For All the Wrong Reasons (37 page)

“My dear,” she said, placing one wizened hand, glittering with diamonds, over Diana's soft one, “you must secure him as fast as you can. What a triumph! The Baileys are
quite
the people around town. She is a much sought after hostess and he's retired now, of course, but Bradley has been doing so well. And still single. Every mother in New York has been after him for years, he dated a couple of times, Camilla Vendela, I think, and Tina Fellows…”

“I'm not
after
him,” Diana protested. “Come on, Elspeth. The world isn't like that anymore.”

The thought of her first marriage flickered into her mind, but she ignored it.

The old woman snorted. “Of course it is. Tell Felicity Metson the world is not like that anymore.”

Diana smiled and said nothing. That was the wisest tack. But Elspeth did have a point, and Claire reinforced it. How would Felicity take her waltzing off with Brad Bailey, the last single man worth anything on the scene?

“I'm just enjoying his company right now,” she said finally.

Elspeth leaned forward, her crisp Chanel tweed bunching. “You do that, dear. You enjoy his company. Just make sure he enjoys yours.”

Well, last night had been very enjoyable. She almost didn't want to go to work. But the telephone was ringing, and she had to answer it.

She lifted the receiver. “Hello, Michael.”

Who else would it be at six fifteen
A.M.
?

*   *   *

After briefing Diana, Michael showered, dressed and prepared to walk around to the office. He had no cell phone and this might be the last minutes of the day he could spend quietly. There would be a frenzy of calls and recrimination later, Goldman Sachs wailing, the marketing people yelling at their contacts, why hadn't anybody gotten wind of this earlier? He could see it now, and he knew how it would end. Ernie Foxton had what they lacked: money. He hadn't needed to float in order to get cash for distribution and marketing. That deal with the Italians, that Michael had read about and dismissed, that was his footing in toys. And he knew the devious twists of that little fucker's mind. Foxton would have spent heavily on this launch. That billboard wouldn't be a one-off.

He set out at a fast clip. It cleared the mind to walk. This would ruin the IPO; he realized that straight away. Their product was no longer unique. Without ad-spend or awareness from Joe Public, they looked as though they had come late to their own party.

It was almost as if it was
deliberate.

He turned the corner onto West Fourth and mulled that over. Deliberate? Ernie Foxton had certainly enjoyed firing his ass and cheating him of his millions. But would he come after him further? Was this an intentional attempt to ruin him?

Michael's thoughts slid to Diana. Ernie had divorced her and had hooked up with some new gold-digging broad, but Michael had given Diana a job. When the company, and she, had started to take off, maybe it had pissed him off.

They did say you hated the people you had harmed worse than the people who harmed you.

He thought about that ad. It wasn't just a kids' educational CD-ROM. It was a total rip-off of Imperial's own ground-breaking product.

Plenty of his best people—Diana's best finds—were staying with his comparatively small salaries because they expected a big pay day. From the start it had looked like Imperial would float. All the staff had small stakes. They would all have become rich to greater or lesser degrees when the IPO went through. But that was over now.

Michael thought it through. They would walk, and he couldn't fault them. This was a business, not a charity. If he was a top-grade code writer, or a marketing hotshot, he wouldn't take thirty grand a year less than he was worth with no trade-off. A big staff hemorrhage would gut his company. Product would be late and less good. Distributors would fall away. It would be back to square one.

Anger closed a cold fist around his heart. Fuck it. If Ernie Foxton thought this would kill him off, he was mistaken. And if he wanted war, he was welcome.

*   *   *

“So what's the news?” Ernie said. It was a great morning, he thought. Jung Li had been superbly vicious, the little bitch, this morning. She'd broken in a new pair of steel stilettos on his back. Felicity had kept out of his way, apart from sending up his favorite breakfast, and there was the news from the lawyers.

Goldman Sachs was pulling back from the Imperial offering. The word was out, Fineman said. The ad spots they'd run last night had done well and been noticed. Clearly Imperial was no longer the only player on the scene. The market hated uncertainty and would wait to see how Blakely's did.

