The Perfume Thief

by Timothy Schaffert

  “He was alive when I left,” Zoé said.

  He was alive when I left, sang a redhead from the bordello, a protégée of Day’s, one who fancied herself a songwriter now, alive when I left when I left when I left, as she uncorked a bottle of the convent’s own brew. She poured the beer into a champagne coupe for Zoé, over twigs of juniper berries and shavings from a fennel bulb.

  64

  I’m being followed as I walk to Café Roche, I’m certain of it. The street’s busy with people going about their day slow, less frantic in the warmer weather, and I can’t say I like the sight of it much. The last thing you want to see is everything back to normal before anything’s back to normal at all.

  I didn’t sleep in the night, but I didn’t dare walk the streets after curfew. I need to check on Day somehow. I just need Madame Roche to assure me she left her apartment days ago with the musicians.

  I slip away from all the bustling, and I wind around, then back, then around a corner I don’t know, onto a narrow street with a tricky curve to it, the buildings casting their shadows against each other, creating a too-early twilight. One building looks like it’s been singed by centuries of flames, an armless angel perched near the door leaning out like the wooden sibyl of a ship’s bow. Her stone cheeks are streaked with lime.

  My shoes echo on the cobblestone walk, just heightening my sense that there are men close behind. I pick up my pace.

  And maybe Day is back already. She wasn’t sure how long she’d be gone. If she’s back, I need to convince her to move in with Blue and me. Why haven’t I insisted on it all along?

  When I open the door to the café, Madame Roche looks up, giving me her one good eye. She’s sitting at the bar, telling the bartender’s fortune with a deck of cards. “They ransacked her room,” she says before I’ve even opened my mouth. She’s always been no-nonsense, Madame Roche has, always speaking low with a voice that has a wet rattle, like a clogged spigot. But I detect a crack of worry in her voice just now. “Late last night they came by. A few Nazi soldiers.”

  “Was Day here?”

  “No.”

  “Did they know she wasn’t here?”

  “They knew she wasn’t here,” she says. “And they said she won’t be back for a while.”

  A while. Somehow this offers a moment of relief. I’m so grateful for any bit of promise. She won’t be back for a while is much better, of course, than she won’t be back at all. That’s the nature of optimism now.

  “Did you recognize the soldiers?” I say.

  “No,” she says. “But one of them was the most angel-faced of anyone I’ve ever seen, I hate to say.”

  Lutz? He was alive when I left. “Anything wrong with that angel face, by chance?” I say. “Maybe a welt? A goose egg?”

  “A bandage when he took off his hat,” she says, tapping her finger on the side of her head. “Right in the thick of his curls.” She then tapped her finger on her neck. “And a little something here too,” she says.

  “A cigarette burn,” I say.

  “You know your Nazis,” she says.

  Her bartender hands her a cordial glass, and she holds it out to me. “A little swallow to settle your nerves a touch?” I shake my head, refusing it, even as I reach to take it and toss it back. It burns going down, and doesn’t settle a single nerve.

  Madame Roche gives me the key to Day’s room, and I go up. Day was never one to own much more than what she could carry with her in a pinch, but Lutz made as much of a mess as he could with what little he had to work with. Her wigs, particularly, are strewn everywhere—on the floor, across the bed—as if she suddenly had hundreds.

  All her dresses are off their hangers, but that’s not so unusual. She’s never been one to put her clothes away. She wears them, then drapes them over chairs or the bedposts. Not only was it costly to have her gowns laundered the way they should be, but she hated for the patterns to fade, or for the dresses to wear away with the soap and steam and the press of the iron. They don’t get dirty, she says. And they smell better after I wear them, because they get doused in my perfume.

  I pick up a wig from the floor, and its shade of blond is typed on a label sewn to the inside cap: pineapple ice. I sit on the edge of the bed, the wig in my lap.

  I feel my hands shaking, and then my shoulders are, and I’m crying. I take a deep breath and assure myself that Day is more savvy than I am. Maybe she knew trouble was brewing. She didn’t want me to worry, so she told me she’d be off making music. She promised she’d be back soon. I hope she’s with Zoé, and she’s finding her way to the fishing trawler to carry her to America. I can’t bear not knowing. It gnaws at my gut.

