13
Punta di Petto and Tripe
Marco didn’t soften his hard-line commitment to his marriage, not a bit, not for a moment, not once during our travels. I played along. I flirted outrageously at dinner at Ora d’Aria in Firenze with the third regional sales manager that Marco put before me in that four-day trip. You can’t slide tapas-sized plates of three-star Tuscan food before me and not expect me to use my fingers. Really, whose fault was it that my index finger made its way inside that sales manager’s mouth, topped as it was with a brown-butter-and-chickpea sauce the exact shade of a maiden’s aureole. And what can a woman do with the last morsel of pork belly sauced with a garlic and lavender reduction other than pop it in the mouth of the unmarried man to her left. I was in Italy, after all, and even though Marco was having none of me didn’t mean I had to be a nun.
For the record, I didn’t have sex with the third regional sales manager. He failed to be intriguing. I kept my relationship with Marco professional. It was all merely part of the game that Marco didn’t know he was playing.
The Art Institute of Chicago is home to a lurid painting of a door.
Ominously black yet kissed with a candy-pink-flowered wreath, this door looms almost life-sized, eldritch as Victorian hair jewelry, ornate and vaguely threatening, somehow dripping in blood, though none is visible. From its jamb, a hand reaches out; you wouldn’t accept it.
The work of Ivan Albright, this painting’s real name is That Which I Should Have Done I Did Not Do. Choices are, after all, the things that haunt us. The moments when we could’ve turned left but turned
right. The times when we could’ve gone back but forged ahead. The instants when we made decisions that we would live to regret. I don’t regret killing Marco. It was, after all, almost his decision.
Had Marco broken with his monogamous pact, had he forsaken his bourgeois conformity to the donna, to his faith, to the superego of respectability, had he merely made the easy choice to fall gently into vague dissolution, he’d still be walking and talking, alive to sneak into obscure trattorias to eat prosciutto and finger-fuck my familiar genitalia beneath the table. I’d rub my face into his badger-pelt chest and order another magnum of Champagne. We’d have oysters and anal, not necessarily in that order, and all would be right with the world.
Instead things took another route. Deep in the plum of a Friday night, I opened the back door to Marco’s butcher shop in Rome. It was almost too easy, but then I had planned this murder within an inch of its life, and Marco, seduced as he was by the future of seeing his empire spread slick as a centerfold across the pages of Gourmand, fell like a complicit lamb into my hands. To cap my visit to Marco’s meat empire, Marco suggested meeting at his famed macelleria in the Jewish Quarter late on the Friday sabbath because no one would be out; no one would see us; no one could bear witness; and no one could tell his wife that he was meeting a testarossa of little good repute. In the religious quiet of the night, tucked as his shop was off the quarter’s main drag, we were unlikely to be seen. Particularly if, as we did, we entered separately, and I wore an overcoat and a fedora.
I arrived first, by design. Marco was uncertain of when he would be able to pry himself loose from his familial bosom. We were both aware that our walking in together would raise suspicion, so Marco had given me the keys and the alarm code. From an alley, I approached the rear of the store; next to the gripping maw of the loading platform was a plain metal door, thick and heavy. I unlocked it and disabled the alarm. I skulked quiet through the hallway to the darkened front room, the one with the large plate-glass window, which during working hours would have illuminated me like a sweet in a candy case. I looked at the worn wooden floor in the streetlight’s Picasso-blue shadows, the refrigerated cases bare and clean and
gleaming in the gloaming, the scales weighing nothing but air. The room held the uncanny silence of a public space empty of people.
Visible to the light foot traffic and the windows of the apartments facing the building, shutters decorously closed as averted eyes, the actual shop was not where my interests lay. I wanted the back rooms. The guts of the butcher shop, deep in the building and sealed tight as a tomb. This is where Marco’s team performed the unsavory work of making animal corpses into saleable meat. The abattoir I’d visited earlier that day was merely the overture to the corporeal matinee that played out on these dark stages. I fumbled along the walls and found the light switches, flicking them with a snicker-snack of sound and flooding the room with the hallucinogenie glare of aggressive fluorescent light.
