The Agency

by Ally O'Brien

  “It’s nice to see you, too, Guy.”

  He rubbed his balding pate like he was hoping for a genie to pop out. “Oh, I know what I sound like—you’re catching me on a bad day. You can’t imagine how it feels to see this river of money streaming along, and you have to stand on the shore and wave as everyone else paddles by.”

  “If it’s any consolation, I do know how you feel,” I told him.

  I was willing to bet that Guy made a lot more money than I, given his senior editorial role and his unique relationship with Dorothy, who was one of their biggest bestsellers. However, Guy was approaching fifty, and he had his eye on a retirement property in Grasmere. Fifteen years ago, a house in the Lake District might have been within reach for someone in Guy’s position, but the inflated property market had driven prices so high that you had to work in the financial sector in the City to afford the nicer areas.

  “Yes, sorry, of course you do,” Guy told me. “You know how unfair it is. We have to look out for each other, because we both get screwed by our employers.”

  He picked up his phone and told his secretary that I was here. Fifteen minutes later, she delivered cello-wrapped tuna sandwiches and bottles of Perrier in a takeaway bag from Pret. I had to push aside stacks of books to find someplace on the desk to balance my sandwich. Most editors’ offices look as if a flu-ridden library had sneezed books over every available surface.

  We had the obligatory conversation about Lowell.

  “Terrible thing about your boss,” Guy said.

  “Terrible,” I said.

  “Imagine copping it while you’re wanking off. Pretty humiliating. Like having a heart attack while you’re on the loo.”

  “Dead is dead,” I said.

  “Still, he lived the high life, didn’t he, the rich bastard.” Guy wiped a stray bit of tuna from the side of his mouth.

  “Someone told me they found him in a white corset and heels,” I said.

  Guy’s mouth fell open. “Seriously?”

  “Well, it’s just a rumor.”

  “That is bloody brilliant! Oh, that is a treat! You just made my day, Filippa, you really did.”

  I smiled. “You didn’t hear it from me. Don’t tell anyone.”

  “No, no, of course not. My lips are sealed.”

  The entire building would know by five o’clock.

  Guy leaned forward. I could smell his fishy breath across the desk. “So do you think it’s true, that thing about constricting the airflow when you come? What did the papers call it? Erotic asphyxia?”

  “I have no idea.”

  Guy grinned at me. “Ever tried it?”

  “I get my orgasms the traditional way, thank you. Two Nubian masseurs, a bowl of salad cream, and a Rampant Rabbit.”

  Guy roared. “My God, you are wicked! You are wicked!”

  I smiled, but inwardly I was concerned, because Guy was stalling and appeared overconfident. Usually, he was a nervous, down-to-business type. Get the details out of the way. Wring his hands about sales. Leave the flirting for the last few minutes.

  Guy knew how much I was asking for the new contract, and he had already told me he was prepared to make it happen. This should be a no-brainer. The last thing that Guy wanted was to lose Dorothy, although he knew that my threats to take her elsewhere were mostly empty. Dorothy thought that she and Guy shared a mystical literary relationship reminiscent of Eliot and Pound’s. Sort of like “The Waste Land” with pandas. Guy also fancied himself an animal rights activist like Dorothy, although it was obvious to anyone who met Guy that he was a ravenous carnivore who would eat grilled polar bear cub if it was served with enough brown sauce.

  On the other hand, I wasn’t in a hurry anymore to do a deal. I didn’t want anything in writing for a few more days.

  “We already agreed that ten million is the right target,” I told him. “Three-book deal, like we discussed. We can haggle out the royalty terms next week.”

  Guy leaned back in his chair. The frame squeaked ominously. He folded his hands over the dome of his belly.

  “Oh, yes, no problem, no problem.”

  He smiled at me. It was a nasty smile. I didn’t like it. What was going on?

  “Marty Goodacre called me today,” Guy said.

  Shit.

  “Oh?” I said.

  “He told me Cosima was wondering where we were on Dorothy’s deal. He sounded pretty anxious to get a contract signed.”

