Satin Doll (17 page)

Samantha actually started. “No, his name is Alain des Baux.”
 

“
Alain des Baux?
” The hoarse, excited voice rose to such a pitch that their waiter came back, looking apprehensive. “You did say
Alain des Baux?
Like tall, gorgeous—
rich
? Jesus,
le tout de Paris,
drives his own Mystère jet, owns a computer firm, gorgeous, fantastic, sexy out of this world—the Duc des Baux himself?” Brooksie screamed.
 

“The duke of
what
?” Sam said, stunned.
 

Chapter Nine

The design room faced north like the atelier, offering the best light in the Maison Louvel building, the pure, clear blue-white exposure sought by artists and seamstresses and others who do fine work. The window light was so much better than the ancient, French-made fluorescent lamp over the drawing table that Sam drew a chair up and propped her feet on the windowsill, spreading Mademoiselle Claude Louvel’s drawings across her knees.
 

Since she had her own ring of keys, Sam had been going through the Maison Louvel, glad of the opportunity to make her own independent survey and do a little exploring. There had been no rescheduling of the disastrous meeting with Madame Doumer; Sophie, who would have interpreted for them, hadn’t shown up for work Monday morning, and when she finally straggled in late Tuesday afternoon the directrice had met her with screams of fury. Sophie had a problem and that it was no secret was obvious. For once, Sam was glad she didn’t understand French; Madame Doumer had screamed at her daughter until the redheaded model was a soggy mass of tears. The women in the atelier, Nannette and Sylvie, ignored what was going on, busy as they were with the orders for clothes for Prince Medivani’s youngest daughter. Sam had stayed out of everyone’s way.
 

The Jackson Storm representative from New York existed in a state of polite limbo in the Maison Louvel. Once Sam had been shown the building and been given the keys, she was left to investigate. Considering the problems between Madame Doumer and Sophie, the Medivani order and the backlog of work in the atelier, Sam was glad to leave it at that.
 

For a day or two at least, she had told herself, she’d go along with the situation and give herself time to think. She needed time to think about Jack Storm and what he’d done to her, the crazy unplanned things that had happened since she’d arrived in Paris, and what she was going to do now that she was there.
Stay in Paris,
Mindy Ferragamo had told her. Sam was beginning to feel that Mindy Ferragamo didn’t know any more about what Jack Storm was going to do with her than she did.
 

She had started with the old publicity office on the third floor, thinking newspaper clippings and perhaps even press releases might be a gold mine of information about the Maison Louvel, but none of the keys fit the locks. On the third floor, though, in the cupboards of the design room, she’d found hundreds of sheets of sketches of clothes of the 1950s. The paper was yellowed but the drawings were still bright, all of them signed with a simple “C.”
 

Mademoiselle Claude, unless she missed her guess, Sam thought triumphantly. She dragged a chair over to the window, took up a stack of designs and began to examine them in the clear north light. With her feet propped up on the windowsill, Sam could look down into a courtyard between the Maison Louvel building and a gray stone structure that faced the rue Castiglione. Her attention was drawn from the sketches for a moment as a boy on a motor scooter, delivering blueprints from the cylinder strapped to his back, parked his Vespa next to a blue Renault sedan and disappeared through the arched stone doorway of what had once been a seventeenth-century
hôtel particulier
.
 

She was getting used to Paris. A messenger in a windbreaker parking a motor scooter in a courtyard built for horse-drawn coaches seemed almost normal. In one of the offices across the way, she could see a girl sitting at a typewriter. The sense of time and age that was a part of Europe suddenly made the problems of the present seem less important; Sam sighed. She knew now that the mess of her first twenty-four hours in Paris had been her own fault. Getting the bad news from Mindy was one thing; going totally out of her mind was another. That one night, with Alain des Baux and then sleazy Chip, had been a nightmare. It showed how easily she could let herself fall apart.
 

