“and the independents are dinosaurs who’ve refused to adapt to an evolving marketplace. If Amazon.com sells more of my clients’ books, then they deserve to beat out the mom-and-pop bookstores.”
Taylor sidled up to the two women just as the color was rising in Brett Silverman’s pale, drawn face. Brett was in her late thirties, a couple of years older than Taylor, and had been around long enough to gain the kind of confidence necessary to deal with the likes of Joan Delaney, but not long enough to let Joan’s over-the-top opinions slide off her without leaving skid marks.
“Hello, ladies,” Taylor interjected. “Has anyone seen the star of the evening?”
“Yeah, where is he anyway?” Joan demanded, her already shrill voice rising a notch.
“No,” Brett said quietly. “He disappeared a while ago.”
“Well, he was upstairs powdering his nose earlier,” Taylor said, “and said he’d be down in just a few. I wondered if you’d had a chance to ask him how this latest leg of the tour was going.”
Brett turned, plainly relieved to steer the conversation in another direction. “I talked to Carol Gee yesterday afternoon. He drew a good crowd at Davis-Kidd. People lined up for hours.”
“How about Birmingham and Atlanta?” Taylor asked.
“We were speculating on whether the deep South was ready for Michael Schiftmann.”
Brett shrugged her shoulders, her sheer silk blouse sliding loosely across her freckled skin. “Not so good. Atlanta, maybe twenty. The Little Professor in Birmingham was a bust, though. Less than ten …”
Taylor grimaced. “Jeez, and the
Brett smiled. “Maybe once you get west of the Hudson, the
“Bite your tongue, girl!” Joan snapped. “We live and die by The List.”
Taylor took Brett’s left elbow softly in her right hand.
“Maybe we need to make some adjustments before the last leg of the tour kicks off. Why don’t you and I step into the kitchen for a moment and make some notes.”
“Yes,” Brett said, her eyes thanking Taylor in advance.
“Good idea.”
“Would you excuse us, boss?”
“Sure,” Joan said, holding up her empty glass. “If you need anything, just call me. I’ll be at the bar.”
Taylor leaned in close to Brett as the two strode arm-in-arm across the room toward the kitchen.
“You’ll have to excuse her,” Taylor said soothingly. “You don’t get to be head of one of the top half-dozen literary agencies in the city by being a shrinking violet.”
“Shrinking violet’s one thing,” Brett said as they stepped through the swinging door into the kitchen. “Dragon lady’s quite another …”
“Yes, she’s abrasive and in-your-face and loud and vul-gar,” Taylor said. “And she also fights like a pit bull for her clients and everyone who works for her.”
Brett held up a hand, palm-out, toward Taylor. “Hold on, girlfriend. You’re preaching to the choir. Remember? I’ve been up against her.”
“Then you understand why her clients are desperately loyal to her, and so are her employees.”
“Yourself included, I guess,” Brett commented.
Taylor smiled. “Yes. And now that we’re away from the crowds and the music, why don’t you tell me what’s really going on with Michael’s tour.”
Brett sighed and leaned against the refrigerator. There was barely room for both women in the cramped kitchen at the same time.
“Well, it’s kind of weird, really,” Brett said slowly. “I can’t quite figure it out, and I’m not sure it’s anything serious.”
Brett paused, crossed her arms, and lifted an eyebrow.
“You’ve seen how women react to him?”
Taylor pursed her lips, thinking of the situation she’d just encountered upstairs. “Yes,” she said. “It’s kind of hard to miss.”
“I mean, the guy’s really good-looking!” Brett said. “Am I right or am I right?”
Taylor nodded. “You’re right, Brett. When you’re right, you’re right.”
“And he’s funny and he’s warm and he’s sexy and he’s personable and he’s smart and-” Brett hesitated for a moment.
“
Taylor laughed softly. “Don’t forget, he’s very close to rich and famous as well.”
“Yes!” Brett exclaimed, her arms flapping out to her sides in an exaggerated gesture. “That, too! I want to say the guy’s a hunk, but that word doesn’t quite fit, does it?”
Taylor thought for a moment. “No, it really doesn’t and I’m not sure why.”
“Half the time I want to jump his bones and the other half of the time I want to take him home and make him dinner,”
Brett said. “Forget that he’s one of my authors.”
“Don’t forget that,” Taylor warned. “Never forget that.
Don’t even think of it.”
“I can’t help but think of it!” Brett placed her hands on her hips and slouched even harder against the refrigerator door. “Besides, I’m only half serious. I’m a lot of things, my friend, but deluded isn’t one of them. I haven’t got a chance with him …”
“Brett,” Taylor said, feeling like she was interrupting a reverie that really wasn’t much of her business. “What are you trying to tell me? Out there, you sounded like there was some kind of problem.”
“I can’t figure it out,” Brett said. “Given what an attractive, charming, sexy man he is-”
“Yes?” Taylor asked after a moment.
“How come Carol Gee hates him so much?”
Audrey Carlisle was the first to spot Michael Schiftmann as he carefully made his way down the spiral staircase from the second floor of Taylor’s loft. The black wrought iron bent and squeaked as he descended, but the din of party chatter and music covered what would otherwise have been an annoy-ing sound. Audrey, a short, severe woman in her late fifties who’d been the
main reviewer of crime fiction for more than two decades, had managed to solidify a comfortable and safe niche for herself. The more academic and literary critics stayed away from popular fiction, especially mysteries and crime novels, while the less accomplished reviewers of pop culture novels had been beaten into submission.
Crime fiction was Audrey Carlisle’s turf, and she guarded it zealously. She’d made careers and she’d torpedoed them.
Writers respected her and feared her, the savvy ones anyway.
But in all her years of dealing with writers and authors-the distinction between the two being very real, she thought, authors considering themselves officers while writers were enlisted personnel who worked for a living- she had never encountered anyone like Michael Schiftmann.
He was what she considered a workmanlike writer. Audrey had briefly reviewed his first two novels and found them perfectly competent but less than outstanding. She worked in a couple of paragraphs about his first book in a column that reviewed a dozen other first novels as a favor to an editor. Schiftmann’s first book had been published as a mass-market paperback, had spent its customary six weeks on the shelves, and then faded quietly into obscurity.
A year later, Audrey found in the basket of review copies that inundated her office every day Michael Schiftmann’s second book. It, too, had been designed, published, and marketed in a completely forgettable fashion and, once again, got a cursory two-paragraph mention in Audrey’s regular column. When a third book landed on her desk eight months after the second, it wound up in a canvas bag jammed full of other review copies and bound galleys and shipped off to the VA hospital in Queens.
