The Book of Lost Fragrances: A Novel of Suspense (33 page)

On every job, there were always stops and starts. But there were usually breakthroughs. If they didn’t come, you made them happen. So far there had been only stops.

She pointed to the laptop he had opened.

“Any luck getting information about the guy?” she asked him.

“Loads. Yeah. Malachai Samuels. He’s a past-life therapist from New York City.”

“Someone else who’s after the damn pottery,” Valentine said. “So do you think he’s still there alone?”

“Yeah. It’s too quiet for there to be three people there. Even if they were all just sitting around.”

“Where did they go, William? Where do they think L’Etoile is?”

He handed Valentine the computer. “I got this, too. You’re not going to like it much.”

Was it her imagination, or did he sound slightly pleased?

She looked down. It was a blueprint. It took her only a few seconds to recognize the mansion across the street. There were two exits. The door to the shop. The door to the house. A courtyard in between. A wall around the courtyard.

“No exits other than the two we have under surveillance,” William said.

She bit into the shiny red apple. “Well, they aren’t being helicoptered out.” The fruit tasted mealy. She threw it on the floor with the rest of the mess that had been accumulating. Rubbed her eyes. “We have to create some kind of diversion. Force her out of the house. And take her.”

“The police aren’t going to let her out of their sight.”

She was so sick of William. Of his negativity. Of his high-pitched, whiny voice. Of his habit of clearing his throat before he spoke. Of his red-rimmed eyes.

The wrong partner had lived. She wanted François back. She tried to think. What would her mentor tell her to do?

A melody might be set, but you could change the key. The tempo. You could always riff.

The hair against the back of her neck was making her hot. The collar of her T-shirt was damp.

Riff.

Forty-one

1:10 P.M.

Through a crack in a wall, Jac and Griffin watched a group of four women and two men, all wearing dark robes, pass through a narrow corridor. Their faces were in shadows, hidden by their hoods.

Jac tried not to move. Not to breathe. Afraid to alert the strangers to her presence. On the internet, she’d read about the artists and musicians, drug users, and adventurers who visited the catacombs. Among the cataphiles were satanic groups who, for centuries, had been using the stone galleries to hold ceremonies.

Is that who these people were? What if they knew they’d been seen? What if they discovered her and Griffin? Were they dangerous? What if they’d already found Robbie? Would they have hurt him?

The group moved slowly. Their progress through the tunnel seemed endless.

Finally the corridor was empty again. Footsteps no longer echoed in the rock cavern. Jac started to step forward. Griffin reached out and held her back, his hand on her shoulder.

“Let’s just make sure they are gone,” he whispered.

Five minutes later, certain enough time had passed, Griffin nodded. “Okay. Let’s get going.”

The path ahead was wide but arduous. Jac and Griffin crawled side by side through the pebbles as the passageway twisted and turned. Finally, they reached an opening.

As she dropped down into the next room, Jac sensed something here was different. But before she had time to look around, before she even saw him, she heard his voice echoing in the small rock chamber.

“I knew it!” Robbie laughed as he ran to her. “You always were such a wonderful puzzle solver.”

Jac threw her arms around her brother. They’d followed a faint clue into an impossible place and found him! He held onto her just as tightly.

Robbie smelled of the underground. Of the same mold and dust and death smell that she’d been inhaling for the last hour. Slightly vinegary. Definitely unpleasant. But that hardly mattered. The path to reaching her brother had been treacherous. She and Griffin had dislodged rock and bones, but they were here.

When she pulled back, she saw dried blood on his cheek. His shirt was filthy and ripped. “Are you hurt?”

He shook his head. “Why?”

“You’re scratched. On your face.”

“I suppose I brushed against some rock. In the beginning, I was moving so fast.”

“But you’re all right?” She couldn’t take her eyes off him. She wanted to put her fingers on his wrist and feel his pulse. To be certain. She’d been so afraid of what might have happened, of what might have been.

“It’s all right.” He put his arm around her. “I’m all right, Jac.”

She rested her head on his shoulder. Closed her eyes for a minute.