  I twist my finger through the curls in the wig. Often as I prepare a bed for someone new at the house, I find the husk of someone old. A stocking that’s lost its match. A slither of ribbon. A pair of underwear with a line of silk rosettes around the waist.

  I decide to return some wigs to their heads; I put a dress on a hanger. I fold some silk. I remember the days years ago when I’d dress up proper, in satin and ruffles, wherever I was, to buy gifts to send M back in Manhattan. I’d stand there at the haberdashery, playing the little lady selecting something special for her gent: a shaving brush with bristles plucked from a badger’s back, a Hungarian mustache wax, a lizard-shaped tie pin, bloodstone cuff links, slippers of teddy-bear cloth, a menthol aftershave of rectified spirits.

  With every gift, and every letter I sent M, no matter how little I said, I feared I’d said too much. I even learned the particulars of recalling a letter you’d already dropped in the mail. If you presented to the post office proof the letter was yours—a description, an example of your handwriting—and you did so within an hour of posting the letter in the letterbox, you could get it back. You could take back your words. Though I never actually went so far as to go to the trouble, it was on my mind each time the letter slipped from my fingers and down the chute. It felt like a magical promise of protection: make a mistake and undo it.

  65

  After straightening Day’s room, I go home and put on a suit I never wear. It’s ball-of-fire orange, or “dragon-fruit red,” to hear my tailor tell it. It tends to draw attention. A wool suit, flecked with shimmering threads of yellow, with a matching waistcoat, all of gabardine houndstooth. I wear my collar open, no necktie. It’s been long enough since I’ve been to the barber that my hair’s just an inch or two short of somewhat feminine. I slick it back with pomade, and you can see the rake of my comb through the silver and gray.

  Or, I should say, Blue slicks my hair back. He puts makeup on me too—a little black for my lashes, and some lipstick made of sumac berries; a red that’s the shade of a rusty scythe. But I like that I don’t quite recognize myself when I look in the mirror.

  “Day is fine,” Blue says, though I can hear the lack of conviction in his voice. “She’s like a nymph, really. She’s always been able to stay above any misery that’s nipping at her ankles.” The fact is, Blue has never been a good actor, not even onstage.

  Any confidence that any of this high style gives me is gone the moment I discover that the concierge is not the concierge anymore. This woman now at Pascal’s door is someone I’ve never seen. But she seems to know me. “Monsieur Voss is expecting you,” she says. But there’s no reason he would be.

  She leads me upstairs and through the front rooms, making no mention at all of the fact that the house is wrecked. Chairs are upside down, lamps broken on the floor. When I look into the rooms we pass, I see that every desk, every chest, every cabinet, has had its drawers pulled out and overturned.

  In the kitchen are footprints of men’s boots in the sugar and flour that’s been shaken from the bags. Cupboard doors hang open on their hinges, dishes having spilled out, as if we’re on a listing ship.

  Voss sits at the kitchen table in silk pajamas, powder blue, the color of a clear
sky. He’s doing nothing at all.

  “Where’s the concierge?” is the first thing I ask, once the new concierge has left.

  “Oh,” he says, waving his hand in the air, “she’s off…explaining herself.”

  “No one loves this house more than Madame Vachon,” I say. “Not even you. She didn’t have anything to do with this.” It’s a feeble defense of her, I suppose, but I have to say something. I don’t need her explaining anything about me.

  I move to the counter to make some tea, plucking a couple of teacups from among the broken shards. One is missing its handle but otherwise fine.

  “Well, we’ll see,” he says. “She did at least provide a useful description. Of the cyclone that hit this place.”

  The stove click click clicks when I turn the knob, then whoosh, the fire lights beneath the kettle. At the sound of it, he says, “No no no no no no no. No tea.” He holds up two cigarettes. “We’ll have these. Hungarian tobacco, rolled in with some coffee grounds and table salt.”

