The Perfume Thief

by Timothy Schaffert

  He doesn’t have all that much charm, but he has an easy way about him, which has likely served him well in his climbing up. Every now and again, he provokes a minute of my sympathy. And I do believe his fascination with me is genuine. I’ve spent so much of my life thinking polite society couldn’t bear to know a single truth about me that I fall victim to those who show me a nod of respect. Around Voss, I let myself think my life hasn’t been as unspeakable as I thought.

  Once we’ve arrived at Madame Boulette’s, Voss has enough vigor to saunter among the tables, slapping backs, shouting greetings above the squawk of burlesque on the stage. I can tell he’s trembling, but he manages to make his weakness intimidate with a slow air of elegance. The grim composure of authority.

  Lutz stands from his table and elbows in on that composure, giving Voss’s hand such a hard shake it seems he might topple the old bloke. Yet at the same time, with that bone-rattling handshake, Lutz is clearly eager to please. He wants to both defeat and surrender, I suppose, whichever might better his rank the quickest. Kowtow or leapfrog. I watch Lutz. The way he stands, the lift and set of that square jaw, the smile—none of it is unrehearsed. He and I, we’ve practiced our lives in front of a mirror.

  They do that thing that men do, holding the handshake, pulling each other in to speak right into each other’s ears, a tug-of-war of camaraderie. But this back-and-forth seems to embolden Voss. He won’t allow Lutz the last word.

  Lutz looks over at me. “I didn’t recognize you,” he says, and he takes my hand and leans forward. But he does not kiss the back of my hand when he brings it to his lips. He turns my wrist and holds it to his nose. He acts overtaken by the scent of my perfume. “Is this yours?” he says. “This perfume? A creation of yours?” Before I can even answer, he says to Voss, “This is why I led her to you. Her perfumes are purely from the garden. She captures the exact scent of the flowers.”

  It’s all more performance—he wants Voss to think I’m his own discovery. If the perfumes of Paris are what carry Voss upward, he wants to be sure he’s tethered to that.

  Voss gives Lutz his nod of dismissal, then takes my arm, and we walk away. I say, “Surely you’re not fooled by all of that.”

  He pats my hand. “You know I’m not, of course,” he says. “I never even hear half of what he says, because I’m so fascinated by his face. The architecture of it. What’s it like, do you suppose, to walk into a room knowing you’ll stun people dumb with your beauty.”

  “What makes you think I wouldn’t know from personal experience?” I say, pretending to be playful, though I have to force a smile. “Why do I have to suppose?”

  He pats my hand again. “You’re beautiful in a number of ways,” he says. “An infinite number of ways. He’s beautiful in one way only.”

  We slip into a banquette at the back of the cabaret. I say, “Does he work for you?”

  “Not quite.”

  “You should do what you can to be rid of him,” I say. “Send him elsewhere.”

  Voss raises an eyebrow. “My heavens. You put on a designer gown for an evening,” he says, “and you become one of those women who tell it like it is.”

  “He’s destroying that poor girl,” I say. “The cabaret singer. And you shouldn’t trust him yourself.”

  He reaches across the tabletop to squeeze my hand. “You have a good heart, Charlie,” he says. “When I meet people with good hearts when they’re young, I tell them to be careful of people taking advantage of their kind nature. It’s my standard line of advice. But you’re the very type of person I’m warning them against.”

  I squeeze his hand back. “I don’t think I’ve taken advantage of kind people,” I say. I squeeze one more time, as a signal that we should stop holding hands.

  He takes his hand back. “There’s a new wave of Nazi officers already rising up,” he explains. “They’re more German than the rest of us, don’t you know. Lutz is part of that new wave, but he’s staying friendly with the old guard. He’ll use me until he can destroy me. At least, that’s what’s rattling around in his pretty head. But he’s going nowhere, accomplishing nothing. He’ll not get the best of me. I’m not a little torch singer in a whorehouse.”

  “Why has he picked you?” I say.

  “He knows all my business.”

  “Hm,” I say. “Does he know more than I do?”

  He pauses, and just as he’s about to say something, Madame Boulette brings us a bottle of champagne. She pours some for each of us, then puts the bottle in a silver bucket. Voss smiles and takes her hand. But she seems startled by the clamminess of his sweaty palm, so he drops his hold quick. “My next book about Paris will have a whole section devoted to Madame Boulette’s,” he tells her.

  She flutters her lashes and fans her fingers at her cheeks, pretending she’s cooling the heat of a blush. I like to think she’s mocking him by acting so girlish. After she leaves our table, swinging her hips in her snug velvet gown, the band strikes up loud, and Day takes the stage. The German soldiers in the audience shout and whistle shrilly because these are the songs they love the most, the songs Day writes especially for them, off-the-cuff operettas using their girlfriends’ names, and the names of their towns, and all the bliss of their lives before the war.

  But the song Day sings now is bawdy, about a fräulein named Sigilwig with nipples as pink as a possum’s tongue. The pink, pink tongue of the Beutelratte. The men roar at the mention of the girl’s name, as if they all knew her when.

  Voss says something I don’t hear. When I ask him what he said, he scoots along the bench of the banquette to sit right next to me. “You don’t like her,” he says. He gestures his thumb in the direction of the doorway. “Madame Boulette.”

  “That’s not true,” I say. We’re leaning toward each other so we can keep from shouting but still be heard.

  “Like it or not, I’ve gotten to know you, and I know every face you make.” But he’s not looking at my face. He’s dropped his eyes down to the tabletop, watching the bubbles pop in his glass. He touches a finger to the stem. “You don’t like her, because you disapprove. You disapprove of her…service…to the German military.”

  “We’re all doing what we can,” I say. Then I say, “Maybe I disapprove of her flirting with you, right in front of me.” I must be possessed by the bullet-holed soul of Mata Hari. “I mean, look at this.” I ting my fingernail against the side of my champagne coupe. “It’s pretty much emptier than it was before she filled it. She could barely be bothered enough to pour me a sip.”

  He smiles and pushes his glass over. “You can have mine,” he says. “And I will write about Paris again, you know? My new diaries for the new Paris. And the new Paris will be just as good as the old one.”

  “You didn’t answer me before,” I say. “When I asked you if Lutz knows more than I do.”

  “You’ve grown bold as I’ve grown weak,” he says. He smiles. “But you I trust. There’s honor among thieves. Is that the expression? Or is it that there’s no honor among thieves?” I don’t answer, so he continues. “All Lutz knows is that I know what I’m doing. And he knows I have plans for the perfumery. The perfumes of Chamberry will give everyone’s memories back to them. Every girl they ever loved, every man who ever loved them. In the flowers of those bottles, you’ll find the gardens of your childhood. The altars of your church. Your weddings. Your funerals. We’ll convince Parisians to spend their money, as soon as they have some again, to buy back the lives they had before. And they’ll seek the nostalgia of our perfume. The way I see it”—and here he points at me—“Berlin can get rich soothing all the pain it caused.”

  Ting ting ting. I tap my fingernail on my half-empty glass again. “Forgiveness is the fragrance that flowers yield when trampled on,” I say.

  “Is that from a poem?”

  I shrug. “I read it in a magazine for rose gardeners.”
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  “Well, there you go,” he says.

  “What does Lutz know about Pascal’s perfumes?”

  “He knows we have all of Pascal’s properties. The laboratories. The shops. The mills. The distilleries. The farms in Grasse.”

  “But you don’t have Pascal?”

  He shakes his head. “His every factory was ransacked by its own workers,” Voss says. “It’s like he had them all hypnotized. All he had to do was whistle and they threw their own wrenches in their own cogs. Hundreds of people worked for the Parfumerie Chamberry, but there’s not a single list with a single name. They shoveled all their papers into a furnace. And all the workers, they’re all gone. He had an army of girls who did nothing but go in every day to sit at a bench and pinch together the little silk rosettes.” He flutters his fingers around, pantomiming the ruching of roses. “And another army of girls to tie those rosettes to the long necks of the bottles of Le Cygne. All of them, every one of them, nowhere now.”

  But they did find one gentleman who couldn’t quite vanish. When Voss mentions him, my heart skips ahead. Jean-François. It worries me that Voss knows his name.

