The elevator ground to an unscheduled stop at the third floor. They looked out on a marble landing and a sign with an arrow that said Offices.
The tall, black-haired man said something under his breath. “Let me do it this time, will you?” he growled. He reached over the model’s shoulder and pressed the button marked “4.” The elevator trembled and then started up again slowly.
Sam had grabbed out instinctively at the nearest thing at hand, which happened to be his hard-muscled shoulder. He partly turned when he felt her touch, looking down at her through a tangle of furry black lashes. “Not to worry, love,” he assured her, “it’s just been repaired.”
Crammed against his body intimately, Sam was aware of the faint aura of sweat and masculine muskiness. Sam took her hand away quickly. Up close he wasn’t as young as he’d first seemed, probably in his mid-thirties. And he certainly came on too strong in the revealing jeans, the work shirt, the sauntering display of that big, sexy body, to be an employee in an haute couture house. She didn’t know about Paris, but in Shoshone Falls, Wyoming, he would look like a prime suspect for breaking and entering. It was probably his motorcycle she’d seen down in the courtyard.
Did these two in the elevator, she wondered, know how all this had looked to someone arriving from New York, representing the company who had just bought the Maison Louvel? Or didn’t they care? The model acted so spaced out Sam would swear she was stoned. The person she’d found giving orders had been this big, sexy hunk in front of her. Where were the Maison Louvel management staff who were supposed to be there to greet her? Where was the director, the S. Doumer, who had supposedly received Mindy Ferragamo’s telegram announcing her arrival? She still hadn’t accounted for the other people who’d been in the salon when she’d come in, the man in the jogging suit and the elegantly dressed, fainting blonde.
“Who were the other people?” Sam asked slowly and clearly in consideration of Sophie’s limited English. “The man in the sweat suit with the blonde lady?”
“Oh, Alain des Baux,” the model responded with a breathy sigh. “And the sister of him, Madame Marie-Louise Failloux. They come here many years wiz their mamma, they are trop Bottin Mondain le tout Paris, vraiment! And Alain, he is so beautiful, non?”
“French social register,” the man between them translated. His black eyes were now studying the front of Sam’s jacket and the curve of her breasts with interest. “Old customers, the des Baux. Sophie says the sister still buys some of her clothes here.”
Sam kept her eyes fixed on the shoulder in front of her. She was aware the people at the Maison Louvel were probably expecting a male executive from New York and someone considerably older at that, and at the moment she was feeling a little over-challenged. If there was one thing Jack had taught her, it was where and when to assert your authority. Or at least to give it a try.
“Just what,” she said, lifting her eyes to the workman, “do you do around here, anyway?” The black eyes only stared back at her. “I mean, your title, your job description. Like what hours do you work?”
At that moment the elevator gave a terminal shudder and ground to a stop. “French machinery.” He lifted the corners of his mouth again in a slight smile and a solitary dimple appeared. “Have to get used to it, love. Or use the stairs.”
Sophie pulled the gate back and stepped out onto the fourth-floor landing. “Oh, zis is Cheap.” She gave Sam a misty, dislocated smile. “He is speak very good French, Cheap. He come help me talk wiz you.”
“Chip,” the tall Englishman corrected her quickly, “not Cheap, Sophie dear. You do me a terrible injustice.” As he held the gate back for Sam, he flashed her another smoky look. “Christopher Chiswick is the name.” He pronounced it “Chizzick” in a low growl. “But plain Chip will do. Christopher, Chip—but not Chris, please.” As Sam squeezed past him, he didn’t move to get out of her way.
“Oh, he is somezing, Cheap,” Sophie called over her shoulder, “but he is nize.”
On the contrary, Sam thought, Cheap was incredible. Was he counting on getting fired under the new management, and didn’t he give a damn? she wondered, glaring at him. Or was he some kind of Maison Louvel fixture, selling sex appeal for tips? If so, Cheap did a great job of it. Sleazy, but good.
Sophie was leaning over the railing of the staircase looking up at the top of the house and an iron door with a formidable set of locks on the small landing above them. “Iz big room—up, up,” she explained with a wave of her hand, “for ze old robes, clothes. But the key, she is lost.”
