Basil Instinct

by Shelley Costa

  Renay Bassett

  Frederick Faust

  Will Jaworski

  Slash Kipperman

  Georgia Payne

  Corabeth Potts

  Mitchell Terranova

  L’Shondra Washington

  Eight lovelies. Mitchell would be the class clown. Corabeth would be the shy violet. Renay would be secretly pining for Will, who would be the quarterback—wait, did the career center have a football team? Just as I was sliding into a sweet little reverie about which of my brood would be the first to set a polished red apple on my desk, I checked the time, yelped, and headed lickety-split back to town.

  It’s not that I was worried I’d miss cousin Kayla’s delivery, it’s that I was worried she’d get there and just hang out in my restaurant without adult supervision. The last time that happened she had a three-night fling with my lawyer, Joe Beck. And the time before that she managed to set off the sprinkler system. I don’t know which infraction made me madder.

  Sure, water everywhere was a mess and a nuisance, so that was bad. But Joe Beck was, well, Joe Beck—kind of the human equivalent of Landon’s best cassata cakes, and someone I think deserves better than a woman whose conversation runs from how garlic has a soul to the best time she ever had in the back of the Kale and Kayla Organics van with a man. (This account changes monthly.)

  I have no personal interest in the Beck Stakes, really, because although he came in reasonably handy when Nonna was arrested for murder, (a) I don’t think it’s wise to give a new meaning to the term legal aid, (b) I couldn’t get the visions out of my head of my lawyer finding organic things to do with the flaky Kayla that had nothing to do with farming, and, well, (c) I don’t think he likes me.

  * * *

  During a drowsy afternoon of dinner preparations, the day after the Belfiere invitation arrived—and the day before I was scheduled to walk into a classroom at the Quaker Hills Career Center—Choo Choo found me in the kitchen, thumbing through our collection of family recipes, hunting for an entrée special for the next day. The summer sunlight crowded through the skylight and I could watch sun specks dance in the steady thrum of the circulating fan. I really wasn’t getting very much done.

  “You got eight,” he announced cryptically, smoothing his cuffs. I looked up. “I checked online.” Li Wei was perched on his stool, reading a book on the history of video games. Sometimes he just shows up when he’s off the clock—I think it started after Choo Choo called him an honorary Angelotta and stenciled Lee Way on the back of his stool.

  Landon was humming away—the clear sign that he’s experimenting—while grinding and toasting a pound of shelled hazelnuts. Since his signature dish, panna cotta, was on the specials menu for that night, I was betting the toasted nuts were destined for the creamy custard. He caught my eye at Choo Choo’s cryptic announcement that I had eight. Ever since he developed an effervescent crush on our sommelier, the delectable Jonathan, Landon has promised me that—unlike Choo Choo—he would not celebrate any romantic success by casting his beloved Eve into the Great Unknown. Then he wisely made himself scarce while Choo Choo’s Give Back to the Community phase flourished.

  “Eight what?” For a second I worried he was referring to zits, but I couldn’t figure out how that observation would have made it to one of the popular cyber-squeal places yet. But with the fan lazily spreading golden sun specks and the aroma of toasted hazelnuts, I hardly cared. If there’s a heaven and it doesn’t include toasted nuts, then it’s not what it’s cracked up to be.

  “Students,” said my scrupulously bald cousin. The tip of his Weight Watchers Weekly Tracker peeked over the top of his breast pocket.

  “I know. I picked up my class list. Is eight good?”

  “Well . . .” He narrowed his eyes and looked like he was pondering the third law of thermodynamics while Li Wei elegantly turned a page and Landon’s fingers fussed. Then Choo Choo came to a conclusion. One strong, black-sleeved arm swung open one of the double doors leading back out to the Miracolo dining room. Where was he going?

  Out of the corner of my eye I caught sight of Maria Pia, dressed in one of her signature Lucy Ricardo dresses she “summered up” with a wide cinch belt in Florida pink, talking to herself as she motored around the cool, dark dining room with a clipboard, her right hand looking like a big paw in a glove, planning what Landon and I were calling Friday’s “hazing” meal for the Belfiere cultoids.

