Satin Dreams Read online

  Satin Dreams

  Maggie Davis

  All things turn to dust

  Save beauties fashioned well;

  The ivory breast

  Outlives the citadel.

  —Theophile Gautier

  Prologue

  “You can’t do this on your own. You’ll never make it.” The voice on the transatlantic telephone line was crisply bullying. “Your trust pays only, what—twenty-five or thirty thousand a year?” it asked scornfully. “That’s nothing for you, Catherine, the way you’re used to living. Come home. You’re only making a fool of yourself.”

  The girl in the bed scraped strands of thick red-gold hair back from her face. She rolled over on her stomach to squint at the clock on the night table. “What time is it?” she mumbled.

  The clock’s glowing digital numbers said 5:30 A.M., nearly midnight in Washington, but not yet dawn in Paris. The shabby bed-sitting-room was still dark.

  “What do you want?” Even half-awake, she knew the answer. They wanted to frighten her. Make her do what they wanted. The calls were supposed to put her off-balance. Then came threats.

  She sat up, clamping the telephone receiver between bare shoulder and chin, the bright mass of her hair spilling over her naked arms and shoulders. “You know, I can fix this kind of thing,” she said. “I can put a stop to this.”

  “Not this time, Catherine.” A few telephone calls ago, the voice had been sure it would persuade her. Now it was openly menacing. “From now on, you’re going to find out how serious we are.”

  She shivered, drawing the bedclothes around her, the worn sheets contrasting sharply with the exquisite hand-embroidered satin nightgown she wore. Sooner or later, these disembodied voices on the transatlantic lines would get tired of threatening her. Then the pressure wouldn’t be confined to just telephone calls.

  “I know you’re serious, but I’m not going to be bullied,” she blurted. “I’ll—I’ll change my telephone number. I can even have it disconnected!”

  “Don’t be childish, Catherine. You should be concerned with how you’re going to continue to exist this way.” It paused, significantly. “When so much is waiting for you here.”

  She knew very well what was waiting for her, how much they wanted her. She also knew that everything she was doing in Paris—where she worked, where she was living—had been investigated thoroughly.

  She clutched the old blanket around her. The room was bleak, a stove and sink hidden away behind a folding screen. At the end of the room, the window, if one leaned out far enough to see past the brick wall of the building next door, offered a view of the neighborhood around the French government radio and television building. Beyond that, the slope of Paris’s Right Bank led down to the River Seine. The district was hardly a place one would want to live if one could afford anything better.

  “I can always go someplace else,” she reminded the voice. “What would you do if you couldn’t find me?”

  The voice in Washington said carefully, “Is that a threat?”

  She bit her lip. How she wished she could threaten them. “Take it any way you want to.”

  Before the voice could answer, she quickly rolled over on her stomach and slammed the receiver back in its cradle.

  That takes care of that, she thought. Until next time.

  She swung her legs over the edge of the bed, wincing at the icy floor under her bare feet. It was time to get up; her caller had actually done her a favor by ringing her at dawn.

  Static electricity made the satin nightgown cling to her body as she bent to turn on the small gas heater. She saw herself reflected in the mirror on the back of the bathroom door: a sleepy young woman with a tumbled mane of startling red hair that contrasted with pale skin and violet eyes. The mirror-image in the clinging nightgown had a model’s professionally slender body—a little more well-rounded in Paris than in New York, where the standard was almost skeletal—enchantingly leggy, with small, thrusting breasts.

  Catherine studied herself dispassionately. She was so changed, she hardly recognized herself. The music student with orange hair was so drastically altered, flesh seared away by a more than twenty-pound weight loss, as to be hardly recognizable. You wouldn’t think that was all that was needed to make a person professionally “beautiful,” but it was. That, and the four unbelievably expensive days she’d spent at Alexandre de Paris’s salon in the avenue Matignon. Her body was sleek, her hair changed to a shade so glorious it could never be found in nature. Even her skin had been bleached of its few freckles. She wondered if they knew that. That she no longer looked like the woman they wanted.

