Perfume: The Story Of A Murderer (19 page)

But, then, one day in March, Richis was sitting in the salon and watched as Laure walked out into the garden. She was wearing a blue dress, her red hair falling down over it and blazing in the sunlight—he had never seen her look so beautiful. She disappeared behind a hedge. And it took about two heartbeats longer than he had expected before she emerged again—and he was frightened to death, for during those two heartbeats he thought he had lost her for ever.

That same night he awoke out of a terrifying dream, the details of which he could no longer remember, but it had had to do with Laure, and he burst into her room convinced that she was dead, lay there in her bed murdered, violated and shorn—and found her unharmed.

He went back to his chamber, bathed in sweat and trembling with agitation, no, not with agitation, but with fear, for he finally admitted it to himself: it was naked fear that had seized him, and in admitting it he grew calmer and his thoughts clearer. To be honest, he had not believed in the efficacy of the bishop’s anathema from the start, nor that the murderer was now prowling about Grenoble, nor that he had ever left town. No, he was still living here, among the citizens of Grasse, and at some point he would strike again. Richis had seen several of the girls murdered during August and September. The sight had horrified him, and at the same time, he had to admit, fascinated him, for they all, each in her own special way, had been dazzling beauties. He never would have thought that there was so much unrecognized beauty in Grasse. The murderer had opened his eyes. The murderer possessed exquisite taste. And he had a system. It was not just that all the murders had been carried out in the same efficient manner, but the very choice of victims betrayed intentions almost economical in their planning. To be sure, Richis did not know
what
the murderer actually craved from his victims, since he could not have robbed them of the best that they offered—their beauty and the charm of youth… or could he? In any case, it seemed to him, as absurd as it sounded, that the murderer was not a destructive personality, but rather a careful collector. For if one imagined—and so Richis imagined—all the victims not as single individuals, but as parts of some higher principle and thought of each one’s characteristics as merged in some idealistic fashion into a unifying whole, then the picture assembled out of such mosaic pieces would be the picture of absolute beauty, and the magic that radiated from it would no longer be of human, but of divine origin. (As we can see, Richis was an enlightened thinker who did not shrink from blasphemous conclusions, and though he was not thinking in olfactory categories, but rather in visual ones, he was nevertheless very near the truth.)

Assuming then—Richis continued in his thoughts—that the murderer was just such a collector of beauty and was working on the picture of perfection, even if only in the fantasy of his sick brain, assuming, however, that he was the man of sublime taste and perfect methods that he indeed appeared to be—then one could not assume that he would waive claim to the most precious component on earth needed for his picture: the beauty of Laure. His entire previous homicidal work would be worth nothing without her. She was the keystone to his building.

As he drew this horrifying conclusion, Richis was sitting in his nightshirt on the edge of his bed, and he was amazed at how calm he had become. He no longer felt chilled, was no longer trembling. The vague fear that had plagued him for weeks had vanished and was replaced by the awareness of a specific danger: Laure had quite obviously been the goal of all the murderer’s endeavours from the beginning. And all the other murders were adjuncts to the last, crowning murder. It remained quite unclear what material purpose these murders were intended to serve or if they even had one at all. But Richis had perceived the essence of the matter: the murderer’s systematic method and his idealistic motive. The longer he thought about it, the better both of these pleased him and the greater his admiration for the murderer—an admiration, admittedly, that reflected back upon him as would a polished mirror, for after all, it was he, Richis, who had picked up his opponent’s trail with his own refined and analytical powers of reasoning.

If he, Richis, had been the murderer and were himself possessed by the murderer’s passions and ideas, he would not have been able to proceed in any other fashion than had been employed thus far, and like him, he would do his utmost to crown his mad work with the murder of the unique and splendid Laure.

This last thought appealed to him especially. Because he was in the position to put himself inside the mind of the would-be murderer of his daughter, he had made himself vastly superior to the murderer. For all his intelligence, that much was certain, the murderer was not in the position to put himself inside Richis’s mind—if only because he could not even begin to suspect that Richis had long since imagined himself in the murderer’s own situation. This was fundamentally no different from how things worked in business—
mutatis mutandis
, to be sure. You were master of a competitor whose intentions you had seen through; there was no way he could get the better of you—not if your name was Antoine Richis, and you were a natural fighter, a seasoned fighter. After all, the largest wholesale perfume business in France, his wealth, his office as second consul, these had not fallen into his lap as gracious gifts, but he had fought for them, with doggedness and deceit, recognizing dangers ahead of time, shrewdly guessing his competitors’ plans, and outdistancing his opponents. And in just the same way he would achieve his future goals, power and noble rank for his heirs. And in no other way would he counter the plans of the murderer, his competitor for the possession of Laure—if only because Laure was also the keystone in the edifice of his, of Richis’s own plans. He loved her, certainly; but he needed her as well. And he would let no one wrest from him whatever it was he needed to realize his own highest ambitions—he would hold on tooth and claw to that.

