Gideon Read Online Free PDF Page A

for him, too. Hell, a great job. The Journal was looking for someone to cover sports as a form of popular culture, not a game. Profiles. Think pieces. It might even lead to a column. But he had turned it down. The job would have been all-consuming, and he refused to abandon his book. He also refused to abandon New York, so, furious, she had gone without him. She had not understood. How could she? She was thirty then. He was twenty-seven—which, in gender evolution, meant she was somewhere between nine and twelve years ahead of him on the maturity scale. He knew he was giving up something special. But he could not change how he felt.
    He just plain was not ready to get real yet.
    That had been almost a year ago. And now they were hurtling through the rain-slick streets of New York in her car and they had nothing much to say to each other. She took Madison up to Ninety-sixth and shot across Central Park on the Ninety-seventh Street Transverse. Carl lived on 103rd between Broadway and Amsterdam, one of the only blocks on the entire Upper West Side that had somehow managed to elude gentrification. It was a street of scruffy, grimy tenements where unemployed Latino men sat on stoops all day drinking cans of Colt 45 the bought from the bodega on the corner.
    “Since when are you and Maggie Peterson so tight?” she asked.
    “She read my novel. She liked it.”
    He waited for her to be happy for him. Or even impressed. But there was nothing. She gave him nothing.
    “I wonder if the gossip about her is true,” Amanda said.
    “I doubt it.” He glanced over at her. He hated it when she sucked him in like this. “Okay, what gossip?”
    “When she was editor of the Daily Mirror in Chicago, she broke up her top columnist’s marriage.”
    “What, she was having an affair with him?”
    “She was having an affair with him and his wife.”
    “No way.”
    “Way. Believe me, way.”
    “She just wants to talk,” he said as casually as he could.
    “She wants a lot of things. Including her own talk show on the Apex network. She’ll probably get it, too. She and Augmon are totally tight.” Augmon being Lord Lindsay Augmon, the reclusive British-born billionaire who had personally built the Apex empire, piece by piece: the TV network, the movie studio, newspapers in London, New York, Chicago, and Sydney, magazines all over the world, book publishing houses in New York and London, international cable franchises. Lindsay Augmon cast a wide and powerful net, and Maggie Peterson was his biggest, hungriest shark. His miracle worker. She was the woman with the sizzle. The Mirror had been failing when she took it over, and she raised its circulation by 25 percent in six months. From there she took two of his moribund monthly magazines and turned them into must-read trendsetters. And now she had put his publishing house on top.
    “She never likes to stay anywhere for very long,” Amanda added. “She doesn’t like to manage. Her job is to come in and make a big splash.”
    Carl nodded, wondering just what sort of splash Maggie Peterson had in mind for him.
    “Have you met anyone?” he asked her over the clanking of the engine.
    “Tom Cruise,” she answered. “It’s hot and heavy. But keep it to yourself, okay? We don’t want Nicole to find out.” She pulled a cigarette out and lit it from her lighter, filling the car with smoke. “And I swore I’d never get mixed up with a married man.”
    Carl rolled down the window so that he could breathe, the rain pelting him. “When did you start smoking again?”
    “Guess,” she said sharply. Too sharply, and she knew it. She softened. “How about you?”
    “Never. Nasty habit. Bad for the wind.”
    “I meant—”
    “I know what you meant. And the answer is no. Starving artists aren’t very popular these days.”
    “Starving artists were never popular.”
    “Now you tell me,” he said, grinning at her.
    ““Uh-uh,” she said, shaking her head. “It won’t work, so