The Perfume Thief

by Timothy Schaffert

  “Why?” was all I could think to say.

  “Civil War veterans were given certain benefits. If we still had our legs and our wits, we could head west.”

  “You were married to a veteran?” I said.

  “I was a veteran, Mr. Van Horne,” she said, having tossed in yet another pause before that mister. “But that’s a story for another time. All these ladies have already heard it.”

  One of those ladies said, “Fanny is the subject of the novel I’m writing,” a comment that led to debate among them all as to whether she had the right to boast of writing a novel that she’d not yet begun. But I have all my characters and all my incidents, she insisted.

  In the flurry of that dispute, tea was served by the Widow Waverley. “The tea is from Holland,” she said, “so you ought drink it as the Hollanders do.” She took up a sugar cube to pop into her mouth. With the cube tucked into the pocket of her cheek, she slurred her suggestion that we do as she had, and that we keep the cube there for the tea to wash past with each sip.

  Fanny leaned in toward my ear and slipped a card under the cuff of my sleeve. “I host a salon for people like us,” she whispered. As Fanny stepped away to gather her hat and walking stick, thanking the Widow Waverley for lunch, I felt my cheeks go red-hot and sweat prickle on my forehead. I still had my sugar cube lodged in the inside of my cheek. I opened my mouth so it could roll in between my teeth, and I bit down. The cube wasn’t as softened by the tea as I’d expected, and I hoped the crunch and crack of it didn’t sound as loud in the room as it did inside my head.

  After the others left, the Widow Waverley poured me a snifter of her home-bottled blackberry brandy and told me all she’d figured out on her own.

  “What was the name you were given at birth?” she said. “You can trust me. I’m a poet. A lifelong student of human nature. I’m just curious.”

  I wanted to trust her, and I wanted to tell her, so I did. “Clementine,” I said.

  “Clementine,” she said, nodding. “Do you wish you’d been born a man?”

  “No one’s ever born a man,” I said. “Men are born boys.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “Do I?”

  “Of course you do. It’s a simple question.”

  “But…I don’t think it’s a matter of simplicity,” I said. “It’s about the rightness of it, I guess. Or the wrongness. I mean to say, it seems to me the wrong question for the answer you want.” I was talking in circles, but how was I to explain that I was born a boy, and I was born a girl too? Or, rather, how could I explain that boy and girl have nothing to do with birth?

  She sighed. Took another drink. “One would think you’d have given more thought to all this,” she said. She seemed disappointed that I couldn’t reveal to her all the dimensions of my perversity. “Never mind,” she said. “Fanny is part of the widows’ club, but she rarely attends. I told her about you. I thought you should meet.”

  “She’s a widow?”

  She shot back the last of her brandy. She closed her eyes and let the liquor lead her elsewhere. She began Fanny’s story: “A young man, knowing he was to be sent off to battle, attended every show in the city, to distract himself. Even the ballet. He saw Fanny dance onstage. He brought her roses. They fell in love at the stage door. Within a few weeks, they were married. And she was heartbroken when he left. So she enlisted to fight, as a man, alongside her husband. He died in her arms. And when he died, the man she was died with him. She shook off her coat, dropped her weapons, and stepped back into her old life. She even returned to dance, to ballet, but her heart wasn’t in it. So she returned to the battlefront, as yet another man, a different one, and she fought until the war was over.”

  “And who is she now? An old ballerina or an old soldier?”

  The Widow Waverley whimpered melodramatically. “What does it matter if she’s a ballerina who doesn’t dance or a soldier who doesn’t fight?” She nodded at her snifter, inviting me to pour her more. She said, “All I can say with certainty is that she receives two war pensions—one as a widow, and one as a veteran.”

  After I poured us both more brandy, I took from my inside coat pocket the card Fanny had given me, and there was only a time, and a date, and an address, along with Fanny’s initials. For people like us, Fanny had whispered in my ear.

  Who? I wondered. Who are people like us?

