Zoé stands. “They told Day not to come back,” she says. “Everyone’s so concerned about the girls from upstairs getting away, they’re letting hardly anybody in.” She drinks the last drops of her gin. “And since I’m the bird in the cage, I have to sing.” She walks away, leaving the tin behind.
“Please, Zoé,” I say, but I’m thinking of Day now, and my voice is so weak, I doubt she can hear me above the saxophone on the stage.
But she does hear me. She stops. She pauses, her back to me. “Zoé,” I say again. She returns to the table, crushes her cigarette in the ashtray, and picks up the tin from the tabletop.
57
It’s a literal itch, Day says, when she’s not singing for people. It tingles her skin, like an allergy, when no one’s around to lend an ear.
She’s been fired from the cabaret, now that the bordello is in a quick downhill slide, so many of its girls having run away, the management in a frazzle.
I’ve stopped at Day’s on my way to see Voss. He called me early this morning to tell me he was sending a car. I told him I’d rather walk. Don’t dawdle, he said. You’ll want to see what I found. And I do believe he’s genuinely enthusiastic to show me the diary. At the very least, I know his moods. To be honest, I think I might be his only friend. I’m certainly the only person he can confide in. That, at least, is something I might still be expert at: tricking people into trusting me.
Or I could be wrong. I could be expert at nothing anymore. Did the concierge even notice that Blue bled all over the chair I sit in every day? Could that old woman be capable of any kind of deception at all? If Voss is in any way suspicious, then I’m waltzing right into his snare. He would most certainly want to toy with me before he carted me off to the camp in Alsace. I’m terrified at what he might be like at his most diabolical.
Or he doesn’t suspect a thing. And I have one more chance to lift the diary right out from under his nose.
“The café was open way past curfew last night,” Day tells me. I’ve brought her a tray of breakfast from downstairs. “It was full of happy drunks sick of staying home.” She sits up in bed, and keeps her sleeping mask on. Over the eyes of the mask are eyes of silk with long lashes, one open, the other closed in a flirty wink. “Nobody can stay in anymore. Not another minute. So we sang all the songs we knew, then made up new ones when we ran out.” She tilts her head, pouts, looking at me with those embroidered eyeballs. “Can you do something about the sun so I can take off my mask?”
I place the tray across her lap, then adjust the drapes the best I can. This corner room has four windows, each with a window seat, each seat cluttered with department-store mannequin heads used for hat displays. Each head props up one of Day’s wigs.
“We made up a sad little song about the elephants that get killed for their tusks for piano keys,” she says. “It was a jazz funeral.” On a plate on her tray is a deck of cards, so Day can tell her own fortune. Day insists on a fortune daily, and Madame Roche always stacks the cards so they predict the best. Day’s never once objected to their sunny forecast.
“I wish you could get away,” I say. I sit on the edge of the bed and help myself to a wiggle of bacon.
“Actually, I am going to be gone for a bit,” she says. “A couple of the musicians from the cabaret are going on a short little tour, for a week or two. They need a singer.” She pushes the mask up on her forehead and inspects her breakfast.
“Tell me the truth,” I say.
She won’t meet my eyes. “What truth is there to tell? I’m singing, that’s all.”
“Just promise me you’ll be careful,” I say. “Even singing all the old songs makes everyone nervous.” I pour more coffee into her cup. “The girls of the bordello. The oldest profession. There’s a new word for them now. Horizontales. Horizontal collaborators.”
“Collaborators?” she says. She looks up and off, a gaze of despair. “They’ve done nothing wrong. They just sleep with the bastards.” She takes the top card from the deck, then tosses it aside without even seeming to see what’s on it. She plucks up the next one and tosses it aside too. “Collaborators,” she says, looking at me, rolling her eyes. It’s stuck in her craw. “All of Paris is a whore. We’re all horizontales; that’s why we’re here to begin with. We’re here to get too much of everything nobody needs. Thank God we have those big beautiful churches where we can drop off our sins.” She picks up the deck of cards and shuffles them fiercely, with a hard snap and flutter. “If men liked to fuck more than they like to kill, we’d all be better off,” she says.
