beach, got drunk and sat there, roasting his never-before-exposed-to-the-
sun scalp to the July ultraviolets. When he returned to work the next day,
not only was he jarringly bald, but his head was a bright strawberry-red,
blistered and oozing skullcap of misery. No one talked to him until his
hair grew back.
Dimitri saw himself, I think, as a Hemingwayesque, hard-boozing
raconteur Renaissance man, but he was completely under the thumb of
his mother, a severe, equally brilliant gynecologist, whose daily calls to
the Mario kitchen were much imitated.
"Alloo? Is Dih-mee-tree zere?"
We'd met before, of course, the previous year, when he'd known me, no
doubt, as "Mel". But I was a broiler man now, a CIA student, a curiosity.
It was permissible for Dimitri to talk to me. It was like Hunt and Liddy
meeting; the world would probably have been a better place had it never
happened, but a lot of fun was had by all.
Dimitri was scared of the outside world. He lived year-round at the tip of
the Cape, and he liked to fancy himself a townie. He did a damn good
imitation of a local Portuguese fisherman accent, too. But Dimitri was—
as the Brits say—quite the other thing. We'd have drinks after knocking
off at our respective restaurants and try to outdo each other with arcane
bits of food knowledge and terminology. Dimitri, like me, was a born
snob, so it was only natural that when our lord and master, Mario,
decided on two employees to cater his annual garden party, he selected
his two would-be Escoffiers, the Dimitri and Tony Show.
Our early efforts were, in the cold light of day, pretty crude and
laughable. But nobody else in town was doing pâté en croûte or
galantines in aspic, or elaborate chaud-froid presentations. Mario tasked
his most pretentious cooks with an important mission, and we were
determined not to let him down—especially as it allowed us time off