Turn of the Century (71 page)

“Thank you.” Mose is almost sixty.

“—starting with baby boomers, the big idea is getting whatever you want right this second.
Now
. TV twenty-four hours a day, sex, drugs, all of that. Earnings growth
this
quarter. So the web delivers in spades—books now, CDs now, flowers and groceries now, stocks, data, letters, anything I want I can get
now
, all the time, by tapping a button.” She’s surprising herself with her conviction. She feels like an evangelist. It’s so much easier than running an actual business.

Mose turns his head to let the uniformed manservant address him.

“Mr. Featherstone has arrived,” Luis informs his master. “In the sitting room.”

Mose nods. If George were here, he would want to hum the opening “Goldfinger” bars. She does miss George.

Mose asks her, “Do we think interactive entertainment is going to make anyone any money?”

“Well. If by interactive entertainment you mean video on demand, ordering up any movie or show when you want it,
right now
, that’ll be great. Throw away the VCR. But I guess I don’t know how that makes money for anyone but the Intels and the movie studios. And game playing. But if interactive entertainment means most people will do anything but sit on the couch and stare at
Monday Night Football
and
Baywatch?
No.”

“The couch potatoes will continue to bake.”

“It’s the lazy-sex paradigm,” Lizzie blurts, regretting it.

Mose tilts his head and squints.

“Oral sex became the easy default mode, just like dishwashers and microwaves. Given a choice, people would rather be performed on than perform. That’s why they’re going to keep watching TV for a long, long time. Just watching it, not ‘interacting’ with it.”

Happily, Mose does not dwell on her metaphor. “Any film
now
, any TV show
now
,” he says. “What’s the tipping point there, do you think? We can’t get enough bandwidth to send your husband’s program to an individual viewer whenever she wants, but until she sees how that works, she’s not going to
demand
the bandwidth. You need to build the pipe to get the business, but you need the business to pay for the pipe. Catch-22. How the Heller do you get around it?”

Pipe, bandwidth, tipping point
. The man is a connoisseur. His Joseph Heller pun was lame and labored—but “she,” the
she
was slick. “I don’t know, you see the predictions. Five years? Maybe. Who knows?”

“But you don’t doubt it will happen?”

“It’ll happen. I’ve bored you with my hypoglossal analogy already, haven’t I? In one of the memos?”

“If you did, I very carefully paid no attention.”

“The hypoglossal canal is the hole in the bottom of your skull where the spine connects to the brain,” she says, touching the back of her neck. “It holds all the nerve fibers that run from the brain down to the muscles in your tongue. In chimps and gorillas, the pipe, the hypoglossal, is really small. A million years ago, humans had little chimpsize ones too. But over the next half million years or so, the hypoglossal canal expanded, doubled in size. So more nerve fibers could run up to the tongue. And so then, finally, humans could talk. And here we are.”

He’s looking at her with his mouth slightly open, as if she may have just told him an elaborate joke.

She blushes. “I wrote my college thesis on this. Biological anthropology.”

He takes a deep breath. “I must have you for myself, Elizabeth.”

Lord
. Her blush spreads, and she tries to look amused.

“I’m serious,” he says. “I need you.”

She looks away, toward the reservoir and Harlem. Her frozen smile jitters. “Harold? No.”

“If Mose Media Holdings is ever to be more than just some pipsqueak poseur—what did the columnist call us last month, ‘UPN on steroids, PBS on acid, NBC wannabe, and Fox putting on airs’—I’ve
got
to get a serious digital strategy. We’ve bought all these crazy little dot-coms and TK Corporations, but I need someone to stitch it all together. Make convergence
happen
. You’ve got to come work for us. President of Mose Media Holdings, Digital. And executive vice president of Holdings itself.”

“It’s completely flattering, really, but—”

“Stop.”

“—but we’re not going public, not this year anyway. I can’t just walk away from the company. I couldn’t.”

“Correct. I know the IPO’s off, and of course you can’t cut and run.”

