He pulled over three blocks later. “Here’s your money,” Murphy said, and dropped a ball of twenties in Russell’s lap. Russell scooped up the roll, tested its thickness with a quick squeeze, and began peeling off bills and piling them on his knee. He was three hundred in when Murphy swung open the door and eased out.
“Hang on,” Russell said. “What if it’s not all there?”
“What?”
“I said, what if it’s—”
“I heard you.” Murphy fronted his waxy smile. “What are you gonna do about it?”
Russell’s shoulders sharpened; his cheeks went dark. “Rip your faggot face off, you little twerp,” he hissed.
“Whatever,” Murphy said, “that’s the easiest grand you’ll ever make.” He hopped over to the sidewalk and set a course for the mall. At the next intersection he called up the Florida bank on
his cell to check if the rest of the money had arrived, cash shipped certified mail, not the traditional way to make deposits but a quirk this financial institution had been willing to accommodate. Then a burger, a couple movies, a cab ride home. Maybe he’d pick up a can of paint for the tree house.
As he crossed the street to the mall he felt a flash of liquid against the back of his head, then a soft, metallic knock. He turned and saw the diet soda can on the ground, the Chevy peeling off toward the Metro station. “Two hundred short, assface!” Russell yelled out the window. “I’m coming back for it!”
Murphy walked to the median strip and sat down against a lamppost. Violence was the only response that came to him, violence against violence, violence against idiocy, clubs and kicks and immobilizing headlocks, like the cops on TV with heavy boots and backup. But Murphy knew he didn’t have backup; he was a troublemaking bastard orphan, and no adult would side with him against the out-of-work mechanic he’d found in the phonebook, the only person with the same last name dumb enough to take the gig. They wouldn’t even listen. Just another punk-ass kid.
He’d been on the cusp of insignificance ever since he was born.
He slapped the lamppost, swinging with open hands, the doggy paddle on land. He galloped over to the sidewalk and pulled down a NO PARKING sign, threw somebody’s rake into the street, knocked down a mailbox. He found a tricycle and slammed it against a driveway until he got kind of ashamed for fucking up a kid’s toy, threw it aside and took on a trash can across six front yards, head stomps and jawbreakers and bionic pile drivers and top-rope clotheslines and all the other wrestling moves he could remember, the one-sided smackdown slowly disemboweling his rage. As his body slowed, he realized this was the worst he’d felt since missing the top video spot live, the shit that started it all, his swan song repeated twenty-one
times in the parking lot while the outside world fell lost in the synthesizer beats, the monster creep, the werewolf preening, the deranged cackles. He was capable of anything, and he stabbed an SUV’s tires with a garden trowel to prove it.
Live! Live! Live! Live! Live! Live! Live! Live!
All Murphy had wanted was to see the fucking video live.
LET THEM EAT CAKE
The time had arrived when the abuses of the old
régime
could no longer be tolerated, and sweeping reforms were demanded . . . The nation, hitherto politically a nullity, had awakened to a sense of its rights; while absolute sovereignty, with its arbitrary dictum, “
L’état c’est moi
,” and its right divine to govern wrong, had lost its prestige, and had apparently no prospect of regaining it.
—
LADY CATHERINE CHARLOTTE JACKSON,
The French Court and Society: Reign of Louis XVI and First Empire
If the people have no bread, let them eat cake.
—MARIE ANTOINETTE,
archduchess of Austria and queen of France during the Revolution, executed by the Revolution in 1793
Until the age of
twenty-two, Esmerelda Van Twinkle was a regular-sized person, even on the skinny side during summers. She enjoyed bikinis and Spandex and salads, jogged three times a week before breakfast, and often went on bike rides over the Golden Gate Bridge and through the Marin Headlands, once all the way up Mount Tamalpais. She was the sprightliest of the chefs at Incognito, the only one without a bowling-ball belly, the lone woman, the pastry chef. Her pretty picture appeared regularly in food sections nationwide, the accompanying articles discussing the finer points of piecrust preparation and dishing on the culinary dating scene, her bashful smile not hurting business one bit.
