Healthy Place to Die (8 page)

“You saved my life,” I said to both of them. “What’s your name?” I asked the blond girl. She wore only a bikini as brief as that of the previous girl.

“Anita,” she replied. “Where is Celia?”

“She went to adjust the temperature,” I said as normality crept back. “She must have misread the dial or got hold of the wrong handle.

“Can you bring me one of those robes?” I asked. Now that I was feeling better, nudity seemed out of place.

Anita brought me a robe. “I’ll have a look at the temperature control,” she said, and disappeared into the steam haze.

Marta gave me a brief, reassuring smile. “It’s a good thing I came back. What happened to you?”

“The pool got hotter. I got weaker. I passed out. I hope this never happened to you at the Gellert.”

“Mud baths are supposed to be invigorating,” she said.

“This one wasn’t,” I told her, and sat for a few minutes as my strength returned.

“This must remind you of
Shanghai Nights
,” I told her. “You ran an establishment with a very doubtful reputation. You fell in love with the chief of police, who had to put you out of business or the politicians would get him fired. He stood up to them, they had him hit on the head and thrown into the Pacific and you saved him—you had been standing on the pier where you were going to drown yourself.”

“Ah yes, Josef—he was a great director. He fell in love with me during that picture.”

“I thought your costar, Robert what’s his name, fell in love with you in that picture?”

She smiled wistfully. “Yes, Robert too—but it was Lloyd I married.”

“I thought that was Kent?”

“He was next.”

We laughed together. “I think you have recovered,” she said, “and at least the hot mud hasn’t softened your brain. Do you remember all my movies?”

“Every single one,” I said—one of the rare occasions on which I think it permissible to lie is when talking to a beautiful woman.

Anita came back frowning. “The temperature control is set for normal, but the thermometer reading is fifteen degrees higher.”

“I would have been cooked like a goose in another few minutes,” I told her.

She was still frowning. “I don’t understand. The control must have been running under a higher setting for a period of time. I must report this. It is a very serious matter.”

“I agree. I’m glad you arrived when you did.”

“I was not supposed to relieve Celia for another half hour,” she said. “You are lucky I came early.”

Marta walked back to the main buildings with me. She could pass for twenty years younger, I thought. She was still a very beautiful woman—and not just because she had saved my life. That reminded me …

“Thanks again for saving my life,” I said.

“Anytime,” she said, then looked at me anxiously. “No, I didn’t mean that. I hope it doesn’t happen again.”

The grass was soft and the air clean and pure. It was good to be alive.

Marta said almost to herself, “I wonder how the temperature got up that high.”

She surprised me. I had thought of her as being totally self-absorbed. I was glad to be wrong.

It was a point that I had started to think about now that the shock had worn off. It might not have been so significant, but this was the second time that one of the blond staff members had been involved—the first time in a death (or at least an unaccountable disappearance) and the second time in a near death. From now on, I was going to look at those girls with suspicion. How many more of them could be involved?

“There’s another thing,” Marta said. “I didn’t think it had any meaning before, but now …”

“Go on,” I encouraged her.

“I waited a long time on that phone line. I was told to wait, wait. … Finally, a voice said there was a problem with the line and they would try again later.”

“It’s possible,” I said. “Even Swiss telephones aren’t perfect.”

“I called my agent in New York. He knew nothing about a conference call.” I was silent. She continued, “He is trying to put together a deal for a new picture, but it’s not ready yet.”

“Yes, that is strange,” I admitted. “Some kind of mistake, I suppose.”

“It must have been.”

She might have been waiting for me to tell her that I was in the Secret Service and could not tell her any more. She had probably heard that line in half a dozen movies, although that would not mean she was ready to believe it now. I thought of telling her more, but at this stage I did not want to get her involved. I was not sure yet of what was happening. All I knew was that too much of it was happening to me.

I could always quit and go back to London.

No, I couldn’t. I was really curious, and besides, I liked the spa. I would hang in there a little while longer, even if I didn’t have a paying client—and even if someone did want to boil me like … well, like a lobster.

