The Underwriting (3 page)

“Harvey, it's great to hear from you.” Todd rolled his eyes and mouthed
Harvey Tate
to Kal, who watched eagerly.

“I heard about the deal and wanted to congratulate you,” Harvey said.

“Thank you, sir.” Todd was surprised but impressed that senior management agreed it was a good thing for a young guy to be leading this IPO.

“I've got a few ideas. Why don't you come up to my office and we can discuss?”

Todd hesitated. He had less than thirty-six hours to pull together a team, a work plan and contract; he didn't have time to pander to Harvey Tate. “Sure,” he said, “I'll reach out to your assistant to find a time next week.” Harvey was old: maybe he'd forget.

“Ten o'clock work for you?”

Todd's jaw set in irritation. He was also supposed to meet his trainer, Morgan, at eleven, for a workout he desperately needed to clear his brain for all of said work. “Sure,” he heard himself say, wishing for the thousandth time his mother hadn't instilled him with such good etiquette. Life would be so much easier if he were an asshole.

“Great. See you in an hour.”

“Looking forward to it.” Todd hung up the phone. “Fuck.”

“What?” Kal leaned in. When a man worked sixteen hours a day, six days a week, in a cubicle that smelled like the revolving ethnicity of last night's takeout, gossip was like Vicodin. And Todd had just become the best dealer in the firm.

“Fucking Harvey Tate wants to be my mentor.”

“Ha! The perks of being a big deal, man,” Kal said sarcastically.

Neha Patel, the group's overly eager second-year analyst, appeared at his desk, looking down at a stack of papers in her hands, speaking with her standard Adderall-amped speed. “Here's the deck you asked for. I put in an extra section showing historical earnings reports for similar media companies, and I printed out all my assumptions. The only thing I think we need to discuss is this part about—”

“Whoa, whoa, whoa.” Todd blinked. “Slow down, hot rod. I haven't had my coffee yet.”

“Do you want me to go get you one?” she asked automatically, looking up over her glasses. She had a line of dried spittle on her chin, evidently unnoticed since she returned to her desk from the nap room. Most analysts pulled two all-nighters a week, but Neha averaged two
non
-all-nighters a week in her unbridled drive to be the best analyst in L.Cecil's history.

“No, Neha,” he said, “it's fine. What is this for?”

“It's the Viacom pitch you asked me to put together.” Her voice sounded like a tape on perpetual fast-forward.

He looked at the deck: he didn't need this for another three weeks, if ever.

“Were you up all night working on this?”

“I took two forty-eight-minute naps,” she said. “As long as you don't hit fifty-five minutes you don't go into REM sleep so you don't actually get that tired.”

“When was the last time you slept at home?”

“Last Friday.” Neha said it without any hint it was odd. This was exactly the attitude one wanted in an analyst.

“Do you want to come to California?” he asked the girl.

“What?”

“I'm taking Hook—the dating app company—public. Do you have the bandwidth to be the analyst?”

Neha's spittle-flecked jaw dropped. Her face was round and dotted with acne; she definitely didn't wear makeup and had never been introduced to a pair of tweezers. “You mean the biggest privately owned company in Silicon Valley? The one backed by Dalton Henley Venture Partners with five hundred million users and a two hundred fifty percent quarterly growth rate?”

Todd looked at her: all she cared about was the financials—she probably had never even used the app. This was also exactly what one wanted in an analyst. “That's the one,” Todd said.

“Are you kidding? Of course I want to work on it!” The thought sank in and she got more animated. “I mean, I'll work my butt off. I mean, thank you. Thank you so much for the opportunity.”

“Sure thing.” Todd smiled, her enthusiasm making him feel benevolent. “I need you to drop everything else and pull together as much information as you can tonight, as well as an outline for a work plan. We fly Friday morning.”

“Yes, done! I'll get going right now!” She scrambled back to her desk, like a three-year-old who'd just been given a new Lego set.

Todd turned back to his computer, and noticed Kal still looking at him. “What?”

“You dick,” Kal said. “You're taking our best analyst, too?”

“Sorry, bud.” Todd grinned. “You bring in a 1.8-billion-dollar deal and I promise we can draw straws for her.”

“Whatever.”

