The Perfume Thief

by Timothy Schaffert

  But it’s my attire that comes into question. When she finally looks up, she tilts her head. Lifts an eyebrow. “I figured the tuxedo of the other night was…a costume,” she says.

  I start to cross my legs, ladylike, but then I don’t. But then I do. I’m wearing a pair of my favorite trousers—a heavy Harris Tweed, checked, emerald green. They’re actually meant for hunting, and not to be worn indoors because of their scorched-earth smell—the farm that weaves the tweed also burns peat, to roast barley for whiskey. But the smoky scent is just another reason they’re my favorite. And they’re my very warmest. Made even warmer by the smell.

  “Day told me you know everything about me,” I say.

  She nods. She then tips her head toward my necktie. “Charvet,” she says. Charvet is the chemisier in the place Vendôme where I have my shirts made. I buy ties there too. This one is plum-colored with gold thread stitched through for shimmer.

  I tug on the end of it. Flutter it. “It’s old,” I say. We’re always apologizing these days for any gesture of ostentation.

  Ich entschuldige mich vielmals.

  I apologize many times.

  Zoé isn’t really listening. “How can I know if you will?” she says.

  “How can you know if I will?” I say, perplexed.

  “How can I know if you’ll keep my secrets?”

  “I guess you have no way of knowing,” I say. But I have no idea what we’re talking about. Perfume? I assume this is simply how a woman of mystery speaks: she has to cast all her idle chitchat in riddle and tease. I hold out the vial of bluebell, but she ignores it.

  “Tell me about the young man you were with,” she says. “At the cabaret.” Young man, she says, like an old woman. He can’t be much younger than she is.

  “He lives in my attic.” I pick up the glass and take a sip of the wine after all. It’s a risk, I suppose, telling this to a Nazi’s lover. But I follow those old instincts of mine. She wants to trust me. I realize that’s why I’ve let Day lead me into this house and around all its sharp corners, up its twisting staircases, dodging the shadows of Nazis. I’m not here for the naked ladies, as lovely as they are. I’m here in case there’s something I can help with. And if there’s something I can help with, maybe Zoé can help keep Blue and Day safe. She can help me keep them close.

  I say, “How can they bear to send these boys to their deaths?”

  Zoé drops her hands into her lap. She nods, her eyes wide, as if she’s relieved to hear my concern.

  “Men stir up wars because they’re too stupid to realize they’ll lose them,” she says. She looks even younger here, younger than in the cabaret. When she sings, she sounds older. When she speaks now, her voice is almost girlish. “They know they might lose, but ‘might’ seems like something that’ll happen to somebody else.” She nods toward my open palm, the vial of bluebell. “You know all about perfume,” she says.

  I hold out the bluebell again. I lift the stopper. She leans forward to put her hand around mine, to pull the perfume closer. “You’re the Perfume Thief,” she says. “Before, when I said I knew all about you…that’s what I know. I know of your…” And here she stops. Looks off in thought. She stands to walk to a credenza along the wall, the top of it lined with liquor bottles, highball glasses, cigar boxes. “Your peculiar crimes.”

  I get a jolt of headache in my temple, the kind of headache that troubles my sight, a play of light and shadow. At the corner of my eye, butterflies flutter and snap their wings, shifting their colors. I close my eyes and they fade away, but when I look around the room, I suddenly notice butterflies I didn’t see before. They’re in the stained glass of a lampshade. There are a few among the figs in the pattern of Zoé’s robe.

  Butterflies tend to make me nervous, evoking a touch of phobia. They can be a harbinger.

  “I’ve been rehabilitated,” I say.

  “Oh yeah, I know all about your sainthood,” she says, sharp, like a gun moll in a gangster flick. “Day says you don’t use any dead or tortured animals in your perfumes. Your heart breaks for the musk deer. And the civet cats.” On the credenza is a novelty box, an alligator made of wood—she pushes down on his tail, his jaw unhinges, and he leans forward to snag a cigarette with his teeth. She takes the cigarette, lights up, then taps the gator’s head. “And crocodiles,” Zoé says, smoke lifting from her lips.

  “Crocodiles?” I say.

