Page 24

BACKBURNERS

KONSTANTIN MET VIKTOR the next afternoon for zakuski—hot and cold appetizers, basically—at the Russian Tea Room, which was exactly the kind of place he expected a paunchy old oligarch to conduct business. (Either that, or a banya , where they’d sit naked in a steam room talking shop before beating each other raw with birch branches and plunging into ice pools. Fun.)

What he hadn’t expected was the guy waiting for him at the table, or the baffling tear in the time-space continuum that had paired Viktor Musizchka’s voice with his body. While his accent was goofy, all Rocky and Bullwinkle , Boris and Natasha in fedoras and furs, his face was early-era Brad Pitt, the rest of him an Armani underwear ad, his confidence reeking like too much cologne.

Viktor Musizchka (muted) was a force.

The kind of man you’d want to do business with. Capable. Sophisticated. Someone who got shit done. He was mid-thirties—unfathomably, Kostya’s age—and the kind of athletic that required discipline and green juice and early-morning Peloton rides. His thick blond hair and trim beard were meticulously styled to appear both boyish and mature. He practically glowed.

Kostya kept getting distracted by it—Was that dimple real? How’d he get his skin so dewy? Did he moisturize? Should Kostya be moisturizing?—and if not for his voice, bootlegged overseas and dubbed by Yuri’s Unauthorized Audio, he’d almost certainly be on television, selling people things they didn’t need.

Luckily for Kostya, he’d gone into business instead.

Viktor gave his spiel after he ordered their food, barely glancing at the menu, the kind of patron for whom the kitchen delivered off-piste delights, seasonal secrets, amuses the average schmo never got anywhere near his bouche. He’d grown up in St. Petersburg, attended university in Moscow convinced he’d be a poet, then graduated and went to work for the family business (some hand-wavy import-export deal). Turned out he had a knack for it, made a killing, and moved to the States to expand his operations into a global affair. Along the way, he’d sponsored several pet projects—Russian restaurants, a nightclub—and was looking for his next great adventure.

“Which bring me to you. I want know everything.”

Kostya was sure Viktor would pepper him with inquiries about his clairgustance, his prior restaurant experience, what qualifications he might have to head a kitchen. These were the questions he’d prepped for, but Viktor never raised them. Instead, they spilled the chai about Konstantin’s upbringing, where in the USSR he’d hailed from, what family he had in New York. Viktor asked about Kostya’s mother, whether she worked, whether she was married.

When Kostya mentioned Uncle Vanya—Ivan Vasil’yevich Kozlov; not his real uncle at all, but his mom’s light-switch boyfriend, on-and-off-and-on-again for the better part of two decades—Viktor grinned broadly, as though Konstantin had just told him exactly what he’d needed to hear. Unlike Michel Beauchêne, Viktor Musizchka had heard of Vanya’s Victuals— That’s your uncle? What small world! Vanya been supplying me long time!— and it seemed to tick a certain box, to somehow cement Kostya in his mind as his kind of people.

Viktor lit a cigarette and inhaled deeply.

“We have opportunity here,” he said, tapping his ash into an empty glass, none of the waitstaff daring to tell this demigod that you couldn’t smoke in a New York eatery anymore. “A major restaurant. We just needing chef with big idea. I believing very much in concept. Anyone can have restaurant, but we”—he pointed to Konstantin, to himself, to the space between them as though they were already one entity—“interested in experience.”

He paused, took a quick shot of vodka, a little nip of caviar from a mother-of-pearl spoon.

“Is good here, yes? Ikra like in Moskva. You see—concept! Anyone can serve caviar, but Russian Tea Room is institution. The place to go for authentic experience.”

Kostya looked around the dining room—emerald walls with elaborate inlays, soaring firebirds in gold relief, crystal caviar bowls, etched silver trays—the cumulative effect of which felt like being trapped inside a Fabergé egg. This experience was authentic for only a small portion of actual Russians, the kind who used to live in palaces and rub elbows with Romanovs. It was a fantasy, a way to imagine yourself at the table with a tsar, breathing in the air of lost aristocracy, that excessive, exclusionary, gilded age.

