6.
NEW YORK
If publishing has an evolutionary scale, after hundreds of years of natural selection what has risen to the top is a formidable creature – the Manhattan-based publisher of a large publishing company. Capable of stopping a Bengal tiger in mid-spring or charming a swallow out of its nest, this paragon is usually a woman of indeterminate age, with the ability to bend a room full of New Yorkers (unanimously regarded as the toughest and most cynical people in publishing anywhere) to her will, or to make a steely agent see reason, or to have one of the planet’s biggest authors eating out of her hand. Each of these ladies, and there are less than a half-dozen of them present on the scene at any one time, has put more bestsellers on the New York Times list than God, and for as long as they are around publishing will not perish. At least that’s the way it seems to Zach as he watches the publisher of Globish Inc.’s US company in action in the seventeenth-floor boardroom of the company’s midtown headquarters.
Casey Travers has published more bestsellers than all but three other legendary women in the pantheon of great US publishers and as she is far from done yet the odds are that she will stand alone at the summit when she finally bows out. Her appearance belies the enormous power she wields within the company and in the marketplace. She is a diminutive, brown-haired woman, dressed in a grey pantsuit and possessing an unexpectedly deep voice. As Zach watches her in action, a character in a western novel he read when he was a schoolboy crosses his mind. Dusty Fog was a short, insignificant-looking gunfighter, but his prowess with the twin ivory-handled Colts he wore in crossdraw holsters was so deadly that when he entered a crowded saloon his presence intimidated every person there. There must be about fifty sales reps, marketing staff, editors, and sundry other company people sitting at the enormous oval boardroom table, but there is no question about who counts the most. At the moment proceedings have ground to a halt because Casey is tearing a strip off a rep who has made a suggestion that she thinks is risible. He is astonished by how these grown men and women can take a public dressing-down without protesting, and is beginning to get a sense of the culture of a large corporation like Globish – or perhaps it’s the way they do things here in America; back home publishing is much more collegial. Here it seems – he searches for the right word – gladiatorial. You are expected to get in the ring and fight to the death for your books. Or perhaps it is just the sheer force of Casey’s personality that determines how these meetings are run.
The door to the conference room opens and Mortimer Weaver walks in and takes a seat at the back. His arrival hasn’t escaped Casey’s attention and she snaps, “You’re late, Maarty,” with just a glimmer of a smile to acknowledge the fact that he is her boss.
“Sorry, was delayed by a phone call,” he mumbles sheepishly. Casey resumes her berating of the hapless rep, and the morning session of Globish’s December sales conference carries on. Usually, this conference would have taken place in a venue out of town, but the company is cutting costs this year. This delights Zach; New York is a city he is always happy to visit. Although the conference is devoted to the coming year’s summer list, the earlier lists having already been sold into the stores, he has been invited to present Storm of Angels, which everyone is hoping will be dropped as planned into December, although the production deadline is extraordinarily tight.
Events have moved swiftly after Frankfurt. Gabrijela has worked out a deal with Globish wherein the formal acquisition of Litmus will be completed and announced to the media as close as possible to the release of Storm of Angels on 21 December, 2009. This is expected to work well for both parties. The share price of Globish’s parent company will rise, and she has been able to include a clause that will give Litmus’s shareholders a bonus on top of Mortimer’s already generous offer if the share price gets to a certain level. It has been agreed that Gabrijela will stay on as Litmus’s CEO until April 2010, by which time all staff will have moved into Globish’s London offices in a featureless low-rise in Camden Town. This development has been met with a great deal of unhappiness, but only four people have quit. In these troubled times it is madness to chuck up a good job, although given Globish’s reputation there is no doubt that cuts will come soon. But Gabrijela has managed to include a provision in the takeover agreement that no Litmus employee can be fired for a year from the date of the sale being finalized except for justifiable cause. It’s the best they could have hoped for in the circumstances.
