by M. J. Rose
At least now, at night, the blazing neon signs advertising everything from McDonald’s to traditional French fare offered some visual excitement that matched his mood. A clandestine meeting with the head of the Chinese underworld in Paris was not, even for Huang, a regular occurrence. But yesterday, after getting word through his spies that a curator at Christie’s had inspected fragments of an object purported to be a reincarnation memory aid, Huang had to act.
He finally found the restaurant squeezed in between a bank and a laundry. The small, shabby place was just one room, crammed with yellowed Formica tabletops and cracked red leather seats. The floor was a checkerboard of linoleum, the black and white tiles stained and faded. Despite the late hour, more than half the tables were filled with groups of Chinese men, drinking tea and talking—not French but a cacophony of different Chinese dialects. Hundreds of pieces of calligraphy—black characters with occasional touches of red—hung on the walls, and the glass covering them was smudged with years of restaurant grease.
Despite the visible signs of neglect, Huang felt reassured by the familiar incense of seeping tea, brewed flowers and spices and roasted rice and toasted barley. Huang circumnavigated the tables to the far-right corner, where a wizened man, bald and slightly hunched over, sat with his back to the wall. He was ordinary looking, wearing ordinary clothes. Yet this was the man who oversaw a network of tens of thousands of members, a sworn brotherhood engaged in a wide range of criminal activity specializing in smuggling, VAT fraud, drug trafficking, and more.
Huang paused as the waiter set down a glazed teapot. He’d been instructed to act as if he and the man were already acquainted, so he nodded his head, said hello, pulled out a chair, and sat down. On the table in front of him were thirteen white porcelain teacups arranged in a rectangle with one cup in the middle.
The ritual Huang was about to engage in was over three thousand years old and had been abandoned by most Hak Sh’e Wui bosses, but the head of this local black society—only Caucasians called them Triads—still engaged in the old customs. The ancient ceremony had been a way to test an unknown visitor and ascertain if he was a member of the secret society or not. It made sense in the days when there was no internet, telephone, or even a dependable mail system, but now it was just another of Gu Zhen’s idiosyncrasies.
Huang reached for the lone cup in the middle—in the Triad’s language telling the boss he was one of them, literally an insider.
Gu Zhen poured tea for himself and then for his guest. Huang watched, riveted by Zhen’s deliberately slow, teasing movement as he put the teapot back down. If he placed the spout facing Huang, it would mean the meeting was over, that he’d considered his request, didn’t trust him or was upset with him and wouldn’t give Huang his help or his blessing.
The spout was facing away from him. This meant his next step was to drain his cup and set it back on the table bottom up to send a signal that he wanted to discuss something. He did so.
Gu Zhen nodded. “I can help you,” he whispered in a low rasp. “But it will be expensive. We prefer not to deal outside of our regular businesses.”
“Money’s not an object. Our government doesn’t want this toy to get into the wrong hands.”
The old man raised his gray eyebrows. “Toy?” He said the word as if he tasted it and then took a sip of his tea.
Huang had been warned that it was in his best interest to respect the elder, engage in the tea drinking ceremony, and not exhibit any sign of impatience if he wanted to get the help he sorely needed to accomplish this mission. So here he remained, sipping tea from a small, stained porcelain cup, twenty minutes, eight kilometers and a world away from his elegant office in the Ministry for Foreign Affairs of the People’s Republic of China on Avenue George V.
“So what can you tell me about this toy, as you call it?” Gu Zhen asked.
“It’s supposed to be some kind of ancient tool to help people remember their past lives.”
“Which you think is a joke?”
“What I think isn’t important. The way we’re fighting this war, we’re not making headway. We have a situation with no end in sight. Buddhists are not giving up. The world is still on the side of the exiled Tibetans, even if most governments are afraid of us. We don’t want this unrest. We don’t want any more monks becoming martyrs by setting themselves on fire. The last thing we need is a rumor that there is a way to finally prove reincarnation.” Huang had heard of other portals that supposedly helped people connect with past lives. An ancient flute in Vienna. A cache of stones in Rome. The Chinese had been unable to get their hands on any of them. But according to information that came from his undercover connection in the Buddhist community, this one was here in Paris.
“If it were to get into the hands of the religious zealots, it would give them fuel. They broke the law two weeks ago. They claimed they found a reincarnated lama in Lhasa. Something expressly forbidden.” Huang spat out the words. “Every time they stage another so-called peaceful protest, they know we’re going to step in. Then the fighting starts all over again, and more monks martyr themselves. That brings the media. And it turns into an international circus. The Tibetans know that. That wolf in monk’s robes knows it. Two hundred people were killed in the last two weeks. And we all have the blood on our hands.”
“Who has this tool?” Gu Zhen asked. “And do you care what happens to him?”
Eight
NEW YORK CITY
FRIDAY, MAY 20, 11:20 A.M.
“In the middle of the nineteenth century one of my ancestors—along with some other members of the Phoenix Club—funded a project. Its goal was to identify a scent to help people remember their past lives,” Dr. Malachai Samuels said. Then, with a flourish, he handed Jac a deeply faceted crystal flacon, empty save for a quarter inch of viscous amber perfume.
