Satin Dreams

by Davis, Maggie;

  Bits of Heavenly Lace littered the opera’s grand staircase from top to bottom. It was to the everlasting credit of the other models, professionals all, that they had held their positions on the stairs for at least a quarter of an hour while the light show flashed around them and the Firebird music segued into the last movement of Richardson’s The Planets. And even as they stood there, portions of the laminated lace in their costumes were slowly giving way.

  Halfway down Alix realized her beautiful lacy wings were coming apart. By the time she reached the bottom, shreds were floating around her in the air like cosmic debris. With a sinking heart she knew that there would probably be almost nothing left by the time she turned and started for the center of the staircase. Worse, she was feeling an ominous breeze around, of all places, the area where the seam on her backside should be.

  Alix made a quick turn and saw that Jackson Storm wasn’t at his table. Nearby, Nicholas Palliades, looking more like a leopard than ever, sat with one elbow propped on the tablecloth beside Princess Catherine. Alix saw his wooden expression change as his gaze dropped to the vicinity of her derrie. It was at that exact moment Alix also felt the slight passage of warm air across her breasts.

  Alix looked down.

  Gilles’s great space bird fantaisie was practically dissolving against her skin! Nicholas Palliades, shock and determination written all over his face, was practically climbing over chairs to get to her.

  No you don’t, Alix thought frantically. She didn’t need his help—or his outrage.

  Alix put one hand tentatively across her breasts and her little finger encountered a bare nipple. She whirled, sending microscopic bits of fabric floating on the air. That strange sound growing around her, she knew dimly, was the audience’s uproarious laughter.

  The light show soared to a marvelously bright, bursting finale, illuminating the opera’s foyer, the murals, the molting models, in every detail. The staircase was littered with remnants of Heavenly Lace. Passing the owls, cranes, and egrets lining both sides of the stair, Alix saw some were crying in sheer exasperation, some merely held their hands in strategic places with stoic resignation. But heroically, no one had budged.

  At the top, Alix forced herself to turn around and face the crowd. The finale had only a few more moments to go.

  She could hardly do it. The Vogue photographers had rushed to the bottom of the stairs and flashbulbs were popping furiously. Much of the laughing audience was on its feet. It was not so much that Alix was sensitive about working nudity, but she was coming apart! Virtually all that remained of Gilles’s maillot was a beltlike strip around her waist.

  Even as she stood there wondering if she should break the ridiculous tableau of near-naked models and start for the dressing area, there was a disturbance taking place among the tables in the vicinity of Prince Medivani’s party. It seemed to be a fight or a small riot. Abruptly, at the far entrance doors to the opera, a phalanx of Paris gendarmerie came pouring in, and there was the distant sound of police sirens.

  “What happened? What happened?” Gilles Vasse burst out of the mezzanine and down the stairs trailed by Nannette and Sylvie and the hairdressers. The designer stopped and regarded what was left of the space bird costume with glazed eyes. Seeing his expression, Alix drew what was left of one lacy wing around her, modestly.

  Below them the foyer was in an uproar. The fight had drawn photographers as well as the police, and television crews could be seen clamoring at the opera’s main doors to get in.

  “We must get the models away,” Nannette was shouting. Some of the cranes and owls had already started up the stairs without waiting for the final music.

  Alix watched, stunned, as a figure in a familiar stadium coat detached itself from the melee below and started up to them. She realized how nearly naked she was when Christopher Forbes quickly averted his eyes.

  “I have to go,” she whispered. Gilles had dropped to his knees, muttering incoherently, to pick up pieces of the litter of Heavenly Lace that covered the staircase. Nannette tried vainly to haul him back to his feet.

  Christopher Forbes took off his corduroy coat and quickly wrapped it around Alix. “De Brissac knew about this damned lace. Hell, half of Paris remembered the stuff. If it had been anybody but Jackson Storm, they would have said something!”

  Alix turned stricken eyes on him.

  “The sodium in dry cleaning fluid dissolves the laminate. That’s why de Brissac never marketed it.”

