Face Value (28 page)

The camera cut to JK, who was kicking around the same blue, red, and yellow ball he’d rescued previously, with the three children she’d seen on the top of the hill. He jokingly wiped the sweat from his brow, then spoke into the camera.

“Yes, I’d like to thank the FBI for cracking this heinous and very hurtful campaign against my character, and to say how relieved I am that the two women in question are in custody. That’s all I have to say, I’m afraid, apart from, let’s keep America beautiful! Oh . . . one last thing, I’d like to thank those beauty editors who were approached, but had the faith in me, and the respect for the law, to report these individuals before they could really do some damage. Ladies, you rock!”
He smiled graciously, then the cameras cut back to Vivienne.

She smiled adoringly as if basking in his image.

“Yes, Roger, it started when John Kingsley the Third met a young English reporter, Kate Miller, the beauty director for
Darling
magazine, and was inspired so much by her natural, fresh look, he decided to put into practice a whole new approach to plastic surgery. He calls it ’imperfect perfect’ but you and I might call it ‘less is more.’ Basically, he’s against everyone looking the same, from the Botox to the blow-dries to the one-look-fits-all surgery being offered all over town. His recent demonstration at Face-Off, the international plastic surgery convention here in Los Angeles, astounded fans and is expected to revolutionize the approach of many surgeons around the world. Basically, Roger, he took a pretty girl and refused to operate on her, except to remove a precancerous mole on her face.”

Alexis switched the video off with the remote control, then looked into Kate’s eyes.

“Facts, Kate. Facts.”

It was Kate’s turn to start shaking. The hairs on her arms were standing up; she felt a chill run down her spine. Patty and Aurelie were conartists! She was next on their list; just another sucker they were trying to mislead. They’d got farther down the line with her than any others. And if this had all happened a few weeks ago, her copy would have been filed, approved, ready to be printed out and fall into the laps of hundreds and thousands of Americans, all eager to believe in the downfall of another hero, another vanity case. Newspapers would have picked up on it, the TV news, it would have gone around the world! And it didn’t matter that JK was innocent; no one would have cared once the initial story was out, and if he’d sued them, his reputation would have been ruined for the years and months it would take for the case to come to trial. His work on those children would have been finished immediately—they wouldn’t let him anywhere near children, even ones in dire need of his help.

She’d got him all wrong. All of him. Not just Patty, but the “mutilation” of the Face-Off model as well. She’d been so determined to “out” him, to out surgery itself, as corrupt, dishonest, unethical, that she’d taken shortcuts, failed to see what he was really doing, failed to see that he could no more harm a pretty face than he could make one from scratch. Despite all his showmanship, his flamboyance, his charm, he was really the good guy in all this, the consummate professional. It was she who was the unprofessional one. She who had allowed ego to overtake and let her feel she was breaking news, fighting battles, on to something that would really make her career. She felt numb. She hadn’t even given him a chance to . . .

“You didn’t even interview him, Kate,” said Alexis. She was calm now, sad even. “You didn’t even give him a chance to talk about it, to defend himself. There you were, on an island with him, witnessing his work firsthand . . . you didn’t pause for a second to think you might be wrong?”

A tear rolled down Kate’s cheek. She sniffed. Alexis passed her a tissue.

“You talk of being a reporter, but that’s not reporting, is it?”

“Alexis, I’m sorry, I really am. I don’t know how I could have been so stupid to have been sucked into all this.” She blew her nose. “But they were so . . . I mean, I saw her! She had cuts all over her wrists, her face was a wreck, I saw it!”

Alexis sighed.

“Listen, they were a couple of pros. Sick, twisted, yes, but clever. The only way you could have guessed was by touching her skin, and being English, and polite . . . they knew you would never do that, would you? Don’t you see, Kate, they picked you because you were gullible, new to the game, not like those other, more experienced beauty hacks who spotted what they were up to straightaway!”

“But I read the documents. . . .” That was the mortifying bit. That she’d labeled those other beauty editors as little more than bimbos—more interested in where they were getting their next free Botox shot from—when all the while they were more professional than her.

“It’s easy to fake a document. Listen, I’m mad at you, but I’ll get over it.”

Kate knew she would have to do some serious damage control. Write something else. Apologize to JK—did he even know how close she’d come to exposing him for something he hadn’t done? He did seem to genuinely like her—and look how she’d treated him in return! It was too awful to think about. At least she had the natural beauty story shot and finished.

“Did you like the other story?” she ventured timidly. “About natural beauty?”

“Oh, God, Kate . . . I don’t know how to tell you this, but we can’t run those pictures of Petruschka.” Alexis sighed and retrieved three photos of the model resting on the top of her in-tray. She looked them over, with neither admiration nor disdain. “At least, not with this story.”

“I’m sorry? Was it too explicit? I mean, I know you’re not allowed to sunbathe topless in this country, but I would have thought . . .” Kate sniffed.

Alexis looked at her wearily. “Everyone, Kate—
everyone
—in this industry knows that Petruschka had her breasts done last year. JK did them. You can’t run a story about natural beauty and feature a model with fake breasts. It just isn’t done.”

“Oh, no!” Kate cried. She couldn’t believe this was happening to her! Why hadn’t Clarissa said anything? Why hadn’t the makeup artist or the hairdresser? And then she remembered— in their own way, they had. They’d looked away, looked perturbed when she’d told them that natural looked best, explained the model would be photographed nude. She hadn’t been receptive to any kind of debate, hadn’t even looked for problems, she’d been so determined to get on with the story. And she’d trusted Clarissa’s choice. Clarissa.

“Oh, God, I’ve messed up so badly. . . . I’m so sorry, Alexis, I really am!” She couldn’t hold back the tears any longer. She didn’t care that the entire office outside Alexis’s glass walls was probably watching, or that Clarissa was probably fully aware her downfall was happening so spectacularly right now.

