Beautiful People (25 page)

    "But…but…I thought I wasn't supposed to talk about you to anyone else."

    They were interrupted by a buzz at the penthouse door. "Niall," Belle exclaimed, rather testily, to Emma's ear. Had they had a row, she wondered?

    "Great," said Belle, as a handsome waiter entered with a bottle of champagne.

    "Just the one glass," she instructed as the waiter placed a flute before Emma. "In front of me," she barked, as he failed to remove it.

    As the waiter, with a shaking hand, filled her flute and then made his escape, Belle continued setting out the terms of the agreement. "There will, of course, be no salary."

    Emma stared at Belle in shock. "Sorry?"

    "It's an education, working for me," Belle cut in. "You're working for someone famous. You should be paying me, by rights. For broadening your horizons."

    Emma took a deep, stiffening breath. "I can't accept not being paid." She willed her knees not to shake. "And if you insist on not paying me, I'm afraid I really can't take the job." She met Belle's angry gaze with a flintiness belying her nerves. There was deadlock.

    The suite telephone now rang. Exclaiming crossly about Niall again, Belle reached for the nearest receiver. Just as she did so, Morning started wailing from the bedroom.

    Her heart thumping at the recent drama, Emma walked swiftly to her bedroom to attend to what was, for the moment at least, her charge.

    She bent over the side of the cot and looked down into Morning's liquid black pupils with their pure, glowing whites. He made a gurgling noise and smiled up at her.

    She felt a surge of tremendous love as she picked him up. He snuggled contentedly in her arms, a small smile puckering his pink little mouth, a smell of warm, washed baby wafting up from him. Emma gazed down at him indulgently, tightened her arms round the baby's little body, and planted a kiss on his forehead.

    Could she really leave this baby with Belle? On the other hand, could she really stay without a salary? Of course not. It was impossible. Belle was impossible…

In his Los Angeles office, Mitch was, once again, feeling slightly stunned. There he'd been, asleep after that rare thing in Hollywood—a colossally indulgent lunch—and deep in a wonderful dream in which all four of the Oscars' Best Actress nominees were clients of his.

    This was followed by an even better dream: a call from Jack Saint saying he'd heard good things about Belle's current turn in London as an evil, child-eating manipulator and would she be interested in being the Countess of Tyfoo,
Galaxia
's evil, man-eating manipulator? Only, after Mitch had pinched himself a few times, this dream had turned out to be real.

    He still could not quite believe what had happened in London. That the production of
Titus Andronicus
in which Belle appeared— naked for much of one scene, admittedly—had proved an unexpected triumph. Belle had even been singled out by one critic "for adding undisputed buoyancy to the production."

    When the call was at an end—never long with Saint—Mitch spun himself round in his seat so hard the chair shot across the room and fell over with him in it. The resulting shattering noise was enough to draw Greg Cucarachi to the doorway.

    "Celebrating are we?" Cucarachi enquired snidely.

    "Sorta," Mitch said, defiant from beneath the avalanche of papers he had knocked from his desk. "My client Belle Murphy's got a part in
Galaxia
," he added, replacing his glasses with a flourish.

    "Congratulations," Greg said smoothly, without missing a beat. "My client Christian Harlow's gonna be very interested to hear that."

    Mitch stared back at the trim figure lounging elegantly in the doorway. An alarm bell was shrilling in his heart. Amidst all the excitement of finding Belle back on the Hollywood bandwagon, he had completely forgotten that this particular bandwagon had Harlow on it already.

    "Your client can be as interested as he likes," Mitch said steadily, "but my client no longer is. Things between her and Graham MacDonald are both steady and serious," he extemporised, watching with satisfaction as Cucarachi tried and failed to reply to this. As his hated co-worker departed, Mitch picked up the phone to call Belle in London.

    The penthouse phone rang just as Emma had settled Morning in his cot. Under strict instructions not to answer any calls, Emma ignored it. Happy after his bottle, the baby snuggled into his mattress. Now and then a warm brown eye flicked open; Emma sensed that he needed to reassure himself that she was still there. He often woke her in the night for the same reason, but one look into the liquid chocolate eyes so full of appreciation, and all tiredness would melt away.

    Emma yawned. As ever, it was hot in the penthouse and, as ever, she was tired.

    She was shocked wide awake by a loud and persistent shrieking from the next room. Such sounds, of course, routinely emitted from the bedroom, but there was a less orgiastic quality than usual to what Emma was hearing now. Seizing Morning, she leapt to her feet and ran to see what the matter was. It sounded, she thought, as if Belle was being murdered.

    One could always hope.

The camera flashed and whirred.

    Darcy, her knees raised in their tattered fishnet tights, her naked back against the cold marble floor, and her head thrust into one of the none-too-clean corners of the ornate fireplace, wondered, not for the first time that morning, afternoon, or whatever time of day it had got to by now, what the hell she was doing here.

    She reminded herself hurriedly that this was high-fashion photography of the most esoteric and artistic kind, under the direction of the style legend Rumtopf. And that she, an actress about to make the breakthrough into the big time, ought to be grateful for the opportunity.

    Darcy knew this because her newly acquired model agency, Wild, had told her so. According to Sam, its fearsome head, the Rumtopf shoot was the first in a series of photographic sessions and features aimed at launching Darcy into the stratosphere ahead of
Galaxia
's release. The fact that the film had not yet been made was immaterial; interest had to be created right from the start.

    Whether Darcy actually wanted to be in the stratosphere was, she gathered, immaterial too. The studio making
Galaxia
wanted it, and fashion shoots were part of the contract NBS had sent her. It had been the size of a telephone directory—possibly two—and bristled with little, yellow plastic stickers marking where she was to sign.

