Life Among Giants (37 page)

“Putative,” I said. “You're calling him putative again. But he's not
putative
, Jack. He was in our restaurant. I
identified
him.
Th
e question is what to do about it, Jack. Not whether Kaiser is
putative
.”

“Easy,” Etienne said.

“We make them
pay,
” Kate said.

“Jack, you give me credit. Say it now—Kaiser's not putative.”

“Now, let's not get at cross-purposes here,” Jack said firmly. “I do give you Kaiser, okay? Kaiser is real, he's really with Perdhomme. Done.”

“
Th
ank him,” Etienne said.

“
Th
ank you,” I said reluctantly.

“You're welcome,” said our captain the same. All had been going so well. He said, “And Kate. Everyone. Payback is
their
game. Lubbers like us won't have a chance. If we've got new evidence, we should call the police, go to the D.A. Whatever we think best. But go to the authorities.”

“
Th
e authorities aren't always up to the job,” I said. “
Th
e police?
Th
ey've proved it.
Th
e D.A. is worse. You remember.”

“It's a new outfit up there, David. It's a whole new court, a whole new system. We go to the D.A. But we'll need better evidence than this single sighting.”

Long silence as we sailed with the wind, last warmth of the sun.

Kate climbed up on the foredeck, stared ahead across the water.

“I've ruined the afternoon,” I said.

“Nonsense,” said Jack. “I'm sorry I was so stiff. You took me by surprise. I do give you credit. I really do. You had to say something.”

“Say thanks again,” said Etienne.

I felt more thankful this time: “
Th
anks, Jack.
Th
at means a lot.”

“Now, gentlemen, let me sail. Our window at low tide this evening is short.”

Etienne looked stricken: he didn't like short windows. I felt the same, my sense of safety vanished.
Th
e shore held no landmarks for me—time, too, moving separately from my thoughts. And Kate, all separate. So I was surprised when Jack brought us windward again and we entered their inlet, slipped over the sandbar with an audible scrape of the keel. From there it would be a slow drift to mooring in the lee of the bluff.

Kate rejoined us in the cockpit, looking nonplussed, very irritable, a bad sign.

“Jack's apologized,” I said. “He says he knows Kaiser is real.”

“I know how to get them,” Kate said oblivious. “I've been studying up—DNA.”

Jack wasn't going to scoff. He said, “We'd need tissue samples. Tissue samples tied to the crime. And tied at this end to Kaiser, whom it is unlikely we'll ever see again.”

“Yellow sweater,” Kate said. “
Th
ey found several dozen hairs on there and I have found more. Blood on the sweater. Blood evidence, too, on a pair of rubber gloves. Spittle in a Dr Pepper can. And other stuff, too, pretty much galore, once you have a person to attach it to at this end. It's all sealed and labeled.” She looked suddenly like the scientist she'd inhabited briefly, described the forensics process, the developing legal situation. She'd read in the
Times
that two rapists had been convicted decades after their crimes on DNA evidence, an innocent man freed. And she'd seen in one of her genetics magazines that anyone with the cash could bring DNA material to a lab.

“We lure them to the restaurant,” Etienne said. “Snick a little spit and curlies.”

“Makes some sense,” Jack said. “And I'm not saying that grudgingly.”

“DNA,” Kate said, just the faintest manic glimmer.

“Could work,” I said. “But won't the court consider our evidence contaminated? Out of police custody? For how long?”

“Oh, contaminated,” Kate said. “We'll put it back.”

“Lord,” said Jack. “And how do we do that?”

“Chuck will put it back,” said my sister firmly. So much for the idea that she'd ended her contact with the detective.

“And then to the D.A.,” Jack said, resigned. “Both of you, do you hear me? Straight to the D.A.”

“And then to the High Side,” said Kate.

“Lord,” Jack repeated.

“Look at me,” said Etienne, sensing my bubbling emotion. “My first day sailing and no seaweed in my lungs.”

