The autumn decay of a root in Bengal. A swamped field of sugarcane. Fresh ginger baked in the Jamaican sun.
Before I met M, I thought I’d already learned everything about flowers and spices. After we met, I realized I knew next to nothing. I read and reread the book M gave me until I knew all its arcane knowledge by heart.
24
In whatever city I was in, no matter the laws and ordinances, I wore my suits and collars, my oxfords and ascots, with a mix of confidence and fear. I strolled with a man’s stride. I sat back in cable cars with a gent’s jutting of knees and elbows. I robbed the rest of the world of every inch of space I could reach, of every breath I could take in deep and keep in my lungs, just as a man would.
I sometimes think I was more convincing then, even as my features were softer, more feminine. But the very notion of a woman dressing as I did in those days was so perverse, no one could fathom I was anything but an overly tender gentleman with a scowl to hide his girlishness.
But on my way to Fanny’s salon, to the address on the card she’d slipped up my sleeve, I could hardly breathe at all. I curled in on myself, my shoulders low, the brim of my hat bent down. My heart beat fast. At the widows’ club, Fanny had seen me. She’d caught me in the act. And so had the Widow Waverley. I was certain everyone I passed could recognize, in my furtive looks this way and that, that I was guilty of being a woman in wolf’s clothing.
On the silk band of my bowler hat, I pinned a brooch shaped like a grape bunch, each grape a little round mirror, reflecting you back at yourself with a housefly’s many-eyed stare.
When I walked into Fanny’s parlor, all the many eyes that turned my way were turned back on them with my nifty pin.
There were probably twenty-some handsome, charming, chatty deviants in the room, all in suits and neckties, or men’s smoking jackets. My anxiety lifted in an instant. Now that I was here, I wanted to be among them. Before I could step into this crowd, I was stopped by a young woman (in a velvet robe and silk trousers, a tasseled fez atop her head, her hair in a marcel wave) sitting at a makeshift desk, who demanded of me my alias. And I gave it: Judge van Horne.
She tapped at her typewriter, lining up the name on a paper card. Her desk wobbled on its skinny legs with each peck of a key. When she handed me the card, I saw that I was now a member of “The Brothers of the Sisterhood.”
No sooner was the card placed in my hand than it was plucked away. Fanny was at my side, and she took the card and opened my suit coat enough to tuck it into my inside breast pocket. “It helps with the law,” Fanny said, “having a club. On the advice of our attorney, Mr. Firth, over there.” She nodded toward someone in a wing chair, who had a very convincing set of muttonchops. “We have to navigate these things.” She led me to the sideboard to fix me a drink, chipping off a chunk of ice with a pick and dropping it into some bourbon. She handed me the glass, and I clutched it tight in my grip. “The police like to go after people like us”—again Fanny thinking she knew who I was—“when they feel like flexing a muscle. So they charge you under a law that forbids people from gathering in disguises—probably some old holdover from the Boston Tea Party. Mostly they just raid the basement bar down on Bleecker Street to round up the fairies who get all dolled up. But lucky for us, the law allows for clubs to hold masquerade balls. So we have a club. And masquerades.” She did a little jig, a little vaudeville skip.
I’d had plenty of back-and-forth with big-city police in my day, and I doubted the paper card in my pocket would keep me out of the clink if the coppers came knocking.
I again scrutinized the facial hair of the club’s attorney. “So there are some men here?” I said.
Fanny nodded slow and hesitant. She said, “Yes,” then added, somewhat under her breath, “in a sense.”
I started nodding my head in rhythm with hers. “But all of us here are women,” I said.
“Yes,” she said. “In a sense.”
She linked her arm with mine and led me through the room, making quick introductions. Some members of the Brothers of the Sisterhood were clearly dressed only for the evening, as if this actually was just a masquerade. For others, the nights were extensions of their days—they likely wore their ties to work, to jobs as accountants and attorneys and shopkeepers. You could practically see the nicks on their chins where they’d cut themselves shaving. You could smell the sandalwood tonic that greased their curls back.
