Glitter Baby

Chapter 16

Fleur cashed a check at American Express using her Gold Card as ID. When she arrived at the Gare de Lyon, she pushed through the crowd to the schedule board and studied the blur of numbers and cities. The next train was leaving for Nîmes, which was four hundred miles from Paris. Four hundred miles from Alexi Savagar’s retribution.

She’d destroyed the Royale, systematically smashing the hood and the windshield, grille and lights, beating in the fenders and the sides. Then she’d attacked the heart of the car, Ettore Bugatti’s peerless engine. The thick stone walls of the museum had held in the noise, and no one tried to stop her as she put an end to Alexi’s dream.

The old couple already occupying the compartment regarded her suspiciously. She should have cleaned herself up first so she wasn’t so conspicuous. She turned to stare out the window. There was blood on her face, and the cut on her cheek from the flying glass stung. It was only a small cut, but she should clean it so it didn’t get infected and leave a scar.

She envisioned her face with a little scar on her cheek. And then she imagined the scar beginning at her hairline, cutting a diagonal across her forehead, and thickening to bisect one eyebrow. It would pucker her eyelid and cut down over her cheek to her jaw. That would just about do it, she thought. A scar like that would keep her safe for the rest of her life.

Just before the train pulled out of the station, two young women came into the compartment carrying a supply of American magazines. Fleur watched their reflections in the window as they settled into their seats and began studying the other occupants in typical tourist fashion. It seemed as if weeks had passed since she’d slept, and she was so tired she felt light-headed. She closed her eyes and concentrated on the rhythm of the train. As she drifted into an uneasy sleep, she heard the echo of smashing metal and the crunch of broken glass.

The American girls were talking about her when she woke up. “It has to be her,” one of them whispered. “Ignore her hair. Look at those eyebrows.”

Where was the scar? Where was that pretty white scar cutting her eyebrow in half?

“Don’t be silly.” the other girl whispered. “What would Fleur Savagar be doing traveling by herself? Besides, I read that she’s in California making a movie.”

Panic beat inside her like the pounding of a crowbar. She’d been recognized a hundred times before and this was no different, but being connected with the Glitter Baby made her feel sick. Slowly she opened her eyes.

The girls were looking at a magazine. Fleur could just make out the page in the window’s reflection, a sportswear ad she’d done for Armani. Her hair flew in every direction from beneath the brim of a big, floppy hat.

The girl directly across from her finally picked up the magazine and leaned forward. “Excuse me,” she said. “Has anybody ever said that you look exactly like Fleur Savagar, the model?”

She stared back at them.

“She doesn’t speak English,” the girl finally said.

Her companion flipped the magazine closed. “I told you it wasn’t her.”

They reached Nîmes, and Fleur found a room in an inexpensive hotel near the railroad station. As she lay in bed that night, the numbness inside her finally broke apart. She began to cry, racking sobs of loneliness and betrayal and awful, boundless despair. She had nothing left. Belinda’s love had been a lie, and Alexi had soiled her forever. Then there was Jake…The three of them together had raped her soul.

People survive by their ability to make judgments, yet every judgment she’d made was wrong. You are nothing, Alexi had said. As the night settled around her, she understood the meaning of hell. Hell was being lost in the world, even from yourself.

“I am sorry, mademoiselle, but this account has been closed.” Fleur’s Gold Card disappeared, tucked like a magician’s trick into the palm of the clerk’s hand.

Panic gripped her. She needed money. With money, she could hide someplace where she’d be safe from Alexi and where no one would recognize her, someplace where Fleur Savagar could cease to exist. But that wasn’t possible now. As she hurried through the streets of Nîmes, she tried to shake off the feeling that Alexi was watching her. She saw him in the doorways, in the reflections of store windows, in the faces passing her in the street. She fled back to the train station. Run. She had to run.

When Alexi saw the wreckage of the Royale, he felt his own mortality for the first time. It took the form of a slight paralysis in his right side that lasted nearly two days. He closed himself in his room and saw no one.

