“I know, Skip,” said Cassie, feeling the fatigue. “The biggest in the business are guilty of mass mediocrity. They pump new product onto the market and think they can fool the public with a curvy new bottle and a new name, but it’s the same old content.”
“It’s those outside formulators.” Forrest Cunningham, from sales, leaned back in his chair and steepled his fingers. “Almost all the Liz Claibornes and Paul Sebastians in the business use them. We’re one of the few remaining who blend their own fragrances.” Phlegmatic, head small and round like a bulldog’s, For-rest was affectionately known as Poochie on the loading docks.
“So how come we’ve not produced a home run?” Lyons looked as if he battled chronic heartburn. He was a gangly man, a person of as much pattern and reliability as the numbers he crunched. “Silent Breeze, Crystal Sea, and Bermuda Gale have all been solid producers for the Sears crowd, don’t get me wrong, but none of them have rocked anyone back on their heels.”
“It’s a fickle market, Skipper,” Forrest said, addressing the man by his office moniker. “Everyone’s in panic mode; it’s just that some have deeper pockets. Overall, sales are sluggish, and the perfume hunters have exploited the same resources year in and year out. They’ve run dry. Take that His and Hers “Standup,” rumored to be in this year’s Christmas catalog for the online fashion boutiques in the UK. They call it a funny little aroma for the comic in all of us! Did you ever hear such garbage?”
Lyons scowled. “The only funny smell in the business right now is the scent of fear in the pores of perfume execs reaching for something, anything, with perceived bang.”
Cassie flinched. Is that what they think I’m doing — reaching?
Where’s the trust? Somebody in management is playing both sides.
There are too many leaks. Files have gone missing. Rumors are flying. But it’s all circumstantial.
She hated these thoughts. She peered around the table at the fourteen senior administrators of Azure World and swallowed hard. The team was solid by anyone’s standards. They’d had little turnover in twenty years, and their loyalty quotient was the envy of the industry. Her VPs, production line managers, sales directors, fragrance chemists, package designers, copywriters, and front office support staff weren’t perfect by any stretch, but they were solid citizens with families and mortgages and dreams — and the odd skeleton-in-a-closet, she supposed — as in any corporate entity in America. And like any CEO close to her troops, Cassie laughed at their fortieth birthday parties, celebrated the arrivals of their babies, wept at their funerals, supplied silver cake servers for their marriages and remarriages, loaned money to newlyweds, sympathized with the recently divorced, consoled the suddenly widowed, and tried to reward their faithfulness with a decent wage, stock options, employee discounts, and free samples.
That at least one of her staff should be working for the competition came as little surprise. The bitter pill was that until the Benedict Arnold — or Mata Hari — was discovered, all were suspect. Though the air in the boardroom at 8:19 a.m. was redolent with the white lotus succulence of Day Break, a high-end scent at forty-two dollars for a sixth of a fluid ounce, Cassie could smell the stink of betrayal. It was the nature of the business.
Skip coughed and studied a computer printout with grim determination. “Fourth quarter earnings last year are off pace with the year before by twenty-two percent. On this news, Azure’s stock should drop a full four, maybe six, bucks a share — ”
“That’s today’s gas pains.” Forrest, an ever-present white plastic insulated coffee mug glued to his grip, liked his talk unadorned. He understood nothing of stocks and bonds and considered them voodoo. “What’s going to sink us good is the piece that’s coming out in D&C. It says we’re using the musk of endangered animals and quotes more ‘anonymous, well-placed sources close to the company’ than the Pope’s got lapsed Catholics.” He glared about the table pointedly, but few took it to heart. Poochie would give both his kidneys to any one of them, and they knew it. He just felt the walls closing in same as the rest.
But why won’t he make eye contact? Cassie took a couple of deep breaths. He’s in a prime position to scuttle us, and he’s acting as shifty as a rat in a rain barrel. Probably just the java jitters. The man sucks down caffeine by the gallon.
“Something’s rotten in Danzig, all right.” Bridgette Sigafoos, vice president of product development, was as determined to misstate her adages as to formulate the most enticing aroma since baked bread. “It’s all over town that Gelasse is engineering a buyout. And Nicky’s trip to Ghana — ”
“New Guinea,” corrected Cassie.