“What?”

“Fine Technologies would be the final purchase in my ‘digital shopping
spree.’ The jewel. I’m proposing that you shmoosh your little bubble into my bigger bubble. You and your shareholders get a couple of million shares of Mose Media Holdings, and I get the hottest computer game of next Christmas, plus ShowNet—synergy!—as well as your telephone-robot software, what was it? Speak Memory. Plus the Y2K thingamajig. As a write-down, anyway. And you. Most important, I get you.”

A couple of million
. Ten minutes ago, two million Mose Media Holdings shares were worth $102 million. One hundred and two million dollars.

She’s flattered that he is serious enough to have had someone dig up the name Speak Memory.

She’s flattered and disconcerted that he already knows her IPO is off.

She finds the number, the
nine-figure
purchase price, dizzying. And flattering.

She thinks of how she’s ridiculed executives with multiple titular incarnations as “corporate Shivas,” president of one entity, executive vice president of another, vice chairman of something else.

She remembers what George told her a long time ago, when she almost took a job at a publishing company as “senior change agent and executive vice president at large,” about the folly of being a general with no troops. “Everybody salutes you,” he said, “but you can’t launch an attack. And you get shot at anyway.”

“Look, I can probably strategize and deliver opinions as glibly as any other MBA,” she says. “And I’m not saying you aren’t serious about new media and digital, but I really have no interest in being a glorified consultant. Half my business school class became consultants, and it was the half I didn’t like.”

“No! Absolutely not! Ask Timothy,” he says, nodding toward the front hall, “how often he’s briefed or been debriefed by some three-thousand-dollar-a-day MBA fuckwit.
Never
. Consultants are my bane. And my McKinsey and Booz-Allen.”

He grins—bane, Bain,
get it?
—expecting a smile back, which she gives, even though she finds all punning slightly repugnant, like an old-fashioned salesman with a loud suit and bad breath. (Mose’s breath is sweet, of course, and his suit is perfect.)

“What I
need
,” he goes on, “is someone to integrate TK Corporation and MotorMind and TurboSearch and all of the new properties into Mose Media, someone who understands that … mind-set, to
run
them for us. If you’re worried that you’d be an admiral without a fleet, no: the operating heads would report to you.”

She must take this seriously.

“Are the existing managements at the acquired companies,” Lizzie asks, “you know, faits accomplis?” She is asking if she can fire people freely—such as Penn McNabb, Nancy’s stupider and prettier brother, whose financial success in the software business offends Lizzie.

“Entirely up to you. There are a few employment contracts. But nothing an egregiously large severance check couldn’t resolve in about thirty seconds.”

She nods, but she refuses to smile. This sort of clubby, callous boardroom talk Lizzie has always found creepy, somewhere between boys frying ants with a magnifying glass and a Judenrat planning session. But at this instant, Mose’s hypothetical cruelty on her behalf, with the spectacular green of Central Park below and $102 million in mind, gives her a dirty aristocratic thrill. All that relentless Mose
wit
might get exhausting. But it could also be a refreshing change from George’s current autistic despond.

“You sure you would want a greedy vivisectionist working for you? Wouldn’t I be terrible for Hank Saddler’s popularity quotient?”

“Media Perception Index. Hank is all for you, Elizabeth. When you told him no on the software for the Army, he got scared of you—or, should I say, began to respect your astute public relations judgment and decisive management style. Hank is a bit of an S-and-M’er. As for our MPI, getting these motley web businesses shipshape will drive up the ‘visionary-slash-reinvention-slash-cutting-edge scores.’ So Hank reckons. And hiring a very senior, very high profile young
woman
also gets us MPI points, for ‘progressive-slash-enlightened.’ Where I’m shockingly low.”

Transparency
, Lizzie thinks. This is transparency, not in Karen’s young-Maoist
Animal Farm
sense, but true transparency, jolly candor about every mixed motive. She likes Mose. She likes Zip Ingram. She likes amusing scoundrels, as long as they’re honest and loyal to her.

