Chapter 8
The syndicate gave them ten days.
The mechanism was simple and Clara understood it before Amsel finished the sentence.
The refinancing required a resolution executed by every holder of record.
There were two holders of record. If both did not sign by Friday the twenty-third, the existing facility matured, the lender was under no obligation to extend, and a company with four properties and nine hundred people on the payroll would go into a process.
"You could refuse," Amsel said.
"I know."
"I want to say it out loud once, because it is my job." Papers. "If you do nothing at all, that company goes into receivership in March, and there is no legal exposure to you whatsoever. You'd take a loss on paper. You'd also be entirely free of it, permanently, in about ten weeks."
Clara stood in her apartment above the hardware store and looked at a laundromat.
"Denise," she said.
"I'm sorry?"
"There's a woman at the Ellwood called Denise who's been doing a night audit at six in the morning for four months because nobody replaced the auditor.
" Clara's voice was perfectly level. "There's a kitchen porter at the Verdura whose name is Efrain and who has three kids and who has worked in that building longer than I have.
I could give you nine hundred of these. I know most of them. "
"Clara —"
"I'm not being noble. I want that on the record too." She turned away from the window. "If it were only him, I'd let it burn and I'd sleep. That's the honest answer and I've had four days to check it."
"So you'll sign."
"I'll sign."
"Then I need to tell you the part you're not going to like," Amsel said. "It's a wet signature, in person, both holders, in front of the syndicate's counsel. They've been explicit. After what happened on Monday they want to see two human beings in a room."
They put it at the Verdura, because of course they did.
Clara drove down on the Thursday and got there ninety minutes early, which was not strategy, it was blood. She had never once in nine years arrived at that building on time.
There were photographers on Cabrillo.
Three of them, and a woman with a phone, and Clara understood as she came around the corner that somebody had told them, and that the somebody was probably the syndicate, who had an interest in the market seeing this happen.
She parked in the staff lot.
Then she sat in the car for a moment and did something she had not done in four months, which was put her hair up.
Paloma Solis met her at the service door.
She did not say anything. She just stood there holding the door open, and behind her, in the back-of-house corridor with the oatmeal walls and the stack of banquet chairs that predated everybody, there were perhaps thirty people.
Not a line. Nobody had organized it. It was housekeepers and line cooks and two banquet runners and the woman from reservations whose son had been sick in the spring, standing in a service corridor in the middle of a Thursday, because word had gone around that Clara Devlin was coming in the back.
"Oh, no," Clara said. "No, don't — everybody has to — "
Danny said, "You put my brother through his certificate."
And then a lot of people said things at once, and Clara stood in that corridor for four minutes and got through it by doing the thing she had always done, which was to ask each of them a specific question about their specific work, and it did not help at all, and by the end her face was wet and she did not care.
Paloma walked her to the elevator.
"You didn't do that," Clara said.
"I did not."
"Paloma."
"I told two people you were coming through the back and I did not tell them why." Paloma pressed the button. "They can do arithmetic, Clara. Everybody in this building has been reading the same magazine as everybody else."
The elevator came.
"He's upstairs," Paloma said. "He's been up there since eight."
The old operations office is on the second floor at the end, with a window that looks at the service yard and not the ocean, because in 1961 nobody wasted an ocean view on an office.
That was where they had put the table.
Adrian was standing at the window with his back to the door and he did not turn around when she came in, and Clara realized, with a small cold shock, that he was doing it on purpose. He was giving her the room first.
Nine years ago he had stood at that same window and told her he was not going to say things he did not mean.
"Clara."
"Adrian."
He turned around.
He had lost weight. Not in a way anyone in that building would remark on — he was a man in a good suit who looked like a man in a good suit — but Clara had been married to him for seven years and it was the first thing she saw and she hated that it was.
There was more gray. That was quick, she thought. Four months.
"Thank you for coming," he said.
"I didn't come for you."
"I know." He said it immediately, without any defensiveness at all, which was new. "I want to say one thing before they come up, and then I'm not going to say anything else that isn't about the document."
