Does he? I won’t suggest that it’s all a myth, that the fragrances of the Parfumerie Chamberry began in a barbershop less than a century ago, that all the perfume houses of Paris have fictional histories that work them into the warp and weave of kingdoms and queendoms.
“You’re thinking it’s an extravagant theory,” he says. “You think it’s precious. But Pascal must have had it in mind when he created Gabrielle. And if it isn’t fiction, and Pascal’s family actually was involved, what if there are clues in the perfume? Clues to the past?”
Certainly some of Pascal’s perfumes delighted in riddles and something called a calembour, a French pun. My French is too feeble to fully appreciate them all, but his very simplest is his perfume Allô, a play on à l’eau, at the water, a scent that suggests mist and linens in a seaside hotel.
“What do you want from it?” I say. Is he striving for a specific connection between perfume and power, something to prove? Hitler may not be moved by perfume, but poison will touch his very soul.
Voss holds his wrist to his nose, and he grimaces, the scent of Gabrielle overwhelming him, dropping him back into his slouch. He falls into a funk. He lets out a heavy sigh. “I’m just asking for a minute of your imagination, Charlie,” he says. He sighs again. “Anyway, it’s more likely it was her unborn child who murdered her. Gabrielle was pregnant. It went wrong.” He adds, “And they’re sisters.”
“Who?”
He nods again toward the painting. “Gabrielle d’Estrées et une de ses soeurs. That’s what they call the painting. They’re sisters, not lovers. So Gabrielle…she doesn’t likely wear Gabrielle, if you know what I mean.”
“I do know what you mean,” I say.
He pushes himself up from the sofa, his hand at his stomach. “Enough of that,” he says, with a groan of disappointment. “I’m going to do a few hours of work at my desk.” He cringes again with a jolt of pain. He holds up one finger, signaling for me to wait for it to pass. We wait.
I put my own teacup aside. “I’ll help you to your office,” I say.
“No, I’ll be fine,” he says, but he nonetheless takes my arm as we leave the room. I lead the way down the stairs, and he puts one hand on my shoulder.
After I’ve left him in his office, I turn, then turn again, and I walk right up to a reflection of myself, in a mirror in a gold frame. I notice I need a haircut. My hair is standing on end in places, from the gusts of wet wind, I guess. I lick my fingertips and attempt to pat it down. My sweet farm girl. I love all your cowlicks and rooster tails, M told me as I sat up naked in bed on what was most certainly a Sunday morning, the sunlight filling the room and stirring the dust.
I lift my chin. Tug on my necktie, tightening the knot. I smooth out the wrinkles of my shirt. I was never a pretty girl, but when I set my square chin just so, with my lips at half a smirk, I’m not a bad-looking chap. And other than those years that my mother stitched ugly frills onto my secondhand overalls, I’ve always had a handsome wardrobe. I’ve never been without the town’s best tailor, whatever town I happened to be in. A glance in a mirror almost always ups my confidence.
I walk to the stairs holding Voss’s bottle of Gabrielle that I picked from his pocket. He won’t suspect me. He’s in too much of a dither. I run my thumb over Gabrielle’s smooth breasts as I tip the bottle to dampen the dauber. I pluck off her head and touch the dauber to the back of each ear. I touch it to my wrists and to my neck, filling the air with the scent of my theft.
29
Zoé has her own dressing room backstage at the cabaret, and I can’t quite find her among the bouquets and baskets of camellias.
The socialites of Manhattan I knew long ago had read French novels in which women killed themselves through floral asphyxiation, by filling a room with lilies and gardenia, shutting the door, and stuffing the keyhole with a handkerchief. My clients longed for someone to bottle such a delicious death.
I find my way through the flowers to Zoé at her vanity. Day’s here too, sitting on the vanity top, legs crossed, leaning back against the mirror.
Neither says hello. They both seem morose. Zoé is even touching a hankie to her eyes, like she’s wiping away mascara after a crying jag.
