Raiders of the Lost Corset (20 page)

“All the same, two other rooms please,” Lacey said. “I’d rather not bump into Marie.” He nodded agreeably, as if he heard these requests every day.

“Does Marie show up in a lot of your rooms?” Brooke asked with interest.

“Most often the floor you are on, where she died. Of a broken heart,” he hastened to reassure them. “No violence. But she has been known to visit any room in the hotel. She was a chambermaid here, many years ago.” Henri assured them they need only move their bags to their new rooms on the third floor and turn in the old keys. If they needed assistance, he would be happy to arrange it.

They declined his offer.

“Does Marie wear perfume?” Lacey asked, feeling a little foolish. “Has anyone noticed any particular aroma when she’s around?

Or after she’s left?”

Henri frowned. He couldn’t recall any reports of a ghostly perfume. “But if you hear a woman crying and there is no one there, ah! It is poor, poor Marie.” He sighed as he handed her the new room keys.

“I can’t believe he’s trying to make me feel guilty over hurting a ghost’s feelings,” she whispered to Brooke as they headed for the elevator once again.

Lacey didn’t want anyone, living or dead, rummaging through her things. A new hotel room would help ease the feeling of intrusion, she thought, even though it was almost identical to the one she had just left, decorated in shades of blue instead of rose.

Brooke’s was done in yellow and gold instead of green. And she was satisfied that whoever had searched their old rooms hadn’t found what he or she was looking for. Certainly not a Fabergé egg or a bloody corset.

Brooke scanned their new rooms efficiently and declared them bug-free. The air was also pleasantly scent-free. While Brooke was freshening up in her own room, Lacey felt compelled to take a moment to apologize to the alleged ghost, who she realized probably didn’t even speak English.

“Marie, I’m sorry,” she said aloud to the empty room. “I used you as an excuse, but I needed to get out of that room.
Je suis désolée.
No hard feelings, Marie. Let’s be friends,
d’accord
?” Lacey felt utterly ridiculous, but suddenly the room lights flickered off and then back on, as if in acknowledgment. The hair on the back of Lacey’s neck stood straight up. “Oh. Okay then.
Merci. Bonne nuit,
Marie.”

Before leaving for dinner, Brooke carefully taped all their drawers and room doors with snippets of Scotch tape, and this time Lacey didn’t even utter the word “paranoia.” She and Brooke went in search of a restaurant at random, strolling around the neighborhood and through a small park. Lacey decided she didn’t need to mention her possible encounter with Marie, not just yet. There was plenty to talk about concerning their earthly intruders, and she filled Brooke in more fully on her puzzling encounter with the softer side of Kepelov in the lingerie shop.

“Sorry I missed that, Lacey,” Brooke said, amazed. “Imagine that goon buying lingerie.”

“You think maybe it was Kepelov’s girlfriend who searched our rooms?” Lacey asked. “A girlfriend who wears woodsy rose perfume? ‘Long and Leggy,’ the one Griffin mentioned?”

“Why not? There’s always a woman behind every big dumb

lug. She’s probably the smart one. Maybe the black nightie was a thank-you for the search-and-bug operation. Only I vote for ‘Short and Chubby.’ ”

“He does seem more like a thug than a spy.”

“Maybe he’s just the muscle,” Brooke mused, “and Miss Eau de Rosewood is the brains. Let’s try that little brasserie on the corner, it looks cute.”

All through a dinner just as delicious as the one on Mont-Saint-Michel but at a third the price, Lacey’s mind kept returning to the note, the torn note she had found in Jean-Claude’s cellar. Did Juris Akmentins discover the corset was gone and then see the note left in its place in the metal box? Did he tear the note in half? If so, why, and why leave half in the box? Or did his old comrade Drosmis Berzins for some odd reason deliberately leave only half the note? She inspected it again by candlelight, pretending to examine the wine list while Brooke watched out for Kepelov and Griffin.

The tear didn’t appear to pass through any of the handwriting, though it was so dirty it was hard to tell; perhaps Drosmis simply wrote the note on an already torn slip of paper, so the note she had was all there ever was. Or perhaps it was torn between lines of writing.

Two questions remained: What did the other half say, if anything? And if it did say something, who had the other half now?

With a sigh, Lacey added a third question: Why would someone wall up a poor little dog?

