The Agency (2 page)

Guy Droste-Chambers is Dorothy’s editor, the man who makes the deals. He is a sleazy bastard, but Dorothy is infatuated with his wordsmithing. Or perhaps he reminds her of her panda hero,
Butterball, with his porky belly and soup dripping down his chin. Regardless, Dorothy will not hear of switching editors or publishers, despite my advice that she could do better elsewhere.

“Take the lunch out of my calendar, will you?” I said.

“You mean cancel it?”

“God, no, keep the appointment but delete it from the agency calendar right away, okay? Don’t mention this to anyone. Just remember to remind me about lunch on Friday.”

“Okay.”

Emma knew better than to ask me why. The truth is, I wasn’t entirely sure myself. All I knew was that I didn’t want Cosima to find out that Guy and I were close to inking a new contract for Dorothy that would gross around ten million pounds in advance money. In agency terms, that’s one and a half million to us. Not that I would see any of that myself.

Which brings me back to that big idea of mine.

I’m thinking of going out on my own. Launching my own agency.

THE BAR DWRIGHT AGENCY
—named for Lowell’s father, the éminence grise of the publishing industry, who started the agency in 1960—is located on the south edge of Soho. We can lunch in Chinatown and walk to the premieres in Leicester Square. Forty of us are crammed onto a single floor with glass closets for agents like me, a rabbit warren of desks for assistants like Emma, and corner palaces for Cosima and Lowell. I can see Lord Nelson in Trafalgar Square from my office window, if I lean out far enough. Never lean out a window when you work at an agency, however, unless you are certain no one is behind you.

All hell was breaking loose when I arrived that morning. Everyone was jabbering into their phones and clacking away on their keyboards. I had fifty-one new messages on my BlackBerry. Lowell would have loved it.

If there is one thing the entertainment world runs on, other than money, it’s gossip. Lowell’s death was the kind of wonderfully risqué event that will keep us all buzzing for days. Truth doesn’t
really matter. I have no idea whether Lowell was found wearing high heels and women’s lingerie, but I’m sure that someone like me will make a joke about it, and a joke will become a juicy rumor, and a rumor will become fact. By Saturday, someone will parrot it back to me as gospel.

I hurried down the hall to my office as quickly as I could, spinning the wheel on my BlackBerry and getting a crick in my neck as I browsed my dozens of messages. I was busy—but much more important, I wanted to
look
busy to avoid getting roped into bull sessions about Lowell and Cosima. I was too full of my big idea and how to make it work without screwing up my life.

“Morning, darling,” I called to Emma as I ducked into my office. She waved back at me and held up three fingers, meaning she was on three calls at once.

I draped my leather jacket on the back of my door and closed it. I took my phone off the hook. I hit a button on the stereo and started a disc by Eminem. (God help me, but I think he is a genius.) I sat behind my desk, grabbed a manuscript from the stack of seventy unread scripts on my floor, and leaned back in my chair and pretended to read.

Nice try.

Marty Goodacre drummed on my window with his fingernails and then let himself inside. “Are you busy, Tess?”

“Would it matter if I was?” I asked.

Marty laughed nervously. “I assume you’ve heard.”

“Lowell. Dead. Dick in hand.”

“That’s rather crass.”

“That’s me,” I said.

Marty was the agency’s business manager and handled the messy matters like salaries, contracts, and accounts. Cosima brought him with her from her old agency. He was thirty-two, had limp brown hair that lay in a greasy pile on his head and a long, narrow face on which he boasted a scruffy goatee. He wore a Marks & Spencer navy suit that hung baggily on his tall frame, and his Argyle tie was loosened so far that the knot fell below the second button on his
baby blue shirt. He punctuated his remarks with a tittering laugh, which I imagine he developed while spending half his life on all fours, having Cosima spank his bum.

“I know this is a difficult time, but Cosima wants me to assure everyone that life will go on,” Marty said. Titter, titter.

“Be brave, Marty,” I said.

“We’ll all miss Lowell very much, of course, but I’m sure you know that he would want us to soldier on. Every change is an opportunity. Cosima specifically wanted to be sure you know how much she values you in this agency.”

“So much that she couldn’t tell me herself,” I said.

“Oh, you can imagine it’s a busy morning—with banks and solicitors and reporters and editors and everyone else wondering what’s going to happen next. It’s important that Cosima demonstrate that someone is in charge. The agency isn’t going to drift.”

“No drift. Got it. Is that all, Marty?”

“Well, Cosima wanted me to check on one other thing.”

Dorothy Starkwell.

“Dorothy Starkwell,” Marty said. “Cosima thinks it would be a great morale boost—what with everyone being down over this tragedy with Lowell—if we could announce Dorothy’s new deal soon. Cosima feels this would send everyone a signal that we’re still on top and we plan to stay there.”

“Tell me, Marty, when you’re wanking off, do you tell your dick that Cosima thinks it would be a good idea if you spurted some jism now?”

Okay, no, I didn’t say that.

I said, “No news to report yet, Marty. Sorry.”

“Cosima was hoping that you and Guy Droste-Chambers were close to nailing down a deal,” Marty told me. Titter, titter frown.

“We haven’t even started. Guy’s been busy. I’ve been busy. Dorothy’s been doing veggies-not-meat, free-the-bunnies kinds of stuff, so she asked me not to hurry. As soon as we sign a contract, she starts feeling guilty if she’s not writing, and she promised all of May to the animal rights crowd.”

“Oh,” Marty said. “Well, yes, we do whatever Dorothy wants. I know that Cosima would love a timeline, though, for when you hope to wrap up the deal.”

“You mean start the deal? Soon.”

“Soon as in this week?”

“Soon as in soon, Marty.”

“Cosima thought she saw a note in your calendar about lunch with Guy on Friday.”

God, that woman doesn’t miss a thing.

“It was tentative. Guy had to cancel. But I’ll keep you posted.”

“Oh, yes, please do that. Cosima calls this her number one priority.” Titter. Coffee-stained smile.

Marty snaked his way out of my office, and Emma Strand passed him on the way in. He contorted his body like a Cirque du Soleil acrobat in order to make accidental contact with Emma’s tits. She closed the door and stuck out her tongue.

“Any news?” Emma asked.

“Just what I expected. They’re salivating over Dorothy’s deal.”

“I take it you don’t want them to know about it.”

“You take it right.”

Emma smiled. She was smart, God bless her.

“You look tired, darling,” I said. “Partying last night?”

“Martinis at the bar in the Soho Hotel until two,” Emma said. “Sienna was there. The popzees had it staked out.”

“Sienna is one of your faves, isn’t she?”

Emma panted. “Are you kidding? Did you see
Factory Girl
? I don’t care what anyone says, I think they were really doing it.”

“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.