For All the Wrong Reasons (6 page)

He loved women. The trouble was, he reflected, that he loved too many of them. Settling down with just one? Impossible. Maybe, someday in the future. But if Michael was honest, he sometimes doubted that day would ever arrive. He shrugged and towelled himself off. Romance wasn't his style. He had work to do.

Outside his apartment it was very cold. New York's snap into winter couldn't be far away. A bitter gust whipped down from West Broadway and into his jacket. Shivering, Michael ducked into the subway. Whatever people said about the New York subway, it was warm.

He arrived at the office to find Susan already there. Today she wore a smart, short red shirtdress that buttoned up along the front, with a fitted jacket over it. Jessica had concentrated his mind against her temptations, though. Michael nodded a brisk good morning to his assistant and asked for his schedule.

“You have a ten thirty uptown, at the Blakely's headquarters, with a lunch to follow. And that's all today, Mr. Cicero.”

Michael had made it quite clear: In the office, it was Mr. Cicero from the staff—which was Susan, at this point. Susan said to herself this was totally arrogant.

“You've got my files?”

“Right here, sir.”

She felt a little tingle in her skin as she said that. Her nipples tightened sweetly. No wonder Leslie thought she was on fire in bed lately, she spent her whole day at work dreamily frustrated.

“Wish me luck,” Michael said, grinning at her.

Oh, my. Susan steadied herself with one manicured hand. “Oh, I do, Mr. Cicero, really, I wish you the very best of luck, there's no way you're not going to wow them—”

“Thanks.” He cut her off, absently. She could see his mind was already on the meeting. “I'll get a cab on the street. Make sure Seth has the artwork he needs, OK?”

“OK, Mr. Cicero.” Susan sighed.

He walked out.

*   *   *

Damn, Michael thought. The chick this morning had made him forget he had this meeting. He was getting old. He walked hastily away from Zabanda's, so the moussaka reek didn't cling to his suit, and jumped in a cab on the corner of Madison. This was a pretty big morning. He had pitched their latest list to a new group of buyers last week and got some good orders … major bookstores, even an order placed by Amazon.com. It seemed that the clean, crisp, old-fashioned editions with his own special typeface and sweet illustrations were making waves.

He'd expected some interest from the big houses, and he hadn't been disappointed. Everybody was singing the same tune. Michael settled back into the black leather seat, and got ready to wince at the fare. If he took any one of these job offers, he wouldn't have to watch cab fares ever again. They had different voices: the young, hip, book mogul, the old lady known as a killer editor, the crisp accounting type with the seductive figures. But the trip was the same. Give up Green Eggs and work for us. Acquiring editor, right off the bat. He could pay off the student loan and stop dressing off the rack. Hell, he could buy his own apartment on the West Side someplace.

Michael turned them all down flat, even the lady who came to his office. Not interested. He didn't branch out on his own so he could report to some other asshole. He liked being called sir. He hated calling other men the same thing. In fact, he refused to do it. Taking a salary? That was for guys without balls. He was going to make his own path.

The sixth call had been from Blakely's. Michael had read about the changes there in a trade magazine, but he hadn't paid any attention. What the big firms did couldn't impact on Green Eggs, so why would he care?

Ernie Foxton, the new president, apparently had his own ideas as to why Michael should care. In the call his assistant had made last week, she hadn't mentioned a job for Michael, no salaried post at all. Mr. Foxton, she informed him, wanted to talk about a “joint venture.”

Michael was instantly suspicious. He had a tiny, two-person mom-and-pop outfit; he was just on the verge of hiring a salesman to make it three people, and the biggest publishing house in New York wanted to set up a joint venture? Why?

But there was no denying it. Blakely's was the big time. If he could work something out … Michael saw financing. He saw distribution, not himself and his staff of one in a beat-up old van but fleets of shiny new trucks. He saw a national, not a local catchment area. He saw printing costs plummeting. He saw … he didn't know what, it was cloaked in a vague, golden cloud … a vision of opportunity.

But he knew Ernie Foxton's reputation.

All he had to do was wow the toughest cookie in the business.