  I smoke with him, but I don’t sit with him. I stand at the window, and perch myself against the ledge. “So who did this?” I say, knowing full well.

  And he knows I know. “Zoé St. Angel fluttered off, and everything went topsy-turvy,” he says. “She didn’t just leave her pretty officer, she gave him a few thunks on the melon on her way out. The concierge said there’s a grisly scar, which, frankly, he was needing. He was just too lovely. It’ll give him a touch of rough-and-tumble.”

  “Did he find what he was looking for?”

  Voss shrugs. “If he found what he was looking for, it must have been in the last place he looked. There’s nothing in this house he didn’t bust into. And I was only out for a few hours this morning.” He looks me up and down. He then waves his cigarette in my direction. “Well, look at you,” he says, with a sigh of boredom. “Dressed like a true swell. You’re up to something.”

  “I need your help, Oskar,” I say.

  “Oh, I should say so,” he says. “You definitely need help. You’ve raised some…you’ve raised suspicions, Nebraska Charlie. And that’s made some folks suspicious of me.” He pauses, and I feel the need to speak, but he interrupts. He says, “You seem to run in all the most vicious circles. Madame Boulette’s. The cabaret singers. Oh, and you’ll find this interesting. There’s a very peculiar thing the concierge revealed. About the perfume diary. She lied, as it turns out. There was no chambermaid who made a mess. She didn’t just find a loose floorboard. Someone claiming to be you was the one who found the book, it seems. But you know that already. You knew that all along.” He draws in a drag from the cigarette. “You’ve played me for a fool, my dear.”

  “Oh, Oskar, no,” I say. “Oskar, I just…I just wanted it, that’s all. I wanted Pascal’s perfume diary. Why wouldn’t I? You know me. You know me probably better than anybody else by now. Monsieur Pascal’s perfume accords? All his recipes? It was irresistible. I wasn’t stealing it from you. I was just…taking it.”

  He seems to accept this. He even seems pleased with it. I allow myself a moment of relief. I bring to my nose a tiny vial of that calming Holy Basil.

  He smiles just a little, and he flicks the cigarette toward the ashtray on the table. I take a step to lean forward, to flick my ash in too.

  But then he says, “My ascent was short-lived. We discovered one of the farms we didn’t know Pascal had, in southern France. They found tanks there. But they’re practically empty. And until I can actually produce the formula for the poison Pascal discovered, then it doesn’t much matter that I know of its existence. As it turns out, the time I thought I was buying was only minutes, not weeks.” He pauses. “Why are you here?” he says. “In that suit?”

  “I need your help,” I say.

  “Yes, you said that.”

  I say, “My friend Day…the singer…her place was torn apart like this one. She’s completely innocent, but Boulette’s has been shut down, and…well, I’m wondering if there’s a way you can check. If she’s…if she’s been arrested, then maybe you can help her. It’s all a mistake.”

  “Day Shabillée,” he says. “Yes. There’s been no mistake. That little lady has done a lot of damage.”

  “That can’t be,” I say.

  “I’m afraid it can be,” he says. He then goes on to describe Day the spy, and it all starts to fit together. Without even leaving Boulette’s, Day weaseled secrets from the Nazis she sang to. She played to their vanities, promising to write songs about them—about their heroism and handsomeness. She poured them drinks, and tousled their hair, and they often gave her more than she needed, and more than they realized. The men told her where they were going and where they’d been.

  She wrote charming, harmless lyrics; but the notes she plotted on the pages of staff paper were a code that told everything else. Every clef, every sharp and flat, every quarter note, every eighth, every sixteenth, all a musical cryptogram. Her notes weren’t to be played; they were to be decoded.

  And the musicians that performed at Boulette’s freelanced, moving among the clubs of the occupied zone, slipping in and out of stage doors. They performed for soldiers of all stripes. The music Day placed on the stands of her saxophonists, her trumpeters, her drummers, her ukulele pluckers, every time she took the stage, had foiled more than a few nefarious plots.

