Satin Doll (16 page)

Samantha watched her disappear down the marble steps. She whirled and rattled the doors to the salon, not too surprised to find them locked. And no one came to open them for her.
 

“Just a minute,” Sam shouted, starting for the steps and Brooksie, who was out of sight. “Just stop right where you are! I want to talk to you!”
 

She caught up with Brooksie in the rue des Bénédictines as the journalist tried to dodge behind a huge black Rolls-Royce limousine parked at the curb with a uniformed chauffeur sitting in it. “Listen, I got a New York press card,” the girl bleated. She was limping slightly. “Hey, I’m a freelance journalist! I swear, I’m not putting you on!”
 

“Did you get hurt?” She took Brooksie’s arm to make sure she wouldn’t slip away.
 

“I skinned my knee. Listen, you’re not going to take my film, to hell with that, so leggo of me.” She backed away. “I want to know what somebody from Jackson Storm’s doing at Louvel’s.”
 

They eyed each other warily. “I’m not going to take your film,” Sam told her. “Look—”
 

“It’s a story, see? Like, what is Jackson Storm doing in Paris?” Brooksie told her. “So, do you tell me, or what?”
 

Stalemate, even Sam could see that. “Let’s go someplace and talk,” she suggested. “And you can tell me just what’s going on.”
 

The raffish face under the punk rock hairdo suddenly grinned. “Buy me coffee and something to eat in the Ritz bar and you’re on. We can walk there from here,” she added hopefully. “It’s not far.”
 

Sam nodded.
 

“Okay, here’s the deal,” Brooksie said fifteen minutes later as they settled themselves in the garden behind the bar of Paris’s famed old Hotel Ritz in the Place Vendôme. A waiter came down the flagstone path toward them with their order of French pastries and café au lait, and the journalist was momentarily distracted as she shoveled several apricot tarts onto her plate. She picked one up in her hands, not waiting for their silverware, and bit into it with a blissful expression. “The Ritz was really run-down a couple of years ago until one of the Saudi crowd, Kashoggi—you ever heard of him? Well, he bought this place and started renovating it. He put millions into it. It’s back like it was when Hemingway used to drink in the bar, and F. Scott Fitzgerald and all that bunch.”
 

“I want to know what happened,” Sam said, watching her, “back there at the Maison Louvel.”
 

“Ah, Louvel’s.” Brooksie made a gesture with what was left of her pastry. “That was just a lucky guess, you know? Nobody ever hears of it now. Louvel’s is where these weird down-and-out European princesses and ducchessas go when they need a dress for a state funeral, or one of the crowd gets an audience with the Pope, or they’re going to marry off one of the daughters and have to have a wedding gown. Because Louvel’s knows how to give them the stuff they save up their pennies for, all the black crepe, the satin sashes for the order of the Holy Roman Empire, the Czar’s Citizen’s Medal, the Star of Lower Slobbovia, all that crap. So I figured if the prince was going to get his nasty kid some clothes he’d remember that all that Balkan crowd used to go to Louvel’s back in the Old Stone Age and they’d know what he wanted.”
 

“Prince?” Sam said, frowning. Brooksie was painting a strange picture of the Maison Louvel, but then she was remembering the old ducchessa and her granddaughter and the black garments on the tables in the atelier.
 

“Yeah, the little fat guy who came out of the elevator is Prince Alessio Medivani. The kid with him is Princess Jacqueline.”
 

Of course, Sam was thinking; she didn’t know why she hadn’t recognized them. But then there’d been a lot going on with all the shouting and camera-grabbing.
 

“Princess Jackie’s got a drug problem,” the woman across the table went on. “Nothing new—she’s just following in her sister’s footsteps. But daddy, the prince, was so burned by bad publicity the first time around with the older girl, Princess Catherine, that he wants to do better with Jackie. More coffee?” Brooksie said, indicating the silver pot. “Mind if I help myself? Naturally the press, especially the European tabloids, are crazy for what jet setters do, like Greek millionaires, the Arab oil bunch, anything about the decadent rich. But if it’s a title—oh, wow! Medivani’s girls don’t get as much publicity as the Grimaldi princesses in Monte Carlo, but then they didn’t have Grace Kelly for a mother, either. Princess Catherine is married now and sort of cooled off, but in her day she was in all the tabloids, stoned and falling on the floor in Paris nightclubs, taking her bikini off on the beach in Monte Carlo for photographers, screwing all the soccer players in the All Europe playoffs—”
 

“Look,” Sam interrupted her, “why were you in the Maison Louvel this morning?”
 

