Badje’s owner asked him: “Glad to get some time off?”
It was a nice way to put it. “I am actually.”
“You are coming back to all this craziness, of course.”
“I will be, yes.”
“I’m looking forward to it. I think you will do something interesting.”
Jeremy glanced around for Benny and Dante.
They were opposite, at the Chart Room Restaurant tent. They were eating soup out of baked acorn squash bowls, ladling it gingerly into their mouths and comparing notes with a group of seven or eight people who had gathered around them. Dante’s face was set to an impassive princely expression as he held very quiet court, the shortest of the men in the group but the core of group attention.
Jeremy noticed something, even at this distance. When others would speak to Dante, or greet him, he would nod hello or exchange brief pleasantries. When Benny pointed her spoon at the squash bowl now—she was guessing at the ingredients of the soup, or commenting on the fact that the tiny squash itself was edible—Dante listened fixedly. Somebody who didn’t know Dante, hadn’t read first-hand his unearthly post-sexual presence, this might have offered a suggestion of intimacy between them. To Jeremy, it seemed only suddenly clear that Benny had something to fear. That somehow the barista, whose career had blossomed so magnificently, so quickly, would be made to pay.
Dante leaned closer. He was watching Benny’s lips as she spoke. She finished. He straightened, took a spoonful of soup and looked around as if nothing had been said.
The Inferno kiosk was opposite. People were standing two-deep in front of the cappuccino maker, waiting for their skinny frappuccinos. And there at the edge of the crowd was Trout, standing quite still and staring up at the Inferno logo on the tent front: the mythic-looking figure and the hair of soft steam, in his outstretched hand a steaming black brew. The coffee deity offering the world a rich cup of Honduran arabica.
He walked up slowly behind the little boy in his rolled-up jeans, white T-shirt, his nylon packsack slung over both shoulders, the buzz-cut head leaned back as he gazed upwards. Trout sensed him coming, turned and held up a hand for a silent high five.
“Who is that?” And here Trout pointed a stubby finger up at the Inferno logo.
“The Devil?” Jeremy suggested.
Trout shook his head. “Nahh,” he said. “Too obvious.”
Olli appeared just then and Trout scurried off through the barnyard, following the whiff of something. Olli was corporate casual, an expensive merino-wool pullover and khakis. A new Barbour. He was also drinking a glass of wine, Jeremy couldn’t help but notice.
“The wise child dispensed wise words, I trust,” Olli said.
Jeremy waggled his head. “Not bad, really.”
They looked around for a minute at the milling crowds, the foodies eating and comparing notes, the organic-hemp fusion component of the crowd walking slowly and looking up at the sky, communicating wordlessly with the Mother Earth that brought them such bounty.
“I saw Jules,” Olli said. If Jeremy took a small measure of judgment from this comment, thought Olli, so be it. The Monkey’s Paw closure had disappointed him more than he could tell his friend. He didn’t know why it had happened, he only had the sense that Jeremy hadn’t tried hard enough in the face of some crisis. How many times in the early years of Trout World had he fought bankers? Many. And here Jeremy was supposed to be some kind of culinary artist, according to Margaret, in which case giving up seemed a very bad thing. “I really liked Jules,” Olli finished.
They walked over to the fence around one of the fields and leaned on the top rail, looking out over the rows of arugula, mustard, chard, kale, radicchio and other high-end produce.
“Do you still talk?” Olli asked him finally.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
Olli shrugged. “Just wondering.”
“I got into some trouble. It was out of my hands. Sure, we talk.”
In the middle of the field opposite, there was a woman walking between the rows of arugula and kale. She was wearing black tights and a black sweater, Dayton lumberjack boots.
“Why didn’t you come to me?” Olli asked.
“I did once.”
“Different,” Olli said. “Start-up money. You weren’t facing a crisis. You could afford to be turned down.”
“I see.”
Sometimes he sounded harsher with Jeremy than he wanted to. Olli turned to his friend now and said, a fraction gentler: “I’m assuming it was a crisis this time.”
Jeremy nodded. “You ever hear of a kite? I got busted more or less.”
