Colin Harrison: The Finder

Which was why Tom Reilly used his corporate seats as often as possible. His job was to make rain for Good Pharma and that meant wooing and wowing a steady stream of potential investors. He himself loved the Yankees-though how many baseball games could a man see in a year? — but what he really loved was how great seats at the game put people in a great mood. And he made sure to keep that mood going. After the game he had the limo take his group straight from the stadium to one of the best night spots, maybe a hot little lounge crowded with models, maybe a jazz club downtown. Always something to do in New York, folks. Affable Germans, clever Brits, fake-relaxed Japanese, high-tech cowboys from out west in $7,000 snakeskin boots or gumbo-guzzlers from down south-gimme anybody! They all had a blast with Tom Reilly. Show them a good time, make sure they get back to their hotel exhausted with fun. Good fun. Good Pharma. The first equals the second. They were no longer just a small company. Last year's revenues topped $800 million. Market capitalization now $33.2 billion. Growing steadily. Twenty-eight percent last year. See what happens when you whip that out of your pants! New drugs in the pipeline. Emphasis on lifestyle improvement therapies. Good stuff coming out of Good Pharma. That was the message, and the message was the medium, baby. Good Pharma was a new enough biopharmaceutical company that it needed to keep hustling investors. Nibble on our stock, graze on our bonds, get a taste of it. Rub a little of that surging market penetration on your gums, snuff a bit up into your nostrils. Like that? Taste that… feel that-that stream of patents, the awesome products under development? The new applications, the category killers, all aimed at global use? Good stuff, right? Then gobble some of the pills or, better yet, just inject the stock right into your bloodstream. Good Pharma! Nine million dollars spent on branding research, too: respondents liked the postironic pun in the company title. Seemed hip, new, futuristically cool in its faux-Big Brother cleverness. "Big pharma" (derogatory but perceived as powerful and efficacious) plus "good karma" (retrohippyish, naturalish, organic or Hindu or religious or something kind of humane and nice) equals Good Pharma! They had drugs coming along that were going to make the aging baby boomers start cha-cha-ing all over the golf course. Make them remember their sixth-grade homework, hump everything that moved, lose weight while they slept, dunk basketballs. That was true, in fact, even if anecdotal. The Good Pharma researchers in one of the cartilage-therapy trials had enrolled a couple of old NBA players, geezery black giants who felt so good they started dunking the ball again. The stuff was based on some kind of Brazilian tree frog bone cells that they'd cloned. Think of when that hit the market, think of the clip in the webcast commercials when a seventy-year-old black man dunks a basketball! Millions of thick-hipped white women would demand prescriptions! Score with Good Pharma!

But now it was time for baseball. The pin-striped Yanks were on the field, expertly whipping the ball around, warming up under a soft seven p.m. sky. Tom had the tickets ready in his hand and settled down in the seats with his two guests, a sixtyish Cuban investor from Miami named Jaime "Jim" Martinez and his protege, a young man who knew enough to say nada.

"You were right!" agreed Martinez, seeing how close they were to home plate but expecting no less. "Very good seats."

"Absolutely," burbled Tom, the message being you guys are worth it. That was half of making a deal, getting that symmetrical rush of greed started. And he should know, he'd made a lot of deals for a guy who was just a few years over forty. Tom Reilly, Senior Executive Vice Presi dent for Schmoozing Big Investors. Corporate responsibility for the Manufacture of Extremely Valuable Hype. Skills include Smiling Through the Pain, Showing No Fear, and Lying When Necessary and Sometimes When Not. Good with bankers, researchers, stock analysts, the media, anybody. The public face of the company. Handsome but not too handsome. Not pretty. Manly. Solid. Healthy-looking. Confident. Wife a successful Park Avenue internist in private practice. Children: none yet. Stated reason: Too busy. Real reason: Lazy sperm. Weak, undersexed, insecure sperm. Dud bullets, wet firecrackers. Solution: Maybe in vitro, which his wife, being a doctor, wasn't crazy about; she knew the low odds of success and comparatively higher odds of having preemies. State of marriage: Could be better.

But why think about such things? There was money to be made! And in Jim Martinez next to him, Tom Reilly sensed worthy prey. Martinez possessed a full head of silver hair slicked back Pat Riley-style and a charmer's smile, no doubt useful as he fronted for a venture-cap group trying to diversify into biotech projects. The group's funding came from Cuban doctors, lawyers, and real estate developers in southern Florida and Latin America. Hard-core capitalists, Castro haters. Many of them were on their third or fourth wives, had boatloads of getting-whiter-with-every-generation grandchildren who'd grown up with BMWs in the driveways and going to private schools. The pressure to make more money never stopped, even for rich men! Especially for rich men! The group was looking to take a $54 million position in Good Pharma's new synthetic skin project, which was also to say they expected to get a discount on a purchase worth more than $62 million-a chunk of business that Good Pharma would prefer to sell for $69 million or so. Thus the purpose of the evening. Martinez and Tom were creating an atmosphere of bogus informality and cold-blooded heartiness in order to facilitate the knife-fight negotiation to follow.

So it began! The game, the chatter, the corporate foreplay. Three men in blue blazers and good slacks. Tom ordered beers and hot dogs from the attendant and then set about entertaining the Cubans. The first inning blew by, then the second. Yanks up 2–1 over Baltimore. Good tight pitching, a couple of great plays in the infield, one by Jeter.

Then in the third inning the overpaid Yankee sluggers murdered the Orioles' starting pitcher for five runs. The game suddenly threatened to become a laugher, but now Martinez was on his third beer and had become so relaxed that he'd started to explain how the wealthy Cuban investors in Miami were getting frustrated with all the hurricanes that damaged or slowed their real estate projects and hadn't yet figured out how to wire the post-Castro Cuba for their benefit.

"We're tired of risk," Martinez admitted. "So maybe we try something else. Maybe we see what your company can do for us."

"I think you'll find we have a lot to offer," Tom breezed back. "You know, it's not quite public knowledge yet, but some of the early research results coming out of these trials show a very promising-"

At this moment an attendant appeared at the end of their aisle. He checked something written on an envelope.

"Tom Reilly?" he asked Martinez.

"He's right here," Martinez said.

The messenger handed Tom the envelope. "I was told to give this to you."

"Thanks," Tom said, quick fingered with a twenty-dollar bill as a tip. The messenger darted away. Tom threw his guests a smile. "Not enough to have e-mail and a phone in your pocket, now they've got to send actual pieces of paper…" He tore open the envelope and withdrew a single sheet of yellow stationery with a blue border. He could stand and read his message in the aisle, but that was rude and also suggested a crisis, exactly what he didn't want to suggest. So he unfolded the paper enough to glance quickly at the message, felt it gore him in a soft, private place, and yet had the presence of mind to nod as if merely receiving confirmation of what was expected.

"Anything good?" the foxy old Cuban from Miami nudged.