This story is a favorite of mine that was written for a themed anthology that took years to come to fruition and was released with little fanfare. With foodies and exclusive dining experiences getting ribbed in The Menu and Pig, I thought it would be a perfect story to start the year with in my exclusive story archive. Enjoy a bite, and please leave a comment about your meal…
The Cronus Club
By Thomas Pluck
Believe it or not, the best thing about making billions trading other people’s money isn’t the cocaine-fueled gymnastics with supermodel hookers, or the helicopter rides over the little people crammed together like lemmings in their leased wage-slave rides on the L.I.E., or even the power you take for granted, knowing your name puts you at the front of an invisible line that the proles wouldn’t even know how to get on: it’s the meals.
There’s a whole subset of the economy, an entire service industry dedicated to inventing dishes to wake up our jaded palates, just so me and my fellow masters of the universe don’t pull out a platinum-engraved bespoke handgun and splatter our brains across the walls of a gentleman’s club you don’t even know exists unless your great-great-grandfather bribed some rumpy-pumpy out of a Puritan milkmaid in steerage on the Mayflower.
That’s not exactly true, because I’m a member of one of those clubs, and my heritage is second wave Scots-Irish. My invitation to this rarefied world was through Caleb Anderson, who I’ve known since prep school. He was the only inbred old-money mutant who would give me the time of day, and that was after I stomped his rival on the lacrosse team. There was some hazing, as expected, but soon enough I was welcomed into the Anderson family, and asked to join their firm, which has held seats on the New York Stock Exchange since the day it opened. Caleb split off a hedge fund, and we managed it to great success.
The clubs and organizations we’re part of are on another plane of existence from where I came from. The buildings have hidden entrances. We are driven through Manhattan in blacked-out Mercedes vans apportioned with kid leather seating and sheepskin carpet, with enough sound deadening material to muffle out another 9/11. We were in one of those vans, the headliner twinkling with an artificial starfield that mimicked the night sky as it appeared on the day Caleb was born.
When the most strenuous act you’ll ever accomplish is being squirted out to join the family tree of one of the world’s richest families, you must feel the need to venerate the day it happened. They all do it. It’s kind of cute.
Tonight was Caleb’s surprise gift for me, because it was the anniversary of the day we became friends. No wives, just us. Mine’s pregnant with twins, but she’s got the help to take care of her. Caleb is still playing the field, avoiding an all-but-arranged marriage to a Stepford daughter of the 400 as long as he can.
We sipped 40-year-old Scotch cut with droplets of peated Highland water in hand-carved crystal tumblers, while masseurs kneaded our shoulders on a massage table steadied by gyroscopes.
“Tonight we conquer the culinary pinnacle,” Caleb said. “The Cronus Club. There is no gastronomic experience more exclusive.”
I wonder what it could be. We’ve had hundred-dollar-an-ounce wagyu beef flown from Kobe the moment after slaughter. There are underground clubs where you can eat endangered species. Those are strictly low class, usually funded by new Chinese money. There’s nothing especially delicious about animals stressed to extinction. So the Chinese can eat their tiger penises, while we pursue the best. That’s what America is all about. The Old World was played out, so we started one of our own.
The French and the Japanese excel in the pursuit of pleasure. Take for example the ortolan. Tiny birds the French blind and gorge on figs, then roast alive in Armagnac, to be eaten whole. The bones cut your cheeks and your own blood stews with the meat and marrow. You eat with a napkin over your face to breathe in the brandied steam of their juices.
In Japan they eat horse sashimi. And they are a horse culture, dating back to the samurai. They respect the animal. Caleb and I ate horse sashimi, when one of his best fillies broke her leg. It was exquisite, but the ritual made it taste better. She was a winner, fed on the best, not trained hard to die young. The Japanese also eat whale, more out of tradition than anything. It doesn’t taste very good, and they’re so packed with mercury and toxins you might as well eat a rectal thermometer. Same with all those dolphin they slaughter every year. They do it because they can, not because it tastes good.
