This Book Is Not Good for You

by Pseudonymous Bosch

  Not that Cass would notice his shoes anyway. She was always concerned with more serious things. Like tornadoes and floods and toxic sludge.

  When Cass and Max-Ernest walked in carrying armloads of books, Yo-Yoji decided to play it as though nothing were wrong.

  “Yo, dudes! What’s up?”

  He waved his violin bow in their direction.

  Cass and Max-Ernest both took involuntary steps backward.

  Yo-Yoji laughed. “Relax. There’s no sword in this bow. It’s just a normal violin. Like Master Wei would even let me use hers.”

  “That’s right. And you’re not done practicing—you have three minutes to go,” said Lily, crossing from the other side of the room to greet the newcomers.

  “As for you two—”

  She pulled a long, needlelike sword out of her violin bow and pointed it at Cass and Max-Ernest, who both tried (unsuccessfully) not to jump.

  “You two are next—we have to work on your reflexes. Jumping in fright is not a good defensive posture.” She smiled to show she was playing with them.

  “Hi, Lily.” Cass smiled back while sneaking a peek at the reluctant violin student.

  The first thing Cass noticed: he was wearing his yellow shoes—her favorite ones, although she would never think of mentioning it to him.

  “Where’s everybody else?” she asked, turning away from Yo-Yoji before he could see where she was looking.

  “Oh, they’ll be here in a minute. Pietro’s back in the archives with Mr. Wallace.” Lily nodded toward an opening in the tent.

  Through the opening, Cass and Max-Ernest could just make out the refrigerated trailer where the Terces Society Archives were now hidden. It was marked CAT FOOD in faded letters and had held the huge sides of meat that fed the “big cats” back when the circus was home to a team of hula hoop–jumping lions.

  A man in an airplane pilot’s uniform stepped out of the trailer and headed into the tent.

  “Who’s that?” whispered Cass, concerned. Strangers were unwelcome at Terces Society meetings, to say the least.

  “Oh, a visitor,” said Lily lightly. “He’s Swiss, I think.”

  “Guten Tag, Fraulein Cass,” said the mysterious pilot.

  “Um, guten Tag…”

  “That means ‘good day’ in German,” said Max-Ernest helpfully.

  “You don’t speak German,” said Cass.

  “Yeah, but I memorized how to say hello in a hundred languages.” *

  “Very wise, indeed,” said the stranger, removing his hat.

  Now Cass recognized him: “Owen?” Formerly a struggling actor/waiter, Owen was a master of disguise and frequently used his talents in the service of the Terces Society.

  “I didn’t know you were a pilot,” said Max-Ernest, impressed.

  Owen laughed. “I’m not really. But I am about to fly to Switzerland.”

  “So, did you learn to say hello in Italian?” Pietro, the old Italian magician, had entered the tent. He smiled at Cass and Max-Ernest. “How about a buon giorno for your old friend? Or do you prefer ciao?”

  “Buon giorno!” Cass and Max-Ernest repeated, thrilled to see their pink-cheeked, gray-mustached, and almost always cheerful-looking leader.

  He was followed closely by the tall, gaunt, and almost always pained-looking Mr. Wallace. The young Terces members waved halfheartedly at Mr. Wallace. He responded with a dry, raspy cough.

  Pietro frowned, touching his wildly bushy mustache. “I think there is maybe a mustache hair out of place. It is annoying me and tickling my nose. Max-Ernest, can you please pull?”

  Max-Ernest stared in surprise. “You want me to pull your mustache hair?”

  “Yes, if you please.” Pietro thrust out his nose, offering his mustache.

  “Uh, OK,” said Max-Ernest uneasily. Embarrassed, he reached forward and plucked an unruly hair. Pietro reeled backward.

  “Ow! Not that one, this one!” He pointed to another hair, curling jauntily upward around his nostril. “And be careful!”

  “Oh. Sorry.” Max-Ernest carefully tugged on the offending tendril and pulled out a small gray—

  mouse.

  It dangled by its tail, clawing at the air.

  “Eeek!” Max-Ernest dropped the mouse and it scurried across the dirt floor.

  Pietro grinned. “It is my new trick. I call it the Mouse-Stache. You like?”

