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" I. Alberto Gonzales always made me hungry. I am being literal here: I&amp;#039;m speaking of food, and not justice. Like a quiet man who leaves you with no choice but to speak, Gonzalez is an abstemious man who leaves you with no choice but to eat. I have eaten with him three times over the course of the last ten years; at each meal he eventually cleaned his plate, but always seemed dismissive of what was set before him, no matter how lavish the fare. He waited a long time, before taking the first bite, with his small hands poised at the edge of the table; he was watchful and quiet, as if unsure how to proceed; and when he finally picked up his utensils to eat, it was as though he had been backed into a corner, so he ate with a sudden, determined ferocity. First he cut his food, into small, regular mouthfuls, but then he gulped them down, one after another, while occasionally lifting his face and looking at me, as if to make sure I was not leaving the room. I had the feeling, always, that he thought I was out to trick or embarrass him, by making him eat; I also had the feeling that he never tasted so much as a single bite, not out of haste or hunger, but rather as an exercise of will -- because he would never allow himself to, because he wanted me to know that he was not like that: was not a man who gave in to the pleasure of eating, when there was business to discuss. Of course, I was exactly the opposite; faced with the spectacle of Gonzales&amp;#039;s puritanism at table, I became an inspired epicure -- one of those obnoxious fellows who keeps saying, &amp;quot;Have you ever had this?&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;You must try that&amp;quot; -- and so what he was really saying, with his attitude of driven reluctance, was that he was not like me. The first meal was in Austin, Texas, when he was still general counsel for George W. Bush, who was then governor of Texas. I was not in town to write about either Bush or Gonzales -- indeed, I, like so many others, was having trouble taking Bush seriously, and I had barely heard of Gonzales -- but rather about Janet Reno, and the aftermath of the incineration of the Branch Davidians in Waco . Of course, neither Bush nor Gonzales had anything to do with Waco; but I was trying to get permission to investigate the ruins of David Koresh&amp;#039;s compound, and after failing with the Feds, I figured I&amp;#039;d try the State. In particular, I figured I&amp;#039;d try someone whose antipathy towards Attorney General Reno was well-known, at least among my Texas sources, who had told me that Gonzales had often said that the Siege at Waco would have never taken place if George W. Bush had been governor at the time, instead of Ann Richards. &amp;quot;He would have handled it in-house,&amp;quot; was the quote I kept hearing, and I figured that if I could get Gonzales to repeat that to me, on-the-record, I&amp;#039;d follow up by asking him for a tour of the scorched-earth crime-scene. It was the formula I&amp;#039;d always resorted to when trying to get favors from politicians: What can&amp;#039;t be accomplished by appealing to their sense of duty, or even to their sense of greed, could always be accomplished by appealing to their sense of spite.  Although Gonzales wasn&amp;#039;t properly a politician -- he just worked for one -- my strategy worked, to a degree. He took my call, after I intimated to his secretary that the story I was writing was sure to be critical of Ms. Reno, and then he surprised me when he accepted my invitation to meet for lunch. It was a what-the-hell offer on my part, something journalists do just so they can tell themselves they tried, but what I remember about his response was the apparent difficulty of it: Instead of the usual glib dismissal, there was a drawn-out silence, after which he said, &amp;quot;I will transfer you back to Jackie. She will make the arrangements.&amp;quot; And that was it: the end of the conversation, and the first flash of what may be called his decisive passivity. The next person I spoke to was Jackie, the trusted -- and, of course, loyal, to a fault -- Texas secretary, 62-years-old, honorably widowed, sexless in manner over the phone, but still rather sexy in person, as I found out later, with her dancer&amp;#039;s legs showcased by the short dress she bought before she became a Christian, and her pearl earrings, and her heels dyed to match her bag, and her simmering dislike of everyone but her boss. She followed her initial obligatory sigh with a burst of efficiency at once robotic and, well, intimate, flipping loudly through Gonzales&amp;#039; datebook until she came to a take-it-or-leave-it opening, ten days hence, at eleven-forty five, at the Longhorn Steakhouse near the Capitol. &amp;quot;Longhorn?&amp;quot; I said. &amp;quot;Yes,&amp;quot; she said, &amp;quot;it&amp;#039;s new.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;We have them where I live, back in Atlanta.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;I haven&amp;#039;t eaten there yet, but Mr. Gonzales has. He came back with a good report. All right, then, Mr. Junod. Eleven-forty-five, Tuesday the twenty....&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Is Hoffbrau Steaks still open?&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Excuse me?&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Hoffbrau Steaks. I used to go there when I lived in Texas. A long time ago. The whole Longhorn chain is based on the Hoffbrau formula, right down to the salad dressing.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;I went to Hoffrbrau when I was a newlywed, Mr. Junod. I don&amp;#039;t know if it&amp;#039;s still open or not. But Longhorn is very convenient, and it&amp;#039;s new. So eleven-forty-five....&amp;quot; &amp;quot;How about Wampum?&amp;quot; Now the sigh was more than obligatory, more than just part of her manner. It was personal, for food is personal, the indication of preference is personal, and the sound she made was a jet of derision. And yet she was engaged, in a way she hadn&amp;#039;t been before -- she would remember me, by being made to despise me. &amp;quot;Mr. Junod, I&amp;#039;m not sure you have the right Mr. Gonzales. The Mr. Gonzales I work for is a man of simple tastes. He likes chicken, he likes steak. I don&amp;#039;t know if he&amp;#039;s ever heard of Wampum.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Have you?&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Have I what?&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Have you heard of it?&amp;quot; &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s Mrs. Bush&amp;#039;s favorite restaurant. The chef is a close personal friend of hers, and he catered the barbecue last summer at the ranch.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;How was it?&amp;quot; &amp;quot;It was very unusual, but very good. Not food you could eat every day. Well, maybe Mrs. Bush could eat there every day. But I&amp;#039;m sure the Governor would not be caught dead in a place like that.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Did you like it?&amp;quot; &amp;quot;I just told you that I did.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;No, you just told me that it was unusual.&amp;quot; A sigh, of a different, more genuine timbre than before. She was genuinely tired of me. &amp;quot;It was unusually good,&amp;quot; she said. &amp;quot;Could you check with Mr. Gonzales, and see if he could meet me there, instead of at Longhorn? See, I sometimes write about food, and since I&amp;#039;m only going to have one day in Austin, I thought I could kill two birds.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;You write about food?&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Sometimes.&amp;quot; This was a lie: I wanted to write about food, but then, as now, I only wound up eating it. &amp;quot;I don&amp;#039;t think we&amp;#039;ve ever had a restaurant reviewer request an interview with Mr. Gonzales. But there&amp;#039;s a first time for everything. What&amp;#039;s your phone number?&amp;quot; A few minutes later, she called back in curt surrender: &amp;quot;Mr. Junod? I&amp;#039;ve talked with Mr. Gonzales. Tuesday the 27th, 11:45. Wampum. If there is a problem, we have your number. Thank you, Mr. Junod. I hope you enjoy your meal.&amp;quot; I was, then, already hungry when I first met Alberto Gonzales -- hunger was, indeed, the precondition for the interview. I had been interested in Wampum, and its chef, Carlos Boundary, since I&amp;#039;d gone to Tallequah, Oklahoma, on an assignment, and eaten real &amp;quot;Indian&amp;quot; food. Tallequah is the capitol of Cherokee Nation; although it has a desolate, quarantined quality -- you need never ask the outcome of the Indian Wars once you&amp;#039;ve been to Tallequah -- it is home to a few restaurants that serve food unlike any I&amp;#039;ve ever eaten. It&amp;#039;s not exactly good; in fact, the &amp;quot;Indian tacos&amp;quot; are similar to the standard Tex-Mex issue except that the ingredients are fried in lard, and then served on a pie-plate sized decal of corn that&amp;#039;s swollen, spongy, soggy, and the color of cyanotic skin. It is frankly repugnant -- the cuisine of the conquered -- and yet I ate one serving after another, with almost impossible gusto, because it fed in me a sense of well-being. The restaurant itself was a dump, a greasy spoon whose filmy window was lined with basketball trophies, but the woman behind the counter was damply gorgeous, the Native-American equivalent of a sexy scullery maid: short and sort of stocky, but titty, with hairless arms and tender skin, and a potent mole -- her one blemish -- suspended like a navigational star above her long dark lips. Her straight black hair was frazzled in places from the steam rising off the humble provender, and she was wearing a sweat-stained T-shirt with the words SHOW ME THE WAMPUM stretched over the dark suggestion of her aureoles. I felt not only horny as I ate; I felt triumphant, and so I never got full, although I did ask myself if I was feeling so good only because I was reveling in my own privilege -- if I was slumming in an elemental way previously available only to the Europeans who happened on a new continent with bloody armies behind them. I stayed until closing, but never made a move on the squaw, and when I put my rental back on the highway, I drove 90 miles in 60 minutes so that I could catch &amp;quot;Seinfeld&amp;quot; in my motel room. It turned out to be the &amp;quot;rye-bread&amp;quot; episode, and when it was over I watched Frasier and when that was over I opened the Texas Monthly I was carrying around and read for the first time about Wampum and the astonishing things Carlos Boundary was doing with maize and buffalo jerky. The effect was electric; I got hungry all over again, but the hunger felt different somehow -- redeemed by its exposure to irony and innovation. This was the Nineties, after all, and it was through irony and innovation that America was learning to live with the embarrassment of its endless appetites. (For a while there, we actually thought we were going to get away with it -- get away with the historical accident of being American -- and so we could never predict that both irony and innovation would be done in by those whose only virtue was the sin of having no appetites at all.) I didn&amp;#039;t have breakfast the day I was supposed to eat at Wampum with Alberto Gonzales, because I wanted to preserve the insulated core of my hunger. I got there at 11:30, when the servers -- all ash-blonde astonishments from UT, not an Indian maiden among them -- were still folding napkins and tightening their string ties. There is, before a restaurant is officially open for business, an enchanting air of dishabille, and Wampum had it in spades; even with its gnarly desert wood sculptures and its brightly colored sand paintings, the place had the animatronic feel common to restaurants of the era -- the sashes of subdued light from the brushed-steel sconces -- and yet, with its staff of beautiful women still, you know, getting dressed, I had the sense of wandering through a seraglio in aftermath. I&amp;#039;d phoned, in advance, to set up an interview with the chef, but now I felt like a vice-cop instead of a journalist, with all the waitresses (the unfortunate waitron was not, as yet, in the lexicon) looking at me blankly as I threaded my way through their ministrations instead of offering me advice or welcome. Luckily, I didn&amp;#039;t need directions to find the kitchen; all I needed was my nose and my salivary glands. I remember the smell of it even now: the adamantine of earth consumed in the blaze of pinon fire. A cauldron of beans simmered on the stove, but that was the only place where the flavors of the food were allowed to come peacefully into being; everywhere else was fire, and heat that crinkled the hairs in my nose. There was a violence to that kitchen, not to mention a kind of symmetry with the dining room. Or maybe asymmetry: because, if the dining room was stalked almost exclusively by great limber Anglo women, here it was all men, and all the men were smallish and swarthy, lit by the flames of the wood-burning stove, around which they huddled like laborers at a bus stop. I couldn&amp;#039;t tell if they were Native-American or mestizo, but I knew then that to work in Boundary&amp;#039;s kitchen, you had to be willing to do more than get your hands dirty. You had to be willing to get them burned. &amp;quot;Carlos Boundary?&amp;quot; I asked, when I got close enough to the fire to see what I smelled: the haunches of cactus-wrapped cabrito spitting in the swelter and the strips of buffalo jerky curling up on a queue of hot stones. I was expecting him to step out of the ranks of his cooks, but instead the whole assemblage went suddenly silent, until one lifted up his downcast eyes, and gestured with his thumb around a corner.  And there, sitting on a stainless steel counter, among the stashed backpacks of his crew, was the man who was trying to popularize what he called &amp;quot;aboriginal&amp;quot; cuisine in the United States. He was not a big man, either; his feet were swinging off the floor, and even with the lift provided by the counter, he wasn&amp;#039;t as tall as the tendrilly waitress he was talking to. But Che Guevera wasn&amp;#039;t tall, either, and that&amp;#039;s who Boundary reminded me of. It wasn&amp;#039;t just the meticulously lank hair and shadowy mustache; but also the low-temperature glow, the sense of remove from the very revolution he&amp;#039;d fomented. He was in his white chef&amp;#039;s tunic, and splayed open on his black-and-white checked pants was an old paperback copy of Soul on Ice, by Eldridge Cleaver. He had an eagle feather cocked behind his ear, and after he whispered something to the waitress, he found the feather, used it to bookmark the pages, slipped the book into her hand and sent her on her way. She looked at me and blushed, then squeezed past with a blowback of secondary perfume. Boundary smiled to himself, then gave his short legs a push, with his hands folded in a peony-sized fist between them. &amp;quot;So what do you think?&amp;quot; he said. &amp;quot;I think I don&amp;#039;t know how you can stand it,&amp;quot; I said. &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;d go fucking crazy, working here.&amp;quot; He nodded, then sniffed the air and smiled. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s hard, my friend, it&amp;#039;s hard,&amp;quot; and from then on, we were friends, because even though I was talking about the smell of the food, he thought I was talking about pussy. He slid down off the counter, and showed me around the kitchen, telling me his story -- or, as it turned out, his creation myth, for he was, in his telling, a chef who worked close to fire because he was born in it. He was one-quarter Apache, he said, which was Apache enough not to give a shit about the three-quarters of him that was &amp;quot;Texican.