Base Notes, page 18
Ice shifted in Beau’s glass, though he didn’t appear to have picked it up; perhaps he had only tightened his grip on it.
“Fair,” I said. “Beau?”
“I’ll have to think about it.”
“Also fair. But you don’t have much time. I can help you if you need it.”
“We’ll figure something out,” said Jane.
“I’m happy to workshop it, once you do.” I polished off my vermouth. “After you drop off the bodies, I’ll do what I need to and dispose of them. Without the corpses, they’ll have a hell of a time proving any connection to either of you.”
“Well then why can’t you do it?” Beau asked.
“I have done,” I said. “Many times. Which is why I know this is true. The issue here is not evidence but probable cause. Because of our history, I’m the more obvious suspect. And I doubt I’d stand up to intense scrutiny.”
“And we will?”
“If all goes well,” I said, “you won’t have to.”
There was a pregnant pause, loaded with anxiety. And then the timer rang, rattling against the fridge, where it was affixed by a magnet. Beau jumped up but looked momentarily lost until Jane said, “By the sink,” and his eyes fixed on a pair of oven mitts. He put them on, but they didn’t seem to solve whatever problem had him so distracted.
He pulled a soufflé out of the oven. The top was perfect, crisp and brown and flecked with pepper.
“Fuck,” he said. “I was gonna make a salad. It’ll fall now.”
“Shut up,” said Jane. “Just get some spoons.”
The soufflé was excellent: colored orange and lent smoky flavor by pimentón, it was bitter and milky with some kind of swiss cheese and crisped on the bottom with parmesan. It smelled like salt and skillet and the musk of lactic fermentation.
I want to take a moment here to step back from discussions of murder and mention Beau’s cooking. I know it interrupts narrative flow, but bear with me. It’s poignant and important.
I appreciate good food; with senses so finely tuned, how could I not? But the time it takes to shop and chop I have always found better spent elsewhere. And—this is embarrassing—I don’t have the patience to perfect it, nor the fortitude it would take to eat my failures. I’ve more than mastered one sensory skill. Don’t begrudge me outsourcing the other four to their respective experts. Aside from perfume storage, my refrigerator at the time was a classic New York wasteland, my diet composed largely of takeout.
Beau, meanwhile, was a jack-of-all-trades when it came to living luxe on a shoestring. An absolute whiz at making something out of, if not nothing, then at least very little. Think back on that brunch I described. Squash and pasta are cheap. Butter a little less so, but you’re likely to have it around. Same with eggs. Well-made domestic parmesan is almost as good as something stamped DOC. The wine with brunch came free. Jane probably knew where she could get good vermouth cheap, or at least from someone who would cut her a deal when the boss wasn’t looking. Still, it wasn’t the kind of thing I thought she’d do for herself—Beau injected indulgence into her life, where she would have pressed on in broke asceticism.
But it was luxury conjured up from staples, cheap ingredients, and other people’s generosity. The innovation must have taken so much effort. I always wonder if it tired him, this bricolage. How exhausting it must have been: a constant struggle to create the life he craved, MacGyver-like, out of thumbtacks and a twist of string.
Maybe it was much easier to sway him to our scheme than I imagined.
Perhaps it seems like a strange transition, from this conversation to coitus. But think of the way people laugh at funerals, or at the grisliest parts of horror films: a need for release that manifests—often inappropriately—in the face of mortality. Or maybe simply at the abject.
I suppose death does drive us to affirm life. But I find the latter set of psychological call-and-response much more interesting. The spike in fascination that accompanies a foul but intriguing smell. The morbid curiosity some people feel for gruesome or scatological acts. The focus of the news cycle on unimaginable sadism. Collectors of medical curiosities. Serial killer podcasts and their fan clubs. I had Beau cracking jokes by the end of the meal, and it wasn’t a big jump from humor to hedonism. Jane let him lead—it was interesting to watch how he drew her along, how his surrender gave her permission. I knew she did not need it, but she yielded to her own desires very differently when placed in a position of responsibility. I couldn’t help but think of how we’d fucked alone. I wanted that Jane back again.
