A lasting impression is worth killing for in this intoxicating novel about memories and murder by the author of the Amberlough Dossier series. Intrigued? Well read on to discover the synopsis and an excerpt from Lara Elena Donnelly’s Base Notes, which releases on February 1st 2022.
SYNOPSIS
In New York City everybody needs a side hustle, and perfumer Vic Fowler has developed a delicate art that has proved to be very lucrative: creating bespoke scents that evoke immersive memories—memories that, for Vic’s clients, are worth killing for. But the city is expensive, and these days even artisanal murder doesn’t pay the bills. When Joseph Eisner, a former client with deep pockets, offers Vic an opportunity to expand the enterprise, the money is too good to turn down. But the job is too intricate—and too dangerous—to attempt alone.
Manipulating fellow struggling artists into acting as accomplices is easy. Like Vic, they too are on the verge of burnout and bankruptcy. But as relationships become more complicated, Vic’s careful plans start to unravel. Hounded by guilt and a tenacious private investigator, Vic grows increasingly desperate to complete Eisner’s commission. Is there anyone—friends, lovers, coconspirators—that Vic won’t sacrifice for art?
I had just walked out when I felt my phone vibrate in my back pocket. Juggling pastry bag and pumpkin thing, I managed to answer before it went to voice mail.
“Mr. Eisner.”
“Vic,” he said. ‘Tm glad I caught you. Is it a bad time?”
I sat on a convenient bench in a bus shelter. “Of course not.” Barry’s latte would get cold. I didn’t care. Eisner could buy him another one. Ten more. One for every day of the next three months. The next year. If he’d just cut me a fucking check.
“I was wondering if you’re free tomorrow evening.”
This gave me pause. I leaned into the plastic wall of the bus shelter and watched a man bend down to scoop his chihuahuas shit off the sidewalk. “Why?”
”I’d like to speak with you about a potential commission. And I have an extra ticket to Scheherazade.”
I was torn. An Eisner commission would bring in some cash. I’d have to launder it a little ifl wanted to funnel it into Bright House, but even if I didn’t go that far, at least I could cut my own salary and still pay rent in hundred-dollar bills. Iolanda wouldn’t mind, and wouldn’t ask any questions.
Eisner was unreliable, and I didn’t want to reward his fickleness, his treachery. But I enjoyed the music of the Mighry Handful, Rimsky Korsakov most of all. And I had never heard Scheherazade in the flesh.
“Fine,” I said. “What time?”
Eisner texted to say he was running late, trapped in the office, wouldn’t make the first half So I listened to a series of increasingly elaborate and ethereal Berlioz art songs on my own, wondering what he wanted. I looked forward to intermission with equal parts dread and intrigue.
About halfway through the interval, I spotted Eisner in the lobby: a miracle in the milling crowd of Qtips and successful young professionals, salted with student rush and last-minute bargains. Gold Bond, bad breath, Bath & Body Works.
What did they think when they saw us, I wondered. My best guess was father and child. I kept a careful distance from his side as we ascended toward the mezzanine. I didn’t want to be this evening’s grave-robbing arm candy, even in the minds of strangers.
“It was a surprise to see you at the Dvorak earlier this week,” he said. He motioned me through the double doors ahead of him. “I suppose you didn’t seem like the kind of young person who enjoys these things.”
I wanted to say, You have no idea what kind of young person enjoys these things. Every young person you’ve ever invited has been trying to impress you, or at least get you to pay for dinner. I wanted to say, You don’t know me at all.
But I wanted him to pay for dinner too. Or at least a drink. I wanted him to pay for my life’s work.
Our seats were very good: nestled in the belly of the center orchestra, with just enough elevation to look slightly down on the stage. The musicians rustled and shifted, ran through scales. I smelled cork grease and key oil.
We didn’t have to wait long until the conductor appeared in a rain of applause, stepped up, and cued the oboe for a long, clear tuning note.
The oboe doesn’t tune to the orchestra, one of my paramours had told me. The orchestra tunes to the oboe.