&amp;quot; It was the Apache strain, after all, that gave him the balls to be what he was before he became a chef: a smoke-jumper. &amp;quot;Some people go to Le Cordon Bleu,&amp;quot; he said. &amp;quot;I went to fucking Criapea Gulch. I went to the fire at the Salamacis Gate, in New Mexico. Me and and my people, counting the flaming coup. Right? Tell an Indian he&amp;#039;s going to the Happy Hunting Ground -- well, where do I line up, right? But here&amp;#039;s the thing: you have no idea how happy the hunting is until you&amp;#039;ve gone to a fire. All these poor animals, pouring out of the forests, some of them singed, some of them already smoking, just from the heat -- and so some you have to shoot, so they don&amp;#039;t fucking go on fire. And then you have to eat them, because that&amp;#039;s the Apache code -- what you kill, you eat. So that&amp;#039;s where I learned to cook. On the fire line. In the beginning, I used to bring chiles in a little pouch -- you know, your fucking arbol, your fucking pampanilla, all that good stuff, but after a while I went with nothing but my appetite. Because the fire gives you what you need. Fire tells you what smells good, what smells bad, fire even gives you charcoal briquettes and a box of matches. What else do you need? Okay -- tequila. Because we&amp;#039;re Indians, right? Ain&amp;#039;t no party without the pulque. And if one of the braves gets drunk enough, some of that joyjuice winds up on the meat -- as a blessing. And that&amp;#039;s how it happened, my friend. One night, we all got drunk enough. So drunk that we didn&amp;#039;t know the fire had jumped the line. We got that beautiful elk already dressed, already in the pit and garlanded with juniper berries, already blessed with a whole bottle of our best -- and then it&amp;#039;s like, Hey man, is it hot in here, or is it just me? So next thing, we&amp;#039;re running around like ten little Indians, because the thing about fire, is that it&amp;#039;s fast, man, like God on wheels. Faster you run, faster it goes, because it&amp;#039;s, like, attracted to your breath or something. But somehow we outrun it. Somehow we survive. Not forever -- two of the braves from that trip got turned to ash a month later in Criapea. But that night, the Great Spirit was with us, only our asses get blistered, not our balls. The wind shifts when it shouldn&amp;#039;t, something -- and when it&amp;#039;s over, when the fire passes, I go back. Because I can smell the elk. It&amp;#039;s cooking, man. It&amp;#039;s cooked -- and I&amp;#039;m hungry. And when I taste it, I know what I want to do with the rest of my life. Because this isn&amp;#039;t no knife-and-fork eating, my friend -- this is get down on your knees and eat strips of flesh with your bare hands because you&amp;#039;re lucky to be alive even if the poor Elk isn&amp;#039;t. Two minutes at 2000 degrees. And that&amp;#039;s the essence of my cuisine. That&amp;#039;s the experience I want to recreate at Wampum. Of course, you can&amp;#039;t get the right temperature unless you set the place on fire. And knives and forks are generally a pretty good idea, if you want to feed the white folks. But check out the menu. You got your Elk, with your juniper and pulque infusion. Nothing else like it in the world. People say I&amp;#039;m trying to revive the Southwestern craze -- what the fuck does that mean? I know what Southwestern cooking tastes like. I used to work at the Mansion On Turtle Creek, where it got started. I got a job washing dishes there, after Criapea. I taught Artemis Lundy how to build a hot fire. He&amp;#039;s a good man, Artemis. But he&amp;#039;s to the kitchen what Pat Boone is to the tepee. He cooks for ladies who lunch. Small appetites, and no doggie bags. That&amp;#039;s not me, man. Look around. I like to do my cooking for ladies who fuck.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Um, the governor&amp;#039;s wife\u2014&amp;quot; &amp;quot;She&amp;#039;s a nice lady, the First Lady.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;What&amp;#039;s her name again?&amp;quot; &amp;quot;I call her Mrs. Bush.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;But what&amp;#039;s her first name?&amp;quot; &amp;quot;She says, Call me Laura.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Is she a lady who --&amp;quot; &amp;quot;I don&amp;#039;t know what she does in her spare time. I do know she likes to eat when she&amp;#039;s here. She likes the barbecue.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;I was told you and she are really close friends.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Who told you that?&amp;quot; &amp;quot;A lady who lunches.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Mrs. Bush likes the barbecue.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;What&amp;#039;s that, some kind of code?&amp;quot; &amp;quot;No, man, listen. I got two kinds of customers. There&amp;#039;s those who like what I do, and there&amp;#039;s those who like the barbecue. The First Lady likes the barbecue. Nothing wrong with that -- there wouldn&amp;#039;t be no former, if there were no latter. How do you think a little two-feather Injun like me gets a restaurant like this? When I was at Turtle Creek, I started doing barbecues for rich people. Finally, I got myself a patron. He says, I&amp;#039;ll let you do anything you want as long as you keep me in brisket. I say, I want to open a restaurant called Another Drunk Indian. He says, I&amp;#039;ll let you do anything but that. I say, Okay -- Wampum. And so Wampum it is. Hey, have you heard -- we&amp;#039;re trying to revive the Southwestern cooking craze....&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Well, at least you have a safety net.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;What&amp;#039;s that?&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Cooking for the Bushes.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;That&amp;#039;s no safety net. First of all, let me tell me you, when anybody says that they&amp;#039;re good friends with the Governor and the First Lady, all that means is that they go to the big house, and don&amp;#039;t run their mouths afterwards. That&amp;#039;s all. Oh, yeah -- and the Governor gives you a nickname. You know what he calls me?&amp;quot; &amp;quot;You know what he&amp;#039;s supposed to call Janet Reno?&amp;quot; &amp;quot;I don&amp;#039;t know. What?&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Bobcat.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;The fuck does that mean?&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Well, he used to call her &amp;#039;Shakes,&amp;#039; from Shakes the Clown. But then someone told him he couldn&amp;#039;t do that anymore. So he calls her Bobcat.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Probably his wife.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;What&amp;#039;s he call you?&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Smokey. If I was a black man, he&amp;#039;d never get away with that shit.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Doesn&amp;#039;t mean you can&amp;#039;t cook for him.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Believe me, I&amp;#039;m not going to cook for the Bushes. I got problems beyond the nickname problem. I got this problem.&amp;quot; Here, Boundary extended his arms -- the arms of his white tunic, still clean, since he wasn&amp;#039;t doing any cooking or even any stirring as he took me around the islands of heat in the kitchen. At first, I thought he was showing the backs of his hands, since the skin of them was bejeweled with shiny burns. Then I thought he was shooting his cuffs, for the gesture was formal like that, like a bird puffing his feathers. But he didn&amp;#039;t have any cuffs to shoot; his arms were bare under his tunic, except for a tattoo on his forearm that said ANTONIO. &amp;quot;Oh, I see,&amp;quot; I said. &amp;quot;You see what?&amp;quot; he said. &amp;quot;I see you got a problem.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;What kind of problem.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Um, an Antonio problem, I guess.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;You know Antonio?&amp;quot; &amp;quot;No, I don&amp;#039;t know Antonio. But I know that if you know Antonio, you got a problem with the Bushes. Nothing personal, from what I&amp;#039;ve heard. More a politcal thing.&amp;quot; He stepped away from me. &amp;quot;What do you think, I&amp;#039;m gay?&amp;quot; He was doing the whole offended machismo routine now, sort of dancing from one foot to the other, pointing at his chest with all his fingertips. &amp;quot;Look around, man. Do you think I&amp;#039;d spend half my fucking budget on waitresses if I was gay? No, Antonio is Antonio Banderas. Do you understand now?&amp;quot; &amp;quot;You&amp;#039;ve got an Antonio Banderas problem?&amp;quot; &amp;quot;He&amp;#039;s my brother, man. Mi hermano.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Antonio Banderas is your brother? So that makes you...Melanie Griffith&amp;#039;s brother-in-law? Cool.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Where you from, man? You don&amp;#039;t live here, do you?&amp;quot; &amp;quot;No, Atlanta.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Atlanta. I got an offer to open a restaurant in Atlanta.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Once upon a time I lived in Dallas.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;I lived in Dallas, too, with my brother. With Antonio Banderas.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;I thought your name was Boundary.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Boundary, Banderas, what the fuck. He&amp;#039;s my half-brother anyway. I didn&amp;#039;t see him all that much in Dallas. I was too busy making my way at the Mansion. He was too busy killing cops.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Jesus. Cops? More than one?&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Two. That&amp;#039;s what they say, anyway. Circumstantial evidence. The circumstances being a full fucking confession. The confession being beaten out of him by a tag team of really P.O&amp;#039;ed Dallas centurions.&amp;quot; He leaned down then, as if to spit, but then he kissed the tattoo on his forearm. &amp;quot;Jesus, I&amp;#039;m sorry, Carlos.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;So you see what I&amp;#039;m saying when I say I have an Antonio Banderas problem. I have an Antonio Banderas problem because Antonio Banderas has a Huntsville problem.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;But you&amp;#039;re friends with the Bushes. They like your barbecue. Can&amp;#039;t you talk to them about the Huntsville problem?&amp;quot; &amp;quot;You really aren&amp;#039;t from around here. Because if you were you&amp;#039;d know the thing you don&amp;#039;t do is ask them for anything. If they give it to you, you&amp;#039;re forever in their debt. And if they don&amp;#039;t, then the problem has a way of getting worse.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;What about Alberto Gonzales?&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Who&amp;#039;s Alberto Gonzales?&amp;quot; &amp;quot;He&amp;#039;s Bush&amp;#039;s lawyer.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Bush&amp;#039;s lawyer is named Alberto Gonzales?&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Yeah. And I&amp;#039;m meeting him for lunch. Here. Today.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Bush&amp;#039;s lawyer is eating at my restaurant.&amp;quot; He folded his small hand on my arm, and said, &amp;quot;Mi hermano.&amp;quot; Then he took up a spoon and began stirring the cauldron of beans. In our tour of the kitchen, he had not tended to any of the food being cooked under his supervision, but now he leaned into the steam coming off the pot, and breathed it in through his nose. &amp;quot;You go have lunch with Alberto Gonzales,&amp;quot; he said. &amp;quot;I will be cooking for you today.&amp;quot; He was already there when I walked from the kitchen into the dining room. Outside, it was a bright Texas day, but the dining room was dark, and his face was conspicuously trying to adjust to the gloom. Well, all their faces: he was standing there with the woman I presumed to be Jackie -- a mullioned old broad with terrific sticks, wearing a minidress emblazoned with a pattern of sails and anchors -- and then with a younger woman, flaxen-blonde and bespectacled, frisky with ambition, wearing the requisite pinstriped pantsuit. But he was the only one who was smiling, smiling into the darkness, and it was exactly the same smile you see on kids on their first day of school. It was not a smile intended for me or anyone else; it was the smile of habit, a smile he developed on the first day of school, and stuck with. And he was so small. He was wearing a navy-blue suit that fit him like a box, with an American-flag lapel pin, and no visible cuff -- indeed, the arms of his suit jacket swallowed his arms and swathed his hands in shadow. And so I felt his hands, before I saw them. I walked up to him, expecting him to step forward, but the women he was with kept pouring advice into his ear until I extended my hand, and practically grabbed his. And there it was: At the same time that Jackie was scooting into the shadows, a waxen figure whose distaste amounted to a kind of largesse; at the same time that the foxy, flaxen aide withdrew from her boss with one last flurry of note-taking, and switched to a cell phone the size of a Barbie doll; at the same time that I heard his voice for the first time, which was careful and wispy, or carefully wispy, the voice of a parish priest taking the Fifth -- there it suddenly was, emerging from the arm of his jacket, his hand, a tiny thing, so soft, so new, so seemingly invented, that it might have been the hand of a burn victim. &amp;quot;Alberto Gonzales,&amp;quot; he said. &amp;quot;I am pleased to meet you.&amp;quot; Our waitress was with us, instantly, the very same waitress now reading Eldridge Cleaver at Carlos Boundary&amp;#039;s urging, holding our menus to her breast in the attitude of a prairie wife. I followed her, and Gonazles followed me, as though I were the maitre d&amp;#039;. There were no other patons in the restaurant, and we sat at a table constructed of sticks and stones and decorated with pieces of glass collected from various forest fires. It was hot in the dining room; Gonzales&amp;#039; glasses fogged over, and when he took them off to wipe them, his face changed -- he was one of those people whose faces change when the glasses come off, whose faces look simultaneously bloated and denuded as the result of exposure. He sat there blinking, until he put the glasses back on. Then, instantly, before he began talking to me, he opened his menu and began paging through it, while taking a single loud sniff of the smoky air, as if that were all that was required to confirm his suspicions. He closed the menu and smiled. &amp;quot;I have to tell you, Mr. Junod, that this restaurant is a little fancy for me. I don&amp;#039;t go to places like this very often.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Neither do I,&amp;quot; I said. &amp;quot;That&amp;#039;s why we&amp;#039;re here. It&amp;#039;s supposed to be special.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;I have three children,&amp;quot; he said. &amp;quot;With the hours I work, a special meal is one I can have with my family.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Well, as my father says: You gotta eat.&amp;quot; He chuckled primly -- I thought, at first, that instead of starting to laugh, he was starting to pray -- and said, &amp;quot;I guess you do -- but most of the time, for lunch, I like to have a grilled chicken salad and a mango smoothie.&amp;quot; He picked up his menu, then just as quickly dropped it. &amp;quot;This chef, he&amp;#039;s supposed to be very good. Do you think he&amp;#039;ll be able to make me a grilled chicken salad and a mango smoothie?&amp;quot; It was at that moment that our waitress showed up, and set before each of us an enormous white plate decorated with three little constructions of food, like a big driveway parked with miniature cars. The waitress&amp;#039; name was Monica. She was wearing black pants and a white tuxedo shirt with a string tie and feathered earrings; she was very tall and kind of beaky, but striking, because, as everyone knows, a big nose is the most forgivable imperfection in a beautiful woman. &amp;quot;This is a little gift from Chef --&amp;quot; But Gonazles cut her off. He was looking up at her, thereby giving me the same glimpse of his face that I&amp;#039;d seen when he took off his glasses -- the stung eyes, the baby face that somehow was lacking in innocence. His hands were already beginning to clutch the edge of the table, as if to brace himself. &amp;quot;Ma&amp;#039;am, I didn&amp;#039;t order this.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Um, you didn&amp;#039;t have to,&amp;quot; Monica said. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s, um, an amuse bouche. Three little gifts from Chef Boundary. Three variations of the habanero pepper. The one that&amp;#039;s charred is very, very sweet. The one that&amp;#039;s frozen is very, very spicy. And the habanero flan is, like, so, so good. Okay, then? Enjoy.&amp;quot; She was leaving the table when he called behind her: &amp;quot;Does &amp;#039;gift&amp;#039; mean it&amp;#039;s free?&amp;quot; But she either didn&amp;#039;t hear him, or didn&amp;#039;t want to, so he had no choice but to contemplate the food set before him, and decide whether to eat it or not. As for me: I got hungry. So I ate the three peppers, in a rush of sweat and tears. Gonzales sat watching; then he said, &amp;quot;I thought there was no such thing as a free lunch,&amp;quot; and, with a movement of his hands so darting it was almost furtive, he popped the iced habanero into his mouth. A molecular sweat broke out on his forehead, and he waved his hand in front of his mouth -- &amp;quot;that&amp;#039;s different,&amp;quot; he said -- and then he pushed the plate away from him, as though he would never touch it again. But he did touch it, he must have touched it, because when the waitress came for the plate, it was as clean as mine. But I didn&amp;#039;t see him eat; I didn&amp;#039;t see him evince anything in response to the food but that first momentary surprise; and as the waitress headed back to the kitchen, he said, &amp;quot;We&amp;#039;d like to order now, if possible.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Oh, you&amp;#039;re not eating off the menu,&amp;quot; she said. &amp;quot;Chef is cooking for you.&amp;quot; Gonzales brightened. &amp;quot;Just so long as he makes me a grilled chicken salad and a mango smoothie.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;I don&amp;#039;t know if that&amp;#039;s part of the degustation. But I&amp;#039;ll put in a good word for you.&amp;quot; She was back in a minute, but not with the simple fare he&amp;#039;d asked for. She was back with a tray on which was precariously balanced three meniscal shots of liquor, cloudy with cold. And she was back with Carlos Boundary, whose tunic was now properly stained, and whose sleeves were rolled up to expose the braceleted burn marks and the tattoo that spoke the name ANTONIO with mad jailhouse flourish. He clicked his heels together and bowed; then he picked up one of the shots and bid us to do the same. I did; Alberto Gonzales didn&amp;#039;t. I wanted to warn Carlos; I wanted to tell him to go back to the kitchen, before it was too late; I wanted to tell him my hunch that the vanity of George W. Bush&amp;#039;s attorney was not the usual male kind -- it had nothing to do with how much he could take for himself but with how much he could refuse, and the only way you could offend it\u2014him\u2014was by making him accept something he&amp;#039;d made a show of not wanting. But what could I say? The chef was trying to make a sale. &amp;quot;Pulque,&amp;quot; Carlos said, and raised the shotglass to his lips. He was just about to slurp off the top when he noticed that Gonzales wasn&amp;#039;t drinking. &amp;quot;Pulque,&amp;quot; he said again, but this time directing the word to Gonzales alone. &amp;quot;I don&amp;#039;t think the people of the state of Texas would appreciate me giving legal advice to the governor with a snootful,&amp;quot; he said. &amp;quot;Oh, it&amp;#039;s not to get you drunk, amigo,&amp;quot; Boundary said. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s not even to clear your palate. It&amp;#039;s to make you understand. You can&amp;#039;t understand French cooking if you don&amp;#039;t understand wine, right? Well, there&amp;#039;s a certain taste to my food, and you won&amp;#039;t be able to taste it if you can&amp;#039;t taste this.&amp;quot; Then he placed the shot back on the tray, and did something odd. He kneeled down next to Gonzales, and whispered something in his ear in Spanish. Gonazles reddened, to the color of cinnamon. I thought he was going to get up and go, but instead he said, &amp;quot;I guess it won&amp;#039;t hurt, but now you have to make me grilled--&amp;quot; &amp;quot;I promise to take good care of you,&amp;quot; Carlos said. &amp;quot;Now -- pulque.&amp;quot; He lifted his shot and drank it; so did I; and so did Alberto Gonzales, staring straight ahead, drinking it as though giving testimony after being given immunity. He will never forgive this, I thought; he will never forgive Carlos Boundary for the shot of pulque, any more than an old farmer will forgive a mule for its kick. Because the pulque did have a kick, of course; it didn&amp;#039;t get us drunk, but like anything drawn from the agave, it clouded one&amp;#039;s mind, by making things suddenly clear. And so when Carlos and Monica left to go back to the kitchen, there was that terrible moment, when Alberto Gonzales and I had to stare at one another across the table, with nothing but clarity between us. He was smiling, his cinnamon blush dwindled down to his pulque-pinkened lips, and to avoid his smile I started fixating again on his hands, those soft creatures. He was the kind of man who wore a cheap suit but an extremely expensive watch, because the watch was a gift from a powerful patron -- in this case, George W. Bush. He was the kind of man who, because he didn&amp;#039;t know what to do with his hands -- I would have liked to have played him in poker, because the hands are the surest tells -- had them expensively buffed and manicured, so that now, as his fingertips locked on the edge of the table, his fingernails glowed like a chain of pink pearls.  &amp;quot;So,&amp;quot; he said, &amp;quot;I understand you&amp;#039;re writing a profile of the Attorney-General.&amp;quot; Ah, yes: the cloudy clarity of the business at hand. &amp;quot;Yes,&amp;quot; I said, in pulque-propelled haste. &amp;quot;Bobcat.&amp;quot; Gonzales nodded, as if in in deference to the quality of my sources. &amp;quot;Well, I don&amp;#039;t know how much I can help you. I&amp;#039;m only a local lawyer. But maybe, if we speak strictly off the record, I can answer some of your legal questions.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;That&amp;#039;s Governor Bush&amp;#039;s nickname for her, right?&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Governor Bush has a lot of nicknames for a lot of people.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;But this one -- well, it&amp;#039;s because of Bobcat Goldthwaite, right?&amp;quot; &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m afraid I don&amp;#039;t know who that is.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;He was in the movie Shakes the Clown.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;I haven&amp;#039;t seen that movie.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;But you know what I&amp;#039;m getting at. The movie is about--&amp;quot; &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;ve always been under the impression that he gave her the nickname in tribute to her ferocity,&amp;quot; Gonzales said. &amp;quot;What is his nickname for you?&amp;quot; I asked. He gave a little sniffle that changed the smile on his face -- that made it momentarily genuine. He fluffed up a bit under his suit, and said, &amp;quot;Hermano.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Mi hermano?&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Si,&amp;quot; he said. &amp;quot;Mi hermano.&amp;quot; A few more customers were sitting in the restaurant now. I had my back to the kitchen and my face to the dining room, but every so often I could feel a gust of heat blowing out the kitchen door, followed by the food. The bread came first, a sheet of maize pounded as flat as Indian nan, and then charred in the oven. Gonzales&amp;#039; fingers darted over the basket, but did not take. &amp;quot;It is a terrible thing, what happened in Waco,&amp;quot; he said. &amp;quot;The people who died were all Christian people. They followed the wrong leader, and he led them to wrath. But they were all Christian people.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Have you been there?&amp;quot; I asked. He nodded solemnly. &amp;quot;I have been there.&amp;quot;  I picked up a piece of bread and ate it. I picked up another piece of bread and ate that one too. There was some kind pepper in there, chipotle probably. Chipotle cornbread has become a big clich\u00E9 now, but at the time it tasted like nothing else. &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;d like to go,&amp;quot; I said. &amp;quot;Why do you want to go? There is nothing to see.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Well, when you write about someone, you want to see what they have wrought. I&amp;#039;m writing about Janet Reno. I&amp;#039;d like to see the charred remains of what she&amp;#039;s wrought.&amp;quot; Monica brought our first plates: three golden envelopes shaped like burritos, but tiny, and pulsing with the heat of whatever meat was stuffed inside. &amp;quot;This is one of Chef Boundary&amp;#039;s signature dishes,&amp;quot; she said. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s his version of the burrito. It&amp;#039;s called the Burrr-ito, because it has real burro inside. Well, lardons of burro, because burro by itself is very, very tough. But I just love his little jokes. All right, then....&amp;quot; Gonzales barely looked at the food. He just waited for Monica to leave, then he watched me while I ate Boundary&amp;#039;s burritos in short order. The meat inside tasted like bits of cracklin&amp;#039;, but with a higher, gamier taste. &amp;quot;I know that fried burro doesn&amp;#039;t sound too appetizing,&amp;quot; I said, &amp;quot;but you gotta try these.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;My grandfather had a burro,&amp;quot; he said. &amp;quot;My father used to tell stories about it. He said that Pappito owed his life to that stubborn beast. I think I&amp;#039;ll pass.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Well, I guess it depends on where you&amp;#039;re from. If you live in France, you think nothing of eating horsemeat, but here in the States --&amp;quot; &amp;quot;You spoke just now of the charred remains of the Branch Davidian compound,&amp;quot; he said. &amp;quot;I have to tell you, there are no charred remains. The charred remains have been cleared away. The only remains that are still at the site are not charred. They are melted, the fire was so intense. It was hell on earth. And when I think of those people, the women, the children -- when I was walking through, I saw something shiny on the ground. I bent down to pick it up. It was metal, but it was melted into a little shiny blob. Then I realized what it was. It was one of those -- what do you call them? -- Matchbox cars. A little tiny Matchbox car. And I began to cry. This was a toy that once belonged to a child. But it was more than that. It was something that brought back the memory of my own childhood. Something I did.&amp;quot; A busboy came and cleared the plates, and Monica came in his wake with two new ones. She was sweating a little bit -- her white shirt had changed color, like a cloud -- and had her sleeves rolled up. Her thin arm was striped with the name ANTONIO. The meat on the plates was still sizzling, throwing off its own gravy in tiny droplets. This was the cabrito; it had been wrapped in sheets of agave cactus, the way a burn victim is wrapped in special blankets; now unveiled, it seemed still alive with heat -- squirmy -- and the only thing you could do was cool it down with the prickly-pear relish that came on the side, and eat it. It wasn&amp;#039;t just a matter of hunger, eating that food; it was a matter of conscience. But Gonzales&amp;#039; fingers remained still, poised, as though he were having them done at the salon. &amp;quot;I was about twelve years old,&amp;quot; he resumed. &amp;quot;And I had a friend whose father worked for the Highway Department and he had some flares. You know, those things you put on the side of the road when you&amp;#039;re changing a tire, so someone doesn&amp;#039;t come by and kill you. Well, we wanted to see how hot those flares burned. We went through the usual stuff -- army men, twigs, anything we could find. Then my friend -- I thought he was my friend -- saw a couple of my Matchbox cars. &amp;quot;How about these?&amp;quot; he said. Now, I loved those Matchbox cars. My father used to buy them for me special, and he was not a wealthy man. Far from it. We were not wealthy people. Immigrantes, we were. But I was also a twelve-year old boy, and I was a little bit embarrassed to be playing with Matchbox cars. I couldn&amp;#039;t say to my friend, Wait a second, I love those little cars, they mean a lot to me. They were baby toys. So I said, Let&amp;#039;s try it. Like a big man. I still remember the first one we torched. It was a little white ambulance. I thought that the flare would scorch it, blacken it. Well, that&amp;#039;s not what happened. The little white ambulance melted. I do not mean it changed shape. I mean it liquefied. It turned into a little pool of metal, like mercury. If you are ever stuck on the side of the road and have to burn a flare, you should know one thing: those darned things are hot! So be careful! But me and my friend, we were not careful. Our question had been answered; we should have packed up our tent and gone home. But do you think we did that? Of course not. We were boys. So after the ambulance, went the firetruck, and after the fire truck went...well, who knows? I forget. It was a long time ago. But I sacrificed my whole childhood on that pyre. That&amp;#039;s what it felt like, anyway. It became like an addiction -- an act of liberation. It was not a question of if I should melt every single one of my precious Matchbox cars; it was a question of how fast. But like so many acts of so-called liberation, the freedom I was celebrating was a false one. I had a little brother. I should have given those cars to him. I have sons. I should have saved them for my sons. How they would have enjoyed playing with their father&amp;#039;s Matchbox cars! But they never had that chance. As soon as my friend went home, I began to regret what I had done. My friend didn&amp;#039;t regret it; of course not. They weren&amp;#039;t his Matchbox cars. His father had supplied the flares; mine -- the fuel. Thirty-five Matchbox cars got burned up that day, in the conflagration that took place in my own backyard. My own backyard! Did I have fun? Oh, yes, lots of fun. But the fun I had only deepened my shame. I had fun burning cars my Pappi bought for me. And he was coming home soon. Who knows? Maybe he had another Matchbox car with him. Maybe he was going to come home bursting his buttons at what he had been able to buy for his good son, his dutiful son, Alberto. He was so proud of me. And so what he wanted, more than anything, was for me to be proud of him. And what did I do, I listened to a friend who wanted nothing more than to burn it all down!&amp;quot; The next course was the elk with the scorched juniper perfume and the pulque infusion. I kept waiting for Gonzales to say something about it; something about what the elk, at least, had given to us, through the medium of fire. But no: As the pulque had released me into a hunger for the meat that came off Carlos Boundary&amp;#039;s cruel spit, it had released Gonzales into a hunger to tell his story. It was sort of like being in jail with an oppressively responsible cellmate: a guy who kept getting hacksaws in the mail but never deigned to use them, because they came secreted in chocolate cakes, and he didn&amp;#039;t eat dessert. Besides, why should he want to break out? He was where he wanted to be -- in a place where someone had to listen to him. Jail was good for guys like that. And the jail of shame and stricture was good for Alberto Gonzales. &amp;quot;I didn&amp;#039;t know what do when my father got home,&amp;quot; he said, after tasting the elk and daintily wiping the corners of his mouth with a napkin. &amp;quot;I thought of lying about it, but even I couldn&amp;#039;t sink that low. So I came up with an idea. I would show my father what we had done! I would try to make him think that we had melted my Matchbox cars in the name of science! How impressed he would be! A science experiment! So I waited, and waited, collecting all those little silver blobs, as if they were specimens. I think I might have even tagged them, with little pieces of paper and Scotch Tape. You know: &amp;#039;This is a firetruck. And this is how it burned.