Bestseller. Olivia Goldsmith

the transom. Nowadays, no one even bothered to read them. Even back then they were rarely worth the bother. But two decades ago Pam had believed—or at least hoped—that she could pluck the new Fitzgerald, or maybe the new Grace Paley, out of the endless pile of unknowns. After reading dozens, and then scores, and finally hundreds of pathetic, poorly plotted, badly typed, ineptly written submissions, Pam had realized it was an impossibility. It was like panning for gold in the sewer: all you wound up with was crap.

      Until, just as she was about to give up, she hit upon Peet’s Gothic tale. Set in a wind-battered New England coastal town, it was the story of a monstrous child, hidden from the town, growing up scorned and resented. It was unbelievably badly written—Peet believed strongly in the use of adverbs—but its energy was undeniable. Pam knew the book would need an incredible amount of work before it was close to publishable, but she was willing to do it. There was something primal about the book, and the resentments of the monster—which mirrored Peet’s own—were deeply felt. After she’d cleaned the manuscript up and made it more presentable, she’d shown it to her boss and begged him to support her in the editorial conference. He’d refused, and—in desperation—she’d gone over his head. She’d lost, and it broke her heart when they rejected Peet.

      Then she had the task of calling him, after she had prematurely written to him with good news. He had said it was the omega—the end of his attempts to be published. After all the rejections he’d received and the false hope that Pam had given him, he was giving up. It was only then that she found out that Peet was crippled. He’d been injured in a motorcycle accident and couldn’t get out of his wheelchair. Today that kind of information would roll off Pam’s battle-scarred back, but then it inspired her for one more effort. She succeeded, to a point. Hardcover wouldn’t touch it, but she’d gotten the paperback division to put it out as a paperback original. Jubilant, Peet had insisted they put an omega on the cover art. It had become his symbol. Not an end, but a beginning.

      But it was the end for Pam. When her boss found out, he fired her. However, a few months later the book went on to sell three and a half million copies in paper. There were a lot of teenagers out there who identified with the resentful, monstrous child. Peet became the nine-hundred-pound gorilla, and bless his heart, he wouldn’t do another book without an omega somewhere on the cover, or without Pam as his editor.

      Of course Pam was not only rehired, but treated with kid gloves. Peet’s next book, once again totally rewritten by Pam, sold half a million hardcover copies and over four million in paper. Two more titles, plus a few other less enormous successes, and Pam got her own imprint, a big raise, and—eventually—her boss’s job. She also attracted, for the first time, the attention of Gerald Ochs Davis.

      Although public opinion sometimes held otherwise, Pam Mantiss knew that she didn’t have her job because of her on-again, off-again sexual liaison with Gerald. She kept her job because she was tough and smart and because she delivered. She avoided the Lincoln’s Doctor’s Dog books and sought titles that moved off the shelf. She had a lot more hits than misses. After all, there were a lot of little editor girls who had slept with Gerald Ochs Davis. But there were very few little editor girls who wound up as editor in chief of a publishing house. Only Pam and a very few others had managed that.

      But times were changing. The book business was tougher than ever. Pam remembered the good old days—only a decade ago—when sales of eighty thousand made a book a bestseller. Now it took three or four hundred thousand. The book market was bigger than ever, but the majority of book buyers were looking for only a few kinds of books. To make things worse, there were barbarians at the gate. The conglomerate that owned Davis & Dash looked at it as only another profit center. There had to be profits, and they had to get bigger every year. The pressure made her head hurt. Pam had a nine-year-old son to support. After she dumped Julio, her ex-husband, he’d headed down to Miami, or maybe the West Coast. Anyway, wherever he was playing bad saxophone and dealing good drugs, he wasn’t paying any child support. She was always short of money.

      Pam lived with an ongoing resentment that came from knowing that while she was smarter and more literate than most of her successful authors, they outearned her twenty or thirty to one. She negotiated the contracts, so she knew. Somehow it didn’t seem fair. Peet Trawley was a prime example. He had been neither bright nor particularly talented. There had been a spark of something, and he had—with enormous help from her—prospered from it. While she, meanwhile, could barely pay Christophe’s private-school bills and the ever-increasing co-op maintenance.

      She gathered up her stuff for the editorial meeting: notes, pad, cigarettes. (She’d promised Christophe that she’d quit, but there was no way she could get through an editorial meeting without even looking at smokes.) As she was about to leave the office a thought occurred to her: Maybe Peet had recognized her in his Will. He had often told her how grateful to her he was, when he wasn’t busy cursing her for the revisions and endless rewrites she forced on him. Peet had never been one for gifts, but he had said things like, “I’ll never forget you.” And “You’ll always be taken care of because of what you’ve done for me.

      Didn’t that mean that he was leaving her something? The realization burst upon Pam like a sunrise. What would a million dollars be to Peet Trawley, especially after he was dead? Never generous in life, he would make up for it now, as he’d always intimated he would. Perhaps that was why the estate lawyers had called Jim Meyer and why Jim had called her, but typically lawyerlike, he had been too discreet to say anything.

      Pam’s legs weakened, and she sank into her chair. Yes! Absolutely. Peet Trawley’s death could very well make her a wealthy woman, or at least more comfortable. She could pay off her co-op mortgage. It would mean one less hefty payment a month. Christophe’s overdue school bills. Summer camp. A fur coat. Maybe one important piece of jewelry—something to remember Peet by. Pam smiled. As her grandmother used to say, there was no cloud that didn’t have a silver lining. Actually, she would just as soon have this lining platinum.

17

       One of the signs of Napoleon’s greatness is the fact that he once had a publisher shot.

       —Siegfried Unseld

      Opal sat neatly, her knees tightly together, her left ankle tucked under her right. She always had good posture and had frequently reminded Terry to stand up straight. Of course, Opal couldn’t stand there in the ninth-floor reception area at Simon & Schuster. She had to sit on one of the curving banquettes that snaked along one wall. There was no back to them, only the back wall—which was also used to display the current successful books on the S&S list—so Opal had to sit completely unsupported, with her back erect and her hands neatly folded on top of Terry’s massive manuscript. Opal had her brown leatherette shoulder bag tucked beside her, and she tried to make as neat a figure as possible.

      She had dressed carefully—black polyester twill pants, a plain blue blouse, and her lavender raincoat. She had been especially careful not to carry anything except her purse and the manuscript, and that not even in a bag. It was difficult to manage, because the manuscript was such a bulky pile, and without a sack, Opal was afraid it might slip from her hands. She had it wrapped up in six large rubber bands—two stretched across the manuscript and four crisscrossed lengthwise. It was awkward and tiring to walk with the heavy burden, but when she stood on the subway or the bus, Opal held the manuscript to her like a baby. When she got a seat she put it carefully on her lap the way she did now.

      The black woman at the reception desk seemed oblivious lo her. Thai, she supposed, was better than the day before--when Opal had been ejected from the lobby of Crown Publishers after trying for almost two hours to get upstairs. Opal had tried other means to get the manuscript read, but so had Terry, and they simply didn’t work. Opal had decided that any means necessary was justified in getting Terry’s manuscript published.

      With the miraculous resurrection of Terry’s manuscript, Opal had found a purpose. Although New York was an unknown maze to her, and publishing an even more frustrating, secretive world-within-worlds, Opal had not been a librarian for twenty-seven years without learning how to research. What she learned was