The Perfume Thief

by Timothy Schaffert

  “Who do you mean?” I say.

  “The men of my men,” he says. I take him to mean his partners in crime—Lutz and such. “But I don’t want to tell you anything more,” he says. “Because I don’t want you to ever have anything to tell about me.” He offers this as some kind of generosity, some protection, but to me it sounds like I’ve been thrown to the wolves. He wants to be sure I have no secrets to confess when it’s confess or be killed.

  I pick up the bottle of Gabrielle from the table. “This is somehow the key to something, isn’t it?”

  “Charlie,” he says, then pauses for a long moment. “I need something from you. I need you to describe, on the page, how Pascal might have used poison—poisonous gas, war chemicals—to create perfume. To create Gabrielle, specifically. I need evidence, formulas, that show how Pascal would have diluted the poison, to make it wearable, on the skin. Breathable. It needs to look convincing.”

  What is he talking about? I can’t follow his logic. Is Hitler hoping to slowly poison the lesbians of Paris? But no: “Gabrielle went into production in the early twenties, a few years after the Germans lost the war. In its scent, there’s something like strawberries about to go bad, wouldn’t you say? Sweet and rotten, same reek as the gas I smelled hanging over the battlefield.”

  “I wouldn’t say so,” I say, sniffing at the perfume, though my mind does cast back, considering the possibility.

  “Your imagination,” he says, drawing out the word, sighing, tossing the rest of the cigarette in the teacup. “That’s what I’m asking for. And your expertise. Just make up a formula, but one that would be convincing to chemists who might look at it closely.”

  “Why?” I say, and I toss my cigarette in the teacup too.

  “The French fought with a deadly gas, and so did the Germans,” he says. “And the war was won before all the gas was used. Those poisonous clouds came late into the battlefield. And somehow such warfare seemed more vicious, more deadly, than all the other vicious, deadly warfare, so the treaties that ended the war forbade the use of chemicals ever again. By anyone. Anywhere in the world. Can you imagine? There are laws in war. Rules. Like it’s a card game, some rounds of Doppelkopf. Anyway, the Allies took every drop the Germans had. Added it to all their own vats of poison.”

  “And you think the poison went into perfume?”

  “We believe Pascal worked for the French government,” Voss says. “Or, at least, he was in service to the government. For him to experiment as he did, for him to manufacture his perfume formulas, to manage trade secrets, to license, to protect, he had to strike all sorts of deals with the law. The world of fragrance no longer operates on gentleman’s agreements as it did centuries ago. There are no more gentlemen. So we have reason to believe the government approached Pascal to assist in ridding itself of the gas that was against the rules of war to keep. But rather than just letting it loose, why not make a little money at it at the same time? Pascal was to dilute the gas, to juggle its chemicals around, deactivate it, render it harmless. And then bottle it, sell it, send it faintly into the air.” He waves a hand lightly, up and up and up. “All the German gas designed to choke the French would instead be sweetening the air with the scent of flowers. And the money made from it would strengthen the French military.”

  Voss speaks of it all with such admiration, such infatuation for Pascal’s genius, I can tell he’s overtaken for a moment.

  “But Hitler,” Voss continues, “thinks France did not do what it was supposed to do. That is, rid itself of the poison. He believes there are tanks and tanks and tanks of it still. He has plans for it all. He has factories building weapons. But I don’t think it’s just for practical purposes that he wants it. It’s retribution. He wants to take back all that was stolen from Germany.”

  “And that’s why all the bottles of Gabrielle have gone from the stores,” I say. “He thinks that’s where the poison is, and he’ll extract it all?” I genuinely hope this is true; it’s such madness, and I’d like to see Hitler finally undone by his ambitions.