21

You'd think I would have harbored a lot of resentment for Emily, but I didn't, not really. Her life had gotten too big for her very quickly, and mine had always been too big for me.
Th
at she disappeared when my parents died seemed pretty natural. I'd have liked to have disappeared, too.
Th
at she reemerged as the star of
Children of War,
that was fine, too. We'd come through a trauma together, all unspoken, and really, nothing else mattered, except perhaps that Sylphide had picked us both out for whatever the dance was that she was imagining, a dance too big for the stage.

Emily's parents still lived in the carriage house on the Wadsworth estate, still managed the place, a thought that crossed my mind quite a bit my first year back in Westport, then infrequently: Emily must visit them sometimes, right? Last I'd heard from her was the one postcard. And until the return of Perdhomme and Kaiser I had thought of her little, then less.

Awake all night, I caught a quick item on one of these TV gossip shows: Emily and Carter had split. I wrote Emily a note via her dance company headquarters in Miami, letting her know I'd settled back into my parents' house, five years already, time flies, what had she been up to, breezy, like that. I didn't mention Perdhomme. I didn't mention my folks. I didn't mention that our urgent hours together at Hochmeyer Haven had been coming to mind with increasing frequency, memories wrapped in violence. I mean, there I was in the very bed, on the very couch, in the very bathtub, at the very kitchen table. I did suggest that if she found herself home for
Th
anksgiving or Christmas or really anytime, we might get together and have a coffee.

My phone rang four days later, rang after midnight, Lizard right there reading in the living room she and I had anointed.

“David?”

She was coming home the very next
Th
ursday for a week. She could barely stand the prospect. Her mother wasn't taking Emily's divorce from Carter very well. But maybe Sergeant Bright would moderate things. And her brother the brigadier general would be in town, at least that. She was touring Asia starting very soon, far away at Christmastime and
Th
anksgiving, so the Brights were making their big holiday event out of the Korean harvest festival. “Chuseok,” she reminded me. “Ancestor Days? When all Koreans return to their hometowns to honor their people? It's all about food. Snacks for the dead. I'd love to see you, David. I'll carve out twenty-four hours. But I don't want to see you in that house. I can't believe you're living in that house. I hope that's not harsh. I couldn't even go in that house, I don't think. And I definitely don't want to be staring over at Sylphide's place the whole time. I see her enough as it is. And you know me—I can't handle the competition.”

No idea what she knew or didn't know about Sylphide and me, I said, “We were so young.”

Emily laughed. Emily really laughed. Emily Bright, the girl who never laughed, a long, burbling giggle like water tumbling through rocks.

E
TIENNE AND
I
had been blown away by the wild mushrooms and fungi in the French and Italian kitchens we'd visited in Europe. Every great restaurant had its mushroom hunter, gorgeous porcinis arriving in baskets stuffed into the back of a nondescript Fiat in Rome or chanterelles and morels recovered at a clandestine roadside drop in Chamonix. RuAngela, always with the feelers, had long since found an eccentric fellow in western Massachusetts, a mycologist whose claim to fame was having been fired from the faculty at Harvard, actually a bit of a fungus himself: Ferkie the Mushroom Man. He was full of secrets, wandered the glens and woodlots foraging, kept a basement full of mushroom logs. He'd developed practical drying and freezing techniques: year-round produce. We'd become his exclusive market in our area, and had become friends, as well, several expeditions after delicacies. RuAngela's connection to him had been Jim Riverkeeper, proprietor of the famous Riverkeeper Inn of Lenox, Massachusetts.

Maybe not the getaway Emily had in mind, but such was the timing: Jim and I had long planned a Monday foraging trip and a kitchen visit. Emily arrived at Firfisle by limousine after prep. And here was the thing: her head wasn't shaved bald anymore.
Th
at phase had passed. She'd grown out all that glossy, thick, sumptuous black hair and the braid was back, the precious plait. Something had made her happy: I'd never seen her smile quite like that, 1000 watts, very becoming. Etienne laughed to see her and they hugged as if they'd gotten along the first time around. RuAngela reached up to put her hands on Emily's soaring cheekbones.

