Cooch

by Robert Cook

  She abruptly wiped off her mouth with her napkin and pushed it back into her lap, then interrupted his thoughts. “Tell me about yourself, Alex. I’m curious, and no one seems to know jack shit about you.”

  He shrugged. “There’s not much to tell. My father is dead and my mother now lives in the south of Spain, with her sisters. I have an older sister in New Jersey, who teaches eighth-grade math. I grew up in South Carolina, joined the marine corps young, and stayed for a while. When I got out, I went to Carnegie Mellon and double-majored in electrical engineering and computer science. It took a degree in that stuff to convince me that I didn’t want to make a life of it. I did some postgrad work in England—Arabic studies and modern history, mostly. Then I came to New York and worked up through the financial analyst training program at Merrill Lynch for a while and took a bunch of finance courses at NYU, mostly at night.”

  O’Connor leaned back in her chair and took a sip of her cocktail, studying him. She had a sense there was a lot more to his story than he was telling. Fine, she thought. I suppose we’re just trying to get each other’s scent right now.

  The waiter appeared again, to take a dinner and wine orders. Caitlin ordered the special, a braised veal shoulder, Alex a veal chop. For wine, he chose a 2006 Dancing Hares, a Napa red table wine in a lovely bottle, etched with hares standing on their hind legs, holding paws and dancing around the bottle. The waiter brought it quickly, opened it, and poured a little into a large wine glass and smelled it. He offered the glass to Alex, who swirled it around in the glass a bit, inhaled the scent deeply, and nodded to the waiter. The waiter decanted the Dancing Hares at the table, then swirled it before setting the decanter on the table.

  “I don’t know this wine, Alex,” she said. “The bottle is certainly beautiful. What’s the wine like?”

  “It’s cabernet sauvignon, merlot, and cabernet franc, with a little petit verdot, blended like a traditional right bank Bordeaux,” he said. “It’s not as bold and in your face as some of the wines that are cabernet only, but I love the smoothness and complexity of it. It takes a few minutes to open up.”

  Cuchulain interrupted her thoughts. “And about you?”

  Caitlin picked her chin up from folded hands.

  “You probably know most there is to know about me,” she said. “It’s more public—I’m more public. The loss of personal privacy is what I like least about running a public company. Your salary, your history, your education, and your stock holdings in the company are only the beginning of what people can easily find out about you, and government rules demand that I supply the information.”

  She grinned at him. “You’re reputed to be a thorough researcher and successful at beating the market as a result. Tell me what you know about me, other than that I have a trash mouth, which I’ve been told a thousand times. Fuck ‘em.”

  That was nicely done, he thought. Keep me talking, and give me a little verbal hip fake with the potty-mouth. I don’t think I’ll bother telling her how many otherwise interested investors are turned completely off by that.

  Alex leaned back. “And if I do, will you tell me what it is about you that I missed, in your opinion?”

  She thought for a few seconds. “Not this time. I’m not sure of your agenda, or if you have one. Let’s just see where it goes.”

  “Okay, fair. I don’t have an agenda that you don’t already know about, which makes it easier. I’ll just paint the description a little more broadly.”

  “Go for it. This is a Thomas Keller restaurant, so we’ll be here for at least three hours.”

  Cuchulain nodded, amused. “Okay, your parents are college professors. Two younger siblings—one of each. Summa in physics at Princeton, varsity swimmer, passionate scuba diver, master’s and PhD from Caltech. You ended up at the top, without apparent effort, and Caltech’s the toughest. You got a MacArthur grant—pretty amazing, given your age. Dissertation had to do with dynamic building and connection of virtual neuron receptors in hardware, based on statistical projections of growth patterns under various stimuli. I didn’t understand all of it, but I see how you got the process from hardware to software; software is more flexible and adaptable. Better yet, software is cheap to duplicate and ship to customers.”

  “You read my dissertation?” Caitlin said. “Whatever for?”

