Career Girls (41 page)

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harman, Kennedy & Co represented the parent company’s legal affairs.

‘I am here to inform you that your employment with Musica Entertainment has been terminated with immediate effect.’ He walked forward and handed her a small sealed envelope. ‘Furthermore, this letter notifies you of a breach of-contract suit being brought against you by the company. The guard and I are to supervise your removal of any

personal effects you may wish to take from your office.’ ‘What?’ Rowena gasped.

‘I am furthermore required to inform you that you are to cease and desist from claiming to represent the company in any way whatsoever. Your security classification and system password have been revoked. Any papers pertaining. to company business which may be at your home or 1elsewhere in your possession must be returned to Musica Entertainment forthwith, or the company will take legal action to recover them.’

‘I want to speak to Joshua Oberman,’ Rowena said.

She was standing paralysed. This could not be happening, it just couldn’t. What the hell was the reason for it? She’d spoken to Josh two days ago and he’d been fine. God in heaven, her boss was one of her closest friends!

‘I am acting under direct instructions from Mr Ober man,’ the lawyer replied. ‘If you care to open that letter, Ms Gordon, you can check his signature yourself.’

With trembling fingers, Rowena ripped it open. She couldn’t take in the official-looking type, but Oberman’s spidery hand was unmistakable at the bottom of the page.

‘I see,’ she managed. Then she lifted her head. ‘I do have some things I want to remove from my office,’ she told them in a clear voice. ‘If you could take me up there, please.’

Thank God for the executive elevator, she told herself as they stepped out on to the twenty-fourth floor. She knew instinctively that she had to behave with dignity right now; whatever the luck had happened, she, Rowena Gordon, was not about to run sobbing from her own company like a postroom boy caught stealing stamps. Nevertheless, only

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shock was keeping her upright. The humiliation of being frogmarched upstairs in front of the rest of the staffwould have overwhelmed her.

As it was, when she reached her own office and saw her secretary, Tamara, standing weeping outside, she barely retained control.

‘It’s OK, Tammy. Nobody died,’ Rowena told her.

She wanted to ask the girl if she knew what was happening, but there was no way she’d do it in front of these men. While they watched, Rowena took a plastic crate and packed up all her personal stuff: the printed note that came with Michael’s flowers the day she’d arrived in New York; her personal platinum records, presented to her by Musica for Roxana, Bitter Spice, Steamer and Atomic Mass; a photo of herself and Joe Hunter at the launch of Heat Street, a

cartoon Barbara had clipped for her. Nothing much. Christ Almighty.

She felt Tammy thrust something into her hand. A sheet of newsprint. Without looking at it, Rowena folded it up and put it inside her desk diary.

‘You have my home number, honey, right?’ she asked her loudly.

Weeping, Tammy nodded. Rowena put a hand on her shoulder. ‘It’ll work out,’ she said gently, and turned to the two men.

‘Right, gentlemen,’ she said. ‘I’m ready if you are.’

The sense of unreality stayed with Rowena all the way home as she threaded her way through the midday traffic on Broadway up to West 67th Street. The doorman touched his cap to her as she entered her apar.tment building and handed her a small parcel, neatly wrapped in brown paper. When she unlocked her door and shut it behind her, she was still half dazed from shock.

Automatically she put down the orange plastic crate, thinking how strange it was to be in her aphrtment in the middle of a weekday. She reached for her diary and took out the piece of paper Tammy had slipped her. It was the cover’

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of the new issue of Westside. Rowena unfolded it, and started

to read.

As she did so, she felt herself swaying. The whole room seemed to go dark.

DETONATION: HOW ATOMIC MASS BLEW

UP JAKE WILLIAMS, read the headline. Underneath was a picture of the guitarist, obviously taken illicitly, slumped on the side of a flight-case, his eyes wild, his body skeletally thin. Next to that, she saw with dawning horror, was a picture of Rowena, looking poised and relaxed in the silver dress she’d worn to the Martins’ party. There were several pullout quotes in the middle of the text, but the one that screamed up at her said, Do drugs if you want to … it’s a perk of the job.

Unsteadily, Rowena took the small parcel the doorman

had given her and opened it.