So I’m even more eager to please, I suppose, and to report some progress. “The painting of Gabrielle d’Estrées,” I say. “How did your father come to have that?”
“You’ve been up in his room,” Zoé says. Her voice is even more feeble and scratched than it was yesterday. But maybe she’s just wrestling with a bout of hay fever. She’s even decked out in camellias herself now, with corsages pinned across the bust of her white gown, and more flowers flouncing down the length of it. The virgin bride of the brothel.
“I’m getting to know the house, yes,” I say.
She shrugs. “I don’t know where the painting came from,” she says.
“And the perfume,” I say. “Gabrielle?”
This perks them both up. Zoé looks up and over to Day, to smirk, to give her a wink. “I know nothing about that,” she says. “Do you wear Gabrielle, Day, darling?” She drums her fingers on Day’s knee.
Day winks back at her. She says, “Well, I don’t wear Gabrielle myself. Not regularly, anyway. Known lots of girls who have. How about you, Clementine?”
I play along. “I knew the girls who wore Gabrielle even before there was any Gabrielle to wear.”
I take the bottle from my pocket. Off with her head. I breathe in the perfume. The scent takes me back to the lives we led, in the years just after the War Before, when you could pitch a revolution by dancing with too much leg. We were the degenerates of the twenties. We didn’t take to the underground to resist; we took to the streets, and even to the movie screens, in silver, where girly men kohled their eyes and fluttered their lashes. Sure, we got our own black eye or two, but we refused to believe we were building the scaffolding toward our hangman’s noose. We were looking back at our war dead and remembering to live life. Their brave souls possessed us.
Now we creep and whisper. Every risk seems either too weak or too fatal.
I tell Zoé about Voss’s giddiness over the Medicis, his speculations about her family’s ancestors, and the perfumed gloves. I tell her his theories about how the Parfumerie Chamberry found its path to success: political assassination. I’m a little giddy about it myself, but I only manage to drop Zoé back into her foul mood.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” she snaps. “All that poison and greed. He’s just shylocking.”
I didn’t expect her to take offense, though I see now why she might. Shylocking. I’ve never heard the expression before, and I’m not sure I’ve heard her right. But it makes sense. Shylock, Shakespeare’s Jewish villain. Yes, perhaps Voss wants to believe the perfumery got to where it did by taking pounds of flesh along the way. Oh, the corruption of Jews.
I certainly won’t defend Voss, but I do think he’s at least somewhat moved by the romance of the intrigue, and by this tantalizing key to French history. And it all draws me closer to the diary, though I won’t defend that either, these instincts of mine. I can’t always convince people of my sixth sense. When you have a special talent, you like to think it’s God-given, some bit of magic that can’t be taught. You have an ear for it. A tingling in your bones. I’ve certainly boasted of my instincts to Blue over the years. You can learn the tricks of a cardsharp, but a con game calls for a bedevilment you need to be born into.
Like my little birth defect—the crooked hip that gives me that uneven step. All these years, I’ve been walking through rooms with one shoe lifted slightly off the floor.
Zoé begins to weep. The sobs come upon her with a sudden shiver that works up her spine. She lowers her head, puts her hands gently to the flowers at her chest. At first I wonder if this talk of Shakespeare has reminded her of Ophelia, the perfume her father bottled for her, his apology. Maybe she’s
feeling sentimental, or afraid, maybe thinking again of what will happen if her father’s diary tells everything about her.
Day puts her hand on Zoé’s shoulder. “We’ve been crying most of the day,” Day says to me. She then tells me a few of the girls have gone missing from the bordello. Girls who were Jewish, who thought they were keeping it secret.
“Which girls?” I say.
“Charlotte,” she says. “Pauline.”
I can’t quite picture them, but I know the names.
When I start to say something, I realize I’ve clenched my teeth. I open my mouth, and my jaw trembles. If I speak, my voice will tremble too.
I thought that Boulette, in all her dastardly conspiring, was at least keeping her girls safe.
