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.
13
I LEFT ABOUT AN HOUR LATER. Disappointingly, there was no sign of Ginny in the hallway as Van Loon ushered me out of the apartment, but by that point I was in such a state of euphoria that if I’d had to talk to her – or, for that matter, to anyone else – I probably wouldn’t have made much sense.
It was a cool evening, and as I strolled down Park Avenue I cast my mind back over the previous few weeks. It had been an extraordinary time in my life. I wasn’t hindered by anything or inhibited in any way, and not since my early twenties had I been able to look to the future with such energy, and – perhaps more significantly – without that debilitating dread of the ticking clock. With MDT-48, the future was no longer an accusation or a threat, no longer a precious resource that was running out. I could pack in so many things between now and the end of next week, say, that it actually felt as if the end of next week might never come.
At Fifty-seventh Street, waiting for a ‘Don’t Walk’ sign to change, a strong sense of gratitude for all of this welled up inside of me – though gratitude directed towards whom in particular I didn’t know. It was accompanied by an acute sense of exhilaration, and was quite physical, almost like a form of arousal. But then moments later, when I was half-way across Fifty-seventh Street, something weird happened – all of a sudden these feelings surged in intensity and I was overcome with dizziness. I reached out for something to lean against, but there wasn’t anything there and I had to stumble forward until I got to a wall on the other side of the street.
Several people skirted around me.
I closed my eyes and tried to catch my breath, but when I opened them again a few seconds later – or what seemed like a few seconds later – I jolted back in fright. Looking around me, at the buildings and at the traffic, I realized that I wasn’t on Fifty-seventh Street any more. I was a block further down. I was on the corner of Fifty-sixth Street.
It was the same thing that had happened the previous evening in my apartment. I had moved, but without being conscious of it, without registering that I had moved. It was as if I’d suffered a minor blackout – as if I’d trip-switched forward in some way, or click-clicked forward like on a faulty CD.
The previous evening was because of not having eaten – I’d been busy, distracted, food had taken a back seat. At least, that was the assumption, the rationalization.
Of course, I hadn’t eaten since then either, so maybe that was it. A little shaken, but not wishing to dwell too much on what had happened, I walked slowly along Fifty-sixth Street towards Lexington Avenue in search of a restaurant.
I found a diner on Forty-fifth Street and took a booth by the window.
‘C’n I get you, hon?’
I ordered a Porterhouse steak, rare, french fries and a side salad.
‘To drink?’
Coffee.
The place wasn’t busy. There was a guy at the counter, and a couple in the next booth up, and an old lady putting on lipstick in the next one up from that.
When the coffee arrived, I took a few sips and tried to relax. Then I decided to concentrate on the meeting I’d just had with Van Loon. I found myself reacting to it in two different ways.
On the one hand, I was beginning to feel a little nervous about taking up his job offer – which involved a nominal starting salary and some stock options, with whatever real money I made being on commissions. These would be from any successful deals that I recommended, brokered, negotiated, or, in the gnarled syntax befitting my current thought processes, participated in any phase of the negotiating of – like the MCL-Abraxas deal, for instance. But on what basis, I asked myself, had Van Loon been able to offer me such a deal? On the entirely spurious basis, perhaps, that I even had the slightest notion of how to ‘structure’ or ‘engineer the financials’ of a big corporate deal? Hardly. Van Loon had seemed to understand pretty unequivocally that I was an impostor, so he couldn’t be expecting that much from me. But what, precisely, would he be expecting? And would I be able to deliver?