The Perfume Thief

by Timothy Schaffert

  “Is that so?” I ask Day.

  Day takes a deep breath so she can sigh it back out. “Is there anything that’s true anymore?” she says.

  I glance up into the old faded mirror, with its speckling of blue and black. “I just don’t want to think back to this particular minute, wishing I were sitting here again, so I’d have a chance to do it all over,” I say. “Do it all over and do nothing this time. I don’t want to regret fussing with something I’m much too old to fuss with.” But even as I say those words, I know they’re wrong. I must fuss with something.

  “You’re just bringing her perfume, Clementine. That’s all,” Day says. She takes my hand in both of hers. “I love you with all my heart. And I would never lead you into a problem that I didn’t think you could fix.” She pats my hand. “You’re not nearly as old as you think you are.”

  “I’m every minute as old as I am,” I say. But I’m encouraged by her sense of my age.

  “What about my perfume?” Day says. “Didn’t you bring me a bottle of something today?”

  I did. Today’s fragrance is another old lover she told me about, a croupier in a club, a dealer at a table of chemin de fer. The perfume: the crisp juniper of gin, the faint vanilla of old playing cards. Day breathes it in, she leans back, and she crosses her legs, her bathrobe falling open enough to show off some thigh. I can too easily picture her as a spy at a baccarat table, interpreting the spots on the cards for their instructions of war.

  8

  I meet with Zoé every night for a week, for only minutes, and we only talk perfume. She’s always in a different robe, different scarf, different pattern: bouquets of flowers, dandelions and their puffs, girls on swings. Bees and ladybugs. Lovers in a rowboat. One of her robes is patterned with a map of Paris.

  Maybe all she wants from me is perfume. I should be relieved, but I’m not. Has she determined I’m not up to the task, whatever it is? This evening, she hasn’t even bothered to turn on the music.

  I’ve been dressing my most dapper. Waistcoats, watch chains, tie clips. Pinkie ring, polished shoes.

  “They tell me now I have a little girl’s voice,” she says. “But when I was a little girl, they told me I sounded too grown-up.” She pets her own throat, which I’ve just perfumed with winter daphne and coumarin. “My father didn’t like to hear me sing. So I didn’t sing.”

  This revelation is just another tease. She dismisses me for the evening. But I don’t go. I stand from the fat red chair and walk to the phonograph myself. I thumb through her jazz collection and look for something with a touch of rainy-day. I decide on “Cheek to Cheek,” which isn’t all that cheek-to-cheek, really—it has a pinch too much get-up-and-go for close dancing—but it does allow for some sway here and there. I nudge the volume up a few notches.

  I hold out my hand. “At least let me say I danced with Zoé St. Angel once.”

  She hesitates; she seems about to refuse. She absentmindedly picks at the bracelet she always wears, that she’s always fiddling with, a silver chain laden with charms. I’ve dabbed enough perfume on her wrist to know the charms well—there’s a seahorse, a sailboat, a toy soldier. A woman’s shoe, a telephone. At least one charm on every link. There’s a story behind each one, she says, but she’s told me none of them.

  Finally, she smiles politely and puts her hand in mine.

  “You grew up on the streets,” I say, my voice beneath the tune, my lips close to her ear as we dance.

  “No,” she says.

  “That’s what you sing in your songs.”

  She pauses, then says, “The songs are wrong.”

  “Zoé,” I say, my breath on her neck. “Do you want my help or don’t you?”

  I feel her body relax just a touch. She leans into me.

  And that’s when she tells me about her father. We dance slower than the music goes. She tells me her true story: of a childhood without songs, perhaps, but bereft of little else. It was a life of riches. Her family owned the Parfumerie Chamberry, one of the most famous of the city’s perfume factories.

  “Monsieur Pascal?” I say. “Your father is…well, he isn’t Monsieur Pascal, of course. Is he?”

  “Do you know him?” she says.

  “Our paths crossed once.”

  “You robbed him of something, I suppose,” she says.

