Amy did know. There had been dreadful late-night meetings at Gaudy Press over the news that Roxanne Craybourne might have suffered permanent brain damage when Kenny Coleman beat her up for the last time. Even Roxanne, on checking out of the rehabilitation clinic where she'd spent two months after leaving the hospital, had decided she couldn't forgive Kenny that. She divorced him, changed her security system, and moved the twenty-four-year-old gardener who'd brought her flowers every day into the master suite.
And then, in eleven weeks, gone on to write the thrilling tale of Natasha, the heiress victimized by her papa's trusted henchman, who embezzled all his money. "Poured white-hot from her molten pen" was the copy Gaudy would run in the national ad campaign.
"And I'm terrified that she'll marry that damned gardener next," Amy told her boss the next morning. "First it was the dreadful surgeon who slept with his women patients, then Kenny, and now some gardener who needs a green card."
Clay Rossiter grinned. "Send her a wedding present. She thrives on that kind of situation."
"I'm the one who has to hold her hand through all these trials," Amy snapped. "She doesn't thrive: she trembles on the verge of a nervous breakdown."
"But, Amy, sweetie, don't you see-that's what makes her such a phenomenal success. She's the helpless waif who crops up in A Clean Wound, Embarrassment of Riches, and the rest. She believes in the agonies of all those idiotic Glendas and Corinnes and-who did you say the latest was-Natasha? Did you persuade her she couldn't call it A Passage to India?"
"It was tough," Amy said. "Of course she'd never heard of E. M. Forster-I finally had to show her the video of A Passage to India before she listened to me. And even then she only agreed to a title change when I persuaded her that Forster's estate would make money from her because her fans would buy the video thinking it was her story. And no, I haven't got a clue whether he's got an estate or if it would get royalties, and don't go talking to Lila Trumbull about it, either, for pity's sake. We're calling Natasha's misery Broken Covenant. Oh, by the way, A Clean Wound hit the paperback list at number two. We're printing another five hundred thousand."
Rossiter smiled. "Just keep feeding her herbal tea. Send her roses. Let her know we're her best friends. See if you can engender some kind of vicious streak in the gardener, assuming he hasn't got one already."
"You do that," Amy said, getting to her feet. "I've got a meeting with one of our few real writers-Gary Blanchard has done a beautiful book, a kind of modern-day quest set in the Dakotas. It'll sell around eight thousand, ten if we're lucky. Broken Covenant should make it possible to give him an advance."
After Amy left, Clay went back to the fax he'd received from Jambon et Cie PLC, his corporate masters in Brussels. They were very disappointed in Gaudy's third-quarter performance. It's true they'd made a profit, thanks to the strong showing of Embarrassment of Riches in hardcover, but Gaudy needed several more bankable stars. They were too dependent on Roxanne Craybourne-if they lost her they'd be dribbling along with the nickel-and-dime stuff, the so-called literary writers which Jambon was doing its best to discard. If Clay Rossiter didn't want to be looking for a new job in six months, Jambon expected a marketing plan and sales numbers to show the list was acquiring market flexibility.
Clay curled his lip. Eighteen pages of numbers followed, a demented outburst of someone's spreadsheet program. Title by title Brussels had gone through Gaudy's list, with projections of sales based on changing the number of copies in Wal-Mart, the amount of bus-side advertising, the weight of paper used in dust jackets, the number of trips each sales rep made to key accounts. And Clay was expected-ordered, really-to give a written response to all these projections by the end of the month.
"The curse of modern business is not tight capital, bad management, low productivity, or poor education, but the personal computer," he snarled.
His secretary poked her head through the door. "Did you say something, Clay?"
"Yes. Idiotic boys-and girls-who've never held a book think they can run the book industry from three thousand miles away because they have a microchip that lets them conjure up scenarios. If they'd ever ridden a truck from a warehouse into Wal-Mart they'd know you can't even tell how many copies the store took, let alone-oh, well. What's the use. Send a note down to Amy that she cannot give her new literary pet-what's his name? Gary Blanchard?-more than twenty thousand. If he wants to walk, let him. If I see Farrar or Knopf on the spine when the book comes out it will not make me weep with frustration."
Isabella trembled in his arms. "I must not. You know I must not. Tour mama, if she saw me-"
Her raven hair, enhancing the milky purity of her skin, cascaded over his shoulders as Albion pulled her to him more tightly. "She will learn to love you as I do, my beautiful Mexican flower. Ah, how could I ever have thought I was in love before?"
Albion Whittley thought distastefully of all the spoiled debutantes he'd squired around New York City. He wasn't just Albion Whittley-there was that damned "IV" after his name, meaning his parents expected him to marry someone in their set. How could he expect them to believe that the gardener's daughter stood head and shoulders above all the Bennington girls he'd had to date? The purity of her heart, the nobility of her impulses-every penny she earned going back to Guadalupe to her crippled grandmother.
"Albion, darling, are you enjoying your little holiday? Isabella, I left my gloves on my dressing table. Fetch them for me while my son and I have a talk."
Mrs. Albion Whittley the Third had appeared on the terrace. Her tinkling laugh and light sarcastic manner made both young people blush. Albion dropped Isabella's hand as though it had turned to molten lava. The girl fled inside the mansion…
"Beautiful," Amy gushed, marveling at her own acting ability. "They triumph over every obstacle in the end? Or is it like Natasha, only able to experience happiness through her granddaughter?"
Roxanne looked reproachful. "I never tell the same story twice. My readers wouldn't stand for it. Albion joins the CIA to prove his manliness to Mama. He's sent on a secret mission to Central America, where he has to take on a drug lord. When he's wounded Isabella finds him in the jungle and nurses him back to health, but the drug lord is smitten by her beauty. Since she knows Albion 's mother is implacable she agrees to become the drug lord's mistress. This leads her to a jet-setting career in Brazil and Spain, and she meets Mrs. Whittley as an equal in Majorca. In the end the CIA kills the drug lord, and Albion, who's never forgotten her, rescues her from the fortress where she's been incarcerated."
"Wonderful," Amy said. "Only I don't think we can call it The Trail of Tears."
She tried explaining how disrespectful this might seem to the American Indian community, but gave up when her star's eyes flashed fury.
"Everyone knows how good I am to the Indians who live on my estate in Taos. I'm not having them wreck my book because of some hundred-year-old battle they can't forget. And after the way Gerardo treated me-he was half Indian, and always bragging about it-I think they owe me some consideration for a change."