Killer Heels (43 page)

why
?
Why are you doing this?’
‘It is in your best interests to have Coco out of the picture,’
Mireille said, her tone efficient now. ‘
N’est-ce pas
? Look how
angry you are at the situation that Jacob has created with this
absurd marriage. She is a danger to you, a big threat! If she is
not here any longer, you do not need to worry about your job
any more.’
She made an effort to drop her voice, make it persuasive,
encouraging.
‘Think about it. I have done all the work, I have given her
the pills – all you need to do is help me tip her over and agree
that we will tell the same story.’
‘You must be mad,’ Victoria said, dumbstruck. ‘You’ve gone
absolutely barking, Mireille.’
‘
Tais-toi
!’ Mireille spat at her. ‘You fucked him too! You
whored yourself like a cheap
putaine
with him to get what you
wanted – you, who were always so obviously a lesbian!’
Victoria’s jaw was hanging open.
‘
Ah oui!
To me, it was always very clear that you did not like
men,’ Mireille sneered. ‘You should thank me on your knees
for what I did for you. I see everything,
tu crois
. I saw the way
you looked at some models, some photographs. I worked out
your type and I sent you Lykke, like a present, all wrapped up
for you.’
‘You did that to fuck with me!’ Victoria hissed back. ‘To
destabilise me! Lykke’s told me everything. You weren’t being
kind to me – you wanted to mess with me, that’s all.’
‘
Eh alors?
’ Mireille shrugged. ‘And why should you care
why I did it? You have your lover, you are very content. You
should still thank me. When you fucked her in your office just
last week, when you bent her over the desk and pulled up her
skirt and licked her like an ice cream, you looked very content,
ma chère
, as did she!
Ah oui
, I know all about you and Lykke
fucking in your office – not once, but many times! I have put a
camera in there hidden inside a book on one of the shelves. It
is so easy nowadays to spy, did you know? I have all of it
recorded. For the editor of
Style
to fuck a model who has
worked for her in her office, that is a big scandal.’
She smiled triumphantly. ‘But more, it is harassment. You
fuck this young woman that you have put on the cover of the
magazine – it looks as if you have given her a favour in return
for her body. In America this is very bad.’ She rolled her eyes.
‘In France, nothing would happen; it is normal.
Mon Dieu,
la-bàs
you could fuck hundreds of models every day. But here,
it is a lawsuit.’
‘Lykke would never—’ Victoria began furiously, but Mireille
burst out laughing.
‘And still you do not understand! No, Lykke would not sue
you – she would lose her career. No one would ever work with
her again if she denounced a famous editor in public! But
Jacob –
Jacob
could use it as an excuse to sack you, whenever
he is ready to put his fiancée in as editor of
Style
instead. This
clause you are demanding, it is meaningless if you bring the
company into disrepute. Any contract is invalid if that happens,
tu sais bien
.’

Victoria stood stock-still as the weight of Mireille’s loaded
words sank in.
And Mireille, her smile wide, her green eyes bright, lifted
Coco’s legs to the balcony edge again.
‘Come, help me,’ she panted. ‘It will be easier with two. I do
not want her to use her hands to grab the side. They look for
that, I have seen it on the television shows. It must not seem as
if she tried to hold on, to stop herself from falling.’
Slowly, Victoria walked forward. Coco felt a second pair of
hands close around her legs. And with every scrap of energy
she had left, in a desperate, futile plea for a rescue that wouldn’t
come, Coco opened her mouth and screamed.
The next thing she knew, she was being picked up and
thrown violently through the air. Her eyes clamped shut, her
scream tailed off into a moan.
The last thing I’ll see is Mireille’s mad face, she thought.
The last thing I’ll hear is my own helpless wail . . .
She landed, with a thump that knocked the breath out of
her, on a lounger; it was a nasty fall, as the lounger was wroughtiron, its cushions taken in for the winter. The impact whacked
her funnybone, pain shooting up from her elbow, and bruised
her coccyx.
But I’m alive
,
The pain means I’m alive. I’m not plummeting
over the edge to fall forty storeys down
. . .
She dragged herself up, leaning against the back of the chair.
Mireille was shrieking like a banshee, struggling with Victoria,
who hauled back and slapped her across the face, an openhanded blow which landed like a whipcrack.
‘Get hold of yourself, for God’s sake!’ Victoria yelled at her.