Much later, she asked, “What about Giovanni?”
Beau lifted his head from her shoulder. “What about him?”
I sat up, parched by the radiator and the sex and stiff from clinging to the edge of a full bed never meant for three people. “I talked to him.”
“And?”
“Shit, is he in on this too?” Beau was up at that, and suddenly the whole thing had a sort of absurd slumber-party air. All we needed was some popcorn.
“There are three men I need dead and only two of you,” I said. Four I needed, really, but Eisner was a personal project.
“I kind of figured you’d get the third.”
Clearly Jane hadn’t told him everything. “If I could, I wouldn’t need your help. I had hoped Giovanni would pitch in, but—”
“What did I tell you?” asked Jane. She was still lying at her ease down the center of the bed. I noticed scraps of the gold polish on her toenails, remnants of the glossy coat she had applied for that fateful brunch.
God, it was almost Christmas.
Yes, and all my paperwork had cleared. My first shipment to Clairfield & Amos had gone across the Atlantic already, with more to follow soon. I would be stocked in Paris and Milan. Maybe even at that little shop in South Bank where I had smelled my first Bright House and started my career.
Online orders too had been ticking steadily up in the last month. If I had had more time or money for advertising, numbers might have been higher, but as it was, Leila and Barry kept up moderately active social media accounts and updated the website as often as necessary.
Maybe if the holidays went well for us I could give them a bit of a budget for sponsored content. Or even act on the idea of an intern I had briefly toyed with. Toyed with the idea. Not the intern.
“Vic.”
“Sorry,” I said, putting a hand on her foot. “Just woolgathering.”
“Who says that?” asked Beau.
Jane smirked. “Not normal people.”
“Fine, all right, I’m an idiot.” He slouched against the headboard. “Metzger didn’t bite? I always knew he was smarter than me. I bet you told him the empty-stomach thing and he backed the fuck out.”
“Things didn’t proceed to quite that point.”
“Does he know?” asked Jane. “What you’re up to?”
“Hard to say.”
“Jesus.” She pressed the back of her head into the pillow and looked hard at the ceiling. “Great, so now what?”
“I have the matter in hand,” I said. “Don’t worry.”
Jane cut her eyes at me, full of the same dubiety she had so recently aimed at the crown molding. “Careful. You’re starting to sound like him.” This with a wave of her hand toward Beau. He retaliated by flicking her nipple. A brief tussle ensued, and for a moment I thought we had passed through this sticky situation and might move on to something more interesting.
But once Jane had subdued Beau, she tossed her hair out of her eyes and asked, “Can you give me a timeline?”
“On Giovanni?”
A curt nod, to which I could only reply in negation: “But I’ll be able to soon.”
“Are you fucking kidding me?” Jane sat up now too, and if there had been popcorn, she would have thrown it. “You keep being like ‘wait, not yet,’ and then when you come down here to tell us ‘yes, do it now,’ you’re like ‘oh, but the third guy hasn’t committed yet.’ Fuck you, Vic! If I’m going to do this, it better actually come together for you. It’s a lot to put on the fucking line, for you to be like ‘it might not actually pan out.’”
“I have a plan,” I said. “I’ll get him.” I tried to touch her, but she slapped my hand away.
“The fuck you will,” she said. “I’m not moving on this shit until you tell me he’s locked down.”
She caught me looking over her shoulder at Beau and moved into my line of sight. “And neither is he.”
I took a deep breath and stilled my anger. They needed time to get their strategies together at any rate. I was sure I could land Giovanni, given another week or so. I had set those wheels into motion, and Eisner had promised to work fast. He wasn’t as desperate as me, but he was impatient and had the power to solve the problem. Or at least put pressure on the man who could.
“It’s being taken care of,” I said, as evenly as I could manage.
“Fine.” Jane snatched up a blanket and wrapped it around her chest, refusing to meet my eyes. “Let us know when he’s on board. But if you don’t get him, you don’t get us either.”
