refused to do it. Taking a salary? That was for guys without balls. He was going to make his own path.
The sixth call had been from Blakely’s. Michael had read about the changes there in a trade magazine, but he hadn’t paid any attention. What the big firms did couldn’t impact on Green Eggs, so why would he care?
Ernie Foxton, the new president, apparently had his own ideas as to why Michael should care. In the call his assistant had made last week, she hadn’t mentioned a job for Michael, no salaried post at all. Mr Foxton, she informed him, wanted to talk about a ‘joint venture’.
Michael was instantly suspicious. He had a tiny, two person Mom and Pop outfit; he was just on the verge of hiring a salesman to make it three people, and the biggest publishing house in New York wanted to set up a joint venture? Why?
But there was.no denying it. Blakely’s were the big time. If he could work something out … Michael saw financing. He saw distribution, not himself and his staff of one in a beat-up old van but fleets of shiny new trucks. He saw a national, not a local catchment area. He saw printing costs plummeting. He saw … he didn’t know what, it was cloaked in a vague, golden cloud.., a vision of opportunity.
But he knew Ernie Foxton’s reputation.
All he had to do was wow the toughest cookie in the business.
41
Ernie relaxed in his burgundy leather Eames chair and assessed the decor of his office. He liked the floor-to ceiling sheer glass walls that gave him such a wonderful, vertigo-inducing view of midtown. The traffic crawled seventeen storeys below him, peaceful from his perspective, dotted all over with the tiny yellow bugs that were the New York taxis. He was an East End boy, and he was ” still trying to get used to the size of everything over here.
The buildings, the billboards, the tits on the women… everything was bigger. The feng shui expert had been round yesterday … was that trickling Zen fountain in the left-hand corner there to help wealth go in or bad vibes go out? Ernie didn’t care. He had a rockery in his bloody office, designed by Zaban’s, the most expensive firm on the West Side. The rumour was they had a commission for the renovation of the Kravis wing at the Metropolitan Museum. He would drop the name at his next dinner party, for sure.
Diana told him that, as usual, everybody had accepted. He, Ernie Foxton, would host a gathering including two fi;aanciers, one famous Vanity Fair writer, the Yankees’ third base coach - he hated baseball, but anything Yankees was golden in New York - a supermodel and … who else? A novelist or two? Whatever. Diana was doing a wonderful job as hostess. Hopefully, she wouldn’t bat an eyelid when he turned up with Mira Chen.
Ernie’s groin stirred a little. Mira. He loved the way she dressed, in those mean power suits and the three-inch spike heels. He knew there was nothing above the holdup stockings, either. It was so easy to imagine her in a little Domino mask with a whip in her hand. Mmm hmm. She’d be really cruel. She wore those heels to advertise it. Even on a warm spring day, it was always spikes for Mira, never slides or sandals. And waist wrenching, tiny corsets under her tight iackets.
47.
It was indescribably thrilling. She gave him orders. Ernie’s cock was as hard as her smile. She took him out to a dark, damp little club on East Thirty-Sixth Street, where a succession of strict girls in black leather hmiliated, leashed and aroused him. He wore a mask. He was no longer the terror of his industry, the feared hatchet man. He was just a slave grovelling around their cruel, contemptuous, anonymous spikes. It was dirty and sordid, and it aroused him in a way Diana had never managed to do.
Sure, she was the perfect arm ornament. He wasn’t complaining. And as long as he could still see Mira …
He’d had a headhunter poach her from her firm and given her a commissioning editor’s job over in popular