by Robyn Sisman
Suze felt as if she had been slapped. So many different retorts sparked in her brain that they blew a fuse and she remained silent. Her fantasies of stardom ebbed as she envisaged four weeks of being ordered about like one of Santa’s elves.
Dino was unmistakably gay, well muscled in a tight white T-shirt and about nineteen. He gave her a tour of the department, introduced her to the staff, then very sweetly explained to Suze computer systems she had been using for years. Suze wouldn’t have minded taking him home to play with, but watching him laboriously line up his image on the layout grid was like watching a three-year-old try to thread a needle.
“Listen,” she said, after a decent interval, “why don’t I scout around in the library for some more pictures?” The fact was she was dying for a cigarette, and had earlier earmarked the library as a good place for a quick puff. She made a detour via the coffee machine and was soon ensconced at one of the computer terminals, screened from view by a bookcase. Coffee cup, ciggie, solitude: bliss. She was on her second cigarette when some kind of alarm went off. Suze peeked around the bookcase to see if anyone was reacting, but it was just like England. No one ever took any notice of alarms unless there had been at least three specific memos about a drill. Suze continued with her work, surfing through the photo-library stock. None of the pictures seemed quite right, but she downloaded half a dozen images to show she was willing, and was just exiting from the program when she became aware of a commotion outside. There was the clamor of anxious voices, a deep masculine shout, then the pounding of footsteps. Suddenly the glass door to the library flew open and a terrifying figure in black, carrying an ax, thundered toward her. Suze rose from her seat, cigarette arrested halfway to her mouth, heart pounding. This was it. Her very first day in New York, and she was going to die at the hands of an ax murderer. “Put that out!” he roared.
“Whuh?”
“No smoking. Put out that cigarette!”
Suze opened her fingers and dropped the burning butt straight into her plastic coffee cup, where it died with a sizzle. She now saw that the man was dressed not in killer black but official navy: a security guard. From the street Suze could hear a siren, and prayed it wasn’t the fire brigade called out to rescue her. The knot of curious spectators gaping at her through the glass was bad enough.
“OK, back off, everybody,” the guard told them. “Emergency over.”
“It’s not my fault.” Suze folded her arms defensively. “It’s my first day here. I’m from England.”
“I don’t care if you’re from Planet Zog,” the man growled. “This is New York City. No smoking in public buildings, understand?”
Suze nodded meekly.
“No smoking in taxis, subways or buses.”
She nodded again.
“No smoking in banks, hotel lobbies, sports stadia or public rest-rooms.”
“How about hospitals? Only joking.”
A faint smile of surrender lit his face. He laid down his ax and took off his cap to run a meaty hand over close-cropped hair. Underneath, his head was shaped and pitted like a root vegetable. He had small, deep-set eyes shaded by bristle-brush eyebrows and an aggressive chin. It was an interesting face, in a battered, roughneck way. In fact, he looked just like the sort of person who would drink crappy beer. Suze gave him a brilliant smile. “How would you like,” she asked carefully, “to have your picture taken?”
They did the shoot in the rooftop canteen, using Coke cans instead of beer and a camera raided from the design department storeroom. The guard’s name was Ivan. He loved it, posing ever more ferociously with his ax. Suze gave him some Polaroids to take home to his kids and returned to Dino with the best shots.
“These are great,” he agreed, “but the quality’s too poor. We can’t use them.”
“Why not? It’s only for a dummy. We can run them through that thing.” Suze pointed at the digital scanner in the corner of the department, a giant machine that looked like a futuristic photo booth.
Dino looked at her in surprise. “You know how to operate one of these babies?”
“I should think so,” Suze said breezily. “I tried one out at a trade fair a couple of months ago. They’re brilliant. You could put a Francis Bacon in one end and get your passport photo out the other. Come on, I’ll show you.”
Suze installed him at the controls, and flicked switches experimentally over his shoulder. “You just feed the image in there,” she pointed, handing him Ivan’s picture, “and then . . . hmmm.” She fiddled some more. “Try that white button.” Dino obeyed. The machine hummed to life, swallowed the photograph and projected it onto the screen. Suze smiled smugly. “Warp factor number nine, Mr. Sulu.”
