The Perfume Thief

by Timothy Schaffert

  Blue, who knows his way around a costume, helps to buckle and knot the girls into nuns’ habits, which are not unassuming at all. Our girls sneak out of town in starched headwear that’s as gangly as a white crane lifting from a lake, wings outstretched. They lower their heads, penitent, while their wimples flap with each shuffling step.

  I’ve called a meeting with my conspirators, and we join the artists at Boulette’s. Zoé is convinced that Lutz somehow hears her every word in her apartment, that he has somehow posted listeners at her walls, or hidden microphones in her vents, so we tuck ourselves into the back of the cabaret, hiding behind our easels and canvases, to whisper. Zoé sits at the easel to my left, Day to my right, Blue in front of me.

  Madame Boulette provides the painters the best paints, from the best color shop in Paris. She likes to spoil the artists because she was a model herself in her youth, and she boasts that she hangs naked in garrets and ateliers all across the city. She worked cheap, so in those portraits you’ll see all the finest artists coming of age, finding their style as they shape her breasts and curve her hips.

  I confess everything, my voice low, as we sketch and paint. The poison, the recipe for Gabrielle, the perfume diary within reach for days. I’m glad to make my confession here, out in the open, our eyes on our canvases, so they can’t scold me for not telling them sooner.

  “What do you know about your father’s work for the government?” I ask Zoé as I paint, as I attempt to approximate the exact pink of the model’s skin. “About any formulas he might have concocted? For the military?” On the one hand, I’m hoping she might know something somewhat useful. But on the other, how very aggravating if she kept any such information from me.

  “My father was a perfumer,” she says, all wispiness, as she dots the canvas with purple, with a lazy tap tap tap, for the grapes in the bowl next to the settee.

  “Yes, of course. And a perfumer is a chemist.”

  She puts down her brush. “My father’s entire life was about beauty. What would the military want with his attar of roses?” She looks over at me. “The diary. How are you getting it out of the house?”

  Together we all consider what possibilities there might be for nabbing the book.

  “You’ve been making Voss woozy for weeks,” Zoé says. “Just turn his lights all the way out.”

  There’s the concierge at the door, I tell them. She takes my coat when I get there, and puts it back on me when I go, always certain to send me off empty-handed. Whatever her many setbacks—her severe nearsightedness, her hard of hearing, her hooked spine that pitches her forward, her eyes on the ground—she makes up for with her efficiency and service and pride in her work.

  “You could give them both a little nap,” Day says. “Sneak the book out, then go back in and pretend to have fainted too. Could blame an ether leak.”

  The suggestions become more and more ridiculous, until we finally settle on the most ridiculous one of all.

  “Get Voss out of the house,” Blue says, “and I’ll pretend to be you.” He’s mimicking my voice and does manage to capture something particular about the way I talk.

  I know that the actor in him has been hoping to put his impression of me to some dire use; he’s probably even longed for me to become somehow incapacitated.

  I would just need to convince Voss to walk with me again, like we did in the early days of our twisted courtship. Ever since our night at the cabaret, he’s been squeamish about leaving the house. He has become content with his imprisonment in Pascal’s mansion.

  And then, of course, fate steps up onto the cabaret stage. Another model takes her place on a bench, and when she undoes the belt of her robe and lets the silk fall from her shoulders, I mistake the swirl of a blue and purple birthmark across her shoulder and arm for tattoos. They look, at first blink, like a constellation of butterflies.

  49

  There’s something depleted about Voss when I see him again, but it’s a different kind of depletion than when I drugged him daily. I wonder if my recipe for Gabrielle has done its work for him. I wonder if his mission might be shifting, the pressures altered.

  “What’s M up to?” Voss says, soft, lazy, practically purring it.

  But he knows that M rarely tells us what he’s up to—few of his letters ever said much of anything about his life. He wrote most often of how little he had to say and how inarticulate he was and how much he regretted that he hadn’t a way with words. His letters were lovely apologies for themselves. Or he’d write about the ink he used, or the pen in his hand, or the wax he’d melt to seal the envelope. Nonetheless, over the years, I’ve read each one over and over, like they were lyrics I was committing to memory. There was sweetness and sentiment in his insistence that he wasn’t the sentimental type.

