Death al Dente (4 page)

They were chatting away as I said to Pellegrini, “It’s fascinating that you have buffalo farms. I know that some mozzarella is made from buffalo milk but most people associate the animal with the open plains of middle America. It’s difficult to associate it with Italy.”

“We make the finest mozzarella in Italy,” Pellegrini said proudly. “We export more and more all the time.”

“Isn’t it hard to milk buffalo?” I asked. “They are such big animals—it must make it dangerous.”

He laughed. “You must come and see them. Our cheese factory too. It is one of the finest in Europe.”

“I’d love to,” I said and meant it.

“What would you love to see?” Francesca wanted to know, determinedly keeping track of several conversations at the same time and within a couple of minutes, we had arranged to go out the next day and visit the Pellegrini farms and factory.

“I have a thought,” said Pellegrini. “What are you doing the day after tomorrow? The reason I ask is that is my birthday and Bernardo Mantegna, one of our most famous chefs, is giving a big party for me in his restaurant. I would like for you to come.”

Francesca and I exchanged glances. I saw no reason not to be truthful. “As a matter of fact, we tried to get a reservation there that night and could not.”

“Excellent.” Pellegrini beamed. “Please come as my guests.”

“Haven’t you had dessert yet?” asked Giacomo in concern. “We have some magnificent concoctions of mascarpone. I will send some over.”

He shook hands with the two men, kissed all three women, and turned to me.

“I believe you will leave here tonight, signor, convinced that I am the man for Mr. Lansdown’s restaurant.”

I
WAS MADDER THAN
a wet hen. I was boiling over like a forgotten stew.

We were going back to my hotel, this time with a different driver. She was a middle-aged lady with hair in a bun and the look of a schoolteacher. She drove at reasonable speeds, obeyed traffic signals, and was nonagressive.

“How could he have found out?” I raged. “Somebody must have told him! Who was it?”

“I don’t know,” Francesca said as if she could not have cared less.

I had found it difficult to concentrate on the magnificent sweetened mascarpone that Giacomo served us for dessert. This is the soft cheese used in the preparation of tiramisu, one of Italy’s more recent export successes. Giacomo used a more simple approach. He mashed crushed walnuts into the mascarpone, folded in some whipped cream, and chilled. I told him he was omitting telling me something, for I detected an unmistakable flavor, and he admitted having stirred in some brandy. “I am always trying to be a little different.” He beamed.

My stomach triumphed over my head, though, and I was able to enjoy the dessert and congratulate him on his cuisine. I had said nothing about his bombshell, saving all my anger for Francesca. It did not bother her a bit. She shrugged a curvaceous shoulder at my question about the leak.

“You Anglo-Saxons worry too much about secrets. You are in Italy now. Here, everyone knows everything that goes on.”

“Did
you
know?”

She gave me a tantalizing look, leaned back in her corner of the big, comfortable limo, and crossed her legs. She must have Roman blood in her, I thought. She looked about as unconcerned as the Empress Calpurnia on hearing that a dozen legions had been lost in the African desert.

“Lansdown will be furious,” I told her, determined not to let her off the hook. “If it wasn’t at his end, then it must have been your people.”

“I showed you the fax,” she said languidly. “There was nothing in it.” She straightened to a pose of hauteur as she added, “If anyone is angry, it should be me. You didn’t tell me the truth. You are only supposed to be writing a guidebook.”

“But did you know?” I persisted.

“What is there to know?” She was all wide-eyed innocence. “That Desmond has restaurants in London, New York, and Miami. So he is hiring a chef. What of it? What is—as you put it in English—the big deal?”

A streetcar cut us off, bell clanging furiously. We swayed, but the powerful suspension of the limo righted us immediately, and our driver resumed her smooth control. At least we didn’t have the alpine circuit chauffeur of yesterday taking us on a mad night ride through the streets of Bologna.

It was time to exercise what the crew of the U.S.S. Enterprise call “damage control.” Perhaps it was not that serious. After all, they always survive. I was still puzzled over how Giacomo knew though—and what about the other two chefs? Did they know too?