“I’m scared for you,” I say. I can’t bear to tell her that I’ve lost the perfume diary.
She puts her hand to my cheek. She smiles that smile of sweet pity she likes to give me. And she’s about to say something when the sound of somebody striking up a tune on the piano downstairs, even at this early hour, distracts her. “Maybe they never left at all,” she says. “Maybe they slept in the café.” We hear someone banging a broomstick on the ceiling. She interprets this as a summoning. “I’m being called to duty,” she says, pushing the tray aside. “Grab me the copper-colored one, won’t you, love?” Day takes a seat at her mirror. “You know,” she says, looking over at my reflection, “in all these years, you’ve never asked why I’m always so poor. You’ve never asked what happened to all that money from ‘Where Were You When.’ Don’t you ever wonder how I kept from getting stinking rich?”
“I figured you’d tell me if you wanted me to know.”
“I do want you to know,” she says. “I figured I’d tell you if I was ever asked.”
“Then I’m asking,” I say.
She shrugs one shoulder. Gives her head a little shake. “I was fleeced.” She shrugs that shoulder again. Simple as that, that shrug seems to say. “By crooked contracts. Crooked managers. That’s why I left the US to begin with. They’d book me into terrible dives, then pay me nothing. Less than nothing, sometimes. I’d end up owing them, just to warble in some dump.” I hand her her wig. She rustles it around, looking for the front of it. “You’re a Negro act, they’d say. You’re lucky you get any work at all. And the thing is, I think they believed that. They thought they were doing me good. I was their charity.” She pulls the wig on over her head, tugs on the curls to shift it into place. “But they never convinced me of that. They didn’t, Clem. I never believed them. And that’s why I came to Paris. And I’m here, and I sing, and I never take more than I need.”
Next to her vanity is a trolley, all its glass shelves covered with bottles of perfume, some I’ve made, some she’s bought, some she’s been given by admirers. She asks me to pick the day’s perfume for her, then rejects what I hold forth. “No, the blue bottle. Today I want to smell like a French whore.” The blue bottle is one of mine, inspired by some descriptions in an old edition of Le Guide rose, the pink-jacketed pamphlet that provides an annual rating of the city’s brothels. For the perfume, I tried to capture some haggard courtesan: a hint of crushed bedbug, and the smoky patchouli from an incense lamp hanging off a bedpost, and stale coffee.
“I’ll write a victory song,” she says. “A song for the liberation.”
I help her pull her dress on over her night-slip. I know I need to go, that Voss is expecting me, but I can’t bear to leave her side. If I am arrested, this is the last I’ll see of my sweet, darling Day.
She kisses me hard on the cheek to blot her lipstick, then hands me a tissue to wipe it away. But I leave her sloppy kiss there.
58
The concierge answers the door as she always does, her eyes on my shoes. I’ve worn a pair meant to surprise her: harlequin-checked smoking slippers with metallic threads of blue, green, yellow, pink. Playful. Friendly. “Nebraska Charlie,” she says. She’s never called me that before.
“Madame Vachon,” I say.
She leads me in and up the stairs, fiddling with her keys. Always fiddling
fiddling fiddling with the keys, though of course she knows exactly which is for what. She likes the music of it, I suppose, or she’s working a hex, like each key’s a chicken bone.
“How’s the mood of the house?” I ask her.
“You’ll see,” she says. We’ve reached the landing. She unlocks the door and taps it open, setting it to squeak on its hinges.
I don’t move. “Are you friend or foe?” I ask her.
She twists her neck around to actually look up at me for once. “We’re all friends here,” she says. She waves me in.
I find Voss in the laboratory. He stands at the tall table, drumming his fingers on the journal in front of him. The perfume journal, most certainly. He glances around, gesturing toward the bookshelves. “Every book in this room is about the senses,” he says. “Perfume. Color. Music. Food. The perfumeries of Shakespeare’s time must have been as gory as an abattoir. Goat’s blood. Pigeon blood. The gall of an ox. The membrane of a mollusk.”
