She’d been dreaming the same terrible dream that always came when she was troubled—there was a blizzard and she was terrified of being left alone. Only this time all was lost and everything and everyone had gone away. She couldn’t find the people she loved.
The bed where she lay was warm as a nest. A big body held her tenderly, and without fully waking she turned to it, seeking comfort and hope. “Make love to me,” she murmured.
Gently, fingers stroked the track of her tears down the side of her face. “Love, are you sure?” the dark voice whispered to her. “You want me to make love to you, now?”
“Umm, yes.” Her own voice was husky with sleep. Her body pressed against him, and her hands pulled a big, sleek muscular body over her. She felt him ease between her thighs, already wanting her, already hard.
She should have remembered Jack. After all, Jack was the man she’d been in love with not so long ago. All the guilt and pain she felt for Jack Storm should have kept him alive in her memory. But it hadn’t.
There was someone else, warm, tender, and exciting, but his identity slipped from her consciousness and faded into the night.
The only images Samantha visualized in the hot rush of passion as his mouth closed over hers were the beautiful aristocratic features and the tilted golden eyes of Alain des Baux.
La Coupe
The Cut
Chapter Eight
There were two doorbells at the Maison Louvel. One, a small recessed pearl button that had been out of order for years, was located in the framing of the ancient wooden doors that opened into the rue des Bénédictines. The other doorbell, seldom used since customers came in without announcing themselves, was on the first-floor landing at the entrance to the salon. When pressed, this button sent a loud, irritating buzzing that echoed up the wide, marble stairwell and all through the building. During the last three or four minutes of Sam’s Monday morning conference with Solange Doumer, someone had been ringing this doorbell persistently.
The first hangover of Sam’s life pressed behind her eyes in a black fog of guilt and pain, and the worry that Chip might be hanging around the building somewhere that morning didn’t help, either. The doorbell that no one was answering added to the torment. And then there was Madame Solange Doumer.
The directrice of the Maison Louvel faced Sam across her desk with an expression of almost melodramatic disdain, her hands clasped in front of her. She wore a high-necked black dress that emphasized her dark red hair, the camellia complexion, the slender, still-attractive figure. Sophie wasn’t there to help translate—deliberately, Samantha suspected. Madame Doumer would speak only French.
Whatever game was being played, they weren’t making much headway, except that certain words like “invoices” and “cash flow” seemed to be getting through: Sam could see a flicker of understanding, quickly hidden, in those liquid, prominent brown eyes. But all she was getting back from the directrice, was a rapid-fire barrage of French in which “personne d’autorité” and “Jackson Storm” were featured prominently.
“Jackson Storm is on a tour of his Far Eastern plants,” Sam explained for the third or fourth time, “and he can’t talk to you. Right now, since I’m here, I’m the one on the job. And I’d appreciate a little cooperation.”
She didn’t think Madame Doumer would go over her head to New York and if she did, it didn’t matter; she was acting out a role now as Jack Storm’s representative in Paris.
“And I want you to send somebody up to the apartment to clean it. Vacuum cleaner, understand?” With insulting simplicity she pantomimed running a vacuum across the floor. Solange Doumer’s eyes widened in disbelief. “Then get somebody to change the sheets on the bed. White ones, please.” She pressed her thumb to the bridge of her nose and shut her eyes for a brief second. Whoever was leaning on the doorbell downstairs was driving her hangover headache right to the edge. “I can’t sleep in those black satin sheets every night. They keep me awake.”
White-lipped, the other woman glared back at her. “Je ne comprends rien tout ce que vous dites.”
“Let’s set this meeting up again for tomorrow,” Sam said carefully. “Only next time you’ll have your daughter here to interpret for us.” She was pretty sure Solange Doumer understood her, but she wasn’t going to wait to find out; she was going to strangle whoever had been leaning on the buzzer.
Sam rushed out of the directrice’s office to the landing and looked down the big curving staircase. “Who is it?” she yelled. “Who’s down there, dammit? What do you want?”
The figure of a young woman moved away from the doors to the salon and came to the railing and looked up. “Nobody answers the bell,” she yelled back. “This place isn’t closed on Mondays, is it?”
