Base Notes Read online

  PRAISE FOR LARA ELENA DONNELLY’S AMBERLOUGH DOSSIER

  Amnesty

  “A fitting finale for the series; the experience of reading it is somewhat like watching an elegant train wreck in progress and wondering if there will be any survivors.”

  —Booklist

  “A triumph of craft.”

  —Tor.com

  Armistice

  “Bracing [and] timely . . . Donnelly has successfully built upon her intricate, lush world of passionate spies and turncoats, and each character leaps off the page in this satisfying novel that succeeds on both grand and intimate scales.”

  —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

  “Evoke[s] a smoky, lustrous Art Deco atmosphere reminiscent of a 1930s theatrical production.”

  —Booklist

  “Donnelly is attempting to reimagine the spy novel free of heteronormative, patriarchal, Eurocentric restrictions. The result is highly entertaining.”

  —Historical Novel Society

  Amberlough

  “James Bond by way of Oscar Wilde.”

  —Holly Black, New York Times bestselling author

  “Donnelly blends romance and tragedy, evoking gilded-age glamour and the thrill of a spy adventure, in this impressive debut. As heartbreaking as it is satisfying.”

  —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

  “Donnelly’s striking debut brings a complex world of politics, espionage, and cabaret life to full vision.”

  —Library Journal (starred review, Debut of the Month)

  “Amberlough grabbed me from the first page. It is beautiful, all too real, and full of pain. Read it. It will change you.”

  —Mary Robinette Kowal, winner of the Hugo Award

  “Sparkling with slang, full of riotous characters, and dripping with intrigue, Amberlough is a dazzling romp through a tumultuous, ravishing world.”

  —Robert Jackson Bennett, winner of the Shirley Jackson Award and the Edgar Award

  ALSO BY LARA ELENA DONNELLY

  The Amberlough Dossier

  Amberlough

  Armistice

  Amnesty

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2022 by Lara Elena Donnelly

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Thomas & Mercer, Seattle

  www.apub.com

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Thomas & Mercer are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  ISBN-13: 9781542030700

  ISBN-10: 1542030706

  Cover design by M. S. Corley

  CONTENTS

  BASE NOTES SOLIFLORE DISCOVERY SET

  AN INTRODUCTION

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  EPILOGUE

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  BASE NOTES SOLIFLORE DISCOVERY SET

  THE HEROES

  Vic Fowler

  Unavailable at this time and, at any rate, irrelevant.

  Giovanni Metzger

  Cool, dry cornstarch. Aldehydes and white balsamic. A bitterness almost like gunpowder.

  Beau Singh

  Hot asphalt, sweat lather, nutty ambrette. Clean, green whiff of witch hazel. A complex sweetness reminiscent of healing myrrh.

  Jane Betjeman

  Sweet hay and unwashed hair. Warm, wet wool. Horse stalls and sticky lanolin.

  THE VILLAINS

  Joseph Eisner

  Old book must, dry leather. Powdered latex gloves.

  Reginald Yates

  Sour milk and little boy. The spermy scent of decorative pear trees.

  Conrad Yates

  Sour milk and old man. Petroleum ointment tang.

  Gerald Pearson

  Salty sweetness of bad bourbon, smoker’s breath. The pipe-smoke fug of an OTB.

  THE INCIDENTALS

  Pippin Miles

  A sour new pack of playing cards. Antiperspirant, plastic sneakers, dandruff shampoo.

  Barry Baptiste

  Cocaine sweat and the astringent earthiness of copaiba balsam. Salt, salt, salt.

  Iolanda Ríos

  Metallic curler smoke. Crisp hair. Something powdery beneath it, flowery but sharp.

  AN INTRODUCTION

  Notes de Tête: Ozone

  Notes de Cœur: Burnt Bacon

  Notes de Fond: Wet Earth, Gasoline

  Let’s try something. As a quick proof of concept before we get started.

  Imagine you are me. You are parking a Zipcar at the border of a field upstate. It is early spring, and cold, but the windows are down. Still, everything reeks of ethanol: like twisting the cap off a bottle of Everclear and pressing your nose to its open mouth. Less a smell than a physical sensation.

  The sedan has new-car smell: plasticky and fresh. The open windows let in a breeze, and the rich aroma of wet dirt, turned by the plow and soaked with rain. Upwind there is a hog farm. The manure scent carries for miles.

  It is very dark out here, which is good for what comes first but bad for what comes next. You are nervous, though you have done this many times before. You can smell your own sweat, and the sourness of fear collects behind your molars, tainting each breath. Taste and smell are near enough it does not matter if you breathe through your nose or mouth: either way you stink of trepidation.

  Opening the trunk reveals a plastic tarp, its inside edges wet with condensation. Alcohol burns inside your sinuses and makes you weep.

  The body is heavy, but you have practice at this and get it out if not with ease, then at least without undue awkwardness. The tarp crackles on the fallow ground.

  There is a metal barrel in this field, not far from the fence, where someone burns their garbage on occasion. You have never actually seen it smoldering, but the scent of melted plastic and scorched Styrofoam is always present, if faint.