Chapter 19

“Rue Dauphine is on the Left Bank, in the Latin Quarter, right in the heart of the city,” Lacey announced the next morning, consulting her Michelin map book of Paris. “It’s not far from the Ile de la Cité and the Cathedral of Notre Dame, so if we come up empty-handed, we can always tour the cathedral.” The sun shone brilliantly and it promised to be a beautiful day. She showed the map book to Brooke over the table in a little bistro near the hotel over breakfast. They had agreed not to discuss anything related to Magda or the corset in the hotel for fear of undiscovered bugs.

“How do you propose we check the address?” Brooke yawned and poured herself coffee.

“We just walk down the street like we own the place, like everyone else in Paris, not drawing attention to ourselves,” Lacey said. “Not like tourists.”

“No, no, we
should
look like tourists! I know it isn’t chic, Lacey, but really, if it’s painfully obvious that we’re harmless tourists no one will pay the slightest attention to us.”

“And your path to being blissfully ignored?” Lacey smeared cherry jam on a croissant.

“Deception and illusion, of course.” Brooke grinned like a little girl with a new Halloween costume. “On the plane I read the most fascinating book on disguise by this ex-CIA guy.”

“I’m going to regret this, aren’t I?”

“He says people see what they want to see, the big picture.

Whether your hair is up or down, glasses on or off, those little things don’t matter. Make a big change. Think of it as a reverse makeover. It doesn’t make you look better or worse, just different.

Not like ourselves.”

“Aha. You want us to look like hideously clueless tourists, don’t you?” Lacey’s heart sank. This wasn’t part of her looking-like-a-fabulous-Parisian-in-Paris plan. The bug scanner was just the tip of the iceberg of Brooke’s bag of tricks. “Where do you suggest we find ugly touristy stuff? Is there a Chez Ugly Tourist boutique on the Champs Elysées?”

“There probably is, but I came prepared to make us over.”

Lacey thought Brooke could no longer surprise her, but the young lawyer produced a plain black tote stuffed with disguise goodies.

Lacey was impressed. One might suppose that Brooke Barton, Esquire, was a frustrated actress, but one would be wrong. She really was a frustrated spy.

“Espionage has always intrigued me,” Brooke said. “Did you know?”

“Never had a clue.”

Brooke gave a modest little shrug of her shoulder. It was almost French. “It’s really like a private investigator’s traveling disguise kit, just the basics.”

“I don’t want to look ugly.” Lacey took another bite of croissant. “I’m not allowed to look ugly in Paris, it’s in my contract as a Lost Corset Raider. Underline ‘Lost.’ ”

“You’re not getting into the spirit of this,” Brooke said, down-ing the last of her coffee.

“Do your basics include false noses? ’Cause I like my nose the way it is.”

“I didn’t bring noses. They’re too much work. But I have a dental bridge. According to the spy disguise book, you don’t really need that much to fool everybody. Just something big enough to catch their eye and stick in their memory and obscure the
real
you, the you that we now don’t have to bother to cover up.” She grabbed her bag and pulled Lacey from her seat. “It’s a theory, anyway. Let’s hit the ladies’ room. We’ll walk out of here two completely different people.”

“We won’t match our passports.” Lacey paid the bill and followed her friend, still grumbling, feeling a little like Eeyore, the constantly complaining donkey in
Winnie the Pooh. Go ahead,
make me look like an ugly tourist. Pin my tail on crooked. Just
kick me.

By the time Brooke was finished with her, Lacey was just glad she wasn’t wearing an eye patch and a stuffed parrot on her shoulder. Instead, a dark brown bob curved around her cheeks like the famous Washington Helmet Head hairstyle that she loathed, and her eyes were peering through a pair of little black square-framed glasses, like an earnest new intern on Capitol Hill. And the ugly pale gray sweater and oversized navy blazer nailed the look. She could pass as one of the prematurely serious Washington, D.C., wonklings whom she tried so hard to imbue with the elements of style in her columns, “Crimes of Fashion” and “Fashion Bites.” It was depressing.

“You look like an intellectual,” Brooke said. “Or pseudo-intellectual. Not like you at all.”

“I look like my date for Saturday night is a bowl of popcorn and my sexy back issues of
Congressional Quarterly.
” She gazed in horror at the reflection in the mirror. “Come to think of it, I look like I’ll never get a date again as long as I live. Yuck.”

“So now you’re a crime of fashion. Have some sympathy for your victims. The last thing you look like is that stylish fashion reporter Lacey Smithsonian. Now, what do you think of me?”

