The Book of Lost Fragrances: A Novel of Suspense (9 page)

When he got closer, Robbie recognized that it was made of amber, a hardened resin that had oozed from the bark of trees millions of years ago. A highly coveted material, it glowed like a slow-burning fire.

“It’s magical,” Griffin said. One by one, he opened the small, perfectly crafted drawers revealing a priceless collection of amber pieces, insects and amphibians held hostage for all time. They seemed still alive—just about to move—from the smallest bug to a large spider poised as if waiting for an insect to fall into its web.

“Now for the pièce de résistance,” Griffin said as he opened the bottom drawer. Each of the dozen compartments, lined in chocolate velvet, had a depression in its center. Nestled within every hollow except the last was a crystal flacon decorated with an amber-and-silver top. Each contained a lake of viscous liquid. Perfume thickened by more than a hundred years.

“Can I smell?”

“Go ahead.”

Robbie lifted out the first, unscrewed it and sniffed. The scent was basic and primordial. Rich with frankincense—he sniffed again—and borage, storax and myrrh.

For a moment, he couldn’t catch his breath. The scent was almost agonizing. “What do you know about these?”

“They were an experiment funded by the founders of the Phoenix Club, who were on a constant search for fabled lost memory tools. One was supposed to be a fragrance that helped you enter a deep meditative state.”

“So you could remember your past lives?”

“That was their hope, yes.”

“Like our family legend.”

“What?” Griffin asked.

“Don’t you remember? One of my ancestors supposedly found an Egyptian ‘soul-mate’ perfume in Egypt. And a book of formulas—”

“From Cleopatra’s fragrance factory. Yes, I remember now. Your grandmother told me about it.”

“She loved the legend.” Robbie stopped to inhale the next sample. “You know these are all slightly different formulations of the same scent?”

“Is that meaningful?” Griffin asked.

“I don’t have any idea.”

“Are you getting bombarded by memories?”

“Not from a past life, but these are all familiar scents to me—essentials that go back as far as recorded fragrance history in ancient Greece, Egypt and India. All of them remain major popular ingredients today.” Robbie inspected the flacon, turning it in his hand, peering closely at the engraved markings. “Do you know where these bottles came from?”

“According to Malachai, the Phoenix Club commissioned a French perfumer to work on the formula in the 1800s.”

“The designs certainly fit French perfume bottles of that era.” Robbie removed the one he was holding up to the light. Turning it slowly, he examined the facets until he finally found something. Then he checked the next flacon. And the one after that.

“No one could convince me this is mere coincidence,” he said as he handed one to Griffin, pointing to an area near the bottom. “Do you see that?”

“Those scratches? Wait.” Griffin pulled his reading glasses down off the top of his head, put them on and peered closer. “I see it but can’t make it out. Let me get a stronger—”

“No, I know what it is. It’s a maker’s mark—hard to read unless you’re already familiar with it. Back then perfumers had different flacons made by glassmakers. A customer would pick out the one they preferred and have it filled with the fragrance they chose.” Robbie touched the silver-and-amber top.

“You recognize the mark, don’t you?” Griffin asked.

“I certainly do. It’s an
L
and
E
inside of a crescent moon. The numbers underneath are the date: 1831. It’s my family mark.”

“The House of L’Etoile? Your family’s firm? That’s impossible!” Griffin shook his head and laughed. “And to think there are people who doubt synchronicity and the collective unconscious.”

“You’re going to be even more astonished after you see what I brought to show you.” Robbie opened his briefcase, pulled out the file of photos of the pottery shards he’d found in his father’s mess, and handed them to Griffin.

After examining them, Griffin handed the photos back to Robbie. “It looks like late-period Egyptian, but to be sure, I’d really need to see the actual objects. Pieces of pottery aren’t worth much, though. Only a few thousand dollars. Maybe ten, depending on what the inscription says.” Griffin knew about the House of L’Etoile’s financial problems. “I’m sorry.”