  The fact that she appeared to be weeping quietly had nothing to do with Grief Week and everything to do with the trip with Choo Choo to the tattoo parlor in Philly that morning. She had returned with every spray, lotion, powder, cream, and ointment in a product line called Ink-Me-Gentle, designed to settle down skin with a new tat. These, Choo Choo reported, she applied simultaneously, then pulled up one of Choo Choo’s biker gloves to cover the site. Choo Choo thought the B in Bastarda tattoo font really looked very nice.

  So Nonna was inked, which was more than I could say about myself.

  If Landon and I were going to bring her to her senses about goofy cooking societies, we were going to have to act fast.

  I got impatient. “Well, what, Chooch?” I called after him. “Is eight good?”

  “Well,” said Choo Choo, an octave higher, “it’s probably a very good thing, considering four of them”— he turned and was already halfway out of the kitchen—“are from cribs.”

  And he was gone.

  Four of them are from cribs? How young does the Quaker Hills Career Center take them? I looked at Landon, who wrinkled his nose at me—he didn’t have the answer—and even Li Wei shrugged, without so much as a glance. Me, I turned back to a page of ziti recipes, wondering if there was anything at all I could do with penne pasta that did not involve either baking or chilling. Stuff them with hazelnuts? No? Almonds, then?

  What with a new gig looming as a college (Was it fair to say?) professor, I could feel myself sliding into a weird think-outside-the-recipe-box mood. Don’t just anticipate the unexpected . . . create it. Let that be the motto for Professor Eve Angelotta, undergraduate dance major at Sarah Lawrence, chef by default.

  So, it was in that mood on a lazy summer afternoon at Miracolo that I decided that my four young students out of cribs were just precocious. Supersmart and keen to chop. Yes, that was it. Fresh off solving the murder of Nonna’s boyfriend, I chuckled softly, what couldn’t I handle? Eve Angelotta: Pasta professor. Crime solver. Handler of grandmothers. Broken-legged chorus girl. Maker of cannoli to die for.

  All terribly important skills.

  As Landon, humming, let hazelnut morsels fall through his long fingers, I could tell we were both luxuriating in our little lives and jobs and sexual fantasies. Without so much as a word, we kissed the air near each other’s cheeks. I stretched, ran my fingers through my wavy auburn hair, and believed in that moment at 1:23 p.m. that my world was under, well, control.

  I’m glad I noted the time.

  Control of my world was about to disappear as fast as Landon’s brand-new panna cotta alla nocciole—hazelnut custard.

  * * *

  While cousin Kayla, dressed in her light patchwork overalls and gossamer pink top—how does the woman actually farm?—argued with Landon over the day’s botched delivery, Nonna breezed into the kitchen with her mascara smeared and her clipboard clapped awkwardly against her chest with her non-bear-paw left hand. To the others she delivered one solemn nod; to me she murmured, “Eve, please,” and jerked her head toward the Miracolo office down the short corridor at the back.

  Dutifully, I followed her and closed the door behind us as she tottered over to the white oak and mahogany desk near the wood-shuttered window on the far wall. She collapsed into the leather swivel chair with a squeak. I couldn’t tell if it was her or the chair. Blinking, she set her right hand on the desk, where it lay there looking like a Darth Vader body part, and she went on to ignore
it. Like it was somebody else’s paw, somebody else’s tattoo, somebody else’s mound of creams and ointments.

  In her left hand she held a fountain pen as though it was a dart, that’s how unfamiliar that hand was with writing tools. “Here is the menu for my special meal for”—she actually looked around like possibly Li Wei had slipped into the closet—“you-know-what this Friday night.” She glanced at her clipboard.

  I listened as she rattled off in a single breath what sounded like Scallop Fritters with Roasted Chioggia Beet Carpaccio, Sestri Salad with Grappa and Fig Vinaigrette, Saffron Risotto alla Milanese, Saltimbocca, and Granita di Caffè con Panna. At which she drew a breath, pushed back her lustrous salt and pepper hair with her Darth Vader mitt, and waited for a comment from me. Her expression was a blend of haughty and fearful. I suggested adding some biscotti all’anaci, as the anise flavor would blend nicely with the coffee sherbet. Otherwise, I told her with a respectful dip of my head, a gorgeous menu.

