Basil Instinct (8 page)

I flung my arm up in a broad sweep in the Italian gesture that translates as
If your head were a bocce ball I would pitch it from here to kingdom come
. “What’s the matter with you?” Turning to James, I smiled. “Would you excuse us, please, James?” With that I walked my monumental cousin out the front door, where I backed him up against the window. “Why are you trying to kill me, Chooch?”

He looked genuinely perplexed. “What are you talking about? Oh, say, how did your first class go?”

I gave him a little whoosh of a push, which was like taking a feather duster to Mount Rushmore. “Well, if the goal was Eve flambé, then I’d say it went pretty well.”

The light dawned. “The CRIBS kids, right? Yeah”—he actually chuckled—“they can really push buttons, huh?”

“We’re not talking merry pranksters, Choo Choo.” I got in his face. “They tried to set me on fire. And now, thanks to you, I’ve got them for a month. In a classroom filled with knives and rolling pins and marble cutting boards and cast-iron skillets and—” With a yelp I pressed my lips together and whispered, “meat grinders.” I shook my head, dazed. “It’s like Supermarket Sweepstakes for delinquents.”

Thoroughly entertained, Choo Choo waved dismissively. “They’re just yanking your chain.”

“After they’ve wrapped it around my neck!”

The big guy pulled me in for a hug—practicing for a shot at Vera, I thought—and reminded me how our job as humans is not just to provide good food but also—here he took a deep breath, signaling he was lobbing something profound at me—to
be
good food. I had a quick, disturbing image of myself trussed up in a roasting pan with Mitchell and Slash wearing oven mitts, but I pushed it from my mind as Choo Choo held me at arm’s length. He gave me that look of boundless Choo Choo Bacigalupo faith (which usually entails the sacrifice of others) and cheesy love for Vera Tyndall.

“It’ll settle down,” he said magnanimously.

“You owe me,” I hissed at him, my brown eyes locked on his own. For a brief moment I wished it had been Little Serena’s brother who had taken off to live the dream at Disney World, leaving Little Serena here for me to enlist in the Kayla Wars.

My cousin opened his hands wide and said, totally reasonably, “Whatever I can do.”

I told him I’d let him know.

*   *   *

When Georgia Payne arrived mid-afternoon with Corabeth Potts, I swept them into the office first to present them to Nonna, whose hair by that time was horizontal. She was so awash in paperwork, purchase orders, and diagrams of seating arrangements for the Psi Chi Kappa (the Psycho-Chefs Club) that the new help didn’t register.

The petite Georgia Payne looked quite nice in a yellow blouse with long ruffled sleeves, a white linen skirt, and a cool silver necklace that held a tourmaline in what looked like a fine silver birdcage. Georgia said appropriate things, and Corabeth, still in her Michelin tube top and plaid short-shorts, flapped an arm in greeting and said nothing, which was a good choice.

In the kitchen, Landon, who was wrist deep in homemade pasta dough, hid his surprise at the new help pretty well. I figured the skeleton hair
decorations were more a jolt than I had thought they would be. He said something funny and nice to Corabeth while he managed to check out the ensemble by pretending to look for his rolling pin, but to Georgia he seemed a bit tongue-tied, muttered a “hi” and turned back to what would become dough for tonight’s mushroom-and-truffle ravioli.

Did the lovely and unsuspecting Jonathan suddenly have some competition?

And was it female?

When Vera and Paulette barreled into the kitchen to get the Target bag and my instructions for the nuclear makeover of Corabeth, I glanced at my pale Landon, who was kneading the dough the way he normally would, only his green eyes were staring straight ahead. Maybe when he came face-to-face with the new sous chef, he didn’t like the idea after all, even though it meant a second set of capable hands. Off the makeover team went, with Corabeth trundling along behind them, but it wasn’t until ten minutes later that Landon even realized they were gone.

I was cleaning and slicing mushrooms with the southpaw Georgia, who was slicing at the speed the Roadrunner beep-beeps his way out of the frame, despite the bandage on her hand, when Landon seemed to come out of his reverie. He looked around with a sudden jerk, and asked where the
girl with the draggin’ tattoo had gone. At which the reserved Georgia threw back her head and laughed, and I saw Landon warm up.

He complimented Georgia on her necklace, she told him she inherited it from her mother, and Landon asked whether she knew that men’s underarm sweat produces the same sex pheromone found in truffles. She pretended she didn’t, and Landon was pretending he didn’t know she was pretending, but this little charade seemed to suit them both as they settled into new roles, so I figured they’d be all right.

