Satin Dreams (15 page)

Considering all the activity as the couture house pulled itself together, Alix didn’t mind at all being out of the way. The retreat was as much emotional as physical. The past few days had taken their toll on her emotions, culminating in the tense moment when she’d told Rudi Mortessier she was leaving.
 

“Go,
go
!” Rudi had shouted. “Gilles needs you for his clothes. I’m not so stupid I don’t know that! He is going to be very famous. And only you can wear his designs properly,” he had added, bitterly. “Why should I stand in his way?”
 

Alix heard Abdul’s big chain of keys rattling as he carried up the midmorning mail. Then came the voices of the plasterers and painters who were leaving for their midmorning break.
 

Gilles stuck his head in the door, startling her.
 

“You shouldn’t be doing this.” He looked at the stacks of thread boxes, frowning. “I can find something more interesting for you to do.”
 

Alix shook her head. “Gilles, I don’t need anything more interesting.” After the past few days, doing something quiet and unchallenging was just what Alix wanted. But before she could tell him so, Gilles dashed off to attend to another crisis.
 

With a sigh, Alix put aside the sorted thread and went to find a sink to wash her dirty hands. The third floor of the old mansion was a maze. The low-ceilinged eighteenth-century rooms, their ancient wood floors settled to different levels, all opened into each other without hallways. In one dim, dusty room, bolts of muslin-wrapped cloth were stacked from floor to ceiling.
 

Alix groped her way back out again without disturbing the dust. She already missed Rudi’s workrooms filled with fluorescent lighting, brightly colored partitions and the big, busy, often noisy staff. In the Maison Louvel the only original employees left after the Jackson Storm takeover were Nannette, head fitter and seamstress, and Sylvie, an assistant. Both women were kept on because of their union contracts.
 

Except for a brief period of success in the 1950s, the Maison Louvel’s slide into obscurity from its heyday fifty years ago had been fairly relentless. The original Madame Louvel had had some measure of success as a designer before World War One. Then her niece, Mademoiselle Claude, had taken over just before Paris was occupied by the Germans in the second World War. Mademoiselle Claude, a friend of Coco Chanel’s, was just achieving some considerable fame and success when she suddenly died. The old couture house had coasted along rather mysteriously into the early eighties, almost forgotten by the rest of the fashion world.
 

Looking for the washroom, Alix opened a door and gasped.
 

She almost ran into Abdul’s son, Karim, an engineering student and the Maison Louvel’s part-time handyman, carrying out old wicker baskets full of fabric scraps.
 

Alix held up her dirty hands to explain her search for a sink.
 

“You are the model,” the porter’s son said. His gaze traveled over her, an awestruck expression on his swarthy young face.
 

Alix never got used to that look. Even from the very young ones like Karim. She smiled. “I need to wash my hands.”
 

“Yes, yes.” Karim put down the baskets and nearly fell over them in his eagerness. “There is a door,” he pointed, “back where you came.”
 

When she had gone a few steps she noticed he was still standing there. “What is it?” she asked.
 

He blushed to the roots of his curly black hair. “You are very beautiful,” he said hoarsely. “They are lucky to have you here.”
 

Some time around noon, from the noises coming up the stairwell, it sounded as though a street mob were invading the salon floor. The hubbub grew so loud, Alix finally gave up and went out into the hall.
 

Nannette rushed up the stairs to her, face red with excitement and exertion. “It is the princess! These newspaper people are with her. And she has bodyguards. Can you believe it,
bodyguards
where she is going to work?” She couldn’t resist a quick look into the stairwell. “There are television people, too.
Mon Dieu
, they didn’t tell Gilles Vasse about this!”
 

Alix heard Gilles’s voice two floors below. “What’s going on?” The crowd was ascending the stairs, apparently on some sort of tour of the building. “What princess?”
 

Nannette shot her a sharp look. “Oh, she’s been here before, that one.” She rushed into the atelier and began to throw things off the table into boxes. “She came with her father, Prince Alessio, last year when we have the first American person here, when Monsieur Jackson Storm buy the house. Princess Jacqueline is a
mal fille
, uncontrollable with the boys. They brought her here to dress her very conservatively so they could send her to live with a family in Spain
Quelle désastre!
She only makes trouble. Now she wants to work here. As a
designer.
And these Americans don’t tell the chief designer anything about it!”
 

Alix was not quite sure she understood, but the noisy crowd was coming down the hallway, Jack Storm’s unmistakable baritone voice saying something about workrooms and areas for the cutter, who was the indispensible man in a couture house.
 

Alix shoved the spool boxes into a corner. When she turned, the room was rapidly overflowing with newspaper and television people. In the middle, with all attention focused on her, was a rather savage-looking teenager with cropped hair, wearing a magnificent full-length white fox fur coat and slush-stained mukluk boots.
 

“This,” Jackson Storm said as his publicity people cleared a space for him before the videotape cameras, “is the atelier.”
 

The princess ignored the press and looked past her future employer; her eyes roamed the room until they came to rest on Alix. “Is that your hair’s natural color?” Princess Jacqueline Medivani spoke perfect unaccented English, her voice admirably piercing.
 

Alix held her breath. Were all wealthy Europeans so rude? She looked at Jack Storm, but he was directing the journalists in the hall to let the princess’s bodyguards through.
 

The princess moved closer, carelessly shifting the magnificent white fox coat down her shoulders so that the bottom edge trailed the dirty atelier floor. “I saw you at Mortessier’s,” the princess said again. “A lot of times.”
 