“You can stop worrying about me now.” He rubbed her back. “I didn’t want to scare you, but it was impossible to get a message to you any sooner or any other way.”

She smiled. He was always so good at reading her.

“Did you know who the man in the studio was? Robbie, he’s dead. You know that he’s dead?”

“He wasn’t supposed to die. But he had a gun. He was going to kill me if I didn’t give him the pottery. I burned just enough to knock him out.” His voice was trembling.

Griffin pulled a bottle of water out of his knapsack and handed it to him.

“Have some. There’s time to go over everything that happened.”

Gratefully, Robbie unscrewed the cap and gulped down half the bottle.

“How did you know about this place?” Jac asked.

“Come, there’s a table and chairs in the next chamber—we can all sit down. I can explain everything. And you can tell me what’s going on. It’s unsettling being a hunted man.”

“A table? Chairs?” Griffin asked.

“Come see. There are beds down here, too. Ways to cook food. An entire universe if you know where to look.”

Sure enough, there was a stone slab in the next room and makeshift benches made from tombstones piled on top of each other. At first Jac didn’t want to sit. These were sacred stones. Memorials. But after Griffin and Robbie did, she sat as close to her brother as she could. And while they talked she kept reaching out to touch him. To finger the rip on his sleeve, to stroke his arm.

“Have you been down here since Monday night?” Griffin asked.

“More or less. I came down here first. Then took a train to the Loire Valley.”

“At first I thought you were—that you’d drowned.”

He put his hand on his sister’s arm and leaned toward her. “I’m sorry,” he said again. “I couldn’t think of any other way. I needed to make them think that so they’d direct their attention somewhere else.”

“And pick a place that would itself serve as a message?” she asked.

He nodded. “Do the police think that I’m dead?”

“They aren’t sure. Marcher—he’s the detective in charge of the case—isn’t convinced. How did you find this place? Did Grand-père show you?”

Robbie nodded and pulled out a wadded-up paper from his pocket. Unfolding it, he laid it on the tabletop and smoothed it out.

He was always so careful with things.

The map was an unwieldy two-foot square, creased, worn, and stained. “We started coming down here after you moved to America. He gave me the map and let me guide him, so I’d learn how to navigate. He said everyone needed to have a safe place.

“We explored for hours. He hadn’t been down since the war and would tell me stories about the resistance as we retraced his steps.”

“He climbed down the tunnel? He was in his seventies!” Jac was astonished.

“I know. He was incredibly agile.”

“What an amazing adventure you had with him,” Griffin said. Jac recognized the ache in her ex-lover’s voice. Griffin was bitter about his own family. He’d lost his grandparents when he was young and barely knew his father.

Robbie nodded. “I had no idea how important it would be for me to know my way down here. When I was a teenager, I got friendly with a group of cataphiles—musicians who used one of the chambers as a theater and gave performances a few nights a month. There’s a universe here. There’s art. And history. The macabre. And the sacred. With a million hiding places. There used to be so many ways to get in and out. But the city has closed off most of the exits. It took me three tries before I found an exit other than through the maze.” He pointed to a spot on the map that was in the fourteenth arrondissement. “I used this one.”

“Do the police troll down here?” Griffin asked.

“Too much going on aboveground. Besides, the people down here are harmless. Rebellious artists and amateur explorers. Misfits and fringe groups. People who feel like they don’t belong anywhere else.”

Then I should feel at home here, Jac thought and told him about the hooded people they’d seen.

“Where are we?” Griffin asked pointing to the map.

Robbie put his finger on a spot. “Here.”

“How easy is this place to find?” Griffin asked.

“Not easy.” Robbie drew a line with his finger. “There are two ways in and out of this chamber.” He gestured to one. “The way you came, and this way.” He pointed. “This dead-ends at another one of those narrow fissures. It’s possible to pass through it, but not without getting scratched up. And then, once you get through, you’re in a kind of bone dump—thousands of them piled on top of each other. To get across the chamber, you have to climb over them. They move under you, shifting and crumbling.” He stopped.

The memory of the excursion was obviously upsetting.

“And on the other side of that room?” Jac asked.

