Mick snapped to. “Oui, Chef.”
“Did you talk to the insubordinate girl who was late?”
“Consuelo. I did, Chef. I stayed on her ass all night. She’s in line now. No more trouble from her or I will answer for it.”
“I heard good reports from Sidney about the buffet. Passengers were pleased with your pig roast and the entertainment. All around, a success.”
Mick had been aware of Sidney all night last night and had worked hard, unobtrusively, to make sure his initial impression was good. The maître d’ and head of the waitstaff was an elegant, punctilious, demanding Welshman, and everyone who knew him and had worked with him before apparently deeply respected him. No one seemed to know anything about him, apart from the fact that he was something of a legend among Cabaret kitchen crews. He was like the Godfather. He could make you, he could break you, and no one ever questioned him. And he was effortlessly proper; he brought civilization with him like his own personal corrective. He was therefore superbly effective. And a positive assessment from Sidney, coming from Chef himself, was worth a gold brick or two in galley currency. Mick tried not to beam. He felt Jean-Luc sending him a sidelong death ray.
“I put Consuelo in charge of developing and executing the hors d’oeuvres,” Mick said. It always looked good to deflect praise onto your staff whenever possible, and Consuelo deserved this, especially after she had gotten herself in Laurens’s bad graces right off the bat. “She came up with the sliders and the kebabs. People seemed to love them. Sidney is correct.”
“Ah,” said Laurens. “Was there anything you could do better as we go on?”
“Tonight, the theme is elegant and fancy. Gourmet in 1950s style. Canapés to start. Caviar and blini. A beautiful spread of classic food using lighter, more contemporary recipes and techniques.”
“Ah,” said Laurens again, noncommittal, blank. “Thank you. Okay. Jean-Luc,” he added as if it were an afterthought.
“Oui, Chef.”
“Your assessment of last night. Your station had some serious trouble.”
“The squab,” said Jean-Luc. “Didier, he know now what he did wrong.”
“Didier,” said Laurens, “was not in charge of cooking perfect squab. You were. What happened?”
“Squab,” said Jean-Luc with hatred. “Didier overcook it. C’est simple. Now he know not to do that.”
“Anything else?”
“I would like to do the flambé of the steak Diane on the floor individually. It is impressive and also, the steak is better.”
“Talk to the waitstaff, see what they think.”
Jean-Luc opened his mouth to launch into something about tableside pyrotechnics, Mick was certain, and he also knew that the waitstaff would comply with whatever the chefs wanted them to do, they always did.
“Lobster thermidor,” said Laurens.
Jean-Luc shut his mouth. Blinked. “Excuse me, Chef?”
“How do you make it? All three of you. I want to hear your preferred method and recipe.”
“Lobster thermidor,” said Kenji. “Yes, I know it. It was invented in France in a theater restaurant. Lobster steamed, de-shelled, packed into the clean shells and covered in a cream sauce with sherry and mustard, then grated Gruyère on top, then broiled.”
“Nothing else?” said Laurens.
“That is how I would make it, but I have not ever had to.”
“You never made it out of curiosity? It’s a classic.”
“No, Chef,” said Kenji coolly. “I would welcome the opportunity.”
“Beh,” said Jean-Luc, “it’s too much work for what you get, it’s too rich, and very expensive. In Paris we did a version much easier, much faster. We make the sauce ahead of time, no shells, plated the lobster meat, et fini, but it’s not a good return. You cannot taste the lobster under all the sauce. It’s a waste of money and ingredients and time, Chef.”
Laurens held Jean-Luc’s gaze for a couple of beats, during which Mick gathered himself, thinking.
“Mick, anything to add?”
