The Book of Lost Fragrances

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…”

She looked away from the bottle and back up at him. She guessed what he was about to tell her.

“The perfumer was the House of L’Etoile?”

He nodded.

“Robbie said I’d be surprised.”

“I hope delightfully so.”

“What an amazing coincidence.” As soon as she said it, she knew he was going to correct her.

“Synchronicity is not a coincidence,” said Malachai. “It is the governing dynamic that underlies all human experience throughout history. Concurrent events that seem to be coincidental often later turn out to be related.”

Jac waited for the lecture to conclude. “Is there a maker’s mark?” she asked.

Malachai proffered a magnifying glass. “It’s down here.” He pointed. “Until last week, I always thought that was the jeweler’s mark. Which I know now is why my research never generated results. It hadn’t occurred to me that the perfumer would have stamped it. Or that I’d have such a strong connection to the family of perfumers all these centuries later.”

He smiled, which for him meant his mouth moved the right way, but his eyes never reflected any of the emotions associated with smiling. You never sensed his pleasure or humor or kindness. He wore expressions like masks. But rather than make her feel uncomfortable, this made Jac feel safer and more grounded when she was around him.

It wasn’t his heart but his brain that had helped bring her back from the precipice of insanity sixteen years before.

Jac’s illness had reached its fevered pitch after her mother died. Nothing the battalion of doctors prescribed helped banish the delusions. The pills exhausted her and numbed her mind. The frightening machine that blasted her with electricity left her nauseated and confused. After six miserable months of all the accepted treatments, her grandmother stepped in and flew Jac to Zurich to the controversial Blixer Rath clinic.

This “last resort,” as her father had called it, was run by two disciples of Carl Jung who believed that curing whatever psychological disease Jac suffered had to begin with healing of the soul. Like his mentor, Rath believed that the psyche required mythic and spiritual exploration, along with low-dose medications only if completely necessary.

The traditional medical community was openly hostile to this holistic, soul-centered approach. During her nine months in the clinic, Jac took no drugs. Instead, she was exposed to in-depth analytic therapy designed to strengthen her own healing abilities. In order to understand the symbolism of her dreams and drawings done after deep meditative sessions-in order to translate her symptoms and recognize any possible synchronistic events in her life that might have a deeper meaning-Jac had to learn the universal language of the soul, as Jung called mythology. And the man who taught her that language and spoke it with her was Dr. Malachai Samuels.

On leave from his practice at the Phoenix Foundation, Malachai was at Blixer Rath as a Jungian therapist, not a reincarnationist. He never talked to any of his patients about possible past-life episodes. Only years later, reading a magazine article about Malachai, Jac realized he’d been at the clinic investigating his theory that a high percentage of schizophrenics were misdiagnosed and suffering from past-life memory crises.

“Can you tell the date from the mark?” Malachai asked. He peered over her shoulder while she examined the engraving.

“No. I don’t know as much about the history of these things as I should.”

Malachai shrugged. “That’s entirely all right. I didn’t ask you here to talk about the past, Jac. I want you to help me find it.”

The combination of the intensity of his gaze and his mellifluous voice was mesmerizing. He commanded her full attention. And offered back his own. She’d never known him to be distracted when he was talking to her. That was one of her first memories of him at Blixer Rath. She arrived there a frightened, malnourished teenager, scared of the shadows that haunted her awake and asleep. She couldn’t meet his eyes for more than a few seconds at a time. But when she did, he was always there, present, in her moment. He never once had looked away from her when they conversed. Not then. Not now.

In her therapy sessions in Zurich, and whenever she visited in the intervening years, she thought of him as a wizard who managed to suspend time. Here in his library, with its rare wood paneling, rich oriental carpet, and Tiffany glass lamps, it might be New York City a hundred years ago. It wasn’t just his surroundings. Malachai dressed and spoke formally, in a classic style that was neither dated nor modern. Today’s navy suit, carefully knotted silk tie and the monogram on his crisp white shirt suggested the wardrobe of a gentleman of an earlier time.

“Jac, let me build a perfume workshop for you here at the foundation. State of the art. Your show is on hiatus for the summer, isn’t it? Work here and create the fragrance your ancestors commenced working on but never finished. If you succeed, I’ll be able to pay you enough to secure the future of the House of L’Etoile.”

“Robbie told you about our financial problems?”

Jac’s grandmother had taught her never to discuss money outside of the family-not even with someone who mattered to her as much as Malachai-and it embarrassed her to do so now. She wished her brother’s email had contained more details about his meeting with the doctor.

“Yes, but I’d already read about it in the papers.”

Jac returned her attention to the crystal flask she was still holding and once more sniffed at the odd fragrance. She was astonished. Not by Malachai’s offer itself but by the faith he’d exhibited by making it.

