Jitterbug Perfume (2 page)

For forty years, Madame Lily Devalier had kept the shop. Her father had kept it for fifty years before her. In its day, allegedly, some odd business had passed through its arched doorway. Moon medicine and jazz powders. Lucky root and come-together potent. Mojo cream and loa lotion. Hurricane drops, kill-me-not juice, coonass courting pomade and. a special "oil of midnight" that had nothing to do with overtime at the office. Among fashionable folk in the French Quarter, Madame D. was known as the Queen of the Good Smells. There was a time when certain people in the Quarter pronounced it "Spells." Nowadays, however, with much of the Quarter gone to seed—the shop along with it—Madame was trying to reattract some of the clientele she had lost to the large international fragrance houses, so she dealt in perfume and nothing but perfume. Or so she claimed.

Under her mistress's watchful eye, V'lu poured molasses-

distilled alcohol into a crock. The crock had been collecting the essential oil as it dripped through a filter tube attached to the steeping vat. The Jamaican jasmine was so pungent, however, that the diluting agent barely dulled its edge.

"Ooh-la-la!" exclaimed Madame Devalier. She plopped down her pumpkin patch, her Spanish ballroom, her pagan idol of a body on a lime velvet love seat. "This boof may cause me to feint."

"Ah gitting a sinful headache," V'lu complained.

Out on Royal, following in the footsteps of the departed wino, a tall, lean black man in a greenish yellow skullcap paused before the shutters of the Parfumerie Devalier. He sniffed the air like a stag. He sniffed again. He clapped his hands in delight and cackled aloud. And shifting a bit on his head, emitting a sleepy whisper, his skullcap stirred its many little wings.

Since there were no witnesses, it is impossible to say whether that man was responsible for the single garden-variety beet that V'lu discovered on her cot—tossed in through the open second-story window, perhaps—when she went to lay herself down that night (and thanks to some medication strongly resembling hurricane drops with which her employer had treated her headache, it
was
still night, wasn't it, V'lu?).

PARIS

IN THE CENTER OF A MARBLE-TOP DESK. Directly under a crystal chandelier, sitting alone on a silver tray, was a large, raw beet. The beet must have been out of the ground a week or more, for it had the ashen exterior of a cancer victim. Yet, when struck at a particular angle by a flicker of candlelight from the chandelier, its heart of wine-drenched velvet shone through.

The desk was in an office, the office in a skyscraper. The skyscraper was like any other, a slender tower of steel and glass, totally without embellishment or dash. Even its height—a mere twenty-three stories—was unremarkable. Its lone distinguishing feature was the neighborhood from whose midst it rose. Across the street from its entrance was a monastery and a cathedral, the limestone steps of which had been worn as radiant as blue serge trousers by centuries of pious comings and goings. To the right of the building was a block of bicycle shops and cafes; to the left a slate-roofed hotel where, a few decades past, artists
had
slept and worked within the same four walls, never dreaming that their miserable circumstances might be romanticized in the "studio apartment" market of the future. Above the building, the sky recalled passages from
Les Miserables,
threadbare and gray. Below it (everything sits on something else), were the ruins of a brewery that once had been operated by monks from across the street. In the 1200s, Crusaders returning from Palestine in-

troduced perfume to France, and after it achieved popularity there, the monks had made perfume as well as beer. Vestiges of the ancient perfumery could be explored in the basement of the skyscraper. In fact, the LeFever family, which built the skyscraper, had purchased the perfume business from the monastery in the seventeenth century and was still in the trade.

On this day, already described as meteorologically evocative of Victor Hugo at his most dire, Claude LeFever had barged into the office of Marcel LeFever unannounced. Why not? They were blood relatives and both vice-presidents of the firm. Surely, formalities were unnecessary. Yet Marcel seemed annoyed. Perhaps it was because he was wearing his whale mask.

Claude put his hands on his hips and stared at his cousin. "Thar she blows!" he yelled.

"Kiss my ass," said Marcel, from inside the mask.

"Forgive me but I would not quite know where to look for the ass of a fish."

"A whale is not a fish, you fool."

"Oh, yes."

(Claude and Marcel LeFever were speaking in French. This simultaneous English translation is being beamed to the reader via literary satellite.)

Holding degrees in both accounting and law, Claude made the financial decisions for the LeFever family. Marcel, who had grown up in the perfume labs, learning to think with his nose, was in charge of "creativity," a term that Claude did not completely comprehend, but which, to his credit, he recognized to be essential. If creativity was enhanced by pacing the executive suites in a papier-mache mask, it was all right with Claude, no matter how it frightened the secretaries. It was Marcel's habit of making large cash donations to ecology commandos intent upon sabotaging the whaling industry that bothered the frugal Claude. Claude was well aware of the previous importance to the perfume industry of ambergris, a substance secreted by temporarily infirm whales, but he was convinced that, petrochemical and coal tar fixatives were completely adequate substitutes. "Fish puke is a thing of the past," he'd tell Marcel.

"A whale is a mammal, you idiot."

"Oh, yes."

In Marcel's office, as in Claude's next door, there was a floor-to-ceiling window from which one could look down on the cathedral spire. "We are closer to heaven than the monks," Claude was fond of saying. On this day, however, the sky, layered with thin altostratus clouds and smog, appeared to reflect human suffering and failed to awaken in Claude visions of paradise. It did, in its grim emaciation, remind him that he had skipped breakfast in order to be punctual at a board meeting that Marcel, it was probably just as well, had not attended. "Why don't you take that stupid thing off and let's go to lunch," Claude suggested.

Through the eyeholes of the mask, Marcel continued to stare out the window. "Something rather interesting arrived in the morning mail," he said.

"What was that?"

