When I first arrived again in the city, I shopped all the men’s boutiques and haberdasheries and bought a season’s worth of new suits and shirts. The stores displayed their silk neckties on a tray, coiled like anchovies in a tin. At Tiffany & Co., I bought a lapel pin shaped like a golfer in mid-swing, studded in diamonds, with sapphires where the golfer’s socks met his knickers.
The whole cityscape that had risen up in my absence looked like it had taken its cues from the Tiffany window displays, the Art Deco architecture resembling solid-gold cuff links, platinum brooches, sleek wristwatches of titanium and rhinestones.
I snagged myself a job. And to my mind, this was something within a razor’s edge of legitimate. I became an executive for a perfume company, a place called Minx & Minx Ltd.; I drew a paycheck. A salary. I had a wardrobe allowance that afforded me the finest tailors—I wore suits of ivory linen in the summer, and in the winter of a cashmere so pure and frail it was doomed to collapse by April from the first nibble of a moth.
And we did sell perfume. God-awful, here-today-gone-tomorrow concoctions peddled to down-on-their-luck flappers in drugstores, sold by the quart, practically, with kicky names. Jazzmina. Gin Lizzie. Zozzle. Hotsy-Totsy. Eau de Lollygag.
But Minx & Minx had derelict reasons for hiring a derelict executive. They knew they could make far more money from their legal access to alcohol than they ever could from the perfumes alone. Among my responsibilities was to help them produce perfumes without alcohol, so they could sell their allotted alcohol for thousands of dollars a day. At a meeting of the Aroma Club, an industry organization, perfumers insisted to the prohibition commissioner that perfume was a necessity, not a luxury. The commissioner assured perfumers that reputable, law-abiding businesses would have all the alcohol they wanted.
My appointments were not with department stores and advertisers; my name was not stenciled deep in any brass nameplates. My meetings were with the city’s most moneyed bootleggers and mob bosses, with the saloonkeepers of Harlem’s most elegant speakeasies. It was a tough gig because we weren’t the only ones out there. So many of these reputable businesses with vats of alcohol dabbled in this secondary market. The flavoring companies that dealt in extracts for your apple pies. The hospitals that sterilized the scalpels they cut into your gut. I even knew of an optician with a spectacles shop who cleaned lenses with a violet-scented alcohol spritz—even he did rumrunning on the side.
But at Minx & Minx, we did the best business of all. The city’s underbelly invited me in, and we crooks brokered honest deals. And I lived the life. These were fine-living fellows, these Manhattan gutter rats, and they gave me tickets to the opera, to the ballrooms; they sent limousines to deliver me direct to the city’s best T-bones and frog legs. And they were tickled, not troubled, by my taste for suits, and they liked to impress me with their own insights into style; they gave me gifts: a Rolex Oyster, a pair of chamois driving gloves, a diamond stickpin for my necktie.
Minx & Minx got so flush toward the end, it hosted a lavish New Year’s Eve party on the ice rink atop the Biltmore Hotel—the outdoor Ice Gardens. It’d been a cold winter already, and the men had stopped shaving weeks in advance so they’d sport a heavy beard to warm their chins at the open-air party. The women had spent months haunting the furriers for the healthiest mink and ermine and lynx, for fur capes, fur caps, fur slippers. And the night of the party, the rink itself was alive with white fox, tamed by a circus upstate. The dray horse that lived in the hotel was there too, off-duty; his job, on a normal day, was to drag the ice-scraper across the rink. But that night there was no room for skating, so he stood still and endured us petting his nose and shoving apples in his teeth.
We all stood elbow-to-elbow even to eat, and most of us simply grazed at the banquet table decked out in roasted partridge and quail. We tongued oysters out of their half shells. We plucked up sugared plums and brandied figs, then licked the syrup from our lips and fingers. And from the lips and fingers of others. And we drank. Hot cocktails in copper mugs. Buttered scotch. Cocoa and cognac. We guzzled hooch without worry, because the party was packed with senators, both state and federal.