“Jeez, I’m telling you! Because that was Prince Alessio and his kid, Princess Jackie,” the journalist explained. “Little Jackie starts the same routine about a year ago with a bunch of wildies, like people you don’t even hear about, like some of the younger upper-class Brits, the Sloane Square crowd, some of the Paris
jeunesse dorée
—transvestism, kinky sex, teenagers from what is usually called Europe’s best families. Medivani can’t take any more. He can’t go through what he did with her older sister, so I hear he made a deal for Jackie to live very quietly in Spain for a year and clean up her act. Spain’s tough. It probably cost him a bundle to hook into some of the titles there and get Jackie straightened out in a very secluded environment with some aristocratic family. Spanish nobility raises their girls like nuns, so Medivani’s hoping they’ll keep little Princess Jacqueline locked up and away from drugs and her panties on long enough to find her a husband somewhere.”
 

Brooksie went on, reaching for another apricot tart, “So where else but Louvel’s for Princess Jackie’s clothes? I’m thinking, jeez, Medivani will sneak her in and order up a bunch of clothes the upper-class Spaniards put their daughters in until they get engaged—the white collars, navy blue dresses, the one-piece swimsuits.”
 

“At Louvel’s,” Sam said.
 

“Right, Maison Louvel. Want a wedding dress for your daughter the countess, only you’re living on tea and crackers in a flat in Pantin and working for Galleries Lafayette part-time and hocking what’s left of the Hohenzollern silver to stay alive? Has she got an invitation to spend a weekend with a fourteenth cousin who’s still got money in Brussels and might meet a Flemish relative of King Baudoin’s who’s minor nobility, only there’s no money for a dress and a nightie? Or how about at least an audience with the Pope and you need one of those black dresses, which you can also wear at the state funeral of the former King of Portugal, since you’re related to him through a poverty-stricken branch of his wife’s relatives? Louvel’s knows what you want, and what they haven’t got, they’ll steal from the big couture houses. Last year’s designs, of course.”
 

Sam was following this, not really wanting to believe the journalist’s rapid-fire chatter but realizing it made a sort of sense. “And they pay with—what?”
 

Brooksie shrugged. “Who knows? They sell the portrait of Grandma by Tintoretto or they borrow from their relatives. Or they make their kids pay up, if the kids make good enough marriages. Listen,” she said, leaning across the table, “so it’s one way to survive, right? Louvel’s never made it big. It’s a back-street operation, when most of the big designers are owned by multinationals. And look what happened to Courrèges—his Japanese backers pulled him out of his big July showings because he wasn’t making enough money. Halston got creamed when Beatrice foods bought him out, same story. The only thing the orange juice people kept was Halston’s perfume line.” Brooksie looked hungrily at Sam’s uneaten tart. “Do you mind if I have that? Thanks,” she said, reaching for it. “Look, the way I understand it, Louvel’s hasn’t done anything since the early fifties. Back in the fabulous fifties when all the couture houses in Paris were making it big, Givenchy was just starting with Jacques Fath, Rudi Mortessier left Dior just as St. Laurent started designing for him, and I think Louvel’s had somebody really good, Claudine or somebody.”
 

“Claude,” Samantha said automatically. “Mademoiselle Claude.”
 

Brooksie looked up suddenly, struck by a thought that made her blink. “Jackson Storm,” she breathed. “Beside him, Calvin Klein and Ralph Lauren are turkeys. Oh Jesus, you know he’ll never be able to do it! No American has ever been able to break into Paris.”
 

“
What?
” Sam gasped.
 

“I can’t believe it.” The other woman pushed her plate back, looking triumphant. “Jeez, what a setup, old Louvel’s! And if anybody can, Jackson Storm can do it.”
 

