Satin Doll (6 page)

“You’d be better off staying at some nice American hotel in Paris, like the Hilton,” the voice contributed from the doorway. “Lots of people over at the Hilton, love. Tremendous crowds, everybody speaking American, you won’t lack for company.” He paused. “I’ll just take your bag back downstairs, right?”
 

She could have stayed at any good hotel in Paris, Sam was thinking. Jack usually reserved a suite at the Plaza Athénée when he was there, and Mindy Ferragamo had suggested the fabulously expensive Crillon or the Ritz in the nearby Place Vendôme. Which was, she now knew, almost within walking distance of the rue des Bénédictines. It had been her own idea to use the apartment at the top of the Maison Louvel. Now she was wondering if she’d made a large mistake.
 

So far she hadn’t been exactly overwhelmed with eager hospitality at the Maison Louvel. No one at the airport, no one to meet her on the premises, only a slightly spacey model and an obnoxious Cockney janitor. And the owner’s apartment wasn’t ready in spite of New York’s telegram. If she stayed, even with the night watchman, she was still going to be pretty isolated at the top of the building. She hadn’t considered any of these things. It’s only for a few days, Sam told herself.
 

“There’s a nice little hotel,” the insistent Cockney voice went on, “a few blocks over in the rue des Capucines. Wouldn’t be too much trouble to—”
 

“It’s fine,” Sam said abruptly. Fire that one, she was thinking. Recommended personnel change, effective immediately: one former, English-speaking janitor. “Just put my duffel bag down on the bed.”
 

Sam washed her face, took two aspirin and changed her Western-style shirt for an orange Sam Laredo tank top of silk knit ribbon. The top’s bright color was an improvement, but she’d had better days, she decided, examining her face in the bathroom mirror. From the circles under her eyes, traveling luxury VIP First Class was still sitting up for six sleepless hours, no matter what it was called. And it didn’t make you immune to jet lag. Her head not only throbbed, but it also felt as though it were in another time zone.
 

In the other room she could hear Sophie’s voice and Chip’s low answering rasp. The model expected to show her the Maison Louvel, apparently. Sam had already been told that the employees who worked half days on Saturday were waiting to meet the new owner’s representative before they went home. It really didn’t make much difference, Sam thought; her system was too full of adrenaline from the morning’s outlandish scene downstairs, followed by almost certain death by French elevator, to let her relax enough to take a nap. Executive duties then, she sighed. When in doubt, keep going.
 

The apartment’s bathroom was reassuringly modern. There was no shower but a bathtub with one of the continental hand sprays Jean Ruiz had told her about. The little kitchen she’d found a little more foreign, especially the European gas stove with its cylinder of bottled gas under the sink. But the tiny refrigerator looked fairly new.
 

Sam took out her lipstick and looked at her freshly washed face doubtfully. She knew nobody would recognize this plain, lightly freckled girl as last year’s glamorous Sam Laredo. When she stripped off her makeup she was no longer the product of professional beauty-makers hired by Jackson Storm Incorporated, but only Sammy Whitfield, one of the tribe of shiftless Whitfields that the rest of the population of Shoshone Falls, Wyoming, usually tried hard to ignore. Now, astonishingly enough, she thought, frowning at her face in the mirror, this same person was in Paris.
 

She pulled the leather tie out of the back of her hair and raked the pale strands through her fingers, fighting down a sudden rush of depression. What if she couldn’t handle the Paris trip, simple as it was? An uneasy feeling dogged her for days that anyone in New York could have made the Paris trip in her place, like Dennis Wolchek, John Durham of Legal, even Eugenia Kleinberg of Junior Lone Star. Had they been offered it and had they turned it down for some reason? she wondered, feeling slightly paranoid. Was Mindy Ferragamo all that busy that she couldn’t get away for four or five days?
 

The chiseled features of the girl in the mirror looked tight and suddenly unhappy. She always did this to herself, Sam thought with a groan. She was hard to get rid of, Sammy Whitfield, even after all this time. She was sick and trembling inside without Sam Laredo.
 

