Basil Instinct (3 page)

Indeed. I waved around my empty shot glass.

Landon went on, “Is it some kind of depression support group?”

“Or do they believe in some kind of epicurean afterlife, or—”

Landon caught my drift. “Or . . . does Belfiere ‘help’ you on your way? Is it an assisted suicide cult?”

My eyes roamed the walls of Reginald Jolly’s pub, which featured framed map reproductions of England all the way back to when it was called Anglia and centurions only dreamed of a future
that held pizza. Why all the enforced silence, the secrecy, the mystery, the lonely initiation ceremony out somewhere in the boondocks? What had Nonna gotten herself into? Yes, there were times when I wanted to kill her, but that was my own rightful fantasy, not anyone else’s.

When I fell off the stage of the New Amsterdam Theatre on October 23, 2009, where I was in the chorus of
Mary Poppins
, and I broke my leg, I needed a living. And Miracolo is like a hereditary obligation. We Angelottas have been pounding veal senseless for the past eighty years. That alone is the “miracle”—that we’re still cooking, still making money, still not throttling each other. So I caved. And I cooked. Caved and cooked. Nonna purred for weeks.

Finally declaring the Miracolo culinary tradition safe in my hands, she announced she was retiring. The rest of us—which included vendors, customers, and neighboring shop owners—feigned everything from disbelief to operatic distress at the news. Little did we know that my nonna’s idea of retirement pretty much meant having none of the actual responsibilities of the restaurant while still being every bit as annoyingly present as before, telling Landon he chops like a girl, or Choo Choo that goatees are all fine, well, and good for quadrupeds, and me that I could sell my gnocchi to any
one in the mob looking for the perfect thing to tie to, oh, something they want to keep from floating.

But she was our nonna. She gave me a job when my whole dancing career fell off the stage right along with me. And to this day I am still pretty sure she didn’t push me. But late that night on the day Maria Pia received a command—for that’s really what it was, not an invitation—to tattoo herself with the sign of allegiance, to feed fifty all dressed alike in a Belfiere costume, to show up alone and friendless for a strange initiation ritual, and to understand the absolute need for secrecy . . . danger prickled my skin like the humid June night. I didn’t like any of it. Not one bit.

Finally, without looking up at Landon, I spoke slowly. “Or is Belfiere . . . a murder club?”

2

By 10 a.m., with a mug full of French roast and a chocolate croissant on board, I checked in with Landon, who had already done an online search for Belfiere—surprise, no website. This group sounded like you’d have to pry it open with a crowbar, so these were not folks who hoped to entice visitors to click on their history, their members, their projects, their photo gallery, or driving directions to Dracula’s Castle.

While he talked, I watered my blue geraniums on the grass next to the little two-by-two-foot porch of my Tumbleweed Tiny House, parked on its utility trailer on a patch I rent on a lot owned by a Philly choreographer I know. One hundred thirty square feet of living space, cedar siding, tin roof—by me, that’s as much home ownership as I can stand.

Like Landon, I had spent the morning with my laptop, slowly chasing down even the slightest of hits on the word
Belfiere
. I found a Bruno Belfiere, a self-styled poet in Bayonne, New Jersey. I found a chichi hair salon in Dubuque, Iowa. I found a Bargello pattern on a handicrafts website. And I found an AKC prize-winning English bulldog in Charleston, South Carolina. But there were still a few more hits to check out.

Landon had more luck. He did a reverse lookup from the White Pages—“Am I the sleuth, or what?”—and came up with a resident at 7199 Gallows Hill Drive, Pendragon, Pennsylvania.

One name: Fina Parisi.

Then Googling the name Fina Parisi showed him, at least, that we were in the right ballpark. The Parisi woman competed in a past season of
Top Chef
(she lost the elimination challenge because she had never seen a grit, let alone cooked one) and is part owner of a French restaurant in Larchmont, New York. While living in Larchmont (Did she retire and move to Pendragon? And was it a problem I had never heard of this town?), she served on a committee to raise funds to build a school garden in Bardstown, Kentucky. She was trained at the International Culinary Center in Parma, Italy. Back in the early eighties she played lacrosse in high school on Long Island. She voted Independent,
donated regularly to Heifer International, took fencing lessons for the past seven years and preferred foil to épée, and was a sucker for dachshunds.

