The Fire (21 page)

Now that I had an infusion of fodder that I could burn off, it ignited a few thoughts that had not occurred before.

For starters, Leda and Eremon each knew more than they were letting on about this dinner party, as evidence revealed. After all, one was my driver and the other my potato-provider, which meant they knew when I’d be arriving here and that I wouldn’t have had time to eat. But there was more.

Last night when I was building the fires, I was too exhausted to follow up on Leda’s comments about Rodo: How he’d thrown a fit when he learned I’d left town without notice. How he’d been driving the staff like a slave-master ‘ever since I’d left.’ How he was throwing a secret party for ‘goverment muckety-mucks’ and only I was to help out at the dinner. How he’d insisted that Leda was to stay on-site until I returned that night, to ‘help me with the fires.’

Then this morning, practically the instant I’d arrived up there at the Kenwood estate with the food, Eremon had raced me back here to the restaurant.

What had Rodo said just after his tantrum this morning – just before he slammed the door behind him? He’d said there was no mystery to worry about. That I was late for work. And that
Eremon will explain anything you need to know en route.

But what had Eremon actually told me on the way? That Rodo wasn’t in charge of this dinner at all – lack of control being something my boss had always hated. That it might involve guests from the Middle East. That security was involved. That from square one, this
boum
had been arranged by the highest echelons of D.C. clout.

Oh, yes – and that he himself, Eremon, was in love with Leda the swan.

Such things seemed like diversionary tactics, drawing my vision away from a sneaking lateral attack. This was not the time to miss the big picture, not the moment to succumb to chess blindness – not here, locked in a dungeon, waiting for the ax to fall.

And then it struck me.

When exactly was it this morning that Rodo went into that tantrum? Exactly
when
did he toss his beret on the floor, lapse into Basque, eject me from his presence? Wasn’t this connected with everything Leda and Eremon had hinted at, but hadn’t come right out and told me?

It was not my questions about
this
party that had lit Rodo’s fire. It was when I’d demanded to know how he’d found out about that
other
party. After I told him I’d driven through a blizzard to get here. After I’d demanded to know how he could possibly have known where I was.

Though I’d had the first glimmer, back in Colorado, of what might be headed my way – I’d missed the main point until it reached out and bit me:

Whatever might happen tonight here in this cellar, it was going to be the next move in the Game.

Whereas strategy is abstract and based on long-term goals, tactics are concrete and based on finding the right move now.

– Garry Kasparov,
How Life Imitates Chess

Tactics is knowing what to do when there is something to do.

Strategy is knowing what to do when there is nothing to do.

– Savielly Tartakower, Polish Grandmaster

Practice makes perfect, as Key would say.

I’d spent half a lifetime practicing cooking in my uncle’s big wood-burning ovens and his open hearth out at Montauk Point on Long Island. And now I’d had another nearly four years of apprenticeship here at Sutalde, under the rigorous, if often overbearing, surveillance of the Basque Bonaparte – Monsieur Boujaron.

So one would think that by now, at least when it came to cooking, I’d be able to distinguish a flame from a flimflam.

Yet until this moment it hadn’t really hit me that there was something wrong with this scenario. Of course, I’d been a bit preoccupied by things like food and sleep deprivation, by tempestuous tantrums and Secret Service spies. But my first clue that something was wrong should have been the
Meschoui
itself
.

It was obvious to the trained eye. After all, the clockwork spit was running just like clockwork; the fire I’d created was producing an even, steady heat; and the lamb itself, rotating at perfect elevation above the hearth, was trussed correctly, so as it turned all sides would be evenly exposed to heat from the firebox. But the dripping pan was missing. The liquid fat, instead of dropping into a water-filled catch-all beneath, to be recycled for basting the meat, had been splashing onto the flagstones below and baking into a black mess for hours. It would be hell to scrub all that off.

None of the master chefs would ever have set up the rotisserie that way – much less Rodo. He’d be infuriated. And Leda, even if she were strong enough to set it up, was no cook. Yet someone must have, since none of this was here when I’d left the cellar at two o’clock this morning.

I privately vowed to get to the bottom of it all just as soon as Rodo arrived. Meanwhile, I hauled down the longest ceramic dripping pan I could find and placed it under the sheep, then poured in some water and got out the basting siphon.

The mystery of this fireplace setup made me recall that other one I’d just left behind in Colorado – what seemed like aeons ago: which also triggered my memory of my arrangement with Key, that I’d phone her on Monday to find out what she’d managed to learn about my mother’s disappearance.

I never knew exactly where Key might be found but, given the remote spots where she did her work, she kept her satellite phone beside her at all times. Before I could
pull out my cell phone, though, I remembered that the Secret Service had temporarily commandeered it.

There was a phone with an outside line near the restaurant entrance, behind the maître d’s desk, so I trotted upstairs to use it; I could put the charges on my card. I wasn’t concerned about being overheard or taped by the SS guys, though it was a cinch they’d bugged the place. Key and I had been masters of our own private espionage lingo ever since our youth. When we got going we sometimes had trouble understanding each other or even ourselves.