  Bent in half, Caroline fits neatly over the ashes of last month’s trash.

  You are sweating now with exertion, and that smells cleaner. The wind shifts and the hog shit fades, replaced by fresh green growth and ozone. A storm is coming. But hopefully not until the fire has burned out.

  Though Caroline is pickled, absolutely soaked with alcohol, you have still brought gasoline. You open the can and the metallic tang of it blooms across the back of your throat, summoning memories of filling stations in deep summer.

  You pour gas from the can—not too much or the barrel will explode—and add brush from the edge of the forest to get things started. You will add more later as things progress. It takes a long time for a corpse to burn in these conditions, even saturated with accelerant. In the best case, the fire will still leave teeth and bits of bone for you to bury. The sacrum, after all, is so-called for its ind
estructibility. The holy bone, unscathed amidst the ashes.

  The match sends up a thread of sulfur. The wet wood, when it catches, smokes. And as the fire grows, the smoke begins to smell of hair and rendered fat. Someone else might put their shirt across their mouth, sip the charnel air only with reluctance.

  But you are me, so you breathe deep.

  Yes. Like that.

  1

  Notes de Tête: Whiskey, Jasmine, Oakmoss

  Notes de Cœur: Old Cigarettes and Stale Coffee

  Notes de Fond: Mildew, Charcoal, Barbicide

  For the aesthetically and culturally inclined, there are few places in the continental United States—or the full fifty, for that matter—as apt to satisfy as Lincoln Center. Unfortunately, for those of us aesthetically and culturally inclined people who are perpetually skint, Lincoln Center is a stretch, financially.

  I always made it to the Met’s season premiere, where I bought a single drink to nurse and supplement via flask in the bathroom, breathing through my mouth and trying not to smell the Sauvage and White Linen, the Santal 33 and Coco Mademoiselle.

  It was all in order to be Instagrammed, of course, and I sometimes managed to get my ticket comped. I knew enough things about enough people to engineer that, at least. I had learned my trade at the elbow of Jonathan Bright, a notorious extortionist and iconoclast of the perfume world; I understood the value of kompromat. And Bright House, now under my dubious stewardship, had just enough brand recognition that the Met Opera interns could find us to tag when they posted.

  Besides, I was comparatively young, passingly attractive, and trendily androgynous. Just the right ornament for Last Night at the Met, and the social-media team knew it. Opera couldn’t cater to fossils anymore—the Met needed young blood who would inherit their grandparents’ money.

  Good luck. For most of my generation, it would just go to student debt and cocktails. If anything came to me (an impossibility), I would dump it into a poorly managed career in edgy luxury items. You can’t make opera money on perfume that smells like cunts and gasoline.

  At any rate, I didn’t usually make an appearance beyond the gala. Or, I hadn’t until recently. But Joseph Eisner had promised me a fortune, and now he wouldn’t take my calls. He did, however, like his chamber music.

  It had been an acquired taste for me. In my distant undergraduate past, when circumstance sat me in front of an ensemble, I spent the first five minutes of each concert deciding which musician I would fuck if I had the chance, and the rest shifting minutely in my seat.

  I still couldn’t stand Chanel. And while I had learned to appreciate—indeed, enjoy—chamber ensembles, orchestras, and on occasion even the opera, I retained my former habit as a dirty amusement to add some private savor to the proceedings. Tonight, it was the violist, weaving and bobbing his way through Dvořák’s Terzetto in C Major like a sinuous dancer.

  I prefer the romantics—fewer hair-raising harmonies than modern fare, and certainly more engaging than funereal baroque. The intriguing arrangement of the terzetto kept me engaged, in that slightly detached and floating manner engendered by instrumental performance.

  Moreover, the woman to my left, one row ahead, was wearing Salome by Papillon. The simple fact of anyone wearing such a scent in public pleased me. So few people dared wear anything at all these days, and when they did, it was inevitably staid: an inoffensive classic or antiseptic citrus-and-powder. But this perfume was one I might have worn myself. Jasmine, yes, but more indolic than your average floral. People sometimes say it smells like dirty panties.

  As the trio wrapped up for intermission, I took a steadying breath of musk and straightened my lapels. The music was only a means to an end, after all.

  Haunting the lobby of Alice Tully Hall like a well-dressed revenant, I watched ghostly reflections play across the glass. Headlights slid along 65th, slicing through the spectral intermission crowd.

  My sex-addled spy, Eisner’s personal assistant, had assured me he would be at this evening’s performance. She was sweet, and apt to sing like a canary post-coitus. But she still wouldn’t put my calls through. In this instance, however, she had been more a help than a hindrance: Eisner appeared from the shadowed staircase leading up from the restrooms like wealthy Pluto rising from the underworld. I moved to intercept him.

  “Mr. Eisner,” I said, extending my hand. His, when we shook, was wet. From washing; I would have noticed the scent of urine. Instead, I smelled my own concoction, and that added insult to injury. Iris, cotton, iron rust. Dark threads of sweat and blood underneath a greener, cleaner, sparkling surface. A liminal accord, not quite chypre, not quite fougère. I quashed fury and kept smiling.