Olli raised his eyebrows. “Are you shitting me?”
“No. I had my ass saved.”
Olli nodded slowly. “Dante Beale.”
“I suppose you can relate to the big partner,” Jeremy said.
Olli turned to look back into the field. The woman in Daytons was wandering in a reverie, sipping her Chardonnay. Every five yards or so she leaned dramatically over and plucked arugula direct from the field, elevating a broad ass. When she stood again and ate the arugula, her head was tossed back, blond hair cascading.
“I call it the ‘Risk of the Big Heavy,’ ” Olli said. “Simply put: with heavy partners, the money is good, and that buys some of your freedom. That’s the deal, in essence.”
Jeremy looked at his friend. These words would be advice, then. “Sure,” Jeremy said. “Money for freedom.”
“After that, it’s ad hoc.” Olli was looking around the barnyard now. “The freedom isn’t necessarily the whole pay-off. You give up other things. Things you don’t negotiate at the outset. Parts of your vision. Parts of yourself. Handle this risk well and the big heavy is your friend. Handle it poorly and they become something else entirely.”
Jeremy nodded, chilled by these words. He didn’t think his own situation was particularly difficult to evaluate in this regard. The Monkey’s Paw had been a spontaneous product of what Jules and he had been together, the sum of their culinary selves. Which part of that vision had he not bartered away?
“What’s he like?” Olli asked.
“Dante is a killer,” Jeremy said. “He takes care of business.”
Olli smiled. He didn’t think his friend knew the half of it yet. “And do I get to meet this killer?” he asked.
He did. They all met up in front of the Inferno kiosk. Margaret and Benny found each other at the tent giving out goat’s milk gelato and decided to get the group together for drinks. Dante offered his place.
Jeremy was part of the chatty circle that formed but feeling a little zoned out. Olli’s observations had put him in a dark enough frame of mind without having to see Jules walk by with a man he’d never seen before, bumping shoulders as they walked, leaning in slightly to hear the words of the other. He raised a hand, started to say hello, but stopped mid-word and brought his hand down. She disappeared around the corner of the greenhouse, the blur of her dwindling down the lane towards the Left Coast Grill tent.
Olli and Dante were appraising each other. Dante’s face responded approvingly when he established with whom Olli was now strategically allied.
As they talked, Trout stepped wordlessly between his mother and father, and gazed up fixedly at Dante alone. Dante glanced down, and Jeremy watched as his normally impenetrable facial expression transformed. The hardness went out of it. The blunt came off his eyebrows, the Uzi left the nose, which became merely short and snouted. The bristly dome of his scalp seemed suddenly fragile as a new-born, and he tried for a smile. An unusual, placating smile, as if Trout were an old schoolmate who’d once licked him convincingly.
“Oh, Dante,” Benny said, mildly alarmed. She fumbled in her purse and produced a handkerchief. “You’re bleeding.”
Which he was, a worm of blood having emerged from his left nostril. Dante wadded Benny’s handkerchief to his face and tried to laugh through it. “Sorry. Sorry,” he said. “Just go ahead to the cars, I’ll be along.
”
Benny hung back. Jeremy noticed the handkerchief reddening as he turned to leave.
On their way to the car, walking between Jeremy and Margaret, Trout said, “Look.”
And they noticed the TV crew filming the row of marigolds next to the lane. The heavy-set camera man was holding the camera out, swinging it across the yellow blossoms for a sweeping, dramatic shot that Jeremy imagined opening or closing the segment.
Margaret began to giggle.
“What’s funny?” Olli asked.
“They’re filming the flowers,” Margaret said, laughing louder.
“Maybe they’ll ask them questions too,” Jeremy said.
They arrived before Olli and Margaret. Dante and Benny went up towards the house, but Jeremy impulsively returned to the street to look back up at the two houses side by side.
The streetscape was familiar. The old house sat next to Dante’s, now dark, uninhabited. Both houses were set back off the crescent in a forest of cedars with salal undergrowth. The Professor’s house was the more imposing, with a high, shingled roof and dormer windows staring out from between the trees. Dante had the architect’s house, an Erikson. His work didn’t sit on the ground, it emulated the terrain, in this case forming a low shelf that spread among the trees and traced the lip of an escarpment that plunged to the rear of both properties. Dante’s house had a flat tar-and-gravel roof covered with deep green moss.
