“I’ve got marble flakes in my hair,” she wept. She couldn’t tell him that Chip had been lying on top of her, mad as hell, and she knew that was how he had been shot. “And all down inside my clothes. I’m a wreck!”
“Yes, yes, but you are all right.” He carefully took the coffee cup out of her hand and set it on the floor beside him. “And Chiswick will recover. He is a bit banged up, but it is nothing for someone like him.”
“He’d better be all right,” Sam spluttered. “He’s got my passport.” None of this would have happened if Chip Chiswick hadn’t been trying to uncover a drug operation. And pass himself off as a button salesman. It made her cry even harder. “I can’t get out of Paris without it!”
The Interpol man smiled. “Ah, to get out of Paris. That is what you kept telling us in the ambulance.” He sighed. “I regret, mademoiselle, that all this has happened to spoil your visit. The world grows disorderly, even in our beautiful Paris. It is very worrisome.”
Sam hiccuped into his handkerchief, drying her tears. She hardly ever cried, at least not like this. She was making a fool of herself and Supervisor Lapin was being nice about everything, especially the way she’d behaved in the ambulance on the way to the hospital.
She hadn’t been at her best then, to put it mildly; she supposed she’d been what you might call hysterical. But then it wasn’t every day you discovered someone like Chip was a cop and that he’d nearly been killed trying to mash you into the floor and out of the way of flying bullets. She did remember yelling that if she didn’t get out of Paris, she was going to go crazy. The Interpol man and the Paris policeman who had been in the back of the ambulance with her hadn’t been able to make her shut up. Then Chip had suddenly sat up on the stretcher, all covered with blood, to yell at her to calm down. It had been such a relief to know he wasn’t dead she’d gone to pieces all over again.
Sam closed her eyes for a brief second. What a night, what a crazy twenty-four hours—from the retrospective show with the torrents of rain, the ancient bag ladies turning up, to the world fashion press descending on them at the last minute because Gilles Vasse had shot himself and the Mortessier show had been canceled, to Jack Storm flying in from New York. Then, when you could believe that nothing more could possibly happen, there’d been the nightmarish scene with Alain des Baux.
If you were writing a book about it or making a movie, the whole thing would end right there in the bedroom of Alain’s house in Fontainebleau. You wouldn’t pile on anything more, like a police raid on the Maison Louvel and Chip turning out to be an Interpol undercover agent. Sam shuddered. She could still feel the shock of gunfire in the darkness hitting her like a physical blow, the blast of red and yellow flames that seemed to explode right in her face, and Chip dragging her to the floor and falling on her. That was when she’d hit her head and blacked out.
“I could strangle you for this,” Chip had yelled. She supposed, shuddering inwardly, that everyone else felt the same way. The group in the storeroom had opened up just as she got the elevator door open, blasting the stairs and the whole fourth-floor landing before the police attack team could move in. Later, when the gunfire had died down and more police had come up from the ground floor carrying big portable spotlights, they had dragged Chip’s body off her. And at that point she’d gone a little wild because she’d looked down at Chip on the floor by the elevator, his tough body limp and unmoving. Blood covered him, and he’d looked deader than dead.
And all those bodies, Sam thought, trying not to start crying again, all those bodies lying on the stairs. She’d never seen dead bodies before, that was one of the things she’d missed in life, shot-up dead bodies. One body she would never forget, carried down on a stretcher, one white arm dangling and the slender hand waving as though it were still alive. All that beautiful red hair.
Sam put her hands over her face and bent over, feeling sick. The voices of the crowd at the end of the corridor seemed to fade away. She felt Inspector Lapin’s hand seize the back of her neck. “Your head between your knees, mademoiselle,” he said sharply. “Now we must get you to a room, I insist.”
But Sam took her hands from her face and sat up. She took a deep breath. She wasn’t going to pass out; then they would admit her to the hospital. “I’m all right,” she managed. There were some things she still couldn’t face, that was all.
