Death's little helpers

2

Flesh amp; Blood was a new place just off Union Square that specialized in red meat and game birds and nostalgia for the bull market. It occupied what was once a firehouse, and the hundred-year-old building’s elaborate plaster and tile and brass work had been lovingly restored and augmented with dark wood paneling and crystal chandeliers and a bar across the back that looked like J. P. Morgan’s yacht. It was a small place, but its designers had successfully achieved the cavernous feel and stupefying din of much larger spots. The wine list ran to several volumes, as did the list of single malts and cocktails. The waitresses- and there were only waitresses- were uniformly young and attractive, and clad in short black skirts and white shirts with plunging necklines. If not for city ordinances to the contrary, they would certainly have had cigarette girls in spike heels and fishnets working the tables and firing up the customers’ stogies. It was not my usual sort of place, but Tom Neary was a slave to food fashion, and I owed him more than a few favorsthe latest one being this job for Nina Sachs.

He was at the restaurant when I arrived, standing near the hostess’s podium and making the hostess slightly nervous. Not that Neary was particularly threatening- in fact, with his short dark hair, clean-cut good looks, and horn-rimmed glasses, he could pass for a grown-up Eagle Scout. And he wasn’t saying anything, or doing much at all besides studying the platters that the waitresses hoisted by. But at six-foot-four and 250 pounds, he had a tendency to loom.

Neary wore a dark suit, a white shirt, and a striped tie- the same G-man look he’d sported when I first met him, back when he was with the Bureau’s resident agency in Utica, and I was a sheriff’s investigator in Burr County. Nowadays, though, the clothes were more expensively cut. Gone from the Feds over three years, Neary had a big-deal job with Brill Associates, a big-deal corporate security and investigations firm. The division he ran covered the whole East Coast, and his clients included some of the largest banks and brokerages around.

Neary was more comfortable in the private sector than he had been at the Bureau; his masters at Brill let him run on a much looser lead, so long as revenues kept growing. And now that he was firmly ensconced in management himself, a little of the edge had come off his reflexive distrust of authority. And, of course, the money was a whole lot better. Neary used to worry about the moral gray areas of private security work- his Jesuit schooling, he said- but he seemed to navigate those waters well enough, and I didn’t know if he still gave it much thought.

There were plenty of things I didn’t know about Neary. I wasn’t a guy he invited over for Sunday barbecues or a guy he sent family photo cards to at Christmastime. But he and I had traded favors for years now, and I knew the important stuff- that he was smart and tough and could think on his feet. That he knew the difference between what was right and what was expedient. That I could trust him.

Neary offered me a massive hand and we shook. The hostess looked relieved and led us to a table near the back. Neary hung his suit jacket on the chair, loosened his tie, and unfurled a white cloth napkin on his lap. A blond waitress recited the menu to us, and he listened closely and nodded slowly as she spoke. She took our drink orders and left, and I took a closer look at him.

Success was taking its toll. Behind the glasses, his brown eyes were bleary, and the skin beneath them was pouched and dark. There were new lines around his mouth and new gray in his hair. His big shoulders were slumped and rounded. He yawned and stretched out his arms and rolled his neck. I spoke over the clamor.

“Too much work?” I asked.

“Too much work, not enough hours. Too many meetings, too much talking-” There was a muted chime from under the table, and Neary pulled something hardly larger than a deck of cards from his belt. It was black and had a tiny screen and keyboard on the front.

“E-mail,” he said. “Like a fucking electronic dog leash.” But he read it. He shook his head and put the deck back on his belt. The waitress returned with a bread basket and our drinks: ginger ale for Neary, cranberry juice for me. She left with our lunch orders. Neary swallowed some ginger ale and rubbed his eyes. “You take the job?” he asked.

“About an hour ago. Thanks… I think.”

“You’re not sure?”

“You ever meet Nina Sachs?” I asked.

He shook his head. “I’ve known Maggie Lind for a while, and done some work for her and her clients, but not Nina Sachs. Why?”

