Graveland: A Novel (31 page)

He reaches for the bottle of Stoli on the bedside unit and takes another hit from it.

Then he looks at the screen again, at this Craig Howley guy, CEO and chairman of … what are they called? The Oberon Capital Group?

“… the spreads are pretty high and the base rates are low, so you’re picking up a lot of return, basically, for a lack of liquidity.”

It cuts to the host of the show, a handsome, chiseled little prick in his early thirties. “And how about real estate, Craig? Tell us about the opportunities you’re seeing in the sector right now.”

“Oh, this is just an incredible time to be in real estate, Rob.”

“Why?”

“Well, you’ve got all these CMOs that aren’t going to roll over, you’ve got overpriced properties and distressed sellers…”

Frank squeezes the neck of the bottle. He doesn’t understand what Craig Howley is talking about here, not exactly, but he’s picking up a tone, a hint of contained glee, of dog-eat-dog exuberance. Distressed sellers? Cool. Let’s kick these motherfuckers while they’re down.

“… and then you’re streaming into that attractive investment-grade credit market we mentioned earlier.”

“So share with us, Craig, how much has Oberon put into real estate so far this year?”

“I don’t have an exact figure, Rob, but it’s probably several billion, four perhaps, four-point-five.”

“Wow!”

Fuck
.

Frank raises the bottle to his lips again.

“Look, it’s a large part of our business. We’re known as a private equity company, but really, we’re a bit more diversified than that.”

“Sure, private equity, real estate, debt and asset management, financial advisory, credit, it’s a long list.”

“It is, and people often think that investment by a company like Oberon means focusing only on short-term returns—”

“The classic strip and flip.”

“Yeah, well,” Howley laughs here, but there’s an edge to the laugh, “again I’d use different language, not that it’s even true
any
way … but no, I mean, take an example…” He pauses. “Take any company in our portfolio.”

He stops to think for a moment.

Frank breathes in deeply, his head spinning ever so slightly. Half a bottle of Stoli? Straight up? If it weren’t for his accelerated adrenaline flow, his extra nervous energy, he’d be unconscious by this stage, or in a pool of his own vomit. He glances down at the bottle in his hand and feels his stomach lurch.

Oh, Jesus.

No self-fulfilling prophecies, please.

“Yes,” Howley says, nodding, ready to continue. “I mean, consider a company like Paloma Electronics, for instance—”

Frank looks up.

“Great company,” the host says, “consumer electronics, but a lot more besides, am I right? Military and defense contracting, IT, consulting, security.”

Frank is stunned.

“Absolutely, and don’t forget biotech, and robotics—”

“Of course.”

“So yeah, they’re just a super, super company, and we at Oberon are committed to helping them develop and grow, but here’s the thing, Rob, that’s
over the long term
.”

Frank leans forward on the bed and gulps, reflux vomit coming up into his mouth. He manages to swallow it back.

“Right. Though there
have
been job losses at Paloma recently, if I’m not mistaken, and a lot of cost cutting?”

“Oh sure, but with any effort to drive stronger performance you’re going to get
some
element of rationalization.”

It happens again, but this time Frank just lets it out, splats of clear liquid—he hasn’t eaten today—landing all over the bed, on the books and the magazines. In a sort of daze he lets go of the bottle, the remainder of its contents glugging out over his bare leg and making a deep stain on the polyester bedspread.

Fuuuck
.

He wipes his mouth and looks back at the TV screen.

He’s focused now, though.

And the first thing he notices is that, okay, Howley’s suit is fine, expensive-looking and all, but at the same time … who chose that fucking shirt? And the
tie
? The second thing is that this is Ellen’s—
Lizzie’s?
—Ellen’s … this is the guy that got away.

This is the private equity guy.

The third pillar.

He’s not
the
guy, okay, he’s not Scott Lebrecht. But that doesn’t matter anymore. He’s actually a better pick—a point that Frank would like nothing better than to be able to hammer out with Lizzie …

He clears his throat and coughs up some grainy, charcoaly phlegm.

