Kill Fee (4 page)

"Mr. Sussman is the majority shareholder. He's the one we'd have to deal with in any event."

"
Damn it, Dunlop, that's not what I'm talking about! I'm talking about just plain good manners. How can you think of buying a magazine and
not
talk to the editor? You should have consulted me. UltraMedia is way out of line."

"Well." Dunlop crossed one impeccably tailored knee over the other. "I'm sorry you feel that way." Not exactly an apology.

"How the hell should I feel? My life is being manipulated by strangers and nobody bothers to tell me—that's supposed to make me feel good?"

Dunlop spread his hands, made no comment; the effect was to make Walsh feel he was behaving in a tacky and self-pitying way.
Get a grip on yourself,
he thought. It was the age of his adversary that was throwing him off stride. Walsh should be calling him "son" and teaching him the rudiments of the business. Instead . . .

Instead, this twerp had one-upped him from the moment he walked into the room. And how had he done it? Just by being there, in that office, in that corporation. By sitting quietly while Walsh ranted and complained about being left out. By being
in.

Walsh made the effort to assume a posture of dignity and speak in a level voice.
"Summit
is totally different from your other publications—I can't see how it fits into UltraMedia's corporate image. I need to know what your plans for the magazine are. My staff has a right to be kept informed."

"Ah." Dunlop played here's-the-church-and-here's-the-steeple with his hands. "It would be inappropriate for me to detail our plans before the sale is final—but I do understand your position." He smiled to show how understanding he was. "I can give you an idea of the general thrust we have in mind. We'd like to see
Summit
concern itself
with
issues and writers that people are interested in right now."

Walsh stared. "I thought that's what we
were
doing.''

Dunlop managed a pained smile, as if afraid of hurting Walsh's feelings. "When I say right now, I mean this very minute.
Now.
So far
Summit
has done an admirable job of publishing for, well, shall we say for posterity?"

Don't patronize me, sonny.

"But we'd like
Summit
to go more current, more contemporary. For instance, a few months ago you published an article on Ernest Hemingway—"

Walsh barked a laugh. "You mean to say people aren't interested in Hemingway any more? Come on, Dunlop—you know better than that."

Again that pained smile. "There are always some who still read him, I'm sure. If you'd titled it 'Macho Man Revisited' and gone at it from that angle—well, then maybe it would have said something to the modern reader. But it was the same sort of old-fashioned critique I was forced to read in school."

"When was that?" Walsh snapped. "Yesterday?"

Dunlop smiled the smile of the man who cannot be offended. "I make no pretense to literary expertise, Mr. Walsh. Frankly, it doesn't even interest me very much. We are not in the elitist business here—we deal with
popular
culture. Today's reader doesn't give a damn about the emasculation imagery in Ernest Hemingway. What he wants is input from
today's
writers—people like Derek Stanton and Shana Burleson and Kristy Lee."

Walsh had heard of none of them. Admit it? Hell, no. "Flash-in-the-pan stuff. A year from now nobody'll even remember their names."

"Quite possibly that's true," Dunlop conceded. "But we don't want
Summit
to be for the reader a year from
now.
We want to publish for right now, for this very minute."

Walsh smirked. "Kind of hard when you have a three-month lead time, isn't it?"

"That's something else—we think three months is too far ahead to schedule. Not really cost-effective, you know. We're going to try for one month."

Walsh's mouth dropped open. "That's impossible," he said flatly.

Dunlop smiled and shook his head.

"I tell you it's impossible," Walsh repeated. "You need time to make alternate arrangements when things get screwed up. You can't always get the grade of paper you want, writers don't always meet deadlines, printers go on strike at the drop of a hat—"

"Mr. Walsh, we know what we're doing. The primary reason UltraMedia has an office here is that New York is the center of the country's publishing industry. Everything we need is here. Have you forgotten we put out
weekly
magazines?
Personalities, Homemaker's Weekly, American News Magazine.
We have the techniques, the equipment, the right people. We can put
Summit
out with only a month's lead time."

"But the
quality
. . . only a month . . . !" Walsh was appalled. "It'll be a junk magazine!"

"So you see with only a month's lead time, it's quite possible to deal with matters of contemporary interest," Dunlop went on as if Walsh had not spoken. "It's what advertisers want now—immediate feedback. Even Mueller Electronics."

Pow.
So he'd saved Mueller for the stinger. Walsh said nothing. He looked at Dunlop sitting opposite him. So young, so sure of himself. The young were always positive they had all the answers—but they didn't sit
in
offices like this one telling editors of literary periodicals what was wrong with their magazines. What was Dunlop doing here in so responsible a position, where had he come from? Even as he asked himself the question, Walsh knew the answer. Dunlop was here because it had become a young man's world. Walsh was fifty-four and feeling every minute of it; it was only the members of his generation that started at the bottom and worked their way to the top. Today's kids came
in
at the top, the young
did
sit in expensive offices and tell experienced men how to do their jobs.

"I'm sorry, Dunlop," Walsh heard himself saying. "I can't ask my staff to do a complete turnabout. It's unthinkable."

Dunlop opened his eyes wide for the first time. "We don't expect you to ask them, Mr. Walsh."

Walsh was confused. Did Dunlop mean that Ultra-Media would give the orders? Or the staff would be replaced by UltraMedia people? Or . . . oh. Oh god. Oh god, no. Finally, it sank in on him. It must have been lurking in the back of his mind all the while—he just hadn't wanted to acknowledge it.

"You're replacing me as editor," he said numbly.

Dunlop spread his hands. "It's simply that we think you'd be happier at a magazine with a more literary orientation."

