The Perfume Thief

by Timothy Schaffert

  The Mycalesis safitza smells of chocolate and vanilla bean. The scholar touches her fingertip to another bottle, then puts her hand between my legs. She slips one finger inside. Then another. “Ixias cingalensis,” she whispers, her arm around my waist and beneath me, arching my back. I take the bottle from her and hold it to my nose. I breathe in its scent of meadowsweet.

  51

  I tell Voss about the butterfly hunter, at some risk, I suppose. I’ve left out almost nothing. Not the sleeping potion. Not the sex. He could so easily connect the dots between my drugged olfactory-club fellows and the spiked tea I was funneling down his gullet for days.

  But I also know it’s my corruption that has kept me here. He appreciates my depraved logic. My sick pursuit of beauty.

  After finding the blue-eyed butterfly hunter, I stuck with her, hopping from jungle to jungle. I was with her for almost a year, almost as long as I was with M. I honestly thought I could fix my broken heart by being with someone M loved so much. By knowing the butterfly hunter intimately, I reasoned, I was getting to know M better too. It was as if I was now somehow part of M’s yearning for the lepidopterist. And maybe there was some element of revenge. Maybe I thought I could have the love affair with her that M longed for. I would confess it all to M in long, detailed letters, and he’d be broken with regret and jealousy.

  But I never mentioned any of it in my letters to M. For years after, I looked back at it all in embarrassment. I’d been naive. Childish. From then on, butterflies mocked me.

  I didn’t thieve a single thing in my travels with the lepidopterist, though I made myself useful by negotiating with guides and hoteliers on the prices of donkeys and hammocks. I typed reports on typewriters that weighed half a ton, in Ceylon, in Singapore, in Trinidad. And though I’m not named once in the book she published later, I’m everywhere in it.

  “She could never quite figure out the scents on her own,” I tell Voss. “She had no language for it.”

  “You made it all up,” Voss says.

  “She’d write in her little notebook whatever I told her,” I say. “If it hadn’t been for me, her every butterfly would’ve smelled only of sugar or spice.” I gave her heath mold and sea salt, Turkish steam, Texas firefly, scarlet trumpet creeper, Russian hedgehog. Fanciful descriptions, I suppose, but I only ever had my own instinct to draw from.

  No matter what I said, she’d hold the bug to her own nose, and she’d nod slow. Yes, yes, she’d say. Yes, I can see that.

  She left me for a missionary’s wife we met in Tongatapu. The preacher had left, and the wife stayed behind. She lived on the beach in a thatched hut and smoked a meerschaum pipe. Her dresses were just sheets of hibiscus bark hammered thin and wrapped around and around her middle. She smelled of coconut oil. The lepidopterist never knew she’d never loved me until she fell in love with the missionary’s wife.

  “You never mentioned M to the butterfly killer,” Voss says, “in that year you were with her?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “The longer you wait to confess,” I say, “the guiltier your secret.”

  He seems annoyed by the mention of guilt. He sighs. “How so?” he says, with a pointed tone of boredom.

  “She might have thought I was only with her to punish M.”

  “And didn’t you want to punish the butterfly killer with that? When she left you for the other woman in Tongatapu? You could have said the only reason you were ever with her was to punish M. And then you could have told M about the butterfly killer, to punish him.”

  “She lives in Paris now,” I tell Voss.

  “Who lives in Paris now?” he says. “Not the lepidopterist?”

  “Yes,” I say. “The lepidopterist.”

  “How dare you keep this from me?” he says, but with bemusement.

  “I haven’t kept it from you,” I say. “I’m telling you now.”

  “You’ve seen her, surely.”

  “Yes,” I say. “A time or two.”

  “A time or two? Is she still with the missionary’s wife?”

  “No, no,” I say. “She’s alone.” I explain how we became reacquainted. Before the war came on, I had a supplier, a spice vendor, who traveled the world and brought back to me rare scents and flavors. The squeeze from green lemons, the peel of sweet pomegranate. Myrtle berries, Turkish rhubarb, de-pipped raisins, radish seeds. One day he arrived with glass vials in paper tubes, and on the tubes were labels marking the species of butterflies the scholar collected, and the descriptions of their scents I’d invented years before. The Mylothris agathina: candied cactus. The Papilio polydamas: tanned penguin leather.