Alexis looked embarrassed at her sobs. She bit her lip thoughtfully, pushed the cigarettes across the desk like some kind of peace gesture. Kate continued to cry, couldn’t even bring herself to smoke. Alexis went to tidy up the photographs of Petruschka, arranging them back in a pile on the in-tray. Eventually, when it became apparent Kate’s sobs were not about to relent, she got up, walked around to the front of the desk, and leaned against it. She held Kate’s hand.

“Now listen. You’re young, you have some things to learn. I’m angry at myself as much as I am at you. I gave you way too much responsibility, and you weren’t ready for it. Simple as that.”

Kate gulped. She wasn’t ready to have her hand held by her boss. She wriggled her hand out of Alexis’s so that she could wipe her nose with the tissue, now embarrassingly reduced to a screwed-up ball of soggy disintegrated matter. She wondered whether it was polite to wriggle your hand back under your editor’s when it had just clasped a snotty tissue.

Alexis continued, “I guess that I . . . well, let’s just say I hired you because I thought that as an experienced beauty director, with the training of
Harper’s Bazaar
behind you, you could handle stuff. . . . I guess not. That’s okay, we can work on things, your ideas are good.”

“
Maidstone Bazaar
,” Kate corrected her.

“Your writing is sharp, Kate, and you musn’t let this—I’m sorry? What did you say?” Alexis frowned, confused.

“
Maidstone Bazaar
,” said Kate. “And I wasn’t the beauty director, I was a reporter.”

The color drained from Alexis’s face, like a chameleon falling from a leaf to the white sands below. She took a deep breath and stared at Kate, as if frozen in shock, and repeated, “
Harper’s Bazaar
.”

Kate knew, with the utmost clarity, that something awful would happen as soon as she uttered the next two words; that she could circumvent her fate by using any two other words, or no words at all; that she didn’t fully understand why the next two words would have such an earth-shattering effect; but that ultimately she was powerless to change anything and had no choice but to be honest and answer the only way she knew how.

“
Maidstone Bazaar.
”

twenty-three

“L
izbet!”
shouted Alexis. A hush fell over the office. Everyone looked up and stared, then when they realized Alexis had flung open her door and was now looking at them, fell back to hurriedly typing, crouched over their computers as if the more uncomfortable or bowed they looked, the more convincing it would seem.

It seemed to take an age for Lizbet to traverse the office from the water fountain where she’d been chatting with Clarissa and enter Alexis’s domain; but in her twenty or so steps, Kate felt her journalistic life flash before her, her pulse racing uncomfortably, before the final moments of her career disappeared in a puff of smoke before her. What was going on? She hadn’t done anything wrong, had she? She’d been offered the job; true, it had come a little out of the blue, but things happened like that in the fast-paced world of magazines, didn’t they?
Harper’s Bazaar
was another magazine. She knew of it, of course, but surely they couldn’t have been so stupid as to muddle the two up, could they?

Sensing Alexis’s anger, Lizbet stood in the office, her face composed, waiting patiently for whatever wrath was about to fall, looking as if she’d been in this position a few times before. Alexis stood behind her desk; Kate stayed in the chair, looking like a small child in a headmistress’s office, waiting for her parents to arrive before they could have a big dressing-down.

“Tell us, Kate,” said Alexis, staring directly at Lizbet, whether because she was too angry to look at Kate or too angry with Lizbet to remove her gaze, she didn’t know.

“I’m sorry . . . tell you what exactly? I don’t really understand what’s going on!” She sobbed again, clutching at the snotty tissue, looking anxiously for a scrap that wasn’t already soaked through with her tears.

“Tell me what you just fucking told me!” The swearing was another bad sign. Until today, she’d never heard Alexis swear before. Even Lizbet looked shocked now.

“Um . . .
Maidstone Bazaar
?”

“
Maidstone Bazaar
—
Maidstone Bazaar
—
MAIDSTONE Bazaar
! What the hell is going on here!” shouted Alexis. “Since when did
Darling
magazine hire its beauty director from some magazine no one’s ever even heard of?!”

It seemed a little harsh.
Maidstone Bazaar
wasn’t a bad magazine. It had won awards, been featured in the UK
Press Gazette
a couple of times, the bible for the press industry. Kate’s Trisha piece had even been picked up by one of the nationals, which had used it to reveal her split with that orange man—Tania had e-mailed her the other day. So what if it was local? She’d left it behind now, proved that she could do the job, hadn’t she? Except for the surgery story cock-up. And the “natural is best” story on the model with fake tits. Kate looked awkwardly at her tissue again.

Lizbet spluttered, “I did what you—what you told me to!”
“No, you fucking didn’t!”
Alexis shouted. “I told you to find me Kate Miller,
the
Kate Miller, from British
Harper’s Bazaar
, beauty director of some ten years’ or so standing, friends with Gustav, Lisette—
the
Kate Miller.” She turned and looked at Kate disparagingly. “Not—not—this!”

Kate started making an unattractive whooping noise, something akin to hyperventilation or a small baby crying. She was about as far removed from the Kate who had confidently pulled off the big surgery story as she would ever be; a million miles away from the Kate who had frolicked in bed with France’s finest artist only a few hours ago. She was a sniveling wreck.

“I’m sorry . . . I don’t understand how I could . . .” Lizbet started crying, too, although Kate managed to observe from somewhere under the tears that were falling, the snotty tissue, and her bedraggled hair, that Lizbet’s tears were the tears of contagion, the tears you cried because someone else—in this case, her—was crying, suffused with a fair amount of fear and panic as to what the eventual outcome of this would be.

On the other side of the glass, the office had stopped pretending to be working and whispering, and was now openly staring aghast.