‘What the
hell
is going on here!’ bellowed Jacob from the
doorway. ‘Have you all taken leave of your senses?’
Striding across the terrace, he interposed his body, bulky in his
black cashmere overcoat, between Mireille and Victoria. He was
wearing his Russian black fur hat, which gave him extra inches of
height; he loomed over the fighting women like a colossus.
‘How dare you hit her!’ he growled at Victoria, protectively
setting Mireille behind him. ‘What the
fuck
, Vicky? You leave
me a string of increasingly psycho messages, you say you’ve got
an ultimatum for me, my doorman rings me to say you’ve
barged your way in here, and I have to rush away from a very
important meeting to come and find out what the hell you’re
playing at. And when I turn up, I find you smacking Mireille in
the face! You’ve gone out of your mind!’
‘She was trying to kill your fiancée, Jacob!’ Victoria screamed
back at him, not a whit abashed by his rage. She set her hands
on her hips again, her jaw jutted forward. ‘I saved her bloody
life! That mad French bitch has stuffed her full of sleeping pills
and she’s trying to shove her over the edge of the fucking
balcony. You should be thanking me, and yelling at
her
!’
Jacob opened his mouth as if to deny it. For a long moment
he stood there, a huge black-clad figure, completely silent, staring at Victoria, the winged sleeves of her white fur cape coat
lifting and falling in the wind.
And then, very slowly, his big body turned around till he
was facing Mireille instead.
‘Mireille?’ he said in a whisper. ‘What did you do?’
Gazing up at him as if he were the only person on that
terrace, the only person in the world, rat-tails of black hair
hanging over her destroyed face, Mireille whispered back,
‘What did
you
do, Jacob?’
There was a long pause. Jacob drew a deep breath.
‘No,’ he said. ‘No, Mireille. Is Victoria telling me the truth?
Did you try to hurt Coco?’
‘No,’ Mireille said, causing Victoria to exclaim in anger and
take a couple of steps forward, about to contradict her. Without
looking at her, Mireille held up a hand to stop her, and such
was her power in that moment, the perfection of her gesture,
that Victoria actually stopped in her tracks.
‘I did not try to hurt Coco,’ Mireille corrected him, still
speaking quietly. ‘I tried to kill her.’
Jacob groaned, a genuine cry of anguish. But Victoria,
watching intently, heard no denial in his exclamation, no
disbelief.
‘Mireille!’ He covered his face momentarily with his hands.
‘Why?’ he moaned. ‘Why did you
do
this – ruin everything?’
‘Because,’ Mireille began, her eyes gleaming terrifyingly
through the strands of hair, ‘because, Jacob, you were going to
marry her. And because, Jacob,’ her voice was rising now to a
banshee scream, ‘because you already have a wife! Not her!
I
am your wife!’
Victoria gasped in shock at this revelation. ‘You and Jacob?’
she exclaimed. ‘You’re
married
?’
‘Yes.’ The white lock of hair blowing over her face, Mireille
turned to stare with ghastly triumph at Victoria. ‘Me and
Jacob!
Toujours, Jacob et moi
! All the time that you were having
sex with him so that he would promote you, he was my
husband. All the time, he was married to me!’
‘Thirty years?’ Victoria echoed incredulously. ‘But—’
‘In Paris! Just Jacob and me, at the
mairie
. Two witnesses,
the next couple waiting. It was like an elopement.’
Coco had collapsed back onto the lounger when she realised she was out of danger. But she had managed to prop her
arms on the side, to watch what was happening, as thunderstruck as Victoria by the secret that Mireille had just exposed.
To Coco’s horror, she saw tears forming in Mireille’s eyes.
‘It was so romantic,’ she wailed, her hands rising to clasp
together.‘We wanted to keep it secret – at first, it was for my
sake, he said. Jacob was going to make me a famous editor, and
he didn’t want me to be compromised by people knowing I
was his wife. He said they would not take me as seriously, and
I agreed. As long as you work for Dupleix, he said, people
should not know. And I loved him. I would have done anything
he wanted.’
She whipped her head back to glare at Jacob, her hands
rising to pound on her breast with emphasis.
‘Because,’ she screamed, as loudly as if she were trying, after
all these decades, to finally tell the world, ‘I am your
wife
! I
thought I would always be your wife! That was the one thing I
possessed, the one thing that none of your other girls could
ever have, because we were married already. Oh, I know some
of those little sluts schemed all they could, thought they could
get you to propose to them, but you always came back to me.