But that was it for introductions—after a quick tour, we left the restaurant in the hands of staff and got in my decrepit Volvo: north!

T
H
E
R
IVERKEEPER
I
NN
loomed high amid horse pastures, the Colonial homestead of one patriot or another, nice stone buildings dating from before the American Revolution. When we pulled in, Jim popped out the kitchen door, huge man, a solid four hundred pounds but light on his feet, grumpy manner, linen-service kitchen-togs, a real chef's toque cocked on his head.

“I haven't seen so many Black people in one place since I left Boston!” he said. We laughed, but it wasn't clear he was joking.

His wife, Jean, was as big as he, pink and cheery and snugged into a gigantic in-your-face uplift bra, the obvious boss of the place, droll and forceful. “No rest for the wicked,” she said, and whisked us off on an overly detailed tour of the stately dining rooms, the antique billiards room, the Prohibition-era basement tavern. We paused in the stained-glass stairwell, like standing in a church, each on our own level, Emily above.

Shortly, E.T. and Jim settled down to inspect the new wood-burning beehive oven, made pizzas on bare brick for a snack before lunch. Not a word between us, Emily and I retrieved our bags from the Volvo, climbed the stairs to the exquisite room she'd picked, twin beds in an alcove on the third floor. “I honestly think we should make love right now,” she said.

I was not against the idea.

F
ERKIE TURNED UP
while Emily and I napped and snuggled, or maybe while we made love a second time (old desire insatiable), took no particular notice of us when we joined the group, all but climbed down Jean's fantastical cleavage over our second lunch—complained about the “freaky” pizza Jim and Etienne had invented, leek cream and woven stripes of vegetable: puréed dal for the warp, kale pesto for the woof.

“Mr. Mushroom, you got poor people skills,” RuAngela said.

And it was true, Ferkie kept rising up into the conversation like something growing on a stump. Jim and RuAngela bantered with a kind of expertise—old-line cultural insults I didn't quite get, homo vs. hetero insults that I did, tried to incorporate whatever the clueless Ferkie thought to interject, such as “RuAngela, you are obviously a man.” You always remembered why he hadn't lasted as a college prof: he was made to be the guy on the water-tank target at the county fair, three throws for a buck.

E.T. took no notice of anyone but pondered, pondered, always something cooking in his head. He roused himself and quietly put together a second small course at lightning speed, five or six unfamiliar types of mushrooms Ferkie had spied at seventy miles per hour roadside on his trip down from a mushroom conference in Canada: distinct textures, individual flavors, various colors, all sorts of culinary possibility, like they'd been auditioned and hired and only awaited their parts. Ferkie brightened at the flavors E.T. had coaxed forth, softened with each bite.

And then, he announced, it was time to forage.

No amount of coaxing could get Etienne out in the woods. He stayed in Jim's kitchen to experiment, and of course RuAngela stayed with him, platform pumps unsuitable for hard hiking.

The rest of us climbed into Ferkie's creaky old Mercedes diesel, and after a series of wrong turns on a maze of back roads behind the inn, drove up an impossible dirt track that ended at a pond-sized puddle in the midst of a vast tract of public land.

Ferkie leapt out, distributed collection bags, and without a word lurched into the dense Berkshire forest, his trajectory like a rocket gone wrong, abrupt swerves and curlicues, all but a rail of smoke out his butt. Emily had no trouble keeping up, even as the terrain grew steep, but Jim and I fell behind, unsettling speed through the underbrush, especially given the several bottles of wine we'd downed with lunch.
Th
e two of them stopped over a specimen while Jim and I, puffing, caught up to them.
“Clitopilus prunulus,”
Ferkie told us. “Known as sweetbread mushrooms, easily confused with
Clitocybe
dealbata,
which is poisonous, not deadly, but fucking weird, causes sweating and heavy salivation, also tunnel vision.”