"What else but a beet?" Marcel shifted his gaze from the window to the centerpiece of his desk.

"Oh, yes. I wasn't going to mention the beet. In my years as your cousin and business associate, I have learned that it is frequently best to let sleeping dogs lie. Now that you've broached the subject, I must admit there is a beet on your desk, rather prominently displayed. Arrived in the mail, you say?"

Without a trace of self-consciousness, Marcel lifted off the mask and placed it on the floor beside his chair, revealing an imposing Gallic nose, a gray-streaked spade of a beard, wet brown eyes, and black hair slicked back to resemble patent leather. Were it not that Claude's eyes were less moody, his hair more lightly greased, the cousins were identical, even to the cut of their pin-striped suits. Business competitors often referred to them as the LeFever twins.

"It hadn't actually been posted, if that's what you mean. Nor was it wrapped. It arrived in its corporeal envelope, which is to say, its own body of beet flesh. It was merely sitting atop the basket of morning mail when I came in."

"A token from an admirer. Some woman—or man—in the building. A beet is not entirely devoid of phallic connotations."

"Claude, this is the third time since I've returned from America that there has been a beet with the morning mail."

"You see? Someone's got it bad, you handsome devil, you. Or else it's a joke."

"The receptionist claims that on all three occasions there was a strong, unpleasant odor in the foyer just before the beet was mysteriously delivered. ..."

"A joke, as I said. An unpleasant odor in the LeFever Building? A
practical
joke."

"Yes. And a trace of the odor still clings to the beet. It is something I've smelled before. Musk, but more intense. Claude, I encountered such a scent in the United States, but I can't seem to remember where and it is driving me coocoo. You know how it is with my nose."

"Indeed I do," said Claude. "I would never have allowed LeFever to insure your nose with Lloyd's of London for a million francs were I not convinced of its infallibility. All the more reason to be unconcerned. Your snout will solve the puzzle even if your intellect should not. Meanwhile, this silly talk of beets is whetting my appetite. Let's get to a restaurant before the noon rush." He buttoned his jacket. After a short hesitation, Marcel rose and buttoned his. There was something about that morose sky scraped by the LeFever Building that indicated that protection against elements might be wise. "By the way," Claude added, "speaking of the United States, what do you hear from V'lu?"

At the mention of V'lu, Marcel unbuttoned his jacket. He sat back down. He pulled the mask over his head and moaned as a whale might moan were it about to upchuck some ambergris.

PART I

THE CITADEL WAS DARK, and the heroes were sleeping. When they breathed, it sounded as if they were testing the air for dragon smoke.

On their sofas of spice and feathers, the concubines also slept fretfully. In those days the Earth was still flat, and people dreamed often of falling over edges.

Blacksmiths hammered the Edge Serpent on the anvils of their closed eyelids. Wheelwrights rolled it, tail in mouth, down the cart roads of
their
slumber. Cooks roasted it in dream pits, seamstresses sewed it to the badger hides that covered them, the court necromancer traced its contours in the constellation of straw on which he tossed. Only the babes in the nursery lay peacefully, passive even to the fleas that supped on their tenderness.

King Alobar did not sleep at all. He was as awake as the guards at the gate. More awake, actually, for the guards mused dreamily about mead, boiled beets, and captive women as their eyes patroled the forested horizon, while the king was as conscious as an unsheathed knife; coldly conscious and warmly troubled.

Beside him, inside the ermine blankets, his great hound, Mik, and his wife, Alma, snoozed the night away, oblivious to their lord's distress. Well, let them snore, for neither the dog's tongue nor the wife's could lap the furrows from his brow, although he had sent for Alma that evening mainly because of her tongue. Alma's mouth, freshly outlined with beet paint, was capable of locking him in a carnal embrace that while it endured forbade any thought of the coils beyond the brink. Alas, it could endure but for so long, and no sooner was Alma hiccupping the mushroom scent of his spurt than he was regretting his choice. He should have summoned Wren, his favorite wife, for though Wren lacked Alma's special sexual skills, she knew his heart. He could confide in Wren without fear that his disclosures would be woven into common gossip on the concubines' looms.

Alobar's castle, which in fact was a simple fort of stone and wood surrounded by a fence of tree trunks, contained treasures, not the least of which was a slab of polished glass that had come all the way from Egypt to show the king his face. The concubines adored this magic glass, and Alobar, whose face was so obscured by whiskers that its reflection offered a minimum of contemplative reward, was content to leave it in their quarters, where they would spend hours each day gazing at the wonders that it reproduced. Once, a very young concubine named Frol had dropped the mirror, breaking off a corner of it. The council had wanted to banish her into the forest, where wolves or warriors from a neighboring domain might suck her bones, but Alobar had intervened, limiting her punishment to thirty lashes. Later, when her wounds had healed, she bore him fine twin sons. From that time on, however, the king visited the harem each new moon to make certain that the looking glass had not lost its abilities.

Now, on this day, the new moon of the calendar part we know as September, when Alobar conducted his routine inspection, he looked into the mirror longer, more intently than usual. Something in the secrets and shadows of the imperfectly polished surface had caught his eye. He stared, and as he stared his pulse began to run away with itself. He carried the glass to an open window, where refracting sparks of sunshine enlivened its ground but refused to alter its message. "So soon?" he whispered, as he tilted the mirror. Another angle, the same result.
Perhaps the glass is tricking me,
he thought.
Magic things are fond of deceptions.

Although the day was rather balmy, he pulled up the hood of his rough linen cloak and, blushing like blood's rich uncle,

thrust the mirror into the hands of the nearest concubine, who happened to be Frol. The other women gasped. They rushed to relieve her of the precious object. Alobar left the room.