  Cuchulain shrugged. “It’s not rocket science as to my motives. I have a lot of my clients’ money invested in your company, and the market for tech stocks right now is not great, so I have to be super careful. It’s my job to dig as hard as I can. If I’m to outperform the market, I need to know more than the other money managers, and there is a big bunch of smart people managing money and looking at technology companies. If I get out of a suddenly troubled stock thirty seconds before anyone else, I win. Thirty seconds late—I lose. If I sell and then short the stock before the others get out, and I’m right, I win big-time. So, you can see that I play both long and short. I’m a hedge-fund manager; that’s what a hedge player does.”

  “You’d short Axial? My baby? That’s sacrilegious!” Caitlin snapped in mock horror.

  Cuchulain laughed. “Only to you. This is what I do for a living. My clients and I are just as much owners of Axial as you are; you sold us that right when you went public. We have the independent right to buy or sell the stock as we see fit. I exercise that right aggressively.”

  O’Connor shook her head ruefully. “I’m too close to Axial to think like that. Have you ever sold Axial short?”

  “Not yet,” he chuckled. “But your last calendar quarter was close. If you hadn’t closed that Daimler deal in the last few days, you would have missed the financial expectations the market holds for Axial. That would have hammered your stock price by at least twenty percent, maybe fifty percent in this market, even from this depressed level. The good news is that the Daimler deal closed, even though you gave them a nice discount to get it in.”

  “Jesus,” she sighed. “You know a lot more about my business than I dreamed any outsider knew. But we have a deal working with Airbus in Toulouse. That could have just as easily closed as Daimler. You missed that one, didn’t you, Cuchulain?”

  He sat silently for a moment, thinking. It had been a long time since he had met someone who attracted him the way Caitlin did, but it wasn’t his practice to arm CEOs with any more knowledge about him or his methods than was essential. Then he decided.

  “That deal with Airbus may not happen at all,” he said. “It certainly won’t happen any time soon. Your French country manager is in over his head; he’s slippery, and the customers there don’t trust him. Things there will progress very slowly. Don’t depend on him.”

  Caitlin’s temper flared. “You’re a money manager who has never produced anything, and you have the unmitigated gall to tell me that you know more about my management team than I do? Who the hell do you think you are? You just sit there on the sidelines, smug, and tell others how to do things that you’ve never done yourself. Get a life, Cuchulain!”

  Damn! Cuchulain thought, now you’ve done it!

  He shifted slightly, then said, “It’s what I do, Caitlin, and you asked. I dig and dig and dig, and have employees who do the grunt work and like it. You don’t have time to do that. No, I’ve never run a company, and I don’t plan to. I like what I do. I’m good at it and it pays the bills.”

  “Oh no!” she fumed. “I want to hear more than bullshit platitudes! Just how do you pretend that you reached those conclusions when you’re three thousand miles from the source? Are you fluent in French?”

  “I wish,” Alex said. “I speak only schoolboy French. But I hire people in France to ask questions. I mostly use university professors in the summers to make calls, talk to customers and company people and provide some oversight perspective on a short list of topics we suggest. You would be amazed at how many people in Europe will open up to college professors, plus the professors are smart, articulate, and can usually write their reports in English. Sometimes I hi
re what you might call financial detective agencies. One of those detective types gave me written evidence that your manager in France got caught with his hand in the cash register at another company where he worked a few years back, so I watch Axial France pretty carefully.”

  Caitlin’s face went cold. “I don’t believe you,” she said. “I can’t believe that you’re sitting here bullshitting me about something like that, for no reason. You’re an asshole, you know that?”

  Cuchulain was fighting his irritation. “Check it out. If you can’t find it, I’ll e-mail you a sanitized version of the report. I have no reason to bullshit you. I’m telling you things tonight that I almost never discuss with anyone. It may have been a mistake.”

  “And how did I get favored with all this disclosure? Dumb luck?”

  Here we go, he thought, standing up.

  “Worse yet,” Alex said, “I think you should close your European offices and pull back. Europe is in worse economic shape than the US, and no one there is buying much of anything they don’t have to have. Save your cash.”

