by Peter King
“Then perhaps I’ll see you there.” The luminous eyes were irresistible. I agreed.
CHAPTER TEN
THE ENTRANCE TO THE mud baths was dark from the outside, but that was a trick of the glittering sun. Inside, the bath was lit with bulbs like giant pumpkins that gave off a soft natural light. A winding path led inward and soon merged into a vast subterranean palace with a low roof of natural glistening rock.
Bronze fittings on the lamps gave it a period look, but the earth-brown marble of the mud bath was clearly modern. In it, rich brown mud heaved and bubbled, sending clouds of steam wafting into the humid atmosphere.
One of the lovely blond staff girls was on duty. I had not seen her before. This one looked like the star of the Olympic swimming team. Her tiny bikini allowed no space for a name badge, and she introduced herself with, “I’m Celia.”
In the simmering bath of mud, three vaguely human shapes could be distinguished, wallowing gently like grotesque sea creatures. I had to reach the side of the bath before I could identify a couple from Dublin whom I had met in the restaurant. I turned my attention to the third figure and was just able to make out the features of Marta Giannini. Her eyes sparkled out of the thick gelatinous mass that parted reluctantly as she raised a hand to wave.
I slid in beside her. It was different from what I had expected. Instead of getting into the mud, all I could do at first was lie on top. It was denser and heavier than it looked, like a mass of unbaked pumpernickel dough. Gradually I began to settle, sinking very, very slowly. Marta laughed, and the sound tinkled and echoed from the low ceiling.
“Don’t think about your nose itching! If it does, you will want to rub it and then you have a problem!”
“I won’t think about it.” It was an impossible promise. “You’re an old hand at this mud bath venture, aren’t you?”
“I love them,” she said gleefully.
I floated for a while. I thought I was sinking deeper very slowly but my face was still above the mud.
“This isn’t just ordinary mud,” Marta said. “The mineral water from the natural springs deep down makes it different, gives it medicinal powers. It’s wonderful for the skin.”
“Does anybody ever sink?” I asked.
“The mineral water being pumped in has a very strict temperature control on it. That keeps the mud at just the right consistency.”
Right for what? I wondered. It was too dense to swim in and too thin to float on. I moved my arms and it was frustratingly difficult. I kicked but nothing happened. The Irish couple was climbing out, saying something to Marta. She smiled and I thought she nodded but the movement was minimal. Celia led the couple into a shower cubicle and handed them white terry-cloth robes. They left, and Marta called to me, “Still afloat?”
“I think so. Is my skin peeling yet?”
She laughed, expert enough in mud bathing to prevent mud from slipping into her mouth. I lay there, immobile. It was like being suspended in space and after the passage of an indeterminate number of minutes, suspended in time too.
A loud piercing noise broke my reverie. It was a while before I recovered full consciousness, and I became aware that the blond girl was talking to Marta. The piercing noise stopped, and I saw the cell phone in the blond Celia’s hand. Marta moved slowly, slowly to the side of the pool. She pulled herself half out and turned to me. Venus arising from the mud bath, I thought.
“My agent and an executive from Universal are on a conference call,” she said. “They want to talk to me about a new part. I’ll have to take it in my room.”
“Good luck,” I wished her sincerely. Celia helped her out and took her to the shower. Marta gave me a wave as she disappeared. Celia came back to the edge of the bath. “I have to go and look at the temperature. I’ll be right back.”
“All right,” I managed to say.
“I’m not supposed to leave you alone,” she said, “but I’ll only be a minute or two.”
She walked away with a sway of the hips that was so different from any of those I had seen before. I went back into my mud world.
I was exfoliating. My skin was coming off in huge patches. Soon I was going to be a hunk of unprotected flesh, grotesque and unrecognizable. I would submerge in a hot steamy swamp and be lost.
