"Are you insane?" Bernadette DaCapo was asking "Are you completely insane?"

The expensively coifed, tastefully attired Executive Vice President of Hillyer, Jones was pacing back and forth in her modern-art-filled corner office, using the cellular phone -- which was strange, considering that she was standing two feet from the regular office telephone on her desk. But Bernadette liked mobility more than anything else. Keep moving.

So she paced.

She was talking to the Advertising Director of a national magazine that had just done a special issue on nutrition, and the evils of fat, cholesterol, and sugar. The problem? Her account, and one of the principal advertisers in the magazine, was a junk-food giant. And her client was furious.

What's SHE hiding? A convent-school upbringing and a Vassar education didn't take any of the starch out of Bernadette DaCapo, whose tough-as-nails exterior are matched by . . . a tough-as-nails interior. But thank heavens for Bernadette. She's the one who gets on a plane when the unpredictable Ad Director of Consolidated Foods decides to put the account up for review, and invariably woos him back. A former grocer's daughter who favors Armani pantsuits and and Frederick Fekkai hairstyles, Bernadette recently returned from a dude-ranch in Montana and shared with receptionist Agnes Ramirez a "life-altering event" that may well shake Hillyer, James to its very foundations.

"Oh, editorial integrity my foot," Bernadette shouted into the phone, walking over to the window, pushing back the jacket of her Laura Biagiotti wool suit and placing her left arm akimbo, hand-on-hip. "If Consolidated Foods pulls its ads for the rest of the year, do you know what you're out in revenues? And do you know what I'm out in commissions? Are you trying to commit suicide?"

She turned around and saw Sydney Chen, James Hillyer's assistant, standing at the door trying to get her attention, and abruptly waved her hand at the twenty-four-year-old in a get-out-of-here gesture. Sydney, used to Bernadette's rudeness, raised her eyes ceilingward and walked away.

"All right, all right," Bernadette hissed into the phone. "I'll explain you'll give them a make-good for this issue. But for crying out loud, Ken, let me know if you're going to do any more cover stories trashing my clients' products. If your editors have taken complete control of that magazine, at least give me some notice, will you? Good bye."

She pressed the "End" button on the cell phone melodramatically, chipping a manicured nail in the process.

"Ouch! Sydney! Sydney! What did you want?" Bernadette stalked to the door of the office.

"Where did that girl go?" she said to no one in particular, looking into the outer office. It was 10:30 a.m.. Hillyer's office door, Bernadette could see, was shut tight.

Great. The boss is having another secret meeting, Bernadette thought. What is that guy up to these days?

She walked back to the credenza and poured herself a cup of coffee from the sleek stainless-steel Thermos resting pristinely on a wicker placemat. Luckily for her colleagues, it was decaf. Bernadette was already wired enough.



GOSSIP! TATTLETALE!

Behind the closed mahogany door of his office, James Hillyer was doing anything but having a "secret meeting." He was, in fact, listening to Sydney Chen tell him about Cy Lefkowitz. Sydney was "bringing him up to speed," as Hillyer himself would say, on Cy's alarming appearance that morning, disheveled and disoriented.

Sydney had gone into Cy's office later in the morning to check on him, and found him with his head down on his desk. Sydney could tell he'd been crying, but when she asked him what was wrong, he'd told her to leave.

"Honestly, Mr. Hillyer," Sydney said, genuinely concerned, "I don't mean to be telling tales out of school, and maybe it's none of my business, but --"

"No, Sydney," Hillyer said, "I'm glad you're telling me this. I'm worried about him, too." Hillyer had known and worked with Cy for 15 years. But the truth is . . . what he was really worried about was the presentation they soon had to make at Cummings Athletic Shoes, of which Cy was a crucial part.

Hillyer was central casting's idea of an ad agency CEO: smooth, sophisticated, good-looking, and smart. Lots of people thought he was fake, but Sydney liked working for him.

"I'll check on him, Sydney. And thanks for telling me. Better get back to work; and confirm that lunch date I have with Bernadette. We have a lot to go over before she leaves for her vacation Friday."

"Okay," she said, and turned and walked out of the office, shutting Hillyer's door behind her.



BUT LIFE GOES ON...
Receptionist Agnes Ramirez spoke firmly into the phone. "Well you can sue us if you want," she said, "but we need to get the window fixed!"

Agnes was on the phone with building maintenance, trying to get a new pane of glass installed in a window. A senior copywriter at the agency had gone berserk the night before, and had tossed a computer through a purportedly unbreakable glass window. The seventeenth round of client revisions on Consolidated Foods advertisement for Chewy-Crumbly Cookies had sent him around the bend, poor guy, and the machine went sailing 20 stories to the sidewalk below. Miraculously, no one was hurt. Needless to say, he was now on sick leave.

"It's 39 degrees!" Agnes was saying, "and we've got no window! It's got to be done this morning!"



THE PAST HAUNTS US...
Downtown, despite the fact that it was approaching 11:00, Lucien Brandt had still not dressed for work. In fact, he'd been sitting on the side of the bed in his loft, half-dressed, for close to two hours, thinking. He knew he was late, but he didn't care.

