III.
The managing directors came in over the next four minutes, and Lindsay, who had taken the chair nearest the door because her legs had decided for her, watched each of them see the man at the head of the table and rearrange their faces. Tom Gaffney from restructuring, who had clearly been briefed, nodded at him like an old acquaintance. Bill Kessler from private wealth came in talking and stopped talking. Anjali Rao from capital markets, who missed nothing, looked at Turner, then at Douglas, then — briefly, unreadably — at Lindsay. Jill Fenwick, who ran marketing and had been Lindsay's closest friend at the firm for eleven years, slid into the chair beside her and murmured, "Who's that?" Lindsay said, "I think we're about to find out," and was proud, for one second, of how steady it sounded.
Douglas did the introduction, and it went on too long, the way everything Douglas did went on too long when he was frightened. He talked about the firm's ninety-one years. He talked about his grandfather, who had founded it in a two-room office on Pine Street, and his father, who had moved it uptown and then, when uptown went out of fashion, back down. He talked about headwinds. He said "partnership" five times. Then he said that as of 11:52 the previous evening, Turner Hayes Capital had acquired a sixty-one percent stake in Brandt Whitlock & Co., that Mr. Nathaniel Turner would serve as chairman of the board effective immediately, and that he, Douglas, would remain chief executive "through a transition period," a phrase that made Tom Gaffney study the grain of the table.
Lindsay heard all of it and none of it. She was hearing her own voice saying Kyra's waiting in reception. She was thinking about the eye-close. She had a sudden, physical memory of that 360 review, the anonymous line, and how it had annoyed her for a week, and how she had told it to Pete over dinner as a joke.
Turner spoke for less than five minutes. He did not stand. He said he had bought the firm because he believed it was worth more than it was being run for, and that this was a compliment to the people in the room and a criticism of the way the room had been run, and that he intended both. He said no one's job would be decided this week, and that anyone who told them otherwise was guessing. He said that over the next thirty days his team would read every client and prospect file from the last five years — every account won, lost, or declined.
"Not the decks," he said. "The files. The emails. The notes in the margins. I'm less interested in what we told clients than in what we told each other about them."
Then he asked each of them a question, going around the table clockwise. They were ordinary questions, operational, the kind any new owner asks. Bill Kessler was asked about attrition among second-generation clients. Anjali was asked which of her people she would fight hardest to keep. When he reached Lindsay he asked how long, on average, it took client relations to move a new prospect from first meeting to engagement or decline.
"It varies," she said.
"Of course," he said. "Roughly."
"Six to eight weeks."
He nodded and wrote nothing down. He didn't need to. She had the sudden, sick conviction that he already knew the real number, and that it was not six to eight weeks for everyone.