Julia is perched on a sofa in the far corner, her coat still on. She is utterly exhausted. She spots Zach before he sees her, and a tired smile animates her face. She is glad they are beginning to repair their relationship; she knows that she is making him work hard, but he ought to – he’s given her enough trouble, hasn’t he? But perhaps the time has come for her to ease up a bit. She doesn’t doubt his love for her, and while she doesn’t know if things will work smoothly if they get back together, she is more confident than she once was that they will be able to make a go of it.
Just then Zach catches sight of her, waves. She smiles at him as he comes up to her.
“Hey, falling asleep?” he says.
“This is crazy, I don’t think I can move another step, think another thought, pitch another book.”
“That makes two of us, now I know what it means, literally, to eat an ox – or rather a pig!”
“That’s gross,” she says. “Where have you been?”
“The Wagner.”
“Oh, really,” she says, “that’s a Frankfurt institution.”
“Not for you, honey,” he says gently. “It’s only for certified – no, certifiable – carnivores. You’re not allowed entry unless you can prove that you can eat a hippo. Medium-rare.”
“Ugh!” She wrinkles her nose, and the well-remembered gesture drenches him with a huge longing.
“Julia,” he says huskily, having difficulty getting the words out, “move back in with me now, please. I love you so much.”
“That’s sweet,” she says, “but you’re drunk, better hide the flowerpots.”
He is sober enough to look abashed. In the early days of their relationship, they had gone to a party in Knightsbridge, not a neighbourhood they frequented much, but they had been at a loose end and had tagged along with a friend to the palatial apartment of a stockbroker who was throwing a large bash to celebrate his fortieth birthday. Zach had quickly become bored with the people there, hotshots who worked in the financial industry and their vacuous girlfriends, so had begun to drink his host’s whisky a bit more quickly than was wise. He had got separated from Julia after a while, but was quite sloshed by then so he hadn’t really noticed she was no longer around. Finding the living room (where he had stationed himself for the past three or four drinks) claustrophobic, he had wandered out onto a balcony with a rather splendid array of potted plants. Two or three people were standing around, smoking and drinking. He knew none of them but they all seemed to be very friendly, and he was beginning to have a good time. The apartment was seven or eight floors up, and at some point in the conversation one of his new friends, a tall brunette, had wondered whether they would be able to hear the sound of something that fell from this height and smashed against the pavement, over the noise of the traffic and the background hum of the city. It was but the work of a moment for him to hoist a largish pot with a flowering shrub in it (the blooms were purplish, he recalls) over the wall and send it sailing into space. For a moment everyone froze but then they began clapping and cheering him on. Another flowerpot hit the pavement. They all thought they could hear the sound of the impact faintly, but just to be sure they weren’t imagining it he was getting ready to tip another pot over when Julia was by his side, restraining him, leading him away over his protestations, getting him out of the apartment. Her tiny frame was almost bent over with the effort of supporting his body, which refused to stay upright, into the lift and into a cab. To this day he does not know how or if she squared things with the host, but when she brings up flowerpots it is his cue to go easy on the booze.
She gets up, wearily slings her bag onto her shoulder, and says, “Come on, let’s get that drink, probably mineral water for you, and then I must go. We will have time enough to discuss our relationship back in London.”
He rarely stays for all five days of the fair but he has to this year because of details surrounding the upcoming publication of Storm of Angels. The plan is to have a single lay-down date of 21 December 2009 for all the English-language editions, the Italian edition, possibly the German edition if Dieter is able to swing it and any other translated editions that might be ready by then. It’s almost three in the afternoon before he finishes with his last appointment. Everywhere in the giant fairground, only a skeletal staff remain, watching as the public, who are let in on the final day, denude the stalls of sample copies of books, posters, leftover goody bags, whatever they can lay their hands on.
Gabrijela comes up to the Litmus stall. Like everyone at Frankfurt by now, she has pouches under her eyes, her lips are cracked, and she’s moving as though she were underwater.
