Bon Bon Voyage

by Nancy Fairbanks

  Consenting adult? I had to assume that meant she was actually having an affair with her submariner. Good heavens.

  “As for you, my girl, you are married, and to my son.”

  “I thought it was against the feminist credo to call women girls,” I retorted, “and I doubt that Jason would be upset that I had breakfast in the dining room and toured Las Palmas with Mr. Griffith when they’d lost my registration for the tour.”

  “Christ, we’re back to Mr. Griffith,” said Owen. “For those of you who don’t know me, I’m Owen Griffith. You can call me Owen. Everyone does but Carolyn here, who keeps forgetting. If I’d been so fortunate as to get her into bed, she’d probably have called me Mr. Griffith then, but you can rest easy, madam.” This to Vera. “Because she hasn’t cuckolded your son that I know of.”

  I sent him a frown and continued to my mother-in-law, “Not as upset as Jason would be to hear that you and Commander Levinson—”

  “So what did you think of Las Palmas?” Luz interrupted quickly. “And by the way, I did spend the night out, so I can’t vouch for your presence in our room, Caro, but I believe you. You obviously don’t know what a prissy lady—”

  “I am not,” I snapped.

  “—your daughter-in-law is, Vera, so lay off her.”

  “So that’s why you won’t call me Owen,” said my companion for the morning.

  “I’m not prissy,” I muttered.

  Randolph Barber was filming the whole thing, and I thought, for the first time, that his equipment might record voices too. How embarrassing. The strange waiter in the lime green shirt arrived in time to break up the impending quarrel and introduce himself as Vladimir Putin. After insisting that he really was Vladimir Putin, asking if anyone was interested in buying a missile, and receiving negative answers all around the table, he proceeded to translate the menu.

  I ordered a wonderful piece of tuna in a green sauce made of cilantro and garlic, among other things, and I convinced Owen to try Ropa Vieja, which translates into “old clothes.” As I found out later, the dish was called that because some of the ingredients were taken from leftover chickpea stew— namely the carrots, chickpeas, and meat. It wasn’t bad—spicy and red from the paprika. Because Owen didn’t care much for it, I had to give him half of my tuna and eat the rest of his Ropa Vieja. Vera muttered something about trading food being very cozy.

  Harriet Barber had been reading up on Canary cuisine and said we had to try the Canarians’ favorite dessert, fig cake, which the locals liked so much that many took it to South America when they emigrated. Since I intended to write about my experience with the local cuisine, I could hardly object, but truthfully, I don’t like figs, and this recipe is made with very, very ripe figs, nuts, and not much else. And as I later discovered, it sits around for eight days before it’s ready to serve. The recipe does not mention refrigeration. It’s a wonder we didn’t all end up in our rooms, sick as dogs.

  Incidentally, there were statues of those native dogs in the town, and they looked large and mean. Owen said he thought that was the breed that killed a lawyer in a hall outside her apartment in San Francisco. They’d escaped from their owners. Frankly, I’d just as soon the islanders kept their dogs and their fig cakes at home.

  After lunch we had to hurry to take cabs to the port so as not to miss the boat and tomorrow in Tenerife. I was really looking forward to seeing the golden Virgin of Candelaria and the guanche mummies in a museum there. The Stone Age natives had actually mummified their dead. How very interesting!

  For those of my readers who like figs, I include this recipe, which is the hands-down favorite dessert among Canary Islanders. They encircle the cake with a pleita de palma, a pretty plait of palm leaves, not always easy to come by in the United States.

  Figs have always been an important crop (the food of athletes, according to Plato) around the Mediterranean and in ancient religions. African women made ointments of figs and used them to promote conception and lactation. Berbers, believing figs to be fertilized by the dead and a gift from the other world, placed them on rocks as offerings when it was time to plough the fields, a practice much criticized by strict Muslims. Figs were thought to symbolize everything from knowledge to fertility.

  Whether you’re hoping for a baby, a good crop, or a high IQ, perhaps the Canary Fig Cake will prove to be your remedy. If not, figs are, at the least, nutritious.