“Hey, what's an eight percent fee on 1.8 billion?” Todd mused aloud at what the firm was going to make on the deal. “And what's-his-face that brought in Catalyst last year made, what, a five-mil bonus? His deal was only half that—”

Kal threw a pen at him. Todd laughed. He could already feel the five million in his bank account.

“Here,” he said, handing Kal his Equinox card as he stood to go to his meeting with Harvey. “Take my training session. Morgan's boobs'll cheer you up.” Todd patted Kal's shoulder as he moved past.

The twenty-seventh floor was crowded with loud-talking investment bankers. Analysts and associates, the lowest-ranking employees, sat crammed at three long tables in the center of the room, each appointed a double-monitor computer and a Bloomberg terminal. On either side of the analyst desks were stacks of six cubicles, where VPs sat. Managing directors were rewarded for decades of servitude to the firm with small, glass-enclosed offices on the building's perimeter, hogging all the sunlight.

As he walked to the elevator, Todd played the game where he counted the number of people who blushed when he passed: men got half a point, hot women got two. From desk-to-elevator, Todd collected eight points, which was a 72 percent hit rate. Or maybe it was 81 percent. Sonja was a maybe—it was hard to tell when Indian people were blushing.

The elevator doors opened onto Chad Horton, a fat, pink-shirted trader, and Tara Taylor, a VP in Equity Capital Markets, looking down at her BlackBerry.

“Hey, buddy! Heard the big news,” Chad said and punched Todd's shoulder. Tara didn't say anything, engrossed in whatever she was reading on the device in her hands.

“Shh . . . not too loud. Don't want Tara's people to start fighting over which of them gets to be on the team,” Todd said.

The girl's head snapped up. Wait for it . . . Yes. There was the blush. Ten points for the day. Or maybe nine and a half—Tara was attractive, but not quite a two-pointer. Definitely borderline. When you broke down her attributes, she wasn't that hot: great legs and a tight little waist, but no curves; her ass was flat and she couldn't be more than a B-cup. And her brown eyes were a little too close together, though whatever she was doing with her makeup helped. But her chin was still too sharp—nothing you could do about that. Still, there was something about it all together that was attractive. What the hell, give her two points. He was feeling generous.

Tara smirked and said nothing, returning to her BlackBerry.

Chad kept talking: “Heard you guys had a big night last night, eh? Just ran into Lou downstairs. Boy, did he look like hell. Said he didn't go to bed till sunrise.”

Every other month Lou Reynolds organized drinks for the 2004 analyst class, of whom twelve of the eighty were still at the bank. The guys weren't nearly as cool as Todd's outside-of-work crew, but he knew his presence meant a lot to Lou and that Lou would pay it back with loyalty someday when Todd was running things. “Ha. I left early.”

Chad elbowed him knowingly. “I heard you bailed, but wasn't exactly to go to sleep. Old girlfriend?”

“Yes,” Todd lied, weirded out, but also flattered, that these guys paid so much attention to his sex life.

Todd tried to catch Tara's reaction in his periphery and was grateful when Chad stepped off on the next floor and he could turn to her and laugh.
“Men
.
”

“Yep!” Tara smiled closed-lipped before returning to her e-mail.

They'd slept together twice during his senior spring at Stanford, when she was a freshman. The first time was at a Pi Phi–SAE Redneck Racing pledge event. It was a frat favorite because all the girls showed up in their best Jessica Simpson–in–
Dukes of Hazzard
short-shorts, spray-tanned and made-up to the hilt. Except Tara, who arrived in overalls with fake teeth that would have made Gisele Bündchen ugly. Todd was manning the bar and joked with Tara about the teeth, but she, pretty drunk by that point, insisted they were real and feigned offense. They bantered for a bit and he spent his next half hour on keg duty devising something clever to say, which he delivered when he found her on the dance floor with SAE's token gay pledge, Corey.

“Excuse me, Tara, but I still think those teeth are fake, and I'd like to prove it by removing them for you, preferably with my tongue.”

She'd laughed and turned to Corey, saying in a voice loud enough that Todd could hear, “The very popular Todd Kent wants to hook up with me, Corey. I guess I should probably go with him, right?” and, with Corey's overwhelming approval (who said gays weren't good for the frat?), turned back to Todd: “Oh, fine. Let's go. But I'm leaving the teeth in.”

