The Book of Lost Fragrances: A Novel of Suspense (48 page)

triads
Originally Triads were Chinese resistance forces who opposed the Manchu rule. In the 1760s they formed the Heaven and Earth Society in order to overthrow the Qing Dynasty. The society then branched out into many smaller groups, adopting the triangle as their symbol, and going on to exert influence throughout China. In reference to that symbol, the British colonial authorities in Hong Kong coined the term “triad” to describe organized crime syndicates.

In 1949, when the Communist Party came to power in China and law enforcement became more stringent, the triad society members began to migrate. Since the 1880s they have been engaged in counterfeiting. Today, they are active in many regions with significant Chinese populations. They are known to engage in prostitution, extortion and money laundering.

tulpa
A mystical concept of a being or object that materializes through willpower, based on the ancient idea of mind transmission. The term originated with Alexandra David-Néel, a Belgian-French explorer and spiritualist who entered Tibet when it was forbidden to foreigners. She claimed to have created a
tulpa
in the image of a monk who eventually took on a life of his own and needed to be destroyed.

Author’s Note

As with most of my work, there is a lot of fact mixed in with this fictional tale.

Cleopatra’s love of fragrance was legendary and she did in fact have a perfume factory. Archaeologists believe they found remains of it in the Dead Sea, thirty kilometers from Ein Gedi. According to Dioscorides, Homer and Pliny the Elder, the Egyptian queen kept a record of her favorite fragrances and cosmetic formulas in a book called
Cleopatra gynaeciarum libri.

No known copy of the book exists today.

Napoleon, who was sensitive to scent, did go to Egypt in the late 1700s and while there explored the pyramids with an army of savants; there is no record of a perfumer having accompanied him.

The history of perfume and the fragrance industry past and present, the Triads, the methods by which lamas are found and how monks study and live are all based on research.

That’s also true of Tibetan beliefs and rituals having to do with reincarnation, which are sadly being threatened by China’s rules requiring people to register to reincarnate.

Unfortunately, Xie’s story is rooted in history. In 1995, the Dalai Lama identified the next reincarnated Panchen Lama, a five-year-old boy named Gedhun Choekyi Nyima. Months later, the child disappeared. The Chinese government admits to taking Nyima and claims he is alive and living with his family in Tibet, but his whereabouts remain unknown and no foreign party has been allowed to see him.

While there is no Phoenix Foundation, the work done there was inspired by work done at the University of Virginia Medical Center by Dr. Ian Stevenson, who studied children with past life memories for more than thirty years. Dr. Bruce Greyson and Dr. Jim Tucker, a child psychiatrist, continue Ian Stevenson’s work today.

And then there’s Paris. I’ll never be able to do her justice. What a magical city. If you visit, do voyage down to the catacombs. They are moving, fascinating and yes, a little frightening. Afterward, stop at Café Marly for a glass of wine and then on to L’Orangerie—Claude Monet’s paintings are truly breathtaking.

Acknowledgments

To my editor, Sarah Durand, an author’s dream: insightful, wise, patient and sensitive.

To my agent, Dan Conaway—for so many reasons—this wouldn’t be
The Book of Lost Fragrances
without you.

To my sorcerer of scent—the blogger Dimitri—who opened the doors of the mysterious world of perfume. Thank you for your generous advice and all the vintage samples.

For the inspiration: thanks to the iconic Sophia Grossman, one of the great living perfumers, and the inventive and poetic Olivier Durbano.

To Frederick Bochardy for his wonderful fragrances, spirit of adventure and willingness to share his scents with me and with this book.

To the whole team at Atria Books—those I know: Hilary Tisman, Lisa Sciambra and Paul Olsewski, as well as all the people who worked on this book whom I haven’t had the chance to meet yet—I’m honored to be working with you.

To everyone at Writers House—from the always calming Stephen Barr to the charming Michael Mejias (one day I will open the right door!).

