Hatched (29 page)

“All in all it was just a brick in the wall.

All in all it was all just bricks in the wall.”

He stared, taunting, at Russ.

“You! Yes, you! Stand still, laddy!”

Russ smiled, and then with an effort of recollection, replied: “We don’t need no e-d-u-c-a-tion!”

“You do.”

Russ reverted to his semi-obedient, on-guard state.

Nate wasn’t finished. He continued orating for the new guy’s listening and viewing pleasure with vigor that recalled those hours he spent in similar guises with Jessica, outside near the trash containers.

“We have it in our power to begin the world anew! America shall make a stand, not for herself alone, but for the world!” Nate had a collection of slogans memorized, and in the days when he’d sit with Jessica outside near the garbage bins, he’d rattle them off, each in a different accent. This one was the easiest, having been uttered in Nate’s version of Thomas Paine’s Anglo-American accent, prevalent, he imagined, in the early days of the American Revolution.

“Um,” stammered Russ.

Nate indicated that he was by no means finished. Russ seemed stunned in the face of the coming onslaught.

“Having banished from our land that religious intolerance under which mankind so long bled and suffered,” Nate hesitated, as though straining to remember, and then continued in a bellowing voice: “We countenance a political intolerance as despotic, as wicked, and capable of as bitter and bloody persecutions.” He grinned. Russ looked to be in awe.

“That’s Thomas Paine!” said Nate, waving his fist.

Russ looked ready for flight, but Nate shouted at him, this time loudly enough to be heard throughout the kitchen.

“If there be any among us who would wish to dissolve this Union or change its republican form, let them stand undisturbed as monuments of the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated and where reason is left free to combat it!”

John looked up from the Hobart that he was examining, in preparation for the evening. He glared at Nate.

“That was Thomas Jefferson,” whispered Nate into Russ’s ear, and then pushed him away and shouted in John’s direction.

“THE DIRT WILL NOT BE TOLERATED, AND THE REASON IS THAT THE INSPECTOR WILL WANT YOU TO COMBAT IT!”

Nate loved to chant revolutionary slogans for the pleasure of John, who, satisfied that he was simply initiating the new guy into the proper way of working at Fabergé Restaurant, smiled a rather wicked smile, and returned to his un-named task. It was an odd game of mimicry, imitation, revolution, and deceit.

“What kind of a place is this?” thought Russ to himself.

By now Jessica and Johnny were also looking towards this odd interaction, knowingly, while Boris seemed to be fiddling with the fly on his chef’s pants.

Jessica uttered her mantra to herself, in order to prepare her for the evening: “It’s going to be a long night!” This time she was almost audible, and she’d uttered it directly in Nate’s direction.

“À bas le roi!, À la guillotine!!” Nate said, as though replying.

Russ had understood only one word, but seemed to get the point of it.

“The lobsters?” he inquired innocently.

Nate smirked and looked right into Russ’s eyes.

“Oh, yes, lobsters, Russ. The lobsters!” he repeated, and then turned his gaze in the direction of Boris, who raised his head, oblivious to the goings-on in the kitchen, and then returned to the little problem he was having yanking the fabric of his chef’s jacket off the fly of his pants.

“And capitalists, my boy, capitalists!” Nate continued, right back into Russ’s bewildered face. Then he paused, as though to clarify.

“Capitalists, Russ! The people you’ll be serving tonight!” Nate looked down at the bleach-infested rag that Russ was donning in his right hand, and feigned scorn, to get the point across.

“All of us, Russ!” He paused. “Do you know what Proudhon said after the failure of the revolutions in 1848?”

Russ had no clue who Proudhon was, but looked enthralled, for Nate’s sake.

“‘We have been beaten and humiliated . . . scattered, imprisoned, disarmed, and gagged. The fate of European democracy has slipped from our hands!’ That’s what he said! Little did he know how humiliated we’d become! And not just in Europe!” He stared at Russ. “Let go of your rag,” he commanded, motioning towards the rag. “Tonight, we begin by serving, but we will end by conquering!”

Mystified, and sensing the glare of John’s regard burning into his auburn-colored locks, Russ dutifully tucked his rag into the apron strings of his kitchen uniform, turned around, and walked back towards the dishwashing station.

As Russ marched, Nate sang, with his best French accent, the refrain from “La Marseilleise.”

Aux armes, citoyens,

Formez vos bataillons,

Marchons, marchons !

Qu’un sang impur

Abreuve nos sillons !

Jessica had to almost hold herself back from emotion, hearing those words, words that Nate had sung, and then translated, and then sung again, so many times for her.

“Arm yourselves, citizens!” she recalled, carried away, emotional.

Hearing her sweet, powerful, eternal voice singing those enchanted lyrics, Nate approached her, and with the certainty of yesteryear guided her to the walk-in, singing, and she, despite herself, joined him.

And I joined him too:

Arise children of the fatherland

The day of glory has arrived

Against us tyranny’s

Bloody standard is raised

Listen to the sound in the fields

The howling of these fearsome soldiers

They are coming into our midst

To cut the throats of your sons and consorts

“Arm yourselves, citizens!”

Form your battalions

March, march

Let impure blood

Water our furrows

What do they want this horde of slaves

Of traitors and conspiratorial kings?

For whom these vile chains

These long-prepared irons?

Frenchmen, for us, ah! What outrage

What methods must be taken?

It is us they dare plan

To return to the old slavery!

What! These foreign cohorts!

They would make laws in our courts!