  Canary Island Fig Cake

  Remove the stalks and tips from 34 ounces very ripe black figs.

  Grind figs together with 9 ounces walnuts and 17 ounces almonds.

  Sprinkle on and mix in thoroughly 1 ground clove.

  Encircle mixture with a brass strip or mold to give a cake shape.

  Dust both sides of cake with flour and allow to stand for 8 days, turning now and then.

  Remove the cake from the mold and dust all sides with flour (5 or 6 ounces of flour should suffice for both dustings).

  Eat.

  Carolyn Blue, “Have Fork, Will Travel,” Olympia, WA, Bulletin

  25

  Not Lamb!

  Hartwig and Patek

  Deep in thought, Bruce Hartwig sat alone in his office, chair tilted back, feet on his utilitarian desk. After the unexpected detour away from Casablanca to the Canary Islands, things were working out again. The riots in Morocco had been controlled, which meant that the men he had hired in Casablanca should have no trouble getting the helicopter and themselves away from their army base to pick up the hijack team from the boat.

  With several hours before the passengers began to return to the Bountiful Feast, Hartwig decided to go ashore and put through an untraceable call from a public telephone to his two pilots. If he didn’t reach them today, he’d try again at Tenerife. Only after two misses would he risk connecting with them from the ship. After Tenerife would be the big Mother’s Day dinner. The liquor would flow, and the passengers would stagger back to their cabins, only to be warned of heavy seas and given the “seasick” pills. Then he’d take over the ship in the night and keep it out in the Atlantic until the third morning, when the money would be in the Swiss account and he and his cohorts gone.

  He was rising to go ashore when Umar Patek entered the office, unannounced, saying, “We have two problems.”

  “Tell me later. I need to call Casablanca from the docks.”

  “I tell you now. One is bad. Other is worse.”

  “Well, what?” asked Hartwig impatiently, thinking everything was going well. He didn’t need any late-breaking trouble.

  “Your comp passenger, Mrs. Blue. She stop me this morning. Sechrest told her Mrs. Gross was looking for me the night she disappear.”

  “So? I hope you told her Mrs. Gross never found you.”

  “I told her, but she get closer. A persistent woman, I think. Maybe we should do something about her.”

  “Like what? Break her neck?” Hartwig asked sarcastically.

  “We’re in this for the money, not dead bodies, even if you do have a hard-on for killing women.”

  “Women. Men.” Patek shrugged. “I kill both in my time. Worse problem is chef. He decides lamb for Mother’s Day. Goes in meat freezer.”

  “Christ! He didn’t have lamb on the menu until after we took the ship.”

  “So he sees lamb tag, finds Mrs. Gross inside plastic bag. Runs out yelling for doctor.”

  Hartwig slammed his hands on the desk. “Let’s hope the doctor’s ashore. As security officer, I can take charge of the body.”

  “Doctor is nap in office. Had tiring night with roommate of troublemaker Mrs. Blue.”

  “Did he figure out what killed her? Like a broken neck? Administered by you?”

  “Last he cannot know. Neck, probably. He is pathologist. Should be able to tell.”

  Hartwig swore again and dropped into his chair. Patek sat opposite, silent and expressionless while several minutes passed. “So we take the ship tonight instead of tomorrow night,” Hartwig decided. “Now I have to get that call t
hrough to Casablanca. And you, you see if you can’t get the body back in the freezer and out of the doctor’s hands. Then pass the word to the others that we’re moving up the schedule.”

  Luz

  Nobody was very talkative at dinner. For one thing, the food tasted like something from a school cafeteria. And Beau, who usually kept the conversation from dying, hadn’t said a word and hadn’t even asked anyone to dance. Maybe all the jokes about his dancing had hurt his feelings. I could tell the others that he might not be a Fred Astaire, but he sure was good in bed. Then again, since he did look a little peaked, maybe I’d been better than he was. “So you think the chef ’s on strike or something?” I asked, pushing away a limp salad that had followed a soup so boring I couldn’t tell what kind it was. He gave me a really shocked look, like the chef was his brother and I’d insulted the guy.

