A Frenchman steps up to me, grunts, holds out his hand for my paper. At first I think he might be handsome, but quickly all his features shift, and his stubbled chin, his piercing eyes with a touch of bloodshot, his jet-black hair greased into a movie-star swoop, all become sinister somehow.
He grunts again. Nods sharp at a man at a desk with a long scar that seeps down his cheek from the corner of his eye like the trace of a tear. That man stands, takes the letter, tells me to follow him. Suivez-moi. Another Frenchman.
In this cavernous space, I can hear echoes of laughter, of coos, of conversation. I hear the wings of a bird caught inside, high up, fluttering at the panes of the broad arched window that lets in the gray winter light. I hear shoes click-clacking quick on tile, and the rolling of a cart’s wheels that sounds like a billiard ball across felt.
In the sections where there’d been furniture, there is now a variety of goods—one cubby holds only pictureless picture frames stacked and leaning, another holds shelves full of clocks, none of them ticking, all of them telling a different time.
At the end of the nave, where an altar would be, is a grand staircase of marble steps and gilded railings. We go up up up, my knees popping, and we’re passed by two women coming down, another pair of French ladies in fashionable coats and hats, discussing the play of light on the diamond in the ring on one’s finger. One of them wears a cologne I know, Heureuse. Happy. Another scent from Chamberry, but one I never much liked—somehow oversweet and dusty, like a piece of old marzipan spoiling in a confectioner’s window.
And the lady’s been freshly blasted with it, heavily, so much so that I can feel it scratching at my throat, tickling up a hack. I cough. My eyes water. I dab at them with the end of my scarf as I trudge up.
When we near the top of the stairs, some hyacinth enters the mix, then some orangey-lemon, some polished cedarwood. The air’s noisy with scent.
The second floor looks down on the main floor, and it’s lined with archways that lead to more departments; my guide escorts me closer to a pea-soup fog of floral stench, into a room with the number 8 spray-painted on the wall. Inside are glass cabinets and barrister bookcases, and mirrored trays arrayed with squeeze-bulb atomizers, and women spritzing and spraying and waving at the air. They sniff toward each other like truffle pigs.
The man who has led me here hands the note with Voss’s name to a woman behind a counter. She was expecting me. She seems to know more about why I’m here than I do. “This is for you,” she says, handing me a canvas bag. “Monsieur Voss invites you to take what you want. The perfumes you don’t know, or don’t know well. Perfumes you’d like to study more closely. For research.”
The shoppers notice me, and I note their disdain. I take from my pocket my black woolen stocking cap, and pull it onto my head, over my ears. I look like an old salt from the pier in my peacoat and dark trousers. I know those bottles and boxes—expensive and fashionable perfumes, colognes, talcs. And I know these women.
These are the perfumes you wear when you want people to know you’re wearing them. Delicate oils weighed down, anchored, burdened, by the glands of caged vermin. These scents are the ones I think of when I think of old-moneyed matrons at the opera, their face powder crackling their dry cheeks, their droopy earlobes stretched taut by fat pearls dangling on diamond-studded strings.
The fact of the matter is, so many of my wealthy clientele who hired me to steal never understood what was truly worth having. They were like the fisherman’s wife in the old fairy tale; they didn’t care what they got, they just wanted more. The perfect clients, the rare ones, were those who listened to me, who let me seduce them with the fable and poetry of fine essence. They believed me. I stole for them what I wanted to take. They recognized that scent should ghost away at first dab, that all you’d need was to breathe it in once, let it move and inspire. You don’t wear perfume; you interpret it. You apply it. It shouldn’t matter whether anyone knows you wear anything at all.
Of course, so much of my disdain for the rich was because they always knew I wasn’t one of them. No matter how expensive my perfume, they could smell my tawdry soul.