  Cuchulain said softly, “You are drop-dead good-looking, drop-dead smart, drop-dead successful, hard body, good jock, and an articulate and interesting conversationalist. I wanted to tell you as much about the way I think and work as you wanted to hear. I took a risk. I’d like to see more of you, and this was my shot to get you interested. I’m sorry it didn’t work out, and that I ended up irritating you. That was not my intention. I just tend to plunge right down the middle on things that interest me.”

  “Sit down, Cuchulain,” Caitlin said with a smile and a wink. “I’m not done with my wine. This Dancing Hares is great wine, by the way. Good choice. Besides, I think it worked out just fine, at least so far. I’m interested—at least a little. So, I guess we are now officially on a date. Where are you going to take me when we finish dinner?”

  “All right!” Alex said enthusiastically. “I’ll take you wherever you want to go!”

  “I know!” she said excitedly. “I heard today that there’s a biker bar downtown that’s hot. Everyone’s talking about it. It’s called Choppers, with lots of motorcycle-gang types with tattoos and leather jackets, drinking, doping, and raising hell for local color. Let’s go there.”

  Alex frowned. “That’s probably a bad idea. We’re both pretty dressed up to be going to that kind of place, Caitlin. We should probably wait until we’re wearing something that will allow us to blend in a little better.”

  “Oh, come on!” Caitlin giggled. “A big guy like you worried about us getting picked on? Besides, I was told they have bouncers to handle any trouble that comes up. Don’t be such a fucking wuss. Do you know where it is? This is your town, you know, and you said anywhere, remember?”

  Alex raised his hands in surrender. “Choppers it is, Caitlin. I know it. When we finish up here, we’ll go slumming.”

  New York

  Downtown

  CHOPPERS was jammed and loud. Smoke curled around cheap lamps hanging from an ancient, bulging ceiling, and the sounds of Ernest Tubbs blared from huge speakers mounted high in two corners above a tiny dance floor. Groups of young men and women in jeans mingled with tattooed men in cutoff, black T-shirts, and leather vests, but mostly the groups were of their own. The smell of stale sweat competed with the essence of Happy perfume and the pungent stench of marijuana.

  Alex and Caitlin slipped into a booth just as another couple left it. A large-breasted waitress, going to fat, in shorts and a fitted body shirt came to take their order. “I’ll have a beer, Sam Adams,” Caitlin said.

  “Me too,” Alex said.

  There was a strange medley of people on the dance floor. Bikers in leather were dancing close with preppy young women with barrettes in their hair. A few of the women were trying to pull their hips away from their sweaty, bearded, unwashed dance partners, most of whom had both hands on the girls’ buttocks, pulling them into their erections. But a few of the other women were grinding their hips back to their dance partner, enjoying the danger and the forbidden fruit.

  A huge, bearded man walked up to their table, his body odor preceding him. His belly pushed an old denim shirt over his belt, which had a wide, silver Harley-Davidson buckle, and a sheath knife strapped on the right side, facing back. Thick, black hair covered his arms and curled from his shirt, which was open halfway to his navel. He smiled at Caitlin, showing his yellowed teeth, one with a prominent gold cap.

  “My name’s Billy. I run this gang. Let’s dance,” he said, and reached to grasp her hand.

  Caitlin pulled her hand from his. “Thank you, but no. I don’t dance.”

  He laughed loudly and reached again for her. “I’ll teach you. You’re gonna like it.”

  Caitlin grabbed his little finger and bent it back. “I said I don’t want to dance. What part of ‘no’ don’t you understand?”

  Billy ripped her hand from his finger. “Listen, bitch,” he snarled. “This is my bar. If I want to fuckin’ dance with you, you’re going to fuckin’ dance with me. If I want you to suck my dick, you’re going to fuckin’ suck my dick and swallow, not spit. Your little fairy boyfriend there don’t have shit to say about this. I’m the boss here.”

  Billy turned to glare and lean menacingly at Alex. “You got the message, pansy?” he said.

  Alex watched two bouncers rush across the room, separating to approach Billy from either side. Others were flowing among the crowd, ready to stop budding trouble.

  Alex turned his head and stared at him. “Yeah, I got the message, Billy.”

