pen in her hand, and a thick sheaf of documents in front of her. Farther down the table was dinner- chicken satay, pad thai, vegetables simmered in curry and coconut milk, and crab rolls- all from the Thai place around the corner. Caetano Veloso was singing soft Portuguese from the stereo. I picked a crab roll from its white cardboard box and took a bite.
“Shit,” Jane said into the phone. “We sent them the audit papers three weeks ago, Roger. They’re only getting to them now? What lazy bastards.” She was wearing a white MIT T-shirt and snug blue jeans. Her small feet were bare, and there were two black loafers under her chair. Her left leg was tucked beneath her, and she brushed the ball of her right foot lightly against the floor.
Jane was about five-foot-four and slim, with a shapely layer of muscle on her arms and legs and on her flat belly. Her cropped jet-black hair was damp just now, and I figured she’d stopped upstairs to shower and change. She listened to Roger talk and said “uh-huh” and jotted notes in the margins of a page, and there was an intent look on her heart-shaped face. Her small mouth was pursed, and the pout in her bottom lip was more pronounced. Her fine brows were furrowed as she scanned the pages. She looked much younger than her thirty-four years.
Jane made some final notes and put aside the document. Roger spoke, and she drummed her short glossy nails on the tabletop. She took up another document and flicked through the sheets.
“I’m on page seven of the memorandum of understanding, third paragraph. You with me?” She waited. “They screwed up the revenue targets for year two… Yeah, all four quarters.” Roger talked some more, and Jane looked at me and rolled her eyes. She made a one minute gesture. “And the same thing with the head-count projections on the next page. You see that?… All right, I’ve got to eat now. I’ll call you when I’m back in the office.” She laughed. “Yes, I actually eat, Roger.” She closed her phone and sighed heavily. She looked me up and down.
“Nice outfit,” she said, smiling.
I smiled back. “Glad you like it. How’s your deal going?”
“Lurching is the word that comes to mind. Par for the course with law firms and investment banks, I guess; lots of well-credentialed people billing lots of time while avoiding much actual work. Pass me those noodles, will you?” I handed Jane a container and a pair of chopsticks. She ate from the box. I sat down next to her with the container of crab rolls.
Jane is a CEO-for-hire, a kind of A?ber-consultant called in by the boards of companies in deep trouble to save their sinking shipsor at least to get a good price for the scrap. Her gigs are strictly short-term, two years or less, and she demands- and gets- a piece of the action for her efforts. Jane was brought into the dot-com about a year ago, by the venture capital firm that held a majority stake in the company. Her mandate was to get the business back on its feet, make it profitable, and find a buyer, and through a combination of scary intelligence, relentless energy, and icy political savvy wrapped in irresistible charm, she was three-for-three. For the last six weeks, she’d spent most of her time on closing the deal.
“You’re really going back in?”
“I have to. They’re reviewing our contracts tomorrow, and I’ve got people getting ready. They’ll need help.”
“So it’s going to happen?”
Jane picked a crab roll from my container. “It’ll happen. It may age me by ten years- but it’ll happen. It’s a great fit for the buyers, a great price for us, and the best thing for the company. It’s a win all the way around. Slide those veggies down here.”
I did, and helped myself to a skewer of chicken satay. “Are they still asking you to stay on?”
Jane winced and shook her head. “It’s just a crush,” she said. “They’ll get over it.” She got up and gathered her papers and stacked them on the kitchen counter. She saw the tulips there. “These are pretty.”
“They’re for you,” I said.
Jane smiled. She opened a cabinet beneath the counter and came up with shears and a blue glass vase. She slit the wrapping on the tulips and snipped an inch from the bottom of the stems. Her movements were quick and sure. She ran water in the vase and put the tulips in.
“Nothing they can do to make it worth your while?” I asked.
“Nope. The buyers are okay, but it’s still a big company and way too much of a boys’ club. There’s no way I’d sign up for that again.”
After B-school, Jane had done time at a prestigious investment bank and at a big management consulting firm, and both experiences had filled her with a fierce resolve to be always self-employed.
“Besides,” she said, “it’s been a long year. I’ve got another few weeks on this deal, and all I want afterward is to ride into the sunset.” Jane looked up at me. “Have you thought any more about riding along?” she asked, and the air seemed to thicken between us.
In the brief reprieves she granted herself from the office and the culmination of her deal, Jane had been planning a very long vacation, and she’d invited me to join her. Guidebooks and travel magazines had been turning up in my apartment for weeks now, and we’d been tiptoeing at the edges of this conversation for almost as long. Each time we did, it was a cautious tug-of-war, a wary testing of resistance and balance over suddenly unstable terrain. And each time left us both a little edgy.
“Sure,” I said.
She cocked an eyebrow. “Sure, you’ve thought about it, or sure, you’re coming?”
“I’ve thought about it. I’m still thinking about it.”
“Thinking that it’s a good idea?”
“That it’s a good idea, but…”
Jane looked down at the flowers. “But what?”
“But I took a job today, and I don’t know if it’ll be a long one. I have to see how it plays out.”
Jane pursed her lips and nodded minutely. She stared at the tulips and spent a while rearranging them in the vase. “I guess your trip to Brooklyn went well,” she said eventually.
“Well enough,” I said, and I told her about my meeting with Nina Sachs and my lunch with Tom Neary. She listened carefully and shook her head when I was through.
“If it was anyone else, I’d say maybe he’d run off to hide his face in shame. But as it’s Danes, my bet is that some investors bought him a room at the Jimmy Hoffa Hilton.” There was a wry twist to her mouth and I was relieved to see it.
I laughed. “Do you know the guy?”
“Just from the stuff in the papers- about Piedmont- and from when he was on Market Minds all the time. I remember the bratty know-it-all attitude. I was actually referring to the whole analyst species.” She opened the fridge and took out a bottle of seltzer. She brought it and two glasses back to the table.
“You have it in for them on general principle, or do you have a more specific grudge?”
Jane filled the glasses. She drank from hers and stretched her legs out. “Both, I guess.” I raised my eyebrows, and Jane continued. “I never had illusions about analyst independence. I knew who paid their bonuses and who they were beholden to- and it certainly wasn’t the investing public. I mean, the notion of getting an objective opinion about a company, or an unbiased recommendation about its stock, from somebody who’s essentially a paid pitchman for that company- it’s ridiculous. And even if they weren’t thoroughly compromised, what are their opinions worth anyway? They’re like weathermen. Being right has never been a big part of the job description.” Jane took another drink. She put her right heel on the edge of her seat and rested her arm on her knee. She flexed her toes, and the tendons were taut along the top of her foot.
“I thought the reforms changed things,” I said.
Jane shook her head and gave me a sympathetic, silly-boy look. “That’s the party line, I suppose- that the reforms got rid of a layer of conflict by separating the analysts from the investment bankers and separating analyst pay from banking fees. But so what? It’s still the same guys at the top of these firms, deciding who gets paid and how much. If investment banking is important to them, and if they think a certain analyst has helped win business, they’re going to make sure he gets paid for it. Senior management knows it, the investment bankers know it, and so do the analysts- they just try to be a little less brazen these days.”
She drank some seltzer and shook her head some more.
“And sure, firms are very careful now about saying so if they do business with a company that their analysts are touting. But telling people about conflicts of interest doesn’t make the conflicts go away. A cynical person might even argue that all this disclosure just gives the firms more cover for the next time around.”
Jane was relaxed, and her compact body was at ease in the chair, but she nonetheless projected a latent,