  “Cleopatra wrote a beauty book,” Zoé says. “One of her recipes called for crocodile musk.”

  “There’s no such book,” I say. “It’s a myth.” I shouldn’t have said anything so know-it-all, but I’ve spent years disabusing collectors of the notion they could own Cleopatra’s book of perfumes.

  I’m one of only a few thieves in all the world who specializes in such artifacts. In my early days, I had to pinch anything within reach worth a nickel, but when I got older, I narrowed my sights. At my peak, I catered to a clientele of perfume fetishists and obsessives. Men who had everything. Ladies who wouldn’t take no for an answer. For the rich, the whole world is an open market. What you can’t buy, you pay someone to steal. I’ve peddled hot goods in the backseats of limousines, my face hidden by a veil of lace roses. I’ve pilfered tulip bulbs and rare orchids, smuggled spices from foreign marketplaces in the drapery of a silk robe. For years, I was the woman you went to when you wanted to spend a fortune on ether and bubbles.

  Or the scent of butterflies.

  The record has stopped, so Zoé returns to the phonograph. She moves the needle back to the front of the grooves, and the same song plays again. She sits again in the chair across from me. “I need your help,” she says.

  “If this is about Cleopatra’s book,” I say, “I promise you, it’s nowhere. I could have bought and sold it twenty times over by now. I’d have a mansion.”

  “You do have a mansion,” she says. “That adorable building on the rue de Vaugirard.” She wants me to know, I suppose, that she knows where I live. She takes a deep breath and sighs with boredom. Or frustration. She flicks her ash into the glass of wine the chambermaid left for her. “I’m not looking for Cleopatra’s book. I have it already. Or, rather, my family does.” I don’t even respond to that. But Zoé goes on. “But it’s not really a book, so much. A scroll, I guess.”

  I don’t have the heart to tell her she owns a forgery. It doesn’t surprise me that someone might deal in such fraud, the demand being what it is. I could have made a mint flooding the market with Cleopatra’s beauty secrets. There are plenty of rogue Egyptologists, college professors needing money to fund another plundering of a mummy pit. You pay them to help you fake the thing, then you pay them again to authenticate it. It’s all for the underground, so there are no reputations at stake. And, to be honest, if you can convince a client just a little bit, he’ll convince himself the rest of the way. He wants so much to believe. Faith. It’s vital in both thievery and perfume.

  But I can’t help myself. I’m about to question Zoé about her scroll when she shuts me up by lifting her wrist to my nose for a sniff. And, dear God, there she is. Cleopatra. I can’t place all the elements of the perfume, but I can practically hear the slither of an asp in it. I still don’t believe it, but I respect it as a brilliant sham. I even feel a sting of professional jealousy.

  “Cardamom?” I say.

  “Cardamom,” Zoé confirms. “Sweet rush. Wine. Myrrh. Some other things.”

  She then invites me to leave. She must get ready for her show, she says, though I know her show is still hours off. “You’ll come back tomorrow,” she says.

  7

  Day sleeps late because she works late, so I wait until nearly noon before going to the Café Roche, where she lives upstairs, one floor up. She knows more than she’s telling me about Zoé St. Angel. So I’m going to twist her pretty little neck until she sings like a bird.

  I call her name
up the back stairs. I knock at the wall. I sing the chorus of her own song. Where were you when, I sing, off-key. I looked for you then. Nothing. I call up to her like I’m calling her to the stage—“Mesdames et messieurs, Day Shabillée!,” throwing my arms out. But all I get back is my own echo.

  She adopted her stage name years ago, inspired by a French word we’d had in America too: déshabillée, a state of undress. It tickled her. It seemed like the name of a fan dancer in a burlesque revue.

  “I gave her something wicked to knock her out cold,” Madame Roche tells me when I take my usual table in the café, right beneath a towering mirror so old, so desilvered and foggy, it barely reflects at all. In that mirror, we’re all as faint as ghosts. “Some dust in an envelope to stir into a glass of wine.” The old woman produces just such an envelope from her apron pocket. “You’ll sleep like I smothered you with a pillow.”

  “Just the coffee, please,” I say. “And milk.”