He remembered, in stark contrast, something his father had once told him, how in the Soviet Union a meal out at a restaurant cost a month’s pay and the food you got was never better than your grandmother’s. His dad had been amazed by American eateries, by pizza parlors and diners and hamburger joints, by the idea, the thrill of it, a place you could sit and eat and still afford to pay rent after, where the food was good and fast and cheap, a holy trinity. This , he told Kostya once, is truly American. Everyone equal in pizzeria.

It was what he aspired to in his own kitchen. A place where everyone was welcome. Kostya wasn’t sure, watching Viktor pour another round of Imperia into a slender shot glass, whether he was the kind of person who could appreciate that.

“So.” He cleared his throat. “How did you hear about me?”

“On the Instagram. I see post from NamastayHigh.”

Kostya had to remind himself to relax his jaw. NamastayHigh was that influencer, the one who had gotten him shut down.

“I’m… surprised you saw that.”

“Everyone see it! She gets fifty thousand likes.” Viktor took another shot of vodka, a flush coming into his face. “People very interesting to know what is secret, how she see brother again, how she get this closure. So I ask her: Is this joke, dinner with ghosts? Is she making metaphors? And she tell me, no. Is chef who brings back Dead. And I know then I must meet you.”

Kostya sat back in his chair.

Fifty thousand likes! That many people thinking about his food, excited to discover it! That many people who might need his help.

“And you’d really want to back a restaurant? Just like that?”

“Listen,” Viktor said, spreading a thin layer of caviar onto buttered toast. “I have many business. Very successful. I know restaurants. And I know people. Idea, I think, is amazing. Ghosts very scary. Very sexy. Like Halloween, and people love this.” He took a bite, chewed. “Is like old spiritualists, yes? Fortune-telling? Talking to ghost through crystal ball and flying scarf. What you use now, projection? Hidden speaker? We will upgrade tech. My associate, Maksim, has—”

“What? No. No, no, no. It’s not a trick.” Kostya felt himself grow warm, his shirt too tight, the cuffs, the collar. “What I do—it’s not a show. It’s real.”

Viktor laughed like he was in on the joke. “I sure you make feel very real, but Kostya, my dear, if I’m investing, I must know truth.”

“That is the truth. There’s nothing fake about it. The ghosts are real.”

“I not believing in ghosts.”

“It doesn’t change the fact that they exist.”

“This we can debate. But people not want real! They want fantasy.”

“Look, you might think that, but authenticity is everything. You need it for connection. For food, too. I was at Saveur Fare for almost a year—”

“Yes, yes.” Viktor rolled his eyes, took another bite, laughed with his mouth full. “Michel Beauchêne, I guessing, not believe in ghosts either. According to my source, he fire you in middle of service.”

“Because he saw me do it!” Kostya blurted out. “You want proof?” He tore open the buttons at the cuff of his shirt and pulled violently at the sleeve, revealing the shiny, scarred flesh beneath. “Here. I raised a ghost right there in the middle of his big holiday party, and he didn’t like it. Gave me this as a Christmas bonus. They’re real, okay?”

Viktor’s eyes drank in Konstantin’s arm, the puckered skin from wrist to elbow. He set down his toast, wiped the corners of his mouth with a napkin.

“Okay. Let us say is real. How many times you do this, raising ghost?”

“What?”

“How many you bring back?”

Kostya dug his fingernails into the palm of his hand. Breathed.

“A couple dozen.” If you rounded up. And multiplied.

Viktor nodded slowly, calculating something. “And you can always do this, for every customer? It always work?”

“Well, no, but—”

“You can do this ten, twenty, thirty times each night, every night of week?”

“Sure.” Konstantin swallowed, his spit thick and unpleasant. “Probably.”

“You do this before, at supper club? Multiple seatings?”

“Not—not exactly.”

