The Perfume Thief
also by timothy schaffert
The Swan Gondola
The Coffins of Little Hope
Devils in the Sugar Shop
The Singing and Dancing Daughters of God
The Phantom Limbs of the Rollow Sisters
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2021 by Timothy Schaffert
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Doubleday, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.
www.doubleday.com
doubleday and the portrayal of an anchor with a dolphin are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
Cover photographs: person © Denise Bellon/akg-images; Paris © Interfoto/akg-images
Cover design by Emily Mahon
library of congress cataloging-in-publication data
Names: Schaffert, Timothy, author.
Title: The perfume thief / by Timothy Schaffert.
Description: First Edition. | New York : Doubleday, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, [2021]
Identifiers: lccn 2020043849 (print) | lccn 2020043850 (ebook) | isbn 9780385545747 (hardcover) | isbn 9780385545754 (ebk)
isbn: 9780385548151 (open market)
Classification: lcc ps3619.c325 p46 2021 (print) | lcc ps3619.c325 (ebook) | ddc 813/.6—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020043849
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020043850
Ebook ISBN 9780385545754
ep_prh_5.7.0_c0_r0
Contents
Cover
Also by Timothy Schaffert
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Chapter 70
Chapter 71
Chapter 72
Chapter 73
Chapter 74
A Note from the Author
Acknowledgments
About the Author
To Rodney, mon bon ami
Has war affected perfume-making?…Ingredients difficult to get now are these: mousse de Chine, an oak-moss from Yugoslavia; it gives the green color to some perfumes. Pure jasmine from France or Palestine, used in almost every good perfume. (Last year it cost $275 a pound; this year nearer $1,000.) Oil of bergamot from Italy. And from France—violet, rose de mai, mimosa.
—“perfume propaganda,” vogue, 1941
1
If you’re picturing me in some ladylike frock printed with posies, lace at the collar, don’t. I’m not done up that way. I began wearing trousers long before we ladies were allowed. You’ll find me in tweed and neckties, shirtsleeves and cuff links, fedoras and porkpies.
People sometimes say, She’s still somewhat handsome, and I think they mean it as a compliment.
“Are you whoever you are when you’re dressed,” a fellow asked me many, many years ago—decades, probably—a bourbon in one hand, his other hand toying with the button of my suspenders, “or are you whoever you are when you’re naked?”
I’ve had aliases. Sometimes I committed my crimes as a man, sometimes as a woman, sometimes as a woman in a man’s clothes. I don’t think of myself as dishonest, though. Never did. I’ve told lies, yes, but you can’t call me a liar just for being different. I’m an actor, if anything. I’m none of those people I pretended to be. Or, better yet, I’m all of them. And I have a good heart, and I’m a damn sight kinder than most of the saps I’ve snookered. When I was famous for a time, I’d be doing you a favor to filch your fine goods. People practically begged me to fleece them so they could boast of it. They’d pay me double the worth of whatever I took, just for the bragging rights.
I haven’t dragged my tuxedo out in years, and though I’ve never much minded the scent of mothballs, I’ve doused myself, lapel to sock, in a perfume I’ve bottled new for the occasion—the pretty, powdery stink of fresh-plucked mimosa smuggled up from the farms south of here, from the unoccupied zones, snuck right past the border by my underground spice merchant. This illegal perfume is my little slap on the nose to any Nazi who comes sniffing around my throat.
Now we’ve been invited back, we Parisians, to some of the clubs, some of the parties, some of the playgrounds we got kicked out of when our invaders invaded. They need us drunk and happy and batting our lashes at the enemy. They need Paris to be Paris. They need the city they stole to be something worth stealing after all.
It’s all pretend, but that’s fine, because I was always my most charming when I lied.
2
When the Nazis first hustled their way into Paris, they took all the brothels as their own, setting up camp in the frilly boudoirs with the ruffled pillows and beaded lampshades and roses in the wallpaper. The soldiers soak their long, gangly limbs in the seashell-pink bathtubs of les montantes (“the women who go upstairs”).
