INTERZONE 253 JUL-AUG 2014

by Andy Cox

  Felix crumpled the note in his fist.

  “What is it then?” Joanna leaned over his shoulder. That terrible perfume – crushed roses and children’s candy – that she liked made him gag.

  He handed her the apparatus. “See for yourself.” With that he stood, dusted the toast crumbs from his lap and strode towards the door.

  “Felix!” The urgency in Joanna’s voice made him turn. She was holding the box in one hand, the mask in the other hovering in front of a face that was stretched in uncommon delight. “Violets!” She crossed the room, talking. “Is this new? Something you’re working on? You clever man.” She kissed him on the forehead and pressed the apparatus gently back into his hands. “Clever, clever man.”

  Once Joanna had breezed out of the room, her smelly little dog trotting after, Felix closed the door and retook his seat. He placed the device on the table, knowing he ought to toss it straight in the bin but now curious. He had shared many examples of his craft with his wife over the years. Some she had liked well enough, others she had not, but he had never seen her express such delight in a scent before.

  Felix pressed the sterile, soft plastic over his nose, closed his eyes, flicked the switch, and inhaled.

  “Fuck me,” he whispered.

  He had smelled violets in many forms over the years – crushed, dried, distilled; violet water, violet powder, violet essence – but none got close to this. This was fresh, living blooms of V. odorata growing in a meadow at the height of spring. With his eyes closed even Felix could not have told the difference between this synthesis and the real thing.

  He tore the cup from his face, pushed the device away. The movement disturbed the pile of bills, exposing the corner of something he had not spotted earlier. A postcard, plain apart from the inked stamp of the shop that had sent it.

  Antikzone

  Gerhardt Zickler, proprietor

  On the reverse, next to Felix’s own address was a handwritten message: Herr Kapel, we have your item.

  •••

  The shop was above a café bar half way to the 12th district. The barman directed him through the partitioned half of the room where smoking students cast him looks that confirmed he was every bit as out of place as he felt. By the time he had crossed the room, the cigarette haze had entirely numbed his sense of smell, but on seeing the piles of mouldering books crowding the wooden stairs, the reaches of necrotic mildew crawling the walls as he climbed, he was grateful.

  Herr Zickler, when Felix found the proprietor slouched at a desk at the centre of the maze of lumber like a torpid spider, was a surprise. From the tone of his emails, the sure, unfussy knowledge he had displayed on the Habsburg History site that Felix’s ineffectual Googling had led to after reading about the artefact in the Karlheinz Kuntz biography, he had expected tweeds, greying temples, a professorial air. Not this…loafer.

  Zickler acknowledged his arrival with a nod, but did not remove his headset or divert his attention from his laptop screen. “Five minutes, Herr Kapel,” he said, covering his microphone. “Raiding on Warcraft. Dungeon boss. Have a look around.”

  Having no choice in the matter, Felix did as he was bid. He wandered curving aisles of casement clocks whose complicated faces once told who knew what manner of things in addition to mere time, but now were still and smelled of lacquer and dust. He brushed past rails of military coats pungent with moth balls. Teetering towers of books and sheet music and old documents of all sorts. Plastic tubs of spectacles and opera glasses, watches and hip flasks. Forests of walking sticks.

  Old things for which the world no longer had a use.

  “What a load of junk,” he muttered.

  “One man’s junk, Herr Kapel.” Zickler’s beaky countenance appeared between two stacks of pulp science fiction magazines. “Is another’s gold.”

  Felix reddened, but the proprietor did not appear to have taken offence.

  “Come,” Zickler said. “I’m printing out your provenance…such that it is.”

  Felix followed him back to the desk where a printer was spewing a sheaf of papers. “Such that it is?”

  Zickler grinned good-humouredly. “As I explained before,” he said, “with an artefact like the Nose, there’s really no way to prove its veracity. I can tell you where I got it from, and where my vendors got it from, and so on. But there’s no way of ascertaining that this is the real one. If indeed there ever was a real one. The Habsburg Nose is legendary, man. And legends, by their nature…”

  “So you can give me no guarantee.”