“You've tried it, of course . . .” Riverkeeper said, ardent hippie hater.

“Just a bite, well cooked. And it was worth it: delicious. Fishy, sticky.”

“You suffered
symptoms
?” Emily said.

“Tunnel vision, for sure. And auditory hallucinations. Like mosquitoes and springs popping, and my mother's voice:
Ferkie, Ferkie.
But that turned out to be real. I was still in high school, Buffalo, New York.”

We kept marching. Ferkie collected small amounts of this and that inedible for the sake of some paper he was writing, announcing the names: ribbed pluteus, blushing false truffle, candlesnuff fungus. We hiked down into a small, heavily shaded gorge, mushrooms galore, now that I had eyes for them. One grouping was all bright red with white spots.

“Like a roomful of sore throats,” said Jim.

“Fly agaric,” Ferkie said. He didn't pluck a specimen but lay on the ground and put his tongue to the toadstool, sat there savoring the taste. “
Th
ese are seriously toxic,” he said dreamily. “Tastes like. Like
wind.
”

“So this is how poets die,” Jim said.

Ferkie got to his feet, indifferent. He said, “Nah, nothing serious. Not like some. Eat that, you might puke a little. Maybe a little worse if you ate 'em raw.”

And like that, dozens of species, till we came upon an enormous log lying covered with pale sheaves: oyster mushrooms, as any chef could see. We filled two large collection bags, then a third, heavy, the excitement of acquisition.

“You assholes pay twenty bucks a pound,” Ferkie said.

Oh, Emily's giggle. I couldn't recall her giggling at all.

We struggled back down the mountain to the car—Ferkie knew exactly where it was in the seemingly endless woods—then straight back to a patch of blue chanterelles he'd spotted, striated little trumpets completely hidden from my eye even when he pointed, like ballet costumes.

When Riverkeeper finally saw them, he said, “Now, these, I gotta say, look poisonous.”

“
Th
ere's no poisonous look,” Ferkie said. “Some of the most dangerous ones look very tempting. Some of the most delicious look fecal and foul.”

Nonchalant, I said, “What are the most dangerous?”

“Oh,” Ferkie said. “Right? For a chef, any little tummy ache out there is going to be bad news. Tunnel vision from a bowl of soup, you kidding?”

“
Lizard, you
could advertise the experience,” said Jim.

“But most dangerous around here is definitely
Amanita
phalloides,
death cap, it's called, very handsome, big shape, tasty looking, makes you want to take a bite. In fact, people who've survived amanitin poisoning say
phalloides
tastes very, very good. Drops people in the United States every season. Some years dozens. Beautiful things. I could show you hundreds of 'em right around here in a week or two. And a little later in the season,
Amanita ocreata.
Closely related, even stronger, called ‘destroying angel,' which I dig, cuz they grow up with these veils like wings.”

We collected about half of the blue chanterelles, leaving enough to preserve the patch, made our way out of the woods and to the puddle we'd parked in, climbed in the car triumphant, headed back to the Inn.

Emily and I sat in the back holding bags of the delicate chanterelles in our laps, nice to get out of the misting rain, my head pressed against the ceiling, knees up in my face. Emily put her hand on my leg under the mushrooms, ran it up my jeans very gradually.

Playing it cool, I reached back over my shoulder and snagged one of the mushroom books piled on the dash under the rear window, the fattest one,
Mushrooms Demystified,
by someone named David Arora.
Th
e dedication caught my interest immediately:

I dedicate this book with love to my mother and father, whose admonitions to me as a teen-ager to stay away from mushrooms inspired me to get closer.

Quickly, lest Emily ask what I was doing, I looked up
Amanita
phalloides,
then
Amanita ocreata,
having memorized the names, followed notations in the index to an appendix called “Mushroom Toxins,” page 892.
Th
e first entry concerned certain compounds called amatoxins, and put a spear in my gut: