Blessing in Disguise (20 page)

Jack could feel his heart thudding, a taste like burnt toast in his mouth. His eye fell on his favorite of the four Fuseli prints over the sofa—a heroically drawn scene from
Macbeth.

If thou speakest false, thou shalt hang alive upon the next tree. ...

It’ll be my hide hung out to dry, he thought, but somebody has to stand up, draw the line.

If
numbers
were everything, if his life’s work, all the marvelous books he’d helped give birth to, if that’s all they amounted to, then he might as well throw in the towel right now. Ignoring this would make him almost as bad as Roger—a silent partner, the driver of the getaway car.

But, at the same time. Jack was hoping—no,
praying
—he could come up with some way to keep from altogether alienating this creep. Without Roger, Cadogan would be crippled, and his own future would probably take its cue from the jacket illustration on Roger’s current book: a nuclear missile rising up from its silo, soon to blast the world into extinction.

Jack, feeling himself beginning to sweat under his suit, made a conscious effort to relax his posture, and loosen the muscles in his jaw.
Stay on top of this,
he willed himself.
They’ve got you by the balls, but they don’t have to know that.

He was relieved to note that Roger, beneath his mask of indignation, seemed the tiniest bit nervous. Jack watched him light a cigarette, sucking in deeply and sending a stream of smoke Jack’s way while his gaze slid off toward a point-of-sale display for
Operation Crimson
standing between two crammed bookshelves.

“Look here. Gold ... who are
you
to tell me when enough is enough?” Roger leaned forward, his shoulders hunched up around his ears, making Jack think of a comedian doing a bad impression of Richard Nixon. “You wanted this bloody tour, and you’re bloody well going to get it!” His Oxbridge accent was dissolving into something that sounded suspiciously Liverpudlian.

“Look, neither of us needs reminding of what’s at stake in terms of potential sales here, but this ...” Jack spoke quietly, bringing his hands up and folding them over his chest, thumbs bracketing his flowered Liberty tie—a touch of whimsy, courtesy of Grace. “Your last tour, I dealt with the complaints I got from the female reps and media escorts, about how you came on to them. I even turned a blind eye to the hookers you charged on your hotel bills. About ground the enamel off my teeth, but I figured, Hey, he’s not really hurting anyone, is he?”

“Oh, stop with the Billy Graham, will you? You wouldn’t be sitting here if it weren’t for Roger,” sneered Young’s agent, Rait, quietly referred to by publishers as “The Rat.” He was always trying to pull a fast one, bringing in a higher offer from someone else after a deal had already been agreed upon, manufacturing a phony bidder or two to goose up the price in an auction, sneaking manuscripts all over town regardless of the option clause. Now Rait was railing, “You did over seven hundred thou with
Operation Crimson,
close to two
million
in paper. Do you have another author who even approaches those numbers? Can you look me in the eye and say you don’t owe your fucking
job
to Roger here?”

“He’s very important to us,” Jack said.

“Then what the
hell
are we doing here?”

“Discussing how best to handle the fact that Roger will not be completing this tour as we originally planned it.” Jack held Rait’s indignant gaze. He felt sweat pasting his shirt to his shoulder blades.

Meshugge,
a cold voice inside him admonished.
Twenty years working your ass off to become somebody, build a company, publish books people love, and you’re going to throw it all away? For what? To be holier-than-thou? For some ...
principle?

What if he were to back off, change his tack? How much easier and smoother it would be just to go along, make believe no real harm had been done, no one had really been hurt. He was a businessman, not a moral arbiter. And Roger Young was the guy with his hand on the tiller, not Jack Gold or even their new chairman, Kurt Reinhold.

Then Jack remembered something he’d read somewhere.
You must think like a hero merely to behave like a decent human being.
But did whoever had come up with that realize that the hardest word in the English language, any language, had to be “no”?

Jack turned his gaze to Rait, watching him twist in his chair, as if he were being held there against his will. “You oughta be kissing the ground Roger walks on that he’s even
willing
to do a fucking tour!” Rait snarled.

“Well, if it’s such a chore, cutting it short now shouldn’t be such a hardship.” But what Rait was saying was true. Celebrity authors like Roger usually had to be
begged
to do publicity tours.