Oh lord, not another one, Sam thought, looking down at her. The woman’s hair was black, dyed bright orange on the ends and hair—sprayed to stand up in spikes like a punk rock singer’s. She wore a puffed green satin blouse, long Indian print cotton skirt, and red plastic boots and carried a black patent leather shopping bag.
“Do you work here?” the apparition asked, moving around the railing to the stairs. “I’m Brooksie Goodman, a freelance writer and photojournalist here in Paris. Real name’s Elaine but the Brooksie is for Brooklyn, because I’m supposed to have an accent, you know, at least to the French, but actually I’m from Long Island.” She hardly took a breath before she went on, “I freelance for Fairchild Publications. Also I’ve had stuff published in French magazines like Elle. What’s an American doing—”
At the foot of the stairs she could see Sam more clearly and her eyes widened. “Jeez,” she cried, “you know who you look like? Hey, you are—you are, aren’t you?” She put her foot on the bottom step. “Aren’t you Jackson Storm’s Sam Laredo?”
Sam came down the stairs two at a time. A freelance writer? How was she going to handle this? The elevator was coming up from ground level. Brooksie heard its melancholy whining and froze.
“Can I get back to you later?” the journalist said hurriedly. “Because if this is who I think it is—” She did a crabwise shuffle to one side of the elevator doors, dragged open the patent leather shopping bag by its straps and pulled out a professional-looking Nikon camera with flash attachment.
“Wait a minute,” Sam said. “What do you think you’re going to do?”
The elevator reached the salon floor. The doors slid open, revealing a tightly packed group of people inside. Two burly men in tweed jackets abruptly pulled the gate back and stepped out onto the landing, partly shielding a stout, balding man who held the arm of a teenage girl wearing a windbreaker, tight faded jeans and dirty running shoes.
The girl, her hair cropped short as a boy’s, sullen-faced and not particularly pretty, was the first to see the photojournalist. She stopped, trying to pull back. Before the bodyguards could move in front of the man and the girl, Brooksie had scurried up and taken several rapid shots of them with her camera.
There was a strange, static pause as the photo flashes popped brightly, the szznick, szznick of the camera’s automatic advance loud in the sudden stillness. Then the teenage girl screamed. The stout man put his arm around her shoulders and drew her to him as one bodyguard lunged for Brooksie and the other bodyguard wrenched at the French doors to the salon as though he would tear them from the hinges.
“Leggo, you bastard,” Brooksie was screaming. The man in the tweed jacket tried to drag the Nikon from her hands. He gave her a shove with one hand, the other on the camera’s flash attachment, and Brooksie fell to her knees.
“Keep your hands off her,” Samantha cried, grabbing for the camera. “What do you think you’re doing!”
“Associated Press! New York Times!” Brooksie howled, getting to her feet. She backed away, holding her camera over her head. “I’m an American journalist! You suckers cool it, okay?”
The flash attachment had come apart, a piece of it in the bodyguard’s hand. He made a lunge for the rest of the camera just as
the doors to the salon suddenly opened. Without hesitating, the short man and girl rushed through, followed by both men. The French doors slammed shut behind them.
The figure in the green satin blouse and trailing peasant skirt leaned against the wall, gasping. “I knew they’d come here.” She quickly stuffed the camera back into the shopping bag. Then she bent and picked up the broken piece of flash attachment from the floor and swore under her breath. “Lousy rotten gorillas. You couldn’t get the Prince to pay for it, if you sued him.” She started for the stairs. “See you later,” she said over her shoulder.
Samantha watched her disappear down the marble steps. She whirled and rattled the doors to the salon, not too surprised to find them locked. And no one came to open them for her.
“Just a minute,” Sam shouted, starting for the steps and Brooksie, who was out of sight. “Just stop right where you are! I want to talk to you!”
She caught up with Brooksie in the rue des Bénédictines as the journalist tried to dodge behind a huge black Rolls-Royce limousine parked at the curb with a uniformed chauffeur sitting in it. “Listen, I got a New York press card,” the girl bleated. She was limping slightly. “Hey, I’m a freelance journalist! I swear, I’m not putting you on!”
