“I’m sick of these fucking rope-a-dope strategies.” Duncan-Michaels blinked hard, and I could almost imagine the wet sound the stye made as it slid across his eyeball. “We built this fucking world, and now these ungrateful idiots want to dismantle it, and you want to hand them that ammunition.”
Fred Wimpel, who sat to Duncan-Michaels’s left, placed his hands flat on the table. “If I may.” Everyone in the room turned to him. He looked me in the eye. “This is excellent work, Ms. Shipman. I want to make that clear. And I know it’s good”—he looked at his clients, specifically Emii—“because it makes you all uncomfortable. Ms. Shipman’s correct, I’m sorry to say. Your members had no idea how dangerous this new iteration of the climate movement really was until last year, and you’ve been caught flat-footed. Those other multinational advertising conglomerates want to sell you what you want to hear. Safe ideas that won’t get anyone fired.”
As he spoke, I felt the thrill of the embattled boxer striking back.
Yeats was nodding along. He pointed two thumbs at his chest. “And hey, not all multinational advertising conglomerates are so bad.”
There was tepid laughter. Duncan-Michaels, Emii, and the minions looked like they knew they were about to eat their own intestines.
At the hotel bar, Gruber ordered our drinks. Yeats had gone home to his penthouse and Darnell left to catch his flight back to Chicago. The rest of us were out the next morning.
“We’re either fucked or we got it with that meeting alone,” Linda decided.
McClann looked at me. “You were good, Jackie.” I felt a bit of the tension between us that had built over the last six months deflate.
“We’ll see,” I said. “If even a few of their members have doubts we’ll be dead in the water.”
“Yeah, but the more I think about it,” said Linda, “the more I take Wimpel’s point. They’ve probably met with four or five other agencies, and I’m sure they’re all saying play it safe.”
Gruber returned to the table with overpriced cocktails. We cheersed and practically chugged our first drinks. By the second, Linda was saying, “C’mon, doesn’t good ole Duncan-Michaels just look like a guy who jets off to Thailand to buy child prostitutes?”
We laughed, ridiculed the minions, drank more, and ate a dinner of appetizers. I watched to see if Gruber would get on his phone, possibly to scan the hookup apps for local tail, but he remained with the old ladies. Around nine o’clock, Linda announced she had to call her husband and get some sleep. McClann seconded the motion and came around the table to hug me. “Great freaking job, Jackie.” And she lowered her voice to say, “And I’m so sorry about everything you’re going through with losing your dad.”
“Thank you, Mac,” I told her, feeling a genuine affection that wasn’t entirely the alcohol. They both tottered toward the elevators.
Gruber ordered us each another drink, then the bill. When he tried to pay for it, I snatched his card away and inserted my own. “You don’t make half my salary.” He smiled, held his drink lazily in two fingers, one of which had a tattoo of the Star of David on the knuckle.
“Would you want to come up for one more drink?” he asked.
I was tipsy and still buzzed on the energy I’d summoned for the pitch.
“That’s probably not the best idea,” I said.
He nodded. “Will it be a good idea ever again, you think?”
“You’re fifteen years younger than me. And my employee. So I’m going to say probably not.”
“Yeah, but fifteen years is…” he flipped a hand. “I’m roughed up from alcohol and occasional intravenous drug use. You still look younger than me.” He waved this away. “I’m just saying if all you want is the night, all it has to be is the night.”
Vines crawled up his forearm onto his shoulder. I thought about the red-and-black knife sheathed into the muscle below his groin and the exploding galaxy on his chest. His sleepy eyes watched me.
“I’m going to bed,” I said.
We went to the elevator, and he got off on his floor, and I got off on mine. I cracked open the minibar, mixed whiskey with ginger ale, and fumed that the room didn’t have a VR set. I had to settle for old-fashioned television.
When my phone buzzed on the nightstand, I expected to see Gruber’s name. But it was a new number.
Hi, it’s Fred. Wondering if you had time to grab a drink or a bite? Talk about the pitch?
I was drunk. My fingers dashed across the glass, and I hit Send before I had a chance to question myself.
In for the night. Want to come by my room?
It wasn’t that I invited Fred Wimpel with any intention, but his text told me something. I’d felt it in how he shook my hand when we parted ways after the pitch. A subterranean attraction that tugs at both people simultaneously. Each of them searching for an excuse to act on it.
I mixed him a vodka tonic, and he sat at the desk chair while I perched on the bed. We at least had the pretense of talking business.
“He didn’t like you,” he said, referring to Duncan-Michaels.
“I gathered.”
“These guys, they’re real retrograde. They still think they can sell doubt. They don’t understand they’re about to lose that game the way tobacco did in the nineties. All at once.” He sipped, bringing the drink to thin, pale lips framed by his beard. “But Emii Li Song, she’s a secret advocate of the plan.”
“It didn’t seem like it.”
“It’s her strategy for handling the Coalition’s more intractable members. To be blunt, I can talk them into your firm, but you’ve gotta come up with, I dunno, a Kate Morris vaccine. They want a strategy for her.”
This issue had not come up in the meeting, but I’d been preparing for it for months. There was a recent interview with her addressing the House bill and the Lucas Frisk story, and I’d listened to it over and over. Morris was compelling, confident, and brash, and in that combination, I saw weaknesses she likely didn’t think she had. I crossed my leg over my knee and tugged at the hem of my skirt.
“Everyone’s trying to get at her from the right. She’s too savvy. The way at her is to steer into the skid.”
“What does that mean?”
I felt him hanging on my words, and I liked it. “When I won the Cannes Lion for Sine qua non…” I laughed. “Sorry. What a braggy way to start. But when I won that, it was just a nice idea that got lucky. Adidas was never going to beat Nike at anything because Nike was the indispensable athletic brand. But you marry a charitable campaign to an advertising strategy, and you create a movement. Get shoes to every child in the world. Troubling images of African kids trekking miles for water in bare feet. Adidas could raise prices, sell more shoes, and make sure that growing markets in the developing world would be wearing Adidas, not Nike.”
“I guess I don’t see your point.”
“Adidas wasn’t in a crisis. We just summoned an emotional narrative in people. And that’s crucial. It doesn’t matter how many think pieces are written about the conditions in Adidas factories in some of those same countries. Nobody cares about Bangladeshi sweatshops when they feel like they can be doing some good with their shoe purchase. Intellectually, they might know it’s bullshit, but emotionally they connect.”
“Same thing with the army campaign?”
When a pretty young Texan named Brandy Squires published a piece about her repeated rape by her commander while she served in Saudi Arabia, suddenly military women began pouring into the public sphere, and each story was more horrific than the last. Women’s enlistment fell off a cliff. It wasn’t like it was any secret the military had a huge sexual assault problem, but then it emerged just how hard the Pentagon worked to keep those stories out of the media and cover the tracks of abusers. Reputational fires began with representative stories or images—a spark like Brandy Squires.