Perfume: The Story Of A Murderer (7 page)

The goatskins for the Spanish leather! Baldini remembered now. He had ordered the hides from Grimal a few days before, the finest, softest goatskin to be used as a blotter for Count Verhamont’s desk, fifteen francs apiece. But he really did not need them any more and could spare the expense. On the other hand, if he were simply to send the boy back…? Who knew—it could make a bad impression, people might begin to talk, rumours might start: Baldini is getting undependable, Baldini isn’t getting any orders, Baldini can’t pay his bills… and that would not be good; no, no, because something like that was likely to lower the selling price of his business. It would be better to accept these useless goatskins. No one needed to know ahead of time that Giuseppe Baldini had changed his life.

‘Come in!’

He let the boy inside, and they walked across to the shop, Baldini leading with the candle, Grenouille behind him with the hides. It was the first time Grenouille had ever been in a perfumery, a place in which odours are not accessories but stand unabashedly at the centre of interest. Naturally he knew every single perfumery and apothecary in the city, had stood for nights on end at their shop windows, his nose pressed to the cracks of their doors. He knew every single odour handled here and had often merged them in his innermost thoughts to create the most splendid perfumes. So there was nothing new awaiting him. And yet, just as a musically gifted child burns to see an orchestra up close or to climb into the church choir where the organ keyboard lies hidden, Grenouille burned to see a perfumery from the inside; and when he had heard that leather was to be delivered to Baldini, he had done all he could to make sure that he would be the one to deliver it.

And here he stood in Baldini’s shop, on the one spot were only sleeping because it was dark and would come to life in the morning. Should he perhaps take the table with him to Messina? And a few of the tools, only the most important ones…? You could sit and work very nicely at this table. The boards were oak, the legs as well, and it was cross-braced so that nothing about it could wiggle or wobble, acids couldn’t mark it, or oils or slips of a knife—but it would cost a fortune to take it with him to Messina! Even by ship! And therefore it would be sold, the table would be sold tomorrow, and everything that lay on it, under it and beside it would be sold as well! Because he, Baldini, might have a sentimental heart, but he had also had strength of character, and so he would follow through on his decision, as difficult as that was to do; he would give it all up with tears in his eyes, but he would do it nonetheless, because he knew he was right—he had been given a sign.

He turned to go. There at the door stood this little deformed person he had almost forgotten about. ‘They’re fine,’ Baldini said. ‘Tell your master that the skins are fine. I’ll come by in the next few days and pay for them.’

‘Yes, sir,’ said Grenouille, but stood where he was, blocking the way for Baldini, who was ready to leave the workshop. Baldini was somewhat startled, but so unsuspecting that he took the boy’s behaviour not for insolence but for shyness.

‘What is it?’ he asked. ‘Is there something else I can do for you? Well? Speak up!’

Grenouille stood there cowering and gazing at Baldini with a look of apparent timidity, but which in reality came from a cunning intensity.

‘I want to work for you, Maître Baldini. Work for you, here in your business.’

It was not spoken as a request, but as a demand, nor was it really spoken but squeezed out, hissed out in reptile fashion. And once again, Baldini misread Grenouille’s outrageous self-confidence as boyish awkwardness. He gave him a friendly smile. ‘You’re a tanner’s apprentice, my lad,’ he said. ‘I have no use for a tanner’s apprentice. I have a journeyman already, and I don’t need an apprentice.’

‘You want to make these goatskins smell good, Maître Baldini? You want to make this leather I’ve brought you smell good, don’t you?’ Grenouille hissed, as if he had paid not the least attention to Baldini’s answer.

‘Yes indeed,’ said Baldini.

‘With “Amor and Psyche” by Pélissier?’ Grenouille asked, cowering even more than before.

At that, a wave of mild terror swept through Baldini’s body. Not because he asked himself how this lad knew all about it so exactly, but simply because the boy had said the name of the wretched perfume that had defeated his efforts at decoding today.

‘How did you ever get the absurd idea that I would use someone else’s perfume…’

‘You reek of it!’ Grenouille hissed. ‘You have it on your forehead, and in your right coat pocket is a handkerchief soaked with it. It’s not very good, this “Amor and Psyche”, it’s bad, there’s too much bergamot and too much rosemary and not enough attar of roses.’

‘Aha!’ Baldini said, surprised that the conversation had veered from the general to the specific. ‘What else?’

