From "II Creation" Writing the Perfume Guide, Falling into the Smell Mystery.

....The second thing happened that summer, during a drive home from a trip to the beach near Beaufort, North Carolina. Turin and the Dearborns were in the middle of nowhere east of Raleigh near the intersection of Highway 70 and I-95 when Turin spotted some signs: cigarettes, and also liquor, and then one that announced "JR Perfumes. Largest Discount Perfume Store in the World." He and Anna looked at each other. Mark and his young son sat in the sweltering car with their dripping Tastee-Freez cones, waiting for Turin and Anna. An hour and a half later-"You couldn't print all the names I called them under my breath," says Dearborn-they emerged from the store. Turin was carrying a huge cardboard box he could barely see around, filled with perfume.

They spent the rest of the drive home smelling. Turin explained each fragrance, its creator's oeuvre, its chemical provenance and molecular construction. The Dearborns were astounded at his breadth of knowledge and by how entertaining he made it. "Why don't you just write a damn perfume guide and get it over with," Mark said.

Turin decided he would.

* * *

At this moment, Turin got word from CNRS that they'd no longer be paying his NIH salary. They wanted him back in France. He packed up and thanked the Dearborns. In Paris, he found that the new lab was unavailable for a few months, so he sat down at his little Mac in his mother's apartment near avenue Wagram, his mother working at her Mac across the room, and started writing perfume reviews. As he finished, he handed them to her. With each one, she was more surprised. She'd only ever seen his writing on biophysics.

For the first three reviews, he didn't even bother to smell the perfumes. He'd smelled them so many times, knew every molecular nook and cranny, each glinting facet as they revealed themselves to him over hours, that he just reached into his memory and pulled out the smells and waved the words into them. Vetiver by Guerlain, Rive Gauche by Yves Saint Laurent, Après l'Ondée by Guerlain.

Rive Gauche (Yves Saint Laurent)

Grâce à Rive Gauche, les mortels connaissent enfin l'odeur du savon de Diane au bain...

Thanks to Rive Gauche, mortals can at last know the scent of the goddess Diana's bath soap. A true emblem of the '70s, this sumptuous reinterpretation of the innovative metallic note found in the less fortunate Calandre (Paco Rabanne) belongs to the uncrowded category of sculpture-perfumes. Its seamless silvery form, initially hidden by white, powdery notes, soon pierces the clouds and gains height by the hour. Like Chamade (Guerlain), Rive Gauche enjoys a peculiar relationship with intensity: the more time passes, the stronger its grace becomes, as if fading allowed its inner light to radiate more easily. A masterpiece. A notable example of the perfect agreement between container and content, its atomizer of metal and blue stripes, at once precious and whimsically "industrial," is itself an item of undying chic. The perfume seems slightly superior in quality to the eau de toilette.

Après l'Ondée (Guerlain)

Divinely named ["After the Rainshower"], a prototype of the cold and melancholy fragrance, this stunning creation is the counterpart-the brighter, fresher younger brother-of the mysterious L'Heure Bleue (Guerlain). Après l'Ondée evolves only slightly with time: its central white note, caressing and slightly venomous, like the odor of a peach stone, imposes itself immediately and retains its mystery forever. Its simplicity, its keen nostalgia, and its unadorned beauty make this an anomaly for Guerlain.

The current eau de toilette seems a bit attenuated, more timid than the marvelous perfume. Choose the latter.

Vetiver (Guerlain)

One of the rare perfumes so named that do not betray the character of this uncompromising raw material, Vetiver is a temperament as much as it is a perfume, above all when it is worn by a woman. Stoic and discreet, Vetiver scorns all luxury save that of its own proud solitude. At the same time distant and perfectly clear, it must be worn muted and must never allow itself to be sensed except at the instant of a kiss.

His mother edited his reviews. She was, he would say afterward, beaming. So was he. He found it one of the single greatest pleasures of his life. The images came pouring out, and Adela focused her critical energies on paring down the efflorescence. The descriptions took him fifteen minutes or they took five hours, depending, and every day when he had completed his three or four new ones, he felt incredible satisfaction. "I assume it's what a movie director feels when he's got great dailies in the can. When I managed to capture this awesome beauty and greatness in language, translating smells into black-and-white words on the page and making this ether tangible and real-that was thrilling."