Viktor raised his eyebrows. Nodded again. Lifted a glass of champagne to his lips. Took a long, relaxed sip.

This wasn’t good.

“Maybe we misunderstanding each other,” he said at last. “I like very much your concept—”

“It’s not just a concept,” Kostya said quickly. “I can do it. My dishes—my food—I serve closure. It matters. I’ll work hard, harder than—”

“I like very much your concept,” Viktor repeated, cutting him off, “but I looking to open restaurant. You not ready. You need practice. Test kitchen, not restaurant. This not for me. I no longer interesting.”

They didn’t stay for dessert.

KOSTYA TRUDGED HOME in the cold.

As he passed the Times Square McDonald’s, an old standby in moments like this, he resisted the urge to go in, to order several combo meals and shove them, one after the other, into his mouth. He didn’t want to be that guy anymore.

Then again, that guy’s life had been simple. Predictable. Safe.

That guy had had a job—a shitty, soulless, dead-end delivery job he hated, granted, but most of New York seemed perfectly at peace with that kind of arrangement. He’d had Frankie, who always knew what to do. He’d had a quiet, stable existence rather than this Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade of fuckups, each one more spectacular than the last.

When Kostya finally made it inside, his apartment was a Popsicle. Had the furnace busted? Had he missed a bill? Was it just the universe, icing him out while he was down?

He retreated to Frankie’s old room, the most interior, for warmth, and wrapped himself in the comforter. It was so cold he could see the puffs of his jagged breath as he sat there trying not to wallow, which wasn’t exactly easy when he was shivering in an apartment he’d shortly be unable to afford, smelling his dead friend’s body spray on the sheets, reliving in his mind how catastrophically it had gone with Viktor.

It’d be almost funny if it weren’t so sad. He hadn’t raised enough ghosts to satisfy Mr. Musizchka, but too many (if she only knew) for Maura’s taste. One kasha too cold, the other too hot. Maybe it was good, he told himself, that Viktor had passed. Kostya didn’t think he could open a ghost restaurant and be with Maura, too. It’d be like running a steak house and dating a vegan.

You kind of had to pick a side.

He wanted Maura; that was as undeniable as the alchemy between butter and salt. It was more than mere attraction, though there was plenty of that. Being with her was like cooking by intuition, without a recipe, just a feeling that this thing and this other one would be magic if you put them together. If it were anything else he needed to give up, any other obstacle he’d have to overcome to be with her, he wouldn’t hesitate.

Never drink again? Done.

Disown your family? Okey dokey.

Rob a bank? Citi or Chase?

But his aftertastes? Even with all their setbacks, the inconvenience and disappointment and frustration they’d invited into his life, he couldn’t just leave them behind. The good of them was too good.

Each time he succeeded in raising the Dead, the rush was like rocket fuel. It made him feel like he was more than a fluke. Like he was worthy. Impressive. Exceptional.

With every spirit he brought back, he felt like he was changing a life, like what he was doing mattered. He wasn’t sure he could just abandon them—the ghosts, the dishes, the Living—or his decades of flavor profiling, his months of kitchen toil, the shadow parts of himself that he’d only just begun letting into the light.

Then again, maybe Maura was worth that. How he felt when he was feeding her—that was life-changing, too. He could picture it with her. Something real. Long-lasting. He could imagine growing old—his body too stooped to lift a cast-iron pan, his fingers so gnarled they could barely crack eggs—and still working each day to make Maura a meal. To feed her something that would draw out that smile.

But that was insane!

Months of fantasizing notwithstanding, he’d barely spent twenty-four hours in her actual company. He couldn’t throw away everything he’d been working toward for a crush!

… Or could he?

He plopped down onto Frankie’s pillow, wanting the darkness to ingest him, to make it so he wouldn’t have to think, but a sheet of paper fluttered down from the bedside table and he leaned down to fetch it.

It was a daily calendar page featuring a questionable recipe for English Muffin Pizza Bites: If you don’t have pizza sauce handy, sub in pasta sauce or catsup!

This aberration was probably a gift from one of Frankie’s many hookups, someone who actually believed that what a professional chef wanted most for the holidays was 365 days’ worth of bad ideas.

The other side was a menu. Frankie had written it, his cramped block letters dashed off in a flurry, the ink smeared:

Aperitif—Spectral Sour (Library of Spirits, Fall 2016)

Amuse-bouche—Sautéed Liver he’d believed in him. Always. So much, apparently, that he’d imagined what a restaurant serving Kostya’s food would look like. How he could structure his courses.

Longing gathered in Kostya’s gut, making him simultaneously empty and full.

He wished more than anything that Frankie were there. He wished he could ask him about this menu, about what to do, whether he should choose the ghosts or the girl, a shot at a legacy or a shot at love. Most of all, he wished he knew what had happened that night at Wolfpup. Whether Frankie was okay. How he’d died.

“I miss you, man,” he whispered, the room growing colder in response. “So damn much.”

Kostya shivered, pain and loss moving within him like a physical thing, a finger burrowing into his chest, paralyzing his lungs.

And then, air. A puff, hitting the back of his throat. Melting into flavor.

Irish Whiskey. Not Jameson. Not Teeling. Sexton. Strong and toasty, honeyed fruit stinging his nose. Sweet sponge cake. Soft, so soft, sopping with booze, oozing into his throat. Coconut Cruzan. Flavored Dominican rum, the scent of an island breeze. Beeswax, from a birthday candle, crackling between his teeth.

He’d know that rum cake anywhere. Warm and heady, half-Irish, half-Dominican, with the promise of a good time. Just like the man himself.

In all the time they’d lived together, Frankie had never had a sweet tooth—preferred heat and spice, salt to sugar—but whenever he went home to his mama’s, he’d come back with a Tupperware of this. It was what she made every birthday, every holiday, every time her baby visited. It was the stuff of Frankie’s childhood memories, the magic of his sweetest moments baked into a bundt and soused with sweet booze—a shot of Cruzan for his ’ lita, his mama’s mama; a shot of Sexton for his grandmam—and served to him in increasingly large slices as he aged up and learned to hold his liquor.

Kostya could almost see him, coming through the door with the container swinging in a plastic bag, digging a spoon out of the drawer, leaning over the kitchen counter to shovel it into his mouth, no plate, no chair, just a look of ecstatic nostalgia on his face.

Y’all can have the foie and lobster , he once said, scooping crumbs into his mouth. This is my death row dish. Want a bite?

“F-Frankie?”

Kostya’s heart beat six cups of coffee. He knew what he’d promised Frankie. That he’d sworn never to raise him. But after all these months of nothing, the sudden appearance of his aftertaste might mean a change. Maybe Frankie had reconsidered. Maybe he was in trouble. Suffering, like Sister Stacy had said. Maybe he needed Kostya’s help.

The heat rushed back into his fingertips. He disentangled himself from the sheets, found his shoes, jammed his feet inside. He was tracing a mental map to the nearest grocery store when his pocket lit up, vibrated.

Maura.

He stared at the screen, tearing in two. If it had been anyone else, he’d have already sent them to voicemail. Instead, he stood there, the hint of whiskey on his breath, rereading her name.

It rang for a second time, his thumb hovering just over the slider.

Frankie or Maura. Maura or Frankie.

Would Frankie wait? Would he come back again if Kostya didn’t act now? Or was this his only shot? He could already feel him starting to slip, the tingle of sugar dissolving from his tongue. If he sprinted, he might make it to the bodega for ingredients. Or it might already be too late.

Maura’s name flashed up at him again, and he recalled what she had said.

It’s repeat offenders that get on the naughty list.

They’d probably come for you.

“No Dana, only Zuul.”

Maybe it was a bad idea, bringing Frankie back before he could at least investigate those claims. He might cause more harm than good. He might piss Frankie off. And besides which, he reminded himself, he’d promised not to.

His phone buzzed again.

“Maura? Hey.”

The aftertaste vanished as soon as he picked up.