  “Grazie,” she whispered. Then she rambled incoherently about how we’d need at least two other servers and another rock solid sous chef for Friday night, no arguments. Although my mind was whirring along figuring the net loss of providing fine, free eats to Nonna’s new sorority—not to mention all the lost revenue from other customers, considering we’d have to close for the evening; not to mention having to pay three extra staff for this gig—I said, “Of course” without a hint of good Italian ire in my voice.

  She seemed relieved.

  “Let me see your tattoo, Nonna,” I said, stepping closer.

  She looked pained, but extended the mitt to me and turned her head away. I slipped off Choo Choo’s black biker glove and pushed aside a layer of white Ink-Me-Gentle goop, and there it was. An artistic three-centimeter blue B in what was apparently Bastarda font. I toggled my head as I gently rotated her wrist. “I think it looks good, Nonna.” With one fingertip I slid the goop back over the tattoo and eased the mitt back into place. “It’ll heal, you know.”

  Her whimper seemed doubtful on that score.

  I found myself wondering if she was regretting her invitation to join Belfiere. Very slowly, I started to ask, “Nonna—do you—”

  She held up the mitt. “Don’t even say it, Eve. As if I could—ever—ever—as if a little tattoo is enough to make me—” At that I lost her in a flutter of eye blinks.

  “Okay, okay. I get it.”

  She gained strength. She snorted. She was back.

  Then I crossed my arms. “Landon found out who lives at 7199 Gallows Hill Drive in Pendragon.”

  Suddenly my nonna went red in the face and started to stagger to her feet. “You looked?” She sounded like she had just washed up on a desert island and was struggling to catch her breath. “You read my invitation? Shame on you! Shame—”

  In another minute she’d wrestle with a desire to slap me with a lusty malocchio—an Italian curse that generally explains sudden and intractable cases of warts and hairlessness. Mind you, not even Little Serena, that happy heretic, had deserved a malocchio. When the “other” granddaughter declared she Didn’t Cook—“Why the hell should I spend the time making food when I can just pay for the food other people cook like, say, at the Kroger’s?”— Maria Pia was so distressed that she actually looked for a support group for Fine Italian Chefs Whose Grandchildren Don’t Cook. She ranted when she couldn’t find one, and it was the closest she ever came to burning a risotto alla Milanese, but even then she wasn’t flinging around malocchios.

  Finally, when nothing seemed to help, Little Serena Bacigalupo got flung into Maria Pia’s blind spot. It’s not that she forgot her. It’s kind of like the blind spot in the car when you’re driving down the highway. You know that motorcycle’s there; you just can’t see it. I was pretty sure a grandchild—any grandchild—lived in a malocchio-free zone, so I didn’t hesitate to tell Nonna about eyeballing her invitation from Belfiere.

  “Nonna!” I said firmly. “Landon and I have your back whether you like it or not. In fact,” I added, “whether we like it or not.”

  She narrowed her eyes. “You must never divulge what you—”

  I waved a hand at her. “Fine, fine, no problem, believe me.”

  Even though she was squirming in her chair, she gave me the eyelash flutter that always tells me she knows she’s either lying or about to tell me something she knows I’ll hate. “I am telling the staff”—here she laid the mitt against her chin and tried to look dignified—“that Friday evening we’re entertaining my”—flutter, flutter—“mah-jongg club.”

  I slapped my forehead. “Mah-jongg club? Nonna, you don’t even play mah-jongg.”

  She tried to fold her hands and gave up. “They don’t know that.” I was about to make a crackpot pitch for honesty, but then she added, “You read the invitation, shame on you. So you saw the line about omertà. I just don’t know how far it goes. So I’m not taking any chances.”

  She had a point. Mah-jongg club it is, then. “As for the owner of the house where you’re being initiated . . .” I had her complete attention. “The name is Fina Parisi.”

  With a sudden step backward, Nonna landed in the leather swivel chair. “Are you sure?”

  Something changed, but I couldn’t tell what, exactly. My eyes slid away from her, trying to understand what was different. “Yes. Fina Parisi,” I repeated. “That’s the name.”