There were essentially two spaces for these theatrics of butchery: one large, clean room ranged with four large tables, each accompanied by a sink and a martial row of knives, sharp as freed felons. Overhead was a complex network of tracks; in a topsy-turvy way, it looked like mass transit, and it sort of was, but rather than trains, sharp metal hooks ran on the tracks, and rather than carrying people to their destinations, they carried dead animals to their tidy dismemberment. To my surprise, there was almost no smell, only the faintest copper taint of blood, just the palest whiff of cleaning supplies. Marco ran a very clean shop.
The other room was a giant refrigerator festooned with a very large number of dead animals, great lumpen halves of steers, split down the center; the discomfiting toddler shapes of lambs and baby goats; piles of chickens in plastic bags. In life, this room would have resonated with barnyard cacophony; in that walk-in still life, with its zinc refrigerator walls and mottled animal bodies, my footsteps fell like cotton balls. A door in the back led to a freezer; my breath puffed in impotent clouds about the corpses.
There’s a lot of human labor involved in turning dead animals into palatable slabs of meat. One dead cow can garner more than sixty different cuts of beef in as many as eight grades of quality. This math obscures the work it takes to put that filet on your plate; the back of Marco’s butcher shop did not. Technology helps, of course, and the tracks that traversed the ceiling made it easier to swing a cow do-si-
do around the room from fridge to table, and the small skill saws ranged like sentinels in the corners no doubt did their parts, but in the end, it’s the butcher and his handiwork that makes meals from meat.
I had to say, I was impressed. Of course I’d visited butchers before, but they were never butchers I’d known for decades and seen mature from romantic college boy to industry mogul. Marco’s modest shop, the genus for his empire, plied the perfect punctuation to the journey. I had to marvel at the perfection of the narrative loop.
This butcher shop wasn’t just the humble beginnings of Marco’s empire of meat; it was also the big, wet secret he’d kept from me in our youth. I’m no heart-doodling fool. I know full well that being only Marco’s mistress—the thrill of the chase, the delinquent deliquesces, the ellipses-studded Morse code of our nearly life-long relationship— had kept us interested in each other. Had either one of us been fully available and thus open and honest, our desire would’ve died a needful death. You only want what you can’t consistently have, at least if you’re me. Or Marco, I suspect, at least some of the time.
I heard the rasp of a key turning in a lock, the tapping of expensive shoes on cement flooring, and then Marco was all about me, enveloping my body in his arms and beard and trench coat, like a stingray around a school of fish.
“Mia cara, mia fiamma, la mia Stella scarlatto,” he murmured into my neck. My darling, my flame, my scarlet star. “I have… anelare,
anelare… how do you say?”
“Yearned.”
“Sì. Yearned. I have yearned for you. Sono debole. Sono debole.
Sono così, così debole.” I am weak, he said, I am so, so weak. He breathed the words into my cleavage, punctuating them with kisses on my breasts.
This was awkward. I had promised myself Marco’s freedom if he came to me, bent-kneed and supplicant, primed for fornication. In the days we’d spent together, his conduct was so professional as to be nearly imperious. In truth, he’d been kind of a prick. Marco’s reigning supreme in his empire of meat didn’t make me an underling, yet his behavior toward me verged on bossy. If this was how he treated women on the regular, he didn’t deserve to draw breath, much less
be allowed to enter my body. Day after day, as Marco withheld, as he swanned about—as he lorded and puffed his chest and kept referring to me as “la piccola scrittrice,” the little writer, as if I didn’t have decades of experience, two bestselling books, and fluency in Italian—the more I felt he was sealing his own fate. His death was his doing.
