The Perfume Thief

by Timothy Schaffert

  Intermission ends. The lights of the cabaret are lowered, and we’re left with the flicker of the candles on the tabletops. The darkness softens our voices, softer, softer, down to a hiss of whispers, then nothing at all.

  And up from this nothingness lifts a hum of melody. Even as the stage bulbs brighten, clicking up watt by watt, Zoé St. Angel seems barely there. She’s a shadow of smoke.

  She sings an old German ballad, a folk song the boys will know from their schoolbooks back home. She’s seducing these tyrants with a song their mothers sang them.

  We notice that the nicotine-brown fabric of her gown is nearly transparent. Or not. We all get caught up in what you can and can’t see.

  When she finishes the song, the silence descends again, and then it’s gone in a rush and roar of cheers and applause, of shrill, sharp whistles. Her next couple of songs have some swing to them. She steps from the stage and snakes around the tables, her hips sashaying. She sings a verse in French, then one in German, then in French again, then in German again, and every word is about the beauty of youth.

  Yes, we’re the young ones, she tells the boys, reaching out to tousle some soldier’s curls, to pinch an earlobe, to tug on a lower lip. She steals quick kisses and sips of champagne. Age is only for the old, she promises. We, we were lucky enough to be born babies. And that luck will keep us young always.

  We have what the old can never have, and that makes us the richest of all. So drink too much and love too hard and study your face in a mirror. Spend every minute, because time’s too precious to keep.

  Blue leans over to speak into my ear. “Those Nazis will always be young, all right,” he says. “Once they’re shot in the head.”

  I reach up to swivel Blue’s chin, so his ear is at my lips. “But at least they won’t be cursed with old age,” I say.

  As if she’s in on the morbid joke, Zoé’s next song is in English, of all things. It’s a soldier’s song—a march, really—and she winks, and sings, Though cuddling in bed is all very well, soon we’ll bid you a sailor’s farewell. And though her gown is indeed nothing much more than mesh, none of the men manhandle her. They’re especially cautious not even to stumble into the bump of her hips.

  Zoé sings of roses blown in by the dozens: If we can’t pluck yours, we’ll pluck your cousin’s.

  She then takes a rose from a soldier’s lady and snaps the bloom from its stem as she walks to our table. I’m terrified that all eyes are on us, but I know that Blue is thrilled to be caught in her sights.

  Zoé St. Angel looks at me. She glances down at my tuxedo. Raises an eyebrow. Smiles. I smile back. She presses the rose into the buttonhole of my lapel, her fingers grazing my breast. She gives my cheek a playful slap, and walks away, singing the next dirty verse to someone else.

  4

  I’m back at Boulette’s a few days later, in daylight, up in the parlor where the ladies laze around in silk pajamas, or summery dresses of thin satin, the room so warm, everyone is forever fluttering paper fans at their throats. The Nazis arrange for the house to have the heat that’s been withheld from everyone else. So the women sit there and swelter. Such luxury.

  These little ladies get the best of everything that’s as light as air. Milk to spin into foam for their coffee. Featherlight silk stockings. A dusting of salt for their soft-boiled eggs. A few extra inches of bathwater and a few more suds of soap.

  And perfume. Madame Boulette has so admired the fragrances I’ve bottled for Day, she’s paying me a handsome sum to create scents for her and for her every lady-in-waiting. She has more than forty in her employ. I arrive in the morning carrying two cracked-leather satchels—doctor’s bags, really—ringing with the rattle of glass bottles and jars.

  One girl in the parlor practices dance steps wearing nothing but her underthings, her long legs in long stockings with tiny scarlet bows all up the backs of them. Another girl wears even less—the only thing she’s got on is an ice pack on her head, nursing her hangover. And the girl next to her is just as naked as she is, except she’s wearing spectacles as she repairs a seam in a dress draped across her knees.

  I busy myself at a corner table set up for me, trying not to stare at their nakedness, though I sense they’re noticing my quick glances their way. I suspect it feels refreshing to be appreciated from a distance.

