Читать книгу Coming for Money - F.W. vom Scheidt - Страница 8
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Tuesday morning.
Intermittent flecks of snow driven across the chalky February morning; but mostly dust and grit from the salted streets carried by the biting wind off Lake Ontario as it streamed down the canyons between the office towers in Toronto’s financial district.
Twenty minutes after nine if you worked out your day in a single time zone; the day continuing without beginning or end, this side of the world or the other side, for myself and others who laboured in the global financial markets.
The sidewalks thinned by the wind-chill and final curtain of rush hour. I trudged across the concrete plaza between the office towers of the Toronto Dominion Centre. Despite running late, I persevered with my morning ritual of taking the stairs from the underground parking lot into the lobby of the tower opposite my office, and then walking outdoors across the plaza to my building, rather than flashing up in the elevator directly from my car to my office suite.
The controlled environments within the sealed glass office towers precluded me from touching the true rhythms of the day. Inside, I would be muffled by stale heat, re-chilled air, false, fluorescent light; insulated by my synthetic manipulation of money from an immense distance through computer impulse and intangible telephone words; never meeting the people I was dealing with or seeing the money I was trading. Without this exposure to a legitimate atmosphere, it was easier for me to get swept along in the frantic momentum of the markets; it was easier for my world, always seductive, always urgent, to lie to me.
The stiff wind tugged at me. I squinted, tucked my chin, glanced to both sides as I walked, trying to keep my eyes shielded from the blasts of grit. Noticed that, with the exception of a single kamikaze bike courier and a handful of shivering smokers hugging the revolving doors, I was alone on the concrete squares of the plaza. To someone looking down from the upper floors of the towers, I must have seemed like some forgotten chess piece struggling to cross the wind-blown board after the game had already been abandoned.
In my final steps to the doors, I pulled the metallic cold through my nostrils sharply. Searching for the part of the air that was genuine.
* * *
Michelle, our receptionist, shaggy blonde bangs, her thirties nearly spent and her excessive weight haplessly cloaked in a pleated top, looked up from her computer keyboard through blue-rimmed designer bifocals and broke into a cheerful smile. Huge hoop earrings dancing against her round apple face, she reached to a shelf at the side of her station where snapshots of her cat and her nieces clung with yellowing Scotch tape, and lifted a clutch of pink message slips. “Morning, morning, morning. These are all for you from yesterday.”
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?”
“I’m telling you we need a hundred million.”
“And we don’t have the cash.”
“But we’ve got a lot of it.”
“How much?”
“A lot more than you think we have.”
“How much is that?”
“Most of it from a single deal I put together in Singapore. And I think I can pull together a syndicate of a few more smaller players in Singapore and Hong Kong for the rest.”
“No. How fucking much?”
“I don’t know yet.”
“Then you’ve just bankrupted this firm. We close our doors in less than a month.”
“We – ”
“Get out. Get the fuck out. Just get the fuck out.”
I made a performance of drawing a breath, exhaling in overly tried patience; articulating that I was winning because Kyle was losing his temper.
“Before I went to Bangkok,” I announced conspicuously, “we agreed I was going to run with this one.” I opened my palms, concentrated on sprinting ahead of Kyle’s next outburst. “When I came back from Bangkok – ”
“That wasn’t – ”
“And reported on the preliminary negotiations, we agreed to run hard with it.”
“What we planned – ”
“And I have.”
“That’s an understatement! Paris, we talked buying on a best-efforts basis. About paying maybe twenty million, tops. From our own capital. And dialling for dollars to syndicate another twenty or thirty million. But only taking what we could pay for or pre-sell in syndication. Not a penny more.”
“And paying for the rest of the offering by using the financing from Singapore.”
“Agreed. You were supposed to be bringing on Bank of South Asia in Singapore to back us up with the additional mezzanine financing.”
“Which I have.”
“But we were going to broker the deal. Not buy it outright. We didn’t expect to buy the entire bond issue and have to pay for the whole damn thing sight unseen. Now we’re expected to settle up on a hundred million with Bangkok Commercial Bank. By March fuckin’ tenth.”
I waited.
In the diameters of discord and uneasy quiet that persisted between us, it seemed that we were breathing in unison. To break the grip of Kyle’s anger and accusation I found myself expanding my chest and holding my lungs full.
