Jonathan Dee - A Thousand Pardons

“This is Harvey Aaron Public Relations?” he said. Helen nodded. He looked a bit like Harvey, actually, or maybe just of Harvey’s vintage, like someone Harvey would have avoided at his own high school reunion because of the man’s conspicuous aura of success.

“I won’t ask for Harvey himself, because I know he’s sadly no longer with us,” the man said. “I take the liberty of calling him Harvey because we actually met once, probably twenty years ago. More than twenty.” His smile seemed to refresh itself. Helen and Mona were still seated with their fingers over their keyboards. “But may I ask, which of you ladies is Ms. Armstead?”

Helen, absurdly, raised her hand. The white-haired man looked again at Harvey’s empty office, as if he had not noticed it before, and said, “I wonder, if you’re not too busy, if I might have a few moments of your time. That is,” he said, turning his gaze graciously upon Mona, “if you don’t mind.”

Skepticism had flared Mona’s nostrils. “You from the government?” she said. “Because you seem a little bit like somebody from the government.”

Helen shot her a stricken look, even though she too had an instinct that this man was not some prospective client. Too untroubled, maybe. He seemed like he was pretty happy with the public image he was projecting already.

“Not at all,” he said. “My name is Teddy Malloy.” The way he said it, he clearly expected it to make some impression; Helen felt at fault for having no idea who he was. He extended his hand toward Harvey’s office door, graciously and presumptuously at the same time. “Shall we?” he said to Helen.

At least he let her take the seat behind Harvey’s desk, she thought as he closed the door after them, though he couldn’t have been smart enough to know how wrong and off-balance it made her feel to sit in Harvey’s old swivel chair. “Well!” he said pleasantly as he sat, folding his hands over his stomach. “So you are Helen Armstead.”

Helen smiled weakly. “What can I do for you?” she said.

“You’re the woman who handled Peking Grill, yes? And Amalgamated Supermarkets? We’ve been watching your work for some time now, with greater and greater admiration.”

“Who’s ‘we’?” Helen said politely.

His smile widened a bit whenever she spoke, but then he just resumed what he was saying as if she hadn’t spoken. “Crisis management is, as I’m sure I don’t need to tell you, the fastest-growing sector of our business by far. I’m old enough to remember the days when influencing the public discourse was just a matter of taking gossip columnists out for lunch and getting them drunk. But now of course with the Internet—”

“You’re in the public relations business too?” Helen said.

This time his eyes met hers. The smile, she was beginning to understand, was a sort of catch basin, or surge protector, for emotions of any kind; wide as it was already, it seemed almost to flash a bit when he realized his name had meant nothing to her. “Yes,” he said. “Forgive me. I am the chairman of Malloy Worldwide, which is, for lack of a better term, a PR agency, the sixth largest PR agency in the world. We have offices in Los Angeles and London and Tokyo and Rome, as well as here in New York. We have about twelve hundred employees, including eight full-time members of a crisis management team at our main office, which is about twenty blocks north of here. It’s a company that was started by my uncle, actually, but I’ve been chairman since 1979, which is when he passed away.”

A silence ensued. “It’s funny,” Helen said, “just because Malloy is actually the name of the town where I grew up.”

“How about that,” Malloy said.

“Listen,” Helen said abruptly, “can I get you anything? I really should have asked that before we sat down. I guess we’re a little rusty. We don’t get that many visitors here.”

“You’re very kind,” Malloy said, “but no thank you. You’ve probably already figured out why I’m here. We follow the trades, of course — we’re not so arrogant as to think we can’t learn from our competitors, however small — and it’s clear that when it comes to the art, if I can call it that, of public-image repair, you have an extraordinary gift. I have come here to try to hire you.”

Now was the time for her to say something. He waited patiently. “Well,” she finally managed to produce, “it’s a complicated situation here.”

“So I see. In fact, now that I’m here, it’s unclear to me whom I’d be competing with for your services. Who owns this place, now that Harvey is no longer with us? Who pays the rent?”

“No one, really,” Helen said, cursing the blush she could feel coming on. “I mean, technically it’s Harvey’s son. But when Harvey died, there was actually some outstanding debt that we hadn’t known about, and my colleague, Mona, and I decided to work off, and collect on, the existing contracts, so there’d be something more than just legal headaches for Michael to inherit. He doesn’t work here himself, though he does come in from time to time. Fairly often, actually. He’s a little bit of a lost soul.”

Malloy pursed his lips. “Remarkable of you,” he said. “So then the plan was really to wind the business down all along.”

“Well, yes, that’s the plan. It’s just — it’s taken a bit longer to climb out of the hole, to be honest, than I’d first calculated. The pure business end of things — it’s not my strong suit.”

“No, it wouldn’t be,” Malloy said.

“Excuse me?”

He lifted his eyes to hers. “I only meant that you have a gift,” he said gently, “and that gift has nothing at all to do, strictly speaking, with business. This is why I wanted to come to talk with you in person.” He tapped his fingertips together, thinking. “Would you know how much the debt consists of, right at this moment?”

She would have been embarrassed to tell him how small an amount it was, how shallow the hole they were laboring to get out of. “It isn’t just a matter of getting back to zero, at this point,” she said. “I have responsibilities, to the others here, to existing clients—”

“I see that,” he said indulgently. “What if, then, rather than hire you, we simply bought out the agency, from Harvey’s son? And then, what’s the right word, absorbed it? That would take care of the debt and then some, I should think.”

Helen’s heart started to pound. She was afraid to ask him what he thought the whole operation might be worth. It was part of her lack of business acumen that she wouldn’t have considered it worth a cent to anybody but her.

“And what about Mona?” she said, surprising herself. “I couldn’t just put her out of work. She has a family.”

“We would offer her a job,” Malloy said calmly, “though at this point of course I’m unacquainted with her particular skills. As an alternative, we could offer her a very fair severance package.”

Helen sat back in Harvey’s chair. An old line of the nuns’ kept sounding in her head: Close your mouth , they’d say, you look like a trout . Nothing like this scenario had ever even occurred to her, which made her reflexively search for reasons why it wouldn’t work. She couldn’t come up with any right away. Still, what she felt most was not excitement or relief, but fear.

“Why are you doing this?” she asked him.

He leaned forward, his elbows on his knees. “I’ll be honest,” he said. “I don’t care about these other people — though I understand why you do. But not many people, Helen, can do what you do. Nor can they be taught to do it, even though business schools make a fortune pretending otherwise. It’s a calling. This is why I came here myself today to try to persuade you, instead of just sending one of my managers to do it. Think of it this way. This place, it’s like your training ground. But there’s a whole world out there, where a lot of people need your help. It’s time to expand your mission.”