I sit on an ottoman that’s been pushed up next to the sofa where Zoé lies back, her face draped with a light chiffon scarf. Veiled, like a woman in mourning. She hands me the pamphlet she’s holding. Perfume therapy, it says in English, for nightmare victims. I tip the page toward a thin ray of lamplight, to read. The treatment aims to banish not only nightmares but also something called depression insomnia.
I study the pamphlet’s instructions. It calls for an eyedropper and calming fragrances. Eucalyptus, rosemary, worn leather. I have all of these. As I sort through my satchel, I ask her about the fashion show I’ve been invited to. It begins in a few hours.
“I have questions,” I say.
She says nothing.
I say, “I just don’t know…well…tell me…who am I?”
“Who are you?” she says.
“Who am I pretending to be?” I say. “They think I’m an associate of Monsieur Pascal’s. How much do I know about his business?”
She sighs, her breath billowing the scarf. “You best not know too much, I suppose.” Her voice is throaty, scratched up, like she has a cold or she’s been crying.
“Why not?”
“Well,” she says, “you don’t want them putting screws to your thumbs. For information. That you don’t even have. Do you?”
Why is she acting as if I’m alone in this, embroiled in my own personal turmoil? “Do you know something I don’t?” I say.
“I know nothing,” she says. “Less than nothing.” She says this softly, and gently, and I believe her. Then she says, “What am I paying you?”
“Are you paying me?”
“You’re a crook for hire,” she says. “You’ll need to be paid. I need you committed to me.”
How is it that I’m insulted by this?
I can’t see her eyes through the scarf. They might not even be open.
I begin with the therapy, squeezing the bulb of the eyedropper, dipping it into the perfume bottle. “I gave up crime years ago,” I say.
“Why?” she says.
“I got clumsy,” I say, to make her nervous, to punish her for insulting me. It is true, though. I got clumsy. “Now shhh,” I say, holding the dropper over her scarf.
According to the pamphlet, this is the first step of her therapy—daydreaming out loud. Strolling through pleasant memories. As she talks, I pinch a droplet of perfume on the scarf, between her nose and her mouth. The scarf puffs up with her story, pulses with her breath. Music plays on the phonograph, an aria of some kind, though I don’t know much about opera. The idea is that she’ll describe the good things, while breathing in scent, while listening to music, and eventually she’ll describe the bad things. The nightmares. All the sentiments will get stirred around, and the nightmares will end up defanged. Or so the pamphlet says. The next time she has bad dreams, she’ll put on the record and hold the perfumed scarf to her nose.
“I’m with my father,” Zoé says. “He’s leading me through a field of roses on the Riviera. I’m not even a teenager yet, or maybe I am. He loved when I’d go to the farms with him.” Her blinking shivers the scarf. “Perfume is passed along from father to son. The business, I mean. The oldest perfumeries have been handed off, down, down, down, all along the line for generations. All in a whisper, practically, to keep it all close. My father had no sons. But he didn’t care, he said. I had to learn it all. I absolutely had to. But, the thing is, I wouldn’t. And I didn’t.”
And now it’s been taken away.
I drip more perfume on the scarf. She breathes in deep, sucking in the silk. “They can’t take your father’s perfumes,” I say. These industries of fashion the Germans want aren’t industries at all. Every dress, every shoe, every handbag calls for buttons and embroidery and buckles, and they’re all made by different shops, different guilds. And it’s not enough to know who to go to for the buttons and buckles; you have to know how to get them to give them to you. You must romance these artisans and convince them that your dress deserves their buttons of pearl.
You would never throw away a dress whole, even if it’s worn out or ruined. You’d go at it like a buzzard, picking off all the pieces of it. Collecting ingredients is part of the art of perfumery too. All twisted in among scents and spices, among smoke and color, is religion and medicine and money. Longevity. Eternal life. The search for spice launched ships even when the explorers thought they might sail off the flat edge of the ocean.
