by Robyn Sisman
Chapter Twenty-three
“Glad you could make it, Ms. Wilding.”
From the far end of the conference room, Bernie Schneider stared coldly at Suze. There were perhaps fifteen people already seated around the table, their paraphernalia of notepads, pens, artwork and paper cups ranged neatly before them. The clock on the wall read nine thirteen.
Fuck a duck. How was she to know that this morning’s meeting would be brought forward to nine? Suze considered herself bloody brilliant to have found a hairdresser prepared to squeeze her in at such an early hour; evidently it hadn’t been early enough. She had not planned quite such a triumphal entrance for her new shorn look.
The only empty seat was next to Sheri. Suze slunk into it, feeling a faint distaste at her proximity to the woman Nick had said was so great in the bedroom. Sheri acknowledged her presence by the faintest stretch of her lips. Suze could sense that she was excited, like an actress waiting in the wings. Her shining blue eyes were fixed on Bernie, waiting for him to continue.
“OK, people,” he resumed, “end of spiel. Our mission, I repeat, is to convince Passion that Schneider Fox is still the right agency for them. I’m going to hand over to Sheri now to outline the concepts we’re working up for Friday. She’s in the driving seat on this one, and I want you to know that she has my full confidence.”
“Thank you, Bernie.” In her suit of ice blue, golden hair pulled back into an immaculate French pleat, Sheri looked like the Queen of the Valkyries. She glanced around the table, establishing eye contact. Then she began to speak, in a low, fervent voice. “This is an inspirational moment for us all. We have the opportunity to transition into a whole new phase of our creative partnering with Passion. Many of us are experiencing sadness and shock about Lloyd Rockwell, but remember the famous quotation: ‘No man is an island.’ This business isn’t about individuals. It’s not about egos. It’s about sharing, about teamwork, about giving 100 percent. On Friday I want to walk into that presentation knowing that each and every one of you is with me in spirit, saying, ‘Go, Sheri! Go, Schneider Fox!’ ” She raised her fist in a power salute and there was a spontaneous outbreak of applause from around the table. Suze twisted her hands in her lap, embarrassed. “Now,” Sheri continued briskly, “to work.”
For the next two hours they bandied statistics and research data, examined reels and debated visuals, choosing and refining the concepts for the final presentation. Dee Dee kept her head down throughout, silently taking notes. Schneider watched Sheri with a proprietorial half-smile, occasionally lowering his head to record great thoughts into his tiny Dictaphone—probably ordering his lunch, Suze thought, eyeing his triple chin. At the end he roused himself to make the usual corporate pep talk about how important it was for the company that this presentation should succeed. He expected total commitment, even if that meant working around the clock. Suze flushed a little when she heard this. Tonight, she decided, she would work late. After all, she had nothing else to do.
As the meeting broke up, Sheri indicated to Suze that she should follow. She walked purposefully back to her office with Suze in her wake, pausing only to dump a load of papers on Dee Dee’s desk. Once they were both inside her office she shut the door and leaned back against it, closing her eyes and exhaling deeply.
“Are you all right?” asked Suze.
Sheri opened her eyes again and beamed a smile. “Absolutely fine. Goodness, what an original hairstyle! You English are so unconventional.” Her eyes narrowed assessingly. “You know, I think you should be at the presentation on Friday. Ross Bannerman himself is coming. You fit the Passion image. You can wear one of your strange outfits.” She frowned. “No bare flesh, of course. Now, I need your help . . .”
Suze left Sheri’s office feeling cheered. It seemed that she was to have a key role in the upcoming presentation. Hah! She wasn’t a nobody, whatever Nick had said. Men always liked to make you feel small; it was women who were supportive in a crisis. So what if Nick and Sheri had once slept together? It was a free world, and the incident was way in the past. And even if Sheri had suggested that Nick take her out, wasn’t that just the kind of consideration one woman showed to another? She had been wrong to feel humiliated. It was a sisterly thing.
