He stepped up his pace. His fingers unlinked from mine only after the cab sped up.
I had time to settle into a swoon, and to marvel at the night, and to watch the stars overhead get jostled with every crack and bump we hit in the road. M’s song caught in my head, and I sang it too. I put a blanket across my knees as the night got colder. I held the paper flower to my nose, and I could swear it blossomed with the scent of M’s burnt tobacco and warm whiskey breath. I licked my lips and still tasted his kiss—sweet from the sugared tip of his cigar.
I also had his ring on my finger, a gold snake coiling around four times, little rubies for eyes. I’d slipped it from his hand as the cab pulled away. I did not steal it. I only borrowed it for the night.
32
I tug the coiled snake from my ring finger, my knuckle swollen, my skin baggy on the bone. I’m in the kitchen alone. I place the snake next to Oskar Voss’s china cup—plink—on the saucer, and I fill the cup with untainted tea. I’ve been easing him off the poison again, so that I can give him more later.
It’s been a few days since he spoke of his interest in Gabrielle. I’ve quickly grown impatient and weary. But telling him about M has been an unexpected tonic. For him and for me. Instead of dreading it as I did when he first asked for stories from my past, I’ve come to appreciate their effect on him. When I’m talking, Voss is in my dominion.
I carry the tea set from the kitchen to the room upstairs, the spoons clattering, my hands shaking from the weight of the tray. I keep stepping on the backs of my trouser cuffs; my pants are sagging and loose. I wear a bulky old sweater the color of smoke, and I’ve pulled the sleeves up over my hands because of the terrible cold. The Paris winter has gotten so bitter, it’s even biting the Germans in the homes they stole.
I’m afraid for Voss to get better, but I’m afraid for him to stay ill. I’ve gone back and forth on this. One day I’ll dose him just a drop or two, to steal just an hour or an evening from him, and the next I’m convinced unless he’s well, he’s of no use at all. The poison has made him comfortable. He’s quite at peace here at Pascal’s house. And though I want to steal the house out from under him, I don’t want the Nazis to take it from him first.
I set the tray on the table before him. “We deserve a drop of sun, don’t we?” I say. I walk to the window.
The heavy velvet drapes have been kept closed every day, to smother the drafts. They’re so thick, like carpets, that I have to put some shoulder in to part them. And there, hanging over the window, is a screen of tatty—a curtain of blinds woven of vetiver grass. In the summer, it soaks up the heat. Your maid sprinkles it with water to release a sweet musk, the cool, thick scent of freshly turned soil.
I open the tatty, and I press my forehead against the cold windowpane. I have a knock of pain in the back of my head, a headache settling into my skull. Maybe I’m the one getting poisoned this go-round.
Last night I dreamed of butterflies, their flapping wings as loud as a sheet whipping on a clothesline. I could feel them caught in my hair and tiptoeing across my cheeks, and my neck, and the backs of my hands. It seemed they might try to lift me with their sticky, spindly legs. I could smell their perfume, a scent of sea salt and gardenia.
“Look at that,” Voss says. “It’s even more handsome than I pictured it.”
I turn to see Voss attempting to put the snake ring on his ring finger. He can’t get it past the middle knuckle, so he moves it to his pinkie. He holds up his hand to admire it.
“You’ve kept it all these years,” he says. He twists it around and around. “It’s priceless.”
Yesterday I made the mistake of telling Voss I still have the ring. So today, I had to bring it to show him. It will take my breath away, he insisted.
“Yes,” I say as I step over to sit in my chair.
“And M never knew that you stole it?”
“He knew,” I say. “After I told him.”
In Manhattan back then, letters arrived at your door five or six times a day, and the mailbox on your street corner was emptied twice as often as that. The city was in the process of building underground pneumatic tubes to send letters hurtling with a proper gust, so that a note sent from downtown could reach its uptown recipient within the hour. Everyone wanted every word every minute. A love affair by letter could intensify in a week. M’s first letter arrived at the Widow Waverley’s the very next noon. It was unsigned, but the red wax seal of the envelope had been stamped with a simple, unadorned M.
I remembered your address, M wrote. And that was all.