  Down the table, Carolyn was telling Greg, the golfer, and Randolph Barber about some opera-loving, Metropolitan-Opera-ticket-holding couple she’d met in the bar. Now that was weird. She’d gone to the room when we got back to the ship, and instead of taking a nap or reading her book from the library, the one about Casablanca, she took a shower, got dressed for dinner, and left. Mad at Vera for the showdown they had at Vladimir Putin’s restaurant? That guy was a character. Or maybe Carolyn was shocked at me for staying out all night. Christ! She wasn’t my mother. She’d have to get over it.

  “And then in the scene when Manrico walks out of the convent, the giant cross fell down and just missed him. They said it was the strangest performance of Il Trovatore they’d ever seen, and the tenor’s voice wobbled for the rest of the scene.”

  “Don’t care for opera myself,” said Greg.

  “Okay, Beau, what’s bothering you?” I asked. I’d just been served a steak that was brown all the way through with some frigging sauce on it that tasted so bad I had to scrape it off.

  My vacation lover sighed and put his fork down. “You can’t blame poor ole Demetrios for the food. He had a shock this afternoon that would shake any man, an’ he’s on the hysterical side at the best of times. I’ve already had to give him anti-anxiety pills to keep the whole kitchen staff from walkin’ out.”

  “Okay, so he’s nuttier than ever. What happened to set him off? A soufflé fall or something?” I grinned at Beau, hoping to cheer him up.

  “You can’t tell anyone this,” Beau all but whispered.

  “Okay.”

  “He found a corpse in the meat locker.”

  I had to squelch the urge to say the locker was probably full of corpses, animal corpses, so no big deal, but Beau didn’t look like he was in the mood for jokes.

  “Mrs. Gross,” he whispered.

  Oh shit, I thought. “What happened? Did she get locked in and freeze to death?”

  He sighed again. “She was wrapped in a full-length, plastic bag marked lamb and hung from a hook.”

  I gulped. Not that I hadn’t seen some corpses in my time, and Beau must have seen ten times that many, but he looked pretty shook up, and I was too. “Any idea how she died?”

  “Broken neck.”

  “Accident?”

  “I doubt it.”

  Oh man. I was going to have to tell Carolyn, promise or no promise, and then the two of us were going to have to find out who broke Mrs. Gross’s neck. As for why, it could have been anyone; it’s not like the woman wasn’t a royal pain in the ass. “Was she wearing anything besides the bag?” Carolyn would have questions. Might as well find out.

  “That ugly brown dress, the one she always wore to dinner.”

  “Right. So she must have been killed, or at least died, between dinner and morning when she stopped showing up for anything. What about the green jewelry? Emeralds, Carolyn told me.”

  Beau shook his head and then invited me back to his cabin, but somehow I felt like I should stay with Carolyn that night. I didn’t know when I was going to tell her—tonight, tomorrow morning, whenever—but she was going to be upset, and she was going to want to see justice done and all that idealistic crap. Some vacation! Here I’d found myself a nice man for the duration—it wasn’t like I had any long-term designs on him—and instead I’d get to go after another murderer with Miss Prissy. That may sound like I don’t like her, but to tell the truth, I kind of get a kick out of her, as long as she doesn’t burst into tears about my language.

  “Maybe tomorrow night, sweetie,” I said to Beau. “You just about wore me out last night.” Of course, Beau liked that.

  “Isn’t that pretty,” Carolyn was saying as she viewed a tall goblet thing with white, red, and dark brown layers of stuff inside.

  “Double chocolate raspberry mousse, ma’am,” said the waiter. “It’s one of our best desserts.”

  About time we got something decent with this meal, I thought, and dug in. Obviously the chef, who’d found the corpse of Mrs. Gross, hadn’t had a hand in this course; it actually tasted good. Carolyn sure thought so. She said it was “superb” and after finishing the mousse ordered the Marmalade Delight.

  My favorite marmalade story involves Mary Queen of Scots, who had to return from Calais because the English wouldn’t let her ashore. She was miserably seasick, so her doctor mixed up an orange and crushed-sugar tonic to ease her mal de mer. The word marmalade supposedly comes from the phrase “Marie est malade.”