This building, it seems to me, is peopled with the wealthy French, with Nazi officials, and with the gangsters of Paris and their molls. It’s an operation, clearly. I step closer to the shelves, and I realize all these bottles belonged to someone. Most of them are less than full. I touch my fingertip to a frayed silk knot at the neck of a rose-colored decanter. I pick up another bottle, a clear one, and breathe on it, frosting it with my breath, and I see the swirl of fingerprints, maybe those of the woman who’d worn this scent last.
I don’t want any of this, but the woman behind the counter is very interested in my selections. And some of these are perfumes that I’ve heard of but never tried. Some are from whole other generations. I start filling the bag.
I decide Day might like this charming bottle shaped like a dancer in a pirouette, her arms lifted, a somewhat drooped feather tied to her back with a ribbon to resemble an angel’s wing.
I find myself gently cradling the dancer in the palms of my hands, as if it were a wounded bird, as I leave the department. I hear the squeaky wheel of that pram again, echoing, and I try not to think of those dolls, and the children they’ve lost.
37
In Pascal’s upstairs room, Voss sits on his sofa, and I sit in my chair. I’ve gotten to know well all the old chair’s discomfort. You sit too much this way and you’ve got a wild spring jabbing your ass. Sit too much that way and you bump your elbow on its rickety arm. The whole thing is falling apart, right out from under me. The chair is covered entirely with a blanket, so I can only imagine what a true wreck it is. Pascal, so rich, sought solace here, in this broken-down room. Zoé told me the house reflected her mother’s eye for elegance, so I wonder if this space was Pascal’s retreat, a place he could leave cluttered and dusty. Or did he need this room only after his wife’s death? Did he need someplace that didn’t remind him of her?
Together, Voss and I examine the perfumes I brought. But I can’t concentrate on any of them.
Did I ever truly believe more could be taken from Voss? More than just the perfume diary? How could I have thought that his corruption was within reach, that I could turn him against his own country and its crimes? That I could convince him that Paris can only survive if the Nazis don’t?
He hasn’t really been waylaid by my poison, I realize. Not at all. He’s so very familiar with the sinister habits and methods of these monsters that he’s been able to navigate with ease, even from his bed. He’s kept his corner of the black market thriving, his stolen department stores well stocked.
“I thought you would enjoy this assignment,” Voss says. “But you seem distracted. You even look a little green around the gills. I hope you haven’t caught my flu.”
“Actually, it’s you I’m worried about,” I lie. “I feel just fine. But, Oskar, you don’t look at all well.”
“That’s sweet of you to worry,” he says, “but—”
“Could it be something else?” I say. “Maybe it’s not the flu.”
This does what I’d hoped it would—he wilts before me, weakened by my diagnosis. He’s been hoping he’s better. He eases back deeper into the pillows of the sofa, holding a black bottle of perfume to his nose. “I’m fine,” he says. “I’ve had a long, long life of doctors telling me I’m on the verge of death. The closest I ever came to it was when I was a little boy. I was in the hospital for a month. I’d start to kick whatever it was that ailed me, then something else would swoop in to take me down. My immunity, it seems, is the culprit. Any bug that comes along can just tippy-tap at it, and the whole thing shatters. It falls apart and lets all the killers in.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
“But I’m a master at hiding my illnesses,” he says. “I’ve been doing it for so long.” He manages an offic
e that provides endless reams of accounting, hatch marks and scritch-scratches, to demonstrate his efficiency, to demonstrate the effectiveness of the pillaging, to provide staggering lists of the wealth acquired since the Nazis took Paris. And it was Voss who facilitated, on his arrival, a very simple trick: the ballooning of the exchange rate, sending the value of the deutsche mark upward to crush the downward spiral of the franc. Voilà.
All he needs is to show Hitler how rich he’s making them all and he can stay in bed until his dying days.