When she looked up, she saw two policemen bringing Brooksie Goodman down the hall. Behind Brooksie were Nannette and Sylvie from the Maison Louvel. Unbelieving, Sam half rose from the bench.
Brooksie threw herself at her. “Oh, Sammy, are you all right? The flics came and got us, everybody’d who’d been working on the show today—yesterday,” she corrected herself breathlessly. “Jeez, they got us out of bed. When they went to get Nannette, they wouldn’t even let her wake up the people next door to take care of her kids. Would you believe she left a Paris flic babysitting them? They took us downtown to metropolitan central station and wanted to know what we knew about the Maison Louvel, and they wouldn’t even tell us what it was all about! I showed them my press card and it was like nowhere with them, the flics wouldn’t even look at it.”
Brooksie’s hands were patting Sam’s face, her shoulders, her arms as though she couldn’t believe Sam was there. “Hey, are you all right? Jeez, did you know anything about the drugs? What in the hell were you doing there last night, anyway? Sylvie said you left the show with Alain des Baux, and then when we heard you were at the American Hospital we couldn’t believe it.” The two Frenchwomen with Brooksie were talking excitedly at the same time; Brooksie paused long enough to wave her hand to hush them. “We saw Jack Storm down at police headquarters. He already had a lawyer with him. They were waiting around but we didn’t have time to talk to him. God, you should have seen the newspaper and television people—they were climbing all over the place! First the Gilles Vasse thing, and now a shoot-out with terrorists, all during fashion week!”
“Brooksie, Sophie’s dead.” The words fell flat into a shocked silence. Sam looked over Brooksie’s shoulder and saw from Nannette’s and Sylvie’s faces that they had heard the name and guessed the rest. “Oh, Brooksie,” Sam rushed on, her voice trembling, “she was upstairs with them behind the storeroom. They told me her boyfriend was the ringleader. I saw them bring her down the stairs. And I was so mad at her yesterday because we were counting on her to show up!” She wept again, she couldn’t help it. “Oh damn, poor Sophie!”
Suddenly they were all crying. Little Sylvie moved to put her arm around Sam and Nannette wept openly. They made a knot of shared grief; when Sam lifted her head, she realized she had more friends than she knew in Paris. After all, Brooksie and Nannette and Sylvie came looking for her at the hospital at four o’clock in the morning, after their terrible ordeal. She put one arm around Brooksie, one around Sylvie and held on to them. “Oh God,” she sobbed, “I never even learned French. Maybe I could have talked to her, Sophie, done something, helped her, if I’d just learned the language!”
They were making a lot of noise, the four women hanging on to each other in the hospital corridor, remembering beautiful, unfortunate Sophie. The two gendarmes moved closer, trying to make them quiet down.
“They want us to go,” Brooksie said, wiping her eyes. “The flics who brought us in said we could have only a minute to see that you were all right.” She pulled back and looked up into Sam’s face. “You’re not under arrest or anything, are you?” she whispered. When Sam shook her head, she said, her eyes widening, “Listen, did you hear Chip was an Interpol cop? You know, like big, good-looking Chip Chiswick?”
“Brooksie,” she said hurriedly, “will you tell Nannette and Sylvie how much I appreciate their coming here?” Frustrated, she stared at the two Frenchwomen, unable to tell them what she was feeling. Supervisor Lapin took Sam by the arm, and a gendarme tugged at Nannette and Sylvie.
“Listen, Sammy,” Brooksie cried, “you owe me an interview!” The policeman pulled her out of the way o
f a nurse wheeling an IV stand down the hall. “The least you can do is give me an exclusive!”
Sam wanted to tell Brooksie about Alain des Baux, about Solange Doumer’s part in it, but there wasn’t time. Perhaps she already knows, Sam thought. There was one more thing—probably no one had even thought of it in the last few hours. “Brooksie,” she cried as the gendarmes were hurrying her away, “what about Gilles Vasse? Will he live?”
She saw Brooksie’s spiked orange and black head turn to her. Brooksie gave her a helpless look before the crowd of newsmen outside the emergency room doors at the end of the corridor surged through. Two nurses and an orderly were unable to hold them back. Beyond them Sam saw that the parking area was lighter. The sun was coming up.