"Adrian —"
"You saved this company twice." He stood very still.
"You saved it once in twenty-one and nobody knew, and you're saving it again today, in front of everybody, and it is going to cost you something and you will never say what.
I'm not going to thank you. I've worked out that thanking you is the thing I did wrong for seven years. "
Clara stood in the doorway with her hand still on the frame.
"That's a very good line," she said.
"It isn't a line."
"Everything you say is a line, Adrian. That's not an accusation.
It's how you were raised." She came in and put her bag on the table.
"Your father says everything to a room. You say everything to the person you want to move.
You've never once in your life just — said a thing into the air with nobody catching it. "
He absorbed that.
"That's fair," he said.
"I know it's fair."
The syndicate's counsel came up at nine-forty and they did not speak again for two hours.
Here is what Clara had not been prepared for.
She had prepared for anger. She had a version of herself ready for anger and had rehearsed it in the car.
She had prepared for grief, and for the particular horror of being in a room with a man who had put her daughter's name on a schedule.
What she had not prepared for was that they would be good at it.
The syndicate's counsel had brought a problem.
There was a covenant in the new facility that keyed off a change-of-control definition, and the definition as drafted would have been tripped by the very resolution they were signing, which is the kind of thing that happens when four law firms draft against each other for two weeks.
Everyone looked at the paper for a while.
And then Adrian said, "Carve out an intra-holder transfer," and Clara said, "Not a carve-out, they'll never take a carve-out on the front end — restate the definition to key off operating control, not equity," and Adrian said, "They'll want a floor," and Clara said, "Give them a floor at forty and a consent right on disposal, they'll take that before lunch," and Adrian said, "They will," and picked up the phone.
It took nine minutes.
The bank took it before lunch.
And when it was done, Clara looked up and found the syndicate's counsel watching the two of them with an expression she recognized instantly, because she had seen it on four hundred faces across nine years, at galas and in boardrooms and once at a funeral.
It was the look people got watching the Whitmores work a room.
Oh, Clara thought. There it is.
That had been real. Whatever else had been a lie or a folder or a schedule in twelve-point type — the two of them across a table were real, they had always been real, and it was the single most dangerous fact in that building.
They broke at one and the counsel went to make calls, and there were forty minutes with nothing in them.
Adrian said, "There's still coffee in the GM's office."
"I know where the coffee is."
"Right." A pause. "Yes. Obviously."
He almost smiled. She almost did.
And then, because forty minutes is a long time, they talked — carefully, about nothing, about the Ellwood's roof and the new channel contract and whether the Portugal mill had ever been paid.
"It went in," Adrian said. "The order. Esther found it in a supplier chain three weeks late."
"I know."
"You know."
"She told me."
He looked at his hands. "She tells you things."
"She does."
"Good," Adrian said. "That's good. I'd rather somebody was."
And it was fine. It was almost easy. And then Clara, without thinking, because they were talking about the mill, said:
"Do you remember when the sample book came and Willa took it up to her room for a week and made that thing out of it — "
She stopped.
She stopped because he had lit up. Actually lit up — the whole face, the way it used to, the way it had at a kitchen table on a Sunday four years ago when a twelve-year-old came downstairs with a lampshade made out of two hundred dollars' worth of fabric swatches and a hot glue gun.
"The lampshade," Adrian said.
"Yes."
"It's still in the — " And then he stopped.
Because they had both arrived at it from opposite directions at the same moment: that lampshade was in a house on Ladera Lane that was now, irrevocably, legally, in a trust with Clara as sole beneficiary, and neither of them lived in it, and the girl who made it had not spoken to her father since October.
The forty minutes went completely silent.
"Clara," Adrian said.
"Don't."
"I need to ask you something about Willa and I'm going to ask it badly —"
"Don't." Her voice did something. She hated it. "Not here. Not in this building, in this office, on a Thursday, in between a covenant negotiation. You don't get to do her in the gap."
He shut his mouth.