Cleopatra�s Perfume (11 page)

“You
must
help me get to England,” she said, her accent foreign, “before it’s too late.” She rushed her words, as if every moment was precious.

I stood back, not wanting to get involved. “Too late for what? Who
are
you?”

She said her name quickly, but my ears picked up a German name, Jewish, if I wasn’t mistaken. That disturbed me for reasons I shall not explain. She grabbed my arm and begged me for help. I pulled away from her. She was a young girl, no more than eighteen, her slender form appealing but her body fragrant with the smell of fear. She was dressed in a shapeless brown-checked suit cut with a sophistication that didn’t fit her.

Eyes brimming with tears, she went on to explain how Germany’s new racial laws threatened Jews and how things had only gotten worse since Kristallnacht, when gangs of Nazis and their supporters roamed through Jewish neighborhoods breaking windows, burning synagogues and looting. Since then, no one would take in the Jews fleeing the Nazi state.
No one.
Both England and America had refused her entry, so she boarded the Italian ship
Conte Rosso
to escape persecution from Hitler’s Reich. Without a visa only one place would take her.

“Where?” I asked, more out of politeness than curiosity.

“Shanghai,” she said.

“Lovely city. Do be sure to make the rounds at the Cathay during the cocktail hour,” I said, mentioning the Chinese outpost famed for its watering hole for wealthy visitors. I rambled on about the interesting members of the literati I often found lingering at the bar. I paid no attention to the blank look on her face. I merely wanted to get rid of her. A stronger urge pulled at me as I continued to stare at the Bar Supplice and I wanted to be alone with my thoughts. I
still ached for Ramzi’s arms around me, his sensuous voice spinning tales. Lies, but I didn’t care.

Meanwhile, the Jewish girl rambled on, begging me to help her. I tried to ignore her. What did her problems matter to me? Surely it couldn’t be as bad as all that in Germany. Not too long ago I’d traveled to Berlin with Lord Marlowe to attend a photography show at a gallery for my friend Maxi von Brandt. We knew each other from the old days when we both worked the cabarets, me as a dancer, her as a photographer, chatting up strangers on the telephones at each table and drinking in the pleasure palaces of Berlin. Haus Vaterland and the Resi. Fun days, filled with all the wildness and proclivity and sexual abandon of the Weimar Republic.

“Lady Marlowe,
please,
listen to me. You don’t understand what’s happening to Jews in Germany. The nightly arrests, the forced-labor camps—”

“Rumors, all rumors.” I avoided her eyes, not believing her theatrics. Didn’t all young girls go through a stage of dramatics? I couldn’t help her, I insisted, walking away, my eyes going again and again to the boarded-up building I’d known as Bar Supplice. I haunted the street with a vacant stare in my eyes. Hoping, dreaming it was all a mistake and Ramzi would return. I couldn’t bear the thought that the sumptuous den of decadence where I’d stripped down to my soul was dirty and crude, infested with rats, their vermin sticking to me like broken promises.

So absorbed was I in my plight, I barely listened to the mournful tale of the young Jewess following me. She implored me to tell the world what was happening to Jews, the camps, the deaths, the rape of Jewish women by the Gestapo.

“I wouldn’t have gotten out of Germany,” she said, “if a man hadn’t taken me to Genoa with him.”

“A man?” I asked, interested. “Then why are you asking me for help?”

“You don’t understand. He—he gave me a passport and said I was to tell anyone who asked I was a dressmaker.”

“A dressmaker? Why?”

“He promised me there’d be no trouble getting through customs and immigration if I did as he asked.”

“And did you?” I said, aware of the implication in my voice.

She lowered her head. “Yes. I had no choice.”

I thought about how I’d been young once and had nearly fallen for that same trick in the back alley behind a Berlin bar. In my case, the man met an untimely end when he was robbed by local thieves. And me? I ran and ran and ran, never looking back.

“Don’t you see, you
must
help me, Lady Marlowe,” she pleaded, her fearful eyes darting everywhere. “Without family or papers, I—I will have no way to pay for what I need in Shanghai except—”

“Yes. I understand.” I opened my purse, wrapping my hands around some bills. I was about to give her some money and be on my way, when a commotion caught my attention.

“Lady Marlowe, you’ve retrieved my hat!”

I spun around, surprised to see Lady Palmer bouncing down the dirty street hatless with both her sagging bosom
and
her daughter in tow. But who was that man in the dark jacket, bow tie, white pants and Panama hat behind them? His gait was uneven, as if he had a crippled leg, and his right hand was in his pocket in a way that disturbed me. Was he reaching for a gun?

“My pleasure, Lady Palmer,” I said, plopping the hat on her head
and trying to smile, though I cast a wary eye toward the man observing us. I turned my back and chatted with Lady Palmer about the impudent camel who dared to pluck her designer hat off her head. Silly, infusive talk, but I was grateful to once again enter that parallel dimension I lived in whose portal was accessible to a privileged few.

When I turned around to give the Jewish girl some money, the man in the Panama hat had her by the elbow and out of my reach. Then she was gone. Off to Shanghai, I imagined.

I recounted the girl’s story over tea to Lady Palmer, if only to assuage the guilt burning in my soul. I knew what happened to white women in Shanghai. Not even a heated fainting spell from Lady Palmer kept me from telling her how disease was rampant in the miserably squalid, decadent city. And how procurers of human flesh forced women to service customers in dirty backrooms, lying in a bunk in a cloud of smoke while one, two men fondled them, opening them to the probing of fingers, mouths, with only opium to help them forget. Intense nausea gripping them from the drug, their skin turning sallow, their bodies growing thin and frail until they took their last breath and found release.

Lady Palmer dismissed the entire incident as a scheme to cheat me. The whole thing was an act, she insisted, admitting she’d also been approached with the same story the week before in the bazaar.

Later in my room, I collapsed on the bed, sobbing. I couldn’t stop shaking, fearful to face what I’d become. I had money, privilege, yet I had done nothing to help the young Jewish woman. Why did that bother me so?

No, Lady Palmer was right, I convinced myself. Her story was a
fabricated tale like Ramzi’s, designed to glean money from me. I owed her nothing.

I put aside the unpleasantness in the Port Said market, reminding myself though I was faced with the rigidity of British society, I would find no shortage of gentlemen wishing to escort me to the races or to the ballet. Taking a lover would be difficult. Sexual freedom was considered a gentleman’s sport among the royals, though I often dared to join the hunt with discreet weekend affairs at country estates.

I was after bigger game now. Ramzi. Setting into motion my plan to find him obsessed me. I used my fortune to hire guides to get leads on his whereabouts, sent cables to the local authorities in Cairo to track him down and bribed bank officials to check his financial records. So consumed was I with my hunt, I forgot all about the Jewish girl. Whatever curiosity I’d experienced about her dissipated like dewdrops sucked up by the greedy tongue of the sun. I continued to hide from the problems of a world on the brink of war, dismissing them as easily as I eliminated anything in my life that didn’t please me, whether it was weak tea, cotton underwear or a snoopy maid. Little did I know I couldn’t escape. The seeds of war grew slowly, nurtured by those like myself who refused to see them sprouting under our feet, though I had personal reasons for ignoring them I dare not explain here, fearing you’ll detest my actions even more so.

I cringe now, my hand aching, cramping though I must fight through the physical pain and write down these words of truth so you can see, dear reader, what a ruthless, rapacious woman I’d become. I cared only for my own endless carnal satisfaction, seeking to possess every moment and entwine it around my senses and never let it go. My hunger was a
sexual journey not ending in submission or physical satisfaction, but a yearning for the passion left unfulfilled by the death of my husband.

My whole being quivered when, after two weeks, I again picked up the scent of the man I believed would satisfy that hunger. I received a telephone call. My contact at the bank had news.
Good news,
he said. Ramzi had returned to Port Said.

I put the phone down, shaking, my pubic muscles tightening. I moaned as a sense of heightened anticipation took hold of me, a hot, glowing arousal making my mouth dry. I gave no further thought to the world’s problems. None at all.

Ramzi was back.
But he wasn’t alone.

My excitement turned to jealousy when I found out he’d brought a woman with him.

She was dark, mysterious, with the bearing of a high priestess, her long neck unadorned, dangling earrings reaching to her shoulders. I’ll never forget the first time I saw her. I could see sexual arousal spark in her eyes every time her beaded earrings brushed her bare shoulders. I had no idea then who she was, or what part she would play in this melodrama. I sharpened my claws and arched my back like a feline in heat on the attack. I wanted Ramzi for myself. And I’d do anything to keep him.