He has a lunch appointment at Balthazar and decides to walk to the restaurant; to his mind nothing quite matches the experience of wandering through the streets of Manhattan. The streets of Hong Kong are busier, the streets of Bombay are rattier, the streets of Paris are filled with more elegant people, the streets of Singapore are cleaner, the streets of Rome have more architectural delights, but none comes close to matching the sheer variety and energy and excitement of New York’s streets. He relishes the chaotic traffic barely contained by the sidewalks, the thunder of people surging in every direction, and everywhere the blaring noise of construction, car horns, hot dog vendors, shouted conversations, arguments – everybody and everything in a constant state of flux. This is, after all, a city whose every inhabitant is convinced they know how to catch that goddamn falling star, make that next million, star in the third act of their lives. Never mind that they may be delusional; to be a New Yorker is to want to do it all, win at all costs, fill every minute of every day with whatever will sway the world, and this translates into an extraordinary force field of energy that all are plunged into the moment they set foot in the city – energy so powerful it could resurrect the dead and make the living levitate. By the time he gets to Balthazar he feels drained and energized at one and the same time.
He is looking forward to his meeting with Alfred Rothstein, a man who has been part of the New York publishing scene for over fifty years. And although he has handed off the day-to-day management of his literary agency to his successors, he keeps close tabs on everything about the publishing business, much like Ramesh in Delhi, and Zach has come away from every meeting with Mr. Rothstein (he will always be Mr. Rothstein to him) with a deeper appreciation and understanding of his profession. In the dim aqueous light of the bistro, he finds it hard to spot his host. Matters are not helped by the fact that the maître d’ seems run off his feet as he attempts to maintain some order in the clamorous room. As he waits he thinks Balthazar, with its zinc bar, red leather banquettes, and glasses sparkling like mermaid’s conches, is the perfect setting for a meeting with a renowned New York publishing personality. He can imagine Kerouac or Fitzgerald or Hemingway deep in conversation with Maxwell Perkins over in one corner, while Alfred Knopf or Nelson Doubleday inks a contract with another New York literary lion at the bar.
When he is led to his table he finds Mr. Rothstein already there, looking through a copy of that day’s Times, a partially crumbled roll on the tablecloth in front of him. He is impeccably turned out – polka-dot bowtie, dark suit, blinding white shirt, his few remaining strands of hair neatly combed over the large domed head speckled with liver spots. Although he is nearly ninety, the quick birdlike movements and the sharp inquisitive mind would be the envy of a much younger man. Zach goes with Mr. Rothstein’s recommendation and orders the calf’s liver. His guest has a Kindle lying next to his paper and Zach asks him whether he is at all worried about the effect ereaders and other manifestations of the digital age might have on the publishing industry. After admitting that he loves his Kindle and can’t wait to get his hands on an iPad when it is launched next year, Mr. Rothstein says that he is not concerned at all about the ability of the publishing business to negotiate any challenge that might be thrown down. He says he has watched it morph from a business of small independent houses, where the proprietor’s knowledge of stock turnover was limited to running his hands over the piles of books in the warehouse to gauge how quickly they were moving from the amount of dust that had collected on them, to one of giant conglomerates with
sophisticated sales and marketing and warehouse management systems. He has seen the coming of the paperback and the mass market edition; vertical integration; the virtual disappearance of the independent bookstore and the rise of mall stores, superstores, and online bookstores. With every new development enough people were ready to write off the publishing industry, he says, but it has weathered every crisis. When Zach asks whether he thinks that the forces that have sorely tested the newspaper and the music business might prove too difficult to handle, Mr. Rothstein leans across and levels a finger at him.
“You must remember,” he says, “relatively speaking, you work for a tiny, quirky industry, and that alone gives you a lot of protection from the forces of change, as some astute observers have pointed out. Publishing has never been and will never be as mainstream as the newspaper business or the music industry. Two centuries ago, literacy levels limited its size, and today its size is limited by the plethora of entertainment and information options available to the consumer. Why, the world’s seven largest consumer publishing companies, including your own, Globish (it feels strange to be addressed as an employee of Globish, Zach thinks), put together aren’t even a third the size of Amazon, let alone Apple or Google. So that gives you a certain amount of protection, the giant corporations don’t think of your turf as something that is big enough or profitable enough to invade.”
