I'll Take Manhattan (54 page)

“Ah.” There was a world of sadness and disillusionment in his sigh. “So that explains it. I should have guessed. What a fool I am, not to have thought of that. It is the only possible explanation for destroying what your father stood for. Still, I’m amazed that she’s doing it this way. The magazines could be sold untouched, intact and proud. There would be no dishonor then in selling them if that’s what she has decided to do.”

“But less money?”

“Oh, yes, less, unquestionably somewhat less, but still enough for any family until the end of time,” he said bitterly. “She’ll have my resignation within an hour. I predict that many other people will resign too. I came in here to escape their outraged phone calls. They don’t realize that even I can’t fight this. Soon the editors who knew your father
best and longest, the key people, will decide that they don’t want to have any part of it, if they haven’t made that decision already. Also, they’ve been around long enough to know that inevitably they’d be on their way out after the sale. The new owners, whoever they are, will change the magazines to suit themselves, put in their own people. In a few years you won’t know that this group of magazines was once Amberville Publications although the magazines will probably have the same names. That’s all that’s being sold now: brand names.”

“How can you be so sure that the new owners won’t want to keep on the people who made the magazines great?”

“Oh, Maxi, perhaps they will try, after all. Perhaps they will be wise. But good editors must spend money and this memo makes that impossible. When a company that has been created by one man is sold, the heart goes out of it, the soul if you will, the spirit of the founder, the vision of that one man can’t possibly be retained. Look, right here, on this memo, it’s started already. I’m appalled by your mother, Maxi, appalled. As long as Amberville Publications lived, so did your father.” He shook his head with something far deeper than sadness as he thought of the high hearts and great plans with which he and Zachary Amberville had embarked on their publishing adventure almost forty years ago.

Slowly Maxi rose and walked the few paces to her father’s desk and sat down in the chair that nobody but he had ever used. In her mind she turned over everything her mother had said.
B&B’s
future was only a small part of the puzzle. What was happening was the willful dismembering of Zachary Amberville’s achievement, an achievement that had continued on past his death, that had lived and prospered for a year and could endure indefinitely with the group of loyal people he had drawn together around him, far into the future. Six enormously prosperous, powerful magazines were to be cheapened, degraded and then sold to no necessary purpose. A lifetime’s achievement was being destroyed, her father’s lifetime. The dividends that came from Amberville Publications had supported his family
in luxury until now, and would do so as long as people could still read.

Cutter. There was only one person whose interests could be served by tearing down the monument that Amberville Publications was to her father’s memory. Cutter. Everything Maxi knew or had observed about Cutter, everything she sensed, everything her instincts told her, everything she and Toby and Justin had felt about this younger brother who had married their mother, gathered into a cloud and the cloud began to take a form, to solidify into a shape, the shape of a great hate.
A great envy
. Envy even more potent than hatred. First he had taken his brother’s wife. Then Cutter had strangled the last of Zachary Amberville’s new creations, those three magazines that hadn’t yet hit their stride. And now he was sucking the guts out of the sturdy giants and selling them as quickly as he could. Only envy could answer for his actions, only her father’s death had given him the chance to first mutilate and then betray a life’s work he could never have matched.

She wasn’t going to let him do it
.

“Pavka, don’t resign,” Maxi said. “Please, for me, don’t resign. I’m going to fight this sale. I think I can influence my mother not to do it. If you can keep everybody calmed down and working for the next few months, making these infernal changes as slowly and as imaginatively as humanly possible, trimming here and there but not enough to seriously compromise the October and November issues, dragging your heels on absolutely everything, making Oxford pin you to the wall on the tiniest detail, commissioning articles and photographs by the best people you know,
as of yesterday
, if you can do all that, Pavka, I’m going to fight Cutter.”

“Cutter?”

“None of this started as my mother’s idea, Pavka. Cutter has led her into it, I promise you. It could never have happened without his influence.”

