I needed to tempt the Nazis, to make it seem worthwhile to unlock all the blueprint’s secrets and codes, but also to keep them unable to unlock anything at all. This will give me time to get Day out of Paris. Maybe I’ll leave too. Voss doesn’t want the blueprint to disappoint anyone either. He too is still jockeying for time.
“Did you describe your crimes to M, in your letters?” he says.
“I did,” I say. M was the first person I told about moving to Paris, after my arrest. I wrote a letter in the middle of the Atlantic. Once I was settled, and had an address to give him, he wrote back. It was all my talk of poison, he claimed, back when we were lovers. It became your destiny.
The rain, which had been light, only sprinkling the car windows, falls harder, a swift and sudden downpour, sending the few people out on the street running for cover, splashing through puddles. Voss raises his voice above the pounding of the rain against the roof.
“Do you think that’s what drove you to commit the crimes in the first place? Would you have had such a life if you’d not had M to describe it to?”
I find myself confiding in Voss. I tell him that my whole career rested on a sense of invisibility, an invisibility I believed in. I’m not trying to convince him. I’m simply telling the truth. I was vapor. In my letters, I wanted to describe to M the exceptional life I lived without him, a life in shadows, me always slipping out of sight the second anyone looked my way. I wanted to seem exceptional so he would regret losing me. And yet, at the same time, I wanted him to think I was nothing at all, less than I’d ever been, nearly nonexistent, because of him. He’d ruined me; he was my damage. I wanted him to always carry the weight of that guilt.
The car turns a corner and slows to a stop. As if she were expecting the car to come, a woman steps from beneath an eave, where she’s likely been waiting for the rain to let up. She can walk between the drops now. She wears a raincoat, belted at the waist, and a silk scarf wrapped around her head. She has her hands in her pockets. And I know her by the tick-tock of her hips.
But before I can say anything, before I can thank him again, Voss says, “I was very much hoping we could work together, Charlie.” The driver is driving slow enough to go slower than Day. She’s moving farther down the empty street, her back to us. “You’re such a disappointment,” he says.
It takes a moment for me to realize exactly what he’s said. His English, normally quite light on his tongue, is so heavy with accent, I at first think he’s speaking German to me. But the word disappointment untangles itself.
He says, “I needed very much to trust you.”
The car slows again to a stop. Day moves on along.
“You can trust me,” I say, but I can’t swallow, and my words get caught in my throat.
He knows I’m not innocent. I concentrate on my rapid heartbeat. I lose myself in the rush of blood in my veins. In the silence of the car, I slow my pulse. This is how I’ll die, I think, running the words through my head, again and again, a mantra. I think my pulse might slow to nothing.
I see there’s no handle on this side of the door. No way of getting out without being let out. And no crank for the window.
The car begins to inch forward again, without Voss instructing the driver. The car moves, but Day stops. Someone has called her name. I hear the clop of heavy shoes on the pavement, and I look out the window as two men in patterned suits and damp hats pass the car, walking toward Day.
My pulse speeds back up, and I feel sick. Day turns away from the men, picks up her pace. “You’re not disappointed, Oskar,” I say. But I keep my eyes on Day. “I know you. And you know me.” I sputter something about the formula on the page, that he’ll need me to decipher it. I claim there are keys I didn’t give him. I’m trying to negotiate.
Though I can see only the men’s backs, I can tell from the jut of their elbows that they’re pulling their guns. I scratch at the door. At the glass.
I scream Day’s name. I pound my fists against the window. I hear the gunshot, and I feel the noise of it in my spine. I see Day fall to the ground. Our car picks up speed and drives past the men, who now stand over Day’s body, their guns still drawn. I can’t stop clawing at the door. I press my cheek against the glass.
Voss tries to speak above my sobbing, above the noise of the rain again on the roof. You have only yourself to blame, he says.
