Page 19 of The Oligarch's Daughter

“Well, she’s beautiful and smart and talented,” Paul began.

“Good start. Not bad. What’s her name?”

“Tatyana.”

“Nice. How long have you been seeing her?”

“A month or so. But she feels . . . I don’t know, Rick. She’s just . . .”

Rick raised his beer glass in a mock toast. “Happy for you, pal. But isn’t that how you felt about Serena just last year?”

“For about a minute. Until we realized we had just about nothing in common. Nothing to talk about.”

“No comment,” Rick said with a wry smile.

“Anyway . . . Do you realize how hard it is to have a relationship in my line of work?”

“Come on. You’ll be rich someday. A lot richer than me. A lot of women find that attractive.”

“And those aren’t the ones I’m interested in,” Paul said. “Dude, my job gets in the way of my personal life. I’m already stressed at work, and I’m too exhausted to put in the energy a relationship requires. What limited time I have, I want to spend it with a woman who understands how busy I am. Which is not a lot of women.”

“They want some degree of commitment. Not unreasonable.”

“I’ve got friends at Aquinnah who are downright calculating and businesslike about their social lives. They want to control every variable. Each woman, they take to the same restaurant close to their apartment. It’s, like, a routine.”

Rick smiled. “I’m getting the warm and fuzzies just listening to this. Anyway, so tell me. What does this Tatyana do?”

“She’s a photographer.”

“Shesupportsherself as a photographer?”

“I think so, yeah.” Paul had been wondering how she paid her rent. Living in New York City was expensive no matter what part of town you were in.

“She any good?”

“Really good. I want you and Mary Louise to meet her. A double date or whatever.”

“Great—let’s do it, then. I want to meet this mystery woman. Next couple of weeks, maybe? If you two’re still together?”

12

Paul’s workspace at Aquinnah Capital wasn’t an office but a cubicle in the bullpen. A nice cubicle, as those things go. Low walls topped with glass. The concept was called “seated privacy.” It was better than the no-walls, open-plan office, but not as good as a real office. Only the senior guys had real offices. Paul was one of fifteen employees who interacted in one large space.

His friend Michael Rodriguez, a fellow analyst, was standing at the edge of Paul’s cubicle. Mike had jet-black hair, heavy black brows, and a blindingly bright smile and was growing an ill-advised mustache.

It was eight forty-five in the morning, a few weeks after he’d met Tatyana. Trading didn’t start till nine thirty.

“Hey, you see what’s going on with Cavalier? It’s, like, unbelievable!”

“Saw that, yeah,” Paul said with a straight face. “Bonkers.”

But nothing about the Cavalier situation was unbelievable to him. Cavalier was a real estate firm whose stock Bernie Kovan, their boss, had wanted him to load up on, so of course he had. Pretty soon, Aquinnah owned almost 5 percent of the company, and Bernie was talking about getting a board seat. He wanted Paul to keep buying shares.

But Paul had begun feeling that something was rotten at Cavalier. He’d noticed a line item on their budget for legal expenses that was ridiculously high. Tens of millions of dollars. Paul had made calls to the company, but no one would talk. But instead of giving up, he’d dug in. Talked to a lot of former Cavalier employees. And in the process, he’d discovered that the CEO was known to have an “active” social life. Turned out he’d had a number of children by different women, some of them employees. He had forced those employees to sign nondisclosure agreements and paid them off handsomely to silence them. And the company had hushed it up. These women amounted to a giant ticking time bomb: potentially massive lawsuits for sexual harassment. And when the lawsuits started, Aquinnah Capital’s investors would have grounds to sue Aquinnah for failing to do adequate due diligence, especially if Aquinnah were named in the press.

Paul did this research privately—for Bernie, without telling his colleagues—and a couple of weeks ago, he had advised Bernie to sell all of Aquinnah’s shares in Cavalier. Bernie pushed back hard, but he relented when Paul explained the potential liability. He reluctantly agreed to selling the shares, and Paul did so.

Shortly after Aquinnah offloaded its Cavalier holdings, a huge investment management company, WhiteRock Real Estate Investment Trust, announced that it was acquiring Cavalier. Cavalier’s share price shot up from ten bucks to almost twenty-five.

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