The Agency

by Ally O'Brien

  “The girl is gorgeous, I’ll give you that.”

  “What I wouldn’t give for a girlfriend that classy,” she breathed.

  Emma sat down in my guest chair and crossed her legs, which shunted her candy red skirt somewhere near her upper thighs. She shoved a pencil in her mouth and began flipping through the pages of her diary. Emma still wrote things down, which was another thing I liked about her. She had electric, stick-your-finger-in-a-socket red hair and a scrubbed Irish face that was a mess of freckles. Her teeth were lily-white but were crammed in her mouth like rush hour commuters on a Central Line train. She had a sweet, perky smile, though, and, Lord, what a body. Insanely tall. Pencil thin. Breasts like over-blown birthday balloons. She claims they’re real, but I’m suspicious.

  I hired Emma away from another agency two years ago, where she was a celebrity publicist. If you are twenty-two and a publicist, your job is to sleep with stars. Every now and then, you might leak a photo op to a friendly popzee or call a knuckle dragger at the Sun about some fake bit of gossip, but mostly you ride back to the hotel and give blow jobs in the limo. Emma, being gay, didn’t really fit the job requirements, except for an occasional threesome. Anyway, she was incredibly organized and loyal, so for me, she fit the bill perfectly.

  “Hey, good news,” she told me.

  “What?”

  “We got a Czech deal for Singularity.”

  “How much?” I asked. The ex-commie countries are about as lucrative as finding a penny on the street.

  “A thousand euros.”

  Right. Minus commission and taxes, that will leave the author, Oliver Howard, with about two weeks’ rent in another six months or so when the deal gets signed and the publisher coughs up the money. Unless your name is Nora Roberts or Dan Brown, writing isn’t likely to buy you a yacht to race around the Isle of Wight.

  “Did you tell him that we got turned down in France, Germany, and Holland?” Emma asked me.

  “I don’t tell writers when publishers say no,” I told her. “They can’t handle it. Better to wait until someone says yes.”

  “So do you want me to e-mail Oliver with the Czech details?”

  “No. See if he can do dinner on Friday night. Pick someplace nice. I’ll pay. Oliver could use something other than a bacon sandwich for once.”

  “That’s nice.”

  “Speaking of Oliver, what’s the word from Tom Cruise?”

  Emma’s red lips curled into a snarl. “Felicia called.”

  Felicia Castro is Tom Cruise’s agent and business manager. Unless you know Katie, there’s really no other way to get to the Man with a proposition for a movie idea. However, I pissed off Felicia about two years ago because I passed over one of her clients who was desperate to option a number one bestseller, in favor of a series buy with HBO at twice the price. Not a tough choice. But Felicia screamed at me that we had a handshake deal, which wasn’t true, and she swore I would never sell so much as a Weetabix commercial to any of her clients from that day forward. And she’s been as good as her word.

  The trouble is that Oliver Howard’s first book, Singularity, was absolutely written for Tom Cruise. Anyone who reads it can see Cruise in the lead role. If I do nothing else in this life, I want to see Tom Cruise take that book and make a movie out of it. It’s not like the guy needs to buff up his box office bona fides, but this would be his Shawshank Redemption, the one everyone remembers in a hundred years.

  Another confession: Singularity was a huge bomb. I sold the UK rights, and we couldn’t move ten fucking copies off the shelves. Oliver didn’t earn out even a quarter of his measly advance. I know it happens that way, and that’s why, as agents, we try not to fall in love with the works we sell. But I thought Singularity was absolutely mind-blowing amazing, and I still think Oliver ought to be the hottest literary author since Thomas Pynchon.

  So far, though, I am a cheering section of one.

  “What did Felicia say?” I asked.

  “Mostly, she called you a cunt,” Emma said.

  “Well, fuck her,” I said. I knew what Felicia wanted. If I lay down naked in front of her desk, let her paint the words “I am a lying bitch” on my chest, and then paraded that way through Leicester Square, maybe she would take my proposal to Cruise. But I wasn’t about to do that.

  I just didn’t know how else to get Singularity in Tom’s hands.

  “What else?” I asked.

