Raiders of the Lost Corset (27 page)

“Damon and I can still play.” Brooke caught Lacey’s smile.

“I’m sure you and Vic have your little games to play too.”

“We’ve been playing a game for the past six years.”

“So now it’s game, set, match? Or is it love all?” Brooke zipped up the hooded sweatshirt and bent down to tie one of her shoelaces. “Gotta run. We have so much ground to cover before we go see Jim Morrison’s alleged grave in Père-Lachaise cemetery.”

Lacey slumped against the wall and hugged her robe tight around her. “Wait. Not Jim Morrison of the Doors? Heroin overdose? You said ‘alleged.’ You don’t believe those rumors, do you?

Oh, of course you do. What was I thinking.”

Brooke smiled at her naive friend. “Heroin overdose is the official story, but no one ever saw the body, except for his girlfriend who reported the death and a doctor no one ever heard from again.” Brooke stretched her quads and then her back.

“Oh, Brooke. You think the Lizard King is still alive, right?”

“He told people he was going to fake his death just a couple weeks before he, quote, ‘died,’ unquote. Coincidence?”

“Nobody ever just plain dies in your universe, do they? The cemetery is on my list too, but not to visit Morrison.” Lacey put her hand on the doorknob and yawned. “I can’t believe you’re so into dead people.”

“Only some dead people,” Brooke corrected her. “And missing persons who
pretend
to be dead. Damon is writing a case study on how to disappear and why Paris is such a good place to do it. So why don’t you two meet us there at —” She checked her watch.

“Say two thirty at the, quote, ‘tomb,’ unquote, of Jim Morrison.”

“But I don’t even like the Doors! ‘Light My Fire’ just makes me want to —”

“It’ll be fun. We’ll see you there. Damon’s waiting for me. Au revoir,
chérie.
”

Lacey watched Brooke sail down the stairs in her jogging shoes, her blond braid flying. She opened the door to find Vic up and getting ready to shower.

“But I thought we could — You know. Go back to bed?”

“You don’t want to miss anything, do you? Especially if we have to meet those two at two thirty at Père-Lachaise.”

“You heard all that?”

He grinned. “Darling, you expect me to just let you slip off into a dim hallway where ghosts, spies, jewel thieves, killers, or your lunatic friends could spirit you away from me?”

“Ah, you haven’t met the ghost yet,” Lacey said. Over Vic’s shoulder, Lacey watched as the lamp beside the bed flickered on and then off again. Vic saw her eyes go wide and he turned around, but it was over.

“Don’t worry, darling,” Vic smiled. “The day is young.”

Chapter 26

Consistency is the key to a woman’s signature look, Lacey decided.

Lacey had always strived for a consistently pulled-together look, but especially since becoming the fashion reporter at
The Eye
Street Observer.
Everyone she knew suddenly expected her to look well-dressed all the time.
Quel drag.
The other reporters simply took her word for it; they assumed whatever she wore was in style because she was wearing it, the way readers assume that the sports reporter understands football. But this was Paris. Parisians, she assumed, would be highly critical connoisseurs of style.

This morning her reflection in the mirror satisfied her, and she hoped it would even satisfy hypercritical Parisians. The plain black skirt, tights, and boots went with anything, and the emerald sweater made her blue-green eyes sparkle. A matching emerald jacket with a belted waist, copied from a vintage Forties jacket in Aunt Mimi’s trunk, completed the look. She added gold hoop earrings and a cuff bracelet. But maybe looking good had more to do with being in love, she thought. Whatever it was, it was working.

“You’re gorgeous,” Vic said. “Let’s go.”

“You just interrupted my work. I was making up a new theory about fashion.”

“Time’s a-wasting. It’ll come back to you.”

Before they left for the day, Lacey wanted a chat with the helpful concierge. With Vic waiting outside on the sidewalk, Lacey turned the charm of her carefully chosen outfit on Monsieur Henri.

The fastidious little man was wearing a starched white shirt and a green wool vest with brown slacks. He greeted her, his perfectly trimmed mustache conveying utmost seriousness.

“
Bonjour
, Monsieur Colbert.”

“
Bonjour
, mademoiselle.” He gave a curt nod and a lightning appraisal of her outfit. She must have merited his approval. His face relaxed and his mustache flirted with the hint of a smile.