Sam held the first sketch, a design for a tailored suit, up to the light. The style was the romantic, somewhat overblown New Look of Paris just after World War Two, with softly rounded shoulders, pinched waist and wide, flaring skirt. The generation of that great global war had wanted a return to total femininity, and the focus was on breasts, a tiny waist, rounded hips. Mademoiselle Claude’s tailored suit was sexily simple, yet it had the incomparable quality of French couture. It was so exquisitely designed that even now, thirty and more years later, it could still be worn and be fashionable. Talk about art with a capital A, Sam thought, staring at it.
 

The remainder of the sketches she’d picked up at random were cocktail dresses, out of style since the 1960s but now coming back again with a vengeance: off the shoulder, pushed-up cleavage, tight, corseted waists, panniered full skirts. Some of the sketches added hats with flirty nose veils just as Valentino and Marc Bohan for Christian Dior were showing currently. Sam ruffled through the rest of the sheets quickly, her mind a jumble of thoughts. Brooksie Goodman, that savvy little New Yorker, had jumped to the conclusion that Sam Laredo was in Paris to scout the Maison Louvel as a project for Jackson Storm, that the Storm King was going to challenge Paris on its own turf with an American-run haute couture house, the crowning touch for the Jackson Storm mass-market fashion empire.
 

Go slow, Sam thought, staring down at the designer sketches. Whatever this idea is, it’s coming too fast. There was so much she didn’t know about Paris, about the French fashion world. She was still young and inexperienced, with only a couple of years exposure to the rag trade as a Jackson Storm “discovery.” She didn’t have enough confidence in herself to think big. Did she?
 

And I keep making big mistakes, she thought; what happened to me the first twenty-four hours in Paris proves that.
 

Like
Alain des Baux.
Her only excuse was that maybe she’d read the signals all wrong. Because every day since that terrible Sunday night, a delivery boy had come to the Maison Louvel with a gold-covered box from Lachaume, Paris’s most expensive florist, with flowers and a card with a message. Monday there had been dark red camellias. The card said simply, “Notre Dame?” with no signature. Tuesday brought forth a cluster of beautiful golden-hearted daisies and the message: “Longchamps for the races?” Today, there were small green orchids and a card that read “Naughty shows?”
 

If she’d expected an apology for that scene in his car that had ended with her scrambling out of it and running away, she was disappointed. Nothing so clumsy as that—just the beautiful flowers and a list of the Paris sights he’d show her if she wanted to go out again.
 

Staring into the courtyard below, Sam saw the messenger with his blueprint cylinder over one shoulder slowly wheel his Vespa out of his parking space. She didn’t understand Europe. There was subtlety, a finesse to this way of life that had come through centuries of practice. She couldn’t acquire it overnight, especially since she was a person from the wrong side of the tracks in a little cattle town in Wyoming. But Sam doubted if Jack Storm could, either.
 

Brooksie’s idea was interesting, but to tackle Paris would take millions. Jack would have to go outside his own considerable empire to finance it, Sam guessed, and it would involve so much more than money. The publicity campaign would take at least six months to a year to set up. Jack would have to pull some of his best division heads out of their present jobs to put their energies and talents into the Maison Louvel and that would mean an exodus from New York of some of his best people at a time when the Western-wear lines weren’t doing too well. Then there would be the flap created in the rag trade when the word got out, the sidelines kibitzing and gossip—those who wanted the Storm King to fail, and those who didn’t.
 

But Jack could do it, Sam thought, biting her lip as she stared at the sketches in her lap. The great Storm King taking over a Paris haute couture house would be one of the biggest media stories of the year, even for that large part of the public that had no idea what haute couture meant. The drama would revolve around whether Jackson Storm could take his place in Paris with houses like Dior, St. Laurent or Cardin, or be shut out just as the Italian designers had been.
 