I shrugged. “A difficult personality.”

“I thought that was the definition of client,” Neary said. He reached across the table for a roll.

“Why did Brill pass on this?” I asked. “Was it too small for you guys?”

“Small was part of it,” he said. “But we had a conflict of interest, too. Brill is on the short list to take over security services for Pace-Loyette.”

I thought about that for a while. “Nina Sachs told me that Pace had more questions than answers about where Danes might be.”

Neary nodded, eyeing an elk steak that passed our table, gleaming and smoking. “If we win this beauty contest, I expect that finding him will be one of the first things Pace management asks us to do. If you’ve already located him by then, all the better.”

Wheels within wheels. I smiled. “Why are they so interested?”

“Danes isn’t just another office grunt,” Neary said.

“I know, he’s their wunderkind stock analyst- or he was until a few years ago, when he crashed and burned along with the rest of them. Now I guess he’s like all the other ex-superstars, the pile of dog shit on the kitchen table that everyone’s trying to ignore.”

Neary smiled. “His management is afraid he might be an exploding pile of dog shit.” I raised an eyebrow and Neary continued. “You see the articles in the Journal, on pending enforcement activity?” I shook my head. “I thought you followed this stuff,” he said, smiling. “I thought it was in your blood.”

“I’m in recovery for it. What’s the Journal say?”

“They’ve been running a series on what the next wave of Fed actions might be. Speculation is that the SEC and the Justice Department are looking at the small boutique firms- the niche playersand that they’re set to land hard on anyone who didn’t come to Jesus when they had the chance a couple of years back.”

“And Pace falls into that category?”

“Yep. They’ve got a nice little franchise, providing investment-banking services to tech companies. They’re a one-stop shop: doing M and A, underwriting, lending, syndications, and research. A lot of folks think they never really fessed up, back when the analyst shit first hit the fan- which could make them a prime candidate for some Fed attention this go-round. Pace management has consistently denied any wrongdoing- big surprise- but it’s no secret that they’re nervous.”

“Danes is a part of their worries?”

“He’s been their chief analyst for a long time. He’d inevitably be at the center of any investigation into whether or not Pace tailored their stock recommendations to curry favor with their investment banking clients- or potential clients. A firm in that position has to do some fancy dancing with a guy in Danes’s spot. A guy like that is under a lot of pressure. He could be… unpredictable. He could do damage. So they’ve got some tough calls to make.”

“Like what, whether they can serve him up to the Feds before he cuts a deal of his own?”

Neary laughed. “They haven’t been quite that blunt about it with me,” he said. He drained his ginger ale and waved to the waitress for another. “But they are worried about what Danes might be up to.”

“Is that just corporate paranoia, or has Danes given them reason?”

“The last time they saw the guy, he was storming out of his office after a twenty-minute shouting match with the head of the legal department, and he was muttering something about forwarding his e-mail to the SEC. The next thing they know, he’s on vacation. It got them a little nervous.”

“Very dramatic,” I said.

“But not out of character,” Neary said. “Not for him. You know much about the guy?”

“Not too much. I’ve seen him on the tube- though not lately. Today I heard he’s an asshole, unreliable, a bad father, a liar, and friendless- the usual stuff you get from the ex. But I realize that might not be the whole story.”

Neary made a maybe, maybe not shrug and started to speak, but he was interrupted by our waitress, bearing lunch. Neary’s buffalo steak ran with blood and juices and threatened to overwhelm his plate. My duck sandwich on sourdough was a bit smaller- but just a bit. She laid platters of carrots, steamed spinach, and spicy onion rings in the middle of the table. I took a bite of my sandwich. Neary cut himself a piece of steak and chewed it with his eyes closed. He sighed and nodded to himself. Finally, he came back to earth.

“I never met the guy, but I got an off-the-record earful from some folks at Pace. According to them, Danes is a massive pain in the ass: an egomaniac, a bully, and half a nut job to boot- maybe more than half.” He paused to savor another hunk of buffalo. Color was returning to his face, and his eyes had lost some of their muddy look.

