“So tell me, what am I wearing today?”
He’s already smiling, shaking his head slightly, avoiding eye contact. Maxine understands that whatever this gift is, he doesn’t go around showing it off.
“On second thought…”
“Too late.” Some kind of jive nose manipulation, as if clearing his passages. “OK—first of all, it’s from Florence…”
Uh-oh.
“The Officina in Santa Maria Novella, and you have on the original Medici formulation, Number 1611.”
Aware that her mouth has dropped open a few millimeters further than she would like, “Don’t tell me how you do it, don’t, it’s like card tricks, I don’t want to know.”
“I seldom run into that many Officina persons actually.”
“More of them around than you’d think. You wander into this beautiful high old room full of these scents, people who’ve been to Florence a hundred times never heard of the place, you start to think maybe it’s your own secret discovery—then suddenly, shopper’s nightmare, it’s all over town.”
“People who wouldn’t know a floral from a chypre,” sympathetic. “Drives you nuts.”
“And… being a Nose… it’s nice work, the pay’s good?”
“Well, most of it’s with the larger corporations, we all keep revolving firm to firm, after a while you begin to notice the companies changing hands, getting restructured, just like the classic scents do, then you’re out on the bricks again. For years it never occurred to me this might be what our mutual guru calls a message from beyond. ‘Who is the person without rank, who goes in and out through the portals of the face?’ is how he put it.”
“He gave me that one too.”
“‘Portals’ is supposed to mean eyes, but right away I figured nostrils, the koan turned out to be spot-on, gave me some room to think, and nowadays I’m freelance, my waiting list for new clients is about six months, which is longer than any of those company jobs ever lasted.”
“And Shawn… ”
“Steers an occasional client my way, takes a small fee. Enough to cover his Erolfa bill, which he tends to bathe in. Usual thing.”
“In the Nose business. You have your own perfume line, or…?”
He seems embarrassed. “More like an investigative agency.”
Aahhh! “A private Nose.”
“It gets worse. 90 percent of my business is matrimonial.”
What else? “Goodness. How… would something like that work?”
“Oh, they show up, ‘Smell my husband, my wife, tell me who they’ve been with, what’d they have for lunch, how many drinks, are they doing drugs, is there oral sex—’ that seems to be the top FAQ—and so forth. Thing is, it’s all in time sequence, each indication layered on top of the one before. You can put together a chronology.”
“Strangely enough”—is this such a good idea?—“there’s this situation I’ve had come up… Do you mind if I just pick your— let me put that another way, could one of you Nose people go in to a crime scene, like a police psychic, give it a snort, and reconstruct what went on?”
“Sure, Nasal Forensics. Moskowitz, De Anzoli, couple others, they specialize in that.”
“How about you?”
Conkling angles his head, she’d have to say charmingly, and takes a minute. “Cops and me… You run a nasal scan, the boys get paranoid, they think maybe you’re scanning them too, snorting into all those deep cop secrets. So we always end up at cross-purposes.”
“This is never a problem for Moskowitz and them?”
“Moskowitz is a decorated bunco-squad veteran, De Anzoli has a D.Crim., and there’s family members also on the job, it’s a culture of trust. Me, I’m more comfortable as an independent.”
“Oh, I can relate.” She points her face across the room and then slides her eyeballs sideways to look at him. “Unless you already smelled that about me also?”
“Like is there some notorious pheromone, kicks in whenever—Wait, rewind, now you’re gonna think—”
Maxine beams brightly and sips her Sudden Enlightenment Organic Bamboo tea. “Sure must make dating complicated, this snoot of yours.”
“Is why I can generally keep quiet about it. Except when Shawn tries to fix me up.”
They have a look at each other. Over the past year, Maxine has been out with hat fetishists, day traders, pool sharks, private-equity hotshots, and seldom has she been visited by anxieties about seeing any of them again. Now, a little bit late for it, she remembers to check out Conkling’s left hand, which proves, like her own, to be innocent of a ring.
He catches her looking. “I forgot to check your finger too. Awful, ain’t we.” Conkling has a boy and a girl in middle school who show up on weekends, and today’s Friday. “I mean, they have keys, but usually they find me there.”
“Yeah I’ve got to go punch back in too. Here, this is my home, office, beeper.”
“Here’s mine, and if you’re serious about a crime-scene job, I can either put you in touch with Moskowitz or…”
“Better if it was you.” She allows for a heartbeat and a half. “I don’t want to coordinate with the NYPD any more than I need to on this. Not that they ever take kindly to civilians poking their—sorry, I meant inquiring into police business.”
• • •
SO WHAT THEY DO is meet for a noon swimming date at The Deseret pool, it having been proven scientifically, according to Conkling, that the human sense of smell tends to peak on average at 11:45 A.M. Maxine wears some midrange Trish McEvoy scent that’s going to wash off anyway, so it shouldn’t freak her out beyond some proper perimeter if Conkling guesses right again.
Conkling seems to be fit, in a frequent-swimmer way. Today he’s wearing something from one of the WASP catalogs a couple sizes too big. Maxine resists any eyebrow commentary. She was expecting maybe a Speedo thong? She discreetly checks for dick size anyway, curious also about any reaction he might be having to how she looks in this number she has on today, a high-ticket reformatting of the LBD into a swimsuit, instead of the more or less disposable ones she gets through the mail in floral prints it is better not to think about… And whoop there it is. Isn’t it?
“Something, uh…”
“Oh I was just looking for uh, my goggles.”
“On your head?”
“Right.”
From its looks, The Deseret pool could be the oldest one in the city. Overhead you can see soaring into the chlorine-scented mists a huge segmented dome of some translucent early plastic, each piece concave and teardrop-shaped, separated by bronze-colored cames—during the daytime, whatever the sun’s angle, admitting the same verdigris light, its surface at nightfall growing ever more remote and less visible, vanishing before closing time into a wintry gray.
Joaquin the pool guy is on duty. Usually something of a motormouth, today he seems to Maxine a little, you’d say, unforthcoming.
“You heard anything more about the body they found?”
“Much as anybody, which is nothing. Not even the guys on the door, not even Fergus the nightman, who knows everything. Cops been and gone, now everybody’s pretty creeped out, right?”
“It wasn’t a tenant, I heard.”
“I don’t ask.”
“Somebody must know something.”
“Around here it’s deaf and dumb. Policy of the building. Sorry, Maxine.”
After a couple of token laps, Maxine and Conkling pretend to head for their respective locker rooms, but meet up again, sneak into a staff-only stairwell, presently they’re underneath the pool, moving flipflopped and semiclad through the shadows and mysteries of the unnumbered thirteenth floor, which belongs to a disaster always about to happen, a buffer space constantly under the threat of inundation from above if the pool—concrete, state of the art back then, grandfathered exempt from what today would be a number of code violations—should God forbid ever spring a leak. For now it’s the outward and structural form of a secret history of payoffs to contractors and inspectors and signers of permits, dishonest stewards long gone who expected the deluge after them to take place well after any statute of limitations has run. Creaking underframe, early-20th-century trusswork and bracing. A range of animal life in which mice could be the least of one’s worries. The only light comes shimmering from watertight observation windows in the pool, each enclosed in its private viewing booth, much like a peep show at an arcade, where according to an early real-estate brochure “admirers of the natatory arts may obtain, without themselves having to undergo immersion, educational views of the human form unrestricted by the demands of gravity.” Light from above the pool comes down through the water and through the observation windows and out into this darkened level below, a strange rarefied greenish blue.
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