Characters in Under the Weather

Al Peterson was still running things back then, and he was the one I took the comps to. I remember sitting in front of his desk in the sweat seat with my heart in my mouth as he shuffled slowly through the comps we’d worked up.

I can stay until seven; after that there’s only Alfredo.” The disparaging note in his voice suggests I’d be better off dealing with a street weirdo. Never, I think. I’ll never be home. In fact, I was never there in the first place.

“Petrov Excellent Vodka,” Aura McLean says. Her wonderful breasts rise and fall in a theatrical sigh. “If that name’s an example of the new Russian capitalism, it’s dead on arrival.”

It’s Berk Ostrow, the building super. He wants to know what time I’m going to be home, because the rat everybody’s been smelling isn’t in 5-C, it’s in our apartment. Ostrow says the exterminators have to leave by four to get to another job, but that isn’t the important thing.

“By the middle of next week for sure. I want to give Billy a chance to see what he can do.” Billy Ederle is our newest hire, and doing his break-in time as my assistant. He doesn’t get an invite to the morning meetings yet, but I like him.

Then he said, “These are good, Bradley. More than good, terrific. We’ll meet with the client tomorrow afternoon. You do the prez.”

It’s nice, all right, spring edging into summer and a shine on everything. Carlo, the doorman, is under the awning, talking on his cell phone. “Yuh,” he says. “Yuh, I finally got hold of her. She says go ahead, no problem as long as I’m there.

“They used to call your condition ‘barren,’ Mrs. Franklin,” the doctor said when he gave us the bad news, “but in this case, your inability to conceive could be a blessing.

left? center? below?—and Frank Bernstein suggests that actually adding the recipe might prolong the page-view, especially for webvertising and in mags like Playboy and Esquire. I tune out, thinking about the drink sitting on the tray in my airplane dream, until I realize George Slattery is calling on me.

Most are terrific and at first Fred Willits seemed terrific too. I took him under my wing, and so it became my responsibility to fire him—I guess you’d say that, although interns are never actually “hired” in the first place—when it turned out he was a klepto who had decided …

I tune out, thinking about the drink sitting on the tray in my airplane dream, until I realize George Slattery is calling on me. I’m able to replay the question, and that’s a good thing. You don’t ask George to chew his cabbage twice.

Then the shape’s head turns and two eyes gleam at me. It’s Lady. She’s not supposed to be under there, and I guess she knows it (hard to tell what a dog knows and what it doesn’t), but I must have left the door open when I came to bed.

God knows how much stuff he lifted before Maria Ellington caught him loading reams of paper into his briefcase one afternoon. Turned out he was also a bit of a psycho. He went nuclear when I told him he was through.

Or supposed to be. “I finally got hold of Mrs. Warshawski,” Carlo tells me. Mrs. Warshawski is in Five-C, but only technically. She’s been gone for a couple of months now. “She was in Vienna.” “Vienna, is that so,” I say. “She told me to go ahead with the exterminators.

But I come around in a hurry when Pete Wendell shows a mock-up poster for the new Petrov Excellent campaign.