SNAP: The World Unfolds (4 page)

With its global scope and network, SNAP didn’t constantly replay the short snippets of video like other shows did—not even the repeated screen crawl on CNN. The shows were fast-paced and snappy because we could always fill with clips from Rio or Budapest or Munich.

And I was traveling. The trip to Rio was just the beginning: London, New York, Munich, Paris.

Jean-Louis went with me occasionally but our relationship was stalled at business.

According to Jazz, the jury was still out on his sexuality—or any other interests. He treated all the staff pleasantly, seemed to have no favorites and busted his hump on making the pages look stunning. I’d heard that even the set designers asked his advice.

And finally, Jazz explained the strange phone tones. It was a recording of blood pumping through the chambers of the heart—truly grisly.

“Maybe. The Board and Baron Kandesky wanted a sound that was calming and human,” Jazz said. “I heard they listened to a lot of voice sounds but they were all too jarring when people were concentrating. All the phones everywhere at SNAP, even the company cell phones, use that ring. If you have your own cell, you’re required to keep it off or on vibrate when you’re doing business.”

The low noise level made for a serene and comfortable environment, especially at deadline but it still made me uneasy. Too much whispering. Even when groups clotted together there wasn’t much sound, just murmurs.

We had a crisis.

No one had seen or heard from Penelope DeVries.

Penelope—Pen in celeb-talk—was a Certified Celebrity. Her photo on our cover could sell a million more copies at the check-out stand. Her in a TV trailer could jump our Nielsen ratings.

She was spectacular. Average height, brown hair sleeked back in a perfect chignon, no more than a size two in her Chanel dress, shoes, handbag and oversized sunglasses. When she took the sunglasses off she became a giant.

She wasn’t the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen, she had no particular talent, she didn’t model, she didn’t pose nude, she hadn’t been in rehab—at least as far as we knew and we would have been the ones to know—she was just a celebrity with a capital C. She was at every film festival that mattered, every club and gallery opening of note, every A-list party on both coasts. She was dressed by Paris, Milan, Fifth Avenue and Rodeo Drive. Designers clawed over each other to give her clothes. If she was photographed at dinner, the restaurant would be booked solid for the next 12 months.

I’d only seen her once. She and Baron Kandesky had dropped in at a content meeting, leaving everyone speechless. Amazingly, her escort was better known than she was but absolutely shunned any photos. And Baron Stefan Johannes Kandesky knew how to dodge the paparazzi—he owned most of them.

That was then. This was now. She hadn’t been visible for the past few weeks. Chaz and I messaged all our contacts asking about any sightings; no one answered. She’d slowly done a Cheshire Cat, with her seductive smile lingering in everyone’s mind. No Pen, though.

But the Baron turned up at a planning meeting one afternoon. No announcement, no trumpets, just a door sliding open and a sudden drop in temperature as though winter swept in. Chaz led the response with a “Hello, Baron. We weren’t expecting you. Please have a seat,” and he waved his arm at the head of the table where an empty chair suddenly appeared.

“Thank you, Chaz. I won’t interrupt for too long, I just have an announcement.” The man spoke in a low, cultured voice with a trace of an accent—some Eastern European hints.

“Penelope has decided to retire.”

Most of us sat there with our jaws on the table, but Jean-Louis just nodded. Did he already know? He was a newer hire than I was, what made him higher on the need-to-know list?

“Penelope has told me she wants to move to France for some peace and serenity.” the Baron’s voice was calm. “We’ll miss her at SNAP, but want the best for her. This will lead our coverage tomorrow, but now we have today to finish with.” With that, the meeting continued and the Baron left.

It felt anticlimactic to just talk about what we were all planning for tonight’s show, but Chaz was right. We’d need a day to work out the best way to cover such a bombshell. Pen had been the anchor around which we could hang a TV show or a magazine issue, no matter what. I jotted a note to check with Francois Sartou about how we’d handle this move. The Baron said “France,” not specifically “Paris,” so first thing would be to find out where Pen decided to settle. And even though the Baron had told her we’d cease our coverage, there would be local people who recognized her, maybe shoot pictures. I didn’t want anybody, or any other media, trying to sell us a photo of Pen after this announcement.

One day I drove myself to work. Having the limo pick me up was great and luxe, but I wanted to run some personal errands in the afternoon and I always felt funny using the limo for this. It probably wouldn’t matter, but I could hear my mother:
Don’t take advantage of small things, you may need the big ones later
. That morning I parked and came to the staff elevator. Down the hall was a door I’d never noticed before. It had a key card lock so I used my card and went in. Like most of the rest of the offices, there were no windows. There was a reception desk with the omnipresent gurgling phone and a sign, “Open by appointment at 5 p.m.”

Beyond the reception desk, another door led into an inner room. I stepped through into what looked like a medical lab. Five semi-reclining couches were against the far wall with machines and IV stands next to them. At the far right end of the space, another room held bins full of medical supplies; stretchy bandages, syringes, tubing and empty plastic bags. To the left was another office, maybe a nurse’s or doctor’s, with books and journals on shelves and piled on the desk. Decidedly odd; probably just the company nurse’s office. I didn’t know we had one. None of the company information talked about one, but we did have several hundred employees in this location, so it made sense. And appointments after 5 p.m. meant that even though a nurse was available, not much company time would be lost.

