One day Rif came home from a bridge party holding a small painting to his heart. He was very excited and his long nose shook like the end of a sword in a great swordsman's hand. His mustache was out of curl and my best shirt was soiled.
“We are rich, my young friend!! We are off to the isles of Griks … where Sambo sang and danced.”
“Not Sambo …”
“What matters … we shall fill up on boeuf en daube on gold plates. Good Burgundy and a bisque d'écrevisse and a chervil salad big enough to make a cow cry.”
“Bridge was very good today, Rif?”
“Bridge-smidge … pour une infante défunte! I have here a rare Daumier.”
He unwrapped his bundle and I saw a dark brown painting of three men drinking bocks. It was well done and it was signed h. daumier.…
“Give it back,” I said, “before they close up. They'll never know you took it.”
“I am an honest man, Ignacy Dyonizy Rifkinoff, Prince of Poland.”
“Then how?”
“It is l'beure du cocktail. I am having horse-radish sauce and shrimp at the Café des Deux Magots. On the cuff. La triste aventure. I meet there an old friend that I knew in Turkey. He is very rich … but un peu exalté … he is having trouble with love. Her husband is after him, just like in a stage show. He wants to leave town and his money is tied up in stocks and bonds. He has this painting he found in a little house he bought in Nice, and a fur overcoat, and two dogs. He will sell any one of them for three hundred francs.”
“The dogs?”
“The items. He knows nothing but the stock market and husbands. I buy the Daumier.”
“Is it his?”
“Yes, he buys the house furnished, the lady likes the sea. I have sale of bull.”
“Bill of sale,” I said, examining it.
“We will sell it to the owner of the Torride Tziganer.” (I give it the name it has, if you could translate French; in America the joint would be called the Hot Gypsy … but Torride Tziganer is what we all called it. Emince de volaille bongroise was its big dish.)
The Torride Tziganer was owned by a tall dark man with a limp. It was a night club painted a hydrangea-and-horizon bleu. They played a lot of Rimski- Korsakov under the idea he had invented barrel-house jazz in New Orleans, and their food was very fine. So fine we only went there with people who wore turquoise clips and wanted to see the table where Picasso had invented cubism. M. Tziganer collected paintings and explained his limp by “Ah, cette guerre … cette guerre terrible …”
“Before we begin talking of business,” said the gypsy…
“There is no business,” said Rif, “We offer … you take or you don't.”
The gypsy smiled. “But tonight you eat with me. I have prepared The Tziganer's Bride … the secret of my tribe when it comes to preparing duck. You will love it.”
In time when I again spoke to Tziganer about food, I found out the tribal secret without becoming a blood-brother … but even that would be worth it. Here is how you, too, can make the Tziganer's Bride (Duck).
Rub a fat duck inside and out with a mixture of salt, pepper, marjoram, and ground thyme soaked in olive oil. Roast your duck at 370° for 40 minutes, adding sweet butter from time to time.
While this is going on, prepare in a pot on a hot stove this mixture: an ounce of orange peel julienne, the blood of two oranges, one lemon, half a pint of bitter orange marmalade, and to top it all, four tablespoons of curaçao. Stir as it simmers and add one bay leaf and three cloves.
Cut up your duck into slices and pour over it the hot sauce from the pot. If you really like good food it will make a gypsy of you in one sitting. You will be going around with a rose in your teeth before dinner is over, offering to tell people the past and future.
The gypsy joined us and we put away enough of the gypsy bride to be arrested for bigamy.
With it we had a white Greek wine, and to finish off, a claret that the gypsy said was stolen from the cellar of a Frenchman so important that even the newspapers didn't dare mention what business he was in (later, of course, it came out he was making airplane parts for the Germans).
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