Blue says, “I’m ready for my greatest love affair. I want my heart to be broken in a hundred different places before the end of it. Maybe you can make me a perfume that will conjure him up.” I’m hoping this means Félix is not the great love that he seeks. That boy is too dangerous. I could see it in his scars. “I’ll wear it on a handkerchief, since I can’t wear it on my skin without itching.”
“What should she put in this little love spell?” Day asks Blue.
“When have you been the happiest?” I ask him, and after the words are out of my mouth, I realize I’m peeking into the past of a short life overwhelmed by abandonment. I see in all of Blue’s pursuits, even in his attachment to me, the orphan he was.
“The bees,” he says, and I know he’s talking about a few months at an apiary in Châteauroux, a bright spot in his sad childhood as he was shuffled among relatives. I think of the smell of clover in the fields, the sugar syrup that intoxicates the bees and makes them lazy. The hint of the smoke that stops them from stinging.
Day says, “If you could bottle a scent that fogs the memory, you’d make a fortune.” When I find the diary, I’ll need to figure out how to make it serve us too, for leverage. Maybe I somehow keep the diary for myself. To wriggle our way out of the things we might need to wriggle our way out of. Certainly if I ever had it, and had to turn it over, to save Blue or Day or myself, I’d tear out any reference to Zoé. I’d still be protecting her secrets. I’m no villain.
I sniff again at Day’s wrist. I need to make the perfume complicated enough, perfect enough, and potent enough to distract Voss for the next few days. I need to jostle his senses. Even deaden them, if I can, so he doesn’t detect the poison I’ll be peppering his brandy with.
I don’t intend to murder Voss. So poison might not be the right word for it, though poison it most certainly is. Some of it, anyway. It will sicken, but only slightly. And if he’s sickly by nature, he won’t suspect. I’ll comfort him, and lull him along, and learn what it is that he wants.
Madame Roche keeps more than just sleeping powder behind her counter at the café. She has all sorts of prescriptions. The city’s beggars go to the clinics, and then they go to Café Roche to swap their pills and potions for shots of liquor. I will bring to Illiers a few of these remedies, as well as some concoctions of my own.
18
In the little country village of Illiers, where the air is every bit as cold as it is in Paris, Voss and I huddle close, arm in arm, in the street. We’re still in the occupied zone, so no one drives, though I suspect the villagers have always walked in the roads—the sidewalks are as narrow as a tightrope. I’m in a hooded cape of purple velvet that reaches my shoes. A fairy-tale hag, into the woods. I carry the walking stick Voss gave me the other afternoon. And in the bottle in the bulldog’s brass head are a few swallows of something that, in heavier doses, might be a touch toxic.
Meanwhile, in my pockets are sachets of tea I’ve stitched together, a smoky blend of noxious herbs and pernicious weeds that would be fatal only to a kitten.
“It’s a ghost town,” Voss says with a sigh. “I mean, it’s a ghost of itself. Or a ghost, at least, of what Proust described in his novels.” Based on some notes from the town’s mayor, we’ve found the house Proust visited as a child, his aunt’s house, the heart of all his sentiment, and one of the settings for his fiction. “It’s too small,” Voss says as we stand across the avenue. He squints and holds out his hand, as if to block the house from his sight. “The family could not have been…situated in there, as he told it.” He closes his fingers, closing his hand around it. It looks quite spacious to me. To make matters worse for Voss, the grocery store where the family bought their biscuits with pink sugar is now a bicycle shop.
And we’ve already been to the stream, which he declared murky and fetid. Proust described the water as violet, Voss complained as we gazed into the deep, dead green of it. He said the floor of it was like Japanese cloisonné.
In the hotel café, he’s pleased that at least he can request Proust’s cookies and tea. Voss picks up from the table the copy of Swann’s Way that he’s been carrying with him, with its ripped and raggedy blue paper jacket, its pages tabbed and marked and dog-eared. He reads me the passage about the madeleine, soaked in lime-blossom tea, and how the taste of it brought on a rush of innocent joy, of sweet nostalgia. He translates for me from the French. “I had ceased now to feel mediocre, contingent, mortal.”