And she had, the whole time they drunkenly fumbled through sex while the music pounded outside his frat room. When he woke up she was gone, but had left the teeth on his desk, with a note that said:
Souvenir
.

He'd expected to hear from her, but didn't. He stopped by Pi Phi for lunch with his friend Nicole the next week, but when he saw her she pretended not to notice him. Finally he got a casual “Hi there!” when he followed her to the soda fountain. “Diet Coke, eh?” He'd gestured to the glass she was filling at the tap. “Original, huh?” she'd offered, returning to her seat.

That night he'd gotten drunk and showed up at her dorm room.

She'd opened the door in checkered pajamas, but Todd didn't remember much beyond that. He'd woken up in her twin bed, her long, naked body squeezed between his own and the wall. There was a condom wrapper on the side table. His head had pounded as he gently sat up to take a sip of water, knocking a worn teddy bear off the bed as he did so.

“Morning,” Tara had said, sitting up and pulling a T-shirt from under the covers over her head.

He'd thrown the stuffed animal at her playfully. “Nice teddy bear, freshman.”

“Ha. Thanks. It was my sister's.”

“She give it to you as a going-to-college present?” he'd teased.

“Nah. She's dead.”

His heart had dropped. “Fuck, I'm sorry.”

“Not your fault,” she'd said simply, pulling her long legs out from the covers to step over him and re-dress her lower half. She'd noticed his concern and added, for his benefit, “I've still got one.”

She'd grabbed her shower caddy and a towel and headed for the door, told him she had to study but didn't mind if he kept sleeping. He hadn't known what to do, unaccustomed to being left in bed and under the impression that all girls liked cuddling. So he'd left before she got back from the shower, and that was it. The next week he'd graduated and moved to New York and five years later they'd been reintroduced by Lillian Dumas, an MD in Equity Capital Markets who'd had it out for him ever since he'd rejected her advances at a holiday party in favor of Suzie Tebow from Investor Relations. He'd hardly recognized Tara in a fitted suit and Longchamp bag and makeup to match the New York working-girl uniform, and he'd felt a pinch of sadness that she, too, had become a cliché.

“After you.” Todd held the elevator door open, wondering whether she still slept with the teddy bear.

“Thanks.” She swept past, heading right as he turned left.

Harvey's assistant had Todd wait for twenty minutes outside the plush office where the senior vice chairman was laughing into his phone's earpiece. The forty-second floor was only fifteen up from where Todd sat, but it felt like a different universe, with expensive art on the walls and massive offices that wrapped around the perimeter, looking out over the bustling city below.

“Sorry for the wait,” Harvey said when Todd was finally permitted entry into the spacious corner office. His handshake was stronger than his five-foot-seven frame might have led a person to expect. “My real estate broker.” Harvey shook his head with a congenial
I-know-you-don't-know-but-trust-me-on-this-one
look. “I'm buying a new place in East Hampton. Southampton's gotten overrun. You wouldn't believe the kind of people they're letting into the Meadow Club.”

“Sounds like a wise decision,” Todd said neutrally.

“Please, sit,” Harvey offered, and Todd followed the instruction. Harvey leaned back in his chair, tapping his thumbs together in his lap and staring into Todd's eyes, studying. Todd could feel the muscles in his neck tense down through his shoulders, the way they used to before a water polo match when he saw the opposing team.

“Hmph,” Harvey finally grunted, shifting his weight in his chair, setting his arms on the desk between them, as if he'd uncovered all he needed to know about Todd.

“When I was your age,” he started, “I was in the navy. I was stationed in the Pacific, in command of a crew of a hundred twenty, most of whom were older than me. It was right after the war and we were there to reingratiate ourselves with the Vietnamese.”

Todd held his breath. He hated when old guys talked about their military days.

“A lot of the guys liked going into town to visit the whorehouses. It was cheap entertainment and helped them relax, so I didn't mind.”

Harvey's silver-blond hair was combed over his always-tanned skin; he wore an Ermenegildo Zegna suit over a starched white shirt and Cartier cuff links. Old school slick dick.