All day, he lay in bed, holding a handkerchief in his left hand. Sometimes he stared at his reflection in the mirror.

The right side of his face sagged.

It was almost imperceptible, except for the mouth. No matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t control the trickle of saliva that seeped from the corner. Each time he lifted his handkerchief to wipe it away, he knew that the mouth was what he would never forgive.

The paralysis gradually faded, and when he could control his mouth, he called in the doctors. They said it was a small stroke. A warning. They ordered him to cut back on his schedule, stop smoking, watch his diet. They mentioned hypertension. Alexi listened patiently and then dismissed them.

He put his collection of automobiles up for sale at the beginning of December. The auction attracted buyers from all over the world. He was advised to stay away, but he wanted to watch. As each car went on the block, he studied the faces of the buyers, printed their expressions in his mind so he would always remember.

After the auction was over, he had the museum dismantled, stone by stone.

Fleur sat at a battered table in the back of a student café in Grenoble and stuffed every cloying bite of her second pastry into her mouth until nothing was left. For nearly a year and a half, food had provided her only sense of security. As her jeans had grown tighter and she’d been able to pinch that first definitive fold of fat at the base of her ribs, the thick fog of numbness had lifted long enough for her to feel a brief sense of accomplishment. The Glitter Baby had disappeared.

She imagined Belinda’s expression if she could see her precious daughter now. Twenty-one years old, overweight, with cropped hair, and cheap, ugly clothes. And Alexi…She could hear his contempt tucked away inside some honeyed endearment like a piece of candy with a tainted center.

She counted out her money carefully and left the café, pulling the collar of her man’s parka tighter around her neck. It was February, and the dark, icy sidewalk still held remnants of that morning’s snow. She tugged her wool hat further down over her head, more to protect herself from the cold than from fear that anyone would recognize her. That hadn’t happened in nearly a year.

A line had already begun to form at the cinema, and as she took her place at the end, a group of American exchange students fell in behind her. The flat sounds of their accents grated on her ears. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d spoken English. She didn’t care if she ever spoke it again.

Despite the cold, the palms of her hands were sweating, and she shoved them more deeply into the pockets of her parka. At first she’d told herself she wouldn’t even read the reviews of Sunday Morning Eclipse, but she hadn’t been able to stop herself. The critics had been kinder to her than she’d expected. One called her performance “a surprisingly promising debut.” Another commented on the “sizzling chemistry between Koranda and Savagar.” Only she knew how one-sided that chemistry had been.

Now she simply existed, taking whatever job she could find and sneaking into university lecture halls when she wasn’t working. Two months ago, she’d gone to bed with a sweet-natured German student who’d sat next to her in an economics lecture at the Université d’Avignon. She hadn’t wanted Jake to be the only man she’d made love with. Not long afterward, she’d imagined Alexi’s presence breathing down her neck, and she’d left Avignon for Grenoble.

A French girl standing in line ahead of her began to tease her date. “Aren’t you afraid I won’t be interested in you tonight after I’ve spent two hours watching Jake Koranda?”

He glanced over at the movie poster. “You’re the one who should be worried. I’ll be watching Fleur Savagar. Jean-Paul saw the film last week, and he’s still talking about her body.”

Fleur huddled more deeply into the collar of her parka. She had to see for herself.

She found a seat in the last row of the theater. The opening credits rolled, and the camera panned a long stretch of flat Iowa farmland. Dusty boots walked down a gravel road. Suddenly Jake’s face flooded the screen. She’d once loved him, but the white-hot fire of betrayal had burned up that love, leaving only cold ash behind.

The first few scenes flicked by, and then Jake stood in front of the Iowa farmhouse. A young girl jumped up from a porch swing. The pastries Fleur had stuffed down clumped in her stomach as she watched herself run into his arms. She remembered the solidness of his chest, the touch of his lips. She remembered his laughter, his jokes, the way he’d held her so tight she’d thought he’d never let her go.

