Fiskbullar
Krumcakes
Surströmming
Kringlers
“Wow. This looks…appetizing,” he said.
“Not as appetizing as this.” Teddy pointed to the jars of worms and the strings of dried tadpoles. All around them, cauldrons whistled and meat sizzled in pans. Fragrant aromas wafted from an oven large enough to roast a human. The male dwarves brought slabs of ice to melt for cooking, while the women fussed over buckets of fish.
Honey and Teddy were assigned to their tasks, and they worked absently, too tired to speak. Blanche was quiet, too, snoring softly against Teddy’s chest. Suddenly she stirred, nestling into his underarm.
“Hey!” he giggled. “Hey, stop it!”
The bowl of puffin eggs smashed on the floor.
“Woops!”
“Watch it, you ice-damned London boy!” shouted Black Russian. “Those eggs are worth more than your life!”
When he turned around, Teddy gave him the finger. Honey smirked – but a worried frown was on her face.
“What’s wrong?” Teddy asked.
“I don’t like the thought of Oskar going into hiding,” she whispered.
He shrugged. “It’s for the best.”
Honey wasn’t sure. After all, none of them could imagine how everything would end. A trip to the Savissivik heliport, the closest spot of civilization according to Erasmus, was a possibility – a hope she hung on to. This might all go terribly wrong, but it was their only chance to escape.
“Get a move on!” Black Russian gave Honey a rough shove, with a look of disgust at the roughly-peeled pile of potatoes before her. By her side, Clementine placed dough balls on a tray lined with greaseproof paper.
“Fiskbullar,” the chef took a dough ball to his nose and sniffed it. “Fish balls. One of the finest recipes,” he declared, before moving on to the side of the table where a red-faced Rong opened cans with a doll. The doll’s sharp teeth gripped the edge of the can, and Rong moved it around until a rotten smell escaped from inside.
“Eew! What the heck is that? It smells like dirty nappies.” Fern held her nose.
“That,” said Erasmus, pinching a limp, tiny fish from the can, “is delicious Surströmming. A Sweedish recipe as old as time itself.”
“Surstrat what?” Zachary grimaced.
“Fermented herring. Pickled in salt for six months.” Erasmus ate the fish with gusto.
Other goodies, mostly traditional Scandinavian dishes, were being made. Johann was flipping krumcakes – another name for Christmas pancakes – high up in the air, having a lot of fun until one of them flopped onto Black Russian’s bald patch, making him look like a dwarf with a kippa. The chef soon discovered that the entire ceiling was decorated with krumcakes and went off in a rage. He ran around the factory huffing and puffing, kicking pots and pans, while the pancakes rained through the air like flying jelly fish. He caught them with his sinister barbecue fork, and ate them grudgingly.
In a corner, Jerry was stirring the blueberry soup, the most disgusting concoction Honey had ever seen, beating even Grandma’s snails filled with stinky cheese. It spat and it bubbled, sticking to the stirring spoon like a sticky boiled sweet, and was dark like blue blood. Jamie was dedicated to a rather appetizing stew which Honey had no doubt was reindeer, and Zachary licked the spoon clean after making a delicious bacon and egg cake.
Honey placed the last potato on the table to be made into Jansson’s Temptation, a dish she knew well as it was one of her mum’s favourites. It involved a lot of potatoes and a can of salt-drenched anchovies. “I had the dream again,” she said thoughtfully.
“What dream?” Her brother was breaking an egg and reciting a recipe under his breath.
Honey hoped that by telling someone about it, the dream would detach itself from her brain. During the hour of exhausted sleep she’d fallen into, she was back in Chess Cottage, crashing through the floor. Dad was in the dream. He walked awkwardly, one hand behind his back, and watched her. There was hunger in his eyes – as if Honey wasn’t a little girl but a double cheese hamburger. Behind him, a bloody arm retreated back through the cat flap. For a long time after Honey woke up, she still saw Dad’s eyes throbbing in his head like black, bloated leeches.