  “Yes, you know Cosima.”

  “He also said you told him that our lunch today had been canceled and that we hadn’t started talking about the terms of a new deal yet.”

  “Did he?”

  “Yes, he did.”

  “What did you tell him?” I asked, holding my breath.

  “Nothing,” Guy said. “Marty left me a voice mail. I thought I would wait to call him back until you and I had talked.”

  I tried not to sigh with relief, but I must have sounded like a popped balloon.

  “However, you’ll be happy to know that I’m ready to print out a contract right now,” Guy said. He dug into his drawer and pulled out a stapled sheaf of papers. “In fact, I have a model draft already typed up. It’s got Dorothy’s name as the Proprietor in care of the Bardwright Agency. That’s what you want, isn’t it? Would you like to take it with you to review?”

  I hesitated. The bastard knew exactly what was going on.

  “There’s no rush,” I said.

  “I thought you might say that.”

  “Just between us, I’m contemplating a change in my status.”

  Guy fanned himself with the contract. “You mean you’re thinking about spreading your wings and flying from the Bardwright Agency, now that Cosima is in charge?”

  “I haven’t made any decisions yet.”

  “But in the meantime, you’d like to keep your options open. As well as Dorothy’s contract.”

  “As a matter of fact, that’s right.” My face was burning red. I hated that he was playing me.

  “So you’d like me to tell Marty that we haven’t started negotiations yet—is that what you’re saying?”

  I took a deep breath. The girls swelled. Guy liked that. “Yes, that’s what I’m saying.”

  “Ah.”

  Guy got up from his chair. He came around the front of his desk and sat next to the tiny open space where I had my sandwich. He glanced at the office door to make sure it was closed and then stared down at the half-moons of both breasts that were on display.

  “And what’s in it for me?” he asked.

  I folded my arms, blocking the view. “What do you want?”

  “Well, for one thing, I haven’t had a decent meal since the Americans put this fucking conflict policy in place. They have eyes all over London. I can’t go anywhere without bumping into someone from one of the other divisions. You know how it is, don’t you, Filippa?”

  “That must be difficult.”

  “Yes, it is, it is. So I was thinking it might be nice for you and me to have dinner somewhere outside the city. We could celebrate your new venture properly.”

  “What did you have in mind?”

  “I don’t know. Brighton maybe? I love the sea, don’t you? We could even make a weekend out of it.”

  Bastard, bastard, bastard.

  “Get real. That’s not going to happen, Guy.”

  “No? You think about it, Filippa. Think hard. I really believe this is the time to go out on your own. You’ll be a huge success. You’re smart, you’re sexy, and you know how the game is played. I’d hate to see you miss such a great opportunity.”

  I stood up. I was furious, but I couldn’t simply take off my shoe and drive the heel into his groin, which was what I wanted to do. Guy knew damn well that he held all the cards this time. If he told Marty that we had already talked about numbers, then I would watch my biggest client and my biggest deal slip through my fingers. So much for the seed money to go out on my own. I kicked myself for not realizing how vulnerable I w
as and for not thinking about all this weeks ago, before Lowell’s death, before Guy and I started negotiating. I was too complacent.

  “Here’s something else for you to think about,” Guy said, as I gathered up my things and felt like a fool.

  “What?” I snapped.

  “You’ll make, what, fifteen percent of the gross on this deal? That’s a nice piece of pudding to start a business on.”

  “So?”

  “So I imagine you could carve off five percent and not even miss it.”

  “Are you saying you want a kickback to hold the deal? Fuck you, Guy.”

  Guy put a plump hand on my shoulder. I felt him rubbing my skin. “Don’t decide right away, Filippa. Take the weekend. I won’t call Marty back until Monday. But I know Cosima would love to grab one and a half million pounds in new commission money for the agency. On the other hand, I’ll bet even a million pounds would let you get a nice start on your own business. Wouldn’t it?”

  I didn’t say a word. There was nothing to say.

