Goodbye, Janette

by Harold Robbins

  “Nothing?” he screamed, suddenly leaping from his chair at her, his hands grabbing at her.

  She was too quick for him. She stepped back, her hand picking up the razor-sharp, stiletto-shaped letter opener from her desk. He stopped suddenly in front of her, its needlepoint at his throat just over his collar between his Adam’s apple and his chin. Their eyes burned into each other’s in mutual hatred. Her lips were drawn back over her teeth in an animal-like snarl. Her voice was an animal’s growl. “Don’t stop now, Maurice! Give me a chance to finish what my mother began!”

  He took a deep breath and stepped back just as the office door behind him opened and people began to crowd into the doorway, staring into the room. “You won’t get away with it!” he said shrilly, trying to control his voice. “The general tried to screw me and he’s dead, your mother too. And she’s dead. You won’t get away with it.”

  She looked up and saw the people in the doorway staring at them. Suddenly she was exhausted. “Get out, Maurice,” she said in a weary voice. “Before I have you thrown out.”

  Then he became aware of the people behind him. He glanced back at them, then at her. “This is not the end of it,” he said, his voice quiet once again. “Someday when you least expect it, you will pay. Just remember that!” Then he turned and walked out with as much dignity as he could muster. The people stepped aside silently to let him pass, then filled the doorway again.

  Robert came to her as she sank into her chair. “Are you all right, Madame?”

  “I’m fine,” she said. She looked at the people in the doorway, their white, frightened faces staring at her. “Go back to your desks!” she snapped. “It’s not seven o’clock yet.”

  The faces disappeared from the doorway quickly. She looked up at Robert. “Close the door,” she said. “Then I’ll have a cognac.”

  “Yes, Madame,” Robert said. He was back in a moment, the brandy snifter in his hand. He watched her swallow half the drink in one gulp. “Is there anything more I can do for you, Madame?”

  She felt the liquor burning its way down her throat. “No, thank you, Bobby,” she said. “Just leave me alone for a while. I’ll be all right.”

  She watched him close the door behind him, then put her head on her hands on the desk. She still felt the trembling inside her and knew if she hadn’t sat down when she did, her legs would have gone out from under her.

  Nothing had changed since she was a child. The moment he started violently for her, she was at the point of orgasm and her legs grew weak. The terror she felt was the pleasure she felt. Her hatred of him could only be measured by the desire she had for him to punish her. Her thighs were soaking wet from the juices that had poured from her.

  She opened a drawer and took a handful of Kleenex from the box inside, then raised her skirt and began to wipe the moisture from her. Her dress was stained and she would have to change it. Slowly she got up and went to the bathroom. She would take a quick shower. She smelled of her own sex.

  For the second time that year she was the topic of conversation at the cocktail parties of Paris. First it had been the Greek. This time it was her stepfather.

  ***

  As unbearable as the cold had been that winter, the heat of the summer during the collection in Paris at the end of July and the beginning of August was equally unbearable. And in the large reception room of the Hotel de Ville it was even more so. Air conditioning hadn’t been invented as yet for French government buildings.

  More than two hundred people had been packed into the room whose capacity was less than half that number. The champagne wasn’t even cold and the hors d’oeuvres were limp with the heat. The photographers and reporters crowded their way to the small platform at the end of the room. A collective sigh rose from the crowd as a man perspiring in a heavy black suit climbed up on the platform. The ceremony was about to begin. Soon they would all be able to leave.

  He spoke into the microphone. “Messieurs et Mesdames.” No sound came from the public-address system. He tapped the microphone. No sound. He tapped again. Still nothing. He shrugged his shoulders and gave up. This time he almost shouted. “Messieurs et Mesdames, the Mayor of Paris.”

