by Mark Teppo
Harrigan growled in his throat and paced the far side of the room like a hungry hyena, glaring at me.
OCD offered me his hand. “Mr. Mallory,” he said. “I'm sorry about this.”
I looked at his hand.
He lifted it to indicate the two new men. “These are Agents Lombard and Channing. Special Agent-in-Charge Harrigan will be stepping out. I'm Special Agent Daniels.” The hand came down again.
I took it this time.
“I'm sorry about the confusion with the food.”
I accepted help from the more slender of the two new men. Channing was thin and blond, half my size and with his own nose and cheekbones. His grip was strong and firm, self-assured even. “That wasn't food,” I said as I got to my feet. “That's the sort of thing you feed dogs hoping they'll choke to death on it.”
Harrigan came at me again and, this time, all three of them couldn't keep him off me and he managed to sock me in the eye with a wild swing. I fell down again, cupping my hand over my eye, as they hustled him out of the room. The pain wasn't too bad and I considered smacking myself once or twice more to really get a good bruise going.
The one-way mirror. I couldn't be sure someone wasn't watching, and I didn't want to ruin the game I was running. I had to keep playing it as straight as possible, adhering to the stereotype they had selected for me. I needed them complacent, sure of the assumptions they had been building about me.
Harrigan was not my friend, and the game with the food was an attempt to separate my interrogators, pushing the Bad Cop/Good Cop dichotomy to its breaking point.
The mirror was going to be a problem. My sleight of hand was going to be difficult to pull off if someone was watching.
Daniels returned a few minutes later. He closed the door behind him and sat down in the other chair. He motioned for me to drop my hand and I let him take a look at my developing shiner. His mouth made a tiny movement as he examined the discoloration forming around my left eye; his fingers moved unconsciously, attempting knots, while he fought with his ingrained zeal for tidiness. My bruise was causing ripples in his mental organization of the universe.
“Look, Mr. Mallory, this is an unfortunate turn of events...”
“I want a lawyer,” I said.
He spread his hands. “We're trying to track one down for you.”
“I want my lawyer,” I clarified. “I gave you his name three hours ago. His card is in my wallet. You do still have my wallet, don't you? Or has it wandered off with some of my personal effects?”
His hands came together again. “We're having some trouble reaching him.”
“My dear boy,” I said. “I'm an educated man. I'm not some illegal immigrant who doesn't speak the language.”
His eyebrows pulled together. “And?”
“I would expect that you can understand me when I say: my lawyer's direct line is printed on the card.”
Daniels sat back in his chair, his gaze flickering towards the mirror behind me. “Mr. Mallory, I don't care much for your tone.”
“I don't care much for the physical and mental abuse I've been subjected to. I am an American citizen. I was returning from a two-week vacation in Venezuela. I have nothing to hide. I told you everything I could about the—” I laid the proper amount of distaste on the next word “—item found on my person. I'm not a terrorist. I'm just a chef.”
“Well, we're still running a RAM, Mr. Mallory—”
“A what?”
“A RAM. A Risk Assessment Matrix.”
“Risk assessment? Does my Curried Carrot and Coconut Milk Soup threaten national security? Can my Galangal Eggplant on a bed of Lemon Grass and Fennel bring down an international flight? Or is it my Bacon, Lettuce and Cantaloupe sandwich: so simple and yet so divine that possession of it has been made into a crime?”
Daniels let me finish. “Special Agent Harrigan is very interested in the results of the RAM, Mr. Mallory. He's really hoping that the numbers are high enough to warrant incarceration.” Yes, Harrigan didn't like the sight of me.
“Since when you do base your decisions on a charted value?”
“We're trying to improve our image,” he explained. “Paperwork makes everything easier to justify when the liberal watchdog groups get involved.”
“Of course,” I said with a sigh. Paperwork made the world go round. Didn't I know that.
