Noordhaven Advisory arrived at Kell & Moberly on a Tuesday, in two black cars, wearing matching quarter-zip pullovers with a sail on the chest.
I watched from the server closet window. There were five of them. Four wore the pullovers. The fifth wore a charcoal suit and carried nothing but a fountain pen, which she held the way other people hold car keys.
That was Rosamund Nyberg. She was fifty-six, with a silver bob so precise it looked like it had been approved by a committee. She walked into our lobby, looked once around the room, and appeared to count everything in it.
Then she looked at the corkboard of Moberly's postcards. Wind good. Hope the books balance.
"Who is Moberly?" she asked.
"My partner," said Leopold. "He's on a boat."
"Since when?"
"2011."
Rosamund wrote something with the fountain pen. Leopold watched her write it the way a man watches his car being towed.
Due diligence is the part of a merger where the bigger firm reads everything you own. It is like having your in-laws stay for a month, except the in-laws have a spreadsheet. Noordhaven took over our conference room, the small meeting room and half the break room.
The youngest of them was Kip Lindahl. Kip was twenty-six, an integration associate, and spoke entirely in email. He didn't just write "per my last email." He said it out loud, to people's faces, in a friendly voice.
"Per my last email," he told me on the first morning, "we'll need admin access to the shared drive."
"You emailed me eleven minutes ago," I said.
"Right. Per that."
He meant no harm. That was the confusing part.
Kip had the energy of a golden retriever who had been given a lanyard. He thanked everyone and held doors. He brought his own labeled snacks.
The labels were the problem.
The first formal session started at ten. Leopold led for us. Mina sat beside him with three binders and a mechanical pencil. I was there to keep the projector from doing what our projector does.
Rosamund sat across from them with her pen and a glass of water. She never touched the water. Over the next three weeks I never once saw her drink it. Clement later developed a theory that it was a prop, and that the real Rosamund was solar-powered.
"First item," said Leopold. "The name. We'd like to keep Kell & Moberly on the door. Something like 'Kell & Moberly, a Noordhaven firm.'"
Rosamund looked at him.
That was all. She didn't frown or tap the pen. She just looked at him, with polite and bottomless patience, and said nothing.
Leopold waited. Then he cleared his throat. Then he moved a binder half an inch.
I watched the clock above the door. At one minute, he smiled at her. At two minutes, he looked at me, as if IT could fix this.
At three minutes and forty seconds, Leopold said, "Of course, the name could be revisited later."
Rosamund wrote something down. "Thank you," she said. "Second item."
Mina's pencil stopped moving. She glanced at the clock, then at Rosamund. I knew that look. It was the look she gave Clement's wrist at the twenty-second mark.
By lunch, Leopold had revisited the name, the parking spaces, the holiday party budget and the bookshelf in his office. He had not won a single point.
He had barely heard a single sentence. Rosamund Nyberg had spoken eighty-four words in two hours. I know because Mina counted them in the margin of binder two.
"She's not negotiating," Leopold said afterward, in the hall. He looked like a man who had gone for a light jog and accidentally run a marathon. "She's just waiting."
"Yes," said Mina. "She's very good at it."
The fridge incident happened that afternoon.
Our break-room fridge had a system, and the system was chaos. Everyone knew where everything was, and nobody could explain it.
Clement's lunch lived on the second shelf, left side. It had lived there for nine years. It was always the same lunch: egg salad on rye, folded in wax paper in thirds.
At two o'clock Kip relabeled the fridge.
He did it as a kindness. He used Noordhaven integration labels, little blue stickers with the sail logo. Top shelf: NOORDHAVEN — TEMP. Second shelf: SHARED — PENDING REVIEW.
He moved Clement's sandwich to the crisper drawer, next to a lemon of unknown origin.
Clement found it at two-fifteen. I heard him from my desk.
It wasn't a shout. Clement doesn't shout. It was a long, low exhale, like a tire with feelings.