So what was I to make of Marco’s erotic penitence, and what should I do with the man, now pooled at my feet, his nose pressed against my pudendum, huffing his deep breaths through the lace of my panties. Did it violate my rules to kill him now? Or had his behavior until now sealed his fate. If Marco had to die because of his choice to kowtow to convention and commitment rather than honor personal history and eros, how should I read his eleventh-hour conversion.
“Let us leave,” Marco said into my pudendum. “Andiamo.
Andiamo nel tuo albergo. Non mi interessa. Ti voglio.” His mouth moving compellingly over my vulva, his breath hotter with each “non mi interessa”—I don’t care. He yearned. I felt it. His yearning was palpable through the silk and the lace, and it shot shivers. My vertebrae trilled like a xylophone, but my hotel was inconveniently located in Toscana.
I grabbed a heft of hair and pulled Marco to standing. I kissed him and pushed him against the wall. I slid his trench coat off his arms, first his left, then his right. I pulled his suit jacket down, pooling it around his wrists. I untied the knot of his tie, and I shucked his shirt like an ear of corn. Marco stood in his pants, his chest bare, his arms bound behind him in a wad of aggressively expensive clothes. The fluorescent light turned him the dainty green of an immature olive.
Marco struggled to free his hands.
“No. Stai ferma,” I said. Be still.
I pulled a pair of cuffs from my pocket and, reaching behind him, clipped first one, then the other over his wrists. I pushed him a couple of feet to his left, where a chain hung from the ceiling, part of the track apparatus for sliding carcasses across the ceiling, and I clipped the cuffs on to the chain. I’d brought a double clip from a bondage store in Manhattan with me (I’d picked up the cuffs in Milan, one of the few Italian cities whose commerce is not entirely prudish).
I believe I mentioned that I’d planned this murder within a cunt’s hair of its life.
Marco moaned, indistinctly. His chest rose and fell, and his skin was taut with want.
I unbuckled Marco’s Gucci belt, unzipped his Valentino trousers, pulled his cock free of his Dolce & Gabbana boxers, and I took it into my mouth. I lulled Marco into willing submission, and as I felt his cock quiver with the hardness of near orgasm, and as I tasted the bleach-and-umami flavor of his precum, I reached my right into my purse. Marco spent himself into my mouth, shuddering, groaning; his orgasm echoed in his butcher’s room. I caressed his flank with my left hand, waiting for him to go soft in my mouth. Then, I stood and kissed him, looked him in the eye, and I slit his throat with my blade.
I did not hesitate. I did not flinch. I did not press. My knife did not slip; it did not dig; it did not tear. My knife, I had taken care to ensure, was free of nicks, and it was sharp. So sharp it shined, and it sang no pain when I’d tested it, first with the pad of my thumb and then with my fingernails. It was a clean, sharp blade. It made Dorothy Parker’s wit look dull.
Precise as a skater, my knife sliced through Marco’s throat; a second smile spilled crimson down his chest. Marco’s eyes locked with mine, a fast, tense flash—and then they glided off, a dull stare that glanced to nothing. There was no time for terror, no lingering mortality, no slow ebb of life, no time to worry or to watch. Marco was alive, and then he was not. His death was as sudden as a light flicked by a forefinger: here-slash-gone. The fault in that analogy, however fitting, is in the undoing; I could not lift the knife, slice backward through the air, and make him as he was. I should have liked, if only to slice again, to do it again; reverse it and do it again and again. Gone. Here. Gone. Here. Gone. I watched as Marco’s blood poured and his pleasure-crying mouth went slack. A great red pool grew on the floor beneath him; I stood to the side and let it flow, then I let it trickle, and finally I let it drip, leaving great scarlet trails down his furry chest, belly, and loins. The air smelled hot and bright with blood.
Was it a shechita slaughter? Obviously not. First and foremost, human meat is most assuredly not kosher. Second, I am not Jewish.