  “Absolutely not.” Zickler adjusted his glasses. “But I can guarantee that it’s very old and a lot people have believed it to be the real deal down the years. Including Karlheinz Kuntz in the years before his unfortunate demise.” Zickler folded the papers and placed them on top of the unremarkable cardboard box that had replaced his laptop on the desk. “I believe we said eight hundred and fifty.”

  Felix licked his lips. The money wouldn’t have been enough to repaint the entire apartment, but it would have got a couple of rooms done. He was gambling it on what? A legend? And not just money, his entire career. He needed an edge, was hoping for a miracle. If it didn’t work, he’d be out of business within the year.

  “Will it really do anything?” He was surprised by the plaintiveness in his own voice. “I mean, really?”

  “Who knows, Herr Kapel.” Zickler tapped his nose. “I imagine you’re the only man in Vienna who will be able to tell.”

  •••

  To the layman, Felix had always believed, real skill, real art, should be indistinguishable from magic. What else do you call it when another human being achieves something which, for you, would be impossible?

  Karlheinz Kuntz had been a magician. A contemporary of Escoffier in Lucerne and a more than decent chef in his own right, he had been obsessed with the importance of aroma in cooking. Without smell, he said, your soul is unnourished. You might as well eat air. In pursuit of what started as a theory but quickly became an obsession, Kuntz had pioneered blindfolded tastings, then entirely dark restaurants. Towards the end of his life it was said he took to wearing a prosthetic nose made of gold. He died in a sanatorium in 1931 suffering from something called psychosomatic putrescence. According to the biography, the physicians had detected nothing physically wrong with the man. He had just wasted away, and near the end he had smelled so rotten the sanatorium staff had to be paid extra even to enter his room. A tragic and ironic fate for such a gifted individual.

  Felix didn’t open the box in the shop, or in the café downstairs or even on the tram home. While it sat heavy on his lap he distracted himself with Zickler’s notes. They filled out the story that he already knew. The material was presented prosaically, but that in itself did much to restore his confidence that he’d done the right thing. He regretted now asking Zickler if the Nose actually worked. Of course it didn’t work. However, it was a symbol, a talisman that had been owned by renowned olfactory greats over the centuries. The artists, the magicians. After Kuntz the chef had come an orchid grower, an unassailable champion greyhound breeder, a wartime bomb disposal ace. Before, there had been a spice importer, a rose gardener, a mulberry horticulturist in the court of George III of England. The nose was like a badge of genius that cropped up now and then through history.

  The story went that the Nose was made for a military officer close to one of the Viennese archdukes. The Hauptman, known only to history as The Bloodhound, had been famous for his ability to root out seditionists and spies, and the golden prosthetic, which he wore ostensibly to cover the syphilitic ruin of his face, was said to lend him the supernatural power of sniffing out plots against his master before they had even been uttered aloud. An ironically gruesome footnote claimed that the fellow had been murdered on Ottoman orders, his body dumped on an island in the Lobau, but discovered within a day because the stench of the corpse could be smelled from the city. The fate of the Nose was not recorded, but it had appeared a century later in the po
ssession of a successful perfumer. The first links in the chain of ownership that continued now with Felix himself.

  The apartment was empty but even so he went into the bathroom and locked the door before, with shaking hands, he unwrapped his prize.

  Inside the box was a nest of straw. Buried within the straw, an object wrapped in sheets from a 1982 edition of El País. And then it was in his hands. The Golden Nose of the Habsburgs.

  The Nose was an exact replica of a human nose, if perhaps a little large. It had a nobbled crook at the bridge and wide nostrils and had a texture that resembled pores. The colour of the gold was soft, dull, almost fleshy in tone. It was impressively heavy.

