Just the thought of such a headline made Lavallette wince. He picked up a hand mirror just as his personal secretary stepped into the suite.
"The press is here, Mr. Lavallette," the secretary cooed. He had hired her out of nearly sixty applicants, all of whom he subjected to what he called "the elbow test. "
The elbow test was simple. Each applicant was taken aside and asked to clasp her hands behind her head until her elbows projected straight ahead, like a prisoner of war in an old movie.
"Now walk toward the wall," Lavallette told them.
"That's all?"
"Until your elbows touch the wall."
The applicants whose elbows touched the wall before their chests did were disqualified. Out of the seven passing applicants, the only one who hadn't tried to slap him or bring a sexual-harassment suit was Miss Melanie Blaze and he had hired her instantly. She was nothing as a secretary but she was good for his image, especially now that he was between wives. And he liked her for the way her cleavage entered a room a full half-beat before the rest of her.
"You look fine," she said. "Are you ready for the press conference?"
"It's not a press conference," Lavallette said. "That comes tomorrow."
"Yes, sir," said Miss Blaze, who could have sworn that when a businessman called in the media for the express purpose of making a formal announcement, it constituted a press conference.
"Would you please hold this mirror for me, Miss Blaze?" The young redhead sauntered on high heels to take the mirror and was immediately sorry she had.
"Aaargghh!" howled Lavallette.
"What is it? What's wrong?" she squealed. She thought he must have seen a precancerous mole on his face.
"A hair," Lavallette shrieked. "Look at it."
"I'm looking, I'm looking. If we get you to a doctor, maybe it can be cut out," she said, remembering that hair growing out of a mole was a bad sign. But she still couldn't see the mole.
"What are you yammering about, you idiot? There's a hair out of place."
"Where?"
"Back of my head. It's as plain as day."
Miss Blaze looked and looked some more. Finally, Lyle Lavallette pointed it out.
Yes, there was a hair out of place, Miss Blaze agreed. But it would take an electron microscope for anyone to see it.
"Are you making fun of me, Miss Blaze?"
"No, Sir. I just don't think anyone will notice. Besides, it's at the back of your head. The cameras will just be shooting front views, won't they?"
"And what if an Enquirer photographer is in the pack? What if he sneaks around to the side? You know how they latch on to these things. I can see the headline now: 'LYLE LAVALLETTE. HEAD OF DYNACAR INDUSTRIES. LOSING HAIR. Shocking Details Inside.' They'll have my face in between the Abominable Snowman and the woman in Malaysia who gave birth to a goat. I can't have it."
"I'll get a comb."
"No, no, no. Take a comb to this hair and we'll have to start all over again. It'll take hours. Get a tweezers. And some hair spray. Hurry."
When she returned, he said, "Good. Now carefully, really carefully, use the tweezers and put the hair back in its proper groove."
"I'm doing it. Just stop shaking, huh."
"I can't help it. This is serious. Is it in place?"
"I think so. Yeah. It is."
"Okay. Now, quickly . . . use the spray."
Miss Blaze shook the can and applied a quick jet. "More. More than that. Lard it on. I don't want that sucker popping up at a crucial moment."
"It's your hair," said his secretary, who noticed that the ingredients on the can included liquefied Krazy Glue. She emptied half the can on the back of Lavallette's snow white hair. He looked it over and permitted himself one of his dazzlingly perfect smiles. It could not have been more perfect if he still had his natural teeth.
"Okay, we're all set. Let's go get 'em," Lavallette said.
"You sure go to a lot of trouble over the way you look, Mr. Lavallette," she said.
"Image, Miss Blaze," Lavallette said. He gave his shirt cuffs a final shoot so they projected a precise half-inch beyond the jacket sleeves. "Image is everything."
"Substance too," she said lightly.
"Substance sucks. Image," Lavallette insisted.
"Who are we waiting for anyway?" a photographer asked a newsman inside the hotel's grand ballroom.
"Lyle Lavallette."
"Who's he?" the photographer asked.
"The Maverick Genius of the Car Industry," the reporter said.
"I never heard of him. What's he done?"
"Back in the old days, when there was a General Motors and a Ford and a Chrysler company, back before all the buyouts and mergers, Lavallette was the guiding genius who led them to new heights."
"I still never heard of him," the photographer said.
"Then you're a clod," the reporter said.
"I got no problem with that," the photographer said. He looked up as he heard a smattering of applause, and saw Lavallette walking to the podium behind which was mounted the ten-foot-square logo of the new Dynacar Industries.
"Is that him?" the photographer said.
"Yes. That is Lyle Lavallette. Maverick Genius."
"He bleaches his hair," the photographer said.
"Take his picture anyway," the reporter said disgustedly. Some people, he thought, had no sense of history. Lavallette was bathed in electronic light from all the photographers' strobe units flashing. He could never understand it. Why didn't the print media just hire a handful of photographers to take a few pictures and then divvy them up? Instead, they hired a zillion photographers to take a zillion pictures and only a fraction of them ever made it into print. What happened to the rest? Lavallette imagined a big file somewhere holding enough photos of himself to have a different one printed beside every definition in the dictionary.
Well, today he was glad to see all the photographers. It showed that Lyle Lavallette hadn't lost his touch with the press and he was going to give them enough to keep them interested.
He let the picture-taking go on for a full three minutes, then stepped behind the podium and raised a quieting hand.
"Ladies and gentlemen of the press," he began in a sonorous voice. "I'm happy to see you and happy to see so many old friends. In case you were wondering what happened to me, let me just tell you that Maverick Car Builders don't die and they don't fade away either. We just keep coming back."
There was a warm-spirited chuckle through the audience. "As some of you know, I've spent the last few years working in Nicaragua, fighting my lonely fight against totalitarian oppression. There are some, I know, who think I failed because the car I built there did not establish itself among the major car lines of the world." He paused and looked around the room dramatically. The errant hair, he knew, was still in place and he was pleased with the way things were going. If only they kept going just as well.
"I don't think I failed. I helped to bring some good old car-making know-how to Nicaragua and I'm sure the lives of the people will never be the same because of our efforts there. That alone would have been enough of a success for me because spreading freedom is what the auto industry is all about. But I had an even greater success while I was there." He paused again to look around.
"While I was fighting my lonely battle against oppression, I spent all my free time in my research-and-development laboratory and I'm proud to tell you today that this effort paid off. We are preparing to announce a car design so revolutionary, so important that from this time on the automobile industry as we have known and loved it will be forever changed."
A gasp rose from the crowd. The television people jostled closer, bringing their videocams in to Lavallette's tanned face. He wondered if they were trying to get prints of the retinas of his eyes. He'd read somewhere that retina prints were like fingerprints, no two being alike.