INTERZONE 253 JUL-AUG 2014 by Andy Cox Read Free Book Online Page B

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