Spring Collection (3 page)

“It was Gabrielle d’Angelle. GN has chosen April, Jordan and Tinker for the Lombardi contest,” she spat out in a rush of fury.

“But … but …” I sputtered, “they’re all ours! All three of them—
our
girls!”

“You don’t think it’s a stroke of good luck, do you?” Justine asked me with bitter scorn. “You can’t possibly believe that out of dozens and dozens of girls they’re the only acceptable new faces in this entire town? He’s planned to pull this from the beginning … when nothing else worked, he saw a way to sneak into my life through the business, that vile son of a bitch!”

“Justine, have you gone out of your mind?” I demanded, stunned by Justine’s incomprehensible flood of words.

“It’s Necker! Jacques Necker, that contemptible, evil,
evil
man—he’ll do anything to get what he wants. From the second d’Angelle waltzed in here I knew it had to be something like this, but I never dreamed he’d go so far, damn him to hell … it stinks to high heaven, it’s unspeakable—”

“Necker
 …? Justine, I don’t get it. You’re not making sense. None, not one word.”

I finally penetrated Justine’s tirade. She looked at me and took deep breaths, willing herself to calm down enough to explain. I could actually watch the process on her features as her passion of outrage slowly changed to the decision to part with a secret she could no longer keep.

“Frankie, he’s my father,” Justine said in a low voice, speaking so quickly that the words ran together in her haste to get her statement over with.

“Your
what?”
I sputtered, too confused to make any sense of her statement. “What the hell are you raving about?”

“Necker, that bastard, that bloody,
bloody
rotten man, is my father. Frankie, you heard me the first time.”

“But … but … Justine … that’s the most absurd thing—” ’

“Now don’t,
do not
, ask me anything more about it,” Justine continued. “It’s not something I can discuss, not now, maybe never. But I’m not delusional. I’m his
daughter, God help me. I want nothing to do with him, nothing ever,
ever
—and now he’s found a way to reach me, a way I can’t get out of.”

“But, Justine—”

“Frankie, not one question!”

“Okay, okay! I’m not saying one word about you and.…” I stopped and regrouped, my brain starting to function again. “The thing I don’t get is how GN using our girls puts you in … that person’s … power, that’s all. Hey, let’s take the worst-case scenario, okay? Are you with me here on this, Justine?” I spoke with exaggerated calm. “Three of our girls will go to Paris for the Lombardi collection and one of them will win the pot of gold. Can you show me the harm in that?”

“But you didn’t hear all of it, you didn’t listen to d’Angelle’s end of the conversation, Frankie,” Justine said, ferociously. “An essential part of this whole thing is that I
personally
have to accompany the girls to Paris.” She said the words so furiously that it seemed as if she thought sheer anger could make them disappear. “And it gets worse. It’s not enough that I go with them, but in addition, d’Angelle—meaning Necker, of course—wants all of us in Paris three days from now! ”

“What? That’s two whole weeks before the collection!”

“Exactly
. You should have heard her, false and smarmy, fronting for him, taking a fairy godmother attitude to explain something she has to know is a lie—‘The extra time will give the models a chance to learn the ropes and become familiar with the job.’ What a joke! They’re even paying each of them an additional hundred thousand bucks for doing that one Lombardi show! Not even Iman or Claudia has ever earned half that much. Two entire weeks at GN’s expense? At the Plaza-Athénée with hot and cold running limos?
Please
. Gabrielle knows that most new girls have less than two days to get acclimatized, if that. Obviously those two weeks are for Necker to get at me and break me down, Frankie, don’t kid yourself. None of it makes sense any other way.”

“They seem to have thought of everything,” I said finally, forcing myself to push away the impossible matter of Justine’s paternity and make myself consider only the business alternatives.

There weren’t any. None. There was no possibility that we could turn down this opportunity for our three girls, no matter how Justine felt. How could anyone rationalize not grabbing the GN opportunity? Justine had been cleverly painted into a very tight corner. We looked at each other for a minute, as if expecting the other to come up with some brilliant idea. Finally, as the silence lengthened and felt more hopeless by the second, I roused myself.

“Justine, we’re wasting time. You’ll have to deal with this long-lost-you-know-what business sooner or later, but right now we should be letting the girls know that they’re going to Paris.”