  “Vic,” he said. “What are you doing here?” He didn’t even have the grace to sound discomfited.

  “I enjoy Dvořák as much as anybody.”

  “Of course, of course.” His laugh was expansive, showing orthodontically straight teeth yellow with years of coffee and nicotine. Light bounced off his baldness.

  A much younger man approached us, holding two plastic flutes of sparkling wine with heavily ringed fingers. “Jojo,” he said, lifting one drink and giving it a perilous waggle.

  Eisner smiled indulgently. “Andrew, meet Vic.”

  “Your son?” I asked, because I knew it would annoy him. I should have been polite, but I could hardly bear it. I’m not a polite person, when all is said and done, and less so when I’m pressed or peeved. At times, my displeasure can be downright violent.

  Eisner’s smile was thin. “Andrew, Vic is a perfumer. Absolutely charming little enterprise called Bright House. Here, smell.”

  He lifted his wrist to the young man’s face in a way no blood relation would dare outside a particular subgenre of pornography. Andrew wrinkled his surgically delicate nose, and my annoyance swiftly solidified into hatred.

  “It’s so nice to see young people taking an interest in the arts,” I said.

  “Vic,” purred Eisner. “You’re hardly out of high school.”

  “I’m twenty-eight,” I said, icy. “And I run my own company.”

  “Well, you don’t look it.” It was not a compliment. “How is your little cottage industry these days?”

  He knew exactly, because he had seen the financials. When our initial off-the-books association led to the perfume he had the gall to wear tonight after breaking his promise, he had offered to act as an investor. He knew I only needed a little push—little by his lights—for a boost in production. With that, I could lock down a European distribution deal I hoped would put Bright House’s feet back under us. Then I could stop making spreadsheets and return to making perfume. But I couldn’t pull it off without his cash.

  The money had not been forthcoming. It was either cruelty or caprice. What did Bright House matter to him? He could wear Frassaï, Frédéric Malle, Fueguia. He could finance his own damn line of aftershave and eau de toilette and never feel the squeeze. And yet he wouldn’t cut a check for me, no matter what I had done for him. Despite the specter of scent that hung around his throat and everything I had put into it. There was more in that bottle than iris and aldehydes, and we both knew it.

  I wanted to wrap my hands around that wattle where he’d sprayed my scent and strangle him.

  The lights rose and dimmed. We all went back to our seats. Throughout the final quartet, I smelled Salome working through its middle notes, decaying to the stink beneath. My mood grew fouler to match until the final chord rang out, and I slipped away under cover of applause.

  My landlady had not lit the boiler yet, which meant that it was cold. Autumn had come to New York at last and was making its presence felt. I checked my mail—junk, junk, bills, and junk. A cold draft slithered through the mail slot and raised hairs on the back of my neck. The lights of Lincoln Center felt very far away.

  My company might have been operating in the red, but I still paid myself enough to live alone. You might think this was an extravagance. Given the lucrative criminal sideli
ne I pursued outside of office hours, I assure you it was not.

  I had no projects steeping at the time, and no raw materials to prepare. My basement studio felt empty, my prospects devoid of potential. I was not in a mood to accept this with grace. With more than necessary force, I flung my coat across the armchair and, from the bar cart, drew a dwindling bottle of Longrow I could ill afford to replace. It reeked like seaweed, smoke, and iodine. Before drinking I drew the smell so deep into my lungs they burned. I was in a mood to set most things on fire, including myself.

  Fuck Eisner, anyway.

  I was tired. I could finally admit it to myself, five years on from that first fateful day in the lab. As protégé to the illustrious Jonathan Bright, founder of the eponymous House, I had been eager to surpass him. As his lover, I had fought for power along every axis of our relationship. And I had finally won it, albeit in an . . . unorthodox fashion. Now that I was—nominally—on top, it was a scramble just to stay in place.

  While Bright House shone in the press for some time following Jonathan’s tragic disappearance, sales slacked off when our name slipped from the headlines. The company came to me after a little bit of cursory legal paper pushing; I was second-in-command and nobody else wanted it. Peers appreciated Jonathan’s craft but wouldn’t touch the business with a ten-foot pole. I didn’t do much to remedy the situation.

  In truth, I was too ambitious out of the gate. A rookie mistake. I spent more money on R & D than I could spare and not enough on marketing, compliance, personnel. Our production of staples faltered—I was not interested in scents just anyone would wear. My flaw, like Jonathan’s, was an abiding passion to produce perfume that made people think. Or that bypassed the brain altogether and went straight to the gut and groin.

  Unfortunately, sex and shit make most Americans uncomfortable, and few of them really enjoy introspection or intellectual exercise. Yourself excepted, of course, or we wouldn’t have gotten this far.

  It was lucky, then, that Jonathan’s death—because I know he did not “disappear”—led to one of the most interesting craft discoveries of my career. And my most lucrative, ounce for ounce. Unfortunately it’s not something I can advertise. So while I very occasionally made—and still make—a comfortable sum committing or at least abetting an array of unsavory acts in the service of creating inimitable scents with certain arcane attributes, it was not enough to run a company. Besides, the IRS would ask too many questions.