And hundreds of beautiful women.
Somewhere, Jack thought, there was a woman. Today. This year. Tall, beautiful, cool, and poised, like Jaclyn Smith in her heyday. Or like Marianna, his wife, when she’d been New York’s top model. Marianna had been one of the most beautiful women to face a camera anywhere, anytime.
He swiveled his chair back to his desk and reached across it to grab the telephone. After a moment’s thought he punched in the international code for the United States. Then the number of his house in Wilton, Connecticut.
The housekeeper answered.
It was six o’clock in Paris, which meant it was about noon in Wilton. He was stunned to find no one at home except the housekeeper, Mrs. Ansel.
His daughters, Mrs. Ansel told him very patiently, were in class at Hodgkins Country Day School and wouldn’t be home until five-thirty or later. Mrs. Storm was at a horse show in Fairfield.
Disappointed, Jack told Mrs. Ansel she was doing a good job and hung up the telephone. So much for having a wife and family around when you needed them. He didn’t know why he felt angry. He wasn’t even sure why he felt he had to call home. He hadn’t talked to Marianna in days. Jesus, Jake, his inner voice reminded him, it’s not days. It’s been weeks.
He couldn’t believe it. His secretary always put in his calls to ask how everybody was at home, and see if they needed anything.
More than ever he wanted someone to eat dinner with him. A simple meal in a restaurant wasn’t too complicated, was it?
Jack stared at the papers on his desk. He couldn’t be seen eating dinner alone in Paris. It would make all the gossip columns. He could go back to the Plaza Athenee and order dinner in his suite while he watched French television. It was, he reminded himself, what he’d done last night.
Jack looked around his partly dismantled office that awaited the plasterers in the morning. He was tired of working in chaos. This Paris thing was beating him into the ground.
As he picked up his overcoat, he thought about Nicholas Palliades and his beautiful redheaded model. Maybe after a few weeks the novelty would wear off. Then he could have a talk with Alix about launching an ad campaign using her for Storm King fashions here in France. Maybe throughout Europe.
Hell, the United States.
Maybe, Jackson Storm thought as he shrugged into his fox fur-lined coat and buttoned it, worldwide.
Gilles Vasse’s resignation had been so abrupt, no one at Mortessier’s had thought to give him a present, or even a small going-away party. Still, Alix wasn’t prepared for Gilles’s cold, furious attitude as he prepared to ride his motorcycle home from the avenue Montaigne for the last time.
“Gilles, I can’t leave Mortessier’s,” she told him. “I have job security here.”
He shook her off. “I’m the one who hired you. Rudi didn’t want you. Without me you wouldn’t even be a model!” He made a melodramatic gesture with the hand that held his motorcycle helmet. “I can’t go to the American house without you. I thought you understood that. Now what do I do?”
Alix hated to have Gilles leave on a note of anger, but she couldn’t console him. He stormed down Mortessier’s backstairs.
Most of the atelier was waiting at the bottom. They clustered around Gilles, some of the seamstresses weeping. It was going to be a very French farewell, after all, Alix thought helplessly, with everyone in tears.
She came down slowly, buttoning her jacket against the cold. Alix longed to join the women surrounding Gilles. Even the tall, aloof seconde from the showroom had joined them, dabbing at her eyes. But Gilles was furious with her, and she didn’t want to incite his anger any more.
Beyond the iron door of the employees’ entrance it was nearly dark. The winter-bare branches of the plane trees in the parklike median winked their little golden holiday lights, but the snow of the past few days had turned into slush and then frozen again, covering the ground with a layer of ice. Alix stepped gingerly in the twilight, wisps of hair from under her scarf blowing around her face. She was conscious only of a tall blot of shadow, seconds before the hands grabbed her.
“Get in the car,” a husky voice said. “I want to talk to you.”
She was too startled to scream. Nicholas Palliades’s huge glossy Daimler was parked at the curb. The uniformed chauffeur loomed at the open car door.