Her chest constricted. She couldn’t stay in Grenoble any longer. She had to leave. Tomorrow. Tonight. Now.

The last thing she heard as she rushed from the theater was Jake’s voice. “When did you get so pretty, Lizzie?”

Run. She had to run until she disappeared, even from herself.

Alexi sat in the leather chair behind the desk in his study and lit a cigarette, the last of the five he permitted himself to smoke each day. The reports were delivered to him at exactly three o’clock every Friday afternoon, but he always waited until nighttime when he was alone to study them. The photographs before him looked much like the others that had been sent to him over the past few years. Ugly barbershop hair, threadbare jeans, scuffed leather boots. All that fat. For someone who should be at the apex of her beauty, she looked obscene.

He’d been so certain she would go back to New York and resume her career, but she’d surprised him by staying in France. Lyon, Aix-en-Provence, Avignon, Grenoble, Bordeaux, Montpelier-all towns with universities. She foolishly believed she could hide from him in anonymous throngs of students. As if such a thing were possible.

After six months she’d begun to take classes at some of the universities. At first he’d been mystified by her choice of courses: lectures in calculus, contract law, anatomy, sociology. Eventually he’d discerned the pattern and realized she chose only classes held in large lecture halls where there was little chance of anyone discovering she wasn’t a registered student. Officially enrolling was out of the question, since she had no money. He’d seen to that.

His eyes slid down the list of ridiculously menial jobs she’d held to support herself for the past two years: washing dishes, cleaning stables, waiting tables. Sometimes she worked for photographers, not as a model-such an idea was ludicrous now-but setting up lights and handling equipment. She’d unwittingly discovered the only possible defense she could use against him. What could he take from a person who had nothing?

He heard footsteps and quickly slipped the photographs back into the leather folder. When they were tucked away, he walked over to the door and unlocked it.

Belinda’s hair was sleep-tousled and her mascara smudged. “I dreamed about Fleur again,” she whispered. “Why do I keep dreaming about her? Why doesn’t it get better?”

“Because you keep holding on,” he said. “You will not let her go.”

Belinda closed her hand over his arm, imploring him. “You know where she is. Tell me, please.”

“I am protecting you, chérie.” His cold fingers trailed down her cheek. “I do not wish to expose you to your daughter’s hatred.”

Belinda finally left him alone. He returned to his desk, where he studied the report again, then locked it in his wall safe. For now, Fleur had nothing of value that he could destroy, but the time would come when she did. He was a patient man, and he would wait, even if it took years.

The bell over the front door of the Strasbourg photo shop jangled just as Fleur set the last box of film on the shelf. Unexpected noises still startled her, even though two and half years had passed since she’d fled from Paris. She told herself that if Alexi wanted her, he would have found her by now. She glanced at the wall clock. Her employer had been running a special on baby photographs that had kept them busy all week, but she’d hoped the rush was over for the afternoon so she could get to her economics lecture. Dusting her hands on her jeans, she pushed aside the curtain that separated the small reception area from the studio.

Gretchen Casimir stood on the other side. “Good God!” she exclaimed.

Fleur felt as if someone had clamped a vise around her chest.

“Good God!” she repeated.

Fleur told herself it was inevitable that someone would find her-she should be grateful it had taken this long-but she didn’t feel grateful. She felt trapped and panicky. She shouldn’t have stayed in Strasbourg so long. Four months was too long.

Gretchen pulled off her sunglasses. Her gaze swept over Fleur’s figure. “You look like a blimp. I can’t possibly use you like this.”

Her hair was longer than Fleur remembered, and the auburn color was brighter. Her pumps looked like Mario of Florence, the beige linen suit was definitely Perry Ellis, and the scarf de rigueur Hermès. Fleur had nearly forgotten what such clothes looked like. She could live for six months on what Gretchen was wearing.

“You must have gained forty pounds. And that hair! I couldn’t sell you to Field and Stream.”