  “Sally Harlingford wants to know if you can do tea on Monday at Fortnum’s.”

  “She read my mind,” I said.

  Sally runs her own agency, and she’s been a friend and colleague for years. I wanted to pick her brain about my big idea. She knows what it’s like to go it alone. By the way, tea at Fortnum’s is our own little code for pinot noir at the Groucho. On our bad days, we like to head out for an early drinkie.

  Emma leaned forward with a knowing smile. “Also, Darcy sent me an e-mail.”

  “Ah.”

  I felt a lovely little spurt of arousal between my legs.

  “He wonders if you can meet him late on Friday night.”

  “Tell him yes, I can.”

  “I thought you’d say that,” Emma replied, giggling. She loved being the secret go-between for my affair. I never communicated with Darcy directly, and his name, of course, isn’t Darcy. But Emma and I are both suckers for Pride and Prejudice, even if Emma’s dream Darcy would look more like Sienna Miller.

  “Eleven o’clock at the apartment in Mayfair?” I said.

  “I’ll tell him.”

  “Order in some champagne, will you?”

  “Of course.”

  My week was looking up.

  3

  I PACKED A SMALL BAG in my apartment on Friday morning. Nothing much. I was planning on being naked most of the night. Toothbrush, toothpaste, makeup, L’Occitane shampoo, pair of black lace knickers, fresh blouse, and a packet of ribbed Trojans. What every girl needs for a tryst. The zipped pouch fit comfortably inside my purse.

  After my shower, I chose the tightest pair of jeans I could wear without risking circulatory failure and the amputation of my lower body. Honestly, I don’t know how Emma gets her jeans on or off. I picked out a push-up bra for the girls, not only because of Darcy but because I was having lunch with Guy Droste-Chambers, and the negotiations always go better with him when my tits are front and center. I hooked on a slim gold chain. Diamond studs. I wore an untucked strawberry silk shirt and left the top couple of buttons open. I squeezed my feet into killer black heels. Pointed toes. Mirror shine. Three-inch spikes. I swayed a little from the lack of oxygen up there. The shoes brought me in at five foot ten.

  My hair is short, bottle blond, with a few strands of color. Blue. Red. I’m going for that delicate balance of young, hip, tarty, and aggressive. I worked in a pomade with my fingers and spent fifteen minutes messing and remessing until I was satisfied that I was irresistibly sexy. Guy will think this entire look is for him, which it isn’t, but I’m okay with that.

  Am I beautiful? Well, I have to work at it, and that means working a lot harder at thirty-six than I ever did when I was twenty-six. Even so, I get there when I need to. Wherever I go today, men will stare, but that’s no challenge. Men will stare at anything with breasts. The real test is whether women will take a second glance and pinch their mouths unhappily. I still get those jealous looks, but I know my days are numbered.

  Beauty is an attitude. It’s about confidence. It’s the message you send to the world. Someone once told me that nice people aren’t beautiful—and that’s harsh, but it’s probably true. You have to have a bit of edge to be beautiful, like you know you’ve got something other people want, and they can’t have it. Beauty is about ego.

  Sexy is something different. I think women who love sex have a chemical makeup that men can whiff like pheromones in the air. I had a boyfriend who claimed he could look at any woman and decide in five seconds whether or not she enjoyed giving oral sex. (Honey, we all like to get it, do
n’t we?) He kept a scorecard on his computer. This is what you get when you date an industrial engineer. Unfortunately, I discovered that the entries in his BJ ledger didn’t stop after he met me, so it was time to move on.

  I spent the morning working from home, answering e-mails, calling clients, reading crappy manuscripts, and sweet-talking editors and reporters. Everyone wanted to talk about Lowell. They all wanted dirt. I dropped a couple of hints about his being dressed in a white corset and garters when he went to the big sex shop in the sky. I couldn’t resist.

  Someone named Nicholas Hadley left me a voice mail message. He didn’t say who he was or what he wanted, so he was way down on my callback list. Probably a writer trying to pitch a book. I’m at the point where I don’t tell anyone what I do for a living, because everyone has either written a book, thinks they could write a book, or knows someone who has written a book. I figured Hadley was one of the three.

