“She doesn’t know. She thinks I like politics and that I want to become prime minister. She can see herself having tea with the Queen.”
“So she isn’t aware of your business dealings?”
“No, she would never turn against her parents. Nor would she do anything to alter the English countryside. She’s been hunting since she was a child: she likes animals and doesn’t understand that progress happens only when you make certain sacrifices. The world cannot stop for the sheep.”
“She’ll catch you red-handed.”
“She hasn’t yet.”
“We’ll see.”
“I’m not lying to her, I’m just not sharing a few things with her.”
“Why do you need a seat in Westminster? I’m sure your partners already have a bunch of good friends in Parliament, government ministers too.”
“That’s right. But I don’t want to depend on just them. I need to cover my back. To be someone, not just a pawn they can use according to the circumstances. But the next step is to get that damned seat in Parliament. Being mayor is making me popular.”
“You’re a piece of work.”
“That’s why I knew I needed your help. When I read in the press what you’d done with Green, the shopping mall nobody wanted, how you sold it to the Chinese and got Cathy Major off your case, I was sure you were the man for me. You have no scruples, just like me.”
“Those people…I don’t know who they are but I doubt they consider you anything more than their pawn. When they don’t need you anymore they’ll get rid of you,” I insisted.
“That’s why I want to be at their level. But for now, I’m mayor and the next step is to win a seat in London. I’m not a worthless man of the prairies.”
“You need me more than you imagine.”
“So, do you accept?”
“No, as I said, I want to meet your partners. As for that Bernard Schmidt character, we’ll talk later. I like to work on my own.”
“All right, we’ll talk about the German when you meet my partners.”
—
I told Esther about the conversation with Roy, omitting nothing. If I was sure of anything I was sure that I could trust her.
“He’s proved to be smarter than you. He made you believe he was a simple country man putting on airs and it turns out he is a shark. He manipulated you as he pleased,” Esther declared.
She was right. During his electoral campaign, Roy had played me. Now I was deeply annoyed not to have realized this. I fancied myself a man of the world, but I actually had a lot to learn.
“You were and still are very young,” Esther reminded me, “so it should come as no surprise that Roy took you for a ride.”
“He deceived me,” I complained.
“You were too clever by half. You’re too full of yourself in your role as the bad boy. Also, when Roy called you, after the Green operation, you’d become arrogant. You thought you were the king of the world. You’d cashed out on two bankrupt real estate developers and a rich bystander; and to top it off, you’d been hired by a prestigious PR agency.”
“Mark Scott didn’t like Roy…nor did Cathy…I don’t know why I let Roy convince me to work on his campaign.”
“Because he knew what he wanted and played hardball. He won. He had you. Maybe another agency wouldn’t have wanted to take charge of the campaign. He was going to lose all those votes, he needed to find someone like you to do the dirty work. It was essential that his election had the necessary guise of respectability.”
“But his partners could have helped him.”
“What for? They preferred to keep Roy as their messenger boy in that region. They don’t need him in Westminster. Of course, they don’t need you either, but since Roy is starting to get out of hand, they’ve decided it’s better to get someone to rein him in.”
“And what would you do?”
“I’m not in your place. I’m not like you, I don’t have the same ambitions; my answer isn’t useful.”
“But you could give me your opinion.”
“I could, but you don’t need it.”
“Don’t you want to help me?”
“Of course I do, but you’re the one who has to decide. I think you’re dying of curiosity to meet Roy’s partners. And…you’ll accept.”
“I haven’t made the decision yet!”
“Of course you have. It’s just that you’re feeling insecure; you’re worried Roy might manipulate you again. That scares you. You thought you were in control, and now you see that Roy was pulling the strings all along.”
“Will you marry me?” I asked, worried.
“I don’t know…I still don’t know. I enjoy spending time with you, but is it enough? I don’t think so. I aspire to love, Thomas, and with you, I’ll never have it. We might share other things, and I’m not saying we can’t be happy, but I dream of more than that. We already discussed this last night.”
“You’re very important to me, I wouldn’t want to live with any woman but you. Our marriage would be more solid than if we were infatuated with each other; that stuff has a sell-by date.”
“Yes, but once it’s over something remains. There’s something else…There are the embers of love and those embers maintain the union forever. I see my parents smiling at each other when they think we’re not looking. My father holds my mother’s hand, and when he does, we realize how important she is to him, how much he’s loved her. And because he has loved her, he continues to love her. I don’t know if you understand what I’m saying.”
“Marry me, Esther, you won’t regret it. We’ll always be together.”
“I need to think about it. I need to be sure that I care for you enough to renounce the kind of love I was hoping for. Anyway, now that you’re staying in London you might find someone else, or I might meet someone else in New York. Let’s not make plans, Thomas, not yet.”
“I’m not staying in London. I’m coming back to New York with you.”
Esther laughed.