“Paris, our treasury people are fielding all kinds of flack about where do we expect to get that kind of capital. Even if we sold off everything we owned in a fire sale, and leveraged that right to the hilt, we could barely raise half that much. Am I missing something? Was I not listening when you told me about how some rich uncle just died last week and left you a spare hundred million?”
I measured Kyle’s rhythm, tried to interrupt it at a weak link. “That’s not the important thing this minute.”
“If it’s not, I’d sure as hell like to know what is.”
“The important thing is that we got the entire issue with no competition and no interference. And because we cut the competition out of the market, we got the deal at a much better price. A lot more profit for us. That’s the important point.”
“Except now we can’t pay for it.” Kyle hesitated. Sniffed savagely. “And that’s the sure-as-shit important point!”
I listened to the heat pumping into the room and to the wind scouring the wide windows. Over Kyle’s shoulder the city skyline wobbled in the ashen winter light.
Kyle struck swiftly, lowering his voice, levelling his tone, thrusting the allegation in his words. “You’ve been on shaky ground this past half year. Since …”
“Since what?”
“Since you damn well know what.”
“Let’s,” I stated, “keep my personal life out of this.”
“Okay then,” Kyle conceded in lemon tones, “let’s keep it to your performance around here.”
“Where the numbers speak for themselves.”
“Sure. On your own you’ve produced as much income for the firm as the rest of us combined.”
This was familiar between us; we recited our responses as if reprising them from previous dissonance.
“That’s right,” I said.
“But I built this firm with a team of partners,” Kyle proclaimed. “Not with lone players.”
“Yeah. Well. Fine.” Giving ground would only give him momentum.
“I’m sure the directors would be interested in having their newest executive vice-president give them that fuck-you attitude at the next board meeting.”
This was sour. And suspicious. Kyle gathering fuel from as many sources as possible to ensure that his accusations consumed everything in their path.
I refused Kyle sufficient quarrel, or voice, to let it go any further.
Scooping up the silence, Kyle regrouped, resumed his original censure. “You bring this deal to us last summer, sell us on your promise to pull if off, and then you miss half the meetings, missed half of everything around here, once we take it on.”
This was a portent. Kyle resuming the course of least resistance. Refusing to concede the possibility of success for the bond sales, leaving me with the minimal defence of trying to brush aside the potential for failure. Seeking to lay the predicament at my feet in his indictment of my consistency, if not my competence. It was unsafe to remain in the path of such determination. Kyle had already choreographed this entire meeting in his mind ahead of time. There was no use trying to change any of it now. If I was lured into trying, I would be absorbed into his agenda. Better to cut it off. Get out.
“I missed those meetings for a reason,” I told Kyle succinctly. “You know why. You saw it then. You just don’t want to see it now.”
It was a weak statement that I didn’t feel entitled to truly believe. But it served. I watched Kyle’s face slowly fill with coppery indignation, spreading from his nose out across his cheeks towards his temples.
“If you don’t want to,” I added, losing momentum, “I can’t make you.”
That was the end of it. We had both circled our conflicts long enough, talking around them to purposely ignore each other’s points. Neither of us owned any progress. Neither could be bothered with any further arguing. Both of us were equally betrayed by it.
“Get out,” Kyle grumbled blandly.
As much as I wanted to stand, pivot, and leave without another word, let Kyle re-breathe the staleness of his own aggression, I needed Kyle’s cooperation. I needed the firm. I needed its capital and resources to ensure the success of my bonds. Let myself be reduced to striking back in similar rage and I would dilute the mortar necessary to join my deal and my career, to mend my life with fresh momentum.
Ducking his disregard, I tried to purge my tone of any admission or apology. “Give me a chance to make a few calls and check my faxes and email. And double-check our financing arrangements in Singapore overnight. It’ll take the best part of twenty-four hours. We might as well put the exact numbers on the table. First thing tomorrow morning.”
“We might as well, Paris.”
Kyle was dismissing me; making it apparent that, in his opinion, I had lost the argument, if not something more.
As I turned, he caught me between the shoulder blades with a parting thrust. “If you had bothered to come to the office yesterday we wouldn’t have to waste time waiting for this information now. Would we?”
Another of Kyle’s perfected tactics, reducing the conflict to a personal criticism and leaving you with two losing choices: strike back and stray from the real issue; or stick to the issue and let the criticism stand undefended, making it valid, and making you pay a price in frustration and bile whenever he dredged it up against you in a future confrontation.
