The car pulls into the public plaza of Bloomberg Tower, Howley is met by the producer and a couple of assistants, and they all head inside.
He is shepherded through makeup and then onto the set for a quick sound check. After a few minutes, the show’s host, Rob Melrose, appears, and they chat briefly. The atmosphere is relaxed, the studio bright and spacious, unlike pretty much every other studio Howley’s ever been in.
Someone adjusts his mike, and before he knows it the interview has started.
Rob Melrose’s style is direct and quite dynamic, but he’s also respectful-and, in Howley’s case, maybe even a little deferential.
The first few minutes they spend on private equity and its image problems.
“There’s no denying it, it’s a tough time for the industry,” Howley says in his now almost trademarked whisper. “Because the fact is, Rob, not all deals work out, and it’s pretty easy to highlight the ones that don’t, and make a song and dance about them, but really, the numbers should speak for themselves. I’m talking about the number of jobs created, proportion-wise compared to in the general economy, three-point-nine percent compared to one-point-two percent last year alone, I’m talking about returns for investors and pension funds, and about availability of growth capital for new companies, I mean it just goes on and on.”
“But the negativity is there,” Melrose says, swiveling on his stool and flicking the back of his hand at his silver laptop, as if to indicate all the hard data he has on his screen, “so what effect is that going to have on the Oberon Capital Group, what effect is it going to have on Craig Howley?”
“Well, you’re right, Rob, there is negativity, and unfortunately, for a time, that’s going to make it harder for companies like Oberon to raise funds, and to buy companies, and ultimately to create new jobs…”
And… yadda, yadda, yadda.
Okay, Howley can admit it to himself, he was slightly nervous coming on to do this interview, but sitting here now, under the lights, large bot-like cameras hovering on the periphery of his vision, he suddenly feels totally relaxed.
He knows this stuff.
There isn’t a single question Rob Melrose could put to him that he wouldn’t be able to answer-comprehensively, and with more wit and depth than they could ever have time for on a show like this. All he needs now is a nice little segue into his IPO spiel and his work here will be done.
“Let me throw something else at you,” Melrose then says. “This whole question of going public, it’s pretty much a hot button issue at the moment, to file or not to file, pitching to investors, how much stock to offer, how low or high to set the price, the whole crazy roller-coaster ride. Where does Craig Howley stand?”
“Well, Rob,” Howley says, looking directly at him now, and smiling, “I’m glad you asked me that…”
“… because it’s been on my mind a lot recently, but you know, having a stock ticker isn’t necessarily a panacea. Sure, it’s a good way to raise cash, but to be frank, that wouldn’t be one of our core concerns right now. And I like the idea of being able to stay agile, especially in the current climate-”
“Keeping it lean and mean.”
“Maybe not the term I’d use, Rob, but yes, and there’s a certain tyranny about the quarterly report, you know, about having to meet analysts’ expectations and forecasts, where you end up romancing the markets instead of looking after your LPs…”
“Romancing the markets? Fuck you, you prick.”
Frank takes another swig from the now half-empty bottle of Stoli and replaces it on the bedside unit.
The arrogance of this baldy fuck on the screen, with his barely audible, breathy delivery is something else.
Romancing the markets?
If it wasn’t so tragic, it’d be funny.
But a word like that certainly sticks out, because most of the time what you hear on these business cable shows-the language they use, the jargon-is impenetrable. It’s also mind-numbingly boring, and this is probably deliberate.
Because they…
They obfuscate.
That’s the word.
He burps, and pats his bare chest.
They operate in secrecy and darkness and hide behind arcane terminology.
“… more or less what you get when credit spreads blow out, when correlations go to one…”
Listen to him.
Laid out in front of Frank on the bed are a couple of books open at specific pages, some magazine pieces, and printouts from the various websites he’s been visiting. A part of him expects all of this material to pull into focus suddenly, to coalesce into a neat revelation, a mathematical formula almost. But another part of him knows it’s not going to happen, that this stuff is too diffuse, the connections too tenuous, the hunger for order and meaning-his hunger-too acute and voracious to possibly accommodate any degree of reasoned argument or criticism, any anomalies or pieces of the puzzle that don’t fit.
The truth is, over the last two days, much of it spent in Café Zero, Frank has been sliding into a quicksand of unverified and largely unverifiable… what? He hesitates to describe it as information.
White noise?
All he was looking for was an answer, an explanation, a grand unified field theory, something or someone to focus on and blame. What he got instead was an ever-widening gyre of speculation and paranoia-from Alan Greenspan to Ayn Rand, from the securitization of subprime mortgages to the payment of German war reparations, from LIBOR to Jekyll Island… from JFK’s infamous executive order skewering the Fed to Abraham Lincoln being assassinated by a cabal of international bankers because he insisted on printing his own debt-free legal tender to pay for the war.
From the New World Order to the Book of Revelation.
He didn’t know how or where to stop and ended up with a splitting headache, stomach cramps, and a sore back. Sometime late in the afternoon he gave up and came back to the hotel. He stripped and crawled into the shower.
When he got out after about twenty minutes he checked his phone, which he’d left in the room all day. He had half a dozen messages from Deb, a couple from Lenny Byron, and one from Ellen Dorsey. He didn’t reply to any of them.
He didn’t feel up to it.
Wearing only boxer shorts, he flopped back onto the bed and stared up at the ceiling for a while.
Then he got off the bed, grabbed the unopened bottle of Stoli from the dresser, opened it, and took a slug.
Deciding that surrender wasn’t an option, he sorted once again through the books and magazines he’d bought, and the articles he’d had printed at Café Zero. He spread some of them out on the bed, trying to conjure up a pattern, a meaning.
He continued taking belts of vodka directly from the bottle.
At one point, in need of further sensory stimulation, he reached over for the remote and flicked the TV on. He whipped through a few channels, dismissing each one in turn. But then he found himself pausing and staring at this guy, Craig Howley. It wasn’t so much the Boring Middle-Aged White Guy in a Suit thing that caught his attention, or the awful financial jargon. It was more the words on the screen: DEFENDING PRIVATE EQUITY… which, after a couple of seconds, did actually coalesce into something of a revelation, and quite a neat one, too. Because for all of this time, since last weekend, Frank has been interested in only one thing: finding a wormhole into Lizzie’s mind, and what he suddenly suspected he had here was a wormhole out of it. It’s what Ellen Dorsey was talking about the other night in that diner. The three pillars of the system. One guy from an investment bank, one from a hedge fund, and one from a private equity firm.