by M. J. Rose
Hungry, lazy, in a hurry. Would Chung read the document carefully?
Xie averted his eyes, afraid to watch, and focused on his painting, but his mind wasn’t still. Was his old programmer going to note the dates? Write them down to take them back to Beijing and check them against some master document that kept track of the comings and goings of heads of states? Was this trip going to get caught up in inexhaustible bureaucratic red tape or be allowed?
Again Xie dipped the brush into the ink that was the color of a moonless sky and touched the point to the fine paper. He let his wrist and his fingers go where they wanted, let them soar across the page.
“Now, about that wine?” Chung said as he placed the document on the table.
Xie’s eyes slid to inspect it.
The signature was sloppy. There was no grace to his letters, just as there was no grace to the man. But it was signed.
Six
NEW YORK CITY
WEDNESDAY, MAY 11, 6 P.M.
Robbie approached the Queen Anne–style villa with its gables, pitted stone gargoyles, and scrolled wrought-iron railing. He was pleased that the Manhattan developers—always tearing down the old to make way for something newer and bigger and taller—seemed to have skipped over this small section of the West Side. The elaborate details on these nineteenth-century buildings made him feel at home, as if he were back in Paris.
In the early evening shadows, the Phoenix Foundation took on an almost mystical appearance. As if all the reincarnation investigation that went on inside—examinations into the synchronicity and parallels of lives lived and lost and found again, and the complicated philosophical, religious and scientific issues raised because of them—had given the building a rich patina.
Even though his sister had known Dr. Malachai Samuels, the foundation’s codirector, since she was a teenager and Robbie had been the one to introduce Malachai to Griffin North, he’d never been here before. Now, with a thrill of excitement, he climbed up the six stone steps, each one bringing him closer to deciphering what he’d found in Paris among his father’s papers.
When Robbie had started searching for the formulas for Rouge and Noir that his sister had asked for, he’d been horrified at the mess he’d discovered. The disease that had confused his father’s mind seemed to have manifested as physical chaos in the workshop. Every cabinet and drawer had been emptied onto the floor. Every book on every shelf had been removed. Stacked in piles. All the oils and essences and absolutes had been left open to evaporate. Hundreds of thousands of euros’ worth of supplies, ruined. Slowly and methodically, Robbie had tried to sort through the detritus of—how many years? No one was quite sure how long his father had really been ill. Louis had always been eccentric; the line from there to dementia was a blurry one.
And then Robbie came across a cache of broken pottery scattered in the bottom of a carton. At first he thought the turquoise, coral and black designs on the glazed white background were abstract. But when he found two shards that fit together, he realized they were hieroglyphics. Bending over his puzzle, trying to fit more pieces together, he’d detected a very faint scent. Only a trace. But that trace was everything to him. He needed his sister to smell it. Jac had the most attuned nose of them all. When they were children, their father would test them on combinations of essences and absolutes on linen squares. Robbie was right only half the time. Jac never got one wrong. With study, he improved, but he’d never have the innate ability she did. Their father said that Robbie had the faith and Jac had the nose—and as long as they worked together, the House of L’Etoile would be safe for yet another generation. Except they weren’t working together, and the house was in danger.
But at least, now, finally, he was in New York. And Robbie was sure the time was right for his Zen approach. For tranquil, spartan scents based on natural accords. Each orchestrated to evoke a sense of spirituality, of meditation, of connectiveness. Someone was going to fall in love with his new perfumes.
And maybe the time was also right for him to be the member of his family to discover a very old scent that could matter even more to the House of L’Etoile.
Standing in front of the large wooden door, Robbie inspected the bas-relief of a large bird rising out of a fire, a sword in its talons. There was a glyph on one of the pottery shards depicting a similar bird. Robbie inspected the mythical image. Tempted to pull the photographs out of his briefcase and compare the two phoenixes right away, he resisted and instead reached out and rang the doorbell.
