Ithaca (3 page)

This means that every action in the publishing sequence has a whiff of desperation about it. Editors frantically sell their colleagues further down the chain on the mythical selling points of the book they are pushing, and these fabrications get ever more elaborate and fantastical as the process unfolds. By the time the salesman is selling the book to the buyer at the retail chain, neither quite knows or believes what is being talked about – partly because the odds are they haven’t read the book but more so because they haven’t the faintest idea of whether it will work or not. Given this scenario, everyone in a position of authority is cynical about the claims made by those who need them to buy into their arguments. This is what Zach was struggling with.

In the end, he decided to keep it simple. He would let the book speak for itself; there was nothing that could better support his conviction that Litmus should publish
Angels Rising
. Although Gabrijela did not like editors to read from manuscripts at editorial meetings – to her it simply meant
that they hadn’t marshalled enough selling points to persuade her to approve the acquisition – this was precisely what he intended to do. He deliberately did not put the novel on the list of titles to be discussed at that week’s editorial meeting. After they had gone through the titles on the agenda, he said there was a submission that had come in at the last minute that he wanted to table. Gabrijela’s eyes had locked on to him as he nervously started to read the first paragraph of
Angels Rising
.

You do not want to be touched by an angel …
he began. There was no interruption, and he steadied his voice and read the next six sentences unhurriedly and stopped. Editors know when they have won a room over, and Zach knew he had caught and held the interest of every person present. The only one who knew what he was trying to do was Maggie, the marketing manager, whom he had shared the manuscript with. She had loved it, but Gabrijela knew they were friends and he hadn’t been sure how persuasive Maggie’s support would be.

Into the spell cast by Seppi’s writing he introduced the things that could sink his campaign – the name of the author, his dismal track record, the four books that they would need to buy. Gabrijela’s eyes gave nothing away. Maggie spoke bravely into the silence, said she had loved the book. Still nothing from the boss. Then, with her usual lack of ceremony, Gabrijela approved the acquisition. The sales director, Gareth, raised a dissenting voice, said Seppi would be a tough sell, but he wasn’t telling her anything she didn’t already know, and the decision stood. She set one condition: Zach
couldn’t pay more than twenty thousand pounds for world rights to all four books.

Zach waited for Toronto to wake up, and phoned his author with the news. Seppi’s response was as unemotional as ever. Zach was a bit irritated by this – if only the author knew about the hoops Zach had had to jump through to be able to make an offer. But he tamped down his annoyance and asked why Seppi had decided suddenly to write about angels. “I’m Italian,” Seppi had said, “and Catholic. Why wouldn’t I want to write books featuring angels?” He then told Zach about the catalyst that had got him started, and the devotion and commitment that had kept him working away at the project. All through the many years that he had spent writing and conceptualizing the quartet, he had kept quiet about its existence because he had wanted to finish the first book in its entirety before getting in touch with publishers. Meanwhile a friend of his had read and wanted to publish the literary novel he had written in homage to Lampedusa (he liked to work on more than one novel at a time, Seppi said, although from now on he intended to devote himself exclusively to the quartet) and that was why things had worked out as they had. Zach told him what he was prepared to pay as an advance at the very end of the conversation. There was no immediate response from Seppi and Zach’s elation began to drain away – was he going to be denied the opportunity to publish a masterpiece? Then Seppi had asked if there was anything he could do to raise the advance, he really needed the money. Unusually, for someone as stoic as he was, he had expanded on his circumstances – the
vermin-infested, suburban one-room apartment on which he hadn’t paid the rent for three months and from which he was in imminent danger of being evicted; the days when he didn’t have enough money even for one proper meal and subsisted on whatever he could get from food banks and marked-down items from grocery stores; the inability to send money to his ailing mother in Palermo. Embarrassed, he cut short his litany of woe. Zach felt for his author but explained how hard he’d had to fight to be able to make even this offer; the best he could do was throw in a couple of sales bonuses. Seppi had hesitated, and then agreed.

Angels Rising
was published eight months later to modest acclaim. It won a minor award at the World Fantasy Convention and sold seven times more copies in hardback than both Seppi’s previous works combined – a grand total of 7,230 copies, although they had given away an equal number at sci-fi conventions, to various reading groups and, two weeks before publication, to random members of the public (each member of staff was given a bag of books to distribute at strategic locations – Tube stations, on buses, Costa Coffee bars, in night clubs). A major Hollywood studio bought movie rights to the first book for a tiny sum by its standards, and Zach recovered the advance from that deal alone.

By the time the second novel,
Angel Dust
, featuring the Archangel Gabriel fighting the Beast and his cohorts against the background of the fall of the Roman Empire, was published (the opening battle scene against Alaric’s invading army of Visigoths still gives him goosebumps when he thinks about it), they had got better at publishing a series that was
aimed outside their core market. The cover was more commercial, the author’s name and title were foil-stamped, and they had their first brush with the joys and sorrows of pushing substantial numbers of a book into the supermarkets. Half the company’s marketing budget for the year was devoted to
Angel Dust –
posters on the Tube, window displays, advertising in the broadsheets – Maggie was exhilarated by all the new toys she got to play with, and even Gabrijela, who rarely attended marketing meetings, got into the spirit of things. Litmus printed ten thousand copies in hardcover and to everyone’s delight the book sold double the number of copies of its predecessor. The best was yet to come. In the annual Christmas round-ups, one of the world’s most famous fantasy authors picked the
Angels
books as her books of the year, and said she couldn’t wait to read the third volume in the series. A fourth reprint of ten thousand copies was rushed through, and from that point onwards Litmus and Seppi were in uncharted waters.

