Lace (24 page)

He gave a cry of triumph and wrestled open the shutters as Maurice dashed into the room.

Guy could see Judy two floors below and about fifteen feet away, anxiously looking up. He screamed at her. She heard immediately and dashed toward Guy’s window. Aunt Hortense started up
the motor and the Mercedes slowly followed Judy, then waited with the engine running.

Both men started hurling the clothes out of the window so they landed far too fast for Judy to stuff them into the bags. She wrenched open the near side door of the Mercedes and threw suits,
dresses, hats and shoes into it as fast as she could pick them off the pavement. The few astonished passersby watched motionless until Aunt Hortense gave three sharp whistle blasts. Judy jumped
into the back of the car, throwing herself on top of the clothes, the two men ran out of the doorway and squeezed into the front seat of the Mercedes. Aunt Hortense stepped on the gas and took the
first corner on two wheels, leaving a pink satin shoe and a green scarf fluttering on the pavement behind.

“Steady, Madame, steady!” Maurice said. “We don’t want a speeding ticket at this point.” But Aunt Hortense was enjoying herself. She drove at top speed to
Guy’s dry cleaner, where they left Judy with the clothes. Judy felt exultant as she never had before—she now knew the exhilaration of action. She had expected to be frightened but
instead she had positively
enjoyed
it. And they had won.

“Nothing seems to be missing,” reported Guy, as Aunt Hortense drove to the workshop. “Only the hat brims are wrecked.”

Aunt Hortense braked, then reluctantly yielded the wheel to Maurice. “No need to mention anything to the police,” she said carelessly. “They don’t like breaking and
entering. And they might want to keep the clothes as evidence. So why not let this remain yet another of their unsolved mysteries?”

Guy nodded, then raced upstairs, two at a time, hoping to catch José before she left for the night. The other two employees had already left and José was belting her beige
raincoat. One look at Guy’s face told her that she had been found out. Roughly he leaped across the room, caught hold of her wrist and dragged her to the telephone. “If you don’t
want me to call the police, you’d better tell me why you did it and who helped you,” he said, tight-mouthed with fury.

“Let me go! You must be mad, Monsieur Guy, let me go. I’ll scream.”

“Scream away—and someone will call the police.” She tried to free her wrist, tried to kick Guy, then jerked her head in despair toward the window as she and Guy fought. He
panted, “I’m not going to let you throw yourself out of the window, José, what good would that do? I don’t want to hurt you, I only want to know what happened. I know it
wasn’t your idea. I know you didn’t want to do it. We’ve got the clothes back. They were on the bed in the little bedroom in your apartment.”

Astonished, she stopped struggling and looked at him, frightened but wary. “What good will it do me if you go to jail, José? I’ve got the clothes back. But I want to know what
happened.
If you tell me all I want to know, I
might
not tell the police. But if you don’t come clean I’ll call the
flics
straightaway, and that’ll mean
prison. So tell me the truth, José. It was your husband’s idea, wasn’t it?”

“I don’t know what you mean.” There was a pause.

“We found the clothes in your apartment.”

José burst out, “It
wasn’t
my man.” She paused again and Guy jerked her toward the telephone. “No! It was his pal André—he’s a
pickpocket. I’ve never liked him. My man would never have tried this by himself. Oh, Mother of God, what’s going to happen to us now?”

“And who else helped you?”

“No one else! No! Put the phone down, Monsieur Guy! I’ll tell you! There was no one else.”

“Was it this André who telephoned?”

“Yes, yes, it was André who phoned.”

“Liar!” He yanked at her wrist until she started to whimper again, but she still looked surly and wouldn’t speak. “André would not have said ‘shears.’
One more lie and I call the
flics”

She burst into tears again. Guy shook her shoulders but she only howled louder. However, when he picked up the telephone she stopped in midshriek and told him the rest of the story. It was very
simple.