As she took it, sunlight coming through the French doors leading to the courtyard set it aglow. Fiery sparks leapt onto the ceiling. Rainbows of refracted light danced.
When she was a little girl and her mother wanted to work on her poetry and the nanny was off or busy with Robbie, Audrey would sometimes take Jac down to the workshop.
Sometimes the doors to the garden were open. “The breeze clears out all my mistakes,” her father always said. And it did. On those days, Jac wouldn’t smell any perfume at all—just grass and cypress, along with whatever was in bloom: roses or hyacinth or peonies.
Louis would put cushions on the floor for her and then give Jac the carton filled with crystal bottles that had lost their stoppers and stoppers that had lost their bottles.
It was one of her favorite games.
Jac would position the glass and draw on the ceiling with the reflections.
“My light painter,” her father would say with delight and applaud her efforts.
That was one of the good memories of being with him, there in his workshop on the days when the sun and the breeze kept the strangers and their shadows away.
“Open it,” Malachai said, bringing her back to the present. “Smell it. I want to know what you think.”
The heavy silver cap studded with pieces of amber unscrewed easily. Jac bent her head and sniffed the mixture. The scent was ordinary. Frankincense and myrrh. Storax. It smelled like it looked—flat, lacking in luminosity and life.
“Do you know exactly how old this is?” she asked.
“According to the correspondence I found, it dates back to the 1830s.”
“And do you know who created it?”
“The Phoenix Club commissioned a perfume workshop in France to create the scent . . .”
She looked away from the bottle and back up at him. She guessed what he was about to tell her.
“The perfumer was the House of L’Etoile?”
He nodded.
“Robbie said I’d be surprised.”
“I hope delightfully so.”
“What an amazing coincidence.” As soon as she said it, she knew he was going to correct her.
<
br /> “Synchronicity is not a coincidence,” said Malachai. “It is the governing dynamic that underlies all human experience throughout history. Concurrent events that seem to be coincidental often later turn out to be related.”
Jac waited for the lecture to conclude. “Is there a maker’s mark?” she asked.
Malachai proffered a magnifying glass. “It’s down here.” He pointed. “Until last week, I always thought that was the jeweler’s mark. Which I know now is why my research never generated results. It hadn’t occurred to me that the perfumer would have stamped it. Or that I’d have such a strong connection to the family of perfumers all these centuries later.”
He smiled, which for him meant his mouth moved the right way, but his eyes never reflected any of the emotions associated with smiling. You never sensed his pleasure or humor or kindness. He wore expressions like masks. But rather than make her feel uncomfortable, this made Jac feel safer and more grounded when she was around him.
It wasn’t his heart but his brain that had helped bring her back from the precipice of insanity sixteen years before.
Jac’s illness had reached its fevered pitch after her mother died. Nothing the battalion of doctors prescribed helped banish the delusions. The pills exhausted her and numbed her mind. The frightening machine that blasted her with electricity left her nauseated and confused. After six miserable months of all the accepted treatments, her grandmother stepped in and flew Jac to Zurich to the controversial Blixer Rath clinic.
This “last resort,” as her father had called it, was run by two disciples of Carl Jung who believed that curing whatever psychological disease Jac suffered had to begin with healing of the soul. Like his mentor, Rath believed that the psyche required mythic and spiritual exploration, along with low-dose medications only if completely necessary.
The traditional medical community was openly hostile to this holistic, soul-centered approach. During her nine months in the clinic, Jac took no drugs. Instead, she was exposed to in-depth analytic therapy designed to strengthen her own healing abilities. In order to understand the symbolism of her dreams and drawings done after deep meditative sessions—in order to translate her symptoms and recognize any possible synchronistic events in her life that might have a deeper meaning—Jac had to learn the universal language of the soul, as Jung called mythology. And the man who taught her that language and spoke it with her was Dr. Malachai Samuels.
On leave from his practice at the Phoenix Foundation, Malachai was at Blixer Rath as a Jungian therapist, not a reincarnationist. He never talked to any of his patients about possible past-life episodes. Only years later, reading a magazine article about Malachai, Jac realized he’d been at the clinic investigating his theory that a high percentage of schizophrenics were misdiagnosed and suffering from past-life memory crises.
“Can you tell the date from the mark?” Malachai asked. He peered over her shoulder while she examined the engraving.
“No. I don’t know as much about the history of these things as I should.”
Malachai shrugged. “That’s entirely all right. I didn’t ask you here to talk about the past, Jac. I want you to help me find it.”
The combination of the intensity of his gaze and his mellifluous voice was mesmerizing. He commanded her full attention. And offered back his own. She’d never known him to be distracted when he was talking to her. That was one of her first memories of him at Blixer Rath. She arrived there a frightened, malnourished teenager, scared of the shadows that haunted her awake and asleep. She couldn’t meet his eyes for more than a few seconds at a time. But when she did, he was always there, present, in her moment. He never once had looked away from her when they conversed. Not then. Not now.
