Ithaca

by David Davidar

  Jet lag gets him up early the next morning. He is ready well before the appointed time and prowls around his room restlessly. Three days ago he was in London fretting about the future. Now he is in the midst of lawyers, negotiations, and possibly the biggest deal of his life. Swing it, and he can already feel the applause, smell it, hear it.

  When they reach their destination, a handsome detached two-storey residence that he recognizes from his previous visits to see Seppi, Caryn parks her little VW a few doors down, and then to his surprise buries her head in her hands and begins to weep noisily. He hesitates, puts his hand on her shoulder.

  “It’s OK, the meeting will go well, I’m sure.”

  He doesn’t know what else to say. A few minutes later, her sobs subside, she finds a tissue in her handbag, wipes her face, blows her nose, and turns to him, saying, “I am sorry. This is my first visit to the house after Massimo’s funeral.”

  But, of course, the first thing the cousin would have done is move into his fancy new home. When they ring the bell, there is no evidence of her recent breakdown. Cousin Giuseppe opens the door; he is a large man, a pendulous belly overhangs his jeans.

  “Ciao, Caryn,” he says.

  He turns to Zach. “And you are Massimo’s publisher. Welcome.”

  He leads them to the family room that overlooks a backyard messy with junk – a rusting lawn mower, pieces of pipe, a half-assembled bird feeder. Ugly black squirrels dart around the lawn, chittering and squeaking. The disorder outside is of a piece with the untidy rooms of the house. This was not how things were on a previous visit when the room Seppi, Caryn, and he had met in was neat and orderly. Caryn sits on the edge of a handsome wing chair and tells Giuseppe why they are here in the mixture of Italian and English that she used when she spoke to him on the phone. Giuseppe scratches his belly under the T-shirt, yawns, and busies himself in the adjoining kitchen, making the coffee that he offered them. Once that’s done he launches into an animated monologue, delivered entirely in Italian.

  When he has said his piece Caryn says sharply, “That is unfair, Giuseppe, you know Massimo would never have stood for it.” She has spoken in English for Zach’s benefit.

  Giuseppe shrugs, massively indifferent, and says in English, “He was my family, you were a business associate. If you don’t think my terms are fair, let our lawyers talk.”

  She remains composed, though her colour has risen, “Very well, then, let Mr. Thomas and I discuss it, and we will get back to you.”

  “I’m in no hurry, Caryn.”

  “But we are. Mr. Thomas needs to carry word back to London about our decision.”

  “I’m being generous, Caryn,” Giuseppe says with a smile and a wink at Zach when he thinks Caryn isn’t looking. Zach doesn’t let any emotion show, wonders what this gross ape has proposed. They leave without drinking their coffee. When they are back in the car, Caryn shrieks in frustration and then says, “It’s unbelievable, that greedy bastard wanted ninety per cent of the advance and all future revenues.”

  “That’s ridiculous! What did you offer him?”

  “Half.”

  “Which is really generous, I’d have started with a quarter myself.”

  “So what do we do now?”

  “We’ll go back to Manning. Perhaps the lawyers can talk and work out a more reasonable division of the money.”

  “I hope Manning is tough,” she says grimly. “Giuseppe’s lawyer is a nightmare – you know, one of those sleazy, ambulance-chasing creatures out of central casting.”

  The negotiations drag on for two days, and Zach begins to understand that a prolonged legal negotiation is much like attending upon a critically ill patient. A lot of their time is spent worrying and waiting, getting their hopes up as bits of half-baked information leak back to them, only to have them dashed again a few hours later. The oppressive heat of the past few days has subsided, so instead of being cooped up in the hotel, they go on long walks through the city. Although the tension he is gripped by doesn’t allow him to properly appreciate its many virtues – leafy ravines, well-tended neighbourhoods, a profusion of parks and flower beds, the bustle of Yonge Street and Chinatown, all of this flowing down to the dark eye of the lake – he can see why Toronto attracts so many immigrants, and features high in quality of life rankings.