“The offering's postponed. Which means they don't have money.”

“They're dead,” Ernie crowed. “Little cocky bastard.”

“Er … quite,” Fineman agreed. “Certainly I foresee a good many problems for them.”

Ernie hung up whistling. He was a king of the bloody universe. It was great to have cash in New York. He was Ernie Foxton, he could make men and break them. Michael Cicero once objected to dancing to his tune. Diana the same. But I don't take crap, Ernie told himself importantly. This would show the world that if Ernest Foxton struck you down you stayed down.

It pissed him off that Diana had apparently taken back her own name. Felicity had come in after the Elspeth Merriman party, whining and carrying on about her. Ernie made her understand that he didn't want to hear it. He hated the idea of public fights. Everything around him should be smooth. That was his image. He had to keep up the image.

But Diana Verity? What the fuck was wrong with Foxton? She was lucky she'd ever been his wife. It bugged him that she had the balls to do it.

He pulled himself back to the present. Pleasant reflections on the shitty day Michael Cicero would be having couldn't last forever. He had the monthly review meeting. Davits, Norman Jackson, his new adult-fiction chief, and Emma Datson, who ran marketing, were all lined up around the table with the flunky suits from their departments whose names he didn't bother to remember.

“Lawrence Taylor is going
so
well,” Emma gushed. She was a beautifully put together forty-something and therefore of no interest to Ernie. Women for him stopped at thirty-five. However, she had survived his purge by being too good to sack. So far. That could change at any second.

“We expect him to go well. He's our biggest author. Gimme the breakdown of the list,” Ernie said.

There was a moment's pause. His executives were looking a bit shifty, Ernie realized suddenly. Staring down at the table, and that.

“Out with it,” Ernie snapped. “I asked for a fucking breakdown.
Capisce?
”

Mrs. Datson swallowed. “Well … there has been a teeny sales problem with some of our new signings.”

Ernie blinked. His new signings were the big-ticket names, the trashy novelists for whom he had cleared out all those literary fuckers and whiny poetry writers. He had spent heavily on ads, mostly using the money he'd saved by firing all the deadwood, the old sales reps who weren't making their quotas, the tweedy fucking American gentlemen editors in the history department, the men who started spouting crap about what the publishing house should be giving back to the community. It was a pretty penny altogether, had done fantastic shit for the bottom line. It was how he got his ruthless reputation. The stock had soared, too.

He was pleased he'd taken out the trash. The star-author drive was part of that. Their blaze of posters, radio ads, in-store dump bins, pro-PR campaigns and talk-show appearances had produced six new bestsellers that had taken turns at the top of the
New York Times
list for the last six months.

“What are you talking about?” He lectured Datson like she was a particularly stupid child. “Lawrence's book is number fucking one. The rest are doing good, too. No?”

“They are,” Emma agreed nervously, “in terms of chart positions. But since we stopped the advertising, sales have taken a bit of a dip.”

“A dip? What kind of a fucking dip?”

“Twenty-eight percent on Shoshanna, thirty-nine percent on Richards, forty-one on Redde—”

He held up a hand. “I get the picture. Why the hell has that happened? Why did we stop the advertising?”

“We have spent heavily,” Davits said.

“You gotta spend it to make it,” Ernie snapped.

“Yes. But if we spend at the same rate, the profit from the bestsellers cancels out. We must let them try to carry their own weight. And other sales have fallen heavily too.” Davits plowed on. Nobody else would dare to tell Ernie the way things actually were, but if they lost ground at this rate, he thought, maybe the company would be in trouble, and that would be bad for his career. “The mid-level writers, the genre romances, the ones the agents brought on board … that list is selling very badly. Two of the literary authors we axed, who have advances of no more than a hundred thou, have just had bestsellers for Random House and Simon and Schuster…”

“Who cares what they've done? You're a bunch of incompetents,” Ernie blustered at them furiously. “If it's not selling, it's your fault. I don't want to hear
can't.
There's no such word as can't. This strategy worked perfect in England and it'll work perfectly here, too. Six fucking bestsellers. You make sure they keep selling.”