She abided in my leather box now, alongside Jonathan. She had not been a particularly interesting person. Beautiful, yes, and very talented. But it was no sacrifice for me to lose her presence in order to preserve her music in a bottle. Many of my independent pursuits arose when I became involved with people who had a single attribute that captivated, or with whom I had shared one moment of the sublime and several others of the deeply unpleasant. She was one of these: better recalled only in flashes, for the talents she possessed. No lost potential there. Not to say there hadn’t been, with others.
If I wanted, when I got home, I could listen to her play Mozart, the two of us alone in the submarine gloom of her ground-floor apartment in South Slope, all the windows facing the courtyard. The boiler just beneath the floor filled the rooms with a low hum like the engine of a ship.
Mildew, lavender, hot metal, spit. And her own smell, unique, inimitable. I could almost conjure them now, but I knew my remembrance, unaided by the true accord, was fallible. Memory is treacherous territory. My scents are maps, guides, pathways, landmarks that will bring you safely to your intended destination.
Silence fell in the concert hall. Several hundred breaths drew in. The baton came down, and the brass exploded.
How can I describe this symphony to someone who has never heard it? I cannot hope to do it justice if you are unfamiliar with the piece, and even then, to hear it performed live by the Philharmonic is another matter.
The music painted. It danced. It inhaled and exhaled and wove a narrative just beyond language, just behind the veil of comprehension. It moved so lightly from bombast to lullaby that I felt dizzy. And in the end, when all that was left was a single violin singing over the final chords, I felt my soul strain at the bounds of my body as though it would break through my ribs and follow that sound wherever notes went when they died.
Applause did not explode immediately-the audience was stunned. But once it had begun, it would not end. It was like another movement, its dynamics rising and falling as if this paean too had been penned by Rimsky-Korsakov.
“What would it take,” asked Eisner in the aftermath, eyes half-shut, “to preserve that sound forever? Just that single note, that moment in the dark.”
“Not forever,” I said. “Only as long as the perfume lasts, as long as it remains unspoiled, and doesn’t oxidize.”
He sighed, waved a hand. “You know what I mean. Could you bottle it for me? The last notes of tonight’s Scheherazade. What would it take?”
I looked around David Geffen Hall, the crowd already streaming out. Bright lights, warm wood, the strange geometric shapes of dampeners. I dosed my eyes and took a deep breath, conjuring not the image but its outlines in the air, the way the currents of scent eddied around them.
Warm wood, still: baked by stage lights. Hot dust. Rain carried in on the clothes and shoes of the audience, present in the draft from out of doors. Menthol from a hundred unwrapped cough drops. Old cigarette smoke. New cigarette smoke. The mingled traces of a thousand different colognes, perfumes, shampoos. The smell of the audience. The smell of the orchestra.
“You’re not asking about the elements,” I said. “Not the absolutes, or the accord. You want to know how many people have to die.”
He said nothing, only arranged his purple lips into a thin and crooked smile, eyes fixed on something far away.
“Is that the commission?” I asked. Was that why he had brought me here? “I’ve never even tried something like that. It just isn’t feasible.”
“A pity,” he said, and even I felt cold. “But no. I have something more practical in mind. Still a challenge, I think, but one more suited to your talents. Join me for a drink, and I’ll explain.”
We went to a whisky bar on the Upper West Side. It unnerved me that he knew what I preferred to drink. Even more so when he said, ”And it’s dose to your trains, I believe.”
I doubted Eisner ever took the subway, and the fact he knew enough about my public transit habits to deposit me within easy walking distance of three convenient train lines made me leery.
I tried to ignore the feeling, until I had a heavy tumbler of Caol Ila in hand. (I didn’t want to tax his generosity too grossly, not at this juncture.) Once the notes of pepper and lemon rind had seared my sinuses clean and the booze was settling warmly in my stomach, I finally asked, “What is all this?”
Eisner traced the edge of his coaster with one finger. Made no eye contact, except with the meniscus of his Scotch. “It’s a commission, as I said.”
“But nothing to do with Scheherazade. So why the symphony?”
He drank, smiling into his glass. But the smile was grim. When he put the whisky down, he smoothed his hands along the creases in his trousers and said, “Consider that an apology, of sorts. For … what is it called? For ghosting you?”
”About your investment.”
He nodded.
“I just need a yes or no, Mr. Eisner. That way I can make my plans.”