The waiter brings us the teapot and cups, and a plate of cookies, and while Voss again reads aloud from the book, from Proust’s description of this madeleine in front of us, those squat, plump little cakes, I manage to slip a tea bag from the cuff of my coat, plop it into the pot, swirl its damage around. I let it steep for a long moment before pouring us each a splash.
Even the madeleine disappoints Voss. Too rubbery, even when he dips it into the tea.
“The girls at Boulette’s always have memories they’re hoping I’ll bottle for them,” I say. “A grandmother’s powder, or sachets in a drawer. Pastilles their father kept in a tin. But if I give them exactly what they’re asking for, they don’t recognize it. They’ll only believe it’s true if it’s better than they remember it.”
I remember a day at Coney Island, with M, the two of us posing for an artist drawing cartoons seaside. He captured us perfectly in a quick sketch, with just a few lines here and there. The trick, he told us, is to depict only what’s most distinctively our own. What makes our face our face. The more I add, he said, the less it looks like you.
“And what is that perfume you’re wearing?” Voss says, sneering. “It’s been watering my eyes all day. You’ve soaked yourself in it.” He hasn’t once mentioned it, so I doubt it’s been such torture.
I hesitate to utter Proust’s name under the circumstances. I say quietly, “It was something I was playing with. Inspired by…well, this trip. In one of your books on Paris, you describe some of the scents in Proust’s novels.”
He furrows his brow. “No no no no,” he says. He picks up his book again. After a moment, he finds what he’s looking for, and thumps his finger against the page. He reads aloud: “…alone in ecstasy, inhaling, through the noise of the falling rain, the everlasting scent of invisible lilacs.” He looks up to me. He raises one hand, shrugging, as if it were all so simple and obvious. “Rain,” he says. “Everlasting lilacs.”
He sweeps through the pages, seeking more scents to punish me with, but stops when the church bells chime. “Well, at least that’s as it should be,” he says. “The bells that chime every quarter hour.” He looks at his watch, grimaces, holds it to his ear to listen for ticking. He then glances along the walls, seeking a clock. “I have an appointment,” he tells me, slamming the book closed, standing from the table. “I’ll be back before dinner.” With a firm nod, he drinks the tea in one gulp, and he’s off.
After he leaves, I retrieve the tea bag, in case there might be more sickness to squeeze from it. I tuck it into a wax candy wrapper. Can’t he hear himself? Doesn’t Voss realize he’ll soon enough be as disappointed with Paris as he is with Illiers? In Paris, they’ve covered the eaves and awnings of the shops with banners in German. They’ve draped the city in swastikas. They’ve changed the names of the avenues.
They want the city’s every essence, putting their filthy hands on even the untouchable—the scent of our ladies’ necks, the bubbles in our champagne, the stout wallop of our black coffee, and the black exhaust of our cigarettes. The notes of jazz that lift from our basement windows. They’ll filch the air from our soufflés.
Everything Voss loves will grow faint, then fainter. Paris will become everyone’s old dowager aunt wrecked by opium.
19
We’re to be here only a few days, but Voss packed for me a week’s worth of new clothes. A day dress of black rayon, patterned with caramel-colored sparrows. An ivory evening gown with Madonna lilies.
A blouse with a print of red feathers for one day, a skirt of paisley for another. I don’t much like it, but I go along with it.
These dresses make me worry more about what he has in mind for me. The patterns are dizzying.
In the evening, we’re alone in the hotel’s front parlor. I’m in a dinner dress of pink chiffon, swirling with circus carousels in baby blue. I bring him a snifter of liquor.
“The old French colognes were made of brandy,” I tell him. I’ve corrupted his with a sickly syrup of cherry laurel. “Some complain that the brandy crushes the violets.”
“And what do the druggists use in Nebraska, Nebraska Charlie?” he says. “To make their colognes?”
“Fermented sugar beets, I reckon,” I say.
