“I let the girls paint my face too,” he says, fluttering his eyelashes. But his cheeks are always pink, his lips always pouty and red, so I can hardly tell. He says, “Ladies, this is my darling Clementine,” parroting my tenor and cadence. He tries again, adjusting an octave or two here and there, a little higher, a little lower. “My darling Clementine.” And then he says it again, inching his voice closer to the sound of mine. My darling Clementine.
He’s been practicing my voice, my stride, my slight slouch, upon my insistence. Young men have been plucked from their homes and sent to Germany, thrust into the labor force. Blue, despite his bum ticker, is otherwise able-bodied. So, if needed, we’ll drag out his makeup kit, dress him in my most ladylike, and shove his pockets full of my documents and identification. We’ll send him off.
Blue isn’t one to take it all lightly. He’s an actor. He doesn’t want to just pass for a little old lady. He wants to become me, specifically, down to every whistle between my teeth and every hitch in my giddyup. He follows me around the house, practicing the fall of my shadow.
He has even started adding to my character, to have more to borrow. He bought a pair of crochet roses, one for him and one for me, to pin to our matching lapels. And upon his request, I designed a perfume for myself, for him to steal from my skin.
This project seems also to distract him from Félix’s absence. He’s become a scholar of holes in the plot, ever since Félix up and left. He goes back and forth: one minute he’s certain Félix is lying low because of the danger of his missions; the next minute he’s certain he’s dead; and then he’s wishing for his death. One minute Blue’s heart is broken; the next his heart’s unbreakable. Take a dagger and drown yourself, as the actors say: Say one thing, mean another.
“How old are you girls?” I ask them. They tell me they’re seventeen.
Blue says, in his own voice, “I told them to tell you they were fifteen, so they’d seem even more tragic. But that shows how good they are, that they wouldn’t lie.” He’s clearly trying to convince me that the girls should stay. With his cheeks so rosy-hued, I can’t help but remember when he first showed up here at the house, lost and pathetic, like a fairy-tale waif.
“Bring them each a mattress up from the cellar,” I tell Blue, “and put them in the library. That’s where you girls will sleep.”
I imagine a houseful of refugees, all of them rehearsing my voice and my gait, wearing my clothes, walking in my shoes, escaping the city one by one by one.
45
“Let me read your leaves,” I tell Voss. Reading tea leaves always seemed to me to require little skill or instinct. You just hold the cup by the handle, rock the last drops back and forth, swirl and agitate, letting the wet sediment clump in telltale shapes.
After he’s drunk the tea in a few long gulps, I take the cup back, and I see what seems to me a flock of blackbirds.
He sits there, looking at me, expecting more. I tip the cup forward. I point out the birds.
He’s twisting M’s snake ring around and around his pinkie. This is the first time he’s worn it since that day he took it. He’s wearing it to taunt me, I suspect. He’s frustrated I haven’t given him a recipe for Gabrielle yet. I’ve assured him that it’s not as easy as he might think, that I can’t just do it overnight, that in order for it to convince, it needs to be able to withstand careful scrutiny by chemists. It must be impeccable. And we have to be careful of Lutz, I say, hoping to tip Lutz toward a bad fate. He’s already suspicious.
In truth, I’m taking my time, dragging it out. I need more hours in the house to see if there’s even anything to find.
“What might these blackbirds mean?” Voss says. He twists twists twists that snake ring around and around and around.
I want the ring back.
I put that ring on M’s finger myself, and M took it off and put it back on my finger. I want you to keep it, he said.
Of course we can’t really be married, I said. I know that.
You know nothing about me, he said, which is a very cruel thing to say to someone who loves you.
I swirl the tea around some more, knocking the birds apart. I remember a little magpie who brought me scraps of things when I was a child on the farm, the little trinkets and beads he stole and left in the crook of a tree. “The French here have a folktale,” I say. “The blackbird’s feathers were white until he tried to steal gold dust from the Prince of Riches. A demon came after him, breathing fire. The blackbird escaped, but he was forever soiled by smoke.”
