Offerings Read Free

cupboard stocked with Meissen porcelain. There was an original oil by Fernand Leger above the mantel. Peter had outbid a Saudi prince at the Langley Spring auction in London the year before. Kate always thought the story of how he came to own the painting gave him more pleasure than the picture itself; three women, distorted the way all Cubists slice up their figures, sitting nude on red stools on a checkered tile floor.
    Mack whispered his fear again. Kate wondered if it was more than a demon-in-the-closet sort of fright. The house had been through two bankruptcies and one divorce since a stock trader named Cameron Dortmund built it for his wife Lucille and their boys Martin and Simon. They lived in it exactly nineteen days before he was wiped out by the crash of 1929. Peter laughed at the supposed curse. The day Kate and Peter took the title, Ascalon closed at thirty-seven and a half. He thought the price would rise forever, so instead of selling any of his shares, Peter pledged two hundred and fifty thousand to get the cash to buy the house and another two hundred thousand to buy the Leger.
    The stock closed today at under a dollar. They’d made such a large bet on Ascalon they had little to fall back on beyond what Kate could earn.
    Kate took another look at the Leger. In the morning, she’d make some calls to find out whether they could sell it to give themselves some breathing room.

THREE
    Two days later, Kate was in Colorado.
    Chris Franklin, from his seat at the head of the table, spoke first. “Let me get right to the point,” he said, with a soft inflection. “We’ve talked to three sets of bankers this week and every one of them told us to stick to our knitting and to ride out the storm. They said the capital markets haven’t recovered to the point where they’re ready for someone as small as Majik. So, tell us something we haven’t already heard.”
    Chris was a compact man, tightly coiled. Dusty blond hair curled away from his face. The way he kept moving from side to side suggested he’d prefer to be on the plant floor or in the design room or on the back of a horse. Kate guessed he might be somewhere in his mid-forties.
    “There’s a large dollop of truth in what you just said, Chris, but look at the other side of the coin,” Kate said. Hedging her answer only would have assured defeat. “At the rate you’re burning through cash, Majik will trip its bank covenants by June and you’ll be bone-dry by July or August. Unless you’ve got a few million dollars sitting around, you don’t have the luxury of waiting for even a partial recovery of the market.”
    Thrust and parry. It was Chris’s turn to react. Kate saw no reason to rush him. Her associate began rummaging through his book bag, to bring out the slick books she’d prepared. Kate raised her hand two inches off the table to hold him back.
    “Why June?” Chris asked, leaning forward. The man seated to his right, short, square-faced, beady-eyed and balding, looked confused. To his left, Beth Parker underlined the word June on the pad in front of her.
    Kate spun her laptop around. She invited Chris to scroll through her numbers. He moved to the center of the table, pulled it toward him, and looked over the top of his rimless glasses. Beth stood over his shoulder.
    “It’s not just the cash burn. You’ve also got to factor into your thinking how your competitors have positioned themselves. Greatgames, Sony and Microsoft all have licenses with Disney or other major studios to exploit their characters. Wowaction just got a tie into Paramount for its summer films. I’m not telling you something you don’t already know, but there was a fire at the Kiyobe plant outside Seoul two weeks ago. It’s prioritizing shipments of its chips according to order size. Yours won’t be big enough to get their attention.”
    The way everyone on Majik’s side of the table was leaning in Kate’s direction emboldened her to go a bit farther. “You need