*   *   *

Ernie relaxed in his burgundy leather Eames chair and assessed the decor of his office. He liked the floor-to-ceiling sheer glass walls that gave him such a wonderful, vertigo-inducing view of midtown. The traffic crawled seventeen stories below him, peaceful from his perspective, dotted all over with the tiny yellow bugs that were the New York taxis. He was an East End boy, and he was still trying to get used to the size of everything over here. The buildings, the billboards, the tits on the women … everything was
bigger.
The feng shui expert had been around yesterday … was that trickling Zen fountain in the left-hand corner there to help wealth go in or bad vibes go out? Ernie didn't care. He had a rockery in his bloody office, designed by Zaban's, the most expensive firm on the West Side. The rumor was they had a commission for the renovation of the Kravis Wing at the Metropolitan Museum. He would drop the name at his next dinner party, for sure.

Diana told him that, as usual, everybody had accepted. He, Ernie Foxton, would host a gathering including two financiers, one famous
Vanity Fair
writer, the Yankees third base coach—he hated baseball, but anything Yankees was golden in New York—a supermodel and … who else? A novelist or two? Whatever. Diana was doing a wonderful job as hostess. Hopefully, she wouldn't bat an eyelid when he turned up with Mira Chen.

Ernie's groin stirred a little. Mira. He loved the way she dressed, in those mean power suits and the three-inch spike heels. He knew there was nothing above the hold-up stockings, either. It was so easy to imagine her in a little domino mask with a whip in her hand. Mmm-hmm. She'd be really cruel. She wore those heels to advertise it. Even on a warm spring day, it was always spikes for Mira, never slides or sandals. And waist-wrenching, tiny corsets under her tight jackets.

It was indescribably thrilling. She gave him orders. Ernie's cock was as hard as her smile. She took him out to a dark, damp little club on East Thirty-sixth Street, where a succession of strict girls in black leather humiliated, leashed and aroused him. He wore a mask. He was no longer the terror of his industry, the feared hatchet man. He was just a slave groveling around their cruel, contemptuous, anonymous spikes. It was dirty and sordid, and it aroused him in a way Diana had never managed to do.

Sure, she was the perfect arm ornament. He wasn't complaining. And as long as he could still see Mira …

He'd had a headhunter poach her from her firm and given her a commissioning editor's job over in popular fiction. If there was any talk, he hadn't heard about it. A smile curled around Ernie's lips. Frankly, he didn't think anybody would dare.

His phone blinked. He let it flicker for a few seconds before he picked it up.

“Yes, Marcia?”

“You asked for a reminder at ten fifteen, Mr. Foxton.”

Ernie scratched his head. “What is it this time?”

“Mr. Michael Cicero. He's already waiting in the outer lobby.”

“Let him wait.” Ernie loved to keep the little people hanging. It reminded him of his power and impressed on them how lucky they were to see him at all. He flipped through his monogrammed leather day-planner. Oh, right, of course—the Green Eggs guy, the possible comer. Well, Blakely's—and himself—had courted the kid assiduously. Now it was time to remind him just who the big boys were in this scenario. He wanted Cicero on board—but only on his terms.

“When it turns quarter to, you can send him in,” he told Marcia.

Let him cool his heels for thirty minutes. Time for the poor man to appreciate the Degas in the lobby, and the Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee and imported French petits-fours that they would be serving him. That was what Blakely's could offer. He liked dangling the carrot, to soften up his prey a little. And making him wait. It was important to show the little people who was boss.

SIX

“Show them in,” Ernie said, finally. He liked saying that. It made him feel like a king granting an audience and that was really what he was, in a way.

Marcia ushered in the courtiers. First came Peter Davits, known as the Russian, an excellent number-cruncher, head of the business affairs department. Ernie gave him his job so he could slash the jobs of others. No point in carrying lots of fat. Close behind him, Janet Jensen, an all-American girl and his closest ally in restructuring the Blakely's list. Who needed to carry poetry titles that never sold, to invest in young authors and take silly risks with literary fiction? Nobody could say that he, Ernie, carried no literary fiction. He did. He carried authors that sold, just the same as he invested in pulp romances that sold. He didn't believe in catering to long and loyal readerships. To Ernie, a loyal readership was one that bought about three-quarters of a million copies per title—and anything upward of that.

