Satin Dreams (11 page)

It had almost stopped snowing, but the ground was thickly covered with an icy white blanket. She plunged into it up to her ankles, heedless of her fragile satin shoes. The wind caught the stiff folds of the evening coat, billowed it out like a sail, and she staggered. She expected at any moment to hear Nicholas Palliades shouting for her to stop.
 

She found herself at the curb in the avenue Foch, skidding and sliding in the snowfall. Headlights came out of the darkness. A car slowed; someone peered through a windshield with wipers still going against the last errant snowflakes.
 

The window on the driver’s side rolled down. “What’s the trouble?” The voice was male, speaking English. He drove slowly beside her as Alix stumbled along the sidewalk. “Can I help?” He had a rugged face and a disarming smile, the accent was American. And he was there. Almost as though he had been looking for her.
 

Alix stopped, breathing in the frigid air. The man in the car leaned across the front seat to hold up an open wallet displaying identification cards. His sharp blue eyes took in her disheveled hair, the beaded hem of her evening dress hanging below her coat, her stockingless feet in soaked satin slippers.
 

“I’m Christopher Forbes,” he called out the window. “Writer for an American magazine,
Fortune.
Look, if you’re not afraid to get in, I’ll give you a lift.”
 

Alix held her blowing hair out of her face with one hand and crouched down to see. It was dark in the avenue Foch, but she could make out a picture of a strong, pleasant face on a press card. There was another photograph on his U.S. driver’s license. He was telling the truth.
 

She shivered, drawing the satin coat around her, her teeth chattering from more than the cold.
 

“I’m not afraid,” Alix told him.
 

La Navette

The Shuttle

Six

Mortessier’s seamstresses were taking their late-afternoon break in the employees’ lounge, watching Thierry Mugler’s collection on a special Television France fashion spectacular from Les Halles. Mugler’s spring line was a good one; the enthusiastic applause from the crowds watching in the rotunda of Paris’s giant, glossy fashion complex penetrated even upstairs where Gilles was working with the models.
 

“Who’s on now?” Iris whispered to Alix. The seamstresses yelled out as an especially successful Mugler design came down the runway. The Ethiopian model was itching to join them; Iris followed the Paris couture shows on television as eagerly as she did the international soccer matches.
 

Alix glanced at Gilles. The assistant designer was not in the best of moods. They were all recovering, in one way or another, from the emotional explosion of the day before, when Gilles had broken the news to Rudi Mortessier that he was leaving. When Iris whispered again, Alix shook her head. They could both use a break, but it was best not to push it.
 

Alix and Iris were wearing almost identical versions of a white summer suit from Mortessier’s spring line. Gilles was working on the solution for the suits’ elusive problems.
 

Iris gave a little twitch as the seamstresses in front of the television set downstairs broke into cheers. “Ah, Thierry must be fantastic this year,” she groaned. “I adore his clothes. He is head and shoulders above Christian Lacroix, Ungaro—all of them.”
 

Iris’s chatter was the last straw for Gilles. He threw down his pencil and put his head in his hands. “Don’t let me bother you, Iris.” The sarcasm was meant to be withering. “Naturally, you must do what is important. Go sit in front of the television until Mugler’s show is over! Until your backside grows to the chair!”
 

Iris hesitated, but another burst of applause came up the stairwell. She gave Alix an apologetic look, stuck out her tongue at the back of Gilles’s head, and slipped into the hall.
 

Gilles rubbed his eyes wearily. “They’ve been sitting down there all morning, wasting time. How typical of this damned place!”
 

It was true, the atelier was taking an extraordinarily long break, something they wouldn’t have done if Rudi had been there. But the boss was at home in bed, surrounded by his pet Lapsas, at last report talking on the telephone to at least half the world of Paris couture, telling them of Gilles’s terrible betrayal.
 

Gilles propped his head in his hands and stared down at his drawing board. The whole building had heard Rudi’s anguished screams yesterday when Gilles had finally told him of his decision to join Jackson Storm’s new couture house, the Maison Louvel.
 