I’d have to ask Jazz about this, too.

The strange room zapped out of my brain the minute I reached my office. Jazz was twittering around talking to herself and trying to answer three gurgling phones, my office was full of people and controlled chaos reigned.

“Hi” I said, dropping my stuff on the desk and nodding as Jazz, still talking on her earbud, put a coffee in front of me. “Is this a meeting? I didn’t have it in my planner.”

This was good thinking. Pen had been a mainstay, kind of like the weather. There were a lot of celebs we hunted or followed, not stalked, but they weren’t always available. Having, or polishing, another woman would give us a good backup.

“Do you guys have a plan or just ideas?”

“A semi-jelled plan. We have several people outside the U.S. that we can fill in with right now. The American audience will like exotic places, especially Rio, and the aristos are always good. We,” and here Carola gestured at her fellow editors, “almost never get out. We use stringers and free-lancers to fill the gaps. If
we
were out, we’d control the faces.”

It was interesting. She exaggerated slightly because all of the senior staff went to parties and events occasionally, but there were just too many to hit everything. We sent staff to the big ones and the rest we either assigned a stringer or freelancer or took potluck with the paparazzi.

Their plan was to pick a couple dozen smaller events, with smaller clubs thrown in, and take turns. It was limited to Southern California, basically LA and Hollywood, and everybody would take three or four. One of the attractive parts was that our faces weren’t known outside of our office. Unlike the TV production of SNAP, our pictures weren’t seen and our names only appeared on the magazine’s masthead and TV credits, which nobody read. If we spent the next few weeks, and compared photos and names at our weekly meetings, we should have a selection to hone in on. There were drawbacks. We couldn’t let the clubs, restaurants or events know we were coming. We’d have to use small digital cameras or cell phones because shots had to be candid. We came up with the first two weeks of assignments and parceled them out. With my travel schedule, I could only take on two, one with Jean-Louis and one with Gordon.

Gordon was first up and we went to an up-and-coming club in the Melrose area. Beautiful people and so much sound packed the space that we communicated with gestures and shrugs. Shooting for a couple of hours yielded only four possibilities when we downloaded them the next day. There were hair spikes, midriffs, navels—both pierced and unpierced—tattoos and rainbows of hair colors. There were oversized sunglasses and tiny bags. There were even two Chihuahuas. We saved the possibilities, but not the dogs, and waited for the next hunting party.

After a month of this, we met again. All we’d gleaned were three possible women. One of them was big in the club scene and the other two were second-tier event-goers. They were all single, daughters of SoCal money—one oil, one movies, one insurance—and loved to party. They were good for a few “Seen Ats”; we gave their names to our freelancers, but none of them was a Pen.

It was a game try, but our foray netted us very little. Except the night that Jean-Louis and I spent at a fund-raiser for abandoned animals. The dinner and speakers were bearable, lots of flashbulbs on the evening’s celebrity, a 50-something actor with a fading career and his pumped-up trophy wife. The planned after-party, dancing and mixing, began and Jean-Louis stopped working.

We were dancing to a slower number when he pulled me close, too close for just a dance, and said “I’ve looked for years.” It was such a cliché that I choked.

“If that’s your best line, I need to buy you a book,” I said, once I’d stopped laughing.

“I don’t know, it certainly got us beyond talking business,” his brows went up. “I’ve watched you for the last few weeks and figured I’d have to play the humor card. I would like to get to know you better, on a more personal level, on a level level,” and he gave me an odd closed-mouth smile, almost a smirk.

It was flattering and warming to have someone as dishy and talented as Jean-Louis express interest. I could hear my mother’s voice,
Don’t get involved with someone prettier than you; they know it.

The evening ended with a kiss on the cheek when the limo dropped me, and I planned to drop any involvement. He was clearly prettier than me.

I was so preoccupied the next morning that I punched the wrong elevator button. When it dinged, I got in, swore, pushed the “Open Door” button and stepped out. What I saw out of the corner of my eye didn’t register because I was checking my Blackberry. I jumped and tried to scream when the arm snaked across my throat. Instinctively, I dropped everything and grabbed for the arm, trying to pull it off so I could breathe.

“Don’t struggle,” a voice hissed. “This won’t take long.”

In panic from fright and beginning to feel the lack of oxygen, I thought the voice had an Eastern European accent with Vs. The arm, and the guy it was attached to, were incredibly strong. My clawing hands weren’t able to get any grip. Some slick cloth covered the arm and underneath I could feel the muscles like steel bands. They were flexed without an inch of give.

The guy leaned back and the effect lifted me up to the tips of my toes, only tightening his hold on my throat more. Suddenly I could feel his breath on the side of my neck then a slicing pain as I began to lose consciousness. I thought I heard humming as my mind was going black.

Rushing, roaring wind hit me. I was pulled off my feet, hit the front of the closed elevator door and slid to the ground. That was when I realized the arm was gone. I took a deep breath and another and another then someone said, “Slow down, slow down, you’re going to hyperventilate.”