I’m so surprised by his vulnerability, and so desperate for him to leave, I say nothing. But he goes on.
“My other son,” he says, “would be my oldest. If he’d lived. When he was a little boy, he jumped into my arms, and…it was like he fainted. Like he fell asleep. He died after a few hours in the hospital. A heart condition. Very rare. And even more rare in children so small. To have your child stop breathing in your arms casts a pall of loneliness over the rest of your life. You never recover.” He returns the perfume bottle to the vanity. “And you spend the rest of your life counting birthdays. Wondering what he’d be like now if he’d lived. A little terrible, tragic indulgence you allow yourself every now and again.”
“I can only imagine,” I say. But I’m trying to analyze. Might the loss of that child have thrown a shadow through his brain? Casts a pall of loneliness. Can such terrible grief deaden you to the grief of others?
“You can’t imagine at all,” he says, but not unkindly. He’s not scolding me.
Voss then straightens his back, puts his hands in his coat pockets, and gives me a sharp nod of dismissal. “I have no need to see the rest of the house,” he says, as if I’ve invited him to.
“Oskar,” I say, “if you don’t mind too terribly, I’ll let you go back on your own. It’s been…well, I’ve had a lot on my mind this morning too. Old acquaintances, and all that.”
“Ah,” he says, cheering. “Your old lover made you sentimental.” It always returns him to his best spirits when he can remark on my perversions. Though he says nothing to mock me, I can hear the notes of ridicule in the lift of delight in his voice.
55
Voss summons a car by phone, it arrives, he leaves. It takes minutes, maybe seconds, but seems endless.
I call out Blue’s name even as I pull closed the drapes in the shop, to shut out the street. When I turn back from the drapes, he’s there. He says, “It’s much worse than it looks.”
“How could it be worse?” I say. I’m startled at the sight of him. He’s still in the clothes that match mine, but his shirt and trousers are blood-spotted, like his necktie. His sleeve is torn. His hand is wrapped tight in a bloodied silk scarf. He had put on some makeup this morning, to actually downplay the pink of his own cheeks and the pretty flutter of his thick eyelashes, and it’s a smear across his face now, all horror show.
“No, no, no, no,” Blue says. “I meant to say…it looks worse than it is.”
“The dagger,” I say, and I go to him, to cradle his wounded hand in both of mine. “It’s got a mind of its own.” But, of course, what I’m really thinking is that I should never have given Blue anything more blunt than a butter knife.
But no, not the dagger. Blue went right to Pascal’s upstairs room, with no problem at all, he explains. The concierge was convinced by Blue’s costume and demeanor and let him pass. But no sooner had he dipped his hand into the back of the chair than he pulled it back out, away from a sharp sting. He’d cut himself, scratched up against a staple, or a sliver of wood. Maybe a nail.
“You’d think I’d opened a vein,” he says.
It was one of those slight, shallow cuts that won’t stop bleeding, out of all proportion to the damage done.
And he bled for a bit before even realizing he’d bled on the fabric of the chair, on the blanket, on the rug. He attempted to sop up the blood with his necktie, but he was terrified too, that he’d somehow severed something vital and his body was too shocked to feel it. In his fussing about, he knocked into the chair, which dislodged the book from its nest and sent its corner poking out.
“But the diary wasn’t just a little pocket thing,” he says. “It wasn’t one of those girls’ diaries with a heart-shaped lock. It was a long, fat ledger book. Overstuffed. Some pages falling out, others crammed in. And while I was trying to smuggle it into my coat’s lining, where it didn’t fit at all, the concierge walked into the room. To check on me. I was on my knees on the floor, and she saw me. And she saw I wasn’t you.”
Sometimes, when you’re caught, you don’t have time to contemplate the best defense. And sometimes that is your best defense, to rely on instinct. Any thinking is overthinking. Let adrenaline work your tongue and talk your way out.
But all I can do is overthink. My mind darts around, considering the damage done. I should never have entrusted this task to anyone.
