Authors: Maggie; Davis
The workman grabbed for the girl and pushed her down again. Then he looked at Sam. “Jesus, the old girl’s had a bloody fit. Go help Sophie, will you?” When Sam could only stare at him, he jerked his head impatiently at the old woman lying on the floor. “The ducchessa there. The one here with her granddaughter.”
“Granddaughter?” What had she said? Sam wondered. Only that they needed an ambulance, that was all. “What granddaughter?”
“Bloody hell, woman, the damned ducchessa flat on her back is the grandmother,” the Cockney workman growled. His chin jerked again at the struggling girl he was holding down on the sofa. “This one’s the little contessa.”
Sam stared at the bundle of black rags lying on the carpet, the redheaded model bending over them, then at the bedraggled girl with her bleeding wrist.
Ducchessa? Contessa?
She’d thought they were vagrants, Paris bag ladies! “You don’t mean,” she whispered, “these people are
customers,
do you?”
Their faces told her the answer.
Chapter Three
“Oh yez, there are many of them, the old aristos, in Paris,” Sophie declared. The redheaded model dragged the gate of the elevator closed and punched the button on the control panel for the fourth floor. “Always the old
noblesse
come to Paris wizzout the money, to live.”
Sam slumped against the wall of the open-work brass elevator cage and closed her eyes. Now that the contessa and her grandmother the ducchessa had been packed off in a taxicab and the man in the jogging suit and his blonde companion had left, she was going to take a couple of aspirin and fall into the nearest bed. It wasn’t even noon in Paris and already she was so tired she could hardly stand up.
The little brass cage of the Maison Louvel elevator was so small Sam was uncomfortably crowded together with the model and the big workman who had insisted on carrying Sam’s duffel bag upstairs. Sophie jabbed at the button again with a long white finger. “The di Frascati, they are real
noblesse
—noble? Well, how you say zis,” the redhead shrugged. “But the
grand-mère,
she is real ducchessa, very
ancienne famille
of Italia. And little Savania is real contessa.”
Sophie had changed into an old frayed silk kimono that ended just above her bare knees, and it was plain she was naked under the clinging fabric. Except for smudges of mascara around her large, velvety brown eyes and her skin’s waxy paleness, she seemed completely recovered from her recent bout of mindless hysterics.
The elevator gave an uncertain shudder and unexpectedly sank about a foot. Then it gave a jolt that almost brought Sam to her knees. Finally, shuddering uncertainly, it started upward at a snail’s pace.
“Little Contessa Savania, she has the
hemophilie,
” Sophie went on, unconcerned. She twisted around in the cramped space to look at the tall man behind her. “Is zis right? Do I say it right—
hemophilie?
”
“Hemophilia, love,” he corrected her. He wasn’t looking at Sophie but was studying Sam intently from under straight black brows. He carried Sam’s duffel bag chest-high in his arms, which only crowded them more. “Hereditary bleeder’s disease,” he volunteered in his low, husky voice. “European aristocracy’s full of it.”
Sam stared past him to Sophie’s disheveled redhead. She couldn’t say she appreciated the type, this Cockney English-French-Italian handyman or whatever he was, and it hadn’t been necessary for him to come along with her airplane carry-on luggage that she could very well manage herself. His bold once-over was the same in any language. But, she reminded herself, if it hadn’t been for the workman, they’d probably still be down in the salon. He was the only one who had taken charge, wrapped the bleeding girl’s wrist in a towel and finally gotten the old woman and her granddaughter out of the Maison Louvel and into a cab.
“She is getting marry, the granddaughter,” Sophie was saying at the front of the cage. “The old ducchessa, she take
longtemps
to look for ‘usband for little Savania—has to be
comte, duc,
very
noblesse,
is very important.” The elevator shuddered to a stop between floors and she jabbed the button on the panel again. “But zey are poor,” she sighed. “Zey don’t eat nozzing, those two. And sell furniture to live. Sell everyzing zey have—jewels, all things like zat.”
