Vintage (27 page)

Bruno refused to enter.

“Something is wrong?”

“No, no . . .”

“Is okay?”

“No, this won't do at all.”

“This is what we have.”

“I said the prison kitchen.”

“This is guard's kitchen. It is the best we can do.”

“I need a real kitchen. With a broiler, professional cookware, open flames. Salt and pepper, even.” Bruno felt the weight of the impossibility of what he was doing pressing down on him. He'd once done a column on prison kitchens, and those he visited could have been the envy of any restaurant. That's what he'd been expecting. Things were evidently different in Russia. He cursed himself now. Why hadn't he planned a simpler meal?

“There has to be something else.”

“There is no place else.”

“What about the main prison kitchen? There must be at least one, if not several, that are better equipped than this.”

Khramov scratched his chin and thought. “That would be very difficult . . . and expensive,” he said.

“How expensive?” Bruno asked, reaching for the inside pocket of his jacket where he'd stashed the money for his return flight.

*      *      *

The second kitchen was perfect. The stainless steel gleamed. Towers of battered but scrubbed pots stood awaiting orders. Implements of every configuration hung from racks. Industrial-sized cans lined the metal shelves like soldiers, labels all facing outward. The head cook was a former member of the Russian Ground Forces, and it was clear he brought military precision to the prison kitchen. Bruno ran his hand along one counter, his
heart swelling. For the next few hours, this would be his domain. And he loved it.

Khramov haggled with the cook for quite some time before dividing the last of Bruno's funds down the middle. The cook pocketed the cash and ushered his staff toward the break room, where they removed their hairnets and turned on the television, glaring through a fogged glass window back into the kitchen.

“I will send for you in two and one-half hours,” Khramov said, and then was gone.

Bruno couldn't help but whistle while he unpacked his things and arrayed them on the long central counter, composing a sort of still life and timeline of all of the meal's ingredients, arranged in the order he was to work. He mentally sifted through the prep process, deciding what should be shaved, shredded, chopped, pinched and rinsed, and when. From the bottom of his grocery sack he pulled out a white cotton chef's jacket he'd purchased at a restaurant supply stall at the Dorogomilovsky Market, hoping that Varushkin and Katya would appreciate the touch.

*      *      *

At the same moment that Bruno was admiring his
mise en place
and worrying just a little about doing irreparable damage to the meal through some clumsy misstep, Varushkin was in his “stone sack,” a tight three-man cell, where he had a small sink, a mirror, a seatless toilet and two mute, shirtless, tubercular cellmates covered in tattoos of Russian Orthodox religious themes. They lay on their bunks smoking while Varushkin unfolded a clean, ironed white shirt that he'd bartered for from one of the kinder guards.

He'd done his best to make himself presentable through a sink bath, and he wet and combed his hair with his fingers. He
felt like a schoolboy on his first date. For a man used to control, this may have felt like a failure of his confidence, but since his confinement he had so rarely felt anything at all that this youthful confusion was a sort of tonic. Varushkin generally dismissed writers as opportunists and self-proclaimed experts. But he had actually read the man's novel, and for a moment after finishing it he had wanted to sell everything and move to Burgundy and take a seasonal job as a vineyard laborer. Tannenbaum could weave a spell. Maybe he could transform the prison enough to bring husband and wife together one last time for a civil meal. But then, Varushkin knew his Katya well, and he expected that she would stand for none of it. She would likely leave in a huff as soon as she learned that her husband had no intention of divulging information on the last of his fortune. And then the deal would be off and the writer would have to poke around in other dark corners if he was ever to find this wine he was seeking.

“Katya, my dear Katya, look at me fumbling like a love-struck youth.” Varushkin buttoned his clean white shirt and studied his pale face in the mirror.

And at that same moment Katya Varushkin Ivanovich was in the backseat of a limousine with the appropriately named Igor, her hulk of a driver and all-around errands man, behind the wheel. She stared out the window at the traffic, wishing that she could just scrape together enough money to live comfortably abroad and leave this wretched, crowded, expensive, dirty city. One hundred million rubles would do. Well, perhaps two hundred. She had her designs set on Milan or maybe Florence, though the latter was somewhat touristy and provincial despite the better weather.

