Totally Killer Page 6

  But no—I had to be at the staff meeting, and Taylor had to talk to someone about Walter Bledsoe, had to vent, and now, or she would throw up. Already she could feel a gurgling in the gullet. Who else to talk to, if Todd Lander wasn’t available? Her mother? Trey Parrish? J.D. wasn’t answering his phone. And Kim Winter, assuming she could be tracked down, would just insist that Taylor do something: file a complaint, sue, get the asshole fired. Which Taylor didn’t want to do. There was enough grief in her life without filing a sexual harassment claim. Who else to call?

  Taylor’s steel-blue eyes strayed to the embossed card taped to the wall above her desk. Completely on impulse, as if on autopilot, and without any idea of what she might say, she rang the Quid Pro Quo offices.

  Asher Krug was in, and sounded genuinely delighted to hear from her. He picked up on her discomfiture almost immediately. He was a master at reading people, especially women. “You sound upset. Is something wrong?”

  “I had a terrible interview today.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah.” And she unloaded on him, told him the whole story, right down to the bulge in the guy’s crotch. “What a slimebag. You should have seen the look he gave me. He did this thing with his tongue—he looked like Jabba the Hut.”

  “Despicable. Truly despicable. I’m so sorry you had to go through that.”

  Suddenly Taylor realized she’d been babbling for ten minutes—she was more tipsy than she’d thought—and was awash in self-consciousness. “I’m sorry, Asher. I didn’t mean to…I mean, you must be busy.”

  “No, no, please. That’s what I’m here for.”

  That’s what I’m here for—the lousy prick even appropriated my line!

  “I knew you’d understand.” Taylor took a sip of her rum-and-Coke and vented on. “I mean, it’s just, Angie was so cool, you know? I mean, she really liked me. And it’s not like you have much contact with the editorial director, not on a day-to-day basis.” Slamming the glass on the nightstand, she said, “What really gets me is, I couldn’t even tell him off, because he could, like, blacklist me or something.”

  “It’s a conspiracy, is what it is,” Asher said. “Nobody takes us seriously. Not just you and me. Our whole generation. They treat us like children. Like infants.”

  “I don’t think it has anything to do with when you’re born, what generation you belong to or whatever.” Taylor rolled onto her back. “People are all the same. They’re all assholes.”

  He laughed. It was the first time she’d heard his laugh. Most people, when they laugh, they sound silly. Not Asher Krug. Oh, no. Even his laugh was seductive.

  “You need to come in here,” he said. “What’s the soonest you can come in here?”

  “I don’t know. Tomorrow morning?”

  “Why not right now?”

  Why not right now. Why not indeed.

  “I’m all the way downtown. I wouldn’t be able to get there before five.”

  “I’ll wait.”

  “I don’t want to put you out.”

  “It’s nothing. Really. I usually don’t leave till six or seven. Beat the traffic.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Don’t give it another thought. I have paperwork to catch up on anyway. Take your time, don’t rush, get here when you can—but get here.”

  I beat myself up over it still—can you blame me?—but the truth is, even if I had called in sick, even if we had watched Bill and Ted beat the Grim Reaper, or Thelma and Louise drive off the cliff, it would have only delayed the inevitable. Taylor would have met with Asher Krug eventually. He was irresistible, and besides—it was meant to be.

  CHAPTER 4

  A

  s she hurried from the tumult of rush-hour Madison Avenue, with its too-narrow sidewalks, to the spacious lobby of 520, Taylor was greeted by the most dazzling live piano music she’d ever heard. Clearly it was not the same old biddy at the keys. A crowd had gathered around the big black Baldwin, blocking the performer from view. Taylor stood in the back and struggled to see. Only when a couple in the front moved did she realize that the virtuoso at the keys was a pimply-faced kid who couldn’t be out of high school. In jeans and a ripped Megadeth T-shirt, no less. “Wow,” she remarked to a young woman of the dress-suit-and-white-Reebok set to her left. “He’s really something.”

