The Darkest of Shadows

by Lisse Smith

  “Just how much ‘protection’ are we talking here?” I asked cautiously. “Can I go grocery shopping?” He shook his head slowly. “To the movies?” Again with the negative. “On a date?” My voice might have risen in volume somewhat as the negatives just kept on coming. Not that I intended to go on a date with anyone, but it was the principle of the thing.

  “You aren’t going to have time to date anyone,” Lawrence countered in a deep voice.

  “You don’t own me twenty-four hours a day, Lawrence,” I snapped back. At least I didn’t think he did.

  “I can if I need to.”

  I would have given him a mouthful over that, but luckily for him, Allan decided to announce himself at that moment.

  “Monterey.” Allan Marsh acknowledged Lawrence as he walked purposefully into the room. He was an older man, edging fifty if I had to guess, with a distinguished grey streak that ran through the front of his hair.

  Lawrence and I both stood as he walked closer to where we had been sitting. “Allan. Glad you could make it.” Lawrence shook his hand and then indicated for us both to sit.

  “Allan, allow me to introduce you to Lillianna Owen,” Lawrence said. Allan leaned forward, and we shook hands.

  “Nice to meet you,” I told him.

  “Pleasure is all mine,” he replied. “I was surprised when Monterey told me that he found an assistant. Last I heard, he had given up hope of ever finding someone; however, I’m very happy to have you aboard and hope that you might be a bit better at keeping him on schedule than he does himself.”

  “I’ll give it my best effort,” I assured him with a polite smile.

  “Allan here,” Lawrence continued, amused by the other man’s casual banter, “is in charge of our UK operations. Lots of different projects happening, some high-level building developments, urban housing—and he’s also in charge of our newest enterprise. We’ve collaborated with another company and dipped our fingers into the banking sector. It’s still early stages at the moment, but it’s looking promising, provided Allan can keep some of our more adventurous advisors in check.”

  “What sort of banking?” I queried.

  “Mostly loans, but what we’re doing is incorporating the purpose into the equation. So we’re offering very select clients funding for their building works. So we pay for and build their projects, and they pay us back.”

  “Sounds interesting.”

  “It’s a very select process, an invitation-only venture. So unless we approach them, the offer doesn’t exist,” Lawrence added.

  “So you get two bites of the cherry,” I said.

  “Exactly. We make money from the development, and we get interest from the loan. But the profits are extremely long term, so it’s carefully calculated to ensure that it doesn’t leave our own company short on cash flow or credit. If we put too many offers out there, we aren’t going to get the big projects that are cash on completion of the works.”

  “Enterprising,” I admitted. “What do you need from me?” I directed my question to Allan. His requirements would, no doubt, be very different from Lawrence’s.

  Allan shared a glance with Lawrence, whose nod was enough for Allan to continue. “I need you to answer his phone,” he said bluntly. “No offence intended, Monterey.”

  I raised my eyebrow in query. Lawrence shrugged. “I don’t always answer their calls,” he admitted, without any hint of shame. “If I’m busy or at a function, I can’t be running out of the room to talk to them; and when you have sixteen people who want to talk to you all the time, it gets very busy. If I didn’t ignore their calls, I would spend my whole day on the phone.”

  True. “OK, Allan. I’ll answer his phone.”

  “No.” Lawrence got up and moved over to his desk, returning a moment later with a nice, bright new mobile. “You’ll answer your own. Here.” He handed it over. “I’ve been told it’s programmed with all the numbers you need, and there’s an e-mail going out to everyone with your details. It’ll probably start ringing soon, and then you’ll wish you had never got it.”

  “As long as I can talk to one of you, I’ll be a happy man,” Allan said. “What I usually need is just to pass messages along to Monterey, and occasionally I’ll need an urgent decision made. He gets a little irritated with us when we don’t keep him up to date with what’s going on, but that’s difficult when he won’t take our calls.”

  “I could imagine,” I said. With Lawrence, I didn’t doubt it.

  “You will have mine, and fifteen other men’s, eternal gratitude if you could manage to make that part of our life easier.”

  I liked Allan; he was simple and straight forward. We would deal with each other well.

  “I’m trying not to scare Lilly off today, so I’m not dumping her into my life right away,” Lawrence told Allan. “We’re going to lunch, and then she’s going to spend the rest of the afternoon familiarizing herself with her new office.”

  Allan nodded. “Does Lilly have a base here in London?” he asked.

  “Not really,” Lawrence answered, before I could. “She will be moving into the apartment this afternoon and will base herself from wherever I am.”

  “That should help a lot,” Allan stated. “At least if you’re always here, someone should be able to get hold of him. Frost and Charlie are useless; they refuse to pass messages along, even if Monterey is standing right beside them. They don’t answer their phones anymore, either. However, I think that might just be personal to the MDs.” He grinned at me, and I knew he wasn’t totally serious.

  “I can’t guarantee that I’ll get him to talk to you,” I warned him, “But at least I’ll answer, and if I think it’s important, I’ll make sure he gets the message.”

