Read Online The Fire by Katherine Neville - Free Book Online Page B

‘Little Cinder Girl’ – a reference to my job as a firebird: the person who stokes the coals.
    ‘So! You are sneaking away in the dead of the night and leaving me to discover Le Cygne this morning, in your place! I hope she will not produce the… aruatza . How you say? The œuf ? If she makes the mistake, it’s you who cleans it up! You abandon your post with no warning – for some boum d’anniversaire – so Le Cygne tells me. Very well. But you MUST return back here at the ovens before Monday, to make the new fire. So ungrateful! You will please recollect why you even have a job: that it was I who rescued you from the CIA!’
    Rodo clicked off – he was clearly lathering himself into one of his typical Basque-Hispano-French snits. But his blathering wasn’t quite as bizarre as it sounded, once you learned to read Rodo’s multi- lingo -isms:
    The ‘Cygne’ – the swan – whom he’d suggested might lay an egg on the night shift during my absence was my colleague, Leda the Lesbian, who’d happily agreed to pinch-hit for me, if necessary, until my return.
    When it came to maintaining those huge wood ovens for which the restaurant Sutalde was known (hence its name inBasque: ‘The Hearth’), Leda – as glamorous as she appeared when on display (as she often was) – was no slouch back in the kitchens, either. She swung a mean shovel; she knew the difference between hot ashes and embers. And she preferred taking over my Friday night solo hitch on the graveyard shift, to her customary cocktail-hour duties on the floor of the restaurant, where overjazzed and overpaid male ‘K Street lobbyists’ were always hitting on her.
    When it came to Rodo’s comment about gratitude, however, the ‘CIA’ that he’d ‘rescued me from’ was not the Central Intelligence Agency of the U.S. government, but merely the Culinary Institute of America in rural New York – a training ground for master chefs, and the only school I’d ever flunked out of. I’d spent a fruitless six months there just after high school. When I couldn’t think of anything I wanted to study at any college, my uncle Slava felt I should prepare myself to get a job in the only other thing I’d ever known how to do, besides chess – something that Nim had trained me in himself when I was young. That was cooking.
    In short order, I’d found the CIA atmosphere a bit like storm trooper boot camp: endless classes in accounting and business management, memorizing vast repertoires – of terminology more than of technique. When I’d dropped out in frustration, feeling I was a failure in everything I’d ever done, Slava urged me into an underpaid apprenticeship – no dropouts, cop-outs, time-outs, or waffling permitted – at the only four-star establishment in the world that specialized exclusively in open-hearth cuisine: that is, cooking with live coals, embers, ash, and fire.
    But now, almost four years into my five-year contract, if I took a good hard look in the mirror I had to confess that I’d turned into as much of an isolated loner – even living smack in the midst of Our Nation’s Capital – as my motherwas, here in hermetic retreat atop her very own Colorado mountain.
    In my case, I could explain it away with ease: After all, I was contractually tied to the obsessively slave-driving schedule of Monsieur Rodolfo Boujaron, the restaurateur-entrepreneur who’d become my boss, my mentor, even my landlord. With Rodo standing over me these past four years, cracking the proverbial whip, I’d had no time for a social life.
    In fact, my all-consuming job at Sutalde, that my uncle had so prudently locked me into, now provided me exactly the same structure – the practice, the tension, the time clocks – that had been woefully lacking in my life ever since my father had died and I’d had to abandon the game of chess. The task of preparing and maintaining the fire for a full week of cooking each week required all the diligence of minding an