The Book of Lost Fragrances: A Novel of Suspense

by M. J. Rose

  No. She didn’t know how long she’d been there. No, she hadn’t made the mess. No, she didn’t know what was real or imagined. Not anymore. And maybe never again.

  Marcher pulled out a pack of cigarettes. “Do you mind,” he asked, “as long as we’re outside?”

  Even though she didn’t smoke anymore, she asked him for one. He shook the pack toward her, and she extracted the cigarette that slid forward. She put it between her lips, and he lit a match, extending it. The mixture of tobacco and sulfur was a delicious distraction.

  Jac sensed that the inspector’s quiet demeanor represented almost an apology, an acknowledgment of the regret that came with having witnessed the tragedy of her early life.

  Even one puff of the strong cigarette was too much. Jac threw it on the pebbled path and ground it out with her heel, noticing the yin-yang pattern in black and white pebbles circling the obelisk. She’d forgotten about that too. All that Eastern influence. “Let’s go back,” she said, and as they walked, she questioned him.

  “Have you found out anything at all to suggest where my brother may be?”

  “We haven’t, no.”

  “And what of the man who you found here; do you know who he is?”

  “We’re having a bit of a hard time with him too.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “In your brother’s diary, there’s a notation of a meeting with Charles Fauche, a reporter with the International Journal of Fragrance. And while there is indeed a man with that name who’s affiliated with the journal, he’s currently in Italy on an assignment and has been for the last five days.”

  “So you have no idea who you found here?”

  “That’s correct. We know only that whoever he is, he doesn’t have a criminal record. His fingerprints aren’t on file with us or Interpol.”

  They’d reached the workshop. The French doors were still opened.

  “Inspector, do you have Robbie’s diary?”

  “Yes, I do.”

  Marcher gestured for Jac to go inside first. He followed her and shut the doors behind him. Jac reopened them. She didn’t want to smell all those warring scents.

  “Could I have it back?” she asked.

  “It’s evidence.”

  “Take down any information you need. Xerox it if need be, but I’d like to have my brother’s—” she broke off, confused. “Evidence?”

  “Yes.”

  “Robbie’s missing. I thought you were looking for Robbie because you think he might be in danger.”

  “Yes. And because he is also at this point in time a person of interest in this case.”

  “I don’t understand. On the phone, you said that Charles Fauche—or whoever he is—died of natural causes. That he’d had an asthma attack.”

  “That’s right. He did. Brought on by what he breathed.”

  “But that can’t be Robbie’s fault. The man knowingly came to a perfume workshop.”

  “It appears your brother was burning a toxic chemical in here that brought on the attack.”

  “My brother is a perfumer. He works with all kinds of toxic chemicals. Surely you can’t—”

  Marcher bowed his head in deference to what she was saying, but his words belied the action. “We don’t know anything, mademoiselle. Not yet. But you might be able to help us learn more. Could you look around at what’s on the table here and tell me what kind of perfume your brother was working on that would have required him to burn benzyl chloride?”

  “Inspector, someone came here to see Robbie. Someone who wasn’t who he said he was. Now my brother is missing—for all we know, he was kidnapped. How can you jump to the conclusion that he committed murder?”

  “Mademoiselle, I am not jumping to any conclusion. Far from it. What I am doing is considering all possibilities. One man is dead. Another is missing. Objects from the workshop appear to have been taken. Whether they have been stolen or not isn’t clear. We don’t yet know anything, but let me assure you, I intend to find out everything.”

  Eighteen

  After the detective left, Jac sat down at her brother’s desk and began to look systematically though his papers. What else was there to do? She had to try to find out what Robbie had been doing. Whom he’d been seeing. What he’d gotten involved with. The police had probably gone through his things already, but maybe there was a clue to what had happened that they wouldn’t have recognized.

  Her brother had to be all right. He had to be somewhere near.

  The phone rang. She jumped. Stared at it as if it were a creature, coiled and waiting to spring. It rang again. There was an answering machine. And Marcher had told her his team was monitoring all calls. She didn’t need to answer. Except what if it was Robbie? What if he’d been hurt or injured, had been staying with a friend and was finally well enough to call?

  “Bonjour?”

  There was no reply.

  “Robbie?”

  A breath. Then a beat of silence. Then a click. Damn. She never should have said his name. What if he had been reaching out to her? What if he was in trouble and calling for help? He might not want the police to know about it. Might have assumed they’d be listening. Once she’d identified him, he couldn’t have answered even if he’d been desperate to.

  No, that was crazy thinking. Robbie didn’t even know she was here in Paris. Whoever had called was expecting to get Robbie, heard her, was confused, and hung up.

  She stared at the phone, willing it to ring again. For whoever had called to call back. Silence mocked her magical thinking.

  Turning her attention back to her task, Jac opened the desk’s top drawer and was rifling through its contents when a gust of wind blew in through the opened garden doors. Bills, envelopes, letters and notes flew around the room.

  After shutting the doors, Jac set to picking up the new mess. Some of the papers had wedged in between the bottles on the perfumer’s organ. She stood on the opposite side of the room from the self-contained antique laboratory and stared at it. Not quite ready to go near it.

  When she was a child, the organ was off-limits to her and her brother; the precious essences stored there were too expensive. Forbidden, the organ took on larger-than-life proportions. It was wizardry. And temptation.

  Sometimes she would sit far across the room and watch the light play on the small glass bottles. The reflections danced on the walls and ceiling—even on her arms when she held them out. Beautiful for the moment. Until the clouds moved and the organ settled back into shadows. A phantom in the corner of the room. The monster of scent. Giving up ugly and strange and beautiful and powerful smells.

  Some of the oils were now so old that Jac doubted her brother could even use them. Some must be nothing but sediment. Others, she knew, were so rare that once he finished them, he could replace them only with synthetics.

  The perfume industry was changing. Only the talent required to create a truly worthy perfume was the same. Melding dozens of individual notes into a truly sensuous, memorable bouquet would always require a sorcerer of scent.

  Going back over two hundred years, her ancestors had sat there mixing up elixirs from the ingredients in these antique bottles. Now they stood, hundreds of glass tombstones in an alchemical museum, waiting for their wizard to come give them life. Could Robbie be that magician?

  She was too old to be afraid anymore. Jac crossed the room and sat down at the organ. The essences here were no different from the ones any perfumer used. But no matter how many labs she’d been in, none smelled the way this room did. She breathed it in: the perfume she hadn’t smelled since her mother had died. Jac folded her arms on the wooden shelf. Rested her head. Shut her eyes.

  As a child, Robbie had named it the Fragrance of Comfort. As an adult, he’d tried to recreate it. She said he was crazy and argued that it was anything but comforting. Dark and provocative, it was, for her, the perfume of time long gone. Of regret. Of longing. Maybe even of madness.

  It was no surprise that the smell was more
intense now that she was on top of it. Overwhelming. Intoxicating.

  A headiness that was almost euphoric filled her and threw her off balance. Grabbing the edge of the organ, she held on as the swell took her. With her eyes closed, she saw a blaze of orange-blue light. Then a swath of opalescent darkness. Then a verdant, marshy, churning green.

  The kaleidoscope of images swirled, fracturing before she could identify them. Each thread of scent had a color, and she saw them mingling; saw the chemical bonds forming, sending olfactory shivers up and down her spine. It was more than an aroma or an odor. Much more. The scent was a drug of dreams. A vivid magic carpet ride. Suddenly she was sailing over icy mountains of clouds and oceans of forests, lush and beautiful beyond her dreams. Seeing fragments of faces; eyes that spoke to her, lips that watched her.