  The attractions of the city aside, the time spent with Caryn makes him warm to her. What a price a life spent in the service of literature can sometimes exact, he thinks, all those years of dedication to Seppi only to end up at the mercy of a greedy philistine! They are eating lunch in a cavernous dim sum restaurant in the heart of Chinatown. After instructing him in the art of eating chicken feet, laughing with delight as he gingerly begins to suck the skin and flesh off the greasy claw, she finally begins to open up about herself.

  He discovers that she is a native of Montreal, and formed part of the great anglophone exodus from what was then Canada’s cultural epicentre during the political disturbances of the 1970s. She had found that her master’s degree in linguistics from McGill was useless for anything but a career in teaching or research, neither of which had interested her, so she had taken off to Europe where she eked out a precarious existence teaching English, waitressing, taking secretarial jobs, while making the translations that would come to dominate her life. Then the connection with Seppi came about, and she had returned to Canada and to Toronto, a city she barely knew, having lived in it only briefly before her European sojourn. She had no real friends except Seppi but returning to Montreal had not been an option. She hated how provincial it had become (although its bakeries and patisseries put Toronto’s to shame), her parents had split up, and she had no lasting connections with her extended family or friends. She had stayed on in Toronto and toughed it out (she makes the merest mention of an unhappy romantic entanglement) until at long last the angels had alighted and her life had entered its happiest phase. With Seppi’s death, Caryn’s existence had grown unsettled again, but he hopes Storm of Angels will calm things down for her, assuming cousin Giuseppe doesn’t play spoilsport. The next morning Giuseppe finally comes around, accepting a 75:25 split in his favour. Zach books his ticket home the same evening, thrilled with the way things have gone. Caryn, who has found a way to a grudging acceptance of the deal, drives him to the airport, and they have a drink at the bar to celebrate. The onrush of positive energy that accompanies the successful culmination of a deal is one of the highs that publishers and writers share unreservedly. Together they toast Seppi, themselves, and the future of their book. When it’s time to go he gives Caryn a hug (any distance that existed between them has disappeared), and makes his way to the boarding gate still wrapped in a soaring sense of well-being. Onwards and upwards, he thinks, onwards and upwards, and the thought stays with him as the plane floats free of the blaze of light that is Toronto and points for home.

  PART TWO

  Always in your mind keep Ithaca

  To arrive there is your destiny.

  – from “Ithaca” by C.P. Cavafy

  5

  FRANKFURT

  Mortimer Weaver fishtails ineffectually above the heavy-haunched publisher of Globish’s New Woman imprint in the bedroom of his suite at the Hessischer Hof. Ever since he had a quadruple bypass operation two years ago, despite his doctors’ assurances, he hasn’t been able to perform as he once was able to in bed, but like the muscle memory of top-flight athletes his sexual instinct remains undimmed. One of its manifestations is the revolving door of women in his life, especially at the Frankfurt Book Fair where, safe from the prying eyes of his colleagues in New York, he has conducted a variety of sexual adventures.

  After a while he stops flopping around on top of his partner, says with as much remorse as he can, “Sorry, my dear, jet lag is the very devil,” and clambers off. As she is getting dressed a famous line from an Allen Ginsberg poem pops into his head, and he wonders in how many other hotel rooms in the city this scene is being repeated, hopefully with more satisfactory
result. The well-known cliché about Frankfurt – that its whores go on holiday when the book fair comes to town because all the publishing folk are busy fucking each other, both literally and metaphorically – is based on more than just industry folklore.

  After his colleague has left for her own room, Mortimer sprawls on a sofa and turns his attention to his first appointment tomorrow, a breakfast meeting with an old flame and the current CEO of Litmus, a company that has been in his sights for almost two years now. The problem is Gabrijela will not sell unless her hand is forced; what she does not know is that her chairman, Sir William Boyce, is on the point of capitulating, and once Mortimer has a majority shareholding it will only be a matter of time before Globish will be able to ingest all of Litmus. The fact that Litmus has just acquired a new Seppi is both good news and bad news – he will have to raise his offer but he can reassure Globish’s board, and especially his boss, Greg Holmes, the majority shareholder of Globish’s parent company, Amadeus Inc., with the news that he will be bringing one of the hottest properties in the publishing world into the Globish fold.