To the dream team—when you’re stuck with a plot point, character or just losing confidence—they’re incomparable and great friends all—Lisa Tucker, Douglas Clegg, C.W. Gortner and Steve Berry.

To readers, booksellers and librarians everywhere who make all the work worthwhile.

As always, to my dear friends and family. And most of all, Doug.

The Romance, the Passion . . . the Fascinating True Story Behind
The Book of Lost Fragrances

M.J. Rose

Several years ago I went to a
brocante
(flea market) in Cannes, France. It was a perfect morning to peruse antiques—warm with a little breezeto mingle the scent of fresh flowers with theseaside town’s fresh salty air.

One table that caught my attention offered anintriguing mix of items laid out as if they were resting on an elegant woman’s vanity.

Next to a shagreen jewelry box—opened to reveal strings of pearls—was a pair of fine, creamy white, kid gloves. Sunshine glinted off the silver trim of aturquoisecloisonnéhair brush set and illuminated the gold lettering on a group of leather bound books all about mythology.

There were also a dozen perfume decanters scattered around. Some were cut crystalwith fancy repoussésilver caps. Others were intricately sculpted pieces of glasswork—the kind created by Lalique and Baccarat in the late nineteenth and early twentiethcenturies.

Sadly, all the bottles wereempty with the exception of one, which had an inch of thick, dark perfume that coated the bottom. It was the least ornate flacon. A residue of glue was visible to show where a label had once been pasted. It was capped with agreen ceramic stopper shaped into a lotus—a flower that I recognized from Ancient Egyptian tomb paintings.

As I daydreamed about the woman who’d owned all these treasures, I picked up the bottle, uncapped it and sniffed.

In
Remembrance of Things Past,
Marcel Proust wrote about how the taste and smell of a madeleine returned him to his youth with an immediacy that nothing else ever had. For me it was the scent in that bottle that returned me to a day years before.

Suddenly I wasn’t in the square in front of the Hôtelde Ville in that French town but was sixteen years old, standing on the hill overlooking Bethesda Fountain in Central Park, talking to a boy who I’d just met.

He was telling me about Plato’s theory of soul mates.

And I was falling in love.

The scentin the bottle in the flea market was his scent. He was wearingcologne—discontinued before he was even born—that he’d found in a house his parents had rented one summer.

It had been so long since I’d even smelled it—or even thought of it. But suddenly everything about that meeting—learning about soul mates, being sure I’d found oneand the tall boy with the sly smile who had sadly long since died—came rushing back in that one inhalation.

The Book of Lost Fragrances
is very much a suspense novel weaving history into a tense hunt for an important treasure, but the theme for book—an ancient scent that would help people identify their soul mates—came to life that lazy day in the south of France.

I bought the very bottle from the antique dealer and it sits on a shelf with the rest of my perfume collection. I’ve never opened it again . . . I don’t want the scent to evaporate any more quickly than nature will insistupon.

It’s enough to know that memories lay captured inside and they were strong enough to inspire a novel.

Lip Service

A seductive novel that masterfully mines the relationship between sexuality and identity. . .

On the surface, Julia Sterling’s life seems blessed. Married to a renowned psychiatrist and living on Manhattan’s tony Upper East Side, Julia deeply loves her stepson and is forging a career as a journalist.

When a writing job exposes her to the world of phone sex, Julia glimpses a world that stirs her erotic fantasies but threatens her carefully constructed reality. As she explores her emotional and sexual connections to the men she knows and several she will never meet, she confronts evil, perversity, and her own passions.

Read on for a look at M. J. Rose’s

Lip Service

Currently available from Atria Books

Excerpt from
Lip Service
copyright © 2000 by M.J. Rose

One

ALEXANDRIA, EGYPT, 1799

Giles L’Etoile was a master of scent, not a thief. He had never stolen anything but one woman’s heart, and she’d always said she’d given that willingly. But on this chilly Egyptian evening, as he descended the rickety ladder into the ancient tomb, each tentative footstep brought him closer to criminality.