Suze decided to reward herself with a tripette to the street-level coffee shop. There had been no time for breakfast this morning, and her nicotine level was dangerously low. As she walked down the corridor she could see poor old Dee Dee, slaving away at the photocopier. Something about her stance, still and secretive, troubled Suze, and as she came closer she understood why. Dee Dee was crying. Suze put an arm around her shoulder. “Hey, what’s up?” she asked gently.
Dee Dee shook her head, unable to speak. She was clutching a sheet of paper—a letter, perhaps. Suze looked more closely, wondering if it might be a love letter, but it was just office stuff. She rubbed Dee Dee’s arm encouragingly. “Tell me.”
“His handwriting . . .” Dee Dee wailed. “It brings it all back. And I feel so guilty. I haven’t even spoken to him.” She began to sob.
Suze could make no sense of this, but it was clear that Dee Dee needed comforting. “Come on, let’s get out of here.” She turned her toward the elevators. “What you need is some serious caffeine.”
Once downstairs, Suze settled Dee Dee at an outdoor table, found her some paper napkins to mop up her tears and bought them a coffee and croissant each.
“I’m on a diet,” Dee Dee sniffed.
“Bollocks.”
Dee Dee gave a weak, hiccuping laugh. “What does ‘bollocks’ mean?”
“Tell you later. First of all, you’re going to tell me what’s upsetting you.”
Dee Dee was still holding the piece of paper in her lap. She laid it on the table.
“Lloyd wrote this. It was in the pile Sheri wanted me to Xerox.” She raised round, guileless eyes, shimmering with tears. “He was so special. I’ll never find another boss like him. He made me feel like I was someone important, one of the team, not just some dumbo secretary.”
“Lloyd was your boss?” Suze was surprised. “I thought Sheri was.”
Dee Dee glowered. “She is now. You missed the part of the meeting where Bernie announced that he’d made her acting creative director. ‘Acting’ is right. If I wasn’t a nice girl I’d call her a nasty word beginning with B.”
“ ‘Banana’? ‘Blancmange’? ‘Bandicoot’?” Suze was rewarded by a glimmering smile. “Come on, Dee Dee. Sheri may be a bit bossy but you have to admit she’s frightfully impressive. It’s great to see a woman in charge, for once.”
“You wouldn’t understand,” Dee Dee said bitterly. “You’re one of her favorites.”
“Well . . .” Suze hesitated. This wasn’t the right moment to blow her own trumpet, though surely it was obvious that Sheri had singled her out because of her talent?
“She even gave you Lloyd’s office, right next door to hers.”
“Is that why you weren’t very friendly to me at first?”
Dee Dee looked embarrassed. “It’s just the way you took right over, looking so perky and fiddling with his stuff. It’s like you knew he was never coming back.”
“Don’t be ridiculous.” Suze bridled at Dee Dee’s accusing tone. “I knew nothing about Lloyd when I came here. I still don’t. But I’ve heard the rumors. Sheri’s been really worried about the Passion account—quite rightly, as it turns out. Lloyd was letting things slide badly.”
“I don’t believe that for one minute.” Two bright spots appeared on Dee Dee’s plump cheeks. “Lloyd’s work for Passion has been the talk of the industry. He’s won awards. He’s been asked to give seminars at business schools.” She glared at Suze defiantly.
Suze sipped her coffee. Dee Dee’s fervor was convincing. “So you thought Lloyd was good at his job?”
Dee Dee looked at her as if she were mad. “He’s brilliant! Everyone knows that. Why do you think they made him creative director?” She leaned eagerly toward Suze. “The
thing about Lloyd is that he can take even the crummiest company and find at least one good thing about it. That’s what he focuses on. That way, he says, you’ve not only got the trust of the customer but you make the company feel so good about itself that it starts raising its standards. Once your campaigns are positive, you can make them fun. Lloyd is good at that.”
Suze nodded slowly. This was the way she liked to work too. “And he didn’t ever strike you as disorganized?”
“Lloyd?” Dee Dee burst out laughing. “Lloyd’s lists are famous. I used to kid him about having to write a list every night of the clothes he was going to wear the next day.”
“He forgot about the Matsuhana invitation,” Suze reminded her.
Dee Dee pursed her lips. “Lloyd gave Sheri a five-page briefing memo on that a week before you even arrived. I typed it myself.”