‘Key to the Kingdom,’ she answered her phone. ‘Can you read me? Speak now or forever hold your peace.’ That was ‘Key’ code that she knew it was I phoning and asking whether the coast was clear.

‘I read you,’ I said. ‘But it’s sort of in one ear and out the other.’ Establishing that others were likely listening in to whatever we said. ‘So what’s new, Pussycat?’

‘Oh, you know me,’ said Key. ‘A rolling stone gathers no moss, as they say. But time sure flies when you’re having a good time.’

This meant that she’d rolled on out of Colorado in her vintage bush plane, Ophelia Otter, and was already back up in Wyoming doing her job in Yellowstone National Park, where she’d commuted throughout high school and college. She had been studying geothermal features – geysers, mud holes, the steam vents called fumaroles – all powered by magma from the Yellowstone Caldera, or cauldron, created by the ancient supervolcano that now slept miles beneath the earth’s crust.

When Key wasn’t screwing around in that crazy plane of hers – running around to events where bush pilots took joy in coasting in onto melting icebergs – she was one of the top experts in the thermal field. And in great demand lately, given the escalating numbers of ‘hot spots’ on our planet.

‘What’s up with you?’ she was saying.

‘Oh, you know me, too.’ I followed our usual patter. ‘Out of the frying pan, into the fire. That’s the problem with chefs, we love those flames. But it’s my job to follow orders. As they say, “Theirs not to make reply, theirs not to reason why, theirs but to do or die – ”’

Key and I had been doing our Navajo-Code-Talker routine so long that I was pretty sure she’d know the next line of ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’
–
‘Into the valley of Death / Rode the six hundred’ – and would grasp it meant I was headed into the proverbial box canyon at this very moment. And it was clear she got the hint with respect to my job and my boss, but Key had a surprise of her own in store.

‘That job of yours,’ she said, in a
tsk-tsk
tone. ‘It’s such a shame you had to rush away like that. You should have stayed: They also serve who only stand and wait, you know. If you’d waited just a bit longer you wouldn’t have missed that meeting of the Botany Club, Sunday night. But it’s okay – I sat in for you.’

‘
You
?’ I said, in shock.

Nokomis Key was hobnobbing with the Livingstons after I’d left Colorado?

‘In a backroom kind of way,’ Key said offhandedly. ‘I wasn’t actually invited. You know I’ve never gotten on well with their chairwoman, that Miss Brightstone. She was never the brightest bulb in the chandelier, as they say, but she
can
be illuminating. Sunday night would have interested
you
. The subjects were right up your alley – Exotic Lilies and Russian Herbal Remedies.’

Good Lord! Sage met with Lily and Vartan? It sure sounded like it – but how? They were both down in Denver.

‘The club must have changed its venue,’ I suggested. ‘Was everyone able to get there?’

‘It was moved to Molly’s place,’ Key affirmed. ‘Attendance was slim – but Mr Skywalker managed to make it.’

‘Molly’s Place’ was our standard code for that flamboyant millionairess of the Colorado Gold Rush era, the Unsinkable Molly Brown, and her former stomping ground: Denver. So Sage
was
there! Nor was ‘Mr Skywalker’ much of a stretch. That would be Galen March, the mysterious recent purchaser of Sky Ranch.

What in God’s name were he and Sage Livingston doing hoity-toitying down in Denver (apparently just after my departure) with Vartan and Lily Rad? And how did Key learn of this mysterious coven? It all sounded pretty suspicious.

But the subtext was getting too complex for my limited supply of aphorisms, and Rodo might show up any moment to crash the party. I urgently needed to know how all this might relate to the topic I’d phoned Key about – my mother. So I jettisoned our repertory of quips from
Familiar Quotations
and cut straight to the chase.

‘I’m here at work, expecting my boss soon,’ I told Key. ‘I’m using the house phone; I really shouldn’t tie it up longer. But before we hang up, tell me about your job progress: anything new with the…Minerva hot spring lately?’

Key was at Yellowstone and this was all I could think of in a pinch, to connect. Minerva was a famous ’stairstep’ or terraced hot spring at Yellowstone, a spot that boasted more than ten thousand such dramatic geothermal features, the largest group in the world. Minerva herself, a magnificent steaming waterfall of breathtaking rainbow colors, had been a premiere Yellowstone attraction. I say ‘had been,’ since over the past ten years Minerva had in-explicably and mysteriously dried up – the entire enormous hot spring and waterfall had simply vanished, just like my mother.

‘Interesting you should ask,’ said Key, not missing a beat.
‘I was working on that problem only yesterday. Sunday. Looks like the Yellowstone Caldera’s getting warmer. Might cause a new eruption where we’re least expecting it. As for Minerva, our defunct hot spring, I think she may make a comeback sooner than we thought.’

Did that mean what it sounded like? My heart was pounding.