Robbie shook his head. “
Pas de probleme.
I didn’t imagine these were worth enough to solve the crisis we are having. I told a friend of mine who is a curator at Christie’s about them, and she said pretty much what you said. If they were genuine, they’d be an interesting artifact, but pottery shards are not very valuable.”

“Then why do you want me to look at them?”

“I want you to help me translate them.”

“They’re probably just inscribed with a prayer for the dead.”

“I’d like to make sure.”

“Why’s that?”

“I found them in the workshop. And I’m sure they have something do with that soul-mate scent I mentioned.”

“In which case they could have some connection to the fragrance in these crystal bottles? Do you actually think you’ve found some sort of ancient memory tool, Robbie?”

“Even though I believe that everything, no matter how trivial it is, is connected to everything else and that there are no coincidences in life . . . something like this . . . it seems impossible, doesn’t it?”

Seven

PARIS, FRANCE
THURSDAY, MAY 19, 8:30 P.M.

Warned not to be late, Tom Huang hurried across the street while scanning the long block for number eighteen. The teahouse was in the section of Paris they called
Quartier Chinois,
but little about the area was as appealing as the appellation. Unlike the narrow streets and charming ambiance of old Paris, the thirteenth arrondissement’s Chinatown was overpopulated and overcrowded with skyscrapers and supermarkets. There were none of the chic cafés, charming florists, iconic boutiques and authentic bakeries that made so much of the city attractive. This wasn’t Huang’s Paris, and whenever he visited here, he felt oppressed. Especially during the day, when every ugly nuance of the blocks of buildings stood out in high detail.

At least now, at night, the blazing neon signs advertising everything from McDonald’s to traditional French fare offered some visual excitement that matched his mood. A clandestine meeting with the head of the Chinese underworld in Paris was not, even for Huang, a regular occurrence. But yesterday, after getting word through his spies that a curator at Christie’s had inspected fragments of an object purported to be a reincarnation memory aid, Huang had to act.

He finally found the restaurant squeezed in between a bank and a laundry. The small, shabby place was just one room, crammed with yellowed Formica tabletops and cracked red leather seats. The floor was a checkerboard of linoleum, the black and white tiles stained and faded. Despite the late hour, more than half the tables were filled with groups of Chinese men, drinking tea and talking—not French but a cacophony of different Chinese dialects. Hundreds of pieces of calligraphy—black characters with occasional touches of red—hung on the walls, and the glass covering them was smudged with years of restaurant grease.

Despite the visible signs of neglect, Huang felt reassured by the familiar incense of seeping tea, brewed flowers and spices and roasted rice and toasted barley. Huang circumnavigated the tables to the far-right corner, where a wizened man, bald and slightly hunched over, sat with his back to the wall. He was ordinary looking, wearing ordinary clothes. Yet this was the man who oversaw a network of tens of thousands of members, a sworn brotherhood engaged in a wide range of criminal activity specializing in smuggling, VAT fraud, drug trafficking, and more.

Huang paused as the waiter set down a glazed teapot. He’d been instructed to act as if he and the man were already acquainted, so he nodded his head, said hello, pulled out a chair, and sat down. On the table in front of him were thirteen white porcelain teacups arranged in a rectangle with one cup in the middle.

The ritual Huang was about to engage in was over three thousand years old and had been abandoned by most
Hak Sh’e Wui
bosses, but the head of this local black society—only Caucasians called them Triads—still engaged in the old customs. The ancient ceremony had been a way to test an unknown visitor and ascertain if he was a member of the secret society or not. It made sense in the days when there was no internet, telephone, or even a dependable mail system, but now it was just another of Gu Zhen’s idiosyncrasies.

Huang reached for the lone cup in the middle—in the Triad’s language telling the boss he was one of them, literally an insider.

Gu Zhen poured tea for himself and then for his guest. Huang watched, riveted by Zhen’s deliberately slow, teasing movement as he put the teapot back down. If he placed the spout facing Huang, it would mean the meeting was over, that he’d considered his request, didn’t trust him or was upset with him and wouldn’t give Huang his help or his blessing.

The spout was facing away from him. This meant his next step was to drain his cup and set it back on the table bottom up to send a signal that he wanted to discuss something. He did so.

