Earlier, Day told me that she plays along to play against. I sing them their songs and I sit in their laps and I pour them their drinks. And someday soon, I’ll slip under their skin. They confide in her. She teases out their anxieties. They’re terrified of getting shipped off to some grisly battle, Day told me. They’re all scrambling to build empires in Paris, to dig in their heels, to be indispensable.
Zoé, frustrated, rolls her eyes. She fans at the cigar smoke as the men around her bellow and bark. She picks up the Punch and snuffs it out in the mostly empty candy dish. Suddenly, at her shoulder is a soldier holding open his silver cigarette case. She seems startled, worried that he has noticed her annoyance with Lutz. But she smiles at him, and she takes a cigarette from his case, and she accepts his light.
Madame Boulette brings me my coat, which I’d tossed in a corner chair. She’s holding it up for me, wanting me to leave. She says, “No women who don’t work here are let in past the cabaret at night,” she says.
It’s my coat that brings Lutz back to us.
“What kind of beast is that?” he says, giving me a manly slap on the back.
“It would be a gazelle,” I say, “if it were real. But it’s not. It’s synthetic gazelle.”
“Synthetic?”
Zoé tells me, “Lutz hates perfume but loves to smother me in fur.” She leans back into the sofa cushions, crosses her legs. She sticks the cigarette in the corner of her mouth, to free her hands, so she can count off her list of coats and capes, muttering through pursed lips like a cinema gangster. “Patagonian skunk. A squirrel choker. Cross fox. Marmot. Muskrat. Black rat. Polecat. My bedroom is positively crawwwwwwling with vermin.”
Lutz chuckles at her, then notices that his cigar’s been extinguished. He looks back and forth from Zoé to the dead cigar, his brow furrowed; he playfully thieves Zoé’s cigarette, taking it from her lips, then spinning it along his fingers, rolling it over his knuckles in a clumsy, college-boy sleight of hand. But he manages to keep from burning himself, and the cigarette ends up right-side-in at his lips. Even he seems surprised to still have the knack. “Where’d you get this from?” he says, pointing his thumb at the cigarette in his mouth. But the soldier with the silver case is long gone, and Zoé just waves her hand around, in the general direction of all the men in the room, as if to say, I can’t tell them apart.
They seem used to performing their intimacy for an audience. Though their flirtation appears genuine, it’s partly for my benefit. They act like lovers who are most in love when others are watching.
Lutz looks at me, sizing me up. The part in his hair is a work of art, and every blond wave is locked into place with pomade. The pomade will keep his hair from getting ruined when he puts his hat on but will ruin his hat sooner than later with all its oil and slick. “So why’s the fur fake?” he says. “France has some of the finest peltmongers in all the world.”
“It makes me uneasy,” I say. “Fur does.”
“Ah,” he says; he nods, but not because he’s agreeing with anything. He’s condescending to me. “What about leather?”
Zoé gives me that look of concern again.
“I don’t wear leather,” I say.
“And you never eat a steak?”
“Not so much these days,” I say. “There’s a famine going around, if you haven’t heard.” He keeps his eyes on mine. “But I do eat meat when I can, to keep alive, mostly.”
“But, now, these perfumes of yours,” he says. “Nothing dead in any of your scents? No remnant of a carcass? Suet? Musk?”
“No,” I say. “None of the fixatives I use come from animals. Except sometimes a bit of ambergris so long as I know it wasn’t scraped out of a whale’s gut.”
“So you know your way around a bottle of perfume,” Lutz says.
Zoé says, “That’s what I’ve been telling you.”
“That stench you’ve been leaving behind on Zoé,” he says to me. “Those are your own designs?”
“Tell him about Escroquerie,” Zoé says, but I’m not sure what she has in mind. In my hesitation, she says, “Clementine worked on that scent. For the Parfumerie Chamberry.”
“You worked with Pascal?” Lutz says.
“I…I contributed,” I say.
“On just the one perfume?”
I try to look Zoé’s way without letting Lutz see my eyes shift. Where, exactly, does she mean to lead me with this? “On others too,” I lie.
