though, I have to say. Creative. Our firm has managed the tax particulars on their major acquisitions. Most of the work had been done for us by their own excellent counsel. Anticipated nearly everything.”
“Iku was involved with them on the big oil deal,” I said.
“Big is right.”
“You know Angel Valero?”
“Nominally. The name comes up in relation to Craig. I see him at fundraisers, the Financial Roundtable. Nothing beyond that.”
“Reputation?”
“Deranged by ambition and greed. I thought we covered that.”
“We did.”
This time of the season most of the big powerboats had emptied out of the Little Peconic Bay. There were still small fishing boats hugging the buoys and rocking in the turbulence above the shoals, and a scattered fleet of sailboats responding to the better wind and lighter traffic. Again, I felt a pull as I watched the sails angled to the wind glide across the green coast of the North Fork.
“Getting out on the boat much?” I asked Burton.
“A cruise or two. Club racing. Enough to satisfy the impulse.”
“Is that impulse a lifetime thing?” I asked.
“Begins in utero,” said Burton.
“Hm.”
We studied the approach and subsequent disorganized tack of a small sloop. Neither of us wanted to break the spell by criticizing the maneuver.
“I need to talk to Angel Valero,” I said. “I think I have an introduction, but I need a shtick. Something to get him talking.”
Burton always looked slightly in need of a haircut. A thing he drew notice to by frequently using his fingers to comb his hair off his forehead, a futile gesture when sitting at the edge of the breezy Little Peconic Bay.
“Large-scale investments are at once dauntingly complex and simple as it gets,” he said. “The complexity is all in the targeting of opportunity, the valuation and subsequent number crunching, the accounting and regulatory contortions, conflicts in corporate structures, tax implications—our bailiwick—and personnel considerations, mostly as it relates to management, though sometimes middle management and unions come into play. To say nothing of core business practices and strategic planning.”
“What’s the simple part?” I asked.
“The motivation.”
“Ambition and greed?”
“Natural economic evolution. The formation and reformation of corporate enterprise, a necessary function of a dynamic free market system. Anyway, people like to buy and sell things, and when those things are worth billions of dollars, it calls for robust capital markets. It also breeds people like Angel Valero.”
“A dealmaker.” I said.
“Not exactly. Angel operates on the outer fringes of the hedge fund and private equity business. Very aggressive, creative, risk-based. The type who buys a business, usually distressed, at a big discount, reorganizes the company, then rearranges the playing field, changing not only the business model but the market in which it operates.”
“You can do that?”
“Angel runs a unit at Craig they all call Special Ops, short for special opportunities, meaning anything you can turn into a huge profit if you have huge capital to invest and a willingness to take the accordant risk. A slot machine maker in country A is bankrupt, partly because country B next door has banned gambling. You buy the slot business, figure out a way to repeal the gambling law, and bingo, if you’ll forgive the expression. A bank in the next country is collapsing under defaults because management is made up of second cousins who happen to be the brothers and sisters of the borrowers. You buy the bank at a fire-sale price, broom everyone in management, entice a third party collections operation with giant commissions and have at it. It’s a lot harder than it sounds, but people like Angel Valero do it every day.”
“Make good money, does he?”
“A few hundred million a year, if you believe the street. I think that’s an underestimate. Craig is privately held, and pretty opaque, but the word is Special Ops comprises a tenth of the revenue and forty percent of the profit.”
“So Angel will talk to me if I have a lead on an exotic, undervalued financial opportunity.” I gestured toward the driveway. “Like a 1967 Pontiac Grand Prix.”
“An asset to tantalize the cagiest investor.”
For some reason Eddie brought us a slimy piece of driftwood that he’d pulled from one of the tidal pools next to the beach. He dropped it in front of Burton and stood poised to chase it like he usually did with normal things like oak limbs and tennis balls.
Burton obliged and we watched Eddie do his soaring wonder dog routine off the breakwater.
“Sorry about that,” I said to Burton, watching him wipe his hands on his khaki duck hunters.
“Interesting departure.”
“That’s what he wants you to think.”
Eddie’s toss-the-beach-debris game and a few more beers occupied the rest of the productive day. We wandered down some desultory conversational paths, some relating to the dismal prospects of any baseball franchise arrayed against the Yankees. Burton caught me up on the garden renovations at his estate over near the ocean, and his success at tiling the master bathroom. Years ago he’d set himself the challenge of mastering—or at least making an honest go of—the construction trades, an area of common interest that first brought us together. As with most things Burton did, it was misinterpreted as a way to get in touch with working-class sensibilities. Burton just liked to build stuff, and uncover wonderful new experiences, like meeting the dry cleaner or using an ATM card at the grocery store.
“By the way,” he said to me as I walked him back to his car, “Angel worked as a professional wrestler while earning his MBA. His nom de guerre was ‘The Brainiac.’ Word is physical intimidation features largely in his negotiating repertoire.”
While I watched Burton drive off in his late-seventies Ford Country Squire, an automotive atavism as illogical as the Grand Prix, Eddie trotted up to me with another hunk of driftwood, more slickened with saliva than brine. I reached down to take it, but he moved out of the way and headed for Amanda’s place.
“Good luck with that one,” I called to him, but he continued undeterred, head upright and tail under sail, happy in his eccentricities.
For all I know Eddie and Amanda spent the rest of the evening tossing and retrieving smelly chunks of petrified wood. Neither of them interrupted me as I sat at the pine table on the screened-in porch scribbling on a yellow legal pad. This was a habit of mine left over from my troubleshooting career. Writing things down helped me think, if only by holding certain thoughts immobile as suppositions to validate or upend.
Deep into the night, I was still underlining and pointing arrows at one of these suppositions when a thought occurred to me. I picked up the phone.
“Wha’,” said Jackie.
“If you’re stoned I can call you back.”
“Asleep. What time is it?”
“Bedtime. If you live in the next time zone.”
“Christ.”
“Is your computer still on?” I asked her.
“My computer’s at the office. My old computer that I hardly ever use is on the porch disintegrating in the salt air.”
“Can you use it to get on the Internet?”
“Oh, you heard about the Internet? Did you also hear that you, too, could access this modern marvel simply by buying your own fucking computer?”
“Start ’er up. I’ll hold,” I said, lighting a cigarette and settling into a more comfortable chair.