  I’m all alone in the café, cold and miserable, still wet from the wind and gusts of snow. Madame Roche brings a cup of coffee that’s all chicory and tastes like twigs, with a little pot of hot milk that’s mostly steam. Her cupboards are bare, and on the chalkboard, where the menu goes, she’s chalked what she doesn’t have: 900 pigs at market this morning; 600 sent to Germany, is written in the jumpy scrawl of her angry, arthritic hand. She fills the board with her screed. I’ll go to jail if I cook a rabbit, she writes. And she lists what the Germans eat at Maxim’s, one of the city’s finest restaurants, which they’ve taken for themselves: langoustes, canard à l’orange, grenouilles sautées provençale.

  Even the menu makes me nervous, though she can easily erase it with a rag. Everywhere you look, there’s another ugly truth. Each day that passes, we feel even further from the Paris we knew. We should be more pained by all the injustice, but it still seems impossible. Unbelievable. How could it be as bad as it seems?

  The café too is only all echo, but echoes from before the war. I don’t even know the place anymore, without Madame Roche shouting orders back to the kitchen, and customers shouting back at her to correct her when they hear her shouting their orders wrong. Whenever she was behind the bar herself, she made every mixed cocktail sound like industry, hammering at ice, clanking a spoon in a glass pitcher. Her espresso machine wheezed and clanked, hissed and whistled.

  Now, the place empty, she sits at the bar with a pen and a ledger book, calculating her losses again and again, desperate to find a mistake in her math.

  I keep my topcoat on. I pull my wool beret down, tight over the top of my head. I sit near a cylindrical stove of dented metal, a warming oven Madame Roche rolled out. I can barely feel its weak waves of heat, but I set my cup on it to keep my coffee halfway warm.

  While I’m twisting Day’s neck, I’ll twist Blue’s too. He’s to meet me here. He’s been out all night. He rang late in the evening to tell me he was working with his new lover—his new old lover—a playwright and director twice Blue’s age. This man has cast Blue in a play, and Blue’s helping him with research, collecting books from the library, for set and costume details. The Nazis approve only productions of historical plays. They want to prevent commentary and criticism, I suppose, as if history were only ever about the past.

  I want Blue to find love, but true love, with someone his own age, someone to grow old beside.

  Blue finally arrives in a wine-colored coat I’ve never seen before. And when he leans in to kiss my cheek, I smell a soap I’ve never smelled on him, a shaving soap, menthol and eucalyptus. His neck and head are wrapped up in three woolen scarves, and before he’s even unraveled himself, Madame Roche has brought him his cup of chocolate.

  “He didn’t feed me,” he says, dramatically tossing his scarves across a chair at the next table. “Don’t you hate him?” He salts his hot chocolate with extra sugar to tap away at his hangover. His voice is a low, wet rumble from too much liquor guzzled too late.

  “I hate you,” I say. “I’ve been waiting all night and all morning to tell you that I met Zoé St. Angel.” I hold my finger to my lips. Shhh. “It’s a secret.”

  He’s so giddy, I forgive him for falling in love with the wrong people. He grabs my hand and kisses my fingers. “Tell me [kiss], tell me [kiss], tell me [kiss].”

  “I can’t say anything,” I say, to tantalize. I don’t have much of anything to tell, but even a little bit of nothing is still something.

  I do, though, tell him about the bluebell perfume, about Zoé and me keeping our voices low beneath the jazz, about the patterns busy in her silk. I tell him she told me to come back tonight.

  Day finally arrives, carrying bruised fruit in the sling of an Hermès scarf. And a loaf of papery bread. The cook in the bordello kitchen often sends her home with food that’s about to turn. She’s in a bathrobe and sunglasses, the lenses literally rose-tinted.

  “Find me a husband,” Day says.

  “What do you want a husband for?” I say.

  “I don’t want a husband,” she says. “Nobody ever wants a husband. I want someone’s money to take.”

  “Then it’s settled,” I say. “You’ll marry me. And you’ll rob me blind.”

  “I love you too much to marry you,” she says. “I’d make the very worst wife.”