    Darcy squirmed on the hard studio floor, feeling her ribs press painfully against it. It was just as well she had lost so much weight following her break with Niall. Rumtopf, however, didn't seem to think she was thin enough. He had stood glowering in the back of the changing room as Darcy was tugged, rammed, and generally shoehorned into a basque so full of rips it looked as if a lion had attacked it. This was, she discovered, one of Rumtopf's own designs. It did not make her warm to him, in any sense. The studio was ice cold, and the floor she sprawled on felt gritty, as if it could have done with a good sweep. The fact that everything was painted white didn't help.

    Rumtopf himself wore white: white jeans, white cowboy boots, a white leather jacket, and white circular spectacles that did not appear to have lenses in them. His hair was white and cut extremely short. He had a mouth like a bouncy castle, and his nose looked as if it belonged to someone else. Perhaps it did. Or had.

    He turned glittering, strangely slitted eyes on Darcy through his glassless frames and regarded her unsmilingly and at length. "Nein, nein," he stormed. "Spread ze legs more. Push out the chest more. Ja!"

    The smell of hundreds of scented candles was making Darcy feel sick. Tuberose had never been her favourite. And she had recently read somewhere that a liking for very strong perfume signalled depression or madness.

    The scenario Rumtopf had cast her in seemed to strongly support this theory. "The Master's vision," one of the acolytes had explained in awed tones, "is The Murder House." Darcy listened with disbelief. Every shot—or "tableau"—was to feature a different room and a different murder, with herself as all the victims.

    The first "tableau" had been the bathroom; she had lain in the freestanding, claw-footed, candlelit tub in a satin ballgown in whose design Rumtopf's trademark rips and tears were generously represented. It was ripped particularly around the area of her breasts where a bloody, fake stab-wound appeared.

    As the next "tableau," to feature her strangled in the bedroom, now got under way, Darcy's feeling that the shoot crossed the line from the artistic to the downright psychopathic increased. Perhaps, she now tried to convince herself, it was just as well that Rumtopf, an obvious homicidal misogynist, had an outlet for his fantasies. It may be humiliating and unpleasant for her as the model, but she was probably doing humankind a favour. What might have happened had the Master been obliged to bottle this sort of thing up hardly bore thinking about.

    It was obvious that women weren't Rumtopf's thing. The whiteblond, powerfully muscled figure in black who sat on the sidelines behind the snaking cables of the lights was, Darcy had gathered, the Master's current muse, Stefan. He wore a black baseball cap, which was turned back to front, and the piece of material attached to its reverse to shield the wearer's neck from the sun hung in front of his face. And these, Darcy thought despairingly, are the people telling everyone else what to wear.

    The next "tableau" was The Grand Salon, and so she was lying under a table, her makeup smoothly immaculate apart from the fake bullet wound in her temple. A side-parted and pouting male model in boxer shorts and lenseless spectacles stood beside her, holding a toy pistol of green neon plastic. Darcy had noticed that, while his chest was waxed, the legs protruding from beneath the houndstoothchecked boxer shorts he had changed into were extremely hairy. As the Master prodded her again, Darcy felt a giggle rising irresistibly in her throat.

    "Nein! Nein!" shrieked Rumtopf, the spurs on his cowboy boots ringing as he stamped his feet. "Think murder! Think Sweeney Todd! Think Jack the Ripper! Think Dr. Crippen! Think…"

    "Yeah, okay," Darcy interjected hurriedly, anxious to be spared more of the grisly roll call that had evidently provided inspiration. What she was really thinking about was lunch, however. Her stomach was a storm-tossed sea of hunger. She had been rushed to the Rumtopf shoot directly after the plane from Los Angeles had touched down in Rome and had seen hardly anything of Italy. Least of all the leisurely-lunch-in-shady-vine-draped-taverna type of Italy she would so appreciate now. Where was the Florence where they'd film
Galaxia?

    Finally, the end came. Darcy, hurriedly gathering her small number of things together—her luggage, such as it was, waited outside in the car that had brought her from the airport—looked up to see Rumtopf's strangely diagonal eyes gazing assessingly at her.

    "Rumtopf," he declared suddenly, in thrilling tones.

    Darcy eyed him uncertainly, wondering what was coming next. Perhaps nothing was. Perhaps the mere iteration of his identity was meant to be sufficient, reminding the lesser mortals in the room like herself that one was in The Presence of Genius.

    "Rumtopf will now make you a wonderful offer. The most wonderful thing a woman in your position could wish for."

    Darcy glanced at the camera. Frankly, the most wonderful thing a woman in her position could wish for was the destruction of the images just taken.

    "Rumtopf will make your dress for the Oscars."

His red brows knotted, his pale-blue eyes narrowed and cold, Niall sat glumly in the back of the Mercedes conveying himself and Belle to the airport. But of the two of them, only Belle would be boarding the first-class flight to Florence. Only Belle would be taking a lead role in a guaranteed blockbuster movie.

    As the car ground slowly through the London traffic, Niall raked a resentful hand through his dark-red hair. It was so bloody unfair. Just what was it about him? Why was it that every woman he went out with automatically got a part in
Galaxia
, tipped to be the biggest thing since Everest, while he remained treading the boards, a mere bit-part player?

    Granted, he was a bit-part player in one of London's current hits, but now that Belle's own particular bit parts were leaving, it seemed unlikely the success would continue. Not even the most ardent Shakespeare loyalist in the cast was deluded enough to imagine that the audience came to hear the Bard's words alone. The chance to see a Hollywood celebrity bare all had had more than a little to do with it too.