David’s unexplained presence in Meredith’s suite must have confused him. Not enough to keep him from extracting his fifty francs, but enough to delay retrieval of the microdot from Maggie. What was more, Paige’s emergence as Meredith Ames last night must have added to his confusion.
Anyone else would probably have abandoned his mission at that point. But not this kid, Doc guessed shrewdly. Not someone who lived by his wits and snatched at any chance to make a few francs. What was more, he could very well be too frightened to report failure to the individual who’d sent him. A kid like Henri was expendable. All too expendable, when the stakes were this high.
His face grim, Doc pulled his cigarette case out of his pocket and waited for Control to acknowledge his signal. Everything was conjecture at this point, he reminded himself. Their only recourse was to proceed with the plan to visit the Palais des Festivals this afternoon. But he was damn well going to know everything there was to know about a certain red-haired street rat before Paige set one foot out of the hotel.
Several hours later, Maggie slipped across the hall in response to Doc’s signal. Her silvery-blond hair was still tousled from sleep, but her eyes were wide and alert.
Paige sat quietly on the sofa, thoroughly shaken by Doc’s suspicions about the boy, while he briefed Maggie.
“Claire can’t find out anything about the kid?” she asked incredulously.
Doc shook his head, frowning. “Nothing definitive. A child of his description was picked up for truancy a couple of years ago and returned to his foster home. The authorities suspected abuse, but the boy disappeared again before anyone could check it out. Since then, the local police have heard his name mentioned by several of the kids who work for a local thug by the name of…” He reached for his notebook.
“Antoine,” Paige supplied in a small voice.
“Antoine,” he confirmed. “The guy’s a pretty rough character, from what Claire was able to piece together. He’s a member of the Sicilian contingent here in Cannes. Specializes in drugs, prostitution and bookmaking. A few of his money carriers suspected of shorting him have been found strangled in back alleys.”
Paige locked her arms around her waist. “Poor Henri.”
“So far,” Doc continued, “there’s no known connection between Antoine and Victor Swanset, or Henri and Victor. I even had Claire check to see if there was any link to Swanset’s missing cook, who, incidentally, was found a few weeks after he disappeared, floating facedown in the bay.”
“Was there? Any link, I mean?”
“None,” Doc admitted.
“If there is a connection, we’ll find it,” Maggie said. Maggie stretched, then tucked a stray curl behind one ear. “This telephone kiosk the boy mentioned is located on the Allées de la Liberté, isn’t it? I’ll nose around the area while you guys check out the Palais des Festivals.”
“Be careful,” Paige cautioned. “I saw the bruises this Antoine gave Henri.”
“I will.”
Paige’s delicate features assumed a stern expression. “Check in with us if you stumble onto something. Don’t try to take out this character by yourself.”
Maggie snapped to attention and rendered her own, less than precise version of a salute. “No, ma’am.”
“I’m serious!”
She abandoned her military posture and smiled at Paige. “I’ll be careful. I promise. You just keep yourself covered at the Palais des Festivals.”
That might take some effort, Doc thought wryly as the two women gave each other a little hug. The damned halter slithered sideways with the movement, baring a good portion of Paige’s small, sweet breasts.
The sprawling five-tiered tan-and-white Palais des Festivals dominated the western end of the Croisette.
Crammed with every imaginable audiovisual device, the convention center had been designed as a permanent home for the film festival—which, Paige discovered from the guidebook Doc purchased for her at the front entrance, got off to a shaky start by opening on the very day in 1939 that Germany invaded Poland.
“‘The festival reopened in 1946, when Ray Milland won the Best Actor award for Lost Weekend,”’ she read aloud. “‘Since then, this glamorous gathering each May has drawn greater and greater crowds and garnered worldwide attention, until Cannes now rivals Hollywood as a center for the serious study of cinematic art.”’