Katya resented Varushkin for a number of reasons, but chiefly the fact that he'd always treated her like a trophy. When they
first met, she'd so hoped that he was attracted to her not for her youth and beauty, but out of respect for her accomplishments. From humble roots as the daughter of a low-level party functionary, she'd staked out a career as a journalist. She'd liked to think that they were a power couple . . . equals. But it was soon clear that she was considered mere decoration. The fact that he'd always assumed she married him for the money was an insult. She'd loved him at one time, but she doubted he'd ever loved her, despite pretending to for so long. And for that crime, and for robbing her of her most productive career years, and forever associating her name and reputation with his ego and overreach, forever taking from her what remained of her independence, she was determined to extract a fee, a pound of flesh from her former husband, a sting that he would feel, even in prison, to know that she'd escaped and carried on and was living happily without him. “I want to spend no more than twenty minutes in that stinking cesspool,” she said to Igor. He cast his steel-gray eyes into the mirror in acknowledgment and nodded.

In the prison kitchen Bruno was making one more round of the ingredients, sniffing the dill, petting the truffles. Ah, the truffles! “Children of the Earth,” Cicero had called them.

The steelhead still lay on its bed of crushed ice, its flesh taut and firm under his thumb. The oysters smelled like the sea so many thousands of miles away. It was a risk to bring that sea, in the form of a meal, this many miles inland. But like the journey that the steelhead takes, it would be a transformative experience for the unhappy and beleaguered couple, or so Bruno hoped.

He scanned his ingredients once more and his stomach suddenly dropped.

He gulped.

He'd forgotten something.

Bruno believed that there were certain select recipes that required the delicate presence of a good fresh olive oil. He simply couldn't work without it. How could he be so forgetful? It was usually the first thing he purchased. Even when he knew he'd be cooking in a well-stocked kitchen, he would purchase a small bottle of quality oil just to ensure its freshness.

He did another check of his bag, cooler and the ingredients he'd laid on the counter to be sure, and then he began systematically tearing through the kitchen. He inspected the tall stainless-steel cupboards and the walk-in cooler. There were various cans of industrial vegetable oil, but nothing even remotely close to what he sought.

He ran to the break room where the kitchen staff lounged.

“Olive oil!” he said. “Do you have some?”

They shrugged and looked at each other. Bruno went to the head cook.

“Speak English? Do you know olive oil?”

The man said something in Russian and waved him off, as he was blocking his view of the small picture-tube television.

“Yes,” a skinny, toothy young man said, smiling awkwardly. He was standing in the corner away from the others, leaning against the wall. Bruno rushed up to him.

“You speak English?”

“Yes,” the kid said.

“Can you show me to the olive oil? Please?”

The kid led him back into the kitchen toward a series of cabinets in the corner. He dragged a stepladder over to it and climbed to retrieve a small bottle from the back of a top shelf.

“Is good?” the kid asked as he came down.

Bruno hugged him and nearly wept.

“What is your name?” Bruno asked.

“Vasili,” the kid said, tapping his chest and smiling.

Bruno grasped the youth's shoulders and held him at arm's length.
Vasili.
It was a good name. A fortuitous name. A Czar's name. Bruno knew its Greek origins. It meant “basil.” “Vasili, eh? Well, we've got olive oil. If we had pine nuts we could make a decent pesto, no?”

Vasili looked at him and blinked, not getting the joke.

“Well, Vasili, can you cook?”

Vasili nodded vigorously.

“You want to help?”

He nodded again.

“Let's get to work, then, shall we?”

*      *      *

Varushkin sat on the edge of his bed, waiting. He closed his eyes and leaned his head back, breathing in a rhythm. He tried to remember Katya's smell. Spending so much time locked in a cell had sharpened this sense. He knew by scent which of the guards had passed outside his cell. He could smell the mud on their boots and know if it was raining outside. Sometimes he smelled blood.

When Katya came for a visit, he smelled her. Beneath the must of her fur coat and the perfume and antiperspirant. Under the soap and the jasmine bath oil, he could smell the real Katya. It was the rich, intoxicating, animal odor of her.

In his mind he tried to trace that scent. It conjured the shape of her. She was taller than him. Her body, the curves and slopes of it . . . the only word he could think of to describe it was lush.

