Chasing Cezanne (2 page)

In the way of new editors making their mark, Camilla promptly invested a considerable amount of Garabedian's money in self-promotion. She was seen—appropriately
and expensively dressed, of course—at all the right occasions, beaming at all the right people, the magic moments being photographed by her personal
paparazzo
. Well before her first issue of
DQ
appeared, she had managed to establish a certain level of celebrity based on nothing more substantial than social stamina.

But those countless evenings of seeing and being seen and cultivating, those dozens of follow-up lunches, were to pay off. Camilla quickly came to know everybody she needed to know—that is, the rich and the bored, the social mountaineers and, perhaps most important, their decorators. Camilla paid particularly close attention to the decorators, knowing that their influence over clients often extended far beyond advice about fabrics and furniture; knowing also the fondness that decorators have for publicity.

And so, on those rare occasions when one of the magazine's chosen victims showed any reluctance to have her home invaded by photographers, writers, florists, stylists, and numerous black-clad attendants with cellular phones, Camilla called the decorator. The decorator twisted his client's arm. The doors were opened.

In this way, Camilla managed to go where no other glossy magazine had gone before. In fact, her very first issue contained a scoop, a double triumph—the Park Avenue triplex (an Impressionist in every bathroom) and the Mustique cottage (three servants per guest) belonging to Richard Clement of the Wall Street Clements. A normally private, almost reclusive bachelor, he had surrendered
to a pincers movement mounted by his young Italian companion (a neophyte decorator himself) and Camilla. The resulting article, twenty pages of honeyed description and luscious photography, had been widely noticed and much admired.
DQ
was off to a fine start.

Three years had passed, and by keeping rigidly to its credo—“Never,
ever
, a nasty word about anybody”—the magazine had flourished. Next year, even allowing for Camilla's expenses, it would make a noticeable amount of money.

Andre picked up the latest issue and turned to the pages featuring the photographs he had taken of Buonaguidi's apartment in Milan. He smiled at the memory of the little industrialist and his bodyguard being directed by Camilla to rehang the Canaletto in a more photogenic spot. As it happened, she'd been right. He enjoyed working with her. She was amusing, she had a good eye, and she was generous with Garabedian's money. Another year of regular assignments from her, and he would have enough to get away and do his book.

He wondered what she had for him today and hoped it would take him to the sun. The New York winter had been so cold that when the city's sanitation department had gone on one of its strikes, very few people had noticed. The whiff of rotting garbage, usually a potent negotiating tool, had been neutralized by ice. Union men were counting the days until spring, and a pungent thaw.

The sound of high heels on the polished slate floor made Andre look up in time to see Camilla clicking by, her hand tucked under the elbow of a young, bearded man
who appeared to be dressed in a black tent. As they stopped in front of the elevator, Andre recognized Olivier Tourrenc, a fashionable Parisian designer renowned for his minimalist furniture and currently at work transforming a SoHo meat-packing plant into a boutique hotel.

The elevator arrived. A flurry of air kisses—one for each cheek and one for luck—was exchanged. As the elevator doors slid shut, Camilla turned to Andre.

“Sweetie! How
are
you? How boring of me to keep you waiting.” She took him firmly by the elbow and started to propel him past the receptionist's desk. “You've met Dominique, of course.”

The receptionist looked up and offered a token rictus, which barely stretched her lipstick.

“Yes,” said Andre. “I'm afraid so.”

Camilla sighed as she steered Andre down the corridor. “Staff are
so
difficult. She's a bit po-faced, I know, but she does have a rather useful father.” Camilla looked at Andre over the top of her dark glasses. “Sotheby's.”

They were followed into Camilla's office by the senior secretary, a willowy middle-aged man armed with a notepad and wearing a deep, out-of-season tan. He smiled at Andre. “Still taking those heavenly snaps, are we?”

“We're doing our best, Noel. Where have you been?”

“Palm Beach. Don't even
think
of asking who I was staying with.”

“I wouldn't dream of it.”

Noel looked disappointed and turned to Camilla. “Mr. G. would like a word with you. All the other calls can wait.”

