“ ‘Hornswoggled’?” I say. Our conversation is a fog of frost.
He leans back against the railing, stretches his leg forth, and pulls closed the casement door with his foot, all with the elegance of a dancer. I get the genuine sense he likes to be considered boyish.
“No, not at all,” he says, taking a sip of his brandy. “Or maybe a little. I’ve never been to America, but I’ve read many American novels. The cheap ones. The dime novels. I should be ashamed to admit it. But I get a kick out of the Wild West. One of the first ones I ever read was about a Nebraskan such as yourself. Nebraska Charlie, it was called, the Boy Medicine Man of the Pawnees.”
I take a sip of the brandy too, just to send a rush of warmth to my cheeks. “How did you know I’m from Nebraska?”
He starts to say something, then stops. He says something else. He affects that country twang again. “Aren’t all Americans from Nebraska? Or Texas?” When I raise my eyebrows, suspicious, he says, “I guess I’ve given myself away.” Like he’s been planning it all night, he pulls from his coat pocket a pulp paperback of The Perfume Thief, a detective’s exposé about his career pursuing me. I’ve never seen this edition. It’s clearly manufactured to titillate, with a buxom blonde in a silk robe sitting at a mirror, the vanity top covered with perfume bottles.
“I’ve been reading all about you,” he says.
“You’ve been reading nothing about me if you’ve been reading that,” I say. “He gets nothing right.”
“Oh?” he says, skeptical. “You were never a thief?”
“I dealt in antiquities,” I say, sly. “Artifacts. It’s all a swap. Nobody can own any of that. Why should anyone keep a relic if they can’t hold on to it? Anything old has a long history of getting lost, or being stolen. Just because you pay for something, it doesn’t mean you came by it honestly.”
But none of this rationale, which I’ve rattled off before, seems true to me anymore. I’m reciting someone else’s lines.
His laughter lifts in a few clouds of steam. “Spoken like a true western outlaw,” he says.
To be a crackerjack thief, you’re always in character. You’re always pretending. I would have made an excellent spy in one of our wars, or coups, or skirmishes; spying, like theft, relies on human fallibility. Little breaches. You romance, you seduce, you charm and promise—you dance small dances in tight spaces—and you manage to make people do things for you that they’re not supposed to do. If every general obeyed his every order, every spy would be useless. You look for those squeaky hinges. You look for the people who need to connect. You look for egos—and sometimes the biggest ones are the weakest. To even the most discreet official, the sturdiest military man, a secret can seem worth having only if he can boast that he has it. And once a spy knows that someone has a secret, she’s halfway to having that secret herself.
“I did actually work for a medicine show,” I say, “like in your little western pulp. Some of my first work with perfume. Back then, we said it was healthy to smell pretty.”
I wasn’t famous until the detective’s book. I was stealth. The detective, or the hack who wrote the book for him, made much of the metaphor—the ethereal thief of ether. The book became a bestseller, but certainly no one reads it today. For a time, everyone was crazy about me, though no one even knew what I looked like. The detective wrote the book before having been within a foot of me. He never had any idea where I was until I wasn’t there anymore. But he got rich off me and that book and all that it inspired: a silent picture, a rose-infused gin, and, of course, a perfume that was all wrong. The Perfume Thief eau de parfum was not only obnoxious, it nagged at you, it cried for attention, it announced itself as it stumbled into a room. Anyone who wore it would never get away with anything.
“I’m going to call you Nebraska Charlie from here on out,” Voss says. I don’t like the idea of any “from here on out,” or any nicknames, or any familiarity at all, but I’m encouraged by the suggestion of it. I need him to feel friendly toward me. He lives in Pascal’s house, and I need to be invited in.
He returns the paperback to his pocket. “I know other things about you too,” he says.
“That so?”
“You might be flattered to know you’ve left a trail of international dossiers in your path,” he says. “Your holidays are kept in many scrapbooks.”
I try to make light of it. “Vile gossip,” I say.
“Now that’s a name for a perfume,” he says. “What should it smell like?”