  “I came to Paris when I was pretty—prettier than them, at least,” Madame Boulette tells me, startling me from my covert peeping. She nods toward the naked ones. Her cheeks are plump with broken capillaries freckling her skin, making her look somehow like a little girl and an old lady both.

  Boulette is not her real name; boulette is a French dumpling. She’s as round as one. When she’s in the cabaret playing hostess, her heavy breasts are up and out, cinched tight in a frilly bodice of black lace and ivory silk.

  She sits at my station and turns up her wrist to me, tugging back a ruffle at her cuff. She’s wearing an old-fashioned velvet robe and bedroom slippers. I dab onto her vein a dot of scent—oil of sweet fennel.

  Madame Boulette eyes me up and down. She gives me an approving nod, and a wink, but not because of the fennel. She then nods again toward her naked ladies. “Paris,” she says, “has always belonged to old women like us. Us, not those sweet nothings. Frenchmen are intimidated not only by their mothers but also by all their fathers’ many mistresses. If the old women of Paris had been foolish enough to enter government, the city could not have been ripped out from under us so easy.”

  But where are Madame Boulette’s loyalties, really, in serving the Nazis? Those who manage to keep up a good business somehow stay untroubled, even as so many shops have gone dark, one by one. We’re all complicit when it comes down to it, just by going on with our lives.

  Would Madame Boulette risk housing Jewish girls here? Is she bold enough for that?

  She examines the bottles in my satchel, squinting at my handwriting on the labels. When she was a farm girl, she tells me, she read a popular novel about an artist’s model. The model wore a military overcoat and carried a tobacco pouch in her pocket. “The book said her voice had notes of peaches, oranges, and lemons,” Madame Boulette says. “I’ve always remembered that. I wanted to get my voice that way, though I had no idea what it meant.”

  I have a pale blue notebook the size of the palm of my hand. Peaches, lemons, oranges, I write in it. She asks what I’m writing, but I don’t tell her. I don’t say anything in these interviews. I don’t want to interrupt, or misdirect. When I let people talk, let them fill the empty air, I can learn the answers to questions I didn’t even know I had.

  Perfume isn’t only about chemistry. It’s also about psychology.

  I meet with her girls one by one, there in the parlor, to learn more about them, for the perfumes I’ll create. One is allergic to perfume—but somehow I can smell on her skin a late afternoon by the sea, the gentle rock of the boat on mostly still waters, the gin and ginger ale.

  “I don’t know the person I see in the mirror,” another girl tells me, in a mouse’s tiny tremble of a voice. “I’m…disappointed…when I look at myself.”

  “I’ve never been disappointed by the mirror,” her friend says, with a smile and a wink. “Not once.”

  For the sad girl, I’ll bottle something barely there, a fragrance of white rose and lotus. And for the satisfied one, something always there, some common fig, some smelling salts, some camphorwood.

  I watch each girl closely, learning her character. Studying her shape. All of the girls’ fidgets and shimmies, or their quiet, easy languor, their long limbs and swans’ necks, or turnipped hips and squat legs, will inform how the perfume communicates. A perfume can smell different on different wrists, different throats, depending on your habits and tics, and the way you cross a room. I’ll tell one girl to wear her perfume behind her ears, another to wear it at the backs of her knees, another along the line of her
jaw.

  For the perfume to work, they have to believe what I tell them.

  I want each woman to breathe in the perfume I conjure for her and to recognize herself in it, to feel she’s been properly interpreted. The girls need to feel I’ve noticed something unnoticed about them.

  But it can sometimes be a disguise they’re seeking. I can see in some of these girls the desire to disappear, or to become someone else. Sometimes the right scent is the one that seems all wrong. Sometimes a woman goes into a perfume shop seeking adaptation. Or metamorphosis. Or an outright lie.

  5

  Evening comes, and I’m still at the bordello. These women never leave, but that’s not just because the city’s shut down. This is where they live. They sleep in the same beds they work in. They call Madame Boulette “Maman,” their mommy. Her cook cooks them their dinners, and her laundress launders their laundry. Her doctor gives them their pills and potions.

  Everyone is getting ready for the evening, for the cabaret. I find my way to Day’s dressing room, which really isn’t a room at all. It’s nothing much more than a short corridor with a dead end. She sits cramped at her vanity.