“I think we should get out of the hall,” Supervisor Lapin said at her elbow. “The news media are coming in. And I think they are getting ready to release Inspector Chiswick. Let us go to him.”
Chip sat on an examining room table. He was bare to the waist, except for a large gauze bandage around his chest that the nurse was taping. Sam thought that his sleekly muscled body looked almost overpoweringly sexy. He gave her a hard stare. “Well, you look rather the worse for wear,” he commented.
His hair was gray from marble dust, Sam noticed, as though someone had sprinkled talcum powder all over it. Then she remembered that she must look the same way. She was still wearing the same jeans and tattersall shirt she’d worn when she’d left the Maison Louvel, and she was filthy. After lifting her hand to her hair, her fingers were gritty. But ‘worse for wear’? Was that all he could say to her?
“Sorry about the delay, Georges.” He watched the nurse wind a band of adhesive tape over the bandage that covered his lower ribs. “They’ve been busy picking pieces of that damned staircase out of me.”
So that was what had happened to him when he fell on top of her, she thought, staring. His shoulders were peppered with little cuts, each one colored a bright iridescent red with Mercurochrome. When he had covered her, protecting her, the marble floor chewed up by gunfire had sprayed him like so much buckshot, yet he had never moved. She suddenly remembered what Supervisor Lapin had said about her face. But there was more, Sam thought wearily. A bullet had grazed him. That accounted for the bandage.
“They arrested Alain des Baux,” she said tonelessly.
Chip said, not lifting his head, “Des Baux gave them a safe house for the drug operation. For a percentage off the top.” He picked up his shirt from the examining table. When he shrugged into it, she saw him wince. “Do you want to see him?” he asked her. “Georges can take you downtown. He can get you a minute with des Baux if he’s been booked.”
Sam stood there thinking. The light in the little room was very bright and seemed to bore right through her eyes into her sleepless, aching brain. “A percentage off the top.” Alain’s sleek black Lamborghini, the extravagant dinner aboard the restaurant boat the first evening he’d taken her out, his marvelous chateau in Fontainebleau, all cost lots of money. She was remembering how wonderful Alain had seemed to her, so handsome, so charming, so accustomed to wealth and power. Sam bit her lip, looking down at the floor, thinking about what had happened when he’d finally tried to make love to her. She knew she didn’t want to see Alain in some Paris jail, defeated and changed, when the police brought him out to talk to her. “No,” she whispered.
“No?” Chip slid his long legs down to the floor and stood up. He buttoned the last button on his shirt, waving the nurse away. “Just ‘no’?”
She didn’t want to answer that. “What—what about Solange Doumer?” she asked, thinking of Sophie.
He turned away to pick up his tie and jacket from a metal stool. “Another percentage. The Maison Louvel was hardly a money-making operation, but the old relics made a fairly good cover. Handy for the old girls, since most of them didn’t pay their bills.” He lifted his chin while he wrapped the tie around his neck and drew it through the loop. “Solange was des Baux’s old girlfriend. One of them, anyway.”
“Sophie’s dead.” She couldn’t keep the pain out of her voice.
He shot her a quick look. “Yes, I know.”
Sam lifted her eyes to that hard, noncommittal face and knew Chip was remembering the same thing, that she had seen Sophie in his arms, kissing him, that night in the café.
“She couldn’t have been saved, Samantha,” he said in a different tone. “I tried, believe me, I did. But they were keeping her up there with them the last few days, and away from that show. They knew what they were doing.” He straightened the knot of his tie, frowning. “She was getting to be a large problem for them. Heroin does nasty things.”
Why did he want to convince her? she thought, staring at him. If you held somebody in your arms and kissed them and it was only part of your job, what difference did it make? It was the same thing when he made love to her—part of what he had to do because she was in everybody’s way there in the apartment, dragging the clothes out of the storeroom, setting up the retrospective show.
