The Pot Thief Who Studied Escoffier (21 page)

“Why?”

She rolled her eyes. “So the customer can see the bottle and be sure it hasn’t been opened.”

I didn’t see what difference that made. It has to be opened before you can drink it, so why does it matter where that happens? But I could see she was in no mood to debate the irrationality of restaurant protocol, so I said, “In this case, the customer would not have liked what he saw. The tin cap had a big hole in it.”

“Oh my God! You served wine with a defective top? It could make someone sick.”

“It didn’t have a defective top.”

“You said it had a hole in it.”

“Yes, and I put it there.”

She gave me a blank look.

“I was trying to open it with the corkscrew,” I explained.

She showed me how to spot a tin cap, which only made my work more difficult because I had to examine the neck of each bottle before deciding to twist or screw. That sounds lewd, but you know what I mean.

Despite such hardships, I survived my final shift behind the mahogany. It helped that I was sipping Gruet during the slow moments, of which there were precious few. But I did manage to work in enough sips to finish the bottle.

By rough estimate, I figured Chile Schnitzel had done as well on Friday as it had the first two nights. I wasn’t going to total it up or worry what to do with it, but I was happy for my friends’ success.

I was cleaning up the bar when Maria brought a crème brûlée.

“The last one. I hid it when I saw they were running low. Want to share it with me?”

“Sure. Shall I open a split of Gruet?” I said, referencing our lunch at La Casa Sena.

She gave me a radiant smile. “Half bottles are for work days.”

She evidently recalled that afternoon as accurately as did I.

The velvety crème, the spicy brûlée topping and the icy champagne were an even better trio than Athos, Porthos and Aramis. Contrary to popular belief, D’Artagnan was not one of the three. I mentioned the three tastes of the crème brûlée to Maria and proposed a toast, “Tous pour un, un pour tous.”

As soon as I said it, I wondered if my newfound compulsion to use every French phrase I’d ever heard would subside once I left the restaurant business.

“To Alexandre Dumas,” she added. Beauty and brains.

Maria had brought only one spoon. We shared that and a single flute.

Some guys are quick to notice when a woman flirts with them. Many men pick up on it even before it actually happens because they assume they are irresistible to women.

I am not one of those guys. My natural inclination has always been to assume an inverse relationship between how desirable a woman is and the likelihood she will be interested in me. So I am often the last to know when I am being flirted with.

But I was beginning to believe that Maria Salazar was doing exactly that. Worse, I was beginning to hope she was. Worse because I didn’t know what to do. Well, what else was new?

“I see Tristan is here again. Do you have to take him home tonight?”

“No,” I said, my voicing cracking like a thirteen-year-old. “He’s riding with Susannah.”

“I still have that cold Gruet at my place,” she said, “and another special treat I think you’ll like.”

The walk to her apartment on East Alameda took only ten minutes. It was a small one bedroom with brick floors and a kiva fireplace in which she lit a piñon fire. She served cheese cake with a chocolate sauce you knew on first taste was made by a professional saucier. I wondered if that was the special treat.

The Gruet was icy cold. The fire was warm. Maria did not look like a woman who had worked in a hot kitchen all day. She did smell of food, but it was a pleasant scent mixed with her sandalwood perfume.

“You don’t really want to drive back to Albuquerque tonight, do you?”

“No. I’m too tipsy.”

“Would you like to stay here tonight?”

“Sure. I’d be happy to sleep on this sofa.”

“It’s not a sofa, Hubie. It’s a love seat. You know what that means?”

I thought maybe “It means you make love on it” was the answer she was fishing for, but I also thought saying so would be too bold, so I said, “What does it mean?”

She tilted her head to an alluring angle and moistened her lips with her tongue before answering. “It means it’s not long enough to sleep on.” Then she giggled.

“I’m not very tall. I bet I can fit.”

She stood up and bent down, her lips only inches from mine. “Try it.”

I wasn’t sure what I was to try, but I opted for trying to fit on the love seat. I snugged my head against one arm of the love seat and swung my legs up. They reached over the other arm by several inches.

“I told you you wouldn’t fit.”

“Well, I can sleep on the floor.”

“The floor is brick. Pretty to look at. Too hard to sleep on. You’ll have to sleep in the bed.”

“What about you? You’re as tall as I am. You can’t sleep on the love seat either.”

“I’ll have to sleep in the bed, too.”

“Oh.”

“Is that O.K. with you?”

I hoped my gulp wasn’t audible.

Her eyes were the color of freshly brewed tea, her lashes long and curled. I stared into those lovely eyes until they blurred because she was too close for me to focus. Or because I had enjoyed too much Gruet. But a blurry Maria was as alluring as a clear one.

“Wait here,” she said.

The last thing I heard was the sound of a shower running.

49

Susannah was giving me a well-deserved roasting, and we were both laughing as she did so.

“Men are supposed to fall asleep after sex, Hubie, not before.”

As you may have guessed, I had awoken that morning under a blanket on Maria’s love seat.

My location and the fact I had slept in my clothes made me suspect no hanky had been panked. I hoped that – other than falling asleep on her love seat – I had done nothing further to make a fool of myself.

“So what happened to your principle of not dating two women at the same time?”

“I didn’t have a date with Maria.”

“Right. And Clinton ‘never had sex with that woman’.”

I sighed. “Neither did I. She invited me to her apartment for a late night snack. Then, seeing that I was too tipsy to drive back to Albuquerque, she graciously invited me to spend the night.”

“In her bed.”

“Yes.”

“With her in it.”

“The love seat was too—”

“I know, the love seat was too short for either one of you to sleep on, so you were going to share the bed strictly for convenience. Maybe she was planning to put one of those bundling boards in the bed between you.”

I sighed again, a sigh of what might have been. “An unnecessary precaution, as it turned out. God, I can’t believe I fell asleep.”

“Admit it, Hubie. You knew exactly what she had in mind, and you were looking forward to it.”

“I wasn’t absolutely certain. But I wasn’t planning to resist.”

“So you will date two women at the same time.”

“It wasn’t a date.”

“O.K., so you won’t date two women at the same time, but you will have sex with two at the same time.”

“No way. That’s way too kinky for me.”

“You know what I mean.”

She was right, of course. I was ready and willing to jump into bed with Maria. Well, willing anyway.

“The weird thing is I feel guilty even though Dolly said she isn’t the jealous type and doesn’t care what I do when we aren’t together.”

“That’s because it doesn’t matter what Dolly thinks about it. It’s your rule you would be violating, not hers. She can’t give you permission to break your own rule. Only you can do that.”

She was right again. I needed to forget what Dolly said and decide what I believed. I figured I had plenty of time to do that. After last night, I didn’t think I’d be invited back to Maria’s apartment, much less to her bed.

So I signaled Angie for a second round and asked Susannah about her date with Rafael after the Wednesday re-opening.

“You’re a good friend, Hubie.”

“I am?”

“Yeah. I know it wasn’t easy for you to tell me about Rafael and Wallace, but you wanted to protect me, and I think that’s very sweet.”

“Aw, shucks.”

Angie brought our second round and more chips.

“Turns out I didn’t have to ask him. He brought it up.”

Damn, I thought. He jilted her. That’s why she called him Rafael for the first time. It signals a change in their relationship. Why does such a great young woman have such bad luck with men? It isn’t fair.

“You were right,” she said. “She had been coming on to him. He said he played along because he didn’t want to risk offending her. He seems to think she’s dangerous somehow.”

I hoped that was true. Not the part about Wallace being dangerous. The part about him just playing along.

“I don’t doubt it.” I said. “Machlin Masoot told me to be careful what I said to her. Did Rafael say why he thinks she’s dangerous?”

“Only that she seemed to wield a lot of power when they were at Café Alsace together. Two employees who didn’t get along with her were fired.”

“So is she still after him?”

“I don’t think so. When she first came on to him, he figured he could play along until he got a sense of whether the place was going to survive. I guess you could say he was playing for time. But when he talked to her on the picket line, she had reverted to her normal cold fish persona.”

