Кейт Кристенсен - The Last Cruise

“She’s tough,” Mick added after a beat or two went by without a firm no. He guessed that this was one of the highest compliments in Laurens’s lexicon. “Her sense of timing is good, she knows the recipes of this era.”

“Well then,” said Laurens. “Consuelo can switch with Didier. Okay?”

“ Oui, Chef,” said Mick calmly. His second promotion in three days, and he’d secured a place for his underling.

“Is this clear, Jean-Luc?”

“Oui.” Jean-Luc swallowed a toad in his throat. “Chef.”

The main galley roared and clanked, the air vibrated with heat. In the midst of the controlled chaos, Mick wrestled a gigantic tray of briskets into an oven and turned to a forty-quart pot of simmering beef stock. Nearby, Consuelo braised duck legs. She looked neat and calm, swathed in an apron, her dark hair tucked under a scarf, focused on her work. After last night, Mick was now very aware of her. He found himself watching her, studying her. She was slender and strong and had a flat, moonlike face with full lips and almond-shaped eyes and a high, pale forehead. Her face wasn’t beautiful, but she had a macho samurai-like implacability alongside a Hispanic formality and, he thought, an underground sensuality. He imagined that softening her would be a challenge, but once you had her, she would surrender all at once. He thought of the way a mushroom resisted, sliding drily in the hot pan in clenched refusal until all at once it ran with juices and went limp and rich and fragrant.

Mick recalled his promise to himself that he would make it a point to get laid on this cruise. Of course he could not have anything to do with Consuelo—never someone who worked with him, especially an underling in such close proximity all day—but the fact that he was allowing himself to think about her in this way only proved how much he needed it. He imagined himself in that parallel, luckier life he would have been leading right now if things had gone as planned: in Paris, in Suzanne’s bed drinking red wine, naked, smoking, talking about where to go for dinner, or should they stay in… and then he stopped thinking about Suzanne altogether.

There were no windows in the galley. Giant vents sucked up the smoke and circulated the air, but they couldn’t do much when the kitchen was in full swing. Around him, the huge stainless steel room was all monochromatic hard polished surfaces, some fogged with steam, some bright with reflected light from the red-hot electric burners, some gleaming. The air was so thick and wet, Mick felt as if he were breathing hot seawater. He remembered his dream of swimming below the ocean with big friendly fish; had that been only two days ago? That was what he felt like now, shoulder to shoulder with his fellow cooks, no one saying much, everyone fierce and intent, staying out of one another’s way with practiced expertise and finesse. He knew this work, he knew exactly how to take charge of a meat station, although he had never run one before. He had been in Consuelo’s place for years. He had observed. And he’d been very keen to get a chance to prove himself. And the fact that Laurens van Buyten of all people had put him here… He could not fuck up, could not distract himself by imagining himself eating coq au vin with Suzanne at a table outside somewhere, licking the meat juice off her fingers, gathering his forces to fuck her again when they got back to her small aerie in the Marigny on a quiet, twisting lane, with its billowing curtains and high ceilings and the tiny kitchen he loved to fill with provisions he didn’t have to cook and could heap on a board after sex to eat picnic-style on her enormous platform bed, peaches and tomatoes, boules and cheeses, charcuterie with cornichons and grainy mustard, chocolate and pastries, and wine, always wine…

“Right behind you, Chef,” said Consuelo, passing by him fast, so closely he felt the air whoosh against his back, but she didn’t touch or even graze him.

He snapped out of the impossible reverie and went to the walk-in and brought out a crate of quail. One by one, he began spatchcocking them, pressing them into the cutting board and snipping out the backbones with shears to flatten them. He loved working with quail. They were a simple thing, little bodies that looked vulnerable, froglike, in the roasting pan; their bones were tiny, delicate, and their meat was tender, mild, responsive to whatever flavors it was bathed in. Tonight it would be paprika, fines herbes, and sea salt, cooked fast in butter in a hot pan, served on a bed of roasted potatoes with a side of julienned vegetables, so simple, yet so easy to get wrong: quail had to leave the pan still faintly pink at its core or else it dried out. But if you did that, you were rewarded with a delicacy beyond chicken, or pheasant, or duck, a tiny rich morsel of meat racked with wee bones that demanded slowness in its consumption, a conscious suspension of gluttony, a Zen focus in which dismantling this perfectly made small creature took your entire attention.

He was aware, in the back of his brain, that Laurens was sitting in his office right now, eating the lobster thermidor that Mick had made. This time, he had used Julia Child’s recipe as per Laurens’s implicit directive at the first staff meeting, which called for mushrooms and cognac and cream, and required him to cook the lobsters in a quick vegetable-infused broth. It was intensely fun to make and completely different from the method he’d been taught by Chef Viktor at the Eszterházy Restaurant. He’d grinned to himself the entire time he’d been cooking it, glancing happily between the book and the stove. It had been a while since he’d taken such a childlike pleasure in cooking. He’d made two: one for Chef, the other for Consuelo and himself to share. Of course Chef had recognized its author when he’d brought it in to him.

“Julia Child’s recipe,” he’d said, inhaling the steam that rose from the sauce.

Mick and Consuelo had devoured theirs, standing side by side at their station, grinning at each other. Then they’d thrown the plates and forks in a dish tub and seamlessly resumed whatever they’d been doing.

“Hello?” came a female American voice through the swinging doors. Mick ignored whoever it was. Let the prep cooks handle her, whatever she needed. “Excuse me?”

He went on spatchcocking quail. Press, snip, snip, stack.

A woman appeared at the end of the station, her head cocked playfully sideways to show that she knew she was intruding and was half apologetic about it, but she needed to talk to them so here she was. She was youngish, tall and skeletally thin, with curly, short reddish hair and glasses, a long, pale face, her upper lip curved and long and almost prehensile.

“I’m Valerie Chapin,” she said. “A freelance writer, I’m working on a book, and I wondered if I could take up a few minutes of your time. Not now, of course, but sometime during the cruise?”

Consuelo had watched her sidelong as she talked and then, without a word, vanished into the cold storage room.

Mick kept one hand on the quail he’d just finished, the other on his knife, and stilled his hands. “Maybe,” he said as curtly as he could. “You have to go through Chef van Buytens.”

“I’m so sorry,” she said, giving him a keen look, half flirtatious, with a predatory edge. “What is your name? Maybe we could meet later tonight or tomorrow, whenever you like, I’ll be available.”

Mick gave her a quick glare and resumed working.

She waited there, standing and watching him work, longer than he would have imagined was possible, even for someone as rude and arrogant as this woman clearly was, but finally she gave up and left the galley.