Fresh laundry, I don’t say. The common hausfrau here in Paris who has queued up for soap flakes might be paid in extra lumps of coal to eavesdrop and tattle. Even if you don’t know how to spy, you know how to gossip. Gossip hasn’t stopped with the war; as a matter of fact, war has turned everything into gossip. People go to the police to inform on their neighbors about whispers heard through walls. You can end up on a list if you so much as tune in the wrong radio show or read the wrong paper. You have to watch your tongue when standing in line for your rations.
Just going about our lives is illegal. I look out across the city, all the windows blacked out. You’re all of you thieves now, every last one of you, for simply wanting to keep what’s yours. I try to take another sip of the brandy, to settle my nerves, but I’ve already emptied my glass. I keep it at my nose, to breathe in its fumes.
Voss says, “Witches say the bark of the slippery elm wards off gossip. Put a pinch of that in our perfume, I guess.” He then mutters something about spice, as he tries to wind his way around a quote. Shakespeare. He stumbles, fumbles words, finally settling on “ ‘And, in the spiced Indian air, by night, full often hath she gossip’d by my side.’ ”
With the mention of Shakespeare, I think of Ophelia. I think about the dangerous lines to be drawn between Zoé and the perfume her father bottled for her.
“You have all of Shakespeare at the ready in your head?” I say.
“Just Midsummer Night’s Dream,” he says. “I was Puck in a school production.”
An actor. I believe it.
He says, “And what’s the scent of Mûrier Blanc? If you were to describe it.”
“It makes me think of New Orleans,” I say. “It always takes me to a sidewalk café one afternoon. Drinking a cocktail of bourbon and sweet tea. The scent of pralines cooking in the candy shop next door.” As I picture the cloth-of-gold roses vining along the twists of the ironworks, those ironworks twist into the shape of the insignia on the note from Zoé’s father. I glance down now to study the balcony railing before us. I look over to the swirl of design in the silver buttons of Voss’s coat. And I try to remember the exact fretwork of pewter that encases the milky glass of the bottles of Mûrier Blanc.
“And here I thought you’d think I was a sentimental fool if I confessed that I love Mûrier Blanc,” Voss says.
“What does it make you think of?” I say.
“I came to Paris for the Exposition, the one in 1889, to see the Eiffel Tower when it was just put up,” he says. He too looks out at the city before us, out toward where the tower stands lost in the dark. “I was still a teenager. I decided I wouldn’t leave Paris until I fell in love. And I fell in love the day I arrived. The minute I arrived, really. Right at the train station. I bought a cigar from her. She worked in the tobacconist’s shop. She sold me the cigar, I fell in love, then I bought a newspaper from her, just to linger. And then I asked her which perfume in the cabinet I should buy for a girl I’d only just fallen in love with, and she picked Mûrier Blanc. I paid for it. I handed it back to her. I asked her if she wouldn’t mind trying some of it on, for me to smell on her wrist. She did. She let me take her hand in mine. Her skin was cool. And I brought the underside of her wrist to my nose.” He pantomimes it all, the girl’s ghostly hand in his. “It was perfect. Just when you think the scent’s too sweet, you catch a pinch of its burnt sugar. Or maybe that
bourbon you mention.”
“Did the poor girl fall for it?”
He shrugs. He takes another sip of his brandy. “She might have,” he says. “But I was too late. She was already engaged to someone else.”
“Too bad you didn’t think to ask her about that before you spent all of your money on the perfume.”
“I’m glad I didn’t ask,” he says. “The money would be long gone by now, but I still have that scent of her wrist.”
“Did you ever love again?” I say.
“Oh, many, many times,” he says. “What about you, Charlie? Ever been in love?”
“Once,” I say, which is what I’ve always said when asked that. I’ve said it even to those who’ve claimed to be in love with me. I’ve always talked about M to keep him with me. “I’ve probably loved more often than that. But I like the idea of having only loved him. It makes your whole life seem more romantic if you’ve only had one true love.”
“Him?” he says. He smirks. He takes a sip of the brandy. He clears his throat. “I would have taken you for a ladies’ man.”
I hold the empty snifter to my lips again, and get only the burnt-wood scent. I wonder if Voss means to seem sophisticated, or if he’s testing me. I hold my glass to my nose. I know that if I speak, I’ll say what I shouldn’t. I’m tempted to ask him about the camp in Alsace, where they’ve clipped the fairies’ wings. What are you all so afraid of? I want to ask.
