“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.
Consuelo returned. “Who the fuck was that?”
“She said she’s a writer,” said Mick.
“What does she want with us?”
“I told her to fuck off.”
“She’s a guest.”
“I was polite.”
“You were polite,” repeated Consuelo, infusing the words with all the amused skepticism they could contain. Mick realized he was being teased. She was subtle. On hearing of her promotion to the meat station thanks to Mick’s recommendation, she had nodded at him briefly, a typically economical gesture Mick had interpreted as her version of clicking her heels together with joy.
“I want to talk to her,” said Consuelo. “On my break.”
Mick squinted at her. Consuelo’s face held a blank expression that revealed nothing. Mick went back to his quail. He felt a twinge of unease, but there was no reason for it, at least nothing he could pinpoint, so he let it go.
After another decadent dinner in the fine-dining restaurant, Christine and Valerie went back up to the crescent-shaped teak pool bar. They perched on high stools amid a talking, laughing, drinking crowd. People swam in the pool and floated on rafts. The same jazz band from the night before had set up on the other side of the pool. Valerie, who seemed to have thrown her determination to stay sober overboard, was halfway into her second martini. “Meanwhile, this hot Eastern European chef was a total dick,” she said. She had been telling Christine about her slow progress so far with conducting interviews. “He ignored me, anyway.”
“He was probably working,” said Christine. She flashed on the drunk, tough-looking Hungarian guy who’d sat next to her at the hotel bar in Long Beach, the one who’d hit on the waitress and made her run for cover. “I wouldn’t mess with professional chefs. They’re all supposedly ex-cons and thugs.”
“Just my type, right?” Valerie took a cigarette out of a chrome-plated cigarette box she’d pulled from her pocket and lit it with a sleek lighter. Christine hadn’t known she was in possession of all this equipment. Valerie had quit and started again through the years so many times Christine had lost track. Valerie loved renouncing vices, but she equally loved taking them up again, as if this cycle of abstinent virtue and decadent self-destructiveness were a private, seasonal rhythm that anchored her in some way. Christine, who always felt ploddingly steady and sensible, adored this about her friend.
“Who do these chefs think they are in their stupid white aprons and Crocs?” Valerie said, exhaling a stream of smoke as she talked. “I mean, seriously. Why does cooking bring out the douchebag in men? Actually, writing does too. Actually, everything does.”
“Farming doesn’t,” said Christine. “At least, not as obviously.”
“I’m gonna stalk that fucker and make him talk to me,” said Valerie. “He’s too high up the food chain for my purposes, but now it’s a point of pride.”
“In other words, he’s hot,” said Christine.
“A hot douchebag,” said Valerie. “Just my type.”
“So let me ask you something. Why didn’t you try to get a job on a cruise ship if you wanted the real story? Like Barbara Ehrenreich. Instead of interviewing workers, work alongside them.”
“I’m doing the Studs Terkel thing instead,” said Valerie. “Like an update of Working. The socioeconomic landscape he was writing about has totally changed. I want to give contemporary workers that kind of voice. I see my cruise-ship chapter as an answer to David Foster Wallace’s snarky essay, which frankly hasn’t aged well.”
Christine laughed; this was so like Valerie, to appropriate the work of writers she admired while bragging that she would write something better. “It is? How?”
“Wallace just went on a cruise by himself as a skeptical dude with an attitude. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a brilliant and funny essay, but that all seems too obvious now. We get it. The world is so much bigger now, so much more complicated. And I want to go deeper. I want to uncover the real story. There’s a class structure on this ship, there’s an economy, there’s a system that mirrors the global one. There are thirty different nationalities in the working staff, the waiters and bartenders and cooks and room stewards and engineers and dishwashers. No Americans. All the Americans are above decks, in entertainment and on the bridge and among the guests. But below, it’s all foreigners, most from Third World countries. All cruise ships are the same.”