“But some have already started aggressively edging onto our turf.”
Mr. Rothstein waves the objection away. “Publishing is way too small for them to bother with so they will just reach an accommodation with you guys. What is important to bear in mind is that your core customers are extremely loyal, better educated than the average guy, more affluent, and more mindful of the need to keep you all alive. What I think might happen over time is that publishing companies might not be able to afford to be as large as Globish and some others are today, too much cost, not enough revenue, and so you might see a return to the days of smaller independents who fulfil a specific editorial and marketing role. One way or the other publishing will go on, the industry is full of smart people like you who will incorporate what you need to take on board to keep you viable and you’ll go on.”
Zach has been ignoring his BlackBerry, but it has started to buzz insistently and he excuses himself to take a look at his messages. The most urgent one is from Rachel in London and it does not bear good news. No matter how hard they push, she says, there is no way they are going to make a December pub date for Storm of Angels. She says that Gabrijela has already e-mailed Mortimer, and followed up the message with a phone call, but has suggested that Zach meet with him as well. The message casts a pall over the rest of his lunch, and he refuses coffee and dessert. His host, who has seen it all before, tells him to get going, and Zach races out of the restaurant, flags down a cab, and makes his way back to the office and a meeting with Mortimer that he is not looking forward to.
Mortimer has called a strategy meeting after lunch, in the small boardroom on the fifteenth floor. He has lunched alone in his office – a BLT and mineral water that his longtime secretary, Edna, has organized – and has spent the past half-hour brooding about what he would like to do to Casey Travers if only he could. He dislikes her arrogance, her American forth-rightness and aggression, but most of all he hates her disdain for him; she barely masks the fact that all she does is tolerate him. He knows he needs her more than she needs him (she would be long gone if that weren’t the case), but she could at least hide her contempt better. This sort of nonsense would never happen in London, no matter what a subordinate thought of him it would be suitably camouflaged.
He is swept by a wave of homesickness. He would like to be back in the UK, the acquisition of Litmus should make it possible for him to spend more time in London. Although he has spent nearly a decade in the States, two of them even married to an American woman – the two most distressing years of his life, filled with endless talk about every shade of their emotions and how they were doing as a couple, and sex, and love, and pretty much everything in between; God, these people liked to talk every single thing to death and beyond – stolid, repressed London would be a nice change. The moment passes. He puts Casey from his mind. It is something he does well, this ruthless closing down of one window of his mind and the opening of another. It is the only way to survive as a chief executive; with a million things that need to be addressed simultaneously, nothing can be dwelt on for too long, especially if he doesn’t have a solution to the problem. Suck it up and move on, there will come a time when Casey is no longer needed.
A message lands in his inbox and a few moments later Edna buzzes him to say that Gabrijela is on the phone. Storm of Angels cannot be released this month, she tells him; they cannot even get him an advance copy for his presentation tomorrow, he will have to make do with a jacketed dummy. Fuck, that’s not good, but there’s not a whole lot he can do about it. It would have been great to have the Seppi revenues this year, but to have them next year shouldn’t be too bad, and his announcement of the Litmus acquisition and the impending arrival of a new Seppi should do the share price of Globish’s parent company no harm. He looks at his expensive watch, a present from his new love interest, the widow of a wealthy Philadelphia banker, whom he fortunately has to see only about once every eight weeks or so, and gets up from his desk to go to his meeting. He pauses for a moment by the window, looks down at the traffic crawling down Park Avenue, the cabs so alarmingly yellow, so New York, and then heads to the elevator.