  23

  I’ve learned from my mistakes in Illiers, and I will manage Voss’s drugging better now, strumming at his health, easing him toward the brink of recovery, then pulling him back. Every teacup’s aroma of flowers and herbs will convince him I’m helping.

  Just pump the tea right into my veins, Voss told me when we reached the train station, like with that perfume syringe the woman told you about. I thought he’d been napping through most of my stories of Manhattan.

  He insisted I bring him more tea in the morning. Or any of your folk remedies from the old farm. He’s leery of doctors, he says.

  So I arrive at Monsieur Pascal’s house just after dawn. I know the house well from the outside, this hôtel particulier, a fat mansion not far from my house on the Left Bank. Pascal’s house squats overstuffed on the corner, with two addresses, one for each street it runs along. It’s a one-family house that could house five families. Five rich families, no less.

  The concierge has not been evicted by Voss. She lives in a few rooms of the first floor, and Voss lives in all the floors above. She is hunched forward, a severe curve in her spine bending her sharp at the waist. Though I can’t see her face past the hair that falls forward, she’s intimidating with her brusque manner and bent back. I feel my own slouch in my shoulders, so I straighten up.

  The concierges of Paris hold a place of authority and manage all the household contracts. They often seem irreplaceable, as if a concierge could steal the building right out from under you, simply by locking you out. And now here they all are in this ravaged city, still holding all the keys.

  She fusses with hers on a metal ring at the end of a chain around her neck. She surely has more keys than the building has suites. “Too many keys cripples the keep,” she tells me, and though there’s a touch of singsong to her scratchy voice, I can tell she wishes I were elsewhere.

  Her commitment, really, is to the house itself, and to the house’s own long legacy of concierges at the door. I thought she might be the one to nettle for information, that Monsieur Pascal might have confided in her, that she might have an inkling about the best hiding places, or might recognize something about the squiggle in the note; she could be the very link I’m needing. But Zoé quickly cautioned me to steer clear. Daddy inherited her with the house, she said. I think she was there even before my grandfather bought it. She’s always been there, and she’s always been old. She’s probably just as happy to work for a fascist.

  Since Voss is expecting me, the concierge lets me in upstairs without a knock at the door. Her back is so crooked that her eyes are directed at my knees as she speaks. “Monsieur Voss is waiting for you in the kitchen,” she tells me, but she’s gone before I can ask where the kitchen is.

  I’ve seen some very fine homes over the years, and this is certainly among the finest. But the second I step inside, I feel like stepping back out.

  I take off my coat and gloves. The herringbone pattern in the tweed of my trousers matches exactly the woodwork of the parquet floor. I get a touch of vertigo when I glance down, but looking back up doesn’t help. The house is full of open doors, and massive mirrors on the walls that double and triple everything, reflections of reflections of reflections.

  What have I got myself into? I’m much too old for this. I run my eyes along all the mirrors, and I’m already worn out. I’m hoping to see deeper into the house somehow, hoping to spot the symbol Pascal etched onto his note to Zoé. I write about you in my diary, he wrote, but I’m certain the t
rue message is in the squiggle at the bottom of the card. As I walk through the house, I study the carvings in the table legs, the crown molding over doorways. If Pascal was unable to take the diary with him, he would have needed to conceal it quickly. These old French houses, like my own, are riddled with secret pantries, trapdoors, narrow staircases.

  I just want to find the diary and go, and never return. But I’m afraid I’m already in too deep. I fear I’m far beyond the point where I can just disengage when I decide to. A thief is at her most conspicuous when she’s suddenly not around anymore.

  Despite all the doors and windows I see around me now, it looks like there’s no exit at all, like I’m in a mirror maze in a Chinese box.

  Zoé told me Pascal had a spacious laboratory in the house, a studio, but she doesn’t know if the diary was ever kept there. The diary was most often in his hands, she said. He might sit with it at the table at breakfast, or in the parlor in the evening, the journal open in his lap. He kept it on his bedstand, or on the kitchen counter, or on the library desk. He left it on the bench in the garden, or on the telephone table, or on the carpeted steps.

