Lauren Weisberger 5-Book Collection: The Devil Wears Prada, Revenge Wears Prada, Everyone Worth Knowing, Chasing Harry Winston, Last Night at Chateau Marmont. Lauren Weisberger

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СКАЧАТЬ responses raced around my head, but I could only sputter like a first-grader who’d been singled out by the teacher for talking in class.

      ‘Um, well, Miranda, we’ve called all of the numbers we have listed for him, and he doesn’t appear to be at any of them,’ I managed.

      ‘Well of course he’s not!’ She was almost screaming now, that precious, well-guarded cool was precariously close to collapsing. She took a deep, exaggerated breath and said calmly, ‘Ahn-dre-ah. Are you aware that Mr Lagerfeld is in Paris this week?’ I felt like we were doing English As a Second Language lessons.

      ‘Of course, Miranda. Emily has been trying all the numbers in—’

      ‘And are you aware that Mr Lagerfeld said he’d be available on his mobile phone while he was in Paris?’ Every muscle in her throat strained to keep her voice even and calm.

      ‘Well, no, we don’t have a cell number listed in the directory, so we didn’t know that Mr Lagerfeld even had a cell phone. But Emily is on the phone with his assistant right now, and I’m sure she’ll have that number in just a minute.’ Emily gave me the thumbs-up right before she scribbled something and exclaimed, ‘Merci, oh yes, thank you, I mean, merci’ over and over again.

      ‘Miranda, I have the number right here. Would you like me to connect you now?’ I could feel my chest puff out with confidence and pride. A job well done! A superior performance under the most pressure-filled conditions. Never mind that my really cute peasant blouse that had been complimented by two – not one, but two – fashion assistants was now sporting sweat stains under the arms. Who cared? I was about to get this stark raving mad lunatic of an international caller off my back, and I was thrilled.

      ‘Ahn-dre-ah?’ It sounded like a question, but I was only concentrating on trying to figure out a pattern for indiscriminate name mix-ups. At first I’d thought she did it deliberately in an attempt to belittle and humiliate us even more, but then I figured out that she was probably quite satisfied with the levels of belittlement and humiliation we endured and so she did it only because she couldn’t be bothered to keep straight details so inane as her two assistants’ names. Emily had confirmed this by saying that she called her Emily about half the time but called her a mixture of Andrea and Allison – the assistant before her – the other half. I felt better.

      ‘Yes?’ Squeaking again. Dammit! Wasn’t it possible for me to have just a tiny bit of dignity with this woman?

      ‘Ahn-dre-ah, I don’t know what all the fuss is over finding Mr Lagerfeld’s mobile number when I have it right here. He gave it to me just five minutes ago, but we were disconnected and I can’t seem to dial correctly.’ She said the last part as though the entire world was to blame for this irritation and inconvenience except for herself.

      ‘Oh. You, um, you have the number? And you knew he was on that number the whole time?’ I was saying it for Emily’s benefit, and it only served to enrage Miranda even more.

      ‘Am I not making myself perfectly clear here? I need you to connect me to 03.55.23.56.67.89. Immediately. Or is that too difficult?’

      Emily was slowly shaking her head in disbelief as she crumpled up the number we’d both just fought so hard to get.

      ‘No, no, Miranda, of course that’s not too difficult. I’ll connect you right away. Hold just a minute.’ I hit ‘conference,’ dialed the numbers, heard an older man shout ‘Allo!’ into the phone, and hit conference again. ‘Mr Lagerfeld, Miranda Priestly, you’re connected,’ I stated like one of those manual operators from the Little House on the Prairie days. And instead of putting the whole call on mute and then hitting speaker so Emily and I could listen in on the call together, I just hung up. We sat in silence for a few minutes as I tried to refrain from badmouthing Miranda immediately. Instead, I mopped some dampness from my forehead and took long, deep breaths. She spoke first.

      ‘So, let me just get this straight. She had his number the entire time but just didn’t know how to dial it?’

      ‘Or maybe she just didn’t feel like dialing it,’ I added helpfully, always enthusiastic for the chance to team up against Miranda, especially considering how rare the opportunities were with Emily.

      ‘I should’ve known,’ she said, shaking her head like she was horribly disappointed with herself. ‘I really should’ve known that. She always calls to have me connect her to people who are staying in the next room, or who are in a hotel two streets over. I remember I thought that was the weirdest thing, calling from Paris to New York to have someone connect you to someone in Paris. Now it just seems normal, of course, but I can’t believe I didn’t see that one coming.’

      I was about to run to the dining room for lunch, but the phone rang again. Operating under the lightning-doesn’t-strike-twice theory, I decided to be a sport and answer the phone.

      ‘Miranda Priestly’s office.’

      ‘Emily! I am standing in the pouring rain on the rue de Rivoli and my driver has vanished. Vanished! Do you understand me? Vanished! Find him immediately!’ She was hysterical, my very first time hearing her that way, and I wouldn’t have been surprised to learn it was the only time.

      ‘Miranda, just a moment. I have his number right here.’ I turned to scan my desk for the itinerary I’d set down a moment earlier, but all I saw were papers, old Bulletins, stacks of back issues. Only three or four seconds had passed, but I felt as if I were standing right next to her, watching as the rain poured down on her Fendi fur and caused the makeup to melt down the side of her face. Like she could just reach out and slap my face, tell me I’m a worthless piece of shit with zero talent, no skill set, a complete and total loser. There wasn’t time to talk myself down, remind myself that this was merely a human being (theoretically) who wasn’t happy to be standing in the rain and was taking it out on her assistant 3,600 miles away. It’s not my fault. It’s not my fault. It’s not my fault.

      ‘Ahn-dre-ah! My shoes are ruined. Do you hear me? Are you even listening? Find my driver now!’

      I was at risk of some inappropriate emotion – I could feel the knot in the back of my throat, the tightening of the muscles in the back of my neck, but it was too early to tell if I would laugh or cry. Either one: not good. Emily must have sensed as much, because she leapt out of her seat and handed me her copy of the itinerary. She’d even highlighted the driver’s contact numbers, three in all, one for the car phone, his mobile phone, and his home phone. Naturally.

      ‘Miranda, I’m going to need to put you on hold while I call him. Can I put you on hold?’ I didn’t wait for a response, which I knew would drive her crazy, and threw the call on hold. I dialed Paris again. The good news was the driver picked up on the first ring of the first number I tried. The bad news was he didn’t speak English. Although I’d never been self-destructive before, I couldn’t help but smash my forehead firmly into the Formica. Three times of this, and Emily had picked up the line at her desk. She’d resorted to screaming, not so much in an attempt to make the driver understand her own bad French, but simply because she was trying to impress upon him the urgency of the current situation. New drivers always took a little breaking in, mostly because they foolishly believed that if Miranda had to wait forty-five seconds to a minute extra, she’d be all right. This was precisely the notion of which Emily and I were to disabuse them.

      We both put our heads down a few minutes later, after Emily had managed to insult the driver enough that he’d high-tailed it back to where he’d left Miranda three or four minutes earlier. I wasn’t particularly hungry for lunch anymore, a phenomenon that made me nervous. Was Runway rubbing off? Or was СКАЧАТЬ