“All right,” I said. “So that’s three. Bertrand? Last chance.”
He snorted and pushed himself back from his half-finished plate. “I would just as soon join the Three Stooges.” He slapped a pair of bills on the table and, donning his slicker and rain hat, strode from the restaurant. It wasn’t until he was gone that I saw he had underpaid.
James looked from the closing door to Flor and me. “So,” he said with a happy sigh. “What time shall we be off?”
“The weather is scheduled to improve around noon tomorrow,” Flor said. “We should reach the monastery late the following day. If you two do not slow me down.”
I slid James a sidelong smirk. “Yeah, we’ll try to keep up.”
He grinned back. “Well, I do like the sound of only spending one night in the forest each way.”
“And I have an idea for some wolf repellent,” I said.
5
Flor came down to the breakfast table the next morning as James and I were finishing up. Her grunted response to our greetings suggested she wasn’t a morning person. That didn’t stop her stray hair and sleepy face from playing games with my imagination though. I coughed into a fist.
“The Frenchman is gone,” she stated, ripping a chunk of bread from the loaf and slathering it with butter.
“Gone for a walk?” I asked. “Or gone gone.”
“He has taken everything with him.” The chunk disappeared into her mouth, and she chewed morosely.
“I heard him moving about early this morning,” James said. “It seems he’s set out on his own, the poor sod.”
“Yeah, to beat us there,” I grumbled. “Let’s just hope we don’t arrive to a fortified monastery.” Though I wouldn’t have put something like that past Bertrand, concern for his safety moved through me. I reminded myself that we had warned him, that he was a grown man.
As for our safety…
“If you’ll excuse me,” I said, standing from the table. “The pension owner gave me kitchen privileges for the next hour, and there’s something I need to cook.”
“Then it looks like I’ll have this lovely fount of conversation all to myself,” James said, cutting his sparkling eyes to Flor. She stopped chewing long enough to glower at him.
Geez. Even that look on her was amazing.
I stumbled into a chair as I left the room.
Since I was a young boy, my head barely as high as Nana’s hip, cooking had fascinated me. Combining disparate ingredients. Getting the proportions just right. Adding energy in the form of heat. All to end up with something whose whole was greater—or at least tastier—than the sum of its parts. And Nana’s meals were some of the tastiest I’d ever had.
That process, that alchemy I suppose you could call it, still impressed me.
I placed a cast-iron pot of water onto the gas stove. From the refrigerator, I pulled out a large bag of Romanian hot peppers I’d picked up at the local grocer. I pounded the pale-green peppers with the flat side of a butcher knife, releasing the juice and seeds, and scraped the mess into the pot. Finding the pension’s black pepper, I ground it liberally into the steaming mixture.
James arrived twenty minutes later, as I was funneling the final dregs of the pepper spray between three spray bottles.
“Ah, your wolf repellent, I presume?”
“I made it extra strong, so be extra careful.” I screwed on the plastic nozzles and handed him a bottle. “It so much as touches your skin, you’ll think you’re under a fire-ant attack, so you definitely don’t want to get any in your eyes. A wolf’s eyes are fine.”
Flor appeared from behind James and claimed her bottle. She smirked as she wrapped her fingers around the plastic trigger. “They are cute,” she remarked.
“Cute?” I’d been hoping for badass. “Just watch where you point it.”
Her lips straightened as she lowered the bottle to her side. “We need to set out.”
“But it’s still dreadful,” James said, lowering his head to the window to be sure.
Flor’s dark eyes fixed on mine. “What you said about Bertrand wanting to reach the monastery before us. It disturbs me.”
“Why?” I asked.
She peered over a shoulder, as though the man might be standing behind her, and then stepped close enough for me to feel her heat.
“Because he is not who he claims to be.”
We set out an hour later, tromping up a muddy road that led from the village into the foothills. Families paused in their field work to stare at us through the gray rain, their wan faces impossible to read. At a final farmhouse, I caught an elderly woman making the sign of the cross before withdrawing from her dark window and closing the shutters.
Okay. That wasn’t creepy or anything.
I jogged every few paces to keep up with Flor, and I noticed James doing the same. In her black combat boots, she seemed intent on taking the forest by bloody conquest. In addition to her backpack, she had set out with a titanium suitcase, declining James’s and my offers to carry it for her. When we’d asked what was inside, she had given the one-word answer, “Equipment.”
“So,” I breathed, when I’d pulled even with her again. “Are you going to tell us about Bertrand now, or what?”
“He is a fraud,” she said.
“Really? In what way?”
“What he told you last night?” She lowered her eyelids to half mast and affected a French accent. “‘I am star professor. I am coveted speaker. I am genius.’ It is all bullshit.”
James laughed. “Not bad. And how did you discover that delightful gem?”
“Google,” she said.
“Google?” I peered back down toward the remote village. “Was there an internet cafe I missed?”
“I have a satellite phone. I had someone look into his claims.”
“Well,” James said. “A spy after my own heart.”
Flor ignored the comment, which gave me private pleasure. While James and I might not have been academic rivals, I sensed a growing competition between us for Flor’s attention. A competition I was determined to win. “Bertrand teaches
