“Okay. Which category do I fit in?”
She stared at me for a five count, the way someone might if they were attempting to count your eyelashes. “Maybe neither. Except for the cloud, I’d put you somewhere between tourist and businessman,” she concluded.
“Maybe that’s all I am,” I offered. “A businessman on vacation.”
“Right,” she said sarcastically.
She quieted down for a while, checking random dials or whatever one is supposed to check when one flies an airplane. She hadn’t touched the stick in over an hour, which made me wonder how much pilots actually have to do to fly planes. Not like she had to swerve to avoid things. Seemed pretty easy to me.
“How old are you?” Patti asked, finally.
“Isn’t that an impolite question?”
“There are no impolite questions at this altitude.”
“Okay. How old do I look?”
She frowned. “You have a habit of answering questions with questions, you know that? Maybe thirty-five.”
“Okay. Thirty-five, then.”
“Except you don’t act thirty-five, so that can’t be right.”
“How should I act?” I was trying not to be too forthcoming, because I’d only recently learned exactly how much trouble it caused when I was. It helped that I was currently sober, and thus less likely to run off at the mouth. Plus, this was sort of interesting.
“Oh, I know what it is!” she exclaimed. “You’re a vet.”
“A pet doctor?”
“Don’t play dumb. What was it? Iraq?”
That was a tricky one to answer. If I said yes, we might have gotten bogged down in questions about divisions and units, and I didn’t know enough about regular army to lie convincingly. And once you start talking about this stuff, you quickly find the person you’re speaking to knows someone who knows someone you might have served with. But I couldn’t very well tell her that the last time I fought in something that was big enough to come with a name was during the Peloponnesian War.
“What about me cries out veteran, exactly?”
“Dunno. But I know a few. There was this World War vet I used to know. He didn’t give a damn about much of anything. Or maybe it was just that he knew nothing that came next would ever be quite so bad. It was a confidence thing. That’s it, that’s the vibe I’m getting.”
I decided it was time to cut off the conversation entirely. Either that or start talking about the Greeks.
“You’re wrong,” I said curtly. “I never fought in a war.”
“Oh,” she said. “Okay.”
And then we settled into one of those uncomfortable silences she had been talking about earlier.
* * *
Patti had been good enough to set us up at a hotel near the airfield after the first leg of the trip. Separate rooms, of course. As soon as I was alone, I arranged a call to Switzerland.
As you may have already guessed, I’m sort of terrible about money. I can never really keep decent track of what is, and isn’t, a lot of it, which is just not my fault. Seriously, I remember when I could buy a horse with what a loaf of bread costs now. So when I first called the Swiss bank from Clara’s apartment and gave them the necessary account information, I learned two things. The first was I now had my own private banker, Heintz, whose only job was to kiss up to me. This was because of the second thing. The exact balance in my account. Heintz had to read it to me five times because I’d never heard a number that large before, and I frankly didn’t know what to make of it. “That’s a lot, isn’t it?” was about all I could muster.
So the money was nice, but far more important was what that money got me, i.e., a Swiss banker who wanted to keep me happy at all times. Which was why I felt comfortable having him look into Robert Grindel’s finances.
What I learned on my follow-up call from the hotel room was that Clara and I had been correct about at least one thing. Grindel was indeed swimming in venture capital money.
The question was, what was Grindel offering his current investors? Heintz’s best guess put the project somewhere in the field of medicine, based mainly on the types of projects these investors had previously shown interest in.
“For us to learn more, we must first show an active interest in investing,” he said. “Would you like for me to make the necessary arrangements?”
If I were at that moment sitting on a beach in Fiji, I’d have said yes. But as I was about to get the answers I needed on my own, it seemed superfluous. Plus, this was in all likelihood the last chance I would have to speak to Heintz for some time.
“No,” I said. “But I am interested in how one gets this sort of money from these sorts of people. How fluid is the situation?”
“I am not sure I understand.”
“I assume one has to provide the investors with solid evidence that one’s project is worth investing into. How much proof? And what would constitute a breach of contract? What would make the investors decide to ask for their money back?”
“Ah,” he said. “That varies wildly from circumstance to circumstance. Mostly, it is up to each venture capitalist as regards their personal comfort level in the arena of standards of proof. A person who has shown past success in a particular avenue, and who has a new idea that merely looks good on paper, can do quite well. For others, a prototype, or an experiment proving the viability of a theory. It depends on the hypothetical product. And again, on how stringent the investor’s vetting procedures are.”
“And breach of contract?”
“That would take quite a lot. One would need to prove not only did the concept that initially warranted the investment fail to bear fruit, but the party which proposed it was consciously aware the product would not succeed. This is exceedingly difficult to prove. Investors are notoriously skittish for just this reason. Most arrangements involve a gradual influx of funding contingent upon pre-established goals being met along the way. Using this Mr. Grindel as an example, he could have his funding cut quite suddenly from one or all of the investors if at one point he failed to deliver an aspect of the project as promised.”
“All right,” I said. “I think I understand. Now let me ask you something, Heintz, understanding first that this is an entirely hypothetical question.”
“Of course.”
“Let’s just say I wanted to destroy Robert Grindel, immediately. Can this be done?”
“Do you intend ‘destroy’ to mean financially or some other way?” His tone did not change in the slightest, even when discussing what had to be an allusion to murder. I so very liked this whole personal Swiss banker thing. I made a mental note to pay more attention to my money in the future.
“I mean financially,” I said. “Is he vulnerable?”
“Most assuredly. Any time the bulk of one’s finances comes from a source outside of one’s own fortune, one is vulnerable. Immediacy is another matter.”
“I was afraid you were going to say that.”
“Things do not happen quickly in high finance,” he said. Heintz had very rapidly come to grips with my naïveté. Actually, given that according to my account I was roughly a hundred-and-forty-seven years old, he’d come to grips with a large number of seemingly impossible things already, so my lack of financial acumen was probably comparatively minor. He continued, “Even were I to devise a way to cut off all of his funding today, in all likelihood he would have access to several months of advanced funds. And it would take years for the investors to successfully reclaim their initial investments, if at all.”
“Even in a case of fraud?”
“At this level, that word is effectively meaningless. And realistically, the worst I could do was inspire his investors to apply a more hands-on approach to his project. Enforce timetables, that sort of thing. It would be a nuisance, but that’s all it would be, provided he has a viable product.”