Raiders of the Lost Corset (31 page)

They were breathing a little harder by the time they approached the top of the many steps of Sacre-Coeur. The Basilica atop the hill, with its striking domes of white stone, reminded Lacey of a whitewashed castle looming against the sky. Tourists, students, and worshipers milled around the church, admiring one of the finest views of Paris. Lacey spied Brooke and Damon at the top of the steps and stopped to take a picture of them silhouetted against the Basilica.

“You’re late,” Brooke said, rushing down the steps to meet them with Damon close behind.

“Ten minutes,” Lacey replied. “I have a good excuse.”

“Thirteen minutes,” Brooke corrected, pointing at her watch. “I was half afraid you’d been shot and killed by Kepelov’s phantom assassin.” Several people who must have spoken English turned to stare. She lowered her voice. “So what’s your excuse?”

“A run-in with a scary old friend of Magda’s,” Lacey said, catching her breath. “ ‘Friend’ may not be the right word. And I bought several hundred dollars’ worth of sexy French lingerie.”

“Cool! Can we see it?” Damon said. Brooke smacked his arm.

“Hey, babe, it’s research.”

“Do your own research, buddy,” Vic suggested with a grin.

“Grow up everyone! It
is
research for me,” Lacey said. “Fashion research. Have you been inside the Basilica yet?”

“Not without you,” Brooke said. “We were keeping watch.”

“No sign of Nigel Griffin,” Damon said, “no word on Kelepov, and no telling who else in this city, or even in this crowd, might be a foreign operative.”

“No telling,” Vic agreed. “Maybe even us. Shall we go in?”

They started up the last few steps together. A sudden breeze caressed Lacey’s cheek and brought with it a rich wave of
Forêt de
Rose
, Magda’s perfume. She felt dizzy, and a little tickle of fear went up her spine.
Does everyone in Paris wear that damned
scent?!
She stumbled on a step and grabbed Vic’s hand.

Above them there seemed to be some kind of commotion. She looked up to see a white-haired man lose his balance and slip off the very top step. “Hey! Stop —!” he shouted in English. The expression on his face was sheer shock as he tumbled head over heels down the stone steps straight at her. Lacey blinked. She seemed to be reacting far too slowly.

A pair of strong arms lifted her off her feet and swung her out of the way just as the man careened past her down the steps, taking several other people with him as he fell. “Oh, my God, Vic.”

She was shaking in Vic’s arms. “He came straight at me.”

Vic made sure she was all right and left her with Brooke before he and Damon pounded down the steps to the crumpled heap of victims writhing below. Several people were unconscious and bleeding, but the white-haired man was conscious and shouting for help. The others had broken his fall. Lacey heard Vic tell him to lie still, help was on the way. He was protesting loudly in English that he hadn’t lost his balance at all.

“Pushed! I was pushed! Some bastard pushed me!” The man’s leg was twisted beneath him at an unnatural angle. He told Vic he felt hands on his back and a swift vicious shove. “Some son of a bitch did this on purpose!” Unfortunately he hadn’t seen who had pushed him down the stairs, nor did he have a clue who it might be or why. He was still swearing from pain and anger when the paramedics and the gendarmes arrived and Vic and Damon stepped away. The white-haired man and several others were carried away to the ambulances.

Vic and Lacey made very brief statements to a gendarme hastily canvassing the crowd for witnesses. Neither they nor Brooke or Damon had seen anything but the man’s fall. No one in the crowd stepped forward to point to a culprit or to claim responsibility.

Tourists shrugged and resumed their business of enjoying the spectacular view, but for Lacey, the charm had gone out of her last day in Paris. Paris was still lovely, she thought, but her first trip abroad had so far included a mugging by chloroform, a dead dog, relentless stalking, room searches, electronic bugs, the ghost of a lonely chambermaid, a shooting, the unsettling Madame Noir, and now an innocent bystander launched in her direction like a missile.

“Are you okay, sweetheart?” Vic seemed quite willing to hold her securely in his arms until she stopped shaking.

“It’s time to go home now,” she said.

They were on the plane back to America before Lacey felt safe enough to relax. The couples had swapped seats so Brooke and Damon, both feeling feverish from their wet afternoon in the rainy cemetery, could sit together, and Lacey and Vic sat together several rows behind them.

Just before she could doze off on Vic’s shoulder, Lacey remembered his Thanksgiving dinner invitation, which she had ten-tatively accepted. She felt her anxiety rising about Vic’s invitation to his parents’ house.
Great. Something else to worry about. I escape Paris with my life only to end it all at Thanksgiving.
Indicative of her basic shallowness, she thought glumly, the first thing she worried about was what to wear. This meeting was so important. She wanted them to like her. She sighed.
This may be a bigger problem than just a wardrobe decision.

