Alexi turned on his heel and left the salon.
Fleur stood at the window of her mother’s bedroom while Belinda napped. She watched Alexi pull away from the house in a chauffeured Rolls. The silver car glided down the drive and through the great iron gates onto the Rue de la Bienfaisance. The Street of Charity. What a stupid name. There was no charity in this house, just a horrible man who hated his own flesh and blood. Maybe if she’d been tiny and pretty…But weren’t fathers supposed to love their daughters no matter how they looked?
She was too old for the baby tears she wanted to shed, so she slipped into her loafers and set out to explore. She found a back staircase leading into a garden where mathematically straight paths delineated geometric beds of ugly shrubbery. She told herself she was lucky to have been sent away from this horrible place. At the couvent, petunias flopped over the borders and cats could sleep in the flower beds.
She swiped her eyes with the sleeve of her sweater. Some small, stupid part of her had wanted to believe her father would have a change of heart when he saw her. That he’d realize how wrong he’d been to abandon her. Stupid. Stupid.
She took in a T-shaped, one-story building sitting at the back of the grounds. Like the house, it was constructed of gray stone, but it had no windows. When she found the side door unlocked, she turned the knob and stepped into a jewel box.
Black watered silk covered the walls, and gleaming ebony marble floors stretched before her. Small, recessed spotlights shone down from the ceiling in starry clusters like a Van Gogh night sky, each cluster lighting an antique automobile. Their polished finishes reminded her of gemstones—rubies, emeralds, amethysts, and sapphires. Some of the automobiles rested on the marble floor, but many sat on platforms, so they seemed to be suspended in the air like a handful of jewels flung into the night.
Slim columns bearing engraved silver plaques sat next to each car. The heel plates of her loafers clicked on the hard marble floor as she investigated. Isotta-Fraschini Type 8, 1932. Stutz Bearcat, 1917. Rolls-Royce Phantom I, 1925. Bugatti Brescia, 1921. Bugatti Type 13, 1912. Bugatti Type 59, 1935. Bugatti Type 35.
All the automobiles grouped in the shorter wing of the L-shaped room bore the distinctive red oval of the Bugatti.
Positioned in the exact center, a brightly illuminated platform, larger than all the others, sat empty. The label at the corner of the platform had been printed in big, bold script.
BUGATTI TYPE 41 ROYALE
“Does he know you’re here?”
She spun around and found herself gazing at the most beautiful boy she’d ever seen. He had hair like fine yellow silk and small, delicately formed features. Dressed in a faded green pullover and rumpled chinos fastened at the waist with an oversized cowboy belt, he was much shorter than she and as small-boned as a woman. His long, tapered fingers had nails bitten to the quick. His chin was pointed, and pale eyebrows arched over eyes that were exactly the same brilliant shade of blue as the first spring hyacinths.
Belinda’s face looked back at her from the form of a young man. Her old bitterness rose like bile in her throat.
He looked younger than his fifteen years as he nibbled on the remnants of a thumbnail. “I’m Michel. I didn’t mean to spy.” He gave her a sad, sweet smile that suddenly made him look older. “You’re mad, aren’t you?”
“I don’t like people sneaking up on me.”
“I wasn’t really sneaking, but I guess that doesn’t matter. Neither of us is supposed to be here. He’d be pissed if he found out.”
His English was as American as hers, and that made her hate him even more. “He doesn’t scare me,” she said belligerently.
“That’s because you don’t know him.”
“I guess some of us are lucky.” She made the words as nasty as she could.
“I guess.” He walked over to the door and began flicking off the ceiling lights from a panel of switches. “You’d better go now. I have to lock up before he finds out we’ve been in here.”
She hated him for being so tiny and pretty. A puff of air could blow him away. “I’ll bet you do everything he tells you to. Like a scared rabbit.”
He shrugged.
She couldn’t face him a moment longer. She dashed through the door and rushed out into the garden. All those years she’d worked so hard to win her father’s love by being the bravest, the fastest, and the strongest. The joke was on her.