He pauses, thinks about the words in his head going down to the paper. "You know, perhaps the edge I have in turning smell into language is that for me smell has always had an utterly solid reality that, to my utter astonishment, it doesn't seem to have for other people. Every perfume I've ever smelled has been to me like a movie, sound and vision, which to most people are thoroughly real senses-but not smell, for some reason. To me, smell is just as real as they are."

He called around, took the manuscript to the large French publishers, Hachette and Flammarion and Gallimard and so on, "and most of them told me to sod off." Someone said to him, You know, there's a little outfit that puts out these guides. By the time the third person had said it, he was ready to find the company's offices.

Hermé is actually a huge bookbinding company that, says Turin, "just decided to publish books so they could go to the parties at the book fairs. At the time they'd put in charge a complete scoundrel of a man, a very charming and a genuine French cynic. His attitude, delivered with an even smile, was 'It's a nice idea. We'll take it. And you clearly know what you're doing, but frankly if it wasn't you and I'd thought of the idea, I'd have found some jerk in Paris who would have written a completely bullshit guide that would sell just as well.'" He shrugged and reached for the manuscript. Turin shrugged and gave it to him.

The book, called simply Parfums: Le Guide, was published in 1992 and became the best-selling perfume guide in France. Perhaps it was the fact that no one had ever done anything quite like it. Perhaps it was the lushness of the critical prose ("Caron's Alpona juxtaposes a resinous candied-orange-peel idea with a civilized chypre base"). The FNAC, the French superstore, sold it. It was stacked twelve high at Sephora, the perfume giant (the manager of the big Sephora on the Champs-Elysées told Turin they gave a copy to each new sales associate, which pleased him). That officially it sold eight thousand copies made him figure the publisher had ripped him off-"They've probably sold four times more books than they've told me and just kept all the profits," he says briskly-but so it went. He'd sort of expected it.

What he did not expect was that the guide would change his life in the most wonderful way by cracking open to him the hermetically sealed, well-hidden world of those who create perfumes.

Virtually all the smells in all scented products in the world are manufactured by six huge companies that operate in carefully guarded anonymity: International Flavors & Fragrances (United States), Givaudan Roure (Switzerland), Quest International (Britain), Firmenich (Switzerland), Haarmann & Reimer (Germany), Dragoco (Germany), and Takasago (Japan). These are the Big Boys, the industrial giants of the production and sale of a specific, unu-sual product: molecules. Molecules that trigger the human sense of taste and, above all, the sense of smell. Taste is, actually, a dwarfish, minimally functional sense responding to only six different stimuli: sweet, sour, salt, bitter, umami (richness), and astringent; smell-which in point of fact gives us some 90 percent of what we taste-is thought to respond to ten thousand or so distinguishable molecular smells, but we only say ten thousand because (and this is literally true) we've thus far never touched the limits of smell's power to detect odorant molecules. The Big Boys' molecules generate roughly $20 billion a year in economic activity. They employ hundreds of chemists, molecular jockeys who spend their days welding atoms together to create new molecules with new smells. And, upstairs, they employ an army of perfumers, who spend their days mixing these molecules into new scented elixirs.

The Big Boys have two kinds of perfumers. The functional perfumers work with the Johnson & Johnsons, the Procter & Gambles, to scent Tide detergent and Palmolive soap and peach-vanilla candles and the fabric softeners that smell of a million mythical springtimes in distant countries we've never known. These corporate employees create the smell track of our everyday lives, which we barely notice and for which we pay billions of dollars. (A new furniture polish on the market: you open it, sniff-hmm, nice! Buy? Not buy? You sniff again. . . .) The Big Boys won't tell you who they work for. Their names never appear on the toilet-paper label, the shampoo bottle. But where they get positively paranoically secretive is perfume. Because, in fact, all the golden liquid scents sold by the Giorgio Armanis and Vera Wangs, the Ralph Laurens and Jean Paul Gaultiers from their houses of fashion in New York and Paris and London and Milan, these expensive concoctions being sprayed on models and celebrities in the photographs and rip-open ads in the glossies-these scents are not, in fact, created by Mr. Armani or Ms. Wang or Mr. Lauren at all. They are made by professional ghosts working in the locked offices and labs of the Big Boys. These haute perfumers, carefully anonymous and discreetly faceless, are the ones who actually craft the fragrant elixirs in little jeweled five-ounce bottles slipped into boxes that are sold under the names Gaultier and Wang in the department stores' glass cases.

