The Perfume Thief

by Timothy Schaffert

Just think of all the secrets hiding on blank pages, M wrote. Years and years and years of invisible ink in letters from men to their mistresses. Or bawdy poems written by virgins. Or lesbian confessions.

  The paper of the blueprint is rough, which helps to keep the ink hidden. And when I tilt the page just so, I can make out the little specks of silver across the front and back of it.

  I step behind the chair to hide myself should anyone walk in. I lift the bottom of my gown, gathering up all the rustle and frill of it, up up up, past my knees. I’ll clip the blueprint to the hook of my garter belt, and I’ll waltz right on out with it. But as I fuss with it all, I realize the clip’s not strong enough to hold the stocking and the paper both.

  I roll down my hosiery, wrap the blueprint around my leg, and pull the stocking up over it. I clip the stocking in place.

  I return to the party. I have a drink, and another, and I’m at ease, everyone’s chatter in foreign words a dull throb in my ears. Voss finally tells me I look tired, and he’ll send me home. “You know me so well,” I tell him.

  A Nazi officer drives Blue and me, so I keep mum about my theft in the car. But once we’re inside the perfume shop, I tell Blue to lock the door and to make sure the curtains are drawn tight. I drop my fake fur to the floor and pull up the bottom of my dress as I walk to the counter. I unbuckle the garter, roll down the stocking, and unwrap the blueprint from around my leg. I shove aside the bottles atop the counter, and switch on the table lamp. I point out to Blue the silver I’m seeing, the etching on the page from the nib of a pen. But he doesn’t see it. I tell him to trust me. “I’ve got a good eye for seeing invisible ink,” I tell him.

  In the morning, I go to Annick. I suspect her shop might have the solutions that will lift the letters from the vaporous ink, and, of course, she knows all about these things. Within a few minutes, we’ve tested a patch of the page with a sponge. There are notes on reactions and impurities and processes of manufacture, on character, properties, syntheses.

  This is indeed the formula for the poisonous gas Pascal discovered. Voss was right about Gabrielle hinting at poison, but wrong about the poison being the perfume itself. It’s pleasing, really, that Gabrielle, such sweet nectar, is entirely innocent. Never was there an ounce of chemical warfare in its Sapphic fog. Gabrielle was only ever her mysterious self, naked and pale, just a clue in Pascal’s game of hide-and-seek, tucking the formula away in the story of her bottle.

  “I’ll be damned,” Annick says, and she sounds truly impressed. She gives me a pat on the back. “I’ll be damned.” She shakes her head. “You snuck this right past the Germans. And they were the masters of invisible ink in the last war.”

  She tells me about the spies who would dip their neckties in liquid to make the ink to hide their plots. “If the spy was a lady,” she says, “she’d sneak around with her invisible ink in a perfume bottle.”

  60

  Everything you once were turns to smoke, says one of the nuns, smoke rising from her lips as she speaks. We’re in my courtyard, and she weaves among the girls, my house flowers, inspecting their costumes, as if they’re all on their way to take their vows. Some of the ash from her cigarette spills onto the shoulder of a girl we named Pansy, and she pats the habit hard, to brush it off. We lose our names, she says. We lose our clothes.

  Our painted ladies always leave us in nun’s habits before sunup, their faces scrubbed raw and cinched tight with starched, linen wimples. They escape penitent, in disguise. Blue and I rub their tears away with our thumbs, and we coo-coo and we tut-tut and we cry a few tears of our own, as if we’ve raised them from hatchlings in a dovecote.

  The nun’s habits come from the basement wardrobe of Blue’s theater; the troupe once did a play about a convent overcome by mass hysteria, all the nuns done in by stigmata fantasies.

  We only ever loan them to the ladies we escort from Paris. The nuns, the genuine ones, launder them and bring them back, for the next batch of escapees. They deliver the habits starched and folded tight in makeshift shirt boxes, with little silk pillows tucked in, sachets of cedar shavings and powdered sassafras that somehow make the clothes smell more worn than before, with a hint of flesh and stale sweat.

