receive a ten percent commission. At Harry Winston yesterday Megan had located a similar pendant priced at ,800. She expected to net ,000, which she would add to her account with Pictet & Cie, her private Swiss banker on Avenue des Champs-Elysees.
Alain would no doubt eventually ask her why she hadn’t worn the pendant, which would give her an opportunity to tell him that she decided what she wore and when, not him. She could sell it if she wished, couldn’t she? Or was it a gift with strings? Alain, who was lithely and sensuously beautiful, and whose unconscious sense of superiority exuded from his every pore, was, when all was said and done, a twenty-four-year old child who could — and would — easily be brought to heel. Only three years older, Megan felt ancient compared to her new lover, too worldly wise for her own good. Not a good feeling, but there it was, and there was all of Alain’s unearned money, his very real sexual charms, and of course his father’s jewelry.
As Megan strolled along Rue Durantin, she was stared at by the lost boys, whores, pimps, drug dealers and pickpockets — the cream of Paris’s low life — who hung out in and around the bars and greasy spoons that lined the avenue. Clutching tightly to her bag, her naturally proud and erect bearing making her look taller than her five-foot seven inches, she tossed her hair in defiance, and moved with apparent casualness through the carnival that was Montmartre, especially on market day, when the tourists showed up in busloads to be victimized. At the corner of Rue Caulaincourt, she ran into two prostitutes whose garish makeup and fantastic dress she had used in a story about slut chic that the editors at Cosmopolitan had bought thinking they were on