“You don’t have to keep any company secrets,” he says. “Not anymore.”
I’m able to catch a glance at Zoé, who nods me on. “I did consult with Pascal,” I say. “We worked together…on various scents.”
“Don’t you think she should meet Oskar?” Zoé asks Lutz, stepping in a bit too soon, I fear.
He pauses. He keeps his eyes on mine, even as he speaks to Zoé. “I think you’re right,” he tells her. “She should meet Voss.” He looks over at Zoé, then back to me. “Oskar Voss is an associate of mine. He has a particular interest in the perfumes of Paris. Leave your card with Madame Boulette on the way out. I’ll make some arrangements.”
He takes the cigarette from his lips, and he makes to return it to Zoé with the same flourish he’d brought to its theft, spinning it along, but this time faster, more deftly. But it reaches her face hot end out, and she flinches, from the coal dangerously near her cheek. Even I start at the sight of it; my hand jerks forward, as if I might need to slap the cigarette from him, to keep it from burning her face. “Pardon me,” he says, righting the cigarette, his voice icy, no longer playful. “Who did you say gave this to you?”
“I didn’t say,” Zoé says. “I didn’t know.” She hesitantly reaches up for the cigarette to take it from him, but he won’t relinquish it. He brings his hand, and the cigarette, to his chest.
“Point him out,” he says, pointing the cigarette toward the roomful of men.
“I don’t see him,” she says without looking around, her eyes not leaving his.
“What’d he look like?”
She pauses. “A Nazi,” she says. She leans forward to pluck the cigarette from his fingers. As she brings it to her lips, Lutz snatches it from her, making her flinch again. He grinds it out in the glass dish with a sharp twist of his wrist. I pull my coat on over my shoulders, and I nod toward Lutz and Zoé. “Good night,” I say, but they’re still eyeing each other, viper-like.
12
I’m chauffeured back to my shop in the backseat of a black car, my driver tight-lipped. Somehow Lutz had arranged for the car and driver without even leaving Zoé’s side in the gentleman’s lounge.
I’ve never seen Paris so still and so dark.
It begins to snow.
We stop in front of my building, and the driver, still without speaking, holds up with two fingers an envelope I’m to take. I put it in the pocket of my synthetic gazelle.
Though I’ve been escorted home in a Nazi car, I’m still skittish about turning on a lamp at this hour, for fear of some night patrolman appearing out of nowhere to knock on my door and slap me with a fine. To needle me with questions. I light a candle. My hands are still shaking from the bitter cold of the night air.
I start toward the stairs but stop when I hear snoring behind me. Blue fell asleep in the shop? I walk across the room and aim my candlelight toward the sound of the snuffling. The flicker of the flame shimmers on some of my perfume bottles strung across the top of the low table. They’ve been left open. I smell eucalyptus and plum. Juniper. Clove.
Blue is asleep on the settee where my customers sit to contemplate the fragrances I bring them on silver trays. His snores sound muffled, and I suspect he’s on his stomach. I lean forward, holding out the candle. I see his naked feet, then his naked legs. It’s almost as cold inside as it is out—I read that eleven people have died in Paris this winter, some of them frozen stiff in
their own beds. I take a few steps closer, and run the light up his leg, along his thigh, his naked hip. He’s a man in a painting I’m certain I’ve seen somewhere, some skinny-dipping farm boy, sunning himself by a river.
When I reach out to shake him awake, I become distracted by what appears to be a crisscrossing of scars on his shoulder. I assume it’s just how the light’s falling—I don’t know of any such wounds on the boy’s skin. I lean in closer. Oh yes, those are scars, and they’re deliberate, like from a knife fight. As I lean in yet more, I bump my ankle against another ankle, and there’s a rustling. My light falls on Blue’s face, his mess of curls, his naked chest. He’s been asleep too, on the floor, and he sits bolt upright.
Two Blues, both stark naked. The man I’ve been eyeing on the sofa, Mr. Knife-fight, isn’t Blue at all. He’s blond and bearded, and he’s been startled awake too. He lifts himself up and looks back at me.
