“A false friend,” Rachel said distractedly. She was noticing how many boutiques there were as they walked up the boulevard. Hermès on the corner as they crossed, Louis Vuitton back next to Les Deux Magots, and now Ralph Lauren, Sonia Rykiel, and something called Bruno Cucinelli that looked as if it could give those two a run for their money. Literally. She hadn’t been in this area for a long time; had it always been like this? She started counting: boutique, café, boutique, boutique, boutique, café, boutique. Was this all Paris was now, a place for eating and buying, consuming in one way or another? She thought of Baron Haussman, building this street and the boulevards surrounding it by tearing down the homes of the poor; then her mind conjured up 21 Rue la Boétie, once the site of Maximilien Sauveterre’s efforts to save Jewish lives and now a production line for expensive clothing that no one actually needed.
She sighed.
“What are you thinking?” Magda was digging in her shoulder bag.
“Just … existential thoughts.”
“Oh, right.” But she didn’t seem interested in following up. Instead, she pulled out her phone.
“What are you doing?”
Magda put the phone to her ear. “Trying the number he gave me for Cyrille Thieriot.”
“You don’t want to regroup before—”
But Magda waved a silencing hand. “Allo?” Thieriot had answered the call.
Chapter Eleven
Cyrille Thieriot, who was delighted to give an interview for a film about his former lover, lived in the tiniest and most crowded appartement Rachel had ever seen. Perhaps ten meters square, it nonetheless managed to contain a bed, a table holding a huge television set, a kitchenette with a two-ring electric stovetop, a cube refrigerator, a bar sink and miniscule countertop, and a wardrobe made up of a complex series of drawers and doors. On the left-hand side of the room was a narrow door that Rachel assumed led to the bathroom; the remainder of the wall was covered with photographs of people smiling, laughing, or putting their tongues out in a variety of public areas, their youthful arms around each other’s skinny waists. The right-hand wall was a collage of pictures of Roland Guipure, in different clothing and different rooms, sometimes with ordinary people and sometimes with celebrities Rachel recognized, but always in the company of the same young man, the one Rachel had seen with him in Magda’s printed photos.
Against this background of memories sat the real-life version of that young man. Thieriot’s eyes were outlined in orange shadow that stretched from the inner edge of each socket to the outer edge of each temple, his lashes were heavily mascaraed in purple, and for his lips he had chosen a bright matte fuchsia. Dressed in tight black jeans and a black turtleneck, he was skinny as a twig. He looked like an exotic hothouse flower brought to life.
“We were in love!” he was saying. He was a maker of exclamations and a stressor of significant words. “We were devoted. And then it all changed.”
It was quite an introduction. For a moment the women were stunned into silence.
Then Magda cleared her throat. “I’m sorry.” That seemed to be the safest response. “Would you like to start at the beginning and tell us how you met?” She discreetly tapped the “record” button on her portable where it lay between her and Rachel on Thieriot’s peacock-blue bedspread.
“In a resto.” He smiled as he remembered. “It was very romantic. I was a garçon de table at Bespoke. The place was so popular that it was impossible to get a reservation with us, but he managed it. He came in with a group. He sat at someone else’s table, but he noticed me. The next day he telephoned the restaurant and asked to speak to me. One date, and we both knew.” He lifted his arm and showed them an R tattooed on the inside of his wrist. “I had this done after our first month together. We were that sure.”
“And this was before he started using heroin?”
Thieriot looked as if he would very much like to deny that Roland Guipure had ever used heroin—it was clearly too unsentimental for the story he wanted to tell. But he must have known that he couldn’t get away with that, so he shook his head and said reluctantly, “He’d been using for a while by then. But only recreationally. He told me he started when he and some friends were vacationing in Goa. They took it to loosen up, the way you do when you’re on holiday. And then he just didn’t stop. But it wasn’t a big deal. He never took very much. And I could see why he needed it.”
Rachel’s ears pricked up. Were they going to get a useful revelation at last? “Oh? Why?”