Well, neither Landon nor I could find fault with any of these pursuits and accomplishments—and the dachshund thing seemed particularly sane—but we decided our pal Fina Parisi could use a closer look. Perhaps she was just letting the Crackpot Cooking Society use her home for a meeting or two. Or, all right, all right, maybe Belfiere is just a bunch of harmless, doddering old chefs who had turned in their toques for wide-brimmed hats with fake peonies. Maybe the secret sign was raised pinkies over china cups of English breakfast tea. Maybe Belfiere was just a kind of Junior League for old cooks and Maria Pia wasn’t in any danger.

And then I remembered their coat of arms: three knives on what looked like a field the color of dried blood. Landon and I would keep digging, dachshunds aside. After hanging up, I threw on my work clothes, the “Miracolo look,” which consisted of sleek summer-weight black pants and (only because it would be hidden beneath my chef jacket) a deep V-neck, ruffled white blouse you could probably kind of see through even if you were standing in a dark room. I added a black single-breasted suit jacket and—grabbing my brand-new, too expensive leather portfolio—headed out the door.

I had business out at the Quaker Hills Career Center, and I wanted to get it done before needing to turn up at the restaurant for a day in the life.

Cranking up the A/C, I picked up County Highway 8, thinking about how I’d got roped into a new gig. Even though our nonna retired from cooking when I stepped up after my accident, Choo Choo says she’s still adjusting to a reduced role in the world of Miracolo. Maybe that explains her bedazzled response to the invitation from the Crackpot Chef Club, aka Belfiere. And true, her boyfriend had wound up murdered just three weeks earlier, which left our nonna with some time on her French manicured hands.

But for years now Landon and I have watched Maria Pia Angelotta do mortally embarrassing interpretive dance to the music provided by our ragtag group of late-night regulars and wonder how Choo Choo defines “reduced role.” But he tends to take a more generous view of the grandmother we share. I think, in retrospect, that Choo Choo Bacigalupo’s relaxed attitude toward everyone and everything is what explains why I was now swinging my beloved old blue Volvo sedan into the parking lot at the Quaker Hills Career Center, where they teach firefighting, welding, computers, welding computers, whatever “automotive technologies” may be, and . . . cooking.

Falling in love with Vera Tyndall, one of our servers, led the three-hundred-pound Choo Choo Bacigalupo to join Weight Watchers. Losing ten pounds pretty quickly led to his receiving a Bravo Sticker at his weekly meeting and deciding there was nothing he could not reasonably do. But with Choo Choo, “doing something” invariably meant getting someone else to do something. I could practically see his thoughts writ large on the blackboard of his brain: a fine two-hundred-ninety-pound example of a male Bacigalupo would now undertake to give back to the community.

Just how this played out was by Choo Choo’s talking me—whose vision of civic-mindedness consists of not throttling my nonna— into teaching a four-week cooking class through the Quaker Hills Career Center. He wheedled, he cajoled, he invoked
Stand and Deliver
, he referenced
To Sir with Love
, he was majestic in describing what he deemed my moral obligation to pass on my gifts to the noncooking youth of America. Here’s how I heard the bottom line: I could earn a pittance and impart my skills to a few less-than-stellar students who would rather be watching Paula Deen. For reasons still very murky to me, all this sounded as good as Landon’s creamy
panna cotta
, and I signed on.

I’d like to say it was the beginning of the end.

But that would be an understatement. And unfair to the problem of Belfiere.

So, before I had to turn up at Miracolo to receive the day’s order of farm-fresh produce from my second cousin the flaky Kayla Angelotta, owner of a farm she calls Kale and Kayla Organics, which tells you something about what she considers clever, I entered an office labeled
Admin
. There, a fifty-year-old woman with beauty parlor pouffed hair and a pink polo shirt emblazoned with
Quaker Hills Career Center
like it was a muffler shop, handed me my class list for Cooking Basics (taught apparently by someone called Staff).

I wondered if Choo Choo got a finder’s fee for delivering me.

When I asked her whether there would be an orientation for new faculty, she stared me down. “You get paid on the fifteenth and thirtieth of the month,” she said. “Keep your valuables with you at all times. If you leave it, you grieve it.” Then: “Consider yourself oriented.”