In my response, I confessed my theft. I told him he’d have to invite me out again to get the ring back. In his next letter, M suggested I not give it back, that I wear it when we met, and he’d steal it himself when I least expected it. And we’ll just have to keep meeting, until it’s on my finger again.
Voss says, “Oh, let’s do that too. I like that. You can have the ring back if you steal it back.”
My head begins to pound again. I say, “I’m not a thief. Anymore.”
“You stole my bottle of Gabrielle.”
“I just did it for fun,” I say. “To see if you’d notice.” Indeed, I’ve even worn the fragrance every day since. I hold my wrist to my nose now. I can almost get lost in my own fictions—the perfume so reminds me of M, with its sulfur-sting of a struck match, its hint of bitter plum, that I wonder if somehow Pascal stole this one from me too.
“I didn’t notice it stolen,” he says. “I just noticed it gone. And I just now tricked you into confessing.”
“I had to take it,” I say. “Your bottle is the only bottle in town. There’s not a drop of it to be had anywhere in Paris.”
“Ah, that you noticed,” he says, nodding, impressed.
“Yes,” I say. “I know all the ladies around here who wear Gabrielle. And none of them can find any Gabrielle to wear.” I only know this from Blue, who knows it from the theater. There’s already so much anxiety, with the homosexual camp in Alsace and the closing of the nightclubs, that something like the sudden disappearance of a notoriously lesbian perfume is as ominous as it is puzzling.
“I can’t wait until I first notice it’s gone,” he says. At first I’m confused, then he begins to twist twist twist the snake ring around and around his finger. “I wonder how long it will take me to realize you took it. Or maybe I’ll catch you in the act.”
“You’ll catch me,” I say. “You certainly will. I have no knack for such things these days.”
Voss examines the ring again. He says, “M had small hands. The hands of a lady.” He pauses, looking at me. “Were you ever genuinely fooled, at any point at all?”
“Fooled?”
“You never really believed M was a man, did you?”
“M was a gentleman, always,” I say.
“Scandalous,” Voss says, with a sigh that sounds like boredom. “You were never naked with your lover?”
I won’t dignify that with an answer, but the question brings me back to that music hall in the Bowery, in Thistle Bishop’s sprawling dressing room, full of gowns on dressmaker’s mannequins, and hats in cabinets, and a wall of wigs on faceless burlap heads. Thistle had many admirers and received gifts of many kinds. There were vases of roses and orchids and tulips. A sideboard of bottles of champagne and brandy, and pastries under glass. Thistle loaned M the room for an evening.
Everywhere were silk hearts dangling from ribbons, little sachets of dried fennel, to disgust the moths. But it didn’t seem to work—when M raised the wick on the kerosene lamp to light the room, the shadows of moths rushed and sputtered.
In thinking of it all now, I see the insignia I seek, the symbol from Pascal’s note to his daughter Zoé, in patterns on velvet. I see it everywhere it most certainly never was, in Thistle’s every gown. I see it in the fretwork of lace, and the filigree of a sleeve, and the embroidery o
f a boot. And then all those designs begin to twist into swastikas, everywhere, on silk, in metallic stitches, in the icing of a cake.
I close my eyes tight.
M undressed me, uncuffing my cuffs, unlinking my links, unknotting my necktie, unclipping my wingtip collar. Unbuttoning my suspenders and the fly of my trousers, unlacing my boots. He stayed entirely dressed himself, keeping on even his topcoat and waistcoat and derby, while my naked skin goose-pimpled in the ice cold of the music hall attic. M removed my socks, first one, then the other, rolling the silk down my ankle, over my heel, and off my foot. Then he delicately draped my suit and underthings over a wooden valet stand.
M carried from Thistle’s wardrobe a dress of satin, its color shifting with the angle of lamplight, fluttering between a faded rose and a silver gray. He held it in his arms as if it were a lady who’d fainted.
M seemed a master of the costume’s busks and lugs and elastic cords, the shanks and rivets, spring clamps and screw buttons and clinches. And I enjoyed watching him fuss over and around me, his tongue at his lips as he strung me up with ribbons and laces. He shifted me around, situating me correctly within the gown and its trappings, taking my hips, my breasts, my waist in his hands. I let him lead me, like in a waltz.