“I made homard thermidor in Budapest at the restaurant where I learned to cook. It was a three-step process for the sauce, and it was excellent, delicious, and worth the trouble.” He paused and added pointedly, without looking at Jean-Luc, “Expensive, yes, but not more than filet mignon. We made the custard separately in a bain-marie, then folded it into the sauce, tempering it, very slowly. For the sauce we did not use cream; we made a roux as for a béchamel and then added to it a glaze of lobster stock, wine, and sherry with a sprig of tarragon, a pinch of nutmeg. Then you slowly temper together the béchamel and glaze with the cream custard, adding a little dry mustard, until it is very glossy, thick, then pour just the right amount, not too much, over the tender lobster meat. And broil with a little grated Gruyère to finish, then a hit of paprika, and finally, we served it over buttered egg noodles with a small pitcher of the sauce on the side.”
“I’m hungry,” said Laurens with a half-smile so faint, Mick was sure he’d imagined it. “Can you make me one for lunch?”
“Oui, Chef,” said Mick.
“Also,” said Laurens. “One more thing. Mick, you’ll replace Jean-Luc on the meat station for this cruise. Jean-Luc, you’re running the buffet galley now. I think that is a better use of our resources.”
“Oui, Chef,” Mick said. “I’d like to bring Consuelo over too.”
Laurens flashed a look at him. Mick knew he’d stuck his neck out too far now with Chef, but he held his eye contact without wavering; he had just learned from Kenji’s example that holding Laurens van Buyten’s gaze was the way to impress and disarm him. Of course: he was a bully, and like all bullies, he could be disarmed only with fearless strength. Any emotion on the part of his prey, any sign of weakness, and he smelled blood.
“She’s tough,” Mick added after a beat or two went by without a firm no. He guessed that this was one of the highest compliments in Laurens’s lexicon. “Her sense of timing is good, she knows the recipes of this era.”
“Well then,” said Laurens. “Consuelo can switch with Didier. Okay?”
“Oui, Chef,” said Mick calmly. His second promotion in three days, and he’d secured a place for his underling.
“Is this clear, Jean-Luc?”
“Oui.” Jean-Luc swallowed a toad in his throat. “Chef.”
chapter eight
The main galley roared and clanked, the air vibrated with heat. In the midst of the controlled chaos, Mick wrestled a gigantic tray of briskets into an oven and turned to a forty-quart pot of simmering beef stock. Nearby, Consuelo braised duck legs. She looked neat and calm, swathed in an apron, her dark hair tucked under a scarf, focused on her work. After last night, Mick was now very aware of her. He found himself watching her, studying her. She was slender and strong and had a flat, moonlike face with full lips and almond-shaped eyes and a high, pale forehead. Her face wasn’t beautiful, but she had a macho samurai-like implacability alongside a Hispanic formality and, he thought, an underground sensuality. He imagined that softening her would be a challenge, but once you had her, she would surrender all at once. He thought of the way a mushroom resisted, sliding drily in the hot pan in clenched refusal until all at once it ran with juices and went limp and rich and fragrant.
Mick recalled his promise to himself that he would make it a point to get laid on this cruise. Of course he could not have anything to do with Consuelo—never someone who worked with him, especially an underling in such close proximity all day—but the fact that he was allowing himself to think about her in this way only proved how much he needed it. He imagined himself in that parallel, luckier life he would have been leading right now if things had gone as planned: in Paris, in Suzanne’s bed drinking red wine, naked, smoking, talking about where to go for dinner, or should they stay in…and then he stopped thinking about Suzanne altogether.
There were no windows in the galley. Giant vents sucked up the smoke and circulated the air, but they couldn’t do much when the kitchen was in full swing. Around him, the huge stainless steel room was all monochromatic hard polished surfaces, some fogged with steam, some bright with reflected light from the red-hot electric burners, some gleaming. The air was so thick and wet, Mick felt as if he were breathing hot seawater. He remembered his dream of swimming below the ocean with big friendly fish; had that been only two days ago? That was what he felt like now, shoulder to shoulder with his fellow cooks, no one saying much, everyone fierce and intent, staying out of one another’s way with practiced expertise and finesse. He knew this work, he knew exactly how to take charge of a meat station, although he had never run one before. He had been in Consuelo’s place for years. He had observed. And he’d been very keen to get a chance to prove himself. And the fact that Laurens van Buyten of all people had put him here…He could not fuck up, could not distract himself by imagining himself eating coq au vin with Suzanne at a table outside somewhere, licking the meat juice off her fingers, gathering his forces to fuck her again when they got back to her small aerie in the Marigny on a quiet, twisting lane, with its billowing curtains and high ceilings and the tiny kitchen he loved to fill with provisions he didn’t have to cook and could heap on a board after sex to eat picnic-style on her enormous platform bed, peaches and tomatoes, boules and cheeses, charcuterie with cornichons and grainy mustard, chocolate and pastries, and wine, always wine…
“Right behind you, Chef,” said Consuelo, passing by him fast, so closely he felt the air whoosh against his back, but she didn’t touch or even graze him.