There should be, she thought cautiously, some way she could make good on it, too, if she were smart enough—like prove that she didn’t deserve being pushed out of the way when Jack decided to dump her, that she had talent. All she needed was some idea of how Jackson Storm could test the waters here in Paris without going overboard.
 

Sam was so lost in thought she didn’t hear Sophie come into the design room. She wasn’t aware of her, actually, until the model bent over her curiously to look at the sketches in her lap. “
Le serrurier est ici,
” Sophie murmured.
 

Sam looked up. Sophie looked better than she had yesterday. At least she wasn’t so waxy pale, and her hair was combed and her eyes had lost their unfocused look. “The man wiz the locks,” Sophie said in English, “he is here. He say you call him.”
 

The locksmith! Sam had gotten the name of a lock shop at the news stand in the boulevard des Italiens, but when she’d called and left a message in English, she’d written it off as a failure. The lock shop had never called back, but now he was here.
 

She jumped up, scrambling over the drawings that scattered at her feet and dashed outside to the landing. When she looked down, she saw him waiting below, a short, hook-nosed Parisian in yellow coveralls, wearing a black beret.
 

“Sophie?” Sam yelled. She needed Sophie to translate. She leaned over the stair railing, pantomiming to the locksmith that she wanted him to come up. “I want him to go up, open that lock on the storeroom upstairs,” she said, grabbing the model’s arm. “Tell him that, will you?”
 

Sophie looked blank. “Up?” She lifted a white hand and pointed. “The room up zere?”
 

“Explain to him,” Sam told her, “what I want him to do. Open that lock on the door that nobody has the key for.”
 

Now that she’d seen Mademoiselle Claude’s sketches, she couldn’t wait to get a look at the actual clothes, the originals the mannequins had worn at the old Louvel showings. She waited with growing impatience as Sophie and the locksmith in his yellow jumpsuit discussed how to get a padlock open without breaking it.
 

“Tell him just to go ahead and break it,” Sam interrupted. “Tell him we need a better lock with a key for the door, anyway.” The two looked gravely skeptical, their expressions indicating that breaking a padlock was a weighty matter. “Get in the elevator,” Sam said, a little desperately. “We’ll talk about it when we get to the fourth floor.”
 

Sophie hung back. “Is an old lock, from
longtemps.
Maybe I go tell Maman.”
 

“No, you don’t.” Sam pulled her into the elevator cage. “I need you here, to tell the locksmith what to do.”
 

“No, is better,” Sophie cried, twisting away. “I go tell Maman!”
 

The little man in the beret stepped back into the elevator, shaking his head. The expression on the locksmith’s face said he’d come back some other time, when they got their problems straightened out.
 

“Oh, damn, Sophie, what have you been telling him?” Sam cried, exasperated.
 

Their voices carried down the natural amplifier of the stairwell. While Sophie was still protesting shrilly that she had to call her
maman
and the locksmith was loudly adding his opinion in a flurry of shrugs, there was the sound of a door opening on the office level below. A moment later a familiar voice called out inquiringly. Then the figure of the Maison Louvel directrice stepped to the railing and looked up the stairwell.
 

Before Sam could stop her, Sophie had called down a torrent of excited explanations. Solange Doumer started up the stairs at a run, her high heels clicking loudly on the marble, her voice calling out to them at every turn.
 

A tall, broad-shouldered man lounged up the stairs behind the directrice, buttoning his shirt as he came.
 

Sam hadn’t seen Chip since that fateful night in the apartment, but there was no mistaking the pantherish movements of that impressive body. Oh, God, she thought, watching him take the stairs two at a time. She backed against the wall by the elevator, her heart suddenly pounding. She had wondered what she would do when she met him again and now she knew. Her pulse was speeding, and her palms wet with sweat. She was stupidly scared out of her wits.
 

Solange Doumer had reached the fourth floor, demanding shrilly to know what was going on. Her prominent dark eyes were bulging a little from exertion and anger; they swept over Sam with an expression of outrage.