But when Blue and I turn the corner, I’m struck sober. Even with the streetlamps off, I can see by the moonlight the car in front of my shop. I see someone leaning back against my front door smoking a cigarette. At first I wonder if there’s time to turn on our heels and head back. But then the man catches sight of us. And I see that the man is Lutz.
I take my arm from Blue’s. “Keep walking past the shop,” I tell him. “You’re only walking me home. You live somewhere else.”
“No,” Blue says. “I’m not leaving you alone for this.”
“Be a good boy and go,” I say.
“Forget it.”
As we get closer, the inside of the car lights up with a flash. Zoé is in the backseat, and she’s lighting her own cigarette, signaling to me that she’s there.
“There you are, old chum,” Lutz says to me. When he pushes himself up from the door, he makes himself dizzy. He grabs hold of the doorknob to keep from falling over his feet, and then he just swings there, back and forth, playful. He takes no notice of Blue at all. “I’ve come to ask you a very important question.”
I’m relieved that he’s drunk. He’s not here on official business. “I hope I can answer it,” I say.
He points toward the car. “Why doesn’t Zoé St. Angel love me with all her heart?”
“I would have guessed that she did,” I say.
“You spend all that time with her”—and now he’s poking his finger at my chest—“filling our rooms with your stench, but…but you probably don’t know her any better than I do, do you?”
“I certainly don’t,” I say.
“So what do you know?” he says. He glances over at Blue but still doesn’t quite notice him. He says to me, “Do you know anything about love potions?”
“I only know perfume,” I say.
“Then make a perfume that will make her love me,” he says. He looks again at Blue, and this time he sees him. “Who are you?”
“He rents one of my rooms,” I say. “That’s all. He’s a boarder. He lives upstairs.”
“Then run along,” Lutz tries to say, but his slurring prevents it. He tries to say it again, then again.
“Yes,” I say to Blue, “go on inside.”
“We’ll all go inside,” Lutz says. He goes to the car window to tap against it. He gestures for Zoé to come out. She’s in a pale green nightgown and a white fur coat, her hair tied up in a scarf. She’s got on high-heeled bedroom slippers, with a wispy riot of green feathers at the toes.
Once we’re inside the shop, I nudge Blue in the ribs. I whisper that he needs to go upstairs and stay away. He whispers back that he’ll be nearby.
“There are so many things I do that annoy her,” Lutz says. He picks up a bottle and holds it in the lamplight. “This is an ink bottle,” he says. I only ever use secondhand bottles I’ve bought at the flea markets: old cologne bottles, whiskey bottles, aspirin bottles, bottles for snuff, iodine, salt, vanilla, buttons, matches, arsenic. He opens the lid for a sniff. “God-awful,” he says, recoiling, squinting.
Zoé takes a seat on the settee. “Ignore him,” she says to me, but she’s looking at him. “He becomes maudlin when he drinks.”
“What did I tell you?” he says to me, looking at her. “Everything I do annoys her. Everything. The way I drink. The way I talk. The way I breathe. And she thinks I do all these things that annoy her only to annoy her. That all my little habits are just performance. To torture her. My every thought. My every gesture. My every move. It’s all about her, and her misery.”
His spite and bitterness seem to be sobering him up. He’s speaking clearly now, standing up straighter. But he nonetheless returns to his mission of finding a perfume that will cast a love spell. “What’s the most intoxicating scent?” he asks me.
I once stole, from a lemon farmer in Pasadena, the hypnotizing stink of a rare beetle that blasted its enemies with a gust of fog. The farmer was an agricultural genius who’d somehow bottled it. But that bottle is long gone. I want to send Lutz home, so I hand him a potent perfume that always brings to my mind the smoke of a toy cannon at a garden party, on Bastille Day, a pop that stopped our hearts. I wore seersucker and flannel sandals.
Lutz doesn’t like it. As he looks at the shelves and tables of perfume, he finds his way to the copy of Gabrielle d’Estrées et une de ses soeurs that Voss had delivered. It’s still mostly wrapped in butcher paper and twine, leaning against the wall, but some of the paper is torn away. Lutz lifts the flap of it and peers inside. “Huh,” he says, with a note of suspicion. He looks over at me, his eyebrow raised. “How’d you come to have this?”
