I paid the cabbie and stepped out. Ollie was standing on the curb, waiting for me. I walked toward him and he held up my phone, which I had slipped into the side pocket of his briefcase.
“Clever,” he grumbled.
I stopped ten yards away.
“You’re straight as an arrow all right. Through the back.”
He pointed. “You’re the first one to come through that stupid program that’s had half a brain. Don’t screw it up.”
“Why does everybody keep saying that?”
I took my phone from him and turned to see where we’d stopped. There was a wide-windowed corner bistro on the bottom floor of a roughly three-story building. It was difficult to say because the upper floors weren’t demarcated. They were lined in giant panes of glass covered in faint reflective film. You couldn’t see inside. Which was weird enough. But on top of that, the newer parts of the building had been added to the remnants of a much older brick structure, but they weren’t so much built onto as inside it, as if the newer building were wearing the old like a turtle’s shell.
“Why are we here?” I asked.
“Look . . .” Ollie began. He was so skittish, like an abused dog pacing around a free handout. “It’s better if I do all the talking.”
I nodded. “All right.”
“And if this doesn’t work out, it’s better if no one even knows we came. Just trust me on that. Please?”
I looked up at the sign over the door. It said “Bistro Indigenes” in fancy script lettering. It was certainly a nice place—modestly decorated but definitely upscale, set on a busy street corner opposite a small park. There was a dentist’s office across the side street.
He turned for the door. “Glowing Amazonian mushrooms. It’s just too fucking big of a coincidence. He might know something.” He corrected himself as he walked in. “He will know something. Whether or not he’ll tell us . . .”
“Who?” I asked.
Ollie strode through the little waiting area as if he’d been there before, many times, but I got stuck when a server passed holding—I couldn’t believe it—a plate of flayed salamander on a bed of greens, belly up, its sizzling skin pinned open like a frog in a dissection tray. I did a double-take when I caught a whiff—like a musky grilled fish. It was the middle of the afternoon on a weekday, but all but a few of the twenty or so linen-covered tables were occupied. A curved counter serving a single row of diners arced halfway around the open kitchen, which looked like a cross between a greenhouse and an assembly line. A round brick oven filled the center and rose from floor to ceiling. A bevy of chefs in black aprons and matching bandannas ran around it and yelled to each other as they pulled spiked husks from strange vegetables and pulverized bone in heavy mortars. It was loud.
“Oliver.”
Female voice.
I turned and saw a short-haired woman approach the empty hostess stand from the interior of a glass-walled wine closet. The legs of her sheer black slacks swung back and forth with casual grace. She wore a white silk top that didn’t hug a single curve and yet managed to let you know they all were there. She had little makeup—she didn’t need it—and a walnut-sized gem dangling from a long necklace. It was clear but not a diamond. But it didn’t look like costume jewelry either. It refracted a rainbow, like high-quality crystal, and it was cut with a very peculiar geometry, so much so that I did a double-take. My brain didn’t want to accept that shape was possible.
Ollie shook her hand with a grumble and asked for the chef. The woman politely ignored the question and turned to me.
“Milan.” She extended her hand and I took it. She spoke like a woman who had been born somewhere else but had been speaking American English for so long that you almost couldn’t tell.
Oliver jumped in. “This is an associate of mine. From the CDC. It’s important,” he stressed.
“The CDC?” She turned back to me in surprise. “Have we graduated to national health hazard now?”
“Excuse me?”
“Look—” Oliver started.
“No court order this time?” Milan scanned his hands.
Ollie responded with half-closed eyes, as if he was tired of repeating himself.
“You were warned. Repeatedly. Keeping vermin in a kitchen that serves the public is a violation of—”
“The cockroaches were imported,” the women explained to me softly. “From Kazakhstan.”
“Is he here or not?”
“I’m sorry. You just missed him.”
Ollie was skeptical. He lifted a finger. But before he could speak, Milan rested a hand on his shoulder, gently, as if to show him the door.
“But it’s always nice to see you, Oliver. Please come for dinner sometime. I’m sure we could comp you a glass of wine.”
He made a face.
A young server presented the hostess with a covered tray. A bit of steam escaped from one corner. Whatever was inside was hot. Milan motioned silently for the kid to leave it on the hostess station as she waited politely to see us out.
