“What holy fathers?” Alix wanted to know.
“Ah, the ghosts,” Nannette said mysteriously. “Don’t you know we are supposed to have ghosts here, of the monks?”
When Alix laughed, she looked at her reprovingly. “Don’t be so smart. This was once a monastery up here on the way to Montmartre. They taught us about it in school. There were many monks on this side of the Seine, with many houses of holy orders.”
The key in the lock turned, and the door to the storeroom opened. Nannette shoved it back and groped along the wall for the light switch.
“Under this house there is a crypt from the holy fathers’ chapter house. I have seen it many times. That is where the street gets its name, you know, the rue des Benedictines, from their order. There were tombs of two knights down there. We used to say they were Crusaders. But that is all sealed up now.”
At the click of the switch, a naked light bulb overhead came on. The room was filled with rows and rows of clothing hanging from horizontal iron pipes.
“Up here,” the fitter went on, “during the war when Hitler’s army was in Paris, the Resistance fighters hid in the room behind this. No one knew they were here except Mademoiselle Claude, the couturiere. These are her clothes you see hanging here. During the war the Maquis went out down below, through the crypt and right into the sewers. The same way these crazy children of Khomeini did with their illegal drugs.”
Nannette put down the empty thread boxes and dusted her hands. “There was a big raid. Did you see it on television, when they brought out these Iranians that were making drugs up here? To capture them the police shot up the stairs. That’s why it was necessary to replace all the marble above the fourth floor.”
Alix remembered reading something of the sort; she hadn’t connected it with the old Maison Louvel. She put down her boxes to examine the rows of hanging clothes. The fabrics were beautiful. Even in the storage room’s dim light she could see the ruby gleam of velvet, the glimmer of gold lame and cloudlike chiffon. If they were in style, the clothes would be worth a fortune.
“It was not too long ago,” the other woman said. “Maybe a year.”
“Does Jackson Storm know about it?” Alix said without much interest.
“Oh yes, he was here. He had just bought the old place.” The excitement in the fitter’s voice died away. “The Americans, they rush on to the next thing. One month passed here, and it was like nothing had happened. Besides, that was not the only incident with Iranians and drugs in Paris that year. It was very violent.”
They heard a door slam not too many floors below, then the quick stamping of feet descending the marble staircase. It could only be one person. No one else went that fast. Or that angrily.
“Merde, Gilles is giving up.” Nannette looked at her wristwatch. “That boy is driving himself mad. Now he goes home—and that wife of his is useless.”
Alix knew Gilles would be upset, later, when he remembered that he’d left without wishing anyone a Joyeux Noel. “Jack Storm doesn’t really listen when Gilles tries to tell him he’s not a theatrical costume designer.”
That had been the subject of Gilles’s latest rousing fight with their employer.
Nannette shrugged. “I told you, Americans do not listen to anything.” She bent to push aside the hanging dresses and check the stacks of brown paper-wrapped bolts of laminated lace that were stored there. “We have too much of this stuff they brought up from Lyon.” She sniffed and made a face.
Alix thought of Gilles working all morning in the design room with the door locked, still struggling desperately with the creation of whimsical bird costumes that, as far as anybody knew, would be only used once, for Jackson Storm’s extravaganza publicizing the “new” laminated lace fabric.
Then there was Gilles’s running war with their apprentice designer, Princess Jacqueline. Jackson Storm had given his approval for the princess to work for Alix exclusively, creating an original, starring fantaisie for her to wear in the show.
Alix, of course, was Gilles’s model; he designed for her, in fact, depended on her for the basic look for his collections. The screaming row that had reverberated through the Maison Louvel had been typically French, with both parties throwing their hearts—and voices—into it.
Jackson Storm had forced a compromise. Alix was to wear Princess Jackie’s “flamingo” creation first in the show and change into Gilles’s for the finale.
“One more of these failures to communicate,” a gaunt Candace Dobbs had threatened, “and I take up the offer to go with Guess jeans.”
