Still in the first week of the reopening, everything had gone well, with the exception of the Internet, which still had bugs in it, and the phone system, which was continuing to go down in various parts of the hotel with no reasonable explanation. It would come back on a few hours after it went off, as though a ghost were running it and playing tricks on them. Maybe it’s Lavalle, Yvonne had suggested. Her superior did not consider it amusing. Why would Lavalle want to torture him, just to remind him that he was still running the show, even from “the other side”? He didn’t even like Yvonne saying it in jest, since anything was possible. As Olivier Bateau pointed out to her, hotels had a life and soul of their own, and there were already more than enough superstitions about them. From all he knew of him, he thought Louis Lavalle perfectly capable of haunting the phone system, just to prove a point and make his lingering presence known. Lavalle had acted as though he was the owner of the hotel, and was possessive about it, although people knew he wasn’t the owner. But in his discreet way, he had been very grand, and all the new technology had been his idea. Olivier thought it was much more complicated and advanced than necessary for a relatively small hotel.
There were three shops and several vitrines in the lobby. There was the shop of a famous jeweler with a sampling of their very high-end, high-priced wares, a small Loro Piana shop, and a handbag shop carrying various brands, with its own vitrine of vintage Hermès alligator handbags, which sold in the six figures. All of the vitrines were rented by important luxury stores to show a small sample of what was available in their boutiques along the Faubourg. Occasionally they sold a high-priced matching set of jewelry right out of one of the vitrines. People who came to the popular, well-known bar for a drink, or to their famous three-star restaurant, enjoyed looking at the jewelry and other wares in the vitrines. The hotel also had an elaborate alarm system, and a flock of security people to safeguard the merchandise on display.
The prices of the accommodations at the Louis XVI were appropriately high, given the magnificence of the decor and who their guests were, and they had raised their prices again before the reopening. No one of modest means could have afforded to stay there, and people with some of the largest fortunes in Europe, Asia, the Middle East, and a few from America were among their regulars, although the Americans seemed to prefer larger hotels, like the Ritz and the Four Seasons. The more discerning guests had been coming to the Louis XVI for years, and were begging to return now. Sold out by the time they opened, they already had a waiting list for the next four months, and a full house until then. They always kept a small number of rooms and suites in reserve in case someone exceptionally important made a request at the last minute, but even those were in short supply. Halfway through their first week back, Olivier went down the list of people checking in that day, and told Yvonne at an early morning meeting who he wanted her to accompany to their rooms, and who he would be seeing to. All the others could be handled by the junior assistant managers on duty at the front desk.
Yvonne was impressed when Olivier put Gabrielle Gates on her list of people to greet that day. She was on their list of regulars. Yvonne had seen her at Claridge’s, but hadn’t been allowed to go near her. She was too junior then to greet such an important guest, but as the number two at Louis XVI, despite her age, it was an honor to be allowed to escort such an elite client. Yvonne knew who she was. Gabrielle Gates was American, an important art consultant. Her late father, Theodore Weston, had owned a prominent art gallery in New York, and she had learned from him. She had been married to Arthur Gates, one of the most successful venture capitalists in the States, who was twenty-five years older than she was. Yvonne vaguely remembered that Gabrielle was around forty-five, had two daughters who were college age or slightly older by then. Gabrielle was a very attractive, very chic woman, with an aura of power around her, her own, and that of her late father and ex-husband. She had been born into a privileged family. Her late mother had been a famously beautiful debutante, and Gabrielle had the self-assurance of a much-loved only child. She was headstrong and had been the apple of her father’s eye. Yvonne remembered that there had been a scandal in the last two years when her husband left her for a much younger woman, only three years older than his oldest daughter. There had been a lot of press about it, and talk about how much Arthur Gates was worth, and how young his new bride was. But Gabrielle came from money too, and was a successful art consultant who dealt with extremely high-priced art, and had famous clients. Like all gossip and scandal, the story burned white hot for a while, with photographs of both parties in the press, and after six months the story disappeared.
Gabrielle Gates was famously private and discreet. She had made no comment to the press that hounded her, and eventually they lost interest in her and her story. Arthur had remained visible though, at sixty-eight with his twenty-four-year-old bride, a Russian girl he had met skiing in Saint Moritz.
Yvonne knew her type. The hotels where she worked were full of them, always with much older, very, very rich men. For whatever reason, the men they latched on to were flattered by their attention, and spoiled them beyond belief. Their rejected wives were usually handsomely rewarded with houses and ski chalets, yachts, jewels, planes, and art. The young girls won the big prizes, for however long the relationship lasted, and when it ended, they often found another older man just as wealthy and powerful, or even richer. Yvonne always thought that they certainly knew what they were doing, and she envied them at first, but not for long. She wouldn’t have wanted to marry a man like that, or to marry for money. A real Prince Charming would have been welcome, but not a seventy-year-old man and his big bank account. It was all too venal for her. Some of the men with those young girls were pretty awful. She’d never seen Arthur Gates except in photographs, and he was quite a lot older even than his ex-wife. Gabrielle had been his third wife, and he’d been widowed before her. He looked distinguished in photographs, but he was certainly very old, and she didn’t think he was a nice man if he had dumped his wife and run off with a gold digger in her early twenties.
She noticed on their reservation lists that Gabrielle had taken their usual suite, and was traveling alone. She had made the reservation fairly recently, and they had done some serious juggling to accommodate her. There were several stars after her name in the old records kept by Louis Lavalle, indicating they should be willing to move heaven and earth to give her the suite she wanted whenever she asked. She came to Paris frequently for business, and to see friends, and the notes said that her husband was always with her. This time obviously, he wasn’t. The notes said they had their own plane. It didn’t mention who had kept the plane in the divorce. But the car and driver they had hired for her was picking her up at Charles de Gaulle Airport, not Le Bourget. So, this time she was flying commercial.
* * *
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When the plane landed at Charles de Gaulle Airport in Roissy, an hour outside Paris, it was the first time Gabrielle had come to Paris in two years. She had stayed at the Ritz and the Four Seasons while the Louis XVI was being renovated, before she and Arthur separated. Neither hotel compared to the smaller, more exclusive hotel she and Arthur loved. She had stayed at the Ritz with her parents as a child when they vacationed in Europe and loved it then, but once she discovered the Louis XVI with Arthur, she had come to prefer the smaller, more personal atmosphere it offered, with its incomparable suites, and their favorite one, and she loved the location so close to the shops on the Faubourg Saint-Honoré.