Flawless (32 page)

After the success of their opening-night party—Jake’s street brawl with Magnus had helped ensure them valuable column inches in the tabloids—Flawless had rapidly become a Mecca for hip, young Hollywood. Before long Scarlett and Perry knew most of the paparazzi by their first names and never tried to stop them from loitering outside the store, hoping for a shot of Lindsay or Paris, the way most of their competitors did. As Jake rightly pointed out, paps provided free publicity for Flawless, and their “targets” certainly didn’t seem to be bothered by press intrusion, whatever they might claim in interviews. One of the snappers, John, had even invited Scarlett to his kid’s fifth birthday party.
She’d have gone too, if she hadn’t been working up in Hollywood that day, shooting models for her latest Trade Fair campaign, a Russian-themed extravaganza complete with fur, fake snow, and her now-trademark nude models posing as corpses in diamond-encrusted coffins. It was gruesome, but it worked. As the business gained momentum and her designs started flying off the shelves, Scarlett finally found she had more time to devote to Trade Fair. Andy and Gregori, her friends from Yakutia, were thrilled at the direction of her new campaign, the first to focus exclusively on Siberia and the appalling conditions there.

“If you can get those pictures in any of the big US magazines, O’Donnell’ll have to sit up and take notice,” said Andy excitedly when she sent him the proofs. “This is just the shot in the arm we need, and the kick up the backside
he
needs, the heartless git.”

Fund-raising was also a breeze in LA. A good 50 percent of Flawless’s customers were professional “charity wives,” and those not already snapped up by Laurie David for her anti-SUV campaign or committed to the ubiquitous Make-A-Wish Foundation were more than happy to get involved with Trade Fair.

The only remaining fly in the ointment was the difficulty of getting US press coverage, although she was confident her gorgeous new ads would change that. Brogan had set Aidan Leach the task of keeping Trade Fair out of the US media, and he took the responsibility very seriously, more determined than ever not to fuck up after his “oversight” with Scarlett’s Yakutia trip last year. The
LA Times
had already dropped an interview with Scarlett days before it was due to run, under pressure from Aidan. Even
In Style
had heavily edited its profile of Flawless and its famous customers, eradicating every mention of Trade Fair from the published text, much to Scarlett’s fury. Brogan evidently had friends in high places.

Still, she reasoned, not even he could keep her out of the press indefinitely. There was a lot of goodwill toward her in LA, where to her surprise she’d been warmly and swiftly adopted as
a quirky, British outsider. Only a week ago, Katy Perry’s manager had been in the store, hinting that Katy herself might be prepared to lend her name to Trade Fair if Scarlett could let her people know a little more about it. It hadn’t happened yet, but it was all exciting stuff.

At least, Scarlett thought so. Magnus, much to her disappointment, had been less interested in her charity work than she’d anticipated. After six months “together”—although admittedly 90 percent of their relationship had been spent apart—she’d hoped for at least a modicum of boyfriendly solidarity. But he was so caught up in his own work—most recently he’d been working on an esoteric challenge to some minuscule piece of immigration law that he hoped, when published, would secure him his partnership—he had no mental energy left for her interests.

Having agreed at the outset to spend a minimum of one weekend in three together, Scarlett ended up doing all the traveling. Other than his first, surprise visit in March, Magnus had only made it down to LA once before tonight. Meanwhile, Scarlett had been ratcheting up the air miles to Seattle, a city she secretly found dull as ditchwater, spending her precious weekends mingling dutifully with Magnus’s boring lawyer friends, nodding and smiling her way through corporate cocktail parties and tennis club socials until her jaw ached.

All of which wasn’t to say that she and Magnus never had fun together. When he wasn’t “on duty,” sucking up to his senior partners, he still had the ability to reduce her to tears of laughter. They read the same books, were interested by the same NPR news stories, and thanks in part to the enforced, long separations, the sexual chemistry between them seemed to strengthen rather than weaken with time. The last three times she’d gone to see him, he’d booked them into a swanky hotel, which Scarlett thought was sweetly romantic. But it hadn’t escaped her notice that nine times out of ten,
she
was the one making the effort and the sacrifices to keep the love affair going. And that on some
very basic level, Magnus considered his career and interests to be more important than hers.