Vic’s folks lived in McLean, Virginia, a very well-to-do suburb full of wealthy politicians and lobbyists and CIA bureaucrats. She assumed the “comfortable” senior Donovans were wealthy, sophisticated people; she hoped they had high standards for holidays.

Lacey believed that if you drag out the good china, you dress up.

You don’t wear blue jeans with the good china.
A sophisticated soirée in McLean might have its charms. It might play to her strengths, she realized.

“What’s the dress code for Thanksgiving dinner?” she asked.

“My mother likes people to dress, but it’s not way formal. More semiformal.”

“What are you wearing?”

“Um, slacks, sweater, blazer, that sort of thing. I mean, if you want to go really casual, Mom won’t throw you out or anything —”

“Casual? You must be kidding. What will your mother be wearing?”

He shrugged. Clearly this was a question he didn’t address very often. “You know, a dress or something. I don’t know. Maybe slacks. Is this a big problem?”

“I don’t know what to wear,” she whispered.

“The fashion icon of
The Eye Street Observer
is worrying about what to wear? Say it ain’t so!” Vic laughed. Lacey glared at him, but she couldn’t help smiling. “How about some wine for Madame Fashion Reporter’s nerves?” He opened a small bottle of Air France’s finest screw-top Cabernet for her and poured it into two glasses.

Lacey took a sip of wine. “Let’s proceed to question number two. What should I bring?” Lacey imagined Vic saying, “Not to worry, just bring some flowers or something.”

“I said we’d bring dessert.”

“Dessert? Are you crazy? You said
we
would bring dessert?”

Homemade dessert! For a big family Thanksgiving!
She just stared at him.

“Sure. Why? My mother doesn’t make desserts. Not like your mom. But she loves sweets.”

Lacey was appalled. “A dessert like
my
mom makes? Surely you aren’t suggesting I whip up a big bowl of Rice Krispies and chocolate and marshmallows and graham crackers and maraschino cherries and gummy bears and —”

“Whatever. Anything you like. Sweeten her up. She’ll love you, darling.” Lacey sank down in her seat and covered her face with her hands. “It’s okay if you can’t cook, you know, we’ll just pick up a —”

“I can cook,” she snapped. “I just don’t do it very often, that’s all. I can ride a horse, too, but I try not to do it every day.” In fact, once in a while she even indulged in baking. But she didn’t want the secret to get out. It was bad enough being the fashion reporter: If her editor found out she could cook too, he’d expect her to go brownie-to-brownie and tart-to-tart with the evil Felicity.

“We’ll pick up a pumpkin pie at a bakery. No problem,” Vic assured her. “She’ll never know the difference.”

Lacey rolled her eyes. “Men! Of course she will, how could she possibly not know?”

“That’s what I do. She always says, ‘Yum, great pie.’ ”

“Because
you
brought it! Vic, dearest, store-bought pies come in those little aluminum tins. Everyone knows that!” Vic looked unconvinced. “I can’t believe you want me to start off by lying to your mother with a store-bought pie. I can’t believe you would suggest that. Do you want this woman to
hate
me?” Even if Vic didn’t have a clue what this was all about, Lacey did. This was an audition: She would be trying out for the role of Vic’s girlfriend, with his mother as the show’s producer. She could just see Vic’s mother smiling that cool producer’s smile, saying, “So nice of you to read for us, dear. Don’t call us, we’ll call you. Next!”

“Don’t worry. She’ll like you.” Vic nuzzled her cheek warmly.

“How could she not?”

Lacey drank her wine. “Okay, Vic. This is what we will do.
We
, you and I, will bring a homemade dessert, like you promised, because you and I are going to bake something together.”

“Is that right?” He stroked her face with the back of his hand.

“If it turns out great, we will share the praise, and if it turns out
badly
—”

Vic kissed her forehead. “We’ll just pick up that crummy dried-out store-bought pie in the cheap tin. And a big old can of Cool Whip.” He grinned at her. Lacey groaned, a groan that turned into a giggle as he nuzzled her ear. This little test would either cement their relationship, she thought, or kill it deader than a day-old doughnut.

Chapter 29

“New Orleans? Smithsonian, are you out of your mind?” Douglas MacArthur Jones’s eyebrows arched dangerously into his forehead. Lacey wondered if that hurt. “Wasn’t being chloroformed by some deranged Russian enough for you?”

