The Bluffing Game (3 page)

“The more people experience that, the better,” Sterling said. It took me a second to remember he meant space. “If everyone could understand how small we are, how short-lived in the scheme of things, so much less would matter. Only what’s really important would.”

“Like what?” I said. “What’s really important in the end?” I wanted to know for myself as much as to know his take on it.

Sterling stared at his empty glass and spun it by its stem between his thumb and fingers. “Sometimes I wonder. Sometimes I think, not a damn thing. But that’s wrong. I feel it in my bones that something does matter. Every day when I wake up in the morning, I know it.”

How had the conversation gotten so heavy?

“Maybe when you open your space tourism port, I’ll buy a seat,” I said. Three hundred K would be a year’s salary for me. By the time he opened the port, I would probably have forgotten all about it. But if the port had already been built, and he had asked to take me up tomorrow, I would have gone.

“I’ll buy it for you,” he said, still twirling his glass, but meeting my eyes now. “If you win my settlement and I finally get to build the damn thing.” He smiled just a bit mischievously. “It’ll be my tip.”

“Deal,” I said. I drank the rest of my champagne.

Dinner was fabulous, but I’ve never been one to marvel over the details of a meal, so a truly exquisite shrimp scampi was still shrimp scampi, even if it was the best I’d ever tasted. Dessert was another story. The waiter brought what looked like an enormous chocolate lotus in a shallow bowl, and then poured steaming caramel into the bowl around it. As the heat of the caramel melted the chocolate, the petals of the lotus unfolded one by one to reveal a sundae of ice cream, fruit, and nuts within. This, I had to admit, won my heart. I might come back here someday just to have that sundae again.

Afterward we took an elevator to the roof, where Victor had a chopper waiting for us on the helipad. It lifted us into the night, and on the ride back I rested my head on Victor’s shoulder, and he put his arm around me. It could have meant nothing and probably did, but I savored every minute of it. I didn’t need a helicopter, or a giant house, or even that enormous mattress in my room, but this arm around me—this. This I needed.

We landed on a helipad I hadn’t even known was there on the roof of the Sterling House, and once the wind and noise of the chopper had subsided, he walked me back down to the living room. Sterling went to the bar and poured himself a drink, and asked me if I wanted anything.

“No thanks. Best not to have a hangover during the meeting tomorrow. You might give some consideration to that yourself.”

He spun around with a smile, walked over to me, and poked me on the sternum. “Are you going to tell Victor Sterling what to do in his own house on his own island? Really?”

I smiled too. “I am your counsel.”

“Legal counsel, nothing more.”

“Unlike Andrea.” Whoops. Looked like I’d had enough champagne now that my filter was gone. That was rule number two: Never get drunk with a client. At least not before the verdict.

Victor shook his head. “Please. She likes to brag that she sleeps with me, but she’s a gold digger. I’m just her treasure trove. We’re more like fuck buddies than anything.” He took a sip of his drink. “We have a consensuality contract we sign every time we do it, saying we mutually decided to engage in physical activities together, without coercion in either direction, and that this is a completely separate engagement than our employer-employee relationship, having no bearing on it whatsoever.” He drained his glass. “How’s that for foreplay?”

“Sounds stimulating,” I said, wondering how two people could become so separated from the commoner’s world that such a thing could even make sense to them, and be so distrustful of each other’s motives yet still want each other’s bodies.

“Yeah, fuck that,” he said.

“So what kind of foreplay do you prefer?” I said. A bold, loaded question. Hadn’t I given up on him for tonight?

“I’ll show you,” he said, and set his drink down on the bar, loosened his bow tie, and walked straight past me to a Steinway Grand in the corner of the enormous living room. “You like jazz?”

“What else?” I said, following him.

He sat on the piano bench, cracked his knuckles with a comic theatricality I suspected only his slightly drunk self would allow, and then began playing the chords to “The Way You Look Tonight.”