“Did you get hurt?” She took Brooksie’s arm to make sure she wouldn’t slip away.
“I skinned my knee. Listen, you’re not going to take my film, to hell with that, so leggo of me.” She backed away. “I want to know what somebody from Jackson Storm’s doing at Louvel’s.”
They eyed each other warily. “I’m not going to take your film,” Sam told her. “Look—”
“It’s a story, see? Like, what is Jackson Storm doing in Paris?” Brooksie told her. “So, do you tell me, or what?”
Stalemate, even Sam could see that. “Let’s go someplace and talk,” she suggested. “And you can tell me just what’s going on.”
The raffish face under the punk rock hairdo suddenly grinned. “Buy me coffee and something to eat in the Ritz bar and you’re on. We can walk there from here,” she added hopefully. “It’s not far.”
Sam nodded.
“Okay, here’s the deal,” Brooksie said fifteen minutes later as they settled themselves in the garden behind the bar of Paris’s famed old Hotel Ritz in the Place Vendôme. A waiter came down the flagstone path toward them with their order of French pastries and café au lait, and the journalist was momentarily distracted as she shoveled several apricot tarts onto her plate. She picked one up in her hands, not waiting for their silverware, and bit into it with a blissful expression. “The Ritz was really run-down a couple of years ago until one of the Saudi crowd, Kashoggi—you ever heard of him? Well, he bought this place and started renovating it. He put millions into it. It’s back like it was when Hemingway used to drink in the bar, and F. Scott Fitzgerald and all that bunch.”
“I want to know what happened,” Sam said, watching her, “back there at the Maison Louvel.”
“Ah, Louvel’s.” Brooksie made a gesture with what was left of her pastry. “That was just a lucky guess, you know? Nobody ever hears of it now. Louvel’s is where these weird down-and-out European princesses and ducchessas go when they need a dress for a state funeral, or one of the crowd gets an audience with the Pope, or they’re going to marry off one of the daughters and have to have a wedding gown. Because Louvel’s knows how to give them the stuff they save up their pennies for, all the black crepe, the satin sashes for the order of the Holy Roman Empire, the Czar’s Citizen’s Medal, the Star of Lower Slobbovia, all that crap. So I figured if the prince was going to get his nasty kid some clothes he’d remember that all that Balkan crowd used to go to Louvel’s back in the Old Stone Age and they’d know what he wanted.”
“Prince?” Sam said, frowning. Brooksie was painting a strange picture of the Maison Louvel, but then she was remembering the old ducchessa and her granddaughter and the black garments on the tables in the atelier.
“Yeah, the little fat guy who came out of the elevator is Prince Alessio Medivani. The kid with him is Princess Jacqueline.”
Of course, Sam was thinking; she didn’t know why she hadn’t recognized them. But then there’d been a lot going on with all the shouting and camera-grabbing.
“Princess Jackie’s got a drug problem,” the woman across the table went on. “Nothing new—she’s just following in her sister’s footsteps. But daddy, the prince, was so burned by bad publicity the first time around with the older girl, Princess Catherine, that he wants to do better with Jackie. More coffee?” Brooksie said, indicating the silver pot. “Mind if I help myself? Naturally the press, especially the European tabloids, are crazy for what jet setters do, like Greek millionaires, the Arab oil bunch, anything about the decadent rich. But if it’s a title—oh, wow! Medivani’s girls don’t get as much publicity as the Grimaldi princesses in Monte Carlo, but then they didn’t have Grace Kelly for a mother, either. Princess Catherine is married now and sort of cooled off, but in her day she was in all the tabloids, stoned and falling on the floor in Paris nightclubs, taking her bikini off on the beach in Monte Carlo for photographers, screwing all the soccer players in the All Europe playoffs—”
“Look,” Sam interrupted her, “why were you in the Maison Louvel this morning?”