&amp;#039; Well, my father was not an educated man. But he was not stupid. No. Pappi was not stupid. I still remember his face when I showed him the first car. And then I remember his face when I showed him all the cars. Because he made me show them to him. Each one. He was surprised, at first -- taken aback. Then he was disappointed. Surprise is a fleeting emotion. Anger is a fleeting emotion. But disappointment? Disappointment is like a drunken uncle. It doesn&amp;#039;t leave, even when you throw it out the door. Now, my father was not a man to be trifled with. A good man? Yes? A fair man? Yes. But like a lot of Mexican fathers, he believed in the belt. And so, when I was finished showing him what was left of my collection, I waited for him to take off his belt, and teach me a lesson. A lesson about justice, a lesson about the law. I was prepared for this. I was prepared for what I was sure he was going to do. What I wasn&amp;#039;t prepared for was what he didn&amp;#039;t do. He stood up and said, &amp;#039;You will have to live with you&amp;#039;ve done, Alberto.&amp;#039; And then he went to bed. He closed the door of his bedroom, then clicked off the light. I could hear it, because my entire household -- my brothers, my sisters, my mother -- was silent. They were all looking at me. Waiting to see my reaction. Because I had gotten away with it, right? Wrong! We never get away with crimes like that -- crimes against those we love. I could have begged my father to take the belt to me. I could have prayed for God to do something, anything, so that I would have known the relief of punishment. But no, I already had the punishment I deserved. And besides, it was too late. My father&amp;#039;s door was closed. Six years later, he died. And when he was laid out, and they were about to close the door of the casket on him forever, I put something in that plain pine box with him. You see, there was one little car I couldn&amp;#039;t bring myself to burn, even when all the others were on fire. It was the James Bond car. Because that&amp;#039;s what I wanted to be, when I was little boy. The Mexican-American James Bond. Jaime Bond. Double-oh-siete. Licensed to kill. That sounded so glamorous, then. And so the little James Bond car survived. Maybe you remember it. It was an Aston-Martin, with a little shield in the back so that nobody who was chasing James Bond could shoot him. And it went to the grave with my Pappi. It is there still. It was my way of saying, Pappi, I&amp;#039;m so proud of you. Pappi, please be proud of me. And now, when I happen to mention that my father was, as the saying goes, free with his hands, there are some people who recoil in horror, and ask how I was affected, by all those blows with his belt. I tell them no, that the thing that affected me most was the blow I never received.&amp;quot; Monica was standing over the table. I looked at her. Gonzales looked at her. She was moistly smiling. She had two plates with her, and put them down in front of us. &amp;quot;This is something that Chef Boundary created just for you, Mr. Gonazles. It&amp;#039;s pellet-shot quail with a sour mango gelee, on top of another signature dish -- the &amp;#039;barbed-wire&amp;#039; salad, which is a selection of cactuses Chef Boundary has grown himself. Don&amp;#039;t worry if it&amp;#039;s a little prickly -- you can eat it. It&amp;#039;s my personal favorite. I have it every day, because it&amp;#039;s been found to have, like, antigens in it.&amp;quot; Gonzales stared at her, that blind smile bracketed now with dimples. In a child, a dimple signals the performance of pleasure; in Alberto Gonzales, a kind of sly pique. &amp;quot;How is this just for me?&amp;quot; he asked. &amp;quot;Um, you ordered it?&amp;quot; Monica said. &amp;quot;I did not order this.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;No, I wrote it down. Grilled chicken salad and a mango--&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Oh,&amp;quot; he said. &amp;quot;Oh.&amp;quot; He was happy now, with the triumph, but not with what was on the plate, which he picked at with his long-tined fork while Monica stood by and waited out his reaction. &amp;quot;Good,&amp;quot; he said, at last. &amp;quot;Very unusual. But good.&amp;quot; I began to eat again, and to listen. &amp;quot;So that&amp;#039;s what I found when I went to see where David Koresh lived with the Branch Davidians,&amp;quot; he said. &amp;quot;I had found my own childhood. Because you see, Tim, that&amp;#039;s what those people were looking for. They were looking for the same thing I was. They were looking for a leader with a belt. Their search was not a terrible thing. The terrible thing was who they found.&amp;quot;  His face changed then. He had such a practiced face, to go with his practiced hands. But now, suddenly, as he was chewing a forkful of quail, he raised his napkined fist to his mouth, and spit something into it, as if he had tasted a bad clam. His lips peeled back, and he patted his exposed teeth, as if making sure they were all still there. Then he showed me the contents of his napkin. It was a small piece of lead shot, darkened with spit the color of coffee. He smiled. &amp;quot;Am I supposed to eat this too?&amp;quot; he said. &amp;quot;I do not know, in this place. Maybe it&amp;#039;s supposed to taste good!&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Oh Jeez,&amp;quot; I said, &amp;quot;Oh Jeez.&amp;quot; And, feeling another hit of heat, turned around towards the kitchen. Boundary was standing at the door, with his arms folded. He seemed a completely different person than he was before. Before he was cool, sinuous. Now he looked like a combination of Apache warrior and Vulcan. I tried to signal him over, but he smiled and slipped back into the kitchen, as if he were too bashful to accept my applause. &amp;quot;Don&amp;#039;t worry about it,&amp;quot; Gonzales said. &amp;quot;It is no problem. It just never happened to me before. At least I know the quail was fresh!&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Well, we should tell the chef, at least.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;No, please don&amp;#039;t, not on my behalf. He is a proud man. I do not want to embarrass him.&amp;quot; Boundary came out, anyway. He came out of the kitchen, with Monica, and they were each bearing a white bowl in mittened hands. &amp;quot;See, I told you I&amp;#039;d take care of you!&amp;quot; Boundary said, with a smile. It was, I realized, the first time I&amp;#039;d seen him smiling, and his teeth were a triumphant ruin, two of them in front flanged with gold. He was carrying the heat of the kitchen with him, like a curse. &amp;quot;The quail was -- well, everything was -- amazing,&amp;quot; I offered, trying to forestall what I knew what was going to happen next. But Carlos Boundary was not particularly interested in what I had to say about his food, nor was he about to be forestalled. He was smiling at Alberto Gonzales, and Alberto Gonazales alone. Finally, Gonzales said, &amp;quot;It was very good. Very unusual, but very good.&amp;quot; But then he grimaced, and was fingering the clean white front tooth that bit into the piece of shot.  The busboy came and took away our plates, then Boundary and Monica placed the steaming white bowls in front of us. They were full of a maize pudding, swirled orange with candied hot chilis, and then topped with frozen goat curds. I immediately stuck my spoon into it, and felt the heat travel up the spoon. &amp;quot;You better watch out,&amp;quot; Boundary said, laughing, his crazy teeth the color of cake. &amp;quot;That pudding is cooked in the oven all day. It&amp;#039;s as hot as the oven. We had to get special bowls for it. The first few cracked.&amp;quot; Gonzales&amp;#039; smile settled into a straight line between his accusatory dimples. &amp;quot;Why would you do that?&amp;quot; he asked.  &amp;quot;Taste it,&amp;quot; Boundary said. So we did. I did. It was as hot as solder. But the heat itself surmounted the surroundings; for though the restaurant was warm with the breeze from the kitchen, it was cool in comparison with the pudding, and so the pudding offered the same kind of relief as hot chocolate on a winter day. And then, after the relief, came the second wave of heat from the chilis, and their tooth-pinging sweetness, and the numbing application of the frozen goat curds, which were lemony and jarringly white. Gonzales picked up his spoon and started blowing on it. &amp;quot;No, you must taste it when it&amp;#039;s hot,&amp;quot; Boundary said. &amp;quot;My grandmother made maize pudding,&amp;quot; Gonzales said. &amp;quot;But always she made us wait. She didn&amp;#039;t want us to burn our mouths. The waiting was part of the fun.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Please,&amp;quot; Boundary said, and at the level of the table I saw Monica&amp;#039;s hand sneak into his, then fall away. Gonzales&amp;#039; hand was on his glass of water when the spoon went into his mouth. But he never drank it. He didn&amp;#039;t need to. The spoon lingered in his mouth, and as it did his eyes squinted behind his glasses, and his face went funny -- it faltered, with pleasure. &amp;quot;I haven&amp;#039;t had maize pudding in a very long time,&amp;quot; he said. &amp;quot;My grandmother made it with condensed milk. I have tried to get my wife to make it. For my sons. But it doesn&amp;#039;t taste the same. This,&amp;quot; he said, &amp;quot;it tastes--&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Yes?&amp;quot; Boundary said. &amp;quot;Almost like hers. But my grandmother made it with condensed milk.&amp;quot; It was enough. &amp;quot;Do you know who taught me to make it?&amp;quot; Boundary said. He was squatting next to the table now, and he smelled of sweat and smoke and pulque. He radiated it, and his sleepy brown eyes kept getting startled by their own pulque-driven inner-knowledge. &amp;quot;My brother. Antonio. He was the cook before I was the cook. He was one of those guys, he could make a pork roast from a baby elephant, you know what I mean? He just had the knack. You just give him some protein and a fire, he&amp;#039;ll sing you a song, man. If he was cooking here, if he was cooking here instead of me, there&amp;#039;d be a line out the door. Me, I&amp;#039;m crazy. Antonio was the crowd-pleaser. He&amp;#039;d be running around here, putting on a show, right now. You want a juggler, table-side? He&amp;#039;d juggle for you. You want a clown? He&amp;#039;d wear the funny shoes with the bells on them. He was the personality. And his food was the same way. He lived through it, he breathed through it. The first time he made me the pudding, man, I ain&amp;#039;t ashamed to tell you -- I cried. I said, Antonio, why are you so good? Mr. Gonzales, I tell you -- I am nothing but a punk. A lot of show, a lot of flash. Antonio is the good one in the family. He is the one with all the soul.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Why don&amp;#039;t you hire him, then?&amp;quot; Gonzales said, patting his lips with the napkin. He was getting ready to go. &amp;quot;It sounds like you could use a man like him. He could please the crowds, while you do the crazy stuff. You know, back when I was first going to law school, it was my dream to hang out a shingle with my younger brother. Gonzales and Gonzales -- now that would make my father proud!&amp;quot; &amp;quot;So you know what it is like to love a brother.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;I had no choice. With a father like mine? Even when I didn&amp;#039;t love my brothers, I loved them.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;And if one of your brothers got into trouble, you&amp;#039;d keep loving him, right?&amp;quot; &amp;quot;We got into plenty of trouble when we were boys. Plenty of scrapes. All of us. The Gonzales brothers were not choirboys. Though we had to sing in the choir.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Mr. Gonzales, a few years ago, my brother got into terrible trouble. I told you, he&amp;#039;d do anything for anybody. Well, one night in Dallas, one of his amigos got beaten up real bad by the Dallas police. This was that bad time, they&amp;#039;re still getting investigated for it. Well, my brother, he&amp;#039;s got soul, but he&amp;#039;s not too smart, you know? He&amp;#039;s not careful, like me. He went outside, maybe to try to keep the peace, maybe to give somebody a good talking to. Who knows? Like I said: stupid. With all that machismo on top -- it&amp;#039;s one thing being stupid, it&amp;#039;s another thing being macho and stupid at the same time. And he had a gun. We lived in a bad neighborhood, Mr. Gonzales -- back then, I had a gun too. I&amp;#039;m not proud of it -- I don&amp;#039;t have it anymore -- but I did. Anyway, some bad things happened that night. A policeman died, and then another a few hours later. Men with wives and children. My brother&amp;#039;s no choirboy either, Mr. Gonzales. But because he had the gun and because he was a Mexican and fit the general -- &amp;quot;What is your brother&amp;#039;s name?&amp;quot; Alberto Gonzales asked. He was gripping his rolled-up napkin like a magician hoping it would turn into a dove. It didn&amp;#039;t.  &amp;quot;Antonio. Antonio Banderas.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;He is in Huntsville, is that correct?&amp;quot; &amp;quot;C Block.&amp;quot; Gonzales nodded. His eyes became alert behind the scratch-proof lenses, as if he were getting signals from someone across the room. &amp;quot;Mr. Banderas, I have no legal connection with your brother&amp;#039;s case. But I am familiar with it, as a reader of newspapers. I remember it. And I remember it because one of the officers killed was also Mexican-American. He had a large family. There was a picture in the newspaper of his children crying at his funeral. I remember that picture. Do you, Mr. Banderas?&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Si,&amp;quot; Carlos Boundary said. He stood up, because his squat was inappropriate for mourning. He straightened, assuming the grave mien of a French chef. Monica reached for his hand again, as if she were trying to fit her own hand through a tiny bracelet. He shook her off, like a crow shaking off the attentions of a catbird. &amp;quot;Your brother, he confessed to the crime. To both crimes,&amp;quot; Gonzales said. &amp;quot;But he was beaten,&amp;quot; Boundary said. &amp;quot;The police admit this. They admit they were overzealous.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;The courts will decide that. That&amp;#039;s what they are for.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;I am not asking you for anything, Mr. Gonzales. I just want you to to know my brother. To know his name. And to know that if the confession was disallowed, there would be no evidence to connect him to these crimes. None at all. My brother is a soft touch, so he tries to be a hard case. But a killer? Twice? Two times? Mr. Gonzales, he taught me how to scramble eggs. He taught me how to make tortillas. He taught me to put a little vinegar in the bowl....&amp;quot; His head hung forward, as if someone had toppled it from behind.  Gonzales sniffled, and the tip of his tongue, a little dry and baloney-colored, rose up again to his teeth. The food in front of him was miraculously gone, as if he&amp;#039;d hired someone to eat it. He reached into the front pocket of his starched shirt and extracted something very small with the instrument of his fingers. His teeth were very white, his shirt was very white. I thought at first it was a stone caught between his fingers, but it wasn&amp;#039;t. It was the piece of shot from the quail, and when he dropped it on the tabletop, it bounced, and fell to the floor on the second hop. Monica scurried to pick it up, as though it might be a lost diamond. Boundary stiffened with anger, sagged with shame. &amp;quot;Did your brother Alberto teach you how to put something like that in the food you serve?&amp;quot; Gonzales asked. Then his face recovered its smile, though no teeth showed, and the smile was wistful, the kind you get when you&amp;#039;re driving a car, and pass something funny in the rain. &amp;quot;You need to be more careful, Carlos,&amp;quot; he said. &amp;quot;You&amp;#039;re lucky I am careful enough for the both of us. You&amp;#039;re lucky I always chew before I swallow. You might have had a lawsuit on your hands.