  I also talked to my solicitor and my banker and asked for their confidential assessments of whether I could launch my own agency and what I would need to make it work. They talked about cash flow, client agreements, contracts, currency exchange rates, financial accounting, and administrative support. In other words, I would need to hire people to do the things I didn’t know how to do and didn’t want to do so that I could do what I do best: make deals.

  However, they were very encouraging. If you have Dorothy Starkwell, they both told me, you can do it. That’s what it takes to get started, really—a big client and a big deal.

  So I was ready for Guy.

  Around one o’clock, I took a cab to his office. No need to inhale bus fumes or risk humidity, dust, sweat, body oils, and Tube grease before my big meeting. I sat in the cab as the city went by and let my mind wander. I had all the sales figures and prior contracts in my briefcase, but I had been over them so many times that I couldn’t bear to look at them again. I could recite hardcover, trade paperback, mass market paperback, and open market sales country by country from memory. Guy knows where we have to be. He got lucky on the last deal. Dorothy has written six panda books, so this deal will be for seven, eight, and nine. She didn’t hit the big time until an indie studio made a computer-animated version of The Bamboo Garden and hawked it at Sundance. That was shortly after her fourth book was in the stores. The movie was a respectable success, and all of a sudden, parents started snapping up Dorothy’s books. It made the twenty-five-thousand-pounds-per-book advance for four, five, and six look pretty paltry when the royalties began closing in on seven figures for every title in her backlist.

  This time, Guy was going to have to break open the piggy bank. He knew it. I knew it.

  Dorothy has done well, but this is only the beginning. Books are a small piece of the pie. The real money is in film, television, Broadway, product licensing, merchandising tie-ins, that kind of thing. Hardly anybody reads anymore. Sad but true. My plan later this year is to start hammering my buddies in TV land and get those damn pandas their own weekly series. Maybe a children’s magazine, too. From there you can see them on cereal boxes, jammies, stuffed animals, fridge magnets, lunch boxes—you name it.

  If I sound like a tough negotiator, I am. I don’t make any apologies for it. Even the editors who are my personal friends know that I will reach into their mouths and pull out the last gold filling on behalf of my clients. After ten years, I have a reputation. A lot of women don’t like dealing with me because I’m a pushy bitch. Men are turned on and a little scared. That’s okay. I use it to make my clients a lot of money.

  People ask where I get it, and I tell them my father. My mum and dad divorced when I was only five, and my mum followed her horny desires to Italy, where she has lived the bohemian life with a chorus line of buff waiters and long-haired street painters ever since. If I inherited anything from my mum, it’s an unfortunate tendency to listen to my clitoris even when it is giving me lousy advice. More about that later. Anyway, Dad is and has always been a political editor for the Times, married to his job, hard as nails, scary as hell, an old boy from the old school.

  I had thought seriously about following in his footsteps. I worked at the paper for three years after college as a political reporter. I learned the ins and outs of Parliament. I interviewed Colin Powell when he was in London. I did a six-month stint in New York at the UN. I had an affair with a married Cabinet minister. It was that last one that got my arse kicked out of journalism, and it was my dad, true to form, who gave me the heave-ho. I didn’t blame him for it, and I didn’t miss the job. I had been in the media long enough to know it was populated mostly by chain-smoking cynics who despise the people they cover. I was in the wrong biz.

  From journalism I did the shuffle into publishing, not as an editor (God help me) but as a marketer negotiating mass media placements. English translation: I was the one who got Carmela to announce on HBO that she was reading our latest gardening book, which propelled it onto the bestseller list for nine weeks. Never underestimate the power of The Sopranos.

  It was during that period that I first met Dorothy Starkwell. She was a fifty-year-old housewife living in upstate New York in a town called Ithaca, which to this day I still call Icarus. Dorothy worked at the local library, picketed hamburger restaurants on behalf of the animal rights loonies known as PETA, and wrote stories about pandas in her spare time. When I met her, she had published the first of her stories in the United States. This was The Bamboo Garden, which would later become a movie. She was in Frankfurt trying to schedule appointments with overseas publishers during the book fair, but she was a babe in the woods with a sixty-four-year-old literary agent from Buffalo who appeared just as naive about the sales game as Dorothy. We met for vegetarian Indian food at a restaurant across the street from the Messe, and I wound up giving them both some informal advice on book marketing. Little did I know how that night would change my life.