“How are you?” she asks.
“Bone tired but it was a great fair. May the spirit of Seppi rejoice among the angelic hosts, it was all because of him,” he says, casting his eyes upward to the less than inspirational steel beams and roof of Halle 8.
Gabrijela smiles, then walks across to a locker and pulls out a bottle of champagne and a couple of plastic glasses. “Cristal,” she says, pops the cork, and fills the glasses, hands one to him, and is about to take a sip when she pauses, puts her glass down, gets up, and fills a couple more glasses and takes them across to the two young women who have been manning reception. She fills another one for their international sales manager, who will be supervising the shipping of their remaining books and other fair-related paraphernalia back to London. She spends a few moments with him, returns, and raises her glass in a toast.
“To Litmus,” she says.
“To Litmus.”
“When do you get back?”
“Early tomorrow.”
They sit in silence for a while, the sounds of the dying fair rustling around them. A few people are still walking around, the proprietors of the stall across the aisle are packing up, but for the most part tired exhibitors are putting up their feet and relaxing as the 2009 edition of the Frankfurt Book Fair winds down.
“When did you last read a book, Zach?” Gabrijela asks, breaking the silence.
“Don’t know, two days ago, finished the proof copy of The Arc, Julian’s book for the spring, great new talent –”
She interrupts him. “Did you enjoy it?”
He turns the question around in his head. “I suppose I did. I think we could have done a little bit more work on it, the ending is a bit flat, but schedules being what they are …”
“You know, I was thinking there are over a hundred thousand of us here, all of us focused on nothing but books, all of us living, breathing, exhaling books, but what I find sad is that so very little of it has to do with what brought us to books in the first place.”
She is not looking at him but down at her drink, at the bubbles rising and exploding against the plastic sides of the glass. “How old were you when you first read a book all by yourself?”
“Oh, I don’t know, six or seven?”
“What was it?”
“Probably an Enid Blyton or something like that.”
“Umm … I guess we all have favourite kid’s books but, you know, the first book that made a real impression on me, a book that I can recite passages from to this day, was something my father gave me to read when I was fifteen maybe, an extraordinary collection of stories entitled The Encyclopedia of the Dead by a writer called Danilo Kiš, known as the Serbian Kafka. There was one passage that stuck in my mind, it described a train pulling into Belgrade, and I related to it so fervently I suppose that I blame it for my addiction to this business – the words were so simple, so mesmerizing: ‘The train wheels clatter as they pass over the metal trestles, the Sava flows mud-green, the locomotive blows its whistle and loses speed.’ It was exactly as I remembered it from train journeys I took as a little girl. What about you?”
Her reminiscing illuminates a long forgotten corner of his memory. “I was in college, and I’d just finished wading through a monumental tome by Lawrence Durrell, The Alexandria Quartet. I tried to reread it recently but gave up. I found it too ponderous and dated, but
if there is one fragment of prose I’ll remember all my life, it was something I read in that novel, in which he describes a scene in Alexandria: ‘A basket of quail burst open in the bazaar. They did not try to escape but spread out slowly like spilt honey.’ ”
He wonders where this conversation is going, he doesn’t have a good feeling about it; the last time he and Gabrijela had had a conversation like this in the coffee bar in London he’d thought it was the end. Fortunately things had turned out otherwise.
“I’m sad that every one of us reads books without actually reading them, savouring them as we once used to,” she says. “We read books for work, we read books to fix them, we read the books of our competitors; if we are good at what we do we take the time to read the books of the day, the books of tomorrow, the books of yesterday. Books, books, and more books – but when was the last time we really immersed ourselves in them?”
“On vacation?” he ventures.
“Yes, of course, now and again by accident we might slip out of our professional personae and actually sink into a book. But what of it? There’s so much we lose.”
“We’re better off,” he says, “than all those others who have even less to be thankful for.”
