MALLORY’S QUICK-QUICK SEDUCTION COOKIES
The TSA screener shrieked when she realized the mystery object in the package of trail mix was a candied baby’s foot. Transportation Security Administration agents had been going through my pockets, rifling my luggage and rubbing the text on my passport with their grimy thumbs—the modern world’s equivalent of bureaucratic harassment—when the one tasked to my personal effects spotted a foreign object in the bag of trail mix I had in my coat pocket.
She picked up the still-sealed plastic bag and massaged it, moving the nuts and dried fruit around. She finally managed to isolate the object that had caught her attention, and she held the bag close to her face. I knew trouble was coming when she started squinting at the tiny sugar-coated toes.
The other agents weren’t watching her. Everyone else had their own agenda: the heavyset agent behind me was intent on running the metal-detection wand so high up my inner thigh I thought we were dating, the agent examining my passport was reading it for the third time as if the letters had changed since the last time he had opened the pamphlet, and the pair working my luggage were opening the spice jars I had neatly secured in my suitcase, scattering flakes of Paracress and Cinquefoil in a barbaric fast-food assembly line manner. Me? There was nothing for me to do but watch the petite agent perform the heretofore dull task of examining the personal objects of the individual singled out for the United States’ intimate and invasive “Welcome Home, Citizen!” reception.
She wound up to a scream, dropping the bag of trail mix on the table. While one of the agents attempted to calm the screaming one by yelling at her, a level-headed agent merely ripped open the bag of mix, scattering the nuts and dried fruit across the table. The baby’s foot separated out from the mix and lay on the table, a dried twig of bone and sinew albeit dusted with a light coating of sugar.
I did the only sensible thing a fifty-two year old, rotund, slightly effeminate master chef could do in the face of approaching pandemonium: I fainted.
*
“I bought it at the airport,” I said again, sticking to my lie. “From a stand near the gate.”
I was in an interrogation room, a tiny chamber with an old Formica-covered table that leaned badly when I put my arms on it. The metal chair was hard and uncomfortable—in keeping with the stern impression being offered by the two Homeland Security agents in the room. A one-way mirror was set in the wall opposite me.
My interrogators were two government men baked in the same mold, though a little creative attention made it easier to tell them apart: one had a touch of OCD, and the other had a facial tic that was a clear result of not enough fresh greens in his diet. The obsessive-compulsive one kept playing with the now-empty plastic bag that lay on the table like the discarded skin of some dead animal.
“It’s a long flight,” I said, shrugging. “You know how the airlines are cutting back on in-flight food; I didn’t want to get too hungry. I had something like 5,000 Bolivars left—not enough to change, it would cost me more than what I had to convert it to dollars—so I blew it on a sack of nuts.” I spread my hands, innocently. “I’m a big guy. I get hungry easily. It’s always good to have an emergency reserve, know what I mean?”
Facial Tic stared at me, his eyes still and dead like bad water. The tic was there, just under the surface of his skin, waiting to start. I tried not to stare at the corner of his mouth. He was thin—cadaverous even—I doubted he had ever been hungry his entire life.
He blinked finally and his eyes scanned the clipboard in his hands. “Roderick Mallory,” he said, reading from my passport. “You do a lot of traveling.” My passport was splayed open under the heavy clip like a dissected frog. He had a fat pen that he worked like a butter knife. “Who is your employer, Mr. Mallory?” he asked.
“Self-employed,” I said. “I’m a chef.”
OCD nudged the plastic bag with a knuckle, almost afraid to touch it, but incapable of leaving it alone. “Mallory?” he said, trying to place the name. “Didn’t you used to have a cooking show?”
I nodded. “Yes. I did.”
OCD snapped his fingers. “Right. It was on Channel 5. Right before Dr. Phil in the afternoon. Cooking with Mallory. My ex-wife used to watch your show all the time.” He looked at his partner. “She was a total bitch, but man, could she cook.”
Facial Tic didn’t share his enthusiasm. His sandy brown hair was cut short in an attempt to hide the fact that it was falling out. His skin was dry too, the light dusting of dandruff on his suit coat a dead giveaway that his body was crying out for moisture. I could tell he ate fast food beef—always double-sized his fries and soda—and his diet was the whole reason his mouth kept twitching as if he was going to bite me. “Wasn’t your show canceled?” he asked.