“You’d go to all that expense to explore a fantasy?”

“You know as well as anyone that I don’t believe reincarnation is a fantasy.”

In the years since Blixer Rath, she had learned a lot about Malachai’s foundation and knew that he worked with thousands of children who remembered their past incarnations. He and his aunt, the other codirector, had documented the children’s journeys and presented remarkable proof of the lives they discovered in their regressions.

“Yes, but you operate as trained psychologists seriously searching for psychic DNA. Your investigations are carried out under strict and rigorous circumstances. You’ve fought to keep your work free of populist faddism. How does that track with something as fantastic as a perfume to help people remember their past lives?”

“Reincarnation is a fact,” replied Malachai. “A fact of life. Of death. And just as I know reincarnation is real, I know there are real tools that can aid in recovering past-life memories. I told you, didn’t I, that I was present when one of them caused a mass regression? Hundreds of people, all hypnotized at the same time, experiencing past-life memories. An astonishing moment. As close as we’ve ever gotten to proving reincarnation.”

“When you were shot? Yes, but you didn’t tell me-”

“I’m sure they exist,” he interrupted. “Aids. Tools, Jac…”

She’d never heard him so wistful. “Some of them are lost,” he continued, “some destroyed… But there are others still waiting to be discovered… They might not have been used since ancient days, but they exist. I know they do.”

His dark eyes gleamed. His lips parted. There was something akin to sexual longing on the therapist’s face.

He lusts after this information.

Jac crossed her arms over her chest. She’d known Malachai a long time. He was always in control. Unemotional. Reserved. Never this intense.

But, then, his life had become more intense in the past few years. Twice he’d been a suspect in different criminal cases involving stolen ancient artifacts, and he’d been referred to as a person of interest in a third. Because of Malachai, the Phoenix Foundation had been in the news more in the past few years than in the past few decades combined. Were these artifacts the memory tools he was talking about?

“You and your aunt have gained so much respect over the years from the scientific community for how careful you are with your research,” said Jac. “If you seriously pursue a perfume because you think it will help people remember their past lives, you’ll be putting the institute’s reputation at risk. And yours.”

He leaned back in his chair, and the expression on his face relaxed. He was once again the esteemed therapist in his well-appointed office. Confident, erudite and charismatic.

“In ancient times, priests burned incense because they believed souls traveled to the afterlife on the swirls of smoke. Mystics sniffed incense to enter into altered states so they could visit alternative dimensions. Certain cultures use scented oils to open the third eye so they can experience psychic perception otherwise unavailable to us.”

“I know the different ways fragrance has been used.”

“Then surely you can understand why I believe fragrance might aid us in accessing our past lives.”

“Even if I wanted to, I can’t help you. I’m not a perfumer, Malachai. I’m a mythologist. Why not offer Robbie the job? He believes in the things you do.”

“Robbie said that as good as he is, his nose is mediocre compared to yours. That you’ll be able to take this”-he held up the crystal flacon-“and intuitively know how to build out the fragrance from this base.”

Once, a lifetime ago it seemed, she’d wanted to be a perfumer. But that idea had died with her mother. Jac had an aversion to the idea of ever sitting down at a perfumer’s organ again.

Her grandfather had always said that she was the culmination of centuries of great perfumers-that she, not her father and not her brother, was destined to be one of the great noses. Robbie believed it too and sometimes admonished her that that she wasn’t doing the work she was born to do. He wondered why she’d turned her back on becoming the artist she was capable of being.

“My brother’s wrong about me, about my ability.”

“He seemed very certain,” Malachai said, and then added an aside: “I’m glad the two of you have remained so close. You have, haven’t you?”

She thought she heard something mournful in his voice. Or maybe it was her own projection because she and Robbie had been at odds these past few months, and she missed their easy camaraderie. Jac felt the pain of letting Robbie down. She hadn’t been able to conceive of a plan to solve the House of L’Etoile’s financial crisis without irrevocably disrupting the company.

Malachai was watching her. Waiting for a response.

“Yes, we’re still close.”

Sadness lurked in Malachai’s typically inscrutable brown eyes. What about this conversation was affecting him so much that he was letting his guard down? He’d never shown her this side of him. She’d never seen him in any kind of emotional distress. What was it? She knew he was unmarried and without children, but did he have a sibling? Was he estranged from a brother or sister? Or, worse, did he have a sibling who was ill or had died?

For someone who’d been so crucial in her life for so long, Malachai had kept Jac woefully ignorant about his personal life. He’d paid attention to and kept up with her career, much the way she imagined a proud father might. But like many fathers, he shared little about himself other than news of his work.