It is the perfumers who transform the confidential briefs from the religious visions and aesthetic hallucinations at the houses of Dior and Calvin Klein and Givenchy-obsessions and poisons and envies and joys; "We want the smell of old melting candles in ballrooms of Italian marble during a Chinese winter," "Give us the fragrance surrendered by a young blue flower crushed under the heated, ivory back of a woman with chocolate eyes," "We must have the scent lightning makes the instant it strikes a platinum rose." The perfumers turn these visions into structures of neutrons and protons and electrons welded together that make our eyes suddenly open, make us sit up, turn and inhale, molecules that blossom and flame, molecules that spin stories.

They never speak to the media. They may quietly attend their chemical offspring's launch parties at Issey Miyake and Donna Karan and Anna Sui (staying out of range of the cameras-to you they'll just look like one more guest), glass bottles lining the walls, or watch from the back as Thierry Mugler and Jean Paul Gaultier are strafed by the flashes. Then they go back to their offices and labs and get back to work transforming more emotion, desire, and smart marketing into actual chemical potions that can be sold and bought. It was the creations of these nameless creators that Turin had dared to transform into language in a book, and to evaluate and judge. And the faceless creators were fascinated.

At first they thought Turin was a spy. That was the rumor. A professional perfumer using a pseudonym? A rogue in the industry? Possibly a thief of some sort. (Son of a bitch.) He wasn't. They thought he was one of them, secretly putting his prose together in the office down the hall. He wasn't. Which made them even more intrigued. A scientist? Yes, a chemist, apparently-no, no, a biologist. Some kind of professor, believe it or not. Suspicious, they checked his curriculum vitae. Well, what did he want? He wanted to meet them was what he wanted. So they obliged. Naturally, they were not uniformly elated. He had not spared anyone's feelings. He was writing in the trade magazines now, in English, and he acted as if he owed nothing to anyone.

57 for Her (Chevignon) *

Chevignon is a fashion house of such toe-curling vulgarity that one finds oneself hoping that they will never come up with a good fragrance, for one would then have to praise it. Fortunately, that possibility remains as remote as ever. 57 for Her is a sad little thing, an incongruous dried-prunes note with a metallic edge that manages the rare feat of being at once cloying and harsh.

And this.

Python (Trussardi) *

The absurdly named Python is a poverty-stricken sweet-powdery affair, a very distant relative of the wonderful Habanita (Molinard). It belongs in a tree-shaped diffuser dangling from the rearview mirror of a Moscow taxi.

It made their hair stand on end. On the other hand, there was this.

Paradox (Jacomo) *****

Beauty itself, as with faces, is not simple: perfumes can be handsome (Mitsouko), graceful (Calandre), gorgeous (Joy), comely (Shalimar), radiant (Tommy Girl), exquisite (Après l'Ondée), stunning (Angel). Reader beware: Paradox is, to paraphrase something once said about Scriabin's music, a perfume of "almost unbearable loveliness." One of the properties of loveliness is that it disarms all attempts to be serious, and turns all critical machinery into a pile of whirring junk. What I find all the more irritating is that Paradox isn't even "my type." It is, after all, yet another fruit salad of the type that has kept perfumers gainfully employed since Deci-Delà. But this fruit salad does something that it has no right to do: break hearts. If this were music, it would be Bizet's Symphony in C. If it were a car, it would be a Facel-Vega Facellia. If it were an aircraft it would be a 1959 Caravelle in Air France livery. Anyway, go smell it.

And this.

Rush (Gucci) *****

Gucci hasn't put a foot wrong for some time, both Envy perfumes were landmarks, and expectations were high for their latest. The first sniff gave me a shock of recognition, like a long-forgotten but familiar face, and I spent a few busy minutes dredging my memory for the original impression... Dioressence! Not all of it, mind you, just a bit I loved, which in the original happened two or three hours into the story and felt like a warm breath whispering crazy things in my ear. That breath is back, now strong, loud, irresistible, a sultry wind fit to keep everyone stark awake and plotting indiscretions... The charm of this perfume is entirely man-made, no mention of Nature, e.g. flowers, etc. This thing smells like a person. To be exact, thanks to the milky lactone note, it smells like an infant's breath mixed with his mother's hair spray... What Rush can do, as all great art does, is create a yearning, then fill it with false memories of an invented past...