“Storerooms,” Chip translated helpfully. He lounged one shoulder against the nearest wall, holding the duffel bag to his chest, regarding Sam through half-closed lids. “We’re at the top of the house here, but there’s a ladder you can take to go to the roof. Nice view, you can see as far down the hill as the Tuileries and up the other way to Sacré Coeur at the top of Montmartre. But quiet as the grave up here at night.” Again that speculative look. “You’ll be all alone except for the night porter. Old Frenchman, a little deaf, name’s Albert.”
A night porter named Albert, Sam thought. So she wouldn’t be entirely alone. She moved to stand beside Sophie as the model searched through a large ring of keys for the one to the owner’s apartment.
What Sophie had said in the elevator had still left a lot unexplained and it wasn’t just the difficulty of trying to get past the model’s fractured English. Sam was remembering the lingerie, the white chiffon peignoir flung over the back of the sofa, the white satin nightgown. Beautiful stuff, undoubtedly expensive. A trousseau?
“Good lord,” she said without thinking, “if these people are so poor, how do they manage to pay their bills?”
“Well, love,” the man behind her said softly, “that’s what you’re here to find out, isn’t it?”
The Maison Louvel owner’s apartment, described in the brokers’ inventory as, “sitting room, bath and bedroom, some accommodations for cooking,” looked like a converted attic or old servants’ living quarters. And it was obviously not ready for occupancy. Although the rooms were not exactly covered in dust, the deep dormer windows were closed, and in spite of the warm spring day the apartment was cold, almost dank under the eaves of the old building. The furnishings could only be described as exotic. An early Art Nouveau style with a gilded plaster bust of an Egyptian sphinx perched on a tall porphyry column, and handsome, faded violet velvet sofas and an elaborate marble fireplace with blackened hearth were jumbled together with 1930s Art Deco represented by stark white walls, a six-foot-round mirror with stylized chrome wings over the fireplace and black plush carpeting underfoot.
In the bedroom Sam found a massive circular bed the size of a skating rink with a black velvet bedspread. Dangling aluminum tube lamps and wall sconces, white carpeting faintly yellow with age and a geometrically patterned black and white headboard gave the bedroom the air of a set from an old 1930s Hollywood musical.
Chip lounged in the doorway. “Not exactly homey, is it? Smells a bit musty, too.”
Sophie had wandered to a large Louis Quatorze armoire in white and gilt, opening the doors to peer inside. Sam stood and stared down at the slightly dusty surface of the black velvet bedspread, wondering if the bed were made up, and in what condition she’d find the sheets.
“You’d be better off staying at some nice American hotel in Paris, like the Hilton,” the voice contributed from the doorway. “Lots of people over at the Hilton, love. Tremendous crowds, everybody speaking American, you won’t lack for company.” He paused. “I’ll just take your bag back downstairs, right?”
She could have stayed at any good hotel in Paris, Sam was thinking. Jack usually reserved a suite at the Plaza Athénée when he was there, and Mindy Ferragamo had suggested the fabulously expensive Crillon or the Ritz in the nearby Place Vendôme. Which was, she now knew, almost within walking distance of the rue des Bénédictines. It had been her own idea to use the apartment at the top of the Maison Louvel. Now she was wonder
ing if she’d made a large mistake.
So far she hadn’t been exactly overwhelmed with eager hospitality at the Maison Louvel. No one at the airport, no one to meet her on the premises, only a slightly spacey model and an obnoxious Cockney janitor. And the owner’s apartment wasn’t ready in spite of New York’s telegram. If she stayed, even with the night watchman, she was still going to be pretty isolated at the top of the building. She hadn’t considered any of these things. It’s only for a few days, Sam told herself.
“There’s a nice little hotel,” the insistent Cockney voice went on, “a few blocks over in the rue des Capucines. Wouldn’t be too much trouble to—”
“It’s fine,” Sam said abruptly. Fire that one, she was thinking. Recommended personnel change, effective immediately: one former, English-speaking janitor. “Just put my duffel bag down on the bed.”
