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+{"text":" \n# Duck\n\nAnimal\n\nSeries editor: Jonathan Burt\n\n_Already published_ | |\n\n---|---|---\n\n_Crow_ | _Fox_ | _Camel_\n\nBoria Sax | Martin Wallen | Robert Irwin\n\n_Ant_ | _Fly_ | _Chicken_\n\nCharlotte Sleigh | Steven Connor | Annie Potts\n\n_Tortoise_ | _Cat_ | _Wolf_\n\nPeter Young | Katharine M. Rogers | Garry Marvin\n\nCockroach | _Peacock_ | _Horse_\n\n_Marion Copeland_ | Christine E. Jackson | Elaine Walker\n\n_Dog_ | _Cow_ | _Penguin_\n\nSusan McHugh | Hannah Velten | Stephen Martin\n\n_Oyster_ | _Swan_ | _Elephant_\n\nRebecca Stott | Peter Young | Daniel Wylie\n\n_Bear_ | _Shark_ | _Ape_\n\nRobert E. Bieder | Dean Crawford | John Sorenson\n\n_Bee_ | _Rhinoceros_ | _Butterfly_\n\nClaire Preston | Kelly Enright | Matthew Brower\n\n_Rat_ | |\n\n_Sheep_\n\nJonathan Burt | _Forthcoming_ | Philip Armstrong\n\n_Snake_ | _Moose_ | _Eel_\n\nDrake Stutesman | Kevin Jackson | Richard Schweid\n\n_Falcon_ | _Hare_\n\n|\n\nHelen Macdonald | Simon Carnell\n\n|\n\n_Whale_ | _Spider_\n\n|\n\nJoe Roman | Katja and Sergiusz Michalski\n\n|\n\n_Parrot_ | _Pig_\n\n|\n\nPaul Carter | Brett Mizelle\n\n|\n\n_Tiger_ | _Worm_\n\n|\n\nSusie Green | Daniel Brass\n\n|\n\n_Salmon_ | _Pigeon_\n\n|\n\nPeter Coates | Barbara Allen\n\n| \n\n# Duck\n\nVictoria de Rijke\n\nREAKTION BOOKS |\n\n---|---\nPublished by  \nREAKTION BOOKS LTD  \n33 Great Sutton Street London EC1V 0DX, UK  \nwww.reaktionbooks.co.uk\n\nFirst published 2008  \nCopyright \u00a9 Victoria de Rijke 2008\n\nAll rights reserved\n\nNo part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the publishers.\n\nPage references in the Photo Acknowledgements and  \nIndex match the printed edition of this book.\n\nPrinted and bound in China\n\nBritish Library Cataloguing in Publication Data  \nde Rijke, Victoria  \nDuck. \u2013 (Animal)  \n1. Ducks 2. Animals and civilization  \nI. Title  \n598.4'1\n\neISBN: 9781861894892\n\n## Contents\n\nPreface\n\n1 Natural History\n\n2 The Free and the Pressed\n\n3 The Duck's Quack\n\n4 Ducks _ex machina_ : The Mechanical and Animated Duck\n\n5 Playing Duck\n\n6 Quackery Unmask'd\n\nTimeline\n\nReferences\n\nBibliography\n\nAssociations and Websites\n\nAcknowledgements\n\nPhoto Acknowledgements\n\nIndex\n\n## Preface\n\nNature produces them, contrary to her own laws, in a most extraordinary manner. They are like marsh ducks but smaller. They grow in the guise of growths in the trunks of trees that have been washed up on the beach by the sea. As they grow, they hold onto the trunk with their beaks like seaweed adheres to the wood on the beach. Shells protect them so they can grow freely underneath.\n\nWhat were these marvels? Ducks in a larval stage? Travelling through Ireland in the twelfth century, Gerald of Wales goes on to explain how over time the ducks become covered by a layer of feathers and drop off into the water or fly into the air. He insists that they feed on the sap from the sea itself, allegedly having seen more than one thousand of these little birds hanging from a tree trunk on the beach, lying under their shells and already formed. Gerald observes that certain bishops and prelates in Ireland eat these creatures during Lent because they are not made of meat.\n\nDid Catholic priests, who had no intention of giving up their meat diets for Lent, invent vegetable ducks? A cunning excuse: birds called 'bernacae' found in large quantities all over Ireland, justifying roast duck dinners all through Lent. In 1597 Gerard's _Herbal_ referred to the phenomenon again: the duck's special familiarity and ease on land, air or water offers richly confused interpretation:\n\nThis fowle vnknowen to the Auncients hath no certeine name amongst the Greekes . . . Amonge the Latynes . . . from the branded colour thereof callinge it Branta or Bernicula . . . In France they call it Crabans or Crauant or Oye Nonnette, the Germanes Baumganss, Wiewolanch, and the Scots Clakis. [It] liveth in fresh waters: sometimes aboue and sometimes vnder.\n\nClaude Duret's 'Portrait of tree with rotting branch which produces mould, then living, flying duck', from his _Histoire admirable des plantes et herbes esmervillables & miraculeuse en nature_ (1605). |\n\n---|---\n\n'Sometimes above and sometimes under': that is the prevailing mystery of duck \u2013 existing in between the elements, in between reality and imagination, unstable creature that it is.\n\nThis book begins with a natural history. The term used to categorize duck \u2013 _tribe_ \u2013 is not used with any other avian family but is instead found in plant taxonomy, referring us back to the medieval confusion cited above. We move from what science has classified to matters of more slippery duck and human interest, and tell a story which moves from facts on the duck fossil record, problems of taxonomy, habitat, feeding and migration, to the border territories of navigation, sociability, display and sexual behaviours.\n\n  | Duret's depiction of a tree from which fish or fowl are made, depending on where they fall.\n\n---|---\n\nChapter Two examines wild duck hunting, domestication, and how ducks continue to be 'pressed' into social organization. Chapter Three analyses associative human and duck sound and resulting metaphor and music. The discussion of a politicized relationship between ducks and humans is animated by Disney's Donald in chapter Four, while chapter Five explores duck shapes and entertainment. Chapter Six brings the book to a close with a review of ducks and doctors, ducks and disease, and ducks and meaning.\n\nIn a Mexican creation myth a great bird came whirling, and its feathers fell into the water, turning into all the waterbirds of the world. Duck came from one of those feathers. Another tale relates how the Iroquois hero Hiawatha, travelling through Mohawk territory, came to the edge of a great lake. As he was wondering how to cross it, a huge flock of ducks descended on the lake and began to drink the water. When the ducks rose up again, the lake was dry, its bed covered in shells. From these shells Hiawatha made the first wampum beads and used them to unite the tribes in peace.\n\nWaterfowl are part of the sacred story of life, and in Egypt were associated with Isis in bringing forth the sun. In Yoruba creation myth the world began as marsh full of waterfowl, and for the Magyars (the inhabitants of present-day Hungary) the sun god Magyar turned himself into a diving duck and made humans out of sand and seedy muck from the ocean floor. For the Hebrews and many other cultures, duck is associated with immortality. According to Indian legend and the sacred texts of the Brahmins, the world was born out of a cosmic egg, the _Brahmanda_. In the Rig-Veda, the most ancient of Indian religious texts, a duck lays golden eggs on a nest built on the head of a thief, and the Finnish epic Kalevala describes a duck building a nest on the body of Ilmator (daughter of Air) as she lies in the sea. The duck lays eggs that fall and crack open, the yolk forming earth and the rest the heavens, sun, moon, stars and clouds. In ancient thinking, the Celts, Greeks, Egyptians, Hindus and Chinese all believed that the sky was the upper half of a cosmic egg. And since ducks live both in the sky and the water and lay eggs, they naturally lend themselves to cosmic interpretation and explanation.\n\n  | In George Wither's _Collection of Emblemes, Ancient & Modern_ (1635), an interfering fool inadvertently kills the waterfowl he carries over the river in case they should drown themselves paddling across! The surrounding Latin motto translates as 'The assistance of fools only brings trouble'.\n\n---|---\n\n_'Omnis mundi creatura_\n\n_Quasi liber etpictura'_\n\n_\u2013 Et hic erit Anas._\n\n'Every creature of this world\n\nis like a book, a portrait'\n\n\u2013 and this will be Duck.\n\n## l Natural History\n\nIf it looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, we have at least to consider the possibility that we have a small aquatic bird of the family Anatidae on our hands.\n\nDouglas Adams, _Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency_\n\nThe 151 species collectively known as waterfowl or wildfowl belong to the class of Aves (birds): order Anseriformes, family Anatidae and sub-family Anserinae. Anseriformes \u2013 the term is derived from the Latin verb _anas_ , to swim \u2013 include ducks, geese and swans and their relatives. Ducks, geese and swans make up the family Anatidae. Most ducks belong to the sub-family Anserinae. With a hundred additional sub-species in tribes, there are probably a total of 250 different forms of ducks. The species has beaks or bills covered with soft skin, some with a horny plate or 'nail' on the front, which can curve over the end like a hook or be shaped like a spatula. The bill is flattened and has horny teeth, or blade-like lamellae. The front toes are webbed. Size, plumage and wings vary, from the tiny russet torrent duck _Merganetta armata_ to the spectacularly colourful and large mandarin duck _Aix galericulata._ Consistent duck characteristics are: a broad body, a short tarsis or lower leg set well back, plumage waterproofed with oil from a gland near the tail, a 'speculum' or area of metallic colouring on the trailing edge of the wing, a flexible neck with a large preen gland crowned by a tuft of feathers, and a large external penis in males. Ducks have worldwide distribution, great diversity of habitat, food sources and feeding habits, lessening the usual competition between the species. Though the mallard's ( _Anas platyrhynchos_ ) 'quack' is best known, ducks have a huge sound repertoire. They are gregarious, good flyers, swimmers and divers. Their main predator is man.\n\n  | Waterfowl, _Aves aquatica_ , or _anseriformes,_ includes ducks, geese and swans and other swimming birds, as in this schematic illustration from Jan Comenius's encyclopaedia for children, _Orbis sensualium pictus_ (1657).\n\n---|---\n\nAlthough avian taxonomists disagree on the classification of the family Anatidae, most ornithologists place related waterfowl groups into units called _tribes_ : _Tadornini_ (shelducks), _Tachyerini_ (steamer ducks), _Mergini_ (scoters, etc.), _Aythyini_ (pochards and scaups), _Somateriini_ (eiders), _Cairinini_ (perching ducks), _Dendrocygnini_ (whistling ducks), _Oxyurini_ (stiff-tails) and _Anatini_ (dabbling ducks). In _Duck_ different features of the tribes have been selected to dramatize the remarkable aspects of duck natural history.\n\n### THE FOSSIL RECORD: A TRIBE OF ONE\n\nIn 1891 _The Catalogue of Fossil Birds in the British Museum_ listed a number of duck fossil findings from Essex and the Norfolk Fens in England, and Puy-de-D\u00f4me and elsewhere in France, as well as Switzerland, Germany and New Zealand: tiny pieces of bone found in cave deposits or rock, with further fragments discovered in North America, China and Europe. The _Animal Life Encyclopedia_ identifies the earliest anseriform fossils as _Anatalavis rex_ (duck-winged bird king): 'Two bones recovered in New Jersey may date back to the late Cretaceous period (80\u201350 million years ago), and similar bones found in England helped identify those fossils as possibly duck. The most common anseriform in the fossil record is Presbyornis from the Paleocene and early Eocene' (65\u201350 million years ago). In January 2005 a partial skeleton of a dinosaur duck, _Vegavis iaai,_ was discovered on Vega Island, western Antarctica \u2013 though it may be (as a sceptical Professor Alan Feduccia argued) 'an unidentifiable bundle of bones'.\n\nThe tribal arrangement for ducks was first proposed by Jean Delacour and Ernst Mayr in 1945, and developed by Paul Johnsgard in 1961. |\n\n---|---\n\nWhich begs the question: what is a duck? The pygmy goose is smaller than a duck; the Egyptian goose looks like a duck; and a duck's skeletal character cannot \u2013 it is said \u2013 be distinguished from that of a goose. In the skull form, a goose is so much like a mallard that no osteological line can be drawn.\n\n  | New analysis of duck fossils such as these discovered in New Zealand suggest that _Dendrocheninae_ is not real and that its members form part of an expanded _oxyurine_ (stiff-tailed) duck tribe.\n\n---|---\n\nA tribe of just one species, _Stictonetta naevosa_ (freckled duck, gadwall or guall-guall to Australian Aborigines) has affinities with geese and swans but has no near living relatives. Its unpatterned downy young, remarkably primitive syringeal structure and reticulated tarsus all argue strongly for the position that this duck is the sole survivor of a very ancient waterfowl lineage, evolved some 20 million years ago. Covered with mottled dark brown and cream flecked, speckled or 'freckled' feathers, the drake's bill turns red in the breeding season. It has been described as 'quiet, tame and sleepy, with a voice like the grunt of a Berkshire pig'. It is currently endangered, among the ten rarest birds in the world, and is part of captive breeding programmes between Australia, the US and UK.\n\n  | Freckled duck ( _Stictonetta naevosa_ ).\n\n---|---\n\nVictoria caves in Naracoorte (an Aboriginal word for 'large waterhole') have provided possible duck fossil remains. The latest idea, based on details of the skull, is that they evolved early in the lineage that includes waterfowl. Because of its large skull, some possible carnivorous habits and its probable waterfowl relationships, _Bullockornis_ and\/or _Dromornis stirtoni_ has been nicknamed 'the demon duck of doom'. Yet, of some 15,000 mammals and 6,000 reptiles from Tertiary deposits, palaeontologists say we have fully described only fifteen birds. Where _are_ the fossil ducks? Why has a creature common to all continents left so little record?\n\nThe simple fact is that fragile bird bones are more easily destroyed by time than those of most animals. There are a few fossil remains of huge extinct geese and swans, and fossil duck fragments from the Miocene (13\u201311 million years ago) and Pleistocene (11\u20131.8 million years ago) eras. _Chenornis_ , from the mid-Miocene, is a fossil duck said to have affinities with the petrel and pelican, but the _Guide des Fossiles de France_ points out the uncertainties:\n\nBecause there is no complete series of duck skeletons, duck taxonomy is subject to guesswork. The oldest certain anatids are the genera Romainvillia Lebedinsky and Cygnopterus Lambrecht from the early Oligocene (34\u201323 million years BP) of France and Belgium, respectively. These were rather large forms, the size of geese, but of uncertain affinity. Anatids are not common as fossils until the Neogene (23 million years BP). In many Pliocene (5.5\u20131.8 million years BP) and Pleistocene freshwater deposits, ducks and geese are the dominant group of birds. If it arose as early as the Cretaceous, the lack of fossils is difficult to understand.\n\n### PROBLEMS OF TAXONOMY\n\nThe tribe _Tadornini_ (shelducks) with its fourteen species is a good example of the categorical confusion around ducks as it either exists alone or includes the _Tachyerini_ (steamer ducks). According to Phillips, the duck family Anatidae 'are headed by the Sheldrakes of the Old World', which, depending on your perspective, are either large ducks or small geese. English vernacular names for _Tadorna tadorna_ (common shelduck) are St George's duck or sly goose. German and many Scandinavian languages use _brand Ente_ or _Gans_ (fire-duck or goose), and _Tachyerus pteneres_ (flightless steamer duck) is _canard \u00e0 vapeur_ or _oie de plein_ (full goose) in French. The Spanish call the species _paro-tarro_ (duck jar) and their portraits do in fact feature on many jars from antiquity. There is a fine mosaic of the species in Pompeii and Pliny mentions them breeding in holes on an island off the coast of Apulia. A method of identifying and distinguishing between ducks, swans and geese is argued for in Eykman's _European Anatidae_ by size, form or colour of bill and feathering near the tail. The sexes differ little in swans and geese but widely in ducks: in particular, males have more conspicuous plumage.\n\nThe taxonomic history of Anatidae began early in English when the naturalist John Ray edited _Ornithologia libri tres_ (1676) for Francis Willughby. Considered the beginning of scientific ornithology in Europe, the work included a comprehensive classification of aquatic birds. Much has been clarified since then, but controversy remains. A rough agreement is that Anatidae comprises 41 genera and 147 species. Most attempts to provide a 'natural' classification \u2013 one that best reflects actual evolutionary relationships \u2013 are variations on a scheme first proposed by Delacour and Mayr in 1945. Where earlier classifications had emphasized the association of species at the sub-familial level, this landmark work instead emphasized association at the tribal level. Johnsgard's behavioural studies of the family from 1961 simplified things further into seven sub-families or tribes. Simple species definitions and unequivocal numbers are inadvisable in a highly variable species like duck.\n\n'Mergus Serrator & Trachea' as drawn by the naturalist Thomas Eyton, for _A Monograph on the Anatid\u00e6, or Duck Tribe_ (1838). |\n\n---|---\n\n### HABITAT\n\nIn terms of habitat, ducks can be found anywhere that is wet. Ducks need some sort of wetlands or body of water; the white-headed stiff-tail ( _Oxyura leucocephala_ ) is found on the steppe lakes, Brazilian teal ( _Amazonetta brasiliensis_ ) in the rainforests, African black duck ( _Anas sparsa_ ) in tidal estuaries and mallards ( _Anas platyryhnchos_ ) on your local pond. Ducks are fantastically adaptable, hence their success in numbers. They can live in almost any part of the world in any temperature as long as they have access to water. Constant bathing in good water keeps ducks cool, clean and free of pests; preening also waterproofs and oils soft parts such as feet and bills.\n\nThe range of habitat diversity spans the tribe _Mergini_ , including true sea ducks like the scoter ( _Melanitta_ ), the torrent duck ( _Merganetta armata_ ), which swims with and against quick-running torrents in rivers and mountain streams, and smews ( _Mergus albellus_ ), introduced to the parks of European cities since 1840. The torrent duck has one species: a fairly rare duck of the Andean mountains, with a torpedo-shaped, streamlined body and spikes on the wings assisting rapidity, and relatively isolated populations between Venezuela and Tierra del Fuego. As Stolzmann observed in 1886, the torrent duck 'dives and swims with incomparable celerity' in its special habitat.\n\nSurf scoter showing their characteristic red beaks and various formations in the skies.\n\nIn contrast, the tribe _Mergini_ (sea duck) has twenty species, including harlequin ( _Histrionicus histrionicus_ ), also called 'circus duck', because of its colourful harlequin-clown plumage, and 'squealer' or 'sea-mouse', because of its squeaky voice. _Mergini_ resemble diving ducks with their large flap-like lobes to the hind toe, long necks and narrow bills, well adapted for agility underwater, diving for (and living off) fish, including catching them under ice. _Bucephala clangula_ (called goldeneye because of its markedly bright yellow eyes) is a restless individualist of the _Mergini_ tribe with acute sight and hearing, swimming with its head forward as if looking down into the water.\n\nScoter roam the seas \u2013 in fact, the Common or Black Scoter ( _Melanitta negrita_ , or little black diver) is thought to be the subject of the pre-seventeenth-century belief that _marcreuse_ (derived from the French _maigre,_ to fast) had their origins in sea-shells or in worms on the rotten wood of shipwrecked ships. This made them both fish and fowl and therefore suitable eating for fasting periods, as mentioned in the Preface.\n\nScoters gather in their thousands to feed off the annual herring run off Vancouver Island, British Columbia.\n\nDuck habitat is constantly at risk from competitive human interest, and recent research trying to keep the North American and Pacific seas a sustainable habitat and feeding ground for the scoter in the face of the human shellfish farming industry is one example. Scoter are also at risk from the dangers of oil pollution, for great numbers feed in the entrances of crowded harbours where conditions are far from ideal.\n\n### FEEDING AND DIET\n\nIn 1838 the ornithologist Thomas Eyron produced his _Monograph of the Anatidae or Duck Tribe._ Species whose names have since disappeared are confidently drawn and described: 'Summer Duck'; 'Spirit Duck', even 'Supercilious Duck'. But like Vaucanson the automatist, whom I discuss in chapter Four, Eyron was most interested in the workings of the bird: 'The intestinal anatomy of the family Anatidae is characterised by the very great length of the alimentary canal compared to that of the bird: in some instances it is as many as five times its length, even more.' Ducks are eating machines.\n\nIn terms of their feeding ecology and diet, surface-feeding ducks either dabble at the surface of the water or mud, swinging their bills, sifting for small invertebrates and plant materials, or 'ending-up' by sticking their heads underwater so far that their tail is the only thing left showing. In this way they can reach the bottom of shallow waters with their bills. Diving ducks can reach greater depths by diving deep below the surface, using their wings to help them swim underwater, though mergansers use only their webbed feet for remarkably quick twists and turns chasing fish. Diving ducks have been caught 40 metres (100 ft) down in the sea in trawl nets.\n\nDucks eat by using highly specialized (sometimes elongated and spatulate) bills dipped in the water, filtering it and foodstuffs, the tongue pumping water through finely spaced lamellae (transverse tooth-like or comb-like ridges inside the cutting edge of the bill). Dabbling ducks suck up muddy water through the tip of the beak and squeeze it out again at the base. This makes the familiar dabbling or chattering sound as food particles are filtered through water. Ducks forage for an enormous variety of food, both vegetable (including grass seeds and grains, water lilies, pond weeds, muskgrass, wigeongrass, eelgrass, wild celery, lettuce, alfalfa, windrows of kelp, plankton, algae, rice, bulbs, leaf shoots, buds, rushes, fruits or seeds of plants such as acorns, grapes, roses, rhododendrons and pines) and animal (molluscs, insects, snails, worms, limpets, crabs and crustaceans, aquatic invertebrates, small fish and fish spawn, frogs). As the folk rhyme goes: 'as Mr Frog was crossing the brook\/Heigho! Said Rowley\/A lily-white duck came and gobbled him up'.\n\nDucks can dive and sift food from the mud and debris on ponds, rivers, lagoons, reservoirs and pools, pans and dams or lake bottoms, graze for seeds in fields and marshes, and sieve or filter-feed weeds and seaweeds in swamps, creeks or seas. The tribe _Tachyerini_ (steamer ducks) has four species, two essentially flightless (e.g. _Tachyeres pteneres_ ). Their large feet enable them to swim at speed (15 knots), resembling old-fashioned paddle-steamers. Darwin described a steamer duck on his _Beagle_ expedition, and his specimen can still be found in the Natural History Museum Collection at Tring. His notes include a description of the duck 'steaming' over the water with flapping wings rather than taking flight; because of the churning movement, Darwin thought the duck moved its wings alternately, but in fact they move simultaneously, like those of any bird. Steamer ducks are the greedy duck heavyweights. Captain Cook, one of the first Europeans to spot them, reported weights of over 13 kg (28 lb), crammed to the gullet with shrimp and mussels.\n\n  | In Rudolf Raspe's _Adventures of Baron Munchausen_ , morsels of bacon on a string passed through the ducks that fly the baron home are 'strung together, like pearls on a necklace'.\n\n---|---\n\n### MIGRATION\n\nDucks are either completely or partially migratory. The vast majority wander over wide areas in response to changing water levels. Wandering whistling ducks are nomadic and travel thousands of miles in flocks of hundreds or thousands, even hundreds of thousands in places like Sri Lanka, where they have to migrate in enormous numbers dictated by dry season changes in water supplies. The tribe _Aythyini_ , freshwater diving ducks with fifteen species including ferruginous ducks ( _Aythya nyroca_ ) and pochard, winter in India, the Mediterranean and the Sahel zone of West Africa, or the Nile Valley, and breed in Kashmir, Tibet and Siberia. In winter immense flocks of pochard visit Algerian lakes, Venetian lagoons and Indian jheels. Sightings of Baer's pochard ( _Aythya baeri_ ) have severely declined in China and Korea, suggesting changes in migration routes to adapt for drought and loss of wetlands. The pink-headed Madagascar pochard ( _Aythya innotata_ ) is now apparently extinct.\n\nMany ducks are gregarious flyers and fly in groups: suddenly taking off as if by prearranged agreement in 'springs' of twenty or more at a time. Pochard, because of their short, curved wings ideal for swimming underwater, have to flap vigorously with faster wing-beats than most ducks. Light as they are (1 kg\/2 lb), they can run along the water's surface for a distance before take-off, yet are known for their strong, fast flight; in fact the collective noun for a flight of pochard is a 'rush'.\n\n  | Considering its hefty body weight, a mallard can fly to incredible heights.\n\n---|---\n\nThough they normally fly at about 150 metres (below 500 ft), ducks may fly at very high altitudes during migration (possibly to avoid dehydration) and at high speeds. A commercial airliner famously struck a mallard 7 km (4 miles) up above the Nevada desert, and ducks have been known to reach speeds of 80 kmh (50 mph) in still air, and even faster in a tail wind (or if being chased). There is only half the oxygen at this height but, flying for ten hours at a stretch, ducks can cover distances of 650\u2013800 km (400\u2013500 miles) a day, over incredible distances in total.\n\nAll duck flight is worth observing; it is something humans admire, perhaps because that movement is naturally denied to us, but also because of its sociability and its evident patterning, forming recognizable shapes like letters against the sky. Collective (covey) flying works like this: a duck sets off and makes way for two others, followed by another pair, whose energy inspires a fourth pair to join, and so on, until the ducks fly in an elegant 'V' formation. There are thought to be two good reasons for the V: first, the shape of formation reduces the drag force each bird experiences (due to wing-tip vortices). The birds change places to spread the most fatiguing positions, with each duck at some time flying at the both the head of the V and at its tail. Second, the V-shape also allows birds to keep good visual contact and communicate easily with one another in flight.\n\nNothern pintails ( _Anas acuta_ ) in the air, demonstrating a gentle arc formation for communication in flight.\n\n### NAVIGATION\n\nIn 1680 the astronomer Johannes Hevelius saw a constellation and group of stars to the north of Sagittarius, more or less in the centre of our galaxy. He named it 'L'\u00c9cu de Sobieski' (the crown of Sobieski) in honour of the king of Poland. This cluster of about 200 stars in the constellation 'Sobieski' is thought to look like a flock of wild duck on the wing, hence its more familiar name 'Canard Sauvage'.\n\nThough essentially superb flyers, ducks sometimes encounter problems when flying with strong tail winds, crashing into trees or, more typically, landing with the wind at their backs, coming down with heavy splashes, overturning or sliding across the ice on their tails. In unstable air conditions the body may turn and twist, and the feet may splay wide out, but the head holds its position steadily with the horizon, as if the neck were the pivot on which everything depended. Even if you blindfold a duck and turn the body upside down, the head remains constantly oriented to gravity. Experiments with blindfolding birds and observing their hooded flight patterns have shown that ducks do not fly in circles or spirals but climb high and quickly disappear out of sight. From this we can conclude that the fact the duck cannot see probably bothers them less than it bothers the watching human scientists (who have now lost a duck _and_ a blindfold). This supports the theory that skilled flyers use many other factors besides sight for navigation.\n\nStrange images on radar called 'angels' since the 1940s are now known to be migrating birds.\n\nHow do ducks travel so far? How do they navigate? These days ducks are studied using digital video technology and radio telemetry (radio tags) to map 'site fidelity' and regular feeding grounds, distances travelled and so on. While flying, ducks use the forces of gravity and the earth's magnetic field. Bundles of magnetite have been found in the brains of birds who are thought to have a magnetic sense for the direction where the magnetic field dips most sharply \u2013 always north in the northern hemisphere \u2013 so any changes to the earth's electromagnetic properties will confuse migration routes. It is possible ducks can use sound-wave patterns (hearing super-low frequency sounds and calling continuously as they fly to listen for the sound reflected from waves and other surfaces), learn established routes and landmarks, use the horizon, the seasons, elements of weather, light and shadow, the moon and sun cycle, the solar system (reading star patterns for direction), and through a combination of known methods and multiple backup systems, teach the young by training them in flight with the more experienced.\n\n  | Splaying feathers for take-off, this male mallard is angled to the water but always level-headed.\n\n---|---\n\nOne unusual, important feature of the natural history of water and wildfowl is the manner in which they moult their plumage. Most other families of birds undergo a gradual moult during which the flight feathers are shed and replaced over a protracted period. Duck, on the other hand, shed all their wing feathers simultaneously, with the result that they become flightless for several weeks. The susceptibility of some male duck to predation during this flightless period is reduced by the fact that they typically moult out of their distinctive breeding colours and assume a drab appearance similar to the females and juveniles of their species. The feathering of wildfowl has other important characteristics particularly suited to the birds' aquatic lifestyles. Duck have evolved a covering of heat-retaining down beneath an outer coat of closely interlocking feathers. A gland at the base of the bird's tail secretes waterproofing oil and frequent preening serves both to distribute this oil throughout the plumage and to maintain the interlock of the feathers. Additional protection against heat loss is provided by a subcutaneous layer of fat.\n\nDucks often migrate without stopping to eat or drink, using their high fat reserves to manage epic journeys and weather the extreme cold and conditions of some wintering grounds.\n\n  | A pet eider, or 'Cuddy's duck', at St Cuthbert's feet in the 19th-century stained-glass window in the church at Great Salkeld, Cumbria.\n\n---|---\n\nThe famously well-feathered eider duck or Cuddy's duck ( _Somateriini_ , four species) migrate hugging the Arctic coast in long diagonal lines and gathering in polynyas (ice pools). According to the fieldwork of Thompson and Person in 1963, probably a million eiders cross Point Barrow, Alaska, in late summer during this migration. The males begin to flock early in the summer, leaving the females to form a regular migration to a safe moulting place in the sea. Breeding plumage (a V-shaped mark and green patches of colour on the sides of the head, grey or white contour feathers on mantle, breast and chin, black feathers on sides and flanks with darker coverts) goes into eclipse by July or August, losing wing (flight) feathers by late August or September. This adaptation allows the males plenty of time to make their tremendous journeys back from breeding grounds just at the moment when most other species of duck are in full moult. Were it not for such provision many would be caught in the ice and starve before they could reach open water. In 1995 satellite radios implanted in eider pinpointed over 360,000 birds (incredibly, the entire world population) mass wintering in a unique zone of rich sub-sea molluscs in open ice leads. Massive numbers in eider flocks help keep sections of open water from freezing, and their movements help indicate the effects of global warming and climate change.\n\nFlock of spectacled eider. Prior to 1995, no one knew where this species wintered. Satellite radio transmitters revealed them to be in the Bering Sea. |\n\n---|---\n\n### NESTING\n\nNesting is a variable business for ducks, depending on the context. The African white-backed duck ( _Thalassornis leuconotus_ ), architect of the species, builds baskets of woven grasses in reeds or papyrus beds, often on fairly deep water, with a ramp leading to the nest, concealed from above by overhanging reeds. There may also be an approach channel between the nest and open water. There is an instance of a pair of muscovy duck ( _Cairinamoschata_) building in the steeple of a church in Sussex 24 metres (90 ft) from the ground, among the bells.\n\nMost ducks will nest almost anywhere, on stretches of shoreline, small islets surrounded by water, nests placed in grass, dry kelp, 'diddle-dee' (empetrum), tussock grass (poa) or in reed beds, tall grass cover near water, rushes or sedges, rice fields, bush cover, old antbear, porcupine or penguin burrows, in rabbit holes, in rock or stone crevices, the hollows or holes of trees, on the slope of a ridge or hill, on sandbars or muddy flats, in clay banks, depressions in dry or wet ground, in hay or straw stacks, among driftwood, flotsam and jetsam and piles of rubbish.\n\nSome ducks 'dump-lay' their eggs in strangers' nests, such as those of gulls or even birds of prey, and move on. An incredible 87 eggs have been counted in a single nest. More usually, ducks have their own nests, and between 2 (musk duck) and 22 (mallard) eggs are laid at a rate of one a day, female ducks pluck nest down from their underparts to complete the lining. The eggs are usually pale and unmarked, with sizes varying from 2 to 20 gm (0.07 to 0.7 oz). If a sitter is frightened away from the nest, she may release foul-smelling, oily, green excrement over her eggs before leaving, to repel predators.\n\nDucklings are among the best adapted of all waterfowl young, because their mother's undercarriage immediately greases their plumage so she can lead the brood straight to water a few hours after their hatching, where the liquid rolls off their downy feathers 'like water off a duck's back'. In Sergei Prokofiev's 1936 composition _Peter and the Wolf_ , the little bird looked down at the duck: 'What kind of bird are you if you can't fly?' said he. To this the duck replied: 'What kind of bird are you if you can't swim?' and dived into the pond.\n\nFor the tribe _Cairinini_ , thirteen species of perching and cavity nesting ducks such as mandarin ( _Aix galericulata_ ) and wood duck (Aix _sponsa_ ), leaving the nest site is difficult for the young because of the drop involved, but ducklings are light, their bones soft and pliable, allowing them to fall without harm. In 1850 Thomas Bell watched a female muscovy push her newly hatched young off a beam in a barn 12 metres (40 ft) from the floor and said that they landed uninjured. Bell recorded another interesting incident, seen elsewhere in ducks:\n\nWood nest-boxes can be a secure habitat for successful duck breeding. |\n\n---|---\n\nOne day after feeding and bathing and before returning to sit on the nest, this female carefully passed the point of her bill over every egg. Then she singled one of them out, removed it about 3 yards, broke it by a stroke of her bill and returned to her duties of incubation, perfectly contented. The egg proved to be addled.\n\nMoffat's 1970 field study in Argentina described a torrent duck nest in a cliff crevice high above water from which 'he watched the ducklings drop from their cliff-side nest to the rocks 18 metres (60 ft) below at the call of their mother'.\n\nDucklings feed independently from their first day with the adult warming and protecting offspring, tending the youngsters until they can fly (40\u201370 days, according to species). The young of most duck species are sexually mature by 9\u201311 months, so they breed in the second summer of their life. The duration of a pair bond varies; in most species of duck it is short and ends with egg-laying, males having little or nothing to do with incubation, while in others the males remain near the females until the young hatch, then gather into large flocks of males.\n\n### GATHERING AND SOCIABILITY\n\nThough the social highlight of the tribe _Dendrocygnini_ (eight species of whistling or tree duck) is the fulvous duck's ( _Dendrocygna bicolor_ ) famous long-legged, post-copulatory 'step-dance' (in which the pair display unusually on land rather than water), Red-bills' ( _Dendrocygna autumnalis_ ) communal roosting, sharing large clutches of eggs in dump nests and carrying the young on their backs, has led many breeders to believe that gathering and social interaction is the key to whistling ducks' productivity. The 'new men' of ducks, _Dendrocygnini_ males participate actively with incubation, sit and guard the nest, do not quarrel and are very gentle and familiar in their habits. They have a curious habit of mixing with and caring for strange young birds of other species, defending them against enemies.\n\nSilent in aviaries, _Dendrocygnini_ are vocal on the wing, flying in irregular formations, preening each other and gathering in huge flocks in the wild. Though, in 1857, 'veritable clouds' were seen in the Sudan, the fact that they are \u2013 somewhat fatally \u2013 unwary, slow fliers, suggested these numbers might not last. Among the most cosmopolitan of all birds, they breed in North and South America, Africa and Asia in a variety of habitats from lowlands to an astonishing 3.35 km (11,000 ft) up.\n\nFulvous whistling duck ( _Dendrocygna bicolor_ ), whose under-wing feathers look like Impressionist sweeps of paint, and striking, almost tortoiseshell plumage of warm russet tones shown to great advantage in late afternoon light.\n\nMost waterfowl are very sociable when not nesting. Some winter gatherings can be enormous, such as wintering flocks of Baikal teal ( _Anas formosa_ ) in Japan, where 100,000 have been seen near Osaka. King eider ( _Somateria spectabilis_ ) form cr\u00e8ches of a hundred or more ducklings, shared by a few females. The other females and males migrate in vast flocks to moulting areas at sea, a thousand miles away from the nest.\n\nIn captivity tree ducks such as lesser or Indian whistling teal ( _Dendrocygna javanica_ ) become exceedingly tame; it is possible to keep them in complete freedom without their making any attempt to leave the home pond; they feed from the hand, habitually whistle in reply when called, become rather inactive and reach advanced years. In 1883 the London Zoological Gardens had four specimens of black-billed or Cuban whistling duck ( _Dendrocygna arborea_ ) that had lived there for the past twenty years.\n\n### DISPLAY\n\nOne of the most notable aspects of human interpretation of waterfowl behaviour is response to duck ritual displays. Duck sexual behaviour interests humans greatly, down to the last possible detail. Ducks breed following various courtship or pair-maintaining displays, sometimes involving intense competition among males with breast-to-breast fighting and aerial chasing (both male and female birds, though mostly males, have been observed in courtship flights, plumage change, shaking, tail cocking, head, chin or tail lifting, 'nod-swimming', burp or grunt-whistling, head or bill-dipping \u2013 often called 'false drinking' \u2013 raising a 'sail' feather or wings and calling) and mutual head-pumping (repetitive bobbing of the head up and down). The tribe comprising eight species of _Oxyurini_ (stiff-tailed ducks) have long stiffened shafts of tail feathers that serve as underwater rudders and display features, plus large feet placed so far back it is difficult to walk on land. The endangered white-headed duck ( _Oxyura leucocephala_ ) rarely flies and makes almost no vocal sounds, but like the ruddy duck ( _Oxyura jamaicensis_ ) can contort their necks and tails into striking postures for communication and display.\n\n  | A sketch of display behaviour, including swimming with outstretched neck or 'ritual drinking'.\n\n---|---\n\nMutual chin-lifting of a pair of Chiloe wigeon. |\n\n---|---\n\nIn 1898 Phillips saw the whole of the vast sound of Currituck in North Carolina as 'paved with Ruddies. I can only describe it by saying it looked as if one could walk dry-shod . . . some eight miles, without getting his feet wet, by simply stepping on the backs of these ducks!' The enormous number of fond vernacular names given to this species (such as booby duck, bumblebee coot, sleepy-head, fool duck, deaf duck, dumpling duck, shot-pouch and horse-turd dipper) points to how easy it is to catch or shoot. The ruddy duck also has an allegedly 'ludicrous courtship performance' like a puppet pulled by strings, lifting his tail up and down, tapping his chest with his bill (a large air-sac opening at the windpipe used as a sounding board during display), drumming out a croaking 'tick-tick-tick-tickety-quek' and 'boiling' the water with wings and feet. Females commonly mimic males in display postures. Whitehead's observations of _Oxyurini_ in 1885 demonstrate a recurrent tendency for analogies to human behaviour, since he describes how they hoist their tails up, 'spreading every feather to the utmost, like a hand with all the fingers spread out', and Phillips wryly observes: 'I daresay this ruddy is fully as slipshod in its maternal affairs as we are.'\n\n  | Ruddy duck in display position, stiffened tail held high.\n\n---|---\n\n  | Duck feeding, tail up, having thrown up a shower of spray.\n\n---|---\n\nAs with human species, stories of rape and pillage have shaped duck history, and like human behaviour on the Costa del Sol and elsewhere around the world, sexual tourism remains a controversial subject. The UK ruddy duck population, descended from a few birds imported by the Wildfowl Trust after the Second World War, settled at Slimbridge Bird Sanctuary, but did not stay put, and this is where the trouble began. 'The best known member of the stiff-tailed group is the aptly named ruddy duck, as in Britain this charming and entertaining stiff-tail is proving itself to be a ruddy nuisance, due to its tendency to wander off to Spain and seduce white-headed ducks.' In the early 1990s the ruddy duck fell from grace when Spanish ornithologists reported that invading male ruddy ducks had arrived on lakes in Andalusia inhabited by the rare, endangered white-headed endangered white-headed duck, a closely related stiff-tail. The aggressive ruddies were\n\nseducing, even raping the female white-headed ducks, and hybrids were appearing as a result. As the Spanish had spent a good deal of time, money and effort on restoring the white-headed duck population, they were not too pleased. An urgent report was sent to Britain, asking that the ruddy ducks should be controlled and thus stopped from heading for Spain, and indulging in such lager-lout behaviour. This threw the British ornithological hierarchy into turmoil.\n\nThe endangered white-headed duck.\n\nEnglish Nature, the RSPB and the Wildfowl and Wetlands Trusts agreed that control was needed. Many ruddy duck have since been shot and had their nests destroyed, but by the late 1990s they were nesting again in France and the Netherlands . . .\n\nThough courtship is a term used to include the whole sequence of events in the pairing of sexes, it is notable that display does not always lead to copulation, as the male musk duck ( _Biziura lobata_ ) from Australia and Tasmania shows:\n\nThis display \u2013 perhaps the most dramatic of all birds \u2013 draws both males and females, who crowd round the courting male. Often males become more attracted than females, swimming much closer to the displaying male and sometimes even making physical contact by gently and repeatedly nudging their beaks against his shoulder. The displaying male is in a trance-like state and rarely responds directly to any of the onlookers.\n\nAccording to Johnsgard, the musk duck is unusual in that when females approach displaying males, they 'suddenly attempt to copulate in a rape-like manner. Seemingly no association between the pairs occurs . . . There appears to be a greater development of promiscuous mating systems than in perhaps any other species of this family.'\n\n### SEX LIVES\n\nIn Greek mythology, _Anas platyrhynchos_ (mallard) were connected with the cult of _Aphrodite_ (goddess of love and hunter\/warrior) and consequently with Eros. In Rethymno museum, Crete, a sculpture of Aphrodite from Ancient Lappa has the goddess resting a foot lightly on the back of a duck. It has been suggested that Aphrodite was originally an Asian fertility goddess whose domain embraced all nature \u2013 vegetable and animal \u2013 as well as human (just as ducks do).\n\nThe British tabloid press often features 'amorous' duck stories, such as 'Lovelorn Jake's 8-mile duck walk' in 2005, when a muscovy duck who had been removed from a country park because of his rape behaviours then walked 12 km (7.5 miles) back across north Devon without, according to a wildfowl specialist, 'any natural homing instinct whatever'. In the same spring, another article from a London newspaper carried a story about single ducks in London's royal parks 'looking for a partner' to encourage breeding. 'With Valentine's Day in mind, the royal parks are urging the public to sponsor a duck to help fund \"Operation Love a Duck\" . . . Sponsors will receive a photograph, a certificate and the chance to name and keep track of their duck.' Human double standards: either duck decide entirely for themselves or we for them; understood in terms of love and romance rather than sex and mating.\n\nTypically, duck such as mallard will display, then copulate or 'tread' in water of swimming depth. Though most birds copulate without a penis, McCracken's study of _Oxyura vittata_ (Argentine lake duck or blue-bill) in 2000 revealed a long 'ornamented' penis half the duck's body length with an 'array of dense spines running the length of the organ and a thorny, brush-like texture'. Having first measured the organ at 20 cm, McCracken and colleagues found a specimen a year later with a penis nearly half a metre long. The fact that this organ is uncommon in birds but present in non-avian groups such as crocodiles and turtles suggests that a well-developed penis in many dabbling and diving ducks may derive from copulating in water. After treading, either or both sex can rise in the water, wing-flap and call, while each vertically raises its wing on the side opposite its partner, or the partner raises the other's wing with its beak. They often turn to face their heads to one another for a few seconds, followed by a post-copulative display, where they bathe or preen themselves or one another. Hudson first described, in 1876, mallards' nuptial flights where 'every time they came close they slap each other on the wings so smartly the sound can be distinctly heard, like applauding hand-claps'. In 1907 Crawshay recorded 'a merry tourney on the water' followed by 'a reckless dashing flight-wheeling, twisting, doubling, stooping and rising'.\n\n  | The male Argentine Lake duck and his 42.5 cm penis.\n\n---|---\n\nThe courtship behaviour of the Chiloe wigeon ( _Anas sibilatrix_ ) was compared by Konrad Lorenz in the early 1950s to an anserine triumph ceremony, interpreted as the species' strong pair bond. This has since been discovered to be more diverse, since in the wild it is not probable that a pair will stay together for more than one season (January to May) or likely that attachments are permanent ones. In China and Japan the mandarin duck (Aix _galericulata_ ) still symbolizes happiness and marital fidelity, yet studies have long revealed that mandarin ducks force copulate and their population is dwindling, suggesting poor attachment patterns. The myth that ducks (like swans) are permanently pair-forming, monogamous birds is refuted by observation in the field, where many male birds make attempted rape chases, and their possible role in normal pair formation is dubious. In fact, some ducks' sexual behaviour can be positively deviant.\n\nMutual preening is part of post-copulative duck behaviour. |\n\n---|---\n\nForced copulation or mating, less sociologically charged terms for rape (copulation without consent, resisted to the best of the victim's ability), is thought highly unusual in the animal world, but has been studied in ducks, geese and insects such as the damselfly. Sexual coercion typically occurs in the animal world where the male (or female) has the strength or a specific organ designed to restrain during copulation (such as the male scorpion-fly), but research into 'convenience polyandry' (accepting more than one mate at a time) suggests that the relative safety of submitting to some forced mating may reduce the risks of repeated harassment, wounding or death. When artificially crowded, males can become exceedingly troublesome. Huxley, observing an incredible 1,200 pairs breeding on Tring reservoir in 1912, recorded 70 females killed by drowning that year by forced copulation. Grandin and Johnson have argued that over-selection inevitably results in neurological damage resulting in further unnatural practices, such as intensive breeders' need for 'debeaking' or bill trimming to avoid females' attacks on penises in overcrowded factory farm conditions.\n\n  | A happy couple is called a 'mandarin duck couple' in China and Japan, where the birds are symbols of love and fidelity.\n\n---|---\n\nDue to the risks to the female with mating or 'treading' in the water, female ducks can drown. |\n\n---|---\n\nAs many as 40 males may chase a single female in aerial or aquatic pursuit; drakes have been known to grab and mount females underwater when they dive (attempting escape) or knock females to the ground in mid-flight. In some populations as many as 7\u201310 per cent of all females die each year as a result of drowning or injuries incurred during rapes. In March 2005 _The Register_ ran an article titled 'Boffin Honoured for Necrophile Gay Duck Paper', detailing the work of researcher Kees Moelikers, an 'Ig Nobel' prizewinner, for his improbable findings on homosexual necrophilia in _Anas platyrhynchos._ Bruce Bagemihl concurs:\n\nOccasionally, males even mate with dead males. While they are still paired in the mating season, males frequently court and attempt to mate with (or rape) females other than their mate. About 3\u20137% of offspring are a result of such non-monogamous mating, and in some populations multiple parentage occurs in at least 17\u201325% of broods.\n\nThe tribe _Anatini_ (dabbling ducks) demonstrates all the homosexual and bisexual non-reproductive, promiscuous behaviours that Bagemihl's study of animal homosexuality points to: pair bonds with same-sex partners, courting, mounting and copulating out of the breeding season, including forcibly. Mallard pairs commonly separate, or 'divorce' as some ornithologists put it, and single or groups of females raise families without males, share or exchange nests, and adopt extra ducklings.\n\n_Anatini_ , with about 40 species, is the most common duck in the world; the duck with the recognizable 'quack'. The Latin name for mallard was originally _Anas boschas,_ and it is invariably 'wild duck' in any vernacular, from _wilde Ente, canard sauvage, pato real,_ to the Turkish _ordek_ or Mongolian _azin:_ simply 'duck'. Most breeds of domestic duck derive from the mallard: toy mallard call ducks, the Rouen giant mallard, the Pekin, Aylesbury ducks, the Penguin and Indian runner ducks. Staying fertile, _Anatini_ hybridize readily with other species and also show extraordinary diversity within its own tribe. They are hunted, painted and kept by humans, from gadwall ( _Anas strepera_ ) in the marshes, to teal (blue-winged, _Anas discors_ ) on the wing; from 'spoonbills' (northern shoveller, _Anas clypeata_ ) as the most outwardly distinctive to European widgeon ( _Anas Penelope_ ) 'of lovely shape' like Penelope, the ever faithful and devoted wife of Homer's Odysseus. _Anatini_ increasingly assimilates other tribes into itself (such as _Cairinini_ and _Stictonettini_ ). The most well known of the dabbling ducks, mallard ( _Anas platyrhynchos_ or 'flat nose') are undoubtedly the most abundant in the world. Perhaps it is their adaptability, not least in terms of flexible sexuality and the ability to live both wild and tame, that makes them one of the most familiar tribes to humans.\n\n  | Single-sex mallard pairs can often be observed demonstrating courtship and mating behaviours.\n\n---|---\n\n  | A green-winged teal drake, part of a common species.\n\n---|---\n\n  | Northern pintail ( _Anas acuta_ ).\n\n---|---\n\n  | Northern shoveller, shovel-shaped bill in profile, plus the full variation of plumage with strong primary and secondary flight feathers.\n\n---|---\n\n## 2 The Free and the Pressed\n\n### SKIES BLACK WITH DUCK: THE FREE\n\nOf the species of wildfowl in the world, the 'edible' are defined in Western texts as mallard, teal, pintail, shoveller and gadwall, the 'non-edible' are scoters, scaup, golden-eye and long- or stiff-tailed ducks. In the US and Canada a huge abundance of ducks, public right of way over land and the right to own a gun make hunting easy. When Charles Dickens visited the US in 1842 he wrote of wide streams blackened by flocks of wild ducks. These would have been canvasback ducks, the tastiest of America's indigenous breeds. By the mid-nineteenth century professional hunting of swans, geese and duck on a vast scale depleted wildfowl so rapidly that public concern resulted in US Congress passing the Migratory Bird Act in 1918 to put an end to market hunting. Hunting on an individual basis continues to this day, and shows no signs of declining.\n\nDuck hunting has been a traditional way to catch game to eat for the last 8,000 years, as well as a popular sport. It is said to be relaxing, anticipatory, offering the companionship of dogs and other humans with the chance to feel at one with nature in the dark, dusk and dawn. Yet the first motives were hunger and need; subsistence hunting is as much a feature of poorer regions as game sports as leisure activities are of the richer. The typology of animal exploitation has revised the subsistence systems of hunting, herding and agriculture long held to be sequential into a new sequence: 'predation' (hunting for protein), 'protection' (free-range herding and taming of pets) and 'domestication' (breeding in isolation from the wild). Though the Siriono of Bolivia and Waimiri Atroari Indians of Brazil were still subsistence hunting whistling duck and muscovy in 2000, duck hunting in the West has moved from a subsistence activity to a social game, a luxury rather than a necessity, with two emerging trends: recreational and specialist hunting. While the initial economic importance of hunting steadily decreased and hunting tourism became the new variation, the demands for high levels of sport harvest brought controversy over duck hunting regulations.\n\n  | Pisanello, _Two Teal_ , 1430s, ink drawing with watercolour and wash.\n\n---|---\n\nThe Federal Duck or Migratory Bird Hunting and Conservation Stamp for 2005.\n\nIn 1934 the Migratory Bird Hunting Stamp Act (or 'Duck Stamp Act') was passed by US Congress, requiring the purchase of a Federal Duck Stamp by waterfowl hunters to generate revenue to protect wetlands. Since its inception, it is thought that the programme has protected 4.5 million acres of waterfowl habitat. Duck hunters in North America and elsewhere take pains to ensure the continuity of their sport by funding wetlands conservation. The private organization Ducks Unlimited has over a million supporters. Founded by duck hunters in 1937, it has concentrated on saving the main wildfowl-nesting habitats in North America, in particular the 906,500 square km (350,000 sq. mile) wetlands of the Canadian and US prairies called the 'duck factory'. It has done this by raising money to buy swamps, attaching entails to prevent drainage and selling the swamps on. It has paid farmers the market rate not to drain them. The ducks do well, with species increasing, it is argued, while wildlife hunters and photographers benefit because they want to shoot more ducks.\n\nThe struggle between farmers, hunters and governments goes on, however, with national subsidies affecting 'developing' country farmers and duck habitat on an international scale, plus pressure from the anti-hunting fraternity from the big cities, who want to turn wetlands into theme parks for city dwellers. Yet this theme \u2013 of townies as the root of all misunderstanding and damage to 'countryside traditions' \u2013 is by now a tired clich\u00e9. As progress makes demands on both city and countryside life, it increasingly exposes the contradictions and the interrelatedness of hunting and conservation. Banding or bird-ringing, fitting numbered light metal rings to bird necks or legs for large-scale research, began in 1898 when a red-breasted merganser ( _Mergus serrator_ ) was marked by H.C.C. Mortensen of Denmark, the first ornithologist to mark birds extensively for science. It has defined over four continental flyways, and organizations such as Ducks Unlimited juggle the conflicting or complementary interests of hunting, conservation and waterfowl management. Specialist hunters have been characterized as either 'enthusiasts' (amateurs who hunt large numbers and do most damage) or 'participants' (older, experienced waterfowl hunters who hunt small numbers and are aware of the need for 'refuges' for migratory waterfowl, since over-hunting disturbs and displaces the birds significantly). Refuge creation is working to improve conservation value and the biodiversity of wetlands of most importance to waterfowl, and forecasts include a larger role for women as professional wildlife managers and hunters, taking a more holistic view of wetland management. Women hunters represent 1 per cent of the US population and 9 per cent of all hunters, according to a 2001 survey of fishing, hunting and wildlife-associated recreation.\n\n  | Ornithologist ringing (banding) a duck in Saskatchewan, Canada, in the early 1950s.\n\n---|---\n\nThree types of duck netting: concealed in trees, in the open and on water (from Diderot's _Encyclop\u00e9die_ , 1751\u201372). |\n\n---|---\n\n### HUNTING BY HAND\n\nThough duck hunting these days conjures up the image of a gun, in fact weapons for duck hunting and killing have included bare hands, missiles, stones, darts, spears, blow pipes, arrows, pellets, hawks or falcons, drugs, snares, traps, funnels, baited hooks, bird lime and nets. Netting birds is an immemorial practice: 5,000 years ago the Ice Man recently found frozen in the Alps carried a bird net identical to those used in Portugal today. Ornamental depictions of Chinese emperors show them hunting with bow and arrow, showing off their skill on horseback chasing flying duck. Aztec manuscripts show hunters with all their weapons and individual characteristics, including the association of each to a bird. The Zsujta duck of 1200\u20131050 BC was found with a hoard of weapons.\n\n'Waterfowl shall come to you in their thousands', reads an Egyptian coffin text. Egyptians used large hexagonal nets to catch enormous numbers of migratory birds, putting decoys in the water or flushing the ducks out of their hiding places with dogs or civets. 'You have cast your throw-stick at them and a thousand have been felled', continues the text. Where Egyptians used throw sticks, ancient Eskimo and Amarind peoples hunted with bow and arrow and other cleverly devised tools to throw into flocks of duck. Bolas weapons \u2013 ivory weights attached by hide and braided sinew thongs, bound together at a bone handle with a bundle of bird quills and sedge \u2013 are known to have featured in the Birnirk culture of north-western Alaska. Alaskan native peoples were ready to trade iron and tobacco for furs and artefacts, which found their way into nineteenth-century museum collections. Eskimos hunted widely with bolas: in the hunting season men and women wore them wound round their heads, to be thrown at a moment's notice when hunting birds on land and, adapted with driftwood weights, for sea hunts. The Alaska bird spear \u2013 made of wood, bone and sinew \u2013 was thrown from a kayak using a throwing board ( _atatl_ ) to increase the speed of the spear, skimming over the water to catch waterfowl by the neck or wing during the summer moult when they could not fly.\n\n  | Egyptian water-fowling scene: a fragment of wall painting from a tomb of _c_. 1350 BC.\n\n---|---\n\nA Hidatsa Indian called 'White Duck', posed wearing a headdress of duck-down, skin and feathers, _c_. 1908. |\n\n---|---\n\nThe early peoples of North America also hunted duck, with some duck traditions \u2013 such as dances \u2013 lasting to this day. The ritual forms part of the _hesi_ cycle (imitative dances) of the Patwin and Maidu of California, while the Kutchin waddle and wave their arms like ducks to ensure a good catch out hunting; the Iroquois cry 'Hat-Hat', and the men are joined by impersonations of the spirits of plenty, to encourage duck multiplication. But for catching duck, decoys are needed, and their history is as old as hunting itself. Without duck decoys, a duck hunt would usually involve employing beaters to scare the birds into flight out of the wetlands, so they could be netted or shot. Every year since 1279 a great duck hunt was held on the _\u00e9tangs_ (ponds) of Ponthieu in France. Many local peasants were obliged to assist in driving the birds, even stripping off and entering the water to drive the ducks out of the reed beds. Great bag nets ( _panneaux_ ) were extended at regular intervals along the lake, though mass netting provoked conservation legislation from the 1500s onwards.\n\n### HUNTING BY DECOY\n\nThe word 'decoy' means two things: a fake or a trap. There are two kinds of duck decoys: one a large netted construction to trap a number of birds, the other a fake duck used to trap a real duck.\n\nThe first type of engineered decoy is almost certainly a Dutch innovation: the word comes either from the Dutch _de Kooi_ (cage or trap) or _eendekooy\/eende kooi_ (duck cage), from this ingenious method of harvesting wildfowl used in the Netherlands from the seventeenth century. This kind of decoy is composed of a number of 'pipes' narrowing to tunnels with a 'purse' at the end, covered by netted hoops made of wych elm, willow, ash or metal, which radiate from a pond or lake surrounded by woodland. Ducks are tempted by grain, potatoes or the quacking of live decoys to enter, then a _kooikerhondje_ (little cage dog) or 'piper' dog and decoyman would drive the ducks to their fate. As early as 1432, 600 wildfowl were recorded as having been stolen out of the Abbot's Decoys at Crowland Abbey, Norfolk, but decoys are formally recorded as introduced into Britain by Dutch drainage engineers employed to drain the great marshes in the East Anglian Fens around 1650. Similar decoys existed in other parts of Britain: St James's Park in London had a 'King's Decoy' established by Charles II around 1665 as a source of duck for the table, built for him by a Dutchman variously named Hydrach Hilens or Sydrach Hilcus. There is also a fine example in working order in Buckinghamshire, the Boarstall Duck Decoy, constructed between 1691 and 1697.\n\nThe Boarstall Duck Decoy, Buckinghamshire, in the 1890 s. |\n\n---|---\n\nThe Dutch had their decoys in the Wadden sea region, especially the western side of the Lauwers Zee in Friesland, where widgeon and teal gathered in thousands. Pond decoys were extremely popular in Britain, the Netherlands, France and Germany from the seventeenth century to the early twentieth. There were over 200 in Britain by the end of the nineteenth century; some in East Anglia were recording catches of over 5,000 ducks per season. By 1918 there were only 28 remaining, and the slaughter of ducks on this scale by this method had ceased in Britain by 1954. In 1980, when the National Trust acquired Boarstall, only three or four decoys were left working in the country and Boarstall was one of two that still used a piper dog. Wildfowl are caught in decoys like Boarstall now only for scientific purposes: to be ringed, recorded and released again. Decoys are restored or maintained as country heritage sites open to the general public and nature reserves (where ducks now enjoy respite from the attentions of fowlers).\n\n  | A hunter sets duck decoys in the sunlight.\n\n---|---\n\nGentlemen and dogs pursue a mallard in _Duck-baiting_ , an 1820s print by Henry Thomas Alken.\n\nThe second kind of decoy is an established folk art in the US, Canada and Europe, and hand-carved and painted wooden ducks from well-known decoy-makers are sought-after antiques. An Elmer Crowell decoy (a Massachusetts carver, 1862\u20131951) fetched $684,500 at a Sotheby's sale, the highest-flying sale price to date. It is clear that humans fall for decoys. So do ducks, but why? So strong, it is generally agreed, are the drives to eat and gather sociably that a duck will risk much to go wherever it thinks other ducks are. Decoys are often used with a 'blind' or a 'sink box' (a boat, hidden among the reeds, sunk into the water), a fixed shelter, a 'grave' (a shallow trench dug in a stubble field) or a 'hide' (any place to stalk a stretch of water) to conceal the hunters.\n\nCrafted decoys can be fold-up silhouette or shadow birds made of card, solid birds made from grasses or reeds, cork, plastic or wood or inflatable rubber, or stuffed dead birds. In 1911, during the mining of bat guano for fertilizer in a cave 22 miles south-west of Lovelock in the Humbult valley in west-central Nevada, a remarkable find was made: numerous well-preserved Native American objects, amongst them eleven canvas-back decoys, over 1,000 years old. These were made of tule rush reeds bound together in duck shape and covered with the skin and feathers of the bird to add realism. Other finds included bird bones elaborately ornamented with incised designs and whistles for bird hunting. Legend and local folklore suggest that the cave was used as a trap for killing an entire rival tribe in competition for food (the seeds and waterfowl of the nearby lakes).\n\nHunting was often done with birds of prey or dogs. Though the first duck-droving (herding) dog was a poodle, preferred gun dogs are self-restrained ones with soft mouths that will not damage the bird, such as retrievers, labradors and spaniels. Essentially, even when hunting duck with 'duck hawks' (the peregrine falcon in the US and Arab states, the marsh harrier or moor buzzard in the UK), any hunting animal must be well trained, obedient to whistles and silent signals and reliable to 'fetch' or kill.\n\nLewis Clement travelled to Abbeville, near Amiens in France, in 1871 to try duck decoying in the French style, and later wrote up his experiences, as hunters still do. The Englishman was invited by the local duck decoyman (or _huttier_ ) to his tiny night-hut \u2013 apparently 'uncommonly like a dunghill' \u2013 which he shared with three live decoy ducks (trapped and tied together) and a wet poodle. This sets the scene for what is representative of an entire oeuvre of hunting descriptions of male bonding in close (if not foetid) quarters. 'Old Pierre' explains that he has once accidentally shot his decoy drake, which ever since understandably 'ducks his head when the gun goes off'. As wild duck fly overhead, the decoy ducks 'quack' furiously, drawing them in. Clement describes this in terms of 'light-principled females' or 'unfaithful wives having a flirtation with the newcomers', which infuriates the drake:\n\nA successful hunt: a black retriever poses with his duck . . . |\n\n---|---\n\n. . . as do a group of humans with theirs, including a woman hunter dressed in camouflage. |\n\n---|---\n\nThe two ducks, aware of his jealousy, and of the approach of the wild birds, continued, repeatedly, as if in defiance of their lawful lord and master, to call out softly, to plume themselves, and to duck under water, and make themselves altogether as pretty and interesting as circumstances would permit.\n\nHuman preoccupation with the duck's sexual relations takes on the language of romantic farce: the 'flirtation' of 'unfaithful wives', the 'jealousy' of a 'lawful lord and master'. Gun types are as loaded with evidence of social hierarchies. In 1871 Old Pierre used a muzzle-loader rather than a breech-loader as loyal to his class: 'Because all the other _huttiers_ would call me an _aristocrate_.'\n\n### HUNTING BY GUN\n\nThere was a little man, and he had a little gun,\n\nAnd his bullets were made of lead, lead, lead;\n\nHe went to the brook, and saw a little duck,\n\nAnd shot it right through its little head, head, head.\n\nBetween 1876 and 1878 the Russian explorer Colonel N. Przhevalsky travelled with a party of Cossacks to the heart of central Asia, across the Tian Shan to Lob-Nor, in Mongolia. Przhevalsky noted a wealth of pintail ducks, pochards and gadwalls on Lob-Nor, a massive freshwater lake once thought to be salt. In February ducks arrived by the thousands; by March they were gone again. 'Seated on the ice, the flocks murmured to themselves as though taking counsel together on their further flight northwards.' The locals had no guns, but ducks trapped in nets were variety to the fish diet, and fully used in other respects. Przhevalsky found inhabitants of Lob-Nor using fish and duck as a regular part of purchase money for brides: 'Girls marry at the age of 14 or 15 and the \"kalym\" or dowry is 10 bundles of cloth, 10 strings of dried fish, and 200 ducks.' 'In Winter, the cloaks are lined with duck skins dressed with salt, whilst the down and feathers are mixed with the dry reeds and used for bedding.' In sharp contrast, all of Przhevalsky's party of Russian Cossacks carried rifles, so\n\nA 1950s tableau of punt guns against a 'duck-billed reptile' in a museum. Punt guns(huge shotguns) enabled market hunters to bring down between 30 and 100 diving ducks per shot, before they became illegal in the USA in 1918. |\n\n---|---\n\nDuck shooting was always absurdly easy. We counted the slain by dozens, although we husbanded our ammunition, having only a small quantity, and no use for half the ducks we killed. Of these we required three apiece for food, so that we boiled 24 ducks in our saucepan for breakfast, lunch and supper daily. Such are traveller's appetites sharpened by outdoor life and constant exercise \u2013 the best of antidotes against stomachic disorders and sleeplessness.\n\nThe history of modern waterfowl hunting essentially parallels the evolution of the shotgun, since neither falcons nor longbows could match shot. Gun types vary enormously, from extremely elegant bespoke sports and hobby equipment to what seem to be more or less cannons. Contemporary North American and Canadian duck hunting and shooting books, anecdotes or advertisements tend to take a no-nonsense (even macho) tone: 'create a pattern of natural calm . . . then move in for the kill . . . dozens of duck will succumb to a dose of cold steel . . .'. 'If you shoot my guns: all new Benelli M1-90 autos in 12 and 20 gauge, all you need to do is get on the plane and come on down.' Yet, referring back to the little ditty, in the US, UK and Canada, by law all shot used for waterfowl must now be non-toxic (lead-free).\n\nOnce a duck has been shot or wounded, some hunters leave it to die, but traditional hunting manuals recommend hand-killing quickly and mercifully:\n\nWith both hands grasp the duck by the shoulders, belly up and with his head away from you. A small stone, a log, the edge of a blind or the bar of the boat will make a suitable anvil. Swing the duck up over your shoulder and bring the back of his head down smartly upon the anvil you have chosen . . . even if the first blow does not kill the duck it will at least render him unconscious and end his suffering. The second or third blow will end his life. It is an unpleasant proceeding, I know. But you wounded the duck, and it is up to you to finish the job humanely.\n\nHunters are aware of the technical irony of killing by hand after shooting. The recriminatory tone above ('you wounded the duck') is one also found in retired duck hunters, who see no contradiction in moving on to duck conservation in private sanctuaries or former duck decoys. This 'payment of dues' attitude is preserved in myth. A Japanese folk tale describes how Sonjo the hunter came across a mandarin duck pair in the rushes of Lake Akanuma, killed the male, cooked and ate him. That night he dreamed he saw a beautiful woman weeping bitterly. She reproached Sonjo for killing her husband and told him to go again to the rushes. When he did so, a female duck swam straight towards him, tore open her breast with her beak and died before his eyes. Sonjo was so shaken he gave up hunting and became a monk. This story is often performed in Japan in _kage'e_ (a shadow picture) with puppets in front of a back-lit screen. At the moment of her death, the puppet of the female duck is replaced by another puppet, this time theatrically tripled in size, magnifying the weight of Sonjo's sin and the female duck's sorrow.\n\nDucks in an 18th-century Mughal painting.\n\n### DUCK HUNTING AND THE CLASS DIVIDE\n\nWith diverse cultural histories, many models of the hunter permeate the modern world. What seems most at issue is the hunter's (symbolic) relationship and status as a reflection of those different societies. It is argued that agricultural development led to increasingly class-divided societies and specialist functionalist categories. If the old cultures of China, Russia and Europe maintained a social order where a minority of royalty and aristocrats shot duck (and peasants who happened to get in the way), a majority across the US and Canada were proud of duck hunting as sport for 'ordinary folk'. Whom we allow the 'freedom to hunt' relates in Asia and Russia to royal histories, in Europe to class distinctions, in the US and Canada to a frontier spirit to make free with the wild, a constitutional right for every citizen.\n\nClass is inextricably linked to duck hunting. In the era of the Mongolian empire, Marco Polo related the importance of game birds to the imperial cuisine, where Mongols obtained a large portion of their food by the chase. Imperial game also supplemented the rural population's diet. In many parts of early medieval Europe agricultural production was insufficient to feed the population and hunting still had a place in the domestic economies of noble and peasant. Hunting behaviours and clothing developed. The Miwok people of what is now California first rid themselves of their clothes and human smell in 'sweat lodges' and wore costume (such as duck masks) to take on the attributes of the animal hunted (hunting in hide and feathers to catch hide and feathers). Arctic peoples produced parkas with up to 60 stitched pieces lined with duck-down feathers, capable of withstanding sub-zero temperatures, while other Native Americans wore tanned skin shirts and leggings for the hunt. From the sixteenth century to the nineteenth in the West, sporting gentlemen and the military wore leggings ('spatterdashes') or breeches made of woollen cloth or leather, a fashion for 'hunting shirts' associated with the frontier in North America appearing in the eighteenth century. Later, the 'shooting jacket' (a sports coat with leather patches on elbows and the front shoulder to prevent wear from the butt of the shotgun or rifle) became popular. Camouflage materials gave hunting a military look and are now commercially marketed, as are wool and silk underwear, quilted duck- and goose-down layers in 'blanket' trousers for winter hunting, hooded jackets, caps with flaps, socks, rubber and insulated boots.\n\nAn Eskimo adult and child wearing duck-skin parkas, Nunivak Island, Alaska, 1929. |\n\n---|---\n\nBoots have always been important indicators of social status for the hunter, in terms of their quality and material. Mongols first wore the special riding boots later (by the 1870s) to be known as cowboy boots: a narrower, high-heeled version of the military design, to fit but not slip from the stirrup. Duck hunters traditionally wear leather boots since _waders will drown you_. A major problem is keeping warm, hence the uses for lard, gloves made of wool and rubber, pocket warmers and a variety of tipples. In a modern post-colonial context duck-hunting images invariably depict the male hunter in camouflage or combat clothing, with gun and a string of dead ducks \u2013 more than he and his family could possibly eat. The more ducks the better in fact, since it's a competitive sport and most is best, which is the most disturbing aspect of the Przhevalsky story.\n\nA pair of hunters wading through a swamped hardwood forest.\n\nMass hunting of game birds for the upper-class table and restaurant trade pushed several species to the brink of extinction during the late 1800s and early 1900s. |\n\n---|---\n\nThough women have often been involved in hunting, they have been historically portrayed as being in such absurdly robust physical health as to slip into comic visual jokes about lesbianism. And though today women from all walks of life are being actively encouraged to participate in duck hunting, with 'Duck Hunting Clinics' and women-only hunts in American and Canadian state parks, the most familiar picture of duck hunting for the European man or woman is as an upper-class pursuit. Set in 1913, the twilight of the Edwardian era, Isabel Colegate's novel _The Shooting Party_ is the story of an aristocratic game shoot on a country estate on the eve of the Great War. The adults are gathered for tea on the afternoon before the shoot when an unexpected visitor enters the room: a young female mallard in the peak of condition. The wild duck\n\nshook its feathers slightly, then slowly extended one leg sideways as if in a dance movement. It then stretched one wing along the length of the leg, opening to view a patch of deep bright blue feathers barred with white which it had been concealing beneath the speckled brown of its wing. 'How beautiful,' said Olivia . . . The duck now with a surprisingly loud sputtering sound emitted a large damp dropping. Cicely giggled. The duck walked slowly forward and lowering its head began to dabble, or graze, at a Persian carpet.\n\nIn rushes the child Osbert, to whom the duck belongs, who is warned to keep his pet inside the following day. However, on the day of the shoot, Osbert's duck has escaped among the wild duck; village beaters \u2013 many of whom will soon be called up for the trenches \u2013 are in exposed positions in the wood, and a Christian activist, declaring 'Thou Shalt Not Kill', has placed himself in the path of what he calls 'the massacre'. As the child and a servant frantically search the wetlands, the rivalry between hunters becomes so fierce that they stop 'shooting like gentlemen' and just as the pet duck is found alive, a beater is accidentally shot and dies horribly.\n\nOsbert's duck \u2013 its beauty natural rather than 'civilized', its vulnerability heightened, a wild thing now dangerously too trusting \u2013 is not shot after all. But a human is \u2013 a lowly beater. How this corrupt society (de)values life is satirized by _The Shooting Party_ , especially how the domestic is servant to a (sauvage\/wild) uncivilized elite. It is a familiar theme. As early as 1884 Henrik Ibsen's play _The Wild Duck_ used the confinement of a wounded wild duck rescued by a young woman as a metaphor for frustrated domestic life. Made on the eve of the Second World War \u2013 and promptly banned by the French government as demoralizing and unpatriotic \u2013 Jean Renoir's 1939 film comedy _La R\u00e8gle du jeu (The Rules of the Game_ ) is bleak about human prospects: 'Do you like hunting?' one woman asks another, who raises a nonchalant eyebrow and shrugs no, whilst killing everything in sight. Gabriel Metsu's classic genre painting _The Sleeping Sportsman_ (Wallace Collection, London) indicates more has been going on than just hunting. Behind the dead duck hanging from the tree in the foreground are a dishevelled countrywoman and sportsman; worn out from the chase in all senses. _Vogelen_ , 'to bird', is Dutch slang for both bird hunting and copulating, and in the seventeenth century a knowing viewer would have made this association.\n\nBut who speaks for the duck? In the contemporary West, it is cartoons and children's literature. There you will find all the humour of the unstable subject. In _Duck! Rabbit! Duck!_ , a 'Merrie Melodies' cartoon of 1953, Daffy Duck removes and burns every 'Duck Season Open' sign he finds. 'I am a duck bent on self preservation', he tells the audience, challenging the hunter\/hunted order, as does Roald Dahl's 1968 story _The Magic Finger_ , in which an eight-year-old girl discovers she can 'point a magic finger' at injustices and reverse reality. A friend's family shoots ducks: outraged, she points the finger at them \u2013 they shrink and grow wings. A family of ducks gains human arms, take over their house, sleep in their beds and threaten to shoot the humans with their own guns. In Michael Bedard's _Sitting Ducks_ of 1998 (which began as a commercially successful poster before evolving into a picture book and an animated TV series), ducks roll off a factory assembly line worked by alligators. An egg drops off by accident, the emergent duckling secretly rescued by an alligator worker who at first plans to fatten it up for eating, but instead they become friends. The duck then cooks up a plan for the sitting ducks to flee Ducktown before they end up as meals. As with fairy tale, anthropomorphic humour 'points the finger' at human ironies, such as our tendency to imagine duck equally cheerily accepting its role as pet, friend or food. The duck's jolly personality disguises its oppression. Works aimed at children in particular suggest the possibility of reading domestication as not slavery but a way to _rescue_ duck from slaughter: a kind of agency-as-resignation. But how far were duck pressed into being domesticated?\n\nGabriel Metsu, _The Sleeping Sportsman_ , _c_. 1660s, oil on canvas.\n\nNeolithic cave drawings at Tajo de las Figuras in southern Spain show organized groups of hunted and possibly domesticated animals as part of a human settlement.\n\n### THE PRESSED: DOMESTICATING DUCK\n\nAt La Cueva del Tajo de las Figuras in Andalusia, Spain, among over 500 Neolithic cave drawings at least 50 of the 178 birds are ducks. The cave is just 8 km (5 miles) from the shores of Laguna de la Janda, which has always been full of waterfowl. At the entrance to the cave are figures of women, children and men, including hunters and birds, filed like neat civil service records, of how many were caught: they are standing, walking and in flight. The drawings represent bird diversity as to size, species, type and behaviour. Are these roof and wall panels not only records of hunters and hunted but also of settlements, allotments, farmers: the first step in domestication? Were some of these birds caught, owned, bred? Exchanged and traded? Could these drawings describe nomadic hunter-gatherers as they turn agriculturalists, marking out a borderline in the continuum of cultural adaptations, 8,000\u201315,000 years ago?\n\nIn the Las Figuras cave paintings there are line marks next to the rows of ducks. These juxtapose duck icons with numbers \u2013 suggesting three marks are three sets of something. Perhaps a scribe or notary marked down the weight and\/or number of the commodity, on a document held by both parties to sanction and pledge the bargain? Thus depiction links directly to domestication. _The Walking Larder's_ definition of the 'essence' of domestication is the 'capture and taming of animals with particular behaviour characteristics, their removal from their natural living area and breeding community, and their maintenance under controlled conditions for mutual benefits'. Domestication can also be defined in anthropological terms: with ducks, for example, being integrated into the socio-economic organization of human groups, as objects of ownership, inheritance, exchange and trade.\n\n  | An Egyptian poultry yard, indicating the early domestication of waterfowl, in a fragment of wall painting from a tomb, _c_. 1350 BC.\n\n---|---\n\nDisagreement persists concerning Egyptian duck domestication, with the argument that there is no definitive evidence to suggest that ducks were domesticated, though almost certainly captured and held in captivity. The large quantities of ducks that seasonally passed through Egypt as well as those that stayed all year round could lead one to conclude that the number of wild ducks was so large that augmenting this through domestication was unnecessary. Yet Diodorus Siculus, writing his exhaustive history 60\u201330 BC, contradicts this:\n\nWhat excites most our wonder and deserves the greatest praise, is the industry shown by the rearers of fowls, geese and duck, who, not contented with the course of natural procreation known in other countries, hatch an infinite number of birds by an artificial process. Dispensing with the incubation of the hens, they with their own hands bring the eggs to maturity; and the young thus produced are not inferior in any respect to those hatched by natural means.\n\nThis technique continues to be used by modern Egyptians. By country village custom, eggs are collected from the peasants and handed over to the rearers, who place them on mats strewn with bran. Merchants sell the stock, fed for the table, in market towns.\n\nEgyptian palaces, villas and even modest peasant dwellings contained poultry yards and aviaries. Old Kingdom reliefs depict some of the earliest attempts to tame and raise birds, with poultry cages, illustrated as large structures filled with cranes, ducks, geese and pigeons. Bird behaviour \u2013 fighting, pecking, strutting, preening \u2013 is often shown with humour. Since the birds in ancient Egyptian art and literature were all seed eaters or grazers, the original rationale for duck trapping may have been to stop them robbing crops. It is possible that pet ducks were even mummified, but the remains \u2013 as with those of most birds \u2013 failed to survive the 4,000 years wait for rediscovery. The Nile Valley and Delta were and remain excellent havens for birds, and migratory and non-migratory birds have long been important sources of food there. The Egyptians left many scrolls about correct ways to hunt and pen, which influenced medieval hunting.\n\nIn Europe, with the breakup of the Carolingian Empire (the fifth- to ninth-century Frankish kingdoms, now Germany and France), local lords monopolized forest reserves and small game in warrens, a practice most successful in England after the Norman Conquest and in Gascony from the twelfth century. Under these terms of ownership, the peasantry were engaged for penning, breeding and releasing harvested duck in season, but could not hunt the land themselves, poach being subject to severe punishment.\n\nIn Jan Steen's _The Poultry Yard_ (overleaf), a wealthy heiress shows off her ownership of species and breeds both long domesticated (barabantes, Breda fowl and Old Bearded Dutch) and new fangled (crested duck). Most of the ducks are white.\n\nThe trait white, a negative property in the wild, is positively valued in captivity by humans. Since it is a recessive trait, it is easy to develop a pure breeding stock of 'always sleepy' white ducks. The white duck has signed away its wildness for the tamer behaviour and weaker condition associated with un-coloured plumage. The foremost painter of hunting scenes and still-lifes of dead game in eighteenth-century France, Jean-Baptiste Oudry, combined naive naturalism with theatrical effects (as in the white-on-white composition illustrated overleaf). Purchased unseen by Oudry's patron Carl Gustav Tessin even before it could be shown in the Paris Salon of 1753, _The White Duck_ is a gorgeous example of exceptional technical skill. The other whites \u2013 candle, cloth, wooden table-altar, pomander bowl, wall \u2013 cleverly establish an argument in relative whiteness and stillness, suggesting religious refinement: duck as sacrificial object. Or perhaps mythological object: a fallen Icarus, legs and wings pointing up, neck curled in the bottom of a question mark; or erotic: a fallen sexual object, white and virginal, legs splayed to show its sex, the 'V' indent below the tail lit and painted with sensual attention to detail.\n\nYet the most carefully, beautifully placed item in the painting is the piece of paper bearing the artist's signature and date. Attached like a tag to the duck's foot by a piece of string, it floats magically above, as if the duck has only just fallen and the paper, slightly crumpled, casting a pale and blurred shadow, is still in mid-air. This duck is a fallen angel, at once gorgeously sexualized and de-sexualized, an object of impossible purity, its eyes and beak closed in beatific peace \u2013 sleeping, rather than dead. The duck and the paper have fallen together in such a way that it is as if they are still falling and always will. It is a painting engineered to show off Oudry's skills in reproducing different materials, objects and shades of white in confident, convincing perspective, cheating life and death, defeating the laws of gravity and time. Appropriately enough, since _The White Duck_ is about art and illusion, it has disappeared. Worth \u00a35 million, the painting was stolen in 1992 from Houghton Hall, home of its owner, the Marquess of Cholmondeley, who hired a former Head of Scotland Yard's Fine Art Detective Unit to track it down. Until a detective does so, one of the few places you can see this duck is in this book.\n\nJean-Baptiste Oudry's _The White Duck_ , painted in 1753 and stolen from a Norfolk country house in 1992; it is still missing.\n\n  | Jan Steen, _The Poultry Yard_ , 1660, oil on canvas.\n\n---|---\n\nMary Cassatt's 1890s print _Feeding the Ducks_.\n\nEuropean and especially British landscape and flower painters over the next three centuries produced increasingly sentimental, twee images of ducks in their natural or domesticated habitat: _Duck and Ducklings by a Pond_ by John Frederick Herring ( _c_. 1795), George Frederick Nicholls's _Gloucestershire Village_ ( _c_. 1908), Thomas MacKay's _Feeding the Ducks_ ( _c_. 1913), Edgar Hunt's _Ducks by a Pond_ ( _c_. 1922). Latterly, these ducks were generally Aylesbury ducks or 'English Whites', a breed developed in the villages of Buckinghamshire around Aylesbury. According to Victorian local historian Robert Gibbs, 'In the early years of the present [nineteenth] century, almost every householder at the \"Duck end\" of the town followed the avocation of a ducker.' The 'duck end' of town (the poorer end) encouraged disease: 'The Asiatic cholera commenced in those parts of the locality where the principal part of the sewerage of the town terminates, and open ditches existed, a large surface of stagnant water, and where ducks and other animals are kept in dwellings and on the premises of inhabitants.'\n\n  | Aylesbury duck were declared the 'universal favourite' for eating by the cook Mrs Beeton in 1859. A pair of prize-winning ducklings exhibited in 1921.\n\n---|---\n\nAylesbury ducks are large, with extremely white feathers, orange feet and pale pink beaks. They were bred to be eaten as eight- to ten-week-old ducklings, at weights of 2\u20133 kg (5\u20137 lb): hence the young were fed several times a day in their first week on eggs, toast, rice and liver, moving by the second week to a rich diet of barley meal, rice and tallow scrap ('greaves'), with some green vegetation, since without that it was observed the ducklings became giddy, fell over repeatedly and died. In their drinking water Aylesbury ducks were given grit from local flint, chalk pellets and pebbles, which gave the bills their characteristic fleshy colour. Killed on the premises, the ducklings were quickly hung upside down so the blood ran into the head, which kept the flesh white. It is not without irony, perhaps, that many of these scenes of ducks 'at home' or on ponds \u2013 so charmingly painted and photographed \u2013 may well have been the one swim the feasts-to-be ever had: 'It was a very pretty sight to see a flock of young ducklings driven along the village streets to have their one and only swim on a pond; which, taken at the right time, helped them to feather properly.'\n\nBeatrix Potter's Jemima Puddleduck is also an Aylesbury duck, by 1908 a breed in some danger. At the height of the Aylesbury duck's reputation, in the 1850s, it was said to be the tastiest in the country, and thousands were sent to London for restaurants and quilt filling. In the first edition of _The Book of Household Management_ (1859), the pioneer domestic goddess Mrs Beeton warmly recommended the killing and eating of Aylesbury ducks for the nation's gratification:\n\nThe white Aylesbury duck is, and deservedly, a universal favourite. Its snowy plumage and comfortable comportment make it a credit to the poultry yard, while its broad and deep breast, and its ample back, convey the assurance that your satisfaction will not cease at its death.\n\nIn 1880 Aylesbury Dairy Company shares were known as 'ducks' on the London Stock Exchange, but, as a cheaper market-ready duck than the 'pure-breed' Aylesbury, the 'Peking' duck had been introduced into the UK and the US from China, and crossbred with the Aylesbury. With rising duck food costs, problems arising from interbreeding, complacency and neglect (of ducks) came a decline in the Aylesbury industry, and by the Second World War most breeders had given up on it. As for duck eggs, they went out of fashion in Europe after the war, along with the egg-laying breeds of duck. Hens' eggs became mass-produced and cheap, and several notorious cases of salmonella poisoning in the 1920s had implicated the duck egg. Duck meat, however, remained as popular as it is today.\n\n  | Beatrix Potter's Jemima Puddle-duck, blissfully ignorant of the dangers of the 'foxy gentleman'.\n\n---|---\n\n'The Brigade's Ducks', a popular 1960s Chinese poster, shows children at the edge of a lake watching a plenitude of white duck.\n\nAmong others, Dutchman Constant Artz (1870\u20131952) answered the huge nineteenth-century demand for cute duck genre painting with works such as _Duck Family in a Meadow_ , _The First Swim_ and _Ducks in a Riverbank_. His birds bask in sunlight; light plays on their feathers, bathed in Impressionist splashes of yellow light, darling little ducklings bobbing in the water. The reality for the European domesticated duck was disease, forcefeeding and one swim before slaughter.\n\n### EATING DOMESTICATED DUCK\n\nFrom ancient Egypt and Rome to imperial China and Japan, in the Aztec empire, everyone everywhere ate duck. Ducks were domesticated for eggs, meat and feathers by the ancient Chinese and Maya and by early farmers in the Americas and Europe. Eating and sex are naturally analogous across many cultures' depictions of duck: Dutch genre paintings of kitchen scenes are often less a larder than an orgy of fish, fowl and meat. In these pictures, meat is a metaphor for all the pleasures of the flesh. If domestication accentuates the duck's capacity to be a symbol, then cookery accelerates this power towards a carnival chaos of symbolic capacity. Generally, if a pictured kitchen maid accepts a hunter's advances, duck will be on the menu. In Nicolaes Maes's _Woman Plucking a Duck_ , a cat stalks the dead mallard, seemingly unnoticed by the servant woman, though dishes, bowl and basket are overturned, fruit pointedly spilled on the tiled floor. The hunter's weapon leans large and erect against the wall, suggestive of direct correlations between shooting and sexual arousal, hunting and sex.\n\nSpilled fruit, the cat stalking the other dead duck, the hunter's gun against the wall \u2013 all contribute to Nicolaes Maes's allegorical _Woman Plucking a Duck_ , 1655\u20136.\n\nStretching the definition of 'hide', 19th-century hunters exploit trusting ducks in Fran\u00e7ois Grenier's print.\n\nThe eating of fertilized duck egg with a nearly developed embryo \u2013 _balut_ \u2013 meaning 'wrapped' in Filipino, known in China as _maodan_ (literally 'hairy egg'), has been common practice since the sixteenth century: Filipinos, Chinese, Cambodians and Laotians eat it as a street snack, or in the best restaurants. _Balut_ is sold all the time and everywhere on streets, at stalls, outside movie houses, nightclubs or discos, in markets; by vendors walking, sitting or squatting, at midnight and early dawn, at breakfast, lunch and dinner time. The newly cooked _balut_ are sold with twists of rock salt in baskets covered with cloth to keep them warm. _Balut_ has an important role in Asian culture, where \u2013 perhaps because the egg is a fertility symbol \u2013 fertilized duck egg is thought to improve the male sex drive; in Filipino: _para lang sa lalaki ito_ (it is just for men). Socio-cultural factors dominate its consumption. Men down two or three hot boiled eggs with cognac, drinking the egg white and quickly crunching the bones, feathers and beak of the foetus chick. Anthropologists suggest that 'machismo' arrived with the Spanish invasion of 1521 and that _balut's_ sexual connotation and promise of aphrodisiac properties derive from this, but local beliefs about its power also apply to women.\n\nA fifteen-day _Balut_ egg boiled for a quarter of an hour shows the duck foetus floating in hot sauce and patis.\n\nConsuming ducks' eggs and meat continues to relate to sexual health. The Jin-Ling black-beaked duck \u2013 a small, upstanding hybrid between the 'rare medical duck seeds of China and wild duck' \u2013 has been used to help relax the nerves, beautify the countenance and protect the liver, spleen and stomach since the Yuan Dynasty (1279\u20131368). Today, this duck, bred by the Nanjing Livestock and Poultry Research Institute for modern science and technology, of 'original and delicious taste' can\n\nprevent hepatitis, unknown fever, measles and so on . . . anchor your vim, keep your energy, nourish your marrow, accelerate your circulation of blood and make you stronger and cleverer than before . . . the refined product from the duck is useful for male impotence and the female menopause . . .\n\nPeking duck, introduced into the UK and USA from China, became the most popular duck among diners. |\n\n---|---\n\nIn ancient times duck meat was reserved for emperors. Peking duck is a famous duck dish from north-eastern China, still popular in Chinese restaurants around the world, and probably the best-known duck recipe, as the court dish of the Northern Song Dynasty (960\u20131127). First, the fresh plucked duck is inflated, separating the skin from the body (this was done by blowing through a straw by someone with strong lungs in ancient times). Boiling water is poured over the duck, hung up to dry overnight. Next day the skin may be brushed with honey before roasting in a hot oven for one or two hours. The bird is shredded, slivers of crisp skin and meat placed in the centre of a thin pancake with strips of cucumber, spring onions and a thick soy sauce, rolled up, and eaten with the fingers. A soup made with cabbage and the carcass may be drunk at the end of the meal. In 1873 a Yankee clipper reached Long Island carrying nine Peking ( _Anas platyrynchos_ or white mallard) ducks taken aboard in China. It is said that from these nine all the millions of Peking ducks in the US today are descended. The Peking is sturdy, tasty, juicy and \u2013 given that ducks generally have dark meat \u2013 has relatively light flesh.\n\nForcible feeding of poultry in Egypt, from a tomb at saqqara of _c_. 2,000 BC.\n\nA can of _foie gras_ , now part of the protected gastronomic inheritance of France.\n\nThe cultivation of the duck's own liver for _foie gras_ (literally, 'fat liver') goes back to Egyptian antiquity, and the Romans force fed ducks with figs. The Roman emperor Heliogabalus allegedly fed his dogs on _foie gras_ during the four years of his chaotic reign. References to _foie gras_ appear in numerous Roman sources such as Cato, Martial, Pliny, Horace and Apicius, the last a fourth-century gourmet credited with compiling the only extant Roman cookbook. After the fall of the Roman empire, the tradition was preserved by the Jews, who carried the knowledge of _foie gras_ with their migrations north and east to Europe. Penned birds were fed by scattering grain inside their enclosure, but there is also evidence that they were hand or force fed, to fatten or enlarge their livers, a practice familiar in France since medieval times, originating in the Perigord region. Probably farmed first by the Amerindians of the southern shores of the Caribbean and Peru, the muscovy duck has been cross-bred since the mid-nineteenth century across France, Israel, Taiwan, Australia and South Africa with other domestic ducks to producing sterile offspring \u2013 'mules' or mulards \u2013 which mature quickly and taste excellent. In France and Israel muscovy cross-breeds are bred commercially for _foie gras_ as well as for breast fillets weighing 400 g (13 oz) each.\n\nLarge white mallard ducks with black flecks bred around Rouen, the so-called 'Barbary' species, _canard mulard_ or _canard clair_ , are the authentic breed used to make the locally renowned _foie de canard._ After fourteen weeks free-range existence, by seventeen weeks ducklings at Le Ferme des Roumevies in St-Cr\u00e9pin-et-Carlucet are dead meat. Tourists can visit the farm's pens, laboratory and workshop, for cooking tips and the tasting of different products. Twice a day, morning and evening, the birds are fed boiled corn from a mechanical feeder in the traditional funnel-shape, with a human feeder massaging their throat, enabling them to eat at first 250 g (9 oz), eventually 1 kg (2 lb) a day. Kept in large purpose-built pens, the ducks drink thirstily after _gavage._ To say ducks are naturally greedy is hopelessly short of the truth. Johnsgard noted a single wild Falkland flightless steamer duck ( _Tachyeres brachypterus_ ) with more than 450 mussel shells in its crop and stomach \u2013 this was a record, but perhaps there is truth in the argument French farmers make: namely, that if ducks could find in a day all the grain they are force fed under _gavage,_ they'd eat it anyway.\n\nOnce the ducks achieve optimum size \u2013 still judged by hand by feeling the underside \u2013 they are killed instantly by electrocution, hung upside down and plucked by machine. Down and feathers are collected for duvets, cushions and linings. The birds are sterilized rapidly and cooked or conserved in various ways, then packed in sterile tins for immediate distribution. The process can, of course, be speeded up still further \u2013 industrial battery farming, castrated duck, hormones to increase growth, force-feeding with flour \u2013 though the French insist this produces _un monstre de natur_. Chef Paul Aussignac of Club Gascon in London feels intensive production does not create good quality foie _gras_ (or anything else) and artisanal, free-range husbandry renders the mechanical horrors of _gavage_ unnecessary. Feelings run high in the farming communities of France about EU laws insisting mechanical gavage is more sanitary than hand-feeding. In October 2005, amid fears that animal rights activists would try to ban it completely, _foie gras_ was declared a national treasure. _'Foie gras_ belongs to the protected cultural and gastronomical heritage of France' states the French Rural Code. The ethics of the practice remain controversial: to date it has already been banned in some twenty countries, including Israel, despite the key role the Jewish diaspora played in the spread of force-feeding throughout Europe. The EU Scientific Committee Report of 1998 concluded force-feeding was detrimental to the welfare of birds, but this has since been contested by American Veterinary Medical Association research, which found no evidence of stress and warned against unnecessary anthropomorphism. The reluctant compromise is that the force-feeding of animals for non-medical purposes has been prohibited by the EU since 1999, _except where it is in current practice._ Nowadays, around 20,000 tons of _foie gras_ are produced worldwide. The French contribute 70 per cent of this and make up 85 per cent of its global consumption, with Hungary, Bulgaria, the US, Canada and China as smaller producers and consumers.\n\n  | Poster for Anti-Gavage Campaign, 2007, describing _foie gras_ production as a unique tragedy.\n\n---|---\n\n### DUCK _PRESS\u00c9_\n\nIf 'one man's meat is another man's poison', this is certainly true of ducks. Ancient alchemists prized duck for its poisonous, medicinal and aphrodisiac properties. Pliny describes some 54 different poisons, including the following: 'The blood of a duck found in a certain district of Pontus, which was supposed to live on poisonous food, afterwards used in the preparation of the Mithridatum (antidote), because it fed on poisonous plants and suffered no harm.' Ironically, Mithridates tried to commit suicide by poison and it failed, perhaps due to this antidote, so he made a soldier stab him to death.\n\nIn the Far East black pudding or blood tofu is traditionally made with duck's blood, and in Europe's East, 'Czarnina', or duck's blood soup, is an old Polish recipe used at Easter. Since the case of three brothers who contracted bird flu after sharing the Vietnamese delicacy of raw duck's meat and blood, the World Health Organization (WHO) advises against eating such meals; a recommendation that may also affect the future of _canard press\u00e9_ (squeezing the blood out of a duck carcass with a special press to make consomm\u00e9).\n\n_Press\u00e9_ is the most pressed a duck can become. For the European gourmand the most famous place to eat _canard press\u00e9_ is the Tour d'Argent in Paris, an exclusive restaurant that keeps a record of every duck. In 1582 this elegant inn on the Seine opened its doors to the aristocracy and soon became so popular that duels were fought to get a table. The duck are from Ch\u00e2lons in the Vend\u00e9e: the inhabitants \u2013 _maraichins,_ descendents of Spanish emigrants \u2013 captured and domesticated marshland birds, and from them bred the Chalandais duck, as they still do. In the 1800s the great _maitre d'hotel_ Fr\u00e9d\u00e9ric created the ritual of _canard au sang a l'orange,_ and decreed that each duck cooked be registered, since when every order is served with a card stating your duck's number. Thus no. 328 went to the Prince of Wales, later Edward VII, in 1890, while Emperor Hirohito ate no. 53211 in 1921. If you choose duck there today with a friend rich enough to join you, the _commis_ will write 'one duck for two' on the blackboard and a _canardier_ will weigh a duck arrived that morning from Ch\u00e2lons. Tour d'Argent describes the process on a webpage titled: 'His Majesty the Duck':\n\n  | The duck-press and numbered duck order from the Paris restaurant La Tour d'Argent, in a 1920s postcard.\n\n---|---\n\nOn the eve, in spite of its youth, or rather because of its very youth (from 6\u201310 weeks), the poor bird was unfeelingly strangled, then plucked by its assassins. Here, it has already been roasted 20 or so minutes. The _canardier_ dashes away to present it to the guest before the ritual sacrifice . . . In three strokes of a razor-sharp blade, a fat duck, roasted 'a la gouette de sang' skewered on the end of a fork, [is] skilfully sliced into two portions: on one side, the wings and legs, on the other, the body. Then . . . the magic potion, cognac and madeira, are poured into a consomm\u00e9 of what is left of the duck's carcass, to impregnate a finely chopped liver. A drop of lemon juice, and finally, the juice from the press. Beat well, keeping time to the formula: at least 25 minutes. This is the time it takes the aiguillettes to transform. With 'souffl\u00e9s' potatoes, it is a supreme dish. Later, the legs are served, well broiled with salad. This duck, still proposed at the Tour d'Argent, has made its way around the world.\n\nThis is the supreme irony: duck making its way 'around the world' not on the wing, but on the Internet, via a restaurant's reputation.\n\nSince ancient times duck has been a valued food commodity across the globe. Perhaps humans still have idealized images of wild duck flying across the world, hunted fairly, trapped without cruelty but, just as ducks are taken in by decoys, so are we trapped in our cultural and social nets. The history of hunting cannot be separated from human\u2013animal interactions, humanity and animality, nature and culture. Though hunting still requires some knowledge of 'free' nature, duck is easily domesticated to live among us 'as if' wild: in sanctuaries, parks, on farms, stately homes, even in our gardens as pets. Domesticated duck farmed to eat has been 'pressed' into a further compromised and contradictory relationship with us, via force-feeding to factory farming: that of a life caged 'inside' in the dark, hidden to the outdoor world until it becomes meat. 'Eat vegetables and fear no creditors, rather than eat duck and hide', goes a cautious Hebrew proverb. A duck's worth is still considerable. According to the World of Cherry Valley, the UK'S largest duck farming company:\n\nA futuristic vision of the 1970s that shows ducklings being reared in an incubator. This is now common practice, although the treatment of factory farmed duck has its critics.\n\nduck can make a valuable contribution to alleviating the world's shortage of protein . . . helping to conserve the world's diminishing resources, for virtually everything from the feathers to the feet can be turned into profit. The liver, the tongue and even the feet all find a ready market, while the world demand for feathers is increasing so rapidly that the net return from this byproduct is alone sufficient to pay the labour costs of a processing plant. So nothing about a Cherry Valley duckling is unsaleable \u2013 not even the quack.\n\n## 3 The Duck's Quack\n\nWind and rain are on the way if ducks hiss and quack more than usual.\n\nEnglish superstition\n\nBy noting down their business transactions trappers and traders, converting wild ducks into commodities, oversaw the birth of the duck as symbol. Pai Ta-shun calls ducks 'runes' in his poem 'Wildfowl':\n\nDark flying rune against the western glow,\n\nIt tells of the sweep and loneliness of things,\n\nSymbol of Autumns vanished long ago,\n\nSymbol of coming Springs.\n\nIn fact, the duck features repeatedly in sacred carvings, and not just as itself. Student scribes in Egypt drew practice hieroglyphs on stones called _ostraca_ (cheaper than papyrus, which needed special preparation). Once trained and skilled, they continued to sketch or doodle cartoons for some of the more elaborate hieroglyphs.\n\nThough linguists argue that the relationship between the signifier and the signified is 'arbitrary' (e.g. that the word 'tree' is not tree-like in sound), this does not appear to be true of duck. Duck seems to be a non-arbitrary name, based on duck sound and action. A _duck_ in English is a word for a swimming bird, from the Old English _duce_ mixed with _ducan,_ meaning to dive or duck down. In Middle English the word became _douke_ , _doke_ or _dukke_ from the Norse, meaning doll or baby. Middle Low German is _duken,_ Dutch _duiken,_ Middle High German _tucken,_ Old High German _tuhhan_ and modern German _Tauchen_ and _Ducken._ Words for 'duck' are musical and onomatopoeic in many languages: _mitiq_ in Inupia (an Eskimo language), _ordek_ in Turkish, _batakh_ in Urdu, _pato-itik_ in Cebuano (from the Philippines) and _bata-miti rangi-mbili_ in Swahili. In hieroglyphic dictionaries we find, as well as definitions, suggested pronunciations of various duck hieroglyphs. As sound and icon slip past simile towards metaphor, the ducks vanish into the air.\n\nEvidence of a scribe having practised drawing the duckling hieroglyph, which was used for writing 'Prime Minister'. Hieroglyphs, as signs with a pictorially 'similar' value (ideograms) acted like sounds (phonograms) or similes (such as, to alight 'like a duck'). |\n\n---|---\n\nThere are schools of thought that maintain that language began with metaphor. 'Figurative language was the first to be born; proper meanings were the last to be found. If the first metaphor was animal, it was because the essential relationship between man and animal was metaphoric.' In one of the most influential studies on animal language, the Gardners' work with chimpanzees, a now famous experiment appears. To 'name' the first duck she saw to humans teaching her sign language, the chimp Washoe signed 'water + bird'. Of course, this does not tell us what 'duck' is in chimp, since she was doing it to communicate to the linguists she was working with, but it was a 'novel combination', just as humans are capable of making. In fact, what follows is a near-exhaustive list of human novel combinations across the Anglophone world, in response to the word 'duck'. These fall into categories; the first of which, like Washoe, links duck to liquid pursuits:\n\nThe duckling hieroglyph. The solar disc is a title of the king, the duck hieroglyph means both 'duck' and 'son'; therefore 'Son of Re'.\n\nThe ancient game of 'ducks and drakes' or 'Menicus Felix: a kind of sport or play with an oister shell or a stone throwne into the water, and making circles yer it sink, &c. It is called a duck and a drake, and a halfe-penie cake', and is still played today by anyone throwing a flat stone obliquely to skim and rebound repeatedly from the water's surface:\n\nIf the stone skims only once, it is a duck;\n\ntwice: a duck and a drake, thrice, and a half-penny cake;\n\nfour times: and a penny to pay the old baker;\n\nfive times, a hop and a scotch, is another notch;\n\nsix times, slitherum, slitherum, take her.\n\n  | The 'ducking-stool', a test or punishment for witches. Note the ducks upstream observing human cruelty.\n\n---|---\n\nSign for _The Dog and Duck_ , a famous pub in London's Soho. |\n\n---|---\n\nWhile a ducking-stool proved a woman was a witch (or that she was not, if she drowned), 'ducking' could also be drinking: to _drink with the ducks_ is to drown in the sea: 'A goodly number would drink their grog with the Ducks tomorrow morning.' _Drunk as a duck_ is very drunk: 'He's drunk as a duck and don't give a quack.'\n\nEnglish inns and pubs have been named after ducks since _The Dog and Duck_ signalled a hunter's stop in the fifteenth century. Guy Fawkes met the other gunpowder plotters at _The Duck and Drake_ on The Strand in London; _The Dirty Duck,_ a well-known actors' pub in Shakespeare's Stratford, provides the title of a crime novel by Martha Grimes that explores the bloodier side of Elizabethan verse. The disciplinary court of the British Stock Exchange from 1815 to 1870 was called the _Duckery,_ while George Godfrey records the terms _to duck it, lame duck_ and _waddle out as a lame duck_ in his 1828 autobiography; such expressions were probably then carried by colonists, emigr\u00e9s or deportees to Australia, flowering into fresh local idiom. Sailors or marines are still derisively referred to as _ducks_ or _duckboys:_ 'You'll find the ducks in the bar.' But there are other possible routes of derivation: Harrow School's swimming pool was known as the _duck paddle_ or _ducker_ until 1878; a _ducker_ was also a sporting dive. Watery vocabulary is awash with duck terms, _duck diving_ is a surfing term for pushing down on the beak and tail of a surfboard, going beneath a breaking wave. In Australian and New Zealand English \u2013 though of Irish origin \u2013 _duck weather_ is very wet ('fine weather for ducks' is an ironic UK English phrase for the same). In France when freezing cold, _il fait un froid de canard,_ and drenched to the skin is _trempe comme un canard._\n\n  | The first successful seaplane was Henri Fabre's 'Le Canard'. Flown by its inventor at Martigues in France, the biplane's first flight in 1910 was 503 metres (1,650 feet).\n\n---|---\n\nFrequently implying sexual derogation, duck idiom often satirizes gaming or play linked to masculine pursuits. Despite this, the overwhelming majority of metaphors stem from the collective noun or singular female 'duck', not the male 'drake'. The second category continues an already emerging masculine tone, drawing from military and sporting usage. A significant number of duck metaphors originate in military terms: in the First World War a two or a deuce in poker was a _duck_ ; _duck-shovelling_ was to pass the buck; a _duck slop jar, glass duck_ or _piss duck_ was a hospital bedpan; a _duck butt_ was a lighted cigarette stub; and _shooting ducks_ was the action of relighting a previously extinguished cigarette butt: 'Duck that butt'. ( _Duck buddies_ shared their butt ends.) _Duck cloth_ is the hardwearing cotton canvas that sea bags and boat covers were made of. _Duckboard_ is military planking, as found in the trenches; a _duckboard harrier_ was a messenger; a _duckboard glide_ an after-dark movement along a trench. By the Second World War a _duck_ was a sailor's uniform and an amphibious aircraft, or an aeroplane that was old and unreliable: 'This duck is about to fall apart!' S _ea-going ducks_ were the enormous, cargo-carrying vehicles that unloaded ships, from the official acronym DUKW (the factory serial letters, combined, for boat, D, lorry body, U, and lorry chassis, KW). The Commando Armoured Car was nicknamed 'the Duck'. In army slang, to have _duck's disease_ is to be short, a _duck shoot_ is a simple operation, a _sitting duck_ an easy target, a _dead duck_ a craft dead in the water, a _duck pond_ is a bathing place for cadets and a _column of ducks_ is a line of soldiers.\n\nMany of these alliterative, rhyming or onomatopoeic expressions may use the term 'duck' because of how satisfying it is phonetically: _ducks and drakes_ is the shakes in Australian rhyming slang, _ducks and geese_ the police, a _duck's neck_ a cheque. A _blue duck_ is a dud; _couldn't head a duck_ is how you insult a racehorse. A _lame duck_ cannot or will not pay his losses: 'He'll have to waddle out of the alley like a lame duck.' A _dying duck_ or a _duck in a thunderstorm_ is a crestfallen sight. To _duck the scone_ is to plead guilty in court; _duck-shoving_ is fighting for status; _shove that against your duck-house_ is idiom for point scoring. A duck can be a loser in any sport: 'I'm embarrassed to get in the ring with this unrated duck', Muhammad Ali said of Willi Besmanoff in a Louisville TV programme before their heavyweight title fight in 1961. In radio and TV sports commentary, taking an idea from the fairground, to line one's ducks up is to be prepared, to have a strategy: 'He's lining up his ducks for his next move'; 'I bet he's got all his ducks in a row.' The terms _duck_ or _goose egg_ \u2013 indicating the zero shape \u2013 are obsolete in US English, but in the UK a _duck_ can be a no-score in cricket, when you're out without making runs. If you're out very first ball, it's a _golden duck,_ so some players wear ties proudly patterned with ducks.\n\nThe third category is sexual, on a continuum from affectionate to obscene usage. In Geoffrey Chaucer's dream poem _The Parliament of Fowles_ , a huge gathering of bird species debates, on Valentine's Day, attitudes to love. Conflicting authorities are addressed, in 'huge noyse', full of discord and complaint. The poem, written between 1373 and 1385, is thought to be an allegorical metaphor of the social discontents that gave rise to the Peasants' Revolt in 1381. But the duck has a comic role, interrupting matters with an apparently nonsense commentary irrelevant to the argument: 'That men shulde loven alwey causeles!\/ Who can a resoun fynde or wit in that?\/ Daunseth he murye that is myrtheles?\/ Who shulde recche of that is recheles?' Moll Flanders goes into the streets of seventeenth-century London, not at night like any common prostitute, but in the beautifully ambiguous 'duck of an evening'.\n\nA century and a half later Dickens was a frequent duck metaphorist, though he uses it so lightly the reader can pass by without noticing. In _Barnaby Rudge_ they are comic relief: 'Good night, noble captain', whispered the blind man \u2013 'Good luck go with you for a conceited, bragging, empty-headed, duck-legged idiot.' In _The Pickwick Papers_ they are parodie reportage: during a court proceeding in which Sergeants Buzzfuzz and Snubbins interrogate witnesses in the incomprehensible vocabulary of the constabulary, Susannah Sanders is forced under oath to admit:\n\nDuring the period of her keeping company with Mr Sanders, [she] had received love letters, like other ladies. In the course of their correspondence Mr Sanders had often called her a 'duck', but never 'chops', nor yet 'tomato sauce'. He was particularly fond of ducks. Perhaps if he had been as fond of chops and tomato sauce, he might have called her that, as a term of affection.\n\nDickens exposes how terms of endearment can turn sinister, as in _The Old Curiosity Shop_ , where the dwarf Quilp refers to the lovely child Nell as 'dainty duck' and 'my duck of diamonds', a duck ornament he covets and keeps while she weeps for her dying father. In modern UK English a duck can be a fine example of something: 'Oh, isn't he the duck of a fellow?' A _duck of diamonds_ is the best, as is the _duck's quack. Duck Soup_ \u2013 besides being the title of well-known comedies by Laurel and Hardy in 1927 and the Marx Brothers in 1933 \u2013 is anything easy, a guaranteed success. 'I went a-ducking with my duck' is to go courting with a sweetheart. Though Henry VIII'S letter to Anne Boleyn uses _duckys_ to mean her breasts \u2013 'whose pritty duckys I trust shortly to kysse' \u2013 _ducky,_ slang from 1897, expressed general fondness, especially as still used in the East Midlands of England: 'Isn't that ducky?' 'How are you, duckie?' 'Alright, me duck?' By the early twentieth century, in Australian English, it had become male and sarcastic \u2013 'Isn't that a ducky pair of shorts?' \u2013 and a similar usage is found in present-day gay communities, often for exaggerated, camp irony. This may carry crudely homophobic overtones: 'Watch your ass: there's duck dudes round here', and _duck_ became US slang for 'gay'. In Mandarin Chinese a duck or _yazi_ is a male prostitute. Yet, as noted in the categories above, many duck metaphors are associated with the seemingly manlier pursuits of competitive sports and military action. What begins to be apparent is how untrustworthy duck idiom is, how it itself ducks fixed categories of meaning.\n\nUS slang has a _duckbutt_ as a runt; a _duck's ass_ (or _DA_ ) a 1950s haircut; _a duck-fucker_ a loafer or lout (named after the man who looked after the poultry on a warship); a _duck fit_ is a tantrum; a _duck fart_ the plop of a stone falling into water; the exclamation 'Fuck a duck!' expresses astonishment; the _duckpond_ is the vagina; _duck butter_ is smegma, semen or sweat around the male genitals; to _stick the duck in the mud_ is a (male) plan to have sex.\n\nSome duck metaphors remain elusive. If _duck green_ is the bright green of duckweed, _duck-egg blue,_ the palest, purest light greenish-blue thought by some to be the colour of infinity, perhaps refers back to those myths of a world created from a cosmic duck's egg. In Caribbean Hinglish _duck-pickneys_ are ducklings: the expression 'Hen 'gree fe hatch duck egg, but him no 'gree fe teck duck-pickney fe swim' ('Hen may have agreed to hatch duck's egg, but did not agree to take the ducklings swimming') ironically queries family expectations and arrangements. So wide-ranging are these many meanings, common-sense guesses at lost colloquialisms are simply impossible. In the colloquial Anglo-Indian of 1787 one purwannah of Tipoo Sultan declared: 'We have fixed the produce of each vine at four ducks of wet pepper.' What on earth _these_ ducks might have been \u2013 sacks? buckets? ducats? \u2013 is lost to us.\n\nIn South Africa to 'duck in the green curtains' is to sleep on the slopes of Table Mountain.\n\nIn Farrukh Dhondy's 1990 novel _Bombay Duck_ , a black Jamaican is taken by an Indian friend to London's Brick Lane Market, famous for its curry houses:\n\nHe comes back with this thing which looked like the penis of an opened-up mummy I saw in a museum once. 'Your Bombay duck,' and he pops it on the table. 'I said duck, man, not shrivelled insoles.' The thing was stinking. Anjali was looking amused . . . 'We Indians call that duck. Bombay duck.' Smell like salt fish gone bad. 'That's what it is. Try it.' Bwoy, I was too polite to say what it taste like. A fish called duck, cool, well, you live and learn, boss.\n\nBombay duck is 'a fish called duck': a small marine lizard fish native to Bombay abundant in the Ganges delta and Arabian Sea, dried and salted whole or filleted, used as a relish, especially with curry. Locally (in Hindi) the fish is known as 'bombil', 'bomnaloe macchi' or 'bummalo': there are various stories how it came to be 'Bombay duck', either, during the Raj, the Victorian British were embarrassed at the rude-sounding 'bummalo' or:\n\nBombay duck, actually a deep sea lizard fish ( _Bathysaurus ferox_ ). |\n\n---|---\n\nwhen the British introduced the railway system to western India under their Raj, it started going in wagonloads to the interior from Bombay. The crates stank of fish, like stale penises. They were marked 'Bambay Dak', literally 'Bombay Mail'. At the time the railway was run by whiteys. The English may call a spade a spade but they don't call 'stinking fish' by that name. They referred to it euphemistically as Bombay Dak.\n\nDhondy uses Bombay duck as an extended metaphor to expose British hypocrisy or sexual, cultural and linguistic double standards; 'spade' being a racist term for Blacks of African origin. As further irony, Bombay duck was banned for a while by the European Commission, because it is dried in the open air \u2013 since reprieved for export to the UK if sealed in approved packing stations.\n\nThe final category has 'ducking' as a special kind of moving, a furtive, ironic 'slip' between one thing and another (arguably, just as metaphor works). As Milton put it: 'Here be, without duck or nod \/ Other trippings to be trod.' It can mean a slight bow: 'The learned pate ducks to the golden fool', said Shakespeare. In plain verb usage, 'to duck' means a sudden inclination of the head or body, resembling the motion of a duck in water. To _duck_ something is to avoid it: 'We made an excuse for duckin' church'; in the army to _duck a detail_ is to shirk work; Cockney _duck and dive_ rhymes with 'skive'; to _duck someone_ is to avoid them surreptitiously: 'We meets Charlie ducking into a beanery', 'Come on, quick, let's duck!' In espionage a _duck dive_ is a period of bad mistakes; to _duck out_ is to escape capture. A dark corner is a _duck_ to hustlers \u2013 an easy place to rob; to _do a duck_ or _play the duck_ or _fake the duck_ is to leave without or avoid paying a fare; to _cop a duck_ is to lay low, out of sight. The duck's own movement \u2013 waddling \u2013 is part of this comic word-play: the Vietnamese have idioms for being 'duck-legged', _baata_ is duck in Bantu (a group of languages of Central and Southern Africa) and _baatabaat_ to waddle like a duck; in Italian _caminare come un anatra._ In German _Blaue, felte Ente_ is false or unfounded information used in journalism; in French, _un canard_ can be a lump of sugar soaked in coffee or alcohol, a slip or mistake, inaccurate information or a hoax: _Le Canard enchaine_ is a satirical newspaper, _lancer des canards_ is to tell trumped-up stories, _vendre un canard a moiti\u00e9_ is to 'half-sell a duck', in other words, to cheat.\n\nCross-Euro duck metaphors: the (French) Citro\u00ebn 2CV car is (to the Dutch) _een eend_ (a duck).\n\nIn parallel to the extraordinary diversity of human idioms about duck, the voices of actual duck vary enormously, hence the challenge in describing them. Modern scientists use the language of comic-strip onomatopoeia to describe the male musk duck's extraordinary courtship display: 'He also produces a variety of sounds during these PADDLE-KICK, PLONK-KICK, and WHISTLE-KICK displays, including KER-PLONKS . . . Both sexes of whistling ducks utter a clear, multisyllabic whistle . . . including a whirring sound produced by the wings in flight.'\n\nPublished almost a century earlier, John C. Phillips's _A Natural History of the Ducks_ is an impressive collection of amateur naturalist observations, revealing the tendency for humans to anthropomorphize onomatopoeically duck voice descriptions, from the 'South-south-southerly' song of the old squaw to the scoter who 'whistle with their wings' and make 'the sound of water dropping into a cavern: \"puk-puk\"'. Golden-eye are also called merry-wing, rattle-wing or jingler in English, _Klangente, Klingelente, Klapperente_ in German or _morillon sonneur_ in French because of the loud humming or whistling sound the narrowed web the last two primaries (ten outer quills in each wing) make as the drakes fly. Fulvous duck apparently make un-duck-like reedy whistles or flocking calls, described by Gibson in 1920 as 'the crackling of rain upon a hot iron-plate', modifying their voices almost like singing birds and responding to imitations of their call-notes. _Dendrocygna bicolor_ (the fulvous whistling duck) is called _pata quiriri_ in Spain, _vis-sisi_ in Guiana, _g\u00fciriri_ in Venezuela and _tsiriry_ in its native home, Madagascar; it is said to call 'pyswy-pyswy'. The notes of the teal are variously translated as: 'ek-ek', 'kup-kup', ruck-ruck', 'wot-wot-wot', 'mok-mok', even 'tick-tick' or 'clock-clock', or a creaking call like the 'low soft whine of a little puppy'. For the male steamer duck the range is from 'rasping grunts' via 'mechanical ticking' to 'whistle-like sibilant grunts'. In 1909 R. Hall described the same species of duck (freckled) with a voice like 'the grunt of a Berkshire pig' _and_ 'the mewing of a cat'. Harlequin ducks squeak like mice. Eider hoot like owls. The gentle voice of pochard, a 'soft, liquid, several syllabled utterance in chorus', is a call also described as 'somewhat like a man affected with asthma told by the doctor to take a deep breath'.\n\n  | A Peking duck's beak wide open, showing tooth-like ridges and tongue.\n\n---|---\n\nThomas Eyton's drawings of duck trachea, showing the ossified enlargements at the union between the trachea and the bronchi, or 'bulla', which acts as a resonating body for sound production. |\n\n---|---\n\nThe lists of duck sounds are clearly endless, but how does the creature manage this diversity of repertoire? Watch closely and you'll see the whole diaphragm move with a duck's voice, like an opera singer. That is why the duck can laugh (open beak laughs). Though the quack sound is overwhelmingly what ornithologists concentrate on, duck noise is actually made by the whole of a duck's body: it clicks, tuts, whispers, grinds, hisses, quacks and squawks with the beak from shut to wide open; caresses, curls, twists and taps with the head and neck; rustles, whirrs, hums and beats with the feathers on closed, outstretched or flying wings; fans and shakes the tail feathers; flaps and slaps with webbed, waddling feet. Duck's elemental association with water repeats in idiom across many languages: taking to it as well 'as a duck to water'; things roll off 'like water off a duck's back'. Many of the noisier duck sounds are made with water: dabbling, splashing, washing, shaking, swimming, up-ending, diving, popping back up, defecating with a loud liquid squelch. One might say the duck has verbal diarrhoea.\n\n  | _'Anas_ tetrinnit', or _'The Duck quack-eth',_ from an early schoolbook.\n\n---|---\n\nKonrad Lorenz listed a number of categories of voice in 1953 based on mallard: 'inciting' ( _queg-geg-geg-geg_ ), the 'decrescendo' or 'hail call' to attract ( _quack-quack_ ), the whole performance of display, _rabrab palavar,_ post-copulatory 'whistle', persistent quacking before laying, harsh _queggeggegegqueggegeg_ or 'scolding' _gaeck_ sounds to repulse unwanted male harassment, _tocka-ta-tockata_ feeding sounds, auditory imprinting with _gn-gn'gn_ and _quai-quai,_ and _peep_ cries from the young. Ducklings utter longer distress cries when wet, hungry, cold, alarmed or separated. Lorenz called this a 'whistle of desertion' and believed the male _raehb_ note developed ontogenetically from this call. Less recorded than the louder duck sounds made in flight, display, mating or behaviour when excited or disturbed are the quiet, intimate sounds intended for the close group. The duck has an exquisite repertoire of subtle sounds \u2013 it even talks in its sleep.\n\n'With a quack-quack here, a quack-quack there,\/ Here a quack, there a quack,\/Everywhere a quack-quack,\/Old MacDonald had a farm. ee-i, ee-i, o!' Things are patently not this simple: 'quacking' can be many things, most often scornful, linked, perhaps, to how a duck's quacking often sounds like derisory laughter to humans. Leonard Woolf's indictment of fascism and militant nationalism, _Quack! Quack!_ , was described by Virginia Woolf as 'a very spirited attack upon human nature'. Published by the couple at the Hogarth Press in 1935, the book uses 'quacking' as equivalent to anti-Semitic ranting. Woolf demonstrates what he thinks of speeches and pamphlets by Hitler and Mussolini by ending quotes with two derisory words: 'Quack, quack!' Muriel Sparks's 1960 _Ballad of Peckham Rye_ has a wife dare to say 'That's how _you_ go quacking on' to her self-important husband, with fatal results. Though George Orwell's _1984_ labels _Duckspeak_ as quacking like a duck without thinking (as it is used in computer science), _duck typing_ has recently developed as a term for the dynamic systems of some programming languages.\n\nAs is already evident, onomatopoeia is fundamental to duck's language history. Yet the sounds that humans _attribute_ to duck are not rigorously scientific. The French \u2013 in different contexts \u2013 hear _coin-coin, couin-coiun, couan-couan, couean-couean_ or even _can-can._ Typically, a rhythmic pair of strongly onomatopoeic words emerges: _cac-cac_ (Vietnamese), _kac-kac_ (Czech), _quack-quack_ (English), _qua-qua_ (Italian), _couak-couak_ (Arabic), _kwek-kwek_ (Dutch), _kvakk-kvakk_ (Norwegian), _kva-kva_ (Slovakian), _kwa-kwa_ (Hebrew), _krya-kyra_ (Russian), _kwrk-kwrk_ (Mongolian), _kkoyk-kkoyk_ (Korean), _gaab-gaab_ (Thai), _ga-ga_ (Slovenian), _gaa-gaa_ (Japanese), _gua-gua_ (Chinese), _gack-gack_ (Bengali), _graz-graz_ (Spanish), _gik-gak_ (Esperanto), _rap-rap_ (Danish), _hap-hap_ (Hungarian), _hat-hat_ (Iroquie), _mak-mak_ (Albanian), _vak-vak_ (Turkish), _sisip_ (Cree).\n\nFor centuries, composers from Mozart to Stravinsky and Satie have been inspired by birdsong: for Olivier Messiaen, its transcription and mimicry was a central project. For works such as the _Catalogue d'oiseaux_ , completed in 1958, and _La Fauvette des jardins_ of 1971, Messiaen was considered a more conscientious ornithologist than any previous composer, and a more musical observer of birdsong than any previous ornithologist. More recently, 'natural sound' music uses digital recordings of birds in their natural habitat to form 'audio collages'. Contemporary composer John Levack Drever's _Quack Composition for The Quack-Project_ features ducks quacking and children imitating them, then cut, pasted and mixed as looped rhythmic parts that still sound individual and unique: 'The extra-musical interest was the dialogue between human and animal, and the sounds that fall somewhere in-between.' Players of the _The Quack-Project_ can click on the duck icon to place them in the field where they will make a sound according to the chosen language, thereby creating compositions from duck sounds as they manifest in different languages spoken across London; a visual and aural reminder and celebration of the verbal, tonal and melodic diversity of kingdoms human and animal. Duck have different dialects too.\n\nA screen-grab from _The Quack-Project_ , a work by the author, which plays with onomatopoeic words that humans give to animal sounds. |\n\n---|---\n\nBut the finest \u2013 and most utopian \u2013 example of musical duck metaphor in composed music is Messiaen's pupil Karlheinz Stockhausen's avant-garde electro-acoustic _Hymnen_ ( _Anthems_ ), its object \u2013 like the _The Quack-Project_ \u2013 being nothing less than world harmony. Listening to radio broadcasts from all over the world, Stockhausen recorded over 150 national anthems, including _La Marseillaise,_ being quacked rather than sung. He took the sounds of children playing, and put them through an electro-acoustic distortion process, turning them into swamp ducks:\n\n  | 'Duck's Dialect(ic)': Sound files show clear differences between Cockney and Cornish ducks recorded in 2004.\n\n---|---\n\n  | Karlheinz Stockhausen's drawing of 'spatial polyphony' in his electronic piece _Hymnen_ (1966\u20137) sees notes like ducks in a pond. (At one point in _Hymnen_ sounds are manipulated so that a duck quacks the beginning of the _Marseillaise!_ )\n\nlittle boys shouting 'Hi, come here!' \u2013 speeded up, and I moved this sound up again in speed until it sounds like ducks. I used an actual recording of swamp ducks, and you don't notice when the real ducks are continuing from the human voices. I then took one small duck \u2013 just a Quack-Quack \u2013 and put her on the machine, and she quacks the beginning of the _Marseillaise_ : Quack-quak-quak-qua-qua, qua-qua, cah cah cah qua quaaa . . . I'm interested in revealing how, at a special moment, a human sound is that of a duck and a duck's sound is the silver sound of shaking metal fragments. Many of the fairy tales are about this: the straw that the miller's daughter has to weave into gold in _Rumpelstiltskin,_ for example . . . And that's the theme of _Hymnen?_\n\nJust as Stockhausen's _Hymnen_ plays with the language rules of national and universal music, linguists who have made studies of sounds in different languages argue that there are recognizable, rule-governed 'grammars of onomatopoeia'. The metaphors of duck as affectionate (love a duck), sexual (fuck a duck), criminal (duckin' and divin'), punningly playful ('duck or grouse' signs on low beams warning tall English country pub drinkers), or onomatopoeic ('drunk as a duck and don't give a quack') suggest that human wordiness around duck parallels the animal's own verbosity, slipping between scientific truth and expediency like quack-doctors.\n\n## 4 Ducks _ex machina_ : The Mechanical and Animated Duck\n\nIn the Mus\u00e9e des R\u00eaves M\u00e9caniques (Museum of Mechanical Dreams) in Grenoble, France, is a copy of a mechanical duck built by Jacques de Vaucanson, born in that city in 1709. Dubbed a 'new Prometheus' by Voltaire and La Mettrie, Vaucanson began his career developing new technologies for silk manufacture, but following a riot by angry silk workers (and pioneer Luddites), he fled to Paris, where he turned his attentions to automata. He exhibited the duck in 1739; it became his most famous creation: looking up 'automaton' in the early editions of Diderot's _Encyclop\u00e9die_ , you would have found a description of Vaucanson's robot duck.\n\nThe same size as a _canard sauvage_ (wild mallard), it was made of gold-plated copper, and could drink, dabble in the water with its beak, quack and flap its beautifully articulated wings. Each wing had over 400 articulated parts, meticulously copied from the duck in nature. It took food from Vaucanson's hand, swallowed it, digested it and \u2013 in front of amazed audiences \u2013 excreted it. It was the Age of Reason, and the inventor also provided detailed anatomical diagrams in lectures. Civilization cannot be separated from its waste: the duck was beyond a machine; it was a highly skilled joke.\n\nVaucanson died in 1782, his duck long flown. It had toured Europe with him, only to be pawned in 1754, bought by a German professor of philosophy and medicine who showed its wreckage to Goethe and refused an offer from Napoleon to buy it, found again years later in another pawnbroker's attic and eventually passed on to the famous Swiss clockmaker J. B. Reichsteiner, who made himself ill painstakingly repairing it over three and a half years. A duck in working order was once more exhibited in 1843, but it is unclear whether this was the original or a copy \u2013 Reichsteiner had made another version, dressed with real feathers. Hence a copy of a copy (of a copy?): the duck on display today in Grenoble, made by the gifted automatist Fr\u00e9d\u00e9ric Vidoni: a replica of a copy of a model of a real duck.\n\nVaucanson's duck, drawn in an attempt to grasp how it might digest its food. It was found out later not to work like this, but to 'trick' the viewer by eating and then defecating from separate mechanical parts. |\n\n---|---\n\nIn order to distinguish animals from humans in terms of capacities and behaviours, the model of the machine is frequently used. The difference between the literal and the metaphorical is based only on convention; what we take at one time or another to be (as if) alive or intelligent. In Vaucanson's time, the automated machine was as popular a metaphor to reflect on human life as the computer is today. Though writers such as Julien Offray de La Mettrie controversially argued that man was a 'self-winding machine', the soul 'nothing more than an empty word to which no idea corresponds', the fact that _anima_ means 'soul' suggests that the automata of Vaucanson's day were a means to humanize the machine.\n\nThomas Pynchon's epic novel _Mason & Dixon_, about the rich possibilities and tragedies in the founding of America as a nation, features the memorable character of Vaucanson's duck. Apparently, at the time Vaucanson was building the robot, he was suffering from a fistula of the anus, and could not eat \u2013 hence his obsession, perhaps, with robot bowels, anus and sphincter: 'Without the shitting duck', Voltaire commented, 'there would be nothing to remind us of the glory of France.' In Pynchon's novel the Englishman Dixon recalls him as 'the Lad with the mechanickal Duck', but a French chef prefers rhetoric: 'the man Voltaire called a Prometheus, \u2013 to be remember'd only for having trespass'd so ingeniously outside the borders of Taste, as to have provided his Automaton a Digestionary Process, whose end result could not be distinguish'd from that found in Nature.' 'Soon Tales of Duck Exploits are ev'rywhere the Line may pass. The Duck routs a great army of Indians. The Duck levels a Mountain west of here. In a single afternoon, the Duck, with her Beak, has plow'd ev'ry field in the County, at the same time harrowing with her tail. That Duck!'\n\nPynchon's picaresque fusing of real history and science with fable and folklore brings Vaucanson's duck literally to life where its ( _real_ ) existence was a metaphor before. Literature animates what might have happened; science vivifies the mechanical; and the natural turns supernatural. Questions of animate reality that Vaucanson (by constructing and exhibiting the mechanical duck) was raising in an Age of Reason are toyed with, as the duck brings her 'erotick Machinery' to life. Questions of sexual power relations are recognized by the chef, who understands the politics of flesh: 'her Iron Confidence in the power conferr'd her by her Inedibility, being artificial and deathless, as I was meat'. _Not_ believing in Vaucanson's duck has real risks. Mason criticizes his Age's (the nineteenth century's) need for artificial life, 'its Faith in a Mechanickal Ingenuity', but, as he refers to the duck as a 'French toy', his hat is swept high into the sky by an invisible creature, 'faint Quacking heard above'. 'Very well', Mason calls. '\"Toy\" may've been insensitive. I apologize. \"Device\"?'\n\nVaucanson's 'device' was exactly what the word means: at once a cunning machine, a tool for change and a way of achieving something somewhat dishonestly. No wonder Pynchon used the duck as an ideal plot device to raise questions about historical reliability in the context of contemporary (artificial) life. The figure of the duck works dually: with consistent 'iron confidence' since it is animated artificially, and unstable 'soul' expressed in personality, exactly as was developed for the Disney device called Donald Duck.\n\nWith a workforce urgently directed to develop a brand new cultural technology, Walt Disney \u2013 the great satirist of the machine age \u2013 was nevertheless deeply suspicious of technology, as early animations demonstrate. A pastiche of Charlie Chaplin's 1936 _Modern Times_ , _Modern Inventions_ in 1937 had Donald Duck visit a 'Museum of Modern Marvels', get tied up by a wrapping machine, force fed and changed by an automated baby basket, turned upside down by an automatic barber chair that trims his tail feathers and shoeshines his face and beak, while a robot butler repeatedly reappears to swipe his hat. Of course, non-fictional ducks suffer exactly these indignities \u2013 they're trussed, dressed, force fed, clipped and controlled \u2013 but the fearful spectre of a dehumanizing technological modernity dissolves into familiar human\u2013duck gags (such as the 'duck's arse' haircut). The threat of humanity-as-machine is dispelled by comic effect, since the machines become human and the put-upon human is a duck. Underlying this is a darker joke: the machines \u2013 as they are humanized \u2013 treat this duck\/human as if he were a non-human (or 'real') duck.\n\nAccused of much \u2013 the venom perhaps a measure of his titanic cultural stature \u2013 Disney is best seen as an instinctive populist, the 'triumph of the little guy' his deepest political ideal. In the early 1930s Disney was best recognized by a cartoon mouse, but:\n\nAs the Depression began to wane, Mickey was surpassed in popularity by another character, the irascible Donald Duck. This was not completely an accident. Perhaps appealing to a recovered sense of social confidence in America by the late 1930s, the quick-tempered Donald captured audience's affection with an assertive, even belligerent determination to secure his place in the scheme of things. Displaying temper tantrums that were truly works of art and a squawking, half-intelligible voice that could raise the dead, the Duck burst into Disney's short films as a cocksure populist hero.\n\nFar more than Mickey, it is Donald \u2013 labelled 'a bad, a wicked duck, a malicious and mischievous duck, a duck corresponding to all the maddening attractiveness of bad little boys and girls' \u2013 that most expresses the shifting cultural climate in and beyond animation. Donald's voice was provided by a former circus clown, Clarence 'Ducky' Nash, whose vocal impressions were key to making the duck the success he was from 1934. Using nasal sounds and the full range of the mouth, the sound was a comic blend of quacking or squawking like a duck and a human child's manic excitement. The worse he behaved, the better the duck was liked. The Disney story department supervisor at this time was one George Drake, who was prey to rages: was Donald created by the design team to annoy him, or even modelled on him?\n\nAfter enduring a particularly obnoxious temper tantrum, they grabbed [Drake] from each side and lifted him off the floor, firmly goosed him while he screamed . . . carried him out of the building, and dumped him in the middle of Hyperion Avenue. They were sternly reprimanded of course, but that scarcely mattered in the light of the standing ovation they got from staff members who witnessed the incident.\n\nThe propensity in cartoon to gratuitous violence worked in more than one direction \u2013 the very fact that anger was justified as funny made the humour politically effective. In 1941, when the Disney animators went on strike, they distributed a flyer aimed at the public: Donald pounds the floor in fury, screaming: '\"This makes me mad! I've been making you folks laugh for years and years, but now something has happened that ISN'T FUNNY AT ALL . . .\". The flyer put the worker's case, from Donald Duck's point of view.' Walt himself was convinced that the strike was led by communists \u2013 and said as much to the FBI and others. The workers won the strike that same year, but Walt had his revenge on the treacherous duck. As war concerns mounted, US military personnel moved in, and the studio was commissioned to make a series of educational war films on behalf of the Government. On 1 March 1942 Walt gave a radio speech entitled 'Our American Culture', broadcast during the intermission of a performance at the New York Metropolitan Opera: 'It is the constitutional privilege of every American to become cultured or just grow up like Donald Duck. I believe that this spiritual and intellectual freedom which we Americans enjoy is our greatest cultural blessing.'\n\n'Donald Duck Work for Victory' said a headline: the Disney war effort began with _Donald Gets Drafted_ in 1942, and the duck marched on through _Commando Duck, The Old Army Game, Sky Trooper_ and _Home Defense._ To encourage the payment of income tax during wartime, the US Government invested in a Disney cartoon bearing the slogan 'Taxes to Beat the Axis'. Donald had little American flags for eyes, and it was a success with critics, public and the Treasury Department alike. It is easy to imagine the current US Government wishing Disney could be brought back to life . . .\n\nThe most successful of Disney's wartime films, winning an Academy Award, was _Der Fuehrer's Face_ of 1943. Donald dreams he works in a munitions factory in totalitarian 'Nutziland'. As the dream becomes a nightmare of food shortages and the ever-faster fixing of bomb parts, he screams 'I can't stand it, I'm going nuts!' \u2013 and explodes. In a surreal sequence, _he_ becomes the object moving down the assembly line, shell casings battering him, until at last he sees the Statue of Liberty. 'Am I glad to be a citizen of the United States!' he squawks in relief.\n\nAfter the war, when family values took precedence over military ones, the 'Disney Doctrine', as it has since been called, made its films not simply as suitable for family viewing, but also explicitly 'true to the American family', and this met with great commercial success. Before 1954 Donald was never part of a recognizable family unit, but a 'domesticated, middle-class, fatherly fowl' appeared in _Spare The Rod_ , where Uncle Donald gets a lesson in child psychology with nephews Huey, Louie and Dewey, and _Donald's Diary,_ where a now-suburban Donald considers marriage to Daisy Duck. Not used by Disney for animations after the late 1950s, the Donald Duck character was to be the star of the _Donald Duck_ magazine for years to come.\n\nPoster for _Der Fuehrer's Face_. One in the eye for Hitler from the Disney team in 1943. |\n\n---|---\n\nJack Bradbury, Phil de Lara, Jack Moores, Paul Murry, Tony Strobl and Al Taliferro all drew the duck \u2013 alongside countless unnamed inkers and colourists \u2013 but the most famous writer and artist pair was Bob Karp and Carl Barks. A rare Barks lithograph would now fetch around $15,000. Donald remains as popular as he is collectable.\n\n'If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck \u2013 it's a duck,' said McCarthyists, talking about communists. According to Ariel Dorfman's and Armand Mattelart's famous rage against the Disney machine, Chile's class enemy was Donald Duck: 'As long as Donald Duck strolls with his smiling countenance so _innocently_ about the streets of our country, as long as Donald is power and our collective representative, the bourgeoisie and imperialism can sleep in peace.' _How to Read Donald Duck_ insisted: 'Disney uses animals to trap children, not to liberate them.'\n\nDonald has become emblematic of the question: how far is life a 'product'? The duck as consumer object par excellence; commodified, commercialized, world-famous. Pop artist Roy Lichtenstein said of the Disney Ducks: 'I really love their stupidity.' Every animated or cartoon duck reference is deliberately superficial and derivative, like George Orwell's greedy proles in _1984_ : unthinking ducks, robot rabble useful only as automata like Vaucanson's: 'They simply swallowed everything, and what they swallowed did them no harm, because it left no residue behind, just as a grain of corn will pass undigested through the body of a bird.'\n\nBlurring the boundaries between human and duck is increasingly popular. One of the most successful 'anime' series to date, Rumiko Takahashi's comedy manga _Ranma nibun no ichi_ ( _Ranma \u00bd_ ) has a central character who transforms into a girl when doused with water. The same charmed water turns his rival friend, Mousse, into a fighting duck. _Ranma \u00bd_ originated in 1987 as an animation aimed at Japanese children or youth culture, particularly boys, but its interest and collectability is now global in scale.\n\nStill instantly recognizable, Donald Duck continues to be a touchstone for present-day artists, forming an exhibition in 2004 at the Cobra Museum of Contemporary Art in The Netherlands, to mark 70 years of his existence. German artist Gottfried Helnwein interviewed Carl Barks in 1992 when \u2013 after 50 years of it \u2013 Barks said he wouldn't paint another duck. Asked about his 'beautiful human girls with real breasts' for 1980s _Xerxes and Harem_ , Barks admitted: 'Yes, that one got me into trouble . . . I had to spend several hours in the art editor's office in order to flatten all the breasts . . . and the girls had to have dog or duck faces.' By contrast, Helnwein, free from corporate censorship, paints canvases of the duck with film noir gangsters and naked ladies, or on the street, in blue-tinted black and white, as if a perpetual dusk is falling. _In the Heat of the Night_ (2000) shows the duck shape in profile, described by the artist as 'derived from the ideal geometrical principle of the sphere'. Helnwein goes on to compare Donald Duck to the _Mona Lisa:_ 'It is fascinating how this small drake so much better mirrors the human soul. In Donald we recognise our fears, our uncertainties and weaknesses \u2013 our stupidity, our vanity, our depravity, our jealousy and our simple-mindedness.'\n\n  | In _American Prayer_ , 2000, Gottfried Helnwein sees Donald Duck as 'a small artificial drake' and 'the mirror of the human soul'.\n\n---|---\n\nFinnish painter Kaj Stenvall's entire oeuvre involves Donald Duck. In _The Europeanized Drinking Habits_ (2000), Donald is trapped inside a too-milky cup of coffee. His recent work pastiches familiar scenes or themes from well-known paintings and popular culture. In _This is Not a Pipe_ (2002) he touches the fake sky of the painted background behind him, a knowing, cynical art historian lecturing on the theme 'representing representation' or 'the suspension of disbelief', while the other hand theatrically gestures: 'See?' In _Little Brother Sleeps, Big Brother Doesn't_ (2000) he is tucked up snug between the glazed slices of an apple tart. We and Big Brother look down on the tasty snack. Thus we meet the real, the mass-produced and the soon to be dead duck in comic interplay.\n\nKaj Stenvall's _This is Not a Pipe_ , 2002, points to Rene Magritte's 20th-century Surrealist series and our continuing 21st-century concerns with the real\/not real.\n\nStooge or anti-hero, cartoon duck figures act out the political and philosophical concerns of the culture that produced them: a paper-thin world of violence enacted on\/in animal life, of battery-run and animated toys, 'stolen' from the real. Animated ducks are submerged metaphors \u2013 small wonder Umberto Eco said he would talk about Donald Duck only in the presence of his analyst.\n\n  | 'Duck dipping' or hooking is a traditional game for children at fairgrounds, where rubber ducks bobbing along a channel of water are hooked up to win a prize.\n\n---|---\n\nFrom Vaucanson to Stenvall by way of Pynchon, Disney, Lichtenstein and Takahashi, duck animation _performs_ alienation from production by mass consumption, increasingly laying bare the device to ever more knowing audiences, yet reflecting nothing of depth, as if all we are aiming at is nothing more than a fairground duck, bobbing about on a moving surface. Device or toy, the ambiguity of duck at play is the subject of the next chapter.\n\n## 5 Playing Duck\n\nIn Britain after the Second World War there was a fashion for the aspiring middle classes to have china ducks (usually mallard drakes) flying in a diagonal line up the wall of their living room. The ducks in a row have become a cultural icon of the British 1950s suburban interior, and now rate as collectable antiques. On the north-east coast of England, Whitby Lucky Ducks have been made in blown glass since the 1950s, in colours corresponding to gem stones associated with each month's birthday. Whitby Lucky Ducks have been credited with ending a drought in the South of France, boys being born to families with ('only') girls, financial winnings, success in exams or competitions and romantic engagements.\n\nIn parallel to the surplus of duck idiom, duck forms have multiplied with a vengeance for over 5,000 years. Duck-shaped objects exist today in disturbing quantities. For example, fine porcelain of the purest white has been made in Limoges, the china capital of France, since the mid-1800s. In Sarlat, the duck capital of France in the P\u00e9rigord region, most of the produce is duck: the caf\u00e9s and restaurants serve duck and duck souvenirs, include walking-sticks, condiment sets, cheese or cake slices, pots, jars, bottle openers, corkscrews, ashtrays, plates, cups, toilet roll and soap holders, bonbon dishes, cuddly toys, bath toys and plastic toys, hot-water bottle covers, towels, teacloths, place mats, serviettes, coasters, ornaments, trinkets, clocks, thermometers, coat-hooks, shoe brushes, baskets: all in the shape of ducks. Though superficially things of utility, the objects in Sarlat act in a kind of ecstatic consumerist duck orgy, a disturbing frenzy of duck tourism. Is this something duck have done to us, or we have done to duck? This tendency to over-ornament parallels what happens in language: not just extensive naming, but a kind of manic over-productivity, an effluence of duck trivia, where form cannot be restrained to function.\n\nFaience perfume vase in the form of a duck, Rhodes, _c_. 600\u2013550 BC. |\n\n---|---\n\nCosmetic spoon representing a duck pulling a swimmer, 18th Dynasty (1801\u20131701 BC). |\n\n---|---\n\n'The Big Duck', a building designed in the shape of a duck, on Long Island, New York, was built in 1930 by unemployed theatrical designers, with Model T tail-lights (which still work) and a wood-frame wire-mesh concrete surface, for a Depression-struck farmer to sell his duck meat and eggs in competition with the other 90 duck farms of his region. The Big Duck is now on the National Register of Historic Places, a 'building-becoming-sculpture', inspiring the architect Robert Venturi to coin the term 'duck' to describe when architecture is subordinate to the symbolic form.\n\n  | Detail of a duck-spout on an Iron Age flagon found at Basse Yutz, France, _c_. 500 BC.\n\n---|---\n\n  | The Big Duck on Route 24, Long Island, a 'building-becoming-sculpture', or 'duck architecture'.\n\n---|---\n\nAn easy alternative to the tortuously difficult-to-make origami duck: simply push out, fold and slot together. |\n\n---|---\n\nAs well as humans' compulsive relationship with their form, the duck can also play with perceptions. The Duck\u2013Rabbit, 'arguably one of the most multistable images in modern psychology', obsessed the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. Why? Wittgenstein writes about the 'seeing as' experience in visual puzzles such as Duck\u2013Rabbit, where being both one and the other takes place only at the moment of seeing the change (such as from Duck to Rabbit).We do not see the duck _as_ a rabbit but one or the other, as a kind of decoy to attract the mind. To see the duck becomes a language game, not of interpretation, but of perception.\n\n'Duck dipping' or hooking is a traditional game for children at fairgrounds, where rubber ducks bobbing along a channel of water can be hooked up to win a prize. The Hobby-duck (a hobby-horse with a duck's head) in the Macclesfield Psalter of _c_. 1330 shows medieval art played for comedy as well as religious illumination. Duck playthings are as familiar as the animals themselves, from wooden wheeled ducks on sticks or cuddly toys for toddlers, to wind-up ducks, ornaments, trinkets and vehicles marketed for older children and adults. Konrad Lorenz demonstrated that ducks bond with 'toy' or sculpted objects, just as humans do. When a duck is effectively a pet it is tempting for humans to read this bond as a parallel emotional affection such as a child might feel towards a parent-figure, but the fact is, ducklings imprint on their first moving object, they follow any 'leader'.\n\nWittgenstein's Duck\u2013Rabbit puzzle: which do you see first?\n\n  | Duck toys generally play on duck movement, especially the waddle.\n\n---|---\n\nDesigned to entertain in the flooded Red River delta, performed on village ponds or on the lake of a temple, the ancient art of _mua roi nuroc_ (puppets that dance on water) has thrived in Vietnam since the eleventh century. The stage is the water's surface. Puppets dive underwater and reappear, worked by puppeteers who stand up to their waists in water, hidden from the audience by a bamboo or linen screen. They work their puppets on long bamboo poles submerged beneath the water, manipulating the arms and heads with hidden strings. Vietnamese water puppetry has many mythical characters, but most abundant are those embodying ordinary peasants: fishermen and duck farmers. In one traditional plot known as 'Duck Catchers', an old couple carry a basket of eggs on stage which hatch into a flock of ducklings and the two try to tend to the lively little creatures. A fox hides in a tree, watching the ducklings. He pounces on one duckling and carries it off in his mouth, but the old couple chase the fox and beat him. Where the fox is invariably the trickster (as Jemima Puddleduck found to her cost), ducks are often the clowns in such performances.\n\nKonrad Lorenz with a duck device to study 'imprinting', although a duck will actually follow anything or anyone. |\n\n---|---\n\n|\n\nThe duck species familiar to Vietnamese farms and performance is the Indian runner duck (actually Indonesian). This duck's salted meat and eggs were part of the diet aboard ships travelling from the East Indies in the 1500s. Live specimens were imported from India by the English by the 1830s, featured as 'penguin ducks' (because of their upright stature) in London Zoo in 1837 and thereafter came to be known as the 'Indian runner'. In the East Indies these ducks live a roving life in rice paddies where they feed on seeds, snails and insects. They are walked (or run) to the rice fields each morning behind a rag tied to the end of a pole, return at night to roost and lay, and eventually follow the same rag to market. As workers, pets or stars, Indian runner ducks are responsive to training, and often used for film and stage work. The comedy spectacular _Ducktastic_ , briefly on stage in London's West End in 2005, featured Daphne the mind-reading duck, who early on in the show's run either escaped or was stolen. Since a dozen duck understudies (all of whom looked uncannily like one another) were waiting in the wings, this did not pose a problem, and the show went on, with its surreal sets of giant ducks laying gigantic eggs with singing, dancing and fooling actors inside.\n\n  | Indian runner duck Daphne in a tiara for the musical _Ducktastic_ , allegedly stolen following a preview performance.\n\n---|---\n\nThere can be a dark side to this clowning, however. 'You expected hourglasses . . . you expected the skull-and-bones motif . . . You didn't expect the rubber duck. It was yellow.' In Terry Pratchett's _Soul Music_ , from the Discworld series, Susan, granddaughter of Death (euphemistically called 'The Soul Cake Tuesday Duck'), visits his cottage. It is disturbingly clear to her that she has spent time there as a child. There is a rubber duck in the bathroom: uncontroversial proof. _Soul Music_ is shot through with culturally specific duck jokes. University academics practising with bows and arrows shout 'Duck!' in the corridors, 'and among a group of tramps, the one they called the Duck man had a duck on his head. No one mentioned it. No one drew attention to it.' The man with a duck on his head is a metaphor for the book as a whole. As a drunk and a beggar, the Duck man is part of society's underclass or untouchables, invisible to mortals (as is Death). If the rubber duck's prosaic comic absurdity counters Death's sting, small wonder adults give every new baby a duck for the bath. But who invented this quack cure for mortality?\n\n'One is never alone with a rubber duck', said Douglas Adams in _A Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy_ (1979). The exact history of the rubber duck and the identity of its inventor are not known, though it can be dated in relation to the development of the rubber manufacturing industry. After Brazilian waterproof gum rubber was 'discovered' by Columbus, it was used and experimented with in Europe and the US over the centuries leading to a 'rubber fever' in the 1830s. Charles Goodyear of tyres fame was an early industrialist who believed passionately in this new 'vegetable leather' or 'elastic metal'. For the Paris World Fairs of the 1850s he built pavilions entirely of rubber, floor to roof. Today there is a cultivated rubber tree for every two human beings on earth, but most 'rubber' ducks are now actually made of vinyl plastic. Therefore, a rubber duck is neither rubber nor a duck, but 'a vinyl plastic duckling toy'. Tell that to a two-year-old.\n\nA rubber duck is also a term for a combat rubber raiding craft dropped from an aircraft with a parachute used by military groups to invade from sea quickly at times of war, adapted for times of peace or prosperity. The 'London Duck Tour' takes tourists in such a vehicle gaily painted yellow through the streets of the city, then, to everyone's delighted horror, rolls down a bank right into the waters of the River Thames, just like the toys dropped off bridges for duck charity races. These races are on an ever-increasingly large scale: on 24 November 2002 Singapore held its annual duck race, and the Singapore river turned yellow for a half-kilometre stretch as 123,500 rubber ducks vied to win the city-state's fifth annual Million Dollar Duck Race. Hundreds of spectators turned out to watch, and a record 1.2 million Singapore dollars was raised for various charities. This contest also achieved the world record for the largest number of ducks sponsored in a single competition. The owner of one of a few red ducks can win a million-dollar bonus. Later, the so-called celebrity ducks are auctioned off on the Internet to the highest bidder. Races involving little yellow rubber contestants are becoming increasingly popular worldwide, involving politicians and other human celebrities. The Great British Duck Race launched the largest ever number of rubber ducks \u2013 165,000 \u2013 into the Thames at Hampton Court on 2 September 2007.\n\n  | A London Duck Tours bus, a converted DUKW (amphibious military truck), takes tourists on trips that include the River Thames.\n\n---|---\n\nStart of the Great British Duck charity race at Hampton Court in south-west London. |\n\n---|---\n\nA few of the 165,000 ducks individually numbered for the Duck Race. |\n\n---|---\n\n  | A 'Luxury' or designer rubber duck that mimics the colours of Pop art.\n\n---|---\n\nIf you should want to, it is possible to collect any number of rubber ducks, of every size, style, colour and design. There are dead ducks (which float upside-down), camouflage, striped, Warhol-design, polka-dot ducks and even 'celebriducks' shaped to resemble icons of film, music, history or religion, such as Betty Boop, Elvis, Shakespeare and the Buddha. Clubs and online rubber duck forums such as 'duckplanet.com' exist on the Internet, where adult fans confess their passions and add to, sell and show their collections. Few of these ducks are for floating in the bath, obviously. There is a sense in which most toy or small ducks are collectable simply because they are 'cute': infantile, winsome, ironic, kitsch, with their big heads and eyes, open beaks, and round, rolling, waddling bodies, but the very surfeit evokes a certain unease: ours is a cultural embarrassment of rubber duckies.\n\n'Luvvva Duck', a battery operated personal vibrating massager for women. |\n\n---|---\n\nYellow rubber ducks are generally for little naked human children to play with in the bath (when both species are arguably at their most 'natural' or innocent), though the 'personal vibrating massager' version called 'I rub my duckie' or 'Luvvva Duck' is described as 'A lady's best friend at bathtime', promoted as 'not intimidating to boyfriends or husbands'.\n\nIn 1988 the French artist Annette Messager produced _La Promesse des petites effigies_ ( _The Promise of Little Effigies_ ), in which children's toys such as teddy bears, pink elephants and yellow fluffy ducks were entombed in vertical glass cabinets hung with black and white photographs of body parts: lips, a laughing mouth, a foot, bottom, toes. Messager calls the toys 'the remains or little cadavers of childhood for which we stay very attached'. In 1999, for _Les Messagers de l'\u00e9t\u00e9 (Messengers of Summer_ ), Messager used (real) stuffed animals given furry masks taken from cuddly toys, totally removing their natural or commercial cuteness, stripping them of their 'natural' dignity and giving them a macabre and threatening appearance. Human ridiculousness, producing cuddly toys in the shape of real animals or even stuffing dead animals as if alive, was unmasked. What is left of the _sauvage_ once human animals \u2013 the 'man-made' \u2013 get their hands on it? The duck, wearing a furry mouse mask with green and pink ears, stood on the edge of a circled net, a smaller animal facing it. It looked freakish: genetically modified, or sinister \u2013 a toy bank robber or terrorist duck? Messager's duck toy differentiates between being animal in a state of nature with itself as a cultural being; wearing a social costume. The mask is at once human and non-human, duck and non-duck.\n\nGiven the variety of playthings in duck form, it is evident they are not merely cute representations of the animal, but highly suggestive commodities. They can be child or adult oriented, sexually naive or explicit, domestic, military, perceptual or performative. The cute unmasks itself as its opposite; duck form follows function to the point of fable. A fable such as this: on 1 January 1994 a container ship ran into trouble in the Pacific Ocean, tumbling 29,000 plastic bath toys into the sea, 8,000 of which were ducks. After many years at sea, the world's biggest rubber duck flotilla has dispersed. Oceanographers and global warming scientists charting the flow of the currents are keen to know where they are being washed up. After drifting over 3,200 km (2,000 miles), hundreds beached in Alaska, with a number continuing through the Bering Strait into the Arctic, where the pack ice conveyed them over the North Pole into the North Atlantic Ocean. The most recent duck sighting was in Maine in July 2003, and pale versions of the yellow originals are expected to turn up along the Icelandic and British coasts any day now.\n\n  | Is Pokemon figure Psyduck prey to terrible headaches because of the unmanageable plethora of duckabilia?\n\n---|---\n\nThese toy ducks have succeeded in a quest \u2013 for the fabled North-West Passage \u2013 where human sailors like Franklin and Nansen failed. Duck have drifted far from the wild into language itself, exemplifying the drift of meanings in metaphor. Though John Berger argued famously in 1973 that under the terms of capitalism, marginalization and commodification, 'the animal has been emptied of experience and secrets', he also admitted that 'sayings, dreams, games, stories, superstitions, language itself, recall them'. And, more than for perhaps any other animal, this must be said of duck.\n\n## 6 Quackery Unmask'd\n\nIn _The Character of a Quack-Doctor; or, The Abusive Practices of Impudent Illiterate Pretenders to Physick Exposed_ , printed for Thomas Jones in 1676, the author rails against how quack doctors fly-post the streets with promises of wildly exaggerated cures: 'Such impudent ostentatious Decoy-papers he dayley spreads about the Streets, as if he had undertaken to serve the whole City with Bum-fodder, and plasters with his quackeries every Pissing-post, and therefore Lime-twigs the Rabble to become his Patients.'\n\nChapbooks and pamphlets, either advertising catalogues of cures and quack services or warning against their dangers, were familiar parts of European street reading from the fifteenth century to the nineteenth, and satiric verses, plays and musicals also featured quacks. The derogatory (highly metaphoric) language describe them as 'cheats, imposters, piss-artists and jugglers in urinals' (logically enough, since disease and infection show up in urine), their 'decoy-papers' offered as lures to a gullible public as decoys are to unsuspecting ducks _Quackery Unmasked: A Treatise on Venereal Disease_ slates 'Those Fools and Knaves' who offer questionable cures for a vast range of disorders (colds, wrinkles, toothache, earache, deafness, scurvy, fever, the pox, madness, shyness, a low forehead, tumours, gall and kidney stones, loss of virginity and so on) with 'feel-good' remedies often simply high in alcohol. _Dottore,_ a stock _commedia dell'arte_ caricature of gluttony and pedantic learning, is sometimes depicted with a mask like a duck's beak. _Dottore_ blathers on and on in fake Latin and shown up as a quack by the end of the play.\n\n_Quackery Unmask'd_ : a treatise of 1709 on venereal disease by 'Licens'd Practitioner' John Spinke, correcting 'gross errors' quack doctors have been making. European cities would have been full of such publications. |\n\n---|---\n\n  | An early 19th-century quack cartoon.\n\n---|---\n\nThough quacks were regarded as profiteers, they alone had the gall to treat conditions that registered physicians would not risk, often operating in the street, then and there. Barber surgeons amalgamated in 1504 in London to form an elite company, but surgery was not established as a respectable profession until 1800, and recognized surgeons and doctors had their reputations and high prices to protect. Master-quack James Graham, working between 1745 and 1794, whose speciality was 'electrical treatments and frictions', invented an extraordinary test of public credulity with his 'Celestial Magnetico-Electrico Bed', said to have cost Graham \u00a310,000 to make. One night on the vibrating mattress made of stallion's hair would apparently cure any couple of infertility, for the princely sum of \u00a350. Quacks have always been chancers, like those flooding the Internet with spam cures for physical and sexual disorders less imaginatively today.\n\nAn oiled-cloth mask with a bronze beak, thought to keep infections at bay, used by 18th-century plague doctors in Venice. |\n\n---|---\n\nThe term 'quack', a pretender to medical skill, or dishonest person, may derive from early Dutch _kwakzalver_ , hawker of salve, or the German _Quacksalber_ , a questionable salesperson. According to German\u2013English idiomatic history, to quack meant to shout in the Middle Ages (as quacksalvers sold market wares by shouting in a loud voice). Due to the similarity to the German word for mercury or 'quicksilver', _Queckzilber_ , myths have arisen about quack dentists and doctors performing the first fillings and mercury cures for syphilis. For the Dutch, _quackery_ is still bogus money-making medical practices and _quacken_ is to brag. Slovak for a quack is _sarlatan_ (a charlatan), and the Vietnamese still have a phrase for 'quackish', _co tinh chat lang bam._\n\n  | Quack Doctor toy 'Dr Duck' has an open beak for 'quacken' (bragging) and a breast for 'quackery' (money for bogus medicines).\n\n---|---\n\nThe quack doctor parallels the traits of the duck: over-determined figures of plenitude and perpetual buoyancy, noisy, unreliable, playfully comic in the face of sober subjects such as health, greed, sex and death. This final chapter examines the duck's chaotic hybridity via the life-and-death issues of the avian flu virus, extinct and threatened species, hybrid or 'misfit' duck figures and, finally, how it is that duck contributes to holding up the world.\n\nA puddle-duck meets a harsher, more realistic end in Ernest Griset's 1880s illustration.\n\nYou will get ti de'eath o' cold,\n\nThen we shall ha' to bury thee,\n\nThen t' worms'll come an ate thee up,\n\nThen t' ducks'll come an ate t' worms,\n\nThen we shall go an' ate th' ducks,\n\nOn Ilkla Moor bath 'at.\n\nIf Death is the remedy all singers dream of, duck songs are no exception. Should you be foolish enough to go on 'Ilkla Moor baht at' (on Ilkley Moor, Yorkshire, without a hat) you'll die of the cold, waste in the ground, feed worms which the ducks eat and the dialect song ends: 'then we shall go an' ate th' ducks'. This is our shared animal hunter\u2013hunted death\u2013life cycle, as sung by Lewis Carroll's Manlet: 'Where the Frog is pursued by the Duck;\/ Where the Ducklet is chased by the Doglet\u2013\/ So runs the world's luck!'\n\n_La Cane_\n\n_De Jeanne_\n\n_Est morte d'avoir fait_\n\n_Du moins on le presume_\n\n_Un rhume_\n\n_Mauvais!_\n\n'La Cane de Jeanne', by singer, poet and 'grand anarchist' Georges Bresson. A duck, found dead over her egg, her chick unhatched, leaves no widower \u2013 so we unfeelingly inherit her feathers and egg. 'La Cane de Jeanne has died', so Bresson prophetically presumed, of 'un rhume \/ Mauvais', a bad cold. Avian flu, perhaps?\n\nThere have been a number of significant pandemics in human history, often 'zoonoses' (infectious diseases transmitted from animals to humans) that came about with the domestication of animals. Spanish flu (an HINI, virus of 1918\u201319), which killed 25 million people in six months, is now thought to have originated in birds. Migratory waterfowl are the natural reservoir of the avian influenza virus, particularly wild ducks. Avian flu first appeared in 1997, since then evolving into several strains. Scientists are increasingly worried that its deadliest strains (HPAI and H5NI), if combined with the human flu virus in what is called a 'reassortment' of the genes, will prove exceptionally dangerous, and could even be the next pandemic, killing millions of people. Virologists agree H5NI presents a risk, and while some governments have stockpiled influenza drugs, it is currently a threat without a vaccine. Foods high in sialic acid may help prevent the illness, and the only currently available drug to combat the virus is Tamiflu, patented and produced by a giant Swiss pharmaceutical company, which has stated that it will need years to stockpile enough drugs to deal with a pandemic. In response to global anxiety millions of birds are being and will be killed: ducks in particular, since they can carry and excrete high levels of this highly pathogenic virus without seeming ill.\n\nA ringed eider hen is checked in Tutakoke Bird Camp, Hooper Bay, Alaska, as part of the Avian Influenza Sampling Project, 2006. |\n\n---|---\n\nThe wetlands of the Danube delta are a major migratory area for wild duck from Europe and Africa: after tests on ducks from this region in 2004 revealed the virus in duck faeces, the European Union banned all poultry from Romania and Turkey. In 2005 scientists urgently called nations to prepare for a global influenza pandemic that could strike 20 per cent of the world's population, and in the same year the Thai government culled three million free-range ducks. Birds found infected with the strain range from pintail ducks tested in Alaska to birds on Lake Pinghai in China; recent scares in Kazakhstan, Mongolia and Siberia have all been attributed to H5NI. Most sinister is that, since ducks do not typically become ill when infected, the virus may be present in pets, food or water, and (this is probably what whips up human hysteria) duck can fly anywhere, all over the world, impervious to borders. There is increasing evidence that a thriving international trade in smuggled poultry \u2013 including live birds, chicks and meat \u2013 is helping spread bird flu. Poultry smuggling, especially intensive between China and Africa, is a huge business that poses a unique threat since the A(H5NI) \u2013 the A virus causes influenza in birds and humans \u2013 bird flu virus is robust enough to survive not just in live birds but also in frozen meat, feathers, bones and even on cages, though it dies with cooking. Duck flu is a virus with potential, like the chain of associations in imagery.\n\nDespite sensational media reporting, though complacency must be avoided, avian flu cannot be categorized as a pandemic because the virus cannot yet cause human\u2013human transmission. Confirmed human cases reported to the WHO in June 2008 of avian influenza A(H5NI) comprise 385 cases of infection and 243 deaths. Of the deaths 110 were in Indonesia and 52 in Vietnam. The pattern of pandemics since the Black Death and Asiatic or Spanish flu suggest parallels can be drawn which may feed racist fears of uncontrolled migrating animals and disease coming from the East.\n\nWhatever the outcome of avian flu, ducks have already given up their lives to humans in what must be trillions over the centuries. Some are already extinct; many more are threatened. Ducks have been with us for 50 million years, but how many species will survive as long again? Over-hunting, loss of habitat via deforestation and the draining of marshlands (often for human property development and tourism) combine to threaten the West Indian black-billed whistling duck, the Australian freckled duck, the white-headed Spanish duck, eider duck, the Baikal teal of Japan and Korea, the Brazilian merganser and the marbled teal in Iraq. Gunshot and fishing sinkers give ducks lead poisoning. The torrent duck's specialized habitat requirements \u2013 clear, swiftly flowing waters \u2013 are easily destroyed by river pollution; the harlequin duck population has declined since the _Exxon Valdez_ oil spill in 1989. As the water table becomes increasingly polluted more living creatures and plants become affected, and waterfowl are among the first to suffer.\n\nDuck are especially vulnerable to oil spills and polluted water. |\n\n---|---\n\nDuck skins with expedition labels. |\n\n'It is a sad fact that as soon as a species declines to rarity, the demand for museum skins increases.' It is now thought that the tragically ironic reason for the Auckland Island merganser's extinction may well have been the number shot by museum collectors in 1901. The last pair, shot on 9 January 1902, are skeletons in the Natural History Museum at Tring in England. Baron Walter Rothschild's formerly private zoological museum at Tring houses a collection he started at the age of seven, and opened to the public in 1892. As part of the biggest bird collection in the world, Tring has two million skeletons, spirit, egg and nest specimens and 'skins' (a body stuffed flat with wood wool or shavings for research purposes rather than display) donated by collectors from 1800 to the present. There are thousands of duck specimens, each labelled with the collector, place and date of collection, stored in sliding drawers on flat trays, in floor to ceiling filing.\n\nBut in many cases the collection ends in the 1950s. With no funds to pay collectors for new specimens, and few amateur naturalists, zoologists or ornithologists who know where to send a dead duck for study, only five curators remain at Tring. Technological progress may have been most active from the 1960s to the present, but surely it is a cultural disaster to have no specimens available for the study of the effects of hybridity, pollution or global warming?\n\nSadly, the extinction of a few duck species is unlikely to make international news or bother the general public. The fact that ducks seem as ubiquitous as humans or houseflies inures us to the risks they are vulnerable to. Rats, weasels, mink, badgers, raccoons, squirrels and skunks steal duck eggs; coyotes, turtles, hawks and large fish eat ducklings; dogs, big cats, birds of prey and foxes eat adult duck; but none of this comes close to the scale of human predation. The greatest hazard is duck sociability. Ducks are highly vulnerable to netting and shooting, or baiting with poisoned grain. Large gatherings can do enormous damage eating newly sown crops, ripening cereals, grasslands, rape or fodder grass, trampling soil, or spoiling fields with so many droppings that other animals will not graze. Farmers can reduce cereal crops, offer lure crops or bait stations, use acoustic devices (gas cannons, pistols), visual scares (flags, sacks, wires, scarecrows) or, more radically, toxic fertilizer or hunt and kill the ducks. If not compensated for their loss, farmers 'can make life as inhospitable as possible for waterfowl. Feelings ran so strongly in the 1950s in Saskatchewan, Canada, there were marches on the Legislative Building to treat mallard duck as vermin with a bounty paid for killing them.'\n\nDisappearing wetland causes habitat problems for duck, but before and after shots of drained farmland followed by wetland restoration are optimistic. |\n\n---|---\n\nYet humans are also aware of the need to make room for ducks. Forward-thinking architect Cedric Price made plans for turning redundant Hamburg Docks into a 'Ducklands' bird sanctuary. From the duck perspective, much of the land currently being returned to waterfowl was originally _their_ wetlands and prairies, now prey to agricultural expansion, with progressive soil and water degradation. Increasingly, 'natural' farmers or gardeners (such as Britain's Prince Charles) imitate the inexpensive organic methods of less-developed parts of the world, using ducks to control insect populations on their crops rather than pesticides. Adaptation and hybridity are duck's specialities. The common mallard ( _Anas platyrhynchos_ ) is one of the oldest ducks classified (by Linnaeus himself in 1758) and the most familiar and widespread across the world, numbering more than 10 million birds. Its status is thought to be secure, with as many domesticated as feral on the planet. A duck is labelled 'feral' when carrying duck plague or the flu virus, when force-copulating out of its usual group or tribe (affecting indigenous duck populations, causing cross-breeds and hybrids), in other words, when 'out of control' and requiring culling, isolation or other 'humane management'. Yet, constructing the idea of a feral duck is itself a metaphor.\n\nWith the right wetland habitats, we may again have 'skies black with duck' such as those Charles Dickens saw in the USA.\n\nIf human tourism threatens ducks, duck tourism is as controversial in its turn, as the ruddy duck controversy discussed earlier illustrates. The latest research argues that since the ruddy duck was introduced artificially into Europe, it is justified to cull those birds, unlike in North America, where they are indigenous. But they can easily fly over the Atlantic. What is the threat? Does inter-breeding weaken or invigorate? As one 'pure' breed loses distinctive aspects of its genetic makeup and culture, new formations arise. The campaigning case against the cull is that it is not a control programme but a senseless massacre, 'killing in the name of blood purity . . . dangerously retrograde . . . as Nature is not pure. Nature is not fixed. It is flux.' The real fear is that such stories are distracting ornithologists from the far more important issues of 'confronting powerful industrial and agricultural interests whose land development and polluting activities are responsible for the decimation of any number of species', but the ruddy duck story is a good example of how trivialization and hyperbole are as central parts of duck narratives (ruddy 'lager louts', 'a plague of hybrids', etc.) as they enter our culture via the tabloid press and popular campaigns as well as academic studies. You simply cannot rarefy duck stories; they will always duck out of seriousness into humour or word play.\n\nHybridity is part of domestication (muscovy and mallard hybrids 'mulards' are more efficient food converters, for example) and natural behaviour in the wild (pochard mate with scaup, mallard with wigeon or gadwall, etc.). As global movement increases, so do hybrid species, clustering in different regions of the world. If the white-headed duck's exaggerated bill evolves into the knowing smile of the red-headed ruddy duck, this will be a fact of life: hybridity is both symptom of and healthy resistance to duck imperialism, creating new transcultural forms. Duck is part of an unstable story of quacks, misfits and migrations, cruel or cheerful expediency, and it is work ostensibly for children that best expresses this.\n\nHans Christian Andersen's _The Ugly Duckling_ (1844) is generally considered a metaphor for his own life. Tall and gawky, awkward in company but longing to fit in, Andersen can be seen as his own ugly duckling, teased and jeered at, a perpetual outsider.\n\nThe duckling was quite melancholy because he was so desperately ugly and because he was the laughing-stock of the whole duck-yard . . . even his mother said: 'How I wish you were miles away.' [Seasons pass and the ugly duckling, who has been hiding in the marshes away from the cruelty of his life, takes to the lake.] But what did he see there? He beheld its own image and it was no longer the reflection of a clumsy, dirty, grey bird, ugly offensive. He himself was a swan! Being born in a duck-yard does not matter, if only you are hatched from a swan's egg.\n\nAnother ugly duckling was the Victorian poet, painter and misfit Edward Lear, whose nonsense songs \u2013 many of which he put to music and sang to the piano, somewhere between laughter and sobbing \u2013 typically relate stories of travel and adventure by unlikely but devoted couples. A Nutcracker runs away with the Sugartongs, an Owl with a Pussycat, and a Duck with a Kangaroo. The desire for release from the mundane world ('my life is a bore on this nasty pond,\/ and I long to go out in the world beyond!') sees escape into the unfamiliar as a joy ('and we'd go to the Dee and the Jelly Bo Lee\/Over the land and over the sea'). But the greatest reason for going is love ('All to following my own dear true \/ Love of a Kangaroo?'), just as Lear himself was happiest when travelling with his lifelong friend and unrequited love, Franklin Lushington. It is not just Lear's loneliness, epilepsy, depression and longing for love that make the songs so melancholic, it is the deliberate emphasis placed on vulnerable absurdity. If the duck went alone, it could easily fly: if it loved another duck, they would simply migrate together. But biological determinism does not create good literature, nor is life always this simple. For rich metaphors of the mind, 'semantics needs impossible worlds'. The duck chooses to love outside its own species. This makes the going more difficult, but the comparative pleasures the greater, perhaps: 'And who was so happy, \u2013 O who? \/ As the Duck and the Kangaroo?' A stable future for ducks is as precarious as Lear pictures it.\n\n  | Victorian poet and artist Edward Lear's unlikely pairing of Duck and Kangaroo, who travel the world together.\n\n---|---\n\nDuck operates comfortably in the fields of cartoon, picture-book and nonsense verse, but why is there no ode to a duck? F. W. Harvey's poem may do for one:\n\nFrom troubles of the world I turn to ducks,\n\nBeautiful comical things . . .\n\n_Mandarin Ducks_ , a film installation by Jeroen de Rijke and Willem de Rooj, representing the Netherlands for the 51st Venice Biennale in 2005, is a similarly enigmatic title: ten people meet in a flat one Sunday afternoon, talk of chaos, love, corruption, consumption, ideals, and work, intercut with reference to theatre, sitcom and mainstream film language. It reads like finding 87 eggs in one duck's nest. Like ducks, the people are noisy and ultimately 'full of sound and fury,\/ Signifying nothing'. Languages \u2013 like all animals including people \u2013 are hybrids. The life of ducks is like that of the 'mongrel tongue' of English ('a gallimaufry or hodgepodge of all other speeches', said Edmund Spenser in 1579); what we call English is a mix of Celtic, Gaelic, Latin, Greek, Anglo-Saxon, Jute, Norse, Scandinavian, French and many other languages.\n\nAlmost anything in the world can be refashioned as a duck.\n\nThe duck's natural history revealed its sociability and adaptability as eminently suitable for modern hybridity. The word 'pressed' '(the being-pressed, the being-with as being strictly attached, bound, enchained, being under pressure, compressed, impressed, repressed, pressed-against . . .)' is prescient to understanding duck. Hence the oppressed Farmer Duck begins a revolution which overthrows the fat farmer for a collective, animal farm. Take the 'compression' of verbal diarrhoea in duck idiom, or how 'impressed', 'repressed' misfits perform alienation from production like Disney's duck, also found in Lear's nonsense verse or Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tale. In the field of naming-as-dominion, the biblical book of Genesis has God allowing Adam or Ish to name the animals, which 'represents at the same time his sovereignty and his loneliness'. If the over-productivity of language and cultural artefacts (as examined in chapters on the duck's sound and form) is a symptom of our loneliness, the duck is the palliative \u2013 as delivered by a quack-doctor \u2013 a metaphor for 'being-together', like all the eider on the planet massing in the same place in the Arctic. Because duck can use the skies and seas, they can gather in one huge 'mobile vulgus' \u2013 Elias Canetti's term for the moveable and excitable crowd \u2013 in numbers we landlocked humans cannot. Perhaps this is why the duck is such an abundant motif for us: we share its need for the reassuring sound and company of others.\n\nIf anthropomorphism is the remains of continuous use of animal metaphor, do we still see the duck 'out there' in the skies and on the waters with its own reality, or have we claimed duck as an imaginary friend? If we balk at the facts, if facts fail us, metaphor remains a way of supposing: it brings insight into the confusion of existence by transferring what we do not know to things we do know; the less familiar to the more. 'Reality is a clich\u00e9 from which we escape by metaphor.' In the face of reality's heavyweight pressures, humans create new realities, and our best duck metaphors are a sign of some new disclosure, a living 'stream of semiosis': Duck metaphors can be cute (as with cuddly or rubber ducks), can be ornament (tiles or flying ducks), can become a household clich\u00e9 (toilet-duck), anthropo-morphically act out phonic jokes (Duck in a Truck), sign (quack and waddle) or perform the real and ideal (from Vaucanson's to the mechanical tin duck), to name just a few. The possibilities are endless.\n\n  | The eponymous 'Farmer Duck' works like a dog before the farm animals overthrow the oppressor in Martin Waddell's and Helen Oxenbury's _Animal Farm-inspired Farmer Duck_ (1991) for five-year-olds.\n\n---|---\n\nThis is not just naming or labelling duck but providing metaphors for over-productivity. The superabundance of duck 'things' \u2013 dictionaries crammed with duck words, cupboards overflowing with duck trinkets, duck in culture all around us \u2013 works as metaphor for the exuberance of the creature but also as a set of man-made decoys for keeping the real duck figurative. Whilst the commercialized market (rubber ducks) utilizes cliched duck metaphor, avant-garde duck material (picture-books, cartoon, music, sound and art work) struggles to express the cultural risks felt with the loss of a shared notion of a real duck. Is the species chased, pressed and over-domesticated to extinction, 'irredeemable for the culture of capitalism'? Lord love a duck, let's hope not. Yet how could it be? We use duck in so many aspects of our lives. Duck proliferates all culture and all modes of culture: a production of our post-colonial, postmodern, post-industrial world, the effluence of duck trivia part of our manic over-productivity, a figure of flux and contradictory value.\n\nGods with duck heads, a magical engraved gem or amulet, 3rd\u20134th century AD, chalcedony. |\n\n---|---\n\nEarly attempts at classification struggled with how on earth this creature could be equally at ease on land, air or water, yet 'sometimes above and sometimes under' is the continuing mystery of the duck. Duck is an animal for science and myth with characteristics and observable behaviours, but it is also uniquely close to human subjectivity as a toy, pet or meal. Duck is expressive of the gods, the elements, cosmic life and death, whilst in everyday reality it behaves as variously and badly as humans. Yet this special relation we have with the species 'that form a collective multiplicity, a becoming', as philosophers Gilles Deleuze and F\u00e9lix Guattari put it, will be lost if only their 'cuteness' wins. We know duck; they are as silly as we are. They are obvious metaphors for us. But duck are also real. The legend of Amala, mythological giant of the Tsimshian Native Americans, carries a final important warning: Amala holds up the earth on a spinning pole behind his back and must balance it. Once a year a servant applies duck oil to his back muscles to relieve him. The Tsimshian believe once all the ducks have been hunted to extinction, the servant will not come to apply duck oil and the world will fall from the pole and be destroyed.\n\n  | A basalt statue of Ehecatl-Quetzalcoatl, Aztec god of the wind, wearing a duck's beak mask, _c_. 1324\u20131521.\n\n---|---\n\nIn the Preface to this book legends described how duck made the world; now we see how duck sustains it. The Tsimshian legend describes the crucial value of duck, not as animal celebrity or revered totem, but a seemingly ordinary, jolly little animal whose _production_ holds up our world. We depend on it bobbing back up as tireless metaphor for buoyant survival in the face of human exploitation. We can study duck and never know its diversity, have it close to us wild, tamed or cute, wear it for warmth, sleep under it, write with it, eat it, speak it, play with it. It serves our pleasure. However much we take the cheery, watery little creature for granted, duck is the finest _use-metaphor_ on the planet, and lord love a duck for that.\n\nBe kind to your web-footed friend,\n\nFor a duck may be somebody's mother,\n\nBe kind to your friends in the swamp\n\nWhere the weather is cold and damp \u2013\n\nYou may think that this is the end,\n\nWell, it is.\n\n'Fantastic! _And_ it was all written with a feather!'\n\n## References\n\n### PREFACE\n\n Giraldus Cambrensis, _Topographia Hibernia_ [1187]; as Gerald of Wales, _The History and Topography of Ireland_ (Harmondsworth, 1951), p. 41.\n\n Ibid.\n\n Sacred song attributed to Alain de Lille (1128\u20131202), theologian and poet.\n\n### 1 NATURAL HISTORY\n\n The tribal arrangement was first proposed by Jean Delacour and Ernst Mayr in 1945, and developed by Paul A. Johnsgard from 1961.\n\n B. Grzimek et al., eds, _Grzimek's Animal Life Encyclopedia_ , 2nd edn (New York, 2003).\n\n 'Cretaceous duck ruffles feathers', BBC News: news.bbc.co.uk\/1\/hi\/sci\/tech\/4187287.stm (accessed January 2005).\n\n Descriptive observations from John C. Phillips, _A Natural History of the Ducks_ , 4 vols (Boston, MA, 1922\u20136).\n\n Though the 'demon duck of doom' or giant dinosaur duck from the late Miocene period is popularly described as a 3m high carnivorous duck with a bill the size and shape of an axe, it is \u2013 by its surmised appearance \u2013 as likely to be related to the emu (BBC News: news.bbc.co.uk\/1\/hi\/world\/asia-pacific\/ 5172292.stm (accessed September 2000).\n\n Jean-Claude Fischer, 'Oiseaux', in _Guide des fossiles de France_ (Paris, 2000), p. 183.\n\n Phillips, _A Natural History of the Ducks_ , vol. I, p. 8.\n\n C. Eykman, _The European Anatidae: An Easy Method of Identifying Swans, Geese and Ducks_ (Amsterdam, 1930).\n\n Stolzman (1886); quoted in Phillips, _A Natural History of the Ducks_ , vol. IV, p. 224.\n\n T. C. Eyron, _A Monograph of the Anatidae or Duck Tribe_ (London, 1838).\n\n 'A Frog He Would a Wooing Go'. A 'rowley-powley' is a plump fowl.\n\n Great Salkeld is a tiny English village in the Eden Valley close to the Lake District, its church first built in 880, one of 40 marking the resting places of the body of St Cuthbert, carried from Holy Island by monks fleeing the invading Danes. On the south side of the nave is a memorial window, which shows St Cuthbert in his cell on Farne Island with an eider duck by his side. The same eider duck, or 'Cuddy's duck', features in the tapestry worked by the women of Great Salkeld to commemorate the 1300th anniversary of the death of St Cuthbert. The saint, shown seated with the duck on his lap, is surrounded by scenes of village life and labour, and by panels representing the four seasons.\n\n Cited in Mark L. Mallory et al., 'Unusual Migration Mortality of King Eiders', _Waterbirds: The International Journal of Waterbird Biology_ , XXIV\/3 (December 2001), p. 453.\n\n Cited in Phillips, _A Natural History of the Ducks_ , vol. I, p. 65.\n\n A. E. Brehm, quoted in ibid., p. 123.\n\n Phillips suggests 'an astonishing locality for Tree ducks is Lake Junin, Peru, altitude over 11,000 feet where in April 1920, Lord William Percy shot a single specimen and saw at least a dozen others' (A _Natural History of the Ducks_ , vol. I, p. 130).\n\n Ibid., vol. IV, pp. 164\u201375.\n\n Ibid.\n\n David Tomlinson, _Ducks_ (London, 1996), p. 12.\n\n Ibid.\n\n Paul Johnsgard, _Ducks, Geese and Swans of the World_ (London, 1978), p. 384.\n\n Ibid.\n\n Patrick Sawyer, 'Love a Duck', _Evening Standard_ (7 February 2005).\n\n K. McCracken, 'The 20-cm Spiny Penis of the Argentina Lake Duck (oxyura vittata)', _The Auk_ , 117\/3 (2000), pp. 820\u201325.\n\n Hudson cited in Phillips, _A Natural History of the Ducks_ , vol. I, p. 31.\n\n Crawshay cited in ibid., vol. II, p. 207.\n\n Cited in ibid., vol. I, p. 34.\n\n T. Grandin and C. Johnson, _Animals in Translation_ (London, 2006), pp. 69\u201371. J. Gellatley, _Ducks out of Water: A Report on the UK Duck Industry_ by _VIVA_ (Vegetarians International Voice for Animals) in 2006 records ducks kept 10,000 at a time in darkness without access to water, requiring debeaking and antibiotics against the behaviours and disease that factory farm conditions exacerbate. VIVA is lobbying for legal regulations rather than UK 'codes'.\n\n The 'Ig Nobel' prize, awarded in Harvard since 1991, is given to published research findings that make the panel laugh; for 'achievements that cannot or should not be reproduced' (www.improbable.com ).\n\n B. Bagemihl, _Biological Exuberance: Animal Homosexuality and Natural Diversity_ (New York, 1999), p. 494.\n\n### 2 THE FREE AND THE PRESSED\n\n Colin Willcock, _Duck Shooting_ (London, 1962).\n\n E. G. Bolen, 'Waterfowl Management: Today and Tomorrow', _Journal of Wildlife Management_ , LXIV\/2 (April 2000), pp. 323\u201335.\n\n Coffin text 62, trans. J. Affman: www.nefertiti.iwebland.com\/ timelines\/topics\/fishing_and_hunting.htm (accessed 2007).\n\n The bolas in Exeter Museum was collected by the Reverend J. Dyson, who sailed around the world from 1885 to 1889. References to natives kayaking out to ships ready to trade artefacts \u2013 which may have been made expressly for trading \u2013 can be found in the journals of First Lieutenant George Peard, sent on a mission of exploration in the years 1825\u20138 to the Pacific Ocean and Bering Strait. See also J. R. Bockstoce, _Eskimos of N. W. Alaska in the Early Nineteenth Century_ (Oxford, 1977).\n\n Mid-twentieth-century dance crazes such as 'Do the Duck' and Chuck Berry's 'Duck Walk' may derive from these indigenous hunting-related duck dances.\n\n Vincent Giannetto III, hunter-carver, has made his living solely as a decoy carver for more than 25 years, according to _Wildfowling_ magazine. He began making his own as a teenager, when he couldn't afford to buy decoys \u2013 now his 'Delaware River style gunning decoys', each 'unique in look, feel, position and character', are worth thousands of dollars, and have appeared in the Smithsonian Institute and museum exhibitions. Gianetto has been invited to the White House to honour his craftsmanship.\n\n A. L. Kroeber and R. H. Lowie, eds, _American Archaeology and Ethnology_ , vol. XXV (Los Angeles, 1929).\n\n Lewis Clement, 'Duck Decoying in France [in the Abbeville marshes near Amiens]', _Baily's Magazine_ (January 1874), pp. 351\u20137.\n\n L. Budgen, _Songs from Lewis Carroll's Sylvie and Bruno_ (London, 1899), and Frank L. Baum, _Mother Goose in Prose_ (London, 1899).\n\n Nikolai Mikhailovich Przhevalsky, _From Kulja, Across the Tian Shan to Lob-Nor_ , trans. E. D. Morgan (London, 1878).\n\n 'Bird Hunting in Mexico', birdhuntingmexico.com\/ duck_hunting.aspx (accessed 23 July 2007).\n\n John G. Mackenty, _Duck Hunting_ (London, 1964), p. 150.\n\n Retold in 1904 by Yakumo Koizumi (Lafcadio Hearn) in _Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things_ , trans. T. Takata (London, 1933).\n\n The shadow play featured in _OBON_ : Tales of Rain and Moonlight, multi-media performance, directed by Ping Chong & Company (Tokyo, 2003).\n\n In a chapter titled 'A Series of Damn Fool Things' from _Duck Hunting_ , Mackenty deplores lit cigarettes, walking on thin ice, leaving the safety catch off guns and wearing waders that can fill with water and drown the wearer in marshes, rivers or the sea.\n\n Isabel Colegate, _The Shooting Party_ (London, 1980), p. 17.\n\n E. de Jongh, 'Erotica in Vogelperspectief', Digitale Biblioteck voor de Nederlandse Letteren, www.dbnl.org\/tekst\/jong.htm , p. 21 (accessed 2007).\n\n 'Domesticated' implies duck's genetic make-up (thus gene pool) having been altered to satisfy the needs of humans such that if the animal is placed back into its natural environment, it will be at a selective disadvantage when competing against its wild counterparts.\n\n Juliet Clutton-Brook, ed., _The Walking Larder: Patterns of Domestication, Pastoralism and Predation_ (London, 1989), p. 22: Sandor B\u00f6k\u00f6nyi's definition.\n\n Diodorus of Sicily, _The Library of History_ [1968], trans. C. B. Welles, 12 vols (London, 1933), Chapter 60.\n\n Sytze Bottema, 'Modern Domestication Processes', in Clutton-Brook, ed., _The Walking Larder_ , p. 40.\n\n Robert Gibbs, _A History of Aylesbury_ (Aylesbury, 1855), p. 622.\n\n W. Ranger, _Report to the General Board of Health_ (London, 1849), p. 5.\n\n W. Rose, _Fifty Years Ago_ , Little Booklets on Haddenham Village (Northumberland, 1931), pp. 24\u20135.\n\n Aylesbury ducks were a well-known export to London where Potter's family were based, and after a lifetime of animal interest, Potter was later to breed and show farm animals from her home in the Lake District.\n\n Mrs Beeton, _The Book of Household Management_ (London, 1859), p. 695.\n\n Carlo Consiglio's argument in _Diane and Minerva_ (Rome, 1990).\n\n Margaret Magat, 'Fertilised duck eggs and their role in Filipino culture', _Western Folklore_ (Spring 2002).\n\n 'Jin-Ling Black-beaked duck', www.monopause.net\/jinlingducksite\/jinlingduck.html (accessed May 2008).\n\n Paul Johnsgard, _Ducks, Geese and Swans of the World_ (London, 1978), p. 138.\n\n _Foie gras entier_ is pure liver cooked whole, _p\u00e2te de canard_ is a mix, _mousceau p\u00e2te_ is minced, _cou farci_ is stuffed neck, _magret farci_ is stuffed breast fillet, _magret seche ou fume_ is dried or smoked breast fillet, _civet de canard_ is jugged duck, _g\u00e9siers_ are gizzards, _coeurs_ are hearts, _rillettes_ are potted, _confits_ are pickled, _grillons_ are grilled and  _graisse_ is duck fat or dripping.\n\n _Foie gras_ (commonly goose) played a significant role in the culinary history of Europe's Ashkenazi Jews. Though hard evidence for Jewish _foie gras_ consumption dates back only to the Middle Ages, the Jews probably assimilated this delicacy during the first century AD while living under Roman rule, establishing the use of poultry fat as part of their dietary law. In medieval times children were given liver before Hanukkah and Passover. When diaspora Jews began their migration out of Palestine, they carried many of their food customs with them, including a love for _foie gras_ and a knowledge of how to produce it. Rabbis then and now, writing about animals raised or slaughtered in an inhumane manner, suggest it is not possible that _foie gras_ could be considered kosher. Claudia Roden, _The Book of Jewish Food: An Odyssey from Samarkand to New York_ (New York, 1996).\n\n Mithridates was king of Pontos (Turkey) about 114\u201363 BC. H.J.F. Horstmanshoff, 'Medicament, Magic and Poison in the Roman Empire', _European Review_ , VII\/1 (1999), pp. 37\u201351.\n\n 'His Majesty the Duck': www.tourdargent.com (accessed 25 July 2007).\n\n 'The World of Cherry Valley': www.cherryvalley.co.uk (accessed May 2008).\n\n### 3 THE DUCK'S QUACK\n\n Pseudonym of American poet Frederick Petersen, 1859\u20131938.\n\n John Berger, 'Why Look at Animals?', citing Rousseau's _Essay on the Origin of Languages_ , in G. Dyer, ed., _John Berger: Selected Essays_ (London, 2001), p. 261.\n\n R. Allen Gardner and B. T. Gardner, 'Teaching Sign Language to a Chimpanzee', _Science_ , 165 (1969), pp. 664\u201372.\n\n Paul Beale, ed., _A Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English_ (London, 1937), p. 348.\n\n George Godfrey, _History of George Godfrey: Written by Himself_ (London, 1828).\n\n G. A. Wilkes, _A Dictionary of Australian Colloquialisms_ (Sydney, 1978).\n\n Geoffrey Chaucer, 'The Parliament of Fowles', in Robert Southey, ed., _Select Works of the British Poets_ (London, 1831); 'That men should always love, without cause! Who can find reason or wit in that? Does one who is mirthless dance merrily? . . .'\n\n Daniel Defoe, _The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders_ (London, 1750), chap. 39.\n\n Charles Dickens, _Barnaby Rudge_ (New York, 1842), chap. 8.\n\n Charles Dickens, _Pickwick Papers_ (Boston, MA, 1868), chap. 34.\n\n Charles Dickens, _The Old Curiosity Shop_ (London, 1847\u201352), chap. 11.\n\n Letter from Henry VIII to Anne Boleyn, _c_. 1528 \u2013 www.geocities. com\/boleynfamily\/transcripts\/henry.html (accessed October 2007) \u2013 as an example of the word 'ducky' having changed.\n\n J. E. Lighter, ed., _Historical Dictionary of American Slang_ (New York, 1994), vol. I, pp. 666\u20138. Also Beale, _A Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English,_ p. 349.\n\n It is difficult to trace any possible links from 'duck' to similar-sounding slang words such as 'fuck' or 'dick' since these were taboo words, therefore not necessarily recorded in early dictionaries; 'dick' used in conjunction with other words as an insult (e.g. 'dickhead') can be traced to British Army slang from 1891, a parallel to the prevalence of military duck slang words and phrases.\n\n F. G. Cassidy and R. B. Le Page, _Dictionary of Jamaican English_ (Cambridge, 2002).\n\n W. Crooke, ed., _Hobson-Jobson: A Glossary of Colloquial Anglo-Indian Words and Phrases and of Kindred Terms, Etymological, Historical, Geographical and Discursive_ (London, 1886); Purwannah of Tipoo Sultan, in Logan, _Malabar,_ vol. III, p. 125.\n\n Farrukh Dhondy, _Bombay Duck_ (London, 1990), p. 241.\n\n From a verse song in _Comus_ , _a Maske by John Milton presented at Ludlow Castle_ (London, 1634).\n\n William Shakespeare, _Timon of Athens_ , Act IV, Scene 3.\n\n B. Bagemihl, _Biological Exuberance: Animal Homosexuality and Natural Diversity_ (New York, 1999).\n\n Gibson cited in John C. Phillips, _A Natural History of the Ducks_ ,  4 vols (Boston, MA, 1922\u20136), vol. I, pp. 128\u201339.\n\n Hall cited in ibid.\n\n Millais (1913), cited in Phillips, vol. II, p. 207.\n\n Originally 'Old MacDougal had a Farm in O-hi-o-i-o' with associated farm animal noises is described as an army song collected by John Goss for the _Community Song Book_ (London, 1927), p. 55. The earliest printing of the song has been traced to October 1917, in _Tommy's Tunes_ (London, 1917), a collection of soldiers' songs, marching melodies, rude rhymes and popular parodies. The song shifted to 'Old McDonald's' farm in the 1920s.\n\n Virginia Woolf to Margaret Llewelyn Davies, 28 April 1935, cited in the introduction to Leonard Woolf, _Quack, Quack!_ (London, 1935).\n\n Muriel Spark, _The Ballad of Peckham Rye_ [1960] (London, 1963), chap. 5, pp. 65\u20136, and chap. 9, p. 136.\n\n Mozart's K220 Mass has a violin chirping like a bird, hence its nickname _Spatzen Mass_ ( _Sparrow Mass_ ). Stravinsky takes on depiction of bird sounds \u2013 with tremolos, gruppetti, pizzicato glissandi, string and harp harmonics, and trills \u2013 in his _Rite of Spring,_ and Satie's work features piano patterns with loons. For Messiaen, see Paul Griffiths, _Olivier Messiaen and the Music of Time_ (London, 1985).\n\n Such as the 'audio collages' of Peter Pannke's _Opera of Birds_ and Walter Tilgner's _Winter at Lake Constance,_ making use of digital sound recordings of thousands of diving ducks, pochards, etc., over the last twenty years.\n\n John Levack Drever, Notes for _The Quack Project_ , CDRom, 2001.\n\n Given Stockhausen's work with reverberation, the urban legend that a 'duck's quack has no echo' is interesting. This was finally disproved in 2003. Tested in an anechoic chamber at the University of Salford, Manchester, a duck called Daisy demonstrated her quack \u2013 though quiet \u2013 had a distinct echo.\n\n Karlheinz Stockhausen, _Stockhausen Talks: Hymnen_ , _1966\u201367_ , sinologic.com\/newmusic\/sub\/hymen.html (accessed November 2001) and www.stockhausen.org. _Hymnen (Anthems) Electronic and Concrete Music with Soloists._\n\n### 4 DUCKS _EX MACHINA :_ THE MECHANICAL AND ANIMATED DUCK\n\n Gaby Wood, _Living Dolls: A Magical History of the Quest for Mechanical Life_ (London, 2002), p. 34.\n\n After Julien Offrey de la Mettrie published a mechanistic treatise, _The Natural History of the Soul,_ in 1747, he lost his job, and all copies of the book were burnt. He is quoted in Wood's _Living Dolls,_ pp. 12\u201313.\n\n Ibid., pp. 24\u20135.\n\n Thomas Pynchon, _Mason and Dixon_ (London, 1998), and p. 448.\n\n Ibid., extracts from pp. 372\u201383.\n\n Steven Watts, _The Magic Kingdom: Walt Disney and the American Way of Life_ (Boston, MA, 1997), p. 73.\n\n Ibid., p. 181. As mischievous and gregarious as male ducks embarked on sexual antics, the Disney crew \u2013 'Fat Boy' Roy Williams and 'Banana Nose' Jack Kinney were the instigators here. They adored practical jokes, constantly misbehaved at the studio, and threw famously wild parties.\n\n Ibid., p. 183.\n\n Quoted in Esther Leslie's _Hollywood Flatlands: Animation, Theory and the Avant-Garde_ (London, 2002), p. 161.\n\n Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart, _How to Read Donald Duck: Imperialist Ideology in the Disney Comic_ (New York, 1971), p. 91 and closing lines.\n\n Ibid.\n\n Robert Pincus-Witten, _Roy Lichtenstein, A Drawing Retrospective_ , exh. cat., James Goodman Gallery (New York, 1984), n.p.\n\n George Orwell, _Nineteen Eighty-Four_ (London, 2003), chap .5 .\n\n Gottfried Helnwein, 'Memories of Duckburg', in _Donald Duck 70 jaar jong!_ ( _D. D. 70 Years Young!_ ), exh. cat. (Amstelveen, Netherlands), pp. 22, 31.\n\n This is a homage to (or pastiche of) Magritte's 1930s _This is Not a Pipe_ series, which involved a painted pipe with the title words beneath, but in series explored the idea of a thing represented clearly not being the actual thing, including a painting on an easel in front of a window scene which is also a painting, in recursive  infinity. A similarly existential question is asked in Peter Weir's film _The Truman Show_ (1998), in which the hero discovers his life is not real but Reality TV and, on trying to escape, reaches the edge of the cardboard set.\n\n### 5 PLAYING DUCK\n\n Konrad Lorenz's assumption that duck displays were instinctive or innate 'fixed action patterns' in his monograph on duck behaviour of 1941, comparing twenty species, was challenged by Lehrman in 1953, who argued that clarifying behaviours is counter-productive since it does not explore how behaviour actually develops and may distract us from finding out. Lehrman's hostile attack had enormous impact. The instinctive versus learned debate continues, expressed now as 'constitutional' versus 'experiential'.\n\n Information about NOAA'S interest in the bath toys is online at www.afsc.noaa\/gov.\/ .\n\n Geoff Dyer, ed., _John Berger: Selected Essays_ (London, 2001), p. 266.\n\n### 6 QUACKERY UNMASK'D\n\n For example, _The So Much Famed Tablets: A Description of a Quack Medicine_ (London, 1680); J. Wiggins, _A Catalogue of Cures: A Collection of 185 advertisements, chiefly relating to quack medicines. The greater part English, the rest French, German and Italian,_ 1660\u20131716. _An Explanation of the Vices of the Age Shewing The Knavery of Landords, The Imposition of Quack Doctors, The Roguery of Petty-Lawyers, The Cheats of Bum-Bailiffs and the Intrigues of Lewd Women,_ Printed and Sold at no. 4, Long Lane, Smithfield, London, dated 1880?; _De Franse Quackslaver of de Boere Klap Beurs_ [The French Quack from Clap District] (Groningen, 1689).\n\n John Spike, _Quackery Unmasked: A Treatise on Venereal Disease_ (London, 1711), n. p.\n\n Eric Jameson, _The Natural History of Quackery_ (London, 1961), pp. 118\u201319.\n\n Lewis Carroll, _Collected Verse_ (London, 1929).\n\n Elisabeth Rosenthal, 'Bird Flu Virus May be Spread by Smuggling', _New York Times_ (15 June 2006).\n\n Janet Kear, _Man and Wildfowl_ (London, 1990), p. 218.\n\n Organophosphate insecticides inhibit an enzyme (acetyl-cholinesterase) essential for proper functioning of the nervous system. Because we all have similar mechanisms of nerve transmission, this mode of action is similar in target insects, birds and mammals. Many organophosphates are acutely toxic to birds at very low doses. A recent compilation of acute lethal doses (LD50s) for the mallard duck showed that sixteen to twenty organophos-phates were acutely toxic at doses less than 20 mg per kg of body weight and the most toxic had an LD50 over twenty times smaller. Pesticides also cause eggshell thinning. J. K. Bennett, S. E. Dominguez and W. L. Griffis, 'Effects of Dicofol on Mallard Eggshell Quality', _Archives of Environmental Contamination and Toxicology_ , XIX\/6 (1990), pp. 907\u201312.\n\n Marc Von Roomen and Jesper Madsen, eds, _Waterfowl and Agriculture: Review and Future Perspective of the Crop Damage Conflict in Europe_ (Lelystad, Netherlands, 1992), p. 56.\n\n Violeta Fuentes Munoz-Pomer, 'Population Genetics and Hybridisation of the White-Headed Duck, _Oxyura leucocephala_ , and the Ruddy Duck, _Oxyura jamaicensis'_ , doctoral thesis, University of Seville, 2005.\n\n Animal Aid Director Andrew Tyler's address to a RSPCA seminar examining the fate of the ruddy duck as part of an ongoing campaign against the cull, February 2004.\n\n Hans Christian Andersen, 'The Ugly Duckling', in _The Complete Stories_ (London, 2005), pp. 201\u20134.\n\n Zdravko Radman, _Metaphors: Figures of the Mind_ (London, 1997), p. 151.\n\n Born in Gloucestershire, England, F. W. (Will) Harvey was an officer in the First World War. Famously courageous at the front, he did forays alone first to see if it was safe enough to take his men. During one of these, he was caught and made a prisoner of war. On one  occasion, after long solitary confinement, he returned to his bed to find a fellow prisoner had drawn a picture of ducks for him, which inspired the poem 'Ducks'. Decorated for his bravery, Harvey wrote poetry all through the war and after.\n\n Monologue on the death of his wife, in William Shakespeare's _Macbeth_ , Act V, v.16.\n\n Edmund Spenser, 'The Shepherd's Calendar', in _The Shepherd's Calendar and Other Poems_ (London, 1978).\n\n Jacques Derrida, 'L'Animal que donc je suis (a suivre)', trans. David Wills as 'The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow)', _Critical Inquiry_ , 28 (Winter 2002), pp. 369\u2013418.\n\n Elias Canetti, _On Crowds and Power_ (London, 2000).\n\n Discussion between author and child: Author: 'Where do imaginary friends go when we grow up?' Child: 'They turn into ducks and things.'\n\n Wallace Stevens, _Opus Posthumous_ (New York, 1957).\n\n John Berger, 'Why Look at Animals?', in Geoff Dyer, ed., _John Berger: Selected Essays_ (London, 2001), p. 266.\n\n Gilles Deleuze's and Felix Guattari's three categories: individuated animals or pets, animals with characteristics or attributes, and more demonic animals, from 'A Thousand Plateaus', in _Capitalism and Schizophrenia_ , trans. B. Massumi (London, 1988), pp. 239\u201341.\n\n The Tsimshians are First Nation peoples living by the Skeena River, off the north coast of British Columbia and Alaska.\n\n Traditional American song for outdoor camps and scouting-type events, sung to the tune of 'Stars and Stripes Forever', covered by Mitch Miller in the 1960s; also on Disney's _The Best of Silly Songs_.\n\n Attributed to Sam Goldwyn (1882\u20131974), speaking in admiration of Shakespeare, in John Gross, _After Shakespeare_ (Oxford, 1995).\n\n## Bibliography\n\nAndersen, Hans Christian, 'The Ugly Duckling', in _The Complete Stories_ , trans. Jean Hersholt (London, 2005)\n\nBagemihl, Bruce, _Biological Exuberance: Animal Homosexuality and Natural Diversity_ (New York, 1999)\n\nBedard, Michael, _Sitting Ducks_ (London, 2001)\n\nBokonyi, S., 'Definitions of Animal Domestication', in J. Clutton-Brook, ed., _The Walking Larder: Patterns of Domestication, Pastoralism and Predation_ (London, 1989)\n\nColegate, Isobel, _The Shooting Party_ (Harmondsworth, 1980)\n\nDahl, Roald, _The Magic Finger_ (London, 1966)\n\nDelacour, Jean, _The Living Air: Memoirs of an Ornithologist_ (London, 1966)\n\nDerrida, Jacques, 'The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow)', trans. David Wills, _Critical Inquiry_ , 28 (Winter 2002)\n\nDhondy, Farukh, _Bombay Duck_ (London, 1990)\n\nDorfman, A., and A. Mattelart, _How to Read Donald Duck: Imperialist Ideology in the Disney Comic_ (New York, 1971)\n\nDuret, _Histoire admirable des herbes emerveillables_ (1605).\n\nEmerson, Ralph Waldo, _Nature: Addresses and Lectures_ [1849] (New York, 2004)\n\nEnkell, Pierre, and Pierre R\u00e9zeau, _Dictionnaire des onomatop\u00e9es_ (Paris, 2003)\n\nGerald of Wales, _The History and Topography of Ireland_ , trans. John O'Meara (Harmondsworth, 1951)\n\nGoldwasser, Orly, _From Icon to Metaphor_ (London, 1995)\n\nGrant, Michael, _Erotic Art in Pompeii: The Secret Collection of the National Museum of Naples_ (London, 1975)\n\nHalliwell, J. O., _Dictionary of Archaic and Provincial Words_ (London, 1889)\n\nJameson, Eric, _The Natural History of Quackery_ (London, 1961)\n\nJohnsgard, Paul A., _Ducks, Geese and Swans of the World_ (London, 1978)\n\nKear, Janet, _Man and Wildfowl_ (London, 1990)\n\nKroeber, A. L., and R. H. Lowie, _American Archeology and Ethnography_ , vol. XXV (1929)\n\nLeslie, Esther, _Hollywood Flatlands: Animation, Critical Theory and the Avant-garde_ (London, 2002)\n\nL\u00e9vi-Strauss, Claude, _Mythologiques (Introduction to a Science of Mythology): The Raw and the Cooked_ (London, 1970)\n\n\u2014, _The Way of Masks_ (London, 1982).\n\nLighter, J. E, ed., _Historical Dictionary of American Slang_ , vol. I (New York, 1994)\n\nMackenty, John G., _Duck Hunting_ (London, 1964)\n\nMagat, Margaret, 'Balut: Fertilized Duck Eggs and their Role in Filipino Culture', _Western Folklore_ (Spring 2002)\n\nMitchell, W. T., _Picture Theory_ (Chicago, 1994)\n\nPhillips, John C., _A Natural History of the Ducks_ , 4 vols (Boston, MA, 1922\u20136)\n\nPotter, Beatrix, _Jemima Puddleduck_ [1908] (London, 2002)\n\nPynchon, Thomas, _Mason and Dixon_ (London, 1998)\n\nPrejevalsky, Colonel N., _From Kulja, across the Tian Shan to Lob-Nor_ , trans. E. Delmar (London, 1879)\n\nRansome, Arthur, _Peter Duck_ (London, 1932)\n\nRichard, Frances, 'Fifteen Theses on the Cute', _Cabinet Magazine_ , no. 4, _Immaterial Incorporated_ (Summer 2001)\n\nSalisbury, Joyce E., _The Beast Within_ (London, 1994)\n\nScieska, Jon, and Lane Smith, _The Stinky Cheeseman and Other Fairly Stupid Tales_ (London, 1993)\n\nScollins, R., and J. Titford, _Ey Up Mi Duck: An Affectionate Look at the Speech, History and Folklore of Ilkeston and the Erewash Valley_ (Ilkston, 1976)\n\nSpark, Muriel, _The Ballad of Peckham Rye_ (London, 1960)\n\nTodd, Frank S., _Natural History of the Waterfowl_ (San Diego, 1996)\n\nTomlinson, David, _Ducks_ (London, 1996)\n\nVelthuijs, Max, _'Frog in Love' and 'Frog and Duck'_ (London, 1999)\n\nWaddell, Martin, and Helen Oxenbury, _Farmer Duck_ (London, 1991)\n\nWatts, Steven, _The Magic Kingdom: Walt Disney and the American Way of Life_ (Boston, MA, 1997)\n\nWillcock, Colin, _Duck Shooting_ (London, 1962)\n\nWood, Gaby, _Living Dolls: A Magical History of the Quest for Mechanical Life_ (London, 2002)\n\nWright, Bruce S., _Black Duck Spring_ (New York, 1966)\n\nZheleznova, Irina, _The White Duck_ : _A Russian Fairy-tale, Retold in English_ (Moscow, 1977)\n\n## Associations and Websites\n\nBRITISH TRUST FOR ORNITHOLOGY\n\nwww.bto.org\n\nBRITISH WATERFOWL ASSOCIATION\n\nwww.waterfowl.org.uk\n\nCARTOON ANIMATION ARCHIVES\n\ntoolooney.goldenagecartoons.com\/daffy.html\n\nDisney.go.com\/vault\/archives.donald.html\n\nCOALITION AGAINST DUCK SHOOTING\n\nwww.duck.org.au\n\nCONSERVATION TODAY, WETLANDS FOR TOMORROW\n\nwww.ducks.org\n\nDUCK BIOLOGICS RESEARCH LABORATORY AT CORNELL UNIVERSITY, NEW YORK\n\nwww.duckhealth.com\/ducklab.html\n\nDUCK BREEDING\n\nwww.duckeggs.com\n\nDUCK STAMPS PROGRAMME\n\nwww.fws.gov\/duckstamps\n\nGLOBAL GLOSSARY OF QUACKS\n\nwww.georgetown.edu\/eball\/animals\/duck.html\n\nINDIAN RUNNER DUCK ASSOCIATION\n\nwww.runnerduck.net\n\nINTERNATIONAL WILD WATERFOWL ASSOCIATION (IWWA)\n\nwww.greatnorthern.net\/~dye\/iwwa.html\n\nLE SITE OFFICIEL DES PROFESSIONNELS DU FOIE GRAS\n\nwww.lefoiegras.fr\n\nPACIFIC FLYWAY DECOY ASSOCIATION\n\nwww.pacificflyway.org\n\nRUBBER DUCK COLLECTIONS AND COMMUNITY FORUM\n\nwww.duckplanet.com\n\nSEA DUCK JOINT VENTURE\n\nwww.seaduckjv.org\n\nSLIMBRIDGE WETLAND RESERVE\n\nwww.wwt.org.uk\/visit\/slimbridge\n\nTOUR DARGENT RESTAURANT\n\nwww.tourdargent.com\n\nVAUCANSON RESEARCH\n\nwww.swarthmore.edu\/Humanities\/pschmid1\/essays\/pynchon\/vaucanson.html\n\nVEGETARIANS INTERNATIONAL VOICE FOR ANIMALS\n\nwww.viva.org.uk\/campaigns\/ducks\n\nWILDFOWLING MAGAZINE\n\nwww.wildfowling.co.uk\n\nWWT WILDFOWL AND WETLANDS TRUST\n\nwww.wwt.org.uk\n\nZOOLOGICAL MUSEUM AT TRING\n\nwww.nhm.ac.uk\/tring\/index.html\n\n## Acknowledgements\n\nThanks to the AHRC for gamely awarding me a grant for sabbatical research leave and Richard Andrews for his appreciation and support of the playfully serious.\n\nSpecial thanks must go to colleagues at Middlesex University and CLE for being such ducks and passing on useful references; the Spitalfields and Isle of Dogs City Farms; Mark Adams, skin specialist in the Bird Group at Tring; Jane Burkinshaw, Curator of Ethnography at the Royal Albert Memorial Museum at Exeter; Mike Lawson-Smith at Hotel Haddock; Hatice Abdullah; Gavin Baldwin; Ron Hammond; Howard Hollands; Blott Krebb; Martin McCabe; Lene \u00d8stermark-Johansen; Mark and Rebecca Sinker; David Vigay; Lisa Wigham; Theresa Lane for braving gavage and caring for lame duck Delboy with John Earl and Suzy Humphries; all the de Rijke flock, especially Ralph and Rapha\u00eblla for bringing me a timely duck work ethic and Jean-Luc and Martine for laying duck's table; Elodie Maire for her duck drawings; Heiko Schlombach for the raw and the cooked; and Lord Love a Duck, la Dr\u00f4me.\n\n## Photo Acknowledgements\n\nThe author and publishers wish to express their thanks to the below sources of illustrative material and\/or permission to reproduce it. (Some sources uncredited in the captions for reasons of brevity are also given below.)\n\nPhotos by the author: pp. 14, 86, 98, 113 (top), 147; image courtesy of the author (\u00a9 Kahve-Society): p. 112; photo Erwin and Peggy Bauer\/US Fish & Wildlife Service: p. 27 (foot); photo Don Becker\/US Fish & Wildlife Service: p. 150; Biblioth\u00e8que Nationale de France, Paris (D\u00e9partement des Monnaies, M\u00e9dailles et Antiques): p. 162; photo R. J. Bridges\/US Fish & Wildlife Service: p. 67; British Museum, London (photos British Museum Images, \u00a9 The Trustees of the British Museum): pp. 53, 73, 130 (top), 131 (top); photos Edward S. Curtis\/ Library of Congress, Washington, DC (Prints and Photographs Division; Edward S. Curtis Collection): pp. 54, 66; photos Donna Dewhurst\/US Fish & Wildlife Service: pp. 26, 47 (top); photo Brent Esmil\/US Fish & Wildlife Service: p. 152 (top); photos Milton Friend\/US Fish & Wildlife Service: pp. 34, 57; photo George Gentry\/US Fish & Wildlife Service: p. 37 (foot); photo courtesy iwasfixin2: p. 37 (top); photo \u00a9 Marjorie Kibby: p. 14 (foot); photo William Larned\/US Fish & Wildlife Service: p. 30; photo courtesy of Kevin McCraken: p. 41; photo Matthew Maran (mattmaran.com): p. 21; photos Dave Menke\/US Fish & Wildlife Service: pp. 6, 32, 47 (middle); Mus\u00e9e du Louvre, Paris: pp. 49, 130 (foot); photo National Weather Service (National Oceanic Atmospheric Admin -istration): p. 27 (top); photo courtesy New York Public Library: p. 97; from Ralph Payne-Gallwey, _Book of Duck Decoys_ (1894): p. 56; Philadelphia Museum of Art: p. 83; photo Adrian Pingstone: p. 38; private collections: pp. 64, 123 (photo \u00a9 The Estate of Roy Lichtenstein\/DACS 2008), 125; photo William Radke\/US Fish & Wildlife Service: p. 154; photos \u00a9 Roger-Viollet\/Rex Features: p. 23 (748180A), 52 (748181A), 82 (748176A), 91 (748178A), 163 (748179A); Royal Cabinet of Paintings 'Mauritshuis', The Hague: p. 76; photo Rex Gary Schmidt\/US Fish & Wildlife Service: p. 51; photos David Sharp\/US Fish & Wildlife Service: p. 60; courtesy of the artist (Kaj Stenvall): p. 126; from _The Stinky Cheese Man and Other Fairly Stupid Tales_ by Jon Scieszka and Lane Smith (Viking, 1992), text copyright \u00a9 Jon Scieszka, 1992, illustration copyright \u00a9 Lane Smith 1992: p. 157; reproduced courtesy of Stockhausen-Verlag, K\u00fcrten, Germany: p. 113 (middle); photo University of Glasgow Library (Special Collections Department): p. 11; photos US Fish and Wildlife Service: pp. 50, 68, 155; Wallace Collection, London (reproduced by kind permission of the Trustees of the Wallace Collection): p. 71; Wellcome Images: p. 146; photo Alan D. Wilson (25, 47 (foot); photo Mila Zinkova: p. 45.\n\n## Index\n\nAfrica 24, 30, 33, 74, 87, 103, 150\u201351\n\nAlaska 29\u201330, 54\u20135, 142\n\nAnatidae 17\u201318\n\nAndersen, Hans Christian 156\u20137, 160\n\nAntartica 14, 29, 65\u20136, 142\n\nanthropomorphism 35, 38\u201340, 45, 60\u201361, 70, 160\n\narchitecture 129\u2013131, _131_ , 154\n\nAsia 24, 34, 42, 48, 53, 61\u20132, 65, 83\u20136, 104\u20135, 151\n\nAsiatic cholera 79\n\nAuckland Island merganser 152\n\nAustralia 15\u201316, 102\u20133, 151\n\nautomaton 115\u201319\n\nAvian influenza virus 90, 149\u201351\n\nAylesbury duck 79\u201381, _79_\n\nBagemihl, Bruce 45\n\n_Balut_ 84\u20135, _85_\n\nBeeton, Mrs (Isabella) 80\n\nBell, Thomas 32\n\nBerger, John 142\n\n_Bernacae_ 7\u20139, _8_ , _9_\n\nBig Duck, The 131\n\nBoarstall duck decoy, Buckinghamshire 56\u20137, _56_\n\nBresson, George 149\n\nCanetti, Elias 160\n\nCassatt, Mary _78_\n\ncave paintings 72, _72_\n\nChalandais duck 91\n\nChaplin, Charlie 118\n\nCherry Valley duck farming co. 93\n\nClub Gascon, London 88\n\nComenius, Jan _19_\n\nconstellation 26\n\nCook, Captain James 24\n\nCuddy's duck 29\n\nDaffy Duck 70\n\nDahl, Roald 70\n\nDarwin, Charles 23\n\ndecoys 55\u201361, _56_ , 57\n\nDelacour, Jean, and Ernst Mayr 14, 19\n\n_Der Fuehrer's Face_ 121, _122_\n\nDickens, Charles 48, 101\u20132\n\nDiodorus Siculus 73\u20134\n\nDisney, Walt 118\u201322, 128, 160\n\nDonald Duck 118\u201328\n\nDrever, John Levack 112\n\nduck\n\nbaiting 58, _58_\n\nbills or beaks 12, 20, 22, 44, _107_ , _145_ , _146_ , _147_\n\ncartoons and animation 70, 118\u201322, 124, 128, 141, 148\n\ndiet 22\u201324\n\ndisplay 35\u20139, _36_ , _37_\n\ndiving 22\u20133\n\ndomestication _73_ , _76_ , 77\u201382\n\neggs 31\u20133, 83\n\nfeathers 28\u20139, 93\n\nflight 12, 17, 19, 23\u201331, 35, 40, 110\n\nfossils 13\u201317, 166\n\ngames 97\u20139, 112, 132\u20133, 139\n\ngods _162_ , _163_ , 163\n\nhabitat 19\u201321, 34\n\nhide 58\u20139, _84_\n\nhunting 48\u201371, _53_ , _60_ , _62_ , _67_ , _68_\n\nhybridity 46, 85, 155\u201360\n\nidiom 95\u2013106\n\nliterature 12, 23, 48, 64, 68\u20139, 101\u20132, 124, 136, 140, 156\u2013160\n\nmigration 24\u20136, 48\n\nmonogamy 42\n\nmoulting 28\u20139\n\nmusic 31, 111\u201314\n\nmyth and legend 10, 16, 39, 163\u20134\n\nnavigation 26\u201330\n\nnesting 30\u201333\n\nnetting _52_ , 53\u20134\n\npenis 40, _41_\n\nrape 38\u20139, 42\u20134\n\nrecipes _79_ , 79\u201388, _85_ , _86_ , 90\u201393, 104\n\nringing and banding 51, _51_\n\nsex life _42, 43, 44, 45_ , 39\u201361\n\nsong 110\u201311\n\ntaxonomy 9, 12\u201319\n\ntheatre and installations 64\u20135, 69, 133\u20136, 140\u201341, 145\n\ntribes _see_ Tribes\n\nvoice 16, 106\u201311, _108, 109_\n\nduck-dipping 128, 132\n\n'duck hawks' 59\n\nduck races 137\u20138\n\nducking-stool _97_ , 98\n\nDuck\u2013Rabbit puzzle _132_\n\nDucks Unlimited 51\n\n_Ducktastic_ 135\u20136\n\nDUKW 100, 137, _137_\n\nDuret, Claude 8\u20139\n\nEco, Umberto 128\n\nemblems 11\n\nEnglish Nature 38\n\netymology 95\u20136\n\nEurope 16, 38\u20139, 54\u20137, 72, 78\u201382, 90, 150, 155\n\nextinction 151\u20132\n\n_Exxon Valdez_ 151\n\nEyton, Thomas 18, _18_ , 21, _108_\n\nFabre, Henri 99\n\nfactory farming 88\u201390, 93\u20134\n\n_Farmer Duck 161_\n\nFBI 120\n\nFederal Duck Stamp 50\n\nferal duck 155\n\n_foie gras_ 87\u201390\n\nFrench Rural Code 89\n\ngames 97, 99, 112, 132\u20133, 139\n\ngeese, confusion with 14\u201317\n\nGerald of Wales 7, 166\n\nGreat Salkeld, Cumbria, stained glass at _29_\n\nGriset, Ernest 148\n\nHelnwein, Gottfried 125, _125_\n\nHevelius, Johannes 26\n\nhieroglyphs 95\u20136, _96_\n\nHobby-duck (in Macclesfield Psalter) 132\n\n_How to Read Donald Duck_ 124\n\nIbsen, Hendrik 69\n\nIndian runner duck 134\u20135, _135_\n\nJemima Puddleduck 80, _81_ , 134\n\nJohnsgard, Paul 19, 39\n\nLear, Edward 158, 160\n\nLichtenstein, Roy _123_ , 124, 128\n\nLimoges porcelain 129\n\nLondon Duck Tours 137, _137_\n\nLorenz, Konrad 41, 110, 133, _134_\n\nMaes, Nicolaes _83_ , 84\n\n_Magic Finger, The_ 70\n\nmallard duck ( _anas platyrhynchos_ ) _27, 45_ , 46, 88\n\nmandarin duck ( _aix galericulata_ ) 42, _43_ , 159\n\nMarco Polo 67\n\nMessager, Annette 140\u201341\n\nMessiaen, Olivier 111\n\nmetaphor 101\u20133, 158, 160\u201364\n\nMetsu, Gabriel 70, _71_\n\nMickey Mouse 119\n\nMigratory Bird Act, The 48\n\nMithridates 90\n\nMoelikers, Kees 44\n\nMongolian empire 65\n\nNash, Clarence 'Ducky' 120\n\nNational Trust, The 37\n\nnative traditions _54_ , 54\u20135, 65, _66_ , 163,\n\nNile Valley 74\n\nNorth America 24, 48, 50, 55, 66, 68\n\nonomatopoeia 106\u201314\n\nOudry, Jean-Baptiste 75, 77\u20138, _77_\n\npandemic 149\u201351\n\nPeking duck 86\n\nPhillips, John C. 36\u20137, 106\u20138\n\nPisanello _49_\n\nPliny the Elder 17, 90\n\nPokemon _141_\n\npoultry smuggling 151\n\n_press\u00e9_ 91\u20133\n\nProkofiev, Sergei 31\n\nPrzhevalsky, Col. N. 61\u20132, 67\n\npub names 98, _98_\n\npunt guns _62_ , 63\n\npuppetry 64\u20135, 133\u20136\n\nPynchon, Thomas 117\u201318, 128\n\n_Quack! Quack!_ 140\n\nquack-doctors 143\u20135, _144, 145_\n\n_Quack-Project, The_ 112, _112_\n\nRay, John 17\n\nRenoir, Jean 69\n\nRothschild, Baron Walter 152\n\nrubber ducks 137\u201340, _139_ , 162\n\nruddy duck 36, _37_ , 38, 155\u20136\n\nSt-Cr\u00e9pin-et-Carlucet, P\u00e9rigord\n\nSarlat, P\u00e9rigord 129\n\nsatellite radio tracking 30\n\n_Shooting Party, The_ 68\u20139\n\nsign language 96\n\nskins _52_ , 152\u20133\n\nSlimbridge, Gloucestershire 37\u20138\n\nsociability 33\u201335, 41\u20132, 45, 58, 153, 160\n\nSouth America 19, 32, 49, 151, 155\n\nStenvall, Kaj 126\u20137, _126_\n\nStockhausen, Karlheinz 112\u201314, _113_\n\nTakahashi, Rumiko 124, 128\n\nTour d'Argent, Paris, La 91, _91_\n\ntown versus country 50\n\nTribes 8, 13\n\n_Anatini_ 25, _25, 26, 27_ , 40, _45, 47_\n\n_Aythyini_ 24\n\n_Cairinini_ 31\u20133\n\n_Dendrocygnini_ 33\u20135, 34, 107\n\n_Mergini_ 19\u201321, 20, 21, 51, 106\n\n_Oxyurini_ 15, 35\u201340, _37, 38_ , 45, 46\n\n_Somateriini 29, 30_ , 29\u201330, 34\n\n_Stictonetta naevosa_ 15, 16, 15\n\n_Tadornini_ 17, 23\u20134\n\n_Tachyerini_ 17, 23\u20134\n\nTring, National History Museum 44, 152\u20133\n\nVaucanson, Jacques 22, 115\u201318, 124, 128\n\nVaucanson's mechanical duck 115\u201316, _116_\n\nvibrator 140, _140_\n\nVoltaire 117\n\n_Walking Larder, The_ 72\n\nWetlands Trust, The 38\n\nWhitby Lucky Ducks 129\n\nwhite duck _54, 64_ , 75\u201382, _76, 77, 78, 82_\n\n_Wild Duck, The_ 69\n\nWildfowl Trust, The 37\n\nWillughby, Francis 17\n\nWittgenstein, Ludwig 132\n\nWorld Health Organization 90\n","meta":{"redpajama_set_name":"RedPajamaBook"}}