I pick up one of the bottles of perfume I’ve brought from Greenspoon’s, one from Parfumerie Chamberry. Enjôleur. Beguiler. They haven’t sold it in many years. It’s only half empty, but whoever had it last likely kept it on her boudoir table for decades. It was never terribly expensive, and it was much adored in its day. Maybe it was an anniversary gift from her husband. Or her children bought it for her when they were small, impressed by its grand and elegant label, its name in raised letters beneath gilded swirls. Maybe she treated herself to it. She wore it sparingly, on special occasions, so that it would never become common to her. She wanted to always associate it with only the best days and nights of her life.
Voss might want to save Paris, but his idea of how to save Paris is a perversion, and has nothing to do with the people of this city and their livelihood. He has no interest in giving anything back. He wants to take more and more. He wants to get rich off the things we love the most, not caring whether we’re alive to love them.
He tells me as much. It’s not even a confession. It’s merely an explanation. There’s honor among thieves.
All his years of strolling the city, of committing its every meandering avenue to memory, of writing book after book revealing its secrets, leading everyone down its lovely wrong turns, made him the culprit best suited to rob it blind. His sense of the people who lived in all the houses he passed aided in the Nazis’ plundering of the wealth of the city’s Jews. He could tell what kinds of lives were lived behind the closed curtains by assessing the curtains themselves. He mapped out an elegant blitz, at street level, his first summer here.
“Everything’s for sale,” Voss tells me, and you can always get the asking price. Every division of the occupation—the police, the intelligence agency, the military, the cultural departments—has its own corner of the black market, its own department stores and dealers and procurement agencies.
“We can pry the gargoyles off Notre-Dame for the right price,” he says. “And it serves the gargoyles right. For years, they’ve watched over the city with dirty greed in their eyes.”
“Are you planning to sell my ring too?” I ask. “M’s snake ring.”
“You’re supposed to steal it back,” he says.
“You never wear it.”
“The bottle of Gabrielle that you took from me,” he says. “Have you spent any time with it? Have you considered its scent?” He takes from his pocket another bottle of Gabrielle he has come to have. Maybe he has every bottle in town. He leans forward to put it on the table between us.
Gabrielle changed everything for the lesbians of Paris. The subtleties of perfume I respect in my shop didn’t apply. Such gentle scents reminded us too much of the women of the last century, who sprinkled their respectable hankies with rose water, only to fade away into the stench of the streets. Instead, we would announce our presence. We wanted to leave our scent lingering in every room we left, and on the clothes of every woman who embraced us. We wanted our lovers’ eyes to water. We wanted to wear our perfume on our skin, not our silk, to carry the scent of our nakedness everywhere.
Voss says, “The concierge has a package for you, for when you leave. It’s your very own copy.” He lifts a pinkie to gesture behind me. I don’t have to turn to know he’s gesturing to the painting of Gabrielle d’Estrées.
“Where did you find one?” I say.
“They’re all over Paris,” he says. “Don’t tell me you haven’t noticed.”
“Well,” I say, “thank you.”
“I want you to study it,” he says, “along with the perfume. I want you to figure out what Pascal was up to. The painting itself is full of riddles. Nobody knows what any of it means. And Pascal loved a puzzle.”
Now I do turn to look. There’s more depicted in the painting than just the sisters in their bath; there’s a woman sewing at the back of the room, and even farther back, a painting on the wall of a man posed with his bare legs parted. There’s a ring, pearls, silk. And that nipple getting a pinch.
Voss says, “I want to find out whatever it might be telling us. About the perfume diary. About the history of the perfumery.” He pauses. “About poison.”
What I want is to tell Voss I’ve been poisoning him. The truth is itching the tip of my tongue. Will I ever have the chance to look into the yellowed whites of his eyes and tell him I’ve been spoon-feeding him his aches and pains? Will I ever be able to boast of my betrayal?
He might even be amused that I’ve kept him sick with the recipes M collected.
M not only kept books about poison, he had a book from Tibet that had poisonous pages, its paper spun from a tree’s bark that chokes the beetles that infest libraries. M had a whole poison collection: an antique teacup made of a jade meant to crack if poison’s poured in; a lock of hair clipped from a wig powdered with white lead.
He knew of butterfly traps.