Sam washed her face, took two aspirin and changed her Western-style shirt for an orange Sam Laredo tank top of silk knit ribbon. The top’s bright color was an improvement, but she’d had better days, she decided, examining her face in the bathroom mirror. From the circles under her eyes, traveling luxury VIP First Class was still sitting up for six sleepless hours, no matter what it was called. And it didn’t make you immune to jet lag. Her head not only throbbed, but it also felt as though it were in another time zone.
In the other room she could hear Sophie’s voice and Chip’s low answering rasp. The model expected to show her the Maison Louvel, apparently. Sam had already been told that the employees who worked half days on Saturday were waiting to meet the new owner’s representative before they went home. It really didn’t make much difference, Sam thought; her system was too full of adrenaline from the morning’s outlandish scene downstairs, followed by almost certain death by French elevator, to let her relax enough to take a nap. Executive duties then, she sighed. When in doubt, keep going.
The apartment’s bathroom was reassuringly modern. There was no shower but a bathtub with one of the continental hand sprays Jean Ruiz had told her about. The little kitchen she’d found a little more foreign, especially the European gas stove with its cylinder of bottled gas under the sink. But the tiny refrigerator looked fairly new.
Sam took out her lipstick and looked at her freshly washed face doubtfully. She knew nobody would recognize this plain, lightly freckled girl as last year’s glamorous Sam Laredo. When she stripped off her makeup she was no longer the product of professional beauty-makers hired by Jackson Storm Incorporated, but only Sammy Whitfield, one of the tribe of shiftless Whitfields that the rest of the population of Shoshone Falls, Wyoming, usually tried hard to ignore. Now, astonishingly enough, she thought, frowning at her face in the mirror, this same person was in Paris.
She pulled the leather tie out of the back of her hair and raked the pale strands through her fingers, fighting down a sudden rush of depression. What if she couldn’t handle the Paris trip, simple as it was? An uneasy feeling dogged her for days that anyone in New York could have made the Paris trip in her place, like Dennis Wolchek, John Durham of Legal, even Eugenia Kleinberg of Junior Lone Star. Had they been offered it and had they turned it down for some reason? she wondered, feeling slightly paranoid. Was Mindy Ferragamo all that busy that she couldn’t get away for four or five days?
The chiseled features of the girl in the mirror looked tight and suddenly unhappy. She always did this to herself, Sam thought with a groan. She was hard to get rid of, Sammy Whitfield, even after all this time. She was sick and trembling inside without Sam Laredo.
“Damn,” she muttered under her breath.
She dragged her professional makeup case across the washbasin and opened it, taking out her specially blended foundation cream to cover her freckles, and an array of eye shadow, pencils and blushers. She started all over again.
Two separate owners of the Maison Louvel had occupied the upstairs apartment, Sophie told her as they took the stairs to the floor below. The original Madame Odette Louvel had come from Dijon to Paris as a dressmaker and had worked as a seamstress in a number of couture houses at the customary very low wages of pre-World War One France before she managed to save enough money to open her own establishment.
“First Madame Odette she work in a small shop, not so elegant. Then she want to make couture and she have Monsieur Fred—he is Madame’s cutter. He has come from London where they are the best to cut the cloth because they ‘ave best—” The model hesitated, searching for the word.
“Tailors.” Chip was right behind them. “Fred Cooper was a cutter, a highly skilled job. The English supplied the best cutters, even in Paris. You know what a cutter is, don’t you?” he murmured, so close his breath brushed the back of Sam’s ear.
Sam decided to ignore him. But Chip was getting on her nerves. If he wasn’t so useful translating, she’d send him off to do whatever it was he did at the Maison Louvel in a hurry.
The third floor was marked “Offices.” Old-fashioned frosted-glass doors led off the landing, but most of them were locked.
“He make her famous, Madame Louvel, he is such good cutter.” Sophie was leading the way down a musty-smelling corridor. “Also, they are lovers. But he is marry, this English—he leave poor madame and goes back to wife and children in Angleterre.”
