Faces of Fear Page 10

  The Los Angeles Times had been even more explicit. This food is so indecently stimulating that you almost feel embarrassed about eating it in public’

  Craig had opened the Burn-the-Tail on Santa Monica Boulevard a few days after his twenty-third birthday, and now its endlessly surprising juxtaposition of classic French and Oriental cooking meant that it was booked solid almost every night, mainly with movie people and lawyers and record executives. But unlike Ken Horn and Madhur Jaffrey and other celebrity chefs, Craig had shied away from television appearances and recipe book offers. Whenever he was asked to give cooking tips, he always shook his head and said, “Ask me in ten years’ time. I’m not good enough yet.”

  All the same, he had plenty of faith in himself. Almost too much faith. He believed that he was more highly-skilled than almost any other chef in Greater Los Angeles, if not the whole of California. But he had an idea in his mind of food that would arouse such physical and emotional sensations in those who ate it that they would never be able to touch any other kind of food again. He had an idea of food that would literally give men erections when they put it in their mouths, and make women tremble and squeeze their thighs together.

  He could cook better than any chef he knew, but until he had cooked food like that, he knew that he wasn’t good enough.

  He swigged more Evian. On a busy night, he could lose up to three pounds in fluid. He had six assistants working with him, but his style of cooking was furious, fast and highly labour-intensive. It was the Chinese influence: the pride in slicing marinated duck livers so that they looked like chrysanthemum flowers and cutting sea-bass so that it came out in the shape of a bunch of grapes.

  Tina, his cocktail waitress, came out into the yard. Tina didn’t know Escoffier from Brad Pitt but he liked her. She was very petite, with a shiny blonde bob and a face that was much too pretty. She wore a tight blue velvet dress with a V-shaped décolletage that gave customers a brief but startling view down her cleavage whenever she bent over to serve them a drink. Tina was proud of her cleavage. She had appeared in two episodes of New Baywatch and she had sent pictures of herself to Playboy.

  “Almond Head’s asking to see you,” she said.

  “Tell him I’ve been bitten by a rabid dog.” Craig hated it when customers asked him to come out of the kitchen so that they could congratulate him. They would kiss their fingertips and say things like, “that feuillete of scallops, that was just, mwuh!” while all the time Craig knew that the feuillete of scallops was not just “mwuh!”, it was made from sparkling fresh scallops that he had bought himself from W.R. Merry the exotic fish wholesalers, poached in eggs and cream and served with a cognac-flavoured lobster sauce that had taken him three years to perfect.

  “Almond Head seemed kind of insistent. Here.”

  She handed him a visiting-card. It was slightly larger than the usual type of visiting-card, and printed with severe, dark letters. Hugo Xawery. Underneath, the address read The Sanctuary, Stone Canyon Avenue, Bel Air.

  Craig turned the card over. On the back were scrawled four words, in fountain pen. The Secret Shih-Tan.

  He stared at the words and found that he could hardly breathe, let alone speak. Their effect on him was the same as the words The Ark of the Covenant would have been on a devout Christian, if he had known for sure that whoever had written those words had actually found it.

  And there was no doubt in Craig’s mind that ‘Almond Head’ had found The Secret Shih-Tan, because scarcely anybody knew of its existence.

  Craig had never seen a copy. It had been written only for private circulation amongst a privileged number of chefs; and after its publication its author had suffered such deep remorse that he had tried to retrieve every copy and burn them. But two copies had eluded him: and The Secret Shih-Tan had been republished in a strictly limited edition in Shanghai in 1898, under the liberal regime of the young emperor Kuang Hsü. Only 100 days later, however, Kuang Hsü had been deposed by the Dowager Empress Tzu Hi, and The Secret Shih-Tan, along with hundreds of other books, had been banned and destroyed. It was rumoured that a single copy had been smuggled out of China by the emperor’s personal chef, the legendary K’ang Shih-k’ai, but that was the last that anyone had heard of it. As far as Craig knew, it existed only in myth.