He sniffs the brandy. Closes one eye. Looks up. Contemplates. Takes a sip. Takes another. And another. Drinks it down. He returned from his appointment even more irritable than he was before. He hasn’t explained, but I imagine he visited Pascal’s rose farm.
I take the snifter back from him, and return to the trolley along the wall. I pour him more poison.
“Did you see more of the village this afternoon?” I ask. We sit on opposite ends of a long sofa. I keep wanting to look down, to see if I’ve somehow left the room without my pants. And, of course, I have. The dress—its flow and soft touch—makes me feel naked. But this dress helps me play a character, proper and doting, with its silky pinks and blues. I defer to Voss’s authority, my dress fanned out, my legs tucked in, my ankles crossed.
He swirls the brandy around in his snifter. “No,” he says. He seems to want to say more, so I wait, and he finally does. “You probably know that Pascal has a farm near here. For the perfume factory. Roses. I had a meeting with a…” He pauses, then says, with a pinch of disdain, “A manager.” He takes a drink. “But he was more of a farmhand, really. It was useless.”
“Some people would say that bothering with something like perfume, in wartime, is just…fiddling while Rome burns,” I say, but I say it in such a way that he knows it’s his response that matters.
He’s enlivened by this, as I knew he would be. “Well, it was the emperor who did the fiddling in Rome,” he says. “And then he built his grand palace and gardens on the ashes of it all.” He smiles, and he raises his glass toward me, like he’s toasting the emperor’s victory. But then he flinches. Squints. He presses a finger to his temple. “Spots in my eyes,” he says. “I must have looked right into that lamplight.” He sighs, and takes another sip.
“What does your wife wear?” I say, though he’s not spoken much of the wife. In all the time we’ve spent together, including the few hours on the train to Illiers just this morning, he only ever answers my questions with questions of his own. I say, “What perfume does she wear?”
Dropping his voice an octave, Voss says, “When I mentioned my wife before…well, she’s not my wife anymore. I’m not married now, but I’ve been married three times. It never keeps.”
“It seems you’d be able to keep at least one of them,” I say. “You’re pleasant enough to be around.”
“I’m almost inclined to say the same of you,” he says, almost flirtatiously. We both smile. Is his smile fake too? He lifts his snifter in what I think is another toast, but he’s signaling that it’s empty. I’m happy to pour him more.
When I bring his brandy, I say, “Oskar, I sense…I sense that you want my help. And I want you to know that, without a doubt, I do want to help you. I do.”
He takes the snifter and sips. “Why?” he says.
“Well, I’ll be completely honest with you,” I lie. “Pascal robbed me. He’s a crook. We formed a partnership, to design some fragrances together, and he claimed them all as his own. He said he owed me nothing.”
I’m feeling creaky in my old habits. I rattled that off too fast. Back in my youth as a thief, I knew I wouldn’t get caught, and even if I did, I knew the consequences would be meager. I was expert at skirting the law. But if I fail at this, I’m done for, and not just me, but everyone in my orbit. I’m risking not just my neck but Blue’s too, and Day’s, and Zoé’s.
Voss swishes his brandy around, and I wish he would say something.
“Ahhh,” he says, finally, as if this is a revelation he’s been waiting for. He says, his voice spiked with gossip, “Did you know Pascal kept a journal?”
The perfume diary. Suddenly, the book is in the room with us, and my heart picks up so much I worry it’s fluttering the silk bow knotted at my chest. “Yes,” I say. “If you mean the recipe book. With all the formulas and ingredients.”
“That’s the one I mean,” he says. “Do you know where he kept it?”
“That I don’t.” I say, “I’d love to see it. I’d love to know if he credits me at all. If he confesses his theft.”
Voss nods a slow nod. He nods and nods. “I’d love to see it too,” he finally says. “There’s work to be done. It will be a new age, Charlie, unlike anything before. A renaissance. The borders of Europe, all the different laws, the tariffs and taxes, haven’t allowed for the exchange of ideas, and methods. And materials! The great perfumeries of Berlin and Vienna will now have for themselves all the fields and gardens of France. The roses. The best jonquil, the best jasmine. Carnations. Orange blossoms.”