“Oskar…,” I say, but I don’t know what to tell him. I don’t know what to ask for.
“I haven’t slept,” he says, as if it weren’t obvious from his wild eyes. “I keep getting distracted. I shouldn’t be in here, among all these books. I don’t have time to read them.” I suspect his sleeplessness has been spiked. He’s taken something. Then he says, “We found it.” He giggles, actually. Drums his fingers faster. “We found the perfume diary. Guess where it was.”
“How should I know?” I say.
“And that’s the thing, isn’t it? You should know. You should. You’re an international crook.” He giggles again, a giggle even more lunatic than before. “It was right under our feet. The concierge, with her eyes always low. She found it. She said the chambermaid was up there dusting, knocked over our whole tray of perfumes, shattered the glass, spilled all over the rug. The concierge had the rug swiftly removed, and she noticed something off about one of the floorboards. Just a feeling she had, she said. ‘I know the bones of this house better than I know the bones under my own skin,’ she said. She lifted a board, and there it was.”
He is talking so fast, he’s tripping over his tongue, which I suspect is weighted, furred, with whatever jolt of pep his Nazi druggist has prescribed. He explains that he had put the concierge to the task of finding the book before he even met me. She had boasted even then that she knew every inch of the place. “When she gave me the diary yesterday, I offered to pay her, but she said it was her duty to the house. The poor thing was embarrassed it had taken her so long to find the diary. Finding lost things was part of her job. But, she said, she had always had her eye on the crystal candlesticks on the mantel. The girandoles with the little brass cherubs. So I gave her those.”
She swapped all the perfumes of Paris for a matching set of gewgaws.
He pushes the diary toward me, across the countertop. The book itself is nothing special—as a matter of fact, it’s battered and faded, its canvas cover warped and torn. They’ll put it in a museum case someday, and you’ll marvel at its simplicity.
But I’m stunned by it. I run my fingers over the cover, which is either pale black or dark blue. There’s a block of faded red, the word journal across it in scratched-up gold leaf. There are copper plates at the top of the spine and at the bottom of it, and at the tips of the corners of the front cover. I run my thumb over them, rubbing at the tarnish.
And I open the book. Just inside are marbled endpapers, and a card tacked there with the name of the shop the journal was bought from: A. Roussel: Imprimerie, Librairie, Papeterie.
I turn to the first page.
There I find a lined ledger of household accounts, specifically what’s been paid to the butcher, and the meats received. Veal, kidneys, lamb, brains, bœuf, gigot, saucisses, graisse, all written in a fine hand, at an elegant slant.
The next page is more of the same, and so is the next, and the next, a complete history, week by week, month by month, dating back to 1903, of every shank, filet, rib, tenderloin, araignée, basse côte, gîte à la noix. April, May, June, juillet, août, septembre, 1904, 1905, 1906, ’07, ’08, ’09, page after page after page chronicling one family’s penchant for flesh and gluttony.
“Can you believe it?” he says.
Has he not found the perfume diary after all? Has whatever drug he’s on tipped him into madness?
“Imagine how frustrating it was as I first turned these pages,” he says. “Can you believe that he just took an old book of household accounts, and turned it into a collection of some of the most valuable recipes in the history of France?”
Voss reaches across to turn the pages for me. Finally, the kitchen cupboard is bare.
We arrive at a perfume recipe.
Essence de néroli fin, 46 grammes. Esprit de romarin, 8 livres. Fleurs de lavande récentes, 4 onces. Sommités d’absinthe, 2 onces. Racine sèche d’angélique de Bohême, 125 grammes.
I realize I’ve been grinding my teeth, but I don’t know for how long. Maybe for days. Or weeks. But now it stops. So does the tingling I’ve had in my funny bones, and my wrists, as if a doctor has been knocking his mallet at me, testing my reflexes. My fists unclench too, and the pinch in my neck and shoulder goes away. There was a low whistling in my ears that I didn’t even know I was hearing nonstop, until now that it’s sputtered out to nothing.
I’m like a fairy-tale hag, shuffling off her curse.