In her therapy sessions in Zurich, and whenever she visited in the intervening years, she thought of him as a wizard who managed to suspend time. Here in his library, with its rare wood paneling, rich oriental carpet, and Tiffany glass lamps, it might be New York City a hundred years ago. It wasn’t just his surroundings. Malachai dressed and spoke formally, in a classic style that was neither dated nor modern. Today’s navy suit, carefully knotted silk tie and the monogram on his crisp white shirt suggested the wardrobe of a gentleman of an earlier time.
“Jac, let me build a perfume workshop for you here at the foundation. State of the art. Your show is on hiatus for the summer, isn’t it? Work here and create the fragrance your ancestors commenced working on but never finished. If you succeed, I’ll be able to pay you enough to secure the future of the House of L’Etoile.”
“Robbie told you about our financial problems?”
Jac’s grandmother had taught her never to discuss money outside of the family—not even with someone who mattered to her as much as Malachai—and it embarrassed her to do so now. She wished her brother’s email had contained more details about his meeting with the doctor.
“Yes, but I’d already read about it in the papers.”
Jac returned her attention to the crystal flask she was still holding and once more sniffed at the odd fragrance. She was astonished. Not by Malachai’s offer itself but by the faith he’d exhibited by making it.
“You’d go to all that expense to explore a fantasy?”
“You know as well as anyone that I don’t believe reincarnation is a fantasy.”
In the years since Blixer Rath, she had learned a lot about Malachai’s foundation and knew that he worked with thousands of children who remembered their past incarnations. He and his aunt, the other codirector, had documented the children’s journeys and presented remarkable proof of the lives they discovered in their regressions.
“Yes, but you operate as trained psychologists seriously searching for psychic DNA. Your investigations are carried out under strict and rigorous circumstances. You’ve fought to keep your work free of populist faddism. How does that track with something as fantastic as a perfume to help people remember their past lives?”
“Reincarnation is a fact,” replied Malachai. “A fact of life. Of death. And just as I know reincarnation is real, I know there are real tools that can aid in recovering past-life memories. I told you, didn’t I, that I was present when one of them caused a mass regression? Hundreds of people, all hypnotized at the same time, experiencing past-life memories. An astonishing moment. As close as we’ve ever gotten to proving reincarnation.”
“When you were shot? Yes, but you didn’t tell me—”
“I’m sure they exist,” he interrupted. “Aids. Tools, Jac . . .”
She’d never heard him so wistful. “Some of them are lost,” he continued, “some destroyed . . . But there are others still waiting to be discovered . . . They might not have been used since ancient days, but they exist. I know they do.”
His dark eyes gleamed. His lips parted. There was something akin to sexual longing on the therapist’s face.
He lusts after this information.
Jac crossed her arms over her chest. She’d known Malachai a long time. He was always in control. Unemotional. Reserved. Never this intense.
But, then, his life had become more intense in the past few years. Twice he’d been a suspect in different criminal cases involving stolen ancient artifacts, and he’d been referred to as a person of interest in a third. Because of Malachai, the Phoenix Foundation had been in the news more in the past few years than in the past few decades combined. Were these artifacts the memory tools he was talking about?
“You and your aunt have gained so much respect over the years from the scientific community for how careful you are with your research,” said Jac. “If you seriously pursue a perfume because you think it will help people remember their past lives, you’ll be putting the institute’s reputation at risk. And yours.”
He leaned back in his chair, and the expression on his face relaxed. He was once again the esteemed therapist in his well-appointed office. Confident, erudite and charismatic.
“In ancient times, priests burned incense because they believed souls travele
d to the afterlife on the swirls of smoke. Mystics sniffed incense to enter into altered states so they could visit alternative dimensions. Certain cultures use scented oils to open the third eye so they can experience psychic perception otherwise unavailable to us.”
“I know the different ways fragrance has been used.”
“Then surely you can understand why I believe fragrance might aid us in accessing our past lives.”
“Even if I wanted to, I can’t help you. I’m not a perfumer, Malachai. I’m a mythologist. Why not offer Robbie the job? He believes in the things you do.”
“Robbie said that as good as he is, his nose is mediocre compared to yours. That you’ll be able to take this”—he held up the crystal flacon—“and intuitively know how to build out the fragrance from this base.”
Once, a lifetime ago it seemed, she’d wanted to be a perfumer. But that idea had died with her mother. Jac had an aversion to the idea of ever sitting down at a perfumer’s organ again.
Her grandfather had always said that she was the culmination of centuries of great perfumers—that she, not her father and not her brother, was destined to be one of the great noses. Robbie believed it too and sometimes admonished her that that she wasn’t doing the work she was born to do. He wondered why she’d turned her back on becoming the artist she was capable of being.
“My brother’s wrong about me, about my ability.”
“He seemed very certain,” Malachai said, and then added an aside: “I’m glad the two of you have remained so close. You have, haven’t you?”
She thought she heard something mournful in his voice. Or maybe it was her own projection because she and Robbie had been at odds these past few months, and she missed their easy camaraderie. Jac felt the pain of letting Robbie down. She hadn’t been able to conceive of a plan to solve the House of L’Etoile’s financial crisis without irrevocably disrupting the company.