The Professor’s lawn was cut and trimmed.
“I have my landscapers do it,” Dante said, who was waiting at the front door when Jeremy returned up the drive.
“Thanks. He’s forgetful.”
Olli and Margaret pulled up in the Land Rover, waving. Dante looked for a moment like he didn’t remember who they were, then turned and went inside with Benny.
“You ever carry a sleeping kid, Chef?” Olli said, from the back door of the Rover.
“Gee. I don’t know. Is there a special technique?”
Trout was sitting in place, shoulder belt holding him upright, head lolled to one side. He was snoring.
“Just like carrying a large prosciutto ham I would imagine,” his father said.
Margaret smiled, collecting her things from the front passenger’s seat.
The house was a sprawling split-level. From the black stone entrance hall, stairs stretched down to the lower level and up to the living room, the upper terraces, the wide-open kitchen and dining areas, and from there to other rooms that spread out to the right and left. In the centre of the house was a fifteen-foot-wide stone chimney with fireplaces in either side, one facing into the living room the other towards the kitchen. The chimney ran through the floor and down to fireplaces on the lower level.
“Come on in,” Dante called from the living room as they entered the foyer. He was up in the living room, pulling bottles out of a cabinet and setting them on a folding mahogany table. Scotch, vodka, gin, port. He kept his back to them, calling from the far end of the room: “If Trout wants to play downstairs, there’s a box of toys down there somewhere.”
When he turned, Dante’s eyes locked on Jeremy holding Trout.
It hadn’t been that difficult after all, Jeremy discovered. Although Trout’s head fell heavily across his shoulder and he thought it might have been drool he felt on his neck, at least the kid’s legs crimped around his waist in a subconscious grip, sensing true sleep, deep, bed-sleep was near. Jeremy smiled back at Dante. Look what I found.
Trout was still snoring, louder.
“Well, fine then,” Dante said, lowering his voice, but his stare did not easily disengage. While Margaret and Olli made their way up into the living room, he continued to stare, processing something. The connection between Jeremy and Margaret? Between Jeremy and Olli? The connection between him and Trout? Was he just remembering hearing somewhere, sometime in the past, that Jeremy had a godson?
Dante directed Margaret to an unused bedroom down a hallway behind the kitchen. She motioned Jeremy to follow, which he did. “You’ll be talking him back to sleep before this is over,” Trout’s knowing mother assured. And sure enough, set on the bed, sneakers removed, Trout was awake.
“Hey there, adults,” he said, looking from one of them to the other. Margaret got him under the covers and kissed him on the forehead.
“Uncle Jay-Jay’s going to say goodnight, then you sleep. Roger?”
“Roger.” Thumbs up.
She flicked off the light, leaving only a swirl of orange coming into the room from the hall. Jeremy sat on the bed and looked around. There was a window on the far side of the opening onto a narrow stretch of garden between the house and Dante’s greenhouse, where Jeremy knew he kept dozens of orchids.
“So,” Trout said.
“So, bedtime,” Jeremy said.
“But it’s not.”
Jeremy pretended to study his watch closely. “But it is. Your. Bed. Time.”
“My time, yes. My bed, not.”
Clever. “You know who’s bed this is?”
Trout said: “The Devil’s.” His voice rang a bell in the still air.
Jeremy stared down at him.
Trout’s mock-serious expression finally broke and he started to laugh. He then produced a credible impersonation of the figurehead in the Inferno Coffee logo. He adopted a stern, regal expression, drew his chin down as if to suggest a lengthy, weighty beard, extended one hand slowly as if it were holding a very deep mug of coffee. When his hand was out as far as Jeremy’s chest, Trout’s eyebrows glanced up, inviting, beguiling.
“Very funny,” Jeremy said.
“Very serious.” Trout held the pose.
“Time for Zs.”
Trout dropped his arm, settled. He closed his eyes. Sleep was right there.
