Basil Instinct

by Shelley Costa

  The second sign was a twin to the first and simply read, Closed for a Private Party. “This one will go up on Friday,” said Jonathan, very sensibly. Landon beamed as if his crush had just found a brand-new planet in a distant solar system.

  “Good work,” I said, clapping Jonathan on the back, which sent up an invisible little scent-cloud of the hypnotic cologne. Everyone was happy. Jonathan headed through the double doors to post the first sign on the front door.

  My fingers sorted out some of the waves in his brown hair as I told Landon about the new help. “Dish,” was all he said as he happily closed his eyes. I covered Corabeth Potts—which was more than I could say about her shorts—in a couple of sentences. The skeleton rubber bands, the scene from Harry Potter (sounds like Order of the Phoenix, Landon opined), the anxiety sweat, the natural grace. He didn’t need to know too much about her since she’d be on Paulette’s team out front. But I had hired Georgia Payne for Landon, so I went into some detail.

  Georgia Payne looked to me to be in her late thirties—forty, tops—and was back in school, from what I could tell, as kind of a refresher course, having been out of the food industry for a while. No wedding band, no mention of kids. A petite blonde with dark roots. Conservative but stylish dresser what with her long sleeves and below-the-knee skirt on a summer day. A quiet personality. “She’s here for Nonna’s big Belfiere thing to make your life easier, Lan, okay?”

  He liked the idea of personal help. “Understood.” Then, taking in a big breath, he gave me a probing look. “As long as you can stand by her kitchen skills, dollink, because I don’t want to have to teach.”

  I studied the ceiling. “Let’s put it this way,” I said judiciously, “when I announced we were going to be making polenta next time, Georgia Payne wanted to know where we keep the flat whisk.” Only the initiated would know that a flat whisk keeps the cooking polenta off the sides of the pan, where it likes to hang out.

  Landon gave me his flat, broad smile, contented. “She’ll do,” he said, tipping his chin at me. “Oh,” he suddenly remembered, “Numquam Nimis Multi Cultri?”

  I nodded. “The Belfiere motto?”

  “I went online to the Latin Forum and posted it, asking for a translation.”

  I was interested. “And?”

  “And,” he preened, “I got a hit.”

  “So what is it? ‘Protect Your Nonnas’?”

  Landon gingerly slid off the stool, curling a forearm around my neck. In a low voice, he told me, “ ‘Never Too Many Knives.’ ” We gave each other that look in the old movie when the snowbound weekend guests realize they’re locked in with the killer.

  At that moment Kayla shouldered her way through the back door, toting a yellow bin of produce from the back of her van. I crossed my arms, and, despite my best efforts, my nostrils flared. Someday I’d really have to learn a proper malocchio at my nonna’s knee. Just as an insurance policy against the maddening worst of Kayla. Today she was wearing light denim shorts overalls and a pink floral tank top. Her tanned legs ended in steel-toed boots. It was, admittedly, kind of a cute look if what you were going for was Farmer Chic. A matching floral stretch headband was controlling her gobs of curly hair.

  I found myself wondering what she was wearing to the dinner dance.

  At the Philly Ritz Carlton.

  As Joe Beck’s date.

  “You can just set the order down on the far counter, Kayla,” I told her with a grim smile. I couldn’t manage anything better than grim. She lifted an eyebrow and I swear she was trying to communicate that she was not communicating something. Did she really think she was putting one over on me about kicking up her steel-toed heels with Joe Beck? Two can play at that game, missy. “Things good in Kayla Land, cuz?”

  She boosted the load with an assist from her hip, and once she had set it on the counter, she turned to me, with a hand on one hip. “Busy,” she said with the kind of smile that made da Vinci slap oils on canvas.

  Busy!

  Busy!

  I didn’t need to post anything on an online forum to know that “busy” translates into Poor little Eve, your lawyer and I are doing the electric slide, and, honey, it has nothing to do with a dance floor.

  “You?” she challenged.

  I looked demure. “Also,” was all I said, with a quick look at my fingernails.

