The Perfume Thief Read online

  To think, before the war, people mounted campaigns against the noise. They were so churlish as to criticize the laughter and shouts of the puppet shows in the Luxembourg Gardens, and the merchants in the street—Venez voir mon poulet grillé, they sang, the peddlers of chicken, eggs, tripe, chocolate. All that food.

  “Day,” I say, because a woman my age must get on with things, “what sort of trouble you stirring up with these devils?” No need to whisper. We can barely hear each other even with our voices raised.

  She takes a deep breath, puts the glass down. But instead of telling me what she’s been wanting to, she sighs and asks, “Why’d you bring the boy?” She nods toward Blue without looking his way.

  “Aw, come on, tough guy,” Blue says to Day. “Don’t talk about me like I’m not here.”

  “You’re not here,” she says. “You’re up in your attic, out of the way. Where you should be.”

  I shouldn’t have brought him, but he begged. The show’s headliner is Zoé St. Angel. In better days, Blue would see Zoé at the Casino de Paris, a legitimate club, a grand hall, nothing like this little brothel tavern. The Casino de Paris even sold a Zoé St. Angel doll in its souvenir shop, one decked out and painted up to look like the singer, her glass eyes wide and amber-orange, her porcelain lips prettily swollen. The doll wore a wig advertised as featuring one genuine lock plucked from Zoé’s own head and woven in among the yak hair. At the Casino de Paris, Blue would cradle that doll in the crook of his arm like a sociopath pansy.

  Day knows how Zoé ended up here, but she won’t say.

  “It’s too cold in his attic at night,” I say, in defense of bringing Blue along. “We don’t have a brick of charcoal. Not a lick of heat. We sneak out to go anywhere there’s a pack of warm-blooded strangers we can huddle up next to. Even past curfew. We’ll even go to the movies and sit through Nazi propaganda flicks…if there’s a working furnace and a good plot.”

  I can tell that Day is reconsidering her invitation to me. Exasperated, she rolls her eyes, and it knocks her fake lashes loose again. This time she just flutters them all the way off, and flicks them onto the tablecloth. She returns her attention to her mirror to repaint her lips, to put back the red she left on my cheek.

  “How can you even bear to sing for these sadists, anyway?” I say.

  “When I’m on the stage, I’m up in the light, and they’re down in the dark,” she says. She shrugs. “All I can see are spots in my eyes.”

  I had wondered why she chose a crowded cabaret, right in the thick of the thieves, to discuss something secret, but I think I know now. Her plot hinges on this bordello.

  Old instincts kick in, and I glance across the room, looking for the play of light. Thievery isn’t just about being stealthy; it’s also about jostling, disrupting, in the gentlest of ways—the touch of an elbow, a half-whispered apology. Throwing a shadow this way, stepping out that way. Is this yours? you say, offering the mark something they dropped as you take something else.

  I’m nervous about old instincts, though. I never did retire, really. I stumbled. More than stumbled, I suppose. I failed, to be honest. I broke. I fled. And now I’m thousands of miles from where I was.

  As a thief, you balance your confidence with your anxiety. You respect omen and augury. One flinch and you’re doomed.

  And the fields of war are full of ghosts who wish they could go back to that one split second that separates them from life and death. There’ve been so many lives undone by a misstep, a wrong turn, a hair trigger.

  I pick up one strip of Day’s false eyelashes from the tablecloth and try to put it on myself, but my fingertips so close to my eyeball makes me blink too fast. I can’t catch my lid. When I get the lashes on, Blue picks up the other strip to stick to his own eyelid, completing our matching costume.

  This gets the attention of a photographer who’s been popping his flashbulbs all through the cabaret, and he lifts his camera. But Day reaches up to push the drape closed as far as she can reach, shutting us away behind the see-through curtain. She casts a scolding glance at us. “Shhh,” she says, but we haven’t said anything. It’s our eyelashes and tuxedos that are too loud, I suppose. We’re too conspicuous.

  But I can’t help but see the picture that photographer might have taken. And I’ve heard that the Nazis have all the color film, miles and miles of it, to run photos in the newspapers of the French having fun. Not a care in the world. Not a hair out of place. Paris better than it ever was.