The phone call that he'd received that morning was from out of his deep, dark past. And though he'd known it was inevitable, something kept him believing it would never come.

What's HIS story? As art director, Lucien Brandt has carte blanche to be a prima donna -- and hey, he's decided to go for it. Black and brilliant, a week doesn't go by that Lucien doesn't throw a hissy-fit in the art department over a client's reaction to one of his "concepts." No one knows much about Lucien's background -- he's compulsively private -- except that he once worked as a Bloomingdale's window- designer and is forever whining about how much he misses "the immediacy of retail." Lucien lives alone in a converted warehouse loft in the West Village with a black cat named Gladys Knight and a Soloflex muscle machine. But what are those dozens of e-mail messages he's been getting lately that no one's allowed to look at? And why must he compulsively run out of the office every day at 6 p.m. as though his life depended on it?

Lucien was being blackmailed. His life had been a colorful one, to say the least, and, now approaching 45, Lucien could look back and say he'd done it all -- and survived it all. Civil rights in the late '60s. Disco and decadence in the '70s and '80s. And serious work in the '90s. Now, at the top of his career, he stood to lose it all. And why? Because some creep had finally, after all these years, found him. And had the wherewithal to reveal Lucien's secret. Lucien had gone over this scenario a thousand times in his mind. Would it really matter if people knew all about him? Would it necessarily mean that he'd . . . lose his job? His friends? Or worse, be put on trial and sent to prison? It was unthinkable. But he'd been thinking about it.

Fourteen years earlier, Lucien hadn't been Lucien Brandt. His name had been Allan Bagley, and he'd had been the senior window designer for a top department store in San Francisco, and had been responsible -- people said -- for one of the worst fires in retail history. He'd done a series of Christmas windows for the store using strings of sub-standard lighting that the store's Vice President of Marketing had specifically told him not to use. The result, that disastrous Christmas eve, had been a catastrophic blaze that burned nearly half a city block to the ground -- including the entire department store. Two nighttime security guards had been killed in the fire.

The worst part was as soon as Lucien had heard about it on the news, he knew it was his fault. Rather than come forward and take responsibility, he took off. Vanished. Literally. The local press coverage of his disappearance had been devastating, and he'd spent two full years on the run. A fugitive from justice, like in a movie. Only this was real, and it was a nightmare, as he drifted from city to city under assumed names faking various forms of identification and doing degrading temporary jobs. He'd finally washed up in New York, under the name of Lucien Brandt, where, lost amid the corporate concrete canyons, he'd begun life anew.
Thanks to the phone call he'd received that morning demanding cash to keep Lucien's secret, Lucien's past had come to grotesque life once again.

EXISTENTIAL-CRISIS ALERT!

"None of it means anything anymore, Jim," Cy said, mournfully. "None of it."

"None of what?" Hillyer responded, standing in front of Cy Lefkowitz's desk desperately trying to get his friend and colleague to tell him what was wrong. "What are you talking about?"

Cy leaned back in his chair and put his feet up on his desk. He put his two hands to his face and began to massage his eyes, as a child does when trying to wake up from a deep sleep.

"Jim, my divorce from Renée became final last week. I just got the papers. I don't know if I'm going to get over this one." He sighed.

Cy had been married twice before, both times to much younger women, and when he'd gone ahead 18 months ago and married Renée -- whom he'd met when she worked as a temp at the agency -- nobody said anything but everybody knew it wouldn't last.

"I'm sorry, Cy," Hillyer volunteered, unhelpfully.

"Hey, it's not your fault," Cy laughed, weakly. "It's my own. I just can't seem to make it work. Make anything work, outside this damn office. Need a brilliant campaign? Need a headline that'll knock their socks off? Need an award-winning commercial? I'm your man. The only thing I can't do right is . . . my life."

"Come on, Cy," Jim said, like a high-school coach trying to cheer up a dejected team player. "You're exaggerating."

"You know I'm not," Cy answered.

In a very real way, Jim thought -- though he couldn't admit it -- Cy was right.

What's wrong with HIM? No one argues that Cy Lefkowitz is the creative brains behind the agency's success. How could they? He's the one who came up with the copy line that landed them the Bongiorno Pizza account --"We don't deliver. Deal with it." -- the giant account that started the ball rolling. As Senior Copywriter, Cy has masterminded campaigns for Tsunami laundry detergent --"A tidal wave of clean.", Cummings athletic shoes -- "Take a hike.", and other clients that have kept billings well into eight figures for the last five years. But lately, Cy has been worrying everyone. Now that his third divorce is final, his beard is more scraggly then ever, his corduroy pants more frayed, his suede wingtip shoes scruffier, and his temper frighteningly short. Is it a simple case of burnout . . . or is it something worse?

"I've already done it," Cy answered, meaningfully, and looking at Jim with an intensity Jim hadn't seen in his friend in a long time.

"I've already gone and done it."