Victoria swung her legs out with a contented smile. Her lunch meeting at Da Silvano with the Lancôme people had been hugely successful; they had agreed to practically double their current advertising spend, which Victoria had finagled with assurances that she would radically increase namechecks for their brand. Da Silvano, a famous downtown restaurant on a fashionable block of Sixth, was a meeting place for actors, models, and film people, and the Lancôme reps had been hugely impressed by the number of celebrities who had come over to greet Victoria. The food was no better than average, and the prices sky-high, but then few customers were actually eating anything, and they were all on expenses anyway, so no one cared. Another triumph under my belt, Victoria thought complacently. And I simply adore coming back to the office; it’s my favourite building in the whole of New York. She loved the Lipstick Building, so-called not only because its post-modern design was oval, stacked in three layers like a lipstick tube, but because its glittering, shiny red granite, banded with equally shiny stainless steel, resembled designer cosmetic packaging much more than it did a traditional office block.