If you’re going to eat dolphin, and I recommend trying it at least once, you eat them young, when they’re tender as veal, before they’re weaned, and most importantly, before they have a chance to absorb all those heavy metals. That was last year’s meal, my gift to Caleb, with the sushi chef flown from Tokyo as a favor from the son of a railroad magnate I’d helped made a few bil. Caleb had been talking about it ever since.
“The Sons of Cronus haven’t had an opening for twelve years,” Caleb said, rolling his neck. “I think you’ll have trouble topping this one.”
Like everything else, our anniversary gifts to each other were somewhat of a competition. Especially since my accounts were doing better than Caleb’s by a large margin. That’s the thing about scions of old money; they only know the ephemeral value of the dollar. They’ve never had to squeeze the eagle until it grins. They’ve never been hungry, so they don’t know how to hunt.
But they sure know how to eat.
We were deep in the outer boroughs when the van pulled behind a sagging, dark mansion. We toweled off the massage oil and suited up, and after I knotted my double Windsor, Caleb handed me one of the Mardi Gras masks we kept for visits to the traveling orgy we’d attended last year, where we’d tangled ourselves with a masked supermodel who was now Karl Lagerfeld’s newest ingénue.
I tied the mask on, my interest piqued. We’d done gigs like this before. Pop-up restaurants, where a chef took over a space for a few hours, served meals with ingredients smuggled past customs. Delicacies the FDA would never approve, or which violated international law. Some dinky country’s spirit animal, delicately seared over coals.
We stepped out, and an usher wearing a balaclava directed our driver toward the carriage house, where other cars sat parked in darkness. As he waved us toward the portico with a flashlight, I caught the silhouette of a man with a rifle perched on the rooftop. My shoulders tensed, despite the massage and several glasses of Drumnadrochit 40-year.
Caleb slapped me on the back, pushing me toward the doors. “Relax,” he said. The other thing rich boys don’t know is when to be frightened.
The usher opened the doors and we followed a majordomo sporting ruby epaulets down an intricate carpet, through a hallway decorated floor to ceiling with gilded portraits. I looked straight ahead, but let my eyes rove behind my mask. J.P. Morgan’s beak poked from one golden frame. Thomas Jefferson winked from another.
The hallway opened into a large dining hall, where eighteen masked men sat at a long table Last Supper style, all on one side. Their low chatter cut to silence. The majordomo gave a curt nod toward the two empty seats on the far left. We walked to our chairs with calm, and the conversation returned to a murmur.
Caleb stuck me with the end seat. A bearded man with thick tufts of hair jutting from his tuxedo cuffs sat to our right. He wore a red kabuki mask with long golden horns. “Welcome, Nineteen and Twenty,” he said. “Took you long enough.”
“Gentlemen,” the majordomo said. He wore a white domino mask that contrasted with his olive skin. His head was shaved clean, pointed at the top, as if his mother squeezed him out the birth canal like toothpaste. Behind him, a canvas sat shrouded on an easel.
“I welcome you to the two hundred and forty-ninth meeting of the Cronus Club, which my family has been honored to serve since its inaugural meal. This evening we will be serving you the finest, as befitting lions of your stature.”
“Get on with it,” Eighteen said under his breath. The three men to his right talked amongst themselves, ignoring him. I didn’t need to wonder why.
Four waiters descended on us in French service, delivering an amuse-bouche on tiny gilt plates. A delicate tart the size of a half dollar, topped with a pink paper square crisped at the edges, sandwiched between creamy dollops of marbled curd.
The man in the rightmost seat, who must be One, was tall and gaunt and washed out, like a dead tree salted by sea-breeze. His mask was a simple black Zorro. He plucked the tartlet from its plate and popped it in his mouth. He gave a muffled nasal whine of pleasure. We heard his teeth clack together in the anticipatory silence.
Eighteen weaved his hairy fingers and rubbed his thumbs together like knitting needles. “Swallow already, you old coot.”