At least the fact that he was here tonight was some sort of step forward, and Scarlett was grateful for his support. It was four full months before the Academy Awards, but the
pre-
pre-Oscar season was already underway in Los Angeles. Every fashion-related business—clothes stores, jewelers, accessories outlets, shoe designers, hairdressers, you name it—was immersed in a fierce and frenzied competition for precious Oscar-night endorsements, bombarding actors, agents, managers, and their wives/friends/dogs with free products and services in the hope that their name might be glimpsed or mentioned on that all-important red carpet.

As the new kid on the jewelry block, Scarlett was at a distinct disadvantage, made worse by the fact that Jake had decided to disappear off to Africa for the second time this year to buy new stock just when the parties and press junkets were beginning in earnest. She felt no small pride in the fact that she’d put together tonight’s celebrity cocktail party all by herself. She knew the Jimmy Choo boss, Tamara Mellon, from London, and when she heard she was in town last month had put in a tentative call, wondering if perhaps they could meet for dinner and she could pick Tamara’s business brain for PR ideas. It was Tamara who’d suggested the joint event—Flawless, like Jimmy Choo, was a luxury brand aimed primarily at a younger, celebrity-conscious clientele—but Scarlett had leaped at the chance.

“Tamara’s such a whiz at these things,” she whispered to Magnus, smiling at one of her regular customers as they strolled past. “I’m lucky she let me hang on to her coattails. Oh look, there’s Kate Hudson. I wonder if she’ll go for my bumblebee pendant? It’s very her, don’t you think?”

Magnus looked at her as if she’d just let out the most horrendous fart.

“Have you heard yourself lately?” he said disapprovingly. “You sound like a valley girl. How should I know what kind of pendant Kate Hudson wants to wear? More to the point, why should I care? Why should
you
care? She’s only a stupid actress.”

“Unfortunately, stupid actresses count for a lot in my business,” said Scarlett. “Without them, we couldn’t hope to compete with the established brands. And Trade Fair would sink like a stone.”

She hated his assumption that because of what she did for a living she was somehow more shallow and more tolerant of the vile
US Weekly
celebrity culture than he was. Publicity was an evil, but a very necessary one. Surely he could see that and accept it without judging her?

“I have to circulate,” she said, kissing him on the cheek. “Are you OK here? Or d’you want to come with?”

“Into that coven of witches?” said Magnus, surveying the army of rich girls in hipster jeans and Fred Segal T-shirts as they drooled over the merchandise, giving little squeals of delight at the kitschiness of the set. “No thanks, honey. I’ll be over at the bar if you need me.”

What I need
, thought Scarlett, glad-handing her way through the guests,
is some bloody support
. If only Jake were here, he’d be charming his way around the garden like Eden’s snake, flirting for England and hard-selling her designs the way that only Jake could. She pictured him, sipping an ice-cold gin and tonic on a veranda somewhere in Africa, gazing out over a savannah sunset—was it sunset there? She could never get the hang of this time difference thing—and felt a pang of jealousy. How she wished
she
could take a month off to visit her beloved Franchoek—a small, old town in South Africa—and tour the continent while Jake got to stay here, schmoozing LA chicks and doing what he did best.

Over the past few months, she’d developed a grudging respect for Jake’s people skills. But he still annoyed the hell out of
her. He was always goading her about Magnus and how lame she was to be doing all the running.

“He’ll be Fed-Exing down his shirts next so you can iron them for him,” he quipped, the day Magnus called to ask if she could call US Air and book his flights. “Tell him to do his own travel arrangements. You’ve got a business to run.”

“Thanks for the advice,” Scarlett replied caustically, irritated because she knew he was right, “But seeing as your longest relationship to date has been, what? Four weeks?”

“Three,” said Jake proudly.

“I think I’ll follow my own judgment on this one.”

“Yeah, good idea,” said Jake. “Maybe you can talk things over with him this weekend. When you fly to Seattle,
again
. What delights has lover-boy got in store for you this time? The ‘Seattle Over Sixties Please God Make Me A Partner’ Bingo Championships? Bet you can hardly wait.”