Spits it out.

“… in point of fact turmoil is
good
for private equity…”

And the supreme irony of the situation is that until a few days ago, until a week ago, maybe a bit more—he can’t remember exactly, until
whenever
—but it turns out that this bland, calculating, vicious, badly-dressed bastard on the screen
was his boss
 …

“… but ultimately, I think, to solve the deficit problem, governments in Europe, and here, governments everywhere—”

All Frank wants to do now is tell Lizzie that, discuss it with her, dissect the irony.

That’s
all
he wants to do.

“—are going to have to move to the printing presses…”

But what he does instead is pick the empty Stoli bottle up, raise it high, and fling it hard at the flickering TV screen.

FIVE

It was while working in 1878 as an ill-paid scrivener at a dingy law office on Wall Street that Charles A. Vaughan first encountered the fabulously successful financier and speculator Gilbert Morley.

—
House of Vaughan
(p. 212)

13

T
HE REFERENCE TO
P
ALOMA
E
LECTRONICS IS WHAT GETS HER.

It’s weird, she thinks, how all of this stuff seems connected. The only reason she’s watching an overcaffeinated cable news channel like Bloomberg in the first place is because she received an e-mail out of the blue yesterday from Jimmy Gilroy in which he mentioned that Craig Howley was taking over as the new CEO of the Oberon Capital Group.

Not
really
out of the blue, then.

Which is her point.

Jimmy Gilroy has been researching James Vaughan and Oberon for the last eighteen months, ever since he and Ellen covered the Rundle brothers story together. That was big enough in itself—one of the most spectacular cases of a presidential candidate falling from grace in U.S. history—but Jimmy Gilroy knew that Rundle’s withdrawal from the race was only the outermost ripple of a much darker and more complex set of circumstances. The Rundles’ business in the Congo, for instance, involved the setting up of an illegal supply chain of thanaxite that led all the way to a robotics plant in Connecticut. But when it became apparent to Jimmy that behind
that
story was a large and very active private equity firm, the Oberon Capital Group, the focus of his interest shifted. It shifted again when he became aware of Oberon’s founder, James Vaughan—of his wide-ranging influence in Washington and of his long, serpentine family history.

So what started out as a proposed series of background articles for
Parallax
has gradually morphed into a book-length project with the provisional title
House of Vaughan
—a book that will apparently cover a period stretching back over nearly a century and a half. The only problem is that the project seems to have turned into something of a black hole, and one that Gilroy himself has more or less disappeared headlong into.

Ellen occasionally gets e-mails from him—yesterday’s was the first in several months—but she’s heard other stuff, stories from people in the business, rumors that Gilroy doesn’t have a publisher or any kind of a contract, that he has encountered all sorts of obstacles in getting research done, that he’s been subjected to subtle forms of intimidation and even manipulation, that he’s had to sell his apartment in Dublin to keep going, that he’s had a nervous breakdown, that he hasn’t actually written a single word.

Ellen liked Jimmy Gilroy, and she got on well with him over the few weeks that they ended up working together. But he was young and relatively inexperienced, even a little callow, and when he took off on his initial research jag to the Democratic Republic of Congo she wondered if he’d ever be heard from again.

The occasional e-mails she got from him were reassuring, but they didn’t reveal much.

Yesterday’s revealed a bit more than usual.

It turns out that he’s been living in Brooklyn for the last three months working in a bar and trying to patch his manuscript together.

But
go figure
is what he seemed to be saying in the e-mail yesterday.

Just as I’m getting somewhere with this book, James Vaughan retires? What, is he going to die on me next? Rendering the book even less relevant than it apparently already is? And his replacement is this boring-as-shit Craig Howley guy? Seriously? Watch him on Bloomberg tomorrow and you’ll see what I’m talking about
.

