Ole Zeke, like some poor misbegotten anthropophage, leaned a pace closer to the fire and spat, his spittlegob sizzling greedily in the cackling flame.
“Seems to me,” said the old-timer [Why not ole-timer? Kossweiller wondered], “that your so-called advert-iss-ments haen’t more than a spit in the fire. Only yer middleminded are gone to ’tribute any importance to ’em.”
Big Jim nodded, half to himself. The old guy was making a curious heap of sense! Who’d have thunk he’d come to understand his own city slicker’s world through the words of a stranger in the Savage West?
He looked up to find Ole Zeke holding an open pouch toward him. “’Baccy?” the old-timer asked.
Bogged down, Kossweiller abandoned the manuscript and left his office.
Cinchy was at his desk, feet up, speaking loudly into the receiver to one of the stable of second-rate celebrities he published: an ex-president turned poet, a ’50s film star who wrote an exposé on his ’80s film-star daughter, a former TV evangelist’s wife turned blandly pseudo-Buddhist.
Farther down, Tal Anders’s door was open, Anders himself staring at his computer screen. Kossweiller went in without knocking, sat down.
“Who is it?” asked Anders, not turning.
“Me,” said Kossweiller.
“Koss,” said Anders. “I’m just on to something here. Absolutely the next big thing. Give me a minute.”
“Want me to come back?”
“No, no,” said Anders. “All I need’s a minute.”
Kossweiller stood. He went over to the nearest bookshelf, read along the spines, removed a slim handsome volume at random. The Secret Lives of Housewives. The back copy read: Not just gossip and recipes for delicious cherry pie pass from one matronly hand to another…. Here, glimpsed through keyholes, the real hidden history of housewives in all its chaleur: high romance, lesbianism, bestiality, S&M, and every depravity imaginable, and yes, even a little tenderness….
“You actually published this?” asked Kossweiller.
“Published what?”
“This.”
Anders turned slightly. “That?” he asked. “Sure. Eight printings in cloth, still going strong in paperback.”
“Is it any good?”
“Define ‘good.’”
“Is it worth reading?”
“People want it,” said Anders. “They buy it. That’s good enough for me.”
“That doesn’t answer my question.”
Anders turned. “Koss, you’re asking the wrong questions.”
“That’s what Cinchy thinks.”
“Cinchy’s absolutely right,” said Anders. “You should listen to him. Remember: he may be a boss of the people, but he’s still the boss.” He turned his attention back to the computer screen. “Just a few seconds more.”
Kossweiller sat down and stared at the back of Anders’s head.
“I mean, why did you go into editing anyway?” Kossweiller asked.
Anders shrugged. “You have to be philosophical about these matters. It’s not why you went in but how you stay in.”
“That’s cynical.”
“Philosophical, you mean,” said Anders. “Come on, Koss, lighten up.” He shook his fingers out, pushed his chair back away from the computer. “There,” he said. “Got him.”
“Got who?”
“What?” said Anders. “Only the biggest ex-KKK memoir in publishing history.”
“Off the computer?”
“From a chat room,” he said. “Ran into this guy attacking the fascists on Nazichat.com and got him to agree to write his book for us before the supremacists blocked him from the chat room. Fortunately, I was the only editor monitoring that particular list.”
“Doesn’t it tell you something that you were the only editor logged on to Nazichat.com?”
“Sure it does,” said Anders. “It tells me I’m the only one smart enough to sniff out the next big thing. Imagine this: you’re a KKK member, happily living out your dreams of white supremacy, maybe even involved in a few lynchings — of course, you’re not directly involved, or at least you won’t be once a good editor gets through with you — when Blammo! it hits you like a ton of lead.”
“What hits you? Did you actually say ‘blammo’?”
“You find out your grandfather was a Jew. Yes, blammo. Why not? I’ll say it again: blammo. So you give up the KKK, reform, and go to Israel to immerse yourself in your newly discovered heritage.”
“Sounds like a bad TV movie.”
“Exactly,” said Anders. “It’s sure to sell to TV. Cinchy’ll eat it up.”
“Cinchy wants me to bake him a cake.”
“A cake? Is it his birthday? I didn’t get him anything.”
“‘You can’t spread frosting on an empty plate.’”
“What are you talking about?”
“It’s a metaphor,” said Kossweiller. “You still remember metaphors, don’t you? It’s the best Cinchy can do. He wants me to stop publishing literature and start publishing blockbusters.”
“But you don’t do blockbusters,” said Anders. “You’re the guy who does literature, who gives us respectability. You’re the eye candy.”
“I’ve got to do at least one.”
“So, do one then.”
“What do I know about blockbusters? I don’t even know what sells.”
“Look,” said Anders, spreading his arms wide. “Don’t think in terms of good or bad. Think accessibility. Think largest possible target audience. Knowing you, if you go against all your impulses, it’ll work.”
He called the agents he knew best, took them to lunch, told them that this time he was looking for something “really big.” But his reputation as a literary editor meant they interpreted “big,” no matter how he qualified it, as literary.
Their best varied drastically. Raymond Knoebler of Knoebler & Goebler sent him the aging Thomas Johnson’s As a Boy One Read Kipling: A Literary Life; Jed Bunting passed along a copy of Sal Lazman’s The Slice, a literary golf novel; Sally Johnson offered a new posthumous collection of occasional pieces and a few stories by minimalist Roland Pilcher, a collection that Kossweiller suspected had been largely ghostwritten by Pilcher’s wife, a writer herself and a professional literary widow.
Carolyn Kiff, however, sent him Albert West’s fourth book, En Masse, a novel of enormous scope and skill, so good that he knew it couldn’t possibly sell. Not enough to sneeze at anyway. Cinchy would never sign off on it.
He sent the manuscripts back, except the West, which he couldn’t bear to turn down. Perhaps if he could find one huge book, one real blockbuster, he thought, Cinchy would let him do the West as icing.
Once he’d run through the agents he knew best, he approached those he generally shied away from. There was Claudia Bart, who offered him a chance for an unauthorized biography of George Clooney, but by the time, three hours later, he’d gained Cinchy’s approval, she regretted to inform him that she’d sold the book to a rival house. There was Robert J. Voss, who offered him a book about American one-hit-wonder bands, entitled Where Are They Now? Most of them were working at Wal-Mart, it turned out. Ducky Hawarth slid in wearing a spangly shirt to suggest Follies, a coffee-table book about dinner shows, musicals, and dancers, “done in three versions, one for each gender.”
There were other books, some of which he made halfhearted offers on. But the day before the quarterly meeting, Kossweiller still had nothing in hand. There was only one lunch appointment left, with a somewhat frayed hustler named Ralph Bubber.