Pages of perfume recipes. And with each one, there are notes. Influences listed, titles of songs and symphonies, and lyrics, and lines plucked from poems. Quotes from philosophers and geniuses and clever debutantes. The names of characters from novels, and operas. Mostly, there are flowers. They bloom around me, a sudden garden. Spring.
And code. Tacked onto the end of every recipe is a symbol. I don’t know if Voss has noticed, but it’s quite apparent to me that Pascal has left ingredients off. Somewhere there’s another book, a key to the codes.
As the pages flip before me, I keep an eye out for Zoé’s name, and for the recipe for Ophelia, but Voss rushes ahead, leaping his fingers through, to bring me to a page he has marked with a tattered dirty little feather, as if he’d just reached out the window and into a nest.
“Read it, read it, read it,” he says, tapping his finger on the page, but he won’t let me read; he keeps talking, telling me what’s there.
Poison. Voss is thrilled that he was correct all along about the unused gases of the War Before. Pascal writes of his engagement to prettify the phosgene, the benzyl acetate, all the deadly breezes from military tanks. He tamed them into sympathetic fumes. He was tasked by the government with bottling the diluted poison, selling it to the women of the world, and paying a tax to the military based on the percentage of bottles sold. The French were then meeting both the peacetime requirements of disarmament and the demands of a public still reeling from the violence of the war.
Pascal worked with his own chemists, and with executives of the military, and a cabal of professors from elite universities worldwide. He made use of the poisons and other war excesses as well: the lubricating oils of airplane gears, the slicking agents for rifle chambers. He created Possédée, possessed, a violet perfume; he created Serrure et Clé, lock and key, a jasmine mix.
“What about Gabrielle?” I say.
He shrugs. “That’s where I was wrong,” he says. “The recipe is in there, but there’s nothing particularly revealing in it. Unless there’s something in the little code that he’s peppered the book with. Did you see that?” He turns some pages back, to note the symbols I’ve noticed. He stops on the page with Gabrielle, and taps on its symbol at the end of the list of ingredients. A circle with a dot in the middle of it. A nipple. He shrugs again. Sighs. “Clearly he’s left things out. Maybe he kept a code key, or maybe he didn’t, but it doesn’t matter to us. We…you…will have enough to work from here to re-create the perfumes.”
> “But is this enough for you?” I say. “Is any of this useful? Does it say where the gases are kept?”
“No,” Voss says, but with no note of disappointment. “It doesn’t tell where the gases are kept. But it tells us something better.” He turns more pages before me. “Read, read, read,” he says again, and again he won’t let me.
While frolicking in the laboratory with his chemists, who’d all danced with war and its gases and oils, Pascal summoned from his flasks and test tubes a poison of his own. Accidentally. He’d simply been after a synthetic, an artificial additive, for his perfume. The synthetic turned out to be absolutely poisonous, and therefore nothing Pascal could use. This perfume, with its hint of orange slightly turned, a scent of oversweet spoil, wreaked all kinds of havoc in the test labs, killing all its rats, its cats, its birds, its dog, its ravens.
Through his associates in the government, he offered the formula to the military. He didn’t see this as a contribution to war and destruction. He saw it as an act of loyalty to the country he loved.
Regardless of any international treaties prohibiting research of chemical warfare, Pascal wrote in his diary, France must protect itself from those nations that ignore such prohibitions. For France to rely on a mutual trust is foolhardy. We must be at the ready. We can’t allow ourselves to be poisoned by our own efforts toward peace.
Further testing by the military found the perfume to approximate war gas so closely, it surpassed anything the French had ever produced before. This was the poison the warmongers lusted for, a liquid that turned to fume.
It wouldn’t contaminate the battlefields the way other gases did. Once it killed, it dissolved. Mustard gas stays on the ground for weeks, Voss explained. Armies must often march through the lands they’ve just poisoned, among the vehicles and equipment, among the corpses, all still smoldering with gas. But Pascal, without even intending to, had created a weapon that could fade away minutes after felling its victims.
The Perfume Thief Page 27