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put it out that we want another book from Zito. You can find anybody that way. If you were lost in an African jungle and said, ‘I’ve got a book contract here,’ half a dozen people would pop out of the bush to sign it. Wiesenthal should have come to us when he wanted to find Himmler. Make it known a publisher wants a book out of someone and suddenly”—Bobby rat-tat-tatted on his desk with his hands—“you’ve got them on the phone or the doorstep. Magic.”
    Clive rose, walked around the desk to peer out of the window, down at Central Park. Yellow cabs beetled along so slowly it was hard to believe these were the same death traps he took every morning and evening. He turned, brows knotted. Magic maybe, but why? “Are you suggesting what I think you’re suggesting?”
    “And what would that be?”
    Clive stared at the ceiling, doing a sort of little half-turn dance step as if this might shake off what could only be a bad dream.

SIX
    T he only thing Clive could do at lunch was to be mysterious. He had made the foolhardy gesture of insisting the meal be “on him” and “on him” at one of the more expensive restaurants in Manhattan. He had wanted so much to enjoy the sheer delight he could take in gloating. Now, of course, he had nothing to gloat about. Lunch would be a trial.
    His two companions were well-established editors at two other publishing houses. Nancy Otis was at Grunge. She was almost unfailingly right in the projects she signed on, purely on the basis of a skimpy outline, but more often nothing but the naked and unembellished “idea.” (“For God’s sakes, if you’ve got Tom Cruise saving the lives of an entire Nepalese village, do you have to see a fucking manuscript?”) Rarely, rarely was she wrong. But there had been those rare occasions, and Clive had basked in one or two of them.
    Bill Mnemic’s success was in getting his nose in other publishers’ bags of oats and then leading off their prize horses in what he called “a moonlight flit.” Bill was British; he was at DreckSneed (Sneed having been the once venerable British publishing house, now part of American Dreck, Inc.).
    Both of them (especially Bill, for raiding another house’s writers was his specialty) had put everything on hold when they’d heard about Paul Giverney’s wanting to make a move away from Queeg and Hyde, his publisher for the last decade. It started out as gossip and, as was generally the case in publishing, had not risen into verifiable fact, probably wouldn’t, until the deed was done. Folks in publishing rather preferred it that way; it led to much more interesting huddles over lunch. The three of them had, in a sense, “grown up” together in publishing. Nancy had been in the publicity department of Hathaway and Walker, long since embalmed and raised to life again by the Dracula of foreign conglomerates, Bludenraven; Bill had started out in marketing, at which he was brilliant; Clive had always been in editorial, had started out as an editor’s assistant. That was twenty-five years ago and the three of them had risen on the corporate ladder almost nose to nose. A competitive spirit was hard to avoid, then, and it had been at first a friendly one. But as the stakes got bigger and publishers were shelling out higher and higher advances to less and less deserving writers (nonwriters, most of them), the spirit had changed. Changed slowly, but changed. It became harder to conceal (and it had to be concealed) spite, rancor, enmity. But these three were good at such concealment.
    There were times when his memory turned to the lunches of twenty years ago, then held in whatever deli was nearby, and he felt threatened by sadness, a great wave coming over him that he barely managed to outrun before it crashed on an empty shore. Feelings like that were bothersome, and he didn’t really understand them.
    The waiter had come and taken their order for wine and food. All three of them always ate the same thing.