Her father named her Isabel. Her mother pronounced it Eee-so-bel, and so they spelled it Isobel. She was five foot four in stocking feet, and although unable to ignore a half-dozen unwelcome pounds, on a good day Isobel could admit that she probably looked as good as a thirty-year-old woman should. She did not confuse herself with the flat-bellied, hard-assed, high-titted beauties infesting the Times. But after a drink and a glimpse in a flattering mirror she could be confident any man worth coming across might think her attractive. Isobel’s jet-black hair was cut to the shoulders. It complemented her creamy skin and small, hazel eyes. Her nose was thin but good, her cheekbones high like her mother’s, and her chin very much English. Isobel dressed less carefully than most. She liked loose woolen suits in bright, clear colors. She wore rimless drugstore glasses for reading, which meant that she looked through them most of the time. She once heard a sympathetic colleague describe her appearance as “studious.” Isobel did not know if that was to the good.
Diversity, an ongoing enterprise and a major cultural force at the Times, is not an inordinately difficult pursuit for that institution. Droves of Latinos, African Americans, Euros, Asians, and diverse others, representing the wide world’s groups and classes, constantly besiege the paper for jobs. Yet some at the Times contend that management is never satisfied. They hold that its Human Resources barons (hardly newspaper people themselves) hunger unreasonably for the still-under-represented. Pacific Islanders were always at a premium. Thus, a female Fijian (white or not) crossing the HR horizon appeared as glory incarnate, a pearl very much above price. That Isobel suffered, on frequent occasion, from a vexing stutter added to her luster. The Times chose to classify it as a disability. After her first long interview, Isobel Gitlin e-mailed her parents that she had much to be cheerful about. The following day the Times offered her employment.
Isobel Gitlin wrote Christopher Hopman’s obituary. Although the news section of the paper carried a prominent story about the killing, her obit’s high point was the cause and manner of death: great man gunned down on golf course by high-powered rifle, no trace of physical evidence, no suspect, no hint of motive. She researched his life as a captain of industry, arts patron, and philanthropist. It was well documented and easily discovered through standard sources. Amid a generation of senior corporate executives that blossomed in the Reagan years, Hopman excelled as a driver of corporate expansion wielding leveraged debt as his weapon of choice. He didn’t run companies. He bought and sold them. His business was rerigging, repainting, rewrapping them for sale. As Isobel studied Hopman’s history she identified only one exposed mistake: his acquisition of controlling interest in a Houston-based holding company that included among its assets Knowland amp; Sons-the company most thought had precipitated the great southeastern E. coli disaster three years earlier. She highlighted that point in her notes and included it as a subordinate clause in a lengthy sentence somewhere in the middle of the piece.
“There are only two places in the paper,” an editor told her once, “where you’ll find absolute certainty: Sports and Obituaries. You make sure you get the score right.” She took that more seriously than he could have hoped.
New York
Nathan Stein was angry. He hated whatever he did not understand, and now he felt that a good deal of gobbledy-gook had been shoved in his face, possibly to make him feel small, trapped, mocked, morose.
“Agar? What the hell’s ‘agar’?” he demanded, “and this ‘sorba whatever, something MacConkey’? And what the fuck is ‘smack’? I thought it was some kind of heroin. What the hell kind of equipment is that?” He’d liked this Hindu woman, or whatever the hell she was, at first glance. She was pretty as a picture: dark and sharp featured, with little green stones in her ears and a nice yellow, silky thing hanging off her shoulder. He thought she was supposed to have a dot in the middle of her forehead, but no matter. She looked like a lovely doll and stood a good six inches shorter than him, a difference he enjoyed infrequently. She’d been standing there for half an hour before she had a chance to say a word.
“Sorbitol, Mr. Stein,” she replied in a lilting, chimelike voice. “It’s called a sorbitol-MacConkey agar. That is S-M-A-C, or smack, if you will. As noted in the report before you, the agar itself is made up of agar-agar. It’s-”
“Agar-agar?” he exploded. “Give me a break! And smack is a goddamn illegal drug. Christ, Tom!” he whined, exasperated, appealing to the man on his left. “This sounds like Abbott and fucking Costello. Agar’s on first and agar’s on second.”