  When she sees me come around the corner, she gives me a wink with her dangerous eyelashes. She abandoned her fake lashes and their weak glue because an admirer gave her some eyelash dye that’s been outlawed and is hard to get, believed to have caused blindness back in the States. “I’ve never been sick a day in my life,” she says when I suggest she not risk it. “Nothing can sink its fangs in me. I sang for the soldiers in the hospitals through both waves of the Spanish flu. Without a sniffle. If a boy looked healthy enough, I even let him kiss my cheek.” She looks in the mirror, blinking into a cotton ball to blot some of the ink. The dye’s a shiny black, like the silk of a tuxedo’s lapel. I won’t give up my upkeep, she’s told me a time or two.

  “I did sometimes sing through a mask, though,” she says. “It gave my voice a sexy muffle.”

  “Here you go, Nightingale,” I say, holding out today’s perfume. Some women choose a scent they wear exclusively, forevermore, but Day refuses. I’m certain she could make any fragrance distinctly her own no matter how many people put it on, but I do love bringing her a few drops of something new every day or so.

  I get to know her a little bit better with each ounce. She tells me of old lovers, of magical nights, of mysteries and fascinations, all of which I try to align with the draughts bottled in my cabinets.

  “Is this the bluebell extract?” she says. I say yes, though it’s not, really; it’s not distilled from the petals. People don’t always realize that you can’t just bottle the air that rises from a bloom. Squeezing oil from the petals doesn’t give off the same stink. To best capture the essence, you fuss and muddle. To me, bluebell smells of fog and, faintly, strings of fresh ginger.

  Day stands and takes my wrist but not the vial. She leads me back the way I came. “It’s for Zoé,” she says. “She wants to meet you.”

  “Zoé St. Angel?” I say. “Why would she want to meet me?”

  “The bluebell oil,” she says, as if that should make sense. She’s ahead of me, suddenly rushing around sharp corners and up the steps of a maze of corridors and staircases. I practically skip to catch up. The house is enormous, its halls as labyrinthine as a rabbit’s warren.

  The narrow stairway can barely accommodate the full swing of Day’s hips. It’s not an affect, it’s a defect, Day told me years ago, when I first followed her. It’s quite a sight, that swing. My pelvic girdle’s been off-kilter since the day I got hatched.

  It’s a defect we almost share, though my swing is nothing at all like hers. I’ve got a crooked skeleton. Years and years ago, I got naked with a surgeon’s nurse, and she had me stand in the moonlight at the window. Your left leg is just a wee bit longer than the right one, she told me. Or my right was longer than my left. I can never remember, because the difference is so slight. And because it’s so slight, I spent days infatuated with the surgeon’s nurse for seeing something nearly invisible about me.

  When you’re someone like me, dressing as I do, you feel like people stare at you in order to make you fade away. The longer and harder they look, the less they want to see you. They stare and squint so you’ll dart away and disappear.

  “Why the bluebell?” I say, now huffing and puffing to keep up.

  “Nightmares,” Day says as we turn around one corner, then another quick after that.

  “Nightmares?” I say. I squeak it, really. I bump my shoulder into the wall after another sharp turn, jostling a painting of a swarm of cherubs, knocking it off its nail. I stop to set it right.

  “They say bluebells chase them off,” she calls back to me, then disappears around another corner.

  6

  Zoé St. Angel has summoned me to her private suite of rooms. Zoé St. Angel. I can just hear her name in Blue’s voice. A gasp, a swoon.

  Zoé is kept in a penthouse that pokes out the roof, a flat with so many windows it is practically all glass, perched above the city like a dovecote or a greenhouse. Some evenings, she leaves the drapes parted, and she blasts the street with all the room’s electrical light. Even the Eiffel Tower’s gone dark, but never Zoé’s pied-à-terre. Anyone who looks up of an evening will see her wringing her hands and pacing, singing, rehearsing that night’s numbers. Back and forth, back and forth in her glass house, like a doll on a wheel in a music box.