  Craig first heard about it from one of his Chinese uncles, when he was fourteen. His mother had found a copy of Penthouse under his mattress. His uncle Lee had laughed, and said, “At least it wasn’t The Secret Shih-Tan!” Blossom Richard had been unaccountably disgusted; and George had warned Craig’s uncle not to mention it again. But later, Craig had asked his uncle what it was, and his uncle had told him.

  Now here was the name again, on this stranger’s visiting-card, and Craig was gripped by the same feeling of dread and excitement that had gripped him all those years ago, when his uncle had sat smoking by the window, murmuring all those forbidden and alluring things that his uncle had once murmured to him; and his father before that.

  “Are you okay?” asked Tina. “You look like you’ve really been bitten by a rabid dog.”

  Craig swallowed. “I’m fine. Thanks. Tell Mr Xawery I’ll be right out.’

  “You’re going to see him?”

  “Why not? You have to kow-tow to the customers some of the time. It’s their money, after all.”

  When Tina had bounced her way back into the restaurant, he went to the men’s room, stripped off his sauce-splashed whites, and vigorously washed his hands. Jean-Pierre, one of his sous-chefs came in. He was plump and unshaven, and he mopped sweat from his forehead with a crumpled T-shirt.

  “We had idiots tonight, yes?” he asked Craig, in his erratic, up-and-down French accent. “Those people on table five sent back that Columbian River caviar because it was yellow. ‘We know caviar,’ they said. ‘And caviar is black.’”

  Craig was trying to comb his hair. He was trembling so much that he had to grip the rim of the washbasin to steady himself.

  “Hey, you’re not sick, are you?” asked Jean-Pierre.

  “No, no,” Craig told him.

  “You’re shaking like jellies.”

  “Yes. Yes, I’m shaking.” He hesitated for a moment, then said, “What’s the most terrible thing you’ve ever done?”

  Jean-Pierre blinked at him. “I don’t understand the question.”

  “What I mean is, have you ever deliberately hurt another human being in order to satisfy something that you’ve always wanted to do?”

  “I don’t know. I stole quite a lot of money from one of my girlfriends once. Well, I say stole. She kept buying me clothes and presents, thinking that I was going to marry her, but I knew that I never would. She had a what do you call it? A wart. Do you know, I am not fond of warts.”

  Craig laid a hand on Jean-Pierre’s shoulder and said, “Sure. I understand. I don’t like warts either.”

  “Are you certain you’re not sick?” frowned Jean-Pierre.

  “I don’t know. It’s hard to diagnose your own sickness, isn’t it? What’s sick to one person is right as rain to somebody else.”

  He dressed in jeans, a button-down Oxford shirt and his favourite sand-coloured Armani jacket. Then he walked through the kitchen, turned left, and out through the swing door into the restaurant. It was nearly one o’clock in the morning and almost everybody had left now. The restaurant was decorated in a pale, restrained style, with lots of natural-coloured woods and concealed lighting. The only distinctive decorative motif was a steel and enamel mural of carp leaping across the main wall, with their tails ablaze.

  The man whom the waitresses called ‘Almond Head’ was sitting with a young girl at table nine, the most discreet table in the restaurant, but the table with the best view. He was very tall and swarthy, with a narrow skull and ears that lay flat back against his head. His hair was jet black, and combed in tight oily ripples; his forehead was deeply furrowed, too. His eyes disturbed Craig more than his almond head. They were hooded and withdrawn and as expressionl
ess as two stones. For all that they communicated, he might just as well not have had eyes at all.

  He wore an expensive grey suit and his black shoes gleamed as much as his hair. On his hairy wrist hung a huge gold wrist-watch.

  However, it was the girl who held Craig’s attention most of all. She looked as if she were partly Asian and partly European. She was very slight; all arms and legs; and she wore a short dress of flesh-coloured silk that made her look from a distance as if she were naked. As it was, it concealed very little. Her nipples made little shadowy points, and the silk clung to her thighs as if it was trying to ride up all by itself, and expose her.

  Her face was extraordinary. She had black hair cut in a severe cap; and beneath this cap she had the features of a sphinx – slant-eyed, with a narrow nose and lips that looked as if she had just finished fellatio.

