Read Online The LeBaron Secret by Stephen; Birmingham - Free Book Online Page B

She pauses, and then smiles. “Well,” she says, “how about some lunch? I don’t know about any of you, but I’m starving.” She presses the button on her desktop and rings for her secretary, Miss Martino.
    Eric rises. “Sorry,” he says, “but I can’t join you. I have an engagement.”
    He can do this. He can escape, with an excuse, but the others cannot. As long as the Madison Avenue boys remain in San Francisco, they belong to Assaria LeBaron. Sari nods a curt farewell to Eric, and Gloria Martino appears at the doorway, notepad and pencil in hand.
    â€œSomething to drink before lunch, boys?” Sari asks.
    Mike Geraghty speaks first. “I’ll have a nice chilled glass of Baronet Chablis,” he says.
    â€œGood!” says Sari. “I’ll have a touch of Baronet vermouth”—she winks at them—“mixed with a couple of jiggers of Beefeater gin.”
    Eric LeBaron strides into his office on the other side of the building and flings himself into the chair behind his desk. Marylou Chin, his willowy Eurasian secretary, has followed him into the room. “Well,” he says, “she did it again. Let me have it, in front of the whole Madison Avenue gang. Shit! ”
    Ordinarily, Marylou would have simply made clucking noises with her tongue, murmured something noncommittally sympathetic, and then asked him if it was all right if she took her lunch hour. But just in the last few weeks the nature of their relationship has changed, and so, instead, she closes the office door behind them, takes a seat in the small chair opposite him, crosses her legs, and carefully lights a long filtered cigarette, studying his face. “How much longer are you going to let her treat you like this, Eric?” she asks at last.
    â€œShit, I don’t know,” he says. “Until they carry me out of here with a ruptured, bleeding ulcer, I suppose.”
    â€œIt’s—it’s intolerable, is what it is.”
    â€œI know.”
    â€œYou work so hard, you give her so much, and she rewards you by treating you like some sort of galley slave. Like shit, as you say.”
    â€œI know.”
    â€œYou’re the one who should be running this company. Not her.”
    â€œI know I could run it a damn sight better,” he says.
    â€œOf course you could.” She shapes the ash on her cigarette against the rim of his ashtray. “Was it—was it the same sort of thing today?”
    â€œOf course. She simply refuses—refuses to consider anything that even remotely smacks of a new idea. Refuses.”
    â€œYou’ve offered her so many good ideas.”
    â€œThe Madison Avenue guys had come up with a new campaign that was, frankly, shit. But they were on the right track. But she, of course, derailed them before they could even get the train out of the station. Refused to listen to anything anybody else had to say.”
    â€œPoor Eric.”
    â€œYou should have heard her little speech today. All about larks and honeybees and wild mustard and purple vetch—whatever the hell that is.”
    Once more she shapes the ash on her cigarette. “You know,” she says, “I’ve been thinking.”
    â€œThinking what?”
    â€œThere was an article a couple of weeks ago in Newsweek . In fact it was the cover story. It was on Alzheimer’s disease, that thing old people get. It’s like senility. They can remember something that happened fifty years ago, but they can’t remember whether they opened the refrigerator door to put something in or to take something out. She’s what now—seventy-four? Do you think that might be what she has, Eric?”
    â€œHa! I wish it were.”
    â€œI mean—well, that thing she did with the plane. That was really pretty crazy. I know how embarrassed you were by that. We were all embarrassed. ‘Is that the woman you work for?’ friends said to