5
She was right: I stayed in London. When I dropped her off at the airport I promised we’d meet in New York in a couple of days. I didn’t keep my promise. She didn’t expect me to either. Anyway, I missed my visits to Madame Agnès’s house. The truth is I didn’t want to be bothered; I preferred sleeping with any one of Madame Agnès’s girls to spending nights with girls who smile at you and look at you all starry-eyed, like they care about you. Likewise, I hated having to make conversation with women I didn’t know as a necessary step to ending up at my apartment.
Roy was very secretive about the people we were going to see and the place where we’d meet them. He insisted on picking me up at my apartment.
The place was as ordinary as could be, if “ordinary” is a word that can be used to describe a glass-and-iron building where you have to go through several security screenings to enter. The building was occupied by various companies and businesses. They were waiting for us on the twentieth floor, where a secretary greeted us at the elevator.
“Good morning, Mr. Parker, Mr. Spencer…They’re expecting you.”
We followed her to a door that she opened without knocking. It looked like a meeting room; it wasn’t big. A round table with six chairs around it, a leather sofa and a couple of armchairs, a polished wooden bookcase, two or three pictures. Nothing that stood out.
Two men, whose appearance was as bland as the building, were waiting there for us. They were both in their fifties. One in a dark blue suit, the other in gray, both with discreet silk ties and good shoes. They seemed like classic executive types, as likely to be selling detergent or missiles.
“How are you doing, Roy? Mr. Spencer, I’m Brian Jones and this is Mr. Edward Brown. Please, take a seat.”
Brian Jones shook my hand and I liked that his handshake was firm. Edward Brown seemed to hesitate, but in the end he shook my hand as well.
“I’ll be clear, Spencer. We represent a conglomerate of businesses with different interests. O
ur clients demand discretion and efficiency, and that is what we give them. There’s a very high price to pay for indiscretions in certain situations,” Brian Jones said, looking at me directly.
I didn’t bother to respond. I kept looking at him, waiting for him to say something else, as if that slight threat he’d slipped through his words did not affect me.
“Mr. Parker is very satisfied with the electoral campaign that you conducted. He insists on having you work for us. We have excellent PR and communications experts at hand, whose results have been more than satisfactory and whom we have put at his disposal. But Mr. Parker wishes you to be in charge of his affairs. Given that we hold interests with Mr. Parker, we wouldn’t want the discretion which distinguishes us to be jeopardized. So we’re not willing to work with any communications expert if we do not have full control. Our clients are people whose businesses have great standing and social prestige and they don’t want anything to tarnish that reputation,” Brian Jones continued.
While he was speaking, he tried to catch any expression on my face that might give away what I was thinking. But I remained impassive.
“Our dear friend Roy wants to fly high,” Brown put in. “That’s fine, it’s good to be ambitious, as long as he doesn’t do anything that threatens our business.”
“Yes, Roy has his own ideas about how to do things, but it’s easy to make a mistake,” Brian Jones remarked.
“From what we understand, you insisted on meeting us. Well, our concern is doing things as they should be done. We believe that the best thing is for you to join one of the agencies that work under our supervision. You will, of course, have to sign a strict confidentiality agreement. Our clients pay us to ensure that they can operate with peace of mind,” Brown added.
I glanced at Roy, fuming.
“I assured them they can trust you,” said Roy, oblivious to my anger, waiting for me to confirm my trustworthiness to these men.
“Gentlemen, I am grateful for this meeting. I insisted to Mr. Parker that I meet you because it’s important to know if we share the same interests; otherwise there’s nothing more to talk about. However, I have not yet made a decision about whether I want to tie my fate to yours or to the people you represent. I don’t know who they are or what they do, and as a matter of principle, I don’t trust anyone, no matter their credentials.
“I suppose you researched my background prior to this meeting, so it won’t be necessary for me to tell you that I don’t need your money or your permission to start my own business if that is my ambition. In any case, if I decide to work with Mr. Parker I will mark out my own boundaries and decide what I will and will not do, whom I will work with and how. It should be clear to you that I am not looking for a job. I don’t need one.”
They looked at me, their poker faces not reflecting anything—not surprise, not annoyance, not interest, nothing.
“If you are here it’s because Mr. Parker insisted on it. These days we need another way of doing things…Fresh ideas. You are very young. But you should understand that it’s we who set the terms,” said one of the lawyers.
“No, Mr. Brown, that is not the correct equation. If I decide to accept you as my clients, would be more precise.”
I detected a flash of indignation in Brown’s gaze. I knew he was thinking that I was nothing but a stuck-up brat and that as soon as I left the room they’d tell Roy they weren’t going to support his decision to hire me.
“If we decide to work together, does that sound better? Naturally, you would need to adjust to our way of doing things. We have guidelines, norms, which are nonnegotiable. If you decide to work for…with us, we thought you might join GCP, Media and PR Management; it’s a good agency, you may have heard of it. Mr. Lerman, Leopold Lerman, their director, is a prestigious professional. GCP, like other agencies that work for us, is under the supervision of a gentleman who has our total confidence, Bernard Schmidt. There is no one better than him at…the media business. If you decided to join GCP we would ask Mr. Lerman to allow you to put together a small team, perhaps your own secretary and a couple of assistants,” Brown concluded.