  “You smelled your own nose on them,” Voss says. “Does she have any of her research left?”

  I shrug. “She’d fallen on some hard times,” I say. “So she’d been selling it all off. But she might have kept some of it back. I can’t imagine there was much of a market for it.” I stop speaking for a moment, and pluck at a puff of lint on my trousers. “She doesn’t live far from here, now that I think about it.”

  I don’t need to nudge any more than that. We’ll go in the morning, he insists. We haven’t taken a stroll in days, he says. No, it’s been weeks, I tell him. Perfect, he says. That’s that.

  52

  I have no idea what became of my butterfly hunter. I haven’t seen her, or bottles of her butterfly scents, since she left me for the missionary’s wife over forty years ago.

  We are off to Annick, the printer and bookbinder. And actress. She is French, while my lepidopterist was American, but I revised the story accordingly when telling it to Voss. I gave her a French name. I revised her eyes too. They’re brown, with such warmth.

  “I’m wearing your favorite,” Annick says when she opens the apartment door to us. She waves her hand at her throat, stirring up the scent. “The Catophaga paulina. You always said it reminded you of Irish-moss lemonade.”

  She’s laying it on thick, this one. She’s been tasked with making as little impression as possible. I just needed a lure to get Voss out of the house. My script calls for her to be distant, absentminded, and lovelorn. She’s to be the lepidopterist as I prefer to picture her: full of regret. Wounded. We would sniff at the vials of fraudulent butterfly juices I’d concocted from my perfumery’s collection of oils, satisfy Voss’s curiosity, then move along.

  Annick gestures us into her apartment. “Oskar Voss,” I say, nodding an introduction. “My partner in perfume.” And to Voss: “And Professor Baptiste here is a scholar of the mating tricks of butterflies.”

  As Voss shakes Annick’s hand, he sniffs toward her and her Irish-moss lemonade. She hooks her finger around the knot of her own tie to tug it down, to bare her throat. She arches her neck.

  “Not unpleasant,” Voss says after taking in a full snuffle. He then leans back to examine her attire. “You seem to share my lady friend’s taste in tailors.”

  “You know,” Annick starts, then stops, leading us to the sofa by the window, with that swagger of hers. She’s waving a finger in the air, strutting her long legs, and I swear she kicks up an electrical spark with the whisk of her corduroy trousers. “I wore what women wore well into my twenties,” she says. “Then one day, at the fair in Vincennes, I’m bustled up tighter than a trussed pig, can hardly breathe from all the gut-strangling of all my straps, and I look up on the stage and there, among the clowns, is a man in a silk dress and a wig, fluttering a fan around, doing somersaults, showing off his bloomers. Dancing. Spinning. Light as a feather.” I sit on the sofa; Voss sits in the chair across from me. Annick still stands. “And I thought, well, isn’t that the way it is. When you’re wearing a woman’s clothes, you’re either a tragedy or a comedy. And I wasn’t having it. I’ve worn trousers ever since.”

  I catch Annick’s eye and try to signal she should ratchet it back, this performance, but I get
caught up in those eyes. She holds my gaze, and my heart speeds up. I haven’t been smitten with anyone in years, and here Annick comes along, in the worst of times, to surprise me.

  She keeps going, and I’m enchanted: “There are even butterflies that take on a costume, to throw off the enemy. ‘Mimickers.’ They take on the flight patterns, and the wing colors, of a more disgusting variety of bug. If they seem like insects that will stink and stain, and taste bad, they’ll be unbothered by their predators.” She winks at me and tightens the knot of her necktie.

  I’m taken in by the spectacle of the character she’s created. She really does seem to be someone I invented. She drops onto the cushion next to me, her legs open, her knee near mine. She stretches out her arm to rest against the back of the sofa, and I lean back, and we’re touching. And when we touch, she doesn’t move her arm an inch. I feel the weight of it against me. And I feel inclined to tilt in her direction, her energy pulling me in. The eye of the storm, sucking in ships.

