Never Too Rich (7 page)

“
Not with my ole lady, you don’t,”
Trog scowled.

“
Why’d I wanna have her when I got
Shirl?”

“
Then good luck, bro.” Trog
laughed. “Yuh might as well have yerself a snooze
first.”

“
Huh?” Snake stared at
him.

Trog poked a greasy thumb eastward. “She left a
couple, three hours ago. Said she wuz goin’ window-shoppin’, or
some shit like that.” Trog shook his head morosely. “Bitches! Never
satisfied. Always goin’ out to buy shit. If I’d let her, my ole
lady’d have me hock my scoot.”

Angrily Snake kicked his rear tire and shoved his
hands in his chain belt. “Shee-it!” He glowered. “When she gets
back, there’s gonna be one bitch screamin’ so loud they’ll hear her
all the way out to Montauk.”

“
Hey, hey,” Trog said equably.
“Take it easy, man. Lighten up. Shirl’s a good kid.”

“
Yeah?” Snake demanded. “Well, she
knows better’n to go traipsin’ off without my permission.” Snake
sniffled again, leaned over, pressed his thumb against the other
nostril, and cleared it too. Then, hunching his shoulders, he
stomped up the front steps of the clubhouse.

Sometimes he didn’t know what got into Shirl. It was
almost like she was asking for punishment. Despite his warnings,
every few weeks she’d sneak out and go walking off by herself. Like
poking around St. Mark’s Place, or heading over to the West
Village. Once, she’d even gone uptown, to Bloomingfuckingdale’s,
like she was some kind of princess. He’d warned her often enough,
and slapped her around a little so she’d remember who was boss, and
she’d beg his forgiveness and promise never to go off by herself
again.

He stepped over a biker who was passed out in the
front hall, headed for the nearest refrigerator, and grabbed a can
of Bud. He popped the top and then went back outside. A carful of
teens was driving slowly by. Ogling the row of bikes shining in the
sun.

Getting a thrill out of cruising past the Satan’s
Warriors’ clubhouse. He heard the shrill of female laughter, and
that did it. He flung his beer can down to the sidewalk, watching
the foam explode.

Christ, sometimes he hated women! They were crazy
bitches, all of them! Crazy fucking bitches!

Well, the longer Shirl was gone, the sorrier she
would be. Bet your ass on that.

Where the fuck was she?

_Chapter
7

Either Olympia Arpel’s office in the East Sixties
town house had been designed with Olympia in mind, or else she had
been designed expressly for it. Visitors were never quite sure
which.

The space was severely modern and austerely angular,
all black leather, stainless steel, tweedy wall-to-wall, and glossy
white walls. The chairs and desk were Mies van der Rohe; a giant
glass test tube on her desk held a single perfect bird of paradise.
Crisply framed model shots behind chrome and glass, hung with
mathematical precision, stared out from the walls. There was no
clutter, nothing lived-in looking except a giant glass ashtray
overflowing with long lipstick-smeared white-filtered cigarette
butts.

It was a room purposely devoid of pretty
distractions, a room with fierce, unflattering lighting that had
been designed with but one purpose in mind: to reduce visitors to
their most unflatteringly flawed physical states.

Olympia Arpel was in keeping with the surroundings.
She was spare and minimal, tailored in tweeds, without frills or
froufrous. Her face was coffin-shaped, her nose a beak, and above
her tiny Ben Franklins, her eyes were a startling sea green.
Sharply cut straight salt-and-pepper bangs framed her odd features,
and her skin was like parchment that had been balled up and then
smoothed back out.

She smoked fiendishly, with nervous, jerky
movements, but never took more than four puffs off each cigarette
before stabbing it out.

She marched thoughtful circles around the seated
girl, her eyes acutely appraising. Then her lighter clicked as
Olympia lit another cigarette and was wreathed in smoke. “Do you
recognize any of these faces?” she asked, her voice hoarse and
gruff. She gestured round at the giant photo blowups with her
cigarette.

The girl nodded. “They’re models?” she said.

