Due Diligence: A Thriller (3 page)

Already, the desperation he had been feeling that morning seemed far in the past. Had that really been him, scheming to muscle in on some chickenshit Florida deal? Eight hundred million? What was $800 million to a guy who’d just pulled down an eleven-
billion
-dollar play?

He ran through the numbers again, for the sheer pleasure they gave him.

On that half-hour drive to the airport, Pete Stanzy did once or twice ponder the strangeness of the way it had happened. There were all kinds of things that might have given him pause. But it wasn’t too hard to think of reasons to explain them. Mike Wilson had probably had a dispute with Merrill. That happened with clients all the time. And suddenly, just when he needed an investment bank in a hurry, he found himself without one. And if he called for a beauty parade to find a replacement, with a half-dozen banks all strutting their wares, you could just about guarantee there’d be a leak from one of them. And Wilson must have been impressed when Pete pitched to him back in the spring, so why not go straight to him? Why not? It was possible.

And the forty bips was unusual. More than unusual. But there were probably all kinds of good reasons Wilson had agreed to that as well.

Besides, Stanzy wasn’t committing irrevocably to anything yet, not until the letter of engagement was signed by Mike Wilson and approved by Dyson Whitney’s own mandates committee. That wouldn’t happen until next week. He would have plenty of time to check out Louisiana Light when he got back to New York. Ask around, do a little digging, find out whether there were any problems with Louisiana Light that he should know about before he took Mike Wilson’s forty bips.

And what?
Not
take them? Pete shook his head, amusing himself with the absurdity of the thought. Forty bips … he ran through the numbers, turning them around and around in his mind, like things so precious and beautiful you can hardly believe they really exist, and if they do, they might shatter before you can get ahold of them.

That was what he started to think about now, the long, twisting, obstacle-laden path that lay between him and that prize. Any deal, even the most apparently straightforward and mutually agreeable, can break down over any number of potential points of dispute. It isn’t done until the ink’s on the page. A deal of this size, with the added complication of the transatlantic dimension, would be as fragile as any. Stanzy began to plan. He pulled out his notebook and started to jot down some points.

At last, in the airport, he pulled out his phone and called one of the vice presidents at the bank.

“Menendez!” he said. “We need a team.”

“What’s going on?”

“I’ll fill you in when I get back. Just get hold of a team. Two associates and an analyst.”

“Associates are tight, Pete. We got rid of so many. Every time I talk to Fischer, he’s fucking telling me he’s got no one.”

“We need a top team, Menendez. Tell Fischer. I don’t care what he has to do. Tell him I need the best we’ve got. Tell him I want Sammy Weiss. You got that? Tell him to get us Sammy Weiss. This is big, Phil. Tell Fischer this is big.”

“What’s happening, Pete? You got a deal? You big swinging dick! You’ve got a deal, haven’t you?”

Stanzy grinned. “I got something, that’s for sure. Get a war room, Phil. The lot. This is ultraconfidential. I’ll be back at eight. I’ll fill you in then.”

“What’s going on, Pete? What? Tell me now.”

“I’m in Baton Rouge. Figure it out. And Phil, when you talk to Fischer, see if you can get someone on the team who’s a Brit.”

4

Bernard Fischer had the worst job at Dyson Whitney. That was saying something, considering all the other jobs he’d had at the bank. Over eight years, he had worked up from analyst, through associate, to vice president, which was one rung on the hierarchy below managing director. The problem was that he wasn’t just any VP. For the period of one year, he had been tapped to be VP in charge of staff allocation.

Being VP of staff allocation had a downside. You got lied to, threatened, yelled at, and generally abused by anyone at VP level and above. The upside? Bernard Fischer was still waiting to find one.

Allocating staff at Dyson Whitney meant distributing the analysts and associates among the various projects in the bank, trying to balance the near-hysterical demands of table-thumping MDs and VPs against the limited realities of the available pool. Analysts were the lowest grade in the bank and did the worst of the grunt work. After about three years, if they survived that long—and about half of them didn’t—they were promoted to associate. Associates would serve about three years before having the chance to become a VP. When it came to analysts and associates, the only thing anyone cared about was whether they were going to deliver the work they were told to do. Every MD and VP had favorites. Everyone thought they knew who were the big producers and who were the losers. Everyone wanted experienced associates who could be told what to do and left to get on with it. Bernard Fischer found himself struggling to satisfy demands out of an unusually shallow pool of associates that had been left after a round of layoffs earlier in the year. No one seemed to ask themselves how the green first-year analysts who had just been recruited would turn into the experienced associates to replace them if no one was prepared to staff them on their teams and teach them the trade. Before he had become the staffing VP, Bernard Fischer wouldn’t have asked it, either. By now he had worked out the answer. Only no one else much wanted to hear it.

