‘Scotch would be fine.’
‘Sure.’
Van Loon went over to a drinks cabinet in the corner of the room and as he poured two glasses of single malt Scotch whisky, he spoke back at me, over his shoulder.
‘I don’t know who you are, Eddie, or what your game is, but I’m sure of one thing, you don’t work in this business. I know all the moves, and so far you don’t seem to know any – but the thing is, I like that. You see, I deal with business graduates every day of the week, and I don’t know what it is – they’ve all got this look, this business-school look. It’s like they’re cocky and terrified at the same time, and I’m sick of it.’ He paused. ‘What I’m saying is this, I don’t care what your background is, or that maybe the nearest you’ve ever come to an investment bank is the business section of the New York Times. What matters’ – he turned around with a glass in each hand, and used one of them to indicate his belly – ‘is that you’ve got a fire in here, and if you’re smart on top of that, then nothing can stand in your way.’
He walked over and handed me one of the glasses of Scotch. I put the folder down on to the couch and took the glass from him. He held his up. Then a phone rang somewhere in the room.
‘Shit.’
Van Loon put his glass down on the coffee table and went back in the direction he’d just come from. The phone was on an antique writing desk beside the drinks cabinet. He picked it up and said, ‘Yeah?’ There was a silence and then he said, ‘Yeah. Good. Yeah. Yeah. Put him through.’
He covered the phone with his hand, turned to me and said, ‘I’ve got to take this call, Eddie. But sit down. Have your drink.’
I smiled briefly in acknowledgement.
‘I won’t be long.’
As Van Loon turned away again, and receded into a low-level murmur, I took a sip from the whisky and sat down on the couch. I was glad of the interruption, but couldn’t figure out why – at least not for a few seconds. Then it occurred to me: I wanted time to think about Ginny Van Loon and her little rant about the stock market and how it had reminded me so much of the kind of thing Melissa might have said. It seemed to me that despite obvious differences between them, the two women shared something – a similar, steely intelligence, as well as a style of delivery modelled on the heat-seeking missile. By referring to her father at one point as ‘Carl Van Loon’, for instance, but at all other times as ‘Daddy’, Ginny had not only displayed a sophisticated sense of detachment, she had also made him seem silly and vain and isolated. Which – by extension – was precisely how I now felt, too.
I told myself that Ginny’s comments could be dismissed as the cheap and easy nihilism of an overeducated teenager, but if that was the case, why was I so bothered by them?
I took a tiny plastic sachet from the inside pocket of my jacket, opened it and tapped a tablet out on to the palm of my hand. Making sure that Van Loon was facing away from me, I popped the tablet into my mouth and washed it down with a large gulp of whisky.
Then I picked up the folder, opened it at the first page and started reading.
The files contained background information on a series of small-to-medium sized businesses, from retail chains to software houses to aerospace and biotech companies. The material was dense and wide-ranging and included profiles of all the CEOs, as well as of other key personnel. There was technical analysis of price movements going back over a five-year period, and I found myself reading about peaks, troughs, points of resistance – stuff that a few weeks earlier would have been rarefied, incomprehensible fuzz, Mogadon for the eyes.
But just what did Carl Van Loon want? Did he want me to state the obvious, to point out that the Texas-based data-storage firm, Laraby, for example, whose stock had increased twenty thousand per cent over the last five years, was a good long-term investment? Or that the British retail chain, Watson’s – which had just recorded its worst ever losses, and whose CEO, Sir Colin Bird, had presided over similar losses at a venerable Scottish insurance company, Islay Mutual – was not? Was Van Loon seriously looking to me, a freelance copywriter, for recommendations about what stocks he should buy or sell? Again, I thought, hardly – but if that wasn’t the case, then what did he want?
After about fifteen minutes, Van Loon covered the phone again with his hand and said, ‘Sorry this is taking so long, Eddie, but it’s important.’
I shook my head, indicating that he shouldn’t be concerned, and then held up the folder as evidence that I was happily occupied. He went back to his low-level murmuring and I went back to the files.
The more I read, the simpler, and more simplistic, the whole thing seemed. He was testing me. As far as Van Loon was concerned I was a neophyte with a fire in my belly and a lip on me, and as such just might find this amount of concentrated information a little intimidating. He was hardly to know that in my current condition it wasn’t even a stretch. In any case, and for something to do, I decided to divide the files into three separate categories – the duds, the obvious high-performers and the ones that weren’t instantly categorizable as either.
Another fifteen minutes or so passed before Van Loon finally got off the phone and came over to retrieve his drink. He held it up, as before, and we clinked glasses. I got the impression that he was having a hard time suppressing a broad grin. A part of me wanted to ask him who he’d been on the phone to, but it didn’t seem appropriate. Another part of me wanted to ask him an endless series of questions about his daughter, but the moment didn’t seem right for that either – not, of course, that it ever would.
He glanced down at the folder beside me.
