The Agency Read Free Page B

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