Satin Dreams Page 9

  “We know that,” Candace Dobbs put in quickly. “Jackson Storm has extensive—”

  “You got a coupla’ options,” Ms. Goodman went on. “Like, you can do what every other couture house does. Market a new perfume.”

  Peter Frank sat up. “Yes, we plan a perfume in—”

  “But unless you can get Elizabeth Taylor to promote it,” she was talking now only to Jack, “a perfume is going to bomb. You could go with a new fabric like ultra-suede. But who’s got a new ultra-suede?” She shrugged. “A top-rated Paris designer? So, you already got one. Gilles Vasse is a possible great.”

  Jack lifted his fingers and made a steeple of them, resting them against his lips. She’s better than she looks, he thought. A little meshugga hustler.

  Peter Frank said quickly, “How did you know about Gilles Vasse?”

  But Jack motioned Peter to keep quiet. “The deal’s not closed yet.”

  Maybe the Medivani kid really was an art student. But did he need her? His stateside operations were hurting; Junior Lonestar, Sam Laredo Jeans, his men’s wear divisions were all being drained for the Paris venture. It didn’t make sense, princess publicity for them. But sometimes a crazy thing like this was a shot in the arm.

  “Interesting,” Jack said neutrally. “But maybe too complicated.”

  Ms. Goodman tensed. For a moment he saw uncertainty. “The prince will send his friends over to buy.” She looked him straight in the eye. “The prince’s influential friends are currently buying from St. Laurent and Givenchy, but Prince Alessio will get them to bring their trade over to the Maison Louvel.” She lowered her eyes discreetly. “They all gamble in the prince’s casino.”

  Jack held back a smile. The prince’s offer was worthy of the best Seventh Avenue games. He let her dangle for a long, stressful moment.

  “You push too hard,” he said finally.

  Brooksie Goodman flopped back in her chair. “Apprentice designer,” she said a little hoarsely. “It’s what Princess Stephanie was at Dior, we wouldn’t take anything less. But Princess Jacqueline wants to learn the business. She’s not going to screw around.”

  “Base numbers,” Peter Frank murmured.

  “Yeah.” Her small brown eyes were pinned on Jackson Storm. “In addition to the subsidies, publicity. It goes with the Medivani name. You get in Vogue, Vanity Fair, Women’s Wear Daily, the Wall Street Journal—”

  “Stop, you’re killing me.” Jack pointed to the paper she’d taken from her purse. “What’s that?”

  She handed it to him. “Suggested contract, subject to your lawyers’ approval. Prince Medivani will underwrite Princess Jacqueline’s salary thirty to forty percent, negotiable. A car will bring her to work and pick her up every day. She has her own bodyguard. There’s no problem with security, or insurance.”

  At that moment the telephone rang.

  Jack continued to stare at Ms. Goodman. For the price of a subsidized salary and no doubt a large headache, they could have a real live princess on the premises. Jake, he told himself wryly, you should be so lucky.

  Peter Frank held out the telephone. “It’s Gilles.”

  Jack took the receiver. “Excuse me,” he said, flashing his famous smile. “The way my luck’s been going today, I’m about due for a major screw-up.”

  Seven

  “Ah, he was in a tizzy, that Gilles!” Iris exclaimed in her strangely mixed accents. “I never saw our pauvre petit so bonkers!” The tall, willowy black girl eyed Alix apprehensively as they took off the white suits and hung them up on hangers for the maitresse to check. “Why should our Gilles yell at you like that, Alix? When he say to you that you have ruined his career?”

  Alix picked up her sweater and skirt, keeping her back to the other model. She knew very well why Gilles had lost his temper when she’d returned from the employees’ lounge. She’d told him she didn’t want to argue anymore about leaving Mortessier’s. And Gilles had exploded.

  It was all so ridiculous. There was no reason why she should leave Mortessier’s right now except that Gilles had suddenly made up his mind that he needed her. He seemed to feel that his clothes wouldn’t be successful at the Maison Louvel unless she were there to model them. Gilles was so testy these days, it was impossible to talk to him without having him fly off the handle.

