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Sari?”
    â€œNonsense!” she says. “Me—frightened? That’s bull-do!” And she drums her lacquered fingernails sharply on the library tabletop.
    This is a signal and Thomas, as though on cue, steps quietly into the room. It would not surprise Gabe the slightest little bit if Thomas has been standing, all the time, just outside the sitting-room door, listening to their conversation, every word. “Excuse me, Madam,” Thomas says. “Just to remind you of your ten-o’clock appointment at the office.”
    â€œYes, Thomas. Thank you.”
    Gabe rises as Thomas withdraws. “I’ll see that a follow-up story is written right away, on the Odeon,” he says. “And this one I’ll write myself. An editorial, I think. And I’ll speak to Archie on the other little matter we discussed.”
    â€œDear old Gabe,” she says, now all smiles and dark, twinkly eyes, as though she has forgotten everything they have just been talking about. “It was so good of you to come by, such a nice surprise. Just the boost I needed on a rainy day. Dear old Pollywog. Why are you always so good to me?” And she offers her hand to be kissed again.
    Because, he thinks, if I weren’t so good to you you’d feed me to the lions. And first you’d cancel all your ad pages in my paper. But he says nothing, and kisses the upraised hand.
    If you have spent any time in the Bay Area—and certainly if, like us, you live here—you will have heard stories about Assaria LeBaron. She is something of a local legend, a character, as they say. Some of the stories are true, some not. Many of these tales are fictions. You may have heard, for example, that she was once an artist’s model, and also that she was once a dancer. You may have been told that she was the bosomy young woman who posed, loosely draped, for the statue that stands atop the Dewey Monument in the center of Union Square, and you may have heard that she posed for this sculpture in the nude, and that when the statue was delivered the prudish city fathers insisted that the draperies be added. But how can any of this be true? Sari did not come to San Francisco until the 1920s, long after the Dewey Monument was completed and in place. You may also have heard that she was the model for some of the female figures that appeared, undraped, on the friezes of the old Post Office building. But put two and two together. The friezes and the Post Office went in the Great Fire of 1906. Assaria LeBaron was born in 1909. All these stories are untrue. Untrue, untrue, all of it, and remember that you read it here.
    In San Francisco, Sari LeBaron has long been known as “the Tiny Terror,” and she earned that sobriquet long before it was applied to the late Truman Capote. Some of that reputation is deserved, some is not. It is true that her name is occasionally uttered in tones of dread within the boardrooms of certain banks and in certain law offices along Montgomery Street. When she is hammering out a contract for a new distributorship, for instance, she can be an absolute demon with her demands until the lawyers throw up their hands in despair and give her every article and subclause that she wants. “We are arguing, now, over pennies, Mrs. LeBaron— pennies! ” the lawyers will cry. “Well, if it only amounts to pennies, then why not let me have them?” she will answer. Watch her, late at night, with her old-fashioned adding machine, going over the company’s books, checking monthly sales figures, finding tiny discrepancies that even Messrs. Price and Waterhouse have overlooked somehow. Still, no one in this town will deny that Sari, almost single-handedly, rescued Baronet Vineyards, pulled it out of the shambles that Julius LeBaron left it in, and made Baronet what it is today. It was even she who first proposed the name Baronet Vineyards for the company’s label, who suggested that the