  Though I was fearful of harboring them at first, and the girls are never with us long, we do grow attached. Even to the worst of them, even to that noxious weed we called Myrtle, who liked to change all the clocks and wore jingle bells on her ankles, a jangling bracelet that announced her every step.

  I haven’t been called to Voss’s for a few days. I haven’t seen Zoé either, so I entertain the hope that she made her escape. Day is gone too; a few days ago, she left town with her musicians. I’m picturing her singing in the unoccupied zones, perhaps in the south, a fresh rose in her hair, finding a new lover for me to capture in perfume. And Blue is here with me, the play having ended its run. When he’s not working at the library, he’s at my side, fully dedicated to the city’s courtesans.

  Blue has taken to making note of our girls, jotting down a history of each and every one, in Bible-paper carnets de croquis the nuns give us. He interviews them and documents their lives by listing the things they’ve lost: their real names and the names of their mothers and the names they gave their dolls, the streets they grew up on, the songs they sang as children. Or the things they wish they could remember: the candy their grandmother kept in a cut-glass bowl, or the tune their father whistled on Sundays, or the flowers of the sachet in the linen drawer, where the pillowcases were kept in the summer cottage, a scent that could drop them off to sleep in a blink. If only they could smell that scent again.

  Go ahead, go ahead, go ahead, whisper the truth under your breath or drop it down a well. If you tell the truth, even if only in your heart, someone will hear it. That’s one of the miracles of existence, like radio waves or the tap tap tap of electrical signals. Science is designed to perform these magic acts, to carry our voices, one to the other, so that if I speak down here, as low as I can go, my words will echo up and out.

  Take these girls, for example. Somehow all the harlots of Paris know that the old boys’ academy is now a halfway house for brothel refugees. And though we have no intention of turning away anyone who isn’t a lady of the evening, only ladies of the evening arrive, as if the whistle is pitched in a key only their ears can hear.

  Finished examining them, the nun stands back. Citing the writings of a mystic, she says, The nun’s black habit should help her remember that someday she’ll die.

  61

  Blue and I relax after the long day of sending ladies south, on the settee in the shop, our feet up on the same ottoman. We have snifters of brandy.

  “One of the widows in Manhattan hired me to steal a mask that was two hundred years old,” I tell him. I haven’t thought about that mask in years. “It had been made for a courtesan in Venice, who wore it to look like the society women. Only eyeholes to see out of, but no hole for the mouth. There was a button you’d bite, to keep it on your face.”

  “Seems it would keep you quiet too,” he says. “Button your lip.”

  “A face of blue velvet, with a silk lining inside. She would perfume the silk and walk the streets inhaling the scent.” I think of the old perfume called Holy Basil, a serene and heavenly blend of geranium, jasmine, Tonquin bean, tolu. So very calming, and a calming scent can put you in ecstasy almost, if you let it. The right scent is all you need to slip away into tranquility, into that part of your brain where all the awful things get hushed.

  My pulse slows now just thinking of it, this notion of sprinkling some silk with Holy Basil, holding it to my face, and breathing it in. Waltzing through Paris without a care.

  Just as I lose myself to the thought, I hear a rustling in the house. I bolt upright and listen closer, my ear turned to the hall. Blue looks at me, puzzled. He hasn’t heard anything, so I decide I just know this house’s creaks and complaints all
too well. I think again of the concierge: I know the bones of this house better than I know the bones under my own skin.

  But no, the random racket comes together in the sound of footsteps. I stand, my heart fast. And then the women step cautiously into the shop from the back of the house.

  “There’s four of us,” one says. Another one says, “We heard there was a key under the gargoyle’s foot.”

  The gargoyle in the courtyard behind the house. “And a few more are coming too,” the first one says. “Or maybe a few more than a few.”

  These are girls from Boulette’s. For one, I made a perfume of bitter almond, acacia, frangipani.

  One of the girls says, “The Nazis have shut down Madame Boulette’s. Even the cabaret. Especially the cabaret. Because of what happened with Zoé St. Angel.”

  “What happened with Zoé St. Angel?” I say. “I just saw her sing the other night.” But even as I sputter it out, I know how pointless it is, how impossible it is to know anything about anyone who’s not standing right in front of you. I know how quickly everything can change.

