WEST 57
B.N. FREEMAN
Copyright © 2015 Brian Freeman
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 1515372804
ISBN-13: 978-1515372806
For Heathrow, Gatwick, and Baltic —
who swear they write the books
Table of Contents
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10
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21
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
NOTE
BOOKS BY BRIAN FREEMAN
1
Kelly Jax wasn’t happy. I couldn’t blame her.
“The title of the book is I’m Into Wellness, Not Hunger!” she reminded me over the phone, which wasn’t necessary at all. I was the agent who sold her book for a hefty sum. It was an easy deal. America cannot get enough of beautiful blonde talk show hosts writing diet books, and IIWNH was already a top 10 New York Times bestseller.
“Do you know what those freaking morons did?” Kelly went on.
Okay, she did not actually say “freaking,” but you get the picture. America’s sweetheart has a mouth on her. They don’t call her Jax the Ripper for nothing.
I knew exactly what the freaking morons had done. Kelly had already texted me a photo of the bookstore window in Chelsea, where her book was prominently displayed in a pyramid of about fifty copies. Normally that would be a good thing for an author, but the store had made an itsy-bitsy mistake. Kelly needed to vent. I understood.
“They put a discounted price sticker in the corner of the book,” she continued, in a voice loud enough to carry through the phone to the other tables in the restaurant. “They covered up half the title! So now the freaking title of the freaking book in the freaking window is I’m Into Well Hung!”
Do not laugh, I told myself silently. Do not laugh, do not laugh, DO NOT LAUGH.
I smothered the phone with my hand, and I laughed anyway.
“Look, I understand,” I told her when I could talk without choking. “I’ll call the agency. They’ll talk to the store and get it fixed.”
“Do you know what I’m doing on the cover?” Kelly asked me, as if I hadn’t said a word. “I’m eating a hot dog! I have my mouth open, and I’m about to eat a freaking Coney dog!”
“I hear you, Kelly. The stickers will all be moved by tomorrow morning.”
“It’s too late! People have been posting about it all evening! The top trending hashtag on freaking Twitter is #KELLYJAXLOVESBIG——!”
I think you can guess how that hashtag ended. Yes, rhymes with lox.
Anyway, that’s the kind of phrase that gets people’s attention. The other diners at da Umberto turned their heads to stare at me. I smiled bravely. Across the table from me, Helmut Mischler sat with a tiny smirk and drank a glass of expensive Dornfelder wine.
“I’ll fix it, Kelly,” I promised. “Really.”
Kelly hung up on me with a final “FREAK!”
Again, that wasn’t exactly what she said.
Helmut waited patiently for me to compose myself. He discreetly flagged the waiter, who materialized with another glass of San Giovese for me. Say what you will about Helmut (and many people do), he is impeccably cultured. You can afford to be gracious when you make as much money as he does. A year ago, Helmut was in Tokyo, overseeing the Far East digital music division of Gernestier, the European conglomerate which owns pretty much everything in the media world. Today, he is based in New York, running the company’s U.S. publishing interests. He freely admits to knowing nothing about the book biz, but as he likes to say, “Machts nichts.”
I think that translates roughly to: “Who cares, I can buy and sell your mother.”
I knew Helmut was ready to get down to business. He picked imaginary lint off the lapel of his chocolate brown suit (Kiton, five thousand dollars). He smoothed his trimmed beard with thumb and forefinger and used both hands to carefully secure his tiny oval glasses on the bridge of his nose. His fingernails are more perfectly manicured than mine. He is an oddly tall, narrow man with an oddly long, narrow face, and he is probably about ten years older than me. In my case, I will turn forty in 617 days. Not that I’m counting.
“Unhappy client?” Helmut asked me.
“Yes, very unhappy.”
“Being an agent, you must deal with difficult personalities,” Helmut said.
“Oh, no. Most authors are well adjusted and really good with people.”
Ha ha ha. We both laughed at that one.
“You have been an agent for a long time, Julie,” Helmut went on. “Your whole career, yes?”
“Almost. I was an actress for a couple of years before I went into the book biz.”
“Oh, really? I did not know this.”
“Well, sort of. My breasts were in acting, but the producers had to hire the rest of me to get them.”
Helmut looked confused. The very mention of die zwei Alpen made him uncomfortable. His eyes didn’t know where to look. “I’m sorry?”
“It doesn’t matter. I was an unsuccessful actress. Fortunately, I’ve been a successful agent.”
“That is true, very successful — but now you are a publisher! This is a big change for you. How are you finding it?”
“It’s too soon to tell. It hasn’t even been a month. I’m still organizing my father’s affairs.”
“I understand. So you don’t know yet whether you will stay on at the helm of West 57?”
“I haven’t made any decisions,” I said.
“Naturally. You have my sympathies. Sonny is such a loss to the entire industry.”
“Thank you.”
I brushed my Jane Seymour-length black hair from my face, which gave me cover to rub away the tears that filled my eyes. If you have lost your father, you know that a month is no more than a minute in measuring grief. Maybe it’s even worse when he is a force of nature, the kind of man who is so filled with life that you cannot imagine death stealing him prematurely.
