Eating Crow (24 page)

“What’s the incentive? I mean, why would I want to do this? I’m not saying it’s a bad idea, just—”

“No rush, but when you get a chance, have a look at the text. Schenke makes a clear point that in the commercial sphere, the market will set the fees. I’ve been talking to a few informed guys and they say we could charge anywhere from one to three percent of the Schenke differential for our services.”

I gasped. “One to three? That’s thousands of times what I’m getting now.”

“And I’m here to tell you, many of the settlements will still be measured in the billions of dollars.”

I stared out the window again. “You’re talking about enormous sums of money. I’m already rich. What would I want with more?”

“Forgive me, Marc, but you are no more than comfortably off.”

“So what do you call rich?”

He lit another cigarette. “Simplest measure?”

“Yeah, simplest measure.”

“Enough so you can’t ever spend it all.”

“What’s the point of that?”

“A fine rule for life, son: only losers die poor.” He raised his eyebrows and sucked noisily on his cigarette again, content he had closed down that part of the conversation. “And of course,” he said, “in the private sector there will be far less of the pressure you’re under now. No organization takes itself more seriously than the United Nations. I think you’d thrive outside of it.”

I sipped a little of my own cognac and felt it strip away the cocoa burr on my tongue. “And what do we call this venture of yours?”

“Of ours, Marc. Of ours. It will be a partnership. Rashenko, Olson, and Basset Associates?”

I shook my head. “The acronym is ROB. Not good for a money-making venture.”

“The other way round, then?”

“That’s BOR, which hardly suggests dynamism.”

“We can decide on the name later,” he said. “For now, read the book and have a think. This might be exactly the change you need.”

I said I would, and thanked him for a remarkable meal.

Back in my restaurant critic days I made a point of ordering dishes according to appetite rather than what I thought might challenge the kitchen. Nonprofessionals only ordered what they wanted to eat, and I believed I had a duty to be as normal a diner as possible. There were a few exceptions. If a dish showed up on a menu which read like a car crash—black pudding spring rolls in chili jam, for example, or grilled scallops with strawberry-scented laksa—I would order it “so you don’t have to.” But for the most part I let taste be my guide. Occasionally, as we all do, I would get in a rut, ordering, say, grilled sardines three weeks in a row because I had my grilled-sardine head on. I would then argue, week after week, that the grilled sardine is a great test of any chef, when really it only tested my capacity for grilled sardines.

Still, at least I was exercising free will. Talking to Max that evening I realized that for many months now, my free will had been on holiday. Events had come my way and I had engaged with them unquestioningly. I had been living according to the set menu rather than going à la carte, and then dealing with the indigestion. Perhaps it was time to put appetite back in charge. Perhaps it was time to choose what I really wanted. In front of me lay the plate of chocolates. There were some oblong ganaches and a few dipped centers and a couple of those rust-dusted truffles. In the middle was a single shiny tablet of the darkest chocolate I had ever seen. I picked it up and put it in my mouth. It was delicious.

I
awoke to the sound of my own heart thumping angrily in my ears. My cheeks felt hot and swollen, and when I tried to breathe, a feeble hiss squeezed itself into my lungs. I threw back the quilt, assuming it was the thick hotel bedclothes about my face that were restricting the supply of oxygen, but it made no difference. I was trying to gulp down great drafts of air but all I was getting was feeble sips. This was when it occurred to me that I might be dying.

I reached out into the darkness to find the phone, and just as I managed to get a hand around the receiver, the bed bucked and kicked and chucked me onto the carpet. Now the floor tilted furiously, desperate to roll me into the corner. Then the bedside table threw itself on top of me. All the time I kept a grip on the telephone. The telephone would save me. I was certain of that. The telephone was my friend. I found a button to punch, a mouthpiece to speak into, but I had nothing to say save a savage rasp, for my throat was closed and my breath gone. In the darkness I could hear furniture throwing itself in all directions, trying to find me. There was a feeling of panic, but something else too: a distinct curiosity. In my mind I kept hearing the words “perhaps it was something I ate perhaps it was something I ate perhaps …” over and over. And there, half lit in the darkness, was Harry Brennan, shaking his grizzled head at the sad inevitability of it all. “Indeed, dear boy, perhaps it was something you overate.” Would this not be the most vainglorious of ends: to be killed by your dinner?

I must have lost consciousness, for the next thing I sensed was light flooding the room and then the repeated calling of my name in a French accent, as if someone were trying to get my attention from far away. Events passed now in single images, like the frames of an incomplete movie storyboard: my body being thrown onto its back; a hard cushion shoved under my neck; a sharp, painful blow to the throat and then, oh thank you, thank you so much, hurt me again if you must but keep it coming, for here is a rush of sweet, soulful air to the lungs, and here another.

I am on a stretcher now, strapped in beneath a red blanket, chandeliers flashing over me. And now in a car. Or a van. I feel another sharp punch, this time to my arm. And a voice saying, “Try to relax, Meester Bassay. Try to relax.” How interesting, I think to myself. The French pronunciation of my name. Maybe they have mistaken me for Dad. No no. Silly me. Dad’s dead. Aha! Perhaps I am too.

