Satin Dreams (33 page)

Alix winced. It was four o’clock in the morning, and the women stood in a cluster, staring at the disaster all around them. Abdul had brought up mops and brooms, but it was going to take more than that to repair the damage.
 

“But I haven’t been smoking
kif
.” Karim looked around desperately for support. “I begged the princess not to do it. And I wasn’t with her tonight, I swear it! She was up here alone, working on her costume for Alix, as you can see. I didn’t even hear her come inside.”
 

The boy’s explanation infuriated his father. Abdul lifted a bucket of dirty water as though he were going to throw it on his son. “Idiot! All of Paris walks in and out of here at night when you are on the job! Well, what does the princess do for you so that you would let her in?”
 

One look at the boy’s suddenly flaming face told them what the princess did for him. Nannette groaned in disgust.
 

“I didn’t let her in, she has her own key!” Four pairs of eyes regarded Karim skeptically as he plunged on, “She—she comes in to work on her sketches at night, because she likes it when it is nice and quiet, when no one can interfere with what she wants to do!”
 

Abdul struck his own forehead in despair. “My son is an imbecile, a college-trained imbecile! Now he has destroyed us.”
 

“Well, you will have no jobs, now,” Nannette put in, “either of you.”
 

Alix put her hands over her ears. All the shouting made her head ache. “Does anybody know where the princess is now?”
 

They shrugged and looked at each other.
Gone
, seemed to be the answer.
 

There was no doubt the fire had started from a marijuana joint burning in the atelier’s battered glass, ashtray. Princess Jackie had been working at her drawing board; her sketches for a new project, originals for the coming Maison Louvel spring collection, were still pinned to the table’s wooden surface. Crumpled sheets of drawing paper littered the floor, as well as some muslin scraps of toiles. A few burning ashes must have dropped onto the floor, igniting some of the scattered papers. They could almost see the place where the ashes had fallen.
 

From the porter’s cubbyhole downstairs, Karim had smelled the smoke and had raced upstairs. When he’d opened the door to the atelier, black, acrid clouds had billowed out. Karim had been frantic, thinking the princess was still inside. The boy had braved the smoke to search every nook and cranny for Princess Jacqueline before he finally opened the windows.
 

He could have been a hero, Alix thought, looking at Karim’s red-rimmed eyes and smoke-stained clothes. Instead, he’d be the one who’d be blamed.
 

“Quelle une disastre!”
Nannette propped her bottom against the worktable and folded her arms across her chest. “After all that has happened, this is the end of the world for poor Gilles.”
 

Gilles!
 

They stared at each other, appalled.
 

“He’ll have
une crise nerveuse
,” Sylvie said hoarsely. “A collapse.” Distraught, she added, “Mon Dieu, he will never see his own baby!”
 

Nannette was just as stricken. “
Pauvre Lisianne
. That poor young woman, she is such a fool. She will be useless to him.”
 

“Now wait a minute,” Alix said.
 

“Gilles goes to pieces as it is.” Sylvie wrung her hands. “He is an artist, he cannot endure these Americans! This will finish him.”
 

“The show is destroyed!” Nannette concluded.
 

Abdul started for the telephone. “We must call Monsieur Jackson Storm and tell him.”
 

“Stop it,” Alix told them. “We haven’t seen what the damage is. The costumes didn’t burn, did they?”
 

“They didn’t have to burn.” Nannette pointed to Gilles’s
fantaisie
creations. “Go and look.”
 

The bird costumes had been taken down from the long pipe that ran the length of the room and placed on the worktable. Some were in silk covers. Most were not. Alix saw at once that the material was no longer white. Princess Jackie’s joint had set fire to not only the muslin toiles, but also other objects on the littered floor. The plastic silver-and-gold Mylar trimming. All the fluffy ostrich and goose feathers. Even the sequins. The dense smoke had left a yellow-brown film on everything. Gilles’s beautiful
fantaisies
looked as though they had been dripped in tobacco juice.
 

Alix was familiar with most of the costumes but not all; the atelier had been full of part-time and temporary seamstresses for the past week, and she’d had her own costumes to worry about, especially Princess Jackie’s “flamingo” design.
 

Oh Lord—that, too
. “Have you seen Princess Jackie’s flamingo?” she asked.
 

Nannette snorted. “Naturally, that is not touched. She hung it in the design room.”
 

Well, so much for that
, Alix thought, sighing.
 

With a new appreciation for Gilles’s genius, she stood back and looked at the
fantaisies
spread out on the worktable.
 

Heavenly Lace
was
truly awful, at least for the job Jackson Storm had instructed Gilles to do. The heat-processed lace didn’t really lend itself to Gilles’s space-age designs.
 

But somehow, miraculously, Gilles had turned the scratchy lace into dreamy creations. Big, sumptuous skirts were fluffed up in lacy poufs to expose the models’ long, shapely legs. Silver beads, sequins, and other glitter were spread lavishly over tail feathers. Laminated lace had even been wired in frames to form spreading wings.
 

Lacy wings?
Alix peered at a creation Karim was just taking down from its hanger. It didn’t look bad at all. If only it were still white...
 

They gathered around the table, a sad little group beneath the bright fluorescent lights of the atelier, brought together by the hysteria that had mushroomed.
 

“We’ve got to tell Jackson Storm,” Alix said. “I don’t see that we have any other choice.”
 