  He will make the usual promises to Gaby – that she can stay on as CEO, that the company’s independence will be guaranteed and so on – none of which he will be able to keep, and if she is smart she will know that. Inevitably the time will arrive when with a genuine show of sadness (even he is surprised by how sincere his insincerity can often seem) he will fire her, sweep the parts of the company he no longer has any use for into the trash can and fit the remaining bits into the increasingly bewildering patchwork that is now Globish Inc. The acquisition of Litmus should see him well on his way to achieving his goal (and also, it must be said, that of his boss) – overtaking all the companies that are bigger than his own – Macmillan, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, Penguin, Hachette, and Random House – until he stands alone on the summit.

  For a fleeting moment he thinks that once he would have hesitated to press home his advantage – after all, he thinks of Gaby as a friend, and they have shared a bed – but he thrusts the thought aside ruthlessly. Loyalty, he had decided decades ago, was an overrated virtue. The time when publishing was a business conducted by gentlemen was long gone. Authors weren’t loyal to agents or editors, agents weren’t loyal to editors or publishers, publishers dumped authors, and chief executives dumped colleagues. No big deal, it was all part of doing business.

  Mortimer might not have been as cynical in his view of the world if he hadn’t been at the receiving end of treachery early in his career. He had always known he would make something of himself. His father was a successful executive at an insurance company, and Mortimer and his three sisters had grown up in an affluent neighbourhood on the south side of Glasgow. He had been sent to an expensive public school not far from home, which he had hated for its insistence on swims in icy lochs and rivers and other activities designed to toughen its students (he had never been especially athletic). He had also been humiliated on more than one occasion by the upper-class toffs and minor royalty who were the ruling elite at the school; a clever and sensitive boy, Mortimer couldn’t wait to see the day when he would leave them all far behind. After passing out of school, he had fled to America, where class and lineage were not prerequisites for success, and managed to obtain an MBA in marketing from Harvard Business School, the only springboard an ambitious young man needed at the time to launch himself into the corporate world. He was soon earning an excellent salary with a securities firm on Wall Street. He met and married the first of his three wives, a Korean-American woman called Barbara Chang, a colleague at his firm, and seemed set for a comfortable if undistinguished career in the corporate world. He began to think of himself as Morty, an essential first step in the process of Americanization, although he was too smart to become a parody of himself like the upper-class British twit in Tom Wolfe’s Mid-Atlantic Man.

  Two years later, his father had died of a heart attack and his wife had left him (the events were unrelated), and Mortimer found himself back in Glasgow sorting out his family’s affairs. He landed a job with a bank in his home city, married again, a Glaswegian this time, and his life seemed to have recovered its stability. Soon enough, though, Mortimer was bored. Glasgow was too small to contain his ambition; he found his wife, Mary, provincial and dull; football and beer bored him. After a few years of trying to settle down, he threw over both wife and job for yet another fresh start, this time with a leading entertainment company in London, where he soon rose to head a TV channel. He was thirty-four years old and headed for the big time. He loved the energy and unpredictability of the TV business, and the creative people he associated with (during his time at public school he had distinguished himself in elocution and debating competitions and had toyed with becoming a writer, although he discarded the idea when he realized that success wasn’t guaranteed). He was also delighted that he was one of just two candidates for the top job at the group’s TV division when the incumbent retired. His competition was his best friend at the company, James, who headed the international sales and licensing department. The public school he had attended, despite his dislike of it, had instilled in Morty a very strong sense of fair play, and although he competed vigorously with James every move he made was above board.

  “Treachery” is derived from the Old French trecherie, which means to cheat or deceive, and it is something most of us experience in one form or the other at some point in our lives. If we are lucky, the consequences will not be too extreme and we will pick ourselves up and keep going with only the tiniest scar, but sometimes betrayal can have a catastrophic effect. We cannot guard against treachery because it is always perpetrated by someone we trust, and so when James accused Morty of diverting a substantial amount of money from a business deal to his own bank account, he was taken completely unawares. He was so shocked by his friend’s perfidy that he didn’t put up a fight, but from that point onwards Morty would never completely trust anyone again – especially at work.

