"Mr. Pemberton," he said at last, keeping his voice in the register of a man discussing a repair. "Thirty percent over Friday's close, for the shares and the debt together, comes to a figure my son could say to the dollar. Your counsel knows it. I know it. What I also know — and I take no pleasure in knowing it in front of this table — is where the cash would have to come from. The family's liquid position is pledged. The lake house is pledged. The shares are pledged to the debt you'd be asking me to sell you back. You'd be buying my paper with my paper, sir, and calling the difference a premium. The banks wouldn't take that trade on Thursday. They sold to me instead. I expect you remember Thursday."
Nobody in the room moved. Sloane, at the far end, closed his eyes briefly, the way a man does when an X-ray confirms the break he had already diagnosed by touch.
"I am not saying it to shame you," Isaiah said. "I am saying it because this meeting will go faster once the pretend money is off the table. There is no buyout. There never was going to be one — not because I am stubborn, but because you are, in the narrow sense that matters to bankers, broke in everything except this company. And this company is worth what you think it is — " his eyes traveled once along the table, the portraits, the river beyond the windows " — because of what's in it. Not because of the name on the gate. That is the last time I will explain myself on the subject."
"You'll forgive us," Bianca said, from the wall, and her voice had lost its party varnish entirely and was the better for it, "if we don't applaud the eulogy."
"Miss Pemberton, I did not come for applause. I came because your father requested the pleasure of my company." The word pleasure landed in the room and lay there. "And because some things should be said by the man himself, to faces."
Chad could not hold it any longer; Chad had never once in thirty-eight years held anything longer than it wanted to be held. "Say it, then. Let's all hear the joke land. Because that's what this is, isn't it? Friday night you were the entertainment — my God, I stood up in front of two hundred people and I — " He stopped, because the memory had arrived at the part of itself that he was in. "I made a toast," he said, more quietly, to the table. "I welcomed him. I said it was a credit to the house that Pemberton hospitality extended to every department of the company. Every department. And he raised his glass and drank to it. Sitting there knowing."
"Yes," Isaiah said. "I drank to it."
"And facilities," Chad said. "I said the company was glad to see facilities taking an interest in the cultural life of the firm. People laughed. I have been hearing them laugh all weekend, in my sleep, and this morning I understood — it wasn't a joke about him." The sentence would not finish. He looked around the room as if the rest of it might be written on the walls. "It was the last true thing I'll ever say about myself in public, wasn't it. Facilities. I'll be lucky if facilities is where I end up. Is that the shape of it? Is that why you're smiling?"
"I'm not smiling, Mr. Pemberton."
"No. You're not. That's worse, somehow."
"Sit with it a moment," Isaiah said, and there was no triumph in it, and that, everyone in the room understood, was the whole of the difference between the two men. "You said a cruel thing carelessly, in the one room where cruelty costs the speaker nothing. This company is full of people who've had to eat words like yours with their heads down and call it lunch. The difference between us is not that I'm better, Mr. Pemberton. It's that on Friday night one of us could afford his words, and the other was about to find out what his cost. Now — shall we do the business? I'd like the people who actually make this company's product to hear it before the journalists finish inventing it."
Reginald raised one hand, a fraction, and the room obeyed it out of ninety years of habit. "Do the business, Mr. Coleman."
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Isaiah laid his terms out the way his father had laid out tools on a bench before a hard job — in order, in reach, each one named, nothing decorative among them.