Doubly angered, I was tempted to collect on past debts. But this morning was not other mornings. My reserve of confidence was meagre, and I cautioned myself against squandering it by engaging in a retort.
Without response, I walked out, back to my office.
Why hadn’t Kyle already gone storming to the board of directors? I had to ask myself. Why was he holding back?
There was more threat lurking in what he had not done than in anything he could have done by denouncing me to the board before I could defend myself.
Twice along the hallway, I touched the walls with my fingertips, unsure whether I was steadying myself or merely testing my connection with something solid.
* * *
In my office, I closed the door. Pulled the creased message slips from my pocket and flipped them to a corner of my desk. Sat motionless.
I refused to look at the calendars on my desk and computer. I had become afraid of the dates, afraid of their measuring of my life. I feared that I had already lived too long, experienced too much, used up my luck and all of my chances.
I tried to concentrate on suppressing the uncertainty that seeped into my thoughts from some deeper place within me.
In my mind I saw myself sitting out yesterday morning next to the electric kettle in my kitchen, its white plastic shell, cracked behind the spout, leaking steam for months, my shopping for a replacement lost within my overall procrastination one weekend to the next. There would never be a language affluent enough for me to explain it in words spoken aloud to another person: how not leaving my apartment had been necessity rather than choice.
I had woke in an unfamiliar bending of space and shadow in the false light before dawn, feeling as if I had been dug out of sleep by a blunt shovel.
In a stale bathrobe, I prowled the clamorous silence of my empty rooms. Sick. Unsteady after a murderous night of murderous dreams that had all been rinsed away at that exact second my eyes fluttered open, leaving me with ragged effigies of the dense emotion and confusion. I chased the fading dream images, stretching to heal myself by somehow linking the broken ends of my feelings to the raw ends of my broken-off dreams.
My concentration absent, my hands unguided, I fell into familiar routine. Fussing to fill and plug the kettle, spooning ground coffee into the glass carafe with the plunger. Pouring the boiling water. And then pouring the coffee. Inhaling the fragrant gush of steam from the mug.
It was not until I had lifted the mug and sipped that I noticed the second steaming mug still waiting on the kitchen counter.
I could not prevent myself from glancing to the hallway leading from the bedroom. Like grabbing at empty air halfway through an unexpected fall. I could not stop myself from expecting her to come shuffling into the kitchen.
Parked, then, at my kitchen table over slowly cooling bitter coffee, without her, I could think of nothing but all of the things now undone between us, all of the things we would now never share, our lives forcibly unravelled by a specific minute in time. I seemed to breathe by having to remember how to do it.
Breaking dawn brought a ferocious sun, shooting blindingly through the floor-to-ceiling windows; diffusing all the angles in the rooms and corners and hallways. Their shadows bleached away, the straight lines melted back into the walls.
How was I to navigate with no exact points of reference?
Anxiety swirled in my blood, bringing a headache that was too stubborn to either bloom or depart.
Even as I willed myself to remain motionless and tried to pierce the thick light by tightening my focus, the blurred lines along the ceilings and baseboards, and the dispersed angles in the corners of the room, refused to grant any purchase of motion or retreat from my thoughts and memories.
I saw our mornings, heard the growing silences between us. Felt the lost chances slip away.
I could not hide from pieces of life lived so deeply.
Nor were there any points of reference to plot my escape into the future.
Sitting at my kitchen table, hoarding my heartache, trying to write on the tabletop with my dripping coffee spoon in blotting letters “love has gone.”
The voice within me ran ahead of the pokey scratchings of my spoon, demanding:
What was my life any more?
What would it mean after I died?
Where would they go, all of my thoughts and feelings?
How long would it last, death?
Unable to move.
Unable to function.
By noon, sunlight surged over me like high tide. The rooms and hallways poured out into window-glass reflections and mirrors and confused soft shimmerings at the edge of my vision where there should have been clarity. In the glare, my vision receded, leaving me trapped in a brain soup of distortion, weakened by sorrow.
In ribbons of regret streaming from my fingertips, the day spun itself out.
* * *
Mid-afternoon. Only halfway down the river.
Despite remaining at my desk and computer keyboard through lunch to weed through my faxes, sow a handful of phone calls, and punch out new email, I had not produced the critical information needed to liberate the firm from the hundred-million-dollar payment it would have to make three weeks out. Singapore and Bangkok still asleep. With their information not yet available, I had only been able to work with a few stray calculations, recording the limited number of bond subscriptions booked from Toronto. Grabbing up their dollars like lifeboats and stringing them together where, at the bottom of my screen, they always sank under the immense load of the hundred-million-dollar bond payment.