And now he had Phil Menendez on the phone, shouting in his ear. Phil was the loudest, most foul-mouthed VP in the bank, which wouldn’t have been so bad if only he had a vocabulary of more than about three expletives that he continually repeated.

“Phil, I cannot give you Vince Cozzi,” Bernard said for the fifth time. “Why don’t you understand? He’s in the middle of a deal.”

“I don’t give a fuck!” shouted Phil.

“Obviously. But Bob Waite does. You want Vince Cozzi, Phil, you’re going to have to talk to Bob.”

Bob Waite was an MD. He hated Phil Menendez, who hated him back. Phil didn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of getting an associate off one of his teams.

“Get Pete Stanzy to talk to him,” said Bernard.

“I gotta get this team today!” yelled Phil.

Bernard sighed. “Phil, I’ve given you Sammy Weiss. Sammy’s a great associate, a top producer. You wanted Sammy, right? You asked for him. Okay, I’ve pulled him off something he was doing for Dale Bronson. You understand what I already had to go through with Dale for that? You want to thank me?”

“Yeah, right.”

“And I’ve given you Cynthia Holloway.”

“She’s crap! We should fire her ass.”

“You
wanted
her, Phil.”

“I wanted a Brit. Don’t we have another Brit?”

“She’s the only one.”

“Jesus Christ! I told you, she’s crap. I wouldn’t let her give me a blow job.”

Unlikely to be an issue, thought Bernard. He had a printout of the staffing sheet on the desk in front of him. He ran his eyes down the sheet, mentally evaluating the ones who were free. Phil had knocked back just about every other name he had suggested. “Jeez, Phil. Two out of three you wanted, I’ve got for you. The third one, I can only tell you what I’ve got left. I offered you Nick Bromgrove and you won’t take him because he didn’t perform on the Alphaguard deal—”

“He’s a jerkoff! Didn’t we fire him already?”

“What about Steve Pippos? What did you say? He couldn’t find the severance terms on some guy down in Florida—”

“We should fire him as well! What a useless fuck!”

Bernard shook his head. There was no point going through the names again, Phil had something against them all. “Well, all I’ve got left for you is Rob Holding and Ben Levi.”

“Who are they?”

“They’re analysts, Phil.”

“What kind of analysts?”

“Analysts,” said Bernard cautiously. “Dyson Whitney analysts.”

There was silence for a moment. Bernard winced. It would take about two seconds more for Phil to realize why Bernard hadn’t mentioned them before.

“You’re selling me rookies!” yelled Phil. “You’re selling me fucking rookies!”

“Phil, I’m telling you what I’ve got—”

“Do you know what kind of a deal I’ve got here?” demanded Phil, who had no idea yet himself. “Do you know what this deal is gonna mean for the bank?”

“How can I know that, Phil? You won’t tell me anything about it.”

“I can’t. Do you know how confidential I have to keep this?”

“Look, you’re going to have to choose,” said Bernard. “Otherwise, you’re going to have to take it all the way up to the Captain. I bow out.”

Phil was silent. The chief executive of Dyson Whitney, or the Captain, as he was known, hated getting involved in staffing disputes. Pete Stanzy wasn’t going to thank him if he got the Captain involved.

“Choose, Phil,” said Bernard.

“What were their names?” growled Menendez.

Bernard glanced at the staffing sheet on the desk in front of him. “Rob Holding and Ben Levi.”

“What are they like?”

“How would I know? They’re rookies, Phil. Joined a few weeks ago. We must have thought they were good enough to work here.”

“Oh, that’s great.”

“You can have either of them. They’ve been given stuff to keep them busy. Nothing that anyone needs.”

“Mother
fucker
.”

“Well?” said Bernard.

“You’re killing me here. This is the judgment of Samuel.”

“Solomon,” said Bernard. “And it’s not.”

“What? What’s not? What the fuck are you talking about, Fischer?”

Bernard sighed. “Who do you want, Phil? Holding or Levi?”

“Give me the first one,” said Menendez grudgingly.

