The Strudel Gambit: Flair McSnazz and the Ray Gun of Doom

FLAIR MCSNAZZ HAD made himself three promises about Vienna.

The first was that he would never return. The second stipulated that should he return, he would avoid the Innere Stadt, a place where certain shopkeepers possessed persistent memories and deeply rooted family connections. And the third was that if he somehow found himself in the Innere Stadt despite the first two promises, he would absolutely, categorically, not go anywhere near Konditorei Hoffmann on Dorotheergasse, because the last time he had been there, a woman named Gertrude had looked at him in a way that suggested she intended to either marry him or have him arrested, and he had not stayed long enough to determine which.

He had made these promises in 1847.

It was now a Wednesday in late August 2038, and Flair McSnazz stood on Dorotheergasse, looking at a bakery window, breaking all three promises at once.

He adjusted the collar of his jacket, which caught the afternoon light in a way that made two passing pedestrians stop walking and a bicycle courier ride into a lamppost. The iridescent blue jacket, fitted in a manner that suggested either extraordinary tailoring or a mild violation of the laws of physics, displayed gold trim along the edges and a collar that rose high enough to be dramatic without quite tipping into absurd. It shimmered. McSnazz read the window display, which advertised Hoffmann’s Original Wiener Strudel, Family Recipe Since 1798.

“Since 1798,” he murmured. “Well. Close enough.”

Beneath his jacket, tucked into a holster that a generous observer might mistake for a hairdressing belt, the Ray Gun of Doom hummed against his ribs. She had been restless for three weeks. The ward he’d placed on the recipe had thinned, like stitches pulling loose in old fabric, leaving a faint itch at the back of his skull. Two hundred and forty years was a long time to expect any lock to hold. McSnazz patted the holster. “Not yet, darling.”

He pushed open the door.

The old brass bell above the door sounded like a small, polite question. The interior of Konditorei Hoffmann existed just as McSnazz remembered it. Dark wood paneling. Glass display cases filled with pastries arranged with the geometric exactitude of someone who took baking personally. The smell of butter and sugar and something warm and yeasty settled into the chest like a minor act of kindness.

Behind the counter stood a woman in her early forties with flour on her apron and dark hair pinned back in a way that sent a small, involuntary pang through his chest. She had the Hoffmann jaw. They all had the Hoffmann jaw. It was a good jaw. Determined. A jaw that said, “I will get this puff pastry right if it kills me, and it very nearly has, twice.”

She looked up when the bell rang and saw McSnazz. And she kept looking at McSnazz.

This was not unusual. Various authorities, in various centuries, had called his facial architecture “statistically improbable,” “a public hazard,” and once, memorably, “an affront to the ugly.” His cheekbones could calibrate scientific instruments. He was aware of this. He tried not to let it define him, but it kept defining other people’s afternoons.

The woman behind the counter opened her mouth, closed it, and opened it again.

“Do I know you?” she said.

“I don’t think so,” McSnazz said, which was technically true. He had known several previous Gertrudes, but not this one.

“You look like someone.” She frowned, not at him but at the sensation of almost-recognition, which annoyed her. She turned and glanced at the wall behind the register, where a collection of framed photographs documented the Hoffmann family’s long and floury history. McSnazz knew which photograph she would look at, because he had been trying not to think about it since he walked in.

It was a black-and-white image from 1923. The patriarch, Heinrich Hoffmann, stood outside this very shop with a man in a long cloak the family records identified only as “the charming foreign guest who left suddenly.” The charming foreign guest had very familiar cheekbones. And hair. And yes, the cheekbones.

The woman looked at the photograph. She looked at McSnazz. She looked at the photograph again.

“That’s my great-great-grandfather,” she said. Then, quieter, still studying McSnazz’s face: “Do you remember him?”

The question landed somewhere McSnazz had not expected. And yes, he remembered him. Heinrich, with his booming laugh and his terrible card skills, and his habit of giving away pastries to anyone who looked hungry. Heinrich, who had not asked a single question about the cloak or the accent or how his guest seemed to know the layout of a house remodeled twice since anyone matching that description could have visited.

“No,” McSnazz said. “Family resemblance. You know how it is. Genetics. Very powerful. I once knew a family with seven Gertrudes.”

The woman’s name tag read GERTIE.

McSnazz decided the universe was not acting subtle today and that he should probably get to the point before it got worse.

“I’m here about the strudel,” he said.

The recipe had been in the family for over two hundred years. The University of Vienna’s Conservation Department, impressed that it still existed, once offered to preserve it for free. Gertie kept it in a wooden box behind the counter, next to a novelty mug that said BAKERS GONNA BAKE.

“The strudel recipe,” Gertie said again, eyeing McSnazz with an expression that had transitioned from confused to suspicious in the way that Hoffmann women had transitioned from confused to suspicious in the presence of well-dressed strangers for approximately two and a half centuries.