  Maria Pia Angelotta gazed past me. “So,” she said finally, barely above a whisper, “Fina Parisi is La Maga of Belfiere.”

  “The what?”

  “La Maga. The chef of all chefs.” Her brown eyes closed softly. “The supreme conjuror of gustatory delights—”

  “Ah, of life and death.”

  She shot me a dark look. “La Maga is in charge for three years. And chosen”—here my nonna indicated something rather mysterious with her big mitt—“in a very complicated process.”

  “Let me guess. Is it secret?”

  She squared her shoulders. “You have no respect.”

  “I have respect, Nonna. When it’s something that lets me look at it. But not this. Not Belfiere. I’m sorry,” I temporized. “Not yet.”

  But my grandmother wasn’t listening to me. Instead, she had a faraway look in her eye. “Fina Parisi,” she said slowly, her voice dripping in a thin stream like melted chocolate into Landon’s ricotta pudding.

  I lifted my chin. “Who is she?”

  “Fina Parisi,” said Maria Pia Angelotta, looking me with a strangely neutral expression, “is that strega Belladonna Russo’s daughter.”

  * * *

  Belladonna Russo, who owns a restaurant in New Brunswick, New Jersey, is Nonna’s culinary archenemy. Exactly how this came to be so, I’m not sure. All I know for a fact was that they trained together and the bad blood began in their Advanced Sauces class. There was an unfortunate hair-pulling incident followed by a takedown in a puddle of flung béchamel sauce.

  Now, the fact that the daughter of this archenemy happened to head up the Crazy Cooking Club at the precise time when Maria Pia Angelotta was invited to join was somewhat worrisome to me. Was Nonna being set up? And, if so, set up for what? I was baffled, all right, but fencing and dachshunds aside, Fina Parisi screamed for more digging. Why, after all, was this Fina person—a Top Chef finalist, after all—living kind of in our neighborhood? Bucks County, Pennsylvania, is a little far from where Fina Parisi has a part interest in an upscale place in Larchmont.

  Landon, who had disappeared for a while, came back a little later than he usually shows up for work, and he was toting his laptop. Since Maria Pia had gone home early to call vendors for the Friday-evening soirée—she insisted it had nothing to do with avoiding all the merriment of Grief Week here at Miracolo—the office was empty. Landon was looking freshly showered and shaved, but so quiet and distracted that even a megawatt smile from the delectable Jonathan got little more
than a thin smile from my cousin. And when no Fosse steps find their way into whatever he’s doing with a utility knife or spatula, I know something’s amiss in Landon Land.

  At a break in the mid-evening reservations, Landon touched my shoulder and led me back to the sumptuous brown leather couch in the office. The very scene of the crime where Kayla Angelotta had consulted my lawyer Joe Beck on matters of sex. Landon and I sat, knee to knee, and he powered up the laptop, basking in the Wi-Fi. “Look what I found,” he said, tapping quickly across the keyboard.

  “What?”

  “I decided to try different ways of spelling Belfiere, just in case we were missing something, you know?”

  I nodded.

  “When I typed in Belfiere and spelled it with a final i, here’s what I got.” He scrolled down. “Well, it’s a blog for victims of cults. Nothing very official. Just a cyber support group.” Landon turned the screen to face me. “Here’s a post from a couple of years ago. It’s still up.”

  I scanned it quickly, saw it was signed “Anna T.,” and then—with my heart pounding—I read what she had to tell us about Belfiere:

  OMG I think I’m going to die, I think they’ll come after me, they’re so crazycrazycrazy. I couldn’t take it anymore at the meeting last night when they were doing the poison guessing game or whatever they call it in Belfieri when you have to decide which dish has the poison only by smelling and looking and then you actually have to taste one of the other dishes!!! And then that one member collapsed and I started screaming. I think they know they made a mistake with me but they never let you go, never let you go, and all I could do was run. I’m too scared to go to the police because of the code of silence. The next day there was nothing in the papers, I looked, nothing online, nothing anywhere about the member who fell over and died. What did they do with her? OMG what did they do with her?