It was, Samantha thought tiredly, like something from a fairy tale. The old woman in her black rags was a real Italian duchess, poverty-stricken, but going to marry off her granddaughter who had a serious hereditary disease. To someone with a title if they could find him. And the model had said Paris was full of these people. She couldn’t help wondering how many of them came to the Maison Louvel.
The sides of the brass cage were an open-work fantasy of vines and curlicues through which the passing walls of the elevator shaft were not only visible but dangerously close. After one look, Sam leaned as far into the center as she could, even though it meant pressing up against the back and hard rear of the big man in front of her.
“If the girl is so sick,” Samantha said, her words slightly muffled, “why didn’t they call an ambulance?” She took a deep breath as a sudden grinding noise was heard in the machinery somewhere over their heads.
There was a silence in the front of the cage. Then Sophie said something in rapid French to the man sandwiched in between. “Oh, because is secret,” she answered. “Nobody marry little Contessa Savania if zey know. If zey know she is sick, zis family of husband—
pouf!
—he no marry!”
The elevator ground to an unscheduled stop at the third floor. They looked out on a marble landing and a sign with an arrow that said
Offices
.
The tall, black-haired man said something under his breath. “Let me do it this time, will you?” he growled. He reached over the model’s shoulder and pressed the button marked “4.” The elevator trembled and then started up again slowly.
Sam had grabbed out instinctively at the nearest thing at hand, which happened to be his hard-muscled shoulder. He partly turned when he felt her touch, looking down at her through a tangle of furry black lashes. “Not to worry, love,” he assured her, “it’s just been repaired.”
Crammed against his body intimately, Sam was aware of the faint aura of sweat and masculine muskiness. Sam took her hand away quickly. Up close he wasn’t as young as he’d first seemed, probably in his mid-thirties. And he certainly came on too strong in the revealing jeans, the work shirt, the sauntering display of that big, sexy body, to be an employee in an haute couture house. She didn’t know about Paris, but in Shoshone Falls, Wyoming, he would look like a prime suspect for breaking and entering. It was probably his motorcycle she’d seen down in the courtyard.
Did these two in the elevator, she wondered, know how all this had looked to someone arriving from New York, representing the company who had just bought the Maison Louvel? Or didn’t they care? The model acted so spaced out Sam would swear she was stoned. The person she’d found giving orders had been this big, sexy hunk in front of her. Where were the Maison Louvel management staff who were supposed to be there to greet her? Where was the director, the S. Doumer, who had supposedly received Mindy Ferragamo’s telegram announcing her arrival? She still hadn’t accounted for the other people who’d been in the salon when she’d come in, the man in the jogging suit and the elegantly dressed, fainting blonde.
“Who were the other people?” Sam asked slowly and clearly in consideration of Sophie’s limited English. “The man in the sweat suit with the blonde lady?”
“Oh, Alain des Baux,” the model responded with a breathy sigh. “And the sister of him, Madame Marie-Louise Failloux. They come here many years wiz their mamma, they are
trop Bottin Mondain le tout Paris, vraiment
! And Alain, he is so beautiful,
non?
”
“French social register,” the man between them translated. His black eyes were now studying the front of Sam’s jacket and the curve of her breasts with interest. “Old customers, the des Baux. Sophie says the sister still buys some of her clothes here.”
Sam kept her eyes fixed on the shoulder in front of her. She was aware the people at the Maison Louvel were probably expecting a male executive from New York and someone considerably older at that, and at the moment she was feeling a little over-challenged. If there was one thing Jack had taught her, it was where and when to assert your authority. Or at least to give it a try.
“Just what,” she said, lifting her eyes to the workman, “do you do around here, anyway?” The black eyes only stared back at her. “I mean, your title, your job description. Like what hours do you work?”