“Oh,” I say, stepping away. I blow out the candle, and we’re back in the dark. “I’m sorry,” I say. “I’m so sorry. Go back to sleep.” Blue says my name, but I don’t stop until I get to the staircase. I say, “Well, no, actually, don’t stay down here. Go to bed, where you can get under the covers. Or you’ll catch your death.”
“All I wanted to catch was a catnap,” says Knife-fight, and I hear them both shuffling themselves into their trousers, the clank of their belt buckles.
I worry I shouldn’t have said anything at all. Blue has never brought a man home, that I know of. Did I make things awkward for them? Is it one thing to be naked on a sofa, and another thing entirely to invite a man to your bed? I’ve complicated the already complicated bob-and-weave of romance.
Blue turns on a table lamp, then closes the heavy chintz drapes to keep the light inside.
“Where do you live?” I ask the bearded man as he ties the laces of his boots.
“Montmartre, madame,” he says.
“Well, you…you can’t go all the way to…not at this hour…”
He pulls on his raggedy coat as he walks up to me. He smiles. Takes my hand. Leans in to kiss my cheek. “I’ll be fine,” he says. “I’m very fleet-footed. Now you see me, now you don’t.” He smells of a spike lavender after-slap I sell in the shop as part of a shaving kit. It suits him. He goes to Blue, tousles his hair, whispers something in his ear, and he’s gone.
After closing the door, Blue, distracted, runs his hand through his hair himself. He gathers up his wild locks in his fist, pushes them up off his forehead. From the little telephone table he takes a binder clip from a stack of papers and somehow manages to clip his hair in place. I’ve often marveled at the architecture of his curls. The very drama of a simple clip.
His shirt is buttoned unevenly. He’s barefoot. He seems to look at me for a while before he actually sees me. “You’ve lost your little noose,” he says, his voice scratched with sleep.
“Hm?” I say.
He drums his fingers at his throat. “Your necktie.”
“Oh,” I say, bringing my own fingers to my own throat. I then bundle up tighter in my coat. “Aren’t you cold?” I say.
Blue sort of saunters, sort of half waltzes, into the shop, to where the rest of his costume, from his role in the play, is piled on the floor. “I’m not cold,” he says, though he plucks up the military jacket with a flourish, drapes it over his shoulders. “We had much, much, much too much to drink,” he says. He takes a bottle of whiskey from the cabinet where I keep liquor, and two glasses. Sometimes the people who visit my shop want colognes that suggest gin, red wine, absinthe. “But just one more sip,” he says, pouring us each far more than that.
I pick up his mask from the floor. The mask, made of copper and clay, covers one cheek, and part of his jaw, and his brow, with a half-moon for his left eye to see through. In the play, he’s a voiceless veteran of the War Before, one of those men, les mutilés de guerre, whose faces were wrecked by shrapnel, and who masked the damage with smooth and pristine cheek-and-jowls of plaster.
I hold it out to him after he hands me my drink, and he puts it to his face.
“Heartbreaking,” I say, tapping my finger on his glass jaw. “I can’t bear the idea of it.” He takes a sip. Clink, his glass against the plaster.
“Félix,” he says, “—that gentleman who just ran away is Félix—Félix told me he wouldn’t have looked at me twice if he hadn’t first seen me onstage in the mask.” He puts the mask aside. “He says I’m too pretty for his taste.”
“All of you boys want to fall in love with a thug,” I say. Men who love men seem so often to be seeking the affection of the boys who bullied them.
After the curtain drops for the night, the stage of Blue’s theater becomes a makeshift canteen for the lavender crowd. They prop open the alley door with a pink-beaded bedroom slipper from the wardrobe closet, and the ladies and men slink in with their own booze. They sit in the dim lick of candlelight, everyone barely there until you lean in close.
We need a place to lurk. The saloons for us, what few there were, have shut up tight, the Nazis having dragged along with them their laws against queer romance. Even Berlin, which had once upon a time known next to no restraint, has become a ghost of its former self, or so we hear.