Malachai reached into his jacket pocket, pulled out a deck of playing cards, and began to shuffle. Jac found the slapping sound familiar and annoying.

“I’m not nervous,” Jac said.

She knew firsthand that when he worked with young patients, he used tricks to relax them.

He laughed. “Of course not, dear. Just a habit.” He held the deck out to her. “But please, indulge me.”

Jac took a card, noting the elaborately colored fleur-de-lis pattern and fine gilt edges. He had a huge collection. All antiques.

“These are beautiful.”

“From the court of Marie Antoinette. I think the most beautiful cards I have in my collection are from France.”

Jac shivered. It came from deep inside her, emanated out to the tips of her fingers, and raised the hair on the nape of her neck. She looked around for a reason for the sudden chill. The two windows on either side of Malachai’s desk were open.

“Are you cold?” he asked. His lips were lifted in a curious smile, as if he knew something about how she was feeling that she didn’t.

She shook her head. “It must have been the breeze.”

“Of course,” he said, but he sounded as if he didn’t believe her. “Would you like me to close the windows?”

“No, it’s fine.” She glanced into the small courtyard with its informal garden. The cherry, crabapple and dogwood trees were in bloom, and she enjoyed their faint, flowery scent. Her home in Paris featured a much larger courtyard that had functioned as a magical playground for her and her brother, an herb garden for the cook, and a natural laboratory for generations of perfumers who grew many of their own exotics.

“You still have no curiosity about whether or not you’ve had any past-life memories?” Malachai asked, leaning slightly forward, acknowledging the intimacy of the question.

“Still none.” Her answer came quickly. Even a little coldly. This was one area where she felt he sometimes overstepped his bounds. She hoped he wasn’t going to push her again. Jac wasn’t interested in the debate. She had enough of it with Robbie, who was a great believer. Nothing about the subject interested her.

“So if I were to find one of these memory tools, you wouldn’t be curious to test it out?”

“I respect you and what you do,” she said evenly. “I know the children who come to you are terribly unhappy and that you help them, and I’m proud that you can do that. Isn’t that enough? Do you need more than that from me?”

“Can I tempt you with the mythology of the memory tools?”

She wanted to object, but he’d mentioned the one subject that she couldn’t resist.

“It is believed that four to six thousand years ago, in the Indus Valley, mystics created meditation tools to help people go into deep states of relaxation during which they would have access to past-life memories.” Malachai’s voice lulled her, as it had so long ago, and she settled into the story.

“There were twelve tools-twelve being a mystical number that we see repeated all through various religions and in nature. Twelve objects to help pull memories through the membrane of time. I think, and other experts agree, that it’s quite possible two of these tools have been found in the past few years. The first was a cache of precious stones, and the second was an ancient flute made of human bone. Depending on what newspaper you read, what happened to those tools differs, but one thing I can assure you: both have been lost to research, and there’s nothing we can learn from either of them for now. It’s a travesty.”

“How were they lost?”

“Red tape. Ridiculous protocols. Accidents. Fate. Despite the fact that I spend my time helping people look back, I don’t believe in doing that in situations like this. What is past is past. I’m not going to lose any more chances to find the tools.” He paused and searched her face as if he were looking for something. When he resumed speaking, his voice had taken on more gravitas. “Over the past one hundred and fifty years, members of this society have heard about the tools, or met people who knew about them, or in some cases may have seen them or even owned them.” Malachai spread his arms wide, as if embracing the entire foundation. “One of the tools was a fragrance. And the stories I’ve heard about it are curiously similar to the family legend you told me about years ago.”

“Which you believe is a serious piece of synchronicity.”

“Which I know is. Nothing is an accident or a coincidence, according to past-life theories that go back though history, through the centuries, circling through cultures. If we were in the East, being skeptical about these moments that seem to be part of a bigger plan would be as unusual as questioning the wetness of water.”

Jac knew better than to argue. She’d done it before. Malachai would start naming all the geniuses who’d believed in reincarnation over the centuries, starting with Pythagoras and moving up to Benjamin Franklin, Henry Ford and Carl Jung.

“If you could discover a scent that works like a memory tool, it would be worth a fortune.”

He’d never seemed to care about money before, and she was surprised that he mentioned it. But then, so many aspects of today’s conversation were unexpected.

As if anticipating her question, Malachai said, “The money doesn’t matter to me. It would be yours. Enough for you to ensure the future of the House of L’Etoile. All I want is the memory tool.”

“To help the children?” Jac was certain there was more to his need. She wanted to know what it was.

“Of course.” He frowned. “Do you doubt that? I’ve spent my life trying to help them.”

She’d never suspected him of doing anything untoward; never doubted he had any but the most moral and principled motives. What was it about this conversation that suggested otherwise?

