Satin Doll

by Davis, Maggie;

There were several small rooms in Interpol international headquarters in St. Cloud, just outside of Paris, that were available for the convenience of police agents in transit, or for those who were on stakeouts and needed a few hours’ sleep. Supervisor Lapin escorted Samantha to a room with a window overlooking a vista of trees and office buildings, and with a large double bed and an adjoining tiny bathroom with shower. Through a sleepwalking fog Sam saw her duffel bags and several paper shopping bags neatly stacked on a plastic-upholstered chair of the type found in thousands of American motels. Supervisor Lapin was somewhat disconcerted when Sam staggered to the bed and fell into it with her clothes on.

  “Mademoiselle,” the Interpol officer said, bending over her, “do you not wish to change into something more comfortable? There is a bath if you wish to use it before you sleep. There is even some breakfast that can be arranged.”

  But Sam was dead to the world.

  Six hours later, rested, showered, freshly made up and wearing the orange silk dress she had bought at Laure’s boutique in Paris, Sam was a new woman. But she was not exactly in the best of moods.

  She didn’t remember agreeing to drive to London with Chip. It was true, she’d been making a lot of noise in the ambulance going to the hospital, but then she’d been in a state of shock. And yes, she had probably been somewhat hysterical, but she didn’t think she’d forget something like that. Chip’s version was that he’d told her he’d be leaving Paris within a few hours after his reports were made, and that she’d begged him, several times, to take her with him. Supervisor Lapin and the gendarmes were witnesses, he said. Supervisor Lapin, unfortunately, had gone home, and she had no idea where to find the two Paris policemen.

  Then there was a lot Chip hadn’t told her, Sam realized when she saw his car sitting in the parking lot behind Interpol headquarters.

  “I can’t drive that,” she exploded. It was absolutely the worst-looking car she’d ever seen, and Sam had known some spectacularly bad wrecks in her life—in fact, had learned to drive in them. “For one thing, the steering wheel is on the wrong side,” she complained, walking around his automobile. Chip’s car was some sort of ancient roadster with high wheels and uncovered headlights and a large canvas strap over the hood to keep it from falling apart. The best that could be said for it was that it had a fresh coat of dark green paint.

  “It’s an English car, love,” he said imperturbably, stowing her duffel and the paper bags in the trunk. “All you have to do is drive it as far as Calais and the ferry, and I’ll take it when we get to England.” He shot her a dark, inscrutable look. “They drive on the wrong side of the road there, in case you don’t know.”

  He looked quite different, Samantha saw, glowering at him. For the first time the unruly gypsy-black curls were combed back and somewhat tamed, although still longish at the back of his neck. He had showered and shaved somewhere in the Interpol offices and was dressed in a white shirt, a conservative blue and gray striped tie and charcoal-gray slacks. There was no evidence that he hadn’t slept, except for a rather heavy-lidded look, and there were few clues to the night that had just passed, except for some Mercurochrome dots under one ear. He seemed annoyingly cheerful as he climbed into the bucket seat on the passenger side and settled his long legs under the dash. “Wake me up when we get there, love,” he said, leaning back and closing his eyes.

  “Aren’t you even going to show me how to work this thing?” she demanded.

  “If you can drive a Lamborghini,” he murmured, his eyes closed, “you can drive my car. Just be careful, will you?”

  The only reason she was doing this, Sam fumed, was that she didn’t have the strength to argue with him. Arguing with Chip, as she’d found out the hard way, was futile. Since she was on her way back to New York, she supposed it didn’t make much difference whether she went back by way of London. And yes, dammit, she told herself, she did want to get out of Paris; she didn’t feel as though she could breathe or think until she got away from there. If she couldn’t walk straight onto a 747 at Charles de Gaulle airport at that moment, then driving to London with Chip seemed like the next best thing to do.

  By the time Sam had reached the beltway of the Périphérique, she was changing her mind. Chip’s ancient little car had a superpowered engine that shot it away from Paris traffic lights like a startled deer. The gearshift, on the other hand, seemed to be locked in concrete and the first few times she shifted she had to use both hands. The roadster drove like it had never heard of springs or shock absorbers.