The title of the book was propitious in more ways than one, for angel dust was sprinkled over all the events, big and small, that took place in Zach’s life that year. The most important, trumping even the rush of publishing a writer who was on the verge of superstardom, was that he had finally begun to feel his life had settled down on the personal front. After the frantic, usually unsuccessful attempts at romance during his undergraduate days in Delhi, his love life had begun to improve, in part, he supposed, because he had stopped trying so hard. He didn’t think of the women he courted successfully as conquests – he genuinely liked most of them and
thought they enriched his life in some way. Moreover, he treated whomever he was with as though she were the first woman in his life. The freight of past loves, the knowledge that her glory would rapidly dim, none of this mattered; when he was with her, everything about her was beguiling. The problem was that six weeks or six months later, despite being enormously fond of his lover of the moment, he couldn’t think of a single reason to continue to be with her. In his moments of introspection about his love life, which happened naturally enough when yet another relationship was about to end, he could see how selfish he was being, how much hurt he was causing. It was to their credit that few of his lovers brained him with their stilettos when he suggested that they move their relationship to a rather less intense plane, possibly because they had regarded him all along as an “idiot boy trapped within an adult frame” (as a cellist with impossibly long eyelashes had declared as she sped out of the tail end of their relationship). It helped that he was unfailingly contrite and blamed himself for everything that had gone wrong with the union that until just a short time ago had passed all earthly understanding. On the couple of occasions that things had got ugly, his sense of guilt and mortification had risen exponentially, and he had resolved never to fall for a woman again – until some enchantress came along and placed him under her spell and the entire cycle started up again. And then he had met Julia, who took him over completely.

By the time
Angel Dust
had started climbing the charts, they had been married for a little over three years and their lives together had taken on the sort of happy domesticity he
had never imagined for himself. The initial white heat of their romance had given way to a deep attachment, and although he sometimes missed the electric charge that had accompanied each new romance in his life, this was way better, and something he had never had before – a union with another person with whom he felt he could always share everything in his life. As their relationship deepened and broadened, and his professional career seemed poised to skyrocket upwards, Zach couldn’t have felt better about himself.

When it came to publishing the third book in the series,
The War of Angels
, all Litmus’s forty-nine employees were stretched to the limit. The company was planning to publish a quarter of a million copies in hardcover, along with half a million copies of the movie tie-in edition of
Angels Rising
to coincide with the release of the Hollywood blockbuster (Seven Star Studios had purchased movie rights to the rest of the quartet after the success of
Angel Dust)
directed by one of Peter Jackson’s protégés. Taking their cue from
The Lord of The Rings
, the studio and the director had shot the movies of all three books simultaneously in Iceland, and planned to release them at the rate of one every autumn, which was exactly what Litmus needed, because it would be the perfect platform for the release of their new hardcovers and movie tie-in editions.

Unfortunately, things were not as good on the personal front. The blissful domesticity of less than a year ago had disintegrated to the point where Julia and he were fighting almost constantly. He hadn’t seen this coming and, worse, he didn’t know how to make things better. In the past he would
have shrugged and walked away, every romance had its sell-by date. But he knew he wanted to be with Julia no matter how difficult things had become; the strain on their relationship was compounded when Zach’s father passed away from a sudden heart attack. In the end, confused and heartsick, he retreated as far as he could into his work. He immersed himself in all the details required to get the epic story of the Archangel Raphael fighting on the side of the Crusaders during the siege of Jerusalem and the battle of Antioch to as many readers as possible, working long hours, returning home only to bathe and sleep. He wasn’t the only one in the company working maniacally hard. Every person in every department was doing the same, including their two-person rights department that was inundated with offers from around the world – rights were sold in twenty-nine countries. The success of the first book in the
Twilight
series published that year helped all books featuring vampires, wizards, zombies and, yes, angels and when they launched
The War of Angels
, it charted on bestseller lists on both sides of the Atlantic. Seppi and Litmus were on their way to becoming very wealthy.

Six weeks after publication Gabrijela took Zach out to a celebratory lunch. She had chosen Sheekey’s, an expensive fish restaurant in Soho, in itself a surprise, for Gabrijela entertained frugally. But they were toasting Seppi’s success, so he thought he understood why she was splurging. She raised her flute of champagne to Seppi and the company, and then sprang her surprise by ending with a toast to Litmus’s new publisher, Zachariah Thomas. She explained that she was
dividing her job and would stay on as managing director – he would continue to report to her – but that he would now be responsible for all the books the company acquired. He hadn’t thought even once that he might rise to such a position so soon; Gabrijela was only fifty at the time, she embodied Litmus’s publishing, it was unthinkable that anyone else could take her place. Overwhelmed, he had looked blankly into his boss’s grey eyes – usually flinty, they were now friendly and warm in a rare show of emotion. He had just turned forty and nothing seemed impossible. Perhaps he could even find the inspiration to turn his messy personal life around.

Four years later things are as bad as they could be. Zach asks for his bill politely and is rewarded with a smile by the waitress whose expression seems to suggest he has done her a great favour. He has learned to be very considerate to wait staff over the past five months or so, which is as long as he has been with Mandy, his girlfriend of the moment. In her thirties, she is still looking for a break as an actress; she spends the rest of her time waitressing, the latest in a series of thankless jobs, and ignoring his attempts to extricate himself from the relationship. He finds it interesting that this is the first time he has thought about Mandy since he got to Bhutan; it gives him proof, if he was indeed looking for proof, as to where she fits in his scheme of things. He had got involved with her soon after his breakup with Julia but the vivacity and attractiveness (and the French maid’s uniform that had
so beguiled him whenever he lunched at Noreen’s, he has to admit) had soon faded, and as Julia began to seep back into his life, he couldn’t wait to see the back of Mandy, especially as he is aware this would be a prerequisite for any reconciliation with Julia.