Conspiracy Theory(50)

The Price Heaven documentation was spread out in front of him in variegated stacks of paper, freshly printed out this morning so that he could get a physical sense of what was happening here. Actually, there was no doubt what was happening here. Price Heaven was in free-fall. Even the drastic measures David had outlined to Tony might not suffice to correct it. If they didn’t, Price Heaven would file for bankruptcy—real bankruptcy, David thought, not just Chapter 11—and then the shit would truly hit the fan, because the bank was exposed on this one big-time. David had done the calculations a dozen times. There was no way around it. In all, the bank had loaned Price Heaven something close to a billion dollars outright, and provided spot financing and stock-price support in a myriad number of small ways. The small ways were adding up.

The door to the office opened. David looked up from where he was sit-ting—on the floor, with his legs spread out in front of him and his jacket tossed onto the couch behind him—and saw Paul Delafield coming in. Paul Delafield was executive vice president in charge of development, a fancy way of saying the man who found new projects for the bank to invest in, the man who had brought Price Heaven to the bank. Paul Delafield looked pale, as he had been looking pale for weeks. If he was mourning Tony’s loss, there was no evidence of it on his face.

Paul came over to the little sitting area and dropped down on one of the chairs. “Well?” he said. “Should we all batten down the hatches?”

“At least.” David thought about getting up, but didn’t see the point. There were people he had to fear in the bank, but Paul Delafield wasn’t one of them. “The good news is that it’s not Enron. There’s no evidence of accounting fraud.”

“And the bad news?”

“We’re going to be lucky as hell of they don’t implode completely. And I mean completely. Chapter eleven bankruptcy. Public liquidation.”

“Shit.”

“I agree.” David bent over the papers again, but he couldn’t keep it up. He didn’t have his heart in it. He already knew what was here, and now that he’d spent a few hours making the reality physical—turning it into stacks of physical paper so that he could visualize it—he had a knowledge of the internal workings of Price Heaven far more complete than its own directors ever had had. Which was a good part of the problem. Price Heaven might not be in the mess it was in if its directors knew what they were doing. It completely amazed him that so many people rose to the heights of American business with IQs in the single digits, and not because they were hereditary legacies, either. The chairman of the board of Price Heaven was Jerry Poldawicz, who grew up in Levittown and did his undergraduate degree at SUNY New Paltz. The CEO was Tom O’Hay, whose father had been a bricklayer and mother a nurse. There were probably a dozen Price Heaven employees running cash registers in Price Heaven outlets who could have done a better job of managing a company than either of those two.

“So,” Paul said. “Where do we go from here?”

“Don’t ask me,” David said. “I just make recommendations. I have no power at all about what recommendations the board will decide to follow.”

“What recommendations do you intend to make?”

David sighed. “All the layoffs we discussed last week, before Tony—before Tony. Then we need to close at least a third of the stores. They’ve got stores in the oddest places, small outlets that have been doing next to no business for years. It’s bizarre. Once they opened a store, nothing could get them to close it. And I do mean nothing. So they’ve got little hole-in-the-wall places in small towns off the highway that nobody can get to because nobody knows they’re there, but nobody would want to get to even if they knew, because there’s nothing at the end of the ride but a kind of mom-and-pop novelty place with not much to buy. Some of them were opened in the 1940s. They should have been closed or moved to malls years ago. It’s insane.”

Paul Delafield looked away, out those big windows that looked over lower Manhattan. He didn’t seem to be seeing anything. David had always found it interesting to see who was and who was not emotionally affected by the World Trade Center collapse. Some people—Paul Delafield—seemed to live in an emotional vacuum.

“She’s not going to like it,” Paul said.

“Who isn’t?”

“Charlotte.”

“She’ll just have to live with it, then,” David said. “There’s really no way around this. We should have done something a long time ago. We’re sicken-ingly exposed, and we don’t have the excuse we have with governments, where we can say we loaned Argentina all this money to make sure nobody starved or their economy could keep running. This is Price Heaven. It’s an old but mostly derelict company that under other circumstances would have been run underground by Wal-Mart long ago.”