  Max-Ernest guffawed loudly. “I think it’s great!”

  Nobody else said anything.

  Cass and Yo-Yoji glanced at each other. Yo-Yoji raised his eyebrows slightly as if to say, Can you believe them?

  Cass rolled her eyes as if to say, I know, they’re always like this. And then she smiled. Maybe it was time to forgive him, she thought.

  Maybe.

  Ten minutes later, Cass and Max-Ernest stood on the sideshow stage in front of a blackboard, drawing diagrams and writing down key points—just as if they were giving an oral report in school. (Not that they’d ever worked this hard on an actual oral report.)

  They were so excited they kept tripping over each other’s words:

  Cass Max-Ernest

  “We found out where the Midnight Sun are hiding!”

  “They’re in the Cote d’Ivoire. That’s Ivory Coast in French. That’s what they speak there—”

  “They’re on a chocolate plantation. And—”

  “The Cote d’Ivoire is in West Africa and that’s where most of the cocoa beans in the world come from, although they’re really cacao seeds—”

  “They have an orphanage!”

  “But we think it’s actually cover for a child labor camp—”

  “Do you know how much chocolate is made with child labor?”

  “Almost half the chocolate you buy! How ’bout that?”

  “Some people call it blood chocolate—”

  “Which is like blood diamonds—diamonds mined by slaves—”

  “And after this is all over I,m going to organize a chocolate boycott—”

  Now wait just a moment—a chocolate boycott?

  The very idea makes me shudder.

  With your permission, I will skip their lecture about the so-called evils of the chocolate trade and move on to the next part of their presentation. *

  I’m afraid I’m going to have to cut-in in the middle of a sentence, but I’m confident you’ll catch the drift:

  “… and here it is,” concluded Cass. She stepped off the stage and handed the magazine to Pietro.

  “I agree—this picture, it is not right. Thank you for sharing it with us,” said the old magician, studying the photo in We. “The reason Owen is going to Switzerland—it is because the Midnight Sun, through their business, Midnight Chocolate Incorporated, they are buying the chocolate companies all over the world. And now, we see, the chocolate plantations, too…”

  “So what are we going to do?” Yo-Yoji asked, standing.

  “Should we go to Africa to investigate?” asked Cass.

  “Absolutely.”

  Cass lit up. “That’s great! When do we go?”

  Pietro chuckled. He leaned back in his folding chair. “I was thinking of Owen. He will be halfway there already.”

  Cass couldn’t hide her disappointment. “But what about us?”

  “And how would you explain to your mother?” asked Pietro.

  “Then what can we do? There has to be something!”

  Pietro smiled at the eager young Terces member. “With the Midnight Sun, there is never the accident. Why the interest in the chocolate? We have been wondering and wondering. Is there perhaps a history of using the chocolate in the alchemy?”

  “Does it have something to do with the Secret?” asked Max-Ernest.

  The tent went quiet for a moment.

  Although the entire purpose of the Terces Society was to preserve and protect the Secret, the Secret was seldom mentioned aloud.

  “Everything they do, it has to do with the Secret,” Pietro said finally. “Nothing matters t
o the Midnight Sun except the immortality they think the Secret will give them. That’s why this chocolate business is so confusing.”

  He stood, kicking his folding chair aside.

  “What does the Midnight Sun want with the chocolate!? They never eat. They are like vampires. Is it for the money? But they have treasures going back centuries!”

  He gesticulated with his hands, expressing the depth of his frustration. “I do not understand what they are after—that Ms. Mauvais and my Lucian… I mean, Dr. L.” He spit out the name as if it were dirty.

  If Pietro was especially emotional on the subject of Dr. L, everyone in the tent knew why: Dr. L was Pietro’s twin brother, Luciano. He had been kidnapped by Ms. Mauvais as a young boy and raised to be her partner. The hatred between Dr. L and Pietro was now as strong as their love once was.

  Ending his long silence, Mr. Wallace held up a file stuffed with documents. Although he was an accountant by day, Mr. Wallace’s true profession was that of Terces Society archivist. “Whatever the Midnight Sun is doing with all this chocolate, we think the Tuning Fork is involved somehow.”

