by Matt Weber
Leblancs owe me," he says. "For taking care of their own, and for that poem all you slickers love so much. I know you don't think I look like much, but I get what's mine."
"That's why you'll leave here empty-handed," I say, to my own not inconsiderable admiration.
And he does.
Aimée, Aimée! I write from a desk in an office—more a carrel, really, in a smart little tenement in a fussy neighborhood of the sinistral fourth. The shingle over the tenement's door bears the name of a little press, and I am newly minted an acquisitions editor.
They pay me half the wage of the university graduates who do the same work, and say I should be grateful, for the press rarely hires contributors. I wish they would not say it—but it is true for all that, and for all that, I am! For a man paid by the word can double his wage by doubling his time, and a man endowed an office does not need a bed. There is money with this letter, and more to come.
Your mother will have noticed that I still do not provide an address, nor any information that could lead you to one. It is not a matter of Jesson, who did not receive a work authorization to move between the terraces, and who did not want to come in any case. I am tempted to say that the concern is purely financial—and it is true, my wage would be hard-pressed to cover an apartment that could house the three of us in comfort, still less with funds for food remaining. Here is another argument: I may not have long to live, and I would rather give you money to live where you are, rather than a life you cannot afford.
If these were the only objections, I would have you here in heartbeats. But here is the truth. The chancre is no better; if anything, worse. And if I do not wish to die apart from you, still less do I wish to harm you before I go.
The fourth is expensive to our eyes, but the higher terraces view it as cheap living, and art thrives here like lichen, hybrid and ineradicable. My poem seems to have become something of a sensation. On expert advice, I have bet on it in the conceptual markets, whence I will take the dividends and reinvest them into Greyking. It is a confident man's bet, or an insider's; I am the second only, but for resolute action, desperation is better than confidence.
Save most of what I send you, but not all. By investing in happiness, you invest in life. You now walk and speak for yourself, I know it, and the subtle joys and frustrations of complex effort are coming open to you. Make sure your mother and Elias encourage that effort, even if it costs.
Take what you will of my love, and give them what remains.
We'll get back to Elias in a bit, but first we need to talk about the other shakedown.
I mentioned before that I was spending a lot of time poring over legal matters. Their substance was roughly this. Bear with me.
Gauthier Leblanc died with a large interest in the company, about a third. Before his death, he'd formed a coalition with a group of of wealthy arts patrons for a controlling interest. Duskstreet Wealth Husbandry broke that coalition when Leblanc died, and instead formed a controlling interest with a coalition of venture capitalists and other financiers, who replaced several of the board of directors, which in turn rolled over the management. To their credit, I suppose, this new regime nearly doubled the size of the company—not by producing any especially well-regarded literature, but by exploiting loopholes in the tax code meant to be favorable to the arts, in which corporations tend not to have investment arms. Duskstreet Wealth Husbandry reinvested its own takings to keep its interest at the same proportion of the company that Gauthier Leblanc had, around a third.
Now that Leblanc's will was actually being executed, the assets held by Duskstreet had reverted to Aimée Leblanc, making her the plurality shareholder and renewing the possibility of coalition with that original consortium of arts patrons, who readily pursued it. So far, so good.
Meanwhile, since the irregularity in Duskstreet's books had been discovered, Dawnroad Bank had quietly bought up Greyking shares from smaller interests, mostly individual shareholders. Maybe some people in these seats, I don't know. To the tune of 20% of the company.
But, as I was about to discover before Elias Charbon interrupted my reading, Greyking's board of directors contended that, as Duskstreet had purchased about half of the interest now controlled by Aimée Leblanc, it was entitled to about half her influence on the board. That is to say, 17% instead of 33%. No question about who owned the shares, just a procedural issue concerning how decision-making power was allocated among the shareholders.
Now, remember who owns Duskstreet.