Fleur tried to pull the old screw-you grin out of mothballs, but it wouldn’t fit on her face. “Nobody’s asking you to,” she said tightly.

“This escapade has cost you a fortune,” Gretchen said. “The broken contracts. The lawsuits.”

Fleur tried to slip a hand into her jeans pocket, but the fabric was stretched so tight she could only manage a thumb. She didn’t care. If she weighed her former one hundred and thirty pounds, she’d lose even her fleeting feelings of safety. “Send the bill to Alexi,” she said. “He has two million dollars of mine that should cover it. But I imagine you’ve already found that out.” Alexi knew where she was. He was the one who’d sent Gretchen here. The room closed in on her.

“I’m taking you back to New York,” Gretchen said, “and getting you into a fat farm. It’ll be months before you’ll be in shape to work. That awful hair is going to hurt you, so don’t think I can get your old price, and don’t think that Parker can get you another film right away.”

“I’m not going back,” Fleur said. It felt odd to speak English.

“Of course you are. Look at this place. I can’t believe you actually work here. My God, after Sunday Morning Eclipse came out, some of the top directors in Hollywood wanted you.” She stabbed the stem of her sunglasses into the pocket of her suit jacket so the lenses hung out. “This silly quarrel between you and Belinda has gone on long enough. Mothers and daughters have problems all the time. There’s no reason to make such a thing out of it.”

“That’s none of your business.”

“Grow up, Fleur. This is the twentieth century, and no man is worth splitting up two women who care about each other.”

So that was what everyone believed, that she and Belinda had quarreled over Jake. She barely thought about him anymore. Occasionally she saw a picture of him in a magazine, usually scowling at the photographer who’d invaded his privacy. Sometimes he was with a beautiful woman, and her stomach always did an unpleasant flip. It was like stumbling unexpectedly across a dead cat or bird. The corpse was harmless, but it still made you jump.

Jake’s acting career was stronger than ever, but even though Sunday Morning Eclipse had earned him a screenwriting Oscar, he’d stopped writing. No one seemed to know why, and Fleur didn’t care.

Gretchen made no effort to conceal her scorn. “Look at yourself. You’re twenty-two years old, hiding away in the middle of nowhere, living like a pauper. Your face is all you have, and you’re doing your best to ruin that. If you don’t listen to me you’re going to wake up one morning, old and alone, satisfied with whatever crumbs you can pick up. Is that what you want? Are you that self-destructive?”

Was she? The worst of the pain was gone. She could even look at a newspaper picture of Belinda and Alexi with a certain detachment. Of course her mother had gone back to him. Alexi was one of the most important men in France, and Belinda needed the limelight the way other people needed oxygen. Sometimes Fleur thought about returning to New York, but she could never model again, and what would she do there? The fat kept her safe, and it was easier to drift through the present than to rush into an uncertain future. Easier to forget about the girl who’d been so determined to make everybody love her. She didn’t need other people’s love anymore. She didn’t need anyone but herself.

“Leave me alone,” she said to Gretchen. “I’m not going back.”

“I have no intention of leaving until-”

“Go away.”

“You can’t keep on like-”

“Get out!”

Gretchen let her eyes slide over the ugly man’s shirt, over the bulging jeans. She assessed her, judged her, and Fleur felt the exact moment when Gretchen Casimir decided she was no longer worth the effort.

“You’re a loser,” she said. “You’re sad and pitiful, living a dead-end life. Without Belinda, you’re nothing.”

The venom behind Gretchen’s words didn’t make them any less true. Fleur had no ambition, no plans, no pride of accomplishment-nothing but a mute kind of survival reflex. Without Belinda, she was nothing.

An hour later, she fled the photo shop and boarded the next train out of Strasbourg.

Fleur’s twenty-third birthday came and went. A week before Christmas, she threw some things into a duffel bag, picked up her Eurail pass, and left Lille to board a train to Vienna. France was the only place in Europe where she could work legally, but she had to get away for a few days or she’d suffocate. She could no longer remember how it felt to be slim and strong, or what it was like not to worry about paying the rent on a shabby room with a rust-stained sink and damp patches on the ceiling.

She chose Vienna on a whim after she read The World According to Garp. A place with bears on unicycles and a man who could only walk on his hands seemed just about right. She found a cheap room in an old Viennese pension with a gilded birdcage elevator the concierge told her had been broken by the Germans during the war. After lugging her duffel bag up six flights of stairs, she opened the door to a minuscule room with scarred furniture and wondered which war he meant. She peeled off her clothes, pulled the coverlet over her, and, as the wind rattled the windows and the elevator creaked, she went to sleep.

The next morning she walked through the Schönbrunn Palace and then had an inexpensive lunch at the Leupold near Rooseveltplatz. A waiter set a plate of tiny Austrian dumplings called Nockerln in front of her. They were delicious, but she had a hard time getting them down. There were no bears on unicycles in Vienna, no men who walked on their hands, only the same old problems that no amount of running away could solve. She’d never been the bravest, the fastest, or the strongest. It had all been an illusion.

A Burberry trench coat and Louis Vuitton briefcase brushed by her table, then backtracked. “Fleur? Fleur Savagar?”

It took her a moment to recognize the man standing in front of her as Parker Dayton, her former agent. He was in his mid-forties with one of those faces that looked as if it had been perfectly formed by a Divine Sculptor and then, just before the clay was dry, given a push inward. Even the neatly trimmed ginger-colored beard he’d grown since she’d last seen him couldn’t quite hide the less-than-impressive chin or balance out the squished-in nose.

She’d never liked Parker. Belinda had selected him to handle Fleur’s movie career on the strength of Gretchen’s recommendation, but it turned out he was Gretchen’s lover at the time and not a member of the upper echelon of agents. Still, from the evidence offered by the Vuitton briefcase and the Gucci shoes, business seemed to have picked up.

“You look like shit.” Without waiting for an invitation, he took a seat across from her and settled his briefcase on the floor. He stared at her. She stared back. He shook his head. “It cost Gretchen a bundle to settle on the modeling contracts you broke.” His hand tapped the table, and she had the feeling he was itching to pull out his calculator so he could punch in the numbers for her.

“It didn’t cost Gretchen a penny,” she said. “I’m sure Alexi paid the bills with my money, and I could afford it.”

He shrugged. “You’re one reason I pretty much stick to music now.” He lit a cigarette. “I’m managing Neon Lynx. You have to have heard of them. They’re America’s hottest rock group. That’s why I’m in Vienna.” He fumbled in his pockets and finally pulled out a ticket. “Come to the concert tonight as my guest. We’ve been sold out for weeks.”

She’d seen the posters plastered all over the city. Tonight was the opening concert in their first European tour. She took the ticket and mentally calculated what she could get for scalping it. “I can’t see you as a rock manager.”

“If a rock band hits, it’s like you’ve got a license to print money. Lynx was playing a third-rate club on the Jersey shore when I found them. I knew they had something, but they weren’t packaging it right. They didn’t have any style, you know what I mean? I could have turned them over to a manager, but business wasn’t too great at the time, so I decided, what the hell, I’d give it a shot myself. I made some changes and put ’em on the map. I’ll tell you the truth. I expected them to hit, but not this big. We had riots in two cities on our last tour. You wouldn’t believe-”

He waved to someone behind her, and a second man joined them. He was maybe in his early thirties with bushy hair and a Fu Manchu mustache.

“Fleur, this is Stu Kaplan, road manager for Neon Lynx.”

To Fleur’s relief he didn’t seem to recognize her. The men ordered coffee, then Parker turned to Stu. “Did you take care of it?”

Stu tugged on his Fu Manchu. “I spent half an hour on the phone with that goddamned employment agency before I found anybody who spoke English. Then they told me they might have a girl for me in a week. Christ, we’ll be in freakin’ Germany next week.”

