Майкл Ридпат: The Partnership Track

‘You should take a few days,’ Bill said. ‘You need to give yourself time to process these things. It’s important.’

He was right. I swallowed. Damn it, I was going to cry unless I did something soon.

Bill noticed. He glanced at his watch; the waitress was clearing away dessert. ‘About time I said a few words, I think.’

Bill cleared his throat. It was a signal we had all been waiting for. The table was silent instantly, and I was snapped out of my misery, back on the partnership track.

‘Well, thanks to everyone for making the trip,’ Bill said. ‘I know some of you have come a long way.’ He nodded to me and a couple of the others around the table. ‘And I know we are all working on deals for the firm.’ It was true; we were all busy. We were always all busy; there was no slack capacity at Labouchere.

‘We’ll begin on the exercise tomorrow morning; you’ll find an envelope with all the details in your rooms when you return to them. You will be divided into three teams of two and will role-play a takeover battle. You will need to prepare tonight.’

This was bad news: I was shattered and now a little drunk, not at all in the mood for reading documents late into the night. I had hoped that we would be doing some exercise that would allow a good night’s sleep. But, despite Bill’s languid Louisianan drawl, sleeping wasn’t the Labouchere way.

‘Before I let you get to work on that there are a couple of things I’d like to do.’

Of course there were. Bill wasn’t going to let the opportunity to mess with our heads slip.

Bill paused, looked benignly at each one of us, and smiled. ‘I think it only fair to let you know who it is you have to beat. You all have a chance to make partnership, that’s why you are here, but one of you is in pole position.’

Suddenly we were all sober. Bill let the moment rest. He had that frustrating, slightly amused look on his face that he wears when he’s playing with you. Glances flickered around the table, most of them ending up resting on me. There had been much office gossip about who would be promoted, and frankly I considered myself the favourite, with a Canadian smooth-talker called Charlie Campbell close behind. Maybe Manuela was in with a chance too.

‘Harald Utnes,’ Bill said.

There was an intake of breath; eyebrows were raised. I noticed Manuela next to me gave a little smile — perhaps she was pleased that my name hadn’t been mentioned. I knew Harald well. We had worked together for a year in London before he moved to New York nine months before. He was a tall Norwegian with curly fair hair, a very nice guy, a geologist, totally reliable, totally honest, but in my opinion he lacked the killer instinct, the ability to close a deal. In our business, it’s closing deals that makes the money. And, whatever Bill might say, honesty was probably more of a liability than an asset at Labouchere.

Bill allowed himself to look pleased with his little bombshell. But he hadn’t finished. I could see repressed excitement in his eyes. I shot a quick glance at Professor Behbehani. She was paying close attention. There was something else coming.

‘We all trust each other,’ said Bill. ‘Or we wouldn’t be here. But in a partnership, a strong partnership like Labouchere, that trust has to be unquestioned. So, as you no doubt expected, I have gotten Cray to run the rule over all of you.’

He was right: we had expected that, or at least I had. Cray was a corporate investigations firm we often used to check out people who ran the firms our clients were targeting, or even, on occasion, our clients themselves. I was pretty sure I was clean. But you can never be 100 per cent sure.

‘I’m not going to tell you what Cray discovered. As I say, we should trust each other to disclose those things anyway. So what I’m going to do is to ask you to tell me, to tell all of us, any little secrets you have that we should be aware of. Things that your partners should know about.’

The table tensed. We had all figured out what Bill was up to. He hadn’t said it, but the implication was that if we didn’t confess to something that Cray had discovered about us, we would be marked down with a mark so black we would be out of the running. But of course, if we volunteered some genuine secret that looked bad for us, then there was a chance that it would be news to Bill. Tricky. Very tricky.

‘Can’t we just tell you in person?’ Harald asked. ‘Do we have to do it in front of each other?’

Of course you do, I thought. That’s the whole point. It will be much more fun for Bill to watch us squirm in front of everyone.

‘No, Harald,’ said Bill. ‘Part of what we are doing is learning to trust each other. Charlie? You start.’

Thank God it’s not me, we all thought as we turned to Charlie. Charlie Campbell — Extravert, Sensing, Thinking, Perceptive — was an expert bullshitter, which, let’s face it, is a good skill in our business. He was a Canadian graduate of Harvard Business School, who had worked short stints for a number of energy companies around the world before joining Labouchere a year after me. I didn’t like him, I didn’t trust him, but he had landed the firm two big deals in the previous twelve months. Partners landed deals, vice presidents and associates did the work, so Charlie was already acting like a partner.

Charlie paused, whether for effect or genuinely to give himself time to think. ‘I’m gay,’ he said.

Silence. I was surprised, and so, I thought, was everyone else. Charlie didn’t look gay; he didn’t sound gay. I had worked with him on a North Sea deal and had had no inkling. He was short with neat thinning dark hair. In fact, he was neat all around, from his perfectly tied ties to his expensive suits and his well-polished shoes. Even in smart-casual mode his clothes were the best pressed of any of us.

But then I realized I was just wallowing in stereotypes. So Charlie was gay? He shouldn’t have to tell us about that; that was his business. What was more relevant was that you couldn’t trust his bullshit.

‘I know you’re gay, Charlie,’ said Bill. ‘And I expect most of us in the room know that.’

I checked. Everyone was nodding sagely. They did all know apart from me. Unless they were pretending. A little late, I nodded too.

‘But I haven’t come out to any of you,’ said Charlie. ‘That is my big secret. I’m gay.’

‘Is that all you have to hide?’ Bill asked, his voice soft and dangerous.

‘Absolutely!’ Charlie protested. But he protested too much. We all knew it. There was something else — there had to be.

Bill inserted the knife. ‘Not the plagiarism at Harvard? You were investigated for copying from a former student’s paper in your Finance 2 course. You were nearly thrown out.’

For a second, Charlie glared at Bill, fury in his eyes. We all saw it. Through my peripheral vision I spotted the professor making a note. Then he smiled. ‘But I wasn’t thrown out, was I? In fact I came fourth in my class. Which is one of the reasons you hired me.’

Nice try, but no cigar. ‘That may be so. But you should have told us, Charlie. That’s the reason I asked you: to give you a chance to tell us.’

The rest of us had been warned. This was going to get uncomfortable.

‘Trent?’

Trent shifted his long frame in the chair. Trent Dunston — Extravert, Intuitive, Thinking, Perceptive — was a tall jock with thick fair hair oiled back from a large, handsome face. He had been reserve in one of the United States’ rowing teams in the Olympics seven years before. I didn’t know too much about him apart from the fact he liked to ‘party’, in all that word’s varying meanings. And he had proven quick to spot opportunities for the firm in the collapsing US fracking market. It wasn’t from his own analysis. He had contacts: he knew how to make the people who knew what was really going on in the industry tell him.