  “Tuning fork? You mean like in music? To tune your instrument?” asked Yo-Yoji. “I have one at home.”

  Mr. Wallace gave him a withering look. “Not that kind of tuning fork, something much older. It is a cooking utensil, but according to the legends of the alchemists, much more.”

  He pulled a rumpled piece of paper out of the file and passed it around. It was an old drawing of a two-pronged instrument that looked something like a musical tuning fork (if you know what a musical tuning fork looks like), but it was longer and more rough-hewn.

  “With the Tuning Fork in his hand, a Chef has the power to stir into being any taste in the world—as long as the eater has tasted it before,” said Mr. Wallace as the others examined the drawing. “The food of the fork acts on a person’s memory in a way that haunts him. And he wants it again and again.”

  “So what does it have to do with chocolate, Mr. Wallace?” Cass asked nervously. Mr. Wallace wasn’t the easiest person to speak to.

  “I was getting to that, if you would only wait a moment. As the story goes, the Tuning Fork was forged by an Aztec sorcerer and was first used to stir chocolate for the Aztec emperor. You know of course that chocolate came from the New World and was originally served only as a drink.”

  “Yeah, we knew that,” said Max-Ernest, as if they’d known it for years and hadn’t just read it on the Internet the night before.

  “The Tuning Fork, I thought it was only the myth,” said Pietro. “But who knows—Mr. Wallace, he may be right this time. Unlike the usual.” He laughed at his own joke. “Cass, Max-Ernest, Yo-Yoji—I want you to learn what you can about this Tuning Fork. Is it real? Where is it? Let us hope we can find it before the Midnight Sun do.”

  “Well, where do you think it might be?” asked Max-Ernest. “Are there any clues?”

  “Not many,” said Mr. Wallace. “Supposedly, the fork traveled to Europe with a monk in the late fifteen hundreds—”

  Rrrrring.

  A loud and ill-timed telephone ring stopped Mr. Wallace in the middle of his sentence.

  Her ears burning with embarrassment, Cass pulled her phone out of her pocket.

  “You brought a cell phone into a Terces Society meeting?” Mr. Wallace stared in a way that would give the strictest grade school teacher a run for her money. “Never mind how rude that is—think of the danger. It could be bugged.”

  “Oh, do not be so hard on the girl,” said Pietro. “Nobody has bugged her phone.”

  “It’s my mom,” said Cass sheepishly. “I’m supposed to meet her outside right now. She thinks this is… clown camp.”

  “Go on then,” said Pietro. “Answer.”

  Miserable, Cass clicked on her phone. “Hello, Mel… No, no, don’t get out of your car! It’s all over. There’s nothing to see… No, we aren’t tightrope walking, I swear…”

  Having a mother, even an adopted one, was terribly inconvenient when you were a member of a secret society. Perhaps, Cass thought, she didn’t want more parents, after all.

  A real chef needs only one knife. It is his sword. It is his best friend. It is everything to him.”

  A man of the type often called dark and swarthy stood behind a stove holding a large knife in his gloved hand.

  He wore a black chef’s coat and, covering his bald scalp, a black scarf decorated with skulls and crossbones. Adding to the pirate look: a hoop of gold in his left ear and a goatee ringing his mouth.

  He also wore a pair of extremely dark sunglasses.

  The glasses of a blind man.

  He raised the knife higher so it gleamed in the light. “A real chef would as soon give up his knife as cut off his arm.”

  Then he sliced his knife through the air if he were about to cut off his arm in demonstration.

  It was, in fact, a demonstration kitchen—a class-room clad in stainless steel—and facing him, on the other side of the stove, sat an audience of twelve.

  His students gasped. Then let out a collective sigh of relief when the knife landed point-down in a cutting board.

  “Other knives, like these here—bread knife, paring knife, boning knife—” He pulled the knives off a magnetic rack one by one, as easily as if he could see them. “They’re for amateurs.”

  He smiled slyly, the stove’s blue-flamed burners reflecting in his sunglasses. “Or for carnival tricks.”

  Without warning, he tossed the three knives into the air and juggled for a good thirty seconds. The knives spun so fast they were a blur.