“Damn,” she muttered under her breath.
 

She dragged her professional makeup case across the washbasin and opened it, taking out her specially blended foundation cream to cover her freckles, and an array of eye shadow, pencils and blushers. She started all over again.
 

Two separate owners of the Maison Louvel had occupied the upstairs apartment, Sophie told her as they took the stairs to the floor below. The original Madame Odette Louvel had come from Dijon to Paris as a dressmaker and had worked as a seamstress in a number of couture houses at the customary very low wages of pre-World War One France before she managed to save enough money to open her own establishment.
 

“First Madame Odette she work in a small shop, not so elegant. Then she want to make
couture
and she have Monsieur Fred—he is Madame’s cutter. He has come from London where they are the best to cut the cloth because they ‘ave best—” The model hesitated, searching for the word.
 

“Tailors.” Chip was right behind them. “Fred Cooper was a cutter, a highly skilled job. The English supplied the best cutters, even in Paris. You know what a cutter is, don’t you?” he murmured, so close his breath brushed the back of Sam’s ear.
 

Sam decided to ignore him. But Chip was getting on her nerves. If he wasn’t so useful translating, she’d send him off to do whatever it was he did at the Maison Louvel in a hurry.
 

The third floor was marked “Offices.” Old-fashioned frosted-glass doors led off the landing, but most of them were locked.
 

“He make her famous, Madame Louvel, he is such good cutter.” Sophie was leading the way down a musty-smelling corridor. “Also, they are lovers. But he is marry, this English—he leave poor madame and goes back to wife and children in Angleterre.”
 

Most of this floor looked as though it, too, hadn’t been used for years. Through glass partitions they peered in at wooden desks and a few ancient typewriters.
 

“Then come Mademoiselle Claude,” Sophie said, her nose pressed to the glass. “She is daughter of Madame’s sister. She come to Paris when Madame Odette is old and make famous couture, Mademoiselle Claude, but she die too soon. All the beautiful clothes mademoiselle make, they are up, up.” She lifted a white hand and pointed to the ceiling.
 

“In the storeroom,” Chip interpreted. When Sam turned to stare at him he only cocked a black eyebrow at her arrogantly.
 

“Now we see atelier, where they make robes,” Sophie announced.
 

The office floor had smelled of dust and carpet with a faint overlay of paper. The next floor smelled richly of cloth. The rooms were set at uneven levels, the ceilings low, and there were no hallways. They went through a maze of workrooms that connected with each other into the atelier, or sewing room, where the two seamstresses were waiting. Sam immediately recognized the middle-aged woman with the tape measure around her neck and the girl in the blue canvas apron and slacks.
 

“Nannette Bloch is the
seconde,
and also the fitter,” Chip said. “Nannette’s general
maitresse,
supervisor in here, although you can see there’s not much now to supervise.” He broke off to relay something in French to the older woman and she gave him a cautious smile. “Very good type, Nannette, has a couple of kids at the
lycée
—high school, works hard, doesn’t normally go to pieces the way you saw downstairs.” He turned to the girl in slacks. “Sylvie here, this lovely young bird, is a seamstress, and a damned fine one. She’s from Alsace—they still teach girls to sew up there. Talent like Sylvie is getting hard to find in Paris. Isn’t it, love?” he said, giving the uncomprehending girl a wink. “Most birds her age want to go into offices and use word processors, be travel agents, glamorous things like that.” He said something in French and Sylvie laughed. “Keep your eye on her,” he muttered to Sam sotto voce, “she’s only here for the training. Give her half a chance, she’ll go across town to the avenue Montaigne in a few months.”
 

Samantha shook hands with Nannette and Sylvie, and they nodded, taking in her Sam Laredo clothes with critical interest.
 

“Could you do me a favor?” She hated to ask Chip for anything, but Sophie had wandered off into the next room. “Tell them I’m just here as Jack Storm’s personal representative to look over the place.” She met the women’s stares with a try at friendliness. “I don’t have any real authority to make changes, just in case they think I do.”
 