  Just then the bouncers got to either side of Billy, and grasped his arms. One of them said, “It’s time to go, Billy. We’ve talked about this before.”

  They started to pull him away when Billy said to Caitlin, “Listen, you snotty cunt. If I ever see you again, and I fuckin’ well hope I do, then we’re gonna have some fun. You’re gonna find out why they call me big Billy!”

  “You’re an animal!” Caitlin shouted at him. Then she turned to Alex. “As for you—thanks for all your support! Let’s get out of here.”

  Billy crowed loudly as they pulled him away. “No pussy for you tonight, pansy. No head, neither.”

  Alex stood, tossed a twenty-dollar bill on the table, and followed Caitlin from the bar. As the bouncers hustled Billy out of the bar, several bikers stood staring at Alex and Caitlin, grinning. Another made little kissing sounds as they walked by.

  When they got outside, Alex said, “Let’s get out of sight and grab a cab.” He had her arm and was moving her quickly down the street when she pulled her arm from his grasp.

  “Keep your hands off me, Cuchulain!” she snapped. “You weren’t so forceful back there in the bar. I’m not afraid of those people, and I’m not going to run from them. They’re animals! God, that was disgusting.”

  They walked at a slower pace and finally turned the corner.

  “Well, are you going to say anything, Cuchulain?” she asked.

  He waved down a cab and they jumped in. “Let’s go back uptown and have a drink somewhere quiet and talk about it,” he said as the cab pulled away from the curb. “I know just the place.”

  “You’re sure there are no bad guys there?” O’Connor sneered.

  Alex smiled. “I certainly hope not.”

  A few minutes later they settled into a corner booth at a small wine bar in the West 70s. O’Connor looked intently at him.

  “So talk to me, Cuchulain. I sort of assumed you were the type to jump to my defense, whether I needed help or not.”

  “And you like men who do that?” he said.

  She sat back in the booth and took a sip of her wine. “No, for the most part, I detest it. It’s just so macho. Billy scared me. What a fucking pig! I think he scared you too. He did, didn’t he, Cuchulain?”

  “Caitlin, of course I was scared. Billy had a knife and a ton of friends there. I know this is going to sound like bullshit. I’m sorry about that, but I think it’s the truth. Quite simply, there was
no need for me to do anything. So I didn’t.”

  She studied him over the rim of her glass. “And you think you could have? Is that bodybuilder look just a bit of narcissism or do you have that much animal in you? I’m pretty damned sure you don’t, but I would have been less sure before watching you tonight. And if you were that much of an animal, I’m not sure I’d like you.”

  Alex chuckled. “Ah, the conundrum of civilized behavior. If you deal with animals by using animal behavior against them, are you civilized for protecting the society, whatever it takes, or have you become an animal and consequently not fit to mingle in civilized society? Do we say thank you and give out a medal and invite him to speak at graduation, or do we keep our would-be hero chained in the backyard like a pit bull, always half afraid he will turn on us someday?”

  O’Connor sat tapping her foot reflexively, studying him. Finally she said, “In your case, I suspect that the argument is academic, but I’ll probably never know. I do know that Brooks Elliot would have reacted differently.”

  He shrugged. “Maybe.”

  “Well, I’m going to be in New York for another week and a half. Before I go back to California, I’m going back there. Back to that animal farm. I hate this feeling of intimidation that I have right now. I’m going to exorcise it.”

  “That’s probably a bad idea,” Cuchulain said, “but it’s none of my business. Do you mind if I trail along with you? I didn’t get to drink my beer.”

  Caitlin studied him for a second. “You’re welcome, but you may get spanked if you’re not careful.”

  Cuchulain smiled and said, “Sounds kinky. I can’t wait.”

  New York

  Midtown

  SEVERAL days later Caitlin walked beside Brooks Elliot from a conference room at Goldman Sachs. Axial was trying to schedule another round of public fund-raising in a difficult environment; Brooks Elliot was leading the charge at Goldman. As they stood awaiting the elevator, Caitlin said, “Why don’t I buy you lunch? I want to ask you about something.”