Satin Dreams

by Davis, Maggie;

  It was, the PR woman crowed, the culmination of all their work—Jackson Storm’s dramatic venture into Paris haute couture. Publicity had been building slowly in the news media all fall. With the Heavenly Lace press party at the Maison Louvel, everything now seemed to come together to make Jackson Storm a full-blown media phenomenon, the year’s biggest fashion story—from the prolonged effort to get the old Maison Louvel back in the Paris mainstream, to the search for a bright, talented new Parisian designer, to the discovery of Heavenly Lace that was (somewhat spuriously, according to gossip) being called an artistic and technological breakthrough. The worldwide media was quite suddenly giving Jack Storm all the coverage he could have wished for. It looked as though publicity was going to continue to snowball right up to the opera ball and the premier of Gilles Vasse’s fantaisie designs.

  Alix looked around the crowded room. What had happened to her? she wondered. She’d never expected to be part of this sort of three-ring fashion circus. When she’d first taken a job with Rudi Mortessier, she’d only wanted to escape into a world where very little was required except to be beautiful. Modeling in a couture house wasn’t very demanding; it was passive, almost frivolous, and for the most part one didn’t have to think. That was what made it so wonderful—not to have to think about failed dreams of a career in music. Or about home. Or about anything.

  She fought back a sudden wave of nerves that sent an answering quiver through the lace and pine boughs around her.

  Like the hastily constructed bower, her costume of aqua lace laminate studded with rhinestones and tiny seed pearls was only tacked together. The eighteenth-century court gown had been substituted at the last minute for one of Gilles’s “bird” creations on the grounds, Candace Dobbs and the public relations people argued, that a premature glimpse of the Bal des Oiseaux Blancs fantaisie numbers would give the whole story away.

  Jackson Storm had insisted only that the costume be ready in time for the press party, scheduled for a few days before the holidays, as he planned to spend Christmas with his family in New York.

  The strain on all of them showed. Particularly on Gilles. Some days he came in looking haggard, worried about Lisianne, his hands trembling with nerves as he tried to draw. The entire Maison Louvel staff, with the exception of Jackson Storm, could see that their young designer was pushing himself far too hard.

  Unfortunately, Jackson Storm was so strangely removed from reality even his longtime associates hardly knew how to deal with him. The head of the world’s largest mass-market fashion empire turned a deaf ear to everything these days but the most wildly unrealistic assessments of the upcoming ball at the Opera. Even Mindy Ferragamo couldn’t penetrate Jack’s strangely euphoric detachment. The great Storm King simply didn’t want to hear anything that even remotely resembled bad news.

  And there was bad news.

  Too many of the bolts of Heavenly Lace sent from Lyon had proved, when they were opened, to be spoiled with black mildew spots, apparently the result of years in the De Brissac warehouses. Since everyone was sworn to secrecy, the fabric was taken up to the top-floor storeroom to be hidden. Jack Storm’s orders, considering the Paris gossip mill and all that was at stake, were to not even trust it to the city garbage collection.

  The inescapable fact was the De Brissac Frères’ laminated lace was not the brand-new discovery Jackson Storm’s press releases inferred. Gilles hated it on sight. Even Peter Frank had his doubts. “We’ve got to be careful,” Peter had warned, “or this whole thing is going to blow up in our faces. We can’t take orders for it, we can’t build a spring line on it—the stuff’s not even in production!”

  Jack had waved away all objections. “So, we’re not in the business of selling yardage. Will you people try to understand, we’re promoting a concept, an idea, a fantaisie—an illusion.”

  “Like your profit margin?” Mindy Ferragamo had said.

  For once, Jack had paid no attention to her.

  The rush to put the press party together, the squabbling, including Gilles’s tantrums over having to work with the tricky laminate, had left them all drained. It was just luck, Alix thought, looking over the packed crowds, that it seemed to be a smashing success.

  Gilles, looking fairly calm for a change in his tight black turtleneck and black jeans, was being interviewed under bright portable lights in one corner of the salon for a BBC television fashion special. Jackson Storm, his silver head standing out above the others, waited his turn to go on. Christopher Forbes, taking notes for his Fortune magazine story, stood just behind them.

