Free Nowhere by Thomas Berger

Sebastian? My great-grandfather’s interest in the professor was due to their common keenness for collecting classical antiquities and Jewish jokes.”
    At that moment Rupert rolled the trolley to the tableside, and I was pleasantly surprised to become aware that a footman was discreetly laying a place for me, with a plate bearing a gold relief of the crown, heavy gold cutlery, and a napkin of linen a good deal finer than any stuff I had worn against my skin: the serviette was embroidered with the crown, and the cutlery showed it in cameo.
    On Rupert’s trolley were several footed vessels the bowls of which were spanned by golden-brown domes of pastry. With a spoon from his dependent gear the old retainer broke through one of these and tasted whatever lay beneath, then put the bowl before Sebastian.
    The prince scowled at it. “You old sod, you have spoiled the looks of this dish, as well as the surprise.”
    “A pity,” said the imperturbable Rupert. “But I could hardly taste it without breaking the crust.”
    The prince seized a spoon and smashed the remainder of the pastry, churning the fragments into the contents of the bowl, which seemed to be a clear soup. He then dug into this mix with much the same urgency with which he had ingested the ice cream. He had emptied the first bowl by the time the lackey had placed mine before me, and before I penetrated the crust, Sebastian’s empty vessel had been removed and Rupert had served a second order.
    When I broke through the gossamer puff-pastry dome, I inhaled a celestial aroma which I could not have begun to identify until I saw, in the first spoonful of amber broth, black morsels of what could only be the priceless truffle, of which there were approximately as many pieces as there are noodles in a packet of my usual soup, Lipton Cup-a: I trust it is not bad taste to wonder what each of these bowls would have cost in New York.
    Sebastian drained four or five of them into his gullet, and we did not converse during this performance, which had no sooner ended than Rupert returned with a trolley load of the largest poached salmon I had ever seen and a sauce in which at least a pound of beluga caviar figured.
    It was during the fish course that I remembered that McCoy was not there. But it seemed impolitic to ask the prince about him, or indeed anything else, for with his last bite of the salmon, he turned eagerly to the new dish brought by Rupert, an enormous salver on which reposed dozens of tiny ortolans, which is to say birds the size of, uh, wrens: morally no different from cooked chickens, perhaps, or, speaking pantheistically, no more pitiable than a stringbean that has been boiled to death. Yet, this spectacle for me was fraught with pathos, and in fact I lost such little hunger as I had had.
    Sebastian however seemed only just to be hitting his gustatorial stride with the small birds, seizing each by its hairpin legs and plunging it beakfirst into his mouth, biting it off at, so to speak, the little knees and discarding the legs of one en route to the next: quite a pile of these limbs began to accumulate alongside his plate. Apparently he could deal internally with the bones and beaks.
    When a footman offered me a similar dish, I waved him off, but I did begin to sip the champagne I had been served by another.
    Perhaps it was the diminutive size of what he was eating that reminded Sebastian of his own childhood. In any event, after the second dozen of the ortolans, he suddenly stared at me with misted eyes and said, “Like the old heirs apparent to the French throne, I was most savagely treated as a child. I was whipped bloody by my tutors, viciously slapped and pinched by my nurses, and the detestable old jackal who stands behind me at this moment was crudest of the lot. My boyhood, Wren, was a living hell. It was intended to be, of course. That’s the only sort of thing that develops the ruthless, vengeful qualities of character so necessary to a