“It was a gift,” I say. “It’s just a cheap copy you can buy…well, you can buy it at the flea markets.”
“Oskar Voss sent it to you,” he says.
“Well, yes,” I say, unsure if I should lie or not.
“You and him,” he says, “you’re very good pals. Very good pals.” And now he seems to be slipping back into his drunkenness. “I would say very, very good pals, even. I’d say you were even more than good pals but for the fact that he’s not to your liking. In that way.” He tilts his head toward the painting, lifting an eyebrow.
“We both appreciate perfume,” I say.
“Gabrielle must have something in it that’s…that’s a little titillating, doesn’t it?”
I ignore the pun he’s batting around. “I suspect the liquid’s tint is from Cannabis indica,” I say. “That’s often used to color perfume a pale green.”
“What else?” he says, and now he is all business. “What else is in it?”
“I wouldn’t know,” I say.
“You wouldn’t know,” he says. After a moment, he says, “And how is Voss, anyway? He didn’t look well at the cabaret.”
I cross my arms, feeling protective. Voss is a villain, but he’s my villain. If anyone takes him down, it will be me. “He works too hard,” I say. “That’s all.”
At the suggestion of Voss’s hard work, Lutz’s shoulders droop; his head drops. He’s suddenly exhausted. He walks over to sit next to Zoé. He leans against her, puts his head on her shoulder. He says to me, “Well, I hope you don’t catch whatever he’s got,” and then he nuzzles his nose into Zoé’s neck. I try to catch her eye, but she won’t look at me. She shuts her eyes tight as Lutz begins kissing her neck and her ear. When he notices how tense she is, he pulls back. He says to me, “They sent us a report on gonorrhea. Did you know that more claps are caught from kept women and actresses, and from shopgirls, than from prostitutes? More actresses have it than both public prostitutes and clandestine prostitutes combined.”
Zoé stands and walks toward the door, clutching her coat closed around her. “I’ll wait in the car,” she says.
Lutz says to me, “Now look what you’ve done.” He stands to leave but asks me again for perfume. “Give me something,” he says. He’s pleading with me now, his eyes wet, his voice soft. “So I can at least tell her it’s something you recommend.”
I give him a simple perfume of May roses, to hint at Gabrielle d’Estrées, though I don’t tell him that. I tell him only that it’s one of the oldest perfumes of Europe.
Oskar Voss so wants to believe Gabrielle was poisoned by the Medicis, and this recipe is one devised by Catherine de’ Medici’s own private perfumer. The perfumer would access her chambers through a secret passageway so that he couldn’t be abducted and his recipes stolen. Some believe he concocted her poisons for her too.
After Gabrielle’s death, the king of France married a Medici to settle a war debt, no less. And now here’s Lutz, drunk and slovenly, begging for love potions. All the swagger of generals and dictators so often leads to rose fields.
And I’m awake the rest of the night, restless over the sight of Zoé in such despair. I feel further from the diary than I’ve ever been.
4
1
In the morning, the concierge lets me upstairs, where I’m to wait for Voss. Our little room has been disturbed: drawers opened, cabinet doors flung wide, everything in disarray. I walk through, straightening up. The bell-shaped birdcage where Pascal kept the origami birds he used to fold, fidgeting them together as he puzzled out his perfumes, has been tipped over, its gate unlatched, the birds spilling out. In among those uncaged are many unfolded ones, as if Voss were looking for words written inside their wings.
The only thing he seems to have handled with care is the painting of Gabrielle d’Estrées; he has propped it up on an easel of its own. But he has turned it, so that Gabrielle-and-her-sister’s nipples face the wall. It seems he might have been studying the marks on the back—the stamp from the Louvre museum, and the registration number of the student who painted the copy.