Because slicing and dicing mushrooms is just about as much hilarity as I can stand for any twenty minutes you care to name, I started grilling the new sous chef on matters of interest. To me. “So, where are you from, Georgia?”

She smiled. “Here and there.” She waggled her head like she was trying to remember. “Outside Philly.”

“And your folks?”

She raised two carefully arched eyebrows at me.

I shrugged. “What do they do?”

“I was adopted.”

I said “I see” when I didn’t see anything except diced truffles.

Hunched over his floured bread board, Landon heaved a sigh.

Like a girlfriend, I said teasingly, “Any—significant others?” What a stupid term.

She glanced at the ceiling. Finally: “My cat Abbie.”

Landon, who owned the splendid tabby Vaughn, nodded over his ravioli dough.

That silenced me for all of fifteen seconds, when I said to Georgia, “So . . . where have you been working?”

“Oh, I’ve knocked around for a while now.” Then, with some spirit: “Most recently I was selling gloves at Bloomingdale’s.”

I tried to get into the swing. “Men’s?”

She smiled, the expert knife work still going. “Women’s.”

And now we were having fun together. “Wool?”

“Calfskin,” she countered, the little flirt.

“Were you living in”—let’s see, where could she sell gloves at Bloomingdale’s and afford to live?—“Brooklyn?”

“Queens,” she said triumphantly. And added, “Ha!”

First we laughed, then we shifted the diced mushrooms and truffles into one bowl, and before I could even reach for the bottle, Georgia drizzled just the right amount of olive oil over it with a circling flourish. Out of the corner of my eye I caught Landon studying her.

“And before gloves?”

She smiled but it was paired with a steely look. “Oh, I knocked around—”

And together we finished, “Here and there.”

Her hands paused midair. “Right,” she said softly.

At that moment Li Wei showed up, plugged into his iPod, wearing gray ripstop cargo shorts and a black motorcycle jacket. When I introduced him to Georgia Payne, he lit up and sang a soulful few bars of “Georgia on My Mind,” then finished with a bland look that makes you wonder whether you were imagining it.

We kept working, picking up the pace as I glanced at my watch, dealing with interruptions from Choo Choo, Jonathan, and Giancarlo, who wanted permission to play the soundtrack from the Plácido Domingo version of
Carmen
. (Personally, I prefer the Stones, but said fine.) I had all but forgotten the fact that three weeks ago my nonna’s boyfriend turned up murdered on the very spot where I was presently chopping tomatoes for a
pomodoro
sauce.

Li Wei started emptying the industrial dishwasher from the night before, so the noise level increased, what with clattering pots and plates competing with dangerous tenors and scoffing sopranos. Then he started on the flatware. But there
was a pause in the activity at the moment Maria Pia emerged from her office lair. I sensed her presence the way animals can tell the tsunami is on its way. “Tomorrow at one,” she declared, “she’s coming to check out the preparations for Friday night.”

I pushed back my hair. “Who’s coming, Nonna?”

“Fina Parisi.”

At that moment a knife hit the beautiful black-and-white tiled floor.

*   *   *

Over the next couple of hours, once I could tell Georgia was fine on the prep work, I paid some bills, complimented our aged bartender, Giancarlo, on his new Clark Kent eyeglasses, and debated with our pianist, Mrs. Crawford—resplendent in a white cocktail dress embroidered with gold—whether chiffon has indeed had its day. Landon settled it unequivocally when he breezed by and flung “Never!” at us.

An hour before we opened on this third night of Grief Week, Paulette and Vera returned with Corabeth, who was actually, well, dressed. The shirt and pants from Target, as a quickie spin on the Miracolo look, fit her pretty well. But the biggest change was from the neck up. Her short, shrieking-red hair had been freed from the skull
rubber bands, dyed ash blond, brushed, and swept behind her ears. With some bronzing, plucking, volumizing, and glossing, this CRIBS girl now looked kind of like Michelle Williams on steroids.

Our new sous chef, Georgia, hit it off with sommelier Jonathan, and they were discussing whether the merits of Barbaresco had indeed been overlooked when the mandolin and clarinet players showed up early to set up the framed photo shrine on the bar and meet Dana Cahill to go over the repertoire. The fact that they even had a repertoire was news to me, but I always enjoyed it when I saw all over again how Miracolo has a life of its own. All the friendships among the staff.