Inside was a small silver cup, a replica of a sports trophy,

and a note.

It read: ‘Game, set, match and championship.’

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In the Wall Street offices of Maughan Macaskill, the prestigious investment bankers, Gerald Quin stared at his Quotron screen. It was flashing up a takeover: Mansion Industries had bought out Pitt Group, a small magazine company based in Minneapolis. The deal was a tiny one, scarcely worthy of the market’s notice. But it interested Gerry.

Everything Mansion did interested Gerry.

Quin vcas twenty-six, happily married, a cure laude graduate of Wharton Business School and a skilled analyst. He was a rising star at Maughan Macaskill, and his specialization was tracking the movements of big conglomerates, predicting what they might do next. Months of harrowing research hell in the company library, grunt work on structuring deals and an instinctive feel for what makes a great entrepreneur tick had paid off, and Gerald was very, very good at his job.

He watched Lords Hanson and White. He watched Sir James Goldsmith. He watched Barry Diller. He watched Rupert Murdoch. And he watched Connor Miles of Mansion House.

Gerald took a sip of coffee from the plastic beaker on his desk. Th takeover had been hostile, bt Pitt hadn’t put up much of a fight. Who could blame them? David and Goliath wasn’t in it. Pitt Group was an old family company, running two local papers and a sports magazine. Three years ago they’d gone public, and recently a stock flotation meant that the family had -just - lost control. And. Mansion’s all-encompassing, predatory eye saw that as an.

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open invitation.

Mansion Industries. A monolith so vast it crisscrossed the entire globe, and yet most people had never heard of it. Of course they knew about the individual companies it owned: Pemberton Diamonds in South Africa; Freyja Timber in Sweden; Natural Foods in France. Connor Miles was a bottom-fisher, like Larry Tisch, which was to say he bought undervalued companies cheap, then broke them down and sold them offor merged them into each other for economies of scale. Tradition, staffpolicy, product quality - all these meant nothing to Miles. Money was the only bottom line. On every company he took over he imposed his own supervisors, and in ninety per cent of cases fired the incumbent management. Who cared if they’d been there for generations? If they couldn’t give Mansion the profits they

‘ demanded, they were out. End of story.

In the business community, Connor Miles was feared. In the banking community, he was admired. And Gerald Quin was his number one fan. To watch Connor Miles at work, he thought, was to watch the shift in world profit centres: after the war, Mansion had been heavily into construction; in the sixties, pharmaceuticals; in the seventies, computing; in the eighties, any upmarket quality product - God, the eighties was a great decade, you made money just breathing - and in the nineties, entertainment and leisure.

He knew their big shopping spree wouldn’t start for a few months. But Pitt Group was one of the first symptoms, .although it was too small for most analysts to notice.

But Maughan Macaskill noticed,, Quin thought, and he smiled.

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As far as Topaz was concerned, it was over. She put Rowena Gordon out of her mind. There were a million other things to think about.

‘Temple wedding,’Joe said. ‘We’re getting married under a wedding canopy and that’s it.’

‘But you haven’t been to a synagogue for years. You’re not religious,’ Topaz retorted, outraged. ‘We’re getting

married ir St Patrick’s Cathedral.’ ‘No way.’ Yes way.’

They settled on a justice of the peace, with a rabbi and a priest blessing them afterwards.

‘Have you got any plans for restructuring the division?’ Matt Gowers asked his new director.

‘How long have you got?’ she replied, crossing a terrific pair of ankles in Ann Klein heels.

Gowers mentally cursed the fashion for long skirts, but part of him was relieved to see R0ssi bang up-to-date as usual. Her flair for fashion had pushed American’s women’s titles to the front of the newsracls; refusing to use editorial space on see-through bras, designer grunge or thigh-high minis designed with an anorexic teenager in mind had won them a lot of friends amongst American women, who’d had it with being told to aspire to a body shape biologically

impossible for most of them.

‘Try me,’ he offered.

‘OK,’ Topaz said. ‘I want to rehaul US Woman, close

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down White Light altogether, take Westside national and start an entertainment glossy to rival Vanity Fair, except we won’t bother with stories about businessmen - ours will be wall-to-wall stars.’