+{"text":" \n###\n\n# Tainted Lilies\n\n###  \u200bBecky Lee Weyrich\n\n###\n\n# Copyright\n\nDiversion Books  \nA Division of Diversion Publishing Corp.  \n443 Park Avenue South, Suite 1008  \nNew York, NY 10016  \nwww.DiversionBooks.com\n\nCopyright \u00a9 1984 by **** Becky Lee Weyrich  \nAll rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.\n\nThis is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.\n\nFor more information, email info@diversionbooks.com\n\nFirst Diversion Books edition **** June 2014  \nISBN: 978-1-62681-335-9\n\n#  Also by Becky Lee Weyrich\n\n[Swan's Way  \nSavannah Scarlett  \nRainbow Hammock  \nCaptive of Desire  \nSands of Destiny  \nThe Scarlet Thread  \nOnce Upon Forever  \nSummer Lightning  \nSilver Tears  \nTainted Lilies  \nAlmost Heaven  \nWhispers in Time  \nSweet Forever  \nRapture's Slave  \nGypsy Moon  \nHot Winds from Bombay  \nThe Thistle and the Rose  \nForever, For Love](chap259272.xhtml)\n\n> _To Michaela Hamilton, who stuck with me faithfully through Death Pearls, Rainbows, Virgins and Bulls._\n\n###\n\n# Author's Note\n\n> \"He left a Corsair's name to other times.\n> \n> Link'd with one virtue, and a thousand crimes.\"\n\nLord Byron wrote these lines in his poem, _The Corsair,_ in 1816, having gained his inspiration from newspaper accounts of Jean Laffite's brave part in the Battle of New Orleans.\n\nCorsair, privateer, smuggler, freebooter\u2014Laffite freely admitted to being all of these. But ony a man who placed small value on his life would dare call Jean Laffite \"pirate.\" That very epithet, in the end, drove him from New Orleans, the city he longed to adopt as his home.\n\nThe youngest son of a wealthy family, Jean Laffite grew up at his grandmother Zora's knee on tales of his ancestors' past glories in France and their later persecution in Spain, where his Jewish grandfather became a victim of the Inquisition. These events fostered in Laffite an ever-growing hatred of oppression and the Spanish crown, and shaped his character and the pattern of his life.\n\nLaffite, according to his own accounts, was born and raised in what is now Haiti. The slave revolt in that former French colony brought the French Revolution to the North American continent in the late eighteenth century and changed Jean Laffite's destiny. Together with his seafaring brothers and uncle, he helped transport refugees to safety from the island, bringing thousands to New Orleans between 1802 and 1805. When the polyglot society of that city welcomed these homeless citizens, Jean Laffite decided he had found his home as well.\n\nThough New Orleanians-Creoles, blacks, Indians, and _Americans\u2014_ all cheered his arrival, corrupt government officials wanted no part of the \"gentleman smuggler.\" Those in high offices were lining their pockets with gold from excessive taxation before the brothers Laffite entered the scene. Together Jean and his older brother Pierre set up a commercial network, manned by other homeless sailors, which stretched to every ocean, with a home base on the islands of Grande Terre and Grande Isle in the Baratarian region on the Gulf. From the warehouses on his island outpost, goods were brought to New Orleans for sale, duty free, to the tax-burdened citizens of the city.\n\nJean Laffite became a hero to all but the competing merchants and the outraged customs officials. The U.S. governor of Louisiana, William C. C. Claiborne, waged his own vendetta against the man who was, he felt, stealing his gold and making a fool of him. He dared to brand Jean Laffite a pirate.\n\nFor years, Laffite eluded arrest and continued his smuggling activities. When the British threatened to take New Orleans, Laffite volunteered his men, guns, ammunition, and his own services, in hopes a victory might clear his name.\n\nNot until he had fought for the United States and the battle was won did Jean Laffite discover that some men are without honor.\n\nThough _Tainted Lilies_ is basically a work of fiction, many of the characters lived, loved, fought, and were buried in and around New Orleans. I have tried to recreate the events of history faithfully, though full details were not always available. Here I have allowed my imagination to supply what I believe might have happened, given existing circumstances. I hope my readers-and Jean Laffite\u2014will forgive any liberties for the sake of a good tale.\n\n###\n\n# Prologue\n\n_New Orleans, 1811_\n\nSlowly, deliberately, as if hoping the darkness might banish her fears, the young woman, swathed in cream-colored satin and lace, snuffed out all the candles about the room, then went to her window to gaze out through rain-spattered panes.\n\nThe wet glass reflected like a mirror, limning high cheekbones and brow, sensually flared nostrils, and fragile lips\u2014now trembling slightly.\n\nNicolette Vernet's face, curtained on either side in thick skeins of raven's-wing black, radiated a pale, mysterious beauty\u2014the Creole ideal of delicacy and refinement.\n\nHer black-sapphire eyes searched muddy Toulouse Street three floors below. Carriages lined the narrow way, each stopping briefly to deposit party-going passengers at the banquette before churning on to make room for the next vehicle. But Nicolette could see by the guttering gas street lamp overhanging the intersection that the burgundy landau bearing the golden Castaigne crest had yet to arrive.\n\n\"Where can Octave be?\" she whispered, her warm breath filming the glass.\n\n\"Nicolette, unlock this bedroom door. _Now!\"_ Her mother's voice was high-pitched, nearly hysterical.\n\n\"No, Maman. Not until Octave arrives.\"\n\n\"He'll be here any minute!\"\n\n\"You've been saying that for nearly an hour. Please, leave me alone! When he gets here, I'll come out... not before! Surely, you can't expect me to attend my own engagement soir\u00e9e without my fianc\u00e9!\"\n\n\"But our guests are here, Nicolette. I've used up all my excuses for you. You are as impossible as your Aunt Gabrielle! And we all know how _she_ turned out!\"\n\nNicolette made no answer, but moved hesitantly toward the door. She leaned her ear close to the painted cypress and heard shuffling sounds in the hall.\n\n\"Please, Nikki, for me?\" It was Claude Vernet's quiet voice.\n\nNicolette knew she couldn't resist her father's request. \"For me\" was a phrase that always worked its charms. She might defy her mother occasionally, but never, ever her patient, soft-spoken papa.\n\nHadn't he gone to a tremendous amount of trouble and expense for her special evening, even refurbishing their townhouse for the occasion? The quaint old building at Toulouse and Royal, which had survived the disastrous fires of 1788 and 1794, breathed new life tonight, glowing through the misty April twilight like a miniature crystal palace for her engagement party.\n\nBecause Claude Vernet wanted his home to reflect what he considered his daughter's perfection, he had ordered a new coat of ivory paint for the exterior stucco covering the sand-brick fa\u00e7ade, and fresh blacking for all the lacy wrought iron on the galleries.\n\n\"Nikki?\" Her father's softly pleading voice jolted her thoughts back to the present, and the problem at hand.\n\nSquaring her shoulders, she tried to shrug off this bothersome feeling of... _What?_ she wondered. Anxiety? Fear? Pre-engagemeru jitters?\n\n\"Octave Castaigne, this is all your fault!\" she said to the miniature on her dressing table. \"When we're married, I'll see that you mend your tardy ways. For now, I'll have to face our guests alone and make the best of it. But nothing will go wrong. Our life together is set-engagement, marriage, children, love,\" she ticked off on her fingers. \"Just as it should be!\"\n\n\"Nikki, please answer me.\"\n\n\"I'm coming, Papa. Give me a moment.\"\n\nShe touched the curls piled _\u00e0 la Grecque_ on top of her head, took a deep breath, and counted to ten.\n\n\"There!\" she said. \"I'm ready for anything now\u2014even Octave Castaigne, _if_ he decides to show up!\"\n\nHer father trained his eyes, as midnight-blue as hers, on Nicolette as she came out of her room. He waited at the top of the stairs to offer his arm. She took it almost shyly, wondering if he would scold her for the anxious hour she had given her mother and Mammy Sukey. But, of course, he didn't.\n\n\"You look perfectly regal tonight, Nikki. I'm not sure I'll hand you over to Octave Castaigne when he does arrive. You're too good for him or any man!\"\n\n\"Oh, Papa, don't tease me so.\"\n\nSensing her nervous state, he went on in a bantering tone. \"Thank God I'll have a year to keep my little girl before this wicked man steals her away!\"\n\n\"Papa! How can you call Octave wicked when you chose him for me? Why, I've only set eyes on him twice in my whole life and the first time, ten years ago, I was barely seven years old! I trusted you. You haven't promised me to some _roue\u00e9_ who'll drink too much absinthe and beat me with his sword cane, have you? It's bad enough that he's late for our party!\"\n\nHe patted the soft, lace-encased fingers that lay in graceful repose on his arm, but Nicolette noticed a small frown crease his brow.\n\n\"He'll be here, Nikki, or I'll have satisfaction from him! As for his character, you needn't worry, my dear. Octave is well-bred, comfortably situated, and even-tempered, from all that I've seen of him. He'll give you a fine home, a large enough family to make any Creole maman proud, and he'll give you the place you deserve in society.\"\n\n\"And will he give me love, Papa?\"\n\nThe question, which had been gnawing at her for weeks, popped out before she let herself think about it. This was not the sort of thing a daughter discussed with her father. Nicolette felt uncomfortable for her papa as he struggled to find an answer. The silence lengthened between them.\n\nClaude Vernet stopped on the stair and searched his daughter's face with melancholy eyes. \"He _will_ love you! And if his love is half as great as mine for you, Nikki, you can count yourself fortunate indeed.\"\n\n\"Oh, Papa, I love you too,\" she said, blinking back tears.\n\nA happy tide of friends and relations engulfed Nicolette and Claude Vernet when they reached the bottom of the stairs, sweeping them along to the _petit salon._\n\nThe room had been magically transformed into a ballroom for the evening by sliding the heavy doors, which connected to the _grand salon,_ into the thick walls. The rugs of winter had been taken up, beaten clean, and stored in protective sleeves for the hot months ahead. Even the grass matting, which served as carpet pad in winter and floor covering in summer, had been removed and the wide boards had been polished to a high gloss for dancing.\n\nThree musicians, on flute, violin, and French horn, were tuning up to begin playing. The formal room glowed with candles reflecting crystal and silver, and a rainbow of fashionably gowned ladies and their elegant gentlemen.\n\nNicolette's uneasiness at not having her fianc\u00e9 at her side subsided somewhat amidst the compliments and good wishes showered upon her.\n\n_\"Ma ch\u00e8re,_ you look _tr\u00e8s \u00e9l\u00e9gante_!\" Aunt Phoebe enthused, her purple bombazine bosom heaving hugely with excitement. \"You will be a beautiful bride, dimming even the prayer candles on the altar of Saint Louis Cathedral.\"\n\n\"The image of your dear maman,\" Uncle Alphonse added with an approving twitch of his waxed gray moustache.\n\nThen Nicolette's cousin, Clementine, a confection in pink-and-white ruffled dimity, chimed in, \"Oh, Nicolette, I'd just die if a man as handsome-as your Octave wanted to marry me!\" bringing the missing man back to the forefront of her thoughts.\n\nSuddenly, she felt a cool palm clasp hers. She looked up into glass-black eyes in a faintly familiar face. The tall, slender young man, dressed all in black except for the snow-white ruffles of his shirt, said with the barest hint of a smile, \"Mademoiselle Nicolette. Your father has spoken of you often, but I assumed he exaggerated your charms. I owe you both an apology on that account.\"\n\nNicolette tried to place him. She had seen him somewhere only recently. Then it came to her. \"Why, Monsieur Bermudez, of course! You are Papa's new clerk at the Exchange. Maman pointed you out to me only last week when we were shopping in Royal Street. You were going into Jean Laffite's showroom, I believe?\"\n\nDiego Bermudez stiffened and shot a glance toward her father. \"Not so loud, please! If Monsieur Vernet found out I do business with those smugglers, I might lose my job. He has little respect for the _banditti_ of Barataria.\"\n\n\"You don't have to tell me that.\" Nicolette restrained a wayward laugh with the tips of her fingers. \"Papa seldom loses his temper, but I saw it happen once. His ship, the _Carlotta,_ was seized in the Gulf. He swore that Jean Laffite was behind the raid. The loss of that cargo and ship almost ruined him. He's never forgiven The Terror of the Gulf.'\"\n\n\"And rightly not!\" He took her arm and said, \"I think we should dance now.\"\n\nSurprised by his forwardness, Nicolette stammered, \"Why, yes... I mean, no... thank you.\"\n\nHe looked both amused by her confusion and annoyed by her reply. \"Ah, you think you should wait for the man of the hour... allow him the first waltz? Well, I'm afraid you're wasting your time. Monsieur Castaigne has been detained and I'm quite sure he won't be here tonight.\"\n\n\"Of course he will!\"\n\n\"Have it your way, mademoiselle.\" A strange, cold smile twitched his thin lips. \"But if he fails to show up, I offer myself as a willing and quite suitable substitute. I'm not married, you know.\"\n\nDiego Bermudez did an about-face and moved across the room. Nicolette, her mouth open to protest, stared after him. Was this arrogant young man serious, or only making light of a desperate situation? In either case, his attitude and outspoken proposal were in the poorest taste.\n\nThe brass knocker on the front door banged insistently. Nicolette whirled around, dismissing all thoughts of the brazen Monsieur Bermudez. She raced Jonah, the butler, to open the door, sure that Octave had arrived at last.\n\nShe threw the door wide and gasped when she saw the two men standing there. Octave Castaigne, his eyes glazed over and his smooth face pale and drawn, leaned heavily on a tall, red-haired man for support.\n\n\"Monsieur Vernet, please,\" the green-eyed stranger said, but Nicolette didn't hear for the furious rushing of blood in her ears.\n\n\"Octave, how could you?\" she cried angrily. \"On the very night of our party!\"\n\n\"This is no time for a temper tantrum, mademoiselle. The man needs help!\"\n\nNicolette shot a quick, cold look at Octave's partner in crime, himself a shabby sight with mud covering his bottle-green velvet evening clothes and his longish hair in wild disarray. She was forming a few choice words for the pair of disreputable tipplers, but got no chance to speak them.\n\nHer father appeared at her side suddenly, his manner controlled, but anxious.\n\n\"Monsieur Laffite,\" he said, sizing up the situation at a glance. \"Help him through the carriage drive and the courtyard to the servants' quarters. We mustn't let our guests see.\"\n\nNicolette hissed, \"He's falling-down drunk, Papa! We **'ll** never get him sober enough to be presentable tonight!\"\n\nClaude Vernet pulled Nicolette quickly through the door and closed it behind them, following the two men into the drizzly night.\n\n\"Hush, child!\" was all he said to her.\n\nWhen Jean Laffite lowered Octave to the moss-stuffed cot in the room next to the kitchen, Nicolette saw the scarlet stain for the first time. His evening cloak had hidden it before.\n\n\"But he's been injured!\" she gasped.\n\nOctave's bluish lips moved slightly and a word escaped in a ragged whisper that sounded like \"mortally.\"\n\n\"We have to do something for him! Get water, bandages, a doctor!\" she cried, tearing at his brocade waistcoat, trying to open his dress shirt.\n\nA strong hand gripped her shoulder. \"You'll do the lad a favor, mademoiselle, by leaving him in peace. Only a priest can help him now. I've sent for Pere Antoine.\"\n\n\"Oh,\" she said and stilled her hands. She sat by Octave's side, watching his life flow away through a sword-wound near his heart. She felt as if she should be screaming, fainting, crying her heart out. But no tears came. She experienced only a queer numbness, as if she were wading into deep, icy water. Her breathing grew shallow with Octave's. She took his cold hand and held it, not wanting him to be alone when the end came.\n\nHer father and Jean Laffite were talking only a few paces away, but their muffled words seemed to drift to her over a vast distance.\n\n\"He was at the St. Philip Street Theater earlier this evening, Monsieur Vernet.\"\n\n\"At the quadroon ball?\"\n\n\"Yes. He's a regular. But tonight he brought his mistress, Lizette.\"\n\n\"Not so loud, man, my daughter!\"\n\n\"Forgive me. I heard about the engagement... So did Lizette. She was furious... out to find a new protector this very night. Castaigne took her scandalous behavior for as long as he could stand it, then he challenged several gentlemen in a fit of irrational jealousy. You can guess the rest, sir.\"\n\n\"Swords under the oaks?\"\n\n\"Castaigne had the better of the first two. But the third man did him in.\"\n\n\"And who was the third? _You,_ Laffite?\"\n\n\"I've heard you have no use for me, Monsieur Vernet, and you probably won't believe me, but I was only passing by. I went to see what aid I could give. But it was too late. Young Castaigne begged me to bring him to this address.\"\n\nA murmur from Nicolette drew the men's attention.\n\n\"What is it, Nikki?\" her father asked gently.\n\n\"He's gone, Papa. I'm a widow before I was ever a bride,\" she answered, still dry-eyed. \"I'll go into mourning immediately.\"\n\n\"That's crazy! For a man you hardly knew? A man you never loved?\" The angry questions came from Laffite.\n\nNicolette jerked her head to face him, fire in her dark eyes as she challenged, \"What business is this of yours?\"\n\n\"None,\" he admitted. \"I'm sorry, mademoiselle. It's only that you're so young, so lovely, and I know how marriages are arranged among you Creoles. Little consideration is given to the heart's desires.\" His eyes caressed her for a moment. \"Besides, mourning won't suit you.\"\n\n\"Monsieur Laffite and I have had our differences in the past, Nikki, but this time we agree,\" Claude Vernet added quickly. \"I won't see you wrapped in black bunting like an old crow to shrivel away for months on account of the foolish indiscretions of a man you hardly knew, much less loved.\" He paused and looked pleadingly into her eyes. \"I'd rather see you exiled than have you in the center of this _scandale.\"_\n\n\"You mean you're going to send me away, Papa?\"\n\nHe folded her in his protective arms and cried, \"Don't say it like that, _ma thin._ You'll break my poor heart. I'd never send you away! I'm allowing you to go. Your mother's sister, Gabrielle, in Paris will welcome you, Nikki.\"\n\n\"Paris! But that's across the world from here! New Orleans is my home. And besides, you know Maman doesn't approve of Aunt Gabrielle. She'd never let me go to live with her.\"\n\n\"I'll handle your mother, don't worry. And you'll be back soon, I promise, Nikki. I want you to put all this behind you. While you're away, I'll make a new engagement contract, and be more selective this time. You'll come home to be a bride. There won't be the slightest whisper of gossip.\"\n\n\"Your father's a wise man, Nicolette. Listen to him. Anyone can tell he loves you very much.\" Laffite's words were spoken with a quiet compassion.\n\nShe looked closely for the first time at this man her father had cast in the role of villain for as long as she could remember. His green-gold eyes held a sadness she could only imagine and couldn't begin to understand. Something in the way he spoke to her stirred sympathetic feelings that she had never known before. Deep inside she knew that here was a man who had experienced true sorrow. She reached a trembling hand out to him and said, \"Thank you, Monsieur Laffite. For everything.\"\n\nHe bent warm lips to her fingers; then a slight smile softened his grave features. She returned it, feeling a strange quickening within her breast.\n\nThree hours later, after bidding her parents _au revoir,_ Nicolette climbed into Jean Laffite's carriage, an unusual arrangement, but necessary since her father was needed at home to calm her hysterical mother. Sukey, her tignoned mulatto maid, who would be her traveling companion and chaperone, sat on the opposite seat, her eyes wide with wonder at the thought of crossing an ocean.\n\nDay had barely broken. The sky above Saint Louis Cathedral looked like purple velvet threaded with silver and gold.\n\nThe fetid odors that would rise from the open gutters with the sun still lay dormant at this early hour. Only the enticing aromas of black coffee laced with chicory and of fresh-baked bread drifted through the narrow streets of the _Vieux Carr\u00e9_ from the French Market near the levee.\n\nWhen they reached the berth where her father's ship, the _Fleur de Lis,_ waited for its two extra passengers before casting off downriver to the Gulf, Nicolette felt all the pain and heartache she had been suppressing for hours well up in a sudden rush. She looked through misty eyes back over the city she loved\u2014where she'd been born and had lived all her life. She wasn't only leaving her parents and friends, she was going away from her beloved New Orleans, an exile, just like her mother's younger sister.\n\nWhen would she stroll the Place d'Armes again? Kneel in the cathedral's hushed interior for morning mass? Wander among the bright stalls along the levee, making market with Sukey, stopping to indulge her sweet tooth with honeyed rice cakes and pralines?\n\nHer tears rushed to flood, like the Mississippi after spring rains. Jean Laffite folded his muscled arms around her and drew her to his broad chest. \"Cry it out, Nicolette. You'll feel better for it.\"\n\nNever before had any man but her papa held her this way. Still, the feeling of Laffite's soothing embrace was welcome. She felt neither shy nor embarrassed, only warm... sheltered. She snuggled close and breathed in his male scents of tobacco, cognac, and musk. When she relaxed against him, Laffite put one finger under her chin and tilted her face up to his.\n\n\"Better now?\" he asked huskily.\n\nShe only nodded. She couldn't trust her voice yet.\n\n\"The ship's ready to cast off. Think of it this way, _ma petite\u2014_ the sooner you leave, the sooner you'll return. May I wish you a _bon voyage?\"_\n\nShe nodded again, not understanding his intentions. He smiled down at her, then his lips covered hers in a gentle, caressing kiss. A new kind of warmth tingled through her blood after the initial shock at his actions.\n\nHer arms stole up around his shoulders underneath his cape and she was keenly aware of her breasts pressed to his hard chest. His mouth lingered over hers and teased the soft inner flesh of her lips. She felt this new sensation in every part of her and sighed.\n\nShe had never been kissed before. She liked the curious headiness of the experience\u2014a mingling of surrender and, at the same time, a tender power over the man. His body changed, reacted to hers. She had thought of this moment for a long time. But never in her wildest imaginings had she guessed that it would transport her to such heights of pleasure.\n\nTonight, she realized suddenly, was not the end, but a new beginning. Even if she never saw the man again, she would always remember Jean Laffite... always hold him in a warm and secret place in her heart.\n\n###\n\n# Chapter One\n\n\"We're almost home!\" Nicolette sang out with her first waking breath. \"No more exile! Won't Papa be surprised at our early arrival?\"\n\nShe bounded to the edge of the ship's bunk and searched out the porthole for any sign of land, all the while humming a French tune she had learned from a devastating suitor in Paris, the one who'd stolen a kiss from her as they strolled beside the Seine.\n\nShe cocked her head, remembering, and mused, \"It wasn't a bad kiss either! But I'm sure my husband's will be far more delicious!\"\n\nShe reached under her pillow, as she had every morning and night since they sailed, and withdrew a well-worn sheet of vellum\u2014the letter from her father that had set Sukey packing, Nicolette dreaming, and Tante Gabrielle muttering oaths under her breath when her niece only smiled indulgently at her sermons on the evils of certain Creole customs.\n\nNicolette's bright eyes took in the words at a glance. She knew the contents almost by heart.\n\n> New Orleans  \n>  January 1, 1813\n> \n> My dearest Nikki,\n> \n> If you were here this minute, I would hug and kiss you soundly, and wish you _la bonne ann\u00e9e,_ then give you this New Year's gift in person which I am having to send so many miles to reach you.\n> \n> No, _ma ch\u00e8re,_ the package is not lost. What I send to you comes wrapped, not in paper and pretty ribbons, but in love, straight from an adoring father's heart.\n> \n> But before I give you your surprise, let me tell you what we would do this afternoon if I could wish you home this instant. Your maman would wrap up warmly in the beautiful cashmere shawl you sent. You would don one of the lovely Paris gowns you bought recently, (for which the bills have already reached me), and I would call for our carriage to be brought around. Then, with a handsome lady on each arm, a smile on my face, and the ivory-headed cane you sent me, I would direct the driver to Bourbon Street. There the three of us would make a grand tour of a certain gracious townhouse under construction and nearing completion.\n> \n> If you have not guessed by now, my sweet Nikki, this is to be your wedding gift. I have also written to Monsieur Jacob Desmalter in Paris, Napoleon's own cabinetmaker, with a letter of credit, directing him to allow you to choose whatever you like to furnish your new home.\n> \n> But a wedding gift and a New Year's gift cannot be one and the same.\n> \n> Here is your real surprise, _ma fleur._ The contract has been struck for your engagement. The gentleman partner is of the highest calibre socially, financially, and personally. I have known him in business for several years. There will be no repeat performance of the last disaster, I promise you.\n> \n> _Who is he?_ you are demanding. _Oui, ma petite?_\n> \n> A few hints are all I plan to divulge. He has met you and the two of you conversed quite pleasantly on one occasion that I know of. He swears he lost his heart and soul to you on your first meeting. He is older than you, but not too old. Your maman declares him a handsome man. (Actually, she used the word, \"elegant,\" but I think that goes a bit too far!) Suffice it to say, we find the gentleman son-in-law material of the first order. Already preparations are underway for your wedding.\n> \n> The _Fleur de Lis_ sails out of Le Havre in early April, so we will expect you home no later than the first of May. Captain D'Orsay will contact you in Paris with the exact sailing schedule. Hurry home to us, Nikki!\n> \n> Our warmest wishes to Gabrielle, and love and kisses from your maman and your adoring papa,\n> \n> Claude Vernet\n\n\"Who could it be?\" Nicolette wracked her brain for the millionth, unsuccessful time. \"Oh, well, I'll know soon enough.\"\n\nShe draped a peacock satin dressing gown over her bare shoulders, thinking what a grand surprise it would be for her parents that Aunt Gabrielle had decided to come with her, and began brushing her waist-length hair with long, even strokes.\n\nHer thoughts centered for a time on her aunt, asleep in the next cabin. Why had she reacted so violently when Papa's exciting letter arrived? Nicolette had read the entire missive to her, sure that her aunt would share her delight at the prospect of a proper marriage to an upstanding Creole gentleman. But instead, Gabrielle DelaCroix's porcelain-lovely features had gone ash-pale, her sable eyes flashing a warning fire of anger.\n\n\"So!\" she had said, her voice icy to brittleness. \"You're to be sacrificed on the same antiquated, Creole altar in the Cathedral of Saint Louis as all the others. Of course, the blood offering will come later, beneath the marriage canopy under the very roof of your adoring papa! Barbarians... all of them! There are other ways, Nicolette, and I'm returning with you to New Orleans to put a stop to this madness! But let's keep my visit our secret.\"\n\nThe words her regal aunt had mumbled to herself as she swept out of the parlor were unfamiliar to Nicolette, though she thought she had heard one or two of them before, back in New Orleans. A burly French seaman had uttered them as he was loading heavy hogsheads of molasses onto a wagon on the levee. Odd that her aristocratic aunt should know that ruffian's jargon.\n\nShe brushed these bothersome thoughts from her mind as she brushed the night tangles from her hair and smiled into the mirror. The reflection there bore little resemblance to the young girl who had left New Orleans almost two years before. She stared at a woman, full of body, ripe now and ready for the more sensuous side of life.\n\n\"We're so close,\" she sighed, drawing in a deep breath, \"that I can almost smell the marshes along the Mississippi. Nothing can stop us now! My life is set!\"\n\nNicolette frowned suddenly, and made a sign with two fingers to ward off any bad luck that might be summoned by her high spirits and confident words. Hadn't she thought the same thoughts, said almost the same words, the night of the engagement party?\n\n\"And look what happened then!\" she reminded the face in her mirror.\n\nBut her charm against the evil eye came too late. Even as she made the sign, the boom of thunder reached her ears. A cannonball roared across the calm waters of the Gulf of Mexico to smash through the deck of her father's ship with such force that Nicolette was thrown to the floor, stunned when her head collided with an edge of her brass-bound trunk.\n\nSukey, having delivered Gabrielle's breakfast to her cabin, came through the door with another tray at the moment of impact. She fell atop Nicolette's still form and the carafe of coffee went flying. The thick, aromatic liquid spilled on the sheet of paper beside Nicolette\u2014causing Claude Vernet's words to his daughter to run together, melting his hopeful promises away to a grayish-brown blur.\n\n\"Mam'zelle Nicolette!\" Sukey sobbed, her arms protectively caressing her charge.\n\nThe hatch cover banged against the bulkhead and male voices intruded. \"Get rid of the nigger woman, Hernandez. I'll take care of the girl!\"\n\nJean Laffite stretched his powerful body beneath the mosquito _baire_ enveloping his bed. He patted the spot beside him, thinking he might assuage his morning's passion. The place was still warm, but the woman who had shared his space for the night had gone. He sighed his resignation and put all amorous thoughts from his mind for the time being.\n\nThe sheets felt sticky and clung to his bare skin. No early morning breeze from the Gulf breathed in to cool him. The oppressive humidity was a sure sign that summer was closing fast on Louisiana.\n\nHe felt the hair stand up on his arms and along the back of his neck suddenly and his eyes shot open. This was a lifelong reflex with Laffite, the ability to sense danger before it presented itself. He was staring hard out the window, his heavy brows drawn together in a frown, watching stripes of red bleed into the pearl-gray dawn when it happened. The boom of cannon fire thundered out in the Gulf, rocking his bed and sending gulls squawking and flapping over the island of Grande Terre.\n\n\"Xavier!\" he yelled, sitting up and pulling on britches in one fluid motion.\n\nAn undersized servant who looked as if he had been dipped in a pot of India ink, only the whites of his eyes and his large teeth escaping the dousing, appeared at once.\n\n\"Boss, you call me?\"\n\n\"Damn right I called! Who's blasting away out there and at what?\"\n\nBefore the valet could answer, Dominique Youx, Laffite's older brother and chief lieutenant, burst into the room. His bearded face twisted in barely suppressed rage and his barrel chest heaved with indignation.\n\n\"Me and Reyne, we got the _Tigre_ and the _Spy_ ready for sea, Boss.\" He threw up his beefy hands then, losing what little control he had mustered before. \"Them bastards! Them bloody sons of diseased whores!\"\n\n\"Dom, will you tell me what in God's name is happening?\" Laffite was on his feet now, striding through his mansion toward the front entrance, which looked out over the Gulf. \"Is Grande Terre under attack? Has the war with the British finally found us? Or Governor Claiborne's troops from New Orleans? Who? What?\"\n\nLaffite ignored Xavier, who chased after him, trying to give him a clean linen shirt. Dominique You followed in his brother's wake, his large feet looking like twin pirogues and his bearded chin as gray as Spanish moss after a hard freeze.\n\n\"See there,\" Dom said when they reached the wide veranda. He focused a spyglass on billowing columns of oily smoke rising over the Gulf. \"Silas Browne and his crew of vultures took the _Sea Raven_ out scavenging before dawn. They fired on an American ship.\"\n\n\"An American ship? Armed or unarmed?\"\n\n\"A merchantman, Boss. No guns,\" Dominique answered in a grave tone. He paused, a nerve twitching beneath one of the powder bum scars beneath his eye, waiting for the explosion sure to come from Laffite.\n\n\"Those goddamn, filthy bloodsuckers! They know my orders: 'No attacks on American ships or merchantmen flying any flag but Spain's.' Did Vincent Gambi send them out, or is this Browne's own idea?\"\n\nDominique gave a Gallic shrug. \"Who knows? And what difference will it make? The same will happen to the passengers and crew either way.\" You drew his forefinger across his throat with a slitting sound.\n\n\"I'll be damned if that's so!\" Laffite growled. \"Let's go!\"\n\nLaffite's boots ate into the sandy soil with great, angry strides as he headed for the beach. The tall privateer, whose features bespoke his mixed French, Spanish, and Jewish heritage, stopped short, breathing hot curses when he reached the shoreline. The American ship lay like a wounded sea bird on the waves, her cannon-mangled sails flapping in the slack breeze like broken wings. Heavy layers of smoke roiled skyward, obscuring the morning sun.\n\n\"It's too late, Boss,\" Dominique said quietly.\n\n\"Not too late for me to hang Browne from his own yardarm! Come on. He's had his fun; now we'll have ours!\"\n\nThe dying merchantman had drifted toward shore, riding the incoming tide. Not waiting to board and set sail in one of the larger vessels, Laffite leaped aboard a long boat near shore. Dominique Youx, Reyne Beluche, and several others rushed to join him. All were silent as muscled arms plied oars, stroking their way toward the crippled ship. Soon they were bumping through flotsam\u2014bits of torn deck, smashed wine barrels, shredded sail, a waterlogged Paris gown.\n\n\"At least we haven't sighted any bodies,\" Laffite mumbled, as much to himself as to the others.\n\nThe words had hardly passed his tight-drawn lips when he saw a white turban bob above the water some ten yards to starboard. A dark hand groped skyward, then the figure sank beneath the waves again.\n\nNot bothering to remove his boots, Laffite dived overboard and pulled with strong strokes to the place the victim had surfaced.\n\nHe circled in the turquoise water for a moment, drawing great drafts of air into his lungs before he plunged under the waves. The salt water stung his eyes, but eerie sunlight penetrated the clear depths, allowing him fair vision for his search.\n\nDown and down he swam, letting a fine trail of bubbles surface from his flared nostrils. In no time, it seemed, his air was almost used up. He would have to go to the top in another few seconds. His lungs ached. His eyes and throat were on fire. Then he spotted her, thanks to the white tignon about her head. She hung suspended like a limp puppet in the water. With forceful kicks and amazing will, he coerced himself to stay under long enough to capture the body and drag it through the water to air and life.\n\nHis men, sure of their Boss's ability to catch up, even with a drowning victim in tow, had rowed the short distance away to the jacob's ladder hanging over the side of the disabled ship.\n\nWhen Laffite hoisted the woman's head above water, he spotted Dominique starting up the rope ladder, his dagger clenched between his teeth. The others were preparing to follow him. Laffite felt a certain pride that these well-trained buccaneers needed no direct orders from him to know what to do.\n\nThe mulatto woman in his arms began coming around. She coughed several times before her eyes fluttered open, wide and staring. Taking him for one of the pirates who had attacked the _Fleur de Lis_ and unceremoniously dumped her overboard, laughing at her protests, she now flailed her arms, frantically trying to escape.\n\nHer elbow hit him a glancing blow to the temple and Laffite gripped her tighter, saying, \"God in heaven, woman! You'll drown us both! Be still. I'm trying to help you, dammit!\"\n\n\"Never mind me,\" she whimpered. \"You got to save my mistress and Madame Gabrielle. They still on that ship. And those terrible men, they say they going to... they say they mean to...\" but her words broke off in coughing sobs.\n\n\"How many passengers are onboard?\" Laffite asked the servant as he and the oarsman settled her in the bottom of the longboat.\n\n\"Only my Nicolette and her Tante Gabi, m'sieu. The ship belong to my master, M'sieu Vernet of N'Orleans. Captain D'Orsay brought us from France. A safe passage. But now... _Mon Dieu_!\" Another sob cracked her voice. \"You got to save them, please!\" Sukey begged.\n\nHe stared down for a moment at the hysterical woman, remembering her only vaguely. He hadn't paid much attention to the servant that night. His eyes had been for the girl alone. So the desolate little refugee who had been shipped off to Paris was home again. She'd been a sweet thing, if he recalled correctly, and so lovely she made his heart ache. Made more than that ache! he thought, reliving her innocent, but urgent, kisses in his mind.\n\nA woman's scream from above told him Nicolette Vernet was still alive. Browne and his _men\u2014Gambi's men,_ he corrected in his mind\u2014were notorious womanizers. Without help, the girl's fate was as certain as the next tide.\n\nJean Laffite, his long, dark hair plastered back by the sea, his bare chest glistening in the hard glare of the sun, and his britches clinging to every muscled bulge of his thighs, looked like the terror he was called. His mustachioed lip curled back from his teeth in an angry snarl as he grabbed up a rapier in one hand, a cutlass in the other.\n\nWhen they neared the ship, he leaped to catch hold of the rope ladder. His men waited above, gripping the outer sides of the ship's railing, ready to spring at his command.\n\n\"Ready, lads?\" Laffite whispered with the gruff voice of a man not used to speaking softly. \"Mind you, leave Browne to me. We have a score to settle.\"\n\nLaffite hurled himself over the rail without further conversation, springing with the ease of a hunting panther and a snarl to match. The yells and whoops of his six men filled the air, freezing Browne's half-dozen pirates where they stood, but only momentarily. Sabers and cutlasses flashed like fire, sending sparks over the smoldering deck.\n\nLaffite spied Browne, taunting the bound girl, and made a dash for him. The other woman\u2014her aunt-was nowhere in sight.\n\nAnother scream tore itself from Nicolette's throat.\n\n\"Your time's up, Browne!\" Laffite growled through clenched teeth, brandishing the cutlass dangerously close to the pirate's midsection. \"Throw down your weapon and tell your men to do the same.\"\n\nBrowne backed away, circling the dark-haired girl tied to the mast. He smiled through gaping teeth, but made no move to toss his saber aside.\n\n\"Have a heart, mate,\" Browne wheedled. \"I'll split the booty with you. Even this bit of fluff I've taken prisoner.\" He jerked his head toward Nicolette Vernet. \"Ain't been a bad morning's work!\"\n\n\"Your _last_ morning's work, Browne!\" Laffite replied, closing in. \"My orders were that no American ships were to be molested.\"\n\n\"Ah, there, you see, boy, that's where our problem lies. I take me orders from Vincent Gambi and none other. Had Gambi passed them words on to me, this here ship would be sailing smooth as you please on her way to New Orleans. But Gambi, he says, 'Loot's for the taking, lads. A pirate shows no allegiance.' I go by Gambi's word alone.\"\n\n\"Then you'll pay the penalty for your crimes,\" Laffite answered, positioning himself to lunge.\n\nSilas Browne moved quickly for a man of his age and weight. Before Laffite's blade could contact flesh, he leaped for the girl, putting her and the mast between himself and Jean Laffite.\n\n\"Please,\" Nicolette whimpered. \"No more.\"\n\nLaffite backed off, taking in her torn gown, bruised mouth, and the glaze of torment in her blue eyes.\n\n\"You've sunk low enough to hide behind a woman's skirts, Browne?\" Laffite taunted. \"I might have guessed as much from one of your kind.\"\n\n\"My kind, is it?\" Browne sneered. \"And what might you mean by that?\"\n\n\"One who would take orders from the likes of Vincent Gambi, then whine over his punishment. What's he getting out of this raid? Half? Or is he talking all the cargo _and_ the women?\"\n\nBrowne squinched up his colorless eyes and stared hard at Jean Laffite. \"Women?\" he said. \"There ain't but this one. If you mean the nigger wench, Hernandez throwed her to the sharks.\"\n\n\"Never mind!\" Laffite snapped. \"You know Gambi won't divide equally. You'll come away with your tail between your legs and your wounds to lick... if you come away at all!\"\n\n\"In a pig's eye!\" Browne spat, his face distorting with rage, showing Laffite that his words hit near the mark. \"I'll take the captain's share and the woman, if I want her. Puny thing, though. I like my chippies with more ass and tits to 'em!\" As he said this, Browne slipped his big hands around to cup Nicolette's breasts.\n\nShe cried out, her eyes wide with fright.\n\nLaffite recognized both his advantage of the moment and the further terror his action would cause Nicolette, but there was no help for it.\n\n\"Don't be afraid, Nikki,\" he said, but saw that his words had little effect as he lunged his rapier point-blank for her breast.\n\nSure of his aim and timing, Jean Laffite thrust his arm and body forward, stabbing Browne through the back of his sword hand.\n\nThe pirate howled in pain, letting go of Nicolette's torso in a convulsive jerk. He unleashed a stream of gutter words as he spun away, crouching his body over his wounded hand.\n\nNicolette's still form hung heavily against the ropes binding her to the mast, mercifully released from her terror for the time by a sudden faint.\n\nShe was spared the sight of the bloody battle being waged around her. She didn't have to view Browne's death or the hoisting of his body to be tied by the ankles from the jib boom of the _Sea Raven._ This universal form of punishment served as a warning to other would-be offenders of the harshness and swiftness of Laffite's Law of the Gulf.\n\n###\n\n# Chapter Two\n\nNicolette, though dead weight in his arms, felt light as a feather to Jean Laffite. He lowered her gently to the deck, all the while wondering what the past hours had been for her. Would she survive Browne's harsh treatment and return to her old self? Or would she awake a dead-eyed shell of the woman she had been?\n\nHe had seen that sort of reaction once before in Bianca, the mere child he'd rescued and married to restore some semblance of her honor after these same pirates had taken her by force.\n\n\"Poor Bianca. I never knew her as a whole and vital woman. She died, in spirit, long before that stray bullet pierced her tiny breast.\"\n\nLaffite realized suddenly that he'd spoken aloud. He cleared his throat self-consciously and glanced about the ship's deck. No one was close enough to have heard. Only Nikki, and she remained still... silent... pale as death. He quickly erased that thought from his mind.\n\n\"Hey, Boss! Look here!\" Reyne Beluche, Laffite's uncle, called out in a jubilant voice.\n\nReyne, the first of the family to take up privateering as an occupation, had put in twelve years at sea before teaching his nephews the family trade. But Reyne had long since recognized the leadership qualities of his dead sister's youngest son and addressed Jean Laffite as \"Boss,\" the same as all the others on Grande Terre did.\n\nLaffite looked up to see his tall uncle escorting a Creole beauty on his arm. She might have just stepped out of a carriage a moment earlier for an evening at the St. Peter Street Theater in New Orleans. Reyne's large, sun-bronzed frame, his craggy features, and his flamboyant seaman's costume contrasted violently with the woman's statuesque perfection and her gown of Paris design.\n\n\"So this is your infamous nephew, Reyne?\" she said with a smile, not yet aware that her niece lay unconscious just out of her view. \"If half the tales that have reached Paris are true, I'm sure I should be fairly quaking in my slippers at this moment!\" She turned flirtatious, brandy-colored eyes to Beluche, then gave Laffite a sweetly wicked smile.\n\nReyne Beluche bellowed his delight and squeezed her ungloved hand affectionately. \"You have nothing to fear from this nephew, my dear Gabrielle, but watch out for his brothers.\"\n\n\"And their uncle!\" Madame DelaCroix added.\n\nBeluche laughed aloud again and beamed at her.\n\n\"Well, Uncle Reyne, are you going to continue this flirtation interminably or are you going to introduce me to the lady?\"\n\n\"Ah, Jean boy, you've heard me speak fondly of the fabulous Gabrielle Dubois often enough. Now she's the Widow DelaCroix, but the same charming girl I remember from my courting days. When I was a younger man with hotter blood and a shorter fuse, I fought more than one duel trying to win her favor. She could break a heart with the flicker of an eye or fire a man's passions past the boiling point with half a smile. Nothing changes, eh, Gabrielle?\"\n\n\"Everything changes, my dear Reyne,\" she said cynically, then softened her tone and added, \"except our friendship.\"\n\nJean Laffite felt almost embarrassed watching them, as if he were a guilty voyeur peeking in on some private and very intimate reunion. So this was the love of his uncle's life\u2014the woman who had fled New Orleans when another man she loved married someone else. The very woman Reyne blamed for his lifelong bachelorhood. Laffite and his brothers had always thought Uncle Reyne made up the romantic tale to amuse them and himself. But it must be true.\n\n_\"Mon Dieu!_ Nikki!\" Gabrielle gave a sudden, shrill cry when she spied her unconscious niece. \"What's happened to her?\"\n\nShe dropped to the deck and cradled Nicolette's head against the soft mauve silk of her bosom.\n\n\"Browne and his men had her; then in trying to save her, I'm afraid I frightened her half to death, ma'am. She should come around soon. Right now, the best thing would be to get her off this hot deck and back to shelter on the island. I'll take her in one of the lifeboats. Reyne, lend a hand.\"\n\nThe two men lifted Nicolette gently and placed her in one of the small craft on deck, before lowering it to the lapping waves. Sukey had gone ahead to shore in Dominique's boat. Laffite was sure Gabrielle DelaCroix would find safe keeping in Reyne's care.\n\n\"Monsieur Laffite?\" Gabrielle's call delayed the casting off.\n\n\"Madame?\" he answered, looking up at the strained but beautiful face peering down from the railing.\n\n\"My niece... They didn't... you got here in time, I pray. Why did I lock myself in my cabin? I might have helped her.\"\n\nLaffite shared the woman's concern, though he couldn't answer her question. He chose his words diplomatically. \"I don't think she's suffered any lasting damage, Madame DelaCroix. But whatever has happened, I take full responsibility. And I promise you Nicolette has endured all she'll have to.\"\n\n\"She was to be married, you know. As soon as we reached New Orleans. But now...\"\n\nLaffite made an instant decision. \"She will be married, madame. You have my word on it.\"\n\nHe gave a signal to his oarsmen and the sleek boat flew across the water toward shore.\n\nNicolette awoke in a strange bed, in a strange room, out of a strange dream. Or had it been a dream? Some of it seemed so real. She had been taunted by rough-faced men, but a shadowy figure tried to save her. At first, she'd feared him, but as he came closer, she understood that his presence held no menace. During the dream, she had watched her own ghost-white arms stretch out to the man, touch him at last. He had caressed her so tenderly, kissed her with a fire that warmed her soul. When he pressed her body down, she'd known no pain, only a flooding sweetness. She had writhed through the haze-dimmed corridors of this illusion, aflame with her longing for him. She had become lost in a misty world of uncharted passages, warm and cold, bright and dark, finally surfacing into the shocking light of reality.\n\n\"Come back... please,\" she moaned as she stirred out of sleep. Then she shivered, though the air was close and hot. The boom of cannon fire startled her into hysterical wakefulness. She screamed and arms reached out to protect her.\n\n\"Hush now! It's only thunder, Nikki.\"\n\nFor a moment she accepted his comfort, snuggling deeper into his embrace. His warm breath against her damp hair felt reassuring. Then she drew away, frightened and confused. \"Who are you?\"\n\nThe pit of her stomach contracted with dread. Her dreams came back more vividly. And the remembered horror of the pirate attack made her shudder.\n\nHer companion smoothed a gentling hand down the length of her bare arm and said softly, \"Don't you remember me, Nikki? I saw you off to Paris. Today I brought you home. I'm Jean Laffite.\"\n\nShe pulled farther away, staring hard at him, and said, \"You are not! Laffite has red hair\u2014as bright as the sunset over the Gulf!\"\n\n_And gentle lips,_ she remembered, _much like the man in my dream._\n\nHe chuckled softly, happy to hear from the caustic tone in her voice that her ordeal hadn't killed her spirit.\n\n\"You're right. My hair was red the night we first met. You see, women aren't the only vain creatures in the world. I rather enjoy changing my hair color from time to time. Besides, it keeps my enemies guessing. I'll show you my secret\u2014gunpowder and potash\u2014when you're feeling like yourself again.\" He fingered a stray tendril of her dark hair, where it lay curled on her cheek. \"You'd be something with flaming hair and those deep blue eyes.\"\n\n\"I'm not staying here! I have to get home\u2014to New Orleans. My fianc\u00e9 is waiting.\"\n\n\"And who is the lucky man _this_ time?\" Laffite recognized the sharp tone in his words and could have bitten off his tongue. Who was he to question her plans or the outdated manner in which young Creole women were handed over by their families to the best prospect? But he couldn't deny the jealousy he felt.\n\nNicolette's answer came timidly, as if she were ashamed to admit it to him. \"I don't know yet.\"\n\n\"Then it won't break your heart if you don't see him right away.\"\n\nHer temper flared. \"And what am I supposed to do that's going to keep me occupied in the meantime?\"\n\n\"This!\" He pressed her back on the pillows and captured her lips so quickly and expertly that she had no time to protest. The fires from her dream rekindled\u2014liquid flames that flowed with her blood, consuming her whole body with delicious, forbidden feelings. She fought against her desire to respond. She lost the battle.\n\nHe pulled away suddenly, leaving her shocked and breathless.\n\n\"I'm sorry if I startled you. But you do have a way of provoking me, Nikki!\"\n\n\"You haven't any right to...\"\n\n\"I have every right, but we won't discuss that now. I'll be back shortly. You rest.\"\n\nShe watched him go out the door, feeling relief at the same time that she experienced a curious twinge of disappointment that she didn't understand. She pushed him from her thoughts with a determined effort.\n\nSuddenly, she caught her breath. Nicolette realized for the first time that she was entirely naked under the satin sheet. Who had undressed her and for what purpose? She felt totally vulnerable. Was that what Laffite meant when he said he had every right? To do what? Or had he already done it?\n\nShe thought back over the day, frantically trying to piece things together. After the two pirates had taken Sukey from the cabin, one of them came back for her. She'd been terribly groggy at the time, dazed from the blow to her head. She remembered the man fumbling at her dressing gown, using vile language when she tried to fight him off. Then he'd lashed her to the cabin bunk. The next thing she remembered was seeing the corpse-strewn deck and the second party of men leaping over the side to do battle. Finally, her last waking vision from the ship: this man who claimed to be Jean Laffite poised to strike a killing blow. But how had she escaped that perfectly aimed thrust of his rapier?\n\nHow did I get here? she wondered. And where are Aunt Gabrielle and Sukey? Then strange, wistful pieces of her dream crowded in from the edges of her memory\u2014the soothing parts where love took away all the pain and revulsion of earlier in the day. Who was that tender pirate who plundered her while she slept?\n\nIn order to avoid answering her own questions, she tried to get up to find her robe. But the effort of moving made her head throb. She lay back against the pillows and studied her surroundings, forcing her mind from all thoughts of Jean Laffite.\n\nThe room represented a microcosm of many countries and cultures. The wall opposite where she lay was dominated by a massive armoire of cedar, masculinely handsome in its solid strength of design. Next to it sat a black lacquered dressing table with oriental pictures inlaid with mother-of-pearl and gold. A mahogany half chest like the one her father used for storing spirits stood near one window, its door ornamented with gilt figures of the Greek deities Aphrodite and Apollo.\n\nShe turned and spied her tired face in an oval mirror set in an ebony frame, its side candle-holders supported by winged sphinxes.\n\nThe bed itself was most elaborate of all, with its fanciful turnings touched with gold leaf, its monogrammed sheets of antique gold satin, and heavy, burgundy velvet hangings suspended from a corona attached to the high ceiling.\n\n\"Like a king's bed,\" she marveled to herself.\n\n\"It was, once.\"\n\nA sudden flash of lightning illuminated the room for an instant. Jean Laffite lounged against the doorframe, dressed in a gold velvet robe, the exact color of the flecks in his green eyes\u2014eyes now caressing her bare shoulders from a distance.\n\nHow long had he been standing there watching her? Nikki had no idea.\n\n\"King Carlos of Spain slept in that bed\u2014he and his many lovers shared it. I borrowed it,\" he offered her a slightly mocking bow, \"especially for you, mademoiselle.\"\n\nShe hugged the sheet closer, feeling totally defenseless in her nakedness.\n\n\"If you'll kindly give me my clothes back, I'd like to 6e on my way home.\"\n\n\"Home? But this is home\u2014my home, Grande Terre. Maybe you'll like it after you've been here a while. I hope so.\"\n\nShe tried to ignore his remarks and the smoldering look in his eyes. \"Where are my aunt and Sukey?\" she demanded.\n\n\"Safe... resting.\" He moved closer to the bed.\n\n\"How long have I been here?\"\n\nAn enigmatic smile touched his lips when she made a slight gesture with her hand, which seemed to suggest that by \"here\" she meant in his bed, rather than on his island.\n\n\"Long enough, Nikki,\" he answered, reaching out to caress her shoulder. \"Don't you remember anything?\"\n\n\"No!\" she gasped.\n\nShe watched one eyebrow cock upward as he drawled, \"A shame.\"\n\nThose two words seemed to say so much\u2014more than she wanted to hear. Tears gathered behind her midnight blue eyes, but she refused to allow him the satisfaction of seeing her dismay. It had only been a dream! He wouldn't have... _would he?_\n\nThunder crashed suddenly, making the whole room clatter and quake. Nicolette felt the shock deep inside her and cried out. Laffite took her into his arms to comfort her.\n\n\"No!\" Nicolette pleaded, terrified by his nearness. \"Don't touch me!\"\n\nJean Laffite rose from beside the bed, looking down on her, his smile vanquished by her words.\n\nWhen he spoke, each word jolted Nicolette's nerves and conscience. \"But I already have, Nikki.\"\n\nShe couldn't think of anything to say. When the full impact of his words struck her, a sob wrenched from her throat and she turned her face into the pillows to muffle it.\n\n\"It isn't the end of the world, you know. Drink this,\" he ordered, holding out a steaming cup of tea laced with hundred proof rum, which had been warming over a candle by the bed. \"It should calm you. You'll be able to sleep. Don't worry. I won't disturb you the rest of the night. I'll take the guest bedroom until you get used to the idea of having me with you.\"\n\nStill clutching the sheet tightly to cover her trembling breasts, Nicolette turned and allowed Laffite to support her with his free arm while he held the paper-thin china cup to her lips.\n\nBetter to drink quickly, she thought, and then he will leave. Her mind refused to remember anything clearly after the initial invasion of her cabin onboard the _Fleur de Lis._ Just as well, she told herself. If Jean Laffite made love to me, I'm better off not remembering.\n\n\"Good girl,\" he said when she'd swallowed the last of the scalding tisane. \"Iil send Sukey in... now that you and I have finished with\n\nHe started to rise from the bed, leaving his sentence as unfinished as Nicolette's thoughts. She was just allowing herself a sigh of relief when Laffite turned back to her. Without warning, he pulled her into his arms. The sheet slipped until her bare breasts felt the contact of his hard, bare chest. He covered her lips with his and clung to her\u2014searching, probing until Nicolette felt she would drown in her own desire.\n\nShe might have lost her will completely\u2014thrown off the partitioning sheet to feel the full length of his body pressed to hers\u2014had he not broken their embrace, cleanly and abruptly. He strode to the door without looking back.\n\nNicolette collapsed, trembling and gasping, among the down pillows. What had she done? What had she allowed him to do? If only the fuzz would clear from her brain! Her shame and embarrassment at the thought of Jean Laffite being the man in her confused dream\u2014the man she longed for so desperately\u2014drove all the horror of the time with the _Sea Ravens_ captain to the black recesses of her subconscious.\n\nNicolette tried to hold her heavy lids open until Sukey arrived. It was useless. Whatever potion Laffite had forced upon her, its effects were quick and sure. Gathering shadows dulled her senses.\n\nThe rain drummed a soothing tattoo on the window-panes and roof. With the darkness that crept into the room came an easing of her mind. At last she felt totally relaxed. Her breathing became even and heavy.\n\nOnly faint sounds penetrated the curtain of drowsiness descending over her\u2014the shuffling of feet, the ticking of a clock, pots and pans rattling, voices outside in the hallway. Men's voices. Or was she dreaming again?\n\n\"You gone crazy, Boss?\"\n\n\"I know exactly what I'm doing, Dominique.\"\n\n\"But I heard what you told her just now. She's gonna think you did this to her!\"\n\n\"Dom, don't you understand? The girl can't go home to her fianc\u00e9 now. Not after what they put her through. Her pristine Creole husband would make her life hell after he found out on their wedding night. I don't think she even realizes what's happened to her. I told her aunt I'd take full responsibility and I mean to.\"\n\n\"Responsibility is one thing, Boss. But to take the blame! _Sacrebleu!_ She may hate you tomorrow!\"\n\n\"Let's hope not, brother. A wife shouldn't hate her husband.\"\n\nThe dream voices drifted off out of Nicolette's consciousness with the rest of the world. She missed the end of the conversation\u2014the part where Jean Laffite told his brother how much he loved her. She slept.\n\n###\n\n# Chapter Three\n\nSukey and Gabrielle both went to Nicolette's room as soon as Jean Laffite left her. But when Madame DelaCroix saw that her niece was sleeping peacefully, she left for her own bed, trusting the servant to keep careful watch over her charge.\n\nSukey eased her old bones into a fragile gilt chair beside the bed, where she could monitor every breath Nicolette took\u2014every flutter of an eyelash or twitch of a muscle. Out of habit from years long past, she crooned a soft lullaby in _gombo,_ the patois spoken by Creole slaves, a combination of French and ancient African dialects. One toe tapped the thick Turkish carpet and her turbaned head nodded slowly.\n\nFor nearly an hour, Sukey's eyes never left Nicolette, who slept fitfully, her dreaming obvious in the soft sounds she uttered from time to time. Still, the smile on her face indicated to Sukey that her night-wanderings were pleasant. She had no need to worry about her _enfant._\n\nThe servant nodded off finally, releasing her own mind to travel back over well-worn roads of memory. She saw herself, a younger and more energetic woman, hovering over the accouchment bed as Francine Vernet, frail and terrified, struggled to give birth to Nicolette on December 8, 1794.\n\nSukey might not remember her own birthdate, but she would never forget the day Nicolette was born, during the great holocaust that destroyed most of New Orleans.\n\nShe could still see the unearthly orange glow on the blush-pink walls of the third floor bedroom of the old house on Toulouse Street. She remembered the hysteria in her mistress's pain-filled eyes, heard her frantic moans: \"The bells... the cathedral bells! Why don't they ring?\"\n\nShe listened in her dream to her own words of reassurance: \"Don't fret yourself, madame. This time won't be like back in the fire of '88. This isn't Good Friday. The priest, he'll ring the bells in time... bring all the menfolk running to put out the blaze before it gets to us. You just lay easy. Let that baby come natural.\"\n\nIn her dreams, Sukey went again to the window of the bedroom. She felt the air, stifling for the month of December. She gazed out at the tongues of flame licking along Royal Street, leaping and gnawing across rooftops to threaten Toulouse Street. She prayed fervently for M'sieu Claude to hurry back with Dr. de Beaumont. But the men never came. The bells never rang. Sukey alone tended her mistress\u2014sponging her, trying to quiet her, promising her things that only God could deliver.\n\nThe sleeping servant broke out in a sweat and squirmed in the elegant, uncomfortable chair. Somewhere deep in Laffite's mansion, a clock chimed five.\n\nSukey started joyfully out of her doze. \"The bells, Miss Frannie! The bells, they ringing!\" Then she realized where she was.\n\nShe rose and went to gaze down at her sleeping mistress. \"Those bells rang that day, Mam'zelle Nikki, and you came into this world right then. Couldn't wait to hear their beautiful sound. Not you! No, you never could wait, little missy.\"\n\nNicolette stirred and smiled, seeming to understand that Sukey was watching over her\u2014that all was well.\n\nSukey sat for a while longer, remembering. Francine Dubois Vernet had had other pregnancies, other children. But one by one, they slipped away\u2014fever, measles, even a freak carriage accident, which plunged two of the Vernet children, their nurse, and the driver off the top of the levee to watery deaths in the river. Only Nicolette, the child born of fire and fear, had survived.\n\n\"The one horn for love,\" the old servant whispered.\n\nThe house at the corner of Toulouse and Royal Streets remained untouched by the fire with mother and daughter safe and healthy inside. Among the slaves, Nicolette Vernet's birth had been and still was looked upon as an omen. They considered her birth miraculous and expected extraordinary things from her.\n\n\"But just how many miracles can one person expect to conjure up in a lifetime?\" Sukey muttered softly, shaking her head. \"This child ain't got nine lives like a cat!\"\n\nHer mind still roaming, Sukey didn't hear the door open quietly behind her. She jumped when a hand touched her shoulder.\n\n\"Oh, Madame Gabi, it's you!\"\n\n\"Go along to bed now, Sukey. I'll sit with Nicolette until she wakes up. Monsieur Laffite has had a room down the hall fixed for you, so you'll be close to her.\"\n\nSukey nodded to the statuesque woman whose hair was piled high as an ebony tower and whose curving body, unrestrained by corset or stays, was wrapped in a shimmering robe of silvery-rose silk. How different Gabrielle DelaCroix was from her frail and timid sister, Francine Vernet.\n\n\"Sukey, is that you?\" Nicolette's voice came small and sleepy from the huge bed.\n\n\"No, darling, it's Gabrielle. I sent Sukey to bed. We didn't mean to wake you.\"\n\nNicolette propped herself up against the pillows, her dark eyes luminous in the moonlit room. The sheet slipped and Gabrielle caught a glimpse of her niece's naked breasts\u2014two pale globes peaked with perfect twin rosettes of dusky pink. She looked away quickly, allowing Nicolette to cover herself.\n\n\"Tante, what are we doing here? We have to get home... to Papa and Maman... and whoever else is waiting for me.\"\n\nGabrielle took her niece's hand and stroked it with long, satiny-smooth fingers. \"Why, Nikki, we all need a rest before we start for home. It's a three-day joumey along the bayous through the swamps\u2014and according to Captain Laffite, that's under the best conditions. With these heavy rains, it isn't even safe. He doesn't want to endanger us further.\"\n\nGabrielle eyed her niece, trying to read any reaction to Laffite's name that might register on her face. Nicolette maintained a closed expression.\n\n\"He's very charming, don't you think?\" she prodded. \"The type of man any woman would desire.\"\n\n\"Oh, how should I know if he's charming?\" Nicolette suddenly burst out. \"He did take me to the ship when I left that awful night Octave was killed, but that was only for convenience. Maman had gone into a swoon and Monsieur Laffite had his carriage there and ready. Of course, we were properly chaperoned by Sukey. Otherwise, Papa would never have allowed him to drive me, even the short distance to the levee. As for what I've seen of him since we were attacked\u2014almost nothing! How could I know if he's charming or not? I suppose he might seem so to some women, but I really haven't noticed him that closely.\"\n\nNicolette realized that her words were tumbling all over each other in their rush to deny to her aunt*that Jean Laffite held any special allure for her. She was glad dawn hadn't dispersed the deep purple shadows in the room so that the other woman couldn't see the tinge to her cheeks, throat, and breasts which felt hot\u2014a brand proclaiming her shame.\n\n\"So you're anxious to get home to whatever man your papa says is right for you? Live out your life in New Orleans with a husband you don't even know?\" Gabrielle asked in an accusing tone.\n\n\"But I do know him!\" Nicolette insisted. \"Papa wrote that we'd met... talked\n\n\"Kissed?\" Gabrielle demanded.\n\n\"Well, of course not! That would be unthinkable before we're officially engaged. Why, I'd never let a man take such liberties!\"\n\n\"You let Jean Laffite!\" Gabrielle's statement came like a shot. \"Sukey told me you let him kiss you that night on the levee. She was scandalized.\" She paused, holding her niece with a piercing gaze. \"And tonight he was in this room with you for a very long time before he called Sukey to come in. Do you want to tell me what happened?\"\n\nNicolette caught a ragged breath. The last thing she wanted to discuss with anyone was what went on during that time between herself and her pirate captor!\n\nShe forced a reply out of her parched throat. \"Would you believe me if I told you I don't know what went on?\"\n\nGabrielle put a slim, bejeweled finger under Nicolette's chin and raised it until they were eye to eye before she said, \"Probably not, unless it's like an old conjure woman in New Orleans told me years ago\u2014that people can block out of their minds things that they don't want to remember or don't want to admit to themselves.\" She paused, letting the full portent of her words sink in. \"All I know is that I came to this room with Sukey to peek in after he left and you were sleeping. You were wearing a lovely smile, my darling, _nothing else_!\"\n\nGabrielle DelaCroix paused dramatically to allow her niece a chance to speak, but Nicolette said nothing. The girl either truly didn't remember or had no intentions of enlightening her aunt as to what had transpired, considering it none of the other woman's business.\n\nThat's fine, Nikki. Don't tell me a thing! Gabrielle thought to herself. I didn't want to discuss my first affair with anyone either.\n\nWhen Nicolette continued to hold her tongue, her aunt tried again to provoke some response. \"You know, _ma chere,_ proper Creole ladies, even married ones, keep their _robes de nuit_ on and modestly tied up to their chins when they allow their men to...\"\n\n_\"Aunt Gabrielle!\"_ Nicolette gasped.\n\nGabrielle didn't finish her sentence, but laughed quietly at her niece's stricken look.\n\n\"I'm not blaming you, dear. Monsieur Laffite, as I said, is a most charming man, and undoubtedly, a lover to be reckoned with! And, if the truth be known,\" she whispered, \"I've always found the bedpost a convenient place for my nightgown under similar circumstances. But then no one ever accused Gabrielle Dubois DelaCroix of being a proper Creole! We are much alike, you and I, _mais oui_?'\n\n\"Please, Tante, you're embarrassing me.\"\n\n\"Very well, Nicolette. But before you plead with Jean Laffite to take you to New Orleans to be locked into a loveless marriage for the rest of your life, give it some thought... a great deal of thought. If my guess is correct, you are no longer a chaste maiden.\"\n\nNicolette guessed the same, but hearing it said aloud and so bluntly came as a terrible shock. A sob escaped her tight-drawn lips.\n\n\"Don't act so devastated, Nikki!\" Gabrielle snapped, annoyed suddenly. \"You aren't the first tainted lily and you won't be the last. Our kind survives. We even have it better than most, in my estimation. After it happened to me, I ran away to Paris rather than be forced to marry another man. I could have refused my papa's orders and stayed in New Orleans, of course. But that would have meant 'tossing my corset on the armoire'\u2014being resigned to an old maid's fate. Can you see me knitting and gossiping with those old crows? It's too outrageous to contemplate!\n\n\"As for you, Nikki, the choice seems to have been taken out of your hands. But all for the best. I spoke to Jean shortly after he left you. I've seen that glow in a few men's eyes. It speaks more eloquently than words ever could. He wants you, my girl! He may even be in love with you!\"\n\nGabrielle's words dropped like heavy stones in the silence. Nicolette felt her heart soar for the tiniest instant before her Creole propriety forced it back into passive submission to the rules.\n\nNo! she told herself in stem silence. I don't care for Jean Laffite! I never will. He's an outlaw, an arrogant rogue who forces women to obey his will. How could I love him when he's done such awful things to me?\n\nHer aunt had rushed on ahead while Nicolette busied herself at regaining some measure of composure\u2014false as it was.\n\n\"Most of the married Creole women I knew in New Orleans spent their nights saying their beads and wishing they were their husbands' mistresses instead of their wives. Those quadroons along the ramparts are the ones who share the happy times, believe me. It won't hurt you to bide your time, give Jean Laffite a chance, and search your own heart to find out exactly what you want for the rest of your life!\"\n\nDawn had drawn the heavy curtains of shadow, creeping into the room while Gabrielle delivered her lecture. Nicolette sat in King Carlos's _bed\u2014Laffite's bed,_ she corrected herself mentally\u2014hugging her knees to her breasts and biting her lower lip to hold back tears of uncertainty.\n\nGabrielle had retreated to the gilt chair, unspoken questions written plainly on her face. Maybe she was wrong. Perhaps Nicolette was not made of the same stout stuff as she. But she had to speak her mind\u2014to find out.\n\nShe watched her niece out of the corner of her eye, thinking how very much she looked like Francine. Poor Frannie, forced to marry when what she really longed for was the convent life. Gabrielle might have laughed aloud, if the irony of that situation hadn't been so bitter to her even now. Francine, unable to cope with the life pressed upon her, resorted to migraines and smelling salts. Gabrielle lived the mess that had been left of her life with a vengeance, not allowing a moment to slip by unsavored. And Claude-poor, dear Claude\u2014took his pleasure with his _plac\u00e9e_ on the ramparts, giving her children with coppery skin, and the love his wife refused to accept.\n\nNo! Gabrielle thought. I won't allow that for Nikki! She'll be a thousand times better off with Jean Laffite. To be only his mistress would be preferable to being the wife of most men I've met. Why, if I were ten years younger...\n\n\"Aunt Gabi, the man you loved... is he still in New Orleans?\" Nicolette seemed to be receiving her aunt's thoughts.\n\n\"He is.\"\n\n\"Will you see him again?\"\n\n\"Most assuredly!\"\n\n\"Will you marry him?\"\n\nGabrielle's words came out in a wistful sigh. \"If ever he is free to marry in my lifetime. We swore it to each other long ago.\"\n\n\"But you married someone else. How could you have done that?\"\n\n\"Nikki, my dear girl, I thought perhaps your time in Paris taught you a few subtleties of life. But I suppose your strict upbringing forbade your understanding. Yes, I married in spite of the fact that I loved another. But he was out of my reach. He may always be. My husband was much older than I. He offered me affection, a fine home, a good name, respect and companionship. We were the best of friends, before and after our marriage. He accepted me for what I was and what I could give him, never demanding more than he knew I was capable of offering. If the marriage wasn't blissfully happy, at least we were content with what we had. That counts for something.\"\n\n\"I don't understand. I'm sorry, Tante. You tell me that you married a man you never loved, but you have warned me repeatedly not to do so.\" Nicolette stared wide-eyed at her aunt, waiting for the secret to this riddle to be revealed.\n\n\"The difference, _ma petit innocent,_ is that I _chose_ the man I wished to be my husband. What your papa is demanding is all wrong. He shouldn't be the one to decide with whom you will share your life... and your bed!\"\n\nNicolette nodded slowly and whispered, \"I see. But how does a woman know when she's in love? Truly and forever!\"\n\nA slow smile curved Gabrielle's rose-tinted lips. \"Dearest Nikki, when love strikes, you won't need to ask that question of anyone. You'll feel such a stirring in your blood, such a pounding of your heart, such a quickening of your whole body when he's near you that there can be no mistaking it.\"\n\nNicolette drew in her breath sharply. She thought back to earlier hours. The odd hammering inside her head when Jean Laffite kissed her unexpectedly. The hot tingling in her thighs. The tightening of her stomach muscles. The faintness when he released her. Could it be?\n\nNicolette and Gabrielle shared a long, intimate silence. Without speaking a word, the young woman told her aunt what she wanted to know. Her niece longed for more than marriage\u2014she wanted love!\n\nOutside, the rain had stopped. The fat, gray clouds scudded away to allow April sunshine to warm the spring earth, turning puddles to rising jewels of mist. The moisture-laden air filled the early morning with green scents overlaid with traces of honeysuckle, jasmine, and sea salt.\n\nSmells of home, Nicolette thought, though home was still far away.\n\nWhen Sukey brought water for Nicolette's bath, the morning bustle began about the mansion. Gabrielle went in search of Jean Laffite.\n\nShe found him on the wide veranda of his ballast stone mansion, leaning against one of the six gilt ships' figureheads, which served as columns to support the cypress-shingled roof. He stood staring out to sea, smoking a thin, black cheroot. The blue-white smoke wreathed his rugged, bronzed face, making him look for all the world, Gabrielle thought, like a handsome apostle of Lucifer.\n\n\"Captain Laffite, she's awake.\"\n\n\"And feeling well?\" he asked, frowning.\n\n\"Confused, I'm afraid. But that's quite normal for one of her tender age and temperament... after all she's been through.\"\n\n\"She's not the only one, Madame DelaCroix.\" He stubbed out his cigar with the toe of his boot. \"Damned if I've felt this befuddled in all my years! The woman's bewitched me! I want her, and I don't know what to do about it.\"\n\nGabrielle touched Laffite's arm with a comforting hand and smiled into his emerald-gold eyes. \"I guessed as much. I think she cares for you, too. But you must go slowly with her. She doesn't quite realize what her feelings mean. She'll be shy as a doe in her first season.\"\n\n\"And I'm a tough old buck in my third,\" he said bitterly.\n\n\"You mean your other two unfortunate marriages. Reyne told me. I'm sorry.\"\n\n_\"You're_ sorry? I'm almost afraid to look at another woman. My first marriage, of course, was arranged. Christina and I might have grown to love each other, if she'd lived long enough. But she died in childbirth. I've always blamed myself. She was frail. She never should have tried to have children.\n\n\"Bianca, that poor child, never even realized I was her husband. She lived through an attack by some of Gambi's men, much like what occurred yesterday. But I didn't know about it until she was brought to Grande Terre and deposited in one of the brothels with a dozen seasoned whores.\" He bowed slightly. \"Pardon my plain talk, madame.\"\n\n\"I've heard and said worse, Jean. Go on.\"\n\n\"Bianca was a Spanish nobleman's daughter\u2014the only survivor from the set-upon ship. Uncle Reyne learned of her fate from the men lining up to sample her tender young favors. I was wild when I heard what they were doing to a thirteen-year-old! I took her out of the house and married her on the spot\u2014the only way I could insure her safety, since Gambi claimed her as spoils of battle. She might have come back to her senses, in time. But she was shot and killed in an accident. At least her suffering ended.\"\n\nHe stood in silence for some time, his face clouded with painful memories. He cleared his throat and gave Gabrielle a smile that really was more of a grimace.\n\n\"So now you've heard my sordid marital tales. Do you still think I'm the type of man your niece would have, madame?\"\n\n\"That's not for me to say, Jean. Only time and Nicolette can tell us that.\"\n\n\"I'm not off to a very good start with her. I took some... liberties last night.\"\n\n\"I know,\" Gabrielle answered, unable to meet his gaze.\n\n\"Not what you're thinking!\" he snapped. \"But Nikki seems to believe the worst and is terrified by what she imagines happened.\"\n\nGabrielle looked at him oddly. Was Laffite lying to her, or had he really not made love to Nicolette? And, if he hadn't, why on earth not? The man's logic confounded her.\n\n\"It's only natural for her to be frightened right now. She's been through so much, and just when she thought her life was moving in its natural flow at last. But take my advice, Jean. Let her think what she will for the moment. It may be to your advantage.\"\n\nHe stared at her for several moments. What could she mean? She actually wanted her niece to believe he'd ravaged her while she slept? But hadn't his first inclination been the same\u2014to take the blame himself rather than letting her know what Silas Browne had done to her?\n\n\"What if I'm in love with her?\" he asked suddenly.\n\n\"Then I'd say you're a lucky man, Captain Laffite.\" She gave him a peck on the cheek. \"And I'd say that my niece is even luckier!\"\n\nShe left him with those words.\n\nHis tormented expression wrenched her heart. She hoped Nicolette would find it in her heart to love this man. Laffite needed someone to add a soft side to his hard, lonely seafarer's life... to make up for all the pain of his past.\n\n###\n\n# Chapter Four\n\nThe next week followed in a procession of sun-warmed spring days ripening into the fullness of a semitropical Louisiana summer.\n\nGabrielle watched Laffite and Nicolette closely, hoping for some sign that the pair would experience a blossoming of deep emotions to match the greening of the island. But perhaps she'd hoped for too much.\n\nJean went about courting Nicolette in the accepted Creole fashion. He refused to be alone with her any longer, requiring Sukey or Gabrielle in attendance as _due\u00f1as_ whenever he and Nikki were together. He brought her bouquets of wildflowers, gave her small impersonal gifts, said the proper inane things, and, in general, kept his maddening distance, to Gabrielle's way of thinking.\n\nNicolette responded in the manner of her upbringing. She smiled at him when required, offered demure thanks for his presents and flowers, answered his small talk with more of her own, and worked constantly at suppressing what she thought of as her shameless longing to taste his lips again.\n\nTo Gabrielle DelaCroix, they seemed like two actors playing assigned roles, taught carefully not to deviate from the written dialogue and prescribed actions. She complained bitterly to Reyne Beluche about his nephew's impeccable manners. \"Why doesn't he simply sweep her into his arms and melt that simpering facade she's thrown up as a barrier between them?\"\n\nThe uncle replied with a teasing grin, \"They don't call Jean Laffite 'the gentleman smuggler' for nothing, Gabi!\"\n\nOn the afternoon of April 30, the whole region of Barataria\u2014from the islands in the Gulf up through the bayous\u2014throbbed with preparation and excitement. To mark the first anniversary of the admission of Louisiana to the Union as its eighteenth state, the Baratarians planned a party on the beach, complete with barbecue, dancing, and fireworks after the sun went down.\n\nGabrielle sat at the far side of the spacious parlor that afternoon, absently alternating between working at her needlepoint and stirring the sticky heat with a palmetto fan. She'd tried concentrating on the conversation between Laffite and Nicolette, but soon found it so boring she almost nodded off. Perhaps, she thought, we should return to New Orleans. This simply isn't working out!\n\nNicolette sat perfectly straight in a tapestry-covered chair, her ramrod backbone six inches away from its medallion back. The girlish smile on her face was frozen in place. These sessions had become a trial for her. She nodded occasionally as her proper suitor discussed music and literature. It was as if nothing had happened between them.\n\nHad she imagined the fire in his kisses that night she arrived on Grande Terre? Had he really shared her bed not so long ago? Perhaps she had dreamed it all. Surely, if he had made love to her, she must have been found lacking!\n\nShe sighed deeply without realizing she'd done so. Laffite was out of his chair instantly, concern etched in his face as he asked, \"Are you feeling all right, mademoiselle?\"\n\nThe fact that he addressed her so formally instead of using her given name suddenly pricked Nicolette's ire beyond endurance. She flounced out of the uncomfortable seat and said almost harshly, \"No, Monsieur Laffite! I am not feeling well at all! If you'll excuse me, I'm sure my aunt will fill in for me and listen to your endless chatter.\"\n\nBefore Laffite or Gabrielle could say a word in response to Nicolette's outburst, she had fled the room, furious tears staining her cheeks.\n\nLaffite looked crestfallen. \"What did I say?\"\n\n\"My dear boy, you've said nothing worth listening to since you set out on this senseless courting campaign! What have you been trying to prove? That you're capable of boring my niece and myself to distraction? Do you think for one instant that you've fooled us into believing that this is the real Jean Laffite? I'm sure Nikki feels by this time that she would be as well off with any man her father might pick for her. What is the purpose of this charade you've been playing, Jean? Or have you decided you don't care for my niece after all and this is your method of driving her away?\"\n\n\"Don't care for her?\" he blasted. \"My God! I haven't slept in weeks just knowing that she's under the same roof. I take three cold baths a day to try and put down the rebellion of my own body. Tight britches were not designed for unrequited passion, madame! So what do you expect me to do? Haul her off into the dunes and ravish her?\"\n\nGabrielle chuckled softly. \"That might not be a bad idea. Certainly more effective than the heading you've set out on.\"\n\nHis voice softened. \"You know I can't do that, Gabrielle. I care for her too deeply. She's been through so much. I don't want to frighten her or hurt her. I love her too damn much for that.\"\n\n\"You know she thinks you bedded her that first night. She confided her suspicions to me only yesterday and said she suspected you found her a poor piece since you've made no further attempts on her virtue.\"\n\n\"God! I can't do anything right!\" He stamped across the room and slapped his fist against the heavy wood mantel. \"I actually set things up that first night to make her believe what she does... to protect her, I told myself. I want her so bad I can't think straight. Every time I'm near her it's torture! And I thought I'd lost her for sure. Now you're telling me she wants me?\"\n\n\"Well, I'm certain she wanted the Jean Laffite who kissed her on the levee in New Orleans and the one who came to her room our first night here. But you've forced yourself into this posturing mold that isn't at all a good fit. Try being yourself, Jean. See what happens.\"\n\nGabrielle gave him a reassuring smile before she left the room to find her niece. She'd given one of the lectures she'd been suppressing for days. Now she had other words of wisdom to impart to Nicolette.\n\nJean Laffite continued to pace the wide board floor of the parlor, his mind a maelstrom of uncertainty. How could he really know if Nicolette felt anything for him? What if he rushed ahead with a false move and alienated her forever? Could he bear to live without her?\n\n\"Damn it all, I've got to take that chance!\"\n\nHe turned on his heel and headed determinedly down the wide hall toward Nicolette's room. He knocked, but didn't wait for an answer before he threw the door wide. Gabrielle was stopped in mid-sentence, Nicolette in mid-undress. She snatched up her lavender tissue silk gown from the king's bed to hide the erect nipples peeking through the transparent batiste of her basque.\n\n\"If you please, Monsieur Laffite, I'm not dressed!\" Nicolette said angrily.\n\nLaffite gave her a nonchalant look and answered, \"I've seen you in less,\" then turned to her aunt. \"I'd like a word with Nikki... alone!\"\n\nGabrielle smiled, nodded, and left them before her niece could protest.\n\nLaffite, his face now as darkly intense as storm clouds over the bayou, slammed the door shut and moved toward Nicolette.\n\nShe backed away until she ran out of floor space at the far wall. He eliminated the distance between them in two long strides.\n\n\"There will be no more chaperones!\" he thundered. \"Only the two of us... and the business at hand.\"\n\nNicolette could feel his breath on her cheek, he stood so close. He scorched her with his hot, probing gaze. She felt like a nervous hare, hypnotized by the predatory stare of a snake, frozen to inaction, her limbs gone so weak that she couldn't flee, even if quarter were granted. She experienced, at the same time, excitement and terror at his sudden show of dominance.\n\nHe snatched away the gown she was hiding behind. Then, slowly, his hands moved up her arms. Still holding her in a firm grasp, he let his eyes travel over her. They stopped at her peaked breasts. One hand cupped a firm mound, raising it, caressing it. He leaned forward and Nicolette gasped as she felt his lips brush the bare flesh above the top of her basque.\n\nThe room was silent except for his heavy breathing and the pounding of her heart. They seemed suspended in the vivid tongues of sunlight streaming through the window.\n\n\"I want you,\" he said in a voice tense with desire.\n\nWhen she didn't answer, he pulled her to his body suddenly and held her so tightly that she had trouble catching her breath. Her heart's regular beat seemed to be saying, Please... please... please...\n\n_Please what?_ she wondered in her dizzy confusion.\n\nHis lips came down hard on hers. With a fierceness that demanded response, he forced her flesh, tasting the moist depths of her mouth. Nikki clung to him as much for support as because she had no control over her eager arms and lips. She knew at last! She was sure she loved him!\n\nHis release came as such a shock that Nicolette almost fell backward. Her confused desires blurred her thoughts, but not her senses, which still remained filled with the taste, the feel, and the sight of him.\n\n\"Not here!\" he said. \"You'll dress. We'll go to a secret place I know where we can be completely alone. Hurry!\"\n\n\"Alone?\" She parroted the word as if he spoke some foreign tongue which she had never heard before.\n\n\"Here, put this on,\" he ordered, thrusting a thin peasant blouse into her hands. \"With this,\" he added, indicating a flowing cotton skirt of azure and scarlet print.\n\nNicolette obeyed without a word. This change in him seemed incredible. Never had any man ordered her about this way. His glittering green eyes watched her every move, never looking away to protect her modesty. Yet she felt no embarrassment.\n\nWhen she was fully clothed, he came to her and drew the pins from her hair, releasing the dark tresses to cascade down to her waist. He smoothed the ebony ripples with his fingers, sending new chills of longing through her.\n\n\"You'll wear your hair down from now on. I like it this way.\" The order was given as if she were his slave or one of his crew members.\n\nShe was about to make a sharp reply about wearing her hair any way she pleased, when he grasped her hand and hauled her along through the length of the mansion to the veranda.\n\nThe sound of singing voices, the smell of pork roasting over slowly burning hickory, and the freshening salt wind assaulted their already aroused senses when they stepped outside.\n\nLaffite started down the stairs to the oyster shell path, but Nicolette pulled away. He turned to her, glaring his .disapproval of her balking.\n\n\"You didn't give me time to get my slippers,\" she explained, raising her skirt to show her bare feet and nodding toward the sharp shells. \"I'll go back for them.\"\n\n\"Never mind,\" he answered.\n\nSwinging her up into his arms, Laffite strode down the path between the Spanish dagger hedges, their white bell flowers ringing soundlessly in the breeze.\n\n\"Where are you taking me?\" Nicolette asked, suddenly wary of his actions.\n\n\"You'll find out.\"\n\n\"I want to know now,\" she demanded. \"I have some say in what's done with me!\"\n\nWhen he didn't answer, Nicolette began to struggle in his arms. He laughed and tightened his grip on her.\n\n\"Put me down!\" she cried. \"You have no right to do this! I'm not your personal property!\"\n\n\"I haven't done anything yet. And I don't feel like putting you down. As for whose property you are, I could claim you by right of salvage. I did rescue you from a sinking ship, remember? But even that isn't necessary. You see, as long as you remain on Grande Terre, you answer to the Boss, the same as anyone else.\"\n\nAngered by his sudden, imperious attitude, she beat wildly on his chest, yelling, \"Put me down, I say!\"\n\nHe did... immediately, unceremoniously, without warning. Nicolette landed in a tousled heap in the white sand.\n\n\"Happy?\" he growled down at her.\n\nShe glared back, ready to attack him physically as well as verbally. But the sudden change of expression on his face stopped her. His eyes had gone deadly as he looked out to sea. His lips drew together in a hard line.\n\n\"Damn!\" he muttered. \"The _Philantrope_! Gambi! That black-hearted scoundrel's come back!\"\n\nHis words were interrupted by an angry roar of many voices from down the beach. Nicolette looked in the direction of his gaze and spied a strange ship in the channel. Rowing into shore were a dozen or so men in small boats. The ruffians landed and advanced toward them. Each one was cursing and yelling to feed his mates' rage and courage.\n\n\"Quick, Nikki, run hide in those trees. Stay there, no matter what happens!\"\n\nLaffite shoved her toward a line of tortured oaks, their branches and trunks twisted inland by the never-ceasing ocean winds. She crouched in tall sawgrass, concealed just beyond the beach, watching and listening.\n\n\"Laffite, you bloody bastard, you had no call to do in Browne and the others!\" The man speaking stood at the head of his motley crew, a sneer on his bristled face and so much accumulated filth on his clothes and body that he looked all over a grayish-brown. He choked the handle of a broad-axe in his beefy fists.\n\n\"They knew the law as well as you do, Gambi. I won't abide piracy!\" Laffite answered. \"We have no quarrel with the Americans and no letter of marque to legalize the taking of their vessels. Browne paid the price for defying my commands.\" He narrowed his eyes and strode to within a pace of the man with the axe. \"But I suspect Browne was acting under another's orders and paid more than his share of the price.\"\n\nBy the time Laffite finished speaking, the Italian pirate, Vincent Gambi, wore a thundercloud on his swarthy face.\n\nNicolette held her breath, watching the two men challenging each other's authority with cold, murderous stares. Gambi was the first to give way.\n\n\"By the fires of Vesuvio, Laffite, will you kill every man-jack of us? Browne was an unholy sonuvabitch and and idiot to boot! But _my_ men are _my_ men! You had no right to deal him a rope!\"\n\n\"You're wrong, Gambi.\" Laffite's voice held the cold, quiet force of command. \"All the men of Grande Terre are my men. Either we work together or we'll hang separately. We all voted, fair and square. _I am the Boss!_ What I say goes!\"\n\nNicolette felt her own fury at Jean Laffite's treatment of her replaced by a peculiar surge of pride as she watched him turn his back on the band of grumbling pirates, proving himself their one and only leader\u2014a man who scorned fear.\n\nShe gave a sigh of relief that the confrontation was over and started to go to him. Then the glint of the sun on a pistol barrel and a figure pushing his way to the front of the milling crowd caught her eye.\n\n\"Jean, watch out!\" she screamed.\n\nThe action went like clockwork. Laffite whirled and crouched. Dominique Youx, who had been approaching, yelled and tossed a gun to his unarmed brother.\n\nJust as a pirate broke clear and yelled, \"The men of Gambi take orders only from Gambi!\" two shots rang out.\n\nThe pirate dropped to the sand, a jagged hole in his forehead, looking like a third bloodshot eye. Laffite stood erect.\n\n\"Anyone else?\" His words cut with the deadly edge of a rapier. \"Gambi?\"\n\nThe challenging leader turned without a word and motioned his band to follow.\n\nThe sight of the dead man bleeding into the white sand made Nicolette feel sick. She was shivering, but she knew she wouldn't faint. Her overriding emotion was one of soul-deep relief. Laffite was safe!\n\nThen he was beside her, taking her into his arms and turning her away from the gory scene. He held her close until she stopped trembling, tilting her face up to look into her eyes. She hadn't realized she was crying until he wiped the tears gently from her cheeks. A new kind of thrill ran through her at his touch.\n\nIn a horrible instant, the whole scene flashed back through her mind. She could have lost him! She clung tighter to him, praying for his kiss.\n\nBut instead of kissing her, Laffite cupped her face tenderly in his two hands and made love to her with his eyes. She couldn't move... couldn't speak. She was aware of his gaze caressing her very soul.\n\n\"You saved my life, Nikki,\" he said softly.\n\nA new roar rose from the beach, but this time from Laffite's faithful followers. Nicolette listened, then realized what they were chanting: \"Mam'zelle Boss! Mam'zelle Boss! Mam'zelle Boss!\"\n\nConfused, she looked from the men back to Laffite, pleading silently for some explanation.\n\nHe gave a quiet laugh. \"It's their way of saying, 'You'll do,'\" he told her. \"They want you to stay here with us. Will you, Nikki?\"\n\nShe couldn't take her eyes from his face. It seemed to her that the rest of the world and everyone in it had ceased to exist. Her whole being and reality lived in this man alone.\n\n\"Do I have a choice?\" she whispered.\n\nHe took her hand in his and slowly brought her fingertips to his lips, kissing each in its turn. The feel of his warm breath on her flesh sent tingles of pleasure up her arms and awakened a throbbing ache in her heart's most secret chamber.\n\n\"A woman always has a choice with me, Nikki.\"\n\nBut she doubted it as he closed his arms around her and sought her lips.\n\n###\n\n# Chapter Five\n\nThe island sang that night\u2014cicadas, spring peepers, and crickets blending their choruses to match the song in Nicolette's heart.\n\nShe understood at last. Her aunt's words made sense. The whole world was suddenly in tune for the first time, and there seemed to be a rhyme and reason to everything.\n\nJean Laffite hadn't simply happened into her life the night Octave Castaigne died. The fates had sent him to teach her the true meaning of love. The attack on the ship that brought her to Grande Terre had completed the master design\u2014bringing them together, never more to be parted.\n\nAnd what had she learned? She loved him without question; his happiness was far more important than her own. By making him happy, she would receive more than her own share of the same commodity. Love, given and received unselfishly, created a never-ending cycle of rewards for those involved. Nicolette Vernet was ready now. to offer and accept without question.\n\nNicolette could hardly contain her excitement as she sat in the slipper-shaped tub filled with heated rainwater, and let Sukey sponge her back and shoulders. The fancy cake of French soap scented the bedroom with delicate wafts of verbena. When Sukey finished with her, Nicolette leaned back, closed her eyes, and let the silky water caress her body.\n\nShe tried to envision what lay ahead in the hours, the days, the years to come. But try as she would, the only image which came clearly to mind was Jean Laffite's face\u2014the sun-bronzed cast of his skin framed in combers of darkness, which broke about his shoulders, his bold brows shadowing the green-gold glitter of his sometimes-melancholy eyes. She didn't have to visualize his strong, sensuous mouth. The feel of his kisses still lingered on her lips.\n\nNothing else matters, she thought to herself. I'm my own person. The choice is mine.\n\nShe knew her parents would be disappointed by her decision and that hurt her. But not as much as the thought of life without Jean Laffite hurt. She couldn't imagine spending the rest of her life away from the man she loved.\n\n\"There comes a time,\" she'd told her aunt shortly after the incident on the beach that afternoon, \"when a woman must choose between being selfish or resigning herself to living out an empty life to please others. I've made my choice, selfish as it may seem to some people.\"\n\nJean Laffite, aided by Xavier, dressed slowly, meticulously. He savored the feel of fresh linen against his scrubbed skin. Rubbing a hand over his close-shaven face, he nodded his approval to his servant. He stepped into his perfectly cut trousers, then pulled on new boots, which shone like polished mahogany.\n\nAll for her, he thought to himself. For my Nikki!\n\nXavier, sensing the Boss's pensive mood, remained silent as he carefully wound the sash of crimson satin about Laffite's trim waist. Tonight his master wore the colors of the American flag\u2014white shirt and blue britches, set off by the bright red cummerbund\u2014to honor Louisiana's first anniversary as a state.\n\nJean Laffite, a man whom no country claimed, longed to find a home for his fierce patriotism as much as a place for his intense affections. France, the land of his forebears, had been denied him when his parents transplanted to Spain before his birth. Spain, which had killed his Jewish grandfather and had driven the rest of the clan into exile in Santo Domingue, or Haiti, where the Laffite brothers had been born, stirred only his hatred now.\n\nHe knew the islands of the Antilles well. He had been schooled on Martinique, taken his military training on Saint Christopher, sailed with Beluche and his brothers under letters of marque out of Guadeloupe. His first bride hailed from Saint Croix. But those homelands were lost now, too. In 1804, when the slaves of Haiti rose up to drive the French off the island, Laffite and his family escaped with ten thousand other refugees to make a new home in Louisiana. Now they lived in the United States, and Laffite longed to make himself a valued citizen, not a man outlawed and hunted by its government.\n\nHis need for respect, for belonging, and his need for the love of Nicolette Vernet twisted and twined about each other in his mind and in his heart, making each an intergral part of his whole desire.\n\nLaffite told himself that with a woman he loved and cherished at his side, he would naturally become more respectable in others' eyes and be more easily accepted by his countrymen.\n\nIt was all well and good to be the Boss of several hundred pirates, privateers, freebooters, and buccaneers expelled from the four corners of the world. But he longed for more. He enjoyed his status of \"gentleman smuggler\" in New Orleans\u2014the camaraderie of the Crescent City's leading businessmen when they met at Maspero's Exchange and the shy but admiring looks offered him by their wives and lovely daughters at the opera\u2014but it pained him that he was never invited into their close-knit society. There were a few wealthy rebels who entertained him in their homes on occasion, but the true _cr\u00e8me de la cr\u00e8me_ of New Orleans eyed him with the same disdain and suspicion they had for the _Americains\u2014those_ settlers from other states who had invaded from the northeast, traveling down the Mississippi to begin new lives in the old city.\n\nNicolette, if she would have him, could change all that.\n\n\"You going to marry her, Boss?\" Xavier asked suddenly.\n\nJean Laffite looked down into the inky face and opened his mouth to give an immediate \"yes,\" but it froze on his lips. He frowned.\n\n\"Well, I'll be damned!\" he said instead. \"I can't! We've got every type of man on this island, from ships' masters to boy whores, but not one priest in the lot. Not even a back-country parson to say the words over us!\"\n\nXavier grinned, his large teeth shaping a crescent in his dark moon-face. \"I got a right handsome broomstick, Boss. Ain't never been jumped before, neither. Reckon it might not be as fancy as the sort of wedding her papa'd give her in New Orleans, but it'll tie a right smart knot all the same. My ma and pa didn't have no preacherman, but here I is, big as life\u2014almost\u2014and all thanks to a ole broomstick!\"\n\nLaffite's frown deepened. The thought of Nicolette Vernet jumping a broomstick like a slave wench rather than having a priest preside over her marriage bothered him. She deserved better. Did he even dare ask her to do such a thing?\n\nHe'd had one of his captains read the ceremony when he married Bianca, but she'd been beyond protesting by then. She would have allowed him to have his way with her, if he'd demanded it under the circumstances, without benefit of any knot-tying. That service had been for Gambi, not for Bianca and himself. But he could not marry Nicolette in that manner. Despite his formal education, island superstitions were deeply ingrained in him. To repeat that type of ceremony might well set the fates in motion to repeat the tragic ending.\n\n\"Get me that broomstick, Xavier!\" Laffite ordered at last.\n\nStill, vague fears gnawed at him. Would Nicolette Vernet consent to marry him under these or any other conditions? He could make her stay on Grande Terre, but he couldn't make her love him.\n\nJean Laffite, the fearless corsair, had sailed the seven seas, fought as a privateer for the government of Cartegena, faced rapiers, pistols, and knives in more duels than he could remember. He had pitted his strength against swamp panthers, hurricanes, yellow fever, and his own mutinous men. But now he found his hands clammy, his throat dry as sun-bleached bones, and his heartbeat as erratic as slack sails in a nor'easter. He was terrified at the thought of asking Nicolette Vernet to become his wife.\n\nNicolette, waiting down the hall in the pink-and-gold sitting room, was in no less of a dither. She anticipated his knock at any moment, the edges of her frayed nerves at the point of unraveling. He had yet to declare himself. Would he tonight?\n\nFollowing the afternoon fracas on the beach with Gambi and his men, Laffite had escorted her back to the mansion and left her in her aunt's care, telling them both to rest and be ready for the exciting activities that evening.\n\nHe had kissed her, yes. But he hadn't asked her to marry him. Maybe he didn't love her the way she loved him.\n\nThe longer Nicolette waited, the more dismal her thoughts became. They clicked through her mind like a nun's beads at vespers\u2014sharp, grating, inevitable in their sameness and lack of warmth.\n\nShe sat, straight of spine, on a rose brocade slipper chair, and laced her nervous fingers in her lap. Part of her prayed for him to hurry, while another part hoped he would give her more time to compose herself. She didn't want to rush impulsively into his arms the minute she saw him\u2014begging him to have her, promising to love him always. No! That would never do!\n\nWhat if he arrives with all intentions of asking me to be his bride, but then changes his mind at the last instant? Because... Because of what? her mind groped.\n\nBecause I'm so young and inexperienced... because I'm as silly as a child at times... because Papa wouldn't approve... because he knows I'm betrothed to another man...\n\n\"Because he doesn't love me!\" she wailed aloud.\n\nThe knock at the door startled Nicolette so that she almost tipped over the chair.\n\n\"Nikki? May I come in?\" The husky timbre of his voice caused a hollow ache inside her as if she hadn't eaten a decent meal in several days.\n\nHer own voice surprised her with its strength and musical clarity when she answered, \"Yes, please, Jean. I'm ready.\"\n\nAnd she was ready by the time he opened the door and strode through it. Though her cheeks were more blushed than usual and her French-blue eyes sparkly-bright as a fever victim's, her smile was calm and welcoming, making Laffite's own uncertainties take flight.\n\nShe stood demurely before him and allowed him to drink in her beauty. His gaze traveled from the constellation of jasmine stars twinkling in the midnight of her hair, over her glowing countenance, pausing to kiss her coral lips with his eyes. Soon his gaze traveled down to the point where her vernal breasts rose in silken fullness out of the crisp lace trimming her simple white gown.\n\nHe smiled into her eyes, pleased. \"Out of all those fancy costumes I had Xavier place in the armoire, you chose to wear all white tonight. It's appropriate, darling, and becomes you.\"\n\nDarling, he called her! Nicolette's senses soared. He was saying more\u2014showering her with compliments\u2014but that one word resounded in her heart so that all the others were drowned out.\n\n\"I picked it for you, Jean... dearest.\"\n\nThe breathy endearment quivered on her lips... not because she didn't mean it with all her heart, but because she wasn't sure he'd accept it.\n\nHe did, and with a smile so touched with emotion that Nicolette found herself fighting to hold back her tears. When he opened his arms to her, she went gratefully, accepting what he offered and giving full measure in return.\n\nHis face lowered over hers. Their lips met tentatively\u2014touching, caressing, savoring the joining. Nicolette parted a way for his intimate exploration when she felt his urgent tongue against her flesh. She let her bare arms slide up the creamy linen on his back until her fingers twined in the coarse locks against his neck. Through her happy haze, she thought, I'll always remember the texture of his hair, how wonderfully warm it feels against my palms, how fresh and clean it smells, like sea air and Spanish limes.\n\nHe drew away slowly, but held her still in his arms. Nicolette looked into his ruggedly handsome face and felt him speaking to her with his eyes. The silent message touched her heart\u2014made her ache for him.\n\n\"I want you to be my wife, Nikki,\" he said at length. \"I can't offer you the perfect life you deserve. I'll have to be away from you at times. But you'll always be in my heart. What I'm trying to say is, I love you. I want to know that you'll be here... from now on.\" He frowned as if he found his own words unconvincing, and added, \"That's not much of an offer, is it?\"\n\n\"Could I ask for more?\" she murmured.\n\n\"Most women would.\"\n\nShe pulled away slightly and traced his high cheekbone with a gentle finger.\n\n\"I'm not most women, darling. I'm the woman who loves Jean Laffite more than life itself. I'm the woman who'll be your wife and give you everything I have to give\u2014love, understanding, tenderness, and, I hope, beautiful children.\"\n\nHe crushed her in his arms then, burying his face in the shielding curtain of her hair. She felt his silent sobs. Her own emotions broke with his. So much tension had built up over the past days. So many times they had seemed worlds apart. Now the sudden realization that they shared an eternal love overcame them both.\n\nWhen he had composed himself and could manage his familiar rakish smile again, he asked, \"Well, Nikki, shall we go now and make it official? I'm sure the word has spread already that a ceremony may be in the offing tonight. Secrets are hard to keep on Grande Terre. Xavier and Gabrielle both knew my intentions. That's two people too many for us to spring a surprise on anyone.\"\n\n\"Aunt Gabi knew and didn't give me a hint?\" Nikki gasped. \"She let me spend all those hours of misery, hoping, but not knowing? How could she be so cruel?\"\n\n\"Don't blame your aunt, darling. I had to ask her permission to marry you, but I begged her not to give you a hint. You see, I was so sure you'd turn me down that I didn't decide until the very last minute that I had the courage to ask you.\"\n\n\"You thought I'd... Oh, Jean! What a couple of fools we've been! Let's promise each other that we'll speak our minds plainly from now on. Think of all the agony we could have saved each other if I'd told you the minute I realized I loved you and vice versa.\"\n\n\"I promise, my darling,\" he answered, and sealed it with a lingering kiss.\n\n###\n\n# Chapter Six\n\nNicolette wasn't sure what she had imagined in the way of a marriage ceremony here in this desolate part of Louisiana, but certainly the flower- and ribbon-bedecked broomstick that Xavier offered for her inspection and approval had never entered her mind.\n\nBy the orange glow of the bonfires on the beach, Laffite saw the look of disconcertion on her face and bent toward her to whisper, \"This is only for the moment, darling. When the time is right, I'll take you back to New Orleans and we'll find a priest to sanction our marriage properly.\"\n\nThe urgency in his voice, as if he was pleading with her to accept rather than only explaining to her, melted Nicolette's misgivings. She was as impatient as he to form a solid bond between them, as anxious as she had been a few short weeks ago to get back to New Orleans. Surely, her father would realize that his ship was now past its arrival date and come searching for his missing daughter. When he did, she wanted to be bound fast to Jean Laffite so that no man, not even her father, could separate them.\n\nThe savory tang of sea salt and hickory smoke flavored the warm night air and mingled with the mouth-watering aromas of roasted suckling pig and thick, spicy gumbo laden with bayou crayfish and plump red Gulf shrimp.\n\nThe Baratarians, Jean's men, formed bright-colored tableaux about the beach\u2014their boisterous laughter and booming sea chanties obliterating all other sounds except for the eternal pulse of the waves.\n\nAs Laffite led Nicolette from group to group in a sort of informal introduction of the bride-to-be, she marveled at the flamboyant holiday garb of the wedding guests\u2014brightly striped shirts, kerchiefs on their heads, rough canvas britches disappearing into thigh boots made of cowhide, calfskin, alligator, and rattlesnake skin. Flashes of gold cast back the reflection of the flames from earlobes, necks, belts, and teeth. Many of the men wore hibiscus blossoms behind their ears.\n\n\"To let the gals all know that ole Tom here ain't been spoke for yet, ma'am,\" a sailor told Nicolette with a gap-toothed grin as he shifted his black eyes toward one of the women near him and tucked a red flower behind his right ear.\n\nNicolette, too, looked at the well-used lady of the evening, who had joined the festivities with the other women from the island's brothels. She wondered where the woman hailed from and what misery she had left behind that could make her content to service this band of rough misfits.\n\nHad she been in New Orleans, Nicolette would have shied away from any close association with such females, sweeping her skirts aside when she happened to pass a \"fallen woman\" in the street. She would have ignored totally the fact that she even knew of the existence of such creatures.\n\nShe smiled at her own hypocrisy. Hadn't she fought her great-grandmother's battles all her life? Though her family denied the rumors, even to the point of death under the dueling oaks, the fact that the story might be true could not be wholly denied.\n\nThe tale persisted that her great-grandmother had come to the Louisiana Territory to find a husband shortly after New Orleans was born. But two kinds of women came to the French settlement at about the same time\u2014the casket girls and the correction girls.\n\n_The filles \u00e0 la cassette,_ so called because of the coffin-shaped clothing chest each was given by the Mississippi Company, which brought them from France, were poor, but very proper. The correction girls were quite another matter. To ease overcrowding in the jails of Paris, the French government shipped women from _La Salpetriere,_ one of the city's correction houses, to the New World. These prospective brides were all of highly questionable character.\n\nBoth groups brought with them a woman of the same name as Nicolette's ancestor. But early records were destroyed in the fire of 1788, and thus the question could not be answered. Still, Nicolette's family had always held that their clan sprang from a casket girl's womb.\n\nNicolette laughed softly, remembering an incident from her school days in which her ancestor and Jean Laffite were both involved and caused her no end of trouble.\n\n\"What's so funny, sweetheart?\" Laffite asked, leading her to a palm trunk seat away from the others.\n\nShe covered her smile with her fingers, then looked up at him, her eyes sparkling wickedly.\n\n\"I was just thinking back to when I was eleven years old and you caused me to be punished severely. I swore then that some day I'd get even. But I never guessed I'd have to marry you to do it!\"\n\nLaffite's mind flipped back through the pages of time, trying to remember his Nikki as a young girl. No, he decided, he had never laid eyes on her until the night he first kissed her, two years ago.\n\n\"Don't look so baffled, Jean. You knew nothing about it. It was a lovely spring day in 1805. Sukey told me secretly that a new shipment of contraband goods had arrived at the Laffite showroom in Royal Street. She begged me to go along with her in pleading with Maman to let us walk to the Ursuline convent rather than having Pluto drive us. Her plan was to stop off at your place of business and have a peek at the new merchandise. We didn't go in, but stood in the doorway long enough for Sukey to get a quick look around and for me to see you for the first time and commit to memory a colorful epithet you bestowed on one of your workers.\n\n\"Later, during history class, Sister discussed the subject, delicate to my family, of the difference between the _filles \u00e0 la cassette_ and the correction girls. Always proud of my ancestry and, like the other members of my family, quick to defend our honor, I announced to the class that my mother's original ancestor was a casket girl. Micaela Almonester y Roxas, at that time my mortal enemy, piped up, saying with Spanish-accented sarcasm, 'Sister Madeleine, is it true that every casket girl had at least a hundred children and that all the correction girls were barren and that's why every Creole claims to be of noble birth?'\n\n\"Before the good gray nun could answer, I called Micaela the name I'd learned from you. I was immediately hauled by the ear to the Mother Superior's office, my father was sent for, and I spent a miserable two weeks secluded in my room, most of the time on my knees at my _prie-dieu,_ praying for forgiveness for my sins! I swore my vengeance on you every hour of those days!\"\n\nThough Laffite had not known Nicolette at the time of her misfortune, he was acquainted with her nemesis, the fiery-haired and fiery-tempered Senorita Micaela. He could imagine the two meeting in pitched battle inside the sacred walls of the old convent. The very thought sent him into fits of laughter. He tightened his arm around Nicolette and kissed the top of her head.\n\n\"I don't see what's so funny!\" she hissed. \"That was a terrible time for me!\"\n\nHe forced composure and said with some measure of solemnity, \"I'm sorry, truly I am. Tell me the words you learned from me and I'll swear by all that's good and holy never to utter the offensive syllables again.\"\n\nNicolette drew in her breath. \"Oh! I couldn't... not out loud!\"\n\n\"Whisper?\" He offered an attentive ear.\n\nNicolette hesitated, looked about to make sure no one else was listening, then mumbled, \"Whoremonger!\"\n\nLaffite roared again, tears rolling down his cheeks. \"Oh, Nikki! My innocent darling! You didn't call Micaela _that_ in front of a nun? Why, you didn't even have the right gender for your blasphemy!\"\n\nShe pouted at him, saying nothing.\n\n\"I promise you, darling, that I will never use that word again as long as I live. So help me God or strike me dead!\" He paused and gave her a teasing, sidelong glance. \"Am I forgiven? Will you still jump the broomstick with me?\"\n\nA laugh soon trembled from his lips. Nicolette found his mirth contagious.\n\n\"If you also promise to explain to me-in private\u2014what it means. But not until after we're married,\" she added quickly.\n\nLike a cloud passing over the sun, his expression changed from laughter to earnestness. He took Nicolette in his arms and held her so close that she could feel his heart beating against her breasts.\n\n\"I plan to explain many things to you, Nikki, after we're married. There's a whole world of feelings and emotions that I don't think you know about yet. Together we'll explore the unknown.\"\n\nAs he held her, Nicolette became acutely aware of one of the unknowns in her life. His nearness, his touch, caused a queer aching heat in parts of her body that had no names to her. She guessed that these intimate regions had much to do with the mysteries of relations between a man and a woman. Beyond that, she only knew, instinctively, that she longed for her lover to caress these throbbing, nameless places.\n\nGabrielle DelaCroix, finding them entwined like a grapevine about a sturdy oak when she arrived on the beach, interrupted their passionate interlude, saying, \"I assume she gave you the answer you hoped for, Jean.\"\n\n\"We gave each other the answers, Aunt Gabi.\"\n\nNicolette beamed up at the tall woman, who looked much younger than her thirty-eight years. She wore a simple blouse with a swirling skirt of mingled reds and yellows.\n\n\"I'm happy for you, Nikki,\" Gabrielle said warmly, clinging to Reyne Beluche's arm.\n\n\"The same goes for me,\" her escort added, clearing his throat to hide any traces of sentiment that might have crept into his voice.\n\n\"Since we're all agreed,\" Laffite said, \"let's get on with it!\"\n\n\"Just like that?\" Nicolette asked, a bit breathless, realizing her blissful period of anticipation was about to be rudely interrupted by the sudden advent of reality.\n\nNo one in the group answered her with words, but Laffite took her hand, while Gabrielle and Beluche looked on smiling.\n\nAs if they sensed the time of the ceremony approaching, the Baratarians and their women rose from the sand and shuffled into a ragged horseshoe formation on the far side of the largest bonfire. A humming rose from their midst, and Nicolette realized they were forcing their voices into the proper key to provide wedding music. She offered them a faint, shy smile of thanks as the first words of \"Eternal Father\" drifted to her. The sailors' sweet prayer brought tears brimming to her eyes.\n\nSuch an unlikely group of choirboys, she thought, knowing no other music would ever sound this beautiful.\n\n\"Shall we, darling?\" Laffite whispered, leading her forward.\n\nThe sand near the edge of the roaring fire blazed with the intensity and beauty of an opal. Through Nicolette's tear-blurred eyes, the pink, gold, and orange haze of light danced like some dreamed-of fairyland, bits of mica on the beach sparkling like tiny diamonds.\n\nLaffite and Nicolette walked slowly, hand in hand, toward Xavier, who stood before the blaze presiding over the sacred broomstick. His broad grin was evident as they neared.\n\nWhen they were only a yard from the instrument which would make them man and wife, Laffite dropped to his knees in the sand before Nicolette. She stared down, not knowing what to expect, but feeling her whole body sing with excitement and anticipation.\n\nHe raised the ruffled hem of her gown and slipped his hands around her ankle. Lifting her foot, he carefully removed one slipper and then the other. Nicolette wriggled her bare toes in the warm sand, enjoying the unexpected pleasure of this newfound freedom.\n\n\"It's part of the tradition,\" Laffite whispered when he had taken his place at her side once more. \"The bride must be barefoot to show her innocence.\"\n\nShe nodded and stood waiting for him to take the lead. He seemed to be listening for something. She cocked her ear, too.\n\nAbrupdy, the sailors' voices changed from their solemn hymn to a boisterous chanty.\n\n\"Me and my wife, we don't agree... Whiskey... Johnny... She puts whiskey in her tea... Whiskey for my John-ny.\"\n\n\"Now!\" Laffite signaled.\n\nThe next instant, with both hands clasped and their eyes on each other's smiling, flamelit faces, Jean Laffite and Nicolette Vernet jumped the ornamented broomstick, landing between it and the fire in a tangled, giggling heap on the hot sand.\n\n\"Is it over?\" Nicolette asked breathlessly.\n\nJean caught her in his arms and rolled her onto her back, his lips poised only a hair's breadth from hers as he answered, \"Not by a long shot, darling! It's only beginning!\"\n\nThe singing and laughter seemed far, far away when he found her lips. She felt the hunger of her own mouth and somewhere she heard: \"A girl asleep with a blue dress on... Shake her, Johnny, shake her... An unsafe couch she's restin' on... Shake her up and wake her.\"\n\nLaffite's body pressed hers deeper into the sand and her breasts rose to meet his hard chest. One of his hands slipped up and fondled the fabric of her bodice and what lay beneath, making Nikki suck more breath into her lungs while the serenade continued. \"Oh, when we get to the Black-Wall Docks, them pretty young gals come down in flocks, with short-leg drawers and long-tail frocks, Come and get your oats, me son...\"\n\nNicolette had no idea how long their passionate spectacle lasted. It seemed to be the expected thing that the bride and groom put on a show for the wedding guests.\n\nWhen Laffite released her at last and she looked up into the circle of appreciative faces and lust-bright eyes, her whole body trembled with embarrassment. Applause resounded through the darkness when Laffite helped her to her feet. She shyly hid her face against his chest.\n\nThen a cheer went up: \"Madame Boss! Hip-hip-hooray! Hip-hip-hooray! Hip-hip-hooray!\"\n\n\"Come on, darling. Show the men how much you appreciate this fine wedding they've thrown for us. They mean well, and it won't be long now until we can be alone,\" he whispered.\n\nNicolette raised her face slowly from the linen folds of her husband's shirt. She managed only a quivering smile at first, but that soon blossomed to fullness when she saw the genuine pleasure all about her. She waved to the mob and curtsied. They howled their approval.\n\nA skyrocket hissed overhead, then exploded into red, white, and blue stars. The chorus sang out \"Yankee Doodle\" in a half-dozen different languages.\n\nXavier, his decorated broomstick held on high, paraded before them waving the staff. He capered and strutted his way to the place of honor, which had been prepared for the bridal couple. Grass mats had been spread on the beach and over these a down-filled quilt made a soft place for them to lie. A low table sat nearby, set with the best of the banquet the men had prepared.\n\nChampagne corks went off like a volley of artillery fire from one end of the beach to the other. Laffite filled two silver goblets, offering one to Nikki. She accepted it gratefully.\n\n\"Being married is thirsty business!\" she said, laughing as her new husband tried to catch the bubbles streaming from the bottle's neck with his tongue.\n\n\"Aye, that it is!\" he answered, upending the bottle to restrain the overflow. \"And likely to get thirstier before the night's over, my love!\"\n\nHe winked at her and Nicolette looked away, shy with him suddenly.\n\nShe drank slowly, letting the bursting bubbles tickle her upper lip and thinking that the sparkle of the wine reminded her of Laffite's kisses. As if he read her thoughts, he leaned close every few minutes to taste her champagne-flavored lips, all the while keeping a possessive arm about her.\n\nThey sat far back from the leaping flames and prying eyes. After they had feasted and drunk their fill, Laffite turned his full attention to his bride. Gently, he caressed her breasts, slowly teasing her nipples with his fingers until they stood rigid, straining at the fabric of her gown.\n\nNicolette found herself longing to have him carry her away\u2014to hide her somewhere dark and private so that they could block out the rest of the world. She was ready for him to show her things, tell her things, and help her explore the sweet world of the unknown, as he had promised.\n\nThe night wore on in a dizzying haze of celebration. The sailors proved a talented lot, providing music for dancing on fiddle, hornpipe, and turtle-shell drums. The men and women whirled and jigged about the fires, creating a picture vivid as a kaleidoscope. Nicolette watched, amazed, when she saw her aunt join the dancers on Reyne Beluche's arm.\n\n\"God's blood! Would you look at the old man!\" Laffite shouted. \"Well, you won't outdo the bridegroom on his wedding night, uncle!\" He tugged at Nicolette. \"Come on, darling. Let's show them!\"\n\nA moment later, Nicolette found herself dancing around the fire, her bare feet flying over the shifting sands. Her heart pounded with a joyous rhythm and her head felt light as a cobweb in a summer breeze.\n\n\"Faster, Nikki, faster!\" Laffite urged, whirling her until the whole world became a spinning top.\n\nThe music accelerated with their motion and the clapping of hands matched the fierce coursing of their blood. When she felt she would drop, Laffite lifted his bride off the ground and swept her on, a limp doll in his arms.\n\n_\"Mon Dieu!\"_ he whispered in gasping syllables. \"I see why the wild Africans dance so frantically at wedding ceremonies. It fires the blood like nothing else. Right now I want you so I could die from it, Nikki! I want to feel you naked beneath me. I want to kiss you, taste you, drown in you!\"\n\nHis words set her aflame. Never had she thought any man would say such things to her\u2014or that she would welcome hearing them.\n\nWhen the music crashed to a finish, Laffite still held her to him. For an instant, Nicolette thought he would take her there on the beach in front of everyone. His eyes flashed green fire into hers and a vein pulsed erratically in his neck. Through her thin skirt, she could feel another throb between his muscled thighs.\n\nHer feet still missed the ground by several inches. Slowly, he let her slip down his body, her breasts sliding over the planes of his heaving chest. His eyes held hers\u2014speaking silent words of passion and longing that made her shiver and feel faint just looking at him.\n\n\"No, Jean!\" She thought she spoke the words, but couldn't be sure she had really said them aloud.\n\nHis face came down suddenly, but missed her lips. Instead, they found the sweet valley between her breasts. Nicolette closed her eyes, moaning softly, and let her head fall back as if she were in a swoon. His urgent tongue fluttered against her bare flesh.\n\n\"Well, brother! It seems I got back just in time for the most interesting part of the festivities.\"\n\nJean Laffite jerked his head up, gave Nicolette a confused look, then turned toward his brother Pierre. He offered him a sheepish grin.\n\n\"Not a minute too soon! I'm afraid I might have embarrassed my bride terribly if you hadn't interrupted.\"\n\n\"Bride? By damn! I never thought I'd see the day again. Thought you'd sworn off. But congratulations! And you, too, madame.\" Pierre bowed to his new sister-in-law, but she noticed a momentary frown cross his face.\n\n\"This is Nicolette Vernet... I mean _Laffite,_ Pierre.\"\n\nThe frown intensified. \"I guessed as much, but hoped otherwise. We have to talk, Jean.\"\n\n\"Come sit with us, then,\" Laffite offered.\n\n\"Dear sister,\" Pierre said, kissing Nikki's hand, \"some things are better discussed in private, if you'll allow us a moment.\"\n\n\"Of course,\" she answered, going back to the blanket.\n\nShe sat watching the two brothers. Though Jean was taller by several inches, he and Pierre could almost have been twins, they looked so much alike. Pierre did show his two years' seniority, but it seemed more due to a lack of grooming and a love of rum and fast living, than age. Pierre looked, she decided, quite rumpled from overuse.\n\nTheir voices grew louder and she keened an ear to catch what they were saying.\n\nJean, angrily: \"We're married, I tell you, even if this broomstick ceremony isn't legal or sanctioned by the Church!\"\n\nPierre, placatingly: \"I'm not questioning that. I'm merely trying to warn you that Nicolette's father is out for blood. I heard about your trouble with Browne. Some of Gambi's henchmen were in New Orleans just last week, spreading the word that you're the one who attacked that ship. Monsieur Vernet has sworn to get troops down here, if he has to, to return his daughter home. Seems another man is waiting at the altar for her.\"\n\nThey turned away from her and Nicolette could hear no more. She picked at the rest of the roast pork on her plate to do something with her nervous hands until Jean returned. But she found she couldn't swallow it. The lump in her throat after hearing her father mentioned was too large.\n\nWhat am I going to do? she wondered. I can't let Papa fight Jean!\n\nThe brothers Laffite turned back toward Nicolette and she watched them change their expressions, forcibly, from deep concern to the joviality due the occasion. They walked to where she sat, their strides equally long and fluid\u2014like two jungle predators stalking, she thought to herself.\n\nPierre reached down for her hand. \"My dear sister,\" he said, \"I'm sorry if I didn't welcome you properly. It's only that I know my little brother so well and I do hate to hear that such a pretty maid will be saddled with him for the rest of her days.\" He winked at her. \"Now my advice to you is to keep a fat cypress knee handy to clout him a good one over his thick skull when he's pulled too long on the bottle. Then, too, you'll need a trusty pistol to keep under your pillow so you can get some sleep from time to time. Just remember that you have a big brother to protect you now. I've got a good, broad shoulder just right for pretty eyes to cry into. Jean Laffite, so some say, was sired by an alligator and suckled by a polecat. To my way of thinking, that makes my brother a born and bred alii cat! You're too good for him, Nikki! Back out of this marriage while there's still time!\"\n\nNicolette caught the barely disguised mirth and winked back at Pierre. Her first mistrust of him had turned into true liking.\n\n\"Mind, now, Nicolette. If he tries anything funny tonight, you just come running to Brother Pierre. I know how to treat a lady!\"\n\n\"Why, you no good, philandering whoremong\u2014\" Jean Laffite caught himself abruptly, remembering his promise to Nikki. \"You bastard!\" he quickly substituted. \"Get away from my bride and quit filling her head full of your foul-mouthed lies! You might remember, too, that you and I _are full_ brothers. Whatever names you put to my parentage apply to you as well!\"\n\nPierre laughed aloud and said, \"If you young people ' will excuse me, I'm going to put these old, bastard alli cat bones to bed. See you in the morning.\"\n\nHe glanced down and saw his brother tasting his new bride's lips with some urgency. Pierre chuckled softly. They'd already forgotten he was there.\n\n\"Then again, maybe I won't see you two in the morning,\" he said, and left them to their rapture.\n\nFires were dying down by now, and the men and women had paired off, finding sheltered spots under the oaks at the beach's edge where they could enjoy each other in private. Nicolette became aware of groans and sighs of passion drifting from the shadows. A new kind of tension filled the night. She could feel it tingling through her husband and touching her own body.\n\n\"Nikki,\" Jean whispered, sliding one hand up to cup her warm breast. \"We can go now. No one will miss us.\"\n\nSilently, she rose and walked with him through the silvery moonlight back to the mansion. With every step she took, Nicolette Vernet Laffite felt herself passing out of her old life and into some new realm where none of her carefully learned rules applied. She could almost hear doors closing behind her\u2014feel bonds breaking, never to be woven back together.\n\n\"We're home,\" she heard him say, and the words held new meaning for her.\n\n\"Yes, home, my darling,\" she answered.\n\nSweeping her into his arms, he carried her up the steps and across the threshold, pulling the door shut behind them.\n\nThe bang of the frame seemed almost symbolic to Nicolette\u2014locking the world out. She snuggled her cheek against his neck.\n\nShe hadn't lost anything by closing that door on the years and her past. She had gained the one thing a woman longed for more than anything else in life\u2014a man she could truly love.\n\n###\n\n# Chapter Seven\n\n\"I'll give you some time to get ready,\" Jean said, leaving Nikki at the door to the bedroom with the feel of his kisses still warming her lips.\n\nNicolette watched her new husband walk away down the hall, then felt Sukey tugging at her arm.\n\n\"Hurry now, Mam'zelle Nikki. The Boss, he won't be patient tonight!\"\n\nSukey took her time, though, in spite of Nicolette's own desire to hurry. She bathed her mistress, powdered her clean body, brushed her hair until it gleamed like spun silk. Then when Nicolette stood naked, ready for Sukey to slip the filmy gown over her head, the servant instead brought forth a silver and crystal flacon of perfume. Sukey removed the frosted stopper and the scent of lilies of the valley filled the room.\n\n\"Now you stand right still, Mam'zelle Nikki, while I do like M'sieu Boss done told me.\"\n\nNicolette watched as Sukey dipped the stopper into the bottle's neck, then dabbed perfume in odd places\u2014between her breasts, along her hairline, into the dimples in her shoulders, behind her knees, and finally at the base of her smooth, white belly, making Nicolette quiver.\n\n\"That's fine, _mon enfante._ Now you lie down and I'll tell the Boss you ready for him,\" Sukey said, arranging the ecru folds of her gown so that the medallions of Alen\u00e7on lace covered strategic parts of her body enticingly.\n\nAfter the servant left, Nicolette lay in the flickering candlelight, which cast fantasy shadows about the walls, thinking she must be trapped in a fairyland region somewhere between earth and sky. She sipped at the sweet red wine Jean had sent to refresh her and listened to her own quiet breathing in the stillness. His last kiss still lingered on her lips, its aftertaste making her long for more.\n\nLaffite didn't knock. The door opened suddenly and he was there. He gazed down at her, his face shining with love. His hair, still damp from his bath, was pushed back at the nape of his neck. She could see the heave of his chest as he breathed in the scent of her. The dark hair in the V-opening of his burgundy satin robe glistened with tiny diamonds of moisture. The picture he made caused Nicolette new stirrings more intense than she had yet known.\n\nHe sat next to her on the edge of the bed and his robe fell open, revealing ropelike muscles in his tanned thighs. She gazed, transfixed, longing but not daring to reach out and touch him.\n\nHe poured himself a glass of wine and raised it in salute. \"To us,\" he said, then downed it. The next instant, he bent to cover her lips. He shared his wine, letting it flow slowly from his mouth into hers. Nicolette drank with a new kind of thirst\u2014her mouth, her lips, her tongue, warming to him.\n\nWhen he tried to raise his head and she held him fast with arms about his neck, he pulled away and forced her to lie back.\n\n\"Don't move, darling. I want you just as you are right now,\" he commanded.\n\nShe had no idea what he had in mind, but she obeyed. His eyes locked their gaze to hers, making her feel he could see inside her deepest, most secret thoughts. She lay motionless, mesmerized, ready to do his bidding.\n\nShe watched his strong hands move to her cheeks. His finely molded fingers traced her forehead, her brows, her cheekbones, finally finding her lips and teasing them ever so gently. It seemed that by touching each part of her he proclaimed that portion his.\n\nSlowly, his fingertips followed an invisible line down her neck. The low-cut gown cupped her breasts in lace, offering little resistance to his exploration. When he slipped one breast out of its hiding place and circled the nipple with his thumb, Nicolette moaned slightly and trembled.\n\n\"Easy, darling,\" he whispered against her ear. \"We have all the time in the world, and I have so many things I want to show you. Just relax... enjoy.\"\n\nNicolette opened her eyes again and looked into his face. His smile for her was so tender, so all-consuming in its love. She forced herself to lie perfectly still, allowing him full use of her body.\n\nHe uncovered the other breast and fondled it lovingly. Her breath came in short bursts. It seemed to her that the nerves there must be connected to other parts of her body, which twitched and burned longingly, though he had yet to lay a hand on them.\n\n\"You like that, Nikki?\" he asked, smiling down at her. When she couldn't answer, he said, \"Never mind. I can tell.\"\n\nHis head came down to her breast and suddenly a burst of hot flame kindled in her blood as she felt him suckling, his tongue teasing. She twisted her fingers through his hair, giving a small, involuntary cry\u2014his name.\n\n\"I'm here, my love,\" he answered, then kissed her lips with a new fierceness.\n\nShe lay shaken, her blood scalding her veins, when he released her. She wanted... wanted what? Nothing in her upbringing or past experiences had prepared her for this moment. She pleaded silently with her eyes. He read them and understood.\n\n\"I'm as anxious as you, Nikki,\" he said, stroking her .bare shoulder, \"but it takes a woman longer to know fulfillment. I won't cheat you on our wedding night\u2014or ever, my darling.\"\n\nHe slid her gown up to expose her feet and legs. Tenderly, he massaged her toes, her ankles, and on up, murmuring endearments all the while.\n\nIt seemed to Nicolette that time stood still. She lay suspended now somewhere between the silver-lined clouds of heaven and the fiery-tongued depths of hell. The unknown he had promised to show her was like nothing she had ever dreamed of. Did all women know these exotic, life-giving, soul-wrenching regions? If so, why did they keep these marvelous secrets to themselves?\n\nHer thoughts jerked back when she felt his hot breath on her bare thighs. Her nightgown now lay in folds about her waist. She gazed down at her hips and the tuft of dark curls covering that part of her which craved his touch most. She held her breath... closed her eyes... waited.\n\nWhen one finger brushed the unnamed spot, Nicolette shivered, then purred. The sensation was so exquisite she never wanted it to end. She began breathing deeply, feeling the beginning and the bittersweet end of something about to wash over her.\n\nWhen Laffite moved away abruptly, her eyes shot open. He must have read the anguish on her face.\n\n\"I know what you want, darling. I won't disappoint you. Trust me. A little longer and the moment will be that much sweeter.\"\n\nHe moved back beside her again. As his fingers found her magic spot once more, he pressed his lips down over hers. His free hand manipulated first one taut nipple and then the other. Nicolette's entire body felt as if it were in a bath so scalding that it carried her past the point of pain to some nebulous region beyond, where suffering was miraculously transformed into ecstasy.\n\nHer eyes tightly shut now, she witnessed a starburst in the darkness of her mind. Cold sparks chilled her legs to numbness then turned them to fire. The flames fed on her flesh, racing upward until they flooded her belly, her breasts, her face. She arched her back, thrusting at his fingers, and cried into his open mouth. She rode a blissful wave in a storm-tossed sea for what seemed an eternity. Then, ever so slowly, the tide of emotion-packed sensations ebbed, leaving behind a star-strewn path in her mind which tingled and warmed and made her body feel more alive than it ever had been in her life.\n\n\"Jean, darling, lover, sweetheart!\" she cried, throwing her arms around his neck. \"What have you done to me?\"\n\n\"I've only shown you what you were born to know, my sweet. What you will know for as long as you love me.\"\n\n\"I do love you! I always will!\"\n\n\"Always is a long time, Nikki,\" he said solemnly. \"But not half as long as I'll love you.\"\n\nHe pressed her back on the pillows and rose from the bed. By the first tints of the golden dawn outside the window, she watched as the robe fell away from his dark silhouette. His strong, erect phallus pulsed with a life all its own. She felt a sudden cringe of fear at the sight of it. But that soon faded. She understood his need. She longed to satisfy him.\n\nHe came to her waiting arms and whispered, \"Love me, Nikki, please. I need you!\"\n\nNicolette caught her breath at his first thrust and the pain it caused. She cried out in spite of herself. For a moment, Laffite, stunned to find her still virginal, withdrew.\n\nNicolette held perfectly still for a time, then said, \"Please. I'm all right now.\"\n\n\"You're more than all right, darling,\" he said, easing back into her. \"You're wonderful!\"\n\nHe gave an expert, rapier-sharp thrust then. The pain was over so quickly that Nicolette had only time for a small exclamation before more pleasant sensations overcame her. She marveled at this new feeling of being totally, lovingly filled with his strength and passion. She picked up his rhythm automatically, and as she felt his strong body tense over hers, she tightened muscles she never knew she had. At that instant, a fountain of heat erupted inside her. She heard Jean's groan of sheer ecstasy, felt his body quiver, then relax. A new wave of pleasure and happiness engulfed her. They were one!\n\n\"Oh, my sweet Nikki!\" he whispered as he settled for sleep, surrounding her fragrant warmth with possessive arms.\n\nNicolette came partially awake in the yellow haze of noon. Her body ached in a wonderful way. She stretched her arms over her head, wiggled her toes, arched her back.\n\nHow lovely it is to be alive! she thought.\n\nShe turned to reach for her lover, but the bed was empty. Probably nature's call, she speculated, surprised at herself for thinking of such private matters.\n\nThen voices reached her from the dressing room beyond. She heard Jean say, \"But I hadn't planned another auction at The Temple until June at the earliest.\"\n\nDominique Youx's heavily accented voice answered, \"I know, Boss, but Gambi brought the _Philantrope_ in last night after we left the beach. I'm not for doin' the sonuvabitch any favors either, but he's got two hundred prime slaves from the Cuban market stacked in that hold. There's no room left in the barracoons on Grand Isle. We can't leave a cargo like that packed in that stinking ship. They'll die on us. Gambi says he paid three hundred a head in Havana. They'll bring two, three thousand each at auction to the planters. Not a bad profit if we move fast. _N' est-ce pas?\"_\n\n\"Goddammit, Dom! I just got married! I want some peace and quiet. Why does Gambi do things like this? Doesn't he recognize the position this puts me in? That warrant for me and Pierre is still hanging over our heads. If we advertise an auction at The Temple before that arrest order expires, Claiborne will send troops down the bayou for sure.\"\n\n\"Maybe that's what Gambi's figured. Boss. My guess is it's a trap he plans to spring. With you out of the way, the bastard could take over Grande Terre without a single swing of his bloody broad-axe.\"\n\nNicolette strained to hear more, but only tense mumblings greeted her ears for several minutes. She could make little sense out of what the men were saying. She listened more closely when she heard Laffite swear under his breath.\n\n\"We'll just see about that, Dom! Set the auction for three days from now. We won't put up broadsides in New Orleans this time. I'll send Raymond Ranchier to the city in the courier pirogue. With our strongest slaves at the oars, he can make the trip in a little more than twenty-four hours. I'll have him contact Joseph Sauvinet and John Blanque quietly and then, in turn, they can tell the planters who are interested in buying. That way, we won't have every sightseer and gossip in New Orleans spreading the word just to make it a day's outing. With luck, we'll have the lot of them sold in a couple of hours and be back on our way to Grande Terre before Governor Claiborne and his militia get wind of what's happening. Oh, and, Dom, we'll need armed guards posted from Lake Salvador north to the river just in case we have uninvited visitors.\"\n\n\"Right, Boss. What about her?\"\n\nNicolette leaned toward the voices to catch the answer. There was another long pause.\n\n\"I'm taking her with me. \"\n\n\"It'll be a rough trip.\"\n\n\"Nikki can take it. She's tougher than she looks.\"\n\nNicolette smiled at her husband's words.\n\n\"But, Boss, what if someone spots her?\"\n\n\"Doesn't matter. Pierre told me last night that Monsieur Vernet already knows she's here... another thing we have Vincent Gambi to thank for! I'll keep her hidden in the cabin while we're there. Nothing will happen.\"\n\nNicolette could almost see Dominique Youx's familiar shrug as he answered, \"You're the Boss!\"\n\n\"Damn right I am!\"\n\nWhen she heard Jean's footsteps approaching the door, Nicolette snuggled back amid the plump pillows and fixed a pretty smile on her face. But her husband wasn't smiling when he entered.\n\n\"Darling?\" She stretched out her arms to him.\n\nHis eyes traveled over her and his expression mellowed perceptibly. But he didn't accept her unspoken invitation to return to their bed. Instead, he threw off his robe, exposing his powerful nakedness to her eyes for the first time in the bright light of day.\n\nNicolette tried to look away, but these mysteries, revealed in such sharp and magnificent detail, entranced her. She winced at the sight of a deep dimple in his left side just above his hip bone\u2014an old bullet wound. Paler scars on his chest and arms proved that other men's rapiers had on occasion drawn blood during his many duels. But the ugly scars only worked as contrast to make the rest of his body seem all the more Olympian.\n\n_\"Ma ch\u00e8re,_ I'm afraid our honeymoon is about to be rudely interrupted,\" he said, pulling on canvas britches. \"We have to leave shortly for The Temple.\"\n\n\"The Temple?\" she asked, thinking that she had heard of the place, but not sure where it was.\n\n\"It's about halfway between here and New Orleans. We'll have to travel up Bayou Barataria by pirogue to the point where it meets Bayou Pierrot at Little Lake.\"\n\n\"Why, that's the middle of the swamp!\" Nicolette gasped. \"What's there?\"\n\nHe smiled to reassure her, saying, \"It's not all that bad, sweetheart. You may even find you enjoy the uniqueness of the area. The Temple itself is a _ch\u00eanie\u00e8re,_ an ancient Indian shell mound\u2014high and dry. I have a small cottage there where you'll be comfortable. The trip will take less than two days, but we won't be there long. A quick morning auction and then we'll be on our way home again\u2014safe and sound.\"\n\n\"What about Aunt Gabrielle and Sukey? Will they be going with us?\"\n\nLaffite frowned. He hadn't thought of them. Transporting three women could prove hazardous.\n\nHe gave her a sly look and asked, \"Do you really need your maid along, darling? Can't you manage with just me?\"\n\n\"I suppose... if you'll help me lace my stays, Jean.\"\n\nHe howled his delight at the image of Nicolette, dressed for a formal outing, traveling all that way through the bayous by pirogue. Leaning down to reach her, he kissed her softly blushing cheek and said, \"I think we'll leave your corset and stays here with Sukey, _ma ch\u00e8re._ You won't need them and I'd hate to see some alligator end up wearing them!\"\n\n\"Oh!\" Nicolette exclaimed.\n\n\"As for Gabrielle, I'll leave it up to the two of you to decide whether she stays here or goes with us. But I warn you, the cabin is small and not outfitted with all the comforts of home.\"\n\nGabrielle DelaCroix came in while Nicolette was having her breakfast of _caf\u00e9 au lait,_ croissants, and orange sections in bed. She had made plans of her own. No, she would not go to The Temple with them.\n\n\"I've talked Reyne Beluche into taking me on to New Orleans, Nikki,\" she stated firmly.\n\n\"But, Aunt Gabi .\n\nShe raised a hand and shook her head to silence her niece's protests. \"Now, I won't have any argument, young lady! Jean will take care of you, I'm sure. If I go on to Claude and Francine, I can pave the way for you and your husband. They'll have to listen to reason. I think it might be wise for Sukey to return with me. She's an old woman and the life here may prove too much for her. Besides, how would it look for me to arrive in New Orleans on a smuggler's ship without a proper chaperone? The man I love knows that Reyne once fancied me. He'd be sure to jump to the worst possible conclusions. So it's all settled!\"\n\n\"Well, if you're sure...\" Nicolette began.\n\n\"I am, indeed!\" Gabrielle cut her off. \"I sail this afternoon aboard the schooner _Spy.\"_ She smiled happily, as if taking off with a band of avowed ruffians and cutthroats were the most natural thing in the world for her to do.\n\n\"I'll miss you,\" Nicolette said, taking her aunt's hand.\n\nGabrielie's great brown eyes glittered with mischief. \"I have a feeling that your darling corsair will keep you far too busy for you to even realize I've gone. You're a lucky woman, Nikki. Give all your love, all your attention to your man. Love him as if there were no tomorrow!\"\n\n\"I do,\" Nicolette whispered. \"I hurt, I love him so much, Aunt Gabi,\" she confided.\n\nGabrielle closed her eyes and sighed dreamily. \"Ah, how often I wish to know that kind of love again. _C'est magnifique!\"_\n\nThat afternoon, after several hours of frenzied activity on Grand Terre, ships and pirogues set off in all directions.\n\nAlready, Laffite's messenger, Raymond Ranchier, was speeding up through the lazy, brackish bayous, his swift cypress dugout propelled toward New Orleans by twenty muscled black arms.\n\nThe _Spy,_ which had been anchored in Barataria Pass between the sheltering islands of Grande Terre and Grande Isle, took its two passengers onboard and sailed out into the Gulf, headed for Lakes Borgne and Pontchartrain and finally into Bayou St. John to make port in the Crescent City.\n\nNicolette, sensibly clothed in a calf-length canvas skirt with britches underneath and high boots, climbed into one of the pirogues bound for The Temple. Jean took her hand and settled her in the center seat.\n\n\"Comfortable, darling?\" he asked.\n\nShe offered him a smile more confident than her feelings and answered, \"Couldn't be more!\"\n\n\"Then haul away, you bloody brigands!\" he shouted to the men at the poles.\n\nThe flat-bottomed cypress boat shot forward like a bullet, speeding over the ubiquitous duckweed, which gave the bayou the appearance of being covered in green velvet.\n\nNicolette settled back, fanning herself with a palmetto frond, and watched the bright sun fade into greenish-yellow half-light. The swamp closed in over them, giving her the serene feeling of being inside a vast, green cathedral.\n\nEven while Nicolette painted fanciful pictures of the place Jean called The Temple, a warning began to buzz in her brain. As they drew deeper into the swamp, all feelings of serenity fled. She told herself that she was being silly... that it was only her nerves grating at the sound of the swarming mosquitoes all around them. Still, no matter how hard she tried, she couldn't silence a voice somewhere deep inside her which kept insisting she should never have left Grande Terre.\n\n###\n\n# Chapter Eight\n\nJean Laffite watched over Nicolette carefully throughout the trip, keeping a protective arm about her most of the time. To his relief she showed no outward signs of discomfort. She took the long boat ride and the attacking swarms of insects in her stride. He cursed himself more than once for not thinking to have the boat covered with a frame and netting for her comfort. But, after all, he thought, who in New Orleans hasn't learned to live with mosquitoes?\n\nStill, he felt he'd made a mistake by bringing her along. He had been too furious with Vincent Gambi for interrupting their first days together to think seriously about the dangers to Nikki when he made his hasty decision.\n\nWhat if troops did show up at The Temple and shooting broke out? Monsieur Vernet had never appeared at the auctions on Grande Terre or at The Temple, but what if he came to this one in search of his daughter? Which man... which life... would Nicolette choose, if told she had to decide on the spot between her family and her lover?\n\nAfter all, Laffite thought with a sharp twinge of pain in his heart, we aren't really married\u2014not until we have the sanction of the Church.\n\nA loud commotion up ahead snapped him out of his dismal reverie.\n\n\"What the hell?\" he muttered.\n\n\"Chomp that nigger, ole buck! Bite that thar boy! Goddammit, ain't you hongry for a taste of prime dark meat?\"\n\nThe cries exploded through the swamp, disturbing the peace in an egret aerie, causing the snowy birds to swoop skyward.\n\n\"Sounds like Kaintucks, Boss,\" Dominique called from the boat ahead, referring to the rough rivermen who plied the Mississippi in their keelboats and then sold them in New Orleans, once the cargo was unloaded, to be turned into floating cathouses along Gallatin Street near the levee.\n\n\"Sounds like trouble to me,\" Laffite yelled back. He handed Nicolette a kerchief like the ones the men wore and ordered, \"Tie this around your head and don't say a word. Keep your face down. We'll all be better off if they don't find out a woman's with us.\"\n\n\"They're just hunting 'gators,\" Dominique said. \"We don't mess with them, they won't mess with us!\"\n\nThen a shrill cry reached them\u2014a child's voice, begging, \"Please, massas, don't throw me in dere no mo'. That old 'gator gone snatch off my leg right up to my eyeballs! Please, have pity on this poor, no-'count boy!\"\n\nA roar of laughter answered these words, then a loud splash, and the bellow of a bull alligator. Shots rang out, followed by a scream, shrill and terrified.\n\nNicolette, unnerved by the sounds, clutched Laffite's arm and whispered, \"What's happening up there?\"\n\n\"Nothing to worry about, darling. We'll be past them soon. Just keep your head down.\" His face and voice were grim. \"Dom, pull up when you spot them. We don't want any wild shots coming this way if we surprise them.\"\n\n\"Aye, aye, Boss.\"\n\nThey rounded a sharp bend, where the bayou turned back upon itself, and three men came into view. Their flowing, matted beards and battered felt hats sporting red turkey feathers in the bands proclaimed to the world that they were indeed men of the river\u2014at all times spoiling for a fight, lusting for a woman, and thirsting for a long pull at a jug of Monongahela whiskey.\n\n\"River trash!\" Laffite said and spat into the bayou.\n\nNicolette's eyes grew wide. She stared in spite of Laffite's warnings. She had never seen men like these at close range. She had been cautioned about their kind in New Orleans, and no proper Creole would go near the rough waterfront dives and hot-sheet hotels they frequented.\n\n\"They be the spawn of the devil!\" she remembered Sukey remarking in hushed tones once when a Kaintuck wandered into Royal Street.\n\n\"Ho, mates!\" Dom hailed.\n\nThe three men looked up, eyeing the approaching flotilla of pirogues suspiciously, their long Kentucky rifles cocked and ready.\n\n\"I'm Dominique Youx of Grande Terre, bound for The Temple with niggers to sell,\" he called out. \"You gentlemen from around here?\"\n\nThe leader of the group, a man of ominous proportions with hair and beard as red as hell's fires, snarled, \" Tain't likely! Though I myself was borned and bred in a river swamp akin to this 'un. Me mother was a wiley vixen who got herself cotched by the meanest, orneriest catamount what ever stalked the earth. I was suckled by a rattler and learnt what I know from a sidewinder. Alone, or with Spike and Zeb here, I can lick twenty men and skin the hides offen 'em to make boots! You spoilin' for a fight, little man?\"\n\nLaffite dreaded Dom's reply. He'd heard one other hapless soul call his older brother \"little man.\" That Spanish grandee's bones were now lost among the coral beds off the coast of Florida. Before Dominique had deep-sixed the outspoken noble, he had slit his throat and his tongue.\n\n\"Easy, Dom!\" Laffite cautioned. \"We have Nikki to think of.\"\n\nDominique turned for a moment, his face black with rage. But his features softened when he looked at his sister-in-law. His nod was slight, but significant.\n\nHe turned back to the rivermen and answered, \"I think not today at least. I myself fought my share when I served as Napoleon's cannoneer in the _grande arm\u00e9e._ It's enough to have made the acquaintance of three such noble pugilists. I would offer you, though, some good Jamaica rum for the inconvenience we cause by passing through your 'gator pool.\"\n\nDom raised a wicker-covered jug, offering it to the red-haired brute.\n\n\"Don't mind if I do!\" the man said, snatching the bottle and yanking the cork out with his teeth.\n\nFor several minutes, he stood, feet planted wide apart and the weight of the basketed demijohn tilted skyward. The dark brown rum ran down to saturate his beard and soak the front of his filthy shirt.\n\n\"Ah-h-h!\" he breathed at last, belching his appreciation of the gift as he wiped a begrimed sleeve across his lips. \"A mite sweet, and she ain't got the bite to her that a good swig of 'Nongaheli do, but my gut's right grateful for most anything I happen to toss down its way. Reckon this here Jamaicy firewater'll serve, mister! Now, tell you what we'll do, you bein' so first-rate polite an' all. We gonna fix you up with enough 'gator meat to see you all to N' Orleans and back. Right, boys?\"\n\nHis sidekicks nodded and mumbled their agreement, being much more interested at the moment in sampling their share of the rum.\n\n\"Haul your black carcass out here, Gator-Bait!\" the fiery-haired giant roared, yanking viciously on the length of rope that ran from his belt into a nearby stand of scrub palmetto.\n\n\"Please, massa! Not no more! That 'gator's gone eat me sho' 'nough next time!\"\n\nNicolette half rose in the pirogue when she spotted the small black boy, the end of the rope tied about his thin middle. The Kaintuck lifted the protesting pickaninny and tossed him into the murky bayou.\n\n\"Catch that old bull 'gator now, you piss ant, or I'll screw your kinky head up your you-know-what!\"\n\nDominique Youx chuckled softly at the wild flailings the slave boy made in the water. He eyed a movement in the bushes, the unmistakable motion of a large alligator lumbering toward the commotion.\n\n\"Damn fine bait, eh, Boss?\" he said to Laffite, who nodded his agreement.\n\nBoth men knew that many young slaves were taught to attract alligators during a hunt in this manner. This boy obviously knew his job well. The more noise and splashing, the more likelihood of attracting the quarry. After the huge reptile entered the water, the bait would be snatched back to safety before the alligator reached him or the men opened fire. Prime gator-bait was too valuable to be used only once.\n\nNicolette, however, did not know all this. Such quaint folk customs were not taught by the Ursuline sisters. When she spied the horny head of the alligator, its jaws parted, showing double rows of jagged, razor-sharp teeth, she jumped up and screamed, \"No! You can't do this!\"\n\nLaffite tried to pull her back to her seat and silence her, but she twisted away from him. He managed to grab the hem of her skirt and keep her in the boat for the moment.\n\nThe three rivermen recognized a woman's voice when they heard one. 'Gator-hunting was good sport, but there were others they enjoyed far more. And a woman\u2014any woman\u2014meant just one thing to them.\n\n\"Reckon you fellers been holdin' out on Big Red,\" the leader said, baring yellow teeth in a wide grin. \"'Pears like you got somethin' a heap better than rum fit for the sharin'.\"\n\nLaffite rose to his full height, several inches shy of Big Red's astounding stature, and pointed the four barrels of his pistol at the man's heart.\n\n\"This is my wife! Back off now and let us pass or you'll be dinner for that 'gator!\"\n\nNicolette was too caught up in the terrifying drama taking place in the water to realize any threat from the Kaintocks. The ten-foot alligator had emerged from the underbrush and was slithering over the muddy bank toward the water's edge. The little boy was screaming with real terror now, trying desperately to fight his way back to shore. Nicolette knew that once the creature maneuvered its heavy body into the water, it would strike like lightning. There were only seconds, and none to spare.\n\nHauling her canvas skirt up, she knotted it about her waist and leaped from the pirogue to the spongy bank. She ran directly for Big Red and yanked the rope from his hands, pulling for all she was worth. The hysterical child kicked and squirmed, making it more difficult for her to bring him to safety. The alligator was in the water now, sailing like a log in swift current toward its evening meal.\n\n\"Dammit, boy, quit fighting me!\" Nicolette yelled.\n\nThe men fell silent, taking in the drama with amazed immobility, too stunned by her actions and words to offer help.\n\nIt seemed to Nicolette that she tugged at the coarse rope forever. Her delicate hands burned, her shoulders ached, and her breath tightened hot bands about her chest. Finally, just as the dreadful beast gave a last lunge, his jaws wide to receive the bait, she yanked the boy onto the bank. The release sent her sprawling into a stagnant pool of slimy mud. A cheer went up from all the men.\n\n\"Goddamn! If she ain't a pistol!\" Big Red hooted, slapping his knee. \"I reckon it ain't likely you'd want to sell her to me, mister?\" He measured Jean Laffite with an unmistakable gleam in his bloodshot eyes.\n\nLaffite raised his hand weapon again and the look on his face told them all that he wasn't far from pulling the trigger. He answered in a steely voice, \"Not for sale, for barter, or for loan, you filthy, overgrown son of a river rat!\"\n\nHe went to Nicolette, never taking his eyes or his aim off the big Kaimuck, and positioned himself between her and the three men.\n\n\"Don't get me wrong,\" Big Red answered almost sheepishly, raising his hands in front of his chest as if to shield it from the bullets he expected at any moment. \"I ain't one to jump another stud's mare. They's a-plenty more in the pasture. Just thought as how I'd ask, mister. Don't do no harm to ask, does it?\"\n\n\"Well, you've got your answer! Now get away from her before I let daylight through your shirt.\"\n\nLaffite reached down to help Nicolette up. \"Come on. Let's get back in the boat and get out of here before I have to shoot somebody,\" he said.\n\nShe sat cross-legged in the mud, refusing to budge, and said stubbornly, \"No!\"\n\n\"What do you mean?\"\n\n\"I'm not leaving here without that boy! These men cannot be allowed to go on torturing him this way!\"\n\n\"Nicolette, be reasonable,\" Laffite pleaded softly. \"The boy's been raised to hunt 'gators. He doesn't know anything else.\"\n\n\"Why, that's inhuman!\" she cried. \"I can't believe you're willing to accept this and just go your own way. And even if you are, I'm not!\"\n\nJean Laffite scowled, helpless in the wake of this sort of insubordination. He knew his men were all watching the confrontation. And probably laughing behind their beards, he thought. He'd have to take a firmer stand with her.\n\n\"You will do as I say! Now!\" he bellowed.\n\n\"No, I won't! You didn't buy me at some auction, Jean Laffite, and you can't order me about. Either the boy goes or I stay.\"\n\nBig Red heard Nicolette's reply and grinned broadly. He winked at her and said, \"I got a nice tent, missy, and plenty of whiskey and 'gator meat salted down. We could have ourselves a high ole time!\"\n\nLaffite narrowed his green eyes at the man and made a menacing motion with his pistol.\n\n\"Nikki?\" he said, trying to raise her again.\n\nShe only shook her head, set her jaw in a firmer line, and stayed put.\n\n\"How much for the boy?\" Laffite growled at last.\n\n\"Oh, me and my men, we paid a-plenty for this little, ole nigger. 'Sides, there's sentimental attachment.\" He poked the toe of his boot into the buttocks of the panting figure on the bank and snarled, \"Ain't that right, Gator-Bait?\"\n\n\"Yes, massa! Whatever you say, massa!\" the boy answered, quaking with fear.\n\n\"Why, this here youngun'll tell you, I been just like his own pappy. Don't reckon I could part with him... without it plumb breakin' my heart... for less than a thousand.\"\n\nThe boy darted his eyes, panic-filled and pleading, from Big Red to Nicolette.\n\n\"Pay him, Jean,\" Nicolette demanded.\n\nThe pirogues moved on up the bayou a few minutes later. Big Red and his compatriots grinned and waved from the bank while they counted their gold coins\u2014currency that had lately resided in Jean Laffite's leather pouch and before that in the velvet purse of an unfortunate Spanish nobleman.\n\nNicolette used a lace-edged handkerchief to wipe the mud from the tiny black face beside her. His wide eyes looked uncomprehending.\n\n\"What's your name, child?\" she asked.\n\n\"Gator-Bait, ma'am. Ain't never had me none other.\"\n\n\"Well, we'll remedy that.\" She thought for a moment.\n\n\"I'm going to call you Daniel, because he escaped death in the jaws of a fearsome beast, too.\"\n\nThe boy, probably not more than eight years old, crinkled his face into a merry smile. \"Yes, ma'am. I heared tell about that. How Marse Dan'el Le Beaux over to Vermillion Parish whupped that ole swamp cat bare-handed and saved his own skin.\"\n\n\"No, not in Vermillion, Daniel. This was in the Bible.\"\n\nHis forehead creased as if he were thinking hard about something. Then he shook his head slowly.\n\n\"Reckon I ain't never been in that parish, ma'am.\"\n\nNicolette tried to make the name stick. But for the rest of his life, \"Madame Boss's boy\" would only answer to Gator-Bait, and eventually even his mistress forgot that for a brief time he had been christened Daniel.\n\nJean Laffite remained brooding and silent as they moved on through the bayous. He wasn't pleased at having to hand over so much gold for the pint-sized slave, and he was even more unhappy at Nicolette's high-handed tactics in getting her way.\n\nThis was a side of the gentle girl he hadn't seen before, but he knew with a terrible certainty that he would see it again.\n\n###\n\n# Chapter Nine\n\nThe flotilla of pirogues from Grande Terre arrived at The Temple the next day, just as the sun was setting and turning the greenish shadows into soft purple twilight, pinpricked by fireflies.\n\nNicolette had remained uncomplaining through the exhausting trip, though every muscle and joint in her body screamed with pain by the time their boat nosed through the marsh at the old shell mound. Even more agonizing was the swelling of her face caused by the bites of ravenous mosquitoes, who had seemed to fancy the crushed juniper berries she'd rubbed on her skin to repel them. More than anything, she wanted a bath and a soft bed.\n\nWhile Nicolette still sat in the boat, Gator-Bait clambered over the side, squealing his excitement.\n\n\"Lawdy, look at dis here place! All dem shells musta took your darkies a heap of shuckin' and stackin' time, M'sieu Boss!\"\n\nLaffite, occupied tying the boat, answered halfheartedly, \"Not my people, Gator-Bait. Indians... a long time ago.\"\n\nThe boy crouched low on the bank and swept the clearing and shadowy oak and cypress forest beyond with keen eyes.\n\n\"Them Choctaws, they bad! Ain't none 'round these here parts now, is they?\"\n\n\"No,\" Laffite answered, helping Nicolette to dry land. \"But you mind Madame Boss or I'll conjure up a ghost of one to teach you right from wrong. You hear me, boy?\"\n\nGator-Bait shrieked with terror and rushed to hide his face against his mistress's skirt.\n\n\"Jean, how could you be so cruel?\" Nicolette scolded. \"You've no call to frighten the child.\"\n\nLaffite made no reply, but scowled his displeasure. A new brand of jealousy ate at him, though he wouldn't have admitted to it by that name. Ever since Nicolette had coerced him into buying the boy, she'd put the worthless little slave's comfort before his. It rankled deeply.\n\nProbably she'll want him to sleep on the foot of our bed tonight like a pet dog, he thought morosely. Well, by God, I won't stand for it!\n\n\"You, boy,\" Laffite growled. \"Fetch the lady's satchel up to the house.\"\n\n\"He has a name, Jean!\" Nicolette reprimanded again.\n\n\"I know!\" he mumbled under his breath. _\"Trouble!\"_\n\nThey walked from the boat landing the short distance to the cabin. Nicolette welcomed Laffite's supporting arm. Her stiff legs protested every step of the way. Her back ached and her head throbbed.\n\nThough she felt little like examining her surroundings closely, she did note the strange hill of oyster shells, four or five feet higher than the marshes, and the two-room cabin of cypress perched at the edge of the _cheni\u00e8re._ The weathered wood looked as silvery-gray as the Spanish moss trailing down out of the oaks. The house appeared warm and cozy from the outside.\n\n\"The men are building a fire now, so you'll have hot water for a bath shortly,\" Laffite told her as they mounted the steps to the miniature veranda. \"I'll help you out of those muddy clothes and you can lie down for a while, darling.\"\n\nHe couldn't stay upset with her, he realized. She looked so utterly miserable and so vulnerable in her present state of untidiness and fatigue. He wanted her fresh and clean so that he could lie down in the bed next to her and massage away her pain... hold her close and do the things to her that made her sigh with pleasure... whisper how much he loved her and needed her near... let her relieve his own primal ache.\n\nBut making love was the farthest thing from Nicolette's travel-weary mind at the moment. She glanced about the tiny sitting room of the cabin and her heart sank. Dust, cobwebs, and rotting leaves filled all four corners. A large, green lizard skittered across the seat of the lone chair in the room, sending a shiver through her.\n\nLaffite saw the disappointment in her face and said, \"I know it isn't much, darling, but it will serve well enough as a roof over our heads for one night. I'll get Gator-Bait busy in here with a broom and a pail.\"\n\nShe walked silently, hesitantly, into the bedroom and breathed a sigh of relief. At least there was a bed\u2014a low, narrow affair with a moss-stuffed mattress sagging down into the ropes. But it was a place to lie down. With a silent prayer of thanksgiving, she eyed the mosquito netting which covered it.\n\n\"The tub's in here,\" Jean said, opening another door to a closet-sized room, \"and the basin and chamber pot.\"\n\nWhen she still didn't answer and kept her back to him, he came to her and turned her to him. She let her head droop against his chest and suddenly she was weeping pitifully.\n\n\"I'm sorry, Jean,\" she sobbed. \"I don't know what's wrong with me. I'm just worn out and all this is so new to me. I'll get used to your way of life, but I guess it will take more time than I thought.\"\n\nHe caressed her tangled hair and whispered, \"Don't cry about it, sweetheart. I won't be impatient with you. I promise. Besides, we have all the time in the world.\"\n\nAfter Nicolette had undressed, bathed, eaten a light supper of delicate frogs' legs, and sipped at a concoction of rum, water, and fresh lime juice that Jean had urged on her, she felt restored.\n\nShe lay back on the cool sheets. The drawn mosquito netting seemed to screen out the rest of the world, lulling her senses and dulling her aches. She listened to the night sounds\u2014the Baratarians talking and laughing around their campfires, the sad-sweet songs of the slaves who would go to new homes shortly, the chorus of crickets, and the intermittent hoots of an owl far off in the swamp.\n\nSukey had always said that an owl's mournful night cry presaged doom, but Nicolette never believed it. The sound was soothing, not threatening.\n\nShe was on the verge of sleep when she heard Jean enter the cottage. His protective presence removed the last concern from her mind and she let herself drift off into blessed oblivion.\n\nLaffite stood beside the bed, staring down at his Nikki. She looked much better now-all pink and white in her fresh linen gown with her clean hair brushed and spread out on the pillow. A sweet smile touched her lips. He longed to kiss it. One arm was under her head. The other hand rested between her breasts, the fingers curled delicately as if she were beckoning him to that region.\n\n\"Nikki,\" he whispered.\n\nShe moved slightly, but didn't open her eyes or answer him.\n\nThe heat of the May night made his clothes cling to him. Quickly, he shrugged out of them, then slid under the netting to lie beside Nicolette. When he was settled so close that he could feel her warmth and breathe in the femaleness of her, he let out a satisfied sigh.\n\n\"At last,\" he murmured. \"I thought I'd die from wanting you these past two days, darling. But I couldn't do much about it with all the men watching us every minute.\"\n\nWhen she didn't answer, he leaned over to kiss her. Her only response was to turn her face away from him.\n\n\"Don't be that way, Nikki,\" he pleaded. \"If you're still angry about the way I treated the boy, I'll promise not to tease him anymore. But, God, don't punish me this way!\"\n\nHe touched her face tentatively to see what response he got. She swatted his hand away as she had so many insects in the past days.\n\n\"Nikki, _please'.\"_ he begged, letting his hand ease inside the loose bodice of her gown.\n\nHer body stiffened as he clasped her breast. She pulled away and gave a soft sob.\n\n\"Darling, what's wrong?\"\n\nBut her level of sleep was so deep that nothing he said penetrated. Instead, the aches in her body conjured up hideous, suppressed visions of her encounter with Silas Browne. The nightmare which she couldn't remember by day was beginning to creep back to conscious level under cover of darkness.\n\n\"No! Don't touch me!\" she cried out, slapping at his hands.\n\nLaffite pulled away. \"I'm sorry, Nikki,\" he said in an injured tone.\n\nHe lay still for a few moments until her whimpering stopped and she turned on her side toward him.\n\nSure that she had given in at last to him, he let his hand slide up under her gown to stroke her thighs. She twisted out of his grasp and pounded his chest with clenched fists. He released her abruptly and battled his way blindly out of the tangled netting.\n\n\"Have it your way!\" he said angrily. \"I'll sleep in Pierre's-tent tonight!\"\n\nHe grabbed his britches and stormed out of the cabin.\n\nNicolette slept on undisturbed, her exhaustion so complete that even nightmares couldn't penetrate her consciousness after a short time.\n\nWhile she slept, Laffite drank more than his usual quota of rum and told his brother, \"Maybe it was all a mistake. I don't think she loves me the way I love her, Pierre. She cares more about that little nigger than she does about me. God, I could die from this ache in my gut! And there's not another woman within a day's journey of here!\" He stared silently down in to his mug for some time, then said, \"I wouldn't want any other woman, anyway. I only want her.\"\n\nFinally, the rum did its work and Jean Laffite fell into an uneasy slumber, which would leave him with an aching head and a quick temper the following day.\n\nNicolette awoke the next morning to find Jean dressed and standing at the foot of the bed, staring at her.\n\n\"I trust you slept well,\" he said when he saw her eyes come open.\n\nShe smiled and stretched, realizing thankfully that most of her soreness had vanished. \"Yes, Jean. And you?\"\n\n\"You already know the answer to that question!\" he snapped, scowling at her.\n\nShe didn't understand what he meant. \"What's wrong, Jean? I'm sorry if .\n\n\"Belay that!\" he cut in angrily. \"I don't want your apologies. I don't need them.\"\n\nNicolette sat rigid in the bed, trying to piece together what was happening. Obviously, they were embroiled in their first lovers' quarrel. But where had it come from? Out of the blue! And why was it happening? She had no idea.\n\n\"I wasn't trying to apologize,\" she said. \"As far as I know, I have no reason to. I was simply going to say, before you interrupted so rudely, that I'm sorry if you didn't sleep well.\"\n\nLaffite threw up his hands and turned away from her. Focusing his gaze on some distant point out the window, he addressed an unseen presence. \"Now she's sorry. But she certainly didn't give a damn last night.\"\n\nNicolette launched herself off the bed, grabbing his elbow to spin him around. \"If you have something to say to me, say it to my face. What is all this about? You never even came to bed last night, as far as I know. So how could I possibly have disturbed you?\"\n\nHe offered her a mocking grin to match the tone of his voice. \"Oh, so that's the way you plan to play out this scene. The total innocent. Can't remember a thing, eh?\" His voice deepened to a growl. \"Nicolette, at least give me credit for a smattering of intelligence. Don't patronize me!\" He paused, stepped back a bit, and almost smiled. \"I'll make this easier for you. You don't have to say a word. Just nod your head if you want me to forgive you and I will.\"\n\nShe stood staring at him, speechless, furious beyond words. Finally, she found her voice. \"Now who's patronizing whom? I haven't the vaguest notion what you're talking about, Monsieur Laffite, but if you will notice, I am not nodding my head. Nor do I intend to... ever!\"\n\nHe bowed curtly. His face, when he looked at her, was drawn tight with rage. He fired his words at her like so many shots from a pistol, while she stood before him, at point blank range, shuddering in pain at each direct hit, but too proud and defiant to let him see how he was hurting her.\n\n\"Very well, madame! I see now that I've been wrong about you all along. My first hint came when you forced me to buy that miserable little slave. But I couldn't believe that woman was the real you. Now I see that I've been in love with an imposter all along. Why don't you go back where you belong? Perhaps some friend of yours will come from New Orleans to the auction and escort you back to your family.\" He paused to note her reaction. She said nothing. \"That is what you want, isn't it?\"\n\nNicolette didn't want that. She wanted to throw herself into his arms and beg for his forgiveness for her transgressions\u2014real or imagined. But she couldn't. Her voice had deserted her and her body seemed made of wood.\n\n\"If that's your answer then, I'll leave you. I'd advise you to keep to the cabin. Slave auctions aren't pleasant sights.\"\n\nLaffite turned on his heel and strode out, banging the door after him.\n\nNicolette was left standing in the middle of the room, her mouth open to speak words that never came. Slowly, tears seeped out of the corners of her eyes. All the love she felt for Jean Laffite seemed to have been turned into a heavy lead weight now crushing her heart.\n\nWhat had she done wrong? Why was he so angry?\n\nOne of the boats arriving from the city carried a passenger whose mission was not to purchase slaves. He had a plantation upriver from New Orleans and his bride-to-be owned a townhouse in Bourbon Street, but he already had more than enough servants to staff both. The tall, lean man with hair and eyes as coal-black as his finely tailored suit and polished boots, was one of the first to arrive at The Temple.\n\n\"Bermudez!\" Jean Laffite said when he saw he couldn't avoid greeting the new customer. \"Haven't seen you in awhile. You missed a good poker game at Grande Terre a few weeks back. You know I'm always happy to relieve you of some of your hard-earned cash.\"\n\nPeculiar flames seemed to leap in the man's cold, dark eyes at the mention of his favorite sport\u2014more than a sport, a passion with Diego Bermudez.\n\n\"My loss, I'm afraid, Captain Laffite. I was out of the city and didn't hear about the game until after the fact. But remember me the next time you organize a high-stakes game.\"\n\n\"I will! I will!\" Laffite answered, ticking off in his mind the fabulous sums he'd won from the arrogant Spanish Creole, whose wealth was far greater than his caution or his ability to bluff. \"You're here to add to your stock today? We have some prime bucks\u2014good studs, I'd say, from the number of pregnant wenches in the lot.\"\n\nBermudez laughed quietly, a controlled, ugly sound. \"Bucks I don't need, monsieur. I pride myself in servicing my own females well enough. I prefer high yellows on my place. Black studs are trouble. However, if you happen to have some comely wenches... say, twelve or thirteen... who haven't dropped suckers yet, I might be interested.\"\n\nLaffite had difficulty hiding his disgust for the man's carnal habits, but managed to control his already ragged temper long enough to show Bermudez to the bar that Dominique had set up for their customers. \"We have anything your heart desires, monsieur.\"\n\nDiego Bermudez bowed curtly as Laffite walked away.\n\n\"Anything my heart desires, eh?\" He laughed his low, nasty laugh again. \"Indeed, you have, Captain Laffite!\" the man said to himself as he sauntered over to the board between two wine barrels, where Dominique Youx was doling out the rum, brandy, Kentucky whiskey, and _bi\u00e8re du pays,_ the local pineapple ale brewed with brown sugar, cloves, and rice.\n\n\"Ah, Monsieur Bermudez! Name your poison,\" Dominique said cheerily. \"My guess is brandy, the Creole water of life!\"\n\n\"Your guess is correct.\"\n\nDiego Bermudez accepted the drink and strolled about the clearing as if looking for friends from New Orleans. He wandered over to the stock pen where the slaves were chained and manicled awaiting the block. Though he made a pretense of examining a ripe young girl in her early teens, his jet eyes darted from her bare breasts to the cottage a few yards away.\n\n\"She must be in there,\" he said to himself as he pulled the whimpering slave girl's shift back up to cover her.\n\nWhen he was sure no one was watching, he wandered over to the house and around the back to the bedroom window. Peering in, he spotted Nicolette at once. Though time was of the essence, he couldn't make his presence known to her just yet. This opportunity to watch her bathing was too delicious to pass up.\n\nHe leaned against the rough cypress boards and let his eyes devour the rosiness of her breast buds peeking through the froth of bubbles, the smoothness of her flat belly, the enticing patch of fuzz between her thighs. When she turned, his mouth watered at the perfect, white roundness of her buttocks. His palms itched for the feel of that bare flesh and other parts of him throbbed to know her more intimately.\n\n\"All in good time!\" he told himself quietly.\n\nAfter Nicolette slipped into her calico skirt and cotton blouse, Diego rapped on the windowsill. She turned, her surprise evident.\n\nShe recognized her father's partner and hurried to the window. Surely Diego Bermudez would have recent news of her family. Her heart ached from the long separation she'd endured. She missed New Orleans, her friends, her family. She longed for their placid company more than ever after her stormy confrontation with Laffite.\n\n\"Monsieur Bermudez!\" she cried. \"How good to see you!\"\n\n\"And you, mademoiselle. You look well.\" He hesitated, as if trying to decide if he should go on with what he was about to say. A pained expression crossed his face.\n\n\"What is it, Monsieur Bermudez?\"\n\n\"Your papa sent me to bring you home, Nicolette. But it isn't going to be as easy as I'd thought. This whole _cheni\u00e8re_ is crawling with thugs and pirates. Perhaps I should have let Monsieur Vernet go ahead with his plan\u2014to bring troops and storm the area to rescue you.\"\n\n\"Rescue me? From what?\"\n\n\"Why, from that damned pirate, Laffite, of course! We've all feared the worst for you since we found out he was holding you.\"\n\n\"He's not a pirate!\" she snapped. \"Don't ever call him that!\"\n\nBermudez narrowed his eyes and gazed at her unnervingly. \"A quick defense of the man who's holding you prisoner, mademoiselle.\"\n\n\"I'm not his prisoner, I'm his...\" Nicolette cut the sentence off. What business was it of his, anyway?\n\n\"I shudder to think what this attitude of yours toward the man would do to your poor father! It's bad enough, his knowing that you're so near, but can't come home to him. Had he the slightest notion that you stayed away of your own free will and not by force... well, I'm not at all sure he could stand the shock.\"\n\nNicolette eyed him suspiciously. She remembered his arrogant behavior at their one other meeting\u2014the night Octave died. What was he up to now?\n\n\"I hate to have to spring this on you so abruptly, but your father fell ill while trying to raise a band of men to come down here after you. He swears he'll rise from his bed at any moment to lead the expedition. But, of course, that would be out of the question. That would certainly kill him.\"\n\n\"Oh, no! Why didn't you tell me he was sick? What's wrong with him?\"\n\nTears blurred Nicolette's vision so that the barely suppressed smile on Bermudez's face looked to her like a grimace of concern.\n\n\"The doctors don't know. He had an attack of some sort after he heard Laffite was holding you captive. They think it's his heart. Any strain or further shock and he might go like that.\" Bermudez snapped his fingers, making Nicolette jump. \"I've done all I can. I've taken as much of the burden as possible off his shoulders, and more important, I've found you and told you of his plight. The rest is up to you, mademoiselle. If he doesn't get to see you soon and hear from your own lips that you're all right, he won't last much longer.\"\n\n\"What can I do?\" she asked through her tears.\n\n\"Return to New Orleans with me now and reassure him. Once you've put his mind at ease, it's entirely up to you if you want to stay in your father's home where you belong or resume this sordid existence among thieves and murderers.\"\n\n\"Oh, dear, I don't know what to do. I'll have to talk to Jean... see what he thinks. \"\n\n\"You actually mean to ask Laffite's permission to leave? I thought you were a free woman. If you beg him to let you go and he refuses, then you've sentenced your father to death. Is that What you want?\"\n\nPain twisted Nicolette's heart. Of course she didn't want that. But how could she leave Jean now\u2014specially with bitter words between them? Wouldn't he take such a move as her admission that their love was a mistake?\n\n\"You know Laffite will never allow you to leave without him, not even for your father's sake. He's a jealous, possessive man. If he's holding you, but not by force, I can only assume that I know his methods. And he'll never let you out of his clutches.\"\n\n\"You don't know what you're talking about!\" Nicolette snapped. \"Jean's not at all like that!\"\n\nBermudez laughed dryly. \"How typical of an innocent young girl, to fall in love with the first handsome rogue to come along! It won't last, you know. Men like Laffite never stay long with one woman.\"\n\n\"Are you speaking from experience, Monsieur Bermudez?\" Nicolette hissed. But his words hurt. Was Jean even now trying to drive her away? Could he have tired of her so quickly?\n\n\"Go ahead! Act childish and defend him all you like. Maybe you can even persuade him to come to New Orleans with you. That's the only way he'll allow you to leave. And once he gets there, Governor Claiborne will use the warrant he's issued to arrest Laffite for piracy. Within a week, Laffite will be in chains in the Cabildo, or possibly swinging from a rope in the Place d'Armes. Would that make you happy?\"\n\n\"Of course not!\" Nicolette cried, horrified at the mental picture Diego's words conjured up.\n\n\"Then come with me now, before anyone sees us. You can write a note and tell Laffite you'll be back soon, if your heart is so set on returning. Even Laffite must have had a father, though some in New Orleans swear it was the devil himself. But surely he will understand your distress and your need to leave quickly and without him.\"\n\n\"Certainly he'll understand!\" she answered defensively. \"He's a man of compassion, a gentle man.\"\n\nBermudez smiled crookedly and nodded. \"Whatever you wish to believe, my dear. Please hurry now. We haven't much time.\"\n\nTaking the pen and paper that Diego Bermudez offered, Nicolette sat down to write. She thought out her message carefully before she began. She had to make Jean understand that she was not leaving because of their disagreement and that she would be back as soon as possible.\n\n> My darling Jean,\n> \n> If you were here with me right now, you would see me nodding\u2014as if my very life depended on your forgiveness. I don't know how I have failed you, but be assured it was not out of any lack of love. I do love you so, my darling. Please believe me.\n> \n> Now I must leave you for a time. Diego Bermudez has brought word that my father is desperately ill. So I'm taking Daniel and returning to New Orleans. I couldn't tell you this in person because of my fears for your safety. Had I spoken to you. I'm sure you would have insisted on seeing me to the city. It's too dangerous, Jean. Please don't follow me. I couldn't bear it if anything happened to you. I'll come back to you as soon as I can.\n> \n> This morning is no longer a part of my memory. I've wiped the entire misunderstanding from my mind. Until we are together again, my husband, I will remember our night of love\u2014the taste of your lips, the feel of your hands, our bodies pressing, and the sweet, glorious new world you gave to me.\n> \n> Please believe me when I say I will never love another the way I love you, Jean!\n> \n> Forever and ever,  \n>  Your Nikki\n\nNicolette reread the note, folded it, then summoned Gator-Bait, who had been taunting the cabin's resident chameleon, to take it to Laffite.\n\n\"What do you think you're doing?\" Bermudez demanded, grabbing the little slave and snatching the paper from him.\n\n\"It's my note for Jean,\" Nicolette explained.\n\n\"Have you lost your mind? He'll read this immediately and we'll never get away. Put it on the bed. He'll find it.\"\n\nNicolette turned away from Diego long enough to press a kiss to the paper. Then she smoothed the counterpane over the pillow and placed her note there with trembling hands. She said a silent prayer that Jean would read her words and understand.\n\n\"Will you please come along?\" Diego said. \"We haven't got all day!\"\n\nNicolette gave the little bedroom one last glance. Dingy and uninviting as it was, she hated to leave it. If she remained here, Jean Laffite would soon return to her.\n\nShe closed her eyes a moment and visualized that reunion. Jean would be tired after the auction, but not too tired to make up. She would run to him, hug him, kiss him, make him know the full measure of her love. There on the bed, where a soft breeze was even now teasing the edges of her farewell note, the two of them would lie down together. They would undress each other slowly, taking their time with the wondrous act, expanding their love to the full height and breadth of emotional limits...\n\n\"Nicolette!\"\n\n\"I'm coming, Diego,\" she called, giving the note a parting glance.\n\nOutside the cabin, she realized that the wind was rising. They would have rough sailing.\n\nIn a lightless crack in the wall behind the bed, the object of Gator-Bait's recent abuse wriggled his green body to test it for injuries. The tip of his tail was gone\u2014dropped to effect his escape. But that would grow back. Satisfied with his self-examination, the chameleon thrust his head out in a lightning-quick motion.\n\nHe sensed two things immediately\u2014one good, one bad. He took advantage of the good\u2014having the cabin to himself again\u2014to further explore the bad. A storm was brewing. Every primal sensor in his body twitched with warning when he sniffed the air. But he'd have to make the climb to see for himself how bad it was going to be.\n\nThe mountain of a bed lay in his path. Once that height was scaled the worst would be over. A strong leap to the sunny windowsill and he'd know whether he'd have to take to the rafters for the night to avoid high water.\n\nHe was breathing hard by the time he had climbed high enough for one yellow eye to peer over the edge. What he saw all but stopped his heart. A white thing lay, fluttering threateningly, on the bed. He darted his head down, out of sight, and listened. The thing made a crackling noise\u2014not like any animal he had ever heard. He eased higher, balancing precariously with his stump of a tail. He cocked his head this way and that, eyes unblinking, as he examined Nicolette's note.\n\nHis alarm system shut down suddenly. He knew there was no danger. Quickly skirting the flapping white thing as he crossed the bed, he reached the windowsill in a magnificent leap. He peered out, waiting for his eyes to adjust for distance, much like a telescope lens. Far off now he could see the three who had been in his room, but their scent was very faint. Good! He would have the place all to himself again.\n\nHe smelled the wind coming before the gust hit him, and instinctively dug his claws into the wood of the sill. At the same time, he flattened his body to protect it, squeezing his eyes shut against the bite of blowing sand. While he lay there, he could feel the green draining from his skin, turning him a brownish-gray the same as the cypress wood of the sill. The change wasn't painful, but always came as a shock\u2014the cool dullness replacing familiar warmth.