“It is good,” One announced.
Eighteen devoured his morsel, and we followed suit.
Buttery, with a flash of sour, like raw grass-fed sheep’s-milk; the paper crackled and cut through the sour with its richness, then a fat-flood cleansed the palate. The tart crust must have been baked with lardo, so rich and pure.
When I looked up, the majordomo was folding the shroud. The revealed portrait was painted in the Grand Manner style, of a barrel-chested man seated nude on a chair like the ones we sat in. He had the physique of a bodybuilder gone to seed, which made him resemble a Brahma bull.
“His name was Jules, age forty-four. Our oldest subject, but I think you’ll agree he was in prime physical condition, a phenomenal genetic specimen.”
“Magnificent,” Eighteen said. “The chef this year is a true master. Brains, skin, and fat. Ethereal!”
My throat caught the way it had the first time I gnawed the eye of a suckling pig. But I still swallowed, like I had when the eye exploded with juices. There are pleasures that only those who can control their conscience are permitted to enjoy.
“He was never a heavy drinker or abuser of drugs,” the majordomo continued. “A health enthusiast from a young age, an athlete who eschewed performance enhancers, and ate clean. We learned of him when one of our members, head of the board of a prestigious child cancer treatment facility, was alerted to his bone marrow donation. In exchange for the Club paying for the experimental treatments his daughter required, and pushing through any approvals from the board for whatever might extend her life, Mr. Jules agreed to forgo his lean diet and follow a finishing protocol derived from the cattle masters in Kobe, Japan. Each day he drank the finest sake, and was massaged with it by beautiful and talented women. He was fed a vegetarian diet prepared by our master chefs, his marbling tested monthly. He lived a stress-free year, enjoying his daughter’s first painless summer, until he was harvested and his flesh dry-aged in our cellar for forty-five days.”
Caleb grinned like he had during my hazing. There was no way I could top this.
The twelve courses were beyond compare. At the tail end of the table, we received only a morsel of the best cuts, but they were both stunning and sublime. The short ribs melted in your mouth. The chef had cooked them sous-vide in veal stock.
Eighteen rolled his eyes back in ecstasy, savoring a cube of ruby-red carpaccio. “You can get trash meat easy, overseas. But Americans, we’re the most sedentary animals in the world. It’s the stress levels that kill meat. So I came up with this idea. Next year, I’m moving up to the tweens, for sure.” He winked through his demon mask.
The cheeks were magnificent, simmered in their own gelatin. I’ve had sheep’s head before, the halves roasted, teeth gleaming. But I was glad the Cronus veterans didn’t go for ostentation. We knew what, and who, we were eating. We had seen his portrait and heard his life story. There was no need for a gaudy presentation, the meal was sauced with the knowledge we were breaking a deeply held taboo.
They can kill you, but they can’t eat you, my mother warned, when I left to join the elites. She was never more wrong. We could do both, and enjoy every bite.
The majordomo wheeled out the steak cuts prior to cooking. The marbling was exquisite, as promised. The cuts were small, and One got the best, but at close inspection they resembled the richest Kobe beef.
They didn’t ask how we wanted them cooked. They knew.
Bloody.
Caleb mocked me for it later, called it my plebeian roots showing, but my favorite plate was the human bacon. They’d fattened Jules up, given him a gut like a potbellied pig. I imagined that he balked. A good eight pack is a work of sculpture—which I knew from experience—and losing it intentionally had to hurt. But he’d done it for his daughter. It felt disingenuous for me not to appreciate his sacrifice, so savored my perfectly crisped rasher of his abdominals, streaked with glorious fat, finished with smoked Hawaiian sea salt.
For digestifs the members produced bottles from their own cellars. What you’d expect; ancient ports retrieved from shipwrecks, a couple bottles of that ridiculously expensive 64 year old scotch—even though the 1868 blend is much better—legendary Bordeaux, bottles of Chateaux LaTour thought to no longer exist. Caleb and I had gone Dutch on a 1858 Croizet Cuvée Léonie cognac as tribute to the club.