  The Maison Louvel’s showroom was a noisy fairy-tale setting of gilded mirrors, massed Christmas greens, candlelight, and a gypsy orchestra playing turn-of-the century operetta music. So many fashion reporters were clustered around the immense buffet, all that could be seen was the head and outspread wings of the giant, carved ice swan, hollowed out to hold several pounds of the finest Beluga caviar.

  Considering that it was just three days before Christmas, the huge gathering of Europe’s most important press was something of a miracle. But the champagne was flowing and the crowd looked flushed and happy.

  “Alix, darling, where can I get a brochure?” The fashion editor of Paris-Soir, Bebe Columbert-Zinn, regarded Alix’s eighteenth-century costume with critical eyes. “Gilles made this, didn’t he?” She reached out to finger a flounce of lace and silk gauze. “I am mad, of course,” the editor murmured, frowning, “but I keep thinking I’ve seen this tissu somewhere before.”

  Alix thrust a pamphlet into the woman’s hands. A convenient pile of handouts describing Heavenly Lace and how award-winning young designer Gilles Vasse planned to utilize it for the upcoming Bal des Oiseaux Blancs was on a stand just behind her. All she had to do was reach carefully around shaky pink pine boughs to get another one. But Alix couldn’t take her eyes off the opposite side of the room where Princess Jacqueline Medivani was managing to hold her own press conference in a crowd of newspaper reporters.

  God knows what she’s telling them, Alix thought, alarmed. For once, Princess Jackie looked very street-chic in a postage-stamp leather miniskirt, black net stockings and high heels, and an enormous crocheted baggy top of gold metallic yarn through which could be seen a black satin brassiere. Karim, in a neat blue uniform was not far away, picking up invitations at the doorway, his eyes almost constantly on her.

  In the few days she’d shared the atelier with the princess, Alix had grown rather fond of the grubby teenager; after all, how could you dislike someone who was so obviously adoring and willing to please? But she also knew Princess Jackie was capable of saying anything off the top of her head, in her freewheeling gutter French. Or English.

  There was a real danger the princess might decide to tell the press about Heavenly Lace. Alix tried to catch Candy Dobbs’s eye, but the PR woman was busy talking to Jackson Storm.

  Alix looked frantically around the room. Gilles had finished his BBC television interview. Monsieur Louis de Brissac, Sr. of the famous Lyons silk industry family, had moved next in line.

  That was bad, too. Alix thought de Brissac had been cancelled. Just that afternoon she’d overheard Candy rehearsing the silk mill owner who was to read a statement describing the lace fabric as a triumph of French world leadership in textiles. Candy and her staff had written the piece, intending to take some of the heat out of French resistance to Jackson Storm’s Paris ventures. But even Candy had decided at the last moment that the speech was too risky. De Brissac was nervous about being on camera; there was no guarantee he wouldn’t blurt out how long Heavenly Lace had lain in his warehouses.

  Alix dragged her attention away from the television crews, twisting her hands again. “Gilles Vasse likes working with Heavenly Lace.” She’d promised Candy she would say that to the press, even if she strangled on it. “It’s been a very creative experience for him,” she lied.

  But Bebe Columbert-Zinn had turned to stare at a group of businessmen, black-browed and commanding, w
ho had just come in. “Ah, the Greeks!” She looked excited. “I was hoping they’d come. I wanted to see Jackson Storm’s backers.”

  Alix was frozen with surprise. There were two men with Nicholas Palliades, very similar in their black silk suits and hard, Mediterranean faces. They could have been executives. Or bodyguards.

  They looked like gangsters.

  It had only been days. Alix was suddenly assailed with a panicky guilt.

  “They were in court today,” Bebe was saying, “the entire Palliades-Poseidon crowd. You know they have a big suit against them for international maritime trade violations, don’t you?”

  Alix tore her eyes away. “I didn’t know.”

  “Did Niko Palliades put money into this because of you?” The newspaper editor was pretending to read the Heavenly Lace brochure, flipping the pages. “Or did he invest because Jackson Storm got Gilles Vasse?”

  “Wh-what?” Alix’s heart was pounding. Nicholas Palliades’s dark gaze had found her.