Zoé’s breath slows, the silk growing still. She pinches at the scarf to lift it away from her mouth, to speak. Her voice is growing faint. She’s losing it a little more with every word. “All I know is that Oskar Voss is in my house. And if he finds the diary, and he reads it…then he’ll be able to put together who I am. He’ll know I’m Pascal’s daughter. And he’ll use that against Lutz. That I’m Jewish. I might be a captive here, but in my little glass house, there’s an ounce of hope. As long as Lutz thinks I love him, all I have to do is…” Her voice catches. “Warble in my cage.”
We return to our therapy. I put on a different record, and choose a different perfume. “He promised me butterflies,” she says, “my father did, to get me to go with him, because I always get bored on the farms. And I always complained about getting bit raw by bugs. So I bring a little net with me. And I have a book on the butterflies of the Riviera. I’ve circled the ones with my favorite names. Camilla. Cleodoxa. Medusa.”
I don’t stop her from talking about the butterflies, and I decide to be relieved. They’re not just fluttering in from my deep past, to taunt and terrify. She has butterflies of her own. From her days on the farms.
I listen as she lists them in a sleepy voice: Icarus, Clytie, Simplonia, Dorilis.
14
At the Ritz Hotel in the early evening, I’m led to a private salon, where maids have set up a semicircle of chairs. The men move about with leisure, drinking champagne, but no one’s going anywhere near the long banquet table littered with all the critters of the forest—woodcock and pheasant, partridge and thrush, goose and snipe and wild boar, nearly every carcass dressed in ribbons of bacon or dripping with truffle sauce. There are baby octopi tentacles, suckers and all, in a glass bowl. The Nazis even have access to everything out of season: the strawberries of Plougastel, blue figs, red grapes on green stems. White asparagus, always the first glimpse of spring in France, sits here somehow on a plate in the dead of winter.
“Try not to look so hungry,” Day whispers in my ear, sidling up close. “The food’s only here to be ignored.”
“Disgusting,” I say. I look around. “I wonder if I can fit a few of these lobster claws up my sleeves, to take home to Blue.”
Day’s wearing a flapper’s jet-black bob, shiny, like the wig’s been waxed with brilliantine. And she’s wrapped up in a fur jacket.
“Whose hide is that?” I ask.
“Kangaroo,” Day says. “It was a gift.”
“You should give it back,” I say.
“To the kangaroo?” she says.
Day plucks a strawberry from a basket, then holds it to my lips. I bite it from the stem. I say, “I didn’t expect to see you here.” I lower my voice to a whisper. “You’re everywhere the enemy is anymore. It’s enough to make a person suspicious.”
“Shhh,” Day says, a shush she then muffles with a sip of her champagne. I turn to see Lutz approaching.
Lutz takes Day’s champagne away from her and hands her a different glass. “Don’t drink that,” he says. “This is better. Pol Roger, 1928.” He has a glass for me too.
Another man approaches, and Lutz introduces us both. Oskar Voss. I’ve been here less than fifteen minutes, and I’ve met the man I most need to meet.
“And you’re Day Shabillée,” Voss says. He leans toward her, lowers his voice. “I subscribe to a very secret newsletter, sent around by a colleague of mine. About American jazz in Paris. You�
��ve been in it.”
Does he mean to flatter her, or threaten her? I don’t like the sound of it. Just leave her to that little stage in the bordello cabaret, please. Don’t take so much interest.
Though I’m not much of a wine drinker these days, I know, with only a sip, tasting only with the tip of my tongue, they’ve been duped. The champagne’s more than a little off, a half bubble off plumb, in a way it wouldn’t be if it was the ’28. It’s so off, I wonder how someone so proud to pour it wouldn’t know the difference. I’ve heard that the Nazis have been robbing the vineyards, so the vineyards have been robbing them back, passing off the bottles from recent weak crops as vintage, slapping on dummy labels, rolling the bottles in dirt to give them some dust, even tossing spiders into the crates to spin some deceptive webs.
The wine tastes like a wet dog.
“She had that song,” Voss says to Lutz. “It was so popular, nobody could ever get away from it. My wife and I, we had the record, we had the sheet music. We even had the music roll for our pianola.” He raises his glass to Day. “Whatever happened to you?”