  Blue’s blue eyes, Day’s red lips blowing a kiss. The blush at the tops of Blue’s cheeks. Day’s saffron-colored freckles. She wears a light-colored wig, a shade of dirty blond she calls “palomino.” She used to wear wigs only onstage, but ever since the city was robbed of all its heat, she’s had one on always, even when sleeping, to keep her head warm.

  My hair’s just the dull gunmetal gray of a coffee urn, but Blue cut it close to the quick this afternoon, then slicked it back with vegetable tallow, giving it a hint of shimmer.

  Do I even have any photographs of the three of us, color or otherwise? Of course not. I have a bandit’s sixth sense for keeping out of sight. The fact is, I don’t have any pictures of anybody.

  I’ve led a long life of avoiding friends and lovers, to keep from getting caught in the snare of sentiment. I’ve not wanted any temptation to linger in a place; but now that I’ve settled in, so far away from the life I led and the person I was, I’ve let these two characters into my heart.

  I came to this city to hide from my mistakes, to be a little old lady with a shop with no shingle. My perfumery doesn’t even have a name, only an address, and not much of an address at that. My building is so narrow, you feel you’re always on the stairs, just to get from one place to the next. It’s as if the buildings on either side of it have spent a century squeezing mine flat.

  When I first moved to Paris from New York, it was still the 1920s, and I had turned sixty. Here, my strangeness was a lure, not a trap, and strange people arrived. They were in costume but without disguise, you might say, entirely and utterly themselves. From this side of the looking glass, I finally recognized myself. These people I knew.

  Here, a woman could put on a three-piece suit and a gentlemanly monocle without anyone calling the law. And these mischief-makers dared to think this could be the way of things from now on, this manner of living the way they wanted to live, of loving who they loved. Instead of changing themselves to fit in, they decided to change the world. Instead of becoming more like the people they weren’t, the people they weren’t might feel compelled to become more like them.

  “We should have seen it coming, I suppose,” I mutter. The shift away from such freedom. Even if the Nazis hadn’t come along, it was inevitable, wasn’t it? Too good to be true?

  “Who’s we?” Day says.

  “For a short while there, we could listen to all the clichés,” I say, putting my hand on Blue’s sleeve, “all the lyrics about kisses and dreams, and it seemed those old songs were finally about us too. How dare we.”

  “Are you all right, Clementine?” Blue says. He picks up my champagne glass and holds it toward me. He stops just short of putting it to my lips. I take it and take a sip, but I’ve had too many sips already. I’m becoming maudlin.

  Who’s we? The queer denizens of Paris, who despite pasts that must pain them, and wounds they’re still licking, come to my shop seeking nostalgia. They might ask for the smell of a grandmother’s kitchen, of a molasses cake she baked every holiday from a recipe she took to her grave. Or there was the strong coffee and stout brandy in that café that winter, with that girl you loved who never loved you back.

  I have a laboratory full of flasks and pots and vials, evaporated smoke, pickled lilac, casks of peach pulp and raspberry mash and candied peel, tincture of basil and ginger, pocketsful of posies, ashes in tins, dusts in apothecary drawers.

&nb
sp; Folks also come knocking at my shop for perfume that’s distinctly their own, that reminds them of nothing, that’s potent and subtle both, a scent they can leave behind everywhere they go. These are often people who have no affection for objects from their past. They’ve perhaps been tossed from their homes, deprived of their inheritances, punished with loss. They avoid attachment. They come to value the ethereal above all else.

  It’s not for their things that they stayed in Paris with the occupation. As much as they may love their books bought from the stalls along the quai, and the chifforobe they found abandoned on the street, or the silk scarves they bought for cheap at les puces, the flea markets, none of that keeps them here. They stayed because to leave would be to admit defeat. They, of all people, believe in the true beating heart of Paris.

  We’ll get through this, we tell each other. We all say it, all of us, always, but how could anyone possibly know what’s what? But we try to believe each other, when we can. Yes, we say, yes yes yes, it’ll end, it’ll end, it’ll end, galloping along like one of Day’s impromptu tunes.

