Wicked Becomes You(33)
She turned back to Alex. “I don’t require your help,” she said.
The dimple in his cheek betrayed his sober expression: he was biting back a smile. “Mais non,” he said. “If you’re going to do this, you’ll do it right. Next time, fifty francs should do nicely.”
Chapter Six
Le Highlife du Westend. Among fashionable French society, this was the sardonic term used to describe the annual influx of Englishmen to Paris. It also applied to their clumsy forms of amusement: their insatiable appetite for champagne (which no true Parisian would touch, save during Carnival); their ardent pursuit of the plump-cheeked cocottes who worked the music halls and cafés of the Latin Quarter; and their long lunches over haunches of beef at Richard-Lucas. In short, the phrase was a mocking acknowledgment that the well-heeled English came to Paris to do the very same things they liked to do in London, only with the added entertainment of being able to gawk at foreign ways that convinced them ever more deeply of their own country’s superiority.
It surprised Alex, then, to discover that Barrington had managed to set up camp in the Rue de Varenne. Generally speaking, the neighborhood jealously guarded its aristocratic provenance, making exceptions only for select Americans. To have found a house here, Barrington must have well-connected friends in very high places.
But connections were not the only resource Barrington could claim. He also had a surprisingly large number of guards posted about his property. As Alex loitered on the corner, pretending to smoke a bulldog pipe—no better way to look like an English tourist, and thereby provide passersby with a reason to dismiss the importance of any other detail of his person—he noticed that a deliveryman and a mail carrier were both stopped and questioned before being allowed up to the front door. The mail carrier did not disappoint, voicing considerable outrage at this violation of his dignity. Said outrage prompted another man in a bowler hat to emerge from the shadows of the ground story, and a third to lean out the window.
Three men set to guard the entry. It seemed curious. English real estate barons generally did not require such security.
After a half hour or so, Alex decided against attempting to approach. Better to find out as much as possible about the man. The first and most obvious idea was to discover who had secured him that house.
And who better to ask than the doyenne of gossip herself? Today, Alex recalled, had been Elma Beecham’s social tour of the Rue de Varenne.
“No,” Elma said absently, “I don’t know who owns that house.” They were standing in the marble-floored lobby of the Grand, beneath the chandelier at the base of the grand staircase, waiting for Gwen to make her descent to dinner. “I can find out, of course,” she added.
“I would appreciate it if you did,” Alex said. “A discreet inquiry, of course. Elsewhere, I would have contacts, but I do very little business in Paris . . .”
He trailed off as he realized that for once, Elma was not curious for explanations, nor intent on keeping his attention. Indeed, her blue eyes continually broke from his to dart toward the staircase. She reached up to run a nervous hand over her smooth blond coiffure, and then set her fan to rapping an arrhythmic tattoo against the inside of her gloved wrist. “Where is she?” she muttered.
“And how is Gwen faring?” he asked slowly.
“Oh, she—here she comes,” she exclaimed.
He followed her look toward the stairs, and found Gwen drifting down toward them.
I’m an idiot, he thought. He had forgotten the most basic tenet of business: to issue no challenges one was unprepared to see met.
Yesterday afternoon, Gwen’s enthusiasm had seemed relatively harmless. The glee with which she’d ordered beer had put him in mind of his nieces playing dress up in Caroline’s jewelry. Where two bracelets would suffice, Madeleine and Elizabeth always insisted on twenty, stacking bangles right up to their armpits.
But in the past twenty-four hours, Gwen appeared to have moved past bracelets and beer and fallen headlong into a pot of rouge. To be sure, she still looked like a child who had gotten into her mother’s wardrobe—but only if her mother was a high-class prostitute whose taste ran to pink satin and necklines far lower than the hour permitted.
“Did you take her shopping?” he asked. In a bordello?
Elma shot him a nervous smile. “Oh, a short stroll through the arcades on the ground floor. We picked up a great many joking gifts. I must have missed the moment when she chose this particular . . . Well, she’d never wear such a thing in London, of course! But she took a liking to it, and I—you know how Parisians are. Nobody will notice.”