At five o’clock that afternoon, her husband had been waiting fifty yards from the cinema in the Champs Elysees because he hadn’t trusted his pickpocket friend. Their plan was that
after snatching the money both of them should dive into the metro, catch a train at random, get out and find a park. They would wait until dark, when there would be few people around, and then
divide the money. José’s husband then planned to post his share of the money addressed to himself,
poste restante
, at his local post office. When he felt safe, he would collect
the money.

Guy could only whisper, he was so furious, so weak with rage. “Get out,” he croaked, “and never, never, never come around here again or I’ll call the police
immediately.”

José burst into fresh tears and fled.

Within twenty-four hours, the story of Guy’s kidnapped and returned collection was known to the entire fashion trade of Paris, and although he denied the story to
reporters, the intriguing tale drew many more journalists to his collection than might otherwise have seen it.

That collection established Guy as a serious designer to be watched, not just a rich brat dabbling in fashion. Judy suddenly found that dealing with the press was almost a full-time job.

The only person to publicise an accurate story of the theft was Empress Miller, who was so charming, so disarming, so unobtrusively efficient that she always found out the truth—which was
why Judy was a little afraid of her.

T
HE NEXT TWO
years were breathlessly busy but packed with excitement. Success invariably involved money problems until Guy
obtained support from an unexpected source—his bank manager. Having studied Guy’s financial history and the profit and loss projections, his bank manager—unprompted—telephoned Guy’s father and said that it seemed a pity to turn his back on a potential money-making business simply because it had been started by his own son. The result was that the bank
agreed to back Guy, and his father—quite glad to be able to drop his dogmatic stance—guaranteed the loan. Nevertheless, Guy was still determined not to expand simply because he had
enough orders to do so.

“I’m not interested in short-term turnover but in long-term stability,” he explained to Empress Miller, who was wedged into a creaking conical cane chair perched on three thin
black metal legs. Their new, modern office not only had an elevator and a tiny reception area, it also had a picture-window view of the gray rooftops and chimney pots of Paris—now covered
with January snow—and a louvred cupboard, inside which was fitted a compact little kitchen. Judy hovered with the coffee pot as Guy answered Empress Miller’s questions. “What I
eventually want is to establish a small, good-quality ready-to-wear collection. There’s no RTW fashion in Europe, as there is in the States, only cheap, manufactured garments. But on the
other hand, in the States there are no name designers—which is why your manufacturers buy their designs from Paris. I want to combine the two operations.”

“Yes, that’s quite a good idea, Guy.” Empress always praised with caution, although she did not hesitate to criticise in a manner that ranged from mildly ironic to downright
acid. But she was always fair, and when she didn’t like something, she explained exactly why.

Her neat blond head bent over her notebook. “How does it feel to be so successful when you’re so young? To have come so far in only a couple of years?”

Guy wriggled on his purple canvas womb chair, suspended on a thin, black metal butterfly frame. “That’s the question that everybody asks me, but you might as well ask me what
it’s like to be a dog or a university student or a post office messenger. I am who I am, and there’s no getting away from it, and I don’t know what it’s like to be
different. I’m a fashion designer, just the way someone else is an accountant. I started young because it worked out that way and because I wasn’t interested in anything else.” He
looked reflectively at the orange ceiling. “If you’re going to do something really well, I suspect that it has to be to the exclusion of everything else. And I
haven’t
been
an overnight success. I’m twenty-six and I’ve been working hard in fashion for ten years. It’s simply that people suddenly
realised
it overnight. I suspect that most
overnight successes are the same.”

“Nevertheless, Wool International went out on a limb for you with your last collection.”

“And so did I for them. My entire collection was made from wool and nothing else.”

Not without some of the noisiest rows I have ever participated in, thought Judy, who had insisted on this publicity-attracting theme.

Empress raised her eyebrows in polite query and Guy explained. “Wool jersey drapes well and is flattering to the figure—synthetic fabrics tend to be either too stiff or too
limp.” He heaved himself out of the purple canvas sling, pulled a bolt of dark green wool from the rack, then deftly draped and pinned the fabric around Judy, an old favourite trick to
demonstrate his point. “See what I mean? And look at the colour—it glows, it has depth, because a natural fiber absorbs colour better than a synthetic.”

