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would be forthcoming.

     
    “You ever been here, Wendall?” the man across the burnished copper table asked.
    When Clayton spoke, however, it was to the captain of the Carleton Hotel on Fifty-ninth Street, off Fifth Avenue. “The nova, Frederick?”
    “No, Mr. Clayton.” The captain shook his head. “Not today.”
    “Thanks. I’ll have my usual.”
    “Very good, Mr. Clayton.”
    “Well, that answers my question,” John Perelli said with an explosive laugh. “How’s the yogurt today, Freddie?”
    “It’s—”
    “That’s a joke,” Perelli barked. “Gimme a bowl. Dry wheat toast and a fruit cup.”
    “Yessir, Mr. Perelli.”
    Perelli was stocky and dark, with a long face. He wore a navy pinstripe suit.
    Clayton shot his cuffs, revealing eighteen-karat-Wedgwood cuff links, and said, “I feel, in answer to your question, right at home here.”
    Though this was not completely true. Recently Wendall Clayton had been coming to this dining room—where many of Perelli’s partners breakfasted and lunched—to make inroads into Midtown. Yet this was not his natural turf, which had always been Wall Street, upper Fifth Avenue, his weekend house in Redding, Connecticut, his ten-room cabin in Newport.
    Clayton had a stock portfolio worth around twenty-three million (depending on how the Gods of the Dow were feeling at any particular moment). Hanging on the oak paneling in his Upper East Side den were a Picasso, three Klees, a Mondrian, a Magritte. He drove a Jaguar and a Mercedes station wagon. Yet his wealth was of the hushed, Victorian sort: a third inherited, a third earned at the practice of law (and cautious investment of the proceeds), the rest from his wife.
    But here, in Midtown, he was surrounded by a different genre of money. It was loud money. Acquired from new wellsprings. This money was from media, from advertising, from public relations, from junk bonds, from leveraged buyouts, from alligator spreads and dividend-snatching. Commission money. Sales money. Real estate money. Italian money. Jewish money. Japanese money.
    Clayton’s wealth was money with cobwebs and therefore it was, ironically, suspect—at least around here. In this part of town, when it came to wealth the slogan was: the more respectable, the less acceptable.
    He tried not to give a damn. Yet here Clayton felt as if he were “without passport,” the phrase whose acronym gave rise to the derisive term for Italians. Wendall Clayton in Midtown was an immigrant in steerage.
    “So why the call, Wendall?” Perelli asked.
    Clayton replied, “We need to move faster. I’m trying to accelerate the vote on the merger.”
    “Faster? Why?”
    “The natives are restless.”
    Perelli barked, “What does that mean? I don’t know what it means. That your people wanta go forward or that Burdick and his cronies’re trying to fuck the deal?”
    “A little bit of both.”
    “What’s Donald doing? Setting up an office in D.C. and London to goose up your operating expense?”
    “Something like that. I’m finding out,” Clayton conceded with a nod.
    The waiter set the plates on the table. Clayton hunched over the soft mounds of eggs and ate hungrily, cutting the food into small bites.
    Perelli waited until the server was gone then examined Clayton carefully and said, “We want this to work. We’ve got labor clients we can parlay into your SEC base. We’ve got products liability cases that are gold mines. You’ve got corporate people and litigators who’d be a natural fit. Obviously we want your banking department and you want our real estate group. It’s made in heaven, Wendall. What’s Burdick’s problem?”
    “Old school. I don’t know.”
    “The fact we’ve got Jewish partners? The fact we have Eye-talian partners?”
    “Probably.”
    “But there’s more to it, right?” the keen-eyed Perelli asked. “Cut the crap, Wendall. You’ve got an agenda that’s scaring the shit out of Burdick and his boys. What?”
    Okay, Clayton