“ — to New Guinea,” continued Bridgette without a skip, “is about as secret as the formula for Kool-Aid. Do you think it’s smart to pour all we’ve got into Cream Base #6 when the wolves are on the phone?”
“At the door, Siggy, the wolves are at the door! For crying out loud, if we’re going to sit here and discuss the coming apocalypse, let’s at least be on the same planet, shall we?” For-rest’s color approached magenta, and Cassie knew it was time for a little stress reduction all around.
She stood and smiled confidently, no small feat considering the knots in her stomach — I need word, Nicky; please send word! — and circled the table, hands on hips, red-lacquered nails tapping sequence against the intense cherry hue of her Donna Karan dress. She paused to stare from the third-floor window at the Canada geese gliding across the man-made lake framing three sides of Azure’s corporate offices. Remembering the scene at the Black Swan, she took a deep breath and turned to face the team, lips dry.
“The best thing to repel wolves,” she said in careful, measured tones, “is a loud noise like an explosion. Mark?” Mark Butterfield was her VP for marketing and media relations. He was also a jazz trumpeter for a local blues band. He twirled a silver pen and visibly squirmed in the warmth of her smile.
Bridgette and Forrest exchanged knowing looks.
Mark jabbed the silver pen behind one ear in his thicket of blond hair and leaned forward. “Tabloid tactics! Cockamamie supermarket crud! The D&C ignored most of the insiders I recommended and talked instead with a freak show of faceless, nameless cowards who wouldn’t know perfume from skunk spray!”
Cassie doubted that Mark Butterfield had been this upset since the day he’d shipped to Vietnam. The Drug and Cosmetic Weekly was the industry’s Little Red Book. “Forget it, Mark!”
Cassie said. “This time they’ve got it flat wrong. This time, Mark, no more code, no more Cream Base #6. I am confident that what we’ve got is Perfume #1, so why hide it any longer?
I want you to take all calls resulting from the Weekly article.
All of them. And here’s what you tell them: this fall Azure World will launch the greatest fragrance the market has ever known!”
Her enthusiasm caught their attention.
But Forrest looked skeptical. “What’s the formulation?”
Cassie stood behind his chair and put a hand on both beefy shoulders. “I’ll tell you what it isn’t. No more modest claims of precious little florals. No more oleander, orange blossoms, and lilies of the valley. No more geranium oil, bourbon, and sandalwood extract. No more essence of saffron or handpicked blends from the mountains of Greenland. No, Azure World — you, me, Nick, the entire team — will debut an exquisitely rare and captivating fragrance that will stun man, woman, and child with so rich and exotic a scent, it nearly defies description.”
Forrest turned in his chair and gave her a dubious expression. “You sound like a female P. T. Barnum!”
Cassie gave a small nod. “Thank you. It will be up to Safi” — here the beautiful face of Safi Voronin, a Ukranian Muslim and director of product packaging, turned and fixed Cassie with a regal smile — “and her team to control the language that expresses the inexpressible and take it out of the realm of empty hype. I know you’ve already fashioned a good deal of the message, and from what I’ve seen, it is spun of pure gold. Fine w
ork!”
Safi’s refined countenance scarcely changed, but her opaline eyes flashed pleasure at the compliment.
“Mark, the press must never know what hit them! I want them hand-fed everything on this one, no secondary sources, no plants, no additional rumor. They get what they get through only two sources, people. Mark or me. That’s it. Anyone else gets quoted, it’s automatic termination.”
Mark waved the silver pen.
“Yes, Mr. Butterfield?” Cassie said in the exaggerated tone of an elementary school teacher. “What is your question?” A few of the others laughed.
Mark grinned. “As much as I would like not to hide this wonder scent from the public any longer, it would be easier to let it out of the bag if I knew what ‘it’ is. No more code, you said, so . . . ?”
The moment had arrived. She took a deep breath. “Well, Mark, you tell them it’s called . . .”