“Specifically, the original,” McSnazz said. “The one with the thyme.”

“How do you know about the thyme?”

“Lucky guess.”

“Nobody knows about the thyme. It’s the family secret. My mother told me on her deathbed. Well, not on her deathbed. She was in the bath. But it was very solemn.”

“Gertie.” McSnazz leaned forward, and the light from the display case caught his blue eyes in a way that made Gertie forget how numbers worked. “I need to see the original document. The actual paper. This sounds strange, I know. I sound like a man who has walked into a bakery and asked to see a piece of paper for reasons he is not adequately explaining. I want you to know that I am aware of how this looks.”

“How does it look?”

“Unhinged. But charmingly so. I’ve been told that’s my range.”

Gertie stared at him. The staring did not serve her resolve well, because staring at McSnazz was a bit like staring at the sun in that it felt significant but also damaged her ability to make sensible decisions.

“Fine,” she said, and went to get the box.

* * *

The recipe was beautiful. Two hundred and forty years of handling had softened the paper to something that felt almost like cloth. The ink had faded from black to a deep, warm brown, and the handwriting was the precise, unhurried script of someone who understood that getting strudel wrong was a form of moral failure. McSnazz held it with the care of a man handling a newborn, or a live explosive, or both.

He turned it over.

On the back, in handwriting from no century Gertie would have recognized, was a sequence of symbols that resembled musical notation, if musical notation had been designed by someone who found three dimensions limiting.

“There it is,” McSnazz said. Something older and more careful replaced the typical humor in his voice. The voice of a man who had been in too many places in too many centuries and learned to recognize when one of them would turn dangerous.

Above the door, the bell rang.

This time, the sound it made was not a small, polite question. It was more like a small, impolite answer.

The man who entered Konditorei Hoffmann stood tall in a way that made the room feel smaller and emptier at the same time. He wore a coat that appeared to be made of a material that could not decide what color it wanted to be, settling on a shade that existed somewhere between charcoal and grief. His unremarkable face was itself remarkable, as though someone had designed it to be impossible to describe afterward. If McSnazz’s appearance was a Class-IV Aesthetic Disruption Event, this man’s appearance was a Class-IV Aesthetic Absence. Looking at him was like trying to remember a dream about a hallway.

“Flair,” the man said. His voice sounded as if it arrived from somewhere a little farther away than his mouth.

McSnazz did not turn around. He placed the recipe on the counter. He took a slow breath that smelled like butter and sugar and something that was no longer altogether kind.

“I was wondering when you’d show up,” McSnazz said.

“You have something that belongs to me.”

“I have many things. I’m a collector. It’s part of my charm.”

“The formula on the back of that paper. You wrote it there in 1798 because you thought I wouldn’t look inside a strudel recipe.” The man paused. “You were correct for two hundred and forty years. Impressive and irritating. But when your protective ward weakened three weeks ago, the recipe lit up like a beacon.”

Gertie, who had stood behind the counter with the expression of someone whose day had taken a sharp left turn, said: “What is happening in my bakery?”

“Nothing important,” said McSnazz.

“A reckoning,” the man in the impossible coat said.

“Somewhere between those two things,” McSnazz conceded. He turned to face the man. As he did, his hand moved to the holster beneath his jacket, drawing the Ray Gun of Doom with the ease of someone who had wielded weapons in places far less appropriate than a Viennese bakery, though not by much.

The Ray Gun caught the light. Chrome barrel. Rose gold accents. Its power cord dangled down along McSnazz’s leg and onto the floor. A small digital display on its rear housing, which most of the time cycled between the temperature and a countdown of unknown significance, showed a tiny screaming face. It now screamed more than usual.

“You brought the gun,” the man said. Annoyance crossed his face, or what passed for one, and two pastries collapsed inside the display case. “You brought my gun to a bakery.”

“She’s not yours anymore. You lost her fair and square. You should not have bet on a straight flush when I had a royal. That’s just mathematics.”

“That game existed in a dimension where mathematics worked differently, and you knew that.”

“Details.”

The man took a step forward. The surrounding air did something complicated and unpleasant, like a room-temperature shudder. Gertie gripped the counter. Two more pastries collapsed. On the wall, the 1923 photograph of Heinrich Hoffmann flickered, and for a moment the charming foreign guest in the cloak was no longer in it.

McSnazz raised the Ray Gun. His thumb found the dial on the side and clicked it one notch past TOUSLE. To DEVASTATE.

“Don’t,” the man said.

McSnazz clicked it one more notch, setting it to APOCALYPSE.

The tiny screaming face on the display screamed in a higher key. An overwhelming lavender scent saturated the air. Gertie sneezed. The framed photographs on the wall rattled.