Camilla paced to and fro behind her desk, the phone
cradled on her shoulder, her voice a low and intimate purr. Andre recognized it as her Garabedian voice, and he wondered, not for the first time, if their relationship was confined to business. Camilla was a little too overpowering for his taste, too much like a corporate missile, but she was undoubtedly an attractive woman, successfully resisting the passage of time with every available artifice. She was slender, just the acceptable side of skinny, her neck still smooth and unwattled, the backs of her arms, her thighs, and her buttocks lean and taut as a result of her daily six a.m. workouts. Only one part of Camilla was remotely thickset: her hair. Camilla's hair, dark brown, helmet-cut, so straight, so clean, so shiny, so fabulously bouncy, was a legend at Bergdorf's, where it was serviced three times a week. Andre watched it fall across her cheek as she leaned forward, cooing goodbye to Garabedian before hanging up.

She looked at Andre and made a face. “God, the things I have to do. He's giving an Armenian dinner party. Can you imagine?”

“You'll love it. Give you a chance to wear the national costume.”

“What's that?”

“Ask Noel. He'll probably lend you his.”

“Not funny, sweetie. Not funny at all.” Camilla made a note on her pad and looked at the oversized Rolex nugget on her wrist. “God, I must fly.”

“Camilla? You asked me to come in and see you. Remember?”

“I'm late for lunch. It's Gianni. I daren't keep him waiting. Not again.” She stood up. “Listen—it's icons, sweetie. Icons on the Riviera, maybe a little Fabergé as well. You'll have to root around. The owner's an old Russian dowager. Noel has all the details.” Camilla scooped her bag off the desk. “Noel! Is the car down there? Where's my coat? Call Gianni at the Royalton and tell him I'm stuck in traffic. Say I'm on my way back from a deeply upsetting funeral.”

Camilla blew Andre a kiss before clicking off to the elevator, her hair performing its fabulous bounce, the junior secretary trotting alongside with her coat and a fistful of messages. Andre shook his head and went over to perch on the edge of Noel's desk.

“Well,” Andre said, “it's icons, sweetie. On the Riviera. That's all I know.”

“Aren't you the lucky one.” Noel referred to his notepad. “Let's see, now. The house is about twenty miles from Nice, just below Saint-Paul-de-Vence. Ospaloff is the old dear's name, and she says she's a princess.” Noel looked up and winked. “But don't we all these days? Anyway, you're booked in for three nights at the Colombe d'Or. Camilla's coming through to do the interview on her way to Paris. She'll be staying the night, so the two of you will be able to have a cozy little dinner. Just don't do anything I wouldn't do.”

“Don't worry about it, Noel. I'll say I have a headache.”

“You do that. Here.” Noel pushed a folder across the desk. “Tickets, car and hotel confirmations, and Mother
Russia's address and phone number. Don't miss the plane. She's expecting you the day after tomorrow.”

Andre slipped the folder in his bag and stood up. “Anything I can bring back for you? Espadrilles? Cellulite cream?”

Noel raised his eyes to the ceiling and shuddered. “Since you ask, a little lavender essence would be very nice.” The phone rang. Noel picked it up, waggling his fingers in farewell as Andre turned to leave.

The Riviera
. Andre wrapped the thought around himself like a blanket before going out to face the frozen grime of Madison Avenue. A bitter wind, cold enough to split skin, made pedestrians flinch and lower their heads. The nicotine fraternity—those huddled masses yearning to inhale who gather in small, guilty groups outside the entrance doors of Manhattan's office buildings—looked more furtive and uncomfortable than ever, their faces pinched in a vise of frigid air, sucking on their cigarettes and shivering. Andre always thought it was ironic that smokers were denied equal-opportunity privileges and banished to the street, while their colleagues with a weakness for cocaine could indulge themselves in the warmth and relative comfort of the office rest rooms.