Third, I’m not trained as a shochet. And fourth, while it’s not technically required that a kosher slaughter needs the knife known as a Hasidische hallaf, it is the industry standard. Not using one in shechita butchery is akin to a pastry chef using a mixer other than a KitchenAid; sure, there’s the odd one who prefers a Cuisinart or a Viking, but they’re the strange child on the playground. My knife was not a Hasidische hallaf; in all other respects, however, it was fine for the task. It was as close as I, a laywoman, could get. I felt as if I had done what I could to honor Marco in the most appropriate manner that I could approximate. It was his heritage, after all, his faith, his vocation, and the visible parts of his life. How could I have killed him otherwise.
The Butcher of Baghdad, the Butcher of Beirut. The Butcher of Uganda, the Butcher of Congo, the Butcher of Plainfield. Bill the Butcher. We’re a culture that uses “butcher” as a disparagement.
When you’ve done a really bad job at something, you’ve butchered it; no one would go to a surgeon who’s a butcher. We bandy about the word “butcher” with regard for the profession, but truths be told, humans would still be screeching apes shitting from trees if it weren’t for the transformative power of meat. A long, long time ago, a random Neanderthal found a stick and thumped it hard on the noggin of some dumb animal; then she took a sharp rock and slid it into the animal’s hot hide. With these modest actions, human history forever changed. We know that people have been using tools to disassemble animals for at least 2.5 million years. And for the last thousand, we’ve been using the cleaver.
“Cleave” is an interesting word. A contranym, “cleave” means both to join and to separate; in this regard, it works like “splice,” but no one splices another to her breast. We cleave to people, or they cleave to us, yet to cleave a person is self-defense at best and a horror at worst. Knives are flexible things; a chef’s blade is among the most versatile tools you have in your kitchen—you can press, slice, chop, mince, cut, and even scoop with it. You’d think nothing of picking up a boning knife to prise out a bit of peach pit lodged in the fruit’s tender flesh. Your serrated knife may be made to cut bread, but it works wonders on tomatoes, chocolate, and cake. The cleaver,
in contrast, has but one task: it cuts through fat, flesh, tendon, and even bone. It turns a carcass into meat.
It is, therefore, somewhat a pity that this tool—so efficient, so shiny, so sharp—has fallen out of favor. Born more than a million years ago, the cleaver has been replaced by quotidian saws, first hacksaws and then table saws, for the gross work and a series of thin boning knives for the fine. You can still find butchers who rely mainly on cleavers, but most do not. In part, this shift is owing to the fact that more and more packers hot-trim the carcass on the kill floor, not even waiting for the body of the cow, the pig, or the sheep to cool to room temperature before disassembly. (“Hot-trim the carcass” is not yet a euphemism, but what a fine, feral euphemism it would make.) And in part it’s owing to more sides of meat being shipped frozen, making it easier for meatpackers or supermarket butchers to use table saws to cut it into saleable pieces. More meat, more mechanization, and the cleaver sits on the side of the block, gathering dust on its shiny, noble blade.
Suspended with his wrists shackled to the wall, Marco beetled forward like a figurehead on a ship. His wrists were bound behind him, by clothes and by cuffs; his knees locked in death. Though at a decided angle, he stood upright. I shook a shoulder to test for stability. Gravity and physics blessed me; the body didn’t seem inclined to move. In planning, I had been concerned about turning the carcass upside down and thought it might be more difficult had it fallen to sprawl like a line drawing on the floor. Kosher killing—and standard slaughter, too—places a high value on inverting the body to ensure the blood drains fully. Plus, as I had repeatedly witnessed in the slaughterhouse, it was relatively easy to skin, check the vitals, and porge the carcass as it hung, like fruit turned upside down and inside out. I wanted to engage in as much of the shechita process as I could, if do it more swiftly than is usual.