“Because he never had any chance to relax! When he and I first met, he did nothing but work on the clothes. Day and night! And even when he had a moment to spend with me, his harpy sister and that salope of a personal assistant were always interrupting, with something for him to approve or something for him to sign. He never had a moment’s peace.”
“And you think the heroin was an escape from that?” Magda sounded unconvinced.
“Obviously.” Thieriot’s tone said only a fool would believe otherwise.
“And that’s why you bought it for him?”
“I didn’t—”
“Gédéon Naquet told us that when interviewed, Monsieur Guipure said he saw you buy drugs for him.” Magda’s matter-of-fact tone managed to suggest that there was no point in denying it; she wasn’t accusing him, just stating a fact.
Thieriot looked as if he had a few choice words he’d like to share about Naquet, but he rose above it. “Well, yes, I did do that. But it was part of a plan.”
Magda raised her eyebrows and waited. Thieriot squirmed a little in his chair.
“You see, once we began spending all our time together, Rollie asked me to handle the … the acquisition. I saw that if I did that, I could control his intake. Rollie would give me the money, of course, but I made all the other arrangements, and because I did that, I could cut down the amount he took. I thought that if I did that and helped him to relax more, then I could wean him off.”
“But his addiction grew worse.”
“Yes, because no one was interested in helping me! They preferred him as he was. It made it easier for them to squeeze every drop out of him. Whereas I—I gave him fun! We went to Le Piaf, Chez Raspoutine”—Rachel recognized the names of two of Paris’s most exclusive nightclubs—“we went shopping. Which,” he added huffily, “was a kind of work, because he was looking at the work of other designers. And I directly helped with his work too. Those mirror dresses from spring/summer 2014? He got the idea for them from an after-hours drag club I took him to. But of course my ideas about how to save him never had a chance. Who was going to listen to a little waiter? That Dolly Fauré, his PA, said to me, right to my face, that Rollie didn’t need nightclubs, he needed désintox.” He leaned forward and locked eyes with Rachel. “You know, there’s a long history of opiates being an asset to the creative process. Verlaine, Baudelaire, that fat English poet who wrote about the Chinese king.”
Rachel considered him. This was not a Gédéon Naquet who wanted a moment’s silence for his loss. This man wanted someone to echo his drama. That would be empathy, to him. She made her voice breathless. “And then what happened?”
“What happened?” He cast one elegant hand into the air. “What always happens when many line up against one. They waited until after that terrible collection in 2015”—he leaned forward confidingly—“which wouldn’t have been so terrible if Rollie had been given more time to be open to inspiration and relaxation. And then they ganged up on him and convinced him to go off to that Greek island place.”
“They?”
“His sister, that head pattern cutter Lellouch, and Dolly Fauré. She’s the one that told me about it. Antoinette took him off on a plane, and I never saw him again.”
Rachel gasped, and made her eyes round for good measure. “But surely he contacted you at some point to break things off?”
“Never!” Thieriot shook his head. “Not before he went, not after he came back. Although I tried to contact him. I texted. I telepho
ned. I knew he’d want to hear from me. I knew.” He touched his chest lightly with a fist. “But I never heard anything. I didn’t even know he had died until I read it on Quelles Nouvelles! I had to take the day off work.”
“Where is work?” Magda took over the questions once again. “Still at Bespoke?”
He shook his head. “Rollie liked to have me near him all the time, so I stopped working while we were together. I had to find a new job after—after—” He turned his head in profile and covered his mouth. Only the city noises wafting through the window from the busy Rue Vieille du Temple below prevented the scene from being a silent tableau of grief.
“I’m so sorry.” Rachel shook her head. “After all you were to each other, and all you did for him, to be dropped like that.” She gave him a second to feel secure before she added, “But of course you had the croquis to remember him by.”
Thieriot’s hand dropped. He turned back to them. “What croquis?”