Leo, the mandolin player, offered that his hip had never been the same since he had a botched hip replacement five years ago. And Dana piped up that she had never been the same since Clinique stopped making Ruby Red lipstick five years ago, at which everyone else laughed, and she looked at them in wonderment. They all got more out of newbie Georgia Payne than I had success at finding out about women’s calfskin gloves, but it was fine by me.

If the chemistry turned out to be as right as it seemed, maybe I would keep Georgia on after Friday night. Also Corabeth, who was looming over Paulette, with her big arms crossed, as my best server showed her the ropes. The big girl had shown
an interest in the framed photos, alternately clucking and tsking, which endeared her right away to the band, and especially to Dana, when her glossy lips quivered at the shot of poor little Booger.

Now that everybody was as nicely bonded as
pomodoro
sauce to rigatoni, I donned my white lightweight chef jacket and toque, schooled the servers on the specials, and took my post at my beloved Vulcan stove, the stove of the gods. Together we whipped up a northern Italian version of Olympian fare on a daily basis.

Choo Choo opened the front doors at 5:30, and in they came. Into our Miracolo, this Angelotta sacred space with brick walls and black-painted woodwork and gleaming plank flooring and hanging globe chandeliers and impeccable white table linens and black votive candle holders. The first rush was always the after-work crowd hankering for drinks and antipasti. Then came the older diners, who preferred a nice settled meal followed by some nice settled digestion followed by a slow drive home.

The last rush was the younger set, who dashed from one place for happy hour to another spot for tapas and finally to Miracolo for whatever I was dishing up that day—plus the experience, later, of whatever Dana Cahill and her band of Merry Men were offering up as entertainment.

So there’s a kind of predictability about business hours at Miracolo.

Which is why a murder just thirty-six hours later put an end to predictability—and to the life of one of our very own.

*   *   *

On Thursday, Maria Pia wore the apron she had hung up when I came on board, and she dominated the kitchen, prepping whatever she could in advance of serving her Belfiere sorority sisters a gorgeous meal of Scallop Fritters with Roasted Chioggia Beet Carpaccio, Sestri Salad with Grappa and Fig Vinaigrette, Saffron Risotto alla Milanese, Saltimbocca, Granita di Caffè con Panna, and Biscotti all’Anaci.

Nonna was the queen of multitasking that day, not just overseeing the preparations, but doing them herself. Maybe she had no choice, considering that Landon seemed slow and preoccupied, and Georgia Payne had called to say she had lost a filling, had to make an emergency appointment with her dentist, and would be at Miracolo by 3 p.m. Amazingly, Nonna took it all in stride. She seemed to welcome the opportunity to make everything “alla Maria Pia.”

When the Belfiere “La Maga” (Italian, apparently, for Big Kahuna), Fina Parisi, showed up,
Earth did not actually grind to a halt in its orbit. While I brined the chicken for that evening’s entrée special, Maria Pia showed La Maga the plans for the dinner the following evening, and I was introduced to her briefly. If Nonna wanted to remind me that this woman was the daughter of “that
strega
” Belladonna Russo, she resisted, settling instead for a meaningful look, which I always had a hard time telling apart from gas.

Fina Parisi was in her late forties, slim, average height, with chin-length wavy black hair, a heart-shaped face, the kind of lips that show up in Estée Lauder ads, and dark blue eyes. She was gracious, stylish, and if I had to decide in a split second, I’d say I liked her. But then, I liked Joe Beck, so don’t go by me. Wearing a pale-blue summer linen sheath, the Belfiere
B
was visible on her right wrist. On her it looked like very cool jewelry.

Fina Parisi asked to see Nonna’s tattoo—no longer hidden by a Darth Vader–style glove—and the two of them disappeared, chatting softly, into the office, where Nonna closed the door. To keep out all of us non-Belfiere troglodytes, apparently, the Oompa Loompas of Miracolo . . .

By the time Daughter of Strega had left, pleased, Maria Pia went home to change, and Georgia Payne showed up with a numb cheek and a watchful manner. But still pleasant. Landon, I
noticed, had nothing more to report on either the Belfiere whistle-blower named Anna T. or Psi Chi Kappa itself. He left his assistant, Georgia, totally alone to figure out how she could, well, assist. He seemed not to notice when the beloved, Jonathan, showed up in new duds—still the Miracolo black-and-white look, but with something modest in the way of bling around his neck—although I overheard Landon murmur something about how jewelry shouldn’t be allowed in the workplace. He had nothing more to say either about Corabeth Potts or the lasting contributions of Bob Fosse to Broadway theater.