What! These mercenary phalanxes

Would cut down our warrior sons

Good Lord! By chained hands

Our brow would yield under the yoke

The vile despots would have themselves be

The masters of destiny

Tremble, tyrants and traitors

The shame of all good men

Tremble! Your parricidal schemes

Will receive their just reward

Against you we are all soldiers

If they fall, our young heroes

France will bear new ones

Ready to join the fight against you

Frenchmen, as magnanimous warriors

Bear or hold back your blows

Spare these sad victims

That they regret taking up arms against us

But not these bloody despots

These accomplices of Bouillé

All these tigers who pitilessly

Ripped out their mothers’ wombs

We too shall enlist

When our elders’ time has come

To add to the list of deeds

Inscribed upon their tombs

We are much less jealous of surviving them

Than of sharing their coffins

We shall have the sublime pride

Of avenging or joining them

Drive on sacred patriotism

Support our avenging arms

Liberty, cherished liberty

Join the struggle with your defenders

Under our flags, let victory

Hurry to your manly tone

So that in death your enemies

See your triumph and our glory!

Chapter 25

The first orders of the night had begun to trickle into the Yolk, and the bustle of activity grew to the sound of the whirring industrial fans, now turned on full blast in anticipation of the busy evening and the long night. Johnny was already putting small, steel ramekins into his broiler ovens, most probably from the Renaissance section of the menu that included simple delights like
oeufs heaumés
, egg yolks in half the shell, set close to the fiery source of heat in the broiler oven. For the more adventurous, tonight there was also the
Eyroun in Lenten
, a counterfeit egg made by delicately placing strained almond milk solids back into a shell, and then roasting it back to solidity.

Johnny was also responsible for preparing a few of John’s favorite
hors d’oeuvres
, lovingly pilfered from Platina’s late fifteenth century cookbook
De honesta voluptate
. One of his favorite dishes was made up from the eggs that he’d cook on the open grill, a kind of gourmet campfire delicacy. John insisted upon serving it before the main course, even though it seemed to be appropriate for either a dessert or the main breakfast dish. But it was very complex for an
hors d’oeuvre
, not to mention its preparation required two chefs working together; and because there were multiple ways in which the dish could go wrong, timing was everything. This of course meant that Johnny would have to work with Jessica, and they’d hope that major orders wouldn’t arrive in the midst of the trickier moments.

The process of making “some honest sensuality” would begin, appropriately enough, with Jessica’s careful work of frying up a very thin
frittata
, ostensibly a delicate omelet made with fresh herbs. When it was of a consistent texture, Johnny would recover from her, and carefully place it into the antique Spanish
patellettes
that John had purchased, undoubtedly, at some ungodly price, even though any metal ramekin would have done the same job. Finally, either Jessica or Johnny would carefully and lovingly break fresh Cornish hen eggs on top of the concoction, finishing it all off with a layer of sugar and a short outbreak of cinnamon, before gingerly maneuvering it into the oven. Done correctly, the entire process looked like some ornate mating ritual undertaken on behalf of someone else’s eggs, or perhaps a kind of elaborate preparation of the eggs in preparation for artificial insemination.

Johnny and Jessica worked well together in part because despite his height, and the gawkiness that one might expect from a boy who seems to have taken over a body too large to be his own, Johnny was remarkably nimble and sure handed. And Jessica worked with assurance alongside of him, glancing over from time to time to observe the agility of his deft fingertips, which, admittedly, he had imagined employing upon her soft skin. With some guidance, she had ruminated, he might put those hands to the task of love and devotion, and maybe in so doing would find someone else’s skin worthy of his obsessive attention.

The shift was underway, and Jessica was already busy. She was forced to occupy Boris’s space near the sauté station, because although he would eventually be drawn into battle with the unwitting lobsters, he was at this point relegated to the role of spectator. And so he stood and ogled Jessica’s nimble fingertips manipulating John’s ovophiliac tendencies turned recipes, while not so inconspicuously observing Jessica’s body pressing the fabric of her tight-fitting chef’s clothing through an array of dream sequences, from bending to perching to leaning to squatting.

Boris could watch all he wanted, but he didn’t have a chance in hell with Jessica. He didn’t know that and, had she seen the insistence of his stare, she’d have found a way to bring John to her station to carefully burn the tips of his fingertips or, more likely, manipulate Boris’s head deep into his own asshole en route to asphyxiation. But she was oblivious of Boris’s gaze, and John was lost in Hobart land, unlikely to emerge until the evening fans were turned off.

Jessica’s work was primarily focused on these kinds of recipes, because the Renaissance was the era in history when eggs made their appearance as main ingredients for important dishes. John had once told her, repeating something he’d learned in some egg conference he’d stumbled upon in Boston, that medieval chef’s rarely used eggs for anything other than gilding or coloring dishes, such as roasts. And the few exceptions to that rule were hardly his style of cooking. In order to round out Fabergé Restaurant’s offerings, though, he did master the medieval recipe for
civé d’oeufs
, which were poached eggs, because they offered a delicious variation on some of his favorite recipes. Their particular pungency was the consequence of their being poached in olive oil, and then served up in a broth of wine, vinegar, fried onions, and
verguice
.

The latter ingredient, derived from grape vines, provided a distinctively bitter flavor that has had a long culinary history in the Mediterranean region since the middle ages. In Egypt, for example, the young and tender leaves were used for enveloping balls of hashed meat at good tables. The sap of the vine, known in ancient times as
lacryma
(a tear), was applied to weak eyes for treatment of infections of the cornea. This juice of the unripe fruit, the principle source of verjuice, was much esteemed by the ancients, reputed as a cure for bruises and sprains. There were variations on this dish that featured almond milk and spices, or with parsley, sage, and cheese, but they all lacked the sophistication to satisfy John’s own palate, and with their heavy consistency, they’d never become one of those “oooh aaaah!” dishes that his guests would be ready to dole out a couple of hundred dollars for, especially since in most cases they’d make such a choice to impress clients who would probably have been more satisfied by a GMO-infested and filler-infused burger from their local fast-food factory.