Always! And then – then you tell me you are going to marry
that
petite espèce de
—’
‘Mireille!’ Jacob interrupted, cutting short her insult to
Coco.
‘You don’t control me any more, Jacob,’ she shrieked, tears
once more falling down her face.‘I have not signed the papers
your lawyer sent me yet, and I never will! I will never divorce
you!’
‘Jesus Christ,’ Victoria said incredulously. ‘Jacob, you
proposed to Coco without having got divorced from Mireille.
Are you completely insane?’
Jacob’s face was white as paper. ‘I didn’t think . . . after all
these years, I thought it was just a formality,’ he muttered. ‘I
didn’t know she would react like this.’
‘
Men
!’ Victoria said contemptuously. ‘You haven’t even
bothered to see how Coco is.’
She shot out an arm, the white fur winged sleeve falling
from it dramatically, pointing with a matching white suedegloved finger at Coco, half-sitting, half-lying on the lounger.
Obediently, Jacob crossed the terrace to the lounger, kneeling
down beside it on the icy stone flags, taking Coco’s hands,
which were nearly as cold as the stone by now.
‘It’s true,’ Coco said faintly, dazed by the scene that was
unfolding before her. ‘Mireille tried to kill me. She said she was
your wife – she gave me pills, in a drink. Victoria saved my life.’
Chafing Coco’s hands, Jacob swivelled clumsily round to
look at Mireille.
‘I know you were upset,’ he said to his wife. ‘I didn’t handle
it right. Okay, I get that now. But to try to
kill
her? Mireille,
she’s just a girl! How could you do something like this?’
Mireille’s hands were twined in her hair, her fingers blackened by the wet make-up on her cheeks. The great emerald
ring she wore, the ring Jacob had given her for their engagement, decades ago, which she had moved to the fourth finger
of her right hand when they had agreed to keep their marriage
a secret, flashed in the last rays of the setting sun.
‘How could
you
do this!’ she raved. ‘After all these years,
how could you betray me like this? You said you would never
divorce me, never. You said another woman would never take
my place.You lied! You are a filthy, disgusting liar!
Dégueulasse!
Tout à fait dégueulasse!
You took my chance of having a baby,
you stole that from me with your lies, and now you are trading me in, like the filthy disgusting vulgar American that you
are, for that little piece of pathetic nothing! You promised!
Over and over again you promised that you would never
divorce me, that I would always be your wife. I could endure
anything, if I knew I was your wife. And then you take me to
lunch and you say that you want to marry
that
–’ she stabbed
an arm at Coco in a furious gesture – ‘and expect me to be
happy for you, to drink champagne with you! You are not
even brave enough to say the word “divorce”, you dirty
coward!
Salaud!
’
Jacob hung his head as her words sunk in. ‘Mireille,’ he said
slowly. ‘Oh God,
Mireille
.’
Heaving himself to his feet without a backwards glance at
Coco, holding out his hands, he walked towards his wife
imploringly.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘
Je suis desolé, mon amour
. I’m so sorry
for what I have done to you.’
Mireille hesitated for a moment, staring at him, her eyes
huge and wild, her hair whipping across her face.
‘It’s too late, Jacob,’ she said, her voice low now, sounding
sane once more.‘You want a divorce?
Bien
.’
She smiled sadly, a smile of immense, heartbreaking beauty
that, even through the smears of make-up, transformed her
face. For a moment, she was the young woman with whom
Jacob had fallen in love, on the stage of the Paris Opéra, all
those years ago.
‘I will never sign the papers,’ she said. ‘I will never divorce
you. But as always, Jacob, I will give you what you want.
Au
’voir, mon amour
.’
Turning away, she ran with a quick, graceful step towards
the edge of the balcony, jumping up onto the balustrade as if
she were still the prima ballerina she had once been. The skirts
of her black coat billowed around her in the wind.
‘No!’ Jacob roared, lunging for her, arms outstretched to
grab her and pull her back.
But as she had already told him, it was too late. Mireille did
not jump: she let herself be taken by the wind, falling back into
the open air behind her, her coat flapping like dark wings. Her
eyes were on Jacob until gravity, pulling her down, took him
from her sight; and then she closed them, so that the griefravaged face of her errant husband would be the last thing she
would ever see.