“When the market was up and he was on TV every other day, he was a real prima donna. He roared around the office like a bull in a china shop, terrorizing everyone who crossed his path- including senior management.”

“Nice hobby, but maybe not wise.”

“Apparently he wasn’t too worried. He fancied himself the greatest thing since sliced bread- or the smartest thing, anyway- and he had the press to back him up. He barely tolerated the less gifted- which, according to him, covered pretty much the rest of the world. And they tell me he reserved a special contempt for the Pace-Loyette management committee, his bosses. Thought they were bureaucrats, second-raters, et cetera, and he made no secret of his feelings.”

“No one ever took him out to the woodshed for an ass-whipping?”

Neary shook his head. “I guess the committee tried to get him to chill a couple of times, but in those days- when the market was riding high, and Danes was their analyst poster boy- he had them by the balls, and he knew it.”

“He sounds more like a head trader than an analyst,” I said.

Neary nodded. “Except back then he made more than any trader at Pace.” He picked an onion ring off the platter.

“I take it he toned down his act when the market tanked.”

“A good guess- but wrong. The Pace people tell me that, if anything, he’s gotten worse. Going from hero to goat overnight was a real kick in the head for him- which is maybe understandable. I mean, one day he’s everybody’s favorite market expert, and the next nobody takes his calls. That’s got to hurt.”

Neary shook his head and helped himself to more onion rings.

“Once he got over the initial shock, he demanded that his management get out there and defend his good name- circle the wagons, call out the marines, that sort of thing. That went over like a lead balloon, of course. Pace-Loyette just wanted it all to go away. Their tactic was to say as little as possible, and they suggested to Danes that he do the same. That apparently made him crazy- or crazier. He’s gone from arrogant and contemptuous to openly hostile and paranoid. He claims management is setting him up as a fall guy.”

I worked on my sandwich for a while and thought, while Neary put an end to his buffalo. “If he’s so hostile and so nuts, why hasn’t Pace gotten rid of him?”

Neary put his flatware at parade rest and took up his napkin. “If not for this SEC threat, and the investor grievances still floating around, they would have. As it is, they’re reluctant to force him outand all but guarantee that he becomes a hostile witness in any action. They need to keep up at least the pretense of a united front.”

“Then why not do what other firms have done? Make a deal with the guy. Agree on a sum in exchange for a nice quiet resignation.”

“From what I hear, the issue with Danes is ego, not money. He wants his rep restored; he wants vindication. He’s got no interest in going gentle anywhere.”

“So he’s still got them by the balls.”

“It seems to be a talent of his.”

I finished my sandwich and the waitress came by to clear the table. We passed on dessert but said yes to coffee.

“How good is the Journal’s information?” I asked. “How likely is it that the Feds will target Pace?”

Neary snorted and shook his head. “How the hell should I know? I’m only slightly more welcome than you are down at One Saint A’s these days- which means not at all. And I’ve been getting the cold shoulder at the Woolworth Building too.”

One St. Andrews Plaza is downtown, near the courts and City Hall, and it’s where you find the office of the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York. Neary and I had had dealings with that office late last year, as part of a case he’d helped me with, and the ill will we had left in our wake apparently extended a block or so west, to 233 Broadway- the Woolworth Building- and the regional offices of the Securities and Exchange Commission.

“Tell me these guys have nothing better to do than nurse their grudges,” I said.

Neary gave a rueful laugh. “Don’t kid yourself. We got special training in that, down at Quantico.”

“Still, I find it hard to believe all your sources are dry.”

Neary shrugged. “I’ve got some friends of friends who tell me that Pace is just one of several firms the SEC is looking at. Apparently, no decision’s been made on who or when.”

“Have they been talking to Danes?”

“Not that I’ve heard.” The waitress refilled our cups and Neary’s belt chimed again. He pulled the wireless out, peered into the tiny screen, and read. He shook his head and sighed.