  I enjoyed the work, but I wasn’t cut out to be in publishing. I avoided jumping into bed with my boss (not for want of trying on his part), but I lasted only two years. Despite my working sixty-hour weeks, my salary barely paid the monthly rent on a flat in Rayners Lane. My peers who had been in their jobs five, ten, fifteen, and even twenty years weren’t doing much better. Publishing is not exactly about upward mobility.

  That was when I first met with Lowell Bardwright about the possibility of joining his agency. He offered me a 30 percent raise over my current salary, and a month later, I was at my new desk in Soho. Six months after that, Dorothy Starkwell’s agent in Buffalo died of a heart attack, and Dorothy called me.

  Ten years later, here I am.

  Don’t get me wrong, I have made progress. I made it from Rayners Lane to a two-bedroom flat south of the Thames that is three times as expensive. When I go to Frankfurt now, I stay at the Hessischer Hof. There are at least a few items in my closet that come from Sloane Street. So, yes, I do just fine.

  But there comes a time when you wonder if you will always be working for someone else, and whether you will be content to live out your life earning a paycheck instead of profiting from the fruits and risks of your own labor. There comes a time when you have to prove yourself to yourself.

  For me, as I got out of the cab and stared up at the Regent’s Park Nash house where Guy Droste-Chambers and his publishing house were located, that time was now.

  I was totally unprepared.

  4

  GUY WELCOMED MY BREASTS WARMLY. He hugged them like long-lost friends and stared at them with the protectiveness of a mother lion, as if to make sure they didn’t decide to get up on their own and leave the two of us alone together in his office. He waved them into a chair and asked if they would like anything to drink. On their behalf, I ordered Perrier.

  “Filippa, darling, it is so good to see you again,” he gushed.

  No, he didn’t get my name wrong. I’m Tess Drake, but Filippa is the nickname Guy has used for me since I did the movie deal for The Bamboo Garden. The rich Russian developer who wants to pave over the
panda habitat with the help of corrupt Chinese officials (you try pitching this stuff with a straight face) was originally called Liudmila in the book. However, we ran into an unusual snag when negotiating the film rights, because Liudmila turned out to be the name of the executive producer’s grandmother. So he insisted that we change the villain’s name before signing off on the deal. Like most stubborn artists, Dorothy was adamantly against doing so, until I proposed the name Filippa, which for some reason resonated with her as an even greater paragon of wickedness. Thanks to me, Liudmila became Filippa in the movie, and we were forced to change the name in the books, too, so moviegoers wouldn’t become confused.

  Guy thought the whole affair was incredibly amusing.

  “I have reservations at Locatelli,” I told him.

  Guy loved Italian. I could practically see saliva gather at the corner of his mouth, so I was stunned when he said, “That’s sweet of you, Filippa, but I’ve ordered lunch in for us right here.”

  Immediately, my guard was up. One of the few perks of life as an editor is the opportunity to eat out almost every day at trendy restaurants, sucking up beef, shellfish, and expensive wine, with literary agents picking up the tab. Guy had leveraged the generosity of agencies like Bardwright into eighteen stone bulging out of his five-foot-five frame.

  I raised an eyebrow.

  “New house rules.” He sighed. “Ever since the damn Americans took over, they’re obsessed with conflicts of interest. We can’t accept any gifts, meals, liquor, what have you. It’s insanity. Like a few bob for a nice meal would sway me one way or another. It would be one thing if they adjusted our salaries to compensate for the change, when they know perfectly well that all of us count on the occasional free lunch or cocktail hour to make ends meet.”

  Occasional?

  “But, no,” he continued, “we still make the same pittance of a wage while our authors buy penthouse flats and agents like you scum off fifteen or twenty percent of the cream while leaving the real work to us.”