  “No, this is not the usual sort of investment the Palliadeses make, a fashion house.” Bebe Columbert-Zinn took a note pad out of her purse and wrote something on it.

  The men with Nicholas had gone to the buffet, but he stood watching her over the heads of the crowd. Alix felt perspiration break out on her palms and the back of her neck.

  A vague terror gripped her. She tried to fight it, but somehow, in just a few seconds, life had grown too complicated, too dangerous. Anxiety swept over her. Everything bad was going to happen. The truth about Heavenly Lace was going to come out. If it did, she would undoubtedly lose her job at the Maison Louvel. The princess was going to say something awful to the reporters clustered around her.

  “But I can’t believe young Niko has gone into this as a hobby,” the editor chattered on. She seemed to be making notes on the dress, peering at it, then scribbling on the little pad. “Old Socrates wouldn’t let him. And besides, their minds don’t work that way.” She fingered the lace again. “Has Niko Palliades given you jewelry?” she asked shrewdly. “If he’s doing all this for you, he must be finally coming out of his shell. It’s taken a long time. After what the first Medivani girl did to him.”

  Alix said, “What?”

  At that moment Candace Dobbs was on her way to the bower with a television crew. When the Paris-Soir editor saw them she closed in on Alix.

  “Come, what do you know of these violations the Palliadeses are in court about?” she asked, her words running together hurriedly. “Did Niko tell you anything? I hear they are trying to indict them for illegal shipping practices. It’s an international scandal.”

  Taking a position right in front of them, the television crew zoomed a camera in their faces for a close-up. “English? Francais?” the blond interviewer asked, holding out a microphone. “Deutsch?”

  Bebe stuffed her notes into her purse. “You mustn’t let them hurt you.” She didn’t look at Alix; her tone was conspiratorial. “The Greeks are pirates, they think they can buy anything. But don’t give in to them, ma cherie. Especially the terrible grandfather.”

  The television interviewer asked Alix in English, then in French, to hold up the brochures on Heavenly Lace. Alix stared at her. She couldn’t make up her mind whether it was a mistake to appear on European television, or if it even mattered now.

  “What did you say this fabric is made of?” the television interviewer wanted to know.

  “Silk gauze.” Alix was so rigid, her lips hardly moved. “Lace on silk gauze laminate.” Nicholas Palliades had started moving through the crowd. “It’s bonded under heat and pressure with an advanced type of resin to form one fabric.”

  Alix looked into the camera lens, seeing a tiny, magical pinpoint size image of herself in the curving black glass. The events of the past year, she now knew dimly, had caught up with her. She was helpless—here, in the strangest of all places, at Jackson Storm’s extravagant promotional party for his latest project. While she was being interviewed for West German television.

  Indictments. International violations. Illegal corporate maneuvers.

  The same world she was running from.

  When she dared to lift her head, she saw it was not really Nicholas Palliades coming toward her. It was some other man, with a face just as hard, just as unyielding.

  The light began to fade. Alix heard one of the German television crew exclaim as she reached up to touch her clammy cheek.

  She was going to faint, she was sure of it, but one thing was clear. Even in the twilight dimness, the disorienting feel of the crowded room whirling around her, she knew that the face coming toward her so purposefully was not Nicholas Palliades.

  It was Robert, her brother.

  And he was coming to take her back to prison.

  The cameras kept rolling. But Alix was already unconscious, falling, when he caught her in his arms.

  Thirteen

  “You’re driving these people to the wall, Jack,” Mindy Ferragamo shouted down the stairwell. “You want a bunch of hospital bills on your head? The seamstresses are killing themselves, racking up overtime like you wouldn’t believe on these crazy fantaisie costumes. And your designer’s having a nervous breakdown!”

  She leaned over the railing, untypically loud and accusing. “Your own model,” she yelled, saving the best for last, “collapsed and fainted dead away on European television. In the arms of your backer, for God’s sake!”

  “It wasn’t live, it was on videotape.” Jack signed the last bunch of purchase orders in the lower hallway while Peter Frank held the clipboard. “So, we bought it off Deutschevideo.” He shrugged his big shoulders under a Cardin black wool coat trimmed in caracul. “The boo-boo won’t air.”