"Pending review," he said. "My sandwich is pending review."
"Per our integration plan," said Kip brightly, "shared spaces are being—"
"It's been on that shelf since before you could drive."
"Oh, absolutely, and per my last email—"
"You didn't email me."
"I emailed everyone."
They both turned to look at the break-room table. I'm not sure Kip knew why he did it. Clement did it from habit. Everybody at Kell & Moberly eventually ended up looking at that table.
Mina was already there, eating yogurt. She put down the spoon.
"Would either of you like to settle this?" she asked.
To be clear, nobody pushed Kip into anything. I asked him three times. Imelda asked him twice, and then asked him to repeat the answer slowly for the clipboard.
Kip was thrilled. He had heard rumors. Someone in our audit team had told him about the table at the coffee machine, and he had assumed it was a metaphor.
"Is this a real thing?" he said. "Like a real policy thing?"
"It's a real form," said Imelda. She handed him Form AW-1. It had grown to five pages, because Noordhaven was in the building. Page five covered "visitors, guests and parties to an acquisition."
Kip read every page. He was the first outside person who ever had. He even read the footnotes. Imelda watched him the way a gardener watches someone finally notice her roses.
"Mina's taking your side?" Kip asked Clement.
"No," said Clement. "I am taking my own side."
"I'll take Clement's position," Mina said. "He's oh-for-fifteen. It's not fair to make him go again."
Clement opened his mouth to object. Then he closed it, because it was true, and folded his arms in thirds.
Kip came in the way everybody does: hard and fast, with a top roll. He'd clearly watched a video. His wrist curled over Mina's and pushed.
Mina's hand went back about an inch. Then it stopped.
She held it there, wrist straight, eyes on the stapler. Her face had the same expression it had when a bank statement was off by a cent. She wasn't straining. She was waiting for the cent to turn up.
At fifteen seconds Kip grinned. At twenty-five he stopped grinning. At thirty he started talking, which happens to a lot of people.
"Per my—" he began.
"Don't," said Clement, from behind him.
At thirty-four seconds Kip's eyes flicked to the crisper drawer. Mina brought his hand down, slow and level, and his knuckles touched the laminate at thirty-eight.
"Ledger's closed," she said.
They shook hands. Kip flexed his fingers and looked at them, astonished, as if they belonged to someone with worse judgment. Clement moved his sandwich back to the second shelf, left side. Mina peeled the blue sticker off the shelf and handed it to Kip.
Then she went to the sink and started washing mugs.
Kip watched her. "Why are you doing that? You won."
"Rule five," said Mina. "Winner washes."
Kip stared at the sink for a long moment. Then he walked over, picked up a towel and started drying. Nobody asked him to. He dried WORLD'S OKAYEST UNCLE with great care, and he didn't say "per my last email" for the rest of the day.
I wrote Entry 213 in the book. Under it, at Mina's request, I added: First visiting party. Very good sport.
I should have seen what was coming. IT is supposed to see things coming. That's our whole job, along with explaining the cloud to partners over sixty.
Kip posted about it that night.
He didn't mean anything by it. Noordhaven had an internal message board called the Mooring, and it had a channel called Wins.
Kip posted a photo of the fridge with Clement's sandwich restored. Under it he wrote, Kell & Moberly settle disputes at the break-room table. Lost to their senior accountant in 38 seconds. Best integration meeting I've ever had.
By morning it had four hundred reactions. Somebody in the Phoenix office had made it into a sticker.
At eight-fifteen, Imelda came into my office without knocking. She was holding her phone at arm's length, as if it might go off.
"I've received an email," she said, "from Noordhaven's general counsel."
"What's the subject line?"
She turned the screen toward me. It read: RE: ARM WRESTLING (URGENT).
Under it was a second email. It was from Rosamund Nyberg, and it was one sentence long. I'm told it was the longest email she sent that week.
I would like to see the table at nine.
Up next: Section 9.4
Continue to Part 3 →