  5

  “WELL, WHAT DID YOU EXPECT, Tessie?” Oliver Howard asked me, as he downed his second shot of Lagavulin and reclaimed his cigarette from the marble ashtray. “Everyone fucks everyone else in this business.”

  “You don’t have to tell me,” I said. I was halfway through a bottle of Narbey Pouilly-Fumé and was a little buzzed. I checked my watch. I still had three hours to go before I needed to be in Mayfair, stripped and ready for Darcy.

  “Dangle a wad of money in front of anyone, and he’ll sell his mum for it,” he said.

  “Except you,” I said.

  “Except me,” he acknowledged. “But I’ve never had a penny to my name, so my poverty actually feeds my ego.” He inhaled smoke and let loose a phlegm-filled, tooth-rattling cough, which you’d expect from a seventy-year-old woman with spots on her lungs, not a twenty-nine-year-old writer. Oliver smoked the dark European cigarettes that form choking clouds outside Parisian cafés, but that was the least of his vices. I was worried about him.

  “How are you, darling?” I asked.

  He shrugged. “I’m all right.”

  “No, seriously.”

  “I’m not dead yet.”

  That was something of a miracle. Oliver was tall and skeletal. He wore a black turtleneck that didn’t hide his protruding bones. He had black hair buzzed down to a #1, which basically means your skull has five o’clock shadow. His face was sallow; his sunken eyes looked haunted and sleep deprived, and his skin hung like a wrinkled shirt on a coat hanger. It was the kind of beaten-down face you’d expect to find on a chronic drug user, and you’d be right. Seeing him smoking and downing scotch was better than seeing him with his pupils so wide you could stare into his brain.

  But what a brain. Singularity blew me away. It was a fantasy novel, which is normally not my genre. I’m not much for sword fights between mole-faced dwarfs and three-eyed unicorns. However, Oliver’s world is nothing like the dungeons and dragons of Tolkien or Paolini. Instead, his book was about a kind of post-apocalyptic Eden with burned-out cities and odd cross-species sexuality; and out of this he managed a retelling of Paradise Lost with a high-energy hero-devil searching for his soul. Sound crazy? Well, you weren’t the only one to think so. No one in the industry knew what to do with Singularity. I am still trying to rescue it. What I need is Tom Cruise as the devil.

  “If you needed something, you’d call me, right?” I asked Oliver.

  His lips cracked into something like a smile. “Sure, Tessie.”

  I wasn’t convinced. On some level, Oliver reveled in his self-destruction. He liked playing the tortured writer, and I wasn’t sure what he would do if I could make him into the success he deserved to be, with fat royalty checks twice a year. However, I knew Oliver’s story, and it wasn’t pretty. When Oliver was fourteen, his father killed his mother with a kitchen knife and then booked his own journey to the afterlife with a supersized injection of heroin. Oliver found the bodies after school. He wound up in a foster home but ran off and spent five years in the blackest streets of Manchester, selling himself, breaking into shops, drowning himself in cocaine. By all rights, he should already be dead or brain damaged, but he was one of the rare kids who wound up saved by his stint in jail. There, he was forced to wean himself off drugs for a few years, and during that time, he wrote stories that attracted the attention of a fantasy mag editor on Charing Cross Road, who recommended him to me.

  I’ve known Oliver for four years now. It took that long to launch Singularity. Publishing is a slow game. Meanwhile, Oliver has relapsed a couple times and wound up in rehab. In between, he writes for weekly magazines to stave off complete poverty and starvation. He is a few chapters into his second book, Duopoly, which is every bit as astounding as the first, but he’s writing it on spec. I’m still fighting with his publisher over a new deal.

  I don’t always understand Oliver and his demons. Even so, I like him. He is my favorite client. He’s the reason I got into this business: to find authors who really have something to say and give them an audience. There are days when I think that Oliver is my ultimate test, and that if I can’t succeed with him, then I should give up this business once and for all.

  Right now, that doesn’t sound so bad.

  “Guy Droste-Chambers,” Oliver mused. “I don’t even know him, and I know exactly what he’s like. I guarantee you he has a nine-hundred-page novel in a desk drawer somewhere that he wrote when he was thirty-five, about a posh Victorian gentleman who discovers what great sex is like with a char girl and gets her pregnant.”