Alix charged into him, sending him off-balance. “Leave me alone,” she cried.
She tried to push past him, but he grabbed at her again. “What are you doing? Are you crazy? I’m not going to hurt you!”
“Let me go,” Alix gasped, outraged. The man thought he could buy anything. “You’re assaulting me! I’ll call the police!”
His face was close to hers. “Don’t be ridiculous, I only want to talk to you. Here,” he said, as she tried to kick him, “I wish to give you these.”
With one hand he dangled glittering objects in her face. His other hand held her tightly. “I had them reset with amethysts. I was right, this is better. This color goes with your eyes.”
Alix threw her head back to examine the objects at the end of her nose. There were the same earrings, now with square-cut purple stones in their centers.
She didn’t know whether to scream or laugh. “You’re a lunatic! I don’t want these things. I want you to let me go!”
Almost desperately, he jiggled the earrings in her face. “Isn’t this what you want? Or do you want money?” His expression grew stony. “I’ll give you money. I’ll pay you, but only until I know whether or not you’re pregnant. And I want the names of the people who hired you to do this.”
Alix managed to break away. For one long moment her violet eyes regarded him as though he were an alien from another planet. He really was crazy.
“I have to get away from you,” she gasped. “I don’t know how I’m going to do it, but I have to!”
Then she bolted and ran.
“Come back!” he shouted.
Alix dragged open the door to Mortessier’s back entrance and almost fell inside against the hard, unyielding chest of Gilles Vasse in his leather motorcycle jacket. The designer’s arms went around her to hold her upright.
Alix jammed her heels against the door to hold it shut. “I’ll go with you!” She clutched the front of Gilles’s jacket with both hands. “I can’t stay at Mortessier’s anymore,” she sobbed. “I have to get away from here!”
Eight
A white marble fin de siècle staircase ran up through the interior of the Maison Louvel, an ancient building very different from Rudi Mortessier’s trendy glass and chrome town house in the avenue Montaigne.
The wide sweep of the “grand stair” began at ground level, rose to the European “first floor”—the couture house’s reception area converted from what had once been the Louis Quatorze grand salon—up five and a half stories to the top. On any landing, one could lean into the stairwell and peer over the concentric circle of polished marble balustrade straight to the bottom. The staircase terminated on the fifth floor at the foot of a small iron stair that led to a storeroom and then to the roof.
In the past centuries the marble stairs had been a thoroughfare for servants carrying the things necessary to maintain the historic old hotel particulier that had been built, the story went, by the Sun King, Louis XIV, to house one of his favorite mistresses. In modern times a small antique brass elevator provided much of the transportation from floor to floor, leaving the circular hole of the staircase to function as a marvelously effective amplifier of activities going on in haute couture. Everything, from the ringing of the doorbell on ground level to the slam of the iron storeroom door above carried through the middle of the house like a gigantic speaking tube.
Each morning Abdul, the Maison Louvel’s Tunisian porter, swept the staircase with a push broom, then plugged in the vacuum cleaner to clean the carpet in the salon. Thus it was Abdul who found Alix at the ground level doors at eight o’clock on her first day of work.
“Eh bien,” the North African
said as he let her in, “so you are the new model. You are early.” His aquiline features looked faintly disapproving. “Not that there’s anything for you to do. Young M’sieu Gilles, he is still getting the workroom together. It will be months before there are any clothes for you to wear.”
Though Abdul’s bark was fierce, there wasn’t any bite. The porter brought her coffee from the electric pot he kept downstairs in the broom closet, and several crusty slices of French baguette with butter and jam. Alix suspected that the taciturn but soft-hearted Arab knew models were always hungry.
A few minutes later, Alix heard the French workmen enter the building. And by nine-thirty when Nannette, acting maitresse of the atelier, brought Alix a stack of cardboard boxes filled with spools of thread, they could hear Jackson Storm arriving with his New York staff after their daily breakfast meeting at a nearby brasserie.
