The Perfume Thief

by Timothy Schaffert

  Pilots could fly low over the fields of war and strafe the enemy, clearing the way for the advance of their own soldiers.

  “It’s a clean annihilation,” Voss says. He speaks as if entranced by the beauty of it. He even draws out that word: cleeeeean. “Unlike anything else anyone has. The Wehrmacht can attack with the chemicals but keep on marching through. Can you imagine? A lethal perfume, gentle and sweet, that kills then turns harmless, a coy, lovely vapor. And knowing Pascal as we do, isn’t it likely that the scent remains? Perfuming the battlefield? I’m desperate to know the scent. What do you suppose? Sage? Leather? Or something gentle, like fresh laundry?”

  I’m turning the pages backward through the book.

  He says, “I know, I know, it’s grisly war talk, my dear, but the war is going to rage on and on and on, regardless of what we do here in Paris. The important thing is that Hitler’s listening to me. He’s trusting me.”

  I look for Ophelia. If there’s any mention of Zoé, I’ll rip the page out. Right in front of Voss. He’ll believe me if I tell him it’s my favorite fragrance, that it’s the puzzle I most want to solve. “He’s trusting you?” I say, to keep him talking.

  “When Hitler writes about the condition of the world,” Voss says, “and its cultural demise, perfume is his metaphor. For suffocation. For eroticism. But I’ve been changing his mind, Charlie. Me. He’s listening to me.” He thumps his finger on his chest. “I’ve saved Paris. When he moved his armies in, he considered it a city of whores.” He shrugs. He throws his hands up. He’s wide-eyed and giddy. I’ve never seen him so happily agitated. “Whores who cared about nothing but their own romantic collapse. Their morbid sentiment. Their nostalgia. He saw Paris as a city of the pampered, a people who were cruel to the poor.”

  Horizontales.

  “The formula for this gas you’re talking about,” I say. “It’s in the book?”

  “Well, no,” he says, and here he reaches across to slam the book shut and pull it away from me. “He only describes how he came to discover the gas. The formula, it would seem, is recorded elsewhere. But, it’s enough to have the book for now. Hitler will commit resources to me. Support. Mostly he’ll give me time to find the formula. He’ll be patient with me. He’ll trust that I’m on to something. And this will lead to the support we need for our perfumes.”

  I nod. I lean forward. I hold out my hand. Wiggle my fingers at him. “Give me the book,” I say. “I’m ready to get to work.” He stays still.

  I nod. I smile.

  He shakes his head. “I need more time with it myself,” he says. “When I can give it a sober eye.” He then admits that his doctor gave him something so he could stay up all night studying the book, orchestrating his mission. “It’s some sort of miracle pill. It not only keeps you awake but adds hours and hours to your night. You can accomplish everything in a blink.” He begins drumming his fingers on the book again. “I’ve even planned a party already. For tonight, for all our best men in Paris. Very formal. It’s here at the house. My house. I need to be seen. Now that everything’s falling into place. They need to recognize my standing.” He takes my elbow and leads me toward the door. “You’ll come to the party,” he says. “And you’ll bring the boy in your attic, won’t you? I’d love to meet him.”

  “He’s not…I don’t think that he can…”

  “You’ll bring him,” Voss commands, with a twitch in his brow. “And I’ll send you something to wear.”

  By the time I’ve gotten back to the house, my gown for the night has been delivered, with a note from Voss: Illegal silk from Lyon, he writes, meaning the hosiery, complete with garter belt and buckles, in the thin, peppermint-striped box delivered with the dress. All silk is supposed to go to the war effort, but it seems some legs must be deemed essential.

  59

  To amuse himself, I suppose, Voss has sent me a gown with the faintest pattern of butterflies, as if some bug-catcher dusted their wings with sugar and sent them fluttering against the pink satin.

  Voss even arranged a tailor’s appointment for Blue in the afternoon, and by evening, he had a sharp new tuxedo so flattering and stately it almost seemed as if the tailor somehow tailored Blue to fit the suit, not vice versa.