  “It happened yesterday,” one of them says. And then the girls tell me all they know.

  62

  Here’s how it goes: Zoé’s alone with Lutz, in her glass apartment atop the brothel.

  He walks up behind her. He kisses her neck. He whispers in her ear. He traces his finger along her throat, following her swallow of whiskey. He says, as he often does these days, “Why don’t you love me anymore?”

  “What a thing to ask,” she says.

  “What a thing to ask?” He takes a step back. He leans his hip against the credenza. “What a thing to say, ‘What a thing to ask.’ ”

  “What is it you want me to say?”

  “You might insist that you do love me,” he says.

  “Then I do,” she says. “I do insist.” She pours another shot of scotch for him, and he leans back to sip it. Lutz is so arrogant, Zoé always manages to comfort him eventually, to convince him she loves him more than life. Her I do insist is hardly insistent at all, but it makes him stop pouting.

  He brings his hand to her throat again, but this time it’s to run his fingers gently over her neck. She realizes, as the scent rises, there’s perfume on his fingertips. The scent of Ophelia. Her perfume.

  Is he toying with me? she thinks. Is this his way of telling her she’s caught? He knows? He’s read about her in her father’s diary?

  He presses his fingers in, like he’s taking her pulse. “Your heartbeat picked up,” he says. “Do you like it? The perfume?”

  Zoé puts her hand to his, to lower it from her throat. She holds his hand open, before herself. She traces her finger over the lines in his palm. She doesn’t look up. “Why?” is all she says.

  “Oskar Voss thinks he’s onto something,” Lutz says. He’s looking down now too, and he runs his fingers soft over hers. “Somewhere in these perfumes of Pascal’s is something useful. Something we can take to Hitler. And to the fields of war. It will help us win.”

  She starts to say something, then stops.

  Lutz turns her hand so that her palm is up before him now. He runs his fingers over the lines in her palm, then along the veins in her wrist. He says, “I just need to find the answers before Voss does.” He looks up at her with those beautiful eyes, that beautiful face. “I need to be the one to bring these discoveries forward. Whatever they are.”

  “So find the perfumer,” she says.

  “Pascal?” he said. “If only we’d thought to keep him alive. But we have an assistant of his…helping us. He claims not to know anything, but I predict his memory will improve.”

  Zoé takes her hand back. If only we’d thought to keep him alive. She turns her head away from Lutz. She lowers her face. She clutches the lace shawl at her shoulder and brings it to her cheek.

  “Nothing,” she tells Lutz when he asks what’s wrong. Why are you crying? “My eyes are watering, is all. The perfume’s a little…strong for me.”

  “It’s not the perfume, it’s all this god-awful smoke we can’t get enough of,” he says, pulling a cigarette from his shirt pocket and lighting up.

  Zoé and Lutz have stocked the credenza with all the fixings for cocktails and smokes. There are crystal decanters of scotch and bourbon, and matching highball glasses, and a silver ice bucket with tongs shaped like a wishbone. There is a humidor of polished cedar, and a table lighter of pink onyx. There is the novelty box with the wooden alligator that opens its jaw and fishes out your cigarette for you.

  Zoé opens a drawer and takes out the tin. The cigarettes I gave her: a top layer hiding a second layer, with a plot of instructions printed on the cigarette paper. She takes one, lights it with the onyx lighter. She likes bringing out the tin in front of Lutz, her liberation right there at her fingertips.

  She has smoked nearly the whole top layer. If she starts smoking the layer under the parchment, she’ll be burning away the map of her own rescue.

  Lutz leans toward her again, nuzzling his nose against her, taking in more of her perfume. In the jostling, she nearly burns his hand with the tip of the cigarette.

  “Be careful,” he says softly.

  Be careful. Zoé’s fingers begin to tremble. And she lifts her cigarette, and she touches its burning coal to his neck.

  Lutz yelps, stumbles back, slapping his hand against his wound like he’s been stung. Zoé reaches over for the statue of a horse rearing up on its hind legs—it’s a stomper Lutz brought home one day, meant for crushing your cigarettes out with its heavy brass base.