“Fuck it, John. How about we give up the investigation shit and go halves on an eatery someplace. Maybe a bistro in Murray Hill or a tapas bar in the East Village. It couldn’t be more aggravation than this.” He drank some coffee. I smiled.

“Has Pace filed a missing persons?” I asked him.

Neary ran a big hand through his hair. “Not yet. So far they’ve convinced themselves it’s not their responsibility. And it’s not like they’re in a big hurry to have him back. Besides, they don’t relish police attention or the kind of publicity that goes with it.”

He reached into an inner pocket of his suit jacket.

“A present for you,” he said. It was a small paperbound book with yellow covers. On a gray square on the front were the letters PLS in black capitals. “Pace-Loyette phone directory. I marked the names that might interest you.” I looked at Neary. He looked back.

“You’re awfully helpful today,” I said. “And you know a lot of Pace-Loyette gossip, considering they’re not a client yet.” Neary smiled enigmatically and drank more coffee.

“I like to look before I leap,” he said. Wheels within wheels.

It was late afternoon by the time we picked our way across Union Square toward the subway station. The crowd was light at the farmers’ market in the square, and the vendors were restocking for the evening rush. The yeasty fragrance of baked goods, the scent of cut flowers, and the earthy smells of produce and potted plants masked the less appealing city odors. The sky was full of high thin clouds and pink light. We walked slowly, looking through the stalls as we passed. Neary’s wireless chimed a few times along the way, but he ignored it. We crossed 14th Street and stopped outside the station and shook hands.

“You still seeing that neighbor of yours- what was her name?” Neary asked. The question took me by surprise.

“Jane. Her name is Jane,” I said.

He nodded. “You look… better.” His belt chimed again and almost simultaneously his cell phone trilled. He shook his head. “Fuck this,” he said, and disappeared into the subway.

It was a short walk home, and I went back through the farmers’ market. I stopped at a flower stall for some tulips for Jane.

Winter had taken hold early- well before Christmas- and it had held on tight till April Fools’. Nearly every week had brought a storm, and in between the blizzards and the frozen rain there had been long stretches of head-cracking cold and breathtaking wind. It seemed that I’d been running through ice and sleet and blackened city snow forever. So these last few weeks had been a gift.

Overnight, the plow shavings and dirty rinds of ice had vanished from the curbsides and intersections, and a drenching rain three weeks ago- the day we’d changed the clocks- had sluiced away the sand and salt and flotsam that remained. Feathery blossoms had appeared on the trees, faintly at first, like tentative green sketch marks, and then with more color and conviction. Grass was coming in on the dirt patches in the parks. Even now, the sidewalks and buildings had a scrubbed, surprised look- like a drunk, waking up sober and in his own bed for the first time in a long time. I picked up my pace.

I turned west on 20th Street, and ran between Peter Cooper Village and Stuyvesant Town. I headed south at First Avenue, and west again at 17th Street, past some Beth Israel Hospital buildings and over to Stuyvesant Square. I had five miles behind me. I checked my watch. It was after seven and there was still some light in the sky. I felt loose and limber, and my breathing was easy. I was good to go for another two. I dodged around a pair of dog walkers on Rutherford Place and went west on 15th Street. Thoughts jumped and skittered in my head as I ran, like a ball over a roulette wheel.

Nina Sachs was an edgy, prickly woman, and she emanated a tension that seemed to permeate her household. It was there in her son- in the painful twist of his shoulders as he shrank from his mother’s touch and in his thin, angry voice. And it was there in Ines Icasa, too- in her quick movements about the apartment and in her face that was like a smooth dark-eyed mask.

There was something about Nina’s story that didn’t sit quite right. Maybe it was her reluctance to call the police- and risk upsetting the ex-husband she so obviously disdained- that didn’t make sense. I’d seen enough of divorced couples, though, to know that sense only rarely entered into things- and particularly not when kids were involved. And I’d had few clients whose stories hadn’t raised at least an eyebrow.