Just inside the front double doors of Madame Boulette’s bordello is a cabaret, an entertainment all its own. There’s a small stage with space just enough fo
r the singer and a jazz trio, maybe a quartet, a quintet at the most. An upright piano shoved off to one side. A cramped dance floor before the stage, and behind it, a mural of naked women with skin a cotton-candy pink and nipples a candy-apple red, waltzing with lanky men buttoned up undertaker-like in midnight-blue suits. Along one wall is a long mahogany bar sculpted with a frenzy of mermaids. But most of the room is devoted to little tables with linen cloths, and the place is already packed and buzzing, the show still an hour off.
The cocktail waitresses move through the cabaret wearing nothing at all, their naked skin painted with words and numbers, their hands on their hips. One strolls nearby, and I see it’s a menu she wears, a list of brands of champagne (Bollinger, Taittinger, Gosset), their prices, and their years, inked across her breasts and her stomach, her back, her ass, and up and down the insides of her thighs.
We’re in one of the banquettes at the back of the cabaret. We’re tucked into the shadows, and the booth is even draped with chiffon curtains we can draw if we want to turn ourselves into silhouettes.
Our dear friend Day, the cabaret singer who summoned me here, sits with us now, gussying up for her show. She has a secret. A plot. She’s up to something, but she hasn’t told me what. And though I’d rather Day kept out of trouble herself, I don’t mind dusting off my criminal instincts.
She’s pinching her fake eyelashes onto her eyelids, leaning in to look in a hand mirror she’s propped up against a vase of felt flowers—a raggedy clutch of daffodils. “My first job when I got to Paris was doing exactly what I’m doing right this minute,” she says. “Can you believe it? They paid me to sit in an apothecary window, in a flimsy slip, and put the lashes on, take them off, put them on, take them off, on, off, on, off, for hours, all day, showing how easy it was.” On, off, on, off, on, off, she trills on along, singing it to an invented tune, flapping her lashes frantically, testing them, making sure they’re on tight.
Day and I didn’t run when we should have, when we Americans would have been wise to leave Paris behind. We’ve too long considered ourselves exiles. Day came to Paris to become a devoted expatriate when the city’s clubs so embraced Black performers and the jazz songs she sang. She even had a popular tune in ’21, when she was twenty-one, “Where Were You When,” her voice mournful and girlish both. Everyone heard in it a sweet grief for all the world’s war dead.
Her father had been Nigerian, a sailor on a whaling ship, and her mother an Irish cancan dancer on the San Francisco wharf, and Oh how they loved each other, and anybody who didn’t like it could go straight to hell for all they cared. Day has told us that story more than once. She says she’s been singing since birth, that she left the womb cooing a love song to her mom and pop, then took to the stage when she was only twelve and a half. In America, she could pass for white when she had to, to sing where she wouldn’t be allowed otherwise.
With the Nazis banning jazz willy-nilly all through Paris, she’s back to passing. And she makes up her own songs; she’s heard of people getting arrested just for singing American swing on a street corner.
Day grabs hold of a naked waitress’s wrist. She runs her finger along the loops and letters of the cursive across her hip. “Bring a bottle of this,” Day says. She winks at the girl, her lopsided lashes slipping from their glue.
But the waitress has her eye on Blue, my little boy Blue, who lives in my house and sleeps in my attic. We’re both in tuxes tonight, he and I, matching right down to our unknotted bow ties, the ends dangling. We’re not exactly twins, of course. I’m old enough to be his grandmother.
The waitress can’t resist giving his cheek a playful pinch; he’s used to such things. He was orphaned as a boy, and his pretty baby face still begs to be mothered. He’s even named for those sweet, melancholy peepers of his, born Bleu, with that French pucker-up, Bluh, a little lip-flutter and puff of breath, but he Americanized his name for the stage. He’s an actor.
Blue the stage actor, Day the cabaret singer, me the whatever-I-am. The perfumer. We’re all feint and dodge. We’re light and shadow. Art, beauty, champagne bubbles, all the smoke and mirror that gives Paris its character, it’s all under siege. We are the alchemists of the city’s very soul, the way I see it.
“Oh,” I say, remembering, pulling from my trousers pocket the bottle of perfume I made for Day. Since retiring from my life of crime, I’m a halfway respectable businesswoman, with a perfume shop on the Left Bank of Paris, my house above it, all of it easy to miss if you’re not out to find it. Day’s often in the shop, always wanting my help to stir up her ghosts. Every week, it’s a different lover she longs to recall. Last week, it was a boy training to be a priest, a long-ago summer in a rectory garden, with the moonflowers at midnight, their scent like a negligee washed in the sink with soap flakes. I matched some vanilla with some jasmine with the velvet must of a confessional booth.
The week before that, we summoned for her a boyish chap with broken teeth who sucked on candy whistles, always tweeting on the cinnamon sticks, scenting the air with a song that smelled oversweet and red-hot. His kisses tasted that way too.
This bottle I’ve brought her tonight I’ve been working on for weeks, with no success. She lifts the glass stopper, holds it to her nostril, inhales, closes her eyes, slowly tilts her head as far back as it goes, like she’s been done in by a quaff of morphine. This is encouraging. I’ve been expecting her to say, once again, Goddamn, so close, but not yet. It’s her nature to be never-satisfied. I wait for her verdict, tapping my foot, drumming my fingers. “Ah, yes, there he is,” she finally says, to my surprise. “There he is,” she sings. “We’ve found him at last.” She leans over to give me a smack on the cheek, pressing hard so she’ll leave the perfect pucker of her red, red lips.
Day falls in love all the time—with men, with women—but she never falls out of it. Anyone she’s ever loved, she loves still. And madly so.
One of the many things I love about Day is how she always acts as if she’s being watched. Or not watched, really, but seen. Even now, with just us three in the booth, she lifts her chin and closes her eyes, performing every breath she breathes in, waving the bottle slow beneath her nose.
The lover in this particular bottle was a pyromaniac, so I’ve singed the perfume with burnt sugar, tobacco, kerosene.
As if inspired by the fragrance that fills our booth, Blue takes out his cigarette case and offers us each a smoke. He’s well stocked in cigarettes, beyond just his tobacco ration, his fumer sa décade, and liquor too, having quickly mastered that particular edge of the underground. For the most part, though, we avoid the black market. We don’t want to reward the trafiquants, the marketeers who get fat on our famine. Yes, I’ve lived the life of a thief, but I’ve only ever taken from people who didn’t need what I took.
Besides, in the black market, you pay too much for too little. The other night, we got our hands on a roasted chicken that was more likely some songbird, a back-alley jackdaw dropped by a slingshot. We cut into his plump breast and found it mostly empty, like he’d died with his lungs puffed up with a half-whistled melody. We ate the little bird like tender wolves, stripping it down to its skeleton, going so far as to break off bones to suck.
Food is scarce in Paris, but the Nazis eat fine.
“I wish you wouldn’t,” I say to Blue, but I know there’s no point. He craves smoke, but cigarettes are bad for his sick heart. Tobacco heart was what they used to call a ticker slowed down by nicotine.
Blue lights our cigarettes, three on a match, unlucky. We court superstition these days. Laugh in its face. Believing in luck is a luxury of the past. “My bad heart’s good for me,” he says softly, giving me a pitying pout with that plump bottom lip after he blows out his smoke. “It keeps me off the front.”
It skips too many beats, or maybe it beats too many per minute. Not even he can remember the particulars of the affliction, though it’s one he’s had
since infancy. It somehow hasn’t killed him, and now his heart’s broken rhythm is likely saving his life. Blessedly so. I can’t imagine such a delicate boy surviving a standoff with the enemy.
Nonetheless, we keep to the shadows and silhouettes of the banquette. The Nazi soldiers come to the cabaret in civilian clothes now, so as not to startle. But it’s even more startling to see them out of uniform, here among us. Their cheer and charm seem like a trick. A trap.
The waitress brings us the champagne, and a highball of calvados for Day. Day lifts her glass toward Blue and me, like she’s toasting us, and says, “What would I do without you?”
“You talking to us or to your glass of hooch?” I say.
She winks with those heavy lashes, then tosses the drink back in a gulp. She likes the burn the brandy gives her vocal cords when she sings, lending her songs an extra shiver of romantic damage.
More and more Germans cram themselves into the club, and they bring along their noise, their bravado and backslapping. To me, even when they’re festive, they sound like a pack of snarling, barking dogs straining at their chains. Nonetheless, when I stop listening close, the human racket is a relief. With the Nazis’ curfews and ordinances, the nights often sound as if the city is under glass, a giant crystal bell overhead muffling all.