“Remember,” Mose adds, “
I’m
Commodore Slave Ship.” He’s referring
to his involvement in the Classical Galley Circuit. The CGC is a very rich man’s hobby in which a dozen 150-foot-long wooden boats, imaginary replicas of ancient vessels powered by double-decked galleys of 150 oarsmen, compete in weeks-long races six times a year on six different seas and oceans. Mose owns one of the boats, the
Sic Transit Gloria
, and co-owns with the Chopper Channel the TV rights to air the CGC spectacles. Lizzie has never watched a race, but she did see the famous catapult-accident clip, from
The MBC MegaSports
, which occurred during last winter’s Mumbai-to-Djibouti run.

“Well,” she says, shifting to a more upright, predeparture posture. “This is a pretty astounding offer, Harold. I’ll need to think about it.”

“Of course. And I apologize, but unfortunately I can only give you the rest of the day. The shareholder meeting’s tomorrow in Burbank. If we’re going forward, my crack team of investor relations advisers say we need to go forward
now
. At least agree in principle.”

Mike Zimbalist’s seat on the Fine Technologies board has not been filled, and she has his proxy. If she wants to do this, she requires the agreement of only one other board member, George or Ben or Bruce. She needs to double-check the price. She wants to say,
By ‘a couple of million’ shares of stock, do you mean
two
million?

Instead she asks, “You’re proposing an all-stock deal?”

Mose nods. “Two million shares. Two million shares, I should point out, at their fifty-two-week high, and which every analyst in America rates a buy or strong buy.”

Lizzie nods and says dead seriously, “Well, I’d better get back downtown and begin having some conversations with my board.”

On her way out, glancing into the sitting room, she sees Featherstone. Silent, and unsmiling, he looks like a different person. He spots her, smiles weakly, and gives her a thumbs-up. In the lobby, on her way out, she doesn’t even notice the FedEx driver dumping a dozen packages on the concierge’s desk; buried among them, in a trim envelope the size of a paperback book, is a computer disk from Chas Prieve. As she hits the sidewalks, she feels like walking the two miles back to the office, despite the heat (she likes hot city days, particularly wandering home through Chinatown, pretending she’s in Shanghai), but she does need to get back as quickly as possible, right now, and begin having conversations with her board.

“Please.
Talk
to her. The lady just doesn’t get it. She needs to understand that Angela Janeway does not want to be in the series business anymore. End of story. Angela Janeway is transitioning to the
news
business, the broadcast journalism business. Plus feature films, of course. You know we’re up for the
Driving Miss Daisy
prequel, in the Jessica role?”

“I don’t produce
NARCS
anymore, I haven’t talked to Emily in weeks.” The last time he talked to her, in fact, was when she called about an actress, a day player named Shawna Switzer who said she knows George well. He told Emily to go ahead and hire her, but that he couldn’t vouch for her.

“I’ve got my own show, Sandy, which goes on the air in about ten seconds.” It’s the beginning of shakedown week.
Real Time
premieres in eight days.

“Please. Call her.” Sandy Flandy ostensibly phoned about his new client, Francesca Mahoney (she needs George’s permission to go on the road to emcee The Gap Presents the New Lilith Fair this summer), but wheedling on behalf of his other big MBC client is Flandy’s real agenda. Barry Stengel’s firing removed the only drag on
Real Time
, and the main obstacle to Jess Burnham becoming George’s star anchor-woman. Stengel also was deadset against trying out Angela as an MBC news correspondent (“We will not, repeat
not
, put some
actress
on our air!”), so his departure has permitted Angela’s real dream to come true—during the
NARCS
summer hiatus, she’s coanchoring
News-Night 2000
. Already the ratings have moved up. And now her agent wants George to persuade his former partner to let his former star out of her
NARCS
contract, so that she can become permanent coanchor of
NewsNight 2000
, and complete her transmutation into Angela R. Murrow.