I turned north onto Irving Place. The street was quiet and yellow light came from the windows of the town houses and old brick apartment buildings. The block was lined with spindly trees, studded with white blossoms. A gust of wind sent some drifting, like fat snowflakes, as I passed. My thoughts turned to Jane Lu.

We’d met last November, when Jane moved into the loft apartment above mine, and fate- in the form of my younger sister, Lauren- had made our meeting inevitable. Lauren owns the apartment I live in, and she works at the dot-com that Jane has been nursing back to health for the last year. Lauren also takes a touching, if sometimes invasive, interest in the state of my social life. But in this case I had no complaints. My attraction to Jane was immediate and powerful and like nothing I’d felt in a long time.

Jane and I were lovers by New Year’s, and in the brief hours that we weren’t working- in the odds and ends of late nights and early mornings and rare weekends off- we fell into a sort of intimacy. We slept together and ate together, and we walked the city and talked at length about work and politics and the sad, sorry state of the world. It wasn’t a lot of time as the clock told it, but in the years since my wife had died it was more time than I’d spent with anyone besides myself. It was also a precarious thing.

By tacit agreement, we kept our relationship balanced in the present tense- with few references to our pasts and none at all to any prospects beyond the most immediate. And when anything threatened that equilibrium, we would retreat to the familiar security of our jobs. I’d had some practice at this, and so had Jane.

Jane didn’t often withdraw, though she had ample reason to be wary. In fact, she had ample reason not to touch me with a ten-foot pole. Not long after we’d met, Jane was swept up- and almost swept away- in the violent currents of one of my cases, the same one that had run me afoul of the Feds downtown. Her injuries had been slight, but only by a hairsbreadth, and she’d seen firsthand the ugliness that could erupt in my life, that was a part of it. Jane herself never mentioned the violence, and I never asked, but she knew how close she had come- closer than inches- and she knew how my wife had died. I came to the top of Irving Place, and looped twice around Gramercy Park. The sky was reddening, and purple shadows lay on the square.

It would be four years in August- four years since Anne was murdered, the final victim of a man I’d suspected in a long string of killings. Four years since my own arrogance and stupidity had put her in harm’s way. I’d stopped being a cop- or much of anything elseright after the funeral, though it was another few months before I got sober enough to resign. After that, I was alone with a ravenous, angry grief that I’d been certain would swallow me whole.

As it happened, it didn’t- at least, not entirely. It left some scraps behind, bits and pieces, some threads and a few shards, and from them I pasted together a life- a half-life, my sister Lauren would say- of work and running and solitude. It was sparse, but it was manageable. It was what I had and what I knew, and I wasn’t sure that I could handle much more.

I turned north on Lexington Avenue and ran faster.

It was nearly seven-thirty by the time I got back to 16th Street. The arched windows that run across the front of the converted factory building that I live in were dark. I took the elevator to the fourth floor and flicked on some lights. My place isn’t half the size of Nina’s, but it’s big enough, with high ceilings, bleached wood floors, and a wall of tall windows. There’s an open kitchen in cherry and granite at one end, and a bedroom area and bathroom at the other, and in between a few pieces of comfortable furniture, mostly in leather and dark woods.

I drank water from a bottle in the refrigerator. Then I stretched for ten minutes and peeled off my running clothes and stepped into the shower. When I stepped out again I smelled curry and cilantro and coconut milk, and I heard faint guitars. I wrapped a towel around my waist and walked out of the bathroom.

Jane waved at me across the loft. She was sitting at the head of my long oak table, a cell phone at her ear, a pen in her hand, and a thick sheaf of documents in front of her. Farther down the table was dinner- chicken satay, pad thai, vegetables simmered in curry and coconut milk, and crab rolls- all from the Thai place around the corner. Caetano Veloso was singing soft Portuguese from the stereo. I picked a crab roll from its white cardboard box and took a bite.

