Ithaca (26 page)

“But surely you can stay on, you’ll still hold a large chunk of the company.”

“I could stay on for a while, but I couldn’t work for Morty,” she says ruefully. She takes a sip of her drink. After a while she asks, “Do you know what CEOs really do?”

“Run companies?”

“I suppose we do that, but unless we retain control of some operational areas of our firms, in terms of actual, hands-on work we do very little. Oh, we manage teams, we keep track of earnings and costs, prepare reports, chair meetings, fly here and there, make speeches, formulate strategy, fire-fight … all very necessary, no doubt, but what we are paid the big bucks to do is take decisions, hundreds of them, thousands of them, all the time. As you know, taking a real decision is one of the toughest things to do in business – or in your personal life for that matter. When a junior assistant or manager wonders why the CEO pulls down his or her six- or seven-figure salary, it’s because at every other level of the company you are paid a fair wage for your craft, the things you were trained to do, while at the very top you’re often a long way from what you were trained to do, but you’re being paid for your ability to make decisions when often there is not enough information on which to base such decisions. You’re being paid for your strategic instincts, your people management skills, your intuition. Business schools and work experience can prepare you for the role, but they can’t teach you how to perform it.”

“Do you want me to take over from you?” he asks in some alarm. “I’m not interested, Gabrijela, all I would like is for you to stay.”

She laughs for the first time since they began talking. “No, Zach, I’m not suggesting you become CEO. I think
you are a very good publisher with the potential to become a great publisher, and that’s what you should focus on. The reason I’m talking about the CEO’s role is so you will have an understanding of what life will be like as part of the Globish organization. At Litmus I was CEO but I was an integral part of a small, tightly knit group, and was therefore able to devote a lot of time to what you and the others did, but when you become part of Globish it is likely that you will find your lack of access to the man at the top frustrating. In a company the size of Globish the CEO is spread really thin, not surprising when you realize that he is managing something the size of a small country. Not that you should worry about that too much – it is probably a good thing you won’t be working directly with Morty. In fact, come to think of it, you will in all likelihood report in due course to Hayley, the UK CEO. Now that’s a whole different story.”

She takes a sip from her glass, grimaces. “Champagne tastes foul when drunk out of a plastic glass,” she says. “Let’s go to your hotel bar and have a proper drink.”

They collect their bags, bid goodbye to the people remaining at the stall, and leave, with Gabrijela talking as they go.

“I’m fifty-four years old, Zach, and I have been head of this company for a couple of decades now. It was fun at first, but after a while I found I wasn’t enjoying life so much, especially once Litmus had grown to something approaching its present size. This is probably because I have always been a bit of a worker bee, and while I liked directing the course of the company, and have never shied away from taking tough decisions, I felt I wasn’t as fulfilled as I once was. I wasn’t being hands-on enough. To be
honest, even though I would find it difficult to work for Morty, the real reason I’m going is because I would like to taste and feel books and work with authors again. I’m going to take a long break after I leave Litmus and then I’ll probably start a small company that will publish the sort of books I once published. It’ll lose money, I’m sure, but I’ll be able to afford it.”

She bends down and, to his astonishment, takes off her shoes, stuffing them into her bag and laughing at his expression. For just an instant he glimpses the vivacious young woman she once must have been.

“What they never warn you about at Frankfurt is how much punishment your feet have to take. I’ve always wanted to do this, and as I suspect this will be my last Frankfurt for a while, I don’t care if my stockings are shredded to bits.”

“You sure you don’t want to take the shuttle bus?” he asks.

“Absolutely,” she says firmly, “I’m making a statement here.”

He shrugs and they walk on.

“As I was saying, a couple of years into my role, I came to the realization that being the CEO of a largeish company was fine for the time being. I was competent enough but I wasn’t as excited by the job as I was when I was publisher; that in turn meant that I would never be great at the role, which was the other problem with being CEO. If I wasn’t going to excel, that simply wasn’t good enough for me. Like any industry, publishing has all kinds of CEOs. There are some disastrous ones and many who are competent, who form the majority; they keep their companies sailing steadily onward but don’t have a clue about how to take the big intuitive leaps or formulate innovative strategy. The good
CEOs increase the value of their companies, meet their annual targets, keep shareholders happy, strategize effectively. Morty is one of these; he’s a very clever guy, make no mistake, he wouldn’t have got to where he has otherwise.

“Then there are the beloved CEOs, the ones everyone in the company would kill for, and everyone in the industry would die to work for. They are rare; and even rarer are the game-changers, the extraordinarily talented individuals who are often tunnelvisioned or crazy, who make the sort of intuitive leaps that they themselves can’t explain to you, who see the field of play and take decisions with blinding clarity, rather like how Roger Federer in his prime could figure out exactly where to whack a tennis ball three strokes in advance of winning the point. They will be remembered long after they are gone, the founders of great companies, the fixers of broken companies …

“Morty’s problem is that he would like to be thought of as one of the great ones when he knows he doesn’t have it in him to be one. Not that that is going to hold him back, and in his desire to be recognized as one he will stop at nothing, I fear. He is a few years older than me, and figures he has another ten or twelve years to get to where he wants to be, which is not a whole lot of years in the world of business, especially when he works in an industry that is past its prime, so he’s a guy in a hurry and the acquisition of Litmus is just one of many steps to get him to where he wants to be. It simply won’t do for his ego to retire as the head of the seventh-largest English-language publishing company in the world.”

They leave the fairgrounds behind, and are passing the Maritim Hotel when Gabrijela says she cannot walk one
step further without a drink to revive her. They walk into the lobby, head for the bar, which is relatively noiseless and uncrowded today. She orders a large gin and tonic and he settles for a mineral water.

“I know you probably have lots of questions for me,” she says, “but there is no rush, we have plenty of time to work through them. I just wanted to give you enough information so you’re able to ask the right questions.”

“The only question I have right now,” he says, “is whether I should be looking for another job?”

“Not at all,” she says. “In fact, you are probably Litmus’s most valuable asset after Seppi, so Morty will take very good care of you, he will not ignore you the next time you meet, believe me. But you should also know the kind of person you’re dealing with. I’ve already told you why the fact that he will never be what he wants to be makes him rather difficult and unpredictable, but the real reason you will need to be cautious around him is more complicated. You may know that he and I went out together briefly many years ago. Well, just before we got together Morty was let down badly by a friend and he has never trusted anyone completely since – nor has he been trustworthy. Over the years many of his employees have learned that about him when they were shown the door after they had outlived their usefulness, or became a threat to him, or made a mistake that he thought would reflect badly on him. At Litmus we were truly a family, I would like to think we looked out for each other, but at Globish you will have to learn to watch your back. Remember that and you’ll do just fine.”

I
f 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.