The Dress Thief (5 page)

‘Half a day’s pay down the plughole! What does he expect, your contact? If somebody gives me the money, I’ll buy the scarf myself.’

‘I expect
somebody already has. It’ll be zipping off to New York, to be turned into ten thousand fakes in a month. I’m sorry, Alix. For me too. I needed that commission.’

‘They could have worked from my drawing.’

‘She said not.’

‘She? Your contact’s a she?’

‘Stop it.’ He tried to smile, but squeezed out a frown instead. He kept her away from his ‘contacts’ and the backstreet bars where he did the deals.
Paul had been involved in the black market since he was old enough to outrun the law, but reckoned Alix was too innocent for that world. ‘You smile at policemen,’ he’d tease her. ‘First sign of madness.’

Now he shrugged. ‘You win some, you lose some.’ When she
stopped and stood in front of him, he misread her, pulling her close. ‘I don’t want you to waste your life stealing.’

Their lips came
together in a leaf-soft kiss. Alix tipped her head back and replied, ‘I don’t steal.’

‘All right, copying. Thanks to people like you, New York ladies get Paris originals the same time as Frenchwomen do. You offer a social service, right?’

‘Right. Everyone gets what they want.’

‘Except the designers who create the clothes. They’d like to string you up.’

‘You got me into it,’ she reminded him.
‘We’d only known each other a week and you smuggled me into Longchamps races to see the rich women’s outfits. You said you had a friend who sold fashion drawings to a New York magazine, a dollar a sketch, who was looking for artists with a quick hand. You seduced me.’

‘I know. God, Alix, I wish I didn’t need you so much.’ Paul kissed her hungrily and Alix wriggled away, thinking he’d no right,
that she disliked it … then realised that she didn’t. In fact, she liked the pressure of his mouth, the feel of his evening-rough chin against her skin. Even the taste of Gauloises didn’t alter the feeling.

She broke the kiss. ‘Are you telling me there’s no more work?’

‘If we get caught, who’d care for my sisters and your grandmother?’ He sighed. ‘Yes. No more. That’s right.’

‘There’s another
job, isn’t there?’ Paul never could lie.

He groaned. ‘You’ll fly at me, or snap my head off.’

She pulled his sleeve, kissed him briefly, then provocatively. ‘Tell me, then I’ll decide what I do.’

Paul told her.

*

Steal the spring–summer 1937 collection from Maison Javier, a couture house on Rue de la Trémoille, close to the Champs-Elysées. Steal from the house for which Mémé was currently
working … Steal the
whole
collection?

Paul nodded. ‘My contact wants every last ribbon and buckle.’

‘Impossible.’

‘That’s what I said.’ Paul raised her wrist, checking the time by her watch. They’d retired to a café, ordering the cheapest wine, both conscious of family waiting for them at home. ‘People are wild for him in America, this Javier. It’s to do with that American woman who slept with
the English king.’

‘Mrs Simpson wears Javier?’ Alix thought a moment, then nodded. ‘Maybe that’s why she looks so tall in her photographs. Javier pulls women straight, like a stick of rock.’

Paul shrugged impatiently. ‘All I know is, American women queue down the street for copies of his dresses. My contact wants somebody at his spring show, sketching every outfit.’

‘Tell your contact she’s
too late.’

‘But that’s it.’ Paul leaned forward, runkling the cloth. ‘Javier’s showing in April.’

‘Nobody shows spring–summer collections in April.’

Paul opened his hands palm up. ‘Javier is, this year. Don’t ask me why.’

Alix’s mind whirred. A whole collection, from one house? ‘You’d have to be in the workrooms. You’d have to rob his atelier. Take everything: garments, sketches, samples …
or kidnap Javier himself.’

‘Can’t you get into the salon and take notes? They have parades every day, don’t they?’

‘Not until the collection is launched. I get into couture shows by pretending to be a lady’s maid. I follow a well-dressed woman inside. Or I pretend to be a titled English girl, desperate for her first Paris outfit. “What spiffing frocks! How do you people do it?” They fall for
that. On a good day, I can memorise five or six designs. For a whole collection, I’d need three brains or a camera.’

Paul rubbed his nose, out of his depth. ‘Thing is,’ he said, ‘my contact has wholesalers on standby. They have sweatshops in New York, full of what they call “table monkeys” – people who work all night at sewing machines to meet demand. American women want the fashion they see
in the magazines. They want Javier. They want what Mrs …’

‘Simpson.’

‘– what she wears, and they want it yesterday.’

Alix was shaking her head. ‘I’ve pushed my way into the collections too often as it is. The saleswomen circle like buzzards and drop on you if they see you making so much as a line with
a pencil. Paul, you were correct when you said it was wrong. We should stop.’

Paul looked
down at his fingers. The skin around the nails was snagged from rough work, from biting. ‘Yes, I agree, but … you see, my contact, she knows an American speech therapist on Rue du Bac who’s had incredible results, who could get Suzy talking again. But he’s expensive.’

Alix sighed. ‘Everyone is, except you and me. I’m sorry, Paul.’

Paul drained his glass. ‘Don’t look so wretched. I’ll tell my
contact the job’s too big.’

‘No. Paul … tell her I’ll do it.’

‘You will?’

She drank her wine. ‘Just after I’ve learned to make myself invisible. How much was offered, by the way?’

‘Oh …’ Paul counted coins on to the table, and named a figure that made Alix’s jaw drop. ‘I know. Rather like putting a year’s wages on a dark horse in the Prix de Diane and scooping the lot.’

Seven hundred thousand francs. Enough, even split two ways, for Paul to refit the
Katrijn
, turn her into a home fit for small children and engage a dozen speech therapists. For Alix … freedom from that swivel chair and the eternal clicking exchange.