  “Ah.” She grinned, heading for the back door for the rest of the order. She actually wrinkled her generous nose at me and said like a confiding girlfriend, “Sandor?” With a bleat, she dashed out.

  So many things started happening at once that I didn’t have time to contemplate a witty comeback. Sandor himself actually leered and toothlessly grinned his way through the laying of the carpet (better the carpet than me) at the back door, making some kind of gesture that I believe was meant to put me in mind of bedsheets. The depressed and Austrian Arne was stacking table linens in the store room and muttering to himself that no good could come of it. I figured he was referring either to Belfiere or to the Phillies/Yankees series starting that night.

  Maria Pia started dashing in and out of the office, her skirts all in a swirl, proclaiming something about pantry pests and new shipments of semolina flour for the saltimbocca—throughout the raving, her hands had tugged her thick salt-and-pepper hair into the stratosphere.

  At the fateful moment I spotted Choo Choo out in the dining room, the only voice I was hearing that made sense was Mick Jagger’s going on about Jumping Jack Flash, which should tell you something. “Choo Choo!” I yelled, cursing myself for not remembering to put on my tennis shoes.

  At that moment he was leaning on the podium—as maître d’, his center of operations—chatting up James Beck, Joe’s florist brother, who used to make my sore heart break out into four-part harmony until, well, he didn’t anymore. James was the taller Beck brother, the married Beck brother, the Beck brother you want to turn to in an orchid emergency, and the one who leaves a trail of swooning males and females, if what you like is obvious good looks and you don’t mind the total absence of dimples.

  “Choo Choo!” I yelled again, unmindful of the swarming vendors with all their various produce and products. My big cousin, who had dropped another two pounds, looked at me blandly like he was tuning in to some distant sound that was only infinitesimally interesting.

  Too bad the object of his affection, Vera Tyndall, was smiling at me and smoothing out the linen cloth across table 8. Shame to see the big guy scamper like a bunny. I headed toward him, my jaw working. This was the man who had talked me into babysitting the CRIBS crew, who were on the lookout for their first felony the way normal people scouted out prom dates.

  “Hi, Eve,” he said, turning back to working out an order with James Beck.

  Apparently I wasn’t transmitting my displeasure sufficiently.

  He stood his ground.

  Was my voice alone not fearsome enough?

  I flung my arm up in a broad sweep in the Italian gesture that translates as If your head were a bocce ball I would pitch it from here to kingdom come. “What’s the matter with you?” Turning to James, I smiled. “Would you excuse us, please, James?” With that I walked my monumental cousin out the front door, where I backed him up against the window. “Why are you trying to kill me, Chooch?”

  He looked genuinely perplexed. “What are you talking about? Oh, say, how did your first class go?”

  I gave him a little whoosh of a push, which was like taking a feather duster to Mount Rushmore. “Well, if the goal was Eve flambé, then I’d say it went pretty well.”

  The light dawned. “The CRIBS kids, right? Yeah”—he actually chuckled—“they can really push buttons, huh?”

  “We’re not talking merry pranksters, Choo Choo.” I got in his face. “They tried to set me on fire. And now, thanks to you, I’ve got them for a month. In a classroom filled with knives and rolling pins and
marble cutting boards and cast-iron skillets and—” With a yelp I pressed my lips together and whispered, “meat grinders.” I shook my head, dazed. “It’s like Supermarket Sweepstakes for delinquents.”

  Thoroughly entertained, Choo Choo waved dismissively. “They’re just yanking your chain.”

  “After they’ve wrapped it around my neck!”

  The big guy pulled me in for a hug—practicing for a shot at Vera, I thought—and reminded me how our job as humans is not just to provide good food but also—here he took a deep breath, signaling he was lobbing something profound at me—to be good food. I had a quick, disturbing image of myself trussed up in a roasting pan with Mitchell and Slash wearing oven mitts, but I pushed it from my mind as Choo Choo held me at arm’s length. He gave me that look of boundless Choo Choo Bacigalupo faith (which usually entails the sacrifice of others) and cheesy love for Vera Tyndall.

  “It’ll settle down,” he said magnanimously.