Olympia shook her head irritably. “No,” she said.
“They’re not just models. They’re
top
models,” she
emphasized. “Cover girls. Not one of them makes less than five
hundred bucks an hour.
Vogue, Sparkle, Harper’s Bazaar.
You
name it, their faces sold ‘em.” She inhaled with satisfaction,
tilted her head back, and spouted a plume of dragon-smoke toward
the ceiling. Then she stabbed her cigarette out in the overflowing
ashtray and took off her Ben Franklins. She began to walk along the
walls, tapping each picture frame with her glasses as she passed
it.

“
Atalanta Darin.” Tap. “Francesca
Kafka.” Tap. “Vienna Farrow.” Tap. “Joy Zatopekova, Obi Kuti, Melva
Ritter, Kiki Westerberg.” Tap tap tap tap.

She stopped and turned, crossing her arms in front
of her chest, her bangs swaying. Her thin Parasol Orange lips
slashed a rare faint smile. “They’re my girls. I discovered them. I
made them into the stars that they are.” She gestured with her
eyeglasses, and her voice went momentarily soft. “Beautiful, aren’t
they?”

The girl sat quietly, turning her head to follow
Olympia’s constantly moving hand. “They’re gorgeous,” she agreed in
an awed voice.

“
You bet your ass they are.”
Olympia sat back down behind her desk and the girl had a poker-card
image of her: two Olympias—the one above the desk, and the
upside-down one mirrored in the polished surface. The Queen of
Models. The Ace of Beauty.

Olympia leaned forward and her eyes narrowed. “But
you know what I
don’t
have?” she asked softly.

The girl shook her head and waited.

The lighter clicked and Olympia squinted against the
smoke. “Christie Brinkley,” she said, holding the girl’s gaze.
“Jerry Hall.” She watched the girl’s eyes carefully. “Vienna Farrow
may just have super-model potential; then again, maybe she hasn’t.
A few more months will tell.” She leaned even further across the
desk and shook her glasses at the girl. “But
you
have it for
certain.” She nodded to herself. “I can smell it!” She sat back and
twirled her glasses.

“
But . . . but I don’t know if I
want to model,” the girl said meekly. She looked very
uncomfortable, as if unaccustomed to this kind of attention and
this alien world.

Olympia’s eyes hardened. “Of course you want to be a
model,” she scoffed harshly. “Every girl wants to become a
superstar model!” Calmly she abandoned her Ben Franklins as a
pointer and put them back on the tip of her nose. She felt like
grabbing the girl and shaking some sense into her, for she was
undeniably the most gorgeous creature Olympia had ever set eyes
on—and as the founder and sole owner of Olympia Models, Inc., she
had seen more than her share of the world’s most exquisite young
women. Olympia Models, Inc., though not in the same league as Ford
and Wilhelmina, nevertheless had a dependable reputation and a
large stable of regularly working, reliable beauties.

However, to Olympia’s chagrin, her agency was
forever known as a good starter agency, a stepping-stone for models
on their way up.

It irked her to no end that her girls were such a
disloyal and undevoted lot; invariably, after she discovered them
and polished them, sent them to the right makeup artists and
hairdressers and photographers, paid for their grooming, and even
taught them how to move and pose, they left her for the big-buck
pastures of Ford or Wilhelmina or Zoli without so much as a thank
you.

Today, though, Olympia found herself with an
entirely different problem, one she had never expected to face,
even after twenty-three years of running her agency. Like a
prospector who’d been panning nuggets for years, she had never lost
hope that somewhere, someday, she would hit pay dirt and find that
singular, heart-stopping face that would be the mother lode. And
now, with every passing minute, she was fast becoming more and more
convinced that the girl sitting across from her was exactly that.
Her most important discovery ever. Her very own Koohinoor or Star
of India. The find of a lifetime, an unearthed treasure. She had
the kind of face and body that a camera made love to. Ruthless bone
structure. Flawless complexion. A certain indefinable way of
moving.

That pelvis-length hair. Why, it even put Jerry
Hall’s to shame.

Jes-us.

And to think it had been a purely accidental stroke
of luck that she had run across her!

Olympia didn’t normally venture downtown, and hardly
ever set foot in the East Village; she didn’t care how much of a
renaissance it had undergone. The only reason she’d gone there this
morning was that she had missed a friend’s gallery opening and this
had been her last opportunity to see the show before it closed.