&amp;quot; Two weeks later, I called Wampum. I wasn&amp;#039;t calling to talk about food, though I had already hungrily proposed a profile of Carlos Boundary to Esquire. I wasn&amp;#039;t even calling to talk about the case of Antonio Banderas, though I had become somewhat obsessed with it, after reading an expensive raft of articles about it on Nexis. I was calling about an omission -- about something I hadn&amp;#039;t seen or read in any of those articles. You see, as it turned out, Carlos Boundary had always championed his brother&amp;#039;s cause. The murders were by now six years old, and when they first happened, Boundary was the first to take the issue of police brutality to the press. Except that he wasn&amp;#039;t known as Carlos Boundary then. He was simply Carlos Banderas, and he was working as a dishwasher in a Mexican restaurant on Greenville Avenue in Dallas. He had pretty good luck with the press, because he had something essential -- he had pictures of his brother&amp;#039;s broken face, taken at the hospital, and so the newspapers were able to run pictures of him, with the pictures of Antonio&amp;#039;s face beside his own. &amp;quot;The black eyes of my brother give black eyes to the entire Dallas Police Department,&amp;quot; he was quoted as saying, and he succeeded in getting the circumstances of the confession investigated. In all of the stories that were written about him and his brother and the murders of two cops in one night, however, there was one thing that was never mentioned: his Apache bloodline. Nor his experience as a smoke-jumper. The newspapers never portrayed him as anything other than a dishwasher fighting for his brother&amp;#039;s life. They never portrayed him as anything other than a Mexican who lived in South Dallas, at a time when the Dallas Police Department was even more hostile to Mexicans in South Dallas than it was to blacks. I called Wampum because I had to find out if I had a story or not. Another drunken Indian -- that&amp;#039;s a story. I didn&amp;#039;t know about another fake Indian. But the phone at Wampum kept ringing, even when I called at lunchtime, even when I called at dinner. At first, there was a tape-recording, telling me to leave my name and number if I wanted to make a reservation. Then after a few days there was nothing but a ring, pealing on and on in the dark. I called Gonzales&amp;#039; office, though not to ask about Wampum -- at the time, I still thought I could get a tour of whatever the fire didn&amp;#039;t consume at Waco -- and was surprised to hear Jackie asking me if I enjoyed my meal with her boss. I told her I did, and asked her if her boss enjoyed it as well. &amp;quot;I think he did,&amp;quot; she said, in a voice you don&amp;#039;t often hear in a woman -- a whistler&amp;#039;s voice; the voice of a female whistler. &amp;quot;Not that he would tell me if he did or he didn&amp;#039;t. He doesn&amp;#039;t care about food.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;He did okay. There was a lot of it.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;But apparently you&amp;#039;ve landed in the right place,&amp;quot; she said. &amp;quot;I hear you have quite an appetite. And now you&amp;#039;re in the catbird seat -- you got a five-course meal out of that restaurant and you don&amp;#039;t even have to write a review.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Excuse me?&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Well, the last time I went by it was closed.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;What? Esquire was just about to include it....&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Too bad it didn&amp;#039;t make sure its workers had green cards.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;You mean it got closed down?&amp;quot; &amp;quot;You know what I think? I think that when an awful lot of nice people send their nice young girls to the state university, they might expect them to go a little crazy at football games. But I don&amp;#039;t think they expect her to end up with the name of a convicted murderer on her arm.&amp;quot; I called her. I called Monica. I had tipped her big, and I had asked for her number. She had given it to me. I had told myself not to call it, but kept it. It was in my desk. A number and a name, in brownish, purplish ink, the same color as her lipstick. She wrote her name the way a sixth-grader would. She was either really loyal to Carlos Boundary, or she would betray him without a second thought. Either way, he was cooked. A voice of low, practiced sultriness answered. &amp;quot;Underground Barbecue,&amp;quot; it said. &amp;quot;Monica?&amp;quot; I said. &amp;quot;Um, who&amp;#039;s this?&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Monica, this is Tom Junod, from Esquire. I--&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Oh, hi. Hi.&amp;quot; She let go of the low charge. Her voice changed back to its prom-queen timbre. &amp;quot;We were wondering what happened to you.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;I was wondering what happened to you. I mean, what the hell is Underground Barbecue?&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Well, after Wampum was closed down--&amp;quot; &amp;quot;That&amp;#039;s what I was calling about. When did Wampum close down?&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Right after you ate there. With Gunga Din.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;His name is Alberto Gonzales, Monica.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Well, Carlos calls him Gunga Din. From some old movie about this guy who betrays the revolution.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s my favorite movie.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Well, it&amp;#039;s about this guy, and he&amp;#039;s supposed to be like this hero and stuff, but really he betrays his own people. That&amp;#039;s what Carlos says.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Have you ever seen it?&amp;quot; &amp;quot;I won&amp;#039;t watch black and white,&amp;quot; she said. &amp;quot;Monica, can you give me Carlos&amp;#039; phone number?&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Don&amp;#039;t have to. He&amp;#039;s staying with me.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;On campus?&amp;quot; There was an argumentative silence, then Carlos Boundary jumped the line. &amp;quot;Hey hermano,&amp;quot; he said. His voice was tired, cigarettey, as though his throat was coated in tinder. &amp;quot;Gunga Din betrays his people?&amp;quot; I asked. &amp;quot;Watch it again,&amp;quot; he said. &amp;quot;You Anglos, you get all teary-eyed when he gives that little salute at the end. Well, we brown-skinned people, we get sick. We know all them Smiling Dans. Mexican don&amp;#039;t know what it&amp;#039;s like to get roughed up, until he gets roughed up by a Mexican cop.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;I thought you were Apache.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Apache, Mexican, whatever. You know what a chipotle pepper is? It&amp;#039;s a jalapeno pepper, smoked. Nothing chipotle about it. Ain&amp;#039;t no pure bloodline, in any part of the world where the white man has been.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;What happened to Wampum?&amp;quot; &amp;quot;You tell me, amigo. I guess your friend Alberto didn&amp;#039;t like the food.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;I heard it was because you were fucking the waitresses.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Shit, man. The busboys were fucking the waitresses. Ain&amp;#039;t no point in working in a restaurant if you can&amp;#039;t fuck the waitresses.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Maybe you fucked the wrong one.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;They&amp;#039;re all the wrong one. They&amp;#039;re all the right one. You work for Esquire. You should know that.&amp;quot; I told him what Jackie had said, about the tattoo on Monica&amp;#039;s arm. I told him what she said about Texas girls and the permissible limits of crazy. &amp;quot;See, that&amp;#039;s what I&amp;#039;ve been saying,&amp;quot; he said. &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;ve been telling my girl here, It&amp;#039;s because I&amp;#039;m a sexually threatening brown man. &amp;#039;Cause that&amp;#039;s the deal the brown man has worked out for himself. You can come here and work, Pedro, but you have sit under the apple tree all by yourself until the pickup truck comes by and gives you a ride. You can&amp;#039;t look, you can&amp;#039;t touch, and if anyone asks, You send three-quarters of your paycheck back home to the family in Chihuahua. That&amp;#039;s the deal, all right? The black man, he don&amp;#039;t sign the paper, so look what happens to him. The black man don&amp;#039;t work by the pool anymore. He don&amp;#039;t work anywhere. You think that if it was the black man coming over the border, they wouldn&amp;#039;t have shut that shit down already? Two things the white man don&amp;#039;t want to part with, white money and white pussy. But the brown man, he willing to work for less, senor, and he don&amp;#039;t want no poossy. So he&amp;#039;s in. For the time being. Until there&amp;#039;s too many. Look at your friend Alberto. He&amp;#039;s made a career of not getting laid. He&amp;#039;s the original blue-balled brown man. Me, I got a cheerleader from Tyler, Texas, so they shut me down.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;He&amp;#039;s got a white wife, Carlos.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;So what? You saw the way he ate, amigo. A man fucks like he eats. You gonna tell me who eats like that fucks anything?&amp;quot; &amp;quot;He&amp;#039;s got three kids.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Well, maybe so. But let me tell you, even if he does, he&amp;#039;s gotta show he doesn&amp;#039;t like it. Napkin, please. And that&amp;#039;s what happened to Wampum. He asked for the napkin, before he finished the meal. You know what I mean, amigo?&amp;quot; &amp;quot;I think so.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;I was too brown-skinned for him.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Maybe your brother was too brown-skinned for him.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;No, no, no. Antonio had nothing to do with it. It was the food, man. He didn&amp;#039;t like it, so now none of those people can like it.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Those people?&amp;quot; &amp;quot;The Bush people. That&amp;#039;s what they&amp;#039;re like, man. Mrs. Bush, she&amp;#039;s my best customer, right? She eats there every Thursday, right? With all her lady friends. They eat my barbecue, think they&amp;#039;re open-minded. Well, the day after you take him to lunch, that&amp;#039;s a Thursday. I have the table all ready for the Missus. But the Missus don&amp;#039;t show. The missus don&amp;#039;t show the next Thursday, either. You get what I&amp;#039;m saying? Because the next Thursday, that&amp;#039;s when they shut me down.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Who shut you down?&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Immigration. They raided the place. It was like, &amp;#039;Up &amp;#039;gainst the wall, motherfucker.&amp;#039; All my campesinos, taken out, taken home. They took everything, everyone. They put out the fire. My fire. Job well done, Gunga Din. Good show, Bugler!&amp;quot; A year and a half later, I received an envelope with an Alaskan postmark. It was from Carlos Boundary. I had been wondering what happened to him. Underground Barbecue -- his attempt to bring the revolution to a backyard near you -- was long gone, shut down by the health department because he never got the required permits. There was some talk that he was going to reopen Wampum in Dallas with Turtle Creek money, but that venture got eighty-sixed by rumors that one or more of his waitresses was going to file a sexual harassment suit against him. He wound up cooking briskets and whatever else he could get his hands on -- moose, bear -- on those so-called &amp;quot;barbecue cruises&amp;quot; that became popular in the heyday, such as it was, of the Clinton Administration. This was before the red-state/blue-state divide was codified by the election returns of 2000, and there was still a thrill to be had by liberals availing themselves of things thought to be &amp;quot;conservative&amp;quot; -- country music and barbecue -- because the president himself was so hungry for them. It was a kind of hopeful slumming. Of course, those cruises became famous -- scandalous! -- for the amount of sex to be had on them; as Clinton knew, there&amp;#039;s only one reason to eat barbecue if you don&amp;#039;t have to, and that&amp;#039;s for the affirmation of your own appetite, and the blowjobs that are sure to follow. I never went on a barbecue cruise, whether to the Alaska or to the Caribbean, but when I heard that Carlos Boundary had moved his fire to the good ship Toga, up in the Gulf of Alaksa, I figured that he wound up in the right place, though I wondered if he would come back claiming that he was Tlingit, or Aleutian. The envelope, however, contained no letter, no account of his travels or his experiments with walrus blubber. I opened it, and two newspaper clippings, both from the local newspaper in Austin, Texas, fell out. They were both from the same day -- July 11, 1998. The first was a photograph that seemed inoffensive enough at the time, but which became infamous in the ensuing years, simply because it was so endlessly reproduced: the photograph of Alberto Gonzales, decked out in overalls and a straw hat, working as the grillmaster at the annual barbecue at the ranch in Crawford, while his boss crept up behind him with a fire extinguisher and mugged for the camera. The second was the account of the execution of Antonio Banderas. It was, like all press accounts of capital punishment, formal and stylized, boiling the spectacle of state-run death down to three essential questions -- what did the condemned eat, and what did the condemned say, and what did the condemned look like as he died? The answers, in reverse order: he seemed to be glancing around for a familiar face, and, finding none, shuddered, exhaled, and &amp;quot;expired.&amp;quot; And: &amp;quot;I am sorry for any trouble I caused. We men do what we think is right, and it is never enough. That is why we must trust in God.&amp;quot; And then, because the state of Texas refused to grant his wish to have his brother, the controversial chef Carlos Boundary, cook for him, he had a final meal of grilled chicken with mole sauce, and a smoothie. The article did not say what flavor smoothie he drank, but Boundary circled the word in red pen, and next to it, put an exclamation point in the margin with a violent strike. It was the only editorial comment he offered, and several years passed before I heard from him again. And then, of course, they won. Bush won, and so Alberto Gonzales won as well. People were surprised by this -- at least the people who didn&amp;#039;t take them seriously to start with, who thought that Bush was simply dumb and Gonzales simply lightweight. I took them very seriously, because of what had happened to Antonio Banderas. He was, as it turned out, one of the last death-row inmates executed while Alberto Gonzales was still giving legal advice to Governor Bush, before he went on to serve as Secretary of State and justice on the Texas Supreme Court. His death warrant came to Bush&amp;#039;s desk, and Alberto Gonzales said: sign it. This was not in itself unusual; 97 death warrants had come to Bush&amp;#039;s desk while Gonzales was his lawyer, and Gonzales had never advised him to do anything but sign them. In all, Bush signed 152 of them in his two terms as governor of Texas, and he signed them without exception or exemption. It was a frenzy of glib reckoning, and when friends of mine wrote off the Bush campaign, I said no -- every time a prisoner is executed in Texas, Bush gets a bump in the polls. So these are people who are willing to kill for political gain. They&amp;#039;re executing their way to the top, and that savage expediency will be the basis for everything they do while they&amp;#039;re in office. I mean, advising his boss on the writ proferred by Antonio Banderas was one of the last things Alberto Gonzales did, when he was Bush&amp;#039;s lawyer in Texas. One of the last things! Think of the discipline that required! Think of the deadly resolve! You don&amp;#039;t think these people know exactly what they want to do when they get to the White House? You don&amp;#039;t think these people have such extraordinary ambitions -- and such powerful masters -- that they&amp;#039;re willing to do just about anything to get there? II. Still, not long after Gonzales settled in as White House counsel, I wrote him a letter, asking if he would meet me for lunch when it was convenient for him. I did not expect to hear back. It was the summer of 2001. Our lunch at Wampum had taken place more than three years before. I had to remind him of it in my letter, and at the same time avoid reminding him of Carlos Boundary&amp;#039;s effrontery -- his ill-considered appeal to Gonzales on behalf of his brother. I sent the letter in late June, along with a copy of a profile I had recently written of the Janet Reno, which made no use of anything Gonzales had said to me, and which couldn&amp;#039;t make use of any tour of the Branch Davidian grounds, since I had never been granted one. I called his office after the July 4 weekend, and when a young assistant answered, I asked for Jackie. &amp;quot;Um, she&amp;#039;s not here.