Page 66 of Aftertaste

Kostya tried to swallow, couldn’t manage even that.

“Kostya,” she said slowly, “tell me I right. Tell me you not talking with murderers and thieves. Tell me—”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said quickly, which was true. “He’s great.”

The Viktor he knew seemed totally legit. A businessman. A well-dressed hunk standing on the other side of the room with expensive champagne and an open checkbook, Kostya’s ticket to a restaurant, to making a difference, to finding Frankie, and his dad, and all the lost pieces of himself again.

“Bozhe moy!”He could hear her clutching the fabric over her heart. “You lose completely sense of smell?! What you messing into! You gonna get yourself killed.”

“I gotta go.”

“Kostya? Kostya! Don’t you dare hang phone! Don’t—”

He hung up and turned back to his host.

“Everything is okay?” Viktor asked him.

“Oh, yeah. She, um—she likes to worry.”

“Well, you have no worries now.”

Viktor raised his glass, and Kostya mirrored him. When they drank, the champagne seemed flatter, duller. Less sweet, more metallic. The iron like blood.

“Welcome to family.”

!!!!!!

THE NEW GUYis starting a food tour.

The Konstantin Duhovny Culinary Experience.

A stupid name, you think but don’t say. Instead, you ask him how it works. If what you’ve heard about the, uh,itineraryis for real.

Think of it as a hop-on, hop-off, the New Guy tells you.

He winks as he says it, which you take to mean that the rumors are true. That you’ll be hopping neither on, nor off, but through. You try to probe further, to understand how it happens, whether they really can make Aftertastes outside of the Food Hall. But the New Guy deflects. Either he doesn’t know, you decide, or he isn’t saying.

You ask when the tour leaves, and he tells you that his guy is opening a restaurant on the other side. That the tour’s gotta be there opening night.

Why?you ask, unsure what a Living restaurant has to do with the Dead.

’Cause that’s what his spot’s for! Aftertastes. Spirits. He’ll bring us all back there. Long as you’re down for the ride.

The Hunger lurches, hard, inside you.

Okay, you tell him.I’m in.

He says he’ll reach out about the date, but it shouldn’t be long now. No time at all.

You just hope Maura lasts until you make it.

That she doesn’t do something reckless. Impulsive. The kind of something that spells trouble.

But then, because she’s Maura, of course she does.

HAU(N)TE CUISINE

IN THE SEVENTIES,Swingline was a glitzy, superfly spot, a boutique hotel far downtown, catering to the grooviest cats and foxiest kittens, the kind of beautiful people who shook their asses and snorted their drugs in Studio 54 and Max’s Kansas City. In the twenty-teens, not so much. Now it looked old. Run-down. Decidedly—Kostya frowned at the peeling gold siding and mirrorball door—retro. And not in a good way, like a first-press vinyl or vintage tee. More of ashould-have-died-with-discovibe.

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