  “That’s all I can ask.” He rose. “It is indeed a pleasure to meet you, Lilly Owen. I hope you enjoy working with us and stay for a very long time.” He sent a calculating look at Lawrence before adding, “Good luck, my dear. You’re going to need it.”

  “Get out, Allan.” Lawrence feigned irritation. “You’re not supposed to be scaring her off.”

  “How are you feeling?” Lawrence asked once Allan had left.

  “Honestly?” I asked. “A little drained.”

  “I imagine it’s a lot to take in, and there’s much more for you to learn, but no one expects you to pick it all up on the first day.” He crossed to a cupboard near the door and extracted his suit jacket from within its doors. “Let’s go have lunch, and then you can have the afternoon to go through things at your leisure.”

  Sounded like a good plan.

  If Charlie and I drew attention when we walked into the building, it was nothing compared to the havoc Lawrence left in his wake. Unlike Charlie, who patiently ignored everyone around him, Lawrence took the time to acknowledge people, or some of them, anyway. Those he knew by name he greeted, but the others just received a nod of acknowledgment. Not that we actually got close to too many people. I think that Frost and Charlie had a bit of a reputation for keeping unwanted attention away from Lawrence, because most people seemed far more intent on keeping out of our way than engaging in conversation.

  It was also a little frustrating to see that I seemed automatically included in the group to be feared. It doesn’t really affect management when their employees are wary of them, but that kind of attitude hardly helped those of us who would need to blend in more. I needed to work cohesively with these people, I needed them to tell me things; and having them scared to approach me wasn’t going to help me in that regard.

  “Am I allowed to move around the building without a tail?” I asked, as we settled in his town car.

  To give him credit, he did take time to think about it before he answered. “I’d rather you didn’t move too far, if that’s possible. What would you need to go wandering around for, anyway? If you need something, have them come to you.”

  That was definitely not going to work. “Lawrence.” I sighed his name in exasperation. “I’m not you, and I don’t want
to be. I’m the one who has to make sure that what you need happens, and I can’t do that if the people who work for you are scared of me.”

  He looked at me blankly, obviously not following.

  “If I need something, what are my chances of getting it done and getting it done well, if I don’t have a good relationship with the people I work with?”

  “Ask the other PAs, and they’ll get it done.”

  “I don’t work that way.” I stalled any further comments. “You hired me, and you get me the way I am. I need to know the people around me, and just as you need to have faith in me, I need to have faith in them also. I need to get to know them, so that if I’m off on the other side of the world and I ring to get something done, I can have confidence it will be ready when I need it.”

  “I can’t argue with that,” he finally admitted. “But I don’t think it’s necessary for you to be wandering around the building all the time— besides, you’re not going to have time. But I won’t stop you from meeting people you need to meet.”

  “I’m not taking Charlie or Frost with me.” But he was shaking his head before I even finished speaking.

  “Not going to happen,” he announced.

  “You can’t lock me up, Lawrence. What about when I have to use the bathroom? Are they going to come too?” When he didn’t answer, I had the horrifying suspicion that they would. “OK. So here’s the thing, they scare your employees.”

  He looked at me like I was dense. “They’re supposed to.”

  “Not all of them,” I retorted. “I can’t build trust with someone when there’s a gun-carrying giant hovering behind me.”

  “You can’t wander around alone, Lilly; that’s not negotiable. But I can compromise on the method,” he said.

  “Meaning?”

  “They will escort you to where you need to go but will then remove themselves from your general vicinity, so they don’t ‘intimidate’ your new friends.”

  That might work. “Deal.” I’d take what I could get.

  We walked into one of the most exclusive restaurants in the city, without a booking, and got a table right away. Tells you a lot about a person, when he or she has that much influence—or money.

  Frost and Charlie were very good at their jobs. From the moment we stepped out of the offices, they were everywhere, but yet their presence wasn’t intrusive. They didn’t hover; when Lawrence and I ate lunch, they stationed themselves near the door and stood in silent attention until we were ready to leave. As long as they could sustain that unobtrusive manner, I was a bit more confident about our future together.

  TEXT: This is my new number.

  REPLY: what happened to the last one?

  TEXT: new work number. Can’t manage two so turning the old one off.

  REPLY: Great. U know how I hate people changing numbers

  TEXT: I did it deliberately to annoy u

  REPLY: I dont doubt it

  TEXT: I just had lunch at a seriously nice place

  REPLY: What did u have?

  TEXT: I have no idea.

  REPLY: Typical. Do u need to call in at mcdonalds to eat now

  TEXT: would love to, but stuck in car with LM on way back to office

  REPLY: dont they have drive through over there?

  TEXT: alas no.

  REPLY: shame. Btw can u take a pic of him so i can appreciate the hotness too?

  TEXT: you have no shame.

  REPLY: is that a no?

  TEXT: google him. Trust me youll find a million pictures of him.

  REPLY: Gotta go, google is calling

  When we got back to the office, I found a veritable explosion of paperwork on my desk.

  “People move fast around here,” Lawrence said with a shrug, and retreated to his own office. “Come see me if you have any questions.”

  With no other alternative, I settled at my desk, turned my computer on, and started to sort through the mountain of documents that hadn’t been there an hour ago.

