“Oh no no no, not for me. Oskar Voss…well, he…I guess he…he must have…well, he caught something in Illiers, you see. I need a doctor who might…who might be persuaded to make a diagnosis that will keep him in bed a while longer.” I can’t bring myself to admit to drugging Voss. No one needs to know all my methods. “I thought maybe the brothel has a discreet doctor it uses…one who is perhaps somewhat disreputable…who might be paid to tell Voss to stay in bed. To drink tea. A doctor who might…overlook whatever might be really wrong.”
Day and Blue exchange a glance. A look of concern, I suppose. And though their concern should trouble me, I’m pleased that they might worry about me some. Day says, “Any doctor curing whores of the clap has the most integrity of all. He’s keeping Paris sexy, even if he might be mocked for haunting a cathouse.”
“I suppose that’s right,” I say.
“I’ll do it,” Blue says. “I’ll wear my tweed jacket.” He runs his fingers through his thick curls. “You can cut my hair.”
“You can’t be a doctor,” I say. “You look like a schoolboy.” But an actor isn’t a bad idea at all. And Blue has made it sound like the whole troupe of them have dipped their toes in espionage. “What about one of the other actors?” I say.
“Monsieur Rémy,” Blue says without hesitation, with a gasp of awe and respect. His mind on covert activity, he leans back to show off the bicycle chain around his waist, strung through his belt loops, something he learned about from Félix. “I don’t know how to use it yet, but the idea is you pull on it, give it a few quick twists”—he pantomimes all this for me—“and you bring the chain before yourself, wrapped around your fists, and you strangle a German when you get half the chance.”
Paris’s famous souterrain, its under-city of catacombs and railway lines, and its underground veins of limestone quarries, is crawling now with covert Americans, Blue says. “There are doorways in the theater basement that lead right into it all,” he says. He makes it sound like there’s a whole other war down below, among the rats and skeletons, playing out in the light of lanterns and coal miners’ headlamps.
Blue says that Félix tells him the homosexuals are at the heart of the Resistance. “We’ve been driven out of our nightclubs,” he says, “so we lurk in the shadows.”
I’ve not seen Félix at our house since the night I walked in on them together in the shop, but the boy is clearly much in Blue’s thoughts. I want to issue a warning, but I don’t know how to word it. I know Blue so well, and I know the twists in his romantic imagination. If I tell him that Félix is too dangerous, he’ll just be all the more drawn to him.
“Eat,” Day says to Blue, nodding toward the bird. “And don’t let anyone see that chain around your waist. You’re less apt to choke anybody with it than you are to get choked by it.”
I’m glad she’s being motherly so I don’t have to. He might listen to Day but will think me a scold. And a hypocrite. I should never have spent all these years telling him my own stories of crime. He’s far too tender for such a life, especially with so many enemies in our midst.
When I’m with Zoé, I’m ready to take on the Germans barefisted. But when I’m with Day and Blue, I fantasize about all the ways I could sneak them away, and maybe go with them. I don’t know anymore what’s bravery and what’s cowardice. Maybe my brain has finally gone scrambled from all my shifting identities over the years.
But as I poison Voss’s tea, I could be poisoning my own as well. If I’m caught, we’re all caught.
“You need to eat too,” I tell Day. “You’re wasting away to nothing.”
“Am I?” she says, smiling, kittenish, straightening up in her hammered satin.
“Eat,” Blue says.
“I don’t want to spoil my appetite for all the fine food we’ll eat when the war is over.” With that, she glances upward and begins to reminisce. “Ah, the ortolans, before the war,” she says, speaking of the teeny-tiny birds served on paper doilies. “I’d sometimes order them if I was at the right place. I knew a chef who had them delivered alive in a cage, and he’d suffocate them himself by sticking their heads in brandy.”
“Ghastly,” I say. “I’d rather starve.”
Day taunts me. She says, “Oh no, it’s delicious. It’s so delicate, you can taste its fear. You can even taste the fatal brandy that choked it.”
“You’re wicked,” I tell Day, and she smacks her lips, blowing me a kiss.
“This isn’t that kind of bird,” Blue says. “This handsome fella died for his country, a hero. Feeding the hungry. Maybe I should eat him standing up, in salute.”