Preceding L’Etoile had been an explorer, an engineer, an architect, an artist, a cartographer, and, of course, the general himself—all the savants from Napoléon’s army of intellectuals and scientists now stealing into a sacred burial place that had remained untouched for thousands of years. The crypt had been discovered the day before by the explorer Emile Saurent and his team of Egyptian boys, who had stopped digging when they unearthed the sealed stone door. Now the twenty-nine-year-old Napoléon would have the privilege of being the first man to see what had lain lost and forgotten for millennia. It was no secret that he entertained dreams of conquering Egypt. But his grand ambitions went beyond military conquests. Under his aegis, Egypt’s history was being explored, studied and mapped.

At the bottom of the ladder, L’Etoile joined the assembled party in a dimly lit vestibule. He sniffed and identified limestone and plaster dust, stale air and the workers’ body odor, and a hint of another scent almost too faint to take in.

Four pink granite columns, their bases buried under piles of dirt and debris, held up a ceiling painted with a rich lapis lazuli and a silver astronomical star chart. Cut into the walls were several doors, one larger than the others. Here Saurent was already chiseling away at its plaster seal.

The walls of the antechamber were painted with delicate and detailed murals, beautifully rendered in earth-toned colors. The murals were so vibrant L’Etoile expected to smell the paint, but it was Napoléon’s cologne he breathed in. The stylized motif of water lilies that bordered the crypt and framed the paintings interested the perfumer. Egyptians called the flower the blue lotus and had been using its essence in perfumes for thousands of years. L’Etoile, who at thirty had already spent almost a decade studying the sophisticated and ancient Egyptian art of perfume making, knew this flower and its properties well. Its perfume was lovely, but what separated it from other flowers was its hallucinogenic properties. He’d experienced them firsthand and found them to be an excellent solution when his past rose up and pushed at his present.

The lotus wasn’t the only floral element in the paintings. Workers took seeds from sacks in storerooms in the first panel and planted beds in the next. In the following panel, they tended the emerging shoots and blooms and trees and then in progression cut the flowers, boughs, and herbs and picked the fruit. In the last, they carried the bounty to the man L’Etoile assumed was the deceased, and laid it at his feet.

As more plaster fell and chips hit the alabaster floor, Abu, the guide Saurent had brought, lectured the men about what they were seeing. Abu’s recitation was interesting, but the odors of perspiration, burning wicks, and chalky dust began to overwhelm L’Etoile, and he glanced over at the general. As much as the perfumer suffered, he knew it was worse for Napoléon. So great was the commander’s sensitivity to scent, he couldn’t tolerate being around certain servants, soldiers, or women whose smell disagreed with him. There were stories of his extended baths and his excessive use of eau de cologne—his private blend made of lemon, citron, bergamot and rosemary. The general even had special candles (they lit this dark chamber now) sent over from France because they were made with a wax obtained by crystallizing sperm whale oil that burned with a less noxious odor.

Napoléon’s obsession was one of the reasons L’Etoile was still in Egypt. The general had asked him to stay on longer so he could have a perfumer at his disposal. L’Etoile hadn’t minded. Everything that had mattered to him in Paris had been lost six years before, during the Reign of Terror. Nothing waited for him at home but memories.

As Saurent chipped away at the last of the plaster, the perfumer edged closer to study the deep carvings on the door. Here too was a border of blue lotus, these framing cartouches of the same indecipherable hieroglyphics that one saw all across Egypt. Perhaps the newly discovered stone in the port city of Rashid would yield clues as to how to translate these markings.

“All done,” Saurent said as he gave his tools to one of the Egyptian boys and dusted off his hands. “Général?”

Napoléon stepped up to the portal and tried to twist the still-bright brass ring. Coughed. Pulled harder. The general was lean, almost emaciated, and L’Etoile hoped he’d be able to make it budge. Finally, a loud creaking echoed in the cavern as the door swung open.