He leans his head back on the sofa. Closes his eyes. But he’s not finished. “Fiddling,” he mutters. “Fiddling! Perfume is not just vanity. Think of the spice trade. The Silk Road. Our desire to be intoxicated by the senses led to our very enlightenment. We wanted to get lost, so we found the world. Empires were built from cinnamon and cloves. And from all this, all this marriage of cultures, came science and medicine. The swapping of art. Dressmaking. Mapmaking. We wanted to take more and more and more from the sea, so the sea rose up around us for the taking.” He swallows the last of his brandy.
He speaks like an explorer asking the queen for a fleet of ships and a royal charter. It’s a lecture I’m sure he’s delivered before, and it does seem it’s exhausted him.
I touch my fingers to my hair, as if I’m tucking a curl behind my ear. “It all has to do with infatuation, I suppose,” I say. “Opium. Gin. Cuban weed. African violets. We can be happy enough if we think we’re in love.”
Before I can ask him more about his work, he says he’s feeling woozy, and he needs to go to his room and rest. Now I better understand our winter walks. The merest sniffle would send him into conniptions. A pinch of sore throat. A cough. Even a gentle stab of headache. He’s terrified of falling ill but can’t bear to stay in out of the cold. He’d suffer more, he says, if he couldn’t walk the streets of Paris all winter.
I’ve always been frail, he told me. But it’s my frailty that gave me my sentimental education. I grew up reading books. Studying art. Long before I visited Paris, I knew its every corner. I knew its every luxury.
20
We’ve left Illiers early, after only one night. Voss blames the moldy hotel for the dull thump in his temples. Or maybe, he says, some vapors rose from the green stream we walked along.
We’re in our own compartment, on a train to Paris. He’s wrapped in a heavy quilt, leaning back on a bank of pillows like a sultan. His eyes are bloodshot, his cheeks flushed a stark white. We’ve swapped sides twice already—he can’t decide if it makes him queasier to ride facing forward or looking back.
I’ve overdone it with the poison. Or maybe he’s even more frail than I imagined. But I lost track of things, meeting him brandy for brandy. The liquor went to my head. And then this morning, I served him drugged tea before I realized how sick he still was from the drugged brandy.
“You drank more than you think you did,” I tell him.
“I did not,” he says, his voice weak.
“You’re used to cognac,” I say. “That was Armagnac we drank last night. It’s more stout. It’s got more gumption when it comes to doing y
ou in. Or maybe it was the elevation. We were much higher up.”
He rolls his eyes, insulted. “I know cognac from Armagnac,” he grumbles. “No, I caught something in that church.”
“The church was empty,” I say. We’d visited the Saint-Jacques, where Proust’s characters worshipped.
“There was that old lady kneeling by the altar,” he says. “She was sniveling and hacking. Probably crawled from her deathbed to beg God to end her suffering.”
“She wasn’t anywhere near us,” I say. She’d been at the front, we’d been at the back, and the old church was lengthy, seeming like it might stretch through half the town, a vital artery of stained glass.
“That terrible, loud, death-rattle cough of hers echoed through the whole place, carrying all its infection with it. I only had to hear it to get it stuck in my own lungs.”
I don’t know why I’m trying to talk him out of his theories. Better he blame the old lady or the mold of the river. Or whatever illness it is that makes him weak from time to time.
He drifts off to sleep, then wakes only minutes later with a start and a gasp. He seems confused by the sight of me. I’ve gone back to wearing my own clothes. He directs his gaze to the scuff of my shoes, then up along the leg of my trousers. His attention catches on my necktie, but it’s too busy for him to stare at. It’s black and white, with a pattern of triangles that seem to throb and jitter even when you’ve not been overdosed.
“Can I ask you something?” he says, his eyes shut tight.
“If you have to ask me if you can ask me, then it’s probably not a question I want to answer, is it?”
The Perfume Thief Page 11