“You do it, Frankie,” Justine told me, drooping in the aftereffects of her storm of emotion. “I have to think. I know I don’t have to say it, but this whole mess stays between us.”

“Of course, idiot.” I dropped a kiss on the top of her head, and retreated to my own office, closing the door firmly. I stood still, making no move toward the telephone. I found myself shaking, cold and dizzy. My shock was so great that the only word that came into my head was the one I reserved for the great events of life.
Caramba!

I
t is arranged, Monsieur,” Gabrielle d’Angelle informed Jacques Necker, as she stood before his desk in his office in the Paris headquarters of GN.

“No problem?”

“Certainly not, Monsieur. Miss Loring had little to say but of course she agreed.”

“What about the negotiations, Gabrielle?” he asked eagerly. “What details did she ask about?”

“None. She sounded frankly overwhelmed. The surprise, as I expected, was enormous. She answered me only in monosyllables and she had no questions. I’ll telephone her again, tomorrow, when the news has been absorbed, and finalize everything. Then we can send the contracts to be signed.”

“Report your conversation to me before you authorize any release from our press department. And I want to see that release as soon as it’s written.”

“May I say anything to Monsieur Lombardi? A day doesn’t go by without his asking me about your decision.”

“Lombardi will have to be patient,” Jacques Necker answered curtly, dismissing her with his habitual abrupt nod.

She too would have to be patient, Gabrielle d’Angelle thought as she walked quickly out of the vast office. She would have to restrain her curiosity until she discovered exactly why, out of hours of videotape and
the copious notes she had taken on her impressions of literally dozens of new models from every last agency in Manhattan, Jacques Necker had rapidly chosen three girls. Particularly three girls from the same agency. They were the best of the Loring Model Management lot, exceptional girls, but not, no certainly not, unique. Nothing explained the haste of his choice, nor his impatient insistence that not one of her other suggestions could even be considered.

She would have to be clever enough to find out why she had been sent on a scouting trip to New York when she could have accomplished everything Necker wanted merely by sending a fax to Loring Management with a request for photos. And why had that unpleasant, ungrateful female, Justine Loring, been overwhelmed neither with delight nor with any other positive emotion in spite of this gigantic plum falling into her lap? The agency owner had been angrily and resentfully unresponsive. A series of grunts when handed the coup of a lifetime? An impossibly rude attitude? Hanging up on her? What kind of reaction was that? It was astonishing but not something she intended to tell Necker, since she habitually tried to give him the impression that she had every aspect of a situation under control.

No, watchful patience was required in an extremely odd situation in which the oddest question of all was why Jacques Necker, one of the busiest of men, who ran an enormously complicated group of companies and ordinarily delegated authority in a masterful manner, should have concerned himself for more than a passing minute in this relatively unimportant decision about the models for Lombardi’s spring collection. Why had he himself developed the initial idea of using untested models, for all the world as if he were a bright young publicity attaché? And why was he now asking her so eagerly about routine negotiations with such tense interest?

In addition to the mystery of these questions, Gabrielle d’Angelle considered that she herself had reached far too high a level within GN to have been
asked to go to New York on this matter. Any stylist from one of the couture houses could have accomplished it.

In the twenty years Gabrielle d’Angelle had worked for GN, rising steadily from the typing pool to the job she held now as chief administrative assistant to Necker himself, she’d advanced herself with intelligence, shrewdness and sheer hard work. At forty she had achieved a consummate polish, the impeccably finished and flawlessly groomed freshness of a woman without family responsibilities to occupy her, a woman who is highly paid and has access to the best craftspeople of Paris. Yet, as Gabrielle d’Angelle glanced at herself in the mirror, smoothing her casque of shining dark hair that was cut to the perfect length for the shape of her face, approving of the cut of her new grey suit, she felt no satisfaction at her faultless image. The Lombardi contest left her feeling powerless, because she didn’t know what it was really about. And the one rule that dominated her still unsatisfied ambition was that knowledge was power.