  With the space heater left on high, she crawled back in bed and sat hunched, arms wrapped around the expensively skimpy satin gown, waiting for the room to warm. The earlymorning call that had dragged her from sleep was not going to be the end of it, she knew. It would get worse.

  Still shaking, she stared at the telephone.

  Do it, she told herself. Fight back—if only to say you won’t put up with being bullied. The multiple electronic clicks of French and American telephone systems resounded loudly in her ear as she dialed the numbers for New York City. The connection, more than a thousand miles away, began to ring.

  It didn’t ring long. When it was picked up, she said, fiercely, “I’ve just been called again. It woke me up. It’s only five-thirty in the morning here!”

  “Oh, my God. Where are—”

  She interrupted, “When I said I didn’t want this to happen anymore, my caller told me that this was the way it was going to be from now on.”

  “Wait,” the voice said hurriedly. “Cath—”

  “I told him if I had to, I’d take care of it. So I’m taking care of it now, do you understand?” Her voice rose. “I want it to stop, the telephone calls—everything! I want you to call off your goons!”

  “Wait a minute, don’t hang up,” he pleaded. “I want to talk to you. We all want to talk to you! Catherine, please—do you realize I haven’t heard your voice in months?”

  “Fix it,” she told him shortly. “Make them stop.”

  “Catherine, darling, listen to reason.” He didn’t conceal his urgency. “Listen to me. There’s nothing we can’t talk out, nothing we can’t—”

  “Fix it!” She’d never talked to anyone this way. But this was the new Catherine.

  There was a pause on the other end of the line. The recording machine had been activated the moment she called the unlisted number, and she knew the conversation was being taped. She had expected that. What she hadn’t expected was his response.

  “No.”

  “N-no?” For a moment she didn’t believe it. “You can’t mean that. I called you, that’s what you wanted, wasn’t it?” When there was no answer, only silence on the wire, she cried, “You can’t do this to me! You’re trying to ruin my life!”

  “Whatever it takes. Whatever it takes, Catherine. Think about it for a moment,” he said, almost pleasantly. “The power is all on our side. And yet you have none.”

  She gripped the receiver, hearing their voices accusing her. You ‘re being unreasonable. You’d cut off your nose to spite your face.

  “Don’t hang up,” the voice in New York told her. “Are you listening? God, I feel we’re closer to getting this settled than we’ve ever been! Just the fact that you called me—”

  She was staring at her reflection in the mirror as though watching someone else. “What your goons are doing to me, what you’re telling them to do,” she said, “isn’t going to make any difference.”

  “They’re not goons, they’re lawyers. They just want to—”

  “You’ve lost.” She took a deep breath, trying to convince herself. “That’s why you keep following me, tormenting me. You’ve l
ost, but you just don’t want to give up!”

  “Catherine? Catherine?” He sensed what was coming. “Damn it—listen to me!”

  The voice was still shouting as she reached over the bed and put the receiver back, breaking the connection.

  “You lost,” she said to the empty room. “No matter what you do, you can’t touch me now.”

  But she shivered again. Now all she had to do was make herself believe it.

  Le Métier à Tisser

  The Loom

  One

  Assistant couturier Gilles Vasse stood partly hidden in the hanging slabs of dark-brown glass panels and rows of tiny light bulbs, chain-smoking Gauloise cigarettes and somberly viewing Mortessier’s afternoon customers in the first row of seats.

  The salon’s showroom was a madhouse, just as it had been for the past two years at Christmas. December was traditionally the holiday lull in Paris fashion before the haute couture houses showed their spring collections, but this snowy winter afternoon the crowd for the regular 3 P.M. showing had overflowed the chrome and white-leather chairs provided for customers. There had been an embarrassing fifteen-minute delay in getting started while the vendeuse, her assistant the seconde, and the receptionist from the foyer had gone to round up more chairs from the fitting rooms.