Lacey thanked him for his excellent service and asked if he knew the hospital where last night’s shooting victim was taken. He did. Would he be so good as to make a call and ask about the condition of the victim, a man named, she thought, Gregor Kepelov?

“For you, mademoiselle, but of course.” He picked up the phone. While he was engaged, she picked up brochures featuring Parisian attractions. Henri was taking what seemed like a long time to the final au revoir. She looked up.

“Ah, Mademoiselle Smithsonian. I regret to inform you they say there is no Gregor Kepelov at the hospital,” Henri said. “And so, thinking there was perhaps a mistake with the name, I inquired, was a man who was shot outside this restaurant last night admitted? I was informed she could not say, which means, of course, he was. But it must be a different man. I am so sorry.”

Henri looked perturbed that his special charm had not wormed more information out of the hospital. Lacey assured him he was brilliant and thanked him profusely.

Kepelov, no doubt, had many aliases. Whatever his real name was and wherever he was, if he was still alive, there was nothing she could think of to do to learn more about him. She briefly pon-dered whether Griffin might have shot him, but Griffin didn’t seem the murderous type, and he could barely open a pack of cigarettes.

And who was the mystery woman wearing Magda’s scent? Lacey determined she would not dwell on Kepelov or Griffin today. Or phantoms.

Lacey and Vic were on the Métro on their way to the famous Cluny Museum of the Middle Ages when she suddenly realized she needed to jot down notes for a “Fashion Bite,” her irregular column of humorous fashion advice and commentary. Her editor, Mac, professed not to understand a word of them, which gave her the freedom to write nearly anything she pleased.

She had begun to wonder if she were hanging out in all the wrong places in Paris to catch a glimpse of the elusive glamorous Frenchwoman of fashion legend. In the fashion world the mystique of the effortlessly stylish Frenchwoman with her legendary scarf-tying abil-ities would never die. Lacey thought most of the women she saw on the streets here looked perfectly normal, some slightly better dressed than others, some worse. Where were those dazzling and elegant trendsetters she had been conditioned to expect?

In the real world of Paris fashion in the street, Lacey was not seeing anything like a parade of haute couture knockouts, but she was noticing some trends. There was a certain consistency of style among Frenchwomen that could be counted on, and it was in the details where their genius lay. And the genius was sheer confidence, an attitude that said, “Of course what I am wearing is in style, because I am wearing it!”

“Laundry list?” Vic asked, peering at her notes.

“Fashion clues.” She kept writing as he nibbled on her ear. “I like Paris, it brings out the romantic in you.”

“I’m a natural-born romantic, didn’t you know? Are you writing about the alleged corset?”

“No, I’m working on a column. A ‘Fashion Bite.’ ”

“I’ll bite. What’s the key clue?”

“Attitude,
mon cher,
attitude.” Lacey wrote a few more notes on her theme that the Frenchwoman had the style war won over the American woman in only one key attribute: attitude. They believe they look great, and this gives them the confidence to look their best, so everyone else believes it too. She closed her notebook, thinking that perhaps if she could don a little of that nonchalantly fearless attitude, perhaps others would see the same courage in her.

Perhaps even she would begin to feel it herself.

Lacey sat on a bench in the darkened circular hall of the Cluny Museum. She was reveling in the exquisite artistry of the brilliant unknown weavers who had created these six vibrant tapestries:
The Lady and the Unicorn.

Every mystery requires a key to unlock it, she was thinking, as she drank in the sight of the famous tapestries. Lacey marveled at the skill it must have taken and wondered about the La Viste family who had commissioned the tapestries, though no one quite knew why. What did the images signify, beyond what the glossy guidebook told her? What was the key?

She learned that the tapestries were woven in the late 1400s.

Five panels of
The Lady and the Unicorn
depicted the five senses:
Sight
,
Hearing
,
Taste
,
Touch
, and
Smell.
The focus of each panel was a soigné blond Lady and a playful white unicorn. Each featured a scene symbolic of that sense, enacted on a sapphire-blue rug or island set against a blazing crimson background, dense with birds and flowers and small animals. A sixth panel,
A Mon Seul
Désir
, “To My Sole Desire,” seemingly depicted the Lady putting away her rich necklace, renouncing her worldly passions, or so the book said. Lacey peered closely at the necklace in her hands, poised above a chest of similar jewels offered by her maidservant.