  “What’s even more surprising,” the woman said, “is that he’s only filling in because the regular pianist is ill.”

  “Who is he?”

  “No idea. I heard he got the job through that agency upstairs.”

  Taylor did not stay for the rest of the performance; Asher Krug was waiting for her, after all. And with a glance at her watch—it was half past five—she headed for the offices of That Agency Upstairs.

  The Quid Pro Quo lobby was empty and startlingly quiet, giving it the serene and unused look of an Architectural Digest spread. Then Mae-Yuan emerged from a back room, speaking in soft tones to three impeccably-dressed businessmen, one NBA tall, the others short and squat, all three with long black beards and turbans. Arabs, probably. Who else wore turbans?

  There was a hush as they noticed her. Taylor felt like she’d walked in on her mother and Billy Ray having sex.

  When Mae-Yuan saw her, however, she only smiled. Standing next to the three men—not to mention the towering stone owl—the receptionist was no more than a shadow, a wisp of smoke. “Hello again, Taylor. Asher is expecting you. Please have a seat; I’ll be right with you.”

  The tall Arab, who had a beatific charisma, fixed his endlessly dark, almost womanly eyes on hers. “Such great beauty, you see? This is why women should wear veils.”

  The others laughed, and with stately bows, the threesome took its leave.

  “Sorry about that,” said Mae-Yuan once they had gone. “Important clients.”

  At the end of a long hall was an oak door similar to the one that marked the agency entrance. Taylor followed her hostess that way. “Through the big door?”

  “No. That’s the Director’s office.” The capital D was evident in the intonation.

  “Who’s the Director?”

  “The Director is not in.” Mae-Yuan halted in front of the great door, barring entrance, and gestured with her left arm to the only-slightly-less majestic entryway to Taylor’s right. “This way, please.”

  Thanking Mae-Yuan, Taylor stepped into a side office that was as swanky as the rest of Quid Pro Quo headquarters: antique desk and file cabinets, leather chairs, a velvet chaise lounge, oak paneling. Magnificent view of Central Park. Two paintings: a Modigliani and a Mondrian. Martini stand. And Asher Krug, eyes aglow, hair perfect, and wearing a different but equally GQ-worthy suit.

  “Thanks so much for waiting. It’s really nice of you.”

  “Don’t mention it.” He rose to greet her as she entered; they clasped hands. He had a firm, Teddy Roosevelt handshake. “Well worth the wait, to see you again.”

  This caused the hair on Taylor’s neck to stand on end, but she played it cool. She gestured to the window. “Nice view.”

  “Yeah. I should probably spend more time enjoying it. I would have killed for a little sunlight the last place I worked.”

  “Where was that?”

  “I was a trader at Drexel Burnham, if you can believe it. It’s kind of embarrassing, actually.”

  “Embarrassing?”

  Taylor Schmidt knew nothing of junk bonds, the Keating Five, Michael Milken, the S&L scandal from which the country was still fighting to recover. Even if she had, she could not imagine Asher Krug being ashamed of anything.

  Asher, in any case, did not hear her. He was back behind his desk, rustling through some papers. “Have a seat. You want a drink? Coffee? Tea?” Noticing perhaps the weary look in her eye: “Scotch?”

  He was wearing cologne. The scent had the same effect on her body that Selsun Blue is alleged to have on a psoriatic’s scalp: it made her tingle.

  “What are you having?”

  “Scotch.”
/>   “Scotch, then.”

  “Excellent choice.” He strode to the martini stand, poured two fingers of scotch, and handed her the drink. “Cheers.”

  “Cheers.” They clinked glasses, sipped, and then took their seats.

  “I’m sorry your interview was a washout.”

  “He kept staring at my chest.”

  Asher seized the opportunity to do the same, but unlike Walter Bledsoe he very artfully kept his eyes moving. “I’m not surprised. Men of that generation, they rarely know how to behave around women smarter than they are.” He shook his head as if to say tsk tsk. “What did he say during the interview segment? Or was there an interview segment?”