  Alix stepped into her woolen skirt and zipped it up. She supposed it was normal for him to feel nervous and insecure about his new job, but it was hardly fair of him to take it out on her. The way he’d carried on, finally storming out of the design room, had reminded Alix of the other emotional storms she’d endured lately. After Nicholas Palliades’s raging paranoia, Rudi’s hysterics, and now Gilles’s tantrum, she was sick and tired of scenes.

  She knew Gilles was also worried about his wife having their baby. But I have my problems, too, Alix thought. At any time now, I’m going to get another telephone call from New York or Washington.

  She picked up the silk scarf she’d worn that morning and pulled it around her head. And this call is going to be the worst so far. I’ve already made sure of that.

  Iris leaned against the doorjamb of the changing room, wearing only tanga panties, her arms folded over her brown breasts. “Mebbe you should go with Gilles. You make his designs look marvelous good. Besides,” she added practically, “you not doing so much here with Rudi. Except maybe you get more rich types that tear your clothes off.”

  Alix had to laugh. Iris didn’t believe the story about catching her dress on a doorhandle. “That was just a mistake. It won’t happen again.”

  The other woman looked skeptical. “Mistake? Niko Palliades did mal chose to you, didn’t he? I saw him at the show that day, standing in the back watching you with them black, black eyes. I knew then that big tiger going to get what he wanted.”

  Alix finished tying the scarf under her chin. “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “Oh, honey, I see pictures of him in the magazines; when they are taking photos of the swells they always take Niko because he so sexy, so good-looking. He take out all the little bon chic-bon genre from the seizième arrondissement, the little heiresses, to the races, the big charity balls.” She shook her head. “But he don’t look at them like that. I see him at the show and I say to myself, ‘Iris, he going to have our beautiful Alix, like a big cat with a little bird.’“

  Alix picked up her cardigan. Iris had been her friend since she’d started to work at Mortessier’s. Suddenly, it was on the tip of her tongue to blurt out the whole terrible story, her stupid plan to take a lover—the more unacceptable the better to defy Robert—and what a fiasco it had been. She was carrying a burden of disappointment and guilt she couldn’t seem to get rid of.

  “Well?” Iris said.

  Alix looked away. She couldn’t even tell her about the funny, awful dinner at La Veille Russe. Because it was part of a larger, more complicated story. “Well, what?” she murmured.

  Iris stared at her. “Oh, luv, you one strange one! Sometime I feel like you somebody else when I see you dressed up in Gilles’s clothes. Look at you now. You still wearing all them student down jackets and boots. Why don’t you go back? You be more happy there, in music school.”

  “I wouldn’t be happier back at the Sorbonne, Iris. I flunked out.”

  The model looked at her sympathetically. “Can’t you go home, honey? Your family—they kick you out, too?”

  Alix held back a laugh. “No, no, it’s not that. Look, I think you’d better get some clothes on,” she pointed out, “unless you want to ride home on the Metro in a tanga.”

  The Parisian plumbers, plasterers and carpenters left the Maison Louvel promptly at six o’clock, and at that hour peace and quiet descended upon the historic old mansion in the rue des Benedictines.

  Jack Storm leaned back in his chair with a sigh. Peace and quiet was not peace of mind. The latter was something he’d given up the day he came to Paris to start the Maison Louvel. But it was soothing to be alone in the old building for a cha
nge and not have to listen to alien French voices, the squeal of electric saws, and unidentifiable objects being dropped downstairs.

  Jack gazed at the unpainted ceiling of his office. The spotty plaster overhead reminded him that there had been another argument between the New York decorators and the French contractors.

  He needed Mindy, he thought irritably. Things never ran right when she wasn’t around. Mindy Ferragamo had been with him since the embryo Seventh Avenue days, when he’d given up a successful job as a tie salesman to risk his first venture into a men’s wear line. Those first years Mindy had been his bookkeeper and girl Friday. They had been exciting, exasperating years, trying to get the business off the ground. They’d achieved success, but they’d also had some major disasters. Including a loft fire that had all but wiped them out, and not to mention the sudden bust in the market so common to the rag trade, when “leisure” suits bottomed out and Jackson Storm, Inc. was so overstocked they couldn’t give them away.