  As Sam roared up the ramp to the Périphérique, the man in the seat beside her opened one eye lazily and said, “Just take A-1 going north, love, and when you get to Arras, take A-26 straight into Calais.”

  She couldn’t take her eyes off the traffic on the beltway long enough to glare at him. “I’m going to stop this thing and let you drive,” Sam yelled. “I don’t know why I’m doing this in the first place!”

  “Need to sleep, Samantha,” he mumbled, turning on his side. “Wake me up at the hovercraft.”

  When Sam turned onto the Autoroute du Nord he was sound asleep. In the hot summer sunshine, she saw that his hard face looked tired. Vertical grooves of fatigue—or perhaps pain, she thought, suddenly remembering the bandage around his ribs—were etched in the skin between the straight slash of his black brows. He slept with his head thrown back and mouth slightly open, snoring softly. A few seconds later Chip shifted his long body and half turned to her, and Sam saw the rusty stains of dried blood that had seeped through the front of his white shirt. He’d bled through the bandage and hadn’t said a word. Irritably, she knew she was going to keep on driving. In fact, she didn’t know how he had planned to get to London without her in the first place.

  After a while, driving north from Paris was not as bad as Sam had expected. Once she recovered from the strangeness of steering an automobile from what should have been the passenger’s side and mastered its tendency to drift over ninety miles an hour without even half trying, the trip was actually not bad. When she turned off the A-1 at the Compiègne exit to buy some gas, Sam was getting her second wind and feeling much better. The hot July day was clear and sunny, the blue sky drifted with the fat white clouds of summer, and the green, rolling countryside of northern France with its ancient checkerboard fields and little villages was seductively pretty. After the claustrophobic weeks in the Maison Louvel, it was good to be under this sky, to see the horizon.

  While she was waiting for the car to be gassed up, Sam went into the service station and found the rack with the Paris newspapers. The headlines screamed at her, full of the police raid on the drug operation in the Maison Louvel. Sam grabbed a handful of them, paid the girl behind the cash register and brought them to the plate glass window at the front of the service station.

  “Terrorist Drug Operation Uncovered.” “Police Raid Paris Haute Couture House.” “Shoot Out Kills Three Iranians.” From the few words of French she’d picked up, she could make a little sense out of the headlines and guess at the rest.

  All the front pages featured photographs of the front of the building in the rue des Bénédictines with police vans and barriers blocking the street and sidewalk. Another shot showed two dark, bearded young men in handcuffs being led through Maison Louvel’s familiar medieval wooden doors. One photograph showed Jack Storm leaving Paris police headquarters with Dennis Wolchek and Peter Frank and a man with a briefcase who looked like a lawyer.

  Sam leaned up against the plate glass window decorated with decals advertising OMO detergent and Gitane cigarettes, and stared out at the English car parked by the gas pumps. From where she stood, she could see the top of Chip’s curly black head and part of a broad shoulder and knew he was still sleeping. The sun pouring through the plate glass was hot, there was a fly buzzing against it and behind her the girl at the cash register was talking loudly on the telephone. Remembering again what had happened, Sam was suddenly hit with a reaction that made her knees buckle.

 
Was she going to react this way every time she thought about it? she wondered, closing her eyes. She could almost feel again the curious sensation of the air tearing around her, hear again the whoomp, whoomp of some powerful weapon that was being fired from the storeroom door and that shook the dark like an earthquake, and the spatter of returning fire from the police. She thought of Chip’s big body crushing her, the sound of his breathing loud in her ear. If she’d felt anything in those first few moments, it was a wild fury at having him hold her down no matter how hard she struggled.

  But he had saved her life.

  She kept her eyes closed, frowning, wondering at the strange turmoil, the almost unbelievable aggravation that Chip’s image aroused in her. Then she opened them and folded the newspapers, looking for a place to throw them away. An item at the bottom of the front page of Le Monde caught her eye. “Couturier Servit.”

  She read it quickly, though the story was mostly incomprehensible to her with her knowledge of just a few words of French. But Gilles Vasse’s name was mentioned several times, and “servit” Sam knew meant lives, or survives.