He felt better now. Having succeeded by these nocturnal deliberations in bringing his struggle with the demon down to the level of a business rivalry, he felt fresh courage, indeed arrogance, take hold of him. The last remnants of fear were gone, the despondency and anxious care that had tormented him into doddering senility had vanished, the fog of gloomy foreboding in which he had tapped about for weeks had lifted. He found himself on familiar terrain and felt himself equal to every challenge.

Relieved, almost elated, he sprang from his bed, pulled the bell rope, and ordered the drowsy valet who staggered into his room to pack clothes and provisions because at daybreak he intended to set out for Grenoble in the company of his daughter. Then he dressed and chased the rest of the servants from their beds.

In the middle of the night, the house on the rue Droite awoke and bustled with life. The fire blazed up in the kitchen, excited maids scurried along the corridors, servants dashed up and down the stairs, in the vaulted cellars the keys of the steward rattled, in the courtyard torches shone, grooms ran among the horses, others tugged mules from their stalls, there was bridling and saddling and running and loading—one would have almost believed that the Austro-Sardinian hordes were on the march, pillaging and torching, just as in 1746, and that the lord of the manor was mobilizing to flee in panic. Not at all! The lord of the manor was sitting at his office desk, as sovereign as a marshal of France, drinking
café au lait
and providing instructions for the constant stream of domestics barging in on him. All the while, he wrote letters to the mayor, to the first consul, to his secretary, to his solicitor, to his banker in Marseille, to the Baron de Bouyon and to diverse business partners.

By around six that morning, he had completed his correspondence and given all the orders necessary to carry out his plans. He tucked away two small travelling pistols, buckled on his money-belt and locked his desk. Then he went to awaken his daughter.

By eight o’clock, the little caravan was on the move. Richis rode at its head; he was a splendid sight in his gold-braided, burgundy coat beneath a black riding coat and black hat with jaunty feathers. He was followed by his daughter, dressed less showily, but so radiantly beautiful that the people along the street and at the windows had eyes only for her, their fervent ahs and ohs passing through the crowd while the men doffed their hats—apparently for the second consul, but in reality for her, the regal woman. Then, almost unnoticed, came her maid, then Richis’s valet with two pack horses—the notoriously bad condition of the road to Grenoble meant that a wagon could not be used—and the end of the parade was drawn up by a dozen mules laden with all sorts of stuff and supervised by two grooms. At the porte du Cours the watch presented arms and only let them drop when the last mule had tramped by. Children ran behind them for a good little while, waving at the baggage crew as they slowly moved up the steep, winding road into the mountains.

The departure of Antoine Richis and his daughter made a strange but deep impression on people. It was as if they had witnessed some archaic sacrificial procession. The word spread that Richis was going to Grenoble, to the very city where the monster who murdered young girls was now residing. People did not know what to think about that. Did what Richis was doing show criminal negligence or admirable courage? Was he daring or placating the gods? They had only the vague foreboding that they had just seen this beautiful girl with the red hair for the last time. They suspected that Laure Richis might be lost.

This suspicion would prove correct, although the presumptions it was based upon were completely false. Richis was not heading for Grenoble at all. The pompous departure was nothing but a diversionary tactic. A mile and a half north-west of Grasse, near the village of Saint-Vallier, he ordered a halt. He handed his valet letters of attorney and transmittal and ordered him to bring the mule train and grooms to Grenoble by himself.

He, however, turned off with Laure and her maid in the direction of Cabris, where they rested at midday, and then rode straight across the mountains of the Tanneron towards the south. The path was an extremely arduous one, but it allowed them to circumvent Grasse and its basin in a great arc and to arrive on the coast by evening without being recognized…. The following day—according to Richis’s plan—he would ferry across with Laure to the Îles de Lérins, on the smaller of which was located the well-fortified monastery of Saint-Honorat. It was managed by a handful of elderly but quite able-bodied monks whom Richis knew very well, since for years he had bought and resold the monastery’s total production of eucalyptus cordial, pine nuts and cypress oil. And there in the monastery of Saint-Honorat—which except for the prison of Chateau d’If and the state prison on the Île Sainte-Marguerite was probably the safest place in Provence—he intended to lodge his daughter for the present. But he would immediately return to the mainland, this time circumventing Grasse, on to the east via Antibes and Cagnes, and arrive in Vence by evening of the same day. He had ordered his secretary to proceed there in order to prepare the agreement with Baron de Bouyon concerning the marriage of their children Laure and Alphonse. He hoped to make Bouyon an offer that he could not refuse: assumption of his debts up to 40,000 livres, a dowry consisting of an equal sum as well as diverse land holdings and an oil mill near Maganosc, a yearly income of 3,000 livres for the young couple. Richis’s only conditions were that the marriage should take place within ten days and be consummated on the wedding day, and that the couple should thereafter take up residence in Vence.