Sonny Chavan. My father. Founder and owner of West 57 Publishing. In its heyday, Sonny’s publishing house was considered the barometer of literary trends (as he would be the first to tell you). Intelligent. Thoughtful. Meaningful. Deep authors saying deep things. If you were a novelist with an original voice in the 1970s and 1980s, you wanted West 57 on the spine of your books. If you were a critic at the Times, the advance copies from West 57 moved to the top of your reading list. But that was then, and this is now. Sonny is gone, and the world has changed. I was less concerned with black ink on the printed page than red ink on the balance sheet.
West 57 was running out of money. Helmut was well aware of my predicament.
“To inherit a house like West 57 must be a complicated legacy,” he told me. “The brand has a storied past, but in the current economic climate, well, I’m afraid the past isn’t much comfort, is it?”
“We have some encouraging prospects,” I replied gamely.
His eyebrows arched in surprise. “Oh?”
“Yes, this week is huge for us. Kin
g Royal’s memoir Captain Absolute arrives in stores. It’s about Irving Wolfe and the massive Ponzi scheme he ran on the Upper East Side. It’s going to be our biggest bestseller in years. Lots of orders. Lots of national media attention.”
“Ah, yes.” Helmut leaned across the table, and his nose cast a long shadow. He probably knew the advance orders on King’s book better than I did. “Your father did overpay for the book, though, didn’t he? Four million dollars in this marketplace? Such a cowboy Sonny was. Even if the book is a bestseller, it’s unlikely to be profitable.”
“Well, we’ll see.”
Helmut picked at the artichokes in his plate of pappardelle and gave me a condescending smile. He was right, and we both knew it. One book wasn’t going to change the fortunes at West 57. And four million dollars for King Royal? Ridiculous. But that was Sonny, throwing big advances at books he liked, demanding re-writes that added months to production times, sniffing at accountants who fretted about money when he was concerned with art.
Now I had to deal with the consequences.
“I have a proposal for you, Julie,” Helmut said.
“I figured you did.”
“I think it represents a practical solution to your problem.”
“What’s my problem?”
“Debt. Debt is your problem. Let us not pretend, okay? West 57 is bankrupt. You are proud of what Sonny built, and that is a good thing, but not if it blinds you to sound decision-making. Your father, he was the kind of stubborn man who thought he could get out of a hole by digging to China, but you are not your father. You are smart, tough, mature.”
Mature. There’s a compliment that makes a girl’s knees go weak. You are smart, Julie! Tough! Wizened!
“So what do you suggest?” I asked.
“Let us take over the brand. Gernestier will assume all of your financial obligations. A clean slate, so to speak. The alternative is shutting down, is it not?”
“If West 57 is in such dire straits, why would Gernestier want to acquire it?”
“Because the name still carries weight in the marketplace,” Helmut explained. “West 57 is like Rolls-Royce or the Mandarin Oriental or Krug. It carries an expectation of quality, and this is something we can leverage. What the house has always lacked is fundamentals like discipline, budgets, good business practices. This is what we bring. With proper management, West 57 can again aspire to be the premiere name in American literature.”
“Again?” said a raspy, cigarette-stained voice that was not mine. “Again? Helmut, you wouldn’t know literature if it bent over and farted in your face.”
I covered my smile with my hand. It was Sonny.
My father towered over our table, all six-feet-four of him, his jet black hair as regal as the mane of a lion, his face fogged by the smoke of his Davidoff Superslims. I was surprised it had taken him so long to show up, but this was Sonny. He was always late. Even when he arrived at a restaurant on time, he greeted everyone at every table like a giant Indian version of Ed Koch. Arm around back. Nicotine breath in your face. Coffee-brown teeth grinning as he whispered a tidbit of gossip or debated the merits of a Cortese Barbaresco on the wine list.
Sonny.
Don’t worry, I’m not crazy. I knew he wasn’t really there. A heart attack felled Sonny last month like a bullet takes down a bear. He slumped over at his desk into the blue-inked pages of a manuscript he was editing. Garrett Wood, Sonny’s protégé at West 57, found him there and called me. My father was gone. Even so, he has shown up in my head ever since that day, same old Sonny, bellowing, laughing, and arguing. Maybe he was a ghost. Or maybe my heart was simply conjuring a fantasy in order to convince myself that nothing in my life had changed. Instead of everything.
“I understand how difficult this is for you,” Helmut told me.
Sonny snorted. “Oh, please! Helmut has to pluck a nose hair to work up a tear.”
“What I’m offering you is an opportunity to restore and preserve what your father built,” Helmut went on. “Gernestier can put West 57 on a sound financial footing, and with that foundation, we can identify important new authors and give them the kind of multi-media backing and economic support that Sonny never could.” He snickered, which sounded like an oboe flourish at the Philharmonic. “Not that Sonny ever hesitated to spend money he didn’t have.”
“Freak you, Helmut,” Sonny announced cheerily. Or words to that effect.
I frowned at him. I do not like swearing. Yes, I live in New York.
“Gernestier doesn’t exactly have a literary reputation,” I pointed out. “Don’t you prefer bosom-heaving vampire tomes? That sort of thing?”