“Never mind,” she sighed, realising her brother couldn’t care less. After all, he was making what he loved most: cakes.
A shadow fell over the table: it was Black Russian, bits of pancake still glued to his scalp like strips of flaking skin. “Question!” he barked. “What’s the most used kitchen utensil in Arctic cuisine?” He produced a tiny silver object from his pocket, and opened a can. “The can opener. Although, of course, some of our dolls are already multitasking.” He patted Rong on the back so hard the fragment of tissue she called an eye wobbled in its socket like the last bit of jam at the bottom of a jar.
Afternoon came, and as the dark thickened behind the windows, lamps were lit around the festive table. Candles flickered in paper bags and a string of bulbs hidden in old graters twisted around the walls like miraculous, luminous plants. The golden light pooled on the table, giving the dishes an aura of mystery. Samples of Scandinavian cooking filled every inch of the blood-red tablecloth. Kringlers – Scandinavian burgers –, pickled vegetables, salads, reindeer casseroles, tortes and puddings, steamy soups and a large mound of krumcakes decorated with fir tree branches and ribbons huddled together invitingly, waiting to be eaten. Honey felt a twinge of pride at this wonderful display of culinary skills.
Cold air entered the room with Fridrik, making the warm cooking smells vanish in the seconds it took for the heavy door to close with a thud. Dressed in a sparkling white parka, trimmed with thick fur, he looked like a prince of the North – a handsome warrior. And he was greeted like a prince, too – with an explosion of cheers.
“All right, all right,” he smiled, gesturing for the clapping to stop. “Wow, look at this! Food, wonderful food! Sausages, reindeer pie, and is that Surströmming?” He took a handful of pickled fish and sucked on it with his eyes closed, oil dripping down his chin. “Chefs, this is just the kind of feast I’ve been dying for all year!” He licked his fingers, and started plugging and unplugging the speakers. “I hope you like music. The Nenets are playing live tonight, in the nearest town. Reception shouldn’t be too bad. These guys are awesome, their songs are all about keeping the traditions alive and protecting the environment…”
“What a strange name,” Honey commented.
“The Nenets are a tribe of nomadic people, originating from the North of Russia,” said Erasmus. “They are animist – they believe that rocks and trees have a soul. I think I heard of the group before. Aren’t they the ones who promote hunting for pleasure? Weren’t they tried for torturing captured animals and cannibalizing an explorer?”
“And acquitted.”
“Because there wasn’t enough evidence against them. But everyone knows what they do.”
Fridrik smiled – a sharp smile like the stroke of a knife. “It’ll be a good night. Well-deserved, too.” He picked up the label where Honey wrote ‘FRESH FISH’ in her best handwriting. The fish twitched. “Fresh indeed!” he laughed. “And what’s this?” He dipped a finger in the thick black liquid. The ‘SHARK FIN SOUP’ looked like a real baby shark was swimming in it, and Honey had to wonder if the ‘SEAL EYES’ carried on blinking inside you once you swallowed them, giving you butterflies in your stomach forever. Fridrik admired the ‘DEEP FRIED POLAR BEAR KIDNEYS’ and ‘SALTED WALRUS SKIN’, and he tasted the many types of bread, reindeer pies, broths and sausages.
After a hard day’s work, Honey’s guts protested with loud churning sounds. She broke a baguette with her fingers, and tried very hard to imagine the shark soup was black bean sauce. Reluctantly, she poured some in a cup, and was about to sip it, when Fridrik spoke to her.
A memory of a boat took shape in her mind. She was on the boat, and it was rocking. A heart of snow was growing on a pane of glass.
Honey could only nod, and the bite of bread she took tasted like sand.
Mid-afternoon came and went. Behind the dark windows, the snow-covered land disappeared from view. A bright, pale moon sparkled in the sky.
The silence crept in, that awful silence of the North, stretching for hundreds of miles.
Black Russian was in a rotten mood. “You! Stop picking your nose! Hey! Get away from that boring machine! No! Don’t touch that! Ha! What are you looking at?”