I located an empty meat hook on a chain in the ceiling trestle and rolled it along the track to where the body was. The butcher room had been designed to minimize the need for carrying large carcasses from the fridge to the individual tables. There were separate tracks for each of the four butcher stations, presumably
because the shop delivered to so many of the area restaurants and because of its direct link with the abattoir. Marco never liked physical labor, and his ingenious design mitigated it. The tracks on the ceiling let meat swing from fridge to table, a moribund square dance. But the room’s design meant one very large problem for me.
It was Gil all over again. Why is it so difficult to get a man where you want him.
Designed for cattle, lamb, and goat that were impaled and then left to hang, the chains were short. About two feet spanned the space between the hook and the freshly killed body below, no insignificant gap. Presumably the butchers, all big beefy men, could easily jostle and lift the slabs of beef or whole lambs and goats off these hooks, wrestle them to the tables, and be jovial about it. I might be a tall, relatively strong middle-aged woman, but I was no Roman butcher. In life, Marco stood six-foot-two and weighed in the mid-200-pound range. In death, his body looked and felt like a beached walrus, dense and pudgy unto bursting. I couldn’t lift it.
Even more to the point, the body was slick with blood that I did not want coating me. Red and shining, Marco’s body looked like a still from an old movie on the life of Caligula. I gazed at the crimson puddle on the floor. I had a hard time believing that I’d be able to drain any more blood, but I had to try. If there was one thing I’d learned from touring Marco’s meat empire and from Andrew’s rump roast, it was that exsanguination wasn’t merely fun; it was necessary to prime meat.
What to do. What to do. I found a thick rubber apron and put it on, ditto some plastic sleeves that made me look like a dealer in a space-age western saloon. I’d already slipped on rubber gloves, of course, and I’d been careful to not touch anything other than Marco and his handcuffs with my bare hands. My clothes and my chest had been spattered with blood when I slit Marco’s throat, but I’d brought a change of outfit and some strong camphor soap. I’d wash later.
Looking presentable was a problem I’d prepared for; bridging a two- foot ceiling gap so that I could hang my carcass upside down was not.
Searching through the shop’s back rooms, I found two lengths of chain hanging from a wall—likely for this exact sort of emergency.
Mine could hardly be the first carcass that failed to fit the pre-strung meat hooks. I hung one end from the hook, looped the other around the cuffs, fit the link into the hook, and carefully lifted the cuffs off the wall. The body swung free, a weighty pendulum, the legs collapsing beneath it.
I slid off the Ferragamo loafers, sliced off the pants, and discarded everything in a heap away from the pool of blood. I took the other chain, wrapping it securely around the ankles in a figure- eight pattern. Then I swung the carcass around, wedged my shoulder under the buttocks, and heaved it up until the ankles met the wrists, slipping the chain over the hook. Now it looked less like a walrus and more like a veal calf, ankles and wrists bound together by the hook; all I had to do was unlatch the handcuffs, and the torso fell free. Inverted, the corpse swung with lugubrious grace. I am nothing if not resourceful.
You’d likely enjoy it if I stopped narrating this chapter at this precise moment. You—comfortable in your chair, snug in your bed, rocking somnolent on the train, curved around your Kindle, or propping your book open in your splayed hands—probably are making a silent wish for me to table the gruesome details. You’re tempted to thumb ahead, to skip this section where I detail the skinning, gutting, stripping, and slicing of this corpse that once was my living, breathing, ejaculating lover.
It’s for your own good that I tell these bits. It’s for your own good that you hear them. You’ve come too far not to see how the sausage gets made, metaphorically speaking, of course.
The animal has to be checked after it’s been shekhted. Add that line to your nursery-rhyme pool. It’s no more gory than rock-a-bye baby in the treetop. Separating the gash on the neck just below the perfect beard, I peered into the throat, looking to see if I’d nicked the esophagus or the trachea; both looked white, whole, unscathed as a virgin’s hymen. I paused to feel appreciation for my knife skills.