  I don’t know what Voss wants with Blue, if anything, unless perhaps he’s interested in Blue’s work at the library. Voss keeps a librarian of his own within the intelligence agency, a woman even older than me, a German librarian who dismantles libraries. She catalogs and evaluates the collections and archives of the enemies, helping the Nazis go spelunking into the mindset of Jews, of Catholics. She determines which books to save and which to burn. She reads by the light of a match, so to speak, Voss says.

  I put on some lipstick, and I can see how just the act of it can lend a lady confidence. A few swipes of wax and you’ve masked yourself. Barely a twist of the wrist, this way then that, and you’ve armed yourself with artifice.

  I smack a kiss toward my reflection in the mirror, and this seems to summon a knock at the shop door. Our driver. I take a deep breath. Straighten my back and drop the lipstick in the evening clutch Voss delivered—a little pearlescent box of Bakelite. The Nazis are crazy for Bakelite; they made cheap radios from it so they could pipe their propaganda into every German living room.

  But it’s not the driver who’s at the door. “Félix,” I say. Of all people, of all times. For a moment, I wonder if he somehow knows we’re off to a Nazi’s cocktail party.

  “Félix,” Blue says too, standing right behind me. It’s been some time since Blue has heard from him. “You’re…you’re alive, I see.”

  “For a minute or two,” he says. He puts his hands in his pockets. Smiles with what looks to me like pity. Or apology. “How handsome you look.”

  That’s all it takes. I look over at Blue, who forgives Félix everything with that how handsome.

  Félix is spruced up too, like he has dressed for the occasion of breaking Blue’s heart. His hair is mussed in the tidiest way, a few of his curls greased with pomade so they’ll droop fetchingly over one eye. He’s got on a fine coat, one busy with buckles and pockets, probably something he’ll claim to Blue was snagged off a drunk German’s back.

  Blue invites Félix in, but Félix invites Blue outside.

  I stand back in the shadows, so I can watch through the window without their seeing me, but I needn’t worry—they’re completely caught up in each other.

  On these late winter nights, moonlight keeps the streets lit in pale silver. We haven’t had streetlights since the Nazis arrived, when they painted the bulbs a blackout blue. They hoped it would stop us from creeping around come midnight.

  Outside, Blue and Félix stand in the bit of light that falls from the shop’s window. They talk in clouds of fog, their hands shoved into their coat pockets. They bounce on the balls of their feet, from the cold. Rock from foot to foot.

  As I watch them now, I imagine Félix in close-up on the cinema screen, his wet eyes looking right into ours, the snow collecting in the fur of his coat’s collar, in his newly grown beard, in his long lashes, like soap flakes on a movie’s soundstage.

  Félix seems to catch me looking, so I step away, deeper into the shop. I fuss with my dress as I check my reflection in the mirror again. Only a few moments later, Blue comes back in alone. He’s sniffling and coughing, from the cold and from crying some, I suppose. He rubs at his face with his sleeve. “He’s off on another mission,” he says. “He doesn’t know when I’ll hear from him again.”

  “I’m sorry, sweetheart,” I say.

  He comes to me and leans his head on my shoulder. I hate it when Blue’s wounded, but I do love comforting him. “Fix this,” he says. “Bring him back. Make him love me so much he can’t leave my side.”

  Only a few years after I left M, America went to war, and my career in thievery thrived. During the Spanish-American Wa
r and the War Before, women longed for love potions, to cast lasting spells on the men who left their sides to fight. Ladies sent their soldiers off with handkerchiefs doused in their scent, or they tucked little bottles into their men’s pockets, pretty perfumes to suck up their snouts like smelling salts.

  And if it was a potion so rare and coveted it had to be stolen, that made it seem all the more magical. Love and desire is as much the thief’s dominion as the witch’s. A stolen cure for sadness. People need to take things because they lose things.

  “He’ll never forget how you looked tonight,” I say. “How could he?” I turn him so we can see ourselves in the mirror. “For so so long, I’ve wanted to shoehorn you into a suit that fits you.” The wealthy widows who rent him like to see him in the expensive clothes left behind by their dead husbands, whether the suits fit or not.

