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nose-to-armpit with the refugees who had managed to make it this far and their displaced descendants, she did indeed feel for the washed-over masses of the drowned isles and lost littorals, and in the greenhouse summer, when temperature and humidity exceeded even her grandparents’ tallest stories of lost New Orleans and vast clouds of giant mosquitoes invaded the nights, she felt at one with the survivors in the jungle fringes of the Amazon Sea.
    That was the Blue of it.
    The Green of it was that a girl who had grown up in sunny sultry Paris would have had to be a saint in a crown of thorns and a hair shirt to trade such environs, which the gods of chance had greened, for the modulated surcease of the agonies of the Lands of the Lost.
    A no-colored animal with Green and Blue stripes.
    Which, upon graduation, as it turned out, made her a valuablerecruit for Bread & Circuses, and made the syndic culture thereof an offer she couldn’t refuse.
     

    Monique’s pedicab dropped her off at Thirty-fourth Street, where Bread & Circuses’ headquarters occupied a modest four floors atop the Empire State Building. This second-most-prominent visual icon of the Apple had had its ups and downs during the two centuries that it had been to New York what the Eiffel Tower was to Paris, and when Bread & Circuses had moved in, it was going through one of its seedy epochs.
    As far as B&C was concerned, since the Statue of Liberty was unavailable, this made the deal perfect. The syndic bought the top thirty floors at a distressed price, renovated the exterior tower and the lobby, lit it up like a halogen and laser Christmas tree, redid the top four floors as its headquarters, and then sold off the twenty-six floors below, one by one, at ever-increasing prices, to chic entertainment, couture, travel, and resort syndics.
    This resulted not only in a handsome profit to its citizen-shareholders but in soaring property values in the rest of the skyscraper and the consequent renovation of the whole building’s decor and prestige, leaving Bread & Circuses sitting high, wide, and handsome atop the city’s reborn signature edifice.
    That is, the crowning monument to New York’s mighty edifice complex, Monique could never refrain from thinking, despite the tired awfulness of the pun, every time she stared up the gargantuan gray length of the Empire State Building, capped by a rounded and gleaming silvery tower, from which B&C had caused the antenna to be removed in order to enhance the phallic effect.
    Deliberate?
    Believe it!
    Advertising, public relations, lobbying, putting on events, promoting causes, however the client wished to interface with the public, B&C could handle it for a price.
    But Bread & Circuses wasn’t content to be just the world’s
leading
public interface syndic, it intended to be
the
public interface syndic for all practical purposes, and nesting atop this ultimate totem pole to the potency of the deep sell image was not the sort of thing B&C didwithout full consciousness of the effect it was achieving.
    Nor, she had to admit, without a syndic sense of humor.
    Of which, she hoped, she was not about to become the hapless object.
    Bread & Circuses had a private express elevator to its suite of offices, and Monique took it to middle-management country, where Giorgio Kang’s lair was located.
    Giorgio had been humorously appreciative of how she had not only been instrumental in closing the Gardens of Allah project for the client, but had done so in a manner likely to garner B&C a lagniappe larger that the original deal in the form of a long-term interfacing contract from the projected Islamic disneyworld.
    But while Giorgio handed her her assignments, he was only a supervising account executive, far below the board level, and a long lateral distance from the accounting department too.
    So when an immediate bonus of additional shares had not been forthcoming from on high, she took Giorgio’s assurance that this was merely a