\n\nHe heard the fluttering sound, but dared not look. The wind slackened. Cautiously, he opened one eye.\n\nThe white thing\u2014whatever it was\u2014could fly! It took off from the bed, spiraled downward in a graceful sweep, then disappeared beneath the bed. The chameleon waited and watched\u2014eyes blinking, head moving up and down. The motion of the thing looked like a mating dance. The very thought made him puff up the pink sacks beneath his neck\u2014just in case.\n\nExcited now, with no time for fear, the chameleon scurried down and under the bed.\n\nHis eyes adjusted quickly to the darkness. He saw it\u2014sleeping now against the far wall. Away from the light, it changed colors\u2014from brilliant white to a dull gray. They had that much in common.\n\nHe advanced, sidestepped, then went straight ahead, but cautiously. When it made no threatening moves, he approached it head-on. He touched a corner of it. It didn't run away. He lay down next to it.\n\nSoon the chameleon and the white thing slept\u2014far back in the dark, beyond the reach of prying eyes.\n\nHours later, after the last slave had been examined, bid on, and sold, an exhausted Jean Laffite headed for the cabin. His anger with Nikki had mellowed to impatience with his own short temper. He determined to make amends as soon as he was with her again.\n\nWhat kind of unfeeling boor am I? he asked himself as he opened the door. First, I haul my new bride through a hundred miles of stinking swamp, then I expect her to fall ecstatically into my arms the moment she sets foot on dry land. God, I'm a selfish bastard! But I'll show her I can be considerate, understanding... by God, downright humble, if that's what she wants!\n\nHe hurried through the front room, anxious to make up for his harsh words earlier. He knew better. He could bully his men and get what he wanted from them, but a woman needed tenderness and love.\n\n\"Nikki! I'm home!\" he called out.\n\nThe silence that greeted him was tangible. He could feel it\u2014heavy, empty, lonely.\n\nHe rushed to the bedroom. The mosquito netting was pulled back, neatly draped. Everything seemed in order, but some sixth sense told him that was not so.\n\n\"Nikki, where are you?\"\n\nHe rushed to the closed door of the bathing closet, knocked, but didn't wait for an answer. Wrenching the door open, he found it empty. The tub was there\u2014recently used. A damp length of toweling, which smelled of French soap and Spanish limes, hung on the rack. She had bathed\u2014not very long ago.\n\nSuddenly his heart was pounding and he was conscious of a cold uneasiness creeping along his spine.\n\nHe moved back to the center of the bedroom, breathing heavily, trying to conquer the panic which was threatening to possess him. He looked about. Her silver-handled comb and brush had been on the bureau. Gone! Her nightgown. Where would she have put that? He jerked open all the drawers. Empty!\n\nUntil this moment, he had refused to allow himself to remember the specifics of their early-morning quarrel. Now, the echo of his own voice came to haunt him: \"Why don't you go back where you belong?\"\n\n\"No!\" he gasped.\n\nIn a frenzy, he dashed for the bed. Her carpetbag! She had shoved it underneath. It had to still be there. Down on hands and knees, he tossed the bedspread up out of the way and peered into the semidarkness.\n\nA tailless chameleon scurried out of its nest, terrified by the intrusion. But except for the nest of discarded paper the creature had left, Laffite saw nothing.\n\nThe bag was gone! Nikki was gone!\n\nHe stood up, stunned, trying to decide what to do next. Maybe she had left a note. He scanned the room quickly, but dresser, bureau, and bed were bare. His mind, grasping at straws now, went to the scrap of paper he had spied far back under the bed.\n\nHe knelt down, ready to retrieve it. Perhaps...\n\n\"You're acting like a goddamn fool!\" he cursed, rising to his feet again.\n\nHis reasonable mind would not allow such folly. She wouldn't have left a note at all. She would have come to him in person to tell him she was going. But, if she had written some message, she certainly would have left it in plain view for him to find, not thrown it under the bed.\n\nHe stood limply, like a marionette with no one at the strings. Suddenly, the full force of his loss hit him, crushing him physically until he collapsed on the bed.\n\n\"Nik-ki-i-i-i!\" Her name came from his lips in such a deep, piercing scream that his men rushed to see what had happened. They found him clutching the pillow which still smelled of her clean, lime-rinsed hair. Tears stained his cheeks.\n\nPierre and Dominique sent the others away. They tried to reason with him. Maybe she had only gone for a walk and would return any minute.\n\n\"Taking all her belongings?\" Laffite asked. \"No, she's gone. She left me.\"\n\nJean Laffite, in his mind, believed he had treated her harshly and now she was gone... back to New Orleans of her own accord... leaving him behind.\n\nWhile Laffite was still reeling from the shock of Nikki's leaving, another blow came. Word had spread quickly among the Baratarians that Madame Boss was gone. One loyal freebooter felt duty-bound to confess to Laffite what he had seen earlier in the day\u2014Nicolette climbing into a boat with Diego Bermudez and the little slave. This information only served to deepen Laffite's depression.\n\nThere wasn't enough rum in the whole state of Louisiana to lessen the pain or make Jean Laffite forget that the only woman he had ever loved had deserted him with another man.\n\nHe had chuckled often enough over the large sums he had won from Diego Bermudez at the gaming table, but now Bermudez had walked away with the richest stake of all\u2014his own Nicolette.\n\nAs the moon rose over the bayous late that night and the men prepared to leave The Temple, Jean Laffite stared at the empty bed, wishing he could turn the clock back twenty-four hours.\n\nDominique clamped a compassionate hand on his brother's shoulder and said, \"There will be other games, Jean. Don't count yourself out, my lad; not until you are dead and lying in Saint Louis Cemetery.\"\n\nJean Laffite wished for an instant that he were in his grave. Then he took heart. A lover's quarrel, that was all their disagreement had been. He would find her and show her how much she meant to him. No love as strong as his for Nikki could be denied. He would find a way!\n\n###\n\n# Chapter Ten\n\nDanger threatened only once during the two-day trip from The Temple to New Orleans. As they neared the Mississippi delta, one of Laffite's sentries hailed the boat. Bermudez immediately ordered his oarsmen to halt.\n\n\"Ah, Se\u00f1or Bermudez! _Buenos dias! \u00bfC\u00f3mo se va?_ \u8221 the bewhiskered buccaneer called.\n\n\"I've met this man before,\" Diego said to Nicolette. \"There won't be any trouble. He's a Spanish ex-patriot. As the _Americains_ would say, we speak the same lingo.\"\n\nNicolette looked carefully at the guard, but didn't recognize him. Perhaps he had come in on one of the recent ships to make port at Grande Terre and had been sent immediately to this outpost duty to watch for the governor's men while the auction was in progress at The Temple.\n\nShe tried to follow the conversation between the two men, but they spoke Spanish. It was a language she was forbidden to learn. No French Creole would admit to understanding the foreign tongue brought forcibly to New Orleans by the regime of King Carlos III, after a secret treaty in which Louis XV signed over the territory to his Bourbon cousin in 1762. Fifty years had passed. But old prejudices, like old customs, died hard among the Creoles of New Orleans.\n\nHowever, Nicolette did understand Italian. So when Diego Bermudez nodded toward her and said something about _esposa,_ so like the Italian word for wife, and the guard answered with a wink and a grin, she was quite puzzled.\n\nSurely, Diego Bermudez could know nothing about her broomstick marriage to Jean Laffite on Grande Terre. But if that wasn't the topic of their conversation, why would they be using the word \"wife\" in connection with her? She started to ask, then decided against it.\n\nThe answer came only hours later, in the salon of her childhood home in Toulouse Street During the time that Nicolette had been celebrating her union with Jean Laffite, banns were being published in New Orleans in anticipation of the _Fleur de Lis'_ arrival, setting the wheels in motion for her marriage to Diego Bermudez. The wedding was set to take place within days. Now that the bride had arrived, there was no reason for delay.\n\nJust as great a shock as her impending wedding was finding her dear papa in the very pink of health. When Nicolette questioned him about Diego's story that he was at death's door, he waved a hand to dismiss his recent illness and laughed, saying, \"I thought I might depart unexpectedly a few days ago. But it was nothing, _ma ch\u00e8re._ Some bad oysters, most likely.\"\n\nShe sat stunned and speechless, feeling as if she had happened into some topsy-turvy dream.\n\nNoting Nicolette's silence, her mother cooed, \"There, you see, Diego dear, I told you we did the right thing, surprising her. The child can find no words to express her delight. She's simply overwhelmed at the thought of your coming marriage, aren't you, Nicolette?\"\n\nThe bride-to-be snapped out of her trance. \"I think we all need to discuss this. I'm not the same little girl you sent off to Paris. Things have happened these past weeks...\"\n\n\"Nikki!\" her father interrupted with a meaningful nod toward her mother. \"We aren't going to discuss your time with those pirates. It will only upset you. You'll forget about your ordeal in time as long as you don't dwell on it.\"\n\n\"But, Papa, how can I forget Jean Laffite?\"\n\n\"Not another word, Nicolette!\" Claude Vernet ordered in an unusually stem voice. \"The whole matter is closed and I forbid you to-speak that man's name in this house ever again! Am I understood?\"\n\nNicolette was so shocked by his harsh tone that all she could say was \"Yes, Papa.\"\n\nClaude Vernet would have had little time to listen to Nicolette's story of her time with Laffite even if he had allowed her to speak. He had the entire household in a frenzy of activity, preparing for the annual move from the townhouse in New Orleans to his upriver plantation, Belle Point, for the duration of the yellow fever season.\n\nHe had planned to go to Nicolette's rescue himself, when he heard the gossip shotgunning the city that a slave auction was to be held at The Temple by Jean Laffite. But he had demurred to his future son-in-law's suggestion when Diego reasoned: \"Think, sir, how difficult it will be for your daughter if you journey into the bayous to rescue her. She will be terrified for your sake. Those pirates are no better than rabid dogs-vicious and unfeeling. She might even refuse to come, rather than put you in danger of being killed. But were I to slip into their camp quietly, I'm sure I could manage to get her away and bring her home, safe and sound, before Laffite and his ruffians realize she's gone.\"\n\nAnd so it was that Nicolette returned to New Orleans to face a life sentence-married to Diego Bermudez, a scheming Spanish Creole whom she knew she would never love.\n\nShe felt cut off, imprisoned in her own home, guarded by her own family. They tortured her with kindness and concern, assuming that her \"ordeal,\" as they referred to it, had been soul-shattering. The Vernets didn't even mention Sukey, their daughter's trusted servant, fearing that she had perished. They didn't want to further upset Nicolette. They worked at convincing her that only a speedy marriage to the man they had chosen for her could heal her deep wounds and take the sad expression from the depths of her midnight blue eyes.\n\nShe moved through the first days like a sleepwalker, accepting the inevitable, with a placid hopelessness that she couldn't shake off. When she thought of Jean Laffite and their love-filled hours together, her heart ached and she couldn't hold back her tears. Even worse were the feelings that came when she realized how she had been tricked into returning by the man who was about to usurp Jean's place in her life, if not her heart. When she objected to Diego's tactics, her father replied, \"Desperate situations require desperate measures, Nikki. Don't judge the man too harshly for having your best interests at heart.\"\n\nThat night in bed, Nikki thought of her Aunt Gabi. She hadn't arrived yet, but should appear any day. Oh, where is she when I need a strong ally, she wondered. Only her strict Catholic upbringing kept her from throwing herself into the wide river and ending the misery that possessed her now, and stretched ahead as far as she could imagine into the future.\n\nSome glimmer of hope flickered the very next day, when Gabrielle DelaCroix arrived. Reyne Beluche's ship had run afoul of a squadron of British men-of-war in the Gulf, delaying their arrival in the city. The spunky _Spy_ handily outsailed the heavier foreign vessels, losing but a day.\n\nGabrielle walked in from the _pone coch\u00e8re_ of the Vernet house looking fresh-air radiant, sea-foam crisp, and as elegantly coiffured as always.\n\nHer unannounced arrival sent her already unnerved sister into near collapse. Francine, unable to cope rationally with the sudden appearance of her outcast sister after so many years, dithered about\u2014fluffing pillows, sweeping imaginary dust from tabletops, and twisting her lace hanky to fragile shreds.\n\n\"You know I'm delighted you're here, Gabrielle, and Claude will be overjoyed when he comes home from the Exchange. But, dear, couldn't you have sent Sukey ahead to give me some warning? Why, the place isn't fit for company! The servants get fatter and lazier every year. I simply don't know why we put up with them.\"\n\nGabrielle offered her jittery sister a practiced smile that hid her impatience. Could the woman think of nothing to talk about but housekeeping after all these years they'd been apart?\n\nThe room, the entire house, was immaculate. Silver gleamed from its twice-a-week polishing, every inch of wood glowed with lemon wax not long since applied, nothing was out of place. Even the silk sleeve, which covered the chandelier chain in much the same way that a pantelette covers a limb, looked spotless and without telltale ribbons of dust. Francine was as she had been all her life, a rabid perfectionist when it came to housework, but a failure when it came to dealing with the unexpected.\n\n\"Don't worry about me, Frannie. I'm sure I'll survive this primitive setting. Now, if you don't mind, I'd like to go up to my room and freshen up.\"\n\nThere would be time after Claude came home to speak to them both about Nicolette and her choice to stay in the Barataria region with the man she loved.\n\nGabrielle met one of the maids coming down the stairs as she was going up and said, \"Would you bring a decanter of Madiera up to my room? Immediately!\" as she swept past. I'll need a stiff drink before I tell Claude and poor Frannie that their Nikki has married Jean Laffite! she thought to herself. Then Gabrielle froze on the top stair. She couldn't believe her eyes.\n\n\"Nikki! What on earth...?\" she gasped.\n\nHer niece, just coming into the hall from her room, raced to her aunt's arms. The instant they met, Nicolette burst into pitiful sobs.\n\n\"Child, what are you doing here? What happened?\"\n\nShe led Nicolette into the guest room and tried to soothe her, without much success. When the maid brought the wine, Gabrielle poured the red-brown liquid into two glasses.\n\n\"Here. Drink this down, Nikki, and try to get hold of yourself.\"\n\nNicolette did as ordered. The tears still flowed in gushes, but her sobs quieted.\n\n\"Now, explain! How did you get back to New Orleans? And why did you come?\"\n\n\"Oh, Aunt Gabi.\" Nicolette's lips trembled threateningly as she spoke. \"They tricked me!\"\n\n\"They? Who do you mean, Nikki?\"\n\n\"Papa... Diego. They planned it together, I'm sure. Diego came to The Temple and told me Papa was dying... that I had to come right home. But he said... Oh, Aunt Gabi, he promised...\" The sobs won out for a time.\n\n\"Yes, go on, dear,\" Gabrielle urged, laying a comforting hand over her niece's.\n\n\"Jean and I had a terrible argument, but I meant to go back to him after I saw Papa and explained everything to him. But Papa won't listen. They had it all planned before I returned... even before Diego went for me. And now there's no way out of it. I have to marry him!\"\n\n\"Marry?\" The word burst from Gabrielle's mouth as if it had a wretched taste. \"I don't understand. Marry whom?\"\n\n\"Di-ego Ber-mu-dez!\" worked its way out between sobs.\n\n\"But, that's out of the question! You are Jean Laffite's wife!\"\n\nNicolette only hung her head. She couldn't trust her voice.\n\n\"You mean you haven't told them?\"\n\n\"Told them what? Jean and I aren't really married\u2014not in the manner my parents would accept or understand. Besides, when I've tried talking to them, they've cut me off with 'There, there. We aren't going to discuss your ordeal just now. When you're stronger, dear.'\"\n\n\"Nicolette Laffite! You are not a child! You are a grown... married... woman! You can't let them manipulate your life this way!\"\n\nNicolette looked at the other woman with eyes that were deep pools of misery. Her voice was the barest whisper.\n\n\"I don't feel like a woman any longer. Jean told me I should leave, though I never planned to stay away for good. But now that I'm here, they treat me as if I were a child. I can't defy them, Aunt Gabi. It's useless for me to try.\"\n\n\"Balderdash!\" Gabrielle jumped off the bed and paced the room with angry strides. She stopped by the window, turned again to face Nicolette, and added, \"Poppycock! A simple lovers' quarrel and you come running home to Papa! You pull yourself together, young lady, and when your father comes home, we're both going to talk to him. Before they can prepare for this outrageous marriage, we'll have to put a stop to it!\"\n\nNicolette felt her spirits and hopes rise for an instant, listening to her aunt's confident words. But then she sagged to the depths again. Even if she could get out of her marriage to Diego, would Jean take her back? It seemed hopeless.\n\n\"Let's see,\" Gabrielle thought aloud, \"it will take some time for the banns, more time to send the invitations around, weeks for the wedding gown to be made, food to be planned and prepared. We have at least two or three months. They're probably planning the event for the start of the social season in the city. November?\"\n\nShe raised a questioning brow at Nicolette, who shook her head sadly and murmured, \"Monday, in the garden at Belle Pointe. Everything is done.\"\n\n_\"Mon Dieu!_ Perhaps we can get word to Jean!\"\n\n\"It's no use, Aunt Gabi. Even if we could find someone to leave this minute and carry a message, it wouldn't reach Grande Terre for two days at the earliest. And when Jean arrives I'll already be Madame Diego Bermudez.\" The tears in her voice were replaced suddenly by a note of total, hopeless resignation. \"Besides, I've already accepted his proposal.\"\n\n\"You accepted?\"\n\n\"My marriage to Jean isn't legal or sanctioned by the Church. We only jumped a broomstick. Perhaps it was all a mistake from the start.\"\n\nNicolette's heart screamed at her: _You little fool! Of course it wasn't a mistake! You love Jean Laffite!_ But was love enough to sustain her if she tried to defy her parents, her beliefs, her entire way of life? Maybe her father was right.\n\n\"Papa says Diego is perfect for me and we'll be very happy. Papa says he already thinks of Diego as his son.\"\n\n\"Papa says... Papa says!\" Gabrielle mimicked. \"And why is he suddenly such an authority on marriage and happiness? He certainly didn't manage his own very well! He never loved Francine, never wanted to marry her! Is he now going to force you only because he was forced and has lived to regret his lack of fortitude all these loveless years?\"\n\nNicolette stared at her aunt, aghast. \"What are you saying?\"\n\nGabrielle DelaCroix for once in her life felt ashamed. She hadn't meant to let uncautious words slip out in the heat of anger. Nicolette didn't need to shoulder this burden along with all her others.\n\n\"Nothing, dear. Forget what I said.\" She sighed. \"It's only that sometimes your papa acts like a first cousin to a jackass!\"\n\nThe discussion ended with nothing resolved. Gabrielle, out of sheer desperation, borrowed Gator-Bait and sent him to the Basin with a message for Reyne Beluche, telling him to return to Grande Terre as quickly as possible and alert Laffite to the emergency. The _Spy_ sailed within the hour.\n\nNicolette remained in her room, not wanting to see or speak to anyone. Sukey clucked over her chick, happy to be back among \"civilized\" people in an atmosphere she understood.\n\nShe groomed Nicolette carefully for her four o'clock meeting, a daily appointment now, with Diego Bermudez in the _petit salon._\n\nNicolette stared vacantly into her mirror as the servant added a few soft curls around her face with a hot iron. She felt the heat near her face and thought with a sudden burst of relief that she might be coming down with yellow fever.\n\nThat would solve all my problems, she thought. I'd be dead before the wedding.\n\nNicolette rose on command, as she'd been conditioned to do since her return home a few days ago. The long skirt of palest blue muslin fell about her ankles from a high waist and a bodice much too tight for comfort in the May heat. She longed for the freedom of her bright peasant skirt or canvas sailor's britches.\n\nShe almost smiled, thinking how horrified her mother would have been to see the casual way she'd dressed on Grande Terre. No stays, no corsets, and she had seldom bothered with slippers\u2014stockings, never! She hadn't truly valued that freedom until now, when it had been taken away forever.\n\n\"That M'sieu Diego, he shore a fine-looking gentleman!\" Sukey enthused. \"You two gonna have the prettiest babies in all N'Orleans, Mam'zelle Nikki!\"\n\nBabies! The servant's statement stopped Nicolette's breath for a moment. She felt herself gulping at the air to recover.\n\nIt was the first time she had even considered this facet of her marriage and the thought numbed her. She hardly knew Diego Bermudez. How could her papa expect her to allow Diego Bermudez to do the things necessary to produce babies?\n\nWhen she left the room to meet Diego downstairs, she was trembling all over and her face was chalky-white.\n\n\"My dear, Nicolette,\" Diego crooned as she came into the salon. \"What a lovely bride you'll make-all pale and fragile, like a _muguet,_ a lily of the valley.\"\n\nShe didn't listen to his words, but answered automatically, because he always showered her with lavish compliments, \"Thank you, Monsieur Bermudez.\"\n\nAfter he kissed her hand, he continued to hold it and said, \"I want you to call me Diego from now on, Nicolette. After all, in a few days, or should I say, nights, we'll be very close.\"\n\nHe closed the door behind her. Only then did she realize that they were alone for the first time. Her mother should have been there to ensure the propriety of the meeting and relieve Nicolette of some of the strain of entertaining her fianc\u00e9.\n\n\"Where is Maman?\" she demanded.\n\n\"I believe she said she'd be resting this afternoon, darling.\"\n\nThe smile curling his thin lips sent a chill through Nicolette, and his calling her \"darling\" made her want to slap his insipid face and scream at him, \"No! That's Jean's name for me! Don't you dare call me that!\"\n\nBut instead, she decided simply to leave. When she headed quickly for the closed door, Diego caught her arm and pulled her roughly up against his chest, holding her in a bruising grip.\n\n\"It isn't time to go yet, Nicolette. I'll tell you when you may leave. Until then, you will entertain me!\"\n\nBefore she could reply, he captured her lips in a fierce kiss. His fingers bit into her ribs and he arched her back awkwardly, almost throwing her off balance. She dared not try to squirm away or he might drop his arm and let her fall. But when he let one hand glide up her bodice to fondle her breasts, she struggled against his hold. During this quiet battle, the door opened behind them.\n\n\"Monsieur Bermudez, I presume!\" Gabrielle DelaCroix's voice cut through the charged air like a shot through a quiet forest.\n\nDiego righted Nicolette at once and released her.\n\n\"Aunt Gabi!\" Nicolette said, surprised, feeling sick and dirtied.\n\nGabrielle pretended she hadn't noticed the compromising embrace. \"When I heard my sister had taken to her bed with a migraine, I immediately appointed myself chaperone for the afternoon. Of course, it would be unthinkable in any proper Creole household for an engaged couple to meet alone.\"\n\n\"See here, madame, if you're insinuating...\"\n\n\"I _never_ insinuate, monsieur!\"\n\nGabrielle walked all around Bermudez, eyeing him in a calculating manner as if he were a slave on the block.\n\n\"So, you're to be my niece's husband? Well, well! You look respectable enough. But then, respectability in some cases is only a surface thing. What about it, Monsieur Bermudez, have you any hidden vices?\"\n\n\"Madame!\" Diego exclaimed, feeling unnerved by the woman's outspoken manner.\n\n\"Well, answer me, young man! Women? Gambling? Drinking?\" She drew herself up to eye level with him and gave him the blackest of stares. \"It seems only fair that my niece should know what's in store for her.\"\n\nDiego swallowed several times and his face changed from angry scarlet to fish-belly white under Madame DelaCroix's scrutiny.\n\n\"I don't keep a mistress, if that's what you're getting at.\"\n\n\"Commendable!\" Bermudez relaxed his guard at this slight praise so that her next statement caught him totally unprepared. \"Commendable, but highly suspect! All Creole men have mistresses. Am I to take it from this admission that you don't like women? That you prefer\n\n\"Madame, please!\" he cut her off.\n\n\"Very well,\" Gabrielle conceded. \"I won't pursue the matter with my niece present. However, her father should be aware of the type man he has picked for his daughter. He's paid you a considerable dowry, I'm sure.\"\n\nThinking of the outrageous sum\u2014five thousand _piastres\u2014he_ had demanded of Claude Vernet, Diego almost smiled. Then his anger flared. Such a delicate matter was never discussed with women, and in this case he certainly didn't intend to reveal that he had used the possible taint on the maternal side of Nicolette's family to up the ante.\n\n\"I don't see that this is any of your concern, and I refuse to remain here and be insulted by an outsider!\"\n\nHe whirled about and hurried from the room, not even pausing to say goodbye to his fiance\u2014. When they heard the carriage gate slam after him, Nicolette gave a great sigh of relief.\n\nGabrielle laughed. \"The pompous ass! I've seen quite all I care to of Diego Bermudez!\"\n\n\"I'm afraid you'll see more, Aunt Gabi,\" Nicolette said. \"He'll be back for dinner, as usual.\"\n\nGabrielle stared at her niece, her mouth in a wordless \"O\" and her agile mind whirring with plans.\n\n###\n\n# Chapter Eleven\n\nDiego Bermudez stormed out of the Toulouse Street house and headed straight toward the river and the Vernet Company's warehouse and offices near the levee. He decided against taking a carriage, hoping to walk off some of his rage before he confronted Claude Vernet. But his mood only soured more as the smell of rotting garbage and emptied slops shimmered up in the afternoon heat from the open gutters, offending his nostrils.\n\nHe covered his nose with a perfumed square of linen and swore under his breath. No decent human being should try to exist in New Orleans after Easter. Most of the right people had left by now for the clean air and cool breezes of their plantations upriver or down.\n\n\"Another bit of unpleasantness for which I have my dear Nicolette to thank!\" he grumbled. \"I'd be at The Shadows, cool, comfortable, and properly wed, if she hadn't decided to go traipsing off with that bastard Laffite instead of coming back to New Orleans as any decent woman would have. Well, we'll just see after the wedding if the little hussy's sorry for the way she's acted!\"\n\nFrom the Place d'Armes, the ships riding at anchor made the Mississippi look like a forest thick with leafless trees. It seemed that all eight thousand inhabitants of the town must be occupied along the wharves today\u2014loading and unloading cargo, hauling produce to the market, peddling their wares from baskets on their heads. The levee teemed with brawling, sweating masses, cursing in a dozen different languages.\n\nBermudez brushed past an old Choctaw squaw squatting in the shade of a sycamore at the edge of the square. She puffed cascarilla in her clay pipe while she hawked her sassafras, dried herbs, and charms.\n\nNear Gallatin Street, mongrel women\u2014all shades, from magnolia-pure, to _caf\u00e9 au lait,_ to tobacco-gold\u2014roamed the levee. By daylight, they crept from the Swamp, where a man could buy a drink and a woman for a picayune and possibly get his throat slit in the bargain. By night, they hoped to lure men to visit their notorious brothels.\n\nSomething about the pure baseness of this area stirred heat in Diego Bermudez's loins. He glanced farther upriver toward Tchoupitoulas Street and the section of the levee which fronted Faubourg Ste. Marie, where the _Americains_ were establishing a foothold in the city. These _foreigners,_ from other states, weren't worth thinking about, but the several hot-sheet hotels he owned in that area and the rent past due from their madams were never far from Diego's thoughts. His gambling debts would more than consume what the women owed him, but their rent would buy him time.\n\nThis proved a monthly problem. The gamblers and money-lenders were forever dunning him while he waited, hard-pressed, for his soiled doves to pay up. He couldn't go to them and collect. Neither Diego Bermudez nor any other man in his right mind dared trespass in that area, even on his own property, without fear of his life. And the local authorities, such as they were, stayed far clear, accepting the average murder a night as none of their concern and good riddance to bad rubbish.\n\nWell, he'd think of a way to get his money or, by God, he'd bum them out!\n\nDiego laughed aloud and muttered, \"Wouldn't Nicolette's high and mighty aunt love to know about my dealings with these women? No, I don't have a mistress. I'd never let a woman use me. That's my department, and Nicolette Vernet will soon be in it!\"\n\nIt was hot inside the Vernet offices, and the ceiling fan, kept in motion by a small slave, drove waves of stifling air down Diego's collar when he entered. He squirmed in his own sweat and cursed, mopping his brow.\n\n\"Ah, Diego!\" Vernet hailed, his coat off and shirt sleeves rolled up, a serious breach of etiquette for any Creole gentleman, even if the temperature soared over 100. \"High time you showed up!\" He shoved a pile of papers across his cluttered desk. \"This is your specialty. Damned if I can make a dent in all these bills of lading.\"\n\n\"I'll do what I can, sir, but I really came back to talk to you about Nicolette.\"\n\n\"Nikki?\" Claude asked, a worried frown on his tanned face. \"She isn't ill, is she?\"\n\n\"No, monsieur, not at all. In fact, she looked wonderful this afternoon. I didn't mean to alarm you. It's just that I've been upset.\"\n\nClaude Vernet rose from the chair behind his desk and came to drape an arm around his future son-in-law's slender shoulders.\n\n\"I'm sure she didn't mean to hurt your feelings, Diego. You have to remember that she's high-strung, and after what she's been through these past weeks... well, we both know the problems. Besides, all brides tend to be jittery. Take my word for it, son, after next Monday, everything will be just fine!\"\n\n\"I'm not putting this well, monsieur,\" Diego said, shrugging off the other man's arm. \"What happened this afternoon wasn't Nicolette's fault. It's that aunt of hers, Madame DelaCroix.\"\n\n\"Gabrielle?\" Claude cried. \"You mean she's here... at the house? No one told us she was coming. Why didn't anyone send word to me? Here and starting trouble already, is she?\" he chuckled. \"By God, some things never change! Thank heaven!\"\n\nHe grinned like a boy and his eyes danced with marine-blue lights.\n\n\"Dear\u2014Gabi!\" he sighed. \"Is she still beautiful... not gone to pudding like so many Creole matrons?\" He babbled on in his excitement\u2014remembering old times and quiet moments between them. \"I can't wait to see her. Why, it's been almost ten years!\"\n\nHe was pulling on his coat, shoving papers aside, and heading for the door.\n\n\"Monsieur Vernet! About the trouble she caused?\" Diego called after his employer.\n\n\"Oh, don't give it another thought! Beautiful women always cause trouble! It's just Gabi's way. She's a very loving person, actually.\" His words trailed off into pleasant thoughts for a moment, then he added, \"She's overpro-tective of Nikki... always has been. You'll come to dinner tonight, of course...\" and he was gone, leaving Diego Bermudez more angry than ever.\n\n\"I wouldn't miss it!\" Diego spoke to the now-empty doorway, glowering at Claude Vernet's disappearing back.\n\nOf the people involved in the family dinner that night, only two realized the full significance of the occasion\u2014Diego Bermudez and Gabrielle DelaCroix. Both spent the remainder of the afternoon scheming to attain their opposite goals.\n\nGabrielle had seldom been bested, but her adversaries in the past had not often been as unemotional, unscrupulous, and ambitious as Diego Bermudez.\n\nWhat lay so delicately in the balance of the evening's outcome was nothing less than Nicolette's entire future. Gabrielle refused to see it sacrificed on the matrimonial altar. Diego was just as determined to accomplish his own goals\u2014a prosperous marriage, a partnership in the Vernet Company, and his share of that family's fortune. He would brook no interference from any quarter.\n\nAs the dinner hour drew nearer, Nicolette finished sorting things in her mind. She had reached several conclusions: Diego Bermudez, as dull as he seemed next to Jean Laffite, would make a proper husband, and that had been her goal from birth\u2014to marry well, make a good home, and bring numerous children to the union. By doing this, she would be a credit to her husband and to her parents. If they were happy, she could be happy.\n\nThe affair with Laffite had been no more than a lovely fairy tale. Life simply wasn't made of spun sugar and dashing gentlemen smugglers. Little girls dreamed such dreams. Grown women did not!\n\nShe would cherish the memory of Laffite's love all her days, but she knew now that it was not meant to be. She even felt fortunate that their interlude had come to such an abrupt conclusion. How much more difficult the memory would be if he had grown tired of her and sent her away!\n\nShe frowned at the thought. Hadn't he done just that? At the very least, he had suggested strongly that she go. Would he have sent her packing if he had returned and found her there? She refused to think about that.\n\nAs for Aunt Gabi, she adored the woman, but as her maman had whispered quietly to her that very afternoon, \"My dear sister has always been such a flighty person. She thinks she knows what is best for everyone, but in truth, she has never been able to choose wisely for herself. Consider the source, Nicolette, when she offers you advice.\"\n\nNicolette thought about those words as she sat in her little, copper slipper tub, bathing carefully. I should have questioned his motives when Jean Laffite said he wanted to marry me... that he'd always love me. Surely, if he had wanted our marriage to be proper and legal, he could have arranged to bring a priest to Grande Terre. After all, he is the Boss, as he so often reminded me! But it served his purposes to pretend we were married... to play at being my husband for a time!\n\n\"Yes, I'm well out of that situation,\" she told herself, \"and fortunate that Diego doesn't hold my frivolity against me!\"\n\nThe frivolity she spoke of to herself surfaced in her mind as Jean Laffite's lingering passion-filled embraces, his tender way of kissing the hollow of her neck, the peaks of her breasts, the inside of her thighs, and...\n\nShe pushed all such improper memories from her thoughts. That part of her life, brief as it had been, was over. Thinking about it aroused forbidden feelings, which embarrassed her deeply. She swore to herself that she would never dwell on the past again. She would think only of her future, and Diego Bermudez, and their life together!\n\nGabrielle DelaCroix tried discussing the barbarity of arranged marriages with Claude Vernet, but decided that she would do as well or better to go out and present her arguments to the brick wall at the back of the courtyard.\n\nClaude wanted to reminisce about earlier days, to question her about life in Paris, her plans for the future. But he refused to discuss anything concerning the time she and Nikki had spent among the Baratarians.\n\nFailing in her attempts to get through to Claude Vernet, Gabrielle chose another tack. She hated using trickery, especially on Nicolette, but this was no time to be fainthearted.\n\nShe knocked softly at Nicolette's door, and heard her niece call, _\"Entrez.\"_\n\n\"Nikki, I'm so glad you haven't dressed yet. I've brought you something. I saw what your mother had her provencial modiste make for you to wear, and though I hate to criticize, I'm afraid my sister lacks any sense of style.\"\n\nNicolette's fingers moved delicately, letting the tissue silk of the gown her aunt offered slither over her hand. The color had no name that Nicolette could think of\u2014sunset-rose, coral-fire, or ruby-glow, perhaps. She'd never seen such a shade on a young woman and certainly she had never worn any color so vibrant. She held it up and smiled, the hue reflecting a warm blush on her face.\n\n\"I hope you like it, _ma ch\u00e8re._ It is also my gift of apology to you.\"\n\nNicolette stared at her aunt, not understanding. \"You have nothing to apologize for.\"\n\n\"Oh, come now, Nikki! We both know I behaved abominably this afternoon toward your young man. I'm sure I embarrassed you as much as I did him. I've simply lived too long in Paris and I've become far too outspoken because of it. I promise to make amends to Monsieur Bermudez as well.\"\n\n\"Aunt Gabi,\" Nicolette said, hugging the woman, \"you are wonderful!\"\n\n_\"Bien_! Enough, Nikki! I know when I've been naughty. You are a dear not to scold me as I deserve. Now let's get you dressed. That charming Diego will be here any moment.\"\n\nWhen Gabrielle had helped Nicolette into the gossamer gown, they both stood back from the mirror, appraising the effect. Nicolette frowned.\n\n\"I can't wear this,\" she said apologetically.\n\n\"Why ever not, my dear?\"\n\nGabrielle tried to hold a look of surprise on her face for her niece's benefit. She knew as well as Nicolette that the gown was cut along all too revealing lines, that the sheer, clinging fabric left almost nothing of Nicolette's form to the imagination, and that the vibrant color gave the girl's face and the shocking expanse of exposed bosom a passionate glow that would have seemed daring even on one of Napoleon's courtesans. But, if her plan were to work, she had to convince her niece that the gown looked fetching and proper on her.\n\n\"Oh, I see the problem now, Nikki! How silly of me not to have thought of it before. It's your hair, dear. To allow the costume its full impact, we'll have to put your hair up, of course.\"\n\nNicolette grasped her long curls with a horrified look on her face, as if her aunt had just come after her with shears. \"Oh, no! I couldn't! Jean likes it... She stopped and laughed with nervous embarrassment. \"How stupid of me! I almost said that Jean wanted me always to wear it down.\" She grabbed a handful of ivory hairpins and began doing up her hair with a vengeance, forcing back tears. \"Always!\" she repeated. \"But that always doesn't exist, does it, Aunt Gabi? It never really existed at all!\"\n\nNicolette's words and her pathetic, heartbroken tone wrenched Gabrielle's heart. Gabrielle renewed her resolve to go ahead with this plan, no matter that it would hurt them both for the time being.\n\n\"Nicolette, you foolish child!\" she chided. \"You don't mean you believed all those things that pirate promised you? Why, you're working yourself into a frenzy over the man at this very moment. I went along with you when we were on Grande Terre because I felt it was our only way of escape and you did seem willing enough to make the sacrifice. I admit that I was shocked when I arrived here and found you ready for another wedding so quickly. But I thought you were resigned to this arrangement. Then, after I met Diego and saw that he was everything your papa had promised, well, I just assumed that all was as it should be. My cross-examination of him was no more or less than I would have subjected any man to under the circumstances. You can't be telling me now that you are having second thoughts?\"\n\nAll the while that Gabrielle talked, she worked her magic with Nicolette's hair, pulling it high in curls and waves to add years and sophistication to her niece's appearance.\n\n_Mon Dieu!_ She's a ravishing beauty! she thought. No wonder Laffite fell so helplessly in love with her so quickly! And Diego Bermudez, that pompous ass, thinks he can make up for what she's known and lost! Never!\n\nBut Gabrielle DelaCroix thought one thing and spoke the opposite\u2014all a part of her plan.\n\n\"There, Nikki!\" she said, putting the last touch to her niece's new coiffure. \"Your darling Diego will be dazzled. Stand up! Let's have a look at you.\"\n\nNicolette did as ordered, but in a halfhearted manner.\n\n\"Beautiful! Exquisite! _Magnifique!_ Why, if Jean Laffite could see you now, he wouldn't send you away!\"\n\nNicolette turned and stared at her aunt, a look of pained anguish in her eyes. \"He didn't send me away. I left him!\"\n\n\"Of course you did! How careless of me to forget your story, Nikki. Let's see, your papa and Diego tricked you, wasn't that it? I'll remember from now on.\"\n\nGabrielle avoided her niece's mournful look by going to the dressing table and pretending to study the scent bottles there.\n\n\"You certainly learned your lessons from me well, Nikki. One of the first was never to let it be known you were ever spurned by a man. And any gentleman will allow a lady to pretend she has broken the association. I suppose Laffite had some training in etiquette, years ago.\"\n\n\"Aunt Gabi, you don't understand. I told you the truth! I left him and wrote a note telling him why and where I was going. He didn't really want me to leave!\" There was desperation in her voice. Her thoughts went back to the morning of the day she left. Jean had been so angry with her. Would he have sent her away, if she hadn't left before he had a chance to?\n\n\"Nicolette,\" Gabrielle said sternly, facing her now, \"did it ever occur to you that there might have been three conspirators in the plot to return you to New Orleans?\"\n\n\"Three? But I don't understand what you...\"\n\nSuddenly Nicolette did understand. She gasped and buried her face in her hands.\n\n\"There's nothing to cry about now! The time for tears is over, Nikki. You're home again and the date of your marriage is set. Forget what measures were needed to bring about this end!\"\n\nGabrielle saw from the secession of tears and the new resolve on Nicolette's face that her niece was actually beginning to believe that she'd been used by her lover. Now the final thrust of her verbal blade to put Nicolette's feelings in order once and for all.\n\n\"Forget Laffite's kisses, his caresses, the endearments he must have whispered into your ear during the wee hours when the two of you were alone and... intimate with each other. The feel of his hands stroking your flesh was no different from what you'll experience with your husband. And, take it from one who speaks from a vast store of knowledge, in bed in the dark, one man's thrust hurts no more or less than the next!\"\n\n\"But Jean never hurt me!\" Nicolette gasped, discomfited by her aunt's outspokenness, but wanting to defend Laffite.\n\nGabrielle gave her niece the barest smile, as if she didn't believe her. \"Really?\"\n\nNicolette knew her face was flaming. No woman had ever spoken to her so frankly about these matters. Her aunt only stood there, waiting and watching her.\n\nNicolette shook her head to clear it. She couldn't speak for several minutes. Her aunt's words had sparked such memories, such deep, longed-for feelings. She trembled, remembering how Jean Laffite could fire her senses.\n\n\"I can't... describe... can't talk about it,\" she whispered finally.\n\n\"Very well. I'll leave you to think about it then.\"\n\nGabrielle DelaCroix closed the door behind her and gave a sigh of relief. She wondered if the conversation had been half as taxing for Nikki as it had been for her.\n\n\"But it had to be done,\" she told herself. \"And now for the finishing touch. I must speak to Diego alone.\"\n\nShe glanced back at Nicolette's door when she heard a sound come from within. Crying? No, she realized. It had been a heavy sigh almost like the sound a passionate woman might utter at that special moment of ecstasy with the man she loves.\n\nAnd so it was. Nicolette stood where Gabrielle had left her. But now her eyes were tightly shut and she swayed to inner rhythm. Behind her closed lids, she watched Jean Laffite's love-filled face, his naked body stalking toward her like a panther courting its mate. So vivid were her memories that she could almost feel his hands caressing her breasts, fondling her, inflaming her.\n\nNot until she heard the bell at the carriage entrance downstairs did she snap out of her euphoric trance. Alone again, once the fantasies of her lover had fled, she felt empty and older\u2014not at all like the young girl who had been manipulated these past days by her family. Perhaps she would do well to give her present situation more consideration before she rushed into anything.\n\nIf Gabrielle DelaCroix understood her niece and knew exactly how to trigger the responses she wished in Nicolette, the opposite was true when it came to Diego Bermudez.\n\nShe judged him wrong from the outset. He was not the proper Creole she imagined. He did not possess that well-spring of honor so pronounced in the breed. Nor was he in the least concerned with tradition, propriety, or a virgin bride. In fact, he found shy, inexperienced women quite boring. But Gabrielle knew none of this.\n\n\"My dear, Monsieur Bermudez,\" Gabrielle gushed, meeting him in the salon with an ingratiating smile as she captured his arm. \"I do hope you won't mind my entertaining you for a few moments until the others come down.\"\n\nLooking into her face, he might have thought there were twin sisters in the house\u2014the ogre who had attacked him earlier and now this charming seductress clinging to his arm and staring up at him with warm eyes.\n\nHis smile was slow, cautiously inviting. \"Madame DelaCroix, I presume?\" he mocked with the words she had used on him earlier. \"I hardly recognized you with your claws sheathed.\"\n\nShe lowered her lashes flirtatiously and looked away. \"I was a witch this afternoon, wasn't I?\"\n\n\"I plead a gentleman's right not to answer that question, madame.\"\n\n\"And a gentleman you were not to answer me harshly at the time. It's just that Nicolette is so dear to me, and after what she had to endure at the hands of that brute, Laffite! Well, you can see my concern for her, can't you, Diego?\"\n\n_\"Cenainement!\"_\n\nHer expression grew grave suddenly. \"I knew I could count on you to understand.\" She paused, but Diego realized it was only a slight hesitation. He waited for her to go on. She did.\n\n\"There are other areas in which you must show understanding, if you plan to marry our Nikki, Diego.\"\n\nShe led him to the settee and they sat down together. He became more than curious as she took his hands in hers and looked up at him with a doleful expression.\n\nShe gave a deep sigh before she continued. \"Diego, you appear to be a man of the world, not a moonstruck boy. So I feel that I can speak frankly with you. Nicolette is not the girl you expected to marry. Forgive me if I seem brazen or if I stumble on the words. Poor Nikki, of course, couldn't bring herself to tell you and I can't destroy my brother-in-law by explaining to him so that he can talk to you. That leaves this odious task up to me.\"\n\nGabrielle paused for such a long time that Diego, his curiosity getting the better of him, prompted, \"Go on, madame, please.\"\n\n\"Nicolette is no longer untouched!\" she blurted out. \"Of course, she and her family will understand if you wish to call a halt to the wedding plans.\"\n\nNow the silence came from Bermudez. Wonderful! Gabrielle thought. He's so shocked he can't even find his tongue!\n\nHe looked at her, his face totally expressionless though his pulses pounded with excitement. \"Laffite?\" he asked.\n\nGabrielle clenched her teeth and offered a silent prayer for forgiveness before she answered, \"For one.\"\n\n\"Raped?\"\n\nOdd, Gabrielle thought. That quiver in his voice sounded almost as if he relished the thought. She must be mistaken.\n\n\"Repeatedly,\" she whispered.\n\nDiego rose on shaky legs, the thought of tender Nicolette at the carnal mercy of hordes of lust-hungry pirates making him weak with desire for her.\n\n\"How she must have suffered!\" he said in a tight voice.\n\n\"Shall I explain to them all that you've decided against the marriage?\" Gabrielle asked, trying to keep the hopeful note out of her voice. \"They'll be shattered, of course, but under the circumstances .\n\n\"On the contrary, madame!\" Diego answered quickly.\n\nDamn! she thought. He's more noble than I'd counted on. I'll have to go on with this.\n\n\"Very well! I suppose I must tell you everything, Diego. Nicolette has changed since she left home. The things she's been through have damaged her very soul. She imagines that she's in love with Laffite. She's sworn to return to him\u2014to be his woman. Why, she's even dressing now as if she were one of those dreadful tarts from the ramparts. You couldn't possibly think of taking a wife who dresses and behaves like an octoroon mistress!\"\n\nDiego wasn't listening any longer. Every word Gabrielle had spoken only served to fire his blood. So, the little mouse of a girl he had chosen to wed offered more promise than he could have ever dreamed of. She had been seasoned by many men, would come to him knowing secrets learned from experienced lovers. He wouldn't have to coddle and cajole on their wedding night. If she can't have Laffite, by God, she'll submit to me in short order, he thought.\n\nSomewhere in the room, Gabrielle DelaCroix was going on and on about a blasted dress.\" He couldn't care less about a dress!\n\nDiego caught a ragged breath when Nicolette appeared at the door. She was draped in the most magnificent, indecent gown he had ever seen on a decent woman.\n\nGod! What a body she has! he thought.\n\nHis eyes traveled down the tight fabric of the bodice, which fit so snugly that her breasts seemed to overflow the brilliant silk. Her ripe nipples stood out in bas-relief. When she moved, the skirt clung to her from thighs to ankles, showing him what petticoats had denied his vision up to now. His lower body gave a spasm of delight and longing.\n\n\"Monsieur Bermudez?\" Gabrielle's voice, urgent and questioning, interrupted his visual feast, demanding an answer.\n\n\"The wedding will be on Monday, as scheduled!\" he shot back at her. Then he went to Nicolette and took her into his arms to kiss her and declare his intentions.\n\nIn spite of the consuming heat Diego's kiss spawned in his own body, his mind worked old channels. Unlike Gabrielle DelaCroix, he had no qualms about telling Claude Vernet of his daughter's soiled virtue. That knowledge, and his willingness to marry Nicolette anyway, should be worth at least another couple of thousand to the man. That money would cover most of his gambling debts at the moment.\n\nYes, he decided, forcing Nicolette's lips apart to find the sweetness of her tongue, Madame DelaCroix had done him a great service. She had provided him with the knowledge he needed to inspire his lust for his bride and with the perfect wedge to pry more funds out of Claude Vernet.\n\nNicolette, consumed with longing for Jean Laffite after her mental intimacy with him, was caught off guard by Diego's unexpected embrace. Her first impulse, to fight him, soon melted as he touched remembered chords, triggering passionate impulses. For a time, she relaxed in his arms and savored the sensations he aroused. Perhaps, she thought, Aunt Gabi is right\u2014one man's love is the same as any other's. I've been through all this anguish for nothing. It wasn't Jean Laffite I wanted. It was love!\n\nShe pressed her body close to Diego's, feeling his surge of longing, which nourished her own. Her mental turmoil eased. She pushed all thoughts of Jean Laffite to a far, dark edge of her mind.\n\nDiego is here, now, and will be forever, she thought. He loves me and I will love him.\n\n###\n\n# Chapter Twelve\n\nClaude Vernet regretted having ordered the expensive cargo of spiders from China. He felt he had been irrationally extravagant, too, when he commanded his slave blacksmith to grind all those gold and silver coins to dust. But it was too late now!\n\nHe stood on the veranda of his upriver plantation, Belle Pointe, staring down the long avenue of giant oaks. He watched as seventy-five field hands worked among the trees, using hand bellows to blow a fortune in gold and silver particles into the miles of cobwebs spun by the Chinese spiders.\n\nTrue, the treasure-dusted branches would form a glittering canopy for Nicolette's wedding and the reception planned for three hundred guests afterwards, but had he known that Diego Bermudez would demand more dowry money at the last minute, he might have counted the cost of preparations more frugally.\n\nOnce again he had that pirate, Jean Laffite, to thank for his misfortunes. According to Bermudez, Laffite was the one who had forced his daughter\u2014ruining her reputation, costing him another two thousand to secure her future.\n\nEven at that, the money was well spent. Suppose she was carrying the man's bastard seed! He forced his mind away from that onerous thought, but not from Jean Laffite and his smuggler band.\n\nHis own import business was in dire straits at the present time, thanks to the illicit trade carried on by the Baratarians. He couldn't say he blamed the citizens of New Orleans. They had suffered long under Spanish tariffs. Why, then, should they not take advantage of the duty-free goods Laffite offered, rather than paying much more for the similar merchandise he imported? Still, there were laws against trafficking in contraband, and Governor Claiborne should do something about it. The whole economy of New Orleans was suffering these days, thanks to Jean Laffite.\n\n\"Papa?\" Nicolette said, slipping a hand through her father's arm. \"Why such a sour expression? You aren't having second thoughts, are you?\"\n\nHe forcibly smoothed the wrinkles from his brow and smiled down at his lovely daughter.\n\n\"No, Nikki. Everything must be just so for your wedding. I'd happily spend twice as much to see you properly wed.\"\n\nNicolette frowned now. That wasn't what she'd meant, and for her father to mention money in even this slight way told her he was concerned about finances.\n\n\"I meant second thoughts about Diego, Papa,\" she corrected gently.\n\n\"Diego?\" he laughed. \"Why would you even ask such a thing? No, _ma cherel_ Diego has a business head on him that will keep him as solid as the new levee. And he seems ever so fond of you. If I could have chosen from all the men in the world for you, I believe I still would have picked Diego Bermudez to be your husband, Nikki.\" He bent and kissed her forehead. \"I want you to be happy, _ma petite.\"_\n\n\"I am!\" she answered positively. She had convinced herself that it was true.\n\nThe final puff of gold dust had shimmered the last web only moments before the guests began arriving for the evening ceremony. They came from the neighboring sugar plantations by every means of transportation, from horseback to landaus and curricles. On. elderly matron, who mistrusted horse-drawn vehicles in any form, had six brawny slaves carry her the twenty miles from her country house in her sedan chair. Those who came from New Orleans arrived by boat and were met at the Belle Pointe landing in flower-bedecked carts and carriages.\n\nNicolette's nerves danced inside her skin to the thundering beat of her heart. The moment was speeding toward her at a dizzying velocity. She gripped the bedpost for an instant, trying to steady her trembling hands. She was consumed with doubts, worries, and unbidden memories of Jean Laffite. Premarital jitters, she thought to herself. Nothing more! How did brides survive these final hours? she wondered.\n\nHer large bedroom of rose, white, and gold bustled with bodies and feverish activity. Her mother and Gabrielle vied for the right to make final decisions.\n\n\"No! No, Celeste!\" Francine Vernet argued with the octoroon hairdresser brought from New Orleans. \"The curls you have brought forward should be pinned back so that Nicolette's face is more prominent to everyone's view!\"\n\n_\"Sacrebleu,_ Frannie! Let the woman do her job!\" Gabrielle scolded, then went on to instruct Celeste on what she thought should be done.\n\n\"Please, please! Don't fight over me!\" Nicolette begged. \"I need some peace, some quiet!\"\n\n\"Nikki is right, of course,\" Gabrielle agreed. \"Frannie, you should be downstairs with Claude, greeting the guests. Hurry along now! I've supervised Nicolette for the past two years. I can certainly manage things here.\"\n\nFrancine Vernet looked suddenly stricken. \"Oh, but there are things a mother should tell her daughter at this time. I really meant to explain... Oh, dear! I think I'm getting a migraine!\"\n\nNicolette put her arms gently around her flustered mother. \"Don't make yourself ill, Maman. And don't worry about what you should have told me at this late date. I'll manage. Perhaps it would be best if you joined Papa now.\"\n\nThe mother of the bride, nervous and near tears, kissed her daughter quickly and offered her a grateful smile.\n\n\"You look _tr\u00e8s belle, ma filler_ Madame Vernet said before she hurried from the room.\n\n_\"Bien!\"_ Gabrielle sighed, closing the door after her sister. \"Poor Frannie! We may survive this, but I'm not sure she will. Come now, Nikki. Let me look at you and see that all is ready.\"\n\nNicolette stood and turned slowly, a vision of snowy silk and heirloom lace. Her gown\u2014the same that her mother had worn\u2014fell from a high band of satin ribbon, which clutched her body just below her breasts. The square neckline was covered demurely with antique lace rising to her throat. Long sleeves tapered down her arms, coming to points below her wrists. A short gossamer veil cascaded from the tiara of orange blossoms and seed pearls set carefully into the dark, shining confection Celeste had created with pins, combs, and determination.\n\n\"Ah, Nikki, _ma ch\u00e8re,_ my heart could break, you look so lovely,\" Gabrielle whispered. But even as she spoke the words, she visualized her niece dressed for another wedding\u2014with jasmine stars in her flowing hair and a look of ecstatic expectation on her face.\n\n\"Aunt Gabi, what's wrong?\" Nicolette questioned, seeing the woman's smile fade suddenly.\n\nGabrielle shook her head. \"It's nothing, _enfant._ Permit an older woman a moment's nostalgia, won't you?\"\n\nMy message didn't make it in time, Gabrielle thought. But I knew the hopelessness of it all along. She started to mention Laffite's name to Nikki\u2014to see her reaction\u2014but stopped herself. Nicolette seemed to accept her fate, almost to be happy about it. No need to bring up old hurts again, she thought. Who knows if Laffite would have come anyway?\n\n_Face it, Gabi,_ she told herself. _You were wrong!_\n\nA dark, sleek shape slipped undetected out of the river's current and into a creek close to Belle Pointe landing.\n\n\"We're in time, Dominique!\" Laffite said, watching the last boat filled with wedding guests from New Orleans as it docked.\n\n\"Aye, Boss. Lucky Reyne caught us before we got back to Grande Terre or even Raymond's fast pirogue couldn't have gotten us here before the wedding.\"\n\nLaffite leaped from the boat's bow to the muddy shore and pulled them in to land. Torches came near and he ducked into the marsh to avoid being seen.\n\n\"Blood of a thousand devils!\" Dominique cursed. \"Did you see who was in the party that just passed? Governor Claiborne!\"\n\n\"He's not after us tonight, Dom. He's here for the celebration. Well, we'll just see if we can't disrupt the merrymaking! Come on!\"\n\nThe two men crept stealthily out of hiding, leaving their boat guarded by four oarsmen. It took little effort to find the plantation house. By a hundred torches, the avenue of oaks leading up to it glowed as if inhabited by millions of amorous fireflies.\n\n_\"Mon Dieu!\"_ Dominique breathed. \"I never seen nothing like this!\"\n\n\"Hurry up, Dom! We haven't got all night!\"\n\nThe pair had not bargained for the multitudes of guests in attendance. It had been Laffite's plan to find Nicolette and whisk her away from the plantation before anyone noticed her absence. But this simplistic operation, he realized, would not be possible. Torches lit the grounds all around the house so that no cover was provided by the moonless night.\n\nSwarms of guests, relatives, and slaves surrounded the mansion, awaiting the appearance of the bride. Had Laffite and his brother had the time and opportunity to bring formal clothes with them and change, they might have lost themselves in the masses. But dressed as they were in rough sailors' togs, they dared not show themselves for fear of immediate recognition.\n\n\"What now, Boss?\" Dom asked as they hid watching from the shadows among the rows of slave cabins some distance from the opulent scene.\n\n\"Let's give it a few minutes and see what's happening. Nikki must still be inside. Maybe we can slip in when no one's looking and smuggle her to freedom.\"\n\n\"Jean?\" Dom said hesitantly. \"What if she don't want what you call her 'freedom?' She took off mighty quick with Bermudez.\"\n\n\"Shut up!\" Laffite snapped. He let his explosive temper cool for silent moments before he said, \"I'm sorry, Dom. I just can't think that way, that's all. I have to believe that she wants me... loves me.\"\n\nDominique shook his head sadly for his younger brother's sake. He was in love and paying the price for such foolishness. It was too bad that Jean couldn't think of women in the same terms as he and Pierre\u2014lovely to look at, exciting to hold, necessary to take to bed when the need arose, but not dependable enough to stake one's dreams, one's very life, upon. Pierre was satisfied with his mistress, Marie Louise, in New Orleans, and Dominique could quench his lusty appetites with any woman, providing she was large, passionate, and comparatively clean. But a wife? What need had a corsair for such a permanent arrangement?\n\n\"Look there!\" Laffite said in a husky whisper, interrupting Dominique's philosophical ruminations. \"That door at the back of the house, below the gallery. A slave just came out of there carrying a basket filled with bottles. It must lead to the wine cellar. If we stay close to that line of oleanders, no one will see us enter. Come on, Dom!\"\n\nNot really a cellar, since such rooms below ground were impossible to keep dry in Louisiana, the chamber Laffite and Youx entered was a cooling room, which led up to the pantry behind the dining room on the main floor. Like most river plantation houses, Belle Pointe had a partially enclosed outside staircase for the servants' use, leading from the working area at the back of the main floor to the storey above. Meals, bath water, firewood, and other necessities of everyday life could be transported easily this way.\n\nThe two men had spotted the servants' stairs as they approached the house. Laffite determined that this would be their best means of reaching the bedroom floor above.\n\nOnce inside, they waited on the rough wooden steps to the pantry, listening until all was quiet over them.\n\n\"Now!\" Laffite whispered, carefully inching the heavy trap door open slightly.\n\nThey hurried from one door to the other and emerged on the narrow stairs leading to the bedrooms. Staying close to the house, they made their way upward. Laffite eased the door open when they reached it and found himself in a closet chamber or bathroom adjoining sleeping quarters, empty at the moment.\n\n\"Stay here, Dom, and whistle if you hear anyone coming. I'm going to check the hall and see if I can locate Nikki's room.\"\n\n\"Aye,\" Dom answered. He caught his brother's arm. \"Be careful!\"\n\nAs Laffite crossed the bedroom, he noticed several things that told him much. The grandly appointed chamber with its tall, mahogany bed, massive armoire, writing desk, and spirit cabinet was meant for a man's use. And that man, at present, was Diego Bermudez. A purple silk dressing gown hung on the armoire, ready for use later in the evening. The unmistakable gleam of the Bermudez crest\u2014a golden snake and dagger\u2014adorned the garment. And there on the desk lay cards fanned out in a perfect poker hand. The nervous bridegroom had obviously been indulging in his passion for the game while he awaited the appointed time to meet his bride.\n\nFinal proof was exhibited by the silver-headed _colche-marde,_ the sword cane Bermudez carried with him everywhere as much for swagger as utility, though Laffite had seen it bloodied more than once, including the night Octave Castaigne died.\n\nHe picked up the sword cane and moved to the door. Opening it only a crack, his breath caught. Nicolette stood directly before him across the hall, a vision of lace-trimmed beauty. The ache that had been within him since the moment she left him now doubled and redoubled as he stared at her. He couldn't believe his luck. There she was\u2014alone and within his reach. He had only to rush to her and whisk her away.\n\n\"Nikki,\" he whispered.\n\nShe looked up, frowning, as if she weren't sure she had heard her name spoken.\n\n\"I have it now,\" Gabrielle said, hurrying into the hall from Nicolette's bedroom, a fragile fan in her gloved hand.\n\nLaffite jumped back, then sighed with relief. Only Gabrielle DelaCroix! She certainly wouldn't present an obstacle since she was the one who sent the message to him in the first place.\n\nHe opened the door more than a crack, but his moment had passed. Claude Vernet, his wife, several servants, and the entire City Guard decked out in their formal silver-trimmed, buff and sky-blue uniforms, converged in the hallway. Governor Claiborne, their captain announced, had designated the Guard as official escorts for the bride from the house to the altar.\n\nWith a sinking feeling, Laffite drew back and closed the door quietly. Dominique's low whistle alerted him to more trouble. He sped back to the stairs.\n\n\"I saw guards going into the house,\" Dom rasped. \"I had to get you out of there quick!\"\n\n\"I saw them, too,\" Laffite said in a dejected tone. \"We've missed our chance before the ceremony, Dom. Afterward. I'll get to her after she takes her vows. It's the only way.\"\n\nDominique groaned. \"You crazy? You mean to steal another man's wife? Before is one thing, but after?\"\n\n\"I'm damned if I'll let that slimy bastard Bermudez lay a hand on my wife!\"\n\nDominique Youx started to remind his brother that Nicolette Vernet was not, in truth, his wife, but thought better of it. What good would it do? Laffite was half-crazed now. Reminding him that Nikki was not really his at this point would only make matters worse.\n\nDom couldn't let the moment pass without some comment, however. \"Why don't you steal something easy, like the governor's underwear?\"\n\nLaffite ignored the remark and pulled Dominique along behind him into the bedroom, across the hall, and to the window of Nicolette's empty chamber. They could watch the ceremony from there.\n\nNicolette's pink satin dressing gown lay discarded on the bed. Laffite picked it up and pressed it to his lips as he stared down from the window. The fabric smelled of orange blossoms and the fresh limes she always used to rinse her hair. His body strained with eagerness as he imagined that the warmth of the garment came from close contact with the body he longed to hold once more.\n\nHe leaned his taut frame against the sill and peered down on the glowing scene. The oaks sparkled in the freshening breeze off the river. Gathered under the spreading branches, the wedding guests, en masse, formed a brilliant display of New Orleans' elite. Everyone who was anyone had been invited.\n\nLaffite gave a humorless laugh. \"Do you suppose our invitation got pirated, Dom?\"\n\n\"Take it easy, Jean,\" his brother answered.\n\nLaffite watched silently. The double line of City Guards formed ranks facing each other down the stairs of the veranda. They made an arch of raised cutlasses over the deep red carpet spread for the bride. At the near entrance to the oak alley, an altar of white and gold had been erected. Laffite recognized the wizened figure of P6re Antoine, the rector of Saint Louis Cathedral, almost lost in his voluminous robes, his twin sets of side whiskers falling from the jawline to lie in silvery coils upon his breast.\n\nLaffite felt a pang of guilt. Diego Bermudez was about to offer Nicolette a solemn ceremony, presided over by the holiest man in all of Louisiana. He had not even provided her with a poor bayou padre!\n\nHis self-flagellation became more pronounced when he saw Nicolette begin her descent from the veranda, her face obscured from his view behind the filmy veil. She moved as if her satin-slippered feet never touched the stairs. Slowly, like a cool mist from the marshes, she seemed to float toward the altar... toward Diego Bermudez.\n\nLaffite shook with a silent spasm of anger as he watched Nikki place her hand in that of her black-clad groom.\n\nWhen Diego gripped her hand, Nicolette almost gasped audibly. He grasped it with an air of total possession and unwavering authority. She had expected a tender touch from her groom\u2014loving and gentle. But the way he crushed her fingers in his hot, dry palm made her think he was saying without words, \"I _own_ you now and forever!\"\n\nP\u00e8re Antoine intoned the solemn ceremony, but Nicolette had trouble following his words and making the proper responses at the right times. She had been so sure for the past few days that she was making the right choice. Now, on the very threshold of matrimony, she was having second thoughts.\n\nShe tried to force her mind to attention. But the voice she had imagined as she stood alone in the hall refused to go away. She had heard Jean Laffite speak her name as clearly as if he had been standing before her. And the memory of her name on his lips\u2014his wonderful, caressing lips\u2014left her trembling.\n\n\"Your response!\" Diego's annoyed stage whisper prompted Nicolette Vernet to give Pere Antoine the final answer he needed to pronounce her Madame Bermudez.\n\nBefore she realized what was happening, her new husband raised the veil and demanded his first rights. Diego's arms closed around her like a vise and his thin lips bruised hers painfully. The pressure of his body through her gown frightened Nicolette. Again she had the feeling of being owned\u2014a slave to her husband. Panic filled her. She tried to pull away, but he wouldn't allow it.\n\n\"My son,\" she heard P\u00e8re Antoine whisper. _\"S'il vous pla\u00eet!_ Think of your bride's honor!\"\n\nDiego released Nicolette so abruptly that she nearly stumbled backward. He stared down into her face, unsmiling, his eyes like black ice.\n\nFor her ears alone, he answered the priest. \"Honor, Father? My bride has none!\"\n\nNicolette gasped with the realization that Diego knew she was no longer a virgin. She had planned to explain to him later. Of course, she could never have discussed such a topic with him before their marriage. But somehow he knew and despised her for it. Fear rose suddenly, like black bile in her throat. She had never seen such a fierce, hateful look in any man's eyes. And those passions, she knew, were reserved for her alone.\n\nShe had one hour to mingle with the guests, feast on the mountains of food the servants had prepared so lovingly, and say all the things expected of a happy bride. After that, she would have to go up to her room and prepare to receive her husband. For five days and nights she would see no one but Diego. The traditional Creole honeymoon could not be avoided.\n\nShe had wondered at Diego's request of her father, that they be allowed to use one of the two adjacent _garconni\u00e8res,_ the smaller houses usually used by sons or male guests for their honeymoon instead of staying in the main house. Now the meaning of Diego's plan came to her all too plainly. She wasn't to be his bride, but his prisoner during that time. He could do what he would with her and even a scream wouldn't be heard. She felt faint at the thought.\n\nShe cast about wildly in her mind for some escape route. She could tell her father what Diego already knew and plead for his protection from the revenge she imagined her husband had in mind.\n\nNo! she thought with a sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach. Papa would be upset and he would think that I was making it all up to avoid doing my wifely duty. I've heard the servants whisper often enough about the excuses Maman uses not to have to She quickly cut off the thought. It wasn't proper for her to know such things about her parents.\n\n\"Aunt Gabi!\" she said aloud and with new hope. \"She knows. She'll help me.\"\n\nBut at that very moment, Diego returned to her side. He didn't leave her during the rest of her hour of freedom. And Gabrielle stayed occupied at a distance with the governor and his charming wife. All hope of rescue flagged as her minutes of grace ticked away,\n\nAt precisely eight, Diego Bermudez checked his gold pocket watch, snapped it closed with what sounded to Nicolette like the clang of prison bars slamming shut, and ordered, \"Go and change, Nicolette. It's time.\"\n\nAccompanied only by Sukey\u2014her mother would come later to see her to the _garconni\u00e8re\u2014_ and not being allowed a word in private with anyone, Nicolette made her way slowly up the veranda stairs and toward her bedroom.\n\nThe hallway, which had bustled with activity such a short time before, was empty now. The lamps burned dimly and, to her surprise, her own bedroom lay in total darkness.\n\n\"Go down and get some oil, Sukey. Someone forgot to fill my lamps.\" A quick thought popped into Nicolette's head. \"Wait! Tell Aunt Gabi I want her to come up.\"\n\nSukey didn't ask questions, but started out as quickly as her arthritic joints would allow.\n\nNicolette stood at her window, looking down on the vast panorama of her own wedding reception. She spotted Diego alone in the deep shadows under one of the oaks. No, he wasn't alone! A dark shape stood against the tree. One of the torches flared in the rising wind and Nicolette saw the other figure clearly. It was Jada, one of the kitchen maids, a pretty young wench with a shape that had all the bucks on the place sniffing after her. Diego, her husband, was...\n\n\"Nikki!\"\n\nThe low whisper behind her made her turn with a start. Suddenly, she felt familiar arms close around her. Tender, moist lips found hers in the darkness and pressed with gentle urgency. All the feelings she had tried to suppress for the past weeks flooded back to engulf her. She clung to Jean Laffite as if her life depended on his nearness.\n\n\"Jean, darling,\" she sighed when he paused for an instant between kisses. \"Oh, my love!\"\n\n\"I've come to take you home,\" he whispered. \"I didn't really want you to leave. I was such a fool. Forgive me. I don't know why you've gone through with this farce of a marriage to Bermudez. All I do know, Nikki, is that I love you with every fiber of my being and I can't live without you. I don't want to live if I have to live without you! Hurry now and get out of that gown. We have to leave right away. Our boat's waiting near the landing.\"\n\nNicolette didn't waste time on words. She didn't know how, but Jean had arrived in time to save her from her own folly and Diego Bermudez. She tossed her veil and tiara aside and began working at the hundred little pearl buttons down the back of her gown.\n\n\"You'll have to help, darling,\" she said. \"I can't reach all of them.\"\n\nWhen the dress slipped off her shoulders, Laffite indulged himself for a moment, fondling her breasts.\n\n\"I've dreamed of this moment,\" he whispered, then clung to her, burying his face in her sweet warmth.\n\nDiego Bermudez had watched the slave girl, Jada, develop for some time. His curiosity came from the fact that her mother, Bella, had belonged to him and was pregnant when he sold her to Claude Vernet. Jada, he speculated, must be the first fruit of his loins. He had been a lad of sixteen when his father died, leaving him the plantation that shared a common boundary with Belle Pointe. Terrified that Bella's child might be a boy and look exactly like him, Diego had sold her off the place before she gave birth.\n\n\"But you're no boy, are you, Jada?\" he said as she squirmed against him. \"Don't fret, girl. I don't have time for you tonight. Besides, I have to take care of my bride. But I'll be back. You just let me get a good feel while I kiss you.\"\n\nA few minutes later, when he saw Sukey shuffling out of the house, he was already pulling Jada's dress back up to cover her melon-sized breasts. He slapped the voluptuous girl on the buttocks and said, \"You save it for me, you hear now, Jada?\" before he wandered off to find out what Sukey was up to and why she had left her mistress.\n\nWhen he demanded to know Sukey's mission and she told him of the dark bedroom, the need for oil, and Nicolette's request to see her aunt alone, Diego said, \"Never mind, Sukey. I'll tell Madame DelaCroix my wife wants her and I'll speak to one of the boys about refilling the lamps. You go rest yourself and have some cake.\"\n\nThe old woman nodded gratefully. \"You be a kind gentleman, M'sieu Diego.\" She slumped down on a high step, puffing with the effort of her long walk. _\"Merci! Merci!_ My little Nikki got herself a good man!\"\n\nBut Diego had already turned, headed not to find Gabrielle DelaCroix, but to Nicolette's bedroom.\n\n###\n\n# Chapter Thirteen\n\nNicolette slipped her hands from behind Laffite's neck until both her palms caressed his cheeks. Slowly, she pried his lips from hers.\n\n\"Darling, I have to change so we can leave. Diego will get suspicious soon.\"\n\nAs if summoned by the mention of his name, Diego Bermudez shoved open the bedroom door. A slanting path of yellow light from the hallway fell over Nicolette and Laffite. They both froze in surprise.\n\nDiego snatched up his sword cane from beside the bed where Laffite had propped it earlier. The silver head gleamed ominously in the dull light as he whipped the blade free of its sheath.\n\n\"Move away from him, Nicolette!\" Bermudez ordered in a tone murderous for all its calm.\n\n\"No, Diego!\" she screamed.\n\nLaffite shoved her away, onto the bed, so that she would be clear of danger. He circled cautiously, his hands out at waist height, his limber knees bent to spring.\n\nBermudez, his blade leveled at Laffite's heart, synchronized his movement to match those of his opponent. Nicolette watched, her hands clamped to her mouth to stifle choked sobs.\n\n\"Were you a gentleman, Laffite, I'd slap your face and invite you to meet me at dawn on the sandbar in the river. But since we all know you fall far short of that mark, and since I have pressing plans for the rest of the night,\" he shot a quick, menacing look at Nicolette, who could not hold back a cry of fear, \"I see no reason to rouse myself so early in the morning for the benefit of honor!\"\n\nLaffite made no reply, but used all his concentration to avoid the flashing tip of the blade. Unarmed, he had to rely on his wits to save him. Bermudez gave an unexpected lunge, opening the sleeve of Laffite's shirt and a slash wound in his upper arm. Bright red soon stained the white linen.\n\nNicolette sobbed aloud, \"No, Diego! Please! Do what you will with me, but let him go. I beg of you!\"\n\nBermudez filled the room with his ugly laughter. \"I intend, my bride, to do what I will with you! But first, I'll dispose of this vermin!\"\n\nWhile Bermudez was distracted, Laffite dived forward, knocking the sword away. Nicolette watched, helpless and terrified, as the two men rolled and tumbled over the floor, knocking over a table and chair, breaking a lamp, a mirror, so that her own horrified reflection showered down over the two men in sharp, silver fragments.\n\nThe scream that tore itself from her throat at that moment traveled to many ears. Dominique You, waiting once more on the back stairs, heard it and rushed through the bedroom across the hall.\n\nBelow on the veranda, two of the governor's City Guards, who had been enjoying a plate of roasted suckling pig, gumbo, _coq au vin,_ and various tortes and jellies in the company of two comely mademoiselles from nearby Beau Rivage plantation, looked at each other for a split second. Without a word, they dropped the fine china plates and grabb\u00e9d their cutlasses. They were halfway to the upper floor when a dozen others who had been about the grounds caught up with them.\n\nA second scream and then a third spurred them on.\n\n\"Sounds like Mademoiselle Vernet!\" one of the guards said.\n\n\"Madame Bermudez now,\" the man beside him corrected as they hurried on.\n\n_\"Le bon Dieu!\"_ Dominique cried as he entered the bedroom and quickly sized up the situation, then heard the stampede of booted feet coming up the stairs.\n\nLaffite and Bermudez were still grappling on the floor, with neither having a clear advantage as far as Youx could see. He made his decision in the flicker of an eye. There was no time to consider alternatives.\n\nGrabbing a heavy brass statuette of Napoleon from the corner _\u00e9tag\u00e8re,_ he raised it over the struggling pair and waited for the right moment.\n\n\"Sorry, _mon petit fr\u00e8re._ This will hurt me more than it does you!\"\n\nDominique brought Napoleon's head down to meet Laffite's. A surprised Bermudez, suddenly released from the other man's grip, reached for his sword cane and received a healthy whack from Napoleon as well.\n\nNicolette's screams had silenced. She lay in a faint among the pillows on the bed. Dominique did not even see her and assumed she had escaped the room before he arrived.\n\nQuickly, Dominique dragged his unconscious brother out of the room and across the hallway. Though Laffite towered over Youx when in a vertical position, the shorter man, with his brawny arms and magnificent shoulders, had no trouble maneuvering Laffite's two hundred pounds of dead weight. And lucky it was for both of them. Just as Dom got Laffite onto the back stairs, the entire City Guard charged the hallway.\n\nDominique hefted his load onto one shoulder and said, \"Now, little brother, since you can no longer talk back, maybe you will listen to reason. I take you home to Grande Terre where you belong. I fix you up with a sweet, young _poussin_ from the bayous, and you feel like a new man... forget ail this craziness of stealing brides and dying for love!\"\n\nYou checked carefully to make sure the coast was clear before he headed out through the garden behind the house. No one saw them. In only a short time, they were in the pirogue, moving downriver.\n\nA low moan came from Laffite when he started coming around. Only that sound, the lapping of the oars, and the eternal song of the river currents disturbed the stillness of the black night. But soon the wind rose, howling its fury.\n\nNicolette and Bermudez regained consciousness at almost the same moment. While the bride huddled down under her counterpane to hide her state of undress from the dozen City Guards crowded into her bedroom, her husband rose unsteadily to his feet.\n\n\"Monsieur,\" the tall, bronze-haired captain of the Guard questioned, \"What happened here? Who gave you that nasty bash?\"\n\nWithout answering immediately, Bermudez whirled toward the bed, his eyes flashing black fire. When he saw Nicolette there, whimpering into her pillows, an unpleasant smile twitched his lips. She stared back at him, stark terror alive in her face. She had no idea what had happened to Laffite, where he was, or if he was safe.\n\n\"Gentlemen,\" Bermudez said, turning back to the guards, \"I assume my wife's screams alerted you?\"\n\nThey all nodded and voiced agreement.\n\n\"It seems Madame Bermudez found a large, ugly river rat in her bedroom. I attacked the thing with my sword cane, but it got away. In the scuffle, I slipped and must have hit my head on the bedpost. I assure you we are both fine. Now, if you will please leave us alone... this is our wedding night, after all.\"\n\nThe men shuffled and chuckled their way out of the room, wishing the couple a _\"bon nuit_ and a \"happy honeymoon,\" a \"long life together,\" and \"many _enfants.\"_\n\n\"I will do my best!\" Bermudez called after them, then turned his attention to his bride.\n\n\"You didn't tell them the truth,\" Nicolette said, her curiosity almost as great as her relief.\n\n\"But of course not, _ch\u00e8re_! I plan to deal with Laffite myself. Perhaps he will escape me this time, perhaps not. We shall find out soon enough.\"\n\nHe sat down on the bed beside Nicolette. She tried to move away from him, but he caught her in his arms and forced her to lie still while he pulled back the covers.\n\n\"So this is what so entranced your lusty pirate that he almost got himself killed for it,\" he smirked, tugging her chemise down to free her breasts to his view. \"Quite ripe and lovely.\"\n\nSuddenly, the scene Nicolette had witnessed from her window earlier flashed back through her mind, turning her embarrassment to fury. \"As ripe and lovely as Jada?\" she hissed.\n\nWith n\u00f8t a hint of rage, only cool, amused deliberation, Diego Bermudez drew back his hand and slapped Nicolette sharply across the mouth. One shocked, hurt cry escaped her, but she bit her lower lip to avoid giving him the satisfaction of hearing more.\n\n\"You will learn, my little coquette, that what I do with other women is not any concern of yours. It is part of my business, you see. I use women... any way that they can be of the most advantage to me. Jada will find a place in my bed. You might call her an experiment in selective breeding. You see, I'm Jada's sire. She is big, strong, healthy, and she should drop a sucker a year during her fertile time. If I can father sons out of her, they should bring top dollar in the marketplace, even as babies. I've already arranged with your dear papa to send Jada to my plantation as part of the marriage settlement. She'll be your personal maid.\"\n\nNicolette realized she was gasping for breath. She had heard of such awful, incestuous practices on other plantations, but never had she dreamed that Diego was involved in anything so lurid and shameful. The thought made her feel weak and ill.\n\n\"And you plan to use me as well?\" she managed.\n\n\"But, of course, _ma coeur.\"_ Once again he was toying with her breasts, almost in a bored manner now. \"You have much to offer, _n'est-ce pas?_ Your papa had no sons. His business, his plantation, his entire fortune will come to me through you. And you will be a most acceptable wife, opening doors for me in the best circles of society. There will be no more whispers, no turned backs, because my father was of Spanish blood and my mother of no consequence among the Creoles. I have married a Vernet! They must accept me!\"\n\n\"You... you beast!\" she cried out, flailing at his chest with clenched fists. \"I'll tell Papa!\"\n\nHe caught her wrists in his hands and squeezed until fire bumed up her arms and her fingers went numb. Tears rolled out of control down her pale cheeks.\n\n\"Tell Papa whatever you like, Madame! You are a married woman now, joined to me in the eyes of God through all eternity! Your papa will stand for no scandal! Remember how quickly he sent you off to Paris the night I put an end to that simpering Octave Castaigne, who planned to marry you?\"\n\n\"You!\" she gasped. \"You killed Octave?\"\n\nHe laughed low and long before he answered, \"It really wasn't as difficult as I'd thought it would be. We both went to the _Bal du Cordon Bleu_ at the St. Philippe theater that evening. I'd been trying for weeks to provoke a confrontation. But Castaigne was a dull fellow. He always laughed off my insults without issuing a challenge. I had decided already that you were to be my ticket to the fortune I deserve. But on that evening, I was in luck.\"\n\nHe smiled down at Nicolette's wild eyes and slipped a hand beneath the covers to find more of her. She squirmed away, but Bermudez pulled her back in place.\n\n\"Did you know your Octave had a quadroon mistress, Nicolette?\" The catch in her breathing gave him the answer he had hoped for. \"Well, then, let me tell you about Lizette. Castaigne's father gave him a shotgun cottage on the ramparts and took him to the balls until an alliance was arranged. Lizette was only Fifteen then... oh, that was three years and as many children before he met you, of course. Lizette was wild when she heard of her protector's plans to marry. She came to the ball that night and flirted outrageously with every man there, including me. Castaigne challenged three of us to duels immediately. I had hoped that one of the first two fellows would finish him off. But I should know by now that if I want a job done properly, I must do it myself. I feel the same way where Laffite is concerned. I'll bide my time. Sooner or later, the advantage will be mine. I plan to take it... swiftly and surely!\"\n\nWhen he finished talking, Diego looked at Nicolette speculatively, as if he expected some response from her. She could think of nothing to say. His tales had left her feeling so drained that she wasn't sure she could speak, even if she wanted to.\n\n\"Very well, my dear. Now that you know all my secrets, we will remove to the privacy of the _garconni\u00e8re,_ where I plan to discover yours.\"\n\n\"No,\" she cried. \"Please!\"\n\n_\"Mais oui, ma petite!\"_ He tore the covers off her. \"I understand how worried you are that this lump on my head might prevent me from exerting myself. Your wifely concern touches me deeply,\" he said sarcastically, \"but I wouldn't dream of disappointing you on this of all nights. Especially after Laffite has been here to fire your passions for me. Don't worry! I'll finish what he started!\"\n\n\"Send for Maman!\" she pleaded in a panic. \"She'll dress me and see me to the _garconniere.\"_\n\n_\"Non, mais non, ch\u00e8rie!_ I wouldn't feel easy about you and your mother crossing the grounds in the dark... not with that pirate _rou\u00e9_ still skulking about.\"\n\nHe swept Nicolette into his arms. She pounded him with her fists, but he held her in a viselike grip. Moments later, he was carrying her down the same enclosed stairway that Youx had carried Laffite down earlier.\n\nShe screamed once before he clapped a hand over her mouth. But that one cry for help couldn't have been heard by anyone. Musicians played on the far side of the house and the babble of guests had increased with their intake of champagne.\n\nWhen they reached the bottom of the steps, Diego set her on her feet and ordered, \"You will walk from here!\"\n\n\"No, I won't!\" she cried, trying to free herself from his grip.\n\nHe slapped her again and said in a deadly voice, \"Don't ever try to defy me!\"\n\nHe dragged his sobbing bride along, both her wrists imprisoned by his hurtful hands. Nicolette fought to maintain her balance. Twice she stumbled and fell to her knees. Bermudez never slackened his pace, but pulled her on, letting the rough ground tear her stockings and bloody her legs.\n\nThe charming guesthouse, a smaller replica of Belle Pointe, waited for them in a quiet glen. No guests or servants disturbed the solitude of the place.\n\nThe front door stood wide to welcome the bride and groom. Bermudez caught Nicolette up in his arms once more and carried her over the threshold. Through her tears she visualized another doorway... another wedding night. Black hopelessness closed over her heart.\n\nDiego kicked the door shut behind them and strode straight through the salon to the bedroom. Without ceremony, he tossed his bride into the middle of the wide, downy mattress.\n\nHe seemed like only an ominous shadow above her as she stared through the darkness and her tears. She felt his hands then all over her\u2014ripping the undergarments from her body until she lay naked, defenseless, and shivering before him.\n\nShe heard a flint strike and suddenly a sulfurous flare torched the gloom. He stood beside the bed, leering down at her while he tore at his own clothes.\n\n\"Your time has come,\" he snarled.\n\nShe screamed when he fell upon her.\n\n###\n\n# Chapter Fourteen\n\nNicolette soon learned the only way to survive as the wife of Diego Bermudez was total suppression of all feelings, all emotions. She became not a person, but a possession\u2014something jealously guarded by the man who owned her, who despised her even as he used her. Her sole prayer, day and night, became that he would tire of her eventually and turn to Jada or some other.\n\nThe five days and nights of their honeymoon seemed like a torturous eternity to Nicolette. Diego never let her sleep at night. When he wasn't satiating his ferocious lust, he was baiting her\u2014telling her the things he had planned for her next, and at all times threatening worse if she tried to resist in any way.\n\nAs dawn broke each morning, she would lie naked on the soiled sheets with vacant eyes and a bruised body. At first, she tried to ignore the awful things he was subjecting her to, emotionally as well as physically. She tried to concentrate all her thoughts on Jean Laffite\u2014her love for him and her belief that he would return at any moment to rescue her. But as the days wore on, she gave up hope.\n\nThe rattle of steel with the rising sun became a welcome sound to Nicolette. Finished with his bride for another night, Bermudez handcuffed Nicolette's wrists to the bedpost so that she couldn't escape while he slept. Then, and only then, did she know any relief from total degradation.\n\nA smirking, preening Jada brought their meals. No other person dared intrude upon the solitude of the bride and groom. But a small eavesdropper lurked about, listening to Nicolette's cries of pain and anguish. Below the bedroom window, hidden in a bed of azaleas, Gator-Bait sat hour upon hour, trying to figure a way to rescue his mistress.\n\nOn their last night in the _garconni\u00e8re,_ a dull-eyed Nicolette felt some glimmer of hope. If she could endure these final hours alone with him, she could escape to the outside world and the protection of having others around her once more.\n\nBermudez had water brought and let her bathe that night\u2014the first time since before their wedding. Even the fact that he refused to allow her any privacy for her toilette couldn't detract from the reviving pleasure of warm water cleansing her skin and hair.\n\n\"Your bruises are healing nicely,\" he commented from his vantage point on the bed. \"Still, it will be beneficial to have Jada waiting on you when we get to The Shadows. She'll never mention any marks she might discover on your skin, for fear of my giving her the same.\"\n\nNicolette made no reply. She almost smiled at his cunning. Not once since their wedding night had he slapped her face. She had wondered at times why not. Now she understood. He didn't want to mark her where it would show.\n\n\"Hurry along with it, Nicolette!\" he snapped impatiently. \"I'm getting bored. And I have a surprise tonight that may amuse you\u2014at least, I know I'll find it rewarding.\"\n\nShe started to climb into bed naked\u2014as she had been since the first moments, when he tore her clothes off.\n\n\"Not like that!\" he said brusquely. \"You'll find undergarments and a gown in the armoire. Put them on!\"\n\nNicolette neither hesitated nor asked for explanations. Conditioned by days of being forced to submit to his will, she obeyed immediately. When she was completely covered by corset, petticoats, pantalettes, and a fashionable gown of turquoise moir\u00e9, she stood before him and waited for his next command.\n\n\"Now! You will tell me exactly how Laffite went about his deflowering process\u2014every detail, no matter how small!\"\n\nFor the first time since Diego Bermudez hauled her away from her father's house by force, Nicolette felt her old rebellious urges awaken. He could kill her, but she wouldn't reveal to him any part of the tender moments she had shared with Jean Laffite!\n\nHer stubborn silence made him angry. He strode to where she stood and repeated his command, adding at the very end, \"Or else!\"\n\nNicolette sensed the danger she faced by refusing to answer. Finally, she thought of a way out.\n\n\"Someone lied to you,\" she said. \"It wasn't Laffite.\"\n\nHe glared at her for a moment and she thought he might hit her. Then he drew back, frowning. \"Who, then?\"\n\n\"The pirates who attacked the _Fleur de Lis.\"_\n\nBermudez smiled, envisioning a gang rape. His first disappointment at not hearing of Laffite's methods vanished and a new excitement gripped him.\n\n\"Very well. I mistook the villain, but not the crime. Tell me all about it.\"\n\nHe sat down on the foot of the bed, watching her closely, an eager expression on his face.\n\nShe had no idea what to tell him, but she hurried her words to have it done with. \"Two of them burst into my cabin. The larger one hauled Sukey away, leaving me at the mercy of their captain.\"\n\n\"What was his name?\"\n\n\"I don't know.\"\n\n\"He was devilish handsome, of course.\"\n\n\"No! Brutishly ugly!\"\n\n\"Describe him to me.\"\n\nNicolette looked straight at her husband and described him instead of Silas Browne. Diego didn't seem to catch on to the deception. He nodded, seemingly fascinated.\n\n\"And what did this brute do when the other man left you together?\"\n\nNicolette felt a twinge of pain twist her heart as she relived the frightening scene. \"He grabbed me, roughly. He kissed me and tore open my bodice. I fought him and tried to bite him. He hit me and threw me to the bunk.\" She stopped for a moment, fighting for composure. She had meant to make up the scene, which she had been unable to remember before. But now, to her horror, bits and pieces were coming back to her in all their terrible, vivid details.\n\n_\"Mon Dieu!_ Don't stop there, woman! It's just getting interesting. He hit you, he threw you on the bunk, and then...?\"\n\n\"He tied me!\" she screamed at Diego, crying now.\n\n\"Fascinating!\" Diego murmured in a raspy whisper. \"He tied you so you couldn't escape him. So that you were totally at his mercy... his prisoner... his helpless victim!\"\n\nWhile Diego talked on in that strange voice, pitched high with excitement, he moved toward Nicolette. Had tears not blurred her vision, she would have seen that his hands were trembling, his face had gone pale, and an erection strained at the fabric of his britches. Only when she felt his fingers grasp the lace of her bodice and heard the material rip did she understand his intentions. With a vicious jerk he tore her gown and basque, exposing her breasts.\n\n\"He began like this?\" Diego asked. \"And then he kissed you... roughly.\"\n\nWhen Bermudez bent over Nicolette, she fought him instinctively, as if she, too, were reliving the shipboard nightmare. This fed Diego's passions. He shoved her toward the bed and ripped down the ropes holding back the mosquito _baire._ In minutes, he had tied her spread-eagle fashion on the bed. She struggled against the restraints, but there was no use.\n\n\"Once he had you bound securely, what then? Did he fall on you at once, or toy with you first?\"\n\n\"I... I don't know exactly.\" She saw the look of rage in his eyes and added quickly, \"He tossed my skirts up over my face. I couldn't see anything... I could only feel and hear.\"\n\n\"And how did it feel? Was it good or did he hurt you... make you cry out, begging for mercy?\"\n\nTo answer this question would sentence her to his abuse either way, and she knew it. If she said the man hurt her, Diego would do the same. But if she said she enjoyed it, she would be punished with even more severe treatment.\n\n\"Well?\" he demanded.\n\n\"It hurt!\" she screamed.\n\nImmediately, the lights in the room dimmed for Nicolette as Diego threw the heavy fabric of her skirt and petticoats over her face. He no longer waited for her description of the pirate's proceedings, but went about inventing his own depravities.\n\nDuring the long night, when all she could do was strain against the ropes and pray for dawn, the whole awful scene with Silas Browne returned to haunt her. He had stripped her, fondled her, told her what he meant to do in the most vivid and descriptive gutter language. But he was interrupted before he could rape her. Jean Laffite's boat had been spotted in the distance and word sent down to Silas Browne. It was then that the pirate hauled her up on deck, meaning to kill Laffite, then take his time with Nicolette.\n\nJean Laffite had saved her from degradation at the hands of Silas Browne, but no one came to save her from Diego Bermudez.\n\nGator-Bait knew the terrain among the bayous and swamps. He knew, too, of Laffite's storehouse and hideout near Donaldsonville. He feared Laffite, but more than that, he feared for the life of his mistress. She had risked everything to save him. He could do no less for her. The small boy hurried with the quickness of a young fox to find help.\n\n\"Them high-falutin' niggers don't give a damn!\" he muttered to himself, seething with anger every time he thought of how Sukey had threatened to take a whip to him for eavesdropping on the honeymooners when he'd tried to explain that M'sieu Diego was hurting the mistress bad. \"Ain't nobody gonna do that to Madame Boss and get away with it!\" he yelled out, shivering with fear when the echo of his own voice bounced back at him unexpectedly.\n\nBut still he hurried on. It was near dawn, four nights after the wedding, when he found the rough cypress warehouse used by the smugglers. Quietly, he eased through the shadows, looking for any signs of life. Not a torch lit the place and no human beings were in sight. He leaned against the splintery side of the building for a moment, trying to catch his breath and decide what to do next.\n\n\"Gotcha! You little sneak-thief!\"\n\nA calloused hand grabbed Gator-Bait by the scruff of the neck. He let out a yelp like a trapped rabbit.\n\n\"Don't hurt me, massa! Please! I's come to fetch the Boss... quick!\"\n\n\"The Boss?\" the grizzled watchman repeated scornfully. \"You think he'd have any truck with the scrawny likes of you?\"\n\nThe man's grating laughter made Gator-Bait's nerves twitch with fear. He squirmed against the grip and fought to control the scared quiver in his voice.\n\n\"I reckon as how he would, seein' I belongs to him and Madame Boss and she's in a powerful heap of trouble! And I further reckon as how he'll be mighty put out and fearsome mad if he don't get to hear what I got to tell him!\"\n\n\"What's all this commotion?\" another man growled from the shadows of the doorway.\n\n\"Boss!\" Gator-Bait squealed, recognizing Laffite's voice. \"It's the mistress! That man makes her scream and cry all the time!\"\n\nThe deadly scowl on Jean Laffite's face could be seen in the violet light of early dawn.\n\nNicolette endured her last night of torture by telling herself over and over again that with the rising sun freedom would come. Once she left the _garconni\u00e8re_ to rejoin her family, Diego would not dare treat her as he had these first days.\n\nHe won't have a chance, she told herself. If my parents won't protect me from him, I'll run away... to Jean!\n\nBermudez allowed Jada in to help Nicolette bathe and dress before they were to leave the honeymoon cottage. The young slave obviously understood what the arrangement among the three of them would be\u2014that she would be the master's lover while his wife would take a secondary position. The idea pleased Jada and made her feel superior. Her outspokenness offended Nicolette, but she kept her peace.\n\n\"I reckon M'sieu Diego done finished with you. Pretty soon you be swellin' up like a sow at litter time.\" Jada preened before the mirror, running her long fingers appreciatively over her slender waist. \"M'sieu Diego, he say he gonna put me in the room next to his over to the plantation. He say he don't even like the sight of a woman when she's carryin' a sucker... it purely make him sick! So I'll be the one what gets the lovin' from now on 'stead of you, missy!\"\n\n\"You're welcome to him,\" Nicolette said under her breath, then she added, \"You two deserve each other!\"\n\n\"You best hurry and get dressed. M'sieu Diego say he be back any minute and he want you ready to travel.\"\n\nNicolette stared at Jada's condescending face. \"Travel? But where are we going? We're supposed to spend the first day after our honeymoon with my family. That's tradition!\"\n\nJada gave a harsh laugh. \"M'sieu Diego say, 'Piss on tradition!' We goin' to The Shadows... right now... today!\"\n\nNicolette felt her mouth go dry and her hands begin to tremble. She had to get away! A knock at the front door made her jump. Jada went to answer it and came back looking angry.\n\n\"It's that no-good little nigger of yours. He wanted to see you, but I sent him off. He got his nerve! M'sieu Diego say nobody is to see you!\"\n\nNicolette noticed an envelope in Jada's hand and asked, \"What's that?\"\n\n\"Ain't none of your never-mind! This here's for M'sieu Diego.\"\n\nAt that moment, Diego Bermudez came into the room. \"What's for me, Jada?\" he asked, after giving Nicolette a cold glance and the slave girl a brief but passionate kiss. She lingered in his embrace as he opened the envelope.\n\n\"That Gator-Bait done brung this for you, M'sieu.\"\n\nDiego frowned. He tore open the wax seal and his obsidian eyes darted over the page. Slowly, a smile started, then grew and spread.\n\n\"Our plans have changed, Jada.\" He addressed the slave as if Nicolette were of no importance and beneath being informed of anything he had in mind. \"How would you like to go to New Orleans?\"\n\nJada threw her arms around his neck and hugged him soundly. \"Oh, M'sieu Diego, I ain't never seen N'Orleans!\"\n\n\"Well, you're about to.\"\n\nNicolette remained silent, her mind whirling with plans of escape. She paid little attention to anything going on around her until she heard Diego mention Jean Laffite's name. Then her head jerked toward him.\n\n\"What did you say?\" she demanded.\n\n\"Oh, still interested in your river rat, are you? Well, it seems he's forgotten all about you and our little disagreement. In fact, he's invited me to sit in on a poker game this very night. So instead of going to The Shadows as I'd planned, we'll head for New Orleans. I believe your house in Bourbon Street is ready. Jada can keep an eye on you there while I go to Laffite's blacksmith shop and relieve him of some of his Spanish doubloons.\"\n\nNicolette sat staring, trying not to show her excitement. Surely, this must be a plot on Laffite's part to rescue her. Her heart pounded with renewed hope.\n\n\"I'm sorry, but you won't be allowed to see your lover, _Madame Bermuda._ I plan to tell him that I've left you at The Shadows to rest after our exhausting honeymoon. And, too, this being the fever season, I couldn't be expected to subject my lovely bride to such dangers. Especially when she's probably carrying the next Bermudez heir!\"\n\nNicolette couldn't suppress a slight smile. She was not pregnant! Her proof had come only hours before.\n\nHe jerked her arm roughly to make her rise and commanded, \"We'll leave now. The carriage is waiting.\"\n\nThe three passengers, Bermudez, Nicolette, and Jada, boarded quickly and left before anyone on the plantation saw them.\n\nOnly Gator-Bait knew of the hasty departure, and even the driver failed to realize that the carriage hosted a stowaway. Gator-Bait clung to the luggage rack as the vehicle swung down the drive.\n\n###\n\n# Chapter Fifteen\n\n\"He's not coming!\" Laffite said to Pierre as the two waited in the dim, smoky interior of their blacksmith shop on the corner of Bourbon and St. Philippe streets.\n\n\"Take it easy, Jean. Have you ever known Bermudez to pass up a game? It's early yet.\"\n\nPierre smiled when a lovely woman with skin the color of wild honey entered the room with a tray of tankards and a plate of pineapple cheese. She offered one of the mugs of ale to Laffite, but he never noticed that she was there.\n\nHer almond eyes conveyed her worry to Pierre. Though Marie Louise Villars, a _griffe_ by virtue of her white father and quadroon mother, was Pierre's mistress, she loved both these men in different ways. She knew the joy... the misery... brought by deep affection, and she ached with empathy for Jean Laffite.\n\n\"Will he be all right?\" she whispered to Pierre.\n\nHer lover slipped a caressing hand about her slim waist clad in guinea-blue calico.\n\n\"We can only hope, my darling,\" he answered.\n\n\"You two talk as if I'm dying of fever or something!\" Jean Laffite shot at them, attempting a weak smile.\n\n\"That is better, _Mon capitaine,\"_ Marie said. \"Some fevers of the heart can be more deadly than those of the body. Your brother and I only wish for your happiness.\"\n\nThe gentle woman went to Laffite and placed a consoling hand on his shoulder. He covered it with his own and squeezed affectionately.\n\n\"Pierre, where did you ever find such a woman? If I had half a wit about me, I'd give up this mad scheme to steal another man's wife and steal Marie Louise instead.\"\n\nShe smiled at one brother and then the other and spoke in a lyrical voice. \"That would be very difficult to do, _mon fr\u00e8re._ Pierre is my life!\"\n\n\"I know,\" Laffite answered, matching her quiet tone. \"And Nicolette is mine.\"\n\n\"So how do you plan to pull this off?\" Pierre questioned.\n\nLaffite shook his head. \"I only wish I knew. The first step is to get Bermudez here. Once the game begins, I'll have to make up the rest as I go along. I'd like to kill him outright the moment he steps through that door. But being hanged for murder isn't part of my plan.\"\n\nNicolette plotted her escape silently through the long hours of riding the corduroy roads that led to New Orleans. But upon their arrival in the almost deserted city, she realized how futile her dreams had been. As their carriage rumbled along Bourbon Street, she gazed out on shuttered houses\u2014their interiors lampless and empty. All her friends, her neighbors, were in the country. Her own house, the wedding gift from her parents, would be the sole occupied residence in this part of the city.\n\nHer hopes went as black as the silent night, then flickered suddenly, leaping with the welcoming flame, which lit the doorway on the opposite banquette. There on the corner an old building of French design squatted unpretentiously, its twin dormer windows looking like eyes staring at her own house across the street. She had never really taken note of the blacksmith shop before, though it had claimed that corner for much longer than she had lived. But now, the quaint old building and the dim lamp guttering in the darkness gave her new hope.\n\nLaffite was there! Laffite would save her!\n\n\"Close the gate behind the carriage... and lock it!\" she heard Diego order their driver.\n\nThe horses' hooves clattered hollowly on the flagstones of the carriage entrance. The deep clang of iron and the click of the massive lock made Nicolette shiver. Once more she felt like a prisoner.\n\nAnd so she was. Diego hurried his wife and Jada into the new townhouse and through the _petit salon_ to the bedroom so quickly that Nicolette had no time to admire the rich furniture created especially for her by Napoleon's cabinetmaker or the exquisite gifts of silver and crystal, which had been sent to their wedding and placed here during the past week by her father's servants. In less time than it took her eyes to adjust to the lamplight inside, she was in the master bedroom. Diego stood before her, a large key in his hands.\n\n\"I'm going to lock the two of you in the house, Jada.\" He spoke to the servant, again ignoring his wife.\n\n\"As you wish, M'sieu Diego,\" Jada replied with a smile that invited and promised pleasure.\n\nNicolette felt her last hope draining away. With the doors locked from the outside, she would have no way of escape. She rushed at Bermudez, screaming, \"No! You can't!\" as she struggled to wrest the key from him.\n\nHe fought her off with little effort and shoved her down on the bed.\n\n\"Very well! If this is what you want, you'll have it!\"\n\nNicolette shrank back, expecting him to strike her. Instead, he brought out the handcuffs and damped them on her wrists, attaching them to the high post of the tester bed.\n\n\"I had planned to give you the freedom of the house. But I see you can't be trusted.\"\n\nHe turned to leave, then went to kiss Jada.\n\n\"Later for us, _ma enfant,\"_ he said to the dusky beauty. \"Wait up for me.\"\n\n_\"Oui, M'sieu,\"_ she answered in a sultry voice, reaching for his lips once more and letting her hand caress him boldly.\n\nNicolette looked away from the two of them, sick with disgust and hopelessness.\n\n\"He's come!\" Dominique Youx called from the doorway. \"The carriage just entered the gates.\"\n\nJean Laffite sprang to his feet, alert and ready for action. \"The others, Dom?\"\n\n\"All here\u2014waiting in the courtyard to catch a breeze, Boss. _Mon Dieu,_ the heat in this place is awful! What a night for a game! It will not be who stays in long enough to win, but who can bear the heat long enough to play!\"\n\nLaffite squinted one eye at his older brother, a habit he had when in-deep concentration. \"Perhaps it's the devil's own breath, _mon fr\u00e8re,_ and he'll come to claim his disciple tonight! Call the others now, please.\"\n\nThe players filed in from the tiny courtyard out back\u2014Messieurs Bernard de Marigny, his graying hair as rumpled as his suit and his Creole features set with a determination to win; John Blanque, Laffite's business manager, a sharp man with money, at the gaming table or away from it, and finally, Auguste Davezac, a rich merchant who traded with the Baratarians to his own advantage and to theirs. They were Jean Laffite's friends\u2014men who would not tip the authorities to the fact that the wanted men were in the city.\n\nLaffite greeted each of them solemnly, shaking hands and indicating chairs around the green baize-covered table.\n\n\"Only four of us?\" Davezac questioned when the men had taken their places. \"Why not have Pierre sit in? An even number's unlucky at the card table.\"\n\n\"Unlucky for whom?\" de Marigny chuckled. \"I put no faith in luck, my friend.\"\n\n\"Not four. Five,\" Laffite answered, counting out ivory chips for his guests. \"Monsieur Bermudez will be joining us shortly.\"\n\nThe other men exchanged glances. All three knew that Diego Bermudez had married the woman the Baratarians called \"Madame Boss.\"\n\n\"What's the pot limit tonight, Laffite?\" John Blanque asked, counting out a stack of gold coins.\n\n_\"No limit!\"_\n\nEyebrows shot up around the table. Laffite was not a devil-may-care sort. They all knew him as a serious businessman and a poker player who looked on the game as a business. But to set no limit on a game? That was the work of a madman\u2014a fool! A man could lose everything!\n\n\"See here, Laffite\" Blanque began, \"I handle your finances and I'm responsible. Granted, you're a rich man, but I won't see you squander every bit and piece on a night's entertainment. Why, we've never played for limitless stakes before\n\n\"And never will again, John. Only tonight. Trust me.\"\n\nJohn Blanque stared for a few moments into Laffite's face. He had never seen such stark pain and determination mingled in any man's eyes before.\n\n\"It's your game, Jean. You name the stakes. We'll play by them. Right, gentlemen?\"\n\nThe others answered Blanque with nods and quiet affirmations. They looked up from their counting when the fifth player entered.\n\n\"Good evening, messieurs.\" Diego Bermudez's voice was cold, his bow stiff.\n\nLaffite stood quickly. The two men locked gazes long enough to fill the room with uneasy tension. Davezac, de Marigny, and Blanque all felt that the two men were about to challenge each other to a duel instead of a poker game. No one voiced that opinion, however.\n\nLaffite smiled finally, relieving some of the electricity about the table.\n\n\"Your rules, monsieur?\" Bermudez asked with forced amiability.\n\nLaffite fanned the cards expertly to draw for deal and answered, \"No limit, monsieur,\" with equal saccharinity.\n\n\"Ah! A man's game for a change,\" Bermudez said, counting out his money. \"I've been waiting for this a long time.\"\n\n\"As... have... I!\" Laffite drawled as he dealt the cards.\n\nThe first hand went to Bermudez. He raked in the chips with fingers trembling as they might have if they were stroking a woman's breasts, Laffite observed. The next hand was Davezac's. When three more went to Bermudez, the Spanish Creole began to believe it was his night. He took chances, bluffed boldly and badly, and lost to Laffite all that he had won, plus more.\n\nBermudez mopped his brow and tried to laugh off this turn of luck. \"Only a momentary lapse, messieurs. I assure you, I plan to win tonight! And I've come prepared to stake all I have in order to strip you bare. Deal the cards, Blanque!\"\n\nRound and round the deal passed. The heat intensified. The smoke thickened as cheroots were lit, forgotten, relit. Marie Louise moved like a shadow, refilling tankards. Pierre and Dominique sat against one wall\u2014silent and alert, observing. Midnight died and the next day was born. Chips clinked. Cards drew damp with sweat, were tossed away and replaced with a new deck.\n\nBlanque and de Marigny lost heavily. Davezac stayed even. The piles of gleaming ivory in front of Laffite and Bermudez, who faced each other across the table, grew and grew as the game went on. Conversation was sparse\u2014an occasional low curse, a dry laugh, a \"well played\" exchanged now and again.\n\nDiego Bermudez bet heavily on three queens, sure that he would take the pot. The other three folded after drawing their cards. Laffite checked to Bermudez, who doubled the bet, trying to suppress a confident smile. His opponent saw his raise and doubled it. Diego's smile turned to a nervous twitch. If he lost this hand, his cash would be gone. Would Laffite accept his marker?\n\n\"And I raise you another five thousand!\" Bermudez announced, shoving the remainder of his chips to the center of the table.\n\nLaffite studied the five cards in his hand, one eye almost closed. He looked up at Bermudez, who was sweating profusely now, then back to his hand.\n\n\"And another ten.\"\n\nBermudez jerked in his seat as if he'd been shot. _He must be bluffing!_ he thought.\n\n\"You'll accept paper?\" Bermudez asked confidently.\n\n\"Not for cash.\"\n\n\"But you can't do this! You know I'm good for it. And, if I'm not, my father-in-law will cover the marker.\"\n\n\"I don't see Monsieur Vernet in this game,\" Laffite answered coolly. \"As I said, I won't take your paper in lieu of gold. I will, however, accept a note on your plantation.\"\n\nBermudez squirmed in his chair and stared at the three ladies in his hand.\n\n\"Nicolette's house across the street!\" he said quickly. \"It's mine now that we're married. I'll put that in the game!\"\n\n\"No,\" Laffite answered.\n\n\"But the plantation .\n\n\"Take it or leave it, Bermudez.\" He shoved a paper, ink pot, and quill across the table.\n\nSlowly, the man wrote his I.O.U. and placed it with the mound of chips. \"Call,\" he said in an unsteady voice.\n\nThe tension around the table tightened like a band of steel. Not a sound could be heard but the heavy breathing of the seven men in the room. Pierre and Dominique both let their hands rest lightly on the pistols at their belts, not sure what the turn of the cards might bring.\n\n\"For God's sake, Laffite, I said call!\" Bermudez cried, half-rising from his seat.\n\nLaffite spread his hand face up and said, \"Two pair\u2014aces and kings!\"\n\nDiego Bermudez gave a shout of joy and raked in the pot as if he were afraid someone might steal it. He all but tipped over the table in his excitement. The fever was upon him. Never had he won so much. Clearly, the night was his!\n\n\"Very well, gentlemen!\" Bermudez said with new confidence in his voice. \"I believe it's my deal and my advantage. Lady Luck is on my side tonight.\" Made bold by his winnings he relaxed and talked while he dealt. \"I've always favored poker over other games of chance. Monsieur de Marigny, I believe you enjoy craps more, but dice games are not where I excel. Lucky in love, unlucky at cards, they say. But I am the exception to the rule. I have four queens, not just the three that brought me this fortune!\"\n\nLaffite burned to ask about Nicolette, but dared not. Pierre, picking up on his brother's thoughts, said, \"Ah, yes, your bride. How does she like her new house across the street, monsieur?\"\n\n\"She's not there,\" Bermudez answered, shooting a nervous glance at the older Laffite. \"I left her at my plantation.\"\n\n\"So soon after your wedding?\" Pierre persisted, grinning innocently.\n\nBermudez offered Pierre a cold sneer. \"We've had time enough together to make it worth my while. She'll be panting for me by the time I get back.\"\n\nLaffite made an angry sound and appeared to be about to rise and go for Bermudez's throat. A gently restraining hand touched his shoulder and Marie said in a soothing voice, \"More ale, _Capitaine?'_\n\nLaffite eased back down to his chair and Dominique Youx at the same time relaxed his trigger grip.\n\n\"Are we going to play cards or talk?\" Bernard de Marigny complained.\n\nThe game resumed. Diego Bermudez, flushed with his good fortune, doubled and redoubled bets\u2014lost and lost again. But still the glow of that enormous winning hand made him hopeful. He had had one fortune before him tonight and each new hand held out the promise of another.\n\nWhen he was dealt the 6, 7, 8, 10 of spades and the ace of diamonds, he felt his time had come. The odds against him were astronomical. No one draws to an inside straight and wins. Still, even with five players at the table, he could draw another spade for a flush. Surely, no other hand could beat that. He made his decision.\n\n\"How many?\" Blanque, the dealer, demanded.\n\n\"Give me one card,\" Bermudez answered, discarding his ace.\n\n\"Laffite?\" the dealer asked.\n\n\"None.\"\n\nBermudez gulped. Eyes shifted around the table. Davezac, to Blanque's left, checked, waiting to hear the other bets. Bernard de Marigny opened with a cautious thousand. Laffite saw that bet. Bermudez, having difficulty controlling his excitement, raised ten thousand when the betting reached him.\n\n\"Too rich for my blood,\" Davezac said, before even looking to see what cards he would draw.\n\nBlanque and de Marigny agreed, folding immediately. Only Laffite, with his pat hand, saw Bermudez's raise, and put in another ten thousand on top of it.\n\n\"Ready, gentlemen?\" Blanque asked.\n\n\"Ready.\" Bermudez and Laffite answered in unison.\n\nAgain, the title to the Bermudez plantation was in the pot. The continued raises had outstripped Diego's diminished funds. He would insist that Laffite take a marker on the Bourbon Street house, if he had to.\n\nJohn Blanque carefully dealt one card across the table to Diego Bermudez. He stared at it for several moments, thinking, nine of spades... be there! He lifted one corner\u2014black! A spade! Nine or not, he had a winning hand! In one swift motion, he looked at the card and placed it where it belonged in his hand\u2014between the 8 and 10. The card was the 9!\n\n\"Your bets, gentlemen,\" Blanque said softly.\n\nLaffite stared across the table, through the smoke, at Diego Bermudez. He was perspiring more than ever. His eyes glittered like black glass. Laffite had seen this look of greed, this thirst for blood, many times before. But never had it been as unbecoming as on Diego Bermudez.\n\n\"Twenty-five thousand,\" Laffite opened.\n\n\"Of course, you can't refuse my marker on the Bourbon Street house now,\" Bermudez said, his voice quivering with anticipation.\n\n\"I can and I do.\"\n\n\"Goddammit, Laffite! This is the last hand! My plantation's already up... my slaves... every cent I have in the world. You have to take my house! It's all I have left to wager.\"\n\n_\"All?\"_ Laffite drawled, boring into Bermudez with eyes so dark green they were almost black.\n\n\"Yes, dammit, all!\"\n\nLaffite didn't say another word, but continued to stare. The other men at the table shifted uneasily.\n\n\"You can't be serious!\" Bermudez said at last.\n\n\"I haven't said anything,\" Laffite answered. \"But if you plan to stay in this game, you'd better think of something fast!\"\n\n\"I have thought of something,\" Bermudez answered, a bemused smirk on his thin lips. \"I have one thing you won't turn down. Give me the paper.\"\n\nLaffite passed paper, pen, and ink once more.\n\n\"This is all academic anyway, Laffite. I have you beat, you know,\" Bermudez said as he scrawled something on the paper, folded it and handed it to Laffite. \"You will, I assume, accept _this_ marker?\"\n\nLaffite opened the paper and allowed a slow smile to take possession of his face.\n\n\"Well?\" Bermudez asked, annoyed. \"Do you accept?\"\n\nLaffite only continued to smile and nodded.\n\n\"Then I call you with this marker, Laffite! Let's have done with it!\"\n\nSlowly, with almost malicious enjoyment, Laffite turned over his cards, one by one. He had hearts, queen high, and down from that lovely lady who reminded him so much of his Nikki, trailed the jack, 10, 9, 8. A straight flush\u2014a single card higher than the one Diego Bermudez held.\n\nBermudez slammed his cards down on the table. \"No!\" he yelled. \"It can't be! I had this hand! You bloody bastard! _You cheat!\"_\n\nDominique Youx caught Bermudez from behind before he could draw his concealed weapon. The man struggled, but Dom shoved him out of the door before he could begin a fight.\n\nJohn Blanque flipped the marker open and gasped, _\"Holy Mother of God!_ Jean, you've won the man's wife from him!\"\n\n###\n\n# Chapter Sixteen\n\nDeep-throated thunder rumbled out over the river, following in the wake of heat lightning. Nicolette lay on the bed, staring out at the periodic illumination. It seemed hours had passed since she gave up on her struggle to get free of the cruel cuffs restraining her wrists. Jada had long since left her alone, in the dark, with only her fears and the sounds of the night to keep her company.\n\nShe wondered if Diego had told the truth about the poker game with Jean Laffite. How could two men who had tried to kill each other barely a week ago sit down together at a gaming table now? She had heard whispers about Diego's passion for the sport. But why would Laffite risk coming to New Orleans and the danger of being arrested for an evening of gambling?\n\nUnless... she had to allow her mind to grasp at straws... unless he had some plan for her rescue and its success depended upon her being in New Orleans.\n\nThrough the long, black hours, Nicolette had more time than she would have liked to dwell on her foolishness and the mistakes in her past. She had not loved enough. She had trusted the wrong people. Worst of all, she thought, I refused to listen to my own heart.\n\nShe prayed with an awesome will to be given another chance. But her loneliness, her fear, and the dark of the night began closing in as if the walls themselves moved toward her.\n\n\"Ps-s-s-t!' The sound came from the door which opened onto the second-storey gallery. \"Ps-s-s-t!\" There it was again.\n\nNicolette turned her head and squinted her eyes, trying to see if anyone was there.\n\n\"Who is it?\" she called.\n\n\"Madame Boss,\" a familiar voice answered, \"it's me, Gator-Bait.\"\n\n\"What? Gator-Bait?\" She could hardly believe the joy she felt at the sound of his voice. \"How did you get here?\"\n\n\"Never mind,\" he said, slipping a skinny arm through the jalousies to feel for the latch. \"I got news!\"\n\nHe moved so quickly that to Nicolette it seemed he never opened the shutters, but came through them by magic. In an instant, he stood beside the bed, his tiny hand resting on her cheek.\n\n\"Oh, Madame Boss, what's he done to you?\"\n\nShe could tell he was crying for her and she had to fight back her own emotions. \"I'm all right. Tell me, what news?\"\n\n\"The Boss, he right across the street, he and M'sieu Diego, both. I been outside the blacksmith shop most all night, listening and watching. They got gold like I ain't never seen stacked up on that green table. But that M'sieu Diego, he tell the Boss that you ain't here\u2014that he left you at his plantation!\"\n\n\"Oh, no!\" Nicolette's breath caught at this information. How could Laffite rescue her if he didn't even know she was there? \"Gator-Bait, can you find a way to let Monsieur Boss know where I am?\"\n\n\"Me, I will!\" he answered importantly.\n\n\"Go, then. Quickly!\"\n\nShe watched the diminutive figure disappear over the gallery railing into the magnolia tree to shinny to the ground.\n\n\"Hurry! Oh, please, hurry!\" she whispered.\n\n\"I got his gun,\" Dominique Youx announced once he had disposed of Diego Bermudez. \"He won't come back looking for a fight.\"\n\nBlanque, de Marigny, and Davezac still sat at the table, staring at Jean Laffite with mingled expressions of shock, awe, and amusement. John Blanque had smoothed out the I.O.U. on the green baize table for all of them to read.\n\n\"I'm not concerned about Bermudez at the moment,\" Laffite said. \"What we have to do is get out of New Orleans fast. No doubt, he's gone straight to Governor Claiborne to claim any reward he might offer for finding out where we are. I mean to make a beeline for his plantation and collect my winnings. There's no telling what he'll do to Nicolette if he reaches her before I do.\"\n\n\"Your horses are saddled and ready, Boss,\" Marie Louise said quietly. \"I had the stableboy see to them.\"\n\n\"Then let's be off!\" Dominique shouted. \"Time and the devil wait for no man!\"\n\nThe three brothers rushed through the back door and leaped onto their horses.\n\n\"First man to The Shadows wins all the gold I raked in tonight!\" Laffite yelled.\n\n\"You're on!\" his brothers chorused.\n\n\"Wait! Wait, Boss!\" a child's voice cried.\n\nLaffite jerked at the reins so hard that his black stallion reared and whinnied, pawing the air.\n\n\"Who's that?\" Laffite demnded.\n\n\"It's Gator-Bait, M'sieu. Madame Boss, she ain't out to the plantation. She's right over there!\" He pointed across the street and all eyes followed.\n\n\"Blood of a thousand pigs!\" Dominique whooped. \"The place is afire!\"\n\n\"Get pails and water, you two!\" Laffite ordered. \"Gator-Bait, run to the Cabildo and alert the watchmen. Hurry, boy!\"\n\nLaffite leaped off his horse and charged across the street. Finding the gate to the courtyard locked, he scaled the wrought iron and tried the carriage entrance to the house. Smoke in the courtyard was so thick already that he found himself choking. He ripped the silk scarf from his neck and tied it over his nose and mouth. He could see the flames inside consuming the first floor and starting up the broad staircase.\n\n\"Help me!\" came a feeble cry from the window above.\n\n\"Nikki!\" he called back. \"I'm coming!\"\n\nWith as little effort as the young slave had used earlier, Laffite climbed the ancient magnolia tree and leaped over the gallery railing. The wooden shutters splintered under the force of his boot's swift kick.\n\n\"Nikki!\" he called out.\n\n\"Here, Jean!\" she sobbed. \"Cuffed to the bed.\"\n\nNo lamp burned in the room, but even if there had been light, the thick clouds of smoke boiling up from the floor below would have made visibility difficult.\n\nLaffite worked frantically, trying to pry the lock on the handcuffs. If only he could see what type these were. He had worked his way out of enough manacles in his time to spring any lock, if he knew what he was dealing with.\n\n\"Oh, Jean,\" Nicolette moaned, \"I can't breathe!\"\n\n\"A moment, darling.\" He located a flint and struck it, holding it close enough to examine her restraints.\n\nHis laugh sounded quite out of place in the smoke-filled room. \"Child's play!\" he said, twisting a spring, which flipped a lock to free Nicolette from her shackles.\n\nIn one swift motion, Laffite grabbed Nicolette up in his arms and fled to the gallery. The street beyond had become a hive of activity. Soldiers and citizens worked side by side, trying to put out the blaze and keep it from spreading. It would never do to try and escape the front way.\n\n\"Does the courtyard have an alley entrance, Nikki?\"\n\n\"Yes. Right back there,\" she said, pointing into the shadows toward Royal Street and the river.\n\nThey were down the tree and halfway across the courtyard before they realized they were not alone. A figure materialized from behind a banana tree and blocked their passage.\n\n\"So, you managed to save your winnings!\" Diego Bermudez growled. \"And all for nothing! You see, I couldn't possibly let either of you escape. Arson, after all, is a capital crime. And Nicolette saw me start the fire.\"\n\n\"No! I didn't see anything!\" Nicolette insisted, clutching Laffite's arm.\n\nA metallic click told Jean Laffite that Bermudez had unsheathed his sword from its cane.\n\n\"You're a poor liar, madame. And since I know I can't be trusted, I've learned never to trust anyone else. Besides, I have a score to settle with your river rat once and for all!\"\n\n\"Jean?\" Nicolette whispered.\n\nLaffite made no answer, but shoved her behind him for safety.\n\n\"You won't get away with this, Bermudez. Every man at the blacksmith shop knows the outcome of the game, what you wagered and I won. Do you think they wouldn't come after you if Nicolette and I are found murdered?\"\n\n\"Ha-ha! _If_ they found you, they'd probably come after me to give me a reward. As for my wife, there are certain unwritten laws about adulterous women and the rights of their husbands. But you see, I'd never leave my fate in the hands of anything so unpredictable as the law. Though I'd enjoy toying a bit with the two of you, I plan to put you away quickly and neatly. Your bodies will be burned beyond recognition before the night's over. Should they recognize your corpses, they'll be locked in a final, incriminating embrace in the remains of the bed from which you just liberated your lover. Certain parties in another part of town will swear that I was in conference with them all night and nowhere near the scene when the fire broke out.\"\n\n\"You are a clever man, Bermudez,\" Laffite said. \"But clever and cautious are two different things. You really should have checked the courtyard to make sure there would be no witnesses to your crime.\"\n\n\"I did and there won't be!\" Diego snapped. \"You might as well save your breath. I'm not buying any of your tricks.\"\n\n\"Now, Gator-Bait!\" Laffite yelled.\n\nThe boy, who had returned after running for help, slammed his whole weight against the back of Bermudez's legs, buckling his knees. Laffite rushed forward and landed a glancing blow to the man's jaw. The sword cane clattered to the flagstones. Laffite would have reached for it and ended the fight then and there, had the iron gates not swung open to admit the firefighters at that moment.\n\n\"Run, Nikki! To the back gate! We have to get to the alley before they spot us!\"\n\n\"I brung your horse around, Boss!\"\n\n\"Good boy!\"\n\nThe three figures disappeared through the oleander hedge and out the wooden gate before anyone knew they had been there. Behind them they heard Bermudez shouting, \"Stop them! They set the fire! Don't let the arsonists get away!\"\n\nLaffite leaped onto his horse, pulling Nicolette up in front of him and Gator-Bait behind. The well-loaded beast sent dirt flying as he galloped across Royal Street and down Dumaine toward the levee.\n\n\"We're in luck,\" Laffite whispered against Nicolette's hair. \"Every man in the city who isn't dead or asleep is fighting the fire. We'll make our getaway good!\"\n\nNicolette sat stunned and silent. So many things had happened in the past weeks, days, hours. She felt as if she had aged beyond her years, made more mistakes than one person should be allowed in a lifetime. Now, miraculously, she had the second chance she had prayed for so fervently. The realization made her want to weep for joy. Instead, she clutched the strong arms encircling her waist and let her head press close to the broad shoulder behind her.\n\nIt seemed only moments before they reached the levee. As usual, the port of New Orleans was crowded with ships from many nations. The citizens might leave the city from April to November to escape the threat of yellow fever, but the harbor never closed... never slept.\n\nLaffite urged the winded horse on to the foot of Conti Street.\n\n\"There she is\u2014our transport to freedom, darling.\"\n\nNicolette looked in the direction he indicated. Already, oyster-sellers were setting up their stalls. Behind them a curtain of crimson fluttered in the light breeze\u2014the red sails of the oyster luggers belonging to the poor Baratarians who eeked a living out of the soil and surrounding waters.\n\n\"My friend, Salvator Guadaloupe, has promised us safe passage back through the bayous in his scarlet-winged chariot.\"\n\n\"Hallo, you!\" hailed a swarthy fisherman from the bow of one of the rakish boats.\n\nLaffite waved back and called, \"My brothers?\"\n\n\"Onboard already, Boss!\"\n\n\"You have room for three more, I hope?\"\n\n\"You no worry! I pack you like sardines!\"\n\nLaffite laughed and dismounted, lifting his arms to Nicolette. As she slid down, making contact with his firm chest, feeling the heat and the tension of his body against hers, she was reminded of their wedding night on the beach at Grande Terre. Everything between then and now she decided to forget. Only the two of them and their love for each other counted.\n\nLaffite pulled her close. Resting his cheek against hers, he whispered, \"Once before I brought you to this levee... long, long ago. You were only a child, Nikki, but I loved you even then. I hated myself for wanting you so. I tried to forget I'd ever met you. But fate refused to leave us alone... or apart. Now... ?\"\n\nNicolette went up on tiptoe to reach his lips with hers. She kissed him slowly, tenderly, then said, \"I'm not a child any longer, Jean Laffite. I know what I feel... what I want.\"\n\nHe held her away for a moment and stared into her smoky-blue eyes as if he might read her thoughts.\n\n\"What do you want, Nicolette?\"\n\n_\"You_!\" she answered, circling his waist with her arms and pressing her face against his chest. \"You and only you, with all my heart and soul... forevermore!\"\n\nHe caught her chin in his hand and tilted her face up to his. Just before their lips met, she saw his smile. It warmed her through and erased all the pain that had brought them to this point. She thought her chest would burst with the happy beating of her heart. Then his lips took away all other sensations.\n\nFor the first time in her life, Nicolette felt free and alive\u2014totally loved and in love.\n\n###\n\n# Chapter Seventeen\n\nThe tap-tap of a hammer disturbed the early-morning silence in Bourbon Street. An old man, his dingy shirtsleeves banded in black crepe, went about his task of hanging death notices throughout the city. Later, the citizens would learn from these public announcements that a prominent Creole had died\u2014where, when, and the hour of the funeral.\n\nThe crier hung his last black-bordered sheet and ambled on, passing the Vernet\/Bermudez house, which still smoldered from the ruinous fire two nights before. Only hours had passed since the rubble had cooled enough to allow rescuers in. It was then that they discovered her body\u2014the remains charred beyond recognition. But, of course, everyone knew who it was.\n\nP\u00e8re Antoine, with an escort of City Guards, rode immediately to Belle Pointe to break the sad news to the Vernet family.\n\nSuch a tragedy, the old man thought, for Mademoiselle Nicolette to end this way when she escaped the flames the day she was born.\n\nHe plodded into Royal Street in time to see the Vernet carriage arriving at the townhouse. Tipping his tall hat, he muttered his condolences to Claude Vernet, then moved on swiftly, not anxious to get caught up in the family's deep grief.\n\nHe knew them all\u2014Claude, whose only hint of sorrow now could be seen in the slight sag of his shoulders; Madame DelaCroix, her face set in painful lines but her back ramrod straight. And then there was Madame Vernet, pitiful in her weeping, unable to support herself. The crier watched from the corner of Chartres Street as she was helped from the carriage and carried into the house by a strong servant.\n\nThe bells of Saint Louis Cathedral tolled mournfully. The city lay draped in a strange, gray mist as if it too felt the loss. The man shook his head and shuffled on.\n\nThe red-haired man and woman lay sleeping under a blanket of blistering June heat, naked and beautiful, the pair.\n\nHer bright tresses swept back from her face to cover the pillow in burnished waves. His hair framed strong features molded by sea, sun, and wind, and glowed a bronzed gold in the morning light.\n\nShe lay on her back, peaked breasts thrusting high, one hand demurely placed to cover the dark triangle between her thighs. He stretched, full length, on his stomach, his slim, white buttocks, tense even in sleep, startling in contrast to the mahogany hue of his torso and legs.\n\nAll was quiet. Nothing moved in the thick humidity.\n\nThe slightest breeze began to stir the lace curtains at the window of the ballast stone mansion. It eased into the room and slipped soundlessly through the mosquito netting to kiss the woman's cheek. She smiled, moved her head. Her eyes remained closed. Only a hand awoke fully\u2014to creep across the satin sheet and find her lover. The barest touch against his thigh, no more, and he was there\u2014pulling her into his arms, seeking her lips, caressing her breasts.\n\nEyes fluttered open momentarily\u2014green-gold searching ultramarine. They smiled. They kissed again. He buried her beneath him and found the hidden entrance to his pleasures, and hers.\n\nEven after their hour of leisurely lovemaking, in which time they explored the wonders of each other's bodies as if for the first time, after that gentle descent from passion to afterglow, they still clung to each other, their bodies one.\n\n\"I'll never have enough of you, darling,\" he whispered huskily.\n\nShe only sighed and snuggled closer as if she wished to meld her entire body, indeed, her very soul to his.\n\nA knock at the door brought an annoyed oath from Jean Laffite. \"Why must they interrupt us every time?\" he said, pulling on a robe and tossing the velvet coverlet over his lover.\n\nDominique Youx, a sheepish look on his powder-scarred face, stood in the hallway. \"A thousand pardons, Nikki,\" he stammered, nodding toward the figure in the bed. \"I would not interrupt... er... that is, disturb you, if this weren't of grave importance. One of our ships has come in from New Orleans with distressing news.\"\n\nLaffite stared at his older brother. He could tell that whatever Dominique had to say to them was something he dreaded. The man was never at a loss for words, but now he hesitated and stuttered.\n\n\"Come in, Dom,\" Laffite insisted. \"Tell us what it is.\"\n\nDominique's eyes never left Nicolette, though their expression held a sort of startled wonder rather than the lust or curiosity one would have expected under the circumstances.\n\n\"Well, out with it!\" Laffite prompted.\n\nDominique shrugged and said, \"I don't know any other way to say this. Excuse my bluntness. Nikki, it seems your family buried your remains in Saint Louis Cemetery last week. A woman died in the fire on Bourbon Street. Everyone believes it was you!\"\n\n\"My God!\" Laffite exclaimed. \"Who could it have been?\"\n\n\"Papa! Maman!\" Nicolette cried. \"Oh, how awful for them!\"\n\nLaffite went to her and put his arms around her for comfort. \"Take it easy, darling. We'll get word to them immediately. I'll send Raymond in the courier pirogue. You can write to them so they'll see the news comes directly from you. But who else was in the house with you when I came?\"\n\n\"No one, Jean. I was all alone... and so frightened!\" She paused for a moment, then remembered. \"Jada! She went down to the pantry and left me by myself. When the fire started, she must have been trapped below stairs.\"\n\n\"Jada? One of the servants?\"\n\nNicolette nodded, deciding not to tell that she was also Diego's daughter and lover, and would have been his mistress, if she hadn't died.\n\n\"Any word about Bermudez?\" Laffite asked.\n\n_\"Oui!_ It seems the bereaved husband attended the funeral services, then retired to his plantation for a short rest before setting out on a business trip to an undisclosed destination up the river.\"\n\n\"He knew it wasn't me!\" Nicolette cried out. \"Why didn't he tell my parents the truth\u2014spare them all this?\"\n\nLaffite's voice softened. \"How could he tell them the truth, darling? That he lost everything, including his bride, in a poker game? That he tried to kill her? That he set a fire that could have destroyed the entire city? No! I wouldn't put it past him to have murdered the serving woman and tossed her body in the flames to make it look as if you were dead.\"\n\n\"Yes, Diego Bermudez would kill his own daughter to save himself,\" Nicolette said quietly.\n\nLaffite took her trembling hands in his and looked into her eyes. \"Nicolette, when you write to your father, tell him you are alive, but tell him too that you are with the man you love\u2014the man you want to be your husband. Try to explain to him. We don't need any more hurt. Let's see if we can't reconcile your family to our relationship... our happiness.\"\n\n\"I will, Jean. They must understand!\"\n\nClaude Vernet sat like a zombie in the _petit salon_ of his New Orleans house, holding Nicolette's letter crumpled in his fist. Gabrielle DelaCroix, a fine gown of royal-blue silk replacing the black bombazine she had worn for the past ten days, moved about the room, ripping down mourning crepe and opening shutters. A relieved smile lit her face.\n\n\"I might have guessed!\" she called over her shoulder. \"Laffite saved her! Imagine! And how romantic of him to carry her off to his island\u2014their love nest.\"\n\n\"She might just as well be dead,\" Claude remarked glumly. \"How could she do this to us? She has a husband! Diego is distraught over her death. How can I tell the poor man that she's alive, but has run away with her lover? And of all men, that pirate!\"\n\n\"How dare you say such a thing, Claude Vernet? Jean Laffite is not a pirate! He is an honest man, involved in a slightly dishonest business. But he never plundered or killed for personal gain. And even if he were the most bloodthirsty villain since Blackbeard, I would think that his saving your daughter's life would temper your hatred for him. I tried to tell you before the wedding that Nicolette was in love with Laffite, but you refused to listen. And Nikki was being so stubborn! Can you believe that the girl feels such family loyalty that she would give up the man she loves just to please you? If we have a pirate in this family, his name is _Claude Vernet_!\"\n\n\"I haven't the faintest idea what you're talking about, Gabrielle. Pirate, indeed!\" He rose to his feet and started to leave the room, but his sister-in-law blocked the way.\n\n\"You're going to listen to me! I've kept quiet all these years. I let you off and never spoke my mind before or after you married my sister. But I will not allow you to make a disaster of Nikki's life the way you ruined mine, Francine's, and your own!\"\n\nClaude Vernet sat back down heavily. Never before had he heard such a fierce tone in Gabrielle's voice. Her brown eyes blazed at him and her face flushed with anger. For a moment, he remembered that she had looked much like this the night he had come to ask for Francine's hand. He had evaded her wrath that evening, but today there seemed no way out.\n\n\"Do you love my sister, Claude?\" she demanded.\n\nHe couldn't meet her eyes. \"Love? Of course I love Frannie. We've been married all these years. We've had children. We still have Nikki.\"\n\n\"Don't change the subject! I asked about love, not marriage, and we both know there's a vast difference between the two. You and I have experienced both and should be able to recognize that by now. When was the last time you made love to my sister with the kind of fire and passion you showed me that day in the meadow at Belle Pointe?\"\n\nClaude Vernet shifted uneasily in his chair. Gabrielle had finally brought up what had remained unmentionable between them all these years.\n\nIn spite of his wishes, his mind flashed back to a sun-drenched field where red clover perfumed the spring air. He saw himself\u2014a lusty lad of eighteen, his blood fired with first love and the rising sap of the season. And there beside him lay the most beautiful girl he had ever seen\u2014her skin, magnolia-pale and -soft, her eyes like bright amber, her lips parted, inviting.\n\nHe closed his eyes and tried to will the visions away\u2014to push them back into the locked part of his brain where he had kept them for so long, hoping they would fade with time. But the memories refused to be banished. He saw again her virgin breasts, felt their sweet warmth against his bare chest. He relived in an instant his own stallionlike thrust, which initiated them both into the secret society of lovers. And he heard again her sighs, her words of love.\n\n\"I love you, Claude Vernet.\" But these words came from her lips, not from his memory.\n\n\"No, Gabi. You mustn't say that... or think it!\"\n\n\"And you Claude, mustn't lie to yourself. Not any longer. I watched the expression on your face just now. You were thinking about us, weren't you?\"\n\nEmotion choked his words. His Creole reserve melted into an affirmative nod.\n\n\"And did you think the scene through to the very end, to the place where we kissed one last time and promised to love each other always? We both knew you were meant to wed my sister, but you said\u2014you _promised\u2014_ you would speak to my father and set things right.\"\n\nClaude Vernet hung his head, feeling like the confused and dejected lad he had been that summer. \"I couldn't,\" he whispered. \"I've told you before how sorry I've been all these years, Gabi. I never wanted to hurt you.\"\n\n\"Hurt _me?_ Claude, darling, don't you realize what you've done to yourself... to Frannie? She never wanted to marry anyone. Her only wish in life was to enter the convent. But because you let our parents dictate our futures, Frannie has lived her life like a frightened rabbit\u2014terrified of the world, even her own husband. You have been an exemplary mate. No woman could have asked for more kindness and understanding than you've given Frannie. But don't you see? You've killed the love that lived in you! And Frannie, who loved the Church above all else, has been dying by degrees all these years. I'm not like my sister. I cling to life! I demand happiness! But my only true and lasting happiness will come when you and I can be together.\"\n\n\"Gabrielle, what a thing to say! Are you wishing your own sister dead?\"\n\nShe ignored his question for the moment and went on. \"We made a promise to each other, Claude. I mean to hold you to it. Frannie confided in me that the two of you have not shared a bed since Nikki was born. I know about your mistress, Claude, and I feel cheated! You can't be faithful to my sister because she won't give you what you need. But if your love must find another home, why not with me instead of that woman on the ramparts? What difference would it make, other than the fact that I truly love you?\"\n\n\"No.\" His answer was barely a whisper.\n\n\"Do you love me?\"\n\nHis head jerked up and their gazes caught and held. He felt new life flowing through his body. For an instant he could have been eighteen once more. Suddenly, his arms went to Gabrielle's waist and he clung to her, burying his tear-streaked face against the bodice of her gown.\n\n\"Yes, Gabi, yes! I've always loved you!\"\n\nShe leaned down then and found his lips. A million times in her dreams, waking and sleeping, she had envisioned this moment. Now, at last, it was real. Her senses soared as Claude Vernet held her, caressed her, whispered out his flood of emotions, which had been dammed for over twenty years.\n\n\"And now, Claude, my darling,\" Gabrielle said at last, \"I hope you understand your daughter better. She possesses the same fire that runs in your veins and mine. Do you want her to have to endure an agony of years waiting for someone she can truly love? Which is more important\u2014what your friends say and think or what your daughter feels?\"\n\nHe clasped Gabrielle to him once more and covered her mouth with hungry lips. His kisses held the answer to all her questions.\n\n> Belle Pointe, Louisiana  \n>  June 20, 1813\n> \n> My dearest Nikki,\n> \n> There are no words to describe my emotion on reading your letter. To lose one so dear, then literally have that beloved daughter return from the grave, it is almost beyond human comprehension. I can only say how very much I love you, _ma ch\u00e8re,_ and how your maman and I send up hourly prayers of thanks to _he bon Dieu_ for your return. All our friends join in our joy and thanks.\n> \n> As for your decision to remain with Monsieur Laffite, I admit to being outraged at first. But you have a wise and understanding friend in your Tante Gabi\u2014we both have. She has made me see that love, above all else, is sacred. Had I known of your affection for Jean Laffite before I forced you to marry Bermudez, I like to think I would have understood. I am trying now to reason with my heart more than with my head. Dear Gabi assures me I will be much better off for it. Perhaps we all would be!\n> \n> As for your legal husband, he has disappeared amidst a wave of the most shocking rumors. It would seem that you are a far better judge of human nature than I will ever be. At any rate, you are well rid of Bermudez! Should he resurface and attempt to claim you as his own, I will go to any lengths, even to ending his miserable life on the field of honor, to keep you safe from him. I must say that I was mortified to learn that my own dear daughter had been used as a stake in a game of chance, but again _Le bon Dieu_ was watching over my _enfant_ when He gave Monsieur Laffite the winning hand!\n> \n> I understand that there are legal complications at present which prevent the brothers Laffite from visiting New Orleans openly. But we would be happy to welcome you here at Belle Pointe at any time.\n> \n> Your maman and Tante Gabi send their love and kisses and I remain\u2014\n> \n> Your adoring papa,  \n>  Claude Vernet\n\n\"Oh, Jean! Read what Papa wrote to me!\" Nicolette cried out as she ran from the front door of the mansion on Grande Terre to find Laffite sprawled on the veranda in a red hammock, gazing out to sea.\n\nHe took the letter from her and scanned the page. His heavy brows, drawn together in a frown at first, raised in pleased surprise as he finished reading. A smile to match Nicolette's grew on his face.\n\n\"Come to me, _ma petite,\"_ he said, raising his arms to her. \"This is the moment I've been waiting for\u2014to see you totally happy again. We'll visit your papa soon, I promise.\"\n\n\"Really, darling?\" Nicolette cried, sliding into the wide hammock beside him and snuggling close. \"Oh, I am happy! No more problems!\"\n\nNicolette rested her head against Laffite's shoulder and enjoyed the peace and contentment of a sleepy, undisturbed summer afternoon on the island. The sea breeze blew gently over them, and Laffite set the hammock swaying with a soothing rhythm. He ran his fingers through her shining hair. Nicolette shivered. She loved the feel of his hands stroking her.\n\n\"When we go to your papa's, Nikki,\" he said in a grave tone, \"what will he think of your red hair?\"\n\nNicolette laughed softly. \"I'm not sure what Papa will think, but Aunt Gabi will undoubtedly ask to borrow your concoction of potash and gunpowder!\"\n\nThey spent the long, drowsy afternoon swinging side by side in the hammock\u2014kissing occasionally, touching, reveling in their newfound peace. The whole happy world seemed to belong only to the two of them.\n\nThey were too far away to hear the British cannons at the mouth of Bayou Lafourche roaring their deathwish at a group of Baratarians.\n\nBy June of 1813, the United States had been at war with Britain for a full year. The battles had raged in far-off places\u2014Canada, Ohio, Detroit\u2014leaving the citizens of southern Louisiana free from worries of attack.\n\nBut on June 23, 1813, a British sloop of war slipped past Grande Terre's defenses to open fire on a pair of Laffite's ships, which were headed from the Gulf up Bayou Lafourche. Though the audacious British captain bombarded the two ships for hours, the Baratarians emerged victorious.\n\nStill, Jean Laffite did not receive the news with a smile. He realized already what would not dawn on the powers that be in Washington City for some months\u2014that his own island and the bayous above it were the keys to New Orleans. And whoever controlled New Orleans would claim the Mississippi, the entire country, and the war!\n\n\"Why don't those jackasses make some defensive move in this direction?\" he snarled at Dominique and Pierre that night at the dinner table.\n\n\"Because they are what you name them, little brother,\" Dom answered. \"The time will come when they will see the error of their ways. Let us hope it won't come too late!\"\n\nNicolette's sunny mood of the afternoon faded quickly as she sat and listened to the brothers' gloomy conversation. She picked at the broiled pompano on her plate and tried to puzzle out all that they were discussing. Dinner discussions in her home had centered around art, literature, and palatable family matters. \"Not one word... ever... to upset the digestion!\" she could remember her mother admonishing.\n\n\"Nikki?\" Laffite asked. \"Don't you like your fish?\"\n\nShe nodded and forced a smile. \"It's delicious. My compliments to Xavier. It's only that\n\n\"Yes, darling?\" he prompted.\n\n\"This talk of war,\" she finally confessed. \"I find it upsetting.\"\n\n\"We all do,\" Laffite answered. \"But, believe me, my men will fight to the very end to see that the British Dragon doesn't devour the United States!\"\n\n\"Talk is cheap, little brother,\" Dominique said. \"Just how is it we are going to fight for a country that will not even allow us to walk the streets of one of her cities?\"\n\n\"Governor Claiborne's only being pigheaded!\" Pierre answered. \"The arrest warrants run out shortly. As long as Jean and I aren't caught in New Orleans, there's nothing he can do.\"\n\n\"I believe Claiborne's sorry he put himself in this position,\" Laffite added. \"He would tear up those papers this very day, but he can't without looking like a prize fool. Pierre, you're right. We'll wait it out; then make our move after the warrants expire.\"\n\n\"And until then?\" Nicolette asked, her uneasiness plainly visible.\n\nLaffite leaned toward her and smiled into her eyes. \"Until then, my love, my time is all yours!\"\n\n\"Ho! Ho! Pierre, do you get the feeling that our little brother would as soon we excuse ourselves?\"\n\n\"I do! And I can't say that I blame him.\" Pierre rose from the table and bent to kiss Nicolette's cheek. \"Were you mine, sweet child, I'd kick both my brothers out for good and never let any man near you!\"\n\nDominique gave a hearty laugh. \"And your Marie Louise would scalp that unruly thatch from your head, too!\"\n\nDominique kissed Nicolette on one cheek and then the other, as if she were a French sergeant. He and Pierre said good night and ambled out the front door.\n\n\"So! Alone at last!\" Laffite said; his eyes had an unmistakable glitter. \"What would you like to do this evening, darling?\"\n\nNicolette pushed her chair back and rose\u2014slowly, deliberately\u2014never taking her eyes from Laffite's face. She swayed toward him and eased herself into his lap, letting her arms twine about his neck.\n\n\"This, _mon ch\u00e8re,\"_ she whispered huskily, bringing her lips down to cover his.\n\nLaffite marveled at her almost wanton show of desire. How she had changed from the shy, tearful child he had seen off to Paris and the abused maiden he had rescued from the burning ship.\n\nHe slipped his arms around her slender waist and pulled her closer so that her unrestrained breasts nestled their warmth against his chest. Still, her moist lips clung to his, fanning fire in his blood which, in turn, ignited hers anew.\n\nWhen he rose from the chair, lifting her in his arms, Nicolette finally ended the kiss. She stared at him questioningly when he headed, not for their bedroom, but to the front door.\n\n\"I wanted you on the beach the night we were wed,\" he answered. \"Tonight I plan to satisfy that pagan desire.\"\n\nHe strode out of the mansion into the moon-silvered night with Nicolette clinging to him, whispering her love.\n\n###\n\n# Chapter Eighteen\n\n> I, GOVERNOR OF THE STATE OF LOUISIANA, OFFER A REWARD OF FIVE HUNDRED DOLLARS WHICH WILL BE PAID OUT OF THE TREASURY, TO ANY PERSON DELIVERING JEAN LAFFITE TO THE SHERIFF IN THE PARISH OF ORLEANS, OR TO ANY OTHER SHERIFF IN THE STATE, SO THAT HE, THE SAID JEAN LAFFITE, MAY BE BROUGHT TO JUSTICE.\n\n> Given under my hand at New Orleans on the 24th day of November, 1813.  \n>  William C. C. Claiborne\n\nNicolette, home from Grande Terre for a visit with her family, read the broadside hurriedly, then snatched it from the lamp post at the corner of St. Anne Street near the cathedral.\n\n\"I'm afraid you have a mammoth task ahead of you, my dear, if you plan to remove every one of those notices from the city,\" Gabrielle DelaCroix said. _\"Monsieur le gouverneur_ has had hundreds printed. They are plastered all over New Orleans.\"\n\n\"How dare he!\" Nicolette hissed, tearing down a second notice and then a third as they walked along.\n\n\"He dares because he must! Don't you see? Your darling Jean and his men have made poor Claiborne an object of ridicule rather than authority. The most upstanding citizens cheer at Laffite's every bold escape and laugh behind their hands at the governor's ineffectiveness in this matter.\"\n\nNicolette turned a shocked expression on her aunt. \"How can you voice any sympathy for the man? He's made our lives miserable these past months.\"\n\nGabrielle laughed softly. \"And you think Jean Laffite hasn't provided a bit of hell for him? _Mais non, ma ch\u00e8re!_ The governor has suffered far more. Claiborne may call your man a bandit, but others are calling _le gouverneur_ much worse.\"\n\nBy the time they turned into Royal Street, Nicolette had collected a dozen or so of the offending documents. At the entrance to Laffite's showroom, she stopped.\n\n\"What are you doing, Nikki? Gabrielle asked, alarmed. \"You know you've been warned to stay away from this place. You've shocked all New Orleans enough by turning up alive and well after your funeral. Now you are supposed to be putting on a grand show of the deserted and grieving bride to worm your way back into the good graces of the _cr\u00e8me de la cr\u00e8me.\"_\n\n\"That wasn't my idea. It was Maman's.\"\n\n\"But she's ailing, Nikki. She needs to be reassured that her daughter isn't some of the names she is being called around town.\"\n\n\"You mean 'Laffite's mistress'? I can think of worse things to be called!\" Nicolette snapped.\n\nGabrielle put a gentling hand on her niece's arm and whispered, \"I mean 'the pirate's whore'! If your maman ever heard that epithet, it would take more than smelling salts or a wine-soaked cloth to bring her around!\"\n\nThe words stung and Nicolette lashed out, \"And what if she should hear the same term applied to her sister, but with her own husband's name replacing Jean Laffite's?\"\n\n_\"Touch\u00e9!_ But your father and I are at least discreet. Parading into Laffite's shop in broad daylight is anything but!\"\n\nNicolette looked away from her aunt, ashamed of herself for using such an intimate confidence against this woman she loved and admired\u2014even more now that she knew her own father was the great love of Gabrielle's life, the man she'd longed for all these years.\n\n\"I'm sorry, Tante,\" she murmured. \"But I must get word of this to Jean. Raymond Ranchier may be here. If so, he can take me back to Grande Terre right away. That's where I belong... with Jean! Not here in New Orleans, trying to pretend I'm something I've never been.\"\n\n\"Very well.\" Her aunt nodded. \"But be quick with you. I'll keep watch out here.\"\n\nNicolette entered the shop, where the aromas of exotic spices mingled with the heavy fragrance of French perfumes. The tables and showcases glittered with jewelry and fine brocades from Spain. The usually quiet establishment clattered and clanked with unidentifiable sounds issuing from a back room. A tinkling bell alerted the men in back to a customer's arrival. Nicolette heard the grating noise grind to a halt and Raymond Ranchier himself came out to greet her.\n\n\"Why, Madame Boss! How good to see you. I trust you're well,\" the tall, sandy-haired courier said, smiling.\n\n\"Not well at all, Raymond, and neither should you be! Haven't you seen this?\" She thrust one of the rumpled notices under his rather long nose.\n\n_\"Oui,_ Madame!\" he said with a frown. \"And let me tell you, the Boss is plenty mad that Governor Claiborne has offered such a picayune amount for him! He said, if I remember correctly, 'Blast the man! I'm worth ten times that much!'\" Ranchier ended with a hearty laugh at his own imitation of Laffite, which really wasn't half bad.\n\nNicolette smiled in spite of herself. \"Well, what are you planning to do about it? Just ignore the governor's insult?\"\n\nRaymond chuckled over his juicy secret. \"No Madame. Far from it! Come with me.\"\n\nHe showed Nicolette through the shop to the dim backroom. There the odd noises she had heard earlier were explained\u2014a printing press.\n\n\"Read for yourself, Madame!\"\n\nHe held up a freshly printed broadside between his ink-stained thumb and forefinger.\n\nNicolette scanned the page and her cobalt eyes lit up with merriment. Her laughter began as a quiet ripple, but soon tears of mirth were rolling down her cheeks. She hugged her sides to belay the pain of her laughter.\n\nWhen she recovered her composure, Nicolette said, \"Do you have some old sailor's togs about the place, Raymond?\"\n\nHe looked quizzically at her and said, \"Aye.\"\n\n\"Get them for me, please, and tell me where and with whom I'll meet tonight to help distribute these!\"\n\nRaymond Ranchier clicked the heels of his scuffed boots and bowed. _\"Oui,_ Madame Boss!\"\n\nThe cathedral bells had tolled midnight only moments before Nicolette, dressed in canvas britches and a sailor's striped shirt and knit cap, slipped out of the pantry door to the courtyard of the Toulouse Street house. She had confided this planned escapade to no one\u2014not even her Aunt Gabi, who might have insisted on joining her.\n\nExiting to the alley through the back gate, she soon found several others\u2014boys and old men mostly\u2014hurrying toward the back entrance of the Royal Street showroom. Within a half hour, a gang of a hundred or more were skulking through back-passages and hiding in dark doorways throughout the city. By the time Governor Claiborne stretched and yawned himself awake, the city would be papered with new broadsides.\n\nAt first, Nicolette felt nervous. None of the men realized she was not just another boy, scurrying about in the night to avenge his hero. She tried to stay with a group, but soon found that impossible. These men knew how to vanish into the shadows, darting out only long enough to hang a notice and then be gone again.\n\nNicolette worked along Bourbon Street and then Royal, feeling this a safer area for a woman than the red-light district along the levee or the alleys around the cathedral.\n\nShe was down to the last ten of her hundred sheets when a noise from the black depths of an alley made her jump and caused her skin to prickle all over. She knew that the Kalmucks often wandered into this part of town when they had had too much whiskey. The sound came again\u2014something between a scream and a strangled cry.\n\nShe crouched in a doorway and waited, her heart pounding fiercely. Surely, if the man found her, he would take her for a boy and leave her alone. Then some sordid whispers she had overheard among the men at Grande Terre popped from her memory. Some men, it seemed, relished young boys...\n\nShe drew back more. Suddenly, the screaming seemed ail around her. Something brushed her leg and she leaped up, ready to kill to save herself. In her terror, she let the remaining broadsides fly out of her hand to litter the banquette.\n\nJust then two toms moved into a lighted area. One was yellow with stripes and the other a motley gray. Their claws and teeth ripped and tore fur over a feline lady friend. \"Cats fighting,\" Nicolette said, and allowed herself to breathe. But a hand gripped her shoulder suddenly, spinning her around.\n\n\"See here, boy...\" a gruff voice began, but her scream cut off his words.\n\nNicolette sank her teeth into the hand holding her arm and pounded at the dark figure, trying to fend him off. But he grabbed her roughly, tearing the ragged shirt. He shook her by the shoulders until her stocking cap fell off, releasing her long hair.\n\n_\"Mon Dieu!\"_ the man gasped. \"Nikki?\"\n\nNicolette's sobs caught in her throat, not allowing her to speak for a moment. All the fight drained out of her\u2014relief replacing it.\n\n\"Jean?\" she asked, hardly daring to believe it.\n\n\"All five hundred dollars' worth!\" he said with a laugh, pulling her into his arms and bruising her tear-salted lips.\n\nThey went, not to the house in Toulouse Street or Laffite's mansion on Bourbon, but to the little blacksmith shop with its small attached sleeping quarters.\n\n\"It's always been my favorite home in New Orleans,\" Jean confided, lighting an oil lamp in the plain but tidy room. \"I love the smell of hickory smoke embedded in these old walls. And besides,\" he continued, pressing Nicolette down onto the red, white, and blue patchwork quilt, \"I want to make love to you everywhere so that no matter where I am, I can remember you there with me... wonderfully naked...\" he added, slipping the remains of her shirt from her shoulders, \"deliciously warm...\" his lips pressed into the valley between her breasts, \"all mine!\"\n\nThey had been apart almost a month. It seemed a lifetime of chaste endurance to Nicolette. Anxious as she was, she made her lover lie back while she covered his face, his chest, his whole tense body with kisses.\n\n\"God, don't let me die now!\" he moaned, then strained back against the pillows, lifting his hips, and gasped, \"Oh, Nikki... Nikki! Not that! I can't take it... don't stop... I love it... love you... so... so much!\"\n\nThen he forced her mouth away from his flesh and pressed her down\u2014his victim of love. She sighed and begged him to quench her fires with his own.\n\nThe passion-drugged couple still clung to each other as the rose rays of dawn struck the governor's bedroom windows.\n\nWilliam C. C. Claiborne lay alone in his bed. Madame Claiborne had deserted him weeks before for a guest chamber, saying, \"Willie, I will not share you with Jean Laffite! Let me know when you're in better temper and ready to give me your full attention. Until then, you may thrash about with your bloody pirate all night alone!\"\n\nClaiborne awoke disgruntled and dyspeptic. \"But when am I not these days?\" were his first words, followed by a weary sigh. He lay in bed, wishing his wife were next to him. Her Creole upbringing wouldn't allow her to make love after the sun came up, but still, there was something reassuring about having one's wife close by in those first waking moments.\n\nHe heard a hubbub below in the street and rose to see what was going on. A knot of excited people were gathered around the lamp post reading his broadside. Quickly, he got into his dressing gown. Perhaps something had happened. Laffite might have been captured during the night and could even this minute be locked behind bars in the Cabildo.\n\nHe ran fingers twitching with nervous excitement through his sparse, reddish hair. He smiled for the first time in weeks, contemplating Laffite's arrest. The expression gave his puffy face an almost youthful look.\n\n\"By God, if we've got that bandit at last, I'll pop the champagne's cork... and my wife's... this very night!\"\n\nClaiborne hurried to the door to see if any messages had arrived from the Cabildo while he slept. Jacob, the butler, stood in the hallway, about to knock, when the door flew open. The old servant's face looked the color of dead ashes, a sure barometer of bad news to come.\n\n\"What is it, Jacob?\" Claiborne snapped, dreading the answer.\n\n\"This, _Monsieur Gouverneurr_ Jacob said, handing his master a long sheet smudged with barely dry ink.\n\nClaiborne's eyes widened as he scanned the page. His heart thundered. His hands trembled with rage.\n\n> I, BOSS OF BARATARIA, OFFER A REWARD OF FIVE THOUSAND DOLLARS WHICH WILL BE PAID OUT OF MY TREASURY, TO ANY PERSON DELIVERING GOVERNOR CLAIBORNE TO ME AT ISLE DU CHAT WEST OF GRANDE TERRE, NEAR THE MOUTH OF BAYOU LAFOURCHE.\n\n> Given under my hand at Grand Terre on the 26th day of November, 1813  \n>  Jean Laffite\n\nGovernor Claiborne remained in his bed that day, ill with the realization that he had been bested once more by Jean Laffite, and knowing that New Orleans loved it.\n\nToward noon, he answered a knock at his bedroom door, but sent Jacob and the tray of food he offered away. Claiborne strode to his window and looked out absently. A man and a woman stood on the banquette below, perusing Laffite's reward offer. The governor barely noticed the woman's elegant, burgundy velvet gown and the matching bonnet covering her long, Creole-black hair, but something about the way her tall companion carried himself\u2014with a sort of arrogant grace\u2014made him take a second look.\n\n\"Damn!\" he cursed, still watching the couple. \"Must every person in town read Laffite's outrageous words?\"\n\nHe heard laughter from below and looked down again. \"They're all making fun of me!\" he moaned.\n\nJust then, the expensively clad pair turned their faces up toward his second-storey window. They were smiling and they waved to him. His lower jaw dropped, forming his mouth into a wide _O._\n\n\"Laffite!\" he hissed. \"That goddamn, cocky bastard!\"\n\n\"Isn't this dangerous, Jean?\" Nicolette whispered, a thrill of excitement charging her blood when she spotted the governor watching them.\n\n\"Not in the least, my love. The man won't dare show his face today. I've called his bluff. From here on out the game is mine. And I always hold aces!\"\n\nHe tucked Nicolette's gloved hand into the crook of his elbow and they continued their stroll down Royal Street toward the river.\n\nThe Place d'Armes was crowded with people wanting to bask in the bright November sun. Many were hoping to catch a glimpse of Jean Laffite. His arrival the night before had not gone unheralded. Laffite had not meant for it to!\n\n\"We're through hiding,\" he told Nicolette as they strolled the walkways in the shade of the sycamore trees, acknowledging nods and smiles from all sides. \"You see, the good people of New Orleans hold no grudge. They're on our side.\"\n\nNicolette had relaxed at first when she saw that no soldiers came rushing forward to arrest Laffite on the spot. But soon she realized that the warm smiles and friendly greetings were for her escort\u2014none for her. More than once she detected a fleeting look of disdain cast in her direction. These people could forgive a man his smuggling, but not a woman her passions!\n\nNo! she thought. They're not on _our_ side, my darling. They are only on _your_ side. To them I am only...\n\nShe couldn't even repeat the phrase in her mind, though she knew it was spoken openly by the good citizens of New Orleans.\n\nBut a dirty, bearded drunkard, leaning out of one of the flatboat brothels tied out of earshot upriver from the Place d'Armes, spied Nicolette and finished the phrase for her: \"Filthy _pirate's whore!\"_\n\n###\n\n# Chapter Nineteen\n\nDuring the early months of 1814, two conflicts, an ocean apart, were striking fear in the hearts of Louisiana's citizens. The aggressor in both cases was the \"British Dragon.\"\n\nWhile red-coated land forces hammered away in France, the king's navy continued to block shipping from American ports and bum cities at will.\n\nThose people in New Orleans who had always thought of France as the mother country and some who still had relatives there hung on every scrap of news from across the sea, hoping to hear of a French victory. They resented the others, who said, \"As long as the Dragon's busy chasing after Napoleon, it won't have time to whack its tail at us!\"\n\nBut, resented or not, the statement was true. Jean Laffite worried more than most that France might fall to the British. Since the attack on his two ships the summer before, all had been quiet. But he continued to stock arms and munitions, preparing to defend his territory and all of southern Louisiana, if need be.\n\nWhen the axe fell, Laffite's men were the only ones prepared.\n\n\"Look here, Nikki,\" Laffite said, holding a copy of _Le Moniteur de la Louisiane._ It's news from France, over two months old. \"The paper says Napoleon has abdicated. The Treaty of Fontainebleau was signed on April 11, exiling him to Elba.\" He stopped and took a deep breath, as if trying to digest what he had just read. When he continued, his voice was as frighteningly serious as Nicolette had ever heard it. \"Our wait won't be long now.\"\n\nNicolette, who had been thinking in her first waking moments what a lovely day it would be for a picnic on the beach at Grande Terre, felt her sunny fantasies dashed like so much driftwood in a storm. She blinked the sleep out of her eyes and sat up in bed, clutching Jean's arm.\n\n\"What have we been waiting for, darling? And why do you sound so grave? We all knew Napoleon had to fall sooner or later.\"\n\n\"Nikki!\" he huffed, rising, naked, from the bed. \"You've listened to all the war talk. You know the British will come here now.\"\n\nNicolette tried to tease him out of his abysmal mood. \"And will they rape every woman and hang every man when they breathe their Fire on New Orleans, my darling?\" she asked brightly. \"I'm sure the men will flee in terror. But I know many a wife who would welcome an amorous, red-coated dragon into her bed in place of her stodgy husband!\"\n\nLaffite glared at her. \"This is no joking matter, Nicolette! The city of New Orleans is the key to the entire United States through the river. My men and I are guardians of that key! I plan to declare martial law on Grande Terre this morning. If you don't wish to remain in an armed camp, feel free to return to your family!\"\n\nHe turned away from her abruptly. Nicolette felt a deep ache in her heart and a twisting pain in her stomach. They hadn't argued once since their reunion at the blacksmith shop\u2014until now.\n\n\"Darling,\" she cried, running to catch him at the door. \"I didn't mean to make light of this trouble. And you know I'll never leave you again. I promised!\" Tears were filling her eyes.\n\nHe clutched her suddenly in his arms and smoothed her hair. His voice grew gentler. \"I know you promised. But maybe it would be best. I told you a long time ago that there would be times when I would have to go away from you. This could be one of those times, Nikki.\"\n\n\"What do you mean? Go where?\"\n\nHe shook his head and bent down to kiss a tear from her cheek. \"I don't know yet, _ma ch\u00e8re._ I'll go when I'm called to wherever I'm needed.\"\n\n\"And I'll wait for you!\" she said desperately, hurting inside.\n\n\"Of course you will. I never doubted that.\"\n\nHe enfolded her bare shoulders with his arms and kissed her deeply. Nicolette closed her eyes and let her other senses drink him in. She couldn't bear the thought of being separated from him\u2014not even for a short time. He had become her whole life. Loving him was her reason for existing.\n\nAnd now, she thought, more than ever, we should be together. Perhaps if I tell him...\n\n\"Jean, darling,\" she began.\n\n\"Boss! Boss!\" Dominique You's voice, coming from outside, interrupted her words. \"They got Pierre! They took him away!\"\n\nLaffite froze in Nicolette's arms for an instant, then he threw on his clothes and dashed out of the room toward the sound of his brother's voice.\n\nNicolette pulled on her dressing gown and followed him. She reached the veranda in time to hear Dominique finishing the story.\n\n\"They arrested him right in the street, near the Place d'Armes. He'd been to visit Marie Louise and overslept so he didn't get out of the city before daylight.\"\n\n\"Don't worry, Dom. We'll have him bailed out in time to visit his lady again this evening,\" Laffite answered.\n\nNicolette could tell from the looks on both brothers' faces that Laffite feared his words were not true, and Dom knew they were totally false.\n\nYoux shook his head sadly. \"Not this time. He's in the Cabildo... in chains! Bail has been denied. His case will be heard... when they get around to it... by a secret grand jury. No witnesses allowed in his defense!\"\n\n\"Sweet Mother of God!\" Laffite groaned. \"He'll die in there!\"\n\nNicolette touched Laffite's arm, trying to console him. \"Other men have survived the Cabildo.\"\n\nHe looked at her with great sadness in his eyes. \"You don't understand. Pierre was very sick the year before we met. Marie Louise nursed him back after the stroke, but he's never been the same since. He has the fortitude of an old man. The weight of the chains alone could sap what remaining strength he has in a very short time. We must free him!\"\n\n\"Can you?\" Nicolette's voice quavered as she asked the question.\n\n\"Claiborne hates me!\" Laffite replied bitterly. \"Ever since the affair with the broadsides, he's sworn his revenge...\" His voice broke with emotion. He cleared his throat and went on. \"He couldn't get at me, so he's taking out all his wrath on Pierre. Still, there might be a way.\"\n\nDominique looked at him with one eyebrow raised and a slow smile beginning on his face. \"You mean...?\"\n\n\"Exactly! The governor's own lawyer and District Attorney, Livingston and Grymes. We'll hire them away from him!\"\n\n\"Ho! Ho! Give the old fart something to yell about, _non_?\"\n\n\"Claiborne can yell or whimper, it makes no difference to me, as long as we get Pierre out of that hell hole. Nikki, how fast can you pack? We're leaving for New Orleans. Now!\"\n\nNew Orleans was buzzing with rumors when Laffite and Nicolette arrived a few days later\u2014The Seminoles from Florida were banding with runaway slaves to attack New Orleans, but General Andrew Jackson was devising a plan to head them off. A British sloop of war had been sighted in the river near the Balize. A plot was afoot to send a ship from New Orleans to rescue Napoleon. Jean Laffite and his Baratarians were making plans to storm the Cabildo and free Pierre. Perhaps they would even murder Governor Claiborne in the bargain!\n\nLaffite dismissed most of the outlandish talk they heard along the levee. But one terrifying tale was based in fact. Yellow fever, it was whispered behind nervous hands, had been brought into port on a merchant ship from South America. The numbers who had died already varied with each telling: a dozen, fifty, over a hundred. But they were all foreigners, the New Orleanians were quick to point out, sailors off other ships. No native had caught the fever yet.\n\n\"Bronze John!\" Laffite grumbled as they stood on the levee, waiting for Gator-Bait to collect Nicolette's bags from their barge. \"I should have thought of the fever season being upon us before I let you come along, Nikki.\"\n\n\"I would have come anyway,\" she insisted.\n\nHe looked down at Nicolette, admiring the flattering cut of her pale muslin gown. Though, he thought, her figure needs no flattery!\n\nHe smiled at the petulant expression on her face. \"Well, that's not a subject for debate at this point. You're here. And I have to admit, I'm glad you are. But I want you to stay indoors while we're in the city. The less you're exposed to the swamp vapors, the safer you'll be.\"\n\n\"And what about you?\" she demanded.\n\n\"Oh, I had the fever when I was no bigger than Gator-Bait and recovered. It won't strike again. Besides,\" he added, his voice going deadly serious, \"I have business to attend to.\"\n\nNicolette watched his gaze shift across the Place d'Armes to the Cabildo. His eyes changed to cold, obsidian green, and she could imagine that he was visualizing his brother\u2014a helpless prisoner in the place, suffering under the weight of his chains and the stifling July heat.\n\nShe touched his hand. \"You'll get him out, Jean. He knows you will.\"\n\n\"I wish I were as sure of that as you.\"\n\n\"Hey, Boss, me, and Gator-Bait got everything,\" Xavier called. \"You want I should hire a trap?\"\n\nLaffite looked down at Nicolette, questioningly.\n\n\"It's only a short way. Let's walk,\" she said with a smile. \"I want New Orleans to see that I'm still your woman.\"\n\nHe kissed her cheek. \"My _wife_! And a brave girl at that!\"\n\nThey formed a curious entourage, walking down St. Peter Street to Bourbon. Laffite and Nicolette in the lead, followed by the two small blacks, one a child and the other a middle-aged man, but both the same size and both struggling to handle the baggage and to keep up on short legs with Laffite's long strides. Nicolette hurried along, not complaining of Laffite's quick pace. She had never seen the inside of his mansion and was anxious to get there and inspect her new home.\n\nThe place was far more luxurious than she had ever dreamed. Laffite had filled it with the best of his take: Brussels lace, Persian carpets, gilt furniture from France, and mirrors everywhere, doubling and quadrupling all the opulence.\n\nShe stood in the _grand salon,_ turning slowly, her eyes wide and bright with wonder.\n\n\"Jean, it's like a palace! I've never seen anything this gorgeous!\"\n\nHe came to her and hugged her. \"I have. You!\"\n\nHe gave her a lingering kiss which almost made her forget her excitement over the house.\n\n\"I'd like to tell you that I had the place decorated especially for you, Nikki, but that's not true. Actually, all this show is for business purposes. I am, after all, first and last a businessman. My clients, the other merchants in town, expect to be entertained. By the show of wealth I put on with this house and the things in it, I've impressed them with my taste and know-how. They're quick to envy and quicker to buy! Most men, I'm sad to say, are greedy beyond belief.\"\n\n\"I don't care!\" she said, laughing with glee. \"It makes no difference what your motives were in creating this showplace. I wouldn't change a thing!\"\n\n\"Now, my lady,\" he said, taking her hand and leading her to the stairs. \"To the _boudoir_ with you!\"\n\n\"Jean! In the middle of the day... in New Orleans?\"\n\nLaffite turned to Gator-Bait, who had just entered with a tray and two glasses of wine, and said, \"Your mistress thinks of only one thing!\" Then frowning at Nikki in mock disapproval, he explained, \"I would certainly not sully your reputation by suggesting anything more serious in the bedroom at this hour than perusing the gowns in your armoire.\"\n\n\"Gowns?\" she asked, dumbfounded and a bit disappointed.\n\nHe led her up the carpeted stairs. \"For this evening, I want you to look dazzling... as if nothing is wrong. We have two guests coming, Messieurs Edward Livingston, the best legal counsel in New Orleans, and John Randolph Grymes, Claiborne's own District Attorney. I know them both, and I believe they will see things my way. But, forgive me if this sounds like I'm using you, I've always found a handsome woman in an exquisitely cut gown to be an aid to difficult negotiations.\"\n\nNicolette started to object, not sure what she would be called on to do during the evening. But the expression deep in Laffite's eyes pleaded with her to cooperate. His bantering since they reached the house had only been camouflage, she realized, to cover his true concern. Surely he wouldn't expect her to...\n\n\"I'll do whatever I can to help free Pierre,\" she said quickly, cutting off her thoughts.\n\nHe kissed her ever so tenderly, then said, \"I was certain you would, darling.\"\n\nNicolette stared at herself in the long dressing-room mirror and decided she didn't mind being used in this fashion. As Laffite had decorated his mansion to impress, so had he adorned his lover.\n\nThe gown he chose for her was of midnight-blue silk, cut lower than anything Nicolette had ever seen worn by a decent woman in New Orleans. A cloud of flowing silk fell from the high waist to the toes of her silver kid slippers. The entire skirt was hand stitched with silver threads, forming an intricate, allover pattern of dainty flowers. The slightest move caught the candlelight, making the dress shimmer and gleam.\n\nAnd for the first time in her life, Nicolette wore diamonds\u2014a parure of necklace, earrings, and bracelets with a matching tiara crowning her blue-black hair.\n\nShe let her fingers caress the web of white fire at her throat, wondering what wonderful, terrible tales the brilliant stones might tell if they could speak.\n\nJean had told her earlier, \"These jewels belonged to the seven wives of Ivan the Terrible, the first tsar of Russia. Each wife, from Anastasia on down the line, wore them until the last of Ivan's tsarinas died in the late fourteenth century. They disappeared then. Some say they were stolen away from Moscow by a Jesuit priest sent by the Pope from Rome to unite the Russian churches. A half-century later, the gems resurfaced in Venice to adorn a Doge's wife and then his mistress. Again they vanished, only to turn up in Spain when my grandmother, Zora, was a young woman. Many times I've listened to her tell tales of the tsarinas' diamonds. The jewels were in my family for a time, owned by a wealthy ancestor on Zora's side of the family. I felt it only fair that they return to their most recent rightful owners.\"\n\n\"You bought them?\" Nicolette had asked.\n\n\"Confiscated stolen property, my dear,\" he answered with a wickedly charming smile.\n\nNicolette frowned at her image as she pondered the diamonds' troubled history. But a knock at the door revived her drooping spirits. \"Jean!\" she cried, pulling it open.\n\nBut, to her surprise, a strange woman stood in the hallway\u2014a woman with copper-gold skin and a green satin tignon about her head. She was a servant, obviously, though she didn't bow to Nicolette in the normal obeisant manner. Instead, she stood tall and straight, staring at Nicolette's face with warm brown eyes.\n\n\"Madame Boss, I am Marie Louis, _plac\u00e9e_ to Pierre Laffite.\"\n\nNicolette took a step back, shocked by the woman's open admission to being Pierre's mistress.\n\nShe recovered and said, \"Yes. I've often heard Jean and Pierre speak fondly of you, Marie Louise.\"\n\n\"As they both speak of you, madame,\" the lovely octoroon said with a gentle smile. \"It is of this very fondness that I come to speak to you. With your permission?\"\n\n\"Oh, forgive me! Do come in so we can talk in private.\"\n\nWithout preamble, Marie Louise explained, \"I am carrying Pierre's child. I do not want my baby's father to be in jail when my time comes. I do not want him there at all. Pierre is not a well man.\"\n\n\"Jean told me of Pierre's illness. We all want him out of that place.\"\n\n\"Then you will excuse me for coming here to beg you to help get my man back, madame?\"\n\nThough Nicolette could see tears shining in Marie Louise's eyes, the woman held herself erect, a look of deep pride on her face. She refused to allow her emotions to get the better of her.\n\nNicolette felt a sudden kinship to Pierre Laffite's lover. She reached out a comforting hand.\n\n\"You need say no more, Marie Louise. I've promised Jean that I would help, if I can. For you and for the child, I will make a special effort.\"\n\n_\"Merci,_ Madame Boss. You are most kind,\" Marie Louise answered in a whisper.\n\nBecause of Laffite's long absence from New Orleans, the house was not staffed with a full contingent of servants. Marie Louise, anxious to hear what went on at dinner, begged Laffite to allow her to serve the guests.\n\nLaffite's chef, Andre, who lived at the house and was always on call to create a banquet for any number of guests, prepared a feast of green turtle _soup, filet de boeuf_ with truffles, a seafood platter of pink shrimp, red crawfish, and oysters on the half-shell, a salad of crisp greens and tomato wedges seasoned with tarragon, and for dessert, fresh strawberry tortes topped with whipped cream and almond liqueur.\n\nGator-Bait served as \"whistling boy.\" As he carried steaming platters and tureens from the kitchen across the courtyard, he chirped away to let Marie Louise in the pantry know that he wasn't sampling the dishes along the way.\n\nXavier, dressed as formally as Laffite himself and, with a large key on a chain around his neck, played the role of wine steward expertly for the evening.\n\nEverything was perfect, Nicolette observed.\n\nTheir two guests, Edward Livingston, a man already graying into his fifties, and John Randolph Grymes, a slightly younger and heavier man with a shock of sandy hair, arrived promptly at the appointed time. Nicolette's initial nervousness at having to entertain _Americains_ for the first time in her life dissolved when the men began lavishing compliments upon her. She was soon blushing, but enjoying herself.\n\nThrough dinner, the men talked of everything but Pierre Laffite's imprisonment. It seemed to Nicolette that though Livingston and Grymes understood full well what the main topic of the evening would be, some unspoken agreement delayed their broaching the subject until after the final course.\n\nWhen Xavier brought out the brandy and cigars, Nicolette awaited her signal from Laffite to retire, hoping she had played her part toward a successful climax to the negotiations. But Laffite gave her no sign.\n\nFinally, Livingston, who had toyed with his unlighted Havana for a full five minutes, trying to decide what to do, asked, \"Ma'am, do you mind if we light up?\"\n\nNicolette smiled nervously and glanced at Laffite as she started to rise. \"Perhaps you will excuse me...\"\n\nLaffite reached for her hand. \"We'd like you to stay, Nikki,\" he said. \"And I'm sure you won't mind if our guests smoke.\"\n\n\"Oh, of course not! Do enjoy your cigars, messieurs.\"\n\nA pause followed as tinders were struck and Xavier scurried about the table, refilling silver goblets.\n\n\"Now, gentlemen,\" Laffite said. \"I hope you have been mellowed by this superb meal from Andre's kitchen, because I'm about to make an offer which I want you to accept.\" He paused, squinting one eye at the two men, who waited in silence. \"You know my brother is in the Cabildo.\" They nodded. \"You also know he's done nothing illegal\u2014other than keep a few dollars that the customs officials in New Orleans would have pocketed anyway.\"\n\nThe two men squirmed uncomfortably in their seats, knowing that Laffite spoke God's own truth. The only crime Claiborne could pin on either of the Laffite brothers was that of failing to pay customs taxes on some\u2014not all\u2014of the merchandise they brought into the city for sale. Had the customs officials been able to collect, they would have reported nonpayment of tariff anyway, then priced the goods so that the citizens paid enough to cover the loss.\n\n\"What I'm proposing is this: a fee of twenty thousand dollars in gold to each of you, if you'll give up your present positions and come to work for me!\"\n\nLaffite puffed on his cigar, letting the phenomenal figure sink in. His head was wreathed in blue-white smoke by the time Grymes finally recovered enough composure to say, \"By God, I'll do it!\"\n\nLivingston said nothing, but nodded his head slowly, up and down.\n\n\"You understand that my brother must be freed before you get the money?\"\n\n\"Livingston and I could get _you_ out of hell, if necessary!\" Grymes enthused. \"I'm sure we'll have no trouble securing Pierre's release.\"\n\nLaffite wouldn't let them accept so quickly. \"Claiborne's not going to like it. None of them are. They'll say that you've sold your birthrights for the usual mess of pottage and that you've been seduced off the path of honor and duty by the bloodstained gold of a _pirate_!\" Laffite finished with a snarl.\n\n\"What is this, Laffite?\" Livingston asked. \"Are you trying to talk us out of it?\"\n\nNicolette spoke for the first time. \"No, Monsieur Livingston. I believe Jean understands the problems you will be facing and wishes to point them out to you so that you won't say afterward that you weren't warned. Pierre's freedom means too much to all of us to have an offer of assistance made lightly or without proper consideration.\"\n\nNicolette, embarrassed by her own impassioned words, looked quickly down at the white tablecloth when she finished. Laffite's hand found hers in her lap. He gave her trembling fingers an approving squeeze.\n\n\"Grymes, here, may be speaking out on impulse, madame, but I've turned over all the possibilities in my mind. I'm sick to death of seeing this kind of injustice and Claiborne's persecution of these two men. We'll do it! Agreed, Grymes?\"\n\n\"Agreed!\" the District Attorney answered enthusiastically.\n\n\"Xavier!\" Laffite called, and the servant was instantly at his elbow. \"I believe you can bring out the champagne now.\"\n\nLivingston and Grymes lingered only a short time, discussing their ideas with Laffite and Nicolette. She slipped out of the salon long enough to go to the pantry and give the good news to Marie Louise. This time Pierre's mistress allowed her tears to flow.\n\nWhen the two men left, Laffite and Nicolette sat alone on the gold brocade love seat. He didn't kiss her, but held her hands and stared at her so lovingly and intently that Nicolette felt a flush of self-consciousness creeping out of the low sweep of her bodice.\n\nShe laughed nervously. \"Do I have crumbs on my chin? Has my hair come loose from the combs? Have I broken out in spots?\"\n\nHe let his fingers trace her lips. \"None of those things, my darling. I was only staring because I have never known a woman so beautiful who also has such a magnificent brain. And to think that this lovely wizard is all mine. Ah, it's nearly more than I can comprehend.\"\n\nXavier strolled into the room at that moment, just as Laffite bent to kiss her. He carried a violin under his arm.\n\n_\"Pardon,_ Boss, but I thought perhaps some music?\"\n\nLaffite nodded, stood, and took Nicolette's hand. \"A waltz, madame?\"\n\n_\"Merci,_ monsieur,\" she answered, melting into his arms.\n\nThey clung to each other and Nicolette felt as if she were floating about the room. If she had ever wanted Jean Laffite to make love to her\u2014and she had, many times\u2014right now she wanted it more than life itself. She felt almost faint, her need was so great. Still, the music went on and she endured the thrill of this intimacy in his arms, knowing all the while that even more wondrous things were to come.\n\nNestling his lips against her right ear, he whispered, \"Madame, you objected to my talk of the _boudoir_ earlier, but now the lamplighter has already made his rounds, and I don't think I can wait\n\n\"Now, Jean, please!\" she said, cutting off his words.\n\nHe gathered her in his arms and started for the stairs. Sweet notes followed them up and lingered in the air about the bed all the while that they touched, caressed, and finally surrendered to the sweetest passion Nicolette had ever known.\n\nWhen she lay in his arms afterward, still feeling new thrills as he kissed her erect nipples and stroked her trembling thighs, she felt totally at peace.\n\nHad she seen the shadowy figure lurking outside the house all evening, that euphoria would have shattered. Even after they extinguished the lamp, the man waited... watching the dark house... scheming... planning his twisted revenge.\n\n###\n\n# Chapter Twenty\n\nThe rains that normally turned New Orleans into a swamp in midsummer came, but lingered only briefly. Mosquitoes swarmed over the city, breeding in the murky canals that had previously been Bourbon Street, Royal Street, and the other byways before they were flooded.\n\nNicolette, confined to the house by Laffite's orders, felt even more imprisoned by the steady deluge. When the sun forced its way through the slate-colored clouds on the third day, it set the whole area steaming.\n\nNicolette and Marie Louise burned bay and juniper berries in every room to try and dispel the fetid vapors from outside. The humidity was so bad that shoes left on the floor overnight were covered with mildew by morning. The women tied vetiver roots into small bundles for every armoire and drawer, trying to dry the air and save their gowns from ruin. But nothing seemed to help.\n\nMarie Louise, Nicolette noticed, moved about like a zombie. She could imagine her thoughts of Pierre, who was still in the Cabildo in spite of the two lawyers' efforts. If they were this uncomfortable with the heat and dampness in Laffite's spacious mansion, Pierre must be in total misery, chained in a dark, cramped cell. The rising waters would undoubtedly drive all manner of lowlife in from the flooded streets to share his quarters. Nicolette shuddered at the thought of rats, frogs, and snakes crawling indoors, and decided she would be better off not thinking about such things.\n\n\"Chin up, Marie Louise!\" Nicolette advised as they worked together changing soured bedclothes. \"Pierre will be free soon.\"\n\n_\"Oui,_ madame,\" the woman answered, not meeting Nicolette's eyes.\n\n\"When Jean gets home, I'm sure he'll bring good news.\" Nicolette made another attempt at cheering her companion, but this time Marie Louise didn't answer.\n\nShe gave up. Her words, meant to be encouraging, came out in a tone of voice as hopelessly limp as the starched curtains at the bedroom windows. She hadn't seen nor heard from Jean since before the rains began. He had left the morning after their dinner party that first night in New Orleans, saying not to worry, that he might be gone a day or so. Nicolette sighed and flopped down on the freshly made bed, staring vacantly at the ceiling. For all she knew, Jean could be sharing Pierre's cell by now!\n\nJumping up suddenly, she said to herself, \"I can't wait any longer. I'll go stark, raving mad!\"\n\nThe man who had been watching the house for days pulled himself back into the late afternoon shadows of the house across the street when he heard the carriage entrance door of Laffite's mansion open. He saw Nicolette come to the black wrought iron gate and start to open it. He tensed, ready to act. But then a second woman, an octoroon, appeared.\n\n\"No, Madame Boss! You cannot go out into the streets!\" he heard her say.\n\nNicolette tried to pull away from the clutching hands. \"I have to find him!\" she insisted.\n\n\"You'll find nothing but death about this afternoon,\" she said ominously. \"There's a bad feel to the air!\"\n\n\"What are you talking about?\"\n\n\"The fever, madame! It has begun already. Now the rains have come and gone. This sickness clinging to the city will infect any who are exposed to it. I cannot let you go!\"\n\n\"Damn that witch to hell!\" the man across the street muttered under his breath when he saw Nicolette hauled forcibly back indoors.\n\nHe leaned back against the cool, shaded bricks, his fevered mind playing tricks on him. He thought for a moment that he saw her face at a second-storey window, staring down at him. He wiped his sweating brow with the back of his hand and settled back to wait once more.\n\n\"Sooner or later you have to come out,\" he muttered.\n\nAnd it turned out to be sooner than he expected. The argument between the two women ended when Nicolette insisted that she be allowed to go to the cathedral and light candles and say prayers for Jean and Pierre. Marie Louise gave in at last, making Nicolette promise that she would take the highest ground to avoid wetting her feet in the fetid water still standing about, and that she would return within the hour.\n\nNicolette held a handkerchief soaked in camphor oil before her nose and mouth as she came out into Bourbon Street. She turned into Orleans Street, the city's widest street, which ran into the back of the cathedral. She hurried her steps. She would do as she had told Marie Louise, but she had other plans besides prayers and candles. The Cabildo stood next to the cathedral. Perhaps she could get some word from the guards on duty. At least she could make sure that only one Laffite brother was in custody.\n\nHer mind and her feet were working at such a clip that she didn't realize she was being followed. She had an hour or more until twilight. She never thought to worry about being out alone this time of day.\n\nNicolette came up short and her breath froze in her throat when she spotted black, oily smoke billowing up from the direction of her father's warehouse.\n\n\"Fire!\" she choked out, visions of that night in her house on Bourbon Street flashing horror through her brain.\n\n\"Only controlled fires in barrels to kill the threat of fever,\" a familiar voice said behind her.\n\n\"Thank God!\" she answered, then gasped when she saw the man approaching her. She tried to flee, but it was too late. He already had a restraining arm about her waist.\n\n\"Leave me alone, Diego!\" she cried, trying to fight her way out of his grasp. She looked about frantically, but the street was deserted, all the windows and doors closed against the dreaded mists.\n\n\"I've been very patient, Nicolette,\" he said in a shaky voice, hauling her into the alley beside the cathedral. \"I thought you'd tire of your role as whore by now and come crawling back to me, begging for forgiveness. I should have known from the start what kind of woman you really are. But you belong to me. If you resist, I'll just have to persuade you.\" He gave a nervous, hacking half-laugh, half-cough.\n\nNicolette looked at him closely for the first time. He was very ill. She recognized the early symptoms of yellow fever from having helped nurse one of her mother's cousins once, the jaundiced skin, yellowish eyes, the sweating, the hoarseness.\n\n\"Diego, wait! Where are you taking me?\"\n\n\"Where we can be alone!\" he answered as he turned her into a narrow alley at the back of the Cabildo.\n\n\"You won't get away with this. They'll be out looking for me any minute.\"\n\n\"Who'll be looking for you?\" He offered her an ugly laugh, followed by a coughing spasm. \"That nigger wench? I've been watching the house. I know Laffite's nowhere around.\"\n\nDiego took a roundabout route to reach a dilapidated flatboat tied up at the levee. A number of people in the vicinity of the boat saw the two of them together, but these were not the type to meddle in the business of others\u2014vagrants, rivermen, prostitutes, and pimps.\n\n\"Please, help me,\" Nicolette sobbed when they came close enough to a man in ragged clothes and the turkey feather of a Kaintuck.\n\n\"By damn, mister,\" he said to Diego with a lecherous squint of his dark eyes, \"if you ain't hired this 'un for the whole livelong night, I'd sure pride myself in _helpin'_ her!\"\n\nDiego snarled French curses at the riverman, who moved off, not wanting trouble, only a good time with a pretty woman.\n\nShaking with a chill, Diego used all the strength he could muster to drag Nicolette onboard the filthy boat and tie her inside the canvas-walled cabin. He started to gag her as well, but she talked him out of it. Having secured her to his satisfaction, he fell back on a dirty pallet, breathing heavily.\n\n\"Diego, why are you doing this?\"\n\nHe didn't answer. His eyes were closed. Nicolette wondered if he had lost consciousness. His heavy breathing and the shrieks of prostitutes and curses from their customers in the neighboring flatboat-brothels seemed the only sounds in the gathering dusk. She kept very quiet, hoping that Diego would not rouse. Given time enough, Laffite would find her or she would think of a plan of escape.\n\nHe came awake so suddenly, and jumped up, his sweating face close to hers, that Nicolette screamed. In one cruel motion, he slapped her across the mouth and brought his hand down, tearing open her bodice. Nicolette bit her lip so she wouldn't cry out again.\n\nDiego lit a lamp and brought it close to her face, staring at her bare breasts and tracing fine blue lines which extended out from her nipples. She sucked in her breath at the touch of his fingers\u2014so light, yet so threatening.\n\n\"What's this? These marks weren't here before!\" He examined her more closely. \"And you're bigger!\" He looked up into her face, a suspicious grimace beginning on his own. \"Are you carrying _his_ child?\"\n\nNicolette shook her head vigorously. \"No, of course not, Diego! What would make you think that?\"\n\nHe slapped her again and raged, \"Don't lie to me! I've seen the changes in a woman's body once she's conceived! I know you're pregnant. You shameless whore!\"\n\nNicolette's heart was pounding. How could he have guessed from so little evidence? Even Jean hadn't noticed. But then he didn't see the gradual changes in her body yet. He saw her naked nightly.\n\nDiego sat back on his heels, mumbling to himself. \"Now I can't do it... not with her this way. It would make me sick to my stomach!\" He turned on her again, yelling, \"How dare you have his child!\"\n\n\"It could be yours,\" she lied, desperate now to protect the tiny thing forming within her. She knew full well that Laffite was the father.\n\nA slow, vicious smile curved his yellowish lips. \"No. It couldn't be mine. Jada complained to me the very day she died about having to wash your bloodied things. But I have a new plan. You'll like this one better.\"\n\n\"What was your old one?\" she asked, trying to keep him talking, hoping he would pass out from the fever.\n\n\"Oh, a bit of sport. I thought I'd have my fill of you and then hire you out for as long as you lasted. This is my boat, you see. I kicked the women off who were using it. They didn't pay their rent on time. So now I need a replacement. Since you've had so much experience, I thought you ought to bring in a lot of trade.\"\n\n\"Weren't you afraid I'd tell the customers to bring Jean Laffite to rescue me?\" she asked, trying to make her voice sound calm, though horror gripped her.\n\n\"Not at all! Most of the men who frequent the girls on the boats could care less about saving anyone but themselves. And they like to play rough, too. You would be out of your wits in a few days\u2014if you lived that long.\"\n\nNicolette shivered. This insane beast was the man the Church recognized as her husband.\n\n\"But that plan won't work now!\"\n\n\"Why not?\" she forced out, tasting bile in her throat.\n\n\"Because the thought of taking a pregnant woman makes me sick. I've never touched one of my women after she got caught. It's the most disgusting thing I can think of! Pregnant women shouldn't even be allowed to show themselves in public. They should be punished severely, if they do. If they can't stay locked in their rooms, they should be locked in the stocks!\" A queer look came over his face as he raved on and on.\n\n\"I'm sorry if I disgust you, Diego,\" she said meekly. \"Untie me and I'll be gone from your sight in a moment.\"\n\nHe threw back his head and laughed until she hoped the awful noise might draw outside attention and bring about her rescue.\n\n\"Oh, no, my dear!\" he drawled. \"I have a much better idea than my first.\" He fumbled in his vest pocket and drew out a key. \"Do you know what this opens?\"\n\nNicolette, remembering his penchant for handcuffing her, could not find her voice. She shook her head.\n\n\"This little key unlocks anything I want unlocked! But at the moment, I have in mind the pillories on Chartres Street.\" He offered no further explanation of his intentions.\n\nNone was needed to make Nicolette's insides cramp with terror. How often had she walked a block out of her way to avoid the ugly sight of some poor felon, perhaps guilty of no more than stealing a loaf of bread to keep his children from starving, with his head and arms locked into the wooden stocks, which stood facing the Cabildo. It was a favorite sport among the naughty boys in town to throw rotten vegetables from the market at these unfortunates. A sign always dangled from the prisoner's neck, telling his name, his crime, and the duration of his punishment.\n\n\"Don't look so stricken,\" Diego said. \"You've been saved! This won't kill you. I've only known one person to die in the stocks and that was from a rock carefully aimed at his temple by a passerby.\"\n\nNicolette steadied her breathing in order to calm herself. Certainly, she reasoned, this couldn't be as awful a punishment as Diego's first plans for her. And besides, the pillories were in an exposed area, right on the edge of the Place d'Armes. She would be released in no time. She felt a wave of relief. She was ready to get on with it\u2014to have this all behind her.\n\n\"Very well, Diego,\" she said. \"I see I have no choice.\"\n\nHis eyes went cold and menacing. \"Not in such a hurry.\n\nThere are still a few people about. Around midnight we'll go.\"\n\nHe stretched out on the pallet again as if he meant to sleep, but sat up suddenly, grinning, his eyes fever-bright, and said, \"Oh, I forgot to tell you the best part.\" Grabbing a piece of scrap lumber from the firebox and a charred stick, he scratched something on the board then held it up for Nicolette to see. \"Here's the sign for your neck.\"\n\nShe read: Nicolette Vernet Bermudez\u2014The Pirate Laffite's Whore\n\nNicolette made a choking sound, but Bermudez went on, \"The other thing is that we can't have you appearing in public in that torn gown.\" He yanked at the ripped bodice, destroying it totally. \"So you'll sit in the pillory naked for all New Orleans to see the tainted flesh of one of their lilies!\"\n\nHe pulled a dirty blanket around his shoulders and lay down to sleep. Nicolette tried to keep reason in her frantic mind. Surely someone would find her before Diego went through with this insane plan. He was getting visibly weaker. She might be able to overpower him. For two hours she pored over escape plans and struggled, trying to loosen her ropes. But it was no use. Diego Bermudez was an expert with a knot.\n\n\"Your time's come!\" he said at length.\n\nNicolette drew back, whimpering with terror, as he untied her.\n\nLaffite covered the distance from Tremoulet's Coffee House, where he'd been meeting with Livingston and Grymes, to the house in Bourbon Street with angry strides. Hours and days were slipping away and with them his brother's strength, perhaps his very life.\n\nStill Claiborne blocked every move they tried to make. Legal obstacles were thrown up at each turn. And there seemed no clear path in sight to Pierre's freedom.\n\nHe slowed as he neared the house, trying to compose himself. Pierre wasn't his only concern. There was Nikki. The reported fever cases had tripled in the past three days, and God alone knew how many as yet went unreported. She would be in grave danger if they lingered in New Orleans. And not only Nikki, he thought, but the baby as well!\n\nHe smiled to himself. How utterly proper of her not to confide in him, to keep her precious secret to herself for as long as she could. But did she think he was a blind man? He would lovingly wring a confession out of her tonight, he decided.\n\nGlancing up at the door, he frowned. The cathedral bells had tolled eleven several minutes ago. Nikki never turned her lamp out until after midnight. Her bedtime habit was to read French poetry and her Bible before she went to sleep. But her room lay in darkness as was the rest of the house except for a small room where Marie Louise slept.\n\nHis old premonition of disaster struck like a physical weight. Hurrying through the carriage gate, he charged up the stairs and pounded frantically when he found the door locked. Somewhere deep inside the house he could hear the empty sound of shuffling footsteps over the pounding of his heart. A lamp flickered inside, casting a dull gold glow on the fanlight above the door.\n\n\"Who is it, please?\" Marie Louise called from inside.\n\n\"Laffite, dammit! Open up!\"\n\nThe door swung wide immediately, revealing Pierre's mistress, her eyes red from weeping and her face a taut mask of worry.