69
Roses, Voss says. That was my boyhood. My mother worked in the rose fields, and all the children of all the mothers worked in the fields too, every July. You snap the rose off the stem, right at the calyx. Rose after rose after rose. In the mornings, and in the evenings, when the flowers won’t spoil from the summer sun. The petals feel lighter than the press of heat on your skin. Every petal even lighter than its scent. Hundreds of acres. Thousands of pounds of those petals that weigh nothing.
Voss won’t stop talking. He’s told me that he’s driving me home, and that we’ll say our good-byes, and that will be that. I won’t be arrested. I won’t be watched. He wants nothing more from me. Day, he tells me, took my bullet. Her death is my punishment for my betrayal.
But don’t be so hard on yourself, he tells me. She’s better off this way. Day’s musical notes have sunk ships and bombed buildings. Men have died from her interventions. Her death might have been gruesomely prolonged otherwise.
I want to protest, but every time I open my mouth, I can’t breathe. My words skip. I lean against the door. She just wrote down things that men said, I try to say.
70
I spend day after day in bed, but I don’t know how many, altogether. There’s a day-by-day calendar on my nightstand, but I haven’t torn a page away since summer. When the war came, I forgot all about it, it just left my mind entirely, my nightly habit of tearing the day’s page off and dropping it in the drawer, for scrap paper for when I wake in the night, or in the early, early morning, with an idea for a fragrance, or a solution to a scent that’s not quite come together yet. My brain’s sometimes better when it’s still halfway caught in a dream, when I’m lying there puzzling over what’s real and what’s not, a nightmare turning to mist and slipping away before I can even describe it to myself.
Sometimes, sleepless, I remember things I’ve long since forgot, or things I’ve never forgotten but haven’t remembered in years, and everything comes back doubly vivid, or triply, and it’s even more alive than when I lived it, all the colors filtered through bottle glass. There’s the gentlest clicking of locusts, the creaking of crickets’ legs, the thick scent of lilacs scratching the back of my throat. The wine tart on my tongue. A kiss, a taste of lipstick and powder and the flat lick of its red wax. An insect tickling the back of my neck, and the acrid smell of its crushed husk on my fingertips after I pick it off my skin.
But when I wake now, I’m terrified. The night sits on my chest like a demon. It holds me to the bed. I couldn’t even write a note if I wanted to. I couldn’t sit up, couldn’t lift a pen. The nightmares won’t fade away. And the days are too sick with pain. Morning comes, and I can breathe a little. But only a little. Some days I dress, some I don’t, but I never leave the room. It seems I’m barely awake a minute and it’s already time for bed. I sit with my cigarette lit but unsmoked. The paper burns away to my fingertips, the ash finally tumbling into my lap. And the sunlight burns away just as quick. People bring me things I do not eat. They say things I do not hear.
For a while, Day lived on a ramshackle houseboat. Some mornings she’d wake in the fifth arrondissement and sometimes in the sixth, depending on the ebb and flow of the Seine. Her boat sat afloat on the line between the two districts, moored at a dock off the Île de la Cité, the little island smack-dab in the middle of Paris. If you asked her where she lived, she’d tell you she was shipwrecked. I’m capsized in the river, she’d say. With a potbelly stove fueled cheaply with corncobs dipped in kerosene, she kept the cabin not just warm but hot
, so hot it seemed she’d boil the water of the river away, right out from under her boat. And yet her teeth were always chattering. She was always cold.
Nonetheless, one winter night a few years ago, we sat on the deck bundled up, lighting the skirts of little paper men in Chinese robes, fireworks disguised as dolls. We touched a match to their red dresses, and they flitted up and away, their skirts turning to smoke, kicking up the powdery perfume of incense as they spun out their flames, then popped, a last crack before disappearing in the dark, the quick, sharp scent of gunpowder tingling in your nose, working up a sneeze. The river and the night were so still, we swore we could hear the sizzle of the hot doll when it hit the water.