We sat in silence for a few minutes, both watching Daniels' fingers toy with the edge of the Formica table. I waited, hoping that I had guessed right about Daniels, hoping his off-handed comment during my initial interrogation was the key I could use to escape.
“Galangal eggplant,” he said finally. “Didn't that call for some really exotic spice?”
“Kaempferia Galangal,” I said. The recipe was from my first book. One of my signature dishes—I could make it in my sleep. “It's a boutique item. When that book came out, only the more upscale Indochinese markets carried it.” I shrugged. “But, times change, you know, things get easier to find.”
He nodded. “My wife made it a couple of times. Once she sent me out to find that Kampuchea...”
“Kaempferia,” I corrected.
“Kaempferia,” he said. “Yeah.”
This was my chance. The key was there, after all. Right in his stomach, where we are all the weakest.
I leaned forward, my elbows causing the table to rock. “Look,” I said. “I understand your situation; I know all about paperwork. I know how it twists everything and makes even the easiest thing complicated. I'm sure your RAM matrix will eventually validate my innocence and we can put all of this behind us. I'm even willing to forget the inconvenience of this interrogation.”
Daniels didn't say anything, but I could tell he was listening intently to my words.
Time to turn the key.
“I haven't had anything to eat since early this morning, and that was a couple of time zones ago. My blood sugar is low and we all get a little fussy and irritable when we get hypoglycemic. I could use something to eat, but not that garbage from the fast food counters. Nothing will kill you quicker. You know that.”
He licked his lips once, a signal that he was still listening.
“Cooking calms me down,” I said. “It soothes my nerves. Two birds with one stone, eh? I could give you a list of ingredients and you could, maybe, provide me with a mixing bowl and a plastic spoon? I could make up a batch of, I don't know, cookies, I suppose. Nobody gets hurt, right? It'll give me something to do; I can stop my blood sugar from plummeting any more...” I let my voice trail off, leaving the sentence unfinished, leaving the thought open-ended for him to complete.
His fingers drummed against the table for a second and then started crawling up his tie, fiddling with the edges. “I'll give it some thought,” he said as he stood up.
“Thank you, Special Agent Daniels,” I said as he rapped on the door, signaling that he was ready to leave. I kept the hopeful look on my face until he was gone.
He came back a few minutes later with a piece of paper and a pen that he put on the table. “List your ingredients,” he said. “Anything that looks suspect you won't get, so keep it simple.”
I took the offered pen and started writing.
He cocked his head and read the title at the top of the page. “Mallory's Quick-Quick Seduction Cookies. I said: keep it simple.”
I didn't stop writing. “It's a sugar cookie,” I said. “But if I called it that, who would care?”
“Marketing, eh?” he said. “'The best damn sugar cookie you've ever had.' Something like that?”
I smiled at him. “Something like that.”
*
Cooking is easy when you do away with the fancy utensils and the flashy ingredients. If you can follow directions, you can cook. Even Special Agent Daniels, my unsuspecting savior, could manage. Cooking as an art form? Well, that's something else entirely.
I have good hands. I studied Chemistry back in college; wasn't much for the theory but I could really bake a c
ake—so to speak—in the lab. Even the lab instructor grudgingly acknowledged the nickname exalted on me by fellow students: Eyeball Mallory. I didn't have to be too careful with my measurements; I just knew how large any sample was. Fluid or particulate or precipitate: it didn't matter, I could eyeball them all.
It was this hand/eye coordination that brokered my career in the celebrity chef business. It was the flash that set me apart from the others and made me exciting to watch. Not only did I not need all the measuring accoutrement when cooking, there was always a hovering sense of disaster that accompanied my efforts. Would I fuck it up this time and get the proportions wrong?
That was one of the differences on my show: I always cooked the dish. We never prepped the meal and then cut to the stove behind me where a ready-made platter was waiting. We didn't bother taping the half hour or hour it took to cook the dish, but the studio audience knew. They watched and tasted when it was done.
I never missed.