Blue lights twinkled on strings strung overhead, and origami cranes, folded from perfumed paper, were tied to the lights; they fluttered hard in the wind that kicked up late, sometimes snapping free and dropping like from a hunter’s gun.
As midnight neared, the temperature plummeted, and the waiters dragged out iron kettles of burning cedar to warm us, and scent the air. We huddled close. The waiters salted the bonfires with crystals that spat sparks and tinted the flames pink and purple.
I was shivering in my white tuxedo and crimson cape and sipping some eggnog from a snifter when I finally met the detective who had been pursuing me for the entirety of my career. I didn’t recognize him. He tapped me on the shoulder. “Clementine?” he said. He held out his hand for a handshake. His eyes were damp, either from the wind or from emotion. He said, “You’re under arrest,” and he said it with such a mix of relief and heartbreak, and infatuation, that for a beat or two I was almost happy for him.
In those last days of December, everybody who scrambled to keep the country dry had been frantically tallying up numbers, for some grim holiday statistics. The prohibitionists hoped to reach a thousand dead in time for the New Year’s Day headlines. A new annual record. And thanks to a vacant-lot shantytown in Hell’s Kitchen, and a tent of frozen hoboes just at the last minute, they won their sweepstakes.
Bootlegging was cold-blooded murder, they said. But not so. I’ll tell you: this was a government sting. The feds started sneaking wood alcohol and other contaminants into the industrial stuff they provided us and others. One cocktail of bad booze isn’t going to blind you, but the drunks who can’t get enough? They started dropping like flies with this government plot. The prohibition agents were doing double duty with that booze—they were able to portray alcohol, and its friends, as negligent, while also ridding the city of its drunks. And that’s what they were finally snagging me for: they were shutting down Minx & Minx, and taking me in.
My lawyer posted bail, and made a hell of a stink in the night court. It was as if my detective knew he’d lose me, so he’d already left me behind. He was nowhere to be found in the courtroom. All this insanity will either work in your favor, my lawyer told me as we had coffee in an all-night diner after my arraignment, or it’ll nail your coffin shut. At the very least, he advised me, I’d best start putting on a dress when meeting a judge and jury. Grow my hair out and twist some curl into it. And would it kill ya to put on a little lipstick?
So I booked my passage overseas, carrying a suitcase full of phony passports.
67
After I’ve told Voss enough of the story to suit him, I lean back against the windowsill in the kitchen and feel my fists tighten. From the kitchen table where he sits, he asks, with a playful spike, “Do you feel like a mass murderer, my love? Were you guilty?” I want to leap for his throat.
“No more guilty than a hostess at a cocktail party,” I say. “I was just pouring drinks.”
“So you have no ghosts at all?”
“It’s terrible what happened,” I say. “But I was only selling perfume spirits.” He keeps his eyes on mine. Waiting for more. “It was the prohibition agents…”
“Ah, the prohibition agents…”
“Yes, the prohibition agents…they were the ones who tainted the well. All those dead people are their ghosts. And no one even knows whether any of those who died had a sip of anything that I had anything to do with. Most of the alcohol that I…I managed at the perfume company, it was sold to the clubs. The speakeasies. And a lot of times, they did their own extra distilling of it. To keep it clean, so it tasted clean.”
“And none of those people died?”
“I don’t know,” I snap. I’m so tired of Voss and his curiosity. But I’m trapped, hoping for mercy. “I
doubt it. Even with the wood alcohol in the mix, there wasn’t enough to kill a baby.” The moment the words are out of my mouth, I want them back. I think of Voss’s child, dying in his arms. I’m so afraid of disappointing him, of pushing him away just when I need his help the most. “That’s what the government said,” I add, as if to give my words to someone else.
But Voss smiles. “How many martinis does it take to kill a baby, do you suppose?” he says.
“The fact is,” I say, “they were setting me up so I could take the fall for a whole pit of vipers.”
And I do have ghosts, I don’t tell him. Not only did I quit thieving when I reached Paris, but I quit drinking, and didn’t tipple so much as a glass of wine until the occupation. Those last days in Manhattan, I was stupid with greed, and lazy from the ease of dealing with those who deal with the devil. I wondered if my own soul was too dark to even see the dark around every corner I turned. So yes, ghosts I’ve got.