\n\n\"Oh, Monsieur Boss, thank _Le bon Dieu_!\" the woman cried. \"You have found her, _oui_?\"\n\n\"Found her? What are you talking about? What's wrong here?\" Laffite demanded, his fears rising to the panic level.\n\n\"Madame Nikki, she's gone!\" Marie Louise wept. \"She should have been back hours ago. I've sent Xavier and Gator-Bait out to search for her, but they haven't returned either. I have been here all alone for hours\u2014wanting to go out and look for her, but afraid to leave in case news arrived.\"\n\nLaffite led the hysterical woman to the salon and poured her a glass of brandy. He had never seen Marie Louise in such a state. She had always been a virtual stoic. Her alarm fed his own.\n\n\"Now tell me, calmly, Marie Louise. When did she leave and where was she going?\"\n\nThe Place d'Armes and Chartres Street lay under several inches of foul-smelling water. In spite of the humid heat of the night, Nicolette shivered, naked, under the torn blanket Diego had draped around her before they left the boat.\n\nAn hour earlier, Diego had released her and ordered her to strip off her clothes. He never looked at her until the blanket hid her offensive body from his view. She had cooperated, planning to go along with him until she could get away. She would scream her plight to the world then, at her first opportunity. But Diego Bermudez's thoughts were a jump ahead of hers even in his feverish state. He gagged her securely before leading her off the boat. Now all she could do\u2014her hands tied and her cries bound up inside her\u2014was struggle along, trying to keep on her feet so she wouldn't fall in the contaminated water. Several times as she waded through ankle-deep water, she felt things slither against her bare legs. She tried not to think what sort of creature might have touched her.\n\nDiego, she noticed, stumbled from time to time, and he seemed out of his head with fever, rambling on and on with fragments of conversation that meant nothing to her. Again she took heart. He might collapse before they reached the pillories.\n\nBut before she had time to adjust to what was about to happen, she found herself bent over uncomfortably, her head and hands locked into the wooden stocks. Not a soul stirred in the streets or the Place d'Armes to witness her humiliation as Diego yanked away the blanket, exposing her totally.\n\n\"There you are, my fine lady!\" Diego spat at her. \"You'll have time to think through your multiple sins before the rowdies come to jeer and gawk at you!\"\n\nAnd then he was gone. She was all alone in the moonless night, water swirling about her ankles, splinters on the rough bench tearing at her bare buttocks with the slightest move she made. She could neither free herself nor cry out for help\u2014only endure the pain and pray silently for an end to this horror.\n\nThe burning cramps began as dawn was streaking the sky. Choking sounds from Nicolette's dry throat could travel no further than her mouth. Her body raged with a feverlike heat, then abruptly turned cold, as if icy water had been thrown over her. The pains came and went. After a time, she was so weak she could no longer hold her head up. She drooped forward until her hair completely covered the incriminating sign Diego had lettered.\n\nSuddenly, nothing seemed to matter any more. She knew with an awful certainty what the pains meant. The first telltale wetness only trickled out of her. Then she felt a wrenching gush soak the bench. She bit down hard on the gag in her mouth and squeezed her eyes tight shut.\n\nI've lost Jean's baby! she thought, and immediately lost consciousness.\n\n###\n\n# Chapter Twenty-One\n\nP\u00e8re Antoine, like many a priest, was an early riser. He valued the quiet hours of the day, feeling he could commune with God best as he watched the sun pour out its virgin gold over the river.\n\nThe old priest stood on the steps of the cathedral for several moments, enjoying the daily miracle of the birth of a new day, before he noticed a form huddled in the stocks.\n\nOdd, he thought, they never leave those poor devils locked in overnight, and I don't remember anyone there yesterday.\n\nHe moved down the steps slowly, holding up his plain brown robes to keep them dry. When he came close enough to make out Nicolette's naked form and the blood all about, he let his robes drop and cried, \"Holy Mother of God! The poor child! Who could have done such a thing?\"\n\nHe hastened back to his quarters to get a robe to cover her. Then he went to the Cabildo and demanded a key to unlock the stocks.\n\n\"Take it easy, Padre!\" the sleepy guard said, scratching for a flea in his scruffy beard. \"I don't know what the fuss is all about. Ain't been a soul in the stocks all week, but I'll give you the key if you'll let me get back to my nap.\"\n\nIn no time, P\u00e8re Antoine had Nicolette in his stark cubicle. When she was lying comfortably and almost conscious, he blessed the aborted child, though it was not yet formed well enough to be recognizable as such, and hid it away for burial later.\n\nNicolette's first waking vision was the old priest's kind face, staring down at her with concern in his eyes.\n\n\"My baby?\" she whispered.\n\n\"With God, my child,\" he answered, making the sign of the cross. \"You must try to sleep now. I will contact your father to come for you.\"\n\n\"No!\" Nicolette cried out, trying to rise. \"He isn't in the city. He's upriver at the plantation.\"\n\n\"Then whom should I send for? Your husband?\"\n\n\"I have no husband,\" she muttered too low for him to hear, then said aloud, \"Please, Father, send for Jean Laffite.\"\n\nP\u00e8re Antoine frowned and glanced at the shameful sign resting against the wall. His mind whirred with possibilities. He could send her to the Ursuline Sisters at the convent to be cared for, but they had their hands full with fever victims. The hospital, too, was overflowing. He could have her taken by coach to Belle Pointe, but after what she had been through, she needed rest, shelter, and caring for.\n\n\"Please, P\u00e8re Antoine. He has a house in Bourbon Street, and he doesn't know where I am. When I left yesterday to come to the cathedral, I said I'd be back within the hour. He'll be so worried!\"\n\nThe priest's snow-white eyebrows drew down, forming a shaggy bridge. \"And rightly so! What manner of man allows a woman to wander about a fever-ridden, half-flooded city in the first place? I'm not at all sure he is the one who should look after you.\"\n\nNicolette wanted to defend Laffite to the good priest, but she was too weak to fight. However, the dilemma solved itself when Jean Laffite pounded on the priest's door a moment later.\n\n\"P\u00e8re Antoine, are you in there?\" Laffite's voice boomed through the heavy wood. \"I have to talk to you. It's a matter of life and death!\"\n\nWhen the priest opened the door, Laffite quickly explained his plight: Nicolette's disappearance and his unsuccessful search for her. He couldn't see her lying there on the cot behind the open door.\n\n\"Monsieur Laffite, if you will only stop long enough for me to speak,\" P\u00e8re Antoine interrupted, and Laffite fell silent. \"The woman you seek is here.\" He motioned toward the shadowy corner.\n\nRushing in, Laffite knelt beside the bed and took Nicolette's cold hands in his. \"Darling, what happened?\"\n\nShe tried to answer, but couldn't speak, her throat was so clogged with tears. She wished so that she had told him about the baby when it could have been a time of shared happiness. Now her news would only be a painful occasion for mourning.\n\n\"Nikki, speak to me!\" he begged, closing his arms around her and laying his cheek against hers.\n\n\"Don't press her now, son. She's had a terrible night. Take her home. Put her to bed. Then come back here and we'll talk.\"\n\nLaffite turned to stare at the old cleric. Something in the tone of his voice, his guarded manner, set Laffite on edge. There was more to Nikki's disappearance than he understood.\n\n\"Did Diego Bermudez have a hand in all this?\" he asked in a quietly deadly voice.\n\nThe very mention of the man's name set Nicolette to whimpering. She tried to control her body, to stop the violent shivering and the terror that consumed her, but it was no use. She realized suddenly and to her horror that she would never feel safe again until the man who called himself her husband was dead. This thought terrified her even more. Never in her life had she wished another human being in his grave. It was against everything she had ever lived by.\n\n_God help me,_ she thought, _I would kill him myself if I could!_\n\nThe priest hesitated. He had no answer for Jean Laffite. He didn't know who did this terrible thing.\n\n\"Never mind,\" Laffite growled. \"Just looking at Nikki, I have my answer. Father, will you see that she's taken to my house? There is a woman there who can look after her until I finish some business.\"\n\n\"No, Jean!\" Nicolette cried, holding out a hand to him. \"Please, don't leave me. I don't want to be alone. I feel so empty. I can't stand it if you go!\"\n\nLaffite looked at her closely. She was shaking all over and her face wore a haunted look. \"What's he done to you, my darling? I've never seen you this way before.\"\n\n\"She's very weak. She lost a great deal of blood,\" the priest said. \"This is never easy for any woman, and under these particular circumstances.\n\nLaffite grasped his meaning at once. \"He made you lose our baby!\"\n\nNicolette felt her whole world crumbling. Her painful sobs echoed through the room.\n\n\"Don't cry, darling. We'll have others.\" He picked her up gently and kissed her forehead, then her lips. \"We're going home now.\"\n\nLaffite had noted when he lifted her that she wore one of P\u00e8re Antoine's robes over nothing at all. He worked at controlling the new fury that filled him. Whatever that maniac had done to Nikki, he would receive full payment in return!\n\nAll the awful tortures of the Inquisition passed through his mind, offering themselves as instruments for his revenge. But he knew, once he found Diego Bermudez, he wouldn't have the patience to administer the slow and painful death the man deserved. No, it would be quick and clean, but very final.\n\nDiego Bermudez lay on the filthy reed pallet on the boat. He had come back to rest and try to recover some of his strength after locking Nicolette in for the night. But sleep eluded him. The fever raged. His whole body ached as if he had been badly beaten. His throat burned with thirst, but he had nothing to drink onboard and he was too weak to rise from where he lay.\n\n\"Help me, someone,\" he called out repeatedly in a cracked voice.\n\nHe could hear talking from the boats tied up on either side. But in The Swamp, one human being neither asked for nor was given aid by another.\n\nAs the day wore on, the summer sun blazed down on the canvas covering above him, turning the makeshift cabin into an inferno. Diego felt as if his life were streaming out through every pore in his body. The sound of the river lapping against the sides of the flatboat only encouraged his raging thirst, taunting him into delirium.\n\nHe began to see horrible things: spiders crawling about the pallet and over his body, dead men's eyes floating through the air, he even imagined the face of death peering in at him through the opening beyond the canvas flap. The eyeless sockets never left his face and the gaping mouth seemed to smile expectantly at him.\n\n\"No! No!\" Diego rasped. \"Get away from me! I'm not ready. You leave me alone!\"\n\n\"Well, lookie here!\" a woman's voice said. The death's head became her painted face. \"If it ain't himself, all stretched out and sweatin' like the pig he is!\"\n\nFemale laughter punctuated her words. The woman hadn't come alone, but Diego couldn't see the others, who remained on the boat's deck.\n\nHe blinked several times, trying to clear his vision. \"Banshee, is that you?\" he asked, recognizing the Irish accent of one of the prostitutes he had recently evicted from his floating brothel.\n\n\"Sure, it is, mate! Come back for me belongins, since you never gave me a minute's warnin' to collect 'em before you kicked my arse off this stinkin' tub. Niver figured I'd come back in the nick of time to give me death-scream to herald your passin'! A fine honor, indeed!\"\n\n\"Don't say that! I'm not going to die! If you could only give me a drink of water,\" he begged.\n\nA shrill, wailing laugh split the close afternoon air. The sound, which gave Banshee her name, was a familiar signal along the levee. It announced to all within blocks, danger approaching, a full bottle to be passed around, customers to be taken care of, or a trick's climax and her own simultaneous, feigned ecstasy.\n\n\"For the love of God, please!\" Diego groveled.\n\n\"Oh, so now it's himself doin' the beggin', is it? Well, it won't do you any more good than it did me an' the girls! You ain't got the compassion God give a duck! And so I'm not bound to waste any of me own, scarce as it is, on the likes of you! Besides, we all seen what you done to that girl last night. Me, I've had me share of hard knocks at a man's hands, but I ain't never seen nothin' like that! You're dirt, mister! Too filthy for even a hog to waller in!\" She came close enough to spit in his face.\n\n\"Water,\" he moaned, reaching for her in vain.\n\nPretending not to hear, the once-pretty Banshee went on, \"Back in Erin, we hold a wake over the corpse. Course, that's done after the fact. In your case, I figured as how we'd take our pleasure aforehand\u2014sort of enjoy your passin'. There's many in these parts 'll be saying their beads in thanks to be rid of you!\" She pulled back the canvas flap. \"Come aboard, girls. It won't be takin' long now!\"\n\nSqueals and giggles filled the stale air. The two women who had been waiting outside pushed their way in, crowding around the prostrate figure and further polluting the atmosphere with the odor of their unwashed bodies.\n\n\"Himself's been beggin' for water,\" a smiling Banshee informed the other two. Then she raised a bottle in front of his face and watched his dry, swollen tongue dart out over cracked lips. \"A shame we ain't got none, eh, girlies? This here Irish rotgut might kill you, sweetie, so we best just drink it our own selves.\"\n\nBanshee tipped the bottle up and swallowed several gulps while Josepha and Spanish Aggie looked on and giggled. They passed the bottle around until it was empty and they were tipsy, then tossed it out into the river.\n\n\"What next?\" the black-eyed Aggie asked. \"The _se\u00f1or_ should have more of a sendoff, _si_?\"\n\n\"Like the one he give us!\" the tiny, blond Josepha said. \"Not even a 'By your leave, ladies.' Just threw us out on our _derri\u00e8res,_ he did! This business ain't tough enough, we got to put up with sons-of-bitches the likes of him!\"\n\nA gleam came into Banshee's green eyes. \"Sure, the man's well-heeled and more often than not carries a sizeable poker stake on his person. What say we have a look-see, ladies? He sure as hell ain't got no use for his ill-got gold in the hereafter, and he's headin' thataway fast!\"\n\nSix sharp-nailed hands flew to Diego's aching body, tearing at his clothes, rummaging his pockets, ignoring his anguished protests. They took it all: his gold watch, a pouch containing several hundred dollars, two rings from his fingers, and finally they stripped off his boots. Then they searched the boat for anything of value he might have hidden on the premises. Finding another fat purse stashed under a loose board beneath the woodbox, the ladies decided to depart and hide their loot.\n\n\"Don't worry, sweetie,\" Banshee called. \"We'll send another bunch to wait out your dyin'! I couldn't stand to be here when it really gets bad anyways. They say it's somethin' fearsome to watch. The body suffers the agony of hellfire before the end.\"\n\nHer Banshee scream-laughter followed her words and lingered in the stifling cabin long after she and the other two departed. But true to her word, Banshee sent others to strip Diego of what little the first scavengers had left, until he lay naked and gasping on the pallet.\n\nSystematically, prostitutes, pimps, and other riff-raff of the docks dismantled the old boat in search of gold, which Banshee had assured them they would discover. Finding none, the treasure hunters took out their anger on the dying man.\n\nNear midnight, Diego Bermudez breathed his last, never having received his requested drink of water.\n\nJean Laffite remained at Nicolette's side for an entire day. By the next afternoon, his rage returned in full force and he was ready to ferret out Bermudez. Nikki, he knew now, would recover, and Marie Louise had assured him she could still have a child. But the abuse and indignity Nicolette had been forced to endure would not go unpunished.\n\nLaffite was armed and ready to let blood when he located the boat owned by Diego Bermudez. His first reaction to the sight he found onboard the rained craft was disappointment. He had been cheated of the sweet revenge he craved. But that feeling quickly turned to nausea.\n\nThe naked corpse lay bloated and discolored on the filthy planks. Rats had done their work on the body during the night, especially on the fingers, toes, and face. Human vermin had also taken their toll. There were cigar bums all over the deceased and one of the pimps had carved his name and the date\u2014two days before\u2014into Diego's sunken chest, surrounding the letters with a fancifully etched heart.\n\nLaffite didn't stay in the stinking cabin long enough to determine the full extent of mutilation. When his stomach lurched threateningly, he hurried out into the fresh air, gulping great drafts of it to clear the fetid odor from his lungs and nostrils.\n\nDiego Bermudez had died as he had lived\u2014miserably and without dignity. There was nothing left for Laffite to do. He lit a pine knot he found on the levee and tossed it into the cabin. With one swift motion, he untied the wreck of a boat and set it to drift with the current. He stood on the levee and watched until the craft burned to the water-line and then, caught in a swirling eddy in mid-river, sank beneath the surface.\n\n\"Burial at sea, eh, cap'n?\" a woman said behind Laffite. He turned, but she hurried away with a Bansheelike laugh before he could answer.\n\nJean Laffite went home to Nicolette, who remained in bed under Marie Louise's care. He had been afraid at the time that neither he nor Nikki would ever be the same again\u2014that the shadow of Diego Bermudez's insane cruelty would forevermore darken their lives together.\n\nBut when Laffite told Nicolette quietly and without details, \"He's dead,\" the lines of strain smoothed from her face in an instant, and seeing this, he let go all his bitterness and went into her arms.\n\nTheir pact went unspoken, but they both understood. The name of Diego Bermudez would never again pass their lips, even as the man himself would never again blight their lives.\n\nNow they could be married, legally. They could look forward to a real future: children, a home, a happily normal life together.\n\nLaffite settled his large frame on the bed next to Nicolette and slipped an arm beneath her neck, bringing her head to rest on his shoulder.\n\n\"Feeling better?\" he asked.\n\n\"Ever so much, darling. Marie Louise is a wonderful nurse.\"\n\n\"Yes, she's done a lot for both of us. I wish I could return the favor by getting Pierre out of that rathole before time for the baby to come. It would mean so much to her\u2014to both of them.\"\n\nShe turned to him, full face, shocked with herself for letting her own troubles wipe everyone else's from her mind. \"Grymes and Livingston haven't made any headway yet?\"\n\n\"I'm afraid not. For every step we think they've taken forward, Claiborne finds some way to push them back two.\" He brushed a wisp of hair back from her forehead and smiled. \"But I don't want you worrying about this or anything else, darling. You have only one job to do: get yourself completely well again so we can go home to Grande Terre as soon as possible.\"\n\n\"Home!\" she breathed, settling in his arms and closing her eyes. \"It will be good to get back. I don't like New Orleans when the fever's here. All that thick smoke makes it like night in the middle of the brightest day. And the cannons booming all night! It's terrifying to be awakened by firing.\"\n\n\"I'd like to know what idiot came up with the idea of firing cannons to chase away the fever!\" he said. \"He must have been hiding when the brains were passed out!\"\n\nNicolette giggled.\n\n\"It's good to hear you laugh again, darling,\" Laffite said, kissing her cheek. \"And it won't be much longer. I'm as anxious to leave as you are. I have a meeting with Grymes and Livingston later this week. If they still haven't made any progress by then, we have an alternate plan that we'll put into motion.\"\n\nNicolette sat up and looked at him, her eagerness apparent. \"Tell me!\"\n\n\"Not a word of it!\" he answered. \"It's a secret. If it works, fine. If not, I don't want you to be called in as a witness against me.\"\n\n\"I'd never...\" she tried to protest.\n\n\"You'd have to, if Claiborne called you to the stand. Now, that's all I'm going to say on the subject. I want you to rest. It's getting late.\"\n\n\"Kiss me goodnight,\" she demanded.\n\nLaffite leaned over her to let his lips capture hers. They were warm and ever so soft\u2014not the icy flesh he had tasted the day he brought her home. Her arms went about his neck and she drew him closer until their bodies found their fitted contours. He pulled away quickly.\n\n\"Oh, no! A kiss is all you get until you are fully recovered, you little temptress!\"\n\n\"Then I'll be well in no time,\" she answered sleepily.\n\nHe laughed. \"My kind of woman!\" she heard him say softly as she drifted off.\n\n###\n\n# Chapter Twenty-Two\n\nThe news reached New Orleans late in August that the British had burned Washington. The Crescent City, already suffering in the grips of a yellow fever epidemic, plunged into an even blacker depression on hearing this disastrous turn of events. Near-panic set in. The Dragon would breathe its fire on New Orleans; the only question was: _How soon?_\n\nJean Laffite worried that the somber atmosphere was infecting Nicolette and keeping her from a full recovery. She needed to be away from New Orleans, but as yet he was afraid to attempt the grueling trip through the bayous back to Grande Terre.\n\nHe returned one afternoon from a meeting with Pierre's lawyers to find Nicolette, still in her dressing gown, sitting in the stuffy, shuttered salon. Her eyes seemed to focus on nothing and she looked pale and unhappy. She didn't bother to rise or embrace him when he bent down to kiss her.\n\n\"That bad, is it?\" he said, frowning.\n\n\"What?\" she asked absently.\n\nHe knelt before her and took her hands. \"Darling, look at me,\" he ordered in a gently scolding tone. \"What would make you happy at this very minute?\"\n\nShe shrugged. \"I don't know. I'm sorry, Jean. I simply don't seem to be able to pull myself out of this depression. I hate staying indoors all the time, but I know I can't go out until the fever threat is past. Still, I miss seeing people, feeling the sun on my face.\" Her voice, which had been quivering badly as she spoke, suddenly took on some of its old fire and determination. \"Dammit, Jean, I want to go out! That's what would make me happy! I feel like a prisoner locked up in a palace. Does it matter whether I die of yellow fever or boredom?\"\n\nHe chuckled and kissed her fingertips. \"That's my girl! Give me a little hell like in the old days! I love it!\"\n\nShe matched his laugh. \"Have I been so terrible to live with these past weeks?\"\n\n\"Never terrible, darling, but hardly yourself. I did miss my old Nikki. And on the outside chance that she might be waiting for me when I got home, I stopped by and purchased these. There's a special benefit performance tonight.\" He reached inside his fawn-colored coat and brought out two tickets.\n\n\"Oh, Jean!\" she cried, throwing her arms around his neck. \"The theater!\"\n\nHe caught her up in his arms, laughing and almost crying he was so happy to see the spark in her eyes and the smile of enthusiasm on her face once again. She found his lips and clung to him, feeling familiar stirrings which she had denied for many days. Her breasts ached for his touch and she pressed them hard against his chest, at the same time fitting the rest of her slim body to his rising contours.\n\n\"Do you think it's safe now?\" he whispered.\n\n\"That's another threat to my life,\" she answered, smiling into his eyes. \"I could die from lack of being loved!\"\n\n\"Not under my roof, you won't!\"\n\nMarie Louise, they knew, would be at the market for another hour at least, and she had Xavier and Gator-Bait in tow to carry her bundles. With the house to themselves, they didn't bother going up to the bedroom.\n\nNot the slightest protest passed Nicolette's eager lips concerning the smoky afternoon sun still streaming through the slits in the shutters. She lay back on the carpet, her dressing gown thrown in careless haste over a chair, and stared hungrily at Laffite's naked body poised above hers. She opened to him immediately.\n\nWhen he began slowly manipulating her toward ecstasy before entering her, she begged, \"Now, darling! I can't wait!\"\n\nTheir hunger for each other was such that they reached the heights more quickly than ever before. And after the weeks of self-enforced abstinence, their shared climax came with crashing intensity. Afterward, they both lay back on the carpet, recovering.\n\n\"My God!\" Laffite gasped. \"I never knew it could be like this, Nikki. Every time it gets better. I'll never get enough of you! The more you give, the more I want. Is there no end to it?\"\n\nShe laughed softly, having thought similar words just before he spoke them. \"I hope there's no end to it! I can see us now, darling, fifty years in the future. You a silver-haired grandfather and I a prim and proper, elderly matron, tossing my skirts up for you to...\"\n\n\"Nikki!\" he interrupted, trying to sound shocked. \"That's indecent! Old couples don't .\n\n\"Well, I certainly intend to!\" She sat up and stared at him, eye to eye. \"If you think I plan to give this up just because you get a little old and crotchety, you'd better think again!\"\n\nHe tried to stifle a chuckle, saying very seriously, \"But, dear, what will the children think... and the grandchildren?\"\n\n\"I don't give a damn what anyone thinks!\"\n\n\"And that's another thing. I want you to watch your language in front of the youngsters. Why, they'll think you were raised among pirates!\"\n\n_\"You!\"_ she shrieked, realizing suddenly that he had been teasing her. He tried to pull her into his arms, but she pushed him back to the floor and straddled his middle, tickling him unmercifully.\n\n\"No, don't!\" he pleaded through gasping laughter. \"Nikki, please... stop it!\"\n\n\"Not until you give me your solemn promise that you won't leave my bed until you go to your coffin! I don't plan to spend my old age withering up for lack of love!\"\n\n\"But my heart,\" he managed between outbursts of frantic laughter. \"Suppose I develop a bad heart. You wouldn't expect me to...\"\n\n\"Don't give me any excuses!\" she said, digging her nails into his sides. \"All I want is your promise!\n\nWhen he still refused to answer, she attacked a new area\u2014his belly.\n\n\"All right! All right! I promise! Anything!\"\n\nThe sound of the door opening from the outside stunned them both to immobility for an instant\u2014long enough for Marie Louise to peek through the open door and see their entwined, naked bodies.\n\n_\"Pardon,\"_ she whispered in an amused tone, then closed the door to the room.\n\n\"Oh, God, Nikki! How could you do this to me?\" Laffite groaned. \"I'll never be able to face the woman again!\"\n\n\"You bastard!\" she said, laughing. \"Always thinking of yourself. I'm the one who's embarrassed. Letting you take me this way\u2014in broad daylight\u2014in the salon! I could just die of shame!\"\n\nLaffite quickly rolled her over onto her back. He paid back in kind what Nicolette had been dishing out to him. She squealed and thrashed as he tickled her.\n\n\"Take it back!\" he ordered. \"What you just said.\"\n\n\"Never!\" she shrieked. \"You _are_ a bastard!\"\n\nThough Nicolette had been able to wring a promise from him, he could not make her give in. The sight of her lovely body, writhing at his slightest touch, her mouth wide and inviting as she panted for breath between bursts of giggles, soon turned his tormenting fingers into instruments of pleasure. Nicolette stopped her thrashing and moaned softly as he caressed her breasts, her belly and thighs.\n\n\"Oh, please, darling,\" she cooed, opening her body to his once again.\n\nBut he would have the final victory. Standing up suddenly and pulling her to her feet, he said, \"After the theater, my anxious one. That will give you plenty of time to enjoy the anticipation.\"\n\nNicolette felt as nervous as the night she had been presented to society. Tonight would be the first time that she and Jean Laffite had appeared as a couple in prominent circles. And the _Theatre d'Orleans,_ newly reopened, was _the_ place for Creole society to gather. All her family's friends would be there to accept or scom their relationship. She dreaded their reaction.\n\nAs the carriage horse clopped slowly through the quagmire of Bourbon Street, Nicolette sat silent, staring at Jean Laffite. This being a Tuesday, one of the two nights when formal attire was obligatory at the theater, he was dressed in black, down to the diamond-centered onyx studs gleaming in his ruffled shirtfront. His thick, long hair, gone dark again now, enhanced the handsome figure he cut.\n\nNicolette thought it almost insane that, though she loved him desperately in canvas britches and a sailor's jerkin, she loved him ever so much more intensely when he was turned out so elegantly. Smiling at her own silliness, she reached out to take his hand.\n\n\"Don't be nervous, darling,\" he said. \"You'll capture so much attention tonight in that gown that no one will notice or care who your escort is.\"\n\nHis eyes raked the creamy flesh at the top of the low-cut, violet brocade. The silver threads running through the rich fabric glittered, competing with the diamonds in her dark hair and the excited sparkle in her smoky-blue eyes.\n\n\"Where will we be sitting, Jean? In one of the _loge grilles?\"_ she asked, referring to the boxes which could be closed off by curtains from curious stares.\n\n\"Nikki,\" he began in a reproving tone. \"I am not ashamed of you or our love for each other. I will not hide from the rest of the world. Sooner or later we have to face this. If you aren't ready yet, I can have the driver take us home now.\"\n\n\"No, Jean, don't take me home! I'm not ashamed. I'm very proud to be with you. I'll be the envy of every woman there tonight!\"\n\n\"That's my girl!\" he said, giving her a quick kiss on the cheek.\n\nThe driver pulled up to the banquette and the doorman reached for the carriage handle. Nicolette stepped down onto the red plush carpet, which had been rolled out over the muddy banquette to protect the ladies' gowns. As Laffite offered his arm and she took it, she raised her diamond-crowned head a trifle higher and cast off the shrinking-violet demeanor she had worn since they left the house. She would not be cowed by curious stares or pushed to embarrassed tears by snippy women \"whose talking strings had been cut at birth,\" as she remembered Sukey used to say of gossips.\n\nAs they walked through the pillared entrance to the arched doors, the hubbub of conversation in the lobby fell so silent that Nicolette was conscious of the tap-tap of her silver slippers on the black-and-white marble floor.\n\nSeveral women she knew to be her mother's friends hid behind their lacy fans or turned away completely to avoid speaking. Nicolette felt Laffite's arm tense under her hand.\n\nShe looked about, feeling her panic rise as she searched for a friendly face. Among all these people who had known her, was there no one willing to offer friendship openly when it was most needed?\n\nThen she noticed a movement out of the corner of her eye. She turned to look. A quietly dressed young woman with lovely golden hair came toward them, holding her gloved hand out in greeting. A smile trembled uncertainly on her pale lips.\n\nLaffite bowed to her. _\"Bon soir,_ Mademoiselle Eleanore.\"\n\n\"Captain Laffite, how very nice to see you again.\"\n\nAs Laffite exchanged pleasantries with the young lady, Nicolette stood by, silent and observing. The woman, though she looked like a mere girl, caused a reaction in Nicolette that she neither understood nor enjoyed. Instead of feeling grateful to this kind person who chose to ignore the coldness of her companions, she experienced the unmistakable pangs of jealousy. There was something in the woman's eyes\u2014the way they lit with blue fire when she looked at Jean Laffite\u2014and the warm flush of her cheeks when he complimented her. For the first time, Nicolette was aware of how much she resented the other women who had been a part of Jean's life.\n\n\"Nikki, darling,\" she heard him saying and quickly pushed the unpleasant thoughts from her mind. \"I'd like you to meet Mademoiselle Eleanore de Beaumont.\"\n\n_\"Enchant\u00e9e,_ madame,\" Eleanore said, with the barest curtsy.\n\nNicolette forced a smile. \"Aren't you Dr. Charles de Beaumont's sister? You've been in France for a number of years, as I recall.\"\n\n_\"Oui_ , madame, though I returned to New Orleans some time ago.\"\n\n\"I was there myself,\" Nicolette said, then looking pointedly up at Laffite, commented, \"I wonder which of us returned first?\"\n\nLaffite pretended not to recognize the fiery flash in Nicolette's eyes for what it was. He was delivered from her accusing stare by the approach of Dr. de Beaumont. The ice was broken. Conversations and activity resumed in the crowded lobby.\n\nThe foursome chatted amiably for a time until Eleanore was hailed by other friends. Dr. de Beaumont excused himself as well.\n\n\"Darling, the curtain should be going up soon,\" Jean said. \"Do you mind waiting here for me while I check on our box? If you don't object, I'd like to invite the de Beaumonts to join us, if the other two seats aren't taken already.\"\n\n\"Of course, Jean.\"\n\nNot a few eyes followed Jean Laffite surreptitiously across the floor, but Nicolette was conscious only of the pale blue pair gleaming their love toward him. She almost choked on her unreasonable jealousy.\n\n\"Nicolette!\" a voice hailed from the entrance. \"Nicolette Vernet! Can that really be you?\"\n\n\"Micaela!\" Nicolette gasped when she spotted the young woman coming toward her. \"I thought you were still in France!\"\n\n\"No, no, _amie_! I arrived this very day to visit my family for a time.\"\n\n\"Is Celestin with you?\" Nicolette glanced about, but Micaela's husband was nowhere about. The pretty young matron with hair as fiery as her temper had flaunted conventions once again by seeing herself to the theater.\n\n\"No. He has bought a tiresome farm outside Paris and he's playing at being one of the landed gentry these days. He'd never leave his vineyards... or his dear maman and papa. I escaped the dreary place to pay a brief visit only. Tin-Tin's papa, the old blackguard, made sure my stay would end in return to his castle by refusing to allow my two sons to accompany me. They are locked safely in his chateau at _Mont l'Eveque_ until my return. As Baroness Pontalba I am a virtual slave to my husband's family!\"\n\nNicolette felt a tug of sympathy at her friend's dejected tone and expression. The wedding between Micaela Almonester y Roxas and her French cousin, Celestin, had been the most glittering affair New Orleans had ever seen. Now the lovely Micaela, her old friend from the convent school, showed the strain of an unhappy marriage and the birth of two children in as many years.\n\nBrightening perceptibly, Micaela rushed on, \"And how have you been since your return? My dear, if you don't find a husband soon, you'll be making tapestry with the old aunties, you know!\"\n\nNicolette tried to break in and bring Micaela up to date on her life, but the young woman ran on\u2014not allowing her a word in.\n\n\"I heard about poor Octave from friends in Paris, but I haven't had much news since. I know you've been through hell, poor dear, and I am so sorry. But I see that more interesting men are taking notice now that you've added a year or two and some becoming inches to your once-flat chest!\" Micaela's laughter bubbled to the surface as it always had when she succeeded in embarrassing her good friend.\n\n\"I don't know what you mean, Micaela. What men?\"\n\n_\"Mon Dieu,_ Nicolette, don't pretend you haven't noticed! This is me, Micaela, your oldest friend and partner in crime! You should be strutting and preening for him, not trying to deny any interest. Goodness knows, I tried hard enough to get him! Haven't you ever wondered why my mother was so eager to have me safely married to my pretty cousin and packed off to France?\" She paused for an answer, but Nicolette still wasn't following her meaning. \"My dear girl, I had set my cap for this same dashing scoundrel and Maman was terrified!\"\n\nNicolette, frowning, glanced in the direction of Micaela's intense gaze and exclaimed, \"Why, you can't mean Jean Laffite!\"\n\n\"Is there any woman alive who wouldn't want him? Just look at Eleanore de Beaumont clinging to his arm. Why, that shameless girl looks as if she could eat him with a spoon!\"\n\nNicolette's eyes narrowed. Micaela was right! It wasn't Jean's fault\u2014he simply attracted females. Nicolette frowned at the thought.\n\n\"Nicolette, take the advice of a married woman. I think you may need it. Laffite keeps glancing in this direction, even with Eleanore clinging like a vine. The man is obviously attracted to you. Don't get involved unless you are sure he will marry you. I've heard stories\u2014painful tales\u2014 about some of the women in his life. Poor Eleanore looks right now as if she might die of love for him. Of course, the dear innocent hasn't a chance with a man like Laffite. But you may. See that he marries you!\"\n\nNicolette couldn't have told anyone what the play was about that evening. Afterward, she didn't even recall the title. Her mind had worried over Micaela's words like a dog gnawing at a bone the whole time. And as conscious as she was of Jean's presence beside her, his hand caressing hers from time to time, she was even more aware of the wide-eyed Eleanore, sitting in the chair behind hers. How many other women would she meet who looked at Jean with longing eyes?\n\nCan I stand it? she wondered. The answer came quickly: No! Not without marriage!\n\nBy the end of the play, her mind was made up. Laffite made things all the easier by announcing when they got into the carriage, \"I've decided we should set out for Grande Terre tomorrow, if you feel up to the trip, darling.\"\n\n\"I'm fine, but if we're to leave so soon, will you take me to the cathedral to pray before we leave?\"\n\n\"Right now?\" he asked in a shocked tone. \"It's past midnight!\"\n\n\"The Holy Mother never sleeps,\" Nicolette answered softly. \"I won't be long, Jean. You can wait in the carriage for me.\"\n\nHe called up to the driver to change his course. Moving slowly through the dark streets, Laffite was reminded of another carriage ride in the same direction so long ago. He put an arm around Nicolette and pulled her close.\n\n\"I love you, Nikki,\" he whispered.\n\n\"Enough to marry me?\" She waited for his answer and added, \"I'm a free woman now that Diego is gone.\"\n\n\"Yes, my darling. Yes!\" he murmured, then kissed her tenderly.\n\nNicolette found P\u00e8re Antoine still awake when she entered the cathedral. He didn't look shocked to see her in such finery or at such a late hour. Few things shocked the old priest after so many years of hearing confessions.\n\n\"Father, I have to talk to you,\" she said.\n\nFearing that it might upset her to return to his quarters so soon after her unpleasant time there, he motioned Nicolette to a far corner of the cavernous sanctuary, where they sat down on a hard pew.\n\n\"Now, my dear, what's troubling you?\"\n\nShe took a deep breath. \"I want to be married, Father.\"\n\n\"But you are married, Nicolette. I performed the ceremony myself.\" He studied her face, a worried expression on his own.\n\n\"He's dead.\"\n\nThe white eyebrows shot up. \"Oh? Why hasn't his death been reported to me to be recorded in the Church records, then?\"\n\n\"I don't know. Does it matter? I am a widow now. That's all I care about. That and marrying Jean Laffite.\"\n\nP\u00e8re Antoine could not cover his surprise. His twin, pointed beards twitched noticeably and his thin lips worked, trying to form a gentle response.\n\n\"My child, I don't think you have considered all the ramifications here. Officially, you are still married. I have seen no death certificate. There has been no funeral. The Church does not recognize you as a free woman. I know for a fact that Diego Bermudez was alive less than a month ago. I saw him myself. Had he died that very day, I hardly consider one month a decent period of mourning!\" His rheumy eyes took in Nicolette's lavish attire disapprovingly\u2014hardly tasteful widow's weeds.\n\n\"You aren't talking about the laws of God, Father! **-** These are the laws of man you're trying to throw in my way. I refuse to let those hamper my plans,\" she answered angrily.\n\n\"There are conventions to be considered, Madame Bermudez.\" He matched her anger.\n\nShe almost replied, _\"Damn your conventions!\"_ Then, remembering where she was, she said instead, \"I won't be bound by mourning a man I hated!\"\n\n\"Hate is a sickness, not a feeling, madame.\"\n\n\"Diego Bermudez was a sickness! One which almost killed me and did kill my baby!\"\n\nAgain the priest was shocked.\n\n\"I'm sorry to learn that your own husband abused you so, but I still cannot marry you. I'm sorry. It's out of the question.\"\n\nNicolette, tears streaming down her face, jumped up and ran down the long aisle of the cathedral. She stood on the steps for a moment\u2014long enough to compose herself and dry her tears. Laffite came to stand beside her.\n\n\"You didn't pray long,\" he said.\n\nShe smiled up at him. \"There wasn't much to pray for, darling. I have everything I want.\"\n\n\"You might have prayed for our long and happy marriage.\"\n\n\"No,\" she answered. \"I've decided that if it takes the Church to hold us together, then we would be better off apart. I don't think I'll marry you after all.\"\n\nAt his sharp intake of breath, she added, \"Only love you for the rest of my life.\"\n\nThere in the moonlight, on the steps of Saint Louis Cathedral, Nicolette and Jean Laffite kissed with a new tenderness and pledged a vow more sacred and binding than any priest could have spoken.\n\n###\n\n# Chapter Twenty-Three\n\nNicolette awoke suddenly when a cannon boomed. She felt as if she were reliving some terrible dream when the roar out over the Gulf shattered the early September calm. Before she was fully awake, she visualized her cabin onboard the _Fleur de Lis_ ; then she thought of the more recent blasts in New Orleans to dispel the fever.\n\nBut, no! She and Jean were back at Grande Terre. The sickness in New Orleans and the long bayou trek were behind them. Their past two days at \"home,\" as she thought of Laffite's tropic outpost, had been peaceful, wonderful, away from war talk, illness, and unsympathetic eyes and tongues.\n\n\"But I should have known it couldn't last!\" she murmured, pulling on her robe.\n\nWhen she walked out into the shell-pearl dawn, she saw from the veranda Laffite and three others shoving off from the beach in a small boat. The cannon, which had ceased its roar, still smoked on the deck of a British sloop in the harbor. A tender from the ship, flying the Union Jack and a white flag of truce, moved toward the Baratarian boat. Nicolette could see by their uniforms that the two Englishmen in the craft were officers, but she had no way of knowing what they were saying to Laffite and the others when the two boats drew together.\n\nUnconsciously, she strained to hear their words, then realized how outrageous the attempt was. She hurried inside to dress, leaving them to their conference.\n\n\"Is Mr. Laffite on this island? I must speak with him. It's of the utmost importance,\" Captain McWilliams of the British Army said to Laffite himself.\n\nLaffite squinted at McWilliams, then at Nicolas Lockyer, commander of His Majesty's sloop _Sophia._ \"You'll have to come ashore to meet the Boss,\" he said, still unsure what the British were up to.\n\nSeveral hundred Baratarians stood watch on the beach, alert to every move the foreigners made. As Laffite pulled into shore, he knew his power. One word and these Englishmen would be his prisoners. Indeed, a number of his men were calling out for that.\n\n\"No! They've come under a flag of truce,\" he shouted back. \"You'll not touch a hair on them unless I give the word!\"\n\nThe two young officers exchanged nervous glances. They, too, realized their precarious position while in Laffite's territory. They stared at the dark-haired pirate who had quieted the mob.\n\n\"Laffite's second-in-command,\" Lockyer whispered to McWilliams. \"I'd lay odds on it.\"\n\n\"Then you'd lose, Captain!\" Laffite said. \"I am Jean Laffite.\"\n\n\"Sorry, sir,\" McWilliams said, handing over a packet addressed: _Mr. Laffite\u2014Barataria._\n\nDominique Youx moved among the sailors, agitating their cries with his whispers. \"They're probably spies, you know. Should be taken bloody prisoners and dumped in Claiborne's lap in New Orleans.\"\n\nHis words spread like ripples on the Gulf in a smart breeze and cries rang out on all sides: \"Spies, they are! Let's have at 'em! Haul 'em off to the Cabildo!\"\n\nLaffite nodded almost imperceptibly to Youx, signaling that his work was done. Then he turned to the two Englishmen and said, \"I think we had better go inside to discuss this. My men follow orders fairly well, but they can be hot-tempered at times. I wouldn't want either of you to catch a stray bullet out here in the open.\"\n\nLaffite put on a fine show for his British guests. They ate exotic delicacies from silver plates and drank the best French wines from crystal goblets, all laid out on priceless damask. Nicolette watched it all through a door at the back of the hall, marveling at Laffite's flair for handling such touchy situations.\n\nThe packet they brought contained two letters. The first, which Laffite read aloud, was a proclamation written by Colonel Edward Nicholls of the Royal Marines, asking that the citizens of Louisiana toss in their lot with the British to overthrow the United States government.\n\nThe second document, written by William H. Percy, Captain and Senior Officer in the Gulf of Mexico, threatened the total destruction of the Baratarian empire unless Laffite and his men aided the British in their invasion of the United States. Percy promised that their services would be rewarded with full pardons for all and lands taken from the Americans.\n\nNicolette held her breath so as not to miss a word as Jean Laffite finally spoke after reading the two missives.\n\n\"Your threats are all too clear, gentlemen,\" he said amiably. \"And I'm sure my men will be enticed by your promises. But what, exactly, do I get out of all this?\"\n\nNo, Jean! Nicolette thought frantically. You can't be considering their offer!\n\nCaptain Lockyer's words upset her even more. He promised Jean the one thing she didn't think he could refuse: Pierre's freedom\u2014along with thirty thousand dollars for himself and the commission of captain in the Royal Navy.\n\nLaffite chuckled softly when the officer finished. The two Englishmen smiled at each other, sure they had lured him with their thousands in gold\u2014not knowing that the warehouses on Grande Terre alone held merchandise worth millions.\n\n\"A tempting offer, I must say!\" He nodded to Lockyer and then to McWilliams. \"But I am a cautious man. I'll need time to think about this and to persuade my men. You saw for yourselves, they're not an easy lot to handle. You'll stay the night, of course.\" Laffite's smile was slow, confident, yet threatening.\n\nThe officers exchanged worried looks, realizing that they had no choice in the matter. They were Laffite's prisoners for as long as he chose to keep them on Grande Terre.\n\nThat night, after his guests had retired, Laffite joined Nicolette at last. She had been waiting for hours, her anger growing with every passing minute. By the time he entered their bedroom, she was in a tearing rage.\n\n\"I thought I knew you!\" she said in a murderous whisper.\n\n\"What kind of man would sell out his country to that pack of hyenas?\"\n\nHe tried to put his arms around her, but Nicolette pulled away, hissing her distaste of a traitor's touch.\n\n\"Nikki...\"\n\n\"Don't call me that! That's my father's name for me. He loves me and America. You love nothing... no one! Only gold can warm your heart! Well, sleep with it!\"\n\nHe chuckled softly, then the sound grew and grew. Nicolette stood staring at him, fighting back hot tears.\n\n\"I was worried, darling. But you've laid those fears to rest. I gather you were listening in on our whole dinner conversation. If I fooled you, then those idiot Englishmen were certainly taken in by my act!\"\n\nHe moved toward Nicolette and caught her in his arms, holding her in a bruising grip. His voice was suddenly cold.\n\n\"But it hurts me, Nikki, to think that you could put so little faith in my integrity. At least you might have accused me of doing it for Pierre's sake instead of for British blood money. Did you really think I would betray our country and everything I believe in for mere gold?\"\n\n\"Jean, please, you're hurting me,\" she begged. \"I don't know what I thought... only what I heard, I suppose. Many men can be bought at the right price. Why should you be any different?\"\n\n\"You know how I feel about the damn British!\" he replied, easing his hold on her. \"I plan to use them, not fight for them!\"\n\nThe day's strain hit her all at once. All the tension drained from her in the form of tears, which Laffite kissed away. He held her close, gently now, and stroked her hair until her sobs subsided. Soon the only sounds from the room were sounds of love.\n\nDeep in the night, while Laffite lay restlessly forming his plans, thinking Nicolette had been asleep for hours, he heard her murmur, \"What are you going to do, Jean?\"\n\nHe slipped his arm under her and pulled her warm body close to his. \"I've been asking myself that same question.\"\n\n\"And?\"\n\n\"And, I'm going to take this information to Claiborne. He may be a pompous fool, but he can't deny that Louisiana is in great danger. He'll have to get reinforcements to New Orleans quickly, if there's any hope of saving the state and the country!\"\n\n\"What if he won't meet with you?\"\n\n\"I don't plan to make an appointment. He'll hear me out or I'll run the bastard through!\"\n\n\"Won't he make things harder on Pierre if you threaten him?\"\n\nLaffite leaned down and kissed Nicolette's forehead, then whispered, \"Pierre will be a free man by then, my love.\"\n\n\"You're sure?\"\n\n\"Positive.\"\n\nCaptains Lockyer and McWilliams wasted no time in boarding the tender back to the _Sophia_ the next morning. The Baratarians, still calling for their blood, followed them to the beach, waving and shouting like pagans. When Laffite requested fifteen days to give them his answer, the officers spent no time quibbling.\n\nThe two British envoys had not reached their ship yet when Laffite called Raymond Ranchier into conference.\n\n\"I want these two letters taken straight away to New Orleans in your fastest pirogue. The first goes to my friend, Congressman John Blanque. The other is a copy of the British documents along with my letter to Governor Claiborne.\"\n\n_\"Monsieur le Gouverneur,_ himself?\" the gaunt Ranchier asked, raising an eyebrow.\n\n\"None other. I'm offering our services to the United States. The man must accept! We will be able to double his ranks. I hear that General Andrew Jackson has been sent for to defend the city. But where is he? The British may be in New Orleans before Jackson arrives. We can't take that chance.\"\n\n\"Aye, Boss! I'll have these letters in the proper hands by tomorrow night and be back with answers the next day.\" Ranchier saluted and turned to leave.\n\n\"Oh, Raymond!\" Laffite called. \"Stay in New Orleans long enough to bring my brother back with you.\"\n\nThe courier stared. \"You mean Pierre?\"\n\n\"One and the same! I hear there's a jailbreak planned two nights from now,\" Laffite answered with a broad smile.\n\nRaymond grinned back, then departed, almost running over Nicolette as he hurried through the library door.\n\n\"A jailbreak! So that's your plan, is it? Will it work, Jean?\"\n\n\"It will. Pierre will be home in no time. Marie Louise will have her wish. I tried the law, but what good is law when it only stands in the way of justice? Pierre is no more a pirate than I am. Privateers are always welcomed in wartime, only to be branded criminals once their services are no longer needed. It's always been that way.\" He sighed deeply. \"I suppose it always will be.\"\n\nNicolette perched on the arm of his chair and slipped a comforting arm about his shoulders. \"But heroes are always honored, my darling. Once you've proven yourself to Claiborne and the others, they'll never call you a pirate again. Wait and see!\"\n\nHe brought her hand to his lips. \"I hope you're right, Nikki. I hope to God, for our sakes, you're right!\"\n\n\"Well, brother, at least you're worth more than I am!\" a beaming Laffite said to Pierre a few days later as they breakfasted together while reading the latest papers from New Orleans.\n\nPierre laughed, glancing at the notice Laffite referred to:\n\n> **1000 DOLLARS REWARD**\n> \n> WILL BE PAID TO WHOEVER ARRESTS PIERRE LAFFITE, WHO LAST NIGHT BROKE FROM THE PARISH PRISON AND ESCAPED. THE SAID PIERRE LAFFITE IS FIVE FEET, TEN INCHES TALL, AND OF ROBUST STATURE, LIGHT COMPLEXION, AND SOMEWHAT CROSS-EYED. IT IS BELIEVED THAT A MORE COMPLETE DESCRIPTION OF THE SAID LAFFITE IS USELESS AS HE IS SO WELL KNOWN IN THE CITY.\n\n\"Cross-eyed, is it? Why, if I ever catch the lying sonuvabitch who wrote this, I'll show him cross-eyed! He'll be seeing double for the rest of his life!\"\n\nJean Laffite was laughing so hard that the table shook. Pierre had teased his younger brother all his life about his curious habit of squinting one eye when he concentrated. Now they were even.\n\n\"You'll have to thrash me, then, brother!\" Jean said.\n\n\"You?\"\n\n\"I wrote that to let our friends know you've escaped. You don't think Claiborne would have advertised it, do you? I had Holland, the jailor, take the notice to the papers.\"\n\nPierre was still scowling. \"You made me sound like some kind of brigand, for God's sake! Cross-eyed, light complexion.\"\n\n\"Well, I figured you would have lost your color after so long in the Cabildo.\" He studied his brother with concern. \"I put in the part about your 'robust stature,' hoping it might still be true.\"\n\n\"Don't give that another thought! Just pass the platter of fish down this way. I'll have those pounds I lost back in no time, eating Xavier's cooking!\"\n\nNicolette, who had slept late, entered at that moment, and cried, \"Pierre! You're really here!\"\n\n\"In the flesh!\" he answered, sweeping her into his arms and kissing her so thoroughly that Jean cleared his throat several times, trying to gain their attention and put an end to the embrace.\n\n\"I know you're a starved man, Pierre, but how about saving your lusty appetite for Marie Louise.\"\n\n\"Ah, my sweet Marie!\" Pierre sighed, releasing Nicolette abruptly. \"Our child is due any day. I wonder how she is.\"\n\nNicolette and Jean exchanged secret glances, smiling. \"See for yourself, Pierre,\" Nicolette said, turning toward the door she had just entered.\n\nPierre turned slowly, as if he feared they might be teasing him. When he saw the copper-skinned woman in the doorway, he stood still for a moment, his mouth open, but no words coming out. Then he hurried toward her and took her into his arms, too overcome with love and emotion to speak.\n\n\"Pierre, my dearest,\" Marie Louise whispered. \"We've waited for you... your son and I.\"\n\nPierre stood away from her for a moment and pressed his palm to the front of her apron, a look of wonder on his face when he felt his child moving inside her body.\n\n\"I can feel the baby,\" he said, as if witnessing a miracle. \"A _son,_ Marie Louise? How can you be sure?\"\n\n_\"Oui, mon coeur,\"_ she answered with happy tears in her eyes. \"I talked to the voodoo woman. She cast a spell and foretold a manchild.\"\n\n\"Then we'll name him Jean,\" Pierre said.\n\nNicolette watched Jean Laffite's face glow with an awed pleasure she had never seen there before. She reached across the table and took his hand. She could detect the faintest trace of tears in his eyes.\n\nPierre didn't have long to wait to meet his son. Just before dawn on September 16, Marie Louise's restless tossing awoke him.\n\n\"Darling?\" he said. \"What's wrong?\"\n\nFor a few moments she didn't answer, but he could hear her breathing deeply. When she spoke, there was a warm joy in her voice. \"Pierre, please get Nikki. Our baby has decided to join us this morning.\"\n\nBaby Jean was not the only early visitor. Six gunboats and an armed sloop lay just beyond the harbor, waiting.\n\nMarie Louise, who had midwifed hundreds of births, did most of the work herself. But Nicolette lent a hand, following the mother's instructions precisely, fascinated by a miracle she had never before witnessed. At the exact moment when Nicolette slapped the tiny, red rump and forced out little Jean's first cry, the ships opened fire.\n\n\"Mother of God, do not let them kill my baby!\" Nicolette heard Marie Louise pray fervently.\n\n\"Stay calm,\" Nicolette ordered in a voice that was anything but composed. \"I'll get Jean. He'll tell us what's happening.\"\n\nBut before Nicolette could leave the room, Jean Laffite burst in with Pierre fast on his heels. A babble of four voices and the cry of the newborn ensued. What came out of it all was as near total confusion as Nicolette had ever been a part of.\n\nPierre was too overcome with joy at the birth of his son to care one way or the other about cannons booming in the Gulf. Jean, on the other hand, only glanced at his namesake and muttered the briefest congratulations to the mother and father. There would be time for that later. Right now, the important thing was that it appeared that Governor Claiborne had accepted Laffite's offer of help.\n\n\"Those are _American_ ships out there, darling!\" he told Nicolette excitedly. \"Do you realize what that means? They've come down here to transport us all to New Orleans to set up the defenses!\"\n\nNicolette tried to share his enthusiasm, but she was worn out from tending to little Jean's birth. \"That's wonderful,\" she said. \"You've spoken to some of them already?\"\n\n\"No, I haven't talked to them, but that's the only reason they could be here,\" he insisted. \"It's Commodore Patterson's _Carolina.\"_\n\n\"But, Jean, they're firing on us!\" Nicolette said.\n\n\"Only a salute,\" he answered. \"Come with me. We'll go to the veranda and hail them back with the American flag.\"\n\nHe half-dragged the weary woman with him to the front of the house. Only then did Jean Laffite realize his mistake. Grande Terre was under full attack from the American ships.\n\nDominique Youx, already aware of their situation, was dashing about, getting the men in order to defend their island.\n\n\"Get that cannon to the beach!\" he yelled. \"Haul up those palm trunks to make a barricade! We'll show the bloody whoremongers!\"\n\n\"Dom, no!\" Laffite shouted to his brother. \"Don't fire!\"\n\nYoux turned toward the veranda with a black scowl on his face. \"Christ, Boss! What are you talking about?\"\n\n\"This has to be a misunderstanding. I won't have you firing on the American flag!\" Laffite called back. \"We'll take to the swamps for the time being.\"\n\n\"They'll find out their mistake soon enough when they taste a few of our cannonballs!\"\n\n\"No!\" Laffite yelled. \"I forbid you to fire on our country's own ships!\"\n\nThe whole island rocked under explosions which produced a frenzy of pandemonium. Men dashed in all directions trying to find out what their orders were. Youx moved among them, telling them not to fire, though he thought his brother was insane for giving such a command.\n\nNicolette and Pierre helped Marie Louise, her infant at her breast, into one of the pirogues. The baby screamed with fear at the hideous sounds around them\u2014cannon blasts which shook the island and sharp cracks of gunfire.\n\nMother of God! Nicolette thought. They're killing our men!\n\nThe cries of the wounded and dying still echoed in her ears after Laffite joined them and they headed back into the bayous, away from the battle.\n\n\"How bad is it?\" Pierre asked over the baby's wails.\n\n\"As bad as it can get,\" Laffite answered grimly. \"Before they're done, the whole commune will be leveled.\"\n\nThe toll was higher than even Jean Laffite imagined. Every building on the island was destroyed except for the warehouses. From those, over five hundred thousand dollars worth of goods were confiscated. Scores were killed and eighty men captured\u2014among them, Dominique You and Reyne Beluche.\n\nThe little band of refugees from Grande Terre moved on through the swamps in stunned silence.\n\n\"What now?\" Nicolette finally asked.\n\n\"God alone knows,\" Laffite answered, his voice hollow with shock and disillusionment.\n\n###\n\n# Chapter Twenty-Four\n\nThe gold of September faded into the chill gray of October. Rain poured down relentlessly, turning New Orleans into a sea of mud. The population, already depressed by the season of sickness and death just past, could only look forward to more misfortunes.\n\nThe British Dragon was threatening. And still, no help loomed on the horizon. Women stayed off the streets, not only because of the foul weather, but fearful that spies were already in their midst and might snatch them as hostages. Men met at the exchanges and coffeehouses about the city to talk in guarded tones and grumble about the weather, the shortness of supplies since Grande Terre had been destroyed, and the very real possibility that they might soon be subjects of yet another cruel king.\n\nLaffite, who had holed up with Nicolette, Pierre, Marie Louise, and the baby in the cramped quarters at The Temple, soon ventured into the city and found it safe. Governor Claiborne and his troops had their hands too full with much more pressing matters to continue their pursuit of old grudges. Besides, the Governor reasoned, Laffite was powerless with so many of his men dead or imprisoned.\n\nSo it was with some surprise that Governor Claiborne looked up from his desk one evening to find Jean Laffite standing before him.\n\n\"How did you get in here?\" Claiborne growled, noting that his aide was suspiciously absent.\n\n\"I have many friends in the government house... friends who don't mind opening a few doors for me.\"\n\n\"I could open a door for you myself\u2014to the darkest cell in the Cabildo!\"\n\nClaiborne remained seated. His anger showed not only in his voice, but in the clenching and unclenching of his fists on the leather top of his desk.\n\n\"I'd assumed your lousy jail was filled to capacity after your commodore's raid on Grande Terre. As for opening cell doors, that's one thing I've come to discuss with you.\"\n\n\"Get on with it! Why are you here, Laffite?\"\n\n\"That's a good question. Maybe I've come to give you a lecture on honor\u2014on repaying the offer of aid with death and destruction. What I should do is offer you a cup of coffee at dawn, though I doubt you'd get to drink yours.\"\n\nClaiborne's naturally florid face paled suddenly. \"See here, Laffite, if you think I'm going to fight a duel with an outlaw, you've lost what little sense you ever had!\"\n\n\"I only said _maybe_ I should challenge you. I have more sense than you give me credit for. If I fought you, and if one of us were killed, that would leave one less man to defend this city. And, by God, whether you realize it or not, you're about to need every man you can muster\u2014including my Baratarians!\"\n\nThe governor laughed, but the sound had a nervous edge to it. \"You haven't enough men left to defend a sandbar! At full strength you couldn't even defend your own island! We took Grande Terre without a single casualty\u2014a fine morning's exercise!\"\n\nLaffite, goaded beyond his limit, reached across the desk and caught Claiborne by the shirtfront, raising him out of his chair.\n\n\"Do you know _why_ you were able to take my land so easily? I let it be taken rather than fire on my country's flag!\"\n\nLaffite released the man before he was tempted to follow his urge and strangle him. He stepped back, a nerve in his clenched jaw twitching a warning as he struggled to gain control over his murderous anger.\n\n\"I don't see...\" Claiborne began.\n\nLaffite cut him off with, \"You certainly, by God, don't!\"\n\nThe men stared at each other for several tense moments before Claiborne shied away.\n\n\"Now you're going to listen to what I have to say or I will have satisfaction and I won't wait for the dueling field!\" Laffite's hand clutched his sword guard to emphasize his seriousness. \"I offered my help defending New Orleans. Now I'm demanding that that offer be honored! I want my men released and in return I'll call in the hundreds still hiding out in the bayous, arm them, and set them on guard at the four forts around the city. When the British come\u2014and, mark my words, they will\u2014we'll be ready for them!\"\n\nClaiborne hated Laffite. The man was everything he was not. But more than that, he hated his present position. The impotence of New Orleans in the face of invaders enraged him. Who did the great fathers in Washington City, or what was left of it, think he was going to send out against the redcoats? A few untrained men? A band of free men of color? Boys who spent their days stealing vegetables from the market? No! As much as he detested Jean Laffite, the pirate had offered him a better solution than anyone else to date.\n\n\"You know that General Jackson is on his way here?\" Claiborne asked.\n\n\"On his way, yes!\" Laffite replied. \"But when will he arrive... with how many troops and what arms?\"\n\nClaiborne shook his head. The feeling of defeat weighed heavily upon him.\n\n\"I have muskets, flints, and above all else, men who know how to use them and are willing to fight.\"\n\n\"You make a strong case, Laffite. But I can't give you an answer right now. I'll have to contact Jackson. He's the military commander for this region. I do promise you this, though\u2014I'll do everything in my power to get him to accept your offer. Not that it pleases me. God help me, it's bitter as gall to have to rely on outlaws to save this city!\"\n\n\"I'm staying at my house in Bourbon Street. You can reach me there when you receive Jackson's answer.\"\n\nLaffite turned and left, his mission accomplished. He walked back to the Vernet house, where Nicolette was visiting her family, with his head held a trifle higher and his thoughts less troubled than they had been for months. Even the steady rain and the cold, ominous breath of the Mississippi failed to dampen his spirits. Jackson would say yes... he had to!\n\nGovernor Claiborne was swift enough in sending Laffite's message to \"Old Hickory,\" who was somewhere between Florida and Louisiana at the time. The final decision and the fate of New Orleans were out of his hands at last. He would trust in fate and Andy Jackson to make the right move next.\n\nBut Jackson, on guard for any tricks from the \"perfidious Britons,\" interpreted Jean Laffite's offer of aid as less than sincere. Hadn't he already read the document from the British offering Laffite a handsome reward, a commission in the Royal Navy, and captured lands to his followers in exchange for their services against the United States? What kind of fool did they take him for? Did they think he would jump at the opportunity to have a gang of \"hellish banditti\" swell his meager ranks? Well, then, the king's men were bigger bloody fools than they took him for!\n\nAndrew Jackson sent his answer back to Governor Claiborne\u2014a resounding and unequivocal no.\n\n\"The man's out of his mind!\" Laffite stormed when Edward Livingston brought the news from Claiborne. \"Doesn't he know the situation here?\"\n\nLivingston gave Laffite a warning look. They were at a table in the smoky upstairs of Maspero's Exchange and it was crowded with people\u2014any one of whom might be a British spy.\n\n\"I doubt seriously if Jackson realizes yet how desperate things are here. Claiborne's not going to be able to raise more than two thousand men to fight\u2014all civilians and three-quarters of them black. And that includes the two hundred and eighty-seven 'soldiers' in the _Battalion d'Orleans._ The British, we know, have at least twelve thousand seasoned troops!\"\n\nLaffite sat scowling into his ale mug. \"What more can I do?\" He shrugged. \"Tell me, Edward!\"\n\nLivingston patted his friend's shoulder. \"Go home and spend some time with Nicolette. You haven't slept two hours at a stretch or had one decent meal in the past month. Forget about all this for the night at least. Worrying isn't going to solve the problem. Maybe when Jackson gets here he'll change his mind.\"\n\nAn old light gleamed in Laffite's eyes. \"Maybe we can persuade him to change his mind, you mean!\"\n\nLivingston winked and said, \"Be gone with you now!\"\n\nNicolette paced the salon of the Laffite mansion. She hadn't seen Jean in nearly two weeks. Would he be home tonight? From time to time he sent Xavier or Gator-Bait with a message for her\u2014usually saying that he wouldn't be home. But now she needed him. Her nerves were strung taut after her mother's outburst earlier in the day.\n\nNicolette had confided in the ailing woman that she was going to be a grandmother. Instead of the pleasure Nicolette had hoped her news would bring, her mother had become hysterical\u2014screaming for Nicolette to leave her house and never set foot under her roof again.\n\n\"Trollop!\" Francine Vernet had yelled at her. \"Guttersnipe!\" and finally the name that cut the deepest, \"Pirate's whore!\"\n\nHer father and Gabrielle had tried to calm Nicolette's mother, but finally they had to send for the doctor. As Gabrielle saw her niece out, she had said, as gently as she could, \"Perhaps, _ma ch\u00e8re,_ it would be better if you and Jean stayed away for a time. Frannie takes several days sometimes to get over one of these attacks. It wouldn't do for her to see you before she is herself again. I'll come to your house and visit when I can get away. You know your maman didn't mean all those awful things she said. She loves you, Nikki. Your papa and I love you too, dear.\"\n\nBut as Nicolette had walked the short distance from her parents' home to the one she shared with Jean Laffite, each step had seemed to take her miles. It was terrible enough to be estranged from her family, but with the trouble brewing, she couldn't bear it.\n\nJust as her tears and the heavy rain began again, she heard the carriage gate opening.\n\n\"Jean!\" she cried, running to see if it could possibly be him. It was.\n\n\"Darling,\" he answered, sheltering her with his arms when she rushed out into the rain to meet him. \"You'll be soaked!\"\n\n\"I don't care! Just hold me... hold me close, darling. Never let me go!\"\n\nThey stood embracing in the courtyard, the gray November rain wetting them through. But neither seemed to notice. The warmth of their nearness chased ail the chills from their minds and bodies.\n\nOnce again, Nicolette realized that everything in her life, especially her happiness, depended upon one person\u2014Jean Laffite.\n\nOn an afternoon in the first week of December, Nicolette and Laffite stood in a cold drizzle outside the three-storey house at 106 Royal Street. Everyone in town seemed to be crowded together to get their first glimpse of General Andrew Jackson.\n\nNicolette did not know what she'd expected, but surely not the gaunt, cadaverous man standing on the second-floor gallery. \"Old Hickory\" was enormously tall and painfully thin, wasted by dysentery and the hard-fought Indian wars in Florida and Alabama.\n\nHis uniforme\u2014old, dun-colored britches and a blue Spanish cape\u2014did nothing to enhance his image. Every threadbare stitch hung on his frame like rummage on a scarecrow. He was spattered with mud from the worn, leather cap, which only partially protected his wild mane of silvery-red hair from the rain, to his scuffed dragoon boots. Nicolette thought to herself that she had seen handsomer corpses.\n\n\"Jean, he looks ill! How will he lead troops?\" she whispered.\n\n\"Half his army's in no better shape than he is. But, they say, what he lacks in strength, he makes up for with sheer willpower and toughness. That's why they call him 'Old Hickory.'\"\n\nEdward Livingston stood beside the general to translate his words into French, since many New Orleanians, including Mayor Nicholas Girod, spoke not a word of English. Livingston raised his hands for silence and General Jackson began in his gravelly Tennessee accent: \"I have come to protect this city. I will drive our enemies into the sea or perish in the effort. Good citizens, you must all rally around me in this emergency, cease all differences and divisions, and unite with me in patriotic resolve to save this city from dishonor and disaster, which a presumptuous enemy threatens to inflict upon it.\"\n\nHis speech was short and to the point. Jackson was calling for Creoles, Americans, all citizens of Louisiana to band together and fight the British Dragon. To Jean Laffite's way of thinking, Andrew Jackson could hardly refuse to allow the Baratarians to be a part of the defending force.\n\n\"We'd better get home now, before those black clouds fall on us,\" Nicolette said, tugging at Laffite's sleeve.\n\n\"Take Gator-Bait and go along, Nikki. I have a meeting scheduled.\"\n\nHe hurried away toward the courtyard entrance to 106 Royal. He would have his say!\n\nThe last of the city officials cleared out of his headquarters and Andy Jackson sighed with relief. He'd been sick enough by the middle of November. But, he thought, I must have been out of my mind to plant this dysentery-wracked body in a saddle and travel over a hundred miles on horseback without a stop! Still, time was of the essence if New Orleans was to be saved.\n\nJackson sank gratefully into a deep leather chair and tugged off his muddy boots. When he heard the door open, he said, \"I can't eat a bite right now. Bring me a bowl of rice later. Maybe I can get that down.\"\n\n\"I'm afraid I can't offer you rice, General, only men, guns, and ammunition.\"\n\nJackson's head shot up and he eyed a tall, dark-haired stranger, whose face was set in a scowl. Every nerve in the intruder's body seemed set with a hair trigger. The man reminded Jackson of nothing so much as a sleek swamp panther he had seen in the Everglades of Florida.\n\n\"Who the devil are you?\"\n\n\"Jean Laffite,\" he said with a slight bow. \"At your service, General Jackson.\"\n\n\"Damned if that's so! I have a say in who I take into my ranks and I'll be hog-tied and hornswoggled before I enlist a bunch of _hellish banditti_ and have to watch my flanks every minute to make sure I don't get stabbed in the back! I thought I made myself plain enough to Governor Claiborne.\"\n\n\"I don't believe the governor made himself plain to you. Otherwise, you wouldn't have refused my offer in the first place.\"\n\n\"Mighty cocksure of yourself, aren't you?\" Jackson stalled, running bony fingers through his disheveled hair.\n\n\"As a fighting man should be! The quickest way to be defeated is to let the enemy know that you think you can be beaten. A good bluff serves as well on the battlefield as at the poker table. Is that what you were doing, General, when you spoke to the citizens of New Orleans\u2014bluffing?\"\n\n\"I don't follow you.\"\n\n\"You said we must _all_ rally to save the city. I don't remember any mention of excluding those whose professions you distrust. \"\n\n\"Profession? You're a goddamn _pirate,_ for Christ's sake!\"\n\nLaffite moved so quickly that Jackson couldn't follow him with his tired eyes. In an instant, Jean had the general in a throttling grip, his eyes wild, his teeth clenched.\n\n\"Don't ever call me that! I am a privateer by profession and a smuggler by necessity. I wish to be a soldier out of patriotism, as do my men!\"\n\nRealizing suddenly that he was strangling the general, Laffite backed off. Jackson coughed and rubbed his bruised throat.\n\n\"If I agree, what do you want out of this? I can't pay you thirty thousand like the British offered.\"\n\n\"I want my men freed from the Cabildo to fight with me and I want full pardons for all after the battles are over.\"\n\nJackson stared hard at Laffite to see if he was serious. He had expected the man to ask for half the territory at the very least.\n\n\"Pardons, huh? And, besides a band of brigands in the ranks, what can the army expect from you?\"\n\n\"All the pistol flints you can use... rifles... cannons... and more damn guts than you've ever seen in battle!\"\n\nJackson sat silent and considering for so long that Laffite was sure he was going to refuse again. Instead, he stuck out his large hand and nodded.\n\n\"You've got yourself a deal, Mr. Laffite! Now, if you don't mind, I need some shut-eye.\"\n\nNicolette knew from the look of triumph on Jean's face when he entered the house that his meeting with Jackson had gone well. His eyes fairly danced with green-gold lights and his shoulders were squared with pride.\n\n\"Well, my darling,\" he said to her, \"you are gazing on a respectable man in the making! Dominique and Reyne, along with all the others, will soon be free to join Jackson's forces. I've already sent Raymond and several others into the bayous to round up the rest of my men. They'll receive full pardons for fighting.\"\n\nHe hugged her tightly, kissing her face all over.\n\nFighting. The word echoed in her ears with an ominous ring. This was the first time she had actually thought about Jean going into battle. Up until now all of her concentration had been on his getting to General Jackson and being allowed to join his forces. She hadn't thought beyond that.\n\nAs they lay in each other's arms that night, hating to give up their intimacy after making love, Nicolette knew she wouldn't sleep. The rain pounding the roof and rattling the windowpanes made her feel lonely and afraid. What if something happened to Jean Laffite? How could she go on without him?\n\nShe crossed her arms over her stomach protectively. It was too early in her pregnancy to feel any movement, but she knew the child was there. She wanted Jean to know, too. But how could she tell him now?\n\nShe looked at his face\u2014so calm and peaceful in sleep. \"No, my darling,\" she whispered, touching him with her fingertips. \"After the battle is over... when all we have to look forward to is happiness... that's when I'll give you the news.\"\n\n###\n\n# Chapter Twenty-Five\n\nTwo weeks later, on December 15, panic broke out in New Orleans. Word arrived that the British were at the very back door to the city. In a three-hour battle on Lake Borgne, the Royal Navy captured the same American gunboats that had destroyed Grande Terre. Ten Americans were killed and thirty-five wounded.\n\nPeople ran about the flooded streets of the city screaming, praying, trying to find guns\u2014sure that the invaders would have the town by the throat and the women by the petticoats before nightfall.\n\nOne survivor of the battle made his way back to New Orleans with the most extraordinary tales about the \"bloody Britons.\"\n\n\"They brought their women with them! They got a whole boatload of wives just sitting out there off Isle-aux-Pois waiting for their husbands to take New Orleans so they can move right into our homes! They're that damn sure of themselves. And fighting with them, you never saw the like! A bunch of murdering heathens\u2014Choctaws\u2014decked out in red coats, cocked hats, boots, and loincloths. And it'll make your skin crawl to see the scalping knives sticking out of their belts, and them waving tomahawks in the air and yelping like the very savages they are!\"\n\nNicolette overhead all of this as the veteran of the Lake Borgne conflict expounded to a group of horrified citizens outside the Bourbon Street house. She was in the process of moving back to her parents' home until the British threat was past.\n\nAs she made her way toward Toulouse Street, she couldn't help but ponder that the Indian soldiers could hardly look any stranger than Jackson's tatterdemalion army, made up of Creoles, free men of color, wild-eyed riflemen from upriver, and Laffite's own Baratarians.\n\nShe thought about Jean Laffite constantly now. He had left nearly a week before, unable to tell her where he was going or when he might return.\n\n\"Only Sir Edward Michael Pakenham, the British Commander, can tell you when I'll be home, darling. The minute he surrenders unconditionally, I'll come rushing back to you!\"\n\nNicolette sighed wearily as she opened the gate to the courtyard at the corner of Toulouse and Royal. Here I am, she thought, almost three years after I left home for the first time, coming back to sleep alone in my childhood bed. Nothing changes!\n\nBut many things changed in the next few days. The weather grew worse\u2014cold, wet, icy\u2014a misery for the New Orleanians, who normally enjoyed mild winters. New alarm ensued with news that the British were closing on New Orleans. The women busied themselves setting up hospitals, anticipating the great battle to come.\n\nThe mood of the city grew as somber as the gray skies. The soldiers had left the city, working at a feverish pace downriver, blocking canals and bayous by felling trees. In timberless areas, bedframes were begged from the citizens to be sunk, obstructing waterways.\n\nOn the afternoon of December 23, Nicolette saw two riders coming down the street at breakneck speed. She recognized them\u2014Colonel Denis de Laronde and Gabriel Viller\u00e9, who owned adjoining plantations just below the city. They never slowed, turning into Royal Street. Nicolette ran out to see where they were headed and followed a crowd converging on Jackson's headquarters.\n\n\"The British!\" she heard Viller\u00e9 shout to Jackson, who had come out on his gallery. \"They've made camp on my plantation! They plan to attack in the morning, General!\"\n\n\"How many?\" Jackson growled.\n\n\"At least two thousand and more arriving all the time, sir!\"\n\n\"By the Eternal!\" Old Hickory roared. \"They shall not rest on our soil!\"\n\nThat night, through the wet darkness, a red glow tinted the sky below New Orleans. The British soldiers, drenched and freezing, wishing they were home for Christmas, indulged their misery with great bonfires. To the people of New Orleans, these mammoth blazes seemed to indicate the brazenness of their enemy and a threat as well\u2014that New Orleans would soon be consumed by flames.\n\nBy nine o'clock that night, the battle lines were drawn: Jackson and his two thousand with their backs toward New Orleans along the boundary line of the de Laronde plantation, and twice as many redcoats facing that line. Only the Lacoste plantation separated the two armies.\n\nOn Jackson's right lay the Mississippi and on his left, a cypress swamp filled with snakes and alligators. A dark shape cruised the river, but the British paid no attention. They took Commodore Patterson's _Carolina_ for ordinary river traffic and went about cooking their soggy suppers and trying to dry themselves before the fires.\n\nShortly after seven the next morning, a splendid red, white, and blue rocket flashed its fiery tail across the sky. A roar came from the ship riding the river: \"Now, damn their eyes, give it to 'em!\"\n\nThe _Carolina_ lobbed seven rounds of 6-pound shot and grape into the confused British lines. The king's army, \"caught with their pants down,\" as one jovial Kentuckian remarked, fell head over heels into panic. Bugles sounded and officers ran in circles, trying to give orders, which were ignored or never heard.\n\nThe battle raged all day, the advantage shifting back and forth. Near dark, when fog as thick as cotton came rolling in off the river, Jackson yelled to his men, \"Save your guns, boys!\"\n\nBoth armies fell back to regroup. British reinforcements were still coming in the back way.\n\nNicolette had hurried to the Ursuline Convent as soon as she saw the rocket light the sky. All through the shattering blasts of the _Carolina's_ cannonade, she had knelt with the gray sisters, as the Ursuline nuns were called. Only a short time later, the first of the wounded began arriving.\n\nMarie Louise, with baby Jean sleeping safely in a laundry basket nearby, took her place at Nicolette's side.\n\n\"Where could Jean be?\" Nicolette said as much to herself as to the other woman as they worked together over a boy from Tennessee whose leg looked like a piece of split timber.\n\n\"Your Jean will be with my Pierre, _amie._ And, God willing, they will both be safe.\"\n\n\"But what if...?\"\n\n\"Silence! One does not think of _what if_ during a battle, Nicolette.\"\n\nSoon the convent hospital was so crowded with wounded from both sides that Nicolette had little time to think about anything but her work.\n\nWhen one of her childhood friends came in on a stretcher, badly wounded, Nicolette rushed to his side. She bathed the mud and blood from his face and saw immediately the look of death in his eyes.\n\n\"Narcisse,\" she whispered, holding his icy fingers in hers, \"can you hear me? It's Nicolette... from dancing class.\"\n\nThe young man murmured her name. His eyes focused for a moment before his slight smile turned to a grimace. He tightened his grip on Nicolette's fingers, crying out, \"God, it hurts so bad!\"\n\n\"You're going to be all right, Narcisse. I'll take care of you.\" She worked over the gaping wound in his chest, frantic to save him. He would be all right! She would not let him die!\n\nShe felt a hand grip her shoulder and looked up into Dr. de Beauchamps' strained face. \"Let him go, Nicolette. There are so many others you can help. This lad's gone.\"\n\n\"No! He's _not_ gone!\" she cried, clutching Narcisse to her. \"He can't be!\" But even as she said the words, she felt his cold still flesh against hers.\n\nWhen she began sobbing uncontrollably, the doctor led her away from the scene of chaos and death to a back room and gave her a small glass of brandy.\n\n\"Drink this. Then I want you to lie down on the cot and rest for a while. You won't be any good to anyone if you exhaust yourself, Nicolette.\"\n\n\"But, Doctor, there are so many... so much to do!\"\n\nHe managed a smile for her. \"But, Nicolette, you can't do it all yourself. Now, I have some news for you. A message just arrived from the front. Monsieur Laffite is safe. He had been across the river, guarding the bayou passages from the south. But now, it seems, the word has reached him that the British reinforcements are coming from another quadrant. He will return to join General Jackson.\"\n\n\"He'll be coming to the city?\" Nicolette asked hopefully.\n\n\"That I don't know, my dear. You rest now,\" he said as he left.\n\nNicolette's release from anxiety brought by the news that Jean was alive allowed her the first sleep she had had in two days.\n\nThe next morning dawned in ominous quiet. It seemed that the whole world sat perched on the edge of a giant precipice, waiting to fall in. The citizens of New Orleans gathered in the cathedral and the chapel at the convent to pray, or assembled in quiet groups behind shuttered parlor windows.\n\nThe British spent the day licking their wounds and bringing up more reinforcements. Jackson's Americans worked on a big ditch, which would give them protection from the British fire when it came\u2014as it was certain to, eventually.\n\nLaffite joined Jackson behind the lines for a conference. \"You look like death warmed over,\" Laffite greeted the general.\n\nJackson pushed a bowl of cold rice away from him and said, \"I feel like it. Dammit man, how do you live in this climate? I'll be shivering the rest of my life. This damp Louisiana chill has taken up permanent residence in my bones.\"\n\n\"A nip of this might help.\" Laffite offered him a bottle of whiskey.\n\n\"If it doesn't kill me for sure!\"\n\n\"I talked to Dominique and my uncle Reyne. They are holding up well... certain of victory.\"\n\n\"You did me a good turn, Laffite, forcing your band of brigands on me. If I were ordered to storm the gates of hell with Captain Dominique as my lieutenant, I would have no misgivings of the result. I don't doubt our eventual victory over these British bastards. What's bothering me is how long before it comes. I want to have done with it once and for all!\"\n\nThe two armies continued their test of endurance into the New Year. The final contest came at daybreak on January 8, 1815, and lasted only thirty gory minutes. Jackson's sentries reported to him that the British forces were on the move.\n\nAn eerie wailing came out of the cold, gray fog. Jackson and Laffite made their way to the lines and stared out toward the British encampment.\n\n\"Godawfulest racket I ever heard,\" Jackson remarked. \"Sets my teeth on edge!\"\n\n\"Bagpipes,\" answered Laffite. \"Their Scots highlanders have joined forces.\"\n\nThe skirling of pipes grew louder, telling them the opposing army was approaching, but still they could see nothing through the fog.\n\n\"Look there!\" Laffite cried suddenly. \"My God, it's a line of targets coming straight for us!\"\n\nJackson's eagle eyes hadn't missed the phenomenon. Out of the mists, a line of white, X-shaped targets had materialized. The strange apparition seemed to float their way on the drifting fog.\n\n\"It's the British army,\" Jackson said in a quiet voice. \"The whole stinking lot of them, dressed in their spanking white cartridge belts and shiny red coats like they were going to an audience with the king this morning. Well, I'll have to thank Lord Pakenham next time I see him. He couldn't have given us a better advantage in this pea soup off the river. And all of 'em marching in regulation, gentlemenlike formation. Sitting ducks for my mountain boys and their squirrel guns!\"\n\nA new sound picked its way through the fog\u2014the growling swoosh of the Congreve rocket, a weapon new and terrifying to the Americans. Jackson heard his men shriek as the red-glaring monsters screamed down on them from the sky. Even after the things hit the ground, they writhed through the underbrush like so marry attacking snakes, smoking and popping until each one exploded in a burst of black fumes with an ear-splitting bang.\n\n\"Steady, boys, they won't hurt you unless the eight-foot shaft catches you on the way down,\" Jackson told his men. \"Watch for them, but keep half an eye peeled on those white targets. Pick the one you want and, when I give the word, put a ball right in the center.\"\n\nAll grew quiet. They waited. Only the wail of the bagpipes and the scream of the Congreves broke through the fog. Then...\n\n\"Give it to them, boys! Let's finish this business today!\" General Jackson yelled.\n\nThe Americans fired into the line of white cartridge belts, which crumpled to the mud, sixty abreast. Then the gunners at the batteries let fly. Cannonballs and grape shot smashed into the redcoated ranks. The whole battlefield erupted in flames and black smoke. The wails and screams of the pipes and rockets were replaced by the cries of dying men.\n\nDominique Youx, in command of Battery Number Three, called to Reyne Beluche, who was manning Number Four, \"Hey, I think I'll end this war right now!\"\n\n\"Sure, Dom!\" Beluche yelled back. \"You just tell them all to pack it in and go home now!\"\n\nDominique's laughter boomed in the thick air. He had sighted his target: Sir Edward Pakenham on horseback, trying to restore some discipline to his mangled ranks.\n\n\"Fire!\" Dominique roared, and so did his cannon.\n\nThe ball caught Pakenham in the legs and lower body. The British commander was mortally wounded. The Plain of Chalmette had become a bloody bog. Nearly two thousand British soldiers lay dead, including their three commanders. The Americans lost only six.\n\nNew Orleans was safe!\n\nAfter the smoke cleared, the wounded were tended and the dead buried. General Andrew Jackson dictated an account of the battle, praising his men.\n\nOne part in particular stirred the hearts of Nicolette and Jean Laffite. General Jackson wrote:\n\n> They performed their duty with zeal and bravery... Captains Dominique and Beluche, lately commanding privateers at Barataria, with part of their former crew and many brave citizens of New Orleans, were stationed at Nos. 3 and 4. The general cannot avoid giving his warm approbation of the manner in which these gentlemen have uniformly conducted themselves while under his command, and of the gallantry with which they have redeemed the pledge they gave at the opening of the campaign to defend the country. The brothers Laffite have exhibited the same courage and fidelity; and the general promises that the government shall be duly apprised of their conduct.\n\nWhile the _Te Deum_ was sung, Nicolette knelt beside Jean Laffite in Saint Louis Cathedral, deeply moved by the service of thanksgiving honoring the triumphant army.\n\nShe reached out and unobtrusively took Laffite's hand. She hadn't truly seen him until this very minute. She could hardly believe he was real... and with her again. She wanted so to throw her arms around him and hold him close.\n\nTonight! she thought. At the Victory Ball! Everything Jean and I have ever hoped for will come true tonight!\n\nHe smiled down at her and she felt her heart ache with love for him.\n\n###\n\n# Chapter Twenty-Six\n\nNicolette waited like a nervous bride at her parents' home for Jean to arrive. Their only time together so far had been the quiet hour in the cathedral. Immediately after the service, Laffite had been swept away from her on army business.\n\nThey had had only a hurried moment alone\u2014long enough for Jean to kiss her once and say, \"I'll come for you at seven this evening for the ball.\"\n\nShe had spent the afternoon finishing her gown\u2014a special creation of white, trimmed in red and blue ribbons and silver stars to commemorate the grand occasion.\n\n\"Nicolette, I have never seen you look so lovely. Being _enceinte_ becomes you, my dear.\"\n\nGabrielle DelaCroix, gowned in French-blue silk, bustled about her niece, making sure she was perfect from every angle.\n\n\"You and Papa are coming to the ball together?\" Nicolette asked with some concern.\n\n\"Of course! And don't you be silly about it, Nikki. Everyone knows how your maman is. She imagines herself in a convent. She hasn't seen Claude or anyone but the servants and the doctor in weeks. Poor thing! I'm afraid she's quite ill. Yet she seems happy for the first time in her life. Perhaps when we don't have what we want, God gives us the will to create our own happiness in our minds.\" She shrugged. \"Who knows?\"\n\nJean Laffite arrived at that moment and came to the salon where Nicolette was waiting. She caught her breath when she saw him. Never had he looked so magnificent. He was dressed in military uniform: tight buff britches, shiny black dragoon boots, and a fitted blue campaign jacket. She stared at him, too awed to speak.\n\nHow will I ever last through dinner and the ball without making a spectacle of myself? I want him so! she thought.\n\nAs if he read her thoughts, Laffite came to her and took her into his arms, finding her lips parted and waiting. Time seemed to stand still. Nicolette marveled at the way he could make her feel. She had a hunger for him which would never be satisfied\u2014not if they lived and loved a thousand years.\n\n\"It's time we were going, darling,\" Laffite said at last. \"Everyone should be at the French Exchange before the General and Mrs. Jackson arrive. We want to make this a grand evening for him.\"\n\nEven the weather seemed to have changed its attitude for the occasion. The air was still cool, but the rain had stopped. A few stars twinkled overhead, shining as brightly as those on the American flags, which flew all over the city.\n\nThe banquet and ball proved elegant. The town fathers had spared no expense in their efforts to thank their general and his officers.\n\nWhen Laffite introduced Nicolette to General Jackson, the tall soldier bowed over her hand, impressing her with his mannered words. Surely General Jackson possessed two personalities, she thought. This man was certainly not the tough old warlord she had seen at headquarters in Royal Street.\n\nRachel Jackson was a bright dumpling of a lady. And she obviously adored her husband. Nicolette hid a smile behind her lace fan as \"Old Hickory\" led his bride onto the dance floor. He galloped into a lively reel with _Madame la Generate,_ as the Creoles called her, to the fast-paced strains of \"Possum Up De Gum Tree.\"\n\n\"Nikki, my dear!\" Dominique Youx called. \"Ah, you look like a flower in full bloom. How can my little brother stand to bring you here and share you with everyone? Had I a lady of my own like you, I would be at home... teaching her lovely things.\"\n\nCaptain Dominique was decked out for the occasion almost as handsomely as Laffite himself, though the older brother wore his treasured uniform of the _grande arm\u00e9e_ of France. His chest gleamed with medals.\n\n\"Jean and I are both anxious to hear General Jackson make his commendations this evening. At last, you'll all be free men\u2014heroes!\" Nicolette said, beaming. \"What do you plan to do now, Dom?\"\n\n\"Me, I got my eye on a little tavern here in the city. I plan to settle down, Nikki.\"\n\n\"And marry?\" she asked.\n\nDominique's eyes twinkled merrily. \"No, my little dove. I leave that to you younger folk. Me and Reyne, we were born bachelors. Now, Pierre, that one should marry. I'd be proud to call Marie Louise my sister!\"\n\nNicolette glanced about. She hadn't seen Pierre tonight. \"They aren't here!\"\n\n\"What are you thinking, Nikki? Of course Pierre couldn't bring Marie Louise\u2014a _griffe\u2014to_ a party like this. It would be an embarrassment to her. No, they are home together with little Jean, celebrating in their own fashion.\n\nNicolette didn't miss the fact that, though most of the guests at the ball greeted her warmly, a few still held out, even now. Let them pretend they don't know me! she thought. All that will change soon enough!\n\nShe watched her father and her aunt across the floor. They stood together, laughing quietly over some secret joke between them.\n\nAunt Gabrielle is the loveliest woman in the room, Nicolette thought. But others were eyeing Nikki and saying those same words aloud.\n\nRaised voices from across the room suddenly drew Nicolette's attention. General Jackson, Governor Claiborne, Colonel Coffee from the general's staff, and Jean Laffite were standing together. Nicolette couldn't hear what was being said, she could only make out the angry tone of Jean's voice.\n\n\"Now, gentlemen,\" she heard Jackson say in a cajoling tone, \"let's begin this introduction all over again. Colonel Coffee, I'd like to present Captain Laffite.\"\n\nThe colonel hesitated a moment too long in extending his hand and Laffite snarled, \"You remember me, Colonel! _Laffite the pirate!\"_\n\nIn a rage, Laffite whirled about and headed for the door. Nicolette stood watching, horrified. What had happened? Where was Jean going?\n\nShe ran after him and caught up on the stairs, clutching his arm.\n\n\"Wait, Jean! What's wrong?\"\n\nHis face was a storm cloud. \"Everything! Claiborne and Coffee just insulted me. You see, they don't need me now. New Orleans is safe. They never meant to accept me... only to use me! I won't stay where I'm not welcome. I'm leaving!\"\n\n\"You can't leave me!\" Nicolette cried.\n\n\"I certainly can't take you! I don't even know where I'm going.\"\n\n\"Jean, please,\" she sobbed. \"Don't do this.\"\n\nHe pulled his arm away. She had never seen him this angry. She crumpled to the stairs, overcome with shock.\n\n\"Dom will let you know when I'm settled somewhere. I'll send for you then.\" He turned to leave, but hesitated and said, \"I love you, Nikki.\"\n\n\"Jean!\" she wailed, struggling to her feet. But he was gone.\n\nNicolette fled back into the ballroom to find Dominique Youx. The jovial cannonier had missed the angry exchange and Laffite's departure.\n\n\"Dom,\" Nicolette said desperately, \"I need your help. Jean's gone! You must take me to him!\"\n\nJean Laffite felt as if his whole world lay in pieces about his shining boots. Two things only he wanted in life: Nicolette and a country to belong to. If he couldn't have a place where he was respected and accepted, how could he have Nikki? She deserved far better than he had to offer.\n\nHe stood on the deck of his ship with a handful of Baratarians as crew\u2014men like himself, who could never settle down. The difference between me and them is that they don't want to and I'm not allowed to, he thought bitterly.\n\nHe had made a few stops on the way to his ship\u2014at his house to pick up some gear, at a tavern for enough wine to see him to Havana, at the stable to make sure his horses would be tended. Now the wind was rising and there was no reason for him to linger in the harbor.\n\nHis sad eyes traveled to the lights still glittering in celebration at the French Exchange. Perhaps he should have let Nikki come with him. It would have eased his pain to have her share it. But, no. How could he ask that of her? She'd been through enough on his account already.\n\n\"Hoist anchor!\" he bellowed.\n\nEvery groaning wrench of the anchor chain seemed to be twisting around his heart. The lights of the city dulled through the mist in his eyes. He stood for a long time, not wanting to let go of New Orleans. His whole life was there...\n\n\"You can't take me back! The wind's wrong!\"\n\nDid he imagine the voice? Was he losing his mind?\n\n\"Nikki?\" Laffite asked without turning.\n\nWarm hands slipped about his waist from behind and he felt a slight frame pressing against his back. His whole body quivered at the touch.\n\n\"I waited until you had the ship out of the harbor. I know you didn't want me to come, but you see, I can't live without you. You said you loved me, Jean, but I think I must love you even more. And, besides, I didn't get a chance to tell you that I'm going to have your baby, and, well... I just don't think it's fair for you to leave now.\" She knew her words were tumbling out in a jumbled torrent, but she couldn't stop them. \"Dom brought me to the ship and told me it was right for me to be here. He said you need me just as much as I need you. He's your older\n\nbrother, Jean, and I think you should listen to him...\"\n\nLaffite finally put an end to her nervous monologue. He caught her in his arms and stole her breath with his lips. She could feel his tears on her cheeks and soon her own mingled with them. They seemed unable to tear themselves apart even long enough to speak.\n\nWhen, at last, Jean released her, he stared down with eyes as warm as spring light on the sea.\n\n\"Oh, Nikki, my darling, I do love you so!\"\n\n\"You won't send me back, then?\" she asked in a small, trembling voice.\n\n\"I'm going to send you below!\" he answered. \"To the captain's cabin... with the captain!\"\n\nNicolette learned to love that small, austere cabin in the months to come. In her lover's arms, she passed the gentle nights at sea, learning a passion few women ever experience. For the first time in her life, she felt totally free. She had only to please herself and her man.\n\nAnd when their daughter was born early the following summer, she added to their love, cooing her pleasure of the waves' rolling motion from her sea chest cradle next to their bunk.\n\nOn a night in the fall, when the soft air hinted of winter, beckoning travelers toward home, Nicolette asked gently, \"Jean, darling, what course are we sailing?\"\n\nHe cradled Nikki and little Jeannette in his arms, kissing one and then the other. His smile gave him a boyish look, and his eyes twinkled with the green-gold lights Nicolette had learned to love that first night he kissed her on the levee.\n\n\"Where are we sailing? I thought you knew, darling. I've set a course that will take us straight into the pages of history!\"\n\nNicolette laid her head on his firm shoulder and sighed. She couldn't think of a nicer place to call home.\n\n###\n\n# Afterword\n\nJean Laffite became a legend in his own time. He remains this country's most colorful and mysterious folk hero. Tales about him vary from writer to writer. The real man remains cloaked in secrecy.\n\nHe was born in Bordeaux... no, in Port-au-Prince. He was a pirate... _never!_ He was a patriotic privateer. Laffite said so himself! He died in 1826, in the Yucatan. But, no! His journal, written in French, was translated and published in 1958. It plainly states that Jean Laffite was still alive in 1850. And an old family Bible gives evidence that Jean Laffite, alias John Laffin, died May 5, 1854, in Alton, Illinois.\n\nMany of the various tales about this man he undoubtedly put into circulation himself. It is known that at a ball one evening in New Orleans, Laffite told three ladies totally different stories concerning his birthplate, his age, and his marital status.\n\nOn June 4, 1850, Laffite wrote in his journal: \"Nobody knows who I was, but I knew myself quite well.\"\n\nJean Laffite planned it that way!\n\nHistorians tell us of his settlement at Galveston similar to the one on Grande Terre. He was reported to have been in Washington, Baltimore, Charleston, St. Louis, Havana, and the Yucatan in later years. But where did he really go and what did he do with the rest of his life after leaving New Orleans in 1815?\n\nThe answers are as elusive as the treasure troves he reportedly buried. While I was writing this novel, an old chest filled with Spanish gold was unearthed at a construction site in New Orleans\u2014supposedly buried by Jean Laffite. Perhaps someday the true and complete story of the \"gentleman smuggler\" will come to light, just as his gold does from time to time.\n\nMy thanks to the staff of The Historic New Orleans Collection and members of the National Park Service, especially those connected with Chalmette National Historical Park and the Jean Laffite Park, for their help with my research. Special gratitude goes to Emmie Espinole for giving me a tour of the old Orleans Ballroom and bringing characters out of New Orleans' history to life for me with her wonderful tales.\n\nAnd, as always, I must say, \" _Merci_!\" to my traveling companions and research assistants, Hank and Vincent.\n\nBecky Lee Weyrich  \nUnicorn Dune  \nSt. Simons Island, Georgia  \nApril 1983\n\n###\n\n# More from Becky Lee Weyrich\n\n_**Captive of Desire**_\n\nWhen beautiful Zephromae watched her brother taken away as a tribute slave, she knew she must rescue him. Her childhood sweetheart, the noble and courageous Alexander, followed to protect her. But he couldn't save her from a ruthless king, the lust of a savage prince or the fury of a spiteful queen who had power over them all.\n\nBut Zephromae possessed a secret strength that no one could have possibly imagined\u2014and she would not hesitate to use it. Set in Crete in the heart of the Minoan culture Captive of Desire sweeps the reader into an ancient world of adventure and romance.\n\n_**Rainbow Hammock**_\n\nLilah Fitzpatrick's childhood sweetheart broke her heart when he married another woman. She never thought she'd find the kind of love she lost. Then Steele Denegal\u2014a fearless Yankee soldier\u2014swept her into his world of passion and captured her heart.\n\nSuddenly Steele disappears, leaving Lilah alone and vulnerable to a treacherous man who's determined to destroy her, along with the memory of Steele's love. Will the promise in their passion find a future, or will Steele return before it's too late?\n\n_**Sands of Destiny**_\n\nWhile vacationing in Egypt, Pia Byrd finds herself transfixed by a miniature crystal pyramid. Roused by her intrigue, a handsome Greek sailor purchases it and, before she can protest, breaks it in two. Suddenly she finds herself plunged back through time and into the body of a queen. Standing before her is a golden-eyed Darius, a man with features\u2014and the yearning\u2014of a god.\n\nCaught between her life in the present and the primal desires of her past, Pia will find a love both passionate and primitive, but can it exist in two ages?\n\n**_Savannah Scarlett_**\n\nWhen Scarlett Lamar returns home to Savannah to restore her mother's ancestral mansion, she has no idea the antique mirror that she's been captivated by since childhood is actually a window to her past.\n\nBefore long, Scarlett becomes the target of a passionate rivalry between two men from her past. While Allen Overman, both charming and seductive, wants Scarlett enough to pursue her across the rivers of time, Bolton Conrad has loved her since he first saw her walk into her first Cotillion ball\u2014on the arm of Allen. Now Scarlett is back in Bolton's life, setting off a series of events that will either join their hearts or tear them apart forever.\n\n**_Swan's Way_**\n\nThe grand plantation of Swan's Quarter still echoes with memories of another time. It is there that Ginna Jones meets Neal Frazier, a recovering plane crash survivor. Young and handsome, but disturbingly familiar, Ginna is instantly drawn to this mysterious man.\n\nWhen a walk in the garden sends the pair spiraling back through the veils of time, their fates become entwined with those of two young lovers separated by the Civil War. Plunged into another century, Ginna and Neal will discover destinies still waiting to be fulfilled, and a flame of passion that not even the passage of time can extinguish.\n\n_**Once Upon Forever**_\n\nIn the arms of Union Soldier Hunter Breckinridge, Clair Sumner finds love both true and impossible. In a century that isn't her own, she lives another woman's life, and loves another woman's husband. As she's haunted by visions of an eerie moonbow, Clair must risk her past and future for a passion that spans two worlds, and a love stronger than time itself.\n\n_**The Scarlet Thread**_\n\nIn the city of New Orleans, Desiree La Fleur, a dark-haired Creole beauty, arrived with the purpose to celebrate her \"Sisters of Sin,\" the fallen women whose lives began and ended on a street known as The Scarlet Thread.\n\nBut deep inside Desiree, hiding just beneath the veil of purity, is a forbidden desire for a man who doesn't want a wife. Armed with unwavering determination and proud innocence, Desiree will soon find herself in a world as enticing at it is dangerous.\n\n_**Silver Tears**_\n\nWhen her mother is condemned as a witch and sent to the gallows, Alice Wiggins flees her English homeland to escape the same fate. In the colony of Maine, an inheritance awaits her\u2014 as does Christopher Gunn, an arrogant stranger who ignites a restless sensuality deep inside the young beauty.\n\nIn the splendor of the Northeast woods, headstrong Alice is brought to blissful surrender by a desire too powerful to resist. But as she fears that Christopher's heart isn't hers alone, she'll challenge the violence of war, the hazards of nature, and even death for his love.\n\n_**Summer Lightning**_\n\nCaptain Damien Clay, a fearless, freewheeling member of Morgan's Raiders, disguises himself as a woman to help win the war for the Confederates. But beneath the veil of his charade, he is all man.\n\nLavinia Rutledge cut off her striking red hair to go undercover as Private Vinnie Rutledge of Thunderbolt Plantation. But under the fa\u00e7ade is a voluptuous, hot-blooded woman.\n\nWhen this unlikely pair find one another, sparks fly and the flame of forbidden passion ignites.\n\n###\n\n# Connect with Diversion Books\n\nConnect with us for information on new titles and authors from Diversion Books, free excerpts, special promotions, contests, and more:\n\n  @DiversionBooks\n\n  www.Facebook.com\/DiversionBooks\n\n  Diversion Books eNewsletter\n\n  www.scribd.com\/DiversionBooks\n\n","meta":{"redpajama_set_name":"RedPajamaBook"}}
+{"text":" \nPENGUIN BOOKS\n\nON BEING AWESOME\n\nNick Riggle dropped out of high school to become a pro skater, participating in stunt shows, demos, and world-class competitions (including three ESPN X Games). He has a BA in philosophy from UC Berkeley and a PhD from New York University, America's leading philosophy program; he is currently a philosophy professor at the University of San Diego. He speaks widely at conferences and workshops and co-organized the first major academic conference on the philosophy of street art and graffiti. He continues to publish in notable philosophy journals, as well as more popular outlets, including _McSweeney's_ , _Aeon_ (on the high five, awesomeness, and suckiness), and _Hyperallergic_. His current academic work focuses on the role of aesthetic value in human life and is supported by a grant from the Experience Project, a $4.8 million, three-year initiative at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the University of Notre Dame.\n\nPENGUIN BOOKS\n\nAn imprint of Penguin Random House LLC\n\n375 Hudson Street\n\nNew York, New York 10014\n\npenguin.com\n\nCopyright \u00a9 2017 by Nick Riggle\n\nPenguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.\n\nIllustrations by Amanda Jaquin\n\nLIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA\n\nNames: Riggle, Nick, author.\n\nTitle: On being awesome : a unified theory of how not to suck \/ Nick Riggle.\n\nDescription: New York : Penguin Books, 2017.\n\nIdentifiers: LCCN 2017016020 (print) | LCCN 2017024527 (ebook) | ISBN 9781524704681 (ebook) | ISBN 9780143130901\n\nSubjects: LCSH: Success. | Conduct of life.\n\nClassification: LCC BJ1611.2 (ebook) | LCC BJ1611.2 .R5175 2017 (print) | DDC 158.1\u2014dc23\n\nLC record available at https:\/\/lccn.loc.gov\/2017016020\n\nWhile the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers, Internet addresses, and other contact information at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party Web sites or their content.\n\nCover design by Paul Buckley\n\nVersion_1\n\nto biz\n\n# Contents\n\nAbout the Author\n\nTitle Page\n\nCopyright\n\nDedication\n\nEpigraph\n\nSUCKINESS and AWESOMENESS: A Taxonomy\n\nChapter 1 In Search of Awesomeness\n\nChapter 2 A Theory\n\nSocial Openings\n\nThe Basics of Suckiness\n\nThe Basics of Non-Suckiness\n\nArticulating Awesome\n\nMixing It Up\n\nWhy _Awesome_?\n\nChapter 3 The Ethics of Awesomeness\n\nThe High Five\n\nCreative Community Builders\n\nBands, Booze, Art, and Shoes: Everything Is Awesome\n\nLiving Together\n\nIntroverts and Expectations\n\nChapter 4 Mapping the Ethics of Awesomeness\n\nModes of Suckiness\n\nModes of Awesomeness\n\nChapter 5 The Origins of Awesome\n\nThe New Ideal\n\nBe Cool (or Not)\n\nLester Young\n\nIndividuality and Community: A Tension\n\nIndividuality and Community: A Resolution\n\nAwesome Style\n\nChapter 6 Awesome Culture\n\nAltruism\n\nAthleticism\n\nCivic Life\n\nArt\n\nWatch Out\n\nChapter 7 Becoming Awesome\n\nAcknowledgments\nA person only plays when they are a person in the full sense of the word, and they are fully a person only when they play.\n\n\u2014Friedrich Schiller\n\nThere is no conflict between the individual and the social instincts, any more than there is between the heart and the lungs: the one the receptacle of a precious life essence, the other the repository of the element that keeps the essence pure and strong.\n\n\u2014Emma Goldman\n\nIf you obey all the rules, you miss all the fun.\n\n\u2014Katharine Hepburn\nSUCKINESS and AWESOMENESS: A Taxonomy\n\n# Chapter 1\n\n# In Search of Awesomeness\n\nDURING HALFTIME AT a Boston Celtics basketball game in 2009, the Bon Jovi song \"Livin' on a Prayer\" came blasting through the loudspeakers. As people relaxed in their seats, chatting, eating, and drinking, the stadium's Fancam zeroed in on the audience, projecting their images onto the jumbo screen for everyone to see. Most of them did what fans normally do\u2014they nudged their friends, smiled, waved, covered their faces, pointed to the giant images of themselves lording over the arena. But before long, the camera settled on Jeremy Fry, a skinny, ordinary young man, apparently there with his mother.\n\nFry could have reacted like everyone else. He could have smiled at the camera, nudged his mom and laughed, waved to friends who might be watching at home. Or he could have done nothing at all. But instead, he bounced out of his seat and immediately assumed the role of Jon Bon Jovi in a music video\u2014lip-syncing, awkwardly dancing, and air-guitaring to the song while roaming among and interacting with a diverse and increasingly lively crowd. Giant high fives, smooth 360s, fist pumps to the beat, and arms in the air: his antics said, in loud effect, _Let's all pretend we're in a Bon Jovi music video!_ Soon the crowd was joining in, cheering him on, and enacting various music video roles.*\n\nIt is hard to describe the experience of watching Fry. It is enthralling, spirit lifting, inspiring. He's just _awesome._ That word is used to describe him in YouTube comments dozens upon dozens of times: \"This is fucking awesome\"; \"This guy is awesome\"; \"This guy is nothing but awesome\"; \"There are no words to describe how awesome this guy is. Salut from Finland.\" Some comments even suggest that Fry exhibits unadulterated awesomeness. We look upon him with the kind of enthusiastic joy that might make us bounce out of our seats and emulate him. Or more. At least one commenter found a renewed faith in people: \"This guy restored my faith in humanity.\" Another saw in Fry the makings of a society-structuring ideal: \"This man should lead us.\"\n\nAnd for many people in the crowd that is exactly what Fry did. Much of his awesomeness seems to come down to the way he proposed and orchestrated a performance that the crowd enabled and then amplified, as women and men cheered him on, hugged him, gave him high fives, and lip-synced and air-guitared in unison. Many of them spontaneously, unreflectively, and enthusiastically accepted his proposal, breathing life into the collective effort. They might not have been as awesome as Fry, but they were consummately game.\n\nHowever, as beautiful as the cooperative performance is, there's something puzzling about the overwhelmingly positive response and willingness to join in. Fry is a perfect stranger acting perfectly strangely. What exactly is so good or awesome about what he does? He is obviously not doing what one normally does in this context, and it's easy to imagine people who reasonably prefer to do just that. A few fans were predictably indifferent to or even slightly irked by Fry's animated proposal\u2014they were there for the game, after all, and who is this weirdo, anyway? Although Fry had nearly the entire section of the stadium smiling, singing, and dancing along, there was one fan who roundly disapproved. Rather than ignore Fry, a man in a large blue T-shirt nudged him away. He even mimicked kicking him.\n\nAs many YouTube commenters observe, this guy totally sucks. Some go further and claim that he \"represents everything that is wrong with the world.\" Others imagine speaking directly to him: \"Dude get a life u suck.\"*\n\nEven if you don't use the word _sucks_ yourself, you probably hear it a lot. Suckiness, for better or worse, is on our minds, and like _awesome_ , it's not a word reserved for the youthful set. In 2013, Wisconsin weather reporter Angelica Duria received cheers and a standing ovation from her on-air news team when, after six hours of reporting from a dreary snowscape, she summed up her findings: \"It is snowing, and it _sucks here_.\" In 2014, Robert H. Lustig, professor of clinical pediatrics at the University of California, San Francisco, displayed full mastery of the term and even emphasized its special ability to articulate his thought:\n\nNow, I will tell you that America doesn't trust its politicians. And we have a good reason for that: they suck. If you don't quote me, I will be upset. The reason they suck is because, number one, they're interested in power, not doing the right thing, and, number two, they take money.*\n\nOur political leaders are often called out as \"sucky\"\u2014a fact that comedian George Carlin, as early as 2001, noted in his book _Napalm & Silly Putty_:\n\nEverybody says politicians] suck. Well, where do people think these politicians come from? They don't fall out of the sky. They don't pass through a membrane from another reality. They come from American parents and American families, American homes, American schools, American churches, American businesses and American universities, and they are elected by American citizens. This is the best we can do folks. This is what we have to offer. It's what our system produces: Garbage in, garbage out. If you have selfish, ignorant citizens, you're going to get selfish, ignorant leaders. Term limits ain't going to do any good; you're just going to end up with a brand new bunch of selfish, ignorant Americans. So, maybe, maybe, maybe, it's not the politicians who suck. Maybe something else sucks around here . . . like, the public. Yeah, the public sucks. There's a nice campaign slogan for somebody: \"The Public Sucks. Fuck Hope.\"[*\n\nToo much suckiness makes hope seem empty or absurd. Appeals to hope are more successful with politicians who openly acknowledge how much suckiness there really is; they appeal to our need to overcome it, to rise above and become awesome.\n\nJust such hope was arguably part of then-senator Barack Obama's promise in 2008. Here he is in a joking (but not really) mood:\n\nIf I had to name my greatest strength, I guess it would be my humility. Greatest weakness, it's possible that I'm a little too awesome.*\n\nObama seemed to appreciate the fact that the promise of awesomeness sang to the contemporary American spirit. It made his appeal to hope in 2008 seem irresistible to so many people. Could someone _that_ awesome really be president? Saxophone-slinging Bill Clinton was cool; people wanted to have a beer with their bro George W. But fist-bumping Obama was just _awesome_. I was emphatically among the 69.5 million voters who thought, \"This man should lead us.\"\n\n\u2022\n\nThe word _awesome_ is, of course, the contemporary antonym of _sucks_. Some take this to be a condemnation of both terms, on the grounds that their usage is so broad that they're nearly empty or pointless, meaning little more than \"good\" and \"bad\" or, even worse, \"I like that\" and \"I don't like that.\" As one journalist recently noted, \"The real problem with 'suck' is that it has become the antonym of 'awesome,' which has similarly replaced all adjectives of approval.\"* And a cursory look at how these terms are used might seem to confirm the point. Just consider the range of things that we casually call \"awesome\": a game, a social media app, a friend's behavior, the restaurant down the street, the concert last night, ourselves. And apparently nearly anything can \"suck,\" including, by Carlin's comedic lights, the whole of American society and culture.\n\nIt's easy to dismiss a glib \"awesome\" or facile \"sucks\" as trendy and ephemeral forms of speech. It is even easier to dismiss them if we regard their contemporary use as a lamentable and superficial co-opting of what should be powerful words. The philosophical comedian Louis C.K. comments:\n\n[W]e waste the shit out of our words. It's sad. We use words like \"awesome\" and \"wonderful\" like they're candy. It was awesome? Really? It inspired _awe_? It was wonderful? Are you serious? It was full of _wonder_? You use the word \"amazing\" to describe a goddamn sandwich at Wendy's. What's going to happen on your wedding day, or when your first child is born? How will you describe it? You already wasted \"amazing\" on a fucking sandwich.\n\nAs tempting as it might be to share this attitude, even brief reflection on the meaning and use of _awesome_ and _sucks_ suggests that they capture something special: The threat of being a sucky person seems distinctive, and the promise of being awesome seems to resonate, at least with the US imagination, in a way that the thought of goodness, virtue, politeness, dutifulness, and other traditional forms of moral excellence do not. _Awesome_ and _sucks_ are powerful words on the contemporary tongue, and we have something important to learn\u2014about ourselves, our culture, and our social aspirations\u2014by resisting the impulse to spurn and dismiss them.\n\nThe contemporary resonance of _awesome_ is evident across the vast landscape of American culture. We see it in our films and commercials, we hear it in our songs, and we feel it in our bones. \"Everything is awesome,\" as Tegan and Sara sing in _The Lego Movie_ (2014), which grossed nearly $500 million globally. \" _Awesome_ sells\" might even be the new \"Sex sells.\" An \"awesome\" sandwich is so much more enticing than one that is \"very good\" or \"excellent,\" and this is reflected in the way _awesome_ is used in commercial and popular culture.* It appears in all variety of marketing, from food and insurance commercials to all-purpose cleaners, wet wipes, and right wing political books\u2014the subtitle of Ann Coulter's 2016 book, _In Trump We Trust_ , is (ironically) \"E Pluribus Awesome!\" It seems that no matter what our political views are, we think our ethical unity as a nation is not _really_ secured unless the public doesn't suck and hope isn't fucked\u2014unless we are _awesome together_.\n\nOf course, being awesome and not sucking does not rule out the more traditional forms of ethical excellence. It's not that we don't care about being fair and just, good and true; we don't want to be immoral, unprincipled, or vicious\u2014quite the opposite: We want to love our neighbor; we are generally proud of whatever virtue we possess. And as we will see, awesomeness is threatened where justice and equality are not widespread and firm. The problem is that the thought of being virtuous or dutiful out of a love of virtue or duty doesn't readily stoke the twenty-first-century ethical imagination. But the thought of being awesome out of a love of awesomeness does. At the end of the day, what we ultimately want is to not suck. More than that: We want to be awesome.\n\n\u2022\n\nBut what exactly is being awesome? Why have these terms seized our hearts and minds? Do we really want to stoke fires of awe in the hearts of everyone we encounter, or be moved to awe by every band we hear and every sandwich we swallow? Why are we so fascinated by awesomeness, so irked by suckiness? Why do we care about being awesome and not sucking right now, in the early twenty-first century?\n\nAlthough our fascination with awesomeness and suckiness is new, it is developed enough to be nuanced in ways that often go unappreciated. The terms _sucks_ and _awesome_ are conceptually related to a wide range of other terms we use. Notice that being \"wack\" is different from being a killjoy or an obnoxious self-promoter, but they all are ways of sucking. And being \"down\" is not quite the same as being \"game\" or \"chill,\" but they both have something to do with awesomeness\u2014at the very least they're both ways of being, for lack of a better term, non-sucky.\n\nThis brings us to a second compelling reason to seek a better understanding of awesomeness and suckiness. In addition to being distinctive, perhaps even new (or newly important) values, they bear conceptual connections to other ways of thinking and valuing that we care about\u2014connections whose subtleties and nuances we don't quite understand. There is an enormous middle ground between being awesome and being flat-out sucky. What is the difference between being down and being game, and how do they relate to awesomeness? What exactly is sucky about being wack or being a self-promoter? Why are they _both_ ways of sucking?\n\nWe can take the very first step toward answers to these questions by carefully considering the many ways we use the word _sucks_. Eventually we will do the same with _awesome_ , but that will take more time to develop, in part because we have to carefully distinguish the contemporary significance of _awesome_ from its traditional meaning of \"awe-inspiring.\" The grammar of _sucks_ is clear enough: It's a quippy and concise monosyllabic intransitive verb, far superior in pith and punch than a predicate adjective (\"That is bad\") or attributive adjective and noun (\"That is a bad thing\"). \"That sucks!\" gets right to the point.\n\nGrammar aside, we use _sucks_ in several different ways that need to be teased apart before we can make progress. My toaster sucks because it doesn't properly toast bread _,_ which is the only thing it is really supposed to do. It sucks because it doesn't perform the way toasters are designed to perform. So some things suck because they fail to do what they are designed, supposed, or expected to do.\n\nSometimes _sucks_ is used in a similar way to dismiss entire people or kinds of people, not merely a person's action. It's hardly worth naming names\u2014we all have our favorite examples\u2014but there are plenty of people to call out. These people, or at least their public personas, are hurricanes of ethical dysfunction and distortion; they're mean, unhinged materialists, aggressively confused, or soaringly arrogant and greedy. It seems that a person \"sucks\" in this sense if they fail to meet basic ethical standards, ones we expect every person to meet.\n\nBut we use _sucks_ to apply to people in another way too, not only to evaluate, criticize, or wholly dismiss them. People can suck without being sucky people, just as a person can do something mean or nice without being a mean or nice person. Just because your friend bailed on you once, it doesn't mean he's a sucky _person_. He just kind of sucked that one time. He did a sucky thing. It's more illuminating to focus on how those who aren't sucky people can suck, because when we correctly use _sucks_ to evaluate or dismiss a whole person rather than one of their actions, we can lose sight of precisely what makes them suck. It's often because of how they act, but it can be hard to zero in on it when so much of what they do sucks. It's easier when we look at the sucky actions of someone who is not a sucky person; their suckiness stands out in contrast to their general non-suckiness.\n\nWhen an otherwise decent person does something sucky, it is not that they are sucking _at_ one thing or another. Most people suck at something or other: bowling, dancing, drawing\u2014I could go on. Yet we continue with our lives assuming that this doesn't mean that we suck _as a person_ (or _at_ being a person). There are basic standards or rules that you have to follow to do an activity well, and if you consistently cannot follow the rules or meet the standards, then you suck at it. It's probably not your fault, either. We can't be good at everything, and those who _are_ can definitely suck. Most of us are stuck with sucking at one thing or another.\n\nSuckiness is different.\n\nAnd it is not a matter of sucking _at life_. People who suck at life don't necessarily suck, even if they are a little more likely to. Lots of artists, musicians, or comedians suck at life but are gloriously non-sucky people. Sucking at life is something we have all done at one point or another, by not really tackling the various things we have to do to have a life\u2014regular laundry, paying bills on time, being a decent family member, watering the plants, basic personal hygiene. And sometimes our pursuits are too demanding, our luck too spare, or our culture too rigid, unaccommodating, or just plain shitty to allow us to be good at life _and_ spend it doing things that don't suck.\n\nFurthermore, people who don't suck at life can certainly suck. We all know people who have life basically figured out but who still suck nonetheless and perhaps all the more. They have good jobs, solid paychecks, mainstream prestige\u2014and they walk into a room and suck the life right out of it. The American writer John Steinbeck notes that it's \"strange how one person can saturate a room with vitality, with excitement. Then there are others . . . who can drain off energy and joy, can suck pleasure dry and get no sustenance from it. Such people spread a grayness in the air about them.\"* And they can do that in different ways. They might be tactless self-promoters, fake-ass people, sticks-in-the-mud, douchebags, thunder stealers, wet blankets, blowhards, or bores, among other things.\n\nTo better understand these different ways of sucking, we need to understand what it is for a person's action to suck. And once we do, then maybe we can understand what it is for someone to _not_ suck, which will shed light on the special character of people who walk into a room (or stand up at halftime) and inject life into it. They're game, down, chill\u2014they're just _awesome_. This will help us understand what it really means to be awesome, and how these different ways of sucking, not sucking, and being awesome fit together.\n\n\u2022\n\nThe task is urgent because when there's too much suckiness, it's hard not to feel Carlin's sense of hopelessness\u2014which makes it hard not to suck hard. Often when we suck it's because we don't have the motivation _not_ to suck, because it's sucked out of us by sucky people: a bore who can't appreciate your generosity and spirit; a lackluster friend who says she'll come to the party but doesn't; a miserable coworker who steals your thunder or can't talk about anything but himself. When you have to deal with these people, you may wonder why you should bother thinking up an awesome plan for your friends or your community. Why envision a road trip, cook a special meal, or throw a party? Why conjure a thoughtful surprise? Why rule? Why be down, game, or chill? Why be a breeze of sweet and pure awesomeness if some vacuum salesman is always knocking at your door?\n\nAs we explore the meaning, structure, history, and influence of awesomeness and suckiness, we will come to see that awesomeness matters a great deal, and there's good reason to do what we can to strive for, promote, and celebrate it. The aspiration to be awesome is, in a sense, an American phenomenon, but it can take hold almost anywhere. We will find awesomeness in a grieving guy in a Superman costume, in shovels made out of melted guns, in swings installed in bus stops, and in a range of emerging cultural practices, from social art to street skating. We will cast new light on our cultural history and our social future by looking at the cultural revolution of the 1960s, the invention of the high five, and the emergence of \"cool\" in the 1930s, among other things.\n\nThe idea I develop in this book is that our love of awesomeness is an expression of our hope for a better social culture\u2014one that is more imaginative, creative, and communal, and one that promises to bolster, enhance, and even help to realize the kind of free, just, equal, and diverse society we aspire to. Our love of awesomeness emerged from our collective exploration and slow discovery of ways to bring community and connection back into a burgeoning individualistic culture, but without destroying that culture\u2014indeed, while promoting and celebrating it.\n\nAfter exploring the theory of what it is to be awesome and what it is to suck, we will be able to see how important these concepts are in our lives and how they inform some of our deepest social and even personal aspirations.\n\nMaybe it's obvious, but I hope this book doesn't suck\u2014I hope it's a step in the direction of greater awesomeness. Once we clearly understand what awesomeness and suckiness are and why they matter so much to us, we will be better at recognizing them in ourselves, in each other, and in our social and cultural ways of life. I hope a little intellectual, philosophical effort can bring us together around a common understanding, one that sheds light on being awesome and not sucking, and can maybe even make our world a little more awesome.\n\n# Chapter 2\n\n# A Theory\n\nIF YOU WANT to understand something that seems too immense to comprehend\u2014truth, beauty, knowledge, love, awesomeness, suckiness\u2014it often helps to begin by trying to understand typical, simple, or uncontroversial examples. Try to formulate a theory about them, or state a few good principles, and then gradually bring in more complicated or marginal examples to see whether your theory or principles hold up.\n\nFor example, imagine that you are trying to understand the nature of beauty. It's usually a good idea to begin by thinking about clearly beautiful things, or things that people tend to agree are beautiful, like sunsets or classical sculpture. And when you have some good ideas about what makes these things beautiful, you can begin to consider more difficult cases, like abstract painting, minimalist music, or \"social practice\" art.\n\nJeremy Fry's grand gesture at the Celtics game is awesome, but it is also a fairly unique event. Focusing on it too much can make awesomeness seem rare and difficult. But it's not. There is the potential for awesomeness and suckiness in many of our simplest, everyday interactions\u2014so let's start there.\n\n## Social Openings\n\nConsider how you might normally order a coffee at your local caf\u00e9:\n\nEmployee: Hi, what can I get for you today?\n\nYou: I would like a large coffee, please.\n\nEmployee: All right, that'll be two dollars, please.\n\nYou: Here you go.\n\nEmployee: Here _you_ go. Have a nice day!\n\nYou: Thanks. You too.\n\nThere is nothing remarkable about this interaction, which simply follows familiar conventions of consumer exchange. The employee plays his role as employee, and you play yours as coffee shop customer. It's not very different, aside from the happy influence of caffeine, from any other civil interaction. It's not very different from the kinds of actions that take place when we ask for directions, help someone carry something, or simply walk down the street. In each case, we act in our generic role as cashier, customer, helpful citizen, or person in public\u2014we all tend to do what the social norms say we should do in these roles.\n\nOur social norms largely determine the ways we act when we fall into certain standard roles, but in doing so, we tend to act in a generic manner. Your actions as a coffee shop customer are more or less the same as mine, provided we're both competent and know our manners. As the prolific and inventive writer and philosopher Iris Murdoch tells us, \"We are not always the individual in pursuit of the individual. . . . Often, for instance when we pay our bills or perform other small everyday acts, we are just 'anybody' doing what is proper or making simple choices for ordinary public reasons.\"*\n\nIf someone asked you why you ordered coffee the way you did, you would give an ordinary public reason: \"Well, that's just what one does to order a coffee. We don't stand on our heads or use a megaphone.\" We internalize vast amounts of information about what one \"normally\" does as a coffee shop customer, citizen in public, and so on, and we draw on this information to coordinate with each other or to simply get through the day more smoothly than we otherwise would.\n\nBut as a result, our actions don't reveal much about who we are as individuals. If we were wearing the same clothes and makeup, then nothing would distinguish us aside from our natural appearance, which, in and of itself, normally doesn't express a whole lot. Your individuality is constituted by your aspirations, your cherished beliefs, what you love and value, your sense of humor, your talents, whether you're shy or intense, your taste in food, music, and clothes, and so on. In other words, your individuality is what makes you _you_ to yourself. It is composed of your appreciable features, which are those aspects of yourself that you cherish, want to cultivate, and want to explore, express, and share. But they are also the ones that it makes sense to value\u2014the ones that really are worthy of appreciation, cultivation, and exploration.\n\nSometimes we abandon the ordinary public reasons and break out of the social roles. Sometimes we do so because we're forced to (in an emergency, for example) or because we're inattentive or impolite. Yet other times we break out of these roles by expressing our individuality. In doing so, we morph into Murdoch's \"individual in pursuit of the individual.\"\n\nWhen we break out of our norm-governed roles by expressing ourselves, we can create what I call a _social opening_. A social opening occurs when an opportunity arises to step outside of or creatively expand upon these roles\u2014in particular, when there is a chance to recognize each other's individuality beyond whatever generic traits and skills are required to simply enact the social role or adhere to the social norms.\n\nSocial openings allow us to express ourselves, but social norms aren't the only things they allow us to transcend. They also function to break up our own everyday habits, prejudices, and routines\u2014ones that aren't necessarily governed by social norms. We could call them our \"personal norms.\" You might break a personal norm by talking to someone you wouldn't normally talk to, cooking a special meal for your family, going out of your way to help a stranger, sending a friend a gift just because, or spending the day learning to play the guitar or paint. Social openings give us an opportunity to step outside of our norms, social habits, and everyday routines by allowing us to explore and express our individuality with one another. Social openings are therefore also a kind of _self_ -opening, because they can provide opportunities for self-expression, exploration, cultivation, and appreciation.\n\nSo how can we create social openings? Normally, someone deliberately creates one by expressing themselves. Consider a slight variation on the morning conversation with the coffee shop employee:\n\nEmployee: Hi, what can I get for you today?\n\nYou: I would like a large coffee, please.\n\nEmployee: All right, that'll be two dollars, please.\n\nYou: Small price to become human again. Here you go.\n\nEmployee: . . .\n\nHere you have created a little social opening by breaking the norms, going off script, and making a little joke. In doing so, you give the employee an opportunity to recognize your sense of play and humor and react with a response of his own. You thereby give him a chance to break out of his role and express _his_ individuality in response. If he takes up your offering in the right way, then the result is a kind of mutual appreciation of individuality. Offering the joke is a way of opening the door to this kind of appreciative interaction. Social openings are a success when this kind of appreciation occurs.\n\nSocial openings engage our capacity for self-expression and interpersonal appreciation, from the simple ability to smile at the right time or crack a joke to impressive gestures of creative generosity. There are many means of expression that allow us to break out of our social roles and norms: remarks (compliments, jokes), gestures (making faces, flashy movements), offerings (gifts), acts of kindness, playfulness, and displays (outfits), to name a few.\n\nImagine if you were to compliment the employee on his skills or clothes, make a silly face, do a little dance, offer a generous tip, or show up at the register with a sweet outfit\u2014maybe you're going to a party, or feel experimental that day, or just feel like flaunting it. These would all give the employee an opportunity to acknowledge you for who you are in a way that reveals who he is. He might laugh at your joke or respond with his own, thereby revealing his sense of humor. He might notice your tip and make you a special drink or reciprocate by smiling at you (thereby revealing his perceptiveness and generosity). He might take up your invitation to notice what you're wearing and compliment your style.\n\nOf course, not all such gestures are successful or appropriate. Attempts to create social openings can misfire in various ways, particularly when the individual you present is, in one way or another, off-putting. Suppose that instead of making a joke, you burp and smile. In doing so, you present yourself in a way that is distasteful (to most people, though I've known a few burp aficionados who might appreciate the offering). Your action is off-putting, and this gives the employee a reason not to engage. Now imagine you approach the employee and make an offensive joke. In this case, the way you present yourself to him gives him a reason to criticize you, which eliminates the possibility of mutual appreciative regard. Finally, suppose you are extremely friendly to the employee, as if you were good friends but you aren't. Here you show your friendliness, but in a way that suggests you may be presumptuous or deluded, or even needy. To him, this is evidence that you won't be accurately receptive to who he is, or that you are unaware of boundaries of personal comfort, and now he has reason not to engage. In short, success in creating social openings requires that you be sensitive to (1) the ways in which you break or set aside the social norms, and (2) the appeal of the individual you present, which in turn requires that you be aware of context and sensitive to the individual to whom you are expressing yourself.\n\nSometimes people deliberately break the social norms without creating a social opening because in breaking the social norms, they aim only to edify or admonish their audience in a certain way. For example, imagine you are in an elevator and someone is talking too loudly. In order to highlight the illicit behavior, you might mimic them and also talk loudly\u2014not to be funny or shocking but to make it obvious that doing so is against a norm that people ought to observe. Here you break the norms with the aim of getting people back in line with them, and so do not create a social opening.\n\nHowever, social openings can be created around education, critique, enlightenment, or illumination. The great etiquette writer Emily Post, whose works contain a good amount of awesome wisdom, often put her elbows on the table at formal dinner parties to make fun of the rule that one shouldn't do that. This is a blatant violation of a norm, but coming from Emily Post it says, \"Free yourself from the tyranny of elbowless dinner tables!\" and creates a social opening that addresses both those who might defend this rule and those who would like to abandon it. The example illustrates a crucial point that we will take up in more detail later: When there is real tyranny or social disorder, breaking the norms can create a social opening of an entirely different order. Generally, social openings occur when the norm breaking is in the spirit of individual cultivation, exploration, and expression, and this spirit is compatible with critique, reform, and edification.\n\nIt is important to emphasize the \"cultivation and exploration\" aspect of social openings. The notion of self-expression is a little misleading. I don't want to suggest that we all have a determinate or concrete self that, every now and then, we decide to express and hope that others appreciate it. Rather, the kinds of things we do when we express ourselves\u2014play, create, explore, take risks, imagine, and so on\u2014allow us to deepen our self-understanding and appreciation. This, in turn, allows us to cultivate and refine our sense of self or individuality.\n\nWhen I talk of the \"mutual appreciation of individuality,\" this can mean two things: a state of appreciation directed either at one or more features of individuality\u2014for example, one's perceptiveness, talent, or sense of style or humor\u2014or at the simple fact of our being individuals in pursuit of individuality. What I mean by \"the simple fact\" is that sometimes, as in the Jeremy Fry episode, the focus of a social opening's mutual appreciation is our _pure_ _individuality_ \u2014our basic capacity to break out of whatever norms, stereotypes, roles, or rules saddle us and just _act_ or _exist_ in that space. The individual purely as such is a playful, empathetic, and perceptive seeker and appreciator of other individuals. Individuals gain definition as they cultivate _ways_ of exploring, playing, and seeking that they like and value\u2014they gain not just the ability to laugh, but a sense of humor; not just the ability to empathize, but a refined sense of care and concern.\n\nNow suppose you successfully create a social opening\u2014you don't alienate or offend anyone, and you aren't out to merely admonish. What happens? The result of a successful social opening is a community, however small, of mutually appreciative individuals. English arguably lacks a term for the connections we form when this kind of mutual appreciation occurs\u2014on the subway or bus, at concerts, barbecues, dinners, sporting events, and so on. We connect with people who aren't (yet anyway) really friends; they might become friends, or we might go our separate ways. Calling them our fellows, companions, or buddies doesn't necessarily capture the kind of mutual feeling that can develop in such situations. In some cases, a lovelike emotion can emerge, leaving us with a sense of connection and joy\u2014one that can be a pathway to a deeper love and lasting connection, one that is meaningful even when fleeting. We never leave a social opening unchanged. We leave with stories and insights, challenged stereotypes and strengthened bonds, deepened empathy and opened minds.\n\nLet's say that a _co-person_ (or _coperson_ ) is someone with whom you have formed a mutual appreciative regard directed at the individual each is. When social openings are created and carried off, copersons are created on the small and large scale\u2014from the mutual appreciation between you and a coffee shop employee to the complex web of mutual appreciation at a social event, concert, or spontaneous gathering. Let's call a group of copersons\u2014paradigmatically, a group of regular copersons\u2014a _crew_ (or _squad_ ).\n\n## The Basics of Suckiness\n\nSo how would you react if you were to present someone with a social opening and they refused to accept it? Imagine that the employee from the previous interaction recognizes that you created a social opening, but for no apparent reason deflects or dismisses it:\n\nEmployee: Hi, what can I get for you today?\n\nYou: I would like a large coffee, please.\n\nEmployee: All right, that'll be two dollars, please.\n\nYou: Small price to become human again. Here you go.\n\nEmployee: Um. Here's your coffee.\n\nThat sucks! He could accept your social opening, but he refuses. By saying \"Um,\" he recognizes that you're acting out of the defined role of coffee customer and closes the social opening thereby offered. To be fair, coffee shop employees would have to be social virtuosos to engage with every caffeine-addled brain who wants to chat or issue a silly joke. What matters here is the _inclination_ to think that the caf\u00e9 employee sucks when he rejects your social opening, even if you should resist the inclination in similar cases. When someone is busy, overworked, or clearly exhausted, a better way to create a social opening, if at all, might be to just tell them how awesome they are. An acquaintance was at the airport observing an airline employee doing an incredible job handling luggage and responding to a flood of irritated passengers. He went out of his way to compliment the worker on a job well done. Their response was a solid high five (awesome) and a return to work.\n\nSucking is, first and foremost, a matter of _being able but refusing to take up social openings_. Social openings are essentially opportunities for the mutual appreciation of individuality, allowing us to express, attribute, and cultivate our individuality beyond whatever is required to play out the script written in the social code, or to carry on in our everyday habits and routines. People who suck in this sense refuse to play along even though they could.\n\nYour joke gave the caf\u00e9 employee an opportunity to acknowledge your sense of humor. He could have acknowledged you by saying something as simple as \"You're funny,\" or he could have reciprocated by playing off of your joke and saying something weird or quirky, like \"WE ARE ALL ROBOTS HERE\" in a robot voice. But he made it clear that he didn't care.\n\nAt the very least, the employee could have been merely polite. He could have mustered a polite laugh or offered a well-wishing smile. Politeness in this context is neither sucky nor non-sucky\u2014it's a way of opting out of awesomeness without really sucking. The merely polite person does not act from a sense of their own individuality; rather, they act out of a sense of their _common humanity_ , their sense of respect for all people, and this is a sense of self we can all tap into. We might say that the merely polite person \"entertains\" the social opening without taking it up in all its glory. However, as we will see in chapter 4, people who are _always_ merely polite are in danger of sucking.\n\nLet's be more specific about what makes an action suck. Sucky actions are a response to a certain kind of opportunity\u2014an opportunity to present, acknowledge, and cultivate each other's individuality on the small and large scales. This is the heart of suckiness\u2014and, logically speaking, part of the structure of awesomeness\u2014so we need to be as clear and specific as we can. For your action to suck, it must meet the following conditions.\n\n### 1. You encounter a social opening.\n\nThe first condition for an action to suck says that you must encounter a social opening. It doesn't state that someone must present you with a social opening. Social openings can occur without either of the people for whom they occur intentionally creating them.\n\nImagine you're walking down the street, and just as you're passing someone walking the other way a remarkable event occurs\u2014a pigeon flies just inches from your face, or a gust of wind nearly knocks you over. These are remarkable events, ones that each of you knows the other recognizes, and recognizes as worthy of comment. If neither of you says something\u2014if you just walk by without acknowledging each other, making a joke, or smiling\u2014then you've missed an opportunity and you suck a little.\n\n### 2. You recognize the opportunity.\n\nPeople who suck recognize the opportunity for a social opening but don't act on it. They see that their social conditions are unusual relative to the social norms\u2014that someone has broken out of or creatively riffed on a social norm in a way that invites a positive response. But it is possible to fail to _recognize_ that such a thing has happened. If that's true then you don't suck. You might _seem_ to suck, but you don't. You don't because, for whatever reason, you just failed in that instance to see what was going on. Sometimes we are simply aloof, stressed out, or too preoccupied with important business to recognize when we have encountered a social opening.\n\nThat said, there are certain standards of perceptiveness that we demand of most people. Other things being equal, you should notice your friend's new haircut; you should be aware of someone's clear attempt at humor. You can suck when you are insensitive to social openings because you are _gratuitously_ aloof or _unreasonably_ stressed. More generally, we should be aware of individuals' expressive efforts. If you don't recognize a social opening because you failed to meet these standards (in spite of being able to meet them), then you suck.\n\n### 3. You could accept the opportunity . . .\n\nEven if you are faced with and recognize a social opening, you might not be able to take it up. Sucky people are in a position to take up the social opening but refuse. The thought here is that you suck only when you _could_ take up the social opening, when there's really nothing stopping you from accepting the opportunity to express and appreciate, no really good reason to opt out.\n\nConsider the coffee shop employee who seemed to suck. It is easy to imagine him being way too busy to do much more than focus on doing his job, on playing his practical role as a coffee shop employee. If he really were that busy, then he would be reasonably unable to accept the opportunity and he does not really suck. If that's his reason for not accepting, then it's a good one\u2014it makes sense for him to opt out of the social opening he's offered (though he could have been more tactful and avoided the \"um\").\n\nIn contrast, suppose he closed your social opening for a different reason. Suppose he just didn't like the color of your shirt, felt like taking his bad day out on you, or superficially judged that you are too boring to be in his vicinity. In that case he sucks.\n\nAnother way to summarize the third condition is to say that we avoid suckiness only when we act on a good reason to opt out. Sucking is a matter of opting out of social openings for bad reasons.\n\nBut what if you decline a social opening for a bad reason while _also_ possessing a _good_ reason for declining\u2014maybe one that didn't occur to you at the time? For example, consider what we should say about a coffee shop employee who really is extremely busy, and so has a good reason to opt out of a social opening\u2014but who does so because he doesn't like the color of your shirt. There's a sense in which, by his lights in that moment, he could have accepted the social opening\u2014he knows that individuals are so much more than the color of their shirt, so that is not a good enough reason to opt out. But in fact, in the broader scheme of things, his extreme busyness gave him a good enough reason. In this case I think we should say that the person is being unnecessarily sucky. He has lost sight of his legitimate reason for opting out and fallen into a pit of suckiness.\n\n### 4. . . . but you don't.\n\nThis is the heart of sucky action: It's a matter of being able to accept social openings you encounter and recognize but simply blowing them off for no good reason.\n\nBut why should we take up the social openings we encounter? You may be thinking, \"I might have no good reason to opt out of a social opening, but why does that mean I have to accept it or else be labeled 'sucky'? If my reason to refuse is no good, then why does that mean I ought to accept?\"\n\nThere are two basic reasons that favor opting in to social openings. They are usually in play for us when we are being awesome and not sucking, but when your reasons for opting out are bad or weak, those reasons take center stage.\n\nThe first has to do with our desire to cultivate, express, and explore our individuality. We want to express ourselves, test and develop our interests, engage our tastes, sensibilities, and style. Social openings are paradigmatic opportunities to engage this interest by engaging our pure or developed individuality (in some cases only in a small, fleeting, but nonetheless valuable way). And this is something that we cannot do alone\u2014we need others to help us along, take up our offerings, and show us how to be awesome and not suck. This means that we also have an interest in promoting the individual engagement of others. By opting out for no good reason, you act as if you don't have these interests or as if being awesome doesn't really matter. But you do! And it does.\n\nWe could perhaps imagine a person who wholly lacks these interests. They don't care about being an individual and have no interest in promoting the individuality of others. They might be very risk averse, fully committed to being merely polite, or, more extremely, they might eschew all attempts at social humor, play, creativity, and so on. It's not that such a person couldn't exist, but they would be missing out on an enormous part of life. In a sense, they would be missing out on life itself, insofar as life isn't just a matter of having a heartbeat. Being invested in the pursuit of individuality is part of what it is to really live.*\n\nThe second reason to opt in to social openings is that if your potential coperson succeeds in creating one, then they have thereby given you a reason to do so. In addition to the general interest in engaging your individuality, their joke merits laughter, their style impresses, their generosity moves, their creativity inspires, their invitation is intriguing, and so on.\n\nAs we will see in detail in chapter 4, suckiness is more complicated than this; there are many ways to suck, but these are the basics. By opting out of a social opening for no good reason you let yourself and your potential coperson down by failing to respond to these reasons of awesomeness. Of course, this doesn't mean that you are morally obligated to accept. It's not obvious that you're open to moral censure if you opt out for no good reason. You just kind of suck. The spirit of awesomeness does not flow within you, at least at that moment.\n\n\u2022\n\nSome readers might cringe at the term _sucks_ , thinking it refers to Rather Adult Things. And indeed some etymological claims about the term locate its origin in such things. In addition to the fellatio speculation, there is the thought that it derives from the expression \"suck an egg,\" or perhaps from the expression \"sucks hind teat\" (which, come to think of it, we should probably revive).\n\nBut like so much etymology, these accounts are highly speculative, complicated, and unclear. And in a way, it doesn't matter. We can set the etymological speculation aside and focus on the special metaphor that our theory makes salient. Sucky people _suck the life out of things_. We create social openings with a certain hope or aspiration\u2014one that we know speaks to something we all care about. We hope to foster the feeling of life and connection embodied in our copersons and crews. And when people refuse a social opening, they dash this hope. Sucky people prevent these feelings and bonds from emerging and developing and sometimes even replace them with their opposites, which range from frustration, ennui, and loneliness to alienation and despair.\n\n## The Basics of Non-Suckiness\n\nNow that we understand the basics of suckiness, we can use our theory to illuminate what it is to not suck. Consider a person who:\n\n  1. is presented with a social opening;\n  2. recognizes the opportunity;\n  3. is able to accept the social opening; and\n  4. _accepts_ it.\n\nFar from sucking, this person is _down_ or perhaps even _game_ \u2014that is, _enthusiastically_ down. She commits and opens herself up to the interaction, breathing life into and completing the social opening. On the most basic level, then, not sucking involves regularly accepting social openings; the basics of not sucking are a matter of being down.\n\nAs we will see later, just as there are many ways to suck, there are a variety of ways to take up social openings and not suck. Consider a variation on our coffee shop scenario:\n\nEmployee: Hi, what can I get for you today?\n\nYou: I would like a large coffee, please.\n\nEmployee: All right, that'll be two dollars, please.\n\nYou: Small price to become human again. Here you go.\n\nEmployee: Welcome back.\n\nHere the employee takes up your social opening by playing along, adopting your pretense and welcoming you back into the human realm. Instead of being merely polite or dismissing your social opening, he opts in and engages. This completes the social opening and secures the formation of copeople.\n\n## Articulating Awesome\n\nSo far our theory captures what it is to suck\u2014it's to fail to take up social openings. It also captures what it is to not suck\u2014it's to take up social openings. Now, what about people who excel at _creating_ the social openings?\n\nThis is the heart of awesomeness.\n\nAwesome people inject life into things: They create and carry out social openings, instituting communities and cultures in which people can develop, display, and appreciate the individual each other is or aspires to be.\n\nConsider what happened when you walked into the coffee shop and decided not to simply enact the role of coffee shop customer. When you ordered coffee, you harnessed a motive that broke you out of the normal way of doing things; you expressed yourself in a way that created a social opening; your coperson was down, establishing the requisite mutual appreciation; and all was awesome.\n\nWe perform an awesome action when:\n\n  1. we approach a situation normally governed by a social role or norm;\n  2. the spirit of awesomeness flows within us;\n  3. we harness this motive and break out of (or creatively riff on) the social role or norm; and\n  4. we thereby create a social opening and give our copeople an opportunity to suck or not suck.\n\nThat's the basic, everyday case. Opportunities to be awesome in that way are ample. But awesome action can take this basic structure to another level\u2014from inspired halftime shenanigans to giant shifts in social structure. Awesome people are excellent at creating successful social openings. They are, therefore, skillful coperson creators: They are skilled at the awesome art of crew building, of inspiring community and mutual positive regard. They are the overlords of interpersonal appreciation. They aren't always moral saints or masters of virtue, but they are the lifeblood of the coperson community.\n\nIn what follows we will refer to actions and people as being _awesome_ when they are excellent at creating social openings. We will use _awesomeness_ to refer to the state of affairs that exists when a social opening is created, people are down, and copersons are made, meaning the social opening is fully realized and successful. Awesomeness normally inheres in groups of individuals; it's a feature of collections of people in which someone is being awesome and others take up the awesome person's social opening. In this way we might say, speaking a little loosely, that someone who is down is awesome because they made an essential contribution to awesomeness, even though they didn't exactly create the social opening.\n\nCorniest insight in this book: The word _awesome_ can be parsed as _a_ _we_ that is _so me_.\n\nThis illuminates why we think the Jeremy Fry performance is so awesome. His decision to wholeheartedly embody Bon Jovi and rock out broke with the conventions of halftime hanging. By breaking out of the role of basketball fan at the arena, he created a social opening that brought the entire section of the stadium together. The people who joined him were down or game\u2014they took up the social opening that Fry created and did their part to institute awesomeness. And the infamous bro in blue sucks\u2014he brazenly refused to take up the social opening. In fact, he disparaged and rejected it (more on that later).\n\n## Mixing It Up\n\nAs the Fry episode illustrates, suckiness and awesomeness can interact in a complex social opening. But sometimes a single person's action contains elements of both suckiness and awesomeness. And when that happens we're often unsure whether they have really created a social opening. Consider the actions of my kind and eccentric unicycle-riding junior high school science teacher, who was sort of awesome but in a slightly sucky way. Some mornings before classes began, he would ride a unicycle around the halls in a vaguely inviting but somewhat alienating way. In doing so, he created a social opening by breaking the normal course of the mornings at school, displaying his talents and introducing budding teens\u2014who were more familiar with skateboards and inline skates\u2014to such a foreign object. But although his method was well intentioned, it was out of touch. The vast majority of junior high school kids couldn't care less about unicycles\u2014objects whose nerdy skittishness all too easily reminds preteens of their own awkwardness. And he wasn't tapping into a rich tradition whose value is important for twelve-year-olds to understand. The result was that he came off as alienating and unaware, if not a little self-absorbed. It was sort of awesome, but in a sucky way. (He was also fond of telling us in class, in a patronizing, science teacher tone, \"People don't suck; only vacuums suck,\" which showed how little he understood suckiness.)\n\nThe lesson here is a general one, which we will dwell on at various points in the book: Success in creating social openings requires sensitivity to individuality. To repeat an earlier point, not all ways of breaking or creatively expanding on social roles and conventions create social openings. To intentionally create a social opening, you must express individuality that is worthy of appreciation. In some cases, as with my unicycle-riding teacher, it can be unclear whether the individuality expressed is worthy of appreciation; it can be a matter of uncertainty, disagreement, and debate. Some modes of individuality, such as a cultivated cynicism, scrappiness, or cheery optimism, appeal only to certain individuals. But in other cases it is clear.\n\nConsider two racists who think they are creating a social opening with a clearly racist joke. One tells the joke; the other issues a high five while laughing. Isn't this awesomeness for racists? No, it's not. There is no such thing as Ku Klux Klan awesomeness because baseless hatred and bigotry are not features of individuality that are worthy of appreciation\u2014quite the opposite, because awesomeness is rich and inclusive. Racists cannot form copeople under the banner of their bigotry. They might think they are doing so, and in some ways it might seem like they are, but they aren't. The same is true of other attempts to create community through exclusion; for example, bullies who team up to taunt someone they regard as inferior.\n\nUnderstanding awesomeness helps us to further appreciate how sucking _at_ something is different from sucking _as a person_. You might do something awesome while sucking at the very activity that makes you awesome. Imagine you're having a friend over and you know she loves a certain obscure dish that you have no idea how to make. But you try anyway. You go out of your way to find a good recipe, buy all the ingredients, and prep the kitchen and home for a warm and special meal. You spend hours chopping, sweating, putting it all together, only to emerge with something barely resembling food. You suck at making that dish. But you made it, or at least something resembling it, and that is awesome. So one can suck _at_ something but nonetheless be awesome, which shows how little sucking at one thing or another has to do with awesomeness.\n\n## Why Awesome?\n\nThe word _awesome_ as it resonates with us these days has new social meaning; it's used to talk about social openings and their dynamics. But why did we adopt this word to talk about such things? The traditional meaning of _awesome_ is simply \"awe-inspiring,\" or, to summarize most dictionary definitions, \"inspiring a feeling of reverence or respect, often combined with wonder, fear, or apprehension.\" Something seems awesome in the traditional sense when it makes us feel that we are so small, the universe is so vast, and it's all just so wonderful, amazing, or overwhelming: a deep, dark, beautiful starry sky; a vast, open ocean; a great work of art; a stunning scientific theory.\n\nBut merely breaking a social norm or convention does not inspire a feeling of reverential wonder in us. Maybe it would in a country or culture where falling out of line carries a serious threat of violence. But in general we are not such die-hard rule followers that we stand in awe of people who break with or creatively expand upon a common convention or norm. And, though it sometimes might, breaking norms in a way that inspires community hardly merits the feeling that we are so awfully small and the universe so wonderfully vast.\n\nOf course, _awesome_ also has a widely recognized informal meaning, which American-English dictionaries commonly claim is just \"excellent\" or \"extremely good.\" Although people certainly do use the word this way, the definition fails to capture the important difference between being excellent and being awesome, in the distinctive, contemporary sense of that word.\n\nMany things can be excellent without being awesome: sports teams, bands, restaurants, TV shows\u2014the list goes on. Consider a really good band, for example\u2014one that is pitch-perfect, culturally astute, innovative, and enjoyable. Such a band can be excellent without being awesome. During a live show, they might simply display their excellence in a way that is to be enjoyed and appreciated, but without fostering mutual appreciative regard. Compare, for example, the live performances of the American rock band Grizzly Bear (excellent) and the late American folk singer and activist Pete Seeger (awesome). Grizzly Bear prefer not to \"perform\" for their audience and stick to a fairly minimal act in which they execute their intricate songs as perfectly as possible. Seeger, in stark contrast, sometimes barely even sang his songs, encouraging the audience to join in the performance. The result was often a room full of strangers singing together, with Seeger leading in enthusiastic strums, awesomely. Seeger had great faith in the awesomeness of music: \"If there's a world here in a hundred years, one of the main reasons will be music. It can leap over barriers of politics and leap over barriers of religion and race. And people who never thought they'd be doing the same thing together will be listening and joining in on the same song.\"*\n\nAwesomeness is a distinctive phenomenon, wherein someone expresses themselves in the spirit of fostering a coperson community\u2014from creating a social opening at the local caf\u00e9 to enlivening or enriching the community or workplace, throwing a great party, or getting a whole section of a stadium to play around.\n\nSo why have we adopted the word _awesome_ in these contexts? What possible connection could there be between _awe_ and _awesomeness_? Our feelings of awe often come along with a certain desire to connect, share, or reach out. When we are moved to awe by an album, a symphony, a novel, or a painting, we want to tell our friends about it, post about it on social media, or give it as a gift. When we feel so small and wonderfully overwhelmed, we want to band together under a common aegis, which might be nothing more than feeling wonder, fear, or apprehension _together_. By reaching out in these ways, we create a social opening; we give our friends an opportunity to see and feel what we are seeing and feeling. This suggests that awe tends to inspire in us the desire to create social openings. Awe inspires us to be awesome.\n\nSome empirical studies seem to confirm a strong connection between feeling awe and the impulse to reach out, to share and communicate that feeling. Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania studied nearly seven thousand _New York Times_ articles to examine which ones were shared the most and why.* They found that articles that evoke high emotional arousal (awe or anger) are more \"viral\" than those with low emotional arousal (sadness, for example). And among the positive emotions, the emotion of awe stood out as very strongly correlated with sharing. Dr. Jonah Berger, one of the researchers, explains: \"If I've just read this story that changes the way I understand the world and myself, I want to talk to others about what it means. I want to proselytize and share the feeling of awe. If you read the article and feel the same emotion, it will bring us closer together.\"*\n\nIf that's right, then it's no wonder we adopted _awesome_ to talk about social openings. Our cultural interest in the value of creative social openings motivated a shift in our use of the word, from using it to talk about awe-inspiring things to using it to talk about the things that awe inspires\u2014reaching out, connecting, sharing, and being closer together.\n\n# Chapter 3\n\n# The Ethics of Awesomeness\n\nBEING AWESOME IS a matter of creatively breaking out of, or riffing on, norms that determine much of everyday life, and doing so in an expressive way, generating a social opening that allows for the mutual appreciation of individuality. This can happen in everyday life, on the bus or at your local coffee shop, and in more extraordinary situations. Awesome people excel at creating and sustaining social openings. They are _creative community builders_ , whose inspired social insight and communal spirit promote coperson creation.\n\nCreative community builders form the center of what I call the _ethics of awesomeness_ , which concerns the actions, habits, character traits, values, and principles\u2014in short, the ways of life\u2014that make us awesome and not sucky. Their actions vividly demonstrate the subtlety, breadth, scale, ingenuity, and art of social opening creation. The ethics of awesomeness concerns (1) ways of being or learning from such a person; (2) ways of responding to such people or taking up, sustaining, and amplifying their social openings; (3) ways of failing to respond to or sustain social openings; and (4) forms of life, culture, and society that embody the ethos of awesome more generally.\n\nIn this chapter and the next we will develop the ethics of awesomeness, first in this chapter by focusing on aspect 1 and sketching its contours. Following that, in chapter 4, we will dig deeper and address aspects 2 and 3, looking in detail at the many ways of responding and failing to respond to social openings\u2014from being down and game to being a killjoy, blowhard, fake-ass person, or just wack. This gives us a guide for navigating the ethics of awesomeness and suggests strategies for being more awesome and less sucky. Chapters 5 and 6 will address aspect 4 by looking first at the origins of awesome in American culture and then at emerging forms of culture that embody the spirit of awesomeness.\n\n\u2022\n\nSo what exactly is ethics? What is an ethical theory? Ethics is the philosophical study of good and bad actions; ethical theories are accounts of what makes actions good or bad. Most generally, ethics concerns how we should live\u2014how we should or shouldn't act and how we should or shouldn't treat other people. This includes clearly moral questions about whether we should eat meat or support the death penalty, but it also covers questions about whether to have a beer with lunch, listen to music more often, or learn how to cook. In fact, the word _ethics_ has roots in the Ancient Greek _ethos_ , which means \"character\" and is used to describe the ways of life that define a community.\n\nOne of the most influential ethical theories, developed initially by the great Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724\u20131804), says (among other things) that you should always treat people, including yourself, with the utmost respect, and never merely as a tool to get something you want.* If you treat someone merely as a tool, according to Kant, then you fail to treat them as a reasoning, self-directed person, and that is ethically wrong. This is an ethical theory, or a proposal about what makes actions good or bad. Roughly, an action is good only when it is respectful and bad when it is disrespectful. For example, failing to pay someone for their work is bad because it fails to respect them and treats them as a mere tool.\n\nKant's ethics focuses on our obligations\u2014what we ought to do\u2014given the mere fact that we can ask, \"What should I do?\" The fact that we can ask this question implies that we can stand back from and consider our impulses and inclinations\u2014we aren't always animated by pure instinct but by motives that are refined by thought and reflection. We can ask, \"Would it suck if I never said hello to my neighbors?\" or \"That person over there is doing an impressive job. Would it be awesome to tell them that?\" Kant thought that having this capacity to reflect on our actions is central to being a person, and when we do reflect well and act, we act excellently as persons rather than as purely instinct-driven animals. His ethics is largely about humans in pursuit of their humanity\u2014humans in pursuit of their ability to respect and be respected\u2014or, in other words, people in pursuit of their personhood.\n\nBut, as we have seen, awesomeness is about individuals in pursuit of individuality. The \"ethics\" of awesomeness, then, is a theory of how to act excellently not merely as a person who can reflect and respect but also as an individual in pursuit of individuality.\n\nSo what do you have to add to a person in pursuit of personhood to get an individual in pursuit of individuality? We cannot answer this question without calling on another philosophical subject: aesthetics, or the philosophy of art and beauty. It would be misleading to say that the theory we are developing is simply an ethical theory. The ethics of awesomeness is also, in a sense we will develop as we proceed, an _aesthetics_ of awesomeness. Central to the ethics of awesomeness is a range of aesthetic categories, or categories that are essential to art or beauty: creativity, individuality, style, imagination, and play. Since these concepts are essential to understanding the ethics of individuals in pursuit of individuality, the theory we are developing is a kind of \"aesthetic ethics,\" or an ethical theory that essentially and centrally involves the aesthetic.\n\nIn fact, things are even more complicated than this because of the way the ethics and aesthetics of awesomeness concern social life and community building. The ethics and aesthetics of being awesome are pitched in a sociopolitical register. For simplicity we will continue to speak of the \"ethics of awesomeness,\" using _ethics_ in its broadest ancient Greek\u2013inspired sense, but we should keep in mind that awesomeness cannot be captured by ethics, aesthetics, or politics alone. It is best to think of awesomeness as its own category\u2014one that has ethical, aesthetic, and social character.\n\nThe ethics of awesomeness is a view about how we can cultivate our individuality while building communities of mutually appreciative individuals. Thus, it is ultimately a view about how we can live well together. Ideally, a good ethical theory will inspire us to live by its lights; it will move us to see ourselves in a new way and compare how we live to how we might live if we were guided by the theory more often. So in that spirit we will look at various sources of inspiration that we might learn from and apply in our own lives and communities.\n\nAs we will see, the special character of the ethics of awesomeness derives from its social, creative, and communal focus. To begin, it will help to go back in time to 1977, to the origins of an action we strongly associate with awesomeness, the original grand gesture of being game: the _high five_.\n\n## The High Five\n\nThe pinnacle of Jeremy Fry's performance could very well be one of the most epic high fives ever spontaneously achieved. At 1:02 in the video you'll see a double fist pump followed by a resounding high five, which rapidly transforms into a tucked 360-degree spin, landed with arms open wide (to appreciate all of its glory, watch it in slow motion).\n\nThe perfectly executed classic high five is expressively superior to the traditional handshake. It involves more coordination and allows for variation and elaboration, and true success resounds with a loud _whoopash!_ that communicates to others that a connection has been made and doubly affirmed.\n\nThe person widely credited with inventing the high five is Glenn Burke (1952\u20131995), a black baseball player and gay trailblazer, recognized by the Baseball Hall of Fame as Major League Baseball's first gay player.* On October 2, 1977, at Dodger Stadium, Dusty Baker had just hit his thirtieth home run of the season. Burke was up to bat next, and when Baker rounded third base and approached home plate, Burke was waiting to greet him. \"His hand was up in the air, and he was arching way back,\" Baker recalls. \"So I reached up and hit his hand. It seemed like the thing to do.\" Burke immediately went up to bat and proceeded to hit his first Major League home run. When he made his way around the bases and rounded home plate, Baker was standing there with his hand up high.\n\nBurke was an exemplar of awesomeness. According to sports agent Abdul-Jalil al-Hakim, \"He was a joyous, gregarious person. He could high five you without necessarily going through the motion with his hand.\"* By all accounts, Burke was essential to the distinctive life and spirit of the mid-1970s Dodgers baseball club. When he was traded to the abysmal Oakland Athletics in 1978, the spirit of the team changed dramatically. Writer Jon Mooallem reports, \"LA sportswriters described the trade as _sucking the life_ out of the Dodgers' clubhouse. A couple of players were seen crying at their lockers.\"*\n\nMany people think the high five signals the recognition of success or excellence, but as the story of Burke and Baker suggests, this rests on a slight confusion. Consider the confusion-generating fact that NBA players routinely high-five the guy who _misses_ his free throws.* The players cannot be praising the free-thrower for his achievements or excellence. Rather, they are using it as Burke intended, to build and confirm community. Memphis Grizzlies forward Jon Leuer explains, \"If you miss a free throw], you want your teammates to say, 'Hey, I'm here for you.'\"[* What the high five expresses, at least in its original form, is not the mutual appreciation of achievement but the feeling we get upon the achievement of mutual appreciation.\n\nGlenn Burke thought he experienced that feeling for the first time: \"You think about the feeling you get when you give someone the high five. I had that feeling before everybody else.\"* Burke's thought is that the high five creates a new feeling of awesomeness. Whether or not a new feeling emerged along with the high five, and regardless of whether Burke felt it for the first time, we know what he's talking about: It's an affect-laden recognition of copersonhood, of success in creating or cultivating interpersonal connection\u2014in short, of awesomeness.\n\nThe high five is a brilliant symbol of the ethics of awesomeness. The ideally awesome person is, like Burke, a virtuoso of communal imagination, imagining culture and community where it might not exist and using inventive action to bring it to life.\n\n## Creative Community Builders\n\nBurke's and Fry's actions show that the ideally awesome person is a creative community builder. Burke not only brought his joy and love to a team, he made the team what it was and defined its very character as more than just a collection of baseball players\u2014as a crew. And he did this in part by inventing the means by which they recognized and appreciated each other, the high five. Jeremy Fry's timing, creative insight, and expressive zeal established an almost irresistible social opening\u2014one so powerful that it moved perfect strangers to play along. Glenn Burke used his charisma, exuberance, and high five; Jeremy Fry used his bold dance moves. Creative community builders use their ingenuity, insight, and courage to foster mutual appreciative regard.\n\nThe creative community builder doesn't create just any community\u2014she creates a community of a special kind. This can get confusing because we use the word _community_ in several different ways. At the very least, a community is a group of people who have a connection or similarity. But this minimal sense of community is too simple. All English speakers form a community by virtue of their shared language, but the Revolutionary War was between English speakers. And US citizens form a community by virtue of their shared citizenship, but the Civil War was a time of the utmost division. Even people who depend on one another, cohabitate, and talk every day might be thoroughly estranged.\n\nThe copersons who form awesome communities can be very different. The sense of community that matters in the ethics of awesomeness is one that can occur between people of different nationalities, classes, languages, and sexual preferences, for example. Creative community builders foster feelings of rapport among individuals, creating a sense of connection among us, often one that is inflected with joy, an expanded sense of self or world, or a deepened or refined sense of the richness and variety in the lives of individuals.\n\nI argue in chapter 5 that awesomeness is, in a sense, an \"American\" phenomenon, in large part because of the promise of awesomeness to address sociocultural issues that arose in the United States in the past several decades.* But this doesn't mean awesomeness is restricted to the United States of America. Creative community building can happen in almost any culture or time, though in some it might not be very effective or much appreciated. (Sucking, by the way, is also a cross-cultural and historical phenomenon: Puritans basically made it a religious principle, and, well, North Korea exists.)\n\nTo appreciate the variety and breadth of creative community building, let's look at a range of examples. The examples show how many ways there are to institute awesomeness through creative community building. They also illustrate how being awesome is available to nearly anyone with insight, initiative, and courage\u2014a truth that we will confirm several times over as we proceed, though we will also attend to the ways that class, privilege, social structures, power, and wealth can diminish access to creative community building and can change the dynamics of, and distort, the ethics of awesomeness.\n\n### Everyday Superman\n\nThe community that Fry's performance created was awesome but mostly fleeting (though he also brightened the days of millions of people who witnessed it through the Internet). The circumstance was special and the timing had to be just right. Others make creative community building a regular part of their lives.\n\nWhen Auburn, Washington, resident Mark Wyzenbeek lost his wife in a car accident, he decided to change his life. His loss showed him that he should try to get as much out of each living day as he possibly could. Many people who feel this way resort to influential clich\u00e9s about carpe diem, living in the moment, or \"healthy lifestyles.\" Wyzenbeek, instead, wears a Superman costume nearly every day\u2014one he made to absolute perfection himself. He wears it on airplanes, to bars, or just to walk around.\n\nWhen people see Wyzenbeek in costume they respond with incredulity and excitement. They cannot resist commenting on and interacting with Superman. Wyzenbeek describes how people honk at him as they drive by: \"The neat thing is, is when they honk at you. They're all looking and you hear this talk in the car like, 'Oh look there's Superman! There's Superman!' And the neat thing is, is they won't stop honking until you look at them. They have to have that eye contact with you, knowing that they're looking at you and that you _see_ them looking at you, and then the whole cycle's complete and everyone's having a good time.\"*\n\nThat is awesome. Wyzenbeek's intrepid social presence breaks the norms and invites people to join him in the pretense that Superman is in town, getting gas or hanging at the local bar.\n\n### Mayor Antanas Mockus\n\nWyzenbeek's creative community building affected his local community, but some creative community builders operate in high office. It's one thing for your neighbor to wear a Superman costume in the spirit of awesomeness, but imagine if your mayor did.\n\nEnter Antanas Mockus\u2014a math and philosophy professor, former president of the National University of Colombia, two-time mayor of Bogot\u00e1, and very nearly the President of Colombia. Mockus, who had essentially no political experience, became the mayor of Bogot\u00e1 in 1995 when it was one of the worst cities in the world, plagued by soaring pedestrian deaths caused by chaotic traffic; high rates of violent late-night fights and homicides; and a general collapse of civil respect and order. To ease the people's skepticism and hint at his leadership style, Mayor Mockus wore a superhero costume with a large yellow _C_ on the chest\u2014it stood for \"Super Citizen\"\u2014and walked the streets picking up garbage and inspiring people to do the same.\n\nMockus's creative community building brilliance goes far beyond this gesture. To address the serious traffic chaos and danger, he issued 350,000 thumbs-up and thumbs-down cards to be used by drivers. If a driver was not observing the rules, you could flash your thumbs-down card; if someone observed the rules, they would get a thumbs-up.\n\nMockus realized that Bogotans were more responsive to social stigma than to tickets or fines. The traffic police were notoriously corrupt, so Mockus replaced them with mimes, who ran around the city mocking people who littered, jaywalked, or violated traffic rules. The mimes would also praise people who did the right thing, creating mini-parades and scenes of joy. Mockus harnessed the power of creative community building by breaking the norms of public life and political rules: \"People respond to humor and playfulness from politicians. It's the most powerful tool for change we have.\"*\n\nMockus-style play and humor is an especially powerful political tool where basic norms of civic rule and respect do not exist. Awesomeness can exist but cannot flourish in societies profoundly affected by violence, social injustice, or inequality. Peace, justice, and equality are the basic moral ingredients for an awesome culture. And hope for such a culture comes into sharper view as we progress toward a society where these basic ingredients are fully present (and blurs as we digress). Mockus had the insight to create moral, political, and civil motivation by juxtaposing the lack of these basic ingredients with the presence of awesomeness.\n\nMockus recognizes the communal character of his awesome leadership style: \"There is a tendency to be dependent on individual leaders. To me, it is important to develop collective leadership. I don't like to get credit for all that we achieved. Millions of people contributed to the results that we achieved. . . . I like more egalitarian relationships.\"* To this end, he created social openings by simply asking people to join him in civic experiments. To address the late-night drunken fighting, homicides, and general danger of the city streets, Mockus instituted a \"Night for Women.\" Men were asked to stay home and care for the family so that women, who were often stuck at home or just too afraid to go out into such a threatening city, could enjoy a night out for themselves. Policemen were also asked to step aside: Fifteen hundred policewomen provided the security for the night as seven hundred thousand women filled the bars and dance floors and brought a carnivalesque atmosphere to the streets. Mar\u00eda Cristina Caballero reports, \"In the lower-middle-class neighborhood of San Cristobal, women marched through the streets to celebrate their night. When they saw a man staying at home, carrying a baby, or taking care of children, the women stopped and applauded.\"*\n\n### Reconstructing the Street\n\nYou don't have to be the mayor of a major city to be an effective creative community builder. Cheap materials, artistic skill, creative insight, and courage can go a long way.\n\nTatyana Fazlalizadeh is a Brooklyn-based artist who was troubled by the way women are oppressed by harassing catcalls, solicitations, and generally unwelcome attention when simply walking down the street minding their own business. In a 2000 survey, 87 percent of women reported experiencing public harassment by men, and 30 percent reported being harassed on a regular basis.* A 2014 survey found that 65 percent of women report being harassed.* This is not solely an urban phenomenon. Women who live in suburban (88 percent) or rural (90 percent) areas report slightly higher rates of harassment.* Such gender-based street harassment changes the character of public spaces for women, making it troubling, threatening, frustrating, and generally oppressive.\n\nAs Jane Jacobs writes in _The Death and Life of Great American Cities_ , \"The public peace\u2014the sidewalk and street peace\u2014of cities is not kept primarily by the police, necessary as police are. It is kept primarily by an intricate, almost unconscious network of voluntary controls and standards among the people themselves, and enforced by the people themselves.\"* But when this complex \"network of voluntary controls and standards\" is skewed toward the interests of a single group\u2014say, heterosexual men\u2014the street can become far less peaceful for people who aren't in that group.\n\nCatcallers often report that they are merely appreciating women's beauty, when in fact they are threatening and diminishing it. Women who are harassed often feel timid, self-conscious, fearful, and uncomfortable\u2014they do not feel like themselves as they walk down the street. By catcalling women, these men in fact erase whatever beauty is embodied in a prideful, comfortable, confident, or purposeful swagger. Even worse, they erase the beauty of a person simply being free to do whatever she wants, however she wants. In response to the harassment, many women change their behavior; 34 percent choose routes to avoid men who harass them and 32 percent avoid being alone in public.* This also silences women's reasonable grievances against men who harass them\u2014any direct verbal confrontation risks violent escalation.\n\nFazlalizadeh found an alternative way to dialogue with harassers and take issue with their distortion of public space. For her project _Stop Telling Women to Smile_ she interviews women about their experiences of street harassment and asks them what they want to say. She draws their portraits and makes posters of them, along with a quote\u2014for example, \"Men do not own the streets\"; \"Women are not outside for your entertainment\"; \"My name is not baby\"\u2014and pastes them on the streets in highly visible public spaces.\n\nFazlalizadeh's creative intervention in public space gives women a voice against otherwise unreachable harassers. It shifts the network of controls and standards and allows women to reclaim the street as an egalitarian and communal public space. In doing so Fazlalizadeh institutes a more just public space, where people can pursue their personhood. But she also opens up a space where individuals can be themselves and awesomeness can emerge and thrive. Her posters not only depict individuals and place them in public\u2014they give them an expressive voice in a space where they are otherwise forced into silence. And that is awesome. Fazlalizadeh is a creative community builder who uses street art to give women a voice and restore their equal claim on public space, opening that space for them to be individuals in pursuit of individuality.\n\n### Turkish Jokes\n\nHumor can also be used to establish an awesome creative interface between groups that would otherwise not interact much. And often there are significant barriers to interaction\u2014like not speaking the same language or being from radically different cultures.\n\nIn 1994, the Dutch artist Jens Haaning went to the Turkish immigrant area of central Oslo, Norway. From a loudspeaker attached to a lamppost near a public square, Haaning broadcast various jokes and funny stories in Turkish, spoken by a native speaker. A similar project, _Turkish Mercedes_ , occurred in Kreuzberg, a largely Turkish neighborhood of Berlin. Haaning broadcast Turkish jokes from a loudspeaker attached to the roof of a Mercedes-Benz with Turkish license plates.\n\nThe result was a crowd of initially puzzled Turkish people who looked around, and then at each other. They laughed together as they recognized a scattered group of Turkish speakers who understood the jokes. As French art critic and curator Nicolas Bourriaud writes, \". . . he produces in that split second a micro-community, one made up of immigrants brought together by collective laughter.\"* This work creates a social opening for Turkish speakers who often feel marginalized in a foreign land. Haaning notes that the work created an unexpected second social opening: The square in Oslo became a meeting point of Filipino taxi drivers who felt more comfortable among other immigrants.*\n\nBut Haaning's work simultaneously creates a third, even more interesting social opening. By eliciting the mysterious collective laughter of immigrants in public, the work shifts the burden of social opening creation onto the in-power group\u2014the native Norwegian or German speakers. This point is often missed in critical writing on these works that claim that the native Norwegian or German speakers are excluded. Art critic Jennifer Allen writes, \"their laughter binds the Turkish immigrants] while cutting them off from the native speaker in their adoptive countries who simply cannot understand why they are laughing.\" And Bourriaud writes that Haaning \"injected a foreign language into the city's body, letting it bring together those who could speak it, thus for once excluding the 'natives,' leaving them without any ability to read the message.\"[* What these remarks overlook is the fact that a loud collective laughter is a social opening for those who find it mysterious. Haaning creates a social opening for Turkish speakers and thereby creates a social opening between them and the dominant culture, whose members are given the opportunity to speak to the immigrants about what is going on. If they don't, then, well, you know.\n\n\u2022\n\nThese are just a few examples of exemplary creative community building\u2014as we will see, there are many more. But our examples thus far show that creative community building comes in different shapes and sizes: It can be fleeting or long-lasting, bottom up or top down, fairly mundane or really profound, born of misery or in the spirit of fun, serious or lighthearted.\n\n## Bands, Booze, Art, and Shoes: Everything Is Awesome\n\nThe creative community builders canvassed in the previous section had awesome ideas, made awesome artifacts (costumes, art, props, collective action), and executed their ideas awesomely. That's a lot of awesomeness. So far we have developed a clear idea of what it means to say that a person's _action_ is awesome or sucky. But what does it mean to say that a costume, a coffee shop, a social media app, street art, an idea, or a band is awesome? To quote from the song \"Everything is Awesome!!!\" by Canadian pop duo Tegan and Sara:\n\nBlue skies, bouncy springs\n\nWe just named two awesome things\n\nA Nobel prize, a piece of string\n\nYou know what's awesome? EVERYTHING!\n\nBut is it really true that everything is (or can be) awesome? Why do we associate awesomeness with _things_? The answer is that many, many things can be awesome or sucky\u2014and this is an important fact about the ethics of awesomeness. To appreciate this fact, we will have to dwell briefly on a few more of the subtleties in the way we use the words _awesome_ and _sucks_.\n\n\u2022\n\nFor starters, we should note that _awesome_ and _sucks_ are often used metaphorically, or nonliterally. Tom McCarthy's film _The Station Agent_ contains a nice illustration of this. The three central characters\u2014Finn (Peter Dinklage), Olivia (Patricia Clarkson), and Joe (Bobby Cannavale)\u2014are sitting down to eat outside Joe's father's isolated roadside coffee stand. Joe's father is unwell, so Joe is looking after the stand. Finn is a quiet, somewhat reclusive man with dwarfism who is obsessed with trains and railroads. And Olivia is a sad and reflective woman who is separated from her husband after the death of their young son. In short, each character is isolated from the larger world. Olivia's isolation is due to pure and final misfortune. Finn's isolation is a part of his very identity, almost forced on him by the glares and taunts he receives as a dwarf. And Joe's isolation is out of duty to his father. Duty, cruelty, and misfortune\u2014some of the most profound reasons we shut ourselves off from the world. Put them all together and you have an impromptu pork chop dinner on a dirty picnic table outside an old coffee stand along a rural New Jersey roadside.\n\nJoe is by far the most gregarious of the three, and he's the chef and host, talking up his fried chops, beans, and rice. The meal is their first chance to emerge from their isolation and connect, if only to acknowledge each other's isolation. But as soon as Joe, with a giant grin on his face, serves everyone, he gets a phone call. He hangs up looking disappointed:\n\nJoe: I gotta split.\n\nOlivia: You're leaving?\n\nJoe: Yeah, that was my dad. He can't find his medication. Totally sucks.\n\nWhat, exactly, \"totally sucks\"? The context makes it clear that it's Joe's leaving the dinner. But according to our theory, Joe's leaving doesn't suck in the strict sense because he has a good reason to leave: His father, the reason he's running the coffee stand in the first place, needs help. Yet he's right to say that his leaving sucks because it sucks the life out of the rare social gathering. In other words, it's _as if_ he's done something sucky. The effect and emotional resonance of his leaving is just like the effect and emotional resonance of true suckiness.\n\nWe use _awesome_ and _sucks_ like this often\u2014when you miss the bus by a hair (sucks), step in poop (really sucks), or get a lucky break (pretty awesome).\n\nYet in other cases we use \"awesome\" and \"sucks\" literally in discussions of various cultural artifacts: from late-night snacks, restaurants, and novels to bands, booze, art, and shoes.\n\nThis broad literal usage can seem strange when we compare it to another couple of terms that we commonly use to evaluate and critique people and their actions: _moral_ and _immoral_. These terms have had a seismic influence on our actions, thought, and speech. But unlike with _awesome_ and _sucks_ , it's a stretch to call various products of human culture \"moral\" or \"immoral.\" It sounds odd, if not downright wrong, to say that a guitar or a drum machine is moral. But guitars and drum machines can definitely be awesome. It's a striking fact about the ethics of awesomeness that its central evaluative terms\u2014 _awesome_ and _sucky_ \u2014apply so clearly and directly to both people and everyday things. Why is that?\n\nConsider the character of our guiding ideal\u2014the creative community builder. This isn't the image of a saint or a moral monk; it's not the ideal of a solo agent always acting on her very best reasons (even if she does), or of an ethical virtuoso always attuned to the highest good (even if she is). The ideal at the center of the ethics of awesomeness fuses a kind of ethico-aesthetic excellence with the aspiration for a _community_ of _individuals_. Action in the ethics of awesomeness is always crew-oriented, or squad-minded, and is successful only if someone else takes up the social opening. Therefore, the awesome person\u2014the creative community builder\u2014must know what it takes to inspire _downness_. A person cannot be awesome unless someone else is down, game, chill, or awesome themselves. So the character traits, modes of responsiveness, and cultural tools and artifacts that inform the ethics of awesomeness are those that promote copersons and crews. The ultimate good in the ethics of awesomeness, then, is not some status that accrues to an individual, like moral virtuosity or sainthood. It's a positive state that takes two to institute, inherent in copersons and crews. Awesomeness essentially has others in mind\u2014particularly other individuals.\n\nIt's for this reason that the ethics of awesomeness, unlike other ethical theories, is so attuned to various activities and products of human culture\u2014to forms of play, cuisines, social media, coffee, bands, booze, art, and shoes. It's an ethics that is highly sensitive to activities, artifacts, and environments that facilitate awesomeness\u2014Superman costumes, street art, pork chops, and drum machines. Or \"awesome blossoms\"\u2014batshit giant fried onions that you can't eat alone (no judgment though).\n\nOf course all of these things can be \"good\" or \"cool\" or whatever, but saying that they are _awesome_ implicates them in a network of aspiring communal agents. It can be the focus of communal exploration, individual cultivation, and mutual appreciation. Saying that something _sucks_ points out that it won't inspire downness\u2014no one will be game to play a wack game, or up for chilling in a boring place. That game, that space\u2014they suck the life out of things. When we say that an event, activity, or object is _awesome_ we are hinting at its suitability for the ethics of awesomeness, for inspiring and sustaining creative community building.\n\nOf course, we can relate to the culture of artifacts in better and worse ways when it comes to being awesome and not sucking. Being awesome is not a matter of simply buying the coolest things. To illustrate, consider the act of giving someone a gift. Gifting is generally awesome, but it is a complicated practice that takes many forms. If I make you an apple pie just for the hell of it, that's awesome. It's even more awesome if I use apples I grew or ones a coperson cultivated. But what if I just buy an apple pie from a supermarket or regift one that someone else made for me? What if I give you a McDonald's apple pie that I bought in a hurry because I knew I had to give you _something_? What if I give you a McDonald's apple pie that someone else bought in a hurry and gave to me?\n\nWhat distinguishes these examples is the extent to which the act of gifting embodies the ethics of awesomeness. If I take the time to make something, perhaps riffing on a recipe I discovered, wrap it up beautifully, and thoughtfully give it to you\u2014that's awesome. It expresses appreciable features of my sense of self and style. If I regift a cold McDonald's apple pie, it's almost as if I'm trolling you. Unless you really like them and I know it, my gift expresses almost nothing of interest\u2014and that sucks.\n\nAn episode of _Seinfeld_ , \"The Deal\" (season 2, episode 9), contains a funny illustration of this. Jerry gifts Elaine $182 cash:\n\nElaine: You got me cash?\n\nJerry: Well this way I figure you can go out and get yourself whatever you want. No good?\n\nElaine: Who are you, my uncle?\n\nJerry: Well come on. That's $182 right there. I don't think that's anything to sneeze at.\n\nElaine: Let me see the card. [Reading] \"To a wonderful girl, a great pal, and more.\" _Pal_? You think I'm your _pal_?\n\nJerry: I said, \"and more.\"\n\nElaine: I am not your pal.\n\nJerry: What's wrong with pal? Why is everyone so down on pal?\n\nThe problem with the gift, the card, and \"pal\" is that they suck. The gift does not express anything appreciable about Jerry, nor does it express any appreciation of Elaine's individuality, and Jerry recognizes this when he passes this interpretive, appreciative labor off onto Elaine: \"I figure you can go out and get yourself whatever you want.\" The card is generic, and the term _pal_ can be applied to pretty much anyone, including sworn enemies ( _Step off, pal!_ ).\n\nSo listen, pal, what truth there is in the idea that \"everything is awesome\" comes down to this: Pretty much everything, given the right context, can be employed in the ethics of awesomeness as long as it plays a valuable role in the appreciation of individuality\u2014even cold McDonald's apple pies. Maybe you and I have an inside joke about apple pies, or maybe our first date involved a cold McDonald's apple pie, or maybe I think cold McDonald's apple pies are really tasty. In these cases, even cold McDonald's apple pies can be awesome.\n\n## Living Together\n\nThe ethics of awesomeness is coming into view: It's an ethics that governs the expression and mutual appreciation of individuality; it looks to creative community builders for guidance and inspiration\u2014people who use social creativity and various artifacts to inspire individuals to cultivate, explore, and express themselves. With this in view, we can begin to apply this way of thinking to a central ethical question, namely, the question of how to live together and treat each other, from our relationships and private interactions to civic life.\n\n\u2022\n\nThe psychologist John Gottman has been studying human relationships for decades. He wants to know what makes a human relationship healthy or unhealthy, and he has published his results in more than forty books. His research is so refined that in a 1992 study, he was able to predict with up to 94 percent accuracy whether a couple would divorce in the future.* One of Gottman's central discoveries is the importance of what he calls \"bids for emotional connection.\" We make these bids to our partners, and we might do so by asking about their day, commenting on our shared environment, proposing a future plan, and so on. Gottman has observed in great detail how people react to their partner's bids. They might \"turn toward\" the bid in various ways, taking it up and engaging; they might \"turn away\" from the bid and deflect it; or they might \"turn against\" the bid and deflect and discourage it.* By now this should sound familiar. A bid is a type of social opening\u2014one that specifically concerns emotional connection. If Gottman is right, then facility with the ethics of awesomeness is essential for healthy relationships.\n\nSuppose you and your partner get in a huge fight. You want nothing to do with each other\u2014you can barely look at each other, and you'd rather scream, cry, or storm out than battle for another millisecond. The ethics of awesomeness has some advice here: Inhale, hold it, exhale slowly, and proceed to be awesome.\n\n**Preamble:** _An epic fight somehow turns into an argument about fries._\n\nYou: You know, this is just like last week when I _told you_ I wanted calamari and you insisted on getting the fries!\n\nPartner: Typical! We always have to do what _you_ want to do. If I want fries then watch out. You're like some kind of preference dictator!\n\nYou [deep breath]: This sucks. What if we tried to make our own fries?!\n\nObviously that's a fake fight (I'll leave the real ones off the page). It's never easy, and sometimes it's not even possible, but creating a social opening in such situations can help both of you regroup and focus on what you appreciate about each other. When the time is right you can return to the topic of dispute, if it's even worth arguing about. Often you'll realize that it was a dumb thing to fight over in the first place. Being awesome in the middle of a fight can provide the needed respite and add character to a healthy connection.\n\nThe hit CBS sitcom _How I Met Your Mother_ illustrates this. The longtime couple Marshall and Lily are awesome arguers (and advanced high-fivers, by the way). They have a rule that says that when they are in the middle of a fight either of them can \"hit pause.\" This breaks the norms of arguing with your partner. Hitting pause means they have to immediately stop arguing; it allows them to forget about the fight for a moment and reconnect\u2014and sometimes they _really_ reconnect, if you catch my drift. When they hit \"unpause\" and resume the argument, they are usually in a much better place.\n\nOf course, not all relationships are long term, and few are perfectly healthy. We have all known, perhaps all too personally, extremely one-sided friendships. One friend is always the one to invite the other over, include her in activities, or suggest fun things to do. The other friend always _takes up_ the opportunities presented by her friend\u2014she always comes over, hangs out, goes to dinner, grabs coffee, etc. She just never creates them herself. She's certainly not awesome, because she never _creates_ social openings\u2014so our theory can capture that. But some people would think that she also kind of sucks. How can we capture this thought, given that she never declines the social openings her friend offers? She seems down, even game\u2014and never creating social openings oneself seems not to count as sucky in our theory.\n\nWell, what are friendships? The term _friendship_ covers an array of relationships\u2014from long-term family-like connections to fairly short-term patterns of shared interests and time together. One thing friendships have in common, it seems, is that they all involve commitments to create social openings. In other words, to be in a friendship is to be more or less committed to being awesome toward your friend. If one friend never creates these opportunities, then it's as if she's invited you on a road trip\u2014thereby suggesting that she'll do her share of the driving\u2014but isn't willing to drive. Which sucks. (As we will see in the next chapter, this \"friend\" is either being a \"half-asser\" or a \"fake-ass person.\")\n\nTo the extent that we are friends with _ourselves_ , then, we are committed to giving ourselves such opportunities. One way to suck as a person is to suck toward yourself, to never give yourself such opportunities and to always enact the roles society expects you to enact. But we must be awesome to ourselves.\n\nSometimes being awesome to ourselves is a way of being awesome to others. Consider dating, in which love and romance are governed by strong cultural norms and powerful social roles. Wanna go on a date? How about the new restaurant downtown, dinner and a movie, kisses on the doorstep, discussing what you like, love, and hate, wine and flowers, sweet outfits, talk of family and life plans? We all know how to enact the generic role of person on a date.