“Well, I think you know the answer is no,” Carver said, drumming his fingers on the marble counter.
Lloyd laughed. “Listen…”
“Why’s the credit committee going bear on me?”
“Not my circus nor my monkeys, as you are no doubt aware.”
“They may not be your monkeys, but this is your circus, dude.”
“I wish I had more to tell you.”
Carver started getting angry, which made him light-headed again. Black spots swam in his vision. “You could tell me more. You could tell me something I actually want to hear. I’m coming to you personally because we have a good relationship.”
“We do,” Lloyd agreed.
“But you won’t go to bat for us, is what you’re saying?”
“My hands are tied, okay?”
“By what?”
“By the fact that I can’t argue this on the merits. McKinsey’s methodology was solid, but the report was thin — honestly, they’re a two dollar whore these days and they took you for aride, and I think you know it.” (He did.) “The committee had a lot of questions, which is not what they want at this stage. I trust you guys, but —”
“See, that’s the issue, you clearly don’t —”
“— but I also understand that we have to protect our bank.”
Carver switched his gaze from the window to the mirror, looking himself in the eyes as he spoke. Maybe everybody had a point — his cheeks looked a little hollow. “If you trusted us, we’d be moving forward with this, not hitting a brick wall on Thursday night.”
“They just want to see more equity. We see a risk, we want you to address that risk.”
“And what about what we want?”
“Well, frankly, it’s less important, as the leverage is on our side.”
“Sure,” Carver said. “Except we always reserve the right to walk entirely.”
There was silence on the line. Carver’s heart sped up, and he grinned at himself in the mirror. What now, asshole?
“That’s not a real threat,” Lloyd said. “You know you’d end up far worse off for that than we would.”
“Sure, except you’d take the reputational hit, not us,” Carver said. He inhaled, then for a moment allowed himself to be possessed by the shrieking frustration and resentment which he was always keeping a lid on and which had spiked in the last few hours. In the mirror, his pretty-boy face suddenly looked ugly and twisted as he hissed into the phone, “We willfryyou. I’ll make this the last deal DB ever does with Blackbrick, and we’ll rip you a new asshole up and down the street. You want to be the bank that blows up deals last minute? Fine, then that’s what you’ll be. We all know what deep shit you guys are in lately. How many jobs are you gonna have to cut in Q3? Ten percent?Fifteen?Twenty? We have dry powder. We’d survive walking away from this deal.”
He could have kept going, but forced himself to stop before he got too crazy. Then he muted himself so Lloyd couldn’t hear how heavily he was now breathing. More black spots were clouding his vision. Carver leaned his elbows on the counter.
“Okay, let’s back up,” Lloyd said in a voice of forced calm. He cleared his throat. “You, uh… Okay. Look, we got this call off on the wrong foot, obviously. Any way we can meet in the middle here?”
Carver unmuted himself. “We’d prefer to increase the equity as little as possible, if at all.”
“But there’s room there?”
“A tiny little bit of room.”
“Okay, well, I can take that back to them and make a strong argument on the merits to see what gaps we can close.”
“Good, Lloyd. I wish you’d made that strong argument to them to begin with.”
“You know, I did, but I didn’t really press the issue,” Lloyd said. He genuinely sounded rattled. Carver had never spoken to him like this before. “I’ll see what I can do.”