“A series of vaulted chambers that are fairly uninteresting, and then you reach another cave. I got through there on my belly. There are enough other passages down here. It’s pretty unlikely anyone would randomly choose to go through those obstacles.”

“But they could?” Jac asked. “If they were looking. If they had, say, a dog that had picked up your scent.”

“They could.” Robbie shook his head. “But that’s far fetched.”

“No, it’s not. You’re wanted by the police.” She heard her own voice wavering between anger and hysteria.

“I didn’t know what else to do. Fauche had a gun. He wasn’t a journalist.”

“And he would have killed you for the pottery shards,” Griffin said softly to Robbie. “You did the right thing.”

“Why would he have killed you for them?” pressed Jac. “And where are they?”

Robbie took off a deep-purple ribbon he wore around his neck. Hanging from it was a velvet pouch of the same royal color. It was packaging from the L’Etoile line. Used for the smaller bottles of perfume.

“So you have had them all along. Marcher asked if I knew where they were,” Griffin said, as Robbie tore apart the bubble wrap and revealed the turquoise, white and coral pot shards.

Jac, who’d never seen them before, leaned over to inspect the items. In her search for the roots of myths, she’d handled thousands of precious objects. These were neither the most magnificent nor the most interesting.

“They’re just ordinary pot shards,” she said.

“Not ordinary,” her brother argued.

“Oh, Robbie.” She was tired from the stress of the last few days. Had barely slept. Or eaten. Had done little but worry. Jac was exhausted, and her brother’s idealism frustrated her.

“This is crazy. These don’t matter enough for you to put your life in danger. It’s just a story. It’s make-believe, for Chrissakes.” She was angry at her brother for being such a romantic and having such grandiose dreams. But even as she vented her frustration, she became aware of something else happening on another level. Something about these pieces of clay that drew her to them. It was their scent.

Shutting her eyes, Jac concentrated on the foreign yet familiar aroma. This was the same scent she’d smelled so many times in the workshop. There it was mixed up with a hundred other threads. Here, isolated in this stone chamber, it was unfettered.

The scents in the old glass vials in Malachai’s cabinet of curiosities all shared this dense amber base. This variation, however, was more complex.

“Can you smell it?” Robbie whispered.

She looked up. Nodded. “Can you?”

Robbie’s face clouded. “No. Not really.”

Jac turned to Griffin. “Can you?”

“No. All I can smell is the dust. But then again, your brother says I have an immature nose.”

Jac smiled.

“If anyone can figure out what this scent is made of, it’s you,” Robbie said to her. “We know four of the ingredients, for sure. We need to know what the others are. Can you tell?”

“What difference will it make? It’s some smell that one of our ancestors impregnated into the clay. It’s a made-up story. You’re chasing a dream.”

“All perfume is a dream. What do you smell?” he persisted.

She shut her eyes and inhaled again, even more deeply. Took everything into her nostrils. Griffin’s scent, her brother’s stink. The ancient aroma she was drawing out of the clay. She separated them. “Frankincense. Blue Lily.”

In the distance she could hear water dripping from a ceiling and the gentle
plop
it made as it splashed in the puddle. It was an even rhythm. One drop after another. Steady. Continuing. Water. Falling. Water. The drip of the water. An even, calming sound.

Forty-two

ALEXANDRIA, EGYPT, 32 BCE

There was a fountain in the center room of his workshop, and Iset liked to lie there after she and Thoth made love. Smell the clouds of perfume. Listen to the splashing. Sometimes she fell asleep while he went back to work. He’d let her nap until it was almost time for him to perform the evening rituals. Then she’d clean herself off and hurry home. If she was missed, if her husband sent servants looking for her, if she was found and her infidelity was discovered, her husband could have her put to death. A nobleman had that privilege.

The sound of many footsteps approaching startled her wide awake.

“Who’s here?” She looked anxiously at her lover. “Were you expecting anyone?”

Thoth shook his head. “Hurry to the storeroom. Wait there,” he whispered.

Quickly, Iset got up, wrapped her linen gown around her naked body and ran to the far end of Thoth’s laboratory. Opening the door, she slipped inside.