He stood on the corner of Fifty-first and Fifth, hoping for a cab to take him downtown.
The Riviera
. By now the mimosa should be in bloom, and the more hardy inhabitants would be having lunch out of doors. The operators who ran the beaches would be adjusting their prices upward and wondering how little they could manage to pay
this summer's batch of
plagistes
. Boats would be having their bottoms scraped, their paintwork touched up, their charter brochures printed. The owners of restaurants, boutiques, and nightclubs would be flexing their wallets at the prospect of the annual payout, the May-to-September grind that allowed them to spend the rest of the year in prosperous indolence.

Andre had always liked the Riviera, the effortless, usually charming way in which it plucked money from his pocket while somehow making him feel that he had been rendered a favor. He was quite happy to endure the over-populated beaches, the occasional rudeness, the frequently grotesque prices, the infamous summer traffic—all these and worse he could forgive in return for an injection of south of France magic. Ever since Lord Brougham reinvented Cannes in the 1830s, the coastal strip had been attracting aristocrats and artists, writers and billionaires, fortune hunters, merry widows, pretty girls on the make, and young men on the take. Decadent it might be, expensive and crowded it certainly was, but never dull. And, thought Andre, as the arrival of a cab saved him from frostbite, it would be warm.

He was still closing the door when the cab took off, cut across the nose of a bus, and ran a red light. Andre recognized that he was in the hands of a sportsman, a cut-and-thruster who saw the streets of Manhattan as a testing ground for man and machine. He braced his knees against the partition and prepared to assume the fetal position recommended by airlines in the event of a crash, as the driver
swooped down Fifth Avenue in a series of high-octane lunges and sudden-death swerves, cursing the traffic in a guttural, mysterious tongue.

At last the cab lurched into West Broadway, and the driver tried his hand at a form of English.

“OK. Where number?”

Andre, feeling his luck couldn't last forever, decided to travel the last two blocks on foot. “This will be fine.”

“Fine?”

“Here. Right here.”

“You got it.” The brakes were applied with gusto, causing the car behind to lock its wheels and slide, very gently, into the back of the cab. The cabdriver jumped out, clutching his neck, and reverted to his mother tongue to deliver an agonized tirade in which the only two familiar words were “whiplash” and “sonofabitch.” Andre paid him and made a hasty escape.

The building he reached after a brisk two-minute walk had started life as a garment factory. Now, as with so much SoHo real estate, its humble origins had been thoroughly concealed by several coats of gentrification. The high-ceilinged, light rooms had been subdivided, partitioned, repainted, rewired, replumbed, rezoned, and, needless to say, repriced. The tenants were mostly small businesses in the fields of arts and communications, and it was here that Image Plus, the agency representing Andre's work, had its headquarters.

Image Plus had been founded by Stephen Moss, a young man with intelligence, taste, and a liking for warm weather. His clients were photographers and illustrators
who specialized in nonfashion subjects—Moss, quite rightly, being wary of the temperaments and complications involved in anything to do with clothing and androgynous models. After the early years of struggle, he now had a tight, profitable little business, taking fifteen or twenty percent of his clients' income in return for representation, which covered everything from career counseling to tax advice and fee negotiation. He had extensive contacts, a doting girlfriend, perfect blood pressure, and a full head of hair. His only problem was the winter in New York, which he detested.

It was this fear of freezing, as much as a desire to expand his business, that had caused him to take on Lucy Walcott as a junior partner. Nine months later, he had felt sufficiently confident in his choice to leave the office in Lucy's hands during that first, suicidally unpleasant part of the year, from January to March. She was pleased to have the responsibility. He was pleased to have the sunshine in Key West. And Andre was pleased to be working with a pretty girl. As he came to know Lucy, he found himself looking for chances to extend the relationship, but he traveled too much, and she seemed to attract a new and dauntingly muscular young man every week. So far, they had yet to see each other outside the office.

Andre was buzzed through a steel door, which led into an airy open space. Apart from a couch and a low table in one corner, the only furniture was a large, square production desk built for four. Three of the chairs were empty. Lucy, head down over a computer keyboard, was in the fourth.

“Lulu, it's your lucky day.” Andre dropped his bag on the couch and went over to the desk. “Lunch, Lulu, a real lunch—Chez Felix, Bouley, you name it. I've just picked up a job, and I feel an overpowering urge to celebrate. How about it?”