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Um, do you know when she&amp;#039;s going to be in?&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Um, she doesn&amp;#039;t work here.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Um, did she not make the move from Texas?&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Um, she&amp;#039;s with Jesus now.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;She died?&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Last December. Cancer. It was so sad. But she got to see us win, and that was awesome. And now she&amp;#039;s in a better place.&amp;quot; There was an almost Catholic silence as she transferred me to Alberto Gonzales. And then that voice, that small smoothed-down squawk that sounded like the voices you used to hear on payphones, when they rang and rang and you picked them up and it was someone from far away, pipsqueaked by distance, calling in their pajamas: &amp;quot;Hello?&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Mr. Gonzales,&amp;quot; I said. &amp;quot;I don&amp;#039;t know if you remember me, but we had lunch together--&amp;quot; &amp;quot;I remember,&amp;quot; he said. &amp;quot;You made me eat all that crazy food. What was that guy&amp;#039;s name again?&amp;quot; I was just about to say &amp;quot;Carlos Boundary,&amp;quot; when he answered his own question. &amp;quot;Smokey,&amp;quot; he said. &amp;quot;Crazy guy. Now, Mr. Junod, how can I help you?&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Last month I wrote you a letter to see if we could go out to lunch....&amp;quot; &amp;quot;What, you have to write another review?&amp;quot; &amp;quot;You really do have a good memory.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;For some things, yes.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Well, I&amp;#039;m going to be down in D.C...&amp;quot; &amp;quot;I will give you back to my secretary. She knows my schedule.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Mr. Gonzales--&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Yes?&amp;quot; I was going to say something about Jackie, but then I thought of her dying of cancer, and the only observation that came to mind was this: the sticks are the last thing to go. I wound up not saying anything, and Gonzales filled the pause. &amp;quot;You pick the place, all right? You&amp;#039;re the gourmet and I&amp;#039;m still a stranger to this town. Just do me a favor and lay off the hot stuff!&amp;quot; A month later, I met him at Salt. It was the restaurant Artemis Lundy opened in Washington when the Bushes won the White House. He had started the Southwestern food craze when he was at The Mansion in Dallas, and had lived to see it end up a staple at Appleby&amp;#039;s. He, like the rest of the Texans, had not just money behind him, but also something to prove -- and he, like they, wound up overplaying his hand. He had discovered the wonders of fleur de sel, had indeed bought an interest in a couple of veins farmed in Gascony, and created a restaurant dedicated to the idea that &amp;quot;the next seasoning is the first seasoning -- salt. Not only is it something everybody likes; it&amp;#039;s something that&amp;#039;s essential to mankind&amp;#039;s health, and part of its history.&amp;quot; It was supposed to represent a purification of sorts, and at the same time a new kind of culinary populism -- but there is no way to combine purity and populism, and so Salt, the restaurant, wound up a new thing under the sun, a punishing extravagance. Its devotees loved its discipline, loved it indeed for what it withheld -- pepper, to start with -- more than for what it offered; its detractors called it a health risk, and pointed out that underneath Lundy&amp;#039;s democratic rhetoric, there was a more obvious motivation for him to create a &amp;quot;sodium-based cuisine&amp;quot;: the extravangancies of hunger and thirst forced upon anyone who tasted the food, and the resulting extravagancies of expense. I got there early, because Alberto Gonzales was scheduled to get there early -- at 11:45, in fact, which was exactly when I&amp;#039;d met him at Wampum three years before. It was about a hundred degrees in D.C. that day, with an almost gaseous humidity; what people forget about that summer is that before it cleared in September and the sky became so bright and pitilessly providential, it was beastly. And Salt offered refuge. The joint was cold and dark as a cave, as it had to be; for it not only proffered salt, on its menu; it was in large part made of it. The famous bar; the twisting, ropelike banisters; the sprawling concert table in the VIP room; and then the knobs to the bathroom doors: they were all fashioned from mineral salt, hardened and marbleized, and they were all joltingly cold to the touch. But there were already problems, the first of what turned out to be many. The things that were made of salt had a tendency to sweat, and so, over time to fall apart. The floor was already covered with a litter of sodium, and when you walked to the table, you followed a grinding course; but this wasn&amp;#039;t so bad -- it gave this forbidding cavern a homey feel, like a scattering of sawdust. No, the problem was with the sculptures. It had been Lundy&amp;#039;s idea to hire a sculptor full-time, and to charge him with fashioning busts first of Washington, Lincoln, Truman, Reagan, et al, then of whoever was in favor &amp;quot;inside the Beltway&amp;quot;; the idea was that, since the sculptures were made of salt, they could be made and remade, and could both indulge the grandiosity of the prevailing political culture and offer commentary on its ultimate transience. The sweat, though, was disconcerting; it was the one thing nobody wanted to see in a politician, least of all the politicians themselves. The bust of Reagan had come down for that reason, deposed by the very core of Republican activists who had at first demanded its inclusion; the Gipper didn&amp;#039;t sweat. The rest stayed on and dripped in silence, with no partisans but the waitrons -- it was a word now -- who were charged with patting them down every time they passed by. I suppose I should have been amused, watching Artemis Lundy himself anxiously wiping the heavy dew off the lip of George Washington before the lunch hour, as though he were a political handler, and the father of our country a nervous candidate before a debate; but I kept thinking of what Lundy wanted to call the restaurant before he realized that the Christians wouldn&amp;#039;t buy -- Lot&amp;#039;s Wife -- and I kept looking at the Gomorrhal splendor of the place, and I got a chill, on one of the hottest days of the year. Gonzales was sweating, too, when he arrived at Salt, and the first thing he did when he walked through the cooling entrance was pull a handkerchief from his pocket and wipe his face. And then he smiled in the eager, compulsive and limited way I recognized, surrounded placidly by a phalanx of handlers -- a few angular guys from Justice, and the same flaxen blonde I&amp;#039;d seen in Austin, her ass a little bigger now, and sexier for that. But Gonzales -- this receding, diminutive presence: he rolled in, passively, like a man on a rickshaw, and when he saw me standing up at the table he strode squintingly forward, adjusting to the light, while his posse seemed to fall away into the darkness. He was the same in so many ways: the same boxy fit of his suit; the same tiny twinkling hands; the same ominous Mommy voice; the same air of practice, standing in place of polish. He was so careful, even in the drawing of breath, and, as always, it was clear that he wanted it to be this way; that this was his idea of freedom; that he&amp;#039;d had a choice of what to become, and had chosen to become this -- this human salute. It was sort of like meeting a drag queen who, instead of choosing fripperies and finery, a life of extravagance, had chosen to dress like a doughty old matron. I mean, if you&amp;#039;re going to go to great lengths to obliterate who you are and where you started, why do so just to accept the clasp, to put the cork in your own bottle? But the answer was right in front of me. His smile glittered with his own sense of arrival, and his dimples bore the paradoxical message of might. He was in power now, at the cost of subservience, and the power and subservience agreed with him, both. &amp;quot;Mr. Junod,&amp;quot; he said. &amp;quot;I checked with my friends and they say you picked a good restaurant. Unfortunately, I am not on expense account. I eat most of my meals at the White House cafeteria.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Well, this one is on Esquire.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;In that case, I&amp;#039;ll order the prime rib.&amp;quot; He smiled, and placed his fingers at the edge of the table. He drummed them, and began looking around for a server. When one came, a wiry young Bengali named Dinesh, he said, &amp;quot;We will be getting separate checks, please. And I will be drinking water.&amp;quot; Dinesh said, &amp;quot;Chef Lundy usually asks that all diners start with the lemonade.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Water for me,&amp;quot; Gonzales said. &amp;quot;I get in trouble when I listen to the chef.&amp;quot; He waited for Dinesh to leave, and said, &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s nothing to do with you. But the Federal Government is very strict about taking favors. I don&amp;#039;t want to get into trouble.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Mr. Gonzales, I hope you don&amp;#039;t mind me saying so, but you are the Federal government.&amp;quot; He offered a blushing smile, and his face gave off a throb of happiness, as though he were a soldier trying on his helmet for the first time. &amp;quot;All the more reason,&amp;quot; he said, &amp;quot;to follow the rules.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Well, I hear they have a good prime rib here, anyway,&amp;quot; I said. &amp;quot;First it&amp;#039;s crusted in salt, and then roasted--&amp;quot; &amp;quot;I was only joking about that,&amp;quot; he said. &amp;quot;Prime rib, that&amp;#039;s something I eat on my anniversary. I&amp;#039;m going to order&amp;quot; -- and here he closed a menu he&amp;#039;d never read, and began looking around again, for Dinesh -- &amp;quot;a grilled chicken salad and a mango smoothie.&amp;quot; Of course, he couldn&amp;#039;t get what he wanted. That was the problem with Salt -- it was anti-accommodationist. In a city designed to flatter and frustrate ambition in equal measure, you have to at least give people the illusion that you&amp;#039;re giving them what they want, before you ram your own choices for them down their throats; but because Artemis Lundy was sure he was giving people what they wanted, he never gave then what they wanted. And, to make it worse, he came out and explained why he wasn&amp;#039;t giving them what they wanted, which is what he did right now. He was a tall man, almost garishly gaunt, with an Adam&amp;#039;s Apple that slid up and down his throat like a swallowed turtle; he might have been the only chef in the country who appeared to suffer from Marfan&amp;#039;s syndrome, and his aspect, overall, didn&amp;#039;t encourage appetite, so much as it seemed to provide an antidote for it. We watched him make his way towards us, slowly, stopping as he did so to wipe the sweat off Lincoln&amp;#039;s brow. He had the aspect of a caretaker, a man of proprietary feeling towards an already wrecked home. &amp;quot;Mr. Gonzales,&amp;quot; he said. &amp;quot;You ate at my restaurant in Dallas. Having you come here today feels a little like a homecoming.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Don&amp;#039;t blame me,&amp;quot; Gonzales said, and indicated me with his thumbs. &amp;quot;My friend over there, he&amp;#039;s the restaurant reviewer. He&amp;#039;s the one with all the power today.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Oh, really?&amp;quot; Lundy said. &amp;quot;Who do you write for?&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Esquire. But I&amp;#039;m not really a restaurant--&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Doesn&amp;#039;t John Mariani do the reviews for Esquire?&amp;quot; Lundy said. &amp;quot;He does,&amp;quot; I said. &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m just a hungry guy.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Well, that&amp;#039;s what we like,&amp;quot; he said. &amp;quot;Hungry guys. Does Esquire still do that thing, The Best New Restaurants?&amp;quot; &amp;quot;It does,&amp;quot; I said. &amp;quot;Well, we&amp;#039;d love to get in there,&amp;quot; he said. &amp;quot;Anything to spread the word.&amp;quot; Now Gonzales was beaming, and drumming his fingertips across the way. &amp;quot;Isn&amp;#039;t that, like, a conflict of interest or something?&amp;quot; he said. &amp;quot;Only if it&amp;#039;s free,&amp;quot; I said. &amp;quot;So make sure you go full fare with this guy,&amp;quot; he said to Lundy. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;ll make your expenses for the month, let me tell you. I&amp;#039;ve eaten with this guy before. He eats like he has two stomachs.&amp;quot;  &amp;quot;Well, maybe today he&amp;#039;ll eat like he has three,&amp;quot; Lundy said, as Dinesh came out and put three finger bowls before us, each one filled with a different crystalline essence -- the first white, the second pink, the third amber. &amp;quot;You see, people think, Oh, salt -- oh, how boring. McDonald&amp;#039;s uses salt. Burger King uses salt. Or they think it&amp;#039;s dangerous. &amp;#039;Oh, that food is too salty.&amp;#039; But they&amp;#039;re talking about table salt. The iodized stuff. Nothing wrong with it, but it&amp;#039;s not the salt we use. The salt we use is miraculous. It has a revivifying effect. Those three bowls in front of you, there&amp;#039;s salt in them. Now, lick your fingers. Don&amp;#039;t worry about it, don&amp;#039;t worry about sharing the bowls. You could eat with fifteen people and you have to worry about germs. The salt we use is antiseptic. The salt we use is electric. And I mean that literally. It has force, its own charge. That&amp;#039;s why it&amp;#039;s revivifying, when you eat. You eat, and you want to keep on eating. You drink, and you want to keep on drinking. Okay, put your fingers in the salt. Pick whichever one you want. You can tell a lot about a person by which one they pick first. Mr. Gonzales, you pick white -- of course you do, you&amp;#039;re a lawyer. You, hungry guy, you pick pink. You think it&amp;#039;s going be sweet. But it&amp;#039;s not, it&amp;#039;s got a little kick. Now here&amp;#039;s the lemonade. It&amp;#039;s not sweet either. Taste it. The salt first -- now the lemonade. Better than any Margarita you ever had, right? You could get drunk on it. But there&amp;#039;s no alcohol in it. What you get drunk on is the taste, the contrast. It makes you thirsty as it quenches, you want more as it goes down. All right, now the menu. The first part is the food we preserved in salt -- the classic stuff, the pork, the cod -- bacala. The second is the raw stuff, flavored only with salt. Beef and fish. That&amp;#039;s it. And salt. It&amp;#039;s all sushi, man. That&amp;#039;s what a friend of mine says. This friend of mine, he&amp;#039;s a genius, and he doesn&amp;#039;t cook with heat now -- only pepper. He&amp;#039;s gone completely raw, except for these insane hot peppers. Some people think he&amp;#039;s gone completely nuts. But we go him one better -- in this part of the menu, we&amp;#039;re raw, except for the sodium. And you&amp;#039;ve never tasted anything so clean, so alive--&amp;quot; &amp;quot;You&amp;#039;re talking about Carlos Boundary, right?