I stood by. He played with grace and a lot of coordination for a tipsy man, and with such ease he must have practiced every day. The chords continued.

“Aren’t you going to sing?” I said.

He leaned back as he played, and said, “It takes two to tango. I’ve always preferred this song sung by a woman.”

Now here was a risk I hadn’t counted on. I nervously smiled. “I don’t know, I may not remember the words.”

He took the sheet music from in front of him and tossed it onto the wide back of the piano in front of him. “Go get them.” He continued to play.

I reached over for them.

“Ah-ah-ah,” he said. “The words don’t come to you. You go to them.”

I took his meaning, and found myself in a spot I hadn’t been in some time—the edge of my comfort zone. Me, singing jazz on top of a piano? You had to be kidding.

“All right,” I said. “If this is happening, I’m having another drink first.”

“Mi alcohol es su alcohol,” he said, grinning, rocking lightly from side to side as he kept the chords coming.

Getting into the spirit of things, I removed my heels and hurried over to the bar, poured myself a shot of sweet vermouth, and tipped it back. Sufficiently buzzed, I ran back to the piano, put my back to it, and pushed down, lifting my backside onto the black wood. I twisted and pulled my legs up, too, and unable to keep a straight face, I nearly giggled while I crawled swimsuit-model style to the front of the piano, and plucked the sheet music up. He laughed, and I lost it, too.

“All right, give me a second,” I said. I read the words—how could I have forgotten them?—and took a breath, hoping the talking we’d done all evening had warmed up my voice without wearing it out. How long had it been since childhood music lessons? Twenty years? More? I sang to myself in the shower, in my car, in my empty office on late nights, but never in front of people. Here went nothing.

“‘Someday, when I’m awfully low, when the world is cold,’” I began. And that was all I needed to get into the mood. I let the song come out of me not as a performance, but as a game. I took a more genuine pose, sitting up leaning on one hand with my feet hanging off the edge, legs crossed at the ankles, while throwing Victor flirty looks. Halfway through the second verse, he joined in, and we mixed our voices together in lyrics about laughs that wrinkled noses, breathless charm, and, of course, the way you look tonight. I had to admit, if this was preferred foreplay as he claimed, it was a pretty damn good prelude to sex. The man had taste.

When we reached the end of the verse, I lay down on the piano and faced Victor, stomach down, propping my chin up with my hands. “So tell me. Mr. Sterling,” I teased, “how do I look tonight?”

“Incredible,” he said, not a hint of a joke in his voice, his smile wide, his eyes tired but still somehow full of—what else to call it—joy. “I’ve never had this much fun with a lawyer before.”

I twirled a strand of hair that had fallen in front of my face. “Want to have some more?” I said.

He hesitated. Our eyes were locked, and he knew exactly what I meant. The extra alcohol had been all I needed to sow reason to the wind and let it flutter quietly up and away. It was gone.

“I have no idea what you mean,” he said, clearly not meaning a word of it.

I turned over and swung my feet down off the piano again, and hopped down. “I mean this,” I said, and took hold of his gorgeous cheekbones, pulled his head to mine, and kissed him. He tasted like gin, but the touch of his lips softening into mine was downright delectable. He hesitated, and then held my hips with his long, warm pianist’s hands. He kissed me back, and for a moment that was all we were, two people kissing, together without words, simply enjoying each other’s touches and immersing ourselves in the moment, and if I could have slowed that moment down into forever, I wouldn’t have thought twice. The feeling wasn’t like the hookups I’d sometimes had in college, where everyone was young and desperate for each other, but more like what I imagined it was like when my parents sometimes fell asleep on the couch, holding hands and resting their gray heads against one another. Humble human love. I disappeared in it.

He pulled away at last, and I felt both suddenly empty and at the same time still warm and filled to the brim with him.

“I’m sorry,” he said, taking his hands from my sides and letting them hang beside him. “But I should stop.”

He looked desperate to take a step back. But he wasn’t blaming me; he was blaming himself.

