INTERZONE 253 JUL-AUG 2014 by Andy Cox

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 possession 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 ?