  Those had been the days. Before the moneymen. Before the multimillion-dollar corporate ventures. Before the expansion in the face of risk and overextension. Once he’d actually made love to Mindy, Jack remembered. They’d fallen into each other’s arms after some crisis—he couldn’t even remember, now, which one. Late one night there in the old Thirty-third Street office, coming together with a burst of awkward need that had surprised them both. He’d tumbled her on a table full of partly assembled tweed sport jackets.

  It was something they’d both tried to forget soon after it ended. At least in the last twenty years since, Jack told himself, Mindy had never given any indication she remembered that night in his office. Or if she did, that she placed any importance on it. Of all the women he’d gone to bed with, he could say Mindy was the one who had given him the least trouble. If not exactly the most satisfaction.

  A telephone rang down the hall, in the offices being used by the public relations people. Jack turned back to his cluttered desk, making a mental note to remind whoever it was down there, probably Candy Dobbs, to go home.

  The mass of papers on his desk needed a file cabinet. Jack couldn’t wait to get his office fixed; when the walls were finally painted he wanted to be sure the mounted photographs were brought from New York, copies of those in his executive suite that were his lucky trademarks, the galaxy of former Jackson Storm “discoveries.” All were ad models from famous Storm King campaigns. One was now starring in a current Hollywood film. Then there was the Sam Laredo jeans girl of television commercial fame, and the European aristocrat who’d made her fortune designing shopping mall leisure wear.

  Lined up on the walls of his New York office, Jackson Storm’s discoveries made an impressive sight. They’d do the same thing in Paris.

  Rather predictably, a vision of magnificent red hair and creamy skin rose up in Jack’s mind. Redheads were not usually his thing, he preferred brunettes, but the American model, Alix, had an air of quirky, smouldering passion that was fascinating.

  Jack’s imagination roamed free, for the briefest of moments, to picture the pleasures involved in tumbling the redhead on a pile of sports jackets. He reached out to shove his appointment book and a stack of Paris ad proposals to one side.

  Unfortunately, redheaded dynamite wasn’t what he needed at the moment. Or one young Greek millionaire stud who wouldn’t commit his money unless she was part of the Maison Louvel operation. Or a French kid designer, Jack thought disgustedly, who’d just blown the whole deal.

  There was no doubt the girl was valuable. He’d love to have her as this year’s Jackson Storm media signature. That blazing copper hair, that creamy skin and lush wide mouth—not to mention those unbelievable dark purple eyes, were unforgettable. If Rita Hayworth and Liz Taylor were the look of the forties and fifties, and the Brinkley-Hutton-Tiegs blondes the look of the sixties and seventies, then Mortessier’s flame-haired model was the perfect 1980s-1990s beauty. The time was ripe for redheads, Jack knew, instinctively. They had the fire and the color for the nineties clothes, cars, jewels, the spirit of life in the fast lane. The look was vivid, hyper, super-elegant—and worth millions in the mass market, he was sure.

  He checked his wristwatch. There was a restaurant, Bourrier at Porte Maillot, that he wanted to try before they closed for the week before Christmas in the French tradition. He suddenly realized he’d waited too long to find someone to dine with him. He’d had lunch with Peter Frank. Peter was out.

  The telephone had stopped ringing down in the PR office. Jack considered asking Candace Dobbs to dinner at Bourrier, then rejected it. He didn’t want to talk shop all evening; he wanted to get away from the subject of the Maison Louvel.

  The redheaded vision flitted through his mind again. He would love to have dinner with gorgeous Alix, but Nicholas Palliades was a certified son of a bitch. Jack wasn’t ready, yet, to commit suicide.

  Somewhere on his desk, he remembered, was a confidential report on the Palliades family he’d requested from his New York brokers, some copies of tax disputes and court challenges in West Germany, a thick wad of magazine articles, and a review in a scholarly magazine by a professor of economics at the University of Zurich which concluded that the Palliades empire, hidden behind a screen of the world’s largest fleet of oil tankers was, even more than that of Onassis and Goulandris, too complicated to ever evaluate.

  The Palliadeses’ personal lives, though, were another matter.

  After looking at the investigators’ report, Jack had to admit the Palliadeses were like something out of a sleazy novel.