He closed his eyes, breathing deeply. “Trust me, I wish I could keep going.”

I ran a finger along the edge of the beautiful piano. I had pushed him too far.

“Listen,” he said. “Tomorrow night. After we make the settlement. We can… we can do this again. If you’re still interested.”

“No, I get it,” I said. I couldn’t look at him anymore, could only look at those beautiful hands I wanted all over me. “You’re right. It’s a bad idea.”

“I’m sorry,” he said, his hands shaking. “I’ll see you tomorrow.” And he turned and hurried away. The room was so big I couldn’t bear to watch his back shrink away for so long, so I turned from him. I held myself and tried not to let the memory of his lips and hands slip away, to keep myself full of him for as long as I possibly could.

Three

Last
night’s message had been clear: today was all business. I didn’t enjoy the monstrously large bed nearly as much as I would have if I’d had someone to share it with, but I did have to admit in the morning that I had slept extremely well. The bottle of champagne sat still sealed on the bedside table, next to the pile of still-wrapped chocolates from the pillows. Maybe I could enjoy a few of them with the champagne tonight after winning Sterling’s settlement for him and—surprise—rejecting his offer of an affair afterward.

Hmm, bitter much? I had to admit it was true. He had built me up with sexy jazz foreplay, allowed me a knockout of a kiss, and had then run away. I supposed he was allowed to change his mind, especially when drunk, but I was allowed to change my mind just as sharply. I could imagine Nick’s voice if I told him over the phone that I had slept with a client, anyway. I would never have heard the end of it.

I slept late and made myself breakfast in my room without caring whether anyone had hoped to see me before the meeting this afternoon. I dressed in my most severe pantsuit, put on my sharpest makeup, and donned dagger-like Prada heels courtesy of the wardrobe at my disposal. Then I sat in a comfortable leather armchair next to the fireplace, and read through the details of the case again. I had no reason to see Sterling outside of the meeting. We had already discussed everything yesterday. I pored over the pages, gleaning whatever details I could about the psychology of my opponents, looking for what they really wanted. Everything seemed just a little off, as if they had a level of confidence their shaky position simply didn’t entitle them to. That usually meant they were hiding something.

Before I knew it, I looked at my watch and saw it was nearly time for the meeting. I reached for a chocolate to give myself one last mood boost and found that I had eaten them all while reading. This struck me as a bad sign, though I couldn’t explain precisely why. I got up from the chair, picked up my briefcase, and strode from the room with my game face on.

I was unstoppable. I was I control. They were on the losing side. They had nothing to hold over me.

I walked down the long hall, through the expansive living space, and into the meeting room, a geodesic sphere on the southern tip of the island, overlooking the ocean like the bow of a ship. Sterling and the opposing counsel already sat waiting at the circular table in the middle of the room, and I sat down without even giving Sterling a glance, instead sizing up the opposition. Two old men in suits who would underestimate me—I had met hundreds of them. And one young Chinese woman in a suit as severe as mine, unceasingly rubbing the very tips of her thumbs together as she gazed at a page on the table. She did not look up at me. She was the only real threat.

“Good afternoon,” I said. “If you plan on attempting to settle out of court, the onus is on you to do so. My client has made many a generous offer already. What you haven’t done is made any clear indication of the terms that would fully appease you. In essence, you’ve refused to name your price. If you hope to settle, you ought to do so now.”

The men in suits glanced at each other, surprised at my directness, my unwillingness to look away from them or back down in any way, show any kind of weakness. This was a hint that the bad publicity and investor withdrawal that would be brought by going to court no longer scared us. That was a bluff, but one I had confidence in. It was their trump card, and I pretended it meant nothing to us.

The Chinese woman sat very quietly still touching her thumb tips together. She had not looked up at me.

“I don’t think you quite understand the position you’re in,” one of the men said. The fact that he responded first meant he was either the most confident or the most intimidated. I bet on the latter.

I smiled at him. “Enlighten me then.”