On the morning after their flight back from Paris, still reeling from jet lag, Lacey sat as usual in Mac’s overstuffed office, shoe-horned in among stacks of copies of
The Eye
and who-knew-what.

Mac was eating a piece of pumpkin pie, Felicity Pickles’ autumnal recipe of the day, pausing in his tirade to appreciate the food editor’s talents.

“Great pie, Lacey. Homemade. Felicity would save you a piece, I bet.”

Lacey ignored that. “I don’t know if it was chloroform, Mac.”

Lacey regretted that Gregor Kepelov hadn’t given her that monogrammed handkerchief he’d used. Perhaps a lab could tell her whether she’d been gassed with something safe or Brooke’s secret Russian killer knockout cocktail. Kepelov himself wouldn’t say.

And now, if Griffin was to be believed, Kepelov was dead. Vic had gotten a frantic long-distance call from him that very morning, midafternoon Paris time, and he’d alerted Lacey at the newsroom.

“But the story isn’t over yet.”

“Careful, Smithsonian, you are on thin ice. You were attacked, knocked out, by your own admission. Running off to New Orleans is out of the question. Too dangerous.”

Rats. Now I’m going to have to use the personal leave card.

“But Mac, you’ve always told me to take some time off after these, um, little incidents. Some personal time. To deal with the stress?”

She tried hard to look pathetic. It wasn’t working.

“I can’t believe you still want to go looking for this crazy-ass corset that doesn’t exist.”

“But the story —”

“Damn the story. You’ve come down with gold fever, Smithsonian. Like one of those miners in the Gold Rush, dead in the bottom of a mine with a bullet hole in them, just for fool’s gold.”

“They didn’t all die, Mac, and I know you’re from California, but you really don’t want to go toe-to-toe with me here. I’m from Colorado and I know all kinds of stories where miners struck it rich. I was raised on the unsinkable Molly Brown. And Baby Doe Tabor.” Lacey left out the part about Baby Doe’s bad end at the Matchless Mine, penniless and freezing to death.

He grumbled. “I don’t like that look in your eye. Besides, you wrote the story. Finished. Done. Thirty. The end.” She knew the story was barely adequate without a satisfactory conclusion to the search. Mac didn’t seem to care.

“I’ll take time off. Do it on my own time.”

“To go to New Orleans?” His eyes narrowed suspiciously.

“I hear it’s a good place to unwind, Mac. I really am jet-lagging badly here.”

He finished off the last bite of his pie and set the plate on top of the day’s issue of the paper. “Let’s look at what you got.” He licked his fork for the remaining crumbs. “You got an address and half a smart-ass note that you say the jewel thief and the dead Russian spy didn’t know about. What makes you think this address is in New Orleans?”

She wasn’t sure herself. Except there
was
a Rue Dauphine in New Orleans, though the exact address hadn’t shown up in her Internet search. Sometimes it was just a feeling, she thought, and the feeling was getting stronger. “The corset wasn’t in Normandy, where Magda thought it was. This Drosmis Berzins character probably took it. Maybe he’d helped Juris steal it, and they had a falling out over it. He emigrated to the U.S., to Mississippi, close to Louisiana. The address wasn’t in Paris. Finding a street in America that echoes a street in Paris sounds like a deliberate mis-direction to me. So maybe Paris was a red herring, but what if it’s a real address? Those two old Latvian guys were old comrades —

maybe they were playing games with each other.” She realized her face was set in that stubborn look she found so hard to wipe off at will. “It’s a theory anyway, Mac, why not check it out?”

“Why do
you
have to check it out?” Mac burped and thumped himself in the chest. Lacey spotted his Maalox half hidden on the desk and handed it to him. “What’s the real reason?”

“I made a promise to Magda Rousseau.”

“You gotta stop making promises to dead people.”

That’s what Vic said.
“It’s on my list of New Year’s resolutions.”

Mac drank Maalox straight from the bottle. “New Year’s is a month and a half away. Plenty of time for you to get into more trouble.”

“I resent that.”

He rubbed his chin and played with a pencil on his desk, letting her squirm. “I can’t stop you from taking vacation time, Smithsonian. Or running around and causing trouble for people in New Orleans whom you haven’t even met yet. Wiedemeyer would call them ‘poor bastards.’ But if you find yourself knee-deep in a real story on this thing, this imaginary artifact,
The Eye
would be interested, particularly if that maniac Newhouse and his Web site are going to be following you around like an addicted gambler track-ing a long shot.”