“Unfortunately,” he said, “it’s a little more complicated than that.”
Christ. He was going to be coy. “Don’t tell me you’re hurting for money.” Unease put me on the offensive. “That’s a line you’ll have a hard time selling.”
“No,” he said. “Not that.”
A worse thought occurred to me. “Is someone onto you? About … our work together?”
“No, thank god.” Then, sharply: “Why? Have you … ”
I sipped my Scotch first, just to make him sweat. “Not yet.”
Eisner looked relieved. I was unused to seeing anything on his face besides self-satisfaction. My sense of alarm increased.
“So you took me out as an apology,” I said. “You can’t tell me yes or no, but you still want to hire me for another commission. And you think I’ll agree?”
“When you hear my terms,” he said.
All my sphincters twisted tight. This sounded very like an entree to extortion.
“Your perfumes,” he said. “They let people relive memories. Their own memories. But what about memories of moments they never lived? Can you do that?”
“Fantasy?” I asked. “Imagination? People can certainly extrapolate from scent, but that’s not under my control.”
He shook his head. “No. Real moments. But ones in which we weren’t present. For instance, things that happened behind closed doors.”
I shook my head in turn. This wasn’t whatever ax I had expected to fall, which meant that one was likely still suspended. “It wouldn’t work. As I understand what I do”-1 barely did-“it’s based on the way our brains retrieve memory, and our associations of particular scents with a moment in the past. If your brain hasn’t already built those pathways …I can’t trail blaze, as it were.”
“Have you ever tried?”
He had me there. I covered by drinking. The smell made me think of Jonathan, the bottles on his bar cart. The man who had first served me single malt. How many of the scents I had concocted from his absolute relied on some kind of whisky note? How many times had I sat across from him with the smells of smoke and malted barley in the air between us, before that last night, that last drink?
What might he have done in my absence that I would want to know? If Eisner’s impossible dream could be made to work, what knowledge could a new memory of Jonathan pass on about this business?
But that wasn’t how this worked. I couldn’t make something out of nothing. Could I?
“If you can do what I ask,” said Eisner, ”I’ll cut a check. Not just for the perfume, but for the sum I offered to help bump production. You’ll get your European distribution in time for the latter part of the holiday season. You’ll be in the black. You’ll be safe, or nearly.”
That invocation of safety didn’t sit well with me. ”And if l refuse?”
“How shocking, when they tell me my dead father was made into perfume, sold to me by a twisted sadist, a serial murderer.”
The Scotch had dried the fat from my tongue, and now it sat rough and awkward in my mouth. “You wouldn’t.”
“I would.”
Only very occasionally had clients threatened me thus-most were dissuaded by the idea of mutually assured destruction, and by the simple fact that what they had hired me to do could just as easily be done to them. Still, it had happened once or twice, though the stakes had been much lower then. I could not take it on the chin if l dealt with Eisner in the usual gruesome way: he held the future of my business in his hands, rather than a few months’ rent.
“You’re only safe because you’re very good at avoiding scrutiny,” he said. “Once somebody figures out what rocks they should be turning over … ”
“Then they’ll find you down there squirming right beside me.”
“It will come down to hearsay in a court, and I have much better lawyers.”
”And who points to the rocks, Eisner? You won’t want to be within a thousand miles of all this.”
“I learned the importance of middlemen long ago. You’d be well served, in the future, to use a few yourself. The more footprints in the mud, the harder to find the trail you’d like to follow.”
“Too many cooks,” I said, “tend to ruin the soup.” The truth was, I couldn’t afford it. He could pay whoever he liked to do whatever he wanted. I couldn’t afford a fifteen percent cut, even to cover my ass. I made do with a keen sense of judgment and the occasional threat, which I occasionally made good on. This time, it had not been enough.
“What if l try, and fail?” Because I would try-I had to, now.
He shrugged. ‘Tm sorry. I only have one contingency plan.”
I licked my teeth, cleared my throat, and asked him: “What’s the job?”
Excerpted from Base Notes by Lara Elena Donnelly with permission from the publisher, Thomas & Mercer. Copyright © 2022 by Lara Elena Donnelly. All rights reserved.