But I’d no time to tarry. Although no one was due into the shop until after sunset on Saturday, my alibi gave me no more than two hours to finish and leave Rome, and I had no way of knowing if Marco’s family would raise an alarm at his absence. I didn’t even know what excuse he’d given them to pry himself from their Shabbat
quiet. I carved a crewneck semicircle across the back just below the neck, added armholes, and slit a placket down the front and another down the back. I also sliced a low waistband. Had I all the time in the world, I’d have cut a cunning little circle around the anus and tied the lower intestine off with a bit of string, but I didn’t have that luxury, so I half-assed it, as it were.
With some tugging, the skin slid off like a waistcoat, revealing a lustrous expanse of fascia, craggy fields of butter-yellow fat, and silky sheets of rosy muscle. According to the laws of shechita, I had to check the internal organs. So I cut a lovely arc across the loins, and I slashed down the center of the body. A fine cascade of viscera hit the floor with an echoing splat. You can read the statistic that the human body holds twenty-five feet of intestines, but until you see it in all its red-white-and-blue glory, you can’t envision it. Twenty-five feet is a lot of intestines, and I was awash. The pulsating, ferocious smell of innards pressed and throbbed in my throat. I pushed snaking lines of slippery viscera to the side, winding some around the nearby jigsaw. The guts smelled like raw haggis—no, let me rephrase: the air smelled like atavistic lust and honor and jubilance and ecstasy. It was awesome, in the oldest Old Testament sense of the word. It was sublime, in the classic sense of Edmund Burke. It was a sharp, bestial, acrid, and mineral smell, one that wed shit and blood and loins and spit in the most holy of matrimonies. If I’d time, I’d have stripped naked and rolled around in it.
I was supposed to look at the lungs, but tick, tick, tick. Time was wasting, and cracking the ribs was hard work. I let that task go with a brief apology. Likewise, I couldn’t really porge the flesh, removing the nerves and arteries. If I’d had oceans of time, I’d have joyfully done what I could to make Marco’s flesh clean for consumption from root to tip, but I’d only about an hour to spare. Choices must be made. In life as in writing, you kill your darlings. You kill, anyway, and then you see what you can take with you.
I’d intended to leave with two parts: the brisket (which is closest in kin to human pectoral muscles) and the stomach. I couldn’t decide which I wanted to eat more, so I took both, first slicing the pectorals away from the chest wall in smooth, heavy sheets, and next following the intestine trail through the belly to find the stomach. It
was swollen as an old boot. I turned the stomach inside out, spilling the contents onto the floor. Chunks of chicken, shards of broccoli, and bits of white somethings, possibly orecchiette. I’d always told Marco to chew his food better. I felt almost nostalgic, seeing how right I’d been.
I brought the brisket and the stomach to one of the stainless steel sinks that lined the wall. I coated the pieces of meat with salt and let them sit. Then I turned to the scarlet slick in the center of the room, dipped my gloved hands in the chilled blood, and I finger-painted. I drew pentagrams and vague goat heads, triangles and anarchist “A”s, something that looked like an infinity symbol topped with an exuberant cross, another figure that was a crescent moon kissed with two intersecting lines, something that resembled a double- bladed axe. I’d raided heavy metal albums and pagan websites for visuals, and I festooned the walls, the floor, even the body with these symbols, drawing them with both my left and right hands, doing what I could to confuse the polizia, who as we know, can be deeply stupid.
Before embarking on my art project, I switched on the flash- freezer contraption, a bit dangerous as it was located near the door to the shop and was almost visible from the street.
A half hour later, the room was thoroughly satanized with symbols, including one very large pentagram inside a circle that nearly rimmed the room. I rinsed the brisket and the stomach. Then I dropped first one and then the other into the flash freezer; in time, happy little icy bricks would pop out, already shrink-wrapped in plastic, perfect for any housewife’s freezer. It felt tidy to see Marco transformed so neatly into supermarket meat. I washed up in a sink and changed into fresh clothes. When the meat was frozen solid, I plopped these bricks into my purse, along with my washed and sheathed knife, and tucked the apron and sleeves and my discarded clothes into a garbage bag that I later emptied into several trashcans around the city. Then I took a final look at my bloody handiwork, and satisfied that it read as the demented acts of a gang of antichrists, I slipped into the Roman night, leaving the lights on and the door wide open.