Richis knew that in acting so hastily he was driving the price excessively high for the union of his house with the house of Bouyon. He would have got it cheaper had he waited longer. The baron would have begged for permission to raise the social rank of the daughter of a bourgeois wholesaler through a marriage to his son, for the fame of Laure’s beauty would only grow, just as would Richis’s wealth and Bouyon’s financial miseries. But what did that matter! His opponent in this deal was not the baron, but the unknown murderer. He was the one whose business had to be spoiled. A married woman, deflowered and if possible already pregnant, would no longer fit into his exclusive gallery. The last mosaic stone would be tarnished, Laure would have lost all value for the murderer, his enterprise would have failed. And he was to feel his defeat! Richis wanted to hold the wedding ceremony in Grasse, with great pomp and open to the public. And even if he could not know his adversary, would never know him, he would take personal pleasure in knowing that he was in attendance at the event and would have to watch with his own eyes as that which he most desired was snatched away from under his nose.

The plan was nicely thought out. And once again we must admire Richis’s acumen for coming so close to the truth. For in point of fact the marriage of Laure Richis to the son of the Baron de Bouyon would have meant a devastating defeat for the murderer of the maidens of Grasse. But the plan was not yet carried out. Richis had not yet rescued his daughter by marrying her off. He had not yet ferried her across to the safety of the monastery of Saint-Honorat. The three riders were still passing through the inhospitable mountains of the Tanneron. Sometimes the path was so bad that they had to dismount from their horses. It was all going too slowly. By evening, they hoped to reach the sea near La Napoule, a small town west of Cannes.

At the same time that Laure Richis and her father were leaving Grasse, Grenouille was at the other end of town in the Arnulfi workshop macerating jonquils. He was alone and he was in good spirits. His days in Grasse were coming to an end. His day of triumph was imminent. Out in his cabin was a crate padded with cotton, in it were twenty-four tiny flacons filled with drops of the congealed aura of twenty-four virgins—precious essences that Grenouille had produced over the last year by cold-oil enfleurage of their bodies, digestion of their hair and clothes, lavage and distillation. And the twenty-fifth, the most precious and important of all, he planned to fetch today. For his final fishing expedition, he had at the ready a small pot of oils purified several times over, a cloth of finest linen, and a demijohn of high-proof alcohol. The terrain had been studied down to the last detail. The moon was new.

He knew that any attempt to break into the well-protected mansion on the rue Droite was pointless. Which was why he planned, just as dusk fell and before the doors were closed, to sneak in under his cover of odourlessness, which like a magic cape deprived man and beast of their perceptive faculties, and there to hide in some nook of the house. Then later, when everyone was asleep, he would follow the compass of his nose through the darkness and climb up to the chamber that held his treasure. He would set to work on it with his oil-drenched cloths right then and there. All that he would take with him would be, as usual, the hair and clothes, since these could be washed directly in rectified spirit, which could be done more conveniently in the workshop. He estimated it would take an additional night to complete the production of the pomade and to distil the concentrate. And if everything went well—and he had no reason to doubt that everything would go well—then by the day after tomorrow he would possess all of the essences needed for the best perfume in the world, and he would leave Grasse as the world’s most fragrant human being.

Around noon he was finished with his jonquils. He doused the fire, covered the pot of oil and stepped outside of the workshop to cool off. The wind was from the west.

With his very first breath, he knew something was wrong. The atmosphere was not as it should be. In the city’s aromatic garb, that veil of many thousands of woven threads, the golden thread was missing. During the last few weeks the fragrance of that thread had grown so strong that Grenouille had clearly discerned it from his cabin on the far side of the town. Now it was gone, vanished, untraceable despite the most intensive sniffing. Grenouille was almost paralysed with fright.

She is dead, he thought. Then, more terrifying still: someone else has got to her before me. Someone else has plucked my flower and taken its odour for himself! He could not so much as scream, the shock was too great for that, but he could produce tears that welled up in the corners of his eyes and suddenly streamed down both sides of his nose.