For the last hour I had done little more than debate whether I could afford to escape the office on the pretence of going out to grab a sandwich if it meant Kyle or others might intercept negative information in messages returned to me before I had a chance to edit them.
What happened, instead, was that Michelle came to see me, hovering hesitantly just inside my office as if uneasy at being removed from the reception area.
“Mr. Smith. I always have coffee with Molly, Kyle Addison’s secretary. She says that Mr. Addison says that the firm’s in big trouble. That you did something in China or somewhere that is going to cause the firm to go bankrupt. Is that true? I’m really worried. I’m afraid to go on vacation and come home to find out that I don’t have a job anymore. I’m afraid I should try to cancel the cruise and get some of my money back if I’m going to lose my job. I haven’t got very much saved right now.”
I was bluntly reminded of how my actions, however high they soared above daily routines and however measured, spilled into the lives of others. A sobering sense of obligation swelled within me. “No, sit down. I’ll try to explain.”
She entered, perching her thick hips delicately on the edge of a chair in front of my desk.
“First of all, let’s begin at the beginning. You’ve been around here a year or so. Long enough to know how Kyle is. Haven’t you?”
Obviously fearful of endangering herself with any gesture of overt disrespect, she shrugged lamely.
“Okay,” I continued haphazardly, “suffice to say that over the last thirty years, Kyle’s gotten so used to sitting in there under his Yale diploma like a bishop at high mass that he thinks God also graduated from Yale. And when he thinks anybody here in the firm has sinned, he wants the whole firm to know about it.”
I watched her eyes drift; I was losing her in the residue of my own resentment.
“But that still doesn’t explain anything to you, does it?”
“No.”
“And that still doesn’t make your vacation any easier, does it?”
She shook her head.
I inhaled slowly, collected my thoughts. “The reason Kyle is storming around here this morning is because I committed the firm to buy up an entire bond issue in Bangkok. And we have to pay for it within a month. And Kyle’s convinced we haven’t got the cash. So he’s screaming that it’s going to drive the firm into bankruptcy.”
“Is this from all the work I did for you a couple of months ago?”
“That’s right.”
“Are we? At risk of going bankrupt?”
“I’ve pre-sold a lot of the bonds in syndication.”
She bit her lip. “I haven’t told anyone else. In January I started the level-one securities course on Thursday nights.”
“Good for you.”
“You always made it sound so interesting when I was doing that work.” She quickly added, “We haven’t got to syndications. Only stocks.”
“Okay. If stock is ownership of a piece of equity in a company, a bond is an IOU from the company. I borrow ten dollars from you. I promise to pay you back at the end of the month. I promise to pay you a dollar in interest. I write you an IOU that says I will pay you eleven dollars at the end of the month.”
She brightly contributed a piece from her coursework. “But there’s also secondary trading in stocks and bonds.”
“Right. You can wait until the end of the month, present my IOU, and demand eleven dollars payment. Or you can sell the IOU to someone else in the middle of the month for ten and a half dollars, take the money, and run.”
“Which is an over-the-counter trade.”
“Exactly. The next phase in financial engineering, after trading, is syndication. In syndication, instead of selling the bonds after they’re issued, we’re the mandated agent and lead book-runner, and we pre-sell the bonds to syndication partners and other book-runners before they’re issued.”
Her eagerness faded. I had lost her in technical terms. And she was embarrassed to admit it. I kicked myself. I wanted to be generous. I wanted to reimburse her for the emotions I had covertly borrowed from her, and to try, however inadequately, to compensate her for the silence of unseen men who had dismissed her as unworthy of attention.
“That’s okay,” I assured her. “You ever had a yard sale?”
“Sure.”
“So suppose your neighbour was going to have a yard sale a week from now and you looked over into his back yard at all the stuff he was going to sell next week. And you thought it looked like a lot a valuable stuff. So you offered to buy the whole lot of it for five hundred dollars.”
“Okay.”
“Except you won’t pay him until next Saturday, until the actual day that he has scheduled for the yard sale. Okay?”
“If you say so.”
“Then you go and take pictures of everything in the yard. And all week you go around to all of your friends. You show them pictures of all of the yard sale stuff. And you sell them all the stuff from the pictures. So far so good?”
“So far.”
“Okay. Now next Saturday, all of your friends come over to your house and they pay you for everything. And all of the money they pay you adds up to six hundred dollars. And you turn around and walk over to your neighbour and you pay him the five hundred dollars you owe him for the stuff. Then you hand the stuff over to your friends who you’ve pre-sold it to.”
I noticed the twitch of irritation from my words in the mirror of her face. I sounded patronizing. In my seclusion, my faculty to touch others has been buried beyond reach. I rushed to wrap up by dropping my palms open. “Then, what are you left with? Even though all the stuff is gone and even though you paid five hundred dollars to your neighbour for the stuff? How much is your profit?”
“A hundred dollars.”
“That’s what pre-selling a bond issue in syndication is like. Right now I’m running around selling the bonds before they’re issued. And when it comes time to pay for the bonds, I’ll have all the money from the syndicate partners who’ve subscribed to them.”
“And you’ll have a profit?”
“Welcome to Dodge City where every two-bit stock salesman wants to become a financial syndications gunslinger.”
She dropped our eye contact, not knowing how to respond to slang that was familiar to me, foreign to her.
To compensate, I offered, “I’ll be glad to help you with your course any time you want.”
“Thank you. I’d appreciate that. Just don’t mention it, okay. The other girls will gossip if they think I’m trying to get ahead of them.”
She raised her eyes, hesitated.
“Does this,” I asked, “make you feel any better about going on vacation?”
“Is this what you’ll be doing when I’m on vacation?”
“Day and night.”
She twisted up from her chair, then lingered before leaving. “Mr. Smith?”
“Yeah.”
“Is this what you really do around here?”
I nodded. “Just like yard sales. Except the money has more zeros.”
My attempted levity did not register. Deflecting back off her poorly concealed doubt, my words settled heavily, like layers of sand being poured around my ankles.
“Don’t worry,” I tried to reassure her in rapidly spun syllables. “I’ve got a secret weapon that’s not available in yard sales.”
“What?”
“I’ve got Stanley Man.”
Puzzled, she scratched her wrist and quietly walked out. Leaving me saddened for having tried. Leaving me irritated that she has made me feel responsible for eroding her happiness.
Was there anyone left I had not in some way failed?
* * *
In my world, sometimes, progress was measured in proximity to power and consent rather than financial profit and loss.
In the final remnants of the afternoon, Kyle appeared in my office doorway – a concession of coming, unannounced and informally, several dozen feet down the corridor to me rather than summoning me back to his office to resume the morning’s arguing.
“Sit down,” I offered. Two steps backward when accusations boiled, one step forward when they simmered back down.
“How’re we doing? What’s the count?” Kyle inquired, dropping into a chair, his voice now deflated by a day laden with unabated apprehension.
I kept my shrug neutral. I had no emotional stamina for further confrontation. Any more, even the least confrontation stirred up a sickening feeling like anticipating the menace of a blindside blow.
“Like I said, Kyle, it’s still going to take a couple more hours until the sun comes up on the other side of the world. I’ll be here late talking to them. Like all last week. I’ll stay on it. And it’s not as if we have to make a deadline today. We’ve got three weeks. I built a couple of weeks extra margin into it.”
Kyle chewed at the inner pocket of his cheek. “I’m still worried as hell about the cash.”
“I’ll bring the commitments in.”
“From whom?”
“Bank of South Asia.”
“How?”
“Most of the negotiations are complete.”
“Will we have enough?”
“We’ll have enough.”
“Paying for the whole issue still worries the shit out me.”
“We both know how important it is for everyone to see us paying for those bonds without having to scramble.”
“Scrambling may not be our only problem.”
Kyle’s contention left several seconds of icy silence between us.
In tepid tones, I tried to curve the conversation around our dilemma. “Underneath all our posturing with Bangkok Commercial, we both know the really important thing is that we bought the entire issue with no interference. We own it. We beat out Amsterdam Bank. We beat out a bank a hundred times bigger than us.”
I abandoned the words I was speaking. Raced ahead to evaluate my next statements.
Sidestepping all references to our shortfall of funds, I tried to stack up our advantages to avert Kyle’s forecasts of collective hazard. “I planned it. I put it in motion. And then I made that whole Amsterdam crew think that we’d rolled over and died so that the greedy bastards would keep pre-selling the entire bond issue until they’d over-subscribed it two or three times.”