Incognito was a California fusion restaurant, steaks and sweet potatoes cooked with expensive wine and Asian seasonings, so pretty much anything flew for dessert. Upon landing the job, Esmerelda introduced a menu of fried green tea ice cream, eggplant tiramisu, papaya gelatin, Japanese plum cakes, cardamom shrikhand, and, on Sundays, raspberry fortune cookies with home-cooked haikus rolled up inside. Her profiteroles were made of thousands of choux pastry strips woven together, layered squirts of Swiss chocolate cream oozing within; her handmade ice cream was cool on the spoon and warm in the mouth, thick as mashed potatoes; her apple pie cracked with ripe fruit and fresh cinnamon, a dash of saffron spicing the crust.
But the showstoppers were the oatmeal raisin cookies, outrageously lush and creamy, always fresh from the oven and tonguelatheringly soft. Shaped in trapezoids and accompanied by scoops of vanilla ice cream, the cookies were light and rich, complex but simple, sweet yet savory, contradictions that tickled the palate so imaginatively that many diners broke out laughing for sheer joy. The perfume of fresh-baked goods meandered down the alley in which Incognito was housed, the thick, wholesome aroma giving the upscale neighborhood a downright homey feel, grandma’s secret recipe and natural goodness twined up in a perfect, pure dessert.
Her secret was simple: butter and lots of it, the high-fat unsalted stuff from Jamison’s Milk & Dairy up in Cotati, where three Jerseys worked exclusively for her in a barn she paid for out of her own pocket, eating vitamin-infused feed, drinking purified water, getting daily rubdowns and baths twice a week, and milked solely by hand while manager, lead milker, and deliveryman Camden Jamison played country tunes on his harmonica and listened to baseball on the radio. The butter arrived in San Francisco in a shade of light blue with the consistency of wet clay, until you warmed it up or used it for baking.
Then—zap! Within months of Esmerelda’s hiring, Incognito was swarmed. Most diners skipped dinner entirely and ordered
three or four twenty-dollar desserts with accompanying elaborate specialty coffees, lounging for hours amid politicos, socialites, and awestruck out-of-towners while the butterfat absorbed in their bloodstream. Incognito raised prices, expanded the seating area, paved a new patio with heat lamps and abstract sculptures, but it was still impossible to secure a reservation with less than three months’ notice. Movie stars got turned down at the door, a cabal of reservation specialists was dismissed for accepting bribes—even the president was forced to wait without calling ahead, though he was thrilled with the cookies speed-delivered to him at the bar. The place was burning hot, a national keep-sake, a pastry Mecca and investor cash cow, and Esmerelda received a correspondingly ludicrous raise.
She was apotheosized in
Gourmet
,
Bon Appétit
,
The New Yorker
,
The New York Times
, the fawning articles accompanied by large photographs of Esmerelda in the kitchen modeling evocative silk blouses and short skirts without pantyhose, chestnut hair strewn lazily over her apron like unraveled extension cords, seductive flour splashes on her cheeks. For a six-month period she was a mainstay of second-tier tabloid features, her string of flings with reality-show contestants and pro hockey players raised to sizzle level by a trail of trashed hotel rooms. Proposals flooded in to launch her own restaurant, join a national morning show, license her desserts to a prominent grocery chain, even go on a world tour. And the three Jerseys in Cotati barreled ahead with the world’s most sublime butter, the exact location of Esmerelda’s barn a secret to everyone except Camden Jamison, who was paid handsomely and was incomparable in his ability to ditch jealous rival restaurateur tails on his ride back to the farm on Highway 101, that hefty milk truck of his surprisingly nimble on the open road.
Esmerelda, at the age of twenty-two, was an enormous star.
She mulled her options, met with handlers, consulted astrologers, flipped coins. After eight nickels in a row rolled off the table and bounced off her sneakers, she decided to go for a run
to clear her head. Outfitted in a plum-colored Lycra bodysuit and matching sneakers, she sneaked out the restaurant’s back door and cut west through the tree-lined lanes of Jackson Square, up the hill through a warren of Chinatown alleys, hooking left for the Stockton Street tunnel straight to Union Square. She swept past the towering department stores and swung onto Market, cantering over the even terrain and through the city’s needle-ridden gut, coasting past the homeless festival permanently parked outside the library, eluding the shaky stream of a man urinating into a trash can, and speeding up significantly when a pair of swarthy pantsless banditos gave floppy chase for half a block. She accelerated through dead blocks and slight rises, drove through the Castro’s bobbing gay boogie. When she saw Twin Peaks Boulevard she turned onto it, why not, she was on top of the world and had earned a spectacular view; there was metaphysical poetry here. Halfway up she thought she heard a quiet clinking noise behind her, but her sideways glance detected only the typical line of turista rental cars puttering uphill at half the speed limit.