A few seconds later, he heard a responding buzz and pulled open the door. On the other side, he found himself back in time. The décor was nineteenth century. A Tiffany chandelier cast soft green and blue reflections on the foyer’s polished black-and-white marble floor. A potted palm with elongated, leafy fronds sat beside a carved giltwood table.
“Can I help you?” A receptionist beckoned him forward.
“I have a meeting with Griffin North.”
“Yes—Mr. L’Etoile. He’ll be out in a minute.”
While he waited, Robbie admired more of the décor. He’d guessed the ornate moldings that capped the high ceilings and framed the autumnal colored Art Nouveau wallpaper were originals—though in America you could never be sure. His family’s maison in Paris dated back to the mid-eighteenth century. One shouldn’t tear down the past to make way for the future. That’s how lessons were lost. The art of keeping a civilization alive, like the art of making perfume, was in the blending.
“Robbie. It’s so good to see you,” Griffin said, striding to greet him.
The two men embraced, French style, kissing each other on both cheeks.
The first summer that Jac and Griffin were together, he’d come with her to their grandmother’s house in Grasse. Robbie, who was thirteen at the time, had been in awe of the nineteen-year-old American who knew so much about the archaeological history of the area. The three of them hiked to dozens of ancient Roman sites, exploring the ruins and remnants of the past. Through the legends that Griffin recounted about the twelfth- and thirteenth-century Cathars who’d lived in those hills until being exterminated during the Inquisition, the younger boy had first discovered the idea of reincarnation. This, in time, would lead him to Buddhism and change his life.
Robbie inspected his friend. The hair that fell in waves across Griffin’s face was still thick but shot through with silver, and there were laugh lines in the corners of his mouth, but the explorer’s gray-blue eyes were as inquisitive as ever.
The Lama Yeshe, with whom Robbie studied Buddhism, had once said that self-confidence is not a feeling of superiority but of independence. Griffin had always seemed intelligent without being condescending and self-confident without being arrogant.
Robbie knew it was because nothing had come easily for his friend. When Griffin was a high school junior, his father, an inveterate gambler, disappeared for the last time. All he left behind were bills and a second mortgage his wife’s job couldn’t cover. Griffin worked his way through college and then grad school to become an archaeologist. His grief hardened into determination, his loneliness into energy. Every discovery, every new idea separated him further from his father’s fate.
“It’s been way too long,” Griffin said. He led his friend down a hallway lit by stained-glass wall sconces. “At least six years, I think.”
“Nine years. You need to visit Paris more often.”
“There’s no doubt about that. I work too much.”
“Too much brain at the expense of the soul?”
Robbie worried that was his sister’s problem, too. When he looked at his fellow students of zazen, or sitting meditation, and the lamas he knew, they seemed to be able to acknowledge the world’s deficiencies and sufferings but still hold on to their younger selves’ sense of delight. Fatigue didn’t affect you quite the same way when you lived mindfully.
“I’m dealing with much more practical problems. Private school costs a fortune. Not to mention divorce lawyers.”
&n
bsp; “Divorce?” Robbie put his arm out and stopped Griffin. They were standing in a pool of warm light, and he could see sadness in his friend’s eyes. “So then it is your soul. I’m so sorry. Are you sure?”
“No, as a matter of fact, we’re not. We got pretty deep into it legally, but we were both too upset about our daughter and what it was doing to her, so we decided to give it a few months more before signing the papers. There’s no acrimony. There’s just stasis. While I’m here, I’m living downstairs in the studio apartment we used to rent out.”
“When do you go back to the dig in Egypt?”
“Not till the fall.”
Since getting his degree, Griffin had been working at a dig 186 kilometers west of Alexandria, searching for Cleopatra’s and Marc Antony’s tombs. He’d also published a book, and he taught at New York University each fall. Because of the separation, he’d decided to delay his return to Egypt and for the next few months was working at the Phoenix Foundation’s library, researching the origins of reincarnation theory in ancient Greece.