“Amsterdam Bank can do that,” Kyle granted in small accord. “Like you say, they’ve got a thousand times our capital. And a hundred times more salesmen to sell off the bonds.”
“And that’s their usual style, isn’t it?”
“Of course it’s their style, Paris. When they want a bond issue, they come in with unlimited amounts of cash to buy it up. And then they resell it before they’ve even paid for it.”
“And they make a killing in the profit spread.”
“Of course. That’s the whole idea.”
“And they beat the shit out of small investment banking firms like us every time.”
Kyle nodded. “Well, what else are we supposed to do when we don’t have the capital behind us. Like right now?”
“That’s right. We always get nothing. If we’re good boys and suck up nicely maybe they throw us a few crumbs. But only at their jacked-up secondary pricing. So our profit barely covers our costs of making the sale. And we always convince ourselves that’s okay because we’re making a name for ourselves in the international markets and we’re at least paying overheads while we’re doing it.”
“Well, that’s the way it is when we’re limited by not having any retail deposit base.”
“Yeah, and what else do big banks like Amsterdam Bank always do?”
Purposefully, I waited, making Kyle reduce the pace of his suspicion and reproach.
“Is that a rhetorical question? Or do you really want to waste time discussing it when we’ve got this other mess staring us in the face right now?”
From the flare of frustration in Kyle’s voice, and the slicing gestures of his open hands, I knew I was pawning myself to certain failure if I let Kyle bully me from my rationale and validation. I struggled to tether him to my reasoning, running down my points.
“No. It’s important. What Amsterdam Bank does as soon as they’ve got the entire bond issue oversubscribed is go back to the bond issuer and beat the living shit out of them to lower the purchase pricing. And double their own in-house profits. And what choice does the poor bond issuer have. They have to cave in on pricing. Because they’re guaranteed that the entire bond issue is already sold. And they’re sitting there with visions of dollars dancing in their heads. They can’t wait to get their hands on all the cash. And there sits the Amsterdam Bank gang. Smiling across the boardroom table with a big bag of cash in their hands.”
“Paris, I still don’t know what all this has to do with us.”
“We decided we were going to Bangkok Commercial Bank and put in a bid for the bonds. Put in a bid against Amsterdam Bank.”
“Right.”
“And what did you think was going to happen? What did you really think was going to happen?”
“Probably that we’d get beat out.”
“But maybe we’d get a little side action. Right?”
“Right.”
“So here’s how I worked it.” I could feel myself sprinting to get it all out before he closed down. “As soon as Amsterdam Bank started to heat things up and throw their weight around with their big amounts of cash, I retracted our bid.”
“You retracted our bid?”
“Right.”
“No,” Kyle corrected imperatively. “That takes a full vote from the board of directors.”
“Most bids, yes. But not this bid. There was a retraction clause included in the bid when we approved it and signed it to submit to Bangkok Commercial Bank. To make sure we had a trapdoor out of the deal if we needed one.”
Kyle ploughed at the carpet with his heels. “So?”
His response, curt and cutting. The meanness of the meetings we conducted in private, where there were no witnesses to curb our incivility, our niggardly accommodation of one another.
I stiffened my confidence, spoke sternly and precisely, without pause for further breath, pressing the full accumulation of facts and consequences out at Kyle like a rude shove. “So. When I retracted our bid, I didn’t let any of our clients know. I didn’t let the markets know. I didn’t let our salesmen know. But I made sure to leak the news to Amsterdam Bank. We made sure they knew in their Singapore office. And we even made sure they knew in Amsterdam. So Amsterdam Bank immediately assumed we had rolled over and died. And they went to market and sold the shit out of the issue.”
“And?”
I concentrated on my words, finding it cumbersome to float the facts up into clearer waters above the sediments of doubt and confusion that dwelled within me.
“And then I just waited for them to go back to Bangkok Commercial Bank with their usual strong-arm tactics. That’s were I spent all my time. Cultivating the directors of Bangkok Commercial. They were only too happy to let me know when Amsterdam Bank began to turn up the heat. Then I resubmitted our bid at the original price. Which was now a good deal higher than what Amsterdam Bank was offering to pay for the bonds. And Bangkok Commercial were only too happy to accept it.”
“And what about Amsterdam Bank?”
“The directors of Bangkok Commercial Bank ruled to cancel them out of the deal for breach of contract. We blew Amsterdam right off the map.”
