A Reasonable Person Would Take It
The good version of Monday lasted until eleven-forty.
Four days had passed since the atrium, and they had been, in the ordinary unremarkable way, the best four days she’d had at Kade Group in a year.
Alexander had come to her desk on Friday and asked, out loud, in front of Priya, without arranging it first, whether she wanted to sit in on the lender call or whether she’d rather have the two hours back.
She’d taken the two hours. He’d said good and gone away and not mentioned it again, and the not mentioning was the entire point.
Saturday he had cooked, badly. Sunday she had made him watch a film he was too tired for and he had fallen asleep at the ninety-minute mark with one hand still on her ankle, and she had sat there in the blue light doing nothing at all, which was a skill she was going to have to practice.
Monday morning the remediation model closed within eleven thousand dollars of the number she’d forecast in March. Farrah Okonkwo emailed to say her side had it at the same figure and did Jo want to co-sign the variance note, which was not a thing junior committee members offered assistants.
So: eleven-forty. A good Monday. Her phone went with a number she didn’t know, and she took it, because the alternative was a voicemail she’d have to listen to anyway.
“Josephine Marlowe?”
“Speaking.”
“Jonah Beckett, I’m with Reddick Ellery. Search firm.” A pause exactly long enough to be polite. “Is this a terrible time?”
“It’s a Monday.”
“It’s always a Monday.” He had the voice of a man who made forty of these calls a week and had decided not to sound like it.
“I’ll be quick and you can put the phone down whenever you like.
I’m running a search for an operations role, New York, new entity.
Your name came up twice from different directions, which is unusual enough that I looked you up properly rather than just calling. ”
“I’m an executive assistant.”
“That’s your title, yes.”
Jo stopped, with her hand on the mouse.
“I’ve got you catching a covenant certification error on the Bellhaven file that outside counsel had already cleared,” Beckett said.
“I’ve got you rebuilding a remediation cost model that two consultancies had had a go at.
I’ve got you named in a Warrick Street committee minute as the person who reconciled two sets of numbers that were eleven percent apart, and I’ve got a Castellane-side committee member describing your work to a third party in terms I’d frankly like to be described in.
” He let that sit for exactly one beat. “None of that is assistant work. Somebody has been getting it at assistant rates for five months, which is either very good management or very bad, depending on which side of the desk you’re on. ”
Priya was on a call. Twelve feet away, through the glass, Alexander was reading something with his head bent.
“Who’s the client?” Jo said.
“I can’t say on a first call. I can tell you it’s a spin-out, it’s funded, and the operating team is already hired except for this seat.
” Beckett didn’t push. He never pushed once, the whole call.
“Forty minutes. Coffee, not an office. If it’s not interesting you’ve lost forty minutes and I’ve lost a fee, and I promise you I’ll survive it. ”
“I’m not looking.”
“I know. Nobody good ever is.” He sounded, briefly, like he was enjoying himself. “Thursday? There’s a place on Fifty-Third that’s empty at half past two.”
Jo looked at the phone for a second, and at the eleven-thousand-dollar variance sitting closed on her screen, and at nothing in particular.
“Thursday,” she said.
She told herself, for three days, that she was going to a coffee to be polite.
It was not a good lie and she did not construct it carefully, which should have told her something. She had turned down three of these in two years without needing a story about it. She had once said no thank you to a headhunter mid-sentence and hung up while he was still saying her name.
She didn’t mention it to Alexander, because there was nothing to mention. That was true on Monday. It stayed true on Tuesday. By Wednesday it had begun to require a small amount of maintenance, and Jo noticed the maintenance and filed it and went to bed.
The place on Fifty-Third was a bakery with six tables and a line out the door at lunch and nobody in it at half past two.
Beckett turned out to be about forty, tired around the eyes, in a good suit he didn’t seem to think about. He’d brought someone.
“Corinne Lasker,” the someone said, and put out a hand. “I’m the client. Jonah’s going to sit here and be quiet, which he’s bad at.”
“I’m excellent at it.”
“You’re not.” Lasker sat. She was somewhere in her fifties, gray coming in at the front and left alone, in a jacket that had been expensive about six years ago and had been worn since.