“You arrogant son of a bitch, I’ll ...” Young’s face contorted—no, seemed to swell—all red and swollen and shiny, like a baby’s. Jack thought. A baby having a temper tantrum. Young lunged to his feet in an oddly disjointed way, his movements jerky, almost spastic. “I could have any publisher in town, just by snapping my fingers.
Who the FUCK do you think you are?”

“Roger, I don’t want to upset you any more than you already are, but do you realize it’s a miracle you weren’t arrested?” Jack went on in as reasonable a tone as he could muster, tensing against a sudden cramping sensation in his belly. “If Sue McCoy had decided to press charges ...”

Rait turned to his client, cupping the air in front of him with both hands as if conducting an orchestra, quieting its crashing cymbals.

“Let’s see if I’ve got this straight,” he began. “You send Roger out with this ... this
bimbo
who claims ...”

“That he tried to rape her,” Jack finished, for once not mincing words or bothering to hide his disgust. “This bimbo, as you put it, is a married woman with four children. She’s one of our best reps. The accounts love her, we love her, and she gets high marks from our authors. But you, Roger, have put her through hell.” Jack drew in a breath. “She still
might
decide to press charges, you know.”

A new expression was taking shape on Young’s chinless face: fear.

“No, no, you don’t understand. ... I ... she ...” he sputtered.

Even Rait seemed to deflate, as
that
reality sank in. “Christ, this ... this is
suicide.
You’ve already sunk hundreds of thousands into this book. All those ads.
People
magazine. The book signings they’re going to be lining up around the block for.”

Jack felt a glimmer of triumph, and the cramping in his gut eased a little. “You don’t think I’ve gone over the figures twenty times?” he said, allowing a note of regret to creep into his voice. “Look, sit down, and let’s see if maybe we can work something out.”

After a tense eternity, Jack watched the chinless wonder sink down in his chair. Jack sensed he was close to some sort of victory—but the prospect didn’t excite him; it only left him feeling a bit sick with himself for having to negotiate with this prick.

“What I was thinking of as an alternative is a satellite tour,” he went on softly, as if they were all completely calm and in perfect accord. “A day, two at the most, and we can have you on radio and television from coast to coast. And the print interviews, too—we can arrange for virtually all of them here in New York, if not in person, then by phone. No hanging around in airports for delayed planes, no lousy room-service meals. And by next weekend, you can be in Westport or Mustique or Antibes.”

Awaiting Roger’s response. Jack realized he was holding his breath. He eased the air from his lungs, slowly, to keep them from noticing.

He watched Young grind out his cigarette in the ashtray that had been a promotional giveaway for last spring’s big self-help book.
Quit While You’re Not Dead,
the gold wrap-around lettering read. Then the novelist leaned back, folding his arms petulantly across his chest. “I never wanted a bloody pub tour in the first place.
You
were the one who asked me.”

He was backing down! Jack fought to hold back a grin of relief.

Rait looked up from the paper clip he was bending as if he wished it were Jack’s arm. “Listen, Jack, can you promise us that no ... uh ...
negative
publicity will get out?”

“I can’t promise you anything,” Jack said. He paused, and added, “But it wouldn’t hurt for Roger to speak with the lady in question. Maybe even apologize.” He cut a quick glance at Roger.

A few minutes later, as he saw Young and his agent out the door amid handshakes and conciliatory words that fooled no one, a line from
Measure for Measure
popped into Jack’s head:
Which is the wiser here? Justice or Iniquity?
Either way, he thought, his heartbeat slowing to a steady march as he went over the meeting in his mind, he didn’t regret a bit of it.

What he
did
regret was what he’d have to do now: tell Ben before it leaked out that there was a strong possibility Young would leave after his next book.

Ben would be livid. He smiled a lot, and appeared as easygoing as Hannah was temperamental, but underneath ...

The divorce? Maybe, but it went back even further than that. Jack guessed, back to when he’d been struggling to build up Cadogan and was hardly ever home with Natalie and little Ben.

Then, eight years ago, Ben had come to work for him, fresh out of college and full of himself. Jack had knocked him down a peg or two by giving him a job in the mailroom ... and Ben had
really
begun to resent his old man. All those extra hours, along with every manuscript Ben had begged from overworked editors with which to hone his editing skills and prove his worth, had been Ben’s way of saying,
Damn you, I’ll show you if it kills me.
Now this sleaze, Young, was going to give Ben yet another reason to carry a chip on his shoulder. ...