  Gilles had heard all the racket at his drawing table in the design room, and had come out to see what was going on. Now he stood in the hanging glass panels that masked the models’ entrance area with his silver ashtray in one hand, watching the saleswomen try to restore some sort of order. His handsome, young face with its high cheekbones and sensitive mouth was dramatically offset by his trademark black sweater and tight, black jeans. In the audience, two wives of Arab oil sheiks decked out in lavish diamond jewelry from Bulgari, the oil kingdom’s favorite jeweler, were rather grudgingly making room in the front rows for some Japanese businessmen. Behind them a clutch of uniformly ash blond women with the look of Houston and New York, the mainstay clientele of Paris high fashion, had settled into their seats.

  It seemed a little bizarre to Gilles that Americans and Japanese—not to mention the wives of Middle Eastern oil sheiks—would come thousands of miles to Paris to shop when there were perfectly adequate, perhaps even more expensive high fashion salons in Tokyo, Kuwait, and Dallas. But the lure of a Paris label was an obsession among the world’s wealthy.

  Not that he was complaining, he thought hastily. All he wanted to do was become fabulously wealthy himself.

  The business offer Gilles had been mulling over for several days popped up in his mind again. He paused, cigarette suspended over silver ashtray, his expression suddenly abstract.

  The announcement of a new haute couture house by, incredibly enough, a New York clothing manufacturer, had rocked Paris months ago. Now the gossip in the insular world of haute couture said that Jackson Storm, the emperor of American mass-market fashion, needed a French designer or else his multimillion-dollar, widely heralded couture fashion project would not get off the ground. He wanted a good Paris designer, an exceptional one—someone young and ambitious and eager to break out on his own. Someone, Gilles thought, sighing, like me.

  Behind the alcove there was a faint rustle of fabric, of clothes being adjusted, followed by the seconde’s low hiss as she cued the first model. Mortessier’s show was beginning, this cold winter afternoon, with the somewhat passé best sellers of the fall and winter collection, even though some of the trendier Paris houses were already showing the first of their spring collections.

  As the signal for the show to begin, the recorded music system segued from the pounding beat of a French rock group into a rendition of an old Beatles song, “Yesterday.” Rudi Mortessier, the premier couturier and owner, loved Paul McCartney; it was the cue for the opener, winter coats, to begin.

  Gilles knew he should go back to work. But the wedding gown he was working on depressed him. He was an artist; he hated creating on demand, especially anything as predictable as a white satin outfit for a Danish countess who was marrying a Copenhagen furniture manufacturer. He was just killing time hiding in the glass panels and watching the show; he knew Mortessier’s fall collection, most of which he had designed himself, to the point of boredom.

  But as the first mannequin brushed past him, lifting her eyes in surprise to find Gilles standing there, he told himself that someone was needed to stand there and check out the mannequins, see that their turns were kept up to standard. The girls got amazingly careless, even had a tendency to move through their routines too fast unless someone kept an eye on them. And, Gilles had to admit, he enjoyed watching the American model, Alix. Even now, after so much time at Mortessier’s, she was phenomenal.

  It was incredible that he almost hadn’t hired her that day nearly three months ago on the grounds that she was much too beautiful for a couture house mannequin. Now she was Mortessier’s, perhaps even Paris’s, top model. And still wildly beautiful.

  Gilles fished out the crumpled pack of Gauloises from his jeans and scooped another cigarette from it into his mouth. There was so much about Alix (he wasn’t even sure that was her real name) that still remained a mystery. Had she really been a music student at the Sorbonne as she said? A student who had thrown up a promising career when she’d failed a vital exam. He did know that she’d had a make-over at a chic salon de beauté, the famed Alexandre of Paris; she’d admitted as much in her interview. That was unusual; few models looking for work had that sort of money to spend.

  He watched the American girl glide out into the show area in a violently lavender felt coat, pause, and turn on her heel. She held the coat open to show a matching lavender wool dress underneath. There was a little murmur of pleasure from the first few rows of seats, then a ripple of protracted “aaahs” through the back rows of customers.