\n\nYou: Hi! So nice to see you again.\n\nDate: You too! You look great.\n\nYou: Oh, thanks. Well so do you.\n\nDate: So, my friend told me about this restaurant. Apparently we have to get the calamari.\n\nYou: My coworker ate here last week and said it was great. . . .\n\nWe all feel strong pressure to enact these roles when so much is at stake\u2014this person could be \"the one\"; you want to make a good impression; you want them to make a good impression. But having the courage to be awesome can break up this routine and reveal your date's awesomeness or suckiness. Go to a caf\u00e9 instead and make up stories about the people around you; hit up a bookstore and buy each other three books you think the other would like; do a late-night taste test of ten items at Jack in the Box (emphasis on _taste_ ) and discuss your culinary findings. OK, maybe that's stuff I would want to do, but you can think of your own awesome date ideas.\n\nYou: Hi! So nice to see you again.\n\nDate: You too! You look great.\n\nYou: Oh, thanks. Well, so do you.\n\nDate: So, my friend told me about this restaurant. Apparently we have to get the calamari.\n\nYou: That sounds good, but what if we [INSERT AWESOMENESS]?\n\nYour date can take up your social opening or bat it down. We can imagine an \"Oh yeah, I'm game!\" response, or a kinda sucky \"Well, I really _would_ like to try the calamari . . .\" response. But Awesomeness > Calamari. If your date doesn't realize that, then it might be a sign.*\n\nWhen I moved from Berkeley, California, to New York City in 2007 I quickly realized that really good Mexican food was nowhere to be found. I would have been perfectly happy eating tacos and burritos all day, every day, so this was going to be a problem. When I started dating a cute redhead who seemed to know every cool restaurant in Brooklyn, I wasted no time telling her about my longing. On our second or third date, she showed up with the most perfect, fresh, delicious handmade tortillas I had ever seen. And this is a person who will argue at length that pizza is superior to burritos. In spite of that, she is awesome. We got married and now live in San Diego, surrounded by some of the world's best tortillas.\n\nSocial openings intervene in our roles, habits, and norms, and as we have noted, there are several strategies one can use to intervene. Depending on the situation, we might use jokes, gifts, friendly gestures, displays of talent, and style, among other things. However, there are social roles that are defined so as to make any such intervention inappropriate. This makes sense in some cases\u2014we probably shouldn't joke around too much with a federal judge who is considering the legality of our actions. But certain cultures and social roles are inherently sucky because they rule out any such intervention for no good reason. This is vivid among people who adhere to rigid stereotypes and reinforce the stereotypes of others. It's even more vivid in socially stratified societies with pronounced socioeconomic disparities, wherein people of \"lower\" status, class, or means cannot so much as speak to those of \"higher\" status, class, or means. The higher, elite, or privileged roles are usually inhabited by very sucky people. They're too important, educated, rich, or consequential for the unimpressive, dumb, oppressed, poor, or unlucky folks. Any role or type of person in general that categorically disallows or prevents social openings with entire groups of people is highly sucky. The ethics of awesomeness encourages social openings with all kinds of people and walks of life.\n\nOne type of person who can seem to think he's too important is the _wayward citizen_ \u2014the litterer, the tailgater, the noisy straphanger. We think these people suck, but why? On the face of it, they haven't been presented with a social opening. They're just going about their business, or lack thereof, and sucking. Furthermore, by littering or tailgating they're disrupting a range of \"ordinary public reasons,\" entrenched social habits, and civic norms\u2014norms we follow to make living together more efficient, safe, and clean.\n\n_Seinfeld_ 's George Costanza suggests an answer. He insists that we understand that we live together in a society, and we have tacitly agreed on a range of reasonable rules and conventions that keep the community intact\u2014including rules about where and how to stand on the subway, walk down the sidewalk, sit at a bus stop, or ask for the time or for samples of ice cream.* They aren't just habits or rules; they are habits and rules of respectful community\u2014the kind of basic community we need in order to be awesome. When George Costanza sees someone breaking those rules\u2014particularly when, and perhaps _only_ when, it negatively affects him, but we'll ignore that\u2014he lets them know by yelling, \"You know, we live in a society!\"\n\nThe contrast to living in a society is living alone, and George is reminding people that we don't in fact live alone. We live together, and we have these rules for a reason\u2014we keep them in place to keep each other together as a community. We need to maintain a background of just and useful social norms against which our individuality can be expressed, understood, and appreciated. These are the background norms that make awesomeness possible. By ignoring and acting against them, the wayward citizen suggests that awesomeness doesn't matter. And he thereby sucks.\n\nBut, as we have seen, sometimes those norms are unjust or otherwise unacceptable, and we can use creative strategies to disrupt them in an awesome way, as with Fazlalizadeh's street art and Mockus's artistic civic interventions. A society's potential for awesomeness depends on the forms of public and social life it constructs and sustains. The most extreme examples are rigidly hierarchical societies\u2014for example, ones structured by strict rules of class, wherein higher- and lower-class people cannot interact\u2014or deeply sexist or segregated societies.\n\nTo appreciate the ways social norms and roles can interfere with awesomeness, let's travel back in time again to consider how the coffee shop conversation might go in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1953:\n\nEmployee: Hi there, darlin', what can I do for you today?\n\nYou: I would like a large coffee, please.\n\nEmployee: All right, that'll be ten cents, please.\n\nYou: Small price to become human again. Here you go.\n\nEmployee: [???]\n\nWhat comes next? The answer depends entirely on who you are and how you look. Are you male or female? Black or white? Gay or straight? Able-bodied or not? What comes next also depends on whether there are norms dictating _how_ you can appear\u2014what you can wear, how you can sound and seem. Does your hair match stereotypes that apply to your sex, your race, your class? If you are black, are you even allowed inside the restaurant? Can you even express what you would like? In many cases, the employee wouldn't address you in the first place. If you are female, then there might be a question about why you are in public without a man at your side, or why you are drinking such a \"manly\" drink. \"Oh,\" the employee might say, \"I didn't think you'd be drinking this all by your little self!\" Of course, if you are an \"appropriately\" dressed, able-bodied white male speaking English without an outsider's accent, then maybe, just maybe you can try to create a social opening.\n\nThere can be serious obstacles to awesomeness written directly into norms of interaction. These obstacles come from sucky attitudes about sex, race, class, gender, and sexual orientation, among other prejudices and biases that restrict our ability to appreciate, explore, or express individuality. They tell people which kinds of individuals they can and cannot appreciate, or they place barriers on which kinds of people can express themselves or, if they can, how they must do it. The ethics of awesomeness celebrates the cultivation, expression, exploration, and appreciation of individuality. Other things being equal, any norms that suppress, discourage, rule out, or inhibit such expression suck.\n\nAnother way social norms and roles can conflict with the ethics of awesomeness is if they include or promote features of individuality that not everyone shares. Some pernicious, unjust, or immoral social norms tell us to be certain kinds of individuals, and in doing so they can obscure genuine expressions of individuality and harm the people we interact with.\n\nWe see an example of this in _Sex and the City_ , season 1, episode 11, \"The Drought.\" Miranda has hit a dry spell in her sex life and is yearning for change, but one evening she finds herself (yet again) without a date or any social plans. On her way into a video store for a movie rental and some gummy bears, a construction worker hollers at her:\n\nMan: Hey, hey! It's my sweetheart! You're lookin' good, baby, good enough to eat. Where you goin', doll? I got what you want. I got what you need.\n\nMiranda: You talkin' to me?\n\nMan: Oh, we got a live one, boys!\n\nMiranda: You got what I want? You got what I need?\n\nMan: Uh-huh.\n\nMiranda: Well what I want is to get laid. What I _need_ is to get laid. _I need to get laid_.\n\nMan: Take it easy, lady. I'm married.\n\nMiranda: All talk and no action, huh? What a _gavone_ [pig]\n\nHere the man is enacting the role of the urban construction worker, who, in addition to building things, gives himself the privilege of being extremely personal with any and all women who pass by, harassing them with taunts and claims of sexual mastery, presenting himself as a \"dirty Don Juan.\" But for the construction worker, enacting this role makes him a fake-ass person\u2014he's married, doesn't want to damage his marriage, and really has no interest in Miranda.\n\nSociety needs construction workers, and the role of construction worker must include various good qualities related to the practical tasks of building: One must be reliable, a team player, physically quite strong and resilient. But one doesn't need the extraneous feature of dirty Don Juan. When it's included, all construction workers are scripted to act that way whether or not they have fervid libidos and loud mouths.\n\nOr whether they even like women. In the Netflix comedy series _Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt_ , Kimmy has recently moved to NYC after escaping from an underground bunker, where she was held against her will for years by a doomsday cult leader and religious fanatic. She's entirely naive about the ways of the world, so when a construction worker catcalls her, she doesn't know what it means:\n\nMan: Hey Red, you're making me wish I was those jeans.\n\nKimmy: Well I wish I was your yellow hat.\n\nMan: What?\n\nKimmy: It's my favorite color. . . . Did I say something wrong?\n\nMan: All right, I'm sorry about the jeans thing. You made your point.\n\nKimmy: And my point is . . . ?\n\nMan: That I say these things to women even though I got a mother that I love, and three beautiful sisters. OK? Are you happy?\n\nKimmy: Happy, but nervous. My friend from Indiana is coming to visit.\n\nMan: Why do I talk to women like that? What are we doing here guys\u2014I mean, big picture? Does the world really need another bank?\n\nLater in the episode we encounter the construction worker again. He's been reflecting on his attitudes toward women and has come to accept that he's gay. In season 2 (episode 2) we encounter him again and he explains that he can't really be himself at work; he has to \"put up a front\" on the job and act like he's into women.\n\nThese examples suggest that good social norms, according to the ethics of awesomeness, are those that are _generic_ in a sense: They don't tell us how to express our individuality; they don't tell us what kinds of copeeps we can have or what kinds of individuals we can be or appreciate. Good social norms allow the ethics of awesomeness to flourish. As long as we are being respectful, they don't tell us how we must present ourselves; they don't bleed into our individuality in a way that makes it unclear whether we are merely enacting a role or actually expressing our individuality. For a painter to make a painting, she needs a good blank canvas. It would suck if every painter who wanted to paint had to use a canvas that already had a bright red square on it. Good interpersonal norms derive from the clear canvas of personhood; they depend primarily on capacities and sentiments we all share or all rightly demand of one another\u2014our capacities for respect, trust, and equal consideration (to name a few). In other words, good interpersonal norms are such that, when we are not being awesome or sucky, we are perfectly polite by merely following the script, no matter who we are or who we are interacting with. Such norms are the best rules to riff on and break\u2014the rich and reliable soil of social life in which the inter-individual norms of awesomeness can grow and blossom.\n\n## Introverts and Expectations\n\nEven when social norms are acceptable and aren't obstructing awesomeness, there can be personal obstacles to the kind of social engagement that the ethics of awesomeness governs. Some people generally avoid hanging out and seeking social connection. Too much socializing often saps their energy, so even if they like to, they cannot hang very long. The introverts among us are wary of forced togetherness and are hesitant to take up social openings, especially when it might mean a prolonged encounter or a lot of small talk. And when they do take them up, they don't always do it very well. This might suggest that introverts are among the suckiest of all, but they aren't.\n\nThe reason they aren't sucky is that introverts often have some of the best reasons to opt out of social openings\u2014from the casual chatty workplace conversation to the raucous party. They report that they need a lot of time alone to gather the social strength that is all too easily sapped by social interaction. As a result, introverts might _seem_ to suck because they're always ducking out, barely engaging, deflecting attempts at conversation. But they really do need the time alone, and they really are inordinately affected by too much social interaction. They don't suck because they have good reasons to act as they do and to opt out of social openings that non-introverts might readily accept.\n\nAs a result, introverts have the unenviable task of having to manage the sucky image that can develop in the eyes of their non-introverted peers. The impression they might leave on these peers is often one they have to deflect or correct. Extroverts face a similar problem at the other end of the spectrum. They are not automatically awesome\u2014they have to be careful to not let their enthusiasm for socializing transform into sucky forms of over-performance: thunder stealing or self-promoting. The ethics of awesomeness cuts across the introvert-extrovert divide. \"Awesome extrovert\" is not redundant, and \"awesome introvert\" is certainly not an oxymoron, though it may be a challenge.\n\nThe challenge can be met in numerous ways. As we saw with Fazlalizadeh's and Haaning's artworks, creating social openings\u2014and being awesome in general\u2014does not require face-to-face interaction. We can create social openings with thoughtful gestures like leaving gifts and notes for people or sending them in the mail, making and delivering food, or writing a story, song, or poem. The British artist Georgina Starr created a performance called _Dining Alone_ , in which she invited people who were dining solo in a Parisian restaurant to visit the wine cellar, where they could dine by candlelight and listen to her reflections on her own experience dining alone.* This social opening creates an empathetic connection about the particulars of the experience of dining alone but does not require socializing or face-to-face interaction.* We can all tap into the spirit of awesomeness, and we can all partake of the joys of creative community building, introverts and extroverts alike.\n\nBut we have to know our limits and not expect too much from ourselves or each other. When it comes to being awesome and not sucking, we have to make sure we have fair and just expectations of people. Our expectations for introverts cannot be the same as they are for extroverts and run-of-the-mill social folk. Distorted expectations can result from indefensible ideas about ability, race, gender, class, and so on. As we will discuss later when we talk about the origins of awesome, there is a shameful history of white people expecting black entertainers to take up any social openings they proposed, no matter how insensitive or absurd. And as Fazlalizadeh's street art reveals, the expectations for women to accept social openings can be so severe as to be socially crippling. These things are not only deeply immoral and unjust, they also really suck. A truly awesome society and culture is one whose expectations are fair and equal across race, gender, and sexual orientation\u2014and it's one that is sensitive to people's differing approaches to flourishing in the ethics of awesomeness.\n\n\u2022\n\nBut what exactly are these different approaches? We now have before us the outlines of the ethics of awesomeness. Sucking is a matter of failing to take up social openings; not sucking is a matter of taking them up and engaging; and being awesome is a matter of creating them. The ethics of awesomeness concerns the ways of being and responding to creative community builders, who give us models, ideas, and motivation for awesomeness, and whose creation or deployment of cultural artifacts\u2014bands, booze, art, and shoes\u2014provides a locus for the cultivation and mutual appreciation of individuality. This way of thinking illuminates why we regard such a wide variety of things as awesome or sucky, from unicycles and barbecues to bad friends and wayward citizens.\n\nBut so far we have mapped the mere surface of the ethics of awesomeness. Now we must wield philosophy's steel shovel and dig deep into the many ways of engaging in the ethics of awesomeness\u2014from being down, game, and chill to being a thunder stealer, douchebag, or fake-ass person.\n\n# Chapter 4\n\n# Mapping the Ethics of Awesomeness\n\nPEOPLE WHO ARE game don't suck, but killjoys and blowhards do. Why is that? What's the difference between being game and being down? How is a killjoy different from a stick-in-the-mud? And why do they both suck? In this chapter, we explore how the theory of suckiness and awesomeness provides a systematic answer to these questions by revealing a deep connection between concepts like being a blowhard, self-promoter, or killjoy and being game, chill, or down.\n\nOur inquiry here will add to the ethics of awesomeness an account of the dynamics of participation in social openings, which are complex and often unpredictable affairs\u2014a fact we are in danger of overlooking if we focus too much on creative community builders and not enough on those who respond to and take up social openings. Our investigation in this chapter will reveal a systematic connection between awesomeness and suckiness, and a range of ways that people can be awesome or not.\n\nAs Norman Mailer tells us, \"It is impossible to conceive a new philosophy until one creates a new language, but a new popular language . . . does not necessarily present its philosophy overtly.\"* In thinking through the contemporary meanings of the popular words _sucks_ and _awesome_ , we have begun to construct a picture of a new philosophy that many will recognize and some will even identify with. As Mailer suggests, if we want to understand this philosophy in more detail, we should understand the nuances of the language that it's bound up with. It is also important to look beyond _sucks_ and _awesome_ and appreciate how much the ethics of awesomeness has shaped our collective tongue. As Iris Murdoch warns, if we remain at the level of _sucks_ and _awesome_ we risk impoverishing our understanding of ethical nuance and being blind to some of the subtler ways the ethics of awesomeness operates. We must discuss the subtle and separate virtues and vices in the ethics of awesomeness.*\n\nAs we will see in this chapter, the language of the ethics of awesomeness is not impoverished at all\u2014it's a language we share, part of our distinctive form of life, but one whose interstices and interconnections we don't yet grasp. One of the strengths of our way of thinking about awesomeness is its ability to systematize our understanding of these terms and thereby of the nuanced dynamics of social openings.\n\nThe Taxonomy of Suckiness and Awesomeness (pp. x\u2013xi) will be our guide as we sweep across it from left to right. The professor in me will take charge of the discussion as we categorize, taxonomize, and evaluate our way through the intricacies of awesomeness and suckiness. The diagram is structured by our concept of a social opening and the different ways a person can relate to one: You can either opt out, opt in, be a nonstarter, take one up, or create one. Along the way, I'll suggest strategies for managing suckiness and will note various ways we can motivate awesomeness and non-suckiness in ourselves and others.\n\nThe Taxonomy of Suckiness and Awesomeness does not exhaust all the ways we have of talking about these matters; in fact, it's just a start. But it's a good start. I'll periodically suggest ways of expanding it.\n\n## Modes of Suckiness\n\nLet's start on the left-hand side of the diagram, where we have a supercell of suckiness. There are three general ways to suck. The most basic is to opt out of a social opening for no good reason. Another way to suck is to opt in and let down. Many social openings are lengthy and dynamic\u2014we might opt in to an extended social opening but fail to handle it well. The third way to suck is to be a \"nonstarter\"\u2014someone who, in one way or another, is fundamentally against taking up social openings.\n\nOne note before we get started. You might be wondering why we have so many more words for ways of sucking than we do for ways of not sucking. While it's important to have ways of encouraging people to keep breathing life into the social activity, a social opening is a delicate thing and we have to be sensitive to actions that threaten to suffocate it. Many of these concepts are useful in understanding what went wrong with a social opening, but they also help us act well when we are in the middle of lengthy or dynamic social openings, keeping them alive and well.\n\n### Opting Out\n\nAs we discussed in detail in chapter 2, we suck when we opt out of a social opening for no good reason. This is the most basic way to suck, but there are in fact two ways to do this: by being simply sucky and by being wack.\n\n#### SIMPLY SUCKY\n\nBeing _simply sucky_ is the basic case of suckiness: We encounter a social opening and fail to take it up. When we say we would love to catch up but cancel at the last minute on a whim; when we say we'll come to the party but just decide not to and don't tell anyone; when we never accept our colleague's invitations to dinner, drinks, or the movies; when we go to an event we know our friend would love but don't invite them or tell them about it\u2014these actions simply suck.\n\nMany people would say that anyone who acts this way is being \"lame,\" but I want to say something about the contemporary use of this word. Historically, the word _lame_ was widely used to refer to people and animals (especially horses) who have difficulty walking. When it initially found use as a term of social criticism, it was used as a metaphor to describe people who lack effort, are dull, or are uninspired\u2014that is, its use derived from the idea that such people are acting as if they are unable to walk. This usage has been the subject of understandable criticism because it seems to suggest or presume that being unable to walk is inherently bad or inferior, which is patently false and indeed offensive to people with disabilities and anyone who cannot walk or cannot do so in the species-normal way.\n\nMy linguistic sense says that nowadays _lame_ , like _sucks_ , has, in mainstream usage, shed this past and gained a new meaning. The metaphor has arguably died, giving _lame_ a new literal meaning, which in common parlance has nothing to do with physical ability\u2014it refers directly to a kind of social ineptitude, lack of spirit or effort, or social dullness. That said, people may be understandably offended by the term, and so it should be used, if at all, with caution, disavowal, or only when the social meaning is clear. As it is, the word is commonly used to pick out a widespread and culturally significant social attitude or disposition, and it's not clear that there is another word we can use instead (the words _dull_ , _spiritless_ , _disengaged_ , and _bland_ are . . . dull, spiritless, disengaged, and bland alternatives). Our theory suggests that the best alternative to _lame_ is _simply sucky_ ; instead of \"That's lame\" we can say, \"That simply sucks,\" or \"That just [merely] sucks,\" so that's what you'll find here.\n\n**Management:** If someone is being simply sucky, then they think they have a good reason not to take up a social opening, but they don't. There are two strategies you can employ. First, you might attempt to convince them that their reason for opting out is no good. This is a somewhat risky strategy because they think their reason is good; by trying to convince them otherwise you are in danger of pressuring them or seeming insensitive to their way of thinking and entrenching them in their suckiness. The second strategy avoids this result: You might encourage them to be down by convincing them that the value of being down is greater than the value of opting out for whatever reason they have. In other words, instead of suggesting that they have a bad reason, see if you can show that their reason isn't as good. Try to make vivid the thought that being down is better than their reason for opting out.\n\nThis applies to self-criticism too. If you're inclined to opt out, then introspect and ask yourself why you're disinclined. Pay attention to the voice that is afraid of the unfamiliar, scared of the uncertain, or wary of the new. That voice is often habitual, reactive, and simply sucky. Closer inspection and careful reflection might reveal a legitimate reason to opt out\u2014and so to avoid suckiness\u2014or you might revive your connection to the value of being up. You might even activate the spirit of awesomeness.\n\n#### WACK\n\nSome people take suckiness to another level. They not only refuse the social opening for no good reason, they actively disparage it\u2014they decline while casting aspersions or implying that they're above it. It's unclear whether colloquial English contains a term for such actions and people. My suggestion is that we call them _wack_.\n\nWack people not only decline social openings, but are actively or symbolically against them for no good reason. They opt out while criticizing or dismissing, perhaps implicitly, the activity, or implying that they're better than or above it. It's one thing to opt out of a social opening\u2014quite another to do so while flagrantly criticizing it or the people who create it.*\n\nThe reason it makes sense to say such a person is being \"wack\" can be illustrated by considering the fact that wackness is also (and was originally) a feature of a person's style, the way they express their individuality in their decisions and actions\u2014the way they dance, dress, walk, sing, rap, and so on. The person with wack style is someone whose style seems to openly flout the values and standards that define a thriving culture or activity. Case in point: President Obama was once criticized for the \"wack-ass\" tan suit he wore instead of his usual gray or navy.* The wackness of the mullet hairstyle, for another example, consists in its being so blatantly out of touch\u2014so magnificently alien, given certain values\u2014that the most aggressive ones seem almost to don a halo of confused confidence. The mullet effectively says, \"I don't care about your party\u2014mine's better.\" What wack people have in common with people who have wack style is that they both seem to flaunt a disregard for certain values the appreciation of which plays an essential role in a healthy social opening.\n\n**Management:** When someone is being wack, we can try to reason with them, like we do with the simply sucky. But wack people wield a special and often mysterious opposition and even animosity that can be difficult to diagnose on the spot, and you may have to resort to other tactics to let people know that they are being sucky. If you're feeling bold, then you might try to wack back, giving the person a little taste of their own medicine. They might not come around, but at least they'll have something to reflect on. Or you might just need to leave wack people to their own devices and hope they come to see the good in the social openings they mistakenly disparage. In other words, being chill in the face of wackness is often our only recourse. It can create a stark contrast and accentuate the wack features of a wack persona or move. We can only hope they see the good in our chillness and learn from their own mistakes.\n\n### Opting In and Letting Down\n\nBeing simply sucky or wack are not the only ways to suck\u2014but they are the main ways of sucking that concern opting out of social openings. Among those who initially take up these opportunities\u2014who opt in\u2014there are many who suck. In fact, this is where suckiness really chafes. People who are simply sucky or wack thankfully opt out before the social opening really expands, but some people effectively opt out in the middle of it, holding out a promise of awesomeness without fully delivering. I call these people _killjoys_. Since social openings are complex and dynamic, there are many ways of being a killjoy. They divide into ways of underperforming, being a bore, and overperforming.\n\n#### UNDERPERFORMING KILLJOYS (OR STICKS-IN-THE-MUD)\n\nA standard type of underperforming killjoy is the _stick-in-the-mud_. This person takes up the social opening but, in one way or another, doesn't fully commit or succeed; everyone else is participating, talking, playing, dancing, or whatever, and they're stuck there. But there are several ways to be \"stuck;\" thus, there are several versions of the stick-in-the-mud: Consider the half-asser, the preference dictator, and the cheapskate.\n\n##### Half-Assers\n\n_Half-assers_ present themselves as being down or game but then they don't put much effort into the activity. They aren't really present or engaged; they use scripted responses and rely on various heuristics, stereotypes, and habits. People who are always \"merely polite\" are often half-assers\u2014they take up the social opening but fail to present their individuality and hide it behind a facade of respect. That's a decent and understandable response to brief or one-off social openings, but not always in a more extended and dynamic context. Half-assers seem to understand the value of not sucking but lack the insight or motivation, or haven't developed the skills, to thrive.\n\n**Management:** Half-assers are probably trying to be minimally up or chill but can't muster the motivation or don't wield the requisite insight. That's fine, but it puts you in the position of picking up the slack (being the other ass cheek?). Use your downness to lead by example. Of course, that might not work. Sometimes you just have to let a half-asser off the hook. Let them be and don't allow their half-assery to diminish the overall awesome.\n\n##### Preference Dictators\n\nAnother type of underperforming killjoy has very strict and inflexible ideas about how to carry out the social openings they take up. These people are on the dance floor, so to speak, but they're telling everyone how to dance. I like to call them _preference dictators_ : They seem to understand the value of copersonhood but think it consists of everyone meeting _their_ preferences. They engage in social openings only when things are going their preference-dictating way.\n\nThis occurs commonly with dietary preferences and food fads. Sir Roger Scruton has a characteristically cutting, though overstated, description of the food-preference dictator:\n\nThe rudeness of the glutton and the face stuffer are obvious. Equally ill-mannered\u2014though it is politically incorrect to say so\u2014is the food faddist, who makes a point of announcing, wherever he goes, that just this or this can pass his lips, and all other things must be rejected, even when offered as a gift. . . . V]egetarians and vegans have now succeeded in policing the dinner table with their non-negotiable demands, ensuring that even when invited into company, they sit down alone.[*\n\nScruton is wrong to think that all vegans and vegetarians are preference dictators. Most vegans and vegetarians do not have \"nonnegotiable\" demands. In fact, they have decent reasons for not eating meat and are willing to share those reasons. The question in any given context will be how they express those reasons, and whether the value of forcefully expressing them outweighs the awesomeness that a social opening around food can cultivate. The truly sucky food-preference dictator cannot let their decisions go unnoticed, draw excessive attention to their moral position, and persistently let their food values determine the character of their social interactions. This is true of many people who have various life-orienting commitments\u2014from Paleo dieters and picky eaters to exercise fanatics and music snobs. There's nothing sucky about having such commitments, but there are more and less sucky ways of bringing them into play in an awesome social opening.\n\nPreference dictators have appreciable values\u2014worthy perspectives on food consumption and farming practices, exercise, health choices, lifestyle, art, and so on. But the true preference dictator's actions are rigidly and loudly governed by these values\u2014ones that are indeed a matter of individuality and relevant to the social opening but not in the way imagined by the preference dictator. By making or suggesting that everyone conform to a certain set of preferences, the preference dictator ensures that those who have different preferences cannot comfortably express them. To that extent they cannot present themselves for appreciation\u2014their love, insight, knowledge, and passion with respect to those preferences is muted. And when a large part of a person is muted in this way, it all too easily affects the rest of the person. Her attention and efforts are aimed at conforming to the will of the preference dictator, and she can't just be herself. In this way, the preference dictator spawns underperformance. In that sense, then, Scruton is on to something when he writes that preference dictators \"sit down alone\"; they sit down with diminished copeople.\n\n**Management:** The preference dictator should chill a bit. The best tool here is direct confrontation. The preference dictator should know that their values are appreciated but that it is not chill, and definitely not awesome, to project in behavior, tone, and voice that everyone else should have the same ones. Remind the preference dictator that other people have their own views about food, lifestyle, art, and so on. Shift the focus and suggest that perhaps this is an opportunity to explore new music, discuss a social or political issue, or engage in a new activity. Social openings are opportunities for expression, exploration, and appreciation, not opportunities for extended sanctimony, preaching, judgment, or propagandizing.\n\nIf you find yourself with preference-dictating inclinations, consider an awesome approach to conveying the worth of your values and attitudes: Speak your piece and then let the social opening breathe a bit. Instead of preference dictating, invite your potential coperson over for a meal that embodies your food values, suggest a film or documentary that conveys the value of your social or political views, or tell a story that reveals why you love the things you love so much.\n\n##### Cheapskates\n\nPerhaps Scruton is confusing the preference dictator with the control freak (and its various subspecies, e.g., micromanagers and such). Control freaks have an unshakable urge to take charge, manage, or ensure that things are done precisely as they see fit. Perhaps they act out of a fear of unpredictability, or an irrational sense that only they can get things right. Control freaks suck, for sure, but their control-freakish preferences and values are not appreciable features of individuality. Another type of killjoy who exhibits preference-dictating tendencies, but who isn't a preference dictator, is someone who imposes their values in a dominating way but those values are not features of individuality\u2014so the values they express and impose are irrelevant to the social opening.\n\nTo make this category clear, let's focus on the _cheapskate_ , who's generally inclined to take up social openings and play along just like anyone else, until money enters the picture. Then everything changes. Their behavior becomes wholly regulated by the overarching norm that tells them to avoid spending more money than absolutely necessary. Preference dictators have rigid preferences that are relevant to the social opening; their preferences constitute aspects of individuality that are appropriately expressed in the context of awesomeness. Cheapskates, however, have dominant and irrelevant preferences that make them unreceptive to the dynamics of the social opening; they have an excessive concern with money\u2014one that suckily overshadows the expressive concerns of being awesome and not sucking. The other person always has to drive; they care not about the good beer but the cheap beer; you categorically must go to the movies on Tightwad Tuesday.\n\nCheapskates are people whose behavior is dominated by a value that is irrelevant to the social opening. It's not about being broke\u2014you can be broke and awesome at the same time\u2014it's about overvaluing the saving of money at the expense of awesomeness. Instead of focusing on the conversation, the cheapskate is busy noting how much everything costs, forgetting to do things for or accommodate others. Some people take cheapskatery to such an extreme that it runs their entire life: They try to get everything for free, measure out tap water with tablespoons, ask fellow diners for their uneaten food, or pick up every valuable item they find, including garbage they imagine repurposing as toilet paper or kitchen supplies.\n\nThe pursuit of cheapness or a good deal can be awesome: the underappreciated food joint, the great thrift shop, the stuffed carpool on a camping trip. In some circumstances, the goal of saving money can create an awesome social opening. Doing so can inspire action so fascinating and novel that it creates social openings. This is basically what happens in an episode of TLC's disturbing show _Extreme Cheapskates_.* Jordan Mederich, who calls himself an \"extreme barterer,\" enthusiastically recites Lewis Carroll's _Jabberwocky_ in exchange for a raspberry doughnut in a doughnut shop. He then teaches his friend Jonathan to use his opera singing skills to get a deal on a cake for his wedding. Jonathan walks into a cake shop, approaches the baker, and offers to sing the aria \"Nessun Dorma\" from Puccini's opera _Turandot_. It turns out that the baker loves opera (\"except Wagner\") and applauds Jonathan's performance. He gets a discount on his wedding cake and the baker enjoys some operatic singing.\n\nPeople like Jordan Mederich seem to really love bartering and, for that reason, either aren't really cheapskates or are a very unusual kind. The true cheapskate ventures far from awesomeness. When they are out to a nice meal with friends they say they \"aren't that hungry\" and then scarf cold pizza when they get home. Or they order an appetizer and eat all the free bread. Or, when the bill comes, they try to underpay by playing dumb or pretending they didn't eat any of the fries.\n\n**Management:** Try playing on the cheapskate's turf\u2014create social openings that are cheap, or that don't involve money. When your social openings do involve money, you might try to finesse that part of the social opening\u2014arrange for the bill to be divided, deal with money in advance, or, if you can, just be generous and pay for your coperson. These strategies will help the cheapskate focus and be reminded that often it doesn't really matter if someone else paid two dollars less than you.\n\nIf you find yourself with cheapskate tendencies, get creative. Maybe you can practice bartering. Instead of eating all the fries and pretending you aren't hungry, suggest splitting something with a coperson. Instead of going to the movies, invite some friends over, dust off an oldie but goodie, or hunt for a cheap treasure at a thrift store.\n\nIn other, more general, words, try to transform your irrelevant preferences into relevant ones. By splitting a meal you're sharing; by seeking alternative movies to watch, you're jointly expanding your film knowledge and appreciation; and so on. The same advice applies to other forms of dominant but irrelevant value expression, like being controlling or micromanaging.\n\n#### BORES\n\nThere is a vexing category between under- and overperformers. _Bores_ take up the social opening and at least ostensibly put in effort, but their efforts are in vain. Their general engagement isn't scripted or rote\u2014it's just boring or spiritless. Their stories fall flat, their jokes are met with silence, their style doesn't inspire. In other words, they have a minimal understanding of how not to suck, but they haven't developed various virtues of awesomeness that allow them to flourish. They suck because they present features of individuality that are of the relevant kind\u2014attempts at humor, social proposals, stories, and so on\u2014but that confuse or fail to animate.\n\n**Management:** Bores are trying but falling short\u2014they need practice and can learn from your presence and good example. But be careful not to encourage them too much by politely laughing a lot or feigning deep interest. Don't forget your Emily Post: \"Alas it is true: 'Be polite to bores and so shall you have bores always round about you.'\"*\n\n#### SELF-PROMOTERS\n\nWhile some killjoys underperform or underwhelm in various ways, other killjoys suck by over-performing. Please shift your attention now to the right-hand branch under \"Killjoy (Opt In)\" to the category of _self-promoter_.\n\nRemember that social openings are successful when they create copersons. Self-promoters generally have an inflamed self-interest that impedes coperson creation by disrupting the requisite mutual appreciation. They focus all their energy on presenting themselves, leaving little for the appreciation of others. Where killjoys have a tendency to underexpress themselves, self-promoters overexpress themselves. There are different ways to over-perform in a social opening, which brings us to the blowhard, the braggart, and the thunder stealer.\n\n##### Blowhards\n\nThe _blowhard_ fails to be sensitive to the egalitarian dynamics of the ethics of awesomeness by overrating or misunderstanding the value of his contribution to the social opening. This is a kind of self-absorption that tends to blind him to the fact that, as genuinely interesting or accomplished as he may be, there is limited value in him contributing so much information about his knowledge, interests, life, or achievements.\n\nThe blowhard's strategy threatens to be self-undermining in two ways, which are related to the two ways the blowhard can suck. By jumping on every topic and claiming interest or expertise, the blowhard makes it difficult for his copeople to form a coherent image of his individuality beyond the fact that this person is interested in, good at, or knowledgeable about everything. The onslaught of information overwhelms. A second problem arises from the blowhard's manner of delivery. Some blowhards might express interest in and knowledge of every topic in such a way that it seems like all they really care about is talking on and on about these things. And this is not an appreciable feature of individuality.\n\n**Management:** Don't try to out-blowhard the blowhard. Try to focus the blowhard, who has a tendency to project mastery over every topic. One strategy is to deepen your investigation into whatever topic you're considering and guide the blowhard into novel territory where you are both on the same level. Alternatively, you might invite the blowhard to try a different activity\u2014an unfamiliar game, a new cuisine, a foreign film\u2014so you both have to navigate various uncertainties together. Or just walk away.\n\nIf you find yourself with blowhard inclinations, try to remember that pretty much everyone has an expansive individuality. Rein it in a bit and let your actions speak louder than your words. Trust the perceptiveness of your copeople and know that the appreciability of your individuality will emerge over time. Remember too that your worth as a coperson does not depend solely on your accomplishments, interests, knowledge, and so on\u2014give your erudition a rest and let your pure individuality shine now and then.\n\n##### Braggarts\n\nA slightly suckier but similar type of self-promoter is the _braggart_ , who exhibits blowhard characteristics. As we've already established, social openings concern the mutual appreciation of individuality. Braggarts, like blowhards, have managed to understand that in social situations they have to express their individuality, yet they fail to appreciate the symmetrical essence of the arrangement. Unlike blowhards, however, braggarts are focused rather oppressively on themselves. They freely offer themselves up for appreciation, without giving others the opportunity to present themselves. Or, if the opportunity does arise, the braggart tends to lose interest in the conversation and half-asses responses or resorts to thinking in stereotypes. The most extreme braggarts aren't just the most interesting topic of discussion in their own eyes\u2014they're the only genuine topic of discussion.\n\n**Management:** What makes the braggart suckier than the blowhard is that the latter has more to talk about than herself. As a result, the braggart offers less to get a grip on to steer the social opening in the right direction. The same strategies apply but success might be more difficult.\n\n##### Thunder Stealers\n\nIt's easy to dismiss or have a little fun at the expense of a blowhard or a braggart. They can be fascinatingly out of touch and can really misconstrue the social dynamics. But an especially offensive type of self-promoting suckiness is that of the _thunder stealer_ , who tries to undermine the attention that someone else merits and direct it upon himself. The worst thunder stealers cause seismic shifts in attention, reorganizing and even dismantling complex social openings. The thunder stealer is, in a way, a kind of opportunistic braggart, or a self-promoter who exploits other people's expressions for their own gain. They suck like leeches, not only by calling undue attention to themselves but also by exploiting and diminishing the appreciation that other individuals merit.\n\n**Management:** Thunder stealers can be hard to manage because they strike like lightning and leave the ash of suckiness in their wake. If you can catch the thunder stealer before they act, then you might try redirection. This is another place where direct confrontation or real talk might help. Remind them that it's not their moment.\n\nIf you find yourself with thunder-stealing tendencies, don't forget that there is a fine line between being awesome, being game, and being a thunder stealer, depending on the situation. You might think you're being awesome or game when in fact you're shifting social attention in negative ways. So check your gameness. If you think you're being awesome or especially game by bringing five pies to a housewarming party full of the host's specially prepared food, then you might think again. You risk stealing the host's thunder. Better to stick with a tasty beverage or some flowers.\n\n### Nonstarters\n\nI would now like to draw your attention to the far right-hand arm of the Suckiness branch. Sticks-in-the-mud and self-promoters have this in common: In one way or another they want to take up the social opening\u2014they opt in but fail to finesse it in the right way. Another type of sucky person lacks even this level of engagement; I call them the _nonstarters_ , and they fall into two main categories: the asshole and the fake-ass person. Nonstarters have various ways of blocking the creation of a social opening and so lie outside the ethics of awesomeness. We might think of them as the opposite of awesome, as \"social closers,\" because their habits and modes of engagement tend to rule out social openings from the start. (For this reason, I don't suggest management techniques for these categories because there is no social opening to manage.)\n\n#### ASSHOLES\n\nPhilosopher Aaron James's book _Assholes: A Theory_ contains a revealing analysis of the asshole.* He tells us that assholes are people who (mistakenly) feel they are entitled to special advantages in social situations, and they systematically act on this feeling to further their ends and immunize themselves against the legitimate complaints of others. The asshole cuts in line and ignores people who call him out; he drives as if he's the only person on the road and flips you off when you honk at him for being reckless. An asshole would get an invitation to a party and think, \"I may or may not go. I'll just decide when it suits me. Obviously the party will be so much better when I show up,\" with no regard for the host who asks for an RSVP.\n\nInsofar as someone is being an asshole, then, they are placing themselves outside or above the community of individuals, making coperson creation impossible. Hence, assholes are nonstarters. They have difficulty even recognizing social openings because so much of their social engagement comes from a sense of entitlement that in their distorted minds places them above their peers. They socialize not to appreciate and love but to dominate or impress. From the asshole perspective, interactions with them are a privilege for you. The asshole is like the man of \"high class\" in a socially stratified culture, except he's given himself the high status, and for no good reason.\n\nSome assholes seem to mistakenly think that their money is what entitles them to special privileges in social situations. Recent research suggests that people who regard themselves as wealthy are more likely to cheat, lie, steal, and break the law, even in fictional or pretend situations (for example, when playing Monopoly). One study appears to show that the more expensive your car is, the less likely it is that you will stop for your fellow citizens at a crosswalk (which is the law in California and awesome everywhere).*\n\n#### FAKE-ASS PEOPLE\n\nWhen we accept a social opening, we present an aspect of the kind of person we are, and in doing so we give an impression of our individuality. In other words, we issue a persona. _Persona_ literally means \"mask.\" But this doesn't mean that we are misleading anyone as to who we are or aspire to be. We can wear masks of ourselves, ones that highlight or accentuate our best features\u2014makeup, clothing, tattoos, and our overall style do this.\n\n_Fake-ass people_ wear masks that aren't of themselves. They issue personas that aren't really theirs, or they don't present who they really are or aspire to be. In doing so, they may seem to create or accept social openings\u2014they may seem to express a certain sense of humor, confidence, generosity, and so on. But they're actually nonstarters because they're faking it. Which sucks. Fake-ass people often have ulterior motives. They issue personas not for the sake of real mutual appreciation, but for the sake of convenience, being part of the in-crowd, to gain an upper hand, or to get something they want.\n\n##### Douchebags\n\n_Douchebags_ are an especially prevalent and troublingly multiplying type of fake-ass person. The douchebag is inseparable from a specific style combined with a certain way of acting and interacting. The douchebag: (1) adopts a mainstream persona, (2) out of an insecurity about and concern for what others think about them, (3) but tries to mask this concern by acting like an asshole, (4) and by doctoring their mainstream persona to seem like an individual.*\n\nConsider a mainstream look, like the Frat Jock, Ivy League Preppy, Miami Beach Clubster, L.A. Slickster, or Jersey Shore Bro. Adopting such a look does not make you automatically sucky; there are awesome Jersey Shore Bros and Ivy League Preppies. But the douchebag adopts the look not because it really captures his sense of style but out of a pronounced insecurity\u2014a dominating worry about what people think of him and whether he'll fit in. By adopting the familiar look, he ensures his place in a mainstream community.\n\nThat level of insincerity alone is familiar enough. But the douchebag takes it further. His desire to fit in clashes with his desire to stand out. He recognizes that he cannot be too mainstream lest he blend into the crowd of slicksters, preppies, or jocks. He wants to seem privileged or important. So he masks himself even further. He hides his insecure attempt to blend in with a nod to individuality: His pink oxford collar is popped, his eyebrows are manicured, his shirt is very tight and flashy. And he masks his insecurity with a veneer of assholery: You don't want to get in his way or question his motives. If you question his sincerity, he'll question yours; if you threaten his self-appointed place as stronger, better looking, or more entitled, then he'll attack. His jokes are obnoxious, bullyish, and crude; his attachments are thin and fickle. But the douchebag isn't an asshole because he doesn't really have an inflamed self-regard. The douchebag wants to belong. But he also wants to stand out and above, which forces him into fake forms of expression.\n\n##### Self-Effacers\n\nA very different type of fake-ass person never really allows a clear persona to emerge, in spite of the fact that she seems generally inclined to take up social openings and might even be quite engaged and engaging. This type of fake-ass person obscures or effaces herself, always expressing some character or other, but never making it very clear who she is or what she cares about. She's often making jokes instead of giving straight answers; she hides behind sarcasm and adds an ironic tone to any hint of sincerity. Marcel Proust supplies an example in his character Charles Swann:\n\nThus he had grown into the habit of taking refuge in trivial considerations, which enabled him to disregard matters of fundamental importance. Just as he never stopped to ask himself whether he would not have done better by not going into society, but on the other hand knew for certain that if he had accepted an invitation he must put in an appearance, and that afterwards, if he did not actually call, he must at least leave cards upon his hostess, so in his conversation he took care never to express with any warmth a personal opinion about anything, but instead would supply facts and details which were valid enough in themselves and excused him from showing his real capacities. He would be extremely precise about the recipe for a dish, the dates of a painter's birth and death, and the titles of his works. Sometimes, in spite of himself, he would let himself go so far as to express an opinion on a work of art, or on someone's interpretation of life, but then he would cloak his words in a tone of irony, as though he did not altogether associate himself with what he was saying.*\n\nThere are several characterizations out there that might capture this person: the ironist or clown. I prefer a more general term\u2014we might use _self-effacer_ because this type of person is always erasing any image she paints of herself in the minds of others. Many circa-2002 hipsters\u2014masters of detachment and irony in dress, artistic taste, and styling\u2014were arguably self-effacers.*\n\nTools are a species of self-effacer because they allow themselves to be pawns in other people's games, simply expressing or doing whatever they are expected to by whoever they look up to or whatever group they want to be a part of. It's no wonder that douchebags are often surrounded by a bunch of tools. Another type of tool is the \"basic\" person who enthusiastically promotes the current trends without really exploring or understanding alternative, less mainstream options. By latching on to and promoting fads unreflectively they become the perfect marketing tools.\n\nSome people combine self-effacement with other sucky modes. Consider the self-effacing blowhard or braggart, who exhibits blowhard characteristics while noting his excessive contributions and feigning surprise or disbelief. He \"cannot believe [he's] talking so much!\" and claims that he's \"really talking too much about [himself]!\" but has no problem continuing and makes no real effort to wrap it up or rein it in.\n\n## Modes of Awesomeness\n\nThat covers the basic structure of suckiness. It's not the complete and definitive taxonomy\u2014we could continue to fill it in by adding more nodes to the tree, such as _tool_ and _micromanager_. You might think about what you would add and where you would place it in the diagram.\n\nLet's shift our attention now to the right side of the diagram under \"Awesomeness.\" There are various ways of not sucking by taking up social openings, and there are a few ways of being awesome by creating social openings. These ways of not sucking and of being awesome are all _modes of awesomeness_ in the sense that they are both essential to awesomeness\u2014the state of copersonhood, or the mutual appreciation of individuality. These ways of taking up and creating social openings are the central goods we seek in the ethics of awesomeness, so we will focus our advice and guidance on motivation instead of management.\n\n### Down\/Taking Up\n\nThe general category for not sucking (or non-suckiness) is to be _down_. People who are down take up the social openings presented to them\u2014they receive and respond to your smile or humor; they dance; they appreciate your generosity and spirit. Being down, and therefore not sucking in general, takes a certain ability to imagine what the future holds and to have faith in a potential coperson's ability to actualize that future\u2014we tend to be down when the thought or image of acting on the social opening is enticing.\n\nBut there are several ways of being down and not all are equal. As Antanas Mockus notes in the context of teaching, \"What people love most is when you write on the blackboard a risky first half of a sentence and then recognize their freedom to write the other half.\"* People act on that freedom in different ways: being chill, being up, or being game.\n\nBeing game, being chill, and being up are ways of responding to awesomeness by taking up the opportunity. That's exactly what Dusty Baker did when Glenn Burke held up his hand for the iconic high five in 1977. When asked whether it was in fact he who invented the high five, Baker said, \"No, I didn't invent the high five. All I did was respond to Glenn. That's all I did.\"* Baker tried to downplay his role, but being down mustn't be downplayed. The ethics of awesomeness is all about taking two (or more) to tango.\n\n#### CHILL\n\nSome people who are down are flexibly responsive to social openings; they are able and willing to take up a wide range of them. Such people are _chill_. They are mellow navigators of the seas of awesomeness. Remember that many social openings are dynamic: They are composed of shifting activities, changing opportunities, and diverse individuals. Chill people wade through the changing waters\u2014they're down for it all.\n\nAlthough chill people are very receptive to social openings, they tend not to express much enthusiasm for any particular opening; doing so might conflict with their mellow receptiveness to whatever comes their way. Chill people do have their preferences, but they don't push them to the fore or make a special effort to express them. The reason is that chill people are at least as interested in expressing themselves as they are in engaging with other forms of expressed individuality.\n\nOf course, being chill can be abused, and sometimes people are chill when they shouldn't be. Sometimes we get justifiably angry, incensed, outraged, or annoyed, and when we express these feelings and someone tells us to \"be chill\" or \"chill out,\" they might be trying to silence our legitimate voice by appealing to what is otherwise a social virtue. The sense of being chill at issue here is specifically a mode of response to social openings and creative community builders; it's not a way of letting immoral, threatening, or sleazy behavior slide.\n\n**Motivation:** Chill people have their own cultivated individuality and aren't afraid to express themselves, but they are also especially open to engaging with the expressed preferences of other individuals. In this way, they are the opposite of the sucky preference dictator, who engages social openings only when and to the extent that they align with his preferences and values. The first rule of being chill is keeping an open mind and cultivating sympathetic insight into the interests and values of other individuals. Try to remember the times when being open-minded and flexible led to insight, connection, and joy. Emily Post one more time: \"The best ingredients for likeableness are a happy expression of countenance, an unaffected manner, and a sympathetic attitude.\"*\n\n#### UP\n\nThe second way to be down is to be _up_. If you're up for something, then, unlike a chill person, you're merely along for the ride. Chill people have their own values and interests that they are into expressing and satisfying, but they are equally happy to explore and engage with the individualities of others, to play along and be another presence in the name of awesomeness. They are like the dutiful tooth brusher who does the right, clean thing against the call of a warm and cozy bed. The person who is up might feel the pull of a little solo time, of the comforting routine they're used to, but they resist this in the name of awesomeness and take up the social opening. When we are merely up for something we have to do what we can to engage and keep the social opening alive.\n\nNotice the fine line between being up and being a bore. Being a bore is the minimal constraint on being up\u2014you are up exactly to the extent that you avoid being a bore. This can create confusion and lack of clarity between the two. The satirical news publication _The Onion_ captures this with its comedic article about \"local man Jeff Kirkwood,\" who:\n\n. . . was up for absolutely anything except making a definite decision, bar sources reported Friday. \"Guys, tonight's going to be epic, and I'm totally game for anything that doesn't require me personally to propose and commit fully to an idea of how to spend the remainder of our night,\" Kirkwood said, finishing off his first beer and ordering another while affirming that he was \"just getting started.\" . . . \"Hell, if you wanted to go bungee jumping right now, I'd be with you all the way given the fact that everyone else already reached that consensus and were sufficiently enthusiastic that I wouldn't make the final call. So, let's see where the night takes us!\"*\n\n_The Onion_ exaggerates the classically up person's willingness to come along and highlights Kirkwood's attempt to stay engaged by feigning enthusiasm. Kirkwood really just wants to come along for the ride\u2014he doesn't want to propose or decide what to do, and reserves his \"enthusiasm\" for whatever others are enthusiastic about, which is to say he's not _really_ enthusiastic about anything. He wants to be up and tries to maintain that position with a nod to spirited interest, but his hollow enthusiasm rings false and threatens to bore.\n\n**Motivation:** It's good to be up! Even if you can't muster enthusiasm for the social opening, why not play along anyway? Try to recall the two basic reasons we have for taking up social openings: our interest in self-expression, cultivation, and exploration; and the fact that social openings present us with reasons to engage\u2014the activity really is worthwhile, and you really do have something to contribute and gain. We can be up for a social opening even when, for one reason or another, we are not very attuned to these reasons\u2014maybe we're a little tired, burned out, stressed, or distracted. That's when it helps to shift your attention to the other source of reasons to engage: your pure individuality, or your basic ability to break character and explore, express, and play. At the very least, you know that anything can happen and you might be challenged or engaged in unexpected ways. So get up and get down.\n\n#### GAME\n\nThose who are genuinely enthusiastic about a social opening are _game_. When the thought of acting on a social opening is exciting or enlivening\u2014in the extreme, when it seems that doing so will contribute to our living the kind of life we aspire to live\u2014then we are game. Being game is a matter of being _enthusiastically_ _down_.\n\nOne way to get a grip on being game is to consider the rules of improv acting. Improv actors work in groups to improvise a theatrical scene, with often hilarious results. Such actors have to work together on the spot to set up an assortment of characters doing a variety of things. The actors build on the previous actor's contribution to create moments of theatrical fun and comedic brilliance. Improv actor and director David Alger's first rule of improv is essentially to be game. He tells improv actors to say, \"Yes! And . . .\" When your partner makes a proposal about what the shared activity or event is, Alger's advice is to enthusiastically accept the proposal and build on it in a way that gives other actors an opportunity to say \"Yes! And . . .\" When one of your partners points right at you and says, \"Hey, you big gray cloud! You're going to rain on us!\" you should say something like, \"Yes, indeed, I really have to pee-pee!\"\n\nThe difference between being down and being game can be illustrated by considering man's best friend. Most dogs don't suck because they are so game. Dogs were bred not to suck by being bred to be game. Consider the fact that dogs aren't just down for a walk, they are _game_ for a walk. They are not chill about it at all. Dogs don't just want to eat, they are _game_ to eat; they aren't just down for a ride in the car, they are _game_ for a ride in a car.\n\nGoing for a ride in a car is better when there's a dog with you who is super into it. People who are game don't just bring hummus and carrots to the party\u2014they get inspired and creative, accepting social openings with communal insight and verve. Their novel contributions animate and inspire others to be game in turn. This is why being game has a special place in the ethics of awesomeness\u2014it's the engine that propels a social opening. Well-expressed enthusiasm tends to spread because it draws attention to the features of the social opening that make it worth taking up. In other words, being game is most effective at getting others to be down, including whoever created the social opening in the first place.\n\n**Motivation:** Think like a dog. Try to tap into what's best about the social opening and reconnect to the value of your individuality. Recall the times when you propelled a social opening by being game. Think about how much more awesome that social opening was because of you. And don't forget to see yourself as a key player in the context of overall awesomeness.\n\n### Awesome\/Create\n\nSo if you're up, you're down. But if you're down then you aren't necessarily up, or at least not _merely_ so, because you might be game\u2014that is, enthusiastically down. Or you might be chill: You might be down for whatever but not especially game and not merely up.\n\nThat sums up our discussion of downness. Now we'll shift attention to the second cluster under \"Awesomeness.\" As we established in chapter 2, being _awesome_ is a matter of creating opportunities to be down, game, up, and chill. To be awesome is to excel at creating social openings\u2014on the small and large scales\u2014and to therefore be a creator of _copersons_ and _crews_.\n\n#### ROCK\n\nSome people combine being awesome with being reliably down in one way or another. Those who are awesome and reliably game _rock_. This makes them very trusty copeople: the friend who loves to take up your social openings and creates her own; the colleague who does everything she can to excel while creating a sense of community by reaching out and helping others however she can; the devoted neighbor whose hospitality and genuineness colors the whole community.\n\nThe term _rocks_ might not be as popular as it once was\u2014perhaps there are other terms that capture this category. What really matters for our purposes is that we understand the significance of combining being awesome and being game. However, the \"rock\" metaphor is apt here: People who rock are sturdy purveyors of the ethics of awesomeness, solid as rocks\u2014they are good at creating social openings and excellent at recognizing them and enthusiastically taking them up. But equally apt is the metaphor of a lead singer in a band. Lead singers rock _out_ but also often rock in the sense of being awesome. Bands thrive on their audience's reactions, which are in turn reactions to the band's performance and the enthusiasm of the lead singer. The front-person embodies this symbiosis: She sings to the audience, she reacts to their attention, she dances to encourage their appreciation and interest. She's awesome because she and the band are creating the social opening, and she rocks because she's game to absorb the audience's energy and respond in kind. The result is a dynamic sense of community. Such energy is exactly what Jeremy Fry captures when he pretends to rock out\u2014in _pretending_ to rock he _actually_ rocks _._\n\n**Motivation:** People who rock combine being awesome with being game. So if you're already practiced in being game, try to create more social openings. Or if you're already a social opener, consider the motivation for being game. Another source of motivation can come from envisioning the special kinds of community and connection that people who rock create. They tend to define the character of a crew, community, or culture.\n\n#### RULE\n\nTo rock is to be a kind of leader or keystone in the dynamics of awesomeness. But the metaphor of a leader is present in the ethics of awesomeness in yet another way. Awesome people are good at creating social openings, and people who _rule_ are really good at carrying them out in all their glory. They are the master overseers, the benevolent rulers of the social openings they create\u2014the dinner party emcee, the barbecue queen, the road trip realizer.\n\nRuling comes down to being good at envisioning, organizing, and overseeing extended social openings. This can be difficult because it can easily become self-promoting or preference dictating. For this reason, some people prefer to rule in a chill way, by combining their awesomeness with chillness. They want to create social openings and then let them breathe and live, while watching out, of course, for potential suckiness.\n\n**Motivation:** When was the last time you tried to create an extended and dynamic social opening? It is one thing to be awesome in everyday life\u2014in the caf\u00e9, workplace, or grocery store\u2014but it's also worth trying to be awesome in more complicated and involved ways. Sometimes we avoid trying because we're so busy or preoccupied, or because the planning can be overwhelming. But it's almost always worth it to plan for awesomeness.\n\n\u2022\n\nMost of us are a curious blend of these types of people. We have our moments of awesomeness and chillness. Sometimes we're game; sometimes we just suck. Healthy crews accommodate this by being dynamic\u2014they shift, grow, and morph, tapping into different sources of energy and forms of self-expression. They also rarely have a single leader, because when they do, they risk turning into structures of suckiness: a fake-ass person dragging everyone down, a braggart surrounded by people being polite, or a self-promoter surrounded by a bunch of tools. It's best for copersons to take turns leading the charge, which is why, even if you're normally a glorious beacon of awesomeness, it's important to practice being down, game, or chill.\n\nThis concludes our initial study of the nature and varieties of awesomeness and suckiness. The ethics of awesomeness centers around the model of the creative community builder and, through social openings, the forms of community she gives us the opportunity to take up, cultivate, and create for ourselves. There are many ways of taking up a social opening\u2014being down, up, game, or chill\u2014and there are many ways of opting out (for no good reason): being fake, an asshole, wack, or simply sucky. Finally, there are several ways of opting in, even in good faith, and falling short. The result is an elaborate structure of value, action, and interaction\u2014one that, if the arguments and images of this book are on the right track, is especially important to us.\n\nWith our theory in hand, we are in a position to inquire about the broader cultural significance of awesomeness. We can take a step back and think about _why_ we value being awesome and not sucking so much these days. Why do we care about awesomeness now? Why are we so upset by suckiness? What are the origins of awesome? And when did we start to care so much?\n\nThe answer is complicated and takes us back in time to the 1930s, to the political and cultural struggle for individual self-expression, its effects on American society and culture, and the contemporary desire for a new way of envisioning ourselves and our social lives.\n\n# Chapter 5\n\n# The Origins of Awesome\n\nWHY IS AWESOMENESS important to us now, in the early twenty-first century? Surely much has been achieved by sucky people, and apparently people engaged in awesomeness are as likely to be acting like Bon Jovi in a music video as they are to be running for office.\n\nThere is little doubt that the ideal of awesomeness has stolen our affection. Awesome sings, inspires, and sells. You can include this book among the creative outputs of awesome enthusiasm; it has been, in a way, a kind of love note to awesomeness. But this is a relatively new obsession. It's hard to imagine Jeremy Fry's shenanigans resonating in 1950, and Franklin D. Roosevelt could not have fist-bumped his way into power.\n\nIs this nascent love a good thing? Will it really deliver on what it seems to promise? What exactly _does_ awesomeness promise, in the broader scheme of things? Maybe it's just a new toy that we like to play with and not a genuine ideal or a serious way to live our lives.\n\n## The New Ideal\n\nIf we were to answer in the negative\u2014that awesomeness is not a serious or genuine ideal\u2014then at least from the perspective of the ethics of awesomeness, this book would suck about as much as a book can suck. We would have built up awesomeness only to smack it down. Technically, then, the book would be wack. I suppose that I, as the author of such a wack book, would suck too.\n\nBut maybe that's just the cost of philosophical insight. Socrates wasn't always the most pleasant guy to hang with, and you could say far worse about many other philosophers. And after all, being evaluated as sucky isn't the end of the world\u2014as good as it may be, awesomeness isn't the only dimension of value or the only ideal worth having. Our ideals grow, shift, and change; their significance is profound and crystal clear to us in one moment, flat and obscure at best in another.* Ideals shift and change not only at the individual level but also at the level of society and culture.\n\nBut the fact that ideals are like this is no reason to deny their importance, or to shy away from trying to articulate them, understand their origins, and evaluate their significance, especially when we're in the grip of one as compelling and seemingly urgent as awesomeness. This sense of urgency is something we must take seriously and try to understand clearly.\n\nSo why, in the entire history of human life, is this a prominent concern in our time and place? Why value awesomeness? Why would a culture care at all about the communities of individuals that awesomeness institutes?\n\nIf the question doesn't grip you, consider the astonishing fact suggested earlier by the story of Glenn Burke: It took our species, _Homo sapiens_ , until the 1970s to invent the high five. I find that almost unbelievable. Thousands of years, nearly the entire history of human interaction, of human strife and struggle\u2014a history of hardship and celebration, of love and friendship, of family and community, of serious challenge and soaring triumph\u2014and no high fives. Vigorous handshakes? Of course. Parades? Glorious ones. Pats on the back? Time and again. Hugs and kisses? So many! But no high fives. Why?\n\nTo answer this question, and to understand the origins and cultural significance of awesome, we have to go back to the 1930s, to the beginnings of a momentous struggle for individual self-expression\u2014one that opened a space for awesomeness to emerge.\n\n## Be Cool (or Not)\n\nIn the 1930s, the pursuit of individual self-expression began to have a shaping influence on American society and culture. We see this most clearly with the emergence and influence of \"cool\" as a powerful personal style\u2014a new way of cultivating and expressing one's individuality, and of emphasizing in appearance and demeanor the importance of doing so.\n\nAs many of us think of coolness, the quintessentially \"cool\" person maintains a comfortable distance, always around but never fully present or committed. He's committed instead to maintaining an air of social skepticism or projecting a sense that he sees through and stands above it all. Think of Marlon Brando in _The Wild One_ (1953), or Steve McQueen. Better yet, think of James Dean in _Rebel Without a Cause_ (1955), in which he plays Jim Stark, the rebel, the disaffected youth, the jobless teen in work boots. The rebel Stark has no real reason to be cool, to project an alluring air of skepticism and distance. As one film poster states, he is \"the bad boy from a good family.\" He is a rebel _without a cause_ , a bored suburbanite rebelling for the sake of rebelling. Brando, playing Johnny Strabler in _The Wild One_ , famously suggests he's attracted to the same kind of cause-free coolness. He is asked, \"Hey Johnny, what are you rebelling against?\" His reply: \"Whaddaya got?\"*\n\nIf these men really have no cause, then they have no reason to act like they're above or outside it all\u2014\"James Dean cool,\" as we might call it, can suck. The James Dean cool person might be\u2014or _seem_ to be\u2014down, but they risk being half-assers, self-promoters, or even thunder stealers; they might come to the party, so to speak, but they stay at a cool distance from it, only half-committing, projecting an air of superiority or the promise of something better\u2014and for no real reason at all.\n\nIt's interesting that the people we associate with James Dean cool are often white men: We might also include Humphrey Bogart, Jack Kerouac, and Frank Sinatra. Some women might seem to resonate with something like James Dean cool\u2014Janis Joplin (especially in the early 1960s), Edie Sedgwick, and Billie Holiday\u2014but it would be misleading. There's a good reason for this: You can't be a rebel without a cause unless you're really without cause, and if you were anything other than a straight white man in the 1950s\u2014if you were black, or a woman, or gay, or trans\u2014then you had many a reason to rebel.\n\nOf course, white men did have causes that a social affectation of distance and allure could address. Coolness could express resilience in the face of pressure to conform to an increasingly bland culture that compelled everyone to fit the mainstream corporate mold.* A pressure so acute, Norman Mailer thought, that \"One could hardly maintain the courage to be individual, to speak with one's own voice.\"* When he is asked, \"Hey Johnny, what are you rebelling against?\" Strabler might have replied: \"Well, frankly, I'm rebelling against the idea that my individual and creative thinking is inferior to conformist, business-friendly, collective decision making. That's why I make an effort to resist, to not conform, even in like-minded and generally affable social situations. Cheers!\"\n\nWhat it means to be cool has evolved over the decades. Another meaning, prominent in the 1980s and still with us today, applies to people who are aware of what is mainstream and popular and resist it by engaging with culture that is less easily digestible, more challenging, or more socially and politically aware. Cool people and cool things in this sense don't fit into mainstream culture and don't even try. Uncool people, in contrast, are either blithely unaware of what is or isn't mainstream\u2014they aren't in the know\u2014or they are enthusiastic mainstream (\"basic\") cultural agents. Cool people in this context are rebels with an anticorporate or at least anti-mainstream cause.\n\nThis anti-mainstream sense of _cool_ is still with us, but these days the term can even mean the exact opposite. The \"cool\" thing is the current fad, the collectively recognized fun thing to do\u2014the thing to selfie with or Instagram.* William Finnegan captures this in his Pulitzer Prize\u2013winning memoir, _Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life_ , when he writes about how cool surfing has become: \"Surfers hope bleakly that surfing will one day become, like rollerblading, uncool. Then, perhaps, millions of kooks inexperienced surfers] will quit and leave the waves to the die-hards. But the corporations selling the idea of surfing are determined, of course, to 'grow the sport.' Some underground panache may be useful for marketing, but really, the more mainstream the merrier.\"[*\n\nThe fact that _cool_ can simultaneously mean one thing and its very opposite suggests that we have lost our hold on its significance.* So what exactly did we lose our grip on? Where did _cool_ come from, anyway? And why did we care about it so much that it became deeply embedded in and ultimately distorted by our social and economic culture?\n\nA look at its origins shows that _cool_ is more complicated than even this\u2014and far more awesome. The true descendant of the original _cool_ is neither James Dean cool, anti-mainstream cool, nor mainstream cool. _Awesome_ is its rightful heir.\n\n## Lester Young\n\nCool began as a rebellion with a very serious cause. Lester \"Prez\" Young, the revered and exceptionally original American jazz saxophonist of the mid-twentieth century, is the true inventor of cool.* He performed in a racist era, when whites imposed racist norms on black performers\u2014actors, comedians, musicians, and others. They were expected to always smile on stage, entertain, and generally be jovial and accepting of whatever their white audience wanted. In addition to their immoral oppression, whites were essentially forcing black performers into fake-assery, and the performers were getting fed up with it.\n\nLester Young resisted this Uncle Tom culture in part by adopting a detached and mellow style and signaling his intention to not observe the \"rules.\" Onstage he played tilting his saxophone sideways, soloing at a nearly 45-degree angle, turned away from the audience. He often wore sunglasses while performing, so that the audience couldn't discern his facial expression. His cool stage presence effectively shifted the focus of the performance from the Uncle Tom goal of pleasing the audience to the music-centered goal of playing excellent original jazz and directing the audience to pay sympathetic attention.\n\nYoung's coolness extended beyond the stage to become an all-encompassing personal style, as original as it was alluring. He adopted an almost indecipherable slang, including the word _cool_ , that made his speech as difficult to understand as it was mysteriously attractive. As cultural historian and Tulane University English professor Joel Dinerstein writes, \"Young's whole life was self-consciously dedicated to being original\u2014in his music, in his mannerisms, in his style of detachment\u2014as if being original was the vital force of human life itself.\"* His individual self-expression was so original and appealing that other people\u2014actors, suburban youth, people without a cause, and even many jazz musicians\u2014could not help but adopt it for themselves.*\n\nLester Young's cool style can be understood only in the context of his ideal of a better social and artistic culture. He cultivated a stylistic strategy to counter racist, immoral, and sucky norms that affected his artistic community. This was a strategy meant to generate interpersonal norms that would bolster that community's ability to express itself personally and artistically and be appreciated for the individuals they were. Once we appreciate this feature of Young's cool style, we can appreciate its connection to awesomeness. His style was very different from a social affectation of distance and allure adopted for its own sake by suburban youth and movie stars. Young's cool was creative community building of the most stylish and awesome order.\n\nThe awesomeness of Lester Young's cool is not only reflected in his personal style. It also shines through his artistic style, in what jazz legend Dizzy Gillespie called his \"cool, flowing style\" of playing the saxophone. The subdued, cool texture drew the listener into Young's melodic universe. As B. B. King notes: \"Prez invented cool. Rather than state a melody, he suggested it. He barely breathed into his horn, creating an intimacy that gave me chills.\"* Young's coolness, reflected in his musical style, created an awesome intimacy\u2014a kind of inviting, musical social opening. His whole style, then, both as a person _and_ as an artist, was awesome.*\n\nYoung's awesome coolness was cultivated and flourished in the context of Count Basie's band\u2014an especially fertile context for awesomeness. As Joel Dinerstein writes, \"The implicit challenge of playing in Basie's band was to maintain one's _individuality_ in the face of a powerful _collective_ rhythmic drive. Here then is the first contribution of big-band swing to African American cool: a cultural form that publicly displayed _the fight for individual self-expression within a larger unit_.\"*\n\nThe interpersonal dynamics of a big band\u2014indeed, of many bands\u2014incorporate a significant tension between individuality and community. You have to be yourself and play your instrument, but you also have to integrate into the larger whole. If you're too much of an individual, then you ruin the music\u2014your solos don't mesh; your rhythm is off. But if you're too willing to blend in, then you fade away\u2014your solos don't inspire; your rhythm doesn't rev the engine and drive things forward. But when everyone in the band is doing this well\u2014when each member is being an individual in and for a community\u2014the tension is resolved into something beautiful: the musical, communal expression of the mutual appreciation of individuality.\n\nThis is the beauty that Lester Young's cool cultivated and that awesomeness promises.\n\n## Individuality and Community: A Tension\n\nIt is no coincidence that the high five emerged shortly after American society, with the hard work, daring, and genius of people like Lester Young, E. D. Nixon, Rosa Parks, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Gloria Steinem, Frank Kameny, and many others, began a seismic shift in American culture\u2014a shift we have yet to fully process and socially realize.\n\nIn the mid- to late twentieth century there was a dramatic upheaval of laws, codes of formality, and social norms and roles that radically changed and continue to change the way we interact. The civil rights movement, women's liberation, the sexual revolution, LGBT progress, and radical changes in artistic culture, among other things, dramatically altered our lives from the ground up\u2014from how we publicly behave and interact to who we can aspire to be and be with.\n\nMany of those laws and norms were morally atrocious. Racist, repressive, sexist, homophobic\u2014they were (and are) oppressive and unjust, and there was a profound moral imperative to change them. But there was another important factor motivating this cultural revolution: Those social norms, exclusionary laws, and codes of formality severely restricted the forms of individuality and expression available even to those who benefited from them the most (middle- to upper-class straight cis white men). The desire to fully and freely develop and express our individuality began to inform our culture at the deepest levels.\n\nWe see this in the emergence of the awesome coolness developed and cultivated by black musicians who fought against sucky fake-assery and for the free expression of individual style. But they weren't the only people who rightly felt that mainstream American culture smothered their humanity by denying them freedom of individual expression. We can't forget women who couldn't follow their wildest\u2014or even basic\u2014dreams, who were expected to stay at home cleaning, cooking, and child-rearing; gay men and women who couldn't pursue their romantic desires, who were forced to hide in the shadows; all who felt oppressed by society's expectation that they marry early and remain monogamous, who couldn't freely express and explore their sexuality; people everywhere who shuddered at the thought of mainstream American life\u2014high school, college, marriage, career, suburban house, children, and so on\u2014and who dreamed of something else, who were pressured to stifle those dreams and toe the line; people who, more generally, could not accept the forms of authority, the rigid expectations, the circumscribed and monolithic communities . . . unfortunately, I could easily go on. These people yearned, with justice on their side and awesomeness in view, for a more open, creative, accepting, and appreciative culture.\n\nWith the cultural and political revolutions of the 1960s, the desire to fully express ourselves and develop our individuality in all its glory started to have a shaping influence on society. Although we are still deep in the process of making it happen,* the complete downfall of oppressive norms, codes, and forms of community would mean that society is open to people being gay or straight, man or woman, religious or atheist\u2014we could be rockers, entrepreneurs, rappers, preachers, punks, hippies, philosophers, skaters, or some strange or exciting combination of these. We could try to be anything our individual ideals could dream up. We could act like Bon Jovi at halftime and get a crew of strangers to play around with us; we could rectify the awesomeness of public space through art, or don a superhero costume in daily life.\n\nBut those social norms, laws, traditions of community, and codes of formality established a range of connections and forms of culture that glued large swaths of society together and satisfied our profound need for community, at least for those privileged enough to be included. The fight for individual expression, along with other economic and political changes, weakened long-standing bonds of community. Beginning in the 1960s, neighborhood and family ties loosened, local associations disbanded, church attendance declined, political participation waned, and ties of social and economic class weakened.* These ties were difficult to repair in the following years, as steady work became harder to find when corporations became more powerful and spread themselves across the United States and the globe. Increased travel, more short-term work, and a widening gap between rich and poor put further strains on American social ties.\n\nThe result of these cultural, economic, and political shifts is a progressively relaxed, dynamic, open, and accommodating social and civic environment. But it's an environment that obscures and even destroys many of the underlying commonalities, traditions, and compatible lives and values that, when expressed and appreciated, satisfied our need for community. And although many of those old forms of community needed to be replaced with something fair, just, and engaging, we are still struggling to find the right way to do that.\n\nThis tension between individuality and community cuts to the heart of a more general difficulty faced by any conception of a society worth hoping for. We love exploring and cultivating our individuality and expressing ourselves. We want to distinguish ourselves, explore, develop, and display our values and talents, flaunt our style; we want to create and cultivate our own sense of a life worth living and express ourselves in the process of living that life. We aren't built to strictly follow predetermined social roles, do whatever someone else tells us we should do, float our lives down the mainstream, or always bend to the general will. We want to explore, cultivate, and express our individuality.\n\nBut at the same time we want to feel that we are part of a _community_ of people. We want to connect with others, be appreciated for who we are, and feel at home in our appreciation of others. Our desire to cultivate and express ourselves is at least as important as our desire to be part of a community\u2014to cultivate that sense of social joy, that intimacy and rapport we feel when we connect and appreciate.\n\nIn short, we want to love ourselves _and_ our neighbors; we want to stand out but stand _together_.\n\nThese two desires are fundamental in our lives, but they naturally conflict. Social and political theorist Emma Goldman appreciated this problem as early as 1911: \"The problem that confronts us today, and which the nearest future is to solve, is how to be one's self and yet in oneness with others, to feel deeply with all human beings and still retain one's own characteristic qualities.\"*\n\nIt is important to appreciate this problem in depth and detail, and we can do so by using the resources we developed in the previous chapter. If you're too eager to be an individual, too focused on standing out and expressing yourself, then you risk being unintelligible to, or alienated from, the wider culture\u2014you risk coming off as a vile self-promoter, \"cool\" thunder stealer, fake-ass person, wack, or simply sucky. And if you're too eager to belong, too deferential to the wider community, too willing to adopt its values and go with the mainstream flow, then you risk being overlooked or uninteresting\u2014you risk coming off as basic, douchey, toolish, or a bore.\n\nNotice that this conflict or tension is not the more familiar one between our free pursuit of individual expression and our responsibility to our community. We know we can't just do whatever we want\u2014 _We live in a society!\u2014_ and we must take into everyday account the fact that we are one among many. Nor does it concern the issue of whether the individual or the community is the more fundamental unit of political significance. Rather, this is a tension or conflict within our conception of freedom, within our sense of what a good life is in a free society. It is a real struggle to strike a balance between cultivating our individuality and being part of a community\u2014a struggle that we can easily lose, ending up disaffected, bored, or hopeless.\n\nOr worse. Various distortions of self and community can be diagnosed as resulting from this tension, from relatively mild douchebaggery to hate groups, cults, and narcissism. Hate groups create a wack individuality and perverse sense of belonging by collectively mutilating their ability to appreciate individuals. Cult members and religious fanatics find community through _group_ individuality, but at the cost of their own personal individuality (and, arguably, real community). Narcissists and certain eccentrics alienate themselves from any desire for community by inflating the importance of their individuality. We recognize these groups and individuals as aberrations because they don't sit well in a flourishing free society, in part because they fail to really resolve the tension between the pursuit of individuality and the pursuit community that informs an important conception of a meaningful life.\n\nAnd, it is crucial to note, this tension exists at the larger level of social and political organization. A society that promotes too much individuality is at risk of lacking a substantial and satisfying sense of community, while one that promotes too much commonality or conformity risks being a community of bores, killjoys, or fake-ass people. Or worse. Fascists deal with the tension by eschewing individualism and, through a blend of violence, false charm, propaganda, and coercion, forcing everyone to share the state-approved values and attitudes.\n\nA good society must find a way to resolve this tension, while respecting the legitimacy of both values and not excluding or diminishing people because of their race, sex, abilities, gender, or sexual preferences\u2014that is, not excluding or diminishing individuals in pursuit of individuality. This truth at the level of social organization also holds at the level of individual aspiration: We must cultivate our individuality in a way that complements our sense of community and vice versa.\n\n## Individuality and Community: A Resolution\n\nWhat if a value we all loved, an ideal we all shared\u2014one that brought us together in pursuit of a society-shaping blend of individuality and community\u2014were awesomeness?\n\nAwesome people combine the rebel spirit with the quest for community. The sense of \"community\" here is, again, that of a community of individuals, or people who appreciate one another _as_ individuals\u2014either as concrete individuals with cultivated values and tastes or as pure individuals in their capacity to play, explore, and express. Awesome people are excellent at finding creative ways to institute this kind of community, not by convincing us to share the same values\u2014we don't all have to be mainstream, Christian, straight, or highly educated; we don't even have to have worked out what our concrete values are\u2014but by encouraging us to express ourselves and appreciate one another through creative community building.\n\nA promising hypothesis, then, is that we see in awesomeness a new sense of style, a new and necessary way of thinking about ourselves and what matters to us\u2014one that seeks to reconcile our desires for community and individuality by redrawing what it means to have a community and be an individual. Restricting community to the sharing of mainstream values doesn't work for a free and diverse society, and our individuality is not something we find sitting there when we introspect\u2014it's something we need to explore, cultivate, refine, and express with others. We need a new ideal or plan for thinking about ourselves, and being awesome is this plan.\n\nOur love of awesomeness emerged from our collective exploration and slow discovery of ways of bringing community and connection back into our increasingly self-expressive, individualistic culture. We identify with awesomeness because it promises to reconcile these values in a way that actually promotes a kind of individualism without threatening\u2014indeed while creating\u2014community. Awesomeness envisions no conflict between individuality and community; it promises to institute a long-sought sociocultural arrangement in which the cost of community is not the loss of individuality, and our pursuit of individuality is not only compatible with but also essential to a new kind of community.\n\n## Awesome Style\n\nStyle and awesomeness go hand in hand. That might not be very surprising given our discussion so far, but there's also a simple argument for it: Roughly, style is the art of expressing your individuality. Awesomeness requires the mutual appreciation of individuality. And if your individuality is to be appreciated, then it must be expressed. Therefore, style is essential to awesomeness.\n\nBut awesome style requires care, lest we be wack, basic, self-promoters, or simply sucky. To understand what _awesome style_ is, we first need to know what style is.\n\nSimple philosophical reflection on style reveals it to be confusing. A person's style, we often think, is his way of doing things\u2014the way he dresses, talks, sits, and walks. But at the same time we tend to think that not everyone has style\u2014that having style is rare, or at least challenging; it is something we have to work at to achieve. But notice that if style is just your way of doing things, then everyone has some style or other because everyone has a way of doing things. So why do we also think that only some people have style, that it's something to work at and achieve? Either only some people have style or everyone has style\u2014we can't have it both ways.\n\nThere is also some confusion about how we value or admire style. On the one hand, we tend to think that pursuing style is trivial or frivolous\u2014that there are far better things to do with our time and energy. When Mark Zuckerberg was asked about his apparent lack of style, why he simply wears the same gray shirt and jeans nearly every day, he echoed this opinion: \"I feel like I'm not doing my job if I spend any of my energy on things that are silly or frivolous about my life.\"* On the other hand, though, we admire people who we think have style. They can dazzle us, amaze us, and send us into a frenzy of inspiration. People with style\u2014Lester Young, Sara and Gerald Murphy, Josephine Baker, Yves Saint Laurent, David Bowie, Patti Smith, Beyonc\u00e9, Cate Blanchett, Michelle Obama, and many others\u2014can even help form our personal ideals, giving our lives meaning and direction. So is style trivial and unimportant or is it dazzling, meaningful, and important? It is either trivial and unimportant or admirable and meaningful\u2014we can't have it both ways.\n\nSome philosophers and art historians have tried to understand style as the expression of personality.* But this doesn't help our confusion. We all have a personality and we all effortlessly\u2014indeed inescapably and unreflectively\u2014express our personalities in nearly everything we do. If style is the expression of personality, then it would seem to be easy and of little interest. So what is so great about style when it captivates, inspires, and enthralls?\n\nIt's more illuminating to think of style as the expression of our _personal ideals_ \u2014not simply the personality each person has but the individual he or she aspires to be.* Our ideals articulate our admirable qualities and aspirations, so this view sees style as bound up with imagination. This helps us understand why we think style is an achievement\u2014it's not easy to really embody our ideals; it's something we must work at and strive for. It also helps us make sense of why we might idealize people who have achieved great style. People whose style we admire are beautifully expressing ideals that we ourselves might identify with and aspire to.\n\nNow that we have a better understanding of style, what is it to have _awesome_ style?\n\n\u2022\n\nLet us hark back, if we can, to some of the first intimations of awesomeness in the writings of the great early theorist of modern life: Charles Baudelaire (1821\u20131867), the infamous French poet, translator (of Edgar Allan Poe), and critic of art, fashion, and culture. Baudelaire was born just as a new era in Western culture was emerging. Kings and queens were losing power, along with the social order their reigns had instituted. The industrial revolution had just transformed Europe socially and economically, and a historic series of democratic milestones was sweeping the west. He saw the aftermath of the founding of the United States of America and the first French Revolution, he lived during the 1848 French Revolution and the passing of the United Kingdom's Slavery Abolition Act, and he witnessed the rise of democracy in Denmark and the Netherlands. As people flooded into cities in search of work, a new working class ballooned along with an increasingly diverse middle class. A new modern era was born\u2014one that was less regal, authoritarian, and rigid and far more democratic and individualistic. Baudelaire was living in and writing about Paris as it anchored this change.*\n\nBaudelaire thought there was a certain potential for beauty in this new life, a new beauty that one could create for oneself and find reflected in people's dress and demeanor: \"The idea of beauty which man creates for himself imprints itself on his whole attire, crumples or stiffens his dress, rounds off or squares his gesture, and in the long run even ends by subtly penetrating the very features of his face. Man ends by looking like his ideal self.\"*\n\nIn other words, there is a certain _style_ of the modern individual\u2014one that expresses the new era's special sense of beauty. Baudelaire sought to uncover this sense of beauty; he sought \"to discover whether we possess a specific beauty, intrinsic to our new emotions.\"*\n\nWhat exactly is that style, that specific beauty? Baudelaire praised Constantin Guys, a Dutch-born war reporter, watercolor painter, and illustrator who Baudelaire thought captured this style perfectly. Guys found a special beauty and joy in the fractured hustle of modern life. He felt connected to the public\u2014and to life in public\u2014and he expressed this sense of beauty in his paintings and illustrations as well as in his everyday life.\n\nGuys had a special capacity for curiosity among and joy in diverse people. He saw the throngs of public life with creative and childlike eyes\u2014as a beautiful expression of humanity that electrifies. He thought poorly of anyone who was simply bored by others: \". . . any man who is not weighed down with a sorrow so searching as to touch all his faculties, and who is bored in the heart of the multitude, is a fool! a fool! and I despise him!\"*\n\nIn other (less French) words, such a person sucks. Guys hated \"blas\u00e9\" people, like those dandies who share with him \"a quintessence of character and a subtle understanding of all the moral mechanisms of this world\" but who mask it behind an aspiration to \"cold detachment\"* (or sucky coolness).\n\nGuys, in contrast, is a \"lover of life,\" a kind of \"man child\" with a \"childlike perceptiveness\"\u2014he is \"a genius for which no aspect of life has become _stale_.\"* This childlike genius approaches the crowd of humanity with creative eyes: \"The lover of life makes the whole world his family. . . . Thus the lover of universal life enters into the crowd as though it were an immense reservoir of electrical energy. Or we might liken him to a mirror as vast as the crowd itself; or to a kaleidoscope gifted with consciousness, responding to each one of its movements and reproducing the multiplicity of life and the flickering face of all the elements of life. He is an 'I' with an insatiable appetite for the 'non-I.'\"*\n\nIn other (less French) words, he is an individual who has a creative hunger for the community of individuals. In expressing this hunger in his art and his own life, he becomes an individual, an \"I,\" whose defining ideal is to engage others with a joyful and creative spirit. In still other (less French) words: His style is awesome.\n\nAwesome style, then, is style that projects an \"I\" with a yearning for the \"non-I.\" Or, to adopt a phrase from philosopher John Dewey, it is style through which we cultivate our own gardens, but without a fence\u2014gardens that are inseparable from the world, open to others, that attract and invite others to engage and appreciate.* Awesome style embodies the ability to cultivate individuality within a \"collective rhythmic drive\"\u2014within, indeed _for_ , the life and culture of individuals in pursuit of individuality. It is style whose central ideal is awesomeness, style that expresses the ideal of being awesome, or style keyed for community.\n\n\u2022\n\nOf course, it took more time and much more political and cultural change for people with awesome style to really capture our collective imagination. Our hypothesis is that our love of awesomeness is a love for a style that promises a culturally important twist on and blend of individuality and community\u2014a style that did not begin to flourish until (roughly) after the cultural revolutions of the 1960s, when our legitimate demand for individual expression merged and clashed with our deep desire for community.\n\nIf this hypothesis is on the right track, then we should be able to find forms of culture that emerged or flourished after the 1960s and that, in one way or another, embody the ethics of awesomeness. We should be able to locate not only individual awesome actions\u2014which of course we have done\u2014but larger cultural forms and movements that embody or reflect this new ethos.\n\n# Chapter 6\n\n# Awesome Culture\n\nTHE CONCEPT OF \"culture\" is vague and confusing. It seems to include everything from what we eat and how we talk to how we build cities and structure government. It was _The Merriam-Webster Dictionary_ 's \"word of the year\" in 2014 because it saw the biggest jump in searches that year. And to add to the muddle, we have pop culture, celebrity culture, consumer culture, car culture, start-up culture, and hookup culture, among many other \"cultures\" that occupy our attention.\n\nIn its broadest sense, _culture_ refers to the customs, attitudes, and ways of life of a group of people. We might be interested in various \"cultures\" in this sense because they are novel, exciting, sordid, or just so different from our own. But a more specific sense of the word concerns the ways we spend our time\u2014the activities we pursue and things we create\u2014when we aren't too hungry, oppressed, jobless, and stressed, or weakened by violence or war. Culture in this sense interests us because it is what we seek when we have the time and peace of mind to cultivate our individuality, explore the city, wander into the museum, volunteer at the clinic or shelter, pick up a book, meet up with a friend, or buy a ticket to the basketball game.\n\nIn this second sense, culture is something we seek and create to occupy our \"free\" time in pursuit of personal and social enrichment. Through culture in this context we amplify our individual and collective quality of life. This is the proper domain of awesomeness, the place where the ethics of awesomeness can fully take hold and really thrive. To appreciate the broader cultural currents of emerging awesomeness, we will have to look at how people use their free time and extra resources to create and engage in such life-enhancing pursuits.\n\nOur case will be strongest if we focus on how the ethos of awesome is affecting _central_ or _paradigmatic_ kinds of cultural activity. To this end, we will look at forms of altruism (how we use our free time and resources to help others), athleticism (how we use our time for fun and recreation), civic life (how we freely engage and interact in public space), and art (how we create and appreciate it).\n\nAwesome culture is primarily a culture of social creativity in action, in which the creative sociality centrally involves the cultivation, exploration, and appreciation of individuality. Such activity embodies the ethics of awesomeness by emphasizing creative community building, the cultivation of awesome style, and the mutual appreciation of individuality.\n\n## Altruism\n\nYale University's endowment is well over $20 billion; Harvard University's is $36 billion (with $43 billion in total wealth). To put that in perspective, the combined wealth of these small private universities rivals the GDP of the Dominican Republic, and each far outweighs the $4 billion endowment of the public University of California, Berkeley, which enrolls nearly ten thousand more students than Harvard and Yale combined. If there are any universities in the history of the universe that have needed money least, it's these two.\n\nYet in 2013, Yale received its largest gift ever\u2014$250 million from Charles B. Johnson, the businessman and enthusiastic Republican donor. Two years later, Harvard topped that when its School of Engineering and Applied Sciences received a $400 million gift from hedge fund manager John A. Paulson, who made $15 billion using credit default swaps to bet against the US subprime mortgage lending market. Following the donation, the engineering school was renamed the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. Paulson also received a tax break of nearly $200 million.*\n\nSuch charity might inspire a certain flavor of amazement, but it is hardly awesome, especially when compared with, to take an obvious example, the Awesome Foundation\u2014\"a global community advancing the interest of awesome in the universe, $1,000 at a time.\"* Members of the Awesome Foundation are self-described \"guerrilla philanthropists\" who give out no-strings-attached microgrants to artists, innovators, activists, organizers\u2014anyone who wants to do something awesome. Each chapter consists of a board of trustees who donate a hundred dollars of their own money each month. The trustees survey various proposals and give as many grants as they can to the most awesome projects.\n\nSo what do they mean by \"awesome\"? Their take on awesomeness is strikingly similar to the theory developed here: \"Awesome projects . . . tend to challenge and expand our understanding of our individual and communal potentials. They bring communities together, casting aside social inhibitions and boundaries for a moment. They spark an instant of joy and delight and inspire a long-term hope for a more Awesome future.\"*\n\nThe first Awesome Foundation project, funded in Boston in 2009, involved making a gigantic multicolored hammock for everyone to enjoy in a public park. As of 2015, dozens of autonomous Awesome Foundation chapters have sprung up around the world, including ones in Paris, Nairobi, Moscow, Yerevan, Dubai, Lusaka, and all over the United States and Canada. And they fund a range of projects, including converting old buses into showers for the homeless, making widely distributable fuel from wood-charcoal waste, creating community murals, and designing \"pop-up experiences\" like the reenactment of the famous boulder escape scene from the Indiana Jones film _Raiders of the Lost Ark_ in downtown Washington, DC.\n\nWhile acknowledging that both forms of giving deliver benefits and embody values, it is important to be clear about their differences. The first is an ostentatious display that benefits a group that is least in need of benefit and shows off the wealth of the donor. It is arguably a self-promoting display of individual excellence, which is to say it sucks. However, that's not to say that it is entirely bad. It doesn't take deep insight to see that there are _some_ good things about giving lots and lots of money to people who already have lots and lots of money\u2014for one thing, they get lots and lots of money. But as a self-promoting display it also sucks.\n\nThe second form of giving shows us how to be altruistically awesome. It is modest and innovative, and focuses on creative community-building efforts. It might not be the all-things-considered absolute best way to use money for good\u2014if such can be reasonably determined\u2014but the world is decidedly more awesome with giant colorful public hammocks, community murals, and pop-up fun.\n\nA more focused effort in awesome giving is Ron Finley's guerrilla gardening, which began in 2010. Finley was overwhelmed by the health problems he observed in his community in South Central Los Angeles. He noticed that he had far better access to fast food than to decent produce, and this was taking a toll on the health of South Central residents. When he noticed all the neglected city land in the neighborhood, he decided to \"get gangsta\" with his shovel. He planted seeds in an unused strip of land near his home and grew a vibrant community garden, giving neighbors access to fresh and healthy fruits, vegetables, and seeds\u2014sunflowers, kale, pomegranates\u2014and the opportunity to explore a wider variety of food options. His efforts, along with similar projects in other states and countries, have inspired others to literally grow a better, healthier community by transforming neglected land into fresh, free produce.\n\nFinley thinks of this effort in terms of art:\n\nI'm an artist. Gardening is my graffiti. I grow my art. Just like a graffiti artist\u2014where they beautify walls. Me: I beautify lines, parkways; I use the garden, the soil, like it's a piece of cloth. And the plants and the trees\u2014that's my embellishment for that cloth. You'd be surprised what the soil can do if you let it be your canvas; you just couldn't imagine how amazing a sunflower is and how it affects people. So what happened? I have witnessed my garden become a tool for the education, a tool for the transformation of my neighborhood. To change the community, you have to change the composition of the soil. We are the soil.*\n\nFinley's community-building altruism invites his neighbors to be up, game, and chill\u2014awesome qualities that the city's Bureau of Street Services severely lacked when they gave him a citation and told him to remove his \"overgrown vegetation\" or pay four hundred dollars. Finley refused and a warrant was issued for his arrest.\n\nMy first thought was: _Bring it_. It's a stupid, antiquated law that needs to be changed. There was no healthy food in the neighborhood\u2014and those parkways were the only land where people could grow food. Plus no one was being cited for the discarded old toilets, couches and used condoms on the street\u2014but I got a citation for bringing nature, beauty, pride, art, and a sense of peace and calm to the neighborhood. It just made no sense.*\n\nFinley's defiance ultimately changed the law. The warrant was suspended after the _Los Angeles Times_ reported on the case and a supportive petition was formed. In 2013, the city changed the law, making it legal to cultivate a garden in a city-owned parkway.\n\nMexican artist Pedro Reyes takes the \"get gangsta with your shovel\" motto to another level. In his ongoing project Palas por Pistolas (Shovels for Guns), which began in 2008, Reyes collected 1,527 guns from the violence-ridden town of Culiac\u00e1n in western Mexico\u2014one of the deadliest cities in the world. In collaboration with the botanical garden of Culiac\u00e1n, Reyes arranged a program in which residents could exchange their guns for coupons that they could use to purchase home goods in local stores. The guns were then steamrolled, melted, and shaped into 1,527 shovels. These shovels are being given to arts institutions and public schools to plant 1,527 trees around the world.\n\n## Athleticism\n\nThe difference between actions and activities that focus on individual excellence\u2014often at the expense of awesomeness\u2014and those that focus on creative community building is important, and we can also see it in different forms of athletic activity.\n\nRoughly since the 1960s new forms of awesome athletics\u2014street skating (Rollerblading and skateboarding), BMX, breaking (or break dancing), certain forms of snowboarding and skiing, parkour, and others\u2014have emerged. Obviously people do awe-inspiring things on skateboards, Rollerblades, skis, and snowboards\u2014triple backflips, massive rail grinds, technical switch-ups, or giant switch quadruple underflip 1620s. But what makes these athletic pursuits \"awesome\" in our new sense?\n\nTo illustrate the difference between awesome athletics and non-awesome athletics, consider the difference between swimming (great but not awesome) and street skating (awesome). Most of us are familiar with the athletics of swimming. Individuals compete against one another in a small set of highly rule-governed matches. The International Swimming Federation (FINA) defines the rules for four primary styles: breaststroke, backstroke, butterfly, and freestyle (which defaults to front crawl, the fastest style). Swimmers, usually individuals but also teams and relay groups, train and compete to achieve the fastest times swimming in these styles. The results can be breathtaking, amazing, inspiring\u2014individual swimmers can certainly be awesome. But on the whole the athletics of swimming are not governed by the ethics of awesomeness. The rules of swimming are very strict, the guidelines are absolutely clear, and nearly all creative or expressive deviations are strongly discouraged. Swimming is an especially vivid example here because the viewer can hardly see the individual athlete in the midst of so much splashing.\n\nWe tend to be less familiar with the athletics of street skating in its classical form. Or if we are familiar with it, we have a somewhat distorted view from focusing too much on televised spectacles, often competitions like the ESPN X Games. At its heart, street skating\u2014and here I include the criminally underappreciated and \"uncool\" sport of inline skating\u2014is very different from swimming. The basic form of street skating involves a group of skaters who venture out into the city or suburban streets to various skate spots, often in search of something new\u2014a new handrail to grind, a novel gap or stair set to jump, an unfamiliar ledge or curb to break in. Skaters seek to develop their talents and skills at these skate spots in a mutually appreciative environment of other skaters who (usually) know and encourage each other. One skater might be trying to invent a new trick; another might be trying to master a certain grind or board trick; a third might be trying to spin as she jumps down a set of stairs. Other skaters recognize these efforts and celebrate when the skater achieves her goal, which might take many, many tries and more than a few scrapes and bruises. The same celebratory, appreciative spirit is returned when the next skater lands his trick. The grand aim of all of this is the development of the skater's individual style and talent in a community of mutually appreciative and encouraging skaters. As a result, a premium is placed on innovation, creativity, and boldness to the near complete detriment of rule following\u2014indeed, the only \"rules\" are those set by the physical limits of the board or blade and the imaginative limits of the skater. The grand aim is, in other words, awesomeness\u2014the cultivation, expression, and appreciation of individuality in an active community of skaters.\n\nWhen it comes to awesomeness, there are three salient differences between sports like swimming and those like street skating, and these differences track radically different approaches to human athletic activity.\n\nThe first difference concerns whether there is an emphasis on the cultivation of _individual style_ or an emphasis on _competition_. These are not mutually exclusive. Some skaters have a competitive spirit, but competition\u2014determining who is the best, the winner, the reigning champion\u2014is not an essential element of the athletic activity. In fact, when it comes to skating, competitions rarely capture what is best about the sport and often force skaters into alien styles and awkward terrain.\n\nIt is fascinating that one of the most legendary moments in skate competition history was arguably not even part of a competition. At the 1999 ESPN X Games Tony Hawk was competing in the contest for best trick on a half-pipe (or \"vert\" ramp), along with fellow vert legends Andy Macdonald, Bob Burnquist, Bucky Lasek, and Neal Hendrix. Hawk decided that he was going to abandon the rules of competition and do whatever it took to land the elusive 900 (two and a half midair rotations)\u2014a trick no one had landed and only few had even dared attempt. The other competitors knew what was at stake and encouraged him, cheering him on in a collective effort\u2014pounding their skateboards on the coping, patting Hawk's back and helmet, and assuring him that he could do it.\n\nAfter a series of falls, Hawk landed the 900 crouched but rolling, and there was a massive collective celebration. As he put it, \"There has just been a general push for that trick to be done, and when someone does it, like, there's sort of a collective rejoicing.\"* Hawk's focus here is not exclusively on himself but on himself _as a skateboarder_ , where being a skateboarder isn't just empty group cohesion but being a member of a coperson community. Landing the 900 was as much an achievement for skateboarding as it was for Hawk himself. That's because skating at its core is not about being the very best or collecting personal trophies and accolades. It's about style, creativity, and innovation. As Hawk puts it, his priorities do not lie in being a great competitor; his priority \"has always been to be progressive. If I'm remembered as being progressive or as someone who broke limits\u2014that's how I'd rather approach it.\"*\n\nThe second, related difference between sports like swimming and those like skating concerns whether there is an emphasis on the _mutual_ _appreciation of individuality_ or on _reverence for individual excellence_. Again, these are not mutually exclusive, but while both swimming and skating involve both of these things, they emphasize them in very different ways. Swimming is, in a sense, all about individual excellence. The whole point is to be the very best\u2014to get the best time, set the record, garner the trophies and medals. Those who set the records are recognized as the definitive best. But most skaters don't really care about being the \"absolute best\"\u2014whatever that would mean\u2014when the emphasis is on style and community. This isn't to say that certain skaters are never regarded as standouts. There are obvious choices: Tony Hawk, Mark Gonzales, Rodney Mullen, Jon Julio, Alex Broskow, and Chris Haffey. But even the standouts are in a sense a matter of taste. Alex Broskow isn't among the best inline skaters of all time because he has a lot of sponsors, definitively holds some world record, or won a bunch of gold medals on TV. He's among the best because of his nearly perfect style, his grasp of a wide range of very difficult tricks, his innovative boldness, his insightful ability to find good skate spots, the arc of his career from his early days full of giant hammers (big, risky tricks) to the sheer precision and beauty of his later switch-ups, wheelies, and rails\u2014the list could easily go on, and we could come up with equally impressive, though very different lists for Gonzales, Mullen, and Haffey. Whereas a great swimmer is like an amazingly refined machine, a great skater is like a stunning and dynamic work of art.\n\nThe third difference concerns whether there is an emphasis on _creativity and innovation_ or an emphasis on _rule-following_. When it comes to swimming, excellence and rule adherence are inseparable. Any deviation from the rules and you are disqualified. Street skating, in contrast, is highly rule averse: There are no rules in street skating, and street skaters even have to abandon many rules and norms of public life. In order to find good tricks and new challenges, skaters need to cultivate an unusual perspective on the urban environment. The normal, rule-following public citizen sees stairs and thinks, \"One walks up these\"; he sees a handrail and understands that it affords holding and supports balance as one uses the stairs; he sees a planter and understands its usefulness for sitting and the definition of public space. Skaters abandon these norms and rules of public spatial orientation and find their own path through public space\u2014handrails are opportunities for daring grinds; stairs, an opportunity to jump, flip, and spin. Even these descriptions will sound unbearably generic to a skater because what makes an urban space good for skating\u2014much like what makes a subject good for painting\u2014is a highly particular, individual matter that depends on who is considering it, when, and why. Not all stairs are good for jumping, and some that are good for jumping are even better for some other trick, maybe even something entirely unheard-of and specific to that site.\n\n\u2022\n\nWhile street skating embodies the ethics of awesomeness, even the more rigid athletic activities can provide opportunities for rule breaking, creative innovation, and the expression of individuality.\n\nSurya Bonaly is a French former figure skater who rose through the ranks of competitive figure skating in the late 1980s. By the early 1990s, she was ranking first in world-class competitions, beating the very best skaters in the world.*\n\nBut Bonaly wasn't your normal figure skater. Just before she began her free program at the 1994 World Figure Skating Championships (the Worlds), a TV announcer watching her skate onto the ice noticed that she was wearing different skates on each foot: \"She's a very unusual skater, in every way,\" he said. \"Everything about this girl is unusual.\"* According to sports journalist and commentator Christine Brennan, \"She in many ways was the ultimate outsider, in a sport that you have to be an insider. I mean you really do have to play by the rules.\"*\n\nWhat made Bonaly so \"unusual,\" the \"ultimate outsider\"? She is muscular and short\u2014just over five feet one\u2014but not small. She used her powerful legs to jump higher and skate faster than her competitors. Bonaly's skating was athletic, dynamic, quick, powerful; when she skated across the ice you heard force and energy.\n\nThis alone made her unusual, as her style stood in stark contrast to the \"ideal\" figure skater\u2014the \"ice princess.\" Ice-skating wasn't used to any style other than the lithe, light, and flowy (the word _graceful_ was used a lot) movements of young ice princesses. The ice princess is smooth and elegant; when she skates across the ice it sounds light and pretty. It also _looks_ light and pretty: Ice princesses often wear soft, light colors and skate to soft, light music. Bonaly wore flashy outfits and often chose unusual music. There was one more \"rule\" that she didn't observe: She is black. And although there had been successful black female skaters before Bonaly (US figure-skating champion and Olympic medalist Debi Thomas, for example), none had been quite as unusual as Bonaly.\n\nBonaly's style did not sit well with judges, who certainly recognized her superior athleticism and ability to jump, but who often said her skating lacked \"artistry.\" Her technical scores were always higher than her scores in presentation. It seems that in the judges' minds Bonaly's aesthetics of power and verve couldn't compete with the traditional aesthetics of grace and prettiness. (Sports that so emphasize style can still suck when they accept only a single variety, which makes them preference dictators.)\n\nBy the '94 Worlds competition, the \"unusual\" Bonaly took her critics' views into consideration and changed her routine. The powerful jumps and technical skill were still on full display, but she had refined her artistic routine. One reporter notes these changes one year earlier:\n\nBonaly, 19, and her mother, Suzanne, have clearly adopted a more pragmatic attitude about getting the sort of notice that will translate to better scores. The hair was cut. (\"Because the judges didn't like it,\" Suzanne Bonaly said.) For now, at least, there are no more vain attempts at quadruple jumps. . . . The skating costumes are simple. . . . A skater? Bonaly certainly looked like one earlier in the week, easily beating U.S. champion Nancy Kerrigan to win one of the two women's qualifying groups at the World Championships. Bonaly landed six triple jumps with grace, and the rest of her four-minute program had surprising aesthetic appeal.*\n\nBonaly retained her power but altered her presentation to appeal to the judges' preferences\u2014her stunning routine at the 1994 Worlds put her in first place with only one competitor remaining, the Japanese ice princess Yuka Sato. Sato delivered, and when it came down to a decision, Bonaly narrowly lost the gold medal to her in a 5-4 vote. She expressed her outrage by refusing to stand on the podium. With confusion on her face and tears in her eyes, she told a reporter, \"I guess I'm just not lucky.\"\n\nIn the years that followed, the judges' preferences would not change, and despite her many high performances and achievements, Bonaly never won an Olympic or World gold medal (despite three consecutive second-place finishes in the Worlds).\n\nBonaly's final amateur competition was the 1998 Winter Olympics in Nagano, Japan. She finished sixth in her barely flawed short program, and some argue that she deserved fifth place, that this was yet another example of bias against her. However, she was skating with a serious injury\u2014a recently ruptured Achilles tendon\u2014and she knew she couldn't manage a gold-winning long program. So when she approached the ice, she was determined to finally and definitively show the judges what she thought of their rules and exclusive aesthetic standards.\n\nBonaly's technical skill allowed her to do something no other female figure skater could do: _backflips_. Backflips were (and still are) illegal in competition because, as the justification goes, they are extremely dangerous. But so are triple salchows and quadruple toe loops. Even more damning of the backflip, though, is the rule that all jumps must be landed on one foot, and this was unheard of\u2014even unthinkable\u2014with a backflip. But it wasn't unthinkable to Bonaly. Near the end of her routine she picked up speed, turned around, and did a backflip, landing backward perfectly on one foot. To cap it off, she did the splits in midair, upside down. She finished her routine and turned her back to the judges.\n\nBonaly demonstrates how clever and courageous awesomeness can be. If you're bold enough, you can be awesome even in highly rule-governed, restrictive, conservative, oppressive conditions. Her awesomeness challenged figure skating's prevailing ideal; her physical mastery, daring, and norm-breaking style helped create a new community of skaters and a broader perspective on what makes a figure skater good. She inspired the next generation of young skaters and helped push the sport in a more stylistically diverse and appreciative direction.\n\n## Civic Life\n\nWe also see awesomeness in creative and communal approaches to civic life\u2014to our lives as citizens in public. Earlier we considered how the first rule of improv acting, _Yes! And . . . ,_ can help us understand what it is to be game. When you combine the spirit of improv with collective action and public awareness you can generate awesomeness.\n\nConsider founder Charlie Todd's group Improv Everywhere. This self-described \"prank collective\" specializes in \"creating scenes of chaos and joy in public spaces.\" As the group describes itself, \"Improv Everywhere is, at its core, about having fun. We're big believers in 'organized fun.' . . . We get satisfaction from coming up with an awesome idea and making it come to life. In the process we hopefully bring excitement to otherwise unexciting locales and give strangers a unique experience and a great story to tell.\"*\n\nOne of their \"awesome ideas\" was realized in Frozen Grand Central. More than two hundred \"agents\" simultaneously froze in place in Grand Central's main concourse, as busy New Yorkers rushed through. Some were in the middle of eating a banana; others had just dropped papers or were on the phone\u2014they all stopped what they were doing and stood motionless for five minutes. A mystified and fascinated audience quickly developed to study the frozen crowd. When the actors simultaneously resumed their activities, the audience erupted in applause.* The word _awesome_ is used to describe the event scores upon scores of times in YouTube comments.*\n\nAnother one of their influential awesome ideas is High Five Escalator, first realized in 2009. During the morning rush, the improv collective went to the 53rd and Lex subway station in New York City, where there are two giant escalators that carry thousands of commuters from deep underground to the upper levels. Right next to the escalators is a staircase that no one uses because it's so long\u2014especially when you're just trying to get to work. Six Improv Everywhere agents stood on the staircase as throngs of commuters ascended past them on the escalator. The first five held a series of signs. The first one the commuters saw read ROB WANTS, then TO GIVE YOU, then A HIGH FIVE! and then GET READY! The fifth and final sign read ROB, with an arrow pointing down to a man with his hand up in perfect high-five form.* As they figured out what was happening, commuters smiled, laughed, and delivered resounding high fives.\n\nHigh Five Escalator used the high five to poke holes in the script of the morning commute and create a little social opening. You don't necessarily need a large group to pull something like this off, however, as Nathaniel Kassel proved in 2007* and Meir Kalmanson proved in 2014 with his project High Five New York. New York City is full of people hailing cabs with outstretched arms and who, with a little imagination, appear to be in need of a high five. As Kalmanson says in an interview, \"I'm all about human connection and I believe the high five is a simple yet friendly way of showing someone, 'Hey, let's be friends.' When I was walking in Manhattan and looked at all the people who were hailing cabs, all I saw were men and women being left hanging from a perfect high five.\"*\n\nKalmanson ran around giving high fives to all the people he saw as \"being left hanging\"\u2014from businessmen and -women to shoppers, tourists, the youthful, and the elderly (Kassel used a bike to do the same). In nearly every case people initially respond with a little surprise and then with a giant smile.\n\nThese public actions engage broad human sentiments\u2014ones that form the core of nearly everyone's individuality: the appreciation of kindness; the fun of play; joy; the feeling you get when you high-five someone. But other awesome public actions engage rarer, less universal, or more local or challenging thoughts, emotions, and ideals.\n\nOver eleven months in 1979 artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles shook the hands of every New York City sanitation worker\u2014all eighty-five hundred of them across five boroughs\u2014thanking them for their essential and nearly universally underappreciated work. This performance piece, titled _Touch Sanitation_ , serves as a reminder of the enormous service these men and women perform for us every day (specifically, collecting more than 10,500 tons of garbage and 1,760 tons of recyclables every single day*). But it does more than animate our connection to strangers\u2014it revives a specific sense of sanitation workers' value, of the worth of their work as laborers. It opens our minds to and transforms our normal thoughts about the kinds of labor we tend to avoid thinking about, but without which society couldn't function.*\n\n## Art\n\nMany of the creative community builders we have discussed so far are either artists or think of their works and lives in terms of art: Mockus, Haaning, Reyes, Finley, Fazlalizadeh, Ukeles, and others. Awesome art is the art of social openings\u2014of creating, cultivating, and encouraging them, but also of performing, theatricalizing, depicting, and representing them. We have already encountered hints and examples of awesome art; now it's time to take a closer look.\n\nThe paradigm of art as we tend to understand it today is object centered (a painting, sculpture, installation, etc.), expressively one-sided (the artist expresses herself to you through the object), nonparticipatory (you receive and interpret her expression), and caught up in art world institutions like galleries, museums, and art fairs. Awesome art, in contrast, is paradigmatically interpersonal, process or interaction oriented, expressively dynamic, and social or participatory.* Consider what emerged from the recent and massive global street art movement. Artistic graffiti began in the 1970s in the streets of New York City and Philadelphia. Talented writers controversially illuminated their city streets with colorful, highly stylized, and often illegal lettering and pop graphics, using the city walls, trains, and sidewalks as their canvas. Although the timing is hard to pinpoint, by the mid- to late 1990s, graffiti culture had expanded into something new\u2014something people started calling \"street art,\" where the street was being regularly used for art in a revolutionary and awesome way.*\n\nMany of us walk down the streets of our towns and cities paying no mind to potential social openings. We use our streets as practical spaces that allow us to get from one place to another. And as we walk down the street, our minds are often on what we have to do, where we have to go, or what more generally is happening in our lives. We might be listening to music or looking at something on our phones. We aren't in the moment, tend not to notice details, and generally ignore the people around us.\n\nBut by the mid-1990s, a movement to challenge this was clearly underway, with artists exploring the many ways we can alter the aesthetics of the street. They began innovating with new ways of using the street for art, calling attention to our common spaces and collective lives in ways that animate both.\n\nStreet art pioneer Leon Reid IV noticed that by tweaking street signs he could personalize them, and thereby personalize the street. Others, like Bruno Taylor, noticed that bus stops were cold and impersonal, so they installed swings to make them more dynamic and fun. Some beautified the urban landscape to make it more inviting and homely. Artist C. Finley aesthetically altered the street by covering urban Dumpsters with vibrant wallpaper, suggesting that even these ugly denizens of the street can reflect our common life. Others turned unused phone booths into free libraries with a \"take one, leave one\" policy. Still others made street signs and crosswalks more playful by altering them in a way that makes pedestrians smile and point out what they have found to other pedestrians. The artist stikman places small yellow thermoplastic stickmen in the middle of crosswalks; the French artist Invader \"invades\" cities, placing mosaic space invaders around the city for people to seek out and discover.\n\nWe can gain a deeper understanding of the awesomeness of street art by thinking more about what the street is. It is common to treat the street as simply a logistical space, one that facilitates travel from one place to another. But the \"street\" in street art is different from this. The street is a public cultural space that, ideally, facilitates self-expression and the kind of mutual recognition that public expression enables. The street in this sense is a place to express oneself, and to recognize and appreciate one another. As such, it is a locus of life and community for cities and towns.\n\nThis cultural notion of the street gives it a certain energy and status: It doesn't just allow us to get from one place to another\u2014it allows us to express ourselves, and to acknowledge and appreciate each other as individuals. It's a place where we can publicly flaunt our style and declare our commitments and values, where we can see and be seen for who we are or aspire to be. As the great cultural critic and theorist of urban life William Whyte says, \"The street is the river of life for the city. We come to these places not to escape, but to partake of it.\"* This is not to deny that, as we have noted, some street spaces are highly conflicted places, dangerous and oppressive even to those who should be able to claim them as their own. But these are distortions of the street that art can help reshape and revive (as we saw with Fazlalizadeh's art in chapter 3).\n\nUnderstanding the street in this way helps us understand what street art is and why it is important. Street art is art that uses the cultural street as a medium. Street artists use the street by taking its cultural function and enhancing, repairing, highlighting, or cultivating it.*\n\nStreet artists are discovering ways of creating awesome community by toying with the norms of the street in a way that creates a truly awesome public space. Their artworks transform the neglected spaces of the street; they draw our attention to the ways we habitually treat, or rather ignore, these spaces. We ignore them just as we tend to ignore each other when we're walking through our towns and cities. Street art is being used to awaken us to the possibilities of a truly shared public space, one that treats its denizens not as mere inhabitants but as individuals.\n\nStreet artists achieve this by making the street a locus of individual expression and exploration; they make it visually interesting and more inviting, turning it into a game, making it homelier, more comfortable, or more playful, or giving it a voice to speak about social, political, or cultural issues. In a project called the Comfy City, artists Jane Tsong and Robert Powers turn abandoned Los Angeles tree stumps into sidewalk seats. Cities and towns often cut down overgrown sidewalk trees and leave ugly, aging stumps in their wake. Tsong and Powers carve them into seats and invite others to relax or do the same:\n\nPlease have a seat. Or make one. Our urban spaces could definitely benefit from more public seating and relaxation. How luxurious it will seem when we are able to rest our feet where we please once in a while. Let us know the location of other stumps in need of improvement. Or for the handy and brave, a chain saw can do the job with two careful cuts. Ask your local tool rental shop for safety tips. Let us make the comfy city ours.*\n\nSure, there are park benches and city-designed resting spots, but Tsong and Powers invite us to consider the municipal and public attitude toward our shared space. Why just cut the tree down and leave a gross reminder of lost glory? Why not make a seat?\n\nCreative and communal attitudes toward public space are evident in more ambitious projects. Amar Bakshi's _Portals_ is a public art project aimed at transforming local public spaces into global public spaces primed for interpersonal appreciation. A \"portal\" is a shipping container painted gold, equipped with immersive audio and video technology, and placed in a public space. The technology presents a hologram-like image and audio of a live life-size person standing in a distant portal\u2014one that could be in Jerusalem, Bulawayo, Progreso, Isfahan, or Los Angeles. All portals are connected to one another. As you enter the global street space, you can look this person in the eye, see them smile, start a conversation, or even sing, dance, or play music together.\n\nBakshi notes how his portals enhance public space. \"Portals as an initiative is really about creating a space that has some indeterminacy to its purpose, which I think is like another way of saying, to create a public space,\" he says. \"A small addition to an existing public space can open up a whole range of new uses that I think both vitalize the space in new ways, but also help revitalize it the way it currently is. It sparks that dialog locally, and programmatically it creates ideas across institutions, and I think really strengthens the public space.\"*\n\nOne portal project focuses on discussions about social justice and connects Newark, New Jersey, with Milwaukee, Wisconsin\u2014two US cities that struggle with extremely high incarceration rates among black men. The portals connect these communities so they can talk about their struggles, safety, and coping and community-building strategies, among other things. Collaborator and cosponsor Dr. Rod K. Brunson, dean of Rutgers School of Criminal Justice, notes, \"What we've found is people have these very rich and detailed and passionate conversations with strangers.\"* This captures the very point of the project\u2014to publicly cultivate these kinds of connections through dialogue, shared experience, music making, dancing, and so on.*\n\n\u2022\n\nPortals, street art, and tree stump chairs are, in many ways, of a piece with an art movement whose initial rise roughly coincides with the rise of artistic graffiti (1970s) and took off with the rise of street art (1990s). Variably referred to as \"social practice,\" \"relational aesthetics,\" \"dialogical aesthetics,\" or perhaps most broadly \"participatory art,\" these works attempt to make art out of social life.*\n\nOnce we understand what it is to have an \"art\" of the street, where \"the street\" is understood as a site for a certain kind of interpersonal expression and connection, we can see the potential for a more general art of human social life. The art of the street is one that enables and activates the street\u2014the public cultural space wherein we express, recognize, and appreciate one another. We can abstract from the focus on the street as a locus of art to see the potential for an art of human social relations in general. In the past few decades, we see a clear focus on social connection in art production; a growing wave of creative projects seek to create, cultivate, perform, or represent social life.\n\nConsider Tino Sehgal's _This Progress_ , which took place at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City in 2010. In this piece participants were led by a guide or \"interpreter\" as they walked up the spiraling ramp of the Frank Lloyd Wright rotunda, whose white walls were entirely stripped of art. The interpreters were volunteers of all ages whom Sehgal worked with in creating the piece. The first one you'd meet was a child of no more than ten years old who'd ask you what you think progress is. The child would probe your answer and engage you in a discussion until you were handed off to a high school student, who continued to ask questions about progress and explore your replies. Then you would be handed off to someone in their thirties, who would ostensibly shift the topic away from progress\u2014to travel, family, happiness, career. Finally, you would be introduced to someone in late middle age who would continue the discussion, complicating the question of progress until the end, when they would say, \"The piece is called _This Progress_.\"\n\nLike much of Sehgal's art, _This Progress_ embodies the ethics of awesomeness and puts the dynamics of social openings on display by merging perfect strangers who dialogue with, learn about, challenge, and appreciate one another. As Lauren Collins writes in her _New Yorker_ profile of Sehgal, \"He is, in a sense, an architect of interaction. His works are collaborations, new builds on human turf.\"* The \"new builds\" Sehgal's piece constructs are moments of connection, insight, and shared joy. _New York_ magazine art critic Jerry Saltz writes, \"This show is wondrous-strange, and can produce waves of uncanny self-revelation, surprise, and delight.\"*\n\nSehgal's work is deliberately opposed to much of the suckiness of art-world culture. His pieces are not commodifiable objects meant for decoration or status; instead he orchestrates impermanent human interactions and interventions but then steps aside. He famously disallows documentation of his work\u2014no catalogs, press releases, photographs, or even paper trails of sales. He also toys with the competitive art market. At the Art Basel art fair in 2004, Sehgal made the two galleries that represent him\u2014and so compete with each other\u2014stand next to each other and allowed them to speak only one word at a time. To form sentences in attempts to discuss and sell his works, the gallery representatives had to work together, alternating each word.* Sehgal's producer, Asad Raza, notes how Sehgal is influenced by his skateboarding past: \"I think a lot of Tino's stuff comes from skateboarders looking at railings and concrete, and thinking, How can I use that in a different way?\"*\n\nAnother whose work focuses on social life is British artist Stephen Willats, a venerable practitioner of awesome art. One could choose almost any of Willats's artworks from the past forty-five years: _Meta Filter_ (1973), his Multiple Clothing series (1965\u20131999), _The Kids Are in the Streets_ (1982).* In a work titled _Brentford Towers_ , Willats collaborated with residents of a West London apartment complex. He was not alone in seeing the domineering beige towers as \"monumental objects\" that \"seemed to deny the complexity of people's lives within it.\"* To address this, Willats worked with the residents to construct a communal sense of presence for their individual lives. He interviewed them about their living spaces and asked them to choose a meaningful object from their living rooms. They then discussed the importance of this object and how it relates to something outside of the residential tower. Willats used this information to create a visual artwork that displayed the resident, the tower, the interior object, and the exterior object, with lines connecting each and a quote from the resident about their life at Brentford Towers. These works were displayed on each floor of the building, giving other residents insight into their neighbors' lives and creating a richer and more visible community of individuals who live there. Such communities are central to Willats's art: \"My work engages the audience in a new way of encountering art in society. I am not talking about a compliance, but something more active, a mutual understanding, an interaction between people\u2014similar to the dynamic image of the homeostat where all the parts of the network are equal and equally linked.\"*\n\nAs art historian and critic Claire Bishop notes, it is not clear how we should think about these social artworks. They seem to be works of ethics or social politics _and_ works of art. When critics move to understand and assess them, they often turn to ethical ways of thinking\u2014empathy, identification, community, social and personal transformation\u2014while at the same time insisting that these works are art and as such are properly compared with other works of art rather than with social or political initiatives intended to bolster community.* The difficulty about how to think of these creative works seems slightly deeper than even this, for I think there is a strong inclination to say that many of them are _beautiful_. They are not just artworks with social intent; they are exemplary works of beauty _._ If that's right, then we are especially stuck: We want to say that these social works are artworks, that some are even beautiful artworks, but that their value lies squarely in their creatively social, community-building character.*\n\nThe problem is that we are wedged firmly between the categories of ethics and aesthetics. The solution is that these works are not exactly ethical and they are not exactly aesthetic\u2014they are a new combination of both, or a new thing with elements of both. They're awesome. The themes, innovations, strategies, and reception of much contemporary art, especially street art and social practice, are in significant ways manifestations of this general cultural ethos\u2014one that informs far more than socially minded art practices and includes political innovations, approaches to athletics, modes of everyday social interaction, visions of social and public life, and personal style.\n\n## Watch Out\n\nNote that I'm not saying that you have to be so bold, creatively altruistic, awesomely artistic, or beautifully risky to be awesome. Being an excellent social artist is not as simple as, say, mimicking Stephen Willats. A good amount of participatory art is misguided (if well intended) and a lot of the good social practice works are good because they are shocking, disturbing, even perverse; they exhibit artistic values other than awesomeness. Not every Awesome Foundation project is awesome, and there are other forms of charity and activism that excellently promote and embody the ethics of awesomeness. A good amount of street art is destructive, messy, or pointless; some of Improv Everywhere's machinations are not awesome.* Being awesome is not as easy as learning to ollie or put together a sweet outfit.\n\nBut sometimes it can seem that way because of how awesomeness is represented to us via television, YouTube, social media, advertising, and so on. Just under the surface of the story we have told in this chapter lies an important warning, one reflected in a lesson we can learn from the cultural trajectory of _cool_. Each practice discussed here is threatened by click-hungry ad agencies, marketing companies, television and media corporations, competition promoters, news companies, and culture hucksters who make us think awesomeness is easy, or disconnected from our daily lives, or just a matter of having an epic night out, wearing sunglasses onstage, or winning an X Games medal. Our enthusiasm for the kind of connection and culture that awesomeness fosters is all too easily exploited, televised, recorded, and made into a spectacle that threatens to turn awesomeness into something that we simply stare at, share on social media, and move on. These shifts to cultures of spectacle and easy entertainment really suck. Not because all spectacles suck\u2014that's obviously false\u2014but because they tend to have a sucky influence on already-awesome activities. They turn skate culture into televised competition culture; charity into self-promotion; street art into social media strategies. The result is that awesome inspiration moves us to click our way into a YouTube rabbit hole rather than get up and get out. Skate culture, street and social art, awesome forms of altruism and civic life\u2014they are all changed when they become things to merely watch and react to rather than things to engage in, be inspired by, and act on in our everyday lives.\n\nThat might seem a little ironic because so much social media marketing\u2014and, more generally, so much enthusiasm about the democratizing promise of the Internet\u2014tries to harness the allure of awesomeness by promising to reinforce and cultivate social bonds. Mark Zuckerberg often states his admirable desire to \"connect the whole world\"\u2014not just to the Internet, but as citizens, friends, family, and loved ones. As good as such connection is, it comes with a price.* We are often compromised in our digital lives, tempted into being fake-ass people, braggarts, blowhards, half-assers, or simply sucky. The image is all too familiar: several friends sitting in a restaurant, all looking at their phones and ignoring each other. Or, you're in a conversation with someone and the moment he's done talking he ignores your response to check his texts, shoot off a tweet, or see whether anyone \"likes\" his status update. Or a half-asser leaves their phone on the table during your meet-up and distractedly glances at it every time it flashes, buzzes, or pings. We too often feel a persistent, nagging suspicion that there's something a little more interesting to do or look at on our phones. We can really suck if we focus too much of our cultural activity around the digital opportunities that social media and the Internet supply.\n\nThis isn't to say that social media is all bad, or that Zuckerberg-style aspirations are entirely misguided\u2014quite the opposite\u2014and no doubt Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, and similar companies have played an important role in generating and facilitating awesomeness. Such aspirations are another expression of the hold that awesomeness has on us and of the promise of new technology to help us really connect. When used in the right way, social media and new technology can help us cultivate the awesomeness we aspire to. A case in point: Consider the messaging app and art project Somebody, a social opening generator created by artist, filmmaker, and writer Miranda July. When you send a message to a friend using Somebody, your message is not delivered directly to your friend but to the Somebody user nearest to them, who then has the opportunity to find your friend and deliver the message.* Or consider hitchBOT, a robot created to hitchhike through various countries, relying entirely on friendly strangers to move it along the right path. The robot cannot move, but it can converse and tell you about itself, its favorites pastimes, and its desire to visit various monuments, artworks, and historical sites. In an enormously sucky turn of events, after successful trips through Canada, Germany, and the Netherlands, hitchBOT was destroyed on its US tour one late night in Philadelphia.*\n\nThere is a lot of work to do to make social media, new technology, and the Internet more generally, truly awesome, especially considering the growing amount of fake, click-bait content\u2014throwaway videos, \"news\" articles, vapid music\u2014created to distract, advertise, persuade, and sell. As former Facebook data scientist Jeff Hammerbacher tells us, fake-assery animates so much social media development, which is often aimed more at selling products than connecting people: \"The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads. That sucks.\"* Indeed it does.\n\nThe awesome practices discussed here are so much more than entertaining visuals and shareable content; through these social, personal, and cultural achievements\u2014whether they're large or small, lasting or fleeting\u2014we can glimpse the outlines of a new social culture. They give us insight into the ways awesomeness is shaping how we give, play, explore, and create, and they illustrate the desire and potential for real awesomeness in our collective spaces, our group activities, our artworks, our daily lives, and our very selves. In addition to being technically awesome, they promote the ethics of awesomeness by promoting the various concerns, character traits, activities, and habits that make us awesome and not sucky. And they point the way to greater awesomeness in other human pursuits: business, medicine, education, and management, among others. Together, they provide a vivid alternative to bleak visions of a sucky society and show us how we can strengthen and focus our hope.\n\n# Chapter 7\n\n# Becoming Awesome\n\nBECOMING AWESOME CAN seem overwhelming. Sure, you start with yourself\u2014you think, \"How can I be more awesome?\" You do a few more awesome things more often. But then you think: \"What about my community of friends, my partner, or my family?\" You reach out and foster communal awesomeness, building more awesome connections and reaching out to some new copeople. Soon you go bold and cultivate a more awesome civic presence. But surely you could improve on this\u2014many of these things are fleeting, after all\u2014so you decide to take it to the next level. Maybe you create an awesome artwork or get involved in an awesome charity. But then what? Couldn't you be even more awesome? You need to work harder. It starts to seem like the most awesome thing you can do is drop everything and spread awesomeness as far and wide as possible. Maybe you should run for office, become a full-time \"awesome\" artist, or write a whole book trying to convince your sistren and brethren of the awesomeness of awesomeness. But who wants to do that? Surely there are other important things to do and values to pursue. And won't you kinda suck if you spend so much time obsessing over awesomeness? (I worry about that.) It starts to sound like becoming awesome is self-defeating.\n\nAlthough that's a natural way to think about it, it's not the right way. In fact, this line of thought evinces a slightly sucky way of thinking\u2014one that is all too easy to fall into, especially if we make the mistake of thinking of creative community builders as people to imitate now and again rather than as people whose insights, strategies, and styles can shape our lives. Truly awesome people don't ask, \"How can I _be_ more awesome?\" They ask, \"What can I _do_ to create more awesomeness?\" Notice the difference: The latter, unlike the former, is not about how you can gain some status or embody some value. Rather, it's about what you can contribute to the collective realization of value (awesomeness)\u2014even when that value might not inhere squarely in _you_ , but instead in your community, neighborhood, workplace, crew, or family. The answer to the second question clearly includes being down, game, chill, and generally non-sucky. Another way to put this point is: The advice \"Be awesome!\" is misleading, for being awesome is a _way_ of doing things and not a thing to do. Focus instead on the more awkward advice: \"Do [x] awesomely!\" Or perhaps \"Awesomize!\" In other words, the first step in becoming awesome is, in a way, to forget about awesomeness as such and focus on doing what you do awesomely. It's not a goal but a result of doing the right things in the right way.\n\nOf course, that doesn't make becoming awesome any easier. In fact, becoming awesome is even more obscure than this; it would be manageable if we knew exactly what it took to do things awesomely. However, while we can use our discussion to craft a rough guide, we can't hope for much detail because there's no recipe for doing the right things in the awesome way. There's a straightforward argument for this: If there were a recipe for awesomeness, then we could be awesome just by following it. But then you'd just have to follow the script of awesomeness\u2014being awesome would be no different than being a normal coffee shop customer. Every NBA halftime would have a Jeremy Fry; every baseball team could expect a Glenn Burke; every subway escalator would have a Rob. As a result, there wouldn't be any creative community building because there would be nothing to create, no norms to break or scripts to innovate with. It would be scripts all the way down. Even worse, there wouldn't be any community building of the awesome variety because inveterate script followers are not \"individuals in pursuit of the individual.\"\n\nIn other words, it would suck if there were a recipe for awesomeness. As our discussion reveals, there's nothing normal about awesomeness. It's essentially unusual. It is part of the very nature of awesomeness that it is creatively attentive to particular situations\u2014to particular people and places, to the norms governing those people and places, and to the potential for creative community building. But this means that awesome's cleverness also makes it elusive, a matter of trial and error, something each person must cultivate for themselves.\n\nEven within these constraints our theory can guide us\u2014there are a few things we can say about what it takes to become more awesome.\n\n\u2022\n\nIf we want to embody and be surrounded by more awesomeness, then there is work to do at every level of social organization, from the grand scale of how we design our institutions, our cities, our companies, and our laws, to the smaller scale of how we tend to interact with others\u2014with strangers, copeeps, and weird kids acting like Bon Jovi at halftime. The future of awesome comes down to who we aspire to be in our own lives and whether we want awesome style to be reflected in the world through the actions we perform, the individuals we create and cocreate, and the institutions we support.\n\nIf your goal in developing yourself, living your life, running a business, or leading a people is to be the number one, or the richest, or the most powerful person in the world, there's a good chance you suck. Possibly quite a lot. Why? Because in focusing all of your time, thought, and energy on being number one, you care too much about yourself alone to care about being awesome. To put it bluntly, you're probably an asshole, a self-promoter, a fake-ass person, a blowhard, a braggart, a douchebag, or a thunder stealer. Being awesome requires us to think of and inspire others; it requires us to pay sympathetic, perceptive, and creative attention to people and situations, and you can't do that if, for all you really care, there's no one else around. If you're living a life, developing a style, becoming the kind of person who aims to make people laugh, think, play, imagine, smile, care, strive, or empathize, then you're probably attuned to the ethics of awesomeness.\n\nSo which one is it? Does the spirit of awesomeness flow within you? Does it flow within your community or society? Here are some questions you can ask yourself to figure out where things stand:\n\n  1. Where do you belong on the Taxonomy of Awesomeness and Suckiness? If you're having trouble answering this question, then consider this: In studying the diagram, you probably thought, \"I totally know someone who is [wack, simply sucky, a blowhard, a braggart, etc.].\" How do you compare to this person? What makes you more awesome or sucky? Why don't you belong on the same branch?\n  2. When was the last time you created a social opening? Do you ever really talk with your caf\u00e9 people, grocer, or bartender? Why not? Is tonight's dinner the same as usual? Did you just throw on whatever shirt was clean and close? When was the last time you sent someone a gift just because, or went out of your way to tell someone that they were doing an awesome job?\n  3. What did you do the last time you were presented with a social opening? Were you sucky? Wack? Bored in the heart of the multitude? Or were you game?\n  4. How's your symmetry in the ethics of awesomeness? Do you always take up social openings but never create them yourself? Or do you always create social openings but never take them up?\n  5. When you did create or respond to a social opening, how did it go? Did it work? Did you unearth a coperson? Did you create a social opening for someone who is different from you, perhaps a person of a different race or sexuality? Did you take one up when someone of a different race or background offered one?\n  6. What can you do to create social openings? What skills can you deploy? Can you spontaneously dance, barter, invent a handshake, make art, build something, sing, cook a feast, forage, throw an inviting and fun party, notice and discuss beauty or style, fall in love with a cuisine, a band, or a city, plan an epic hike or road trip?\n  7. When was the last time you exercised your pure individuality? When was the last time you were silly, broke the rules, or simply played?\n  8. Do you feel moved to do any of these things?\n  9. Do you have an awesome role model? Who is it and why do they speak to you? If you don't, why not? Do your role models suck?\n  10. Maybe you are pretty awesome, but what about your community, culture, and society?\n\n\u2022\n\nThat should give you a rough idea of where to set your sights in becoming awesome. But now let's think about more concrete ways to achieve this. One way is to develop various habits and abilities that help us succeed in creating and responding to social openings. We can think more about the creative community builders discussed in chapter 3, study them further, and seek out our own exemplars of awesome. We can take into account the notes in chapter 4 on motivation and management in the ethics of awesomeness and apply them to ourselves and our social lives.\n\nWe can also consider a general lesson from our discussion of awesome culture. Reflecting on awesome altruism teaches us to be creative in our altruistic and charitable acts, from the foundations and nonprofits we support to how we give to our friends, neighbors, and communities. In considering awesome athletics, we might think about which of our activities embody the ethics of awesomeness and to what extent. How much of what you do and are promotes the cultivation of style, mutual appreciation of individuality, and innovation in contrast with competition, individual excellence, and rule following? Considering awesome civic life can inspire us to bring a more playful, creative, grateful, and perceptive attitude to our lives in public. And keeping an eye out for awesome art can give us new opportunities for social openings, can inspire new ideas for crew building, and can maintain our connection to the beauty and aesthetic excellence that fuels the ethics of awesomeness.\n\nPutting these pieces together: Awesome culture gives us a picture of a person who is creatively generous, egalitarian, nonconformist, socially curious, open, innovative, cooperative, playful, and sympathetically attentive to individual style. It also gives us an image of activities, pursuits, and forms of society that embody and encourage these qualities. Do you and the people you know fit this picture? How much or how little? What about your crew or community? Your society?\n\nLearning these lessons from awesome culture requires exercising and developing a range of underlying skills. More generally, we have to cultivate our social imaginations and excel at perceiving, interpreting, understanding, and sympathizing with our copeople.\n\nBeing good at creating social openings requires sensitivity to the reasons your existing or potential copeople have for and against taking up the opportunities. If your friend is a vegan, then don't surprise her with your very own venison jerky. That's obvious, but it's easy to overlook the subtler ways we can attend to our copeople. We have to be as perceptive as Constantin Guys: \"If a fashion or the cut of a garment has been slightly modified, if bows and _chignons_ have dropped a fraction towards the nape of the neck, if waists have been raised and skirts have become fuller, be very sure that his eagle eye will already have spotted it from however great a distance.\"*\n\nWe must hone this kind of perceptiveness\u2014this observational, interpretive care and consideration\u2014and expand it beyond clothing to all aspects of the individual. Being good at creating social openings requires you to pay creative attention to your potential copeople's whole style\u2014to their interests, tastes, struggles, aspirations, and to how they are exploring or cultivating these things. But if our attention and perceptiveness is blunted, then we'll be unaware of the awesome details\u2014the details of your coperson's efforts in dress, of her choice of music or decor, of her sense of humor, moods, and desires.\n\nRelatedly, awesomeness requires a kind of sympathetic understanding that allows us to not only recognize but vibe with expressive action. We cannot divorce our sense of a whole person from our sympathetic impression of their individuality, of the range of particular traits and values they have expressed and explored in our presence. My sense of you\u2014my sensibility and sensitivity with respect to you\u2014depends in part on the image of your laughter at a joke, your response to a song, your willingness to come along. But this sense of mine depends in turn on the range of particular values and styles I'm able to vibe with, appreciate, or be moved and impressed by. We must be able to understand and appreciate a range of individualities and how they can be expressed, lest we cut ourselves off from one another and our crews become attenuated and atrophied cliques.\n\nAnd to achieve this, we need active, creative, and insightful imaginations, ones that we work to orient toward coperson creation. We have to imagine and reimagine ways of creating social openings and taking them up to bring individuals together. We have to practice acting on our creative community-building thoughts and impulses in public, with our families, friends, and neighbors, in our professional lives and daily lives, and for ourselves and one another\u2014the vibrancy of our culture, our cities, our neighborhoods, even our own well-being depends on it.\n\nThis means that we have to be bold and put ourselves out there, which isn't always easy or simple. We worry about whether we'll succeed and how people will react. Suckiness can really sting, and when we try to be awesome we can really mess up by being insensitive, imperceptive, overly ambitious, or forgetful. Louis C.K. relates a real-world example of this in a bit about his \"awesome possum\" T-shirt. Returning to the coffee shop one last time:\n\nSo, here's a weird thing that happened to me. I have this T-shirt, and it says \"awesome possum\" on it. And it's got a picture of a possum. I know it's stupid, but a friend of mine gave it to me. Fuck you, I bought it. I thought it was cool. But I'd never seen anybody with that same shirt before, with the \"awesome possum\" shirt, and I was in this coffee place in L.A., you know, like, a coffee\u2014not like Starbucks\u2014like an indie coffee place where all the cool people go. . . . But anyway, yeah, so I was in the coffee place, with the young people . . . and I see this guy, he's, like, twenty years old, and he has the \"awesome possum\" shirt. Just like mine! So, I went, like, \"Hey, nice shirt.\" And he went, \"Pfff.\" And he walked away, like I'm a piece of shit. And I stood there, and I was so mad, I just thought, \"Fuck him, man, we have the same shirt!\" it's an unusual shirt\n\nHaving the same unusual shirt is a little social opening that Louis C.K. recognized and initiated. When the guy said, \"Pfff,\" and walked off, he seemed to epitomize wackness by closing the social opening and dismissing the thought that it's kind of awesome that they have the same \"awesome possum\" shirt. That hurts, but it's also disillusioning. If we can't connect over a silly T-shirt, then how can we connect at all? Louis C.K. understandably retreated, cursing the \"cool\" coffee shop and its too-cool inhabitants.\n\nBut that isn't the whole story. When Louis C.K. looked down to affirm the worth of his \"awesome possum\" shirt, he realized he wasn't actually wearing it. He forgot. What seemed to be a case of someone else's wackness was actually his own failed attempt to create a social opening.\n\nSometimes our wires get crossed, the timing isn't right, or we just don't connect and vibe. But we can't let suckiness and failed awesomeness get us down. It's all too easy to lose touch with the value of being awesome and fall into sucky habits, revert to fake-assery, self-efface, or think in or unreflectively adopt stereotypes. It's unnerving how repeatedly we need to be awakened to one another's individuality, shocked out of our blinding and false familiarity with one another and our complacency with ourselves. We must constantly be returned to the sense of worth, wonder, and beauty that even a perfect stranger can evoke in us\u2014and that animates us in our own pursuit of awesomeness.\n\nAwesomeness is the bell that a free people must endlessly sound; it's the caffeine we must crave lest we get headachy, tired, cranky\u2014the small price we must pay to become human again and again. The ethics of awesomeness is an ethics of aspiration and communal imagination: The imagination must be cultivated; the culture must be imagined.\n\nToo many of us live as if this kind of imaginative community building doesn't matter, isn't worthy of appreciation, as if it's something we can just leave to someone else, or simply kick to the side. When you suck, you not only fail to inject your own life-giving energy into the thing, you actually vacuum life out of it because of everyone's more or less subtle awareness that the thing _needs_ your presence and contribution to live and breathe. Such suckiness issues from a false sense of culture and community as a static thing, as simply there whenever you need it, as your bottomless source of connection\u2014as if it's not something we create and confirm together in every awesome interaction, as if our bonds need no light or water or chemicals, or as if it's something you can just pay or vote for, or always find waiting for you on Netflix. This kind of existential disposition to suck can do more than cast a pall over a party or add a sour note to an otherwise beautiful connection. It can make others feel that the spirit of awesomeness is not worth tapping into, that being down is not essential, or that you can just let others bring everyone together. It's the black hole of the suckiverse\u2014one that can pull entire crews, cultures, and societies into its vast nothingness.\n\nI hope that together we can move further and further away from this black hole, but it's too soon to know what will happen. The ethics of awesomeness gives us a new and vibrant ideal\u2014a kind of valuing orientation or sensibility, one that we can adopt and live, breathe, and see by. It's a way of life that is still unfolding before our eyes, and we're in the process of making it happen through social, cultural, institutional, and personal change. From our current vantage point, we don't really know what life would look like if we were more awesome more often. What would we care to think, read, and write about? What would we love to do? Whom would we love to be around? What kinds of communities and neighborhoods would we build? What kinds of movements and collectives would we start or support? What kinds of cultures and societies would we create?\n\nI don't have the answers to these questions, and we can only find them together. One thing is for sure: I'm down to find out.\n\n# Acknowledgments\n\nWriting this book provided many social openings. Whenever I brought it up\u2014at a party, a dinner, with academic friends\u2014people responded with ideas, examples, insights, and enthusiasm. Thanks to the many friends, colleagues, and copeeps who helped me along. Special thanks to Ross Andersen, Sinan Dogramaci, Daniel Fogal, Ben Jahn, Ed Lake, Stan Parish, Laurie Paul, Jeff Sebo, Erin Thompson, and Clinton Tolley.\n\nThanks to Amanda Jaquin for helping me design the diagram of awesomeness and suckiness. Her graphic style makes it sing.\n\nThanks so much to Sara Bershtel, who read a very early draft and introduced me to Mel Flashman. This book would not exist without Mel, who is far more awesome than she thinks.\n\nI'm so lucky that Meg Leder was enthusiastically down to work on this book with me. Her editorial insight and support, along with Shannon Kelly, vastly improved the book. Thanks to the rest of the Penguin Books team for all of their help.\n\nAround the time that I started thinking through these ideas, Aaron James was visiting NYU, where I was lecturing. I asked him if he'd have lunch with me so I could tell him about my nascent project. He agreed and we talked for a solid two hours. Since then he's been an awesome mentor. Thanks to Aaron for his early encouragement and guidance.\n\nThis book was inspired by the many awesome acts and agents in the world\u2014these people give me hope and help me motivate and focus my own efforts to be loving and good. And while I detail several of these people in the book, there's one who I mention only briefly but whose influence and example is present on nearly every page. That's my wife Brett Riggle.\n\nPhilosophy is a serious activity and it can be really difficult, frustrating, even dispiriting. When it goes well, it can be illuminating, mind-opening, even sublime. But it can also be seriously fun. It can engage us in an attempt to understand our lives together, in a way that brings us together. I'd be happy if this book did little more than remind us of that.\n\n# _What's next on  \nyour reading list?_\n\n[Discover your next  \ngreat read!](http:\/\/links.penguinrandomhouse.com\/type\/prhebooklanding\/isbn\/9781524704681\/display\/1)\n\n* * *\n\nGet personalized book picks and up-to-date news about this author.\n\nSign up now.\n* Are you near a smartphone or a computer? Watch the two-minute video by googling \"HD video of Jeremy Fry,\" or go to www.youtube.com\/watch?v=mOHkRk00iI8. As I'm writing this, the original video has 16.5 million views and counting.\n* He's also frequently called (perhaps incorrectly, as we will see in due time) a \"douchebag\" and an \"asshole,\" among other far more inventive and colorful things.\n* German Lopez, \"The Case for Treating Sugar like a Dangerous Drug,\" _Vox_ , September 12, 2016, http:\/\/www.vox.com\/2014\/6\/2\/5771008\/the-case-for-treating-sugar-like-a-drug.\n* George Carlin, _Napalm & Silly Putty_ (New York: Hachette, 2001).\n* Senator Barack Obama, \"Barack Obama at the Al Smith Dinner,\" Real Clear Politics, http:\/\/www.realclearpolitics.com\/articles\/2008\/10\/barack_obama_at_the_al_smith_d.html.\n* Frank Cerabino, \"Cerabino: Bravo, ESPN: 'Sucks' Has Lost Its Succulence,\" _Palm Beach Post_ , December 12, 2013, http:\/\/www.palmbeachpost.com\/news\/news\/bravo-espn-sucks-has-lost-its-succulence\/ncJth\/.\n* See my Instagram account @onbeingawesome for a kind of \"anthropology of awesome\" that documents the use of _awesome_ and _sucks_ in commercial and popular culture.\n* John Steinbeck, _Travels with Charley: In Search of America_ (New York: Penguin Books, 1997), 37.\n* Iris Murdoch, _The Sovereignty of Good_ (New York: Routledge, 2001), 41.\n* As the moral and political philosopher John Stuart Mill put it in _On Liberty_ (New York: Penguin Classics), 2006, 68: \"Human nature is not a machine to be built after a model, and set to do exactly the work prescribed for it, but a tree, which requires to grow and develop itself on all sides, according to the tendency of the inward forces which make it a living thing. . . . Such are the differences among human beings in their sources of pleasure, their susceptibilities of pain, and the operation on them of different physical and moral agencies, that unless there is a corresponding diversity in their modes of life, they neither obtain their fair share of happiness, nor grow up to the mental, moral, and aesthetic stature of which their nature is capable.\" Chapter III, \"On Individuality, As One of the Elements of Wellbeing.\"\n* From the documentary _Greenwich Village: Music That Defined a Generation_. You can learn more about Seeger from the excellent 2007 documentary _Pete Seeger: The Power of Song_.\n* Jonah Berger and Katherine L. Milkman, \"What Makes Online Content Viral?\" _Journal of Marketing Research_ 49, no. 2 (2012): 192\u2013205.\n* John Tierney, \"Will You Be E-mailing This Column? It's Awesome,\" _New York Times_ , February 8, 2010, http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2010\/02\/09\/science\/09tier.html?_r=0.\n* \"Act so that you use humanity, as much in your own person as in the person of every other, always at the same time as end and never merely as means.\" See his _Groundwork for a Metaphysics of Morals_ , ed., trans. Allen W. Wood (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002).\n* Radiolab's podcast _Patient Zero_ discusses the complexities of the high five's origins.\n* Jon Mooallem, \"The History (and Mystery) of the High Five,\" in _The Best American Sports Writing 2012_ , ed. Michael Wilbon and Glenn Stout (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing, 2012).\n* _Ibid._ ; emphasis added.\n* _The New York Times_ reports on this and nicely captures the confusion: Scott Cacciola, \"He Missed a Shot? Give That Man a Hand,\" _New York Times_ , April 11, 2015, http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2015\/04\/12\/sports\/basketball\/he-missed-a-shot-give-that-man-a-hand.html.\n* Ibid.\n* Mooallem, \"The History (and Mystery) of the High Five.\"\n* Sarah Lyall hilariously brings out the Americanness of _awesome_ by comparing US and British culture. See her essay \"Ta-Ta, London. Hello, Awesome,\" _New York Times_ , August 17, 2013.\n* _This American Life_ , episode 198, \"How to Win Friends and Influence People,\" November 2, 2001.\n* Antanas Mockus, \"The Art of Changing a City,\" _New York Times_ , July 16, 2015.\n* Mar\u00eda Cristina Caballero, \"Academic Turns City into a Social Experiment,\" _Harvard Gazette_ , March 11, 2004, http:\/\/news.harvard.edu\/gazette\/story\/2004\/03\/academic-turns-city-into-a-social-experiment\/.\n* Ibid.\n* \"Oxygen\/Markle Pulse Poll Finds: Harassment of Women on the Street Is Rampant; 87% of American Women Report Being Harassed on the Street by a Male Stranger,\" The Free Library, https:\/\/www.thefreelibrary.com\/Oxygen\/Markle Pulse Poll Finds: Harassment of Women on the Street Is . . . -a062870396.\n* Holly Kearl, _Unsafe and Harassed in Public Spaces: A National Street Harassment Report_ (Reston, VA: Stop Street Harassment, 2014).\n* \"Oxygen\/Markle Pulse Poll.\"\n* Jane Jacobs, _The Death and Life of Great American Cities_ (New York: Vintage Books, 1992), 31.\n* \"Oxygen\/Markle Pulse Poll.\"\n* _Relational Aesthetics_ (Dijon, France: Les Presses du R\u00e9el, 1998), 17.\n* Reported in a talk titled \"How Art Can Influence Politics and Vice Versa\" given to the Swedish Exhibition Agency (2015).\n* Both quotes are from Jens Haaning's catalog, \"Hello, My Name Is Jens Haaning\" (Dijon, France: Les Presses du R\u00e9el, 2002).\n* Buehlman, K., Gottman, J. M., and Katz, L. \"How a Couple Views Their Past Predicts Their Future: Predicting Divorce from an Oral History Interview,\" _Journal of Family Psychology_ 5, no. 3\u20134 (1992): 295\u2013318.\n* Gottman has many books and articles on these issues, but for an example see _The Science of Trust: Emotional Attunement for Couples_ (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2011).\n* There's actually a website for awesome dates called HowAboutWe, where people post their awesome date ideas and try to find a good match.\n* Another example is season 6, episode 3 of Larry David's _Curb Your Enthusiasm_ \u2014a show full of examples of people sucking. Larry David's character is fascinating in part because he obsessively calls attention to sucky people while being no stranger to suckiness. Consider his arguably sucky attitude toward the \"stop and chat.\"\n* For a real-world example of a woman who decided to treat catcalls as legitimate social openings in order to flip the script and question the catcallers' beliefs and motivations, listen to philosopher Eleanor Gordon-Smith's piece \"Hollaback Girl\" on _This American Life,_ episode 603, \"Once More, with Feeling,\" December 2, 2016.\n* The text she read is available here: http:\/\/georginastarr.com\/georginastarrdiningalone.htm.\n* Note that I'm not saying this kind of interaction will appeal to all introverts. However, because such a social opening does not require much face-to-face interaction, it might be taken up by, or inspiring to, someone who would rather avoid such interaction.\n* He says this in his 1957 essay on the meaning of _hip_ , \"The White Negro.\"\n* \"It is a shortcoming of much contemporary moral philosophy that it eschews discussion of the separate virtues, preferring to proceed directly to some sovereign concept such as sincerity, or authenticity, or freedom, thereby imposing, it seems to me, an unexamined and empty idea of unity, and impoverishing our moral language in an important area.\" ( _The Sovereignty of Good,_ 56.) Murdoch wrote this in the 1960s, and moral philosophy since has been much better about investigating the \"separate virtues,\" but it is advice well worth keeping in mind.\n* Of course, some attempts at creating social openings merit criticism because they are discriminatory, unjust, presumptuous, harmful, and so on. In that case, we have good reason to criticize and deflect.\n* Caity Weaver, \"President Obama Shames America by Wearing Wack-Ass Tan Suit,\" _Gawker_ , August 28, 2014, http:\/\/gawker.com\/president-obama-shames-america-by-wearing-wack-ass-tan-1628136603. I'm down with the tan suit.\n* Roger Scruton, \"Real Men Have Manners,\" in _Philosophy of Food_ , ed. David M. Kaplan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012).\n* http:\/\/www.tlc.com\/tv-shows\/extreme-cheapskates\/.\n* Emily Post, _Etiquette: In Society, in Business, in Politics, and at Home_ (New York: Funk and Wagnalls Company, 1922), 53\u201354.\n* Aaron James, _Assholes: A Theory_ (New York: Doubleday, 2012). See chapter 5, \"Asshole Management,\" for management techniques.\n* See Paul K. Piff, \"Wealth and the Inflated Self: Class, Entitlement, and Narcissism,\" _Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin_ 40, no. 1 (2013): 34\u201343; Paul K. Piff, Daniel M. Stancato, St\u00e9phane C\u00f4t\u00e9, Rodolfo Mendoza-Denton, and Dacher Keltner, \"Higher Social Class Predicts Increased Unethical Behavior,\" _Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences_ 109, no. 11 (2012): 4086\u201391.\n* _Douchebag_ is a heavily male-centric term, but I see no reason why there could not be female douchebags, or douchebagettes.\n* Marcel Proust, _Swann's Way,_ 7 vols., _Remembrance of Things Past_ series (New York, NY: Vintage, 1982), p. 229.\n* As we saw with the construction worker in the previous chapter, and as I discuss further in the next chapter, sometimes being \"fake\" is an important social strategy. Some people are forced to be fake or to self-efface because of oppressive social conditions. In these cases, it's the social conditions that suck.\n* Mockus, \"The Art of Changing a City.\"\n* ESPN 30 for 30 Shorts: The High Five. http:\/\/www.espn.com\/video\/clip?id=11253247.\n* Post, _Etiquette_.\n* \"Area Man Up for Anything Except Being the One Who Makes the Decision,\" _The Onion_ , August 11, 2014: http:\/\/www.theonion.com\/article\/area-man-up-for-anything-except-being-the-one-who--50178.\n* As philosopher Peter Strawson notes, we have many conflicting ideals that come in and out of our lives (ignoring his focus on \"men\"): \"Men make for themselves pictures of ideal forms of life. Such pictures are various and may be in sharp opposition to each other; and one and the same individual may be captivated by different and sharply conflicting pictures at different times. At one time it may seem to him that he should live\u2014even that _a man_ should live\u2014in such-and-such a way; at another that the only truly satisfactory form of life is something totally different, incompatible with the first. In this way, his outlook may vary radically, not only at different periods of his life, but from day to day, even from one hour to the next.\" (\"Social Morality and Individual Ideal,\" _Philosophy_ 36, no. 136 [1961]: 1\u201317.)\n* There's almost no end to the books and essays on cool, starting almost as soon as coolness emerged and continuing to this day. See Norman Mailer's 1957 essay \"The White Negro.\"\n* A classic account of this is William H. Whyte's _The Organization Man_ (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1956).\n* Mailer, \"The White Negro.\"\n* Malcolm Gladwell writes about this sense of _cool_ in his 1997 _New Yorker_ essay \"The Coolhunt.\"\n* Penguin Books (2016), 419.\n* For an account of how _cool_ found a secure place in the business and marketing world, see Thomas Frank's _The Conquest of Cool: Business Culture, Counterculture, and the Rise of Hip Consumerism_ (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).\n* Joel Dinerstein makes this case in his excellent essay \"Lester Young and the Birth of Cool,\" in _Signifyin(g), Sanctifyin',_ & _Slam Dunking: A Reader in African American Expressive Culture_ , ed. Gena Dagel Caponi (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999), 239\u201376; see also Dinerstein's book _The Origins of Cool in Postwar America_ (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017).\n* Dinerstein, \"Lester Young and the Birth of Cool.\"\n* Some readers will recall seeing a young Bill Clinton running for president and trying to appeal to the American people by overtly adopting Lester Young's style, playing saxophone in sunglasses on _The Arsenio Hall Show_ to wild cheers of \"woot woot woot!\" from an enthusiastic audience.\n* B. B. King and David Ritz, _Blues All Around Me: The Autobiography of B.B. King_ (New York, NY: Avon Books, 1996), p. 105.\n* Young's life also demonstrates our earlier point that a person can be awesome without being extroverted. He was often described as aloof, alien, shy, and elusive.\n* Dinerstein, \"Lester Young and the Birth of Cool,\" 251, emphasis added.\n* For example, five states still have no laws against hate crimes: Arkansas, Indiana, South Carolina, Wyoming, and Georgia, whose hate crime statute was struck down by the Georgia Supreme Court as recently as 2004.\n* Robert D. Putnam, political scientist and Malkin Professor of Public Policy at the Harvard University John F. Kennedy School of Government, documents this extensively and argues at length and with considerable empirical evidence that \"social capital\"\u2014our networks of personal bonds and community ties\u2014has sharply declined (roughly) since the 1960s. See _Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community_ (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000) and, with Lewis Feldstein and Don Cohen, _Better Together: Restoring the American Community_ (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2003).\n* See her essay \"The Tragedy of Women's Emancipation,\" in _Anarchism and Other Essays_ , ed. Will Jonson, 2nd rev. ed. (New York and London: Mother Earth Publishing Association, 1910), 219\u201331.\n* Eugene Kim, \"Here's the Real Reason Mark Zuckerberg Wears the Same T-Shirt Every Day,\" _Business Insider UK_ , November 7, 2014, http:\/\/uk.businessinsider.com\/mark-zuckerberg-same-t-shirt-2014-11?r=US&IR=T.\n* An influential philosophical statement of this view is Jenefer M. Robinson's essay \"Style and Personality in the Literary Work,\" _Philosophical Review_ 94, no. 2 (1985): 227\u201347.\n* I argue for this view in my paper \"Personal Style and Artistic Style,\" in _Philosophical Quarterly_ 65, no. 261 (2015): 711\u201331.\n* It was nowhere near a pretty picture, though, as working conditions were horrifying and a giant gap between rich and poor kept the working class overworked and disempowered (among other terrible things).\n* See his essay \"The Painter of Modern Life,\" in _Selected Writings on Art and Literature_ (New York: Penguin, 1992), p. 400, translation slightly altered.\n* Ibid.\n* Ibid _._\n* Ibid.\n* Ibid.\n* Ibid.\n* \"To gain an integrated individuality, each of us needs to cultivate his own garden. But there is no fence about this garden: it is no sharply marked-off enclosure. Our garden is the world, in the angle at which it touches our own manner of being.\" (John Dewey, _Individualism Old and New_ (New York: Prometheus Books 1999), 82\u201383.\n* Kellie Woodhouse, \"Does Harvard Need Your Money?\" _Inside Higher Ed_ , June 5, 2015, https:\/\/www.insidehighered.com\/news\/2015\/06\/05\/400-million-gift-harvard-sets-debate-about-philanthropy-wealthy-institutions.\n* http:\/\/www.awesomefoundation.org\/.\n* \"FAQ,\" Awesome Food, http:\/\/www.awesomefood.net\/faq\/.\n* Ron Finley, \"A Guerilla Gardener in South Central LA,\" filmed February 2013, TED video, 10:45, https:\/\/www.ted.com\/talks\/ron_finley_a_guerilla_gardener_in_south_central_la.\n* Ron Finley, \"They Tried to Arrest Me for Planting Carrots,\" _Fortune_ , February 25, 2015, http:\/\/fortune.com\/2015\/02\/25\/they-tried-to-arrest-me-for-planting-carrots\/.\n* \"Tony Hawk 900,\" YouTube video, 1:51, from _Ultimate X: The Movie_ , posted by \"Zapatapro27,\" July 23, 2008, https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=e4QGnppJ-ys.\n* Ibid.\n* The podcast _Radiolab_ has a nice episode on Bonaly: http:\/\/www.radiolab.org\/story\/edge\/.\n* https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=fexLmuu4mlI.\n* \"Rebel on Ice,\" _Eva Longoria's Versus_ , directed by Retta (2015), http:\/\/espn.go.com\/video\/clip?id=13416371.\n* Phil Hersh, \"Bonaly's Plan for Revenge: This Time, Keep It Simple,\" March 12, 1993, _Chicago Tribune_ , http:\/\/articles.chicagotribune.com\/1993-03-12\/sports\/9303191274_1_suzanne-bonaly-surya-bonaly-woman-skater.\n* \"FAQ,\" Improv Everywhere, http:\/\/improveverywhere.com\/faq\/.\n* \"Frozen Grand Central,\" Improv Everywhere, http:\/\/improveverywhere.com\/2008\/01\/31\/frozen-grand-central\/.\n* Including a comment from Madhav Shrestha, \"This is what 'AWESOME' means. Hats off!!!!.\"\n* \"High Five Escalator,\" Improv Everywhere, http:\/\/improveverywhere.com\/2009\/02\/09\/high-five-escalator\/.\n* \"High Five New York City,\" YouTube video, 4:20, posted by \"natek213,\" July 31, 2009, https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=QMQk8Uncl9k.\n* Dmitry Belyaev, \"Interview: Metro Chats with Filmmaker Meir Kalmanson, Man Behind 'High-Five New York,'\" _Metro_ , October 10, 2014, http:\/\/www.metro.us\/entertainment\/interview-metro-chats-with-filmmaker-meir-kalmanson-man-behind-high-five-new-york\/tmWniD---16nm5q6V1Go0\/.\n* New York City Department of Sanitation, \"About DSNY,\" City of New York, http:\/\/www1.nyc.gov\/assets\/dsny\/about\/inside-dsny.shtml.\n* For a kind of encyclopedia of creative public actions, some of which are awesome and some of which are not, see Nato Thompson and Gregory Sholette's _The Interventionists: Users' Manual for the Creative Disruption of Everyday Life_ (North Adams, MA: Mass MoCA, 2006). Also relevant are Doris Sommer's _The Work of Art in the World: Civic Agency and Public Humanities_ (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014) and Diana Boros's _Creative Rebellion for the Twenty-First Century: The Importance of Public and Interactive Art to Political Life in America_ (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).\n* Of course, more traditional artworks can also be awesome, but they tend not to highlight or emphasize awesomeness in the same way.\n* This is not to say that artistic graffiti cannot be awesome. For a clear example see the artist MOMO's \"Manhattan Tag\" (2006). MOMO created a mysterious path through the city by tagging his name in a thin line of paint across the entire width of Manhattan.\n* See his film _The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces_ (1980).\n* I develop this way of thinking about street art and consider its place in art history in two papers: \"Street Art: The Transfiguration of the Commonplaces,\" _Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism_ 68, no. 3 (2010): 243\u201357; and \"Using the Street for Art: A Reply to Baldini,\" _Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism_ 74, no. 2 (2016): 191\u20135.\n* \"The Comfy City,\" Jane Tsong and Robert Powers, http:\/\/www.myriadsmallthings.org\n\n\/comfycity.html.\n* \"Next City: Gold-Painted Shipping Containers Create a Global Public Space,\" Shared_Studios, http:\/\/www.sharedstudios.com\/press-list\/2016\/5\/11\/next-city-gold-painted-shipping-containers-create-a-global-public-space.\n* David Porter, \"Experimental Installations Put the Social in Social Science,\" Phys.org, May 30, 2016, http:\/\/phys.org\/news\/2016-05-experimental-social-science.html#jCp.\n* For another project that focuses on cultivating dialogue between disparate groups, see Suzanne Lacy's _The Roof Is On Fire_ , which ran in Oakland, California, from 1993 to 1994.\n* I am grateful for and indebted to two outstanding art history books that discuss such artworks. For many more examples, details, and discussion, see Grant Kester's _Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art_ (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004) and Claire Bishop's _Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship_ (Brooklyn, NY: Verso, 2012).\n* Lauren Collins, \"The Question Artist,\" _The_ _New Yorker_ , August 6, 2012.\n* Jerry Saltz, \"How I Made an Artwork Cry,\" _New York_ , February 7, 2010.\n* The piece is called _This Is Competition_.\n* Collins, \"The Question Artist.\"\n* It's notable that Willats was quick to recognize the \"special world\" one can construct with friends through skateboarding. _The Kids Are in the Streets_ is about how kids use skateboarding to resist the suckiness of life in a tower block in South London.\n* _A State of Agreement,_ directed by Charlotte Ginsborg (2008).\n* \"Context,\" Stephen Willats, http:\/\/stephenwillats.com\/context\/.\n* See Bishop's book _Artificial Hells_ , p. 19. Art historian, critic, and curator Grant Kester attempts to make sense of these works in terms of the \"creative orchestration of dialogical exchange\" ( _Conversation Pieces_ , p. 189), in which dialogical exchange \"requires that we strive to acknowledge the specific identity of our interlocutors and conceive of them not simply as subjects on whose behalf we might act but as co-participants in the transformation of both self and society\" (p. 79).\n* These artworks also challenge us to rethink our understanding of beauty. For an attempt to do so, see my \"On the Interest in Beauty and Disinterest,\" in _Philosophers' Imprint_ , June 2016, vol. 16, no. 9, pp. 1\u201314. All articles in _Philosophers' Imprint_ are available for free online. This one is here: http:\/\/quod.lib.umich.edu\/p\/phimp\/3521354.0016.009\/1.\n* Some of their missions are true pranks that deceive people in sucky ways.\n* For a refreshing counterweight to unchecked optimism about the Internet see Astra Taylor, _The People's Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age_ (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2014).\n* The app is currently defunct. More information is available here: http:\/\/somebodyapp.com\/.\n* Information about hitchBOT and its successors is available here: http:\/\/mir1.hitchbot.me\/.\n* Ashlee Vance, \"This Tech Bubble Is Different,\" _Bloomberg_ , April 14, 2011, https:\/\/www.bloomberg.com\/news\/articles\/2011-04-14\/this-tech-bubble-is-different.\n* Baudelaire, \"The Painter of Modern Life.\"\n* From Louis C.K.'s HBO comedy special _Shameless_ (2007), dir. Stephen J. Santos.\n\n## Contents\n\n  1. Cover\n  2. About the Author\n  3. Title Page\n  4. Copyright\n  5. Dedication\n  6. Contents\n  7. Epigraph\n  8. SUCKINESS and AWESOMENESS: A Taxonomy\n  9. Chapter 1: In Search of Awesomeness\n  10. Chapter 2: A Theory\n    1. Social Openings\n    2. The Basics of Suckiness\n    3. The Basics of Non-Suckiness\n    4. Articulating Awesome\n    5. Mixing It Up\n    6. Why Awesome?\n  11. Chapter 3: The Ethics of Awesomeness\n    1. The High Five\n    2. Creative Community Builders\n    3. Bands, Booze, Art, and Shoes: Everything Is Awesome\n    4. Living Together\n    5. Introverts and Expectations\n  12. Chapter 4: Mapping the Ethics of Awesomeness\n    1. Modes of Suckiness\n    2. Modes of Awesomeness\n  13. Chapter 5: The Origins of Awesome\n    1. The New Ideal\n    2. Be Cool (or Not)\n    3. Lester Young\n    4. Individuality and Community: A Tension\n    5. Individuality and Community: A Resolution\n    6. Awesome Style\n  14. Chapter 6: Awesome Culture\n    1. Altruism\n    2. Athleticism\n    3. Civic Life\n    4. Art\n    5. Watch Out\n  15. Chapter 7: Becoming Awesome\n  16. Acknowledgments\n\n  1. Cover\n  2. Table of Contents\n  3. Start\n\n  1. i\n  2. ii\n  3. iii\n  4. iv\n  5. vi\n  6. vii\n  7. viii\n  8. ix\n  9. x\n  10. xi\n  11. xii\n  12. \n  13. \n  14. \n  15. \n  16. \n  17. \n  18. \n  19. \n  20. \n  21. \n  22. \n  23. \n  24. \n  25. \n  26. \n  27. \n  28. \n  29. \n  30. \n  31. \n  32. \n  33. \n  34. \n  35. \n  36. \n  37. \n  38. \n  39. \n  40. \n  41. \n  42. \n  43. \n  44. \n  45. \n  46. \n  47. \n  48. \n  49. \n  50. \n  51. \n  52. \n  53. \n  54. \n  55. \n  56. \n  57. \n  58. \n  59. \n  60. \n  61. \n  62. \n  63. \n  64. \n  65. \n  66. \n  67. \n  68. \n  69. \n  70. \n  71. \n  72. \n  73. \n  74. \n  75. \n  76. \n  77. \n  78. \n  79. \n  80. \n  81. \n  82. \n  83. \n  84. \n  85. \n  86. \n  87. \n  88. \n  89. \n  90. \n  91. \n  92. \n  93. \n  94. \n  95. \n  96. \n  97. \n  98. \n  99. \n  100. \n  101. \n  102. \n  103. \n  104. \n  105. \n  106. \n  107. \n  108. \n  109. \n  110. \n  111. \n  112. \n  113. \n  114. \n  115. \n  116. \n  117. \n  118. \n  119. \n  120. \n  121. \n  122. \n  123. \n  124. \n  125. \n  126. \n  127. \n  128. \n  129. \n  130. \n  131. \n  132. \n  133. \n  134. \n  135. \n  136. \n  137. \n  138. \n  139. \n  140. \n  141. \n  142. \n  143. \n  144. \n  145. \n  146. \n  147. \n  148. \n  149. \n  150. \n  151. \n  152. \n  153. \n  154. \n  155. \n  156. \n  157. \n  158. \n  159. \n  160. \n  161. \n  162. \n  163. \n  164. \n  165. \n  166. \n  167. \n  168. \n  169. \n  170. \n  171. \n  172. \n  173. \n  174. \n  175. \n  176. \n  177. \n  178. \n  179. \n  180. \n  181. \n  182. \n  183. \n  184. \n  185. \n  186. \n  187. \n  188. \n  189. \n  190. \n  191. \n  192. \n  193. \n  194. \n  195. \n  196. \n  197. \n  198. \n  199. \n  200. \n  201. \n  202. \n  203. \n  204. \n  205. \n  206. \n  207. \n  208. \n  209. \n  210. \n  211. \n  212. \n  213. \n  214. \n  215. \n  216. \n  217. \n  218. \n  219. \n  220. \n  221. \n  222. \n  223.\n\n","meta":{"redpajama_set_name":"RedPajamaBook"}}