  Sam folded up the newspapers again and stood watching the service station attendant pumping gas into the ugly English roadster. Gilles Vasse would go on living, and she would probably never know how the famous triangle would reassemble itself. Gilles Vasse and Lisianne? Or Gilles Vasse and Rudi Mortessier? The problems of love were strange. Gilles Vasse had tried to get out of his decision by shooting himself.

  In the sunlit window glass her own image was reflected back at her. I don’t like choices, either, she thought, staring at the tall, oddly beautiful stranger with fashionably large sunglasses covering most of her face, her wheat-colored hair swept back and tied with an expensive silk scarf, her slim body clothed in a tailored dress of pale orange silk. The woman was sleek, expensive, stamped with that indefinable chic that said Paris. I don’t think she knows exactly where she’s going, Samantha thought, studying her image. She’s not about to shoot herself, but she’s not exactly making clear-cut decisions, either.

  Still, this remote, cosmopolitan being was driving from Paris to London, could manage French well enough to buy gas and figure out newspaper headlines, and knew that the French girl behind the counter was staring at her with a mixture of awe and hopeless envy. As she would have done herself a few short weeks ago.

  She’d been running with blinders on the last few days, obsessed with the crazy determination to succeed with the Maison Louvel show, and she’d been reacting, not thinking, letting events and other people sweep her along.

  She remembered that it was still not too late to call Jack Storm.

  She still had a copy of her proposal in her duffel bag, and Jack was still in Paris. Supervisor Georges Lapin had given her a slip of paper with Jack’s telephone number at the Hotel Plaza Athénée.

  On the other hand, if she went on to London with Chip...

  Samantha was surprised that she could feel so emotional, so confused, just thinking about Chip. He was a good-looking, sexy detour that led to nowhere, she told herself forcefully. Even worse, he would lead her right back to the kind of life she’d always worked hard to get away from. Lord, if she’d wanted to get involved with a cop, she could have done that without leaving Shoshone Falls!

  What Chip had done as part of his job, making love to her there in the apartment in the Maison Louvel, was something he’d try again if she gave him half a chance. She could see, if she wasn’t careful, that she was just drifting into another mess.

  The door to the service station opened and the attendant came in to tell her the car was ready.

  I’ll drive him to London, Sam decided, grudgingly. But that’s all.

  The interior of the roadster was hot with the canvas top up, and she wondered if she should wake Chip and get him to lower it. He had shifted even more to one side, and his big body crowded the cramped cockpit so much that she had to push his knee out of the way to free the gearshift. There were beads of perspiration on his forehead and the black curls had tightened in the heat to their usual gypsy-like tangle. Without thinking, she reached over to brush his hair out of his eyes.

  Sam put her thumb against his cheek and found his skin sweaty but cool. No fever, she thought, letting her fingertips linger. She stared down into Chip’s sleeping face, seeing the tensed line of straight black eyebrows, the ridiculously curving eyelashes that were long enough to brush his cheek. He was certainly handsome, if you liked them hard and tough. He was arrogant, powerful, sexy—and an Englishman. She didn’t really know him.

  She didn’t want to know him any better, she told herself, turning away. She jammed the gearshift into first and let out the clutch. The car rattled and gave a powerful lurch forward, and Sam took her foot off the gas pedal with a yelp.

  A voice next to her, husky with sleep, growled, “Be careful, love, with my Morgan or we’ll never make it to Calais.”

  Sam kept her eyes on the road. Of all the men she could end up with, a cop was probably the worst choice possible—a bare step up from truck driver, county maintenance worker or saddlebum.

  She could still call Jack Storm from London. She could still be a designer. There was still a world open to her, promising everything. She could take a plane from London as soon as she got there, back to New York.

  Peter Frank came into the sitting room of Jackson Storm’s ornate, eighteenth-century suite at the Hotel Athénée Plaza with the notes from his telephone call in his hand.

  “Interpol says,” the development head began, and then stopped.