I was eventually introduced to a gangly fop named M (“Just the letter M,” he said, speaking at a quick clip, his words rolling over each other, “and believe it or not, it’s not short for nothing; it’s even on my baptismal certificate that way”), and our eyes kept catching all evening long, even as we got drawn into other conversations. He had long, spindly fingers and a habit of tapping at the air as he spoke, making it look like he was always in the middle of committing a flimsy magic act.
I met so many astonishing people that night, I might not have made all that much of meeting M had the evening ended sooner. But as I spoke to a gent named Agnes, I noticed M was speaking to someone behind me. M began lightly leaning his back against mine. I leaned back too, but I was careful to lean only at the exact same level of lightness. But then he leaned more. And I leaned more. Suddenly, I couldn’t hear a word Agnes was saying; I could only concentrate on the weight of M against me.
25
When Voss finally stirs, he finds me at the desk, dutifully forging his signature, sorting through the mess of papers.
“You’re going to need to be paid for all this drudgery” is the first thing he says to me. Though he has slept for hours, he’s still exhausted. He drops into a chair in the corner and rubs his temples. “Have you ever held a job? Did you ever get rich as a thief?”
“Not rich,” I say. “At least never nearly as rich as the people I robbed. But I did well enough. It all afforded me my retirement. In the city of my dreams.” Whenever I can, I bring up the charms of Paris. I know that will enliven him.
But he doesn’t seem to be listening. “I’ll have a secretary come up with a wage for you,” he says. “Just until we get the perfumery up and running. When we get things going again, you’ll be made a partner in that.”
“You’re being very generous to me,” I say.
He nods slow. He says, his voice hoarse, “You were up in Pascal’s laboratory,” as if he can tell from the sight of me that I’ve been snooping. Or maybe he smells it on me, the dust of the book weevils twitching up a sneeze.
One of the gifts of a thief is to be able to lie without flinching. As a matter of fact, a good thief becomes more confident in her half-truths than she is in her whole ones. But I don’t even need to lie—he has already mentioned the diary.
Before I can say anything, he says, “The bedroom happens to be right beneath the laboratory. And all the old floors in this house creak with every footstep. The noise woke me up a few times.”
While Voss slept, I managed to inspect the bindings of every book in Pascal’s lab. I never found the symbol. I say, “I glanced through some of the books, but I haven’t found anything like a diary. They’re all cookbooks, encyclopedias of botanicals, medical texts.”
“Oh, I’ve had someone go through all those books already,” he says, waving a hand in the air. “Surely you don’t think I would need a thief to find a book on a bookshelf.”
“I don’t suppose you would,” I say. He means to be condescending, but he has tipped his hand a little. He must be desperate to find the diary if he’s already had all the books skimmed.
When I ask if he’d like more tea, he pauses. He says that perhaps a doctor is a good idea after all. He asks if I know of someone. “Someone discreet,” he says. “Someone who will come to the house.”
“Oh, well, yes, yes, of course,” I tell him. “I know someone very discreet. I can bring him by in the morning.”
But I know of no do
ctors. I don’t even have one of my own. Like any criminal worth her salt, I almost never get sick beyond a sniffle. And when I do, I cure myself with my own pharmacopeia. I’ll live to be a hundred and ten if no one kills me first.
26
Zoé reclines on a fainting sofa in her bedroom, letting her ladies-in-waiting attend to her costume and makeup. She’s been sick for a few days, she says, and she looks it, so wispy-pale. This is the first time I’ve seen her since returning from Illiers. Her ladies are trying to keep her from fading into the ether, frantically pinking her pale cheeks, puffing powder onto her chin. They clip heavy earrings to her lobes, tighten the tiny buckles at the ankles of her shoes, weighing her down, strapping her in, before she floats away.
I hope to God she’s not getting poisoned too.
Zoé sent me a message by courier this morning: One of the girls here swears there’s a gargle that’ll put my notes back in my throat. It’s a creaky old recipe but surefire, she says. Do you have these things in your kitchen? Then a list.