“Where’s the book?” I say. I sit on the edge of the chaise. My knees together. My hands folded atop them.
Blue shrugs. He tilts his head, on the verge of tears. “I don’t have it,” he says.
“You don’t have it.”
“She said…the concierge said…she said she would call someone unless I left it on the table in the studio,” he says. “So I did. And she escorted me out. She didn’t say another word to me.”
The goddamn concierge.
“You used the drug I gave you?” I say.
“Oh,” he says, nodding his head, jittery, “oh yes, yes, I used it. I used it. I spilled it. Down the front of myself. But it must not work anyway, because I remember every stupid thing I did wrong. It’s all I can think about.” He tilts his head, his lip shivering. “I’ve made a mess of it,” he says.
“No,” I say. “You didn’t make a mess. You didn’t. This was mine to make a mess of.”
The important thing is that Blue is here, with me, and that the concierge did not try to have him arrested. And since she let him go, that gives us room to maneuver. There may be ways I can convince Voss that the attempted theft was an act by Lutz. That I’ve been watched, and followed. Or maybe I can convince him that the concierge is lying, that she herself is working for someone out to discredit him. I will play to his every insecurity.
But for now, we do nothing. The phone will ring when it rings. Or there will be a knock at the door. Never go chasing after people to tell them your lies. Your lies have to wait for the people to come asking for them.
“Pour us both a shot of whiskey,” I say, nodding toward the cabinet in the corner. “Something American.”
Blue and I sit side by side on the chaise, twinned in our costumes, letting the bourbon and smoke tingle and burn. I cross my legs. He crosses his. He puts his head on my shoulder. I put my head on his head. We see ourselves in the tilt of a mirror on the wall.
I pat Blue’s knee, and I send him upstairs. He needs to hide for the time being. For all I know, the house is thick with the ladies from Boulette’s. I’ve lost track of who’s here and who’s left.
The phone rings, and I yelp from the shock of it. I’ve never heard it ring this loud. The closet beneath the stairs is a kind of phone booth, with a door of stained glass hinged in the middle, and an ivory telephone with gold bands. I lean against the door, and answer.
“This is Madame Vachon,” she says, and it takes me a moment to remember who that is. I only ever call her the concierge, which has always seemed to be her preference.
“Yes?” I say.
“I thought you might like to know that I found the perfume diary,” she says, and her voice is so strained, so tense, I fear what she’ll say next. I look to the front door, waiting for a shadow to cross the glass. I cower against the wall. “And I gave it to Monsieur Voss myself. I know you would have liked to have found it, but you didn’t. I did. Because I know this house better than anyone. I’ve been in this house longer than anyone else alive, since long before Monsieur Pascal was even born. And I’ll die in this house, so help me God. I don’t care who owns it; it is my house.”
She finally pauses long enough for me to ask, “What do you want?”
“Nothing,” she says. “I found the diary. It had nothing to do with you.” She pauses again. “You’ll be fine.”
And she slams down the phone.
56
I’m nearly turned away from Boulette’s in the early evening, by a pinkie-ringed thug lean
ing back on the door, in a beret and neckerchief. I’ve dressed to the nines, or so I thought, but now I notice that my tuxedo has lost some of its shine, and my top hat’s without polish. “Do you have your membership card?” he grumbles, one of his eyes bulging, the other swollen shut. I do, I think, and I consider bringing out the brittle card I’ve carried in my wallet since that night in Manhattan, decades ago, when I joined the Brothers of the Sisterhood.
“I’m not sure, but I don’t be-lieeeeve I’m technically a member,” I say, furrowing my brow, needlessly fumbling at the inside breast pocket of my tuxedo coat.
“You have to be a member to get in,” he says.
“I’ve never been a member before, and I’ve always gotten in,” I say. He ignores me. I take off my top hat, hold it at my chest, and lean forward on my walking stick. “How do I go about becoming a member, my good man?”
“You fill out an application.”
“How do I go about getting an application to fill out?”
“By being invited to apply,” he says.