“Yes, it was.” Here it comes. Now we relive the entire scandal. Nothing ever came of it. I “donated” a huge sum of money to the aggrieved parties and the lawsuit was dropped. I would have won if the trial had ever gotten to a jury, but the cost would have been so exorbitant and the attendant publicity so terribly skewed by the press that I would have been financially ruined.
As it was, the public was sufficiently disgusted by the possibility that the accusations could be true that the quick-fix payoff was, to them, an admission of guilt. I did it, the money said, and I wanted the details never to be known.
My commercial death was slow like a frog in boiling water: to keep their legs tender, you increase the heat slowly so they aren’t aware that they are being boiled alive. It keeps them from getting stressed; it keeps all the toxins from ruining the meat.
The show ran another three months after the scandal, and it only lasted that long because we had a month and a half of material already recorded. I had two years left on my contract with the network, but they offered me a lump sum to go away.
I took the money and went, all the way to Venezuela where I lost myself up the Orinoco River.
In my absence, one of the aggrieved parties—one of the sad and greedy little bastards that wanted to ruin me for the sake of their own transitory fame—broke the terms of the settlement’s NDA and went public, spilling their guts all over Access Hollywood. Shocking true story of a celebrity chef’s depravity! Tonight at 7:00 p.m.! Yes, Nancy, he was a biter and a pedophile.
I could tell that Facial Tic was an Access Hollywood fan. He probably never missed an episode, home every night by 6:45 p.m. in time to kick off his shoes and arrange his drive-thru dinner on the coffee table before the theme music started.
“Yeah,” he said, nodding. “I remember. Five years ago. There was a scandal.”
None of it was true. Well, except for the biting part and, in any case, the twins had given me verbal consent and I hadn’t bitten them that hard. I had just wanted to know if they tasted different.
*
The baby’s foot was mine. I had picked it up in Caracas from a woman who specialized in occult ingredients, already sealed for travel in the bag of trail mix. She assured me that the child had died shortly after birth from complications in the delivery, and I had no reason to doubt her. The infant mortality rate in Venezuela was high enough that, while I was there, I saw a woman every few days who had the hollow-eyed stare of a mother bereft of the joy she had been carrying the last nine months.
There is a market for exotic contraband, spices and ingredients that are used in the preparation of dishes with metaphysical and mystical benefits. Not in the States. No, you have to go to places more receptive to the spirit world to find these ingredients. Bangkok, Tokyo, Rio de Janeiro, Caracas, Istanbul, Budapest: you can find the right merchants in all these places. The shops change—the locations are as variable as the correct phrase necessary to gain access—but the spices—ah! the spices—are all extraordinary.
I’ve been trafficking in black market spices since my original debasement from television. There isn’t much market for a disgraced TV chef; restaurants couldn’t see the benefit from having my name on their menus even with the thirty years of culinary experience that I brought to their kitchens. The food, you understand, just isn’t enough. There has to be marketing cachet—the extra hook that snares the customers.
It is easier for me to stop breathing than to stop cooking. Prick my finger and olive oil flows from my veins. My heart is my kitchen timer, my index finger my temperature probe, and the hollow of my palm is equal to a leveled quarter cup. I could cook blind, my tongue as receptive a sensory organ as the flickering tongue of a snake.
When I couldn’t find work in the States, I went to South America. Ostensibly to get a fresh start and learn the local cuisine, but what I learned was much more global.
So, the baby’s foot. I use it in my lemon cake. Mallory’s Lemon Cake of Infinite Sorrow. I bake the desert for wives at domestic violence support groups. I give two slices to each woman at the meeting and tell her to feed it to their abusive husbands.
I tried a piece once. I cried for twelve hours, overwhelmed with all the shitty things I had done to people during my lifetime. My list is pretty short; I can only imagine what a slice does to those who have been real bastards.
Most of the women who take my cake home never come back to the meetings.
The secret ingredient is the baby’s foot—ground to a fine powder and sprinkled across the top of the cake after it has been baked but before the icing is layered on. It has to be newly ground as well; it loses its potency after a few days, leached away like the zest from a lemon left too long in the sun.
Of course, I couldn’t explain this to my interrogators from Homeland Security. In fact, the presence of the baby’s foot was scandalous enough that, when coupled with the whiff of indecency that evidently still pursued me, I could very well end up in prison.
My clients would miss me. They would go back to the psychically stunted pap psychology that was spouted from every television across the nation between the hours of 11 and 1. Their problems wouldn’t get solved but, at least, they would have the panacea of false security—“I’m okay, You’re okay”—laid onto their starved taste buds like a communion wafer.
I wouldn’t do so well in prison. I was a little too old and soft to survive the welcoming committee that turned out for newly-arrived pedophiles, even the falsely accused ones. The discernment of fine details was hardly a cultivated trait among the prison population.
It would be unfortunate to lose the baby’s foot. I had gone to some considerable effort and expense to track one down, and the Santa Monica chapter of Women Against Domestic Violence was having troubles finding a large enough space to host their weekly meetings. I had hoped to bake another lemon cake for them. It wouldn’t solve all of their problems, but it would ease the pain of a few.
Though, right now, easing my pain was the top priority. I had to get released before they decided there was a federal statute that would send me to jail. I needed to convince my captors to release me; I needed them more . . . open to suggestion.
I needed to make some new friends.
*
“You expect me to eat that?” I pointed at the flat hamburger resting in the center of the vaguely waxy paper. The food was an offering, a concession to basic humanity. It was, however, fast food. The bun was a dusty mustard color and it had indentations that looked suspiciously like a thumb and forefinger. The single leaf of lettuce limply protruding from beneath this dull cap looked like it had been boiled for a week.
The agent with the facial tic—Harrigan, I had heard the other one call him—shrugged. “I really don’t give a shit what you do.”
I peeled off the top half of the bun, leaving more than half of it still stuck to the dimpled gray surface of the questionable meat product. “This isn’t even real bread,” I said, showing him how the compressed flour came apart in my hand.
“Like I said—” he began.
I threw the hamburger patty and it left a greasy stain on his tie and shirt as it bounced off his chest and disappeared under the table. I followed with the fries, hanging on to the grease-slicked paper and flinging the floppy potatoes like a Jai Alia player.
Harrigan managed to duck most of the fries, though a few pattered off his face like soiled flower stalks. The flying food kept him off-balance long enough for me to tear off the plastic lid on the soda and hurl the sixteen ounces of ice and sugar water straight at him.
“This is Diet,” I shrieked. “You bring me processed potatoes dripping with grease and a fast food hamburger, which everyone knows has shit in it—shit!—and you expect me to eat it? With a Diet Coke?”
Harrigan’s shirt had a dark stain around the collar, evidence that I had scored with the soda. His chin and cheeks were wet, highlighting the red flush blossoming in his face. “You son of a bitch,” he said. “I brought—”
“Diet Coke!” I hollered, throwing the empty cup at him.
He lost his temper, charging me like an enraged rhino, showing me the whites of his eyes. He struck me hard, and I wasn’t overacting when I windmilled my arms in an attempt to keep my balance. I fell on my ass, Harrigan coming down with me, his hands around my throat. He straddled my leg when he came down, and my upraised knee caught him close enough to his crotch that his mood darkened even more.
I heard the interrogation room door slam against the wall and the sound of running feet. Hands appeared around Harrigan’s frame and started to pull him off me. It took the combined effort of several men before he let go of my neck.
His partner—the obsessive-compulsive one—and two others managed to shove Harrigan towards the door, putting themselves between me and him. “Cool it,” his partner said while the other two helped me sit up.
Harrigan growled in his throat and paced the far side of the room like a hungry hyena, glaring at me.
OCD offered me his hand. “Mr. Mallory,” he said. “I’m sorry about this.”
I looked at his hand.
He lifted it to indicate the two new men. “These are Agents Lombard and Channing. Special Agent-in-Charge Harrigan will be stepping out. I’m Special Agent Daniels.” The hand came down again.
I took it this time.
“I’m sorry about the confusion with the food.”
I accepted help from the more slender of the two new men. Channing was thin and blond, half my size and with his own nose and cheekbones. His grip was strong and firm, self-assured even. “That wasn’t food,” I said as I got to my feet. “That’s the sort of thing you feed dogs hoping they’ll choke to death on it.”
Harrigan came at me again and, this time, all three of them couldn’t keep him off me and he managed to sock me in the eye with a wild swing. I fell down again, cupping my hand over my eye, as they hustled him out of the room. The pain wasn’t too bad and I considered smacking myself once or twice more to really get a good bruise going.
The one-way mirror. I couldn’t be sure someone wasn’t watching, and I didn’t want to ruin the game I was running. I had to keep playing it as straight as possible, adhering to the stereotype they had selected for me. I needed them complacent, sure of the assumptions they had been building about me.
Harrigan was not my friend, and the game with the food was an attempt to separate my interrogators, pushing the Bad Cop/Good Cop dichotomy to its breaking point.
The mirror was going to be a problem. My sleight of hand was going to be difficult to pull off if someone was watching.
Daniels returned a few minutes later. He closed the door behind him and sat down in the other chair. He motioned for me to drop my hand and I let him take a look at my developing shiner. His mouth made a tiny movement as he examined the discoloration forming around my left eye; his fingers moved unconsciously, attempting knots, while he fought with his ingrained zeal for tidiness. My bruise was causing ripples in his mental organization of the universe.
“Look, Mr. Mallory, this is an unfortunate turn of events . . .”
“I want a lawyer,” I said.
He spread his hands. “We’re trying to track one down for you.”
“I want my lawyer,” I clarified. “I gave you his name three hours ago. His card is in my wallet. You do still have my wallet, don’t you? Or has it wandered off with some of my personal effects?”
His hands came together again. “We’re having some trouble reaching him.”
“My dear boy,” I said. “I’m an educated man. I’m not some illegal immigrant who doesn’t speak the language.”
His eyebrows pulled together. “And?”
“I would expect that you can understand me when I say: my lawyer’s direct line is printed on the card.”
Daniels sat back in his chair, his gaze flickering towards the mirror behind me. “Mr. Mallory, I don’t care much for your tone.”
“I don’t care much for the physical and mental abuse I’ve been subjected to. I am an American citizen. I was returning from a two-week vacation in Venezuela. I have nothing to hide. I told you everything I could about the—” I laid the proper amount of distaste on the next word “item found on my person. I’m not a terrorist. I’m just a chef.”
“Well, we’re still running a RAM, Mr. Mallory—”
“A what?”
“A RAM. A Risk Assessment Matrix.”
“Risk assessment? Does my Curried Carrot and Coconut Milk Soup threaten national security? Can my Galangal Eggplant on a bed of Lemon Grass and Fennel bring down an international flight? Or is it my Bacon, Lettuce and Cantaloupe sandwich: so simple and yet so divine that possession of it has been made into a crime?”
Daniels let me finish. “Special Agent Harrigan is very interested in the results of the RAM, Mr. Mallory. He’s really hoping that the numbers are high enough to warrant incarceration.” Yes, Harrigan didn’t like the sight of me.
“Since when you do base your decisions on a charted value?”
“We’re trying to improve our image,” he explained. “Paperwork makes everything easier to justify when the liberal watchdog groups get involved.”
“Of course,” I said with a sigh. Paperwork made the world go round. Didn’t I know that.
We sat in silence for a few minutes, both watching Daniels’ fingers toy with the edge of the Formica table. I waited, hoping that I had guessed right about Daniels, hoping his off-handed comment during my initial interrogation was the key I could use to escape.
“Galangal eggplant,” he said finally. “Didn’t that call for some really exotic spice?”
“Kaempferia Galangal,” I said. The recipe was from my first book. One of my signature dishes—I could make it in my sleep. “It’s a boutique item. When that book came out, only the more upscale Indochinese markets carried it.” I shrugged. “But, times change, you know, things get easier to find.”
He nodded. “My wife made it a couple of times. Once she sent me out to find that Kampuchea . . .”
“Kaempferia,” I corrected.
“Kaempferia,” he said. “Yeah.”
This was my chance. The key was there, after all. Right in his stomach, where we are all the weakest.
I leaned forward, my elbows causing the table to rock. “Look,” I said. “I understand your situation; I know all about paperwork. I know how it twists everything and makes even the easiest thing complicated. I’m sure your RAM matrix will eventually validate my innocence and we can put all of this behind us. I’m even willing to forget the inconvenience of this interrogation.”
Daniels didn’t say anything, but I could tell he was listening intently to my words.
Time to turn the key.
“I haven’t had anything to eat since early this morning, and that was a couple of time zones ago. My blood sugar is low and we all get a little fussy and irritable when we get hypoglycemic. I could use something to eat, but not that garbage from the fast food counters. Nothing will kill you quicker. You know that.”
He licked his lips once, a signal that he was still listening.
“Cooking calms me down,” I said. “It soothes my nerves. Two birds with one stone, eh? I could give you a list of ingredients and you could, maybe, provide me with a mixing bowl and a plastic spoon? I could make up a batch of, I don’t know, cookies, I suppose. Nobody gets hurt, right? It’ll give me something to do; I can stop my blood sugar from plummeting any more...” I let my voice trail off, leaving the sentence unfinished, leaving the thought open-ended for him to complete.
His fingers drummed against the table for a second and then started crawling up his tie, fiddling with the edges. “I’ll give it some thought,” he said as he stood up.
“Thank you, Special Agent Daniels,” I said as he rapped on the door, signaling that he was ready to leave. I kept the hopeful look on my face until he was gone.
He came back a few minutes later with a piece of paper and a pen that he put on the table. “List your ingredients,” he said. “Anything that looks suspect you won’t get, so keep it simple.”
I took the offered pen and started writing.
He cocked his head and read the title at the top of the page. “Mallory’s Quick-Quick Seduction Cookies. I said: keep it simple.”
I didn’t stop writing. “It’s a sugar cookie,” I said. “But if I called it that, who would care?”
“Marketing, eh?” he said. “‘The best damn sugar cookie you’ve ever had.’ Something like that?”
I smiled at him. “Something like that.”
*
Cooking is easy when you do away with the fancy utensils and the flashy ingredients. If you can follow directions, you can cook. Even Special Agent Daniels, my unsuspecting savior, could manage. Cooking as an art form? Well, that’s something else entirely.
I have good hands. I studied Chemistry back in college; wasn’t much for the theory but I could really bake a cake—so to speak—in the lab. Even the lab instructor grudgingly acknowledged the nickname exalted on me by fellow students: Eyeball Mallory. I didn’t have to be too careful with my measurements; I just knew how large any sample was. Fluid or particulate or precipitate: it didn’t matter, I could eyeball them all.
It was this hand/eye coordination that brokered my career in the celebrity chef business. It was the flash that set me apart from the others and made me exciting to watch. Not only did I not need all the measuring accoutrement when cooking, there was always a hovering sense of disaster that accompanied my efforts. Would I fuck it up this time and get the proportions wrong?
That was one of the differences on my show: I always cooked the dish. We never prepped the meal and then cut to the stove behind me where a ready-made platter was waiting. We didn’t bother taping the half hour or hour it took to cook the dish, but the studio audience knew. They watched and tasted when it was done.
I never missed.
I didn’t work before an audience with my new recipes. I made them in the absolute privacy of my kitchen. The studio audience wouldn’t understand what I had learned in the jungles of Venezuela. The network would have freaked out. Thousands of housewives and stay-at-home dads across the country would have become a mob of outraged apprentice cooks bent on one single goal: beating me to death with their kitchen utensils.
This was always the fate of revolutionaries: persecuted by fear, panic, and distrust; never did they gain acceptance; never was their offer of a better world greeted with delight; never was there wonderment at their accomplishments.
The bakers of the Trincerẽno tribe mix their spit into their sweetbreads, and they worked the dough on special stones that have been carved and consecrated by the shaman of the village. In addition to being deliciously moist and flavorful, the sweetbread is an antidote to snake venom. There is a particularly nasty tree snake that lives near the fecund waters of the Cauro River, and its bite is fatal within twenty-four hours. The snake population around this village has been purposefully cultivated to act as a protective barrier against other aggressor tribes. The members of the village are protected against accidental bites by the sweetbread that they eat every day.