Face flushed, Cassie paused more from emotion than from any sense of the dramatic. So many hopes were riding on the hunch in her gut. Her coworkers, her Azure World family, seated about the table where they had cut cake, wrung hands, and shouted at each other over two decades, leaned forward, eager to hear at last the name of the scent.
“What!?” Forrest’s curiosity had obviously overcome his misgivings.
“You’re killing us here!” Skip said.
Lyle Mortenson, accounts receivable, placed his index fingers on his temples and pretended to read Cassie’s mind. “Singapore Stinkweed,” he guessed. The others laughed and shouted him down.
Still, Cassie waited. The Naming, as the moment was known in the trade, was always fraught with tension and expectancy.
So much at the cosmetics counter was sizzle and fantasy, often bordering on the preposterous. Mascara that “envelops and nourishes each lash.” Moisturizing cream “synchronized to your skin’s natural rhythm.” Custom-blended, environmentally sensitive, vitamin-enhanced beauty preparations to “coax the inner being into full flower.” A great deal to expect from a dab of essence diluted with chemical solvents.
But expect it they did, and Cassie knew that the exhilaration the staff at Azure World felt now was a hopeful indicator of the public buzz about to be uncorked.
The Name, and the mystique that went with it, was a crucial part of the package.
Cassie laughed at the interest such an announcement always sparked, especially this time. “My, aren’t we the impatient ones?” They laughed again, and some of the worry washed away in magical anticipation.
A dreamy seriousness came over Cassie. The drumroll had gone on long enough. “Nick and I, after more than a little lost sleep and against my protestations, I assure you, have chosen to name our greatest discovery . . . Cassandra.”
She scarcely dared breathe.
The executives of Azure World sat motionless. Cassie knew they were swishing the name around their minds, much as a wine taster sloshes a fine Bordeaux over his tongue and palate to capture the true flavor in all its nuances.
After nearly half a minute, the room exploded in noisy applause and whistles, everyone rising to congratulate Cassie.
She had waited twenty years to find a fragrance worthy of her personal signature, one that could embody all the hopes and dreams inherent in so risky and subjective a venture as perfume, and it was only then that all of them could appreciate how truly exquisite the new scent must be.
Poochie pulled an actual bottle of Bordeaux from beneath the table. Wineglasses materialized with a magician’s flourish, and before long the room was rife with toasts and countertoasts.
“Where’s the caviar?” grumbled the sales manager. A collective cheer went up. “I’ve nothing to spread over my corporate relief!”
“To Cassandra, the woman and her scent!” Mark shouted, glass raised high in Cassie’s direction. Thirteen more glasses joined his, the sunlight turning the wine in them a rich blood red.
Despite a pounding heart, Cassie bowed slightly, her smile radiant.
When all the other glasses had lowered, she raised hers in a wide arc. “To the makers of Azure World, without whom we could not have survived two decades to make such an announcement!” Clinking glasses and shouts of “Hear! Hear!”
rang in the air.
Cassie stood apart, her glass untouched after the first bitter taste. Where is Nick? Where is our precious gift to the world? She stared down from the window at the geese preening themselves on the corporate pond, fighting over crumbs tossed on the water by someone just finishing a morning croissant. Who is the snake among us? Who wants us to fail? She couldn’t bear to think it was one of the happy, joking bunch in the room with her, being loud and brave for each other but worried about their futures.
She brushed the smooth surface of the credenza with trembling fingertips. As important a launch as this was, did it warrant so much of the company’s resources? The team had already gotten the word that to make way for the signature perfume, production was cutting back on much of the Azure line, and that three scents were being discontinued altogether. Spray, cream, cologne, or perfume, every Azure item was a child they’d helped birth and raise. To see so much of their hard work shoved out by royal decree was a shock of Richter proportions.
They had no choice but to trust her.
And that fact alone terrified Cassie.