  My gown is too young for me. I tug at the top of it, hoping I can tuck my shoulders down into the off-the-shoulders bodice. I had first decided against wearing the stockings and garter belt, since the dress is floor length and full-skirted—a ball gown, nearly—but I can just imagine Voss demanding I give him a cancan-dancer flash, to flaunt my violation of the silk restrictions.

  “You look beautiful,” Blue says, but he says it with a note of despair. He drops his attention to his hand, to the ring on his finger. “Did you see him kiss me just now?” Before I can say I didn’t, he says, “That kiss was something, though, wasn’t it? That was a real kiss.”

  “Some people go their whole lives without getting kissed like that,” I say.

  “I hope he’s careful. I just want Félix to grow old, even if it’s without me,” Blue says, with a sigh.

  “Let’s go looking for our own trouble,” I say. “Take your mind off things.”

  “Yes,” he says. “We actually have a mission, don’t we?” And I like the note of scorn in his voice.

  He helps me on with the jacket Voss sent. It’s a synthetic fur that looks like white ermine, and I’m determined to keep it on all evening, to hide my naked shoulders in it, my freckled chest, but a maid lifts it away the second we arrive at the party, and the place is so packed, she’s gone before I can object.

  Blue and I move through the crowd arm in arm. I don’t recognize anyone. I look out for Day, for Zoé. Not even Lutz is here.

  Blue says, “I can see the appeal.”

  “The appeal of what?” I say.

  “The appeal of getting spiffed up,” he says. “You sure can get noticed, can’t you, when you’re just a tad natty? It even does your posture some good.”

  “Yes,” I say. “Even if you’re not getting noticed, you think you are. Because you look so fine, you tell yourself. How could they not notice?”

  How can you simply fade away if all eyes are on you?

  I hear Voss before I see him. “You must be the boy with the bad heart,” he says to Blue.

  “I must be,” Blue says, shaking Voss’s hand.

  “Charlie has told me almost nothing about you,” he says. Being among this crowd, and these cocktails, has made him cheerful. “You don’t have a drink,” he says, looking around for a tray. And in the looking around, he spots someone else. “I need to step away for just a moment,” he says, “but, Charlie, I insist you take Blue to our upstairs room. You have to show him the loose floorboard.” He puts his hand on Blue’s arm. “For weeks, she and I had been talking about Pascal’s perfume diary, and all the time it was hidden right beneath our feet. Did she tell you that?”

  I still can’t tell if his taunting is playful or a coy signal that he’s onto me. Or is he hoping to pump Blue for information? And Blue is unsure how to answer. He shakes his head slightly, raises an eyebrow, looks quizzical. He’s smart to play dumb.

  But as I lead Blue from the room, he leans into my ear and whispers, “Is there a trap up there? Is the concierge waiting? So she can point me out as the man she caught wearing your clothes, stealing the diary?” And I realize I haven’t seen the concierge all evening.

  I had intended to sneak up to the room anyway. I can’t shake the feeling that Voss was right all along about Gabrielle, that the perfume is some sort of clue. And when Voss opened the diary before me, turning to the page about Gabrielle, I caught sight of a few hints. For one, the ingredients included pennyroyal, a toxic plant with the faint scent of mint. And water iris, also poisonous, and completely without scent, therefore pointless to include unless you simply wanted to list it.

  “Hand me your lighter, and a cigarette,” I tell Blue. “And stand at the doorway. Keep an eye on the stairs.” After my meeting with Voss today, I went directly to Annick’s printshop to get her opinion. I have a theory about Pascal’s copy of the painting of Gabrielle d’Estrées and her sister.

  I put the cigarette to my mouth, and hold it there with my lips.

  I light the cigarette lighter, but I don’t light the cigarette. I run the flame close to the canvas, studying the shine, the reflection of the light.

  I look for signs of something hidden, for a wrinkle in the placid rose-milk of the women’s skin. Annick speculated for me, considered how a document might best be concealed on a canvas, how a sheet of paper might be treated or coated, how a page might be safely painted over without causing any ink to smear. Maybe he wrote the secret formula on a piece of paper that he then concealed in the painting. You would treat the paper with egg whites, let it dry so it’s like shellac and won’t absorb the oil of the paint.