Across the floor are sketches Voss left open; they’re all blueprints, all signed by Pascal, for the design of his perfume bottles, marked with lines and dimensions and notes. Erasures. Palimpsests. Here’s the bottle, artichoke-like with frosted-glass leaves, that contains Cœur de la Conscience (chamomile, pine). Here’s the little sphere that holds Pénélope (apple, primrose). I roll them back up and place them atop the Japanese cabinet.
And the blueprint for Gabrielle. The bottle really is quite beautiful, even on the page. Pascal treats his designs as if he’s intending to hang them framed in a gallery. Ink and watercolor on a page of parchment. Gabrielle’s every line, every curve, is perfect. I get caught up in his notes that run along the side of the page, details about the frosted-glass stopper (the mold-pressed head), and some that didn’t end up in the actual bottle: the nipples, particularly. The bottle for sale has smooth breasts, but the blueprint indicates nipples colored pink with applied patina (cupric nitrate, nitric acid). At the bottom of the page, he explains that the bottle is a nod toward the perfume of ancient Rome, when bottles sometimes took human shape. Perfume was an aphrodisiac, he wrote. All of it, even the flow of his handsome handwriting, is seductive. An aphrodisiac. For women who love women. He doesn’t mention anywhere in his notes that the perfume was intended for men. Was that always a lie? Was the perfume always a gift to the lesbians of Paris?
“You don’t have to pick up after me,” Voss says.
He startles me, and I jump. I even gasp.
“I’m too antsy to sit,” I say.
“Are we both on edge?” he says. “I’ve been frenzied all morning myself.”
Frenzied? I’ve never seen him anything but unruffled, comfortable in his quilts and luxury, high on my poison. Despite managing a grand larceny, he daily makes time to play games of chess in the parlor alone, on the telephone with a chess master in Russia.
I begin to roll up the blueprint, to return it to its cardboard tube. “I’m glad you saw that,” he says. “I was going to show it to you. I’m not interested in Pascal’s bottles; only what’s in them. But it’s certainly a curiosity.”
I put the blueprint away. “What are you frenzied about?” I say. We both remain standing, on opposite ends of the room.
“One can be frenzied without reason,” he says. “I was just having trouble focusing my attention on any one thing.” He walks to the sofa, sits, picks up one of the perfume bottles scattered across the coffee table. “And as I sat in here, sniffing at perfume, looking around, the room suddenly seemed full of secrets.” He nods toward the chair across from him, gesturing for me to take a seat. “What are you frenzied about?”
Instead of sitting, I walk to the window and look out, down into Pascal’s garden. To judge from the brittle, winter remnants of the bushes and shrubs, Pascal might’ve been as interested in the insects he lured as in the flowers that bloomed. In the summer, he’d likely see the red-jacketed gendarme beetle. He’d see Tiffany-blue dragonflies. Praying mantis. Moon moths with wings like pale green opera cloaks. And butterflies, of course, would flock to the flowers of the tulip tree.
“Lutz came to my perfume shop late last night,” I say.
“Lutz?” he says, and his surprise is either genuine or very well rehearsed.
I walk slowly to my chair, well rehearsed myself, my hands in my trouser pockets. I pull out a cigarette tin. I sit on the very edge of the chair’s cushion and light up with a gold lighter. I reach up to hook a lock of hair behind my ear, a habit I’ve always had even though I’ve never kept my hair long enough to have hair to hook back. Until today. I’ve not been to the barber, and my hair is growing out of its boyishness.
I picked up the habit as a kid, watching the schoolgirls, memorizing their every quirk of femininity.
“He was there to punish his girl,” I say. “She was with him. He was demanding a love potion.” I hold the open tin out to him, and he leans forward to take a cigarette for himself. He then leans in for a light. “He was mostly drunk,” I say.
I tilt my head back toward the painting of Gabrielle d’Estrées. I say, “He saw the copy of the painting in my shop. Your name came up.”
“The poor boy can’t get me out of his head,” he says. He breathes the smoke in, then out. He fusses with a loose thread on the sleeve of his pajamas. He’s trying to seem indifferent. “What did he say?” he finally says.
“He suspected the painting came from you. Made him curious. He wondered about the work I’ve been doing.”
“And you told him nothing.”