Waxman eyed it. “That’s for him, isn’t it?”
The graceful woman gave my colleague a look that, had she given it to me, would have melted my reformed Southern sensibilities and made me slink out the door. But Ollie was Brooklyn through and through.
He crossed his arms.
“Oliver.” She stiffened. “You know I can’t interrupt him when the doors are closed.”
“Who?” I repeated.
Right then the phone on the podium chirped. It wasn’t a ring. It was more like the chime of an intercom. Milan pressed her lips together resolutely as she lifted the receiver and put it to her ear. She said nothing. After a moment, she returned it to its cradle. She turned, resigned.
Ollie cursed. “Impatient for his lunch, is he?”
“Apparently you are to relay your message—”
“Like hell!”
Milan moved her eyes to the guests in the dining room as a warning not to curse. Ollie froze with his mouth half open. When he spoke again, his voice was hushed, barely more than a whisper, so that no one in the boisterous dining room could hear.
“Tell him to go fuck himself.” And with that, Oliver Waxman, MD, turned for the door.
“Hold up.” I was getting frustrated. “Here and back, we just wasted an hour. The mayor’s people are on the TV right now. I thought you said this guy knew something about the mushrooms.”
Oliver spun around wearing a look that made me certain he was about to say he couldn’t care less. And then follow that with some choice adjectives. But he never got a chance. The phone chirped again. Milan lifted the receiver to her ear. Again, she said nothing. She replaced it, grabbed the tray, and walked toward the door with the soft words “Please follow me. Mr. Étranger will see you now.”
I looked to Ollie with a scowl. “Who?” I repeated as insistently as I could.
“Etude Étranger,” he sighed. We walked to the sidewalk and he leaned close. “He’s this French chef. He’s bat-shit crazy.”
“Mr. Étranger is from Brazil,” Milan corrected as she turned left and took us around the corner to an unmarked steel door. “He was only raised in France.” She opened it and pointed to the plain white stairs.
I hadn’t heard of him, but it turns out he is kind of famous. His restaurant was regularly featured in lifestyle magazines, but the chef himself never granted interviews. In fact, he was almost never seen, and that, along with the many fantastic stories about him, led some critics to speculate that he was too mysterious to be real, that he was a farce invented by some clever marketing consultant. If so, it worked. The restaurant was typically booked weeks in advance. Dining there had a kind of magic show or carnival feel. The chef himself never appeared, but he was sometimes rumored to be in the kitchen. Those were the nights something fantastical would happen. The stories were almost too much to be believed: baby crocodiles climbing suddenly from soup terrines, boiled eggs hatching, sugar-crystal butterflies fluttering from every plate and turning together across the ceiling.
The single door at the top of the stairs led to a loft apartment typical of the urban contemporary style: lots of neutral-colored metals, right angles, and glass. But it was still impressive for its floor-to-high-ceiling windows complete with a partial view of the Manhattan skyline. In any normal loft, that’s what would catch your eye. But not at Étranger’s.
Eight-foot-tall tribal head.
Dark.
Mouth agape.
Staring at you through stitched-closed eyes.
You know those scraggly-haired shrunken heads you see on TV? Imagine its gargantuan evil twin. Eight feet. Right there facing the doorway. Frayed brown twine laced through the lids and pulled tight like an old shoe. The effect is almost physical. You see it and Bam! You’re on edge, half-expecting you’ll turn the corner to the living room and see spear-wielding, arrow-flinging natives hunched over bubbling pots, mixing curare.
Light poured in through the high windows and bounced off the white walls, illuminating the art even under an overcast sky. A long, stone-studded Polynesian battle club hung on the wall next to a six-foot-tall black-and-white photograph of a naked woman in chains resting intimately with a leather-clad pig with a cat-o’-nine-tails in its mouth. I turned away. There was a mummified hand in a glass case. Each finger wore a ring and each ring flaunted a different colored gem. There was a pair of facing burlap couches. In between, a giant stone block carved in bas-relief—Buddhist, maybe—served as a coffee table, despite its irregular surface.