“Fair enough,” she concedes. She sits up straighter in her chair. “I’m getting out, Zach.”
“What?” The import of what she has just said kicks in; he tries to keep it at bay, but Gabrijela is carrying on inexorably.
“I wanted you to know well in advance. I am not going to disappear tomorrow,” she assures him, “but I’m going. As you know we’ve been talking for a while about getting Litmus to firm ground and our dear departed friend Seppi has ensured that will take place, God rest his soul.
“But I hadn’t realized how determined Morty was to get his hands on Litmus, he needs a presence in the UK desperately if he is to be a player of any consequence. His own small company here has not made a go of it, so acquisition is the only route open to him. I thought Storm of Angels would frighten him off, make us too expensive to acquire, but he has simply raised his price, and it was way too much for William to turn down. He phoned me last night to say he was going to accept Globish’s offer, and that three of the other directors were also inclined to accept. That leaves just Andrew and me and it’s just a matter of time before he folds as well. There’s no way I can fend off Morty.”
“But surely you can stay on, you’ll still hold a large chunk of the company.”
“I could stay on for a while, but I couldn’t work for Morty,” she says ruefully. She takes a sip of her drink. After a while she asks, “Do you know what CEOs really do?”
“Run companies?”
“I suppose we do that, but unless we retain control of some operational areas of our firms, in terms of actual, hands-on work we do very little. Oh, we manage teams, we keep track of earnings and costs, prepare reports, chair meetings, fly here and there, make speeches, formulate strategy, fire-fight … all very necessary, no doubt, but what we are paid the big bucks to do is take decisions, hundreds of them, thousands of them, all the time. As you know, taking a real decision is one of the toughest things to do in business – or in your personal life for that matter. When a junior assistant or manager wonders why the CEO pulls down his or her six- or seven-figure salary, it’s because at every other level of the company you are paid a fair wage for your craft, the things you were trained to do, while at the very top you’re often a long way from what you were trained to do, but you’re being paid for your ability to make decisions when often there is not enough information on which to base such decisions. You’re being paid for your strategic instincts, your people management skills, your intuition. Business schools and work experience can prepare you for the role, but they can’t teach you how to perform it.”
“Do you want me to take over from you?” he asks in some alarm. “I’m not interested, Gabrijela, all I would like is for you to stay.”
She laughs for the first time since they began talking. “No, Zach, I’m not suggesting you become CEO. I think you are a very good publisher with the potential to become a great publisher, and that’s what you should focus on. The reason I’m talking about the CEO’s role is so you will have an understanding of what life will be like as part of the Globish organization. At Litmus I was CEO but I was an integral part of a small, tightly knit group, and was therefore able to devote a lot of time to what you and the others did, but when you become part of Globish it is likely that you will find your lack of access to the man at the top frustrating. In a company the size of Globish the CEO is spread really thin, not surprising when you realize that he is managing something the size of a small country. Not that you should worry about that too much – it is probably a good thing you won’t be working directly with Morty. In fact, come to think of it, you will in all likelihood report in due course to Hayley, the UK CEO. Now that’s a whole different story.”
She takes a sip from her glass, grimaces. “Champagne tastes foul when drunk out of a plastic glass,” she says. “Let’s go to your hotel bar and have a proper drink.”
They collect their bags, bid goodbye to the people remaining at the stall, and leave, with Gabrijela talking as they go.
“I’m fifty-four years old, Zach, and I have been head of this company for a couple of decades now. It was fun at first, but after a while I found I wasn’t enjoying life so much, especially once Litmus had grown to something approaching its present size. This is probably because I have always been a bit of a worker bee, and while I liked directing the course of the company, and have never shied away from taking tough decisions, I felt I wasn’t as fulfilled as I once was. I wasn’t being hands-on enough. To be honest, even though I would find it difficult to work for Morty, the real reason I’m going is because I would like to taste and feel books and work with authors again. I’m going to take a long break after I leave Litmus and then I’ll probably start a small company that will publish the sort of books I once published. It’ll lose money, I’m sure, but I’ll be able to afford it.”