“That setting,” the man said, and for the first time something that might have been caution entered his voice, “is not designed for enclosed spaces.”

“No,” McSnazz agreed. “It is not.”

He fired.

* * *

Later, Gertie Hoffmann would try to describe what happened to the police, and to her therapist, and to her sister over a bottle of very good Austrian wine, and she would fail on all three occasions.

The best she managed was this: the room folded.

Not torn, not broken, not exploded. Folded. Like someone had taken the space between the pastry counter and the front door and creased it in half, the way you fold a letter you don’t intend to send. The man in the impossible coat had stood in that space. When the space folded, the man did not stand in it anymore, because the space was no longer there to stand in.

There was also a sound.

She would spend several sleepless nights trying to place it. It was not a bang or a crash or a scream, although it contained elements of all three. It was more like the sound a door makes when it closes for the last time on a house you grew up in. Final, resonant, and sad. Silence followed, joined by the smell of lavender, sudden and sweet. It bloomed through the bakery.

McSnazz stood in the middle of the shop, the Ray Gun still raised, a faint curl of something that was not quite smoke rising from the chrome barrel. The power cord swayed. The tiny screaming face on the display had stopped screaming and now showed the expression of a tiny, very exhausted sigh.

Three of the overhead lights had burst. A croissant had turned inside out. The novelty mug behind the counter now read BAKERS GONNA BAKE in a language that did not exist yet.

“Is he dead?” Gertie asked from behind the counter.

“No,” McSnazz said, lowering the gun. “He’s not the sort of thing that dies. He’s just... elsewhere. For now.” He paused. “I’m sorry about the croissant.”

He looked at the strudel recipe, which still sat on the counter where he had left it. He looked at the symbols on the back. And he looked at Gertie, who shook and gripped the edge of the counter with both hands and, despite everything, still wore an expression that suggested she would want a thorough explanation at some point.

“I need to take this,” he said, holding up the recipe. “I know that’s a terrible thing to ask after what just happened in your bakery. I know this is your family’s history. I know the thyme is important.”

“You know about the thyme,” she said again, her voice halfway to somewhere else.

“I know about the thyme because I suggested the thyme. In 1798. To the first Gertrude, who taught it to her daughter, who taught it to hers, all the way down to you. She was, and I mean this with complete sincerity, the finest pastry chef I have ever encountered in any century, and I have encountered quite a few.” He said this with the gentle, steady voice of a man who had decided the truth was less dangerous than any further attempts at lying. “I wrote those symbols on the back of this recipe because I needed to hide something important somewhere no one would think to look, and I chose the one document I knew your family would protect for as long as it took.”

“How long has it taken?”

“Two hundred and forty years. Your family kept it safe for two hundred and forty years. I am more grateful than I can adequately express. And I am very good at expressing things.”

Gertie looked at him and at the photograph on the wall, the one from 1923. She looked at the faded recipe. She looked at the spot where the man in the impossible coat had stood before the air had folded him away like a letter.

“Keep the recipe,” she said. “I have the important part memorized, anyway.” She tapped her temple. “The thyme.”

McSnazz smiled, and despite every available piece of evidence suggesting she should not trust this man, Gertie smiled back. It was, she would reflect later, an involuntary response, like sneezing or falling in love or agreeing to something you know is a terrible idea.

“You should go,” she said. “Before the police arrive. Or before he comes back. Whichever happens first.”

“Both excellent suggestions.” McSnazz tucked the recipe inside his jacket, next to the Ray Gun, which hummed again, this time in a frequency that sounded almost content. “Gertie, it has been a genuine pleasure. Your great-great-great-great-grandmother would be immensely proud. Of the strudel. And of the jaw. It’s a magnificent jaw. Very determined.”

“Please leave my bakery.”

“Leaving.”

He paused at the door.

“Do you remember,” he said, “whether there’s still a direct flight from Vienna to Washington, D.C.? I need to visit a government department about an unrelated matter. Well. Tangentially related. Well...” He glanced at the spot where the air had folded. “Directly related, if I’m being honest, which I’m trying to be more of.”

“Get out.”

“Gone.”

The bell above the door rang as he left, and it made the sound of a small, polite goodbye.

* * *

Three days later, a man in an iridescent blue jacket walked into the lobby of a building in Washington, D.C. that no public directory listed. He had no appointment, no identification, a piece of very old paper that smelled like butter, sugar, and lavender, and a chrome-and-rose-gold device that an optimistic security guard described in his report as “possibly a salon styling appliance.”

The man told the security officer his name was Flair McSnazz, and he was there to help.

He sat in the waiting area for seven hours because the chairs had excellent lumbar support and because the man in the impossible coat was only elsewhere for now, and McSnazz was not entirely sure what would happen when that changed.

He found that he rather liked the feeling.

It had been a while.