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on their most important author. Moreover, they could not ignore the fact that Seppi had been a model author thus far, especially when it came to meeting deadlines – he remembers Gabrijela’s telling him about an author at her previous company who had overshot his deadline by seventeen years. They had finally decided to make one last concerted effort, before giving up, to publish the novel on schedule – marketing, publicity, and sales commitments had been locked in almost nine months earlier, and if an author as big as Seppi defaulted everyone’s year would be affected. Zach was told by Gabrijela to go to Toronto to reason with his star author. This was easier said than done.
    Great novelists are seen to best effect on the page, but in our time they are expected to be equally adept at performing and enjoying themselves onstage. Most are pretty awful when it comes to public performances or interacting with the media or their fans, but in the relentless, marketing- and publicity-driven business that twenty-first-century publishing has become, no one is spared. Massimo Seppi was noDylan Thomas; his was not an inspiring stage or media presence. They had shipped him to a few festivals and bookstore readings when the first two
Angels
books were published, but none of them was a success and Seppi was miserable. When his star began to rise, he told Litmus firmly that his publicity effort would be limited to one interview apiece for newspapers, radio, TV, and the company’s microsite devoted to him. In common with some of the biggest authors on the planet, as his image waxed and grew gigantic, Seppi became reclusive to the point of near invisibility. As an unknown literary author his anonymity had been guaranteed; after his rise to fame he ensured it was.
    Zach had met with Seppi fairly frequently during the publication of the first two books of the quartet, but he had seen him only twice since
War of Angels
was published. This was something he regretted; in his years as an editor, one of the things he had liked the most about the job was the time he spent with his authors, those brilliant, fragile, unpredictable people, each of them a character in his or her own right. Some became close friends, he’d had a destructive relationship with one of them, there were others to whom he was nothing more than a professional associate, and there were those with whom the connection was even more tenuous, mainly overseas authors or those he had published but once. But he missed those days – he edited only a couple of authors now, and it bothered him that he had so little to do with Litmus’s most famous author and the very first author he had published. This was partly to do with the fact that Seppi lived abroad, partly because he published Seppi intranslation and therefore passed on all his editorial suggestions to the translator, who then discussed them with the author, and partly because since he became publisher the constraints on his time had grown. For some time now Seppi and he had communicated mainly by e-mail and over the past year and a half even that connection was intermittent, with the translator, a woman named Caryn Bianchi, taking over much of the correspondence. His relationship with Caryn had grown strained after she had begun acting as Seppi’s agent and discovered that her author had signed over all rights in the quartet to Litmus; it had got downright nasty after Litmus rebuffed her every attempt to pry rights free, or at least increase royalties. Finally, Seppi himself had had to intervene to patch things up.
    Now she was getting her own back. Zach had spent weeks trying to get Caryn to arrange a meeting with his author, and was on the point of giving up when his phone rang one day and Seppi asked him politely whether he could fly to Toronto for a meeting next week.
    Unlike the last two meetings, which had taken place in Seppi’s house, this time they were to meet in a coffee shop in Little Italy. When he got there