‘So did you get a chance to look through any of that stuff?’
‘Yes, Mr Van Loon, I did. It was interesting.’
He knocked back most of his drink in one go, placed the glass on the coffee table and sat down at the other end of the couch.
‘Any initial impressions?’
I said yes, cleared my throat and gave him my spiel about eliminating the duds and the high-performers. Then I recited a shortlist I’d drawn up of four or five companies that had real investment potential. I especially recommended that he buy stocks in Janex, a California biotech company, not based on its past performance, but rather on what I described, in a breathless rush, as ‘its telling and muscular strategy of pursuing intellectual-property litigation to protect its growing portfolio of patents’. I also recommended that he buy stocks in the French engineering giant BEA, based on the equally telling fact that the company seemed to be shedding everything except its fiber-optics division. I supported what I had to say with relevant data and quotes, including verbatim quotes from the transcripts of a lawsuit involving Janex. Van Loon looked at me in a curious way throughout, and it didn’t occur to me until I was coming to the end that a possible reason for this was because I hadn’t once referred back to the folder – that I had spoken entirely from memory.
Almost under his breath, and looking at the folder, he said, ‘Yeah. Janex… BEA. They’re the ones.’
I could see him trying to work something out – calculating, eyebrows furrowed, how much of the folder it might be possible to read in the length of time he’d been on the phone. Then he said, ‘That’s… amazing.’
He stood up and paced around the room for a bit. It was clear now that he was calculating something else.
‘Eddie,’ he said eventually, coming to a sudden halt and pointing back at the phone on the antique writing desk, ‘that was Hank Atwood I was talking to there. We’re having lunch on Thursday. I want you to come along.’
Hank Atwood, the Chairman of MCL-Parnassus, was routinely described as one of the ‘architects of the entertainment-industrial complex’.
‘Me?’
‘Yes, Eddie, and what’s more, I want you to come and work for me.’
In response to this I asked him the one question that I had promised Kevin I wouldn’t ask.
‘What’s going on with Atwood, Mr Van Loon?’
He held my gaze, took a deep breath, and then said, clearly against his better judgement, ‘We’re negotiating a takeover deal with Abraxas.’ He paused. ‘By Abraxas.’
Abraxas was the country’s second-largest Internet service provider. The three-year-old company had a market capitalization of $114 billion, scant profits to date, and – of course – attitude to burn. Compared to the venerable MCL-Parnassus, which had assets stretching back nearly sixty years, Abraxas was a mewling infant.
I said, barely able to contain my disbelief, ‘Abraxas buying out MCL?’
He nodded, but only just.
The kaleidoscope of possibilities opened up before me.
‘We’re mediating the deal,’ he said, ‘helping them to structure it, to engineer the financials, that kind of thing.’ He paused. ‘No one knows about this, Eddie. People are aware that I’m talking to Hank Atwood, but no one knows why. If this got out it could have a significant impact on the markets, but it’d also most likely kill the deal… so…’
He looked straight at me and let a shrug of his shoulders finish the thought.
I held up my hands, palms out. ‘Don’t worry, I’m not talking to anyone about this.’
‘And you realize that if you traded in either of these stocks – tomorrow morning down at Lafayette, say – you’d be contravening the rules as set down by the Securities and Exchange Commission…’
I nodded.
‘… and could go to prison?’
‘Look, Carl,’ I said, deciding to use his first name, ‘… you can trust me.’
‘I know that, Eddie,’ he said, with a hint of emotion in his voice, ‘I know that.’ He took a moment to compose himself and then went on. ‘Look, it’s a very complex process, and right now we’re at a crucial stage. I wouldn’t say we’re blocked exactly, but… we need someone to take a fresh look at it.’
I felt the rate of my heart-beat increase.
‘I’ve got an army of MBAs working for me down on Forty-eighth Street, Eddie, but the problem is I know how they think. I know what they’re going to tell me before they even open their mouths. I need someone like you. Someone who’s quick and isn’t going to bullshit me.’
I couldn’t believe this, and had a sudden flash of how incongruous it all seemed – Carl Van Loon needing someone like me?
‘I’m offering you a real chance here, Eddie, and I don’t care… I don’t care who you are… because I have a feeling about this.’
He reached down, picked up his glass from the coffee table and drained what was left in it.
‘That’s how I’ve always operated.’
Then he allowed the grin to break though.
‘This is going to be the biggest merger in American corporate history.’
Fighting off a slight queasiness, I grinned back.
He held up his hands. ‘So… Mr Spinola, what do you say?’
I struggled to think of something, but I was still in shock.
‘Look, maybe you need a little time to think about it – which is OK.’
Van Loon then reached down to the coffee table, took my glass in his other hand and as he walked over to the drinks cabinet to get refills, I felt the strong pull of his enthusiasm – and the ineluctable pull of an unlooked-for destiny – and knew that I had no choice but to accept.