Finally, he speaks. “Did you ever know Proust, the writer? The greatest writer of France? Have you read his novels? Steeped in nostalgia. He had a séance in this very dining room. Came out on this very balcony during an air raid, during the war. Proust wrote about it, in Time Regained, how the German pilots were like Valkyries.”
He turns his head toward me. In his pauses, and his lingering, I fear, more than a little, that he’s only humoring me. Batting me around, cat-and-mousy. I fear he’s about to tell me the jig is up, that I’ll be whisked away next. I’m the next to vanish. My dossiers. Has he brought them up to keep me in line? Do any dossiers even exist?
And even if he is amused by me, by my notoriety, what if others in his rank aren’t at all? I have a long history of flouting the law, and I always thought I was only ever hurting myself. Never married, no children. But now it could all come back on me, if it put Blue and Day in danger.
I turn away and glance back inside. Day is once again the center of attention. She always looks as delicate as a piece of china in these rooms full of military men.
And yes, I’m a ladies’ man. I think of all the women I made love to after leaving my man behind in Manhattan. I posed naked once, many years before I moved here for good, in one of these very hotel rooms, for a Dutch woman who’d gotten rich off the scandal of her naked portraits. Her portraits had shut down exhibitions. She’d been exiled from schools. Museums draped her paintings in velvet. You have to part the velvet to get a peek, she told me with delight.
There I sat before her, without a stitch on. No trousers or necktie to tell anyone how to see me. She served me cubes of sugar that had been soaked in perfume, to eat, a habit she’d picked up from French schoolgirls, who like it because it brightens their eyes. And they probably get a little kick from the alcohol in the perfume.
Voss finishes off the last of the cognac in his glass, and looks down into the snifter to see if he’s left a drop. He then looks up, then up, then up, to where there are no stars, no squadrons, no bursting of shells. The sky is as deadly still as the street below. “Proust wrote that the sounds of the sirens in Paris were like the music of Richard Wagner. Like Wagner’s ‘Ride of the Valkyries.’ ” When he sees that I can’t quite remember the music he’s mentioned, he sings it for me, waving the snifter around as if he’s conducting an orchestra: Duh-de-duh-DUH-duh, duh-de-duh-DUH-duh, duh-de-DUH-duh, duh-de-duh-duhhh.
He raises his empty glass to toast the pitch-black heavens. “To Marcel Proust,” he says, then he quotes him, with actorly bravado: “ ‘The Germans have to arrive before you can hear Wagner in Paris.’ ”
15
Oskar Voss has invited me out for a winter walk. He seems to have no place to be. Even his wristwatch quits ticking only minutes after he winds it tight. “There’s something about me that throws a wrench in the cogs,” he says, tapping a finger on the glass. “And if it does manage to last all day, it loses minutes by the hour. By midnight, it’s the middle of the afternoon.” He holds the watch to his ear, shimmies his wrist, listening for a loose pinion or spindle.
“It’s probably all that thumping and shaking you give it,” I say. “You’re knocking the clockworks all out of whack.”
“That’s the farmhand in you, Nebraska Charlie,” he says, giving me a sidelong squint. “No-nonsense. But wouldn’t it be more fun to believe in ghosts? Or that the marrow of my bones has some…some voltage? Magnetism? That there’s something otherworldly that’s dragging at the gears of my watch? Where’s your sick imagination?”
He takes my arm. We’ve already fallen into an easy friendship, or so he thinks. I’m the polite and kindly old woman he’s met on his holiday, the woman with the interesting life and perverse preoccupations. Harmless.
We walk arm in arm, with no destination in mind. This is our second walk this week. He fashions himself a boulevardier, like the vain popinjays who once wandered the streets of Paris just to flaunt their topcoats. The fops and coxcombs known for their knowledge of the avenues and alleyways. These days, however, such gentlemen would be scolded and fined. You’re expected to use the streets only to get from one place to the next, and only when necessary.