I awoke again, this time in a hospital room, to the unsettling pip, pip, pip of a heart monitor. I know some people find this sound reassuring, an irrefutable proof of life, but I didn’t. While the man connected to a heart monitor is clearly now alive, he was also very recently nearly dead and this cannot be a good thing. To my left, asleep in a chair, jacket off, empty holster showing over white shirt, was Franky, head back, snoring. A pale wash of gray morning light illuminated the thin curtains behind him. My body ached, and from somewhere below my chin, I could hear the suck and blow of air. I reached down and found a hard plastic tube protruding from my throat. I was intrigued. Just for a second I placed one fat fingertip over the hole the air was coming from, and I choked. This, too, could not be a good thing.

My retching woke Franky. “Brother. You’re back with us.”

I opened my mouth to say “Are you sure?” but nothing came. My vocal cords were being denied the necessary rush of air to allow for speech, courtesy of the emergency tracheotomy, and I was a sudden mute.

“Don’t strain.”

He called the nurses, who arrived with their uniform of crisp white and their certainty and their impeccable command of five languages. They took my blood pressure and removed the tube from my throat so that the air flow redirected itself back to my mouth, and they sealed up the wound. They opened the curtains, as if genuinely interested in the view, gave me tepid water to drink through a straw, and sat me up. Later they told me to sleep. Ready to be dependent, I did as I was told.

That afternoon I was visited by a doctor. He was a lean man of my own age with dark eyes and the relaxed air of one who knows he is not about to lose a patient.

“You are a lucky man, Mr. Basset,” he said, this time with a hard final
t.

“I am?” I croaked, my feeble voice squeezing itself out through my wretched, battered throat. “In what way, exactly? I am in the hospital and I have a hole in my throat. What’s lucky about that?”

“You had a lucky escape,” he said as if humoring me. “The night manager of your hotel, he is trained as a paramedic by our fine Swiss army. It was he who found you and he who performed the emergency procedure on your …” He tapped at his own throat as if the correct English had eluded him. “Without it you would be dead.”

Automatically my hand went to the soft cotton mound of the wound’s dressing.

“What did he use?”

“A Swiss Army knife, I think,” he said brightly, flicking through my notes. “The spike for getting stones from horses’ hooves.” Even in my addled state this seemed to me so very Swiss: my hotel manager carried a penknife that was clean enough for use in surgical procedures. I could imagine my father reacting to this news with a snort and a glance to the heavens. Only in Geneva!

I was told I had suffered a massive angioedema, a severe inflammation that had caused my neck to swell, blocking the airways; in short, my own body had attempted to strangle me.

“An allergic reaction?”

“Quite so.”

“To what?”

“This we will have to discover, sir.” And sooner rather than later, he said, for the reaction had been too severe to allow it simply to show itself again at a moment of its own convenience. He suggested I remain in the hospital for a few days while they attempted to identify the cause. This suited me fine. A hospital is the right place to be when one has cheated death, if only to remind others of the seriousness of what has happened. The pip, pip, pip had its uses. I wanted to be here with these sweet efficient nurses.

“Very well,” my doctor said. “We will soon begin. In the meantime, is there anything we can do to make you more comfortable?”

I flexed my toes. “Could you send me a podiatrist?”

Later that day I gave a junior doctor a list of everything I had eaten in the previous forty-eight hours, including a course-by-course description of the dinner I had shared with Max the night before. I assumed he would be impressed, jealous even, but he wrote it down as if I had listed the contents of my sock drawer. Ah yes, white chocolate with caviar, of course, and lobster with cocoa powder, you say? And the venison was prepared how? Well naturally, with a chocolate sauce.

I told him I had once worked as a restaurant critic, that there was nothing I didn’t eat “except chicken feet.”

He looked interested and scribbled a note. “No chicken feet. Why, sir, no chicken feet?”

“Clearly you haven’t eaten them; they’re disgusting.” I grinned; the doctor sniffed and crossed out the note. There was no place in this examination for jokes about chicken feet.

Now earnest-looking women came to me and made various scratches on my forearms with sharp implements. They studied the resulting red welts and muttered something to me about false positives. Every few hours they fed me little plastic capsules which they refused to identify, and asked a nurse to sit by me “in case of reaction.”

“What? My throat’s going to close up again?”

The nurse indicated a small box the size of a glasses case. “We have the injections. It is the only way to be sure. There is no risk.” I dared not question her.

We sat together watching old movies, the nurse and I, and flicked over occasionally to the news reports of my hospitalization, and I could not help but wonder how much Professor Schenke had enjoyed the announcement of the misfortune that had befallen me. All of this was a useful distraction while I awaited my body’s attempt on my life. There were other entertainments: a visit from Satesh, who brought another sack of bagels from the World Jewish Congress; a phone call from Max full of guilt and recrimination, but I told him he should not blame himself. It was my body which had attempted the hit, I said, not the food we had been served.