  The lavender felt coat was not one of Gilles’s favorites. He’d almost dropped the number from the winter collection when the bulky layers of felt seemed too overwhelming for the wealthy, middle-aged women who were Mortessier’s usual customers. But once Alix had begun showing the number, it had become a best seller.

  If there was an immutable truth in the world of fashion, Gilles knew, it was that a mannequin need not be beautiful nor even very pretty; in fact, a model who was too good-looking was a definite liability, as she detracted from the clothes. Instead, top-flight models had an almost mystical faculty for making clothes look good. It was a gift defying analysis, but all of them had it.

  Of course, one could not do without the basics. It was necessary to have a slender body with level shoulders and hipbones—even though Mortessier’s did not demand the bizarre thirty-two-inch hip measurements the haute couturier Ungaro was said to require. The best mannequins had exceptionally long legs, reasonably sized feet, and a sexy, well-shaped bust, preferably a small one.

  “C’est fou, the way l’Américaine sells,” a voice murmured at Gilles’s elbow.

  Rudi Mortessier, fourth-ranked couturier in Paris after Dior, St. Laurent, and Givenchy, looked like a small, plump gray rabbit with thinning hair. Rudi had just come from the atelier where the spring lines were in production. There were untidy scraps of multicolored threads all over his vest.

  “Of course, everything about this American girl is wrong.” Rudi’s eyes twinkled amiably behind thick, rimless spectacles. “The hair, the purple eyes like a circus poster—tchah, everything about her is terrible!” He flapped small white hands in mock despair. “Except, of course, that when it is all put together, she is irresistible.”

  Gilles stepped a fraction of an inch back from his employer. “You wanted her hair that color,” he said, “not me.”

  Rudi shot him an enigmatic glance. “So I did, so I did.” He turned his attention back to the model, who was revolving slowly on a lighted gold Plexiglas disk set in the floor. “Of course, in the old days we would never have hired her, this technicolored siren of yours. Taste was more subdued then. Who would believe,” the little couturier mused, “violet e
yes with that incredible color of hair? It is like this terrible rock music—it hurts the mind!”

  Impulsively, Rudi put his hand out to touch Gilles’s arm.

  “Ah, but look at the Japanese there in the front rows. They are enchanted! They are going to buy this lilac coat because of her. Merde, this coat is a monstrosity, Gilles,” he observed suddenly. “Lavender and thick, horrible felt. Have you no shame?”

  Gilles didn’t answer. He designed his avant-garde clothes as an attack on the senses, like the rock music blaring from the showroom speakers. Gilles Vasse creations were meant to be experienced, as well as seen. Actually, Gilles had often declared, the wearer was fairly irrelevant—as long as she was skinny. Gilles’s creations were designed to stand alone. Of course, in the old days haute couture had been quite different. Afternoon showings were dignified, reverent affairs, not the noisy, with-it spectaculars of the present-day avenue Montaigne. Some showings were still that way in the older establishments across the city, in the district around the rue de la Paix where the last of the old guard, Gres, Patou, and Chanel, still held forth. There the collections were virtually silent, decorous affairs where the vendeuse, the main saleswoman, knelt discreetly beside the chairs of important customers, answering their questions in whispers. And where the mannequins did nothing more than gracefully glide into the salon’s cathedral-like stillness, holding a piece of cardboard with the number of the design, to aid in ordering.

  “I don’t know how she does it,” Rudi Mortessier cocked his head thoughtfully as he watched the redheaded model go into another turn to show the coat. He gave his assistant couturier a small nudge with his elbow. “Eh, Gilles, there are even times when Alix reminds me of Lisianne. Do you see it? She has the same air of secrets. It’s very intriguing.”

  Gilles stiffened. He told himself that it meant nothing, the passing reference to his wife, Lisianne; Rudi was always reminiscing about former great models, old couture houses, past fashions. But Rudi’s hand on his arm was another matter.