  Applause rose through the room as the mayor entered through a door from his office. He looked cool and comfortable, as he should—his office was air conditioned. He held up his hand to still the crowd and smiled.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, his voice carrying through the room even without the microphone. He knew how to project. He was a professional. “I know you are all anxious to leave and go on about your business. Many of you have dinners and other important affairs to go to, so we will be as brief as possible. First, I would like to thank all of you for taking the time to be here and do honor to this woman who has done so much to keep the name Paris as the most important city in the world of fashion. A young woman, born and raised in this city, who has risen to the top of her profession as one of the great couturiers of the world. A woman in the grand tradition of Coco Chanel and Elsa Schiaparelli who will leave her mark in the fashion world for many years to come.

  “So I would like you to join me in welcome and applause to this year’s recipient of the Médaille d’Honneur of the City of Paris, to a woman who has contributed so much to the culture and dress of the world and has been one of the greatest exponents of Parisian industry and charm ever known. Ladies and gentlemen, may I present to you Madame Janette Marie de la Beauville!”

  The door to the private office opened again and Janette came out on the platform. She too was cool and smiling. She, too, had been in the mayor’s air-conditioned office. She crossed the platform and stood next to the mayor.

  An usher appeared with the medal attached to the traditional red, white and blue ribbon, lying on a velvet cushion. The mayor picked it up and held it over her head, pausing to let the photographers get their fill; then, finally, he placed it carefully over her shoulders without disturbing a single hair of her coiffure. He was a professional.

  “Madame Janette,” he said, turning his face to the audience so that the photographers could get the pictures. “I call you Madame Janette because I know that is how all your friends and colleagues address you. It is with great honor that I present to you this medal in appreciation of all you have done for Paris, and for France. Your name will grace our history with the beauty you have created for all of us.” He bent over her, kissing her on both cheeks. “Keep it brief,” he whispered in her ear. “They’re sweating like pigs and the room stinks.”

  Janette smiled at him. “Monsieur le Maire.” She turned to the room and smiled again. “Mesdames et Messieurs.” She paused for a long moment, then laughed aloud. “I, too, will be brief.” Another pause. She raised both hands to her lips and threw them a kiss, her arms opening wide. “Thank you. I love all of you. Thank you.”

  The photographers kept shooting pictures of Janette, of Janette and the mayor, but the people were already leaving. It was over. And when the photographers stopped taking pictures, the mayor kissed Janette’s hand and left. It was over for him too.

  Janette sank into the back seat of the Rolls. René looked at her in the rearview mirror. “Congratulations, Madame,” he said. “It is a beautiful medal.”

  Suddenly she remembered she was still wearing it on the sash the mayor had placed around her shoulders. Quickly she took it off and looked at it. It was gold plate over copper. “Yes, it is,” she said thoughtfully. “Thank you.”

  “Where to now, Madame?” he asked.

  She looked up in surprise. How stupid. Her publicity department should have arranged for a dinner to follow the presentation. They really blew it. Another free one hundred thousand dollars’ worth of press had been lost. If she didn’t think of it herself, nothing happened. That never would have happened if Jacques had been here. “Home,” she said in an annoyed voice. “Home, of course.”

  She undressed and had dinner in her robe in front of the television set. She caught the late news on all three ch
annels. There was nothing about the presentation on any of them. That was the end of it. Tomorrow she would have a new publicity director. This one didn’t know which end was up.

  She switched off the set a few minutes after eleven o’clock when the last channel went off the air. She was so angry she couldn’t sleep. Restlessly she paced up and down the bedroom. No way she could go to sleep.

  Finally she picked up the phone and called René. “Bring the mini around, René,” she said. “I’m going out.”

  “Would you like me to drive you, Madame?”

  “No,” she said. “I’ll drive myself.”

  She slipped into a cotton shirt and a pair of jeans, then tied a cashmere sweater over her shoulders. She pulled on a pair of boots and tucked the jeans into their tops, then took several thousand francs from the dresser and stuck it in her jeans pocket. At the last moment, she took a small vial of coke with the spoon attached to its top and put that in her blouse pocket. She glanced at herself in the mirror before she went out. She smiled. No one could possibly guess that she had done so much for haute couture if they saw her now. Then she went downstairs. René had the car in front of the door. She got into it and tore out into the street.

