And we did not resume our talk until a Samis de Faisan landed before me and I took it all in and kept it: a pheasant twice cooked but still pretty near to gamey raw, surrounded by a muddy-rich sauce based on what the folks in New Orleans would call roux, this roux happening to be an intense one, with the essence of salt belly of pork rolling around on my tongue in the company of the bird.
Metcalf opened his eyes after swimming for a while in those muddy, pheasant-strewn waters, and he tapped his lips with his napkin. Almost daintily. A good roux and pretty-close-to-nature bird meat properly required a stronger gesture, a more assertive mouth wipe than that, it seemed to me. But that was a nuance of this kind of dining that maybe the swells hadn’t considered.
I wasn’t one to criticize or advise a gourmet in his own realm, however, so I simply waited for Metcalf to be satisfied with the state of his lips, and then I said, “The guy I’m calling ‘Squarebeard.’ Ring any bells?”
Metcalf straightened and widened his eyes, as if he was coming out of a reverie. He looked at me and focused. “You never saw him close up?”
“No.”
“That was a good medium-range description, though.”
“He could be any number of people, you’re saying.”
“No one who rings a bell.”
I reached for the glass of white.
Metcalf said, “This thing you smelled in your room.”
“Spirit gum.”
“Yes. Actors use it for what?”
Of course. Beards.
I didn’t answer but we looked at each other for a moment.
“He was around the hotel that morning,” I said, following what I took to be Metcalf’s train of thought. Squarebeard could have been the guy who was in my room.
“It’s possible,” he said.
“That we don’t know what this guy looks like,” I said, finishing his thought.
“Possible,” he said.
“You boys tracking any German agents who like to make up?”
“This has only recently occurred to me,” Metcalf said. “We’ll put our heads together and see who comes to mind.”
“But if Squarebeard does do disguises,” I said, “and if he’s good at it, it’s to make sure he never comes to mind in a situation like this.”
“You’ll soon be fifteen hundred miles away. We’ll try to figure him out while you’re gone.”
“Did you figure out the guy I take to be Bourgani’s father?”
“You sure you got the room right?”
“It’s position in relation to the street. Yes. Absolutely.”
“It was empty,” Metcalf said. “Seemingly uninhabited. Clean as a whistle. Which, in that tenement, in that part of town, is suspicious in and of itself.”
“The flag behind the bar?”
“We’re working on it. It’s not a country we can identify.”
“There are countries out there our State Department doesn’t know about?”
Metcalf shot me what appeared to be that pleasant-but-stupid-child smile again. “Okay,” he said. “We know it’s not a country. Not a current one.”
“Hey,” I said. “It’s a big world. You guy’s could’ve missed one.”
Metcalf chuckled. An indulge-a-pleasant-but-stupid-child chuckle. He’d gotten touchy all of a sudden. He said, “Have you asked yourself how Metzger knew you on sight? Even with you portraying an expatriate German?”
“I’ve asked.”
“And?”
“Brauer.”
“Well, did you give him some cause to be suspicious that didn’t show up in your report?”
“No.”
“So let’s say he mentions your casual shipboard encounter to the boys at the shop. That wouldn’t be enough for them to go straight to strong-arming you.”
I didn’t say a thing.
I’d given the impression in my report that I’d only seen and identified Selene from afar, nodded at her across the captain’s table, and covertly observed her get-togethers with Brauer. Only that.
Yes, it could have been Selene who made a point of me to the boys at the shop.
Or it still could have been Brauer. Yes, him. He did walk in on Selene and me. I was jazzing the Huns’ prize spy and then I showed up at their secret headquarters. Sure they’d strong-arm me.
I still didn’t say anything to Metcalf and he’d taken to sipping his lately refilled wine.
I sipped mine, and I consciously kept my face as placid as Metcalf’s in spite of an abrupt, retrospective worry: for the Germans, there was still the matter of my knowing about the bookshop. I was worried now for Selene. But there’d been no indication from the meeting I’d heard that they thought she’d compromised them. There was no reason for Brauer to have told her about the bookshop while onboard the ship. If anything, it was Brauer who had some explaining to do. Yet they clearly still trusted him as well. So that detail was a mystery for the Huns. Discounting a severe coincidence, the only possible explanation for my showing up at the bookstore was my being in the same racket they were.
Then Metcalf and I had before us a flaky, golden pie crust the size and shape of a custard cup, sealed at top and bottom and rim.
He and I leaned and sniffed and, to my surprise, Metcalf started talking even as he began to cut into his fat little pie. Normally he’d talk first and then eat in meditative silence. This time, I realized, I was supposed to listen beneath his words. “There’s something exotic inside,” he said. “And it’s all very simple.”
I started to cut as well, and a warm rush of deep-forest, deep-shadow, dug-deep earth smell rose up and into me.
“Truffles,” Metcalf said, lifting a bite before him. “Rare and beautiful. You dig one up; you strip away the earth from it and lay it out bare; you give it some brandy; you put it under the covers; you heat it up; you eat it.”
He put truffle and crust into his mouth. He closed his eyes and kept them closed.
I looked away from him. I cut myself a good bite of Truffes Sous La Cendre and put it in my mouth, the sweet coating of crust dissolving away, and I closed my eyes and I held the warm fold of a truffle on my tongue, tasting a secret thing, hidden long from view, put now inside me and held.
I knew what Metcalf was actually saying.
I chewed the truffle gently and let it go down inside me and I looked over at Metcalf, his eyes closed, his mouth at rest, perhaps holding his own truffle in there still.
“Of course,” I said. “You take it and you eat it.”
“Be careful of women in this job,” he said, without opening his eyes, without changing the angle of his head.
“Yes,” I said.
“Inadvertently, of course, but did you let on somehow about your true identity? When you were with her?” He leaned just enough on the “with” to be discreet but clear about what he meant.
The secondary lesson in this was to trust your intuition about situations. Which is what he was doing right now, about Selene and me. I was already pretty good at that, but it was worth the reminder.
“Of course not,” I said. “She was jazzed by a famous newspaperman. Strictly that.”
“You figure Brauer knew about it?”
“Yes.”
“There you are,” he said.
“There I am,” I said.
He opened his eyes but directed them to his truffes.
I thought he’d warn me about leaving important issues out of my reports.
But he didn’t. I liked him for that. We simply fell silent again.