No, I don’t have an ounce of any of it. Oil pressed from plum stones? Ashes of bugloss boiled in mead? It’s all the stuff of a witch’s physick.
I tell her this, and Zoé tells me the recipe is from an elderly courtesan who lives in one of the bordello’s back rooms, a kind of mascot who they prop up in the cabaret every night, with bright circles of red rouge at the tops of her cheeks. “The old woman says girls used to use it as a swift remedy for a syphilitic larynx,” she says, her voice soft and low. “But I’m not full of syphilis, just so you know. I just cry all the time. Cry myself hoarse.”
She dismisses her maids. After they’ve left the apartment, she moves from the fainting sofa to sit at her vanity, to finish painting her eyelids and her lips. Tonight she returns to the stage, and the cabaret has played it up in its posters and handbills: a portrait of her holding a white camellia, as if to suggest she’s the courtesan of Camille, tragic and riddled with syphilis after all.
I take from my bag what I concocted for her throat from my own recipe, a mist made of steeped mullein leaves, vinegar, honey, horseradish. I’ve bottled it in a perfume atomizer. She opens her mouth. I squeeze the bulb, spraying the mist in.
“There you go, doll,” I say, “good as new,” even as Zoé cringes and shudders from the taste of it.
Zoé gestures me closer. I lean in. “The diary?” she whispers.
But before I can say a word, she shushes me. “The walls of a bordello are paper thin,” she says. “On purpose. To keep the place noisy with love.”
“Should I put on music?” I say.
“Lutz broke the phonograph,” she says. “He gets very frustrated. Not with me. With the officers he serves. But I was playing a song he didn’t like, so he dropped his fist on the record, and he broke the whole works.”
I lean in more. “I don’t know where the diary is just yet,” I say. She nods, but I know it’s not what she wants to hear. I add, “But neither does Voss. So that’s good, at least.”
Zoé looks in the mirror, squints, as if she can’t quite see herself. When she speaks, her voice grows even weaker. “I read a friend’s diary when we were little girls,” she says, distracted. “I picked its little lock with a stickpin. There was nothing in it worth reading, but she was furious. We weren’t friends after that.” She starts to put on her lipstick. But then she stops abruptly. Glances up at my reflection in her mirror. “You don’t keep a diary, do you?”
She doesn’t want me keeping track of her secrets; she doesn’t want to show up in yet another diary for the Nazis to steal.
“Never have,” I say. But I did, for many years. Before I found Day, and Blue, I was a phantom. Whenever I felt lost or betrayed or uncertain, I simply became someone else somewhere else. For my every character I kept a diary, to keep my lies from tripping me up. I’d assign my aliases their own pain and heartbreak, and I’d commit them to memory. Sometimes my thievery required I linger, make friends, gain trust, so I needed stories to tell. I couldn’t bear to tell my own.
Zoé gestures me closer again. “What is Voss up to?” she says.
I whisper back: “He plans on running the perfume company himself. Eventually. He told me about the office he runs, a procurement office of sorts. He’s the head of a bureau that takes everything it can get its hands on.”
She returns to her reflection, and her lipstick. She sighs, but it’s not her typical sigh of glamorous boredom. She’s frustrated. “Not everything it can get its hands on,” she says, sharp. She tosses the lipstick onto the vanity table. With quick flicks of her wrist, she tugs a few tissues from the box, then dabs away some of the excess red from her lips. “Haven’t you figured it out? They’re not robbing all of Paris. They’re robbing the Jews of Paris.”
Of course this is true. But the uncertainty of it all, of the Nazis’ plots for Paris, can make it sometimes seem as if we’re all about to lose everything we own. They’ve turned out the lights. They’ve taken the food from our mouths. How can any of us be sure we won’t come home some night to find the locks changed? What happens when the Nazis rob all the banks, and we’re left with only our little account booklets of numbers in columns?