“Demons,” Voss mutters.
“I can read your palm too,” I say, offering more magic. I hold out my hand.
After a moment of hesitation, and a sigh, he offers me his palm.
This, I know nothing about. I don’t know love from logic in the lines of his hand. But he’s not very interested anyway.
Holding his hand in mine, I decide to take the ring back. It will be very easy. He’s only indulging me, after all, with some impatience, glancing around the room.
I feign a ritual, holding my palm pressed down on his open hand, slipping my fingers in and among his.
And though I do take the ring from his finger, I fail to do so without his noticing. I clumsily fumble it, and it falls to the floor and rolls away.
Any other day, Voss would have been amused by my failure. But today he’s annoyed. He takes his hand back, sighs some more. “I don’t have time for this, Charlie,” he tells me. Scolding me, really. He waves his hand at me, dismissive. “If you can find the ring, you can have it,” he says. “And then you can go.”
I nod, and I stand. Is he upset with me only because I’m slow with the formula, or does he already know about the girls in my house?
I kneel down, to look for the ring under the chair. The enormous wool blanket that covers it has tassels so long, they touch the floor. I stretch my arm under, reaching past the legs, and when I toss the blanket back over the arm to see beneath, there it is. Right in front of my eyes.
Not the ring. The insignia I’ve been seeking. The bit of flourish on Pascal’s last note to Zoé. Over and over and over and over, a hundred of them repeated again and again in the pattern of the fabric of the chair I’ve been sitting on for weeks.
46
I squirm in the chair whenever I’m in it, twisting my spine, feeling for the diary’s edges and points with my back and my ass. Digging my shoulder blades in. My elbows. Three days have passed since I discovered the insignia.
Voss is no longer quite so owly with me, now that I’m reading him my love letters. I swore to myself I’d never share them with him, but I need something to keep me in this chair, to keep him inviting me back, and they’ve had quite the effect.
He won’t let me fix him tea anymore. He has seen a doctor that the concierge arranged, and this doctor dismissed my teas as folk remedies that do more harm than good. So Voss is always awake, and I’m never alone. But the letters keep me here, in a rickety chair that might very well be the vault where Pascal’s diary is kept.
I can’t just go tearing into the chair, tugging at the seams. Yesterday, when I knew that Voss would still be asleep, I arrived early to investigate the chair more closely, thinking the concierge would let me in. She wouldn’t. But come sit in my kitchen with me and wait, she said, shuffling along the way that she does, bent at the back, her eyes on the floor. You’ve never had coffee as strong as mine. You won’t sleep for days. And though I was grateful for the coffee, real coffee, a flavor that eased even as it sent a jolt, the concierge just sat not speaking, repairing a button on a blouse.
I’ve even asked Voss to let me roam the house alone, emphasizing again my keen criminal intuition. I could practice a kind of water witching; I would listen for loose floorboards underfoot. Press my ear to the wall, tap around for hollow spots. I would need complete silence and concentration. I have instincts, I told him.
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Idiocy, Voss said.
And it is idiocy, really. How have I ever gotten away with anything? It’s humiliating to sit here, the diary likely within reach as I read these letters that I’ve not read in years, and never wanted to read aloud. And though the paper has grown fragile, and the words faint, seeing M’s handwriting makes me feel exactly as I did when I first laid eyes on them; I’m that same tender wretch. Whenever I first opened a letter from M, I wanted to read every word at once, to know his every sentiment in a glance. And at the same time, I dreaded reaching the end of the letter, because I knew there wouldn’t be another one for weeks.
I couldn’t at first smell the perfume on your last letter, M wrote me. But I read the letter all the way through, and when I got to your signature—that faint scribble of yours, always looking like it was written with the tip of a feather—there, suddenly, was what I expect might be lily of the valley. It’d been there all along, but I was too much of a brute to notice it, it was so gentle, so pretty.
When I finish reading, Voss is looking up and off. He says, “How did you prepare the paper?”