  “No, there was. But he was such a jerk. He told me my college wasn’t impressive enough. Because it wasn’t Yale. Fucking Yale. You didn’t go to Yale, did you?”

  Asher smiled in such a way—the guy had an incredible ability to convey complex emotions with a slight curl of his lip—that indicated that while he had gone to Yale, he took no umbrage at her comment.

  “Figures.” She took another sip of scotch.

  “It’s the lay of the land right now. There’s a glut of college graduates, so employees can afford to be choosy.”

  “Why is that?”

  Taylor was not expecting a response, but Asher Krug’s espresso-brown eyes twinkled like he was Cecil Fielder locking in on a hanging curve. (The portly Detroit Tiger had hit fifty-one dingers the previous year, a big deal pre-steroids.)

  “Because the baby boomers fucked it up,” he said. “See, back in the fifties and early sixties, not everyone went to college. It wasn’t the foregone conclusion it is today. Most people, they graduated high school and went directly into the workforce. You only pursued a higher education if you were an intellectual, or if you wanted to be a doctor or a lawyer—something that required an advanced degree. Universities were different back then; the students were there because they chose to be, not because society made it compulsory. A college campus was a center for intellectual development, for academic rigor, for personal growth—not a four-year extension of high school, like it is now.”

  One of Taylor’s more formidable weapons of seduction, as I mentioned earlier, was her ability to gaze at men with Miranda-like awe. Her eyes would grow so wide, so reverential, that it was impossible to tell whether or not she was sincere. Those bewitching eyes were now cast on Asher Krug. “So what happened?”

  “Vietnam happened, the war. And the baby boom generation,” he said, his voice so thick with derision she could almost taste it, “shirked its civic responsibility to serve. They said, ‘We don’t agree with what’s going on over there, so we’re not gonna fight.’ I say, if you want to live in this country, you have to take the good with the bad. You elected the president. You elected the Congress. If they say fight, you gotta fight. But the baby boomers didn’t see things that way. When the going got tough, they dodged the draft. They got doctor’s notes, they claimed religious opposition, they feigned homosexuality, they intentionally caught venereal diseases, they fled to Canada. But most of them just went to college—not because they wanted to go to college; because they wanted to avoid combat. Because they were cowards.”

  While Taylor was not particularly interested in what Asher was saying—she had no use for historical context; she inhabited the moment—she was very interested in how he was saying it. The conviction, the ardor in his voice, the fire burning in his dark eyes, the clenching of his strong hands into stronger fists. His passions had been excited; hers, too.

  “Then what? The war ended, and the veterans, these brave and selfless men who risked their lives for us, came home looking for work. But they could’t find any work, because the draft dodgers all had college degrees, and were therefore more quote-unquote qualified. So the college kids got the jobs, and the vets got the shaft. All because these fucking poltroons went and got BAs in health or some other bullshit while their less fortunate and more patriotic classmates were getting shot at by gooks. Now, thanks to these draft-dodging baby boom crybabies, everyone has to get a college degree, just to keep up. The baby boomers fucked it up, like they fuck up everything they touch. That’s why they must be stopped.”

  A look of what appeared to be panic flashed suddenly across Asher’s face. His eyes darted to the door. Only when he saw that no one was there did he revert to normal.

  “Stopped?” Taylor asked, noticing the change in his expression. “What do you mean, stopped?”

  He ignored her question. “Not that the so-called Greatest Generation has been so great, either. The AARP’s lobby makes the tobacco companies’ look Third World. They got all the tax laws changed, to help the retirees. A young family with one child earning thirty grand a year pays five times as much in federal taxes as a retired couple with the same income. Five times! And where is that money going? To pay off a Treasury debt incurred by the baby boomers, with all their ridiculous spending on bullshit social programs. Basically, we are paying off our parents’ credit card bills—at a Merchant of Venice interest rate. And Social Security? Fuck. There won’t be any Social Security when we retire. It used to be that parents and grandparents provided for their young, tried to make the world a better place for them. Not anymore.”

