The Book of Lost Fragrances: A Novel of Suspense Read online

  “There’s a photo, Valentine. A photo taken of François. In the morgue—”

  She screamed over his words. “Shut up! Just shut up! It’s not true!”

  William reached out for her. Took her in his arms. Put his head on her shoulder. She felt his tears through her thin T-shirt.

  Gagging, she pushed him away and rushed to the bathroom. Leaned over the bowl. Retched.

  When she’d finished throwing up, she slipped to the floor and lay down on the cold tile.

  It was impossible. It was all a mistake.

  William had called her at midnight when François hadn’t returned home. She’d told him not to worry. Things happened on a job. François never gave up. He was probably chasing the perfumer through Paris. At two in the morning, William called again. And again at dawn. Each time she told him to calm down. To wait.

  Tuesday had been the longest day she could remember. No matter how many times William broke, she held strong.

  “You know the rules,” she told him, echoing what François had taught her. “Without confirmation, no assumptions.”

  William came into the bathroom without knocking. Helped her to her feet. Wet a washcloth with cold water. Gently washed her face. He squeezed out an inch of toothpaste and handed her the brush. “It will make you feel better,” he told her and left her alone.

  When Valentine came out of the bathroom, he was sitting at the dining room table staring at an empty vase. Valentine sat opposite him, pulled an ashtray and her cigarettes closer. Shook one out of the pack and lit it. Took a long, deep drag.

  “You said asthma?” she asked.

  He nodded.

  “I’d have known if François had asthma. He would have said.” She looked down at the burning ember between her fingers. “I smoked in front of him.”

  “I’m going to make tea.” William got up.

  “Tea?” Her laughter sounded hysterical in her own ears. François always made tea, too. Was never without a cup, especially in a crisis. Crisis equaled tea in so many cultures. As if heat could heal. Who started this nonsense: the Indians, the Chinese, the British? Macerated dried leaves wouldn’t solve anything.

  In the kitchen, William started the ritual. Every sound—the water running, the cabinet squeaking open, the china cups clinking on the countertop—grated on her nerves. She needed to try calming down; to practice one of the meditation techniques that François had taught her when he’d first taken her in.

  “Why would he let me smoke in front of him?” she called out. “Why wouldn’t he tell me he had asthma?”

  “He didn’t want anyone to know.”

  “Not even me? I don’t believe it.”

  William came out of the kitchen, holding a tray, shaking his head. She thought she detected a little smile of satisfaction on his lips. William was always slightly jealous of her relationship with his lover. She’d even wondered if he’d joined the Triad just to keep an eye on François. He’d never seemed to care about the cause, the brotherhood, or the thousand-year-old traditions. She and François had been the true soldiers. Comrades in arms. And now she was left with the wrong partner.

  “He wanted to appear invincible,” William said.

  “He was invincible,” she whispered.

  “Will you come to the hospital with me this afternoon?” he asked quietly.

  “Where?”

  “To the hospital. We can’t leave his body unclaimed. We have to honor him.”

  She looked at him as if he were insane. “How can we claim his body? Who do we say we are?” She realized that she was yelling and raised her hand in apology.

  “You took an oath,” William said.

  Since the nineteenth century, all members had taken the same thirty-six oaths. She’d memorized them and still knew them by heart.

  I shall assist my sworn brothers to bury their parents and brothers by offering financial or physical assistance. I shall suffer death by five thunderbolts if I do not keep this oath.

  William was right: she had to help him. “But not yet,” she said. “François would tell us this job comes first.” Trying to keep her voice from cracking, Valentine clenched her fists. She’d killed someone once with her hands wrapped around the man’s neck as François stood nearby, giving her instructions on how and where to press.

  She tried to summon him.

  What should I do? With you gone, who do I ask for help?

  François had trained her for this contingency.

  “No one of us is as important as the society,” he’d asserted. “If one of us is caught, even killed, the rest of the team continues.”