She ascended through the residential area and beyond the tree line, the road breaking out into a spectacular view of San Francisco and all the Bay Area, bleached buildings and fairylandgreen crags and iron cruxes across the bay connecting kingdoms, the panorama held to just less than perfect by the bracing gale pounding in from the sea. Needling through a few final turns, she fired out into the flat summit, the planet hanging on either side of her, the wind wild across the city’s canopy. As she sped into the overlook she heard the noise again, a series of clicks and a light hiss, and found a lithe little cyclist pulling in behind her outfitted in a spotless banker-white uniform complete with a long teardrop-shaped helmet and aerodynamic shoe covers, his bicycle shaped like an intergalactic phaser.
He gave her a rectangular smile framed by a ferrety Fu Manchu mustache. “Good evening,” he said, his eyes basting her with cool blue.
Esmerelda spat viciously in his direction, then headed over to the water fountain for a long gulp.
The cyclist climbed atop the rock wall surrounding the overlook and waved his pinched fingers over the view like a symphony conductor. “Do you hear it?” he called, swaying on his toes. “Nature’s music! The wind, the sun, the streets, the cars, even the fog out over the ocean. All unified, working as one.”
He smiled victoriously at the sun, then turned back to find Esmerelda sprinting out of the parking lot, heading downhill.
The clinking followed her descent, accompanied by a faint whiff of confectioner’s sugar. The cyclist raised a finger to his helmet, bounced his butt on the saddle. “Madam, I must know: who is your chemist?”
“My what now?” she coughed, eyes fixed to the road and scanning for sticks, scraps of paper, anything to throw in this nincompoop’s gears.
“Your laboratory, I must know. Also, your spiritual advisor: what is her name? Superlative work from top to bottom. Continuity, synergy, strength.” His white-gloved finger drew a circle in the air. “In my younger days I would have guessed Taoism, but I have learned not to presume when it comes to matters of the soul.”
Esmerelda broke stride and stopped, then doled out the most intimidating hot-bitch glare in her repertoire. “Look, I don’t care where you get your kicks, so long as it’s not me. I’m trying to work some stuff out here, so why don’t you take your psycho-babble sweet talk to someone who might fall for it and leave me the hell alone?”
The cyclist swung off his fiberglass weapon, undid the buckles and snaps on his helmet. “Madam, apologies, please. These days I do not approach strangers frequently. My conduct may not fit proper decorum.” He tucked his helmet under his arm and offered a Gore-Tex-wrapped hand. “Bruce Zoogman, cakemaker.”
“Bruce Zoogman? Like Zoogman’s Zoog?” Blackness encompassed
her, prompting heavy breathing and paralysis and a quantum dose of nausea. From the leaky boat of memory sprang her culinary school professor and his access to the most famous cake in California, one bite of which had slam-dunked her into incoherency for just over three months while he fucked her like a warthog and her grades flatlined and her personal relationships soiled and all she could think about was another bite of that ambrosial meal-ender, Zoogman’s Zoog.
“Yes,” he said flatly, straight factual acknowledgment.
“I heard you lived in a bunker and never came out,” Esmerelda spouted. “And that you’re retired, out of the game.”
“With baking in your blood, can you ever truly quit?” Seriousness stiffened his face, the hard humorless sheen of the devout, the crazy. “I seek perfection. Harmony. Wonderment. The exact blend of ingredients and emotion and craftsmanship that changes the course of lives.”
Esmerelda stared and marveled, love lighting behind her eyes, realizing this was the culinary equivalent of finding Christ under her pillow.
“I have sampled your desserts. You have promise.” He paused to blot a lone drop of perspiration hanging on his temple. “I ask for your help.”
“My help?” she burped, the vista of San Francisco spinning between pink and yellow.
“Be my disciple. Carry my teachings. Add and elaborate, contribute your knowledge. I have only one goal,” he said, elevating a rubberized finger: “To seek the divine.”