The Last Chance Read Online Free PDF Page A

have real problems. I need a job.”
    “I’ll be glad to help,” Margot said. “I’ll look.”
    “Isn’t there something at your station I could do?”
    “They’re not hiring anybody right now. Wait … wait, let me think. Nikki! I’m going to make a call.”
    Margot went to the phone booth and called Nikki Gellhorn at Heller & Strauss. She knew Nikki would be out to lunch but always left word where she’d be, and Margot then called her at the restaurant.
    “What’s up?” Nikki asked. “Are you calling off our drink date?”
    “No. I wanted to know if that opening in your publicity department has been filled yet.”
    “Not yet, but they’re seeing some people tomorrow.”
    “I have someone for them to see today. It’s a big personal favor for me,” Margot said. “I can send her over this afternoon. You’ve met her, it’s Ellen Rennie, my friend since college.”
    “But it’s a kid’s job,” Nikki said. “It’s boring, and the most it would pay is two hundred a week.”
    “She really needs the money,” Margot said. “And besides, Ellen’s so aggressive she’s perfect for publicity.”
    Nikki giggled. “I always like to do a favor for a friend. Especially a pushy one. Tell her to come by at three thirty. I’ll pave the way before.”
    “Thanks a million, Nikki. I’ll tell you the whole story later. You’ll understand how much she appreciates it.”
    “You can pay for the drinks,” Nikki said.
    Margot came back to the table beaming. “I’ve got you a job, I think. You have an interview at three thirty. You remember my friend Nikki Gellhom. She’s a senior editor at Heller & Strauss.”
    “The commuter,” Ellen said. “What’s the job?”
    “It’s in the publicity department. They need someone to book tours for authors: get plane tickets, coordinate schedules, reserve cars and hotel rooms in various cities, make sure that when an author shows up at seven forty-five in the morning to do a television show, they know he’s coming and he knows where to go.”
    “I can do that,” Ellen said. “I’m very efficient.”
    “It only pays two hundred a week, but you haven’t got a résumé and …”
    “Are you kidding? That’s a thousand dollars a month! Do you realize the terrible weight you’d be lifting from my heart with a thousand dollars a month?”
    “It’s independence,” Margot said.
    “It’s beautiful. Tell me everything about the company so they’ll think I’m smart.”
    “Well, let’s see. Heller & Strauss is one of the biggest and richest publishing companies. They have a very good list. Both Heller and Strauss, who founded it, are long since retired—or dead, for all I know—and nobody really knew much about Heller except that he was very rich and very ugly, and he had a horrendous wife who insisted on looking over every secretary and reader in the entire company to make sure she wasn’t pretty. If she was pretty, she got fired. Mrs. Heller was sure that every woman in the world was after her husband, even when he was eighty.”
    “How did Nikki get the job, then?”
    “She came from elsewhere after Heller had retired. Strauss, on the other hand, became quite well known because he was the darling of the talk shows. Now that I think of it, he is dead. He gave the company a kind of panache and a lot of good publicity. Now the company is run by a publisher, a president, the editor in chief, the executive editor, and some senior editors, one of whom is Nikki, and under them some ordinary editors and readers. Then there’s the copy department, the art department, the sales department, and of course the publicity department, where you will be.”
    “It sounds like they have a lot of authors,” Ellen said.
    “They do. But they don’t all tour. Just the ones who can get on talk shows and be interviewed by newspapers.”
    “I don’t actually book them for that?”
    “No, you’ll be sort of the in-house travel agent. Move them around and make sure