Rachel widened her eyes again. “Monsieur Naquet mentioned that you had a habit of collecting sketches Roland made and discarded. He seemed to think you’d kept them.”
Thieriot’s eyes darted around the room for a split second. If it hadn’t occurred to him before that such an action could be seen as theft, it was certainly occurring to him at that moment. He said truculently, “Rollie was always sketching designs, and if he didn’t like one, he would just push it away. But I thought perhaps they would be useful for future collections. So, yes, I held onto some.”
Rachel forgot for a moment that she was supposed to be film director and became pure detective. “Did he sign them?” She didn’t know much about the value of such things, but signed sketches by an established designer might well be a considerable asset for a man whose tastes seemed pitched higher than a closet-sized studio in a 1980s breeze-block building.
“Maybe. I don’t know. Probably.” He recovered his equilibrium. “Why?”
“They’d make such a good visual for the film,” Magda supplied smoothly, knocking Rachel’s knee warningly with her own. “You know, a panning shot across them with a little subtitle saying, ‘Signed sketches by Guipure, from the private collection of Cyrille Thieriot.’”
“Oh. Yes, yes, he certainly signed some of them.”
“Well, we’d love to use them. And of course it would add to their value. Not that you necessarily care about that, but Naquet seemed to think you had saved them because they might be valuable, so …”
“He thought that, did he!” Thieriot snorted. “Well, he would know about people trying to make money off Rollie. You know what he did before he pitched his book to Sauveterre? He wrote trashy celebrity biographies—the kind that you make by quoting other people because the real subject won’t speak to you. Rollie was the first significant figure who’d ever actually agreed to talk to him, and he couldn’t believe his luck. He saw a ticket up.” He shook his head at the shamelessness of the world.
“Well, it doesn’t seem to have worked out very well. Sauveterre halted the biography when Guipure went into the désintox.”
Thieriot snorted again. “That doesn’t have to stop him. If Sauveterre won’t talk to him he can just make the book unauthorized and put in anything he wants. He’ll make a fortune. People might have liked the story of a genius who became an addict but managed to pull himself back up, but the unauthorized biography of a junkie designer who ended up dead outside a nightclub? That book will sell millions.” He looked up at the ceiling, and his voice wobbled. “If Rollie had only stayed with me, none of this would have happened!”
The women knew a good exit line when they heard one.
* * *
Outside, a thin drizzle had begun to fall. The paving stones had lost their mica glitter, the cream-colored building facades had turned a wet yellow, and even the linden tree next to Thieriot’s building looked as if it would rather be indoors. Snapping open the umbrella she extracted from her bag, Magda turned right onto the Rue des Francs Bourgeois. Rachel gazed longingly at a window that said “Palais des Thés” as they passed it, but Magda was walking at a speed that made it plain they wouldn’t be stopping.
“He’s one to talk about people exploiting Guipure.” Her heels banged on the gray pavement. “With that wall of photos and that version of their relationship. And all that stuff about trying to wean Guipure off drugs by encouraging him to relax!”
“I don’t know.” Rachel waited for a car to pass before she crossed the street. “I think he believes his own rationalization. People don’t like to admit their ulterior motives, especially to themselves. And I think it’s possible he loved Guipure, even if what that really means is that he loved the fact that Guipure was giving him the life he wanted. Just the way Guipure seems to have used him partially as a … a drug courier.”
Magda’s face showed what she thought of that reading, but she shrugged. “Well, it doesn’t really make any difference. Whatever motivated either of them, he’s our number-one suspect, as far as I’m concerned.”
Rachel stopped. “How do you figure?”
Magda turned around and held out her unencumbered hand. She began putting up fingers, one per point. “If he actually loved Guipure, then suddenly being ghosted might well have been too much to take. People kill for love all the time. And if he was trying to leech off Guipure, he must have thought he’d hit the jackpot. A rich, famous designer. Then to have that snatched away from him? Being dumped without so much as a thank you? I could see him killing Guipure over that. And once Guipure was dead, Thieriot could sell those sketches for a tidy sum, even if he’s pretending he didn’t take that into account. That was the first thing I thought when Naquet said he picked up the drawings.”
