“What if they can’t make it?”
“They’ll make it, Josh, believe me. Just tell them Victor Matrick changed the time.” She hung up and sat back in her chair with a groan. For years, people had been saying that Victor Matrick, whom everyone called the Old Man, was going insane, and this morning’s phone call seemed to be proof. It was all she needed: If Victor went insane and was forced to step down as CEO, the company would bring in someone to replace him and she’d probably be the very first person to get fired. People in her position always were. No matter how good her numbers were, the president of Parador Pictures would be a vanity choice for the new CEO. And then what would she do? What would happen to her children? To Shane?
Goddammit, she thought, picking up the towel. It meant she was going to have to work even harder, and she was going to have to be smart about it. They’d probably replace Victor from within, which meant she was going to have to start cultivating the various department presidents and CEOs who reported to Victor. The timing couldn’t be worse. Parador released sixteen movies a year, all of which she oversaw—from buying the rights to the material, to hiring screenwriters and directors and the actors and crew, to okaying budgets, making visits to the sets and locations, watching the dailies and giving notes to the editors, and then deciding on the advertising budgets and promotions and finally, attending the premieres—but on top of all of this, she was now in preproduction on the movie that she considered the most important of her career. It was called Ragged Pilgrims, and was scheduled to begin shooting in two months. Ragged Pilgrims was the Big One—the movie that everyone in the business dreamed of making someday—the kind of movie people like her lived for, that made you want to get into the movie business in the first place. But right now, Ragged Pilgrims was like a little baby. It needed constant attention—bathing, feeding, and diaper changing—if it was going to survive to the next phase of its life. The last thing she had time to do now was to be out there schmoozing . . .
Her phone rang and, checking the number, she saw that it was another call from the Splatch-Verner building. Was Victor calling her back? “Hello-o-o-o?” she said brightly.
“Wendy?” a small voice said cautiously on the other end. “It’s Miranda. Miranda Delaney? Nico O’Neilly’s assistant . . . ?” She sounded as if she had all day (which she probably did, Wendy thought), and she said briskly, “Yes, Miranda, how are you?”
“I’m fine . . .” Miranda said slowly. And then, clearing her throat: “Nico wanted me to check with you to see if you could make it to lunch today. At Michael’s?”
“Oh right. Lunch,” Wendy said. She’d forgotten about lunch and probably would have canceled, due to the screening, but she quickly changed her mind. If Victor self-destructed, Nico’s support would be invaluable. Especially as Nico was rising up at Splatch-Verner, secretly angling to become president of the entire magazine division, which would put her just under Victor in terms of power. She only hoped Nico could get the job before Victor lost his mind.
* * *
SITTING UPRIGHT IN THE back of the Town Car on her way to the East Side heliport, Nico O’Neilly was, she thought, perfectly in control. She was wearing a black ruffled shirt that set off her golden complexion, and a dark, navy blue suit that was made in Paris by one of Victory’s special seamstresses. The suit was deceptively simple, and its beauty lay in the fit, which was custom-tailored to skim her body perfectly. She had at least fifty of these suits (some with pants), in fabrics ranging from white silk to brown tweed, which meant that she could never gain a pound, but which also meant that she never had to worry about what to wear in the morning. Her sartorial consistency gave her staff and co-workers a sense of always knowing what they were going to get with her, and gave her the peace of mind in knowing that every day was going to start out the same . . .
Oh God, she thought.
The car was on the FDR drive now and, turning her head, she glanced out at the bleak brown buildings of the projects that stretched for blocks along the drive. Something inside her sank at the sight of all that sameness, and she suddenly felt defeated.
She shifted uncomfortably in her seat. In the past year, she’d started
experiencing these moments of desperate emptiness, as if nothing really mattered, nothing was ever going to change, there was nothing new; and she could see her life stretching before her—one endless long day after the next, in which every day was essentially the same. Meanwhile, time was marching on, and all that was happening to her was that she was getting older and smaller, and one day she would be no bigger than a dot, and then she would simply disappear. Poof! Like a small leaf burned up under a magnifying glass in the sun. These feelings were shocking to her, because she’d never experienced world-weariness before. She’d never had time. All her life, she’d been striving and striving to become this thing that was herself—the entity that was Nico O’Neilly. And then, one morning, time had caught up with her and she had woken up and realized that she was there. She had arrived at her destination, and she had everything she’d worked so hard for: a stunning career, a loving (well, sort of) husband, whom she respected, and a beautiful eleven-year-old daughter whom she adored.