Shortly after lunch on the third day we got a reaction: a red rash the color of unripe raspberries on the back of my hands, hives on my cheeks, and then down my neck and onto my knees, great red swellings and blotches that did no favors to my newly attractive body. The nurse looked and called a doctor to look too, and they studied me with great curiosity as if intrigued by the cruel jokes genetics could play, until I dragged their attention away from my sad, mottled thighs and they pumped me full of antihistamine and adrenaline.

“What is it, then?” I said as the cocktail began to take effect. “What’s the killer ingredient?”

“I do not know,” the nurse said. “This is a blind test with placebos. Only the doctor knows. He will see you this evening.”

I was left alone to ponder the identity of my assassin. While I was waiting Jennie came to see me. She sat next to my bed, dressed in one of her dark pantsuits, one leg crossed tightly over the other as if waiting for a seminar to begin.

“Just wanted to check you were still alive,” she said coolly.

“I am. Just about.”

“I mean, obviously I would be quite happy if you lost your genitalia to a threshing machine, but I didn’t want the inconvenience of your funeral.”

“You told me I had nothing to apologize for.”

She shook her head. “I told you not to apologize, which is altogether different. I could see you’d enjoy it too much, and I didn’t want to give you the pleasure.”

“Aah. I see.”

She brushed some imaginary dust from her knee and shifted uneasily in her seat. “Actually, I’ve got a little news, and now is as good a time as—”

“It must be serious.”

“Not serious, exactly, just … I’m leaving. Leaving UNOAR, that is.”

“Where are you going?”

“Vienna. There’s a new psychotherapy unit for dysfunctional nation-states being piloted there. We’ll be attempting to apply talking cures, looking at various events in the childhoods of the referred countries, that sort of thing.”

“Sounds very … interesting.”

“Oh, I hope so. Anyway, the Foreign Office wants me there, and well, I thought it was a good time to move on. Satesh will take over from me. He’s very capable and I know you two get on. And you know what you’re doing and the office is there and running on wheels. And anyway—”

“Jennie, you’re not going because of …?”

She scoffed. “A woman makes a career decision and it has to be because of a man?”

“Well, I—”

“No, Marc. It is not because of you. It’s just … the right time. I was always bound to move on, sooner or later. A position like this was never forever.”

She stood up and straightened her jacket and looked down at me. “We did some good work, Marc.”

“Yes. And we had some fun. Don’t forget that.”

“Yeah. Some fum. You’re right. We had some fun.” And now, as if seeking an escape route: “They’re looking after you well here?”

“Oh, sure. They think they’ve cracked it, actually. But they’re keeping me in suspense.”

“Well, if there’s anything you need …”

“Franky and Alex are in and out five times a day.”

She considered me uneasily, as if unsure of her next move. Then she leaned down and kissed me gently on the forehead. “Take care of yourself,” she said.

An hour later my doctor came to see me. I was a rare case, he said. Very rare. Many people claimed to have my allergy, but there were few confirmed cases. One for the journals, actually. I was, he said proudly, allergic to the refined fruits of the
Theobroma cacao.

I stared at him, openmouthed. “I’m allergic to chocolate?”

“Very good. Yes indeed.”

“I can’t be allergic to chocolate. I’ve eaten it all my life.”

“But you have not eaten chocolate perhaps for the past few months?”

“Well no, but—”

“Your taste of good chocolate during the dinner made a reaction. Very interesting.”

“Interesting? Interesting? It’s a personal bloody tragedy.”

But there it was: the jury was back in and I couldn’t argue with the verdict. My own body had tried to do me in. It had studied my passions and identified one of the few things that defined who I was (or at least who I used to be) and said, Sorry, pal, but no more. It was very hard to deal with. If I’d been addicted to crack, if my septum had been corroded by cocaine or my arms gangrenous from heroin abuse, I would have understood. I would have been a victim of my own dysfunction. But chocolate? My dear friend chocolate, the one that had got me through so many dark nights and light early mornings when others had deserted me? How could chocolate be the professor in the library with the candlestick, the dowager duchess in the study with the pearl-handled revolver?

It didn’t matter that I’d been off the bean these past few months. I was suddenly desperate for it: I wanted chocolate-covered Calabrian figs and white chocolate truffles; I wanted black chunks of Valrhona and wine jellies from L’Artisan; I wanted Madagascar Vanillas from the Chocolate Loft and perfect balls of creamy Lindt and even great fat bars of Cadbury’s Dairy Milk. I wanted it all and I wanted it now, but I knew that if just the smallest square passed my lips, if I tasted the merest crumb, I could be dead. While I had been off circumnavigating the world in my Gulfstream V and grandstanding before the cameras, and eating caviar off my (now ex) girlfriend’s hand, my body had taken a long hard look at who I was and what I was and what I did, and like my brother, it had said: We do not like who you have become. We do not like it one bit.