This, words that turned their scents into concreteness, they had never really experienced (except perhaps in the classified briefs they received from Kenzo and Hugo Boss, but those were theoretical marching orders, not synaptic evaluations of the olfactory work they'd wrought). So they began sending out feelers. Turin got messages from legendary names he'd heard, people the public never knows who do the work sold under the names the public does. He got a call from Françoise Caron, née Françoise Cresp, a member of one of the most important perfume families in Grasse and the former wife of the legendary Pierre Bourdon, who did Cool Water. Although his guide had said nothing but bad things about her Gio for Armani, Caron asked Turin to pay her a visit. She was a top perfumer at one of the biggest Big Boys, Quest International, at their offices in Paris. Turin swallowed hard and knocked on their doors. They let him in, introduced him around; he met all the perfumers and found that most of them had read his guide, that they took it and him seriously. He met the perfumers Christopher Sheldrake, and Gilles Romey, who told Turin he had loved the guide, and Maurice Roucel, the perfumer who had created one of his favorite fragrances, K by Krizia, the Milanese couturier.

He was euphoric at being admitted to this closed world. They told him secrets, perfume stories. He met (he could barely believe it) the legendary Guy Robert, and listened with quivering attention to Robert's regal recounting of anecdotes of all the famous scents and their creators. (How did Chanel No. 5, one of the greatest perfumes of all time, happen? Well! they said, you see, there are several versions. Some say on the question of the name that the legendary perfumer Ernest Beaux had been messing around with aldehydes and had prepared several samples, and Coco Chanel, called Coco because she threw the most fabulous cocaine parties in Paris, chose the fifth sample. Others say that no, it was actually Beaux's assistant who screwed up the sample Beaux presented to Chanel, put ten times as much aldehyde in the concentration as was specified. Coco loved it, and when Beaux smelled it he realized it was a mistake but didn't dare say anything to her, so Chanel No. 5 is actually a wildly successful error. Take your pick.) And since Turin had never been in a perfumery lab-Could he see? Please? Certainly he could-they whisked him through halls and halls of glass and metal, thousands of vials of patented, proprietary molecules, plump files stashed in reams of cabinets filled with precious industrial secrets, yard after yard of formulas and structures of molecule upon molecule, the precious corporate data generated by an army of perfume chemists trying to create new smells that would generate billions of dollars for these industrial giants.

As he poked around, they started putting a few questions to him about their creations. What did he think of this one? Was that one beautiful? Surprising? Insouciant? Classic? Reserved? Would this sell? Would that? His ability to describe odors in words mesmerized them. One day he was in Françoise Caron's office, and she asked him what he thought of a new fragrance. It was something she'd created for Escada. He inhaled it, said it was wonderful, that it was like one of those silks that has two colors to it, depending on how the light strikes it. Caron gave him a long look. She reached into her desk and pulled out the brief from the people at Escada and handed it to him. She pointed: Read there. He read, "We want it to smell like the silks that have two colors in them, depending on the light."

Then there was the science of it. The chemistry, specifically. He started meeting the molecule wranglers, including Charles Sell. Sell was a Briton based at Quest's headquarters in Ashford, Kent, an hour southeast of London. Trim and controlled with gray hair and an unflappable professional manner, he ran a team of Quest fragrance chemists. His first lieutenant was Karen Rossiter, an attractive young woman and an up-and-coming chemist at Quest. Sell showed Turin all around. Turin had a great time. The two hit it off-Sell's knowledge of perfume chemistry encyclopedic and Turin's interest inexhaustible. The chemists working away in their white lab coats were doing amazing three-dimensional modeling of the shapes of all sorts of atomic structures that had this or that smell because smell was Shape, and all the secrets of smell were to be found in the shapes of molecules. (Turin leaned closer to the screens.) Sell's responsibility at Quest was the creation of new smells, which meant creating molecules that had never existed before, which by definition meant smells that had never existed before, since no two molecules have ever been known to have the exact same smell. Sell and his team had lately been using computers, the computers' purpose being to predict smells. The prediction of smell determined, after all, the productivity-and profitability-of the industry: how efficiently can I predict what some purely theoretical molecule will smell like without actually going to all the trouble and time and expense of actually building it?

Turin watched molecular shapes flashing rapidly across screens and heard chemists saying, "Well, if it's spherical here and here, it must smell like fresh cedar or burnt sugar." As he took all of this in, seeing what was required for the smell chemists at the Big Boys-Givaudan and IFF and Firmenich and Takasago-to produce a single, marketable smell molecule in their vast, sparkling labs, he was . . . startled. Taken aback, thrown in a way he couldn't put his finger on. It wasn't actually the science that struck him at first. What made him frown initially was the economics.