He snapped out of the impossible reverie and went to the walk-in and brought out a crate of quail. One by one, he began spatchcocking them, pressing them into the cutting board and snipping out the backbones with shears to flatten them. He loved working with quail. They were a simple thing, little bodies that looked vulnerable, froglike, in the roasting pan; their bones were tiny, delicate, and their meat was tender, mild, responsive to whatever flavors it was bathed in. Tonight it would be paprika, fines herbes, and sea salt, cooked fast in butter in a hot pan, served on a bed of roasted potatoes with a side of julienned vegetables, so simple, yet so easy to get wrong: quail had to leave the pan still faintly pink at its core or else it dried out. But if you did that, you were rewarded with a delicacy beyond chicken, or pheasant, or duck, a tiny rich morsel of meat racked with wee bones that demanded slowness in its consumption, a conscious suspension of gluttony, a Zen focus in which dismantling this perfectly made small creature took your entire attention.
He was aware, in the back of his brain, that Laurens was sitting in his office right now, eating the lobster thermidor that Mick had made. This time, he had used Julia Child’s recipe as per Laurens’s implicit directive at the first staff meeting, which called for mushrooms and cognac and cream, and required him to cook the lobsters in a quick vegetable-infused broth. It was intensely fun to make and completely different from the method he’d been taught by Chef Viktor at the Eszterházy Restaurant. He’d grinned to himself the entire time he’d been cooking it, glancing happily between the book and the stove. It had been a while since he’d taken such a childlike pleasure in cooking. He’d made two: one for Chef, the other for Consuelo and himself to share. Of course Chef had recognized its author when he’d brought it in to him.
“Julia Child’s recipe,” he’d said, inhaling the steam that rose from the sauce.
Mick and Consuelo had devoured theirs, standing side by side at their station, grinning at each other. Then they’d thrown the plates and forks in a dish tub and seamlessly resumed whatever they’d been doing.
“Hello?” came a female American voice through the swinging doors. Mick ignored whoever it was. Let the prep cooks handle her, whatever she needed. “Excuse me?”
He went on spatchcocking quail. Press, snip, snip, stack.
A woman appeared at the end of the station, her head cocked playfully sideways to show that she knew she was intruding and was half apologetic about it, but she needed to talk to them so here she was. She was youngish, tall and skeletally thin, with curly, short reddish hair and glasses, a long, pale face, her upper lip curved and long and almost prehensile.
“I’m Valerie Chapin,” she said. “A freelance writer, I’m working on a book, and I wondered if I could take up a few minutes of your time. Not now, of course, but sometime during the cruise?”
Consuelo had watched her sidelong as she talked and then, without a word, vanished into the cold storage room.
Mick kept one hand on the quail he’d just finished, the other on his knife, and stilled his hands. “Maybe,” he said as curtly as he could. “You have to go through Chef van Buytens.”
“I’m so sorry,” she said, giving him a keen look, half flirtatious, with a predatory edge. “What is your name? Maybe we could meet later tonight or tomorrow, whenever you like, I’ll be available.”
Mick gave her a quick glare and resumed working.
She waited there, standing and watching him work, longer than he would have imagined was possible, even for someone as rude and arrogant as this woman clearly was, but finally she gave up and left the galley.
Consuelo returned. “Who the fuck was that?”
“She said she’s a writer,” said Mick.
“What does she want with us?”
“I told her to fuck off.”
