Maison Hafsid was something else. No one was polite. At least not down in the kitchens. And what constituted conversation was a hard-edged banter likely to get you knifed in most bars in Seattle. Ear-bleeding nu/Rai ripped from a corner-mounted wall speaker. In the kitchen Raf didn't speak at all. He screamed into the steaming chaos. And others shouted back. Mostly about his parentage, race, sexual orientation and short life expectancy.
Anyone who took offense at Chef Edvard worked elsewhere. Actually, anyone who took offense, full-stop, left for some other industry: one not driven by impossible hours, heavy attitude and dirt-cheap drugs.
"You," he said to Raf, next time Raf staggered by under the weight of a lamb carcass. "I want to know where to file you."
Three kinds of scum ended up in kitchens apparently. Those on the run too stupid to do anything else, brilliant and spoilt artists, and finally mercenaries, those in it for the money, mostly solid and reliable line cooks. Some American years back had given his name to this law, but Chef Edvard didn't mention that, he merely wanted to know which label fitted Raf.
"All of them," said Raf.
"All?" The elderly Madagascan eyeballed his newest recruit for a long second, then slapped Raf on the shoulder. "Misfits are good," he said, his Arabic thicker than coffee grounds, "they stay longer."
Everything Raf had learnt at Café Antonio was unlearnt at Maison Hafsid. At Hafsid no one ever served swordfish or blackened chicken, even if customers asked politely. Right now Raf's job was to braise those chunks of lamb (bone and fat and skin and all). The ironically crude chunks reached the table drizzled with a custard-yellow sauce made from cloudberries flown in from Table Mountain. Given the price Maison Hafsid charged for its speciality dishes, Raf could only imagine the berries travelled first class.
"Faster," Edvard barked.
Raf nodded, but the chef was shouting at someone else.
On a marble slab to Raf's left were a series of bowls filled with herbs and spices, which a kid of about eleven kept topped on a regular basis by ripping handfuls of wilting oregano from fat twigs or grating nutmeg against a tiny grid hung on a string around his neck. Raf used a lot of oregano and nutmeg; also olive oil, anchovies, dried juniper berries and small pods for which Raf didn't yet have a name. The chef seemed to use those in almost every dish.
A great aluminium pot roiled on the edge of a hundred degrees at a station behind Raf, creating its own microclimate, waiting to soften whatever pasta was required. Linguine mostly, with a weird locally made thread noodle that came semiopaque and ended up near invisible; not that much of either got eaten to judge from the quantity scraped from dirty plates into a metal trough that ran the edge of one wall. The noodles and pasta seemed to be something between a base and a garnish.
"A hand to six . . ."
The chef's eyes found Raf, who held up five fingers and nodded. Five minutes to braise the lamb for table six and pass it across for plating. That was the difference between home cooking and doing it for real. Restaurant food got dressed, just like the customers. And an artistic sprig or a near-odourless/tasteless swirl of sauce could hide culinary sins as easily as discreet makeup and good clothes could hide sins of the flesh. Warm plates, flamboyant furnishings, elegant garnishes and adequate food, the demands of haute cuisine at Maison Hafsid were less than its devoted clientele imagined.
"Three," shouted the chef and Raf swirled his pan, smelling oil, seared flesh and oregano. Across the other side of the cellar was a wood oven for which Raf sometimes seared lamb or beef to be roasted, so that no steam from raw meat might dampen the oven's desertlike dryness. It wasn't really Raf's job but Raf was racking up favours, taking shifts he didn't want, helping to hump crates too heavy for one person alone. He'd even rescued a cucumber sauce for wild greyling with a nylon sieve, a splash of Chablis and nerves of steel, decanting it onto a warm plate seconds ahead of the plate heading for the hatch.
Mind you, Raf probably wouldn't be forgiven that one. The sauce came from an Algerian sous-chef and the deputy was less than happy. Particularly now Chef Edvard had decided Isabeau's earlier boast about Raf's having been a sous-chef himself in Seattle was true.
To test the claim, Raf had been handed a red fish of a species he'd never seen and been told, in front of a watchful kitchen, to find a knife and fillet the thing.
Pulling a Sabatier from the back of his belt, Raf oiled up a sharpening block and set about giving himself an edge. All the while checking the fish, noticing its every curve and the geometric relationship between anus, eyes and upper fin, the way the scales changed near the tail.
When Raf cut, it was swift, taking his stance and the looseness of his wrist from a Sushi master who ran a dockside café his old boss Hu San often frequented. Raf spent one memorable evening there near the beginning of his time with the Five Winds, as Seattle's most influential triad was named. And for a while, with tiny dish after dish reaching their table and Hu San chewing in silence, her eyes closing at particularly impressive slivers of raw fugu, Raf thought he was in disgrace. And then, when she looked up and smiled almost without thinking, he realized she intended to sleep with him.
He still hadn't started to shave and she was in her late thirties, maybe more, but her tastes were for the raw and the fresh. Whatever, the moment never arose and as her Lincoln pulled up outside his flat Hu San dismissed him with a polite good-bye and left him standing on a sidewalk in the rain.
Raf cut three times in all. Once to gut the fish and discard its entrails. Once to fillet one side of the fish and once to fillet the other. The skin he'd already removed in a single scoop of his thumb, not using his knife and not damaging the flesh.
"Done?" Chef Edvard had asked, his face impassive.
Raf nodded and waited while the chef told a boy to fetch a set of scales. First Edvard weighed the entrails, then both fillets and finally bones and skin.
"Not as bad as I expected."
Behind his eyes Raf scowled but he kept silent, eyeing a strip of skin so clean it could have been sent for tanning. Not a flake of flesh clung to the spine or ribs, the cut at tail and gills was near perfect.
"I'm out of practice," Raf announced finally and the skeletal chef almost smiled.
Then came three questions.
Where had he cooked before?
Raf named Antonio's pizza place and a five-star hotel in Seattle so famous that even the silent and anxious Isabeau recognized its name.
"This true?"
That question was for Isabeau. Asked almost politely. No one had said anything to Raf but he'd caught the glances. There wasn't a single person in the kitchens unaware of her brother's murder. Even Chef Edvard was making allowances.
"He's been working for Antonio," she said. "I can't guarantee the other."
"Why do you want to change jobs?"
"Debts," said Raf. "Waiting to be paid."
"I work my staff harder," Chef Edvard told Raf flatly. "Believe me I make you sweat for every extra cent."
And so the slot became his, at least until Idries' cousin got released from prison, if he did. Two points went unspoken. One, should Raf turn out okay then Edvard might keep him on anyway, and two, if Idries' cousin was not released, then Raf had the job until someone better came along.
But first Raf had to do a day's suds diving to show he was serious. And do it for nothing. Those were the rules. So he scraped plates, hosed them down and loaded them into a washer the size of a small truck for as long as it took for some elderly Philippino to fry his own fingers in a red-hot wok–which was about four hours. The man wanted to work on but Edvard insisted on wrapping his hand in a towel filled with ice and ordered him home. Only the promise of a full day's pay got the crying man out of the kitchen and into a corridor that ended in steps leading up to an alley at the back. Even then someone had to walk the man up the stairs and shoo him out into the alley.