“It’s cold as death out there.” Rong shivered when Fridrik left the factory, and a new blast of frozen wind swept the room. Strips of greaseproof paper and muffin cases flew around her head like a tornado of rubbish.
“You wouldn’t take a dog out in this weather,” Johann agreed.
“Brr,” said Erasmus.
“You’re used to the cold,” snapped Rong. “Quit faking it!”
“Why don’t you warm him up, Scarface?” grinned Jamie.
“Eew, get away from me, aargh!”
Honey watched them absently. From time to time she glanced at the clock on the wall. Tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock. It was her – their – destiny against the clock. With every tick, the surprise of the night was getting nearer. It was too risky, but then, so were all her ideas. It had been risky to put laxative jam in the cranberry sauce, and it had been risky to steal Dad’s diary, not to mention placing a possibly fatal weapon in his car, but without risks, life would be like that of a caged lion. Boring, and senseless.
The reception from the live concert turned out to be good, but this wasn’t a good thing. Rock carols boomed from the loudspeakers. Instead of cheering the children up, they made them feel even worse. It came to light that The Nenets made a sinister type of music called ‘doom’, a deviation of the mainstream rock. Guttural snarls and grunts roared from the speakers. The words were all wrong, too. For example, ‘Away in a Manger’ had become ‘Away and in Danger’, and ‘Jingle Bells’ was now ‘A Jingle of Elf Shells’. It was the most depressing Christmas music Honey had ever heard.
“It sounds more like choir music, than carols,” said Clementine with a wince.
“A choir of devils. I’m wasting away here, stuffing myself with toxins and listening to rubbish. This is our learning time!” Rong snarled.
“You could learn how to be quiet. We’d all appreciate that,” Erasmus growled.
A mischievous leer was stretched across Rong’s face. “Erasmus, would you like a seal eye? They’re great. Aren’t they the treats you got on Sundays? I thought this was what Eskimos eat.”
“No, on Sundays we…and stop calling me Eskimo, it’s racist…” Erasmus was halfway through a reindeer burger when he screamed in horror. “Eew, take that off, it’s gross!”
Rong blinked and the seal eye dropped to the floor from the hole in her skull. She grinned.
“You’re disgusting!”
The feast was in full swing when the door burst open. Mouths stayed agape. Sauces dripped to the floor. Ovens purred.
In the silence that followed all Honey could hear was the thudding of snow boots. Heavy. Buckled. Boots.
And even though the music had stopped, Honey wasn’t grateful for the quiet. She made herself very small, listening to the gurgling of the pipes inside the wall, a sound like the rushing of blood, and watched as the giant figure emerged into the light, growing clearer with every heartbeat, until at last it stood before her, and she felt as if she was drowning in the dark, dark shadow.
32. I Spy
“Bad news,” announced Flaubert, returning to his seat. “They won’t give us permission to land.”
“Excuse me?” Florence jerked awake, grimacing at the pain in her back. “What do you mean? We’ve been in the air for ten hours. José is tired.”
“The airport is snowed in. We’ll just have to wait until the runway is clear. It’s not every day that private jets land on this island. The scientists are a little suspicious.”
“Good Lord!” Florence opened a new pack of biscuits and took a swig from a thermos of whisky. “Quel coshmare! What a nightmare! We’ll be in the air forever. What if…what if we can’t land at all?”
“Stop moaning.” Flaubert pulled a doughnut from his inside pocket. “We’ll get there in the end. The hard bit will be finding a snowmobile. And riding it. Are you sure you’re up to that? No toilet trips, remember.”
Florence scowled. She rummaged through her bag until she found what she was looking for. She held the pink bundle up in the air for Flaubert to have a closer look.
“What the hell is that?” He looked horrified.
“A trendy adult nappy. Latest Japanese fashion…With a highly absorbent lining of gentle cotton, silk-padded…”
“All right, all right, no need to go into details! What I need to know is, can you ride a snowmobile, cherie?”