  The images came faster now, breaking apart over her, spilling like mosaics at her feet. Turquoise and lapis lazuli. Gold. Silver. The scents whispered to her. Teasing her. Then a damp cold enveloped her, locking her inside a prison of emotion: heartbreak, sadness, relief. Still spinning, she held on and forced the procession of pictures in her head to slow down so she could see them. All unfamiliar, places she’d never seen, never visited. A riverbank, a stone enclosure, a courtyard with palms. Sound, too. Birds. So many birds. A woman crying. A man whispering comforting words to her there by the river. Fragments of language. French? No, not French. And a million smells. Some familiar, some as foreign as the language the man and the woman were speaking. He was dark skinned, wearing a wrapper around his waist. At first Jac couldn’t see the woman.

  Then she realized: she was the woman. Her thighs were covered with a thin linen robe; her feet encased in jeweled sandals. The man was somehow familiar. Not his face, but his smell. It was spiced, exotic amber that wrapped around her and drew her in. Close. Warm. Wanted. Whole. Finally. She belonged here. With him.

  Then the fear hit. A wrenching fear of impending separation. What was wrong? What was happening?

  Jac tried to open her eyes but couldn’t. And then she was spinning again. The man and the woman were gone. The river was gone. There was no perfume at all. Dark night sky breaking into slivers of glass. Shattering.

  And then she was in a new place.

  The air was heavy with burning incense. The terror was gone. Here, inside the church, with her parents and her sister, here she was safe. Here, only peace.

  Nineteen

  PARIS, FRANCE, 1789

  Saint-Germain-des-Prés, with its gilded copper and gold mosaic basilica and marble columns, was the oldest church in Paris and the one place where Marie-Genevieve Moreau always felt at peace. But today she felt as restless as her little sister, who was playing with the hem of her dress even though their mother had twice pulled the child’s hands away.

  The site of the church had been a temple to the Egyptian goddess Isis hundreds of years earlier, and that was one of the reasons she looked forward to coming here. Not because she felt closer to God here, but to Giles. And when the priest swung the shining silver censer and she breathed in the dense smell of the incense, she felt her lover’s presence even more palpably.

  Giles L’Etoile had left for Egypt a year ago. His father and brothers had been excited about the youngest son exploring ancient perfuming methods and materials perhaps unknown to them. Egypt’s history was full of perfume secrets: the timeless methods of extracting the essences of scent from flowers and woods; the processes of expression, enfleurage, maceration and stream distillation from the land that had invented many of them. If Egyptian processes and techniques were superior, then L’Etoile Parfums would have an edge over the competition. And there was much competition in Paris in the last decade of the century.

  Only Marie-Genevieve had been afraid for Giles.

  She didn’t remember a time when she hadn’t known him or loved him. Her father, a tanner, supplied the elder L’Etoile with the leather he needed to make the fine scented gloves he sold in his store. The two children had been inseparable since childhood—almost, Marie-Genevieve’s mother used to say, as if one was the right glove and one was the left.

  There had never been any question they would marry. Marie-Genevieve had thought that would happen when she turned eighteen, but Giles had decided to take the trip to Egypt first. He wanted to see something of the world beyond the street that he’d been born on, he told her. The comment stung, though she knew he hadn’t meant to be cruel. She just couldn’t imagine that there was anything beyond this street—and particularly his arms and his warmth and the smell of his neck where his soft brown hair met his skin—worth leaving for.

  “I’m scared,” she’d finally admitted in a whisper the night before he set off.

  He laughed. “You think I’m going to meet some exotic Egyptian princess who will keep me there?”

  “No . . .”

  “Then what?”

  She didn’t want to tell him about the terrible dream she’d been having over and over.

  Giles down deep in a tomb when a sandstorm struck. In agonizing slow motion, she saw the grit whorl around him, getting in his eyes, his mouth, filling up his throat, and finally suffocating him.

  “What is it, Marie?”

  “I’m afraid you’re not going to come home.”