And no sooner had he dressed me than he began to undo all he had done. He took no time to gaze. He didn’t hold me up to a mirror. Instead, he unlaced, unbuttoned, unhooked. It was clear that he had only dressed me to undress me. Once I was naked again, I touched the buttons of his shirt, but he took my hands, kissed my wrists, shook his head. He ran his kisses along my breasts, down my stomach, across my naked hip. He lowered me to Thistle’s fainting sofa. He gently pushed my knees apart and kissed the inside of my thigh.
I tell Voss none of this.
33
I coerce Voss into getting out and about. I insist we go to the cabaret. I’ll even wear a dress, I tell him. And by the time I get back to my shop, a dress has been delivered. Blue holds it up; the gown is likely a wink toward the weather—floor-length white silk patterned with penguins. A long white coat has arrived with a note pinned to its lapel, dictated by Voss to the shopgirl. Hearing his thin voice in the girl’s jumpy cursive is peculiar. Does your heart bleed for the cashmere goats too? it asks me. Please don’t worry. They have a pastoral life, and their hair just falls off in handfuls.
Voss has also sent a wig, pinned to a faceless burlap head. I’m to have platinum curls that practically shimmer like tinsel.
In the evening, Blue brings out his toolbox of theatrical cosmetics, his brushes and pencils, and he paints a face on me as I sit on the settee in the shop, my hands folded in my lap. He sits on the table before me.
I concentrate on his face as he concentrates on mine. He chews on his lower lip as he brushes blush across my cheeks. My cheeks flush from the attention. When I was his age, girls would rouge their cheeks so they’d seem always blushing, always innocent. Blue’s cheeks are naturally rosy.
The night’s cold has already settled in my bones. I can hardly bear to think of leaving the house. And I still worry that I’m inviting as much trouble for Blue as I am for myself. I should be using all my talents as a sneak-thief to keep us hidden in all the many nooks and crannies of our home. Instead, I court disaster.
When Blue finishes with my makeup, he leans back and clicks his tongue, pleased with his work. “Devastating,” he says. “My femme fatale. My Mata Hari.” He pats his chest, miming a fast-thumping heart.
“Mata Hari was executed,” I say.
“But she went in style,” he says. “She blew a kiss to the firing squad. The suit she wore was tailored special for her to get executed in.” He does some last-minute teasing of the wig’s curls with a tin comb. Every story of caution I ever tell him he interprets as romance.
Blue opens a compact mirror and holds it before my face. “Look at yourself,” he says, and at first I don’t think he means to be literal. With his mention of execution, I was pulled into the fairy tale of vanquishing witches. Look at yourself, Blue says, and I see the powder-and-paint mask and platinum wig of a poisoner-of-Nazis.
I take the mirror and stand from the settee. I touch my pinkie to the corner of my bright red lips. “I’ve done some of my best work in a woman’s clothes,” I say. “Men expect you to be fidgeting with all your clasps and buttons. Your lipstick. Your eyelashes. They think I’m looking at myself when I’m looking in a mirror.” I snap the compact shut.
As I hand it back to Blue, I notice he’s wearing a ring I’ve not seen before. I’ve never seen him wear any ring at all. I reach out for his hand and cradle it in both of mine. I run my thumb over the ring, like rubbing it for luck, making a wish, wanting M’s ring back on my own finger.
Blue’s ring is thick and heavy, unadorned, no stone. “Brass,” Blue says. “Félix gave it to me, from his own finger. He wears a fistful so he can shatter a guy’s jaw if he comes at him.” Blue takes his hand back to run his own thumb, adoringly, over the ring. “He says it’s from melted-down gun casings, from the battlefield. It’s patriotic, really, to knock a nose out of joint with it.”
I give his nose a playful knuckle-thump. “You do worry me, my boy,” I say.
“I worry about you every minute. Be careful tonight.”
“Everything’s dangerous everywhere,” I say. Too little food for the people of Paris, no coal for their stoves, icicles on the inside.