The image seemed ambiguous.
What if the Lady were picking up
the jewels,
she wondered,
not putting them away?
Perhaps the Lady in the tapestry was trying to tell her something, offering her a key to her own mystery. Should she put away all thought of finding the elusive corset and their legendary jewels? Or should she try to take the mystery in hand and pick up the thread of the search?

The Lady was inscrutable, and her unicorn smiled enigmatically. Lacey was pleased the two of them were taking such an interest in her dilemma. She wished Magda could have been here to see this sight again. Magda had seen them years ago and had never forgotten them. The old corsetiere had told Lacey that if she loved stories told by fabric and style, she must see the tapestries at the Cluny.

They were a revelation. For Lacey, the Middle Ages had always seemed a dismal, dirty, dark era, cold and muddy, a place where no one bathed. The sumptuous French tapestries revealed a different world altogether, with their luxurious bold colors and serenely mysterious tableaus. Untold numbers of stitches from unknown numbers of weavers had created them for an unknown purpose, to tell an ambiguous story. It seemed to Lacey that so much of France’s history was told in stitches. It was told in tapestries and in the elite world of haute couture. It was told even by the women who knitted at the guillotine and dropped a stitch every time a head rolled, making a count of the bloody victims of the Revolution.

Vic had been discreetly casing the hall of the tapestries to make sure that they hadn’t been followed by Griffin or a mystery woman perfumed with a woodsy rose scent. He returned to her side, resting his arm over her shoulder and putting his lips to her temple.

She smiled at his touch and felt a little sorry for the Lady in the tapestries, attended by her pretty unicorn, her servants, and her jewels, but with no man in the picture.

“I take it we’re safe?” She was enjoying this new side of Vic.

He had demonstrated his protective side before, but she hadn’t seen such tenderness.

“So far.”

“You know, I’m not followed by bad guys all the time.”

“Yeah,” he said. “I bet you can go for weeks sometimes. Seen enough?”

“A little while longer, please. You could go to the shop or the garden and wait there for me.” She smiled at him and turned back to the sixth panel. “I want to absorb it.”

She thought how nice it would be if someone would hand her a glossy book with a key to the whereabouts of the missing Romanov corset. Maybe with a sidebar on who came up with the idea of stitching jewels into the corsets, and who sewed them into their hiding place, and who had taken them from Jean-Claude’s cellar.

And a neat final chapter on where they were now.

Perhaps this book would give her a metaphor to work with for her story for
The Eye.
But instead of the five senses, it would no doubt be the Three Stooges: Magda and Lacey and Brooke. The blond Lady of the tapestries wasn’t telling any secrets. She wore a bemused and knowing look. Her riches were secure, whether she was picking them up to wear or putting them away, and she and her pet unicorn would be adored forever in the round room of the Cluny Museum.

The room was becoming crowded. Lacey gave the Lady one last look and went to find Vic in the gift shop. She bought a couple of small tapestries, and she suggested a book for Vic’s dad and a pretty scarf in a brilliantly colorful
Lady and the Unicorn
print for his mother.

“You have nothing to worry about, Lacey darling, they’re going to love you.”

Not if they love his ex-wife too
, she thought. Lacey liked to think that she and his ex, Montana, were as different as silk and polyester. The scarf was silk. Lacey hoped Vic’s mom would like it. A lot.

“Do you’ll think they’ll be here?” Vic asked. “In this rain?”

The air was cool, but after the slow-moving crowds in the Cluny, it felt delicious to be walking in the immense Père-Lachaise cemetery in the light November drizzle. Lacey adjusted her shawl over her jacket and put her arm around Vic. The cemetery seemed washed clean in the rain and the scene was lovely, impressionistic.

Burnished leaves clung to the cobblestone paths. Lacey wished she could keep the memory of this moment forever. With a little help from Vic, she thought, she might.

“I don’t think a monsoon would keep Brooke away from the ‘Lizard King.’ ”

Vic shook his head. “Does she actually like Jim Morrison’s music?”

“The Doors? She’s more of a Broadway show tunes girl. It’s the mystery that moves her.”