  Asher’s eyes drifted toward Madison Avenue, where strolled middle-aged men in blue suits who were the focus of his rage. When he looked back at Taylor, his gaze was so intent that for a fleeting moment she was frightened. He looked like he could kill somebody with his bare hands.

  “Think they’re interested in their children? Look at the abortion rate since 1970. Look at the divorce rate since 1970. If my 401(k) climbed that high that fast I could retire at thirty. The baby boomers are too selfish to even have children, let alone raise them properly. They only care about themselves.”

  Asher’s Adam’s apple quivered as he spoke. So did Taylor.

  “I never really thought about it like that before,” Taylor told him. “It’s a fascinating take.”

  “No reason you should. The baby boomers control the media. They make it seem like what they did was honorable, for the good of humanity. They’re not about to criticize themselves, certainly. And there’s no way they’d allow someone our age to do it.”

  Beads of sweat had formed on Asher’s forehead. “This is the generation that brought us chemical dependency and the budget deficit and the health insurance crisis. This is the generation that brought us AIDS and prenuptial agreements and Blockbuster Video. This…”

  Asher stopped his polemic then—suddenly, as if some cosmic puppeteer had yanked him backward. He unclenched his fists, found a handkerchief, mopped his brow. “Sorry. I get carried away sometimes.”

  He took another long belt of scotch, wiped his mouth with the handkerchief, and was back to business as usual. “Okay. Let’s get down to brass tacks, shall we? This is how we operate. You pick a job from our master list. You interview, and if you like the job, it’s yours. In two weeks, you come see me. If you’re not satisfied with your placement, we find you a new job. If you are satisfied—and almost everyone is—we discuss reimbursement. Sound fair?”

  Did it sound fair? Sure, it sounded fair. It also sounded—as Asher himself put it at the orientation—too good to be true. How were they able to offer jobs at other companies so easily? How could she be in control of a job interview? Why did she need to wait two weeks to find out the cost of such an enterprise? There was something fishy about all this, maybe even something dangerous. Taylor could sense it. She was intuitive in that way. Or maybe it was just that the Grisham book she was reading had gotten to her.

  “Reimbursement? You didn’t mention reimbursement at the orientation.”

  “It’s not a big deal.”

  “Then can’t we discuss it now?”

  Asher handed Taylor a fat three-ring binder. “Here’s the list. Publishing is the third tab in.”

  As she flipped through the pages, her heart pounded, the pulse of a bad poker player with a straig
ht flush. The list was astounding. The jobs were all for associate editors, with starting salaries in the high twenties (for the sake of comparison, Mitch McDeere is blown away by an offer of eighty thousand dollars from the eponymous firm in Grisham’s bestseller). Starting as an associate editor at a publishing house is like starting as a lieutenant in the army. And the wages were a decent take for a full editor, never mind a recent college grad with no meaningful work experience beyond Planet Hollywood.

  “Is this for real? How is it possible?” she wanted to know. “There’s an opening at Braithwaite Ross for an associate editor at twenty-seven thousand dollars. Walter Bledsoe wouldn’t hire me as an editorial assistant for sixteen-five. How…”

  “Our reputation helps open doors,” Asher said. “That’s why we’re the best. Is that the job that interests you the most?”

  “I really love their catalog. And the people there are really cool. But I don’t think I could work for that guy.”

  “Who, Bledsoe? I wouldn’t worry about him. You said it yourself: How much interaction do you have with the editorial director? Besides, if it doesn’t work out, you can get a new job in two weeks. Think of it as a lease with an option to buy.”

  “I guess.” Taylor took another sip of the scotch, which, while imported from Scotland and beyond pricy, was not as tasty, in her mind, as a Bacardi and Coke. “Twist my arm. I’ll take it.”

  “Excellent. You start in two weeks, but you get paid right away.”

  “Really?”

  “Really.”

  “That’s all I have to do?”

  “Not quite.” Asher opened a Filofax, picked up a fountain pen. “We have to schedule your follow-up. Let’s see…how about first of October? That’s a Tuesday. At noon, shall we say?”