“She’s a guest.”
“I was polite.”
“You were polite,” repeated Consuelo, infusing the words with all the amused skepticism they could contain. Mick realized he was being teased. She was subtle. On hearing of her promotion to the meat station thanks to Mick’s recommendation, she had nodded at him briefly, a typically economical gesture Mick had interpreted as her version of clicking her heels together with joy.
“I want to talk to her,” said Consuelo. “On my break.”
Mick squinted at her. Consuelo’s face held a blank expression that revealed nothing. Mick went back to his quail. He felt a twinge of unease, but there was no reason for it, at least nothing he could pinpoint, so he let it go.
* * *
*
After another decadent dinner in the fine-dining restaurant, Christine and Valerie went back up to the crescent-shaped teak pool bar. They perched on high stools amid a talking, laughing, drinking crowd. People swam in the pool and floated on rafts. The same jazz band from the night before had set up on the other side of the pool. Valerie, who seemed to have thrown her determination to stay sober overboard, was halfway into her second martini. “Meanwhile, this hot Eastern European chef was a total dick,” she said. She had been telling Christine about her slow progress so far with conducting interviews. “He ignored me, anyway.”
“He was probably working,” said Christine. She flashed on the drunk, tough-looking Hungarian guy who’d sat next to her at the hotel bar in Long Beach, the one who’d hit on the waitress and made her run for cover. “I wouldn’t mess with professional chefs. They’re all supposedly ex-cons and thugs.”
“Just my type, right?” Valerie took a cigarette out of a chrome-plated cigarette box she’d pulled from her pocket and lit it with a sleek lighter. Christine hadn’t known she was in possession of all this equipment. Valerie had quit and started again through the years so many times Christine had lost track. Valerie loved renouncing vices, but she equally loved taking them up again, as if this cycle of abstinent virtue and decadent self-destructiveness were a private, seasonal rhythm that anchored her in some way. Christine, who always felt ploddingly steady and sensible, adored this about her friend.
“Who do these chefs think they are in their stupid white aprons and Crocs?” Valerie said, exhaling a stream of smoke as she talked. “I mean, seriously. Why does cooking bring out the douchebag in men? Actually, writing does too. Actually, everyth
ing does.”
“Farming doesn’t,” said Christine. “At least, not as obviously.”
“I’m gonna stalk that fucker and make him talk to me,” said Valerie. “He’s too high up the food chain for my purposes, but now it’s a point of pride.”
“In other words, he’s hot,” said Christine.
“A hot douchebag,” said Valerie. “Just my type.”
“So let me ask you something. Why didn’t you try to get a job on a cruise ship if you wanted the real story? Like Barbara Ehrenreich. Instead of interviewing workers, work alongside them.”
“I’m doing the Studs Terkel thing instead,” said Valerie. “Like an update of Working. The socioeconomic landscape he was writing about has totally changed. I want to give contemporary workers that kind of voice. I see my cruise-ship chapter as an answer to David Foster Wallace’s snarky essay, which frankly hasn’t aged well.”
Christine laughed; this was so like Valerie, to appropriate the work of writers she admired while bragging that she would write something better. “It is? How?”
“Wallace just went on a cruise by himself as a skeptical dude with an attitude. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a brilliant and funny essay, but that all seems too obvious now. We get it. The world is so much bigger now, so much more complicated. And I want to go deeper. I want to uncover the real story. There’s a class structure on this ship, there’s an economy, there’s a system that mirrors the global one. There are thirty different nationalities in the working staff, the waiters and bartenders and cooks and room stewards and engineers and dishwashers. No Americans. All the Americans are above decks, in entertainment and on the bridge and among the guests. But below, it’s all foreigners, most from Third World countries. All cruise ships are the same.”
“That’s really interesting,” said Christine. “Seriously.”
“Hey, can I play you an interview I just did?” Valerie took out her iPhone. “I managed to get one of the cooks to talk to me, she works under the guy who snubbed me. I want to know what you think. Here.” She thrust her phone at Christine.
The Last Cruise Page 10