As soon as he was alone, Necker jumped up and walked over to the bank of windows on the top floor of the imposing GN building on the west side of the Avenue Montaigne. He gazed at the sky on this unusually clear January day and wondered how he could possibly contain his excitement. As he looked down it seemed to him that trumpets must be blowing, that flags must be flying from every building, that the branches of the bare trees that lined the avenue must now be laden with the white torches of chestnut blossoms that mean spring to Parisians.

On the left he could see all the way to the tree-encircled Rond-Point of the Champs-Elysées, and on the right, only blocks away, the waters of the Seine below the Place de l’Alma flowed swiftly, reflecting the gaiety and brilliance of the sky. Directly across were the fantastic turn-of-the-century glass and iron domes of the Grand Palais and the Petit Palais, and beyond them
the view stretched past the gardens of the Tuileries to the Louvre itself.

But Paris in all its beauty couldn’t begin to satisfy his excitement. His view, startling as it was, had no relation to his mood. He had to get outside, Jacques Necker realized, and walk off some of his elation. He punched the intercom, told his secretary that he would be out for the rest of the day and took his private elevator down to the street.

He walked quickly, at random, for fifteen minutes, with only one thought in his mind.
Justine was coming!
Try as he would, he couldn’t absorb it, he couldn’t make himself believe it was a reality. The words had no solidity, no ring of truth. All he could imagine, in the midst of his joy, were the things that could go wrong. Justine’s plane could crash, he could be killed in a car accident before she arrived … and why not the end of the world, he asked himself in exasperation, while you’re about it? A great fireball from outer space? Judgment Day for everyone, not just himself?

Jacques Necker’s basic good sense asserted itself and he told himself that perhaps if he bought his daughter a present right now, before he let another hour go by, if he found something to give her that had weight and three dimensions, something tangible, he’d be able to feel and actually experience the amazing fact that she was going to arrive in three days.

Obviously, even though she’d never answered his letters, never even read them, Justine now realized that they would see each other, speak to each other. It was inevitable. No destiny could deny him that meeting. Ever since he’d learned of her existence, only months ago, he’d known that it was absolutely essential for him to talk to her.

He had to tell Justine that he was more deeply ashamed of how he had treated her mother than he was of anything in his life. He had to tell her that for the past thirty-four years he’d blamed himself endlessly for having deserted Helena Loring. They’d both been barely nineteen, both students in New York, when she
had discovered that she was pregnant. He’d fled in a blind panic, returning to Switzerland, leaving Helena alone, unprotected. Nothing could ever excuse his foul cowardice. His punishment had been bitter, yet far less than he deserved. It was not an accident, he thought in his darkest moments, that his wife, poor Nicole, had been unable to conceive, but a judgment on him, visited on a woman to whom he had been resolutely faithful until her death several years ago.

Jacques Necker was not a religious man. He thought that he relied only on what he could feel and touch and prove. Now he found himself addressing a God in whom he didn’t believe. Please, he prayed, let my daughter show a little kindness to me. I can’t ask for forgiveness. I don’t deserve it. I only want to know her. She is the only child I will ever have in this world. Please give me a chance, if only to be with her, to look at her face, to hear her laugh.

He had photographs of Justine, scrapbook after scrapbook of them, heartbreaking photographs over which he pored each night, Jacques Necker thought helplessly, but he knew nothing about her in truth, except the bare facts of her growing up to start her successful business and lead a life that had never included marriage. He had not the slightest insight into any detail of her inner life, he possessed nothing but the pictures of a marvelously pretty little girl growing up into an alluring young beauty. How could she never have married? He didn’t have any idea if Justine was happy or not, and, for some reason he couldn’t understand, this was the most important question he needed to ask her.

Female heads turned as he walked oblivious to anything but his thoughts; a tall man without a scarf or topcoat, his thick blond hair cut very short, with crisp grey curling at his temples; his blue eyes thoughtful, his tie flying in the breeze. No Frenchman, each woman thought to herself. Perhaps English, the tailoring surely, and the shoes. Or perhaps Norwegian or Swedish, the hair, the eyes, the height? Perhaps a rich American? No,
too assertive in these crowded Paris street corners to be American, no matter how rich, too much at home to even glance into the shop windows. But surely someone important, someone to reckon with, someone to dream of meeting, perhaps even someone famous, for there was a familiar quality to his face even though no name attached itself to the stranger who walked so quickly.