“And besides, I’m not wasting away,” Day says. “I still need to drop a size to fit into a new dress I spent too much on. A velvet dress. A red one. Candy-apple red, I guess you’d say.”
“Kidney pie red,” Blue says.
“Medium-rare filet mignon red,” I say.
“Roasted wild boar red,” Day says.
We go on for a beat or two more: venison bourguignon red, ratatouille red. Blue wields the little bird’s drumstick like he’s Henry VIII with a peacock leg.
28
The concierge knows me well already, though she’s let me in and out only a time or two. And she never looks up, so she can’t know my face. Her back’s too bad. She recognizes the rhythm of my footsteps, though. She tells me I have an uneven step. My right foot falls lighter than my left. “I can even see it in the wear of your shoe,” she says.
I suppose if you go through life doubled over, you learn your way around by the cracks in the sidewalk. I’ve long known I have one leg slightly longer than the other. But I’ve somehow never noticed the wear of my shoe. This worn-down heel seems like something that could have got me caught years ago, if there’d ever been an expert detective on my case. I wonder how many other telltale signs I’ve signaled without knowing. Every day of my old age, I learn I’ve been luckier than I’ve realized. I’ve been more visible than I thought.
I’ve brought along Monsieur Rémy from Blue’s theater, an actor who has played Iago, Claudius, Caliban, all of Shakespeare’s villains. But he brings to this stage a bedside manner and a stern finality to his diagnosis. “Get some rest. Drink some tea,” he tells Voss, while packing up his stethoscope. “This flu that’s going around won’t give up. It holds on tight. And it’ll get worse before it gets better. I’ve seen a hundred cases of it. But you’ll be on the other side of it soon enough.”
Voss isn’t in bed; we’re in a shabby room I hadn’t discovered in my meandering. He sits on the house’s most battered sofa, a threadbare camelback with flattened cushions. The velvet, a shade of dusty peach fuzz, has been worn to a sheen.
This room, where all the furniture went when it fell into decline—the chairs and settees with broken springs that poke, a chifforobe with drawers that won’t close, a lamp with a shade of stained-glass roses, its petals chipped—this was the room Pascal liked best, according to a magazine article Voss read. Leaning against the walls are paintings and prints that once hung elsewhere. Weevil-eaten books with brittle bindings are stacked here and there. On one patch of wall not only is the wallpaper peeled away, but the plaster’s gone too, exposing pink bricks.
Despite the lab with cabinets full of bottles and vials, and shelves full of books, and sinks with running water, Voss imagines that it was here, in this humble space, that Pascal liked to contemplate his art. “He must have enjoyed the room for its light, and because its windows looked out over the Luxembourg Gardens,” he tells me.
I’m inclined to believe it. A wicker basket full of origami sits in one corner. Zoé told me that whenever her father was stumped by a scent he couldn’t quite capture, he folded paper cranes, bats, swans. Or he cut out paper dolls and made little dresses for them with soap wrappers. Or he’d shuffle around a deck of cards, creating a complicated game. Games, puzzles, folding, cutting, they all
sent his mind clicking along. The scents and synthetics for his perfumes would occur to him, all adding up, as he fiddled with something else, as he played music, as he smoked a cigar.
I see the doctor out and fix some tea. I return to the upstairs room and set the tray on the low table before Voss’s sofa. I sit in the chair across from him. I lean forward and push his cup and saucer toward him.
He leans forward to push the cup and saucer back.
“I’m sick of your teas,” he says. He squints with a twinge of pain.
The pockets under Voss’s eyes are growing more plump and more gray. His pallor is pale yellow. He works his jaw around, his tongue clicking with a dry smack. He’s unpresentable.
I lean forward again. I push the saucer forth with my fingertip. “The doctor said you must,” I say.
I could never kill anyone, no matter what my dossiers might say. I know I couldn’t. I’m not a murderer, but we are at war. And if Voss died, would anyone know? Has anybody else but me been around?
I fantasize. If he were out of the way, could I linger on, live as Voss, find the diary, rescue Pascal’s perfumes? I sign Voss’s name better than he does. I could come and go in his oxfords, with their heavy heels, and the concierge, with her eyes always to the floor, wouldn’t flinch. I’d just be sure to walk without favoring one step over the other, since she seems to know my uneven missteps so well.