Michel gazed at the door his sister had disappeared through. He shouldn’t have let himself hope they’d be friends, but he’d wanted it so much. He’d needed something, someone, to help fill the aching chasm left by the death of the grandmother who’d raised him. Solange had said he was her chance to make up for past mistakes.
It was his grandmother who’d overheard his mother screaming the news to his father that she was pregnant with Michel. Belinda had told Alexi she wouldn’t give any more love to the child she was carrying than he’d given to the baby abandoned at the Couvent de l’Annonciation. His grandmother said his father had laughed at Belinda’s threats. He’d said Belinda couldn’t resist loving her own flesh and blood. That this baby would make her forget the other one.
But his father had been wrong. Solange was the one who’d held him, and played with him, and comforted him when he was hurt. Michel should be glad she was finally free from her suffering, but he wanted her back, puffing away on her lipstick-stained Gauloise, stroking his hair as he knelt in front of her, offering all the love that the others in the house on the Rue de la Bienfaisance denied him.
She was the one who’d negotiated the uneasy truce between his parents. Belinda had agreed to be seen in public with Michel in return for twice-yearly visits with her daughter. But the truce hadn’t changed the fact that his mother didn’t love him. She said he was his father’s child. But Alexi didn’t want him, either, not when he’d seen that Michel couldn’t be like him.
All the trouble in his family had happened because of his sister, the mysterious Fleur. Not even his grandmother knew why Fleur had been sent away.
He left the garage and made his way back to his rooms in the attic. He’d gradually transported his belongings up there until no one remembered exactly how it was that the heir to the Savagar fortune came to be living in the old servants’ quarters.
He lay on his bed and locked his hands behind his head. A white parachute hung as a canopy over his small iron bed. He’d bought it in an army surplus store not far from the Boston prep school he attended. He liked the way the parachute rippled in the moving air currents and sheltered him like a great, silken womb.
On the whitewashed walls he’d hung his precious collection of photographs. Lauren Bacall in Helen Rose’s classic red sheath from Designing Woman. Carroll Baker swinging from a chandelier in The Carpetbaggers, clad in Edith Head’s gaudy sprinkle of beads and ostrich plumes. Above his desk, Rita Hayworth wore Jean Louis’s famous Gilda gown, and, by her side, Shirley Jones struck a pose in the deliciously tawdry pink slip she’d worn in Elmer Gantry. The women and their wonderful costumes enchanted him.
He picked up his sketch pad and began drawing a tall, thin girl, with bold slashes for eyebrows and a wide mouth. His telephone rang. It was André. Michel’s fingers began to tremble around the receiver.
“I just heard the wretched news about your grandmother,” André said. “I’m so sorry. This is very difficult for you.”
Michel’s throat constricted at the warm show of sympathy.
“Is it possible for you to slip out this evening? I—I want to see you. I want to comfort you, chéri.”
“I’d like that,” Michel said softly. “I’ve missed you.”
“And I’ve missed you. England was beastly, but Danielle insisted on staying through the weekend.”
Michel didn’t like being reminded of André’s wife, but soon André would leave her, and the two of them would move to the south of Spain and live in a fishing cottage. In the mornings Michel would sweep the terra-cotta floors, plump the cushions, a
nd set out earthenware pitchers filled with flowers and wicker bowls piled with ripe fruit. In the afternoons, while André read him poetry, Michel would create beautiful clothes on the sewing machine he’d taught himself to use. At night they would love each other to the music of the Gulf of Cadiz lapping at the sandy shore outside their window. That’s the way Michel dreamed it.
“I could meet you in an hour,” he said softly.
“An hour it is.” André’s voice dropped in pitch. “Je t’adore, Michel.”
Michel choked back his tears. “Je t’adore, André.”
Fleur had never worn such an elegant dress, a long-sleeved black sheath, with small, overlapping leaves picked out in tiny black beads at one shoulder. Belinda put Fleur’s hair up in a loose chignon and fastened polished onyx drops at her ears. “There,” her mother said as she stepped back to observe her handiwork. “Let him call you a peasant now.”
Fleur could see that she looked older and more sophisticated than sixteen, but she felt weird, as if she’d dressed up in Belinda’s clothes.