  Until he let them drop in quick succession, chopping an array of vegetables so they splayed on the counter in perfect rainbow formation.

  An astonishing show, even if he hadn’t been blind.

  “Always keep your knives sharp. Contrary to popular belief, they’re much more dangerous when they’re dull.”

  The class burst into applause. Slightly muted applause because, like the chef, they all wore rubber surgical gloves. (He insisted that everyone keep their hands covered in the kitchen.)

  But there was one person whose applause was mute for the simple reason that she was not clapping.

  Yes, it was Cass. The pointy-eared and very grim-faced girl in the front row.

  Her mother had received the brochure for the cooking class not long after Cass first confronted her about the adoption. It boasted a picture of the chef in his sunglasses, posing like a movie star.

  “Look, Cass—what a great way for us to spend some time together!”

  “Why would we want to do that? We already live together,” Cass had pointed out.

  “Cass…!”

  “Well, why a cooking class?”

  “How about so we can start having some home-cooked meals?”

  “What’s the matter with Thai takeout? That’s what we used to always have.”

  “Exactly! I want to fill the house with the smells of cooking. The smells of childhood. The smells you will remember your entire life,” her mother had answered.

  But as far as Cass was concerned, her entire childhood had turned out to be a lie. She didn’t care how it smelled.

  And now here she was having to sit in class with her mother when she should have been hunting for the Tuning Fork with Max-Ernest and Yo-Yoji.

  “I can’t believe you like him. He’s such a showoff,” Cass whispered a few minutes later, when they were taking turns chopping zucchini.

  “How could he be a showoff?—he’s blind. Anyway, he has a right to be. Señor Hugo is one of the greatest chefs in the world. He invented the Cuisine of the Senses,” said her mother reverently. “And so handsome, too,” she added.

  As if on cue, Señor Hugo stepped up behind them. “Oh, I wouldn’t say invented. Maybe developed…”

  He spoke with the lisping Spanish accent known as Catalan—the accent of his native city, Barcelona, or as the Catalans pronounce it, Barthelona.

  “I’m sorry—may I…?
I can tell by the noise you make that you’re not using the proper motion.” The blind chef put his hand over Cass’s mother’s, gently correcting her chopping technique.

  She blushed. Cass rolled her eyes. Her mother’s crush was so obvious!

  “All the senses are important to a chef—but luckily for me, sight is the least important,” continued Señor Hugo.

  Finally, he let go of Cass’s mother’s hand. (A little too late, in Cass’s opinion.)

  “I always wait to taste the food I cook,” he said to the room at large. “Take a curry. First I dip my finger in and feel the texture. Is it too powdery? too foamy? I listen to the sounds. That hiss means it’s not hot enough. That sizzle? Too hot. And at every stage I smell smell smell. Did you know that what we think of as taste is mostly scent? By itself the tongue only detects five flavors: sweet, sour, salt, bitter, and one other—have any of you heard of umami?”

  “Yeah, it’s the taste of fat,” said Cass knowingly.

  Señor Hugo nodded. “Yes, some people say that, although I prefer to call it savoriness or deliciousness.”

  He turned to the room. “Only when a dish is finished do I dare taste it. And when I do, I feel as if at last I can see, as if I have gained a kind of second sight.… Even so, there are some things I can taste only in my head.”

  “You mean, there are things you can’t cook?” asked Cass’s mother in surprise. “A master chef like you.”

  “All artists strive to greater heights, do they not?” the chef responded. “Take chocolate, which is my passion…”

  “Oh, it’s my passion, too!” said Cass’s mother.

  Cass groaned inwardly.

  “My life’s ambition is to make the ultimate bar of chocolate. The best, the purest, the darkest chocolate of all time. As close to one hundred percent cacao as possible.”

  It figures he would make chocolate, thought Cass, imagining the pirate chef commanding a ship full of child slaves.

  “I keep trying to find the right equipment—”

  He gestured toward the wall behind the audience. Sitting on a long steel shelf were dozens of cooking devices: narrow siphons, bulbous whisks, tall Bunsen burners, double, triple, and even quadruple boilers. They looked like they belonged in a chemistry lab rather than in a kitchen.