No sooner had Milan directed us to sit on the couches and wait than my phone rang. I would have let it go to voicemail except for the fact that Ollie’s phone rang exactly one second after. He and I looked at each other as our phones played musical tag. Same phone. Same ring. Alternating.
Oliver reached into his pocket for his and stepped toward the high windows. I said “Excuse me” and stepped back into the short hall with the giant head.
Marlene.
I scowled and answered. “This is Dr. Alexander.”
“Don’t pretend like you don’t know who it is.”
“I can’t talk now.”
“Can you ever?” she asked.
“I’ll call,” I said.
“When?”
“Tonight. But I have to go now. Really. We have an interview.”
Nothing.
“Okay?” I asked.
Call ended. Without a word.
I pivoted my feet to head back into the living room—and stopped.
There he was. The man himself. At least, I assumed it was him. I have to say, he was definitely striking: fit but not particularly tall, mentally alert, eyes narrow and sharp. His great bald head was naked and shiny, as if naturally bare rather than freshly shaven. His skin was a ruddy mix of olive and ocher. His clothes were simple but fashionable—a fancy long-sleeve T-shirt, comfortable slacks, and loafers without socks. He was sort of squinting at me the way Dr. Sowell did at our first meeting. Like my very presence was some kind of magic trick he was struggling to see through. He held a wooden tray in his hands capped with a large glass dome. Inside was a single antler. It was covered in small, seething larvae: maggots, writhing and twisting. It was hypnotic and looked designed to be so, like those horrible modern art installations that are always getting MoMA into trouble with the outrage police.
But it wasn’t art. It was chefery. Deer shed their antlers every year. Certain species of biting flies actually lay their eggs on them so that the developing larvae can feed on the protein before pupation. I asked if it was an experiment. He didn’t answer. He walked to a wet bar at the back, across from those big windows, near a set of French doors, and set it down.
“Please take this to Raul when we are finished,” he said to Milan.
The man had one hell of an accent. Milan had said he was from Brazil, but he didn’t look Hispanic. He looked native. As in indigenous. And while his accent was partly French, it was partly something else—and not Portuguese, which is what they speak in Brazil.
Milan nodded.
They were going to run out of air, I cautioned him—the maggots.
“By which time they should be good and fat,” he said without turning. And then, after a pause, “They’re delicious stir-fried with saffron and truffle oil.”
He walked around the stone table and sat on the couch facing us, the one in front of those tall windows with the skyline view. Milan sat on the opposite end of the same couch. I thought she might be Étranger’s wife or girlfriend or something. She was certainly the right type for a somewhat-famous man—beautiful, of course, and noticeably younger, but not so young as to be scandalous. Around my age, maybe. But I got the sense real quick that that wasn’t the case. They didn’t respond to each other the way a romantic couple would. But they weren’t chilly with each other either, like Marlene and me. They were pleasant. Warm, but respectful of each other’s space. Like coworkers, I guess. Or siblings.
Ollie and the chef barely acknowledged one another. Milan asked us to sit, and we complied. I sat across from her and my mentor sat across from his adversary, whose covered lunch rested untouched and steaming on the irregular table, whose surface was a carved bodhisattva.
Silence.
I turned to my colleague, expecting him to speak. He was the reason we were there, after all. But Ollie just looked at the chef like he was having second thoughts.
“Why are you here?” the man asked directly.
My colleague bristled.
“A number of people have gotten sick,” I said.
“Not from anything I have served.” He didn’t say it to me. He hadn’t even looked at me since we sat down. He said it to my mentor. As if the accusation had previously been made.
Ollie stood. Out of the blue. Without a word. Like he was going to leave.
There was another long pause.
“No, sir,” I jumped in. “We think it has something to do with a rare kind of mushroom.”
That did it. The chef turned to me. He just looked. Then in that wonderful accent, “What kind of mushroom?”
“The kind you can’t buy at the grocery store,” Ollie said, taking his seat. “We thought, with your . . . connections, you might know—”
“I am not responsible for every dangerous food—”
“I didn’t say that,” Oliver jumped in.
“You barge into my restaurant. With policemen.”
“You had roaches in your kitchen.”
“They were imported!”