The screams of pain and anguish that had rattled about his ears in London were being unleashed in New York, but, ensconced in his glass palace up in the rarefied air of the steel and concrete Manhattan canyons, Ernie did not hear them. The PR department of Blakely's had their orders. They issued nice blanket statements about modernizing the firm and not being fettered by the last millennium's traditions. Ernie thought that last millennium bit was a nice touch. He'd written it himself.

He cultivated the opinion makers with the chic parties, lunches and dinners that Diana threw, and he was getting pretty popular. Everybody wanted to come to his dinners. Gradually the printed articles were tapering off. The
New York Times
and the
Village Voice
still shouted inky columns of protest, but really, who cared?—old readers he was no longer selling to, authors that he'd dropped, and a few stick-in-the-mud journalists.

Ernie smiled at Peter and Janet and the flunkies they'd brought along with them. He was retrieving the data about Michael Cicero he'd stored away from the inner filing drawer of his brain. A natural salesman with a nice little list. Sometimes illustrations were all it took to make a difference. Look at Dorling Kindersley. Zero to 90 million pounds in about five years, and still resistant to imitators.

His kids' department had being trying to copy Cicero's style, without marked success. They kept coming up with bright, friendly, Disneyfied illustrations whereas Cicero's style was really old-fashioned … it had a touch of darkness, what his (now fired) children's commissioning head had called “the tangled forest.” Personally, Ernie thought Blakely's own were just fine, and told them to “make it a bit more evil.” But the villains still looked like they walked out of Sesame Street. Ernie liked them, but the buyers didn't.

Whatever Michael Cicero had, Ernie wanted to get. And he thought the other guys, offering him a salary, were missing the big picture. Who wanted a salaried employee who could walk out? What you wanted was the company. That was where the big money was. Owning.

Of course, he wasn't about to tell Cicero that, nor spend any serious money. As yet, the guy just had potential. But if he fulfilled that potential, Ernie Foxton wanted to own him, to get him in so deep he could never break the golden handcuffs.

“Everybody settled? Great.” He gave his little group a warm, conspiratorial grin. “Let's bring him in. Softly softly catchee monkey, remember.”

*   *   *

Michael flipped through his brief statistics—he only had a year's worth—his blown-up illustrations, and his customer lists. He told himself that getting angry would serve no purpose. Maybe something urgent had come up. Maybe this was how it always was in the big firms. Possibly, even, Susan had gotten the time of the appointment wrong. He told himself he knew he had a temper and now was a good time to practice that control he'd been meaning to get to.

His watch tick-ticked. He studied the painting. He went over his presentation in his mind.

By the time he'd been kept waiting for ten minutes he was very aggravated. By the time he'd been kept waiting for twenty minutes he was angry.

At twenty-eight minutes, the president's secretary emerged from the outer office. Her office was bigger than his entire firm. What Ernie Foxton's office was like he could only imagine.

Cicero's gaze flickered lightly over the woman. She was slender with a tiny waist and a very flat butt, which he found unattractive. Her pantsuit was tan, with a matching, tiny cashmere cardigan, neutral make-up, glossy hair and a classic strand of pearls. She was a pretty trophy, the kind he could only dream about right now.

“Mr. Cicero? Mr. Foxton is ready for you now,” she said, condescendingly.

She smiled down at him with a fake smile, and her eyes swept over his suit. Cicero realized she was judging him by it. He dressed off the rack; this wasn't designer, just a plain suit. And the shoes, ditto.

He stood.

“It's eleven. Our appointment was for ten thirty.”

“Yes, I know. Mr. Foxton had some other business he had to take care of first. I'm sorry you had to wait.” She snapped him another frosty smile.

“Thanks for the explanation. Good morning,” Michael said. He gathered his materials together and turned around, toward the elevators.

The fancy secretary was confused.

“Mr. Foxton's office is that way.”

Michael glanced at her. “I'm not going to Mr. Foxton's office.”