  I follow the smell of toasted bread, and I find my way to the back stairs, and down, to the kitchen. Voss wears a spectacular smoking jacket—black velvet with gold leaves that shine and flicker in the light—but his pajama bottoms are a dull flannel. He’s barefoot. I almost wonder if he has tried to brighten his face with cosmetics; there’s a touch of rose in his ashen cheeks.

  He’s trying to seem alive, so I intend to instill some doubt about that. “You should let me call a doctor,” I say, confident he’ll reject the suggestion. He’s still worried someone will find out he’s sick. Survival of the fittest is a fine philosophy until someone poisons your tea.

  “I just need a few days,” he says. “I’ll be up to snuff soon.” He rises from the chair, and he does what he can to conceal his labored breathing. He steps up to me, and picks up the tea tin. Brings it to his nose. Sniffs. “How’d you come to know so much about tea?” he says.

  “I’ve picked things up here and there,” I say. I shrug one shoulder. “I learned a fair amount from that old lover of mine you were asking me about.”

  “Yes, I’ve asked you to tell me everything, and you’ve told me nothing.”

  Perhaps he is sentimental, as he said. Or maybe he means to play to my vanity. In any event, I’ll tell him a little of what he wants to hear. But just a little. If I’m to find the diary in this massive house, I need him to have reasons to invite me back.

  “He worked in the tea industry,” I say. “And he gave me a manual once, something called Odorographia. A guide to raw materials, for those who bottle scents and flavors. I mapped my escape with it, after my heart broke. More than forty years ago. I followed the scents of the world, described in the book.”

  “To rob the world of its perfume,” he says.

  It was my guide to getting lost. I still have that very copy M gave me, with all my notes penciled in, my cursive inching out from the margins to tangle around the text. Tucked in the pages are my sketches on notebook paper of the flowers I discovered, and portraits of insects. Whenever I look at the book, I’m who I once was.

  It’s my own perfume diary, I guess. The doctored cardamom of a Lingayat priest. The magnolias of Himalaya. The star anise of Japanese temples. Orinoco sassafras. I’ve not carried around many things in my travels over the years, but that book has been with me always.

  “And I knew a thing or two before that,” I say. “From the farm. Old remedies. Marigold soup for headaches. Roasted lily blossoms to unclog sinuses. For an upset stomach, you chew on a clove.”

  Cloves, M said once, after kissing me, after tasting the spice on my breath, on my numb tongue, on one of our first nights together. I told him I needed to gnaw on a clove when I got nervous. The clove farms of Zanzibar, he said, are worked by slaves. The slaves bat the cloves from the evergreens. Slavery, sweetheart. That’s the spice that’s settling your gut just now.

  Voss seems to get a lift from my discussing restoratives. His breathing has eased. He straightens his back. And I believe him when he tells me he needs me. “It’s like every breath of scent you’ve ever breathed in is still somewhere in your very soul,” he says. “I believe in fate, and I believe fate has led you to me.”

  He’s standing too close, so I’m grateful for the kettle’s harsh whistle. I lift the kettle from the stove and start the tea. “We’ll work together, Charlie. Pascal robbed you, but I’ll make you rich.” He has dangled that bit of promise before. I listen, knowing there’s more to it. And sure enough, before the tea has even steeped, he says, “I do need to ask a few things of you first.”

  I’m going to need a whole fistful of cloves to keep from getting queasy. But I nod. I raise an eyebrow. Still, he must see some hesitance. “You love Paris, I know,” he says. “But you know that I do too. I worship Paris. And that’s exactly why we should work together. My plans are a celebration of Paris, absolutely. You can trust in that.”

  I’m not sure why he feels the need to convince me of anything. I’m nobody.

  After I’ve brewed his tea, he asks me to follow him back upstairs to an office. In the mirrors, as he leads me slowly through the rooms, I see myself turn every corner, and I practice my poise. I’m slouching again, so I straighten my back. I’m struck cold by the sight of my perfect poker face. Even the tea tray is mirrored. Mirror silvering is listed in my book of poisons, but it’s too deadly.