Let's review, skipping the numbers: In reality, Aimée Leblanc owns a plurality of the corporation; with her coalition, she has a controlling interest. Dawnroad and its financier friends each have a large minority of the corporation, but collectively don’t add up to a controlling interest. Greyking's contention is that Duskstreet, Dawnroad's recent acquisition, deserves half of Aimée's influence on the board, shifting the balance from Aimée and the arts patrons over to Dawnroad and the financiers. Which is to say, it’s a desperation move by an incumbent board of directors to preserve its own control of a press that can’t print a book worth reading, but can hide as many shekels from the synod as you please.
I'm distilling this all for you out of history I hunted down on my own. There is not, in any of these communications, any mention of any kind of coalition, any mention of the implications for control of the board. Dawnroad isn't even mentioned; this is just Greyking asking for a reapportionment of shareholder votes in recognition of Duskstreet's contribution to Greyking's success. After all, the reasoning goes, Duskstreet made the choice to invest in the company rather than take its earnings elsewhere, which it could have done. (That the money it invested was illegally withheld from its rightful owner is naturally never acknowledged.)
There is, likewise, no implication anywhere that Dawnroad will in fact form a coalition with the VC minority that Duskstreet had been in bed with earlier, rather than Aimée. But I have a brief conversation about it with a man in a beautiful bespoke suit, and he tells me all I need to know.
Which is all to explain why, when Aimée hears about what happened with Elias and asks me to leave Dawnroad to work for her, I ask her “Do you care about the press, or just the money?”
Aimée, of course, is looking at her offer as a response to my diversion of an abduction attempt, which I’ve actually almost forgotten about in the evening’s work, and so there’s a bit of confusion and I give her the same monologue I’ve just given you. At some point she understands what I’m telling her, and her face goes very, very dark and still. “Pel,” she says, “I’m tired. Just the money is enough work as it is.”
“It’ll get to be less,” I say, reasonably sure it’s true. “The bank just has to make sure they’re fulfilling all their own legal responsibilities. With Duskstreet setting the precedent for bad handling of your accounts, they want to be as careful as they can.”
“That’s the same bank that’s trying to gouge me out of my birthright, that you’re talking about.”
She’s snappish and annoyed, but inside I feel a little surge of triumph. “They do care about their responsibilities to your accounts. But that doesn’t mean they won’t try to cut you out of Greyking, not when they think they can manage it better.”
“They can.” Her shoulders drop slightly with a disconsolateness that is actually, I think, sincere—but her eyes pierce me, too. She’s interested in how I handle this.
“Yes, they’ll do better than you at inflating share prices through fraud,” I say. “But that’s not really what a press is for, is it?”
“What if I say it is?” She smacks her lips a little, not for any particular reason, and it reminds me of the woman I found: Addled, suspicious, desperate. Convalescence has changed her already; she’s through withdrawal, strong and clear-eyed, adapting to the thinner air. But the attractors are still there, the ones deep in the brain that
“Then we both have the right people working for us already.”
I’m being a cunt, I suppose, but Aimée
shrugs off my cuntery and manages to wangle a smile out of her fear and fatigue. “Ah,” she says, “but we don’t, you see. Because you’re still not on my payroll.”
“What I’d love,” I say, “is to be on the payroll of somebody who actually wants to publish books.”
“Welcome aboard,” Aimée says. I’ll take those words to my doom, I believe; the sweetness hasn’t left them yet.
I have to finesse a few things here. Aimée isn't as credulous as you might expect at first; the next day, she summons me to a meeting before the vice-president handling Greyking's finances, where she rehearses all the things we'd gone over the night before. This leads to an exchange of highly charged words and my summary termination, which is of course the point. There's to be no ambiguity about allegiances, no double-agenting. Perhaps also obviously, Aimée withdraws her business from Dawnroad, which makes the Greyking board meetings even tenser than they already were.
Aimée doesn't want to go back to a bank, so I get the books. I try to tell her that "dogsbody" was not merely my gripe about the job but, in fact, perilously close to my actual title; but, to Aimée, a banker's a banker, so I'm in over my head trying to keep everything straight. One good consequence of the break with Dawnroad: The meetings die