Satin Doll (8 page)

Sam looked down at the woman on her knees. The Sam Laredo jeans were so tight there wasn’t much to grab. She met Alain des Baux’s amused look in the battery of mirrors. Nannette’s demonstration was all for his benefit, she was sure. It said a lot about the des Baux family’s importance as customers.
 

“What’s she saying?” she wanted to know. Nannette was keeping up a rapid-fire flow of French, but there was more to it, Sam suspected, than just an explanation of how to take up a seam. “What doesn’t she like? The jeans, or me?”
 

He laughed, showing beautiful white teeth. “It is not you. They were expecting some type of New York businessman, and you come as a surprise, that is all. She says you are very young to be so important.” He shrugged. “She also says they know nothing here of how to make cowboy clothes. Nannette hopes your company isn’t going to turn Louvel’s into a factory for American jeans.”
 

“Ouch,” Sam muttered. Nannette’s fingers weren’t finding much to grab over the curve of her bottom. “Look, can you tell her Jackson Storm isn’t going to make jeans here? They’re mass-produced, actually, in Hong Kong.” She winced again. “The demonstration’s been great. But please tell her to quit.”
 

Alain des Baux obligingly said something to the fitter and she got to her feet. Sam gave her a small, tentative smile but Nannette ignored her as they filed out of the fitting room. As Sam squeezed by Chip in the doorway, he grabbed her arm. “What happened to Sophie?” he growled in her ear. “What did des Baux say to her?”
 

Samantha stared back. She’d made a big mistake when she’d told this one she didn’t have the authority to fire anybody. “How should I know?” she hissed at him, yanking her arm away.
 

Alain des Baux was standing in the middle of the salon, waiting for her. “This is an old house by American standards; in your country it would probably be a historical site. It is supposed to have been built for one of the many mistresses of Louis the Fourteenth. Up here in the rue des Bénédictines it would not be all that far from the Palais Royal, so we can imagine the Sun King taking a coach and perhaps a company of household cavalry as escort to parade up here in the evenings for a little amorous visit.”
 

Sam was looking around the main salon with new eyes. “A big place like this, just for one of the king’s mistresses? Were there a lot?”
 

“Oh yes, a lot,” he smiled. “Louis was quite handsome, especially for a Bourbon king—the Bourbons were usually quite ugly. A congenital defect of the jaw was only one of their bad features.”
 

Sam lifted her eyes to him. “Is this the end of the tour?”
 

“Usually, yes.” He hesitated. “Could I—would I presume too much to show you something interesting, even unique? Also, it’s not a bad idea for me to show it to you,” he said quickly, “in case you would ever want to go there alone. Which, I want to tell you, you should never do. It’s not very safe.”
 

She stared at him. “Good lord, what is it?”
 

He gave her his teasing grin again. “You will see,” he told her, taking her hand.
 

He pulled her out onto the salon floor landing and then, before she could protest, down the stairs to the ground floor. The women from the atelier had left, but Sam could hear Chip’s heavy feet behind them. When they reached the floor below, Alain des Baux searched through the ring of keys Sophie had given him.
 

“Look,” Sam said, quickly, “if it’s the Paris sewers, I saw them once in an old movie on television. It was called
The Phantom of the Opera.
”
 

“Would I show you a sewer?” He pretended to look pained. “There are better things in Paris to see. Besides, the entrance to the Paris sewers is in the Place de la Resistance, miles from here.” He unlocked a door to one side of the elevator and motioned her to step in. “No, this is a real feature of the house. And very interesting.”
 

They were in what appeared to be a janitor’s closet with a rust-stained sink flanked by mops and brooms. There was another door at the far end secured with a padlock.
 

Alain des Baux was searching for another key on the ring. “In the last century, when many of Paris’s streets were widened under Louis Napoleon, this building was supposed to have been torn down, but it was spared because the city inspectors found the remains of a Benedictine chapter house under here. From which, of course, the street gets its name. You have heard,” he said looking up at her, “of the Benedictines, the religious order?”
 

“Monks?”
 

He had found the key and was unlocking the padlock. “Yes, monks. They were all over Paris, the Benedictines. There was a very large monastery on the top of the hill of Montmartre, the name means the ‘mount of the martyrs,’ from the early Christians. Across the Seine there was an even more famous Benedictine abbey at Saint Germain des Prés. Unfortunately, it was destroyed during the French Revolution.”
 

He pulled the padlock chain away and opened the metal door. There was only pitch blackness beyond. “What was here was a small chapter house facing the other monastery of the Capuchins across a stream. The stream is gone, too, but I believe it joins that famous American movie location”—he made a wry, teasing face—”the well-known Paris metropolitan sewer systems. What’s left here is the Benedictines’ crypt.”
 

“Why isn’t it safe?”
 

“Because it’s not a good idea to go down here alone. But if you wish to make a study of crypts, there are many of them in the big churches of Paris. Notre Dame has a beautiful crypt, but unfortunately it is not open to the public right now.” He swung the metal door back and groped along the wall just inside with one hand. “I will go ahead of you, as soon as I can find the light switch. Watch the steps,” he cautioned as a string of electric lights that descended into darkness glimmered on.
 

Sam peered down at the darkness. “Are you sure you ought to be doing this?” she asked doubtfully.
 

“Of course. I came here as a child many times. There was an old porter, René, who used to show it to me when my mother was being fitted for her clothes.”
 

He took Sam’s hand. The steps descended one turn and continued down in a continual, narrow, stonewalled spiral, vanishing into thick blackness just beyond the glow of the electric light bulbs. Chip’s booted feet sounded like drumbeats coming down behind them.
 