  As we head toward Zoé’s apartment, Day hears some voices echoing down from up the stairs. She takes hold of my sleeve to pull me back, and around, and through a door. It’s a wardrobe closet we’ve tucked ourselves into, all peignoirs and negligees on padded-silk hangers. I get caught up in one, and the gown is so slight, escaping it is like disentangling myself from a cobweb I’ve brushed against.

  “I haven’t the foggiest idea what you’re doing,” I say.

  Day looks up and off, listening, biting her lip. “Might be Lutz,” she says. She then leans in, to whisper, to tell me that a Nazi official named Lutz has taken Zoé as his lover. Lutz, it seems, is a handsome thug from Leipzig who studied French novels, who lived in Paris for a time, painting street scenes for tourists—ladies under umbrellas on the Champs-Élysées and other watercolor rot of that sort. That was when he was a college boy, a handful of years ago. His day job now is looting the city’s best collections. He shuts down the art galleries of Jewish dealers, robs Jewish homes of their antiques and artifacts, lifts rare books from private libraries. He’ll pick the lock of your lovely home, slip his feet into your velour slippers, pour himself a snifter of your best brandy, and shop your valuables.

  Already I feel a stab in my gut with worry for Zoé St. Angel. And a little worry for myself, stepping into her constellation.

  “Zoé St. Angel was one of the things he wanted most,” Day tells me. When he’d lived in the city as a penniless student, Lutz snuck into the Casino de Paris to watch her sing. He’d been caught and hustled out a time or two. So one of the first things he did when he returned to Paris, as an officer of the occupation, was to go to the club and take her right from the stage. He collected other singers too, and he put them to work in the cabaret. The shows he could never afford as a student are now his very own, every night.

  “She’s his prisoner?” I ask Day as she opens the closet door. We step back into the hallway after she’s looked it up and down.

  “We certainly hope so, don’t we?” she says. She puts her arm in mine, and we walk side by side. “If she’s not miserable with him, then she must be a monster.” Feeling her against me, I’ll let her lead me anywhere. I trust Day in a way that I never used to allow myself to trust anyone. I always feared falling victim to a hustler like myself.

  I had my heart broken young. I didn’t think I was young at the time, but I certainly was. I wasn’t yet thirty years old. He tasted tea for a living, and went by only the letter M. He wa
s strange and remarkable, and the very second I fell in love, I started to fear losing him. And though I’m not inclined toward melodrama, I’m certain I’ve never quite recovered.

  We’ve reached the staircase that leads to Zoé’s apartment. The steps spiral upward to a purple door. “Just knock,” Day tells me. “She’s waiting for the bluebell.” She kisses my cheek and skitters away. “Don’t worry,” she says as she leaves. “She knows everything about you.”

  “Don’t worry?” I say. “Everything?” But she’s already gone.

  So I do as Day says, and a chambermaid answers and ushers me in. She tells me where to sit. She brings me a glass of wine I didn’t ask for and won’t drink. She, too, then leaves me.

  All the curtains at all the many windows are drawn. The lamps are turned down, or off. Despite the cool dark of the room, it’s even hotter in here than it is in the parlor.

  “Day tells me you can keep secrets,” Zoé says. She walks in from behind me, passing me, in a silk robe, a silk kerchief tied around her head. She even holds a silk scarf dangling at her side, twisting it a bit as she walks, like it’s a streamer. She goes to a phonograph, flicks it on, sets the needle, ups the volume.

  “If I couldn’t keep secrets, I would’ve been ruined long ago,” I say.

  She holds her finger to her lips, as if to shush me. She sits in the fat red chair across from the fat red chair I’m sitting in. She’s not looking at me. She toys with the silk scarf, fiddling with it, running it through her fingers, twisting it through her hands, around her wrists. She’s nervous.

  She looks like she’s been carefully dressed to appear disheveled, her robe, her scarf, her kerchief all different patterns, all the patterns competing, a clashing of parrots, cherries, palm fronds. A gazelle stitched in gold thread prances up her sleeve. She wears high-heeled bedroom slippers with tufts of pink feathers at the open toes, and her toenails are painted all different shades of blue and purple.