He’s still caught up in the documents I gave him this morning. I concocted what I consider an excellent approximation of the Gabrielle formula, and created a few exquisitely antiqued pages along with it. I was afraid if I didn’t come up with something, he’d hire someone else to do it. And since I’ve hooked him on these letters that I’ve been carrying with me for decades, I know he’ll keep me around. For whatever reason, he listens close to M’s words, though they can’t offer him any kind of insight into the damage he seeks to do. Though I’ve no doubt his soul is corrupt, I know he’s prone to sentiment and nostalgia. He loves the lovelorn refrain of my life with and without M. He’s a romantic at heart.
All that sensitivity just makes him all the more disturbing.
I tell him I took an old journal, tore a few pages out, bleached them, scratched at them with powder of alum. I don’t tell him, though, that I visited Annick in her printshop. I wanted papers to go along with the recipe, vaguely official-looking documents, to hint at Pascal’s involvement with the government. I think I gained a great deal of her respect when I told her I needed to mock something up that might suggest a secret agency of licenses and approvals.
You’re up to no good, she said with a wink. But she had everything I needed, including a whole cupboard full of surreptitious stamps and embossing seals to choose from.
“No,” Voss says, “I’m talking about the perfume that M mentions. You wrote M on perfumed stationery. How darling.”
“It was more about the play of it than the romance,” I say. I feel the heat of a blush in my cheeks.
The etiquette books of the day advised young ladies against perfuming their letters. It was believed to be a bit vulgar, so the stationery shops, more often than not, kept perfumed paper behind the counter. You had to ask the clerk for it, sheepish, as if you were requesting picture postcards of naked ladies.
One letter I sent M had what they called a “kissing spot,” where the perfume was confined to a little heart-shaped blot in an upper corner. Or I wrote on paper with scent worked right into the pulp. Or I would perfume the paper myself, using rice I’d soaked in heliotrope cologne then sprinkled over the linen stationery, in layers in a box.
And M would respond on scented paper too, but not stationery. He’d write on soap wrappers, or on prayer papers that priests burnt like incense, or on paper torn from the lining of a cedar box of cigars. He wrote me a short note on the singed paper of a torn-up firecracker. You could still smell the gunpowder on it. All M wrote: I’ll bet you’re so handsome in your light summer suits.
M wrote me once on a page that fell out of a crumbling book of love poems, his words weaving in and around the poem’s references to honeysuckle and stolen kisses, the paper’s scent tickling my nose, smelling of toast and mildew. I write soft, M wrote, keeping the tip of the pen as far from the paper as I dare to, or it seems the whole page will become a cloud of dust. Wish I were there when you got this, so I could warn you to open the envelope without touching it much.
One of his letters, too fragile to show Voss, was written on a wax wrapper that, when it arrived, still smelled faintly of peppermint, a particular sting of mint that was on M’s breath when he kissed me sometimes, the candy freshly cracked between his back teeth. The letter had only one sentence: Every day, I carry the weight of your absence.
47
I’ve refused any rides home this week. The weather is changing, and though it’s still cold, it’s warmer than it was, and even a few degrees above freezing feels like spring. Instead of walking home, I walk farther away, taking wrong turns. I stumble back, Alice-like, into the wonderland that I love. Paris, where I live. The shopkeepers have stepped out to stand beneath their awnings. They clean their windows, sweep their walks.
“Clementine?” I hear someone say. The curiosity shop is run by a dotty old woman named Yvonne, and she’s often sitting out in front of it in fair weather, on a stool, repairing an alarm clock or some such, her apron riddled with little springs and tiny cogs.
Today she’s got a tin mermaid with a rusty key in her hip. She winds it up, and all the scales of her fishtail shiver and rattle. “I’m getting my summer window display together, to rush the season,” she says. “It’s so good to be out and about, isn’t it? Here it is only February, and the air smells like spring.” She breathes in deep. “Damp and earthy. Like peat moss.”
I envy her the air she’s getting. I suddenly can’t catch my breath. I feel like there’s a strip of cellophane across my mouth, and I’m having trouble keeping steady on my feet.