Then Druot, returning home from the Quatre Dauphins for lunch, remarked in passing that early this morning the second consul had left for Grenoble together with twelve mules and his daughter. Grenouille forced back the tears and ran off, straight to the porte du Cours. He stopped to sniff in the square before the gate. And in the pure west wind, unsullied by the odours of the town, he did indeed find his golden thread again, thin and fragile, but absolutely unmistakable. The precious scent, however, was not blowing from the north-west, where the road leads towards Grenoble, but more from the direction of Cabris—if not directly out of the south-west.

Grenouille asked the watch which road the second consul had taken. The guard pointed north. Not the road to Cabris? Or the other one, that went south toward Auribeau and La Napoule? Definitely not, said the guard, he had watched with his own eyes.

Grenouille ran back through town to his cabin, packed linen, pomade pot, spatula, scissors and a small, smooth club of olive wood into his knapsack and promptly took to the road—not the road to Grenoble, but the one to which his nose directed him: to the south.

This road, the direct road to La Napoule, led along the foothills of the Tanneron, through the river valleys of the Frayére and Siagne. It was an easy walk. Grenouille made rapid progress. As Auribeau emerged on his right, clinging to the mountains above him, he could smell that he had almost caught up with the runaways. A little later and he had drawn even with them. He could now smell each one, could smell the aroma of their horses. At most they were no more than a half-mile west of him, somewhere in the forests of the Tanneron. They were holding course southwards, towards the sea. Just as he was.

Around five o’clock that evening, Grenouille reached La Napoule. He went to the inn, ate and asked for cheap lodging. He was a journeyman tanner from Nice, he said, on his way to Marseille. He could spend the night in a stall, they told him. There he lay down in a corner and rested. He could smell the three riders approaching. He need only wait.

Two hours later—it was deep dusk by then—they arrived. To preserve their disguise, they had changed costumes. The two women now wore dark cloaks and veils, Richis a black frock coat. He identified himself as a nobleman on his way from Castéllane; in the morning he wanted to be ferried over to the Îles de Lérins, the innkeeper should make arrangements for a boat to be ready by sunrise. Were there any other guests in the house besides himself and his people? No, said the innkeeper, only a journeyman tanner from Nice who was spending the night in a stall.

Richis sent the women to their room. He was going out to the stalls, he said, to get something from the saddlebags. At first he could not find the journeyman tanner, he had to ask a groom to give him a lantern. Then he saw him, lying on some straw and an old blanket in one corner, his head resting on his knapsack, sound asleep. He looked so totally insignificant that for a moment Richis had the impression that he was not even there, but was merely a chimera cast by the swaying shadow of the lantern candle. At any rate, Richis was immediately convinced that there was no danger whatever to fear from this almost touchingly harmless creature, and he left very quietly so as not to disturb his sleep and went back into the inn.

He took his evening meal in his own room along with his daughter. He had not explained the purpose and goal of their journey to her, and did not do it even now, although she asked him. Tomorrow he would let her in on the secret, he said, but she could be certain that everything that he was planning and doing was for her good and would work towards her future happiness.

After their meal they played a few games of
l’hombre
, which he lost because he was forever gazing at her face to delight in her beauty instead of looking at his cards. Around nine o’clock he brought her to her room, directly across from his own, kissed her good night and locked the door from the outside. Then he went to bed himself.

He was suddenly very tired from the exertions of the day and of the night before and equally very satisfied with himself and how things had gone. Without the least thought or care, without any of the gloomy suspicions that until yesterday had plagued him and kept him awake every time he had put out his light, he instantly fell asleep and slept without a dream, without a moan, without a twitch or a nervous toss in his body back and forth. For the first time in a good while, Richis found deep, peaceful, refreshing sleep.

Around the same time, Grenouille got up from his bed in the stall. He too was satisfied with how things were going and felt completely refreshed, although he had not slept a single second. When Richis had come to the stall looking for him, he had only feigned sleep, augmenting the impression of obvious harmlessness he already exuded with his odour of inconspicuousness. Moreover, in contrast to the way in which Richis had perceived him, he had observed Richis with utmost accuracy, olfactory accuracy, and Richis’s relief at the sight of him had definitely not escaped him.

And so at their meeting each had convinced himself of the other’s harmlessness, both correctly and falsely, and that was how it should be, Grenouille thought, for his apparent and Richis’s true harmlessness made it much easier for him, Grenouille, to go about his work—an opinion that, to be sure, Richis would definitely have shared had the situation been reversed.