Sometimes when you’re cornered, when you feel your most defeated, is when you’re at your most invincible. You’re angry. You’re suddenly able to see around corners and to peer into the dark. I’ve weaseled out of many impossible predicaments when heady with an adrenaline rush.
I can’t let anything happen to Day, or to Zoé, or to Blue. That bicycle chain around Blue’s waist makes him seem even more delicate. But maybe I can teach him instinct. At the very least, he can practice my steps.
I will beat Voss at whatever game we’re playing.
Though I don’t quite recall the girls who’ve gone missing from Boulette’s, I do know them by the scents I made. For Charlotte, apple and chamomile. For Pauline, pear and almond.
30
When I first met M at the Brothers of the Sisterhood meeting, he sidled up to me at a sideboard. He took a cigar from a box, among plates of glazed apricots, gingerbread, candied pecans. He had a cutter in his pocket shaped like a woman’s legs in mother-of-pearl bloomers—he put the tip of the cigar in the blades between the knees and squeezed them together.
“Let’s skedaddle,” he whispered in my ear, chomping on the end of the unlit cigar. “Snip-snap.”
He gave me his arm, and I took it.
M was very boyish with his long-legged strut. I suspected his trousers were purposefully cuffed an inch or two too high to show off a pair of dazzling socks—they were a lumpy lamb’s wool dyed tomato red, woven with strings of tinsel, to give them snippets of flash.
“So tell me who you are,” he said once we were outside in the cold autumn air. “What do you do with your time, when you’re not on my arm? How do you while away your days without me?”
“I write poetry,” I said.
“Is that so?” he said, a lilt in his voice, as if I’d said I tatted lace or played whist.
“Well, no, not really. I write down the poems that someone else recites. I’m a poet’s secretary.” I waited, and I said, “What do you do?”
“I drink tea,” he said.
“That’s not work,” I said.
“It absolutely is,” he said. “I’m a tea inspector. A taster. To assure quality. To prevent deceptive leaves from blowing into the country.” He stopped for a moment to touch a match to the tip of the cigar at his lips, huffing and puffing at it to get the fat end of it smoking.
“I would think cigars would be bad for a tea-taster’s taste buds,” I said.
“Yes, you might think that, but you’d be wrong,” M said. “Good tobacco stimulates and refines the tongue.” He gave me a wink, then led me around a corner and into Washington Square Park.
“I’m picturing you in your office in a white linen suit,” I said. “With your best china. A peppermint-striped tablecloth.”
“No, no, no, it’s all too dreary,” he said. “A dim, damp room near the docks, much sipping and spitting. The oldest of us are jittery and peaked.” M explained that to reject a foreign tea tainted with lead and wormwood, or with Venetian red, French chalk, Prussian blue, the taster had to taste it first. Even if you only dipped your tongue in, the poison took its toll. “I’m doomed,” he said.
Then he said, “They say that this blue haze you see in the streetlight”—the smoke lifting from his lips, mixing with the frost of our breath—“is the spirits of the dead that got rustled up. This used to be a graveyard.”
I memorized everything along the way. The cinnamon-pepper smell of dry leaves still barely on their branches. Apples freshly pressed for cider. The glow of a church’s illuminated cross.
The south side of the park was lined with tenements and cafés, while just across the way were the grand manses of old families. There seemed to be a party winding down on the rich side, the end of a wedding, a crowd of men in black coats and women in puffed sleeves spilling from a house on the corner, and a line of carriages, cabs, trotting up to the door to carry them off.
“We’re in luck,” M said, his words tumbling forward again. “We need a ride to the Bowery. I’m too feeble to walk. Poor me, I’ve got bones in my legs.” He looked at me, then took his cigar from his lips and put it to mine. “You need this for your costume. You’re going to get us arrested, in that man’s suit, with those beautiful eyes and those beautiful lips.” But M was being playful. He tugged down on the brim of my hat. “No one can trust a man that pretty.”