  She was deeply suntanned. Her skin was so perfect that Craig found it hard to resist the temptation to touch her shoulder, just to see what it felt like.

  “I wish to congratulate you on a very exciting meal,” said Hugo Xawery. His voice was deep, but it had no trace of a European accent. On the phone, you might have thought he came from Boston.

  “You had the beef tendon,” said Craig.

  “That’s right. It takes great skill and patience to make a piece of gristle into one of the finest dishes in the city. ‘If one has the art, then a piece of celery or salted cabbage can be made into a marvelous delicacy: whereas if one has not the art, not all the greatest delicacies and rarities of land, sea or sky are of any avail.”

  “Wang Hsiao-yu,” said Craig. “Quoted by the scholar Yuan Mei.”

  “You’re a very gifted man. I have searched for more than eleven years for a chef as skilful as you. Why don’t you sit down? I have a proposition to make.”

  Craig remained standing, and passed over Hugo Xawery’s visiting-card. “Is it this?”

  Hugo Xawery’s eyes gave away nothing.

  Craig said, “I’ve heard about it, for sure. But I didn’t think there were any copies of it still in existence. Besides, it wouldn’t exactly be legal to try cooking from it, would it?”

  “Some things are so pure in their purpose that they are above illegality.”

  “You could never say that this book is pure.”

  Hugo Xawery gave an infinitesimal shrug. “You haven’t read it. I myself have read it more than a hundred times. I know it by heart. If I ever lost it, or if it was stolen, I could rewrite it from cover to cover. It is the single greatest recipe book ever compiled. The nature of the recipes takes nothing away from its single-minded purity of purpose.”

  “I don’t know whether everybody would see it the same way.”

  Hugo Xawery leaned forward a little. His watch was a very strange design, with a brand name that Craig had never seen before. “How would you see it?” he asked.

  “Academically, I guess.”

  “How could a chef of your brilliance read a book like The Secret Shih-Tan and not have a burning desire to try it out?”

  Craig let out a little humourless bark. “Well, you know why. The ingredients are something of a problem, to say the least. And I have my restaurant to think of, my career.”

  “Ah, yes,” said Hugo Xawery. “Your career.”

  Craig waited but Hugo Xawery said nothing more. He sat with his stone-dead eyes, his watch ticking away the seconds, one of his hands resting on the girl’s bare thigh, far higher up than most restaurant-goers would have considered decent.

  “I’d certainly like to see it, though,” said Craig, after a while.

  “You may see it,” Hugo Xawery replied. “And that is my proposition.”

  “Go on.”

  “You may come to my house and read it. You may read it all the way through, if you so wish. But there is one condition.”

  “What? That I don’t steal any of the recipes and serve them up here? Not very likely! Ha!”

  Hugo Xawery turned to the girl. His hand was very high on her thigh now and his little finger had disappeared under the hem of her dress. God, she was alluring, thought Craig. She was so erotic and so vulnerable that he could hardly believe she was real.

  “Mr Richard here has named his restaurant Burn-The-Tail,” Hugo Xawery said to her, almost murmuring. “This comes from the story told in the Tang Dynasty of how the carp used to swim up the Huanghe River to spawn. They did well until they reached the Dragon Gate, which was very narrow and turbulent, and the current was too strong for them to go any further. That is, until one of them learned to leap.”

  When he said this, he turned back and stared at Craig with such an expression of power and dark intensity that Craig felt a cold shrinking sensation in his spine.

  “One of them learned to leap, and so all the others followed, and as they leaped they flew in shimmering arcs through the spray. The gods were so impressed by their beauty and their courage that they burned their tails gold, and changed the carp into scaly dragons who could fly wherever they wanted. In Chinese, if anybody says you have a ‘burned tail’, it means you have a glittering future.”

  He almost smiled, and then he said, “Mr Richard could be the first carp to make the leap through the Dragon Gate.”

  “So what’s your condition for reading the book?” asked Craig. He still couldn’t bring himself to say its name out loud.

  “Very simple, Mr Richard. You may read; but then, having read, you must choose one recipe and cook it for me.”

  Craig hesitated. “Is this a joke? You’re not pulling my leg or anything?”

