Now she was ready.

They worked for thirty minutes without stopping. Jacqueline adopted several poses. She sprawled across a simple wooden chair. She sat on the floor, leaning back on her hands, with her head tilted upward and her eyes closed. She stood with her hands on her hips and her eyes boring through the lens of Michel’s camera. Michel seemed to like what he was seeing. They were in sync. Every few minutes he would pause for a few seconds to change his film, then quickly resume shooting. Jacqueline had been in the business long enough to know when a shoot was working.

So she was surprised when he suddenly stepped from behind the camera and ran a hand through his hair. He was frowning. “Clear the studio, please. I need some privacy.”

Jacqueline thought: Oh, Christ. Here we go.

Michel said, “What the hell’s wrong with you?”

“Nothing’s wrong with me!”

“Nothing? You’re flat, Jacqueline. The pictures are flat. I might as well be taking pictures of a mannequin wearing the dress. I can’t afford to give Givenchy a set of flat prints. And from what I hear on the street, you can’t afford it either.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means you’re getting old, darling. It means that no one’s quite sure whether you have what it takes anymore.”

“Just get back behind the camera, and I’ll show you I have what it takes.”

“I’ve seen enough. It’s just not there today.”

“Bullshit!”

“You want me to get you a drink? Maybe a glass of wine will help loosen you up.”

“I don’t need a drink.”

“How about some coke?”

“You know I don’t do that anymore.”

“Well, I do.”

“Some things never change.”

Michel produced a small bag of cocaine from his shirt pocket. Jacqueline sat down in the prop chair while he prepared two lines on a glass-topped table. He snorted one, then offered her the rolled-up hundred-franc note. “Feel like being a bad girl today?”

“All yours, Michel. Not interested.”

He leaned over and snorted the second line. Then he wiped the glass with his finger and spread the residue over his gums. “If you’re not going to have a drink or do a line, maybe we need to think of some other way to light a fire in you.”

“Like what?” she said, but she knew what Michel had on his mind.

He stood behind her, placed his hands lightly on her bare shoulders. “Maybe you need to be thinking about getting fucked.” His hands moved from her shoulders, and he stroked the skin just above her breasts. “Maybe we can do something to make the idea a little more realistic in your imagination.”

He pressed his pelvis against her back, so that she could feel his erection beneath his leather trousers.

She drew away.

“I’m just trying to help, Jacqueline. I want to make sure these pictures come out well. I don’t want to see your career crash and burn. My motives are purely selfless.”

“I never knew you were such a philanthropist, Michel.”

He laughed. “Come with me. I want to show you something.” He took her by the hand and pulled her off the set. They walked down a hallway and entered a room furnished with nothing but a large bed. Michel pulled off his shirt and began unbuttoning his trousers.

Jacqueline said, “What do you think you’re doing?”

“You want good pictures, I want good pictures. Let’s get in the right frame of mind. Take off the dress so it doesn’t get ruined.”

“Go fuck yourself, Michel. I’m leaving.”

“Come on, Jacqueline. Stop fooling around and get into bed.”

“No!”

“What’s the big deal? You slept with Robert Leboucher, so he would give you that swimwear shoot in Mustique.”

“How did you know that?”

“Because he told me.”

“You’re a bastard, and so is he! I’m not some seventeen-year-old who’s going to spread her legs for you because she wants good pictures from the great Michel Duval.”

“If you walk out of here, your career is over.”

“I don’t give a shit.”

He pointed at his erection. “What am I supposed to do about this?”

Marcel Lambert lived a short distance away, on the rue de Tournon, in the Luxembourg Quarter. Jacqueline needed time to herself, so she walked, taking her time in the narrow side streets of the Latin Quarter. Darkness falling, lights coming on in the bistros and the cafés, the smell of cigarettes and frying garlic on the chill air.

She crossed into the Luxembourg Quarter. How quickly it had come to this, she thought-Michel Duval, trying to threaten her into a quickie between takes. A few years ago he wouldn’t have considered it. But not now. Now she was vulnerable, and Marcel had decided to test her.

Sometimes she was sorry she ever got into this business. She had planned to be a ballet dancer-had studied at the most prestigious academy in Marseilles-but at sixteen she was spotted by a talent scout from a Paris modeling agency, who gave her name to Marcel Lambert. Marcel scheduled a test shoot, let her move into his flat, taught her how to move and act like a model instead of a ballerina. The photographs from the test shoot were stunning. She had dominated the camera, radiated a playful sexuality. Marcel quietly put the pictures into circulation around Paris: no name, nothing about the girl, just the pictures and his card. The reaction was instantaneous. His telephone didn’t stop ringing for a week. Photographers were clamoring to work with her. Designers wanted to sign her up for their fall shows. Word of the photographs leaked from Paris to Milan and from Milan to New York. The entire fashion world wanted to know the name of this mysterious raven-haired French beauty.

Jacqueline Delacroix.

How different things were now. The quality work had started to slow down when she turned twenty-six, but now that she was thirty-three the good jobs had dried up. She still got some runway work in Paris and Milan in the fall, but only with lower-level designers. She still landed the occasional lingerie ad-“There’s nothing wrong with your tits, darling,” Marcel liked to say-but he had been forced to hire her out for different types of shoots. She had just finished a shoot for a German brewery in which she posed as the attractive wife of a successful middle-aged man.

Marcel had warned it would happen this way. He had told her to save her money, to prepare herself for a life after modeling. Jacqueline had never bothered-she’d assumed the money would pour in forever. Sometimes she tried to remember where all of it had gone. The clothes. The crash pads in Paris and New York. The extravagant vacations with the other girls in the Caribbean or the South Pacific. The ton of cocaine she had sucked up her nose before getting straight.

Michel Duval had been right about one thing: she had slept with a man to get a job, an editor from French Vogue named Robert Leboucher. It was a high-profile job that she needed desperately-a swimsuit and summer-wear shoot in Mustique. It could change everything for her-give her enough money to get back on stable ground financially, show everyone in the industry that she still had what it took for the hot jobs. At least for one more year, two at the most. Then what?

She walked into Marcel’s building, entered the lift, rode up to his flat. When she knocked on the door, it flew back. Marcel stood there, wide-eyed, mouth open. “Jacqueline, my pet! Please tell me it’s not true. Tell me you didn’t kick Michel Duval in the balls! Tell me he made up the entire thing!”

“Actually, Marcel, I kicked him in the cock.”

He threw back his head and laughed loudly. “I’m certain you’re the first woman who’s ever done that. Serves the bastard right. He almost ruined Claudette. You remember what he did to her? Poor little thing. So beautiful, so much talent.”

He pulled his lips downward, emitted a Gallic snort of disapproval, took her by the hand, and pulled her inside. A moment later they were drinking wine on the couch in his sitting room, the hum of evening traffic drifting through the open windows. Marcel lit her cigarette and deftly waved out the match. He wore tight-fitting faded blue jeans, black loafers, and a gray turtleneck sweater. His thinning gray hair was cropped very short. He’d had another face-lift recently; his blue eyes seemed unnaturally large and bulging, as if he were constantly surprised. She thought about those days so long ago, when Marcel had brought her to this flat and prepared her for her life ahead. She’d always felt safe in this place.