits, Patek Philippes, and handcuffs.”
“We’re drafting the audit plan now,” said Rosten. The river in his ear was like the sound of a fax machine sending.
“The document better be tight,” said Joyce.
“Trust Poole,” said Rosten. “You run a good ship. Trust me.”
“What if he hears something . . . extraneous,” Joyce said.
“He would come to us,” Rosten said. “We would say, ‘Thank you, but it is outside the scope of the audit.’ This is a man of the world, Brian. He doesn’t need to be young Lochinvar anymore. He gets paid to defend against Lochinvars.”
“Do I know this Lochinvar?” said Joyce.
The engagement letter seemed fine, if fussy. Berry was good to go, but he sent it to Szilard for a look since he was the one who would be supervising the work.
“They’re hiding something,” Szilard said.
“Who isn’t?” said Barry. “They don’t own our reputations. They’re only renting. We have the implicit right to do what we need to in order to get it back intact.”
3
For Rosten’s father, C. Northcote Parkinson’s laws explained almost everything. Did Rosten’s mother come up a little short before payday? “Expenditures rise to meet and surpass income.” Too many high school papers due? “Work expands to fill the time available for its completion.” An evening call from his boss over some niggling matter at the bank? “The time spent on a matter is inversely proportional to its importance.”
His father’s voice quoting the great man came back to Rosten as he got ready to leave the Red Carpet Club, stuffing files back into the accordion briefcase his father had given him. He was running late (“Work expands”), thanks to another long call from Poole, who rang at least twice a day to tell him that Szilard and company had turned up nothing, with not a hint of mission creep (“The time spent”). They did this today. They did that. Then they did this other thing.
As for the Gnomon deal, there was not an angle from which it had not been modeled. Rosten’s analysts had created a four-dimensional picture all the way to the terminal valuation twenty years out. The public-record phase of due diligence on Gnomon had turned up no messes. Everything was proceeding smoothly, and yet Rosten’s accordion briefcase was so bloated he worried it wouldn’t fit under the airplane seat. Why? Ask C. Northcote Parkinson.
When he got to the gate, they were calling business class, and Sebold was in line. Rosten fumbled around, looking for his ticket.
“You go ahead,” he said.
Joyce had taken the company jet the day before so he could attend a meeting of the Hoover Institution on the Stanford campus. The sit-down with Nyström was not until late tomorrow afternoon, but Joyce wanted Rosten and Sebold there well in advance for final preparations.
“What more preparation does he want?” Sebold said. “We’re already the Navy SEALs of corporate acquisitions.”
Rosten heard his father’s voice and said, “The shorter the event, the more the training.”
Parkinson had been in the British Army, which explained a lot. Rosten’s father liked to tell the story of the troop ship to Korea. Every morning he got up and took a place in the chow line for breakfast. He wound from deck to deck until he could not tell where the line began or ended. When the KP finally ladled breakfast into his father’s mess kit, it was time to go to the end of the line for lunch.
When Rosten came home from London, he tried to get his father past Parkinson to the darker parts of service. But there was so little time before his father died.
People on the jetway backed up around a corner, so Rosten could not see the door of the plane. By the time he entered the narrows of the cabin, the queue had reached the stage of physical intimacy. Purses slapped the shoulders of seated passengers. The man behind Rosten kept pressing up against him. Cradling his fat briefcase against his chest as if it were the Bible, Rosten stepped over Sebold’s knees and bounced into 5A. Eventually the commotion subsided, replaced by a whir like a garage-door opener’s as the little TV screens appeared. Then came the safety briefing. The voice said, “Note that the nearest exit may be behind you.”
C. Northcote Parkinson couldn’t have put it better.
Immediately after his father’s funeral Rosten had raced to the airport to catch a flight to Tokyo. He had fallen asleep in first class and had not woken up until they were off the clock and calendar on the other side of the planet. Today, as they raced toward a deal that could change everything, he felt that way again. He wished his father were still alive, even though he wasn’t sure what he could have asked.
“You may now use approved personal electronic devices,” said the voice from above.
He put on his Bose earphones but did not plug them in. It was an expressionless silence he wanted, the kind he had shared with his father. He slept.
Turbulence over the mountains startled him awake. Sebold was deep in his laptop, working on a red-lined document that probably would have been dull in ten colors. Rosten closed his eyes again, but the plane kept shaking him back to himself, so eventually he surrendered and pulled out one of the copies of The Economist that had piled up.
“You’ll regret it,” said Sebold.
“Knowing what is going on outside D&D?” said Rosten.
“Screwing up your circadian rhythm,” said Sebold. “Taking that nap means you’re not going to be at 100 percent for the big game tomorrow.”
Later, in the hotel bed that night, Rosten finished all the magazines he had brought, including the New Yorkers, in which he read every article, even the reviews of dance. When he finally did doze, he woke at 3 a.m., 5 o’clock Chicago, as if by the alarm in his apartment bedroom that he always set but did not need. He wondered if he had turned it off before leaving. It beeped in his head until the time came for breakfast.