Brooke posed with her curly red wig, topped by a Yankees baseball cap, round red-framed glasses, and a pink I LOVE PARIS hooded sweatshirt.

“You look like a circus clown. Why can’t we dress like femmes fatales?”

“Because we
are
femmes fatales. This no-flirting-zone look is what I was going for. I totally don’t want anyone flirting with us.”

“You’re totally safe. However, some flirting here in Paris would really lift my spirits.”

“I think,” Brooke said, “finding the Romanov corset will lift your spirits.”

“Don’t you mean lift and separate?” Lacey said with a smile.

“Besides, I don’t have a clue about the corset.”

“You’re wrong, we do have a clue, the address on the Rue Dauphine. And if we look clueless, no one will follow us.”

“No,” Lacey admitted. “They’ll be averting their eyes. But we can’t stop them from laughing at us.”

“A small price to pay for our freedom.” Brooke smiled at herself in the mirror before hefting her heavy bag. “Well, my work is done. Almost. Let’s drop this off at the hotel.”

Brooke informed Monsieur Henri, the efficient concierge, that the bag was for Mademoiselle Barton, who would pick it up later.

Henri, who had flirted with her single-mindedly for ten minutes earlier that morning, took her bag without a flicker of recognition.

“Did you see that, Lacey?” she whispered. “He didn’t recognize me. What do you think?”

“I’m wondering if I’ve ever done anything quite this goofy before.”

They navigated Paris with relative ease, Lacey realized, because they were used to Washington, D.C., a city designed in part by the French architect Pierre L’Enfant when George Washington himself was laying out the city. L’Enfant drew broad avenues radiating from circles like the spokes of a wheel on a horse-drawn cart, the vehicle for which the city was built. Later a rectangular grid of narrow streets was superimposed over the original hub-and-spoke avenues. The resulting layout may have been good for horses, but it was dreadful for things like cars. Hopelessly snarled traffic was a fact of modern life in Washington, just as in Paris. But Lacey and Brooke’s mental map of Washington helped them make sense of the chaotic streets of Paris.

They took the subway to the Odéon Métro station and emerged on the Boulevard Saint-Germain with their tourist maps in hand and their Clueless Tourist looks firmly in place. A short walk the length of the Rue de l’Ancienne Comédie brought them to the Rue Dauphine, a narrow and bustling street of restaurants, shops, and hotels. It was just a few blocks long, ending at the Pont Neuf, the oldest bridge across the Seine. They walked the length of the street, up one side and down the other, checking every address, even a little alley marked Passage Dauphine. The street addresses were all two-digit numbers. But the address in Drosmis Berzins’ note was 1101 Rue Dauphine. Puzzled, Lacey stopped in front of the Hotel Le Régent at number 61, near the end of the street where they began, and checked the map again.

She wondered if Paris streets, like those in the District of Co-lumbia, might stop only to start again blocks away. But the Michelin book listed no other Rue Dauphine in the city. There were other places named Dauphine: a park, a circle, a gate, the passage off Rue Dauphine they had inspected along the way. None of them was a Rue, and the note had the word “Rue” underlined.

“Are you sure there’s not more to it?” Brooke asked. “Show me the map again.”

A Frenchman stopped and offered his help. He looked like a professor, not a spy, wearing a tweed jacket and dark brown sweater and slacks. Lacey explained that she and her friend didn’t speak French very well and were lost. It was one of the first phrases on her French lesson CD, and it seemed to work. Lacey wrote an address on a piece of notebook paper, carefully making it 1103 instead of 1101.
If we find one
, she thought,
we can find the
other.
He looked at the address and frowned.

“I am so sorry, mademoiselle. There is no such address on Rue Dauphine. The street, it is short, as you can see, from here to the Seine. This number is too big. Perhaps a wrong address?”

“
Merci
anyway, monsieur.” Drosmis Berzins, wherever he might be, was laughing at her.

“Ah, mademoiselle, I see you are unhappy. A pity, such a lovely lady, and on such a lovely day. Perhaps you would allow me to take you to lunch?” Brooke coughed loudly behind him. “And your charming friend, of course,” he said, without looking at Brooke.

How can he flirt with me in this awful wig?
Maybe just to keep up his skills. Maybe it’s a French law. It seemed to Lacey that things were suddenly looking up. She felt her waning spirits revive with this masculine stranger’s misplaced attentions, but Brooke grabbed her arm.