“Oh, Naquet.” Rachel rolled her eyes. “Talk about pretending! If Thieriot’s right, all that about wanting to write a legitimate book was just lies. I can see him being angry enough to kill Guipure if he’d invested a year’s work and suddenly had nothing to show for it but a check for a few hundred euros. Particularly if offing him would make it possible to write a bestselling book.”
Magda made a disbelieving face. “That seems pretty ruthless.”
“You don’t know authors,” said Rachel.
“Except that Guipure wasn’t responding to him, so how could Naquet get into his birthday party to kill him?”
“How could Thieriot?”
“Fair question.” They had reached the Centre Pompidou, with its exoskeleton of metal pipes and rivets, and its white ducts looming up from the ground like the periscopes of some lost submarine. “I’d like to find out more about Cyrille Thieriot. I don’t like to take people’s word for things, even details about themselves. Especially details about themselves.”
Plus, Rachel thought, you don’t like him. But all she said was, “And I’d like to try to track down this Dolly Fauré.”
“The assistant? Yeah, I noticed they both mentioned her too.”
“And both obviously dislike her, which makes me think she’d be an excellent source of information. About them, at least.”
Magda laughed. “Okay, then. Let’s get started.” And down they went into the métro, the umbrella leaving a trail of drips behind them.
Chapter Twelve
Unfortunately, the first thing Rachel did when she arrived home was fall asleep. She meant only to rest for a moment on the sofa before making a cup of tea and bringing over her laptop to look up Dolly Fauré, but the grayness outside, the warmth inside, and her own damp and chilly feet conspired against her.
When she woke, it was dark out and too late to call anyone before dinner. So she heated up some leftovers and ate them while reading the Memoirs of the great nineteenth-century French detective Eugène Vidocq. She had downloaded it onto her Kindle in the hope that it might offer her some tips, but Vidocq’s swashbuckling tales of the Paris underworld and the maneuvers and disguises he used to catch his criminal prey were enjoyable in their own right.
Just as she was finishing his story of capturing a f
orger who had pretended to be a clergyman and so swindled a small French town for years, her computer made the clanging chime that announced a Skype call.
“Hello, love,” she said when Alan’s face appeared on the screen. “I’m so glad to see you. Remember how I told you that we were going to meet with Guipure’s biographer? Well—”
He cut her off. “My mother wants me to ask you something.”
He sounded like a ten-year-old sent on a reluctant errand. He looked so much like one, too, that Rachel couldn’t help but smile. “Okay.”
“Remember her friend? Whose husband died in Paris?”
Rachel nodded, but as he opened his mouth to continue, a voice murmured off screen. He leaned out of camera range. “No. No, I’m handling it. I will. Fine, fine.” His face loomed back. “She wants to ask you herself.” Now he sounded like a petulant fifteen-year-old.
Before she could say anything, the head and shoulders of Alan’s mother appeared next to him. Jean was one of those who seemed to move through life untouched by spills, perspiration, or the creases and snagged threads that afflicted common mortals, and sure enough, on the screen her silver pageboy was straight and smooth, her pink lipstick as fresh if it had been applied just a moment before.
“Hello, darling. How’s the poetry?”
So Alan hadn’t told his parents about her plan to change jobs. Rachel took her cue from him. “Oh, you know. Coming along.”
“Good, good. Listen, I wonder if you could do something for me. Well, really for a friend of mine, Ellen Ochs. Al told you about her husband.”
“Yes, he did, and I was so sorry to hear it. What can I do for you?”
“Well, it’s a bit complicated, so I apologize in advance for asking. She got an e-mail from the French police this morning, and they need her to come collect Jack’s belongings—you know, what was in the hotel room. For ten days they won’t tell us anything, and now they say she has to come collect his things by Monday or they’ll get rid of them!”
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