It works. I still have the tiny scars on the heel of my right palm where a two meter specimen bit me. My hand turned into an unwieldy sausage platter, and my arm turned black and the skin began to flake and crack. I was given two pieces of the bread and, after a night of feverish sleep, the poison passed from my system and the swelling in my hand and arm vanished.
I thought it was just a matter of having the right ingredients; there are millions of flowers and herbs growing in the Amazon basin and the outlying mountainous regions whose chemical and biological properties haven’t been properly classified. And, when I learned about the magic of natural ingredients, I discovered that having the proper technique and tools was of equal importance. You had to know the ritual and the symbolism as well; you had to know how the magic worked.
There’s one very basic law you have to understand. It didn’t matter what you were baking or cooking or making into taffy, you had to adhere to the essential rule of the universe: as above, so below. Whatever result you wanted to create external to your culinary creation, you needed a mirror of it within your recipe.
This was especially true of love potions. These sorts of tinctures only worked with the purest—more directly harvested—sorts of ingredients.
*
No-bake cookies need to be refrigerated for at least an hour so they can set properly. I didn’t have the luxury of refrigeration so I adapted the recipe accordingly: a little more flour, a little less milk, an extra pinch of salt.
My mixing bowl was a rinsed Styrofoam container. It was small enough that I had to make the mix up in two batches, which suited me well enough. I only needed one batch to contain the special ingredient.
The size of the plastic spoon helped with the illusion I needed to pass. Putting the ingredients together required a lot of vigorous mixing, a circular motion of the arm that got very boring to watch. By the time I got to stirring the second batch, I’m sure no one was actively watching me through the one-way mirror. When I turned my back to the window and changed the motion of my arm slightly, I’m sure no one noticed.
Fortunately, performance anxiety wasn’t an issue.
After mixing and dropping the rounded cookies onto the Subway wrapper Daniels had procured, I shaped them, and with the end of the plastic spoon, I cut tiny symbols on their tops. Carefully, so as to not mar the markings, I flipped each cookie over and arranged them in three rows, six to a row. There was a little extra milk in the container so I drank that down before I put all of the detritus from my cookie-making into the Styrofoam mixing dish.
I pushed one of the chairs into a corner so that I could sit and lean against the wall. There was nothing else to do now but wait. Wait for the cookies to gel and for their curiosity to reach a feverish pitch.
*
The click of the door lock roused me from my light nap. I opened my eyes and worked up some saliva to clean off the milk film that had formed in my mouth.
Daniels brought Channing with him. They stood next to the table, examining the row of cookies. “If they’re firm, they’re ready,” I said as I stood up slowly, feeling an aching stiffness in my back from having slept sitting up.
Daniels poked the nearest cookie with a finger. Channing looked like the sort of kid who was trying to kill a sweet tooth by starving it. The presence of eighteen rounded sugar cookies was firing a number of nerve endings in his brain. He moved first, a hand darting forward to snag one of the cookies on the end.
Daniels watched him eat it. I did too, trying to keep the greedy smile off my face. “Pretty good, eh?” I said, a little of the grin leaking across the rim of my lips. I crossed to the table and took one from the row closest to me—the unmolested row in the back.
Channing nodded, the cookie rapidly disappearing into his mouth.
Daniels watched me take a bite of the soft cookie, watched me chew and swallow before he relented and let his hands reach for the table. He ate cautiously as if he thought the soft dough might burn his mouth.
“Huh,” he said when the cookie was gone. “That was pretty good. Moister than I expected.”
“That’s my secret ingredient,” I said. “Have another one. I couldn’t possibly eat them all myself. You could even take a few out to the others. Maybe Harrigan would like one . . .”
Channing went for his second and Daniels considered the offer.
Not that it mattered. One was enough. In about an hour, the essential aspects of the cookie would be absorbed into his bloodstream and his feelings towards me would change. His inclination to listen to anything I had to say would radically improve.
Maybe not the ‘best damn cookie in the world’ but, then I hadn’t been trying for the Guinness Book of World Records. I was striving for suggestibility—the magic of a love potion worked into a soft cookie shape.
Anything is possible, after all. It is just a matter of the proper ingredients.