Had he wondered too, if she could be saved? Had he made a chart? she thought bitterly. Sophie no, Sam Laredo yes?
Supervisor Lapin handed Chip his suit jacket. Sam watched him put it on, seeing how it changed him. The dark blue suit, well-tailored and expensive-looking, made all his tough good looks even more powerfully impressive. He was not just a cop, now, but an international law enforcement officer. Inspector Christopher Chiswick of Interpol. Something else had changed, too. He had dropped the rough Cockney accent or whatever it was. Now his voice was cultivated, clipped, very upper-crust English. In spite of his dusty hair and the spots of Mercurochrome, Chip was handsome, assured, even formidable. Just because he’d made love to her as part of his job didn’t make it any big deal, did it? It looked like she was just one of the crowd.
Suddenly she didn’t want to remember what a spectacle she’d made of herself in the ambulance, not only screaming and crying but also begging him not to die, blurting out that he’d saved her life by throwing her down on the floor, that she was responsible for his getting hurt, that she’d never forgive herself. She had said all sorts of crazy things in front of Supervisor Lapin and the gendarmes. It had probably made Chip look very unprofessional, she was thinking miserably. No wonder he had sat up and yelled at her.
“Your boss wants to talk to you.” He stood at the mirror over the washbasin, running his fingers through his dusty hair and frowning slightly. “Wants you to call him at his hotel, Plaza Athénée. Georges has the telephone number.”
Jack Storm? She didn’t want to talk to Jack right now, either. “No,” Sam muttered.
“No?” She caught the sudden dark blaze of Chip’s eyes in the mirror as he looked at her. “No?” he repeated.
She bit her lip, not wanting to meet his eyes. How much did he know? Probably everything, she told herself, resigned. Policemen made investigations. He’d probably checked her out weeks ago and knew all about Jack Storm. “No, I don’t want to talk to Alain des Baux.” She stuck her lower lip out stubbornly. “And no, I don’t want to talk to Jack Storm.”
He turned, and she was startled to see he was smiling. This couldn’t be Chip, she thought staring. Not this grinning stranger with a flickering dimple that showed at the corner of that confident, sexy mouth. What was making him look at her like that?
“I just want to get out of here,” she whispered. “I’m going to go home.”
“Right.” He was grinning even more broadly. He looked positively smug. “It’s going to take us a little while. I’ve got to go over to Interpol in St. Cloud and write up a batch of reports, but we should be able to get out of Paris by noon.” As he passed Supervisor Lapin, he gave him an exuberant slap on the forearm with his big hand. “Can you find a cot for her somewhere at the office, Georges? She’s got to get some sleep if she’s going to help me with the driving.”
“Driving? What driving?” Sam was suddenly suspicious. “What are you talking about?”
; He fished in the pocket of his trousers and handed the Frenchman a ring of keys. “If you don’t mind, Georges, get someone to bring my car around to headquarters. I’m all packed up. All that remains is to close up my flat.”
“What driving?” Sam said, stepping in front of him.
“You’re all packed,” he said, hardly glancing at her. “We requested that your stuff in the apartment be collected, but not all of your clothes would fit in your bag. You don’t mind a few extra paper parcels, do you?”
“You had somebody pack my clothes?” She followed Chip to the door. When he opened it, they could see the corridor outside was packed with cameramen and newspaper people. He stepped back quickly, pulling her with him. “Bloody hell,” Chip said under his breath. He turned to the Interpol supervisor. “You do it this time, Georges. Tell them no comment. And try to keep my damned face out of the cameras.”
Sam was hardly paying attention to the mob clamoring to see them. She dragged at Chip’s arm as they let the Interpol man go ahead into the hall. “Drive where?” she cried. “Listen, what are you talking about?”
Chip looked down then, tucking her hand over his arm and holding it firmly. For a moment the old devilish Chip was back. “What I promised you in the ambulance, love,” he said, flashing her his wicked smile. “When you were doing all that yelling. To get you the hell out of Paris.”
Chapter Twenty-One
Satin Doll Page 26