But she’d never made it to the gallery. Just as the
cab caught the red light at St. Mark’s Place, she had seen this
stupendous beauty crossing the street like a mere mortal instead of
the goddess she really was.

Olympia Arpel wasn’t about to let Helen of Troy slip
through her fingers. At the age of sixty-one she could still move
like a lightning bolt. She’d thrust a twenty-dollar bill at the
driver, didn’t wait for the change, and jumped out, grabbing the
bewildered girl before she could go five steps further.

And now here they were.

And now, too, the thrill of finding
the
face
of the nineties was being whittled away by the girl’s infernal
stubbornness.

Christ on a bicycle! Could she have found the
world’s most beautiful woman—only to discover she didn’t want to
model?

Olympia turned on her most assuring motherly smile.
“I tell you what, dear. I’m prepared to sign you to a contract
right now. On the spot.” She sat back and positively beamed. “What
do you say to that?”

“
I . . . I don’t know,” the girl
murmured. “It’s so . . . unexpected, you know?” She tilted her head
and flipped a curtain of auburn hair aside while her superlative
aquamarine eyes, shimmering with slivers of sapphire and
silver—large, brilliant, and liquid—looked beguilingly innocent and
confused.

“
Oh, of course
you
didn’t
expect this,” Olympia purred silkily, sitting forward again. “But
these kinds of things happen all the time in this business. New
talent comes to town, beauties who never considered modeling get
discovered ...” She waved a hand airily. “This is Dream City, kid.
The land of Oz.”

The girl squirmed slightly and her dark lashes
blinked twice. “But a
contract
. . .”

“
Contract, shmontract. It’s no big
deal,” Olympia said emphatically. “They’re standard boilerplate,
and all Dolly has to do is type in your name. Then, depending on
how well I bribe him, I can probably rush you right over to Alfredo
Toscani’s studio to start getting your portfol—” She stopped
abruptly in mid-sentence as she noticed the girl’s perplexed frown.
She couldn’t believe it! The girl had never even
heard
of
Alfredo Toscani! Where could she have been all these years? Toscani
was, after all, one of the Big Four—along with Avedon, Scavullo,
and Skrebneski.

“
Alfredo Toscani,” Olympia
explained patiently, lighting up again, “is one of this town’s most
important photographers. He takes on only the most important
clients. Models. Society women. Movie stars. He’s even had shows at
museums. You’ve probably seen his pictures without even knowing he
took them.” She waved at the walls. “He did a lot of these. Now
...” She clapped her hands together. “Signing a contract needn’t
frighten you. It’s really only a formality, and it’s for your
protection as much as mine. Then, as soon as your portfolio shots
are done, I can get down to business and fix you up with jobs.” She
smiled brilliantly.

“
And you really think I would make
. . .” The girl’s voice trailed off.

“
Five hundred an hour?” Olympia
shook her head. “Not you,” she said pointedly. “I’d start you off
at a thousand.”

The girl looked dazed. “Do you really think I’m
worth that much?” she whispered. “A ... a thousand bucks an . . .
hour?”

Olympia allowed herself a modest smile. “So a
three-day commercial shoot makes you twenty-four thousand. Think of
what it gets the client. It’s your face that sells millions of jars
of moisturizer or lipstick, or scarves. The client makes the big
dough, not you. But
you
sold the product.”

Olympia sat back and smiled at Shirley. “You don’t
have any plans for this afternoon, do you?”

Shirley tightened her lips and hesitated. She hadn’t
told Snake she’d be gone, and she knew he’d be very, very angry
with her. He didn’t like it when she went off somewhere without
telling him, especially for hours at a time. She should at least
call him . . . but if she did, he’d probably start screaming and
make her come home right away. But maybe—just maybe—if she didn’t
call, and surprised him later with the prospect of thousands and
thousands of dollars, he would be mollified.

Slowly she nodded. “I ... I’m free,” she gulped,
wondering whether she would later regret having taken the
plunge.

“
Good.” Olympia looked like a
general as she reached across the desk to shake hands. “Then we
have ourselves a deal. Welcome to the big time.”

Shirley Silverstein couldn’t believe her good
fortune. This was the land of Oz, and Oz was entirely new to
her.