  “Day’s only a singer,” I insist, nonetheless. But I’m proud of her victory, of her using music, and everyone’s fascination with it, to confound. “She sings, that’s all. You remember the song she sang. You said you loved it.” And I start to sing “Where Were You When,” though I haven’t much of a voice for singing. And to make matters worse, my voice cracks only a few verses in.

  I stop. I say, “I took care of you when you were sick. I looked after your work for you.” I hate that my voice is shaking. But maybe it’s exactly what I need.

  Voss won’t look at me. He runs his hand over the tabletop, as if clearing it of crumbs. He then begins drumming his fingers. He’s thinking it all through, and I don’t interrupt.

  “You took care of me,” he finally says, nodding, still looking at the tabletop. “You did.” He looks up. Pauses. “And that’s why I’m letting you go, Charlie. I’m letting you get away. That’s what I’m doing for you.”

  So that’s when I say, “I have the formula.”

  His smile comes on slow. He raises an eyebrow. He’s either skeptical or impressed. Or both. He drums his fingers some more.

  “Is that so?” he says.

  I nod. I suck in some smoke. Blow it out. But then I regret it because the puff of smoke shivers with my breath. My whole body is trembling.

  He leans the kitchen chair back, and rocks it on its back legs, like a schoolboy. He contemplates me. Me and my suit. He says, “And how’d you come to have it, if I may ask?”

  “You basically handed it to me,” I say.

  “Did I?”

  I shrug. “You insisted I show Blue the room of my defeat. At the party. You wanted to boast of my failure at finding the perfume diary. The bottle blueprint, from the drawer in the cabinet. Pascal’s sketches for the Gabrielle bottle. He tucked the details in with all the measurements and numbers and notes. I’ve worked with chemistry long enough to recognize it. I snuck out with the diagram and took it to a chemist I know. It’s the formula, we’re sure of it. And other information you’ve been looking for too.”

  Voss rocks in that chair for a moment longer before dropping the front legs back down to the floor and tucking his cigarette into the side of his mouth to free his hands to applaud. “Brava!” he shouts through the other side of his mouth. The slam of the chair, the slap of his hands, his shout, startle me enough to make me jump.

  He says, “I’ve been outwitted by the great Perfume Thief.” After a pause, he says, “So? Where is it?” Before I can say anything, he says, “Oh yes, of course, of course.
This is the deal you’re making. You give me the formula, and I arrange for Day’s release.”

  “Or the other way around,” I say.

  “Or the other way around,” he says. “Or, I could have you arrested too, and you could give it to me then.”

  “I need your help. I’m desperate, Oskar. I’m supposed to keep her safe.”

  He grinds out his cigarette, though it’s only half smoked. He stands, and steps toward me. “I should just believe you?” he says. “That you would collaborate? That you would just hand over to me such a weapon? Oh, but that’s right.” He reaches over to button up my jacket. “You’ve killed before. I’ve known that for a while. Your reasons for leaving America. It’s all documented, Charlie. The dead and how they died. Your part in their murder.”

  “That’s not how I see it,” I say.

  “I don’t suppose you would.” He takes my cigarette from my fingers, and puts it to his lips. He leans back to sit on the tabletop, exhaling smoke. “Confess to me,” he says. “It’s one of the stories you’ve never told me. Of how you finally got caught. Confess to me, and I’ll confess to you. I’ll tell you a secret of my own.”

  “If I tell you, will you help me?” I say.

  He shrugs one shoulder. Half nods. “Tell me, and we’ll see.”

  66

  I returned to Manhattan in my fifties, during the twenties, the Modern Age. We all thought we’d finally got the world the way we wanted it. The war had ended. I thought I could find good work, since the release of a silent movie about my crimes had become a sensation. I sat through as much of the film as I possibly could, every heist committed with a giddy hiccup and a kicked-up heel. The actress playing me was always in dresses except for one scene, and the silk pants were so billowy, so ballooning, it was like the most extravagant skirt of all.

  But I did like the clever gimmick: with admission you were given scented cards, and whenever the theater’s organist called out a number, you were to hold the card to your nose, and the perfume was to carry along with it some of the drama or comedy of the scene.