&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Yes! Wow, you do know your restaurants.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;I know him,&amp;quot; I said. &amp;quot;Really? I&amp;#039;ve been working with poor Carlos on and off for ten years, and I can&amp;#039;t say I know him,&amp;quot; Lundy said.  &amp;quot;Mr. Gonzales knows him too,&amp;quot; I said.  Lundy and I looked at Gonzales across the table. His face had settled, his eyes had regained their level stare, and he nodded curtly, like a father being toasted at a wedding where his daughter is seven months pregnant. We waited for him to say something, and what he said was this:  &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m just waiting to see if you can make me a chicken salad and a mango smoothie!&amp;quot;  It was not meant as a joke, I don&amp;#039;t think; but as soon as Gonzales said it, Lundy was off, and laughing. The food began to come, with its own negative charge, its own chemical swelter. Gonzales looked at it, as it was spread before him, food that spasmed with color under its white frosting. His face had not changed since I&amp;#039;d mentioned Carlos Boundary&amp;#039;s name, and so also had the look of something preserved.  &amp;quot;That guy you talk about, what&amp;#039;s his name again?&amp;quot;  &amp;quot;Carlos Boundary,&amp;quot; I said.  &amp;quot;That&amp;#039;s right. It&amp;#039;s hard for me to remember, because it&amp;#039;s not his real name.&amp;quot;  &amp;quot;His real name is Banderas.&amp;quot;  &amp;quot;Like the actor, right,&amp;quot; Gonzales said.  &amp;quot;Like his brother,&amp;quot; I said.  Gonzales looked at the odd fare, without moving his hands from the table.   I had started to eat. A piece of ham, a string of jerky, a bite of dried fish that made my mouth water like a sour: it was a cuisine designed to create compulsion. But Gonzales held still, as though working a Ouija board. Finally, he cut a piece of the ham with his knife, and nibbled it into a swallow. Then he put down his knife and fork, and smiled. &amp;quot;Why do you say, Poor guy?&amp;quot; he asked. &amp;quot;He looked like a pretty lucky guy to me.&amp;quot;  &amp;quot;I don&amp;#039;t know if I said, &amp;#039;Poor guy.&amp;#039;&amp;quot;  &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s what everybody says. Poor guy, poor guy. How is Carlos Banderas a poor guy?&amp;quot;  &amp;quot;Well, I don&amp;#039;t know if anybody can qualify as lucky, when they lose a brother.&amp;quot;  &amp;quot;He did not lose a brother,&amp;quot; Gonzales said. &amp;quot;The other people -- the families -- they lost a father, they lost a husband. Carlos Banderas did not lose a brother. His brother was brought to justice.&amp;quot;  &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m just saying it had to be pretty hard on him.&amp;quot;  &amp;quot;So you feel...sorry for him?&amp;quot;  &amp;quot;I feel bad, yes.&amp;quot;  &amp;quot;You feel bad. Do you think I should feel bad, too?&amp;quot;  &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m not saying you should feel bad. I&amp;#039;m saying that you -- everyone -- should feel compassion, even for the accused.&amp;quot;  &amp;quot;He was not accused. He was guilty.&amp;quot;  &amp;quot;Okay, I&amp;#039;m saying that everyone should feel compassion for the guilty.&amp;quot;  &amp;quot;But I don&amp;#039;t have to. That&amp;#039;s what the law is for. We the people do not have to feel compassion for people who have committed terrible crimes. The compassion is written into the law, where everybody has equal standing.&amp;quot;  &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m speaking of personal compassion.&amp;quot;  &amp;quot;You are speaking of pity.&amp;quot; He dabbed at his mouth with his napkin, and so I looked down at his plate. The food was almost gone. He had been eating in such small fastidious bites that I&amp;#039;d not seen him eat. &amp;quot;I am sorry, Mr. Junod, but I reserve my pity for the victims. This man, Antonio Banderas, you know what he did? He shot two offices of the law in their eyes. Okay? But he received the full consideration of the law. He had his day in court. He was the lucky one. The men who were shot in the eyes, they were not so lucky. Where is your compassion for them?&amp;quot;  &amp;quot;I have tremendous compassion for them. But that doesn&amp;#039;t mean that the law should be twisted on their account.&amp;quot;  &amp;quot;Antonio Banderas confessed to the crime. He said, &amp;#039;I shot these men in the eyes.&amp;#039; I call that twisted, not the law.&amp;quot;  &amp;quot;There was a Dallas cop shot in the eyes two months after Antonio Banderas was arrested. There was another shot the same way two months after he was executed. You know as well as I do that violence like that -- really personalized violence -- doesn&amp;#039;t happen by accident. It&amp;#039;s like a signature.&amp;quot;  &amp;quot;It means nothing,&amp;quot; Gonzales said. &amp;quot;Evil is easily inspired. You say this cop-killer, he has his own signature? Well, Antonio Banderas gave him a blank check.&amp;quot;  &amp;quot;He was beaten.&amp;quot;  &amp;quot;He confessed.&amp;quot;  &amp;quot;He was beaten. The police who questioned him were angry that they lost one of their own, and they beat him to a pulp. They admit this.&amp;quot;  &amp;quot;Mr. Junod, did your father ever discipline you, when you were a boy?&amp;quot;  &amp;quot;Do you mean, &amp;#039;Did my father hit me?&amp;#039;&amp;quot;  &amp;quot;Yes.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;He did not. He didn&amp;#039;t have to. I was scared to death of him.&amp;quot;  &amp;quot;Well, I was scared to death of my father too,&amp;quot; Gonzales said, &amp;quot;and for good reason. Your father, he sounds like an easy man.&amp;quot;  &amp;quot;He was not an easy man.&amp;quot;  &amp;quot;Whatever. My father was not an easy man. Far from it. He was a hard man. Fair, but hard. He did not hesitate to punish, when punishment was warranted.&amp;quot;  &amp;quot;You&amp;#039;ve told me this. He hit you.&amp;quot;  &amp;quot;Yes, but not out of anger. He was not one of these fathers who hauled off and smacked you, you look at him funny. No, he was like a judge. Methodical. A judge and jury, all at once. And sometimes, if need be, the executioner.&amp;quot;  &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m sorry.&amp;quot;  &amp;quot;Ah, you have compassion for me, like you have compassion for Antonio Banderas. That is a good thing. Compassion is a good thing. Because there is one thing that is the same, with me and the late Mr. Banderas. And this one thing, it&amp;#039;s what this whole argument is about.&amp;quot;  &amp;quot;What&amp;#039;s that?&amp;quot;  Gonzales took a sip of water, then reached for the lemonade. He hadn&amp;#039;t asked for it, but Dinesh had given it to him, and now he drank it. He said, &amp;quot;Ah&amp;quot; and in all the meals I had with him, it was his most uncomplicated admission of pleasure. Then he said, &amp;quot;In all the times my father took his belt to me, there was one thing his belt never did. You know what that is, Mr. Junod?&amp;quot;  &amp;quot;No.&amp;quot;  &amp;quot;Lie. His belt never made me lie. To the contrary. His belt made me tell the truth. It was like that stuff you see in the spy movies -- what&amp;#039;s it called? Truth serum. His belt was like truth serum. And that&amp;#039;s what this argument is about.&amp;quot;  More food came, the raw stuff, and it was like a wave washing up on a desert, a salt-laden relief. The fish was the best I&amp;#039;d ever tasted, with the salt adding not just taste but texture, and the beef, though raw, was plump and bloodless, as if shrunken up itself, like a bon bon. It was alive, and I got to eat it. Gonzales watched me for a while, and said, &amp;quot;You like this stuff?&amp;quot;  &amp;quot;Sure. I&amp;#039;ll eat anything. But I&amp;#039;ve never eaten anything like this.&amp;quot;  &amp;quot;My wife likes it. She always wants to go out for sushi. &amp;#039;Let&amp;#039;s go out for sushi, let&amp;#039;s go out for sushi.&amp;#039; She says that I&amp;#039;ll develop a taste for it, but I&amp;#039;ve never had the time. I always wind up eating the, uh, beef teriyaki.&amp;quot;  &amp;quot;You should try this steak.&amp;quot;  &amp;quot;It is not steak, it is beef. Steak is cooked. That is raw.&amp;quot;  &amp;quot;Try it.&amp;quot;  He picked up a plug of beef between his fingers, and put it in his mouth. Then he sucked at his fingertips, and I thought he was kissing them for the purpose of bestowing his blessing, like the pope. His dimples flashed in his face, but just for a moment. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s very good,&amp;quot; he said. &amp;quot;It tastes a little bit like beef teriyaki. But I have the feeling it&amp;#039;s a lot more expensive.&amp;quot;  The brined and salt-roasted foods came next, the branzino in a chef&amp;#039;s frock of salt that Dinesh duly unzipped, the salt-coddled prime rib that was so beefy it smelt like a slaughterhouse, the lamb that came with crystalline frozen grapes. Gonzales ate one of the grapes, and a little of the salt -- sweet now, it tasted sweet -- clung to his lips like powder from a jelly donut. My blood pressure was rising, and I could hear my heart in my ears. His face was starting to swell, and he downed one shot of lemonade after another. Then he reached in his pocket and placed something on the table wrapped in a white handkerchief.  &amp;quot;You remember what we talked about last time?&amp;quot; he asked me.  &amp;quot;Sure,&amp;quot; I said. &amp;quot;Janet Reno. Hey, d&amp;#039;you ever read the profile I wrote about her?&amp;quot;  &amp;quot;Yes,&amp;quot; he said. &amp;quot;You should have called me before you wrote it.&amp;quot;  &amp;quot;I did call you. I was working on it when we had lunch. You said you could not be quoted on the record.&amp;quot;  &amp;quot;Yes, but there are things I could have told you.&amp;quot;  &amp;quot;What things?&amp;quot;  &amp;quot;No matter,&amp;quot; he said. &amp;quot;Ms. Reno was a nice lady. But she&amp;#039;s gone now. There is no need to speak ill of her. Her record speaks for itself.&amp;quot; He edged the little package towards me. The handkerchief was very white, very clean, and whatever was inside the handkerchief was about the size of a cherrystone clam. &amp;quot;Open it,&amp;quot; he said, and there was something chef-like in his presentation.  I undid the flaps of the handkerchief. There before me, like a sudden jewel, was a little Matchbox car. It was gold and old -- scarred gray, where the paint had worn away. It sat on the table, pulsing with its owner&amp;#039;s bestowed affection, amid drifts of salt. Gonzales was smiling, and his smile was both fatherly and childish; I thought that any second he might start playing with his toy. &amp;quot;Remember?&amp;quot; he said.  &amp;quot;Yes, I remember.&amp;quot;  &amp;quot;Pick it up. Try it. It still works.&amp;quot;  I picked it up, and cupped it in my hand. I knew what to do with it, because I had had one myself; everybody did. The protective shield positioned behind the rear window clicked into place; the sharp rotors that extended from the tiny spoked wheels -- the rotors James Bond used to cut the tires of jousting assassins -- had been preserved, even though they were made of plastic; the front bumpers stuck out on command, ready to ram anybody who dared challenge 007. I felt an involuntary swell of nostalgia, and wanted to stick it in my pocket and keep it forever.  &amp;quot;Where did you get this?&amp;quot; I asked.  &amp;quot;What do you mean?&amp;quot; he said. He was already reaching for it.  &amp;quot;I mean did you get on eBay or something? It must have cost a pretty penny.&amp;quot;  He was wrapping it up, carefully folding the handkerchief around it. He looked at me, with that funny sad public-school smile. &amp;quot;I did not buy it,&amp;quot; he said. &amp;quot;I saved it. It&amp;#039;s mine.&amp;quot;  &amp;quot;Mr. Gonzales, I&amp;#039;m confused. You told me...&amp;quot; &amp;quot;I know what I told you, and I&amp;#039;m surprised you don&amp;#039;t remember. You are a reporter, right?&amp;quot;  &amp;quot;Mr. Gonzales, I remember the story. Jaime Bond, all that. But you told me you buried the James Bond Aston-Martin with your father.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Mr. Junod, I never told that story to anyone else in my life. It&amp;#039;s my story. I like to think I know it pretty well. Maybe you were, uh, distracted by the waitress or something. She was a pretty good-looking girl.&amp;quot;  &amp;quot;Well, I&amp;#039;m sorry I made a mistake. I thought you told me you buried it with your father. In fact, when you showed it to me, I got a little worried. I thought that maybe you...&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Why would I bury it?&amp;quot; he said. &amp;quot;No, I kept it, I kept it, I kept it. I kept it as an inspiration. I kept it to show my Pappi that what he gave me lives on. It will never go in the ground. I will give it my sons, and they will give it to theirs. It will outlast you and me, Tom. Believe me, I would never bury something like that.&amp;quot;  &amp;quot;I guess I&amp;#039;ll have to check my notes.&amp;quot;  &amp;quot;You do not need your notes! All you need to do is listen to me. Because I remember with my heart. What do your notes remember with?&amp;quot;  He put the Matchbox car in his pocket. I ate my meat, and drank my lemonade. I wanted pulque -- I wanted that expansion behind my eyes, in order to see the truth -- but the lemonade was all I had. In a few minutes, Artemis Lundy came out with dessert, a hot chocolate pudding that had turned jet black, with the addition of his crystals. &amp;quot;You see those blocks of salt?&amp;quot; he said to Alberto Gonzales, pointing towards a dewy slab of white plinthed in an alcove. &amp;quot;They are waiting to become someone. They are waiting to become the next Washington, the next Lincoln. We have a sculptor ready to start working. Maybe you will sit for him one day. Maybe, when you join the Supreme Court, you will already have a place of honor at Salt.&amp;quot;  It never happened. Gonzales never got his chance to become a salt effigy. Lundy&amp;#039;s restaurant closed in December 2001, after the Washington Post ran a larky review suggesting that the salt content at Salt would likely kill Dick Cheney, if he ever ate there. America thought it needed Dick Cheney, at the time, as it thought it needed all of them -- including Alberto Gonzales, who, despite his endorsement of torture and secret wiretapping, was confirmed as Attorney General of the United States three and a half years later, in February 2005. I followed the confirmation hearings from beginning to end. Indeed, I wanted to testify at them -- but what was I going to say? That I had checked my notes, and that they indicated that the first time I met with Alberto Gonzales he told me he buried his cherished James Bond Matchbox car with his father, and then he changed his story? That he had lied, either at the first lunch or at the second, or maybe at both? It was such a little thing -- such a little, wanton thing -- and it obviously paled next to the enormous questions of torture and secret surveillance. But the fact that the lie was a small one was what bugged me about it. A man who was willing to lie about the great issues facing the Republic might after all have good reason to lie. But to lie about a Matchbox Car! To lie about the contents of his father&amp;#039;s coffin! To lie about something so small seemed more fundamental to his character, not less. It was as though Proust had lied about his madeleine. III. I never thought I&amp;#039;d see him again, though, given the general contentiousness of our last lunch, and given that he&amp;#039;d stuck me with the bill when he walked out of the restaurant in the company of handlers who seemed to materialize out of the dark. Then, in September 2006, Artemis Lundy and Carlos Boundary opened Two Birds, on K Street in Washington. The name, of course, referred to themselves -- their gallant ego-subsuming partnership -- but also to the gimmick that has made the restaurant such an epoch-defining success. Wampum, with its heat, had been too penitential for the Nineties. Salt had been too extravagant and too formalist for the precarious days following 9/11, and besides, the basis of its cuisine, fleur de sel, was French. But Two Birds has become the signature restaurant of its times because it offers its customers what everybody wants right now, what everybody thinks they need: One Stone. That is: both lethal choice and the freedom from the responsibility of choosing. The cooking is actually very conservative, very much in line with the American comfort-food revolution -- the idea that what defines American cooking is not technique so much as ingredients so fresh, so local, so goddamn representative of the American bounty that they amount to a kind of arcana. I mean, ramps, anyone? But then, reservations at Two Birds are impossible to come by not because Boundary and Lundy grow their own ramps at the local greenspace, or have used recombinant DNA techniques to reinstate thought-to-be-extinct rarities like the heirloom Pegler radish. No: people fight for the chance to eat at Two Birds because Two Birds does not only do its own growing, and its own harvesting, but also its own slaughtering. In its effort to provide diners the freshest possible food, it has made butchery its adjunct, and hungry people its accomplices. It&amp;#039;s a neat trick: once you make a reservation at Two Birds, you have to go on its website, and pick the animal you will be ingesting at your meal. You are offered two, and you can either pick the one that will be sacrificed or pick the one to be spared. Whether you hit the &amp;quot;spare&amp;quot; button or the &amp;quot;sacrifice&amp;quot; button depends on your proclivities -- whether what you prize in yourself is your capacity for mercy, or for decisive action. So that the political nature of the decision is not lost, the &amp;quot;spare&amp;quot; button is blue, the &amp;quot;sacrifice&amp;quot; button red. But no matter which button you press, you&amp;#039;ll be eating very well at Two Birds.  