  “At least come live with us,” I say. “There’s plenty of room.” I’ve extended this invitation many times.

  “I love that idea,” Blue says, taking a bite of a half-rotten apple.

  “But I can’t leave my apartment,” she says. “All my wigs are here.” She’s wigless now, a chiffon scarf tied around her head and silver-clipped to a few of her curls.

  She’s forever getting evicted from one place or another and tumbling back to Madame Roche’s rickety upstairs apartment. Remind me to fire my accountant…That’s her standard line whenever she blows back into the café flat broke, laden with all her candy-striped wig boxes, her every fur coat and fox stole draped over her shoulders.

  And to be honest, I think she likes living above Madame Roche’s. Whenever someone strikes up a tune on the piano, which most often sits silent in the corner, she can’t resist. She never learned to play, so whenever anyone does, she’s happy to wander down and sing along, no matter the hour. Before the war, when business was brisk, she could pass around the hat for tips, then pay her rent to Madame Roche by simply tipping the hat into her lap.

  The bread she brought is so stale, Blue has to gnaw on the crust before he can tear off a chunk with his teeth. Watching him eat makes him seem even thinner. He’s wasting away before my eyes with every bite he takes.

  “We’ve gone hungry before,” Blue says when he sees me staring. He’s struggling to chew the tough bread. But he’s talking about history. His we’ve is everyone who’s ever lived.

  The Germans took siege of Paris in 1870, Blue tells us, during a winter just as brutal as this one. He cites his library books. “The butchers caught rats and cats to cut up,” he says. “The better restaurants cooked the zoo animals. Elephant filet. Camel chops.”

  “We must eat the wolves before the wolves eat us,” I say.

  Madame Roche brings Day a bottle of Coca-Cola and a glass. During the Great War, or the War Before as we’ve come to call it, Madame Roche worked in the melt-pot room of a munitions factory, in a lazy haze of dynamite dust that eventually struck her blind in one eye, which she now covers with a patch. I’m thinking again of Day’s outlawed eyelash dye, so when Madame Roche leaves us, I whisper to Day, to nag, “You don’t want to end up with an eye patch, do you? From dying your lashes?”

  “Nothing’s been able to blind me yet,” she says, as if this is useful logic. She takes a sip of her Coke, straight from the bottle. She says, “Aren’t you going to tell me about it? About Zoé?”

  “I was about to ask you the same thing,” I say. “Aren’t you going to tell me about it?”

/>   Day takes off her sunglasses. “It’s not my story to tell,” she says, but sweetly, her tone apologetic. “She’ll tell you what she tells you when she tells you. She’s got to go about things her own way.” Day means, I presume, Zoé’s intention of having me over for a few minutes every night this week. The plan: I’m simply there to bring Zoé bottles of perfume, to establish my visits as an indulgence. A luxury. Her own personal perfumer. I’m to overwhelm her apartment with my fragrances, to stir up a cloud of innocence.

  Blue says, “I can tell you anything you want to know about Zoé St. Angel. I’ve read every word written about her.”

  There are rumors of a camp in Alsace, I want to tell him once again. I want to worry Blue, just a touch. I want him to be careful. To keep low. What does he really know about the play he’s in, and its troupe of actors? This government that’s growing is applying new laws to old offenses, scrutinizing records of arrest and arresting again those who served too little time. Be careful who you mix with.

  I’ve seen it before. Anything done to free our kind can be undone in an instant. We needn’t get too comfortable, whoever we are, thinking the Germans are holding grudges only against the Jews. Just because it’s all too grim to imagine doesn’t mean we should look on the bright side. Optimism is just a basket of live bees, M, that lover of mine of long ago, used to say. And, just like stirring up a nest, he keeps coming to mind now that I’ve started thinking about him again. I hear his voice, plain as day.

  “Zoé was eighteen,” Blue says, “when she first sang at the Casino de Paris. She sang sad songs about singing sad songs in dance halls. She sang about running away from home.” She sang about dancing the tango-musette on the rue de Lappe, one of those narrow little lanes on its last legs. She sang about derelict lovers with gambling debts. “She insists all the songs are true,” he says. “She had a hard life.”