“I suspect the starlets cavorting on the beaches were as much of a draw as any of the films by Bergman and Fellini,” Doc suggested with a grin, his eyes on the spectacular view visible through the floor-to-ceiling glass wall in the central rotunda.
It wasn’t the panoramic seascape that had snared his attention, Paige saw at once. Her mouth dropping, she gaped at the generously endowed young woman who was using the Palais as a backdrop while she posed for a cluster of reporters on the beach below.
Paige recognized the girl at once. She was the star of a recent Czech release that critics in twenty different countries had raved about. She’d played an insatiable nymphet in the movie, and although Paige hadn’t seen the film, she could understand why the critics said the girl had been born for the role.
As she draped herself over a rock on the beach in a series of shocking, suggestive poses, it became immediately obvious that the bathing suit lacked both top and bottom. It lacked everything, in fact, except a tiny twist of fabric that circled her flaring hips and dipped between her dimpled rear cheeks.
Paige gawked with the rest of the tourists gathered at the windows while cameras clicked and whirred and flashed all around her.
“The Swanset Wing is across the gardens,” David reminded her, still grinning.
With a last glance over her shoulder at the starlet, Paige followed him through a set of glass doors into the formal gardens. Immediately the seductive scent of roses and a soothing peace enveloped them. After the chatter and the noise of the huge rotunda, the still, unruffled reflecting pools dotting the gardens offered a surprising tranquillity. Few tourists wandered the crushed-shell paths, and even fewer made it to the wing at the rear of the gardens.
In fact, other than a bored, sleepy-eyed guard, David and Paige were the only ones in the modernistic building, dedicated to the movies of the twenties and thirties. Black tile floors and stark white marble walls provided a dramatic backdrop for still shots from classic Charlie Chaplin and Rudolph Valentino films. Screens set into the walls at various intervals flickered with scenes from old black-and-white melodramas.
“Look!” Paige nodded toward a room just off the main hallway. “This alcove’s dedicated exclusively to Victor Swanset’s films.”
“So it is,” David murmured, his eyes on the elaborately framed life-size portrait that dominated the far end of the alcove. It showed a brooding, intensely handsome man in his mid-thirties. He wore formal evening dress, with a dark cape flung over one shoulder and gloved hands curled around an ivory-headed cane. His glossy black hair was slick with brilliantine, as were his luxuriant mustache and his small, pointed goatee.
“This is a studio shot from The Baron of the Night,” Paige reported, scanning the information engraved in marble beside the portrait. “Victor Swanset’s first film, and one of two dozen he did for Albion Studios.”
“Which he later purchased,” David added, supplementing the engraved data with the intelligence he’d gleaned from Claire.
“He made his own movies?”
“He made his own statement,” David corrected. “The films Albion Studios produced in the late twenties and thirties became vehicles for Swanset’s increasingly vocal criticism of British foreign policy. He felt England and the United States should have entered the war long before they did.”
“To stop Hitler?”
“To preserve the old, aristocratic order,” David drawled.
Paige studied Swanset’s striking features and arrogant pose. She wasn’t surprised that his debut as the Dark Baron had catapulted him to immediate international fame. Or that he’d want to maintain the old ord
er.
“The British government appropriated Albion Studios during the war,” David continued, staring up at the portrait. “They used it to churn out propaganda films. Victor Swanset was so outraged by this bastardization of his art and his property that he refused to make another movie. He left England in the early fifties, and never returned.”
Paige turned away, disturbed by the haunting portrait. As she wandered through the alcove, she had the uncomfortable feeling that Swanset’s eyes followed her. Shrugging off the eerie sensation, she studied a series of framed black-and-white stills. Although Swanset appeared to have brought the same dramatic power to all his roles, from defrocked bishop to desert sheik, none of the stills held quite the intensity as the portrait of the Dark Baron.
David bent to examine a typed notice pasted to a bare spot on one wall. “It says that one of the stills was vandalized and has been removed for repair. I wonder which one?”
“The guard will know,” Paige offered.