‘Orange blossom, lime, clove, musk, jasmine, alcohol and something that I don’t know the name of, there, you see, right there! In that bottle!’ And he pointed a finger into the darkness. Baldini held the candlestick up in that direction, his gaze following the boy’s index finger towards a cupboard and falling upon a bottle filled with a greyish yellow balm.

‘Storax?’ he asked.

Grenouille nodded. ‘Yes. That’s in it too. Storax.’ And then he squirmed as if doubling up with a cramp and muttered the word at least a dozen times to himself: ‘Storaxstoraxstoraxstorax…’

Baldini held his candle up to this lump of humankind wheezing ‘storax’ and thought: either he is possessed, or a thieving impostor, or truly gifted. For it was perfectly possible that the list of ingredients, if mixed in the right proportions, could result in the perfume ‘Amor and Psyche’—it was, in fact, probable. Attar of roses, clove and storax—it was those three ingredients that he had searched for so desperately this afternoon. Joining them with the other parts of the composition—which he believed he had recognized as well—would unite the segments into a pretty, rounded pastry. It was now only a question of the exact proportions in which you had to join them. To find that out, he, Baldini, would have to run experiments for several days, a horrible task, almost worse than the basic identification of the parts, for it meant you had to measure and weigh and record and all the while pay damn close attention, because the least moment’s inattention—a tremble of the pipette, a mistake in counting drops—could ruin the whole thing. And every botched attempt was dreadfully expensive. Every ruined mixture was worth a small fortune… He wanted to test this manikin, wanted to ask him about the exact formula for ‘Amor and Psyche’. If he knew it, to the drop and dram, then he was obviously an impostor who had somehow pinched the recipe from Pélissier in order to gain access and get a position with him, Baldini. But if he came close, then he was a genius of scent and as such provoked Baldini’s professional interest. Not that Baldini would jeopardize his firm decision to give up his business! This perfume by Pélissier was itself not the important thing to him. Even if the fellow could deliver it to him by the gallon, Baldini would not dream of scenting Count Verhamont’s Spanish hides with it, but… But he had not been a perfumer his life long, had not concerned himself his life long with the blending of scents, to have lost all professional passions from one moment to the next. Right now he was interested in finding out the formula for this damned perfume, and beyond that, in studying the gifts of this mysterious boy, who had parsed a scent off the top of his head. He wanted to know what was behind that. He was quite simply curious.

‘You have, it appears, a fine nose, young man,’ he said, once Grenouille had ceased his wheezings; and he stepped back into the workshop, carefully setting the candlestick on the worktable, ‘without doubt, a fine nose, but…’

‘I have the best nose in Paris, Maître Baldini,’ Grenouille interrupted with a rasp. ‘I know all the odours in the world, all of them, only I don’t know the names of some of them, but I can learn the names. The odours that have names, there aren’t many of those, there are only a few thousand. I’ll learn them all, I’ll never forget the name of that balm, storax, the balm is called storax, it’s called storax…’

‘Silence!’ shouted Baldini. ‘Do not interrupt me when I’m speaking! You are impertinent and insolent. No one knows a thousand odours by name. Even I don’t know a thousand of them by name, at best a few hundred, for there aren’t more than a few hundred in our business, all the rest aren’t odours, they are simply stenches.’

During the rather lengthy interruption that had burst from him, Grenouille had almost unfolded his body, had in fact been so excited for the moment that he had flailed both arms in circles to suggest the ‘all, all of them’ that he knew. But at Baldini’s reply he collapsed back into himself, like a black toad lurking there motionless on the threshold.

‘I have, of course, been aware,’ Baldini continued, ‘for some time now that “Amor and Psyche” consisted of storax, attar of roses and cloves, plus bergamot and extract of rosemary, etcetera. All that is needed to find that out is, as I said, a passably fine nose, and it may well be that God has given you a passably fine nose, as He has many, many other people as well—particularly at your age. A perfumer, however’—and here Baldini raised his index finger and puffed out his chest—‘a perfumer, however, needs more than a passably fine nose. He needs an incorruptible, hardworking organ that has been trained to smell for many decades, enabling him to decipher even the most complicated odours by composition and proportion, as well as to create new, unknown mixtures of scent. Such a nose’—and here he tapped his with his finger—‘is not something one
has
, young man! It is something one acquires, by perseverance and diligence. Or could you perhaps give me the exact formula for “Amor and Psyche” on the spot? Well? Could you?’