Then the telephones began to ring.
The temporary offices, Alix learned, handled calls from New York headquarters and places like Hong Kong and Mexico City, where Storm King jeans factories were located. Down the hall, the business of decorating, acquiring furniture, purchasing for the atelier, stocking fabric, and hiring personnel was handled by Peter Frank, Jackson Storm’s director of international development. Everything else, especially inquiries from the press and electronic media, were handled by Candace Dobbs and her public relations assistants working in what had once been a storeroom for cutting tables.
Alix was given the job of sorting spools of thread. There wasn’t anything else for the house model to do in these early weeks of organization. As she worked, she discovered that she could sit at a table in the atelier on the third floor and follow nearly everything that went on in the building. It was eavesdropping, of course, but Alix found it fascinating to sit stacking hundreds of spools according to their colors while keeping track of almost everything going on. There was a certain rhythm that gave the old house a life of its own.
Considering all the activity as the couture house pulled itself together, Alix didn’t mind at all being out of the way. The retreat was as much emotional as physical. The past few days had taken their toll on her emotions, culminating in the tense moment when she’d told Rudi Mortessier she was leaving.
“Go, go!” Rudi had shouted. “Gilles needs you for his clothes. I’m not so stupid I don’t know that! He is going to be very famous. And only you can wear his designs properly,” he had added, bitterly. “Why should I stand in his way?”
Alix heard Abdul’s big chain of keys rattling as he carried up the midmorning mail. Then came the voices of the plasterers and painters who were leaving for their midmorning break.
Gilles stuck his head in the door, startling her.
“You shouldn’t be doing this.” He looked at the stacks of thread boxes, frowning. “I can find something more interesting for you to do.”
Alix shook her head. “Gilles, I don’t need anything more interesting.” After the past few days, doing something quiet and unchallenging was just what Alix wanted. But before she could tell him so, Gilles dashed off to attend to another crisis.
With a sigh, Alix put aside the sorted thread and went to find a sink to wash her dirty hands. The third floor of the old mansion was a maze. The low-ceilinged eighteenth-century rooms, their ancient wood floors settled to different levels, all opened into each other without hallways. In one dim, dusty room, bolts of muslin-wrapped cloth were stacked from floor to ceiling.
Alix groped her way back out again without disturbing the dust. She already missed Rudi’s workrooms filled with fluorescent lighting, brightly colored partitions and the big, busy, often noisy staff. In the Maison Louvel the only original employees left after the Jackson Storm takeover were Nannette, head fitter and seamstress, and Sylvie, an assistant. Both women were kept on because of their union contracts.
Except for a brief period of success in the 1950s, the Maison Louvel’s slide into obscurity from its heyday fifty years ago had been fairly relentless. The original Madame Louvel had had some measure of success as a designer before World War One. Then her niece, Mademoiselle Claude, had taken over just before Paris was occupied by the Germans in the second World War. Mademoiselle Claude, a friend of Coco Chanel’s, was just achieving some considerable fame and success when she suddenly died. The old couture house had coasted along rather mysteriously into the early eighties, almost forgotten by the rest of the fashion world.
Looking for the washroom, Alix opened a door and gasped.
She almost ran into Abdul’s son, Karim, an engineering student and the Maison Louvel’s part-time handyman, carrying out old wicker baskets full of fabric scraps.
Alix held up her dirty hands to explain her search for a sink.
“You are the model,” the porter’s son said. His gaze traveled over her, an awestruck expression on his swarthy young face.
Alix never got used to that look. Even from the very young ones like Karim. She smiled. “I need to wash my hands.”
“Yes, yes.” Karim put down the baskets and nearly fell over them in his eagerness. “There is a door,” he pointed, “back where you came.”
When she had gone a few steps she noticed he was still standing there. “What is it?” she asked.