  I wish my letters were like yours, I read aloud to Voss. M had written on a paper cone that had held roasted chestnuts he’d bought from a cart in Central Park. The paper is still dotted with oil spots, and though it no longer smells of the chestnuts, I remember that it did, so richly, that scent of cooked sugar and burnt wood. He wrote the letter on a Sunday afternoon in 1907, a decade since I’d last seen him in Manhattan. I never say all the things I want to, because it’ll all fall flat on the page, and you’ll think me a fool, so if you’d do me the favor of reading between these lines, then I’ll only feel half as inept. I always was better in your imagination.

  Voss says, “He doesn’t feel foolish at all. He’s playing you for the fool. He sends you these sweet nothings, and you respond at once, with your heart on your sleeve, and he can go on, happy-go-lucky, knowing he’s still on your mind. He’s again aglow from your admiration. And you won’t hear from him again until that glow begins to dim a little. I’m quite frustrated with him, honestly. I hoped these letters would be better.”

  “Well,” I say, “M has to be careful, doesn’t he.”

  “How’s that?”

  “He was the vulnerable one. He was married.”

  Voss rolls his eyes. “You were the vulnerable one,” he says. “You. You were all alone. For M to court your affection…it was irresponsible.”

  I had wanted to stay aloof in my letters, but I couldn’t. You never know, when you’re waiting, if you’re waiting in vain. While I waited and waited for M to respond to whatever letter I’d last sent, I’d become determined to punish him. I would decide I’d make him wait too. But then his letter would arrive, and I’d forgive him everything. And I knew I’d just be punishing myself. If I sent no letter, I couldn’t enjoy that irresistible treachery of anticipation.

  I could feel the anticipation. It was like another sense, a sixth or a seventh. It could be intoxicating, that fear that he might never write back. I’d indulge it, like self-pity, and be wasted by it. So when his letter would finally arrive, it needn’t have said anything at all. Just the sight of my name in his hand—it gave me life.

  Were these love letters? Was this love? Infatuation? Preoccupation? Did it matter? Even the possibility of devastation appealed, to be haunted by him should he never write again, to spend the rest of my life interpreting meaning in his silence. Reading between his lines. Above all, I believed in M’s gentle nature and kind soul, despite his fascination with poison. Even that had a harmless, gothic charm. I always believed he deserved true love, even if he couldn’t have it with me.

  I’m about to speak. “Don’t defend him,” Voss says before I can. “He owed you more respect.”

  I want to believe Voss is capable of this flicker of compassion, since he’s telling me what I want to hear. But that will be the mystery that haunts me, if I survive all this: How can he be so moved by beauty, and by tales of love, here in this room with me, while his agencies consume the very soul of Paris? How can any self-respecting man profit from cruelty? What if I led him to Greenspoon’s, and showed him those lost dolls in that squeaky pram?

  I w
ant him to explain it to me. That’s how I’ll punish him. I want to hold the tip of my knife to the bob of his Adam’s apple, and I want him to sing to me every sick note of his wickedness.

  50

  In Costa Rica, I tell Voss, the grasshoppers look like chimney swifts when they take wing. They collect on the limbs of the coffee trees and weigh them down, break them off. They don’t have a taste for the cherries, but they wreck the fields nonetheless.

  It’s the spring after I left New York; I’m not yet thirty. I’m sitting on the front terrace of a coffee baron’s pink house, with the fields just across the road. I watch as the workers run among the trees banging kettles with metal spoons, and rolling mallets up and down the ribs of washboards, to rattle the locusts, to send them up and off. The noise starts to come together as something like a song when a few men arrive with instruments—a little wooden fiddle with horsehair strings, a potato-shaped flute. They form an orchestra, marching in the shade of the leaves of the banana trees planted among the rows.