We gave One the honor of the first glass, and after his nod of approval, the rest of us cleansed our palates with its divine sublimity. I asked the majordomo for six snifters and emptied the bottle in them. I told him to give one to himself, another to the chef, and to pass the rest among the staff whom he considered worthy.
Caleb smirked at the gesture, but then again he always expected the best as his birthright. He’d never had to tip or grease the wheels. It had been unspoken.
Another disadvantage of the privileged.
The next weekend, my sons were born. I can’t honestly say which experience is the more memorable. After all, you can always have another child. Every time you expel your issue, there’s 200 million chances to procreate. Their potential can never be realized, but I imagined out of my hundreds of couplings, I’d had children already, and that dulled some of the novelty.
Besides, twins felt like kind of a waste. Does the world need two of anybody? I’d never had a brother, and I turned out fine. It felt like my genes had been diluted.
Whether they’re novel or not, having children does evoke a sense of mortality, even if you’ve provided exponentially more for them than your parents had for you. So maybe I played it a little risky the next year. Or maybe it was Caleb deciding to take the lead by subterfuge, since he couldn’t beat me in a fair fight.
Whatever it was, six months later I was hurting. I barely had enough for my dues to the Cronus club. But let me tell you, I thought of that bacon every day. Leaving wasn’t on the table. I had chips I could call in from rich men I’d made enormously richer.
Caleb grinned at me from his massage table. “Taking business loans from clients, that’ll cost you your brokerage license. We wouldn’t want that. You’d be back to working for me. If you’d needed a loan, you should have come to me. A friend.”
That’s when I knew Caleb was out to destroy me. Our friendship had always been based on competition, and seeing someone of lower breeding defeat him handily had damaged his fragile ego. We’d remain friends, of course. But I’d be Caleb’s servant, as things should be, in his worldview.
He might invite me to extravagant meals, if only to feed me the scraps. Keep up my membership at the Cronus, throw me a literal roasted human marrow bone, to remind me who was king.
Nothing galls an aristocrat like meritocracy in action.
“I’ll be fine,” I told him.
I found the identity of the Cronus Club’s majordomo after passing a stock tip to a Senator on the National Security Committee. We met in secret, and I gave him my idea for the club’s sestercentennial. They had a soiree planned of course, but my addition would truly mark the event as unique in the two hundred and fifty year annals. It even got me a private meeting with One.
He was delighted.
I asked for a lot in return, but not as much as I could have. They weren’t the richest, or the most powerful, One said. Only the richest and most powerful Americans who wanted to eat human flesh. But becoming the personal advisor would to the triumvirate would give me a modest empire to hand down to my son.
As satisfying as it would have been to eat Caleb, or even a pound of his flesh, teaching him a lesson would sate me longer. Their investments would put me far in Caleb’s league, but most importantly, I’d be their new Seven.
What would that cost me? Well, there’ll be a lot of sympathy, when the news breaks. And more fame than I’d prefer, but it comes with the territory, when one of a billionaire hedge fund manager’s children disappears.
The Sons of Cronus will dine on veal, milk-fed from my trophy wife’s breast. I may try a bite myself. I’m not sure yet. It could seem gauche.
And if Caleb ever does manage to outdo me, it won’t matter.
Because I’ll be getting prime cuts, and he’ll be getting the scraps.
“The Cronus Club” ©2018 Thomas Pluck, all rights reserved. This story first appeared in Skin & Bone, edited by Dana C. Kabel
This is such a good example of why I am positive you have another book in you. I know it's hard otherwise everyone would be doing it. You rock dude.
Holy shit. This is truly magnificent writing.
Also, this is probably a bad time to mention it, but I’ve always kinda wanted to try ortolan. There is something about the idea of putting a napkin on your head to hide a great meal from god that’s irresistible.