“I told him nothing,” I say. Voss might finally be useful to me. Maybe if I can convince him Lutz is a threat, he’ll make Lutz disappear. “But for all I know, he’ll be back to the shop.”
He keeps his eyes on mine. He says, “That little bawdy house of yours stirs up plenty of Sturm und Drang.”
And now I fear I’ve made a mistake in making too much of Lutz. I don’t want Voss to be suspicious of my entanglements with Zoé. For all I know, he has more loyalty to Lutz than he’s letting on. I get even more nervous when he changes the subject.
“You’ve taken up smoking with a vengeance,” he says, holding his cigarette before himself, squinting at it. I buy the cigarettes from the nuns who collect tobacco from stubs they find in the gutters. They roll it into new cigarettes and give them to the men and women living in the streets of Paris. But they sell them too, and the money goes toward their own efforts of resistance.
“You don’t have any idea what it’s been like,” I say. “With things the way they are.”
“Well, neither do you,” he says. “I’ve looked after you very well, I’d say.” When I don’t respond, he says, “Wouldn’t you say so too?”
“Would I?”
For cigarette paper, the nuns use the onionskin scritta from a monastery’s printshop, where the monks churn out Bibles for soldiers. The world’s history of war is full of stories of men saved by Bibles in breast pockets, bullets stopped by the thick book of thin paper, a fraction of an inch from plugging a heart.
“Other than Lutz’s drunken spat with his little bird last night, have you been bothered in any way?” he says. “Have you had plenty of rations? That’s not by accident, Nebraska Charlie.” He thumps his thumb against his chest. “I’m your fairy godmother.”
I even have a document Voss gave me, all in German, indicating that I’m under assignment, and that any questions of my status should be referred to him. I’m both glad for the paper and terrified by it. Should I get in a pickle with the Nazis, it’ll do me no end of good. But in every other sense, it’ll be seen as a damning piece of proof as the French tally up who was faithful to France and who wasn’t.
He says, “And I should also point out, I’ve made no trouble for the pretty boy you keep in your attic.” He watches for my reaction. “What is his name, anyway?”
I wonder again about Voss’s loyalties. Does Lutz report to him? This is the first time Voss has made any mention of knowing anything about Blue. I don’t want to seem alarmed, but I nonetheless st
umble over my tongue. “I think…well, I guess you must mean my…my…my shopkeeper…Blue, is his name. My assistant. In the shop. His…his heart is…broken. I mean, he has a bad heart. A heart ailment.”
“Little boy Blue,” he says. “With the broken heart. Precious.”
He almost sounds wounded. There’s a tone of lonely in his voice, like I’ve kept a secret from him. But I won’t give in to it. “I’m an American,” I say. “You can see how that might make a girl nervous.”
“Well, lucky for you, it seems the Americans might not lift a finger to help,” he says, “so we’re all still very good friends.” This has cheered him up, this shift into war talk. The vulgarity of Americans inspires him, always. “Besides, none of you have much business passing judgment, do you? If you’re to believe the pulp westerns. No one over there lives on an inch of land that wasn’t got without gunshot. But in defense of your countrymen, how can anyone really own something they can’t carry with them. Hm? Didn’t you tell me something like that once?” He flicks his ashes into an empty teacup. “Are the Germans any worse than your neighborhood bank foreclosing on a mortgage? If you don’t pay, the banks will call in the hired guns too, to throw you out. Real estate isn’t all about money. It’s also about brute force. Sentimental attachment, however, counts for nothing. Not in my country, and not in yours.”
“So many of our spats end with you patting yourself on the back,” I say. “Have you noticed that?”
“Spats?” he says, cheering up even more. “Is that what we’re having? Have we turned into an old married couple?” But he doesn’t mean for me to answer. He shifts his tone to a serious one. “Yes, I know about your boy Blue, but I’m not having you followed, really. I’m having you looked after. There might be those who think they can get to me by getting to you. Since you’ve been in and out of the house so much. They think they’ll see into my mind by drilling a hole in your head. So we have to be careful.”
The Perfume Thief Page 21