Voss finally picks up his teacup, and he glances down into it. “Proust writes about those little slips of Japanese paper you drop in a bowl of water or cup of tea,” he says. “They unfold, open, bloom…into flowers or birds. Or houses. Have you ever seen such a thing?” I shake my head. Then, out of nowhere, he says, “Proust’s mother was Jewish.” He offers this with a lilt in his voice, as if to defend himself. “And so is Monsieur Pascal, of course.”
“Where is Pascal, anyway?” I say. I’ve been too worried to ask. I haven’t wanted to seem too invested in the answer.
He says nothing. He puts the tea down and picks up a basket from near his feet on the floor. He overturns it atop the coffee table between us. Bottles of Pascal’s perfumes spill out. He says, “You’ve probably been asked, in your shop, by a lady or two to copy Pascal’s perfumes. And sell it to them at half the price. Hm?”
“Yes, I’ve been asked,” I say. “I can do it, but I don’t. I have some pride.” He raises an eyebrow at me. “Sometimes I will copy a perfume that isn’t made anymore. For old ladies, mostly.” I add, giving my voice a sting of bitterness, “And I’ll happily copy the perfumes I invented for Pascal. Because that’s not really copying Pascal, is it. If I invented it?”
I’ve already told him I worked with Pascal on three scents: Escroquerie, of course, but also Bien Adoré (wild plum, sweet willow, curdled sugar), and Envoûté (fire, white thyme, dark loam). Though I had nothing to do with them, they are my very favorites of his, and the most defining of his genius, so I’m happy to steal the credit.
None of these on the table are any of those perfumes. I’m to hold each bottle beneath my nose and recite what’s in it. Or what I think is in it. I toss in a few things that aren’t, just to keep the recipes out of reach. Ylang-ylang, cicely, I say. Voss writes it all down in a stenographer’s pad.
“I can’t take another sniff,” he says, though he hasn’t put a nostril to any of it. He’s been sitting upright, but he now slouches down, the back of his head against the back of the sofa. When he opens his eyes again, he looks over to the side, lifts his chin, gesturing toward the wall.
“What do you think of that?” he says. I twist around to look; on the floor, leaning against the wall, are paintings, some with frames, some without. He seems to be asking me about the famous one, of two women from the waist up, naked, their skin milk white.
One of the women pinches the nipple of the other.
“The women are taking a bath,” he says. “Together. Why do you think that is? To save bathwater?”
I turn back around to face him; he’s smiling at me, amused by his joke. “Yes, I suppose it’s only a matter of bathwater,” I say, smiling too. “But I don’t know anything about the painting. I know it only from Gabrielle.” Though it’s a woman’s name, Gabrielle is a fragrance Pascal designed to be worn by men. The image of this painting adorns the box. The bottle, clear glass, is in the shape of an armless torso, resembling the woman whose nipple gets pinched.
Her frosted-glass head is the bottle’s lid, the stopper. To apply the scent, the gentleman beheads the lady and daubs her severed neck at his jugular.
“When I first saw the painting here,” he says, “I actually wondered if it might be the original. Certainly Pascal’s rich enough to own such a thing. But no. The original’s owned by the Louvre. And the back of this one has a stamp. It’s a registered copy, by the students who set up their easels in the museum.”
“It’s a very good copy,” I say.
After a moment, Voss says, “Do you…wear Gabrielle?” He raises an eyebrow.
Even sick, he’s being sly. I know what he’s getting at. Ever since the scent first appeared in shops, in that box with the tweaked nipple, it’s been a secret message whispered among the lesbian women of Paris. And eventually the lesbian women of America too. And elsewhere in the world. If you’re out and about, and you smell this gentlemen’s scent on a lady, you know that lady is a ladies’ lady.
And if you fancy a lady who isn’t wearing the scent but you hope she’s the type who would, you simply lean in toward her neck and say, “Is that Gabrielle you’re wearing?” If it isn’t, and she is, she’ll say yes.
All of this code, which was never Pascal’s intention as far as I know, was revolutionary in my little world. Suddenly, we could all hide in plain sight.
