Ann Patchett (28 page)

So Ruben opened up the drawers and cabinets and
Simon Thibault began his systematic inventory, wire whisks and mixing bowls,
lemon squeezers, parchment paper, double boilers.
Every
imaginable pot in every imaginable size, all the way up to something that
weighed thirty pounds empty and could have concealed a small-boned two-year-old
child.
It was a kitchen that was accustomed to cocktail suppers for five
hundred. A kitchen braced to feed the masses. “Where are the knives?” Thibault
said.

“
The knifes
are in the
belts of the hoodlums,” the Vice President said. “They plan to either hack us
up with the meat cleaver or saw us to death with the bread knife.”

Thibault drummed his fingers on the steel
countertops. It was a nice look, but in their home in
Paris
he and Edith had marble. What a
beautiful pastry crust one could make on marble! “It’s not a bad idea,” he
said, “not bad. I’d just as soon they keep the knives. Gen, go and tell the
Generals we will have to cook our food or eat our chickens raw, not that they
would balk at a raw chicken. Tell them we understand we are morally unqualified
to handle the cutlery and we need some guards, two or three, to slice and dice.
Ask them to send the girls and maybe that very small boy.”

“Ishmael,” Ruben said.

“That’s a boy who can take responsibility,”
Thibault said.

The guards had changed their shifts, or at
least he saw two more young soldiers pull on their caps and head outside, but
Gen didn’t see Carmen. If she had come in she was off somewhere in a part of
the house that was off-limits to hostages. Discreetly, he looked for her
everyplace he was allowed to go, but he had no luck. “General Benjamin,” he
said, finding the General going over the newspaper with a pair of scissors in
the dining room. He was cutting out the articles that concerned them, as if he
could keep them in the dark by editing the paper. The television stayed on all
hours but the guests were always driven out of the room when the news came on. Still,
they heard bits and pieces from the hall. “There has been a change in the food,
sir.” Even though Thibault was the diplomat, Gen believed that he probably had
a better chance of getting what they wanted. It was the difference in their
natures. The French had very little experience in being deferential.

“And that change?” The General did not look up.

“It isn’t cooked, sir. They’ve sent in boxes of
vegetables, some chickens.” At least the chickens were plucked. At least they
were dead. It was probably only a matter of time before dinner walked through
the door on its own, that their milk showed up still tucked warmly inside its
goat.

“So cook it.” He snipped a straight line up the
middle of the third page.

“The Vice President and Ambassador Thibault are
planning to do that but they need to request some knives.”

“No knives,” the General said absently.

Gen waited for a moment. General Benjamin
crumpled up the articles he had removed and set them in a pile of tight little
balls of paper. “Unfortunately, that’s a problem. I know very little about
cooking myself but I understand that knifes are imperative for the preparation
of food.”

“No knives.”

“Perhaps then if the knives came with people. If
you could requisition a few soldiers to do the chopping, then there would be
control over the knives. It’s a great deal of food. There are fifty-eight
people after all.”

General Benjamin sighed. “I know how many
people are here. I would appreciate not having to hear it from you.” He
smoothed out what was left of the paper and folded it up again. “Tell me
something, Gen. Do you play chess?”

“Chess, sir?
I know how to play. I wouldn’t say
I was very good.”

The General tented his fingers and pressed them
to his lips. “I’ll send you the girls to help in the kitchen,” he said. The
shingles had just begun to close in on his eye. It was clear, even at this
early stage, that the results would be disastrous.

“If we could have one more.
Maybe Ishmael.
He’s a very good boy.”

“Two is enough.”

“Mr. Hosokawa plays chess,” Gen said. He should
not be offering his employer up for any services in exchange for an extra boy
to chop but the fact was that Mr. Hosokawa was quite brilliant where chess was
concerned. He was always asking Gen to play with him on long flights and was
always disappointed that Gen could not last more than twenty moves. He thought
that Mr. Hosokawa might enjoy the game as much as General Benjamin.

Benjamin looked
up,
his swollen red face seemed to show pleasure. “I found a set in the little
boy’s room. It’s good to think that they would teach the game of chess to so
young a boy. I think it is a remarkable tool for character. I taught all of my
children to play chess.”

That was something Gen had never considered,
that General Benjamin had
children, that
he had a home
or a wife or any kind of existence outside of the group that was here. Gen had
never stopped to think about where they lived, but wouldn’t it be in a tent
somewhere, hammocks strung between the muscular limbs of jungle trees? Or was
it a regular job to be a revolutionary? Did he kiss his wife good-bye in the
morning,
leave her sitting at the table in her bathrobe drinking
coca tea? Did he come home in the evening and set up the chessboard while he
stretched his legs and smoked a cigarette? “I wish I were better at the game.”

“Well, possibly I could teach you something. I
can’t imagine what I would have to teach you.” General Benjamin, all of the
soldiers, had an enormous respect for Gen’s abilities with languages. They
imagined that if he could speak in Russian and English and French, he could
probably do anything.

“I would appreciate that,” Gen said.

Benjamin nodded his head. “Please ask your Mr.
Hosokawa if he would come at his convenience. There would be no need for
translation. Here, write down the words for
check
and
checkmate
in Japanese. I could trouble myself to
learn that much if he would come for a game.” General Benjamin took one of the
crumpled sheets of newspaper and straightened it out again. He handed Gen a
pencil and above the headlines Gen wrote the two words. The headline he saw
said
Poco Esperanza
.
Little Hope.

“I’ll send in some help for dinner,” the
General said. “They will come directly.”

Gen bowed his head. Perhaps it was more respect
than was deserved but there was no one there to see him do it.

It would appear that all their choices had been
taken
away,
locked in a house with an armed teenaged
boy pressed sullenly against every door. No freedom, no trust, not even enough
freedom or trust to deserve a knife with which to cut up a chicken. The
simplest things they believed, that they had the right to open a door, that
they were free to step outside, were no longer true. But this was true instead:
Gen did not go first to Mr. Hosokawa. Gen did not go and tell him about the
chess. If he waited instead until tonight what difference could it make? Mr.
Hosokawa would never know he had delayed. There certainly was no one else who
spoke both Spanish and Japanese to tell him. On the far side of the room, Mr.
Hosokawa sat with Roxane Coss on the rosewood piano bench. Leave him there. He
was glad to be with her. She was teaching him something on the piano, her hands
and then his hands tracing over the keys. The stark, repetitive notes made
background music for the room. It was too soon to say anything for sure but he
seemed to show more promise for music than he did for learning Spanish. Leave
him there for now. Even from this distance Gen could see the way she leaned
against him when she reached the lower keys. Mr. Hosokawa was
happy,
Gen did not need to see his face to know that. He had
known his employer to be intelligent, driven, reasonable, and while Gen had
never thought him an unhappy man he had never thought he took any particular
pleasure in his life. So why not leave this pleasure undisturbed? Gen could
simply make the decision himself and then Mr. Hosokawa could practice
uninterrupted and Gen could go back to the kitchen where Vice President
Iglesias and Ambassador Thibault were discussing sauces.

I’ll send you the girls to help in
the kitchen,
was
what General Benjamin had said.

The words looped through Gen’s head like the
plucked-out refrain of “Clair de Lune.” He went to the kitchen and when he
pushed through the swinging door he held up both his hands, a prizefighter
after an effortless knockout.

“Ah, look at that!” the Vice President cried. “The
genius boy returns triumphant.”

“We’re wasting him on kitchen help and knives,”
Thibault said in the good Spanish he had acquired when he first thought he
would be the French ambassador to
Spain
. “We should send this young
man to
Northern Ireland
.
We should send him to the Gaza Strip.”

“We should give him Messner’s job. Then maybe
we’d get out of here.”

“It was only a few knives,” Gen said humbly.

“Did you get to speak to Benjamin?” Ruben
asked.

“Of course he spoke to Benjamin.” Thibault was
flipping through a cookbook from the stack in front of him. The way his finger
quickly traced back and forth across the lines he appeared to be speed-reading
it. “He was successful, wasn’t he? You know Alfredo and Hector would have
insisted on raw chicken. Better to toughen up the men. What did the good
comrade say?”

“That he would send in the girls.
He said no to Ishmael but I
wouldn’t be surprised if he turns up.” Gen took a carrot out of the box and
rinsed it off in the sink.

“Me they hit in the face with a gun,” the Vice
President said lightly. “To you they give a staff.”

“What about a simple
coq au
vin
?” Thibault said.

“They confiscated all the
vin,
”
Ruben said. “We could always send Gen out for another request. It’s probably
locked up around here somewhere unless they drank it all.”

“No
vin,
” Simon
Thibault said sadly, as if it were something dangerous, as if it were a knife. How
impossible. In
Paris
one could be
careless,
one could afford to run out
completely because anything you wanted was half a block away, a case, a bottle,
a glass. A glass of
Burgundy
in the autumn at a back table at Brasserie Lipp, the light warm and yellowed
where it reflected off the brass railings around the bar. Edith in her navy
sweater, her hair pulled back and twisted into a casual knot, her pale hands
cupping the bowl of the glass. How clearly he can see it, the light, the
sweater, the dark red of the wine beneath Edith’s fingers. When they moved to
the Heart of Darkness they had the wine shipped two dozen cases at a time,
enough wine to quench an entire city through a drought. Thibault tried to make
a cellar out of what was merely a wet dirt basement. French wine was the
cornerstone of French diplomacy. He handed it out like peppermints. Guests
stayed later at their parties. They stood forever on the walk that led down to
the gate and said good night, good night, but never seemed to leave. Edith
would finally go inside and bring them each a bottle, press it into their
resisting hands. Then they scattered into the darkness, each back to his or her
car and driver, holding the prize.

“This is my blood.” Thibault raised his glass
to his wife when the guests had finally gone. “It will be shed for you and for
no men.” Together they would go through the living room picking up crumpled
napkins, stacking plates. They had sent the housekeeper home long ago. This was
an act of intimacy, a pure expression of love. They were alone again. They were
setting their house to right.

“Isn’t there some kind of
coq
sans vin
?” Ruben leaned forward to look at the book. All of these books
in his home that he had never seen before! He wondered if they belonged to him
or to the house.

Thibault pushed Edith’s scarf over his
shoulder. He said something about roasting and turned his head away to read. No
sooner had he looked at the page than the door swung open again and in came
three, Beatriz, the tall one, pretty Carmen, and then Ishmael, each of them
with two and three knives apiece.

“You asked for us, didn’t you?” Beatriz said to
Gen. “I’m not on any duty at all now. I was going to watch television.”

Gen looked at the clock on the wall. “It’s past
time for your program,” he said, trying to keep his eyes on her.

“There are other things on,” she said. “There
are lots of good programs. ‘Send the girls to do it.’ That’s always the way.”

“They didn’t just send the girls,” Ishmael said
in his own defense.

“Practically,” Beatriz said.

Ishmael reddened and he rolled the wooden
handle of the knife between his palms.