Big Irish Tom Maloney shifted position wearily, it seemed to Dr. Ganga Roy, perhaps in an effort to keep his suit jacket from getting stuck beneath his ample backside. She was almost as bemused by her odd little class as she was by her remarkable classroom.
The main section of Nathan Stein’s office, where they were meeting today, was twenty-five feet wide and eighteen feet deep. Its windows looked from the fifty-third floor over Manhattan north of the Battery. Stein’s battleship of a desk occupied the southeast corner of the room, and the light behind him lasted all morning long. He set it up that way purposely. The light was so bright behind him it hid his facial expression from anyone sitting in any of the four leather chairs that lined up to face him across the desk. Ten feet behind them, in the middle of the room, was a brass-fitted glass conference table surrounded by a dozen very different, very expensive chairs. Beneath that grouping a large red Bactrian rug, perhaps a hundred feet square, bespoke the anguished labor of a thousand tiny fingers. At the far end of the office were a black leather sofa, two huge chairs, and a massive sleek black-wood coffee table. Two doors, set off to the right of that furniture, led to Stein’s private bathroom and bedroom, so Dr. Roy supposed, completing his home away from all his other homes.
She’d stood and been ignored for the past twenty minutes, sunlight behind her, an easel at her side. Because she was standing, and because of the easel, where she stood became the head of the table. Tom Maloney faced her from his least favorite chair, the unforgiving mahogany number that forced his body into an awkward forward lean. He was stuck with it because Nathan had chosen the velvet to his right.
Nathan Stein was a genius at making things as difficult as possible. Today he was at the top of his game, and no wonder. The Knowland business had just hit the fan.
Not twenty-four hours ago, when Tom first called Dr. Ganga Roy, he’d modestly introduced himself as Senior Vice President and Director of Mergers and Acquisitions. “Which is,” he said, “when you come right down to it, just a lot of words.” He’d heard from a research director he knew that Dr. Roy was quite good and “quite tiny,” and hoped that the latter might have a soothing effect-that Napoleonfucking Stein, as he was known to so many at Stein, Gelb, Hector amp; Wills Securities, might find her smallness pleasing. This morning Tom had personally helped her set up the flip-chart easel she’d brought. He buzzed around her cheerfully until the others tromped in, none of them extending even the courtesy of a glance her way, and then Tom too acted as if she wasn’t there. She might have been the cleaning woman patiently waiting to make some slight move without causing notice. And so she stood for twenty minutes as the others argued, Tom took his seat, and the spectacle progressed.
She gathered that the big black man, the one Tom told her was Wesley Pitts, had incurred Mr. Stein’s disfavor. The matter had something to do with Houston. “Did you talk to Pat Grath yourself?” Mr. Stein was asking as they entered. Pitts said he’d talked to Grath and Billy MacNeal too. Now they were sitting, and she chose not to. Tom Maloney’s chubby, English-looking cheeks seemed to sag as he followed the conversation. Pitts said, “They’re all scared shitless. They’ve got hundreds of millions at stake.” Now Stein snarled most unbecomingly. “Tell me again,” he demanded.
Pitts’s eyes were large and round, fraught with more than information-bulging with urgency, fighting an anxious tension. “Pat got a call from the plant manager in Tennessee. His name is Ochs.” Pitts’s extraordi
narily large hands fumbled through a tiny notepad. “Floyd Ochs. One of his foremen, a guy named Wayne Korman, told him to shut down his line. He, Korman, said something about the readings being incomplete. Stuff was getting by untested. He said they’d been shipping out beef with E. coli bacteria since yesterday. He wanted to clean the whole operation, scrap the meat supply, and get new cattle before they started again. It seems they’ve been running around the clock. Ochs mentioned ‘operator fatigue’ to Grath. Anyway, Ochs told Korman not to do a fucking thing. He told him to take no action. He told him to wait for instructions. Then he called Grath. Grath told Billy Mac and Billy’s shit turned to water. The IPO-that’s all he thinks about. That’s when Pat called me. And that’s it, Nathan. That’s all I’ve got.”