“Shit,” Jane said into the phone. “We sent them the audit papers three weeks ago, Roger. They’re only getting to them now? What lazy bastards.” She was wearing a white MIT T-shirt and snug blue jeans. Her small feet were bare, and there were two black loafers under her chair. Her left leg was tucked beneath her, and she brushed the ball of her right foot lightly against the floor.

Jane was about five-foot-four and slim, with a shapely layer of muscle on her arms and legs and on her flat belly. Her cropped jet-black hair was damp just now, and I figured she’d stopped upstairs to shower and change. She listened to Roger talk and said “uh-huh” and jotted notes in the margins of a page, and there was an intent look on her heart-shaped face. Her small mouth was pursed, and the pout in her bottom lip was more pronounced. Her fine brows were furrowed as she scanned the pages. She looked much younger than her thirty-four years.

Jane made some final notes and put aside the document. Roger spoke, and she drummed her short glossy nails on the tabletop. She took up another document and flicked through the sheets.

“I’m on page seven of the memorandum of understanding, third paragraph. You with me?” She waited. “They screwed up the revenue targets for year two… Yeah, all four quarters.” Roger talked some more, and Jane looked at me and rolled her eyes. She made a one minute gesture. “And the same thing with the head-count projections on the next page. You see that?… All right, I’ve got to eat now. I’ll call you when I’m back in the office.” She laughed. “Yes, I actually eat, Roger.” She closed her phone and sighed heavily. She looked me up and down.

“Nice outfit,” she said, smiling.

I smiled back. “Glad you like it. How’s your deal going?”

“Lurching is the word that comes to mind. Par for the course with law firms and investment banks, I guess; lots of well-credentialed people billing lots of time while avoiding much actual work. Pass me those noodles, will you?” I handed Jane a container and a pair of chopsticks. She ate from the box. I sat down next to her with the container of crab rolls.

Jane is a CEO-for-hire, a kind of A?ber-consultant called in by the boards of companies in deep trouble to save their sinking shipsor at least to get a good price for the scrap. Her gigs are strictly short-term, two years or less, and she demands- and gets- a piece of the action for her efforts. Jane was brought into the dot-com about a year ago, by the venture capital firm that held a majority stake in the company. Her mandate was to get the business back on its feet, make it profitable, and find a buyer, and through a combination of scary intelligence, relentless energy, and icy political savvy wrapped in irresistible charm, she was three-for-three. For the last six weeks, she’d spent most of her time on closing the deal.

“You’re really going back in?”

“I have to. They’re reviewing our contracts tomorrow, and I’ve got people getting ready. They’ll need help.”

“So it’s going to happen?”

Jane picked a crab roll from my container. “It’ll happen. It may age me by ten years- but it’ll happen. It’s a great fit for the buyers, a great price for us, and the best thing for the company. It’s a win all the way around. Slide those veggies down here.”

I did, and helped myself to a skewer of chicken satay. “Are they still asking you to stay on?”

Jane winced and shook her head. “It’s just a crush,” she said. “They’ll get over it.” She got up and gathered her papers and stacked them on the kitchen counter. She saw the tulips there. “These are pretty.”

“They’re for you,” I said.

Jane smiled. She opened a cabinet beneath the counter and came up with shears and a blue glass vase. She slit the wrapping on the tulips and snipped an inch from the bottom of the stems. Her movements were quick and sure. She ran water in the vase and put the tulips in.

“Nothing they can do to make it worth your while?” I asked.

“Nope. The buyers are okay, but it’s still a big company and way too much of a boys’ club. There’s no way I’d sign up for that again.”

After B-school, Jane had done time at a prestigious investment bank and at a big management consulting firm, and both experiences had filled her with a fierce resolve to be always self-employed.

“Besides,” she said, “it’s been a long year. I’ve got another few weeks on this deal, and all I want afterward is to ride into the sunset.” Jane looked up at me. “Have you thought any more about riding along?” she asked, and the air seemed to thicken between us.