They were having quite a lot of fun giving Ivan a moustache when a voice beside them said, “Don’t tell me someone’s gotten that thing to work.”
Raising her head, Suze beheld a vision of executive womanhood. At the bottom was a pair of perfectly toned legs encased in sheeny tights, at the top a bounce of blonde hair. In between, a stunning pink suit skimmed every curve, the top button faultlessly positioned to guide the eye straight to her cleavage without revealing a millimeter more than was decent. Suze felt suddenly schoolgirlish in her funky outfit.
The woman gave Suze a poised, queenly smile. She had beautiful white teeth. “Won’t you introduce me, Dino?”
The woman was called Sheri Crystal. Cutting short Dino’s stumbling introductions, she reeled off a list of impressive titles. She seemed to be in charge of practically everything. More important, she knew who Suze was, and was the first person to welcome her properly. Glowing under this attention, Suze set out to impress. “I can make most things work,” she boasted when Sheri asked her about the scanner. “The office always sends for me when the computer goes down or they lose a file. I could have made a fortune as a computer hacker.”
“Really?” Sheri gave her a hard look.
“But, of course,” Suze added hastily, “design is my first love.”
“Glad to hear it.” Sheri gave a full-blooded laugh. “I can see you’re going to be a big asset. You must tell me more.” She checked her watch with a neat turn of the wrist. “Drop by my office in half an hour.”
What about Quincy? Suze wanted to ask, but Sheri had already turned on her stiletto heel and was gone in a vapor trail of musky perfume. Suze and Dino stared after her in silent appreciation.
“Whooh!” Dino gave an ecstatic little shiver and flexed his biceps. “Don’t you just love those Hitchcock blondes?” He turned to Suze. “She likes you.”
“Is that good?”
“Do bears shit in the woods?”
Sheri had her own office, naturally, furnished in soft grays and feminized by a vase of Casablanca lilies that trumpeted their heavy scent into the hallway. At the appointed hour, Suze presented herself, hair combed and confident smile in place. Sheri was on the telephone, and Suze hovered, observing the Georgia O’Keeffe prints on the wall, interspersed with small framed mottoes that she had to come close to to read: “Don’t let the past get in the way of the future.” “Success is 90 percent planning and 10 percent balls.”
“You’re right, I don’t understand,” Sheri was saying frigidly. “If the bill isn’t settled by the end of the month we will be instituting legal proceedings.” She cut the line with a manicured finger. “Excuse me, Suzanne,” she said, with an apologetic smile. “So much work! I’ve been here since eight and I’ve hardly made a dent in it. And there’s all Lloyd’s stuff to take care of too.” She sighed. “As if I wouldn’t like a little spell in London. Piccadilly Circus and Harrods and—and all the rest of it. What do you say we get out of this madhouse?” She cocked her head in a friendly manner. “Come on, I’ll take you to lunch.”
They walked a couple of blocks to an Italian restaurant, where they could sit outside under a sunshade, screened from the street by a low hedge. Suze’s spirits rose. Determined to make a good impression, she confined herself to pumpkin ravioli and a salad, with a sin
gle glass of red wine, only to be trumped by Sheri’s order of grilled baby vegetables and mineral water. It didn’t seem to matter. Away from the office, Sheri was wonderfully easy to talk to. She probably wasn’t more than forty: old, of course, but not too old to be enthusiastic about shopping and films and tell Suze places to go in New York. It just showed that you could be successful and nice.
“And have you brought anyone with you to New York?” Sheri inquired. “Husband? Boyfriend?”
“God, no! I’m here to have fun. When I’m not working, I mean.”
The waiter brought espresso for Suze and mint tea for Sheri, and a chocolate each, wrapped in gold foil. Suze, still starving, devoured hers in one bite. The other remained tantalizingly on the plate.
Sheri asked about her work and Suze found herself enthusing about the individual character of typefaces and the great designers she admired. “I’d so love, one day, to produce a piece of work and say, ‘No one else in the world could have done that.’ ”
“The quest for excellence.” Sheri nodded seriously. “I like that. Quincy must be thrilled to have someone so experienced to help him out.”
Suze hesitated.
“Come on,” Sheri laughed, “you can tell me.”
“Well, he is rather patronizing. I can do a lot more than he seems to think.”