  He resigned his job, obtained a position with a publishing company, and it was at this time that he met and became infatuated with Gabrijela. Their affair was intense but brief; they were both much too aggressive and competitive to make a go of it, although they continued to be friends after a fashion. A year before his fortieth birthday, Morty decided that if he needed to make his mark he would need to accelerate his climb up the corporate ladder. He quit his publishing job and over the next decade he zigged and zagged through the management jungle. He learned to play the corporate game to perfection – forming necessary alliances, surrounding himself with loyalists, sucking up to those above, dealing with threats to his pre-eminence ruthlessly, changing jobs every three years on average – with his eyes always fixed on his goal of getting the top job at a major global corporation, ideally in one of the creative industries (movies, TV, books, or media) by the time he turned fifty. He missed his target by two years, but at the age of fifty-two, Mortimer Weaver became President of Globish Inc. He married again, this time picking his spouse, Madeleine, an Englishwoman, for her social connections, but when that marriage began to come apart at the seams after seven months, he abandoned all notions of leading a settled life on the home front.

  Now his only ambition was to make Globish the largest and most powerful company in its field. When that happened he would finally be where he wanted to be. And if there were ever a place he would want that coronation to take place it would be Frankfurt. He loved everything about the Frankfurt Book Fair. The fact that it was over five hundred years old. Attracted almost three hundred thousand visitors over five days. Held over three thousand events. Hosted more than seven thousand exhibitors from over a hundred countries in 170,000 square metres of space spread out behind the familiar landmark of the “Hammering Man.” And although Turin and Calcutta might claim more visitors, no book fair was bigger, more important, and more prestigious than Frankfurt.

  Statistics aside, Frankfurt was where Mortimer felt most acutely his Master of the Universe status, it w
as where his keen mind ticked even more keenly, the spring in his step belied all the infirmities and reverses that the aging human body was prone to, and his predatory instincts were sharpened to the point where he knew that every time he went for the jugular he would not miss the mark.

  On the first day of the fair he shaves his round head carefully. Once upon a time he had felt acutely the lack of a distinguished mane, but that is no longer the case – his natural arrogance asserted itself soon enough, and he now holds his distinctive head high. Having satisfied himself that his pate is bald and gleaming, he admires it for a minute or two in the mirror. How magnificently it sweeps back from his forehead; smooth, without any knobby bits, his is a head to inspire awe and envy. It even makes up for his lack of inches – what a presence he would have been if he’d only been taller! He towels off, brushes his teeth with care. He runs his fingers over the raised scar on his chest, lasting evidence of his heart operation; he had initially felt diffident taking off his shirt while making love to his various lady friends but he has got over that too. The scar is one more piece of evidence that Mortimer Weaver can overcome anything that’s thrown at him.

  He puts on his Brioni suit, expertly knots his Hermes tie, give his Lobb shoes a quick wipe with a shoeshine cloth to make sure they gleam even brighter – these details are important to him, symbolizing as they do his reinvention of himself from an upper-class Brit in ill-fitting suits, unshined shoes, food-speckled tie, and socks without elastic into a sharply dressed American executive. Encased in his armour, Mortimer strides out of his suite to do battle with Gaby. He has magnanimously agreed to have breakfast with her at the Marriott where she is staying; no longer seeking the home turf advantage when it comes to business dealings, he doesn’t care where he fights.

  At the hotel coffee shop, which is filled with assorted publishing types whom he affects not to know – the elite gather at the Hessischer Hof and the Frankfurter Hof, and the rest simply do not count – he spots Gaby sitting at a table by the window. He is faintly annoyed that she is not alone. He gets to the table, pecks her on the cheek (he feels a slight twinge of desire when he notices that she is looking good, the short haircut suits her, as does the classically cut navy blue dress with just the merest hint of cleavage), and discovers that the man with her is her publisher, Zachariah Thomas. Mortimer has never met him, but knows him by reputation as the editor behind the Angels phenomenon. Maybe it is not a bad thing he is here, Mortimer thinks: if he does manage to acquire Litmus, the publisher will be one of the assets he will be looking to keep, especially if he has any more Seppi titles up his sleeve.