“
Je savais toujour que vous allez me quitter!
” Rudi had wailed.
 

I always knew you would leave me.
 

Too distraught to drive himself home, Rudi had left in a taxi. At nine A.M. the next morning his houseman had called to say that Monsieur Mortessier would not be in. In fact, he might be out the entire week. Gilles had reported to work to do the honorable thing, finish up Mortessier’s already late spring collection. A noble gesture, but no one knew if Rudi was aware of it. Or if he even cared.
 

“Iris will be back in a moment. She just can’t stay away from the fashion shows.” Alix was really sorry about flighty Iris. But Gilles was always so intense about everything, and he’d only gotten worse since he’d announced his resignation.
 

“It doesn’t matter, nothing matters, I knew it would be terrible leaving here.” Gilles lifted his head and looked around despairingly. “This place is truly impossible. But then, Rudi likes it that way.”
 

He stared broodingly at the troublesome white suit Alix was wearing. He supposed they should get back to work; Alix had said something about going to a piano concert at the Pompidou center, something she’d saved for a month to do. At the moment she wore very little makeup to protect the clothes. Her red hair was scraped back starkly into a knot that emphasized her delicate bone structure and the startling color of her eyes.
 

He was suddenly reminded that he had forgotten one important piece of business. “How are
you
doing?” Gilles asked, somewhat brusquely. Like everyone at Mortessier’s, he knew about the ruined green evening dress. It had been the chief topic of gossip until he broke his own news. “Are you all right?”
 

She gave him a puzzled look. “Yes, of course.”
 

“Well, no thanks to Rudi. If it hadn’t been for Rudi, you would never have gone out to dinner with this—this—” He struggled with his obvious contempt. “This—
Greek.
”
 

Alix managed a bleak smile. Gilles was so young, so unforgiving; she was only a year or two older, but sometimes she felt ancient beside him. “Gilles, it’s not Rudi’s fault.” Now that Gilles was leaving, she didn’t want to be involved in his quarrel with the boss. “Rudi didn’t say a thing about the dress.”
 

He snorted. “Why should he? The Greek paid for it.”
 

Even Alix had been startled to find out the cost of Rudi’s beaded evening dress.
Eighteen-thousand dollars.
It was a not unheard-of sum, some Paris couture gowns sold for as high as fifty thousand. But she was sure Nicholas Palliades, patron of sleazy nightclubs and purchaser of token jewelry, had paid a lot more for his evening’s entertainment than he’d intended.
He probably thinks it’s another plot,
Alix told herself.
 

She’d gathered from Mortessier atelier gossip that Nicholas had immediately put in a call to Rudi from the Palliadeses’ Paris offices the morning after their date. There had apparently been quite an exchange of telephone calls, some rumored to involve both the Palliades and Mortessier lawyers, but the matter of the green dress had finally been settled when Nicholas Palliades paid the full list price. No one had mentioned the dress to Alix after she’d turned it in to the
maitresse
of the atelier and endured her shocked dismay. And she hadn’t had a chance to talk to Rudi; Gilles’s announcement that he was leaving had pushed everything else out of the way.
 

Alix hadn’t slept well since that awful evening. She wondered what Nicholas Palliades had told Rudi. She couldn’t forget his wild, paranoid ramblings about being blackmailed—or his exclamations when he’d discovered she was a virgin. She knew he was furious over her wild flight from the apartment in the avenue Foch. If worse came to worst, she supposed the whole miserable episode might cost her her job. After all, it was her story against his, and she was only a model, while Nicholas Palliades was wealthy, powerful—and a Mortessier client.
 

Strangely, though, not once in the last two days had he tried to call her or get in touch with her at work. Alix had been afraid he would, and was relieved when nothing happened. She wanted to forget her mistake as quickly as possible.
 