Consider the way Sell and other chemists made smell molecules. First, Sell essentially took fistfuls of atoms and pieces of molecules he hoped would be interesting (often parts of previous smell best-sellers) and went about putting them together in as many new ways as he could, electrons embracing atoms bonded by other electrons. This created hundreds or thousands of new-shaped molecules. When automated, the process was called, logically, combinatorial chemistry.

It wasn't random. Sell did have some guidelines. Fragrance chemists wanted to make patentable molecules, so they tended toward "theme and variations," took a structure that smelled good and was decently easy to synthesize and started sticking things on it-methyl groups, ethyls, aldehydes. And they only had a certain number of atomic ingredients to play with. They weren't going within a thousand miles of, say, the malevolent fluorophosphonates, which include sarin, a notorious chemical weapon, and which react with absolutely everything, generally in a way that kills it as quickly and painfully as possible. And they would stay away from groups known to smell bad, like isonitriles and sulfides, or to give toxicity problems, like nitros. So it wasn't just anything and everything. But when you got down to it, it was basically a shotgun-blast approach: load, fire, see what comes together, and repeat-random recombination chemistry. In the end Sell would wind up with between five hundred and two thousand (the chemists, forever cagey, would never reveal to Turin exactly how many) different new molecules per year.

Now, having created them, Sell began sorting through the new inventions one by one, smelling and testing each, a ruthless, painstaking process of attrition.
Ninety-five percent didn't smell interesting. So he tossed those out, which meant he had only 5 percent left. Of the interesting ones, many were too weak to use; the customer would have to pour a full pint or so on her body-impractical. So he tossed another 95 percent.

Which meant that after the chemists had painstakingly sorted through a couple thousand molecules (and the company had paid many salaries to the many chemists doing it), maybe twenty molecules remained that were both interesting and sufficiently strong smelling. The smell chemists wrapped these up carefully, said a prayer, and sent them upstairs to the perfumers.

The perfumers sat in their sleek offices in Geneva and Paris and New York, their smelling strips wet with new scents, and stared out their windows trying to think of uses for these things. They'd worked miracles in the past, pulling them out of their bag of tricks, molecules that had launched the megaperfumes, and the megabrands. Tipped pitchers of aldehydes into Chanel No. 5. Pumped dihydromyrcenol, a citrus-lime, into the engine blocks of Drakkar Noir and Cool Water, run Escape by Calvin Klein on Helional. Cast musk R-1 prominently in Tommy Girl and powered Beautiful for Estée Lauder and Calvin Klein's Eternity with Iso E Super. But that was last year. The new briefs with new corporate desires kept landing on their desks. Tom Ford was dreaming of a perfume that smelled like fresh cherry wood licked by a green-hot oxygen fire in a Balinese temple, Marc Jacobs absolutely demanding a blossoming daffodil floating on an ocean of smoky Siberian snows-would these molecules work? (The perfumers sifted through their bags.) Was there a smoky metallic here? A wood in green flame? And the answer, statistically, was probably no. In basements beneath the perfumers, gathering dust, were vast, ever expanding glass-vial graveyards of molecules the chemists down below had proffered to them and which they had discarded. This maddened the chemists, who had sweated the creation of each one. And the accountants glowered over in their paper fiefdoms because with every molecule the chemists created, the company was pouring out money, most of which just flowed into the graveyard. How much money? Turin started asking questions, pointed or oblique depending on where he was and what he thought he could get out of them. This, however, was the perfume industry, everything was opaque and slant, and they never really gave him much concrete information. The best estimate he got arrived during a slightly unguarded moment when Charles Sell named a figure of roughly $4,000 per compound, which in a bad year could have you throwing $8 million down the toilet pretty easily, but as usual this went unconfirmed. The perfumers, tossing out the molecules they didn't like, culled the few they did for Yohji Yamamoto and Vivienne Westwood. These, they sent back downstairs to the chemists.

And then, on these, came yet more triage. First, toxicology testing-which was both "Will we be sued for causing cancers if we put this on people's skin?" and "Does this product degrade the ecology, poison streams, and so on?"-a process always done by subcontracting firms that charged the Big Boys' accountants around a quarter of a million dollars to test a single molecule. Fixed external costs. It shot the price of each new molecule skyward. If a molecule survived toxicology, the chemists then had to find an economical synthesis process for it, which meant: How can we make this thing cheaply, accurately, and efficiently? Because if it cost millions to make, it was worth nothing. Those they couldn't find a synthesis for were pitched into the graveyard with the rest.