“But—” Davits started, and Ernie was forced to cut him off. “But what? Don't talk to me about but. OK? Just get out. Come back when the figures are right.”

They got up and hurried out of the conference room. Ernie glared after the retreating backs, noting with grim satisfaction that none of them were dumb enough to look back his way. Peter Davits was last out. He closed the door quietly behind him.

That showed them, Ernie thought. He wasn't having that bullshit. He was the boss.

*   *   *

Michael sighed, pressed the hold button, and switched to another call. He had an ache in his neck from having had the phone glued to his ear all day. The calls from the lawyers, the distributors, the investment bankers, didn't stop coming, but the result was the same. An IPO would be madness right now. They had to watch the Education Station range. Yada, yada, yada …

Already he had talked it through with Diana. She was almost as mad as he was. The thought occurred to him that he'd gone almost a whole day without thinking about that Brad Bailey guy she was meant to be seeing. She had rallied the troops. He was going to call a company meeting tomorrow. Michael sighed. Some guys would walk, others he'd have to fire. Right after hiring them, too. Goldman Sachs didn't come cheap, and now he had to find a way to pay them without market capitalization.

He hated Ernie Foxton.

Tina Armis, their receptionist, walked into the room with a cup of coffee and a muffin. It smelled really good, like it had just come out of the oven. Wordlessly, she set it down before him. Michael talked to his distributors and reached out to touch the muffin. Yeah, it was actually warm.

“Thank you,” he mouthed at her.

Tina gave him a slow smile. “No problem,” she said.

He finished the call and jumped back to the first, vaguely aware that Tina was hovering in the background still. Michael let his eyes drift back toward her. She was young, maybe twenty-two or -three. She had long blond hair and large blue-violet eyes, as well as a small, pert pair of tits and coltish legs that rose up toward a skirt that hovered on the knee. Tina was an all-American beauty. Where was she from? He thought maybe the Bronx, Williamsbridge perhaps. Michael's eye roved to her skirt. It was pencil-line tight on her slender form. He didn't see any panty line. He thought she might be wearing a thong. A cute babe, for sure.

He hung up. “You want something, Tina? It's been a busy day.”

“Oh, I know.” She twisted her hands nervously. Michael smiled to put her at her ease. “I'm sorry to bother you, Mr. Cicero.”

“No bother. Anything I can help you with?”

“Actually it's kind of more personal.” She blushed deeply. “I hope you don't think me too forward but I wanted to ask you out. To dinner tomorrow.”

“What?” Michael said, sputtering. It was so artless. He was used to girls hitting on him, but—

“You're laughing at me.” She looked forlorn. “I'm sorry. I knew this was a bad idea.”

“No. I'm not.” He said it hastily. She was cute, and why the hell should he sit at home pining after Diana?

“You'll actually consider it?” Tina beamed.

“I'll do more than that.” Michael thought about those long legs wrapped around his waist. “I'll pick you up at eight.”

THIRTY-FIVE

“I'm really sorry, you guys.”

Toby Roberts looked at Michael and Diana and started to shift a little on his feet, like a kid caught smoking pot by the principal.

“I wanted to stay. I really dug it here. We had a blast. But these guys have, like, offered me—”

Diana glanced at Michael. Toby was the latest of their top talent to desert them for Education Station. The IPO had crashed, they had to move the company out of the West Fourth Street house to a far smaller, regular office on Eighth Avenue and Thirtieth, and there was no way they could compete with Foxton's offers. Cars, paid vacations and huge salaries were all being dangled in front of Imperial's best programmers.

Toby was among the last to succumb. Michael looked resigned to it. He'd told Diana that morning he was grateful Toby had stuck it out as long as he had.

“I know what they offered you,” Michael told him. “You'd be nuts not to take it.”

Toby still looked embarrassed. “Man, my girl wants to get married and shit—”

“That's great. You take the job. I would do exactly the same thing.”

“OK.” Toby offered each of them a solemn, rather grubby hand. “I hope you guys are going to be all right.”