  These days we can enjoy marmalade without making our own or becoming seasick to get some, and the Italians have a delightful dessert that incorporates ladyfingers and marmalade, both of which are available at your supermarket.

  Marmalade Delight

  Press 1 cup ricotta through a fine sieve into a mixing bowl. (If the ricotta is already creamy, you can skip the sieve.)

  With a fork, beat 4 tablespoons confectioner’s sugar into 2 tablespoons heavy cream until the sugar dissolves.

  Blend the cream mixture into the ricotta with a rubber spatula until spreadable but not runny. If not spreadable, stir in a bit more cream.

  Measure ½ cup orange juice and 2 tablespoons brandy into a small, shallow bowl into which you can lay a ladyfinger flat.

  Choose a plate or oval platter to serve the dessert. Take 18 ladyfingers from a package (you can buy them in 7-ounce packages with 22 to 24 per package). One at a time, roll 6 ladyfingers quickly in the orange brandy mixture and arrange them snugly against each other on the plate.

  With your rubber spatula, spread half the ricotta cream, after pouring down the middle of the ladyfingers, and leave about a half inch on either side without cream.

  Melt ½ cup orange marmalade on high for 15 to 30 seconds in the microwave, stirring once. Drizzle half evenly over the cream.

  Dip 6 more ladyfingers in orange-brandy and arrange on top of the others, pressing each down slightly.

  Again spread ricotta, and place the last 6 dipped ladyfingers on the cream and glaze with the last of the melted marmalade.

  Refrigerate for 3 to 4 hours (will last 3 days in fridge).

  Can be decorated with whipped cream, shaved semisweet chocolate curls, or both. Cut down between ladyfingers for a 3-piece serving. Each serving can be garnished with a candied or chocolate-covered orange peel.

  Carolyn Blue, “Have Fork, Will Travel,” Sacramento Bee

  26

  The Influence of Superb “Mice”

  Crew Dining Room

  The stewards ate while the passengers were eating upstairs, so Hartwig and Patek chose that opportunity to visit the dining room with their cache of seasick pills. However, Hartwig came upon a scene that interested him, so he held the chief steward back in order to listen.

  “You should have examine it,” cried Herkule Pipa. “Is called double-chocolate and berry mice. So handsome. I almost whimper—Is good word, no? Mean cry—almost whimper I have no taste for me.”

  The other stewards, weary after a long day, with more hours to work before they would see their own beds, stared balefully at the dishes of Jell-O that they had picked up from the buffet line. “You’d think the
y’d give us some of the good stuff, considering how hard we work,” said one. “In United States, workers get more money for more hours than eight.” Rumbles of discontent rose around the table.

  “Follow my lead,” hissed Hartwig, and strode toward the stewards’ table.

  Herkule, spotting him first and, more important, Umar Patek with him, said, “But gelatins is very tasty.”

  “In my opinion, you guys have got it right. You’re overworked, badly fed, and underpaid,” said Hartwig.

  Herkule wanted to object to underpaid. He thought his take-home pay was wonderful and wished he’d said nothing about the mice dessert. After all, he never went hungry aboard the ship, for which he said prayers of thanks every day. But he was afraid to say a word to either of the two men now standing at the table. What were they doing? Some trick to get the stewards fired so the line could hire cheaper stewards who didn’t complain?

  “You ought to declare a work stoppage. Just quit doing the rooms and running errands for the passengers until the line agrees to shorter hours and better food. That’s what American workers do, and the line is American owned, no matter what third-world flag we fly under. Don’t you agree, Umar?”

  The chief steward frowned but said nothing. The stewards looked confused and apprehensive. “Big ship men not listen to us,” said Herkule hesitantly, while visions of sumptuous desserts “danced in his head,” a phrase he’d read in an English language book about sugar plums and someone named Santa-clots. A passenger had left it behind. Since many Albanians, Herkule included, were Muslims, he was unfamiliar with that tradition but liked it very much. Imagine some nice person coming down the chimney and leaving delicious things to eat. It would never happen in Albania.