In the end, the very, very rare molecule that smelled strong, was cheap to make, had tested biologically safe and environmentally sound, was patentable, and had a useful odor-that one became a new product in the Big Boys' commercial catalogs. A single decent smell molecule that hit all the right marks could bring money flooding in.

This was why the Big Boys and their stockholders optimally wanted to produce three or so molecules a year. The reality was that each was spending millions every year to create thousands and thousands of molecules, synthesize hundreds, test dozens, and get maybe one onto the shelves. This was what Turin found strange.

The deeper he got into the Big Boys, the more conscious he became that the stockholders were saying to the executives in the boardrooms (and the executives were saying to the chemists in the labs), "Look, to up profits, why can't we come out with ten new molecules a year? How about it?" And he was aware-now it was the science of it that caught him-that the molecular theory that governed these chemists creating these molecules and, thus, the entire massive industry, was Shape. But he didn't really focus. He was busy making friends and having fun. He left for other parts of the building.

Turin is an instinctive egalitarian with an exquisitely refined aesthetic and unabashedly elitist tastes, and so he felt completely comfortable in the perfume world, which is populated by former members of the lower classes who spend their time creating outrageously expensive aesthetically oriented luxury goods for the rich. He met the legendary perfumer Serge Lutens and began frequenting the headquarters of Lutens's Paris empire. Lutens was a working-class kid who started out as a makeup specialist with the estimable French firm Carita and, after successes there, was snapped up by Dior to be their chief colorist, deciding the Dior makeup line each year. In 1980 he left Dior for Shiseido. They wanted him to create their makeup line in Paris, but by this time Lutens had grander aims and worked out a nice deal: he would create their makeup and at the same time open and direct a neck-snappingly chic Shiseido Paris outpost where he would launch a new line of Shiseido perfumery (which he would design), their flagship leading-edge offerings. He had no training in perfumery and none in chemistry either, but he knew what he liked, and that, as is ever the case in fashion, was his genius. Lutens chose Christopher Sheldrake of the Big Boy Quest to be his secret engineer, building in chemicals the concepts Lutens would supply. Sheldrake, in Turin's view, is "a really interesting perfumer. He has this minimalist attitude toward perfumery and, under Serge's direction, has been delivering one wonderful fragrance after another."

The first perfume Lutens directed for Shiseido, the infamous Nombre Noir, burned a hole into everyone's collective memory.

Molecularly blacksmithed by one of Shiseido's in-house Japanese perfumers, it arose from components selected by Lutens (an extremely expensive natural osmanthus straight from the flower and a synthetic, a big-stock damascone molecule of rosy-woody plus prune-"a brilliant juxtaposition of the two," said Turin). The perfume had beautiful packaging, "the most unremittingly, sleekly, maniacally luxurious packaging you can imagine: a black octagonal glass Chinese bottle nestled in exquisitely folded black origami of the most sensuous standard." It was a 1982 issue, and Turin had heard the rumors, as had everyone else, that despite its (significant) retail price, Nombre Noir lost money because of the packaging (unconfirmable). And then it disappeared. "Just too wonderful for words, one of the five great perfumes of the world, and I have none left, none," Turin said, despondent. "I had no idea they were going to discontinue it."

Lutens's tastes in general coveted extremes, but then, that was arguably what made him a success as a perfumer, and Turin thoroughly applauded its every expression. He would go upstairs to Lutens's shop, where they would talk about perfume, and everywhere he looked were exquisite things, ancient Japanese tables and antiques and works of art. One time, Turin went to the toilet and closed the door and looked down. The toilet seat was dark red. He stared at it, tried to move out of the light, and stared at it some more. What in the world was this stuff, some weird red plastic? And then he got down on his knees to check it out. It wasn't plastic. It was red marble, phenomenally expensive red marble. He'd seen it on ancient Egyptian statues at the British Museum. He did his business, left, went to find Serge, and casually said, "So. Red-marble toilet seat, huh?" Lutens shrugged. "Bah, oui." Like why was Turin even bothering to mention it.

It was a blissful time, exciting, full of promise. Turin was here, he was there, information was pouring in. He was beginning to put things together even then, without realizing it. "I was so ignorant," Turin would say later. "I had the confidence of the ignorant, confidence in myself and my abilities and, most of all, in Things Working Out. In good people recognizing good ideas and working together toward the Truth." He paused. "That is truly something only the young could believe. You think everything's going to be just fine."