Fleur took her place at the center of the long, silent dinner table with Belinda sitting at one end and Alexi at the other. Everything was white. White linen, white candles, heavy alabaster vases holding dozens of full-blown white roses. Even the food was white—a cream soup, white asparagus, and pale scallops whose smell mixed with the cloying fragrance of the white roses. The three of them dressed in black looked like ravens perched around a funeral bier, with Belinda’s blood-red fingernails the only spot of color. Even Michel’s absence didn’t make the awful meal bearable.
Fleur wished her mother would stop drinking, but Belinda consumed one glass of wine after another while only toying with her food. When her mother ground out a cigarette on her dinner plate, a servant whisked it away. Alexi’s voice penetrated the silence. “I will take you to view your grandmother now.”
Wine sloshed over the rim of Belinda’s glass. “For God’s sake, Alexi. Fleur didn’t even know her. There’s no need for this.”
Fleur couldn’t bear the twisted, frightened expression on her mother’s face. “It’s okay. I’m not afraid.” A servant pulled back Fleur’s chair while Belinda sat frozen, her skin as pale as the white roses in front of her.
Fleur followed Alexi into the hallway. Their footsteps echoed off a vaulted ceiling, with violent frescoes of women in breastplates and men stabbing each other. They reached the gilded doors that marked the entrance to the main salon. He opened one of them and gestured for her to enter.
The room held only a shiny black casket banked in white roses and a small ebony chair. Fleur tried to act as though she saw corpses all the time, but the only dead body she’d seen had belonged to Sister Madeleine, and that had only been a glimpse. Solange Savagar’s wrinkled face looked as if it had been molded from old candle wax.
“Kiss your grandmother’s lips as a sign of respect.”
“You’re not serious.” She nearly laughed, but then she looked at him, and the expression on his face stopped her cold. He didn’t care about Fleur showing respect. He was testing her courage. This was a dare, un defi. And he didn’t believe for one moment she could meet it.
“Oh, but I’m very serious,” he said.
She locked her knees so they didn’t tremble. “I’ve been facing bullies all my life.”
His mouth curled unpleasantly. “Is that what you think I am? A bully?”
“No.” She forced her own mouth to form the same unpleasant sneer. “I think you’re a monster.”
“You are such a child.”
She’d never imagined she could hate anyone so much. Slowly she took a step, and then another. She moved across the polished floor toward the casket, and as she came closer, she fought the urge to run from this silent house, run from the Street of Charity, run from Alexi Savagar back to the safe, suffocating comfort of the nuns. But she couldn’t run. Not until she showed him what he’d tossed away.
She reached the casket and sucked in her breath. Then she bent forward and touched her lips to the cold, still ones of her grandmother.
She heard a sudden, sharp hiss. For one horrifying moment, she thought it was coming from the corpse, but then Alexi grabbed her shoulders and pulled her back from the coffin.
“Sale garce!” He uttered a vicious curse and shook her. “You’re just like him. You’ll do anything to save your pride!” Her hair came loose and tumbled down her back. He shoved her into the small black chair next to the casket. “Nothing is too vile when your pride is at stake.” He wiped away the kiss with his bare hand, smearing her lipstick across her cheek.
She tried to push his arm away. “Don’t touch me! I hate you. Don’t ever touch me.”
His grip loosened on her arm. He said something so softly she almost missed it.
“Pur sang.”
She stopped struggling.
He stroked her mouth with his fingers, his touch gentle. He traced the line where her lips came together. And then, unexpectedly, his finger slid inside her mouth and moved gently along the barrier of her teeth.
“Enfant. Pauvre enfant.”
She sat there stunned, spellbound, mesmerized. He crooned as if he were singing her a lullaby. “You have been caught in something you don’t understand. Pauvre enfant.”
His touch was so tender. Was this the way fathers treated daughters they loved?
“You are extraordinary,” he murmured. “The photograph in the newspaper didn’t prepare me.” He gently tangled his fingers in the tendril of hair that had fallen over her cheek. “I’ve always loved beautiful things. Clothing. Women. Automobiles.” He brushed his thumb over her jawline. She smelled his cologne, faintly spicy. “At first I loved indiscriminately, but I’ve learned better.”