  3

  When Day takes the stage to sing, her voice starts soft, as soft as paper lanterns bobbing in a garden breeze. As soft as a hummingbird flitting from one bell of the honeysuckle to the next.

  Her voice purrs along, getting a little louder, then a little louder, then louder still, filling the cabaret, echoing and bouncing off the low rafters, until I feel her voice in my throat, giving me goose bumps.

  And her lyrics are only snippets she lifted from a contraband copy of American Vogue backstage: our fur muffs are from pedigreed foxes…don’t let your corset pucker…as fresh as candy-box doilies…

  Most everyone here won’t know the difference, because she’s singing in English. Everywhere else, English is the outlaw tongue, but here at the cabaret, anything goes. Decadence lives at Madame Boulette’s bordello and cabaret. To hear the Nazis tell it, our immorality is what did us in, and yet here they are, sitting in our dark, loving our sin.

  Jeder einmal in Paris—this is what the Nazis call their special gift to their soldiers. “Paris for everyone once.” Each and every member of the German military is allowed a holiday here, to witness the city’s happy captives, to eat the food off our plates and pick the cherries of our maidens.

  Madame Boulette used to go through a hundred bottles of champagne a night in the bordello’s heyday. When the Nazis limited her to a ration of a hundred a month, she went to them directly. She demanded. She begged. She pleaded with them, too, to lift the ban on her French patrons. I’ll be left to hire girls no one desires, she said, citing the loss in income. The girls with rotten teeth and crawling with lice. The Nazis didn’t want undesirable, lice-ridden girls. So days later, a bill of notice posted on her door invited the return of the French bordello dwellers, and business kicked back into a raucous upswing, with as much champagne as they could guzzle.

  Day’s next number is her popular hit, “Where Were You When,” and everyone but us rushes to the floor to waltz slow. The song is twenty years old, but everyone everywhere knows it. The way to dance to “Where Were You When” is to collapse, to hold each other up, like you’re completely done in by love and despair. Even the Germans have always adored the song, though it’s a tribute to the winners of a war they lost. For a time, you couldn’t escape the song; it was on every singer’s lips at every club, even in Berlin. And the bars love the money it brings in; it’s so melancholy, people sidle up for a stiff drink after they’ve wept along to it.

  “Let’s dance too,” Blue says, but I say absolutely not. “You’re breaking my heart,” he says.

  “There’s no room,” I say, and there is and there isn’t. There is indeed little room on the floor, but I’m an expert at dancing in small spaces. I spent years sneaking into dark corners, kitchen pantries, wine cellars, maid’s closets. Balconies, corridors, box seats at the opera. May I have this dance? I’d ask the lady, pulling her closer to me, so I could filch an earbob or a bracelet.

  But still Blue holds out his hand to me. I put my hand atop his and bring it down on the tabletop, to hold it there, as if I might somehow keep him in place, keep him from being snatched away.

  He upturns my wrist, my unlinked cuff falling open and away. I glance around me, looking for the cuff link. He then smiles at me, a full grin, the sapphire link between his teeth. He winks at me, pleased by his sleight of hand, then plucks it from his mouth. Blue hasn’t had much interest in learning the business of perfume, but he has begged me for instruction in some of the niftier tricks of snitching.

  Before he returns the link to my cuff, he puts his nose to my wrist and sniffs at my pulse, and he most surely feels my heart in it, the beat of it speeding up. I make a wish. Never leave me. He touches his lips to my skin, kissing the fork in my vein.

  “What you got on tonight?” he says as he refastens the cuff link. Dressing me.

  “You like it or you don’t?”

  “Of course I like it,” he says. “Even if I didn’t like it, I’d like it on you. You’re a genius at wearing perfume.”

  I taught Blue how to flirt with old women, so it’s a tragic irony that I sometimes fall victim to my own art and corruption. I took him in when he was in his teens. Now he’s twenty-one, but it seems hardly any time has passed since the first time I saw him.