  He’d given Valentine marching orders and made her memorize them like she’d memorized her oaths.

  “If a plan fails, create a new plan. Don’t forget that if you need to, you can go on without me. You’re ready.” He’d smiled proudly. “You’re ready. Do you understand?”

  Valentine crushed the cigarette out. Drank the strong black tea that François favored. That she always found so bitter.

  “I need to call in the rest of the team,” she said. “Reorganize. We need to get someone outside the House of L’Etoile with directional microphones and find out what’s going on.”

  “Shouldn’t we contact Beijing first?”

  “It’s too late in the game for that. They might send in someone new to oversee us. We’ll lose our momentum. We need to take charge.”

  “So you’re appointing yourself incense master?” William asked, referencing another of the oaths they’d all taken.

  I shall be killed by five thunderbolts if I make any unauthorized promotions myself.

  “No. Of course not. Beijing can name anyone they want to fill the official position. We need to finish the job François started.”

  He was looking at her as if she were a stranger. “You’re ready to go back to work? We have to mourn him, Valentine.”

  “There’s no time now. The Dalai Lama will be in Paris on Saturday. We have four days to make sure the Egyptian pottery doesn’t wind up in his possession.”

  Now she placed her hands on William’s shoulders and looked into his red eyes. “I promise, we’ll mourn him properly when this is over. For now we honor him best by finishing the work he died for.”

  François had been worried about this job from the beginning. But not for himself. For her.

  “It’s one thing when the enemy is unknown,” he’d warned her just two days ago. “When your victim is a stranger. But this could be the most difficult test you’ve ever faced. You’re going to have to steel your soul, Valentine.”

  There had been just two men who’d mattered to her.

  François Lee, who’d saved her life and had been the only father she’d ever known.

  And Robbie L’Etoile, who’d opened her heart and been the only lover she’d ever taken.

  Now in avenging one’s death, she might have to kill the other.

  Twenty-one

  Jac gripped the edge of the perfumer’s organ and tried to stand. Her body trembled. The room glowed, as if there were light escaping from the perfume bottles, as if they were alive. Backing up, she took a first tentative step and then a second. Finally, she was on the opposite side of the room, her back up against the door, ready to escape.

  The organ was just a workstation again.

  Her eyes swept over the inanimate objects, making certain nothing moved, nothing waved or shimmered; that all was once again normal. That was how she could be sure she’d returned to her own mind—that the awful episode was over.

  According to the black-onyx-and-alabaster clock, very little time had passed. Five or six minutes, no more.

  It had been so many years since she’d felt the known world slip away and had found herself—or some version of herself—alive and terrified in another place and time. But the experience of a psychotic episode is not something you forget. This one had lasted longer and been more detailed than any she’d endured as a child. Compared to this, those had been cracks. This
was a gaping hole.

  Jac could not allow this to happen. Not now. Not with Robbie missing. Not with the police coming in and out of here. Not again. Not while she was alone. She slid down and sat in a crumpled mess on the floor. She pounded on the floor with her fists.

  When she was younger, the hallucinations had been elusive and incoherent, and when she came out of them, she rarely remembered details. But she could recall everything from this incident. None of the images had dissipated or dissolved. She could see the church in all its detail and hear the people and smell the incense, all with an intense clarity. She remembered exactly what that sad woman had been thinking, exactly what she’d seen . . .

  Wait. She had a name. Her lover had a name, too.

  Jac had never before conjured a hallucination about people whose names she knew. But she’d cast a L’Etoile ancestor in this one.

  A brutal knock on the door reverberated through her body. She jumped and faced the door like an executioner was on the other side.

  “Who’s there?” she called out.

  It was one of the gendarmes stationed outside.

  She opened the door.

  “The inspector dropped this off and asked me to give it to you.”

  The policeman held out a slim black leather book. On the cover, Jac saw the initials—R.L.E.—and something inside her chest constricted. When she reached out to take it, she noticed her hands were trembling.