Pavka came close to the desk and inspected Maxi gravely, without the familiar overtone of fl
irtation
and mutual charm that had always colored their relationship. She sat there, where he had never seen anyone but Zachary
Amberville sit, with an unthinking ease, a sureness, a right of possession. He would not have dared to use that chair, yet she had taken it unconsciously. And she spoke with a firmness, a cleverness, a cold purpose, a gathering together of forces, that he had never dreamed she could call upon. This was not the girl he had watched so long as she flitted after fun, living as if her life were a gigantic sack of brightly colored lollipops, to each of which she’d give one experimental lick before discarding it for another. He had rarely caught sight of Maxi since her return, he realized, and in the months since that shocking board meeting she had changed profoundly. She had not, he thought, aged, no, that wasn’t the word. She had grown up. Maxi Amberville had become a woman.

“Why are you going to fight Cutter? If you leave things alone the only thing that can happen to you is that you will become richer,” Pavka said, and there was a warning in his tone. Maxi, grown up, was still not a match for Cutter, with Lily under his domination. “I know you detest him, but that is no reason to engage yourself in a corporate battle.”

“It’s not a personal vendetta, Pavka. I’m doing it for my father,” Maxi said simply. “I’m doing it because I loved him more than anyone in the world and this is the one way I can show how much he meant—how much he
means
—to me.

“In that case, I too will do my best. For my dear friend, your father.”

Maxi had telephoned her accountants from Pavka’s office and made an appointment to see Lester Maypole, of Maypole and Maypole, who had acted as her personal accountant from the days she had first had the spending of her own trust fund. On the drive downtown Maxi thought about money. It was not a topic on which she usually spent much time. It was as familiar as one of her senses, taken for granted as much as touch or smell. Her mother had talked about a hundred million dollars but Maxi did not see why, when she had always had everything she wanted, she should be interested in such a sum, impossible to comprehend. It would only create problems. Right now she was
rich in the same way that she had ten fingers and ten toes. A hundred million dollars would be like having two heads.

She had been born rich, she reflected, as the limousine slipped through traffic like a long, blue snake, and she’d grown up rich, and when she’d been poor, or living as if she were poor, during the time she and Rocco were married, she hadn’t liked it at all so she had simply arranged to stop being poor. It had been the same as taking off an uncomfortable pair of new shoes endured during a necessary hike; she had just stepped out of poorness and resumed the comfort of the richness that had been there waiting for her all along. Of course the detour into an early marriage and early motherhood had kept her from getting trapped in the rich girl’s world; the silliness of debutantes and fortune hunters; or else the obvious solution of a solid match with somebody appropriate, followed by the accumulation of country houses and dogs and horses. Instead, she supposed, she had fallen into the category that the late-night movies would label “madcap heiress.”

B&B
had taught her what it cost to budget a magazine but it hadn’t influenced her habits of private spending. Nameless people in Lester Maypole’s office paid all her bills and since she’d had no complaints from them she could only assume that there was more than enough to sustain her style of living: to pay for the upkeep on the apartment; the travel; the servants who cooked and laundered and cleaned and drove; the garage; the caterers who did the parties; the florists who sent in flowers twice a week for every room in the apartment; the clothes she wore for the season in which they were fashionable and then replaced; the buckets of jewelry she hadn’t had time to add to since
B&B
started. And then there was Angelica. Rocco paid for half of Angelica’s clothes and school because he insisted on it, so Angelica really was one of the least expensive items in her life, somewhere between food and flowers, so much more necessary than one, so much more beautiful than the other. Of course, there were her collections, Maxi reminded herself. The antiques, the precious boxes, the old silver; so many collections that had had to be put into storage when she moved to the Trump Tower from her old town house in the East Sixties.

What, Maxi asked herself, did her accountants do with all of the money she received that she didn’t spend? Did they reinvest it in stocks and bonds? Did they risk it in the market or buy the safest possible securities? She had no head for the subject and no need to force herself to take an interest in it. That was what she paid Maypole for. But it stood to reason that she must have pots of money. And anyone with money could always get more, everybody knew that.