The three men read the morning papers over omelets then arranged to regroup in fifteen minutes in Joyce’s suite. It had a grand piano in the living room and on a sideboard carafes of coffee and plates of sweet rolls. Marcia hovered almost unnoticed, as an executive assistant should, near where she had set up a laptop and printer in case her boss needed it.
Sebold stood above the piano keyboard and struck a credible chord.
“Donna here?” he said.
“Of course not,” said Joyce.
Sebold closed the fallboard softly.
The preparation session quickly became a monologue. I’ll make these initial points. If Niko says this, I’ll say that. Permutation upon permutation. Occasionally, Sebold or Rosten would interject, then Joyce would go on as if nobody had.
“Worst case I’ll use this,” he said, handing each of them a document of a single page.
“The opening bit about a spirit of candor sounds suspiciously like Hardy Twine,” said Sebold. Joyce did not bother to respond.
The letter was a formal offer, mostly stock for stock. Gnomon shareholders would have the option of getting cash, so long as the stock piece was at least 70 percent of the total.
Joyce stood and went to the sideboard, where he surveyed the pastry as if it were jewelry. He picked up a Danish and held it up. Sebold nodded; Rosten did not.
“You don’t mention the social issues,” Rosten said.
Joyce took another look at the roll with a lapidary’s eye and rejected it.
“Don’t worry,” he said. “You’re safe.”
That was uncalled-for. Rosten had never once voiced any con
cern about job security.
“My point is that for Nyström the social issues are probably the heart of it,” he said.
“This isn’t written for Niko,” said Joyce. “It’s meant to show the board how serious we are. If shareholders were to hear the sound of our money, they wouldn’t give a shit whether the Gnomon name survives, much less Niko’s. What the hell is a gnomon anyway?”
“It is a rectangle that, added to another, makes a rectangle of the same proportions as the original,” said Rosten. He had once tried to use the figure in a poem for Grace about love, of all things.
“I have to point out for the record,” said Sebold, “that this letter goes beyond what our board is expecting.”
“I talked it through with Sabby,” said Joyce.
“He liked the letter?” said Sebold.
“He didn’t say no.”
They spent the next hour fidgeting over details such as whether the letter should carry today’s date or tomorrow’s to give Niko a little time. Then there were the incantatory issues that lawyers loved: a conditional tense here, a missing “thus” there. Wine to blood. Words to money.
When they were finished, the letter had barely changed. Joyce had Marcia print it out on heavy bond. He held it up in the light and admired the watermark. Then he signed it in a bold hand.
“Do we each get a pen?” said Sebold.
“When the deal gets signed,” said Joyce.
“The sooner resolved the better,” said Rosten.
“That’s the stuff,” said Joyce.
They rode in a black Lincoln Navigator to the meeting place, a neutral site in a new, lightly occupied office park some distance from Palo Alto. The developer had clearly built it for start-ups. First an idea in a dorm room. Then a round of funding from a venture-capital firm. Then a move to a small office in a place like this. For the fortunate few, someday there would be a campus with dorms of its own, concierge services, squash courts, all-night cafeterias, and wide expanses of grass beneath a sky wafting with Frisbees.
The Navigator pulled up to a low-slung building that was as plain as geometry. They got out into a desert sun. In their dark suits and ties they would have appeared—to anyone who bothered to look—as though they had gotten lost. But nobody would bother, because they were utterly unknown here. Not so with Niko, of course, but his presence would only provoke chatter about what start-up he had his platinum eye on now.
Marcia was prepared, as always, and led them to an unmarked door that opened onto a conference room with forgettable art on the wall, furniture of a neutral color, and soft lights above. Rosten wondered how much it had cost D&D to set up here and how much Marcia had paid the attractive receptionist to welcome them and confide that they were the first to arrive.
They bided their time by looking at the view of the arid western landscape, reading the letter over silently, and catching up on their BlackBerries, which had four bars despite the isolated location. Nyström was fifteen minutes late, verging on insult.
Sebold broke the silence.
“He’s making a statement,” he said.
Some very smart people had no sense of what true things not to say.
“I have a few statements to make myself,” said Joyce, slipping the folded letter into its envelope, which was so fine it could have taken a wax seal.
They took more turns at the window. Silence bore down on them again; remarkable how much it could thrum.
Then the receptionist’s eager face appeared in the doorway. “Mr. Nyström is pulling up,” she said.
“Well, at least she’s excited,” said Sebold.
Nyström’s entrance was operatic, one of those modern ones with almost no scenery. The tenor wore chinos and a muscle T-shirt. Except for the tattoos, he could have been a high school wrestling coach. His ink did not blare, barely peeking out from beneath the strained fabric around his biceps. One figure seemed to be a pair of ideograms. The other was a logarithmic spiral.
Nyström took two steps inside and let the starched shirts come to him. It wasn’t easy to read the body language of one so obviously sculpted. We are not natural human beings. He accepted Joyce’s hand with an intensity that could have been either sincerity or a demonstration of his grip.
