“Why do you dress the way you do?” he says. “The trousers. The neckties. And all that.” His all that is delivered with somewhat of a sneer.
“If that’s the tone you’re going to take, then no, you can’t ask me something.”
Neither of us looks away from the other. And then we do. When I catch his eye again, I start to speak. “I’m…” But I’m interrupted by the train’s porter, who has arrived at our door with the tea service I requested. He sets the tray on the seat next to me. He’s brought no tea, only teacups, and boiled water in a china pot. I have a silk pouch of tea I tell Voss is medicinal, and I’m telling the truth this time. The porter leaves. I say nothing. I prepare the tea—the crushed leaves and leathery strawberry skins and dried pearls of rosebuds. I sprinkle it into a strainer held over the china cup. Pour the hot water through the strainer. I can sense Voss’s impatience. He’s waiting for me to finish the sentence I’d started. I’m…I’m what? I’d intended to say, I’m neither one thing nor the other, but I’m glad the porter interrupted. I’m not sure how I’d best explain myself beyond that.
I hand Voss the cup and saucer. “Drink up,” I say. “This’ll fix you.”
“I didn’t mean to be impolite,” he says, shrugging his quilts away so that he can sit upright with the teacup. “I just want to introduce you to some people.”
“And these people don’t approve of ladies in pants.”
“They don’t approve of ladies in general.” He squints again, turns his head away, holds up his hand. “Can you at least remove the necktie? It’s throwing this compartment into a spin.”
I take off the tie, and I shove it into my pocket. “This is how my mother dressed me,” I say, in answer to his question about my clothes.
My mother attempted to prettify the hand-me-down britches and flannels of my two older brothers. Our tiny farm gave us little money to work with. She’d scissored some lace trim from a kitchen curtain, and she stitched it onto the hem of some pants, onto the cuffs of some sleeves, onto the points of some collars. She made cloth roses from burlap bags.
I was so desperate for love, and my mother was so stingy with it, I thanked her endlessly for the lace, until she finally insisted I stop. And she did no more sewing for me.
The church ladies, however, descended on our farmhouse in contraptions of silk and wool, suffocating bonnets and shawls, caged in hoop skirts, even on the summer days of desert-like heat. If you were a woman, it had seemed to me, you spent your whole life cloaked in your death shrouds. You were already in a casket of corsets and petticoats. I would later learn, at the turn of the century, that I was right—women’s clothes were not only their coffins but also their killers. The getups that women wore would cinch and strangle, mangling our organs and stealing our breath.
But my family, we were the paving stones for the ladies’ garden paths to heaven. By sharing their plenty with us, their tins of bacon fat and jars of pickled beets, they bought their spiritual redemption. They needlepointed Bible verses, sewed them onto pillows, and gave them to us as gifts to rest our heads on—each parable was meant to remind us of their godly goodwill.
Give, and it will be given to you.
One gives freely, yet grows all the richer.
For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.
I know they kept careful account of everything they gave us, but I don’t know if they ever noticed all I took. My family’s indifference to me was contagious, and I was a spectacular nothing in the presence of the church ladies. I didn’t stir a breeze or muss a hair. The ladies couldn’t be bothered with me—I was too strange in my lacy bib overalls and boy’s haircut to consider for more than a glance. And when I did speak, my voice dropped into a foghorn, a bleat. An awful, unladylike croak. They didn’t know how to unravel me, so they looked away, and just like that, I vanished. And like a sprite on tiny hooves, I pranced forth and back as they sat in my parlor humming Lutheran hymns, and I snatched what I could. A cameo. A stickpin. A widow’s mourning ribbon of black silk. A tassel clipped from a shawl, a hatpin, a stone jimmied from the loose setting of a brooch.
I tell Voss just part of this, just a little, but it seems enough to please him. “Now you can ask me a question,” he says. “So long as it’s a simple one. I don’t have the energy for anything complicated.”
“What do you do?” I say. “What is your job, exactly?”
“Simple enough,” he says. “I run a bureau, within the Abwehr. The Abwehr…the intelligence agency.”