  And I know that fair in Vincennes she mentioned. I’ve mocked up perfumes based on people’s memories of it. A few have come to me with their nostalgia for the fair, fearful that they’ll never be able to visit it again. The gingerbread pig with your name in icing across its back. The hot axles and grease of the carousel, with its giant hares in mid-leap, bobbing up and down as you sit in the saddles on their backs, breathing in the fumes.

  “Go ahead,” she says to Voss, pointing in the direction of the veneered box next to him. “Look inside the humidor.”

  He lifts the lid, and the glass vials jingle. He removes one, uncorks it, holds it to his nose.

  “What’s the label say?” she asks.

  “Ornithoptera darsius,” he says.

  “Ah, that butterfly,” Annick says. “Smells like the musk of the wolverines that infest wrecked castles.”

  Voss scrunches up his forehead, purses his lips, considers.

  Annick pats my knee. “Clementine devised descriptions for the scents, way back when,” she says. “She breathed them in, then put her words in my mouth.” She looks at me, smiles, winks again. As Voss fusses with the humidor of butterflies, she keeps her hand on my knee. Her eyes are steady on mine. She doesn’t look away, and I don’t either.

  She then pats my knee again, smiles again, pulls her hand back to her own knee, and looks to Voss. “What’s that you’ve got now?” she says. Pinacopteryx charina, he says. Ah, she says, evaporated apricots in coffee jelly.

  This goes on for a while, this back-and-forth, of butterfly species, and what those painted ladies smell like when they’re looking for love. Because that’s the upshot—the lepidopterist’s cabinet was bottled flirtation.

  53

  Across the street from Pascal’s, when we left the house to visit Annick, Blue sat waiting in the two-seat buggy of a vélo-taxi—one of the bicycle-drawn cabs that we ride in, in these days of the gasoline bans. The driver remained in his bicycle seat patiently smoking one of the cigarettes Blue had bribed him with. The buggy had no top, so Blue hid behind a parasol, keeping one eye out, watching for us.

  Here’s what was supposed to happen:

  Blue and I wore matching trousers of a light cashmere; they’re bell-bottomed like a sailor’s blues, and they flow as we walk, not at all unnoticeable with their flutter and flap.

  Blue had been practicing to be me for weeks, reciting my lines, in my voice. He would tell the concierge, as me, that he had doubled back for the cigarette tin. Cigarettes…we’re absolutely addicted. Blue was to rush by the concierge, assuming she’d follow but not giving her a moment to object; he’d wave a paper fan beneath his chin, sending up some of the perfume I’ve been blasting at my neck for the last several days, just for this moment, so the concierge would know it was me, my new signature, a scent that quotes the rosemary and clove of a concoction called thieves’ vinegar. Legend has it that spice merchants warded off the plague by dousing themselves in it to plunder dead bodies for their watches and rings.

  Blue had squeezed his feet into a pair of my shoes that have been worn down by my misstep. The concierge, she of the bent back, her eyes always cast downward, knows me best by the slant of my heel. Blue was to creak the steps exactly the way that I do, and his cashmere trousers would move with my particular rhythms of pace.

  The concierge would unlock the door, then wait while Blue went up to the upstairs room.

  Once there, Blue was to take from my coat the kidney-sticker I’ve had since my days in the Wild West. He would simply go to the back of the chair, and use my dagger to pry at the trim, loosening the nailheads further, cutting whatever strap might sit in his way. Blue, an expert tailor from his backstage work at the theater, had secreted a zipper in the lining of my coat, where he would hide the diary once he found it. And then he’d be gone.

  54

  As Voss and I stroll away from the butterfly hunter’s apartment, taking advantage of the spot of sun and lack of wind, we meander like we used to.

  “You haven’t told me,” I say. “What happened with the formula for Gabrielle I gave you?”

  He doesn’t answer for a while. “Nothing,” he says. “Nothing yet. I don’t know how much time it gives me. If any. And now there’s something else…”

  I wait for him to tell me the something else, but he begins chattering on about the shops we’re passing. A milliner’s shop, and a shop with lingerie. Cheap, he says. Poorly cut. A shop that sells rebuilt typewriters sends him into a long-winded reverie on the stately beauty of the machine and the music of its racket.