I learned about the restaurant from an article in the Post Style Section that appeared before the mid-term elections of 2006. The writer was predicting that there would be Democratic surge, based on his reading of what he called &amp;quot;the Two Birds tea leaves.&amp;quot; Apparently, when the restaurant first opened, diners were evenly divided between those who pressed the red button and those who pressed the blue. Two Birds had even become a hangout of sorts for Rudy Giuliani, who, although he had not formally announced his candidacy, was already saying that he was a &amp;quot;red-state kind of guy&amp;quot; because he was a &amp;quot;red-button kind of guy&amp;quot; -- someone who could be trusted to make the tough decisions, and is willing to take responsibility for what he eats. But as the November election drew near, the red-blue balance gave way to a tremendous upsurge in diners opting to spare, instead of sacrifice, and that, according to the writer, spelled trouble for the Republicans. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s running more than two to one, blue to red,&amp;quot; co-proprietor Carlos Boundary was quoted as saying, with the help of some obvious editing. &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m all right with that, because I&amp;#039;m a Democrat. My partner is freaking out, because he&amp;#039;s a hard-core conservative. But you know what? The pigs and the cows and the goats and the lambs, they still wind up on the plate. I guess it&amp;#039;s sort of like that thing with the Thanksgiving Turkey. Every year, the President selects one to be spared. Meanwhile, like fifty million get slaughtered. But it makes people feel better. You know, symbolism has always been a big part of politics. We&amp;#039;re just starting to figure out how to make it a big part of dinner.&amp;quot;  I called Boundary to make a reservation, and he sounded exactly as he sounded nine years earlier. &amp;quot;Hey,&amp;quot; he said, &amp;quot;you finally gonna write about me? I give you everything you need, man. I let you work in the kitchen. I let you be the butcher, man. You want to be a writer? Well, let me tell you, you don&amp;#039;t know nothing about nothing, until you butcher a cow.&amp;quot; But there was a difference now -- he was a man returned from exile. &amp;quot;I was on that cruise circuit a long time, man, a long time. I had that lawsuit going against me, so I was afraid to put my feet down, you know? When I finally did, it was in Europe. France. They don&amp;#039;t know nothing about sexual harassment there, amigo. But they also don&amp;#039;t know nothing about cooking. Now don&amp;#039;t get me wrong. Food&amp;#039;s good. But the minute they hear you got some Mexican in you, they think they got you figured out, you know? And they don&amp;#039;t do tacos in Lyon, man. So I started working as a butcher. I&amp;#039;d a been happy doing that the rest of my life. Dr. Doolittle meets Dr. Mengele. But then I get a call from Artemis. We started talking. He had that restaurant that tanked, I had that restaurant that tanked. He had that lawsuit against him from the high-blood pressure people, I had that lawsuit against me. Hey man, maybe we should join forces, we can really be fucked. But that&amp;#039;s not the way it worked out. We got a line out the door, and all we use is salt and pepper. And blood. That&amp;#039;s the main ingredient, my friend. That&amp;#039;s what the people want. And we&amp;#039;ve found a way to give it to them. But that&amp;#039;s my story, man. How about you? You ever see her around?&amp;quot;  &amp;quot;See who?&amp;quot;  &amp;quot;Monica. Now don&amp;#039;t you try to tell me you didn&amp;#039;t have no thing for her, man.&amp;quot;  &amp;quot;I haven&amp;#039;t seen her since the last time I saw you.&amp;quot;  &amp;quot;Oh. I thought you might. All those political stories you write.&amp;quot;  &amp;quot;Why would I see Monica doing political journalism?&amp;quot;  &amp;quot;&amp;#039;Cause she&amp;#039;s here. She&amp;#039;s working for him.&amp;quot;  &amp;quot;Him?&amp;quot;  &amp;quot;Gonzales, man. Damn, you really don&amp;#039;t know nothing. You sure you do what you do? Listen, this is the way it happened. After she sued me --&amp;quot; &amp;quot;She sued you?&amp;quot;  &amp;quot;What, are you fucking with me? She was the sex in the sexual harassment suit. Her Momma was friends with that bitch who used to work for your friend Alberto.&amp;quot;  &amp;quot;He&amp;#039;s not my friend.&amp;quot;  &amp;quot;You eat with a man more than once, he better be your friend, man.&amp;quot;  &amp;quot;You&amp;#039;re talking about Jackie.&amp;quot;  &amp;quot;Yeah, Jackie, that&amp;#039;s it. The old lady with the gorgeous galoshes. Anyway, Monica sued me, man. She was my girl, she was my love, she was my little revolutionary. Machine Gun Annie. Wanted to shoot anyone who didn&amp;#039;t give her a good tip. And she sued me.&amp;quot;  &amp;quot;She lived with you, Carlos. How the hell could she sue you?&amp;quot;  &amp;quot;Well, that&amp;#039;s what the judge said. But she got what she wanted out of it. I had to leave the country. And after she got out of law school, she started working for your man.&amp;quot;  I called Gonzales. Of course, I had to go through a thorny phalanx of Justice Department flacks. But I got to him, or to his personal secretary, and she scheduled the lunch. You see, I had never written about him. I had given him what every subject wants; I had listened to him, like a journalist, but had never delivered my written judgment. He had entrusted me with that sacred thing, his story, and I had not violated his trust. Besides, I had my reservation set, at Two Birds. Maureen Dowd ate there -- she wrote her column about the illicit joy of pressing the red button -- and so did David Brooks, who wrote his column about the warm compromise of pressing the blue. There was not a politician in Washington who wouldn&amp;#039;t have gone.  I waited for him in the street, on a warm December day in 2006. He was just about to fire a bunch of U.S. Attorneys, but I didn&amp;#039;t know that at the time. He arrived in a limousine, with two men who moved in such standardized procedural fashion that they might have been segmented. They flanked him, and dwarfed him, and he looked as though he were somehow bearing up under the protection they offered, as though he were shrinking away from the appurtenances of power. He looked as though he might be under arrest, an international fugitive finally being brought to justice. He was not smiling, as he always did whenever I&amp;#039;d met him; in the laggard winter sunlight, he was grimacing. I let the formation of men go past me at first, because I didn&amp;#039;t want to approach him -- because I was scared to. He went inside Two Birds, and I followed a few paces behind. The place was dark and warm, with an almost tannic nose -- a coppery, leathery charge that floated on the air. On cue, I got hungry, and on cue, he smiled when he saw me -- the kind of smile that you see in fencing class.  &amp;quot;The gourmet,&amp;quot; he said, extending his hand past his unsmiling retinue, the hand that always looked brand-new, as if he&amp;#039;d spent his life wearing gloves. &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;ve been telling my friends here, you go out to lunch with this guy you never know where you&amp;#039;re going to wind up!&amp;quot;  We sat down. He had gained a little weight over the years, and his neck appeared to be sinking into his shirt. But otherwise he was the same: open the box, and out steps your gift, the Human Salute. &amp;quot;So did you do that thing?&amp;quot; he asked.  &amp;quot;That thing?&amp;quot;  &amp;quot;Yeah, that choosing thing. &amp;#039;Sophie&amp;#039;s Choice,&amp;#039; someone called it in the Times.&amp;quot;  &amp;quot;Someone in The New York Times said it was like Sophie&amp;#039;s Choice? I&amp;#039;m surprised it&amp;#039;s still open.&amp;quot;  &amp;quot;Not The New York Times. Washington.&amp;quot;  &amp;quot;Oh.&amp;quot;  He gazed around, patting his lower lip with two drawn fingers of his right hand. It was the first time we were ever in a crowded restaurant, and he looked star struck. &amp;quot;So, did you do it?&amp;quot;  &amp;quot;Not yet.&amp;quot;  &amp;quot;Not yet? I hear you have to do it two months in advance.&amp;quot;  &amp;quot;You do. But not if you&amp;#039;re going to be eating fish. If you&amp;#039;re eating fish, you get to choose right before your meal.&amp;quot;  &amp;quot;I guess we&amp;#039;re going to be eating fish then!&amp;quot; he said brightly, as though the conversation were being taped, and he were being judged on his enthusiasm. &amp;quot;That&amp;#039;s all right, as long as it&amp;#039;s cooked!&amp;quot;  &amp;quot;No sushi yet, eh?&amp;quot;  &amp;quot;No, that&amp;#039;s for my wife. Me, I like that beef teriyaki.&amp;quot;  He had his hands on the back of the chair, as though he were about to get up. But he never did. He was just excited. The bread came, borne by gorgeous hands, which were attached to a tall girl with three feet of blonde ponytail. Fucking Carlos, I thought.  And then out he came. Well, Armisted Lundy came first, the bony patriot, with his dignified salt-mine aura. But he was followed by a man holding a tableted computer. I thought he was a busboy, at first. He was stocky, with a crown of shining black hair, upswept. He was clean shaven and he was wearing glasses. He looked not at all like Che Guevera, not at all like a revolutionary or a poet. In fact, he looked extraordinarily like Alberto Gonzales, that apotheosis of obedience, the opposing principle to all romantic dreams. But that was only because I hadn&amp;#039;t seen him in almost ten years. It was Carlos Boundary, and on the screen of the computer he was holding swam two fish in invisible water -- for the software at Two Birds was designed to eliminate backgrounds, and focus attention on the sudden prey.  &amp;quot;Attorney-General Gonzales,&amp;quot; Lundy said with a slight corsetted bow.  &amp;quot;Attorney-General Gonzales,&amp;quot; Boundary said. &amp;quot;We welcome you to Two Birds. We would love to talk. But before we talk, there is business we must attend to.&amp;quot; He placed the computer on the table before Gonzales, so that, from my vantage, all I could see was the light silvering his black hair, graying it, making him appear both very young -- for he was rapt by the images in front of him, like a schoolboy -- and very old, like Pappi.  &amp;quot;These are alive?&amp;quot; he said.  &amp;quot;Yes, they&amp;#039;re in the kitchen,&amp;quot; Boundary said.  &amp;quot;Amazing,&amp;quot; Gonzales said. &amp;quot;They look alive.&amp;quot; And they pushed the tablet away, and set his fingertips at the edge of the table. It was a gesture of completion, indeed of resistance.  &amp;quot;They&amp;#039;re salt-water perch,&amp;quot; Artemis Lundy said. &amp;quot;They were caught two days ago, in South Africa.&amp;quot;  &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m sure they&amp;#039;ll be very good,&amp;quot; Gonzales said. And then he didn&amp;#039;t move, he barely breathed. His abstracted wincing smile had returned, as a signal of his patience.  Boundary crouched down next to him, as he had at Wampum, when he convinced Gonzales to drink the pulque. &amp;quot;At Two Birds, someone at every table gets One Stone,&amp;quot; he said. &amp;quot;Today it&amp;#039;s you.&amp;quot;  &amp;quot;Not me!&amp;quot; Gonzales said. &amp;quot;What do I know about food? Let my friend there...he&amp;#039;s the restaurant reviewer.&amp;quot;  &amp;quot;I spoke to Mr. Junod yesterday. He said the One Stone should go to you. As an honor.&amp;quot;   &amp;quot;I would not even begin to know how to, um, pick a fish,&amp;quot; Gonzales said. He was growing slightly agitated. &amp;quot;It is a little ridiculous, you want to know the truth. There are better things....&amp;quot; Boundary bounced a little, on his haunches. His face was sly, a little above it all, like that of a prisoner selling cigarettes. &amp;quot;It is easy, amigo,&amp;quot; he said softly. &amp;quot;See these little buttons here? You press one. You pick a fish, and you spare or you sacrifice.&amp;quot;  &amp;quot;These buttons?&amp;quot; Gonzales said. His lips shriveled, around an imaginary toothpick. He leaned forward into the computer, so that the silvery light once again caught his dense hair. Then he put his hands on the back of his chair, and lifted himself up. It was an awkward, sudden motion, but methodical at the same time, like a man lifting himself at the gym, one of those guys who brags that he doesn&amp;#039;t need weights, only his own body. When his head, and then his bunched shoulders, rose above the heads and shoulders of all the other diners, his two FBI goons walked to the table. He waved them off.  &amp;quot;No!,&amp;quot; he said. &amp;quot;I will not do this. You will not make me.&amp;quot; Boundary was still squatting next to him, but now completely still, with his hands on the table for balance. Lundy had backed away. But Gonzales was facing me, he was scolding me. &amp;quot;You will not make me eat your crazy food, you will not pick up the tab. I will pay! And I will eat what I want to eat. I will eat a grilled chicken salad and a mango smoothie!&amp;quot;  He sat back down. He was pumped up and deflated at the same time. He poured oil on his bread and ate it in small bites, well-chewed. There was a hum in the restaurant, a cool wash of black talk. &amp;quot;I am sorry,&amp;quot; he said finally. &amp;quot;But enough is enough.&amp;quot; Lundy and Boundary went back to the kitchen, and when Lundy returned, a minute later, he was alone. &amp;quot;Of course, we will serve you what you want,&amp;quot; he said to Alberto Gonzales. From the kitchen came the sound of a blender, a high whine of agitation and comfort. It was as if a fire had started there, for there were, at that moment, no servers in the dining room, and there was no cooking in the kitchen. The whole restaurant had retracted to a single point; I looked in the kitchen, and Carlos Boundary and the rest of the staff were gathered around the blender, as if waiting for it to sing. And when the food came out, hastily prepared and assembled -- two grilled chicken salads, and two mango smoothies -- Alberto Gonzales remembered that his napkin had fallen to the floor when he had stood up. He reached down, picked it up, shook it off, and placed it in his lap. Then he crossed himself, and began eating like a man. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/entertainment/books/a3480/threelunches/>