If I Should Die Before I Die by Peter Israel Page A

what he’d asked for. To me the stuff’s like drinking cough medicine, and maybe Margie Magister, her hand pausing near the bottle on the rolling bar, thought the same.
    To my surprise, he answered: “What are you having, Mrs. Magister?”
    â€œWhisky and a little water,” she said. “One piece of ice. Scotch whisky. But I want you to call me Margie.”
    Margie with a hard g .
    â€œMargie,” the Counselor repeated. “Yes, I’ll take the same as you.”
    Unprecedented.
    Roy Barger ordered a white wine, I a beer, both poured from bottles stored in a silvery ice bucket, and then the four of us stood near the terrace parapet, glasses in hand, looking out over Central Park.
    â€œHow can people hate New York?” Margie Magister said with a sweep of her hand. “I think it’s magical.”
    By one of those quirks of New York weather, we were having a rerun of summer, the temperature back in the low 70’s, and the buildings lining the 59th Street end of the park and the glass business towers behind them shone in a strong midday sun. The air all but sparkled, and a soft breeze blew in from the southwest. From that point of view, that height and distance, yes, she had a point. Having nine figures at her disposal, give or take, may have helped the magic along too.
    Small and chic, that’s how she struck me. She had black hair cut short, with slanting bangs across her forehead, olive skin, expressive angular features, dark eyes hidden behind a pair of wraparound sunglasses. She wore a black pants-and-shirt outfit under a tailored olive-colored blazer with the collar turned up, and as dazzling an array of jewelry as you’ll see in the middle of the day, even in New York. Rings on her fingers, a diamond-headed stickpin in one lapel of the blazer, and a diamond choker necklace in which the stones, you’d normally have figured, were too big to be anything but glass.
    She was pretty too, in that miniature European way. The kind of woman, I thought, who probably devoted a lot of time to turning herself out to look both casual and elegant.
    She served us lunch at a terrace table set for four under a large striped umbrella, helped by a blond youth called Edward, in black pants and a white dress shirt unbuttoned to mid-chest, whom I recognized from Bud Fincher’s reports. She put the Counselor on her right with, as she pointed out, the best view of the city. I sat at her left, Roy Barger across from her. She apologized for the size of the meal—a throwback, she said, to Europe, where people used to eat the big meal in the middle of the day before they learned American habits. We should eat as little, or as much, as we wanted. The Counselor maintained that the European custom was more civilized, and they discussed the finer points of the spread, things like where the smoked salmon had come from, how the roast veal had been prepared, whether strawberries were better with English-style clotted cream or crème fraiche from France. As for me, with my American brown-bagging habit, it was closer to a banquet than lunch, and when I made the mistake of switching from beer to white wine, a fruity-tasting version from the Loire Valley, I started thinking things like: well, sure, New York is magical; and why shouldn’t she run Magister Companies? Because somewhere—between, say, the salad and the Chilean strawberries—the conversation had switched to business. It was Margie who’d switched it, and very directly.
    â€œCharles,” she said, “I know Roy has told you what it is I want, what is my objective, but I want you to hear it from me, okay?”
    â€œOf course,” the Counselor said, holding his wine glass up as she poured.
    â€œI want to run the Magister business,” she said, her head tilted toward him. “I want to control the business and to run it. It is as simple as that. Do you think I’m wrong?”
    The Counselor seemed