Ellen is the one who shrugs this time.
“I don’t know. Private equity. LBOs. Asset stripping. They buy companies with debt, fire the employees, dump their pension funds, suck all the cash out, and then… skedaddle. It’s not how they’d portray it, but…”
There is another silence. She studies his face, his eyes. He’s lost in thought.
She nudges his plate across the table, just an inch or so.
“Don’t want to sound like your mother, Frank, but Jesus, eat something, will you?”
He looks at her, then nods. “Yeah, okay.” He lifts the sandwich up off the plate and takes a bite.
She does the same.
They eat in silence for a while, chewing solemnly, gazing out at the passing traffic on Ninth Avenue.
The next morning, Howley has his meeting with the producer from Bloomberg, and they set things up for late on Friday afternoon. It’ll be a wide-ranging interview with, by agreement, no holds barred, but no real surprises either. He intends to mount a general and fairly robust defense of private equity, he’ll talk up some deals that are in the pipeline, and he’ll lay out his position vis-à-vis any prospect there might be of an IPO. He’s done TV before and knows what they want, knows what tone to adopt. He’s not one of the flamboyant guys, he’s not charismatic, so it’ll be a question of slipping his message in under a cloak of unprepossessing middle-aged baldness and cautious, dense, meandering syntax.
It’s a reflex thing, but Howley feels he should be running all of this by Vaughan. He’s not going to, of course. They’ve moved beyond that-or, at any rate, are in the process of doing so.
Apropos of which, lunch with Paul Blanford yesterday proved to be very interesting. Howley knew Paul years ago through a Pentagon connection, and although they hadn’t been friends exactly or done any formal business together, enough of a mutual impression remained for Howley to be able to get Blanford’s attention and then bear down fairly heavily on him. The fact that Oberon once owned Eiben-Chemcorp certainly made things easier-but without the personal link Howley wouldn’t have been able to cut quite as straight to the chase with Blanford as he did. He circled the issue for a while and then dived in by expressing “deep concern” about a possible breach of protocols at Eiben that had just been brought to his attention. It was in relation to a particular set of clinical trials, he said, and this was especially worrying in the light of a recent DOJ investigation into how pharmaceutical companies were carrying out these very sorts of trials.
Blanford was dumbfounded and wanted to know more. He wanted to know exactly what Howley was talking about.
Howley wasn’t about to oblige at this point, but what he did was remind Blanford that Eiben-Chemcorp was no stranger to this kind of thing. There were various instances he could have cited here, most of them taking place long before Blanford’s time. In the early days of Triburbazine, for example, there was a damaging product liability trial involving a Massachusetts teenager who murdered her best friend and then killed herself; there was the botched takeover of Mediflux amid allegations of research results being suppressed; and there was the more recent scandal of widespread résumé fraud by a CRO hired by Eiben. But what Howley chose to cite instead was something he himself had read about just days earlier in Vaughan’s “black file”-those disturbing rumors from about ten years ago of a so-called smart drug called MDT-48 being leaked onto the streets with rather alarming consequences. The reason Vaughan had brought this story, among others, to Howley’s attention was to illustrate what a bad idea going public would be. Back then the Oberon Capital Group had sold Eiben-Chemcorp in the full knowledge that these rumors were about to break, and had then brazenly shorted the buyer’s stock-hardly the kind of trading practices that would bear much public scrutiny.
The reason that Howley was now bringing the story to Blanford’s attention, however, was quite different. In the current climate, any hint of another such scandal could easily destroy a company like Eiben, and at the very least they’d be stung for a couple of billion in fines.
So what he wanted to do was scare the shit out of him.
Phase one.
And it worked.
As far as Blanford was concerned the whole thing had come out of the blue, leaving him not only scared but also confused and compliant, which was just what Howley wanted, because without having to offer an explanation, or mention Vaughan by name, he was then able to suggest that Blanford take a close look at any clinical trials Eiben might be conducting on new drugs for geriatrics.
And to get back to him on it ASAP.
Simple as that.
Howley isn’t even sure where this might lead, but he feels he’s being proactive. He doesn’t want any surprises.
He doesn’t like surprises.
The Bloomberg guy leaves, and Howley calls Angela in. He has a few minutes before his next meeting, and he wants to see how far along she is with her list of office designers.
12
BY TUESDAY EVENING FRANK HAS SKIMMED THROUGH MOST OF THE BOOKS HE BOUGHT. They’re lying on the bed or in small piles on the floor, probably about fifteen in all. He acquired them in three separate spurts of enthusiasm (or delusion?)-each trip out from the hotel to the Barnes & Noble on Fifth Avenue a desperate attempt to shore up his developing but still fragile understanding of the financial crisis, each new title he came across a hit from the crack pipe, an opening up of possibilities, a tingling promise of illumination. On his last trip out he also stopped off at a liquor store and got himself a bottle of Stoli.
Promises, promises.
The one book he keeps coming back to-although there’s no real prospect that he’ll get to grips with it right now, or possibly ever, because the damn thing is over eight hundred and fifty pages long-is Murray Rheingarten’s The Dominion of Debt: Financial Disambiguation in an Age of Crisis. Over and over he reads the blurb and the press reviews and the introduction and the chapter headings, he flicks through its capacious, deckled pages, its dense, labyrinthine prose, catching random names and phrases, picking up the sense each time, tantalizingly-like having a word on the tip of your tongue-that deep inside here somewhere, if only he could find and unravel it, is the key to the whole thing, the answer. He feels if he could only persevere, and concentrate, and focus, he could extract from these endless blocks of print an explanation of what happened to everyone that will explain what happened to Lizzie.
Some of the other books are easier, or seem so at first-Wall Street Crash (And Burn), Money Down, Goldman Sachs and the End of the World-but with most of them it doesn’t take Frank long to see that they’re too specialized, too technical, too detailed in an area he doesn’t quite need to go to. These books vie with one another for the accolade “clearest account so far of the crisis,” but twenty pages into each one and you’re predictably neck-deep in jargon and graphs, in credit default swaps and bogus triple-A-rated securities.
What got him started on this was something Ellen Dorsey said the other night. They were standing outside that diner on Ninth Avenue, about to go their separate ways, when he remarked one more time that he just didn’t understand what Lizzie had been thinking.
“Maybe it wasn’t such a mystery,” Ellen said. “I mean, look at that list of demands they made. They were pissed off at the bankers and the money guys. Like a lot of people. And once you follow that stuff, or try to understand it, which Lizzie and the others had obviously been doing, it’s hard not to… respond. I guess it’s just a question of how you choose to do it.”