  She murmured thanks.

  “Are you all right? Can I get you something? Call someone?”

  “No.” She smiled. “I’m fine. Thank you for this.”

  Once he was gone, Jac once again opened the French doors, let in the fresh air, and sat down at the desk. For the next forty-five minutes, she rifled though her brother’s datebook, absorbed by the distraction. She stopped on the entry for a date two weeks ago: the anniversary of their mother’s death. The day Robbie had flown to New York. He’d been with her at the cemetery and then said he had an appointment. He’d never mentioned who he was meeting. She hadn’t asked.

  But here it was. A name she’d never expected to see here. Why had her brother met with Griffin North in New York? She paged ahead. More appointments with Griffin. Why was he here in Paris? Why had Griffin been seeing Robbie every day for almost all of last week?

  A scent memory swept over her.

  She’d smelled Griffin North before she’d even met him, attracted to his aroma before she knew his name or heard his voice. He was standing behind her at a party. For a moment, she didn’t turn. Didn’t try to find him. She just breathed.

  Later Jac discovered the cologne he’d been wearing had been created in the 1930s by an American fragrance house. And it had been discontinued in the early 1960s, before Griffin was even born. He was the first and last man she’d ever met who had worn that fragrance. When she’d asked him how he even knew about it, Griffin told her he’d found it in a beach house his grandparents had rented one summer. It was the single item the owners had left behind in the bathroom. “The only thing I’ve ever stolen,” he once told Jac.

  Griffin didn’t have much of a nose for fragrance. But what really appealed to him was the mysterious story. Why had it, alone, been left behind? Orphaned?

  Jac thought the scent promised stories, too, but based on its essences. Its ingredients were as old as the Bible: bergamot, lemon, honey, ylang ylang, vetiver, civet and musk. Rich florals and animalic accords that blended together to create a particular scent that for her would always be associated with Griffin. With their time together. With wonder. With falling in love. With a cessation of loneliness. And then with anger and grief.

  Long after they’d broken up, she still scanned tables at flea markets and auctions on eBay, buying up even half-empty bottles. In the recesses of the armoire in her bedroom, she had a cache of eight bottles. Even in sealed packaging, even in the dark, cologne evaporated. Like moments in your life. Time fades the details.

  No culture had been more proficient at creating long-lasting perfumes than the ancient Egyptians. It was said their fragrances improved with time.

  Wait.

  Egypt?

  The woman in the hallucination was thinking about Egypt too.

  Jac struggled to remember why.

  Her lover had been killed there.

  Now, in her mind, that strange woman’s pain echoed and merged with her own. Except Jac’s lover hadn’t been killed. He’d left her. But hadn’t it been a death of sorts?

  She’d been innocent about relationships the way you can be only the first time. Before you understand that the underside of love is so rough that just the slightest contact with it rips your skin to shreds, makes you bleed, causes a kind of pain that goes so deep you can’t see beyond it.

  Jac had just finished graduate school in California. Griffin had completed his PhD at Yale University and had landed a highly coveted job on a prestigious Egyptian dig. The team of archaeologists, sponsored by the Smithsonian museum, was using magnetic sensors to locate and map key pharaonic sites around the areas of Portus Magnus of Alexandria, Canopus, and Heraklion. Griffin was their first new hire in over a year.

  Before he flew off, they were going to spend a week together in New York.

  It was a warm summer evening, and dusk was settling over the lake, casting long shadows. They were so deep in Central Park the hum of insects and birdsong had replaced city traffic. While they drank cold white wine dockside at the boathouse, rowers skimmed the water, lazily dipping their oars, barely disturbing swans and mallards. The bucolic scene was enhanced by the dozens of butterflies flitting around a large patch of wildflowers growing just to the right of the deck.