Nannette stepped back to the doorway. “Are we through?” Seeing Alix still rummaging among the clothes on the racks, she clucked, “Come, this is no way to spend a holiday, up here with Mademoiselle Claude’s things. Come to the guild party with us at St. Laurent’s. Everyone gets a little drunk. We’re all one big family no matter who we work for. You’ll have a good time.”
Alix shook her head. “I don’t need to get drunk. It will give me big circles under my eyes.”
“Phagh, not you.” The other woman turned off the light and Alix reluctantly came out of the racks. “Nothing bothers your looks. Come, no one is waiting for you,” she added significantly.
Nannette was right. Nicholas Palliades’s chauffeured Daimler, which usually waited for her, had not been parked in the rue des Benedictines since the press party. She knew Nicholas hadn’t given up; he was furiously jealous of Chris Forbes—and the whole male population of Paris. He was probably just out of town.
She was grateful not to have that pressure, if only for a few days.
When she’d fainted in front of the television cameras and Nicholas had grabbed her to keep her from falling to the floor, his true identity had suddenly clarified in that last split second of sanity. He was Nicholas—not one of her demons. But the look in those burning black eyes had been so alarmed, so filled with fierce emotion, Alix had been relieved that he’d disappeared in the crowd shortly after she’d recovered.
They went back down the stairs.
“Thank you anyway, Nannette,” Alix said. She put her hand on the fitter’s arm. The atelier always treated her well. They clucked over her like mothers, and seemed to dislike Jackson Storm, but curiously, not Nicholas Palliades. “I do have something else to do.”
On Christmas Eve the Sorbonne’s music school held a recital by honor students and a small reception afterward. Alix had pictured herself standing in the back of the room and watching the concert, not a part of it anymore but, she discovered with surprise, no longer wishing she were. Things had changed.
“I’m going to have a good time,” she assured her.
The Christmas Eve visit back to the Sorbonne was a revelation. Alix had not expected to be remembered, much less welcomed enthusiastically. But in the comparatively short time she’d studied for her advanced music degree, she had made friends, and they were glad to see her. The concert was exciting, the Mozart piano concerto, one of Alix’s favorites, spectacular. Afterward more than a dozen students went to a nearby cafe for dinner, making so much noise over their food and wine they could hardly hear the bells of Paris’s churches calling the faithful to Christmas Eve mass.
The bells were still ringing when Alix took a cab across the Pont de Grenelle back to the rue Boulanvilliers. The night was clear, and millions of cold diamond stars lit the ink-blue sky. She had just paid the taxi driver when someone jumped out of a doorway just ahead and ran toward her.
“Mademoiselle!” Karim took her by the arm and half-dragged her toward the street. “You must come. Only you can help. It’s the princess!”
La Chaîne
The Warp
Fourteen
The taxi careened through the black winter night and into the Bois de Boulogne, the big wooded park on the west side of Paris. In the daytime, the “Bois” was a landscape of joggers, picnickers, and nannies watching the children of Paris’s Yuppies, the bon chic-bon genre. At night the park resembled the last circles of Dante
’s Inferno, a depthless fresco of leafless woods and the harrowing figures of prostitutes, picked out by the headlights of passing cars.
Alix stared into the dark woods as the taxi wound through the park. To judge from the living apparitions in wigs and skimpy miniskirts, neither the freezing weather nor the fact that it was Christmas Eve hampered their business.
Karim leaned forward to the glass partition to shout something to the driver.
She tugged at his sleeve. “You have to tell me what’s wrong. Look, where are we going?”
He turned to her with a glazed look. “The princess, she adores you. She will do anything you say. Only you can get her out of there.” He raked his fingers through his curly dark hair. “Besides, they won’t let me in.”
“Let you in where?” Alix knew now she should have stopped long enough to call someone. She thought of Christopher Forbes, in London, and how she could have used his help at this moment. “Karim, please—if the princess is in trouble, you’ve got to tell me what it is. Better than you’ve been doing!”
The taxi was passing an open area in the woods. The car’s headlights picked out a figure at curbside that was too tall and muscular to be a woman, though it was wearing a leather miniskirt, high heels, skimpy tank top, and a huge blond wig. Alix turned in her seat, mouth open, as the figure slowly rotated to follow her stare. The transvestite, smiling garishly, was holding a fully decorated, table-size Christmas tree in one hairy hand.
“Why does she do this,” Karim moaned, “when she has everything?” He bent his head, cradling it against his hands on the back of the driver’s seat, despairingly. “She is young, beautiful, she has much money, her father is a prince, very powerful. Yet she takes drugs.”
Alix had suspected as much. She suddenly experienced a terrible sinking feeling. Poor Karim. He’d picked the wrong person to ask for help. Alix knew herself well enough by now to admit she wasn’t a fighter; she was a person who ran away from problems.
“Karim, I’m sorry, but I don’t have any experience with something like this.” The words made her wince; they sounded so cowardly. “I think you’d better find somebody else.”
He gave her a distracted look. “She’s in this place. It’s where the young ones go. I always follow her, in case she should need me, even though I know they make fun of me. Tonight one of her friends came out and saw me waiting in the street and said I’d better get her. He was not in such good condition himself.”
Alix stared at him helplessly; Karim evidently thought he was making himself clear.
The taxi now passed through the modern apartment towers of suburban west Paris. Karim motioned to the driver to go straight ahead.
“But when I tried to go in, they told me, ‘It’s being taken care of.’ That’s what they said.” Alix saw the terrible hopelessness in his eyes. “‘It’s being taken care of.’ She’s in there, and I can’t get to her.” His voice cracked. “I know something’s wrong—something very bad. Then I thought of you. Oh, Mademoiselle Alix, they will let you in!”
“Karim, it’s Christmas Eve, I just came from—from a party.” Frustrated, Alix tried to explain she probably couldn’t help him. “Look, shouldn’t we call her father? The prince should—”
“No!” He looked agitated. “No, she doesn’t want that!”
“How do you know what she wants? Have you seen her?”
He set his lips grimly. “Wait,” he told her. “We are almost there.”
The suburbs west of Paris had the sleek look of Miami or Beverly Hills. The cab pulled up to the front of a glassed-in lobby of a tall apartment building. Karim threw open the door and dragged Alix out of the taxi before it had rolled to a full stop.
“You will help me, won’t you?” Although she resisted, he pushed her through the doors. “You are American,” he said desperately, “they won’t stop you.”
They burst through the revolving glass doors, Alix in a dark suit, and the tall Arab boy in his jeans and ski jacket. A uniformed doorman moved across the lobby quickly to intercept them. But Karim sidestepped, pushing Alix in front of him deftly.
A uniformed male receptionist stood up quickly from behind a marble-topped counter. Alix felt his instant appraisal.
Karim was at her back, pushing her like a battering ram to clear the way. Alix gave them a terrified smile. She’d never stormed an apartment building lobby before. But then she’d never had to.
The receptionist snatched up the telephone as he called to them, “Are you cleared to enter?”
Ignoring him, they stepped into the elevator. He was dialing as he shouted, “Wait a minute, are you the ones they called?”
The elevator doors closed. Alix sagged against the far wall, staring at Karim. “Do you,” she gasped, “know where we’re going?”
He punched the top row of buttons rapidly. “A little. My people, North Africans, work in these apartment buildings all over Paris. Everyone,” he added ominously, “knows this place.”
The elevator rose to the penthouse level. When the doors opened they found themselves looking out at a garden one would find in the country instead of a Paris apartment building: a terrace dotted with small potted tress and iron furniture, a grassy lawn. A wooden bridge led over an artificial pond to a full-sized Roman villa, complete with double oak doors and red tile roof. They were twenty-five stories up from the street.
Karim’s hand in the small of her back guided Alix forward. She was remembering stories of a part of Paris hidden but whispered about; stories circulated in Paris’s college communities of unbelievable places for things which Alix, immersed in her music, had never been particularly interested. Not even the gossip. She could see, now, as she stumbled slightly in her haste to look around, it was probably true.
According to the rumors, there was a Japanese house somewhere. And a Roman villa. Private clubs. Where one came to do the unspeakable things even an ultra-liberal society only whispered about. It sounded preposterous. What could people do that wasn’t permitted these days? Especially in Paris?
They practically ran over the little wooden bridge. Karim jumped ahead of her to jerk open the villa’s red painted doors. “Hurry, hurry!” He looked at her, wild-eyed. “Don’t be afraid.”
Alix was speechless. Afraid? She fought down an impulse to turn around and run as the doors banged open into an entrance hall that was a reproduction of one of the houses that had been unearthed in the volcano-buried town of Pompeii. Alix recognized it from photographs.
Nineteenth-century archaeologists hadn’t known what to do with the murals that decorated the walls of the bordellos in Pompeii’s red light district. The second half of the twentieth century had no such problems. Running around four walls of the entrance hall were copies of the original murals graphically depicting what one could get for one’s money in a whorehouse in ancient Rome.
Karim made a low, wolfish growl in his throat. Alix could hardly drag her eyes away from a scene of two Roman noblemen holding a slave boy while a third sodomized him. Around them the nervy, obtrusive sound of fifties progressive jazz doodled from a sound system.
She was not so much frightened as stunned. The music pouring from hidden speakers was intended to cover other noises that Alix found just as nerve-wracking as the pornographic murals. She distinctly heard someone crying in pain.
“Karim, what are we—”
“Open doors,” he said hoarsely. “Just open them.” He started down a hallway. “We have to find her.”
A muffled voice shrieked from a nearby room; it was someone pleading for someone to stop. The hair rose on Alix’s arms and the back of her head. “I don’t think I can do this.” She recognized panic in her own voice. “What is this place?”
“A club.” He tried a door. It was locked.
“A club?” She clutched at him with both hands. “A club for what? Karim, someone will find us here, what will we say? What kind of a—”
He shook her off. “It’s a club for sex.”
A woman in
a gold metallic evening gown and horn-rimmed glasses appeared at the end of the corridor, coming quickly toward them. She gave Alix a sharp, questioning look over her spectacles, displaying a definite managerial air in spite of the revealing evening dress.
“Listen to me, she can’t come here again,” the woman hissed in French. “It’s too unmanageable when they are like this. Who are you?” she demanded of Karim.
The tall boy braced himself, but before he could answer she turned away. “I have told her friends that, too, because they cannot control themselves. I swear to you, this is the last time. I am tired of having to call to ask someone to come and get her.”
The woman strode ahead. They had to hustle to keep up with her. A boy carrying towels popped out of a room to their right, darted to the other wall and flattened himself against it, looking startled. A voice was begging, “No, no, no,” behind a door as they passed. Then a hair-raising scream, and male laughter. The woman in the gold evening dress slapped the closed door with her hand, and the noises stopped.
Alix stumbled after her, trapped in a nightmare. She supposed she accepted that such places existed; she’d just never thought much about it. She was being engulfed by a feeling that she was going deeper and deeper into a decadent world, a horrifying place of no return. She gripped Karim’s arm so tightly her fingers ached. Damn Princess Jackie! Alix suddenly hated the troubled teenager with a vehemence that shocked her.
The woman stopped at the end of the corridor, pushed open a door, and stood aside to let them through.
“They came in a group, these kids. They brought her with them, otherwise she wouldn’t be here. I said last time I wouldn’t tolerate her in that condition.” She shrugged bitterly. “But what can you do to keep them out, when their parents are clients, too?”
The room was a glass chamber; mirrors covered the walls and ceiling. Empty tables and straight-backed chairs were gathered around a ransacked bed. Alix’s first impression, because of the mirrors, was that the room was full of people, but there were only a youth in a bellhop’s uniform, and a middle-aged woman who seemed to be a maid. They were busy scooping up objects from the floor and the bed, and throwing them into a cardboard box.
Satin Dreams Page 17