“Boil some sugar with some rum, some beer,” M explained. “And put it down with some flowers, with a lantern. The butterflies come drink, get drunk, collapse.”
M told me this in the parlor of a bug collector. The collector had opened his home to the public for an exhibit, Beauty, Ugliness, and Oddity, and we strolled among the displays of insects, living and dead. We wore matching suits, right down to our neckties, patterned with strawberries and houseflies. We carried the magnifying glasses a young girl had handed us at the front door.
And that was the first time I saw M’s own broken heart.
The world is made up of eaters and eaten, came a voice from across the hall, where a ladies’ club had gathered to hear a gentleman’s lecture on the exhibit. And it was an old ladies’ club, which the lecturer seemed to take into consideration. He seemed to think he flattered them by talking about butterflies in their last stages of life, and how that’s when they have powers of flight they’ve never had before.
M gave me my own lecture, on butterfly poison, as we studied the bugs.
“After you’ve poisoned it,” M said, “you have to keep it poisonous. You create a little poison house for its corpse, with an inkstand in a corner full of turpentine. You have to kill the tiny mites that will…that will…the mites will feed…” M stammered. He stopped speaking. He cleared his throat. I leaned forward to look through his magnifying glass, to see what he was seeing. Was he concerned about the fly tiptoeing along the teeth of the Venus flytrap?
“I need some air,” he said. I could tell he was on the verge of tears.
As we walked down the block, he spoke of a lost love. “I’m being foolish,” he said, wiping at his eyes with his shirt cuff, like a little boy crying. “A naturalist,” he said. “She could have stayed here and chased butterflies, but she left me to travel the world. The world she most longed to see was one I wasn’t in.”
“Oh,” I said.
“She’s why I was first drawn to you, to be honest,” he said. “Perfume. She loved perfume too. She went off to seek the perfume of butterflies.”
I stayed silent, to punish him, but he didn’t even seem to notice that I wasn’t speaking. So finally I said, “And that’s why you’re with me? Because I make you think of her?”
“Everything makes me think of her,” he said. He then appeared to realize how that must have sounded to me. He cleared his throat. “Don’t get your feelings hurt,” he said. “Don’t be sentimental. She’s gone. You’re not. We’re together
now. Surely you have old lovers you can’t get out of your head.”
“No,” I say.
We walked without speaking for another block, and by the next block, we had fallen in love with each other again. I forgave him for still loving, with such passion, someone else. We held hands despite the fact that we were both in men’s suits. It was dangerous—we risked ridicule, or much worse—but I needed his hand in mine, and he needed mine in his. We needed it more than ever, this simple affection.
Back in my room, in my bed, he said, “I almost forgot,” and he gave me a single bonbon from his pocket. “That’s Schweinfurt green,” he said of the paper wrapper. He cupped his hand at his mouth and whispered: “Arsenical.” He described for me a steam chocolate factory in Darmstadt, and the rows and rows of maidens in kerchiefs wrapping the candy with bare fingers, sitting beneath glass lampshades greened with Schweinfurt too, the lamp’s heat gassing the air with the dye. “Arseniuretted hydrogen,” M whispered. I felt his breath hot on my ear as he unbuttoned my shirt. “The little darlings,” he said into my neck, his thumb rubbing against my nipple, “were dropping like flies.”
38
Madame Boulette takes the stage. She blows kisses to the audience, and they cheer for her. They applaud. “At Madame Boulette’s,” she shouts above them, “we use only Aryan talent onstage,” and she’s met with more cheers and more applause. She then gestures upward, to the bedrooms upstairs, “And Aryan talent offstage!” Even more cheers, more applause. “And all my girls are in the pinkest of health.” She winks when she says pinkest. “While you pay handsomely for the finest champagne, your comrades who frequent the cheap places empty their pockets on doctors’ bills.” The men laugh to assert their authority. They, they want everyone to know, would never think of canoodling with the floozies of cheap houses.
The Perfume Thief Page 19