“But in the Navy—” Reggie began.
“You are no longer deep-frying fish sticks for several hundred men. You are cooking for a single, discriminating customer. There—it’s done!” And Pendergast slid the fish onto a clean plate. “Note that I am serving it presentation side up. Now watch, Mr. Sheraton, if you will.” The FBI agent added a splash of white wine to the skillet, and as a plume of steam arose he added flour and a little more butter, deglazing the pan and whisking the ingredients together quickly. “I’m making a rudimentary beurre manié from which to build the sauce,” he explained. A minute later, in went the mushrooms, then the garlic. Holding the handle of the skillet with a chef’s towel, Pendergast quickly sautéed the ingredients, then added a generous dash of cream, standing directly over the stovetop and whisking constantly. After another minute he turned off the heat, picked up a spoon, tasted the sauce, corrected the seasonings, dipped the spoon again, then showed it to Reggie. “Note, Mr. Sheraton, how the sauce lightly coats the spoon. The French call that nappe. In future, I would ask that you make sure your sauce has been reduced to just such a consistency before serving it to me.” He spooned a liberal amount of sauce over the fish, garnished it with parsley, spritzed a trace of lemon juice over it.
“Filets de Poisson Bercy aux Champignons,” he declared with a small flourish. “Or, more correctly, Filets de Sole Pendergast, since under the circumstances I was forced to take several shortcuts in both ingredients and technique. Now, Mr. Sheraton: Do you think you could reproduce this preparation with the greatest exactitude, for my future dinners in this establishment?”
“It’s simple enough,” Reggie said shortly.
“That’s the beauty of it.”
“But…for every dinner?”
“For my every dinner.” Pendergast reached into his pocket, extracted a hundred-dollar bill, and handed it to the cook. “This is for your trouble today.”
Reggie stared at it, the look of resentment changing to surprise.
“Do you regularly work lunches as well as dinners?” Pendergast asked in a hopeful tone.
“Only twice a week,” Reggie replied.
“Ah, well. Let us then content ourselves with dinner, for the time being. Filets de Sole Pendergast for the foreseeable future, if you please. You have my thanks.” And with that, Pendergast scooped up the plate, turned, and left the kitchen.
Adderly turned to Reggie, laughing, and slapped him on the back. “Well, well, Reggie, it looks like we have a new item on our menu. What do you think?”
“I guess so.”
“I’ll add it to the chalkboard.” And Adderly exited the kitchen, chuckling to himself, leaving Reggie and the rest of the staff staring at each other in openmouthed surprise long after the double doors to the restaurant had stopped flapping.
12
Benjamin Franklin Boyle sank the clam hoe into the muck and turned over a big, fat beauty. As he plucked it out it squirted in protest, and he tossed it into the hod, took a few steps forward—his hip waders sucking loudly in protest—sank the hoe in again and pulled open a new gash in the muck, exposing two more clams. A few more steps, another swipe with the hoe, a few more clams into the hod, and then he rested, leaning on his hoe while looking across the mudflats toward the river mouth and the sea beyond. It was slack low tide and the sun was setting behind him, purpling some thunderheads on the sea horizon. It was a lovely fall evening. Boyle inhaled the smell of the salt air, the ripe scent of the mudflats—a scent he loved—and listened to the cries of the gulls as they swept and wheeled over the Exmouth marshes.
Five years ago, at age sixty-five, Boyle had given up fishing and sold his dragger. That was hard work and the scallops just seemed to get smaller and harder to find, and in the last few years mostly what he’d pulled up were useless starfish that wrecked his nets. He was glad to have gotten rid of the boat, he got a fair price for it, and he’d saved up enough money for a penny-pinching retirement. But clamming gave him something to do, brought in a little extra money, and kept him close to the sea he loved.