  “Five-thousand dollars? Five thou, for a thirty-minute kraut videotape, on top of all the money we’re pouring into the sewers of Paris?” She leaned perilously over the marble railing. Few people had ever seen the vice president and CEO of Jackson Storm, Inc., so riled. “Jack, mark my words, you’re facing the end of the world, we all are—when you get back from your holiday!”

  But the front door slammed, cutting her off.

  Peter Frank looked up the Maison Louvel stairwell, aware that Mindy’s fierce speech had been broadcast throughout the building.

  “We’re in better shape than that, Mindy,” he said, though he wasn’t feeling all that confident himself. “No end of the world before the next fiscal quarter, okay? But you’re right,” he conceded, “we’re all strung out.” He managed a grin. “Get some rest over Christmas, okay?”

  Mindy Ferragamo squared her thin shoulders under her black business suit, belligerently. “Christ, Peter, what do you know about anything? He can’t find Marianna and the girls.” She drew back, her face in shadows. “Jack’s wife walked out on him.”

  “Jesus,” Peter said, shocked. “The poor bastard.”

  He continued to stand in the lower hall with the forgotten clipboard purchase orders in his hand, long after Mindy Ferragamo had left the upper-floor railing.

  Christmas Eve morning, Jackson Storm left for New York on the Concorde, planning to spend the holidays in Tahoe. Or maybe St. Croix. No one was really sure. His calls would be taken at Jackson Storm headquarters in New York.

  Mindy Ferragamo departed Charles de Gaulle airport for Kansas City to spend Christmas with her parents. Peter Frank headed for Boston. Princess Jacqueline Medivani was somewhere in Paris with her father Prince Alessio, and her married sister Princess Catherine. Princess Jackie had left an enormous bottle, beautifully gift-wrapped, of Joy perfume for Alix on the table in the atelier. The Fortune magazine writer Christopher Forbes had flown to London for a temporary assignment.

  On the Christmas Eve half-day at the Maison Louvel, Gilles Vasse came to work, doggedly hoping to finish off a few of the many costumes that had to be done for the opera ball. In his watchman’s cubbyhole off the lobby, Abdul was surprised to see Gilles come up the stairs from the street. But he quickly marked him “in” on his securit
y list.

  Nannette and Sylvie were at work, although they planned to leave half an hour early for the annual seamstresses’ guild party sponsored by St. Laurent. Alix, who had avoided most holiday celebrations since she’d been in Paris, had come into help Nannette and Sylvie.

  All of Paris, it seemed, was partying. Snow was still on the ground, the air was crisp but not freezing, and traffic was heavy. The sound of it in the nearby rue Cambon was like distant thunder. Bells from the many ancient churches on the right bank of the Seine pealed all morning and would continue ringing until Christmas Day.

  The burly little French poste, when he came to deliver the mail, was unsteady on his feet with all the toasts he’d drunk to the holiday season. Even Karim had gone to an all-day bash at his technical college.

  “Eh bien,” Nannette said as Alix helped her carry the last pile of boxes up to the storeroom. “It is good to have the place quiet for a while. Are you all right? You are well, not feeling poorly as you did at the party?” Her keen eyes took in Alix thoroughly. “You do not want to overdo.”

  Alix had the grace to blush. Nannette thinks I’m pregnant, she realized, feeling humiliated. Everyone, apparently, thought she was going to bed with Nicholas Palliades on a regular basis.

  “I’ve been working too hard,” she explained, aware of the other woman’s skeptical expression. “And dieting.” That was probably more embarrassing, because it was the truth. “I’ve had to—I put on two kilos.”

  “Two kilos?” Nannette hauled her middle-aged bulk up the last stairs to the storeroom attic. “Baby Jesus, what an affliction!”

  “It will be, if I haven’t lost it by the time we fit the costumes for the opera.”

  “True, true.” The Frenchwoman eyed Alix’s reed-slim figure, adding, under her breath, “Deux kilos!”

  Alix waited on the iron steps under the skylight while the fitter found the keys to the storeroom. “Well, now that the house is empty, who knows? Maybe it will give our holy fathers the ghosts a rest.”