Chapter 5: A Man Who Eats Alone

The booth in the far corner of the Caruso Bar had three qualities Alexander Reed required of any space he occupied for more than twenty minutes. It had sightlines to both exits. It was far enough away from the next table over that he wouldn't be able to hear their conversation. And the bartender understood that the gesture of holding up one finger meant he wanted another round of the Glenlivet eighteen; holding up his palm meant he wanted the check.

He'd been coming here for eight months. He'd been generous with his tips since the first time he came in. Not because he was a generous person. Because he was an efficient person. Because he believed that if he paid someone well enough, they'd do their job well enough not to need supervision. And he had no intention of supervising the bartender.

He set his laptop down on the table. Ordered his drink. And opened the document he'd been working on for the better part of two weeks. A board presentation. A proposal for the mid-sized acquisition target that had been hemorrhaging value under bad management for three years. And which Reed Capital had been circling for that long. The numbers were good. The case was good. He'd outlined the case in the morning to Marcus in fifteen minutes flat. "Yeah, yeah," Marcus had said. "Got it. I'll get the materials ready." And Alexander Reed had spent the rest of the day staring at the document and making changes in the language that he was pretty sure were meaningless changes.

This was the thing nobody wrote in their profiles. The formidable pieces, the architect of modern dealmaking pieces, the pieces that quoted his former rivals with words like ruthless and surgical, and one memorable piece that had referred to him as the last true predator on Wall Street, both flattering and slightly insane, none of them said that it was all, for the most part, refinement. The sentence, yes, the sentence, that said what he was saying. The variable, yes, the variable, that shifted two places to the left, solved the entire equation.

He was good at it. He'd always been good at it. He got as much pleasure from an argument as other people seemed to get from whatever it was they got. He wasn't quite sure what it was, but he'd watched other people find it, find it in whatever it was, and he intellectually understood it.

He took another sip of his whisky and returned to paragraph four.

The bar was two-thirds full, which was normal for a Wednesday at this hour. He was aware of it, but he wasn't thinking about it. The sound, the smell, the shape of the room, he was automatically aware of all of it, as he was automatically aware of most things, but he wasn't thinking about it. He was back to paragraph four.

A waiter was working the far side of the room.

He registered this too. Tall, sandy-haired, moving among the tables with the efficiency of someone who had done it for so long that he didn’t think about it anymore. He had the kind of ease that service workers acquired when they were very good at it – not performance, not hustle, something closer to fluency. Alexander saw him intercept a table’s order in midsentence, catch a water glass as it rolled off the edge, exchange four words with the couple at the window that made them both laugh, and still not break his pace.

He looked away and went back to his document.

The target's board had three members who would oppose the restructuring on principle, not logic. That was the kind of opposition he found most tiresome, the kind that couldn't be argued with. You could take apart a logical objection. You couldn't take apart someone's feelings about their own importance. You had to go around them, and going around someone's feelings took patience, and patience was not, if he was being honest with himself, and alone in a booth on a Wednesday morning when he could afford to be honest with himself, one of his more reliable virtues.

He shifted to the next paragraph, the sixth.

His phone beeped. He turned it over on the table without looking to see the caller's name.

The waiter was in his line of sight again. He was telling a table of four something, gesturing slightly, a small precise movement. Alexander saw, without meaning to, the hands that made the movement. They were the hands of a cook. Not the soft hands of someone whose work was done in an office, nor the hard hands of someone whose work was done outside, but in between. Useful in a particular way. Not relevant.

He went back to the document.

Half past ten, and the bar had thinned out sufficiently to let the background noise drop. In the silence, Alexander heard, reasonably clearly, the sound of the back door opening, and a voice in the alleyway say, "Yes. I understand."

He didn't look up. There was a staff exit just beside the kitchen. This meant it was probably an employee taking the call on their break. He had heard this sort of conversation before. The short muffled conversations. The cigarette breaks. The low-toned drama of other people's lives. He had never once found it interesting enough to get involved in.

He went back to paragraph six. He has read this paragraph eleven times now.

"I understand the timeline."

He kept his eyes on the screen.

"I can get most of it. If you give me until —"

The caller stopped. Then went on in a softer tone. "My father —"

Whatever was going on in the processing of Alexander's mind halted. He didn't look up. He was frozen in the way he froze when he was listening to something he was not sure if he would act on.

This was the voice of the waiter. He was sure of this even though he didn't know why. The quality of the voice. The register. The way the words were delivered. Fast. Precise. Making up in efficiency what it was not losing in composure.

He was talking to a creditor. Alexander had been on the other side of the table in enough of these phone calls to know the rhythm. The cadence of negotiation from a position of complete weakness. The way the words were said with care because they cost the most to say.

He closed the laptop.

This was not, he told himself, compassion. He had no special feeling about the financial troubles of strangers. What he had was a mind which automatically began to think out the solution to every problem it encountered. And the problem in the alley was one which was almost offensively clean.

He had needed – for four months, since the board had started their quiet murmurs, since the article in the Post had used the words emotionally volatile in a way that was vague enough to be a question – a solution to a specific problem. He had needed someone credible. Someone warm, in a way that he was not – warm in substance, not performance; warm in a way that was discernible, because boards and investors and the type of person who attended galas were not stupid, could tell the difference between warmth performed and warmth substantive. He had needed someone who could hold a room in their own presence, their own authority, without relying on pretension or assumption.

Someone who, thirty minutes ago, had interrupted the order of a table of patrons in midsentence, made a couple laugh with four words, and saved a glass from falling without breaking stride.

Someone who had nothing.

Alexander signaled the bartender with a half-raised finger.

The back door swung open again, and the waiter re-entered the restaurant, his face having done what faces did when they'd been through something and come back from it – smoothed over, mostly; the type of deliberate composure that only gave away what was being covered over if you knew what you were looking at. He went back to work. He picked up a bread basket, moved.

Alexander watched him.

Then he reached into his jacket for a pen and pulled a cocktail napkin from the stack at the edge of the table.

He began to write.