Dread lay in Jack’s stomach as he picked up the phone to buzz Ben’s extension.

“Got a minute, Jack?”

Jack looked up to see Kurt Reinhold striding into his office. A short, wiry man with graying hair that seemed to stand on end no matter how expensive his haircut, Cadogan’s new CEO reminded Jack of a cartoon of someone with his finger in a light socket—bug eyes and all. Except it was never Reinhold who got burned, he thought. Only those around him—especially the ones who got in his way.

Jack tried, as always when dealing with Reinhold, to reconcile his boss’s public image with what Jack knew of his private life. The two didn’t seem to mesh. Reinhold the CEO, with his in-your-face approach to management, his insistence on doing things
his
way, his habit of walking out of a meeting and leaving you hanging in mid-sentence ... and Reinhold the family man, married thirty years, with five kids he never seemed too busy for (even with his constant jetting back and forth to London, Frankfurt, Rome, Paris), not to mention a hobby he was rumored to be passionate about: baking bread from recipes he collected on his travels.

Jack lowered the phone receiver and motioned to Reinhold to have a seat.

But the Chief merely strode over to the window and looked down on lower Fifth like a feudal lord upon his fiefdom. “I wanted to go over something with you—this business with Jerry Schiller.”

“What business is that, Kurt?” asked Jack, though he sensed from the way his heart rate had begun to pick up again that it was serious.

Kurt turned around, his pale, protruding blue eyes fixing Jack with a chilly stare. “Jerry is dead wood. Jack. He’s got to go.”

Jack felt a sudden ache in his chest. Jesus, no, not Jerry—he’d been Cadogan’s editor-in-chief since the Ice Age. Old Jerry, who more than once had come to Jack for a hundred bucks or so to tide him over after loaning his own paycheck, giving it away really, to some old-buddy author whose manuscript was never going to get accepted. Jerry, who fought tooth and nail to keep them publishing poetry ...

“Last year, Jerry had two of his authors—Maisie Weston and Bob Gottschalk—nominated for National Book Awards,” Jack pointed out, careful to keep his tone neutral.

“And if the two of them put together sold ten thousand copies, I’d be surprised,” Reinhold countered. “Besides which, that Princess Di bio, that was exclusively his screw-up.”

“The board backed him up on that,” Jack reminded him.

Reinhold impatiently brushed a speck of lint from the lapel of his dark-blue cashmere suit. Jack had a sudden image of his boss with his sleeves rolled up, pounding the hell out of a lump of bread dough.

“Jack, I know you and Jerry go way back”—he left hanging in mid-air the allusion that Jack himself might very well be in the same league as Jerry—“but he’s pushed it too far this time. Have you seen this?” Jack became aware now that Reinhold was holding something—a rolled-up copy of
Publishers Weekly,
as it turned out. He smacked it down on Jack’s cluttered desktop. “Without saying a word to me, he did a piece for the ‘My Say’ column. A diatribe on behalf of literary authors who supposedly get shafted by their publishers in favor of pot-boilers.” Darkly, he added, “No mention of editors who bite the hand that feeds them.”

“Kurt, nobody is going to pay any attention—”

“I just hope Hauptman doesn’t see this—you know what a stickler he is for company loyalty.”

“If it’s a question of loyalty, I couldn’t name anyone here who would stick his neck out for Cadogan the way Jerry has.”

“He’s got to go, Jack,” Reinhold told him. “And it’s your job to take care of it.” In a single stroke, the man had managed both to remind him that he, as publisher, occupied a mere third place in the chain of command ... and that at the
same
time
he
was responsible for nearly everything that went wrong.

Jack felt as he had a minute ago with Young and Rait, as if he were in the midst of a bad dream. Yet there was nothing murky or dreamlike about Reinhold’s unspoken message:
You could be next.

Reinhold was still blaming him, Jack knew, for their fulfillment disasters, despite his having gone on record that the new warehouse and its systems were still not ready to ship the fall list. And when Reinhold found out about his showdown with Young ...