“Can’t we all? Don’t you hate it when people feel they have to guard their own little empires instead of pulling together? It can happen in the best of companies, particularly if people want to stop a woman succeeding.”
“Not you?” Suze was shocked.
“Tell me, when you look around any boardroom, what do you see?”
Suze cocked her head intelligently. “Power?”
“Men,” Sheri corrected. “Take Schneider Fox. Who runs the office here in New York? A man. Who runs London? A man. Who runs our art department? A man. Who did they pick to go on the exchange program to London?”
“A man,” Suze chipped in. She was getting the hang of this.
“Exactly.” Sheri acted as if Suze had said something brilliant.
Suze felt warmed by a glow of sisterly solidarity. “It’s just as bad in England,” she confided. “Some of the men are so macho they’ve even got to leave the lid of the photocopier up. My first job in advertising was for a company that had some major sanpro accounts—you know, sanitary products?” Sheri nodded. “Another woman and I joined an all-male team at the same time, and when we arrived for our first day at work we found every surface of our workstations—desks, chairs, computers, everything—covered with tampons.”
“Ugh.” Sheri closed her eyes in horror. “That’s just so degrading. I hope you sued for sexual harassment.”
“Chah,” scoffed Suze. “What we did was send off for some of those impotence kits that you see advertised in cheap newspapers—you know, a leaflet, a magic potion and a sort of plastic pump like one of those gadgets to keep wine from going off. One night we stayed late and put a kit on the chair of every man in the office.” She laughed. “They said it was pathetic, but we kept finding them in odd corners reading the leaflet with a kind of haunted look in their eyes.”
“Goodness. I had no idea things were quite so primitive in Britain.” Sheri took a sip of mineral water. “You know, Bernie told me to fire whoever set off that alarm,” she went on conversationally.
“But I—” Suze began. “I mean, it wasn’t—”
“But I have a much better idea,” Sheri continued smoothly. “Suzanne, I can tell that you are a very talented and creative person, and I would like this time in New York to be a fruitful period for you.”
“Thanks. Um, are you going to eat your chocolate thing?”
“Have you any idea how long it takes to rid your body of all those toxins?” Sheri shuddered. “You go ahead.” She looked around the restaurant, then leaned close across the table. “I’d like to take you into my confidence. There’s a special project I’m working on, very important, very lucrative, very confidential, and I need someone to help me on the design side.” She paused. “Someone discreet. Someone talented. Someone I can trust.” Her blue, unblinking eyes bored into Suze’s. Suze held the melting chocolate in her mouth, feeling that it would be unseemly to chew. “How would you like to spend these weeks in New York working with me?”
“Gosh!” Suze crunched Sheri’s chocolate and swallowed it. “I’d love to.”
Chapter Seven
Tony says thanks for the list. Lloyd swivelled his chair away from the desk, propped his feet on the low window-ledge and frowned out at the canal. Tony who? Which list? List of what?
It was one o’clock on Monday afternoon, the beginning of his second week at Schneider Fox, London, and the first sunny day since he had hit England. It was also his birthday.
Ten minutes ago Dee Dee had called to wish him a happy birthday. What a sweetheart. She must have gone in to work extra early to catch him before lunchtime. It had made him smile to hear her broad nasal vowels, already unfamiliar after only a week, as she updated him on office gossip. The photocopier had broken down again. Sheri had installed the English woman in Lloyd’s office. Bernie had discovered a new diet. No, Lloyd responded, he hadn’t met the queen yet, and yes, it had rained a lot. In among the chit-chat she had suddenly dropped the baffling message from “Tony.” He had called on Friday. When Dee Dee explained that Lloyd was in England, Tony had left his enigmatic message and hung up.
Once again, Lloyd scanned his memory. The only Tony who came to mind was the computer salesman in San Francisco who had dated his mother for a while, in a sweaty, ingratiating way that had sped up Lloyd’s decision to leave home. Lloyd gave a grunt of frustration and lowered his feet to the floor with a thump. He hated mysteries in the same way that he hated muddled thinking or an inept sentence. He toyed with the idea of calling Dee Dee back for clarification, but he knew it was pointless. Dee Dee had her Little Black Book in which she kept a written record of the date, time and content of every telephone message. She would have no more to add. Conceivably Sheri might be able to shed some light on the mystery, but Lloyd had already put in one call to her last week, to which she had so far failed to respond. He didn’t want her to feel he was checking up.