  “I’ve often fancied that he stole from me,” I say. I sweep her around. Forward. Back. And I tell her about meeting her father in Marrakech, when I sought to leave thievery. I was already an old woman, but this was my new beginning. I’d come to the markets to buy spices and oils, to use in opening my own shop. Over a bottle of fig brandy, on a hotel veranda, I told him too much about the intricacies of a perfume I intended to design. I’d simply wanted to impress him. He was one of the world’s most famous perfumers, even then. Many months later, I detected in a new fragrance of his a whiff of what I’d described. He’d even titled the perfume Escroquerie, French for “swindle.”

  “No,” Zoé says, and though she’s quite light on her feet, she steals the lead from me and picks up the pace of our steps a half beat or two. Her fingers tighten on my hand. “You stole from him. Your only instinct is theft. You wanted to smell your perfume in his, so you did. Many people have wanted to take credit for his genius. You have no idea. You’re just one in a whole den of thieves.”

  I’ve upset her. I nod. “I suppose that’s true,” I say. Her vexation puts an extra kick in her step, and we’re suddenly at cross-purposes, both of us leading. She knocks her hip into the phonograph, sending the stylus skipping against the groove, stopping the music, thumping the needle against the record’s label. Zoé steps away and turns off the player. When I start to speak, she holds up her finger, stopping me. I wait for her to put on different music.

  This time, it’s something brassy. We remain standing there, but we don’t dance. Zoé fidgets again with her charm bracelet. “My father,” she says, “sees perfume as a puzzle to solve. He’s a scientist, yes, but he knows that perfume is about passion. Emotions. He sees all the collision of the chemicals”—and here she lifts her hand to flutter her fingers around, the chemicals colliding—“as being part of it. As important as the flowers and the spices. There is all that’s at the surface, of course, all that’s recognizable, and then there’s all that’s tipping our brain this way or that.”

  I know a thing or two about Pascal. Everybody does. The family got rich off scents women could afford, but just barely. Pascal’s perfume was just expensive enough to seem exclusive. Every man’s first love, every woman he’s ever gone to bed with, every girl every boy’s ever married. Every mistress he’s had. All those women wore one perfume or another from Pascal’s factory. Every man in Paris, every woman in Paris—all their ideas of love, of sex, are caught in those bottles.

  I’m about to ask after her father, and the perfume factory, and how he’s managing in the face of all this. And that’s when I begin to put it all together.

  If Pascal is her father, then Zoé St. Angel is Jewish. And I instantly sense the danger in the room. The threat she’s living under.

  Before I can ask anything else, a clock begins to chime. Zoé says, “You have to go.”

  “No no no,” I say.

  “Yes yes yes,” she says, and she sweeps me along, waving her hands at me. I pick up my satchel, and I begin to collect my perfume bottles. “Come back tomorrow,” she says.

  “I won’t,” I say.

  “You will,” she says, and she’s right. She claps her hands, hurrying me. She picks up one of the bottles herself, and she follows me to the door, pinching the atomizer’s bulb all along the way, spritzing the air in my wake, scenting my absence.

  9

  I scoot straight off to a covert jazz club in the Latin Quarter where Day sometimes sings in the late afternoons. I walk because there are no cars to call, no taxis, no gasol
ine. I’m walking fast enough to keep just an inch ahead of freezing to death, I suspect. I don’t have far to go, but it’s almost dark before I get there.

  So here’s how you get into the deepest part of the basement, where the jazz is muffled in a tunnel: At the end of the block, a marchande de fleurs, wrapped up in coats and quilts, parks her cart. You say, “Something for my buttonhole,” and you pay too much for a few sprigs of some hothouse flower on its last legs. You flash your lapel, with this boutonniere of the day, to the clerk at the back of a secondhand kitchen shop where they sell rusty skillets and chipped crocks. The clerk opens a door to the stairs.

  I suspect the flower vendor keeps quiet about the basement operation so long as she can pass off her half-dead posies to the club’s clientele needing a passkey. It was only a year or so ago that the nightclub thrived aboveground—you could dance until sunup, then stay for the club’s breakfast of chicken fricassee. But these days, you can get arrested for playing jazz, and clubs are raided for featuring musicians who are Black, who are Jewish. Such music, so unrestrained, rots your soul, or so the Nazis say.

  Our poor, sickly souls. Even the French who live in the unoccupied zones would have us believe it—our moral failures put us in this fix. We have only ourselves to blame.

  I try to sneak into the club and keep to the shadows, but all eyes are on me in a heartbeat. I’m quite a sight, I suppose, in my long coat, and my Tyrolean hat of heavy green felt, a doctor’s bag in each hand. Day sits at the bar, and she spots me before I spot her. She gives me a hesitant wave. By the time I get to her, she’s had the bartender pour me some pastis. “A little nip of licorice will warm you up,” she says, handing me the glass.

  I pluck the ratty gardenia from my lapel and hand it to her. “Don’t sniff too close,” I say, “or you’ll get paint on your nose from where she’s touched up the dead spots.” I take off my gloves and pinch at the fabric of her sleeve. It’s a new dress, rooster red. “What is this?” I say.

  “Silk crepe,” she says. “I took it in and got it blistered.” I don’t know what that means, but I assume it’s what makes the dress wrinkled. Another reason Day’s always broke: she doesn’t just enlist a seamstress; she’ll walk right into the atelier of the world’s top silk manufacturer and say, Can you wrinkle this?

  Before I’ve even taken a sip, or a seat, Day says, “You need to leave.”

  “I’ve been hearing a lot of that today,” I say.

  “I’m about to sing a song that could get my tongue cut out of my head,” she says. She snaps her fingers to the tune, smiles at me, winks, and sings the title: They Can’t Take That Away from Me…

  I look around the room, and it’s so sparsely populated, it hardly seems worth the risk of arrest. Before the war, when the club was at street level, the place was packed with an international crowd, even Germans, and it became a hot spot for spies, to eavesdrop. “Can’t we get you back to America somehow?” I say. “There you can sing whatever songs you want.”

  “A girl I used to sing with went back to Harlem, before things got ugly here,” she says. “Hasn’t had a single gig. She spends her days scrubbing hotel rooms, then spends her nights sleeping in a dirty flophouse.”

  “At least she’s alive.”

  “Oh, is she?” Days says. She fishes the cocktail onion from her gimlet. Pops it into her mouth. She says, “Music will be what saves us, Clem. You wait and see. We’ll be singing at the tops of our lungs as we drive the sons of bitches out of town. One of these days, I’m going to sit in a Nazi’s lap at the cabaret, and I’m going to sing ‘My Funny Valentine’ right in his ear, and then I’m going to stab him in the heart.”

  “Speaking of the cabaret,” I say, to shift the conversation away from her rebellion. I take a seat on the barstool. “What’s your favorite Chamberry perfume?”

  I keep my eyes on my pastis for a moment, then look up at Day sly-like, and she’s already looking sly in return. She smiles. “The most expensive one,” she says. “Galerie des Glaces. They claim the geranium oil is passed through the rose leaves of Versailles.” Then she says, “Zoé told you a thing or two?”

  “Yes. A thing or two.”

  “And now you know why I’ve kept mum,” she says. “Lutz, of course, doesn’t know. All he knows is the fiction in the songs she sings. He fell in love with the whole idea of her—the beauty who worked her way up from a run-down musette.”

  He might never learn she’s Jewish, or it might just be a matter of time.

  “She doesn’t know where her father is?” I say.

  “All she knows is that the Nazis have taken the house. They’ve taken the factories. They have it all. And he’s nowhere.”

  “What do they want with it all?”

  “I don’t know,” she says. “Maybe nothing. They’ve been taking all the Jewish businesses in Germany. So why wouldn’t they do it here? They force you to sell for next to nothing. If you make it illegal for somebody to own something, then whatever they own becomes stolen goods.” She shrugs, as if it should all already be so obvious, these new extremities.

  And it is already happening here. The Jewish shops have to register and post signs. Flyers flutter down the windy streets warning of doing business with Jews. Do I shutter my perfume shop, in solidarity? Should Day stop singing in bars and cabarets? Is that defiance or defeat? Is someone like Madame Boulette serving France or serving Germany by keeping the brothel giddy with delight? Or just serving herself? Those of us wanting to save Paris don’t look that much different than those wanting to see it fall, wanting to fall in line with a fascist Europe.

  The bartender plunks a few more onions in Day’s gin with a tiny pair of tongs. “Tell Clem the trouble we’re in,” she says to him.

  He says to me, “A piano player was dragged off to a camp after playing ‘Pennies from Heaven’ in a bar in Montmartre.”

  “So you might best keep your mouth shut,” I tell Day.

  “I have to sing, darling,” she says. “And these are the only songs I know.”

  She’s called to the stage, and she shoots back the gin, then lets the onions roll from the glass onto her tongue. Before she walks away, I grab her elbow. I say, “So what’s the twist? In the story with Zoé. Where do I come in?”

  “This is the part where you save her life,” Day says, crunching the onions. She winks at me. “I’d kiss your cheek, but I’ve had about ten cocktail onions for my dinner.” She walks to the stage to a smattering of applause.

  10

  Zoé holds out her wrist, and I tap some perfume along her vein. I fumble with the charms on her bracelet. A top hat. A martini glass. The letter Z. A butterfly.

  That butterfly. I pinch at its silver wings. I say to her, “I’m going to ask questions, and you’re going to answer them. Or I’m leaving.”

  She withdraws her hand and leans back in the fat red chair. Fiddles with her charm bracelet. After a moment, she says, “Why are you still here?”

  I don’t have the patience for this. And if I’m tinkering with something lethal, I need to know. How did I never see that butterfly on her bracelet before? I guess I am still superstitious after all, here in the worst of times. Following butterflies has always led me in the wrong direction, without fail. Butterflies carried me away from M, to be honest. I stand, gather my perfume bottles, get ready to leave.

  “No no no,” she says. She leans forward to put her hand on my arm. “Don’t be silly, Clementine. Sit down. I meant to say, why are you still here, in Paris? Why didn’t you go home? Back to America?”

  I do sit down, but only on the edge of the chair’s cushion. “I’ve never had a home,” I say. “No place is mine.”

  She nods, her eyes in a squint of contemplation. Like she’s figuring something out about me. “And that’s why you’re a thief,” she says. “Since you never had a home, you got greedy.”

  “If you
say so,” I say.

  “When I realized people liked to look at me,” she says, “then it wasn’t enough that they looked. I wanted them to fall in love too. And it wasn’t enough that some men fell in love with me. I needed all of them to. How greedy is that?”

  “They probably all do fall in love with you,” I say.

  “No,” she says. “Maybe none of them fall in love. There are those men who say they’re in love but they don’t know the first thing about it. Have you ever thought that maybe men can’t fall in love at all? That they don’t feel what we feel? And they don’t know that they can’t fall in love, so they think that they do. So they say, ‘I love you,’ and we have to believe it’s the same thing.”

  “I never think about how men feel,” I say.

  Her eyes linger on mine. After a moment, she smiles. “You. You know about love; I know you do. You seem sad to me. You have sad eyes.”

  She can’t see anything in my eyes that I don’t want her to see. But I shudder with a chill—“someone walked over your grave,” they used to say when a shiver worked through you, like we’re all ghosts, living and dying in the same breath.

  What if I’d stayed put and never pursued my crimes, all those years ago, when I was so in love with M? Decades ago, lifetimes, so much of it nothing more than mist now. I thought I would fall in love again. I was young; how could I not? I still feel the toe-tap in my boot, my quickened heart, the hesitance, as I lingered in the doorway of the train car on the day I left M. One step forward and I would be gone; one step back and I’d have never left at all. But in the station, in that crowd, with all its elbows and whistles and slaps of rushing skirts, there wasn’t a single soul watching me. There was no one to see me leave. Or see me stay. I wanted to go because I wanted people to know I was gone. But how do you disappear if you’re already invisible?