The Kill Room

Susss, susss, susss…

He stroked from side to side, on the Arkansas whetstone, his personal style for sharpening. Never in a circle.

The hour was around 8 p.m. Jazz played on his turntable. Larry Coryell, the guitarist. He excelled at standards, his own compositions and even classical. “Pavane for a Dead Princess” was an unmatched interpretation.

Aproned, Swa

The lights were low, the shades and curtains drawn.

There was, in a way, a sense of romance in the air. Swa

A sin.

The woman, whose name was Carol Fiori – odd moniker for a Brit – looked back. She was crying softly.

Occasionally she’d make the uhn uhn uhn  sound, like earlier. Carol was the jogger who had approached him in the alleyway earlier and ruined his chance to disable Amelia Sachs. A throat punch and into the trunk she’d gone. He’d driven off quickly, returning home. He’d get the detective later.

Once back in Brooklyn, he’d dragged Carol into the house. While she initially said she was traveling with “friends,” she was actually single and touring the United States on her own for a month, thinking of writing an article about her adventures.

Alone…

He’d been debating what to do with his trophy.

Now he knew.

Yes, no?

Yes.

She’d given up staring at him pleadingly and whispering pleadingly and now turned her damp eyes to the Deba as he sharpened susss, susss.  She shook her head occasionally. Swa

“Please,” she mouthed, her eyes on the blade. So the pleading wasn’t quite abandoned.

He examined the knife himself, tested the edge carefully with his thumb. It gave just the right resistance; perfect sharpness. He sipped more wine and then began to remove ingredients from the refrigerator.

When Jacob Swa

Bulky Andrew Swa

Maria

“Whatsis?” Andrew had demanded.

“Hamburger Helper and lima beans and–”

“You told me you could cook.”

“But I did.” She’d waved at the frying pan.

Andrew had tossed down his napkin and left the table, casino bound.

So she’d bought a Betty Crocker cookbook the next day and started to work.

In the afternoons in their tract house, young Jacob would watch her feverishly fricasseeing a chicken or pan sautéing cod. She fought the food, she wrestled. She didn’t learn first principles and rules (it’s all about chemistry and physics, after all). Instead she attacked each recipe as if she’d never seen a steak or a piece of flounder or pile of cool flour. Her sauces were lumpy and bizarrely seasoned and always oversalted – though not to Andrew, so perhaps they weren’t over, at all.

Unlike her son, Maria

But she worked hard and managed to produce meals functional enough to hold Andrew’s presence for an hour or so. Inevitably, though, with a clink of dessert fork on china, a last gulp of coffee – Andrew didn’t sip – he would rise and vanish. To the basement to work on his secret business projects, to a local bar, back to the casino. To fuck a neighbor, Jacob speculated, when he learned about fucking.

After school or weekends, if he wasn’t slamming his wrestling match opponents into the mat or competing on the rifle team at school, Jacob would hang out in the kitchen, flipping through cookbooks, sitting near his mother as she laid waste the kitchen, with dribbles of milk and tomato sauce everywhere, shrapnel of poppy seeds, the detritus of herbs, flour, cornstarch, viscera. The spatter of blood too.

Sometimes she’d get overwhelmed and ask him to help by removing gristle and boning meat and slicing scaloppine. Maria

“Look at that, honey. Good job. You’re my little butcher man!”

He found himself taking over more and more and instinctively repairing the stew, chopping more finely, offing the heat at the right moment before a disastrous boil. His mother patted his cheek and poured more wine.

Now Swa

He continued to be angry that she’d ruined his plans that afternoon.

She continued to cry.

He returned to preparing his three course di

Swa

When his mother left them – wine plus eighty two mph without a seat belt – sixteen year old Jacob took over the cooking.

Just the two of them, dad and son.

The teenager did the same as his mother, corralling Andrew with meals, the only differences being that the boy enjoyed the act of cooking and was far better than his mother. He took to serving serial courses – like a chef’s tasting menu – to stretch out the time the men could be together. One other difference emerged eventually: He found he liked the cooking better than the hour or so spent consuming the meal; he realized he didn’t really like his father very much. The man didn’t want to talk about the things that Jacob did: video games, kickboxing, wrestling, hunting, guns in general and bare knuckle boxing. Andrew didn’t want to talk about much at all except Andrew.

Once, when Jacob was eighteen, his father returned home with a beautiful, a really beautiful blonde. He had told the woman what a good cook “my kid is.” Like he was showing off a tacky pinkie ring. He’d said to Jacob, “Make Cindi here something nice, okay? Make something nice for the pretty lady.”

Jacob was well aware of E. coli  by then. Yet as much as he wanted to see twenty four year old Cindi retch to death, or at least retch, he couldn’t bring himself to intentionally ruin a dish. He received raves from the woman for his chicken Cordon Bleu, which he made not by pounding the poultry breast flat but by slicing the meat into thin sheets to enwrap the Gruyère cheese and – in his recipe – prosciutto ham from Parma.