We wove in and through and about the elegant crowd, M shaking men’s hands with a firm grip, tipping his hat at ladies, pretending to know everyone. As a tipsy old couple was about to step up to the next carriage in line, M tugged the wife into a waltz and spun her dizzy as the husband wheezed with laughter. (“A girl with a cigar!” the old man said, laughing in my face, before taking the cigar and smoking it himself.) Finally, M dropped the wife into the husband’s arms and insisted they finish the dance themselves. We then leapt into the carriage. M barked out to the driver the cross streets, and the horses capered off.
“They’re all smashed on fizz,” M said, and he took from his coat a half-empty bottle of champagne he’d somehow lifted in the hullabaloo. He took a swig from the bottle, and I took one too.
And then he kissed me.
31
The Bowery, at that late hour, was a particularly wicked neck of the woods. We elbowed our way into the music hall, and up a rickety set of steps to stand in the upper gallery, to look down at Thistle Bishop, billed as a “female impersonator” who was “pretty enough to kiss.”
That may have been so at one time, but Thistle had had a long career of farewell performances, milking his retirement well into old age. He once-upon-a-time sang with a warbling falsetto, M told me, but his voice was now coarse and husky.
But before we even saw a single hair of Thistle’s wig, a buxom woman in a tuxedo and top hat took the stage to rattle off an introduction. Ladieeeeeeees and gentlemen, she sang out.
M leaned his shoulder into mine. He put his lips to my ear. “Which are you?” he said.
“Which what am I?” I said, my lips at his ear.
“Lady? Or gentleman?”
I paused in thought, but I wasn’t thinking about what the answer was so much as what the answer should be. What would M want to hear?
I put my fingers on M’s chin, and my mouth to his ear again. “Lady,” I said.
He pointed his thumb at his own chest, and he said in my ear, “Gentleman.” He then kissed my ear, and my cheek, and my neck.
In between some of the bawdiest bawdy-house hymns I’d ever heard, Thistle made about twenty costume changes behind a curtain, in and out of dramatic opera gowns of velvet and satin and crepe, fringed with ostrich feathers and chinchilla and lace quilling.
At the end of the show, he lectured on dress reform for women, discussing the treachery of corsets and bustles, defining the weight and restriction of women’s clothes as a masculine tyranny. His speech was impassioned, and convincing, but it nonetheless stirred up giggles. As he spoke, he began undoing fasts and buttons, until he stood only in corset and petticoat. His last gesture was to pull off his wig with a defiant and victorious yank, to boisterous applause. Everyone was shocked, thoug
h the shock was what they’d come for.
Outside the theater door, a small boy in a cap sold paper boutonnieres. M bought one for a coin. He put his hand to my breast pocket to pin it on, and he concentrated, his brow furrowed. His eyelashes were thick and dark, and I wanted to feel them blinking against my cheek.
But when he finished with the pinning, M turned away, to step into the street. He waved at an approaching cab, a fairy-tale surrey drawn forward without a single horse. The driver stood at the back of it, perched, watching over the cab’s canopy, but with no whip in hand, no reins. A phantom carriage. A magic carpet.
“Electric,” M said. The electric cab company wasn’t even yet licensed, and it had only begun to usher its battery-powered surreys and hansoms into the streets, one by one, with their low hum, a bzz-bzz-bzz. I’d heard rumors of people seeing the cabs, or even catching a ride, but they were mostly a wonder. I somehow wasn’t surprised M could summon one from the night. Eventually I would think of M as part of the city’s machinery, one of its very engineers. He was so in time with its ticking that I suspected he had never followed a map; I imagined Manhattan’s map most likely followed his paths and ramblings.
M took my hand and helped me up into the cab’s seat, and I sat back, like in a rickshaw, nothing before me but a footboard. M kept hold of my hand and asked for my address, then called it up to the driver. As the driver eased away, M walked alongside. “I’ll write you a letter,” he said, “now that I know where you live.”
“Will you remember?” I said.
M began to compose a catchy song on the spot, my address the only lyrics. “I’ll sing it all the way home,” he said.
The Perfume Thief Page 16