“If we take you to court, your investors will bail. Your PR will tank. The whole island will sit empty.”

I laughed. “You don’t know our investors very well. They’re certainly nervous, as all high-stakes investors should be, but they’re behind the space port a hundred percent, and a minor complaint that was easily dismissed in court years ago by the time the space port opens will be long forgotten by both the investors and the public. You all have a stake in this, of course, but your stake is much smaller than the truly big money that stands behind this project. Simply put, you are no match for them.”

The second man spoke now, clearly the more confident of the men—I had pegged them accurately. “Intimidation tactics won’t get you very far,” he said, leaning forward and smiling the same way I was—the smile of one who knows she is in control. But he was mistaken. “You can come in here and pretend that nothing any of the previous attorneys said was true, but it’s going to take a lot more than a confident face to convince us we have no leverage. You think we’re underestimating you, but I have to inform you it’s the opposite. I happen to know some of Mr. Sterling’s investors personally, and to say that they are behind the space port a hundred percent is, to put it mildly, an exaggeration. They’re not thrilled with it, and neither are we. And our price, since you want us to name it, is that the space port be scrapped altogether. And we’re not going to settle until you agree to our terms.”

I knew their price was no space port, but I had expected the Chinese woman to be the one to finally come out and say it. Was she not the big gun after all? Or was it possible that I was, indeed, the one doing the underestimating at this table?

“I happen to have met many of my client’s investors as well,” I said. “And I don’t know what they may have said to you in the past, or what my client’s previous counsel may have implied about them. But I’ve worked with high-stakes investors in the past, and there’s one thing I’ve found never changes: money talks. Investors can say whatever they like to whomever they like, but at the end of the day, their dollars do the talking. And their dollars are now, and have always been, behind my client’s vision. Since these proceedings began, which I remind you was over a month ago, not a single investor has pulled a single dollar of support from the space port. So you may believe you know these investors personally, but the question is, how well do you know their money?”

The confident man said nothing. He was hiding very well how flustered he must have been.

“Nobody cares about the investors,” the Chinese woman said. Her eyes stayed fixed on the paper in front of her. “Scrap the space port, or we take you to court.”

“Great. Then we’re done here,” I said. “Have a good afternoon.” I stood up and left the room.

“A moment please, before you go,” Sterling said to the others. He jumped up from his chair, followed me out of the room and closed the door behind him.

“What the fuck are you doing?” he said. “If we go to court, my investors are out.”

“We’re not going to court. I’m calling their bluff,” I said. “Their case will never hold up in court and they know it. If we do go, we may lose investors, but they get nothing. I’ve read every word of their claims and contracts over and over again, and all of the relevant laws. They don’t have a case. This whole thing is a waiting game they’ve been playing, hoping you’ll crack under the stress. And from the look on your face right now, I can see why they expected it. They’re counting on you to not take my advice, to not risk losing your investors. They were counting on you, Victor Sterling, to not let your lawyers call their bluff. And up until now, that’s exactly what you’ve been doing. You’ve been playing right into their hands.”

“And what if you’re wrong? What if you’ve missed something? I know that woman, the one who never looks at you when she speaks. She’s a contract lawyer, and a fucking good one. You think she would take a losing case?”

“I didn’t know why anyone would take this case until you stood up just now—and now it makes sense. I think she’s betting on you cracking like this, just like the rest of them. She’s betting on you not trusting your counsel, which, once again, is exactly what you’ve been doing. How many lawyers have told you these people simply don’t have a case?”

“Just you. And one other. The first one.”

“And you didn’t trust him.”

“I did trust him. But I told him the same thing I told you. It doesn’t matter if they have a case or not. We can’t go to court, or we lose the investors.”

“And did he suggest calling their bluff?”