I
HAD NO TIME
to reflect on my narrow escape from being boiled to death—an inexcusable end for a gourmet detective. Our session at four o’clock began right on time—always a predictable occurrence in Switzerland.

Four of us were on the podium—Leighton Vance, Michel Leblanc, Axel Vorstahl, and I. Caroline introduced us and pointed out again that the week’s classes and demonstrations were not basically for professionals. A few of these attended, those who wanted to brush up or those who had been away from cooking for some time. Basically, though, the classes were for serious amateurs or those in auxiliary fields.

“The latter includes guests that the spa is pleased to have with us this week,” said Caroline. She named Oriana Frascati as an editor of cookbooks, Helmut Helberg as the owner of a supermarket chain, and Bradley Thompson as a fast-food pioneer.

“This is to be a short session,” she explained. “You will all have accumulated a lot of questions so far, and many may not have had the opportunity to have them answered in the regular classes. So here is your chance. …”

It was a popular idea, and the room was crowded. Questions came thick and fast. First of all, someone wanted to know what to do about salt. “We are supposed to cut down on it—in the United States, the federal government says by at least one-third. Salt contributes to high blood pressure, we are told. But everyone knows that there is just no substitute for salt when it comes to flavor. What is the answer?”

Michel Leblanc fired the first shot. “The desire for salt comes when a society moves away from fresh foods to processed foods. Unfortunately, all processed foods contain extremely high amounts of sodium, added as a preservative.” He turned an apologetic face to Helmut Helberg and he answered promptly.

“Bradley and I are, of course, suppliers of processed foods, and we must use preservatives so that canned foods have the shelf life that customers demand.”

Caroline, presiding, was cleverly bringing in all the members of the panel as early and as quickly as possible. She pointed next to me.

“Salt is trapped in a vicious circle,” I said. I wanted to avoid taking up the cudgels on behalf of either of the proponents here. “As the body craves more salt, the demand grows for saltier foods, such as prosciutto, cheese, olives, potato chips, dried beef, canned fish, frankfurters, canned soups—”

“Aren’t there other preservatives besides salt?” someone chipped in.

Caroline’s imperious finger swung to Leighton Vance. “Certainly,” he said. “First, though, I must emphasize that life as we know it could not exist without preservatives. We would have to go back to the Stone Age. Chemical preservatives are by far the cheapest kind—”

“—and salt is the cheapest of all,” contributed Helmut.

As the finger swiveled in my direction, I was ready. “Other methods include heating, chilling, freezing, fermentation, pickling, smoking … Irradiation may turn out to be the most efficient, but there is customer resistance to any link between food and nuclear radiation, and even the best PR people haven’t solved that problem yet.”

“Perhaps we should get back to the original question,” said Caroline smartly. “It really asked, How can the chef avoid salt?”

The discussion flowed. Use more pepper, use paprika, use lemon juice, use mustard or fresh basil or thyme—all were proposed. The final word came from Oriana Frascati. “If you must use salt, make it kosher salt—it’s the purest and the only one free of objectionable chemicals.”

A question came on a different subject. “I’m redesigning my kitchen at home. I do a lot of entertaining, so what are the most important points to bear in mind?”

Axel Vorstahl was first to tackle that one. He had worked with kitchen designers on land as well as on cruise ships, he said. Modifying this experience for a personal kitchen, he made the following suggestions: have lots of open shelving and glass-fronted cupboards; have a refrigerator under the counter and put a freezer in the pantry; treat all countertops with polyurethane for the best resistance to bacteria; capture as much natural light as you can and have halogen lighting tracks to augment it; have heat and water close together by having a faucet adjacent to the cooktop.

“What do you think about uncooked food?” was another query. “Some health clinics prescribe raw foods for better health.”

All four of us commented on this. Helmut Helberg pointed out that cooking actually increases the nutritional content of several vegetables, including carrots and tomatoes. That steaming is always better than boiling was universally agreed.