Gilles had been watching her closely. “This lecher wasn’t beastly to you, was he? He didn’t abuse you?” He scowled when she shook her head. “To tear a woman’s
dress—merde,
what a damnable thing! I could choke Rudi with my own hands!” He glared at her. “Are you sure?”
 

“Yes, I’m sure.” Alix couldn’t help smiling. Gilles was so surprisingly straitlaced;
un vrai bourgeois
when it came to women, especially his beautiful pregnant wife. And yet, in his trademark black turtleneck and jeans and motorcycle leather, he looked more like a sexy young punk rock star.
 

As for her evening with Nicholas Palliades, the strange, surreal quality of the dinner at the Russian nightclub, the absurd singing cossack waiters, the diamond earrings in the champagne—it was all a fading nightmare. Who would want to remember Nicholas Palliades storming around the bedroom like a madman, stark naked, accusing her of blackmail?
 

At some time in the future, perhaps she’d be able to laugh at the whole episode. But that wasn’t going to happen anytime soon.
 

“I’m sorry about the dress,” Alix said carefully. The official excuse, that no one at Mortessier’s believed, was that she’d caught it on the door handle of the Daimler. “Rudi was tacking beads on before I went out. I should have been more careful.”
 

If it hadn’t been for the curious appearance of the American journalist who had given her a lift, the night might have been a bigger disaster. Nicholas Palliades might have caught up with her. He might have tried to force her to go back to the apartment with him. He might have...
 

She shuddered. She’d come to the conclusion that Nicholas Palliades was a lunatic. A serious mental case protected by his family’s enormous wealth. Millionaires’ unhinged, dissolute heirs were not all that uncommon in Paris.
 

It was no wonder, Alix thought ruefully, that she’d jumped into the American writer’s car, hysterical, wild-eyed, desperate to get away from him. To his credit, the man had behaved as though everything was perfectly normal. When he left her off in the rue Boulainvilliers, he didn’t ask how she’d happened to be on the posh avenue Foch at that hour, in the snow, obviously running from trouble. He’d given her his business card. His name was Christopher Forbes.
 

“I tell you, Rudi does not think,” Gilles was saying. “No one likes to deal with these Greek shipping people. They are vulgar, unscrupulous. Like the oil Arabs, they are only tolerated for their money.”
 

Alix winced. “But Gilles, there must be some who—”
 

He snorted. “Never! They are all the same. This one’s father was a notorious playboy. He raced expensive cars and airplanes recklessly. He was scandalous with women. The poor wife was beautiful, an heiress in her own right, but became an alcoholic because she couldn’t stand living with him. I have a cousin,” he said with grim relish, “who worked at the Ritz. He tells me once they had such a terrible fight—I mean they were actually
hitting
each other—so that the police came and she was taken to the hospital in an ambulance.”
 

Alix stared at him. “Nicholas Palliades?”
 

“No, no, the
father
, Stavros, who was killed. The son is the same, only he does the grandfather’s dirty jobs, like a gangster. How could Rudi let such a man take you out?” Gilles swept his hand across the drawing board, scattering his sketches. “Everything is Rudi’s fault! Look, I’m trying to clear up this work that should have been completed weeks ago. If Rudi doesn’t get it done before New Year’s, it’s futile to have a showing. It’s worse than working for my mother in her dressmaking business. I left Tours to get away from chaos.
Alors
, now I have to go to the Americans to get away from-
this
!”
 

Alix didn’t know what to say. “But Gilles, I know Rudi will appreciate what you’re doing. He—”
 

“—Is in bed,” the designer snarled, “on the telephone, telling everyone in Paris what a filthy dog I am to be leaving him.” He threw his grease crayons after the sketches. “But Rudi will change his mind. When he is tired of telling everyone what a bastard I am, he will start crying and decide I am okay after all.” Gilles imitated Rudi’s high-pitched voice. “That he wishes me great luck with Jackson Storm, that the American is more rich and powerful than he is, poor little Rudi, and that he knows I have made the right decision. Because it will make me famous.”