Basil Instinct Read online

  I wasn’t reassured. “Not sticking around for ‘Ode to Billie Joe’?”

  He pushed behind our grandmother and did a tense head shake at me as he headed toward the kitchen. “Wait till you see it,” he whispered.

  “That bad?”

  Staring, Landon kept walking. “No good can come of it,” he intoned.

  * * *

  Between us, Landon and I managed to clear Miracolo out by 11:52 p.m., well before its usual closing time. Grief Week was just going to have to be a tad less grief-filled this year. Landon and I had crazy cooking societies to discuss before collapsing into our beds. Dana was sitting hunched on a bar stool clasping a cordless microphone and singing the final strains of her spin on “Billy Don’t Be a Hero” (her third splatter platter in a row), sung as what I can only call a breathless lullaby. When one of the drummer’s sticks slid off his plaid Bermuda shorts, I saw he was fast asleep.

  Leo, the electric mandolin player—and the only musician regular I knew by name—was gathering up the pictures of the subjects of Grief Week from the end of the bar, which had become a shrine. Pictures of a swaybacked basset hound apparently wondering what the hell was wrong with the human who would name him Booger. A young marathoner. An out-of-focus shot of a crew-cut GI caught mugging for the camera on a beach in the South Pacific. A stiff wedding shot of the clarinetist and his bride, who had eyes for the best man. A long-haired girl in a purple miniskirt holding her young son in one arm and pointing out a zoo giraffe with the other.

  Maria Pia was carried along with the rest of the staff, who warbled their good nights, and I finally gave Dana a little shove, which she interpreted as some kind of Girlfriend Gesture and responded affectionately with “Oh, you!” But at least she went out the door. Landon killed the lights, I locked up, and together we headed across Market Square to Jolly’s Pub, which stays open until 2 a.m.

  The downtown commercial district in Quaker Hills, Pennsylvania, consists of shops and businesses lined up on all four sides of the three-acre green space called Providence Park. Right across the street from us is Jolly’s Pub, owned by a second-generation Brit named Reginald Jolly, who, if you happen to come during the slow period, between lunch and happy hour, you might catch trimming his pencil moustache. I think of him as the anti–Maria Pia—he’s as inscrutable and self-controlled as she is generally Out There. They approach each other warily, which is wise, and not often.

  Landon flicked open the top two buttons of his shirt as we loped across Market Square and headed straight across the park. My little hemp tote slapped against my right hip as I dodged benches and playground equipment. “Hi, Akahana,” I called to our wandering Japanese philosopher, who was stretched out on the kiddie slide, reading by the halogen light of a headlamp. I could tell by her grunt that she was pondering the origins of consciousness, her favorite late-night activity.

  The entire front wall of Jolly’s Pub had been buzzed up and out of sight, like a garage door, and the drinking crowd had spilled out to scattered tables fronting Market Square. Inside was a long bar that gleamed like a grand piano and café tables holding battery-op candles that even flickered like the real thing. No Grief Week on this side of the square. Glasses clinked. Voices topped each other. Late-night laughter sounded like surf. The scent of Scotch perfumed the summer air. Floating close to the tin ceiling was the sound of Bob Dylan singing “Subterranean Homesick Blues.” Maybe I could just hang out at Jolly’s for the rest of Grief Week.

  Landon and I grabbed a table, signaled two short ones to Jeanette, the bartender, and we sat. Listing over to one hip, he teased the copy of the Belfiere invitation from his pants pocket. Landon is probably my best friend and the closest thing I’ll ever have to a brother in this lifetime. After my mom died when I was nine and my father—Maria Pia’s oldest son, Jock—took off for parts unknown when I was fifteen, Landon’s dad gave me a home, partly to keep me out of his mother’s clutches. It almost worked.

  He slid the paper across the table to me.

  My fingers walked over to it and slowly drew it back toward me.

  After about three seconds, Landon erupted into fits of exhaled air and pulled his chair around so he was shoulder to shoulder with me. I smiled at him. Bullets leave guns slower than my beloved cousin reaches the limits of his patience. “Oh, here,” he cried, as if I’d bungled the unfolding. In what looked like one motion, he unfolded the copy of the Belfiere invitation, smoothed out the creases, and spun it to face me.

  Centered across the top was what looked like a coat of arms. To me, the shield was shaped like a funnel, which I suppose made more sense than something you’d carry into battle. Even on the worst days, the kitchen at Miracolo didn’t get that bad. In the upper-right quadrant were three silver knives with identical ebony handles laid side by side. A carmine-colored slash ran diagonally from there down to the lower-left quadrant, where a black mortar and pestle was pictured. Running below the funnel-shield was a scroll with the words Numquam Nimis Multi Cultri. Possibly Latin for Crazy Cooking Club?

  And then I read:

  The Society of Belfiere

  ~ honoring the gustatory delights of life and death ~

  welcomes you as a member

  You will first undertake to receive the traditional 3cm B tattoo in Bastarda font on the wrist of your stirring hand

  You will prepare an exclusive evening meal for 50 guests on Friday, June 20, at 9 p.m.

  You will provide yourself with the traditional Belfiere gown in midnight-blue satin for your induction

  on Sunday, June 22, at 10 p.m.

  at 7199 Gallows Hill Drive

  Pendragon, Pennsylvania

  You must arrive and depart alone

  You must perform all instructions faithfully

  and

  In all things pertaining to Belfiere you must observe omertà

  We are 200 years old and our traditions are known only to ourselves

  In matters of our history we are Clotho

  In matters of ourselves we are Lachesis

  In matters of food we are Atropos

  We are Belfiere

  I shuddered.

  “I know!” whispered Landon, his green eyes wide. Then he waved the paper under my nose.

  Our Scotch arrived—Laphroaig for me, Oban for Landon. We were staring at the amber liquid while Dylan sounded so close he might have been at the very next table, and for sure he was the only one at Jolly’s making any kind of sense. You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows. Whatever this whole Belfiere thing was, Maria Pia Angelotta had unquestioningly bought into it, so the prosciutto was about to hit the fan.

  “Our fortress has been breached,” I told Landon moodily, picking up my drink.

  “The barbarians are at the gates,” said Landon, lifting his drink, adding, “and they are so wearing last year’s fashions.”

  “Dwelling on the line about the midnight blue?”

  “Well”—he lifted his elegant shoulders—“coupled with the satin . . .” and he punctuated his scorn with a little sound that went something like “Puh!”

  I took one sip I let slosh from side to side, then knocked back the rest. As I winced and writhed, I got out, “I mean, what’s their brand? On the one hand, bastard tattoo fonts—”

  “On the other,” said Landon, sipping, “an elegant dinner for fifty. I agree. And girlfriend”—he slipped an arm around me—“let’s not even touch the”—here his voice dropped—“omertà line.”

  Omertà is the code of silence. Usually reserved for certain Italian neighborhoods. Usually understood as the cost of doing business with certain Italian businessmen. Or getting the business from certain Italian businessmen. Violating omertà is usually punishable by listening to Dana Cahill sing Motown. But the fact that Belfiere members were bound by this code of silence gave me the kind of creeps that had nothing to
do with Sandor the toothless floor mat delivery guy offering to try out the mat together. “And then,” he always finishes with a leer, “let’s see what happens.”

  I signaled for a second shot. “There’s a lot of death talk in this invitation,” I pointed out to my cousin. “Omertà, the Three Fates—”

  Landon snatched the paper. “ ‘The gustatory delights of . . . death.’ ” He shivered. “What are they talking about? What are those?”

  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 anyone 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: