The Button

The Button

August in Vienna smells of dried horse manure, melting sunblock, and the desperate friction of foreign currency.

Roman Vacek stood behind the glass counter of Habsburg Splendor, a shop no larger than a walk-in closet wedged into a passageway near the Michaelerplatz, and watched a woman from Connecticut press a tarnished hairpin to her breastbone.

“You’re absolutely certain this belonged to one of Empress Elisabeth’s ladies-in-waiting?” the woman asked. She was sweating through a linen blouse that had cost more than Roman’s car.

“Madame,” Roman said, lowering his voice to the register of a discreet priest. “I have the provenance in the safe. It was acquired from a ruined estate in Baden. You can see where the lacquer has worn away from the tension of the imperial updo.”

The hairpin had been manufactured in Guangzhou six months ago. Roman had aged it himself by shaking it in a tin coffee can full of gravel and spraying it lightly with matte hairspray to kill the shine. He charged her one hundred and eighty euros. She paid in crisp, newly converted bills, her eyes damp with the thrill of possessing a secret piece of the past.

Roman smiled as the shop bell chimed her departure. He loved the tourist season. He operated on a simple, immensely profitable principle: no one actually wanted history. History was cholera, incest, and paperwork. People wanted the gift shop. They wanted Romy Schneider in a ballgown. Vienna was a city that had successfully replaced its entire suffocating past with a line of pistachio-marzipan chocolates, and Roman was merely a humble servant of that great municipal lie.

He turned on a rattling plastic desk fan that merely circulated the dust and the cloying scent of other people’s sweat, and dragged a cardboard box onto the counter.

He had bought the box at a flea market in Ottakring—the cleared-out desk drawers of a deceased civil servant. It was full of cheap gilt medals, broken pocket watches, and buttons. Roman needed the buttons. If you sewed a dull brass button onto a square of velvet and typed Uniform Remnant, Hofburg Guard, 1898 on a piece of cardstock, an American backpacker would give you forty euros for it.

He dug his thick fingers into the tangled metal, separating the useless plastic from the brass. At the bottom of the box, his thumb caught on something heavy.

It was a brass button, large and exceptionally ugly. It looked like it had been pried off a heavy winter coat. The double-headed eagle stamped into its face was crude, asymmetrical, and choked with verdigris.

Roman rubbed his thumb hard across the eagle’s heads to clear the grime.

The fan vanished. The heat of the August afternoon vanished.

Roman was standing in a freezing, cavernous corridor lined with gray marble. He could smell wet wool, stale pipe tobacco, and the sharp, unmistakable stench of gangrene. He was looking down at a pair of polished boots. His knees ached with a deep, throbbing rheumatism. A voice above him—nasal, aristocratic, dripping with a boredom so profound it was almost violent—was speaking.

“Let him wait. If his lung is bleeding, he can bleed in the antechamber. I am not missing the pheasant shoot for a man who cannot even manage his own debts.”

A wave of humiliation, hot and sickening, washed through Roman. It was not his humiliation. It belonged to the man standing in the boots, a man suppressing the urge to weep from the sheer, crushing impotence of being a minor fixture in a cruel machine. There was no waltz music. There was only the ticking of a grandfather clock and the sadistic weight of absolute bureaucracy.

Roman gasped, jerking his hand back.

He hit the glass counter, knocking over a display of fake silver spoons. He stood panting in the stifling heat of his shop. His heart hammered violently against his ribs. The smell of gangrene evaporated, replaced by the scent of roasted almonds drifting in from the street.

He stared at the ugly brass button sitting on the glass.

“Stroke,” Roman muttered, rubbing his chest. “Bad paprika. Dehydration.”

He was fifty-three, heavily upholstered with pork and beer, and perfectly primed for a cardiac event. But his left arm did not hurt. His face was not numb.

He looked at the button. It looked entirely ordinary. A piece of scrap metal.

Cautiously, with the morbid curiosity of a man poking a dead dog with a stick, Roman reached out and pressed his index finger flat against the brass.

Instantly, the shop shattered.

He was sitting at a mahogany desk. The air was suffocatingly hot, smelling of medicinal camphor and sour old-man breath. He was looking at a document. A death warrant for three deserters in Galicia. Roman felt the hand holding the pen—a hand mottled with liver spots and stiff with age. He felt the emotion in the man’s chest as he signed the paper.

There was no agony. There was no heavy burden of the crown. There was only a petty, irritable annoyance that the ink was slightly too watery, and a faint hunger for boiled beef. The absolute, sociopathic banality of power. Three men would hang, and the emperor’s only genuine emotion was indigestion.

Roman ripped his hand away, knocking the button onto the floor.

He backed up against the wall, breathing heavily, wiping a cold layer of sweat from his forehead.

It was real. God help him, the ugly little thing was a genuine relic. It had been in the rooms. It had absorbed the psychic grease of the empire. It was a battery charged with the actual truth of the Habsburgs: not romance, not tragedy, just a suffocating, bloodless machinery of spite, cold drafts, and bad breath.

Roman stared at it where it lay on the linoleum.

A dark, opportunistic thrill tried to rise in his chest. What could you charge for this? There were collectors—deranged royalists, dark-tourism fanatics, morbid billionaires—who would pay thousands for an object that carried a literal echo of the court.

The shop bell chimed.

Roman flinched. A man had walked in. He was tall, aggressively thin, wearing a tailored linen suit and wire-rimmed glasses. He looked like an academic who hated his students. He carried a leather satchel and an air of immense, unearned superiority.

“I was told you occasionally carry items of substance,” the man said, looking around the shop with undisguised contempt. He picked up a replica Sisi star from a velvet tray and dropped it with a clatter. “Not this tourist filth. I am looking for something authentic. Something that genuinely touched the inner circle. I am prepared to pay for reality.”

Roman looked at the man. Then he looked down at the brass button, resting near the toe of his shoe.

He imagined picking it up with a pair of tongs. He imagined placing it in a velvet box and handing it to this arrogant fool. He imagined this man taking it back to his hotel room, pouring a glass of expensive Grüner Veltliner, and pressing the metal to his skin.

He imagined the man being slammed into the mind of a syphilitic archduke, drowning in the pathetic, unglamorous malice of the real Vienna. The psychic weight of it would snap the man’s fragile, romanticized worldview in half like a dry twig. He might start screaming. He might have a heart attack right here in the shop.

Screaming men brought the ambulance. Ambulances brought the police. The police asked for tax receipts and import invoices for the fake hairpins.

Fakes were safe. Fakes made people happy. The truth always came with a ruinous rate of interest.

Roman kicked the brass button smoothly under the lowest shelf, out of sight.

He smiled his benevolent, predatory smile, wiping his sweating face with a handkerchief. “Sir,” Roman purred, unlocking the cabinet behind him. “You have an expert eye. I don’t show this to just anyone. But I recently acquired a silver pocket watch—personally inscribed by Crown Prince Rudolf to his favorite stablemaster.”

He pulled out a mass-produced nickel watch he had bought in Bratislava for twelve euros.

The man leaned in, his eyes wide, eager to be deceived.

When the shop closed an hour later, Roman took a plastic dustpan and a short-handled broom. He swept up a dead wasp, two receipts, and the heavy brass button. He opened the lid of the municipal trash bin in the alley behind the shop, dumped the dustpan into the rotting darkness, and went to find a beer.