“Number 2472… 2-4-7-2… dressed for evening in white organdie with black lace insets…”
Irma left the models’ room and crossed the corridor, her crinoline skirt opened umbrella-style around her legs. She took a step, watching the crisp rippling of the skirt. Yes, it was eighteenth-century. And now it would ripple gracefully before all those parakeets: black, yellow and green. It was the fourteenth dress she’d put on in less than two hours, and there were still at least two hours left. She was used to it, but what torture!
“Smile!” commanded Marta, who was watching her.
Irma smiled, opened her arms and lifted her palms outwards in that prickly gesture that said, “Don’t touch—but do!”, before walking into the showroom. Head down, Marta sighed and turned to go back into the models’ room, but the door to the lift at the end of the corridor opened, and she saw the most unexpected vision: platinum hair in a mess, shiny red face, voluminous black dressing gown draped over her and tightened round her waist with a golden cord.
Madame Firmino! What the devil was the artistic director doing showing up in that costume in these showrooms packed with spectators? Obviously another of her oddities—but too dangerous this time for Marta not to try and stop it. She hurried towards her.
“Madame! Madame Firm—” She stopped. The expression on Madame Firmino’s face and in her eyes was enough to cut off Marta’s words at her lips. In any case, Madame Firmino spoke at once.
“Marta, something terrible has happened. Who’s in there?” She pointed at the door to the administrative offices.
“Mr Prospero, Signorina Evelina, the girls…”
“Come with me!”
She grabbed Marta’s arm and dragged her into the offices. They went through the first room, which was divided by a shiny wooden partition in which there were two windows: CASH and SUPPLIERS. A large matronly woman in a black dress—a hundred kilos of fresh flesh packed to bursting in silk and fine satin and squeezed into a whalebone corset—lifted her astonished round face from a large ledger and with small eyes sunken into her fat, watched them go into the director’s office.
The room was huge and luxuriously furnished with a large rosewood desk, clear as a mirror, between two heavily curtained windows. There was another desk, quite a bit smaller, in the far corner, and a large number of armchairs. Next to each of these, a microscopic table with a silver ashtray and a crystal vase containing a yellow rose. A frail gentleman, all in black apart from a head of polished ivory, popped up like a jack-in-the-box from his desk in the corner. At first sight he resembled a porcelain knick-knack, one of those little men from Capodimonte or Copenhagen: so smooth, lustrous and glossy that even their dark clothes appear oddly dazzling.
“Ladies, oh, ladies! You frightened me! If you’re looking for Cristiana, she’s not here.”
He noticed Dolores’s black dressing gown and started, then dropped his gaze, only to be confronted by her bare feet in rope sandals. A profound and haughty disapproval could be read on his face.
“Madame Firmino, it is inconceivable that you should dare to—”
“Shut up, ‘Oremus’!” Dolores shouted. “We have other things to do than listen to your tirades!”
She felt her energy suddenly completely restored. This silly little man had a talent for both exhilarating and irritating her whenever she saw him, but this time he had annoyed her so profoundly that the amusing nickname used by the dressmakers and models escaped her lips. “Oremus” went scarlet, and the veins in his forehead bulged. Fortunately for Madame Firmino, the incident had caused his glasses to slide off his nose, and he couldn’t possibly explode at the foolhardy woman while he flailed around for them on the table.
“Damn!”
Marta looked at Prospero, then at Madame Firmino. “What’s going on here?”
Dolores leant against the rosewood desk. “What’s going on? Oh, just that—” she twirled her celluloid glasses by the arm “—it’s just that there’s a body on Signora Cristiana’s bed. And the signora is lying on the floor in a dead faint.”
Prospero uttered a sort of roar and emerged from behind the desk. He walked over to Dolores.
“You’re mad!”
As for Marta, she contented herself with gently shaking her head. She’d been convinced of Madame Firmino’s craziness for some time.
“Would you repeat that?” Prospero shouted. “Say something!”
“You are aware, Madame Firmino, that today is the day of the collection, and jokes are not always welcome,” Marta sighed. “You must know that I’m too busy to waste time with your eccentricities.”
Dolores was still perched on a corner of the rosewood desk, her dressing gown open to reveal her bare legs, so tanned they looked like brass. Marta looked at those legs and then at Signor Prospero, who was blinking rapidly.
“Go back to your sunbathing, Madame Firmino, and don’t disturb those of us who are working.”
“Do you think I wouldn’t like to, Marta? Do you think it’s actually advisable for me to have my treatment so rudely interrupted? The body is there; I didn’t invent it. As for Signora O’Brian, I’m sure it’s time to go and resuscitate her. I was on my own up there, and I won’t try to hide it from you: the sight of that body upset me so much I couldn’t do it. Even if it hadn’t, I’m no good as a nurse and I wouldn’t have known how to begin to revive her.”
“A body? Good God, whose? We’re all in here, and we’re all alive.”
Prospero stopped blinking.
“We’re all here? Many people work here at Casa O’Brian. If you go upstairs, you’ll find that one of us has been killed.”
Marta blanched.
“Killed, you say? So it’s actually true?”
Madame Firmino patted her dressing gown, searching for pockets it didn’t have. She looked over at the desk, spotted a sandalwood box and reached out to take a cigarette from it.
“Give me a light, Mr O’Lary. I’m sure I’ll faint too if I don’t have a cigarette. It’s not the least bit pleasant to see the body of someone who’s been strangled.”
“Oremus” extracted a lighter from the folds of his extremely snug frock coat. He watched the young woman as he held the flame before her face.
“How do you know he was strangled?” he asked suspiciously.
Dolores drew the smoke in hungrily. “He had two marks on his neck. Two ugly, obvious marks.”
Marta made for the telephone on a small bookcase near Cristiana’s armchair.
“What are you doing, Signorina?” Prospero squawked.
“I’m calling the doctor. What else would I be doing?”
“Don’t you realize that if there’s really a body we must call the police first?”
Marta stopped in her tracks.
“The police? With the showrooms packed with ladies?” The catastrophe had suddenly struck her. “But it would ruin us!”
“I have reason to believe that it would be rather serious if we didn’t call police headquarters right away—in case it really is a body. And I’m asking you to follow me upstairs so we can check it. We can give Cristiana first aid while we wait for the authorities to arrive.”
“Oremus” boldly headed for the door, with Marta trailing after him, groaning. As for Madame Firmino, she slid gracefully off the desk and went to collapse in an armchair.
“I really must get this oil off my face,” she said to herself. And she started smoking again.