‘Nate Rosen never tried anything so radical,’ her boss commented.

Topaz shrugged. ‘I’ll need your support, Matt.’

‘You have it,’ said Gowers, mildly amused at her boldness. ‘Aren’t you getting married soon? You’re going to be pretty busy.’

‘Ain’t that the truth,’ his director answered with feeling.

Tve moved house so many times I can’t do it again,’ Topaz complained. ‘What’s wrong with your place?’

‘It’s not big enough. Neither is yours.’

i ‘They were big enough for us before.’

Joe pulled her to him, running a large tanned hand across

her stomach. ‘They’re not big enough for children,’ he said. ‘Children?’ she repeated.

‘Yeah,’ Joe said, grinning at her. ‘You know, sons, daughters. The indispensable accessory for the modern married couple.’

She picked up a beanbag and threw it at him, and Goldstein reached forward with a lightning thrust, grabbed her wrist and twisted her underneath him. Topaz felt him hardening on top of her as they stared breathlessly at each other, smiling, eyes alight with desire.

‘Let’s practise, ‘Joe murmured, hands reaching down to unbutton her silk cardigan.

She remembered that summer’ as one of the hottest, stickiest, busiest, most terrifying, aggravating, exhilarating, passionate times she’d ever spent in her life.

Work exploded. Financial projections, design reworks, marketing changes - it was a miracle she ever got out of the building. But the restructuring was screaming to be done and Topaz had decided to do it. She was the boss now, with no one but Matt able to countermand her, and at twenty328

eight she’d learnt to trust her own instincts.

Some things were painful, like making the staffon White Light redundant. But the magazine had never recovered from the Atomic Mass fiasco, and it was better to cut the company’s losses. Topaz made as much effort as she could to place employees elsewhere in American and see that the. journalists got good settlements, but she was determined to act like a businesswoman. The decision was final.

Some things were difficult, like rehauling US Woman over the strenuous objections of the editorial team. But Topaz fired the editor himself and talked most of his colleagues round, with demonstrations and presentations. By the time she was through, they thought it had been their idea in the first place.

And some things were your basic nightmare. Like starting a new glossy from scratch and changing Westside to a national. The new title was called Stateside and Topaz envisaged.it as a Village Voice for the entire country, encompassing radical views and underground culture from San Francisco to Dallas, Pittsburgh to Detroit, as well as New York. For both these projects, Topaz took over three empty offices on the thirtieth floor and converted them into a war room, where a crowd of writers and executives could be found any given hour of the day, brainstorming. The best ideas were chalked up on blackboards and left standing around the room, and the atmosphere was so inspirational that editors from existing magazines wandered in to steal ideas.

Josie Simons came up with the best one. A major feature in every issue of the new title, Impact - ‘Not Size Eight’ - which profiled women who didn’t fit the. supermodel straitjacket, or were older than twent3-five, or came from. ethnic backgrounds; strong, beautiful women from all over the world and lots of them.

‘Unadulterated sex bombs,’Jason Richman was heard to remark, and there were sighs of satisfaction from every girl in the room.

‘We’ll give real women something to aim at,’ Josie said;

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underlining How Diana Looks Better When She Puts ON Weight, and placing a picture of Drew Barrymore next to ones of Felicia Rashad from The Cosby Show and Sharon Stone at her fortieth birthday party.

‘That,’ said Matt Gowers when he saw it, ‘will sell millions.’

Her home life exploded too ….

Joe and she seemed to fight about everything. The wedding. The reception. The honeymoon. Where to buy a house.

‘I’ve got a lot of friends. I want them to share this with us,’ Joe said.

‘So do I, but I don’t want a circus,’ Topaz insisted.

‘Let’s go skiing in the Alps,’ Joe suggested, bringing home a sheaf of travel brochures.

‘That’s about as romantic as root-canal work,’ replied Topaz angrily. ‘How could you think of sports on our honeymoon?’

‘Yeah? What do you want to do? Europe and museums all day?’

‘I like SoHo. We could get something really cool down there,’ Topaz said. ‘It’s a great area.’