She should have been thrilled. But instead, she felt tired. Like all those things belonged to someone else.
She took the heel of one spectator pump and pushed it down hard on the toe of her other foot. She was not going to think like this. She was not going to allow some random, inexplicable feeling to get her down.
Especially not this morning, which, she reminded herself, was so potentially important to her career. For the last three months, she’d been working on getting a meeting with Peter Borsch, the new CEO of Huckabees, the giant retail chain that appeared poised to take over the world. Huckabees didn’t advertise in magazines, but there was no reason why that shouldn’t change. It seemed obvious to her, but she was the only one in the magazine division who had thought to try to approach Huckabees, a company that most people at Splatch-Verner considered “down-market.” Nico, however, wasn’t a snob, and she’d been following Peter Borsch’s career for years through mentions in the Wall Street Journal. Peter was a man-of-the-people type, but he was also a graduate of Harvard Business School, which he’d attended on full scholarship. With Peter installed as CEO, she was sure he was going to make big changes, and she wanted to be in on the action from the beginning. But to even get a meeting had required weeks and weeks of wooing Peter, sending him handwritten notes and articles and books in which she’d thought he might be interested, including a rare, first-edition copy of The Art of War—and finally, just five days ago, Peter had called himself and agreed to see her.
Nico took out a compact and quickly checked her makeup. Pulling off this meeting wasn’t exactly part of her job (technically it fell into the realm of her boss, Mike Harness), but six months ago, Nico had decided that the bad feeling she’d been experiencing lately was simply the result of feeling stuck. It was wonderful and thrilling and exciting to be the editor in chief of Bonfire magazine, but she’d held the position for six years now, since the age of thirty-six, when she’d become the youngest editor in chief in the magazine’s fifty-year history. And unfortunately, success was like beauty: It wasn’t so exciting after it had been in the house for five days, wearing dirty socks. And so she had determined that she would move up in the company. The biggest position was CEO of Splatch-Verner, but in order to get that job, she’d have to conquer the position right underneath it first, by becoming the head of the magazine division. The only potential stumbling block was her boss, Mike Harness, who had hired her six years ago. But there was a principle involved: No woman had yet succeeded to the position of CEO of any Splatch-Verner division, and it was about time one did.
And she planned to be the first.
The Town Car pulled through a gap in the chain-link fence that surrounded the helipad, and stopped a few feet from the green Sikorsky helicopter that sat placidly on the landing pad. Nico got out of the car and began walking briskly to the helicopter. Before she reached it, however, she suddenly paused, surprised by the sound of another car coming up behind her. She turned to see a dark blue Mercedes barreling through the gate.
This was not possible, she thought, with a mixture of anger, distress, and shock. The Mercedes belonged to Mike Harness, CEO and president of Verner Publications. Naturally, she’d told Mike about the meeting—several times, in fact, and had even suggested that he should come—but Mike had dismissed the idea with a scoff, insisting that he had more important business to attend to in Florida. The fact that he wasn’t in Florida and had turned up at the heliport instead meant only one thing: He was going to try to take credit for the meeting.
Nico’s eyes narrowed as Mike got out of the car. Mike, who was tall and in his early fifties and unnaturally bronzed due to his excessive use of self-tanning products, began walking toward her with a sheepish look on his face. No doubt he knew she was annoyed, but in a corporation like Splatch-Verner, where everything you said, did, and even wore was potential watercooler fodder, it was always imperative to keep your emotions to yourself. If she confronted Mike now, she’d be labeled a bitch. If she raised her voice, they’d call her hysterical. And then everyone would talk about how she had lost it. Instead, she looked at Mike with a slightly perplexed smile on her face. “I’m so sorry, Mike,” she said. “Someone must have mixed up the schedules. My assistant booked the helicopter five days ago for the Huckabees meeting.”
That put the ball back in his court, she thought. He’d have to admit that he was horning in on her meeting. “After all the work we put into getting this meeting, I decided I’d better come along and see this Borsch character myself,” Mike said. And then go back to Victor Matrick and try to tell him how he’d arranged the meeting himself, Nico thought, silently seething.