Grenouille did not answer.

‘Could you perhaps give me a rough guess?’ Baldini said, bending forward slightly to get a better look at the toad at his door. ‘Just a rough one, an estimation? Well, speak up, best nose in Paris!’

But Grenouille was silent.

‘You see?’ said Baldini, equally both satisfied and disappointed; and he straightened up. ‘You can’t do it. Of course you can’t. You’re one of those people who know whether there is chervil or parsley in the soup at meal-time. That’s fine, there’s something to be said for that. But that doesn’t make you a cook, not by a long shot. Whatever the art or whatever the craft—and make a note of this before you go—talent means next to nothing, while experience, acquired in humility and with hard work, means everything.’

He was reaching for the candlestick on the table, when from the doorway came Grenouille’s pinched snarl: ‘I don’t know what a formula is, maître. I don’t know that, but otherwise I know everything!’

‘A formula is the alpha and omega of every perfume,’ replied Baldini sternly, for he wanted to end this conversation—now. ‘It contains scrupulously exact instructions for the proportions needed to mix individual ingredients so that the result is the unmistakable scent one desires. That is a formula. It is the recipe—if that is a word you understand better.’

‘Formula, formula,’ rasped Grenouille and grew somewhat larger in the doorway. ‘I don’t need a formula. I have the recipe in my nose. Can I mix it for you, maître, can I mix it, can I?’

‘How’s that?’ cried Baldini in a rather loud voice and held the candle up to the gnome’s face. ‘How would you mix it?’

For the first time, Grenouille did not flinch. ‘Why they’re all here, all the ones you need, the scents, they’re all here, in this room,’ he said, pointing again into the darkness. ‘There’s attar of roses! There’s orange blossom! That’s clove! That’s rosemary, there…!’

‘Certainly they’re here!’ roared Baldini. ‘They are all here. But I’m telling you, you blockhead, that is of no use if one does not have the formula!’

‘… There’s jasmine! Alcohol there! Bergamot there! Storax there!’ Grenouille went on crowing, and at each name he pointed to a different spot in the room, although it was so dark that at best you could only surmise the shadows of the cupboards filled with bottles.

‘You can see in the dark, can you?’ Baldini went on. ‘You not only have the best nose, but also the keenest eyes in Paris, do you? Now if you have passably good ears, then open them up, because I’m telling you: you are a little swindler. You probably picked up your information at Pélissier’s, did some spying, is that it? And now you think you can pull the wool over my eyes, right?’

Grenouille was now standing up, completely unfolded to full size, so to speak, in the doorway, his legs slightly apart, his arms slightly spread, so that he looked like a black spider that had latched on to the threshold and frame. ‘Give me ten minutes,’ he said in close to a normal, fluent pattern of speech, ‘and I will produce for you the perfume “Amor and Psyche”. Right now, right here in this room. Maître, give me just five minutes!’

‘Do you suppose I’d let you slop around here in my laboratory? With essences that are worth a fortune? You?’

‘Yes,’ said Grenouille.

‘Bah!’ Baldini shouted, exhaling all at once every bit of air he had in him. Then he took a deep breath and a long look at Grenouille the spider, and thought it over. Basically it makes no difference, he thought, because it will all be over tomorrow anyway. I know for a fact that he can’t do what he claims he can, can’t possibly do it. Why, that would make him greater than the great Frangipani. But why shouldn’t I let him demonstrate before my eyes what I know to be true? It is possible that some day in Messina—people do grow very strange in old age and their minds fix on the craziest ideas—I’ll get the notion that I had failed to recognize an olfactory genius, a creature upon whom the grace of God had been poured out in superabundance, a wunderkind… It’s totally out of the question. Everything my reason tells me says it is out of the question—but miracles do happen, that is certain. So what if, when I lie dying in Messina some day, the thought comes to me there on my deathbed: on that evening, back in Paris, I shut my eyes to a miracle…? That would not be very pleasant, Baldini. Let the fool waste a few drops of attar of roses and musk tincture; you would have wasted them yourself if Pélissier’s perfume had still interested you. And what are a few drops—though expensive ones, very, very expensive!—compared to certain knowledge and a peaceful old age?