I didn't work before an audience with my new recipes. I made them in the absolute privacy of my kitchen. The studio audience wouldn't understand what I had learned in the jungles of Venezuela. The network would have freaked out. Thousands of housewives and stay-at-home dads across the country would have become a mob of outraged apprentice cooks bent on one single goal: beating me to death with their kitchen utensils.
This was always the fate of revolutionaries: persecuted by fear, panic, and distrust; never did they gain acceptance; never was their offer of a better world greeted with delight; never was there wonderment at their accomplishments.
The bakers of the Trincerẽno tribe mix their spit into their sweetbreads and they kneed the dough on special stones that have been carved and consecrated by the shaman of the village. In addition to being deliciously moist and flavorful, the sweetbread is an antidote to snake venom. There is a particularly nasty tree snake that lives near the fecund waters of the Cauro River, and its bite is fatal within twenty-four hours. The snake population around this village has been purposefully cultivated to act as a protective barrier against other aggressor tribes. The members of the village are protected against accidental bites by the sweetbread that they eat every day.
It works. I still have the tiny scars on the heel of my right palm where a two meter specimen bit me. My hand turned into an unwieldy sausage platter, and my arm turned black and the skin began to flake and crack. I was given two pieces of the bread and, after a night of feverish sleep, the poison passed from my system and the swelling in my hand and arm vanished.
I thought it was just a matter of having the right ingredients; there are millions of flowers and herbs growing in the Amazon basin and the outlying mountainous regions whose chemical and biological properties haven't been properly classified. And, when I learned about the magic of natural ingredients, I discovered that having the proper technique and tools was of equal importance. You had to know the ritual and the symbolism as well; you had to know how the magic worked.
There's one very basic law you have to understand. It didn't matter what you were baking or cooking or making into taffy, you had to adhere to the essential rule of the universe: as above, so below. Whatever result you wanted to create external to your culinary creation, you needed a mirror of it within your recipe.
This was especially true of love potions. These sorts of tinctures only worked with the purest—more directly harvested—sorts of ingredients.
No-bake cookies need to be refrigerated for at least an hour so they can set properly. I didn't have the luxury of refrigeration so I adapted the recipe accordingly: a little more flour, a little less milk, an extra pinch of salt.
My mixing bowl was a rinsed Styrofoam container. It was small enough that I had to make the mix up in two batches, which suited me well enough. I only needed one batch to contain the special ingredient.
The size of the plastic spoon helped with the illusion I needed to pass. Putting the ingredients together required a lot of vigorous mixing, a circular motion of the arm that got very boring to watch. By the time I got to stirring the second batch, I'm sure no one was actively watching me through the one-way mirror. When I turned my back to the window and changed the motion of my arm slightly, I'm sure no one noticed.
Fortunately, performance anxiety wasn't an issue.
After mixing and dropping the rounded cookies onto the Subway wrapper Daniels had procured, I shaped them and, with the end of the plastic spoon, I cut tiny symbols on their tops. Carefully, so as to not mar the markings, I flipped each cookie over and arranged them in three rows, six to a row. There was a little extra milk in the container so I drank that down before I put all of the detritus from my cookie-making into the Styrofoam mixing dish.
I pushed one of the chairs into a corner so that I could sit and lean against the wall; there was nothing else to do now but wait, wait for the cookies to gel and for their curiosity to reach a feverish pitch.
*
The click of the door lock roused me from my light nap. I opened my eyes and worked up some saliva to clean off the milk film that had formed in my mouth.
Daniels brought Channing with him. They stood next to the table, examining the row of cookies. “If they're firm, they're ready,” I said as I stood up slowly, feeling an aching stiffness in my back from having slept sitting up.
Daniels poked the nearest cookie with a finger. Channing looked like the sort of kid who was trying to kill a sweet tooth by starving it. The presence of eighteen rounded sugar cookies was firing a number of nerve endings in his brain. He moved first, a hand darting forward to snag one of the cookies on the end.