He blushed to the roots of his curly black hair. “You are very beautiful,” he said hoarsely. “They are lucky to have you here.”
Some time around noon, from the noises coming up the stairwell, it sounded as though a street mob were invading the salon floor. The hubbub grew so loud, Alix finally gave up and went out into the hall.
Nannette rushed up the stairs to her, face red with excitement and exertion. “It is the princess! These newspaper people are with her. And she has bodyguards. Can you believe it, bodyguards where she is going to work?” She couldn’t resist a quick look into the stairwell. “There are television people, too. Mon Dieu, they didn’t tell Gilles Vasse about this!”
Alix heard Gilles’s voice two floors below. “What’s going on?” The crowd was ascending the stairs, apparently on some sort of tour of the building. “What princess?”
Nannette shot her a sharp look. “Oh, she’s been here before, that one.” She rushed into the atelier and began to throw things off the table into boxes. “She came with her father, Prince Alessio, last year when we have the first American person here, when Monsieur Jackson Storm buy the house. Princess Jacqueline is a mal fille, uncontrollable with the boys. They brought her here to dress her very conservatively so they could send her to live with a family in Spain Quelle désastre! She only makes trouble. Now she wants to work here. As a designer. And these Americans don’t tell the chief designer anything about it!”
Alix was not quite sure she understood, but the noisy crowd was coming down the hallway, Jack Storm’s unmistakable baritone voice saying something about workrooms and areas for the cutter, who was the indispensible man in a couture house.
Alix shoved the spool boxes into a corner. When she turned, the room was rapidly overflowing with newspaper and television people. In the middle, with all attention focused on her, was a rather savage-looking teenager with cropped hair, wearing a magnificent full-length white fox fur coat and slush-stained mukluk boots.
“This,” Jackson Storm said as his publicity people cleared a space for him before the videotape cameras, “is the atelier.”
The princess ignored the press and looked past her future employer; her eyes roamed the room until they came to rest on Alix. “Is that your hair’s natural color?” Princess Jacqueline Medivani spoke perfect unaccented English, her voice admirably piercing.
Alix held her breath. Were all wealthy Europeans so rude? She looked at Jack Storm, but he was directing the journalists in the hall to let the princess’s bodyguards through.
The princess moved closer, carelessly shifting the magnificent white fox coat down her shoulders so that the bottom edge trailed the dirty atelier floor. “I saw you at Mortessier’s,” the princess said again. “A lot of times.”
>
Alix couldn’t remember seeing Princess Jackie before. Where was Gilles? If this scruffy looking teenager was really going to be his assistant, she couldn’t believe he hadn’t been told. Had Gilles somehow gotten lost in this three-ring circus?
Having taken all the pictures they needed, the crowd of press people and television crews followed Jackson Storm and the Princess down to the third-floor landing. Only a tall, sandy-haired man remained standing in the doorway.
“You remember me,” he said.
For a long moment, Alix didn’t. The last time she’d seen Christopher Forbes, he’d been standing hatless in the falling snow on the sidewalk in front of her apartment building, waiting for her to unlock the lobby doors so he could see her safely inside. Then she remembered he was a writer. She supposed he’d been in the crowd of journalists. “You don’t mean you’re writing a story about Princess Jacqueline?”
“It looks like it now.” He had large white teeth, a little crooked, which only seemed to enhance the rugged, open quality of his looks. “My original assignment was a profile of Jackson Storm, the mass-market fashion king invading Paris haute couture, et cetera, et cetera.” He gave her a rather wicked grin. “But it’s expanding.”
All he needs is freckles, Alix couldn’t help thinking. “The princess seems to have gone out with the others.” She pointed toward the stairs.
“I won’t miss her.” He paused, his sharp blue eyes obviously enjoying the sight of her dressed in a French blue work smock, red hair pinned back, unaccountably ravishing in spite of the smudge of dirt on her cheek. “Sorry I didn’t have time to explain everything the other night when I picked you up,” he added.
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