Voss says, “The drunkards shouldn’t have drunk so much. They died by their own hands. That’s what your prohibition agents would say, I suppose.”
I still want to defend the dead drunkards, and to praise their lusts, all these years later. I want to defend their every sick whim. They should have wanted a better life for themselves, we’d say. But why should their love for their own addictions be something so shameful? They should have wanted a long life of dead-quiet churchgoing, in a gray village, on flat land? Is that life so much better lived than a shorter one always hot with trouble?
“Did you see M during those years you were bootlegging?” Voss says.
“I didn’t see M,” I say. But we kept writing to each other. Can’t we meet? I wrote once. Hasn’t it been long enough? We’re just old friends now. And when he wrote back that we weren’t just old friends, that it had not been long enough, that it could never be long enough, and we could never meet, I fell in love with him all over again.
In the quiet, I say, “I need your help.”
“You’ve said that,” he says softly. “Charlie,” he says after a moment, his eyes turned downward, his voice even softer. “You and me, we’re not enemies.”
“Of course not,” I say.
“We’re a lot alike,” he says. “I’ve always thought so. And I think you admire me as much as I admire you.” Here he looks up. He catches my eye. I nod. I nod vigorously. “I’ve been inspired by the life you’ve lived,” he says. “In the stories you’ve told me…I can imagine myself. And how different my life might have been. I have no regrets—I’m not a man with regrets—but I sometimes think about parallel lives. You do too. What if you’d gone to M, when you were back in Manhattan? How different would everything be?”
We described these parallel lives, M and I did, in the letters we wrote to each other after my return to Manhattan. We were only a subway ride away from each other, and we wrote letter after letter about where we would meet, if we could. We pictured ourselves together all over the city.
“And how different,” he continues, “if you’d even just dressed as a woman should. If you hadn’t spent your life…deceiving.”
“A life in a dress would have been the deception,” I say.
“I’ve been in love,” he says, as if he hasn’t heard me. “With people I shouldn’t love. That’s the little secret I said I’d tell you.” He repeats himself, saying, “I’ve felt inspired by you. By your stories. I’ve been admiring…I’ve been envious. A little infatuated.” He’s not looking at me. “My family had the means to keep me out of the military, but they put me in, to cure me. After a boyhood affair, with another boy. But I wanted to join the army; I was attracted to the camaraderie. Not just to the men and their beauty, but to how they spoke to each other. Their friendship and intimacy. I wanted to be a student of…of what it meant to be masculine, in a natural way. In a way that wasn’t performance. I wanted to be among men who were simply who they were. And I fell in love again, like I thought I might. With a soldier…and he loved me. I often think about him, even though we had a very short time together. How ridiculous to long for him still. But we do, don’t we?” He looks up at me. “We long for them. Our longing becomes part of who we are. If we let it fade, if we get over it, then we lose that part of ourselves. And we don’t get it back.”
Am I supposed to be moved by this? Stunned? Does he feel that he’s confessing? I refuse to give him the satisfaction of being shocked. But if I open my mouth I’ll scream. We don’t long for anything. We don’t share any hurt at all.
I have no reason to doubt his undying love for his young soldier, but that doesn’t make us the same. For weeks he has condescended to me, belittled me, for my suits and neckties; he has regarded my affection for M as precious. And now he stands before me, claiming my sentiments and sorrow as his own.
But I do bring myself to smile. And I nod in case my smile is too twisted or too pained or too glum. I’m willing to do anything that might bring me closer to finding Day.
He squints, and though he’s been looking at me, he seems only just now to be seeing me. He tilts his head. “You’ve painted your face,” he says. He stands. He brings his hand up, and I hold still, with a kind of curiosity, I guess. He presses his thumb hard across my lower lip, and I let him. I let him rub the red off. He then puts his thumb to his own lip. He turns his head, to and fro, against his thumb, working the red in, almost subconsciously. When he drops his hand to his side, he’s distracted, as if he’s already forgotten about the lipstick. It leaves him with the faint trace of a fresh kiss.