She had a folder with her and she put it on the chair beside her rather than the table, which Jo clocked.
“Thank you for coming. I’ll do this in the order I’d want it done to me.
What it is, what the job is, what it pays, and then you ask me the hard ones. ”
“All right.”
“It’s a hotel operator. Eleven properties, all of them currently inside larger portfolios where they’re being run as an afterthought — three in the Northeast, two Chicago, the rest scattered.
They’re not distressed. That’s the part people get wrong.
They’re neglected, which is different and much more interesting, because a distressed asset needs money and a neglected one mostly needs somebody to actually look at it.
” Lasker’s hands stayed still on the table.
“We’re spinning them out into a standalone operating company.
Closed the equity in June. Eleven properties on day one, target twenty by year three. ”
“Who’s the money?”
“We’ll come to that. I’ll answer it, I’m not dodging, I just want you to hear the job first, because if you hear the money first you’ll spend the rest of this meeting doing something other than listening.” She said it without any edge on it. “Fair?”
Jo considered the shape of that.
“Fair.”
“The seat is head of operations. Not operations support. You’d own the operating plan across all eleven, you’d hire the property-level people, and you’d have four direct reports on day one, going to about nine.
” Lasker went through it evenly. “The reason the seat is open is that I’ve fired one person out of it already, in April, for being extremely impressive and unable to read a document.
Half this job is documents. Ground leases, management agreements, franchise terms, the covenants everybody assumes somebody else has checked.
Every single property we’re buying has something wrong buried in its paperwork, and the entire thesis of the business is that we find it before we close and price it in. ”
Jo said nothing. There was a familiar noise starting somewhere behind her sternum and she was not going to let it show on her face.
“Which is why you,” Lasker said. “You’ve done it four times that I can document and I assume more that I can’t. Jonah found you because a Castellane committee member wouldn’t shut up about a variance reconciliation. I hired you in my head about ten minutes into reading the file.”
“You’ve read a file on me.”
“I’ve read a file on nine people. Yours is the one I came to a bakery for.”
The espresso machine went off behind the counter. Somebody’s phone rang and got silenced.
“Compensation,” Lasker said. “Base is two-fifteen. Bonus target thirty percent, and I’ll tell you honestly that in year one it’s going to pay closer to fifteen because we’ll miss something.
Two hundred thousand of founder equity at the June valuation, four-year vest, one-year cliff.
If we hit the year-three plan that’s worth a number I’m not going to say out loud at a table this size because it sounds like I’m selling you something. ”
Jo’s base at Kade Group was ninety-four thousand dollars.
She had negotiated it herself, eleven months ago, and had been proud of it, and it had been a real win, and she had told Dani about it over takeout and they had opened something with a cork in it.
“You’re doing arithmetic,” Lasker said.
“I’m an assistant. Arithmetic’s most of the job.”
“Mm.” Lasker let it go past without picking it up, which was not the same as agreeing with it. “Ask me the hard ones.”
Jo set her cup down.
“Why is the seat open in April and still open in July?”
“Because I’d rather run short than hire wrong, and because I’ve turned down two people who could do the job but would have made everyone miserable.” Immediate, no defensiveness in it. “Next.”
“Eleven properties across four markets with nine reports and a year-one plan you’ve already told me you’ll miss. What’s the actual hours?”
“Bad for eighteen months. Genuinely bad. Then either it works and it gets normal, or it doesn’t work and you’ll have run an operating company, which is worth more on your next thing than any two years at a desk.
” Lasker held her eyes. “I’m not going to tell you it’s balanced.
You’d know I was lying and then you’d stop believing the rest of it. ”
“What happens if I’m wrong about something big?”
“You’ll be wrong about something big in the first six months. Everyone is. The question is whether you’ll say so on the Tuesday or let me find it in the Friday pack.” Lasker almost smiled. “I already know which you are, or I wouldn’t be here.”
Jo asked four more. Lasker answered all four without once making the answer flatter than it was, and twice said I don’t know yet, and once said that’s a real problem and we haven’t solved it.
“You can fix four buildings in year one,” Jo said. “Not eleven. The capital plan you just described funds four.”
“Correct.”