On cue, Sonny slapped his big hand on his chest, and his voice boomed like Ian McKellen. “Artemis swept aside my flowing hair to expose the trembling skin of my neck. As I smelled the intoxicating musk that told me he was as much man as monster, I knew that I wanted him not just in this moment of paradise but through the interminable stretch of ungodly time.” He laughed so hard that the table shook. Or maybe it was a nervous tic in my knee.
“We do sell many vampire books,” Helmut admitted. “I have to say, it puzzles me. What is it about women and these erotic domination fantasies?”
He said it with an arch of his eyebrow, as if to ask: Does that turn you on?
“Bite me, you animal,” I said.
No, I didn’t say that. Even a year of self-imposed celibacy wasn’t enough to make Helmut attractive to me.
“Sorry,” I said. “That’s not my scene. No vampires, no femporn. I didn’t even read Fifty Shades of Grey.”
“Ah. Well. Anyway, yes, this is a big category for us, but that doesn’t mean we do not see the market potential of more literary authors. Hence our interest in rescuing West 57.”
Sonny snarled. “Rescuing?”
“I’m not ready to make a decision yet,” I told Helmut. “It’s too soon.”
“Of course. I understand. I’m sure your hands are full.”
“Maybe once I get past the launch of King Royal’s book,” I said.
“Yes, this is a busy time. I know you are concerned with your father’s business and your own future. You are probably thinking that you owe it to Sonny to run the business yourself, so you can’t imagine selling the house. What I want you to know is that you don’t have to make a choice.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“West 57 has always carried the Chavan name on its masthead. Why change? If we acquire the brand, we would welcome the opportunity to keep you on as the senior executive, reporting directly to me. This way, you would honor your father’s legacy.”
“Don’t trust him, darling girl,” Sonny warned me.
I didn’t. I knew perfectly well that Helmut wanted me as a figurehead to reassure the book world that the editorial standards of West 57 wouldn’t suffer under the green eyeshades of Gernestier. He’d call the shots, not me. I’d be there to do the dirty work, cutting off authors who underperformed. After a year or two, he’d ease me out, or make my life so miserable that I left of my own accord.
However, Helmut was no fool, and he knew how to negotiate.
“Of course, you may be hungry to return to the world of agenting,” Helmut speculated. “Is this so?”
“I wouldn’t say that.”
“I imagine you made a lot of money as an agent.”
“I wouldn’t say that, either.”
“Well, we would naturally want you to be properly compensated for your senior role at West 57 and for giving up your ownership interest in the house. As an executive, you should receive executive rewards. Say, a three-year contract? We can haggle over the details, but we would want your compensation to be in the range of — ”
Helmut mentioned a number.
It was a very good number.
It was three times my salary at the McNally-Brown agency, where I’d worked sixty hours a week making money for the partners, rather than me. Gernestier was trying to buy my love, and they were succeeding.
“That’s very generous,” I said. “I’ll think about it.”
Sonny wasn’t happy with me at all. “Don’t think about it! Tell him to go to hell! You can’t possibly let this accountant get his hands on my house. West 57 is mine!”
Not anymore, Sonny. It’s mine now.
“I’ll think about it,” I repeated.
2
As I headed uptown after dinner with Helmut, I savored the sights of New York, because it’s easy to take it all for granted when you live here. A night-time cab ride in the city is always magical. You can admire the pastel colors of the Empire State Building overhead. A young girl with her head on the shoulder of her lover, strolling past Bryant Park. An out-the-door, after-theatre line for a slice of pepperoni and mushroom at Ray’s.
A goateed teenager waving at me as he urinated into the gutter.
Nice.
My phone rang as I stared out the window. It was my mother. If I called my father Sonny his entire life, my mother has never been anything other than “Mother.” Her actual name is Cherie. Yes, I know. Sonny and Cherie. I gave mother a special ring tone on my phone, for the same reason that yeomen dug moats around their castles in the old days. You want a little warning when the barbarians arrive at your gate.
Mother’s ring tone? Ride of the Valkyries. It seemed appropriate.
“Hello?” I said.
“Julie!” Cherie announced. “Where are you?”
She always asks me where I am when she calls. It’s her first question. I suspect she wants to confirm that her GPS tracker is working.
“I’m in a cab, Mother.”
“How is the weather?”
“Cold. Drizzly.” It was April, but spring hadn’t sprung.
“It’s sunny in L.A.”
I checked my watch and calculated the three-hour time difference. “No, it’s not. It must be dark by now.”
“Well, it was sunny all day. Seventy degrees. Heaven.”
“I’m sure.”
“Where are you going?”
“Back to Sonny’s office,” I said.
It would always be Sonny’s office to me. It would look like him and smell like him. I could sit behind the desk, but I would always feel like a little girl visiting Daddy’s office for the day. I glanced out the window of the cab. We were nearly at Rockefeller Center. West 57 is located — as you might guess — on West 57th, around the corner from Carnegie Hall. Thirtieth floor. Great view toward the Park. A monthly lease that makes you want to jump out the window.
West 57 Page 1