“Are you out of your mind?” Samantha frowned. “Do what?”
 

“Oh, wow, what a story!” The strange figure was squirming in her seat with excitement. “Listen, Bill Blass and Oscar de la Renta have both got boutiques in London, they sort of hang around on the edges, but they’d never try to crash Paris haute couture. Not that they don’t want to, but God, everybody knows what’s happened to the Italians. The Italians are great, fabulous,
magnificent
—” Her voice rose to an excited squeak. “Armani, Missoni, Soprani, Versace, Complice—but let them into Paris, no way! The French froze them out a long time ago. The Italians even have to show their clothes in Rome and Milan the week
after
the Paris showings. Of course, all the world press, the buyers, take a plane down to see them anyway.”
 

“Are you saying,” Sam asked, “that you think Jackson Storm is going to open up here? In Paris?”
 

“Yeah, oh, wow, what a master stroke. There’s millions and millions in those labels, St. Laurent, Cardin, Dior. They’re on everything but the toilet seat in your john!” Brooksie grabbed up the coffee pot and shook it. It was empty. “I mean, if a big mass-market fashion line like Jackson Storm moved in and bought a Paris fashion house, it would only be working the other way up, wouldn’t it? Instead of buying them out at the top like the Japs and the Arab oil money did, Jack Storm would be coming in with the boutiques, the distribution all set up. All he’d need was the high-fashion glitz like an haute couture house already in place.”
 

It was crazy. Sam knew she had to shut her up somehow, but all she could say was, “You can’t use those pictures. They were taken on the premises. Without the Maison Louvel’s permission.”
 

If a news hustler like Brooksie Goodman broke a wild story that Jackson Storm was going to open up a couture house in Paris, or update the Maison Louvel into one, she didn’t know what would happen. She had to stop it right there. “Look, Brooksie, I’m not in Paris to set up any Jackson Storm operation. This is—” Sam cleared her throat, thinking fast. “Ah, sort of a training visit, very quiet, just to get more back-grounding for my ah, sportswear line.” It wasn’t exactly a lie, she told herself. “But Jackson Storm definitely does
not
, repeat,
not
, need any publicity. No pictures of Prince Whatsit and his daughter, nothing about Jack Storm taking over Louvel’s. Because it isn’t going to happen.”
 

The other woman’s green eyes narrowed and the corners of her mouth turned down. “Are you kidding? I’m going to back off from something like this? For what?”
 

“Okay, the prince pictures,” Sam conceded a little desperately, “but don’t identify Louvel’s. How about—how about just ‘a Paris couture house’?”
 

Brooksie sat back in her chair, the Paris spring sunlight in the garden of the Hotel Ritz bouncing off the stiffened strands of her black-orange hair and the defiant green satin blouse. “You know, you really look great,” she said softly. It didn’t disguise the subliminal menace in her voice. “I see why Jackson Storm picked you to be Sam Laredo. Weren’t you supposed to be one of his designers or something before he put you out front?”
 

Sam took a deep breath and tried counting to ten. All the experience she’d had with the press as Sam Laredo warned her not to make an enemy out of this woman. “I’ll make a deal with you,” she said finally. “You keep the lid on for now about anything about Jackson Storm and the Maison Louvel, and I’ll give you an exclusive as soon as there’s a story.”
 

“There’s going to be a story?”
 

Sam looked her straight in the eye. There was going to be a story, yes, but not one Brooksie expected. “Yes.”
 

“Okay. You’re on.” Now that they had that settled, Brooksie sounded almost indifferent. “Will you order some more coffee? I could use a couple more cakes, too, while you’re at it.”
 

“Actually I’ve only been here three days,” Sam murmured, flagging their waiter, “and I don’t have any news to break, anyway. I’m having enough trouble just getting oriented. This is my first trip to Paris, I don’t know French, I haven’t done much sightseeing—” Her voice trailed away, remembering Alain des Baux. “Although I have met the handsomest man in Paris,” she murmured.
 

Brooksie shot her a quick look, “I know—a big, sexy hunk? Looks like a mean Mel Gibson? Like a salesman named Chip Chiswick?”