  “No no no,” Voss says. He sighs. He slouches deeper into the sofa cushions. “I have all the bottles. I’m creating the intrigue around it. I’m glad to know that Lutz was curious about the painting of Gabrielle d’Estrées. I need his curiosity. And I need Hitler to think I’m onto something. I’ve told him that we just need to find the factories and farms where Gabrielle was produced, and we’ll find the tanks of gas. And I’ve promised him that there’s even more in the perfume diary. I’ve promised him formulas that will assure him of winning the war. I’m close to finding it all, I’ve told him.” He tilts his head. Shrugs his shoulders. He smiles, but it seems to pain him. His voice drops. “But I’m not. I’m not close. I’m just painting him a picture of possibility because I know there’s something to all this. I’m getting him invested in my theories, to allow for more time.”

  So now I’m embroiled in a plot to trick Hitler? I’m to compose a formula designed to deceive, to tinker with the very mechanics of this war, by suggesting the scent of rotten strawberries? “I’m not sure I can help,” I say. Voss is out of his head. When all my deception was confined to these rooms, then we could just sit here sipping tea and talking scent. I just needed to keep to this house, so I entertained his flights of fancy. But now he’s taking on a task that’s beyond him. It’s ridiculous, even for Voss. I can’t trust his hunches.

  “You can help,” he says. I can see the sweat on his forehead. “If I don’t show Hitler that I’m…that I’m…discovering, that I’m integral to winning all of Europe, then I won’t have his ear anymore. He’ll trust someone else. He’ll listen to Lutz, or some other lug with big ambitions. I can’t leave all this behind, Charlie. I’m too far along. This…this”—and he gestures around, signifying the house, the perfume—“I could lose it all. I could be sent to a tent, to tally munitions. Or, worse, I could be sent to a desk back in Germany. Signing stacks and stacks of papers until I’m crippled with arthritis.”

  I’m realizing he’s not quite so chummy with Hitler as he might have always let on. But outlining his own demise for me just now seems somehow to embolden him. His voice grows stronger again. The threat of an ordinary, lackluster fate truly terrifies him. And he has gotten this far, after all.

  “And I do think I’ve excited him about the historical connection,” Voss continues, sitting up a little straighter, lifting his chin. “I think it amuses him that perfume might have assassinated Gabrielle d’Estrées, and that Pascal’s family made the perfume. Because it’s not enough that I’ll rebuild Paris, Charlie. Hitler doesn’t care about perfume in and of itself. He hates perfume. For all its musks. For civet. He thinks of perfume as a kind of slaughter. Hitler gets very emotional about animal cruelty.” He rolls his eyes.

  I’m not at all convinced, but still, I tell him I have ways to make a page look aged. I can make an ink of rotten mushrooms and oil of cloves that will fade the very moment it touches paper.

  This effort to buy Voss more time is a way to buy more time for myself. And the more I become involved in the deception, the more I can deceive. “But what happens when it all leads nowhere?” I say. “We don’t know where the gases are.”

  “We’ll deal with that when we have to,” he says.

  42

  I spend the evening alone in my kitchen, contemplating recipes for Gabrielle, and experimenting with inks and other agents for aging the page. And I get lost in thoughts of M. The scents: shoe polish on leather, the sticky vanilla of old books, sprigs of spearmint he’d grind with his teeth after a day of poking his tongue into cups of tea. The winter wind on his skin when he came in from the cold. The cedar scent of the mutton tallow the barber tugged through his hair.

  I smell sulfur and gunpowder, fire and ash, hell and brimstone. M and I lie back on a blanket in a park to watch the fireworks shift and tumble the constellations. We’re angels fallen to earth fr
om the plaster frescoes of the band shell.

  Sometimes I wore, for him, what he wanted me to wear. Back then we dressed for winter even in the summertime, so I wore the full overskirts and underskirts, the petticoats, the corsets, the whalebone rib-killers of a virtuous lady, all the better to stash all I picked from pockets; I hid under a mile-wide hat, its straw brim wilting and weighed down with armloads of wool roses and silk chrysanthemums, casting shadows across my face.

