looked at their faces in sequence, all united with Kyle in their stares of doubt and indictment.
What to tell them? What not to?
(Was the raging in my ears what a diver felt while suspended in the drop with no return available to the anchored footing of the diving board? Did you consume the gravity in your descent, becoming calmer as you neared the crash with the water?)
“We may,” I opened, “have a lot less than we need. But …”
Kyle wedged in his demand like a knife blade. “Less?”
“But we may not need anything at all.”
“Why?”
“Because we may not have a deal at all.”
“Bottom line,” Kyle demanded, swift and severe.
I scrambled for some lean line of argument. “I got hold of Bank of South Asia last night. They’re our financing arm for the deal. Suddenly there’s a lot of confusion. Even though we’re sitting with all their contracts in hand. They sound like they’re trying to back out on us. From the looks of it, I think the whole deal is going to come unravelled. And we’re not going to have any financing. But there aren’t going to be any bonds available for us either. So we’re not going to get any bonds, we’re not going to owe anything. It’s a wash. And we just move on to the next deal.”
“No.”
Halted by Ted Dwyer’s pronouncement lobbed in from the side of the room, I stood, reticent, uncertain how to proceed, steeping in my own frustration.
Tall, thin, and balding, with thick folds of skin under his jaw where he had once been beefy, Ted leaned back into the couch, bunching the blazer bearing his thready air squadron crest on its pocket, and unceremoniously brushed a scattering of dandruff from his shoulders and lapels.
“We already know that this thing has blown up in your face,” Ted stated. “But it seems we’re not the only ones that know.”
Sensing I would make myself vulnerable by having to ask for more details, I only raised my eyebrows in inquiry to Dwyer.
Adroitly, he handed me back off to Kyle with a curt nod.
“This,” Kyle explained, lifting several sheets of paper from his desk with tangible disdain. “Waiting for me when I came in this morning. Faxed in to us from London just after their open. From Amsterdam Bank.”
I could only wait for more.
“It’s their offer, Paris. For the Bangkok Commercial Bank bonds. They’ll give us eighty cents on the dollar for bonds that we buy for ninety-two cents on the dollar. If we take it we’ll only lose twelve million.”
“But there’s no way – ”
“And if we hustle around and do a lot of selling for them on the side they’ll pay us enough commission that we can carve our loss down to ten million.”
Kyle snapped the pages against his fingers.
Thinking there would be more, I waited in the ensuing silence while Kyle’s words drifted down like dry, brittle leaves.
When no one else spoke up, I began constructing my protest. “We have contracts with Bangkok Commercial. And with BSA. That let us off the hook …”
“Apparently not.”
“Amsterdam can’t do that.”
“Apparently, they have.”
Again, from my periphery, Ted Dwyer’s voice intruded, casual and terse.
“Amsterdam Bank not only knows this firm is in trouble. They know a great deal about how much trouble. They must know everything. Exactly. Or they’d never issue an offer like that. They’d never risk having a firm this small spit back in their face.”
Now I was certain there would be more.
“So,” Dwyer continued, “I think you better tell us everything about what you’ve been cooking up in Singapore with Bank of South Asia. What’s the full story, my friend?”
I bristled at Dwyer’s patronizing remark, tacked on to blandly assert his seniority over the room. I tried to curb my irritation, hastily absorb the extra rules in the game and the fresh positions of the players on the board.
“We have a deal with Bank of South Asia,” I explained briskly, rushing to reach the words before they could be refuted. “Put together when I was in Singapore. We have contracts. Cash. An asset-backed line of credit for at least eighty million bucks secured by the Bangkok bonds. Then, last night when I call, I learn that BSA’s suddenly fired their finance director, Stanley Man, who tells me BSA sold the financing contracts to Amsterdam Bank because Amsterdam was threatening to dump some large blocks of BSA stock from some of their insurance portfolios. And BSA buckled under because they live in constant fear of their reduced capital base with so much blood-letting in the Asian markets all last year.”
Kyle pushed back in his chair impatiently. “Well. That’s it, then.”
“It would seem so,” Ted Dwyer agreed.
Kyle added firmly, “That’s the bitch of it.”
I dashed after them to interrupt their momentum. My impatience swam like a carp beneath my skin bumping for escape. “We have contracts.”
“What you have,” Ted Dwyer declared, “is a legal fight that will take two years to get to court, take two million dollars to run, and take two more years to win.” He paused to allow Kyle to mutter his accord. “In the meantime, what are you going to use to pay for those bonds?”
“Then,” I insisted stubbornly, “let Bangkok Commercial sue us and let them wait a few years.”
Kyle snorted. “And where would our next deals come from? Do you know of anybody that would put a deal through here if there’s even a hint that we might not perform or that their deal might get sucked into some pending litigation that could jump out and bite us in the ass?”
“Only if there is any litigation. Bangkok Commercial will come to the same conclusion and not spend the time and money to chase us.”
“Bankrupt for cash, Paris. Or bankrupt for reputation. It’s all the same thing.”
“But,” I argued, “that’s only if Bank of South Asia is really going to back out of the deal. We need to get to them directly. To their president and directors. Find out what the hell is really going on.”
Kyle shrugged, cynical, broadcasting his scorn of such obvious simplicity. “You can if you like.”
I could not understand why Kyle was conceding so fluently, and so haphazardly; his wrath would normally have been huge. Instead, his indifference was cast about the office in careless plenty.
Arrested as much by my own confusion as by Kyle’s lofty dismissal, I ground my heels into the smooth carpeting under the scolding hum of the fluorescent lighting.
Kyle ploughed on. “Brenda, what’s our