These leisurely, meandering walks seem to be Voss’s official assignment, somehow. He has an instinct about Paris. He’s not just looking at buildings; he’s peeking in windows. He’s watching with his writer’s eye. I sincerely hope he’s not going back to his office to translate his lollygagging into marching orders. For all I know, he sits in his smoking coat and tasseled loafers as he sends his team out to kick in doors with their jackboots, to strip the city of all we’ve marveled at this afternoon: ornate brass work, velvet drapes, stained glass. Crystal chandeliers, lightbulbs and all.
But I sense that in his heart of hearts, if he has any heart at all, Voss is a true Francophile. Maybe he’d truly prefer to see the city move along as it always has. He knows that Parisians need to follow their own winding paths. He respects their eccentricities.
It has occurred to me, a time or two, that he might be corruptible. He has, after all, written three books about his devotion to Paris. So we’ll have our little walking romance with the city, in case even a spark of sentiment can cast a shadow on whatever his intentions might be.
We hit an icy spot of sidewalk, and he lends me his walking stick. “But you’ll be tempted to steal it, I suppose,” he says, demonstrating that its handle, in the shape of a bulldog’s head, twists off to reveal a flacon for cologne. Or maybe a spy’s fatal dose, I think—a sneaky heart-stopper when you’ve been cornered by the enemy demanding answers. But I agree that it is most likely just a perfume bottle in that bulldog’s skull; the stick is nothing but a dandy’s crutch, a useless cane for spinning around gingerly. Too frivolous for suicide.
When we’re discussing perfume, he asks my opinion but then does all the talking. He relates fragrance to music, and he’s a little tickled with himself when he does so, as if he’s the first to ever make such a comparison. He dismantles the classic perfumes for me, speaking of notes and undertones and echoes. Cadences, chords. Staccato, harmony, pitch, refrain. Even woodwinds, nocturnes, leitmotifs. I start tapping the cane against the sidewalk as he makes each point, like an old Russian piano teacher in a tapestry shawl, counting off the beats of the metronome.
We pass the stores with red signs in the windows. One after the other. Each time we do, I can feel the weight of it against our easy stroll. Is he at all distracted by them? Does he wond
er if I’m distracted? Before the red card was taped up on the glass, there was a yellow one, communicating in both German and French: Jüdisches Geschäft; Entreprise Juive. A Jewish-owned business. The Nazis have been managing the sales of the Jewish-owned businesses to non-Jewish owners. The red signs go up when the Jews have gone.
We all know this has happened in Germany and in Austria. Some of the Jews who were robbed fled to France. But, in our sense of helplessness, we try to imagine distinctions between the troubles there and the troubles here. Here, we tell ourselves, the Nazis are unwelcome. In the end, they won’t get by with their larceny. We’ll take down those red signs soon enough.
But we have more theories than we have certainties. Every day that we wake to an occupied Paris, the more familiar we become with fear and disappointment.
Voss nods toward the café on the corner. We’ve been wandering the neighborhood in search of one that sells cigars and cigarettes. This one has tabac emblazoned across the awning, and he sighs with relief at the sight of it. He says, “Can I get you anything, Charlie?”
I smile and shake my head.
When he steps back out from the café, he seems disgruntled with the cigar he’s bought. He attempts to light it, but the wind keeps blowing out his match the second it sparks. I step forward to help cup the flame with both my hands. When our eyes meet, I’m not sure if I should keep looking or look away. I do a little of both, I guess, a girlish fluttering. But I can’t deny there’s some drama to it all—the flirtation and curiosity. I play into it.
When the cigar still won’t light, I suggest the obvious: “You’ll have to go back inside.”
“Never mind,” he says. He tucks the unlit cigar into his inside coat pocket. “The cigars you get here are too wet. The humidors are too humid. French tobacconists all work for the government, you know, so what do they care if their cigars get moldy? They’ll never go bankrupt, and they’ll never be fired.” He speaks as if France is still France, our laws still law. He pops up his coat’s lapel, buries his hands in his pockets, and hunkers down to walk forward. He wiggles his elbow at me, for me to take his arm, and I do. “The Führer insists we quit anyway. He thinks smoking is ruining us all. Giving us cancer. He’s offered me, personally, a gold watch to give up the cigars. But what do I need with another watch that tells the wrong time, gold or not?”
The Perfume Thief Page 9