She didn’t know what he was talking about.
He touched her chin. “Now I have only one obsession. The Bugatti. Do you know the Bugatti?”
Why was he talking about a car? She remembered what she’d seen in the garage, but she shook her head.
“Ettore Bugatti called his cars pur sang, pure blood, like a Thoroughbred horse.” The tips of his fingers brushed the polished onyx drops in her earlobes and pulled gently. “I have the finest collection of pur sang Bugattis in the world, all but the crown jewel—the Bugatti Royale.” His voice was soft, loving…hypnotic. She felt as if he’d cast a spell over her. “He built only six of them. During the war, one Royale was left in Paris. Three of us hid it from the Germans in the sewers beneath the city. That car has become a legend, and I’m determined to own it. I must own it because it is the very best. Pur sang, do you understand me, enfant? Not to possess the best is unthinkable.” He stroked her cheek.
She nodded, although she didn’t understand at all. Why was he talking about this now? But his voice was so loving, and the old fantasies rose up inside her. Her eyes drifted shut. Her father had seen her, and after all these years, he finally wanted her.
“You remind me of that car,” he whispered. “Except you are not pur sang, are you?”
At first she thought she felt his finger on her mouth. Then she realized it was his lips. Her father was kissing her.
“Alexi!” The shriek of a wounded animal penetrated the room. Fleur’s eyes flew open.
Belinda stood at the door, her face twisted with anguish. “Get your hands off her! I’ll kill you if you touch her again! Get away from him, Fleur. You mustn’t ever let him touch you!”
Fleur rose awkwardly from the chair. Her faltering words were unplanned. “But…He’s…He’s my father…”
Belinda looked as if she’d been slapped. Fleur felt sick. She rushed to her mother. “It’s all right. I’m sorry!”
“How could you?” Belinda’s voice was almost a whisper. “Does one meeting with him make you forget everything?”
Fleur shook her head miserably. “No. No, I haven’t forgotten anything.”
“Come upstairs with me,” Belinda said stonily. “Now.”
“Go with your mother, chérie
.” His voice slid between them like silk. “We will have time to talk after the funeral tomorrow and make plans for your future.”
His words gave her a sweet, fluttery sensation that felt like a betrayal.
Belinda stood at her bedroom window looking through the trees at the headlights flickering past on the Rue de la Bienfaisance. Muddy mascara tears trickled down her cheeks and dripped onto the lapels of her ice-blue robe. In the next room, Fleur slept. Flynn had died without ever knowing about her.
Belinda was only thirty-five, but she felt like an old woman. She wouldn’t let Alexi steal her beautiful baby away. No matter what she had to do. She stumbled over to the stereo. An hour ago, she’d made a phone call. She couldn’t think what else to do. As she looked around for her drink, she knew that, after tonight, there couldn’t be any more.
Her glass sat on the floor next to the pile of record albums. She crouched in the midst of them and picked up the album that lay on top. The soundtrack from the Western Devil Slaughter. She stared at the picture on the cover.
Jake Koranda. Actor and playwright. Devil Slaughter was the second of his Bird Dog Caliber movies. She loved them both, even if the critics didn’t. They said Jake was prostituting his talent by appearing in junk, but she didn’t feel that way.
The cover photo depicted the movie’s opening scene. Jake, as Bird Dog Caliber, stared into the camera, his face dirt-creased and weary; his soft, sulky mouth slack, almost ugly. Pearl-handled Colt revolvers gleamed at his sides. She leaned back, shut her eyes, and reached for the fantasies that made her feel better. Gradually the sounds of the distant cars slipped away until she could only hear his breathing and feel his hands on her breasts.
Yes, Jake. Oh yes. Oh yes, my darling, Jimmy.
The record album slipped from her fingers, jarring her back to reality. She reached for her crumpled pack of cigarettes, but it was empty. She’d meant to send someone out after dinner, but she’d forgotten. Everything was slipping away from her. Everything except the daughter she’d never let go.