Day smiles, and she raises her glass too. “Your guess is as good as mine,” she says.
Voss then looks at me, and I’m about to say something when he begins to sing. He snaps his fingers, suddenly remembering a few lyrics of “Where Were You When.” He turns to Day. Where were you when I first sang this song? It’s my love-call to you, will you soon be along?
Lutz slaps Voss on the back. “You’re in fine voice,” he tells him, in a gesture that’s much overdone. Lutz is just sugaring Voss with sweet talk.
I’m about to take another shot at introducing myself when a gong strikes, calling us to the chairs for the fashion show. I fear I’ve lost my chance to weasel in close, but Voss turns to me as we walk through the salon. “And you’re le nez,” he says. “The nose of Paris.” He takes my arm. “You’ll sit with me.”
A seamstress with a pincushion on her wrist hands out folding fans to help us suffer through the heat of the room. The chairs are situated in a crescent moon, surrounding a doorway with a blue velvet curtain pinned with foil stars.
Voss is younger than me, I’d say, but not by all that much. Mid-sixties? His only wrinkles are at the corners of his eyes. He puts on a kind face, and he’s attentive, the sort of thing people fall for. “Won’t you tell me about your perfumes?” he says. “Lutz tells me you fashion your fragrances specific to the lady.”
“Or the gentleman,” I say.
“And that’s the way of things in America, as I understand it,” he says. “Every local druggist has his own brew…mixes together his own mishmash of…toilet vinegars.” I don’t think he means to condescend, despite the pause and the country twang he gives druggist and mishmash and toilet vinegars. I think he means to be charming. And he does indeed put on a good American accent.
“Maybe years ago,” I say. Just earlier today, I stood in a corner of the bookseller’s to skim Voss’s body of work: three guides to Paris, bound in violet-colored cloth, the titles in gold foil on the covers. His was a sensory tour, outlining the city’s flavors and aromas—the cafés, the patisseries. The fashion houses where the couturiers swamp their vents with perfume before every show in their narrow, musty salons.
“What are the best perfumes?” he asks me.
“New?” I say. “Old?” I’m tempted to rattle off any modern perfume that might sound treasonous: Indiscreet. Scandal. Shocking. My Sin. The French Touch. Nostalgia. Instead, I tell him my favorites of all time, some that have come and gone: Houbigant’s Violettes San Remo, Penhaligon’s Hammam Bouquet. I’ve always been fond of Guerlain’s Eau de Cologne Impériale, if for no other reason than the constellation of 18-karat gold bees that swarm up the glass bottle, upping the price with every inch. The perfume is quick, evasive, flitting away the second you catch its scent. It was designed to latch on to the royal headaches of Empress Eugénie and spirit them away.
“Not No. 5?” he says.
“I can only smell the touch of cruelty in it,” I say. “Chanel uses civet. From some brood of mongooses. Kept in tiny cages in Abyssinia. They don’t even have room to pace around. The farmers grab the mongoose by the tail and scrape up the oil from its ass.” Again, I regret saying anything at all. I’m probably insulting him. Mightn’t someone like Voss consider cruelty a virtue?
The curtains part, and the fashion show begins. All wartime fabric restrictions have been ignored for this show—not only ignored but flouted—the gowns saddled with more bustles and trains and overpuffed sleeves than I’ve seen since the turn of the century. Some of the fashions are inspired by the occupation, by the war. One gown suggests the ripples and billowing of a downed parachute, another a canvas tent, with its triangular shoulders. One model wears a khaki skirt-and-jacket set with a number of pockets, and pockets within pockets, for the management of official papers and passports.
The men chuckle at the sight of a scarf patterned with ration tickets. Another model wears a blouse printed with newspaper headlines from the Nazi invasion of Paris. The blouse gets a round of applause. I applaud too, at the wretched rags, so I’m not conspicuous.
I notice Zoé St. Angel among us, sitting across the way, next to Lutz. Voss notices me noticing her. He snaps open his fan with a sharp flick of his wrist, like an opera gossip, and leans over toward me. “Poor little Lutz loves too hard,” he says. “He lets that showgirl run roughshod over his heart.”