“And what about Hopman?”
“I called Hopman myself,” said Tom Maloney. “He wants to hear what we have to say and that’s why we are sitting here now. That’s why we need to do this now. We need to get a handle on the scope of this problem.”
Silence at last settled into the room. They all looked at Nathan Stein and waited.
“Shit, Maloney!” he suddenly squawked in the strained, unpleasant voice of a student who understands nothing and blames that on the book. “Fucking sonofabitch!”
It surprised Dr. Roy only a little that they’d paid no attention to her, despite her doll-like beauty, despite her unconventional costume and easel. She was, she knew, a kind of servant-however well compensated. What amazed her was how freely these people talked in front of the help. She would certainly have excused her half-deaf Polish cleaning woman to ensure privacy for a sensitive phone conversation or a visit with friends. Where she came from, one accorded servants the very real respect due to those positioned to do one harm. Mid-level managers, research directors, whom she’d met by the many hundreds, did not behave this way. Now she knew those at the top were no different. Even faculty meetings were more discreet.
Now, Stein was looking at her, seeing her in his mind, she sensed, as the only one in the room not yet immersed in the troubles of Stein, Gelb, Hector amp; Wills Securities. “Sorry about all that,” he said, attempting a gracious smile, “and you are Dr. Roy. Am I right?”
Maloney shot to his feet much more limberly than she supposed he could. He ran through her credentials and introduced her to Stein (Vice Chairman of Stein, Gelb, Hector this man, she was sure, could only have gotten his crown by inheritance), and Pitts (described as the firm’s invaluable Vice President for Client Relations, whatever that might mean; he was very likely an ex-athlete, almost certainly some kind of salesman). And then there was the only female at the table, Louise Hollingsworth, a tall, stiff-necked, sharp-featured woman, small shouldered and lean, wiry hair unfortunately blonde, not at all flattered by her rich floral scent, black skirt, pink silk blouse, and heels. Maloney described Louise as “our most Senior Analyst, but in reality, much, much more.” Louise rose uncomfortably, unhappily, to shake hands. Even in her midthirties, even under the corporate get-up and ill-advised touches, Dr. Roy pictured a girl spending her best years free of lipstick and casual friends, haunting the stacks of a cozy New England college-Hampshire, Marlboro, maybe Bard-writing very long papers.
Stein got down to business by picking up the report he’d brought with him. He waved the document in the air and made his scrambled, inflamed speech about agar. The fleeting impulse to gallantry was now dead. He’d remembered what he did not understand. He continued:
“Agar’s on first and agar’s on second. No, agar’s on first, smack’s on second, crack’s on third. It reads like I don’t know what.” No one appeared to disagree. “Let me ask you this, Dr. Roy. What’s this stuff about ‘Consequential Developments’? I don’t know what the hell it means but I don’t like the sound of it. Where do you get that from anyway? How do you know what will happen?”
His bratty-student voice rose even higher. “Isn’t that a medical conclusion? You’re a Ph. D., right? Rockefeller Institute?” He held up the cover of the report and pointed to her name.
“That is correct. I am Ganga Roy, Ph. D.”
“Well, damnit, that’s what I mean!” Stein exploded. “What we’ve got here is just some technical bullshit. Thank you Dr. Roy for your technical report. But all this crap about consequences-am I confused or what? Isn’t that a medical thing? A medical kind of judgment? Don’t we need a medical expert to make a call like that?” He stared at the Indian woman, eyes expectant, all but asking, “Aren’t we one man short here?”
She could not have imagined a more delicious turn to the conversation.
