“Fine. Here’s a delivery van, furniture store.”
He made a little grimace. “I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe I’m spoiled or something, but I like to drive for one person, you know. And a good car. Jer always surrounded himself with very good cars.”
“Oh, my goodness,” she said, with sudden realization. “We have someone, very local, who’s famous for wonderful cars, and I know he’s right now looking for a new chauffeur.”
“Well, this is my lucky day,” Gillette said. “Who is he?”
Marcie squinched her eyes up, half in expectation of some sort of explosion. “Monroe Hall,” she said.
“And he’s a rich man with a lot of cars, you say.” Gillette nodded. “What kinda business he in?”
Marcie said, “You never heard of Monroe Hall?”
“Not another showbiz guy, I hope.”
“He was all over the newspapers,” Marcie told him, “and the television.”
“At Jer’s house,” Gillette said, “all we ever looked at was the trades. Unless they’re doing a TV docudrama on this guy’s life, I doubt I’ve heard of him.”
“I bet they will,” Marcie said. “He’s a businessman, stole from his stockholders, stole from his employees, stole from his family, stole from the government.”
Gillette nodded through all this; then, “Well, nobody’s perfect,” he said.
•
Meanwhile, in another cubicle down the line, an applicant named Judson Swope, rather a fearsome large creature, was telling a wee little employee named Penelope, “Yeah, sure, I know who he is. Monroe Hall. Put it over on everybody. Listen, I don’t care what he done. If he pays me, I work for him. People don’t like him, so somebody’s gotta be there to bust heads. I like to bust heads, and I like it best when I get paid to do it. Sign me up.”
“Yes, sir,” whispered Penelope, while in the cubicle behind her a hangdog sort of man with his hat in his hands was saying, “I was a butler in my previous employment.”
Daisy, for this was Daisy’s cubicle, looked at him in some surprise. “You were?” It seemed so improbable.
“I open a mean door,” he assured her. “Here’s the form I filled out, and my references.”
Daisy studied the form first. John Rumsey, with a temporary address with friends over in Shickshinny. Good work history, excellent reference from the Honorable Hildorg Chk, Vostkojekian ambassador to the United States.
“A guy I worked with there, at the embassy,” Rumsey said, “he come in here this morning, you got him a job, he said maybe you could get me one, too.”
“What name?”
“Fred Blanchard.”
“One of the other interviewers must have handled him. Where did we place Mr. Blanchard?”
“With somebody called Monroe Hall.”
“Mon—His name is Blanchard?”
“Yeah.”
“One moment. Just—One moment.”
She hurried away and it didn’t take long to find Marcie, and then it took no time at all to get John Rumsey signed up to apply for the job of butler out at the Hall estate. If John Rumsey didn’t look to Daisy a heck of a lot like her idea of a butler, so what? He’d been good enough for Ambassador Chk. He’d be good enough for Monroe Hall.
•
“Monroe?”
A very guarded “Yes.”
“This is Henry, Monroe.” Blank silence. “Henry Cooper.”
“Ah! Reconsidered Henry? Ready to sell that agency, turn it over to fresh blood?”
“I just wanted you to know, I’m in the process of sending four new employees out to you today.”
“Four?”
Expecting gratitude, possibly even fawning gratitude, Cooper enumerated them: “Chauffeur, butler, private secretary, and a security man.”
“So,” Monroe said, even more snottily than usual, “you can do it when I goose you a little, can’t you?”
“What?”
“If I hadn’t called, called your bluff, offered to take that do-nothing agency off your hands, get somebody eager in there, you still wouldn’t be doing a goddamn thing but rest on your laurels.”
“Monroe—”
“Your problem, Henry, is, you spend too much time at the golf course and not enough time taking care of business. I’ll be giving these fellas a very careful once-over, I want you to know that. We’ll see if you’re trying to palm anything off on us.”
“Mon—”
But he’d hung up, so Cooper did, too. Then he pushed the button to summon Bernice.
“Yes, sir?”
“Tell the girls, Bernice, we won’t be sending people over to Monroe Hall’s place any more.”
“No, sir?”
“No. Fuck him.”
“Yes, sir.”
29
THANK GOD, ALICIA HALL thought, they still had Mrs. Parsons to cook for them. Mrs. Parsons detested Monroe—well, everybody detested Monroe, as she was sadly aware—but Alicia had brought Mrs. Parsons into the marriage with her, Mrs. Parsons having been Alicia’s mother’s cook, and Mrs. Parsons had chosen to stay on where so many of the less steely had fallen by the wayside. Her decision, Alicia knew, had been based on the assumption that Alicia might well need protection, or at least moral support, in the long darkness of the marriage to come. That assumption was wrong, since Alicia was the one human being Monroe treated with unfailing gentleness and concern, but Alicia had been happy to play the part of a Brontë heroine if it meant she wouldn’t have to learn how to cook.
Their dining room table was really wrong for their lifestyle, since it readily seated sixteen while these days there were never more than two places to be filled, at the end nearest the kitchen. The resulting long empty stretch of table made the two of them seem lonelier, somehow, than they really were. Or maybe it didn’t; Alicia preferred, if possible, not to brood.
Mrs. Parsons had been a wonderful cook for many years—the woman must be seventy, at least, stout, silent, and hatchet-faced—and her hand had not yet lost its skill. These days, given the servant problem in the house, she did most of her shopping on the Internet, which worked wonderfully well. The Internet really isn’t the place to shop for peanut butter or cereal, but the more expensive, lush, esoteric reaches of the food world were born for Internet treatment. From FedEx or United Parcel to Mrs. Parsons’s kitchen for transmogrification, and finally to the two people seated in candlelight at one end of the very long table, her waddling figure bearing the platters and tureens, preceded by the best of all possible aromas. It made life as an outcast not so bad.
This evening, as they consumed a fine duck breast and baby new potatoes and haricots vert accompanied by an excellent St. Emilion, Monroe said, “Darling, I have good news.”
Alicia had forgotten there might be such a thing. “Really?”
“Henry Cooper, after just a little nudging from me, has come through at last. I knew I knew how to handle him.”
“Come through?”
“Tomorrow, we shall interview four prospective new employees,” Monroe told her, and he beamed when he saw how he’d astonished her.
Yes, he had astonished her. “Four? Really, Monroe? All at once?”
“A new chauffeur, at last,” Monroe ticked them off. “A new private secretary. A new butler. And an additional man to beef up security.”
“But that’s fantastic,” Alicia said. “How did Henry manage?”
“How did I manage Henry, is what you mean.” He chortled, pleased with himself. “You’ll never guess.”
“Tell.”
“I offered to buy the agency.”
“You what?” She stared at him. “What would you want with an employment agency?”