Suze chased the last flakes of croissant round her plate with her finger, feeling uneasy. She began to replay the tape of the last three weeks in her mind, editing out everything Sheri had told her about Lloyd. She remembered Lloyd’s neatly sharpened pencils, his fiendishly precise music-cataloging system, the way he had lied so poorly about who had dispatched Mr. Kipling.
“Dee Dee, you said you felt guilty about Lloyd. Why?”
“I was the one who took the message that incriminated him. I even wrote it down, for everyone to see.” Dee Dee sank her head in her hand.
“That wasn’t your fault. He did get the call, after all.”
“Yes, but when I gave Lloyd the message, he didn’t know who it was from,” Dee Dee argued. “He kept going over and over it. I know he wasn’t lying.” She sighed. “Anyway, the really bad thing was that the London office found a confidential list in Lloyd’s briefcase. I wormed the story out of Bernie’s assistant. No one knows how he got it, but that was pretty much the nail in his coffin.”
Suze felt her face flame. “List?” she asked casually. Surely it couldn’t be the list she had e-mailed to Lloyd?
“Confidential client information. I don’t know what exactly, but whatever it was . . .” Dee Dee drew her finger across her throat. “The thing is, I can’t believe Lloyd would ever do anything underhanded. He’s not that kind of person.”
“But—” Suze began. Then she shut her mouth. This needed thinking about. For the first time it occurred to her that Lloyd might be wholly innocent, as Dee Dee claimed. If it wasn’t for her, he might still have a job. She felt rather sick.
The streets were beginning to fill up now, with office workers on their lunch break. They looked busy and focused, rushing to fit in their errands or hurrying back to their desks carrying food in brown paper bags. Suze found herself imagining what it would be like not to have a job, to stare out of the window day after day after day, watching other people with appointments to make and trains to catch, while the phone stayed silent and there was no reason even to get out of bed. “Dee Dee,” she said briskly, “I want you to show me that message book you mentioned. I want to see that Matsuhana memo. And I’d like to borrow this, if I may.” She picked up the piece of paper with Lloyd’s handwriting.
“Sure.” A spark of hope kindled in Dee Dee’s eyes. “What are you going to do?”
“We’ll see.” Suze hadn’t the faintest clue. But she thought she knew where to start. “Tell me honestly, why do you think Sheri’s been so nice to me, treating me like a . . .”
“Teacher’s pet?”
Ouch. “I was going to say protégée.”
“You’re an outsider. You’re out of the political loop. You’d believe anything she said. Also—” Dee Dee stopped short.
“Yes?”
“Well, look at you.” Dee Dee waved a hand. “Sheri probably assumed you’d be thinking about clothes and boyfriends all the time and you wouldn’t notice too much what was going on in the office.”
Suze felt her skin prickle. Was this really how other people saw her? An empty-headed bimbo, too self-obsessed to care what went on outside her own tiny world? It was as if someone had handed her a mirror into which she had smiled confidently, only to see an ugly stranger. I’m not like that! she wanted to protest. But Dee Dee’s candor was devastating. Perhaps she was like that. One way or another she had hurt people—Dee Dee, Lloyd, even Nick.
“I see,” she said faintly.
Dee Dee was gazing critically at her. “Why did you cut your hair?”
“What?” For a moment Suze didn’t know what she was talking about. She put up a hand and fingered the crisply cut ends, remembering the hot, darkened room in the Hamptons—the tangle of white sheets, Nick’s savage face, his knife spinning to the carpet. She thought of those self-pitying hours spent staring into the mirror at her ruined looks and felt ashamed. It didn’t seem important any more.
She summoned a self-deprecating, sideways grin. “A success—not?”
“I liked it better long,” Dee Dee confessed. “You looked more human.”
By that evening Suze’s new role as a dedicated workaholic was beginning to pall. Everyone else had gone home hours ago. Daylight had faded, to be replaced by a nighttime ration of strip lighting that functioned only in the public areas, leaving the rest dark. The untenanted offices seemed spookily alive, as if possessed by poltergeists flashing e-mail messages onto computer screens and setting the fax machines whirring. After so many hours at her computer Suze felt radioactive. She was starting to experience odd spells of dizziness when her body seemed to swoop and sway toward the screen. There was a throbbing spot right between her eyebrows that felt almost as bad as a hangover. Suddenly she remembered Dee Dee’s miracle cure: lemons and tomato juice, as she recalled, purloined from Bernie Schneider’s private fridge. There might be ice as well.