“Desmond will be calling in a few days—he’ll call you first, of course,” Francesca said, adding the last part as a conciliatory afterthought. “I’ll tell him that I know about the chef business.”

“He will ask how you know,” I told her.

She stared out at the brightly lighted shop windows as we went through what was evidently the fashion district. She giggled. Sophisticated women cannot giggle and maintain their sophistication but Francesca was the exception. “I’ll tell him you talk in your sleep,” she said and giggled again.

We reached the hotel before I could compose an answer to that.

“Do you want me to come with you to Pellegrini’s farms tomorrow?” she asked.

“No, I think I’ll go alone. Why don’t you take a day off? Pick me up tomorrow evening for dinner at the Palazzo Astoria.”

I got out of the limo. She leaned across the seat. “Are you mad at me?” she asked, her eyes large and childlike.

“No,” I said. “I was but not now. Well, not mad at you anyway—I was so annoyed that someone knows. I still can’t figure out who and how.”

“It’s like I told you, this is Italy. We all know our neighbors’ business. This is probably still a secret—”

“How can it be—”

“A secret not known to more than just a few people.” She gave me a pout that might have implied a kiss and pulled the limo door shut as the vehicle rolled away from the curb.

The Ambasciatore Imperiale had a breakfast room big enough to serve the Italian army. It was all marble, glass, and chrome and sufficiently daunting that I walked on through and out on to the Via Novella in search of a
tavolafredda.
These serve snacks, drinks of all kinds, buns, and cakes, plus, of course, coffee. They have a few tables but it is mostly stand-up service. The name means cold table and distinguishes it from
tavola calda,
hot table, where meals are served.

Both are busy all through the day. The food is under large glass panels, the walls are mirrored and covered with bottles, the floors are marble, and the atmosphere lively and fizzing with conversation. Just in time, I remembered one convention that baffles first-time visitors. You have to pay for your food and drink before you can buy it—and you have to buy it before you can eat it.

Foreigners shake their heads in astonishment at what seems like a cumbersome system. First, you walk around and decide what you want. You pick a person behind the counter, using elbows and shoulders to get there. Forget order and manners. The person rings it up and hands you a sales slip. You take this to the cash desk and pay. The slip is receipted and you now take this back to the sales counter and exchange the slip for your purchases.

There is a reason for all this—the larcenous streak in the Italian nature means that it would be financially suicidal for the owner to trust the staff. He knows that they would pocket what they consider a reasonable share of the profits to compensate for their miserable wage. The system as operated puts all the financial responsibility on the sole person at the cash desk, almost always the owner or his wife. If the books do not balance at the end of the accounting period, the finger of accusation is unerring.

The quality of the food is surprisingly high in such places. Pastry is fresh every day and most of the consumption is sweet pastries. Coffee is always fresh and excellent while, particularly at breakfast time, the flow of customers is heavy. A typical way for an Italian to start his day is a glass of brandy, two or three cups of strong black coffee, and a sweet, sticky bun covered with icing and sugar.

I drank a cappuccino and ate an Italian equivalent of a croissant. These are less sweet than most of the other offerings, though not as flaky as the French version. The seat by the window that I had selected gave me an excellent view of the passing parade. People watching is a great pastime in any foreign city but when the city is Italian, it is triply rewarding.

Italians are always active, purposeful, and vital. Every scene portrays the vivacity, the throbbing, pulsating life with its noise, its movement, and its excitement. Anyone observed strolling is certainly a tourist. The streets are jammed with cars, honking loudly and frequently. The sidewalks are crammed with pedestrians, always seeing a friend across the street. Conversations are conducted in loud voices and with expressive gestures. Every opportunity is seized to dash across in the most dangerous places and between impatient cars. Motor scooters dart in and out like wasps, oblivious to signals, narrowly missing pedestrians, and sneering at the angry motorists.

Mothers admonish, scold, praise, cajole, and encourage children watched by admiring relatives. Men lounge, smoke, talk, gesticulate. Voices call from open windows. Snatches of opera drift out from radios. Scales are practiced, smells of cooking flow out on to the sidewalk.