In the brief reprieves she granted herself from the office and the culmination of her deal, Jane had been planning a very long vacation, and she’d invited me to join her. Guidebooks and travel magazines had been turning up in my apartment for weeks now, and we’d been tiptoeing at the edges of this conversation for almost as long. Each time we did, it was a cautious tug-of-war, a wary testing of resistance and balance over suddenly unstable terrain. And each time left us both a little edgy.

“Sure,” I said.

She cocked an eyebrow. “Sure, you’ve thought about it, or sure, you’re coming?”

“I’ve thought about it. I’m still thinking about it.”

“Thinking that it’s a good idea?”

“That it’s a good idea, but…”

Jane looked down at the flowers. “But what?”

“But I took a job today, and I don’t know if it’ll be a long one. I have to see how it plays out.”

Jane pursed her lips and nodded minutely. She stared at the tulips and spent a while rearranging them in the vase. “I guess your trip to Brooklyn went well,” she said eventually.

“Well enough,” I said, and I told her about my meeting with Nina Sachs and my lunch with Tom Neary. She listened carefully and shook her head when I was through.

“If it was anyone else, I’d say maybe he’d run off to hide his face in shame. But as it’s Danes, my bet is that some investors bought him a room at the Jimmy Hoffa Hilton.” There was a wry twist to her mouth and I was relieved to see it.

I laughed. “Do you know the guy?”

“Just from the stuff in the papers- about Piedmont- and from when he was on Market Minds all the time. I remember the bratty know-it-all attitude. I was actually referring to the whole analyst species.” She opened the fridge and took out a bottle of seltzer. She brought it and two glasses back to the table.

“You have it in for them on general principle, or do you have a more specific grudge?”

Jane filled the glasses. She drank from hers and stretched her legs out. “Both, I guess.” I raised my eyebrows, and Jane continued. “I never had illusions about analyst independence. I knew who paid their bonuses and who they were beholden to- and it certainly wasn’t the investing public. I mean, the notion of getting an objective opinion about a company, or an unbiased recommendation about its stock, from somebody who’s essentially a paid pitchman for that company- it’s ridiculous. And even if they weren’t thoroughly compromised, what are their opinions worth anyway? They’re like weathermen. Being right has never been a big part of the job description.” Jane took another drink. She put her right heel on the edge of her seat and rested her arm on her knee. She flexed her toes, and the tendons were taut along the top of her foot.

“I thought the reforms changed things,” I said.

Jane shook her head and gave me a sympathetic, silly-boy look. “That’s the party line, I suppose- that the reforms got rid of a layer of conflict by separating the analysts from the investment bankers and separating analyst pay from banking fees. But so what? It’s still the same guys at the top of these firms, deciding who gets paid and how much. If investment banking is important to them, and if they think a certain analyst has helped win business, they’re going to make sure he gets paid for it. Senior management knows it, the investment bankers know it, and so do the analysts- they just try to be a little less brazen these days.”

She drank some seltzer and shook her head some more.

“And sure, firms are very careful now about saying so if they do business with a company that their analysts are touting. But telling people about conflicts of interest doesn’t make the conflicts go away. A cynical person might even argue that all this disclosure just gives the firms more cover for the next time around.”

Jane was relaxed, and her compact body was at ease in the chair, but she nonetheless projected a latent, supple energy- like a coiled spring or a watchful cat. It was in her every fluid motion, and it was even in her voice, in the chords of certainty and confidence of her pleasant contralto. She flexed her fingers, and I watched the muscles shift smoothly in her wrists and forearms.

“And what’s your personal gripe?” I asked.

She puckered her lips, as if she’d tasted something sour. “I guess I don’t like being bullied,” she said.

I thought about that for a while. “It’s hard to imagine anyone trying.”

Jane gave a humorless laugh. “You’d be surprised,” she said. She drained her seltzer, and I poured another glass. “It was a few years ago, when I was running that little biotech in Cambridge. They’d had some problems- with low production yields and a couple of nasty lawsuits- but we’d sorted those out and the worst was behind us, and we were shopping for a new credit facility. We were talking seriously to three big lenders when, one day, I got a call from an analyst- one of the few who covered the company.

“I knew him, of course. He was from a big regional firm, and I’d talk to him a couple of times a quarter at least. He was one of those frat-boy-gone-fat types, but he’d always been friendly and reasonably straightforward. That day, it took him a while to get to the point.

“He started asking about our hunt for new credit, which I had just talked about to a bunch of investors and analysts- including him- two weeks before. I thought he was looking for some inside dope, and I started to explain that I wasn’t going to tell him anything I hadn’t told the group, but he cut me off. That wasn’t what he wanted to talk about, he said, and he started telling me how there were other motivated lenders out there besides the ones we had on our short list. By that point, I was feeling like we were in some very weird territory, but I still had no idea what the guy wanted. Finally, he got to it.

“He asked if I was aware that his firm was in the lending business too. I said that I was, but that I thought we were getting into an inappropriate area. I tried to end the conversation, but he pretty much ignored me. He said he wasn’t sure I’d considered the big picture, and maybe it was because I was a short-timer- just an interim CEO- that I was ignoring a firm that had always been very supportive of my company. He said that if I kept on ignoring his firm, that support could evaporate. I asked him if by support he meant his coverage of the company- his research reports- and he said he’d always known I was a bright girl.”

“Bright girl?” I said.

Jane laughed. “I was stunned- as much by his heavy-handedness as anything else.”

“What did you do?”

“I thanked him for his advice and hung up, and then I called the vice chairman of his firm. I told him what had happened and pointed out that- just for appearances’ sake- he might want his boy to ease off a little. A few days later the firm announced that our analyst had been promoted and transferred, and they assigned a new paunchy frat boy to cover us. He was dumber than the first guy but quieter. End of story.”

“Except that you carry a grudge.”

“I have a long memory.”

“Duly noted.”

“I always knew you were a bright boy.” She smiled and glanced down at her watch.

“You’ve got to get back to the office,” I said. “I’ll put on some clothes and walk you over.” I went into the bedroom and Jane was behind me. She tossed her T-shirt on the bed and stood, backlit, in the doorway. Shadows fell across her small round breasts. Her nipples were dark and hard.

“Not just yet,” she said softly, and she came across the room and pulled away my towel. Her hands were soft and warm on my body, and so was her mouth. She pushed me down on the bed and wriggled out of the rest of her clothes and lay next to me. Heat came off her in waves. It carried the milky scent of her soap and the faint spice of her perfume, and beneath them both, the tang of her. I breathed deeply, and my heart hammered against my ribs.

I kissed her and her tongue played slowly in my mouth. I caught the flavors of mint and curry and cilantro. I slid my hands down her back and sides and along her thighs. She shuddered and rolled against me. I kissed her breasts and her belly, and spread her legs and tasted her.

She said something unintelligible and buried her fingers in my hair and moved her smooth legs against my shoulders. She pressed herself against me, quivering, again and again, and suddenly she twisted out from under me.

“Not yet,” she whispered. She pushed me over on my back and hooked her leg across my hips and slid on top of me. She took me in her hands and slowly fit herself around me and we lay there, barely breathing. And then she began to move.

I came out of the oblivion that had taken me, lying sideways across the bed. Jane was beside me, her dark head on my chest, an arm and a leg flung across me. The room was full of her scent and the heat of her body. In the dim light, I watched the slow rise and fall of her back, the faint flutter of her eyelids, and the tiny random movements of her bow-shaped mouth. I ran my finger lightly along her hairline, just above her right temple, and felt the small ripples there, invisible to the eye- the wake of the bullet that had grazed her last year. Jane opened her eyes and looked at me for a long while before she spoke.

“No harm done,” she said softly. I wanted to believe it.