The
Bal des Oiseaux Blancs
at the opera would go on. There was no stopping it at this late date, but there would be no show. Without the highly publicized costumes featuring Heavenly Lace, it would be a major debacle. Hardly anyone would believe a story of a fire in the atelier; it sounded too pat. No, the last-minute cancellation of the show would raise the suspicions of the press and the fashion experts.
 

“This will kill Gilles,” Nannette whispered.
 

They knew she was right.
 

Gilles would be the scapegoat.
His designs were so disastrous, rumor has it that his employer, Jackson Storm, called off the show at the last minute!
That, cynical Parisians would say, was the true story. Never mind the trumped-up one about an atelier fire.
 

But the “true” story, involving their apprentice designer would probably be even worse if it got out. Worldwide headlines. “Pot-Smoking Princess Destroys American Couture Collection.”
 

“If this were the States,” Alix said under her breath, “we might consider getting them dry cleaned.”
 

Nannette looked at Sylvie.
 

Alix frowned. “But all the passementerie, the feathers and sequins, the mylar fringe, would have to be taken off.”
 

Staring at each other, both women nodded quickly.
 

“It’s too bad.” Alix sighed. “We haven’t got time.”
 

Sylvie was positively itching to speak. “I have two cousins who can help. They work for Claude Montana, but I will swear them to secrecy!”
 

Nannette said, “My nephew is the plant manager in Pantin for
Richard et Cie
.”
 

Plant manager?
It was Alix’s turn to stare.
Richard et Cie?
 

That was the name of the famous French dry-cleaning house, noted for their skill with delicate fabrics. And, Alix knew, fabulously expensive.
 

“They are Alsatians, like me,” Sylvie cried, “and very good. For this sort of opportunity they will do a wonderful job!”
 

Alix knew it wouldn’t work. “How many costumes are there?”
 

Nannette said quickly, “Ten. Gilles has the other seven in his office upstairs. He is still having trouble with those, so he keeps them up there hoping to get them finished.”
 

Ten.
Ten complicated, fancy costumes. Alix’s mind was working furiously. It was probably impossible. No dry cleaner in Paris would take on a job that size in just a few hours. And the fact that they were originals by a famous young couturier made it worse; there was the question of liability.
 

“I can’t tell anyone how to dry clean laminated lace,” Alix groaned. “We don’t know anything about it, and there’re only a few hours left. The ball is
today
.” She sat down on a stack of boxes. “God,
tonight
!”
 

Nannette looked formidable and grim as she folded her plump arms. “Nonsense. It is silk. It is lace. Both are done at Paris cleaners all the time.”
 

“We’ll have to tell Gilles.” Alix hated to say it. “We couldn’t just send the costumes out. He’d miss them.”
 

The women exchanged looks again. “Gilles will be working upstairs,” Sylvie said firmly. “It will be six o’clock before we need the models for the final fitting. The girls don’t report any earlier, and he won’t, either.”
 

“Domenic has his bakery’s van downstairs,” Nannette said. “We can use it to transport the costumes to the Pantin plant. They will open up the shop if you give permission for the work, Mademoiselle Alix.”
 

“If
I
give permission?”
 

“Ah, poor Gilles,” Sylvie cried emotionally. “It has been so unfair! We must do our best to help him.”
 

“I really don’t think,” Alix began, “that we—”
 

Abdul interrupted from the doorway, “It is everything, mademoiselle. It is our whole employment.”
 

Alix couldn’t argue with that. But how could
she
give permission? She was just a model—not a principal in the company.
 

She put her head in her hands and stared down at the jogging shoes she’d thrown on in a hurry. Nikes—not Keds. She couldn’t help wondering where Princess Jackie was now. Was it still the same night she’d made love to Nicholas Palliades, and slept in his arms?
 

“I suppose I could give permission,” Alix said slowly. She knew she was going to hate herself for it. “Everything else is crazy. Why not this?”
 

“There is one more problem,” Sylvie said. She looked over Alix’s head at Nannette. “We must have a deposit.”
 

Alix raked her fingers through her hair. “What kind of money are we talking about?” When Nannette told her, she gasped. “How many hundred thousand francs?”
 

“They would do it without the money,” Sylvie cried, sincerely. “But there is the liability—”
 

Ah, yes, the liability. Abdul and Karim and the two French women were looking at her expectantly. Nothing like this had ever happened to Alix; no one had ever asked her help, no one had ever solicited her management skills before.
 

“I don’t have any money.” She could see they didn’t believe her. They knew about Nicholas Palliades.
 

Then a sudden, brilliant thought brought Alix to her feet.
 

“Will they accept jewels as collateral?” she cried. “Like diamond earrings—with two fairly large emeralds?”
 

The night sky was growing only slightly gray in the east. It was only a few steps from the rue des Benedictines to the rue Cambon, but the street was still dark. The streetlamp at the entrance to the old maison did not shed much light on the corner. Alix stumbled a little on the curbing as she hurried toward Domenic’s van.
 

She still couldn’t believe Nannette and Sylvie had entrusted her with the plan to rescue Gilles’s costumes. She, who had never been a part of anything, who had spent most of her life insisting on what was due her from others, was now being called on to help. She was actually granting permission for this scheme. Even if, Alix thought hurrying down the street, her authority was questionable.
 

If there was any one thing that nagged at her, it was the realization she’d offered Nicholas Palliades’s earrings as a deposit for the dry cleaning.
 

A figure stepped out of the shadows. Alix was so busy with her thoughts, she didn’t notice him until it was too late to get out of his way.