+{"text":"\n\nWELL FED, FLAT BROKE\n\nCopyright \u00a9 2015 by Emily Wight\n\nAll rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any part by any means\u2014graphic, electronic, or mechanical\u2014without the prior written permission of the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may use brief excerpts in a review, or in the case of photocopying in Canada, a license from Access Copyright.\n\nARSENAL PULP PRESS\n\nSuite 202\u2013211 East Georgia St.\n\nVancouver, BC V6A 1Z6\n\nCanada\n\n_arsenalpulp.com_\n\nThe publisher gratefully acknowledges the support of the Government of Canada (through the Canada Book Fund) and the Government of British Columbia (through the Book Publishing Tax Credit Program) for its publishing activities.\n\nThe author and publisher assert that the information contained in this book is true and complete to the best of their knowledge. All recommendations are made without the guarantee on the part of the author and publisher. The author and publisher disclaim any liability in connection with the use of this information. For more information, contact the publisher.\n\nNote for our UK readers: measurements for non-liquids are for volume, not weight.\n\nDesign by Gerilee McBride\n\nAll photographs and food styling by Tracey Kusiewicz\/Foodie Photography except for the following: Emily Wight (pp. 2, 5, 21, 29, 81, 117, 119, 134\u2013135, 174, 184\u2013185, 205\u2013207, 247; Bethany Schiedel (p. 11); Jordan Mitchell (p. 47); Gerilee McBride (p. 65); Grace Yaginuma (p. 133) Editing by Susan Safyan\n\nLibrary and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication:\n\nWight, Emily, 1983\u2013, author\n\nWell fed, flat broke : recipes for modest budgets and messy kitchens \/ Emily Wight.\n\nIncludes index.\n\nIssued in print and electronic formats.\n\nISBN 978-1-55152-580-8 (epub)\n\n1. Low budget cooking. 2. Cookbooks. I. Title.\n\nTX714.W547 2015 | 641.5'52 | C2015-900397-0\n\n---|---|---\n\n|  | C2015-900398-9\n**TO NICK AND HUNTER.**\n\n**SORRY FOR LEAVING THE KITCHEN SUCH A MESS, AND SO STICKY.**\n\nCONTENTS\n\nINTRODUCTION\n\nKITCHEN EQUIPMENT\n\nNUTRITION\n\nPICKY EATERS\n\nSTOCKING YOUR PANTRY\n\nRECIPES\n\nRICE & GRAINS\n\nKASHA & EGG NOODLES\n\nKIMCHI-FRIED RICE\n\nLEEK & BACON BARLOTTO\n\nMUSHROOM RISOTTO\n\nNASI GORENG\n\nOVERNIGHT BREAKFAST GRAINS\n\nPANTRY KEDGEREE\n\nRICE & LENTILS\n\nSPAM-FRIED RICE\n\nPASTA\n\nBEEF STROGANOFF\n\nCAULIFLOWER MACARONI & CHEESE\n\nCAULIFLOWER WITH ORECCHIETTE & ALMONDS\n\nLINGUINE WITH TUNA & CAPERS\n\nONE-POT PASTA WITH MEAT SAUCE\n\nPEANUTTY SOBA NOODLES WITH KALE\n\nRAPINI & SAUSAGE WITH WHITE BEANS & ORECCHIETTE\n\nRIGATONI WITH TOMATOES & CHICKPEAS\n\nSHELLS WITH BRUSSELS SPROUTS, CHICKPEAS & BACON\n\nSIZZLING CHILI NOODLES\n\nTUNA PENNE\n\nEGGS\n\nBUTTERMILK DUTCH BABY WITH BACON-BAKED APPLE\n\nBUTTERNUT SQUASH SKILLET STRATA\n\nDEEP-FRIED SRIRACHA EGGS\n\nEGG & CORN QUESADILLA, FOR ONE OR MANY\n\nEGG & TOMATO CURRY\n\nEGGS RABBIT\n\nEGGS WITH CORN & RED BEANS\n\nGREEN EGG BAKE\n\nPAUL'S TORTILLA ESPA\u00d1OLA\n\nRED SAUCE EGGS\n\nBEANS & LEGUMES\n\nBREAKFAST BEANS\n\nBUTTERNUT SQUASH & CHICKPEA CURRY\n\nCHANA MASALA\n\nCHICKPEA SALAD WITH GARLIC SCAPES\n\nLENTIL SALAD\n\nLENTIL SLOPPY JOES\n\nLENTIL TACOS WITH AVOCADO CREAM\n\nPUMPKIN & RED LENTIL DAL\n\nRED BEAN FLAUTAS\n\nSWEET POTATO & MIXED-BEAN CHILI\n\nSWEET POTATO & RED LENTIL SOUP\n\nCHICKEN\n\nCHICKEN & DUMPLINGS\n\nFRIED CHICKEN & WAFFLES\n\nMUSTARD-FRIED CHICKEN\n\nROAST PAPRIKA CHICKEN\n\nSALVADORAN ROAST CHICKEN WITH GRAVY\n\nSRIRACHA BUFFALO WINGS\n\nSWEET YELLOW CURRY\n\nTOMATO CHICKEN CURRY\n\nFISH\n\nFISH SAUCE SALMON\n\nSALMON BALL CASSEROLE\n\nSARDINE PANZANELLA\n\nSARDINO\u00cfADE\n\nSMOKED FISH CAKES\n\nTUNA & DILL PICKLE CASSEROLE\n\nTUNA CHOWDER\n\nTUNA SALAD WITH CELERY & BLACK-EYED PEAS\n\nTUNA TARTARE\n\nPORK\n\nCANDIED PORK BELLY\n\nFRENCH BISTRO PORK & BEANS\n\nNICK'S SWEET SOY PORK TENDERLOIN\n\nPORK & BEAN COTTAGE PIE\n\nSAUSAGE & \"GRITS\"\n\nSLOW-COOKER CABBAGE ROLLS\n\nSLOW-COOKER GOCHUJANG PULLED PORK\n\nSPICY PORK & TOFU STEW\n\nTOAD IN THE HOLE\n\nBEEF\n\nBEEF STEW WITH BARLEY\n\nCOTTAGE PIE\n\nCURRY BRAISED BEEF\n\nDUTCH MEATBALLS\n\nED'S POTATO MOUSSAKA\n\nHAMBURGER STEW\n\nMEATBALLS WITH RED SAUCE\n\nPOT ROAST\n\nSALISBURY STEAK\n\nFRUITS & VEGETABLES\n\nBORSCHT WITH BEETS & RED CABBAGE\n\nBROCCOLI WITH TOFU & PEANUTS\n\nCORN & ASPARAGUS SALAD\n\nCUCUMBER SALAD\n\nCURTIDO\n\nDELICATA TACOS WITH CORN\n\nGRANDMA SALAD\n\nHONEY MUSTARD BEETS\n\nKIMCHI & SOFT TOFU STEW\n\nKIMCHI PANCAKES\n\nMUSHROOM COTTAGE PIE\n\nPEAS & CARROTS\n\nPICO DE GALLO\n\nPOTATO & KALE QUESADILLAS\n\nRICE NOODLE SALAD WITH ALL THE VEGGIES\n\nROASTED ALOO GOBI\n\nROASTED RADISHES & GARLIC\n\nROASTED TOMATO & GARLIC SOUP\n\nSAVORY FRUIT SALAD\n\nSIMPLE GREEN SALAD\n\nSTRAWBERRY SALSA\n\nTHAT KOREAN RESTAURANT SOUP\n\nVEGETARIAN POSOLE\n\nVEGGIE STEW WITH DUMPLINGS\n\nZUCCHINI PARMIGIANA SANDWICHES\n\nFLOUR\n\nBREAD SOUP\n\nFERGAZZA BREAD WITH GARLIC SCAPES\n\nFOCACCIA BREAD\n\nGRANDPA'S RADIO PUDDING\n\nHORSES' ARSES\n\nNATHAN'S ROLLKUCHEN\n\nPEANUT BUTTER BACON FAT COOKIES\n\nPEANUT BUTTER CHOCOLATE CHIP BANANA MUFFINS\n\nRICE & BLUEBERRY MUFFINS\n\nSKILLET CORN BREAD WITH BLUEBERRIES\n\nSPAGHETTI SQUASH MUFFINS\n\nVANILLA SCONES\n\nSUGAR\n\nBLACK FOREST ICE CREAM\n\nBLUEBERRY CRISP\n\nCORONATION GRAPE GRANITA\n\nCUDDLES' BROWN SUGAR SHORTBREAD\n\nLEMON PUDDING\n\nORANGE GRANITA\n\nORANGE UPSIDE-DOWN CAKE\n\nPLUM & BROWN SUGAR SORBET\n\nROASTED PEACH SORBET\n\nRESOURCES\n\nACKNOWLEDGMENTS\n\nINDEX\n\nINTRODUCTION\n\nI like to believe that the best cooks are the messiest cooks because they are so focused on the masterful preparation of a meal that things like spilled liquids and crumbs are secondary or irrelevant. However unfounded that idea might be, I've put my faith in it\u2014I need to believe that what I am doing is worthwhile, even if it is only in the moment. I need Nick to believe that too, because I need him to wash the floor.\n\nNick and I live in an apartment in East Vancouver, and it is wonderful and terrible and expensive and perfect and dusty. We have a two-year-old, Hunter, and when people come over and step in something sticky, I blame him. Our couch smells like yogurt and peanut butter, and I pretend it's all his fault\u2014a toddler is a scapegoat, which makes up for so many of the other things a toddler is. We also have a cat and a lot of cat hair everywhere.\n\nNick and I have creative writing degrees\u2014we met in poetry class\u2014so we've never been wealthy. We're not even economical with our words. But we're better with money now than we have been, out of necessity\u2014Vancouver can be a hard place to live, especially for low-income people and young families. Daycare for a single child can cost as much per month as rent. It's not impossible to make it work here, but it's not always easy; here, as elsewhere, what you save in money you often lose in time.\n\nWe are all doing our best, recognizing that \"our best\" is measured on a sliding scale. Some days, my best is a lovingly prepared meal with wine and pleasantries; other days, my best is an egg cracked into a bowl of instant ramen and a series of indecipherable grunts. Some days I cook because I have to, and other days I cook because I love to. It's the love that makes the have-to's worthwhile.\n\nI don't remember a time when I wasn't so busy or so tired, and some days the world feels very small. At the end of any weekday, I get an hour and forty minutes with Hunter. Most days, I leave for work before or just after he wakes up in the morning, and he eats breakfast at daycare. When he gets home in the evening, he needs to be fed and usually bathed and read to and played with and tickled and to have his constant stream of questions responded to thoughtfully and in oddly specific detail. Most days, most of my time belongs to other people.\n\nNick also has type 1 diabetes, so just having popcorn for dinner is not really an option for him, to my dismay. We also need lunches for work the next day, and I don't like doing any more than I have to. So I cook almost every day but Friday, unless we're having company. On Fridays we get pizza or sushi or pho, or Nick fries some frozen pierogies in bacon fat with onions and we eat that while we vegetate on the couch after Hunter's gone to bed. I watched most of _Twin Peaks_ with a bowl of pho balanced on a throw pillow on my lap. I watched all of _30 Rock_ covered in nacho grease. Some weeks, I live for Friday.\n\nI used to feel guilty about what I wasn't doing, or what I wasn't doing \"right,\" but life is short. If you're a mom on Facebook (or if you know moms on Facebook), you've doubtless read that \"the days are long but the years are short\" at least three times just this week, probably superimposed in calligraphy over a silhouette of a family against a pink and orange sunset, but it's not true, at least for me. The days are short too. There is never enough time to do everything, but everything somehow still needs to get done. And dinner can be a hassle, but it needs to keep happening, every single day.\n\nWe do our best. To be honest, most of the time when I bake it's because my apartment smells bad because no one's remembered to run the dishwasher lately and everything in it has turned to reeking rot. Once a realtor friend told me that the aroma of baking cookies makes a place smell like home for potential home-buyers, and I took to that bit of advice in earnest. If a home is fragrant, its secrets are safe. My life smells like cookies, even if it sometimes looks like a pile of dirty flatware.\n\nThe best advice I can give you about cooking is to just rethink what dinner, or a meal in general, means. Think of a balanced diet in weekly terms\u2014you'll get everything you need in seven days, so don't spend every day trying to fit everything in, and let yourself be okay with taking short-cuts here and there. And let yourself dawdle over a pot of braising meat for hours and hours, if that's what moves you and makes you happy. Cooking is about generosity, but before you can take care of everyone else, first you have to do what's best for you. Sometimes what's best for me is a scrambled egg and some mashed avocado on toast; that's something that's not bad for anyone (and if it is a problem, there is no lock on the refrigerator or any great mystery about how the stove works). Square meals night after night are for people who can consistently do three things at once. I like dinner to be a single dish whenever possible, though if time allows, a salad is nice too. I don't like washing dishes, and because I cook with cast iron (which can't go in the dishwasher), I like to get away with using just one pan.\n\nPlease do take shortcuts. Research supports the notion that a diet rich in whole foods is important, not just for your health but for your budget as well, but that doesn't mean you have to rely on fresh produce all the time. Fresh produce, especially out of season, can be expensive, and in many places not readily available. In my kitchen, canned beans and tomatoes and frozen vegetables and fruit are essential, and are often the difference between a scratch-made meal and a jar of peanut butter for dinner. You do what you can with what you have, including your time. Even Ina Garten is not above store-bought time-savers and canned beans, and she is the fanciest home-cook there is. Good cooking is not about perfection, and it need not be expensive or time-consuming.\n\nWhether you intend to or not, you tell the story of your life in every meal that you serve to other people. My life is messy and calamitous and boozy, and a meal at my table tends to reflect that. I feel trapped and anxious when life falls too much into a routine, so to keep things interesting we eat eclectically, choosing Salisbury Steak (p. 168) one day and bright Rice Noodle Salad with All the Veggies (p. 190) the next. Travel is expensive and rare, so we try to bring as much of the world into our home as we can; the nice thing about where we live is that so much is available to us. Vancouver is home to a diverse immigrant population, many of whom come from Asia, so Nick and I have grown up in an environment where Asian ingredients are essential to the food we've always eaten. It has never been hard for us to come by Indian spices, big jars of kimchi, or Chinese sauces, and so our family's culinary culture has evolved distinct from our cultural backgrounds. We like a little of everything. It all feels like home.\n\nEverything is better if you can find the joy in it, and even though I love cooking, I don't always like it. I'm busy. I'm tired. The little one will just throw most of it on the floor anyway. But even when the week's been a slog and all that's left over after paying the bills is a pocketful of errand money, a warm, nourishing meal is a salve that makes the other stuff easier to take. When work is annoying and the bus smells like a damp sheep's crotch and my bra is particularly oppressive, a warm bowl of veggies and dumplings (p. 201) or a plate of fish cakes (p. 125) is the difference between hopelessness and optimism. If there's joy to be found in cooking, even if you don't particularly enjoy cooking, it's in the eating. That moment when Nick and I finally get to sit down together with dinner is the moment we drag ourselves toward all day long. The weight of our bodies finally off our feet, the warmth in our bellies replaces the dull ache that's been there since three o'clock. When we don't have much else, we have food. Really good and pretty healthy food, most of the time, and our lives are better because of the simple dishes that we look so forward to.\n\nEven at our worst, we are well fed. It is what keeps us together and keeps us going. It is the reason our floors are sticky and why our friends come over to share meals with us, even on weeknights. The days are short, and you can't do everything. I hope that sometimes you can leave the chores undone and take a little longer over dinner instead. I hope that, in all the mess of life and living, you find yourself and your loved ones well-fed too.\n\n   EMILY\n\nKITCHEN EQUIPMENT\n\nI'm cheap, and I only have a couple of cupboards and one drawer in my kitchen, so I don't buy anything that isn't useful for at least two things. However, there are a few essentials I can't do without. Some things you can save money on (almost everything), and some things you should splurge on (a decent knife). Here's what I have, and what I recommend you use.\n\n* * *\n\nTHE BASICS\n\n* * *\n\n_**Knives**_\n\nBuy one good knife, then buy one pretty good paring knife, preferably something you'd spend less than twenty dollars on, because if your partner is like mine, eventually the tip of that paring knife is going to end up bent or broken, and you will never get a satisfactory explanation as to why. Buy a good, all-purpose chef's knife that's comfortable to hold and a good weight in your hand. And then make sure you sharpen it at least once a year. A good knife will last forever. A partner who mangles your paring knife? Re-evaluate at the end of each quarter.\n\n_**Scissors**_\n\nYou need a good pair of kitchen scissors, something that can cut through string and scallions and spatchcock a chicken if you need to; I lucked out and was able to steal a pair from my parents when I left home. They either didn't notice or have grown weary of me. Either way, I have pretty good scissors.\n\n_**Pans**_\n\nBuy cast iron, but don't spend a lot. My best-used pan is from the camping section of the local Army & Navy store. I have one 9-in (23-cm) pan and one 12-in (31-cm) pan, and they work pretty well, most of the time, for most things. Cast iron is great because it's durable and it transfers well from the stove to the oven; I don't like dirtying more than one pan if I can get away with it. Once you get into the habit of using it, it works as well as non-stick pans do, and it lasts forever. I also use my smaller cast-iron pan to bake things (see Skillet Cornbread with Blueberries, p. 222, and Orange Upside-down Cake, p. 241)\u2014it's been seasoned so thoroughly at this point that it works better for me than a baking dish in many cases. I'll let you know as we go when a recipe will work in your pan.\n\n_**Pots**_\n\nMost of my pots are pretty cheap\u2014I won them in a raffle at my high school graduation\u2014but they're also decent quality; they're heavy on the bottom and they don't incinerate everything I cook in them. I have received a couple of enameled cast-iron Dutch ovens over the years as gifts, and they are what I use most. If you have a small saucepan, a pot big enough to boil pasta or potatoes, and a good, sturdy Dutch oven that you can use on the stove or in the oven, then you're basically set. A stock pot is nice to have. You don't need to spend much on these, but whatever you do buy, make sure that the lids fit snugly.\n\n_**Things for stirring**_\n\nI like wooden spoons, and use about four\u2014one long, one short, one for sweet stuff, and the other one (which is who knows how old but I just can't throw it out). You'll also need a rubber spatula and a sturdy whisk. That's all. I don't know why my utensil drawer won't close.\n\n_**The usual gadgets**_\n\nA good quality vegetable peeler, a can opener that doesn't mangle cans, and a reliable set of measuring spoons will make cooking more pleasant and efficient.\n\n_**Thermometer**_\n\nGet a thermometer, the probe kind you stick into a cut of meat to see if it's cooked inside. This need not be expensive. You should not have to spend more than five or six dollars for an analog thermometer; a digital probe thermometer may cost around ten dollars. You won't need a fancy one. If you're like me, you'll forget to turn it off and let it sit in a puddle of gravy until company leaves and you get down to finally cleaning up.\n\n_**Tongs**_\n\nTongs are the reason I still have skin on my fingers. I have two pairs, both long enough to reach into a canning pot and pull a jar out, and they are metal with silicone ends. I always have a pair in use and another in the dishwasher. They're good for everything from salad-tossing to hot-potato-transport to gently moving a piece of roasted meat onto a platter or cutting board. Get good, springy tongs.\n\n_**Rolling pin**_\n\nYou should own a rolling pin, or at least something with which to comfortably roll out dough. Mine is absolutely terrible; it wobbled on its axis so I took it apart, and now I have half a rolling pin, but it works and I won't replace it until it cracks or Nick uses it as kindling after finally giving up listening to me complain about it.\n\n_**Bowls**_\n\nIn the recipes that follow, I usually specify whether you'll need a small, medium, or large bowl. A small bowl is just a soup bowl, a medium bowl will hold about 2\u00bd qt\/L, and a large bowl will hold about 5 qt\/L. I use just three bowls for most of my cooking, and while I'm sure it would be nice to have more, I'd have to store them and wash them, and neither of those to-dos is very appealing at the moment.\n\n_**Dishes, platters, and casseroles**_\n\nThrift stores are your best friend for things like this\u2014there are always stacks of dishes and bakeware when I visit mine, and they cost almost nothing (which makes forgetting them at that friend's house who never returns anything a lot easier to take). You can also find bakeware on clearance after the holidays\u2014pick up boxed sets then when they're priced to clear. Another cheaterly way to avoid paying too much? Buy seasonal versions of things, if you're not bothered by serving summer vegetables in Christmas-themed Corningware or holiday dinner on a platter painted with lobsters. In summary? Never pay full price.\n\n* * *\n\nSMALL APPLIANCES\n\n* * *\n\n_**Immersion blender**_\n\nWhen Nick's mom bought me one, I wasn't sure I'd use it, but now I've burned through three of them. I use this all the time. I use the Cuisinart immersion blender with the mini food processor attachment and the whisk attachment, and it's served me well\u2014I like it for soups and making jam. Don't buy a plastic model\u2014let's just say I lost a boiling pot of homemade raspberry jam to a blade that detached itself and its accompanying parts mid-blend.\n\n_**Food mill**_\n\nI held out on a food mill for a long time because I already had an immersion blender and couldn't see the point. Well. Let me tell you, for mashed potatoes alone it was worth it, but it's also great for tomato sauces and salsas, and fruit pur\u00e9es. I got mine on clearance for eight dollars, and it's by far one of my most useful kitchen tools. The handle broke, but I still use it at least twice a week.\n\n_**Slow cooker**_\n\nI have a Crock-Pot, and it gets me through those weeks when I have to be everywhere for everyone; I also use it to make stock, so it comes in handy when I don't have time to let a pot simmer on the stove for two hours. It's also great for large volumes of stuff you can freeze for later meals\u2014I like making a huge pot of chili or stew and then portioning it into containers to be frozen and then reheated for lunch at work. The only time I use dried beans is when I use my slow cooker.\n\n_**Kitchen scale**_\n\nI don't have a fancy kitchen scale; it's not even digital. But it's very helpful, especially for fruits and vegetables, which vary a lot in size\u2014I measure most veggies by weight. This is another thing I found cheap\u2014mine's from a thrift store. I think it was six dollars. Anything you think you'll need but aren't sure how often you'll really use it? Buy it from a thrift store first. If it breaks and you loved it, replace it with a new model (but never pay full retail).\nNUTRITION\n\nI don't think there's a single family anywhere anymore who's not dealing with a mess of nutritional requirements and allergies and autoimmune disorders. What a time to be alive! Nick's got type 1 diabetes and is insulin-dependent. On Nick's side of the family, food allergies and Celiac disease run rampant; on mine, heart disease and type 2 diabetes are concerns I should probably pay more attention to.\n\nAlso, there are the vegans and the vegetarians and the folks who avoid dairy or gluten (for non-Celiac reasons) or carbs or food that cavemen probably didn't eat. Has it ever been more complicated to try and feed people?\n\nIf you are coming for dinner, I will accommodate your allergies and your sensitivities and your weird issues if you give me sufficient notice. I kind of like dietary concerns and affectations; I find them challenging. Cooking for someone with cancer or Celiac disease or a CrossFit membership invigorates me the same way that sports riles fit people up. Special diets are my time to shine! (I don't have enough hobbies.)\n\nThat said, the day-to-day of feeding someone with challenging dietary needs is at best something to adapt to, and in general kind of a pain. For us, that pain is carb counting.\n\nCarbohydrate foods raise blood glucose levels the most. In order to balance blood sugar and take the right amount of insulin, many people with type 1 diabetes will estimate the carbohydrate levels in a given meal and calculate their insulin dose accordingly. Those with type 2 diabetes who use pills or fixed doses of insulin to manage their blood glucose also adhere to a carbohydrate \"budget\"\u2014often referred to as basic carb counting\u2014in order to control their blood sugar and tailor their meals and snacks around a set goal of carbohydrate grams.\n\nCarb counting is an imperfect science, and many people have trouble estimating carbs versus insulin. It's particularly difficult to calculate the carbohydrate load of combined ingredients, especially when dining out or eating meals that deviate from the whole-plate meat, starch, and vegetable model, such as curries, stews, and most pasta dishes. It can also be hard to know intuitively what is a small, medium, or large serving, especially on plates that aren't your own. The easiest way to practice carb counting well is to be able to read and understand nutrition labels. This doesn't mean you should increase your processed food intake in order to make carb-counting easier, because it's also important to avoid excess sodium and hidden sugars, which many packaged foods are packed with.\n\nOn the one hand, carb counting makes it easier to control your blood sugar; on the other hand, even people who do it well can find it a burden. Fruit is the trickiest\u2014measuring fruit portions can be challenging, because one serving of fruit is not necessarily the same thing as one whole fruit. I make us smoothies in the morning when we're running behind, and if Nick misjudges how much insulin to take based on what I guess I've thrown into the blender, it can throw off his workday considerably. We'll get to this topic a few times in this book, but there are some foods that your guts will convert into glucose pretty quickly, which will cause your blood sugar to spike and then drop. Ideally, your digestive system will have to work a little harder to do this, which is why whole grains are better than refined grains, including flour and instant rice and oats.\n\n* * *\n\nTHE DASH DIET\n\n* * *\n\nThe DASH diet was developed by North American researchers with sponsorship from the National Institutes of Health. DASH stands for \"Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension,\" and the diet is meant to be a simple, healthy way to reduce your blood pressure. In a clinical study, patients who followed the DASH diet were able to decrease their blood pressure considerably in as little as two weeks. The diet worked for those with and without hypertension, men and women, and for people from different ethnic groups.\n\nDASH involves eating four to five servings of fruit and four to five servings of vegetables per day, and includes whole grains, poultry, fish, and nuts. It strives to reduce your intake of cholesterol and total fat, particularly saturated fats like those found in meat and dairy products. Adherents to DASH consume little or no sweeteners\u2014artificial or otherwise\u2014or sugary drinks, including pop and juice. As a result, the diet is high in potassium, calcium, magnesium, and dietary fiber, and low in sodium.\n\nSo basically, that makes it the most sensible diet ever. It's not one we adhere to most of the time, but it can be a great way to repent after the holidays, or any particularly hedonistic period during which many pounds of meat and cheese and Doritos are eaten. And while the diet is designed to prevent hypertension, lowering blood pressure is good for most of us. A welcome side effect of following the diet even casually has been a reduction in how much salt we use. For that reason, I am fairly liberal in my instructions to \"adjust seasonings to taste,\" as you get different mileage out of sodium depending on how freely you use it.\n\n* * *\n\nON SALT\n\n* * *\n\nPeople have a lot of ideas about what salt you should use and for what. I use Windsor-brand coarse salt for most things, because it produces consistent results. Windsor is a Canadian brand, so it's reasonably priced here; find a brand of coarse or kosher salt that you like and stick with it. I put iodized table salt in my salt shakers (and therefore on my popcorn, which I eat too much of), because a little iodine here and there is a good thing, especially if you're concerned about your thyroid, and especially if you're not getting it from other sources. The World Health Organization recommends that you use iodized salt as a way to meet your daily requirements; however, if you suffer from hyperthyroidism, check with your doctor.\n\nI bought some fleur de sel as a souvenir in France and can confirm that it is wonderful; if you buy it, use it sparingly\u2014it's expensive and most foods are simply not worthy of it. I like just a whisper of it sprinkled on desserts\u2014try it sprinkled atop peanut butter cookies or a slice of watermelon at the peak of summer.\n\n* * *\n\nON FAT\n\n* * *\n\nFat is awesome as part of a healthy diet. Don't fear it in moderation\u2014where there's nonfat (in processed foods, that is), there's sugar and artificial sweeteners and an abject lack of satisfaction. If you're going to eat something, really eat it; you'll get more joy out of the fatty stuff, but you'll most likely eat less (unless we're talking about doughnuts and then maybe _you'd_ eat less, but I wouldn't). What kind of fat should you use? There are so many options. I asked a dietitian and was pleased to hear that in her own kitchen, she uses butter, bacon fat, olive oil, and canola\u2014there's no need to get into fancy oils (flax, rice bran, grape seed, and nut oils) unless you like the taste of them.\n\n_**Butter**_\n\nIn small amounts it's magical and cannot be replaced. It is a saturated fat, so use it sparingly, but when you do use it make sure you really, really enjoy it.\n\n_**Bacon fat**_\n\nYou're going to end up with bacon fat if you cook any bacon at all, so save it. This is another fat where a little goes a long way\u2014try it in Peanut Butter Bacon Fat Cookies (p. 220), or just use it to fry onions or sear a steak. Again, sparingly.\n\n_**Olive oil**_\n\nGet plain old olive oil for cooking, and extra-virgin olive oil for salads. Olive oil is one of those good fats\u2014it's a heart-healthy source of omega-3 fatty acids, which are beneficial for growth, development, and mental acuity. Olive oil will make you smarter, probably.\n\n_**Canola oil**_\n\nUse canola oil for everyday cooking, as it's cheap, and a source of omega-3s.\n\n_**Sesame oil**_\n\nUse this to taste; I like a few drops of sesame oil in salads, fried rice dishes, or in soups because it's nutty and strong-flavored\u2014it really doesn't take much. Look for toasted sesame oil that's 100 percent sesame; some companies cut their sesame oil with soy oil. Don't bother with that stuff.\n\n_**Peanut oil**_\n\nIf you're going to fry something at high temperatures, like chicken, use peanut oil. It's a little more expensive, but you can strain it through a filter-lined sieve and use it multiple times. Find the cost of peanut oil a little prohibitive? You can fry with canola, but some people think it imparts a fishy taste when heated.\n\nWhat should you stay away from? Avoid soy oils, vegetable and safflower oils, which are high in omega-6 fatty acids, something we get a lot of by eating commercially prepared foods. If you use a lot of oil (maybe don't do that?), stay away from soy.\n\nWhat about the current fad-nutrition darling coconut oil? Well, if you like it, go ahead and use it. Just don't eat an inordinate amount. Is it good for you? That's debatable; it does make your hair shiny...when you apply it directly to your hair. There is no magic oil that's going to make you super healthy and change your life; save your money if that's what you're hoping for with coconut oil. A quarter cup a day may change your life, though not the way you might hope. But that goes for everything.\nPICKY EATERS\n\nBefore Hunter, I was, theoretically, a great parent. I had such good ideas! \"Oh, I'd never hide vegetables in other foods,\" I'd say. \"Kids should just learn to appreciate the taste and texture of vegetables from the start,\" and \"I'd never make a second meal just for a kid\u2014he'll eat what we're eating, and that's that.\" I was convinced that picky eating was the parents' fault, and that by introducing a diverse array of homemade, delicately spiced vegetables, stewed meats, and fruit, I'd have a champion eater and the smug satisfaction I've always longed for.\n\nSo I worked hard, sourcing the very best ingredients and lovingly preparing individual portions of homemade food, offering a different taste at every meal. And at first, he loved it! I was on my way to being smugly satisfied, occasionally dropping totally reassuring truth bombs like, \"Oh, I just mush up a little bit of what we're eating, and he eats that right up\u2014I don't make a big fuss, so he doesn't either\" to other mothers, as if I'd figured it all out like a damn food genie. Unfortunately, and I didn't realize this at the time, when you get too comfortable with something, or when you think you've achieved some level of success as a parent, kids can sense it, and they'll abandon their course just as easily as they picked it up. Somewhere around eighteen months, he decided that all food is poison and henceforth has primarily eaten peanut butter toast ever since. I have come to understand that I don't know shit. I'm so much better with cats.\n\nResearch suggests that half of all parents describe their young children as \"picky eaters\"; it also suggests that it may take up to fifteen attempts to expose a child to a new flavor before he'll be willing to try it. I think that may be an average\u2014Hunter will refuse things twice that many times, at least. He's an overachiever when it comes to stubbornness. I'm so proud.\n\nChildren are naturally averse to foods with bitter or strong tastes (brassicas, root vegetables) or foods with challenging textures, such as meat. In the English-speaking western world, it's common practice to start kids out with plain and bland foods, such as Pablum and unseasoned grains and starches. I haven't met a kids' menu yet that didn't offer buttered noodles as an entr\u00e9e. As a child-free person, I remember scoffing at this; as someone who is toddler-encumbered, I look at this and hope he'll try at least one noodle, maybe dipped in ketchup, and do consider begging him to do so.\n\nThe context for my assumption that Hunter is picky has been that he doesn't want to eat what we eat. This is annoying, but according to Kelly Mulder, registered dietitian and PhD candidate in human nutrition at the University of British Columbia, picky eating is one thing, but particular eating is another. A kid who will eat five or six different kinds of foods, and who will occasionally try something new, is pretty normal. A picky eater is a kid who will only eat one or two things, like plain white buns or one particular kind of soup (no variation allowed). If your little one is excluding entire food groups, and continues to do so for a long time, it may be worth a visit to a registered dietitian or a pediatrician to ensure he's growing and developing as he should. Another thing to think about? Kids don't eat like we do, and the number of calories they need depends on a multitude of factors, including their age, where they are developmentally, and their activity level (an active kid is a hungry kid!). As a result, yours may not eat the same amount every day\u2014some days she may eat everything in your pantry, and other days\u2014or for many days on end\u2014she'll seem to live on air and water. Hunter is like this\u2014he's a binge-and-coast kind of kid, eating a tub of yogurt, half a loaf of bread, and a jar of peanut butter one day, and practically nothing for three or four days following. He's also tall for his age, and solid. So if your child is eating with some degree of variety and appears to be growing and energetic, then just slip him a multivitamin and hope for the best. You'll get through this. So will they.\n\nHave a picky eater? Take heart:\n\n\u2022 It's up to you to offer healthy food, but up to them to eat it. Start by offering small amounts of a variety of foods. Small portions may be less intimidating; kids will ask for more if they're still hungry.\n\n\u2022 Avoid grazing. Kids need to learn the difference between feelings of hunger and fullness, and frequent snacking may keep them always sort-of-satisfied, so that they'll eat less at meal times. Meals should be large enough that children will still be hungry for their next meal, but not so small that they require snacks in the meantime.\n\n\u2022 Milk is not food. Hunter would beg to differ, but it's not. Children between the ages of two and eight should have two servings of milk or milk alternatives (like cheese and yogurt) per day. Let water be their main drink, and offer milk at the end of a meal. They are sneaky buggers and will fill up on liquids if you let them.\n\n\u2022 Don't bribe them. Lead by example, be the change...just don't reward them with candy for eating a piece of broccoli. Teach them\u2014by showing them\u2014that eating is fun. Enjoy sitting down together and make conversation that is not about the food; a relaxed child is a child who may be open to trying something new.\n\n\u2022 Involve kids in shopping, cooking, and gardening. Make food fun by teaching kids where it comes from. Let them help, even when doing so is not particularly helpful in getting dinner on the table. Involve them in preparing lunch or snacks on the weekends if you're pressed for time during the week.\n\n\u2022 Don't restrict certain foods. Limit junk food, but don't make a big fuss about sugar or junk food\u2014restricted food is more attractive because it's harder to come by. Remember all that Green Apple Sour Puss you drank in your teens? Same idea. Let them have treats, and they will learn to self-regulate. Unless they are fifteen. Then I have no ideas for you, except to hide your pink wine and discourage them from hot tubs.\n\n\u2022 Get into spices. Introduce herbs and spices to expand their palates. All they want is plain rice? Jazz it up with a bit of cinnamon. Plain, buttered pasta? Try a few flecks of dried basil. All they like is (insert vegetable here)? Liven it up with a little garam masala or mild Madras curry powder.\n\n\u2022 Give them a choice. Hunter, for one, is fiercely independent and requires the illusion of control. They're going to have to eat a vegetable, so let them pick which one. Do they like cucumbers? Then always make sure there are cucumbers. Let them feel like their opinion matters by letting them have limited input about what ends up on the table.\n\n\u2022 Let them play with their food. You know how they're always licking everything? They use their tactile senses to understand their world. By letting them touch, taste, smell, and play with their food, you let them get comfortable with the food and enable them to approach their meals more confidently.\n\n\u2022 Hide stuff in other stuff. It's not ideal, but it will make you feel better. Does hiding spaghetti squash in a muffin mean the kid'll eat spaghetti squash? Then, whatever. Just do it. Yes, he's got to learn to eat; but you also have to get through the week without worrying constantly that he'll get scurvy or rickets.\n\nEven if these aren't perfect solutions, they can be perfectly good coping mechanisms. Here I am, feeling as though I've offered you some real solutions to your potential picky-eater problems, and just as I've hit \"return\" on the last bit of advice, Hunter has removed his pants and is shouting about his imminent starvation and how just one jar of Nutella could fix it all. Do what feels right, and rest reasonably assured that there are very few thirty-year-olds who subsist primarily on peanut butter toast (or applesauce, or granola bars, or chicken nuggets, as the case may be).\n\nSTOCKING YOUR PANTRY\n\nMy first apartment was a dank two-bedroom basement suite in East Vancouver, a cheaper part of the city that is well-served by public transit and local businesses. My friend Theresa and I wanted to live near trendy Commercial Drive, but couldn't really afford to live too close. We spent much of our year together covered in sparkly makeup, on a perpetual mission to find the cheapest drinks and late-night snacks. I put on ten pounds that year, most of it from the beef and blue cheese pizza at Uncle Fatih's.\n\nDuring that time, I started to see cooking as more than a fun way to use up my parents' groceries. I had a full course load and tuition, but (as I am perennially bad at paperwork) filled out my student loan application wrong and somehow didn't qualify for free money. (Years later, I would finally be forced to understand that it was not free money, and then I would experience deep, deep regret.) I had to work more than I had time for, and as I wasn't prepared to trim my beer budget, food was a reasonable place to begin cutting back. Theresa, a semi-vegetarian (\"except for fish and pepperoni\"), already ate cheaply. But she cooked without necessarily caring a lot about what the result was, as long as it kind of resembled food. I wanted to do better.\n\nOne day, Theresa and I will share a two-bedroom condo overlooking some tropical sea, and we will do all the things we do now\u2014no-pants mid-day cocktail parties where we consume lavish, cheese-based feasts\u2014but with less shame and more caftans. We were perfect roommates, compatible in our varying degrees of carelessness and disarray; Theresa is the only person I travel almost effortlessly with, because neither of us cares where we end up, as long as there is beer along the way. We're not \"make and follow an itinerary or budget\" kind of people, and though this approach can have drawbacks in travel as well as life, it has occasionally served us well. We will be very happy together as Golden Girls, because I will be doing the cooking. We'll hire a financial advisor.\n\nTheresa's signature dish is Fart Stew. In case it wasn't obvious, Fart Stew gets its name from its smell. It smells like a cat's ass, and the smell sticks to all your fabrics (clothing, furniture, curtains, carpet) for the rest of the evening (or week\u2014who can tell when you live in it?). But its ingredients cost little and it takes only ten minutes to make, so Theresa would make it a few times a week. Fart Stew is a combination of whatever packaged side-dish is on sale, a can of (what I assume was) cat food-grade tuna, a handful of bean sprouts, some chopped cucumber, and a bunch of frozen peas, corn, and carrots. There might have been hot sauce in there too. Not that it would have improved anything. \"It's so cheap!\" she would say in its defense, as if that is the single most important thing about a meal.\n\nI want to assure you that just because you're broke, you don't have to eat Fart Stew. Yes, food can be expensive, and things certainly aren't getting any cheaper, but if you can be strategic in your shopping and open-minded about what constitutes a meal, there are a lot of ways to cut your costs down. For too long we've operated under the assumption that a meal has component parts and each part must be represented in order to achieve meal squareness. Meat and two vegetables, or meat with potatoes and salad, is how I was raised, and it took a long time to break out of the mentality that that's how a meal, especially dinner, should look.\n\nI like Mark Bittman's philosophy of \"vegan before 6:00 p.m.,\" which can be a good way to keep your costs down on breakfast and lunch. If you are disciplined, it's a good approach to meals (and probably life too). I think the problem with defining this approach as a sort of modified veganism is that it can be alienating to some people. It's just food\u2014when we start labeling stuff as vegetarian or vegan, for a lot of people this implies that something is missing or that the dish lacks some essential component. The fact is, there are no essential components; a meal is whatever you're eating. A good meal is whatever you're eating, but with company. A great meal is whatever you're eating, and there's company, and there's wine.\n\nThe last time Nick went hunting, he was gone for a week, and I was free to eat whatever I wanted. The meal I enjoyed the most during that week? A small cauliflower, roasted, and three eggs softly scrambled in a little too much butter. With a glass of very cold wine and a magazine, it was one of those dinners that's totally blissful\u2014the cauliflower was a little salty, a little crunchy, and just tender enough that it still had a little chew to it. The eggs were creamy and smooth, with just a sprinkling of finely sliced scallions on top. There was no meat, no cheese, and no bread, but I didn't miss them, or even notice they weren't there.\n\nA meal is anything that will satisfy and sustain you. Whether that's soup and a grilled cheese sandwich, a rack of lamb and roast potatoes, or a sloppy little pile of eggs, if you feel good eating it, it counts. This is how I justify eating a big bowl of over-buttered, over-salted popcorn for dinner at least once a month.\n\n* * *\n\nSTRATEGIC GROCERY SHOPPING TIPS\n\n* * *\n\n_**1. Don't buy everything in one store.**_\n\nThis is by far my most annoying tip, and it will require you to budget your time a bit. I generally do a big shop every six weeks or so for staples and condiments, and then shop weekly for things like produce, eggs, and milk. I buy my staples (beans, flour, canned goods, and cheese) at a big supermarket that sells a generic brand that's reliably good and affordable. I get my milk, eggs, peanut butter, and toilet paper at the drugstore near my apartment that offers points you can redeem for discounts on future purchases. I get my produce at farms and farmer's markets depending on the season. Sauces and condiments most often come from our local Asian supermarket chain or the little Korean grocer a few blocks from our building. This place also makes their own organic tofu and probably not-organic kimchi\u2014this saves us even more, and the quality is better here than anywhere else. Items we use in large quantities (Sriracha, cooking oils) come from Costco. I also check local flyers for sales on things I use often, and I pick up ingredients like avocados or lemons on a day-to-day\/as-needed basis.\n\n_**2. Buy meat in bulk.**_\n\nThis one requires a bit of budgeting, but you end up saving a lot of money over the rest of the year. Nick hunts, so we get a lot of our protein in the form of wild deer or moose, but if he doesn't get anything in a given year we buy half a cow and store it in the freezer. This might be implausible if you don't have room for a deep-freeze; we don't, really, because we live in an apartment, but I'm not the best parent so we store it in Toddler's bedroom and hope he doesn't wonder what would happen if he put the cat in there.\n\nIf a whole or half of a cow or pig is too much to store or too much to afford all in one go, find a butcher you like who prices stuff reasonably. In my experience, a good butcher is cheaper and sells better quality meat than what you'll get in the supermarket. Of course, this takes a little more time. If you can find the time, it's worth it.\n\nBuying better quality meat and less of it in general has improved our lives, because all our meat tastes better and we enjoy it more. It also means we eat less of it, which is never a bad thing. We appreciate it more when we have it.\n\nIt can be a stretch for some people, but offal meats are another way to get more out of your meat budget; heart and tongue are muscles and taste like the fleshy bits people usually eat\u2014these can be easily disguised and no one you're serving them to will have any idea. I like cooking tongue in the Crock-Pot with onions, garlic, and spices like cumin and paprika, then shredding it and serving it in soft corn tortillas with cilantro\u2014it's tender, like pulled pork, and meaty. I marinate chopped venison or beef heart in soy sauce, olive oil, garlic, and fresh rosemary and saut\u00e9 it to medium-rare, and it's outstanding, like a really lean, tender steak. Liver and kidneys can take getting used to; I don't like cow's liver, but we always have chicken livers in the freezer. You can make a pretty amazing Bolognese-style pasta sauce out of mostly vegetables and a half-pound of mashed chicken livers\u2014it's rich and meaty, makes enough for eight people, and costs less than twenty cents per serving of protein, using meat that often just gets thrown away.\n\n_**3. Buy local, in-season produce.**_\n\nThis means that you don't get to have strawberries in December if you live anywhere but California, but it's actually kind of okay. You will eat a wider variety of fruits and vegetables, and when June finally arrives you will be so beside yourself with anticipation that the payoff will be sheer, unbridled joy when you get to the market and see those fresh berries for the first time in ten months. I'm not kidding. By the first week of July, I've already been picking berries and buying up ten-pound crates every time I pass a farm market. And they freeze well.\n\nI cannot overstate the benefits of a deep-freeze. Find a used one on Craigslist, if you can afford to. They don't cost much, and sometimes they're free. Mine certainly wasn't new when I got it.\n\nPart of eating seasonally is learning to make do with what's available. I'll admit that before I started to really look at my food costs, I only ate a few main veggies, mostly out of habit and because I was comfortable cooking them. I rarely had beets or turnips or cabbage, and never kale or kohlrabi or any kind of squash but spaghetti. I wouldn't have known what to do with them, for the most part. When you make do with what's available, you'll be surprised to discover a whole bunch of unfamiliar foods, and you'll force yourself to adapt with new recipes. Do a little bit of research\u2014maybe what's in season features prominently in another culture's cuisine, and you have an opportunity to try a new dish. The benefit to eating seasonally, aside from the cost-savings, is that you have almost limitless options for potential meals, so you never get bored.\n\nOf course, there are exceptions to this rule. We don't grow a lot of citrus in Canada, for example, and I use a lot of lemon and lime juice in my cooking. And Nick requires avocados to be happy, and his unhappiness is not something he suppresses or endures quietly. If I can't find something local or seasonal, I'll look for an organic option; if there's no organic option available, or it is too expensive, conventional is acceptable (any produce is better than no produce at all)\u2014and don't let anyone tell you otherwise.\n\n_**4. Can your excess.**_\n\nThe other side of eating seasonally is that late summer and fall are seasons of abundance, and you can get too much of a good thing, especially if you have more produce than you know what to do with. Canning is not terribly complicated, and it's a good way to stretch the joy of summer into those dark, gray months. You can start with simple water-bath canning\u2014the supplies will cost you around fifty dollars to get started (you'll need a canning pot, some canning tongs, jars, lids, funnels, etc.), but then you're pretty much set for the next several years. Pressure canning will cost more, but you can preserve a bigger variety of foods, including low-acid foods (beans, carrots, etc.) and meats, which means you can put up a lot more. You can use a pressure canner for acidic things like tomatoes, pickles, peaches, and jams too, so if you're serious about stocking your pantry for the winter, a pressure canner might be your best option. A good one will run you between $100 and $300; watch for sales.\n\nCanning is also a great way to save money on things you might ordinarily buy but that you can make pretty easily, like salsas, hot sauces, and relishes. If there's a condiment you use a lot, there's a pretty good chance you can make it at home. I will never buy salsa again (which is important, because I eat a lot of nachos).\n\nCanning pro tip: Summer is hot, and canning food in a sweltering, window-less kitchen may not be the most comfortable way to spend a weekend. Freeze things like berries, chopped tomatoes and peppers, and corn, then make your jams, jellies, and salsas when the weather cools down. It'll work just fine.\n\n_**5. Shop for points.**_\n\nI don't just shop anywhere and will often go a little out of my way to frequent a place that offers me points on my purchases. But be warned\u2014all points programs are not equal. A program where they are not redeemable for grocery discounts is a pointless points program and not worth your dollars.\n\nSometimes a bank will have a relationship with a supermarket, awarding you bonus points when you use your store's credit or debit card for in-store purchases. If you aren't able or don't want to do all your banking at your store's bank, set up a savings account or open a store credit card account that you can funnel your grocery money into. For my every-six-weeks shopping trip to the supermarket for my staple purchases (and clothes\u2014I'm not totally unembarrassed to admit I buy my clothes where I buy my cheese), I put a portion of what I usually spend into my grocery account, building it up over a period of weeks. That way, the grocery money is spoken for and I can't spend it on wine, but it also doesn't come out of a single paycheck.\n\nGet as many freebies as you can. Often, when the price is right, I'll buy a bit more than what I need to get the points, and I donate the excess to the food bank using the bins the store places conveniently on my way out the door.\n\nFinally, if it's plausible, grow as much of your own food as you can. If you don't have a yard, plant a container of herbs on your balcony or windowsill; those little plastic clamshell packages of herbs in the grocery stores can run as high as three dollars apiece; that is too much when you just need a bunch of parsley here and there. Grow what you can! It's not only cost-saving, it's tremendously satisfying to tell everyone at the dinner table about your efforts. Who cares if they call you smug?! If you're like me, you'll get used to it.\n\n* * *\n\nTHE WELL-STOCKED PANTRY\n\n* * *\n\nStocking your pantry is critical, as there are plenty of days you won't feel like going to the store. Most of my non-working hours are spent in a battle against my inner sloth over whether to go out or stay home. The invention of yoga pants made it a little more likely that I'd leave my apartment sometimes, but it's still a battle every time it comes down to my fatigue versus Nick's and Toddler's increasingly vocal dinner-related demands.\n\nStocking a pantry can be a pricey up-front investment. It won't cost much to maintain, but it's building up your supplies that'll ding you in the beginning. To remedy this, buy in bulk. Spices in particular should never be bought at the supermarket unless from the bulk bins. Those jars you see in the baking section? Way over-priced, and the packaging is annoying (most of them you can't even get a teaspoon into), and chances are they've been sitting around a while, losing their flavor and potency. Buy in bulk from a place with good turnover (one that's busy and refills their bins regularly), then store spices in old jam or condiment jars with tight-fitting lids or small Mason jars.\n\nYou can also buy things like chocolate chips, nuts, dried fruit, flours, and grains (and even pasta) in bulk, which will save you a fair bit up front.\n\nWhen buying ingredients like condiments and sauces, check local flyers. Most people hate junk mail\u2014sure, it's a waste of paper and we get too much of it\u2014but flyers are how I watch prices. (\"Junk mail,\" like flyers and coupons, also keeps your mail carrier on the job!) I need to know when a huge jar of mustard is two dollars, or when mayonnaise is two for four dollars, because that's when I buy. Never pay full price if you can avoid it! And you can almost always avoid it.\n\nFinally, for ingredients that play an important role in the cuisines of other cultures, like soy sauce or sambal oelek or dried chili peppers, visit a local Asian or Latin American grocer where such ingredients will be considerably cheaper and taste a lot better. There's a dish I make a fair bit called Nasi Goreng (p. 39), a Dutch-Indonesian dish of fried rice with ketjap manis, a sweet, thick soy sauce, as a central ingredient. The Dutch brand of ketjap manis, which is the brand you get at the supermarket, costs six dollars for a tiny bottle and it tastes like sadness, but the Indonesian brand I buy at my local Chinese grocer costs $2.49 is three times the size, and delicious.\n\nFeeding yourself on a limited budget isn't hard; with just a little bit of time and energy, you can do it very well. It's hard to raise a family in an expensive city when you live paycheck to paycheck. It's demoralizing to eagerly anticipate payday only to realize that you have just a few dollars left after you've paid all your bills. But a meal should never make you feel poor, even when it's made of simple things. (No Fart Stew for you!) It's a lot easier to handle the indignities of just or not quite getting by when you know you've got a good meal to look forward to. You may occasionally be flat broke, but you should always be well fed.\n\n* * *\n\nSPECIAL INGREDIENTS\n\n* * *\n\n_**Annatto**_ (also known as \"achiote\") is a seed most often used as a natural food dye. It does not have a strong flavor, but lends a red or yellow hue to dishes, including some cheeses. It is sold both whole and ground; the seeds do not soften when cooked, so if you want to use them whole, be sure to strain them out before serving.\n\n_**Garam masala**_ is an Indian ground spice mixture that generally contains black peppercorns, cumin, coriander, cinnamon, cloves, brown cardamom, nutmeg, and green cardamom. However, the spices used in the mixture vary widely; either find a brand you like, or blend your own mixture to taste.\n\n_**Gochujang**_ (also \"kochujang\") is a thick, sticky, dark-red paste typically made with red chilies, glutinous rice, fermented soybeans, and salt. It is pungent and flavorful and can be used in recipes, as a condiment, and as a substitute for other chili sauces when a richer, deeper flavor is desired. Allergen note: gochujang contains soy and can also contain wheat. Check ingredient labels before buying if gluten is a concern.\n\n_**Ketjap manis**_ (also \"kecap manis\") is an Indonesian soy-based sauce sweetened with palm sugar. It is thick, sweet, and dark and is useful in marinades, spice pastes, and sauces. Allergen note: ketjap manis contains wheat and soy.\n\n_**Kimchi**_ is a spicy, lacto-fermented vegetable side dish or condiment, similar to sauerkraut in principle. Commercially available kimchis are most often made with napa cabbage; sometimes it is possible to find daikon, cucumber, or mustard greens kimchi as well. It is spicy and pungent and very high in fibre. Kimchi can be eaten cold as a side dish or used as an ingredient in cooked dishes, but cooking reduces its probiotic benefits. Allergen note: kimchi can contain seafood (including shellfish), wheat, and\/or soy.\n\n_**Madras curry**_ powder is a mix of cardamom, chilies, cinnamon, cloves, coriander, cumin, fennel, fenugreek, mace, nutmeg, pepper, saffron, tamarind, and turmeric. As with garam masala, the spices can vary widely, though Madras curry powder is recognizable for its yellow color. Madras curry paste is also available; in addition to dry spices, it commonly contains ginger, garlic, chilies, and onions.\n\n_**Sambal oelek**_ (also \"sambal ulek\") is an Indonesian ground chili paste that's used in recipes and as a condiment. Most commercial varieties are primarily a mix of ground chilies and vinegar, though traditional recipes can contain a range of complementary ingredients. Sambal oelek is made with ground whole chilies, seeds included, so if you're sensitive to spice, use it sparingly.\n\n_**Sriracha**_ is a smooth, thick hot sauce comprised of chilies, vinegar, garlic, sugar, and salt. It's based on a Thai hot sauce, and is commonly used both in recipes and as a condiment; though there are many variations and different brands, the most often used version in North America comes from Huy Fong Foods in the United States, and is known as Rooster Sauce because of the rooster logo on the bottle.\nRICE AND GRAINS\n\nKASHA & EGG NOODLES\n\nKIMCHI-FRIED RICE\n\nLEEK & BACON BARLOTTO\n\nMUSHROOM RISOTTO\n\nNASI GORENG\n\nOVERNIGHT BREAKFAST GRAINS\n\nPANTRY KEDGEREE\n\nRICE & LENTILS\n\nSPAM-FRIED RICE\n\n**_The best thing in the world is when you order Thai food and they send more rice than you could possibly eat and you end up with enough to make a whole other dinner the next day. I know it's technically not a freebie, but it sure feels like one, especially on a weeknight. While it's true that you can get the same convenience from just making a bunch of rice ahead of time, the joy of take-out extras is not having to think ahead. I love it. I love not-thinking so much._**\n\nFried rice is comfort food for a number of reasons\u2014it's easy on the belly, you can make it with stuff you have in your cupboards already (I love not going to the store almost as much as I love not being required to think), and it's so stretchy. The more you add to it, the more meals it makes. If you're not a leftovers-y person, you can freeze it in lunch-sized containers and then take it to work where it'll taste as good as it did the day it was made, even after a spin in that fusty microwave no one in the office will clean.\n\nFor Nick, fried rice represents a celebration of all the things he likes\u2014usually, salty meat, strong flavors, and an excess of chili paste. For me, it's about cleaning out the refrigerator, making a one-pot meal, and getting dinner on the table fast. It's basically comfort food for our relationship. Fried rice is one of those things I've always eaten in one form or another\u2014pantry kedgeree, for example, has been a staple food since I left home and needed to stretch a tin of fish over three meals. A little rice and egg and fried Spam has cured what's ailed me for years now\u2014but it wasn't until I met Nick's family that I really got the concept of fried rice as a real, intentional dish.\n\nNick's family is Dutch-oriented, his paternal grandparents having emigrated from the Netherlands to Canada in the 1950s. The Dutch, like so many colonial nations, left their tulip-addled homeland during the age of exploration for a taste of the spice. A side effect of 350-ish years of Dutch occupation of Indonesia is the influence of Asian flavors on what would otherwise be some bland-ass food. They really needed that spice.\n\nThere are a lot of Dutch immigrant communities in the suburbs surrounding Vancouver, and it seems like every Dutch (or Dutch-ish) mom has a recipe for nasi goreng, an Indonesian-inspired fried-rice dish made with a variety of seasonings ranging from a pre-packaged mix to a slop of sweet soy and sambal oelek. The dish is made with whatever you've got\u2014after Christmas, our version often contains leftover ham; when times are tight, we use a little bit of bacon and some mushrooms instead. We've used Spam, ground pork, and even fish. The whole thing is traditionally topped with banana goop and fried eggs, but bananas are _the worst,_ so we use sliced avocado instead. Fried rice gets us through, no matter what the times are like.\n\nThere's a reason so much of the world subsists on white rice\u2014it's inexpensive, it cooks quickly, and it's delicious, especially topped or tossed with spicy stuff and maybe a bit of salty meat or fish. It's not as nutritious as brown rice, which retains its hull and bran; brown rice is a whole grain, and it takes longer to digest, which means it won't cause your blood sugar to spike and then fall quickly. I love its chewy texture and subtle nuttiness. It's the healthier choice, certainly; it also takes twice as long to cook, so sometimes I use white rice for dinner instead.\n\nI cook a big batch of rice when I'm not too busy and then stick it in the refrigerator (in the pot) once it's cool, and it's there to save me when I need it, usually on a Tuesday when I have nothing left to give to the world or my family. Is the idea of dinner a huge and terrible effort? Fry some rice. Just heard a friend's in town, but you can't afford to go out? Have them over for tea and rice pudding. Feeling fancy? Risotto.\n\nAs white rices go, there are degrees of blood sugar-spikiness; the more refined the product, such as microwave or minute-rice, the less worthwhile nutritionally. Long grain white rice, such as basmati, is your best option\u2014it's not too far from brown rice on the glycemic index. They're both somewhere in the middle. Depending on where you live, basmati is also very reasonably priced; in Vancouver, there's a large East Indian population, so I get my rice in big bags at Fruiticana, a local Indo-Canadian grocery chain, for not much money. Even the organic stuff isn't out of reach. There's also a brand of lower-GI \"diabetes friendly\" basmati rice; if you can't find it in your local store, you can buy it online for about $1.70 per pound. Rice is another product that's often available in bulk; I find it's best to buy brown rice this way as it can go rancid (you'll know it's off when it starts to smell like Play Doh).\n\nRisotto is a dish that I really, really like, but Arborio rice is problematic both in that it can cost a bit more than regular long-grain rice, and that it's a short-grain rice, so it's higher on the glycemic index. One way that I stretch the (usually limited) amount of Arborio rice I have on hand and balance out the simple-carb numbers is to cut the amount of rice in half and make up the difference with pearl barley. Barley costs somewhere around $1.50 for a one pound (500 g) bag, and it's a great source of fiber. The best thing about it is that it's very forgiving\u2014if you overcook a pot of risotto, it tastes like mush and disappointment. If you overcook a pot of risotto split with barley, you'll hardly know it, and this, as the parent of a toddler, has been my saving grace on many an evening. You can even make a barley version of risotto, a barlotto (p. 36). Barley retains its toothiness and chew a long way into the cooking process\u2014you really have to boil it to death to have it puff into mush, and even then...\n\nYou can replace a portion of rice in almost any dish and supplement with another grain. Quinoa steams at the same rate as long-grain white rice, and barley or bulgur wheat, which are lower on the glycemic index than both white and brown rice, also work well combined with rice. Try cooking farro or spelt grains with brown rice. Whole grains like these are lower on the glycemic index, but they're also an easy way to eat a more diverse diet. I like these simple switches because they make me feel like I'm doing a little better and meeting a few more of my nutritional requirements. Whole grains are good sources of soluble and insoluble fiber; soluble fiber is, perhaps obviously, water soluble\u2014it's the stuff that's converted to sugars to feed your cells and helps maintain your blood glucose levels. Insoluble fiber doesn't break down the same way, but the great thing about it is it helps you poop, and therefore keeps you regular. Nick won't talk to me about his bowel movements for whatever reason (i.e., because he is unreasonable and withholding), so including a mix of whole grains in his diet means I can just know he's doing well, digestively. It helps me to sleep better, knowing everyone's doing well, gut-wise. (Maybe I don't have enough going on right now?)\n\nAnyway, what's important is that rice is easy. As it turns out, it may have additional benefits for people with diabetes. A recent Korean study showed that rice consumption may, over time, improve insulin sensitivity in mice, especially those fed a high-fat diet. It's still a bit of a leap to say that the same thing works for humans, but it does seem promising that diets containing rice may improve cells' sensitivity to insulin in the long term; as far as white carbohydrates go, rice is starting to sound pretty good.\n\n_**How to cook rice without a rice cooker**_\n\nLONG GRAIN WHITE RICE NEEDS A RATIO OF ONE PART RICE TO TWO PARTS LIQUID. BROWN RICE NEEDS A RATIO OF ONE PART RICE TO ONE-AND-A-HALF PARTS LIQUID. RINSE THE RICE UNDER COLD TAP WATER BEFORE PUTTING IT IN THE PAN WITH THE COOKING LIQUID. WHETHER THE LIQUID IS LOW-SODIUM STOCK OR WATER DOESN'T MATTER, BUT EITHER WAY, MAKE SURE YOU ADD UP TO 1 TSP SALT PER 1 CUP (250 ML) RICE. RICE THAT IS SALTED DURING COOKING NEEDS LESS SEASONING IF USED FOR RECIPES; IF YOU'RE WATCHING YOUR SODIUM, YOU CAN COOK RICE WITHOUT ADDING SALT, BUT BE MINDFUL OF HOW MUCH YOU ADD TO SEASON IT LATER. IN A STURDY PAN WITH A TIGHT-FITTING LID, BRING RICE AND WATER TO A BOIL. ONCE IT'S BOILING, SLAP THE LID ON, REDUCE HEAT TO LOW, AND STEAM UNTIL RICE IS DONE: 20 MINUTES FOR WHITE RICE, 50 MINUTES FOR BROWN. REMOVE FROM HEAT, FLUFF WITH A FORK, AND EITHER SERVE OR TRANSFER TO A CONTAINER TO COOL, THEN REFRIGERATE UNTIL YOU'RE READY TO USE IT.\n\nKASHA & EGG NOODLES\n\nThis is an unassuming side dish, a little beige but deceptively delicious. It's based on a recipe I came across a few years ago for kasha varnishkes, which traditionally uses schmaltz (chicken fat) and bowtie pasta. My version evolved because we never had either of those things on hand. It goes fabulously with roasted meats. You may want a bright burst of color to go alongside it\u2014I recommend a bowl of Peas and Carrots (p. 187).\n\n4\n\nAS A SIDE DISH\n\n6 tbsp butter, divided\n\n2 cups (500 mL) chopped apple, diced to about \u00bd in (1 cm)\n\n1 medium onion, diced\n\n\u00bd cup (125 mL) roasted buckwheat groats\n\n1 egg\n\n2 garlic cloves\n\n2 cups (500 mL) chicken or vegetable stock\n\n\u00bd lb (500 g) egg noodles\n\nsalt and pepper, to taste\n\n2 tbsp chopped fresh parsley\n\nIn a large, heavy-bottomed pot on medium-high heat, melt 2 tbsp butter and stir in apples and onions. Cover, cook for 10 minutes, then remove lid and reduce heat to medium. Stir frequently for 20 to 30 minutes, until apples and onions have caramelized and shrunk.\n\nMeanwhile, in a pot on medium-high, heat 3 tbsp butter. In a bowl, stir buckwheat and egg until thoroughly combined. Pour into pot, stirring to keep groats from sticking together. Keep stirring until egg is cooked and appears dry. Add garlic, then chicken stock. Reduce heat to medium, and simmer until liquid is absorbed and groats are fluffy, about 15 minutes.\n\nBring a large pot of salted water to a rolling boil. Add noodles, and cook until just al dente. Drain.\n\nStir cooked groats and drained pasta into apple and onion mixture, and add an additional tbsp butter, stirring to coat. Taste and adjust seasonings. Stir in parsley and serve immediately.\n\nKASHA, OR TOASTED BUCKWHEAT GROATS, IS A GRAIN THAT'S NOT A GRAIN\u2014IT'S ACTUALLY A SEED, AND IT'S RELATED TO RHUBARB. NEVERTHELESS, IT'S VERY GOOD FOR YOU\u2014A GREAT SOURCE OF PROTEIN AND SOLUBLE FIBER, IF EATEN REGULARLY, IT CAN CONTRIBUTE TO LOWER CHOLESTEROL. IT'S ALSO LOW ON THE GLYCEMIC INDEX. TRY IT IN OVERNIGHT BREAKFAST GRAINS (P. 40) FOR A FILLING, HEALTHY START TO YOUR DAY.\n\nKIMCHI-FRIED RICE\n\nI first discovered kimchi one summer when my parents hosted a couple of homestay students from Korea. Their English wasn't clear enough to explain what it was, but it smelled really good; I was sold, and they were so excited to share it. We get our kimchi\u2014a spicy, fermented cabbage not unlike sauerkraut or curtido\u2014from a place down the street that makes it fresh and with just the right amount of kick to it. Look for kimchi in Asian markets or the produce section of better supermarkets\u2014you'll find it near the refrigerated salad dressings and wonton wrappers. You can find gochujang at Asian markets.\n\n4\n\nSERVINGS\n\n6 strips bacon, chopped\n\n2 tsp sesame oil\n\n1 onion, diced\n\n4 garlic cloves, minced\n\n2 cups (500 mL) cabbage kimchi, roughly chopped\n\n2 tbsp soy sauce\n\n1 tbsp gochujang\n\n3 cups (750 mL) cooked rice\n\nsalt, to taste\n\n4 scallions, finely chopped\n\n4 eggs, fried over-easy (optional)\n\nIn a large pan, cook bacon on medium-high heat until crisp. Spoon bacon out of pan and onto a plate lined with a paper towel, and set aside. If bacon has released a lot of fat during cooking, drain off all but 2 tbsp.\n\nAdd sesame oil to pan. Add onions and saut\u00e9 until browned around edges, 5 or 6 minutes. Add garlic, kimchi, soy sauce, and gochujang, and stir to combine. When kimchi begins to release its juices, after about a minute, add cooked rice. Stir, stir, stir.\n\nSaut\u00e9 rice for about 3 minutes, until it's broken apart and well coated by the flavors in the pan. Return bacon to pan, and stir again. Taste and add salt as needed. Sprinkle rice with scallions and serve as-is or topped with a fried egg.\nLEEK & BACON BARLOTTO\n\nBarlotto is lovely because it's everything that's great about regular old risotto, but cheaper and slightly better for you. A 1 lb (500 g) bag of pearl barley will run you about $1.50, depending on where you shop. Nick likes this dish in particular because it's primarily a vehicle for cheese and bacon, but you feel good after eating it. Serve with crusty bread and a bit of steamed broccoli for a hearty, satisfying meal.\n\n4\n\nSERVINGS\n\n4 slices bacon, finely chopped\n\n1 tbsp olive oil\n\n1 cup (250 mL) chopped leeks (white and light-green part only)\n\n3 garlic cloves, minced\n\n1\u00bd cups (375 mL) pearl barley\n\n1 cup (250 mL) dry white wine\n\n4 cups (1 L) warmed chicken stock\n\n\u00bd cup (125 mL) grated Parmesan cheese\n\n1 tbsp butter\n\nsalt and pepper, to taste\n\nIn a large, heavy-bottomed pan on medium-high heat, saut\u00e9 bacon until crisp. Remove bacon from pan to a plate lined with a paper towel. Drain off all but about 1 tbsp bacon fat, and reserve for another use.\n\nAdd olive oil to pan. Stir in leeks and saut\u00e9 until glistening, 1 to 2 minutes. Stir in garlic and saut\u00e9 1 to 2 minutes. Add barley, stirring to coat in fat, and cook until barley smells toasted, about 1 minute. Stir in wine, scraping bottom of pan, and reduce heat to medium.\n\nOnce wine is absorbed, pour in 1 cup (250 mL) stock. Stir frequently until stock is absorbed. Repeat 2 to 3 more times, over 30 to 40 minutes, until barley has puffed and softened; texture should resemble al dente rice, slightly chewy but pleasing to the bite.\n\nWhen almost all liquid is absorbed, return bacon to pan, and cook with barley until liquid has almost completely disappeared. Remove from heat.\n\nStir in Parmesan cheese and butter and season to taste.\n\nMUSHROOM RISOTTO\n\nThis is a warming, fragrant dish that's surprisingly weeknight-friendly; people seem to think that risotto is a lot of work and very time-consuming, but it comes together in about half an hour. It's is great on its own, with a side of green salad, or as a side dish to roasted meats. To lower the amount of simple carbohydrates, you can replace half the rice with pearl barley. Use a wine you enjoy drinking, but not one that's expensive\u2014a dry white wine, such as chardonnay, would be fine.\n\n4\n\nSERVINGS\n\n2 tbsp butter\n\n1 onion, diced\n\n2 garlic cloves, minced\n\n1 cup (250 mL) Arborio rice\n\n1\u00bd tsp chopped fresh rosemary\n\n\u00bd cup (125 mL) dry white wine\n\n4 cups (1 L) warmed chicken or vegetable stock\n\n\u00bd lb (500 g) white button or crimini mushrooms, chopped\n\n\u00bc tsp ground nutmeg\n\n1 tbsp butter\n\n\u00bd cup (125 mL) freshly grated Parmesan cheese\n\nsalt and pepper, to taste\n\nIn a heavy-bottomed pan on medium-high heat, melt 2 tbsp butter. Add onions and garlic, and cook for 2 to 3 minutes, until onions are translucent. Add rice to pan, stirring for about a minute, or until rice grains turn opaque. Add rosemary.\n\nPour in wine, and scrape bottom of the pan to ensure nothing has stuck. Reduce heat to medium. Cook until wine has been completely absorbed by rice.\n\nAdd 1 cup (250 mL) warm chicken stock, stirring frequently until liquid is mostly absorbed. Repeat with an additional 1 cup stock.\n\nAdd remainder of stock and cook, stirring frequently, until liquid is absorbed. When there's just a bit of liquid in pan, add mushrooms. Test rice for tenderness\u2014if al dente, you're awesome and good work. If it isn't, it's probably the rice's fault, so just pour in a little bit more stock, as needed. Keep in mind that the mushrooms are going to sweat and release their own moisture.\n\nWhen rice is ready, stir in nutmeg, butter, and Parmesan. Taste and adjust seasonings.\nNASI GORENG\n\nI inherited this dish from Nick's family; it's one of their favorites. It evolved in an effort to re-create the taste of the package mix Nick is fond of, but which requires a special trip to a store 40 minutes away. \"It's not the same,\" Nick says, \"but I think I might like it better.\" If you can't find ketjap manis (also sold as ABC Sweet Soy Sauce), use 2 tbsp soy sauce and 1 tbsp brown sugar. This is great with Cucumber Salad (p. 179) and a spicy red wine. Serve hot, topped with a sprinkle of cilantro, some scallions, and an egg fried over-easy, so that the edges of the white are crisp but the yolk is still runny.\n\n4\u20136\n\nSERVINGS\n\n6\u20139 garlic cloves, sliced\n\n3 tbsp canola oil\n\n1 shallot, roughly chopped\n\n2 tbsp sambal oelek\n\n2 tbsp ketjap manis\n\n2 tbsp fish sauce\n\n1 tbsp sesame oil\n\n2 tsp lime juice\n\n\u00be tsp ground cumin\n\n1 lb (500 g) lean ground beef\n\n6 cups (1.5 L) cooked rice\n\n2 cups (500 mL) grated carrots\n\n1 kohlrabi (or 2\u20133 broccoli stalks), peeled and grated\n\nsalt, to taste\n\n\u00bd tsp ground black pepper\n\nACCOMPANIMENTS\n\n1 sliced avocado\n\n1 fried egg per serving\n\ncilantro, for garnish\n\nchopped scallions, for garnish\n\nadditional sambal oelek\n\nIn a large pan on medium-high heat, saut\u00e9 garlic in oil until it is golden and crispy but not burned (1 to 2 minutes\u2014any longer and it will become too bitter). Remove garlic from pan with a slotted spoon, and drain garlic on a plate lined with a paper towel. Set aside.\n\nIn a blender or food processor, pur\u00e9e shallots with sambal oelek, ketjap manis, fish sauce, sesame oil, lime juice, and cumin. Set aside.\n\nAdd ground beef to the now garlic-infused cooking oil in hot pan. Continue cooking on medium-high heat until meat has browned and is cooked through. Add cooked rice and grated carrots and kohlrabi. Pour shallot mixture over pan contents and stir to coat. Cook for an additional 3 to 5 minutes. If rice appears dry, add \u00bd cup (125 mL) warm tap water to the pan and stir.\n\nStir crispy garlic into rice mixture. Taste and adjust seasonings with salt and pepper, to taste.\nOVERNIGHT BREAKFAST GRAINS\n\nEveryone seems to love steel cut oats. Unfortunately, they can be expensive\u2014$7 to $8 for just a few cups. I always have just a few grains left over, and this recipe, inspired by a recipe for steel cut oats that Mark Bittman posted on his blog a few years ago, provided the perfect solution. Use any combination of whatever grains you have. I've done this with bulgur, rice, quinoa\u2014all kinds of things. The key here is variety\u2014it makes for better texture. Rolled oats can clump and turn lumpy; if that bothers you, use steel cut oats or a smaller amount of rolled oats. Serve with milk and brown sugar, yogurt and berries, or sliced fresh fruit.\n\n2\u20134\n\nSERVINGS\n\n\u2153 cup (80 mL) pearl barley\n\n\u2153 cup (80 mL) kasha (toasted buckwheat groats)\n\n\u2153 cup (80 mL) rolled oats (not instant or quick-cooking)\n\n\u00bd cup (125 mL) currants or raisins\n\npinch salt\n\n\u00bd cup (125 mL) applesauce\n\n\u00bd tsp vanilla extract\n\nIn a medium saucepan with a tight-fitting lid on medium-high heat, combine grains, 3 cups (750 mL) water, currants, and salt. Bring to a rolling boil, about 8 minutes. Boil for 1 to 2 minutes, then slap lid on top, turn off stove, and go to bed.\n\nIn the morning, warm mixture on medium-high heat. Stir well, breaking apart any lumps. When mixture begins to burble, stir in applesauce and vanilla.\n\nBring mixture back up to a burble, then spoon into bowls.\nPANTRY KEDGEREE\n\nThis is one of those weird English dishes that, at first glance, doesn't make a whole lot of sense. It's not until you eat it that you get it\u2014it's a simple fried rice with bright flavors and an interesting variety of textures, which doesn't look like much, but tastes fantastic. I've been eating this since I was a poor student who had spent her entire student loan; it's as comforting now as it was then. Best eaten on rainy nights while reading M.F.K. Fisher.\n\n4\n\nSERVINGS\n\n2 tbsp butter\n\n1 tbsp canola oil\n\n1 onion, diced\n\n4 garlic cloves, minced\n\n1 tsp minced fresh ginger\n\n1 tsp coarse salt\n\n1 tsp cumin seeds\n\n1 tsp mustard seeds\n\n1 tsp garam masala\n\n\u00bd tsp ground turmeric\n\n\u00bd tsp ground black pepper\n\n3 cups (750 mL) cooked rice\n\n3-oz (85-g) can smoked herring, drained\n\n1 cup (250 mL) frozen peas\n\nsalt, to taste\n\n4 hardboiled eggs, peeled and roughly chopped\n\n4 scallions, finely chopped\n\nIn a large pan on medium-high heat, melt butter with oil. Add onions, garlic, and ginger, and cook until onions have softened, about 2 minutes. Add salt, cumin and mustard seeds, garam masala, turmeric, and black pepper. Cook for another minute, until spices are toasted and fragrant.\n\nAdd rice, and toss to coat in spices and oil. Add \u00bd cup (125 mL) water to pan to refresh and re-steam rice. Cook until heated through, about 3 minutes. Add herring in pieces, then add peas. Cook until peas are cooked through, another 3 minutes. Taste and adjust seasonings as needed.\n\nAdd eggs, stir again, and serve sprinkled with fresh chopped scallions.\n\nRICE & LENTILS\n\nThis one's a bit time consuming, but if you've got the time, it's worth it. Somewhat similar to mujadara, a Lebanese rice and lentil dish, it's great as a main course or a base for a simple curry, such as Tomato Chicken Curry (p. 115). Serve with pink wine or hot, strong tea.\n\n6\n\nSERVINGS\n\n1\u00bd cups (125 mL) basmati rice\n\n\u00bd cup (125 mL) green lentils\n\n1 bay leaf\n\n4 tbsp olive oil, divided\n\n1\u00bd tsp salt, divided\n\n2 cups (500 mL) diced onions\n\n1 cup (250 mL) diced carrots\n\n1 cup (250 mL) diced celery\n\n1 Granny Smith or other tart, firm-fleshed apple, peeled, cored, and diced\n\n4 garlic cloves, minced\n\n3 tbsp tomato paste\n\nsalt and pepper, to taste\n\nhandful fresh parsley, for garnish\n\nIn a medium pot on medium-high heat, combine rice, lentils, bay leaf, 1 tbsp olive oil, and 1 tsp salt with 4 cups (1 L) cold water. Bring to a boil, then reduce heat to low, cover, and cook for 20 minutes. Remove from heat and keep covered.\n\nMeanwhile, in a large pan on medium-high, heat 3 tbsp olive oil. Add onions, carrots, celery, and apple, and cook until onions are translucent. Reduce heat to medium and cook slowly, stirring occasionally for 30 to 60 minutes\u2014however long it takes ingredients to turn golden and soft. Add remaining salt once veggies begin to brown. I let mine go until they're barely recognizable as their former selves and they smell sweet and faintly smoky.\n\nAdd garlic and tomato paste, allowing paste to dry but not to burn. Keep it moving, tossing veggies to coat in sauce.\n\nWhen bottom of pan looks pretty dry, add rice and lentil mixture (first remove bay leaf). Pour about 1 cup (250 mL) water into pan to deglaze, and stir to quickly re-steam rice and redistribute flavors. Taste and adjust seasonings as needed. Serve sprinkled with fresh parsley.\nSPAM-FRIED RICE\n\nThis dish is a treat\u2014we don't eat it very often; twice a year, maybe, as a lazy date-night indulgence. If you want to make it healthier, use brown rice. But Spam is what makes this magic; don't sub it out for ham or bacon. If you haven't eaten Spam in a while, try it again, and don't let the smell of it right out of the can put you off\u2014this dish is tasty, I promise.\n\n4\u20136\n\nSERVINGS\n\n2 tbsp canola oil, divided\n\n1 tbsp sesame oil\n\n12-oz (340-g) container regular Spam, diced\n\n6 garlic cloves, roughly chopped\n\n6 cups (1.5 L) cooked rice\n\n1 tbsp fish sauce\n\n2\u20134 tbsp sambal oelek\n\n6 scallions, chopped\n\n4 eggs, beaten\n\nsalt, to taste\n\n2\u20133 scallions, chopped, for garnish\n\nIn a pan on medium-high, heat 1 tbsp canola and sesame oil. Add Spam and cook until browned, 3 to 5 minutes. Add garlic, and cook until just golden, another 3 minutes or so.\n\nAdd rice, fish sauce, sambal oelek, and scallions. Stir to integrate Spam and garlic into rice and to coat the rice in fat and sambal.\n\nMake a well in center of rice and add remaining 1 tbsp canola oil. Pour eggs into well, and, stirring rapidly, cook eggs until scrambled. Once cooked, stir to mix rice with eggs. Taste and adjust seasonings as needed. Garnish with scallions.\n\nPASTA\n\nBEEF STROGANOFF\n\nCAULIFLOWER MACARONI & CHEESE\n\nCAULIFLOWER WITH ORECCHIETTE & ALMONDS\n\nLINGUINE WITH TUNA & CAPERS\n\nONE-POT PASTA WITH MEAT SAUCE\n\nPEANUTTY SOBA NOODLES WITH KALE\n\nRAPINI & SAUSAGE WITH WHITE BEANS & ORECCHIETTE\n\nRIGATONI WITH TOMATOES & CHICKPEAS\n\nSHELLS WITH BRUSSELS SPROUTS, CHICKPEAS & BACON\n\nSIZZLING CHILI NOODLES\n\nTUNA PENNE\n\n**_In many ways, Nick and I are big, incompetent children, and this is never more apparent than when we're both too tired to figure out dinner. And it's not as if this hardly ever happens\u2014we're both there in front of the refrigerator, exasperating one another at least three nights a week. Add to that the fact that we're chronically broke in the week leading up to payday (so just getting take-out is not really an option), and we have to figure out how to stretch a meal into lunch for work the next day too._**\n\nFor those of us who are fundamentally lazy, pasta is kind of ideal\u2014it's usually fast to prepare, you can load it up with whatever you've got and save a trip to the store, and if you make enough of it, you don't have to make lunch for the next day. Pasta is also one of those things that folks are prickly about\u2014it's a \"bad carb\" in that it's pretty much white bread in noodle form, and it seems everyone's against that now.\n\nBut here is the thing: There are no bad foods, really. Carbs fuel our bodies and feed our cells. If you eat only simple carbohydrates, you'll survive although you won't be at your best\u2014but that's true of anything. (You can turn orange from eating too many carrots, for example, or inflate and float away like a balloon from eating too many chickpeas. I love excess as much as the next person, but you _can_ have too much of a good thing.) If you're choosing pasta as a budget-friendly item, try a bit of variety\u2014many brands make a whole wheat version for the same price (or priced not too much higher); watch for sales on alternative grain and gluten-free pastas, like those made with corn, spelt, or brown rice.\n\nIn many places in the world, wheat flour is fortified with things like folic acid and iron, as well as thiamin, riboflavin, and niacin. Sometimes additional nutrients are added as well, at the discretion of government and industry. Now this is in no way a substitute for a well-balanced (plant-heavy) diet, but it does ensure that the general population is benefiting from the enrichment of foods they consume regularly\u2014fortification prevents nutrient deficiencies, especially in vulnerable populations including young children and low-income families for whom a diverse diet may be less feasible.\n\nFor all my talk of \"eat more vegetables! Kale for everyone!\" I understand that it's not always easy to integrate hearty piles of root veggies and leafy greens into one's daily diet\u2014for those with demanding work schedules (and multiple jobs), the endless busyness of young children or aging parents, or those with low incomes (or middle incomes plus crippling student debt), buying and preparing a wide variety of interesting produce can feel like a big ask, if not an impossibility. Pasta goes a long way, especially between paydays or opportunities to get to a store, and with a few simple ingredients it can nourish a family of four for not much money.\n\nAnd while it's true that you should choose whole grains whenever possible, if all you can afford is an eighty-nine-cent bag of penne on sale, you don't have to feel bad about it. Make something delicious and feel sated by it, and revel in that satiety because many people lack it. Just as there are no superfoods, there are no food villains either\u2014it's how you eat that matters, and the balance in your approach. White pasta today, brown bread tomorrow, and everyone should eat salad as much as possible, but sometimes you can skip salad and just have another bowl of macaroni and cheese if you want because this is life, not boot camp.\n\nWe'd all benefit from worrying less about \"bad carbs\" or carbs in general. Our attitude toward food in much of the English-speaking world is dysfunctional; it doesn't help that our culture is so uncomfortable with fat and sugar and flour. I mean, we love the stuff, but we hate ourselves for eating it. We treat flour like a bad habit. We overthink it, and we pit ourselves against it. Can we not eat a plate of spaghetti and just experience joy? There's a reason why we talk so much about carbs\u2014they are delicious, and we miss them.\n\nPasta will fill your belly for not many dollars and, for many people, that's the most important thing. As a kid I ate a lot of pasta, most often with a simple sauce of ground beef, canned tomatoes, and chopped onions, carrots, and celery. The seasonings were simple\u2014garlic, dried oregano, black pepper\u2014but the result was always comforting and delicious. As a picky eater, this was a dish I could enjoy\u2014there was no pleading or bargaining over how little I could get away with eating on pasta night. Because I grew up in the 1980s and early '90s, fettuccine Alfredo was a popular dish, sometimes with chunks of chicken. I also recall pasta primavera with baby carrots, red bell peppers, and snow peas, which my parents celebrated with gusto for a few years and then never spoke of again. If they were feeling fancy, sometimes my mom or dad would use smoked salmon to stretch a bit of white sauce\u2014if it was a very good day, we'd get garlic bread (the good kind in the foil bag from the grocery store) and maybe Caesar salad too.\n\nAnother reason to love pasta is that it's an easy way to go meatless. While the existence of cheese means that pasta dishes from my kitchen are rarely totally vegan, most of the time they are vegetable-based. Occasionally I'll use bacon, but only as an herb\u2014it's there for flavor but doesn't play a starring role in the dish. According to the folks at Meatless Monday, \"Going meatless once a week may reduce your risk of chronic preventable conditions like cancer, cardiovascular disease, diabetes and obesity.\" It's also gentler on the environment.\n\nPasta does, admittedly, veer higher on the glycemic index, which can be problematic for those trying to regulate their blood sugar. One thing I look for when I'm choosing pasta is a lower number of grams of carbohydrates per serving\u2014once you start comparing nutrition labels, you'll see significant differences across brands and types of pasta. Spelt pasta in particular has been a great alternative for us, as it's a more complex carbohydrate, and also quite filling, so we use a lot less. I've been able to find it in bulk, which is great because \"alternative\" pastas can be costly. Note, this is not no-carb\u2014this is just lower carb and higher fiber.\n\nChoosing lower carb pastas is not always possible, for reasons ranging from limited availability on store shelves to it just being December, which is always financially dreary. That's why if I can't find lower-carb pastas, I'll just use whatever I've got but add more other stuff, whether that's canned beans and legumes or more vegetables; this both stretches the pasta further and is easier on Nick's blood glucose levels. I prefer short, shaped pastas because they're easy to reheat the next day and eat at my desk.\n\nThe thing I like best about pasta is that it's endlessly adaptable and forgiving. A way to use up whatever's left in the crisper at the end of the week, it's a vehicle for repurposing leftover meat or hiding organ meats so nothing goes to waste. It's also perfect for weeknight entertaining, which is my favorite way to have a social life; guests on weekends can be a more costly endeavor, because I think people have loftier expectations for dinner on Saturday or Sunday nights. If you have friends over after work on a Tuesday, I guarantee they'll be thrilled to eat a big plate of spaghetti and meat sauce. Ask them to bring the garlic bread. The good kind, from the grocery store, in the foil bag.\n\n_**How to cook pasta**_\n\nTO COOK PASTA WELL, ALWAYS BOIL IT IN GENEROUSLY SALTED WATER. COOK 1 LB (500 G) PASTA IN ABOUT 1 GALLON (4 L) WATER SALTED WITH 1 ROUNDED TBSP SALT. DON'T BOTHER WITH FANCY SEA SALT\u2014IODIZED TABLE SALT IS FINE.\n\nSOME RECIPES SUGGEST YOU ADD OIL TO THE POT, BUT THIS ISN'T NECESSARY\u2014IF YOU USE A BIG POT AND ENOUGH WATER, AND STIR THE POT REGULARLY, YOUR PASTA WILL HAVE ROOM TO COOK AND WON'T CLUMP TOGETHER.\n\nWHEN NOODLES HAVE REACHED THE AL DENTE STAGE\u2014WHICH IS TO SAY, THEY ARE COOKED, BUT THERE'S A LITTLE BITE TO THEM (THEY'RE NOT MUSHY)\u2014SCOOP OUT ABOUT 1 CUP (250 ML) COOKING WATER AND SET IT ASIDE. DRAIN PASTA, BUT DO NOT RINSE IT.\n\nADD PASTA TO SAUCE, AND ADD A PORTION OF PASTA WATER AS WELL (I USUALLY END UP USING ONLY \u00bd CUP [125 ML]). ADDING WATER TO SAUCE WILL THIN IT OUT A BIT, MAKING IT STICK BETTER TO THE PASTA. IT WILL ALSO HELP THE PASTA ABSORB SOME OF THE SAUCE, WHICH MAKES EVERYTHING TASTIER.\n\nBEEF STROGANOFF\n\nBeef stroganoff was a quick weeknight meal at the Wight house, and it was almost always made with ground beef, occasionally with meatballs. Traditionally this is served with a sprinkling of minced chives; I like it with fresh dill. Serve with Cucumber Salad (p. 179) and Honey-Mustard Beets (p. 183).\n\n4\n\nSERVINGS\n\n2 tbsp butter, divided\n\n\u00bd lb (250 g) button mushrooms, quartered\n\n1 onion, diced\n\n2 garlic cloves, minced\n\n1lb (500 g) lean ground beef\n\n2 tbsp all-purpose flour\n\n1 tsp ground black pepper\n\n\u00bd tsp coarse salt\n\n\u00bd lb (250 g) dried penne\n\n\u00bd cup (125 mL) dry white wine\n\n2 cups (500 mL) low-sodium or homemade beef stock\n\n1 tsp Worcestershire sauce\n\n\u00bd cup (125 mL) full-fat sour cream\n\n3 tbsp chopped fresh dill\n\nIn a large pan on medium-high heat, melt butter. Add mushrooms and cook for 3 to 5 minutes, until they've lost some moisture and started to brown.\n\nMeanwhile, bring a large pot of salted water to a boil.\n\nScoop mushrooms out of pan, and set aside.\n\nAdd 1 tbsp butter to pan, and let it melt. Stir in onions and garlic until onions are translucent and have begun to brown, another 2 to 3 minutes.\n\nCrumble ground beef into pan, and cook until browned. Add flour, pepper, and salt, and stir until flour has been mostly absorbed by beef and onion mixture. Return mushrooms to pan.\n\nWhen pot of water has come to a boil, add pasta. Cook until pasta is al dente, about 9 minutes or according to package instructions.\n\nMeanwhile, add wine to beef mixture, scraping bottom of pan to loosen any browned bits. Add stock, then reduce heat to medium. Stir in Worcestershire sauce. Simmer for 8 to 10 minutes, until thickened and reduced slightly.\n\nWhen pasta is ready, drain. Add sour cream to meat sauce and stir to combine. Taste and adjust seasonings as needed.\n\nAdd pasta to sauce, and stir to coat. Serve sprinkled with fresh dill.\nCAULIFLOWER MACARONI & CHEESE\n\nThis is a dish that's mostly made up of cauliflower and cheese; to be honest, the pasta's only here because I didn't think I should eat three pounds of cauliflower in a single sitting. This mac and cheese is creamy, rich, and crunchy, thanks to the nuts and crumb topping. It's a good dish to make when you've got friends coming over for dinner on a weeknight. Serve with lightly dressed greens and a lot of not-fancy white wine. If you've got room after, Grandpa's Radio Pudding (p. 214) makes a nice, warming conclusion to the feast.\n\n4\u20136\n\nSERVINGS\n\n3 lb (1.5 kg) cauliflower, chopped into florets\n\n2 cups (500 mL) dried macaroni\n\n3 tbsp butter, divided\n\n3 minced garlic cloves, divided\n\n3 tbsp flour\n\n2 tsp grainy Dijon mustard\n\n2 cups (500 mL) milk\n\n\u00bd tsp ground pepper\n\n\u00bc tsp cayenne pepper\n\n\u00bc tsp ground nutmeg\n\nabout 4 cups (1 L) grated aged cheddar cheese\n\nsalt, to taste\n\n\u2153 cup (80 mL) whole hazelnuts, toasted and then chopped\n\n1 cup (250 mL) bread crumbs\n\nPreheat oven to 375\u00b0F (190\u00b0C). Grease a 9\u00d713-in (3.5-L) baking dish, and set it aside.\n\nPlace cauliflower in a large pot, fill to just over top of cauliflower with salted water, and bring to a boil on high heat. Boil for 5 minutes, drain, then set aside.\n\nMeanwhile, to a large pot of water on high heat, add macaroni and bring to a boil. Cook until almost al dente, 5 or 6 minutes. Drain and add noodles to drained cauliflower.\n\nIn a medium saucepan on medium-high heat, melt 2 tbsp butter with 2 minced garlic cloves. When bubbling, add flour and mustard, and stir until a paste forms. Add milk, and whisk to combine. Reduce heat to medium. Add black and cayenne pepper and nutmeg. Simmer until thickened, stirring occasionally, for about 5 minutes.\n\nAdd most of the cheese, save for a handful. Taste and season with salt as needed. Stir sauce, then pour over macaroni and cauliflower. Add hazelnuts, and stir mixture to coat cauliflower and pasta in sauce.\n\nPour into prepared baking dish. Sprinkle with remaining cheese.\n\nMeanwhile, in a small pot on medium-high heat, melt 1 tbsp butter with 1 garlic clove. When butter has foamed, add bread crumbs and stir to coat. Cook until butter is absorbed and pan looks dry, about 2 minutes. Pour over macaroni mixture.\n\nBake for 30 to 35 minutes, until sauce is bubbly and crumbs have turned golden. Serve, basking in the praise and admiration you so obviously deserve.\n\n_**Don't buy breadcrumbs!**_\n\nBREADCRUMBS COST WAY TOO MUCH, AND YOU PROBABLY HAVE STALE BREAD KICKING AROUND ANYWAY.\n\nTOAST SLICES OF STALE BREAD IN OVEN AT 300\u00b0F (150\u00b0C) FOR 5 TO 10 MINUTES, UNTIL BREAD IS CRISP AND GOLDEN. LET BREAD COOL, THEN GRATE EACH SLICE ON THE DIAGONAL USING A CHEESE GRATER (LARGER HOLES). IF YOU HAVE A FOOD PROCESSOR, THAT'LL WORK EVEN BETTER.\n\nNO BREAD ON HAND? SALTINES WILL DO IN A PINCH. TWENTY-EIGHT TO 30 SALTINES, OR ABOUT THREE-QUARTERS OF A STANDARD SLEEVE OF SALTINES, WILL EQUAL 1 CUP (250 ML) CRUMBS WHEN CRUSHED. YOU CAN DO THIS IN A BLENDER OR FOOD PROCESSOR, OR BY PUTTING THEM INTO A SEALED FREEZER BAG AND ROLLING WITH A ROLLING PIN TO DESIRED FINENESS. BE MINDFUL THAT IF YOU'RE USING SALTINES WITH SALTED TOPS, YOU MAY WANT TO CUT BACK ON SALT IN THE RECIPE.\n\nCAULIFLOWER WITH ORECCHIETTE & ALMONDS\n\nCuddles, my grandmother, used to make a side dish of steamed whole cauliflower covered in drawn butter sauce and studded with toasted, slivered almonds. It was my favorite part of the meal\u2014to the point where I would eat the entire dish just so no one else (my Uncle Tim in particular) could have any. Then it occurred to me that I could eat this dish a lot more often if I combined it with pasta, so I upgraded it with a pinch of cayenne pepper and some chili flakes, but the overall taste is about the same. Make it, and don't feel like you have to share it, especially not with relatives named Tim.\n\n4\n\nSERVINGS\n\n\u00bd lb (250 g) dried orecchiette\n\n\u00bd cup (125 mL) butter\n\n1 garlic clove, smashed\n\n\u00bc cup (60 mL) all-purpose flour\n\n1 lemon, zest and juice\n\n\u00bd tsp ground black pepper\n\n\u00bd tsp chili flakes + additional to taste, for garnish\n\n\u00bc tsp salt\n\n\u215b tsp cayenne pepper\n\n1 lb (250 g) cauliflower, chopped into bite-sized florets, stems diced\n\n\u00bd cup (125 mL) slivered almonds, toasted and divided\n\nsalt and pepper, to taste\n\nBring a pot of salted water to a boil on high heat. Add orecchiette, and cook until al dente, as per package directions.\n\nMeanwhile, in a heavy-bottomed pot on medium heat, melt butter with garlic. Let butter become foamy, then let foam subside before whisking in flour. Scoop out garlic clove, then add 1\u00bd cups (375 mL) water, lemon zest and juice, pepper, chili flakes, salt, and cayenne pepper. Reduce heat to medium-low and cook, whisking often, until thick.\n\nTwo to 3 minutes before you expect pasta to be done, add cauliflower to pot of pasta.\n\nStir half of almonds into sauce, and continue to stir. Taste and adjust seasonings as needed.\n\nWhen pasta is ready, scoop out about \u00bd cup (125 mL) cooking water. Drain, then add pasta and cauliflower to sauce. Stir, adding pasta water as needed to thin sauce so it coats noodles.\n\nServe sprinkled with remaining almonds and chili flakes.\nLINGUINE WITH TUNA & CAPERS\n\nI don't know what it is about this dish, because even though it's made almost entirely of stuff I scavenge out of my refrigerator and pantry two days after the rent has been paid and we're totally broke, it feels fancy\u2014the kind of thing you'd almost think of putting pants on to eat, the sort of thing you could serve to a date or a special friend or your mother. It is more than the sum of its parts, and it's delicious. Serve with a simple salad and the rest of the white wine.\n\n4\n\nSERVINGS\n\n6-oz (170-g) can tuna, packed in oil\n\n2 hardboiled eggs, peeled, yolks and whites separated\n\n1 garlic clove, minced\n\n1 large lemon, zest and juice\n\n1 tbsp capers, rinsed and roughly chopped\n\n1 tbsp chopped fresh dill\n\n\u00bc cup (60 mL) dry white wine\n\n\u00bc cup (60 mL) extra-virgin olive oil\n\n1 tbsp fish sauce\n\n1 tsp ground black pepper\n\nsalt, to taste\n\n16-oz (480-g) pkg dried linguine\n\nIn a medium-size bowl, mash together tuna (including its juices) and egg yolks, until the yolks have all but disappeared.\n\nChop egg whites, then stir into mixture. Stir in garlic, lemon zest and juice, capers, dill, wine, olive oil, fish sauce, pepper and salt.\n\nCover bowl with plastic wrap and let sit at room temperature for 30 minutes.\n\nMeanwhile, in a large pot on high heat, boil pasta in salted water until al dente, following package instructions, then drain. Toss immediately with a third of tuna mixture, then pour into a serving dish and top with remainder of mixture.\nONE-POT PASTA WITH MEAT SAUCE\n\nOrdinarily I like to dawdle over a meat sauce. In the pre-toddler era, I would cook a rich, meaty Bolognese sauce for a couple of hours, pausing while occasionally passing through the kitchen to stir and inhale. In the current era, a meaty pasta is a weeknight dish, one I make while a tiny naked person shouts orders and causes a general ruckus. The one consolation? This one-pot dish tastes like a sauce you dawdled over, but you can make it while you try to prevent your tiny naked person from trying to climb into the dryer.\n\n6\u20138\n\nSERVINGS\n\n3 tbsp olive oil, divided\n\n1 lb (500 g) mushrooms, finely chopped\n\n1 tsp coarse salt, divided\n\n1 lb (500 g) lean ground beef\n\n1 onion, diced\n\n2 cups (500 mL) celery, diced\n\n2 cups (500 mL) carrot, diced\n\n4 garlic cloves, minced\n\n\u00bd cup (125 mL) dry red wine\n\n2 cups (500 mL) low-sodium chicken stock\n\n1 tsp Worcestershire sauce\n\n28-oz (796-mL) can whole tomatoes, including juice\n\n1 tsp dried basil\n\n\u00bd tsp dried oregano\n\n\u00bd tsp chili flakes\n\n\u00bd tsp ground black pepper\n\n\u00bd lb (250 g) dried rotini, penne, or other short pasta\n\nIn a large pot with a tight-fitting lid on medium, heat 1 tbsp olive oil. Add mushrooms and \u00bd tsp salt. Cook until mushrooms have released their liquid and it has evaporated, 4 to 5 minutes.\n\nAdd 1 tbsp olive oil and crumble beef into pot. Stir and cook until browned, about 5 minutes. Remove contents of pot onto a plate and set aside.\n\nAdd 1 tbsp olive oil to same pot and return to medium heat. Add onions, celery, and carrots, and cook until the onions are translucent, about 3 minutes. Add garlic, give it 1 minute, then add wine, scraping bottom of pan. Add chicken stock, Worcestershire sauce, tomatoes (crushing them individually into pot), basil, oregano, chili flakes, and pepper. Simmer for 10 minutes, until sauce has reduced slightly.\n\nAdd pasta to mixture in pot, add 4 cups (1 L) water, and stir to distribute noodles throughout sauce. Bring to a boil, then simmer for 15 minutes, until pasta is cooked through and sauce is mostly absorbed. Let sit 5 minutes before serving.\nPEANUTTY SOBA NOODLES WITH KALE\n\nThis is one of those things that we end up eating a lot of in January, when we're feeling obligated to be virtuous and also when only the kale has survived the first stretch of winter in the garden. Make this dish when it's just too cold to walk to the store\u2014most of it comes from your pantry. If you don't have kale, you can use different fresh greens; a package of frozen spinach also works, but thaw it first and give it a good wring with a clean dish towel. This would also be good topped with fresh bean sprouts.\n\n4\n\nSERVINGS\n\n2 tbsp canola oil\n\n1 small onion, chopped\n\n4 garlic cloves, minced\n\n1 tbsp minced fresh ginger\n\n1 block medium-firm tofu\n\n\u00bd lb (250 g) dried soba noodles\n\n\u00bd cup (125 mL) peanut butter (natural peanut butter is best because it's runnier)\n\n\u00bc cup (60 mL) soy sauce\n\n\u00bc cup (60 mL) Sriracha sauce\n\n2 tbsp rice vinegar\n\n1 tbsp sesame oil\n\n2 tsp honey (omit or reduce to taste if using peanut butter that contains sugar)\n\nsalt and pepper, to taste\n\n\u00bd lb (250 g) chopped fresh kale\n\n1 cup (250 mL) chopped fresh cilantro\n\n\u00bd cup (125 mL) chopped roasted peanuts\n\nIn a large pan on medium-high, heat oil and add onions, garlic, and ginger. Saut\u00e9 until fragrant, about 2 minutes.\n\nPat tofu dry with kitchen towel and chopped into cubes. Add to pan, tossing occasionally.\n\nMeanwhile, bring a large pot of water to a boil on high heat. Add soba noodles, and cook for 3 minutes.\n\nIn a small bowl, combine peanut butter, soy sauce, Sriracha, rice vinegar, sesame oil, and honey. Mix well, taste, and adjust seasonings as needed.\n\nAfter 3 minutes, add kale to pot of boiling noodles. Cook for an additional 3 minutes, then drain. Rinse with cold water and drain again.\n\nAdd noodles and kale to onion mixture, and pour peanut sauce over it. Toss with \u00bd cup (125 mL) fresh cilantro. Divide between four plates, and garnish with another splurch of Sriracha, remaining cilantro, and chopped peanuts.\n\nRAPINI & SAUSAGE WITH WHITE BEANS & ORECCHIETTE\n\nRapini can be hard to come by; if you can find it and it's under $2.49 for a bunch, grab some. If not, plain old broccoli will work just fine.\n\n4\n\nSERVINGS\n\n1 lb (500 g) rapini, chopped\n\n3 tbsp olive oil\n\n1 small onion, chopped\n\n3 garlic cloves, minced\n\n1 lb (500 g) spicy Italian sausage, casings removed\n\n1 tsp chili flakes\n\n2 tbsp tomato paste\n\n1 cup (250 mL) dried orecchiette pasta\n\n19-oz (540-mL) can white beans, drained and rinsed\n\n\u00bd lemon, zest and juice\n\n\u00bd cup (125 mL) chopped fresh parsley\n\n\u00bc cup (60 mL) grated Parmesan cheese + extra, for garnish\n\nsalt and pepper, to taste\n\nBring a large pot of lightly salted water to a boil on high heat. Drop chopped rapini in, and boil for 2 to 3 minutes, until wilted and brightened in color. Remove rapini from water, reserving liquid, and plunge into a large bowl of icy water. Set aside.\n\nReturn pot to heat and bring water back up to a boil.\n\nMeanwhile, in a large pan on medium-high, heat olive oil. Saut\u00e9 onions 2 to 3 minutes, until translucent. Add garlic, then crumble sausage into pan. Stir with a wooden spoon, breaking up meat. Stir in chili flakes and tomato paste and continue moving meat around pan.\n\nWhen water has come to a boil, add pasta and boil until al dente, about 8 minutes.\n\nDrain, but reserve 1 cup (250 mL) cooking liquid. Add rapini to pan, stirring to coat in pan juices. As pasta finishes cooking, add beans and lemon zest and juice, then add pasta. If sauce is too thick, add pasta water as needed, a tablespoon at a time. Add parsley and cheese. Taste and adjust seasonings as needed. Serve with additional cheese if desired.\nRIGATONI WITH TOMATOES & CHICKPEAS\n\nA fast, hearty weeknight dish, this pasta is vegan-friendly. The flavors are reminiscent of Italian fennel sausage, but this is gentler on your budget and a great way to go meatless and not really notice. The dish pairs well with off-dry white wine and a simple green salad. Top with grated Parmesan or vegan cheese, if you like.\n\n4\u20136\n\nSERVINGS\n\n3 tbsp olive oil\n\n2 tsp chili flakes\n\n1 tsp fennel seeds\n\n1 medium onion, finely chopped\n\n6 garlic cloves, minced\n\n2\u00bd\u20133 lb (1\u20131.5 g) fresh tomatoes, diced\n\n1 tsp salt\n\n1 tsp ground black pepper\n\n1 lb (500 g) dried rotini\n\n19-oz (540-mL) can chickpeas\n\n\u00bd cup (125 mL) densely packed flat-leaf parsley, chopped\n\nIn a large pan on medium-high heat, combine olive oil, chili flakes and fennel seeds and cook until oil begins to sizzle. Add onions, and cook until translucent, 2 to 3 minutes. Stir in garlic and cook for 2 minutes, until garlic is fragrant and just beginning to turn golden. Add tomatoes, salt, and pepper. Reduce heat to medium, and cover. Cook for 10 minutes.\n\nMeanwhile, bring a pot of salted water on high heat to a rolling boil. Add pasta, and cook for 8 or 9 minutes, until just underdone\u2014not quite al dente.\n\nUncover tomato mixture, and simmer until pasta reaches near-doneness.\n\nDrain and rinse chickpeas.\n\nDrain pasta.\n\nAdd chickpeas and pasta to tomatoes and cook until pasta has reached al dente stage and most of the liquid has been absorbed by noodles. Stir in parsley, and serve hot.\nSHELLS WITH BRUSSELS SPROUTS, CHICKPEAS & BACON\n\nIf all you remember about Brussels sprouts is tiny cabbages boiled to a watery gray death, then it's time to get reacquainted! This is everything I love in one dish of pasta\u2014a little sweet, a little spicy, and buttery. The bacon acts like an herb here, and the meatiness comes from the chickpeas. The sprouts are sweet and tender, having been caramelized. It's not low-cal, but sprouts and chickpeas absolve the dish a little bit. Serve with a crisp white wine and some raw bitter winter greens dressed in olive oil and lemon.\n\n4\n\nSERVINGS\n\n4 strips bacon, finely chopped\n\n\u00bd lb (250 g) dried conchiglie (small shell pasta)\n\n3 tbsp butter, divided\n\n3 garlic cloves\n\n\u00bd tsp chili flakes\n\n\u00bd tsp coarse salt\n\n\u00bd tsp pepper\n\n\u215b tsp ground nutmeg\n\n\u00bd lb (250 g) Brussels sprouts, trimmed and halved\n\n14-oz (398-mL) can chickpeas, drained and rinsed\n\n1 lemon, zest and juice\n\nsalt and pepper, to taste\n\nchili flakes, for garnish\n\n1 lemon, quartered, for garnish\n\nIn a large pan on medium-high heat, cook bacon until crispy. Spoon bacon out of pan and onto a plate lined with a paper towel.\n\nMeanwhile, bring a pot of salted water to a boil on high heat. Add pasta, and cook until al dente, 7 to 10 minutes (or follow package instructions).\n\nReturn frying pan to stove and reduce heat to medium. Add 2 tbsp butter. Stir in garlic, chili flakes, salt, pepper, nutmeg, and Brussels sprouts. Cook until Brussels sprouts have softened and begun to brown, about 8 minutes. Add chickpeas.\n\nDrain cooked pasta, reserving about \u00bd cup (125 mL) cooking water.\n\nPour cooked pasta into pan with sprouts and chickpeas. Add remainder of butter, lemon zest and juice, and stir to coat. If pan seems a little dry, add some pasta water, 2 tbsp at a time, until sauce coats noodles and dish appears glossy and tasty-looking. Taste and adjust seasonings as needed.\n\nServe with additional chili flakes sprinkled on top and a wedge of lemon to squeeze over pasta.\nSIZZLING CHILI NOODLES\n\nThere's this fabulous hand-pulled noodle place called Peaceful Restaurant near our old apartment, and it was already crazy busy when Guy Fieri showed up to film a Vancouver-centric episode of _Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives._ They serve fresh noodles fried in chili oil and a ton of garlic, and it's so explosive that if you don't ask for \"Western medium,\" it'll blow your goddamn head off. I miss that place so much, but it's a hard ask to get a feral toddler to wait for a table and food he'll refuse to eat. When Hunter's tame enough to wait in line, we'll go back; for now, I make this reasonable approximation of the dish at home, with store-bought Shanghai noodles and a bottle of sambal oelek. Adjust the spiciness to your taste; serve with a cooling side of sliced, gently salted cucumbers and the kind of beer you'd only drink ice cold.\n\n4\n\nSERVINGS\n\n\u00bd lb (250 g) fresh Shanghai noodles\n\n2 lb (900 g) baby bok choy, trimmed and leaves separated\n\n3 tbsp peanut oil\n\n5 garlic cloves, minced\n\n3 tbsp sambal oelek\n\n2 tbsp soy sauce\n\n4 scallions, finely chopped\n\nBring a large pot of salted water to a boil on high heat. Add noodles, and boil for 3 minutes. In last minute, add bok choy.\n\nMeanwhile, in a large frying pan on medium-high, heat oil to a shimmer.\n\nReserving \u00bd cup (125 mL) noodle liquid, drain noodles and bok choy.\n\nWorking quickly, add garlic to pan, stir, then stir in sambal oelek. Add noodles and bok choy, soy sauce, and reserved cooking liquid, and stir to coat noodles in saucy mixture. Cook for an additional 1 to 2 minutes, until noodles are tender but still chewy and well-coated with sauce, which should be slightly absorbed.\n\nToss with chopped scallions and serve hot from pan.\n\nSHANGHAI NOODLES, OR OTHER FAT, FRESH ASIAN NOODLES, ARE USUALLY SOLD IN THE PRODUCE SECTION, NEAR WHERE YOU'D BUY WONTON WRAPPERS. IF YOU CAN'T FIND THEM IN YOUR USUAL STORE, TRY THE LOCAL ASIAN MARKET; IN A PINCH, YOU CAN SUBSTITUTE FRESH, FROZEN, OR DRIED (AND RECONSTITUTED) UDON NOODLES.\n\nTUNA PENNE\n\nThis is an ideal dish for mid-February, as it uses stuff you'll likely have in your cupboards and refrigerator already. An easy one that comes together in about 20 minutes, it'll fill you up without filling you out\u2014it's reasonably healthy, after all. The thing I like about it is the little bit of Mediterranean flavor that will inject a bit of sunshine into an otherwise dreary day. You can make it anytime, but winter is when this will really shine.\n\n4\n\nSERVINGS\n\n\u00bd lb (250 g) dried penne\n\n3 tbsp olive oil\n\n1 medium onion, diced\n\n4 garlic cloves, roughly chopped\n\n1 tbsp capers (in brine), roughly chopped\n\n\u00bd tsp chili flakes\n\n\u00bd tsp ground black pepper\n\n6-oz (170-g) can tuna in water, 2 tsp water reserved\n\n28-oz (796-mL) can crushed tomatoes\n\n14-oz (398-mL) can cannellini beans\n\n2 tsp Worcestershire sauce\n\nzest and juice of \u00bd lemon\n\nsalt, to taste\n\n3 tbsp chopped fresh parsley\n\n\u00bd cup (125 mL) Parmesan cheese, for garnish\n\n2 tsp chili flakes, for garnish\n\nBring a large pot of salted water to a boil on high heat. Add pasta, stirring occasionally. Cook until just shy of al dente, 9 to 10 minutes, or according to package instructions.\n\nMeanwhile, in a large pan on medium-high. heat olive oil. Add onions, garlic, capers, chili flakes, and pepper, and cook until fragrant and onions are translucent, 2 to 3 minutes.\n\nReduce heat to medium. Flake tuna into pan with a fork. Add tomatoes, beans, reserved tuna water, Worcestershire sauce, and lemon zest and juice.\n\nReserve \u00bd cup (125 mL) pasta cooking water. Drain pasta, then add to pan. Stir, adding pasta water as needed to thin sauce. Taste and adjust seasonings. Just before serving, stir in parsley. Serve with a sprinkle of Parmesan cheese and chili flakes, as desired.\nEGGS\n\nBUTTERMILK DUTCH BABY WITH BACON BAKED APPLE\n\nBUTTERNUT SQUASH SKILLET STRATA\n\nDEEP-FRIED SRIRACHA EGGS\n\nEGG & CORN QUESADILLA, FOR ONE OR MANY\n\nEGG & TOMATO CURRY\n\nEGGS RABBIT\n\nEGGS WITH CORN & RED BEANS\n\nGREEN EGG BAKE\n\nPAUL'S TORTILLA ESPA\u00d1OLA\n\nRED SAUCE EGGS\n\n**_Everyone cringed when my grandfather made dinner because his eggs were snotty._**\n\nAt the time, it was stomach-turning to be served Grandpa's eggs on toast; they were not just slightly undercooked, they were practically mucous, and most people aren't all about eating a sneeze for breakfast. I didn't get it. Why not cook them longer? Why, Grandpa? I wondered if he was just half-assing it, doing a crap job to get out of having to cook again, which is actually a great approach to everything. (I have made a serious and concerted effort at making it look like I have no ability to properly wash a floor, and it's working out pretty great for me.)\n\nBut it turns out that snotty is just how he liked them. He'd cook them until the whites were just opaque because it was important that the yolks be completely raw. In my experience, \"just opaque\" meant \"still quite raw,\" as if a slippery bite of white was an acceptable price to pay for a perfect, runny yolk. When Auntie Lynn would make him his eggs, she'd follow his specific instructions, regardless of how counterintuitive they seemed. He knew what he liked.\n\nGrandpa also preferred to eat his eggs directly from the frying pan. If it was summer and my grandmother had tomatoes turning ripe in pots on the patio, he'd add a couple of slices to the pan. He'd eat his eggs and tomatoes forked onto pieces of toast, sprinkled with a little salt and dried oregano, and he'd leave the last bite for the dog, swiping his hand under the pan to make sure it wasn't too hot for Riley's doggy lips.\n\nAt the time, the wet whites seemed very gross, but as an adult I absolutely understand his urge to not overcook the eggs at any cost. An overcooked egg is a tragedy. I will sulk about it. One reason I don't think Nick cooks dinner all that often is that the last time he scrambled a pan of eggs, he was also talking and I watched in horror as he stopped moving the eggs in the pan. It took only a second, but I saw it as soon as my shrieking shocked his stir-hand back into motion: brown. Nick had browned the eggs. It wasn't my finest moment, but I (sputtering with swears and an abject lack of perspective) refused to eat them. There's a pretty good chance I'm just awful to live with, and I suppose I'm willing to change...but I will not budge on the egg issue.\n\nBrowned eggs taste like sadness and sulfur and I hate them. A perfect scrambled egg is very soft, still a bit wet, with curds like fluffy yellow clouds. A perfect scrambled egg is whisked with a bit of milk before it's added to the pan, in which a pool of melted butter is waiting. Chef Daniel Boulud, describing the texture of a perfect omelet, once used the word _baveuse,_ French for slobber. We're not even 500 words into this intro and already I've gone on at length about snot and slobber, so things are going pretty well, I think? (Food writing: Nailed it!)\n\nI don't need them that smooth, but scrambled eggs a bit underdone and seasoned once they're out of the pan and onto the plate are about the best thing you can make for yourself on a quiet night alone. Some scrambled eggs, a bit of heavily buttered toast, and a cold beer, glass of wine, or a hot cup of tea, paired with a book and a blanket and your favorite armchair\u2014there is no better way to spend an evening, of that I'm sure.\n\nOn weekends, those same eggs and a bit of sour cream round out pierogies for breakfast; for lunch, we'll throw them into a folded tortilla with a bit of cheese, maybe half an avocado, and some salsa\u2014homemade or store-bought, it doesn't matter\u2014and have egg quesadillas for lunch. We've just gotten so busy, so scheduled, that eggs are the perfect food\u2014they cook quickly, they cost little, and they'll give you that necessary jolt of protein to get you through the next thing. A scrambled egg is not just sustenance; it's nourishment, and I'm quite certain on some weeknights an egg or two and someone else to fry the bacon has been the thing that's prevented my head from exploding. In two minutes, you have food, and you can sit down. Some days, that's everything.\n\nRight. So. Which eggs should you buy?\n\nThe very best eggs you can get are the ones that come from the yards of houses on long, quiet country roads with signs out front that read something like \"Eggs, $3 for 12.\" Bonus points if you can see the chickens just wandering around outside like weird, ugly puppies. Not everyone has country roads, and most of us don't get out of the city anywhere near often enough, so happy-chicken hobby-farm eggs end up being a nice-to-have in a world full of good-enoughs.\n\nStore-bought eggs are likely your main or only option. There is a hierarchy of eggs, with the greatest of these being the SPCA-certified, cage-free organic eggs with yolks as orange as tangerines, a result of the chickens having access to bugs and worms and things to peck and eat outdoors. They are delicious and healthy...and so expensive.\n\nIn the middle, there are varying price points for free run, free range, and organic eggs. At the bottom, there are your regular old factory farm eggs, whose yolks range from golden to pale yellow, and they are by far the cheapest; the chickens tend to be fed corn. There are also the omega-3 or vitamin D-fortified \"sunshine\" eggs, which are pretty much the same as conventional eggs, though the hens who lay them are fed flax or other fortified feed. The eggs cost a dollar or two more, and they often come in Styrofoam cartons. Choosing these eggs is a matter of personal preference; I prefer to save the dollar.\n\nI had been buying the SPCA fancy eggs, but then I got surprise-pregnant and babies cost a lot of money. The place where I buy diapers sends me coupons by email, and eggs are often two dollars per dozen, so I buy the regular ones in the recyclable paper carton. We're all doing the best we can, but I'll admit that in all my trying to do better, I sometimes neglect the chickens.\n\nTruly free range eggs\u2014that is, eggs that come from chickens with access to the bugs and worms that live in the grass outside\u2014are worth the cost if you can afford the splurge. Are they worth it for someone who can't afford six dollars for a dozen? Well, the nutrient content in those fancy eggs is a bit higher\u2014free range eggs are higher in docosahexaenoic acid (DHA, an omega-3 fatty acid), which has been shown to improve brain development and language acquisition in toddlers. According to the US National Institute on Aging, research suggests that DHA may also play a preventative role in the onset of Alzheimer's disease. But eggs in general are nutrient-rich and a great source of energy; they are an essential part of low-budget cooking, whether they're two or six dollars per dozen.\n\nI've resolved to do better when I'm better off, which I always assume will come some day. Maybe when Hunter's out of daycare. Maybe after the next new job or promotion or pay raise. Maybe I need to examine whether I'm subconsciously harboring something against chickens. Those farm fresh eggs are the stuff of idyll, and I imagine Nick and I one day living in a place where we can raise our own gross-faced birds and harvest blue- and tan-shelled eggs every morning ourselves. We will wear name-brand rubber boots. I will suddenly be taller.\n\nEggs are cheap, but are they actually good for you?\n\nYes! And no! And every shade of yes-kind-of and sort-of-no in between, depending on who you ask and what your underlying health issues include. In general, if you're a healthy person, eggs are fine and you should eat them. If you have high cholesterol or type 2 diabetes, there's research to suggest that more than one or two eggs a day can increase your risk of stroke; the Canadian Diabetes Association suggests that if you have type 2 diabetes, you limit yourself to two eggs per week. The American Diabetes Association is more generous, allowing three per week.\n\nThough claims that eggs (especially the yolks) contribute to high cholesterol have since been largely debunked _(thank you, science!),_ there is evidence to suggest that if your \"bad cholesterol\" (low-density lipoprotein or LDL) is on the higher side, the small amount that eggs contain can push you into the heart-disease danger zone. Of course, there are a range of factors at play here, and eggs alone are not likely to have you keeling over at brunch, but it is something to keep in mind. I eat eggs fried in butter with reckless abandon, but I also eat cheese and bacon like I'm going to live forever, so I'll let you know how that goes. It may not be the eggs that get me in the end, you know? In the meantime, if you're concerned, it might be a good idea to talk with your doctor.\n\nBut if you really, really like eggs and have no current cause for concern, then let's get cracking! (I have waited my whole adult life to make that pun in print.)\n\n_**Eggs, by type**_\n\n**SPCA-CERTIFIED**\n\nSPCA-CERTIFIED EGGS COME FROM PASTURED HENS, AND THEIR ENVIRONMENT INCLUDES NEST BOXES, PERCHES, AND ROOM IN INDOOR AND OUTDOOR SPACES FOR SCRATCHING, FORAGING, AND DUST-BATHING. SPCA-CERTIFIED FARMS HAVE BEEN INSPECTED BY THE SOCIETY FOR THE PREVENTION OF CRUELTY TO ANIMALS AND HAVE BEEN FOUND COMPLIANT WITH THE SPCA'S HIGH STANDARDS FOR FARM ANIMAL WELFARE.\n\n**FREE RANGE**\n\nHENS THAT LAY FREE RANGE EGGS SPEND MOST OF THEIR TIME IN TEMPERATURE-CONTROLLED OPEN-CONCEPT BARNS. THESE ARE SIMILAR TO FREE RUN EGGS, BUT WHEN WEATHER PERMITS THE HENS CAN ACCESS OUTDOOR SPACES AS WELL.\n\n**FREE RUN**\n\nHENS THAT LAY FREE RUN EGGS SPEND THEIR TIME IN TEMPERATURE-CONTROLLED OPEN-CONCEPT BARNS. THESE ARE INDOOR ENVIRONMENTS WHERE THE HENS ARE NOT CAGED.\n\n**ORGANIC**\n\nORGANIC EGGS COME FROM HENS THAT HAVE BEEN FED ORGANIC GRAIN FEED. HENS LAYING ORGANIC EGGS ARE GIVEN ANTIBIOTICS ONLY TO TREAT INFECTIONS OR DISEASE.\n\n**CONVENTIONAL**\n\nNINETY-FIVE PER CENT OF EGGS IN NORTH AMERICA ARE PRODUCED BY CAGED HENS IN TEMPERATURE-CONTROLLED LAYING BARNS. HENS ARE CONTAINED IN CAGES WITH THREE OR MORE OTHER HENS; IN CANADA, THEY HAVE CURTAINED OFF SPACE WHERE THEY CAN SOMEWHAT PRIVATELY LAY EGGS. CHICKENS ARE SEPARATED FROM THEIR WASTE, AND FOOD AND WATER IS PROVIDED IN THE CAGES.\n\nBUTTERMILK DUTCH BABY WITH BACON-BAKED APPLE\n\nThis is the kind of thing that's perfect if you've got a morning to yourself; it's equally perfect if you're much too pregnant and it's two o'clock in the morning and you're starving\/sleepless\/bored. The apples bake while the Dutch baby does, and you can have the whole thing in half an hour if you start right now.\n\n1\n\nSERVING\n\nDUTCH BABY:\n\n1 egg\n\n\u00bc cup (60 mL) buttermilk\n\n2 tbsp all purpose flour\n\n1 tbsp whole wheat flour\n\n\u00bc tsp brown sugar\n\npinch salt\n\nBAKED APPLE:\n\n1 strip bacon\n\n1 small, tart, firm-fleshed apple, such as Granny Smith or Braeburn\n\n2 tsp brown sugar\n\n\u215b tsp ground cinnamon\n\npinch salt\n\n1 tsp butter\n\nLightly grease 2 ramekins. Preheat oven to 425\u00b0F (220\u00b0C). Place 1 ramekin in the oven as it heats.\n\nIn a small bowl, whisk together egg, buttermilk, flours, brown sugar, and salt. Set aside.\n\nIn a frying pan on medium-high heat, cook bacon until crisp, 2 to 3 minutes. Peel, core, and chop apples to \u00bc-in (6-mm) dice. Remove bacon to a cutting board, and chop finely. Mix apple, bacon, brown sugar, cinnamon, and salt. Pour into unheated ramekin and top with butter.\n\nPull heated ramekin out of oven and pour batter into it. Bake both ramekins for 22 to 25 minutes, until Dutch baby is puffed and golden. Don't open the oven too early, or it will fall.\n\nServe Dutch baby on a plate, with apple mixture on top or on the side.\n\nButternut Squash Skillet Strata (page 72)\nBUTTERNUT SQUASH SKILLET STRATA\n\nThis strata recipe gets pretty good mileage in my kitchen\u2014we use it as a brunch dish, an occasional dinner, and, once the festive season is underway, as a substitute for stuffing once we've had enough turkey dinners that it's time to shake things up. (With most of our family close by, we eat a lot of turkey between October and January.) It's crunchy, creamy, and savory, and stretches 5 eggs a good long way. This works best in a 12-in (30 cm) cast-iron frying pan.\n\n4\u20136\n\nSERVINGS\n\n8\n\nAS A SIDE\n\n1 tbsp butter\n\n2 tbsp olive oil\n\n1 onion, diced\n\n1 medium butternut squash (about 2 lb [900 g]), \u00bd-in (1-cm) dice\n\n1 head garlic, cloves separated and peeled\n\n1\u00bd tsp salt, divided\n\n5 1-in (2.5-cm) thick slices of day-old French bread, chopped into 1-in cubes\n\n2 cups (500 mL) grated aged cheddar cheese\n\n5 eggs\n\n1\u00bd cups (375 mL) milk\n\n1 tsp dried sage\n\n1 tsp grainy Dijon mustard\n\n1 tsp sambal oelek\n\n\u00bd tsp dried thyme\n\n\u00bd tsp ground black pepper\n\n\u00bc tsp ground nutmeg\n\nPreheat oven to 375\u00b0F (190\u00b0C).\n\nIn a heavy pan on medium-high heat, melt butter with olive oil. Add onions, squash, garlic, and 1 tsp salt, and saut\u00e9 until browned, about 8 to 10 minutes.\n\nMeanwhile, in a large bowl, mix bread cubes and cheese.\n\nIn a separate bowl, whisk together eggs, milk, sage, mustard, sambal oelek, thyme, pepper, nutmeg, and remaining salt.\n\nPour squash mixture into bowl with bread and cheese. Toss, mixing well, then return mixture to frying pan.\n\nPour egg mixture over bread and squash mixture, pressing down on bread so it soaks up eggs and milk.\n\nPlace pan in oven and bake for 35 to 40 minutes, until strata has puffed and turned golden. Serve hot.\nDEEP-FRIED SRIRACHA EGGS\n\nThis is the sort of thing we make when I've boiled too many eggs for the week and there are leftovers. It's great as a simple dinner for two, but I actually quite like just one of these sliced over a quick salad of greens, red onions, and watermelon dressed with a bit of oil and lemon for lunch. It's a nice thing to make when you've got a weekday off; it's also a good, inexpensive first course for brunch if you've got company.\n\n4\n\nSERVINGS\n\nvegetable oil\n\n1 raw egg\n\n1 tbsp Sriracha sauce\n\n1 tbsp milk\n\n\u00bd tsp salt\n\n\u00bd cup (125 mL) all-purpose flour\n\n\u00be cup (375 mL) bread crumbs\n\n4 eggs, boiled medium-hard, then cooled and peeled\n\nsalt, to taste\n\nIn a heavy-bottomed pan on medium-high, heat 2 in (5 cm) oil to 375\u00b0F (190\u00b0C).\n\nBeat together raw egg, Sriracha, milk, and salt. Set aside.\n\nMeasure flour onto a small plate, and bread crumbs into a small bowl.\n\nRoll cooked eggs in flour, then coat with egg mixture, then with bread crumbs.\n\nDrop into oil using a slotted spoon and cook until golden, 60 to 90 seconds, turning as they cook for even browning. Salt and serve immediately, drizzled with additional Sriracha.\nEGG & CORN QUESADILLA, FOR ONE OR MANY\n\nThis is a quickie lunch or dinner, and perfect for when you need to eat in 10 minutes or less. It's a great way to use up those last kernels of frozen corn you have kicking around in your freezer; you can also throw in whatever else you've got in the refrigerator. Multiply the recipe by however many you need to feed; if you're making 4 to 8 quesadillas, limit the oil to 2 tbsp, in total. Serve with salsa or sliced avocado and a green salad.\n\n1\n\nSERVINGS\n\n1 egg\n\n1 tsp milk\n\n\u215b tsp salt\n\n\u215b tsp ground black pepper\n\n\u215b tsp dried oregano\n\n12-in (30-cm) flour tortilla\n\n1 tbsp salsa (hot or mild, homemade or store-bought)\n\n2 tsp canola oil or melted butter\n\n2 tbsp frozen or fresh corn kernels\n\n1 tbsp finely chopped scallions\n\n\u00bc cup (60 mL) grated cheddar cheese\n\n1 tbsp fresh cilantro, chopped\n\nPreheat oven to 450\u00b0F (230\u00b0C).\n\nWhisk together egg, milk, salt, pepper, and oregano. Set aside.\n\nPlace tortilla on a lightly greased baking sheet. Smear top half of one side with salsa.\n\nIn a pan on medium-low, heat oil or butter, tipping and rotating pan to coat bottom. Add corn and scallions, and saut\u00e9 for 1 minute.\n\nStir in egg mixture, and keep stirring, scraping bottom of pan with a spatula so egg doesn't brown, until it's cooked but still soft, between 30 and 60 seconds. Spoon egg mixture onto half of tortilla that isn't smeared with salsa.\n\nSprinkle cheese and cilantro over eggs. Fold over tortilla, and bake for 4 minutes. Flip quesadilla and cook for an additional 2 to 3 minutes, until you can hear cheese sizzling and edges of tortilla appear crisp and lightly golden.\n\nRemove finished quesadilla to a cutting board and let it rest for 1 minute before cutting in half. Eat. Enjoy.\nEGG & TOMATO CURRY\n\nThis is a mild, gentle curry, the kind of thing you might want to eat after a weekend of too much beer and cheese. Serve it with rice and a nice cup of mint tea, and then go to bed early. It's restorative, and won't leave you either uncomfortable or wanting. It is best enjoyed while wearing stretch pants, or no pants at all. Nick and I each like 2 eggs; crack up to 8 eggs to feed 4 people.\n\n4\n\nSERVINGS\n\n2 tbsp butter\n\n1 onion, diced\n\n3 garlic cloves, minced\n\n1 tsp garam masala\n\n\u00bd tsp chili flakes\n\n\u00bd tsp ground cumin\n\n\u00bd tsp salt\n\n\u00bc tsp ground coriander\n\n\u00bc tsp ground black pepper\n\n28-oz (796-mL) can whole tomatoes, juices included\n\n14-oz (398-mL) can coconut milk\n\n1 cup (250 mL) frozen peas\n\n4 tbsp chopped cilantro, divided\n\n4\u20138 eggs\n\nPreheat oven to 425\u00b0F (220\u00b0C).\n\nIn a large pan on medium-high heat, melt butter. Add onions, and cook until translucent, 3 to 5 minutes. Add garlic, garam masala, chili flakes, cumin, salt, coriander, and black pepper. Stir to coat onions in spices, and cook until bottom of pan appears dry.\n\nAdd tomatoes, squishing each between your fingers to break it apart as you add it to the pan. Stir in tomato juices.\n\nAdd coconut milk and bring up to a simmer. Cook for about 3 minutes, until sauce has reduced slightly and appears to have thickened.\n\nStir in peas and half of cilantro.\n\nCrack eggs on top of sauce. Put pan in oven, and bake for 10 minutes, until eggs have set but are still soft inside.\n\nServe hot from the pan, over rice. Sprinkle each serving with remainder of cilantro.\nEGGS RABBIT\n\nThis is Eggs Benedict for my friend Corinne, who doesn't like Hollandaise sauce. While I'll never understand that, this is a perfectly lovely alternative\u2014beery, cheesy, and hearty enough for breakfast or breakfast-for-dinner.\n\n4\n\nSERVINGS\n\n2 tbsp butter\n\n2 tbsp flour\n\n2 garlic cloves, minced\n\n2 tsp grainy Dijon mustard\n\n1 cup (250 mL) malty beer, such as amber ale\n\n\u00bd tsp chopped fresh thyme\n\n\u00bc tsp ground nutmeg\n\n\u00bd tsp Worcestershire sauce\n\n1 cup (250 mL) grated aged cheddar cheese\n\n\u00bd cup (125 mL) milk\n\nsalt and pepper, to taste\n\n4 English muffins, halved and toasted\n\n8 strips bacon, cooked and drained\n\n8 eggs, poached to desired doneness\n\nchopped parsley, for garnish\n\nIn a saucepan on medium-high heat, melt butter and stir in flour, garlic, and mustard to form a paste. Whisk in beer, and reduce to medium heat.\n\nAs butter-paste begins to melt into beer and sauce begins to thicken, whisk frequently, adding thyme, nutmeg, and Worcestershire sauce. Once mixture is smooth, stir in cheese and let melt, until mixture is smooth again. Stir in milk. Season with salt and pepper, to taste.\n\nStack English muffins with bacon and eggs, and pour sauce over. Sprinkle with parsley, and serve hot.\nEGGS WITH CORN & RED BEANS\n\nThis is kind of like huevos rancheros and kind of like eggs in purgatory, but it's a whole lot of delicious, especially after a night of eating recklessly. It's got everything you need in it to restore your digestive well-being, and cheese. Serve it with a dollop of yogurt and, if it wasn't just reckless eating you found yourself up to the night before, a couple of Micheladas (equal parts beer and Clamato, plus lime, a squish of Sriracha, and a few shakes of Worcestershire sauce) for good measure.\n\n4\n\nSERVINGS\n\n\u00bd onion, chopped\n\n2 tbsp canola oil\n\n3 garlic cloves, minced\n\n1 cup (250 mL) fresh or frozen corn kernels\n\n1 bell pepper, diced\n\n1 jalape\u00f1o pepper, minced\n\n14-oz (398-mL) can crushed tomatoes\n\n14-oz (398-mL) can red beans\n\n1 tsp salt\n\n1 tsp chili powder\n\n1 tsp ground cumin\n\n\u00bd tsp dried oregano\n\n\u00bc cup (60 mL) chopped fresh cilantro + additional, for garnish\n\n4 eggs\n\n1 cup (250 mL) grated aged cheddar cheese\n\n4 12-in (30-cm) flour tortillas\n\nPreheat oven to 375\u00b0F (190\u00b0C).\n\nIn a large pan on medium-high heat, saut\u00e9 onions in oil until translucent. Add garlic, corn, bell peppers, and jalape\u00f1o, and cook until glistening, about 3 minutes.\n\nAdd crushed tomatoes, beans, salt, chili powder, cumin, oregano, and cilantro and simmer for 5 minutes, until reduced and thickened slightly.\n\nRemove from heat, and crack eggs over. Sprinkle with grated cheese, then place pan in oven on middle rack, and bake uncovered for 12 to 15 minutes, until whites are cooked and yolks are done to your liking. Serve over folded tortillas, sprinkled with cilantro.\nGREEN EGG BAKE\n\nIdeal for brunch or late-night dinner, this makes efficient use of any greens and herbs you've got wilting in the crisper. I like it best with spinach and dill, because it reminds me of spanakopita. You can substitute a 10-oz (300-g) package of frozen spinach, but thaw it completely and wring it thoroughly in a clean dishtowel before adding it to the pan. Serve with a dollop of Greek yogurt and some quartered tomatoes tossed in olive oil and salt.\n\n4\u20136\n\nSERVINGS\n\n8 eggs\n\n\u00bc cup (60 mL) all-purpose flour\n\n\u00bc cup (60 mL) milk\n\n4\u00bd-oz (125-g) feta cheese, crumbled\n\n\u00be tsp coarse salt\n\n\u00bd tsp ground black pepper\n\n\u00bc tsp ground nutmeg\n\n\u00bd cup (125 mL) chopped fresh dill\n\n\u00bc cup (60 mL) chopped fresh parsley\n\n3 tbsp olive oil\n\n1 onion, halved and thinly sliced\n\n4 garlic cloves, minced\n\n1 lb (500 g) spinach, rinsed, dried, and chopped into ribbons\n\nhandful chopped fresh dill, for garnish\n\nPreheat oven to 325\u00b0F (165\u00b0C).\n\nIn a large bowl, whisk eggs, flour, and milk until smooth. Add feta cheese, salt, pepper, nutmeg, dill, and parsley. Stir and set aside.\n\nIn a 12-in (30-cm) cast-iron pan on medium-high, heat olive oil. Add onions, and cook until softened, 2 to 3 minutes. Add garlic, stir for another minute, and then add spinach. Cook, stirring frequently, until spinach has wilted and reduced in volume, another 3 to 5 minutes.\n\nPour egg mixture over, stir quickly to mix in spinach and onions with egg batter, and place in oven. Bake for 30 minutes, until lightly golden and set in the center (shake pan\u2014if eggs slosh around in the middle, give them a bit more time).\n\nLet egg bake rest in pan for 5 minutes before cutting into slices and serving. Serve sprinkled with fresh dill.\nPAUL'S TORTILLA ESPA\u00d1OLA\n\nMy friend Paul Bell taught me how to make this\u2014he spent time in Spain, and this frittata-like dish was one of his souvenirs. Tortilla Espa\u00f1ola is great for brunch, as it's impressive but not complicated\u2014you can make it with a hangover. Serve with a dollop of yogurt and store-bought or homemade salsa.\n\n4\n\nSERVINGS\n\n1 onion, diced\n\n3 tbsp olive oil, divided\n\n2 lb (900 g) yellow-fleshed potatoes, sliced thinly\n\n6 eggs, beaten\n\n\u00bd tsp salt\n\n\u00bd tsp ground black pepper\n\nIn a 12-in (30-cm) frying pan on medium-high heat, saut\u00e9 onions in 2 tbsp olive oil until translucent. Add potatoes, tossing to coat in oil and onion mixture, then add \u2153 cup (80 mL) water and cover with a lid. Reduce heat to medium-low, and cook for 20 minutes, shaking pan occasionally to prevent sticking.\n\nRemove potatoes and onions from pan and let cool on a platter for 10 minutes, until there's no more steam rising from mixture.\n\nPreheat broiler and wipe out pan.\n\nWhisk together eggs, salt, and pepper.\n\nOn medium-high, heat 1 tbsp olive oil in pan, tipping to coat bottom. Stir cooled potatoes into eggs, then pour into heated pan. Run a spatula along sides every so often as it cooks, 5 to 6 minutes. Place under broiler until center sets and top is golden, 3 to 5 minutes. Check frequently to make sure it doesn't burn.\n\nTurn out onto a dish and let rest for 5 to 10 minutes before slicing and serving.\nRED SAUCE EGGS\n\nThis is my working-from-home \"meal for one\" scaled up to feed more people. A little leftover pasta sauce, an egg, some toast for dip-scooping\u2014there is no more perfect breakfast or lunch, and I will not debate that fact. If this is lunch, I'll serve it with a chopped piece of fruit or avocado on the side. For breakfast, all you need is a glass of juice (or wine, let's not kid ourselves) and some tea and you're ready for the day.\n\n4\n\nSERVINGS\n\n2 cups (500 mL) Red Sauce (p. 165) or store-bought pasta sauce\n\n4 tbsp grated Parmesan cheese, divided\n\n4 eggs\n\n1 tsp coarse salt, divided\n\n1 tsp chili flakes, divided\n\nPreheat oven to 400\u00b0F (200\u00b0C). Lightly grease four ramekins.\n\nIn a saucepan on medium-high, heat sauce until it burbles. Spoon \u00bd cup (125 mL) sauce into each ramekin.\n\nSprinkle grated cheese into middle of each ramekin. Using back of a tablespoon, gently make a small indentation in cheese and sauce.\n\nCrack an egg into indentation so that yolk sits in center of ramekin. Sprinkle each egg with salt and chili flakes.\n\nBake for 8 to 12 minutes, to desired doneness. Eight to 10 minutes will yield a yolk that is runny (more runny with less time); 12 minutes will yield a yolk cooked medium-hard.\nBEANS AND LEGUMES\n\nBREAKFAST BEANS\n\nBUTTERNUT SQUASH & CHICKPEA CURRY\n\nCHANA MASALA\n\nCHICKPEA SALAD WITH GARLIC SCAPES\n\nLENTIL SALAD\n\nLENTIL SLOPPY JOES\n\nLENTIL TACOS WITH AVOCADO CREAM\n\nPUMPKIN & RED LENTIL DAL\n\nRED BEAN FLAUTAS\n\nSWEET POTATO & MIXED BEAN CHILI\n\nSWEET POTATO & RED LENTIL SOUP\n\n**_Though we ate a lot of take-out Indian food when I was a kid, I don't recall much in the way of legumes at home. It wasn't until I moved out on my own that I really discovered cooking with them. I moved to a smelly old basement suite near Commercial Drive, a street\/neighborhood in Vancouver that's a curious mix of a long-standing Italian community and, well, New Age hippies. It's actually a lot more diverse than that, but at the time it did feel like I was encountering a lot of drum circles._**\n\nVancouver's Commercial Drive has a million little grocery stores with abundant, mountainous displays of fresh produce and tall Lucite cylinders filled with bulk dried goods just waiting to be spilled all over the floor when I fail (again and again) to understand chutes and levers. Because of the area's nutritionally left-leaning population, you can get every kind of bean and lentil that exists in the entire world. Before I moved out on my own, I didn't know there was more than one kind. Truth: there are a lot of kinds.\n\nAnd in the beginning, I was excited to be able to stock up on super cheap sources of protein that I could cook in large batches and then eat in various incarnations all week long. Of course, I was gassier than I'd ever been, but who doesn't love a fart joke? (Basically, any guy who hits on you in a bar; they do not want to hear your fart jokes. Their loss.) I was also beginning to get bored eating the same thing every day. I desperately want to be the kind of person who can eat the same thing for two of three meals, three days in a row, because it would give me more free time, and maybe I'd use that time wisely for self-improvement or washing the clothes that never leave the bottom of the laundry hamper, but even though it would be cheaper and potentially more convenient over the course of the whole week, I can't do it. We eat dishes containing beans several days a week, but I use canned beans unless I'm making a single meal in the Crock-Pot. When I find canned beans at seventy-seven cents a can, I buy tons.\n\nDried lentils, canned beans. I'm a busy lady, and if I've already thought ahead to cook rice and pre-chop veggies for the week, then I've used up my allotment for forward-thinking. You can rehydrate small amounts of dried beans, but you've got to have the time to do it. I do not.\n\nWhat are the drawbacks to canned beans? Well, there is the tiny little issue of bisphenol A, or BPA, which is a toxic chemical that has been shown to mimic estrogen in the body. In 2010, a Statistics Canada report stated that BPA was appearing in measurable\u2014not trace\u2014amounts in the urine of as many as ninety-one percent of Canadians in every age group. BPA appears in some plastics and in the coating inside cans, such as those used for food. It's basically all over the place and in all the things. A 2011 study found that significant prenatal exposure to BPA resulted in symptoms of hyperactivity, anxiety, and depression in girls at three years of age (it didn't find the same severity of these effects in boys). It's the kind of thing you want to be careful with, because research is still looking at the long-term connection between BPA and adverse health events including reproductive cancers, even as other parts of the world have declared it fit for human consumption.\n\nSo, am I exposing my family to potentially troubling long-term health outcomes because I'm cranky about eating too many of the same kinds of beans every week? Maybe. But on the other hand, we might not eat any beans at all if it wasn't for the convenience of canned legumes, and beans are extremely valuable as an inexpensive source of fiber and lean protein. Beans and lentils fill you up, they can \"stretch\" meat meals (reducing the cost and health impacts of eating more meat), and they help regulate your blood sugar. For us, eating fewer beans and lentils would mean replacing the bulk that they provide with starchy foods like pasta, bread, or potatoes. Not a good carb-counting option.\n\nIf you're really set on rehydrating dried beans, there are a couple of ways you can do this. First, and possibly most convenient, is in a slow cooker. Soak about 2 lb (900 g) beans overnight in enough water to cover, then drain and rinse. Put beans into a slow cooker, cover with fresh water, add 2 tsp salt, and set to cook on low heat for 6 to 8 hours. I've had mixed success with this\u2014kidney beans and chickpeas have held up well, while others have split and turned to mush. I find that the Crock-Pot most convenient when I can cook something for 10 hours (which covers my work day plus commute). Not all beans will hold up to 10 hours of cooking. If your schedule is more flexible, however, the slow cooker might work out great for you.\n\nAnother handy way to rehydrate beans is with a pressure cooker. You can do this in about 20 minutes, I'm told. A pressure cooker will cost between $100 and $200, and it will save you lots of time. I don't own one, but my friends Dan and Dennis have one and swear by its ability to make weeknight cooking a lot less of a hassle. Dennis tells me he makes a fairly rich, very tasty chicken broth in his pressure cooker in 20 minutes.\n\nThe easiest and most reliable way to rehydrate beans is on the stovetop. Rinse the beans, but don't bother soaking them first\u2014this will work just fine, and you save yourself a step. Cover 1 to 2 lb (500 to 900 g) beans with about 2 in (5 cm) water, and add 1 to 2 tsp salt. In a heavy pot, such as a Dutch oven, bring beans to a boil on medium-high heat, then reduce heat to medium and simmer for about 90 minutes, give or take a few depending on the size and age of the beans. Beans that have been languishing in the back of your pantry for eons will take longer to cook.\n\nOne standard (14-oz [398-mL]) can of beans is equal to about \u00bd cup (125 mL) uncooked dried beans, which, when rehydrated, will equal about 1\u00bd cups (375 mL). I often buy my beans in 19-ounce (540-mL) cans (the size that always seems to be available in generic brands and on sale), which is about the same as 2 cups (500 mL) of rehydrated dried beans. A pound of dried beans will equal 6 to 7 cups (1.5 to 1.7 L) cooked beans and will cost you very little. If you can buy dried beans in bulk, you'll be even further ahead. If you have the time, it's well worth it to rehydrate a quantity of beans, turn them into meals (as in the recipes that follow), and then package them in serving sizes that work best for your family\u2014meals for four for future dinners, for example, or individual portions for everyone to take to work or school for lunch. Beans freeze well.\n\nAs mentioned above, I prefer canned beans for my everyday cooking, and dry lentils, which cook fast enough to not be a problem on weeknights. My experience with canned lentils is that they're a bit soggy, and they fall apart when cooked. Red lentils are an easy way to cram a bit of protein into pur\u00e9ed soups and veggies; they lend starchy bulk, but they're non-confrontational, even for Hunter. They're very mild in both taste and appearance. Green lentils are great for soups and casseroles, and I like the texture of black lentils for tacos because they seem a little more meaty. If you can't find black lentils, green lentils will work just fine. One cup (250 mL) dried lentils equals about 2 cups (500 mL) when cooked.\n\nI think the best thing about lentils is that, if you prepare them in a saucy way, they act like meat and can even pass for it. My sister-in-law Sharon doesn't tell her three boys when they're eating lentils and not hamburger, and everyone's just as happy as they'd be if they were eating ground beef. My father-in-law, an avid carnivore, even admitted after a two-week exercise in clean eating that lentils were an acceptable substitute for meat. Lentils are kind of miraculous that way; they're a great introduction to meatless meals for those who believe that they require meat with every meal. Nick maintains that he prefers meat to lentils, but he prefers lentils to making his own damn dinner, so in the end everyone kind of wins.\n\nA side benefit to lentils? They are highly digestible and contain a small amount of tryptophan, the groggy-making amino acid that makes you sleepy after a big turkey dinner. A lentil-based meal may therefore help you get a good night's sleep. If you're a busy person (and who among us isn't?), lentils are fabulous for many reasons\u2014they make dinner prep uncomplicated, and that counts for so much, especially Monday through Thursday. It makes you wonder what else those New Age hippies were right about. (Please don't let it be drum circles. I can't unselfconsciously sit that close to other people.)\nBREAKFAST BEANS\n\nSometimes Hunter does this adorable thing where he wakes up at, like, 5:45 a.m., which means our mornings are expansive. When that happens, I take the opportunity to whip up these beans, which are more complicated than the smoothies I make while yelling at everyone as we run out the door on regular mornings, but not so complicated that they're not doable, if you have a bit more time than usual. It's not like I'm allowed to just doze on the couch while he watches cartoons anyway. Add additional eggs and a side dish, such as sausage or chopped fruit, and this could stretch to feed 4.\n\n2\n\nSERVINGS\n\n1 tbsp olive oil\n\n1 celery stalk, finely chopped\n\n1 garlic clove, minced\n\n2 tsp fish sauce\n\n1 tsp chopped fresh rosemary\n\n\u00bd tsp grainy Dijon mustard\n\npinch nutmeg\n\n19-oz (540-mL) can cannellini or navy beans\n\n1 tbsp grated Parmesan cheese\n\n\u00bd cup (125 mL) sour cream or thick Greek yogurt\n\nsalt and pepper, to taste\n\n2 eggs, fried or poached\n\n2 slices of toast\n\nIn a pan on medium-high, heat oil. Saut\u00e9 celery, garlic, fish sauce, rosemary, mustard, and nutmeg for about a minute, until celery is bright green and garlic is fragrant. Stir in beans, then add cheese and sour cream. Saut\u00e9 another 30 to 60 seconds, until sour cream has melted into beans. Adjust seasonings to taste, and serve hot, topped with eggs on toast.\nBUTTERNUT SQUASH & CHICKPEA CURRY\n\nWhile I don't believe in cleanses, this dish is like a reset button when gluttony has left you tired and bloated. It feels good to eat, and all that garlic and ginger will set your stomach right, no matter what it's been through. I like this one with brown basmati rice, partly because it makes me feel virtuous, and partly because the nuttiness of the brown rice pairs well with the chickpeas and squash. Serve with a bit of full-fat yogurt mixed with grated cucumber and minced fresh garlic.\n\n4\n\nSERVINGS\n\n3 tbsp olive oil\n\n1 onion, minced\n\n1 jalape\u00f1o pepper, seeded and minced\n\n5 garlic cloves, minced\n\n1 heaping tbsp minced fresh ginger\n\n1 tbsp garam masala\n\n1 tsp chili flakes\n\n1 tsp cumin seeds\n\n1 tsp ground turmeric\n\n\u00bd tsp ground black pepper\n\n2 lb (900 g) butternut squash, diced\n\n19-oz (540-mL) can chickpeas, drained and rinsed\n\n14-oz (398-mL) can coconut milk\n\n14-oz (398-mL) can crushed tomatoes\n\n1 lime, zest and juice\n\nsalt and pepper, to taste\n\n3 scallions, chopped\n\n\u00bc cup (60 mL) chopped fresh cilantro + additional, for garnish\n\nIn a large pan on medium-high heat, warm oil and add onions, jalape\u00f1o peppers, garlic, and ginger. Saut\u00e9 until onions are translucent and jalape\u00f1o has brightened in color. Add garam masala, chili flakes, cumin seeds, turmeric, and pepper. Stir to coat onion mixture thoroughly, and cook for 2 minutes.\n\nStir in diced squash and chickpeas. Add coconut milk, tomatoes, and lime zest and juice. Stir to coat squash in curry mixture, then reduce to medium heat, cover, and let cook for 15 to 20 minutes, until squash has softened. Stir occasionally.\n\nOnce squash has softened, taste and adjust seasonings as needed. Stir in scallions and cilantro, and serve over rice with an additional sprinkling of cilantro for color.\nCHANA MASALA\n\nMy first encounter with chana masala was at Kwality Sweets, a tiny place in a tiny strip mall off the highway in Surrey, the town where I grew up. The majority of the place was kitchen, and if you peered in the back, you could see a frenzy of women working quickly. Kwality Sweets sold samosas by the paper bag, three for a dollar, and they were always very, very busy. I think Kwality Sweets provided me with my first taste of chickpeas; at the time they seemed very exotic. Now they're one of my staple foods. When I'm feeling nostalgic, this is the dish that I make. Naan bread is best with this, but any bread will do.\n\n2\n\nSERVINGS AS LUNCH\n\n4\n\nAS A SIDE\n\n1 tbsp butter\n\n1 tsp coriander seeds or \u00bd tsp ground coriander\n\n1 medium onion, chopped\n\n3 cloves minced garlic\n\n2 tsp finely minced fresh ginger\n\n1 tbsp garam masala\n\n2 tsp ground cumin\n\n1 tsp ground black pepper\n\n\u00bd tsp chili flakes\n\n\u00bd tsp ground turmeric\n\n\u00bc tsp ground cinnamon\n\n\u00bc tsp cayenne pepper\n\n14-oz (398-mL) can diced tomatoes or about 1\u00bd cups (375 mL) diced fresh\n\n19-oz (540-mL) can chickpeas\n\njuice of 1 lime\n\nsalt, to taste\n\nabout \u00bc cup (60 mL) cilantro\n\nIn a large frying pan on medium-high heat, melt butter. Add coriander seeds (if not using ground). Give them about a minute until they begin to pop, then stir in onions, garlic, and ginger. Stir in garam masala, cumin, black pepper, chili flakes, tumeric, cinnamon, and cayenne pepper (and ground coriander, if using).\n\nReduce heat to medium. Cook for 1 to 2 minutes, until spices are fragrant and onions have softened.\n\nAdd tomatoes to pan, juice and all, and scrape up any bits that may have formed on bottom of pan.\n\nStir in chickpeas, and squish the lime juice over. Reduce heat to medium and simmer to reduce sauce, until juices all but disappear. You want it to be thick and rich, not runny. Taste and adjust seasonings.\n\nJust before serving, stir in about two-thirds of the cilantro, then use the remainder for topping.\n\nCHICKPEA SALAD WITH GARLIC SCAPES\n\nThis is the easiest salad in the world. I like to serve it as a side with something simple like roast chicken, because it's so bright and cheery that it practically steals the show. You can also put it into containers for work\u2014it makes a pretty satisfying lunch with a cup of tea. If you can't find garlic scapes, use chopped scallions or shallots; it just won't be garlicky.\n\n4\n\nSERVINGS AS A SIDE\n\n19-oz (540-mL) can chickpeas, drained and rinsed\n\n1 pint (454 g) cherry tomatoes, halved\n\n1 lemon, zest and juice\n\n\u00bc cup (60 mL) olive oil\n\n1 cup (250 mL) chopped garlic scapes\n\n1 tsp chili flakes\n\n1 tbsp chopped basil\n\nsalt and pepper, to taste\n\nIn a bowl, combine chickpeas, tomatoes, and lemon zest and juice.\n\nIn a pan on medium-high, heat olive oil until shimmering. Add garlic scapes and chili flakes, and saut\u00e9 until scapes turn bright green\u2014about 1 minute. Pour scape mixture, oil included, over chickpea mixture, tossing to coat. Chill for 1 hour.\n\nBefore serving, stir in basil, salt, and pepper. Adjust seasonings as needed.\nLENTIL SALAD\n\nI love this salad so much. So much. It's sweet, it's earthy, there's bacon in it\u2014it's basically everything I need out of life in one simple little salad. It also makes use of what I usually have in my pantry, which makes me love it even more. Also, so much fiber! It's good served warm, so if you're in a hurry, don't feel like you need to cool it off to dig in. It just gets a little better with a rest in the refrigerator. Serve with Pot Roast (p. 166), or Butternut Squash Skillet Strata (p. 72).\n\n4\n\nSERVINGS\n\n2 heads garlic, cloves peeled and separated\n\n\u00bd cup (125 mL) olive oil\n\n1 cup (250 mL) dried green lentils\n\n1 bay leaf\n\n4 slices bacon, finely chopped\n\n1 cup (250 mL) dried prunes (about 18 prunes), roughly chopped\n\n1 cup (250 mL) diced celery (about 3 stalks)\n\n\u00bd cup (125 mL) packed fresh parsley, roughly chopped\n\n\u00bc cup (60 mL) red wine vinegar\n\n2 tsp grainy Dijon mustard\n\n1 tsp ground black pepper\n\n\u00bd tsp salt\n\nPreheat oven to 400\u00b0F (200\u00b0C).\n\nPlace garlic cloves in a ramekin and top with olive oil. Roast, uncovered, for 20 to 30 minutes, until cloves are soft, sweet-smelling, and golden. Drain oil into a bowl and reserve. Set cloves aside.\n\nIn a pot on medium-high heat, simmer lentils and bay leaf in 2 cups (500 mL) lightly salted water until tender, 20 to 30 minutes. Drain, then set aside. Discard bay leaf.\n\nIn a pan on medium-high heat, fry bacon until crisp, about 5 minutes. Spoon bacon onto a plate lined with a paper towel, and set aside. Save bacon fat for another purpose.\n\nIn a large bowl, combine still-warm lentils, roasted garlic, bacon, prunes, celery, and parsley. In a smaller bowl, whisk together still-warm reserved oil, vinegar, mustard, black pepper, and salt. Pour over lentil mixture, toss to coat, and chill for at least an hour, or until cool. Can also be served warm. Give it a quick toss just before serving.\n\nLENTIL SLOPPY JOES\n\nSloppy Joes are total kid food. They're also perfect for adults slogging through jobs, parents who just can't cope with all of this right now, and people who have been looking forward all week to spending Friday night on the couch, balancing a plate of comfort food on their thighs while binge-watching Netflix. And these are so healthy, you don't even need to bother with a side salad. Joes go well with chocolate milk and\/or weekend-quality red wine. Serve open-faced, on toasted buns.\n\n4\n\nSERVINGS\n\n1 cup (250 mL) dried green, brown, or French lentils\n\n1 bay leaf\n\n2 stalks celery, finely chopped\n\n2 carrots, finely chopped\n\n1 small onion\n\n4 tbsp olive oil\n\n4 garlic cloves, minced\n\n\u00bd lb (250 g) mushrooms, finely minced (or whizzed until almost pur\u00e9ed in a food processor or blender)\n\n1 tsp smoked paprika\n\n1 tsp ancho or other chili powder\n\n\u00bd tsp ground mustard\n\n\u00bd tsp ground cumin\n\n\u00bd tsp ground black pepper\n\n\u00bd tsp dried thyme\n\n5.5-oz (156-mL) can tomato paste\n\n2 tbsp apple cider vinegar\n\n1 tbsp honey\n\nsalt, to taste\n\nIn a pot on medium heat, simmer lentils and bay leaf in 2 cups (500 mL) lightly salted water until tender, 20 to 30 minutes. Drain, then set aside. Discard bay leaf.\n\nMeanwhile, in a heavy-bottomed pot such as a Dutch oven, on high heat, saut\u00e9 celery, carrots, and onions in olive oil until glistening, then cover, reduce heat to medium, and cook for 10 minutes.\n\nRemove lid, add garlic, and cook until mixture is caramelized and reduced by two-thirds, 15 to 20 minutes. The longer you cook this, the sweeter it will get.\n\nAdd mushrooms and cook until moisture has mostly dissipated and bottom of pan is dry. Add spices, thyme and tomato paste, stir until combined, then add cooked lentils. Stir in 1 cup (250 mL) water with apple cider vinegar and honey. Cook until mix begins to bubble. Taste and adjust seasoning as needed. Serve over toasted hamburger buns.\nLENTIL TACOS WITH AVOCADO CREAM\n\n\"I don't want you to get the wrong idea, but I actually kind of prefer these to regular hamburger tacos,\" Nick said once. Lentils in a saucy mixture are a pretty passable ground meat alternative, and in a taco, it's hard to care exactly what protein you're consuming. What's important is that you are eating tacos. Eat more tacos.\n\n4\u20136\n\nSERVINGS\n\n1 cup (250 mL) dried green lentils\n\n1 bay leaf\n\n2 tsp salt, divided\n\n1 onion, finely chopped\n\n3 tbsp olive oil\n\n2 jalape\u00f1o peppers, seeded, membranes removed, minced\n\n3 garlic cloves, minced\n\n1\u00bd tsp ground cumin\n\n1 tsp smoked paprika\n\n1 tsp chili powder\n\n1 tsp dried oregano\n\n\u00bd tsp ground coriander\n\n5.5-oz (156-mL) can tomato paste\n\n2 tsp apple cider vinegar\n\n\u00bc cup (60 mL) chopped fresh cilantro\n\n20 fresh 6-in (15-cm) corn tortillas\n\nACCOMPANIMENTS:\n\n\u00bd head shredded lettuce or cabbage\n\n2 cups (500 mL) grated aged cheddar cheese\n\n1 cup (250 mL) salsa (homemade or store-bought)\n\n3 limes (cut into eighths)\n\nAvocado Cream (opposite)\n\nIn a saucepan on medium-high heat, combine lentils, bay leaf, 1 tsp salt, and 2 cups (500 mL) water. Simmer uncovered for 20 to 30 minutes, until lentils are tender. Drain and set aside.\n\nMeanwhile, in a large pan on medium-high heat, cook onions in olive oil until just translucent, about 3 minutes. Add jalape\u00f1o peppers and garlic, and cook for another minute, stirring frequently. Stir in cumin, smoked paprika, chili powder, dried oregano, coriander, and tomato paste. Coat veggies in spices and tomato paste. Cook for another minute, until tomato paste has browned slightly.\n\nAdd lentils to pot with \u00bd cup (125 mL) water, remainder of salt, and apple cider vinegar. Stir in cilantro. Taste and adjust seasonings as needed. If mixture appears dry, add a bit more water, a few tablespoons at a time, until mix is moist and saucy.\n\nTo serve, spoon filling into warmed tortillas, and top with accompaniments to taste.\n* * *\n\nAVOCADO CREAM\n\n* * *\n\nIn Vancouver, avocados can be a bit pricy\u2014they don't grow here, so we have to bring them in from California. To get the most out of them, I make an avocado-yogurt hybrid that stretches the avocado and plays on another traditional (north of the border) taco accompaniment: sour cream.\n\n1 ripe Haas or other medium-sized avocado (or 2 small avocados)\n\n\u00bd cup (125 mL) Greek or other full-fat plain yogurt\n\n\u00bd tsp salt\n\n\u00bd tsp ground cumin\n\n\u00bc tsp chili powder\n\nzest and juice of \u00bd lime\n\nIn a large bowl, mash all ingredients together with a fork. Serve with Lentil Tacos (opposite) or with Red Bean Flautas (p. 95).\nPUMPKIN & RED LENTIL DAL\n\nThis is the stuff of long evenings spent marathoning old episodes of _30 Rock_ or _Parks and Recreation._ It's filling but not heavy, warming but not too spicy, and healthy without feeling austere. Serve it with rice and a mug of sweet, milky tea. Best enjoyed on the couch, almost horizontally.\n\n6\n\nSERVINGS\n\n\u00bc cup (60 mL) canola oil\n\n1 medium onion, chopped\n\n5 garlic cloves, minced\n\n1 heaping tbsp minced fresh ginger\n\n2 jalape\u00f1o peppers, seeded, membranes removed, and minced\n\n1 tbsp ground cumin\n\n2 tsp chili flakes\n\n1 tsp ground mustard\n\n1 tsp ground turmeric\n\n1 tsp ground coriander\n\n\u00bd tsp ground cinnamon\n\n2 lb (900 g) pumpkin (or other winter squash), peeled and cubed\n\n2 cups (500 mL) dried red lentils, rinsed\n\n14-oz (398-mL) can coconut milk\n\n2 tsp salt, or to taste\n\n2 tsp granulated sugar, or to taste\n\n2 limes, quartered\n\ncilantro, for garnish\n\nIn a large, heavy-bottomed pot, heat oil on medium-high. Add onions, garlic, ginger, and peppers, and saut\u00e9 until onions are translucent. Stir in cumin, chili flakes, mustard, turmeric, coriander, and cinnamon.\n\nAdd pumpkin and lentils, and stir to coat in spices.\n\nPour in coconut milk, then enough water to just cover pumpkin and lentils (about 3 to 4 cups [750 mL to 1 L]). Add salt and sugar. Bring to a boil, stirring occasionally, then reduce heat to medium-low and cover. Cook for 25 to 30 minutes, until lentils have swelled and broken, and most of liquid has been absorbed. Taste and adjust seasonings as needed.\n\nLet rest, uncovered, 5 minutes before serving.\n\nGarnish with quartered limes for squeezing over and a sprinkling of cilantro.\nRED BEAN FLAUTAS\n\nI didn't learn the word \"flautas\" until my friend Missy had us over for these; up until then, I'd known them as taquitos, which I'd only had at 7-Eleven under dire, desperate, and probably embarrassing circumstances. These, however, are proper flautas, which are nothing to be ashamed of. Make them when you have a few extra tortillas left over after taco night. Serve flautas hot, with Avocado Cream (p. 93) and your favorite hot sauce.\n\n16\n\nFLAUTAS\n\n19-oz (540-mL) can red kidney beans, drained and rinsed\n\n\u00bd lb (250 g) sweet potatoes, peeled, boiled, and roughly mashed\n\n1 cup (250 mL) grated aged cheddar cheese\n\n3 scallions, finely chopped\n\n2 garlic cloves, minced\n\n2 tbsp chopped fresh cilantro\n\n2 tsp Sriracha sauce\n\n1 tsp ground cumin\n\n\u00bd tsp ground coriander\n\n\u00bd tsp salt\n\n\u00bd tsp ground black pepper\n\n\u00bc tsp dried thyme\n\n16 fresh 6-in (15-cm) corn tortillas\n\ncanola or peanut oil, for frying\n\nPreheat oven to 275\u00b0F (140\u00b0C). Put a wire rack into or over a baking sheet, and leave it in oven while oven heats.\n\nIn a large bowl, mix all ingredients but tortillas and oil for frying. Use your hands to ensure ingredients are thoroughly combined.\n\nIn a large pan on medium-high, heat \u00bd in (1 cm) oil until shimmering.\n\nIn a microwave oven, heat tortillas 4 at a time: Wrap them in a damp paper towel, then nuke for 30 to 40 seconds, until soft and pliable. If you don't have a microwave, wrap six tortillas in foil and place on a baking sheet in oven while it preheats, for about 15\u201320 minutes. A standard sheet pan will comfortably hold three of these bundles.\n\nSpoon about 2 tbsp filling into each tortilla, placing it just off-center toward bottom. Gently but firmly roll tortilla away from you. Using tongs, place each roll into pan of hot oil, seam side down. Hold it for a few seconds to seal it shut.\n\nFry each roll for about 2 minutes per side, until tortilla is crisp and golden. Don't crowd the pan\u2014cook no more than 4 at a time. Place cooked flautas on prepared baking sheet in oven to keep them warm as you cook the remainder. Serve hot.\nSWEET POTATO & MIXED-BEAN CHILI\n\nIt turns out that whether this is chili or not is debatable, and depends entirely on what part of North America you hail from. I was raised on chili with beans, and this is very much like the big pots of chili of my childhood, only with a wider variety of beans crammed in and sweet potato instead of ground beef. It goes rather nicely with the Skillet Cornbread with Blueberries on p. 222. I like mine with a bit of grated cheddar cheese and a dollop of sour cream on top. If you have any left over, this is very good on nachos the next day.\n\n4\u20136\n\nSERVINGS\n\n1 medium onion, chopped\n\n1 medium sweet potato, chopped (about 2 cups [500 mL])\n\n2 tbsp olive oil\n\n5 garlic cloves, minced\n\n14-oz (398-mL) can diced tomatoes, including liquid\n\n19-oz (540-mL) can red kidney beans, drained and rinsed\n\n19-oz (540-mL) can black beans, drained and rinsed\n\n19-oz (540-mL) can chickpeas, drained and rinsed\n\n5.5-oz (156-mL) can tomato paste\n\n\u00bd cup (125 mL) beer, preferably an amber ale\n\n4 tsp chili powder\n\n2 tsp ground cumin\n\n1 tsp ground black pepper\n\n\u00bc tsp ground cinnamon\n\nsalt, to taste\n\nIn a large, heavy-bottomed pot on medium-high heat, saut\u00e9 onions and sweet potatoes in olive oil, about 3 minutes. Stir in garlic and add canned tomatoes. Reduce heat to medium.\n\nStir in beans, chickpeas, and tomato paste. Stir in beer, \u00bd cup (125 mL) water, spices, and salt, and simmer, uncovered, for 10 minutes. Taste and adjust seasonings as needed.\n\nCover and reduce to medium-low heat. Cook for 30 to 40 minutes, until sweet potatoes are soft. Serve hot, in bowls.\nSWEET POTATO & RED LENTIL SOUP\n\nMy son Hunter, who won't eat any of the items in this soup individually, will gobble this up and ask for more. We call it Toddler Soup around here, because it's pretty much just for him; I make a big batch of it every once in a while, then portion it into little containers and freeze it for his lunches, and I'm certain it's why he's so tall and hardy. With a bit of everything in it, it's just sweet enough that he doesn't notice it's good for him. Serve with slices of lime and (for the grownups) hot sauce.\n\n8\n\nSERVINGS\n\n3 tbsp canola oil\n\n1 onion, diced\n\n2 tsp minced fresh ginger\n\n3 garlic cloves, minced\n\n2 celery stalks, trimmed and chopped\n\n2 carrots, peeled, trimmed, and chopped\n\n1 lb (500 g) sweet potatoes or yams, peeled and chopped\n\n1 lb (500 g) mango, peeled, pitted, and chopped\n\n1 tbsp coarse salt\n\n2 tsp garam masala\n\n2 tsp ground turmeric\n\n\u00bd tsp ground cumin\n\n\u00bd tsp ground coriander\n\n1 cup (250 mL) dry red lentils, rinsed\n\n1 bay leaf\n\n8 cups (2 L) low-sodium chicken stock or water\n\n14-oz (398-mL) can coconut milk\n\nIn a heavy-bottomed pan such as a Dutch oven, on medium-high heat, cook onions in oil until just browned around edges, 4 or 5 minutes. Stir in ginger and garlic, and cook for another minute.\n\nAdd celery, carrots, sweet potatoes or yams, and mango, and toss to coat in oil. Add salt, garam masala, turmeric, cumin, and coriander, and cook until veggies have begun to sweat and brighten, about 3 minutes. Add lentils, bay leaf, and stock, and bring to a boil.\n\nReduce heat to medium, and partially cover. Simmer for 20 to 25 minutes, until veggies and lentils are tender. Fish out bay leaf, then blend using an immersion blender. If you don't have an immersion blender, pur\u00e9e in batches using a stand blender; just be careful\u2014blending hot liquids can be trouble, so work in small batches. Return pur\u00e9ed soup to pot.\n\nStir in coconut milk and bring back up to heat. Taste and adjust seasonings as needed before serving.\n\nCHICKEN\n\nCHICKEN & DUMPLINGS\n\nFRIED CHICKEN & WAFFLES\n\nMUSTARD-FRIED CHICKEN\n\nROAST PAPRIKA CHICKEN\n\nSALVADORAN ROAST CHICKEN WITH GRAVY\n\nSRIRACHA BUFFALO WINGS\n\nSWEET YELLOW CURRY\n\nTOMATO CHICKEN CURRY\n\n**_The first roast chicken I ever made was to impress my parents and demonstrate that I really was an adult. I had moved into a real apartment with my boyfriend. We had furniture and nothing leaked or was infested with rats, so I wanted to show my parents that I'd made it. I flipped through all my cookbooks, and there were so many variations on how to roast a bird\u2014start with a very hot oven then reduce the heat, some said; start breast-side down and then flip it, others said. Have you ever tried to flip a half-roasted chicken without the appropriate kitchen tools? Let's just say I've dusted off a few chickens as I blundered toward dinner._**\n\nI couldn't decide which recipe was most likely to work, so I panicked and sort of combined them all. An hour after the chicken was supposed to be done, I pulled it from the oven, steaming and golden; its skin was perfect and crisp-looking, and the smell was warm and savory. My mom offered praise for the finished dish until my dad cut into it and discovered it was still raw inside. We ate the side dishes I'd made instead. I apologized ten or twenty times. The relationship with the boyfriend ended a month later. Not because of the chicken, I don't think.\n\nI have eaten many good chickens, and many, many bad ones. Have you ever spent a week looking forward to fried chicken only to find yourself with a carton of greasy, soggy sadness? There is a particular kind of grief that relates to unrequited food cravings, and I can't be the only one who feels it. Chicken is so easy to make, but it's also so easy to ruin. I've eaten overcooked chicken I had to force down my esophagus as if I was trying to swallow a fistful of cotton balls. I've eaten chicken with rubbery, pimply looking skin, just to be polite. I've done some things I regret, and many of them are chicken-related.\n\nThe only time I order chicken when I'm out for dinner is when it's fried. When I was a kid, chicken was a regular, everyday thing, but fried chicken was a treat. Picnic food. My dad would take us out to pick my mom up from work, then we'd grab a bucket of chicken from the drive-thru place nearby. We'd find a park with a playground and a picnic table and eat greasy drumsticks and neon-green coleslaw until the evening light turned the whole park yellow and Instagrammy-looking and the air began to cool. Occasionally, my parents would make a breaded version of fried chicken at home, and it was good too, but the real magic was the picnic and the take-out and the feeling that we were doing something special. To this day, when someone says, \"Let's have a picnic! We'll get fried chicken!\" I get all goofy and excited and shrieky. I have been trying to share my enthusiasm for chicken picnics with Hunter, but he just looks at me like I'm insane (which, I suppose, is exactly how I look with wide eyes and big gestures). I worry that his teenage rebellion is going to be veganism and restraint.\n\nFried chicken is still special to me, and when I make it at home it's a big treat because it takes a lot of oil and I like to pretend for company that I couldn't possibly eat that way every day. We mostly have roast chicken, because a roast chicken one night means dinner again the next night, and sometimes the night after that. When it was just Nick and me, we'd stretch a single five-pound (2.2 kg) chicken over several days; now that we've got a little person to feed, we roast two at a time so we can have sandwiches, salads, and stews for the rest of the week and little containers of soup to freeze for Hunter's daycare lunches.\n\nChicken can be difficult: If you're cooking it whole, there's the balance of juicy flesh and crispy skin and cooked-all-the-way-through-ness that must be maintained; if you're frying it in pieces, you have to cook the inside without burning the outside. Chicken cooked poorly is rubbery or chalky or tasteless. Maybe that explains our modern enthusiasm for boneless, skinless chicken breasts\u2014you just chop them into cubes and put them into things and it mostly works out, sort of. It costs more, but a package of boneless skinless chicken is a bland no-brainer for many people come supper time.\n\n(Suppertime no-brainers are no small thing, of course. For many of us, a few simple shortcuts are the difference between a home-cooked meal and just throwing frozen Hungry Man dinners at each individual family member. But you shouldn't have to spend more for less effort.)\n\nBoneless, skinless chicken breasts are the most expensive way to buy chicken, and the least useful. There's just not enough flavor there to make them worthwhile, and without the bones and skin, you risk having to choke down chicken the texture of dry paper towels. If you are going to pay a premium for meat, it should be for fancy meat that makes you feel flush, something you can serve rare and bloody, not something you have to tart up with sauces and spices. When you buy chicken, buy it whole if possible; this is a bit more pricey up front, but the cost of one or two whole chickens is amortized over several meals. If you hit a sale, buy thighs or legs\u2014there's more flavor there than in white meat, and those fattier cuts are more forgiving. Always buy bone-in\u2014even if you're not using the bones, you can save them for stock. If you want lean, inexpensive, easy-cooking boneless protein, pork tenderloin is a good option and infinitely tastier than boneless, skinless chicken breast.\n\nThe main challenges with chicken are timing and temperature. When cooked, the internal temperature of a piece of chicken should be about 165\u00b0F (74\u00b0C). At 350\u00b0F (180\u00b0C), it will take twenty minutes per pound (500 g) to roast. This is a great jumping-off point, but by no means the only way to go. I've had my best luck taking the Ina Garten approach and cooking a four or five pound (1.8 to 2.2 kg) chicken, breast side up, at 425\u00b0F (220\u00b0C) for ninety minutes. Rotate the pan as you baste the bird, and baste it about four times. If the skin looks like it's getting too dark while there's still a ways to go on the kitchen timer, loosely tent it inside the oven with foil and start to check the internal temperature about fifteen minutes before you expect it to be done. If you have the time, let the chicken rest on the counter for an hour before you roast it\u2014a bird at room temperature will cook more reliably than one still cold from the refrigerator.\n\nIf you plan ahead, the easiest way to guarantee a moist and flavorful chicken is to brine it. I'm certain brining has saved my ass on a number of occasions, and on just as many occasions I've wished I'd done it. I once spent twenty-seven dollars on a free-range organic chicken (I am bad at math and didn't realize how much it would be until after the butcher had rung up the bird\u2014at that point I was too embarrassed to slink out of there and, of course, I'd never be able to return). I spiced it and rubbed it the usual way, but it ended up chewy and dry, like jerky, only way more disappointing. Could brining have saved it? It certainly wouldn't have hurt, and then maybe I wouldn't have cried in the shower about a chicken later that evening.\n\nWhile it's probably not healthy to feel as deeply as I do about a perfectly cooked bird, there is a kind of magic to it, and once you've figured it out, you've got an easy, impressive meal for company or family dinner on a rainy weekend evening. Roast chicken is comforting, like a hug that you eat, only better than a hug because sometimes it comes with gravy. Everyone likes roast chicken, and almost everyone thinks roast chicken is super complicated and time consuming\u2014don't tell them it's not. You'll be a hero.\n\n_**Brine that bird!**_\n\nBRINING IS EASY. AT ITS SIMPLEST, IT'S A MIX OF SALT AND WATER. AND ALTHOUGH THAT'S THE BARE MINIMUM, MOST OF THE TIME IT'S ALL YOU NEED. USE A RATIO OF 1 TBSP KOSHER, COARSE, OR PICKLING SALT PER CUP (250 ML) WATER. IF YOU WANT TO GET FANCY, ADD SOME SLICED LEMONS OR RAW ONIONS, SPICED, BRUISED FRESH HERBS (MUDDLE THEM AS YOU WOULD IF YOU WERE MAKING MOJITOS), OR SRIRACHA.\n\nMIX BRINE IN A LARGE BOWL, AND WHISK TO DISSOLVE SALT. YOU CAN EITHER BRING IT TO A BOIL IN A POT AND THEN COOL IT, OR JUST DO IT COLD. HEATING IT MAKES IT EASIER TO DISSOLVE THE SALT, BUT SOMETIMES THERE'S JUST NO TIME. BRINE BIRD BITS IN A LARGE ZIP-LOCK BAG OR A STORAGE CONTAINER WITH A TIGHT-FITTING LID. IF YOU'RE DOING A BUTTERMILK AND SALT BRINE FOR FRIED CHICKEN, BRINE FOR TWENTY-FOUR HOURS. A WHOLE CHICKEN CAN BE BRINED IN SALT WATER FOR EIGHT TO TWELVE HOURS. CHICKEN IN PIECES CAN BE BRINED FOR UP TO SIX HOURS. KEEP IN MIND THAT YOU WILL NEED TO SEASON CHICKEN LESS IF YOU BRINE IT. (YOU CAN DO THE SAME WITH PORK. YOU CAN BRINE FISH TOO, FOR LESS TIME. DON'T BOTHER BRINING BEEF.)\n\nTO COOK BRINED CHICKEN, SIMPLY REMOVE IT FROM THE BRINE, DAB IT DRY WITH PAPER TOWELS, AND PROCEED AS PER USUAL.\n\nRelajo (spice mixture). See Salvadoran Roast Chicken with Gravy (page 110)\nCHICKEN & DUMPLINGS\n\nA pot of stew on a cold night is restorative anytime, but a stew flavored with warming spices and a good pop of lemon will not only restore you, it'll transport you as well. We call this \"Moroccan-ish stew;\" with its Moroccan flavors, it tastes vaguely escapist, even though it feels cozy and familiar. Don't be put off by the long list of ingredients\u2014most of them are spices. I serve this with a simple salad of greens and capers dressed with olive oil and red wine vinegar. A bit of wine or mint tea doesn't hurt either.\n\n4\n\nSERVINGS\n\n4\u20136 chicken thighs, bone-in, skin on\n\n4 cups (1 L) celery, chopped\n\n2 onions, 1 halved, 1 diced\n\n2 bay leaves\n\n1 lemon, halved, zest reserved\n\n3 whole garlic cloves + 3 garlic cloves, minced\n\n2 tsp coarse salt, divided\n\n1 bunch parsley\n\n1 tsp whole coriander seeds\n\n1 tsp whole peppercorns\n\n3 tbsp olive oil\n\n1 lb (500 g) carrots, chopped about \u00be-in (2-cm) thick\n\n1 bell pepper, seeded and diced\n\n18 dried apricots, halved\n\n1 tsp ground cumin\n\n1 tsp smoked paprika\n\n\u00bd tsp ground turmeric\n\n\u00bd tsp dried chili flakes\n\n\u00bd tsp ground black pepper\n\n\u00bd tsp chopped fresh thyme\n\n\u00bc tsp ground coriander\n\n\u00bc tsp ground cinnamon\n\n\u00bc cup (60 mL) all-purpose flour\n\n\u00bd cup (125 mL) dry white wine\n\n28-oz (796-mL) can whole tomatoes, including juice\n\n2 tsp honey or brown sugar\n\n1 cup (250 mL) frozen peas\n\nIn a large pot, place chicken pieces, celery, 1 onion (halved), bay leaves, zested lemon (halved), 3 whole garlic cloves, 1 tsp salt, 6 sprigs parsley, coriander seeds, and peppercorns. Fill pot with water to cover, and bring to a boil on high heat. Once boiling, reduce heat to low, cover, and cook for 40 minutes. Remove chicken from pot, and pass liquid through a strainer. Discard solids, and reserve liquid.\n\nOnce chicken is cool enough to handle, remove skin and discard, then pull meat off bones. Roughly chop it, then set aside. Reserve bones for making stock.\n\nPreheat oven to 400\u00b0F (200\u00b0C).\n\nIn a large oven-proof pot on medium-high, heat olive oil. Add diced onions, carrots, bell peppers, and dried apricots. Stir to coat veggies in oil. Cook for 2 to 3 minutes, until veggies have softened slightly and onions are translucent. Reduce heat to medium.\n\nAdd minced garlic, remainder of salt, cumin, paprika, turmeric, chili flakes, black pepper, thyme, coriander, and cinnamon. Stir to coat veggies in spices, and cook another minute, until spices are fragrant. Stir in flour and coat veggies.\n\nStir in wine, and scrape bottom of pan to incorporate well. Add tomatoes and juice, squishing each one through your fingers to break it apart. Stir in honey or sugar. Add 4 cups (1 L) reserved chicken cooking liquid, frozen peas, and about \u00bd cup (125 mL) chopped parsley.\n\n* * *\n\nDUMPLINGS\n\n* * *\n\n\u00bd cup (125 mL) all-purpose flour\n\n\u00bd cup (125 mL) whole wheat flour\n\n2 tsp baking powder\n\n\u00bd tsp salt\n\n\u00bc cup (60 mL) cold butter, diced\n\n\u00bc cup (60 mL) cold milk\n\nIn a medium bowl, whisk together flour, baking powder, and salt. Press butter between your fingers as you add it to the bowl, breaking it apart. Continue gently working butter with your fingers to make a sandy-looking mixture with larger chunks of butter. Stir in milk.\n\nOnce chicken mixture has come to a boil, drop ping-pong ball sized pieces of dumpling mixture into pot, distributing evenly around surface of stew.\n\nBake for 18 to 20 minutes, until dumplings are golden and crisp-looking and stew is bubbling.\n\nLet stew rest for about 10 minutes before diving in.\nFRIED CHICKEN & WAFFLES\n\nOur friends Greg and Missy are the only people I ever prepare this for, because Missy has prohibited me from making it for anyone else. I could defy her, I suppose, but it's nice to have a thing that you make only for special occasions. Since we've both got young children, we make Chicken & Waffles Night our reason to get together. Serve chicken on waffles, drizzle with maple syrup and Sriracha, and eat with slices of cold watermelon. Drink beer or lemonade. Wear loose pants.\n\n4\n\nSERVINGS\n\nBRINE\n\n4 cups (1 L) buttermilk\n\n\u00bd cup (125 mL) coarse salt\n\n\u00bd cup (125 mL) Sriracha sauce\n\n1 whole chicken, chopped into 10 pieces\n\n2\u20134 cups (1 L) peanut oil, for frying\n\nBREADING\n\n3\u00bd cups (825 mL) all-purpose flour\n\n2 tsp coarse salt\n\n2 tsp smoked paprika\n\n1 tsp ground cumin\n\n1 tsp ground mustard\n\n\u00bd tsp ground black pepper\n\nIn a deep plastic or glass container with a tight-fitting lid, whisk buttermilk, salt, and Sriracha, then add chicken pieces. Press chicken down to submerge under brine. Refrigerate for up to 10 hours.\n\nIn a heavy-bottomed saut\u00e9 pan or deep cast-iron frying pan, heat 1 in (2.5 cm) peanut oil to between 350\u00b0 and 375\u00b0F (180\u00b0 and 190\u00b0C).\n\nPour flour, salt, paprika, cumin, mustard, and pepper into a durable plastic bag. Holding bag closed, shake contents to mix thoroughly. In 2 or 3 batches, shake chicken pieces to coat in flour, then gently place into hot oil, skin-side down at first. Fry until golden and crispy, about 8 minutes, then flip and fry other side for another 8 minutes, until internal temperature is 165\u00b0F (74\u00b0C).\n\nMeanwhile, make waffles.\n* * *\n\nWAFFLES\n\n* * *\n\n1 cup (250 mL) all-purpose flour\n\n\u00bd cup (125 mL) whole wheat flour\n\n3 tsp baking powder\n\n\u00bd tsp coarse salt\n\n1\u00bd cups (375 mL) buttermilk\n\n2 eggs, beaten\n\n\u00bc cup (60 mL) canola oil\n\n1 tbsp honey\n\n1 cup (250 mL) corn kernels (fresh or frozen)\n\nIn a large bowl, whisk together flours, baking powder, and salt. In a separate bowl, whisk together buttermilk, eggs, canola oil, and honey. Pour wet ingredients into dry ingredients, add corn, and stir to combine. Cook according to waffle-maker manufacturer's instructions.\nMUSTARD-FRIED CHICKEN\n\nThis fried chicken recipe is just me being cheap and lazy\u2014which, as it turns out, is my recipe for personal success. I wanted fried meat, but had no time for a long brine or any of the usual things for dredging and breading; I had mustard and flour and fat. As luck would have it, that's all you need for some pretty tasty fried chicken. This is great with Grandma Salad (p. 182).\n\n4\n\nSERVINGS\n\n1 whole chicken, chopped into 10 pieces\n\n\u00bd cup (125 mL) yellow (American) mustard\n\n4 tsp salt, divided\n\n2\u20134 cups (1.5 L) peanut or canola oil\n\n3 cups (750 mL) all-purpose flour\n\n2 tsp ground black pepper\n\nhoney, to taste\n\nPut chicken pieces, a few at a time, into a sturdy plastic bag. Splurch mustard and sprinkle about 1 tsp salt over chicken. Mush chicken and mustard together in bag, then let sit for at least an hour, or up to 6 hours.\n\nIn a heavy-bottomed saut\u00e9 pan or deep cast-iron frying pan, heat 1 in (2.5 cm) peanut oil to between 350\u00b0 and 375\u00b0F (190\u00b0C).\n\nIn another plastic bag, combine flour, remainder of salt, and pepper and mix well. Remove chicken from first bag and place in second bag. Hold bag closed and shake chicken like it's 1993 and you're making Shake 'n Bake.\n\nWorking in 2 or 3 batches, place chicken in hot oil and cook until crisp and golden on one side (about 8 minutes), then turn and cook for another 4 or 5 minutes, until cooked through (internal temperature should read 165\u00b0F [74\u00b0C]).\n\nDrain chicken on a wire rack (positioned over a plate for easy clean-up) for 5 minutes. Drizzle lightly with honey, and serve hot.\nROAST PAPRIKA CHICKEN\n\nThis sweetly spicy roast chicken is the antidote to the winter blahs. I love it with just a few boiled potatoes and a salad; it's easy, and the prep time is quick\u2014you can do it all ahead of time and stick it in the refrigerator, so long as you let it sit on the counter before roasting\u2014a room temperature chicken roasts more reliably than a cold one. This is perfect for Sunday family dinner.\n\n4\n\nSERVINGS\n\n1 whole roasting chicken, 4\u20135 lb (1.8\u20132.2 kg)\n\n1 onion, chopped\n\n3 stalks celery, chopped into 1-in (2.5-cm) pieces\n\n3 carrots, peeled and chopped into 1-in (2.5-cm) pieces\n\n2 tbsp olive oil\n\n3 garlic cloves, minced\n\n1 tbsp smoked paprika\n\n1 tsp cayenne pepper\n\n1 tsp ground cinnamon\n\n1 tsp ground black pepper\n\n1 tsp salt\n\n\u00bd cup (125 mL) dry white wine\n\nLet chicken rest at room temperature for an hour. Preheat oven to 425\u00b0F (220\u00b0C). Place chopped onions, celery, and carrots in a large roasting pan.\n\nIn a small bowl, combine oil, garlic, paprika, cayenne pepper, cinnamon, black pepper, and salt. Mash together with a fork until mixture forms a paste.\n\nUsing your hands, slather paste all over chicken, sliding your fingers under skin to rub paste into breast, legs, and thighs. Wash your hands, then truss chicken, folding wing tips behind bird. Place chicken in roasting pan with vegetables and pour wine into pan.\n\nRoast chicken for 90 minutes (or 18 to 20 minutes per pound), until internal temperature reaches 165\u00b0F (74\u00b0C) and juices run clear when poked with a knife between leg and thigh. If chicken browns too quickly, place a piece of foil loosely over it. Baste periodically, adding additional wine or water as needed to moisten bottom of pan. Rotate pan each time you baste to ensure even browning.\n\nRemove from oven and, if you haven't already, tent with foil. Let rest 20 minutes before serving. Serve with roasted veggies from pan.\nSALVADORAN ROAST CHICKEN WITH GRAVY\n\nThere's a town in El Salvador called San Juli\u00e1n, and I spent an afternoon there in September of 2013. At a market in the center of town a woman sold spices and canned goods and little wads of chocolate in plastic sandwich bags. She sold bags of the spice mix for this chicken dish, and I bought a whole bunch without even knowing what to do with it. On the bus back to the town where we stayed, one of the Salvadoran World Vision Canada staff with whom I traveled explained how to use relajo. This is it. Serve chicken with the gravy it makes over rice or buns and curtido-style slaw (p. 180).\n\n6\n\nSERVINGS\n\nCHICKEN\n\n1 whole roasting chicken, 6\u20138 lb (2.7\u20133.5 kg)\n\n3 tbsp olive oil\n\n1\u00bd tsp kosher salt\n\n1 tsp ground black pepper\n\n1 tsp ground annatto seed (or ground turmeric)\n\n3 lb (1.5 kg) tomatoes, halved\n\n1 onion, chopped\n\n1 head garlic, halved crosswise\n\n1 batch relajo (see below)\n\n1 cup (250 mL) white wine\n\n1 cup (250 mL) chicken stock\n\n2 tsp Worcestershire sauce\n\nsalt and pepper, to taste\n\nRELAJO (SPICE MIXTURE)\n\n8 bay leaves\n\n1 tbsp peanuts\n\n1 tbsp pumpkin seeds\n\n1 tsp sesame seeds\n\n1 tsp oregano\n\n1 tsp annatto seeds\n\n\u00bd tsp ground black pepper\n\nPreheat oven to 425\u00b0F (220\u00b0C).\n\nLet chicken rest at room temperature for an hour. Rub chicken with olive oil, then sprinkle with salt, pepper, and annatto and rub again. Fold wings behind back of chicken and truss legs\u2014tie them together so that they sit close to the body. Set aside.\n\nOn medium-low heat, toast all ingredients for relajo until mixture is fragrant and sesame seeds are golden. Remove pan from heat and set spices aside. Place tomatoes, onions, and garlic in pan, sprinkle with relajo, then nestle chicken in middle. Add wine and chicken stock.\n\nRoast for between 90 minutes and 2 hours, until internal temperature reaches 165\u00b0F (74\u00b0C) and juices run clear when poked with a knife between leg and thigh. Baste every 20 to 30 minutes, rotating pan each time for even browning. If chicken browns too quickly, cover loosely with a piece of foil.\n\nRemove chicken from pan and, if you haven't already, tent it with foil. Let sit for 15 to 20 minutes.\n\nMeanwhile, process roasted veggies and chicken juices through the finest disc on a food mill or press through a fine-mesh strainer back into pan or into a saucepan. Stir in Worcestershire sauce.\n\nPlace pan on medium heat and simmer for 10 to 15 minutes. Taste and adjust seasonings as needed.\n\nSRIRACHA BUFFALO WINGS\n\nIt's not difficult to make Nick happy\u2014a refrigerator full of cold beer, a pair of pajama pants, and a plate of these wings are all he really needs to experience total bliss. Serve with a plate of crudit\u00e9s and some store-bought ranch dressing. (You could make the dressing if you wanted to, but Nick doesn't care, so I don't either.)\n\n4\n\nSERVINGS\n\n2 cups (500 mL) peanut oil\n\n2 lb (900 g) chicken wings, tips removed\n\n\u00bd cup (125 mL) flour\n\n4 tbsp Sriracha sauce\n\n2 tbsp butter, melted\n\n1 tbsp lime juice\n\n1 tsp salt\n\n1 tsp ground black pepper\n\nchopped scallions, for garnish\n\nIn a large pan on medium-high heat, heat oil to about 375\u00b0F (190\u00b0C).\n\nPreheat oven to 350\u00b0F (180\u00b0C).\n\nPlace chicken wings in a sturdy plastic bag with flour, and shake until wings are covered\u2014you may need to do this in 2 batches. Place half the wings gently into pan, and cook for 8 to 10 minutes, until golden. Flip and cook for 6 minutes on other side. Remove to a plate lined with paper towels, and repeat with second batch of wings.\n\nMeanwhile, in a large bowl, combine Sriracha, butter, lime juice, salt, and pepper. Add fried wings and toss to coat.\n\nPlace on a baking sheet fitted with a wire rack. Bake for 25 minutes.\n\nServe hot and sprinkled with chopped scallions.\nSWEET YELLOW CURRY\n\nNeed dinner fast? This one's great for when you've got people coming over, or for when you've got ten thousand things to do before bedtime. The curry cooks in about the same amount of time as it takes to steam the pot of rice you'll serve this with.\n\n4\n\nSERVINGS\n\n1 cup (250 mL) diced mango\n\n1 banana, sliced into rounds\n\n1 large shallot (or small onion), chopped\n\n1 tbsp chopped fresh ginger\n\n3 garlic cloves, smashed\n\n1 lime, zest and juice\n\n1 tbsp fish sauce\n\n2 tsp Sriracha sauce\n\n1 bunch scallions, light green and white parts separated from darker greens\n\n14-oz (398-mL) can coconut milk\n\n2 tsp coarse salt\n\n4\u20136 chicken thighs, bone in, skin-on\n\n1 tbsp canola oil\n\n2 tsp sesame oil\n\n2 red bell peppers, chopped\n\n1 tsp ground cumin\n\n1 tsp ground turmeric\n\n1 tsp freshly ground black pepper\n\n\u00bd tsp ground coriander\n\n\u00bc tsp ground cardamom\n\n1 cup (250 mL) frozen peas\n\n\u00bd cup (125 mL) chopped cilantro\n\nIn a food processor or blender, combine the mango, banana, shallot, ginger, garlic, lime juice and zest, fish sauce, Sriracha, white and light green parts of scallions, and coconut milk. Pulse or blend until smooth. Set aside.\n\nSprinkle salt over chicken thighs. In a large pan on medium-high heat, saut\u00e9 chicken in canola and sesame oils, skin-side down first, then flip. Cook for about 6 minutes per side, until skin is crisp and golden. Remove chicken from pan and set aside.\n\nAdd bell peppers and cook for 1 to 2 minutes, then stir in cumin, turmeric, pepper, coriander, and cardamom. Coat veggies in spices.\n\nPour mango-coconut milk mixture into pan, scraping bottom of pan with a wooden spoon to remove any browned bits, and stirring to incorporate spices. The color will be fantastic, possibly alarmingly bright. Stir in peas, then return chicken to pan. Reduce heat to medium and bring to a simmer.\n\nSimmer for 5 minutes, stirring occasionally. Before serving, taste and adjust seasoning as needed, then stir in cilantro and reserved dark green parts of scallions.\nTOMATO CHICKEN CURRY\n\nThis is not butter chicken, but since it involves similar flavors, it passes when we need it to. It's a bright, easy curry made of stuff you already have in your cupboards and refrigerator. A perfect Tuesday dish, it comes together in about the time it takes to cook a pot of rice. Serve with rice and Chana Masala (p. 87) and a cup of hot black tea.\n\n4\n\nSERVINGS\n\n2 tbsp butter\n\n1 medium onion, chopped\n\n4\u20136 chicken thighs, cubed, skin and bones discarded\n\n3 garlic cloves, minced\n\n1 tbsp minced fresh ginger\n\n1 tbsp garam masala\n\n2 tsp chili flakes\n\n2 tsp ground cumin\n\n1\u00bd tsp salt\n\n\u00bd tsp ground coriander\n\n\u00bd tsp ground black pepper\n\n5.5-oz (156-mL) can tomato paste\n\n28-oz (796-mL) can diced tomatoes\n\n14-oz (398-mL) can full-fat coconut milk (low-fat's too watery)\n\nsalt, to taste\n\n2 cups (500 mL) whole spinach leaves, lightly packed\n\nIn a large pot on medium-high heat, melt butter. Saut\u00e9 onions until translucent. Add chicken, garlic, and ginger. Brown chicken lightly, 5 to 7 minutes.\n\nAdd garam masala, chili flakes, cumin, salt, coriander, and pepper. Stir to coat chicken in spices. Add tomato paste, and saut\u00e9 until bottom of pan appears dry and paste has stuck to chicken.\n\nAdd diced tomatoes and coconut milk, scraping bottom of pan for any delicious brown bits. Reduce heat to medium and simmer for 20 minutes, stirring occasionally.\n\nSeason to taste. Just before serving, stir in spinach leaves, and cook for an additional minute until spinach has just wilted.\n\nFISH\n\nFISH SAUCE SALMON\n\nSALMON BALL CASSEROLE\n\nSARDINE PANZANELLA\n\nSARDINO\u00cfADE\n\nSMOKED FISH CAKES\n\nTUNA & DILL PICKLE CASSEROLE\n\nTUNA CHOWDER\n\nTUNA SALAD WITH CELERY & BLACK-EYED PEAS\n\nTUNA TARTARE\n\n**_As a child, many of my finest moments were buffet-related. Early on, I understood the value of seafood in a buffet, and would eschew the filling, less expensive carbs (no pasta, potatoes, or bread) and head straight for the crab legs. I am greedy and competitive, which means I am great at buffets._**\n\nMy parents didn't have a lot of money then; it was the 1980s-ish and mortgage rates were high, so often we'd pop across the border to Washington state for cheap cheese, milk, and gas. On special occasions, we'd make an evening of it, and if I was very lucky on a Friday night, they'd take me to the King's Table Buffet, a magical place just off the I-5 where I was free to eat as many crab legs as my stomach would hold.\n\nI imagine that watching a scrawny eight-year-old shove pound after pound of crab into her butter-sheened maw was not unlike watching a snake consume an antelope. I have never passed for adorable. Through the years, I have been an insatiable seafood fiend, eating more than my fair share whenever the opportunity presented itself because seafood has always been a treat, whether it's king crab legs at a buffet or a Filet-O-Fish at three a.m. Despite its local ubiquity, I am never certain that I'll get to eat seafood again anytime soon. I think this is how bears must feel in the lead-up to winter.\n\nFish and seafood have never been everyday food. It was special when Dad barbecued salmon. It was special going to Mo's on the Oregon coast and eating a steamer bucket of clams with a bowl of butter while sweating profusely on a hot, salty summer afternoon. Fish and chips wrapped in newspaper was special, and I'd always try to serve myself first, lest there not be a sufficient excess of tartar sauce for me. It was special picking my own fresh lobster from the tank at the Chinese supermarket on Christmas day during those few years in my early adulthood when it was only my parents and me for dinner. When I went to London with Auntie Lynn and Uncle George in 2004, I ordered fish and chips every night. They were annoyed at me for never trying anything different, but I didn't know when I'd get back to the UK, so I ate as much battered fish as I could, as if I couldn't get fish and chips everywhere we went.\n\nWhen I go to a restaurant, I almost always order seafood. And I worry that I'll regret it if I don't.\n\nI get to eat quite a lot of seafood these days\u2014one of the benefits to having Nick around is that he tries to spend as many afternoons as he can throughout the summer and fall drinking beer in boats, so we usually have a freezer full of rainbow trout. Since friends of ours gave us a smoker, we've been smoking four or five fish at a time and eating them whole instead of proper meals. Salmon also runs from the Pacific Ocean up the Fraser River in British Columbia most summers, so we often get a few large sockeye, coho, or pinks. The west coast is a glorious place to live if you love clams and oysters and mussels\u2014they're all here, and they're abundant. You don't have to dig deep to pluck littleneck clams from the sand at low tide; Hunter will spend hours \"rescuing\" them, digging them up with his fingers and gingerly carrying them one at a time in two hands out to tide pools where I suppose he thinks they can swim away to freedom.\n\nSeafood has been one of my great joys, but like so many of my loves, it's gotten complicated. International demand for fish has never been higher, which has had devastating consequences for the environment, for the fishing industry, and for the communities who rely on fishing as their primary source of income. It is as important to protect the oceans and the species that live within them as it is to protect quality of life for the men, women, and children who work in dangerous conditions catching and processing seafood for commercial sale. Unchecked demand for fish and seafood products leads to corruption in the fishing industry, particularly in countries that are already straining to meet the needs of their populations, especially those in poverty.\n\nIf that sounds dire, take heart\u2014it's not all bad, and there are steps you can take to make sure you're eating fish you can feel good about. I spend most of my time in a breathless panic about how everything's terrible and we're all going to die, but even I'm reassured by some of the measures folks smarter than me are taking to protect the world around us. Choosing sustainable seafood doesn't mean giving up the stuff you love altogether. Farmed shellfish is gentler on the environment than wild-caught shellfish. Local crustaceans are often okay, and so are some wild-caught ocean and lake fish. Some farmed fish\u2014tilapia, Atlantic salmon\u2014are not bad, and clever people in some places have even figured out how to farm shrimp in tanks on land.\n\nWhenever possible, however, choose wild, line-caught fish from local fisheries, or fish farmed in an environmentally friendly manner. This is an easy solution when you live on a coast, but what if you don't? In that case, choose sustainably sourced fish, either fresh, frozen, or canned\u2014in North America, look for the Ocean Wise logo or the Seafood Watch seal; in the UK, look for certification from the Marine Stewardship Council or Marine Conservation; in Australia, choose seafood certified by the Australian Conservation Foundation. (For further information on these resources, see pp. 245\u2013247.)\n\nAnd remember that thing I told you about buffets? No potatoes, no pasta, no bread. Now, you go get your money's worth.\n\nFISH SAUCE SALMON\n\nEvery year, Nick catches too many small fish whose fillets are thin and cook quickly, often lake trout or pink salmon, fish that are certainly not above the help of rich sauces and bold flavors. This dish was inspired by the fish sauce wings at Pok Pok in Portland and has since become our go-to preparation for cheap and otherwise mild-tasting fish. It also works well with cod or tilapia. Serve with Savory Fruit Salad (p. 196) or a bit of steamed rice and lightly dressed greens.\n\n4\n\nSERVINGS\n\n\u00bd cup (125 mL) fish sauce\n\n\u00bc cup (60 mL) honey\n\n2 tsp Sriracha sauce\n\n2 garlic cloves, smashed\n\n2 1-lb (500 g) salmon or trout fillets, about \u00be in (2 cm) thick\n\n1 tsp toasted sesame seeds\n\n2 scallions, finely chopped\n\nPreheat oven to 375\u00b0F (190\u00b0C). In a small saucepan, whisk together fish sauce, honey, and Sriracha. Add garlic cloves.\n\nArrange fillets on a baking sheet lined with parchment paper or greased aluminum foil. Dip a brush into fish sauce mixture and brush some over fillets.\n\nBake for 8 to 10 minutes, until just cooked through. Fish should flake when separated with tines of a fork.\n\nMeanwhile, heat remainder of fish sauce mixture on medium-high heat, whisking frequently until reduced by half to two-thirds, about 5 to 7 minutes. Mixture should resemble a thin caramel sauce. Watch it carefully, as this can burn if left unsupervised. (You may find the task of eliminating the burned fish sauce smell from your home... daunting.)\n\nBrush sauce over cooked fillets until no sauce remains, letting them rest for a minute between brushings so sauce can firm up a bit and get sticky. Sprinkle with sesame seeds and scallions.\nSALMON BALL CASSEROLE\n\nMy mom made this dish with Campbell's Cream of Mushroom soup, and it was delicious and I loved it. Those condensed cream-soup-based dinners of our youth were really wonderful, weren't they? This is very similar, with that same richness, but with less sodium and a fresher taste. It's a nice make-ahead meal, because you can form the fish balls a day ahead and save yourself some time. Serve with rice sprinkled with fresh parsley.\n\n4\u20136\n\nSERVINGS\n\n1 lb (500 g) cooked salmon, chilled, bones removed, or 2 8-oz (250-g) cans of salmon\n\n\u00bd cup (125 mL) uncooked long-grain white rice\n\n1 carrot, finely grated\n\n1 celery stalk, diced\n\n\u00bd onion, diced (use other half in sauce)\n\n\u00bc cup (60 mL) chopped fresh parsley\n\n1 lemon, zest and juice\n\n2 eggs\n\n1 tbsp olive oil\n\n\u00bd tsp salt\n\n\u00bd tsp ground black pepper\n\nMUSHROOM CREAM SAUCE\n\n2 tbsp olive oil\n\n\u00bd onion, diced\n\n3 garlic cloves, minced\n\n1 lb (500 g) mushrooms, chopped\n\n1 tsp dried savory\n\n1 tsp Worcestershire sauce\n\n\u00bd tsp ground black pepper\n\n\u215b tsp cayenne pepper\n\n2 tbsp all-purpose flour\n\n1\u00bd cups (375 mL) milk\n\n1 cup (250 mL) sour cream\n\nsalt, to taste\n\nchopped fresh parsley, for garnish\n\nPreheat oven to 350\u00b0F (180\u00b0C).\n\nIn a large bowl, combine salmon, rice, carrots, celery, onions, parsley, lemon zest and juice, eggs, olive oil, salt, and pepper. Mash together with your hands until thoroughly combined. Form into 16 balls of equal size, about 1\u00bd in (4 cm), and set aside.\n\nIn a large pan on medium-high heat, add oil and onions and saut\u00e9 until onions are translucent, 3 to 5 minutes. Add garlic, mushrooms, savory, Worcestershire sauce, pepper, and cayenne, and cook until mushrooms have sweat and no liquid remains at bottom of pan, about 5 minutes. Stir in flour, then add milk and sour cream. Cook until liquid comes to a gentle boil. Taste and adjust seasonings as needed.\n\nLadle a small amount of cream sauce into a 1.5\u20132 qt\/L casserole dish. Place a layer of salmon balls on sauce, then ladle half of sauce over them. Place remainder of salmon balls on top, then finish with remainder of sauce.\n\nIf you're using a shallow casserole dish, place a cookie sheet beneath it before putting in oven, as sauce will bubble up around sides. Cover and bake for 1 hour. Garnish with parsley.\nSARDINE PANZANELLA\n\nThis is the kind of thing that's nice to pack into containers and take to the beach on a sunny afternoon in late August when it doesn't matter how bad your breath is afterward. It's bright-flavored, fresh, and filling. Make a meal of it by pairing it with Roasted Tomato & Garlic Soup (p. 195) and a glass or two of Vinho Verde.\n\n4\n\nSERVINGS AS LUNCH\n\n6\n\nAS A SIDE\n\n\u00bd loaf whole wheat day-old French bread, chopped into 1-in (2.5-cm) cubes, about 6 cups (1.5 L)\n\n\u00bd English cucumber, quartered lengthwise and chopped into 1-in (2.5-cm) pieces, about 2 cups (500 mL)\n\n4 tomatoes, diced to 1 in (2.5 cm), about 4 cups (1 L)\n\n5.5-oz (160-g) tins water-packed sardines, drained and torn into chunks, bones removed (if preferred)\n\n1 cup (250 mL) whole basil leaves\n\n1 shallot or small red onion, thinly sliced\n\n1 tbsp capers, roughly chopped\n\n\u00bc cup (60 mL) red wine vinegar\n\n\u2153 cup (80 mL) olive oil\n\n1 tbsp fish sauce\n\n2 garlic cloves, minced\n\n\u00bd tsp coarse salt\n\n\u00bd tsp ground black pepper\n\n\u00bd tsp dried oregano\n\n\u00bd tsp chili flakes\n\nPreheat broiler.\n\nPlace bread cubes on a baking sheet. Toast for 2 to 3 minutes, checking frequently to make sure they haven't burned.\n\nIn a large bowl, combine cucumbers, tomatoes, sardines, basil leaves, shallots, and capers. Add bread cubes, and toss gently, using your hands.\n\nIn a separate bowl, whisk together red wine vinegar, olive oil, fish sauce, garlic, salt, pepper, oregano, and chili flakes. Taste, and adjust seasonings as needed. Pour half of dressing over salad mixture, toss with your hands, then add remainder of dressing.\n\nLet panzanella rest for at least 15 minutes. Toss again before serving.\n\nRoasted Tomato & Garlic Soup (page 195)\nSARDINO\u00cfADE\n\nAlthough we're sometimes very tired and messy, we entertain a lot. Often inadvertently, as people tend to just stop by. A few chopped veggies, some toasted bread, and a bit of dip can be nice to serve unexpected guests. This sardine-based dip uses simple ingredients and comes together in the time it takes to receive the call that someone's coming over. It will resemble p\u00e2t\u00e9 and will work as either a spread or dip. Best served with pickles, slices of hard-boiled eggs, and a baguette.\n\n6\n\nAPPETIZER-SIZED\n\n\u00bd cup (125 mL) whole almonds (skins on), toasted\n\n2 garlic cloves\n\n5.5-oz (160-g) tin smoked sardines packed in oil\n\n2 tbsp chopped fresh parsley\n\n1 tsp lemon zest\n\n1 tbsp lemon juice\n\n1 tsp grainy Dijon mustard\n\n\u00bd tsp salt\n\n1 tsp pepper\n\n\u00bc cup (60 mL) olive oil + extra, for drizzling\n\nYou can do this two ways.\n\nThe faster way is to grind almonds and garlic in a food processor, then add remainder of ingredients (including oil from sardines) and pulse until mixture achieves texture you prefer. I like making it this way for parties.\n\nThe other way, which is also easy but has more steps, is to chop almonds as finely as possible and mince garlic. In a bowl, combine almonds and garlic, then add tin of sardines, oil included, and mash until it's a texture you like. Stir in remainder of ingredients until well combined. This works better as a spread. It's less attractive than the above, but just as tasty.\n\nScoop either variation into a ramekin, and drizzle top with olive oil.\n\nIf you have any left over the next day, thin it out with a bit more olive oil and toss with pasta, a few capers, and hardboiled eggs. Top with fresh herbs and a handful of grated hard cheese.\nSMOKED FISH CAKES\n\nWhen I was a kid we'd eat fish cakes at least once a week, probably because they were fast, and because Mom was at work and Dad knew I'd eat them without complaints. Ours were very simple, a mix of canned salmon and mashed potatoes fried in butter until golden brown, with edges that were lacy and crisp. This version uses even cheaper canned herring or leftover smoked fish.\n\n4\n\nSERVINGS\n\n4 cups (1 L) mashed potatoes* (2 large or 3 medium Russets)\n\n2 scallions, finely chopped\n\n1 garlic clove, minced\n\n2 eggs, beaten\n\n2 tsp grainy Dijon mustard\n\n1 tsp sambal oelek or other hot sauce\n\nsalt and pepper, to taste\n\n6.5\u20136.7-oz (180\u2013190-g) tin smoked herring or mackerel (drained), or about 1 cup (250 mL) chunked smoked fish\n\n2 tbsp canola oil, for frying + more as needed\n\n* You can use leftover mashed potatoes to make this even easier. Or, if you're making them fresh, let them cool until you can handle them comfortably with your bare hands.\n\nIn a bowl, combine potatoes, scallions, and garlic.\n\nIn a separate bowl, whisk together eggs, mustard, sambal, and dash each of salt and pepper.\n\nCrumble fish into bowl with potatoes, stir to quickly combine, then pour egg mixture over and mix thoroughly.\n\nForm into 6 cakes, about 3 in (8 cm) in diameter and 1 in (2.5 cm) thick.\n\nIn a pan on medium-high, heat oil until it shimmers and moves easily about the pan. Fry fish cakes in small batches (do not crowd the pan); they should sizzle when they hit the pan. Cook for about 2 minutes per side, until they form a nice crust.\n\nServe with ketchup, more hot sauce, or fancy mustard.\nTUNA & DILL PICKLE CASSEROLE\n\nI love tuna casserole. Love it. I also love pickles and potato chips. To reduce the indulgent quality of this homey casserole, I've cut the amount of pasta in half and added a can of white beans; this makes it a little bit more filling and lowers the glycemic load. What you end up with is a curiously nostalgic-feeling dish that hits every feel-good note in your tuna casserole-loving heart...while not clogging the arteries (too much). Serve with a simple salad and a big glass of milk.\n\n6\u20138\n\nSERVINGS\n\n7-oz (190-g) broad egg noodles\n\n3 tbsp butter\n\n1 lb (500 g) leeks, white and light green parts only, thinly sliced\n\n2 garlic cloves, minced\n\n\u00bc cup (60 mL) all-purpose flour\n\n1 cup (250 mL) chopped dill pickles\n\n\u00bc cup (60 mL) pickle brine\n\n2\u00bd cups (625 mL) milk\n\n2 6-oz (170-g) cans tuna in water, drained\n\n1 tsp coarse salt\n\n1 tsp ground black pepper\n\n19-oz (540-mL) can cannellini beans, drained and rinsed\n\n3 tbsp chopped fresh dill, divided\n\n2 oz (60 g) plain potato chips\n\nPreheat oven to 400\u00b0F (200\u00b0C). Grease a 9\u00d713-in (3.5-L) casserole dish.\n\nBring a pot of salted water to a boil on high heat. Add noodles and cook until they're just shy of al dente\u2014about 4 minutes, but refer to package instructions to be sure.\n\nMeanwhile, in a large pan on medium-high heat, melt butter. Add leeks and cook until wilted, about 2 minutes. Add garlic, cook 1 more minute, then stir in flour and coat the leeks and garlic thoroughly.\n\nAdd pickles and pickle brine, and stir until liquid is mostly absorbed. Add milk, stirring and scraping bottom of the pan to lift any browned bits. Add tuna, salt, and pepper, and cook until thickened, about 3 minutes.\n\nDrain pasta, then add pasta and beans to mixture. Stir in 2 tbsp dill. Taste and adjust seasonings as needed.\n\nPour mixture into prepared casserole dish. Gently crush potato chips inside bag, then sprinkle crushed chips over casserole.\n\nBake for 20 minutes, rotating halfway through, until sauce is bubbly and topping is golden brown.\n\nSprinkle with remaining dill.\nTUNA CHOWDER\n\nThis has a slightly Thai flavor, thanks to the coconut milk and lemongrass. It's a nice deviation from a traditional fish chowder, and it's a bit healthier\u2014there's no flour or white potatoes, so it's a good option for when you need to keep your blood sugar in check. We eat this as a main course, but it can also be served for lunch, with a salad or sandwich. _(Note:_ This recipe works just as well with salmon.)\n\n4\n\nSERVINGS\n\n2 tbsp canola oil\n\n\u00bd onion, finely chopped\n\n2 tbsp minced fresh ginger\n\n4 garlic cloves, minced\n\n1 lemongrass stalk, trimmed and minced\n\n1 lb (500 g) sweet potatoes, diced\n\n3 cups fresh or frozen corn, divided\n\n4 cups chicken stock\n\n2 6-oz (170-g) cans tuna in water, drained\n\n1 tbsp fish sauce\n\n1 lime, zest and juice\n\n1 tbsp Sriracha sauce, or to taste\n\n1 large red bell pepper, diced\n\n14-oz (398-mL) can coconut milk\n\n3 tbsp chopped fresh basil\n\nsalt and pepper, to taste\n\nIn a large, heavy-bottomed pot on medium-high, heat oil. Add onions, ginger, garlic, and lemongrass and saut\u00e9 quickly, until golden. Add sweet potatoes and 1 cup (250 mL) corn. Add stock. Scrape bottom of pot with a wooden spoon to scrape off any browned bits. Stir in tuna. Add fish sauce, lime zest and juice, and Sriracha.\n\nBring to a gentle boil, then reduce heat to medium. Simmer for 10 to 15 minutes, until sweet potatoes are fork-tender.\n\nAdd bell peppers, coconut milk, and remainder of corn. Simmer for 5 minutes. Season to taste. Stir in most of the basil. Sprinkle remainder of basil over chowder for garnish.\n\nTUNA SALAD WITH CELERY & BLACK-EYED PEAS\n\nThis is my cheap work lunch. I make a big bowl early in the week, spoon it into lunch-sized containers, and take it with me to the office. It's bright and flavorful and has the right balance of fiber and protein and good fat to keep you from ravenously rattling the vending machines for free chips around three p.m. The ingredients are sturdy and don't wilt, so this salad can live in the refrigerator for a few days and keep you going for most of the week.\n\n4\n\nSERVINGS\n\n4 celery stalks, diced (leaves included)\n\n4 scallions, white and light green parts only, chopped\n\n19-oz (540-mL) can black-eyed peas, drained and rinsed\n\n6-oz (170-g) can tuna, packed in water, drained\n\n\u00bc cup (60 mL) lemon juice\n\n\u00bc cup (60 mL) extra-virgin olive oil\n\n1 tbsp capers, roughly chopped\n\n1 tsp grainy Dijon mustard\n\n1 tsp celery salt\n\n\u00bd tsp ground black pepper\n\n\u00bd tsp coarse salt\n\n\u00bd tsp Worcestershire sauce\n\nIn a large bowl, combine diced celery, scallions, black-eyed peas, and tuna.\n\nIn a smaller bowl, whisk together lemon juice, olive oil, capers, mustard, celery salt, black pepper, coarse salt, and Worcestershire sauce.\n\nPour dressing over tuna mixture, and toss to coat. Serve immediately, or refrigerate for up to 3 days. Stir or shake it up before serving to redistribute dressing.\nTUNA TARTARE\n\nThis is an appetizer for four, or a really lovely dinner for two. It's very mild, and it feels fancy when it's really just a hunk of frozen tuna, dressed up all saucy. Raw tuna and egg yolks aren't for everyone. If they are for you, then serve simply\u2014with some lightly dressed greens, and a bit of buttered toast, quartered.\n\n2\u20134\n\nSERVINGS\n\n\u00bc lb (125 g) frozen albacore tuna\n\n1 avocado, diced\n\n2 tbsp chopped scallions, light and dark green parts only\n\n1 tbsp minced radishes\n\n1 lime, zest and juice\n\n1\u00bd tsp rice vinegar\n\n1 tsp sesame oil\n\n1 tsp ketjap manis\n\n1 egg yolk\n\nSriracha sauce, for garnish\n\n1 chopped scallion, for garnish\n\nLine 2 small ramekins (I use Pyrex custard cups) with plastic wrap.\n\nTuna should be frozen but workable. Mince it. Mince the hell out of it. In a bowl, combine tuna with avocado, scallions, and radishes.\n\nIn a small bowl, mix remaining ingredients except Sriracha and scallions. Pour over fish mixture, toss to coat, and press into ramekins.\n\nTurn mixture out onto serving plates, pulling ramekins away and peeling off plastic. Serve with Sriracha and additional chopped scallions.\n\nPORK\n\nCANDIED PORK BELLY\n\nFRENCH BISTRO PORK & BEANS\n\nNICK'S SWEET SOY PORK TENDERLOIN\n\nPORK & BEAN COTTAGE PIE\n\nSAUSAGE & \"GRITS\"\n\nSLOW-COOKER CABBAGE ROLLS\n\nSLOW-COOKER GOCHUJANG PULLED PORK\n\nSPICY PORK & TOFU STEW\n\nTOAD IN THE HOLE\n\n**_In the spring of 2011, my friend Grace and I went to France to celebrate her thirty-fifth birthday\u2014and to eat as many things as we could. I put a big damper on the trip by accidentally getting pregnant, but made up for all the wine I couldn't enjoy by eating twice as much._**\n\nI met Grace at a job interview in 2007; she hired me as an intern at the publishing company where she was an editor. By the end of our summer working together, we were friends on our way to a well-established karaoke routine and picnic habit. We're eaters. And pretty good pop singers, if you've had a few drinks. We decided to go to France together one evening after I don't know how many whiskey sours and bottles of ros\u00e9; since then, that is how I've made all my important decisions and large purchases.\n\nOur second dinner in France was a garden party at Jim Haynes' atelier, a Sunday supper club that Allen Ginsberg once attended; there were British expats and local Frenchmen and boxed wine and crusty bread and a man named Claude. We ate a hearty stew and mingled with all kinds of people from everywhere. I think I was the youngest person there, and felt terribly awkward as I was the only one without wine, but Claude made conversation, and that's when I realized I don't actually speak French\u2014that C+ on my French 12 final must have really boosted my confidence in my language skills. Soon Grace joined us, English was spoken, and at the end of the night Claude walked us to the Metro, then rode with us, then walked us to our rental apartment in the Marais. He lived nearby, he explained. There's no stranger danger in Paris.\n\nGrace is meticulous\u2014she is a brilliant editor and a careful trip planner (our personalities clash occasionally in that regard, as I am chaotic and irrational and frequently a stumbling block), and she plotted our course so that we'd hit as many affordable French restaurants as possible from a list of places mentioned and adored by the likes of David Lebovitz, Dorie Greenspan, and Anthony Bourdain. And while we wanted to do and see different things during our travels, we always came together over a meal.\n\nThe French do comestibles well. That's common knowledge, but I didn't anticipate how many delicious things they do with swine. We ate paper-thin sheets of pork jowl curled up on crostini, and ribbon-thin strips of marbled, salty cured ham, and regular ham piled atop buckwheat crepes, and chops of acorn-fed pork from the south of France, from pigs our server described in heavily accented English as \"cute, with bushy black hairs over their eyes.\" We ate head cheese and croque-monsieurs, and terrines, rillettes, and p\u00e2t\u00e9s. It was salty, porky heaven. The greatest dish of all was at Bistroy...Les Papilles, a little bistro in the Latin Quarter whose walls were lined with shelves of organic and biodynamic French wines in a range of prices. There was no menu because you simply ate what was being served that day. (Side note: This is the best way to eat\u2014no menus, just delicious surprises from the kitchen.)\n\nClaude joined us there for dinner. We met at his apartment, which really was a short walk from where we were staying. When you are in Paris, the kind of thing you might interpret as a red flag at home only registers as vaguely concerning, but a worthwhile risk. When you are in Paris, sometimes the city compels you to cram your ham-bloated body into an elevator the size of a phone booth with a similarly ham-bloated friend to meet an eighty-year-old man in his apartment, where you don't have any way of knowing if he'll greet you at the door with a butcher's knife. We were lucky as Claude was kind. Also because Claude was from a family of vintners in Sauternes, and he had a fifty-year-old bottle of his family's wine on hand, just waiting for a special occasion.\n\nThere are few occasions more special than sitting in the dusty library of an octogenarian scientist's beautiful, aged apartment, sipping well-aged Sauternes while looking out over the rooftops of the Marais as the sun fades on the horizon. Pregnant or not, this was not likely to ever happen again, so I had a small glass; it was sweet and bright and concentrated. You would think that after half a century it'd be no good, but there was nothing off about it\u2014it had just reduced somewhat in the bottle over time, so when you swished the liquid around, it drizzled back down to the bottom of the glass like syrup. It tasted like peaches in mid-August at the exact moment when they are at their ripest, and dried apricots plumped with a little bit of apple brandy.\n\nThe bistro was busy, but Grace had made reservations _(en fran\u00e7ais!),_ and although we had added a third member to our party en route, we were seated fairly quickly. So good was the main that I have no recollection what the first course was. The entr\u00e9e came to our table sizzling, fat sparkling, in a metal serving dish piled with gently roasted garlic and fresh spring vegetables, peas and carrots and radishes and fresh thyme. The meat was pork belly, braised and then sliced into thick strips and cooked once more until crisp. It cut like room-temperature butter, oozing its juices into the beans on the plate. I sopped the mess up with crusty bread while sipping another small glass of cold wine. I briefly considered proposing to Claude then and there in an attempt to remain in the country.\n\nI can't think of much I wouldn't do for a life of international wine and swine.\n\nPork is the greatest meat, mainly because of bacon, but also because it is both sweetly delicious and endlessly versatile. It tends to be a bit cheaper than other meats\u2014though other people have noticed this as well and things aren't as affordable as they used to be. If you're looking for something lean that's not boneless, skinless chicken breast, try pork tenderloin. Need to feed a dinner party of eight people on a tight budget? Order bone-in pork shoulder from your butcher\u2014eight to ten pounds (3.5 to 4.5 kg) will leave you with enough left over for subsequent meals at a price significantly lower than you'd expect. Like bacon? Then you'll like pork belly too.\n\nWhen purchasing budget-friendly meat, think French and look to inexpensive cuts (and ground)\u2014you'll save a lot of money over more conventional or popular cuts, like ribs, loins, and some chops. The secret to inexpensive cuts of meat is time\u2014they are very flavorful, but you've got to melt the fat and connective tissue and coax out texture and tenderness slowly, under low heat. Good cuts for this include pork butt, shoulder, and belly, but you're going to need a few hours. For this reason, I advise either investing in a Crock-Pot (see p. 14), or saving your low-and-slow meat adventures for the weekends.\nCANDIED PORK BELLY\n\nI almost feel bad telling you about this, because it's not like you can just have a single piece. It's meat candy, pure and simple, the kind of thing you should eat with waffles or maybe fruit salad. The only person I make this for is my friend Aimee\u2014her enthusiasm for it is so compelling, I hardly notice that it's just the two of us who have polished off most of a pan all on our own. _Note:_ This one's going to require a bit of planning; let it marinate for up to 24 hours, plus an additional 3 to 8 hours to cook, chill, and finish.\n\n4\n\nSERVINGS\n\n1 cup (250 mL) brown sugar, divided\n\n\u00bd cup (125 mL) soy sauce\n\n2 lb (900 g) pork belly, skin removed\n\n1 cup (250 mL) apple cider or unsweetened apple juice\n\n\u00bd tsp smoked paprika\n\n\u00bd tsp ground cinnamon\n\n\u00bd tsp salt\n\n\u00bc tsp cayenne pepper\n\nWhisk together 4 cups (1 L) water with \u00bd cup (125 mL) brown sugar and soy sauce until sugar has dissolved. Place pork in a large, sturdy zip-lock bag or container with a lid, and pour brine over. Seal and let marinate in refrigerator for 24 hours.\n\nRemove pork belly from brine and place fat side up in a 9\u00d713-in (3.5-L) baking dish. Preheat oven to 300\u00b0F (150\u00b0C). Pour apple cider or juice over pork belly, cover with aluminum foil, and bake for 2\u00bd hours.\n\nRemove from oven, let cool completely, and refrigerate\u2014still in pan\u2014for at least 3 hours, preferably overnight.\n\nCut chilled pork belly in half widthwise (with grain of meat) and then into lengthwise slices (across grain) about \u00bc-in (6-mm) thick.\n\nPreheat broiler.\n\nLine a rimmed baking sheet with parchment, and lay slices of pork belly evenly across sheet. Mix remainder of brown sugar with smoked paprika, cinnamon, salt, and cayenne pepper. Sprinkle half of spice mixture over pork belly slices.\n\nPlace baking sheet on highest rack of oven. This part is going to require constant vigilance\u2014it will take just a second to burn, so you need to pay attention. Watch surface of pork belly; watch for sugar to melt and bubble. Immediately remove sheet from oven, flip slices, and sprinkle remainder of sugar mixture over them. Return sheet to under broiler and wait for sugar to sizzle. Immediately remove from oven. Serve hot.\nFRENCH BISTRO PORK & BEANS\n\nThis is my take on a beautiful Paris bistro meal with our eighty-something gentleman-friend, Claude. A two-day effort, be sure to have ingredients ready the day before you want to eat it. It's perfect for a lazy weekend in late September, when the weather has begun to cool and the farm markets are abundant with the best fresh produce of the year. This is worth your time, ideal for entertaining, and it's pretty. Serve with crusty bread and cold pink wine.