  I laughed. “Guy actually did shop around a romance novel a few years ago. It was pure drivel.”

  “Drivel usually sells,” Oliver said.

  “Well, not in this case.”

  “It’s the curse of the editor. Most of them can see what’s wrong on a page, but give them a blank piece of paper, and they don’t know where to begin.”

  That’s true.

  “Yes, Guy has always nurtured the fantasy of being an author himself,” I said. “It killed him when he couldn’t even publish a bit of genre fluff. I think on some level he hates Dorothy and those pandas.”

  “Don’t you?” Oliver asked, smiling.

  “Oh, Dorothy is a bit of odd, but she’s all right. Look, you never know where lightning is going to strike. I learned that long ago. Quality has nothing to do with success or failure. Singularity should have been at the top of the bestseller list—you know that.”

  “Perhaps I should sign up to be James Patterson’s next coauthor,” he said.

  I gagged.

  “Anyway, what are you going to do?” he asked me. “Are you going to whisk off to Brighton with Guy for a weekend of corpulent passion?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Or slip him some of your commission money under the table?”

  “Oh, please. You know I would never do that. It’s wrong.”

  “It’s a little late to be fretting over your ethics, Tessie.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Oliver shrugged. “Well, you’ve already crossed to the dark side, haven’t you? You’re trying to hide Dorothy’s deal so you can steal it away from the evil witch Cosima.”

  I was defensive. “Dorothy is my client. I’ve put in all the work on her deals and not seen a penny from the millions in royalties the agency has made on her. I’ll be damned if Cosima takes it all away from me again.”

  Oliver waved his empty whiskey glass at the waitress and ignored my frown. He lit up again. We were seated at an outside patio table in a French restaurant near Westminster. The MPs all went here. Half a dozen backbenchers waved to me, because they knew my father. Everyone here lived under the cone of silence. You made sure you didn’t listen to the conversations around you, and whenever someone from the Sun called for a reservation, the tables were always full.

  Oliver’s cigarette made me want to smoke again. I quit years ago, but you never really quit, do you? You’re just one fa
g away from inviting Satan inside your house again. With the stress I felt now, I had a good job not ripping the cigarette out of Oliver’s hand and taking a long drag.

  “I’m not saying I blame you,” he said. “Cosima is the scariest bitch I’ve ever met. She oozes all that treacle at you while she’s sharpening the scissors to cut off your balls. I’m sure her first order of business will be to ask why you haven’t dropped a loser client like me who’s wasting your time and not paying the bills.”

  I didn’t say anything. Oliver was dead right.

  “So believe me, Tessie,” he continued, “I’ll be the first to cheer when you tell Cosima to shove the Bardwright Agency up her arse and go out on your own. More power to you. But you know—and I know—there’s only one right thing to do in this situation.”

  “And that is?” I asked.

  “Close the deal with Guy, and then walk away.”

  I stared at him. “Walk away?”

  “Leave it with Bardwright. Forget about it.”

  I put down my glass of wine. I thought for a moment I might have stepped over into Oliver’s Singularity universe. When I looked around, however, I was still in London, and there were no mutant reptiles lurking in doorways, sporting forked tongues and Scarlett Johansson’s breasts.

  “That’s the scotch talking, Oliver,” I said. “I am not walking away from one and a half million pounds. Are you totally bonkers?”

  “It’s not yours.”

  “The hell it’s not. My client, my deal, my negotiations.”

  “Except you have an employment contract with the agency that says otherwise. Right?”

  “Fuck the contract.”

  Oliver shook his head. “I know you, Tessie. You are better than them. You won’t sell your soul. Even for a million pounds. You don’t have it in you.”

  “I’m not sure you know me at all. Don’t you understand? That deal gives me the cash I need to launch the agency. Without that, what the hell do I have?”

  Oliver shrugged. “True enough. I know that you’re not going to pay your bills with the commissions you get on my lavish royalties.”