An Italian can stretch a cup of coffee out for an hour but, as entertaining as it was, I strolled back to the hotel and within a couple of minutes, the Perseus limo rolled up to the curb. I was glad to see that Francesca had paid attention to my request and Bella, the driver of the evening before, was at the wheel.

We headed out of town in a northerly direction and picked up the autostrada. On the green hillsides, herds grazed in the shade of leafy chestnut trees. The valley of the Po River is rich in wheat, said to be the best in Italy. We passed through a region where giant trucks loaded with sugar beet hurtled past us at eighty miles an hour. Apple orchards lined the autostrada then fields of many of the other products of this fertile area whizzed past: pears, strawberries, peaches, asparagus, zucchini, and potatoes.

A huge roadside sign declared that we were approaching the Pellegrini farms, and after some minutes, Bella exited from the autostrada and followed a local road for some distance. Pulling onto a private road, she turned through a massive wooden arch, again with the Pellegrini name in gigantic letters. We drove up a winding incline, past a long fence, and finally stopped before an imposing structure.

In front of it, Silvio Pellegrini sat at a long wooden table talking volubly into a cellular phone. He gave me a wave and resumed his verbal onslaught on the party at the other end who, it seemed, had not delivered on time. He closed the conversation with a blast of orders, shut off the phone, and dropped it into his pocket.

“So, my friend, welcome to the Pellegrini enterprises!”

He was wearing casual clothes today, a gray shirt and blue jeans with ankle boots, but he still looked like the wealthy, powerful landowner and business executive. The smooth, well-groomed face, a little full from good eating, and the sleek black hair seemed more suited to a boardroom than a ranch. His affable manner was obviously one reason for his success—he even seemed genuinely pleased to see me.

He took me into the farmhouse, which had evolved a long way from that humble origin. A large rambling building, it had been enlarged, modernized, and almost rebuilt. Pellegrini had a penthouse in Bologna where he lived most of the time, he told me, but he loved this place, which he had bought when it was a barely livable habitation.

In the added rooms, ceilings were high, with skylights letting in a yellow sun. In the main living room, expensive carpets lay on floors of massive terracotta tile while oil paintings and faded tapestries covered the walls. “I use this room most of the time.” Pellegrini said. Just inside the door was a table with an elaborate coffee maker, gleaming chrome and glass. “I drink a lot of coffee.” He smiled. Next to it was a drinks cabinet and above it glass shelves filled with bottles of all colors. The outstanding feature by far, though, was the waterwheel.

“Long before I bought the place, this was a mill. We don’t have olive trees on this property but there are many groves in the area. They are mostly small and their owners could not afford a press of their own so they would bring their harvest here for the oil to be extracted. It is not used any more but it would have been a shame to destroy such a magnificent feature.”

I agreed. It was a massive wooden wheel, so large that the roof and ceiling had to be raised, Pellegrini told me, in order to accommodate it into the structure of the house, which had then been expanded around it. The stream which had powered the wheel was partly dammed, and only a trickle fed a large pool about the size of a home swimming pool. A wooden walkway went over the water, around the pool edge, and into another part of the house.

“The wheel still turns,” I noted.

“Yes,” said Pellegrini. “It is its natural function. I could not think of stopping it. So I had a small motor installed.”

He took me through the rest of the house then led me out into the back to a Unimog, a small German vehicle very much like a Jeep.

“Now you will see buffalo,” he told me with a proud smile.

We bumped over uneven ground. He drove, like all Italian men, too fast, which accentuated the irregularity of the terrain. He had to shout to make himself heard.

“These buffalo are really bison—just like the American buffalo. These were brought here from India several centuries ago.”

“It seems strange to think of buffalo here,” I shouted back. “They seem so natural on the American plains. In Italy, they just don’t seem to belong. Are the two breeds alike?”

“The American buffalo is bigger and heavier than ours. It has shorter, stockier legs, a bigger head, and heavier fur.”

We had climbed enough to be able to see a panorama spread before us. It was grassy land with frequent clumps of trees and bushes. A strange feature was the vast, whitish areas. I realized they were moving …