  Jean-François has worked in the shop in Paris for decades; he’s as famous around town as a cinema star. He could never just disappear. His every signature suit is a distinctive clash of plaids, a collision of color and checks in his vests and trousers and sports coats. He’s not even passably handsome and has the presence of a field mouse, but it’s him women imagine when they make love to their husbands. In his soft, low voice, Jean-François recites lists of spices, litanies of bouquets, as he cradles your hand in his and stirs the air above the wrist he’s just spritzed. He looks at you knowingly. And know, he does. He knows how you want to seem to others. He selects a scent for you, and even if you don’t much like it, you’re convinced you’re the one who’s wrong. So you tell him you love it, and you outline all the reasons why, because you want to impress him with your sophistication. As you tell him what you like about it, as you bring words to it all, you discover its finest qualities. And you get to know yourself a little better.

  “He told me that the recipes mean nothing without Pascal,” Voss says. “Because the scent isn’t just about the flower. It’s about sunlight and shade. Soil and insects. Inspiration. Romance. At least, that’s what he said at first. As we questioned him more, he became more generous. He said the perfume diary is everything we want it to be. The diary has all the recipes, and everything about them.”

  “But he doesn’t know where it is.”

  “He says he doesn’t know.”

  I somehow doubt it was a polite inquisition. It perhaps hasn’t even ended yet. I imagine Jean-François stripped of his plaids and stuck in a cell. A gun at his temple. A flashlight in his eyes.

  “You’ll help us re-create the scents,” Voss says, “but you’re going to invent new ones too. Fragrances of your very own. We’ll even call one of them Perfume Thief, don’t you think? Voleur de Parfum. You’ll have all the ingredients you’ve ever wanted, no matter the expense. Once we’ve won the war, the victors, with their riches, will demand the luxuries they’ve been deprived of. Your perfumes will be how the women of Europe communicate their power to each other. You’ll be creating the language of their influence.”

  Those women will just be sniffing at each other’s slashed throats.

  As much as I yearn for Voss and his villains to lose everything in the end, there’s no way of knowing how things will play out. So I can see how someone like me might fall into the snare of someone like him. The promise of wealth, influence, notoriety. A place of legitimacy in the New Europe. My very character linked with elegance. I know what he’s thinking: I’d have to be a fool not to sacrifice my flimsy principles, when the stakes are so high.

  Some would cast me as a villain already, for my years of robbery, but was I ever so crooked as all that? Compared to these devils, I’m an angel of mercy.

  “Even alcohol,” I say. “For perfume. Even that’s a luxury in wartime.”

  And there must be more to Gabrielle than Voss will tell me. You can still find Pascal’s other perfumes if you look long enough; at the very least, you’ll find remnants from the secondhand dealers along the quai. But every last bottle of Gabrielle—those armless torsos—must have grown legs and run off.

  Voss sits so close to me, listening so carefully, I can feel him jump when the cabaret is noisy with applause.

  Whenever Zoé takes the stage, the spotlight is lowered to a faint glow, draping across her like a veil of gauze. She fades away night by night. Her ballads have become even sadder; they’re sung in a whisper, and the men cheer the grand tragedies—stories of jilted lovers who end up dead, or next to dead, in every song’s last stanza. A sailor’s girl who walks into the ocean, rocks in her pockets. A broken-down dope fiend done in by one last swig of absinthe. A hopeless widow leaps from a widow’s walk.

  Zoé opens her mouth and leans into the microphone, and everyone quiets.

  “I’m losing my voice,” she whispers, and just like that, her voice is gone. She continues with the song nevertheless, and we try to read her lips. We swear we can see the details of our own sad stories take shape. Our lies, our confessions. Lovers lost or forsaken. We even hear her sing their names.

  35

  In the morning, I’m in the very back of a long black car. I’ve been driven before, but never by this man. I tell him he’s taken a wrong turn. And when he says nothing, I fret. We take another turn, then another, each twist in the path angling me farther from home, and farther from Pascal’s house.