“You sing your songs, and they sing them back at you,” she told me of her nights at the cabaret. This was before the Nazis arrived; these were the gentlemen of Paris she sang for. “Your words are in their mouths, then their words are in your mouth, and you’re swallowing their smoke with every note you’re trying to hit. You’ve swapped your pretty little love songs for dragon’s breath breathing down your throat.” She refilled her glass, with a brandy that smelled of butterscotch and pine needles, like the fir liquors they drink in ski lodges. “The devils,” she said, lighting the paper dress of another doll.
I can’t stop myself from picturing it. Her death. I see it in different ways, my imagination twisting. There’s a raincoat but no rain. It’s a tree-lined street, sun-dappled. As she falls, her coat opens, and the sheets of music she’s smuggling are caught by a sudden gust of wind. The musical notes, with all the secrets they carry, tumble from their staffs, and they float and spin and fall in with the song of a bird on a branch. The notes roll out with the bird’s full-throated warble.
Day, dead or alive, will bring music to Paris.
I’m in my pajamas, sitting on the corner of the bed, looking at the door, when Blue walks through it. Two of the girls walk in behind him. I fear I’m inventing them. I’m hallucinating. I thought we’d sent all the girls away.
He bends over slightly, to look in my face. He says something to me, but I quickly forget what it is. His voice is an echo down a tunnel.
“I’m going to bed,” I tell him.
“No,” he says. “You’re getting up.” He puts his hand on my elbow, but I pull my elbow away.
“It’s time I got to bed,” I say. I’m trying to scramble away from whatever I’m dreaming, to fall back into the black of sleep. I begin to turn toward the quilts. I tug at them, but I’m tugged away. I’m dizzy, as if I were drunk, and it feels like the whole house is tipping. I feel like I’m on Day’s old houseboat. I square up my feet, to keep from falling over, but it’s no good. I’m falling off the bed. But I don’t fall on the floor. I’m steady after all, on my feet, in Blue’s arms. He leads me to the door.
I don’t want to go out there. “That’s where the nightmares go,” I say, but even I don’t know what I mean. It’s real, my terror of the doorway, and the corridor. Maybe I’m in a nightmare now. Maybe everything is only a nightmare. It might as well be a cliff’s edge Blue’s pushing me off. I dig my heels into the rug, but the rug slips away, out from under me. The girls surround me too, these fairies of destruction, chirping goodwill in my ear. They coo-coo and tut-tut.
Leave me be, I think I say, or maybe I’m not speaking at all. I let my legs go limp so I’m every ounce of deadweight I can muster. I claw at their clothes to drag them down with me. But they’re determined, this little troop of do-gooders. They insist that I’m sick.
“I know,” I say.
“A hot bath will do you good,” someone says.
“There’s no water,” I say, “no heat,” as if this will free me from them.
Now I’m crying, and all my sobbing weakens me. I lean into Blue, and he holds me up. The girls help me with my balance.
Before I even realize we’ve crossed the threshold of the bedroom, I’m at sea, in the water, pajamas and all. They hold me, to keep me from slipping in the tub, and I fight them when I first feel the water soaking me. It feels cold, but then I’m shivering the chills away, and I feel the warmth of it settling in, finding my bones. And I can’t deny the ease I feel. I give in.
Blue says, as he leaves, “I’m letting the girls see to your bath. I’m respecting your dignity.” The girls unbutton my wet pajamas and peel them off me. I help them.
I fall under the spell of the ritual. They use a pitcher to pour warm water over me. Over my head. Down my back. I sit up. Lean forward. I realize I’ve been gripping the edge of the tub, and I let my fingers relax. I cross my arms beneath my breasts. Cup my bony elbows in my hands.
And Annick is here now. Or maybe she’s always been here. She dismisses the girls. Her necktie, this time, is all pink elephants. There’s a low wooden stool with four legs, a teak stool from Japan, and she brings it to the side of the tub to sit with me. She presses a sponge to my back, the back of my neck.
She uncorks a bottle and tips some liquid into my bath, a honey-water she fixed in my kitchen herself, from a recipe in one of my books. I know in an instant that it’s expert, a perfect rendering. I haven’t made it in some time. It’s sour and spice: bruised lemon rind, crushed clove.
