Pierre le Couturier stood in the dark outside her window. She’d left it partially open to let the breeze in on this hot, summer’s night. He waited and watched discreetly until she’d climbed into bed and turned off her bedside light. He’d seen that she was sleeping naked. This is going to make my job much easier for me, he thought. Once her breathing became low and regular, he swung his leg over the windowsill of her ground floor room and was in. No sign of movement from the bed. Good. Taking his handkerchief from his pocket, he poured chloroform onto it, and quickly placed the cloth over the young woman’s face. She struggled up but he Vulcan nerve-pinched her neck, blocking her jugular. With the blood cut off to her brain, she soon fell back and lay coldly still.
Good. Peeling back the sheet he gazed with admiration at her white body. “Perfect,” he murmured to himself. With care, Pierre took his previous hospital job’s surgical knife and with great expertise, he gently cut and lifted the skin from top to toe, following a dressmaker’s pattern he’d learned by heart in his recent studies as a designer in the French haute couture districts of old Paris. The human body has seven layers of skin in three sections, the epidermis, dermis, and subcutis. Pierre only took the epidermis lying over the dermis. His work was immaculate, with the skin now lying next to the girl in just two longitudinal sections.
He bent over the two pieces sniffing them with delight. The Frenchman was not only exceptionally skilled in fine couture but in perfumery. He cleared up the blood, squeezing some into a phial to use for the perfume he’d make later. The scent of a young woman could be made into an exquisite perfume, much desired by the older connoisseurs of Paris, and this he would create from roses and the juices from the woman’s skin. With satisfaction, he mused on the English salmon-pink ‘Boscobel’ rose, with its wonderful scent reminiscent of myrrh, and a hint of pears, elderberries, and almonds. Smiling, he envisaged how prettily pink his Essence of Young Girl of Roses would look in the art deco jar he had ready for it.
Stroking the soft skin he’d stolen, he gently rolled it into the leather bag he’d brought expressly for this purpose, along with his phial of her blood.
He climbed out of the window and gazed one last time back at the body on the bed, glistening now, its dermis and subcutis lit up by the light of the moon shining directly upon it.
Back in his atelier with its huge, slanted window looking out over the old grey slate Hansard roofs, and the River Seine snaking through his beloved Paris, the City of Lights, he opened his leather bag. He carefully draped the two sections of skin over his dressmaker’s mannequin standing before the tall attic window.
Taking his needle of gold from its special box, he unwound the most precious of all his silken threads, licking the end of the sparkling lustrous gossamer and pushing it through the eye of the needle. Humming a ballad of love between a man and a woman, Pierre le Couturier began to sew. His stitches were tiny, meticulous, as those of the surgeon he used to be. He sewed all night, until the skin draped over the mannequin had become a woman once again. Then he lay down to sleep.
The cooing of doves awoke him from his slumber. He arose from his bed and surveyed his handiwork. The stitches shone in the sunlight now pouring through the huge slanted window. They were spaced one after the other like tiny, even, sparkling kisses from his golden needle.
Pierre smiled. What a dressmaker was he! He would present this gift to the principal couturiere of the House of Chanel, along with a bottle of his Essence of Young Girl of Roses and would surely be invited to join the dressmakers of this prestigious house of couture.
“Oui! That’s what I’ll do. I’ll start on the perfume now. Coco Chanel will love me. She’ll appreciate my talents,” he smiled, barely able to move his eyes away from his gloriously sewn Parisian woman.
By the next morning he had presented himself and his softly dressed mannequin to Gabrielle Chanel herself. Coco was, indeed, completely blown away by the dressmaker’s exquisitely sewn offering. She picked up her telephone to make an urgent call.
By that evening, Pierre le Couturier opened his atelier door with delighted anticipation to three burly French policemen—and one most serious gentleman holding a crisp, white, straitjacket.