She nodded, her face arranged into its usual expression of total impassiveness. Mike’s treachery was unspeakable but not unexpected—it was just business as usual for the executives at Splatch-Verner, where basically anything went as long as you could get away with it. “Let’s go, then,” she said coolly, and climbed the steps to the helicopter. As she sat down in the plush leather seat, she thought about how it had taken her three months to arrange this meeting with Peter Borsch, and about three minutes for Mike to ruin it. Mike sat down next to her, as if nothing at all were amiss, and said, “Hey, did you get Victor’s latest memo? He really is losing his mind, isn’t he?”
“Mmmm,” Nico said noncommittally. The memo in question was an e-mail Victor Matrick had sent to all employees regarding the window blinds. “All window blinds should be positioned exactly halfway across each window, or precisely three feet, four inches from the bottom of the sill.” Like most CEOs, Victor, who was in his mid-seventies or possibly even eighty, was notoriously eccentric. Every few months he would take an unannounced stroll through the halls of the Splatch-Verner building, and the result would be these memos. Due to his age and his odd behavior, nearly every executive was convinced that Victor was insane, and couldn’t last much longer. But they’d been saying that for five years now, and Nico didn’t necessarily agree. Victor Matrick was certainly crazy, but not in the way people thought he was.
Nico picked up a copy of the Wall Street Journal and opened it with a snap. Nearly every top executive at Splatch-Verner was angling for Victor’s job, including Mike, and another troublesome executive, Selden Rose. Selden Rose was the president of the cable division, and although he and Wendy were at equal levels, Wendy always worried that Selden Rose was trying to expand his territory to encompass her division. Nico hadn’t made up her mind about Selden Rose, but in a company like Splatch-Verner, anyone in a position of power was capable of turning against you in a second. It wasn’t enough to do your job every day, you also had to spend a good deal of time protecting your position while secretly plotting to get ahead.
Nico stared down at her newspaper, pretending to be interested in a story about the retail business. She guessed that Mike could never imagine that she herself wanted the job of CEO of Splatch-Verner. With its Byzantine intrigues and enormous pressures, it wasn’t the kind of job most women—or men, for that matter—aspired to. But Nico wasn’t ashamed of her ambition, and twenty years of corporate life had convinced her that she could do any job as well as any man—and probably better.
Look at Mike, she thought, glancing over at him. He was leaning forward in his seat, trying to shout something at the pilot about sports over the noise of the engines, which the pilot had just started. Corporations were filled with men like Mike—men who didn’t appear to be exceptionally smart or interesting, but who knew how to play the game. They knew how to align themselves with other powerful men; they were always genial and loyal, they were “team players”; they worked their way up the corporate ladder by knowing whose ass to kiss and when. Nico often suspected that Mike had become CEO and president of Verner Publications because he always managed to get Victor Matrick, who was obsessed with all forms of sports and competition, tickets to every major sporting event, which Mike, naturally, also attended.
Well, Mike Harness wasn’t the only person who knew how to play the game, she thought, angrily. A couple of years ago, she would have been uncomfortable with the idea of trying to take her boss’s job, especially a boss like Mike, who was, in general, a reasonable person. But in the past year, Mike’s behavior toward her had changed. Subtly at first, with put-downs in meetings, and then more blatantly, when he had deliberately left her off the list of speakers at the biannual corporate meeting. And now, this, she thought: trying to take over her meeting with Huckabees—a meeting Mike never would have thought to set up himself, and even if he had, wouldn’t have been able to pull off.
The helicopter lifted off the ground with a lurch, and Mike turned back to her. “I just read a story about Peter Borsch and Huckabees in the Journal,” Mike said. “This is a good call. Borsch might really come in handy.”
Nico gave him a cool smile. The article had appeared two days ago, and the fact that Mike was going to make this look like it was all his idea filled her with fresh irritation. She could no longer avoid the reality that Mike was trying to squash her—in a few months he might even try to have her fired. His appearance this morning was no less than an open declaration of war. From now on, it was her or him. But years of corporate life had taught her to contain her feelings, to never let your opponent know what you were thinking, or what you were planning to do to them if necessary. She folded up the newspaper and smoothed her skirt. What Mike didn’t know was that she’d already taken steps to foil him.