You wanna talk about it?

16Oct

I had lunch at the bistro, out in the hip part of Brooklyn. That set me back a nice chunk of cash. Craziest menu I’ve ever seen, too. Shit like smoked quail eggs in cubes of maple gelatin speckled in elk bacon. Or fondue of pig’s blood reduction—whatever that is—served with maize fritters. Or a test tube set of chilled teas, arranged from light green to dark brown and filled with tapioca balls, each injected with a different essence: cinnamon, bergamot, chiles, lemongrass, etc. Bite down and the flavor erupts and mixes with the tea. But my favorite was the charcuterie plate—had to look that word up—with sausage “caramels” and this sweet, taffy-like cheese you have to cut with scissors and chew really slow. If you bit hard, it damn-near cracked your teeth.

The place was packed. And there were a ton of reviews on all the restaurant apps, everything from “Best meal I’ve ever had” to “A complete travesty of cuisine.” The Department of Health apparently shut him down over the summer. He had to go to court and everything, and for awhile, there was some question of whether he’d reopen. But he did and was all the busier for it.

I’d hoped to get a look at him while I was there, but he never showed. Everything’s made by his assistants, the ones in the dark bandannas and matching smocks. From what I read online, that’s usually how it is. Anson was right. The man was a recluse. No fancy black-and-white head shot on his website, no press releases, no interview in Gourmand magazine. Reams have been printed on his cooking, but everything there is to know about the man behind it could fit typed and double-spaced on a single sheet of paper.

Etude Emile Saint-Antoine Étranger. Real name unknown. Born fifty-some years ago in a remote village in the Amazon. He was taken from his parents as an infant—he never knew them—and raised by the village shaman to be his replacement. On his thirteenth birthday, young Etude had to prove his manhood or whatever, so he was sent out to live on his own in the jungle. He survived, obviously, although rumor is he bears a serious wound on his chest.

When he came back, his village was gone. Erased. Loggers had moved in. Cleared the whole area. Nothing but stumps and ash. Kid probably thought the end times had come. Supposedly he lived on his own for a while. Then he was found by some French anthropologists, husband and wife. Doctor and Doctor Étranger-sur-something-or-other. They take the kid back to France, write a bunch of papers on him and his people—in French. It was fun tracking those down, let me tell you. Had to call in a favor with a guy at Interpol. Anyway, they give him a Western education, only he’s a genius or whatever, so he just absorbs it all. And then some. Somehow he ends up at a fancy cooking school of all places. But he never finishes. He leaves France in a hurry, in fact, and is still wanted for questioning, which is why my contact in Paris was only too happy to help. Not that he would give me any details. The French are like that. I’m told so are we.

Then, for most of the next decade or so, he travels all over the world doing these crazy dinners, his Gastronomic Circus or whatever. I don’t even know how to describe it. He did this one in the Australian outback where he trapped poisonous snakes and deep fried their skins like pork rinds. After they puffed up crispy, he tossed them with chili seasoning and served them on top of the barbecued meat, next to which was the poison gland. Guests were encouraged to squeeze the gland over the meat for extra flavor. Snake poison dissolves in stomach acid or whatever. It has to get into the blood to be deadly, so as long as no one had a cut in their mouth, it would’ve been fine. There’s no word on how many tried it.

Fucker totally made a name for himself, too. But after several years, out of the blue, he shut it all down. He built his bistro and retreated to his sanctum and that was it.

“Do you have to do that?” Hammond asked from the driver’s seat.

“Huh? Oh.” I looked down at the bottle of pills in my hand. I had been banging them on my thigh like a maraca.

Once, twice, thrice.

Once, twice, thrice.

“Sorry.” I put them away.

“Look at this,” Hammond nodded down the road from where we were parked.

A vintage black Jaguar purred as it rolled to a stop in front of the bistro down the street. From our vantage, we could see the back of it clearly. It looked awfully familiar.

“Is it just me,” he said, “or does that look like the car from the video?”

The chef didn’t have any cars registered in his name. We’d checked. So I snapped a picture of the license plate, which hadn’t been visible in the footage. We watched in silence as the man himself walked out of the plain, unmarked door just down from the restaurant, bald head and everything. He was even wearing the same coat.

Hammond started the car as I took a few more pictures.

“Who’s driving?” he asked.

I shook my head. A man, it looked like, but I couldn’t see.

The Jag pulled away and we followed. It was a sweet car, too—an MK10, four-door, all black. Late 60s I’d say. We tailed it north to the office of a commercial moving company, strictly nonresidential, specializing in large items, like art for offices and expensive factory equipment. He met with them while Hammond and I waited down the road and across the street.

“Think he’s going somewhere?” I asked.

Hammond nodded. “Tell me again how you found this guy.”

“I never told you a first time,” I teased.