68
Voss insists I bring the blueprint to him in a few hours, and when I return with the paper rolled up and tucked into a cardboard tube, there’s a long black car in front of Pascal’s house. And it’s raining. The driver takes my umbrella and opens the door to the backseat. I slip inside the car to sit next to Voss.
Blue tried to discourage me from going off with Voss; he said he would deliver the blueprint for me. But I can’t have that at all. And I guess I’m feeling under the influence of Voss’s stories this afternoon. After our conversation in the kitchen, I truly believe he does admire me. For so long, alone in Pascal’s stolen rooms, Voss has surrounded himself with illusion. He is not what he is; he’s a gentleman of Paris, he supposes. And I’m certain now that he can’t imagine the city without me. I need to believe that’s true. And I can’t imagine the city without Day.
The driver moves slowly through the mostly empty streets, though the streets aren’t quite as empty as they were all winter. The Nazis now allow some traffic so long as it doesn’t require fuel. Parisians taxi by horse and carriage, or in cars converted to burn wood, their exhaust pipes sputtering out black clouds of charcoal.
I open the cardboard tube, and I pull the page out. I unroll it and hold it across my knees for Voss to see Pascal’s illustration of the bottle of Gabrielle. On both sides of the bottle, in French, are notes and numbers that have nothing to do with the bottle itself, or the perfume, all in silver. I point out also the notes and numbers that seem to tell the story of the formula Voss is seeking.
Voss doesn’t touch the paper; he only glances at it. “You’re giving this to me,” he says. His voice is weak. Tired. “You’re committing a war crime against your own country. Did you know that? All this time, I would have taken you for a pacifist.”
I want him to believe we’re on the same side to some degree. I say, “There are American generals who say that pacifism is more dangerous than chemical warfare. With chemicals, you end things. You cut things short. Pacifists, though, get their emotions wrapped up in it all. They can’t see straight.” I’m not very good at this song and dance anymore. I just want to see Day safe.
Voss laughs without smiling, without laughter even, just a little puff of a snort through his nose. “You Americans and your keen sense of logic.” He begins to recall a play he saw, in Paris, before the war, the War Before, called The Perfum
ed Death. “A woman suffocates in garlands of roses,” he says.
He reaches over to touch the blueprint. “It is interesting that Pascal named a perfume after Gabrielle d’Estrées,” he says. His voice lifts, upping the volume, but only a notch. “The king preferred she wear no perfume at all. He didn’t even want to smell soap on her. He wanted to smell only her stench.”
He tells me to put the blueprint away, and I’m happy to. I’m ready for him to be satisfied by it. I wasn’t worried all that much, as it is an impeccable fraud. Annick had no trouble dummying up a copy in no time at all. And between the two of us, we know enough about chemistry that I was able to rework the formula into convincing nonsense. Voss will wring no poison from these equations.
I knew he wouldn’t fall for simply some sheet of notes handed to him. But this, this all fits his sense of mystery, and his fascination with Pascal’s genius. And, honestly, he likes the idea of me, the sneak-thief, finally coming through with something deliciously covert.
Voss says, “I’m taking you to her. To your friend. I’ve arranged for her release.”
On reflex, I grab hold of his forearm. He pats at my hand, gently, but I know he means for me to let go. I do. “Oskar, I…I…” I look away. I look down at my hands. “I don’t know what to say.”
“I’ve done it at some risk,” he says. “To myself. Like I told you, you’ve kicked up a fair amount of suspicion.”
“I know,” I say.
And now that we’ve moved on to the next steps, I’m frightened of where they’ll lead. I don’t know how long it will take Voss and his cohort to diagnose the blueprint as a hoax; but when writing the narrative to string in and around the formulas and instructions, Annick and I stuck in twists and turns, and false leads, and red herrings—I even incorporated an outdated shorthand in a few places, a shorthand taught in a book long out of print.
The Perfume Thief Page 31