  Felix brought the object up to his face and sniffed it, but the Nose did not smell of anything at all. He smiled ruefully. Then he tried it on. For such a heavy object, it was really rather remarkable how well balanced the thing was. How comfortably it sat on his face, even when he took his hands away. How natural it felt, encasing his own nose. Almost as if it wasn’t there at all.

  Felix looked in the mirror. The nose gleamed in the fluorescent light. When he had imagined this, he had thought it would look clownish, ridiculous, but no. The nose gave him gravitas. The man in the mirror was every inch the authority.

  Finally, Felix gave in to curiosity that logic and common sense had been unable to kill, and drew in a full, deep breath.

  Well, of course, there was no difference between that breath and the one before. Does it actually work? he’d asked Zickler. Does it actually give you preternatural, magical, olfactory sensitivity? Will you be able to tell the difference between species of tulip from a mile away? Or inform the police what the victim’s last meal was from the odour palette of their kitchen? Or tell whether your lover is true from the tang of her sweat?

  Felix laughed at himself. No, there were only the usual smells of the bathroom: soap on the wash stand, bleach from the floor, the slight odour of damp that told him Joanna had showered before she left. He could see the water droplets on the shower curtain, and a rim of mildew around the hem that had really quite a strong taint to it. It almost masked the sting of mint from the dried smear of toothpaste on the sink, and the fulsome guff of sewage seeping from the toilet, the lingering stain of farts too, and the cloying, complex mélange of bathroom dust – talcum powder mixed with flakes of skin and tiny hairs and carpet fibres – and that dog really did stink, she’d been washing him in here, in their shower, that was disgusting, and their neighbours, the vegetarians, well she’d been cooking bacon again after he’d left for work and then doused the place in the most godawful aerosol freshener—

  Felix removed the Nose.

  And breathed out.

  •••

  The effect on Felix’s fortunes was immediate. He told no one but Joanna about the Nose, insisting on privacy while he worked, but it was difficult not to associate his ownership of the artefact with the sudden flood of work offers. And that initial flurry was nothing compared to how it got once word of his newfound abilities spread.

  In a few short weeks there was enough money to completely redecorate the apartment. Joanna might have been a little more pleased about it, but her scowl over breakfast had not shifted one bit. Out of sorts, Felix had accidentally kicked the dog, which had taken to following him round, constantly sniffing at his legs and jumping up, and he and his wife had argued. “And give that thing a proper bath outside,” he’d yelled as he rushed out to catch the flight to Strasbourg. “It stinks.” Her reply had been a petulant mutter, but it had sounded like: Look who’s talking.

  Bernal et fils was a gourmet provisioner. Having started life several generations back as two brothers with adjoining shops, one a poissonnier, the other a volailler, their main business now was in procuring expensive comestibles for the elite of Europe. However, they still kept their hand in with a range of home-smoked fish and meats.

  “Monsieur Kapel.” The woman’s smile was professional, her handshake firm. “Welcome to Bernal. I’m Elodie Meilleroux. Thank you for coming all this way. We really hope you can help us make our mark in the smoked salmon market this winter season.”

  “My pleasure.” Felix smiled too, simply because it was nice to be smiled at for a change. “I’d like to get going right away if that’s all right. Although I have to say I still don’t understand why you need me for this, don’t you have tasting panels?”

  “D’accord.” As Meilleroux waved him towards a door, she glanced quizzically at the carpet where he had walked. Felix looked too but if there was anything there, he couldn’t see what it might be. “Well, that’s our problem, you see,” she said, holding the door and then following him through. “Our panels can’t decide. And to be honest, Monsieur, the company can’t afford to get this wrong.” She shrugged apologetically then ushered him through another door. “So, we’ve called in the expert.”

  Felix was getting used to people saying things like this. It had taken long enough.

  “Obviously, I’ll do what I can,” he said.

  “Thank you, Monsieur.” Meilleroux beamed and stopped before one more door. “Well, here we are. The room has been prepared as you requested. Spotlessly clean, fragrance-free detergents, no background odours.”

  “Very good.” Again Felix tried to match her smile. “Then I shall get started.”

  When he raised his hand to push the door, though, she stopped him. She looked embarrassed. “Monsieur, I’m sorry but, have you perhaps stepped in something. There are a lot of dogs in the area…”

  “Stepped in something, you mean like—?”

  “Oui, merde, Monsieur Kapel. Can’t you smell it? It’s really quite strong.”

  Kapel shook his head. Without the Nose on, he could smell only the things you’d normally expect to smell in an office building. Sterile carpet, stale recirculated air, a lingering chemical taint of air freshener. Nevertheless, he lifted first one shoe, then the other. His soles were spotless. Meilleroux’s brow creased. She checked her own shoes, then she shook her head. “I must be imagining things.”

  “It’s not a problem. The nose sometimes plays tricks on the best of us.”

  She shrugged again. “I’ll let you get to work then. When you’re finished, press zero on the phone and ask for me.”

  The room was empty of everything apart from the table, the sample containers and the clipboard and pen. Felix placed his briefcase on the table and retrieved the velvet-lined box that used to contain his Krugerrand. He took out the Nose, and began his work.

  •••

  Business boomed. Felix travelled constantly, all over Europe, to the Americas and throughout Asia. First class every time. He passed the travelling time writing guest columns for a variety of trade magazines and Sunday supplements and responding to requests to give informative talks. At least to begin with. The columns continued, but the public appearances dried up pretty fast. He tried not to feel personally insulted. Same as when the customers, delighted with his work, nevertheless tried to persuade him not to visit in person in future. We don’t want to inconvenience you. I’m afraid our budget won’t stretch. We’ll send the samples to you. Don’t you use Teleroma?

  He did not, would not, could not use Teleroma. His laptop barely managed email. And besides, he told them: “Why would you buy a greyhound and make it run in shackles?”

  Return visits were to deserted parts of buildings accompanied by a single green-faced employee. Even though Felix had bathed that morning, was wearing clothes fresh out of the dry cleaner’s wrapper, and brand new shoes.

  At first he thought it was his imagination, but the evidence mounted. What he had thought at first to be room accorded by the public to a person of obvious status became naked avoidance. People crossed the street to distance themselves from him. Shop keepers asked him not very politely to leave. Children jeered, or cried.

  He thought of Karlheinz Kuntz. Of psychosomatic putrescence. Well, what else could it be? He was sure he gave off no particular smell – he of all peopl
e would detect one, surely – but everyone he came into contact with acted like he was the skunk from those old cartoons.

  Even Joanna was sleeping in a room at the opposite end of the apartment now. The only person who enjoyed Felix’s company these days was Bijoux. When he came home, the little bastard was waiting at the door to snuffle at his ankles, happily licking its chops.

  Joanna was sitting in the kitchen typing on her computer. When she saw him she looked cross, then guilty, then nauseated. Like the rest of the flat, the kitchen was full of fresh cut flowers and the windows were wide open.

  “What are you doing here? I thought you were in…” She trailed off because he knew she had long since ceased to care where his travels took him as long as it was out of the house.

  “Change of plan,” he said. “I’m conducting a telephone interview with Spice! Magazine.”

  Joanna sneered. “Oh, they’re not coming to do it in person? I wonder why.”

  “Well, the drains…”

  “It’s not the drains, Felix. Have you seen the doctor again?”

  “He maintains there’s nothing wrong with me a good bath won’t fix. And he won’t let me make another appointment.”

  Joanna hmphed. “There’s another letter from the landlord. The neighbours have got a petition together. It’s got nearly four hundred names. Who would have thought your fame would have spread so far?”

  Felix took a step towards her. “Joanna…” But she held up a hand, so he sat meekly at the opposite end of the table. “What are we going to do?”