Jac lifted the flask to the light. An inch of rainbow appeared on Malachai’s white shirt cuff. She moved the glass container, and the rainbow leapt onto the wall.

“Was there anything in the letters about this formulation? Do you know what they based this scent on?” she asked.

“The letters I found are between two members of the society: one in New York and another who lived in France. The Frenchman wrote about a perfumer he’d met in Paris who had a remnant of an ancient scent that he believed was a portal to past lives. The foundation funded his efforts to create a new scent based on that remnant.”

Jac nodded. “Back then that would have required a lot of guesswork and a fair amount of luck. If it was an ancient Egyptian scent, it would have been seriously diluted by the nineteenth century. Essences lose their potency over time. And quite a few ancient sources were extinct by the nineteenth century. Even if you smelled them, you wouldn’t have been able to name them or find them.”

Malachai was staring at her.

“What?”

“I never told you it was an ancient Egyptian scent.”

Somewhere in the building, a telephone rang and a door closed. Jac had been so intent on their conversation, she’d forgotten there were other people here. She shook her head, got back to the facts.

“Even if I wanted to help you, Malachai, the mess in this bottle isn’t even a starting point. It’s a group of four or five ordinary essences.”

“But they are a starting point,” he insisted. “The perfumer was working from some formula, Jac. I have a case with eleven versions of this same base.”

“You didn’t tell me that. Eleven versions of this scent. And why eleven? That’s an odd number.”

“There’s room for twelve in the case.”

“One broke?”

“Or maybe one held a memory tool and someone took it.”

She shook her head. “It’s a myth. You’re the one who taught me that myths are a culture’s collective dream. Small stories about individuals that, out of the thousands told, were the ones that clicked with the most people because of the patterns in our collective unconscious. As the stories are handed down, they change, grow, become more extravagant and magical. Like stalactites in a cave that start out as one drop of water.”

“Robbie and Griffin both warned me that you’d be hard to convince. I told them they were wrong; that you’re more open minded. I suppose I was wrong.”

Jac put her hands on the chair’s carved lion’s-head arms. Her fingertips pressed into the grooves. “Griffin?” She tried to keep her voice even, to make it sound like a normal, off-the-cuff question.

“Griffin North. Your brother’s friend. I thought from the way he spoke about you that you two knew each other.”

Hearing Griffin’s name out of context confused her. “Yes, I do know him. Knew him. I haven’t seen him in a long time. You know him?”

“Robbie introduced us a few months ago. Griffin wanted to do some research in our archives for a book he’s writing. Robbie came to visit him here about two weeks ago. It was just a marvelous piece of synchronicity that Griffin showed Robbie the case of perfume flasks. I’d forgotten about them a long time ago.”

“I didn’t know Robbie saw Griffin when he was in New York.”

It was difficult for Jac to keep up a pretense at conversation. Griffin worked here? Was he here now? Had that been his phone ringing? Had he closed the door she’d heard shut before?

She’d come across the book he’d written when it first came out. Stood in the store and read the flap copy and his bio. So she knew he lived in New York and Egypt, worked on an important dig near Alexandria, was married and had a child. But those were very public things.

The color of the walls in the office where he worked, the street he walked down to go home at the end of the day, the view from his window when he looked up from his research-those were details to which she wasn’t privy. She resented being given information about him without wanting it. At the same time, she was jealous of Robbie and Malachai. Of the room in this building that absorbed Griffin’s breath and the chair that held his body. Jac knew better than to indulge in the delicious pain of remembering him. Of wondering who he’d married. How old his son or daughter was.

Griffin had hurt her. Left her. People who left you once-even just once-were not ever to be trusted again.

“I’m sorry.” She stood up. It had nothing to do with Griffin working here. It was preposterous even to imagine there was a fragrance that could help you remember past lives. She’d been telling Robbie that since they were children. And if there was, she was not about to start playing at being a perfumer after all these years.

Malachai stood too and came around his desk to escort her out. She didn’t believe in any god, but she started a fervent prayer that she wouldn’t run into Griffin.

“So nothing I’ve said makes you even a little bit curious,” he asked.

She laughed. “I don’t have the luxury of being curious.”

“What if I could promise you the three million you need to pay off the banks? Would you accept my offer then?”

“Are you offering that?”

“Would it make a difference?”

“Even if I was capable of doing it, I don’t have the time it would take. I need to raise the money now.” The desperation in her voice matched the desperation in his eyes.

“Will you at least promise me you’ll consider it? Think of what it would be like to prove a myth like this.”

“I’m the perennial skeptic. That’s what you used to call me. Now you’re asking me to believe on faith in something that’s a dream.”

“What if you’re wrong, Jac? What if it’s not a dream?”