“What does that have to do with perfume?”
“The bureau is how I’ve come to have Pascal’s house. And his business. I have a staff of two hundred. We manage…well, the particulars of the various…things…that have been lost in the war.”
“Lost?”
“Lost,” he says. “With all the upheaval. The new laws. Businesses changing hands. Things get lost.” He shrugs. Raises his eyebrows. So obvious, so simple. But he’s fumbling for words, which is unusual for him. His words tend to roll lightly along. “My people sort through it all. Valuables. Artwork, silver, furniture. Jewelry. Rare books. Rare wines. Some is sent to museums. Or to Nazi officials. But much of it is sold.”
I lean back. Lift my chin. Cross my legs.
“I can just imagine the money to be made,” I say.
“Oh yes. Even you, a thief since you were a little girl robbing the church ladies, could never imagine how very rich the world’s very richest are.” He lifts the teacup. “But I wouldn’t trade this cup of tea for a castle. It’s doing the trick. It’s a miracle cure.”
It’s not a cure but an antidote. I’m glad he’s trusting my tea. These little tea parties will help me slow him down. I’ll thwart while I pretend to abet. And Voss has Pascal’s house in Paris as his very own, so I’ll make him sleepy, and I’ll snoop.
I will find the diary.
“You’re taking from the rich?” I say.
He shrugs. He looks out the window, contemplating, perhaps translating the truth, running it through the bureaucratic polyglot in the back of his brain. “My agency brings order to the upheaval,” he says, clearly pleased with himself for coming up with this answer. “And we come to have the property of the enemy.”
A number of Hitler’s best gunslingers envy Voss his appointment, he boasts to me. These barbarians long for something civilized. If Voss took to his elegant feather bed for more than a day or two to convalesce, he’d risk having that bed pulled right out from under him. He absolutely can’t be sick.
“It was my knowledge of Paris,” he says, gazing into his teacup, “and my passion for France that helped me rise to this position. And now that same passion has made me suspicious to some.”
Voss wrote the books on Paris, described the light, the sounds, the scents. To hear him tell it, he is among the men who talked Hitler out of bombing the city from the get-go. If it weren’t for Voss, Paris would be ashes.
“Suspicious?” I say.
Voss looks up from his tea, quizzical, as if he didn’t realize he’d said any such word. Voss doesn’t like to talk about the war with me, in any practical sense. He cares only about the spoils. He seems to believe the war has been won already. Paris is his for keeps.
He sets his tea aside. He says, “Tell me your stories of heartbreak. I know you’ve got some. But you’ve been keeping them from me.”
Just this suggestion of love brings the scent of cigar smoke and tweed, as M’s spirit slips through the train. It was M who gave me my copy of Odorographia, which eventually sent me packing to seek the world’s most impossible scents. The nests of the lost cinnamon birds of the Seychelles. The oil from the bergamot trees felled by the earthquakes of Calabria.
“You want to feed off my misery,” I say.
“It would make me feel better,” he says, smiling sly again. When I say nothing, he says, “I want to
get to know you, Nebraska Charlie. I’m curious. I want to know all about your crimes. And how you got by with them. And love. I want to know allll about that lover…the one who ruined you.” I’m startled for a moment. I’ve spoken of love? Of ruin?
He’s depleted, barely able to sit upright. His eyes blink with sleepiness. He says, “I’m…I’m very sentimental. I’m the most sentimental man you know.”
He gives me a wink and a smile, but not sly this time. I do believe he believes he’s being sincere.
Voss never noticed in Illiers that I never took a sip from my own teacup. That’s the first skill the poisoner learns—pretending to drink from the same draught. Clink your spoon around, M told me in Manhattan, all those years ago when this was all only hypothetical. Make a production of sugaring it, or honeying it up, and nobody will notice that you’ve only poured yourself a splash. Blow on it. Smack your lips. Stir it some more. And let the cup sit with the same few sips you poured in. It’ll look like you drank plenty.