Consciousness began to seep back slowly. Relief flooded my mind. I couldn’t see any of my skin, but I knew it was not peeling. That had been just one of the fears implanted easily because of my negligible knowledge of mud baths. I was not submerging either—that was just another fear that …
But I was submerging. My nose and mouth were barely above the brown ooze. It was hot now, hotter than when I had gone in and so steamy that I could hardly see the stone ceiling. I tried to move my arms and legs but it was not possible.
The steamy air parted as a figure came through it, coming into focus like an image at a séance. It must be Celia returning … but no. The blond girls looked very much alike, but surely this wasn’t Celia. The steam swirled, the face came and went. I tried to gasp out a plea for help, but I could hear no words emerging. She was looking down at me. Why didn’t she help me? I must have passed out from the heat, and when my eyelids had struggled apart I was first aware of the effort to move them and then of the fact that the face had gone.
I was aware again of the temperature of the mud. It was getting hotter by the minute. It must have been acting as a soporific, for I drifted off into a hazy world of only one sensation—heat. It was lulling my brain into a stupor, and even the effort of trying to formulate a thought was too much.
Through the haze of unreality, I had the panicky feeling that I was sinking deeper and deeper, slow though it was. My limbs did not exist, or if they did I no longer had any control over them. Breathing was getting more difficult, I suddenly realized. The moist air was heavy and cloying and my lungs did not want to make the effort. The mud was seeping into my ears, and I thought I could hear a faint glug-glug of bursting bubbles. But the sound was attenuated, as if stretched by the heaving mud.
The awareness of the need for survival was still there, though. A tiny stirring in the back of my mind was urging me to do something, anything, to escape from this world of heat and humidity where the least movement required massive effort, and time seemed to be moving at a cosmic crawl.
The thought crept in as to whether I would ever come back from such a world.
I had no recollection of forcing my eyes open and yet another face was filling my vision. Was I dreaming? Was I still in a universe of increasingly unbearable heat? Was that the sound of a muffled voice, calling out incomprehensible words?
Like successive shots in a film, actuality returned. First steamy white air, then undulating thick mud all around me, then the marble edge of the pool. Marta was trying to pull me out of the mud, and it was reluctant to let me go. My head emerged, and even the heavy humid air felt cool by comparison. The heat still enveloped the rest of my body, and in a moment of sheer irrelevance I resolved to review the matter of lobsters and boiling water.
I could see Marta clearly now. She was struggling to pull me free of the clinging mud, but she was not strong enough. I was slipping back but recovering just enough to be trying to kick and struggle when a blond vision appeared. She and Marta heaved me out as if beaching a large and exhausted fish. I flopped on to the cool marble.
The blond girl was strong and muscular. She half carried me into the shower cubicle, and fresh clear water had never felt so good. She handed me a plastic mug of sparkling water with slices of cucumber, chunks of lemon, and ice. It tasted wonderful, and she filled the mug again from a large pitcher. I dropped into the nearest chair.
Marta was at my side, looking concerned. She was wearing a white terrycloth robe, spattered with mud from her attempts to pull me out. “Drink some more,” said the blond girl, filling my mug again. “It will replace the moisture. You must have lost a lot.”
“You saved my life,” I said to both of them. “What’s your name?” I
asked the blond girl. She wore only a bikini as brief as that of the previous girl.
“Anita,” she replied. “Where is Celia?”
“She went to adjust the temperature,” I said as normality crept back. “She must have misread the dial or got hold of the wrong handle.
“Can you bring me one of those robes?” I asked. Now that I was feeling better, nudity seemed out of place.
Anita brought me a robe. “I’ll have a look at the temperature control,” she said, and disappeared into the steam haze.
Marta gave me a brief, reassuring smile. “It’s a good thing I came back. What happened to you?”
“The pool got hotter. I got weaker. I passed out. I hope this never happened to you at the Gellert.”
“Mud baths are supposed to be invigorating,” she said.
“This one wasn’t,” I told her, and sat for a few minutes as my strength returned.