  A maid lowers a bamboo blind at the edge of the terrace, which doesn’t do much of anything to muffle the thrum of the insects and the racket of the workers.

  “That plague of locusts makes me think of the farm I grew up on,” I tell those on the terrace. I remember standing among the grasshoppers, their feet pulling at me as if plucking me apart, their footsteps sticky, like they’d marched through syrup. They stepped across my eyes shut tight and tugged at my lashes. I pictured them stripping me bare, stitch by stitch, casting me naked into their new world.

  “It’s hardly a plague,” the baron says. “They’ll rest a minute and be on their way.”

  The baron’s wife refills everyone’s cup with coffee from a pot of glass and copper, spilling nearly as much as she pours. Her hands are gnarled with arthritis and riddled with heavy gemstones; it seems as if her knotty fists have begun to grow around her rings. “In Costa Rica, we worry over the volcanoes and earthquakes,” she says. “We don’t fret about the garden pests. We can scare them off with whistles and spoons.”

  There are seven of us on the terrace, sitting at iron tables, and on teakwood benches, under parasols and Panama hats. We’re part of what they’ve called an “olfactory club,” an international cabal of sensualists. It’s not just about perfume, but about anything pleasantly scented—we inhale and analyze the fragrances of fresh flowers, herbs, wine, sweets, supper. We attempt to be poetic about it, but we’re at a loss for words most of the time, no matter the language we speak.

  I’m new to the group. They’re thrilled to have me, because the olfactory club is aging toward oblivion. They’re all of them old, but for me and one other. She’s new too. They’re thrilled even more by her, because of her strange scholarship.

  I catch her looking my way, more often than not. I become a scholar of the scholar’s glances, and the blue of her eyes, which I decide are a mix of midnight and ocean sky, until I decide that’s not right at all—they’re lapis lazuli and turquoise. Dutch china and sapphires. Bluebell and bluebird and blueberry. But maybe it’s not the blue doing me in; maybe it’s only because her eyes are finding mine that I find them so pretty.

  I see why M fell in love with her.

  I wear trousers, a vest, and a pocket watch with a chain. My hair’s cut short. And hers is too, though it falls a little lower than mine, past her ears. She wears trousers, a whole suit, a touch too heavy for the climate—a cheviot tweed, of gray chalk. And it needs tailoring; it’s too broad at the shoulders, too tight at the chest. Wrinkled and trunk-battered, a professor’s cheap getup. Her brown oxford shoes are scuffed bone-white at the toes. On her lapel is a ladylike touch, a butterfly-shaped clip with wings of silver lace. “I wish I’d been given your liberties when I was young,” one of the wives tells us on the terrace.

  “Nobody’s given me nothing,” I say. To them, I’m the very picture of the Wild West, and the smell of it too, the spice of a gunfight still caught in my clothes.

  I cross my legs, revealing a woman’s boot with a woman’s heel.

  I get the scholar’s attention and hold her eyes in mine for a beat or two too long. She obviously wants me to catch her looking.

  Maids bring out platters of scents particular to Costa Rica—balsam flowers, breadfruit, a thorny, blood-colored pitahaya. We hold the objects to our noses, roll our eyes back in our heads. We sigh, we moan.

  The maids then bring out a few trays of empty ruby-red cordial glasses, and I fill them with my contribution to the club’s lost afternoon—an herbal liqueur I claim to have bought from a swamp pirate of the bayou. Everyone sniffs at the stuff before they take a sip. Do I smell licorice? Molasses? Pineapple? Sweet onion? They drink the shot I give them, then ask for another. It’s at the tip of their tongues, they say, a specific scent that’s escaping them. Just when they think they’re at the edge of discovery, it flitters away. Dill? Marigold? Anisette? They stare off in contemplation.

  Sandalwood? Almond? Fig? Their voices are growing fewer, and their jaws are growing weak. They’re slurring their words.

  I ease into the house, and up the stairs. I have to hurry. Now that the herb has kicked in, I won’t have long before it wears off.