  Zoé holds the horse at its middle and swings it with all her strength, knocking the base hard against Lutz’s left temple. The blow doesn’t knock him out, but it knocks him over, and he stumbles on an ottoman. He’s on the floor, facedown, too shaken and winded to stand.

  She knows she can’t let him get up, but she can barely stay standing herself. She can’t bear to hit him again. The first act was instinctual. And now her heart beats fast, and she can’t breathe.

  She steps over to him. Covers her eyes with one hand. She lifts the horse above her head and gives Lutz another whack against the back of the skull. When she opens her eyes, she sees his blood across the rug.

  She doesn’t want to stay and investigate his stillness, but she does linger long enough to listen for a whimper. Is he alive? they’ll ask her later. He was alive when I left, she’ll be able to tell them. She picks up her cigarette tin, and its blueprints for her escape. Some of the drapes are closed, some open. Anyone might’ve seen her up in her glass box. Anyone might’ve witnessed her hitting Lutz. But she manages to make it out, and down, to the corridor behind the cabaret; she stops when she hears men’s voices. German. She turns another corner. She comes face-to-face with Madame Boulette.

  Zoé sees Madame Boulette glance down, and it is then Zoé realizes she is still carrying the bloody horse, gripping it tight. She drops it to the floor, and as the thud of it echoes down the hall, Madame Boulette takes Zoé’s wrist. She leads her past a curtain, and past another, and down some stairs. They enter a wine cellar. This frightens Zoé even more; she’s made a mistake in following her, into a basement trap. But Madame Boulette yanks on one of the cabinet shelves, loosening it from the wall with a few hard tugs. Some hinges squeak, and the cabinet rolls away, revealing itself as a secret door to a hidden room.

  Enough light leaks into the back room that Zoé can see there are more racks of wine—we’ve all heard of people building false walls in their wine cellars to keep their best vintages from the Nazis’ gullets. But this room also has a window, up at street level, just big enough for someone small to shimmy through. Madame Boulette walks to the other end of the room to open the shutters. She unlocks a wrought-iron grill with a key she keeps in an empty bottle in the cabinet. She pushes the window open. And she unfolds a stepladder, and helps Zoé up and
out.

  That’s exactly how Madame Boulette snuck us out too, the bordello girls tell Zoé, when she’s back among them, in the nuns’ sprawling villa in unoccupied France, miles south of Paris, near the sea.

  63

  Within a matter of hours, the story of Zoé’s escape is passed up from Marseille, through the convents and churches and rectories, snippets of gossip working back to us.

  Zoé told the tale of her escape on the night of her arrival. There at the nuns’ villa, winter ended weeks ago, but the nights get cold, so they all dragged the quilts from the beds into the garden, to wrap themselves in.

  The nuns offered what they could, over candlelight; they brought her a plate of snails plucked off the grapevines on the garden wall and cooked in the butter churned from the milk of their own scrawny cow. There was a saucer with a few sardines alongside a spindly sprig of rosemary.

  One of the girls from Madame Boulette’s poked a toothpick at a burnt-out glowworm that inched across the ironwork table. Zoé wondered if she meant to spark up its glow or to skewer it, for a canapé.

  The cupboards were bare, the villa a wreck.

  This was where Zoé was to wait, in a house of crumbling stonework, just a pile of rocks rolling slow down a hill.

  She will meet with the American man with his list of people to save, intellectuals and artists, inventors, dissidents, poets, to see how she might be added to it, so she too can hope to board a fishing trawler after midnight in the outer basins. She’ll pray the storms won’t toss the boat against the rocks before they get to Gibraltar.

  “How could you do it?” a Sister Eugénie asked her. But Zoé knew the nun wasn’t condemning her. She wanted to know; she wanted immoral instruction. But before Zoé could answer, the nun asked, “Is he dead?”

  An older nun slapped at the younger nun’s shoulder. “Don’t be so rude,” she told her. She told Zoé, “You don’t have to answer that.” But her eyes stayed on Zoé’s, waiting for an answer nonetheless.