“We’re getting bored with French cooking, Italian cooking, Chinese food …,” called a voice. “When are we going to get something new, something different?”

There was a pause, and Caroline looked at us all in turn before I ventured an answer. “What about Russian cooking? It has a lot of potential that hasn’t yet been tapped in the West. Maybe it will be next.” Some discussion followed, but no one had any better ideas. Indonesian and Philippine cooking were mentioned, but many thought them only variations on Chinese.

More inquiries flowed, with Helberg, Frascati, and Thompson contributing as much as those of us on the panel. Vance had the least to say. He seemed to have something on his mind. When we finally broke up, a man of the audience wanted to pursue points with selected panelists, and our “short” session became as long as the others.

When I finally left the conference room, I looked for a blond staff girl—any of them. The first one I encountered was Helga, according to her name badge. “Is Celia still on duty?” I asked.

“I think she’s still on mud bath duty,” she responded with a smile.

I went there with a cautious tread, but it appeared safe as half a dozen people were lolling in the thick brown mud and others were coming in. Celia was there and greeted me with a smile.

“I was in the mud bath earlier today,” I told her.

“Oh yes, of course. I remember.” She looked at my stern expression. “Is something wrong?”

“Yes, I almost drowned.”

“In the mud?” she said, sounding unconvinced.

“You left me, saying you were going to adjust the temperature. You adjusted it too much—I almost boiled.”

I studied her carefully. There was no trace of guilt as she said, “I raised it one degree only.” Her brown eyes looked quite innocent. I pressed her further. “You said you’d be back in a minute or two. You didn’t return at all.”

She shook her head. “I had a message to say that I was to report for room service duty and that Anita was replacing me earlier than scheduled.”

“Anita did come early, luckily for me. I might have been dead.”

She was either a wonderful actress or quite blameless. “I am so sorry but I was only obeying instructions. I had no idea …” The blond hair danced as she shook her head again. “I cannot understand how the temperature could get that high. I will have the maintenance department look at it.”

I left her, a bikini-clad figure standing in the steamy chamber. If she was telling the truth, someone else had arranged the whole incident and turned up the temperature. I recalled Marta’s episode with the phone call that never came through. Had that been part of the scheme too, making sure I was alone?

Considered in isolation, it might have been an unusual collection of coincidences, but coming after my discovery of Kathleen’s dead body in the seaweed flagellator, the coincidence factor was too high. Assuming that she had really been dead, of course.

She must have been, I decided. That raised questions of who had taken the body—and where—and why. Further investigation was needed. That raised even more questions—like what—and how—and when. This place had become a mass of puzzles.

A
REFRESHING GIN AND
tonic before dinner helped a little. At the dining table, I was seated with a doctor with a passion for cooking, a retired airline pilot from Swissair who was thinking of opening a restaurant, an American couple now living in Spain, and our most recent arrival, the lady lawyer, Elaine Dunbar. She was already debating the legal rights of airline passengers with the pilot, who was beginning to bristle with all the chauvinism of a country that still didn’t really think that women had any right to be voting.

I started with the pancetta and artichoke fettucine, a Swiss-Italian dish. Again, I had to compliment the chef. He had used egg fettucine, which is much thinner and lighter than the regular kind. The artichokes had had their leaves carefully trimmed. The pancetta—bacon, cured but not smoked—had been cooked till just crisp, while garlic and wine accentuated the flavor.

The German part of Switzerland was represented among the main courses by lamb shank braised with red cabbage, and again Leighton Vance had performed outstandingly. A more earthy, peasant type of dish like this needed a wine with similar characteristics, and I selected a Château de Pibarnon, a red Bandol made from the Mourvedre grape. After some conversation at the table, I decided to go and congratulate him in person.

In the kitchen, busboys were still bringing in dishes and loading them directly into the washers. One sous-chef was scrubbing the wooden chopping boards and another—it was Mallory—was writing on a pad. She looked up, startled, then smiled when she saw it was me. “Making a list for tomorrow,” she explained.