  I take a razor blade I have tucked into the strap of my brassiere. I’m looking for the paper in the painting, for a shine along the paper’s edge, or a raised border, to cut at, to release the page from the oil paint.

  Paris is full of forgers who could have done a special copy for Pascal, Annick said. Every bordello in Europe has at least one copy of the Gabrielle d’Estrées painting hanging in its rooms. Gentlemen’s clubs, low saloons, the social halls of other, more private societies.

  “You’ve brought us champagne,” I hear Blue say, signaling that Voss is coming near. As he walks into the room, I turn away from the painting and bring the flame of the lighter to my cigarette.

  “The night Charlie and I first met at the Ritz,” Voss says as he hands Blue a glass, “they tried to pass off some kind of swill as a fine vintage.” He hands me his other glass. “But not tonight. Tonight you get the 1923 Veuve Clicquot.” He takes the cigarette away from me. “But you can’t taste its gentle nature if you’re burning your tongue with this.” He puffs on the cigarette himself.

  I taste the champagne, nod with approval.

  Voss says to Blue, “One thing that Charlie did tell me about you is that you’re an actor,” though I don’t quite recall that I ever did tell him that. Voss then tells Blue to follow him; he wants to introduce him to someone, someone important, in the theater world. “Are you coming, love?” Voss turns back to ask me.

  “I’ll be along in a minute,” I say. I take a seat in my chair. “I just want to linger for a moment. For old time’s sake.” I put my foot to the loose floorboard and tap my toe against it. “I want to figure out how I missed that floorboard.”

  “Ah, in your throne of humiliation,” he says. “We’ll be back to work very soon, Charlie. We’ll finally put all our plans into place.”

  After he leaves, I turn around in my chair to glance back at Gabrielle d’Estrées in her bath. I didn’t see anything suspicious when I held my flame near the paint. I sit and stare at the canvas, flicking my thumb at the lighter, sending up sparks, thinking, stumped. I turn away from the painting to take another sip of the champagne. The concierge did a careful job of cleaning the room after Blue bungled his theft. There’s no sign of blood or a break-in. And though she claimed the chambermaid broke bottles of perfume, there are still some on an end table. Pascal’s perfumes. Such beautiful bottles, as beautiful as their scents. And Pascal designed those too. The architecture of
the bottles was part of what made the perfumes so divine.

  The blueprints. The day I came into this room and everything was in disarray, the origami birds rustled from their cage, I looked at the sketches Voss had taken from the cabinet. I now put down my glass and lighter, and I walk over to open the cabinet’s bottom drawer. Each cardboard tube is marked with the name of a perfume. I take out the blueprint for Gabrielle.

  Because now I remember. When I was reading the notes on the blueprint, about the materials and processes used in the manufacture of the bottle and its stopper, I saw a reference to silver nitrate. It caught in my mind but then quickly escaped when Voss startled me.

  If you used silver nitrate on glass, you’d create a mirror. I had wondered at the time if Pascal had originally meant for the Gabrielle bottle to be reflective.

  But no. He was simply providing a clue. He didn’t mean to create a reflection with that silver nitrate. He meant to conceal something.

  I take the blueprint from the tube, and return the tube to the cabinet. The beat of my heart is skipping along so fast as I unroll the paper, I hold my hand tight to my chest, as if I can slow it down with the press of my palm. In the upper corner is the nipple-like mark, the code, the round circle with the dot that I’d seen in the perfume diary’s recipe for Gabrielle.

  M wrote me another letter in invisible ink. It arrived in a beautiful little porcelain box painted with cherubs. The letter was wrapped around a bottle, and the bottle’s label read only, Solution for making the invisible visible. When I treated the paper with the solution, M’s handwriting took shape, and his whole letter was about invisible ink, about methods old and new that he’d practiced over the years, including one recipe from forever ago, made of pressed marigolds, steeped pansies, bruised violets. But silver nitrate was key to the formula of the ink he’d used for my letter.