Gu Zhen nodded. “I can help you,” he whispered in a low rasp. “But it will be expensive. We prefer not to deal outside of our regular businesses.”

“Money’s not an object. Our government doesn’t want this toy to get into the wrong hands.”

The old man raised his gray eyebrows. “Toy?” He said the word as if he tasted it and then took a sip of his tea.

Huang had been warned that it was in his best interest to respect the elder, engage in the tea drinking ceremony, and not exhibit any sign of impatience if he wanted to get the help he sorely needed to accomplish this mission. So here he remained, sipping tea from a small, stained porcelain cup, twenty minutes, eight kilometers and a world away from his elegant office in the Ministry for Foreign Affairs of the People’s Republic of China on Avenue George V.

“So what can you tell me about this toy, as you call it?” Gu Zhen asked.

“It’s supposed to be some kind of ancient tool to help people remember their past lives.”

“Which you think is a joke?”

“What I think isn’t important. The way we’re fighting this war, we’re not making headway. We have a situation with no end in sight. Buddhists are not giving up. The world is still on the side of the exiled Tibetans, even if most governments are afraid of us. We don’t want this unrest. We don’t want any more monks becoming martyrs by setting themselves on fire. The last thing we need is a rumor that there is a way to finally prove reincarnation.” Huang had heard of other portals that supposedly helped people connect with past lives. An ancient flute in Vienna. A cache of stones in Rome. The Chinese had been unable to get their hands on any of them. But according to information that came from his undercover connection in the Buddhist community, this one was here in Paris.

“If it were to get into the hands of the religious zealots, it would give them fuel. They broke the law two weeks ago. They claimed they found a reincarnated lama in Lhasa. Something expressly forbidden.” Huang spat out the words. “Every time they stage another so-called
peaceful
protest, they know we’re going to step in. Then the fighting starts all over again, and more monks martyr themselves. That brings the media. And it turns into an international circus. The Tibetans know that. That wolf in monk’s robes knows it. Two hundred people were killed in the last two weeks. And we all have the blood on our hands.”

“Who has this tool?” Gu Zhen asked. “And do you care what happens to him?”

Eight

NEW YORK CITY
FRIDAY, MAY 20, 11:20 A.M.

“In the middle of the nineteenth century one of my ancestors—along with some other members of the Phoenix Club—funded a project. Its goal was to identify a scent to help people remember their past lives,” Dr. Malachai Samuels said. Then, with a flourish, he handed Jac a deeply faceted crystal flacon, empty save for a quarter inch of viscous amber perfume.

As she took it, sunlight coming through the French doors leading to the courtyard set it aglow. Fiery sparks leapt onto the ceiling. Rainbows of refracted light danced.

When she was a little girl and her mother wanted to work on her poetry and the nanny was off or busy with Robbie, Audrey would sometimes take Jac down to the workshop.

Sometimes the doors to the garden were open. “The breeze clears out all my mistakes,” her father always said. And it did. On those days, Jac wouldn’t smell any perfume at all—just grass and cypress, along with whatever was in bloom: roses or hyacinth or peonies.

Louis would put cushions on the floor for her and then give Jac the carton filled with crystal bottles that had lost their stoppers and stoppers that had lost their bottles.

It was one of her favorite games.

Jac would position the glass and draw on the ceiling with the reflections.

“My light painter,” her father would say with delight and applaud her efforts.

That was one of the good memories of being with him, there in his workshop on the days when the sun and the breeze kept the strangers and their shadows away.

“Open it,” Malachai said, bringing her back to the present. “Smell it. I want to know what you think.”

The heavy silver cap studded with pieces of amber unscrewed easily. Jac bent her head and sniffed the mixture. The scent was ordinary. Frankincense and myrrh. Storax. It smelled like it looked—flat, lacking in luminosity and life.

“Do you know exactly how old this is?” she asked.

“According to the correspondence I found, it dates back to the 1830s.”

“And do you know who created it?”

“The Phoenix Club commissioned a perfume workshop in France to create the scent . . .”