When he gets to the conference room he finds the rest of his management team already there. He feels a slight twinge of irritation; he always likes to be the first to arrive for a meeting, it gives him a slight edge to be present in advance of the others. He finds it useful to watch each of his subordinates come in, so he can figure out how best to tackle them that day, the cocky ones, the submissive ones, the ones who don’t say anything, the mediocrities who have got to where they are by virtue of being long serving, or servile, or because they are useful to him. He thinks CEOs who like to stride in late, make a grand entrance, are losing out on a valuable advantage.
He takes his seat at the table, greets them, calls the meeting to order, then lets a moment of silence develop; it is another stratagem he uses to control a meeting – before he spells out the direction the meeting will take, agendas notwithstanding, the others at the table will be unsettled for just a moment and that will be to his advantage. To Mortimer, running a business is like waging a war, but before you join battle with your competitors and enemies it is necessary to be completely in control of your own troops, so he regards all his internal meetings as skirmishes, where he pits himself against his key lieutenants, those who would take his crown from him given the chance. He is not the sort of leader who is a conciliator, who welds his team into an effective fighting unit by playing up their strengths. No, for him management is all about pitting man against man or woman, keeping them guessing at all times, making sure that no one person gets too powerful. A history buff, he is particularly taken with the tactic used by the great strategists of empire – Divide et impera, Divide and conquer. It was how a handful of Englishmen got to rule the world and it’s how he survives and thrives. The three men and the sole woman at the table wait in silence for their boss to speak. There’s Frank Mayhew, the unexciting and dependable CEO of his American company, who can be relied upon to do exactly as he is told. A tall, rangy man, with thinning hair and a weak chin that he hides with a trim goatee, he looks like a complacent greengrocer (the standing joke about Frank is that he is a great listener – because he has nothing of any consequence to say). Hayley Caldwell, the head of his UK company, is a bit mercurial and bossy, but careful never to let him feel threatened; she is going to be tested by Gabrijela, he thinks with grim satisfaction. C.K. Lee is the youngest person present and the head of Globish’s fledgling Australian company – Mortimer is hoping that Lee will in due course be able to reach out to China and points beyond. The fourth person is his
CFO, Bob Nougat, the only person in the group he trusts to the extent he trusts anyone; he has known Bob for twenty-five years and brought him into the company when he took over.
He breaks the silence, reviews the year to date with the group. They had no hope of making their annual targets at the end of the third quarter, he reminds them, and they had nothing in the bag that would have helped them do so, until he pulled out the Litmus acquisition. Their applause rolls over him, and he smiles and accepts it graciously while privately thinking how they must hate him for constantly reminding them that the only reason they hold down their jobs, earn their bonuses, is because of his brilliance. He has no doubt that they slag him off behind his back, but he doesn’t care – he is not here to win a popularity contest, he is here to win, to look good for his boss. He has survived as president for four years, which is three years longer than his five predecessors and he intends to continue in the position for as long as he can.
As the praise dies down he drops his bombshell: Storm of Angels is going to be delayed to April next year. As their faces fall he tells them he has activated Plan B, which should salvage the year through the release of certain provisions; he adds that the delayed launch of the Seppi novel is probably a blessing in disguise because it will make their twenty-fifth anniversary celebration in April 2010 even more special. He wants the company to put together a promotional campaign for the anniversary that is both spectacular and useful; he is not interested in mere pomp, he wants to use the milestone to lodge the Globish brand firmly in the minds of the public. The way things are trending, if they do not have a recognizable brand with which to attract authors and consumers, they might not be celebrating their fiftieth anniversary. And the first place to start, he says, is by reviewing and restating the company’s values. As he says this, he smiles inwardly at the memory of his initial reaction to the obsession of large American companies with values that went beyond their core competencies, usually empty-sounding words and infantile slogans that were a smokescreen for skullduggery. However, he very quickly figured out how to use company slogans to his advantage and now, at least on the surface, he is an ardent believer in them. He asks each member of the group for a single word that they think best describes Globish and what it stands for.
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