Jeremy got up gingerly. On his way out he paused at a framed print near the door. A pale sketch on ivory paper, hard to make out at first, but its overall shape drew his eye. A map of an island. A peninsula, with shore lines and topographical marks, trails and road beds. Concessions, beaches all marked. He scanned the image closely now, taking a bird’s eye view of the place he was only now getting to know at ground level. Down in the lower-left corner he read the engineers block letters: STANLEY PARK—CITY OF VANCOUVER.
Laughter was coming from the living room when he rounded the corner and rejoined the group. Dante was holding court. Olli was sipping a Scotch. Jeremy looked and looked away, but Olli caught the glance and shrugged very slightly.
Dante was pouring Margaret a glass of red. Firesteed Pinot Noir, no doubt Dante’s deliberate choice. Wine from Oregon’s self-proclaimed “virtual winery”: no vineyards, no winemaking facilities. Firesteed contracted instead with a handful of growers, wineries and winemaking consultants from the Williamette Valley to produce a red of very broad appeal. And Jeremy was rightly confident that Margaret would pick up on it. She accepted the glass, sipped and took immediate note of the label. Undeniably drinkable—well market-researched—with bright fruits, medium body and what wine writers called approachable tannins.
Jeremy accepted a Bushmills.
“And such a way with children,” Dante said to him, smiling. Trying for warmth, Jeremy thought, and failing. He went and sat at the top of the squared horseshoe that the couches formed around the perimeter of the room. “But seriously and in all modesty,” Dante was picking up the thread of a conversation that had been underway before Jeremy entered the room, “it was no surprise that we drew such a crowd. Could our product be more local? We thought it up here.”
“And this makes Inferno coffee the product of local vegetables?” Margaret said.
“Droll,” Dante said. “Very.”
“Kidding. I meant the Local Splendour folks are focused on the local produce angle.”
“Certainly,” Dante said, turning away from her. Then to Olli. “But conceived here, that’s local, don’t you think?” Olli protested to be the wrong person to ask, but Dante pressed. “No local on the Net, is that it?” he said.
O
lli didn’t much like techno-philosophy. It was undisciplined. But he tried for an answer. “The Net still relies on wires and fibres. They need to be strung on poles. The poles need to be stuck in the ground somewhere. Somewhere, that ground is local.”
“Then there’s wireless,” Dante said.
Fine. Olli allowed the point.
“You know …,” Dante started, expansive. Host to a large idea. “I think I’m wireless. Culinarily, I mean. Yes.”
Jeremy fleshed it out for him: “Where the duck is twice-cooked New England mallard served in a restaurant in Moscow, and the salmon is Chilean-farmed Atlantic planked on Lebanese cedar in a restaurant south of Cork City.”
Margaret laughed out loud. Dante glanced at her.
“Precisely,” he said. “And so our little Season of Local Splendour, fervency aside, served most in flagging the rules to be broken. Reminding us of where others think we should not go. Maybe I need my young neighbour just as he needs me, to allow us both to take this next step.”
Everybody thought it over for a second while Dante refreshed drinks. And then Benny, who had been piecing it together slowly said: “You lived right next door.… Why don’t you invite your father over?”
A refreshed drink appeared in Jeremy’s hand just as the question aired and he hid a moment’s hesitation behind the swirling of his ice, the blunting down of his Irish whiskey, the tentative first sip. Why stall? To protect himself? To protect the Professor? Not quite.
That the Professor might not be disturbed.
“Travelling.” Jeremy said. Behind Dante, behind all of them, the plate glass made a perfect mirror. And Jeremy saw there what he knew the rest of them were now appraising, himself by the fire, whiskey in hand, cornered.
“Like, uh, where?” Benny said.
“Stromovka,” Jeremy heard himself say. “It’s in the Czech Republic.”
Everybody said: Really? From Margaret to Olli and around the horn to Benny, four iterations of the word. Amused, impressed, polite and overtly doubtful.
“The Professor is an interesting man.” Dante came smoothly to the conversational rescue. “We used to play chess rather often, he and I. He won consistently for several years. After that, he didn’t win so much any more. I miss the competition. Joint?”
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