Anything.

Slinky white gown hugging every curve of my body, my breasts barely concealed by flowing silk, beads of sweat sparkling between my cleavage like loose diamonds, the fragrance of Cleopatra’s perfume signaled my entrance as I posed like a goddess arriving on earth, knowing Ramzi and this woman called Laila watched me
from their table. I was a vision in white in a room filled with intricate latticed woodwork embedded with colorful stained-glass designs niched into the walls to dazzle the eye. Blood red, emerald green, azure blue, tangy orange and golden yellow.

I stood under an archway in the Moorish hall decorated in red and maroon stripes and illuminated by lights emitting from copper lanterns punctured with tiny holes. The effect was breathtaking. The flames from the gaslights flickered on the wall behind me, elongating my silhouette and transforming it into sensual shadow play. An Erté poster come to life.

I held the pose for five minutes, a long cigarette holder poised to my red lips, blowing smoke away from my face, though I rarely took up the habit in the past several years. Now I used it as a show of power, liberation.
I can do as I please,
my body language said as I swayed over to the circular table where Ramzi sat with a woman, and no man controls me.

“How charming to see you again, Ramzi.” I put out my hand for him to kiss it and inhale a whiff of the perfume. I was curious to see his reaction. I noticed he raised his aristocratic eyebrows before getting up from his seat.

“I couldn’t stay away from Port Said.” He took my white-gloved hand in his and, in a sensual manner, turned my palm up so he could unbutton the three tiny pearl buttons on my glove before putting his lips to my bare skin.

“Oh? And why not?” I dared to asked.

“I missed you.” His kiss lingered, his tongue sweeping over my palm in an intimate manner. A familiar heat made me realize my show of bravado didn’t fool him.

“Liar.” I smiled. Instead of hating him, I wanted him more than ever.

“Me?”

“Yes,
you,
you bastard. You made love to me then disappeared with my—”

Before he could explain, the woman with the dark velvet eyes sitting at his table cleared her throat. Ramzi nodded in her direction and said, “Lady Marlowe, may I introduce Laila Al-Rashid from Cairo.”

“Cairo? How convenient, Ramzi,” I said, blowing smoke in her direction. “A girl in every port.” I turned to the woman and attempted a smile. “Do you plan to stay in Port Said long,
mademoiselle?
”

“Long enough to complete my business,” Laila answered, rising from her chair and positioning herself between Ramzi and me.

“I can imagine what kind of business,” I said, not backing down. I removed my long white gloves, indicating I wasn’t leaving.

She laughed. “Ramzi said you had a sense of humor, Lady Marlowe.” She looked me up and down, her eyes resting on my nearly exposed breasts. My nipples hardened under her gaze, disturbing me. “In fact, he told me a lot about you.”

“Really?” I turned away, flicking my ashes into the cigarette tray, my manner bored. “I’ve heard nothing about you.”

“I’m not surprised. My brother prefers to forget he has a sister when he’s chasing a woman. He believes it tarnishes his playboy image.”

My head shot around. “Your
brother?
”

“Yes, didn’t he tell you?”

“No,”
I said, rounding the vowel for emphasis.

Laila took my hand in hers. “I couldn’t help but notice your long,
sharp
nails.”

“Yes, I engaged a local girl to give me a manicure when I heard
Ramzi brought a woman back with him.” I pulled my hand away. “It seems I wasted my time.”

She smiled. “Shall we dine then? I’m famished.”

Ramzi rubbed his hand up and down my bare shoulder, making me shiver. A different hunger made me draw in my breath. “So am I.”

I don’t remember what we talked about, only that the conversation centered around Ramzi, as it always did. He ordered the wine and picked out each course, whether it was a buttery puff pastry filled with flaky fish and decorated with swirled cream sauces and shredded vegetable, or balls of seasoned minced lamb in a rich tomato sauce served over saffron rice. He ordered everything in his charming accent, passing around the silvery tray decked with the caviar, olives and cheeses, while his sister, Laila, entertained me with stories about the pasha’s harem and his wives with their gold teeth, numerous chins and fondness for sweets.