He nodded, then swept the quiet, empty alcove with a keen glance. “I’ll go ask. You sit tight.”
His heels echoed on the tiles as he retraced his steps to the entrance. Paige drifted to the black leather bench in the center of the small room. She perched primly on its edge, in a vain attempt to keep the high slit in the side of her skirt from showing more than just thigh.
Her gaze wandered to the marble pedestal beside the bench. A small sign invited her to press the black button, so she did. She half turned, expecting to see one of Swanset’s films flicker to life on the opposite wall. Instead, a hazy beam of light focused on the portrait of the Dark Baron.
Surprised, Paige watched as the beam increased in both diameter and intensity. The brilliant light dazzled her and gave the figure in the portrait a slowly sharpening three-dimensional quality. The picture’s background faded, blurred by the light. The walls on either side seemed to disappear, until there was only Victor Swanset, the Baron of the Night, standing before her.
Her heart thumping, Paige sat rigid on the leather bench. She was suddenly, ridiculously convinced that if she put out a hand she would touch cold flesh and hard bone instead of canvas.
She half rose, wanting out of the alcove, when the image moved. Paige gave a startled squeak and fell back on the bench with a thump.
It was only a movie, she told herself. Some kind of enhanced video imaging or something.
Despite these hasty assurances, she couldn’t hold back a small screech when the figure in the portrait smiled at her. He actually smiled at her!
Gasping in fright, Paige scooted backward on the bench. She couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t speak. Couldn’t swallow past the huge lump in her throat. The Baron seemed to be looking right at her.
When the shimmering image hooked his cane over one arm, she scrambled back another few inches.
When he stepped out of the portrait, she toppled backward off the bench onto the black tile floor.
“Don’t be alarmed, my dear.”
The measured, mellifluous voice raised the hairs on her arms. Crabwise, Paige scuttled back, away from the approaching image. The high slit in her skirt parted as her sandaled feet sought purchase on the slippery tiles.
An appreciative gleam darkened the Baron’s eyes, and his waxed mustache lifted in a small smile. Bending over her, he held out a gloved hand.
“Don’t be frightened. Let me help you up.”
“Da-vid!”
“Your friend will return momentarily, I’m sure. Please, allow me to assist you.”
Since the shimmering image was at that point hovering directly above her, Paige had to chose between taking his hand and lying on the floor quivering like the spineless, terrified blob she was. Her whole body shook as she lifted her arm, inch by agonizing inch, toward his outstretched hand.
Blinding light from the projector bathed her arm in the same eerie glow it did the Baron’s. Paige thought she would faint when she touched the white glove and felt solid flesh inside. She gave a tiny whimper of abject terror, closed her eyes, and let him pull her to her feet.
“Oh, my dear, I’m sorry to have frightened you so. Please, forgive me.”
When nothing violent happened immediately, Paige opened one eye. She wasn’t quite sure, but she thought she detected genuine remorse on the Baron’s handsome face as he led her back to the bench.
“Here, sit down while I turn off the projector.”
Paige collapsed onto the padded bench. She would’ve tumbled right off it again a moment later, if total shock hadn’t held her pinned in place.
When the Baron pressed the switch for the projector, the dazzling white light disappeared. So did Swanset’s handsome, youthful face. His smooth skin lost its firm tone and sank into wrinkles. Liver spots darkened his forehead. His hair grew thinner, sparser, duller, and his tall frame seemed to shrink into itself, until the Baron of the Night became a stooped, thin man in a conservatively tailored business suit. Only his dark eyes retained their intense, penetrating quality.
Paige glanced from the man before her to the dramatic image in the portrait, then back again.
“How…how did you do that?”
He gave a small, self-deprecating smile. “It’s a new process I’m working on. One which digitizes images and projects them onto living objects. When perfected, this process could revolutionize filmmaking.”
“Well, it certainly revolutionized me,” Paige admitted shakily. “But I don’t understand how you walked out of the wall like that.”