Now, I hadn’t heard of the man, but I had heard about the Cirque Gastronomique—a series of ridiculously expensive dinners he’d masterminded, each set in a different exotic locale: an oasis in the middle of the desert, a yurt on the Tibetan plateau, an ice mansion inside the Arctic Circle, that kind of thing. I had even seen pictures of the Safari Gastronomique on social media. There was one in particular that went viral: wildebeest tartare ground with turmeric and tapioca, covered with a goat’s-blood foam sweetened with freshly tapped acacia sap and served with a side of wild beet, mixed legume, and alligator succotash, all in a woven bowl of edible leaves soaked in orange essence and shoyu and then dried. It was dark when the picture was taken and a fire (not in frame) lit the foreground, including the basket and the strong black hand that held it. At the back, you could see the silhouette of a few sparse trees along the horizon of the African plain, stark against the fading glow of the just-set sun. The rest of the picture disappeared into darkness. In fact, it was surrounded in darkness. You could almost hear lions rustling impatiently, preparing for their nightly hunt.
Étranger had allowed National Geographic to cover the safari, and it had been attended by at least one A-list Hollywood actor, a US senator (both names kept secret by the magazine), a suspected member of the Russian mafia, and the president of Eritrea, to name a few. But the best part was how, according to the reporter, the whole meal became unexpectedly ambulatory, moving through the African plains at dusk, because a young Etude had become dissatisfied with the ingredients he’d been provided and promptly set off to find wild replacements. There is even one report on the internet, unconfirmed by National Geographic, that this involved the shooting of a leopard.
I explained to our “consultant” that the big question was how these people could have eaten the mushrooms. That’s when I noticed his hands. They were tattooed. Both of them. On the palms. The symbols and lines ringed his knuckles before swirling over his lifelines and snaking up to his wrists where they disappeared under the sleeves of his shirt. I tried not to stare. I had never seen tattooed palms before. I haven’t since. I’ve been told the ink doesn’t take.
He scowled at Ollie. I think that’s when it occurred to him why we were there.
Ollie scowled back.
“No,” the chef answered the unspoken question. “I have never served it.”
Oliver raised his hands defensively. “Don’t act like it was a ridiculous question.”
“It’s a foul fungus,” Étranger explained. “Rare and distasteful. There is no reason for anyone to eat it.”
“So you’re familiar with it?” I asked.
“Of course!” he said, like I was an idiot. Then he turned to Milan and asked her to remind him to try a hallucinogenic mushroom risotto. It was hushed, as if he’d just had the idea right then and didn’t want either of us to steal it.
“You are familiar with ayahuasca?” he asked.
“The vision quest thing? Magic mushrooms in the jungle. Drums and chanting.”
“For each, there is an opposite. One mushroom opens the doors to a higher consciousness, to an encounter with a guiding spirit. The other, the reverse—to what you might call a waking nightmare. Terror. Anguish. And if enough is ingested, to death itself.”
“Evil ‘shrooms?” Ollie asked, incredulous.
The chef scowled. I wasn’t sure what to make of him—whether the eccentric genius bit was an act for the tabloids or he really was that clueless. But he was fun to watch. Not because he was particularly handsome or eloquent. It was his demeanor, I guess: careless and aloof. That and the accent—coarse, grainy, and resonant. Since it didn’t belong to any language in particular, the chef had the unusual honor of sounding foreign to absolutely everyone.
I looked to my colleague. This had been his play. I think Ollie was genuinely disappointed. I think he really expected he’d cracked the case. On my lead, of course.
“We’re sorry to have bothered you.” He only half meant it. He stood.
The rest of us did the same.
“If you think of anything else . . .” Oliver said it to Milan, not to the chef.
She smiled patiently, and he walked to the door.
I looked at Étranger. Our eyes met, and I felt then like he was holding back. Like he had something he wanted to say but couldn’t think of the right word in English.
I handed him my card. Milan reached up and took it from my fingers.
“Thank you, Doctor,” she said.
Oliver was waiting near the giant shrunken head.
Étranger looked to my colleague, then to me. His brow was knit, like he wasn’t sure what was happening. Or what it meant.
I walked after my mentor.
“Doctor,” the chef called.
Ollie and I both turned.
“Humans aren’t the only animals in the city that need to eat.”
And that was it.