  “You owe me,” I hissed at him, my brown eyes locked on his own. For a brief moment I wished it had been Little Serena’s brother who had taken off to live the dream at Disney World, leaving Little Serena here for me to enlist in the Kayla Wars.

  My cousin opened his hands wide and said, totally reasonably, “Whatever I can do.”

  I told him I’d let him know.

  * * *

  When Georgia Payne arrived mid-afternoon with Corabeth Potts, I swept them into the office first to present them to Nonna, whose hair by that time was horizontal. She was so awash in paperwork, purchase orders, and diagrams of seating arrangements for the Psi Chi Kappa (the Psycho-Chefs Club) that the new help didn’t register.

  The petite Georgia Payne looked quite nice in a yellow blouse with long ruffled sleeves, a white linen skirt, and a cool silver necklace that held a tourmaline in what looked like a fine silver birdcage. Georgia said appropriate things, and Corabeth, still in her Michelin tube top and plaid short-shorts, flapped an arm in greeting and said nothing, which was a good choice.

  In the kitchen, Landon, who was wrist deep in homemade pasta dough, hid his surprise at the new help pretty well. I figured the skeleton hair decorations were more a jolt than I had thought they would be. He said something funny and nice to Corabeth while he managed to check out the ensemble by pretending to look for his rolling pin, but to Georgia he seemed a bit tongue-tied, muttered a “hi” and turned back to what would become dough for tonight’s mushroom-and-truffle ravioli.

  Did the lovely and unsuspecting Jonathan suddenly have some competition?

  And was it female?

  When Vera and Paulette barreled into the kitchen to get the Target bag and my instructions for the nuclear makeover of Corabeth, I glanced at my pale Landon, who was kneading the dough the way he normally would, only his green eyes were staring straight ahead. Maybe when he came face-to-face with the new sous chef, he didn’t like the idea after all, even though it meant a second set of capable hands. Off the makeover team went, with Corabeth trundling along behind them, but it wasn’t until ten minutes later that Landon even realized they were gone.

  I was cleaning and slicing mushrooms with the southpaw Georgia, who was slicing at the speed the Roadrunner beep-beeps his way out of the frame, despite the bandage on her hand, when Landon seemed to come out of his reverie. He looked around with a sudden jerk, and asked where the girl with the draggin’ tattoo had gone. At which the reserved Georgia threw back her head and laughed, and I saw Landon warm up.

  He complimented Georgia on her necklace, she told him she inherited it from her mother, and Landon asked whether she knew that men’s underarm sweat produces the same sex pheromone found in truffles. She pretended she didn’t, and Landon was pretending he didn’t know she was pretending, but this little charade seemed to suit them both as they settled into new roles, so I figured they’d be all right.

  Because slicing and dicing mushrooms is just about as much hilarity as I can stand for any twenty minutes you care to name, I started grilling the new sous chef on matters of interest. To me. “So, where are you from, Georgia?”

  She smiled. “Here and there.” She waggled her head like she was trying to remember. “Outside Philly.”

  “And your folks?”

  She raised two carefully arched eyebrows at me.

  I shrugged. “What do they do?”

  “I was adopted.”

  I said “I see” when I didn’t see anything except diced truffles.

  Hunched over his floured bread board, Landon heaved a sigh.

  Like a girlfriend, I said teasingly, “Any—significant others?” What a stupid term.

  She glanced at the ceiling. Finally: “My cat Abbie.”

  Landon, who owned the splendid tabby Vaughn, nodded over his ravioli dough.

  That silenced me for all of fifteen seconds, when I said to Georgia, “So . . . where have you been working?”

  “Oh, I’ve knocked around for a while now.” Then, with some spirit: “Most recently I was selling gloves at Bloomingdale’s.”

  I tried to get into the swing. “Men’s?”

  She smiled, the expert knife work still going. “Women’s.”

  And now we were having fun together. “Wool?”

  “Calfskin,” she countered, the little flirt.

  “Were you living in”—let’s see, where could she sell gloves at Bloomingdale’s and afford to live?—“Brooklyn?”

