The letter was typed. Dear Sam I’m sorry to have to write like this, rather than phone, but Sergio and Nick have advised me that it’s best to do these things on a formal basis.
Sergio was the lawyer. Nick was the Barcelona-based boyfriend. Gaddis wasn’t exactly enthusiastic about either of them. The situation is that N and I are desperately short of money because of the restaurant and I need more help with the school fees. I know you’ve already been more than generous, but I can’t meet my half of the payments for this term or the next. Is there any possible way you could help? Min loves the school and is already incredibly good at Catalan and Spanish. The last thing either of us wants is to take her out and separate her from all the friends she’s made. The other school is miles away and awful, for all sorts of reasons that are too depressing to go into. (I’ve heard reports of bullying, of racism against an Indian child, even an accident in the playground that was covered up by staff.) You get the picture. Will you write and let me know what you think? I’m sorry to have to ask you to help with this because we always agreed to go fifty/fifty. But I don’t see that I have any choice. The figure we’re talking about is in the region of €5000. When the restaurant starts turning a profit, I promise to pay you back. I hope everything is OK in London/at UCL etc. Give my love to everybody — Hasta luego Natasha x
Sam Gaddis wasn’t the sort of man who panicked, but equally he wasn’t the sort of man who had twenty-five thousand quid lying around for random tax bills and school fees. He’d already taken out two separate?20,000 loans to pay off debts accumulated by his divorce; the monthly interest repayments alone amounted to?800, on top of a?190,000 mortgage.
He took the tube to UCL and arranged to meet his literary agent for lunch. It was the only solution. He would have to work his way out of the crisis. He would have to write.
They met, two days later, at a small, exorbitantly expensive restaurant on High Street Kensington where the only other clientele were bored Holland Park housewives with lovers half their age and an elderly Greek businessman who took almost an hour to eat a single bowl of risotto.
Robert Paterson, UK director of Dippel, Gordon and Kahla, Literary Agents since 1968, had more important clients than Dr Samuel Gaddis — soap stars, for example, who brought in 15 per cent commissions on six-figure autobiography deals — but none with whom he would rather have spent three hours in an overpriced London restaurant.
‘You mentioned that you had money worries?’ he said as they ordered a second bottle of wine. Paterson was three years off retirement and the sole surviving member of the generation which still believed in the dignity of the three-Martini lunch. ‘Tax?’
‘How did you know?’
‘Always is, this time of year.’ Paterson nodded knowingly as he rounded off a veal cutlet. ‘Most of my clients have less idea how to manage their finances than Champion the Wonder Horse. I get three telephone calls a week from some of them. “Where’s my foreign rights deal? Where’s the cash from the paperback?” I’m not a literary agent any more. I’m a personal financial adviser.’
Gaddis smiled a crooked smile. ‘And what financial advice would you give me?’
‘Depends how much you need.’
‘Twenty-one grand for Her Majesty’s Inland Revenue, payable last Tuesday. Four grand for Min’s school fees. Likely to rise to ten or twenty in the next couple of years unless Natasha’s boyfriend suddenly figures out that being the manager of a successful restaurant in Barcelona doesn’t involve spending three days a week working on his offpiste skiing in the Pyrenees. They’re chucking euros into the Mediterranean.’
‘And UCL can’t help?’
Gaddis thanked the waiter, who had poured more wine into his glass. ‘I’m forty-three. My salary won’t go much higher unless I get Chair. The mortgage alone is costing me a third of what I earn. Short of stealing first editions of Pride and Prejudice from the London Library, I’m not looking at raising the money any time soon.’
‘So you need a new deal?’ Paterson dabbed the corners of his mouth with a napkin.
‘I need a new deal, Bob.’
‘What did I get you last time?’
‘South of five grand.’
Paterson looked mildly embarrassed to have brokered such a meagre contract. He was a huge man, requiring a two-foot gap between his chair and the table. He folded his arms so that they were resting on the summit of his voluminous belly. A Buddha tailored by Savile Row.
‘So we’re talking what? Thirty thousand pounds as a signature advance?’
A small droplet of gravy had appeared at the edge of Paterson’s shirt. Gaddis nodded and his agent produced a stagey sigh.
‘Well, if you want that sort of money quickly, you’ll have to write a strictly commercial book, almost certainly within twelve months and probably under a pseudonym, so that you have the impact of a debut writer. That’s the only way I can get you a serious cheque in today’s market. A historical comparison between Sergei Platov and Peter the Great, God bless you, isn’t going to cut it. With the best will in the world, Sam, nobody really cares about journalists getting bumped off in Russia. Your average punter doesn’t have a clue who Peter the Great is. Does he play for Liverpool? Was he knocked out in the final of Britain’s Got Talent? Do you see the problem?’
Gaddis was nodding. He saw the problem. The trouble was, he had no aptitude for forging commercial bestsellers which he could write in twelve months. There were lectures he had given at UCL which had taken him more than a year to research and prepare. For an astonishing moment, during which Paterson was putting on a pair of half-moon spectacles and scanning the pudding menu, he reflected on the very real possibility that he would have to moonlight as a cab driver in order to raise the cash.
Then he remembered Holly Levette.
‘What about the KGB?’
‘What about it?’ Paterson looked up from the menu and did a comic double-take around the restaurant. ‘Are they here?’
Gaddis smiled at the joke. A small boy walked past the table and disappeared towards the downstairs bathroom. ‘What about a history of Soviet and Russian intelligence?’ he said. ‘Something with spies in it?’
‘As a series of novels?’
‘If you like.’
Paterson peered over the spectacles, a father suddenly sceptical of a wayward son. ‘I don’t really see you as a novelist, Sam,’ he said. ‘Fiction isn’t your thing. It would take you far too long to complete a manuscript. You should be thinking along the lines of a non-fiction title which can spin off into a TV series, a documentary with you in front of the camera. If you’re serious about making money, you need to start being serious about your image. No future in being a fusty old academic these days. Look at Schama. You have to multi-task. I’ve always said you’d be a natural for television.’
Gaddis hid a thought behind his glass of wine. Maybe it was time. Min was in Barcelona. He was completely broke. What did he have to lose by getting his face on television?
‘Go on, then. Give me the inside take.’
Paterson duly obliged. ‘Well, when it comes to books about Russia, Chechnya is a no-no. Nobody gives a monkey’s.’ He broke off to order ‘just a smidgen of tiramisu, just a smidgen ’ from the waiter. ‘Ditto Yeltsin, ditto Gorbachev, ditto His Rampaging Egoness, the late lamented Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Done to death. You’ve written about Platov, Chernobyl is old hat, so — yes — you might as well stick to spies. But we’d need poisoned umbrellas, secret KGB plots to knock off Reagan or Thatcher, irrefutable evidence that Lee Harvey Oswald was the lovechild of Rudolf Nureyev and Svetlana Stalin. I’m talking cover of the Daily Mail. I’m talking scoop.’
The Greek businessman had finally conceded defeat at the hands of his risotto. Gaddis was at once flattered and bemused that Paterson should consider him capable of unearthing a story on that scale. He was also concerned that Holly Levette’s boxes would contain nothing but second-hand, irrelevant dross from dubious sources in the Russian underworld. Right now, though, those boxes were all that he had to go on.