“Oh, I certainly agree. I certainly do.” She flicked an eye toward her new friend Tom, to see whether he was in touch with the joy of the moment. He gave no sign of it. “And most certainly you have the medical opinion upon which you rightly insist. I am also Ganga Roy, MD. I am also a medical doctor, you see. Much like agar-agar, Mr. Stein, you may wish to regard me as doctor-doctor. And, if I may add, with some modesty, I consult for many firms as well as your own, precisely because I am qualified to provide the very thing that you have aptly identified, which is to say, an expert opinion.”
Which was, after all, why Tom Maloney had called her yesterday requesting a “detailed and complete” briefing on the subject of potential problems associated with E. coli contamination in ground beef. Dr. Roy, a fellow at the Rockefeller Institute and professor of medicine at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, consulted with many firms. She billed on a “per day” basis: fifteen hundred dollars for research and reports (plus a thousand more should she appear at a meeting, like this one, to explain her work); five thousand a day for depositions or court appearances. Last year this arrangement brought her eighty thousand in extra income, which included nine thousand in research fees from Stein, Gelb, Hector several of whose functionaries had, in recent months, asked her to investigate the practices of companies in which Stein, Gelb had taken an interest. She reported that the objects of their interest did or did not pollute, were or were not at risk for regulatory sanction. Something like that, she presumed, drove Tom Maloney’s agenda now.
Until yesterday she hadn’t heard of Tom Maloney. During their initial chat, he insisted with unexpected force, though never impolitely, that she present the following day. She told him her schedule would not permit. He doubled her rate to offset the inconvenience. She resisted. He persisted. She gave in before he got to the point of indicating the dollar value of those who sought her counsel. She would have guessed that the woman got a million or two; the black man something more than that; the others even more. Her guesses would have been far short of reality. Further, he did not mention the name of the specific firm in which they had taken an interest. He did emphasize that her audience would be unacquainted with the subject matter. This input was unnecessary. Dr. Roy understood that Stein, Gelb, Hector amp; Wills Securities did not, themselves, process meat.
She followed her rebuke to Nathan with a slight, charming smile. That crossed his wires sufficiently to quiet him for a moment. Tom saw his opportunity and slid a hand onto Stein’s shoulder.
“Just part of the job,” he thought, “but not just part of the job.” Keeping Nathan Stein on an even keel in times of crisis had become Tom Maloney’s most important task. It hadn’t always been so. Twenty years ago, Tom recalled, Nathan had been just as hard-ass about things, equally as aggressive, maybe more so, and probably meaner than he was now. But it played better in his late twenties than in middle age. Ambition is a garment best worn by the young. Tom knew that just as well as he knew who Nathan Stein was the first time he met him.
Tom was standing at the crowded bar waiting for the bartender to make his drinks. His friends were seated across the busy, noisy barroom. Lancers was the name of the place. It had changed names a half dozen times since then, but in those early, heady days it was the Wall Street equivalent of a cop bar. But Lancers, instead of serving as a home away from home for the city’s armed and dangerous blue-collar workers, was filled w
ith stock traders and brokers unwinding as they came off the floor, trying to do two things at the same time-overhear any nugget of news they might make money with, and looking to get laid. Naturally there were the secretaries seeking to better themselves, carefully deciding who to fuck and who not to. The raptors, of course, were there too. Raptors was the name given to people like Nathan Stein. They already had the power and they still had their youth. Some of them made it on their own. Many had more than a little help here and there. A few, like Nathan, were lucky enough to be born into it. Their name was on the door. “Grandson of Ben.” Everybody knew him as that.
Nathan could have done as some did: played golf and fucked every woman he could. And there was no shortage of them to be found at Stein, Gelb and every other firm in the neighborhood. He might have paid little or no attention to the real business of business. Tom often wondered how some men could squander opportunity in such a manner. “Good Christ,” he thought. Had he been fortunate enough to be a son-of or grandson-of, he would surely have done what Nathan Stein did. He would have grabbed that golden ring in his cradle and… just give me the chance! Tom wished. He didn’t know him personally, but he admired Nathan Stein. What he didn’t know was that Nathan Stein admired him.
The Knowland Retribution l-1 Page 7