  Hugo Xawery’s face made it utterly clear that he found even the word ‘joke’ to be offensive.

  “I’d be using substitute ingredients, right?”

  “Do you use substitute ingredients here, at the Burn-the-Tail? Do you use small-mouthed bass instead of Mandarin fish? Do you use collard greens instead of Chinese broccoli? Or pig’s liver pate instead of foie gras?”

  “Of course not.”

  Hugo Xawery said, “I will provide the ingredients. Whatever you ask.”

  Craig smiled, and shook his head, and then stopped smiling.

  “Very well,” Hugo Xawery told him. “If you won’t do it, then I will have to continue my search for someone who will. I have to confess that I am gravely disappointed. You are one of the greatest chefs whose creations I have ever had the pleasure to eat.”

  Tina came up and said, brightly, “Can I bring you some refreshment?”

  Hugo Xawery stood up. He was very, very tall – almost six-feet-five. “I do need refreshment, yes. But not wine. I need to have my soul refreshed. I need to taste – I need to taste God.”

  Craig escorted him to the door. The girl silently followed. She brushed past Craig and he felt as if they were both naked.

  “Listen, I’m sorry I couldn’t help you,” he said, as Hugo Xawery buttoned up his coat.

  “Don’t be sorry, Mr Richard. Only the weak are ever sorry.”

  When they had gone, Craig went over to the bar and asked Tina to pour him a vodka on the rocks.

  “Weird people,” she remarked. “That girl looks young enough to be his daughter.”

  “Maybe she is.”

  “And do you know what’s strange about her? I mean, apart from the fact that you couldn’t stop staring at her with your mouth hanging open?”

  “Go on, tell me.”

  “She wasn’t wearing any perfume. None at all. No make-up, either. Don’t you think that’s strange?”

  “Maybe she’s allergic.”

  “I don’t know,” said Tina. “My grandmother used to say that women can smell fear in other women, even when they’re laughing and smiling and trying to show everybody that they’re having a great time. That girl wasn’t wearing any perfume, but she smelled of fear.”

  Craig lay alone that night in his pale, sparsely-decorated apartment on Mulholland Drive, unable to sleep. He kept thinking of Uncle Lee, sitting by the window, smoking. He could see him now, his eyes lowered, hi
s voice little more than a dry, crackly whisper.

  “The Secret Shih-Tan was written by the scholar Yuan Mei during the Ching period. He was a great intellectual, you know, a great philosopher. For him, food was a world in itself. He loved everything about it, and its preparation, and the way in which it was served. He delighted in such tiny nuances as the fact that the word for ‘fish’ in Chinese sounds exactly like the word for ‘more than enough’.

  “First of all, he wrote Shih-Tan, a very famous book of recipes that was published all over the world. But his fame became so great that he was introduced to a very secretive order of chefs from the province of Shandong, on the east coast of China on the Yellow Sea. They were all master chefs. But they had another interest. Like you, they were interested in the pleasures of a woman’s body.”

  Craig switched on the light and sat up. He kept trying to imagine what The Secret Shih-Tan looked like, what it was like to turn the pages of the most forbidden book in the Western world.

  His uncle had blown out smoke, and said, “Some meat is traditionally taboo. Ch’en Ts’ang-ch’i said that you should never eat the flesh of a black ox or a goat with a white head, a single-horned goat, any animal that had died facing north, deer spotted like leopards, horse liver, or any meat that a dog had refused to eat.”

  He could remember staring at his uncle, speechless, waiting for the words that were almost too dreadful to think about.

  His uncle said, “Yuan Mei tasted their food and it affected him forever. After the first time, he went to a house in Jinan near the Qianmen and lay face-down on the floor of an empty room for two days and two nights, eating nothing more, because he didn’t want his mouth or his body to be affected by the taste of anything else until the food had passed completely through him. Only at the end of the time did he start to write a second Shih-Tan, known as The Secret Shih-Tan”

  Craig had swallowed. “What did he eat?”

  And that was when his uncle had put his lips close to Craig’s ear, and fired his imagination with The Secret Shih-Tan for ever.