He wondered if things could have been different. What if they were some aging middle-class couple, their children grown, spending their summers in a dacha on the river? Could she have
been happy? With what he had hidden away, in bonds, international bank accounts, cash deposits . . . and wine . . . they could live comfortably, albeit humbly, for the rest of their lives. Maybe somewhere in northern Italy. The south of France. Mexico. Would she agree to this? If he could somehow escape or arrange a release and flee the country? It had been done before.

Could that charlatan writer weave some kind of magic and convince Katya that Varushkin loved her? That he'd always loved her? Or was he deluding himself? The businessman in him, the one used to calculating risks and odds, would have judged this deal he had made with the writer as a romantic folly. There was no practical value in one meal. If he were ever to escape, or, by the whim of those in power, be released, then he would want his wine. It was worth a considerable sum. He sat motionless on the edge of his bunk with his eyes closed in a deep state of contemplation.

At the other end of the cell block, Bruno began to work. Vasili was scrubbed and busily grating the ginger (work slow, make a fine paste, remove all liquid and fibers), while Bruno melted a touch of brown sugar with honey.

He'd already started a fish stock after he'd removed the best cuts from the steelhead, and in another pot he was stirring a roux he'd begun with shallots and butter once he had confidence in the intensity of the flame. He was careful. To brown the shallots now would destroy the dish. He sifted in flour a touch at a time, eyeing the color. It could swing from tan to the color of dark mud in an instant, and the visual effect of the lovely golden oyster bisque would be lost. As the aroma of the bubbling stock began to rise in the steam, his belly rumbled and he suddenly wished that he was preparing this meal for, or rather with, Anna and the girls instead of for two strangers who no longer loved
one another. Bruno wondered at his chances of creating some warmth between this Katya and her estranged husband. Hadn't he at least managed this much with Anna, restoring civility around the table?

Bruno's mind drifted from Anna to Sylvie. He realized that he might be missing the mark entirely. Maybe the key to his happiness didn't lie behind him in Chicago, but rather ahead in Beaune.

He wished he could stare at Sylvie as she blew smoke rings after they made love. He wanted to rinse barrels at her side until his back ached and his fingers were pruned. He wondered how long she might be willing to tolerate him. He thought of the angled bones of her hips, the faint blue vein he could see deep within the flesh of her left breast as she lay back and it flattened against her rib cage, the muscled knots of her forearm, the surprisingly soft touch of her cool, callused hands. She may be brusque and aloof, but this was all on the surface. Bruno found her gorgeous, no less so for making some of the greatest wines on the planet.

Bruno felt a jab at his side as Vasili elbowed him and pointed at the roux. “Make sure not burn,” he said.

“Good call!” Bruno replied, stirring the whisk.

It was time to slowly add the stock to the roux, and as he did so he instructed Vasili to shuck the oysters and separate them from their liquor with a strainer.

He would serve the bisque first, then the salmon with white asparagus and paper-thin slices of truffle added at the very last moment so that the warmth of the fish would release their aromatics, and then also a crust of
lepeshka
brushed with the olive oil, garlic and a touch of the ginger and toasted for only a moment over an open flame before being topped with the red caviar.

Bruno was soaring now, in that magic kitchen dance, when everything he needed was a single step and arm's reach away, as a mound of pans accumulated while dishes slowly and steadily coalesced and the shape of a meal began to form like a shimmering, effervescent sculpture made out of something delicate and temporary.

He instructed Vasili to carefully snip the parsley with kitchen shears, leaving a V shape at the bottom of each leaf with no remaining stems. He whisked egg yolks for the bisque into froth the consistency of golden sea foam. He added the ginger to the glaze and turned up the heat until the bubbles just started to rise in the melted sugar, then set it aside to cool and thicken. He laid the lovely steelhead steaks on waxed paper and brushed them with the olive oil. They lay glistening like thick slices of apricot, radiant in their warm color despite the unflattering lights overhead. He checked the broiler flame and readied the truffle oil to drizzle as a final touch onto the steelhead as soon as it finished cooking. It was all in balance, ready for its strange and magical transformation caused by the precise application of heat.