Faces of Fear (14 page)

Craig lay alone that night in his pale, sparsely-decorated apartment on Mulholland Drive, unable to sleep. He kept thinking of Uncle Lee, sitting by the window, smoking. He could see him now, his eyes lowered, his voice little more than a dry, crackly whisper.

“
The Secret Shih-Tan
was written by the scholar Yuan Mei during the Ching period. He was a great intellectual, you know, a great philosopher. For him, food was a world in itself. He loved everything about it, and its preparation, and the way in which it was served. He delighted in such tiny nuances as the fact that the word for ‘fish' in Chinese sounds exactly like the word for ‘more than enough'.

“First of all, he wrote
Shih-Tan
, a very famous book of recipes that was published all over the world. But his fame became so great that he was introduced to a very secretive order of chefs from the province of Shandong, on the east coast of China on the Yellow Sea. They were all master chefs. But they had another interest. Like you, they were interested in the pleasures of a woman's body.”

Craig switched on the light and sat up. He kept trying to imagine what
The Secret Shih-Tan
looked like, what
it was like to turn the pages of the most forbidden book in the Western world.

His uncle had blown out smoke, and said, “Some meat is traditionally taboo. Ch'en Ts'ang-ch'i said that you should never eat the flesh of a black ox or a goat with a white head, a single-horned goat, any animal that had died facing north, deer spotted like leopards, horse liver, or any meat that a dog had refused to eat.”

He could remember staring at his uncle, speechless, waiting for the words that were almost too dreadful to think about.

His uncle said, “Yuan Mei tasted their food and it affected him forever. After the first time, he went to a house in Jinan near the Qianmen and lay face-down on the floor of an empty room for two days and two nights, eating nothing more, because he didn't want his mouth or his body to be affected by the taste of anything else until the food had passed completely through him. Only at the end of the time did he start to write a second
Shih-Tan
, known as
The Secret Shih-Tan
”

Craig had swallowed. “What did he eat?”

And that was when his uncle had put his lips close to Craig's ear, and fired his imagination with
The Secret Shih-Tan
for ever.

The Sanctuary was a large white house set well back from the road on Stone Canyon Avenue; fenced, gated, and almost invisible behind dark, prickly-looking shrubs. Craig drove up to the gate in his red Mercedes and pressed the intercom button.

“
Xawery residence
.” A girl's voice, light and expressionless.

“Hi, this is Craig Richard. I'd like to talk to Mr Xawery.”

“
Do you have an appointment
?”

“No, I don't. But you can tell Mr Xawery I accept his condition.”

“
You'll have to wait
.”

He waited, listening to Beck singing about being screwed up and life's a toilet and why don't you kill me. After a long while, the gates hummed open, and he drove up the steeply-angled driveway to the house.

It was large, but it was also oddly-proportioned and deeply unwelcoming. A rottweiler barked insanely at him as he approached the porch, hurling itself from side to side on its chain. When he rang the doorbell, a small grille opened up, and he was examined for a ridiculously long time by a disembodied pair of glittering eyes.

“You satisfied?” he said, impatiently.

At last he heard bolts being shot back, and the door was opened by an unsmiling Mexican in a black uniform. Inside the house, it was startlingly chilly. The floor was polished marble and there was scarcely any furniture. No flowers, either. Without a word, the Mexican turned and walked off across the hallway, his shoes squeaking. Craig followed him, although he wasn't sure that he was supposed to. They walked all the way down a long gloomy corridor until they eventually reached a sun-room; or what would have been a sun-room if all the drapes hadn't been drawn. Instead, it had a kind of papyrus-coloured light, as if it were an ancient tomb.

Hugo Xawery was sitting in a large armchair, reading. He was dressed in white pants and a white collarless shirt. The girl was kneeling on the floor next to him, one arm on his knee. She was wearing a plain white sleeveless dress, as square as a sack.

“Well,” said Hugo Xawery. “It seems that you have changed your mind.”

“As a matter of fact, no, I don't think I have. I think I was always going to have to do this, no matter what.”

“Of course.”

“I'd just like to know how you knew.”

“What? That you were interested in seeing
The Secret Shih-Tan
? I met your uncle Lee Chan, the second time I had dinner at the Burn-the-Tail. He's a very educated man, your uncle, even though he shouldn't smoke so much. It ruins the palate, smoking. I like your Uncle Lee, too. I don't like many Chinese. We talked about your talents, you see; and the conversation went around to Paul Bocuse and nouvelle cuisine, and then to some of the great modern chefs in China. I praised your skill with difficult ingredients, and said something like, ‘He's probably cooked everything except
The Secret Shih-Tan
' That was when your uncle said, ‘Yes, but he
knows
about it. And that was when I was satisfied that I had found my man. You have only to know about it to want to cook from it.”

Craig said, “I want to ask you something. Have you ever – well, have you ever tasted any of the recipes before?”

Hugo Xawery gave him a closed, stony look. “What happens in this house is private, Mr Richard.”

Craig hesitated. A moulting white parrot was sitting in a cage, nodding at him with horrible intimacy. Craig knew that what he was about to do was wrong. It was probably the most terrible thing that he would ever do in his life. But he also knew that if he turned around and walked out of Hugo Xawery's house without seeing
The Secret Shih-Tan
, his career as a chef would be finished. He would wonder for the rest of his life what he could have done, what he could have been.

He wanted to cook a meal that made Hugo Xawery want to lie face-down on the floor for forty-eight hours,
sobbing because he was digesting it, and that when he had excreted it, it would be gone forever.

“Show me the book,” he said, in a throaty voice.

Hugo Xawery put down his book and stood up. “Very well,” he said, and extended his hand. “So long as you remember what you have solemnly agreed to do.”

“I won't forget.”

Hugo Xawery led the way along another dark, echoing corridor until they reached a bare, marble-floored room with nothing in it but a rectangular steel desk, a plain office chair, and a grey-painted safe. A greenish bamboo shade was drawn most of the way down the French windows. Beneath the shade, Craig could see part of a patio, and the feet of a stone cherub, a reminder of the world that he had now decided to leave behind.

Hugo Xawery walked across to the safe, produced two keys, and opened it. Inside there was nothing but the book itself, wrapped in plain white tissue. Hugo Xawery brought it over, laid it on the desk, and unwrapped it.

It wasn't much to look at. A maroon fabric-bound book with a Chinese character stamped into the cover.

“No,” said Hugo Xawery. “It isn't very impressive, is it? This edition was published in Paris in 1911. I've only ever seen another one in English, and that was much older, and illustrated. But I don't think you need illustrations in a book of this nature, do you?”

Craig sat down in the chair. Hugo Xawery said, “I'll leave you to it. Tell me when you've had enough. My man will bring you coffee, or wine, or anything else that you'd care for.”

He left, and Craig was alone. He sat looking at the book for a long time without opening it. The moment he turned to the first page, he would be committed. He glanced around the room. He wondered if Hugo Xawery
were watching him on a closed-circuit camera. Maybe he should stand up, and walk out now. There was always the Burn-the-Tail; there was always business and chatter and laughter, buying produce, inventing new menus, cooking with sauces and sizzling shallots and flames.

But there was nothing like
The Secret Shih-Tan
; and here it was. It was probably the only copy in America. He laid his hand on the cover. Still he didn't open it.

He knew all of the arcane secrets of great French cookery, right down to roast camel's hump, which the Algerians prepare with oil, lemon juice, salt, pepper and spices, roasted like a sirloin of beef and served on a bed of watercress. He knew all of the Chinese recipes that the bravest of his customers couldn't face: like
beche de mer
, the sea-slug, which has no flavour whatsoever and the consistency of a jellyfish; and bird's nest soup, made out of cliff-swallows' nests, a combination of bird spit, sea-moss and feathers.

But this was something else. This was the moment when food, sex, and death came together in the darkest challenge that any chef could face. Food is sex, his father had always told him. But food was death, too. Every time that something was eaten, something had to die.