“Niko,” said Joyce, “this is Bill Sebold, our general counsel, and my right-hand man, Tom Rosten, the CFO.”
“I didn’t realize you would be bringing staff,” said Nyström.
“If you would be more comfortable . . . ,” said Joyce.
“No, no,” said Nyström. “It was a long way to come is all.”
Joyce waved it off, but then Nyström added, “We can get this over quickly.”
Joyce stood straighter.
“I have discussed our interaction with my board,” said Nyström, “and the response was strong and unanimous. We have absolutely no interest. None.”
“Well, I’m sorry to hear that, Niko,” said Joyce. This must have been what he had looked like when he had commanded a ship in hostile waters. “I’m disappointed,” he said, “but undeterred.”
“I assure you that there is no reason to persist,” said Niko.
“I don’t believe in abstraction,” said Joyce, reaching into his pocket. “This is concrete.”
Nyström turned away from the envelope.
“You have an obligation to the board to bring this to them,” said Joyce. “Isn’t that right, Bill?”
“I don’t need advice from your general counsel,” said Nyström. The ideograms beneath the fabric had emerged almost completely as he flexed and left the room.
Joyce stood silently. Rosten went to close the door. Sebold looked as though he thought he would be held responsible.
“It is only one step in the dance, gentlemen,” said Joyce, slipping the envelope into his breast pocket and patting it in waltz time. Or was it the beat of a heart? “Just a step in the dance.”
Marcia was prepared to have the letter messengered immediately. Joyce pulled the trigger before they left the office.
Not long after the D&D team returned to the Dome, Joyce called Rosten to his office to show him a press release that would announce his appointment as Chief Operating Officer. He would also retain the CFO title.
“I’ll do the dancing,” Joyce said. “You keep the music playing.”
4
A solitary Sunday. Maggie on her travels. Megan off with friends, supposedly to do homework. Very little paper in his briefcase. Gunderman sat in the living room, staring at the cold fireplace as if it were a television. From time to time he pulled out a document. There was a sound at the front door. He put down his papers. When he reached the hall, he saw that it was Betty Cadwalader, holding her coat collar to protect her face, though it was not so very cold.
“Come in, come in,” he said. “Please come in.”
She took the step and dropped her arms but did not raise her eyes.
“I assumed that Maggie was away,” she said.
“Yes,” Sam said.
“May I show you something?”
“Here, let me take your coat.”
He hung it on an open hook where Maggie kept hers when she was at home.
Betty followed him into the living room, where she opened her purse and took out a piece of paper worried into a scroll.
“I’ve made a list of the dates Bill was away,” she said. “Do you mind if I sit?”
She lowered herself onto the couch and began trying to flatten the paper on the glass of the coffee table.
“Maybe you have a list, too,” she said.
She gave up trying to uncurl the scroll and handed it to him.
“You’re shivering,” he said. “Can I get you some coffee or tea?”
“The dates I’ve listed should correspond to days when Maggie was out of town,” she said. “It isn’t fair to involve you, Sam, but let’s face it, you are involved. Nothing about this is fair.”
He reached for a box of Kleenex that Maggie kept on the shelf for colds. Be
tty waved it off. He put it between them on the coffee table.
“I’m sorry we’ve done this to you,” he said.
“You didn’t do it. It’s just who Bill is, who I’ve let him be. I don’t want to be that person anymore.”
He pushed the tissues toward her. She took one and blotted an eye.
“She’ll come back to you, you know,” she said. “He’ll tire of her. That’s nothing against her. He always tires. I hope you’ll be able to put things back together.”
“I can’t see that far.”
He turned his gold ring. It moved smoothly in the groove between the calluses it had made over the years.
“I’ll look at your list,” he said, raising the scroll.
“I don’t think it will end up public,” she said. “My lawyer says having the proof will make him come to terms.”
“They’ll say coincidence.”
“I guess we could split the cost of an investigator.”
“I wasn’t thinking anything like that,” he said.
Only of things the Wise Man told him not to.
“I haven’t even confronted him yet,” she said. “I’ll warn you before I do. Anna and Megan are so close. But it can’t be helped. I assume Maggie denies everything.”
“She hasn’t given me the chance to give her anything to deny.”
“My lawyer says that he always advises cheaters to go on the offense,” she said.
He unrolled the paper. The list was written in a steady hand, the dates lined up as perfectly as if on a spreadsheet.
“The sooner we do this, the better,” she said. “I’m assuming you’ll need proof, too.”
What he needed was proof of what would become of Megan. But that was beyond the accumulation point—where everything was chaos, blind and without form.
“We have to be hard-nosed,” she said. “I know that isn’t you. But . . . Look at me, Sam.” Before him was a woman at least as hard as Maggie had become. “It isn’t what either of us wants.”
After she left he found himself dithering. He could not focus on the work he had brought home. He was drawn to the data on the glass table, memory on silicon. He picked up the scroll and carried it to his office, where he kept the shredder that Maggie had probably used to get rid of incriminating cell-phone records and credit-card bills. He had never used it for anything but work.