So here she is, watching, and what is it that catches her attention? Craig Howley’s mention of Paloma Electronics is what. This is the company that uses thanaxite to manufacture its military robots in Connecticut. But it’s also the company that Frank Bishop had a retail McJob with until very recently—before he shot his mouth off and got fired, and was then catapulted to national attention when his daughter …

Ellen shakes her head.

She doesn’t know. You see weird connections all the time. They don’t have to mean anything, and they usually don’t. But the result of this particular connection is that she is now thinking about both Jimmy Gilroy and Frank Bishop, and it’s giving her the strangest, weirdest feeling. She doesn’t believe in intuition, not really, except when it shows results, and even then it’s more often than not because you worked pretty hard to achieve those results
anyway
.

But sometimes …

She hasn’t answered Jimmy Gilroy’s e-mail yet. She gets up from the couch, goes over to her desk, opens up a reply, and starts typing. She says it’s great to hear from him and that they should meet up soon for a drink—that she has some stuff she wants to talk to him about.

What that stuff might be specifically, what form it might take, she’s not quite sure herself yet. But she’s not worried about it.

She presses
SEND
.

Then she picks up her phone.

She called Frank Bishop earlier in the day and left a message. He never got back to her.

When she saw him on Monday evening he was in pretty bad shape, but there wasn’t much she could do about it, apart from answer his questions. She hadn’t met him to get a story or anything.
He’d
called
her
. Besides, as far as she was concerned the story had played itself out—and as for a human interest angle, the grieving father in the aftermath of a tragedy? That held no interest for her whatsoever.

So why did she call him today?

And why is she about to call him again now?

She doesn’t know.

Intuition?

She waits.

“Yeah?”

“Frank? Hi, it’s Ellen.”

“Ellen.” Pause. “Hi.”

He doesn’t sound any better. Though why would he, she supposes. After all, he
is
a grieving father in the aftermath of a tragedy. A few days isn’t going to make any real difference.

“How are you, Frank?”

“I’m okay. I was pretty drunk a little while ago. Then I got sick. Not drunk anymore.”

“Oh…”

“Yeah, I was watching TV. A thing with, an interview with … what was his name again?”

Still sounds a
little
drunk.

“I don’t know, Frank.”

“Craig Howley. That’s it. One of these big, fucking … private equity guys.”

Ellen’s heart stops.
“What?”

Frank Bishop takes a deep loud breath. “Private equity guy. Even turns out I used to work for him. What do you think of that?”

“But … how did…?” She knows how
she
came to be watching the interview with Howley on Bloomberg. But Frank?

“Huh?”

“How come you were watching
that
?”

“I’ve been watching all the business channels, Ellen, reading business magazines, business
books
. I’m an expert now. On the financial crisis. I couldn’t
explain
any of it to you, but—”

He stops. There is silence for a moment, and then he starts coughing.

Definitely still drunk.

Ellen stares at the floor, waiting.

This is her fault. He was trying to make sense of what had been going on in Lizzie’s head, and
she
more or less told him that to have any chance of succeeding he’d have to … do what he was apparently doing. It was outside the diner on Ninth Avenue. They were standing on the sidewalk. She doesn’t remember her exact words, but—

“—it’d make no difference anyway,” Frank says, recovering. “These people are just carrying on regardless. I mean, you ought to hear what this guy was saying, he—”

“I know, Frank,” she cuts in. “I saw him, I was watching it, too.”

“Sorry …
what
?” He seems confused. “
You
were watching it?” He takes a moment to fold this information into his argument. “Well, then, you know what I’m talking about, right? Because … this motherfucker, he’s like the one that got away. In fact, he’s
worse
.”

Ellen feels something creeping up on her here, a chill. That phrase he’s just used,
the one that got away
—that was also from their conversation the other night. She just can’t remember the exact context, and which of them used it first.

She looks up and across the room.

It’s more likely to have been her, though.

“What do you mean, Frank?”

“Nothing.
Nothing
. I don’t know. It just struck me that—”

He’s trying to be cagey now.