The Perfume Collector(92)
‘No, I’m perfectly serious. Ten thousand pounds and she’s yours.’
‘Ten thousand pounds!’ The man whistled. ‘That’s no small fee.’
‘She’s worth it.’
‘But how can you sell another human being? It’s impossible.’
Lamb shook his head. ‘If you buy the lead, my dear man, then you can have the dog for free.’
‘Dog? Lead? What is this? I don’t understand.’
Lamb clapped him on the back, a little too hard. ‘Unless you have the money, the rest is unimportant.’
The driver laughed awkwardly, and the conversation changed.
Valmont was incensed. He wanted to strangle him.
He was possessed by a painful, confused longing, charged with possibility. When Eva was close to him, he was satisfied, whole. But his desire to touch her was waning. Her scent was all he needed to satisfy and stimulate him. It filled his dreams, spurring him to new refinements in his art.
He formulated Auréole Noire, inspired by the fiery halo that seemed to burn around her that first night she visited him. It was, in fact, a variation on the theme of her own natural scent. An elaborate composition on the central aria of her smell.
Bright, icy clear and yet tender at the same time – built on the original idea of contrasting states that had inspired him with the rain. Top notes of velvety violet leaves, luxurious white flowers and light geranium, warmed to fiery depths, created from amber resins, smoky wood and smouldering dry citrus leaves. Underlying doses of ouhd and ambergris lent it a melting, shifting quality; metamorphosing from an apparition of pure light, to a burning dark core and back again. It was a scent that lacked coyness, made no concessions to charm. Like standing on the edge of a great and terrifying cliff, it was shocking, beautiful, sublime.
Something of Eva’s disturbing beauty, slow-burning sensuality and razor-sharp mind was reflected in it.
And yet he doubted himself.
No other perfume smelled even remotely like it. It was too bold, unorthodox, veering from one extreme to another without any mollifying middle notes; it assaulted the senses rather than seduced them. It had an unapologetic grandeur, ancient and iconic, like the hard, symmetrical face and staring unseeing eyes of Greek gods, carved in cold white stone.
Valmont realized with a sickening sense of fear and disgust that suddenly Eva’s opinion mattered more to him than his own.
No one, not even Madame Zed, had ever held such power over him.
His muse possessed him, saturated him the way water soaks into a flimsy cloth until the fabric is more liquid than solid.
He hid the perfume from her.
It was his first act of betrayal. And, his first true act of independence.
Then the actress Kay Waverley came to spend a fortnight by the sea.
Kay Waverley had flared into stardom seemingly from nowhere. And like many would-be sirens of the silver screen, she was tight-lipped about her origins. The studio claimed she’d been discovered working as a clerk at a Woolworths’ in Missouri, backing the story up with a photo spread of her visiting one such store, surrounded by awestruck, young women in uniforms. But here in Europe there were other rumours, rumours that her past was considerably less wholesome – that in fact she’d earned her living as a highly paid prostitute before she acquired the trappings of a Hollywood starlet. But nobody knew for sure either way.
The single fact that everyone agreed on was that she’d been the lover of the German film director Josef Wiener. He’d launched her career in the bizarre surrealist movie, Moon Dust, in which she’d received mixed reviews. Her one universal success had come from her portrayal of Salome in his film of the same name. But then he’d grown tired of her and replaced her with a beautiful young girl from Kentucky. (Some said that she was still a teenager at the time.) Alone and unattended, Waverley’s star flickered uncertainly in the Hollywood firmament. She moved from one lover to the next, from leading men to producers to scriptwriters. There were tales of morphine addiction after she’d fallen from her horse filming The Bandit of the West. She was replaced.
Now she’d taken up residence in one of the sprawling pale pink villas in the hills that surrounded Monte Carlo. Apparently she needed to rest her nerves. But the sudden presence of the Italian playboy and her former co-star Enzo Gotti made it unlikely that rest was what she was getting.
She appeared at the Grand Casino late one evening, dressed in a gold silk gown, her hair twisted inside a matching turban, escorted by Gotti and a coterie of his friends. She spoke very little French and almost no Italian and as a result seemed sullen in comparison to her companions, smoking steadily, rolling her eyes when autograph seekers approached, scanning the room nervously for more when they disappeared.