“Jeez, I’m telling you! Because that was Prince Alessio and his kid, Princess Jackie,” the journalist explained. “Little Jackie starts the same routine about a year ago with a bunch of wildies, like people you don’t even hear about, like some of the younger upper-class Brits, the Sloane Square crowd, some of the Paris jeunesse dorée—transvestism, kinky sex, teenagers from what is usually called Europe’s best families. Medivani can’t take any more. He can’t go through what he did with her older sister, so I hear he made a deal for Jackie to live very quietly in Spain for a year and clean up her act. Spain’s tough. It probably cost him a bundle to hook into some of the titles there and get Jackie straightened out in a very secluded environment with some aristocratic family. Spanish nobility raises their girls like nuns, so Medivani’s hoping they’ll keep little Princess Jacqueline locked up and away from drugs and her panties on long enough to find her a husband somewhere.”
Brooksie went on, reaching for another apricot tart, “So where else but Louvel’s for Princess Jackie’s clothes? I’m thinking, jeez, Medivani will sneak her in and order up a bunch of clothes the upper-class Spaniards put their daughters in until they get engaged—the white collars, navy blue dresses, the one-piece swimsuits.”
“At Louvel’s,” Sam said.
“Right, Maison Louvel. Want a wedding dress for your daughter the countess, only you’re living on tea and crackers in a flat in Pantin and working for Galleries Lafayette part-time and hocking what’s left of the Hohenzollern silver to stay alive? Has she got an invitation to spend a weekend with a fourteenth cousin who’s still got money in Brussels and might meet a Flemish relative of King Baudoin’s who’s minor nobility, only there’s no money for a dress and a nightie? Or how about at least an audience with the Pope and you need one of those black dresses, which you can also wear at the state funeral of the former King of Portugal, since you’re related to him through a poverty-stricken branch of his wife’s relatives? Louvel’s knows what you want, and what they haven’t got, they’ll steal from the big couture houses. Last year’s designs, of course.”
Sam was following this, not really wanting to believe the journalist’s rapid-fire chatter but realizing it made a sort of sense. “And they pay with—what?”
Brooksie shrugged. “Who knows? They sell the portrait of Grandma by Tintoretto or they borrow from their relatives. Or they make their kids pay up, if the kids make good enough marriages. Listen,” she said, leaning across the table, “so it’s one way to survive, right? Louvel’s never made it big. It’s a back-street operation, when most of the big designers are owned by multinationals. And look what happened to Courrèges—his Japanese backers pulled him out of his big July showings because h
e wasn’t making enough money. Halston got creamed when Beatrice foods bought him out, same story. The only thing the orange juice people kept was Halston’s perfume line.” Brooksie looked hungrily at Sam’s uneaten tart. “Do you mind if I have that? Thanks,” she said, reaching for it. “Look, the way I understand it, Louvel’s hasn’t done anything since the early fifties. Back in the fabulous fifties when all the couture houses in Paris were making it big, Givenchy was just starting with Jacques Fath, Rudi Mortessier left Dior just as St. Laurent started designing for him, and I think Louvel’s had somebody really good, Claudine or somebody.”
“Claude,” Samantha said automatically. “Mademoiselle Claude.”
Brooksie looked up suddenly, struck by a thought that made her blink. “Jackson Storm,” she breathed. “Beside him, Calvin Klein and Ralph Lauren are turkeys. Oh Jesus, you know he’ll never be able to do it! No American has ever been able to break into Paris.”
“What?” Sam gasped.
“I can’t believe it.” The other woman pushed her plate back, looking triumphant. “Jeez, what a setup, old Louvel’s! And if anybody can, Jackson Storm can do it.”
“Are you out of your mind?” Samantha frowned. “Do what?”
“Oh, wow, what a story!” The strange figure was squirming in her seat with excitement. “Listen, Bill Blass and Oscar de la Renta have both got boutiques in London, they sort of hang around on the edges, but they’d never try to crash Paris haute couture. Not that they don’t want to, but God, everybody knows what’s happened to the Italians. The Italians are great, fabulous, magnificent—” Her voice rose to an excited squeak. “Armani, Missoni, Soprani, Versace, Complice—but let them into Paris, no way! The French froze them out a long time ago. The Italians even have to show their clothes in Rome and Milan the week after the Paris showings. Of course, all the world press, the buyers, take a plane down to see them anyway.”
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