Bees. I remember a Lalique comb I stole right off a woman’s head. The bees across the comb were made of gold, and they had made the woman look like her hair was crawling with insects.
I think I’m thinking this only to myself, but I must be thinking out loud. Annick says, “The queen bee leaves pheromones in her path, in her footprints. To send messages. By scent, actually. It’s like a perfume, I suppose. It fades as she gets old.”
Drip drip drip, more tipping of the honey-water.
Annick tilts her head with sympathy. Or pity. Sympathy, pity; one’s much the same as the other, I suppose. She puts a hand to my cheek, then leans in to place a kiss on my forehead, on my temple. Her kiss is so gentle, so kind, it’d break my heart if my heart weren’t already shattered.
“I feel like I’ve been awake every night for days,” I say, “but I also feel like I’ve been sleeping for days. It’s like when you try to remember a dream, and it keeps skittering away from you.” I begin to worry that I’m describing senility. I’m talking like old people do when they snap, when they slip away.
I feel compelled to ask Annick if she knows much about love, but I don’t ask. I’m thinking of M. Can someone truly pine away for years and years? Have I done that?
I haven’t, I don’t think. My love for M did fade, so it’s the memory of the love that so moves me now. I miss knowing it, being distracted by it. You think you’re hypnotized when you’re in the thick of it. Asphyxiated, a suffocation of flowers. Now it’s all out of reach, but only just, and it sometimes seems close enough that you can fall back into the trance of it. You can be haunted again by it all; you can fall in love with your memories.
71
Blue’s decided we’ll celebrate Day. After my bath, I find him in my bedroom; he’s laid out my entire costume for me, draped it over the quilts, all of it situated just so, as if a gentleman had lain back for a moment and then turned to mist, slipping away from his clothes, lifted by the rapture. But none of it is anything I’ve seen before. “Very dapper,” I say. The suit is rushing summer, a thin linen of powder blue, with very light, very thin stripes of pale rose. The stripes are barely a stitch, barely a thread. At the ghost’s throat is a partially knotted necktie of lime green. And at the tie’s center, a pin, a grasshopper of emerald, with golden wings, flown in from my past on the farm, a tribute to my childhood plague of locusts.
“Not gold,” he says, as if he’s read my mind. He taps his finger on a wing. “Gold-painted tin.”
I reach out to lift a sleeve. “Did you at least seduce the dandy before you stripped him of his clothes?” I say.
“None of this is secondhand,” he says. “All the haberdasheries are open to bargaining these day
s.”
“I hope you at least flirted with someone,” I say.
“I flirt even when I don’t mean to,” he says, and it’s true. It’s his cross to bear, that he can’t keep people from falling in love with him.
“The bath made me very tired,” I say. “It’s getting dark already. The nights keep getting longer.”
“They’re actually getting shorter.”
I sit on the edge of the bed. “But then they’ll just get long again.”
“Day died a hero,” he says. “So you can’t pay your respects by pulling your sheets up over your head.”
I’ve taken too many risks. I can’t help but think that the whole house will collapse, that we all will be arrested, and my failure will be an infection that works its way up the entire vein of the Resistance, and all the way down to the nuns in the south, and I’ll have poisoned everyone.
As Blue and Annick help me dress, I say, “All of this is my punishment for breaking the rules.”
Blue slips my arm through a sleeve. “We don’t make the rules,” he says, “so we shouldn’t be blamed for breaking them.” He slips my other arm through the other sleeve.
“That, my darling, is a criminal logic.”
“We are criminals,” he says. He buttons me up.
72
We can’t help but cry a little as we walk in the cold rain, after dark, all of us tucked in under the few umbrellas we could find. But we sing past our tears, Blue leading everyone in Day’s song “Where Were You When” as he walks backward before us, shouting the words above the wind like a drill sergeant, his voice rising far over his usual soft-spokenness. We shout them back at him with the same military bleat. Where were you when I loved you the most? Did you think of me much, did you keep my heart close?
The Perfume Thief Page 32