I straighten in my seat so I can peer over the fan’s paper-lace trim. Zoé’s wearing her hair so it falls forward over half her face. And a veil too. Lutz, in the chair next to her, is pouting. They seem in the thick of a tiff. I think I see a gray shadow beneath her eye. And is that a cut on her lip? I survey and analyze, and I see what I wouldn’t otherwise pay any mind to—the snag in her stocking, the loose thread at the seam of her blouse, the scuff at the toe of her shoe.
I say, “He should let her go then.” I worry that Voss can hear the tremor in my voice, the irritation.
Voss shrugs. He snaps shut the fan with another sharp, quick click. “He can’t live without her,” he says. He shrugs again. “That’s why all of that’s forbidden, you know.”
“What is?”
He returns the fan to his lips, and he opens it just an inch. Raises an eyebrow. “Canoodling with the ladies of the captured nations.” He returns the fan to his lap. “Isn’t he handsome, though? For a while he was an actor in the movies. Horror movies, in Germany. He got a corpse pregnant with a demon. But he wasn’t always the hero. Usually the victim. He was devoured by a pack of werewolves once. Got his blood sucked by a vampire. Rumor has it that his director was in love with him, so it thrilled him to kill Lutz in terrible ways.”
Voss laughs a laugh he keeps in his throat, like a mild cough, amused by this director’s infatuation. But I wonder where this director might be now. The homosexual camp in Alsace?
And why is Voss confiding in me? Would he be gossiping with anyone he sat beside?
The show has ended, and all the models return, to allow their gowns to be inspected. But Voss and I stay seated.
“But the sweetest perfume of all?” I say. “Mûrier Blanc.” I pick up where we left off, dropping the name of one of the most famous of the scents from Zoé’s family estate. The scent has been around longer than Pascal has; it was created by his father.
And Mûrier Blanc truly is one of my favorites. White mulberries. It speaks of southern France. It’s one of those scents worn by many, but it can still catch you off guard. It’s everybody’s and nobody’s all at once. At the heart of it is a lush honeysuckle, echoing the vine that creeps into every corner of your garden.
But the main reason I mention it is because Voss mentions it himself, in his published diaries of his walks through Paris.
Voss gasps at the mention of Mûrier Blanc. Clutches at his heart with melodrama. He stands.
“Come with me,” he says. He taps his finger on my champagne coupe. “We’re leaving this swill behind. It’s not what it’s supposed to be. I do believe we’ve done been hornswoggled. Isn’t that what you’d call it? Isn’t that a word from back on the farm? Hornswoggled?”
The farm? I laugh along with him, but I wonder what he knows about my childhood. And why he knows anything at all.
Voss is dressed as a civilian, a dapper one, in a gold sweater and rose-colored pants, his shirt collar open, looking ready for the golf links. He even has tassels on his loafers. But I assume it’s just a uniform of a different kind—a lure. It gets him things a Nazi might not get when dressed in his polished buckles and pressed jackets.
When I stand from the chair, he takes me by the arm and leads me away. I glance at Day, who glances back as I pass. She’s leaning against a wall as a few officers fall over themselves to flirt with her. She has shed her fur; she wears a long black gown patterned with zeppelins that twinkle when the light catches on their silver sequins. She’s become a bit of a favorite with the boys who haunt Madame Boulette’s, and not just because of “Where Were You When.” She writes original songs for them. They buy her a drink, tell her their stories of valor on the fields of battle, and their heroic tales end up in a ballad or a ditty.
Two soldiers appear at our sides. One places Voss’s military greatcoat over his shoulders; the other drapes my synthetic gazelle over mine; yet another opens the door to the narrow balcony. Voss takes me by the elbow, and we step out.
“It’s illegal for women to wear trousers in Paris,” he tells me with a wink. We’re handed two snifters of brandy. “The police outlawed it a hundred years ago or so, and it’s never been off the books. A woman can only wear pants if she’s attached to a bicycle or a horse.”
“You like to mock me,” I say.
“I’m not mocking you,” he says.
The Perfume Thief Page 8