  “Queens,” she said triumphantly. And added, “Ha!”

  First we laughed, then we shifted the diced mushrooms and truffles into one bowl, and before I could even reach for the bottle, Georgia drizzled just the right amount of olive oil over it with a circling flourish. Out of the corner of my eye I caught Landon studying her.

  “And before gloves?”

  She smiled but it was paired with a steely look. “Oh, I knocked around—”

  And together we finished, “Here and there.”

  Her hands paused midair. “Right,” she said softly.

  At that moment Li Wei showed up, plugged into his iPod, wearing gray ripstop cargo shorts and a black motorcycle jacket. When I introduced him to Georgia Payne, he lit up and sang a soulful few bars of “Georgia on My Mind,” then finished with a bland look that makes you wonder whether you were imagining it.

  We kept working, picking up the pace as I glanced at my watch, dealing with interruptions from Choo Choo, Jonathan, and Giancarlo, who wanted permission to play the soundtrack from the Plácido Domingo version of Carmen. (Personally, I prefer the Stones, but said fine.) I had all but forgotten the fact that three weeks ago my nonna’s boyfriend turned up murdered on the very spot where I was presently chopping tomatoes for a pomodoro sauce.

  Li Wei started emptying the industrial dishwasher from the night before, so the noise level increased, what with clattering pots and plates competing with dangerous tenors and scoffing sopranos. Then he started on the flatware. But there was a pause in the activity at the moment Maria Pia emerged from her office lair. I sensed her presence the way animals can tell the tsunami is on its way. “Tomorrow at one,” she declared, “she’s coming to check out the preparations for Friday night.”

  I pushed back my hair. “Who’s coming, Nonna?”

  “Fina Parisi.”

  At that moment a knife hit the beautiful black-and-white tiled floor.

  * * *

  Over the next couple of hours, once I could tell Georgia was fine on the prep work, I paid some bills, complimented our aged bartender, Giancarlo, on his new Clark Kent eyeglasses, and debated with our pianist, Mrs. Crawford—resplendent in a white cocktail dress embroidered with gold—whether chiffon has indeed had its day. Landon settled it unequivocally when he breezed by and flung “Never!” at us.

  An hour before we opened on this third night of Grief Week, Paulette and Vera returned with Corabeth, who was actually, well, d
ressed. The shirt and pants from Target, as a quickie spin on the Miracolo look, fit her pretty well. But the biggest change was from the neck up. Her short, shrieking-red hair had been freed from the skull rubber bands, dyed ash blond, brushed, and swept behind her ears. With some bronzing, plucking, volumizing, and glossing, this CRIBS girl now looked kind of like Michelle Williams on steroids.

  Our new sous chef, Georgia, hit it off with sommelier Jonathan, and they were discussing whether the merits of Barbaresco had indeed been overlooked when the mandolin and clarinet players showed up early to set up the framed photo shrine on the bar and meet Dana Cahill to go over the repertoire. The fact that they even had a repertoire was news to me, but I always enjoyed it when I saw all over again how Miracolo has a life of its own. All the friendships among the staff.

  Leo, the mandolin player, offered that his hip had never been the same since he had a botched hip replacement five years ago. And Dana piped up that she had never been the same since Clinique stopped making Ruby Red lipstick five years ago, at which everyone else laughed, and she looked at them in wonderment. They all got more out of newbie Georgia Payne than I had success at finding out about women’s calfskin gloves, but it was fine by me.

  If the chemistry turned out to be as right as it seemed, maybe I would keep Georgia on after Friday night. Also Corabeth, who was looming over Paulette, with her big arms crossed, as my best server showed her the ropes. The big girl had shown an interest in the framed photos, alternately clucking and tsking, which endeared her right away to the band, and especially to Dana, when her glossy lips quivered at the shot of poor little Booger.

  Now that everybody was as nicely bonded as pomodoro sauce to rigatoni, I donned my white lightweight chef jacket and toque, schooled the servers on the specials, and took my post at my beloved Vulcan stove, the stove of the gods. Together we whipped up a northern Italian version of Olympian fare on a daily basis.