  Two hours later, she was sitting alone at a table in a lesbian bar on the Left Bank, sipping a brandy. Two bull-dikes were sitting at the bar nursing their drinks, another was dancing with the waitress, who was so tired she could hardly lift her feet.

  Janette gestured to the bartender, who came over to her on heavy, slippered feet. “Yes, Janette?” she asked.

  “What’s happening in this town?” Janette asked. “This is the third place I’ve been to in two hours and they’re all alike this. Zero.”

  “It’s August and it’s too hot,” the bartender said wearily. “All the talent’s gone south.”

  “Shit,” Janette said. “I might as well go home.”

  “Might as well,” the bartender agreed. She smiled, showing two gold teeth. “I’m going to close up anyway. It doesn’t pay to keep the place open just for the beer drinkers.”

  Janette took a hundred francs and dropped it on the table. “Good night,” she said.

  “Yeah,” the bartender said, picking up the bill and putting it under her apron. She watched Janette leave, then waddled back to the bar. “Drink up, ladies,” she said. “We’re closing for the night.”

  Janette pulled the mini up on the sidewalk in front of her house, then got out and locked it. As she walked around the car to go to the steps, two men came out of the shadows of the house next door.

  “Madame Janette de la Beauville?” one of them asked.

  “Yes,” she answered, pausing for a moment. Then a sudden cold dread ran through her and she turned to run up the steps to the door.

  But the moment’s hesitation had been enough. One of the men caught her by the arm and pulled her brutally back. She stared up at him, trying to see his face in the dark. “If it’s money you want,” she said, fear almost choking the voice in her throat, “I’ll give it to you. It’s all in my back pocket.”

  “We don’t want your money,” the man said in a strangely accented, almost amused voice. “We have a message for you from an old friend.”

  They were the last words she heard for a long while. Almost at the same moment, she felt a fist crash into her face. She felt her nose and her cheekbone crack. “Oh, no,” she remembered thinking, then the blood poured into her mouth and she began to fall.

  It was all a haze of pain after that. She heard occasional moans without realizing they were her own; the sharp continuing blows on her face and body never seemed to come to an end. She tried to scream for help but her voice drowned in her throat. Never quite unconscious but never conscious either, all she could do was grunt in pain with each blow. Then she was lying on the concrete sidewalk feeling their heavy boots kicking into her sides. Then as suddenly as it had begun, it stopped.

  She felt rather than saw the men bending over her. “That should do it,” one of them said, laughing. She remembered thinking what a strange accent he had and felt his hand searching the breast pocket of her shirt. She wanted to tell him the money wasn’t there, it was in her back pocket. But then he drew away. He laughed again. “Goodbye, Janette.”

  After a few moments she tried to move. The pain knifed through her body and she screamed but there was no sound. Slowly she began to crawl up the steps. It seemed to take years of agony to reach the door. Finally she made it. It took another thousand years for her to reach up and press the doorbell. And then a million years for it to open.

  She could only hear the shocked horror in the voice of the butler. “Madame!” Then she went headlong into the night.

  ***

  It was six weeks later and she was sitting in the darkness of her room watching a stupid afternoon movie on the television set. There was a knock at the door and the butler came into the room.

  “Yes?” she asked.

  “Monsieur Jacques is here to see you, Madame.”

  “Send him away,” she said sharply. “I don’t want to see anyone.”

  “You can’t send him away,” Jacques said. “He’s already here.”

  Quickly she pressed the remote control she had in her hand and the television set went dark. The butler left the room, closing the door behind him. Jacques came toward her. Quickly she turned the wheelchair away from him.

  “Don’t turn away from me, Janette,” he said.

  “I don’t want you to see me,” she said in a husky, unused voice. “I’m not very pleasant to look at.”

  “I’m not concerned about that,” he said. He walked around in front of her. “Do you know what day this is?”

  She turned away so that he could not look into her face. “It’s a day just like any other. What difference does it make?”

  “A big difference,” he said. “It’s your birthday. I brought you flowers.”

  “So now I’m forty as well as ugly,” she said in a bitter voice.

  “You’ll never be ugly to me,” he said. “Besides, it’s only a matter of time. The doctors perform miracles today.”

  “They’ll need all they can find to help me,” she said.

  “You have the faith, Janette,” he said. “And they will find them. You have to want to be healed before they can heal you.”

  She was silent.

  “You’re not a coward, Janette,” he said. “You never were afraid of a fight before.”

  She began to cry almost silently. “That was because I never really knew what fear was. When those two men were hitting me I was never so afraid in my life. And it wasn’t only the pain I was afraid of, I was afraid that it would stop. Because when it stopped and I would feel nothing, I would be dead.”

  Gently he took her hand. “Who did this to you, Janette?” he asked softly. “I know the police haven’t been able to find out anything, but was it Maurice? If it was, you tell me and I’ll kill him”

  She shook her head. “It wasn’t Maurice.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because I know who did it,” she said. She remembered finding the card that had been stuffed in her shirt that night when she had thought they were looking for her money. It was on her dresser when she came home and the maid said it had fallen from her shirt when she had taken it to be washed. It was a simple white card with only a name printed on it. Nico Caramanlis.

  “It doesn’t matter now,” she said. “It’s over and I just want to forget it.”

  He was silent for a moment, then got to his feet and walked to the windows. Quickly he pulled back the draperies, letting the sunlight fall into the room. As quickly she raised her hands to her face, hiding it.

  He came back to her and, kneeling before her, took her wrists in his hands and slowly moved them away from her face. “Let the daylight in, Janette,” he said gently, looking into her eyes. “You can’t spend the rest of your life hiding in the dark.”

  Her eyes searched his questioningly.

  �
�You still have too much to give,” he said. He paused for a moment. “See, it’s not so bad, is it?”

  She began to cry again, the tears falling silently down her cheeks. Slowly he drew her down to him and held her head against his chest.

  “I would have come sooner had I known,” he said. “But I was in China and I didn’t see a French newspaper until three days ago. Then I knew I had to come home. You see, Janette, I was hiding too.”

  “Jacques,” she whispered. “Jacques.”

  He kissed the top of her head softly. “Yes,” he said. “I’m back. And it will be the two of us again. You and me. And we’ll have fun again and laugh again and love again.”

  “Yes, Jacques, yes,” she whispered. “Tell me.”

  He looked down at her, the tears filling his own eyes. “I’ll never stop telling you, Janette.”

  Harold Robbins, Unguarded

  On the inspiration for Never Love a Stranger:

  “[The book begins with] a poem from To the Unborn by Stella Benson. There were a lot of disappointments especially during the Depression—fuck it—in everyone’s life there are disappointments and lost hope…. No one escapes. That’s why you got to be grateful every day that you get to the next.”

  On writing The Betsy and receiving gifts:

  “When I wrote The Betsy, I spent a lot of time in Detroit with the Ford family. The old man running the place had supplied me with Fords, a Mustang, that station wagon we still have…. After he read the book and I was flying home from New York the day after it was published, he made a phone call to the office on Sunset and asked for all the cars to be returned. I guess he didn’t like the book.”

  On the most boring things in the world:

  “Home cooking, home fucking, and Dallas, Texas!”

  On the inspiration for Stiletto:

  “I began to develop an idea for a novel about the Mafia. In the back of my head I had already thought of an extraordinary character…. To the outside world he drove dangerous, high-speed automobiles and owned a foreign car dealership on Park Avenue…. The world also knew that he was one of the most romantic playboys in New York society… What the world did not know about him was that he was a deadly assassin who belonged to the Mafia.”