Face Me When You Walk Away by Brian Freemantle

Josef. ‘It’s very modest, in fact. With simultaneous publishing, you’ll make a fortune.’
    â€˜No.’
    â€˜You get a sensational book that will sell in record amounts,’ stressed Josef. ‘The potential is enormous.’
    Stanswell shook his head, determinedly. ‘The second contract isn’t acceptable,’ he said. ‘If it becomes the Nobel prize book, it will have to be a coffee-table production. To recover anything like the outlay, we’d have to sell for three or four pounds. Maybe more. You’ll have to improve your offer.’
    Josef sighed. ‘What would you accept?’ he probed. Always leave an opening. That was another rule.
    Stanswell shrugged, unhappy at having to list his demands.
    â€˜I’d want some of the paperback rights,’ insisted the publisher.
    â€˜What percentage?’
    â€˜Sixty for you, forty for me.’
    There was just a little too much hope in the man’s voice.
    â€˜Eighty-twenty,’ countered Josef. ‘And that’s a big concession. My government instructed me to retain full rights.’
    â€˜Seventy–thirty,’ tried Stanswell.
    Still a little too much hope, judged Josef. And the other man hadn’t been able to suppress a smile at the first offer. Adamantly, Josef shook his head. ‘I can’t go below eighty,’ he said, in the voice of a man being pushed too far. ‘Even with that, you’ll make a fortune.’
    â€˜The Publishers’ Association would object.’
    â€˜Who’s going to tell them?’ rejected Josef.
    Stanswell made a calculation in his wallet notebook.
    â€˜Both contracts will be in writing?’ he asked.
    I’ve won, decided Josef. Always, it was the best moment. Outwardly, he remained unmoved.
    â€˜Legally drawn up,’ he confirmed.
    â€˜Copyright?’
    â€˜We’d insist on supervising and approving the translation, but you’d have the translation copyright, in the normal way.’
    Stanswell smiled.
    â€˜Agreed,’ he said, offering his hand. Josef took it. Perhaps, he thought, he was worrying unduly. Perhaps the whole thing was going to be as easy as this. In the negotiations to pump Siberian natural gas to the west coast of America, he’d argued a fortnight over one-eighth of one per cent. And won, of course.
    *
    Josef had met Herbert Blyne six years before, at a United Nations cocktail party, when the man had been a new director at Hartner, Edwin and Elper, anxious to prove himself. He had pursued Josef throughout the function, imagining a book based on Josef’s life. The Russian had been offended then by the man’s pushful Jewishness, his refusal to be rebuffed first by coldness and then by deliberate rudeness, Josef remembered Blyne as an artists’ model for the successful American executive, diet trim, a lapel breadth ahead of fashion, a wife and two brace-toothed children in a white-painted Colonial home in Scarsdale and a mistress on 60th and 2nd.
    The encounter was very different from that with Stanswell. Blyne was late calling, hoping Josef would be the first to make the approach. The Russian waited, confidently, and when the phone went thirty minutes after the appointed time, he allowed it to ring for several minutes before picking it up. Blyne was just unable to subdue the anxiety. Josef smiled, satisfied.
    Blyne would have disliked discussing business over a meal-table, Josef guessed. So he invited the man to his suite. Agreeing to it as the venue was another small psychological concession. Apart from his weight, which Josef estimated had gone up by about half a stone, the American managing director was as Josef remembered. He was quite small and very dark, almost arabic, with short, nervous gestures about which he seemed embarrassed, as if to indicate apprehension showed weakness. He probably carries pills in his briefcase, too, thought Josef, and pays fifty dollars a week to a