“Come on,” he chided. “Nine million people in this city. We got a random picture of one. You go away and come back a couple days later with a name. How’s that work? And don’t say facial recognition because that’s bullshit. We didn’t have a face.” He turned to look at me. “This guy’s a ghost. Here he’s implicated in at least three murders and God knows what else, and we got no way to find him. And yet, you pull his name out of thin air.”

“Like magic,” I said.

He scoffed.

It was nice being back with Craig. There was a definite illicit feel to the whole thing. For reasons he didn’t want to elaborate, he got away from his partner, Detective Rigdon, for the afternoon. It felt like cheating.

“Look. I took a gamble and it paid off.” That wasn’t exactly true, but it was close enough that I didn’t mind leaving it there.

Hammond turned back to watch the door down the road. The Jag was nowhere in sight.

“You don’t wanna tell me,” he said, “that’s your prerogative. Just don’t insult my intelligence, all right? That a fucking deal?”

I scowled. “Whatever. You don’t get to pick and choose what you wanna know and what you don’t.”

“What are you talking about?”

“You know exactly what I’m talking about. I mention anything to do with the occult, anything at all, and you cover your ears and start making baby noises. La-la-la-la-la.”

“No, no. I do not.”

I’d try to talk to him a couple times. I tried to talk to him after the Sacchi case. We had a row. He thought I was going over, as in losing it. Got hard for him to trust me with his life after that, which I understood. Eventually, I put in for a transfer. More for his sake than mine.

“Target’s on the move,” I said flatly.

Étranger stepped from the office door as the black Jag pulled up with perfect timing. They drove a few miles down the road to a florist, where the chef spent all of five minutes before coming out with a tasteful bouquet.

“Maybe he’s got a girlfriend?” I asked as we pulled into traffic.

Hammond laughed. Genuinely. He just looked at me and shook his head.

“What?” I asked.

“For all the women you’ve dated, you’d think you’d be able to tell the difference.”

“The difference between what?”

He put the car in drive and pulled out. “That’s a funeral arrangement, you dope.”

“Really? How could you tell?”

“You didn’t see the white lilies? And the fern branches? In a short round pot? Give a gal something like that and she’s liable to think you’re planning to kill her.”

We passed a gourmet grocer and watch and shoe repair shop, on the roof of which stood a gray wolf as big as a horse. It watched us as we passed. Pretty sure I was the only one who saw it. I didn’t say anything.

“How do you not know that?” he asked.

“Whatever, man. Flowers are flowers. I get whatever looks nice. Or whatever she says she wants.”

“By ‘she’ do you mean the one with the colorful hair and the yoga legs?”

“Yoga legs?” I turned to him. “That’s what you remember?”

He shrugged. “What was her name again? Kinsey?”

“Kinney,” I said after a moment.

“Ah,” he said in understanding. He got from my tone that we weren’t together anymore. “She liked you,” he said. “She liked you a lot.”

I didn’t reply, and he waited a few minutes before asking. “You wanna talk about it?”

I made a face. “What do you think?”

“I’m just asking,” he said holding up a hand.

I watched the Jag, which was several cars ahead of us in traffic, as we inched toward the freeway. It took us another twenty minutes to get there, after which we wound through Queens and crossed the river before turning north up the FDR. Hammond followed at a safe distance. That we were following a vintage car and not just another silver SUV made it easy enough to spot, even if we lost sight for a minute.

“You think I don’t listen to you?” Hammond asked out of the blue.

I squinted at him. “What?”

“You said I don’t get to pick and choose what I wanna know and what I don’t,” he explained very deliberately, like he wanted to be sure I understood his meaning. “Does that mean you think I don’t listen to you?”

I kept squinting at him as he changed lanes on the expressway. “What’s with you? You got ball cancer or something?”

“Close, actually.”

He pulled a stick of gum from his pocket. He handed it to me, but I refused and he unwrapped it and put it in his mouth. I could smell the mint.

“Dinah and I got this gal we talk to,” he said. “You know, a complete stranger you tell all your secrets to. But I like her, believe it or not. She doesn’t let me get away with the bullshit. Not that I’d ever let her know that. Anyway, the consensus seems to be that I can open up all right but I’m not a very good listener.”

I shook my head with a smile, choking back the easy jibe.

“Laugh all you want, Chase. Some of us take our relationships seriously.”

“That’s not why I’m laughing, ass. I’m laughing because it took you almost 50 years to figure that shit out.”

He nodded solemnly—like it was my words, versus what everyone else in his life had been telling him, that clinched the truth of it.

“You’re not a bad listener,” I explained. “You’re just selective. When you wanna be, you’re Fred Fucking Rogers.”

He shook his head. “In the session the other day, I was distracted. Dinah thought I was mad, but I couldn’t stop thinking about a case I had recently. My Alexa Sacchi, I guess.”