\n\n6\n\nSERVINGS\n\nDAY 1\n\n3 lb (1.5 kg) skinless pork belly\n\n1 tbsp coarse salt\n\n1 tsp whole black peppercorns\n\n1 tsp coriander seeds\n\n2 bay leaves\n\n2 thyme sprigs\n\n1 lemon, sliced\n\n1 head garlic, halved crosswise\n\n1 onion, trimmed and quartered\n\nDAY 2\n\n3 tbsp olive oil, divided\n\n1 onion, diced\n\n1 head garlic, cloves separated and peeled\n\n2 carrots, peeled and sliced on the diagonal\n\n2 stalks celery, trimmed and sliced on the diagonal\n\n4 plum or Roma tomatoes, quartered lengthwise\n\n\u00bd lb (250 g) fresh snap peas, trimmed\n\n1 tsp salt, divided\n\n5 sprigs + 1 tsp chopped fresh thyme\n\n1 tsp smoked paprika\n\n1 tsp ground mustard\n\n\u00bd tsp chili flakes\n\n\u00bd tsp ground black pepper\n\n2 19-oz (540-mL) cans white beans, such as cannellini or navy, drained and rinsed\n\n\u00bd cup (125 mL) dry white wine\n\n28-oz (796-mL) can whole tomatoes, including juices\n\n1 lemon, zest and juice\n\nPreheat oven to 275\u00b0F (140\u00b0C). Place pork belly in a 9\u00d713-in (3.5-L) pan. Sprinkle both sides of the pork with salt, rubbing to ensure it sticks. Add peppercorns, coriander seeds, bay leaves, thyme, lemon slices, garlic, and onion quarters to the pan, surrounding pork belly. Fill pan with water so it is level with top of pork. Bake, uncovered, for 2\u00bd hours.\n\nRemove pork from the oven, and allow to cool. Wrap pork in plastic wrap and refrigerate for at least 4 hours, until firm; discard pan juices and solids.\n\nPreheat oven to 400\u00b0F (200\u00b0C).\n\nSlice pork belly into six pieces lengthwise, so that pieces resemble very thick slices of bacon. In a large pan on medium-high heat, sear pork belly slices until crisp and golden brown on each side. Remove pork from pan, and set aside.\n\nAdd 1 tbsp oil to pan, then add onions and garlic. Saut\u00e9 until onions have softened and garlic has begun to brown, about 3 minutes.\n\nMeanwhile, in a bowl, toss carrots, celery, fresh tomatoes, and peas with remainder of olive oil, \u00bd tsp salt, and 1 tsp chopped thyme. Set aside.\n\nAdd paprika, mustard, chili flakes, pepper and remainder of salt to pan. Stir in beans. Add wine, scraping browned bits off bottom of pan. Squish canned tomatoes between your fingers into pan, then add can juices. Stir in lemon zest and juice. Bring to a boil.\n\nNestle pork belly slices in tomato and bean mixture. Carefully spoon vegetable mixture into pan over pork slices. Add sprigs of thyme, strewing over veggies.\n\nBake for 20 to 25 minutes, until veggies have cooked and charred slightly and pan sauces have reduced somewhat. Let rest for 5 minutes before serving.\n\nNICK'S SWEET SOY PORK TENDERLOIN\n\nWe started to buy pork tenderloin once I got my first real grown-up, out-of-school job because it was Costco's best value, pork-wise. And then we discovered how delicious it is. This is Nick's favorite way to eat pork tenderloin. The salty, savory, slightly spicy marinade works brilliantly with the pork, and a benefit of the soy sauce is that it further tenderizes this already tender cut of meat. Great in summer\u2014you can make it ahead, then chill it in the refrigerator, slice it cold, and put it into sandwiches.\n\n3\u20134\n\nSERVINGS\n\n1 lb (500 g) pork tenderloin\n\n3 tbsp ketjap manis\n\n3 tbsp Sriracha sauce\n\n1 tbsp sesame oil\n\n4 garlic cloves, minced\n\n1 tsp minced fresh ginger\n\n\u00bd tsp coarse salt\n\n1 lime, zest and juice\n\n2 tbsp canola oil\n\nTrim any silver skin\u2014the tight, sort of shiny membrane along the side of tenderloin\u2014then set pork aside.\n\nIn a small bowl, whisk together remainder of ingredients except canola oil. Reserve 2 tbsp marinade in a separate bowl.\n\nPlace pork in a heavy-duty zip-lock plastic bag, then pour in marinade. Seal bag, squeezing air out. Squish pork around in bag to coat in marinade. Marinate at room temperature for at least 30 minutes, or up to 2 hours.\n\nPreheat oven to 425\u00b0F (220\u00b0C).\n\nIn an oven-proof frying pan on medium-high, heat canola oil. Sear pork for 2 minutes per side.\n\nBake for 12 to 15 minutes, until pork reaches an internal temperature of about 145\u00b0F (63\u00b0C). Pull it out of the pan and let rest for 3 to 5 minutes. Paint with remaining marinade before slicing into thin rounds.\nPORK & BEAN COTTAGE PIE\n\nWhen Nick was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes, the dietitian at the endocrinology clinic gave us a package of handouts, one of which was a handy reference sheet about common foods and their place on the glycemic index. Sweet potatoes and legumes? Both on the low end. The sweet potatoes lend a bit of an indulgent flair to this dish, and the beans will fill you right up. This is spicy and loaded with complex carbohydrates\u2014great for weeknight dinners and subsequent workday lunches. Serve with lightly dressed greens.\n\n6\n\nSERVINGS\n\n1 onion, halved\n\n3 garlic cloves\n\n1 tbsp chili powder\n\n1 tbsp apple cider vinegar\n\n1 tsp ground cumin\n\n\u00bd tsp ground coriander\n\n\u00bd tsp dried oregano\n\n\u00bc tsp ground cinnamon\n\n\u00bc tsp cayenne pepper\n\n3 tsp coarse salt, divided\n\n1 lb (500 g) ground pork\n\n1 tbsp olive oil\n\n2 bell peppers, diced\n\n19-oz (540-mL) can black beans, drained and rinsed\n\n14-oz (398-mL) can diced tomatoes\n\n6-oz (156-mL) can tomato paste\n\n\u00bd cup (125 mL) chopped fresh cilantro\n\n4 lb (1.8 kg) yams or sweet potatoes, peeled and cubed\n\n4 tbsp cold butter\n\nPreheat oven to 400\u00b0F (200\u00b0C).\n\nChop half of onion and place in a food processor or blender with garlic, chili powder, vinegar, cumin, coriander, oregano, cinnamon, cayenne pepper, and 2 tsp salt. Blend until smooth.\n\nPlace pork in a bowl and pour blended pepper mixture over. Mix with your hands until well-combined. Let marinate for 15 to 30 minutes.\n\nMince other half of onion. In a large pan on medium-high, heat olive oil. Add onions and peppers, and saut\u00e9 until they've begun to sweat, about 3 minutes. Add pork, breaking it apart with a wooden spoon, and then add black beans, tomatoes, and tomato paste. Simmer until liquid has reduced, about 10 minutes. Stir mixture regularly while it simmers. Add cilantro, and remove from heat.\n\nMeanwhile, in a large pot on high heat, bring yams or sweet potatoes in salted water to a boil. Reduce heat to medium and simmer until tender, about 20 minutes. Drain and mash with butter and remaining salt.\n\nPour pork mixture into a 9 x 13-in (3.5-L) baking dish. Pour yam or sweet potato pur\u00e9e over and spread to cover.\n\nBake for 35 to 40 minutes, or until golden on top and bubbling around the sides. Let rest 5 to 10 minutes before serving, so that filling can set.\nSAUSAGE & \"GRITS\"\n\nGrits are an American thing and harder to come by in Canada than I'd like. You can use coarse polenta, but that too may be hard to find. This recipe uses fine-ground cornmeal. On the one hand, you don't get the chewier, more interesting texture of coarse grits; on the other hand, it takes only 10 minutes to make. Although the recipe calls for just \u00bd cup (125 mL) cheese, Nick wanted you to know you can add as much as you like. Of course, he doesn't manage the grocery budget around here.\n\n4\n\nSERVINGS\n\n1 lb (500 g) spicy pork sausage, casings removed\n\n1 tbsp olive oil\n\n1 onion, chopped\n\n2 celery stalks, quartered lengthwise and chopped\n\n1 bell pepper, chopped\n\n1 jalape\u00f1o pepper\n\n3 garlic cloves, minced\n\n1 lemon, zest and juice\n\n2 cups (500 mL) diced tomatoes (about 4 Roma or plum tomatoes)\n\n1 tsp salt\n\n1 tsp smoked paprika\n\n1 tsp chili powder\n\n\u00bd tsp cumin\n\n\u00bd tsp dried oregano\n\n\u00bd cup beer, such as lager or pilsner\n\nhandful fresh parsley, chopped\n\nGRITS\n\n2 cups (500 mL) chicken stock\n\n1 cup (250 mL) cornmeal\n\n\u00bc cup (60 mL) yogurt\n\n1 cup (250 mL) fresh or frozen corn kernels\n\n1 tbsp butter\n\n\u00bd cup (125 mL) grated aged cheddar cheese\n\nIn a large frying pan on medium-high heat, brown crumbled sausages in olive oil.\n\nAdd onions, celery, bell and jalape\u00f1o peppers, garlic, and lemon zest. Saut\u00e9 until veggies begin to sweat, then add tomatoes, salt, paprika, chili powder, cumin, and oregano.\n\nMeanwhile, bring chicken stock and 2 cups (250 mL) water to a boil. Reduce heat to medium, then slowly whisk in cornmeal. Cook until thick, about 5 minutes, stirring regularly to prevent grits from sticking to bottom of pot.\n\nAs grits thicken, add beer and lemon juice to sausage mixture. Simmer until liquid has reduced slightly and thickened. Add parsley.\n\nStir in yogurt, corn kernels, butter, and cheese to grits until smooth. Serve sausage mixture over \"grits.\"\nSLOW-COOKER CABBAGE ROLLS\n\nI hardly ever made cabbage rolls until I discovered this one weird old trick to simplify the process and make it less likely that I'd burn my clumsy hands. The secret? Freeze the cabbage leaves. Freezing breaks down the cellular structure of the leaves so that once they've defrosted they become malleable and much easier to work with. Save time! Don't burn yourself! Everybody wins. Thanks for the tip, Mrs Booy. Make a full batch of these and freeze half. Serve with pickles and well-buttered crusty bread.\n\n20\n\nMAKES ABOUT\n\n1 head green cabbage\n\n1 large onion\n\n2 carrots\n\n2 celery stalks\n\n4 garlic cloves\n\n\u00bd packed cup (125 mL) fresh parsley\n\n2 lb (900 g) ground pork\n\n1 cup (250 mL) uncooked long-grain white rice\n\n2 eggs\n\n2 tbsp olive oil\n\n1 tbsp Worcestershire sauce\n\n1 tbsp grainy Dijon mustard\n\n2\u00bd tsp kosher salt\n\n2 tsp smoked paprika\n\n1 tsp dried savory\n\n1 tsp ground black pepper\n\n28-oz (796-mL) can crushed tomatoes\n\n2 cups (500 mL) chicken stock\n\nsalt and pepper, to taste\n\nThe night before, put entire cabbage in freezer. The next morning, remove it and put in a colander in the sink to defrost. Your mileage here may vary\u2014my apartment tends to be on the warm side, so the cabbage defrosts in 8 hours at room temperature, meaning I can make the cabbage rolls the same day I take the cabbage out of the freezer. If you are unsure, start to defrost cabbage in refrigerator a day or two before making recipe.\n\nFinely chop onions, carrots, celery, garlic, and parsley. Divide mixture evenly between two bowls. Set aside.\n\nAdd pork, rice, eggs, oil, Worcestershire sauce, mustard, salt, paprika, savory, and pepper to one bowl of vegetables and mix to combine thoroughly. (You can do this a day ahead as well; just cover and refrigerate until ready to use.)\n\nIn other bowl, add crushed tomatoes and chicken stock. Season with additional salt and pepper to taste. (Again, feel free to make this ahead of time and set it aside.)\n\nWhen you're ready to roll, pour about 1 cup (250 mL) sauce into a slow cooker. Cut core from cabbage and discard. Peel off leaves, and cut out thick part of center rib. Place 3 tbsp meat mixture on top part of leaf, then roll up, folding in sides. Place each roll into slow cooker, ladling tomato sauce over each layer.\n\nPour remainder of sauce over, cover with lid, then either refrigerate until you're ready to make these, or cook them right away. Set slow cooker to low, and cook for 10 hours.\nSLOW-COOKER GOCHUJANG PULLED PORK\n\nI love pulled pork, but not most barbecue-esque slow-cooker versions, which can be too cloyingly sweet. I do love the texture the slow cooker gives pork, however, and this version provides all the ease and convenience of traditional slow-cooker pulled pork, but it tastes different\u2014better, spicier. It also freezes well. Make a full batch and freeze half, and you've got dinner for another evening. You can serve this on buns, but I like it folded into a piece of soft butter lettuce with a spoonful of rice and cold, spicy kimchi. _Note_ : You'll need to start this recipe the day before you plan to serve it.\n\n6\u20138\n\nSERVINGS\n\nPORK\n\n3 tbsp gochujang (Korean hot pepper paste)\n\n3 garlic cloves, minced\n\n1 tbsp granulated sugar\n\n1 tbsp coarse salt\n\n4 lb (1.8 kg) pork butt\n\n2 onions, halved and sliced\n\n\u00bd cup (125 mL) soy sauce\n\n\u00bd cup (125 mL) beer, such as amber ale\n\nSAUCE\n\n1 cup (250 mL) cooking liquid, strained\n\n\u00bd cup (125 mL) granulated sugar\n\n6 tbsp rice vinegar\n\n3 tbsp gochujang\n\n1 tbsp sesame oil\n\n3 garlic cloves, minced\n\nsalt, to taste\n\ntoasted sesame seeds, for garnish\n\nACCOMPANIMENTS\n\n6 cups (1.5 L) cooked white rice\n\n1 head butter lettuce\n\n2 cups (500 mL) kimchi\n\n1 diced long English cucumber\n\n\u00bc cup (60 mL) sesame oil\n\nThe night before you want to eat this, make a paste of the gochujang, minced garlic, sugar, and salt. Then rub it all over your butt. The pork. Rub it all over your pork butt.\n\nIf you have the kind of slow cooker from which the crock is removable, place onions in slow cooker. Add soy sauce and beer, then nestle pork butt in center of crock. Cover and refrigerate overnight. If you do not have that kind of slow cooker, prepare all the pieces, then assemble in slow cooker in the morning.\n\nSet slow cooker to low, and cook for 10 hours.\n\nWhen the pork is cooked, scoop out 1 cup (250 mL) cooking liquid and strain into a small saucepan on medium-high. Add sugar, rice vinegar, gochujang, sesame oil, and garlic. Bring mixture to a boil, then reduce heat to medium and cook until mixture has reduced by half, 5 to 7 minutes. Taste and adjust seasonings as needed. Pour mixture into a large bowl, and set aside.\n\nUsing 2 forks, shred pork into bowl containing sauce. Using tongs, toss pork so that it's thoroughly coated in sauce. If mixture looks dry, add additional pan juices to moisten pork.\n\nSprinkle with toasted sesame seeds, and serve with accompaniments.\n\nSPICY PORK & TOFU STEW\n\nThis is a good autumn dish, the kind of thing you might eat after a long afternoon of hayrides and corn mazes and picking just the right pumpkin. It's hearty and satisfying, but lighter than you might expect from a pork stew. A nice mix of textures, the butternut squash is what takes this into the realm of comfort food. Serve over rice with an off-dry white wine to dull the burn.\n\n4\u20136\n\nSERVINGS\n\n1\u20131\u00bd lb (500\u2013750 g) cubed pork shoulder or pork shoulder steak\n\n\u00bd cup (125 mL) soy sauce\n\n\u00bc cup (60 mL) Sriracha sauce\n\n2 tbsp corn or tapioca starch, divided\n\n1 tbsp canola oil\n\n1 tbsp sesame oil\n\n1 onion, halved and thinly sliced\n\n4 celery stalks, chopped into 1-in (2.5-cm) pieces\n\n1\u20131\u00bd-lb (500\u2013750 g) butternut squash, peeled, seeded, and cubed\n\n4 garlic cloves, minced\n\n1 tbsp minced fresh ginger\n\n\u00bd cup (125 mL) beer, such as pilsner or lager\n\n2 cups (500 mL) low-sodium or homemade chicken stock\n\n\u2154 lb (350 g) block medium-firm tofu, cubed\n\n4 scallions, chopped\n\n2 tsp toasted sesame seeds\n\nPlace pork, soy sauce, Sriracha, and 1 tbsp starch in a sturdy plastic bag. Seal, pressing out all of the air, and squish pork around, coating in marinade. Let marinate at room temperature for 30 minutes.\n\nIn a heavy-bottomed pot such as a Dutch oven, on medium-high, heat oils. Add pork cubes, reserving marinade. Brown pork, about 3 to 4 minutes a side, then scoop out of pot and set aside.\n\nAdd onions and saut\u00e9 until translucent. Stir in celery and squash. Stir in garlic and ginger, and cook for 1 to 2 minutes, until veggies have softened and garlic and ginger have begun to turn golden.\n\nStir in beer, scraping bottom of pot to collect any browned bits. Add stock and reserved marinade.\n\nMix remainder of starch with about 1 tbsp water to form a slurry. Stir into mixture in pot.\n\nReturn pork to pot, and add tofu. Reduce heat to medium-low, and cover pot partially with lid so some steam escapes. Cook for 45 minutes, occasionally lifting lid to stir pot. When pork is tender, sprinkle with scallions and sesame seeds and serve.\nTOAD IN THE HOLE\n\nI grew up eating this dish, usually for dinner. It's the kind of thing you have on, like, a Thursday night when the week has been too long and nobody's up for a lot of standing upright. Of course, it's also a hearty brunch. For best results, start with eggs and milk at room temperature, so take them out of the refrigerator 20 minutes or so before you start cooking. My dad would serve this with a small, simple salad and a glob of HP Sauce for dipping. Go ahead and do the same.\n\n4\n\nSERVINGS\n\n1 cup (250 mL) all-purpose flour\n\n1 cup (250 mL) milk or buttermilk, at room temperature\n\n4 eggs, at room temperature\n\n1 tsp grainy Dijon mustard\n\npinch, salt and pepper\n\n2 strips bacon, chopped\n\n2 tsp butter\n\n1 medium onion, sliced\n\n1 lb (500 g) pork sausages, such as English bangers or bratwurst\n\nPreheat oven to 425\u00b0F (220\u00b0C).\n\nIn a large bowl, whisk together flour, milk, eggs, mustard, and salt and pepper until smooth. Set aside.\n\nIn a cast-iron pan on medium-high heat, fry bacon. When cooked, remove from pan and drain on plate lined with a paper towel.\n\nAdd butter to pan and let melt. Add onions and saut\u00e9 until translucent with brown bits around their edges, about 3 minutes.\n\nAdd sausages, and brown them too\u2014it doesn't matter if they are cooked through, but brown on all sides. Remove from pan and slice into bite-sized pieces.\n\nReturn bacon and sausages to pan. Pour batter over, and bake for 25 minutes, until batter has puffed and turned golden. Slice and serve immediately.\n\nBEEF\n\nBEEF STEW WITH BARLEY\n\nCOTTAGE PIE\n\nCURRY BRAISED BEEF\n\nDUTCH MEATBALLS\n\nED'S POTATO MOUSSAKA\n\nHAMBURGER STEW\n\nMEATBALLS WITH RED SAUCE\n\nPOT ROAST\n\nSALISBURY STEAK\n\n**_As a kid, my experience with beef was limited to what was affordable, so we ate a lot of ground beef, a lot of pot roast, and the occasional really overcooked steak. Nick and I joke about the beef of our childhood, which was so often gray and board-like, a weathered shingle of beef. Nick recalls, fondly of course, a dish his mother made regularly called Hamburger Mush, a mix of ground beef and Campbell's Cream of Mushroom Soup that was grayer than dinner ought to be. It was the 1980s and early '90s, and everyone was busy, and everyone had kids and mortgages, and yet dinner kept happening every single day, and we were lucky to get food at all. I get it. Hamburger Mush for everyone!_**\n\nGround beef was a staple in my parents' kitchen; they'd buy it cello-wrapped and heaped in big styrofoam trays from Costco, and my dad would portion it out into 1 lb (500 g) balls and wrap them in plastic to store in the freezer. There were always wads of frozen ground beef around, and they went into everything\u2014stuffed bell peppers, meatballs, pasta sauces, soups, and the occasional casserole. Some things were great, like the stuffed peppers, which were basically cabbage rolls in a different wrapper (Dad doesn't like cabbage); other things were just gross, like Dad burgers. I was excited when I learned that Nick had eaten Dad burgers too, as apparently the burgers of his youth were much like mine\u2014a ball of ground beef that started out as a patty but shrank, charred on the outside and dry in the middle. The result was a burger whose ratios were all off\u2014it was mostly bun and condiments, except where it was just a dense rock of indigestible meat. An informal poll of friends who grew up in the same era revealed that we all ate Dad burgers. A rite of passage?\n\nNick and I were just married and fresh out of university when our student loan repayments began to kick in and we moved into our first grown-up apartment. We were finally both working full time and could afford to live without roommates, but that's about all we could afford. I was in the middle of my \"I'm an adult and I do what I want and I do not want to eat red meat\" phase, which excluded cold cuts and fast food burgers, and we were broke anyway so there just wasn't much meat in those early days. There was a little produce market with a small meat counter and a lot of Asian ingredients nearby, and for most of that first year our diet was mainly plant-based; you could buy big bags of baby bok choy at the market for about a dollar, so we'd eat stir fries and curries and heaping piles of steamed greens most nights of the week. I don't blame Nick at all for rebelling.\n\n\"Damn it, I just want a goddamn steak,\" he declared one night, probably on a Friday after a long week of being responsible adults with jobs. There were two big grocery stores nearby; at one, he'd be able to get a bunch of steaks on a styrofoam tray covered in plastic for probably eight dollars. The other was Whole Foods. I don't know if it's because he was feeling fancy, or if he'd just never bought meat at an actual meat counter before, but somehow he managed to spend thirty-five dollars on two steaks; he didn't realize how much they'd be until they were wrapped up and handed over the counter. When he got home he apologized: \"They were, like, seventeen dollars apiece,\" he said. \"You're cooking them, then,\" I told him, backing away from the kitchen.\n\nIt was more than I'd spend on a week's worth of groceries at the time, and it wouldn't even leave us with leftovers for lunches the next day. I don't know if it was because we would never buy meat like that again, or because it was just so much better than any steak I'd encountered in my life, but that extravagant piece of meat was the best steak I've ever had, simply salted, peppered, rubbed with garlic, and grilled perfectly rare. I honestly never knew beef could be like that.\n\nI have the advantage of a partner who hunts, so for most of the year, our freezer is full of wild deer or moose; when the woods come up short, we share a large beef order with a friend and get a quarter or half of a grass-fed cow. Of course, this is a reasonably big investment\u2014you've got to come up with around $250 all at once, and then you have to store all that meat. Check Craigslist or local classifieds for a used deep freezer\u2014someone's always selling one cheaply, or if you're lucky, giving it away. We don't have much room to store ours, but our decor is fairly crappy and primarily second-hand, so our dinged, paint-smeared deep freezer fits right in. We like to think of our home as rustic.\n\nIf you don't have room for a deep freezer, talk to a butcher about freezer packs of grass-fed meat. Many butchers will provide freezer packs to accommodate apartment kitchens or refrigerator freezers. Buying more meat at a time can cost more, but it's cheaper in the long run.\n\nCan someone on a budget expect to be able to enjoy grass-fed beef? Yes, but nothing cheap comes easy, of course, so what you will sacrifice in convenience (especially from steaks and other prime cuts that tend to be lean and don't require long cooking), you make up for in the depth of flavor. Cuts such as bone-in front and hind shank, oxtail, neck, chuck, cross rib, and cheeks are all reasonably priced and delicious, though you'll need to coax out the flavor and texture of these cuts with braising or stewing. If you work full time (or more), these meats may be better suited to weekend or Crock-Pot cooking.\n\nQuick-cooking cuts such as ground meat and sausage are cheap, easy to find options; skirt steak (sometimes called bavette) and heart are inexpensive and will also cook quickly, but may require a trip to the butcher. Ground is my go-to weeknight meat, as it's cheap and fast, and if you forget to take it out in the morning before work, it defrosts well in the microwave. And you can do so much with it\u2014there are so many different kinds of meatballs!\n\nThere are plenty of ethical concerns around eating meat, and the environmental impact of industrial beef production is staggering, but grass-fed, free-range meat is something I feel pretty okay about eating. On the one hand, livestock production accounts for as much as twenty percent of global greenhouse gas emissions; on the other hand, supporting small-scale farmers of grass-fed beef means voting for the environment, because though it runs counter to my hippy-dippy idealism, the only thing that's going to change the world is where we spend our money. Of course, I am in a relatively privileged position in that I am able to work out my finances to buy in bulk, when it is considerably cheaper; I recognize that this is not easy or possible for many people. Buy better, and eat less.\n\nOkay, but is red meat even healthy to eat anymore? Again, yes. One of the great myths of modern nutrition is that red meat is linked with high cholesterol and heart disease. A Swedish study recently found that \"high total red meat consumption was associated with progressively shorter survival.\" That the culprit wasn't the meat itself, but rather the volume being consumed and the fact that it had been processed into things like fast-food burgers. The fifteen-year study concluded that \"consumption of non-processed red meat alone was not associated with shorter survival.\" As with all things, it's not what you consume but how much of it\u2014and how it's made\u2014that's the problem. I wish we could move past this strange idea that there are foods we can't and foods we must eat in order to be healthy. Eating a nutritious diet is simple, but there's no formula. It's not a matter of Kale + Chickpeas - Bread - Beef = I'M GOING TO LIVE FOREVER. So we might all be happier and better off to just eat a damn steak once in a while. (Just please don't overcook it.)\n\nIF YOU'RE PRESSED FOR TIME, A SLOW COOKER IS YOUR VERY BEST FRIEND. ANY RECIPE THAT WOULD GENERALLY TAKE 2 TO 3 HOURS OF BRAISING OR STEWING IN THE OVEN WILL COOK FOR 10 TO 12 HOURS ON LOW IN A SLOW COOKER. FOR ME, 10 HOURS IS PERFECT, AS I CAN SEAR THE MEAT AND TURN ON THE CROCK-POT BEFORE I LEAVE FOR WORK, AND BY THE TIME EVERYONE'S HOME, DINNER IS READY. FOR RECIPES THAT AREN'T SOUPS OR STEWS, AND DEPENDING ON THE SIZE OF THE SLOW COOKER, REDUCE THE AMOUNT OF LIQUID IN THE RECIPE BY ABOUT HALF. IF THE RECIPE CALLS FOR PASTA OR RICE OR FRESH HERBS (SUCH AS ROSEMARY OR THYME), ADD THESE IN THE FINAL 40 MINUTES OF COOKING. FOR SOFTER HERBS, SUCH AS PARSLEY OR BASIL, AND FOR GREENS SUCH AS SPINACH OR CHARD, ADD IN THE FINAL 10 MINUTES IF YOU GET HOME AND FIND YOU'VE ADDED TOO MUCH LIQUID (I ERR ON THE SIDE OF ADDING MORE LIQUID TO AVOID SCORCHING INGREDIENTS), FINISH THE DISH IN A PAN ON THE STOVE TO EVAPORATE ANY EXCESS AND TO THICKEN THE SAUCE.\n\nA SLOW COOKER WILL COST YOU ANYWHERE FROM $20 TO $100 DEPENDING ON THE SIZE AND FEATURES; I RECOMMEND SOMETHING IN THE 5 TO 6 QT\/L RANGE, AND PROGRAMMABLE IF YOU CAN SWING IT\u2014THAT'LL RUN YOU BETWEEN $45 AND $60, BUT IT SHOULD LAST FOR YEARS AND YOU'LL USE IT OFTEN.\n\nBEEF STEW WITH BARLEY\n\nThis one's a little time consuming, but it's worth it, because while you cook the beef, you also make the broth that will form the basis for this homey, hearty stew. Beef shank is cheap and requires a long time to become tender. It mostly rains all winter in Vancouver, and this is the kind of thing that makes staying inside so wonderful. Let it rain, I don't care\u2014I've got beef stew and slipper socks and _Star Trek,_ and nowhere I'd rather be. Serve with dark beer and toasted rye bread.\n\n6\n\nSERVINGS\n\n3 tbsp olive oil, divided\n\n4 lb (1.8 kg) bone-in beef shank\n\n1 tbsp coarse salt\n\n2 celery stalks, trimmed and chopped into 2-in (5-cm) pieces\n\n2 carrots, trimmed and chopped into 2-in (5-cm) pieces\n\n1 onion, trimmed and quartered\n\n4 garlic cloves, crushed\n\n1 bay leaf\n\n4 sprigs fresh parsley\n\n4 sprigs fresh thyme\n\n\u00bd lb (250 g) leeks, green tops trimmed and reserved\n\n1 tbsp whole black peppercorns\n\n1 cup (250 mL) pearl barley\n\n12-oz (355-mL) bottle dark beer, such as stout or dark lager\n\n1 tsp Worcestershire sauce\n\n1 cup (250 mL) frozen peas\n\n1 tsp chopped fresh thyme\n\nIn a large, heavy pot such as a Dutch oven, heat 2 tbsp oil on medium-high heat. Sprinkle both sides of beef shanks with coarse salt. Sear beef shanks on each side about 4 minutes, until brown.\n\nAdd celery, carrots, onions, and garlic. Tie bay leaf, parsley, and thyme to form a bouquet garni; add to pot. Add green tops of leeks and peppercorns. Fill pot with warm water to cover.\n\nReduce heat to medium. Simmer, partly covered, for 2\u00bd hours, until beef is tender enough to fall apart when pulled apart with a fork, broth has reduced and turned deep brown, and veggies are a shadow of their former selves. If it boils, reduce heat to medium-low to keep at a simmer.\n\nRemove beef and bouquet garni, and strain mixture into another large pot, pressing out as much moisture as possible. Discard solids.\n\nTrim beef from bones. If any marrow remains, scoop this out, chop it roughly, and add to pot with broth. Remove any rubbery bits and discard. Chop beef into bite-size pieces and set aside.\n\nCut white part of leeks lengthwise down middle, then thinly slice.\n\nReturn pot to medium heat. Add remainder of olive oil and leeks, and saut\u00e9 until softened, about 3 minutes. Stir in barley. Add chopped beef to pot. Add beer, scraping any browned bits off bottom of pot. Add reserved broth and Worcestershire sauce. Taste and adjust seasonings as needed. Simmer, partially covered, for another 20 to 30 minutes, until barley is cooked through.\n\nJust before serving, add peas and remaining fresh thyme. Cook for another minute, until peas are warmed through.\n\n_**Adapt this to the slow cooker!**_\n\nIN A LARGE FRYING PAN ON MEDIUM-HIGH HEAT, SEAR BEEF, THEN PLACE IN A SLOW COOKER WITH CARROTS, CELERY, ONIONS, GARLIC, BOUQUET GARNI, GREEN TOPS OF LEEKS, AND PEPPERCORNS. ADD TAP WATER TO COVER, AND COOK ON LOW HEAT FOR 10 HOURS. THEN STRAIN STOCK, REMOVE BEEF, AND DISCARD VEGETABLE SOLIDS; CONTINUE AS PER REST OF INSTRUCTIONS. YOU'LL SAVE YOURSELF A FEW HOURS OF WAITING AROUND AND WILL HAVE DINNER READY IN ABOUT 40 MINUTES.\n\nCOTTAGE PIE\n\nIf you're having friends over on a weeknight, make this\u2014hell, make it for them on a weekend, especially a rainy one. This is pure comfort; don't be put off by the weight of the pan as you put it in the oven; it's meant to be hearty. You can make the filling and boil the veggies for the topping ahead of time, which is a bonus. It also freezes fairly well, so it's a great dish for work lunches or to deliver to a friend who's just had a baby. It's also easy to halve. Serve with salad, red wine, and country bread.\n\n8\n\nSERVINGS\n\nTOPPING\n\n4 lb (1.8 kg) starchy potatoes such as Russets, peeled and diced\n\n2 lb (900 g) rutabaga, peeled and diced\n\n\u00bd cup (125 mL) butter\n\n2 eggs, beaten\n\nsalt, to taste\n\nFILLING\n\n\u00bc cup (60 mL) olive oil\n\n1 onion, diced\n\n2 celery stalks, diced\n\n2 carrots, diced\n\n3 garlic cloves, minced\n\n2 lb (900 g) lean ground beef\n\n1 tbsp chopped fresh rosemary\n\n1 tbsp Worcestershire sauce\n\n2 tsp grainy Dijon mustard\n\n1 tsp ground black pepper\n\n\u00bd cup (125 mL) all-purpose flour\n\n1\u00bd cups (375 mL) dry red wine\n\n2\u00bd cups (625 mL) beef stock\n\nsalt, to taste\n\n2 cups (500 mL) frozen peas\n\n\u00bd cup (125 mL) chopped fresh parsley\n\nPreheat oven to 375\u00b0F (190\u00b0C). Lightly grease a 9\u00d713-inch (3.5 L) baking dish.\n\nIn a large pot of salted water on high heat, bring cubed potatoes and rutabaga to a boil. Reduce heat to medium-high and continue to cook for about 25 minutes.\n\nMeanwhile, begin to make filling: In a large pan on medium-high, heat olive oil. Add onions, celery, and carrots, and saut\u00e9 for 2 to 3 minutes, until veggies have brightened. Add garlic and cook for another minute Add ground beef, breaking into pieces with hands as you drop into pan. Stir, cooking until meat has browned. Stir in rosemary, Worcestershire sauce, mustard, and pepper. Stir in flour until absorbed. Add wine, scraping bottom of pan with spoon, and cook another minute or 2.\n\nAdd stock and simmer until sauce has thickened and reduced just slightly. Taste and adjust seasonings as needed. Stir in peas and parsley. Remove from heat. Pour meat mixture into prepared baking dish.\n\nDrain potatoes and turnips once cooked\u2014they should pierce easily with a knife. Return to pot and mash, or process in a food mill. Add butter, stir to combine, then add eggs. Stir quickly. Taste and adjust seasonings to taste.\n\nDollop potato mixture over meat. Spread to coat evenly, ensuring potato mix reaches edges as much as possible. Drag fork tines over topping.\n\nBake for about 25 minutes, until topping is golden and meat bubbles around sides. Let rest for 10 to 15 minutes before serving.\nCURRY BRAISED BEEF\n\nI'm lucky in that for the past six years I've worked at academic institutions that shut down over the holidays, so I get the week between Christmas and New Year's off. This is one of the things I like to make then, as it takes a while but still feels celebratory; it isn't another freaking turkey, and it's gluten-free, so it's good for visiting relatives for whom gluten is a concern. This will make your home smell wonderful. Serve over rice with a sprinkling of fresh cilantro leaves.\n\n4\n\nSERVINGS\n\n2 tbsp canola oil\n\n3\u20134 lb (1.5\u20131.8 kg) chuck roast, cubed\n\n1 tsp salt\n\n1 onion, diced\n\n2 tbsp minced ginger\n\n2 tbsp minced fresh lemongrass\n\n2 tbsp minced fresh cilantro stems (leaves reserved)\n\n6 garlic cloves, minced\n\n2 jalape\u00f1o peppers, seeded and minced\n\n2 tsp ground turmeric\n\n2 tsp ground cumin\n\n1\u00bd tsp ground coriander\n\n1 tsp ground black pepper\n\n\u00bd tsp ground cardamom\n\n\u00bc tsp ground cinnamon\n\n3 tbsp fish sauce\n\n3 tbsp brown sugar\n\n2 14-oz (398-mL) cans coconut milk\n\n1 lime, zest and juice\n\n3\u20134 kaffir lime leaves (optional)\n\n2 red Thai bird chilies (optional)\n\n1 lb (500 g) cubed sweet potatoes\n\n1 medium red bell pepper, chopped\n\nPreheat oven to 325\u00b0F (165\u00b0C).\n\nIn an oven-proof pot on medium-high, heat oil. Add beef and season with salt. Brown beef deeply on all sides, about 3 minutes, but don't let it burn. Remove to a plate and set aside.\n\nTo same pot, add onions, ginger, lemongrass, cilantro stems, garlic, and jalape\u00f1o peppers. Saut\u00e9 until fragrant, 2 to 3 minutes. Add turmeric, cumin, coriander, black pepper, cardamom, and cinnamon, and cook another 2 to 3 minutes, until bottom of pan looks dry.\n\nAdd fish sauce, sugar, coconut milk, and lime zest and juice. Add kaffir lime leaves and Thai chilies, if using. I leave my chilies whole. Return beef to pot with meat juices. Cover and put on middle rack of oven. Braise for 2 to 2\u00bd hours, stirring occasionally.\n\nIn last 45 minutes, add sweet potatoes and cover pot.\n\nRemove pot from oven, uncover, and return it to stove on medium heat. Add bell peppers and cook an additional 10 minutes until peppers are tender and sauce has reduced slightly.\nDUTCH MEATBALLS\n\nThis is another of Nick's favorites. I make a full batch, as they're even better the next day, sliced and served cold in sandwiches with mayonnaise, grainy Dijon mustard, and dill pickles. The Dutch (and Nick's mom) use a spice mix called Gehakt (which sounds slightly Klingon, doesn't it?) that's a blend of salt, coriander, ginger, mace, nutmeg, cardamom, and chili. Adding a bit of nutmeg and ketjap manis to 2 to 3 tsp garam masala is a pretty close approximation. Serve these over boiled potatoes with pan juices.\n\n4\u20136\n\nSERVINGS\n\n2 lb (900 g) lean ground beef\n\n1 cup (250 mL) bread crumbs\n\n2 eggs\n\n1 onion, finely chopped\n\n4 garlic cloves, minced\n\n2 tbsp ketjap manis (or 1 tbsp each soy sauce and brown sugar)\n\n2 tsp garam masala\n\n\u00bd tsp ground nutmeg\n\n\u00bd tsp salt\n\n\u00bd tsp ground black pepper\n\n\u00bd cup (125 mL) all-purpose flour\n\n\u00bd cup (125 mL) butter\n\n2 cups (500 mL) beef stock or water\n\nMix beef, bread crumbs, eggs, onions, garlic, ketjap manis, garam masala, nutmeg, salt, and pepper. Form into 10 large meatballs.\n\nMeasure flour out onto a plate or clean surface, then roll each meatball in flour to coat.\n\nIn a large pan, melt butter on medium-high heat. Add meatballs and sprinkle any remaining flour over. Brown meatballs all over.\n\nAdd stock or water, reduce heat to medium, and simmer for 30 minutes. If liquid evaporates too quickly, reduce heat and cover pan with a lid.\nED'S POTATO MOUSSAKA\n\nI once worked with a rather intense Bulgarian web programmer named Ed. One day I brought in a container of leftover moussaka for lunch, which I'd made with eggplant, zucchini, and feta cheese. The dish offended him; according to Ed, this was not moussaka but some other thing\u2014it was wrong. \"A _real_ moussaka,\" he explained, \"is just potatoes, meat, and yogurt.\" So I made it again, and this version passed Ed's rigorous inspection. Serve with salad and a bold, opinionated red wine.\n\n4\u20136\n\nSERVINGS\n\n6 tbsp olive oil, divided\n\n2 onions, halved and sliced\n\n4 garlic cloves, minced\n\n1 lb (900 g) lean ground beef\n\n3 tsp coarse salt, divided\n\n\u00bd tsp chopped fresh thyme\n\n\u00bd tsp ground black pepper\n\n1 cup (250 mL) Greek or Balkan-style yogurt\n\n4 eggs, beaten\n\n\u00bc tsp ground nutmeg\n\n4 lb (1.8 kg) Russet potatoes (5 or 6 medium), peeled and thinly sliced\n\nPreheat oven to 400\u00b0F (200\u00b0C). Grease a 9\u00d713-inch (3.5-L) baking dish.\n\nIn a frying pan on medium-high, heat 3 tbsp olive oil. Add onions and saut\u00e9 until translucent and edges have begun to brown, about 5 minutes. Add garlic, and saut\u00e9 for an additional minute, until garlic is fragrant but not yet brown. Add beef, using a wooden spoon to break apart. Add 1 tsp salt, thyme, and pepper, and cook until meat has browned, 5 or 6 minutes.\n\nMeanwhile, in a bowl, combine yogurt, eggs, nutmeg, 1 tsp salt, and remainder of olive oil. Thin mixture with 2 cups (500 mL) water. Set aside.\n\nLayer half of potatoes in baking dish. Spoon meat mixture on top. Layer remainder of potatoes on top of meat.\n\nPour yogurt mixture over, sprinkle with remainder of salt, and cover with aluminum foil. Bake for 60 minutes. Remove foil cover, turn on broiler, and broil until top is golden and crispy, 8 to 10 minutes, turning halfway for even browning. Let rest for about 15 minutes before serving.\nHAMBURGER STEW\n\nHamburger stew is as fancy as it sounds, but fancy is hardly the point. This stew is about quick, easy, and hearty, the kind of thing you'd eat under a tarp at a rainy campsite or after soaking yourself to the bone on some grass field somewhere. The first time I made this, it was late November and I'd been playing field hockey on a dark evening with the rain coming in sideways. This stew simmered while I showered, and when I got out, warm and clean, this was the perfect bowl to unwind with. Serve with a slice of good buttered bread.\n\n6\n\nSERVINGS\n\n2 tbsp olive oil\n\n1 lb (500 g) lean ground beef\n\n1 tbsp coarse salt\n\n\u00bd tsp chili flakes\n\n\u00bd tsp ground black pepper\n\n1 onion, diced\n\n4 carrots, peeled and chopped\n\n4 celery stalks, trimmed and chopped\n\n6 garlic cloves, roughly chopped\n\n6-oz (175-g) can tomato paste\n\n\u00bd cup (125 mL) long-grain white rice\n\n\u00bd cup green lentils\n\n2 bay leaves\n\n1 tsp dried oregano\n\n\u00bd tsp dried basil\n\n\u00bd lemon, zest and juice\n\n3 tbsp chopped fresh parsley\n\nIn a large pot on medium-high, heat oil. Add beef, salt, chili flakes, and pepper. Cook beef until mostly browned.\n\nAdd onions, carrots, celery, and garlic, and cook until veggies are glistening and bright, 2 to 3 minutes. Add tomato paste, stirring to coat veggies and disperse paste. Add rice and lentils.\n\nAdd 6 cups (1.5 L) water, and reduce heat to medium. Add bay leaves, oregano, and basil, and simmer for 20 to 30 minutes, until rice is cooked and lentils are tender. Stir occasionally.\n\nAdd lemon zest and juice. Taste and adjust seasonings as needed. Stir in parsley, and serve in bowls.\nMEATBALLS WITH RED SAUCE\n\nI thought this was everyone's meatball recipe\u2014it's not unlike my mom's and it's apparently very much like my friend Tracy's Nonna's recipe. These meatballs are so good that they converted a vegetarian, which is, I'm sorry to admit, a source of great pride for me. You can easily halve the meatball recipe if you want to feed a family of four; I like to make the full batch and freeze half for later. Serve with spaghetti and Red Sauce (recipe following). Garnish with fresh basil, and choice of cheese. As my friend Grace would say, \"serve family style.\"\n\n24\n\nMEATBALLS\n\n1 lb (500 g) lean ground beef\n\n1 lb (500 g) ground pork\n\n1 medium onion, finely chopped\n\n3 garlic cloves, minced\n\n2 eggs\n\n2 tbsp butter, bacon fat, or olive oil\n\n1 rounded tbsp tomato paste\n\n1 tsp Worcestershire sauce\n\n1 cup (250 mL) dry bread crumbs\n\n\u00bd cup (125 mL) grated Parmesan cheese\n\n1 tsp salt\n\n1 tsp dried oregano\n\n\u00bd tsp ground black pepper\n\nPreheat oven to 375\u00b0F (190\u00b0C).\n\nIn a large bowl, combine all ingredients. Squish together with your hands to ensure that crumbs and eggs are thoroughly combined with meat, but don't worry if meat isn't completely combined\u2014it's better to have meat sort of separate, so that you can taste pork and beef distinctly. And you must use your hands. There is no other way.\n\nLine a baking sheet with aluminum foil. Roll meat mixture into balls roughly 1\u00bd in (4 cm) in diameter. There should be about 2 dozen\u2014if you have many more, your balls are too small. (Snicker.) And the reverse is true too.\n\nPlace balls on lined baking sheet. Bake for 25 to 30 minutes.\n\nTo serve, drop them into pot of Red Sauce as it cooks, then spoon mixture over a big plate of cooked spaghetti.\n6\n\nCUPS (1.5.L)\n\n3 tbsp butter\n\n1 tbsp olive oil\n\n1 onion, diced\n\n4 garlic cloves, minced\n\n1 tsp chili flakes\n\n1 tsp salt\n\n\u00bd tsp ground black pepper\n\n\u00bd cup (125 mL) dry red wine\n\n2 28-oz (796-mL) cans whole tomatoes, juices included\n\n* * *\n\nRED SAUCE\n\n* * *\n\nIn a heavy-bottomed pot such as a Dutch oven, melt butter and olive oil on medium-high heat. Add onions and saut\u00e9 until translucent, about 3 minutes. Add garlic, chili flakes, salt, and pepper, and cook for another minute or 2, until garlic is fragrant but not yet browned. Add wine, scraping browned bits off bottom of pot.\n\nAdd tomatoes, one by one, squishing each between your fingers as it goes into pot. Stir in remaining can juices. Reduce heat to medium-low, then partially cover pot with a lid. Allow mixture to simmer for about 45 minutes, until tomatoes have broken down. If you like a smooth sauce, pur\u00e9e with an immersion blender before adding meatballs.\n\nThis recipe is scalable; the full amount makes enough for a big plate of pasta (about 8 servings), or 12 servings of Red Sauce Eggs (p. 80).\nPOT ROAST\n\nMy grandmother made a kick-ass pot roast, and though she was notoriously secretive about her recipes, she let me watch her make this once. I have no idea why, but I'm happy that she did. I've adapted it a bit to suit my own tastes (by which I mean I added an unseemly amount of garlic, as I do), but it's flavorful, and even better the next day piled onto soft white buns with a bit of cheddar cheese and mustard. Serve with buttered noodles or mashed potatoes.\n\n4\u20136\n\nSERVINGS\n\n4\u20135 lb (1.8\u20132.2 kg) beef chuck roast\n\n2 tsp coarse salt\n\n\u00bd tsp ground black pepper\n\n3 sprigs parsley + 2 tbsp chopped parsley, for garnish\n\n1 sprig thyme\n\n2 bay leaves\n\n3 tbsp bacon fat or olive oil\n\n2 large onions, quartered\n\n1 head garlic, cloves separated, peeled, and chopped\n\n12-oz (355-mL) can cola\n\n1 tbsp Worcestershire sauce\n\n2 tbsp instant coffee granules\n\n1 lb (500 g) carrots, peeled and chopped into 2-in (5-cm) chunks\n\n2\u20134 cups (500\u20131 L) beef or chicken stock\n\nPreheat oven to 275\u00b0F (135\u00b0C).\n\nGenerously season beef with salt and pepper. Set aside.\n\nIn a piece of cheesecloth, bundle parsley and thyme sprigs and bay leaves. Roll tightly, then tie with string to secure. Set aside.\n\nIn large pot on medium-high, heat bacon fat or oil. Add onions and saut\u00e9 about 8 minutes, until browned, then remove to a plate.\n\nAdd beef to pot, and sear each side until deep brown. Remove meat to a plate and set aside.\n\nAdd garlic to pot and cook for about 1 minute, stirring frequently. Add cola to deglaze, scraping browned bits off bottom of pot using a wooden spoon. Stir in Worcestershire sauce and coffee granules.\n\nReturn onions to pot, spreading so that they cover entire bottom. Return roast to pot, placing on top of onions. Add herbs and carrots. Cover with enough stock to come halfway up sides of meat. Give it a quick taste\u2014is it delicious? Yay! Not salty enough? Add more salt.\n\nCover and cook for 4 hours. Remove herbs, then sprinkle with fresh parsley for a bit of color.\n\nSALISBURY STEAK\n\nThis is not a beautiful dish\u2014it's all shades of brown, like the 1980s on a plate, so you should definitely serve it with a vegetable, preferably one that goes well with gravy. (They all do.) This is one of those meals my Dad made on weeknights when I was a kid\u2014it's economical and not quite good for you (quintessential dad food, really), and it's best served over white rice, buttered pasta, or a heap of mashed potatoes, with maybe a salad, and a cold, dark beer.\n\n4\u20136\n\nSERVINGS\n\nPATTIES\n\n1 lb (500 g) lean ground beef\n\n\u00be cup bread crumbs\n\n2 eggs\n\n1 medium onion, finely chopped\n\n3 garlic cloves, minced\n\n1 tsp Worcestershire sauce\n\n1 tsp grainy Dijon mustard\n\n1 tsp coarse salt\n\n\u00bd tsp ground black pepper\n\n1 tbsp canola or olive oil\n\nGRAVY\n\n2 tbsp butter\n\n1 medium onion, sliced\n\n\u00bd lb (250 g) mushrooms, roughly chopped\n\n2 garlic cloves, minced\n\n1 tsp chopped fresh thyme (or \u00bd tsp dried thyme)\n\n2 tbsp all-purpose flour\n\n\u00bd tsp ground black pepper\n\n\u00bd tsp salt or to taste\n\n3 cups (750 mL) beef stock\n\nIn a large bowl, combine beef, bread crumbs, eggs, onions, garlic, Worcestershire sauce, mustard, salt, and pepper. Mush together with your hands until thoroughly combined. Form into six patties of equal size and thickness\u2014about \u00be-in (2-cm) thick. Set aside.\n\nIn a large cast-iron pan (or Dutch oven) on medium-high heat, add oil and swirl to coat bottom of pan. Add patties, and cook for 2 to 3 minutes per side, until both sides are seared and brown. Remove from pan, and set aside.\n\nAdd butter to pan, and once melted, add onions. Cook until onions have softened and become translucent, 3 to 4 minutes. Add mushrooms and cook until they're soft and most of liquid has evaporated, another 3 minutes. Stir in garlic and thyme. Reduce heat to medium-low, then stir in flour and pepper and salt. Add stock, scrape bottom of pan to loosen browned bits, and then nestle beef patties in pan.\n\nSimmer, uncovered, for 25 to 30 minutes, flipping halfway, until sauce has thickened and patties are cooked through\u2014they should register an internal temperature of around 160\u00b0F (71\u00b0C). Serve, being generous with the gravy.\nFRUITS AND VEGETABLES\n\nBORSCHT WITH BEETS & RED CABBAGE\n\nBROCCOLI WITH TOFU & PEANUTS\n\nCORN & ASPARAGUS SALAD\n\nCUCUMBER SALAD\n\nCURTIDO\n\nDELICATA TACOS WITH CORN\n\nGRANDMA SALAD\n\nHONEY MUSTARD BEETS\n\nKIMCHI & SOFT TOFU STEW\n\nKIMCHI PANCAKES\n\nMUSHROOM COTTAGE PIE\n\nPEAS & CARROTS\n\nPICO DE GALLO\n\nPOTATO & KALE QUESADILLAS\n\nRICE NOODLE SALAD WITH ALL THE VEGGIES\n\nROASTED ALOO GOBI\n\nROASTED RADISHES & GARLIC\n\nROASTED TOMATO & GARLIC SOUP\n\nSAVORY FRUIT SALAD\n\nSIMPLE GREEN SALAD\n\nSTRAWBERRY SALSA\n\nTHAT KOREAN RESTAURANT SOUP\n\nVEGETARIAN POSOLE\n\nVEGGIE STEW WITH DUMPLINGS\n\nZUCCHINI PARMIGIANA SANDWICHES\n\n**_The thing I enjoy seeing most when I travel is local supermarkets and farmer's markets. In San Salvador, I spent an hour of our highly-scheduled trip just pacing the aisles of Super Selectos, a local chain of grocery stores, looking at stuff. I bought little packages of every spice I didn't think I could get at home and marveled at the eggs, not refrigerated but stacked neatly and nearly four feet (1.2 m) high on paper flats at the end of an aisle. Apparently, egg refrigeration isn't a universal thing, and much of Europe doesn't refrigerate them either. Who knew?_**\n\nIn Paris and Lyon, I'd duck into every market I passed, admiring the little crocks of individual yogurts and pretty jars of chestnut paste and every kind of mustard. In London, I enjoyed Waitrose and Marks & Spencer, especially their wide array of potato chip flavors and the abundance of single-serve meal choices designed for people with limited kitchen space. Even when I cross the border into the US, I love the grocery stores with their long aisles of food we just don't have in Canada\u2014different brands, different flavors, bigger blocks of less expensive cheese. Supermarkets are the museums of right now, and a brilliant way to peer into and learn about the modern lifestyles of whoever's culture you're visiting.\n\nOpen air markets are the best way to find new types of fruits and vegetables. I love fruit the way other people love chocolate, and so for me there is no greater gustatory pleasure than discovering a new variety of something sweet and juicy. In El Salvador, my favorite \"new\" fruit was jocote, a small, musky tropical fruit about the size of a fresh date, with skin that ranged from green to red. In Lyon, I bought and ate an unreasonable quantity of _fraises du bois,_ little wild strawberries that taste like those squishy red strawberry marshmallows you get in five-cent candy bins in 7-Elevens everywhere. In San Francisco, I bought Chardonnay grapes and then wouldn't stop talking about them, and that wasn't annoying for my travel companions at all. \"You guys, you should taste these! These are wine grapes! They taste like wine!\" My enthusiasm is not infectious, but it is extremely repetitive.\n\nA little closer to home, there's a wonderful market down the hill from where my parents live, and though it's forty-five minutes away from us, we still go there most Sundays. The market is seasonal and open only from May to the end of October. So when we go, we get a little ridiculous, partly because the cost of produce is much lower than in the city, and partly because it's all so good. The family who runs the market also operates the farm around it, and they grow the most wonderful greens, new potatoes, giant zucchini, squash, and purple and orange cauliflower, among other things. They even grow broccoflower, a broccoli-cauliflower hybrid that is the best of both brassicas. They also bring in most of what they don't grow from other local farms, and what is imported is clearly marked. Their produce isn't certified organic, but it couldn't be fresher\u2014much of it is picked the same morning or the day before it's sold. They don't take credit cards, just cash or debit, and they'll pack your produce in either bags or big cardboard boxes. We always end up with the cardboard boxes filled to the brim for about twenty-five dollars.\n\nWe mostly don't buy organic produce. For a while I bought the organic version of everything on the Environmental Working Group's \"Dirty Dozen\" list (see p. 172), but to keep our costs down we've always eaten mostly seasonally, so we just don't eat many of the items on that list for most of the year. I don't buy organic nectarines, for example, because we only get nectarines in the summertime, and they come from farms just six hours away. The organic nectarines in the grocery store near my apartment are from California. They're smaller and harder than the ripe, juicy ones at the farm market. I don't know how old they are or when they were picked or who picked them. So we don't eat nectarines unless it's nectarine season in British Columbia's Okanagan Valley. I live all year for my first taste of fresh stone fruit, and when I can finally get my hands on it, there is no one shriekier or more filled with delight. Food is cheaper and tastes better when it's in season. We get by with cold-stored apples and pears and whatever fruit we've frozen for most of the year, so by the time those first spring fruits and veggies hit the market in March or April, we're fully ravenous for them.\n\nDepending on where you live, organic produce can be quite costly; it can also come from anywhere. Organic means that the fruit was grown using organic soils, fertilizers, and pesticides, but doesn't include any criteria for the kind of labor used to harvest the fruit. While on the one hand, produce from an organic farm is gentler on the environment, it may have been picked by people who are not being paid a living wage or who are employed under slave-like conditions. This makes it difficult to feel like you're making the \"right\" choice by buying organic. And it's not like we can all just stop eating fruits and veggies.\n\nI am privileged to live in a place with a lot of very good seasonal produce and to have the time to put a lot of it up for the winter, either by canning or freezing. There's a farmer's market two blocks from home every Sunday during the summer and a winter farmer's market at the local baseball stadium, also not far from home, which means we can talk to local farmers and ask questions about their products. It's more expensive, but when we're able to afford it we do make the effort to buy what we can. I like to know where my food comes from, how often it's sprayed with pesticides, when in its life cycle it's been sprayed, and that the people involved in the harvest are paid fairly for their work. For me, it's easy to eat locally and seasonally first. This is not the case for everyone. Especially for people who live in places that get serious winter.\n\nSo what do you do when you want to eat more fruits and veggies but there isn't a thrilling variety of fresh, local produce available to you at the moment? Frozen and canned fruits and vegetables are often healthier than off-season fresh produce because they are usually picked at the peak of ripeness, making them more nutrient-rich than produce that's picked early, sprayed with chemicals, and shipped across the continent or overseas. Frozen and canned produce are also a lot cheaper. For example, as I write, a bundle of fresh spinach at my local supermarket is $1.99. A roughly half-pound (270 g) plastic bag of baby spinach leaves is $2.79. But a brick of frozen spinach? Ninety-nine cents. And it's not been sitting around deteriorating and being handled by hordes of people who may have just sneezed into their hands. So there's that to feel good about. Spinach is currently two bunches for a dollar at my little farm market, so I'm going to buy a ton and freeze it. To freeze spinach, just blanch it quickly, squeeze out all the water, and place it in tightly packed containers. You can also just freeze it as-is in pillowcases overnight (the pillowcases keep the delicate leaves from becoming freezer-burned), then package according to your preference.\n\nBuy canned vegetables packed in water or their own juices, and if you're concerned about sodium, just drain the veggies in a colander and rinse them before using them in a recipe. A standard 14- to 15-ounce (398- to 450-mL) can of corn or peas will work out to about 2 cups (250 mL) of its fresh or frozen counterpart; a 28-ounce (796-mL) can of diced tomatoes is equivalent to about 2 lb (900 g) tomatoes. Use canned whole tomatoes for most recipes where you don't need the tomatoes to keep their shape; if you need identifiable pieces of tomato, choose diced tomatoes, which have been treated with calcium chloride to prevent them from disintegrating. (Calcium chloride is a kind of salt and common food additive used as both a preservative and a thickening agent. Though associated health risks are minor, it can cause irritation to mucous membranes, including eyes, nose, and stomach.)\n\nIf you are concerned about where your canned and frozen produce has come from and who has picked it, call, write, or email the company who produced it. If you like buying a specific product but are concerned about labor practices or packaging or anything else, let the manufacturer know. Pressure the people who make products you like to do better. The positive changes that we have seen in improved access to organic produce, in a greater variety of fair-trade products on store shelves, in better labeling\u2014all of that has been a result of consumer pressure. Nagging works, both at home and in business. Which reminds me, the refrigerator is starting to smell again...Nick?\n\nWe're all doing the best that we can, and I think that's sometimes hard to remember when looking at all the things there are in the world we can do better. The best advice I've heard on this was from Cheryl Hotchkiss, Senior Manager for Public Engagement and Brand Development at World Vision Canada. You can burn yourself out trying to save the world with every single purchase\u2014that in itself is not sustainable, and if you're broke it's pretty easy to find yourself making compromises and feeling bad about them. She suggested choosing the cause that matters most to you, and making a difference there. So, for example, if you buy a lot of canned veggies, find a brand whose values you share and support them. If supporting your local farmer is important to you, go out and meet him or her and ask questions about the products they sell. If eating the very best nectarines is important to you, wait until August and buy them from a farm or pick them yourself and eat them still warm from the sun and let them blow your mind each and every year. And then acquire too many and freeze them, so you can enjoy them in February (which is the worst month, as everyone knows).\n\nFruit and vegetables are two of the most important elements contributing to our nutrition and well-being. A diverse diet rich in a variety of plant-based foods will go a long way toward strengthening your immunity and protecting your health\u2014anything you can do to eat more of them is a good thing. Even if that means blending them frozen with a bunch of rum and lime juice. Which, honestly, is my second-favorite thing about traveling.\n\n_**The Dirty Dozen (and the Clean Fifteen)**_\n\nEVERY YEAR, THE ENVIRONMENTAL WORKING GROUP _(EWG.ORG)_ COMES OUT WITH A LIST, THE DIRTY DOZEN, OF PRODUCE THAT YOU SHOULD BUY ORGANIC, IF POSSIBLE, DUE TO HIGH LEVELS OF PESTICIDE RESIDUES IN CONVENTIONAL PRODUCTS. IT ALSO PRODUCES A LIST OF CONVENTIONALLY GROWN FRUITS AND VEGGIES THAT HAVE LESS PESTICIDE RESIDUES\u2014THESE ARE THE CLEAN FIFTEEN. ORGANIC PRODUCE IS NOT PESTICIDE FREE, HOWEVER, SO NO MATTER WHAT KIND OF PRODUCE YOU BUY, BE SURE TO WASH IT THOROUGHLY BEFORE YOU COOK WITH OR EAT IT. USE A BRUSH TO SCRUB PRODUCE WITH THICK SKINS, SUCH AS POTATOES AND APPLES, AND RINSE ANYTHING YOU'RE NOT GOING TO PEEL, ESPECIALLY CELERY AND LEAFY GREENS. IF YOU WANT TO BE EXTRA SUPER CAREFUL, FILL A SPRAY BOTTLE WITH A SOLUTION THAT'S ROUGHLY THREE PARTS VINEGAR TO ONE PART WATER, AND SPRAY PRODUCE BEFORE RINSING IT UNDER RUNNING TAP WATER FOR UP TO THIRTY SECONDS.\n\nI REALLY CAN'T GET ENOUGH FRUIT, AND THERE ARE SO MANY WAYS TO ENJOY IT. I LOVE DESSERT, BUT I DON'T LOVE TO FOLLOW A MEAL WITH ANYTHING TOO RICH OR TOO HEAVY; FRUIT-BASED DESSERTS ARE MY GO-TOS FOR ENTERTAINING, BUT FOR FAMILY DINNERS OR EVEN WHEN I'M EATING ALONE, I LIKE TO END A MEAL WITH FRESH SUMMER FRUIT WITH A TINY BIT OF CREAM AND JUST A DUSTING OF WHITE SUGAR OR A DRIZZLE OF HONEY. IN WINTER, PEAR OR APPLE SLICES SAUT\u00c9ED IN BUTTER AND SUGAR OR A COMPOTE MADE OF FROZEN FRUIT IS LOVELY WITH A BIT OF ICE CREAM. DRIED FRUIT SIMMERED AND PLUMPED IN A SYRUP OF WINE OR BRANDY AND SUGAR CAN BE LOVELY WITH A PIECE OF SIMPLE POUND CAKE. AND ANY TIME OF YEAR, YOU CAN'T GO WRONG WITH A FEW PIECES OF FRUIT AND A CHUNK OF CHEESE. FRUIT: AN OPPORTUNITY TO EAT MORE CHEESE. SEIZE IT.\n\nBORSCHT WITH BEETS & RED CABBAGE\n\nMost of the year, we eat our beets raw and shredded over salads, roasted (again, on salads), or pickled. But for the 3 or 4 months it's just non-stop cold and rainy on the west coast, we take our beets brothy and warm, with a dollop of thick, full-fat yogurt and a smattering of caraway seeds and fresh dill. Nutritionally rich and calorically sparse, it's a nice thing to eat on weeknights in December when it feels like every weekend is a two-day butter binge. I like to make this on Sunday, as it's a bit time-consuming, and serve it for dinner the next day.\n\n6\n\nSERVINGS\n\nSTOCK\n\n2 tsp whole black peppercorns\n\n1 tsp caraway seeds\n\n1 lb (500 g) beets, scrubbed clean but not trimmed or peeled (3 to 4, about the size of baseballs)\n\n2 bay leaves\n\n\u00bd bunch fresh parsley\n\n1 head garlic, halved crosswise\n\n1 tbsp kosher salt\n\nSOUP\n\n2 tbsp olive oil\n\n2 carrots, quartered lengthwise and chopped\n\n2 celery stalks, quartered lengthwise and chopped\n\n1 onion, finely chopped\n\n3 garlic cloves, minced\n\n2 cups (500 mL) shredded red cabbage\n\n\u00bc\u2013\u00bd cup (60\u2013125 mL) fresh lemon juice (start with \u00bc cup, and adjust to taste)\n\n2 tbsp brown sugar\n\nsalt and pepper, to taste\n\n\u00be cup (175 mL) yogurt or sour cream, for garnish\n\n3 tsp caraway seeds and\/or 6 tbsp chopped fresh dill, for garnish\n\nIn a stock pot or other large pot, heat peppercorns and caraway seeds on medium-high heat for 2 to 3 minutes, or until spices are fragrant and caraway seeds start to pop. Add 4 qt\/L water, beets, bay leaves, parsley, garlic, and salt, and cook, partially covered, for 90 minutes.\n\nRemove beets to a bowl of icy water, and strain liquid from pot through a fine-mesh strainer into a container you can pour easily from. Discard solids. Peel, trim, then dice beets. Set aside.\n\nIn a large pot on medium-high, heat oil and add carrots, celery, onions, and garlic. Saut\u00e9 until glistening, then add beets, cabbage, and reserved stock. Reduce heat to medium, add \u00bc cup (60 mL) lemon juice, and simmer for 20 to 25 minutes, until cabbage is soft.\n\nTaste, adding sugar and additional lemon juice as desired. Adjust seasonings, and serve with a dollop of yogurt or sour cream and a sprinkling of caraway seeds or fresh dill.\n\nBROCCOLI WITH TOFU & PEANUTS\n\nFor us, this dinner is the ultimate in cheap eats. It's rich in fiber and protein, colorful, fast, and so jam-packed with sweet, salty, spicy flavors that it manages to feel a little indulgent. Tip: If your peanut butter contains added sugar, scale back on the sugar in this recipe a bit and then adjust the sweetness to your taste. Serve over rice.\n\n4\n\nSERVINGS\n\n1 cup (250 mL) unsalted peanuts\n\n1\u00bd lb (750 g) broccoli, chopped into bite-sized pieces\n\n2 tbsp peanut or vegetable oil\n\n1 shallot, minced\n\n3 cloves garlic, minced\n\n1 tbsp minced fresh ginger\n\n\u00bd cup (125 mL) peanut butter\n\n\u00bd cup (125 mL) soy sauce\n\n1 tbsp sesame oil\n\n1 tbsp Sriracha or favorite hot sauce, to taste\n\n1 to 2 tbsp dark brown sugar\n\n1 tbsp fresh lime juice\n\n\u00bd tsp fresh ground pepper\n\n1 red bell pepper, diced\n\n12-oz (350-g) pkg firm tofu, cubed\n\nIn a dry frying pan on medium heat, toast peanuts, and watch them diligently. In 3 to 4 minutes, when they start to smell like roasted peanuts, turn golden, and sweat, remove from heat and set aside. Divide into two piles and chop one pile.\n\nBlanch broccoli by plunging it into a pot of boiling water. Boil for 2 minutes, then remove immediately and immerse in ice water for 1 minute. Reserve \u00bd cup (125 mL) blanching water and set aside.\n\nIn a large frying pan, heat peanut oil on medium-high heat. Add shallots, garlic, and ginger, and saut\u00e9 until just golden, about 2 minutes. In a bowl, combine peanut butter, soy sauce, sesame oil, Sriracha, sugar, and lime juice. Taste. If it needs more sugar, add more. Add pepper and taste again. If it needs to be spicier, add more Sriracha.\n\nAdd bell peppers and tofu to pan. Stir \u2153 peanut sauce into pan. Add \u00bc cup (60 mL) blanching water; if it is still too thick, add more water, 1 tbsp at a time, to thin. Cook until peppers have softened, about 2 minutes. Add broccoli and remainder of peanut sauce. Stir to coat, then toss in whole peanuts. Sprinkle with chopped peanuts before serving.\nCORN & ASPARAGUS SALAD\n\nThis is summer in a bowl! It's a great mix of textures and the colors are fabulous. Make it a couple of hours before serving, as it's best when cold. It's easy, fast, and a nice accompaniment to summer potlucks and beach picnics. Fresh and tasty, too.\n\n4\u20136\n\nSERVINGS\n\n1 lb (500 g) asparagus, trimmed, chopped into bite-size pieces\n\n2 large cobs corn, about 1\u00bd cups (125mL) kernels, fresh or frozen\n\n2 cups (500 mL) diced fresh tomatoes\n\n2 diced roasted piquillo or red bell peppers\n\n1 large shallot, minced\n\n\u00bd cup (125 mL) garlic scapes or scallions, finely chopped\n\n\u00bd cup (125 mL) grated Parmesan cheese\n\n1 lemon, zest and juice\n\n\u00bc cup (60 mL) extra-virgin olive oil\n\n2 tbsp minced fresh basil\n\n1 tsp chili flakes\n\n1 tsp kosher salt\n\n\u00bd tsp ground black pepper\n\nIn a large pot of boiling water, blanch asparagus for about 1 minute. Cool in an ice-water bath until cold.\n\nScrape corn from cobs into a large bowl or thaw frozen corn. Stir in tomatoes, peppers, shallots, garlic scapes, cheese, lemon zest, and asparagus.\n\nIn a small bowl, whisk lemon juice, olive oil, basil, chili flakes, salt, and pepper. Taste and adjust balance of flavors as needed. Pour over vegetables and toss to coat. Serve immediately.\nCUCUMBER SALAD\n\nMy mom always made this when we were going to eat salmon. Her version used dill and sour cream, but the effect was the same\u2014a creamy, cool side dish to go with something rich, a way to balance the flavors on the plate. Depending on what herbs you use, this is lovely with fish (dill or parsley), spicy foods such as curry (mint and cilantro), or fried chicken (parsley and cilantro).\n\n4\u20136\n\nAS A SIDE\n\n1 English cucumber, sliced into very thin rounds\n\n1 small onion, sliced paper-thin\n\n1 tsp salt\n\n\u00bd cup (125 mL) chopped herbs (parsley, mint, dill, or cilantro)\n\n\u00bd cup (125 mL) Greek-style yogurt\n\n1 lime, zest and juice\n\n\u00bd tsp cumin seeds\n\nground black pepper, to taste\n\nIn a large bowl, combine cucumber and onion slices and sprinkle with salt. Toss to coat. Cover, and place in refrigerator for 2 hours.\n\nDrain liquid from veggies. Add herbs, yogurt, lime juice and zest, cumin seeds, and pepper, and toss to coat. Cover and place in refrigerator until serving time. Serve chilled, garnished with more chopped herbs.\n\nCURTIDO\n\nCurtido is somewhere between coleslaw and kimchi\u2014it's a Salvadoran fermented cabbage condiment, usually served with pupusas, thick corn tortillas stuffed with cheese, beans, or meat. This is a short-cut, a recipe you can make when you want the idea of curtido, but don't have time to let the cabbage succumb to science. At my local pupusa spot, this is served as a slaw. In El Salvador, restaurants often kept it on the tables in big plastic jars with spoons inside so diners could help themselves.\n\n6\n\nCUPS (1.5 ML)\n\n1 lb (500 g) napa cabbage, thinly sliced\n\n1 lb (500 g) carrots, peeled and grated\n\n1 onion, halved and thinly sliced\n\n6 tbsp apple cider vinegar\n\n2 tsp brown sugar\n\n1 tsp salt\n\n1 tsp ground black pepper\n\n1 tsp dried oregano\n\nIn a large bowl, toss cabbage, carrots, and onions to combine well.\n\nIn a small bowl, whisk vinegar and 2 tbsp water, brown sugar, salt, pepper, and oregano until sugar has dissolved.\n\nPour dressing over veggies and mix, using your hands. Squeeze veggies as you mix so that cabbage really takes on flavor of dressing.\n\nRefrigerate for at least 1 hour\u2014ideally for 24 hours\u2014before serving.\nDELICATA TACOS WITH CORN\n\nDelicata squash, sometimes sold as \"potato squash\" or \"sweet potato squash\" is perfect for weeknight cooking\u2014you don't need to peel it, and it cooks pretty quickly. Its flesh is sweet and a bit dryer than butternut squash, which makes it perfect for tacos\u2014it soaks up the flavors around it while maintaining great taste and texture. Have friends over and make a batch of these and a batch of Lentil Tacos (p. 92); you'll never feel more virtuous and healthy after Taco Night.\n\n4\n\nSERVINGS\n\n3 tbsp canola oil\n\n1 onion, diced\n\n4 garlic cloves, minced\n\n2 jalape\u00f1o peppers, seeded and minced\n\n2 tsp cumin seeds\n\n1 lb (500 g) delicata squash, trimmed, seeded, and diced\n\n1 tsp chili powder\n\n\u00bd tsp salt\n\n\u00bd tsp ground black pepper\n\n\u00bd cup (125 mL) beer, such as lager\n\njuice of \u00bd lemon\n\n2 cups (500 mL) fresh or frozen corn kernels\n\n4 scallions, chopped\n\n20 fresh 6-in (15-cm) corn tortillas\n\nACCOMPANIMENTS\n\n\u00bd head shredded lettuce or cabbage\n\n2 cups (500 mL) grated aged cheddar cheese\n\n1 cup (250 mL) salsa (homemade or store-bought)\n\n4 limes (cut into eighths)\n\nAvocado Cream (p. 93)\n\nPico de Gallo (p. 188)\n\nIn a large pan on medium-high, heat oil. Add onions, and saut\u00e9 until just translucent, about 4 minutes. Add garlic, jalape\u00f1o peppers, and cumin seeds. Saut\u00e9 until peppers have softened, about 5 minutes.\n\nAdd squash, chili powder, salt, and pepper. Stir to coat veggies with spices. Stir in beer, lemon juice, and corn. Reduce heat to medium. Cook until squash has softened, about 10 minutes. Stir occasionally to prevent squash from browning too much.\n\nAdd scallions in last 2 minutes of cooking. To serve, spoon filling into warmed tortillas (see below), and top with accompaniments to taste.\n\n_Microwave:_ warm tortillas 4 at a time, wrapping them in a damp paper towel, then cook on high for 30 to 40 seconds, until soft and pliable.\n\n_Oven:_ Wrap six tortillas in foil and place on a baking sheet in 350\u00b0F (180\u00b0C) oven for 15 to 20 minutes. A standard sheet pan will comfortably hold about three of these bundles.\nGRANDMA SALAD\n\nNick's grandmother makes something his family calls \"Beppe Slaw\"; my grandmother made something similar. Basically, it's iceberg lettuce and onions in a creamy dressing, and it goes well with most things. Our version is lighter on the mayonnaise and uses avocado for extra creaminess. This one doesn't keep, so insist that everyone has salad and lots of it. You know, like your grandma would have.\n\n6\n\nSERVINGS\n\n2 tbsp Greek yogurt\n\n1 tbsp mayonnaise\n\n1 tbsp white vinegar\n\n1 tsp grainy Dijon mustard\n\n\u00bd tsp smoked paprika\n\n\u00bd tsp honey\n\n\u00bd tsp coarse salt\n\n1 head iceberg lettuce, torn into rough pieces\n\n4 scallions, finely chopped\n\n2 medium avocados, diced\n\nIn a large bowl, whisk together yogurt, mayonnaise, vinegar, mustard, paprika, honey and salt. Taste and adjust seasonings as needed.\n\nAdd lettuce, scallions, and avocados to bowl. Toss to coat lettuce in dressing, and serve immediately.\nHONEY MUSTARD BEETS\n\nGiven how vibrantly colored and dense they are, it's no wonder beets are good for you. They're high in fiber! They're rich in nutrients! That have antioxidant properties and are kind to your liver! Eat more beets. If you think you don't like them, try them again\u2014this sweet and sour dressing brings out the best in them.\n\n4\n\nSERVINGS\n\n1 lb (500 g) beets\n\n2 tbsp apple cider vinegar\n\n1 tbsp honey\n\n1 tsp olive oil\n\n1 tsp grainy Dijon mustard\n\n\u00bd tsp salt\n\n\u00bc tsp ground black pepper\n\nIn a medium pot covered with a tight-fitting lid on high heat, bring beets in salted water to a boil. Boil beets until tender, about 30 to 40 minutes. (If beets are quite large, this can take up to 1 hour.)\n\nDrain beets. Place in a bowl of cold water, and shuck off skins once beets are cool enough to handle. Slice beets thinly.\n\nIn a small bowl, whisk apple cider vinegar, honey, olive oil, mustard, salt, and pepper. Pour over still-warm beets, mixing well to coat each slice. Refrigerate until completely cooled. Serve cold, first giving beets another quick stir to coat in dressing.\nKIMCHI & SOFT TOFU STEW\n\nWith a toddler in daycare, we get just about every virus that goes around from October through March. These are congested times. This stew is magic because it'll clear your sinuses, warm your bones, and get itself onto your table and into your mouth in under 20 minutes. It pairs nicely with slippers and sweatpants.\n\n4\n\nSERVINGS\n\n2 tbsp canola oil\n\n2 tsp sesame oil\n\n1 onion, diced\n\n4 garlic cloves, roughly chopped\n\n2 cups (500 mL) cabbage kimchi, roughly chopped\n\n3 tbsp gochujang sauce\n\n2 tbsp fish sauce\n\n2 tbsp corn or tapioca starch\n\n1 tsp coarse salt\n\n1 lb (500 g) soft or silken tofu\n\njuice of \u00bd lemon\n\n4 scallions, chopped\n\nIn a large pan on medium-high heat, heat canola and sesame oils. Add onions and saut\u00e9 until edges are just browned, about 4 minutes. Stir in garlic, kimchi, and gochujang. Cook for 2 to 3 minutes, until bottom of pan begins to look dry.\n\nAdd fish sauce, 4 cups (1 L) water, and a slurry made of starch and additional 2 tbsp water. Add salt, and bring mixture to a simmer. Add tofu by heaping tablespoonful, then reduce heat to medium. Simmer for 10 minutes.\n\nAdd lemon juice, stirring gently. Taste and adjust seasonings as needed. Sprinkle scallions over and serve hot in bowls.\n\nKIMCHI PANCAKES\n\nThere's a Korean market two blocks from my apartment that makes their own kimchi and tofu, among other things, and it's really, really good. This recipe takes under 10 minutes to make, if you've got kimchi, and it hits several satisfying notes\u2014it's fried, which is always good; it's spicy and tangy, with few ingredients; and it uses kimchi, which is one of those fabulously probiotic things that contributes to a healthy microbiome and overall sense of well-being. It pairs nicely with That Korean Restaurant Soup (p. 199) and is also good with cold soju (a Korean spirit) or a handful of vodka sodas with lime. _(Note:_ these may diminish benefits to microbiome; I'm a lush, not a scientist.) Serve with Sauce for Kimchi Pancakes, below.\n\n2\n\nSERVINGS AS DINNER\n\n4\n\nFOR LUNCH\n\n2 cups (500 mL) cabbage kimchi, chopped\n\n2 eggs\n\n1 cup (250 mL) all-purpose flour\n\n1 tsp sesame oil\n\n\u00bd tsp salt\n\n\u00bd cup (125 mL) club soda\n\n3 tbsp vegetable oil\n\nSAUCE FOR KIMCHI PANCAKES\n\n2 tbsp ketjap manis\n\n2 tbsp rice vinegar\n\n2 tsp minced ginger\n\n2 garlic cloves, minced\n\nIn a large bowl, combine kimchi, eggs, flour, sesame oil, and salt. Stir together until thoroughly combined. Add soda, and gently fold in. You want to keep as many bubbles as you can, because bubbles make this light.\n\nIn a large frying pan on medium-high, heat oil. Divide batter into 4 pancakes of roughly equal size. Cook for about 3 minutes per side, until golden and crispy, especially around edges. Cut pancakes into quarters to serve.\n\nIn a small bowl, whisk together all ingredients for sauce. Serve in ramekins or little bowls wide enough to dip a slice of pancake. Double recipe if serving 4 people.\n\nMUSHROOM COTTAGE PIE\n\nIf you grew up eating Shepherd's Pie and haven't gone back to it for complicated Shepherd's Pie-hating reasons, this one might just bring you back. It's savory and rich, and goes very well with red wine. We serve this with Grandma Salad (p. 182).\n\n4\u20136\n\nSERVINGS\n\n2 lb (900 g) Yukon Gold or other yellow-fleshed potatoes, diced\n\n\u00bd cup (125 mL) grated Parmesan cheese\n\n4 tbsp extra-virgin olive oil, divided\n\n\u00bc cup (60 mL) + 1 tbsp milk, divided\n\n2 eggs\n\n1 tbsp butter\n\n1 shallot, minced (about 2 tbsp)\n\n3 garlic cloves, minced\n\n1 cup (250 mL) finely chopped leeks (white and light-green parts only, about 2 medium leeks)\n\n2\u00bd lb (1 kg) mushrooms, assorted varieties if possible, roughly chopped\n\n2 tsp chopped fresh thyme\n\n1 tbsp all-purpose flour\n\n\u00bd cup (125 mL) dry red wine\n\n2 tbsp soy sauce\n\n1 tbsp grainy Dijon mustard\n\n1 tsp Worcestershire sauce\n\n1 tsp ground black pepper\n\n\u00bc tsp ground nutmeg\n\n1 tbsp chopped fresh parsley\n\nsalt, to taste\n\nIn a large pot of water on high heat, boil potatoes until tender, 15 to 20 minutes. Drain and mash or process through a potato ricer or food mill until smooth. Whip in cheese, 2 tbsp olive oil, \u00bc cup (60 mL) milk, and eggs. Taste and adjust seasonings as needed. Set aside.\n\nPreheat oven to 400\u00b0F (200\u00b0C).\n\nIn a large frying pan on medium-high, heat remainder of oil and butter until butter begins to bubble and foam. Stir in shallots and garlic, and saut\u00e9 for 2 minutes, until translucent. Add leeks and saut\u00e9 until shallots have melted down, about 3 minutes.\n\nAdd mushrooms and thyme to pan, stirring to coat. Allow mushrooms to sweat, about 5 minutes, stirring occasionally. Sprinkle flour over mushrooms and mix until flour is absorbed. Stir in wine, soy sauce, mustard, Worcestershire sauce, pepper, and nutmeg. Reduce heat to medium and allow to thicken slightly, 2 to 3 minutes. Stir in parsley and remainder of milk. Taste and adjust seasonings as needed.\n\nRemove mushrooms from heat and pour into a 1\u00bd- to 2-qt\/L casserole dish. Top with mashed potato mixture, spreading to cover completely.\n\nBake for 20 to 25 minutes, until potatoes are golden on top and mushroom sauce is bubbling out from around sides.\nPEAS & CARROTS\n\nPeas and carrots are the simplest thing, but so easy to half-ass. It doesn't take any longer to make peas and carrots with a little bit of care, and the payoff is that you get a simple, colorful, and flavorful side dish out of stuff you just have in the refrigerator and freezer anyway. This dish is more than the sum of its parts, with all the benefits of nostalgia and visual appeal. It's also fairly universal\u2014serve it with grilled meat, Thanksgiving dinner, or as a side to any casserole.\n\n4\n\nSERVINGS\n\n1 tbsp butter\n\n1 tbsp olive oil\n\n2 cups (500 mL) chopped carrots, \u00bc-in (6-mm) thick\n\n2 cups (500 mL) frozen peas\n\n\u00bd cup (125 mL) chopped fresh parsley\n\n2 tbsp chopped fresh mint\n\nsalt and pepper, to taste\n\nIn a medium frying pan on medium-high, heat butter and oil until butter melts and begins to bubble. Add carrots, and cook until just soft, stirring frequently, 6 to 8 minutes. Add peas and cook for an additional 5 minutes. Peas should be soft but still bright.\n\nStir in parsley, mint, salt, and pepper. Taste, and adjust seasonings as needed.\nPICO DE GALLO\n\nPico de gallo is best made in September or October, when tomatoes are bursting their skins, they're so ripe and ruddy. If you have a food processor, use it; this does not require uniform chopping. It's supposed to be juicy, a little messy, and a lot flavorful.\n\n3\n\nCUPS (700 ML)\n\n4 plum or Roma tomatoes, chopped, about 2 cups (500 mL)\n\n1 small red onion, finely chopped\n\n1 garlic clove, minced\n\n1 jalape\u00f1o pepper, seeded and minced\n\n1 lime, zest and juice\n\n1 tbsp olive oil\n\n\u00bd tsp salt\n\n\u00bd tsp ground black pepper\n\nIn a large bowl, combine all ingredients. Refrigerate for 1 hour before serving. Taste and adjust seasonings as needed.\nPOTATO & KALE QUESADILLAS\n\nEvery culture has some twist on potatoes and cabbage; for the Dutch, it's _boerenkool_ \u2014a mix of potatoes and kale, which often comes in cans. Nick ate this throughout his childhood, usually with sausage and as much butter as possible. My mother-in-law still keeps cans of it in her pantry, mostly for my nephews. Here, fresh potatoes and kale fill tortillas for a vegetarian-friendly take on quesadillas. To make it really Dutch, serve with a side of chilled applesauce.\n\n8\n\nSERVINGS\n\n3 tbsp olive oil, divided\n\n1 large onion, diced\n\n4 medium Russet potatoes, peeled and diced\n\n4 packed cups (1 L) finely chopped kale\n\n2 garlic cloves, minced\n\n\u00bd cup (125 mL) plain yogurt\n\n\u00bc tsp ground nutmeg\n\n\u00bc tsp cayenne pepper\n\nsalt, to taste\n\n8 12-in (30-cm) whole wheat flour tortillas\n\n2 cups (500 mL) shredded Gouda cheese\n\nIn a frying pan on medium-high heat, place 2 tbsp olive oil. Add onions and saut\u00e9 for 3 to 4 minutes, until onions begins to soften and become fragrant. Reduce heat to medium-low and cook for 25 to 30 minutes more, or until onions have caramelized and are deeply browned.\n\nMeanwhile, bring a large pot of water to a boil on medium-high heat. Add diced potatoes and cook for 10 to 20 minutes, until tender when pierced with a fork.\n\nStir chopped kale into pot and cook for 3 minutes more, or until kale begins to become tender. Drain.\n\nMash potatoes with remainder of olive oil, garlic, and yogurt. Season with nutmeg, cayenne pepper, and salt.\n\nIn a nonstick frying pan on medium-high heat, place a tortilla. Place \u215b of potato mixture on one side of tortilla, then \u215b of cheese. Top with \u215b of caramelized onions. Cook for 2 to 4 minutes, fold tortilla over to close, flip to other side, and cook another 2 to 4 minutes, until cheese has melted. Repeat with remainder of tortillas and fillings until used up.\nRICE NOODLE SALAD WITH ALL THE VEGGIES\n\nThis is my summer super lunch\u2014it's cool, it's healthy, and it uses a little bit of everything, so you can make it with whatever's popping up in your garden. You can sub any of this out for other things\u2014I like to switch the tomato for a mango when the price is right. It's surprisingly filling, but it won't weigh you down; keep your energy up by pairing with a tall glass of iced green tea.\n\n4\n\nSERVINGS\n\nDRESSING\n\n_Makes about \u00be cup (375 mL)_\n\n3 tbsp fish sauce\n\n3 tbsp rice vinegar\n\n2 tbsp honey\n\n1 tbsp sambal oelek\n\n1 tbsp sesame oil\n\n1 lime, zest and juice\n\n1 garlic clove, minced\n\nSALAD\n\n10-oz (300-g) rice vermicelli\n\n4 lettuce leaves, sliced into thin ribbons\n\n1 bell pepper, quartered and thinly sliced on the diagonal\n\n1 tomato, quartered and diced\n\n1 celery stalk, thinly sliced\n\n\u00bd English cucumber, quartered and diced\n\n1 beet, peeled, trimmed, and grated\n\n1 carrot, peeled, trimmed, and grated\n\n1 large or 2 small avocados, halved and thinly sliced\n\n4 scallions, finely chopped\n\n\u00bd cup (125 mL) chopped fresh cilantro\n\n4 tsp chopped fresh mint\n\n\u00bd cup (125 mL) peanuts, roasted and roughly chopped\n\nIn a jar with a lid, combine dressing ingredients with 2 tbsp water, and shake. Taste and adjust seasonings as needed. Set aside.\n\nIn a large bowl, place rice vermicelli. Fill up kettle and let it come to a boil. Pour boiled water over noodles and let sit until softened, 2 or 3 minutes. Drain noodles, them add to bowl of very cold water until cool enough to touch, but not ice cold, 15 to 20 seconds. Drain again, and return noodles to large bowl.\n\nShake up dressing again, then spoon 2 tbsp over noodles, tossing to coat. Divide noodles between 4 serving bowls.\n\nPlace shredded lettuce over noodles. Arrange remainder of veggies around bowl. Sprinkle with scallions, then herbs. Finish with peanuts. Pour remainder of dressing evenly over four bowls.\n\nIN THE DEAD OF WINTER, THIS DRESSING FINDS NEW LIFE AS A SAUCE FOR ROASTED OR STEAMED BROCCOLI, CAULIFLOWER, OR KALE. SIMPLY TOSS COOKED BRASSICAS IN A FEW TABLESPOONS OF DRESSING, AND SERVE SPRINKLED WITH TOASTED SESAME SEEDS. IT WILL LIVEN UP YOUR PLATE AND YOUR MOOD!\n\nROASTED ALOO GOBI\n\nTo be honest, this one requires the potatoes only if you feel like it\u2014you could make it with just cauliflower and it would still be fabulous. But the potatoes make it a bit more filling, and I suppose one cannot live on cauliflower alone. (Says Nick, though he doesn't love cauliflower like I do.) Serve this with rice or Chana Masala (p. 87), a dollop of yogurt, and a squish of fresh lime.\n\n2\u20134\n\nSERVINGS\n\n2 lb (900 g) cauliflower, trimmed and chopped into florets\n\n1 lb (500 g) Russet potatoes, diced\n\n2 plum or Roma tomatoes, diced, about 1 cup (250 mL)\n\n\u00bd cup (125 mL) plain Greek or other full-fat yogurt\n\n1 tbsp olive oil\n\n4 garlic cloves, minced\n\n2 tsp sambal oelek\n\n1\u00bd tsp salt\n\n1 tsp minced fresh ginger\n\n1 tsp cumin seeds\n\n1 tsp garam masala\n\n1 tsp ground turmeric\n\n\u00bd tsp ground black pepper\n\n\u00bd tsp yellow mustard seeds\n\n4 scallions, chopped\n\nPreheat oven to 400\u00b0F (200\u00b0C). Grease a 9\u00d713-inch (3.5-L) baking dish.\n\nIn a large bowl, combine cauliflower florets, diced potatoes, and tomatoes.\n\nIn a small bowl, whisk together yogurt, oil, garlic, sambal oelek, salt, ginger, cumin seeds, garam masala, turmeric, pepper, and mustard seeds. Pour mixture over potatoes and cauliflower, and mix well.\n\nPour veggie mixture into baking dish and roast for 40 to 50 minutes, until veggies are fork-tender and golden. Stir after about 20 minutes, for even cooking. Sprinkle with chopped scallions just before serving.\n\nRoasted Aloo Gobi, Chana Masala (page 87), Cucumber Salad (page 179)\nROASTED RADISHES & GARLIC\n\nRadishes are the first things out of the garden each year, and I plant an unreasonable number of them. If there's a theme to my life in the garden, it's a lack of expectation: I never assume anything will turn up, so whenever anything does, holy crap. While radishes are lovely raw on sandwiches and in salads, I love them roasted and served with a fat, juicy steak. They're sweet and surprising and, even if you don't grow them yourself, wickedly cheap as a side.\n\n4\n\nSERVINGS\n\n2 bunches radishes, greens removed\n\n2 tbsp olive oil\n\n1 head garlic, cloves peeled and separated\n\n2 tsp chopped fresh parsley\n\n2 tsp fresh lemon juice\n\npinch of salt\n\nPreheat oven to 425\u00b0F (220\u00b0C).\n\nTrim each radish, top and bottom, removing roots and tops. Slice in half lengthwise, if radishes are of average radish size, or in quarters if very large.\n\nIn an oven-proof frying pan on medium-high heat, sear radishes quickly in olive oil, no more than 1 minute a side. Add whole garlic cloves.\n\nBake for 15 to 18 minutes, turning radishes and garlic halfway through cooking time, until both sides are deep golden brown.\n\nToss radishes and garlic with parsley, lemon juice, and salt, and serve immediately.\n\n**WHAT SHOULD YOU DO WITH THOSE RADISH GREENS? EAT THEM! RADISH GREENS ARE A GREAT SOURCE OF IRON, VITAMIN C, AND FOLIC ACID. YOU CAN TREAT THEM MUCH THE SAME WAY THAT YOU'D TREAT FRESH SPINACH\u2014WASH THEM, PAT THEM DRY, AND THEN EITHER STEAM (2 MINUTES WITH A BIT OF WINE, STOCK, OR WATER IN A COVERED POT) OR SAUT\u00c9 IN BUTTER WITH GARLIC UNTIL WILTED AND SERVE WITH ROASTED RADISHES. TO STRETCH THIS SIDE DISH, TOSS A BUNCH OF SPINACH, SWISS CHARD, OR KALE INTO THE MIX.**\n\nROASTED TOMATO & GARLIC SOUP\n\nGarlic is the best flavor in the world. And I have no idea how to just eat a little bit of it. Fortunately, I married someone who feels the same way\u2014we could never make out with other people, which is probably for the best. This soup is nice as part of a stinky lunch\u2014pair it with Sardine Panzanella on p. 122 and prepare to enjoy an afternoon alone.\n\n6\n\nSERVINGS\n\n5 medium field tomatoes\n\n3 heads garlic + 3 cloves, peeled\n\n\u00bc cup (60 mL) olive oil + 2 tbsp\n\n1 tsp coarse salt, or to taste\n\n1 medium onion, diced\n\n2 tsp ground black pepper\n\n1 tsp chili flakes, or to taste\n\n\u00bd tsp dried oregano\n\n4 cups (1 L) vegetable or chicken stock\n\n\u00bd packed cup (125 mL) fresh basil leaves\n\n\u00bd cup packed (125 mL) fresh parsley leaves\n\nolive oil, for garnish\n\nLightly grease a 9\u00d713-in (3.5-L) pan. Preheat oven to 300\u00b0F (150\u00b0C).\n\nQuarter tomatoes, and line up in pan. Scatter peeled garlic cloves from 3 heads over pan. Drizzle \u00bc cup olive oil over tomatoes and garlic, and sprinkle 1 tsp coarse salt over. Roast for 90 minutes to 2 hours, until tomatoes have withered and garlic is deeply golden. (You can do this in advance; I like to roast a lot of tomatoes and garlic in the fall and stick them in freezer bags for easy weeknight dinners during the winter.)\n\nIn a large, heavy-bottomed pot on medium-high, heat 2 tbsp olive oil. Add 3 remaining garlic cloves and onions. Saut\u00e9 for about 4 minutes until translucent, then add pepper, chili flakes, and oregano, stirring to coat. Add tomatoes and garlic, scraping up any solids to incorporate.\n\nStir in stock and reduce heat to medium. Simmer for 10 to 15 minutes, until fresh garlic cloves have softened. With an immersion blender or in a stand blender, pur\u00e9e mixture. Be careful when blending hot liquids. Taste and adjust seasonings as needed, then add basil and parsley and pur\u00e9e again. Add water to thin to desired consistency, if needed. Serve drizzled with additional olive oil.\n\nSAVORY FRUIT SALAD\n\nThis is the stuff of pregnancy cravings. I ate it every other day while gestating Hunter. It hits every single note\u2014it's sweet, spicy, salty, and just tart enough, and goes perfectly with fried everything (might I recommend Mustard-Fried Chicken? p. 108). If you have a pregnant person in your life, this may just be the thing to win her over for that time you did that thing wrong. (You did. And you may never know what it was.)\n\n4\n\nSERVINGS\n\nDRESSING\n\n1 tbsp soy sauce\n\n1 tbsp rice vinegar\n\n1 tbsp sesame oil\n\n1 tbsp Sriracha sauce\n\n2 tsp honey\n\n1 lime, zest and juice\n\nSALAD\n\n4 cups (1 L) diced seedless watermelon\n\n1 English cucumber, diced\n\n2 avocados, diced\n\n1 mango, diced\n\n4 scallions, finely chopped\n\n2 tbsp chopped fresh cilantro\n\ntoasted sesame seeds, for garnish\n\nIn a small bowl, whisk together all dressing ingredients. Taste and adjust seasonings as needed.\n\nIn a large bowl, combine watermelon, cucumber, avocado, mango, scallions, and cilantro. Toss with dressing, and sprinkle with sesame seeds. Serve cold.\nSIMPLE GREEN SALAD\n\nI like big, complicated salads, but most of the time at my table, a salad is a thing that goes with other things. Here's my basic recipe for \"lightly dressed greens,\" my simple most-of-the-time side dish. A traditional vinaigrette follows a ratio of 3 parts oil to 1 part acid, but I like the oil scaled back a bit so I can really taste the acidity, especially because this is so plain. Add things, subtract other things\u2014make it to your liking.\n\n6\n\nSERVINGS\n\n2 tbsp extra-virgin olive oil\n\n1 tbsp lemon juice or red wine vinegar\n\n2 tsp grainy Dijon mustard\n\n\u00bd tsp honey\n\n\u00bd tsp coarse salt\n\n\u00bd tsp ground black pepper\n\n1 head green or red leaf lettuce\n\n\u00bd cup (125 mL) roughly chopped fresh soft herbs, such as parsley, dill, mint, or basil\n\nIn a large bowl, whisk together olive oil, lemon juice or vinegar, mustard, honey, salt, and pepper. Taste it. Does it need anything? Add the thing it needs.\n\nWash and dry lettuce and chop into ribbons. In bowl with dressing, toss lettuce with herbs. Leave until just before serving, then toss again to coat lettuce and herbs with dressing.\nSTRAWBERRY SALSA\n\nThis goes well with chips. That alone is probably enough for most people, but for the unconvinced, strawberries have that tart, sort of musky quality that tomatoes take on somewhere between August and late September; this makes them a natural substitution where salsa is concerned. If you don't love cilantro, basil is also fabulous here. Serve over chicken, fish, grilled halloumi, or in a bowl on its own with all the chips you can eat.\n\n3\n\nCUPS (750 ML)\n\n2 cups (500 mL) diced strawberries\n\n1 large avocado, diced\n\n1 large or 2 medium jalape\u00f1o peppers, seeded and minced\n\n3 scallions, finely chopped\n\n\u00bc cup (60 mL) packed fresh cilantro, roughly chopped\n\n1 lime, zest and juice\n\n2 tbsp extra-virgin olive oil\n\n1 tsp freshly ground black pepper\n\n\u00bd tsp sea salt\n\nPlace all ingredients in a large bowl. Toss to combine, and let sit for 30 minutes in refrigerator before serving.\nTHAT KOREAN RESTAURANT SOUP\n\nThere's a Korean restaurant in Vancouver's West End that serves pork belly and banchan, little dishes of sides and condiments that go with the meat and rice. To start, you get a bowl of soup that's very much like the one below, and while it's good with dinner, it's perfect if you're at home in footie pajamas, fighting a cold. If you can't find gochujang, use Sriracha sauce instead.\n\n4\u20136\n\nSERVINGS\n\n1 medium onion, chopped\n\n1 tbsp canola oil\n\n1 tbsp sesame oil\n\n4 garlic cloves, sliced\n\n2 cups (500 mL) diced zucchini\n\n5.5-oz (156-mL) can tomato paste\n\n6 cups (1.5L) chicken or vegetable stock or water\n\n2 tbsp soy sauce\n\n2 tbsp fish sauce\n\n1 to 2 tbsp gochujang sauce\n\njuice of 1 lemon\n\n2 cups (500 mL) diced tomatoes\n\n1 lb (500 g) firm tofu, diced\n\n\u00bd cup (125 mL) chopped scallions\n\n\u00bd cup (125 mL) chopped dried seaweed (optional)\n\nsalt and pepper, to taste\n\nIn a large, heavy-bottomed pot on medium-high heat, saut\u00e9 onions in oils until translucent, about 6 minutes. Add garlic and saut\u00e9 until golden. Add zucchini, tomato paste, and stock or water. _(Note:_ If using stock, you may want to lessen amount of soy and fish sauce, especially if stock is very salty. Definitely start with less and add more to taste.)\n\nAdd soy sauce, fish sauce, gochujang, and lemon juice. Bring to a gentle boil, then reduce to a simmer. Add tomatoes, tofu, scallions, and seaweed (if using), and simmer for 5 to 10 minutes. Taste and adjust seasonings as needed.\nVEGETARIAN POSOLE\n\nPosole is a Mexican soup traditionally made with pork and hominy, a lye-cured corn used in the cuisines of Mexico and the southern United States. It is delicious and hearty and satisfying. This vegetarian version comes together quickly, for a weekend lunch or the first course of a Latin-inspired dinner party. Follow with Lentil Tacos (p. 92).\n\n4\u20136\n\nSERVINGS\n\n1 medium onion, diced\n\n1 cup (250 mL) diced carrot\n\n1 cup (250 mL) diced celery\n\n1 cup (250 mL) diced sweet potato\n\n5 garlic cloves, minced\n\n2 tbsp olive oil\n\n1 jalape\u00f1o pepper, minced\n\n2 tsp ground cumin\n\n1\u00bd tsp chili powder\n\n\u00bd tsp dried oregano\n\n\u00bd tsp ground black pepper\n\n4 cups (1 L) vegetable stock\n\n5.5-oz (156-mL) can tomato paste\n\n28-oz (796-mL) can hominy, rinsed\n\n14-oz (398-mL) can diced tomatoes, including juice\n\n14-oz (398-mL) can black beans, rinsed\n\n1 cup (250 mL) diced red bell peppers\n\n1 lime, zest and juice\n\nsalt, to taste\n\n\u00bd cup (125 mL) chopped cilantro\n\nIn a large pot on medium-high heat, saut\u00e9 onions, carrots, celery, sweet potatoes, and garlic in olive oil until colors have brightened, 2 to 3 minutes. Add jalape\u00f1o, cumin, chili powder, oregano, and pepper, and stir to coat.\n\nStir in vegetable stock and tomato paste, and bring to a gentle boil. Reduce heat to medium. Simmer for 10 to 15 minutes, until sweet potatoes have softened.\n\nAdd hominy, diced tomatoes, black beans, and bell peppers. Stir in lime zest and juice. Taste and adjust seasonings as needed. Just before serving, stir in a handful of cilantro. Sprinkle with additional cilantro for garnish.\nVEGGIE STEW WITH DUMPLINGS\n\nThis is late summer in a pot, and it's endlessly adaptable to what you have on hand. Keep quantities the same, but feel free to make substitutions for what's in season or in the freezer. If you need to, I suggest subbing the green beans for frozen edamame (ones without shells) or lima beans, and the zucchini for red-skinned potatoes or delicata squash. Serve with a simple green salad dressed with oil and lemon.\n\n6\n\nSERVINGS\n\n4 tbsp butter\n\n1 onion, diced\n\n2 cups (500 mL) chopped celery (about 4 stalks)\n\n1 red bell pepper, diced\n\n2 jalape\u00f1o peppers, seeded and chopped (remove membranes for a milder dish)\n\n3 garlic cloves, minced\n\n2 tsp smoked paprika\n\n2 tsp ground cumin\n\n1 tsp dried savory\n\n1 tsp ground black pepper\n\n1 tsp salt\n\n4 cups (1 L) diced zucchini\n\n2 cups (500 mL) chopped green beans\n\n1 cup (250 mL) fresh or frozen corn kernels\n\n4 tbsp all-purpose flour\n\n4 cups (1 L) vegetable or chicken stock\n\n4 scallions, chopped, for garnish\n\nDUMPLINGS\n\n1 cup (250 mL) all-purpose flour\n\n\u00be cup (175 mL) cornmeal\n\n1\u00bd tsp baking powder\n\n\u00bd tsp salt\n\n\u00bd cup (125 mL) grated aged cheddar cheese\n\n1 cup (250 mL) milk + 1 tsp apple cider vinegar\n\n2 tbsp canola oil\n\n1 tsp honey\n\nIn a large, heavy-bottomed pot on medium-high heat, melt butter. When it starts to bubble and foam, add onions, celery, bell and jalape\u00f1o peppers, and saut\u00e9 until colors have brightened, 2 to 3 minutes. Add garlic, paprika, cumin, savory, black pepper, and salt, and cook for another 2 minutes.\n\nAdd zucchini, green beans, and corn. Stir to coat in butter and spices. Stir in flour to coat veggies. Add stock. Bring mixture to a boil, then reduce heat to medium.\n\nMeanwhile, prepare dumpling batter. In a medium bowl, combine flour, cornmeal, baking powder, salt, and cheddar cheese. Mix to combine well.\n\nIn a separate bowl, whisk together soured milk, oil, and honey. Let both mixtures rest separately until stew has come to a boil.\n\nWhen heat is reduced to medium, whisk together dry and wet dumpling ingredients. Drop batter by heaping tablespoons directly into stew. Place dumplings so they have room to spread as they cook.\n\nCover pot with a lid, and cook for 18 to 20 minutes, until dumplings have puffed and spread out over stew, and stew has bubbled up around them. Serve stew and dumplings topped with chopped scallions.\n\nZUCCHINI PARMIGIANA SANDWICHES\n\nI don't know about you, but every year I end up with a dozen enormous zucchinis. I don't even plant them\u2014people just give them to me\u2014my mom, my mother-in-law, friends who have grown more than they ever imagined would in their tiny community garden plots. Nobody ever plants zucchini and ends up with just a couple. It's not a bad problem to have\u2014it fries up deliciously for sandwiches. These are great with cold beer and are best enjoyed on a patio.\n\n6\u20138\n\nSERVINGS\n\n8 buns, such as Kaiser or Calabrese\n\n3 large eggs, beaten\n\n1 tbsp Sriracha or other hot sauce\n\n1 cup (250 mL) bread crumbs\n\nzest of 1 lemon\n\n1 lb (500 g) zucchini, sliced into \u00bd-in (1-cm) rounds (about 24 pieces)\n\n4 tbsp olive oil, for frying\n\nsalt, to taste\n\n3 tbsp butter, at room temperature\n\n3 tbsp olive oil\n\n2 garlic cloves, finely minced\n\n1 tsp chili flakes\n\nsalt and pepper, to taste\n\n1 cup (250 mL) marinara or Red Sauce (p. 165)\n\n1 cup (250 mL) grated Provolone cheese\n\n2 tomatoes, thinly sliced\n\n16 basil leaves\n\nSlice buns in half horizontally and set aside.\n\nIn a large bowl, whisk together eggs and Sriracha.\n\nIn a small bowl, combine bread crumbs with lemon zest, and stir to combine.\n\nDredge zucchini slices first in egg, then in bread crumbs.\n\nIn a large pan on medium-high, heat olive oil. Fry breaded zucchini slices until golden, 90 seconds to 2 minutes per side. Place on a plate lined with a paper towel and sprinkle with salt while still hot.\n\nSet oven to broil.\n\nMeanwhile, in a small bowl, combine butter, olive oil, garlic, chili flakes, and salt and pepper. Taste and adjust seasonings as desired. Divide equally between 8 buns, spreading on top half only. Place buns on a large baking sheet.\n\nPlace 2 to 3 zucchini slices on other half of each bun. Top with 2 tbsp each marinara sauce and Provolone, and place on same baking sheet as top halves.\n\nBroil 2 to 3 minutes, until cheese has melted and buttered half has turned golden.\n\nFinish each sandwich with fresh tomato slices and basil leaves.\n\nFLOUR\n\nBREAD SOUP\n\nFERGAZZA BREAD WITH GARLIC SCAPES\n\nFOCACCIA BREAD\n\nGRANDPA'S RADIO PUDDING\n\nHORSES' ARSES\n\nNATHAN'S ROLLKUCHEN\n\nPEANUT BUTTER BACON FAT COOKIES\n\nPEANUT BUTTER CHOCOLATE CHIP BANANA MUFFINS\n\nRICE & BLUEBERRY MUFFINS\n\nSKILLET CORN BREAD WITH BLUEBERRIES\n\nSPAGHETTI SQUASH MUFFINS\n\nVANILLA SCONES\n\n**_My friend Grace made serious notes and plans and prepared a thorough brief for me before our trip to Paris. We had once gone on a weekend trip with friends to British Columbia's Sunshine Coast, and Grace prepared individual duotangs for five people with everything we'd need to know about ferry rides, clam digging, and red tide, so naturally her preparation for a ten-day trip abroad was considerable._**\n\nAmong her notes on places to go and things to eat were instructions on etiquette, and I recall specifically one point, which I disregarded almost immediately: The French don't eat while walking (or driving, or on the Metro). It would be an embarrassing and obviously touristy move for me to not wait until I was seated somewhere appropriate before cramming food into my face in public. It would be very gauche, and I didn't want the French to think I was gauche. The first day, the day I spent finding my bearings with Grace, I didn't eat and walk; but on the second day, as soon as I stepped out of a boulangerie alone with a bag of still-warm croissants, I broke the rule. I never went back. I have no regrets. I am a tacky tourist with crumbs on my face, and I can't change.\n\nBread is my thing. It's a vehicle for cheese and meat, my other things, which is why it's so essential to my personal happiness. And it doesn't have to be sliced from a loaf; tortillas, cr\u00eapes, dosas, waffles\u2014all of it, I want it, and I don't care that I'd be thinner without it. I'd rather be roly-poly with cinnamon buns than have a thigh gap and no cinnamon buns. Life is short. Mine might be shorter, but it will have been a delicious ride.\n\nI remember my parents saving Folger's coffee tins when I was a kid, and my dad using them to bake cylindrical loaves of homemade bread that we'd spread\u2014still warm\u2014with gobs of butter and my mom's homemade raspberry jam. My parents were busy and it didn't happen often, but when it did I remember wiggling with excitement, the kid version of intoxicated, over the smell of baking bread. The bread, made without the benefit of preservatives, would go stale pretty quickly so we'd have to eat as much of it as we could right away. This was never a problem.\n\nIf it's bread, it's going into my face. Anytime my mom bought croutons, especially the flavored ones, I ate them. When I discovered fried bannock and corn syrup at Mr and Mrs White's house when I was about seven years old, life changed irreparably\u2014I learned you could deep-fry dough. There would be no going back to the way things were before. Fried bread and syrup. Forever. Anytime I was at a friend's house and they ordered Crazy Bread with an order of Little Caesar's Pizza (ham and pineapple, if I was lucky!), I ate most of it. When focaccia bread with oil and vinegar was a big thing in restaurants in the late 1990s, I consumed liters of olive oil and balsamic vinegar, spoiling my dinner on the bread basket every single time.\n\nBread is one of those things that we're all so persnickety about now\u2014think of the gluten, the carbohydrates, the candida! Do we think bread is going to kill us? But what is a bowl of soup without the heel of a crusty loaf to sop up the last dregs of broth too low in the bowl to scrape up with a spoon? Breakfast would be nothing without a piece of buttered toast to dip into a runny, salted egg yolk or two. And a grilled cheese sandwich simply would not exist without two pieces of bread to hold it all together. While bread certainly will add a few pounds to your middle if you eat too much of it (what won't?), it is one of those things that I am not prepared to live without, because it is essential to the ritual of eating. Bread is about culture as much as it is about sustenance, and the joy of eating a piece of warm wheat bread smeared with melting butter or dragged through olive oil is as important to our health as any nutrient.\n\nHealth is bigger than just the sum of calories and vitamins and minerals, and life is about more than the endless pursuit of physical fitness. Like almost everything else, if you ask: Is it good for me? the answer is yes\u2014and also no; it's up to you to find the balance. And if you're on a budget, a bit of bread with dinner can be the difference between wanting more and having enough. The heartier the bread, the better.\n\nIf you're really keen and really frugal, you can make your own bread pretty easily. Books and the Internet abound with endless recipes and tips and tricks to make soft sandwich bread, crusty artisan-style bread, sourdough from homemade starter, and everything else you could possibly ever want or need to know about bread making. I make bread _and_ I buy it, depending on what I'm doing and how much free time I have. I don't use a bread machine because I don't like spending money on appliances that have a single purpose, and I have so little room to store stuff that baking bread is perhaps less convenient than it could be for me. Lately I've been fermenting a milk kefir-based sourdough bread starter on my kitchen counter, and my apartment smells a bit like a not-very-good brewery; this is inconvenient, but I enjoy it.\n\nSpeaking of ferments and sourdough, there is evidence to suggest that sourdough bread is more digestible than regular bread, and that it may not raise blood glucose to the same levels as unfermented wheat breads. Sourdough is the result of a mix of good bacteria and wild yeast; over time, the process of fermentation converts the sugars that occur naturally in flour into lactic acid\u2014that's where the sour part of the sourdough comes from. It's gentler on your gut and definitely tastier in your mouth. Apparently also a source of probiotics, research suggests that sourdough can help you cultivate a healthy microbiome (with regular consumption). Gouda is also probiotic, and you should put the two together. With some butter. In a pan.\n\nBut dough need not be sour for bread to be delicious. I like making focaccia, because I never got over the joy of dipping bread in oil, and I like making quick breads and biscuit breads and bannock, which is as good with strawberry jam as it is with corn syrup. One trick I learned somewhere along the way was to substitute a bit of the water in a yeasted bread recipe for a bit of Nick's open beer (he drinks a lot of pilsners and lagers); I'd never use my own, of course, and Nick doesn't always notice that he's been bilked. The beer makes the bread taste breadier, but it doesn't take much\u2014a quarter cup is plenty.\nBREAD SOUP\n\nI don't break out the good olive oil often, but when I do it's for something simple, like this dish, where the taste of the oil really comes through. This is nice for when it's cold and you just want to be anywhere warm. It's also suitable for a weekend lunch with friends; pair with a loaf of crusty bread and a bit of Lentil Salad (p. 89).\n\n6\u20138\n\nSERVINGS\n\n\u00bc cup (60 mL) extra-virgin olive oil\n\n5 garlic cloves, roughly chopped\n\n\u00bd lb (500 g) stale bread, cubed and toasted (about 4 thick slices)\n\n2 28-oz (796-mL) cans whole tomatoes, juice reserved\n\n\u00bd cup (125 mL) red wine\n\n4 cups (1 L) chicken stock\n\n19-oz (540-mL) can cannellini beans\n\n\u00bd cup (125 mL) grated Parmesan cheese\n\n\u00bd cup (125 mL) chopped fresh parsley\n\n1 tbsp lemon zest\n\n1 tsp ground black pepper\n\nsalt, to taste\n\nIn a large pot on medium-high, heat olive oil. When hot, add garlic and saut\u00e9 until fragrant and lightly golden, about 2 minutes.\n\nMeanwhile, whizz bread cubes in a food processor or blender until they resemble coarse crumbs. Don't grind bread too finely, or you'll end up with a boring texture\u2014and no one wants that.\n\nAdd bread crumbs to oil, and stir to coat. Immediately begin squishing tomatoes into mix, adding juice quickly and scraping bottom of pot to ensure nothing burns. Stir in wine and stock. Reduce heat to medium and simmer, uncovered, for 30 minutes.\n\nAdd beans, cheese, parsley, lemon zest, and pepper. Taste and adjust seasonings as needed. Simmer an additional 5 minutes, until parsley has wilted and soup smells magnificent. Serve drizzled with a little bit more olive oil.\nFERGAZZA BREAD WITH GARLIC SCAPES\n\nThis bread is the best. It's pretty, it's cheesy, it's garlicky\u2014there is nothing that's not completely delightful about it. And as far as I can tell, it's a regional specialty\u2014I've never seen it anywhere but here on the west coast of Canada. It's not fougasse; it's unique. I have eaten it my whole life, usually greedily. If you can't get garlic scapes, use scallions and add another garlic clove.\n\n1\n\nLOAF\n\n1 cup (250 mL) lukewarm water\n\n1 tbsp granulated sugar\n\n1 tsp yeast\n\n3 cups (750 mL) all-purpose flour + additional for kneading\n\n\u00bc cup (60 mL) beer\n\n4 tbsp extra-virgin olive oil, divided\n\n1\u00bd tsp coarse salt\n\n1 tsp dried oregano\n\n\u00bd tsp ground black pepper\n\n1 tbsp sambal oelek, Sriracha sauce, or other chili paste or hot sauce\n\n1 garlic clove, minced\n\n\u00bd cup (125 mL) garlic scapes, chopped\n\n\u00bd lb (250 g) cubed aged cheddar cheese\n\nadditional coarse salt, to sprinkle over loaf\n\nIn a small bowl, combine water with sugar and yeast and let rest for 5 minutes, until yeast is foamy.\n\nIn a large bowl, combine flour with yeast mixture, beer, 1 tbsp olive oil, salt, oregano, and pepper. Mix until a shaggy dough forms, then knead for 8 minutes or until dough is smooth and stretchy. Form dough into a ball. Place into a greased bowl, cover with greased plastic wrap and a dishtowel, and let rest in a warm, draft-free place until doubled in size, about 2 hours.\n\nIn a small bowl, mix 2 tbsp olive oil with sambal oelek and garlic.\n\nOnce dough has risen, spread out over a clean, floured surface. Using a rolling pin, roll it to about 10 \u00d7 14 in (25 \u00d7 35 cm). Paint oil-sambal mixture over dough, leaving about \u00bd in (1 cm) around edges. Sprinkle with garlic scapes and scatter with cheese cubes. Form as tight and firm a roll as you can.\n\nFold edges of roll under, then place into a greased 9 x 5-in (2-L) loaf pan. Cover again, and let rise another 1 to 1\u00bd hours.\n\nPreheat oven to 350\u00b0F (180\u00b0C).\n\nUsing a sharp knife, cut slits into top of loaf. Paint top of loaf with remainder of olive oil, and sprinkle with additional coarse salt. Bake for 45 to 50 minutes. Check bread halfway through baking\u2014turn pan, and if loaf is browning too quickly, cover with foil.\n\nRemove loaf from pan and cool on a rack for at least 1 hour before serving.\n\nRice & Blueberry Muffins (page 221)\nFOCACCIA BREAD\n\nThis was one of the first recipes I ever wrote, and I was so pleased with myself at how it turned out. It's a very basic focaccia bread, and you can tweak the recipe with different herbs or cheese or by topping with tomatoes, grapes, plums\u2014anything you've got that goes well with garlic and cheese. I guess you could sub out the garlic, but that would be no way to live.\n\n1\n\nLOAF\n\n1\u00bd lb (750 g) Yukon Gold potatoes, peeled and quartered\n\n\u00bd tsp sugar\n\n2\u00bc tsp active dry yeast (or 1 packet)\n\n4 cups (1 L) + \u00bc cup (60 mL) flour, divided\n\n1 tbsp + 1 tsp dried basil\n\n1 tsp ground black pepper\n\n1 tbsp + \u00bc tsp coarse salt, divided\n\n\u00bd cup (125 mL) extra-virgin olive oil, divided\n\n4 garlic cloves, roughly chopped\n\n\u00bd cup (125 mL) finely grated Parmesan cheese\n\nIn a small pot of salted water on medium-high, simmer potatoes, uncovered, until just tender, about 10 minutes. Drain 1 cup (250 mL) cooking water into a measuring cup and set aside. Cool potatoes slightly, then mash until smooth.\n\nOnce potato cooking water has cooled to lukewarm, add sugar. Sprinkle yeast over mixture and let stand until foamy, about 5 minutes.\n\nMeasure out 4 cups (1 L) flour into a large bowl. Add 1 tbsp basil, pepper, and 1 tbsp salt. Add mashed potatoes and oil, then pour in yeast mixture. Mix until dough is very soft and sticky.\n\nDrop dough onto a floured surface to begin the awesome task of kneading. This is my favorite part of bread-making, and it's particularly delightful with this bread because of the aroma of basil and olive oil. Knead until dough is quite elastic, about 8 to 10 minutes. If you have a stand mixer with a dough hook, you can probably get away with 5 minutes in the mixer, maybe less, depending on the machine.\n\nScrape dough into a lightly oiled large bowl and cover bowl with oiled plastic wrap. Let dough rise in a draft-free place at warm room temperature until doubled, 2 to 2\u00bd hours.\n\nGenerously oil a 9 x 13-in (3.5-L) baking pan.\n\nPunch down dough (do not knead) and transfer to baking pan, then gently stretch to cover as much of bottom as possible (dough may not fit exactly). Cover dough with oiled plastic wrap and a kitchen towel and let rise in a draft-free place at warm room temperature until doubled, 1 to 1\u00bd hours.\n\nPreheat oven to 375\u00b0F (190\u00b0C).\n\nSprinkle dough with remainder of basil, chopped garlic, cheese, and \u00bc tsp salt, and drizzle with \u00bc cup (60 mL) oil.\n\nBake until center is firm and top and underside golden (lift to check), 25 to 30 minutes. Loosen focaccia from pan with a spatula and slide onto a rack to cool. This bread is best when cooled completely and re-warmed for 10 minutes in oven before serving. Cut into pieces, and serve with olive oil and vinegar, for dipping.\nGRANDPA'S RADIO PUDDING\n\nGrandpa, my dad's father, was a war vet, a proud Canadian, and probably the only good dancer in the gene pool\u2014when we visited him in the hospital after his hip replacement, he was already eager to get back to dancing at the Legion. When Grandpa poured the drinks, the Coke was just for color. He enjoyed food as much as he enjoyed a good drink, and this was his signature dessert. It's called Radio Pudding because he heard the recipe on the radio. No further details were ever given, so the recipe is as good as his.\n\n4\n\nSERVINGS\n\nCAKE\n\n1 cup (250 mL) all-purpose flour\n\n\u00bd tsp salt\n\n1 tbsp cocoa powder\n\n2 tsp baking powder\n\n\u00bd cup (125 mL) granulated sugar\n\n\u00bd cup (125 mL) chopped nuts (or chocolate chips)\n\n\u00bd cup (125 mL) milk\n\n2 tsp melted butter\n\n1 tsp vanilla extract\n\nSAUCE\n\n4 tbsp cocoa powder\n\n\u00bd cup (125 mL) brown sugar\n\nPreheat oven to 350\u00b0F (180\u00b0C).\n\nIn a 1\u00bd qt\/L casserole or baking dish, whisk together flour, salt, cocoa, baking powder, sugar, and nuts or chocolate chips. Stir in milk, butter, and vanilla.\n\nIn a separate bowl, mix cocoa, brown sugar, and 1\u00be cups (375 mL) boiling water. Pour over cake mixture. Do not stir.\n\nBake for 1 hour. Serve hot with ice cream or whipped cream.\n\nHORSES' ARSES\n\nI am not sure where this recipe originated\u2014I don't know how far back it goes. Cuddles used to make these, and Grandpa called them Horses' Arses because, well, I guess if you've seen the back end of a horse, this is kind of what they look like. I don't know. Horses are terrifying, and I don't like getting too close to them. These simple cinnamon buns are fantastic served at breakfast or brunch. I like them on Christmas morning, with a lot of Bailey's in my tea.\n\n12\n\nBUNS\n\n2 cups (500 mL) all-purpose flour\n\n\u00bd tsp salt\n\n4 tsp baking powder\n\n\u00bd tsp cream of tartar\n\n2 tbsp granulated sugar\n\n\u00bd cup (125 mL) cold butter\n\n\u2154 cup (160 mL) milk\n\n\u00bc cup (60 mL) butter, melted\n\n1 cup (250 mL) brown sugar\n\n1 tbsp ground cinnamon\n\nPreheat oven to 425\u00b0F (220\u00b0C). Grease a 9\u00d79-in (2.5-L) baking dish.\n\nIn a large bowl, whisk together flour, salt, baking powder, cream of tartar, and sugar. Drop butter into mix in hunks, and gently work it into dry ingredients. Like many doughs, it's best if butter isn't thoroughly combined\u2014you want mixture to resemble coarse crumbs with a few chickpea-sized pieces of butter.\n\nStir in milk. Turn out onto a floured surface and gently knead dough for about 30 seconds, until it's soft and no longer falls apart or is sticky. Using a rolling pin, roll to about \u00bc in (6 mm) thick.\n\nBrush melted butter over rolled dough, leaving about \u00bd in (1 cm) around edges. Sprinkle brown sugar over dough and press it down so it's not loose. Sprinkle with cinnamon.\n\nRoll dough tightly lengthwise, like a jelly roll. Cut into slices about 1 in (2.5 cm) thick to make 12 buns. Place close together in a prepared baking dish. It's okay if they touch.\n\nBake for 15 to 20 minutes, until golden and melty and fluffy. Serve fresh from pan with cold milk or hot tea or coffee.\nNATHAN'S ROLLKUCHEN\n\nRollkuchen is my brother-in-law Nathan's signature dish. Made from his family's recipe, it's basically a meal of fried dough and watermelon. I know it sounds kind of weird, but it's surprisingly cohesive and sort of genius. We usually luck out and get to have this once each year, usually around pickling season (we pickle together); there's no more refreshing lunch on a sweltering hot day. I bet it would be even better eaten outside. Serve with a dry apple cider or light, cold beer.\n\n6\n\nSERVINGS\n\n2\u20134 cups (500 mL\u20131 L) canola oil\n\n3\u00be cups (925 mL) all-purpose flour, divided\n\n1 tsp baking powder\n\n1 tsp salt\n\n3 eggs, beaten\n\n1 cup (250 mL) heavy cream\n\n1 large watermelon\n\nIn a large, heavy pan, such as a cast-iron frying pan, heat \u00bd in (1 cm) oil to 375\u00b0F (190\u00b0C).\n\nIn a large bowl, whisk together 3\u00bd cups (830 mL) flour, baking powder, and salt. Add eggs and cream, and stir to form a soft dough.\n\nSpread remainder of flour on work surface. Roll dough out to about \u00bc in (6 mm) thick. Cut into strips about 2 in (5 cm) wide by 4 in (10 cm) long, and stab a slit into each slice.\n\nIn hot oil, fry each slice until golden on one side, about 2 minutes, then flip and achieve goldenness on the other side. Drain on paper towels, then serve hot with thick slices of cold watermelon.\n\nPEANUT BUTTER BACON FAT COOKIES\n\nNever discard your bacon fat\u2014the slightly smoky, porky taste of the fat makes peanut butter taste peanut-butterier. Bacon fat is not substantially different, calorically, from butter, though if you have high cholesterol or are trying to cut back on your sodium, make this a special-occasion cookie.\n\n2\n\nDOZEN\n\n\u00bd cup (125 mL) bacon fat\n\n\u00bd cup (125 mL) peanut butter\n\n1 cup (250 mL) light brown sugar\n\n1 egg\n\n1\u00bd (375 mL) cups whole wheat pastry flour\n\n1 tsp baking soda\n\npinch salt\n\nPreheat oven to 350\u00b0F (180\u00b0C).\n\nIn a large bowl, cream bacon fat, peanut butter, and sugar so that color of mixture lightens and texture becomes creamy. Once it's there, add egg, and keep beating.\n\nIn a separate bowl, combine flour, baking soda, and salt. Mix to combine well, then slowly add to peanut butter mixture, beating until all ingredients are combined well.\n\nRoll dough into balls about 1 in (2.5 cm) in diameter. Place about 1 in apart on a cookie sheet, and press tops down with a fork dipped in granulated sugar.\n\nBake for 8 to 10 minutes, and cool for at least 10 minutes on a wire rack before eating.\n\n_**Why whole wheat pastry flour?**_\n\n**PASTRY FLOUR PRODUCES CAKES AND MUFFINS WITH A MORE TENDER CRUMB THAN ALL-PURPOSE FLOUR BECAUSE IT CONTAINS LESS PROTEIN, WHICH PRODUCES LESS GLUTEN IN THE DOUGH OR BATTER. SINCE ORDINARY WHOLE WHEAT FLOUR CAN MAKE BAKED GOODS HEAVY AND DENSE, SUBSTITUTING WHOLE WHEAT _PASTRY_ FLOUR GIVES YOU THE HEALTH AND FLAVOR BENEFITS OF WHEAT BRAN WITH THE BETTER TEXTURE THAT YOU GET FROM PASTRY FLOUR.**\n\nPEANUT BUTTER CHOCOLATE CHIP BANANA MUFFINS\n\nWith his top three flavors represented, these are Hunter's favorite muffins. They're an easy way to use up any bananas going brown on the counter; whatever you lack in bananas, feel free to make up for with applesauce. You may find grabby little paws swiping them off the counter as they cool.\n\n12\n\nMUFFINS\n\n1\u00bd cups (375 mL) whole wheat pastry flour\n\n1 tsp baking soda\n\n1 tsp baking powder\n\n\u00bd tsp salt\n\n1 cup (250 mL) mashed ripe bananas (2 or 3 medium)\n\n\u00bd cup (125 mL) peanut butter\n\n\u00bd cup (125 mL) brown sugar\n\n3 tbsp cocoa powder\n\n1 tsp vanilla extract\n\n1 egg\n\n\u00bc cup (60 mL) canola oil\n\n1 cup (250 mL) semi-sweet chocolate chips\n\n\u00bd cup (125 mL) sunflower seeds\n\n1 tbsp ground flax seeds\n\nPreheat oven to 375\u00b0F (190\u00b0C). Grease a muffin tin, or fill with 12 paper liners.\n\nIn a large bowl, combine flour, baking soda, baking powder, and salt. Set aside.\n\nIn another larger bowl, mix bananas, peanut butter, sugar, cocoa powder, vanilla extract, egg, and oil until thoroughly combined. Stir in chocolate chips, sunflower seeds, and flax seeds. Mix well.\n\nStir dry ingredients into wet ingredients and mix until just combined.\n\nSpoon into prepared muffin tin. Bake for 15 to 20 minutes, until a toothpick inserted into center of muffin comes out clean.\n\nRemove from oven and cool in pan for 5 minutes before turning muffins out onto a wire rack to cool.\nRICE & BLUEBERRY MUFFINS\n\nWhen you end up with an annoying, not dinnerable amount of leftover rice, do not throw it out! Fold it into some muffin batter and squeeze every last drop of usefulness out of it. These muffins are sweet and bright-tasting and, mercifully, Toddler-approved.\n\n12\n\nMUFFINS\n\n1\u00bd cups (375 mL) all-purpose flour\n\n\u00bd cup (125 mL) whole wheat flour\n\n1 tbsp baking powder\n\n\u00bd tsp salt\n\n\u2153 cup (80 mL) packed dark brown sugar\n\n1 cup (250 mL) fresh or frozen blueberries\n\n1 cup (250 mL) cooked rice or other grains\n\n1 small navel orange, zest and juice\n\n\u00bc cup (60 mL) canola oil\n\n1\u00bd cups (375 mL) yogurt\n\n\u00bd cup (125 mL) milk\n\n2 eggs, beaten\n\nPreheat oven to 400\u00b0F (200\u00b0C).\n\nIn a large bowl, combine flours, baking powder, salt, and sugar. Stir until combined. Add berries, rice and orange zest and juice and mix well.\n\nIn a measuring cup, add oil and yogurt, and if cup is big enough, milk.\n\nIn a small bowl, beat eggs. Add both to dry ingredients, one after the other, and stir to combine well. It makes a thick, dense batter, so if you're hand-mixing this, as I did, be vigorous. You don't want to find floury bits at the bottom of bowl.\n\nGrease a muffin pan or line pan with paper liners. Fill cups with batter to top.\n\nBake for 20 to 25 minutes, until a toothpick inserted into the center of a muffin comes out clean. Let sit for 5 minutes before turning out onto a cooling rack.\n\nSKILLET CORN BREAD WITH BLUEBERRIES\n\nCorn bread is different things to different meals, and while I love it with a bowl of chili (p. 96), it's also pretty great on its own for breakfast, with butter and honey. The recipe calls for blueberries, but it works well with blackberries too. Serve with barbecued meats, chili, or anything that's a little smoky and a little sweet.\n\n4\u20136\n\nSERVINGS\n\n\u2154 cup (80 mL) all-purpose flour\n\n\u2154 cup (80 mL) cornmeal\n\n\u00bd tsp baking soda\n\n\u00bd tsp coarse salt\n\n\u00bd tsp ground black pepper\n\n1 cup (250 mL) buttermilk\n\n2 tbsp canola oil\n\n2 tbsp honey\n\n1 egg, beaten\n\n1 cup (250 mL) frozen blueberries\n\nPreheat oven to 375\u00b0F (190\u00b0C). Place a 9-in (23-cm) cast-iron pan in oven to heat.\n\nIn a medium bowl, whisk together flour, cornmeal, baking soda, salt, and pepper.\n\nIn another bowl, whisk together buttermilk, oil, honey, and egg.\n\nWhen oven reaches temperature, pull out pan and spray with oil to lightly grease. Quickly whisk together wet and dry ingredients. Fold in blueberries, then pour mixture into pan.\n\nBake for 20 to 25 minutes, until a toothpick inserted into center comes out clean. Let cool for 15 minutes before cutting into slices.\nSPAGHETTI SQUASH MUFFINS\n\nHunter is picky, but he'll eat muffins. So I bake muffins every two weeks and load them up with nutritious stuff and send them off with him to daycare, where I am assured that he eats them very happily. These make use of the abundance of spaghetti squash I find myself saddled with each year. If you don't have quite enough squash, you can make up the difference with applesauce. These muffins freeze well.\n\n2\n\nDOZEN\n\n2 cups (500 mL) whole wheat pastry flour\n\n1 cup (250 mL) all-purpose flour\n\n1 cup (250 mL) rolled oats (not instant or quick-cooking)\n\n1 cup (250 mL) granulated sugar\n\n1 cup (250 mL) dark brown sugar\n\n1 tbsp ground flax seeds\n\n2 tsp baking soda\n\n2 tsp ground cinnamon\n\n\u00bd tsp ground ginger\n\n\u00bd tsp ground cloves\n\n\u00bc tsp ground nutmeg\n\n\u00bd tsp salt\n\n1\u00bd cups (375 mL) cooked and drained spaghetti squash\n\n1 cup (250 mL) canola oil\n\n4 large eggs, beaten\n\n1 tsp vanilla extract\n\n1 cup (250 mL) chopped walnuts\n\nPreheat oven to 350\u00b0F (180\u00b0C). If you have 2 muffin pans, you are very lucky\u2014grease them both, or line cups with whatever kind of liner you like.\n\nIn a large bowl, combine flours, oats, sugars, flax seeds, baking soda, spices, and salt to mix well.\n\nIn another bowl, mix squash, oil, eggs, and vanilla extract. Fold into dry ingredients until just moistened. Add walnuts and fold again.\n\nSpoon batter into muffin tins until each muffin cup is about \u00be full.\n\nBake for 18 to 20 minutes, until a toothpick inserted in center comes out clean. Let cool for 5 minutes in pan before turning out onto a wire rack to cool completely.\n\n**YOU CAN COOK THE SQUASH WHOLE IN A 400\u00b0F (200\u00b0C) OVEN UNTIL IT'S SOFT, ABOUT 40 TO 50 MINUTES. OR, YOU CAN MICROWAVE IT, WHICH IS FASTER\u2014CUT IT IN HALF, PLACE IN A DISH CUT-SIDE DOWN, AND ZAP FOR 6 TO 8 MINUTES ON HIGH, THEN LET IT COOL FOR A MOMENT. SCOOP OUT AND DISCARD SEEDS. WITH A FORK, SCRAPE FLESH INTO A COLANDER SET IN SINK; DRAIN FOR ABOUT 15 MINUTES, UNTIL COOL ENOUGH TO WORK WITH.**\n\nVANILLA SCONES\n\nThese scones are the result of a tantrum I keep having, wherein I have no other options, am starving, and have to buy a pastry from Starbucks to get me through the morning. _Starbucks, why are your pastries always so stale?_ Like, every single time. Every single one. Also, they cost way too much. And because I can't abide a stale or overpriced scone, I made these. They're good with tea or strong coffee, and maybe jam, preferably on a weekend morning.\n\n16\n\nSCONES\n\n4 cups (1 L) all-purpose flour\n\n\u00bd cup (125 mL) granulated sugar\n\n1 tbsp baking powder\n\n\u00bd tsp salt\n\n\u00be cup (175 mL) cold butter, cubed into whatever size you can squeeze comfortably with fingers\n\n2 large eggs\n\n1 cup (250 mL) cold milk\n\n1 tsp pure vanilla extract\n\nGLAZE\n\n1 cup (250 mL) confectioner's sugar\n\n3\u20134 tbsp milk\n\n\u00bd vanilla bean or \u00bd tsp vanilla extract\n\nPreheat oven to 400\u00b0F (200\u00b0C).\n\nIn a large bowl, combine flour, sugar, baking powder, and salt. Squish in cubes of butter, the way you would if you were making pie crust. You don't want to crumble the butter into nothing\u2014think of peas, and let butter hunks remain about that size, no smaller. The texture depends on it.\n\nIn a separate bowl, beat eggs. Add milk and vanilla. Stir liquid into butter-flour mix, and press gently to form a dough. When dough is a single mass that holds together well, turn out onto a floured surface and cut into 4 equal pieces. Form rounds and cut each quarter further into 4 pieces, making 16 scones in total.\n\nBake on an ungreased cookie sheet for 15 to 18 minutes. If using 2 pans to bake, rotate them at halfway point. Cool scones on wire racks before glazing.\n\nMeanwhile, combine sugar, milk, and vanilla bean. (You can use entire bean, but scones won't be as pretty a color.)\n\nWith a basting brush, paint cooled scones with glaze, which should form a runny, spreadable paste, like Elmer's school glue (and did you know that stuff used to have a minty sort of flavor? It doesn't anymore). Let glaze dry for about 1 hour before serving.\nSUGAR\n\nBLACK FOREST ICE CREAM\n\nBLUEBERRY CRISP\n\nCORONATION GRAPE GRANITA\n\nCUDDLES' BROWN SUGAR SHORTBREAD\n\nLEMON PUDDING\n\nORANGE GRANITA\n\nORANGE UPSIDE-DOWN CAKE\n\nPLUM & BROWN SUGAR SORBET\n\nROASTED PEACH SORBET\n\n**_Is there any ingredient more maligned than sugar? We're cautioned to avoid it, and yet it's insidious\u2014try buying a snack food or packaged meal that's not brimming with sugar or mutant high-fructose sweeteners. Even the sugar-free stuff is terrible; it's loaded with artificial sweeteners, which have been shown to negatively affect insulin levels and have metabolic side effects as well. Some artificial sweeteners even have undesirable digestive drawbacks\u2014let's just say it's not very romantic how every year Nick forgets that his sugar-free Valentine's Day chocolate is sweetened with maltitol and then eats too much of it. Oh, how we laugh. Well, I laugh._**\n\nThe problem with sugar is not its mere existence, but the amount of it that we eat. Sugar exists naturally in many foods, including fruit, vegetables, grains, and milk, and we need sugar in our blood in order to fuel our bodies. Sugar is a problem when we consume too much of it. It's most obvious side effect is weight gain, and studies have shown that in high schools, the availability of sugar-sweetened beverages such as pop and juice improved students' odds of being obese. A diet filled with sugary foods is calorically dense but nutritionally lacking\u2014by replacing whole, healthy foods with sugary processed foods, we can deprive our bodies of essential vitamins and nutrients. In other words, if you fill up on junk, you'll have no room for, like, salad. While sugar isn't the culprit in diseases such as cancer, heart disease, or autoimmune disorders, it may be an accomplice\u2014a tasty one, but definitely something to watch out for.\n\nOf course, if you want to avoid excess sugar (or salt, or anything, really), you need to avoid processed, packaged foods. Cooking for yourself is the best way to monitor your sugar intake.\n\nRecently, many people have been looking to alternative sweeteners to provide the sweetness they crave without having to rely on refined sugars. When Nick was first diagnosed with type 1 diabetes in 2010, I spent a small fortune on things like stevia\u2014a natural calorie-free sweetener with an aftertaste like too much baking soda\u2014and low-glycemic index (low-GI) sweeteners like maple syrup, coconut sugar, raw agave syrup, and brown rice syrup. In hindsight, I realized that anytime you have to buy something sold exclusively at Whole Foods, you should maybe consider whether that's something your budget can sustain long-term.\n\nAccording to the Canadian Diabetes Association, \"the glycemic index is a scale that ranks carbohydrate-rich foods by how much they raise blood glucose (sugar) levels compared to a standard food.\" A low-GI sweetener is one that will raise blood sugar levels more slowly, without the sharp rise and drop that accompanies cane (or beet) sugar. For people with diabetes, prolonged or frequent bouts of high blood sugar are problematic because glucose sticks to red blood cells, which causes problems with the circulatory system, resulting in damage to the eyes, kidneys, and feet. In extreme cases, this can result in blindness, kidney disease, and ulcers and infections of the feet, which can necessitate amputation.\n\nUnfortunately, the trouble with low-GI sweeteners is that they are still sweeteners, and the way that we use sweeteners tends to be in conjunction with carbohydrate-rich foods. So, it's not the sweetener that's the issue; your stomach can't tell the difference between a cinnamon bun sweetened with coconut sugar versus one sweetened with regular sugar. Your body treats a cinnamon bun the same no matter how expensive or trendy the ingredients. It's a bit of a bummer, but also tremendously freeing\u2014it's one less thing to have to think about, you know?\n\nAlternative sweeteners can contain more nutrients than regular old white sugar, so if you still want to use them there's no nutrition-based reason not to. As with all sweeteners, either use them sparingly or abundantly but less often. And remember: just because you sweeten it with maple syrup or coconut sugar or whatever does not mean it's sugar free. You can't fool your belly. Trust me. (Sigh.)\n\nSugar has other problems aside from being a pain in the ass for those of us feeding diabetics and\/or trying not to gain quite so much weight, and these are, I think, far more relevant to most people.\n\nThe market value of sugar can fluctuate wildly, especially when faced with decreased consumer demand. Increasing global preferences for sugar alternatives such as corn-based sweeteners like high-fructose corn syrup and sugar-free sweeteners has had a detrimental effect on the global value of sugar crops. Sugarcane tends to grow in places where the economy does not favor people who work in agriculture. As a result, sugarcane farmers can have a difficult time earning a living wage from their crops. This means that they, in turn, cannot afford to pay a living wage to the people they employ, and so cheap labor becomes the means through which sugarcane is harvested. In many places, cheap labor means child labor.\n\nSugar production falls under World Vision Canada's 3D jobs\u2014work that is dirty, dangerous, or degrading. Children as young as six years old are employed in agricultural jobs that include sugarcane farming and harvesting. Sugarcane can grow up to seven yards (or meters) in height, and is harvested via machete, but not before the fields are set ablaze in order to make it easier to chop the stalks down. In El Salvador, I heard stories of kids and families getting trapped in the sugarcane fields, with no warning that the fields would soon be on fire. It's hard, horrible work; it's dangerous, keeps young kids out of school, and doesn't pay enough to lift anyone out of the cycle of poverty. Families working in low-paying jobs with intense demands on their time, health, and fitness find themselves trapped, generation after generation, in a system of poverty from which they cannot easily escape.\n\nOne solution is to always buy Fairtrade sugar. According to the Fairtrade Canada website ( _fairtrade.ca,_ and see p. 245), farmers who produce Fairtrade certified sugar are guaranteed a minimum price that covers the costs of sustainable production, as well as a premium to invest in social and economic initiatives in their communities. Fairtrade products will cost you a little more, but you can often save a few dollars if you buy them online.\n\nAnother option is to find out where domestically packaged sugar comes from. In Canada, most of our sugar comes from Lantic (Rogers) Sugar. While the Vancouver plant packages cane sugar, most of the other sites in Canada package Canadian-grown sugar from beets. Sugar that comes from cane and beets is pretty much the same once it's been refined down into its most commonly used forms. Sugar beets are grown primarily in Alberta. Check the product packaging to determine where sugar comes from and whether it's from sugarcane or beets.\n\nThe drawback to using North American beet sugar is that sugar beets are a GMO (genetically modified organism) crop developed to be pesticide-resistant. There are well-reasoned arguments on both sides of the GMO debate, and depending upon your position on the issue, choosing beet over cane sugar can be either a no-brainer, or the lesser of two evils. My position on this continues to evolve, but for now I'm hesitant to accept GMO ingredients if there's a non-GMO alternative in another product.\n\nMy preference is for Fairtrade sugar whenever possible, and organic in a pinch. I'll use Canadian beet sugar on occasion as well, because while my ethics around human rights tend to trump price, occasionally price trumps my position on GMOs. That said, I don't have to spend too much on sugar as we don't use much of it\u2014Nick has type 1 diabetes so he can't eat sugary stuff anyway, and I'm not baking a ton just to have to eat it all myself. (Not that I wouldn't, of course...but I shouldn't.) I also use honey, maple syrup, and fruit pur\u00e9es to sweeten some recipes, especially when sugar does not play a critical role in the structural integrity of the finished product.\n\nI love dessert and sugar and carbs (and glazing carbs with sugar), but in the interest of saving money and preserving Nick's feet, I don't make a lot of sweets. So when I do, it's special. Most of the time, I make dessert because we're having company, so many of the recipes in this chapter will be designed to be shared between four or more people. There's something wonderful about finishing a homemade meal for friends with a simple, elegant little sweet. Love is all about a little sweetness, after all.\n\nBLACK FOREST ICE CREAM\n\nOn a budget, a rich, custard-based ice cream can be a bit daunting\u2014it uses up a lot of eggs. Which is why when Mark Bittman's recipe for cornstarch ice cream showed up in the _New York Times_ in 2007, frugal home cooks everywhere embraced the idea wholeheartedly. The concept worked well, but there was room for improvement. My friend Grace figured out that the texture could be richer if she used tapioca starch instead of cornstarch. This adaptation has a nicer mouthfeel, a bit more reminiscent of an egg-custard version. Another benefit of tapioca starch? It's about a third of the price of cornstarch\u2014check the international section of the supermarket.\n\n4\u20136\n\nSERVINGS\n\n\u00bd cup (125 mL) brown sugar\n\n2 tbsp tapioca starch\n\n2 cups (500 mL) heavy cream\n\n\u00bd cup (125 mL) whole milk\n\n2 tsp rum (preferably dark)\n\n1 tsp vanilla extract\n\n\u215b tsp salt\n\n1\u00bd cups (375 mL) pitted, chopped fresh cherries\n\n\u00bd cup (125 mL) semi-sweet chocolate chips, finely chopped\n\nIn a heavy-bottomed saucepan on medium heat, whisk together sugar and tapioca starch until well-combined. Add cream, milk, and rum and cook, whisking frequently, until it comes to a boil. Reduce heat to low and cook, continuing to whisk, until thickened, about 7 minutes. Add vanilla extract and salt, whisk again, and pour into a bowl to chill in refrigerator until cool, about 60 minutes.\n\nPrepare ice cream maker. Put tapioca mixture, cherries, and chocolate chips into basin of machine, and churn according to manufacturer's instructions. Spoon into a container, cover, and freeze for at least 4 hours. Let ice cream rest at room temperature for about 10 minutes after removing from freezer and before serving.\nBLUEBERRY CRISP\n\nI feel very strongly that a dessert should not contain things like oats if at all possible. It's dessert, and dessert is no time to be thinking about soluble fiber. (If you're like me, you're already thinking of it most of the time anyway!) You can use fresh or frozen blueberries with this\u2014it's a great, fast, and easy year-round dessert. I use whole wheat flour; all-purpose is fine, but I like the deeper flavor that whole wheat gives. Serve warm with ice cream topping.\n\n4\u20136\n\nSERVINGS\n\n1 tbsp cornstarch\n\n\u00bd tsp salt, divided\n\n2 tbsp maple syrup\n\nzest of 1 lemon + 2 tsp juice\n\n4\u20135 cups (1\u20131.25 L) fresh or frozen blueberries\n\n1 cup (250 mL) whole wheat flour\n\n1 cup (250 mL) brown sugar\n\n\u00bd cup (125 mL) room temperature butter\n\n\u00bd tsp ground cinnamon\n\nLightly grease a 1\u00bd qt\/L baking dish. Preheat oven to 375\u00b0F (190\u00b0C).\n\nIn a small bowl, create a slurry out of cornstarch, \u00bc tsp salt, maple syrup, and lemon zest and juice, then pour over blueberries and toss to coat. Put blueberries in baking dish.\n\nIn a medium bowl, combine flour, sugar, \u00bc tsp salt, butter, and cinnamon, and crumble with your fingers to create a lumpy, streusel-looking mixture. Cover blueberries with flour mixture, pressing down gently to ensure crumble stays put.\n\nBake for 35 to 40 minutes, or until top is crisp and golden and blueberry goo is bubbling up sides.\nCORONATION GRAPE GRANITA\n\nThis is a dish we make in September when Coronation grapes, related to concord grapes, make their brief appearance in our local markets. They are delicate and fleeting, and when they arrive, it is too hot to make jam of them, but this captures their essence simply and efficiently.\n\n4\n\nSERVINGS\n\n1\u00bd lb (750 g) Coronation or concord grapes\n\n\u00bd cup (125 mL) brown sugar\n\n\u00bd cup (125 mL) white granulated sugar\n\n1 lemon, zest and juice\n\nPluck grapes from stems, and plop them into a pot on stove. Add sugars and 1\u00bd cups (375 mL) water, and simmer on medium-high heat until grapes are soft and liquid is purple and dark, about 10 minutes. Add lemon zest and juice.\n\nRemove from heat and mash grape mixture with a potato masher. Squeeze through a fine-mesh sieve into a 9 x 13-in (3.5-L) glass baking dish, and put into freezer.\n\nEvery hour for the first 3 hours, pull juice out of freezer and scrape with a fork to move ice crystals around, fluffing them up a bit. After 3 hours, just check in every so often, scraping and fluffing ice as needed. Freeze for about 4 hours in total. Remove from freezer about 10 minutes before serving, and scrape with a spoon into serving dishes. Serve as is or topped with whipped cream.\n\nGrandpa's Radio Pudding (page 214); left: Cuddles' Brown Sugar Shortbread (page 234)\nCUDDLES' BROWN SUGAR SHORTBREAD\n\nThis shortbread is pure and simple, and it achieves that sandy, perfect shortbread texture without cheats like rice flour or cornstarch. To make these, it's best to have a good, strong mixer, as you're going to need to beat the hell out of them. They are best served with cold granita (p. 232 and p. 239) and warm orange pekoe tea.\n\n4\n\nDOZEN\n\n1 lb (500 g) room temperature butter\n\n1 cup (250 mL) brown sugar\n\n4 cups (1 L) all-purpose flour\n\nPreheat oven to 325\u00b0F (160\u00b0C).\n\nIn bowl of a stand mixer on medium speed, beat butter and brown sugar together until fluffy. Scrape down sides of bowl, then turn up speed to medium-high and beat mixture for 30 minutes, scraping sides of bowl down occasionally.\n\nAdd flour and beat until just combined.\n\nOn a lightly floured surface, roll dough to about \u00bc in (6 mm) thick. Cut dough into rectangles about 2\u00bd in (6.35 cm) long, and poke each slice twice with the tines of a fork.\n\nPlace on a baking sheet about 1 in (2.5 cm) apart. Bake for 18 to 20 minutes, until cookies have only just begun to brown and are firm and crumbly but pale.\n\nCool completely on a wire rack before eating.\n\n**I called my grandmother Cuddles,** a name she chose for herself because she didn't see herself as \"Grandma.\" Everything about her was colorful, and while \"cuddly\" wasn't a word you could use to accurately describe her, she was right\u2014she wasn't \"Grandma.\" She transcended Grandma. She was something else.\n\nFor reasons I'm not sure I'll ever really understand, the women in my family can be a bit proprietary about their recipes\u2014a recipe is something you own, that you hold onto and keep to yourself and take to your grave. Maybe it's generational or it's just nice to have something that's all yours, a secret, a domain you can be the master of. I'm an over-sharer with a food blog, so this is something I don't really understand.\n\nEveryone who tasted Cuddles' shortbread knew it was the best. The magic was in the method, and it didn't matter if you knew that it was just butter, sugar, and flour; that alone wouldn't get you where you needed to go. Good shortbread is all technique.\n\nMy mom wanted to know how to make it, and Cuddles would lead her on: \"We'll make it next time you come over,\" she'd say, and when my mom would show up with the ingredients, it would already be made, or it wouldn't be the right time. One curious thing about this proprietorship over recipes is that it was inconsistent; my mom couldn't have the shortbread recipe, but I could. Maybe Cuddles thought her secret was safe with me. Maybe she just thought she was funny.\n\nAnd she was funny, with a dark sense of humor and a sharp wit. She was my elder, but she never felt like an authority figure. She was wise, and I would listen to her, but I never felt like she spoke down to me. When I'd say something stupid or show up wearing whatever was stylishly inappropriate at the time, all she'd say was \"Oh, Emily...no.\"\n\nI'd visit her on Fridays after class, and we'd sit at her table drinking fruity cocktails and eating cheezies, talking and gossiping long into the night. And she would let me in on things, because a secret is only really fun if you can share it with someone; a secret for two is a conspiracy, and much more glamorous. For most of her years with my grandfather, she'd written her recipes down in a book, she said. And oh, when she died\u2014they'd want it, my mom and my aunt. Whoever ended up with it would try to make the recipes in it, but nothing would work because she wrote the recipes down wrong on purpose. While I personally could never be organized or committed enough to have the last laugh, I think it's sort of fantastic that she was, and that she did.\nLEMON PUDDING\n\nThis was my grandmother's dog's birthday dessert. There's no way for that to sound anything but weird, but it's true. It's a delicate dish with a bold lemon flavor that tastes like lemon slice, lemon meringue pie (sans meringue), and all those treats most of us rarely make anymore. Riley, a not-thin Black Lab, favored it following a dinner of Toad in the Hole (p. 148). People like it too, which is great because, even if they didn't, my grandma would have made it anyway. Serve warm with whipped cream. Possibly be transported back to your grandmother's messy kitchen table.\n\n4\n\nSERVINGS\n\n1 cup (250 mL) granulated sugar, divided\n\n\u00bc cup (60 mL) all-purpose flour\n\nzest of 1 lemon\n\n\u00bc cup (60 mL) butter, melted\n\n\u2153 cup (80 mL) fresh-squeezed lemon juice\n\n\u00bd tsp vanilla extract\n\n3 eggs, whites and yolks separated\n\n1\u00bd cups (375 mL) buttermilk\n\nPreheat oven to 350\u00b0F (180\u00b0C). Butter or grease a 1\u00bd qt\/L casserole or baking dish.\n\nIn a mixing bowl, whisk together \u00be cup (175 mL) sugar, flour, and lemon zest. Add melted butter, lemon juice, vanilla extract, and egg yolks, and whisk to form a batter. Slowly whisk in buttermilk.\n\nIn a separate bowl, whisk remaining sugar with egg whites until they form soft peaks. They should be sturdy but malleable\u2014if you overdo it, you can almost \"chunk\" pieces off. It won't be the end of the world if that happens, but try not to get to there. Fold egg whites into buttermilk mixture and pour into prepared baking dish. Place dish into a larger baking pan with high sides, and fill outside pan with water to halfway up sides of dish.\n\nBake for 40 to 45 minutes, until top is cake-like and lightly browned. Cool for at least 30 minutes before diving in.\n\nORANGE GRANITA\n\nWhen summer's too hot and you're just a ball of sweat but you still for some reason have people coming over, granitas are a great approach to dessert. They come together at a leisurely pace, and you don't have to pay all that much attention to them. They're also not something you see often, so they retain an aura of elegance despite being so, so simple to prepare. This one tastes like Creamsicles.\n\n4\n\nSERVINGS\n\nzest of 1 large navel orange\n\n1 lemon, zest and juice\n\n1 cup (250 mL) freshly squeezed orange juice\n\n1 cup (250 mL) granulated sugar\n\npinch salt\n\n1 tsp vanilla\n\n\u00bd cup (125 mL) heavy cream\n\nIn a pot on medium-high heat, combine citrus zest and juices, sugar, and salt. Whisk until sugar has completely dissolved, 2 to 3 minutes.\n\nRemove from heat. Whisk in vanilla and cream, and pour into a glass pan or pie plate. Place in the freezer.\n\nEvery hour for the first 3 hours after that, pull out of freezer and scrape mixture with a fork to move ice crystals around, which keeps them from becoming a solid mass. After that, just check every once in a while to be sure that all is well, scraping as needed. Freeze for about 4 hours in total. Remove from the freezer about 10 minutes before serving, and scrape with a spoon into serving dishes. Serve as is or topped with whipped cream.\n\nORANGE UPSIDE-DOWN CAKE\n\nSomewhere around the second week of December each year, I inevitably Google \"too much vitamin C side effects\" and try to convince myself that despite the absurdity of it, eating a 5-lb (2.2-kg) box of Mandarin oranges every other day is a healthy thing to do. By February, I'm oranged-out, but they're still all that's in season, fruit-wise. This recipe comes out of coping with that reality while still very much wanting dessert. It's best made in a 9-in (23-cm) cast-iron pan, but will work fine in a pie plate if that's your option.\n\n6\n\nSERVINGS\n\nCARAMEL TOPPING\n\n3 to 4 small oranges, such as navel or blood oranges (or a combination)\n\n4 tbsp butter, cubed\n\n\u00be cup (175 mL) brown sugar\n\npinch salt\n\nCAKE\n\nzest of 1 orange\n\n1 lemon, zest and juice\n\n\u2154 cup (160 mL) yellow cornmeal\n\n\u2154 cup (160 mL) all-purpose flour\n\n\u00bd tsp baking soda\n\n\u00bd tsp salt\n\n2 tbsp canola oil\n\n3 tbsp honey\n\n1 cup (250 mL) buttermilk\n\n1 egg\n\n1 tsp vanilla extract\n\nPreheat oven to 375\u00b0F (190\u00b0C).\n\nUsing a knife, peel oranges. Cut slightly on the diagonal, running blade along flesh of orange, removing bitter white pith. Slice oranges horizontally to about \u00bc-in (6-mm) thick. Test to be sure they fit into bottom of a 9-in (23-cm) cast-iron pan with a bit of overlapping. Set aside.\n\nPlace cast-iron pan on medium-high heat and melt butter, sugar, and salt until bubbling. Remove from heat, and carefully place orange slices evenly across bottom of pan. If you don't have a cast iron-pan, grease a 9-in (23-cm) pie plate, lay orange slices along bottom, and pour caramel on top.\n\nIn a bowl, combine orange and lemon zests, cornmeal, flour, baking soda, and salt. In a separate bowl, whisk together lemon juice, oil, honey, buttermilk, egg, and vanilla. Whisk wet ingredients into dry ingredients, and pour into pan on top of butter-sugar-orange mixture.\n\nBake for 25 to 30 minutes, until top is golden, edges appear crisp, and caramel has bubbled through in places. Let stand for 5 minutes, then carefully turn out onto a serving plate. Let cool for 15 minutes before serving.\nPLUM & BROWN SUGAR SORBET\n\nYou know those blue, oblong little prune plums that show up in market stalls in the fall? They are a little sour, and ordinarily I think people turn them into jam. This is my favorite thing to do with them, as it means I get to extend summer a little longer. They produce a tart, sort of musky sorbet that you can eat in cones on your balcony while you comment on how it's hard to believe it's fall already, and wonder where the time goes.\n\n4\n\nCUPS (1 L)\n\n2 lb (900 g) Italian prune plums, halved and pitted\n\n\u00be cup (175 mL) packed brown sugar\n\n\u00bd tsp ground cardamom\n\n\u00bc tsp coarse salt\n\n\u00bd tsp vanilla extract\n\nIn a pot on medium-high heat, bring plums, 2 cups (500 mL) water, sugar, cardamom, and salt to a boil. Reduce heat to medium, and simmer until plums have softened but not broken apart, 7 to 10 minutes.\n\nAdd vanilla. Pur\u00e9e contents of pot using an immersion blender; if using a regular blender, be careful\u2014blend in batches, as hot stuff in blenders is a splattery, burning combination.\n\nStrain mixture through a fine-mesh sieve into a bowl, and chill in the refrigerator until cold, about 2 hours. Process in ice cream maker according to manufacturer's instructions, then freeze for at least 4 hours before serving.\nROASTED PEACH SORBET\n\nWhen I went to France with my friend Grace in 2011, we ended up in Lyon for the weekend. Our first meal was at a bouchon, a type of restaurant that serves traditional Lyonnaise cuisine. The sorbet they served was delicate and smooth and perfectly bright, like they'd taken the best essence of the fruit and distilled it. It was topped with about a tablespoon of Amontillado sherry, and the effect was a bit of warm in the back of your throat with every cool bite. It was magic. If you can swing it, pick up a little bit of sherry or fruit liqueur to serve with this.\n\n4\n\nCUPS (1 L)\n\n2 lb (900 g) fresh peaches, halved, stones removed\n\n\u00be cup (175 mL) maple syrup\n\n1 large lemon, zest and juice\n\nPreheat oven to 400\u00b0F (200\u00b0C). Lightly grease a 9\u00d713-in (3.5-L) baking dish with neutral-tasting oil such as canola.\n\nPlace peaches cut side down in dish, and bake for 20 to 25 minutes until fleshy sides have turned golden. Remove from oven, cover with aluminum foil, and let rest for 10 minutes.\n\nRemove foil, and peel skins off peaches. Discard skins. Place peaches in a blender with remaining ingredients and \u2154 cup (160 mL) water. Pulse until smooth, then strain into a bowl. Cover with plastic and refrigerate until cool.\n\nPour mixture into an ice cream maker and churn according to manufacturer's instructions.\n\nServe on its own, with assorted other fresh fruits, or with a touch of your favorite liqueur.\n\nIf you have any left over, serve in a glass with sparkling wine\u2014it makes a lovely Bellini!\n\nRESOURCES\n\nFood is joy and love and pain and guilt and magic and math, and it's deeply personal and intensely political and frivolous and important. To some, it's a fun diversion, a bit of entertainment, a source of comfort and release. To others, it is everything\u2014survival and culture and economy. It is worth paying attention to.\n\nPay attention to what you're eating\u2014how it's made and who has been involved in its production, whether it's your partner or your mother or your waiter or some factory somewhere. Know, at least to some extent, where your food has come from.\n\nPay attention to the seasons, to the backs of packaging, to the stickers on apples, and the stamps on eggs. Ask questions. Visit farms, if you are able, and find out what grows there, and why, and if it's profitable. Notice who is working in the fields.\n\nPay attention to other people, especially the ones who aren't getting enough. Help them. We have enough food to go around, but it doesn't always reach everyone, and when it doesn't we need to intervene. Support your food bank, local soup kitchen, and neighbors.\n\nWhen you're buying food, watch for deals. Even if you just pick up a can here and there, or a box or two of cereal every now and again, buy it and donate it. The benefit to watching prices so meticulously, for me, has been that giving is easy; if beans are seventy-seven cents a can, I'll buy as many as I need and a few more to spare; when peanut butter or tuna are on sale, I'll buy extra and just drop it in the donation bin on my way out of the supermarket. Do this throughout the year, not just during the holidays!\n\n**Food Banks**\n\nUnited States: _feedingamerica.org_\n\nCanada: _foodbankscanada.ca_\n\nAustralia: _foodbank.org.au_\n\nUK: _trusselltrust.org\/foodbank-projects_\n\n* * *\n\nSUSTAINABILITY & HUMAN RIGHTS ORGANIZATIONS\n\n* * *\n\n**World Vision**\n\n_worldvision.org\/our-impact\/food-agriculture_\n\nInformation on industries where children are exploited, particularly in agriculture (coffee, chocolate, sugar, fishing, and more) in easy-to-read infographic, video, and short article formats. A good introduction to what you can do to avoid products that employ children in dangerous, dirty, and degrading work, with ways to get involved.\n\n**Fairtrade International**\n\n_fairtrade.net_\n\nFairtrade is a global non-profit that works to improve transactions between farmers and the marketplace for better livelihoods, working conditions, and human rights. Look for the Fairtrade logo on everything from coffee to wine. If you can't find products in your area, look for them online through the Fairtrade site.\n\n**Rainforest Alliance**\n\n_rainforest-alliance.org_\n\nThe Rainforest Alliance works to conserve biodiversity, curb climate change, and help those in poverty to break the cycle by promoting, evaluating, and certifying sustainability standards in several industries, including agriculture.\n\n**Fairfood International**\n\n_fairfood.org_\n\nFairfood is a global non-profit whose aim is to improve the socio-economic conditions of the most vulnerable people in the global food system, promote the sustainable use of natural resources, and preserve the environment. Identifies and highlights areas, industries, and specific food commodities\u2014such as tomatoes, shrimp, and livestock\u2014to inform consumers. They also work to empower vulnerable and impoverished workers to raise their voices and demand their rights in their home countries.\n\n**The Conservation Alliance for Seafood Solutions**\n\n_solutionsforseafood.org_\n\nEighteen North American alliance members, including OceanWise, the Monterrey Bay Aquarium, and the World Wildlife Federation, bring conservation expertise to seafood businesses and consumers so ocean and freshwater seafood stocks and environments they depend on can thrive. They also work to address some of the biggest barriers to seafood sustainability.\n\n**Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations: Fisheries and Aquaculture Department**\n\n_fao.org\/fishery\/about\/en_\n\nThe UN's fisheries branch produces an annual report, _The State of World Fisheries and Aquaculture_ (SOFIA), detailing current issues in seafood stocks, environmental threats, labor, trade, and consumption. It's fairly comprehensive, and a great resource for understanding the state of the oceans and the people who work in and profit from them.\n\n* * *\n\nNUTRITION INFORMATION\n\n* * *\n\n**Canadian Diabetes Association**\n\n_diabetes.ca\/diabetes-and-you\/healthy-living-resources\/diet-nutrition_\n\nThe Canadian Diabetes Association has some great information and resources for maintaining a healthy lifestyle for those with type 1 and type 2 diabetes, but much of it applies to everyone, including those with other illnesses, including heart disease, hypertension, and high cholesterol.\n\n**Meatless Monday**\n\n_meatlessmonday.com_\n\nMeatless Monday is a non-profit initiative of The Monday Campaigns, which works in collaboration with the Center for a Livable Future (CLF) at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. The goal of the Meatless Monday program is to encourage everyone, everywhere to go meatless once a week in order to reduce meat consumption by fifteen percent, for our personal health, and to benefit the environment. The site offers resources, recipes, and news related to nutrition, specifically around environmental issues, meat consumption, and vegetarianism.\n\n**NIH's Human Nutrition Research Information Management Database**\n\n_hnrim.nih.gov_\n\nThis site details past and current\/ongoing studies in human nutrition from a wide variety of academic and hospital sites across North America. You can filter your searches by category and read abstracts, other publications from principal investigators involved in research, and whether or not there are pending or ongoing clinical trials involved.\n\n**Centers for Disease Control and Prevention: Nutrition for Everyone**\n\n_cdc.gov\/nutrition\/everyone\/basics\/index.html_\n\nA fairly straightforward site with basic information on simple health topics, including nutrition (food groups, dietary fat, carbohydrates, protein, etc.), chronic diseases, and more.\n\n**Seafood Nutrition Partnership**\n\n_seafoodnutrition.org_\n\nAn American non-profit group whose sole purpose is education around the benefits of seafood consumption, particularly as it relates to heart health and brain development. They're a partner of FishWatch, a program of the United States' National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's National Marine Fisheries Service.\n\nACKNOWLEDGMENTS\n\nThanks to everyone who helped with the research for this book: Kelly Mulder and Crystal Karakochuk, Registered Dietitians and PhD candidates in human nutrition at the University of British Columbia; Sharon Leung, Registered Dietitian and Certified Diabetes Educator at the Diabetes Centre at Vancouver General Hospital; Ray Bucknell, Head Butcher and Production Manager at Two Rivers Specialty Meats; Teddie Geach, Ocean Wise Representative at the Vancouver Aquarium; Cheryl Hotchkiss, Senior Manager, Public Engagement and Brand Development; Britt Hamilton, Advocacy Communications Officer; and Ryan Mulligan, Policy Advisor, Food Security and Nutrition at World Vision Canada.\n\nThank you to Susan Safyan at Arsenal Pulp Press, who I wish could edit every word that comes off my keyboard and out of my mouth. There is no good writing without skilled editing.\n\nThank you to my friend Grace Yaginuma, who has tested many of the recipes contained herein (and been constructive in her feedback), and who continues to teach me important things about cooking, grammar, and karaoke. Thanks to my loyal team of eaters and food critics: Theresa Connor, Paul Bell, Tracy Stefanucci, Greg and Missy Rinsma, Chris Gerber, Laura Klompas, Aimee Taylor, Corinne Leroux, James Kim, Justyna Krol, Dan O'Brien, and Dennis Wee: I can always count on you to try something new, weird, or deep-fried.\n\nThank you to Nick's family, especially Sid and Candy VanderWoud and Nathan and Sharon Page, who introduced me to Dutch food, wild meat, and how weird people can be about birds.\n\nThank you to Lynn Newman and George Saunders for broadening my culinary horizons, and whose support has been unwaveringly enthusiastic and much appreciated.\n\nThank you to John and AJ Wight, who provided me with a solid foundation, a wealth of material (for this book, future books, and therapy), and all that free babysitting. Thanks to Hudson Wight for hanging out\/putting up with Hunter for so many long hours while the book got written.\n\nAnd thank you to Nick and Hunter, who have been very noisy and distracting through all of this, and who I ultimately do all this cooking and writing for.\n\nINDEX\n\nA\n\nannatto (about),\n\nappetizers\n\nSardino\u00efade,\n\nTuna Tartare,\n\nappliances, small,\n\nAvocado Cream,\n\nB\n\nbacon fat (about),\n\nbarley (about),\n\nbeans (about), 82\u201384\n\nbeef (about), 153\u201354\n\nBeef Stew with Barley, 156\u201357\n\nBeef Stroganoff,\n\nBittman, Mark,\n\nBlack Forest Ice Cream,\n\nBlueberry Crisp,\n\nBorscht with Beets & Red Cabbage,\n\nBPA (bisphenol A),\n\nBread Soup,\n\nbreadcrumbs, making,\n\nbreads and baked goods (about), 206\u201308\n\nrecipes\n\nBlueberry Crisp,\n\nButtermilk Dutch Baby with Bacon-Baked Apple,\n\nFergazza Bread with Garlic Scapes,\n\nFocaccia Bread, 212\u201313\n\nPeanut Butter Chocolate Chip Banana Muffins,\n\nRice & Blueberry Muffins,\n\nSkillet Cornbread with Blueberries,\n\nSpaghetti Squash Muffins,\n\nVanilla Scones,\n\nWaffles,\n\nBreakfast Beans,\n\nbrining chicken,\n\nBroccoli with Tofu & Peanuts,\n\nbudgeting, 23\u201327\n\nbutter (about),\n\nButtermilk Dutch Baby with Bacon-Baked Apple,\n\nButternut Squash & Chickpea Curry,\n\nButternut Squash Skillet Strata,\n\nC\n\nCanadian Diabetes Association, . _See also_ diabetes\n\nCandied Pork Belly,\n\ncanning foods,\n\ncanola oil,\n\ncarbohydrates (about), 15\u201316, 48\u201350, . _See also_ glycemic index\n\nCauliflower Macaroni & Cheese, 52\u201353\n\nCauliflower with Orecchiette & Almonds,\n\nCenters for Disease Control and Prevention,\n\nChana Masala,\n\nChicken & Dumplings, 104\u2013105\n\nchicken (about), 100\u2013102\n\nChickpea Salad with Garlic Scapes,\n\nchildren and nutrition, 19\u201321\n\ncholesterol, dietary, 68\u201369\n\ncoconut oil,\n\nConservation Alliance for Seafood Solutions,\n\nCorn & Asparagus Salad,\n\nCoronation Grape Granita,\n\nCottage Pie,\n\nCucumber Salad,\n\nCuddles' Brown Sugar Shortbread,\n\nCurry Braised Beef,\n\nCurtido,\n\nD\n\nDASH diet,\n\nDeep-Fried Sriracha Eggs,\n\nDelicata Tacos with Corn,\n\ndesserts\n\nBlack Forest Ice Cream,\n\nBlueberry Crisp,\n\nCoronation Grape Granita,\n\nCuddles' Brown Sugar Shortbread,\n\nGrandpa's Radio Pudding,\n\nHorses' Arses,\n\nLemon Pudding,\n\nNathan's Rollkuchen,\n\nOrange Granita,\n\nOrange Upside-Down Cake,\n\nPeanut Butter Bacon Fat Cookies,\n\nPeanut Butter Chocolate Chip Banana Muffins,\n\nPlum & Brown Sugar Sorbet,\n\nRoasted Peach Sorbet,\n\ndiabetes, 15\u201316, , , 68\u201369, . _See also_ Canadian Diabetes Association\n\ndiets and nutrition, 15\u201318\n\nDumplings,\n\nDumplings with Cheese,\n\nDutch foods (about),\n\nDutch Meatballs,\n\nE\n\nEd's Potato Moussaka,\n\nEgg & Corn Quesadilla for One or Many,\n\nEgg & Tomato Curry,\n\neggs (about), 66\u201369\n\nEggs Rabbit,\n\nEggs with Corn & Red Beans,\n\nEnvironmental Working Group,\n\nF\n\nFairfood International,\n\nFairtrade International,\n\nfats and oils, 17\u201318\n\nFergazza Bread with Garlic Scapes,\n\nfish (about), 118\u201319\n\nFish Sauce Salmon,\n\nflour, pastry (about),\n\nFocaccia Bread, 212\u201313\n\nFood and Agriculture Organization (FAO),\n\nfood banks,\n\nFrench Bistro Pork & Beans, 138\u2013140\n\nFried Chicken & Waffles, 106\u2013107\n\nfruits (about), 171\u201374\n\nG\n\ngaram masala (about),\n\nglucose, blood, 15\u201316\n\nglycemic index, , , , . _See also_ carbohydrates\n\nGMOs (genetically modified organisms), 228\u201329\n\ngochujang (about),\n\ngrains (about),\n\nGrandma Salad,\n\nGrandpa's Radio Pudding,\n\nGreen Egg Bake,\n\ngreens, radish,\n\ngrocery shopping, 23\u201326\n\nH\n\nHamburger Stew,\n\nHoney Mustard Beets,\n\nHorses' Arses,\n\nHotchkiss, Cheryl,\n\nHuman Nutrition Research Information Management (HNRIM),\n\nhuman rights organizations, 245\u201346\n\nI\n\ningredients, special, 27\u201328\n\nK\n\nKasha & Egg Noodles,\n\nketjap manis,\n\nKimchi & Soft Tofu Stew,\n\nkimchi (about),\n\nKimchi Pancakes,\n\nKimchi-Fried Rice,\n\nkitchen equipment, 12\u201314\n\nL\n\nLeek & Bacon Barlotto,\n\nLemon Pudding,\n\nLentil Salad,\n\nLentil Sloppy Joes,\n\nLentil Tacos with Avocado Cream, 92\u201393\n\nlentils (about), 83\u201384\n\nLinguine with Tuna and Capers,\n\nM\n\nMadras curry powder (about),\n\nmeat, bulk purchases,\n\nMeatballs with Red Sauce, 164\u201365\n\nMeatless Monday, 246\u201347\n\nMulder, Kelly,\n\nMushroom Cottage Pie,\n\nMushroom Cream Sauce,\n\nMushroom Risotto,\n\nMustard-Fried Chicken,\n\nN\n\nNasi Goreng,\n\nNathan's Rollkuchen,\n\nNick's Sweet Soy Pork Tenderloin,\n\nO\n\nolive oil,\n\nOne-Pot Pasta with Meat Sauce,\n\nOrange Granita,\n\nOrange Upside-Down Cake,\n\norganic foods, , 171\u201372\n\nOvernight Breakfast Grains,\n\nP\n\nPantry Kedgeree,\n\npantry, stocking, 26\u201327\n\npasta (about), 47\u201350\n\nPaul's Tortilla Espa\u00f1ola,\n\nPeanut Butter Bacon Fat Cookies,\n\nPeanut Butter Chocolate Chip Banana Muffins,\n\npeanut oil,\n\nPeanutty Soba Noodles with Kale,\n\nPeas & Carrots,\n\npesticides, 171\u201372\n\nPico de Gallo,\n\nPlum & Brown Sugar Sorbet,\n\nPork & Bean Cottage Pie,\n\npork (about),\n\nPot Roast,\n\nPotato & Kale Quesadillas,\n\nproduce. _See_ fruits (about); vegetables (about)\n\nPumpkin & Red Lentil Dal,\n\nR\n\nRainforest Alliance,\n\nRapini & Sausage with White Beans & Orecchiette,\n\nRed Bean Flautas,\n\nRed Sauce,\n\nRed Sauce Eggs,\n\nRelajo (spice mixture),\n\nRice & Blueberry Muffins,\n\nRice & Lentils,\n\nrice (about), 31\u201333\n\nRice Noodle Salad with All the Veggies,\n\nRigatoni with Tomatoes & Chickpeas,\n\nRoast Paprika Chicken,\n\nRoasted Aloo Gobi,\n\nRoasted Peach Sorbet,\n\nRoasted Radishes & Garlic,\n\nRoasted Tomato & Garlic Soup,\n\nS\n\nsalads\n\nChickpea Salad with Garlic Scapes,\n\nCorn & Asparagus Salad,\n\nCurtido,\n\nGrandma Salad,\n\nLentil Salad,\n\nRice Noodle Salad with All the Veggies,\n\nSavory Fruit Salad,\n\nSimple Green Salad,\n\nTuna Salad with Celery & Black-Eyed Peas,\n\nSalisbury Steak,\n\nSalmon Ball Casserole,\n\nsalt (about), 16\u201317\n\nSalvadoran Roast Chicken with Gravy,\n\nsambal oelek (about),\n\nSardine Panzanella,\n\nSardino\u00efade,\n\nSausage & \"Grits,\"\n\nSavory Fruit Salad,\n\nSeafood Nutrition Partnership,\n\nseasonal and local foods, 24\u201325\n\nsesame oil,\n\nShells with Brussels Sprouts, Chickpeas & Bacon,\n\nshopping. _See_ grocery shopping\n\nside dishes\n\nChana Masala,\n\nCurtido,\n\ngreens, radish,\n\nHoney Mustard Beets,\n\nKasha & Egg Noodles,\n\nLeek & Bacon Barlotto,\n\nMushroom Risotto,\n\nPeas & Carrots,\n\nPico de Gallo,\n\nRoasted Aloo Gobi,\n\nRoasted Radishes & Garlic,\n\nStrawberry Salsa,\n\nSimple Green Salad,\n\nSizzling Chili Noodles,\n\nSkillet Corn Bread with Blueberries,\n\nslow cookers, , , ,\n\nSlow-Cooker Cabbage Rolls,\n\nSlow-Cooker Gochujang Pulled Pork,\n\nsoups & stews\n\nBread Soup,\n\nBorscht with Beets & Red Cabbage,\n\nHamburger Stew,\n\nKimchi & Soft Tofu Stew,\n\nRoasted Tomato & Garlic Soup,\n\nSpicy Pork & Tofu Stew,\n\nSweet Potato & Mixed-Bean Chili,\n\nSweet Potato & Red Lentil Soup,\n\nThat Korean Restaurant Soup,\n\nTuna Chowder,\n\nVegetarian Posole,\n\nVeggie Stew with Dumplings,\n\nSmoked Fish Cakes,\n\nSpaghetti Squash Muffins,\n\nSpam-Fried Rice,\n\nSpicy Pork & Tofu Stew,\n\nSriracha Buffalo Wings,\n\nSriracha sauce (about),\n\nStrawberry Salsa,\n\nsugar (about), 225\u201329\n\nsustainability organizations, 245\u201346\n\nSweet Potato & Mixed-Bean Chili,\n\nSweet Potato & Red Lentil Soup,\n\nSweet Yellow Curry,\n\nsweeteners, alternative,\n\nT\n\nThat Korean Restaurant Soup,\n\nToad in the Hole,\n\nTomato Chicken Curry,\n\nTuna & Dill Pickle Casserole,\n\nTuna Chowder,\n\nTuna Penne,\n\nTuna Salad with Celery & Black-Eyed Peas,\n\nTuna Tartare,\n\nV\n\nVanilla Scones,\n\nvegetables (about), 171\u201374\n\nVegetarian Posole,\n\nVeggie Stew with Dumplings,\n\nW\n\nWaffles,\n\nWorld Vision Canada, ,\n\nZ\n\nZucchini Parmigiana Sandwiches,\n\nPHOTO: Tracey Kusiewicz\n\nEMILY WIGHT is a writer, blogger, and home cook. A graduate of the Creative Writing program at the University of British Columbia, she's spent the past six years blogging at Well Fed, Flat Broke, a site that chronicles her forays in the kitchen as she tries to balance a career and parenthood, which includes a picky-eating toddler and a neurotic cat. Everything in her life is sticky.\n\n**wellfedflatbroke.com**\n","meta":{"redpajama_set_name":"RedPajamaBook"}}
+{"text":" \nDICTATORS WITHOUT BORDERS\n\nCopyright \u00a9 2017 Alexander Cooley and John Heathershaw\n\nAll rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press) without written permission from the publishers.\n\nFor information about this and other Yale University Press publications, please contact:\n\nU.S. Office: sales.press@yale.edu yalebooks.com\n\nEurope Office: sales@yaleup.co.uk yalebooks.co.uk\n\nTypeset in Adobe Caslon Pro by IDSUK (DataConnection) Ltd\n\nPrinted in Great Britain by Gomer Press, Llandysul, Ceredigion, Wales\n\nLibrary of Congress Control Number: 2016962066\n\nISBN 978-0-300-20844-3\n\nA catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.\n\n10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1\nFor Nicole and Greta   \nand   \nfor Julia, Grace and Sam\n**CONTENTS**\n\n_List of Figures and Tables_\n\n_Preface_\n\n_Acknowledgements_\n\nIntroduction: Central Asia Beyond Borders\n\n**1** Inside-Outside, Onshore-Offshore: How Central Asia Went Global\n\n**2** Kazakhstan's Most Wanted: Economic Fugitive or Democratic Champion? The Case of Mukhtar Ablyazov\n\n**3** Tajikistan: The President of the Warlords and his Offshore State\n\n**4** Uzbekistan's Closed Polity and Global Scandal\n\n**5** Kyrgyzstan's Prince Maxim and the Switzerland of the East\n\n**6** The New Offshore Silk Roads\n\n**7** Political Exiles and Extraterritorial Repression\n\nConclusion: Confronting the Challenge of Global Authoritarianism\n\n_Appendices_\n\n_Endnotes_\n\n_Index_\n\n_Illustration credits_\n**FIGURES AND TABLES**\n\nI.1Map of Central Asia\n\n1.1Foreign direct investment and round-tripping in Kazakhstan, 2012\n\n2.1Ownership structure of KT Asia and relation to BTA Bank\n\n2.2European map of detained and arrested Ablyazov associates\n\n3.1Talco tolling arrangements and structures\n\n4.1Structure of TeliaSonera payments and role of Takilant\n\n5.1The organisation of Kyrgyzstan's gold sector\n\n7.1The extraterritorial security process\n\n7.2Map of citizens of Uzbekistan extradited to face torture, rendered, disappeared and\/or assassinated\n\n7.3The tracking of Umarali Kuvvatov, 2012\u201315\n\n7.4Map of citizens of Tajikistan extradited to face torture, rendered, disappeared and\/or assassinated\n**PREFACE**\n\nIn April 2016, the offshore world hit headlines across the globe when records from the Panamanian law firm and company provider Mossack Fonseca were leaked online. The 'Panama Papers' \u2013 by far the largest data leak in the history of the secretive world of tax havens, with 11.5 million documents released \u2013 captured the public consciousness and caused oligarchs, politicians and celebrities the world over to lose sleep. A whole series of revelations ensued about tax avoidance and suspected money laundering in high-value real estate. The front page of the _Guardian_ told of 'the London skyscraper that is a stark symbol of the housing crisis' with apartments owned by a Russian billionaire 'whose business partner is a close ally of Vladimir Putin's', a Nigerian banker and ex-minister, and a 'former MP and vodka tycoon' from the Central Asian republic of Kyrgyzstan. These three examples were among many which demonstrate that both West and East, North and South, are connected via offshore jurisdictions.\n\nIn the public consciousness, it was the effect the offshore world might have on the sacrosanct right of modern Westerners to own a home which really touched a nerve. But researchers at Global Witness, supported by students from the University of Exeter, had already linked central London properties to the offshore accounts of Central Asian oligarchs such as the former son-in-law of President Nazarbayev of Kazakhstan. Campaigners at London's Transparency International and the New York headquarters of the Open Society Foundation saw new opportunities to force tax havens to publish registers of beneficial owners. One academic colleague had the unusual experience of flying business class to preparatory meetings for David Cameron's May 2016 anti-corruption summit at the expense of the very offshore jurisdictions that he had studied for many years. For us and these colleagues of ours, the questionable claim about the inflation of Western real estate markets was merely the tip of the iceberg.\n\nAs this book details, autocrats and their cronies use Western financial, legal, policing and political systems to both extend their power back home and to selectively access Western institutions, status symbols and legal protections. Tajikistan's largest state-owned enterprise opaquely diverts the proceeds from its aluminium industry into accounts in the British Virgin Islands (BVI). The elite of Turkmenistan hold personal dollar-dominated accounts managed by Deutsche Bank. Relatives of Uzbekistan's strongman president accepted bribes from several international telecoms providers via offshore accounts in Gibraltar and stored the proceeds in several different foreign bank accounts. The Kazakh government routinely uses the international policing organisation Interpol in their politically motivated pursuit of former high-ranking officials and their associates who have become exiled opponents of the regime, while members of the Kazakh elite themselves purchase luxury real estate holdings around the world via shell companies. The Tajik regime has used its BVI account to apparently dodge reporting requirements to the Justice Department regarding its lobbying of US Congress.\n\nAnd Central Asia is not exceptional. Much of the world is governed for the benefit of a small number of people who hide their profits in offshore accounts. In short, the whole system of international law, universal human rights and global governance has been undermined by secretive offshore jurisdictions, leaving researchers, journalists and advocates to assess the extent of the damage.\n\nThese stories are some of many detailed in this book about those Central Asian republics that gained independence in 1991, and therefore became sovereign in the era of globalisation. _Dictators Without Borders_ tells this very modern story of Central Asia. It thus differs from many other books on the region you might have read, with their tales of the Orient, the ancient silk routes and fractious clans, or warnings of Islamism and ethnic conflicts. We avoid discussion of these pre-modern themes as they are frankly far less important to the true nature of Central Asia than the high-tech finance and low-tech politics detailed here. Central Asia is not predestined to corruption by its past, its culture, its religion or its traditional social ties. Rather, Central Asia's dictators and their allies are able to abuse power and pilfer their countries' resources because of the fact that international bankers accept their business and foreign politicians don't properly enforce their own laws. We explore the contours of this modern marriage of self-serving power politics to the increasingly sophisticated global financial and legal architectures and the professional intermediaries who manage them.\n\nWe use 'dictators' and 'autocrats' interchangeably in this book. 'Dictatorship' refers to trenchant systems of _authoritarian rule_ and _neo-patrimonial relations_. 'Authoritarian rule' refers to systems in which political authority is concentrated in the hands of the few and exercised without effective accountability to parliament, the judiciary, civil society or a free press. 'Neo-patrimonial relations' refer to the means by which leaders (patrons) lock in junior allies (clients) in modern states via networks which typically provide financial rewards but demand absolute political loyalty. There is a huge amount of academic literature on these two concepts within our field which we will not explore here. Occasionally, when referring to the economic dimensions of dictatorships we refer to them as 'kleptocracies' (a term used to highlight dictators' abuse of office to enhance personal power and wealth) and their behaviour in the global market as 'crony capitalism' (a term used not to imply an aberration but a common form of capitalism across many regions including Central Asia).\n\nThe 'without borders' of this book's title is a play on the _sans fronti\u00e8res_ phrase in the names of M\u00e9decins Sans Fronti\u00e8res (MSF), Dentistes . . . (DSF), Educateurs . . . (ESF), Reporters . . . (RSF), etc. Modern autocrats have effectively taken on this mantra to subvert the idealised version of globalisation as transnational humanitarian action. But to say they are _dictateurs sans fronti\u00e8res_ is not to say they have complete freedom of movement without the encumbrance of national borders and sovereignty. In fact, their actions beyond borders are often in the use of their sovereign status and power to get things done overseas. There are three senses in which dictators are 'without borders'.\n\nFirst, and in the traditional liberal understanding, dictators are without borders in that they operate _without moral and legal limits_ on their use of power. This is not to say they do not operate within their own laws \u2013 they sometimes do, they sometimes don't. They remake their laws to allow themselves to run for office as many times as they wish, extort the independent private sector (to the extent that it often ceases to exist) and pilfer from the public purse. At times they simply break national and international law by torturing their opponents or pervert the law to declare their non-violent enemies to be 'terrorists' or 'criminals' in order to eradicate them. Such actions actually often take place at the scale of _domestic_ or national authoritarian government. There are plenty of examples of this old-fashioned style of dictatorship in this book.\n\nSecond, and less well known though nothing new, dictators operate _beyond borders_. Today's hidden offshore companies are yesterday's private Swiss or London accounts kept by dictators as their insurance against the rebellion they always fear might come. Today's use of rendition and extraterritorial assassination by Central Asian regimes has its precedent in the abductions and executions by the Russian Tsarist and Soviet secret police of their opponents. Consider the NKVD's killing of Trotsky in Mexico in 1940. This is _international_ authoritarianism and authoritarian cooperation. Diplomatic relations with other states and personal diplomatic immunity are the products of sovereignty which have enabled this extension of dictatorial power into other states via cooperative relations with their governments or the use of national and intelligence services overseas.\n\nThe use of the word 'rendition' also highlights that it is not just autocrats that act beyond borders in this way. Journalistic, academic and congressional investigation revealed the extent of the CIA's extraordinary rendition programme under the Bush administration. Such methods continue to this day as liberal democracies like the US and UK extrajudicially execute their citizens suspected of terrorism through drone strikes overseas. But the refrain that 'they're all the same' simply won't do. There is a qualitative distinction between the national security rationales of the US and UK (questionable though they are) and the regime security rationales of Central Asian states. In an autocracy, there is no such thing as an opposition and even opponents in exile are fair game.\n\nThird, and a novel phenomenon of globalisation, dictators operate _across borders_. In particular they subvert the very instruments of global governance that were ostensibly set up to keep them in check. This is _global_ authoritarianism and is importantly different from the international mode noted above. Here we are not merely interested in the possession of foreign accounts or in the strategy of extraterritorial assassinations, but in the elite and even cosmopolititan networks that have enhanced the international status of these autocrats and safeguarded the privacy of their dealings. Brokers and intermediaries with global lives make the connections between post-Soviet dictators and the real estate agent who will sell them a London property, or the Washington lobbyist who will pursue regime agendas in the corridors of power. Transnational organised crime networks \u2013 with which many post-Soviet security professionals have relations \u2013 enable attacks on, disappearances and assassinations of exiles.\n\nBut it's not just about individuals. Networks of intermediaries, company service providers and bankers are embedded in an industry which exists to serve the world's dictators and politically connected oligarchs. These networks, which we refer to as 'transnational uncivil society', embed autocrats within a dense network of institutions, legal protections and global spaces that are intended to obfuscate their transgressions back home and conceal the origins of their personal fortunes. Courts struggle to cope with the opacity of the details in the cases brought before them. Enforcement agents lack the resources to investigate and prosecute even a fraction of the cases they face. Politicians shy away from offending powerful allies from friendly kleptocracies. In this way, informal practices are allowed to subvert anti-money-laundering and anti-corruption laws. The industry itself has its own cultures, norms and self-justifications. 'Well, otherwise they'd take their business elsewhere', is the common refrain. A 'don't ask, don't tell' culture emerges.\n\nThe revelations following the Panama Papers leak reveal that these attitudes are both morally wrong and factually selective. Many laws are already in place but are not implemented properly. In other cases enforcement does take place when it suits. A public register of owners \u2013 now accepted in the UK and some other states but resisted by tax havens \u2013 is a realistic possibility if the political will is there. The European Court of Human Rights is at least partially effective in reversing cases of the abuse of extradition treaties and revealing renditions. There are any number of points of leverage that can be used by governments and campaigners, from public shaming right through to 'blacklists' that would make potential purchasers of property and offshore accounts go through prohibitively demanding checks. These opportunities for change now present themselves. Anti-corruption initiatives must not lose momentum as the attention recedes.\n**ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS**\n\nA book such as this is the product of a certain amount of personal endeavour and a great deal of learning from the insights and labours of friends and colleagues. Many of these have been fellow travellers in a process which included two workshops at Columbia University, New York (in 2013 and 2016), presentations at Harvard University's Davis Center, Vilnius University and the University of Glasgow (2015), a panel at the meeting of the International Studies Association in San Francisco (2013), and a book conference at the University of Exeter (2015). They include Zulfia Abdullaeva, Fiona Adamson, John Agnew, Olivia Allison, Nils-Christian Bormann, Asel Doolotkeldieva, Saipira F\u00fcrstenburg, John Helmer, Alisher Ilkhamov, Edward Lemon, David Lewis, Tom Mayne, Ronen Palan, Jason Sharman, Kemel Toktomushev, David Trilling, Bill Vlcek, and Monica Whitlock. Many of these people read chapters in detail. We also thank four anonymous reviewers appointed by Yale. Authors of articles in the special issue of _Central Asian Survey_ in 2015 on 'Offshore Central Asia' made their own important contributions to getting tax havens and extraterritoriality on the agenda of the study of the region. Stacy Closson, Charles Dainoff, Erica Marat, Jennifer Murtazashvili and Adrien Fauve as well as Doolotkeldieva, Sharman and Toktomushev helped inform our own work. We also thank Deniz Kandiyoti and, subsequently, Madeleine Reeves for their support.\n\nResearch collaboration and assistance has had a direct effect on this book. We must especially recognise Sharman and Doolotkeldieva again for their co-authorships with Cooley and Heathershaw respectively of material that in revised form has made its way into the succeeding chapters. Heathershaw's earlier work with Nick Megoran partially inspired this book's attempt to change the conversation about security in Central Asia. Mayne's early reporting for Global Witness (GW) on Central Asia's offshore connections was path-breaking and his advice on sources invaluable. A team of student researchers from the University of Exeter then worked with Mayne and Chido Dunn to trawl through Land Registry records in earlier research published by GW. Journalists and officials in Kyrgyzstan who shall remain unnamed helped in the background research, and the equally courageous Sean Daley shared his experiences of his attempted assassination during the time of the Bakiyev administration. We learnt from the investigative instincts of journalists John Helmer, David Trilling, Bernt Gran and the legal expertise of Scott Horton. Eve Bishop, Rosa Brown and Juliana Angeles Ruiz at Exeter worked with speed and efficiency on the production and review of the Central Asian Political Exiles Database. Over a dozen human rights activists reviewed the database and provided invaluable comments. Sarah Calderone, Casey Michel and Max de Havalang of Columbia University provided excellent research assistance. The talented Seth Farkas produced the illustrative graphics.\n\nFinally, we must thank our friends and family. They may now have heard enough of _Dictators Without Borders_ , but without their support and sacrifices this project would have not come to fruition.\n\n1 Kazakh oligarch Mukhtar Ablyazov in Almaty, 2006.\n\n2 Kazakhstan President Nursultan Nazarbayev at the Astana Economic Forum, 2013.\n\n3 Tajikistan President Emomali Rahmon and US Secretary of State John Kerry at the Palace of Nations in Dushanbe, Tajikistan, for a bilateral meeting in 2015.\n\n4 The Tajik Aluminium Company (Talco), located in Tursunzade, Tajikistan.\n\n5 President Rahmon's growing family in 2011. Including the in-laws, the family is much larger.\n\n6 Uzbekistan's first president Islam Karimov with John Kerry in Samarkand, 2015.\n\n7 Gulnara Karimova at the World Economic Forum in Jordan, 2009.\n\n8 TeliaSonera's offices in Sweden, 2012.\n\n9 President Kurmanbek Bakiyev of Kyrgyzstan with Donald Rumsfeld in 2005.\n\n10 Maxim Bakiyev and officials from Kyrgyzstan's Central Agency for Development and Investment, 2009.\n\n11 Tajik opposition leader Umarali Kuvvatov, who was assassinated in Istanbul in March 2015.\n\n12 David Nazarov, son of Obidkhon qori Nazarov, at a demonstration following the assassination attempt on his father in Sweden, 2013.\nINTRODUCTION\n\n**CENTRAL ASIA BEYOND BORDERS**\n\nIn early 2007, a report by the anti-corruption watchdog Global Witness revealed that the Central Asian dictatorship of Turkmenistan had secretly accrued $8 billion in foreign reserves, most of which were held in US dollars by Deutsche Bank in undisclosed and offshore state accounts. Revealingly, the report that a Western bank had acted as a personal treasurer to the Turkmen president was not met with universal shock and outrage in official circles. One US diplomat declared in 2008, just prior to the global financial collapse, that the '[presidential] fund has always been officially acknowledged', vigorously defending the bank's actions by noting that 'Deutsche Bank adheres to gold-standard international accounting, and thus _any corruption takes place before the money reaches the bank_ ' (our emphasis). However, anti-money-laundering guidelines also make it clear that, if bankers and middlemen do not check or report their suspicions about the corrupt origins of capital, they are just as much part of a global network of corruption as government procurement bosses. Since 2008 Western governments have begun to recognise the problem of absolute financial secrecy. The US diplomat's defence of Deutsche Bank appears in this light to be either rather na\u00efve or deeply cynical.\n\nPresident Niyazov preferred to be called Turkmenbashi, the father of the Turkmen. He was the first leader of independent Turkmenistan, overseeing the state's transition, before his death in December 2006, from being the most southerly Soviet republic to one of the harshest and most secretive dictatorships in the world. In the central square of Ashgabat, the capital and shimmering storefront of the new sultanate, a golden statue of the great man revolved with the sun. Niyazov's image adorned almost every public building in the country, while he renamed some months after himself and members of his family. Niyazov even wrote his own 'holy book' of wisdom and philosophical musings, the _Ruhnama_ , which became the core of the curriculum at all levels of education in Turkmenistan and an important part of civil service exams. The personality cult left no room for freedom of expression or any kind of political opposition, leading Freedom House to rank Turkmenistan among its 'worst of the worst' of human-rights-abusing countries, and to give the country the lowest possible score for political rights and civil liberties every year since the mid-1990s. The anti-corruption NGO Transparency International consistently ranks Turkmenistan in the world's ten most corrupt countries.\n\nIt is easy to dismiss Niyazov's Turkmenistan \u2013 as many Western media accounts routinely did \u2013 as a despotic and secluded desert oasis that was nonetheless fortunate to sit on vast reserves of natural gas. Indeed, the potential for large energy exports seemed to constitute its major link to the wider world. Niyazov's paranoid government banned international media, restricted foreign travel for citizens and closed almost all externally sponsored schools and universities. Turkmenistan's official foreign policy of neutrality, eschewing membership of military alliances or international organisations, has also promoted this image of isolationism. After his death, Niyazov was rapidly succeeded by the similarly autocratic but more difficult to pronounce Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedov.\n\nLittle has changed. Turkmenistan has gone from dependence on exporting gas along pipelines via Russia to a fresh dependence on new Chinese-built pipelines to the east, making Ashgabat desperate to start exporting gas southwards to Pakistan and India under the Western-backed but ill-fated TAPI project. What would, however, spur the Central Asian state's development is political reform and liberalisation of its state-dominated and corruption-prone economy \u2013 none of which seem anywhere near the distant horizon.\n\nHowever, as the Deutsche Bank story shows, this picture of isolation, autarky and eccentricity is incomplete. Beyond the public view we find Turkmenistan entangled in transnational networks of businesspeople, global bankers and cosmopolitan fixers. Germany may not officially be an ally of Turkmenistan or a supporter of its authoritarian practices, but some of its leading companies play major roles in the country's economy and finances. Deutsche Bank has been operating in Turkmenistan since 1994 and holds the accounts of the Central Bank of Turkmenistan. Its representative in Turkmenistan effectively serves as banker to the regime, managing its accounts. Deutsche and another German bank, Commerz, as class-A European banks, are the only banks able to offer financial guarantees on the holdings of foreign companies working in Turkmenistan. Other German businesses, including Mercedes and Siemens, and many other foreign companies, such as French construction giant Bouygues, have established themselves as preferred suppliers to the Turkmen government due mainly to 'good relations with the highest-ranking government officials'. All these businesses sell in hard currencies, which Turkmenistan needs to purchase foreign technology for its industry and high-end consumer goods for its elite.\n\n'Offshore' accounts are not to be confused with the foreign currency reserves typically held by national banks to pay debt and support foreign exchange stability. They are, however, vital to dictators like Turkmenistan's now-deceased Saparmurat Niyazov, allowing them both to shelter the spoils of power within the international financial system and, in turn, to use these spoils to promote political goals at home and gain influence overseas. Turkmenistan's gas revenues are not simply kept in its local currency, the manat, but are exchanged for dollars through state accounts held offshore. These accounts are off-budget, opaque and may hold as much as 50 per cent of annual hard-currency revenues. They are personally controlled by key regime figures who apparently use them for both personal gain and political purpose, which often coincide in the form of vainglorious state infrastructure projects and their generous kickbacks. If these offshore revenues declined due to the falling price of gas (as they are likely to have done in recent years), or if these accounts were frozen as part of corruption investigations, the very survival of the regime would be threatened. Politically, payments from these accounts fund foreign lobbying and international arbitrations over key state projects. Meanwhile, elites battle over such funds. Indeed, the desire to control them has been a main driver of intra-regime purges in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, post-civil war politics in Tajikistan, and the deposing of two governments in Kyrgyzstan.\n\nThis book tells the fascinating stories of Central Asia's _dictators without borders_. Their tales are at once local and global \u2013 and not infrequently gruesome. Far from operating in isolation, even the most closed Central Asian states have embedded their transactions, or at least their most significant transactions, in a set of informal transnational networks with global reach. The so-called 'local' familial, ethnic and regional networks of power and wealth in the region are often also globalised, as Central Asia's dictators play out their legal and power struggles overseas. This involves concealing their transactions through the use of shell companies, targeting and defeating their enemies abroad and accruing their winnings partly through this network of bankers, lawyers and lobbyists in Frankfurt, London, New York and other financial and political capitals.\n\nHow is it that the majority of policymakers, analysts and scholars ignore or disregard these links? Putting aside the cognitive dissonance of policymakers and any conspiracy theories that might explain their silence, there are three myths which undergird the assumption that Central Asia is a distinctly onshore region. Our analysis vigorously challenges all three.\n\nMyth #1: the distant heartland of Asia\n\nIt is understandable that Central Asia is typically viewed in the West as a distant 'heartland', isolated from global influences and processes, beset by homegrown political repression and economic stagnation. There is a grain of truth to this image. Central Asia is sparsely populated and landlocked, with Uzbekistan one of only two doubly landlocked countries in the world. The poverty-stricken states of Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan have both suffered cycles of violence and 'revolution' largely of their own making. The idiosyncrasies of the resource-rich dictatorship of Turkmenistan and the brutally repressive tactics of its neighbour Uzbekistan seem to confirm the view that Central Asian despotism is far from the ways of the West and best left alone. Only Kazakhstan \u2013 also abundant in hydrocarbons and relatively 'open' for business \u2013 with its 'skilful leadership' is lauded as a modernising state worthy of attention and investment.\n\nHowever, the relative public ignorance about Central Asia beyond its borders is no fault of Central Asians themselves, the majority of whom have considerable awareness of international affairs. Most adult Central Asians speak at least one European language \u2013 typically Russian \u2013 and many are remarkably knowledgeable about global popular culture, foreign exchange rates and contemporary events, particularly in the former Soviet states. But whilst in the aftermath of independence those former Soviet republics farther north received greater attention in English-language media, the southern states of Central Asia were largely ignored as very few global media outlets or major newspapers established bureaus there. Even today, there are few places to study Central Asian languages beyond the region, few major cultural exports from the region, and precious little coverage of its events. It is little wonder that Central Asia was perceived as particularly obscure. In Sacha Baron Cohen's _Borat_ , John Cusack's _War, Inc._ , and countless other movies, TV shows and novels, Central Asia is an easy object of humour, whose states are treated as new instances of Ruritania, or simply those crazy '-stans'. In each of these cases, it is the ignorance of foreign publics and diplomats that is satirised, but in each case the image of Central Asia as unknown or obscure is also reproduced.\n\nWestern officials and experts are often little better informed. Diplomats, security professionals and analysts have routinely argued that Central Asia is disconnected from global political and economic transformations. Following the region's newly acquired independence in the 1990s, most global powers were slow to establish embassies and committed few resources there. Central Asia was not considered part of the 'developing world' like sub-Saharan Africa, nor the source of security threats like the Middle East, nor of global economic importance like East Asia. International oil and gas companies moved more quickly, but their interest was naturally narrow. Following the events of 9\/11 and the US-led military campaign in Afghanistan, the region was securitised as a critical front in the Global War on Terrorism. But this new relevance seemed to only further popularise, rather than dispel, these myths as the Pentagon and its contractors justified funnelling additional resources to regime affiliates and their cronies. As Chapter 6 shows, the West's military campaign in Afghanistan actually spawned new transnational networks and offshore schemes that enriched and empowered Central Asia's supposedly disconnected rulers.\n\nThe apparent obscurity of Central Asia thus became a self-fulfilling prophecy. It leads many of those who dabble in the region for the first time to fall back on the monikers of 'lost', 'hidden' and 'heartland' that were deployed in the nineteenth century by Russian and Western players of the 'great game'. This imperial struggle to control and otherwise cajole the political leaders of the territories between Russia in the north and British India to the south, between Persia and the Ottoman Empire in the west and China in the east, entered the public imagination via the memoirs, travelogues and reports of heroic European explorers. Imperialist thinking was given academic credence in the British political geographer Halford Mackinder's early-twentieth-century claim to the Royal Geographic Society that the Central Asian space was a 'geographical pivot of history'. The centre of the Eurasian landmass, 'the Heartland', was, Mackinder argued, the key to global strategic pre-eminence. These imperial perspectives on Central Asia have a lasting legacy in the apparent inability of many foreign analysts to think of Central Asians as both fully modern and agents of their own polities.\n\nOn closer inspection, rather than isolating the region, Central Asia's contemporary geography instead determines _how_ _its ruling elites access specific transnational networks_. Oil-rich Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan, on the shores of the Caspian Sea, enjoy energy resources like Kashagan, the largest new oil and gas field discovered in the last half-century. The field itself has proved enormously challenging to extract, while intense corporate and international competition have also shaped external interest and its consortium dynamics. The whole region holds mineral wealth, including major gold mines in Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan, with relatively educated populations and weak but growing consumer markets. Central Asia's largest mineral and energy companies have been listed on the London Stock Exchange, although forced nationalisations and local protests have made mining politically risky and are the source of many international arbitration claims against the region's governments in tribunals in London, Stockholm and Washington, DC.\n\nFigure I.1 Map of Central Asia\n\nCentral Asia is also home to the two most migration-dependent countries in the world, the mountainous republics of Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. The remittances of Tajik and Kyrgyz labour migrants back to their families constitute about one-half and one-third of these countries' GDPs respectively. Kyrgyzstan is also the only state in the world to host, for more than a decade, both Russian and American military bases. Tajikistan is one of few countries to receive both a UN peacekeeping mission and a Russian-led one \u2013 the latter through the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), the international organisation which succeeded the Soviet Union. Both Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan serve as entrep\u00f4ts for China's re-export trade to the rest of the CIS.\n\nUzbekistan sits in the geographic and economic centre of Central Asia. It lies between the oil-rich deserts and steppe of Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan on the one hand, and the relatively resource-poor, remittance-dependent and mountainous states of Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan on the other. Uzbekistan also relies heavily on labour migrants to prop up its autarkic economic model of state-controlled investment and trade. It benefits from modest oil and gas exports and, as the region's most populous country with around 30 million people, has a larger domestic consumer market than its neighbours. Downstream from Tajikistan's and Kyrgyzstan's mountain rivers, it is also a producer of cotton and wheat and is the single biggest opponent of the two countries' plans to dam their rivers to generate electricity.\n\nMyth #2: the failure of liberalisation\n\nA second entrenched myth about Central Asia lies in the donor and policy professional's perception that its lack of economic liberalisation has been largely responsible for its economic challenges and endemic governance problems. For the first two decades of independence, Central Asia was not only viewed as geographically isolated, but was widely judged as detached from global governance, the international economy and the process of globalisation. The solution offered to this problem was liberalisation, both political and economic, in the form of market reform, financial deregulation, privatisation and land reform, along with free and fair elections, multiparty politics, and open space for civil society between families and the state. In Central and Eastern Europe, with the carrot of European Union membership promised in the near future, such market and political reform appeared to be working. More importantly, most of the states on Europe's borders had a long history of independence, and the new elites who emerged after the end of the Cold War had no problem labelling the Eastern bloc as a Soviet imperial project to be disavowed wholescale. However, these conditions \u2013 massive international aid and inducements, and an elite committed to reform \u2013 were completely absent in Central Asia. Despite the absence of these factors, the liberal reform blueprint was offered to Central Asia as if these political factors might be incidental to a largely technical process of creating new markets and electoral systems.\n\nOn paper, a considerable number of landmarks were achieved, as Central Asian countries initially mimicked post-communist states in 'transition'. In the heady days of their new-found independence, Central Asian leaders were willing to sign up to ambitious new statutes. Laws governing property and trade were written, with the liberalisers Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan eventually introducing market economies to replace Soviet-era planning. The old Soviet\u2013Russian ruble was unceremoniously abandoned and new currencies introduced by these states, while Western experts advised on how to privatise property and build financial institutions from scratch.\n\nBut, unlike in most of Central and Eastern Europe, such privatisations were not governed by the rule of law, but by the principles of neo-patrimonial relations, where ruling elites provided assets to relatives and allies in return for their absolute loyalty and a cut of the spoils. Elsewhere, this has been labelled 'crony capitalism', a well-established feature of many emerging economies including some of the most successful in terms of economic growth. According to David Kang, crony capitalism during the East Asian economic miracle occurred where politics drove economic policy choices, where bureaucrats lacked autonomy from politics, and where 'business and political elites wrestled with each other over who would reap the rents to be had'. In Central Asia, a similar process occurred. However, as governments established themselves as consolidated autocracies, the spoils of the market reforms of the 1990s were seized and secured through new global financial connections, hidden bank accounts and offshore networks.\n\nWhen economic and political transition in Central Asia was declared dead in the early 2000s the pathologists carrying out the post-mortem were clear that the Central Asians were laggards in market and democratic reform compared to their post-socialist brethren in Eastern Europe. Failure, it was widely acknowledged, was largely due to their domestic conditions. Anders \u00c5slund, who advised Russia and Kyrgyzstan on their reforms, argued that the failure to reform Soviet systems was simply due to a lack of political will on the part of the Central Asians. Thomas Carothers, who was critical of the presumptions of \u00c5slund and his colleagues, identified some Central Asian states as 'feckless reformers' while others simply remained authoritarian. Few acknowledged the distinct difficulties of the Central Asian states' starting conditions, which were completely wanting in the preconditions of capitalism including private property, their own currency and a modern history of free trade beyond the borders of the former Soviet Union.\n\nBut even fewer considered an alternative possibility \u2013 that the hasty promotion of financial deregulation may have actually hindered wider economic and political 'reform'. With hindsight, a closer look at the economies of Central Asia reveals that their problems are _not those of the complete failure of liberalisation, but rather its partial and selective adoption_. In particular, their acute difficulties arise out of the coincidence of authoritarianism and capitalism \u2013 a lack of democratic reform but considerable convergence with the global market economy, enabling transnational networks of kleptocracy and capital flight. These states, which have partially adopted financial and economic liberalisation while remaining authoritarian, are characterised with labels such as 'hybrid regimes', 'electoral authoritarianism' and 'authoritarian neoliberalism'. Liberal reformers like \u00c5slund simply dismiss this liberalisation as mere crony capitalism. However, during the 'globalisation era' of the 1990s, this kind of cronyism became the norm in many so-called emerging markets, which adopted globalising reforms such as floating currencies, seeking foreign direct investment (FDI) and removing capital controls.\n\nFurther, these countries embed many of their transactions and dispute adjudication in foreign law, thus making their legal personas global, even as insider elites retain operational control of these companies. Elites wield liberalisation initiatives as instruments to advance their narrow economic and political interests. Instead of reducing state predation and elite enrichment, financial liberalisation has enabled these practices on a more global scale. Small wonder, then, that even a 'laggard reformer' like Tajikistan in 2011 experienced an estimated capital flight of over 60 per cent of its GDP, according to the IMF. In Central Asia, crony capitalism is the _only_ capitalist game in town, resourced by correspondent relations with major world banks, advice from law firms and auditors, and cooperation with the World Bank, IMF and other leading institutions of global financial regulation. Rather than being innocent bystanders to this slide, many great global financial institutions and major foreign companies were complicit in the emergence of crony capitalism.\n\nTwo inescapable truths of Central Asia's experience of transition have made reform near impossible and corruption a natural part of politics and business. First, the region is characterised by the blurring of politics and economics and public and private sectors to the extent that the boundary between them is completely absent. In Central Asia, if you are ahead in politics, you are ahead in business, and vice versa. This basic axiom is strongly implied by the fact that all members of Central Asian legislatures enjoy some degree of immunity from criminal prosecution. Most Central Asian presidents are wholly above the law, enjoying immunity from prosecution, formal designation as 'leader of the nation', and, with the absence of term limits, the effective power to remain president for life. Second, today's dictators and their cronies are deeply integrated into global business and finance. They may not be able to manage their currencies, control inflation or operate efficient state enterprises, but this is not to say they are not eager players in the hidden world of investments, assets and wealth management. They don't need reconnecting to the global economy: they are already connected through webs of offshore companies, company service providers and brokers.\n\nNot coincidentally, the emergence of this globalised crony capitalism coincided with the region's worsening authoritarianism. Electoral democracy was constitutionally enshrined in Central Asian countries, but competitive politics remains rare. In fact, during the 2000s basic civil liberties in all the regional states deteriorated. Turkmenistan established a de jure president for life, whilst three of the other four republics have followed this path \u2013 removing term limits and other constitutional barriers \u2013 without yet codifying this status. Uzbekistan experienced a brief flourishing of political opposition before this was crushed by its dictator Islam Karimov, who has ruled since the Soviet era. Tajikistan and Kazakhstan saw nascent multiparty systems overcome by authoritarian presidents who also trace their political careers to the Soviet period. In Tajikistan, this was justified by elites as the price of stability after the country's brutal civil war of the 1990s. In Kazakhstan, it was enabled by economic growth on the back of the country's immense oil and gas wealth coming online. Only Kyrgyzstan, despite suffering from periods of authoritarian rule and persistent cronyism, has seen the emergence of multiparty politics and, finally, in 2011 the peaceful relinquishing of power by one leader (interim president Roza Otunbayeva) for another (Almazbek Atambayev). Space for politically engaged civil society tenuously remains in Kyrgyzstan and to a lesser extent in Kazakhstan. Elsewhere, it has disappeared entirely.\n\nThe onset of the so-called 'colour revolutions' from 2003 to 2005 further equated the practice of democracy promotion with regime instability, a fear that in May 2005 informed the Uzbek government's bloody crackdown on thousands of demonstrators in the eastern city of Andijan. Since then, all Central Asian states have cracked down on independent media and imposed restrictions on civil society. Meanwhile in the aftermath of the Arab Spring, Central Asian security services further targeted social media and unleashed yet another wave of restrictive laws against 'foreign agents', with international NGOs and foundations accused of fomenting dissent and encouraging 'non-traditional' behaviours. Gender and sexual identity remain heavily circumscribed within highly conservative laws, norms and political discourse, while Western-style liberal values are now routinely discredited in public in favour of local 'cultures', state sovereignty or 'traditional' morals. All the while, Central Asian ruling families have acquired foreign luxury real estate in cosmopolitan hot spots like London, Paris, Geneva, Los Angeles and New York. Their robust and active transnational networks stand in stark contrast to their countries' weak, demonised and underfunded civil societies.\n\nMyth #3: Central Asian localism\n\nFinally, we have the myth that Central Asia's political predicament has local or cultural causes. 'Okay,' the argument goes, 'these guys have a few offshore bank accounts and Western PR consultants but they get to the top and stay there because of factors internal to Central Asia.' This is the argument of 'localism'. It has two variants: the vulgar and the nuanced. In the nuanced version, where local actors are placed in their global contexts, localism is no myth at all, but the means by which Central Asia is shaped as a region. However, in the vulgar version, localism is a deeply deceptive lens through which Central Asia becomes a mere problem to be solved.\n\nVulgar localism, as championed by popular commentators, posits that there is a clear divide between the region and the outside world. Central Asia is the source of a series of problems for the wider world associated with its supposed multiethnic discord, its religious ferment and its history of tribal and clan-based organisation. Chief among these is Islamism, which is said to be 'resurgent' in Central Asia following the collapse of the Soviet Union. Such localist analysis ironically fails to take account of the particular history of Central Asia. The region's Muslim societies were highly secularised by the Soviet experience and therefore remain infertile ground for widespread radicalisation. Central Asia has not experienced a major armed conflict for twenty years, despite predictions to the contrary. Mercifully, terrorism and political violence \u2013 despite kleptocratic governance \u2013 are rare compared to neighbouring regions of South Asia, the Middle East and the Caucasus. From 2001 to 2013, just 0.1 per cent of global terrorist attacks took place in Central Asia \u2013 a region with around 1 per cent of the world's population.\n\nFor some prominent commentators and analysts, Central Asia's internal problems should be considered threats to the Western world. According to Thomas Barnett, professor of warfare analysis at the US Naval War College, Central Asia is part of a 'non-integrating gap' (including most of Africa, the Middle East, South America and Pakistan\/Afghanistan, but not Russia or Europe), that is dangerous to the 'core' of globalisation because of its disconnectedness from it. For Chris Seiple, director of the Washington think tank the Institute for Global Engagement, using an expression coined by former US Secretary of State Zbigniew Brzezinski and popularised on a famous _Time_ magazine cover, Central Asia sits 'atop the crescent of crisis that rises from North Africa to Central Asia before descending into Southeast Asia'. In a similar vein, former US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld identifies a 'broad arc of instability that stretches from the Middle East to Northeast Asia' and which threatens critical US interests. The affiliation of these writers is significant, illustrating the circulation of ideas among agenda-setters in Washington \u2013 a phenomenon also found in other Western policymaking centres.\n\nNuanced localism is a very different beast. It has been the main means by which social scientists in the field of Central Asian Studies have explained the region over the last ten to fifteen years. Political scientists such as us, who undertook fieldwork in the region following the fall of the Soviet Union, found that local informal institutions trump formal constitutional arrangements. 