the yard sale. Okay?”
“If you say so.”
“Then you go and take pictures of everything in the yard. And all week you go around to all of your friends. You show them pictures of all of the yard sale stuff. And you sell them all the stuff from the pictures. So far so good?”
“So far.”
“Okay. Now next Saturday, all of your friends come over to your house and they pay you for everything. And all of the money they pay you adds up to six hundred dollars. And you turn around and walk over to your neighbour and you pay him the five hundred dollars you owe him for the stuff. Then you hand the stuff over to your friends who you’ve pre-sold it to.”
I noticed the twitch of irritation from my words in the mirror of her face. I sounded patronizing. In my seclusion, my faculty to touch others has been buried beyond reach. I rushed to wrap up by dropping my palms open. “Then, what are you left with? Even though all the stuff is gone and even though you paid five hundred dollars to your neighbour for the stuff? How much is your profit?”
“A hundred dollars.”
“That’s what pre-selling a bond issue in syndication is like. Right now I’m running around selling the bonds before they’re issued. And when it comes time to pay for the bonds, I’ll have all the money from the syndicate partners who’ve subscribed to them.”
“And you’ll have a profit?”
“Welcome to Dodge City where every two-bit stock salesman wants to become a financial syndications gunslinger.”
She dropped our eye contact, not knowing how to respond to slang that was familiar to me, foreign to her.
To compensate, I offered, “I’ll be glad to help you with your course any time you want.”
“Thank you. I’d appreciate that. Just don’t mention it, okay. The other girls will gossip if they think I’m trying to get ahead of them.”
She raised her eyes, hesitated.
“Does this,” I asked, “make you feel any better about going on vacation?”
“Is this what you’ll be doing when I’m on vacation?”
“Day and night.”
She twisted up from her chair, then lingered before leaving. “Mr. Smith?”
“Yeah.”
“Is this what you really do around here?”
I nodded. “Just like yard sales. Except the money has more zeros.”
My attempted levity did not register. Deflecting back off her poorly concealed doubt, my words settled heavily, like layers of sand being poured around my ankles.
“Don’t worry,” I tried to reassure her in rapidly spun syllables. “I’ve got a secret weapon that’s not available in yard sales.”
“What?”
“I’ve got Stanley Man.”
Puzzled, she scratched her wrist and quietly walked out. Leaving me saddened for having tried. Leaving me irritated that she has made me feel responsible for eroding her happiness.
Was there anyone left I had not in some way failed?
* * *
In my world, sometimes, progress was measured in proximity to power and consent rather than financial profit and loss.
In the final remnants of the afternoon, Kyle appeared in my office doorway – a concession of coming, unannounced and informally, several dozen feet down the corridor to me rather than summoning me back to his office to resume the morning’s arguing.
“Sit down,” I offered. Two steps backward when accusations boiled, one step forward when they simmered back down.
“How’re we doing? What’s the count?” Kyle inquired, dropping into a chair, his voice now deflated by a day laden with unabated apprehension.
I kept my shrug neutral. I had no emotional stamina for further confrontation. Any more, even the least confrontation stirred up a sickening feeling like anticipating the menace of a blindside blow.
“Like I said, Kyle, it’s still going to take a couple more hours until the sun comes up on the other side of the world. I’ll be here late talking to them. Like all last week. I’ll stay on it. And it’s not as if we have to make a deadline today. We’ve got three weeks. I built a couple of weeks extra margin into it.”
Kyle chewed at the inner pocket of his cheek. “I’m still worried as hell about the cash.”
“I’ll bring the commitments in.”
“From whom?”
“Bank of South Asia.”
“How?”
“Most of the negotiations are complete.”
“Will we have enough?”
“We’ll have enough.”
“Paying for the whole issue still worries the shit out me.”
“We both know how important it is for everyone to see us paying for those bonds without having to scramble.”
“Scrambling may not be our only problem.”
Kyle’s contention left several seconds of icy silence between us.
In tepid tones, I tried to curve the conversation around our dilemma. “Underneath all our posturing with Bangkok Commercial, we both know the really important thing is that we bought the entire issue with no interference. We own it. We beat out Amsterdam Bank. We beat out a bank a hundred times bigger than us.”
I abandoned the words I was speaking. Raced ahead to evaluate my next statements.
Sidestepping all references to our shortfall of funds, I tried to stack up our advantages to avert Kyle’s forecasts of collective hazard. “I planned it. I put it in motion. And then I made that whole Amsterdam crew think that we’d rolled over and died so that the greedy bastards would keep pre-selling the entire bond issue until they’d over-subscribed it two or three times.”
“Amsterdam Bank can do that,” Kyle granted in small accord. “Like you say, they’ve got a thousand times our capital. And a hundred times more salesmen to sell off the bonds.”
“And that’s their usual style, isn’t it?”
“Of course it’s their style, Paris. When they want a bond issue, they come in with unlimited amounts of cash to buy it up. And then they resell it before they’ve even paid for it.”
“And they make a killing in the profit spread.”
“Of course. That’s the whole idea.”
“And