“If I can drive a racing car,” Florence replied, snuggling back into her pillow, “riding a snowmobile will be like riding a tricycle. Easy-peasy.”
“I don’t know about that.” Flaubert looked thoughtful as he munched on his doughnut. “When you’re used to doing complicated things, you might fail at the simple ones. Remember that night in the walk in freezer? You thought that was an easy job, too.”
“Spying on the chef of a Michelin-starred restaurant is never easy, but I didn’t know that then. La Tortura – that was the name of the restaurant – was my first international mission. I was young and foolish. And I paid a dear price for my incompetence.”
“Yes, I know. Your chronic cystitis. The reason you urinate more than a newborn baby,” chuckled Flaubert.
Not smiling, Florence slid her left glove off and stared at her plastic hand in the light. “If only I hadn’t lost my thermal glove on the way to the restaurant. Transport in San Juan was a living nightmare. Oh lá lá, a whole night in that terrible fridge. And around closing time too. I wrapped myself in ice-cold palm tree leaves and tea towels to survive. I couldn’t touch anything, either. The reason I was asked to spy on Benito Sánchez was that he had been known to exterminate his political opponents by hiding poison capsules in every edible thing he made.”
“I remember. It was difficult to catch him because the poison didn’t kill them…”
“…it just made them mentally incompetent. They’re probably still chasing butterflies and learning to write their names in pink chalk.” Florence sighed. “What was I thinking? You can’t blame me. I was only twenty-two, and had just started to work for I Spy.”
“They give you hard missions in the beginning. To test your aptitude. Mmm, these are great. I love good strawberry jam in a crispy doughnut.”
“The way boys get beaten up before they can be accepted in a gang?” Florence smiled sourly.
“Something like that.”
“Only I didn’t lose a tooth. I lost a hand. I nearly lost my life, too. I’ll never forget waking up to see my own face reflected in the blade of that butcher knife. If it wasn’t for Agent Suárez, who was working undercover as the morning cleaner, there wouldn’t be a story to tell.”
“That is still the worst frostbite I’ve ever seen,” said Flaubert. “Even worse than what I saw in Siberia, before I met you.”
“Siberia? Who were you spying on there, nomads?”
“Villains disguised as nomads. You’d be surprised at how many there are around.” He took Florence’s hand in his own and rubbed it gently. “There is no
thing to be ashamed of. You can do more things with one hand than others with two. You still make the best roasted quail in the world, and you give the best massages.” He winked. “Stop wearing that glove and admit your disability once and for all.”
Florence shook her head, her eyes brimming with tears. “And what do I tell our son, Flaubert? That his parents have made a fortune as…” She gulped. “…as international spies? Like Bonnie and Clyde? I’d have to tell him. Everything…”
“Not all the nooks and crannies of our profession, surely. It’s dangerous, we deserve to be making a buck or two out of it, after all we are risking our lives!”
“So do people who trim tree tops, but they don’t fly around in private jets. They don’t carry the latest electric shock device stuck with adhesive tape on their thigh.”
“Come now, that device doesn’t kill. All it does is send a high voltage shock through the body…”
“…causing memory loss and other long-term disabilities…”
“People who trim tree tops don’t solve international murder cases!” Flaubert yelled, making Florence jump in her seat. He threw a doughnut at the window, where it burst, the red jam filling flowing out of it like blood. “They don’t take it upon themselves to catch fugitives chased by Interpol! You should be proud of what you do, Florence, proud of what you’re making…”
“And what am I making?”
“History! You’re making history!”
Florence closed her eyes. “I’d have to tell him about the time when I carried him on my back, disguised as a rucksack, while I climbed a cliff to get to the cave where the Chinese headquarters of I Spy were located. Or about the moving sands in Mongolia that swallowed his puppy when he was three.”
“I knew that puppy was a bad idea, what with us always on the move.”
“…explain to him that his obsession for chess comes from the time when he was kidnapped by the head of the Italian Mafia, who taught him every trick in the book at the age of four, and that we had to use hypnosis to erase the memory.”
Santa Claws Page 24