Alix couldn’t remember seeing Princess Jackie before. Where was Gilles? If this scruffy looking teenager was really going to be his assistant, she couldn’t believe he hadn’t been told. Had Gilles somehow gotten lost in this three-ring circus?
 

Having taken all the pictures they needed, the crowd of press people and television crews followed Jackson Storm and the Princess down to the third-floor landing. Only a tall, sandy-haired man remained standing in the doorway.
 

“You remember me,” he said.
 

For a long moment, Alix didn’t. The last time she’d seen Christopher Forbes, he’d been standing hatless in the falling snow on the sidewalk in front of her apartment building, waiting for her to unlock the lobby doors so he could see her safely inside. Then she remembered he was a writer. She supposed he’d been in the crowd of journalists. “You don’t mean you’re writing a story about Princess Jacqueline?”
 

“It looks like it now.” He had large white teeth, a little crooked, which only seemed to enhance the rugged, open quality of his looks. “My original assignment was a profile of Jackson Storm, the mass-market fashion king invading Paris haute couture, et cetera, et cetera.” He gave her a rather wicked grin. “But it’s expanding.”
 

All he needs is freckles
, Alix couldn’t help thinking. “The princess seems to have gone out with the others.” She pointed toward the stairs.
 

“I won’t miss her.” He paused, his sharp blue eyes obviously enjoying the sight of her dressed in a French blue work smock, red hair pinned back, unaccountably ravishing in spite of the smudge of dirt on her cheek. “Sorry I didn’t have time to explain everything the other night when I picked you up,” he added.
 

Alix turned away to pick up more boxes. “How did you know—about what was happening?”
 

“You mean, do I cruise around every night picking up Nick Palliades’s runaway dates in the avenue Foch?” He was still smiling, but his eyes had changed. “I was on my way back from dinner with a photographer who wants the contract for the shoot on this story I’m doing on Jackson Storm. I couldn’t miss you, a damsel in distress, running along in the snow.”
 

“I—” Alix murmured, “wasn’t really distressed.”
 

“No? You could have fooled me.”
 

She let that pass. “I’ve been so busy, I haven’t had a chance to get in touch with you—get in touch with your magazine, to thank you.”
 

“Dear lady, it was nothing. The next time I see you running in a snowstorm with your clothes half torn off, you can count on me to rescue you.” When she frowned, he said just as smoothly, “But next time I’ll go back and murder the son of a bitch.”
 

The boxes Alix had stacked toppled and slid across the table, and she grabbed for them. “It wasn’t as bad as it looked.”
 

“I’m glad to hear that.” He had stopped smiling. “I don’t know much about Palliades, but the crowd he runs with stink.”
 

At that moment Nannette came in. “
Déjeuner
,” the seamstress said and pointed to her watch.
 

“She’s absolutely right, it’s lunchtime.” Christopher was smiling again. “Look, why don’t we just wait a minute for the press and TV people to clear out, and I’ll take you to a quiet little place for lunch?”
 

The sound of the Maison Louvel elevator carrying passengers to street level reverberated through the stairwell. Above all the noise, there was no mistaking the peculiarly penetrating voice of Princess Jackie.
 

Distracted, Alix was telling herself that surely Gilles wouldn’t quit over having to work with a spoiled teenage princess looking for something to do. She heard a door on the floor above slam.
 

Gilles’s design room.
 

Watching her, Christopher Forbes asked, “Is there something you need to take care of?”
 

“No, no,” Alix murmured. Did she want to go out to lunch? She supposed she did. “I’ll get my coat,” she told him. “I’ll just be a moment.”
 

She needed that moment to think. Gilles worried her. He was too young himself, and didn’t have the patience to instruct a spoiled kid in the finer points of haute couture design. For goodness sake, why hadn’t they just enrolled the girl in art school?
 

Alix supposed she knew the answer to that. The aggressively bored Princess Jacqueline wouldn’t last two days in a disciplined school environment.
 

When she came back to the atelier with her coat, Christopher helped her into it. “Covering couture houses on the Jackson Storm story,” he told her as they went out on the landing, “is a whole new area for me. My last profile was Lee Iococca.”
 

He paused at the stairs to let her go ahead of him. “But it all begins to sound the same. Ever heard how Jean-Paul Gaultier locked out half the women of the American fashion press and kept them waiting for two hours because he said the lighting was better after dark? And then he gave the American reporters such bad seats, they couldn’t see the show.”
 

When Alix turned to him, he went on, “And then there’s the Dior fashion anniversary party that turned into a shambles.” He took her elbow and drew her to him on the landing. “You have a beautiful mouth,” he murmured. “Or how about Azzedine Alaia? He got into a fight with the fashion editor of the Paris
Herald-Tribune
because she was being too friendly with
Women’s Wear Daily
? And Azzedine told her he wasn’t afraid of any damned American, even President Reagan.”
 

Alix’s lips quivered. “What did President Reagan say?”
 

“God, I forgot to ask.” He laughed with her. “Haute couture’s just as crazy as the automobile industry. Remind me to tell you a famous story about Henry Ford. We can walk to the Ritz,” he said as they reached the salon floor landing, “it’s not far from here.”
 

“Is the Ritz your ‘quiet little place for lunch’?”
 

“Yes.”
 

The doors to the salon were open. As they passed, Jackson Storm stuck out his platinum head. “I thought I heard somebody out here.” He was looking at Alix. “I was just going to send someone up for you.”
 

He stepped back, opening the doors to the old showroom a little wider. A tall figure in a dark business suit stood just inside.
 

“Alix, I want you to meet one of our investors.” Jack Storm favored his house model with a brilliant smile that said there couldn’t possibly be any objection. “Honey, Mr. Palliades is going to take you to lunch.”