  The liquor includes an elixir made from the crushed leaves of a hypnotic weed I bought in Oaxaca, on my way down by train, a local concoction that fishermen pour into the sea to stun the fish just long enough for them to stick their hooks in.

  In the library at the end of the hall, the blue-eyed lepidopterist, M’s butterfly chaser, has set up for her presentation later in the evening. She has plucked off the wings of butterflies, soaked them in alcohol. She has extracted the scents they give off in their efforts to find love. In her glass bottles are the perfumes of their mating calls.

  She has already made a display of little framed boxes of pinned butterflies, and next to each box is a corked bottle of essence. Each bottle is marked with some scientific-looking collision of letters. I take all the bottles and place them in a satchel. I turn my ear to the hallway, listening for silence.

  I leave the room, and step easy across the terrace, trying to keep my heels from clicking too loud against the terra-cotta tiles. For now, the olfactory club is out like a light, slumped in their chairs, their mouths fallen open, their eyes shut tight, their snores buzzing like a swarm of houseflies.

  Suddenly, the scholar’s blue eyes are piercing right through me. I stop in my tracks. “Look at you,” I say.

  “Shhh,” she hisses, her finger at her lips. “They need their sleep.”

  She can’t possibly know that my satchel is full of her butterfly juices. I just need to keep walking. But I don’t.

  She remains seated. She picks up her cordial, still full. She crosses her legs. She sniffs at the liqueur. “For such experts,” she says, “they don’t know much. I couldn’t tell you exactly what you put in this, but I could smell right away that you were up to no good.” She swirls the liqueur around in the glass. “There’s the faintest hint of…corruption.”

  “I have to go,” I say, not going.

  “I’ll go with you,” she says.

  “You’re the one who most needs to be asleep,” I say. “You’re the one I’m robbing.” I nod at her glass. “Take your medicine.”

  “It’s not a robbery if I go with you,” she says.

  One of the old women—the wife of a candle-dripper in Tijuana—on this side of sleep, bats at a grasshopper that’s trapped itself in the curls of her ox-hair wig. She then thumps her knuckle on her nose. She rubs at her eye.

  “We’d best leave,” the lepidopterist says, standing.

  We walk down the road to where I’ve arranged for a coach to wait. The giant grasshoppers light on the lanterns of the carriage, in its curtains, climb through the manes of the horses. The driver up top swats them from the sleeves of his uniform. He kicks them from his boots, jimmies them from his laces wi
th his riding crop.

  On our way to the hotel, the bugs thumping against our roof, I tell the scholar I was hired by the wife of a railroad tycoon who keeps an acres-wide garden in New York state, every plant planted specifically to lure butterflies. She’s a butterfly fiend. She’d heard of the scholar’s research, and she coveted her vials of scent. “You may remember her,” I say. The woman had offered the scholar a handsome sum herself, but the scholar declined in the name of science. So the woman hired me. She so longed to go to the opera, or the races, with the scent at her neck. I’ll pay anything. And she would. She was rich, and there was nothing else she wanted more.

  I don’t tell her that I know M, and that he still cries for her, still loves her.

  I can feel a grasshopper alive under my boot, rustling its wings, sounding like the papery th-th-th-th-th-th-th rattle of a rattlesnake.

  At the hotel, in my room, the scholar puts the scent at my neck, in a finger dab. She has come to Costa Rica not just for the olfactory club but to find the scent of the Heliconius cydno, the longwing butterfly that hovers in tropical lands. “But this is the Hamanumida daedalus,” she whispers in my ear. She has stripped me of my trousers, and my suspenders, and my shirt. The Hamanumida daedalus smells of toffee. Butterscotch. She dabs a dot of butterfly between my breasts. “Mycalesis safitza,” she says, looking up at me with those blue eyes. The blue of a bruise? Of forget-me-nots? She kisses me where she’s placed the scent. Licks at my nipple.

  I know these ways. The whispers that make everything she says—science, chemistry—sound like seduction. She leads, and directs, but with a touch so soft I can barely feel it. I close my eyes and imagine M.