Irregulars

Gunther glanced up, a look of slight confusion on his face. He set his fork down and said, “I don’t know. I wasn’t thinking about it.”
“What were you thinking about?”
“My lunch. My companion.” He gave a warm smile, as though it was only right and natural that all knowledge of his current mission should be put on hold just because someone set a radicchio, apple, and pomegranate seed salad down in front of him. “I was wondering, was being an agent your first career choice?”
“No, not at all,” Keith said, laughing. “I was a chef with no aspirations at law enforcement and no knowledge of the other realms.”
“I wondered,” Gunther remarked.
“Why?”
“When we—” Gunther seemed to struggle a moment before finding the words he wanted. “When we were seeing each other before, you seemed to be uncomfortable with extra-human Americans.”
Keith shrugged. “I hadn’t been with NIAD that long. And the few experiences I’d had—especially with goblins—had been extremely negative and personally painful.”
“I imagine they were.” Gunther poked at his salad, seeming to consider and then discard some worrying thought before saying, “So when you cooked, did you work in other people’s restaurants or did you have your own?”
“Other people’s at first. I followed the tourists from place to place. Finally I managed to get the capital to open my own place—a former diner with twenty seats and the ugliest gray linoleum ever manufactured.”
“I sense this is when you had your first other-realm encounter,” Gunther said.
“It wasn’t for about a year. I busted my ass making that place. I was surprised that all my teeth didn’t fall out from grinding. I got this gray streak during the opening.” Keith touched his temple self-consciously. “I’m thinking of dyeing it. I’m only thirty-four.”
Gunther shrugged. “Premature gray is standard in our line of work, I think.”
Keith nodded. “Very true.”
“You were telling me about how you joined NIAD,” Gunther prompted.
“One day one of my customers came by with this special request. He had this family obligation. Some kind of religious feast he wanted me to cater. He’d provide the meat and all I had to do was cook it for this special summer banquet. I asked, ‘what’s the meat?’ He told me it was special pork from Sweden.”
Gunther nodded grimly. He took a forkful of salad.
“Right away I knew it wasn’t pork. The bones were all wrong, but I needed the money and I just didn’t think about it that hard.”
“What did you think it was?”
“I honestly didn’t know. Some endangered creature, I suppose. I figured if it was already dead it shouldn’t go to waste, right?” Keith shook his head. “I was an idiot.”
“You weren’t an idiot. You just didn’t know what you were dealing with.”
“Even without the extra-human angle I knew there was something sketchy about that meat and I went ahead and cooked it anyway. I used to try and figure out what it had been. I ran down all those endangered Chinese delicacies, trying to figure it out—looking at the bones of sun bears—seeing if they matched. And I knew for a goddamn fact it had to be illegal, but the money was too good to say no. I kept thinking, ‘At least I’m not dealing coke, right?’ It never occurred to me to look at the bones of one of the most widely dispersed animals on the planet.”
“How did you figure it out?”
“I got a piece of protein that had some skin attached and found a tattoo. No caribou, cow, or sun bear tattoos Mom on their arm.” Keith wiped his lips with his napkin.
“Had you eaten the flesh?”
“Of course I’d eaten it. How was I supposed to tell how it tasted without eating it? I’d eaten a lot of it.”
Gunther sat in silence. An unspoken question within him. Since Keith knew exactly what the question was, he said, “It’s okay. You can ask me. Everybody asks me.”
“How did it taste?”
“Really delicious.” Keith pushed his soup plate away. The spinach, chard, and escarole soup had gone down easier than he expected, considering the conversation. “The best meat I ever ate. The last meat I ever ate, as it turns out.”
Gunther, too, finished his first course and set his fork aside. “That doesn’t explain how you got involved with the Irregulars.”
“No.” Keith waited politely for the slim, pleasant-seeming waitress to take his plate before continuing. “I reported what I’d found to the police and a couple of agents contacted me. They wanted to set up a sting operation and I agreed. That’s how I found out that my customers were goblins.”
“That must have been a shock.”
“Finding out that everything I’d previously believed to be a myth was a pretty big shock, yeah. During that time, the agents assigned to the case communicated with me extensively. They and I both realized that there wasn’t anyone at NIAD who had specific knowledge of cooking or restaurants, while at the same time, there was still this problem with human-sourced protein. I suppose the agents who contacted me had planned to recruit me from the moment that they introduced themselves, but I’m not disappointed. I do good work. Important work.”
“Don’t you miss cooking?”
Keith found himself smiling. Melancholy drifted through him. “I do miss it. I miss the companionship of the kitchen, the creative aspect…I suppose what I miss most is the solvability of all problems.”
“How do you mean?”
“Well, when you’re cooking during a dinner service, it’s a pass-fail situation. Either you get the food out right and on time or you don’t. Problems don’t linger. At the end of the night you’ve done all you could and tomorrow is another day where you get a fresh chance at success, no matter how big the fail might have been on the previous day.”
“I see,” Gunther said, nodding. “Our job is not like that at all.”
“No, it isn’t.” Keith folded his hands, observing the sunset across the bay. “It’s not so bad though. I’m the first and only specialist in the detection of contraband food items. I like the idea that I can make a difference.”
They spent the rest of the meal engaging in the sort of harmless chat that they’d never bothered to make before. He found out that Gunther’s high-school track specialty had been hurdles and that he had majored in sociology with a minor in anthropology before signing up with NIAD.
Finally, during coffee and dessert, Keith got the courage to ask the one question he wanted answered.
“So why exactly did you call off our previous arrangement?”
“You made a few offhanded comments about goblins that I didn’t care for,” Gunther said simply. “At the time, I was offended. I couldn’t say I was offended because I hadn’t told you about myself, so I just called it off.”
“Why invite me to lunch today then?”
“I guess I just remembered how sexy you are. And I felt like I’d been unfair.”
Keith drained the last of his coffee. He tried to remember what he might have said that could have been offensive. With no small degree of horror, he realized that he’d said plenty. Shame verging on mortification churned through his chest.
“I don’t want to sound like I’m making excuses for myself, but I wasn’t all that stable at the time. I was still in the humans versus monsters mindset.”
“Yes, I remember.” Gunther’s expression remained neutral, even somewhat blank.
“I guess what I’m trying to say is that I’m sorry if what I said hurt you. I’m not all that smart and it takes me a while to adjust sometimes,” Keith said. “But I do know it’s not all cut and dried. I do now anyway.”
“That’s good to hear.” Gunther glanced at his phone. “We should probably be getting back to the market if we want to use the portal.”
***
Back in Portland, the market was just wrapping up. Their rental had a parking ticket tucked lovingly under the windshield wiper. Keith stuffed it into his pocket to commune with the other three already crammed in there.