  “I know you can hear me.” I’m raising my voice above the scratch of the tinny, hectic music from the dashboard radio. This time the driver responds, but only with a shake of his head. And then I say it in German, or I hope I do. I don’t know the words well enough to know if I’ve used the right ones. And again. I know you can hear me. He begins to sing along to a song.

  Voss is onto me. I’m to be registered. Fingerprinted. I’ve heard these stories. You report to an office, you sign a paper, you check a box, and next you’re arrested.

  My first instinct is to think back, to stumble over all my missteps, but that’s an amateur’s trap. Was there something I said last night, at the cabaret? Could he read my disgust on my face? Is he closer to Lutz than I thought? I’m frightened for a moment, but a moment of fright is all you can allow yourself. At the first bristling of fear, you turn it useful. Because it’s fear, not fearlessness, that gets you to let go of the good sense that keeps you still. Sometimes that means running away even if a gun’s at your temple.

  But, of course, I’m an old woman. I won’t get far on foot.

  And what if this is nothing at all? What if I’m not being abducted? Leaping from a moving car—I can think of no more efficient admission of guilt. How would I explain my fear to Voss?

  So I sit and I wait and I wonder about all the people of Paris who’ve fallen victim to common sense, all those who’ve gone along without struggle, because it’s illogical to expect the worst. It’s crazy. You’ll hurt yourself. Just follow.

  Then I see that I couldn’t tumble out even if I wanted to. There’s no handle on my door.

  I say, or try to say, I can pay you something if you take me home.

  The driver just tosses a box of cigarettes into the backseat. And some matches.

  I decide this is a good sign, these cigarettes. If I were his captive, what would stop me from dropping a match down his collar? Sticking the hot end of the cigarette on his neck?

  I consider lighting a cigarette, to fall into a coughing fit. Turn it into a production. A collapse. A raspy, wheezing cough, an old crone choking on her own tongue. He’d have to stop. He’d have to let me get some air.

  I light a match, let it burn. But that’s all I do. It burns to the tips of my fingers. I blow it out.

  And the car
stops, with the puff of my breath.

  36

  We’re stopped in the middle of the street, but since there’s no traffic anywhere around, it makes no difference how close we are to the curb. To our immediate right is a towering furniture store I’ve visited only a time or two. Greenspoon’s. A Jewish-owned business that has been shut down.

  Closed or not, it’s Greenspoon’s we’ve come to visit, it seems.

  The driver opens the door for me, still humming along to the song he was singing, though the radio’s off. I step from the car, and he hands me a sealed envelope; I recognize Voss’s extravagant handwriting, shivery with his shaky hand.

  Give them, the driver says in English, tapping his finger against the envelope. He points to the store. And then he says, I wait, and I try to feel relief. He will wait, because I’m returning. He will wait because he is taking me home.

  I decide to tear into the envelope before I even reach the doorway; I don’t care if the driver sees me. I remove the folded sheet of paper.

  Oskar Voss is all Voss wrote. With the number 8 squiggled in an upper corner.

  Though the store is clearly closed for business, the door is unlocked. When I open it, a little bell jingles a tiny ring—one of those snippets of music from daily life, once upon a time, that now seem a fairy-tale sweetness long lost.

  Inside, there is a scurrying of industry like in the hours before a sale. A man walks along an aisle, balancing a tower of tasseled pillows. A woman pushes a squeaky-wheeled pram overflowing with dolls. And, at a slower pace, there are those who seem to be shopping, women in coats and hats, handbags in the crooks of their arms, strolling, glancing, clucking their tongues. Some of these women are German, but most are French.

  Though I only catch a glimpse of the dolls in the pram, they stay with me, their goldilocks and the pink cheeks of their porcelain faces.

  No one notices me. The store is massive, the ceilings stretching up three stories. The main floor before me resembles the nave of a cathedral, with short partitions throughout, like two rows of pews lining a center aisle. Within these sections, furniture was once arranged in homey little settings—sofa, love seat, wing chair. Beds and nightstands. Floor lamps, cocktail tables, wine cabinets. At Greenspoon’s, you’d have been invited to be seated, or to even lie down, and to imagine the better life you’d have if all your belongings were new.