With increasing nervousness she glanced occasionally at the boardroom door, willing it to open. Admit one short, balding Royce Blankenship, artist, scientist, sorcerer, nose without equal, face pinched in a perpetual sniff, the only one on senior staff besides Nick who was not there. The Nose had created more than one hundred thirty singular scents by alchemy of memory, patience, repetition, and association. His beak, now red, wrinkled, and hairy with age, could differentiate a thousand various fragrances. He could tell synthetic from natural, and where the natural scents geographically originated. Within six hours of a competitor’s debut product hitting the stores, Royce Blankenship had it broken down into its several parts and could tell you if that was Greek labdanum or Corsican, Madagascar ylang-ylang or Manilan.
“Why so glum?” Mark asked, following her gaze to the geese.
“This is your big moment.”
She checked her Seiko with its slender diamond wristband and saw that it was five minutes slower than the fine timepiece on the credenza. “I was just thinking how blessed we’ve been with good people. Yet nothing is assured, is it?”
He smiled. “Unless you want to hear about death and taxes, my guess is the answer is no. Don’t worry. He’ll be here. He may be guilty of cantankerousness, but never treachery. Not Royce.”
Cassie hoped so. People like Royce were the Beethovens of fragrance. But for all his greatness, Royce had his eccentricities.
For one, he was a purist, roaming the halls at Azure holding a blotter of scent first to one nostril, muttering self-absorbedly, then to the other, emitting another burst of coded comment only he understood. The process often repeated itself for hours and was not to be interrupted, even if one could penetrate the perfumer’s dreamy state.
And he was obsessively punctual. He arrived for work each morning precisely at 8:45 by his Swiss chronometer, to which the company clocks were now synchronized. He was poured a quick morning cup of hot filtered springwater — no aromatic beverages or chlorinated waters to interfere with his olfactory equipment. He left the cup of steaming water to cool while he visited the restroom, then returned to drink the water at exactly 8:59 and thirty seconds. It took him twenty-five seconds to walk from his desk down the hall to the central lab. He began his work precisely at 9:00 a.m. The extra five seconds were to allow for unforeseen interruptions such as a visitor to the building or the ringing of his phone. As he ignored both visitors and phone, the extra five seconds were moot.
“I just wish he were more of a company man,” Cassie said.
Mark nodded. “Isn’t he good because he’s such an individualist?”
Mark had a point, but individualism had its own set of annoya
nces. When she had delicately informed the perfumer the previous day that she had a noon interview on Midday by the Bay and needed to meet with the staff first thing, he had sniffed disdainfully. She and Nick had had a series of dreadful rows with the Nose over the means of capturing the molecular fundamentals and base character of Cream Base #6. Gerald Ruggers had warned that the only way to avoid New Guinean tribal resistance was to artificially record the celerides fragrance, then copy it in the lab. Blankenship, however, considered synthetic scents on a par with velvet paintings. “Bring me the blossom,”
he insisted, “for only then are the natural connectors preserved for the proper formulation. No good can come of approximating nature. I will not guess at what the Creator intended!”
Cassie felt fairly certain Royce would detour from the lab to the boardroom in deference to her, but that it would be on his timetable. Who, after all, would fire Royce for anything short of embezzlement — and probably not then?
8:43 a.m.
She desperately needed him to come through the boardroom door in his fastidious little shuffle — now, before they dismissed. That might help quell the rumors that he was King Rat and suspect number one. It was no secret he was at the top of Brenda Gelasse’s acquisitions list. She’d do anything to hire him away.
Cassie’s stomach soured.
Still the door did not open.
At exactly 8:45 a.m. the Nose made the customary beeline toward his office in a neat, precise, gliding two-step that never made noise. At the center hall credenza he nodded crisply to Mavis, the green-uniformed plant lady from Planted Earth busily giving the miniature palms their biweekly feeding and spritzing. He would attend the senior staff meeting but planned to be late — all that cork-popping and spilled grape would not be good for the nose. He also planned to insist upon another meeting with Cassandra the moment hers concluded.
She had asked him to compromise his personal code of professional conduct. If Nicholas returned with the flower by which all others were mere reflections, then Royce wanted to bottle all its glory, not a portion of it. The soul of a rose was the sum total of all its components. Reducing the number of particulars no more resulted in a real rose than reducing a person to only water, calcium, and salt resulted in a fully human being.
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