Most of this floor looked as though it, too, hadn’t been used for years. Through glass partitions they peered in at wooden desks and a few ancient typewriters.
“Then come Mademoiselle Claude,” Sophie said, her nose pressed to the glass. “She is daughter of Madame’s sister. She come to Paris when Madame Odette is old and make famous couture, Mademoiselle Claude, but she die too soon. All the beautiful clothes mademoiselle make, they are up, up.” She lifted a white hand and pointed to the ceiling.
“In the storeroom,” Chip interpreted. When Sam turned to stare at him he only cocked a black eyebrow at her arrogantly.
“Now we see atelier, where they make robes,” Sophie announced.
The office floor had smelled of dust and carpet with a faint overlay of paper. The next floor smelled richly of cloth. The rooms were set at uneven levels, the ceilings low, and there were no hallways. They went through a maze of workrooms that connected with each other into the atelier, or sewing room, where the two seamstresses were waiting. Sam immediately recognized the middle-aged woman with the tape measure around her neck and the girl in the blue canvas apron and slacks.
“Nannette Bloch is the seconde, and also the fitter,” Chip said. “Nannette’s general maitresse, supervisor in here, although you can see there’s not much now to supervise.” He broke off to relay something in French to the older woman and she gave him a cautious smile. “Very good type, Nannette, has a couple of kids at the lycée—high school, works hard, doesn’t normally go to pieces the way you saw downstairs.” He turned to the girl in slacks. “Sylvie here, this lovely young bird, is a seamstress, and a damned fine one. She’s from Alsace—they still teach girls to sew up there. Talent like Sylvie is getting hard to find in Paris. Isn’t it, love?” he said, giving the uncomprehending girl a wink. “Most birds her age want to go into offices and use word processors, be travel agents, glamorous things like that.” He said something in French and Sylvie laughed. “Keep your eye on her,” he muttered to Sam sotto voce, “she’s only here for the training. Give her half a chance, she’ll go across town to the avenue Montaigne in a few months.”
Samantha shook hands with Nannette and Sylvie, and they nodded, taking in her Sam Laredo clothes with critical interest.
“Could you do me a favor?” She hated to ask Chip for anything, but Sophie had wandered off into the next room. “Tell them I’m just here as Jack Storm’s personal representative to look over the place.” She met the women’s stares with a try at friendliness. “I don’t have any real authority to make changes, just in case they think I do.”
He leaned up against the doorjamb and crossed his arms over his chest. “Tell them yourself. Try enchantée, that should just about cover it.”<
br />
Sam stuck out her lower lip stubbornly. “No, I don’t want to say enchantée. I know that just means pleased to meet you. I want you to say what I told you, in case they’re worried about their jobs.”
He regarded her with an enigmatic expression. “Why don’t you learn a few words of French, then?”
Just keep it up, buster, she thought, glaring at him as he pushed away from the door frame and sauntered through into the next room. I might make an exception and fire you right now.
The atelier was not very tidy but full of work. Pieces of garments basted together lay on the polished wood surfaces of the worktables, and cloth scraps drifted off the tables onto the floor. One black silk faille dress lay spread out with Nannette’s tape measure lying beside it.
There was not a sewing machine in the place. Even the long side seams of the black dress were done with thousands of precise, tiny hand stitches that were as delicate as fine embroidery. This was true haute couture, Sam marveled, holding one up to the light, garments so beautifully cut and exquisitely sewn that they were virtually works of art.
On a shelf running head-high around the atelier were the custom dress forms of Louvel customers. The first cut of the gown or dress was fitted to these forms, which were perfect replicas of the customer’s torso. The almost-finished product was fitted to the customer herself.
And that, Sam knew from Jean Ruiz’s briefing, was only the beginning. The process went on at least three fittings more—the meticulous altering whereby the creation was made to fit the customer’s body an infinitesimal fraction of an inch here, another there, until the customer and the fitter both knew it was perfect. More than perfect—if the fitter wasn’t satisfied, the client kept coming back for more adjustments until she was. The finished product was one a woman could move in, breathe in and live in with reasonable comfort, aware that it was a work of art that made the wearer a work of art, too.
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