“I may decide to help Parker with the fracking business that he and you want to carry out in Derbyshire county, but I’m not sure I want to be involved in anything else. You don’t trust me but I don’t trust you either. You don’t seem to understand that I am not looking for a job,” I replied, defiantly.
“Well, you’ll have to make up your mind, Mr. Spencer. The exploratory drilling for fracking should begin in a couple of months. It’s all the same to us if you decide to come on board or stay where you are.” Brian Jones’s tone was mild and indifferent.
“Come on, Thomas, don’t pretend to be so peevish, it doesn’t suit you. What’s the problem with working for GCP?” Roy cut in.
“An agency where I will be just another employee,” I responded, with more arrogance than was good for me.
“You were also an employee at Scott and Roth,” Roy reminded me. “Why don’t you try it out? If you’re not convinced, you can go. I told the lawyers that I want you to dedicate yourself to me as you did when you were working at Scott and Roth. And as you can see, they agree.”
“I don’t know if I want to work for someone else again, to be given orders, to have to report on what I do and how, and consider whether there are red lines that can’t be crossed.”
“Mr. Spencer, you should draw your own red lines. If you do something you shouldn’t, it will be your problem, never ours, because we’ll never—remember this—we will never ask you to do anything that shouldn’t be done.”
“I see. This is beginning to sound like an espionage movie. The boss instructs the employee to risk his life and get rid of a few select targets for the good of the country, but if he is caught, the boss will say he doesn’t know him, that he’s never seen him before. That’s what you’re saying to me, isn’t it?”
Brown and Jones both scowled. They didn’t approve of my tone, and they didn’t like that I was spelling out what was already implied. They needed someone else to dirty his hands, but they covered their backs so that, if anything went wrong, they could say they had never sanctioned any illegal activity.
I didn’t like men like that. I preferred Roy, even though he had manipulated me. He was a liar capable of selling out his own mother if he could benefit from a situation.
“Mr. Spencer, you’re very young and impulsive. I think it’s going to be difficult for you to work with us. What you’re saying is very far from what we want and, of course, from what our clients want.” Brian Jones spoke slowly, but it was obvious he wanted to dismiss me.
Roy seemed furious. The way he looked at me made me think he would have punched me if he could. I had a split second to decide what to do. I didn’t like those men and they’d made it clear that if I ran into any trouble they would abandon me to my fate.
“When can I meet your man?” I asked.
They seemed disconcerted by the question.
“What did you say?” Brown asked.
“You want me to work with somebody you trust. I want to meet him and speak to him before I make a decision.”
“You can meet Mr. Lerman tomorrow. We’ll call him to arrange a meeting. As for our general supervisor, Mr. Schmidt, he is not in London, but he’ll be back in a couple of days. Perhaps we could arrange a meeting then,” Jones said.
“I’d rather see Mr. Schmidt alone, without any of you present. If Mr. Schmidt doesn’t object, I could take him to lunch. Ask him.”
“Well…I don’t know if that’s the best idea. You’d be meeting Mr. Schmidt, nothing more. The correct thing to do would be for you to first meet with Mr. Lerman as soon as possible.” Brown didn’t like my proposal.
“Ask him. I insist on inviting Mr. Schmidt to lunch, since he’s your man. Roy will tell me if Schmidt accepts, if that’s all right?”
No, it wasn’t all right, but Roy decided it would be done the way I asked. He wasn’t prepared to lose ground befo
rehand and, if there was a possibility I might continue to work for him, he wanted at least to give it a try.
I left the building with a bitter taste in my mouth.
Those two men had given me indigestion. It had been naïve of me to think I would sit down with the people who truly ran the show. Brown and Jones were their representatives. I would never meet anyone other than these lawyers. Those who were really in charge were out of my reach.
—
I realized I still had a lot to learn, that I was a puppet to men like them, even Roy. I needed to think about whether I should move forward or get off a train I wasn’t driving and whose final destination was unknown to me. But one thing I was sure about: I was no one to those two men and if they had to get rid of me they would do it, by hook or by crook—of course they would never stain their own hands.
I needed Esther to watch my back, to help me think, to keep my feet on the ground. I laughed at myself. I’d believed I was smarter than them, but I still had a ways to go if I wanted to measure up to men like them.
I called Esther and told her about the meeting. She listened to me without interrupting.
“Well, what do you think?”
“Roy’s been playing you since the day he showed up at your office at Scott and Roth. What I don’t know is whether he’s as smart as he thinks or is just an ambitious opportunist. We also don’t know whether those men you met intend to continue working with Roy after those fracking companies drill up the county. It might be that once they get what they want, they’ll get rid of him.”
“That’s what Roy must think, that’s why he wants to stack his deck.”
“Of course, but because those men don’t trust Roy, they’ve told him that if he wants to do business with them they’ll have to keep tabs on everything he does. They won’t let him work with you if it’s not under their supervision.”
“Would you accept?”
“Me? No, of course not. I like advertising—I enjoy designing a campaign to sell diapers or perfume, but a press office is something else entirely. It’s about convincing the public of…well, more subtle things. Personally, I’d be scared of those men.”