Satanists shouldn’t seem like a polite, eco-conscious folk.
I didn’t use a cleaver, but I also didn’t butcher my murder of Marco.
You want to know how I got away with it, and I don’t blame you. Of course, the polizia called me; my voicemail was full of messages from the police before my airplane had even landed in New York, Marco’s nicely frozen brisket and stomach tucked deep in my luggage, swaddled in clothing and packed in a pair of boots. I acted appropriately surprised, saddened, appalled, shocked, and outraged as the police informed me of his attack, told me about the murder, revealed the occult component, asked if I’d seen any uomini misteriosi.
This, quite frankly, was the moment I’d been waiting for. I didn’t have to talk to the police—there’s no Italian equivalent to our Miranda rights, but you’re not compelled to talk. However, Italian police will presume guilt from silence. It was therefore in my best interest to provide my alibi, and while it wasn’t a flawless piece of eternal art, it accomplished its task.
It’s classic for a reason: make a drunken spectacle of yourself, and people will remember you. I ordered a split of wine on the train to Orvieto, about a seventy-five-minute train ride from Rome, and I spilled most of the wine (a mass-produced Vernaccia, it tasted like pine needles and banana, an unholy botanic welding) on my suit jacket. I checked into a nice but not excessively luxe hotel heavily scented with wine. After dropping my luggage in my hotel room, I walked unevenly across the piazza, entered a trattoria, and I grew blazingly drunk at a table in the middle of the restaurant, visible to everyone and horrifying to most. To outward appearances, I drank two glasses of Champagne followed by a full bottle of Chianti and most of a glass of Barolo Chinato, all while picking at several plates of listless, pallid food.
While I have excellent alcohol tolerance for a woman, I didn’t drink the wine the waiter served me. I’d picked the restaurant for its abundance of potted plants, and I poured more than half of every glass into my dining companion, a robust fern. But I was loud, and I was garrulous, and I wafted vaguely of alcohol, and I did my best to speak with a broad American accent. People will believe what they want to believe, and what Italians want to believe is that Americans are boorish, ill-behaved louts whose perennial sweatpants are the
least offensive things about them. I merely gave the crowd what they wanted.
Indeed, I got so faux-inebriated that I slurred and tripped, mumbled hazy indecent proposals to waiters and diners, and finally keeled over, thus requiring a bellhop from my hotel to rescue me, shuffle me up to my room, unlock the door, and push me toward my bed. There was not a person in the restaurant or on the staff who did not remember me. I burned myself into their collective memory.
In my room, I sobered up nearly instantly, changed into nondescript black clothes and a black wig, stepped onto my balcony, shinnied over the side, and dropped the four or so feet to the ground.
Then I walked to the train station, boarded a train to Rome, and the rest is Marco’s unfortunate demise.
I told the Roman polizia of my great shame over my drunken night, apologizing profusely for my inability to hold my liquor, and expressing my deep guilt for upsetting other diners and making the gracious hotel staff work so hard. I then told the police that I had slept in, checked out, and flown home, with no change of plans.
Two or three days later, the police called me to ask me a few follow-up questions. They informed me that my story had checked out. I expressed my sadness over Marco’s death. In the years since I’d met him in Siena, I said, he’d grown to be a dear, dear friend. The polizia told me they were sorry for my loss.
I’d already defrosted and eaten Marco’s stomach and his brisket.
The brisket, roasted with prunes and almonds, was divine. The stomach, I’m very sorry to say, was inedible; I had to toss the homage to lampredotto I made from Marco after a single bite. It’s sad that Marco didn’t live to read his profile in Gourmand. I feel certain he would have liked it.