  I was the story the fairgoers would tell for years, of the pilfered pocket watch, Mother’s lost mother-of-pearl opera glasses, the earring clipped right off your lobe. One second you have everything you brought, then there’s a rustle of my endless skirts as I brush past, a bump of my elbow as I’m hustled by the crowd. After a heartbeat or two, you feel that jump in your gut, that panicked flip-flop when you sense your pocket’s too light or your finger’s ringless. You feel the rush of a breeze where your bracelet should be. The pearl choker at your throat has been replaced by a lump in your gullet. I was only just there, and you can still smell the sting of the caraway I chew on, swear you can hear the seeds cracking between my teeth. In an instant, every innocent face in sight is slapped with aspects of guilt.

  When we were in bed together that summer night, M and I studied our loot in the moonlight. He slipped the stolen rings onto my toes, draped a watch chain between my breasts, pressing the clock to the beat of my heart. I took in the salt and pepper of his sweat, in my nose, on my tongue, and his skin’s hint of ginger and dirt.

  But anytime I try to bottle any of it, M scurries away. He throws me off his scent.

  I do, though, sell in my shop a cologne I call M. It’s the perfume of our correspondence. The wood pulp of paper torn by the nib of a pen. The burnt wick of the sealing wax. A hint of cinnamon oil, from an ink that flickered red, glowing in the dark.

  A touch of lime, from a wash that erased any words you wanted to take back.

  My leaving Manhattan wasn’t the end of the affair. M and I wrote to each other for years. Sometimes I even stayed longer in a place than I needed to, or wanted to, just because I knew he’d be writing back.

  I kept every letter. I’ve carried them around the world with me. In a sense, the letters were the affair.

  Clementine,

  Read this letter every day, and every day, it will remind you that I still love you. Even if I never write again, these words will always be true.

  M

  Clementine,

  I am angry at you for being angry with me. Every day, I will mail you a blank page, to punish you with silence.

  M

  Here’s my silence. In all the empty space below.

  M

  Clementine,

  Unless you know I’ve written you in a secret ink that’s see-through, you’re not seeing these words. You can’t see these instructions: heat the page with a match, and my sentiments will rise up in ghostly pale green, then fade away to nothing again when you take the match away.

  But please know, even if you can’t read a word of this, that anything I could possibly say says nothing at all. I’m no poet, so I don’t know how best to tell you all the secrets in my heart.

  M

  43

  I dream my bed is crawling with winged spiders. I wake with a start and see Day beside me, tiptoeing her fingertips over my arm. I bolt upright, and Day jumps too. She holds her hand to her chest. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” she says, cringing, whispering. “I was trying to wake you gently.”

  I might still be lingering in my dream, for at the foot of my bed are two shadowy figures I can’t quite make out in the pitch-dark of the room.

  “Is there someone else here?” I say. Lutz and Zoé, back for more? I pull the cord of the bedside lamp. I’m both startled and relieved at the sight of them: two young women—or tall, lanky girls, really—who could be twins.

  Day snatches at the lamp cord, turning the light back off. “No light,” she says, though the curtains are heavy, and no light could get out. “We might have been followed.”

  “Yes, you might have been followed,” I mumble.

  “You’re going to have to keep the girls here,” Day says.

  “Here?” I say.

  “Yes,” she says. “Just for tonight. Or for a few nights. Or maybe more.”

  Before I can say anything at all, Day grabs at the cord again, turning on the light with a hard tug, nearly knocking the lamp over as she rushes to the end of the bed. The lamp wobbles, sending dark, dusky wings flickering through the room like bats in a belfry.

  I reach over to right it. I tip the shade to lean the light toward the end of the bed. Day grabs the chin of the girl on the left, to aim her face right at me. The girl on the left looks just like the girl on the right, except she has a shiner and a split lip.

  “They’re practically children,” Day says. She’s scolding me. “You’re going to leave them another minute in that brothel? They can’t live there.”

  “Of course they shouldn’t live there…”

  Day folds her arms across her chest. Her wig is off her head and stuffed into her coat pocket, the curls partly peeking out. “You’ve got all kinds of hiding spots in this house,” she says, but now she’s not scolding, she’s pleading. “All kinds of space. In a time like this, your house isn’t just yours.” She pauses. She’s thinking. She says, “It belongs to Paris.”