She strode home, battling dreams and demons. She so wanted to help Paul. And she’d love to wake
in the mornings free of financial worries. But … the couture industry employed thousands of women like her grandmother. ‘Steal a collection, you steal from people like Mémé.’ But then again …
seven hundred thousand francs
.

But what if they were caught? They warned each other of the danger all the time, even joked about it. But what if it really happened? What if she felt a hand on her shoulder
as she was sketching? Or a stern voice stopping her outside a shop –
May I see inside your handbag, Mademoiselle?
Paul had been in police custody numerous times, and his descriptions made Alix squirm. You were put into a windowless cell stinking of the last occupant’s sweat, or worse. They took your shoes and your top
clothes and those came back with lice in them. They searched you, right down
to your underwear. Women were meant to be searched by female personnel, but it didn’t always happen.

In the lobby of her apartment building she walked past Mme Rey, too immersed in thought to see the woman.

‘Ants in the pants?’

Alix whirled round. ‘Sorry?’

‘Been with your nice-looking boy?’

‘No, I mean, yes.’ Alix hurried up the first flight of stairs.

The concierge called after her: ‘My
boy Fernand’s here tomorrow, delivery of coal. You’ll leave a tip,
hein
? He gives his time for nothing and it’s hard work, all those sacks.’

Outside the door of her flat, Alix caught her breath and ironed out her expression. Inside she found Mémé cooking potato pancakes on a skillet. The fleshless shoulders were hunched and Alix knew instantly that something was wrong.

As they sat down to eat,
Mémé sighed. ‘Old Misery Mop told me the landlord means to increase the rent.’

‘What?’ This couldn’t be happening. Not with the copying work drying up, and coal to pay for as well. ‘Why now?’

‘The World’s Fair is opening in June, drawing people from the four corners of the globe, so the newspapers tell us. Our landlord thinks they’ll stay forever. He wants a thousand francs a month more from
next quarter.’

‘Next quarter starts 25
^th
March …’ Alix calculated. Just over two weeks away. She felt like the camel bracing itself for the last
straw. She used a word learned from Paul that fortunately Mémé did not understand. ‘Right, we’ll find a flat near the canal or out at La Villette. We’ll get somewhere for half what we pay here.’

‘No, Aliki. I like a good address. Things like that matter
when you’re my age, and how would I make new friends by the canal? I’m too tired to move again.’ Mémé gazed at her work-table. ‘I could get another hour a day out of my fingers. Poor Brandel will have to go. Who are we with a charwoman anyway? Rockefellers?’

‘I’ll clean. And –’ Alix pulled in a now-or-never breath, acting on a decision she was hardly aware of having made – ‘I was thinking, I
might apply for piecework with Maison Javier. You know, sewing I could bring home? I have the skills, and you could recommend me. Then in time –’ she ignored the warning glint in her grandmother’s eye – ‘I could get a full-time job there. Javier promotes women, so I could work my way up to being a première. Premières are paid really, really well if they’re good.’
Meanwhile, I would steal for Paul’s
contact and keep us all afloat. Maybe even hit the jackpot. Seven hundred thousand francs …

Danielle Lutzman’s mouth twitched in pain, then shock. Anger soon came. ‘You hear me say I’ll slave another seven hours a week, and you talk of throwing away your good job at the telephone company? A job I shamed myself to get you?’

‘I’d stay until I was sure …’ Alix caught up with Mémé’s last comment.
‘What d’you mean, “shamed”? I got
myself
the job at the telephone exchange.’

‘Just when I need to feel safe, you talk of giving up the job that puts a roof over our heads?’ Mémé beat her fist on the table so hard the crockery jumped. Alix seized the bony hands.

‘Don’t, please, Mémé! Whatever I said to frighten you, I didn’t mean it. I’ll stay at the telephone company. I’ll work longer shifts.’
She added silently,
I’ll do whatever it takes to keep you safe
.

Yet, despite her protestations, she was to look back on this as the moment she stepped to the edge of the cliff, looked down into a pit crawling with deceit and danger … and jumped.

V. Haviland, Madrid correspondent,
reports from the heart of Spain’s civil conflict.

A man lying in the gutter may comfort himself by looking up at the stars. For your man in a Madrid gutter, a layer of dust excludes the stars. He lies where he has thrown himself as fighter planes swoop over a street of cafés and
shops. They fly in triangular formation, Heinkel fighter aircraft of the German Condor Legion, strafing the pavements with machine-gun fire, blowing out glass, raising chips the size of gaming dice from the road. The noise is past deafening and humans dart like terrified mice beneath raptor shadows.

The din becomes unbearable until, suddenly, they are gone. They don’t come in plain day any more,
thanks to the presence of fighter aircraft provided to Spain’s left-wing government by its Soviet allies—

Jean-Yves, Comte de Charembourg, glanced up in irritation as a cough from the doorway broke into his reading. His secretary stood with a letter pinched between thumb and finger, his expression conveying its unsavoury nature.

‘You will wish to see this at once, M. le Comte.’

Shaking his
newspaper in half, Jean-Yves made a mental note to come back to that article later. Whoever ‘V. Haviland’ was, he’d obviously rolled in the dust of Spain. The
News Monitor
had been Jean-Yves’s weekday reading when he’d lived in London and he’d been pleased to discover it could be bought in Paris from a vendor near the British embassy, if a day or two late. There was a French-language version,
but it tended to pussyfoot around international sensitivities. Three decades spent in London had not made an Englishman of the Comte de Charembourg, but it had taught him the value of a press that colludes with its readers rather than with those in power. ‘Second post, Ferryman?’ he asked his secretary.