House of Spies (Gabriel Allon #17)(62)

“With great interest,” he admitted. “You auditioned to be an extra in a period film that was being shot along the Norfolk Coast. You didn’t get the part, but someone on the production staff suggested you should consider modeling. And so you decided to forsake your studies and go to New York to pursue a career. By the time you were eighteen, you were one of the hottest models in Europe.” He paused, then asked, “Did I leave anything out?”

“A great deal, actually.”

“Such as?”

“New York.”

“So why don’t you pick up the story there,” he said. “In New York.”

It was hell, she told him. After signing on with a well-known agency, she was put up in an apartment on the West Side of Manhattan with eight other girls who slept in rotating shifts on bunk beds. During the day she was sent out on “go-sees” with potential clients and young photographers who were trying to break into the business. If she was lucky, the photographer would agree to take a few test shots that she could place in her portfolio. If not, she would leave empty-handed and return to the cramped apartment to fend off the roaches and the ants. At night she and the other girls hired themselves out to nightclubs to earn a bit of spending money. Twice Olivia was sexually assaulted. The second attack left her with a black eye that prevented her from working for nearly a month.

“But you persevered,” said the Israeli.

“I suppose I did.”

“What happened after New York?”

“Freddie happened.”

Freddie, she explained, was Freddie Mansur, the hottest agent in the business and one of its most notorious predators. Freddie brought Olivia to Paris and into his bed. He also gave her drugs—weed, cocaine, barbiturates to help her sleep. As her caloric intake fell to near-starvation levels, her weight plummeted. Soon she was skin and bones. When she was hungry, she smoked a cigarette or blew a line. Coke and tobacco: Freddie called it the model diet.

“And the funny thing is, it worked. The thinner I got, the better I looked. Inside I was slowly dying, but the camera loved me. And so did the advertisers.”

“You were a supermodel?”

“Not even close, but I did quite well. And so did Freddie. He took one-third of my earnings. And one-third of the salaries of all the other girls he was handling at the time.”

“And sleeping with?”

“Let’s just say our relationship wasn’t monogamous.”

By the time she was twenty-six, the cadaverous drug-addled look with which she was associated went out of fashion, and her star began to fade. Much of her work took place on the runway, where her tall frame and long limbs remained much in demand. But her thirtieth birthday was a watershed. There was before thirty and after thirty, she explained, and after thirty the work all but dried up. She hung on for three more years until even Freddie advised her it was time to leave the business. He did so gently at first, and when she resisted he severed business and romantic ties with her and threw her into the street. She was thirty-three years old, uneducated, jobless, and washed up.

“But you were rich,” said the Israeli.

“Hardly.”

“What about all the money you made?”

“Money comes and money goes.”

“Drugs?”

“And other things.”

“You liked the drugs?”

“I needed them, there’s a difference. I’m afraid Freddie left me with a few expensive habits.”

“So what did you do?”

“I did what any woman in my position would have done. I packed my bags and went to Saint-Tropez.”

With what remained of her money she took a villa in the hills—“It was a shack, really, not far from here”—and purchased a motor scooter secondhand. She spent her days on the beach at Pampelonne and her nights in the clubs and discos of the village. Naturally, she encountered many men there—Arabs, Russians, silver-haired Eurotrash. She allowed a few to take her to bed in exchange for gifts and money, which made her feel very much like a prostitute. Mainly, she searched for a suitable mate, someone to keep her in the style to which she had become accustomed. Someone who wasn’t too repulsive. In short order, she concluded that she had come to the wrong place, and with her money dwindling she took a job working in a small art gallery owned by an expatriate Brit. Then, quite by chance, she met the man who would change her life.

“Jean-Luc Martel?”

She smiled in spite of herself.

“Where did you meet him?”

“At a party—where else? Jean-Luc was always at a party. Jean-Luc was the party.”

In point of fact, she explained, it was not the first time they had met. The first time had been at Fashion Week in Milan, but Jean-Luc had been with his wife then and had barely looked Olivia in the eye when shaking her hand. But by the time of their second meeting, he was a recovering widower and very much in play. And Olivia fell madly and instantly in love with him.

“I was Rosemary and he was Dick. I was absolutely helpless with love.”

“Rosemary and Dick?”

“Rosemary Hoyt and Dick Diver. They’re the characters in—”

“I know who they are, Olivia. And you flatter yourself with the comparison.”

His words were like a slap to her face. Her cheeks flamed with color.