  Jac, who’d written her thesis on the symbolism of butterflies in mythology, had been surprised to see so many different families and subfamilies in the midst of Manhattan. She pointed out a silvery gray Spring Azure—almost the hue of mother-of-pearl. And an iridescent-blue Pipevine Swallowtail.

  Griffin didn’t respond. He drained his wineglass in one gulp, looked away from Jac, and, in a voice so low she had to lean forward to hear him, told her that he didn’t expect her to wait for him to come back from Egypt.

  “Wait for what?” she’d asked, not understanding.

  “For me. For us.”

  The blue-black butterfly was so close she could count the seven round orange spots on its hind wings. They never touched, she’d read, but were spaced so that they remained separate.

  “Why not?” The words felt like cardboard in her mouth. It sounded to her as if she were spitting them out instead of saying them.

  “You expect too much from me and for me. I’ll never measure up to how you see me.”

  She heard the words. Understood each in the abstract but couldn’t piece them together to make sense of them as a whole.

  He must have sensed her confusion. “Your great expectations for me make me feel small. I know I’m always going to disappoint you. It’s not how I want to live.” He sounded defeated.

  “Is this about your dissertation?”

  She’d been waiting to read it for months. He’d kept putting her off. Telling her he didn’t want to show it to her until it was complete. She’d accepted that. Jac knew the topic was giving him problems, that the research was proving elusive, and that he was up against a deadline. When Griffin stopped complaining, she’d assumed he’d worked it out.

  Then this morning, while he was still sleeping and she was straightening up the hotel room, she saw his thesis protruding from his knapsack.

  She opened it to the first page.

  “I, Griffin North, declare that ‘Greek Influence on the Representation of the Butterfly in Ptolemaic Egyptian Art: Tracing Horus to Eros and Cupid and Back Again’ is my own work and . . .”

  Beside her, a butterfly was feeding on a pink-and-yellow lantana flower. She watched as another joined it. This one was black with red median bands and white spots. She’d forgotten its name. Suddenly remembering became critical.

  “I, G
riffin North, declare that ‘Greek Influence on the Representation of the Butterfly in Ptolemaic Egyptian Art: Tracing Horus to Eros and Cupid and Back Again’ is my own work and that all the sources that I have used or quoted have been indicated and acknowledged by means of complete references.”

  Except that he hadn’t. Griffin had lifted entire paragraphs—a few times, whole pages—of what she’d written without citing her own thesis at all.

  She tried to talk herself out of being upset. His work wasn’t identical to hers. She hadn’t written about Greek influences on late-kingdom Egypt. But he’d used all her research about the symbolism of the butterfly in Greek mythology to tie the insect to Eros and Cupid. Griffin had used her analysis to make his case that paintings of butterflies in late-period tombs were a result of the Ptolemies’ Greek heritage.

  If he’d asked, Jac would have gladly given Griffin her paper. Without a PhD, he’d be unable to secure a position in the field. And that’s where his passion lay. Not in the halls of academia but in the desert with sand under his fingernails. Grad school was tough on anyone, but for him it had been brutal. The professor he’d assisted knew that Griffin needed the job and that there were no other assistantships open, and so the man took advantage of him, dumping a massive amount of responsibility on him.

  Sitting on the floor, Jac had read through the whole dissertation, skimming some sections while giving others careful attention. It wasn’t what he had done but that he’d done it without telling her.

  And when he woke up, she confronted him.

  He’d barely explained. Just accused her of looking though his things without asking.

  “If anyone finds out they’ll withdraw your degree. Accuse you of plagiarism,” she said.

  “No one could find out unless you tell them. Are you planning on doing that?” He was shouting.

  She was suddenly staring at a stranger. “How could you even ask me that?”

  Griffin had stormed into the bathroom, taken a shower, dressed, and gone out, all without saying another word to her. Left her to feel guilty for what she’d done. She’d been astounded by his effort at manipulation. He’d never done anything like that to her before.