“This must remind you of Shanghai Nights,” I told her. “You ran an establishment with a very doubtful reputation. You fell in love with the chief of police, who had to put you out of business or the politicians would get him fired. He stood up to them, they had him hit on the head and thrown into the Pacific and you saved him—you had been standing on the pier where you were going to drown yourself.”
“Ah yes, Josef—he was a great director. He fell in love with me during that picture.”
“I thought your costar, Robert what’s his name, fell in love with you in that picture?”
She smiled wistfully. “Yes, Robert too—but it was Lloyd I married.”
“I thought that was Kent?”
“He was next.”
We laughed together. “I think you have recovered,” she said, “and at least the hot mud hasn’t softened your brain. Do you remember all my movies?”
“Every single one,” I said—one of the rare occasions on which I think it permissible to lie is when talking to a beautiful woman.
Anita came back frowning. “The temperature control is set for normal, but the thermometer reading is fifteen degrees higher.”
“I would have been cooked like a goose in another few minutes,” I told her.
She was still frowning. “I don’t understand. The control must have been running under a higher setting for a period of time. I must report this. It is a very serious matter.”
“I agree. I’m glad you arrived when you did.”
“I was not supposed to relieve Celia for another half hour,” she said. “You are lucky I came early.”
Marta walked back to the main buildings with me. She could pass for twenty years younger, I thought. She was still a very beautiful woman—and not just because she had saved my life. That reminded me …
“Thanks again for saving my life,” I said.
“Anytime,” she said, then looked at me anxiously. “No, I didn’t mean that. I hope it doesn’t happen again.”
The grass was soft and the air clean and pure. It was good to be alive.
Marta said almost to herself, “I wonder how the temperature got up that high.”
She surprised me. I had thought of her as being totally self-absorbed. I was glad to be wrong.
It was a point that I had started to think about now that the shock had worn off. It might not have been so significant, but this was the second time that one of the blond staff members had been involved—the first time in a death (or at least an unaccountable disappearance) and the second time in a near death. From now on, I was going to look at those girls with suspicion. How many more of them could be involved?
“There’s another thing,” Marta said. “I didn’t think it had any meaning before, but now …”
“Go on,” I encouraged her.
“I waited a long time on that phone line. I was told to wait, wait. … Finally, a voice said there was a problem with the line and they would try again later.”
“It’s possible,” I said. “Even Swiss telephones aren’t perfect.”
“I called my agent in New York. He knew nothing about a conference call.” I was silent. She continued, “He is trying to put together a deal for a new picture, but it’s not ready yet.”
“Yes, that is strange,” I admitted. “Some kind of mistake, I suppose.”
“It must have been.”
She might have been waiting for me to tell her that I was in the Secret Service and could not tell her any more. She had probably heard that line in half a dozen movies, although that would not mean she was ready to believe it now. I thought of telling her more, but at this stage I did not want to get her involved. I was not sure yet of what was happening. All I knew was that too much of it was happening to me.
I could always quit and go back to London.
No, I couldn’t. I was really curious, and besides, I liked the spa. I would hang in there a little while longer, even if I didn’t have a paying client—and even if someone did want to boil me like … well, like a lobster.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
I HAD NO TIME to reflect on my narrow escape from being boiled to death—an inexcusable end for a gourmet detective. Our session at four o’clock began right on time—always a predictable occurrence in Switzerland.
Four of us were on the podium—Leighton Vance, Michel Leblanc, Axel Vorstahl, and I. Caroline introduced us and pointed out again that the week’s classes and demonstrations were not basically for professionals. A few of these attended, those who wanted to brush up or those who had been away from cooking for some time. Basically, though, the classes were for serious amateurs or those in auxiliary fields.
“The latter includes guests that the spa is pleased to have with us this week,” said Caroline. She named Oriana Frascati as an editor of cookbooks, Helmut Helberg as the owner of a supermarket chain, and Bradley Thompson as a fast-food pioneer.