Something told me that wasn’t the whole story. I thought about it while I sipped. “The last time we were here, you proved Wallace killed Barry Stiles.” The italics were for Susannah, who smiled at me making fun of her. “If memory serves, the clues were that she’s using an alias, she worked at Café Alsace with Barry, and she’s the perfect villain because she is so unlikely. So how does coming on to Rafael then picketing the place then giving him the cold shoulder fit with your theory of Voile as murderess?”

She was still smiling. She loves mysteries. “I remember Nero Wolfe saying you should never call a woman Jew a Jewess, but it’s O.K. to call a woman murderer a ‘murderess’.”

“Who is Nero Wolfe?”

“He was a hugely fat detective who raised orchids and never left his house.”

“Must be hard to detect without leaving the house,” I observed.

“He used logic, Hubie. You don’t have to leave the house to use logic.”

“I suppose he’s fictional.”

“You can learn a lot reading fiction.”

She scooped up some salsa.

“So?” I prompted.

“So what?”

“So how does the new information about Voile fit into your theory?”

“Hmm. She walked out of the meeting where pay was going to be decided. She didn’t even bother to show up the next day to collect her share. Then on the next day, pay is suddenly so important to her that she’s picketing about it. It doesn’t make sense, does it?”

I shook my head. “Nothing at Chile Schnitzel makes sense.”

50

I wanted to spend an evening alone for a change.

I love books but don’t have room for them. I either check them out from the library or buy, read, and give away. On my shelf that evening was the unabridged edition of the Oxford English Dictionary which should come with a hydraulic lift for hoisting it up to a table where it can be opened. Alongside it were a New Mexico atlas and a first edition of Pueblo Pottery Making: A Study at the Village of San Ildefonso by Carl E. Guthe, published by Harvard in 1925. I’ve read it twice and keep it because it’s too valuable to give away.

So I went back to Escoffier and discovered he had a dark side.

When he wasn’t engaged in humanitarian efforts such as banning the practice of beating apprentices, he was swindling money from his employer.

While in charge of the kitchens at the Savoy, Escoffier received a five percent commission – also known as a kick-back – from his suppliers. In addition, some of the tradesmen testified that it was common knowledge that “large presents consisting of packages of goods were sent every week addressed to a Mr. Boots, Southsea.” Some have speculated that Escoffier, who lived apart from his wife and children, had a second family in Southsea. He took dating two women at once to a higher level than I ever imagined.

In 1900, Escoffier signed a confession admitting to fraud. No charges were brought, however, perhaps because the famous hotel would rather eat the loss than suffer the scandal.

As I contemplated what to have for dinner, I thought of a meal Escoffier had described in his memoir.

Our dinner that evening consisted of a cabbage, potato, and kohlrabi soup, augmented with three young chickens, an enormous piece of lean bacon, and a big farmhouse sausage. To follow, we were served with a leg of mutton, tender and pink, accompanied by a puree of chestnuts. Then, a surprise – but one which was not entirely unexpected from our host, who had an excellent cook – an immense, hermetically sealed terrine, which, placed in the middle of the table, gave out, when it was uncovered, a marvelous scent of truffles, partridges, and aromatic herbs. This terrine contained eight young partridges, amply truffled and cased in fat bacon, a little bouquet of mountain herbs and several glasses of fine-champagne cognac. All had been lengthily and gently cooked in hot embers. At the same time was served a celery salad. As for the wines, we had first the excellent local wine, then Burgundy, and finally a famous brand of champagne. The dinner ended with beautiful local fruit, and fine liqueurs.

Just reading about it made me queasy. I’m not a vegetarian, but I admit to being bothered by the fact that a single meal had required the supreme sacrifice of three young chickens, a pig, and eight young partridges. No mention was made of a pear tree. They also ate a leg of mutton. I don’t know what a mutton is, but I assume it must be killed before its leg can be eaten. Or maybe it can hobble around on three legs awaiting the next grand repast.

I settled on simpler fare, roasted poblanos with queso fresco and a glass of ice cold Tecate.

Even though it was slightly below freezing, I opened the doors to the patio before retiring. I wrapped myself in the covers like a mummy and slept the sleep of the blissfully ignorant.