Brightness Falls (31 page)

"Whitlock? Jesus."

"That's right, they got our CFO. But Calloway's the ringleader."

"They're
kids,
for Christ's sake."

"Tell it to their bankers, Harold. They've got Bernie Melman and probably Drexel behind them. Can you fucking believe this?"

"I'm just getting on the shuttle. Where's Corbin?"

"He's fishing in Belize or some goddamn place. We're trying to find him."

By the time Harold got to the office the young conspirators had gone home.

"First thing, we'll have their offices cleared and locked," Kleinfeld said. "If they have the balls to show up tomorrow morning they'll find themselves shut out. I called security and made sure they didn't take anything out but the clothes on their backs. If I had my way, they'd have walked out naked."

"I'm sure they already have whatever they need, Jerry. They didn't hatch this up yesterday over lunch."

They were in Kleinfeld's office surrounded by pictures of his famous friends. Of the less recognizable faces Harold had always suspected that one or two were probably mobsters.

"I warn you now, I'm not going to let this happen," Kleinfeld said, as if he suspected Harold's determination. Hours after he had first heard the news he was still deranged and bitter, like a man who has just discovered his wife's infidelity. "Can you believe what Calloway said to me this afternoon? He says, 'Nothing personal.' I told him, 'You better believe it's personal, you little cocksucker. Before this is over I'm going to
personally
fucking demolish you.' "

"How'd they get to Bernie Melman, anyway?" In recent years Harold had devoted much effort to studying the ways of a system he'd made his reputation knocking, and he was well aware of Melman's position and power.

"How the fuck do I know? Maybe they met him at Le Cirque."

"Do we pay them enough to eat at Le Cirque?"

"Nobody
pays
for anything anymore, that's the fucking problem. They're totally leveraged. Bridge loans, junk bonds, whatever. The money's out there. Money's cheap. The banks used to be like convent girls, you couldn't get a feel without a marriage license. Then Drexel started to practically give it away, and now they've all got red lights on over the door."

Harold was weary of Kleinfeld's simpleminded, ahistorical views on capitalism, not to mention his proclivity for carnal similes. He had long before concluded that if figures of speech based on sports and fornication were suddenly banned, American corporate communication would be reduced to pure mathematics.

Partly out of strategic habit and partly to meditate, Harold looked out the window and let the silence build, absently calculating the span of Kleinfeld's patience. Through a window across the street he watched the fat hindsection of a woman in a babushka pushing a vacuum—Eastern European, probably Polish. He thought of Isaac Babel, Victor Propp's putative forebear, shot by Bolsheviks; wondered how as a young Stalinist he had been able to wish away all those brutal facts, though even in his youthful folly he felt superior to the Kleinfelds of the world, who'd never possessed the imagination to be that callow. While Harold was sitting in Greenwich Village cafés prepping for the revolution, Kleinfeld was schlepping around the Midwest with a trunkful of books as a college rep. Theirs had been an uneasy alliance, since Kleinfeld came in as publisher to stanch the company's chronic hemorrhage of cash. But the former marketing manager and the former radical intellectual Wunderkind had managed to accommodate each other. Now they would have to strengthen the alliance.

"I don't think we need to panic," Harold said finally. "If they can raise fifty we can raise a hundred. To these fresh-faced world-beaters like Russell, everything's ad hoc. They don't see that this is a city of nets— if you don't know the ropes you're likely to trip."

"Yeah, yeah. All I know is they're halfway there already, Harold. They didn't storm the Bastille—they called Bernie Melman."

"So we hire Wasserstein and Perella at First Boston."

"How about the Gambino family?"

"Careful," Harold said, absently putting a finger to his lips, half of his attention focused on the Carlton situation. A student of history, of Gibbon and Carlyle and for that matter of Ecclesiastes, he could already see that this, too, would pass. Somehow he knew they weren't going to lose the company.

Kleinfeld, in his taut corporate commando mode, spun his head in both directions in a gesture of reconnaissance. "You think they bugged the place?"

"Don't be ridiculous, Jerry." Harold hated using Kleinfeld's first name, but sometimes it was unavoidable. "I meant, in general let's be circumspect. But no, I don't think electronic surveillance is exactly Calloway's style. Whitlock's the biggest problem. Does he have an employment contract? We can throw a bunch of legal motions at him straight off about violating the terms of his contract. We'll bury them in motions."

"I'm surprised at Washington. I thought he'd be savvy enough to come to us first looking for a better offer."

"Well, maybe we should go to him."

Harold nodded thoughtfully, appreciating for the first time how useful his colleague, basically a street fighter, might be in this kind of battle.

They talked about lawyers and investment bankers for another half-hour. Between them they were acquainted with many of the best in the city, and this knowledge calmed both of them. The lawyer who had invented the poison-pill defense against hostile takeovers was a lunch partner of Jerry's. They put together a list of calls for Carlton, who was waiting eagerly outside Harold's office when the two men emerged.

"Are you going to the Whitney tonight," Kleinfeld asked.

"I don't know," Harold said, for Carlton's ears, because he really didn't want to take her along. Tonight he felt like being with the grown-ups.

"I just can't believe those guys," Carlton whined, putting a hand on Harold's shoulder after Kleinfeld was gone. "I mean, who do they think they are?"

"Oh, do shut up," Harold said.

"The Whitney Biennial is a periodic attempt to irritate everyone in the art world and confuse those outside of it," Victor Propp announced to Juan Baptiste—hoping to be quoted, the two of them swaying like buoys as the crowd surged around them in the museum lobby.

The show had been open for a month, but the publishing world was only now taking it in, at a party hosted by
The New York Review of Books.
Everyone was talking about the video installations, the basketballs-floating-in-the-aquarium, and the photo collages done by a pair of twins, the
new
new work framed between familiar names, and speculating about

whether the de Koonings were "appropriations" or outright forgeries, which would at least have invested them with novelty.

Up on the third floor, Russell was mesmerized in front of a painting that consisted entirely of obscene words stenciled at different angles across the canvas. He was fascinated because the "artist" had submitted a novel to him a year or two before, a thriller set in Berlin in the thirties. "And now here he is in the Whitney?" he complained to Corrine. "Pull a few words—granted, colorful words—out of your manuscript, paint them on a canvas, and bingo, you're a famous painter."

"It's kind of funny," Corrine said.

"It's scary, is what it is. And you're a philistine if you say so.
Look
at these people."

"
Shhh.
"

"Ever since the twenties nobody wants to be one of the boors who booed Stravinsky or Duchamp. That's the great legacy of modernism— the fear of being a rube."

"Calm down," she said, though she could see he was having a good time in his own fashion, working off the anxiety of the day.

She reached over and straightened his black bow tie, tucking it under the wing collar of his shirt. "If you're going to be a captain of the publishing industry you've got to look the part." She was immediately sorry she'd said anything; Russell's posture became rigid again as he remembered after a few moments of amnesia everything that had been making him intolerably anxious over the last few weeks. She could see that he was expecting someone to come up and acknowledge today's announcement of intent to buy the company, the stock running up three and a half points. The night before, he'd been unable to sleep. She had tried to talk him out of proceeding, but now that it was too late to turn back she just wanted him to relax.

The perennially single Nancy Tanner swam into their vicinity, kissing Russell, tossing her head in such a way as to lash the man behind her with her abundant blond hair.

"Isn't that Johnny Moniker," she asked, "over there by the Julian Schnabel? I'm dying to meet him, I haven't had a date in weeks. Ever since I quit drinking I can actually
see
these mutts I meet at midnight and it's so—"

"I quit drinking too," Corrine said.

"Oh, yeah? Which meeting do you go to?"

"I, uh, I don't actually go to meetings. I just quit."

"You're not in the program?" She looked at Corrine as if she weren't sure it counted if you quit on your own. "I go to the one in the basement at this church over between Park and Madison, it's really cool. You've got to come. The guys are to die for."

Russell had drifted away; when Corrine caught up with him he was standing in front of a huge color photograph of a group that looked as if it might be IBM's board of directors.

"You know," he said, "I really think we should consider buying some photographs."

"I think you're really silly." Ever since he'd contemplated the purchase of a seventy-million-dollar company Russell had been acting like a man undaunted by lesser purchases. Contemplating these negative millions, he had become very chummy with the four- and five-digit numbers. The week before, he'd proposed they take a summer house in Southampton that went for ten thousand a month, when, as far as she knew, they didn't have a liquid nickel. "Anyway, I came to give you a Harold alert. Recent sighting in the vicinity."

"Where?"

"Over by the wire sculpture."

"Maybe I should get this over with."

"Maybe we should just get out of here. We're going to be late for dinner." Moving with the prevailing tide, they had almost reached the elevator when a cross-current brought Harold and Carlton within inches of them, Harold suddenly so close that Russell could smell his breath, his eyes as they focused on Russell's like talons sinking into flesh, filling the younger man with fear and shame. If the contest between them had been an ancient dispute over leadership of the clan, Russell might have lost it in that moment, facing the older chieftain. He would have turned and fled into the woods beyond the circle of firelight.

"I'm surprised you'd show yourself in public," Carlton said, breaking the spell.

"I don't think Russell has anything to be ashamed of," Corrine said.

"After all Harold's done for you."

"It's not personal, Carlton," Russell said, avoiding Harold's eyes. "Some of us keep the lines between our personal and our business lives quite distinct, actually."

Carlton threw her glass of wine in his face, dousing several bystanders in the process. Temporarily blinded, Russell felt Corrine tug him toward the elevator.

The next morning's
New York Times
noted the bid in a short item in the business section: "Melman Group in Hostile Bid for Publisher."

That same morning, aboard a fifty-four-foot Bertram sportfisherman several miles off Costa Rica, Whitney Corbin III was watching bait dance from the outriggers on the turquoise water and dreaming of blue sailfish taildancing at the end of the line, when he received a call on the radiophone.

At first he was filled with indignation at the idea that a bunch of kids would take over the company his grandfather had built up out of thin air. Nevertheless, he told the bait boy to put out the lines and fixed himself a drink. By the time the glass was empty he'd calculated the immediate cash value of his shares on the basis of the current bid and considered the advantages of retirement. New blood might be just the thing for the old house, after all. And this thing with the black people was terribly disheartening. Corbin thought that his grandfather, once a fiery young entrepreneur himself, might agree with him. Harold Stone and Jerry Kleinfeld, holding little stock themselves, were not apt to see these advantages, but the older board members might. If anything, he thought the bid rather too low. As he fixed himself another drink, his indignation rose again at the idea that anyone would try to get the company on the cheap, just because the stock was underperforming lately. Anyone who wanted to buy the Corbin, Dern name had better appreciate that they weren't just picking up some real estate and a back list, god-damnit. The name alone was worth twenty million.

In the meantime, it looked like an auspicious day for sailfish.

Two days after the Whitney benefit, Juan Baptiste took note of related events in the society column of a leading tabloid:

Arguments about the merits of the art on the walls at the
New York Review
snore—yes, at the Whitney!—were overshadowed by a real-life brawl. The fur—and the wine—started flying in earnest when hotshot young editor russell calloway bumped into Corbin, Dern publishing czar harold stone just hours after the announcement of Calloway's hostile takeover bid for the prestigious publishing firm. Just so you know, Calloway's being backed by bernie melman, the diminutive billionaire corporate raider.

Encountering young Calloway and his lovely wife, corrine, as they admired the much-discussed bruce weber photo-collage, Stone threw a glass of red wine at his former protégé as
tout le monde
looked on in horror. Who says literature is dull? Certainly not
moi.
The glamorous young Calloways retreated after an exchange of remarks too spicy for a family newspaper, Russell's tuxedo and wife Corrine's Calvin klein strapless somewhat wetter for the wear. And you wonder why the beautiful people wear black? Stay tuned —this is clearly a story destined to overflow the staid columns of the business pages.

25

After Jeff failed to appear for a dinner party one Friday night, Russell went to look for him the next morning. He waited till eleven, took the subway downtown, got off at Astor Place and lingered over the would-be merchandise spread out on the sidewalks—an extensive selection of unwanted books, records, magazines, clothes, household appliances and unidentified objects including a nearly complete set of TV
Guides
for the year 1984.