  In the evenings at my kitchen table, I study M’s old book for symptoms and damage. In my cabinets, I have wolfsbane and devil’s fig, and any number of sickening agents I collected from my spice merchants before the war. The various herbs and roots are sometimes bricks, sometimes cakes, sometimes nests of twigs.

  But I’m most pleased to be finally using my pots of honey. The honey is not poisoned, it’s poisonous, the bees having gathered it from gardens of yellow azaleas, or from rhododendrons, or other plants that might tip you into vertigo or double your vision.

  Voss’s plot for me this morning is far more banal. Desk work. “Surely you’ve faked a signature or two in your day,” he says. I’m to post some reports to higher offices, mimicking his signature because he fears his hand’s unsteady. He detects a shiver in his otherwise elegant penmanship. They all need to imagine Voss upright at his desk, in the pinkest of health.

  As he rattles off instructions, he seems to grow weaker by the word. I pour him a cup of tea, and stir in the honey. When he finishes, he says, “Honeybees have bee dances. They communicate by touch.” He reaches for the cup, and along the way he taps his fingers along my wrist, like the dance steps of an insect. It’s the very lightness of his touch that causes me to recoil. I worry he’s seen me wince, so I smile. I nod. I glance toward the desk and its stacks of papers and reports.

  I sit down and practice his signature on a scrap of envelope as he watches over my shoulder sipping tea. After only a few tries, I’ve mastered it, though he signs his name with far more swirls of elegance than necessary; his signature is as pompous as the Widow Waverley’s. He signs every form as if it’s for posterity.

  He decides not to linger. He asks me to carry the tea tray and follow him to the bedroom, where he’ll rest. Like in most of the old houses of Paris, each room just leads into another, and that room into another, no hallways or corridors veining through the place. He says he intends to do some reading in bed, but he crawls in under the heavy quilts without a book. He sits up just enough to lift the teacup from the saucer I hold out for him. “When you’re finished with the signatures,” he says, “you’re going to help me find the perfume diary.”

  And with those last few words, the house suddenly shrinks, the walls collapse, everything tumbles toward me.

  Yes, let me help.

  I make much of situating the tea tray, its spoons and cup and saucer, so I can linger. He
’ll be asleep in a blink. I listen for his soft snuffling.

  I step away from his bedside and wander the house.

  I get all mixed up in the maze of rooms, so after turning a few corners, I end up in the same place a time or two; but even taking that into consideration, and the doubling and tripling in the mirrors, I’m overwhelmed by the number of credenzas, bureaus, wardrobes, chiffoniers. I bump my shoulder on an armoire, knock my knee on a steamer trunk. Even worse, Pascal’s tastes run toward the baroque, every cupboard door busy with scrolls and patterns and gilding, every leg and kneecap of a highboy etched with a doodad. It would take me days to find the squiggle I’m seeking among all this frippery.

  I go up a set of stairs and down another, and I stumble upon the laboratory Zoé told me about, where Pascal experimented with the scents and synthetics, where he kept apothecary cabinets of oils and essences, bottles of dried roots and bulbs and pods, spices and leaves. A sink, hot plates, kettles, copper kegs. And along every wall: bookshelves. A towering library.

  I walk through the room, running my fingers along the bindings. And on those bindings? All kinds of little code marks. A variety of squiggles almost like the squiggle I’m looking for, all of different twists and turns, like letters from foreign alphabets. A cataloging system of some sort. At first I’m discouraged, thinking the symbol I seek will be lost among all these similar ones. Even as I just glance at the bindings, the design I memorized begins to unravel in my head. But then I decide to be encouraged. It seems reasonable to think that I’ve at least narrowed the search down to this one room. So, with a pair of opera glasses I found in my meandering, I begin at the very top. I aim the glasses, turn the wheel to focus, and I look for that squiggle to bend back into shape before my eyes.

  The laboratory smells like the wick of a candle just lit. Or one just blown out. But no, it’s the scent of the books I’m smelling, the vanilla and cedar of their pages and boards. The stale wax of old leather. The salt and brine of the ink.