  “You say there’s something else,” I say. “About the Gabrielle.”

  “Oh yes,” he says. “Yes.” But then he pauses again. He looks around, as if seeking some other shop to go on and on about. Finally he says, “There’s some indication that Pascal was even more involved with the war effort than I had guessed, beyond the excess chemicals…”

  All I can think about is Blue, and the concierge, so all I see anywhere are the keys above the doors of locksmiths. There’s a locksmith on every block and around every corner. Keys lit up with electrical bulbs or neon, or wooden, painted gold, hanging from chains. There are so many apartments in the city that the locksmiths have always done swift business, every little niche of Paris shifting on every day rent is due.

  And then I realize Voss has been leading me to my street. “I’ve never been to your shop,” he says. “You never invited me. I was beginning to think it was a figment of your imagination.”

  “There’s not much to it,” I say.

  “We’ll see,” he says.

  The rest of the way, I fret, afraid to walk in on Blue in my clothes. At the house, I twist the key in the lock with enough rattle to echo, sending the tumblers this way and that, unlocking the lock, then locking it back up. But my hands are shaking, so my difficulty with the lock isn’t entirely fake. I mention Voss by name, my voice close to the glass of the door—You’d think a thief could get into her own house, eh, Oskar?—doing what I can to let Blue know that if he’s in there, in my costume, he shouldn’t be.

  And he isn’t. And neither are any of our girls. Or rather, Madame Boulette’s girls. Our latest batch of lost trollops typically sit in the parlor upstairs, collapsed on the sofa, lazing around in kimonos and ratty silk stockings.

  I open the drapes and blast the room with light, the sun playing off the mirrors along the wall.

  “Precious,” Voss says.

  “I’m sorry to disappoint,” I say, and out of the corner of my eye, I catch sight of the necktie I’m wearing. Without a neck. Wriggling unknotted across the rose-patterned chaise beneath the window. A snake in the garden. It’s the tie Blue wore as part of his disguise. The one difference between his and mine is that his is now spattered with blood.

  I step around and turn my back to Voss, so I’m between him and the necktie. I pretend to fuss with some unstoppered bot
tles, then sweep up the tie as he runs his eyes across the shelves opposite me. I shove the tie in my pocket.

  “I’m not disappointed,” he says. “It’s charming. It’s like the fashion industry here in Paris, isn’t it? Composed of a million little craftsmen. A miracle, really, that a single dress gets made at all. Lace made in one shop, buttons in another. Someone else, even, for the buttonholes.” He picks up a bottle to smell the perfume. “It can only exist by its very fragility.”

  And then I begin to think I’m breathing in the fumes of a drug I sent along with Blue. Were he to get caught, by the concierge or anyone, a quick, carefully positioned spritz from the perfume bottle could make the person take a seat, if not conk all the way out. The useful aftereffect is a lost hour or two, the fumes robbing your victim of recent memory. So if someone catches you, you’re not caught at all. You just make her forget you’ve run into each other.

  And I’m thinking the fumes are doing their number on me too, slight as they are. I feel dizzy as I sit on the chaise, but with Voss’s back to me again, I manage to slip the tie from my pocket and drop it back behind the cushions, just in case it is somehow holding on to the scent.

  When Voss turns to look at me again, his expression is serious, perhaps sad, as he fiddles with a bottle, twisting its lid.

  “I’ve not lost faith in any of this, Charlie,” he says. He pauses. His eyes sparkle with some emotion, it seems. “This is a beautiful shop. I mean it,” he says.

  “Thank you, Oskar.”

  “Have I ever told you I had sons?”

  Had sons. A peculiar way to put it, but no, he hasn’t told me any such thing, and he knows it. I just shake my head.

  “I have a son who is a military man too,” he says. “I’m very proud of him. And I want to protect him. Nobody wants their children sent to any battlefronts in this war. And my son has sons of his own. So you see, this is…this is why…well, I fear everything’s going to fall apart in Paris before I find anything I need.”