"Would you let me try it?"
"I'll bring you a jar tomorrow."
The word "tomorrow" hangs between us in the warm air. It implies continuation. It implies I will cross this street again, enter this tavern again, sit on this ridiculous stool with my feet dangling like a child on a dock. It implies something ongoing.
I drink the funeral ale again. The gap in the mid-palate yawns, an absence shaped exactly like fermented blackcurrant.
Boris opens his mouth.
Headlights sweep across the tavern's front windows. Both of us turn. A black town car, polished to a mirror shine, rolls to a stop directly outside. The engine idles. The rear door opens and a shoe emerges. Black leather, pointed toe, polished to the same oppressive shine as the car.
Then the leg. Then the man.
Tall. Thin. A charcoal suit that costs more than my monthly lease. Silver hair swept back from a forehead so high and pale it looks like it's receding from his own face in disgust. He stands on the sidewalk, adjusts his cuffs, and surveys the street with the expression of someone who has just discovered a stain on the universe.
He carries a notebook. Thick. Leather-bound. Bristling with colored tabs.
My hands go cold around the mug.
"Cleaver."
Boris is already standing. The stool clatters backward.
"Is that?—"
"Reginald Vance."
The name drops like a meat cleaver on a cutting board. Reginald Vance. The critic who shuttered fourteen restaurants in two years. The man whose one-star review of Maison Bleu sent its head chef to a monastery in Provence. The writer who once described a soufflé as "an edible apology for the chef's existence."
He stands between our two restaurants, head swiveling slowly from the tavern to my darkened dining room and back, and he writes something in his notebook.
CHAPTER 6
BORIS
The funeral ale sits unfinished. Solene is already gone, slipped out the side door the second Vance's pen started moving, and I'm standing at the window watching the most dangerous man in the food industry sniff the air outside my tavern like a bloodhound in bespoke tailoring.
He writes something else. Flips a page. Writes more.
My smoker is cold. My kitchen is closed. The man is reviewing the smell of my building at ten o'clock at night, and whatever he's scratching into that leather-bound death warrant, it isn't praise.
I kill the lights. Lock the front door. Step into the alley.
The night air hits my face, thick with the residual ghost of hickory and the sharper, greener scent drifting from Solene's ventilation system across the street. Basil. Lemongrass. Something fermenting. My boots crunch on gravel as I circle the block, keeping my head below the fence line. Reginald Vance does not see me. Reginald Vance is now photographing my sandwich board with a flash so bright it bleaches the chalk lettering into nothing.
I cross at the far intersection and come up the back side of Solene's building. The loading dock. The same dock where Itackled mushrooms out of the sky three days ago. The steel door is ajar, propped open with a five-gallon bucket of what appears to be miso in its third month.
Her kitchen is immaculate. White tile, white counters, white walls. Copper pots hang from a ceiling rack in descending order of size, each one polished to a warm glow. The walk-in hums. Thirty-seven fermentation cultures, she said. The air tastes alive in here, complex and layered, a living thing breathing through ceramic crocks and cloth-covered jars.
Solene stands at her center prep station, both hands flat on the stainless steel, head bowed. Her chef coat is still stained. The barbecue sauce has faded to a rust-colored ghost on the white cotton, a permanent scar she hasn't bothered to change out of. Her French twist has loosened. A strand of dark hair cuts across her cheekbone.
She looks up.
"Get out of my kitchen."
"No."
"Cleaver, I swear on every truffle in Périgord?—"