“Who’s that?”

“The triple I mentioned. This Chinese girl. Wasn’t much older than my Hadlee. I sent her to you. Did I tell you that?”

I shook my head.

“She started talking about . . . you know, all that kinda stuff.” He waved a hand. “She had a tarot deck and was talking curses and shit and I thought ‘Oh Christ. Here we go.’ And I told her to talk to you. I thought you could sort it all out. I didn’t wanna deal with it. I already had a caseload up to my sack and I didn’t want to waste time wading through all the—” He stopped.

We watched as the Jag exited the expressway. Hammond hit the blinker and we followed into Spanish Harlem.

He sighed, like he was sorry he mentioned anything and wanted to wrap it up. “So now I’m wondering if I treat all the women in my life that way.”

He was asking me because I didn’t count. In Craig Hammond’s mind, I wasn’t a woman. At least, not in any way that counted.

“You really worried?” I asked.

“I’m just wondering how many times I’ve sent the girls to their mother like that, when they were going on about school or some boy or something, because I was too busy trying to put some asshole away.”

“Naw,” I said. “I don’t see it. No offense to Dinah, but you’ve always been a better dad than a husband.”

He nodded again, wistfully.

I turned to him. “You wanna talk about it?” I asked with a wry smile.

He snorted. “Fuck you.”

The Jag pulled into a three-story public parking garage.

“Shit,” he said.

If we followed them right behind, there’s a good chance we’d be spotted. If we rolled around the block, we’d probably lose them on foot.

“There,” I pointed.

Just inside the alley between the garage and a hair salon there were three open spots, reserved specifically for police. Hammond pulled in as I pulled the car’s department registration from the glove compartment and tossed it on the dash.

We jumped out at the same time.

“You go east,” he said, and took off the other way.

I moved down the alley, eyes scanning the parking garage for any signs of the Jag or the man in the fantastic coat. But there was nothing. I ran out to the main road at the far side of the alley which was lined with single-story shops on both sides of the street, the kind with narrow facings crammed full of wares where the signs displayed the brands for sale rather than the name of the store. Men’s clothes, a couple ladies boutiques, a Farmacia Latina proudly displaying the Puerto Rican flag, a combo wig shop and hair salon, a convenience store, a falafel shop, a taqueria, an animal clinic, a liquor store, and more, all the way down to the train tracks that ran over the street two blocks from me.

Cars were parked at meters along the street, and there was the usual forest of telephone poles and street signs. With the crowd, I didn’t have any trouble keeping cover. And the chef wasn’t hard to spot, not with that bald head and that pot of bright flowers cradled in his arm. He’d crossed the street and stopped two blocks down in front of a large mural painted on a brick wall facing the main road. It was a swirling, floral, blue-and-white tribute to a goatee’d man, whose likeness took up most of the image. He was looking up and away to the horizon warmly but resolutely. Smaller depictions, presumably scenes from his life, fell away on both sides of his head in turning band of flowers and curls. Most of it was done in white paint. The shading and contrast was all the same tone of gray-blue. The sidewalk underneath was filled with flowers and votive candles of all kinds.

The chef added his contribution, which looked horribly formal and out of place, before stepping back to admire the image. I took the opportunity to snap a photo of the mural from my perch behind a parked car on the other side of the street. A quick image search told me this was a memorial to a local man named Alonso White, who had apparently died the year before. I read as much as I could. He seemed like quite the saint—community organizer, ordained priest, some political ambitions but nothing to get anyone worried.

I glanced up from my phone every few seconds to check my quarry, who seemed to be paying his respects. That was when I caught the date of his death. We were coming up on the anniversary. He blew himself up in some Wall Street office the very same night Kent Cormack was shot—the night I had my first seizure in decades.

I looked up in shock and noticed that the chef was gone.

“Fuck!”

I turned my head right, then left, and spotted him walking down the road under the train tracks. I just had time to see him disappear around the corner on the other side.

I ran after, drawing a screech and a couple honks when I crossed the road, but as soon as I took the same turn, I ran right into a dead end. I slapped my hand against the wall of brick, just to make sure it was real. I spun and scanned the street in every direction. But he was gone.

“Shit.”

That’s when I saw someone on the roof of the building across from me—a big guy in a leather coat. He turned and walked away before I got a good look at him, but I’m positive it was the driver of the Jag.

We’d been made.

 

I’m posting the chapters of my forthcoming urban paranormal mystery, FEAST OF SHADOWS, in order until the book is released. A blend of hard-boiled whodunit and contemporary urban fantasy, it’s been described as “Tolkien meets Dashiell Hammett for dinner in the present day.”

You can sign up here to be notified when the book is released.

You can start reading in order here: The old ones are patient.

The next chapter is: (not yet posted)

cover image by Kristina Collantes

[image error]