“This is to be a short session,” she explained. “You will all have accumulated a lot of questions so far, and many may not have had the opportunity to have them answered in the regular classes. So here is your chance. …”
It was a popular idea, and the room was crowded. Questions came thick and fast. First of all, someone wanted to know what to do about salt. “We are supposed to cut down on it—in the United States, the federal government says by at least one-third. Salt contributes to high blood pressure, we are told. But everyone knows that there is just no substitute for salt when it comes to flavor. What is the answer?”
Michel Leblanc fired the first shot. “The desire for salt comes when a society moves away from fresh foods to processed foods. Unfortunately, all processed foods contain extremely high amounts of sodium, added as a preservative.” He turned an apologetic face to Helmut Helberg and he answered promptly.
“Bradley and I are, of course, suppliers of processed foods, and we must use preservatives so that canned foods have the shelf life that customers demand.”
Caroline, presiding, was cleverly bringing in all the members of the panel as early and as quickly as possible. She pointed next to me.
“Salt is trapped in a vicious circle,” I said. I wanted to avoid taking up the cudgels on behalf of either of the proponents here. “As the body craves more salt, the demand grows for saltier foods, such as prosciutto, cheese, olives, potato chips, dried beef, canned fish, frankfurters, canned soups—”
“Aren’t there other preservatives besides salt?” someone chipped in.
Caroline’s imperious finger swung to Leighton Vance. “Certainly,” he said. “First, though, I must emphasize that life as we know it could not exist without preservatives. We would have to go back to the Stone Age. Chemical preservatives are by far the cheapest kind—”
“—and salt is the cheapest of all,” contributed Helmut.
As the finger swiveled in my direction, I was ready. “Other methods include heating, chilling, freezing, fermentation, pickling, smoking … Irradiation may turn out to be the most efficient, but there is customer resistance to any link between food and nuclear radiation, and even the best PR people haven
’t solved that problem yet.”
“Perhaps we should get back to the original question,” said Caroline smartly. “It really asked, How can the chef avoid salt?”
The discussion flowed. Use more pepper, use paprika, use lemon juice, use mustard or fresh basil or thyme—all were proposed. The final word came from Oriana Frascati. “If you must use salt, make it kosher salt—it’s the purest and the only one free of objectionable chemicals.”
A question came on a different subject. “I’m redesigning my kitchen at home. I do a lot of entertaining, so what are the most important points to bear in mind?”
Axel Vorstahl was first to tackle that one. He had worked with kitchen designers on land as well as on cruise ships, he said. Modifying this experience for a personal kitchen, he made the following suggestions: have lots of open shelving and glass-fronted cupboards; have a refrigerator under the counter and put a freezer in the pantry; treat all countertops with polyurethane for the best resistance to bacteria; capture as much natural light as you can and have halogen lighting tracks to augment it; have heat and water close together by having a faucet adjacent to the cooktop.
“What do you think about uncooked food?” was another query. “Some health clinics prescribe raw foods for better health.”
All four of us commented on this. Helmut Helberg pointed out that cooking actually increases the nutritional content of several vegetables, including carrots and tomatoes. That steaming is always better than boiling was universally agreed.
“We’re getting bored with French cooking, Italian cooking, Chinese food …,” called a voice. “When are we going to get something new, something different?”
There was a pause, and Caroline looked at us all in turn before I ventured an answer. “What about Russian cooking? It has a lot of potential that hasn’t yet been tapped in the West. Maybe it will be next.” Some discussion followed, but no one had any better ideas. Indonesian and Philippine cooking were mentioned, but many thought them only variations on Chinese.
More inquiries flowed, with Helberg, Frascati, and Thompson contributing as much as those of us on the panel. Vance had the least to say. He seemed to have something on his mind. When we finally broke up, a man of the audience wanted to pursue points with selected panelists, and our “short” session became as long as the others.