“Ow,” said Judy, “a little less depth to the pins please.” Guy finished his work and stood back.

“See how that’s going to
flow
as she walks?” The pinned material had taken the shape of a coat, flared at the back like a bullfighter’s cloak. It was cut on the
same lines as that mulberry coat he’d just finished for Maxine, hanging on the rail by the door, ready for them to take to her this evening. Judy was looking forward to a couple of peaceful
days in the country, tramping the frozen, silent woods by day and lying in front of a crackling log fire in the evening.

“How does Pierre Mouton feel about wool?” Empress suddenly asked, looking him straight in the eye.

How did she know? Guy wondered. The Belgian manufacturer would never have told Empress of their plan, and the only other person who knew it was Judy. It had to be a factory leak. You
couldn’t keep a damned thing quiet in this industry, everybody knew everything within five minutes.

“The buzz is that you’re producing a new RTW collection and it’s being manufactured outside Brussels by Pierre Mouton. You’ll show the RTW at the same time as you show
your summer couture collection, then start selling the next day so that RTW garments will be selling before any couture customer can get her clothes fitted, let alone finished.” Empress never
took her eyes off Guy’s face. “Of course this
might
turn out to be professional suicide on your part, because all your couture customers will be furious, but I can see that it
could be a daring new way of linking RTW to couture designs. Do you agree?”

Guy stared at her. How
did
she know? No factory hand could possibly know that. They had calculated that the couture customers wouldn’t be irritated by the RTW collection if they
were offered first choice of the RTW garments. And the RTW wasn’t a copy of the couture collection. He had designed two collections calculated to overlap, rather than have one a cheap copy of
the other.

“Pierre Mouton has always bought from me,” Guy said, affecting calm, “but you know that his factories aren’t geared up to produce boutique-quality clothes.”

Empress looked at him sharply. “You haven’t answered my question.”

“If what you say were true, you know I couldn’t answer it. Pierre Mouton is one of my best customers. That’s all I’m prepared to say.”

“Well, that wraps it up,” Empress said gaily, snapped her notebook shut and turned to Judy. “Now I’d
love
another cup of coffee. It’s a joy to get a good cup
of coffee in Paris. Sometimes I suspect that they’re still making it out of ground acorns as they did during the war.”

“It’s because the French are so stingy that they won’t use enough coffee. The secret is simply to use twice as many beans as they do,” said Judy. She was happy to talk
about anything to get the conversation away from Pierre Mouton. “But you can’t do anything about French milk,” she said. “I don’t think French cows have blood in their
veins. I still sometimes
long
for a glass of real American milk. I still get homesick for silly little things like that, although I’ve now been away for six years.”

She got homesick for bigger things than milk. However long she lived in Paris, however much she loved it, she suspected that her character was too basically American to allow her to settle in
Europe forever. She sometimes wondered if that was the reason why she never seemed to fall in love like every other woman in Paris. She didn’t want to marry a European. She went out with the
eligible Frenchmen that Aunt Hortense produced from time to time, but she never seemed to feel entirely at ease with them except for darling Guy. The rest were so damned suave. But that was another
worry: she was certainly having a terrific time, but she didn’t want to play second string to Guy all her life. What had happened to her own career?

After Empress left, Judy shook off the sudden wistful yearning that she always felt after a visit from an American journalist who knew that a cheerleader wasn’t a political position and
who knew the difference between a milkshake and a soda.

Judy shook her fist at Guy, “I didn’t say a word!
You
practically told her. She only had to put two and two together, and she must have heard something as well. You
must
have told someone, you
must
have hinted. I knew you wouldn’t be able to keep your lip buttoned. Pillow talk, I suppose.”

“I swear I haven’t said a word, you’re the one who chatters to journalists the whole time.” He grabbed her wrist, they lost their balance and both fell noisily onto the
purple canvas sofa, pummeling each other, shrieking and laughing, flinging cushions—a deliberately childish reaction to the strain, the carefully casual mood of the interview.