Craig felt as if he were standing with his toes on the edge of a terrible abyss. It was too late to turn back; and because it was too late to turn back, he opened the book.

The recipes were written with grace and subtle charm, but that only served to make their horror more intense. Craig started with the simplest of them, in the beginning, but he hadn't read more than three before he began to feel as if he were no longer real, as if the room around him were no longer real. What heightened his feeling of
unreality was knowing that he had agreed to prepare one of these dishes, and that he would actually be following the instructions in one of the recipes himself.

‘
Young Girl's Breast, Braised
: The breast should first be soaked in cold water, blanched, cooled in cold water and carefully flattened under pressure so that its youthful curves are not lost when it is braised. Place the breast in a clay casserole. Cut two thin slices of smoked thigh-meat into 12 inch squares and add to the casserole, with 6 soaked dried black mushrooms. Make horizontal slashes along one side of each of two bamboo shoots, like a fan. These will make decorative ‘angel's wings' to surround the breast when it is served. Add salt, sugar, 3 tablespoons of rice wine and 2 slices of peeled fresh ginger. Braise very gently for 3–4 hours. Slice thinly so that each diner receives a full curve, showing the shape of the breast. The most honoured guests will receive a slice with a section of the nipple on it. Serve with braised asparagus and rape hearts. Breast can be eaten fresh, cold or smoked.'

There were over a hundred recipes in all, every one of them using sexual parts, both male and female – sometimes accompanied by other organs, such as liver or pancreas or stomach-lining. Some of the dishes were plain – sexual interpretations of everyday Chinese dishes such as
zha yazhengan
, which was nothing more than duck gizzards deeply fried and served with a dip of ‘prickly ash' – a mixture of salt and Szechuan peppercorns. In
The Secret Shih-Tan
, the gizzards were replaced by plates of deep-fried testicles.

There was
Woman In Man
, which was a sausage made from penis-skin and filled with a mixture of finely chopped labia, seasoned with Maotai liquor, salt, sugar and sesame oil, and fat from the pubic mound.

There were elaborate preparations of male and female
organs, marinated, steamed, and served on a dish in the act of disembodied coitus.
Man Takes Many Lovers
was a penis stuffed into rigidity with scores of nipples, and then encircled with six or seven anal sphincters, like quoits. These should be cooked in the same way as jellyfish,' the book advised, and in the same way they required ‘spirited, vigorous chewing.'

As he turned the pages, Craig didn't notice the room gradually growing darker. He was lost in a world where every meal required the death or mutilation of a human being – sometimes eight or nine people sacrificed for one tantalizing side-dish.

Toward the end of the book, some of the dishes were so perverse that Craig left the table, and stood on the opposite side of the room, almost too horrified to continue reading. But eventually, he returned, and sat down, and read the recipes to the very end.

The last recipe was the most challenging of all. It was called, simply,
Whole Woman Banquet.
A young woman was to be carefully eviscerated, and every organ cleaned, marinated, and cooked in a different way, including her eyes and her brains. Everything would then have to be returned to the body, and her original shape restored, as perfectly as possible. Then she would be steamed.

It was the footnote that riveted Craig more than any of the lengthy descriptions of how to poach lungs in the same way as soft-shelled turtle. The author Yuan Mi had written, ‘It is essential for this dish that the woman be as beautiful as can be found; and that the chef should make love to her the evening before the banquet. The making of love endows both the food and its creator with spiritual tenderness, and is a way that a chef can pay homage to his ingredients.'

Craig closed the book. It was dark now, and he hadn't
realized that Hugo Xawery was standing in the doorway, patiently waiting for him.

“What do you think?” he asked, in a voice like brushed velvet.

“I think it's everything I ever imagined it was going to be.”

“Did it shock you?”

“I'd be lying if I said it didn't.”

“But the technique … what do you think of the technique?”

“Very difficult, some of it.”

“But not beyond you?”

“No.”

Hugo Xawery circled around the table. “Have you decided what you're going to cook?”

“I don't know. You'll have to give me some time to think about it.”