Satin Doll Read Free Page B

on her to do what no one else could do at the moment: Go to Paris and report on the international division’s little problem. Jack, Mindy Ferragamo had repeated, was depending on her. And after all, it was Paris.  
    The taxi started abruptly down the narrow streets of Montmartre, and Sam, pressing her face to the taxicab window, stared at the white domes of the church of Sacré Coeur rising above it. Now that they were in the city itself, Paris was beginning to look more like the pictures in the guidebooks and postcards she’d stuffed in her duffel bag.  
    Not to worry. Mindy Ferragamo had said two days ago, we’re not going to send you to Paris unprepared, Sammy.  
    She’d been sent down to Jean Ruiz, head of Jackson Storm fashion coordination and publicity to be briefed, because Jean had worked in Paris for years as a fashion reporter for a string of Midwestern newspapers and knew all about it. Paris, the publicity head had told her, was divided into two parts—the older, now somewhat passé district off the rue de la Paix, and the newer, trendier area with places like Dior, St. Laurent and Cardin along the avenue Montaigne. The Maison Louvel was in the older part in a street called the rue des Bénédictines.  
    Paris, the city of lights, the publicity head had rhapsodized, the floodlit public buildings, the parks, the banks of the river Seine—it was fantastic, simply a must-see in anybody’s lifetime. Paris was the world capital of fashion in everything gloriously, fabulously unaffordable and not just clothes. The jewels, the art world, the playground of the rich and famous—Paris was the culmination of dreams. If you didn’t believe it, Jean Ruiz had told her, just wait until you get there.  
    Below Montmartre the driver raced the little Renault taxi past the great open square of the Place de l’Opéra as though setting time trials for the Grand Prix de Monaco. Sam braced her feet on the floor-board and got a fleeting glimpse of great boulevards bumper to bumper with traffic, even though it was early on a Saturday morning, continuous eighteenth-century buildings and enough intersections filled with fountains, statues and obelisks to honor every war, major or minor, the French nation had fought. Stay out of the Bois de Boulogne at night, Jean Ruiz had warned, it’s full of hookers and one is as likely to get mugged there as in Central Park. The water’s safe to drink, you can get a reasonably good hamburger at Burger King on the Champs Élysées if you’re just going nuts without one, but the Champs is wild after dark, full of tourists and French teenagers looking for some action. And purse snatchers and pickpockets, especially gypsies, make the boulevard hazardous. This year the French are crazy about anything American, particularly American jeans, food and American money, and are friendlier than they’ve been in the past.  
    “God knows what this thing looks like,” Mindy Ferragamo had said in the VIP lounge at Kennedy. “The rue des Bénédictines is over with Chanel and Grès and Nina Ricci, and it’s not a bad address. On the other hand, who knows? It might be a dressmaker’s shop in a couple of rooms in a basement.”  
    The taxi turned into a little side street, swerved two wheels up on the curb, and jerked to a stop.  
    “Hôtel,” the Paris cabbie announced. He turned to look at Sam with the same smoldering look with which he had greeted her at the airport. He looked more Arab than French, a swarthy youth in a heavy leather jacket with a lidded stare that swept over her denim jacket and the curve of her breasts and lingered at her wide mouth and blonde hair appreciatively. “You pay,” he demanded, sticking out his hand.  
    A brass plaque on the side of the building before them said: Maison Louvel, Couture. As far as Sam knew, they were in the right place. “Okay, I pay,” she told him, opening the cab door to get out.  
    As the taxi pulled away, she stepped back to get a good