Parker frowned. “I’m not getting involved, Stu. You’re the one who’s going to have to work without a road secretary.”

They talked for a few minutes. Parker excused himself to go to the men’s room, and Stu turned to Fleur. “He a friend of yours?”

“More an old acquaintance.”

“He’s a freakin’ dictator. ‘I’m not getting involved, Stu.’ Hell, it’s not my fault she got knocked up.”

“Your road secretary?”

He nodded mournfully into his coffee, his Fu Manchu drooping. “I told her we’d pay for the abortion and everything, but she said she was going back to the States to have it done right.” Stu looked up and stared at Fleur accusingly. “For chrissake, this is Vienna. Freud’s from here, isn’t he? They gotta have good doctors in Vienna.”

She thought of several things to say and discarded them all. He groaned, “I mean it wouldn’t be so bad if this had happened in Pittsburgh or somewhere, but freakin’ Vienna…”

“What exactly does a road secretary do?” The words came out of her unintended. She was drifting, just as always.

Stu Kaplan looked at her with his first real spark of interest. “It’s a cushy job-answering phones, double-checking arrangements, helping out with the band a little. Nothing hard.” He took a sip of coffee. “You-uh-speak any German?”

She sipped, too. “A little.” Also Italian and Spanish.

Stu leaned back in his chair. “The job pays two hundred a week, room and board provided. You interested?”

She had a job waiting tables in Lille. She had her classes and a cheap room, and she no longer did anything impulsively. But this felt safe. Different. She could handle it for a month or so. She didn’t have anything better to do. “I’ll take it.”

Stu whipped out a business card. “Pack your suitcase and meet me at the Intercontinental in an hour and a half.” He scrawled something on the card and rose. “Here’s the suite number. Tell Parker I’ll see him there.”

Parker came back to the table, and Fleur told him what had happened. He laughed. “You can’t have that job.”

“Why not?”

“You couldn’t stick it. I don’t know what Stu told you, but being road secretary to any band is a hard job, and with a band like Neon Lynx it’s even tougher.”

There it was, the open acknowledgment that she wasn’t worth anything without Belinda. She should leave and forget all about this, but what had been nothing more than an impulse had suddenly become important. “I’ve had tough jobs.”

He patted her hand patronizingly. “Let me explain something. One of the reasons Neon Lynx has stayed on top is because they’re spoiled, arrogant bastards. It’s their image, and, frankly, I encourage it. Their arrogance is a big part of what makes them so great when they perform. But it also makes them impossible to work for. And road secretary isn’t what you’d call a high-prestige job. Let’s face it. You’re used to giving orders, not taking them.”

A lot Parker Dayton knew. She dug in with a stubbornness she’d forgotten she possessed. “I can handle it.”

The man who didn’t have a sense of humor laughed again. “You wouldn’t last an hour. I don’t know what happened with you three years ago, but you screwed yourself pretty good. Here’s some free advice. Take a pass on the bread and cookies, then call Gretchen and get yourself back in front of the cameras.”

She stood up. “Stu Kaplan can hire his own road secretary, right?”

“Under normal circumstances, but…”

“Okay, then. He offered me the job, and I’m taking it.”

She was out of the restaurant before he could say anything more, but halfway down the street she had to lean against the side of a building to catch her breath. What was she doing? She told herself this was safe, nothing more than a secretary’s job, but her heart rate refused to slow down.

When she walked into the suite at the Intercontinental an hour later, she felt as if she’d walked into Bedlam. A group of reporters was talking to Parker and two extravagantly dressed young men she assumed were band members. Waiters wheeled in trays of food, and three phones rang at the same time. The insanity of what she’d done hit her full force. She had to get out of here, but Stu had already picked up two of the phones and was gesturing for her to pick up the third.

She answered with an unsteady voice. It was the manager of the Munich hotel where the group was staying the next night. He told her he’d heard rumors about the destruction of two hotel suites in London and regretted to inform her that Neon Lynx was no longer welcome at his establishment. She put her hand over the receiver and told Stu what had happened.

