Douglas Preston - Crimson Shore

Reggie produced one.

“Excellent. Ah, Reggie, what is your last name?”

“Sheraton.”

“Thank you. Mr. Sheraton, how would you go about cooking this?”

“I’d fillet it first.”

“Be my guest.” He laid the fish down on the butcher block and watched with approval as Reggie expertly filleted it.

“Beautifully done,” Pendergast said. “This fills me with hope. Now tell me: How would you cook it?”

“In lard, of course.”

Pendergast shuddered. “Not clarified butter?”

“Clarified?”

There was a moment of silence. “Very well. We will confine ourselves to the simplest of preparations. Would you mind placing that skillet on a high flame?”

Reggie walked over to the commercial stove, turned up one burner, and placed the skillet on it.

“Now add some butter, please. Not too much, just enough to coat the bottom of the pan... Wait, wait, that’s more than sufficient!”

Reggie stepped back from what looked like an impossibly small tab of butter. The rest of the kitchen continued looking on in silent surprise.

Pendergast stood there, holding the fish. “Now, Mr. Sheraton, if you wouldn’t mind assembling the rest of the mise en place — mushrooms, garlic, white wine, flour, salt, pepper, parsley, half a lemon, and cream?”

As Reggie moved around the kitchen, gathering the ingredients in increasingly resentful silence, Pendergast kept an eye on the heating pan. Adderly watched the cooking lesson with increasing amusement and curiosity.

Pendergast salted the fish on both sides and set it aside. “Chef’s knife?”

Stu, the line cook, handed him one.

Pendergast examined it. “This isn’t sharp enough! Don’t you know a dull knife is more dangerous than a sharp one? Where’s your steel?”

A sharpening steel was produced, and Pendergast whetted the knife against it with a few expert strokes. Then he turned to the mushrooms, quartering one of them in a quick, deft motion. He handed the knife to Reggie, who cut up the other mushrooms and minced a clove of garlic and some parsley as Pendergast looked on.

“You have decent knife skills,” he said. “That’s reassuring. Now, let’s pay attention to the fish. If we are going to prepare this sole à la minute , the pan must be very hot, and the fish must cook quickly. It is now at just the right heat.”

He plucked up the fish and slid it into the hot pan with a searing sound. He waited, as if counting seconds, and then said: “Now, you see? It can be turned already. And a subtle fond is developing.” He slid a fish spatula beneath the sole and gently turned it, to a fresh sizzle.

“But in the Navy—” Reggie began.

“You are no longer deep-frying fish sticks for several hundred men. You are cooking for a single, discriminating customer. There — it’s done!” And Pendergast slid the fish onto a clean plate. “Note that I am serving it presentation side up. Now watch, Mr. Sheraton, if you will.” The FBI agent added a splash of white wine to the skillet, and as a plume of steam arose he added flour and a little more butter, deglazing the pan and whisking the ingredients together quickly. “I’m making a rudimentary beurre manié from which to build the sauce,” he explained. A minute later, in went the mushrooms, then the garlic. Holding the handle of the skillet with a chef’s towel, Pendergast quickly sautéed the ingredients, then added a generous dash of cream, standing directly over the stovetop and whisking constantly. After another minute he turned off the heat, picked up a spoon, tasted the sauce, corrected the seasonings, dipped the spoon again, then showed it to Reggie. “Note, Mr. Sheraton, how the sauce lightly coats the spoon. The French call that nappe . In future, I would ask that you make sure your sauce has been reduced to just such a consistency before serving it to me.” He spooned a liberal amount of sauce over the fish, garnished it with parsley, spritzed a trace of lemon juice over it.

“Filets de Poisson Bercy aux Champignons,” he declared with a small flourish. “Or, more correctly, Filets de Sole Pendergast, since under the circumstances I was forced to take several shortcuts in both ingredients and technique. Now, Mr. Sheraton: Do you think you could reproduce this preparation with the greatest exactitude, for my future dinners in this establishment?”

“It’s simple enough,” Reggie said shortly.

“That’s the beauty of it.”

“But... for every dinner?”

“For my every dinner.” Pendergast reached into his pocket, extracted a hundred-dollar bill, and handed it to the cook. “This is for your trouble today.”

Reggie stared at it, the look of resentment changing to surprise.

“Do you regularly work lunches as well as dinners?” Pendergast asked in a hopeful tone.

“Only twice a week,” Reggie replied.

“Ah, well. Let us then content ourselves with dinner, for the time being. Filets de Sole Pendergast for the foreseeable future, if you please. You have my thanks.” And with that, Pendergast scooped up the plate, turned, and left the kitchen.

Adderly turned to Reggie, laughing, and slapped him on the back. “Well, well, Reggie, it looks like we have a new item on our menu. What do you think?”

“I guess so.”

“I’ll add it to the chalkboard.” And Adderly exited the kitchen, chuckling to himself, leaving Reggie and the rest of the staff staring at each other in openmouthed surprise long after the double doors to the restaurant had stopped flapping.

Benjamin Franklin Boyle sank the clam hoe into the muck and turned over a big, fat beauty. As he plucked it out it squirted in protest, and he tossed it into the hod, took a few steps forward — his hip waders sucking loudly in protest — sank the hoe in again and pulled open a new gash in the muck, exposing two more clams. A few more steps, another swipe with the hoe, a few more clams into the hod, and then he rested, leaning on his hoe while looking across the mudflats toward the river mouth and the sea beyond. It was slack low tide and the sun was setting behind him, purpling some thunderheads on the sea horizon. It was a lovely fall evening. Boyle inhaled the smell of the salt air, the ripe scent of the mudflats — a scent he loved — and listened to the cries of the gulls as they swept and wheeled over the Exmouth marshes.

Five years ago, at age sixty-five, Boyle had given up fishing and sold his dragger. That was hard work and the scallops just seemed to get smaller and harder to find, and in the last few years mostly what he’d pulled up were useless starfish that wrecked his nets. He was glad to have gotten rid of the boat, he got a fair price for it, and he’d saved up enough money for a penny-pinching retirement. But clamming gave him something to do, brought in a little extra money, and kept him close to the sea he loved.

Having caught his breath, he looked about the shiny flats. He could see the holes of the soft-shell clams everywhere. This was a good flat and nobody had clammed it for a while, because it was so hard to get to, with a walk through sharp marsh grass and a weary trudge across another, closer flat that had already been pretty much clammed out. Getting out wasn’t so bad, really, but returning with a forty-pound hod full of clams was a bitch.

He sank his hoe into the shiny, quivering surface of mud, then pulled back, exposing more clams. He kept up the rhythm, moving a few steps forward each time, swiping, overturning, plucking, tossing, then repeating the process. As he worked, his line approached the edge of the marsh grass, and once he arrived he paused to look about for another good line. He stamped his foot on the shivering mud, and saw a bunch of squirts go off to his right. That would be a good place to dig. But as he bent down to begin his line, he glimpsed, off in the twilight, something odd: what looked like a bowling ball with hair sticking up from it. It was attached to a lumpy form, partly sunken in the murky channel that snaked through the mud.