  I met Blue because of my house. I bought the place from the estate of a Monsieur Fleury, who’d finally died at 102. Beneath a thinning toupee the color of a winter fox, he’d managed Monsieur Fleury’s Institute for Gentlemen, “a school of every subject.” Blue was only sixteen when he arrived, already taller than me. He’d run away from the home of a cruel uncle.

  He’d come to Monsieur Fleury’s because he’d read about his ramshackle academy in an old book he’d found in a library. He offered scholarships to young men without means, he told me. Blue clutched his duffel to his chest as he sat on a stool in my perfume shop, his head lowered, chewing on his lip, shrinking inch by inch before me, more and more boyish by the minute. He was terrified and disappointed. He related to me his entire plan: hitchhike into Paris, put on a necktie stolen from his uncle’s closet, and flatter Monsieur Fleury with an extensive knowledge of the man’s school and his charitable acts. I’d be happy to shine all the boys’ shoes, Blue said, looking over at me with those big, baby-doll eyes, as if I could somehow bring back all those boys with their shoes scuffed. I could sharpen pencils.

  He works at a library now, during the day, in spectacles, bow tie, and baggy corduroy trousers. And at night he pursues his dream of becoming an actor on the stage. Though he’s cast every now and again, his voice is too soft to carry beyond the first few rows. But he always has a gig at the theater, as an usher working for tips, helping ladies find their seats, which blossomed into something faintly derelict and fruitful—he’s become a gigolo of sorts, a queer lover for those ladies who prefer to remain untouched by their escorts.

  All the lonely women who’ve loved Blue have been warning him lately of the rumors they’ve heard, of the various armies the Germans are building, troops composed of the lost boys taken off the streets of Paris. It even has an official set of initials, as ominous as the rest of them: STO, Service du travail obligatoire, obligatory service to Germany by young Frenchmen. The old ladies beg Blue to stay with them, locked in their rooms, up in their turrets and towers, shut away from danger. And then there are the other rumors, of the Nazis’ moral crusade, of closing the homosexual cafés of Berlin, rounding up the men and putting them in camps.

  During the intermission, we drink more. “How can they expect us to just go on?” I ask Blue. I’m a little tipsy, but mostly I’m feeling sentimental. I’ve been drinking on an empty stomach. I know I’m rambling, but I never quite feel like I’m nearing the end of a sentence. I can’t find my way to the commas or the periods. Or the question marks. “And why would we go on, I mean, all my life I’ve
known families that have fought even just among themselves, fighting fighting fighting, part of their daily lives, breakfast, lunch, supper. I grew up among farmers, fathers pitting brother against brother, to test their gumption, thicken their skin, why should they expect all these people to simply give up? Why aren’t they frightened by our smiles, and our songs?”

  And yet all we can do is apologize. That’s all the German we learn.

  Ich entschuldige mich vielmals. (I apologize many times.)

  Ich bitte recht herzlich um Entschuldigung. (I heartily ask for forgiveness.)

  “ ‘I apologize many times,’ ” I say. “How clever of the Germans to pack so many apologies into one.”

  The Germans won Paris in June. It’s now the end of January. They want our concert halls to ring with German composers, our theaters to stage German plays, our publishers to print German novels. Meanwhile, they can’t stop taking what’s ours, dining in our finest restaurants, eating our candy, buying our dresses for their wives. Reeking of our perfume.

  They go to my old barber, while the men of France shave their own whiskers or don’t shave at all, growing their beards into wild thickets, to face the winter wind that’s worse than it’s ever been.

  I spot a bald German in the crowd of the cabaret, and I point him out to Blue. “Even the bald ones, like that bastard, even they linger at my barber, for a polish with a peppermint tonic, for a hot towel, to lean back in the chair for a few winks of a shallow nap.” I breathe in and smell it just now, the barbershop’s scents of steam and licorice, an antiseptic sting that bristles in your nose like ice in the air.

  But at the nightclubs, at the cabarets—if we manage to squeak in through the front door—the Nazis let us sing along. These popular songs cast a spell over them. I guess all my rambling is provoked by this glimpse of celebration, this reminder of how things were before. Everywhere else we go, however, everywhere in Paris, we hold our breath, to make little noise.