"Why couldn’t Bone offer him-" Compton stopped herself, shook her head. "Sorry. Stupid question. If Bone gets it, the bank’s gonna go away."
Bone told Baki to coordinate a graphics package on how much money would be available through the merger: he would provide the details. "If you do this right, Kerin, and by that I mean if you do this perfectly…" "What?" Kerin Baki was like a piece of blond ironwood, he thought, brutally efficient, great to look at, but cold. Distant. A Finn, he’d heard. Sometimes she was so chilly he could feel the frost coming off her. He couldn’t see her with a southern boy, but thought she might go well with somebody like, say, Davenport.
"You’ll be the most important person in the bank, since I can’t do shit without you." She disapproved of extraneous vulgarities, which is why he sometimes used them. And what she did next surprised him-almost shocked him. She sat down across his desk and crossed her legs. Good legs. Maybe even great legs.
"I hope you’ve talked with the board members. Privately, I mean," she said.
"I’ve started…"
"You’ve got to do better than start," she said. "This is a campaign, not a party."
"Well, I’ll-"
"Have you talked to McDonald?"
"No. He’s out of it…"
"I know. But he’s got friends on the board. He can possibly throw them to O’Dell. So you’ve got to talk to McDonald and do it soon. Call Spacek at Midland and find out if they can find some kind of figurehead job for him after the merger. Vice chairman of the merged banks, or something…"
Bone nodded: "Good idea. I’ll do that." He looked at her, gauging the change in their relationship, then took the step: "What else?" he asked.
"I’ve only got one more thing-well, two more things. First, your old pal Marcus Kent works for O’Dell.
Everything you tell him goes to her."
Bone’s eyebrows went up. "Since when?"
"Since he decided he wanted your job, which was about two minutes after you hired him."
"Little asshole," Bone grumbled, not particularly surprised. "I’ll take care of him later. You said two things. What’s the other one?"
"I want you to do me a favor."
"Sure. What?"
"I’ll tell you when you’re given the job. All you have to do now is promise to do me a favor."
"You mean… blind? You won’t tell me what favor?"
She nodded. She was so serious, so cool, so remote, that he nodded in return. "All right. I hate to do it blind, but if it’s anything like rational, I’ll do you a favor."
She nodded once again, quickly, ticking the commitment off some mental list.
"I mean, money? A title?" he asked.
"I’ll tell you later," she said. And for a fraction of a second, he thought she almost smiled. "Now: I can get a graphics guy to actually put our presentation together, but we might also want some kind of short video presentation from Midland, from Spacek himself, probably. That means we’ll need to check the VCR up in The Room."
Bone slapped his forehead: "That’s great. I’ll talk to Spacek as soon as we’re done here." He looked at his watch: "Plenty of time."
"What else?" she asked.
"I need to talk to a guy named Gerry Nicolas. Today. He runs the state pension fund, I don’t know the formal name."
"I’ll get it," she said. "May I ask why? Just so I can stay current and see how you’re thinking?"
Oddly enough, Bone thought, he trusted her: "Because his constituents don’t know anything about the stock market, but they know he hasn’t gotten them fifteen percent on their money this year, and they want to know why. He’s feeling a little shaky, and he also happens to own almost six million shares of our stock which, until the merger talk started, had been sitting in his portfolio like a brick. He’s now up sixty million, and due to go up quite a few more if the merger goes through. If it doesn’t, he’s sucking wind again."
"So if you tell him the board is thinking about backing out…"
"He’ll be on the phone to the board. And he’s got some serious clout when it comes to electing board members."
"Good. That’s exactly how we’ve got to think." She stood up. "I know this changes our relationship somewhat, Mr. Bone, but I really think you’ll have a much better chance at this job if you listen seriously to my proposals. And I’ll critique yours."
"Of course," he said.
"Don’t dismiss me like that," she snapped. "I’m as smart as you are. I might not know as much about investments, but I know a lot more about the way this place really works. If I’m going to save my job, you’ve got to listen to me."
He laughed despite himself, and again, was somewhat shocked: "Is that what this is all about? Saving your job?"
"That’s half of it," she said.
"What’s the other half?"
"The favor you’re going to do me-that’s the other half."
As she was going out the door, he said, "Maybe you better start calling me Jim."
She stopped, seemed to think for a minute, pushed her glasses up her nose, and said, "Not yet."
"They’re gonna screw you," Audrey McDonald shouted. Wilson was in the den, staring at a yellow pad. Audrey had gone to the kitchen to get a bowl of nacho chips and a glass of water; she snuck the vodka bottle out of the lazy Susan, poured two ounces into the glass, gulped it down, took a pull at the bottle, screwed the top back on, put it back on the lazy Susan, turned it halfway around, and shut the cupboard door. Then she stuffed a half-dozen nachos in her mouth to cover any scent of alcohol, got a full glass of water and the bowl of chips, and carried them back to the den.
"If they were gonna give you the job…"
"I heard you, I heard you," Wilson McDonald snarled. "I heard you a dozen fuckin’ times. You’re so full of shit sometimes, Audrey, that you don’t even know you’re full of shit. I’m running the board-I chaired the meeting today-I can handle them."
"Yeah? How many board members have you talked to, who were willing to commit?"
He was shoving a fistful of chips into his mouth, chewed once, and said, "Eirich and Goff and Brandt…"
"You told me that Brandt-"
"I know what I said," he shouted. "I’ll get the fucker. That sonofabitch." Brandt had equivocated.
"You can’t count on-"
The phone rang, and they both turned to look at it. "Did you talk to your father?" Audrey asked.
"Yes."
"Huh." She stood up, took two steps, picked up the phone. "Hello?… Yes, this is Audrey." She turned to look at Wilson. "Why yes, he’s here, somewhere. Let me call him."
She pressed the receiver to her chest and said, "It’s Susan O’Dell. She said she needs to talk to you right away."
"Okay. Jesus, I wonder what she wants, right away?"
"It won’t be good news," Audrey said. She was seized by a sudden dread, looking at her husband’s querulousness. This wasn’t going right.
Wilson took the phone. "Hello?" He listened for a moment, then said, "Sure, that’ll be okay. Give us an hour… Okay, see you then."
"What?"
"She’s coming over. She wants to cut a deal."
Audrey brightened: "If we can cut a deal, we knock Bone right out of contention. For that, we could offer her quite a bit."
"That’s right. And we basically agree on-" The phone rang again, and he turned and picked it up, expecting to hear O’Dell’s voice again. "Hello?"
Again he listened, and finally: "Really can’t until about, say, ten o’clock. We’ve got guests… Okay, we stay up late anyway. See you then."
He hung up and Audrey raised her eyebrows.
"Bone," he said. "And he wants to cut a deal."
Audrey smiled, almost chortled: "My my. Aren’t we popular tonight. Aren’t we popular…" The half a glass of vodka was brightening the world, right along with the phone calls. "We’ve got some planning to do."
O’Dell came and went.
Bone came and went.