Daniels watched him eat it. I did too, trying to keep the greedy smile off my face. “Pretty good, eh?” I said, a little of the grin leaking across the rim of my lips. I crossed to the table and took one from the row closest to me—the unmolested row in the back.
Channing nodded, the cookie rapidly disappearing into his mouth.
Daniels watched me take a bite of the soft cookie, watched me chew and swallow before he relented and let his hands reach for the table. He ate cautiously as if he thought the soft dough might burn his mouth.
“Huh,” he said when the cookie was gone. “That was pretty good. Moister than I expected.”
“That's my secret ingredient,” I said. “Have another one. I couldn't possibly eat them all myself. You could even take a few out to the others. Maybe Harrigan would like one...”
Channing went for his second and Daniels considered the offer.
Not that it mattered. One was enough. In about an hour, the essential aspects of the cookie would be absorbed into his bloodstream and his feelings towards me would change. His inclination to listen to anything I had to say would radically improve.
Maybe not the 'best damn cookie in the world' but, then I hadn't been trying for the Guinness Book of World Records. I was striving for suggestibility—the magic of a love potion worked into a soft cookie shape.
Anything is possible, after all. It is just a matter of the proper ingredients.
THE QUEEN OF FAITH
I
When his lady abandoned him, Deke left the shining lights of the Strip and wandered north and west until he reached the sea. The ocean eagerly offered to claim him, the roar of its breakers like the roar of a crowd frantic to lay their hands on a winning player. He stumbled into the surf, the frigid touch of the sea spearing through the cheap leather of his shoes, and when he fell, a wave rushed down his throat, freezing his lungs.
The ocean tried to drag him to deep water, to roll him like a cold winter stone, but an instinct—a primal response to some yet unfilled need—held him back. His hands clawed at the wet sand, anchoring him on the beach. Gradually, though the ocean took his strength, he managed to pull himself out of the surf and onto dry sand.
Lying on the beach, gasping and shivering, confused as to why he had not been able to give himself up to the water, he dimly registered a diffuse glow reflecting back from the ugly belly of the clouds. Sme
ars of orange and yellow and blue against the blackness of the sky, they were the lights of a city, a massive sprawl of streets and buildings and suburbs. Shivering, he wrapped his arms around himself and sat up. The lights were like a fire, just beyond the next hill. A fire that meant food and shelter, bodies in motion, and coin in play.
He had thirty dollars and a handful of noisy coins in his right front pocket. It was all he had left. You aren’t dead if you have money in your pockets: his bone yard daddy taught him that axiom. All it took was a deck of cards. In the turn of one hand, one bluff, or one bet: he could see her again.
There would be games in the Sprawl. In the desert, all the luck ran along the narrow river of the Strip, and his lady was chained to that single track, but the Sprawl had a different heritage, and its growth was not as focused as the Strip’s. Her influence would be scattered—like single drops of rain falling on an empty plain—but it would still be there.
Old gamblers can read the streets and alleys as easily as a diner menu: dice in the shadow of container ships, three card in the shrubbery at the base of high-rise hotels, mah-jongg in tiny parlors above dim sum restaurants, and poker. There was always a poker game in the city: in starkly lit law firm conference rooms, in empty operating theaters in medical centers, in the waiting rooms in tattoo parlors, and in the back rooms behind posh wine bars where the ante was more than a day labor’s wage. It wouldn’t be hard to find a game, and in a spread of cards and the spill of chips, Deke might find an answer to the question that had kept him from the sea.
Best to be sure, he realized, best to empty my pockets before I die.
II
“Hold ’Em,” Ralph announced as he finished shuffling the deck. “Pineapple style.” He carefully kept his pinkie away from the deck as he dealt, feeling Whitcombe’s eyes on his hands. The gallery owner had a reputation for cutthroat shrewdness in his deal-making—the sort of fine print avarice that made people hide their wallets—and Ralph had been to Vilmo’s enough to know that a player’s game could be derailed by a wanton accusation of cheating.