At that moment the elevator gave a terminal shudder and ground to a stop. “French machinery.” He lifted the corners of his mouth again in a slight smile and a solitary dimple appeared. “Have to get used to it, love. Or use the stairs.”
Sophie pulled the gate back and stepped out onto the fourth-floor landing. “Oh, zis is Cheap.” She gave Sam a misty, dislocated smile. “He is speak very good French, Cheap. He come help me talk wiz you.”
“Chip,” the tall Englishman corrected her quickly, “not Cheap, Sophie dear. You do me a terrible injustice.” As he held the gate back for Sam, he flashed her another smoky look. “Christopher Chiswick is the name.” He pronounced it “Chizzick” in a low growl. “But plain Chip will do. Christopher, Chip—but not Chris, please.” As Sam squeezed past him, he didn’t move to get out of her way.
“Oh, he is somezing, Cheap,” Sophie called over her shoulder, “but he is nize.”
On the contrary, Sam thought, Cheap was incredible. Was he counting on getting fired under the new management, and didn’t he give a damn? she wondered, glaring at him. Or was he some kind of Maison Louvel fixture, selling sex appeal for tips? If so, Cheap did a great job of it. Sleazy, but good.
Sophie was leaning over the railing of the staircase looking up at the top of the house and an iron door with a formidable set of locks on the small landing above them. “Iz big room—up, up,” she explained with a wave of her hand, “for ze old robes, clothes. But the key, she is lost.”
“Storerooms,” Chip translated helpfully. He lounged one shoulder against the nearest wall, holding the duffel bag to his chest, regarding Sam through half-closed lids. “We’re at the top of the house here, but there’s a ladder you can take to go to the roof. Nice view, you can see as far down the hill as the Tuileries and up the other way to Sacré Coeur at the top of Montmartre. But quiet as the grave up here at night.” Again that speculative look. “You’ll be all alone except for the night porter. Old Frenchman, a little deaf, name’s Albert.”
A night porter named Albert, Sam thought. So she wouldn’t be entirely alone. She moved to stand beside Sophie as the model searched through a large ring of keys for the one to the owner’s apartment.
What Sophie had said in the elevator had still left a lot unexplained and it wasn’t just the difficulty of trying to get past the model’s fractured English. Sam was remembering the lingerie, the white chiffon peignoir flung over the back of the sofa, the white satin nightgown. Beautiful stuff, undoubtedly expensive. A trousseau?
“Good lord,” she said without thinking, “if these people are so poor, how do they manage to pay their bills?”
“Well, love,” the man behind her said softly, “that’s what you’re here to find out, isn’t it?”
The Maison Louvel owner’s apartment, described in the brokers’ inventory as, “sitting room, bath and bedroom, some accommodations for cooking,” looked like a converted attic or old servants’ living quarters. And it was obviously not ready for occupancy. Although the rooms were not exactly covered in dust, the deep dormer windows were closed, and in spite of the warm spring day the apartment was cold, almost dank under the eaves of the old building. The furnishings could only be described as exotic. An early Art Nouveau style with a gilded plaster bust of an Egyptian sphinx perched on a tall porphyry column, and handsome, faded violet velvet sofas and an elaborate marble fireplace with blackened hearth were jumbled together with 1930s Art Deco represented by stark white walls, a six-foot-round mirror with stylized chrome wings over the fireplace and black plush carpeting underfoot.
In the bedroom Sam found a massive circular bed the size of a skating rink with a black velvet bedspread. Dangling aluminum tube lamps and wall sconces, white carpeting faintly yellow with age and a geometrically patterned black and white headboard gave the bedroom the air of a set from an old 1930s Hollywood musical.
Chip lounged in the doorway. “Not exactly homey, is it? Smells a bit musty, too.”
Sophie had wandered to a large Louis Quatorze armoire in white and gilt, opening the doors to peer inside. Sam stood and stared down at the slightly dusty surface of the black velvet bedspread, wondering if the bed were made up, and in what condition she’d find the sheets.