He leaned up against the doorjamb and crossed his arms over his chest. “Tell them yourself. Try
enchantée,
that should just about cover it.”
 

Sam stuck out her lower lip stubbornly. “No, I don’t want to say
enchantée.
I know that just means pleased to meet you. I want you to say what I told you, in case they’re worried about their jobs.”
 

He regarded her with an enigmatic expression. “Why don’t you learn a few words of French, then?”
 

Just keep it up, buster, she thought, glaring at him as he pushed away from the door frame and sauntered through into the next room. I might make an exception and fire you right now.
 

The atelier was not very tidy but full of work. Pieces of garments basted together lay on the polished wood surfaces of the worktables, and cloth scraps drifted off the tables onto the floor. One black silk faille dress lay spread out with Nannette’s tape measure lying beside it.
 

There was not a sewing machine in the place. Even the long side seams of the black dress were done with thousands of precise, tiny hand stitches that were as delicate as fine embroidery. This was true haute couture, Sam marveled, holding one up to the light, garments so beautifully cut and exquisitely sewn that they were virtually works of art.
 

On a shelf running head-high around the atelier were the custom dress forms of Louvel customers. The first cut of the gown or dress was fitted to these forms, which were perfect replicas of the customer’s torso. The almost-finished product was fitted to the customer herself.
 

And that, Sam knew from Jean Ruiz’s briefing, was only the beginning. The process went on at least three fittings more—the meticulous altering whereby the creation was made to fit the customer’s body an infinitesimal fraction of an inch here, another there, until the customer and the fitter both knew it was perfect. More than perfect—if the fitter wasn’t satisfied, the client kept coming back for more adjustments until she was. The finished product was one a woman could move in, breathe in and live in with reasonable comfort, aware that it was a work of art that made the wearer a work of art, too.
 

You’re going to find, Jean Ruiz had told her, that the French respect couture clothes so much that the secondhand shops in Paris put big signs in the window that say: “A real Chanel.” Or “A real Balenciaga.” Even when they’re ratty enough to send to Goodwill.
 

Strangely, the Maison Louvel’s workroom looked as though it were filling an order for a funeral. The tables were filled with black silk faille, black tissue crepe, sheer black organdy, floating panels, drapes, pieces of long sleeves, and bodices with high necks. A slither of white satin fell across a chair. A curious mix, but then the whole place was curious.
 

Sophie appeared at the doorway with a hazy smile. “Come, you must see zis,” she announced.
 

In a small room beyond the atelier were antique wooden frames like old-fashioned curtain stretchers that were used for pulling cloth from the bolts and inspecting it yard by yard for the infinitesimal flaws that had passed the weaving mill’s inspectors—flaws that would send a good cutter into paroxysms of rage if not found before the cloth was laid out.
 

In a room beyond, plain as a medical laboratory, the delicate process of cutting lengths of cloth to the designer’s patterns was carried out. In New York’s garment district, Sam knew, cutters now supervised computerized robot machines that cut hundreds of layers of textiles to a pattern at one time. Here she was looking at the painstaking, beautiful art of handwork.
 

In another room with a doorway so low they had to stoop going in, there were shelves packed with bolts of cloth. The women from the atelier had trailed after them curiously. Now Nannette offered to take down a bolt of gold-shot-aqua tissue silk for Sam to see, but Sam shook her head.
 

The cutting room tables were filled with odd pieces of satins, transparent gauzes, velvets, failles, chiffons, organdies, woolen worsteds, and printed linen. The richness of color and texture was almost overwhelming. Sam fought the urge to sit down at the tables and spend the rest of the day looking over the exquisite French and Japanese textiles.
 

There were also stacks of sample gray yardage, the embryo fabric as it came straight off the looms in the mill before it was sent to the finishers for processing. The various methods of softening the woven fibers and then bleaching them depended on the type of fabric and chemical coating.