“Yeah, well, it beats your weekend,” she shot back. “Another gross, mindless shag-a-thon with some poor, unsuspecting bastard’s wife.”

“Actually, the girls I sleep with are all married to
rich
, unsuspecting bastards,” smiled Jake. But though Scarlett didn’t know it, he didn’t enjoy the banter. Though he made light of it, he genuinely hated watching her trail around after that stuffed shirt lawyer like a loyal puppy. Ironically, it was Magnus’s nominal support for her charity work that fueled Jake’s own continued resistance to Trade Fair. It’d be a cold day in hell before anyone could accuse him of having something in common with that pompous, prematurely middle-aged bore.

But it wasn’t just Jake’s needling that annoyed Scarlett. Although he’d kept out of trouble with Flawless, as promised, he continued to employ unforgivably shady business practices when selling to private clients, flogging compromised or included stones for three or four times their market value where he thought he could get away with it. Scarlett was horrified. But
Jake, thrilled to finally be regaining ground against the odious Tyler Brett, saw no reason to abandon tactics he’d employed successfully for years and clearly viewed her objections as both naive and unreasonable.

“I’m your diamond dealer, not your pet,” he snapped at her the night before he flew to Cape Town, when she’d ill-advisedly embarked on another morality lecture. “I don’t tell you how to run your business, sweetheart. I’d appreciate it if you stopped telling me how to run mine.”

“But Jake, it’s fraudulent!” Scarlett insisted, exasperated by his apparent total lack of conscience. “Can’t you see that what you’re doing is wrong?”

“No,” he said firmly. “I can’t. I’m happy. The customer’s happy. So why on earth shouldn’t you be happy? You might have been too busy saving Siberia’s diamond miners to notice, but Brogan O’Donnell’s got my brother by the balls in New York.”

“What’s that got to do with anything?” said Scarlett.

“When Tyler had me over a barrel last year, Danny kept Solomon Stones afloat,” said Jake. “Now it’s my turn to return the favor. So just butt out, all right?”

Knowing that the Danny situation was a sore point—after ten months, Brogan and Diana’s divorce was no nearer completion, thanks to Brogan’s stalling tactics, leaving Danny bled dry with lawyer’s fees—Scarlett had backed off, for now. But her dislike of Jake’s business practices hung in the air between them like a constant bad smell, as did Jake and Magnus’s mutual loathing.

“Come and talk to Kate.”

Tamara, looking as radiantly glamorous as ever in a tiny aqua miniskirt and a pair of her own aqua-and-chocolate-brown heels, cornered Scarlett just as she was heading to the ladies’ room.

“She’s in love with that pendant of yours. I’ve told her I’m buying it if she doesn’t, and I’ll wear it to the Oscars myself.”

“You’re an angel,” said Scarlett sincerely. “I can’t tell you how much I appreciate all this.”

“Oh bollocks,” smiled Tamara, with a dismissive wave of her hand. “Far more fun to do these things together.”

Glancing back over her shoulder at Magnus, sulking at the bar and checking his watch ostentatiously, Scarlett couldn’t have agreed more.

Sitting in the stifling waiting room of the Freetown orphanage, swatting flies away from his face with a two-year-old copy of
Time
magazine, Jake wondered if the director, Dr. Katenge, was really in his office, as the receptionist had told him, or off snorting coke somewhere with his buddies like three-quarters of the so-called “charity workers” in Sierra Leone.

The country was so corrupt it made the mafia look like the Salvation Army. You never knew whom to trust. This was his seventh or eighth visit here—he couldn’t remember exactly. In the past, he’d always come with Danny, and the pair of them had been whisked straight from the plane to the dealer’s house, normally a fuck-off fortified white palace up on a hill somewhere. There they’d be offered some good diamonds at a reasonable price, with no questions asked or explanations given as to their origin, supplied with a comfortable bed, a selection of willing local girls, and a dizzying array of hard drugs, and left to their own devices for a night or two. After which, without having set foot out of the compound, they’d drive back to the airstrip and the rather less bountiful pleasures of “civilization.”