“Let me wear that wig,” he says. “I’ll go instead.”
“I’ll take you up on that later,” I say. “Perhaps you can stand in for me at my execution.” I give him a wink with false eyelashes so heavy they make my eyelid feel like it’s thick with infection. I peel both strips of eyelashes off, and Blue scolds me by clucking his tongue with disappointment.
He comes to me to do some last-ditch straightening of the wiry curls of my wig. In our nervousness, ready too early and waiting for my car, we sit on the settee and count the pearls in my necklace that’s a mile long, then count again after Blue concludes there are only 318 while I came to 330. But we never do reach the same number, even after counting the pearls two more times, rolling them through our fingers as if they were rosary beads, with a hiss of whispers, nuns numbering sins.
34
Voss sits slumped in the back of the car, and I’m alarmed at the sight of him. I’ve made a mistake in insisting on an evening at the cabaret.
“You look like you’ve seen a ghost,” he says to me.
The driver, a Nazi attendant in uniform and cap, gets back behind the steering wheel after helping me into the car. I catch his eyes in the rearview mirror.
What if Voss just collapses at the cabaret? I don’t know how much of my poison can be traced in his blood while he’s alive, but an autopsy will surely do me in.
“Are you even up for a night out?” I say.
“I’m not,” he says. “But they need to think I am. They need to see me out and about, having a wonderful time, just like you said.” He forces a smile. “So we’ll go out and about, and we’ll have a wonderful time.” He drops the smile. He takes another painful breath. He says, with a whimper, “We’ll just stay for a minute or two.”
He’s wearing a black dinner jacket and a white silk scarf. Without asking permission, I unravel the scarf from his neck and begin wiping the sweat from his face and hair. I give him a rigorous toweling until the scarf is nearly soaked, then drape it over the back of the seat in front of us to dry. I open my handbag to get at the cosmetics Blue used on me, and I begin to resurrect Oskar Voss.
First I hand him a snuff bottle of scent, a mix of lemon, lavender, and rosemary, a formula passed down to me by Fanny all those years ago, from her days as a retired ballerina in New York—she’d suck in a snort to revive herself after a performance. He takes in a deep breath of it, then another.
I touch my fingertip to the tip of a lipstick, and dab so
me of the red lightly on his lips. I dab some more. I lean back and pucker and smack my own lips, telling him to do the same, to spread the red around. I then tap at the rouge in a pot and rub it into his cheeks with my thumb. I lean back, consider. He looks fresh from the undertaker’s. “Forgive me,” I say, and I work at his cheeks more with my knuckles, practically beating a rosy glow of health into him. I crank open the car window in hopes the winter wind will cool his skin, to keep him from sweating all his paint down into his white collar.
Not only does he look like he’s got more blood in his cheeks, but he acts like it too. He’s breathing easier, sitting up without a slouch.
I open my compact and hold the mirror out so he can see himself. He looks past the mirror, to me. “You haven’t mentioned your dress,” he says. “It’s a Schiaparelli. It was in Vogue magazine.”
“It’s clever,” I say. “I like the penguins. I’m not so fond of the wig.”
He shrugs. “Take the wig off, then,” he says.
I don’t hesitate. I drop the wig onto the seat between us, which kicks up an electrical storm of static, tiny blue lightning bolts snapping. With my comb, I try to fix my hair in my compact mirror, but I just stir up more voltage. There’s a tin of putty in my purse, so I take a plug of it and grease all my hair back, like a croupier at a casino.
Voss says, “Much better.” I use some of the putty still sticking to my hands to slick a wave into his forelock. He gives me his handkerchief so I can wipe the putty from my hands.
“Aren’t we a pair?” he says. He angles my mirror up and around his head, to inspect his greased curlicue.
Aren’t we a pair?
I ease over to my side. I pretend to rifle through my purse, rummaging among the lipstick, candy tin, cigarette case. Aren’t we a pair? It is what I intend for him to think, what I need him to think, but the sound of it, with such sincerity, does send an honest-to-God shiver along my spine. Because it’s just the sort of thing you want to hear from the people in your life.
The Perfume Thief Page 17