The Kill Room

together and he understood from their body language and banter what they’d been doing.
    Ah, a working girl. Perfect.
    He waited an hour or two and then circled the grounds casually until he found her in the bar, where she was buying herself watered-down drinks and dangling like bait on a hook for another customer.
    Swann, armed with a thousand dollars in untraceable cash, had been happy to swim toward her.
    After the good sex and over the better stew he’d learned a great deal of solid information for the assignment. But he’d never anticipated that there’d be an investigation, so he hadn’t cleaned up as completely as he probably should have. Hence, his trip back to the island.
    Successful. And satisfying.
    He now returned to his town house in the Heights, off Henry Street, and parked in the garage in the alley. He dropped his bag in the front hall, then shed his clothes and took a shower.
    The living room and two bedrooms were modestly furnished, inexpensive antiques mostly, a few Ikea pieces. It looked like the digs of any bachelor in New York City, except for two aspects: the massive green gun safe, in a closet, which held his rifles and pistols, and the kitchen. Which a professional chef might have envied.
    It was to this room that he walked after toweling off and pulling on a terry-cloth robe and slippers. Viking, Miele, KitchenAid, Sub-Zero, separate freezer, wine cooler, radiant bulb cookers—his own making. Stainless steel and oak. Pots and implements sat in glass-doored cabinets along one entire wall. (Those ceiling racks are showy, but why have to wash something before you cook in it?)
    Swann now made French press coffee. He debated what to make for breakfast, sipping the strong brew, which he drank black.
    For the meal he decided on hash. Swann loved challenges in the kitchen and had made recipes that could have been formulated by greats like Heston Blumenthal or Gordon Ramsey. But he knew too that food need not be fancy. When he was in the service he would come back from a mission and in his quarters outside Baghdad whip up meals for his fellow soldiers, using military rations, combined with foods he’d bought at an Arabic market. No one joshed with him about his prissy, sanctimonious approach to cooking. For one thing, the meals were always excellent. For another, they knew Swann had very possibly spent the morning peeling some knuckle skin from a screaming insurgent to find out where a missing shipment of weapons might be.
    You made fun of people like that at your peril.
    He now lifted a one-pound piece of rib-eye steak from the refrigerator and unwrapped the thick white waxed paper. He himself had been responsible for this perfectly sized and edged piece. Every month or so, Swann would buy a half side of beef, which was kept in a cold-storage meat facility for people like him—amateur butchers. He would reserve a whole glorious day to slice the meat from the bones, shape it into sirloin, short ribs, rump, chuck, flank, brisket.
    Some people who bought in bulk enjoyed brains, intestines, stomach and other organ meats. But those cuts didn’t appeal to him and he discarded them. There was nothing morally or emotionally troubling about those portions of an animal; for Swann flesh was flesh. It was merely a question of flavor. Who didn’t love sweetbreads, crisply sautéed? But most offal tended to be bitter and was more trouble than it was worth. Kidneys, for instance, stank up your kitchen for days and brains were overly rich and tasteless (and jam-packed with cholesterol). No, Swann’s time at the two-hundred-pound butcher block, robed in a full apron, wielding saw and knife, was spent excising the classic cuts, working to achieve perfectly shaped specimens while leaving as little on the bone as he possibly could. This was an art, a sport.
    This comforted him.
    My little butcher man…
    Now he set his rib eye on a cutting board—always wood, to save his knives’ edges—and ran his fingers over the meat, sensing the tautness of the flesh, examining the grain, the marbling of the fat.
    Before slicing, however, he washed and re-edged the Kai Shun on his Dan’s Black Hard Arkansas whetstone, which cost nearly as much as the knife itself and was the best sharpening device on the planet. When he’d been sitting atop Annette, he’d moved from tongue to finger, and the blade had an unfortunate encounter with bone. It now needed to be honed back to perfection.
    Finally, the knife was ready and