“And”—here I was winging it—“if I need to consult with the dean of students . . . ?”

“Well, that would be someone at some other institution,” she drawled, getting all fake-sincere, “so you might have a hard time getting an appointment.”

At which I gathered up my papers—well, paper, since all Muffler Miss, whose desk nameplate said
she was Courtney Harrington, had given me was the class list (personally, I was thinking this
strega
—Italian for witch—had stuffed what was left of the real Courtney Harrington in a foot locker)—and slid them professionally into my portfolio. Then I fake-smiled her right back and headed out to the parking lot. Inside the car I studied the names like they held the secret of spinning straw into gold:

Renay Bassett

Frederick Faust

Will Jaworski

Slash Kipperman

Georgia Payne

Corabeth Potts

Mitchell Terranova

L’Shondra Washington

Eight lovelies. Mitchell would be the class clown. Corabeth would be the shy violet. Renay would be secretly pining for Will, who would be the quarterback—wait, did the career center have a football team? Just as I was sliding into a sweet little reverie about which of my brood would be the first to set a polished red apple on my desk, I checked the time, yelped, and headed lickety-split back to town.

It’s not that I was worried I’d miss cousin Kayla’s
delivery, it’s that I was worried she’d get there and just hang out in my restaurant without adult supervision. The last time that happened she had a three-night fling with my lawyer, Joe Beck. And the time before that she managed to set off the sprinkler system. I don’t know which infraction made me madder.

Sure, water everywhere was a mess and a nuisance, so that was bad. But Joe Beck was, well, Joe Beck—kind of the human equivalent of Landon’s best cassata cakes, and someone I think deserves better than a woman whose conversation runs from how garlic has a soul to the best time she ever had in the back of the Kale and Kayla Organics van with a man. (This account changes monthly.)

I have no personal interest in the Beck Stakes, really, because although he came in reasonably handy when Nonna was arrested for murder, (a) I don’t think it’s wise to give a new meaning to the term legal aid, (b) I couldn’t get the visions out of my head of my lawyer finding organic things to do with the flaky Kayla that had nothing to do with farming, and, well, (c) I don’t think he likes me.

*   *   *

During a drowsy afternoon of dinner preparations, the day after the Belfiere invitation arrived—and the day before I was scheduled to walk into a class
room at the Quaker Hills Career Center—Choo Choo found me in the kitchen, thumbing through our collection of family recipes, hunting for an entrée special for the next day. The summer sunlight crowded through the skylight and I could watch sun specks dance in the steady thrum of the circulating fan. I really wasn’t getting very much done.

“You got eight,” he announced cryptically, smoothing his cuffs. I looked up. “I checked online.” Li Wei was perched on his stool, reading a book on the history of video games. Sometimes he just shows up when he’s off the clock—I think it started after Choo Choo called him an honorary Angelotta and stenciled
Lee Way
on the back of his stool.

Landon was humming away—the clear sign that he’s experimenting—while grinding and toasting a pound of shelled hazelnuts. Since his signature dish,
panna cotta
, was on the specials menu for that night, I was betting the toasted nuts were destined for the creamy custard. He caught my eye at Choo Choo’s cryptic announcement that I had eight. Ever since he developed an effervescent crush on our sommelier, the delectable Jonathan, Landon has promised me that—unlike Choo Choo—
he
would not celebrate any romantic success by casting his beloved Eve into the Great
Unknown. Then he wisely made himself scarce while Choo Choo’s Give Back to the Community phase flourished.

“Eight what?” For a second I worried he was referring to zits, but I couldn’t figure out how that observation would have made it to one of the popular cyber-squeal places yet. But with the fan lazily spreading golden sun specks and the aroma of toasted hazelnuts, I hardly cared. If there’s a heaven and it doesn’t include toasted nuts, then it’s not what it’s cracked up to be.

“Students,” said my scrupulously bald cousin. The tip of his Weight Watchers Weekly Tracker peeked over the top of his breast pocket.

“I know. I picked up my class list. Is eight good?”

“Well . . .” He narrowed his eyes and looked like he was pondering the third law of thermodynamics while Li Wei elegantly turned a page and Landon’s fingers fussed. Then Choo Choo came to a conclusion. One strong, black-sleeved arm swung open one of the double doors leading back out to the Miracolo dining room. Where was he going?