While Egyptians believed in the afterlife, they didn’t accept that the dead returned to earth. And yet hieroglyphics found at the site outside of Alexandria suggested the Greeks’ notion of soul transmigration had taken hold in Egypt during the Ptolemaic period. Griffin was trying to chart how the philosophy might have developed and affected Egyptian religious practices.
“So for now, you and Therese are closer by not being as close?”
Robbie’s question made Griffin frown. “Well, aren’t you the prescient psychologist.”
“I hope you find the right solution.” Robbie had no advice to offer. His own relationships were anything but conventional. His partners—both men and women—always started out as, and settled back into, friendships. He never left anyone. Even if his passion burned out, his love never did. Nurturing those he cared about, he always kept them close.
Only one liaison—with a woman he’d met on a retreat—haunted him. The only lover he’d lost.
Griffin stopped in front of a door on the right. “Come in.”
Robbie took in the overcrowded room. Every corner, shelf and tabletop gleamed with gold and silver, bronze and copper, soft lights and shining crystals.
“What is this, Ali Baba’s cave?”
“Close. This is the Talmage Cabinet of Curiosities. My favorite room in the institute. Trevor Talmage founded the Phoenix Club in 1847 along with Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, Frederick Law Olmsted and other well-known transcendentalists. His original mission—the search for knowledge and enlightenment—led to his starting this collection. I’ve appropriated it as my office while I’m working here.” He gestured to a desk that was covered with stacks of books and a laptop.
“The library is huge but subterranean and too sterile for me, so I bring as much of my research up here as I can,” Griffin said. “Let me show you some of the highlights.”
The room was paneled in walnut veneer, like the library in his own home in Paris. Exquisitely crafted glass cabinets lined the walls. Robbie glanced into one vitrine that held silver and gold chalices. Each was in the shape of a human face studded with all-too-realistic glass eyes. Another case housed a gilded birdcage with a bronze tree, complete with turquoise, onyx, malachite and amethyst birds perched on jade leaves. So true to life, it seemed at any minute they might take flight. A third was crammed with human and monkey skulls, bird and rodent skeletons, preserved lizards and snakes. A fourth held nothing but eggs: from the smallest sky-blue robin eggs to giant ostrich and emu eggs.
“I’ve become fascinated with these wunderkammers,” Griffin said. “Cabinets of curiosities first came into fashion in the seventeenth century, when people were obsessed with the theme of the inevitability of death and the impermanence of life. Collecting was rebellion. Objects like these proved permanence. Two hundred years later, reincarnationists like Talmage and the other members of the Phoenix Club saw them as examples of the endless and repeating cycle of life and death.” Griffin pointed to a cabinet in the corner of the room. “Come look.”
When he got closer, Robbie recognized that it was made of amber, a hardened resin that had oozed from the bark of trees millions of years ago. A highly coveted material, it glowed like a slow-burning fire.
“It’s magical,” Griffin said. One by one, he opened the small, perfectly crafted drawers revealing a priceless collection of amber pieces, insects and amphibians held hostage for all time. They seemed still alive—just about to move—from the smallest bug to a large spider poised as if waiting for an insect to fall into its web.
“Now for the pièce de résistance,” Griffin said as he opened the bottom drawer. Each of the dozen compartments, lined in chocolate velvet, had a depression in its center. Nestled within every hollow except the last was a crystal flacon decorated with an amber-and-silver top. Each contained a lake of viscous liquid. Perfume thickened by more than a hundred years.
“Can I smell?”
“Go ahead.”
Robbie lifted out the first, unscrewed it and sniffed. The scent was basic and primordial. Rich with frankincense—he sniffed again—and borage, storax and myrrh.
For a moment, he couldn’t catch his breath. The scent was almost agonizing. “What do you know about these?”
“They were an experiment funded by the founders of the Phoenix Club, who were on a constant search for fabled lost memory tools. One was supposed to be a fragrance that helped you enter a deep meditative state.”
“So you could remember your past lives?”
“That was their hope, yes.”
“Like our family legend.”
“What?” Griffin asked.