  The platinum-haired figure of the head of the Jackson Storm fashion empire was slumped in a lounge chair, a half-eaten sandwich in his hand, staring fixedly at the television screen across the room.

  Peter Frank could see film clips of the Maison Louvel drug raid on the news, an exterior shot of the Maison Louvel and police barricades, followed by a few rapid shots of Paris gendarmes in their blue capes standing beside them. The film abruptly cut to a corridor in the American Hospital and the camera briefly panned the crowds of newsmen and television crews behind the French newscaster, then did a zoom shot to a bench at the end of the hall where a short man sat next to a slim girl in jeans and a checked shirt. The girl filled the screen as the camera took her in close focus, her head with its silky fall of blonde hair leaning tiredly against the wall, her eyes shut. She looked bedraggled, in need of sleep, the survivor of a Paris police shoot-out, and still startlingly beautiful.

  “What?” Jack Storm said, not turning his head.

  Peter Frank stared at the image of Sam Laredo on the television screen for a long moment before he looked down at his notes. “Interpol says she left for London. But they gave us a telephone number where they say we can maybe reach her later today.”

  The telephone rang in the bedroom again, and Peter Frank heard the Jackson Storm comptroller answering it. “It’s big on the news in the States,” Pete continued. “I guess Mindy told you when you talked to her. Good Morning America reported that Jackson Storm was opening a couture house in Paris. They even ran some kind of still pictures of the show yesterday. You want to issue a correction?”

  “Later,” Jack Storm growled.

  A million dollars worth of publicity, Peter Frank was thinking, and the man hunched in the chair before the television set wasn’t taking calls from his New York headquarters, was refusing the storm of requests for interviews from both the French and American press, and was not even attending to the stack of legal papers on the disposal of the Maison Louvel the lawyer had left. The great Storm King of the New York fashion world was sitting in front of television with a lunch tray in his lap looking for a glimpse of the only woman ever to walk away from him.

  “It would help if we had her here in Paris for an interview,” Peter suggested.

  Jack Storm lifted the tray and put it on the table beside him, brushed the sandwich crumbs from his fingers, and stood up. When he turned, there was a flash of surly determination in the famous blu
e eyes. “She’ll come back.”

  Dennis Wolchek came to the door of the sitting room. “Women’s Wear Daily says there’s a rumor all over New York that we’re going to open a new couture house here in Paris. It’s Fairchild himself on the line. You want to talk to him?”

  Jack Storm only held up his hand, palm out, telling him to wait. He turned and paced the room a few steps. “Can we get into the London papers, the BBC news today?”

  The two men exchanged looks, then Peter Frank shrugged. “If we issue a release out of New York, maybe. We can try.”

  Jack Storm tilted back his leonine head and smiled his slow, charming smile. “This is one magnificent doll, this girl. I still say she’s going to make us a lot of money.”

  “Jack—” the comptroller began.

  “Shut up.” He was still smiling. “Did you ever see me walk away from anything I wanted?” He didn’t wait for their answer but went on softly, “I know Sammy. I love this girl, but I know her. And I’ve got what she wants, believe me.” He passed his hand lightly over the smooth sheen of his hair and paused for a moment. Then he said, slowly and deliberately, “Okay, we’re announcing today that Sam Laredo is the head of the new international division of Jackson Storm, Paris.”

  At Calais a thunderstorm was coming out of the west over the English Channel. Sam had expected to find the town to be full of ugly clutter, docks, cranes, and sheds, like an American port. Instead there was an open beach of firm golden sand where she drove the car to wait for the boat before a vista of open gray sea and England just over the horizon. The purple clouds of the thunderstorm rose to meet the bright sun and a strong wind was blowing.

  Sam stood by the ugly little car and turned to face the rising breeze. She was suddenly tired, but she gulped a great lungful of salt air and felt strangely exhilarated.

  Beyond the gray-blue water was England. From this point of calm, unspoiled beach she supposed some of her ancestors had launched their boats with William the Conqueror. And then they had sailed beyond England to America. The world was suddenly so vast, so dangerous and beautiful, when thought of in the sweep of history, that it was overwhelming.