She bends down and, to his astonishment, takes off her shoes, stuffing them into her bag and laughing at his expression. For just an instant he glimpses the vivacious young woman she once must have been.
“What they never warn you about at Frankfurt is how much punishment your feet have to take. I’ve always wanted to do this, and as I suspect this will be my last Frankfurt for a while, I don’t care if my stockings are shredded to bits.”
“You sure you don’t want to take the shuttle bus?” he asks.
“Absolutely,” she says firmly, “I’m making a statement here.”
He shrugs and they walk on.
“As I was saying, a couple of years into my role, I came to the realization that being the CEO of a largeish company was fine for the time being. I was competent enough but I wasn’t as excited by the job as I was when I was publisher; that in turn meant that I would never be great at the role, which was the other problem with being CEO. If I wasn’t going to excel, that simply wasn’t good enough for me. Like any industry, publishing has all kinds of CEOs. There are some disastrous ones and many who are competent, who form the majority; they keep their companies sailing steadily onward but don’t have a clue about how to take the big intuitive leaps or formulate innovative strategy. The good CEOs increase the value of their companies, meet their annual targets, keep shareholders happy, strategize effectively. Morty is one of these; he’s a very clever guy, make no mistake, he wouldn’t have got to where he has otherwise.
“Then there are the beloved CEOs, the ones everyone in the company would kill for, and everyone in the industry would die to work for. They are rare; and even rarer are the game-changers, the extraordinarily talented individuals who are often tunnelvisioned or crazy, who make the sort of intuitive leaps that they themselves can’t explain to you, who see the field of play and take decisions with blinding clarity, rather like how Roger Federer in his prime could figure out exactly where to whack a tennis bal
l three strokes in advance of winning the point. They will be remembered long after they are gone, the founders of great companies, the fixers of broken companies …
“Morty’s problem is that he would like to be thought of as one of the great ones when he knows he doesn’t have it in him to be one. Not that that is going to hold him back, and in his desire to be recognized as one he will stop at nothing, I fear. He is a few years older than me, and figures he has another ten or twelve years to get to where he wants to be, which is not a whole lot of years in the world of business, especially when he works in an industry that is past its prime, so he’s a guy in a hurry and the acquisition of Litmus is just one of many steps to get him to where he wants to be. It simply won’t do for his ego to retire as the head of the seventh-largest English-language publishing company in the world.”
They leave the fairgrounds behind, and are passing the Maritim Hotel when Gabrijela says she cannot walk one step further without a drink to revive her. They walk into the lobby, head for the bar, which is relatively noiseless and uncrowded today. She orders a large gin and tonic and he settles for a mineral water.
“I know you probably have lots of questions for me,” she says, “but there is no rush, we have plenty of time to work through them. I just wanted to give you enough information so you’re able to ask the right questions.”
“The only question I have right now,” he says, “is whether I should be looking for another job?”
“Not at all,” she says. “In fact, you are probably Litmus’s most valuable asset after Seppi, so Morty will take very good care of you, he will not ignore you the next time you meet, believe me. But you should also know the kind of person you’re dealing with. I’ve already told you why the fact that he will never be what he wants to be makes him rather difficult and unpredictable, but the real reason you will need to be cautious around him is more complicated. You may know that he and I went out together briefly many years ago. Well, just before we got together Morty was let down badly by a friend and he has never trusted anyone completely since – nor has he been trustworthy. Over the years many of his employees have learned that about him when they were shown the door after they had outlived their usefulness, or became a threat to him, or made a mistake that he thought would reflect badly on him. At Litmus we were truly a family, I would like to think we looked out for each other, but at Globish you will have to learn to watch your back. Remember that and you’ll do just fine.”
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