Julie was one of those girls who was at Harvard less on scholarship than on determination. Her education was being financed by a jury-rigged hodgepodge of student loans, summer jobs, financial aid, and moonlighting. She knew what she wanted to do because she had to. She did what she had to do because she wanted to. She had it all mapped out as early as freshman year. First, Harvard. Then a job with a bank. Then a Harvard MBA. Then—everything. Julie told Mark this in a tone of conviction so strong, she might have been Moses come down from Sinai with the tablets. And Mark believed her. Mark always believed her. And he always let her carry him. If there was one thing Julie understood it was that a woman who wanted “everything” could only get it as part of a partnership, as one half of a “dual-career couple” whose “dual careers” were really one big amalgamated one. She latched on to him as fiercely as he latched on to her, although for different reasons. Whatever the reasons, they were off.
Now she was standing in the middle of his office, ready to brain him, and he couldn’t blame her. In the years since they had first come together, things had gotten a little complicated. He had made the suggestion, in their senior year, that they both apply to work at Baird Financial. With his connections, their assignments would be more interesting and their chances of getting recommendations for business school would be better. As it turned out, that wasn’t all that had been better. Their promotions and their bonuses had both been unbelievable, Julie’s more so than his own, so that now, when they were both only thirty-two, they were worth at least $5 million apiece and far higher up the ladder than most of the people they had graduated with. They were also just a little bit stuck. Julie had never gone back for her MBA. Without it, the fact that she was the youngest head of PR at any firm on the Street might be more of a liability than an asset. Mark suffered from what he thought of as Family Syndrome. Without the MBA, nobody out there knew if he could really do a job, or if he’d been being carried all these years by the fact that he was a Baird. For better or for worse, both he and Julie were now intricately concerned with the fate of Baird Financial.
Julie had stopped pacing and stopped posing. She was now standing stock-still in the middle of that great expanse of nothing, looking smaller and blonder than she did when she was throwing a tantrum. Mark cleared his throat.
“Julie,” he said, “it was necessary. Trust me.”
“Why?”
Mark was about to ask “why what?” but he didn’t. It was silly. “We bought the firm,” he said patiently, “don’t you remember that? There was a stock market crash, and then another stock market crash, and on the heels of the second one McAdam was about to go under.”
“And McAdam Investments was famous,” Julie recited dutifully, “with all these ads on the air with movie stars in them, and the public was very jittery with two big crashes coming so close together like that, and everybody was afraid that if someone as big and well-known as McAdam went bankrupt there’d be a run on the bank, figuratively speaking—”
“There’d be a run on all the banks,” Mark said, “and maybe not so figuratively. That was the problem.”
“No,” Julie said. “That was not the problem. We were heroes when we bought McAdam Investments. We had every right to be. How could Jon have been so stupid as to not check on McAdam’s personal employment contract? How could he do that? Jon never makes that kind of mistake.”
“Maybe he didn’t.”
“Meaning what?”
“Meaning,” Mark said slowly, “maybe he thought, at the time, that it didn’t matter. This was before McAdam turned state’s evidence on everybody in creation. Maybe he just thought we could go on carrying McAdam indefinitely, until he was sixty-five, and so what?”
“Why can’t we?”
“Junk bonds,” Mark said reverently.
Julie looked confused.
Mark sat forward a little and put his hands on his desk. “Junk bonds,” he said again. “There’s been all this moaning and groaning in the media about how junk bonds are going bad and losing value and blah, blah, blah, and some of it’s true, of course, but you know what? Milken was right. A diversified junk bond portfolio outperforms the market by twenty-five percent and then some. McAdam Investments is sitting on a gold mine of junk bonds that didn’t go bad and paid off big—or would pay off big, if we could sell them, or even if we could sell the stock we could convert some of them to, except we can’t.”
“Because of McAdam?” Julie asked.