Satin Doll Read Online Free

look at Number 5, rue des Bénédictines. It was tall, the only building in the narrow, dead-end street and seemingly a part of the solid wall of eighteenth-century buildings that stretched for miles in this part of Paris. The soot-stained, white sandstone façade rose four and a half stories to a slate mansard roof topped with a forest of chimney pots. At ground level medieval-looking massive wooden doors, their varnish somewhat bare in spots, were decorated with lion-headed brass door knockers with rings in their mouths. In the United States, Number 5 would have been a museum or a national monument. In Paris it was just another building.  
    The only modern, jarring note in the street was a sinister-looking black-on-black sports car, with air foils jutting up over its trunk, that had been parked a little farther down next to another plane tree.  
    Beyond the massive doors of Number 5 a cobblestoned tunnel passed under the front part of the house to an open area that had obviously been built for passengers disembarking from horse-drawn carriages. In a brilliant patch of sunlight beyond was an interior courtyard with two French automobiles parked side by side and a scruffy, black-painted motorcycle.  
    Sam stood looking at the courtyard for a long moment, thinking that it looked as though she had stepped into a set from some old movie about Paris like Gigi or Moulin Rouge . Suddenly she had a feeling that what was supposed to be a simple inspection was actually going to be very complicated.  
    Jackson Storm International had been in negotiations for months to buy a French textile mill and finishing mill in Lyons, but the package of papers sent from the brokers in London on the sale’s closing had enclosed an unexpected listing of some additional properties not described in the original package. There had been a small, valuable strip of development property in the south of France in the resort village of St. Tropez, an apartment building in a working-class neighborhood of the small city of Uzes, and something the Paris legal firm described as an haute couture house called the Maison Louvel on the rue des Bénédictines.  
    No one seemed to recognize the name. One thing the Maison Louvel was not, a hurried telephone call to Paris from Mindy Ferragamo’s office confirmed, was a fashion house registered with the Chambre Syndicale de la Haute Couture, the Paris trade association.  
    “Okay, so we haven’t bought Pierre Cardin by mistake,” Jack Storm had said. “So what is it?”  
    The Maison Louvel’s ground floor entrance was flanked by wooden Doric columns covered in peeling, cream-colored paint. Inside double French doors in the same color opened to a great white marble fin de siècle staircase. The Maison Louvel, if it was open for business on Saturday morning, was singularly quiet. The tunnel and wooden doors shut out any sounds from the street, but there was no noise from the interior of the house either.  
    After the initial flap had died down about the unexpected items acquired in the package deal for the French textile mill, Jackson Storm headquarters in New York had placed calls to a number of fashion magazines and Women ’ s Wear Daily to discreetly inquire if anyone had ever heard of a Maison Louvel in Paris. At Harper ’ s Bazaar a senior editor said it sounded vaguely familiar but thought Louvel’s had gone out of business forty or fifty years ago. W contributed the information that a friend of Diana Vreeland’s said the last Louvel designer, a Mademoiselle Claude something, had been a girlfriend of Coco Chanel’s.  
    “What the hell do you expect, anyway, from W ?” Jack Storm had snorted.  
    The bottom part of the Maison Louvel buildings smelled, in the slightly moist spring air, like dust, marble and mildew. Sam paused at the bottom of the stairs, looking up to see that the staircase with its wrought-iron railing rose up from the ground floor through the center of the building to a skylight