21
Luck and horses. That’s what I told them in the train’s smoking car when they asked what drew a western man like me to Manhattan. My lucky streak got me outlawed in Guatemala, I lied, even from the cockfights. “The cockfights aren’t so brutal there,” I said when they flinched at the mention. “They fit the cock’s feet with steel hooks”—and I lifted my foot and wriggled my ankle—“so it’s all over in a heartbeat, after a few deadly slashes. And the winning bird’s wounds are stitched shut with kitchen string.”
The silk of my swallowtail coat was patterned with galloping horses, and my carpet slippers were embroidered with horses of another color altogether—blue-gray Arabian steeds. I had a stiff, starched collar and a necktie with a tiepin shaped like a horseshoe. I was headed to the races of Coney Island to make a killing, I explained.
This was just before the century turned. Eighteen ninety-five, I guess. Or ninety-six. I was a few years short of my thirtieth birthday.
But, in truth, I wasn’t following horses to Manhattan; I was on my way to sell rich women French perfume. I had developed two talents during my childhood on the farm, talents I honed further in the years after I ran away from the place: I knew flowers, herbs, and oils, and I knew how to deceive and steal. I was convinced I could fool the big city with my country concoctions. Perfume was the most exquisite fraud of all—a pretty little bottle of cheap fixings and alcohol that you sold for at least triple its worth. How could I, I pondered, with my counterfeit perfumes, be any more corrupt than the perfumers themselves? The expense of perfume hinges on a kind of false promise.
On the train, I talked giddily of horses and betting so the men would think me boyish. And with that, I was able to engage them in cards. I had actual aces up my sleeve, but I never once had to fidget them loose. The men were so confident that I was overconfident, they underplayed, and I beat them round after round. And the more bourbon they drank, the weaker their wits.
Luck. Fate. Winning those card games would lead me to M eventually. The money I won on the train inspired me to take a luxury suite at a hotel I couldn’t afford, the Marie Antoinette, a frilly thing, a fat slice of let-them-eat-cake that took up one whole city block on Broadway, and it was there, in the tearoom, treating myself to a plate of sweet pickled mangoes and a cup of Turkish coffee, that I met a widow named Waverley.
I struck up a conversation with the old woman at the next table, the Widow Waverley—and that’s exactly how she introduced herself, and how she signed her name to my bill for my pickles and coffee, the “Widow” serving as the honorific, and her signature the most extravagant collision of curlicue and dagger-stab I’d ever seen. She made the very most of the sharpest points of the w’s and the v, even as the vowels were fat, sentimental loops.
I joined her at her table and poured her more tea from a ceramic pot that I remember as having an open-winged butterfly as the handle of its lid, with a few other butterflies perched on the spout. But it seems more likely I’m wrong, that those butterflies flew in from the future.
“You say you’re from Chicago?” she said.
“I lived there for a time,” I said. “But I grew up on a farm in Nebraska.”
“Grew up there,” she said, astonished. “You don’t mean to say there are children in the western states?” She spoke without an ounce of irony. She then tipped herself into my web, or tipped me into hers. She appraised me with a squint, and offered me not only a job but also a room in her house. She needed not only the protection of a gentleman, she said, but also a literary amanuensis. She was a poet, she explained, and needed someone to sort through all the little snippets of phrase she jotted down whenever overtaken by a whim. “They are all throughout the house, my phrases are,” she said. “In kitchen drawers, in my sewing basket. I’ve even written on the wallpaper in places. You’ll help me situate it all into proper poetry.” Before I could say anything, she added, “You’ll need a little something until you can make your perfume connections in the city.”
That’s how I had introduced myself: a dealer in French perfume. I would be working with department stores and druggists, I told her. Wholesalers. And that part wasn’t a lie. Up in my hotel room, I had a suitcase full of counterfeit labels that I would affix to my own recipes.
And I did need a job in the meantime, and I needed an address. I needed the foundation of legitimacy and civility the widow would provide, so I could hide my illegitimate intentions for the island of Manhattan. And I needed a kitchen to brew up all that pretty stink.