His smile deepened, and he lifted his cane. Its tip disappeared into the portrait.
“This is what we call a molecular screen,” Swanset explained gently. “It’s composed of air bubbles, not solid canvas, as are those in movie theaters. The Baron’s portrait is projected onto the bubbles, or, at certain degrees of intensity, onto the object behind them.”
“Onto you,” Paige murmured.
“Onto me,” he concurred with a rueful twinkle in his eyes. “I must ask you to forgive an old man’s vanity, my dear. I shouldn’t have done it, I know, but I simply couldn’t resist the chance to appear before a beautiful young woman as I once was.”
He gestured toward the spot beside Paige on the bench. “May I?”
At her small nod, he leaned both hands on his ivory-handled cane and eased down. Once seated, he studied her face. “Will you be all right?”
“I doubt if I’ll ever be able to walk into another movie without swallowing a few dozen tranquilizers first, but aside from that, I’m fine.”
Swanset gave a low, delighted chuckle. The sound rippled over Paige like deep, dark velvet brushing across her skin. Millions of women must have swooned when they heard that husky laugh, she thought in some astonishment. Particularly when it was accompanied by the heavy-lidded, blatantly masculine stare Swanset raked her with.
“You really are a most beautiful young woman,” he murmured, his gloved hands curling around his cane. “That costume you’re wearing enhances your charms quite deliciously, Miss—?”
Paige went very still as his gaze lingered on the gold collar of her halter. In the terror of the preceding few moments, she’d forgotten the reason she’d come to the Victor Swanset Wing of the Palais des Festivals in the first place. The reason came rushing back with soul-shattering intensity.
He cocked a brow, politely awaiting her response.
“Ames,” she supplied, in a small, breathless voice. “Meredith Ames.”
Oh, God! Was he going to ask for the microdot? Frantically she tried to recall David’s itemized list of instructions for just such a possibility.
First… First… Dear Lord, what was first?
The sound of approaching footsteps reined in Paige’s spiraling panic.
David’s deep voice preceded his arrival on the scene by a tenth of a second. “No luck with the guard. He doesn’t have any idea—”
Both his voice and his footsteps ceased abruptly.
Paige swung around on the bench. She had never been
more glad to see anyone in her life. She had never been more glad to see David, her David, in her life.
His red shirt and tan slacks stood out in startling contrast to the sterile white-and-black decor. As did his strong, athletic body and gleaming, steel blue eyes. There was nothing sterile about David, Paige thought in a rush of relief. Nothing ephemeral, like the shimmering image of the youthful Victor Swanset. David was real. He was solid. He was hers.
The instant communication she felt with him at this moment went deeper than mere visual identification. With the heightened instincts of an animal for her mate, Paige knew that she would recognize David even if he stepped out of a molecular screen wrapped in the body of Michael Jordan.
Unfortunately, her brief flash of absolute identity with, of belonging to, this man vanished when he caught sight of Victor Swanset on the bench beside her.
David, her David, disappeared in an instant. In his place stood the stranger she’d seen last night in the mirror.
Only someone as attuned to him as Paige was could have noticed the switch. It was so soft, so subtle. She caught the almost imperceptible tightening of his jaw. The slight shift in the planes of his face. The hint of menace in his walk as he strolled into the alcove.
“Ah,” Victor murmured. “Your gallant returns.”
Rising to his feet with the aid of his cane, he nodded politely. “You are this delightful creature’s David, are you not?”
“I am,” he replied, laying a light hand on her bare shoulder. Neither Paige nor Swanset missed the significance of his possessive gesture. He might be hers, but there was no doubt that she was also his.
This time Paige had no objection whatsoever to being claimed like a lost toy poodle. Even by this stranger, who was almost, but not quite, her David. In fact, she would’ve been more than grateful if he’d tugged on her electronic leash at this very moment and walked her right out of this bizarre situation.
Dangerous to Know Page 13