“Don’t you remember? One of my ancestors supposedly found an Egyptian ‘soul-mate’ perfume in Egypt. And a book of formulas—”
“From Cleopatra’s fragrance factory. Yes, I remember now. Your grandmother told me about it.”
“She loved the legend.” Robbie stopped to inhale the next sample. “You know these are all slightly different formulations of the same scent?”
“Is that meaningful?” Griffin asked.
“I don’t have any idea.”
“Are you getting bombarded by memories?”
“Not from a past life, but these are all familiar scents to me—essentials that go back as far as recorded fragrance history in ancient Greece, Egypt and India. All of them remain major popular ingredients today.” Robbie inspected the flacon, turning it in his hand, peering closely at the engraved markings. “Do you know where these bottles came from?”
“According to Malachai, the Phoenix Club commissioned a French perfumer to work on the formula in the 1800s.”
“The designs certainly fit French perfume bottles of that era.” Robbie removed the one he was holding up to the light. Turning it slowly, he examined the facets until he finally found something. Then he checked the next flacon. And the one after that.
“No one could convince me this is mere coincidence,” he said as he handed one to Griffin, pointing to an area near the bottom. “Do you see that?”
“Those scratches? Wait.” Griffin pulled his reading glasses down off the top of his head, put them on and peered closer. “I see it but can’t make it out. Let me get a stronger—”
“No, I know what it is. It’s a maker’s mark—hard to read unless you’re already familiar with it. Back then perfumers had different flacons made by glassmakers. A customer would pick out the one they preferred and have it filled with the fragrance they chose.” Robbie touched the silver-and-amber top.
“You recognize the mark, don’t you?” Griffin asked.
“I certainly do. It’s an L and E inside of a crescent moon. The numbers underneath are the date: 1831. It’s my family mark.”
“The House of L’Etoile? Your family’s firm? That’s impossible!” Griffin shook his head and laughed. “And to think there are people who doubt synchronicity and the collective unconscious.”
“You’re going to be
even more astonished after you see what I brought to show you.” Robbie opened his briefcase, pulled out the file of photos of the pottery shards he’d found in his father’s mess, and handed them to Griffin.
After examining them, Griffin handed the photos back to Robbie. “It looks like late-period Egyptian, but to be sure, I’d really need to see the actual objects. Pieces of pottery aren’t worth much, though. Only a few thousand dollars. Maybe ten, depending on what the inscription says.” Griffin knew about the House of L’Etoile’s financial problems. “I’m sorry.”
Robbie shook his head. “Pas de probleme. I didn’t imagine these were worth enough to solve the crisis we are having. I told a friend of mine who is a curator at Christie’s about them, and she said pretty much what you said. If they were genuine, they’d be an interesting artifact, but pottery shards are not very valuable.”
“Then why do you want me to look at them?”
“I want you to help me translate them.”
“They’re probably just inscribed with a prayer for the dead.”
“I’d like to make sure.”
“Why’s that?”
“I found them in the workshop. And I’m sure they have something do with that soul-mate scent I mentioned.”
“In which case they could have some connection to the fragrance in these crystal bottles? Do you actually think you’ve found some sort of ancient memory tool, Robbie?”
“Even though I believe that everything, no matter how trivial it is, is connected to everything else and that there are no coincidences in life . . . something like this . . . it seems impossible, doesn’t it?”
Seven
PARIS, FRANCE
THURSDAY, MAY 19, 8:30 P.M.
Warned not to be late, Tom Huang hurried across the street while scanning the long block for number eighteen. The teahouse was in the section of Paris they called Quartier Chinois, but little about the area was as appealing as the appellation. Unlike the narrow streets and charming ambiance of old Paris, the thirteenth arrondissement’s Chinatown was overpopulated and overcrowded with skyscrapers and supermarkets. There were none of the chic cafés, charming florists, iconic boutiques and authentic bakeries that made so much of the city attractive. This wasn’t Huang’s Paris, and whenever he visited here, he felt oppressed. Especially during the day, when every ugly nuance of the blocks of buildings stood out in high detail.