  I quickly determined that this place needed some organization. There didn’t appear to be any format to the documents; they were literally just dumped one on top of another. It took me about two hours, but by the end of it, I was pretty sure I had a clear idea of what sort of paperwork came along and what each kind was used for. They were mainly reports of various different types, investments, telecommunications, developments, financial reports, and a variety of others. I assumed these were for him to review and make the final decision. The other paperwork included official letters that required his signature and other documents that related to meetings he was to attend over the next week.

  I could ignore Charlie and Frost easily, I learned. I had forgotten that they remained in the antechamber with me, although several times one of them would go into the private apartments, but for the most part they spent their time lazing around the room with me. They didn’t attempt to communicate with me—or each other much, for that matter—so I tuned them out.

  I was just sending an e-mail through to Sally at C&N with all my new contact details, when thankfully a helpful, if somewhat hesitant, visitor arrived.

  Jules was a very attractive young American girl, who I learned was Allan’s PA. He had sent her up to introduce herself to me, and after I pulled a chair around for her to sit next to me and convinced her to ignore the two hulking presences in the room with us, it wasn’t long before she was spilling all the important details.

  “I can’t believe that you work with Lawrence Monterey!” she gasped at one point. “Oh, my God, is he, like, totally freaking you out?”

  “Not yet,” I reassured her. “Maybe he’s saving that for later.” Oh, my gosh, she was, like, totally a teenager. It made me feel immeasurably old.

  “He’s scared off the last four assistants,” she confided. “They didn’t last more than a month.”

  “I think that’s probably a private issue between those assistants and their employer.” Office gossip…the same the world over.

  “Yes, but he must have been awful for them to all leave like they did.” She didn’t seem to grasp the fact that I wasn’t going to gossip about Lawrence.

  “I think that the only lesson we can learn from the situation is that finding a suitable assistant is a difficult task.”

  She finally let it go, with a little more prodding on my behalf, and moved onto more important details. Like where to get the best coffee, and where the closest underground station was. More importantly, she gave me a learner’s guide phone list. Payroll, HR, accounts, legal, cleaners, travel, and a few others that she assured me I needed to know. She scribbled the names of the most helpful people, so that I would have some reference when I called. She said I didn’t need to meet the people—some of them she didn’t even know herself—but they were used to dealing with Lawrence and would probably be exceedingly happy to now be dealing with me instead.

  “You won’t normally get so much paper,” she added, as she got up to leave. “But when people find out he is in the office, they think that if they give him work in a hard copy format, he might read it quicker. It’s normally all done electronically; even the mail that he gets will be sent through to you via your e-mail. All of this will be on his laptop already— and yours, too, ’cause you get a copy of all his e-mails. Makes it easier to get things back to people if you have them, too.”

  This was all fairly standard practice and certainly made the pile on my desk less daunting. To be burdened with that every day would have ensured some problems.

  “We don’t actually get to see you guys much,” she continued. “He travels a lot, so most of the time it’s just over the phone and e-mail that we’ll talk. So it’s nice that we had a chance to meet while you’re here.”

  “Yeah, thanks for taking the time to come up and meet me,” I told her, as I walked with her to the elevator. “No doubt I’ll be speaking to you again soon.”

  She left, and as I walked back toward my desk, I noticed Charlie watching me. His amused expression sp
oke volumes.

  “She must be very good at what she does, ’cause for the life of me I don’t know how Allan puts up with all that dizziness,” I told his smiling face.

  “Who’s dizzy?” Lawrence asked from the door.

  “No one.” I answered immediately. I didn’t want to be spreading rumors or bad opinions about people, most especially not in front of the boss. “Doesn’t matter. Was there something you needed?” I asked.

  “No.” He waved my question aside. “Just wanted to know how you’re doing.”

  “Now that I know all that paperwork isn’t normal, I’m a lot better.” I spared him a glance as I sat down again. “I assume that you don’t need most of this. What do you do with it all? Do you check them off your own e-mails, or do you need me to print them all out for you?”

  “I’ll go through them on my own computer, and then when you catch up with me during the day, I’ll give you an outcome, and you send the response through from your own computer.” He picked up one of the documents from my desk. “There is a case number on the top of each document, so that should help you identify them. Also, there’s a formal procedure in place for them that makes sure everything that happens is approved. When we approve the report, the MD will prepare a short summary page with a part at the bottom for me to sign off on. Absolutely nothing happens on any project until that piece of paper is officially signed.”

  I pulled his schedule up on my computer. “I’ve got your schedule now. I see that you have meetings here in the morning and then a site visit tomorrow afternoon, and dinner with clients tomorrow night. Will I be attending all those with you?” I was trying to plan my day, and it helped to know if I was going to be spending half of tomorrow wandering around a construction site.

  “Unless I need you for a specific purpose, you shouldn’t have to sit through meetings with me, at least not while we’re here in the offices. I’ll give you a brief rundown of what happens at the end of them, anyway, but there’s no need for us both to waste our time. You don’t have to come on the site visit tomorrow, either. I’ve asked for more detail on one of the projects, and the engineer thought it would be better if he met me onsite to show me what he meant.”