Peter Spiegelman - Death's little helpers

“They’re for you,” I said.

Jane smiled. She opened a cabinet beneath the counter and came up with shears and a blue glass vase. She slit the wrapping on the tulips and snipped an inch from the bottom of the stems. Her movements were quick and sure. She ran water in the vase and put the tulips in.

“Nothing they can do to make it worth your while?” I asked.

“Nope. The buyers are okay, but it’s still a big company and way too much of a boys’ club. There’s no way I’d sign up for that again.”

After B-school, Jane had done time at a prestigious investment bank and at a big management consulting firm, and both experiences had filled her with a fierce resolve to be always self-employed.

“Besides,” she said, “it’s been a long year. I’ve got another few weeks on this deal, and all I want afterward is to ride into the sunset.” Jane looked up at me. “Have you thought any more about riding along?” she asked, and the air seemed to thicken between us.

In the brief reprieves she granted herself from the office and the culmination of her deal, Jane had been planning a very long vacation, and she’d invited me to join her. Guidebooks and travel magazines had been turning up in my apartment for weeks now, and we’d been tiptoeing at the edges of this conversation for almost as long. Each time we did, it was a cautious tug-of-war, a wary testing of resistance and balance over suddenly unstable terrain. And each time left us both a little edgy.

“Sure,” I said.

She cocked an eyebrow. “Sure, you’ve thought about it, or sure, you’re coming?”

“I’ve thought about it. I’m still thinking about it.”

“Thinking that it’s a good idea?”

“That it’s a good idea, but…”

Jane looked down at the flowers. “But what?”

“But I took a job today, and I don’t know if it’ll be a long one. I have to see how it plays out.”

Jane pursed her lips and nodded minutely. She stared at the tulips and spent a while rearranging them in the vase. “I guess your trip to Brooklyn went well,” she said eventually.

“Well enough,” I said, and I told her about my meeting with Nina Sachs and my lunch with Tom Neary. She listened carefully and shook her head when I was through.

“If it was anyone else, I’d say maybe he’d run off to hide his face in shame. But as it’s Danes, my bet is that some investors bought him a room at the Jimmy Hoffa Hilton.” There was a wry twist to her mouth and I was relieved to see it.

I laughed. “Do you know the guy?”

“Just from the stuff in the papers- about Piedmont- and from when he was on Market Minds all the time. I remember the bratty know-it-all attitude. I was actually referring to the whole analyst species.” She opened the fridge and took out a bottle of seltzer. She brought it and two glasses back to the table.

“You have it in for them on general principle, or do you have a more specific grudge?”

Jane filled the glasses. She drank from hers and stretched her legs out. “Both, I guess.” I raised my eyebrows, and Jane continued. “I never had illusions about analyst independence. I knew who paid their bonuses and who they were beholden to- and it certainly wasn’t the investing public. I mean, the notion of getting an objective opinion about a company, or an unbiased recommendation about its stock, from somebody who’s essentially a paid pitchman for that company- it’s ridiculous. And even if they weren’t thoroughly compromised, what are their opinions worth anyway? They’re like weathermen. Being right has never been a big part of the job description.” Jane took another drink. She put her right heel on the edge of her seat and rested her arm on her knee. She flexed her toes, and the tendons were taut along the top of her foot.

“I thought the reforms changed things,” I said.

Jane shook her head and gave me a sympathetic, silly-boy look. “That’s the party line, I suppose- that the reforms got rid of a layer of conflict by separating the analysts from the investment bankers and separating analyst pay from banking fees. But so what? It’s still the same guys at the top of these firms, deciding who gets paid and how much. If investment banking is important to them, and if they think a certain analyst has helped win business, they’re going to make sure he gets paid for it. Senior management knows it, the investment bankers know it, and so do the analysts- they just try to be a little less brazen these days.”

She drank some seltzer and shook her head some more.

“And sure, firms are very careful now about saying so if they do business with a company that their analysts are touting. But telling people about conflicts of interest doesn’t make the conflicts go away. A cynical person might even argue that all this disclosure just gives the firms more cover for the next time around.”

Jane was relaxed, and her compact body was at ease in the chair, but she nonetheless projected a latent, supple energy- like a coiled spring or a watchful cat. It was in her every fluid motion, and it was even in her voice, in the chords of certainty and confidence of her pleasant contralto. She flexed her fingers, and I watched the muscles shift smoothly in her wrists and forearms.

“And what’s your personal gripe?” I asked.

She puckered her lips, as if she’d tasted something sour. “I guess I don’t like being bullied,” she said.

I thought about that for a while. “It’s hard to imagine anyone trying.”

Jane gave a humorless laugh. “You’d be surprised,” she said. She drained her seltzer, and I poured another glass. “It was a few years ago, when I was running that little biotech in Cambridge. They’d had some problems- with low production yields and a couple of nasty lawsuits- but we’d sorted those out and the worst was behind us, and we were shopping for a new credit facility. We were talking seriously to three big lenders when, one day, I got a call from an analyst- one of the few who covered the company.

“I knew him, of course. He was from a big regional firm, and I’d talk to him a couple of times a quarter at least. He was one of those frat-boy-gone-fat types, but he’d always been friendly and reasonably straightforward. That day, it took him a while to get to the point.

“He started asking about our hunt for new credit, which I had just talked about to a bunch of investors and analysts- including him- two weeks before. I thought he was looking for some inside dope, and I started to explain that I wasn’t going to tell him anything I hadn’t told the group, but he cut me off. That wasn’t what he wanted to talk about, he said, and he started telling me how there were other motivated lenders out there besides the ones we had on our short list. By that point, I was feeling like we were in some very weird territory, but I still had no idea what the guy wanted. Finally, he got to it.

“He asked if I was aware that his firm was in the lending business too. I said that I was, but that I thought we were getting into an inappropriate area. I tried to end the conversation, but he pretty much ignored me. He said he wasn’t sure I’d considered the big picture, and maybe it was because I was a short-timer- just an interim CEO- that I was ignoring a firm that had always been very supportive of my company. He said that if I kept on ignoring his firm, that support could evaporate. I asked him if by support he meant his coverage of the company- his research reports- and he said he’d always known I was a bright girl.”

“Bright girl?” I said.

Jane laughed. “I was stunned- as much by his heavy-handedness as anything else.”

“What did you do?”

“I thanked him for his advice and hung up, and then I called the vice chairman of his firm. I told him what had happened and pointed out that- just for appearances’ sake- he might want his boy to ease off a little. A few days later the firm announced that our analyst had been promoted and transferred, and they assigned a new paunchy frat boy to cover us. He was dumber than the first guy but quieter. End of story.”