“I kick your butt first,” Svetla yelled. The door rattled.
No doubt she would. In Svetla’s jeans pocket, she’d found two hotel key cards. But no room numbers.
Aimée let herself out and hung a DO NOT DISTURB sign from the handle. Even with Svetla’s racket, no staff would dare open it. One of the key cards opened Svetla’s room. The other must be for Marina’s.
She hit Marina’s number. On the tenth ring, the diva’s slurred voice answered. “Da?”
“Madame Bereskova, Svetla gave me her phone. It’s important.”
“What you mean? Who is this?”
“What’s your room number? Svetla’s gone and you’re in trouble.”
“You the Parisienne shopping girl?”
“Mais oui. What’s your room number?”
“I don’t know … Dmitri know.”
“Where’s Dmitri?”
“What trouble?”
Aimée’s ballet slippers sank in the plush carpeted hallway as she tried the key card in the door across the hall. No luck. Her stomach clenched. Three doors down, the key card lit up the green light and buzzed her in.
Vases of lilies, a fruit basket, and several champagne bottles littered the suite. Some full, most empty. Marina, her smeared mascara and black sequin top clashing with her pink flannel pajama pants, sat cross-legged on the bed. She flipped channels with the remote.
“Drink Bollinger? Then we go shopping, da?”
“All the boutiques are closed, Marina,” Aimée said.
“Dmitri make them open. He can. Opened Harrods once like for Queen.”
“The way he’s buying a Modigliani of Lenin for his museum?”
Marina drank a flute of champagne. Handed Aimée one. “Lenin, schmenin,” she said, clinking Aimée’s flute with her own.
“Tatyana’s lying to you.”
“So?” Her voice sounded bored.
Aimée took a sip to humor Marina. The toasty fizz slid down her throat. Not bad. “No one’s telling the truth, are they?” She’d neutralized Svetla, but she couldn’t count on it for long.
“Truth is flexible, Dmitri says,” Marina slurred. Eyes unfocused. Drunk. “Dmitri knows. His mother died after trying to have abortion of him. His father crushed in a steel accident when Dmitri is four. Self-made, that’s what you say?”
And ruthless. But she didn’t care to hear Marina’s drunken rant.
“Alors, Marina, don’t tell me you trust—”
“Dmitri’s good man,” Marina interrupted. “Some men, they trade wife for new younger skinnier wife. Not Dmitri. Not like the others. No stick-thin bimbo for him.”
For now, Aimée thought. Marina protested too much.
“We come from same village, worked in same factory,” she said. “Dmitri say Tatyana no good.”
“Dmitri’s right. Tatyana’s using you, trying to make business.”
Marina waved her bejeweled hand toward the closed door of an adjoining suite. “Dmitri make business. Not me.” Marina poured Aimée more pale-gold Bollinger fizz. “I no answer her calls now. Keep me company and we go shopping tomorrow?”
Poor, sad woman.
“Remember the ELLE magazine fashion spread I told you about?” Aimée said. “Good news. My journalist friend wants to interview you. For you to come to the photo shoot.” For the first time this evening, she spoke the truth.
“Me? In the ELLE?” Marina’s eyes widened. She clapped her hands together like a child.
And then she had an idea. “ELLE wants to shoot on location—in the boutiques, and in Dmitri’s museum. Elegant and Parisienne, you know.”
Marina laughed. “We find museum, no problem.”
“But ELLE wants Dmitri’s museum.”
“Exist on paper.”
“So there is no real museum at all? That’s what you mean?”
“We rent aristocrat’s h?tel particulier. Like private museum, okay? Dmitri do it all the time.” Marina leaned over, pulled out an oversize Hermès bag and emptied it on the bed. Grabbed her checkbook. “I write check now.”
A front.
Marina downed her champagne. Giggled. “Me with you, fashionable Parisienne. I tell them cash check after tomorrow.” She wrote a figure with a lot of zeros on a check from a Swiss bank account. “Kitchen-sink banking, Dmitri call it. Everything go in and everything come out clean.”
Money laundering. The proof. She’d use this somehow. Aimée grinned back at Marina.
“Dmitri’s next door?” The tall double doors to another wing of the suite were closed.
“Meetings. Always meetings. About paintings and money.”
And his wife too drunk to impress clients. Or he got a bit on the side.
She needed to distract Marina. Get next door. “I bet Dmitri keeps pictures of your children. A proud papa, non? Why don’t you show me?”
Marina downed her champagne. “Children?” A sad downturn to her eyes. “Dmitri shoot blanks.”
Did that explain her unhappiness, her drinking, her watching too many American films? Or that he kept to his own suite? Aimée racked her brain.
“Try on the Lolita Lempicka you bought today,” Aimée said. “The one that matches your eyes.”
Marina wove an unsteady path to her open dressing room. “Please to help me accessorize.”
“Bien s?r, but let’s start with that.”
Aimée fingered the checkbook Marina had left on the bed, coughed as she tore a deposit slip from the back, and stuck it in her pocket.
While Marina rummaged through clothes in her dressing room, Aimée moved to the double doors. She took a breath and opened them, revealing a narrow hallway. Followed the smell of cigars to a room off to the right.
She paused at the open door. Heard the clink of glasses and voices. Should she chance going further?
“Show them and they’re in,” said a man’s voice. Aimée edged closer.
A laugh. “Pas de problème, Hervé,” said a man with a Russian accent. “I have it.”
Two men sat in leather armchairs holding Baccarat tumblers before a fire. The one she figured for Dmitri, on the thin side with short black hair and Slavic cheekbones, wore an unbuttoned pink dress shirt, no tie. A sheen of perspiration glinted on his forehead.
The heat or nerves? she wondered.