17
Notes de Tête: Cinnamon, Juniper, Gingerbread Spice
Notes de Cœur: Burnt Sugar and Scorched Almonds
Notes de Fond: Fry Oil, Charcoal Smoke
“I need it done by next week,” I told Eisner. No preamble. “A lot of my plans are riding on this.”
“I’m working as fast as I can.” I could hear him typing in the background, though I doubted he was working on this particular project. “Real estate moves fast, once it moves. The ball’s just been a little slow to get rolling on this one.”
“So shove it harder.”
“It’s the holidays,” he said. “I don’t care, but it’s the time of year when the secretaries start bringing in rum balls and nobody wants to talk business.”
“I’m glad you have such a festive company culture,” I said, with acidity. True, thanks to pre-Christmas purchasing across the pond, we had actually hit a sales target for the first time in what felt like a thousand years. But beyond that the holidays meant shoppers on the train and street closures for parades and pop-up markets. Both of which I could do without.
“Forgive me for asking,” said Eisner. “I wouldn’t normally intrude on your creative process but . . . I just don’t see what our divesting of this building has to do with perfume.”
“Well, Joseph . . .” Alone in my office, I leaned back in the dusty swivel chair. It squeaked. I thought of the perfectly calibrated Aeron in the conference room at EPY&Y. “What you’re asking me to do is unprecedented. You should have expected a few surprises along the way. Do you at least have some prospective buyers?”
“A few. It’s a great location. The problem is, nobody wants to go up against the city as far as demolition and permitting for new construction.”
“So make it worth their while. Lowball the property. You can afford it.”
“Vic—”
“If you want what you asked me for, I can’t negotiate on this.”
“Fine,” he said, his composure breaking at last. I could hear it in the word, and in the echo after he slammed down the phone.
I hoped he meant it. I hoped he could do it. I hoped that, once he did it, Giovanni’s morals would prove a little more flexible. Because anything will bend, once you break it in half.
It was a shame. Giovanni’s shop was in a lovely prewar building. Sculptural keystones, decorative brickwork, deco tile . . . all the works. The stuff they were putting up nowadays, whenever they tore down something old and elegant, wasn’t a patch on anything built before nineteen forty-five.
I had asked Eisner if his company could just raze the place, but he said he’d have a hard time pushing that through. Let him frame the property to Pearson as an inconvenience, he said, and he could have it sold to a developer ready with a wrecking ball in just a couple of weeks.
I didn’t have quite that kind of time. Or rather, he didn’t. And if I couldn’t meet his deadline, because he couldn’t get Pearson to punt this building to some megalomaniacal real-estate tycoon who wanted to build a mirrored excrescence amidst the Federal row houses of the West Village, because the secretaries were bringing in rum balls, it would not be his fault, but mine.
Funny old world, isn’t it?
Somehow, incredibly, we sold through what we had in stock at the lab, and two weeks before Christmas I found myself frantically decanting the newest batches of our staples.
Barry knew a woman who ran some kind of artist-collective booth at the Bryant Park holiday market who had been asking for weeks if she could stock our perfumes. We hadn’t had spare inventory while everything was going out to Europe, but Barry had been after me to plan for it in the next batch so here I was, a box of samples and full-size bottles on my knees, riding the F up to Forty-Second.
I had asked Barry to do it, and Leila. I had too much on my mind, and anyway, we had just found out the concentrations of musk ketone in one of our exports might trigger a review. But Leila was a dab hand at sweet-talking paper pushers, and Barry was out with a violent stomach flu I strongly suspected was a hangover in disguise.
I fucking hated holiday markets.
Guarding my precious cargo against errant shopping bags and elbows, I struggled to the surface and exited the subway into a soggy wind that hadn’t yet decided on rain or snow. Dirty piles of the latter were slopped over the curbs, remnants of last week’s plowing. Smoke from candied-nut carts made my nose burn and clung to my soft palate. It wasn’t exactly picturesque.