Yvonne’s arm in mine makes me want to fall, helpless. I lean on her as she leads me inside. The shift in light puts spots in my eyes, and the spots in my eyes put pain in my head, and I swear I can’t see. My heart feels like it’s stuttering.
“I’m…I’m…” I’m suffocating, I’m trying to say.
“Just sit for a moment,” Yvonne says in a singsong. She lowers me to a bench along the wall, and she speaks with such confidence, I trust that she knows the clutch in my chest better than I do.
I sit on Yvonne’s bench, twisting M’s ring on my finger.
The shop is suddenly alive with the chiming and striking of all the many clocks on the walls, and cuckoos clucking as they snap in and out of their coops. I look up and around, and I realize the shop is full of puzzles. Games. Cabinets. Tables with tops that swivel and shift to become something else. There are chests with springs and triggers. Even the bench I’m sitting on has a little hinged door on its arm. All around me, all I see are hidden things.
I think about Pascal’s love for puzzles.
And I can breathe again.
“Yvonne,” I say. “I need to know about how a person might hide a book. In a chair.”
“I get a lot of that lately,” she says. “Everyone wants everything under lock and key.” I think of my own house with its false doors and trick stairs and the girls I’ve been hiding.
“Could you bring me a piece of paper?” I ask. “And a pencil.” When Yvonne returns with it, I quick-sketch the chair in Pascal’s parlor. And next to it, I illustrate the insignia in the fabric. “Does this look familiar to you?” I say. “Do you think it might have a drawer somewhere inside?” I remember once hearing that gentlemen employed chairs with secret compartments to hide their photographs of naked ladies.
“Well, I guess there’d be no way of knowing, unless you happened to know who made it. There’s no factory line for such things. If it’s truly to be a secret, then it’s got to be one of a kind, doesn’t it?”
But then Yvonne nods. She has an idea. She takes me by the arm again, and we head down the street, just a block, to a furniture dealer. Yvonne introduces me to the owner, then asks him: “If you were going to hide a book in your run-of-the-mill wing chair, how would you
do it?”
I hold out to him the sketch I drew.
He harrumphs, rolls his eyes, and leads me across the shop floor, grabbing a silver letter opener from his desktop along the way. He grumbles and gripes as he walks. “Everybody thinks chairs are full of fluff. Or that they’re solid wood, or something. Nobody ever thinks what it might look like under the upholstery. Never give it a single thought. People pay so little attention to the world around them, to the design that makes the world work. Don’t care a lick about the things they can’t live without.”
He selects a chair, pulls it out from along the wall, and turns it around so its back faces us. He begins to pry at the fabric backing with his letter opener, loosening the nails of the trim. “You’re wanting secret drawers, like in a dime novel, but a chair’s practically hollow. It’s all framework and air. What do you need a trick chair for, when any chair will do?” He pushes back a flap of the fabric, and Yvonne and I peer in.
“Well, look at that,” Yvonne says. “I could crawl up in there myself, if push came to shove.”
48
On slow afternoons, Madame Boulette invites the painters of the Latin Quarter to the cabaret to paint her ladies lazy and naked. The girls nap on settees that are carried onto the stage for them, and the painters set up their easels. And those girls who stay awake stay lost in their own vanity.
Those girls who’ve not fled, that is. The girls we called Rose and Violette have left us for nuns in the countryside of southern France, and an Ivy and an Aster popped up in their place only minutes later; then, when they left, a Tulip and a Clover and a Pansy. Day had promised me I’d house only a few girls for a few days, but my perfume shop is now practically a train station.
There’s a whole path in place, a network. The nuns who make the cigarettes for the poor of Paris have gained a flair for it. They pepper the tobacco with crushed candy lozenges, with shavings of chocolate, with peppermint sprigs. All of Paris craves their smoke. So the nuns have expanded their operation beyond charity, selling their cigarettes to fund their efforts to help people out of the city. Rose, Violette, Ivy, Aster—all our flowers have benefited.
The Perfume Thief Page 23