“Judge,” I said when she asked me to remind her of my name. “Judge van Horne.” When I first ran away from the farm, as a teenager, I’d read about a jail sentence in the daily paper, and I’d thought “judge” was the judge’s name, not his title, and I’d liked it. It seemed manly.
“Judge, darling, have you even ever met a poet before me?”
A poet? Yes. Many, many, many poets. But the poets I’d met in my travels were only scholars of burlesque and limerick, their every rhyme and reason corrupt and perverse. I’d worked as an actor in a medicine show; I’d manned a saloon or two. I’d drunk and sung with the lowest of outlaws and the filthiest of guttersnipes, their tongues untied when singing of entwined limbs and knocked knees.
22
At the Widow Waverley’s club of widows, I announced I was a student of nasology, a bit of hokum I’d read about in Le Petit Journal.
I spoke of my insights into the gardens and farms of France, and the bedrooms of the ladies of Paris. I’d yet to step foot out of America myself, but I’d learned some French from a German actress in Omaha, and I would spend a little time every morning skimming Le Petit Journal for all its gossip.
“Tell me the perfumes you most admire,” I told the widows gathered in the Widow Waverley’s parlor, “and I’ll tell you what it says about you.” They attempted to outdo each other with their listing of the most exotic and expensive fragrances. These were patrons of the arts, these women; they were friends of composers and painters. They were the widows and daughters of robber barons, with their family names on the wings of museums. They paid small fortunes to smell like the Damask rose water of a Turkish harem, or the dried-up juniper twigs in a Russian steam bath.
After telling the women what they wanted to hear about themselves—You’re daring and adventurous, wicked and poetical—I then prescribed for each of them a particular French perfume, a French perfume I’d bottled that morning in the kitchen. And they paid handsomely, and even slipped me tips.
“Give me some of this,” one of the women said to me, handing me a pamphlet. It was all in French, but illustrated, step-by-step, with elegant sketches of women in kimonos collapsed in parlors, sticking themselves like opium eaters, their hair undone and tumbling to their shoulders. “In Paris, they inject perfume like morphine.”
I had noticed this woman the moment she walked in. Like me, she wore a man’s suit, her coat and trou
sers made of a papery silk that made every wrinkle seem part of a frantic pattern of crisscross and crosshatch. But unlike me, she wasn’t pretending to be anything. She was simply the woman she was, despite the suit that she wore. Her long hair was pulled back, tied at the nape of her neck with a frayed piece of twine at the back of her starched collar.
This woman commanded the attention of all the widows, her mouth in a smug half smile, her eyebrows raised, a real grimace of arrogance, titillating the ladies with the rumors of the hypodermic mania of the Paris demimonde. “The women of Paris needle perfume into their veins,” she said, “sweetening their sweat, enhancing their sighs, their moans, their whispers, with the scent of violets.”
The women pretended to be scandalized, snapping their tongues, scolding. A few of them waved their embroidered hankies in the woman’s direction, either in admonishment or as a white flag of surrender.
“You’ve not yet met Fanny, have you, Judge?” the Widow Waverley said, with a sly purr. At that, Fanny stood from her chair, bent at the waist, and took my hand to blow a kiss against it. She then produced a tin from the same pocket from which she’d taken the pamphlet. She opened the lid and offered me a candied violet. “They’re even perfumed,” Fanny said. “They smell a little like a flower, but they don’t taste like one. That’s the magic of potato ether.”
Clearly this woman wanted to expose me as a fraud. She wanted to be the expert on perfume today.
The violet I took and put on my tongue was too slight to do much more than melt.
The Widow Waverley said, “Fanny was once one of New York’s finest ballerinas.”
“Once?” Fanny said, lifting an eyebrow. She then said to me, “Once you’re one of the finest ballerinas, you’re always one of the finest. There are so very few of us.” She then said, “Waverley here tells me you’re a farm”—and here she paused a beat before saying, “boy from Nebraska. I had a farm too for a time, right next door, in Iowa. After the ballet.”
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