At the edges, the market seemed almost festive. Farther in, it became a mixture of quicksand and mosh pit. All to pick over mass-produced paisley pashmina scarves and eat some quickly cooling frites. Fry oil and fake cinnamon hung over the clouded breath of the crowd in a cloying fug. But I couldn’t deny there were a lot of people opening their wallets. It wouldn’t be a bad place to move merchandise. I just had to find the damn booth.
They all looked the same. I had texted Barry and emailed his contact, and I had a meeting time but not a precise location. I supposed the former was too ill and the latter simply assumed I would find her by the light of her unique and beautiful inventory. But everything was technicolor and brightly lit, and the Christmas carols played at maximum volume precluded calling out anyone’s name. If I could even remember this woman’s name.
In despair, I set my box on a miraculously empty table—only after checking that it didn’t wobble—and pulled out my phone. My service was essentially nonexistent. With growing irritation, I attempted to refresh my inbox over and over again, wincing as the shrieks of ice-skating children sheared through the stinking miasma of smoke and mist.
Everything finally updated, and I had at least the woman’s name, if not a good idea of where to look for her. I stowed the phone and picked the box back up, and then promptly almost dropped it when I looked up and saw Pippin Miles not ten feet away, staring straight at me.
Our eyes met. His mouth popped open. He looked like one of those ugly bearded fish you see wallowing in the mud on nature documentaries. I kept my jaw resolutely clenched and managed to smile at him. Even gave him a little finger wave around the corner of my box.
Of course, he started walking toward me.
“Mr. Miles,” I said. “What a surprise.” For me. Because for this to be coincidence seemed like too much. How long had he been tailing me?
“Of all the gin joints in all the world,” he said, offering one red and ungloved hand. “Merry Christmas.”
I had to put the box down again. He put his other hand over my knuckles in one of those shakes that feels condescending and a little too intimate. I was grateful again for my gloves.
“What brings you to this . . .” I wanted to say “mess” and couldn’t find a suitable substitution that encompassed all the awfulness of the market.
Miles apparently thought I had trailed off rather than stumbled. “My grandson wanted to go ice-skating,” he said. “And I have some last-minute shopping to do.” If it was a cover story, it came out with admirable ease. Of course it did. He was a professional. “How about you? What’s in the box?”
“Merchandise,” I said. “I’m here to sell rather than to buy. I just got a bit turned around looking for the person I’m supposed to meet. I can’t find her booth.”
“I’ve been around this place a million times in the last two hours. What’s she sell?”
“Oh, things by local artists. I don’t really know. She gave me a booth number, but hell if I can figure out what it means.”
“What’s the number?” asked Miles. “Come on. You help me, I’ll help you.”
I froze at that. “I’m afraid I’m awful at shopping for other people, Mr. Miles.”
He waved a hand. “No, no. Listen, I’m still on the Yates case, and I’m not making much headway. My buddy Jeff—retired NYPD detective, but he’s still got a couple of friends on the force—I was talking about it with him, just over a couple of beers, and he said, ‘What about that perfume kid, Fowler? You checked up on that lead again?’”
Everything after “NYPD” was diverted to a small white room in my brain, soundproofed against the klaxons that had started ringing insistently everywhere else. As within all soundproofed spaces, I could hear the words perfectly well, but something about them was dampened and they did not quite register as speech.
“I’ve been trying to get in touch with you,” he said, “but you’re hard to track down. You trying to avoid me? Don’t worry, I’m used to it.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. My own voice fell as flat on my ears as his had. The police had my name. “But the holidays have me absolutely swamped. You know how retail gets. It’s really the worst timing.”
“Sure, sure. Of course. No problem.” He put his hand on my shoulder, gave it a gentle pat, and started to steer me away from the table where I’d put down my box. I’m ashamed to say I let him. At least I had the presence of mind to snatch my samples and my merchandise back up. Glass rattled inside, and I could faintly smell a little juniper, a little spice. If you had to smell seasonal, it was better than fake cinnamon and fry oil.