I was about to ask more. But just at that instant, the front door of the restaurant was flung open and Rodo came barreling in with a large chicken tucked under each arm and one of the sunglassed Secret Service guys in tow, bearing a stack of containers.

‘Bonjour encore une fois, Neskato Geldo,’
Rodo boomed at me while gesturing to the SS chap, like a minion, to set down his stack of foodstuffs on a nearby table.

While the guy’s back was turned, Rodo passed by me at the desk and hissed beneath his breath, ‘I pray you will not be very sorry for using that telephone.’ Then in a louder voice, he added, ‘Well, Cinder Girl, let’s go downstairs and have a look at our
gros mouton
!’

‘Sounds like you gotta go see a man about a sheep,’ said Key, sotto voce in my ear. She added, ‘I’ll e-mail you my notes about the Botany Club and the results of our geothermal study. You’ll find it all fascinating.’ We signed off.

Of course, Key and I never used e-mail. This just meant she’d get back to me off-line as quickly as she could. It couldn’t be quick enough.

As I followed Rodo down the steps to the dungeon, I couldn’t keep two nagging questions from my mind.

What had taken place at that clandestine meeting in Denver?

Had Nokomis Key somehow picked up the trail of my mother?

Rodo hefted the large chickens one at a time, suspending them by their strings over the hearth. With these birds, unlike the
Meschoui,
no basting would be required due to his dry-roasting method. The birds would have been carefully dried inside and out, sprinkled with rock salt, then trussed using his own unique design – bound by a crisscross lattice cage and attached by a string to a long skewer run horizontally through each bird. This permitted the bird to swing freely above the hearth from heavy hooks embedded in the stone mantel. The heat from the embers first rotated the bird counterclockwise, then clockwise in an endless motion like Foucault’s pendulum.

When I finished basting the lamb and returned upstairs for the foodstuffs, per Rodo’s command, I found that our dour bridge guards seemed to have been pressed into a bit more than Secret Service. A vast array of containers of food sat just inside the door, with an official-looking seal on each box. Rodo had never been one to let a pair of spare hands go to waste, but this was absurd.

I counted the boxes – there were thirty, just as he’d said – then I dead-bolted the outer doors as he’d instructed, and I started carrying the stacks downstairs to the Dictator of the Dungeon.

For more than an hour we worked together without speaking, but that was par for the course. Rodo’s kitchen was always managed in complete silence. Everything functioned with cleanliness, detail, and precision: the kind of skilled precision I knew I needed – like a game of chess. For instance, on an ordinary night at the Hearth, with dozens of workers in the kitchens, the only sound heard might be the soft tap-tapping of a knife slicing vegetables, or, from time to time, the hushed voice of the chief steward or sommelier over the intercom, placing an order from the main dining room upstairs.

Luckily, today all the preprep here had already been handled by others, or we’d never have made it by dinner. Before I’d even finished hauling the final load of containers downstairs, Rodo already had the baby artichokes, tiny purple and white eggplants, little green and yellow zucchini, and grape tomatoes, like a gorgeous harvest cornucopia, basting in the dripping pans.

But I couldn’t help wondering how the meal-serving was going to fare with just the two of us. Mondays like this, when the restaurant was usually closed, were training days for the waiters. They learned to place silver and glassware properly and what to do if a diner (they were never called customers) spilled a drink or a bit of sauce on the tablecloth. If this occurred – even when diners were in mid-meal – half a dozen waiters and busboys would swiftly descend upon the table, whisk everything away without disturbing the diners, quickly remove and replace the cloth, and put everything back as it had been, including the correct drinks and meals before each diner, like a conjuring act. Rodo timed it with a stopwatch: The whole process had to take under forty seconds.

Watching Rodo now as he moved silently back and forth among the hearths, wordlessly handing me subordinate tasks, was an education in itself that could never be taught in any school. You had to see it in action. And only a true perfectionist with plenty of practice could demonstrate Key’s favorite motto.

Difficult as Rodo might be, I’d never regretted coming to apprentice here.

Until tonight, that is.

‘Neskato!’
Rodo announced, as I was down on my knees turning the vegetables with the tongs. ‘I want you to go upstairs now, unplug the intercom and telephone, and bring them here to me.’

When I glanced up at him strangely, he slapped his open hand flat against the stone cellar wall and bestowed a rare smile on me.

‘See these stones?’ he said.

For the first time I took a close look at the hand-hewn rocks of the wall, likely cut and set in place more than two hundred years ago. They were milky-white and shot through with an unusual apricot-colored vein.

‘Quartz crystal, it’s native here in the soil,’ Rodo said. ‘It has excellent properties for transmission of sound waves but will interfere with communications unless they are – how do you say it? – hardwired.’

Hence, decommissioning the phone and the intercom. And bolting the doors. Rodo was nobody’s fool. He clearly had something to tell me, but although I was dying to hear it, I couldn’t help my stomach butterflies knowing that the highest echelons of government security were flitting about just outside that upstairs door.