What the hell. The sun was shining, he was in jolly old England and his stomach told him it was lunchtime. Lloyd stuffed his wallet in his back pocket and ran down the steel staircase, out across the cobbled courtyard and through the imposing wrought-iron gates that marked the entrance to Schneider Fox’s London office. It was about as different as it could be from New York’s corporate monolith; a handsome, four-story building of decorative brickwork that embodied the virtues of nineteenth-century industrial architecture. To the front it looked out on an unpromising area of inner-city wasteland awaiting development; its glory was the view from the tall windows at the back, across the canal and over a mosaic of slate roofs sloping up to the green fringe of Hampstead Heath. One hundred and fifty years ago, it had been a warehouse for goods shipped down the canal system from the north, or ferried up from the London docks. Wine, tea, wool, books, coal, everything traveled on barges, pulled by horses along the towpaths. To negotiate long tunnels, the bargemen had had to lie on their backs and walk their feet against the tunnel roof to push the boats through—or so Lloyd had been told. He was still grappling with the English sense of humor. When the railways came, such warehouses had either been demolished or had languished, like this one, for decades, awaiting transformation into chic offices and yuppie apartment blocks. The Schneider Fox building was a time machine: step inside and you were transported forward a century and a half. Behind the Victorian facade it was the epitome of cool, with smoked-glass panels and walls of bare brick. Sleek computers rested on elegant desks of pale wood. Clutter was kept to a minimum, and carefully coordinated in shades of gray.
Lloyd headed down toward King’s Cross station, enjoying the sensation of the warm sun on his face. The neighborhood reminded him a little of the East Village in its com
bination of hip and semi-derelict. Italian delis, dance studios and seedy aromatherapy clinics jostled for space with pungent corner stores run by Asian men in robes and beaded caps, their lips stained red from chewing betel nut. There was a basement pool club frequented almost entirely by Chinese, and a kebab house where a wild-haired Greek grandmother used a hair dryer to keep the charcoal fire alight. By day, a throng of stylish young professionals with their briefcases and portfolios testified to the growing trendiness of the area. By night it yielded to the more menacing presence of junkies, prostitutes, pimps and drug dealers.
He entered the deli. As usual, a violent quarrel seemed to be in progress, held in Italian at top volume. From opposite sides of the store the owner and his wife were shouting simultaneously, encouraged from the floor by an old man seated on a wooden chair. Lloyd had learned by now that they were probably just discussing the time of the cheese delivery. He ordered a Parma ham sandwich, watching with enjoyment as the owner lovingly took down a side of ham, shaved wafer-thin slices on the machine, uttered a squeak of delight at their sheer perfection and laid them carefully inside a foot of fresh baguette. When Lloyd came outside, holding his beautifully wrapped package, he noticed a workman on a ladder across the street, pasting a new poster on to a billboard. A tropical sunset glowed in fiery reds and oranges; in the distance the trail of an airliner was barely visible. “A Passion for Travel,” read the copyline. Lloyd grinned: he had written that himself. It seemed like a good omen. He started back toward the office at a leisurely amble, remembering.
It had all begun at a New York dinner party maybe seven years ago, when Lloyd had been seated opposite a wild-haired character called Tucker who had launched into a tirade against advertising executives. Assholes, he called them between slurps of Californian Cabernet Sauvignon, brain-dead airheads, the new mercenaries of the consumer army. More amused than insulted, Lloyd had announced that he was in the advertising business. It turned out that Tucker, age twenty-three, was marketing director for the media and rock music conglomerate, Passion. The Passion label had been one of the success stories of the previous decade. Every thirtysomething, Lloyd included, had grown up on their tapes and CDs, stamped with the distinctive heart logo, scarlet on black. That night he had traded rock trivia with Tucker until, credentials established, Tucker had explained his problem and invited Lloyd to pitch for the new business. It seemed that Passion now wanted to diversify into air travel. At the time this had seemed a wildly improbable leap. Air travel! It was like Bruce Willis saying he wanted to play Jesus Christ. Even Lloyd took a while to wrap his mind around the concept.