“Rob Holding? He’s the one you want?”

“No, he’s not the one I
want
. He’s the little fuck you’re forcing me to take.”

“Rob Holding it is,” said Bernard. “He’s on extension 4327. I’ll pull him off what he’s doing. You want to tell him or shall I?”

“You tell him,” said Phil. “Tell him to be in my war room at eight o’clock.”

“Tomorrow?”

“Tonight!”

“Where’s your war room?” asked Bernard.

“I don’t know yet. If he can’t find it by eight o’clock, it’ll just show what a fuck he is.”

“You want me to tell him that?”

“If you like,” retorted Phil Menendez, and slammed the phone down.

Bernard Fischer put down his phone. His office, like the offices of the other VPs, was separated by a glass partition from the bullpen where the analysts and associates sat at their computers. There were about forty of them out there, gazing seriously at computer screens, punching at keyboards, or talking into phones. Bernard knew that he must have met Rob Holding a few weeks back during the induction program for new analysts when he had given a talk on staffing. He looked around the bullpen. There were a number of faces he didn’t recognize. He had no idea which one belonged to the rookie he had just assigned to Phil Menendez. Rob Holding was just a name on a staffing sheet.

Bernard Fischer ticked it off, writing
Phil Menendez
alongside it. “Rob Holding,” he murmured as he wrote, “may God have mercy on your soul.”

5

The Beneventi Cement Company was a midsize cement manufacturer headquartered in Turin, Italy. According to the annual report on the screen, it had just had a pretty poor year. A damn poor year. The Beneventi Cement Company, thought Rob with a wry smile as he copied the key figures into a spreadsheet, would be lucky to issue another annual report if it kept going like that.

Rob Holding had never heard of the Beneventi Cement Company before and he was unlikely to hear of it again. Its name just happened to be on a list of 214 cement manufacturers that someone in the bank had e-mailed to him. The same person, whom Rob had never met, had also e-mailed the spreadsheet into which Rob was supposed to enter the main data on every company on the list after downloading their financial accounts from the Net. Rob didn’t know why he was doing this. Apart from the fact that he had been told to.

Rob was six-one with dark hair, a good physique, and a winning smile. He came from a middle-class family in Pittsburgh. Rob had an older sister, Sherryl, who got hitched to a real-estate guy who took her to Arizona. That was fine with Sherryl. She couldn’t wait to get out of Pittsburgh. Life had gotten hard for the Holdings, as it had for a lot of families across the Rust Belt. Rob’s father had been a technical draftsman at an auto-parts manufacturer. He lost his job back in the late nineties when the company closed down and hadn’t held a steady job since. Rob’s mother was a schoolteacher, a big believer in the role of community. Kind of a Hillary Clinton disciple. It was only with gritted teeth that she had been able to bring herself to vote for Obama after he beat Hillary to the 2008 nomination, and she still hadn’t recovered from the disappointment. She had devoted her entire career to the public-school system. Year by year, she got more distressed at what she saw.

His mother had instilled something in Rob. Some part of her idealism had rubbed off. Or maybe it was seeing his father lose his job when he was barely forty-five, right in the middle of what should have been the most productive years of his life. Rob had an itch in him to do something, to make a difference. He just hadn’t worked out what it was yet.

Of the two children in the family, Rob was the gifted one. He didn’t have any money to back him, but he had enthusiasm and drive. He worked nights to get through Penn State, then found himself with a part scholarship to law school at Columbia, graduating fourth in his class. Out of law school he joined Roller, Waite & Livingstone, a major Wall Street law firm, and after a couple of years he was about ready to think about paying off some of his debt. But this wasn’t the thing for him, he already knew that. Contracts, bid documents, offerings documents for major corporations. After the initial buzz of getting a job at a firm of that caliber, the shine wore off. He looked at the Roller Waite partners and knew he didn’t want to be like them in another ten years, even the ones he liked. Whatever it was that he wanted to do, this wasn’t the place to do it. In the meantime, he had worked alongside a bunch of investment bankers on deals where Roller Waite was doing the legal work. The investment bankers were sharp, energetic. The kind of people who got things done. They were the ones who called the shots. He got to know a couple of them who had started out as lawyers before making the switch. They told him to do an MBA. He began to think about it. Six months later, he was out of Roller Waite. Now, two years on, he had an MBA from Cornell, a load more debt, and had interviewed with just about every investment bank on Wall Street.