  Old Socrates, the founder of the empire, was a peasant from an impoverished Isthmus goat farm who’d shipped out early in life on a Greek island freighter. There was a legend, probably apocryphal, that he’d been a partner with young Aristotle Onassis in their first business venture—pushing a wheelbarrow of sand through the slums of Buenos Aires. For the Argentinian equivalent of a penny, a child could thrust his hands into the sand in search of cheap prizes.

  Twenty years later, he had made a fortune buying American war surplus freighters to expand the shipping empire. Socrates Palliades had grown rich from among other things, slaughtering whales in the Pacific in defiance of an international ban on endangered species. He had even been brought into court in the United States for illegal oil shipping practices.

  The ruthless founder of Palliades-Poseidon Lines, Inc. had been overweeningly ambitious for his only son, Stavros, but the heir’s marriage to an Irish brewery heiress had been disastrous. The youngest grandson had died tragically three years ago in an accident aboard one of the Palliades tankers in the Persian Gulf. And now, if the rumors were true, Socrates Palliades was dying of cancer. Which meant the surviving grandson, Nicholas Palliades, would inherit the vast Palliades corporation.

  Included in the folder was a small photo file, early family shots at the family island of Poseidonos, two sunbrowned little boys water-skiing with their beautiful mother, then photos of somewhat older boys at Le Rosey, the Swiss school that educated European royalty and the children of vast wealth.

  There was a gap of several years. The next pictures showed a tall, good-looking teenager on the beach at Cannes, and again in front of the Paris Ritz, accompanying world media darling Princess Catherine Medivani.

  One had to be a hermit not to remember that well-publicized romance. Princess Catherine, known as Princess Pussy for good reason, had a reputation for sex and drugs. At twenty she was lovely, with her movie-star mother’s famous features. In the photographs, Nicholas Palliades at age sixteen had been a beautiful kid, Jack remembered, impressed. Nothing like the present-day world-class bastard who’d confronted him in his office in Italian-tailored suit, Rolex watch, and up-yours attitude.

  The photographs dwindled down to a few clippings. Nicholas Palliades had attended a Swiss university, then took a degree in engineering at Stanford, in California. Which accounted for the American accent.

  Currently, Niko Palliades appeared only occasionally in newspapers
as a top-string polo player and one of the best skiers in Europe. But in the recent past he’d run with the same set as Princess Caroline of Monaco, the Prince and Princess von Sturm und Taxis, and the present Duchess of York when she was plain Sarah Ferguson, living out of wedlock with race driver Paddy McNally in Switzerland.

  There was an interesting footnote. Niko Palliades had no drug record, which was surprising, considering his Princess Catherine days. And he had no close friends with one exception. Old Socrates Palliades had turned his grandson over to the care of a young Greek sailor on the Palliades yacht after the death of his father. The old man wanted the boy to have a good role model and companion—one who was definitely heterosexual. Dmitri Lakis, not much older than his charge, had been all of that.

  Jack Storm couldn’t help a snort of laughter. There was only a blurry picture of a good-looking young sailor in the stern of the Palliades yacht in the harbor of Pireus. Lakis had looked after young Nicholas each year during summer vacations, until he went away to get his degree at Stanford.

  The old fox, Jack thought. With a kid that good-looking and that rich, Socrates had taken no chances.

  One more item caught his eye. Nicholas Palliades’s birth date. The world-class bastard who’d given him such a hard time wasn’t even thirty. As far as Jack was concerned, Nicholas Palliades could have his redheaded dolly and be happy. As long as the Maison Louvel got Palliades’s money.

  He still needed someone for dinner.

  There was only one person who’d made his day interesting. Ms. Brooksie Goodman was hardly a beauty, too short, a plain-looking girl in spite of her expensive French clothes. But hell, she could talk, she had ideas, and Jack needed to be entertained. He had liked Brooksie Goodman’s ideas of what they needed for the Paris venture. And he remembered the throwaway about introducing a new fabric, something as innovative as ultra-suede.

  He swiveled his chair to the darkened window and ran his fingers through his hair, squinting at his reflection. Hell, he was acting as though he couldn’t get a dinner date! He was still trim and flat-bellied. The gray flannel Armani suit looked good. The hair was still good. His French barber had put a rinse on it that upped the platinum, and set off the famous Jackson Storm blue eyes. The silver hair and sharp blue gaze had made a thousand sales.