  “But how can that be? What could make me stay there with you waiting for me here?” He kissed her in the secret way they had. They were careful. She was a smart girl and scared of having a baby too soon. Not for any of the religious reasons, not because it was a sin, but because she didn’t want to share Giles yet.

  Now she knelt at the altar, pressed her hands together and lifted her face up to the crucifix of the savior Jesus Christ and waited patiently for the priest to give her the body and blood of He who had risen. She closed her eyes and imagined Giles there naked before her, not Jesus. Imagined that it was her lover’s body and blood that were going to be given to her. And then she felt the familiar hysteria rising in her.

  Why did she imagine such blasphemous things? Yes, the incense always reminded her of Giles, but to imagine that the priest was holding wafers made of Giles’s flesh and offering a gold cup that held his blood?

  She went to confession and tried to admit these travesties but never managed—she was always too embarrassed to speak of them. Instead she’d tell the priest about her other failings.

  “I worry so much about Giles that I make a mess of my embroidery, and then Maman gets upset and yells at me because she can’t sell it if it’s not perfect.”

  “You have to trust in the Virgin Mary,” the priest would intone through the iron grill. “And when you feel the fears coming upon you, you must pray, Marie-Genevieve. Pray with all your heart.”

  And that’s what Marie-Genevieve was doing while she waited patiently for her portion of the holy host. Behind her, as the parishioners who had already received communion returned to their seats, she heard their feet scraping against the stone floor, the rustle of their dresses, the clinking of their rosaries, the soft murmur of their prayers all filling the church with a familiar sound: the sound of faith. Faith that she tried so hard to have.

  “Mon Dieu, non, non, mon Dieu!” A woman’s cry that was rough and raw, that had escaped rather than been uttered. Extraordinary in the church during a service.

  Marie-Genevieve looked to see what was wrong, turning her back on the priest as he approached.

  Giles’s mother was standing in the aisle next to Jean-Louis L’Etoile, who was holding up his wife. Marie-Genevieve focused on his horrified face. His expression that said all the things his wife’s voice had suggested. It was as if he were suddenly one of the stone statues in the side chapels, not Giles’s father any longer.

  Beside them was a bedraggled man, in dirty, worn clothes, who looked like he had not slept or washed for days. Had he brought this bad news? From far away? How far? From weeks at sea? From Egypt?

  Marie-Genevieve tried to run toward them, but her mother held her back.

  “No. You
must wait until they come to us.”

  But Marie-Genevieve didn’t care about convention. She pulled out of her mother’s grasp and ran toward Giles’s parents just as his brothers joined the group.

  The priest had stopped the mass.

  The church was silent.

  Everyone was watching.

  As if his wife were a rag doll, Jean-Louis L’Etoile handed her over to his eldest son and went to Marie-Genevieve. When he took her hands, his were freezing cold, and she pulled back. From his touch, she knew she didn’t want to hear what he had to say. Maybe if she didn’t hear it, it wouldn’t be true. Maybe if she never heard the words, she could go on waiting for Giles to come home, go on being his betrothed, go on living on the memory of what he had looked like, and smelled like, and how gentle he had been with her and how the two of them were like the two hands of one pair of fine French gloves.

  “It’s our Giles . . .” Jean-Louis began in a broken voice.

  And she felt her legs give way beneath her.

  Twenty

  PARIS, FRANCE

  WEDNESDAY, MAY 25, 10:00 A.M.

  “Dead?” Valentine repeated, staring at William in disbelief. He’d said more than that, but she wasn’t sure she’d heard anything else. “François can’t be dead.” As sometimes happened, she’d slipped out of French and into the Chinese dialect her mother had used with her when she was a child.

  “But he is,” William said. Even though it was a warm morning, he was shivering. His arms were crossed over his chest, hugging himself. “My contact emailed me a copy of the police report. And the death certificate.”

  “It’s a mistake. Someone else’s.”