  “I want to know,” Alix said, her voice almost a whisper, “I want to know what they’re doing to Nicholas Palliades down there.”

  The writer half-turned to look below, where four uniformed police had dragged a disheveled figure in formal evening clothes to his feet. Chris Forbes smiled. “I told you I’d get that son of a bitch, didn’t I?”

  Alix stared at him.

  “It’s taken me weeks of investigative work and calling in a lot of favors, but Nicky-boy’s being arrested on charges of criminal conspiracy. Using Palliades tankers to ship illegal arms to Iran.”

  Twenty-Three

  Jack Storm could barely see the masked, costumed woman ahead of him through the falling snow. He wasn’t wearing a coat over his expensive Sulka suit of formal evening wear, and he was getting cold and wet from falling snowflakes. They were not far from the opera in a side street off the rue Auber, but Jack considered the possibility of pickpockets, or a very elaborate scheme to get him mugged.

  Too farfetched, he told himself, trying to avoid the gutter’s soft snow that was beginning to soak his patent evening pumps. Who would send a beautiful dream woman to a charity ball at the Paris Opera on a five-hundred-dollar ticket to mug somebody?

  Still, he slowed his pace. The street contained small shops featuring radios and appliances, underwear and hosiery, all closed and tightly shuttered. He was in Paris, he reminded himself. An alien place, after all.

  Jake, what are you doing? he thought. It’s been a crazy day. You’ve lost part of your company. Have you also lost your mind, running through the streets of Paris in a snowstorm? This woman may not exist, his sensible inner voice told him. You’ve been under a lot of stress. She may be a hallucination.

  But he could see she was no hallucination. The dark-haired woman in the glittering hawk mask had stopped just ahead under a streetlight. When she wrapped her arms around herself, shivering slightly, he knew she was real.

  He slowed to a walk. All my life, he was thinking, I’ve been running like crazy to make more money, to keep Jake Sturm’s head above water, to have a family, to be a success, to provide a glitzy lifestyle. All the things a boy from the Bronx ever wanted. But I’ve been running with my head. I know that now. And not with my heart.

  Okay, so what does your heart want, Jake? his inner voice asked. Is this what you’re chasing—this dream woman who’s waiting for you just ahead in the snow? Or are you just ready to do something crazy tonight like make a meshugga fool of yourself? What do they call it, a ‘midlife crisis’?

  So, it’s a midlife crisis, Jackson Storm told himself impatiently. I’ll take the risk.

  She waited under the light, not moving, as he crossed the street. Up close, under the glare of the streetlamp, he could see she was not young, not a girl, but a woman at the peak of her exquisite loveliness.

  She looked at him with great, gray expressive eyes behind the artfully cruel beak and wings of the white hawk mask, her silence provocative.

  “Madame,” Jack said gallantly, “you don’t know me, but I feel as though I have known you forever. You’re like something from my past and my future, both. That’s difficult to explain, isn’t it? But believe me,” he said, “there’s so much about you that attracts me, I can’t really describe it. If I told you that I have been dreaming about you, would you think I was a total nut case?”

  He paused, hoping she understood English. Maybe she didn’t. Hell, maybe that was better.

  “But I gather you have some—ah, interest in me, otherwise I wouldn
’t have followed you. And,” he said, smiling uncertainly, “we wouldn’t be here.”

  That was not so good, Jake, he told himself, you did better in high school. He wondered where to take it from there.

  “You see,” he said earnestly, “I’m a man who ordinarily doesn’t have dreams—poetic dreams, you might say—about a truly wonderful woman I’m pursuing. If I dream, it’s about things like marketing concepts or some of the fantastic ready-to-wear ideas I’ve had in years past. But now in my dreams I’m pursuing a woman who means everything to me. I think I must be chasing something I don’t have in my life.”

  The urbane Jackson Storm faltered. He knew he was opening his soul to her, but it was an extraordinary evening and he was in an extraordinary mood. He was talking to the woman in the white bird costume, but he was also talking to himself.

  He bent his platinum head and looked down at her.

  “What is it I need,” he almost whispered, “that I don’t have?” Self-realization overwhelmed him; he suddenly knew how miserable he had been these past few weeks. “Is it something that will make me happy? Do you know the answer to that?”

  The silent figure reached up to untie the ribbons that held the mask to her face. As the mask fell away, glittering whitely under the streetlight, her hair fell forward, a dark cloud around her cheeks and over her lovely shoulders.

  Jackson Storm was looking down at the face of his wife.

  “Jack, you stupid shit,” Marianna Storm said, “what’s wrong with you is that you don’t have me.”

  A rumor was circulating at the Bal des Oiseaux Blancs that Reuters News Service would run a story with the headline: “Gilles Vasse’s Molting Birds A Paris Sensation.”

  No one knew if the rumor was true; the Reuters writer hadn’t filed his story, and the evening wasn’t over, but the quip had wide circulation.

  What was true was that while the nearly nude models were making their way back to the mezzanine after the debacle of the show’s finale, the entire audience rose to its feet and chanted for the designer to show himself.

  Parisians are fickle, but Gilles Vasse was one of their own. Up to the moment they began to dissolve, his costumes had been a triumph. But at the sight of so much ineffably Parisian cataclysme the assembled great and famous took Gilles, his clothes, and the disastrous Heavenly Lace to their hearts. After all, were not all three French?

  Consequently, a stunned Gilles, still in his black jeans and turtleneck, was dragged to the foot of the opera grand stairs by the vice-mayor of Paris and the head of the French Silk Bureau. There Gilles was warmly embraced, saluted for his courage and genius, and interviewed on the spot by several television crews that had finally burst through the front doors and the security guards.

  Jackson Storm, unfortunately, was not there to see Gilles’s triumph, and no one seemed able to find him. Nicholas Palliades had, just moments before, left in the company of the Paris police.

  Christopher Forbes followed Alix and the models upstairs.

  “I don’t want to speak to you,” Alix told him. She saw she needed to give Chris Forbes back his coat, but since she was practically naked she had to find her slacks and sweater first. “I really don’t want to discuss anything, especially not what you tried to do to Nicholas Palliades.”

  “I didn’t try to do it,” he said, following her. “I did it.”

  Alix threaded her way through models getting out of their shredded fantaisie costumes, hair stylists and makeup people in various stages of shock, and a crowd of sightseers and reporters who had rushed upstairs.

  “Alix, let me explain,” Forbes begged.

  Sick and disheartened, she ignored him. She supposed she understood what had happened to Heavenly Lace, how the dry cleaning fluid had dissolved the laminate. Poor Gilles, was all she could think.

  What had happened to the costumes was bad enough. The sight of Nicholas Palliades being dragged away by the police was worse. Arms smuggler? This man had made love to her.

  A television crew had elbowed their way in to film some of the models dressing. The women protested loudly. For once, Alix didn’t try to help.

  The Fortune writer followed her through the changing area. “Look, Alix, I shafted Nick Palliades just like he shafted Jackson Storm. This morning Jack Storm thought he was on top of the world. Then Poseidon-Palliades pulled the rug out from under him in New York.” He helped her move a pile of coats to look for her things. “That was your Nicky-boy’s move.”

  “He’s not my Nicky-boy.”

  “Isn’t he, Alix?” he said tightly. “Maybe you’d like to clarify a couple of things for me.”

  “I don’t have to clarify anything for you.” She rummaged through the coats, looking for her street clothes. “How can you be so self-righteous about Nicholas Palliades, when all the time you’ve been married? At least Palliades is an out-and-out rat. He bought and paid for what he got. But he never lied to me.”

  “Alix, I was going to tell you. God, believe me, I was!”

  “And you have children.” The long twenty-four hours filled with disasters was catching up with her; Alix put her arm against the corridor wall and laid her head on it, tiredly. “I’m so sick of lies and deceit. I know I’ve been stupid and spoiled, and all this is my own fault.” She meant Nicholas Palliades, who didn’t deserve what she’d done to him. “I’m even the one who sent those cursed costumes to the dry cleaners.”

  Christopher Forbes braced both hands against the wall, encircling her. “Alix, give me a break,” he said huskily. “I want to marry you.”

  She shook her head, eyes closed.

  “Hey, you’re not stupid and spoiled,” he murmured. “You’re gutsy and enchanting and the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen.” He paused, rather calculatingly. “And I know who you really are. Does it help for me to say that it doesn’t make any difference?”

  She lifted her eyes to him. “You knew that first night. When you picked me up in the avenue Foch.”

  He touched her mouth with the tip of his finger. “Look, Alix, forget about Palliades, he’s not for you. You couldn’t handle it.”

  A figure in a chauffeur’s dove-gray uniform had squeezed through the crowd and now stood waiting to speak.

  Chris saw him and abruptly turned his back. “The Greeks are a bunch of international pirates. Even the way Nick Palliades was brought up made him a basket case. He’ll never be any better. But Alix, I can make you happy.”

  Alix stared at him, wondering how many times she had heard these same words from men just as attractive as Chris Forbes. I can make you happy. I know who you are, but it won’t make any difference. In spite of herself, she began to laugh.

  His frown deepened. “I told you I don’t have much of a marriage, so asking for a divorce isn’t going to come as any great shock.” When she continued to laugh, he said, “What the hell did I say that was so damned funny?”

  Alix leaned against the wall, trying to stop. “Nicholas Palliades never asked me to trust him.” In all their screaming arguments about betrayal and dishonesty, trust had hardly been an issue. “He thinks I’m a poor, underpaid couture-house model on the make. A—a gold digger!” She was remembering the expression of absolute shock on Nicholas’s face as he’d struggled with the gendarmes. He hadn’t looked at all like a man who had been illegally smuggling arms. “His grandfather even paid me a visit. Mr. Palliades wanted to make sure I understood Nicholas could never marry a girl like me.”

  The Palliades chauffeur stepped closer, wanting to interrupt.

  “Listen, Alix,” Chris said urgently, “Poseidon-Palliades is charged with hiding Israeli weapons in specially built compartments on their tankers headed for the Persian Gulf. That’s rotten. And it’s illegal.”

  She turned her violet eyes on him. “You were watching him, that night, weren’t you? Wasn’t that why you were so conveniently right there in your automobile to pick me up in the avenue Foch?”

  He raked his fingers through his hair, sighing.
“What are you trying to get me to say?”

  “You didn’t have to have him arrested right in the middle of the show tonight,” she said bitterly. “You just wanted to get even.”

  The chauffeur broke in. “Mademoiselle, please, he wishes to marry you. Niko told his grandfather he would do so even without his permission!”

  Forbes shoved himself in between. “You’re not going to listen to this crap, are you?”

  The chauffeur’s dark features were rigid with emotion. “You must believe me, mademoiselle. What could Niko do? We are Greek—one does not denounce one’s own grandfather!”

  “This guy is a sailor off old Socrates’s yacht,” the writer said desperately, “he practically raised Nick Palliades. You don’t have to listen to him.”

  The chauffeur pushed him back, scowling. “Niko has tried for months to find out what his grandfather has been doing and stop it. It has put him in much danger.”

  A television team had wriggled its way to them through the crowd. “Fräulein,” the German TV reporter said, pushing a microphone into Alix’s face, “what do you think of the evening’s outcome?”

  Alix ducked her head and fumbled with the zipper of her slacks, knowing she had to get out of there. “No comment,” she told the television people. Lakis had come to her, miraculously, just when she needed him. She knew she didn’t have to explain anything.

  “I need to go by my apartment in Ranelagh first,” Alix said, grabbing her down jacket, “to get some things. Is that all right?”

  “Mademoiselle, anything,” he told her quickly.

  “Alix, don’t.” Forbes stepped in front of her. “Come have a drink with me. At least let me talk to you.”

  Alix supposed Chris Forbes had done what he thought was right. She shook her head. “First,” she said, taking the chauffeur’s arm, “I need to find a telephone.”