“Of course he did. But he and the investors disagreed on two of the exact same things you said. One is that they’ll back down and not take a losing case to court. If they really do have a losing case, then it’s a loss if they take us to court, but also a loss if they give in and come down on their demands. If they lose either way, who’s to say they won’t pick the loss that brings me down too? Which is the other point. Bad press never goes away. Once you’re accused, it doesn’t matter who wins or loses. You’ve already lost your credibility in the eyes of future investors, not to mention current ones. And I don’t think you’re clairvoyant enough to know for sure that they’ll back down, or that I can weather the PR storm if we go to court.”

“So you don’t trust me.”

He faltered. “I want to. Yesterday I did, when you came with a good game plan. But we didn’t talk about just walking out on them like this. You have to see how much is at stake.”

“I do see how much is at stake. Look at it this way. Imagine how you would feel if you were in their position. Just imagine it for a second. You’re unhappy about the space port, and you see it causing a loss in the value of your assets. Legally, there’s nothing you can do. You don’t have a case. But what if you could intimidate the big cheese into backing down on the things you don’t like? Maybe you find a way to do that if you don’t have a case. If you’re smart, you put him in a losing position—either he backs down and gives you what you want, or he goes to court and ultimately loses anyway through bad press and loss of investors. You frame the entire choice that way—as a choice between losing options. And then you wait him out. Eventually, he’s going to choose to lose on his own terms. Which means choosing exactly how much to give up. Which means choosing not to go to court.”

He was silent, biting his thumbnail as he mulled it over. “Go on.”

“So, again, imagine you’re them. What do you do when the big boss chooses to take the unpredictable path of losing whatever the gods of PR and investment hand him, instead of choosing to give up his dream? You’re not prepared for that, because going in, you knew the man too well. You knew, somehow, I don’t know how, that he wouldn’t take an unpredictable risk. So what do you do? If you’re them, you have two choices: go to court and lose, or negotiate. You still want to come out on top in some way, so instead of fighting a losing court battle, you give a little. You bring down your price, but only marginally, only enough to show you’re willing to negotiate. And then you heckle for all you’re worth, and hope the settlement outweighs whatever you were expecting to lose in the first place. In the end, you still come out on top.”

“And where does that leave me, Victor Sterling?”

“It leaves you a winner, too. Because instead of giving them what they want and compromising your vision, or getting taken to court and losing credibility, you instead still settle out of court and force them to negotiate, which is what you wanted in the first place. Your mistake, from the beginning, from before they even threatened to file suit, was showing weakness. Maybe it was your first lawyer, or maybe it was the fact that you fired him, but somehow you showed them you’re at the mercy of your investors, and of the public perception. What you should have done, from the beginning, was rejected their entire premise that going to court would be a bad thing for you. And that, to answer your original question, is exactly what the fuck I just did in there. But you’re the client, so take it or leave it. The question is, are you as weak as they think you are?”

He was angry now. “No. I believe in my vision, and I believe in myself. I didn’t get where I am today by backing down.”

“Exactly. The problem is, you’re now afraid of losing everything you worked so hard for. And that, whether you like it or not, comes across as weakness. You’ve already shown them that you don’t trust me by the way you hurried out to have this very conversation. And that means they’ll wait. They’ll try to sit it out until your lack of faith in your lawyers causes you to fire me and hire someone new. They’ve seen that happen twice already, and they have no reason to expect you to act any differently this time. What they won’t see coming is that this time, you’re going to trust your lawyer and turn the tables on them. You’re going to be the one giving
them
two losing choices, and resting on your laurels while you wait for them to crack. You could have won this a month ago if you had trusted your counsel then. So today, you’re going to trust me.”

He put his hands in his pockets and paced around. “They’re waiting in there. What do I say to them?”

“Nothing. You act like the reason you jumped up to follow me was unrelated. You send Andrea in there with refreshments and have her tell them you’ll see them in court.” He was rubbing his hands together nervously again, so I took hold of one of them. I continued, “And then they’ll realize they’ve royally screwed up, because this time you hired a lawyer who knows how to convince you to trust her.”

His hand softened, and he held my hands back. “OK. I’ll try it. But I am not letting this go to court. I’m not.”