"Summit
has a literary orientation." Woodenly. "Had."

Dunlop actually looked sympathetic. "I know how you're feeling—"

"How could you possibly know? You haven't the first idea of what
Summit
is all about. How dare you tell me you know how I feel?"

Walsh didn't wait for Dunlop's response. He was on
his
feet, brushing past the younger man, out of the fancy room. Miss Vulnerable Beauty materialized and steered him toward the tunnel of lights. The revolving colors disoriented him and the feeling of nausea returned. Then he was out of the tunnel, out of the building, on the street.

Head whirling with humiliation, he paid no attention to where he was going.
That's the first thing normal people think about when ownership changes hands
—
Is my job safe? But good old Head-in-the-Sand Walsh, I manage to make it the last.

The rain had stopped, but Walsh didn't notice. He let himself be carried along by the flow of sidewalk traffic until he came to a saloon. Inside, at the quiet end of the bar, one scotch later, he began to come out of his daze.

Fired. By a Boy Scout.

He ordered another drink. Why were they doing this? It seemed to him as if the hydra-headed UltraMedia Corporation had come into being for the sole purpose of destroying Leon Walsh and
Summit
magazine. His lovely magazine—what were they going to do to it? If they wanted a magazine of the sort that Dunlop described, why not start a new one? Why change
Summit
into something it was never meant to be?

For the advertisers, dummy. Summit
already had the big-money advertisers; but if Sussman was right, they were all whispering the same word:
Change.
Former advertisers like Mueller Electronics could be brought back into the fold by using that same magic word,
change,
as bait. Why should UltraMedia start from scratch when there was a nice little setup like
Summit
just waiting to be taken over?

And Leon Walsh could do nothing but sit there helplessly and watch his life's work go down the drain.
Sum
mit
was the one thing in his life he was proud of, his one real accomplishment.
Had
been proud of. Sure, it had gotten a little tainted lately—but nothing that couldn't be cleaned up, made right. The magazine was his life. Take
Summit
away—and what did he have left? He paid for a third scotch without noticing the bartender had shortchanged him.

What was he going to do now? What the hell was he going to do now? He couldn't live without a magazine to edit. Start over? Build another
Summit,
start from nothing again. No, he wouldn't have to start from quite nothing, he could get financing now, he wouldn't have to depend on the Jerry Sussmans of the world this time. He could do it. He could start over.

A little voice inside his head laughed unpleasantly.
At age fifty-four?

A lot of people start over in middle age,
Walsh answered himself.

But you're not a lot of people, are you?
the little voice asked.

He was too tired, too defeated. Well, then what? He could go to
Saturday Review,
wherever it was now, with his tongue hanging out, begging for a job. But
SR
didn't publish fiction.
Harper's,
then? Or the
Atlantic,
in Boston? He wouldn't have anything like the authority he'd had at
Summit,
but he could probably get some sort of job.

Couldn't he?

Third possibility. Pack it in. Take one grand leap from one of the World Trade Center towers. To hell with everything—who cared anyway? Nobody gave a damn if UltraMedia flushed
Summit
down the toilet. And would anyone even notice if Leon Walsh simply disappeared from the face of the earth? Why keep fighting?

"
He's been on that phone twenty minutes, I tole him it was a emergency, but he don't pay no attention," came a voice from the next barstool.

"What?" Walsh said, startled.

"That fella over there," said the man next to him, gesturing with his head toward a wall phone. "I tole him I gotta call the hospital, but he won't get off." The speaker was a man well into his seventies and stick-thin. "He won't get off," he repeated.

"Yeah, some people are like that."

"I gotta call the hospital to see if they got a room for me. I got cancer and they're gonna cut my stomach out and I don't know if I got a room to stay in. I gotta call the hospital."

A pause. "Ah, I thought the doctor arranged for the hospital room," Walsh murmured, not knowing what to say.

"I thought so too, but he tole me to call. My kids won't do it, they don't take care of me. I wrote 'em all and tole them I was dying and not one of 'em would come. They all had excuses. The doctor tole me not to get my hopes up, he'd just do what he could but he didn't think he could get it all out. Not one of 'em would come."

"I'm sorry," Walsh said, shaken.

"Thanks, mister. Huh—about time." He headed for the wall phone the talkative man had just relinquished.

Walsh slipped an ice cube from his glass and held it on his tongue. Here he'd been thinking of suicide, while that old man—who probably had nothing at all in the world—was fighting for his life right down to the wire. Fighting and needing to talk about it. Well. Wasn't that inspiring.
What am I supposed to do?
Walsh thought.
Feel renewed?
Maybe the old man ought to give up too.

I despised myself and the voices of my accursed human
education,
D. H. Lawrence had written. Walsh had read somewhere that the more educated the individual, the more likely he was to turn his anger inward, on himself. Educated people were more apt to commit suicide; the uneducated tended to turn to murder to resolve their problems. It was the uneducated man who found it easy to direct his anger outward, toward another person.

It was certainly another person who deserved his anger. Jerry Sussman had gotten him into this fix. Sussman knew how much
Summit
meant to Walsh, he knew it was his life. But did that stop him? Walsh wondered if Sussman had so much as hesitated before selling him out to Ultra-Media. He doubted it. Sussman had ridden roughshod over Walsh and
Summit
from the very day he had first bailed them out. Money is power.
And Sussman is shit.
Walsh sat thinking of the man who had destroyed him; he thought about him in a detached, almost impersonal way.

The cancer victim finished his call and left. Walsh went to the phone, dropped in a dime, and dialed Leila's number.

CHAPTER