That is, until we were all found out. By the mid 1930s, it had become a euphemism used against us. Ohhh, she wears Gabrielle, people will say with a sneer, when they can’t bear to wrap their tongue around any other words for it.
“You’re not answering me,” Voss says. “I asked you if you wear Gabrielle. It’s a simple question.”
“That’s not a question a gentleman asks a lady,” I say. “And if a gentleman does ask, a lady doesn’t answer.” I take a sip of my own untainted tea. “And it’s not a ‘simple question.’ ”
“That’s all the answer I need,” he says.
My heartbeat picks up. I try to swallow, but my throat’s gone dry.
Voss leans forward to pick up the cup. It’s a relief to see him drinking the tea. He trusts me after all, it seems. “I simply want to know,” he says. “That’s all. I mean no harm. I’m your friend, Charlie. You should know that by now.” He takes another sip. “And I’m drinking your tea, like you asked.” He returns the cup to the saucer, and the saucer to the table. “And we’re not so unalike, you and me.”
“Oh?” I say.
“You can’t see it in my face now, perhaps,” he says, “but when I was young, I was as pretty as Lutz is. Prettier. When I was a boy, people mistook me for a girl. Long eyelashes. Soft eyes. Gentle voice. I was teased, but I’m grateful for the taunts. Gave me my fighting spirit.”
His voice weakens to a squeak when he says fighting spirit. And I feel my confidence spike again. He sees in me a kinship. I suspect he’s never told anyone of growing up girlish.
I can settle in.
“We should get back to the perfumes,” I say, and I reach for the next bottle.
But Voss takes from the pocket of his smoking jacket a bottle of Gabrielle. He hands it across to me. I know he’s got his eyes on me, so I’m careful in how I handle it. I don’t want to give him any reason to mock me further, so I’m mindful not to even rub my thumb over the bottle’s breasts.
I open the bottle and hold the head-shaped stopper to my nose. The bottle is clear, but the liquid is green, to suggest absinthe, Paris’s most beloved and most outlawed addiction. In the
perfume, I smell myrtle pepper, black currant, burnt coffee, with only an afterthought of something floral: linden and peony.
“And a hint of poison,” Voss says.
My throat closes again, and I can’t swallow. Has he poisoned my tea?
But then he takes another sip of the tea I served him.
He says, pleased with himself, “The woman in the painting behind you. Gabrielle d’Estrées. She was poisoned.”
I return Gabrielle’s head to her body. I hold the bottle in my open palm, and I study the cold serenity in her glass face.
He says, “And here’s where it gets interesting,” and I pray, Please, God, don’t let it get interesting. “Some say she was poisoned by perfume.” Voss sits up straighter. He’s newly invigorated, some pink spotting his cheeks. He holds out his hand, wiggles his fingers, wanting the bottle back. I pass it over. He removes the stopper and puts it to his nose. He dabs the stopper to the skin of his wrist. “Gabrielle was to marry the king of France. In 1599, or some such. But instead of marrying the king, she died a horrible, violent death. On the very night before her wedding, no less. That chalk-white skin in the painting? It went black and blue in an instant. Like thunderclouds rolling through. They say she was poisoned by a wedding gift. A pair of perfumed gloves. The perfume was poison, and it seeped into her skin when she tried the gloves on.”
“Seems unlikely,” I say.
“How so?”
“Why would she open her gifts before the wedding?” I say.
“That’s what you think this story is about, Nebraska Charlie?” he says with a pitying tilt of his head. “A breach of etiquette?”
“Who poisoned her, then?”
“Actually, now,” he says, “that…that is where the story gets interesting. Our king could not marry our dear Gabrielle, of course, because she was dead, so he married a Medici. Did the Medicis, the world’s great poisoners, commission the poisonous perfume to begin with? Of course they did. And, now, wait, wait, here’s where the story gets interesting, actually: the perfume was created by Pascal’s ancestors. His family is a family of perfumers that goes back generations. They had royal decrees; they bottled perfumes for monarchs. They had access to rare materials.” When I say nothing, he says, in a lower tone, “I know what you’re thinking.”
The Perfume Thief Page 15