But “Yes,” I say to Zoé, because there’s no uncertainty about the Nazis’ sentiments when it comes to the Jews. And, really, it’s not just the Nazis’ sentiments. “I’ve been thinking lately about my life in Manhattan,” I say as I rummage through my bag, looking for the right perfume for the night. “When I was starting out as a thief, the women of high society were my clients and my victims. I spun around in their circles when I could. And I saw it happening there too. They didn’t allow Jews in their clubs, or their resorts. Or their colleges.”
“Do you have any camellia perfume?” Zoé asks.
“I have some that I call camellia, at least,” I say. I take her upturned wrist, and I dab some on. “The camellia flower itself has barely a whiff of scent.” That’s something else I remember about the rich women—they often sought the perfumes of flowers that didn’t smell. I guess it seemed exclusive to wear something so ethereal. “So many of the rich families in America consider their wealth a kind of royal bloodline,” I say. “They were entitled to their every dollar, to hear them tell it. The Jews were from somewhere else, taking business that should be theirs. It’s a wonder they didn’t start taking everything from the Jews back then. They would have thought robbing the Jews would just be an act of taking their money back.” I help Zoé with the clasp of her charm bracelet. “It’s a wonder that things didn’t…escalate.”
“Yes,” she says, standing, going to her full-length mirror, pinching wrinkles from her gown. “Aren’t we lucky.” She rolls her eyes. “Over there, kicking the Jews around is still just sport.” She takes a deep breath so she can sigh again. She studies her reflection. She cocks a hip, bends her wrist, practicing the postures of fatigue. “Lutz somehow arranged to have the stage filled with bouquets of white camellias for the show tonight.”
“Have you ever come across perfume injections?” I ask. “Subcutaneous perfume? Was that anything your father ever sold? Was that all just a myth about Paris?”
“To perfume the blood?” she says. “How gruesome. Don’t give Lutz any ideas.” She holds her wrist to her nose, to smell the scent I put there. She says, wistful again, “Is the house the same as it always was?” She looks over at me with those little-girl eyes.
I say, “I’ve never been inside before now.”
“You can see so much of my mother in it,” she says.
I never knew her mother, but at the mention of her, I, too, can imagine her in the house. The tapestries and wallpapers, the sofas and chairs, are all in powder blues and rose pinks and sea greens, like dusty meringues in a pastry-shop window. Zoé grew up among antiques, probably tiptoeing across the Aubusson carpets woven with portraits of unicorns in fields of thistle. She sat in the walled-in rose g
arden behind the house hosting tea parties of her own, with dolls with human-hair pompadours and satin ball gowns, with felt mice in bow ties infesting her paper macarons and glass candy. Such a life.
Before I retired to Paris, I never had a house. I lived in hotels. I lived in women’s dormitories, or men’s dormitories, depending on the city I was in. I’ve rented cottages and beach cabanas. I’ve slept in desert tents. The few belongings I had I kept in a steamer trunk in a locker at a railroad station in Manhattan. But if my house were taken from me now, I’d feel lost at sea.
27
At Café Roche late that night, Day arrives still dressed for the cabaret, in a pearlescent gown. “Oyster,” she says, and at first I think she means the pattern of circles hammered into the satin, but she’s talking about the color.
“In the American issues of Vogue,” Day says, “they compare everything to something to eat. Nothing’s brown, it’s ‘yam.’ Or ‘candied yam.’ Or ‘honeyed’ something or other. A dress hasn’t had a leg-of-mutton sleeve in fifty years, but all of a sudden they’re back.”
“The Americans are flaunting their riches,” Blue says. “That’s what that is.” He peeks into the paper bag Day dropped onto the table. She has brought us food again, this time a roasted bird as paltry as a parakeet.
I left the bordello before Zoé’s big return to the stage, so I ask Day how it went. “Her voice broke and cracked a time or two,” she says, “but everyone’s always so in love with her.” Day smiles and rolls her eyes, both jealous of Zoé and charmed by her.
I wait for her to sit before I get down to business. I say, “I need a doctor.”
Day goes completely still in the middle of taking off her coat, one sleeve off, one sleeve on. “Right now?” she says. “What’s wrong?”
The Perfume Thief Page 14