I put my hat back on. “Any reasonable person would find this situation untenable,” I say.
“You could complain to management inside,” he says, shrugging, sucking on a very thin cigar, “but you can’t get inside if you’re not a member.” He shrugs again. “I’m just as frustrated about it as you are. Bureaucracies can be very crippling.” With his half smile, half sneer, he flashes a gold tooth.
The door then opens a crack, jostling the thug from his perch, and Madame Boulette is there to usher me in. “Merci, Albert,” she tells him, gesturing past him, welcoming me.
She puts her arm in mine, the two of us suddenly friends, and leads me toward a hallway I’ve not been down before. “Albert’s helping a bit because our locks have proven weak, you might say,” she says. “A few of our birds have…flown the coop…without paying their rent. And a few of the other houses nearby have lost some of their girls too. So we’re…troubled.” She sighs. “A few of my best virgins, no less.” She forces a smile. She touches the tassels of my silk scarf. “But it’s good having Albert at the front door, and he’s working for peanuts.”
“For peanuts?” I say. “Because he belongs in a zoo?”
“The poor thing’s a mobster,” she says. “So many of them have lost their way since the occupation. With the new bullies in town, the old bullies have to beg for alms.”
We turn a corner into a little jazz salon where someone I’ve never seen before sings a song I don’t know. Her voice has a hiccup to it, one that comes ticking around like clockwork, or like the squeak of a porch swing.
“We’re using the cozier club lately,” Madame Boulette tells me. “The soldiers are busier than they’ve been.” And indeed, the place seems to be serving only locals tonight, and very few of them at that. Though the girls are wearing as little as they ever have, and even less, the men they’re sitting with are slack and slouched and intent on not leaving a drop in their highballs. At a table nearby, three girls sit by themselves, stirring their drinks with their cocktail umbrellas and chewing on the ends of cherry stems.
Madame Boulette talks in my ear: “The Resistance fighters are finally ruining the soldiers’ evenings just a touch.”
I spray perfume in Madame Boulette’s direction. “Narcissus,” I say. “With a little kiss of ambrette, to land it. I hope Zoé likes this one. I’ve been a disappointment, mostly.”
She taps the bridge of her nose, blinks her eyes tight. Stops just short of a sneeze. A rejection.
She leads me to a table in the corner. “Champagne, Mr. Charlie?”
“We’re having gin,” Zoé says, suddenly here, a martini in each hand. I barely recognize her because she’s chopped her hair short. It’s not as short as mine, but it’s certainly short for her. Her curls bounce like springs.
Her gown is tiger-striped, and on each shoulder strap is a rhinestone-studded panther, stalking, creeping down over her clavicle.
The singer onstage has moved on to another song I don’t know, but with the same squeak in her voice. “You don’t have the diary, do you?” Zoé says the very second Madame Boulette’s out of earshot.
We both sit with our hands in our laps. I can’t take my eyes off our martinis sitting untouched between us on the tabletop, the gin perfectly still. “It did not go smoothly,” I say.
Zoé picks up her martini glass and takes a sip, swallowing hard. I see her hand tremble as she sets the glass back down. She licks her lips. “So where is it?”
I pick up my glass, my hand shaking too, and take a sip. I put the glass back down. “I believe Voss has it now,” I say.
Zoé nods slow slow slow, her eyes downturned, then she tilts her head back, her eyes closed. She puts her hand to the back of her neck to rub there, as if massaging out an ache. She takes another sip of gin, then says, “So you get it back from him.” She shrugs.
“Zoé,” I say, “sweetheart…it’s over. It’s over now. That’s what I’m telling you.” I shrug too. “I told you from the beginning that I couldn’t possibly…that I…Zoé, I’m a small-time crook. That’s all I ever was. And I’m an old, old woman. I had no business even thinking that I could—”
“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” she says, leaning in, hissing. “It’s my own fault? For trusting you?”
“No, no…”
“And you don’t even believe that yourself,” she says. “You don’t think you’re that. You don’t think you’re small-time. You can still get it. You can still go back and get the book.”