Lester Maypole looked at Maxi as if she were a cross between a mermaid and a hippogriff, a mythological creature who had materialized in his office with a list of what would have been perfectly reasonable questions if it weren’t for one fact: Maxime Amberville had always lived up to her huge income, from her trusts and her Amberville dividends. Not beyond it, just within it. And she didn’t seem to realize this fact which had been writ large on the bottom of every month’s statement they had ever sent her.

“But you never
warned me
, Mr. Maypole,” Maxi protested, disbelieving, just beginning to be angry.

“Miss Amberville, we’re accountants, not keepers. We just receive your monies and pay your bills. There’s never been any reason for us to think that you didn’t know that you were spending up to the limit so long as you didn’t exceed it. You never expressed any interest in investments or we would have told you that you had none. Your art objects and your apartment and your jewelry are all assets, of course, but as for the rest—” He waved his hand expressively.

“I’ve just pissed it away.”

“Oh, don’t be too hard on yourself. After all it did cost you almost three million dollars to refurnish Castle Kirkgordon …”

“Laddie Kirkgordon had sold practically everything but his bed to pay death duties … it seemed the least I could do … and there wasn’t any central heating, none at all,” Maxi explained, remembering those frozen, titled years.

“And then, in Monte Carlo, your pearls were stolen
 … twice. The double strands were worth almost nine hundred thousand dollars and you didn’t have insurance. Each time you
replaced
the pearls.”

“It wasn’t really in Monte Carlo. The police there are very effective. It was pirates on the high seas … or at least that’s what they looked like to me. I couldn’t get insurance, Mr. Maypole. Any wife of Bad Dennis Brady’s, even a short-term one, was considered to be a bad insurance risk, with good reason, but a girl
has
to have her wedding pearls,” Maxi said indignantly. It wasn’t as if they had been diamonds after all.

“On top of that, you’re in the highest possible tax bracket, you give very large amounts to charity and you’ve lost several major fortunes in casinos.” He coughed, just short of disapprovingly.

“It’s such fun to gamble, but nobody sensible expects to
win
,” Maxi explained.

“That’s more or less my point,” Lester Maypole said quietly.

“It’s
all
gone?”

“I would hardly put it that way. You are a very rich young woman. You own ten percent of a great company. Why shouldn’t you spend your money freely?”

“Pissed it away,” Maxi repeated furiously.

“You could have employed someone who specialized in estate management …”

“But it’s too late now, isn’t it?”

“For the past, I’m afraid so, but there’s enough in your account to carry you until the next yearly dividends are declared in June, unless you’ve just bought something I don’t know about.”

“How much will the dividends amount to?” she pounced, hope suddenly restored.

“That will depend on your mother. The owner of the controlling interest in any company declares dividends as he or she sees fit.”

“Would you care to bet on the size of this year’s dividends, Mr. Maypole? Never mind. What about my ten percent of Amberville? I’d like to borrow on that up to the maximum.”

“That stock can’t be sold to anyone but your mother,” Lester Maypole said. Surely she must know that much.

“It’s still stock,” Maxi objected wildly. She felt as if Maypole were torturing her for his own pleasure.

“You can’t borrow on it, Miss Amberville. Not a penny.”

“You mean it is as if it didn’t exist? It doesn’t
count
?”

“Miss Amberville, please, don’t get so upset. It exists, it counts, it belongs to you. You just can’t
borrow
on it, because you can’t
sell it
to an outsider.”

“You’re saying that I don’t have any money.”

“You could put it that way, for the moment, yes, I suppose you don’t actually have any, well, any
cash.
”

“Thank you, Mr. Maypole.” Maxi was gone like lightning striking too close, leaving Lester Maypole sweating in alarm. She didn’t seem to understand the difference between money and cash and he, for once, had lost track of it himself. He looked in his wallet. Twenty-four dollars. He buzzed his secretary. “Linda,” he said, his heart beating ridiculously, “get me my investment portfolio, right away. And then take a check to the bank. No, I just want some cash in fives. And make it snappy.”