Within seconds, she realized that the pleasant Stu Kaplan of the coffee shop was not the same man standing in front of her. “Tell him it was Rod Stewart, for chrissake! Use your freakin’ head, and don’t bother me with the little shit.” He tossed a clipboard at her, smacking her in the knuckles. “Double-check the arrangements while you got him on the phone. Double-check everything, and then check it again.”

Her stomach clenched. She couldn’t do this. She couldn’t work at a job with someone screaming at her and expecting her to know things that had never been explained. Parker Dayton gave her a smug smile with I-told-you-so written all over it. As she turned away from him, she caught sight of her reflection across the room. The mirror that hung above the sofa was the same size as those blown-up photographs Belinda had hung on the apartment walls in New York. Those oversized, beautiful faces had never seemed to belong to her. But neither did the pasty, tense reflection staring back at her.

She tightened her damp palms around the receiver. “I’m sorry to keep you waiting, but you can’t blame Neon Lynx for damage they didn’t do.” Her voice sounded thin from lack of air. She took a quick breath, then began a systematic assassination of Rod Stewart’s character. When she was done, she launched into a determined review of the room assignments from the instructions on the clipboard, then went on to detail arrangements for luggage carts and food. As the manager relayed the instructions back to her, and she realized she’d convinced him to change his mind, she felt a rush of satisfaction far out of proportion to what she’d done.

She hung up the phone, and it rang again. One of the roadies had been busted for drugs. This time she was prepared for Stu’s yelling.

“For chrissake, don’t you know how to handle anything?” He grabbed his jacket. “Take care of things here while I get the son of a bitch out of jail. And I’m telling you right now…Those motherfucking Austrian police had better speak English.” He pitched another clipboard at her. “Here’s the schedule and the assignments. Get those stage passes stamped for the VIPs and call Munich to make sure they’ve taken care of transportation from the airport. We were short on limos the last time. And check on the charter from Rome. Make them give us a backup.” He was still hurling instructions as he walked out the door.

She fielded eight more phone calls and spent a half hour with the airlines before she noticed that she hadn’t taken off her coat. Parker Dayton asked if she’d had enough yet. She gritted her teeth and told him she was having a terrific time, but as soon as he left the suite, she sagged into her chair. Parker was leaving the tour in three days to go back to New York. That’s how long she had to last. Three days.

She took a few minutes between phone calls to study the promotional kit, and when the lead guitarist for Neon Lynx walked in, she recognized him as Peter Zabel. He was in his early twenties, with a small, compact body and curly, shoulder-length black hair. Two earrings decorated his right lobe, one an enormous diamond and the other a long white feather. He asked her to put a call through to his broker in New York. He was worried about his Anaconda Copper.

After he got off the phone, he slouched down on the couch and propped his boots up on the coffee table. They had three-inch Lucite heels with embedded goldfish. “I’m the only one in the band who looks to the future,” he said suddenly. “The other guys think this is going to last forever, but I know it doesn’t happen that way, so I’m building a portfolio.”

“Probably a good idea.” She reached for the backstage passes and began to stamp them.

“Damned straight it’s a good idea. What’s your name anyway?”

She hesitated. “Fleur.”

“You look familiar. You a dyke?”

“Not at the moment.” She slammed the stamp down on the VIP pass. Whom did she think she was kidding? Three days was forever.

Peter got up and headed for the door. Suddenly he stopped and turned back. “I know where I saw you. You used to be a model or something. My kid brother had your poster up in his room, and you were in that movie I saw. Fleur…what’s it?”

“Savagar,” she made herself say. “Fleur Savagar.”

“Yeah. That’s right.” He didn’t seem impressed. He tugged on the white feather earring. “Listen, I hope you don’t mind my saying so, but if you’d had a portfolio, you would of had something to fall back on after you was washed up.”