Leaving her shoes under the desk, where she had long since kicked them off, Suze padded out to the elevator and rode one stop up to the twenty-second floor. When the doors opened, she peered out cautiously. There was no one in sight. All was silent. Suze stepped boldly into the corridor. She could see at once where Bernie’s office must be by a rash of exotic potted plants and a stretch of superior carpeting that led to a suite of rooms tucked into a corner of the building. The first room she came to was a tiny kitchen. Suze smiled. This was easy.
There was no tomato juice in the fridge, just several tubs of yogurt, some tonic water and a dozen Snickers bars, but in the ice compartment Suze spotted a bottle of vodka. She was trying to wrestle off the cap when she heard a faint noise. Anxiously, she poked her head out into the corridor. Nothing. Then a small movement caught her eye. It was the elevator indicator. Someone was coming up.
Suze watched the numbers flashing up on the illuminated panel. Nine, ten, eleven . . . There were forty-five floors in the building, she told herself. The chance of the elevator stopping precisely here was tiny. Nevertheless, while she poured out her drink she stood in the doorway of the kitchen, keeping track. Nineteen . . . twenty. The pace seemed to be slowing. Christ! Only a glass wall separated her from the brightly lit corridor; she couldn’t stay here. She shoved everything into the nearest cupboard—glass, bottle, ice-tray—and looked for somewhere to hide. Instinctively she turned in the opposite direction to the elevator. There were three more doors, then a blank wall. Suze tried the handle of the door opposite: locked. The next door opened into a small private lavatory, but there was nowhere to hide and she daren’t lock it. Now she heard the faint bounce of the elevator as it came to a halt. There was one door remaining. Oh, God, the handle wouldn’t turn! The elevator doors hummed open. She could hear voices. Quick!
Suze wrenched the handle the other way and practically fell into a huge room, lit from outside by the pinprick lights of a thousand sky-scraper windows. She looked around wildly. Under the far window was a huge sofa, but it was pushed tight against the wall. She thought of crouching behind some sculpture thing on a plinth, but it was too small. The voices were getting closer. Nightmare! Then she saw the desk, a massive modernist statement with smooth panels almost to the floor on three s
ides. Gibbering silently, Suze sank to her knees on the soft carpeting. She scuttled under the desk and drew in her feet a millisecond before the door opened.
“Wait. I’ll get the light,” said a voice.
“Oh, no. Leave it a minute. This is such a fabulous view.”
Suze closed her eyes in anguish. Bernie and Sheri.
She heard the swish of stockings, then a voluptuous sigh. “Oh, Bernie, when you sit in this big office and look down at all the little people out there, you must feel so proud.”
There was a smug chuckle. “I guess I haven’t done too badly.”
“Badly? You’re only the most successful advertising man in the whole of Manhattan. I’ve had one ambition since I started in this industry, and that was to work with Bernie Schneider. There’s so much one can learn from an experienced man.”
“That’s certainly nice to hear. Listen . . . why don’t I get us a drink?”
Suze froze. Oh, no! He would find the ice tray missing. What if he discovered all that stuff she had thrown in the cupboard?
“Thanks, Bernie, but I couldn’t—not on top of all that wine we had.” Sheri gave a low, teasing laugh. “You’re not trying to get me drunk, are you?”
“Well . . . I mean . . . of course not.”
“Maybe afterward, hmmm? I want to show you these layouts first. I’ve hardly dared to let them out of my sight. I’d feel so much better if you could keep them in your safe, once we’ve finished.”
“Sure thing.”
There was a thump as something was placed on the desk above Suze’s head. She heard the click-click of a briefcase opening and the rustle of papers. A lamp went on with a soft snap. “I’ll spread everything out here, so you can get the picture. Oops, was that your pen? I think something fell off your desk.”