“And what about Amsterdam Bank’s pre-selling of those bonds?”
“You know as well as I do, Amsterdam’s only got two choices right now.”
“They’ve got no bonds to deliver.”
“Damn right they’ve got no bonds to deliver. Because we own all of them. We own the entire issue.”
“So Amsterdam Bank has to renege on delivery.”
“Only two choices. They can renege on delivery and go around the markets with egg on their faces. Or they can come to us and buy all the bonds from us so that they have enough to fill their orders.”
“And we’ll be glad to sell them our bonds.”
“At a profit, we’ll be glad to sell them our bonds. At a hell of a profit.”
Kyle frowned, squeezing his forehead and his chin into pouches and furrows, shook his head in discouraged appreciation of the facts. “They can’t be happy. Amsterdam Bank.”
“They’re furious.”
“And they’ll come gunning for us, Paris.”
“You and I both know they will.”
“And how did you get Bangkok Commercial Bank to even reconsider our bid.”
“I convinced them that we had most of the cash to pay for the entire issue.”
“Which we don’t have.”
“But which we are borrowing.”
“From whom?”
“From Bank of South Asia.”
“What? You pledged the bonds as collateral for an asset-backed line of credit with Bank of South Asia?”
“Bet your ass. And I went to Bangkok Commercial and waved around the contract for the asset-backed credit line with Bank of South Asia that we had quietly pocketed.”
“And now what?”
“Like you say, now we’ve got to pay for a hundred million dollars worth of bonds.”
Kyle crossed over, letting his voice swell with gluey anxiety. “And we don’t have the cash.”
“But we’ve got the credit financing.”
“Stop right there,” Kyle warned. “What about this credit?”
I swallowed my surge of indignation. “What?”
“Anything else we don’t know about?”
“No. Standard stuff.”
“How standard?”
“Bank of South Asia lends us eighty per cent of the price of the bonds.”
“Standard terms?”
“Yeah. We pre-pledge the bonds to BSA before we buy them. BSA lends us eighty cents on the dollar. We use the eighty million to pay most of the purchase price for the bonds. The rest we raise ourselves.”
“We repay BSA on our sale of the bonds?”
“Right. We have to repay BSA in ninety days. When we sell the bonds into the open market, or to Amsterdam, whoever bids the most, cash is paid into escrow. BSA takes eighty cents of every dollar in escrow to retire their loan, then they release the bonds at the end of ninety days for settlement of the sale.”
He refused to acknowledge that the credit arrangements were ordinary, using his silence to pry under my facts suspiciously.
To retaliate, I slipped back into the tone lingering from my discussion with Michelle. “We pledge the bonds. They lend us eighty per cent of the purchase price. We pay back when we sell the bonds.”
Kyle cast me off with disdain. Flicking his fingers. “Yeah. Brilliant.”
I could feel his doubt working, like cold water dripping.
“Have we locked up the eighty million from BSA?” he inquired sharply.
“Of course.”
“Okay, BSA lends us most of the money we need to buy the bonds. So we can turn around and resell them right quick before the interest on the BSA loan sneaks up and bites us in the ass. Where’s the rest of it? The discount settlement is ninety-two. Where’s the other twelve or so million we still need?”
“I can pull together a syndicate of a few smaller players in Singapore for most of the rest.”
“Then tell me. Right now. In plain clear English. Just how much we’ve raised so far.”
“It’s still going to be a few more hours until …”
“To the penny!”
Kyle planted his rage around him like fence posts.
I was reminded that this was also about our previous arguments that had ended inadequately; they had been accumulating over the last several months; vigorously chewed but never swallowed.
With Kyle slipping over the edge into a predictable free-fall of fear and anger, I recognized for a second time in the day that my failure and frustration were assured if I made the mistake of continued discussion and was lured into the trap of assuming Kyle was heading towards principled debate.
“A few more hours,” I announced, wrapping it up quickly. “Until the markets open in Asia and I can call a few people and get some email back.”
“I don’t trust it,” Kyle stated, tapering off into sullen silence.
That, I recognized, was Kyle postmarking his control of the situation. If everything worked out smoothly, his comments would be discarded. But if anything went wrong, he would have this exact point of reference to prove that he had been in command, able to verify that he had warned against it and that nothing had slipped by him.
“I don’t trust it,” he repeated as he stood. “And I don’t trust you on it.”
He walked out.
When did you ever?