“I’ll remember that for the future.” The door shut behind him, and she realized that she was smiling for the first time in weeks. Around this crew anyway, the Glitter Baby was yesterday’s news. She felt as if she had more air to breathe.

The tour was opening that night at a sports arena north of Vienna, and once Stu came back with the errant roadie, she didn’t have a minute to think. First there was a ticket mix-up, and then the one-hour warning calls to the band. She had to be in the lobby early to double-check transportation and take care of tips. Then she had to make a second set of phone calls to the band members telling them the limos were ready. Stu yelled at her about everything, but he seemed to yell at everybody except the band, so she tried to ignore it. As far as she could tell, there were only two cardinal rules: keep the band happy, and double-check everything.

As the members of Neon Lynx wandered into the lobby, she identified each one. Peter Zabel she’d met. Kyle Light, the bass player, wasn’t hard to spot. He had thin blond hair, dead eyes, and a wasted look. Frank LaPorte, the drummer, was a belligerent redhead with a Budweiser can in his hand. Simon Kale, the keyboard player, was the fiercest-looking black man she’d ever seen, with a shaved and oiled head, silver chains draping an overdeveloped chest, and something that looked suspiciously like a machete hanging from his belt.

“Where’s that freakin’ Barry?” Stu called out. “Fleur, go up and get that son of a bitch down here. And don’t do anything to upset him, for chrissake.”

Fleur reluctantly headed for the elevator and the penthouse suite of lead singer Barry Noy. The promotional kit billed him as the new Mick Jagger. He was twenty-four, and his photographs showed him with long, sandy-colored hair and fleshy lips permanently set in a sneer. From bits and pieces of conversations, she’d gathered that Barry was “difficult,” but she didn’t let herself think too hard about what that might mean.

She knocked at the door of his suite, and when there was no answer, she tried the knob. It was unlocked. “Barry?”

He was stretched out on the couch, his forearm thrown across his eyes and his sandy hair dangling over the couch pillows toward the carpet. He wore the same satin trousers as the other members of the band, except his were Day-Glo orange with a red sequined star strategically placed over the crotch.

“Barry? Stu sent me up to get you. The limos are here, and we’re ready to go.”

“I can’t play tonight.”

“Uh…Why’s that?”

“I’m depressed.” He gave a protracted sigh. “I swear I have never been so depressed in my entire fucking life. I can’t sing when I’m depressed.”

Fleur glanced at her watch, a man’s gold Rolex Stu had loaned her that afternoon. She had five minutes. Five minutes and two and a half days. “What are you depressed about?”

For the first time he looked at her. “Who are you?”

“Fleur. The new road secretary.”

“Oh yeah, Peter told me about you. You used to be a big movie star or something.” He threw his arm back over his eyes. “I’m telling you, life is really shit. I mean I am really hot now. I can have any woman I want, but that bitch Kissy has me wrapped around her finger. I bet I called New York a hundred times today, but either I couldn’t get through or she never answered the phone.”

“Maybe she was out.”

“Yeah. She was out all right. Out with some stud.”

She had four minutes. “Would any woman in her right mind go out with another man when she could have you?” she said, even as she was thinking that any woman in her right mind would go out with a penguin before she’d go out with him. “I’ll bet your timing was bad. The time zones are confusing. Why don’t you try her after the concert? It’ll be early morning in New York. You’re sure to get her then.”

He seemed interested. “You think so?”

“I’m sure of it.” Three and a half minutes. If they had to wait for the elevator, she’d be in trouble. “I’ll even put through the call for you.”

“You’ll come here after the concert and help me get the call through?”

“Sure.”

He grinned. “Hey, that’s great. Hey, I think I’m going to like you.”

“Good. I’m sure I’m going to like you.” In a pig’s eye, you degenerate. Three minutes. “Let’s go downstairs.”

Barry propositioned her in the elevator between the ninth and tenth floors. When she refused him, he turned sullen, so she told him she thought she might have a venereal disease. That seemed to make him happy, and she delivered him to the lobby with thirty seconds to spare.