  “But I…Yes, yes, I know. But I…”

  Day pulls open the girl’s coat. She pokes at her ribs. The girl’s wearing a flimsy peignoir of chiffon and silk. And what I took to be blood on her chin, from her split lip, is actually smeared lipstick. Day says, “They’re starving.”

  The girl doesn’t seem that thin to me. And of all the places in Paris, I suspect Madame Boulette’s is well provided for. I begin again. “You see, I have to be careful, because the work I’m doing…” But I don’t continue. How do I explain the danger I’ve put her in, and Blue, by spending my days plotting to deceive Hitler? That I’ve been poisoning a Nazi to gain access? All I’ve told Blue and Day is that I’ve been curing Voss’s flu with cups of tea. I’ve just innocently kept him company, I’ve told them. I search the house for the diary as he naps.

  “Clementine,” she says to me, her voice cracking, “we’re always wrong if we think we’ve done enough. In times like these.”

  The girls shiver. The one’s teeth start chattering.

  “What are your names, girls?” I say.

  They seem stumped by the question. They look at each other. They look over at Day.

  Day’s pleased that I’ve asked. “I’ve told them they can’t remember their old names,” she says. “I gave them new ones. I named them in your honor. This is Rose, and that’s Violette. Flowers of the garden.”

  Day returns to the lamp to turn it out again. She tosses aside my bedcovers. “They can just crawl in with you for tonight. The bed’s plenty big.”

  “Oh, Day,” I say, but I scoot over to make room. The girls get in, coats and all. Day covers them up.

  “They’ll just be here a few days, Clem,” she says, “or maybe a few more than a few. There are some nuns in the country taking in…well, taking in girls like Rose and Violette here. So we just need to get things arranged.” She comes around to my side of the bed to kiss my forehead. “I have to run,” she says. “If they notice I’m gone at the same time they notice they’re gone, we’re in for it.”

  “We’re in for it?” I say.

  At the bedroom door, she turns back to say, “In a few days, I may bring by a few others. But only a few.” I must tell her the house might be watched, but as I’m trying to find the words, she says, again, “Only a few.” And then she’s gone.

  I look over to the girls. One holds the other, the other holds a rag doll, both of them close to the bed’s edge. Their backs are to me. “Get s
ome sleep, Rose. Violette. Unless you’d rather I called you by your real names? Which would you prefer?” They mumble: Rose. Violette. “Okay, then,” I say. “And tomorrow we’ll make a nice room for you.” And Day’s right; there are any number of ample nooks and crannies in this house. And there are mattresses in the basement left behind by the academy. The cellar seems to have been a makeshift dormitory for the schoolboys. Or a dungeon, as Blue has suggested.

  “Thank you, ma’am,” the girls mutter.

  “You’ll call me Clementine,” I say. “Or Clem.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” they say. “Good night, ma’am.”

  And then I recognize them by the perfumes they wear. My perfumes, from when I conjured scents for the girls in Boulette’s house. I smell pine needles and fire. I recall how the one girl described being lost in a storm alone, a little Gretel in the woods, and the hot, intoxicating smell of lightning striking a tree.

  I scoot down beneath the blankets, turn my back to them, lie on the edge of the bed to leave them plenty of room. Though I’m certain I won’t be able to sleep, I begin to drift off. But then I wake to the sound of weeping. One of the sisters is crying, and it sounds like she’s trying to muffle her despair with her pillow. The other tries to coo comfort, whispering. She begins to sing to her sister, a lullaby, a song about sleep. When that doesn’t work, she begins to beg. We have to be quiet, she whispers. Don’t cry, don’t cry, don’t cry, she says, and that chant drifts into a lullaby of its own.

  44

  In the morning, the girls are gone from the bed. Did I dream them? When I go downstairs, I see that Blue is tending to them. He’s brought out his makeup kit. Rose-or-Violette’s bruises have been expertly blushed away, and the pink of her lips hides the cut. Blue did such a good job, I can no longer tell the two girls apart.