“The crypt is the area below the sanctuary.” Alain des Baux’s voice echoed hollowly. “They are usually built in the shape of a cross. Watch your head,” he warned as they reached the bottom of the steps.
 

When they got to the bottom of the stairs, they were in a vaulted stone chamber like a cave, with a ceiling so low they had to stoop slightly, the rough stone arches right over their heads. The air inside the crypt was cold and dank as a refrigerator, smelling of dust and stone and mildew.
 

It took Sam’s eyes a moment to adjust. “Good God,” she almost shrieked, “what are those?”
 

The tall figure in the elegant gray suit beside her hunched over to keep his head from touching the ceiling. “Ah, they are marvelous, aren’t they? Sarcophagi, eleventh or twelfth century. Tombs of knights of the time of the Crusades.”
 

“Tombs?” For a moment she’d thought they were human bodies. Now she could see they were reclining stone figures. She twisted to look over her shoulder. Chip was leaning up against the wall in the pool of light at the foot of the stairs. For the first time the sight of Chip was reassuring.
 

She followed Alain des Baux under an even lower part of the ceiling. He moved around to the far side of a stone effigy, putting it between them. Sam’s back almost touched the dank walls.
 

“Does this frighten you?” he said apologetically. “I didn’t mean to, please believe me. Europeans are quite used to old places, and I forget Americans are not.” His lips quirked. “Would it make you feel better if I told you that the restaurant on top of the World Trade Center in New York scares the hell out of me?”
 

The stone figure of a knight lay on top of a large sandstone bier as though it were sleeping, hands crossed over its chest. The yellow glow from a bulb strung overhead was the only light.
 

“I’m not afraid.” Actually she was thinking of this in a report back to Jackson Storm headquarters in New York.
Item 47, lower level: One crypt with knights in coffins, in reasonably good condition
. “Is someone really buried in here?”
 

He leaned his elbows on the Crusader’s chest to look across at her. “Yes, they are real tombs. As a child I was fascinated with this place. I tried to imagine what it was like then, when the monks were here. There were fields and vineyards covering this part of Paris in the Middle Ages. The monks raised sheep. It was all very rural, very pretty. The city itself was a small, muddy town on the Île de la Cité in the middle of the Seine.” He traced a long finger across the effigy before them. “How the knights came to be here is something of a mystery. The tunic identifies them as the order of St. John of Jerusalem. You can see the cross on the shoulder.”
 

The knight between them lay fully stretched out with a long shield covering his body from his chest to his feet, the carved gray stone blackened with mildew. The knight’s hands came together at the top of the shield in an attitude of prayer. A helmet covered his head and a long nosepiece came down between his eyes.
 

“There are two. The other one is over there, in the alcove opposite. They look like brothers.”
 

“Brothers?” Sam was intrigued. “Are you sure?”
 

He shrugged. “No, but they look exactly alike. I used to imagine two brothers, coming back from the Crusades, who stopped here at the monastery and never went on. Perhaps they caught the plague. There was always plague down in the city in those days.”
 

She shivered. The darkness around them was as cold as a real cave. “It’s very interesting.” She was trying to be polite. “Do you have a degree in history?”
 

He laughed. “My God, no. French children learn this in school. It was very boring, too. Look,” he said, pointing to the stones over their heads. “Do you see how low the ceilings are? These were small people by our standards, even the knights. Their armor in museums shows how little some of them were. They suffered a lot of sickness, a lot of war, a not too good diet perhaps, and they died young. It was tragic, those times.” He said, quite seriously, “Do you believe in ghosts?”
 

Sam had been following him, fascinated, up to that point. Now she looked at him skeptically. “Ghosts?”
 

“It’s nothing serious.” He wouldn’t meet her eyes. “Actually, they’re another interesting feature of the house, Nannette and Sylvie will tell you so. Monks in their black habits wander above us, in the halls upstairs in the Maison Louvel. Many people have seen them.”
 

She knew he was putting her on, but he was doing it with such a straight face she couldn’t help giving it right back. “I know, they use the elevator,” she said just as seriously. “I had a ride in it today and I could tell it was haunted.”
 

“Ah, you Americans. You are such cynics, you don’t believe in anything. Look,” he said teasingly, “is this a fake? Bend over. Take a look at this poor fellow’s face.”
 

The crusader’s stone features were handsome. The mouth was sensitive with a nice, clear-cut chin, and his eyes were closed.
 

Sam stared at it for a long moment, frowning. “Good lord, did you bring me down here just to see this?”
 

The sudden hoot of his laughter bounced around the curves of the vault. “Ah, you finally noticed!”
 

The face of the knight looked just like Alain des Baux. Puzzled, Samantha stared at one and then the other. The tombs were real, she believed that much. But what was going on, anyway?
 

“It’s a coincidence.” He was still laughing at the expression on her face. “But of course all Frenchmen look alike, don’t they? Think of Louis Jourdan, Trintignant, Jean-Paul Belmondo, even old Chevalier. It’s the old story. You can’t tell us apart.”
 

“You’re weird, you know that?” Alain des Baux was a practical joker in spite of his magnificent good looks, his perfect manners. It was sort of endearing.
 

“Please, forgive me, I couldn’t resist it,” he chortled. “Quite seriously, there was a purpose in taking you here. This is not a good place to come to by yourself. Since you will have the keys to the building I wanted to show it to you and be with you when you saw it.” He reached into an inner breast pocket and drew out a card and handed it across to her. “I have an office in Paris. This has my Paris telephone number. I own a computer firm in Nîmes, in the south of France. We deal mainly in software for French aerospace programs like Ariane.”
 

The incongruity of Samantha being handed a business card by a computer engineer in the middle of an eleventh-century crypt struck them both at the same time. They smiled, and then as their eyes met and lingered, there was a sudden silence.