“I thought the theater director was your…well, I thought the two of you…,” I say, then stop. “He wrote you into his play.” We sit side by side on the settee, in our coats, warming our bones with the whiskey.
“He is not mine, and I am not his,” he says, and I’m pleased to hear it. Félix looks to be Blue’s age, at least, unlike the director. But then Blue says, “I’m not with Félix either. They’re all just…erotic friendships.”
Erotic friendships. It sounds to my ear like something he’s heard from one of his corrupt, bewigged old widows who pay him to take them to the opera. Those biddies’ll give him jewelry to pawn in exchange for a peck on the cheek. But I like that he’s not in love. I’ll lose him soon enough. If there’s one thing I’ve learned from living forever, it’s that nothing lasts.
“How did you lose your tie?” he says.
“Zoé St. Angel’s Nazi,” I say. “He stripped me of it.” And that reminds me of the envelope the driver gave me, and I take it from my pocket. It’s an invitation to a fashion show at the Ritz, of a couturier I’ve never heard of. Stamped all along the border of the card are swastikas in gold foil. And someone has written across the back, We will see you there. Tomorrow night.
Blue looks over my shoulder at the card. “I don’t think I like the company you’re keeping.”
“Are you telling me to stop?” I say. “Am I getting myself into something I should be getting myself out of? I won’t go if you don’t want me to.” I’m not sure I even know what I want him to say. And I’m not sure I’d even do what he told me. But I like asking his permission. I’ve never asked anyone for their approval before I’ve stirred up trouble.
He seems surprised by the question too. He brings his whiskey to his lips and pauses, thinking. He leans forward to put the glass on the table, and to pick up a few of the perfume bottles scattered there. He untwists a stopper, holds the fragrance to his nose.
“Félix is a professional blood donor,” he says. “If his blood’s too thin, people in the hospitals in Paris can’t be saved. And more and more people are getting sick from the cold. Nearly freezing in the streets. All the donors are going on strike for more rations. They need more sugar, more fat, if they’re going to bleed for the whole city.” He puts down the perfume and takes another drink. “The poor bastard’s opening up his veins. What are we doing?”
Before I can think of a good reason we’re not bleeding ourselves dry, Blue slaps his hand onto my knee and squeezes tight. He’s got a bolt of energy. “You have to let me help you,” he says. And before I can insist that he can only help by not helping at all, he takes from his pocket a tiny pistol. He pulls the trigger, an
d a flame sparks up. “I lifted this from Félix’s pocket,” he says. “He’ll want it. So he’ll come back. And I’ll get to see him again.” This seems to be Blue’s evidence that he’s capable of my crimes.
I run my thumb over my ring finger, an old, old habit, from when I wore the ring M gave me many, many years ago. “You’re definitely up to my old tricks,” I say.
“The Nazis think we’re an infection,” Blue says, “so let’s infect. Let’s become an epidemic.”
Blue tells me more about Félix, how he’s an actor too but has only a bit part in the play Blue’s in. Félix does most of his acting in the streets, playing a scoundrel. Americans like to lick at the underbelly. So the tourist guides, back when we had tourists, would pay him to stumble around and look at them crooked. Or he’d try to sell the tourists cocaine, but it was only ever sugar.
Blue seems to slip deeper and deeper in love with every derelict story.
“It’s my fault you’re so susceptible to slick hooligans,” I say. “You came to Paris seeking a scholarship at a gentleman’s college, and I poisoned your brain with my moral decay.”
He nods, smiles, tilts his head with affection. He puts his glass to mine, and we clink them together in agreement.
13
At Zoé’s the next afternoon, all the drapes have been drawn, and the lamps are dim. I walk past vases and baskets, roses of all colors, lilies, irises, and tulips, whole hothouses plundered. I glance at a card on a stick poking up from amaryllis—apologies in both French and German: Je suis désolé. Ich entschuldige mich vielmals.
There are dresses too, draped over chair backs. There are fat boxes of new hats and thin boxes of new gloves. Tins of chocolate. The room is cluttered with apology. I apologize many times.
The Perfume Thief Page 7