“I…” But instead of denying I can do anything, I find myself saying, “I’ll try. I’ll try, of course,” and a plot starts to creak together in my head, in spite of myself. “What more can you tell me about the concierge? Madame Vachon.”
“She terrified me when I was a little girl,” she says. “She slammed doors all the time, even when nobody was going in or out. She rattled around like she was a ghost haunting the house. I always thought she was listening in, to every room at once.” After a moment, she leans back and crosses her arms. “Don’t tell me she found the diary for Voss.”
“She caught Blue in the act of taking it,” I say. “In my clothes. She demanded the diary and told him to leave. And then she phoned me to insist that she had found the diary. It sounded like wounded pride, really. She’s not going to tell Voss anything, she says. It was some kind of victory she refused to let me have. But she’s also trying to keep herself there, I suppose. Voss is the master of the house now, so she wants to make herself useful.”
Zoé reaches over to touch my hand. She holds it. Squeezes my hand tight. I squeeze back. “Don’t go back to the house,” she says now. “You need to stay away, don’t you? What if Madame Vachon does tell him something? Or he figures it out? If he has any inkling, any suspicion, you’re doomed. You need to hide, Clementine.”
I take my hand back to bring a cigarette tin from my jacket pocket, set it down, push it toward her. “You need to hide,” I say. “The cigarettes on top are ones you’ll want to smoke. But the next layer, under the parchment, is instructions. Unroll the first cigarette, and you’ll find a map, detailing where to go when you leave here. Unroll the next one, and there’s an itinerary.” I explain it all, cigarette by cigarette, this blueprint of her escape to the nuns in southern France. There, she’ll join an effort by the Americans to help artists and intellectuals out of the country.
The cigarettes I packed in Zoé’s tin are like sticks of candy—so sweet, they’ll numb your tongue, with hints of chocolate and toasted coconut.
I push the tin a little farther toward her. She still doesn’t touch it.
“I’m dead,” she says.
“Maybe you’re not actually in the diary,” I say. “Or maybe there’s no way of recognizing you.”
She takes another bracing swig of her gin. She leans back in the chair. Looks around th
e cabaret. “Can’t we just have Paris back?” she says. “Why should I have to leave it?”
It was either our Rose or our Violette who told me: Sometimes an open door to the outside seems scarier than being under lock and key.
“You just do, sweetheart,” I say. “It’s best not to get philosophical about it.”
She takes one of the sweet cigarettes from the tin. Leans into the tabletop candle to light up. “Lutz knows about the diary,” she says. “He found out somehow. He thinks the diary’s going to lead him to something else Hitler will want. And I should care, he says, because he’ll be rewarded, and he’ll put me up in any castle I want.”
“What does he think is in the diary?”
Zoé says, “He won’t say. He may not know much at all. He thinks Voss is weak. He thinks he should just take whatever it is Voss is after.”
And we drink some more. And some more. And a new singer takes the stage. The gin lets every worry, every terrible fear, take wing for a moment. Fly away. “What castle did you pick?” I say.
“No castle,” she says. She fidgets with the clasp of her charm bracelet. Twists the bracelet around her thin wrist. “I told him I’d take the Notre-Dame cathedral. I want to haunt the bell tower, like the hunchback, among the gargoyles.”
“Leave tonight, then,” I say. “He’s not here. Leave with me.” I glance over at Madame Boulette, who’s sitting at the bar. The club’s so dead, she has her wig off and in her lap. She wears a silk cap tight on her skull as she teases her wig’s human-hair curls with an olive fork.
“It’s not as easy as this,” she says, tapping her fingers against the cigarette tin. “I can’t just get away.” And she does sound too exhausted to go anywhere.
“It is as easy as this,” I say, pushing the tin closer toward her.
The evening’s master of ceremonies, who appears to be another of the thugs Madame Boulette newly employs, takes the stage and announces Zoé’s name, introducing her.
The Perfume Thief Page 26