'Clans', ethno-regionalism and patron\u2013client ties were all identified as significant. In the best work, the ties that bound clans were never presented as purely those of blood. The fictive kinships of business relations and bureaucratic solidarities were shown to expand and update 'clans' during the Soviet and post-Soviet periods. To some authors, localism ( _mestnichestvo_ in Russian) was itself a product of the Soviet multinationalist (or colonial) state project. By this account, 'localism' was the product of a profoundly modern political order. This version of Central Asian affairs has been extremely helpful in our understanding of how local patterns of governance have emerged in the region. For example, such bottom-up analysis provides the best explanations for the end of the civil war in Tajikistan, the 'revolutions' in Kyrgyzstan and the tensions in the border regions of the Ferghana Valley. Such field-based research was a corrective to an earlier generation of scholarship from a time when the Soviet republics had been inaccessible and were largely viewed by Western researchers from afar.\n\nHowever, the study of the international politics of Central Asia still lacks many of these nuances. Commentators often struggle to see how the internal and external affairs of Central Asia are connected. Only a handful of studies have ventured to the region's hidden offshore and extraterritorial spaces. This is striking as few questions of government, international relations, development, business and state formation can be answered without acknowledging the offshore dimension. The timing of Central Asia's independence in the globalisation era of the 1990s was crucial as it allowed this localism to rapidly scale up and embed itself in transnational networks. In Kyrgyzstan, for example, both in the capital Bishkek and in the villages of Talas Province, localism combines with an awareness of the price of gold on the global market and an aspiration to the modern lifestyles and wealth seemingly enjoyed overseas. More importantly, however much regional clans may structure national politics, they require a further set of connections to brokers and middlemen beyond their borders in order to convert their power into secure financial reserves.\n\nWhy have both policymaking and academic worlds been reluctant to identify the offshore dimension? One important consideration is that the full reality of the entangled nature of our global economic and financial relations is a very inconvenient truth indeed. It is uncomfortable for Western governments (and academics) to admit that the same banks that are protected by generous taxation regimes are also laundering the money of organised crime networks. It is unpleasant to recognise that our strict regimes of asylum and immigration make exceptions for high-net-worth investors \u2013 often oligarchs \u2013 whose 'worth' is based on the plundering of their home economies. It is embarrassing to recognise that Companies House in London registers both major high-street brands and shell companies whose beneficial owners are legally unknown and might include organised criminals. And it is inconvenient to admit that the system of deregulation, tax avoidance, legal globalisation and offshore havens which has been advanced by successive British and American governments is the very system which facilitates corruption on an unimaginable scale. In the West, at least, we are schooled to think our political and economic systems are ultimately governed by the rule of law and are therefore relatively free from corruption compared to political systems outside of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). The realisation that our systems may provide the opportunities and vehicles for large-scale corruption is a difficult pill to swallow.\n\nPerhaps the greatest casualty of this focus on Central Asian localism has been that we have missed how Central Asian political contestation \u2013 even so-called clan politics and intrafamilial struggle \u2013 has itself gone global. The Kazakh state had targeted a number of estranged political dissidents and opponents abroad through appeals to foreign law enforcement and the use of Interpol arrest warrants, even including the now-deceased former son-in-law of the Kazakh president. Uzbekistan's ruling family has played out a high-profile international drama involving former President Karimov's once powerful daughter Gulnara Karimova, now under house arrest in Tashkent, and her public spats with her sister Lola. And, as Chapter 7 explores, both the Uzbek and Tajik regimes, no longer satisfied with monopolising 'clan power' and repressing opposition domestically, have taken more aggressive measures to target political opponents and opposition communities residing abroad through a number of extraterritorial instruments. Simply put, even if we privilege the importance of local, familial and regional political identities and loyalties, the setting in which they play out is increasingly global.\n\nCentral Asia and the 'offshore' world\n\nAs Nicholas Shaxson, a tax haven specialist, notes in his book _Treasure Islands_ , 'capital no longer flows to where it gets the best return but to where it can get the best tax subsidies, the deepest secrecy, and to where it can best evade the laws, rules and regulations it does not like'. Perhaps more than half of world trade, half of all banking assets and a third of foreign direct investment are routed offshore, yet rarely do we associate these offshore trends with developments in Central Asia. Redirecting our focus away from formal trade flows to the more hidden offshore world and institutions of contemporary finance, we see, in fact, multiple links between the Central Asian region and the global economy, often via post-Soviet business networks, elite bank accounts, third-party brokers and lawyers who connect supposedly isolated Central Asian elites with global centres of power and wealth. These ties and deals have considerable political and security implications.\n\nThis interconnectedness may begin in the financial realm but it has economic and political, domestic and international ramifications. Over the past two decades, Central Asian elites have learned to use global financial institutions and offshore vehicles to split the legal personality of nominally state-controlled assets. They have also laundered money through shell companies and structured side-payments from their dealings with external actors, including telecommunications companies, energy multinationals and even foreign militaries.\n\nAs researchers, we are only now beginning to comprehend the breathtaking scope and analytical import of these activities. An increasing number of cases have come before Western courts, been the subject of parliamentary investigations or appeared in the international press. In Central Asia, these include Kazakhgate, the Baker Hughes and Kazakhmys cases in Kazakhstan, Asia Universal Bank and Manas jet fuel contracts in Kyrgyzstan, the National Bank and Talco cases in Tajikistan, various examples from Turkmenistan's gas sector, and the ongoing investigation into TeliaSonera in Uzbekistan. In all cases, the use of offshore companies allowed Central Asian regimes to either hide financial transactions or divert state funds into the accounts of leaders and their cronies. These cases are probably the tip of the iceberg. Today, some of the world's biggest banks provide offshore services to Central Asian regimes, as the case of Turkmenistan's presidential Deutsche Bank account shows. But the origins of Central Asia's offshore connections are altogether more ad hoc and adventurous.\n\nOne of the earliest and most notorious brokers operating in the region was the American James Giffen, the key figure in Kazakhgate. In the early 1990s, Giffen became a close adviser to the man who remains Kazakhstan's president, Nursultan Nazarbayev. Giffen organised introductions to international energy companies, brokered large deals and acted as a fixer for the ruling family during the first years of independence, eventually earning himself a Kazakh diplomatic passport. He reportedly structured at least six large international oil deals involving American companies that included Texaco, Amoco, Phillips Petroleum and Mobil Oil. He allegedly used a complex network of over thirty offshore bank accounts and shell companies to direct unlawful payments from these oil companies to the personal Swiss bank accounts of 'very senior' Kazakh officials. In 2003, he was arrested at New York's John F. Kennedy airport and indicted for wire and mail fraud, money laundering and violations of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA). In 2010, he pleaded guilty to one violation of the FCPA.\n\nThough Giffen was the quintessential broker, similar roles are now played, though perhaps not with the same public persona, by groups of lawyers and accountants who are skilled in both negotiating contracts and structuring their terms. Particularly notable in the last two decades is the entry of prominent Western law firms who have opened offices in the region, as well as the increasing tendency of local lawyers to have US or English law qualifications, or at least to take a temporary placement at a firm in one of these two countries. The academic literature on kleptocracy suggests that unscrupulous lawyers are usually a key node in transnational laundering networks.\n\nOther stories remain untold, hidden from view. The offshore world provides secrecy and security but it also proffers personnel and advice that enables dictators and their cronies to manage and enhance their ill-gotten gains. Some of this activity is perfectly above board: offshore companies do serve legitimate purposes. They may protect a buyer seeking to make several purchases at once of similar commodities from price-gouging by sellers. More controversially, they enable tax minimisation in order to attract foreign investment. In this sense, the offshore world is integral to the functioning of the world economy, with all of its immense prospects for growth and its deepening inequalities. But there is also a darker side to the offshore realm, not just in the loss of legitimate public funds in the form of tax avoidance, but in the illegal activities it facilitates. These include illicit tax evasion, money laundering and the secret financing of illegal activities such as terrorism and violent rebellion.\n\nAs our chapters explore, networks of shell companies have been critical in structuring a range of financial transactions involving Central Asian elites. Shell companies have served as crucial intermediaries in new global networks, supplying the West's intervention in Afghanistan, providing links between Western banks and transnational organised crime in Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan and facilitating the foreign-financed corruption of the oil and gas sectors of Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan \u2013 all the while concealing actors' identities and hiding ownership structures. And as Chapter 1 discusses, Western countries are actually more likely to enable the establishment of anonymous companies than so-called tax havens. So while Western diplomats blame the region's economic problems on a supposed 'disconnectedness', they are usually oblivious to the fact that Western intermediaries, shell company providers and professional brokers have actually set up the legal and financial architectures that facilitate Central Asia's economically destructive capital flight and money-laundering networks.\n\nThese, then, are the global links that help produce the greatest security threat for the people of Central Asia: the survival and longevity of predatory regimes that are bleeding their countries dry. In short, Central Asia has been placed at the centre of world politics through a partial process of liberalisation which has connected it to the hidden global financial system of tax havens and shell companies. Central Asia's 'offshore' links are a critical, yet unacknowledged, part of its inherently intertwined domestic and international politics.\n\nChallenges of research\n\nThe recent Panama Papers leak notwithstanding, the global industry of tax avoidance and evasion for the super-rich rarely enters the public spotlight. Much of the reason for the lacuna may be that gathering basic facts on the offshore world is no easy task. As Palan, Murphy and Chavagneux remark, there are greater barriers to research on this topic than most:\n\nThey say in financial circles 'those who know do not talk and those who talk don't know'. In tax matters, those who know talk, sometimes, but those who do not know talk a lot. The world of tax havens is opaque, confusing and secretive. It is a world that is saturated with stories, rumours and anecdotes. Yet the veritable flood of information can sometimes hide a dearth of solid data.\n\nIn embarking on a book such as this it is very important to be humble about the limits of what can realistically be discovered, in order to avoid simply becoming 'those who talk'. Basic methodological problems of access to sources, reliability of data and validity of findings are particularly pronounced in the study of the offshore world. And as Peter Andreas reminds us, the study of the illicit global economy is not only methodologically fraught, it is intertwined in the political agendas of international organisations and bureaucrats who have incentives to selectively engage with the issues. We have faced such obfuscation from potential informants \u2013 often Western interviewees who do not want their dubious connections and clients' manoeuvres exposed. We have also seen surprising candour and openness \u2013 sometimes from post-Soviet officials alarmed that the regulators of London and New York are so relaxed about money laundering taking place on their watch.\n\nThree qualifications about research methods should be made before we proceed further.\n\nFirst, there is the dearth of data. It is hard to get documentary sources: offshore transactions are not published and the beneficial owners of companies are not disclosed. Where documents do become available, they often reveal only part of a complex series of transactions. These documents may be leaked or released for political purposes. Company service providers and lawyers are usually bound by professional confidentiality or non-disclosure agreements. Therefore, only fragments of this world are accessible to us, with sources typically becoming available only as the ownership or the legality of transactions are questioned in the courts. Most of the cases covered in this book emerged after legal action such as that against James Giffen, quasi-judicial investigations such as the Tierney report on Kyrgyzstan for the US Congress, or audits requested by international organisations such as the Ernst & Young review of Tajikistan's National Bank. Publicly available data is therefore limited but it is growing with much smaller data leaks preceding that of 2016. In the future, massive data leaks such as that of the Panama Papers will be all the more vital to exploring the general trends and specific cases of the offshore world. In the study of the regulation of tax havens and the offshore world there are many more sources and a 'rhetorical contest', in Sharman's terms, which can be studied; regulators and public officials may also consent to be interviewed. But for this study, we have chosen to stick strictly to public sources and openly available legal records, so that our study is fully replicable: we hope this work will motivate others to delve deeper.\n\nSecond, there is the question of the reliability and quality of data. In the complex and multiparty case in the London Court of International Arbitration that addressed the tolling arrangements of Talco, Tajikistan's state aluminium company, many of the disclosed sources were questioned by judges for their reliability. The case dragged on for four years and became the most expensive in British legal history at the time, without coming close to resolution, as multiple judges requested further information. Nine years after the beginning of the initial case, a Swiss court found in favour of a United Company Rusal-owned company but against the position argued by Rusal's lawyers in the earlier trial. When documents are presented in this way through the judicial process we can question whether they are representative and whether they constitute full disclosure. Fragments of data may mislead as much as they lead to reliable conclusions. For these reasons, WikiLeaks' Public Library of US Diplomacy, otherwise known as PlusD, has been extremely valuable in plugging political-economic analysis into financial data holes.\n\nThird, there is a question of the validity of findings given the unavoidable compromises that must be made in terms of the principles of research design. The hidden nature of offshore communities means that only certain questions can be answered, even then tentatively. The immediate, topical and policy-focused questions of journalists and the regulatory concerns of officials are often not those of academics who consider conceptual questions of the nature of international political economy, the state and regime dynamics. Sources cannot be selected to achieve a representative sample and it is not possible to select cases in a scientific manner; cases arise and only become known as a result of a regime's fall or a struggle between power-holders and their rivals. We may not be able to generalise about the whole of the iceberg from the study of its tip. Academic research in this area can often resemble investigative journalism or the reports of advocacy organisations, or rely on such reporting as a major source. Research by the journalists Steve LeVine, John Helmer and David Trilling and by the NGOs Global Witness and Transparency International _inter alia_ has greatly added to our knowledge of the offshore world and provides much of the groundwork that inspired this volume.\n\nThese problems of research also beget opportunities for the small band of analysts who study the offshore world. This study requires productive partnership between academics, activists and investigative journalists. We hope this book bears witness to the benefits which such collaboration brings. In working closely with groups such as Global Witness on the offshore economy of tax avoidance and money laundering, and Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch on countering the mechanisms of extraterritorial repression, we have both learnt a great deal about how dictators operate within and beyond borders. Through our information-sharing with investigative journalists, we have better understood complex problems such as Tajikistan's aluminium trading and Kyrgyzstan's fuel contracts. More collaboration across the boundaries of journalism, academic and policy research will be required to push the study of the offshore world forward.\n\nA final challenge, both methodological and ethical, is in the use of deception in research. Experimental, path-breaking research by Jason Sharman, his colleagues and others into the effectiveness of the global anti-money-laundering regimes has involved the impersonation of high-risk clients seeking to set up anonymous companies via offshore jurisdictions or major world financial centres. It is innovative, hard work and great fun \u2013 and all the more important in that their findings show that compliance with the global anti-money-laundering regime is weaker in London and New York than in jurisdictions like the British Virgin Islands and the Caymans. The UK Channel 4 programme _From Russia with Cash_ involved a similar set-up, with investigative journalists impersonating Russian buyers of high-end West London property, and making it clear that the source of the money for the purchase was corrupt. In this case, all five representatives of leading London real estate agents were apparently ready to proceed with the sale, making no attempt to report to the UK's National Crime Agency, as required by law. The practically ethics-free zones of wealth management and luxury property seem fair game for research but such deception must be done carefully so as not to lead participants towards law-breaking (to confirm a suspicion and hypothesis), and with the public interest in mind.\n\nOur argument\n\nIn this book we argue that Central Asia is best understood by focusing on the sprawling, informal transnational links between elites from Astana to London and Bishkek to Beijing. Four of the five Central Asian states are dictatorships whose autocratic presidents rule with an iron fist both at home and abroad. They and their associates use anonymous companies to move money and extraterritorial practices to track down and stifle their opponents. Wherever you are reading this book you may not be far from the registered address of an anonymous company they've used, a PR consultant they've employed, a lobbyist they've contracted, a property they've invested in, or an exile they've had tracked down, arrested, detained or disappeared. More specifically, _Dictators Without Borders_ has three aims.\n\nFirst, we intend to throw light on Central Asian politics writ large \u2013 the means by which autocrats operate beyond their borders with money laundering, political influence and brutal violence. We do not assume their targets are necessarily innocent victims. Only a few have been found guilty of law-breaking in an environment where they may receive a fair trial, but it is clear from these cases that Central Asian regimes sometimes have good cause to want to see their opponents behind bars. In other cases, it is very clear that an innocent victim has been targeted because she or he fell out with the wrong people back home. More often it is hard to discern the rights and the wrongs of a given case. But what is clear is that to understand what's going on in Central Asian politics we must stop thinking about these cases as simply 'what goes on in those countries'.\n\nIn most cases, the struggles we observe are between the regime and a former insider whose alleged crimes took place as a natural function of being in the very government that is now accusing him of corruption. Mukhtar Ablyazov has been found guilty by a British court of failing to disclose his global network of assets, while Kazakh authorities insist that he embezzled billions of dollars as the head of Kazakhstan's largest bank (see Chapter 2). But what we know from the revelations of the James Giffen affair is that such theft was rife among 'senior Kazakh government officials', right to the very top. The former management of the Tajikistan Aluminium Company certainly did make all kinds of side payments but such corruption is routine in Tajikistan (see Chapter 3). For it to count as corruption surely there has to be some kind of alternative, non-corrupt state of affairs? But no one can imagine the Tajik regime holding together without such payments from clients to patrons and the receiving of favours in return. Uzbekistan's Gulnara Karimova's alleged corruption and power-grabbing may have become so obvious as to endanger the regime in Tashkent but it is this obviousness which is evidently the problem, not the alleged corruption itself (Chapter 4). There is undoubtedly some political motivation for some of those who want to see Maxim Bakiyev behind bars in Kyrgyzstan, but there is also a considerable amount of evidence to suggest that he both provided the political cover for the development of a money-laundering system centred on Kyrgyzstan and conspired in the attempted murder of a rival, a well-known British businessman (Chapter 5).\n\nSecond, we aim to highlight the need for regulatory changes in national and global governance to prevent endless repeats of the stories of _Dictators Without Borders._ If this sounds na\u00efve, let us begin with a simple thought: for corrupt money to be laundered it needs a laundry of clean US dollar or euro bills. Without this, it is just corrupt money and worth little to anyone. Laundering is not necessarily straightforward and can be made considerably more difficult with relatively minimal international action, such as minor changes to the law and proper enforcement of existing regulations. The US and UK, despite much positive rhetoric about 'anti-corruption', could do more \u2013 much more. Simply increasing the budget and mandate of the UK National Crime Agency's International Corruption Unit may make a big difference. Whilst the UK has increasingly good, but improperly enforced, laws, the US has many loopholes but its enforcers can come down on law-breakers very heavily indeed. Moreover, the operation of offshore finance and international criminal justice cooperation fall inevitably under the purview of international regulators who can change their rules. The offshore economy would be a good deal more transparent and protected from abuse if it were agreed that each jurisdiction should hold a register of beneficial owners. In the security realm, the extraterritorial arm of Central Asian security services can be evaded if foreign governments provide better legal protections and more rapid provision of safe havens to legitimate refugees while cooperating fully to enable prosecution of exiles who are guilty of crimes at home. This is a difficult balance. We will explore some specific recommendations to global governors and regulators in the conclusion of this book.\n\nThird, and finally, we call for a fundamental reassessment of the nature of politics in Central Asia. We need to get beyond the perceived binary division between domestic affairs and foreign affairs. No longer should we think of authoritarianism as overseeing merely internal repression, and foreign affairs as being about strategic interests and geopolitics. Domestic politics also takes place overseas among the regime's opponents who have fled abroad. Foreign affairs also takes place at home as the great games of external powers play out within domestic politics. The book is thus a call to our colleagues in universities to open up their study of both the international relations and comparative politics of Central Asia to consider the inside-out and outside-in dynamics of its political economy.\n\nAfter presenting an explanatory framework for how Central Asia interacts with the forces of globalisation in the next chapter, across Chapters 2\u2013 the book tells a series of stories that illustrate these dynamics in four of the five Central Asian states.\n\nAs in Turkmenistan's opaque Deutsche Bank accounts, the boundary between domestic and foreign, public and private is blurred in each of these cases from the four other republics. Each case explores the interaction between political and economic developments inside and outside the region. Political contestation, so frequently absent within these authoritarian systems, now takes place beyond their territory. This is as true for more globalised Kazakhstan (Chapter 2), whose government has targeted a number of exiled political opponents residing in London, Los Angeles, Geneva and Cannes, as it is in closed and autarkic Uzbekistan (Chapter 4), where a series of international investigations into alleged money-laundering activities involving the president's daughter appear to have fatally weakened her at home and encouraged her house arrest. It is as critical to remember when observing how Tajikistan's ruling elites (Chapter 3) have battled to consolidate political power and monopolise state wealth, as it is in Kyrgyzstan (Chapter 5), where previous authoritarians and their families now safely reside in exile with their accumulated wealth, perversely using the West's own international legal and humanitarian protections to prevent their own confrontation with justice.\n\nIn the final two chapters we turn our attention to international development and security affairs, which are also characterised by the outside-in and inside-out dynamics observed in politics and business.\n\nIn Chapter 6, we show how grand geopolitical schemes, as developed by the United States and China, to resurrect the Silk Road and 'connect' the region, both misdiagnose the sources of Central Asia's development problems and ignore the existing informal networks that connect local, regional and global actors with their external patrons. We show how offshore vehicles have been key in facilitating the logistical contracts that have helped to supply the Afghanistan War, including a study of how Russian, Kyrgyz and US officials colluded to produce a fuel-smuggling ring to supply the Manas air base. In the case of China, we show how the country's major acquisitions of Central Asian energy assets, usually structured through offshore intermediaries, were loosely monitored by central authorities and appear to have encouraged shady transactions and local elite corruption schemes, and how these activities are now enmeshed in one of the largest corruption scandals to hit the country. Both Washington and Beijing's plans to promote connectivity by funding large-scale infrastructure projects may actually exacerbate the region's governance problems and further fuel the shadow networks that link the region's kleptocrats and their intermediaries with the world.\n\nIn Chapter 7, we demonstrate that in states such as Uzbekistan and Tajikistan where the political opposition has practically disappeared, politics now takes place offshore, as dictators use international institutions such as the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) and Interpol to track down, arrest and detain their exiled opponents. When they fail to legally extradite adversaries who would face long prison sentences and torture at home, dictators are able to adopt overseas many of the tactics of arbitrary arrest, violence and kidnapping that they may use at home. This is done by allies in the post-Soviet security networks and contracted agents who have entrapped, maimed and killed in Istanbul, Sweden and further afield. Domestic politics here works inside out. Central Asian dictatorships not only stifle political competition at home but also seek to wipe it out abroad \u2013 with varying degrees of success.\n\nOur Conclusion addresses how better enforcement and minimal extension of existing international regulations can close down the offshore and extraterritorial spaces that the region's autocrats now use and abuse. But before then it is vital that we properly understand how Central Asia operates beyond borders. It is to the development of an analytical framework to make sense of these practices and their sources, variations and implications that this book turns next. Our account of how Central Asia went global points to the international linkages and informal transnational networks that we in the West have long ignored.\n1\n\n**INSIDE-OUTSIDE, ONSHORE-OFFSHORE**\n\n**HOW CENTRAL ASIA WENT GLOBAL**\n\nCentral Asia's post-Soviet state-building was part of a broader wave of post-communist transition that coincided with the rapid rise of globalisation. The post-communist states, in Claus Offe's famous formulation, confronted a 'triple transition': from a Communist Party that monopolised politics to a more plural democracy; from a planned economy to a market; and from state-controlled social sphere to an independent civil society. But a generation following the independence of the post-Soviet Central Asian states, this globalised transition, unlike in Eastern Europe, has failed to produce states and polities that conform to the liberal-ideal type of marketised democracies. Politically, the Central Asian states, with the exception of Kyrgyzstan, are all described as 'consolidated authoritarian' by Freedom House in 2016, with regimes steadily accumulating power by shoring up their clients and security services, and cracking down on all forms of political opposition. All of the Central Asian states score poorly on global indicators of economic governance, with corruption, patrimonialism and state predation common practices. And civil society remains embattled throughout the region, facing increasing crackdowns and restrictions on its foreign funding and activities, even as Central Asian elites themselves become more globalised and actively use Western banks, company service providers and legal systems, and acquire luxury real estate.\n\nA tale of two post-communist globalisations: how Central Asia became more authoritarian and more global\n\nThis alternative understanding of Central Asia's state-building and global integration is at odds with many assumptions about post-communist pathways. Focusing disproportionately on the relatively successful transition experiences of Eastern Europe, scholars and policymakers have assumed that all 'liberal' processes and reforms reinforce each other \u2013 global integration promotes political and economic reform, which in turn supports and expands civil society. But a brief comparison between the state-building experiences of post-communist Eastern Europe and Central Asia illustrates how their experiences with extrication, international orientation and bargaining with the West differed strikingly; in the Eastern European case, the international environment mostly promoted reforms, while in Central Asia it reinforced global authoritarianism.\n\nFirst, while Eastern European states created competitive political party systems in an attempt to decisively move away from communism, Central Asians were far more ambiguous about shedding the Soviet past. In Eastern Europe, former communists were either almost instantly discredited through lustration campaigns or had to join reformist parties, property was quickly privatised, and civil societies were empowered. Severe political disruptions from market reforms did not, for the most part, engender political backlashes, as some theorists predicted, while these processes were benchmarked against the standards of neighbouring European democracies.\n\nBy contrast, in Central Asia the Soviet Union was abandoned, not overthrown, as Central Asian elites initially feared political life without Moscow's guidance, protection and economic subsidies. Former communist republican parties, led by former party bosses, clung to power, now at a new national level, with little incentive to actually implement political and economic reforms. Only Kyrgyzstan, which had endured an elite purge in late Soviet times, showed signs of genuine political and economic liberalisation, electing a former academic as president. As the 1990s progressed, Central Asian rulers consolidated power, forged large bureaucracies and strengthened the coercive and surveillance capabilities of their loyal security services. Rather than allow competitive political parties, they increasingly marginalised and then banned opposition movements, monopolised power under new nationalist discourses, and structured their political economies to personally take advantage of state assets through insider privatisations. Most political contestation took place through informal channels and networks, rather than the formal party system, while high levels of corruption became entrenched in their weak legal systems.\n\nSecond, Eastern Europe and Central Asia's varying geographical contexts and referents produced different experiences of the purpose and form of globalisation. In Eastern Europe, the prospect of joining the European Union as a national project and 'undividing' Europe became a political focal point. In the economy, foreign direct investment from Western Europe surged into the East, as international companies took advantage of newly nearby cheaper labour, as well as anticipating the region's overall future integration into Europe. This European influence was critical in nudging even the laggards of Eastern Europe to undertake more comprehensive institutional changes in the early 2000s. Thus, for ruling elites, mainstream political opposition parties and the public at large, to be global and modern were synonymous with returning to Europe. By contrast, the Central Asian states did initially join broader European institutions such as the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), and ratified major human rights treaties, but these actions appeared to be driven more by the need to avoid international opprobrium and to pay lip-service to liberal values. Over time, the Central Asian states were also subject to influence from non-European external patrons and models, most notably Russia and China, which included them in a number of regional economic initiatives such as the Eurasian Economic Union and the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation; from 2000 to 2010, official Central Asian trade with China grew from under $1 billion to over $30 billion, while Russian trade expanded from $5 billion to over $25 billion. In turn, these new regional organisations openly challenged Western liberal democratic norms. China also steadily displaced the West and Western-led financial institutions as the main provider of regional development assistance, infrastructure investment and emergency lending. At the same time, Central Asian elites themselves became more adept at using the global financial institutions, shell companies and legal entities for their own benefit and to structure many of those insider deals that involved state assets.\n\nFinally, the bargaining dynamics between the West, on the one hand, and Eastern Europe and Central Asia in the 2000s helped to reinforce Eastern Europe's liberal trajectory, while fuelling Central Asia's global authoritarian practices. Once they committed to join the European Union, EU conditionality mandated that over 20,000 of the EU's legal standards or the _acquis communautaire_ had to be passed by domestic legislatures in almost every area of political, social and economic life. In many cases, this offered lawmakers their political cover to pass unpopular reforms such as liberalising land ownership or protecting minority rights. The EU's strict rules on complete capital account convertibility also ensured that Eastern Europe was rapidly and comprehensively integrated into global financial markets and flows. Eastern European candidate countries had no choice \u2013 to join the club they had to accept the strict membership rules and institutional changes mandated by Brussels.\n\nThe situation in Central Asia again differed strikingly. Not only was Central Asia untouched by any remote prospect of EU membership, but also the West's leverage in promoting liberal values was undermined by geopolitical developments. Following the attacks of 9\/11, the Central Asian states became critical hubs in the US and the International Security Assistance Force's (ISAF's) military campaign and reconstruction efforts in neighbouring Afghanistan. Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan provided logistical military bases for Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF), and all of the Central Asian states provided transit rights for resupply and refuelling. In return, Central Asian rulers overnight became new allies in the Global War on Terrorism and were given unofficial quid pro quo in the form of military assistance and lucrative logistics contracts to support the campaign in Afghanistan; as an extension, both the EU and the US muted criticism of their increasingly authoritarian and rent-seeking tendencies. Supporting the Central Asian regimes and providing them with the incentives to maintain their security cooperation and maintaining basing access became the overwhelming regional priority of Western governments including the United States, UK, Germany and France.\n\nAs geopolitical competition across the region intensified over the 2000s, authoritarianism and governance deteriorated. Under the presidency of Vladimir Putin, Central Asia once again became a strategic priority for the Kremlin, which promoted new economic and security organisations to reintegrate the Central Asian states within Russia's orbit. China too dramatically increased its engagement with the region, both bilaterally and through the SCO, as it attempted to stabilise its borders and crack down on the activities of Uyghur networks that it perceived as fomenting separatism in its adjacent western province of Xinjiang. Then, when a series of post-communist governments were deposed in the mid-2000s in the 'colour revolutions' following rigged elections and replaced by pro-Western alternatives, both Moscow and Beijing strengthened their support for Central Asia's authoritarian rulers and helped them push back against sources of 'destabilising Western influence', including democratic monitors and human rights NGOs. Over 2005 and 2006, all of the Central Asian governments introduced new restrictions on NGOs and the media, and increasingly accused the United States of fomenting instability in the region by promoting its 'values agenda'. Central Asian rulers also invoked geopolitical competition as an excuse to reject external political conditions and supported Russian efforts to scale back the 'human' dimension of the OSCE's activities in the region, such as promoting rigorous and critical election monitoring.\n\nIn short, Central Asia and Eastern Europe experienced post-communist extrication and the new international environment as independent states in very different manners. The Central Asian states were not transformed, as Eastern Europe was, by the forces of globalisation and interactions with Western states and international organisations. Quite the contrary, they innovatively used the new opportunities, institutions and legal tools offered by globalisation to pursue their private economic agendas on a more global scale.\n\nLegal globalisation: shell companies and outsourced law\n\nLet us consider more closely the area of legal globalisation. The conventional wisdom is that the globalisation of international law, similar to economic globalisation, improves overall efficiency, especially in conjunction with the harmonising effects of the EU. But over the last two decades, the two prominent extraterritorial legal features involving the Central Asian states have been the central role of offshore registered companies in facilitating international transactions and the outsourcing of legal dispute settlement between contracting parties to international legal venues and third-country courts. Theoretically, the use of offshore subsidiaries by modern multinational enterprises is meant to minimise tax liabilities and move capital to lower-taxed jurisdictions from higher ones. Similarly, the outsourcing of dispute settlement is argued to be a reaction by commercial actors to uncertain institutional environments where the protection and enforcement of property rights is weak. Such institutional weakness was especially characteristic of the post-Soviet states where property rights remained ill-defined during the transition and transacting actors demanded the protections and certainty of Western common law.\n\nBut the problem with these 'efficiency' explanations, when applied to Central Asia, is that they assume a private business that acts independently of the state and state-related power structures. However, in Central Asia's patronage-based and authoritarian systems, elite networks were fused with state institutions, and elites actively took advantage of unclear property rights jurisdictions, insider privatisation processes and regulatory bodies to extract private benefits and camouflage their own roles in extracting this wealth. In this type of domestic institutional environment, these legal instruments of globalisation have functioned not as protections _from_ the state, but rather as instruments of elite patronage and political contestation _over_ the state and its prized assets.\n\n_Offshore registries and round-tripping_\n\nData on the use of foreign legal entities that actually conduct business is scarce in Russia, and even scarcer in Central Asia. The difficulties are compounded by the tendency of Central Asian companies to split and spin off portions of their companies to offshore jurisdictions, thereby creating patchwork assemblages of domestic and foreign incorporation and jurisdiction even within the same company. Another common practice involving foreign registered companies is that of 'round-tripping', or 'tolling' \u2013 the channelling of funds to special foreign-registered shell companies and legal entities, usually to minimise tax obligations or hide ownership structures, and the subsequent return of these funds to the local economy recorded as foreign direct investment. For example, according to Global Financial Integrity, in 2012 about $403 billion or 61 per cent of Russia's direct outward investment was held in tax havens, with Cyprus the consistently leading source and destination of Russian FDI. In the Russian case, round-tripping has been correlated with the laundering of illicit proceeds and efforts at maintaining secrecy from corrupt regulators and authorities.\n\nThe one Central Asian state whose central bank publishes data on investment inflows and outflows by country or place of origin is Kazakhstan and its investment profile is similar to Russia's in its use of the offshore registries of the Netherlands and the British Virgin Islands. In 2012, the Netherlands, one of the leading international centres for company incorporation, accounted for 42 per cent of inward foreign direct investment to Kazakhstan and 58 per cent of all outward flows. The same year the BVI ranked as the third leading source of inward FDI and third biggest destination for outward flows. But these figures tell us very little about the actual national origin and destination of these flows' countries.\n\nShell companies have also been associated with facilitating high levels of grand corruption on behalf of Central Asian elites. As the case chapters will show, the strategic use of shell companies has been a key weapon used by Central Asian elites who have sought to conceal their own individual transactions and roles in corrupt or questionable deals. Whether used for concealing the extent of ownership of bank holdings from Kazakh regulators, hiding the beneficial owners of a telecommunications licence vendor in Uzbekistan, concealing the dealings of Tajikistan's largest source of export income, covering up the global money-laundering dealings of Kyrgyzstan's largest bank, or structuring Turkmenistan's lucrative but opaque energy trade, shell companies and offshore registries have been at the centre of questionable transactions, international corruption schemes and major acquisitions within the region. One report by Global Witness on Turkmenistan's intermediary energy trading companies found that:\n\nThese companies have often come out of nowhere, parlaying tiny amounts of start-up capital into billion-dollar deals. Their ultimate beneficial ownership has been hidden behind complex networks of trusts, holding companies and nominee directors and there is almost no public information about where their profits go.\n\nTable 1.1 Foreign direct investment and round-tripping in Kazakhstan, 2012\n\n---\n\nInward direct investment from top five sources | Outward direct investment to top five destinations\n\n|\n\n$ millions | Percentage\n\n|  |\n\n$ millions | Percentage\n\nNetherlands | 51,419 | 43% | Netherlands | 11,274 | 51%\n\nUnited States | 12,853 | 11% | United Kingdom | 5,969 | 26%\n\nFrance | 8,421 | 7% | Switzerland | 835 | 4%\n\nPeople's Republic of China (mainland) | 5,308 | 4% | Russian Federation | 599 | 3%\n\nBritish Virgin Islands | 3,862 | 4% | British Virgin Islands | 597 | 3%\n\nTotal inward | 119,944 | 100% | Total outward | 22,928 | 100%\n\n_Source:_ IMF Coordinated Investment Survey, available at: <http:\/\/cdis.imf.org>\n\nIn April 2016 the leak of 11.5 million documents of the Panama-based law firm and company provider Mossack Fonseca \u2013 now known as the Panama Papers \u2013 dramatically highlighted the sheer industrial scale of the use of secret shell companies by international banks, politicians and their agents. The investigation conducted by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) found nearly 214,000 separate companies that had been established across twenty-one different jurisdictions. In the initial release, the family of Azerbaijan's President Ilham Aliyev was found to hold stakes in a variety of financial, media, insurance, construction and telecoms companies, as well as several luxury real estate holdings in Dubai. A subsequent story by the Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) explored how in Kazakhstan, despite President Nazarbayev's calls for Kazakh citizens to repatriate funds from abroad, 'the documents obtained by OCCRP show that members of the Nazarbayev family were regular users of these same tax havens'. Of particular interest were the offshore holdings of Nurali Aliyev, grandson of Nazarbayev and son of the president's daughter Dariga and his deceased political opponent Rakhat Aliyev, who was found to be the beneficial owner of two BVI companies used for 'operating a bank account and a luxury yacht'. Shortly after, Kazakhstan's prosecutor general ruled out investigating these allegations, arguing that 'there is no reliable information in these materials the Panama Papers] concerning their source'. In Uzbekistan, the leaks also revealed a 'string of companies' owned by Rustam Madumarov, the former boyfriend of the president's disgraced daughter Gulnara Karimova ([Chapter 4), who was jailed in 2014 for ten years on corruption charges. Surveying the importance of the papers to Central Asian elites, Paolo Sorbello and Bradley Jardine conclude that 'these developments suggest that western tax havens have played a crucial role in consolidating political power in the hands of Central Asian elites'.\n\n_The politics of enforcing anti-money-laundering rules_\n\nBut what of the international rules, guidelines and recommendations that have been devised to combat money laundering through secret shell companies? Specifically, the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) has drafted guidelines that include a recommendation that all providers of companies should obtain a notarised proof of identity from the purchaser and a current address. Should not the very attempt of Central Asian elites involved in corruption-prone sectors such as energy serve as a warning to providers of shell companies and offshore registries?\n\nWork conducted by Michael Findley, Daniel Nielsen and Jason Sharman provides dramatic and sobering results regarding the actual 'due diligence' that company providers around the world conduct to verify the identities of their clients. In an extraordinary social science experiment, the authors sent over 8,000 email solicitations under fictitious identities inquiring about buying a shell company, critically asking whether the purchase could take place without providing internationally recognised identity documents (in violation of globally agreed rules set by the FATF that require company providers to obtain notarised copies of the registrant's identification documents). With this large sample size, the authors used proxy servers to solicit company providers in over 190 different countries, and impersonated potential clients from twelve countries, including four of the Central Asian states, of various professional backgrounds.\n\nTellingly, for our purposes, over 600 solicitations were sent under fictitious Central Asian names like Abdullo Ogorodov, who described himself as a 'consultant' from a Central Asian country involved in 'government procurement'. The solicitation contained myriad corruption-related red flags that any company provider should pick up on, providing further reason to carefully verify identity information before selling a company. However, the researchers found that the so-called 'Central Asia corruption treatment' made no difference whatsoever to the results \u2013 company providers were as likely to flout the rules with such prospective buyers as they were when approached by representatives from 'clean' countries.\n\nStrikingly, the advanced industrialised democracies of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), were more likely to sell an anonymous company without proper documentation than providers based in developing countries, with the UK and the US the biggest culprits. The City of London and several US states have, in fact, long been havens for corrupt capital and are accustomed to turning a blind eye. More than that, they brazenly advertise themselves to those that demand secrecy and non-disclosure to law enforcers. The state of Nevada touts its 'limited reporting and disclosure requirements' and a speedy one-hour incorporation service via its website. As reported in _The Economist_ , it does not ask for the names of company shareholders, nor does it routinely share the little information it has with the federal government.\n\nIn fact, among OECD providers, the research showed that such high-risk figures would need to make only eleven approaches on average before being able to set up an account without the appropriate checks and documentation \u2013 what the authors refer to as the 'dodgy shopping count' \u2013 while the count for providers in developing countries was about twenty-five approaches. With thousands of companies and brokers in the marketplace the determined money launderer has a high chance of success. This work suggests how relatively easy it is for Central Asian elites, and their designees, to purchase a shell company anonymously in this globalised market.\n\nThe failure of even OECD countries and jurisdictions to follow international rules designed to prevent money laundering can be usefully contrasted with how the Central Asian governments themselves have often politicised anti-money-laundering (AML) norms, using them selectively as legal weapons to clamp down on political opponents and dissidents. One study of the application of AML in the post-communist countries finds that these governments are especially prone to 'using AML mechanism to target political opponents', including 'opposition leaders'. The authors cite prominent examples such as the Uzbek government's targeting of opposition leader Sanjar Umarov in 2006 on counts of money laundering, as well as other leading Uzbek human rights defendants. Chapter 2 will show how the Kazakh government has consistently deployed accusations of money laundering and financial crimes in their efforts to extradite and freeze the assets of political opponents residing abroad. And in yet another unintended political consequence, new global guidelines on AML and terrorist financing have been used by Central Asian governments as justifications to further restrict the activities of NGOs, especially those with foreign funding.\n\n_Legal outsourcing and arbitration_\n\nWhilst foreign-registered shell companies have facilitated round-tripping, money laundering and secrecy, the outsourcing of legal jurisdiction and adjudication to foreign courts has shifted the sites of legal contestation over important Central Asian assets to outside of the region. Many of these international disputes feature litigants from the same country and within the post-Soviet region, even as they act through foreign-registered affiliates and designees. In turn, a host of international judicial actors and Western professionals have benefited from and encouraged this lucrative 'outflow' of legal proceedings. Legal outsourcing has taken a number of transnational forms and modalities.\n\nFirst, since independence, Central Asian elites and their foreign-registered companies have entered into a number of different commercial agreements that effectively outsourced their governance and adjudication to UK law. Though no official statistics are kept on national origins of litigants, one _Financial Times_ report from late 2011 estimated that about half of all active cases in the English Commercial Court had connections to Russia and the former Soviet states, while a High Court judge noted that from March 2008 to March 2013, out of 705 rulings by the Commercial Court, 61 per cent of litigants were from outside the UK, with many from 'Russia, Eastern Europe and Central Asia who amassed wealth following the break-up of the Soviet Union'.\n\nJurisdictionally, cases can be brought under UK law in three main ways: if one of the litigants is physically present in the UK (regardless of whether she is a UK national or permanent resident) or if a company is registered or listed in the UK; by 'party autonomy' or mutual consent to have UK law govern the transactions; and by 'service out of the jurisdiction', which involves UK courts exercising discretion to assume jurisdiction, despite the objections of one or more of the parties, should the court find that it is the 'natural forum' (as opposed to the home country court) or determine that the home country court cannot provide justice in the case. This designation was used to justify the proceedings of the _Tajik Aluminium Plant v Ermatov_ case, described in Chapter 3, which became one of the most expensive cases in UK Commercial Court history.\n\nThe second major institutional mechanism for outsourcing legal proceedings has been the activation of international arbitration clauses in bilateral investment treaties (BITs). According to one survey, as of January 2013 the Central Asian states were parties to a total of 176 BITs, with Uzbekistan party to the most agreements (49), followed by Kazakhstan (42), Tajikistan (32), Kyrgyzstan (29) and Turkmenistan (24). International arbitration judgments are enforceable through the New York Convention (1959), which permits damaged parties to seek to petition for the recovery of sovereign assets of the losing party in any third country that is a signatory to the treaty.\n\nIn the period following the ousting of Kyrgyzstan's President Kurmanbek Bakiyev, Kyrgyz authorities were taken to court nine times around the world, including formal legal proceedings in Ontario, Moscow, Paris and The Hague. Most of these cases involved legal disputes over alleged breaches of contracts in the area of mining and financial institutions, with the cumulative awards and legal fees amounting to nearly $1 billion dollars, about the equivalent of the annual Kyrgyz state budget. The hearings included three cases of bank nationalisations, that of Manas Bank, owned by the Latvian businessman Valeri Belokon, Asia Universal Bank, site of allegations of money laundering (Chapter 5), and BTA Bank, subsidiary of Kazakh BTA. In the first two cases, Kyrgyz officials claim that these financial institutions were repurposed as money-laundering vehicles during the Bakiyev era. However, arbitrators in 2014 issued a $16.5 million judgment in favour of Belokon, brought under the Latvia\u2013Kyrgyzstan BIT, while the Asia Universal case remained active into 2016. With the Kyrgyz government unwilling and seemingly unable to pay these judgments, foreign investors, in turn, explored and initiated proceedings for claiming Kyrgyz sovereign assets in third-party areas, most notably Kyrgyz government shares in gold-mining joint ventures.\n\nThird, the Central Asian states have also entered into a number of regional and multilateral sets of rules governing investment, such as the general investment treaty of the Commonwealth of Independent States (also known as the Moscow Convention for the Protection of Investment Rights) and the Energy Charter Treaty, which provide for international arbitration for dispute settlement.\n\nFourth, domestic legislation within the Central Asian states has also allowed for foreign investors to refer disputes to an arbitration panel. For example, Kyrgyz legislation gives broad consent, even in the absence of a specific arbitration clause in an investment agreement, for the investor to initiate a dispute in the International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID) or another UN-recognised commercial court. One comprehensive review of Central Asian states' international arbitrations estimated that as of 2013, of the thirty-eight cases involving the Central Asian states, twenty-two were brought under a BIT, six were brought under the Energy Charter Treaty, and the rest were unclear. Most of the cases involved disputes in the energy, mining, construction and telecommunications industries, with most claimants described as medium- and small-sized companies, as opposed to large multinational corporations, originating mostly from Western states and Turkey.\n\n_Diffusing law or a globalised legal Tower of Babel?_\n\nBut far from clarifying investment rules and procedures, the onset of outsourced litigations appears to have further emphasised the fragmented and selective nature of Central Asia's relationship with international rules and standards. Though most of the hearings remain confidential, we do know from some completed cases with public records that a significant amount of time and resources in these proceedings are devoted to establishing the actual identity and nationality of the litigants, especially if the case is being adjudicated under a BIT. At times, the proceedings have highlighted the fragmented status of the parties' international legal personas, with disagreements over which language and texts should apply in arbitration proceedings.\n\nOne other area of political and legal irony is the use of domestic corruption accusations to void the validity of international arbitration clauses. In _Metal Tech v Uzbekistan_ , an Israeli mining investor tried to take the government of Uzbekistan to the ICSID for a forced expropriation that it argued clearly fell under the jurisdiction of the Israel\u2013Uzbekistan BIT. However, the ICSID ultimately refused to consider the case because the claimant admitted to structuring a number of payments as bribes (amounting to about 20 per cent of the overall investment) to government-connected 'consultants', in violation of Uzbekistan's anti-bribery laws and international public policy norms against corruption. In essence the decision meant that once a company admitted to bribing officials as part of its transaction with the host country \u2013 in this case Uzbekistan, which ranks very poorly on all international transparency and anti-corruption indicators \u2013 it essentially forfeits its right to an international arbitral claim. The case was the first ICSID decision to deny a BIT claim due to corruption.\n\nIn sum, although legal globalisation has played a pivotal role in the legal and commercial landscape of the Central Asian states, it has not advanced global governance or standards of accountability. Instead, Central Asian litigants, elites and governments have actively wielded the law and legal proceedings for their own political and economic purposes, often mixing their private agendas with state obligations and protections.\n\nGlobalising Central Asia's elites: a transnational 'uncivil society'?\n\nAs Central Asian elites have enmeshed their transactions in a variety of global legal forums and institutions, they have embedded themselves outside the region by globalising their identities, citizenships and places of residence. Far from the stereotype of 'disconnected backwaters', Central Asian elites rank among the world's most active cosmopolitans and socialites, directing charities and foundations in parallel with their political and business activities. Stories of decadent parties and lavish lifestyles have grabbed occasional international media headlines, but it is worth thinking analytically about the legal processes that have allowed Central Asian elites to live and work abroad, often with perceived impunity.\n\n_Global citizenship and residence: diplomatic status, investor residences and asylum_\n\nFirst, diplomatic service is a common way for Central Asian elites to live overseas and cultivate their international networks. Diplomatic service also affords diplomatic immunity from international investigations and prosecutions of crimes, a perk that is especially appealing for Central Asian elites. One of the most high-profile and controversial examples of a Central Asian elite diplomat is that of Gulnara Karimova, daughter of Uzbekistan's long-serving first president Islam Karimov (1991\u20132016). Karimova, as we explore in Chapter 4, has been connected to several money-laundering investigations around the world during the time she served in a number of diplomatic positions. Meanwhile, Gulnara Karimova's estranged sister, Lola Karimova-Tillyaeva, has served since 2008 as Uzbekistan's envoy to UNESCO in Paris, building a number of European-centred networks.\n\nIn Tajikistan, President Rahmon's eldest daughter Ozoda Rahmonova was appointed deputy foreign minister in 2010 after working for just two years in the ministry and then, in 2016, made chief of staff to the president. The two daughters of Turkmenistan president Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedov resided in London and Paris as a result of their spouses receiving official diplomatic appointments. The eldest, Guljahan, is married to Dovlet Atabayev, who rose spectacularly through the state's energy sector and was appointed as director of the London head office of the Turkmen State Agency for Management and Use of Hydrocarbon Resources. A US embassy cable reported that Atabayev subsequently became the target of an internal investigation in Turkmenistan, noting that 'Supposedly, the young man is in trouble for having acquired some nice real estate in the London area.'\n\nA second method of gaining global citizenship and residency is to openly purchase a passport or to obtain a residency through one of a number of blossoming investor-residency programmes. The 'second citizenship' market appears to be growing as a result of demand from elites and private actors to increase their global mobility. The pioneering provider in this area is the Caribbean island state of St Kitts and Nevis, which sells passports without even a residency requirement. The passport is appealing as it provides visa-free travel to much of the OECD, including Canada and the EU. An array of Central Asian fugitives accused of embezzlement and corruption have produced passports from the island state to apply for political asylum overseas.\n\nCentral Asian elites and oligarchs have also acquired overseas residences, passports and citizenship by participating in a growing number of investor-residency programmes. Since the great financial crisis, more than half of all OECD countries have instituted new or refashioned residency-for-purchase programmes. Portugal, Cyprus and Malta openly award passports to investors which, once obtained, afford the holders free movement and rights of residency in the European Union's Schengen Area. Since its adoption of a similar 'golden visa' programme in 2010 for external investors in property or financial institutions, Latvia, a member of the EU's Schengen zone, has become the favoured overseas destination for Russians and Central Asians; according to one report, from 2010 to 2015 the Latvian government awarded 1,525 such visas to Uzbek nationals. A number of private law firms and second-citizenship consulting agencies also appear to be expanding their business to introduce these programmes to high-net-worth individuals, some specifically targeting Kazakh and other post-Soviet clients.\n\nAnother popular destination for investor visas has been the United Kingdom. According to UK authorities, between 2011 and 2013, under the revamped Tier 1 Investor Residency programme, forty-one Kazakh nationals were afforded UK residency, ranking the UK the sixth largest single country recipient of such permits. The programme, according to the UK Home Office, 'is for people with high net worth to make a substantial financial investment in the UK' \u2013 as of 2016, no less than \u00a32 million. Under the programme, recipients are afforded a three-year residency with the possibility of applying for an additional two-year extension. Following a six-year period, they can then qualify for actual citizenship.\n\nFinally, Central Asian elites have managed to secure residency abroad by successfully petitioning for political asylum. Given the fact that all of the Central Asian states, with the partial exception of Kyrgyzstan, have been governed by authoritarian regimes with poor human rights records, estranged officials and dissidents seeking to leave can make credible cases, under international human rights law, that returning to their native country would subject them to political discrimination and\/or torture. As Chapter 2 shows, a slew of Kazakh elites, former government officials and insiders have secured residency and citizenship abroad by claiming political persecution by authorities in Astana. Once political asylum is granted, most countries offer subsequent pathways to permanent residency and even citizenship.\n\nEven the son of ousted Kyrgyz autocrat Kurmanbek Bakiyev has managed to secure residency in the UK by credibly claiming that he would be subjected to persecution and unfair legal procedures in Kyrgyzstan, as Chapter 5 makes clear. Bakiyev, generally detested in Kyrgyzstan and convicted in Kyrgyz courts for embezzlement and ordering the murder of a British national in a gold-mining deal, has thus managed skilfully to use Western legal protections to shield himself from return to the small Central Asian state. According to one report, he currently resides in a \u00a33.5 million Surrey mansion that was purchased by Limium, an 'anonymous company' registered in Belize. He became eligible to apply for permanent UK residency in June 2015 and for UK citizenship in June 2016.\n\nThe high-profile case of Rakhat Aliyev, the controversial former son-in-law of Kazakhstan president Nursultan Nazarbayev, illustrates how all three of these citizenship tools have been deployed by exiles to resist their return to Central Asia. Aliyev was married to the president's eldest daughter, Dariga Nazarbayeva, and in February 2007 was appointed as Kazakhstan's ambassador to Austria and permanent representative to the OSCE. After a falling out with Nazarbayev in May 2007, Aliyev was recalled and formally charged with fraud and abduction. However, the former diplomat successfully applied for political asylum in Austria and used his international contacts and standing to avoid return. He settled in Malta, where he obtained citizenship, during which time both Malta and Austria refused Kazakh requests for extradition on the grounds of human rights concerns. Living overseas, he became an outspoken critic of Nazarbayev, authoring the highly publicised expos\u00e9 _The Godfather-in-Law_ in which he made many allegations about the Kazakh regime's corrupt dealings and international criminal networks. In February 2015, he was remanded in Austrian custody after prosecutors there charged him separately for the murder of two former senior executives at Nurbank JSC in 2007. Aliyev was found dead of an apparent suicide by hanging in his jail cell in Vienna in February 2015 while awaiting trial for murder. Though prison officials described his death as a 'clear suicide', his lawyer disagreed, stating that his client had shown no signs of suicidal tendencies the day prior to his death.\n\n_The politics of luxury real estate_\n\nAlong with attaining global residence and citizenship, Central Asian elites have invested heavily in luxury real estate across the world, including in London, Paris, St Tropez, New York, Los Angeles, Miami and Geneva. A number of studies by NGOs and transparency watchdogs have explored how real estate investments are often used to assist in money laundering. Possible red flags include the purchase of real estate by designated shell companies registered offshore as well as purchase prices significantly exceeding asking prices.\n\nReal estate is viewed as an increasingly useful way of laundering ill-gotten proceeds because of the generally more lax rules associated with settling transactions in cash. For example, in the United States, real estate brokers are exempt from 'know thy client' regulations mandated on banks conducting transactions, while in London, the world's premier luxury market, such due diligence, while legally mandated for sellers, is not required at all of purchasers.\n\nAppendix 1, compiled from public news sources and investigative reports, details some of the more high-profile purchases by Central Asian elites and oligarchs. These include a $32.75 million Beverly Hills mansion bought by Lola Karimova \u2013 President Karimov's second daughter \u2013 and her husband that, according to an industry estimate, constituted the most expensive sale in the Los Angeles area real estate market in the year 2013. During her diplomatic postings, Gulnara Karimova purchased luxury properties, including an $18 million villa in Geneva in 2009, and acquired properties in France and Hong Kong (see Chapter 4).\n\nPerhaps most dramatically, the purchase of the Duke of York's Berkshire estate by Kazakh presidential son-in-law Timur Kulibayev for \u00a315 million (\u00a33 million over the asking price) is just one of many acquisitions made by Kazakh oligarchs in the UK luxury market. Chapter 2 explores how the Kazakh tycoon Mukhtar Ablyazov purchased luxury properties in London's Hampstead and an estate in Surrey, both via shell companies registered in offshore jurisdictions. And, following the mysterious death of Rakhat Aliyev in his Austrian prison, the London-based watchdog Global Witness released a report claiming that a network of offshore companies linked to the Kazakh tycoon acquired \u00a3147 million of London properties, which included 221 Baker Street, site of the legendary 221B Baker Street address of fictional detective Sherlock Holmes.\n\n_A transnational 'uncivil society'_\n\nCentral Asia's globalised elite provides a strong counter to stereotypes of the region's 'isolation' or purported lack of global connections. The point can be pushed further to argue that it is precisely this group of Central Asian oligarchs and government officials, entangled in these international networks, business activities, multiple residencies and luxury real estate holdings, who are the most 'globalised'.\n\nTaken as a category, they constitute what we might term, playing on Stephen Kotkin's revisionist formulation, a post-Soviet transnational 'uncivil society' \u2013 a group of elites and entrepreneurs who operate beyond borders, but who do not hold the liberal principles or share the democratic agendas normally associated with members of 'civil society'. Oligarchs and political elites may fund international charities and cultural events, but their political attentions are primarily dedicated to image-crafting and asset protection. Kotkin's double term also finds a transnational counterpart in contemporary Central Asia and the way scholars have used formulations such as 'transnational networks' and 'civil society' to describe the region's fledgling liberal activist networks and embattled civic organisations. Though myriad NGOs were initially created across the region, they have been demonised as unwelcome foreign forces, their political role has been increasingly marginalised, and they have been subjected to ever-greater funding and registration restrictions: their actual sustainability is now in doubt.\n\nHunted overseas: opposition politicians go global\n\nAs Central Asian elites have globalised their private lives and activities, they have also turned their sovereign power abroad to target political opponents. While the authority of Central Asian rulers remains unchallenged at home, decades of domestic authoritarianism has generated an increasing number of disaffected former government elites, political allies and family members who have fallen out with regimes and fled abroad. Political opposition and political contestation mostly operates from exile. In the case of Kazakhstan, as Chapter 2 explores, a host of former regime officials \u2013 including a prime minister, national security chief and presidential son-in-law \u2013 who have clashed with the iconic President Nazarbayev during his twenty-five-plus years in power have sought refuge abroad. In some cases, such as that of the banking tycoon Mukhtar Ablyazov or former Almaty mayor Viktor Khrapunov, they have even actively supported opposition movements from abroad and funded oppositional media to broadcast within their home country.\n\nCritically, Central Asian governments have not passively accepted the rise of this 'opposition in exile'. Rather, they have responded by conflating their battles with political opponents with matters of state, and have used international state mechanisms and law enforcement tools to target their critics abroad. The diplomatic priorities of the Central Asian states, rather than pursuing national interests, have often become global projections of these authoritarian agendas. These are explored in more depth in Chapter 7, but here we briefly note four broad categories of such authoritarian foreign policy practices: regional security treaties; international litigations; diplomatic image-crafting; and extraterritorial actions by security services and their agents.\n\nFirst, all of the Central Asian governments have institutionalised new extraterritorial powers to more easily extradite political dissidents living abroad through the use of new regional security and anti-terror treaties such as the Minsk Convention and SCO Counter-Terrorism Convention. The SCO Counter-Terrorism Convention, signed and ratified in 2009 by its member states (China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan), grants broad authority to governments to demand the extradition of individuals living abroad simply based on accusation (without accompanying asylum hearings), gives security services of one state signatory the right to conduct investigations on each other's territory, and allows for the creation of a common blacklist of 'extremists, terrorists, and separatists' without accompanying procedures for review or delisting. Human rights groups have criticised the impact of these treaties on safeguarding international human rights commitments, while some monitors have observed that Central Asian prosecutors and government authorities have justified the extradition of wanted political opponents as obligations to these regional treaties, noting that they violate basic international humanitarian norms such as the principle of non-refoulement. As Russian investigative journalists Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan have noted, these new regional security treaties have enabled a number of renditions and extraditions across Eurasia, effectively ending the use of Russian territory as a 'safe space' for Central Asian political opponents.\n\nSecond, Central Asian authorities have also marshalled a variety of international legal tools and law enforcement procedures to attempt to secure the extradition of political opponents and to target their assets. Central Asian governments have been among the most active users of the Interpol Red Notice system. Interpol, the International Criminal Police Organization founded in 1923, is charged with coordinating and networking the activities of its more than 190 member states. Interpol itself has no global enforcement powers, but it provides a number of tools to its members to aid in the cooperation against transnational crime, provided that they remain in accordance with countries' own domestic laws and the spirit of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Chief among these is its issuing of colour-coded warnings known as the 'notice system', in which 'Red Notices' function as a criminal designation akin to an international arrest warrant that empowers member countries to detain and extradite individuals for crimes committed in third-country jurisdictions. However, as revealed in a recent report by the watchdog Fair Trials International, the system is ripe for abuse by authoritarian countries, which routinely list political opponents and activists as international criminals.\n\nCentral Asian governments and their agents have also utilised the authority of the state in order to initiate international legal proceedings against exiles on financial crimes charges. Political scientist Keith Darden has argued that in post-Soviet states where corruption is pervasive, the use of _kompromat_ and blackmail over financial crimes is an essential tool of control and compliance by presidents over their elites. Darden's analysis can be usefully extended extraterritorially, as regimes can use state institutions such as financial agencies and the prosecutor's office to accuse exiled political opponents of financial crimes and target them with anti-money-laundering investigations, asset freezes, Interpol Red Notices and international litigations. Given that a large group of these exiles are estranged former government officials who amassed their fortunes through insider privatisations, especially in countries where property rights and the rule of law are weak, the accusations of economic crimes are plausible, if unremarkable. Nevertheless, they serve as a useful basis to reach out to regulatory counterparts in countries hosting exiles such as the UK, Switzerland, France and the United States.\n\nOther international legal actions are more obviously orchestrated purely for political purposes. In 2011, Lola Karimova sued a French news site for libel for calling her the Uzbek 'dictator's' daughter. In the ruling against Karimova's claim and request for damages, the judge ruled that the article was 'entirely true to reality'. But the proceeding also seemed to backfire when it drew attention to the fact that the EU had funded some official project assistance for Karimova's charitable activities, leading to a backlash among European MPs. In a similar spirit, in 2014, the Kazakh government initiated a legal proceeding in a New York federal district court, under a US federal statute, against the opposition newspaper _Respublika_ , in an effort to close down the newspaper's website for leaking classified documents while attempting 'to pry personal information about _Respublika_ employees and volunteers'.\n\nThird, Central Asian governments have become increasingly adept at leveraging overseas representatives and envoys both to promote positive images of their countries and to designate political opponents as 'criminals', as opposed to political dissidents. Often, these campaigns have directly targeted legislators and officials in countries that host exiled opponents, such as Switzerland.\n\nBut a more informal, indirect type of political influence and lobbying has also emerged \u2013 what journalist Casey Michel has referred to as 'free agent diplomacy'. This involves a set of policy institutions, analysts and academics who appear to have close ties to or contracts with Central Asian governments and their official positions, but fail to disclose them when writing commentaries and op-eds or presenting projects about the region. One journalistic investigation into influence activities on behalf of Talco Management Ltd (TML), the management company of the Tajik Aluminium Company registered in the BVI, found that TLM had contracted Fabiani & Company to formally lobby for Western support for a dam project and to paint a favourable picture of Tajikistan in the US media. Among these activities, Fabiani admitted to paying a writer for upbeat pieces about the corruption-ridden Central Asian country in publications like _Forbes_ (see Chapter 3). Other reports have documented the Kazakh government's funding of research and analysis by reputable Washington-based think tanks \u2013 including the Center for Strategic and International Studies and the Atlantic Council \u2013 that paint it in a glowing light, including an event at the Atlantic Council commemorating the twentieth anniversary of Kazakhstan's independence that was entirely sponsored by the Kazakh government. In Brussels, Kazakhstan funded the establishment of a new think tank, the Eurasian Council of Foreign Affairs, with a high-profile board including the former UK foreign secretary Jack Straw. In addition, Astana has funded a number of international sporting, cultural, educational and diplomatic events and activities whose primary purpose is to promote a positive image of the country and its leadership.\n\nFinally, in a certain category of cases, usually when these legal tools and channels of influence have proven insufficient, Central Asian rulers have sent their security services abroad to forcibly return home or even to attempt to eliminate opponents. From 2001 to 2005, Central Asia was a hub for the practice of 'extraordinary rendition', the forcible abduction of suspected terrorists, extremists and political dissidents carried out by the United States, China and Russia in collaboration with Central Asian security services. Yet Central Asian security services have gone further, with mounting evidence of extraterritorial activities against exiled political dissidents becoming routine. Chapter 7 recounts the increasing extraterritorial renditions, surveillance activities and assassinations carried out against political opponents residing abroad, with a focus on the political refugees who fled Uzbekistan following the Andijan crackdown in May 2005, as well as the campaign against Tajikistan's exiled political opponents in Russia and Turkey. As Central Asia's oppositional politics has become more globalised, the Central Asian regimes and their security apparatuses have relentlessly followed suit.\n\nGlobalised, connected \u2013 and unapologetically authoritarian\n\nPurchases of luxury real estate, the strategic use of shell companies for business transactions, the carrying of multiple passports, the outsourcing of legal disputes to international courts, and active security service campaigns targeting exiled opposition leaders: these are not typically thought of characterising Central Asia's purportedly isolated elites and disconnected governance structures.\n\nYet the conventional wisdom is simply and spectacularly wrong. Central Asia has become significantly globalised and embedded into a number of transnational networks, but not in the manner that is typically thought of by globalisation theorists and Western policy officials. The region's politics have become increasingly authoritarian and restrictive, even as these governments have increased their interactions with global institutions and transnational networks. Central Asian elites have deployed the resources of the sovereign state extraterritorially, while using the protections and services provided by institutions of global governance to safeguard their own individual safety. Politics, like economic transactions, have been taken offshore. The remarkable case of Mukhtar Ablyazov, a Kazakh political insider turned economic fugitive and leading critic of the Kazakh government, dramatically demonstrates these trends.\n2\n\n**KAZAKHSTAN'S MOST WANTED**\n\n**ECONOMIC FUGITIVE OR DEMOCRATIC CHAMPION?  \nTHE CASE OF MUKHTAR ABLYAZOV**\n\nSince independence, Kazakh politics has revolved around the rule of its first and only president Nursultan Nazarbayev. The last Communist Party boss of the Kazakh Republic in late Soviet times, Nazarbayev was elected first president of independent Kazakhstan in 1991 and since has been re-elected four times, most recently in 2015. In 2007, Nazarbayev signed a constitutional amendment allowing him to stay in office for an unlimited number of terms. The president's supporters argue that he remains a highly popular figure domestically and has shown a skilful and steady hand, effectively cultivating Kazakhstan's new identity, developing a modern and stable state, and establishing the newly independent country as a crossroads of civilisations in the heart of Eurasia. His political opponents and critics maintain that this carefully crafted image belies a record of ruthlessly targeting political opponents and using the resources of the state to promote the fortunes of his family and well-connected insiders. Scholars have noted the relative skill and sophistication through which the Kazakh regime has itself pioneered new techniques of image-crafting, media manipulation and clientelism, distinguishing its 'soft authoritarianism' from the country's more overtly repressive regional counterparts.\n\nKazakh elite politics under Nazarbayev is frequently, and persuasively, characterised as 'patrimonial' or 'neo-patrimonial', emphasising that the ruling regime monopolises power by dispersing selective benefits, drawn from state assets and state positions, to loyal supporters via formal and informal channels. But irrespective of how we choose to characterise the form and legitimacy of Kazakhstan's ruling regime, to exclusively focus on political trends and patronage dynamics _within_ Kazakhstan in the 2000s risks missing some of the most important actual developments in Kazakh elite politics \u2013 the global exile of Kazakhstan's political opposition. As the political space within the country and the region has shrunk and power has increasingly become centralised, political opponents and disaffected officials have fled the country. In some cases, these exiles have agreed not to enter the political sphere, but in others they have energetically funded and supported opposition movements and media outlets from abroad. In turn, the Kazakh government has vigorously pursued these overseas political opponents using a mix of international legal tools, including anti-money-laundering laws, asset freezes and extradition requests, and direct diplomatic pressure exerted on foreign governments and law enforcement agencies.\n\nThis chapter focuses upon the political fortunes of one of the most intriguing and controversial figures of this Kazakh 'offshore opposition' \u2013 that of the billionaire tycoon Mukhtar Ablyazov. Once Nazarbayev's trusted political ally, having served as minister of energy, industry and trade in the late 1990s, Ablyazov dramatically fell out with the president after he involved himself in oppositional politics, co-founding the Democratic Choice of Kazakhstan movement in 2001. He was convicted and imprisoned in 2002, but was released in 2003 after allegedly agreeing to cease political activities and focus on business affairs. Ablyazov then left Kazakhstan for Russia, but returned again in 2005 to become chairman of BTA Bank, the country's largest financial institution. Following the onset of the financial crisis and a crash in value of many of the bank's holdings and derivatives, Ablyazov was accused of one of the most elaborate financial crimes of our era, as he allegedly embezzled billions of dollars from Kazakhstan's largest bank through a complex array of offshore legal schemes. He then proceeded to claim political asylum in Western Europe and present himself as a democratic champion and opponent of Nazarbayev's rule, while Kazakhstan relentlessly pursued his arrest and extradition.\n\nAlmost every aspect of the Ablyazov case is contested. Public opinion in Kazakhstan and abroad is sharply divided over whether Ablyazov is a political dissident and whistleblower or a fugitive who cynically presents himself as a democratic activist. His struggle against the long transnational reach of the Kazakh government is inextricably bound with a broader campaign to democratise and depersonalise the Kazakh political system. From his perspective, the Kazakh regime has ruthlessly targeted him at home and abroad, stripping him of his BTA Bank holdings through a predatory nationalisation and deploying the long arm of Kazakh law enforcement and the foreign service apparatus against him in what he insists is a personal vendetta. In legal proceedings, Ablyazov has consistently proclaimed his innocence, insisting that all charges of financial crimes levelled against him are politically motivated, while his supporters maintain that his cardinal sin was to violate a pledge to Nazarbayev that he would stay out of politics after he was released from prison in 2003.\n\nYet, evidence from the legal hearings suggests that the Kazakh banker had personally designed a vast complex of offshore vehicles in order to mask his ownership of certain assets. Moreover, international courts have consistently ruled against Ablyazov in his fierce international legal battles with BTA, now under de facto Kazakh state control, while a UK court found him in contempt for failing to fully disclose his assets and violating a court freezing order. Subsequent attempts by the new BTA management to recover his assets revealed an array of global holdings, including lavish properties in London and Paris. After his capture and arrest by French authorities in 2013, his extradition hearings attracted intense international attention.\n\nFor the Kazakh government, Ablyazov is a clear-cut financial criminal, who has styled himself a democrat to deflect international attention from his alleged transgressions. The regime maintains that the billionaire's framing of his personal actions as part of a broader democratic crusade is nothing more than a cynical attempt to manipulate international public opinion and find allies among Western governments, international organisations and NGOs, eager to criticise Kazakhstan's political practices.\n\nStill, this official characterisation fails to account for the sheer zeal and significant state resources that have been deployed in the international effort to fight Ablyazov. A more convincing explanation for the government of Kazakhstan's obsession may be found in the fact that Ablyazov's acts took place while he was part of the country's political and business elite. His story reveals a great deal about how this elite operates at home and abroad and is therefore hugely embarrassing to the regime. Moreover, in its unrelenting campaign against the tycoon the Kazakh government has severely compromised its own credibility: Astana has cracked down on media outlets and political organisations that Ablyazov has supported and been associated with, while authorities have targeted Ablyazov's family and associates with a broad range of international legal and extralegal tools. Moreover, the campaign waged against Ablyazov has been mirrored by similar campaigns launched against a group of exiled Kazakh elites who once were close to the presidential regime, including a former prime minister, a national security chief and, most dramatically, the president's own former son-in-law. Thus, the Ablyazov case, while unprecedented in terms of the scale of its financial dealings, is part of a broader global political struggle between the Kazakh government and its exiled opponents.\n\nKazakhstan's 'Enron': the fight for BTA and Ablyazov's offshore dealings\n\nAblyazov's first forays into business coincided with the new opportunities brought by Kazakhstan's independence. In 1992 he founded Astana Holdings, a private equity company. In 1998 he led a group of investors in acquiring Bank TuranAlem (BTA) through a voucher privatisation, just after he had successfully restructured an electricity company. Following his imprisonment and exile in Russia from 2003 to 2005, Ablyazov was invited back as chairman of the board. Initially, the bank appeared to thrive, wooing foreign investors and institutional clients and presenting itself as Kazakhstan's dynamic flagship financial institution. But as the global real estate bubble popped and financial crisis hit in 2008, many of BTA's deals went sour and the bank was effectively nationalised in February 2009, when the Kazakh sovereign wealth fund injected liquidity to keep it afloat.\n\nAblyazov and his lawyers have denied allegations of embezzlement and fraud; however, they have admitted to designing hundreds of offshore deals between 2005 and 2009 to restructure the bank's holdings in order to conceal their ownership from Kazakh regulators. Further, it appears that the pattern of Ablyazov concealing the extent of his ownership goes back even further. At an arbitral hearing under the auspices of the ICSID, Ablyazov revealed that in 2002, when he first went to jail, he had temporarily re-assigned all of his shares in BTA to his associate Yerzhan Tatishev to 'prevent a seizure by President Nazarbayev'. In turn, this allowed Tatishev to allegedly make 'a public announcement that Mr. Ablyazov no longer had any shares in BTA'.\n\n_The BTA scandal_\n\nKazakh authorities, and several international financial media reports, present the BTA scandal as a case of clear fraud and embezzlement, one of the most audacious and complex ever committed. BTA's new management accused Ablyazov of defrauding the bank of billions by lending money to a number of shell companies of which Ablyazov was the beneficial owner, and assigning assets and loans on 'terms that were unfavorable to BTA'. Between 2003 and 2007, the bank's outstanding loans grew by 1,100 per cent as it acquired an international reputation for aggressive investments that yielded eye-popping results; Western institutional investors \u2013 including Royal Bank of Scotland, Barclays and HSBC \u2013 poured about $10 billion into the Kazakh bank. This reliance on foreign funds, as opposed to domestic deposits, raised BTA's reported loans-to-deposits ratio to 3.6:1 in 2007, reportedly 'one of the highest anywhere in the world'. In total, BTA is estimated to have borrowed up to $15 billion from external sources, while according to BTA lawyers and Kazakh prosecutors, between $8 billion and $12 billion worth of loans \u2013 about half of its loan book \u2013 were funnelled to offshore shell companies that Ablyazov secretly controlled.\n\nMost of the funds appear to have been invested into ambitious real estate and infrastructure development projects in Russia and Ukraine, including Eurasia Tower, a 75-storey office building in Moscow. According to a leaked US embassy cable, in a meeting with the US ambassador, the chairman of the Kazakh Central Bank, Grigori Marchenko, claimed to have advised Ablyazov to get out of his real estate holdings as late as 2007, when prices were still rising, but the Kazakh banker apparently suggested that the boom still had three years to run. As the property bubble popped in 2008, Ablyazov reportedly still refused to sell these holdings, even while other Kazakh banks were selling at a loss and a deep financial crisis was unleashed throughout Kazakhstan's globally integrated financial system. Instead, as BTA's balance sheets turned red, Ablyazov started shifting loans and holdings to offshore entities. The full extent of the damage done would only be uncovered after investigations into hundreds of deals, offshore shell companies and legal intermediaries. Western financial institutions that had aggressively poured money into the bank were forced to write off billions.\n\nSelective investigative reports and legal proceedings provide a window into a small but revealing sample of BTA's networks of offshore shell companies and how Ablyazov managed them. A UK High Court judgment, according to the _Wall Street Journal_ , found that 'between 2006 and 2008 BTA had lent $1.4 bn to 17 companies incorporated offshore', which held 'few assets'. According to presiding judge Sir Nigel Teare, these seventeen companies were 'owned or controlled by Mr. Ablyazov'. One of these loans for $45 million, dated November 2007, was extended to Astogold Corp., a shell company registered in the BVI with a single nominee director in Cyprus and a balance sheet showing only $5,000 worth of assets. According to the court, these loans were only 'partly repaid', and were subsequently replaced by a new wave of loans, in excess of $1 billion, extended through another network of offshore companies.\n\nAnother arbitration hearing, this time brought by Ablyazov against the Kazakh government for the expropriation of one of his holding companies as a result of the BTA takeover, provides a remarkably vivid account of the Kazakh billionaire's schemes. Evidence from _KT Asia v BTA_ , a case brought under the Dutch\u2013Kazakh bilateral investment treaty (KT Asia was registered in the Netherlands), suggests that the Kazakh banker designed a vast complex of offshore vehicles in order to hide the extent of his ownership of BTA holdings from Kazakh authorities. The panel found that Ablyazov had controlled 75.18 per cent of BTA, 'acquired in stages' and 'through a series of separate companies incorporated in different jurisdictions under the direction of trusted associates'. The panel further determined that 'each of these companies beneficially owned by Abyazov held less than 10% of BTA shares' to avoid disclosure to Kazakh authorities.\n\nIn a critical transaction (see Figure 2.1), in 2007 KT Asia purchased BTA shares from two shell companies registered in the BVI, Refgen Technologies Inc. (Refgen) and Tortland Productions Inc. (Tortland), which together constituted 9.86 per cent of BTA's shares. The panel found that at the time KT Asia was in the hands of a nominee director and 'never had any assets other than the shares in BTA and a bank account with a balance of approximately \u20ac18,000'. As BTA management alleged, 'KT Asia acquired 808,321 shares in BTA for a consideration of approximately US$66,803,388', while the minimum value of those shares at the time was (according to the KASE index) almost eight times as much \u2013 $480,510,410. This was not disputed by Ablyazov's team. Further, KT Asia never paid for these shares, as they were purchased using loans from the actual vendors (the BVI shell companies), and neither did it pay principal or interest payments to Refgen and Tortland.\n\nFigure 2.1 Ownership structure of KT Asia and relation to BTA Bank\n\nAccording to Ablyazov's lawyers, these elaborate structures were part of 'Project Aquila', designed by Ablyazov's financial advisers to facilitate the placement of BTA's shares in companies he owned and to 'achieve optimal tax efficiency' across the group of holding companies of BTA's shares. The private placement of shares was preferred to an IPO because 'it would allow him to sell the shares at minimal risk of confiscation by President Nazarbayev'. Ablyazov has maintained that the financial crisis that BTA found itself at the centre of had been deliberately engineered by Kazakh authorities in order to seize the bank after he steadfastly refused to turn over 50 per cent to the president himself. But an investigation into global offshore networks by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists found that Commonwealth Trust Ltd (CTL), a company provider registered in the BVI, had alone set up thirty-one companies as early as 2006 and 2007 for an individual who was later identified by UK courts as a frontman for Ablyazov.\n\n_UK court cases and asset recovery_\n\nIn February 2009, BTA was effectively taken over by the Kazakh government when the state-owned sovereign wealth fund Samruk-Kazyna injected $1.4 billion of funds into it for an 80 per cent stake in the bank. By that time Ablyazov had fled to London where he applied for political asylum: this was eventually granted in July 2011. A complex internal restructuring then took place, but at the core of the bank's troubles was a giant $10 billion hole in the balance sheet left by these offshore deals. One particular unit called UKB6 was identified as having issued billions of dollars' worth of credits for property developments and other projects in Belarus, Russia and Ukraine. According to one financial survey, as of 2013 BTA was still in the worst shape of any of the major Kazakh banks, reportedly weighed down by about $11 billion in non-performing loans.\n\nBTA's new management almost immediately began a vigorous international legal campaign to locate and reclaim about $6 billion of the bank's assets from Ablyazov. On the basis of a 2008 BTA transaction worth $285 million with a British shell company, Drey Associates, BTA's litigators established jurisdiction in the UK court system. More than eleven separate legal proceedings have been held, with the Kazakh government hiring five law firms and more than a hundred leading lawyers for the case. The cases themselves have proved to be enormously complex and even groundbreaking, reportedly adding twenty-three new points to the White Book, the UK's civil procedure rules.\n\nOverall, the outcomes of these legal proceedings have been unfavourable to Ablyazov. BTA achieved an important initial victory on 13 August 2009 when a court ordered the freezing of Ablyazov's global assets and directed him to fully disclose his holdings and to cease actively managing them. Ablyazov appealed against the ruling on the grounds that compliance with the court order might lead to his self-incrimination in legal proceedings in Kazakhstan, but the directive was upheld on appeal in October 2010. Commenting on Ablyazov's initial lack of compliance with the disclosure order, Justice Teare observed that 'it can fairly be said that the deficiencies are extraordinarily inadequate'.\n\nBTA also successfully petitioned the court to appoint a receiver to preserve Ablyazov's assets, pointing to the defendant's use of complex networks of nominees and shell companies registered in jurisdictions 'renowned for their secrecy and light regulation', as well as his breach of the initial freezing order. The court agreed and in August 2010 it appointed the international accounting firm KPMG to guard against the dissipation of assets prior to trial. In late 2010, the court added an additional 212 companies to the scope of the receivership order, finding 'good grounds for believing that they, and therefore any assets they held, were beneficially owned by Mr Ablyazov through his usual modus operandi of a nominee UBO', while in 2011 another 389 were added.\n\nIn February 2012 Ablyazov was found guilty _in absentia_ of failure to disclose assets and lying under oath. Justice Teare found him guilty of three counts of contempt of court, observing that the Kazakh 'chose not to disclose some of his assets, to lie on oath and to deal with some of his assets', adding that these contempts were 'so serious that nothing less than a prison sentence is appropriate'. Ablyazov was sentenced to twenty-two months in prison, but had fled England, reportedly by coach to France, just hours before the ruling was handed out. As a result, his political asylum and UK residency were revoked.\n\nFollowing the contempt judgment, a November 2012 Court of Appeal ruling by Lord Justice Maurice Kay asserted: 'It is difficult to imagine a party to commercial litigation who has acted with more cynicism, opportunism and deviousness towards court orders than Mr Ablyazov.' Later that month, the High Court entered new judgments against Ablyazov for two civil suits worth $2 billion. Overall, one account estimates a total of $4 billion worth of judgments against the Kazakh fugitive with interest accruing at about $1 million per day.\n\nThese complex litigations have been accompanied by an international effort by Kazakh authorities and their agents to identify and reclaim Ablyazov's assets. In Kazakhstan, prosecutors allegedly amassed 1,000 volumes of evidence against him and his alleged associates, while seizing 20 houses, 9 office buildings, 3 aeroplanes, 106 cars, stakes in 22 companies and $20 million in cash. In May 2012, a court in Almaty convicted twenty-one individuals of embezzling $2.1 billion, resulting in seventeen prison sentences. Overseas, an asset recovery effort by BTA has revealed a global network of holdings held by the banker, including several luxury homes, stakes in energy and mineral companies, holdings of real estate projects and complexes in Russia, and stakes in BTA subsidiaries in Ukraine and Georgia. In May 2014, a judge ruled that BTA could seize and sell Ablyazov's $25-million London mansion, while in April 2015 a 100-acre country estate in Surrey was sold for $40 million.\n\nKazakhstan's politics outside-in: offshore political opposition and the 'foreign element'\n\nAblyazov's main defence in the BTA case was to claim that he has been subjected to a relentless political assault by the Kazakh authorities for his defiance of President Nazarbayev and his support for Kazakhstan's fledgling democratic opposition. As a result, his defenders maintain, the very seizure of BTA was politically motivated, thereby also justifying Ablyazov's own elaborate ownership schemes and efforts to conceal his stakes in BTA via offshore vehicles.\n\nBy November 2001, the former minister had been playing an increasingly vocal and active role in politics. That month, along with Galymzhan Zhakiyanov, Ablyazov co-founded the political opposition movement Democratic Choice of Kazakhstan (DCK). According to scholars and analysts, at the time the DCK was a significant landmark in Kazakhstan's domestic political evolution. The party, spanning clan and regional cleavages, drew upon a broad range of support from the business community and elites who had served in government, who viewed the organisation as a potential bulwark against the government's growing economic predation. According to one study of the party's formation, 'the \"who's who\" of Kazakhstan's business and economic elite issued a joint statement announcing their commitment to the rule of law and democratization', declaring that 'Kazakhstan's stalled political reforms represented the most significant threat to the future of the country, economic development, and national security'.\n\nAnticipating the substantial political danger posed by the DCK, Kazakh authorities acted decisively against Ablyazov and his allies. Prime Minister Kassym-Jomart Tokayev condemned the party, warned of impending political chaos, and demanded the resignation of DCK members holding government positions. On 21 November 2001, a number of government officials with ties to DCK were removed by a presidential decree, including the deputy prime minister and deputy defence minister. In March 2002, party co-founders Ablyazov and Zhakiyanov were arrested on criminal charges. Ablyazov was tried and convicted on charges of abuse of authority during his tenure as minister between 1998 and 1999. He was sentenced to six years in prison, with foreign observers widely condemning his trial as politically motivated.\n\nAfter serving fourteen months in prison, Ablyazov was pardoned and released in 2003 following a public campaign by international advocates including the European Parliament, human rights NGOs and Western governments. His release was reportedly part of a bargain struck with Nazarbayev to refrain from any further political activity. Ablyazov left Kazakhstan for Russia, where he continued to support opposition movements and, according to his own admission, headed the DCK. He lived there until returning to Kazakhstan in 2005, when he was invited back by Nazarbayev to take full control of BTA. Even upon his return Ablyazov covertly continued to support oppositional political activities. According to one of Kazakhstan's leading human rights lawyers, the intensity of Nazarbayev's political targeting of Ablyazov was rooted in a sense of repeated betrayal.\n\n_Political exile and offshore opposition_\n\nAfter his flight to London in early 2009, Ablyazov's time was consumed with BTA-related litigations and he reinvigorated his oppositional activities against the Kazakh regime. From his position in exile, Ablyazov began practising 'outside-in' politics, attempting to influence developments in Kazakhstan by supporting the unregistered opposition political party Alga! and independent media, and networking with other banished Kazakh elites.\n\nIn his meetings with US officials, Vladimir Kozlov, the leader of Alga!, recounted that in London Ablyazov not only declared himself in 'open opposition' to the Kazakh government, but reached out to other exiled Kazakh political players including the former prime minister Akezhan Kazhegeldin and DCK leader Galymzhan Zhakiyanov. According to US officials, Kozlov also reportedly acknowledged that Ablyazov continued to fund Alga! from exile and involve himself in decisions on party policies. In one US embassy cable from London, Ablyazov himself confirmed to US officials that he had privately supported Alga!, the United Democratic and Communist parties, or 'anyone who is against the President'. Ablyazov also shared his plans to increase 'oppositional reporting' on his K-Plus satellite channel, which was set to transmit across the region and over the internet. Commenting on Ablyazov's political organising in London, the human rights activist Yevgeny Zhovtis stated that 'Practically all opposition leaders visited him in London.'\n\nFrom his new offshore perch, Ablyazov proceeded to launch a blistering public campaign to reveal the offshore dealings and alleged corruption schemes of Kazakhstan's ruling elite. In court papers filed for his defence in a BTA case, Ablyazov alleged that Timur Kulibayev, the president's son-in-law, had profited from selling off state assets for below market value, and that he controlled the sovereign wealth fund Samruk-Kazyna \u2013 which effectively acquired BTA in 2009 \u2013 and its subsidiaries, which included all of the country's 'major industrial prizes'. The dramatic disclosure was released during the same week as Kazakhstan hosted a high-profile OSCE summit, the pinnacle of its much-touted years as the international organisation's chair. Ablyazov also alleged that Kulibayev and his associates had devised an offshore scheme, involving a BVI company, to pocket $166 million from a government sale of a 25 per cent stake in the national oil company Aktobe MunaiGas to the Chinese state-owned oil company CNPC in 2003. Kulibayev and his partners have denied the allegations, as has CNPC. In a statement accompanying the allegation, Ablyazov declared: 'It is important that the Kazakh people understand how these shadowy transactions have been conducted and what sort of methods are being used by those close to the president to gain creeping control over the economy in order . . . to enrich themselves.' The core allegation in the story was subsequently published in the _Wall Street Journal,_ along with a visualisation of how the complex deal involving shell companies was allegedly structured.\n\nAs the allegations broke, Kulibayev reacted by taking aggressive measures to prevent the story's appearance in the Kazakh media. He asked for, and won, an injunction in a local Almaty court to halt national newspapers from publishing anything 'harming the honor and dignity' of Kulibayev. The order also allowed authorities to confiscate the entire print runs of the four independent and opposition newspapers that had published the story, including _Respublika_ and _Svoboda Slova_. Kazakh authorities had long viewed _Respublika_ as a mouthpiece for Ablyazov: just a few months earlier, in September 2009, the newspaper had been fined and its print run confiscated for its critical coverage of the initial takeover of BTA by the Kazakh government.\n\n_The crackdown at Zhanaozen and the politics of outside blame_\n\nIn late 2011, the campaign against Mukhtar Ablyazov would take yet another dramatic turn, this time becoming entangled with the most repressive and lethal crackdown carried out by Kazakh authorities since the country's independence. On 16 December 2011, Kazakh police opened fire against protesting oil workers in the western city of Zhanaozen, near Aktau. The strikes had been ongoing since May 2011, as three different oil service companies' workers demanded higher wages and improved living conditions.\n\nThe incident exacted a heavy human toll, but also proved deeply damaging to Astana's carefully crafted international image as an island of political stability in Central Asia. Overall, at least sixteen demonstrators were confirmed killed and sixty-four injured, whilst thirty-five members of the security services also sustained injuries. Initially, forty-eight civilians were indicted, with the first page of the prosecutor's report stating that 'Fired workers . . . with the help of troublemaking youth created mass disturbances accompanied by pogroms, robberies, arsons, and violence toward the peaceful population and members of the police'. Prosecutors also tried and convicted five police officers for using excessive force, all of them junior in rank, who in May 2012 were found guilty and received sentences ranging from five to seven years.\n\nKazakh authorities seized upon the aftermath of Zhanaozen to implicate Ablyazov and further crack down on his political allies and opposition groups and media. On 23 January 2012, Kazakh authorities arrested both Kozlov and Igor Vinyavsky, editor of the opposition newspaper _Vzglyad_. Kozlov was convicted on 8 October 2012, after a trial widely criticised by international observers as deeply flawed, and sentenced to seven and a half years' imprisonment. As one watchdog observed of the trial, 'at no point in the verdict did the court explain who started the violence on December 16. The defendants were convicted of \"incitement of social hatred leading to grievous consequences\" without any explanation of how the incitement caused the consequences.'\n\nAccusations that the defendants had close ties to Ablyazov and were part of an orchestrated foreign plot dominated the trial. Prosecutors presented Ablyazov as the founder of an 'organized criminal group' which Kozlov allegedly came to lead. As part of its closing argument, the prosecution showed a documentary film about how Ablyazov was planning to seize power in Kazakhstan; it was also shown on several Kazakh official television stations following the 8 October verdict. Strikingly, the verdict on Kozlov's involvement referred to this alleged criminal plot with Ablyazov as well as the BTA proceedings:\n\nThe accused V. Kozlov, in March of 2010, with the goal of subverting and destroying the socio-political foundations of the constitutional order of the Republic of Kazakhstan, willingly joined an extremist organised criminal group created and financed from abroad by Mukhtar Ablyazov, who is currently sought by investigative organs for the crime of embezzling $7 billion from BTA Bank in 2005, the board of which bank he chaired. The criminal group was founded on the principles of hierarchy and strict division of roles, and V. Kozlov acted as leader of this group in Kazakhstan.\n\nThe court's main evidence tying Ablyazov to this plot was a transcript of a Skype call between him, Kozlov and regional leaders of Alga! on 30 April 2011. During the call Ablyazov spoke of the effort to 'topple the government' and the need to unite dissatisfied portions of society into an opposition, including oil workers, but it contained no direct operational details linking the striking workers to Ablyazov.\n\nIn a follow-up to the politically charged Kozlov verdict, in November 2012 the public prosecutor's office in Almaty filed a motion to classify as 'extremist' and ban twenty-three internet sites and eight newspapers that operated under the umbrella of the _Respublika_ newspaper as well as the news channel KTK-TV. All of these outlets and organisations were, 'in one way or another, connected with Mukhtar Ablyazov'. The international media watchdog Reporters Without Borders commented on the ban thus: 'This unprecedented blow to pluralism is the result of an outrageous misuse of the Kazakh justice system . . . Reduced to a tool of repression, the courts no longer even try to maintain appearances, flouting defence rights, holding summary hearings and violating procedure.' Events at Zhanaozen, which had started as a strike among domestic oil workers in a remote province, had produced an investigation that implicated Kazakh civil society, opposition leaders, major opposition media outlets and Ablyazov himself.\n\nThe concerted strategy of blaming 'foreign elements' or externalising the origins of Kazakhstan's political instability was clearly outlined and emphasised by Kazakhstan's foreign minister, Erlan Idrissov, in a speech about the government's campaign against Ablyazov's overseas activities. He justified the government's targeting of Kozlov and crackdown on media outlets as an appropriate response. The foreign minister's comments are worth quoting at length:\n\nMr. Ablyazov started positioning himself in the West as a democracy champion. He committed a grave economic crime. It was proved in Kazakhstan's courts. Last year there were some court verdicts establishing his guilt in the UK courts. One should be aware that having stolen the money, he is spending a sizable amount to create an empire that would support him in the West; this empire is flexibly carrying out his campaign to create a picture that many now believe in; at the same time he is supporting similar structures in Kazakhstan. So, Mr. Kozlov is not a genuine opposition activist. _Respublika_ newspaper is not a truly independent newspaper. K+ isn't a truly independent channel. These are special tools created by Mr. Ablyazov to pinpointedly attack Kazakhstan. We classify the situation around Mr. Ablyazov and the [media and opposition] structures involved as a special campaign orchestrated by Mr. Ablyazov against Kazakhstan. Therefore Kazakhstan does have the right to defend itself against this campaign.\n\nCarrying the full weight and sovereign authority of Kazakhstan's Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Idrissov's comments illustrate how the Kazakh government not only denied Ablyazov's claim to be acting as a political opponent, but framed Ablyazov's overseas activities as a threat to the Kazakh state itself and a matter of the highest priority in Kazakhstan's foreign relations.\n\nThe international hunt for Ablyazov and his associates\n\nOn 31 July 2013, Ablyazov was captured and arrested in the village of Mouans-Sartoux near Cannes in southern France. The operation, which involved French police and special forces, ended months of speculation as to the Kazakh fugitive's whereabouts after fleeing the UK. According to one report, Ablyazov had been traced to the property by British private detectives who had tailed his Ukrainian lawyer, Olena Tyshchenko, to France following a High Court hearing. In January 2014, a French court authorised Ablyazov's extradition to Russia and Ukraine on charges of embezzlement. The decision was overturned by an appeals court in April, only to be reinstated in October 2014 and upheld by the nation's highest court in March 2015. With no extradition treaty between Kazakhstan and France, Ablyazov's advocates feared that extradition to Russia or Ukraine would still put the banker in danger of being returned to Kazakhstan, given that these post-Soviet countries are parties to the Minsk Convention, which allows extraditions to member countries of criminal suspects. On 17 September, the French prime minister, Manuel Valls, signed a decree authorising Ablyazov's extradition to Russia; Ablyazov's family appealed to the Council of State which on 9 December 2016 cancelled the extradition order, finding the request from Russia to be politically motivated.\n\nAblyazov's extradition hearings were part of an array of international proceedings, both legal and extralegal, undertaken by Kazakh authorities and their intermediaries to secure the return of the banker. The most powerful of these had been the issuing of an Interpol Red Notice. Interpol's own guidelines stipulate that such notices should not be abused for political purposes, this deemed contrary to Interpol's rules and regulations \u2013 though rights watchdogs have criticised Kazakhstan as one of a number of countries that have abused the Red Notice system by targeting political opponents. Thus, an important subplot in the ongoing international battle between Kazakh authorities and Ablyazov was whether the Kazakh government had improperly used international criminal institutions and procedures to pursue a politically motivated case.\n\n_Extraordinary rendition, Italian-style_\n\nThe most dramatic episode in the Kazakh government's international hunt for Ablyazov could claim no such legal basis. On 29 May 2013, around fifty uniformed and plainclothes Italian agents of the DIGOS police intelligence wing raided Ablyazov's family residence on the outskirts of Rome. Though Ablyazov was absent, the agents proceeded to detain his daughter Madina and his wife Alma Shalabayeva. The two were held on the justification that they had forged identification documents; in fact, Shalabayeva had valid residency permits for the UK and Latvia that automatically granted rights of residency throughout the EU. Just two days later, on 31 May, mother and daughter, accompanied by Kazakh diplomats, were forcibly transported back to Kazakhstan by private jet. The pair were not provided with legal counsel nor was an extradition hearing convened.\n\nThe renditions generated an international outcry. International organisations \u2013 including the OSCE, the European Parliament and the Council of Europe \u2013 and human rights groups such as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International issued strong condemnatory statements and demanded that the pair be allowed safe passage back to Italy. A subsequent opinion issued by three United Nations human rights experts stated that the 'circumstances of the deportation give rise to the appearance that this was in fact an extraordinary rendition which is of great concern to us'. Italy had thus joined the ranks alongside Russia, China and the United States as external powers that have collaborated with Central Asian governments to perform extraordinary renditions back to the region.\n\nIn Italy itself, the episode unleashed a domestic firestorm. President Giorgio Napolitano lashed out against Italian officials for the 'inconceivable case of the precipitous expulsion', stating that the affair had brought 'serious reasons of embarrassment and discredit for the state and so also for the country'. Criticism was heaped on the Interior Ministry and its head, Deputy Prime Minister Angelino Alfano, who putatively arranged the operation on behalf of his close political ally, the former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, reportedly a close friend of Nazarbayev. A later Italian official inquiry into the events found that the Kazakh ambassador, Andrian Yelemessov, had been intimately involved in the operation's planning and had exerted 'pervasive' and 'massive' pressure on the Interior Ministry and police authorities, without adequate consultation with the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. After severe international criticism, Italian authorities revoked the deportation order and, following efforts by the Italian Foreign Ministry, the pair were eventually allowed to return to Italy from Kazakhstan in December 2013. Ablyazov's daughter subsequently launched a formal complaint against three Kazakh diplomats for their role in the affair.\n\n_Casting the wider net_\n\nThough Ablyazov's wife and daughter were allowed to return to Italy, Kazakh authorities have continued their relentless effort to arrest and extradite his associates across Europe, making aggressive use of international legal procedures and applying direct diplomatic pressure. As with the case of Ablyazov himself, human rights organisations have sharply criticised these arrests and interventions as politically motivated. Kazakh authorities, in contrast, have sought to tie these figures to Ablyazov's financial crimes, though in some cases they have added additional serious charges via the Interpol Red Notice system, including allegations of 'terrorism'. Figure 2.2 depicts the location of Ablyazov's network of associates across Europe. These included the following individuals.\n\nFigure 2.2 European map of detained and arrested Ablyazov associates\n\nAleksandr Pavlov, Ablyazov's former head of security, was detained at a train station in Spain in April 2013 and held in Madrid under an Interpol arrest warrant issued by the Kazakh government on charges of 'expropriation or embezzlement of trusted property'. After challenging the extradition request, Kazakh authorities amended the Interpol notice to include charges of 'plotting a terrorist attack', which led to a second arrest. The Kazakh government's revised extradition request was granted by Spain in July 2013 but was subsequently suspended by a Spanish court when the newspaper _El Pa\u00eds_ broke a story that the Spanish government, in a manner reminiscent of Italy's Ablyazov operation, had issued a secret decree approving Pavlov's transfer to Kazakhstan after having met with Kazakh officials. Pavlov was released on bail in August with his application for political asylum, as of July 2015, still pending in Spain.\n\nTatiana Paraskevich, Ablyazov's former accountant, is alleged to have had a managerial role at BTA and was accused of having aided Ablyazov in embezzlement. Paraskevich and her family fled Kazakhstan in 2003 following Ablyazov's first conviction there. She was arrested in Karlovy Vary in the Czech Republic in 2012 on the basis of extradition requests issued by Russia and Ukraine. After being detained in Plze\u0148's prison for twenty-two months, the Czech high court approved extradition to Ukraine, but the Justice Ministry overturned the decision and Paraskevich was freed in March 2014 after a public NGO campaign claimed that she could face possible torture upon her return to Kazakhstan. She has remained in the Czech Republic and has been promised 'international protection' against international extradition claims.\n\nAleksandr Potkin (also known as Aleksandr Belov), a Russian citizen, is an alleged Ablyazov associate and former leader of the nationalist Movement Against Illegal Migration in Russia. Accused of having colluded with Ablyazov in a BTA-related real estate financing scheme through the managing and 'legalising' of 2,500 hectares of land in the Moscow Oblast region of Russia, Potkin was arrested in Moscow in October 2014 and accused of money laundering and embezzlement. He was initially held under house arrest, and on 17 October was transferred to state prison, leading to public criticism by Russian opposition figures like Alexei Navalny and a public rally in his support. Kazakh officials launched a follow-up investigation in November 2014 into his 'inciting ethnic hatred' and his allegedly having been hired by Ablyazov to 'study and foment nationalist unrest in Kazakhstan, with the aim of weakening President Nazarbaev's regime'.\n\nMuratbek Ketebayev is a former deputy economy minister under Nazarbayev turned opposition activist. He fled from Kazakhstan to Poland in 2011 and was subsequently accused by Kazakh prosecutors of planning a terrorist attack on Almaty in March 2012 and abetting the incitement of ethnic violence in Zhanaozen. He was detained by police in Lublin in June 2013, but was released after questioning by Polish officials and granted political asylum there in December 2013. On 27 December 2014, following a visit to Aleksandr Pavlov in Madrid, he was arrested by Spanish police on an Interpol warrant issued by the Kazakh government. Tellingly, in the legal proceedings brought against him, the Zhanaozen events that formed the basis of the Red Notice were not mentioned by the Spanish lawyers hired by Kazakh authorities in support of the extradition; instead, the charges emphasised Ketebayev's role in the BTA scandal and his alleged possession of a false passport. Prior to the case being heard, the Spanish Ministry of Justice closed the proceedings and removed Ketebayev's name from the Spanish database. He was allowed to return to Poland in March 2015.\n\nExtending the argument: making sense of Kazakhstan's offshore politics\n\nThe case of Mukhtar Ablyazov and his associates is but one instance of a broader pattern of 'offshore politics' involving Kazakh political elites, their new global places of residence and their battles with Kazakh authorities in international courts, civil proceedings and the global media space. Since Kazakhstan's independence a number of the country's senior officials and even presidential relatives have fled the Central Asian state and challenged the regime from abroad. The most prominent among them include a former prime minister (Akezhan Kazhegeldin), a former mayor of Kazakhstan's commercial capital Almaty (Viktor Khrapunov) and even President Nazarbayev's now-deceased former son-in-law, Rakhat Aliyev.\n\nAliyev's case has attracted the most attention given that, as we saw in Chapter 1, he was once married to Nazarbayev's daughter (their divorce was announced in June 2007). After falling out with the president, he published a sensationalist account of Nazarbayev's alleged corrupt dealings and political manoeuvres, and met a no less sensationalistic end \u2013 being found hanged in his jail cell, apparently by suicide, in Vienna in February 2015 while awaiting a murder trial.\n\nAs with the case of Ablyazov, this group of exiled officials demonstrate broad similarities in their alleged financial crimes, how they have used their exile to criticise and actively oppose the regime, and how Kazakh authorities have employed the full array of available international tools and foreign relations to target them.\n\n_Kompromat goes global: the politics of 'financial crime'_\n\nThe most important common feature of Kazakhstan's political exiles is that they were all, at one point, powerful elites closely allied with President Nazarbayev. All of them occupied critical positions of power that allowed them to amass fortunes through their access to state assets and networks of influence. They have all been accused of financial crimes including embezzlement and money laundering, thereby triggering a series of anti-money-laundering investigations, asset freezes, Interpol Red Notices and international litigations.\n\nIn a seminal case, the former Kazakh prime minister turned opposition leader Akezhan Kazhegeldin was arrested under a Red Notice in Moscow in September 1999 on charges of tax evasion and money laundering. He was eventually released and vowed never to return to Kazakhstan. He was arrested again in Rome airport in July 2000 under the same notice, as Kazakhstan once again sought extradition. Interpol dropped the Red Notice in June 2002, citing lack of evidence against him and Article 3 of the Interpol constitution (which guarantees political neutrality). 'The illegal misuse of Interpol to harass exiled political opponents [of Nazarbayev] cannot be tolerated', Kazhegeldin's lawyer warned in a letter following the rescinding of the notice.\n\nIn 2014 the city of Almaty filed a lawsuit in a US district court against former Almaty mayor Viktor Khrapunov, accusing him and his relatives of defrauding the city of at least $300 million and using embezzled funds to purchase real estate in the United States. The claim states that Khrapunov 'abused his position of trust as a public official in order to convert and sell numerous assets belonging to the City of Almaty for his own benefit and the benefit of his co-conspirators', though, as one journalist notes, the timing of the case, which was filed a decade after the alleged acts, raises 'questions about why it took the municipality so long to notice the missing millions'.\n\nPerhaps the most dramatic illustration of allegations of 'financial crime' wielded as a political weapon was actually a case in which an international investigation, ordered by the Kazakh government against a political opponent, spectacularly boomeranged to spark the most publicised corruption scandal since Kazakhstan's independence. The origins of 'Kazakhgate' \u2013 the scandal in which James Giffen, a close adviser to Nazarbayev, allegedly structured a series of deals with major Western energy companies in the 1990s through a network of offshore bank accounts tied to Kazakhstan's elite \u2013 actually lie in the Kazakh government's attempts to go after estranged former prime minister Akezhan Kazhegeldin.\n\nAfter Kazhegeldin became critical of Nazarbayev and appeared poised to challenge him for the presidency, he was barred from running for office and in 1998 fled the country. Soon after, Kazakh officials charged Kazhegeldin with financial crimes and prompted Belgian and Swiss authorities to investigate alleged money laundering and real estate deals. However, as part of that investigation, Swiss authorities identified a number of suspicious transfers between American and European energy companies and Kazakhstan. The resulting investigation identified a number of offshore accounts allegedly tied to Giffen and led to his arrest in 2003 in New York on charges of violating the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) and funnelling over $80 million from Western oil companies into the Swiss bank accounts of senior Kazakh officials. In 2010, after more than seven years of court manoeuvrings, delays and motions regarding the classification status of evidence, the trial came to an end when Giffen pleaded guilty to a single misdemeanour and one bribery count against his company. Giffen had mounted an unusual 'public authority' defence, claiming that he acted on behalf of US governmental entities, which the judge in the case seemed to accept, noting that Giffen 'advanced the strategic interests of the United States and American businesses in Central Asia'.\n\nBut the Kazakhgate investigation may never have started were it not for the Kazakh government's own zealous attempt to target a political opponent on accusations of financial crimes. Indeed, the Giffen affair, like that of Ablyazov, reveals that the pursuit of exiles often has inadvertent and unwelcome consequences in the interconnected worlds of global law and finance.\n\n_Opposition in exile, politics by proxy_\n\nAnother characteristic of the exiled Kazakh elite is that they too, soon after fleeing the Central Asian state, presented themselves as democrats opposing Nazarbayev's authoritarianism. Though Ablyazov appears to have been the most active in supporting and funding oppositional movements and media outlets, the others have also publicly denounced the regime and, when faced with extradition hearings and litigations, defended themselves as political targets. Kazhegeldin, Aliyev and Khrapunov all published books that were highly critical of Nazarbayev's rule, with Aliyev's _The Godfather-in-Law_ particularly infuriating to Kazakh officials. Soon after its publication in May 2009, the office of the Kazakh prosecutor general warned citizens not even to touch the book, while media outlets and newspapers were threatened with criminal charges if they printed excerpts or quoted from it. Like Ablyazov, Khrapunov has maintained a detailed website championing himself as an advocate for Kazakh democracy and accusing the Kazakh authorities of targeting him for political purposes.\n\nThe exiles have also actively networked with one another, despite some previous rivalries. Ablyazov appears to have maintained close contact with Kazhegeldin in London, while _Respublika_ and its affiliates have published in detail many of Aliyev's corruption allegations against Nazarbayev and Kulibayev. Khrapunov, who initially appears to have been allowed to leave for Geneva in 2007 on condition that he stay away from politics, had an Interpol Red Notice issued for him in 2012 shortly after he had publicly pledged allegiance to Ablyazov.\n\nOne of the more old-fashioned forms of political alliance, possibly perceived as the core of a strategic political opposition, was cemented in early 2007 when Khrapunov's son Ilyas married Ablyazov's daughter Madina, who also resides in Geneva. In his memoirs, Khrapunov denies that the marriage was politically motivated and alleges that he was approached in Geneva by Kazakh government officials who asked that his son sign a letter pledging loyalty to President Nazarbayev. Like his parents, Ilyas has also been charged by Kazakh authorities with money laundering and heading a criminal group in 1997, though at that time he was fourteen years old and attending a boarding school in Switzerland. Further, as Edward Lemon and Daniel Rosset have noted, these Kazakh exiles in Switzerland hired their own proxies and lobbyists to attempt to influence Swiss institutions, such as parliamentary committees and the Justice Ministry, thereby also embroiling Swiss authorities in the rough and tumble of Kazakh elite politics.\n\n_The long arm of Kazakh foreign relations and the politics of image-crafting_\n\nA third common feature across these cases is the extent to which the Kazakh government has deployed multiple international tools and efforts to discredit, extradite and pressure exiles. As with Ablyazov, the Kazakh government convicted all of these figures of serious criminal charges _in absentia_ , thereby placing them on the Interpol list and lobbying authorities to freeze their assets. But as with Ablyazov, host countries, especially in Europe, have caught on to the potential political motives behind these listings, making these arrests and extraditions drawn out and complicated.\n\nAs in the Ablyazov case, the Kazakh government has also, via its missions, applied direct diplomatic pressure on countries hosting political exiles to arrest them as part of efforts to secure their transfer back to Kazakhstan. And it is here that the personal nature of Kazakhstan's domestic political system is fused with the institutions and practices of foreign relations: Kazakh foreign relations appear increasingly to prioritise the targeting of political exiles abroad.\n\nMore broadly, a growing number of commentators and scholars have noted Kazakhstan's extensive international efforts to craft and maintain a favourable image. Whether it is funding major cycling teams and major universities, commissioning studies from Western think tanks, planting stories through non-disclosing proxies in the international media, establishing think tanks in Brussels or hiring lobbyists abroad, Kazakh authorities are pursuing a foreign relations strategy that relies heavily on national branding, communications and soft-power influence. Astana even hired former UK prime minister Tony Blair as a strategic adviser on a contract reportedly worth $25 million a year, a relationship that has drawn fierce criticism from human rights watchdogs who claim that Blair has downplayed incidents like Zhanaozen.\n\nThe contested politics of Kazakhstan's international fugitives\n\nViewed from the perspective of Kazakhstan's externalised politics and forms of global political contestation, these image-crafting efforts also serve a related political purpose: to keep these international political battles out of the scope of discussions of Kazakh domestic politics and foreign policy. By framing and fostering agendas such as improving Central Asia's connectivity, promoting Kazakhstan's role as a political and economic crossroads in Eurasia, or advocating for 'strategic partnership', Kazakhstan's own offshore political operations are actively excluded from Western discussion, analysis and even policymaking consideration. Instead, figures such as Ablyazov, Aliyev, Kazhegeldin and Khrapunov are presented exclusively as international fugitives and criminals, whose stories themselves are not appropriate subjects of political analysis.\n\nWhat is domestic and what is global? What is onshore and what is offshore? Who is a criminal and who is a democratic champion? What constitutes a legitimate foreign national interest and what is a personal political vendetta? The Ablyazov case reveals just how complicated and blurred the boundaries become when answering these questions. But one characterisation that seems irrefutable is just how globally 'connected' all of these processes, agendas and political frames have become. As our next story demonstrates, even the state itself may be globalised via offshore companies and transnational networks.\n3\n\n**TAJIKISTAN**\n\n**THE PRESIDENT OF THE WARLORDS AND HIS OFFSHORE STATE**\n\n[The Tajikistan Aluminium Company (Talco)] factory is an impressive sight, but like many of the country's assets, President Rahmon sees it as a means of generating income for himself, his family members, and his inner circle. Although it is a state asset, decisions about the company are not made in the best interests of the country . . . As with other industries, Talco's revenue does not contribute to development of the country; rather much of it disappears for off-budget activities and projects, such as palaces and lavish state entertainments. The people of Tajikistan effectively subsidize Talco, by living without adequate health services, education, or electricity. Hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars have disappeared from the company since 1992, and the huge subsidies Talco receives in the form of cheap electricity are draining enormous resources from the Tajik economy . . . End Comment.\n\nTracey Ann Jacobson, US ambassador to Tajikistan,   \nleaked cable, 14 April 2008\n\nIn May 2014, the investigative journalist David Trilling received documents from Russia's United Company Rusal, an aggrieved former partner of the state-owned Tajikistan Aluminium Company, detailing some of its offshore dealings on behalf of family members of President Rahmon. These included how Talco's profits had been routed to CDH Investments Corp. (CDH) and Talco Management Ltd (TML), secretive offshore entities registered in the BVI, at the expense of Rusal. These offshore vehicles in turn financed new Boeing aeroplanes for the private airline, Somon Air, owned by family members, and funded lobbying in the US Congress, apparently circumventing American legislation which requires full disclosure of lobbying on behalf of foreign governments.\n\nIn Tajikistan's economy, Talco is a fully state-owned enterprise and the single dominant industrial asset. In 2008, aluminium exports from Talco were reported to constitute 33 per cent of the country's gross domestic product, 48 per cent of its export revenues and 75.3 per cent of its foreign currency reserves. Producing this aluminium consumes approximately half of the total electricity supply of Tajikistan, which is provided by the state electricity utility at rates vastly below market levels. Talco consumes an extraordinary proportion of energy from the national electricity network in a country where power cuts are routine and severe electricity rationing and irregularity of supply are suffered nationwide over the winter. The bloated company employs over 12,000 workers and is characterised by technical processes and management practices which were until recently a model of inefficiency.\n\nThis chapter tells the post-Soviet history of Tajikistan through the experience of its aluminium industry, its offshore connections and the astonishing rise of President Emomali Rahmon from farm manager to warlord's placeman to international statesman and deal-maker. The story of Talco tells us a great deal about the secretive world of Tajikistan's family-run state and how it uses an array of offshore jurisdictions, all with the complicity of its foreign partners and intermediaries. Given what the international community knew about Talco and its offshore connections, as illustrated in the US ambassador's striking conclusions, it is remarkable that major Western corporations, lobbyists and governments were happy to do business with Tajikistan while claiming that they were abiding by anti-corruption rules. The story of Rahmon, who rose out of the country's civil war to bring the whole economy under the control of his family and inner circle, suggests otherwise.\n\nBattle for Talco, fight for the state\n\nIn the 1990s, Talco emerged as one of the key spoils of Tajikistan's devastating civil war. Its revival and capture by President Rahmon's regime mirrors Tajikistan's own post-conflict story of personalistic state-building. But it is not just a tale of local struggles. Since the late 1990s, Tajikistan's economy has been thoroughly globalised in terms of trade (via connections to multinational corporations and their foreign investments) and labour (with over a million Tajiks \u2013 perhaps 20 per cent of its labour force \u2013 at work in Russia and elsewhere in the region). In terms of finance, inflows of remittances from Russia rank Tajikistan's economy as the most remittance-dependent in the world, while outflows of capital to offshore accounts demonstrate that national economic development is a chimera. Tajik labour, goods and capital all exist in a transnational market economy, where the state is used to the benefit of a small circle consisting of the president and his key associates.\n\n_Soviet beginnings and wartime returns_\n\nThe story begins more than forty years ago with the creation of Tajikistan's aluminium smelter \u2013 the country's single big industrial facility and export-earner. Known by its Russian abbreviation TadAz until 2007, the state company opened in 1975 and is now the world's fourth largest aluminium smelter, based outside the town of Tursunzade near the capital Dushanbe.\n\nThe production of aluminium requires the confluence of raw alumina and large amounts of cheap electricity. As Tajikistan does not produce alumina, it is purchased from overseas \u2013 from within the Soviet Union until 1991 and on the global market since independence. The nearest sources are Mykolaiv in Ukraine and Pavlodar in Kazakhstan. Since 1991 the smelter has remained state property whilst many other national assets have been privatised. As described by the World Bank, 'the company is not governed by a board of directors or any other type of executive committee' and 'is under the sole command of its director, who reports only to the Tajik President at a monthly meeting'.\n\nShortly after independence Tajikistan descended into a catastrophic civil war. Upwards of 50,000 lives were lost in a struggle between the country's regional factions. Like many republics of the USSR, Tajikistan had suffered a turbulent period of _perestroika_ before the Soviet Union collapsed. By 1991 it was buckling under the pressure of a declining economy and the end of Soviet subsidies, as Islamist, nationalist and regionalist movements from the southern and eastern regions of the country mobilised in protests against a state run largely by the _nomenklatura_ of the northern region. Rahmon Nabiyev, a weak president elected in a violent and disputed presidential poll, lost control of the situation. In May 1992, faced with rival demonstrations in the centre of the capital, the increasing involvement of criminal gangs, a weak and divided security apparatus, and the inflow of young men from impoverished villages, Nabiyev distributed arms to his supporters. In return, opposition movements armed themselves from caches provided by allies in the security services. The armed forces, still taking orders from a stricken government in Moscow, were paralysed. The violence began in the capital but quickly spread to the southern regions where peasants had been forcibly settled on collective farms on the basis of their region of origin during the Soviet era. The fighting between these groups was brutal.\n\nBy late 1992, order began to be restored as forces from Russia and Uzbekistan intervened to help install a new government composed of leaders from the southern region of Kulob and the erstwhile elites from the northern region of Khujand. Their opponents, largely of Garmi and Pamiri regional origin, fled to Afghanistan or the mountains of the east. Opposition leaders left for Moscow, Tehran and Cairo among other places. But violence continued throughout the 1990s at the border with Afghanistan, around the capital and especially in the mountainous Rasht Valley. By 1997, under pressure from Russia and Iran, and with the coordination of the United Nations, a general peace agreement was achieved. Under the terms of the treaty, 30 per cent of state posts were to be distributed to the opposition factions in return for their demobilisation and disarmament. Although neither side of the agreement was fulfilled by the early 2000s, Tajikistan was largely pacified under an authoritarian president and security structure.\n\nTajikistan's aluminium smelter was central to the struggles of the war. Talco was one of the key assets over which battles took place, with warlords General Ghaffor Mirzoyev and Colonel Mahmud Khudoiberdiyev fighting for control. Abdukadir Ermatov, the director of Talco from 1994 to 2004, reports of incidents where his life was threatened during the civil war as he struggled to keep the smelter operational. From 1996, he struck a deal with Avaz Nazarov, a friend and businessman from the same region of Tajikistan as him, for investment in the struggling plant. Nazarov was also a business associate of General Mirzoyev, who by this time had established his forces as guardians of the plant at the expense of Colonel Khudoiberdiyev. For the next eight years, Talco's trading activities were facilitated by financing and bartering arrangements with Nazarov and his various companies. Security was provided by Mirzoyev's forces, whose presence deterred rival warlords.\n\n_The rise of President Rahmon_\n\nAs Talco was being rehabilitated, Emomali Rahmon (known by the Russian form of his name, Rahmonov, until 2007) rose meteorically to become president of the republic. Rahmon was merely the head of a Soviet farm during the latter years of the USSR, but as Tajikistan descended into turmoil, he found himself in the right place at the right time. Like Mirzoyev, he was from the southern region of Kulob, an area whose sons had fought to reinstall the government throughout the intense fighting of 1992. At the Supreme Soviet in northern Tajikistan in November 1992, Rahmon was ushered into the premiership by Sangak Safarov \u2013 also from Kulob and a former organised crime boss, convicted felon and one of Tajikistan's new warlords. He was a 'puppet president', put in place to represent the interests of the warlords of the south. Rahmon was from the same neighbourhood of the town of Danghara as Safarov and had only succeeded to his position in the Kulob regional assembly after Safarov had murdered the previous incumbent of the post. Within months, a further stroke of luck befell Rahmon as his patron Safarov was killed in a gun battle with another leading warlord, Faizali Saidov. Saidov was also killed. In hindsight, this event was the start of a process whereby Rahmon was able to move skilfully from being a mere puppet to the arbiter, overseer and ultimately repressor of warlord politics. He became president in 1994 and was re-elected in 1999. He changed the constitution in 2003 to allow himself to serve until 2020 and then again in May 2016 to allow him to serve as president for life. He is now officially Tajikistan's 'leader of the nation'.\n\nRahmon knocked off or incorporated warlord after warlord throughout the 1990s but at the turn of the millennium he still lacked direct control of Talco and, most importantly, its international trading and financial relationships. The Ermatov\u2013Nazarov partnership remained in place with Mirzoyev still on the scene having been incorporated into the state as head of Rahmon's Presidential Guard. From 1998 Talco's principal commercial partner was Nazarov's Ansol Company, registered in the tax shelter of Guernsey in the British Channel Islands. Rahmon accepted these arrangements as, despite the 1997 peace agreement, he remained in a precarious position and faced intermittent rebellions in the region. These arrangements had brought Tajikistan's number one exporter earner back to profitability while providing significant revenues for Nazarov and Ansol. After the civil war Rahmon passed legislation permitting privatisation of state enterprises and regularly suggested to the international community that the smelter would be sold. International bankers and creditors, while surely aware of Talco's violent history, were apparently happy that it was on the right track.\n\nBut as they consolidated power, the president and his key associates also decided to keep Talco within the state and bring it under their exclusive control. In the autumn of 2004, government officials and the country's Orienbank, under President Rahmon's brother-in-law Hasan Sadullayev, arranged for the replacement of the management of Nazarov and the Ansol Company. The pretence for this move was allegations of fraud against Ansol based on an investigation and charges brought by Tajikistan's general prosecutor's office. The long-standing deal with Nazarov was ended in favour of new arrangements with offshore companies owned jointly by the Tajik state and private individuals close to the president. Nazarov sued the government of Tajikistan in the London High Court. In response, the Rahmon regime and Talco countersued in an attempt to have the company's previous management and Ansol convicted of fraud. That this conflict over a Tajik state-owned enterprise fell under the jurisdiction of English law was a puzzle for the presiding judges, but indicated the offshore dimension of Tajikistan's national economy and state.\n\n_The record-breaking international court case_\n\nThe London hearings which ran from May 2005 to November 2008 and cost between $150\u2013$200 million made the court case one of the most expensive in legal history \u2013 costs largely borne directly by the government of Tajikistan and indirectly by its impoverished people. The case became notorious in 2008 as allegation met counter-allegation and ended without conclusion. Talco entered into legal disputes with its partners in the Russian and Norwegian state industrial conglomerates, United Company Rusal (hereafter Rusal) and Hydro Aluminium (hereafter Hydro), which had seen their contracts under the Nazarov arrangement cancelled in 2004. At one point at least eleven proceedings were ongoing; none of these were won by Talco. In several of these, the company, the Tajik state and its key officials were found to have misled the court, while transcripts and judgments from the hearings exposed the details of its secretive trading arrangements and offshore management structures.\n\nThe new management would be under the auspices of Rusal, the Russian state company headed by Oleg Deripaska, an oligarch who maintained a working relationship with Vladimir Putin. Court documents present considerable evidence as to how this occurred and, in particular, the role of President Rahmon and his brother-in-law Sadullayev in these events. Sadullayev makes clear in the documents that it was a presidential instruction for his bank to expel Nazarov and Ermatov and take a leading role in managing the smelter's financial and trading affairs. 'In reality,' he testified, 'Orienbank had no option but to accede to the government's request. It was not a \"request\" at all; the government had rather given Orienbank the task of supplying Talco.' The new management were Sadriddin Sharipov and Sherali Kabirov, close confidants of the presidential family. In his witness testimony Kabirov, then deputy director of Orienbank, declared that he was alarmed that the bank was required by the government to become so deeply involved in the aluminium business. He notes that this was brought about by the debt crisis faced by Talco and the government's desire that in future it 'could contribute its share of the state budget'. Kabirov, who took up a senior management position at Talco in 2005 and became its chief financial officer, would go on to play a key role in the establishment of the offshore company as the secretive cash cow of the Tajik state and a select group of private investors.\n\nRussia's role was also crucial in this hostile takeover. The High Court judge, Justice Blackburne, concluded that Rahmon family members and Deripaska's Rusal conspired to expel Ansol from its partnership with Talco following an August 2004 meeting between Deripaska and Rahmon. An agreement was signed with Rusal in October 2004. Shortly thereafter Ermatov was asked to step down as director and, as a token of compensation, stand as a candidate in the February 2005 parliamentary elections. During the period 2004\u201305, Rahmon also moved against several former civil war allies and foes to remove them from their positions of power. In particular, General Mirzoyev, the associate of Nazarov who had maintained security at the smelter, was replaced as head of the Presidential Guard in January 2004. Mirzoyev threatened a coup and ironically, as a suspected drugs trafficker and former warlord, was placated with the position of head of the Drugs Control Agency \u2013 an anti-trafficking body established a few years before at the request of donors. After several months of tension with the government Mirzoyev was arrested, tried and convicted of numerous offences including murder, embezzlement and the illegal possession of arms. In 2006 he was sentenced to life in prison. It was internal politics which drove these developments but, as we shall see, extraterritorial actions were required to consolidate them. Whilst this process began with the Russian connection, it also entangled Western governments and corporations.\n\nThe Norwegian connection\n\nThere was an apparent geopolitical context for these moves in 2004. That year was the high point in recent relations between Tajikistan and Russia. The July 2004 agreement between Presidents Rahmon and Putin in the Black Sea city of Sochi addressed issues such as the transfer of Tajikistan's southern border from Russian to Tajik control, the status of Russia's space observation centre in Nurek and Tajikistan's debt to Russia. It also included a number of formal and informal commitments regarding Russian investment into Tajik hydropower and aluminium industries. However, business interests were soon to trump the geopolitical factors to which most analysts look to explain Central Asia's international affairs. As the Tajik state became intertwined with global financial and trading assemblages, the future of Talco clearly revealed the interpersonal dynamics and rent-seeking which occurs across the global economy. Rather than deteriorating political and security relations with Russia causing the breakdown in Rusal\u2013Talco relations, the reverse seems to be true as conflicts between Russian and Tajik elites over a Tajik state company led to a downturn in their international relationship and a shift towards the West.\n\n_Norway returns, via the British Virgin Islands_\n\nFollowing the removal of Nazarov and Ansol in December 2004, Talco entered into partnerships with various foreign multinationals via new offshore schemes. CDH and Talco Management Ltd (TML), both registered in the British Virgin Islands, were arranged under the advice of Rusal and became the trading companies for Talco, with TML acceding to the primary role in 2007 (see below). This is a trading arrangement known as a 'tolling scheme' \u2013 designed to avoid the companies involved being subject to tax, regulation and scrutiny by any private or public institution \u2013 as agreed in the settlement with Hydro. CDH and TML are offshore 'cut-out' companies created to reduce tax burdens. They have no formal obligations to the government of Tajikistan but are owned by various state institutions, businesses and individuals in Tajikistan \u2013 reportedly for the profit of the Rahmon family.\n\nThe new arrangement was ordered by a presidential decree of 23 December 2004, allowing aluminium to be transferred from Talco to CDH either without payment or merely with very small fees. This new deal intensified many of the features of the old \u2013 those that controlled CDH and TML also controlled Talco, creating a greater conflict of interest than the previous arrangement with Ansol (whose owner, Nazarov, did not control but bartered with Talco). In the London court, Justice Blackburne concluded that it is difficult to see how this arrangement could have been for the benefit of Talco which is likely to be operating at a 'significant loss'. As the global price for aluminium remained high over this period, Talco's loss meant someone else's gain.\n\nWith high stakes, the battle to control and supply Talco went on. From early 2005 the new arrangement had already begun to sour with the government of Tajikistan's allegation of fraud against their partner Rusal and legal action threatened by Hydro against Talco. Furthermore, according to Kabirov, Rusal had gained control of the supply chain and began 'to make extravagant profits by holding a gun to CDH's head and forcing it to pay a higher price for the alumina supplied by Albaco [a Rusal affiliate]'. More foreign companies became involved, citing the government of Tajikistan's reneging on agreements made under the management of Nazarov and Ermatov, whom it had removed in 2004. This included the American company Gerald Metals which, according to a US embassy cable, was 'pressuring and threatening the Tajik government'. Other foreign multinationals, however, were more effective in pressing their claims.\n\nFinancial, legal and political pressure eventually told. In 2006, Talco shifted again, this time with Norway's Hydro Aluminium \u2013 part of Norsk Hydro, a conglomerate whose majority shareholder is the government of Norway. This was an interim arrangement that would lead to a final deal and the full reorganisation of Tajikistan's major state industry via offshore vehicles. After a June 2006 settlement between Talco and Hydro, the latter became Talco's principal partner, in place of its rival Rusal. An agreement signed in Dushanbe on 20 December 2006 committed Hydro to longer-term investment and possible tripling of the production capacity of the Soviet-era plant. The Norwegian connection was blossoming. In declaring to his American counterpart a Norwegian interest in investing in Tajik hydropower, Moscow-based Norwegian ambassador \u00d8yvind Nordsletten made comparisons between Tajikistan and Norway a hundred years before. The Americans also saw a glimmer of hope. 'At the risk of seeming overly optimistic,' the US ambassador concluded, 'this could represent a significant shift in Tajikistan's investment climate and geopolitical alliances.' Western officials seemed to genuinely hope that liberalisation might finally take hold.\n\nThe final act could now take place. The 2006 agreement provided four years' supply of alumina to Talco, paid Hydro for its losses in four years' supply of processed aluminium, and embroiled Hydro with Talco in its ongoing legal struggles with Rusal's affiliates. In February 2007, the tolling contract was put out to tender once more with, unsurprisingly, the newly formed TML winning ahead of two major international companies, Alaska Metals AG (Switzerland) and Noble Resources Ltd (Hong Kong). The agreement \u2013 the fourth trading arrangement in three years \u2013 was part of the settlement between the companies and was arranged under the auspices of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) and the World Bank. Hydro remained the key supplier but was joined subsequently by Alaska Metals and the Fortune 500 companies Noble Resources and Glencore International AG (Switzerland) as minor partners to the deal. It was at this moment that TadAz became known as Talco.\n\nA shift from Russia to the West had seemingly taken place. The 2006\u201307 moves to push out Rusal came at a time of deteriorating relations between Russia and Tajikistan as Dushanbe pursued an active 'multi-vector' foreign policy of seeking greater cooperation with China, India and Iran among other regional powers. As if to confirm the break with Russia in 2007 Rahmonov changed his surname to Rahmon and his brother-in-law Sadullayev to Asadullozoda, in accordance with Persian naming tradition. For the Rahmon family, de-Russification was personal, financial and political \u2013 all at the same time. But for a country hugely dependent on access to the Russian labour market for its vast number of labour migrants, this de-Russification was superficial.\n\n_New deal, but same corrupt practices?_\n\nIn fact, there is little or no reason to believe that either 'de-Russification' or liberalisation governed this period of chaos and uncertainty. Explaining the three shifts in Talco's trading relations \u2013 which took place in less than three years from 2004 to 2007 \u2013 is impossible without reference to the business interests of its principals and the functioning of Tajikistan's kleptocratic regime. As a leaked US diplomatic cable notes, 'RusAl's development of [the] Rogun [Dam, Tajikistan's other major industrial project,] and a second aluminium smelter was one of the key deliverables during Russian President Putin's October 2004 visit to Tajikistan'. But in early 2005, when Tajik\u2013Russian relations were at a high, the Talco deal had already begun to show signs of strain. As a diplomatic cable of August 2006 notes, 'RusAl wants Rogun for aluminium production, not electricity exports, and without a second smelter or full control of TadAz [Talco], it may not need or want Rogun at all'. This judgement proved correct. Rogun remains unbuilt and the Tajik state has struggled to garner international investment and diplomatic support for its construction. Commercial affairs and personal interests trumped geopolitical dynamics and national interests for all sides. Business simply went on.\n\nIt would also be a mistake to view the new tolling arrangement with a Western company, Hydro, and under the auspices of international financial institutions (IFIs) as evidence of openness to liberal reform. These players and their involvement in Talco were not new. Hydro had been involved in Talco for some time, having had its first contract in 1993, and had been in partnership with Rusal from 2000 to 2004. Nor was the involvement of the IFIs new. Hydro's role was discussed in a World Bank-facilitated videoconference in May 2004 involving President Rahmon's adviser on economic issues. The World Bank had been involved in international trading and financing arrangements since the late 1990s. But neither the IFIs nor the major Western multinationals have ascertained what exactly happens to the money that Talco's foreign partners transfer to CDH and TML in payment for its aluminium. From 2006, the tolling arrangement with Hydro meant that Talco remained in debt while profits were accrued by CDH and TML. Kabirov explained this in terms of outstanding monies owed to Hydro to compensate them for their earlier losses.\n\nDespite the optimism of the diplomats, the December 2006 deal was and remains controversial. Hydro's $150 million losses from being thrown out of the Tajik market in 2004 had been covered (minus a $25 million deductible) by an American political risk reinsurance company, Chubb. In September 2004 Hydro's board was told that 'Tajikistan was challenging politically, environmentally and financially'. Around this time, the post-war government moved to close down media, push out opposition from posts in government (which had been agreed under the 1997 peace agreement) and consolidate the president in power by changing the constitution. Multiple reports by donors and the World Bank observed a high level of corruption in government. But, as the aluminium price remained high in the period 2004\u201306, the profit motive trumped governance concerns.\n\nIt wasn't just the Norwegians who were concerned about the bottom line. Chubb \u2013 which understandably wanted to recoup its losses \u2013 was apparently lobbying the US State Department, whose embassy in Dushanbe was liaising with Norwegian diplomatic counterparts. A July 2006 diplomatic cable quotes the US ambassador speaking directly to President Rahmon about Chubb and the Americans' other interested party Gerald Metals. 'Whoever was mucking around at TadAz has seriously harmed Tajikistan's interests', he remarked, 'especially because political risk insurers for major investment are a very small club, and the TadAz [Talco] mess is globally known.' The cable reports that 'the President nodded but had no reply'. The new deal signed in December 2006 with 'the blessings of the World Bank and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development' was a marriage of convenience. It allowed Talco to begin repaying its debt in 2007 and Chubb to get its money back.\n\n_Due diligence, or 'don't ask, don't tell'?_\n\nThe problem for Hydro, the World Bank and EBRD was that they were bound both by Norwegian and international laws against corruption. Hydro remained embroiled in Talco's legal battles over allegations and counter-allegations of fraud with its other former management and foreign trading partners. In effect, Hydro had simply agreed to switch sides in this complex struggle. The December 2006 agreement allowed Talco to continue its litigation in the London court and continue to make the argument that the previous regime (to which Hydro was a partner) was corrupt. The text of the agreement therefore includes some tortuous explanation. Section 9.6 explains that Talco would continue to be within its right to argue that the previous regime was 'a scheme to defraud' Talco and was 'tainted by corruption'. However, Talco also agreed 'that it shall not suggest that Hydro knew about or ought to have known about any fraud or corruption or that it was guilty of any wrongdoing'. In effect, the deal exonerated Hydro from the charges of corruption while allowing Talco to continue to press the very same charges. The question of whether or not, in fact or in law, fraud or corruption had actually taken place appeared incidental to the new arrangement.\n\nSo excused, Hydro was now getting back into bed with a government which was recognised as one of the most corrupt in the world. In the 2006 Transparency International corruption index, released a few months before the Talco\u2013Hydro agreement was reached, Tajikistan ranked 142nd \u2013 alongside Angola, Pakistan, Nigeria and Turkmenistan \u2013 out of 163 countries. Therefore, for a new relationship with Talco to appear legitimate Hydro needed some distance between CDH\/TML and President Rahmon's regime. CDH was wholly owned by Orienbank under the personal control of the president's brother-in-law Hasan Asadullozoda (formerly Sadullayev), via another offshore company called Amatola. TML was owned by different parties but with the same effect of presumed control by the Rahmon family and its close associates. However, Sherali Kabirov, Talco's CFO, describes the ownership of TML 'by and for Tajikistan' in his 2008 testimony:\n\nTalco Management is a BVI incorporated company which is owned by Vostokredmet (35 per cent), the Tajik state uranium producer, Barqi Tojik (35 per cent), the state electricity company and the remaining 30 per cent held by a small group of wealthy Tajik private investors.\n\nThis new ownership structure reveals a great deal not only about Talco, but also about how Tajikistan operates as a nation state. The 'wealthy private Tajik investors' were assessed by US diplomats to be a group 'presumably including members of the Rahmon family'.\n\nThe identities of the members of the 'small group' remained unknown at the time due to the registration of TML in BVI, an offshore jurisdiction. However, later disclosures via WikiLeaks revealed that there were three individuals who each owned 10 per cent of TML. They were not relatives of the president but included Maruf Orifov, a businessman known to the international community for his joint venture in a supermarket chain with a Dutch investor. The story of Orifov's later downfall is instructive as to how individual businessmen on the fringes of the regime are vulnerable to coercion by state institutions.\n\nWithin a year of the deal with Hydro, Orifov was charged with bribery after an apparent sting operation by the national security services. He was refused bail and held in a pre-trial facility \u2013 unusual for his offence. Orifov had all his property confiscated \u2013 presumably including his 10 per cent stake in TML \u2013 and was sentenced to eight and half years in prison \u2013 more than double what was requested by the public prosecutor. The specific cause of Orifov's downfall is unknown but diplomats in Dushanbe had a good idea. One of Orifov's supermarkets was located in a building owned by a member of the president's family. US Ambassador Tracey Ann Jacobson reports credibly that Orifov 'ran afoul of President Rahmon's daughter, Tahmina' after he had tried 'to curry favor with the President's \"inner circle\" by doing business with [her]'. Orifov's fall from grace is, she notes, an 'example of the country's oppressive business environment, and the ruthless manner in which members of President Rahmon's family exert their influence over business owners'. In short, Jacobson concludes, 'it is more important to be close to President Rahmon and his family members than to run a successful business'.\n\nThe London court took a similar view with regard to Talco's offshore companies. It recognised that the tolling arrangements were in the interests of the beneficial owners of CDH\/TML, which it presumed to be President Rahmon, his family and close associates. The Norwegian company apparently disagreed. In 2007, Hydro's lawyers referred to a forthcoming audit of TML as the basis for transparency in its transactions concerning Tajik Aluminium. But the forthcoming audit would come rather late when a major deal had already been done several months before. As the Carnegie Endowment's Martha Brill Olcott points out, this is ironic given Hydro's 'well-publicized \"integrity\" program in the area of corruption and human rights'. Olcott argues that the Norwegian company 'must have had some suspicion as to who was really profiting from the new tolling scheme, given the personal roles that President Rahmon and those close to him had played in the negotiations with Hydro'. An IMF report released in 2008 considered Talco's lack of both transparency and financial controls to be 'most worrisome'. Under the provisions of its new agreement with the IMF, following the scandal of the National Bank redirecting IMF credits to the financiers of its cotton industry (cronies of the president), Tajikistan was required to publish an audit of TML (the one mentioned by Hydro's lawyers). However, it would take several more years to reveal the audited accounts of TML, its expenditures on behalf of the president's family and inner circle and the compromises Hydro had made in getting back into bed with Rahmon's regime.\n\nHow Talco's offshore connections work\n\nTo recap, over the period from 2004 to 2008, by fair means and foul, the Rahmon family and their key associates wrested complete control of Talco from the previous management and Rusal, before coming to a new arrangement with Norway's Hydro as the chief international partner.\n\nWhile the principal managers and owners shifted over the period from 2004 to 2008, the structure of the tolling agreements has probably changed little since the involvement of Nazarov in 1996 (see Figure 3.1). Although the London High Court hearings did not reach a verdict, they heard considerable evidence that round-tripping or 'tolling' agreements established under CDH\/TML were illegitimate and thus constituted fraud. Justice Blackburne judged in October 2005 that there was 'a seriously arguable case' that, as presented in the evidence by Ansol, 'the new arrangement [from December 2004] was designed to enable the benefit of TadAZ [Talco]'s smelting activities to pass to those who own or control CDH, namely Rusal and\/or close associates and relatives of President Rahmonov led [at that time] by Mr [Asadullozoda] Saduloev'. Following the Talco\u2013Hydro agreement of June 2006, the basic structure of the 'tolling agreement' remained in place with CDH, and later TML, accruing profits for the benefits of their owners and to the disadvantage of state-owned Talco. At the very least the IFIs and Hydro were implicated unwittingly in the fraud perpetrated by Talco and its tolling companies.\n\nFigure 3.1 Talco tolling arrangements and structures\n\n_To the Caribbean and back (twice)_\n\nSo precisely how did these global economic assemblages work? John Helmer, a Moscow-based journalist who followed the court proceedings, describes the arrangements established by the June 2006 Talco\u2013Hydro agreement:\n\nThe court presentation of the documents shows that, according to a scheme of tolling the raw materials for processing at contrived prices, Talco receives alumina from Hydro and gives it to CDH. CDH then contracts it for processing by the smelter and receives the metal back in exchange. CDH then sells the same metal back to Talco at the market price, and Talco sells it to Hydro at a loss.\n\nThe same basic system was used for TML and is a common means of avoiding tax and ensuring secrecy used by multinational corporations all over the world. The lion's share of profits is transferred to CDH\/TML whilst only a portion is returned to Talco in the form of a 'tolling fee' for services rendered. Talco is thus transformed from an aluminium exporter to a processor of aluminium and subcontractor to the offshore trading company CDH\/TML. As Talco bears all the costs of production, as well as the legal fees of the court case, it made just $15 million profit over the period from 2005 to 2007, despite an approximately 200 per cent increase in the price of aluminium over this time. Meanwhile, CDH\/TML is estimated to have made at least $500 million for its owners.\n\nThe revenues lost from the Tajik public purse may have been higher. In 2008, Helmer, drawing on a published IMF report, estimated that Talco earned just 17 per cent of the total value of its exports to foreign buyers in 2006 and 2007. The report lists the value of the 'tolling fees' received as $173 million for 2006 and $183 million for 2007 whilst the total market value of the exported aluminium for each year is calculated at around $1 billion. According to calculations based on the available evidence, this would mean that over the period from 2005 to 2007, Talco, and thus the Tajik state, lost $1.145 billion in revenues due to this trading scheme. If accurate, this would be a massive amount for a country with a GDP of just $3.7 billion in 2007. These profits, according to the trading scheme, were accrued by the owners of CDH\/TML and their foreign partners.\n\nThe wider political economy in Tajikistan that supports this system is one of kleptocracy and cronyism. Associates and even family members rise or fall and gain or lose pieces of the pie, according to their ability to please the president and act according to his preferences. Some are able to cement these relations by marrying their children into the presidential family. Although in 2004 Hasan Asadullozoda's Orienbank managed the transition following the expulsion of the previous management, in 2007 tensions were emerging in the presidential family over control of business assets in the growing economy. By this time, Talco in particular had paid off various debts to foreign parties and was beginning to turn a greater profit. In particular, Asadullozoda, who was married to Rahmon's younger sister, was said to be in conflict with some of the president's children, particularly Rahmon's eldest daughters Tahmina and Ozoda (the deputy foreign minister). The president's son, Rustam Emomali, was now coming of age and was known for racing his sports car down Dushanbe's main avenue, his unusually successful football team, and his temper.\n\nThese matters appear to have come to a head in May 2008, a few weeks after Asadullozoda's final witness statement in the London court case (13 April 2008), when he disappeared from public view for several weeks. Rumours spread around Dushanbe that Asadullozoda had been shot by another family member or associate and subsequently died in intensive care. Most accounts identified 2 May 2008 as the day Hasan Asadullozoda was shot, with some suggesting he may have died several days later. Accounts are sketchy as to who fired at Hasan but regional websites identified Rustam as the shooter. The truth of what precisely happened has never come out and it was not until much later \u2013 following a delay in the court proceedings in London \u2013 that Asadullozoda's survival was verified. His lawyer told Justice Tomlinson:\n\nIt is regrettable that Mr Saduloev [Asadullozoda] did not sign until last Friday. He did sign. He did not die and then become resurrected and die again. He is alive and well. But, for whatever reasons, for reasons we say of his travel and difficulty with communication and him just being too busy to look at it, too preoccupied, it was not signed until Friday [25 July 2008].\n\nAsadullozoda was dispossessed of some key assets but allowed to remain head of Orienbank. In particular, he would no longer control, formally or informally, Talco's lucrative tolling schemes.\n\nIt is easy to see this astonishing but \u2013 by Tajikistan's standards \u2013 commonplace story of the secret state as being one of local corruption and presidential family infighting. But this framing misses the offshore, international and extraterritorial dimensions of the Talco case. This is not simply state capture by the regime, but the creation of a specific arrangement, with the involvement of the World Bank, EBRD and a Norwegian state enterprise, to defraud the Tajik public and enrich private and global interests. The fraud, its exposure and subsequent demands for reform would not be possible without the dynamics of globalisation to which Tajikistan has been exposed increasingly since the end of the civil war in the late 1990s. What is fascinating is how both the economic arrangements and the political accountability for them both occur in offshore and extraterritorial jurisdictions \u2013 in London and Swiss courts, Norwegian state investigations, online press and audits of shell companies.\n\n_Details begin to emerge_\n\nSuch 'transparency' is rare and partial. In the period from 2008 to 2010, IFI pressure mounted on Talco to publish the results of the IMF-ordered audit and revaluation. However, the IFIs themselves are implicated in an arrangement that is perfectly legal and seen as vital for business and thus economic growth. The Tajik political scientist Rustam Samiyev was clear about the reasons for the delay in completion and publication:\n\nMost likely, Talco is trying to conceal its 'tolling system' of partnerships with raw material suppliers that helps deflect hundreds of millions of dollars into tax-free zones. Nothing is wrong with that practice in the eyes of international business and donors . . . Yet it betrays the Tajik people's interests.\n\nOn 25 June 2010, the IMF called once again for the publication of the audit and revaluation of Talco and TML on the company's website. On 3 August 2010, Talco announced that it had received these reports from the auditors and provided a rather defensive summary of their findings justifying the legal fees which had been paid. Talco's press release states that the audit showed that the $51 million spent on lawyers in the action against Nazarov and the Ansol Company was 'forced [in order] to uphold the interests of, in the first instance, the country and defence of the company'. Subsequently, TML released audits undertaken by the Yerevan-based auditor Grant Thornton JSC for the years 2009\u201311 with headline figures but without explanatory notes and detail. They are no longer public but were made available to the authors. They show that by 2011 TML had accumulated consolidated profits of $244 million, had acquired $33 million in property, and made $30 million in what are called 'other expenses'. These profits are considerably less than those estimated by Helmer based on the tolling arrangement and the price of aluminium. This raised the question of what happened to the money, which will be explored below.\n\nIn the meantime, Swiss court judgments have established unequivocally that the Rahmon regime's seizure of Talco from its previous management in 2004 was effectively illegal and that tolling arrangements that defraud the Tajik people remain central to the operation of the smelter. In May and October 2013, these courts, operating under the procedures of the International Court of Arbitration, twice found in favour of subsidiaries of Rusal and handed down a total of $345 million in fines, interest and costs to be paid by Talco. What began as a dispute within the Tajik ruling elite was eventually decided via a legal process between several BVI entities, established by a Russian state company, in a Swiss court, according to international law.\n\nThe ruling effectively refutes the government of Tajikistan's claims that alumina supply and tolling arrangements established before 2004 were illegal _and_ fundamentally different from those it formed after 2004. This claim had been the justification for the government's seizure of Talco from the Nazarov management in 2004 that precipitated the inconclusive London arbitrations from 2004 to 2008. Contrary to the government's claims, the tolling arrangements appear fundamentally similar and have basically the same effect of generating a large slush fund to finance the personal ventures and schemes of the ruling elite. 'Each year,' as _The Economist_ stated in 2013, 'Talco produces hundreds of millions of dollars in profits that are routed to a shell company in the British Virgin Islands.' In October 2016, just before we went to press, Tajikistan's own Ministry of Finance released an unprecedented report which stated that $1.1 billion earned by Talco from 2010\u201316 was unaccounted for and concealed in offshore accounts. The question is what happens next.\n\nThe president's slush fund\n\nTalco and the Rahmon regime continue to assert that these tax avoidance arrangements are for the benefit of the country and people of Tajikistan. The aluminium company claims to be currently spending $2.2 billion on two projects to develop production capacity and local raw materials within Tajikistan, but that this can only occur if monies held by TML are transferred back to Talco. These projects are of an extraordinary scale \u2013 equivalent to more than one-quarter of the 2013 GDP of the country \u2013 and are proposed to occur in a relatively short space of time, with expected completion in three years. This is a vast amount of resources to expend for a state which lacks the impartial bodies and independent legal system to monitor these investments, their contracts and subcontracts. Opportunities for corruption abound and the prospects for successful completion of these ambitious projects are questionable.\n\n_A little here, a little there . . ._\n\nIndeed, the reappropriation and redirection of state funds to the benefit of private individuals, and vice versa, has been essential to the functioning of Talco in independent Tajikistan. The counter-claim made by Talco in the Swiss court proceeding, which ran from 2008 to 2013, was that the forced takeover of the management and trading affairs of the smelter in 2004 was due to the corruption of Nazarov and Ermatov during the period of their joint control from 1996 to 2004. This was said to include gifts from Nazarov to Ermatov's family members of London and Moscow flats, education fees, sham consultancies and company directorships. However, the two businessmen were managing Talco, a state company, at the time of the growing strength of Rahmon and his regime. Surely any corruption took place under the auspices of President Rahmon. As the Swiss judgment rules:\n\nUntil late 2004, both Mr. Nazarov and Mr. Ermatov were in their positions because of the support of the Government and maintained close relationships with the Government. There is ample evidence that TadAZ [Talco], as the main engine of the Tajik economy, and Mr. Nazarov were used to generate cash for state projects and to fund other expenses, such as official Tajik delegations, schools and security, that would usually be paid for through Government revenue.\n\nEarlier court cases had revealed payments of $1 million per month from Nazarov to the president in 2003, and a total of $1.5 million to purchase jewellery for the president's wife in 2003 and 2004. It was, the court rules in typically understated terms, 'a system lacking in transparency, which created the potential for corruption'.\n\nThe potential for corruption was both widespread and widely known at the highest reaches of the state. For example, in 2004, payments of around $8 million were made by Nazarov's company Ansol to a company called Pakhtai Sharitus, a partly privatised cotton business part-owned by the brother of Hasan Sadullayev, the president's brother-in-law. The court concludes that the government must have known about these allegedly corrupt transactions both because the principal beneficiary was a member of the president's extended family and because of the ongoing monitoring of Talco in the period shortly before its takeover by the regime. 'President Rahmon,' the court reports, 'had instructed all ministries to keep close tabs on Talco and its business out of fear that General Mirzoev might attempt a coup d'\u00e9tat financed by Mr. Nazarov and there is no doubt that Orienbank would have acted on the president's instructions.' Once again, family and state, public and private, onshore and offshore, were intertwined as Rahmon sought a stranglehold on the country's economy to the disadvantage of those warlords and businessmen who had done his bidding during the civil war and post-war recovery.\n\nThe pattern of using Talco's profits as a national slush fund beholden to the president and his associates continued under the new management. Sherali Kabirov, who remains in place to this day as CFO of Talco, explained in his witness testimony before the London court how, on the instruction of President Rahmon, he would increase the tolling fee paid to Talco by CDH\/TML in order to invest in public infrastructure. 'For example,' he testified, 'on one occasion in April 2007 the President asked that [Talco] pay for some local school and social projects.' Since then, Kabirov claims, profits accrued in the BVI by CDH\/TML have been directly reinvested back in Tajikistan, again on the instruction of the president. These offshore-routed profits paid for, among other things,\n\nthe purchase of new heavy equipment for [Talco] and the construction of new brick and cable factories. Various further projects designed to facilitate and improve international trade are also underway including the construction of Tajikistan's first 5 star hotel [the Hyatt Regency], the renovation of Dushanbe airport, the establishment of a new airline with modern planes and European-trained pilots, and the purchase of 200 new Peugeot taxis for Dushanbe.\n\nA hotel? An airport? An airline? Taxis? This is quite an extraordinarily long and varied list of items that might be purchased by the state's offshore slush fund. Just as Talco's trading arrangements are a mishmash of domestic and international partners, public and private institutions, so are the profits of the enterprise used to serve an immense variety of purposes that are deemed to be in the 'national interest'.\n\n_Buying US planes \u2013 and influence_\n\nA proportion of the offshore gains were spent in the United States. In January 2014, a BVI-based lawyer operating on behalf of the liquidator of CDH and Rusal subsidiaries who had been victorious over CDH in the Swiss courts in 2013 filed a request to the US district court to open the now defunct company's books and search for its assets. The successful request claimed that 'CDH has been stripped of its assets and CDH's directors and TML colluded in moving CDH's business to TML for little or no consideration'. Furthermore, they alleged that 'Talco's profits have constantly been and are still being moved to TML since 2007 for little or no consideration'.\n\nThese documents were made available to the journalist David Trilling who wrote a series of investigative stories. They list wires in excess of $140 million over the period from 2008 to 2014, including around $97 million in 2008\u201309 which was spent on leasing two Boeing 737 aeroplanes for the new private airline Somon Air, owned by Orienbank and controlled, according to the US ambassador, 'by the President'. These aeroplanes continue to fly commercial flights to and from Dushanbe on behalf of Somon Air. Once again, the line between public and private in the ownership of the airline is so blurred as to disappear from view. The wire transfers suggest that in addition to funding the new airline, CDH funds were also deployed as a maintenance budget for the increasingly degraded Talco plant with over $40 million spent on spare parts, equipment, chemicals and technical consultancy. These appear to be for the aluminium industry but could just as easily be for another private business controlled by the presidential family.\n\nHowever, the $140 million spent over the period from 2007 to 2014, whilst equivalent to about 2 per cent of Tajikistan's official GDP, is small beer compared with the revenues of TML over this time. Even accounting for the decline in the global price of aluminium, the income of TML in this time can be expected to amount to several billion dollars. The considerable production costs were met by the plant and effectively paid for by the Tajik taxpayer out of the general state budget and subsidised electricity prices. In turn, TML continued to contribute to state projects at the behest of the president. It paid around half of the $5 million cost of the construction of the world's tallest flagpole in Dushanbe \u2013 three metres higher than the previous holder of that honour in Azerbaijan \u2013 built to mark twenty years of independence in 2011. But this phallocentric act of nation-building is only a small proportion of the money channelled offshore. So what happened to the rest of the TML billions?\n\nThe answer to this question is not clear as the TML audits for the years after 2008 are incomplete and lack sufficient detail. We know that much has gone to pay creditors. However, investigations by Helmer and Trilling have revealed where a small proportion of the money is going. Since October 2012, TML has been paying the Washington lobbyists Fabiani & Company $1.2 million per year 'to increase Talco's business opportunities and indirectly, improve the Republic of Tajikistan's investment profile and relationship with the United States'. In an initial blitz of lobbying from January to May 2013, Fabiani staff held over eighty meetings in Congress, largely to promote the Rogun Dam, the flagship state project that would become the highest dam in the world, if built. This included meetings with Republican and Democratic representatives on key committees and some of their senior staff. Part of Fabiani's remit under its contract with TML is 'educating the Administration and Members of Congress, opinion leaders, and representatives of the Government of Tajikistan on issues of importance to Talco Management Ltd'. In order to generate any interest at all, lobbyists tied Tajikistan to the 'Af-Pak narrative' and 'New Silk Road' strategy \u2013 Washington's 'inside the beltway' talk for US policy to defeat terrorism and build intra-regional economic ties in Central Asia. By December 2013, this lobbying was apparently gleaning results with a US announcement that it would invest $15 million in the CASA-1000 project to export electricity from Tajikistan.\n\nIn January and February 2014, we worked with Helmer and Trilling to get to the bottom of the influence Tajikistan was buying in Washington. It was not difficult to begin to join the dots. It emerged that, having been commissioned by the lobbyists, Hillary Kramer, an investments analyst at Forbes.com, had gone to Dushanbe to record a video interview with President Rahmon and written promotional 'puff pieces' about Tajikistan that were later taken down from the site amid an investigation. The focus of the interview, these articles and the meetings with congressional staffers was the proposed Rogun Dam which, if completed, would provide electricity for both Talco and export to South Asia \u2013 but not necessarily to Tajikistan's impoverished domestic consumers.\n\nHowever, despite the awareness-raising and educational goals of Fabiani on behalf of TML, it soon became clear that our enquiries were unwanted. On 30 January 2014, on the advice of lawyers, Fabiani had filed an amendment notice with the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) stating that its relationship with TML had ended and it was therefore no longer required to report its work for them. But it appears that what was actually terminated was not Fabiani's lobbying on behalf of TML \u2013 which may continue to this day \u2013 but the reporting requirement. As Helmer describes, following his conversation with Alexander Botting of Fabiani on 26 February 2014:\n\nAccording to Botting, the Justice Department has ruled that because the foreign principal isn't a government, and is nothing more than a management company registered in the British Virgin Islands, Fabiani's activities on its behalf, the payments it receives each month, and the meetings it has with US officials, no longer come under the Act and are no longer reportable. Talco Management [TML], the Justice Department was told, is nothing more than a commercial business.\n\nThis is a remarkable tale. The offshore vehicle TML is effective not only at hiding the private use of state assets from the weary Tajik people but also at concealing Tajikistan's activities in the US Congress from the Department of Justice. In claiming that the Rogun Dam is a commercial project, both Fabiani and the Justice Department appear to disregard the facts. These pertain to the Rahmon regime's long political struggle to get Rogun built and the statements by Uzbekistan that it would go to war to prevent the construction of a dam which it says would cut its supply of agricultural and drinking water. They also seem ignorant of the publicly available court records that detail how TML is majority-owned by the state and the US State Department's judgment that it is fully controlled by the president of Tajikistan.\n\nBack in the USSR, or neoliberal authoritarianism?\n\nBy the summer of 2014, the government of Tajikistan was considering its international trading options once more. Rusal had begun to apply pressure via the opening up of CDH's books, and Talco's CFO Sherali Kabirov sounded a conciliatory note with the Russian company. Around the same time, as Moscow sought to build its regional bloc against the West, Kyrgyzstan announced its intention to join Russia's Eurasian Union, opening up the possibility of Tajikistan also acceding to Moscow's economic integration project. On the other hand, Tajikistan's lobbying in Washington via the offshore TML appears to have borne fruit with tens of millions of dollars secured to finance the CASA-1000 electricity network and a contract signed with an Italian engineering company to finally build the Rogun Dam.\n\n_Tajikistan today_\n\nIn 2016, ten years after Hydro had signed up to re-enter Tajikistan, the vain (and perhaps insincere) hopes for reform of US and Norwegian officials now look absurd. Chinese investment and soft loans to Tajikistan have eroded the influence of Western aid and the leverage of the IFIs. In 2006, a major north\u2013south highway project was financed by a $296 million loan from the Chinese government. Today, China is by far Tajikistan's largest trading partner, accounting for an enormous 45 per cent of its imports. Many Chinese investments are also made via offshore detours. This use of the unregulated avenues of the international financial system does not imply a commitment to the free market as business in Tajikistan continues to flow through the regime and the country still languishes in the lower reaches of global corruption indices. It is a very different economy from the Soviet one in which Talco was born. Rather than socialism in one country, Tajikistan now practises crony capitalism in the global economy.\n\nPolitically, Tajikistan's authoritarian regime has hardened. Since the mid-2000s, the country's secular opposition parties have been dismembered by splits orchestrated by the government while new pro-government 'opposition' parties have been created. Opposition movements such as Group 24 and New Tajikistan have been driven overseas and their exiles pursued relentlessly with the help of the Russian authorities, the abuse of Interpol and the Tajik state's connections to organised crime (see Chapter 7). The last opposition party, the Islamic Revival Party of Tajikistan (IRPT), whose former leader signed the peace agreement with President Rahmon in 1997, is now banned and declared a terrorist organisation. Lawyers defending the IRPT's leaders have themselves been jailed. According to Freedom House, a leading American human rights group, Tajikistan 'increasingly resembles a one-party state'; it now receives the lowest possible rating of national democratic governance available in the 'Nations in Transit' index which measures 'transition' after the fall of the Soviet Union.\n\nAt a cursory glance, Tajikistan appears to be going backwards. But the evidence discussed above suggests that partial liberalisation of the economy and cooperation with new Western actors, including offshore jurisdictions, has enabled the development of Tajikistan's kleptocracy and, by extension, its hardening authoritarianism. Investment from Hydro and other investors, with oversight from the World Bank, provided the resources that allowed the regime to consolidate itself out of the ashes of civil war. Such opportunities were not afforded by the Soviet Union. This is a neoliberal authoritarianism enhanced by the globalisation of finance.\n\n_Questions in Oslo_\n\nNotwithstanding these rather general conclusions about the culpability of the international financial system, the question for Hydro and the World Bank is whether they should have seen this coming in 2006 when the agreement to re-enter Tajikistan was signed. This debate raised its head in Norway in early 2016 following reporting by the Norwegian business newspaper _Dagens N\u00e6ringsliv_. This led to the Norwegian government writing to Hydro, in which it has a 50 per cent stake, on 22 February 2016, in order to demand an explanation from the company for its actions in Tajikistan. Hydro's report of 7 March 2016 is revealing, as much for what it does not say as for what it does. The company claims that 'confidentiality obligations' had prevented full disclosure when the matter was raised in the Norwegian press in 2007 but, reading the report, we are left with the impression that much remains hidden from view.\n\nHydro argues that it has 'zero tolerance of corruption'. In the report, the company argues that it was not party to the fraud and corruption recognised in the High Court's verdict of 2005. However, the parties that were named by the judge as the beneficiaries of the corruption \u2013 namely President Rahmon and his allies \u2013 were to be Hydro's business partners again from 2007. It is hard to reconcile zero tolerance of corruption with a willingness to re-enter a relationship with a corrupt partner via a creative offshore arrangement. Hydro's proposed solution to this dilemma was that 30 per cent of TML should be 'beneficially owned by parties at arm's length from the Tajik government'. At the same time, the report acknowledges that 'establishing an enterprise in a so-called tax haven generally is associated with a greater risk of corruption and concealment of funds, as a result of lack of transparency'. Hydro therefore commissioned an open source due diligence study. In its summary of the study, Hydro states the following:\n\nThe due diligence revealed nothing that was considered harmful for the reputation of the owners of TML. It was revealed that the private owners were Tajiki businessmen with extensive networks. No information was found to indicate that any of them had been involved in \u2013 or investigated for \u2013 any improper or unlawful business.\n\nHowever, in Tajikistan, there is no such thing as 'businessmen with extensive networks' that are 'at arm's length from the Tajik government'. The political economy of the country \u2013 as would have been clear from the judgments of the London court and any number of international academic and policy studies at the time \u2013 means that all high-level business networks are connected to the regime. Moreover, it goes without saying that such well-connected persons would not be investigated 'for improper or unlawful business'. Only those who fall out of favour with the regime face such investigations, as the case of Maruf Orifov subsequently showed. Hydro had thirteen years of experience working in Tajikistan by this time, and (prior to its legal dispute with Talco) acknowledged it to be 'challenging politically, environmentally and financially'. What was clear to impartial and informed observers in 2006, and remained clear in 2016, is that the boundaries between onshore and offshore and between public and private sectors are, in effect, entirely absent in Tajikistan.\n\nThe global character of the family state\n\nOne man is the constant in the remarkable story of Talco. That man is Emomali Rahmon. Once a state farm manager, he became the placeman of a brutal warlord and rose, via offshore and international connections, to be the head of a state that he runs in the interests of his family and inner circle. It is commonplace to think of Talco's commercial and legal struggles as a microcosm of Tajik politics. But the reverse may be equally true: Tajik politics is a microcosm of the international and offshore battle to control the country's biggest industry. Amid the drama of thwarted coups d'\u00e9tat, presidential family feuds, the diversion of state resources on a vast scale, secretive foreign lobbying, and one of the most expensive cases in English legal history, Sherali Kabirov used the opportunity of his witness testimony to the London court to defend the honour of the country. 'Tajikistan,' he opined, 'is one of the more successful countries in Central Asia in managing the transition to democracy and it continues to transform and improve itself.'\n\nThis picture of the republic is belied by the realities of the family state where the president and his inner circle can act with impunity against their rivals. The list of names of those who have fallen out of favour with President Rahmon and paid a high price \u2013 from former Talco manager Nazarov and security chief Mirzoyev in 2004 to the former insiders and latter-day oppositionists Zayd Saidov and Umarali Kuvvatov in 2014 and 2015 (see Chapter 7) \u2013 continues to grow. These individuals are, without a hint of irony, portrayed as 'bad apples' and charged with corruption. In March 2015, Rustam Emomali, President Rahmon's son, took on the state Anti-Corruption Agency \u2013 a body established ten years before at the behest of Western donors \u2013 to ensure that this dividing line between acceptable and unacceptable corruption is maintained.\n\nCorruption is a constant in Tajikistan's family state to the extent that the use of the term with respect to business in the country is something of a misnomer. You can only have corruption if there already exists some alternative state of good governance. This mythic good governance would be based on clear demarcations of the public and private, without conflicts of interest and with the public disclosure of transactions. As the Swiss court ruled, 'charitable support of both Tajik individuals and State projects were not only not secret, but expected in Tajik culture and well-known within Tajikistan'. But the suggestion that this corruption is an entirely cultural and local phenomenon is misleading. Without the financial and international instruments of offshore vehicles and extraterritorial legal processes, corruption on the scale described here would be neither possible nor effective. If major Western companies, American regulators, due diligence researchers and international organisations were not willing to turn a blind eye to the likelihood of corruption via secret jurisdictions, then the capture of the state by the family could not have occurred in the way that it has.\n\nThis offshore dimension has been instrumental in the shift of power since the 1990s. The Tajik state used to be distributed across multiple factions of warlords, businessmen and politicians. Now it is in the hands of just one faction: President Rahmon, his family and inner circle. As our next chapter on Uzbekistan discusses, the Tashkent regime and its family members also have their offshore connections, which have led to a corruption scandal of global proportions.\n4\n\n**UZBEKISTAN'S CLOSED POLITY AND  \nGLOBAL SCANDAL**\n\nUzbekistan is commonly viewed as the contemporary and historical heartland of its region, the only country to border every other Central Asian state. Home to the region's largest population (about 30 million) and the old Silk Road cities of Samarkand and Bukhara, the inheritor of some of the most acute legacies of Russian and Soviet rule, and with a strong sense of national identity, Uzbekistan vies with Kazakhstan for the status of the region's most influential state.\n\nUnlike Kazakhstan, which has embraced a public image as a global crossroads controlled by a cosmopolitan group of influential oligarchs, or Tajikistan with its history of civil war, post-Soviet Uzbekistan is usually portrayed as a self-contained island of repression, stagnation and economic autarky. For twenty-five years since its independence, the country was led by the ruthless Islam Karimov, the former first party secretary of the Soviet Socialist Republic of Uzbekistan, who consolidated his grip on power through a presidential election in 1990 and a number of subsequent uncontested ballots and referenda to extend his term \u2013 the latest being in 2015. In a region where repression is the political norm, Karimov, right up until his death in 2016, was perhaps the most brutal of all regional leaders, banning opposition political parties, crushing all forms of dissent and opposition media, condoning and routinising torture, all while using the threat of Islamic radicalism to justify his iron grip.\n\nBut if we view Uzbekistan's authoritarianism and autarky as a purely internal or local globalised phenomenon, we miss the critical ways in which the country's authoritarian politics, including its elite struggles, rent-seeking and familial infighting, is increasingly taking place within global spaces. Chapter 7 will further explore how the Uzbek government's brutal crackdown in Andijan in 2005, a pivotal moment in the region's post-Soviet history, created a wave of dissidents, refugees and asylum seekers. In response, Uzbek authorities initiated a worldwide manhunt to track down, extradite and even eliminate political opponents and refugees who have fled the Central Asian country.\n\nIn this chapter, we explore another critical local\u2013global interaction: how Uzbekistan's closed oligarchic regime and closed economic system have spawned a series of high-profile global corruption scandals and anti-money-laundering investigations involving members of the president's family and their overseas assets. These scandals have attracted the international media spotlight and shed light on the corrupt schemes hatched between international telecoms providers and Uzbek officials to access the lucrative emerging Central Asian market. But they also appear to have exacerbated family rivalries within the president's closest circles, implicating his eldest daughter Gulnara Karimova in an internal power struggle. They demonstrate how, despite Uzbekistan's domestic political and economic closure, its elite and familial politics play out in a global context that includes Swiss bank accounts, New York court hearings and Swedish media investigations.\n\nCharting a course to statehood\n\nWestern commentators are often fond of drawing direct connections between Uzbekistan's closed state and the Soviet era. And to be sure, there are several institutional legacies that have endured, including the system of cotton procurement, the primary role of the state and the importance of regional elites in maintaining a stable system of centre\u2013periphery relations. But Soviet Uzbekistan was also the prime example of how Soviet institutions and practices, including the local party structure and system of agricultural production, were co-opted for local and regional purposes. Elites in Soviet Uzbekistan built formidable patronage machines with Soviet resources and took advantage of Soviet federalism in areas like education and labour-market hiring to promote their own social network and political allies. As long as Uzbek elites remained loyal to Moscow and the overall Soviet system, Moscow was willing to tolerate certain amounts of elite embezzlement and autonomy. However, as shown by the infamous Uzbek cotton scandal of the 1980s \u2013 where central auditors discovered that the republic had billed Moscow for over a billion rubles of cotton that was never produced \u2013 corruption, nepotism and patronage seemed to be the rule rather than the exception as Uzbekistan transitioned to independence.\n\nAfter a brief flirtation with a democratic political system in the 1990s, political parties were soon eliminated and Karimov quickly moved to consolidate power. He swiftly built a reputation for tight control and was particularly concerned with identifying and crushing all forms of political opposition. The Uzbek regime's propensity for political violence, as Eric McGlinchey has argued, has been particularly targeted at religious organisations and figures, with the government fearful of the political implications of the country's steady Islamic revival. Uzbekistan's elite also promoted new national symbols, myths and cultural events, using the state as an active vehicle for image-crafting and national branding.\n\nThe key to Karimov's heavy-handed state-building and political consolidation is the notorious National Security Service of Uzbekistan (SNB), the most powerful of Central Asia's security organs, which plays a critical role in supporting the regime amid the country's system of regional hierarchies and informal networks. These forces were responsible for most of the killings in Andijan in 2005.\n\nEconomically too, Uzbekistan has openly bucked calls for liberalisation by consistently protecting its state-dominated economy. Informal patronage networks play a critical role in allocating selective benefits to the bureaucracy and political supporters to retain loyalty to the state, while the economy is still dominated by state monopolies over a number of key commodities and export sectors, including gold and cotton. The latter industry has been fiercely criticised by human rights groups for employing the forced labour of hundreds of thousands of children and civil servants during the annual harvest. Cotton is both a source of revenue for the Uzbek government and an enduring form of social control over rural populations. Children are required to put their education on hold to participate in the annual harvest. Given state pressure, farmers have little other option but to cultivate cotton, with the regime apparently motivated by the massive profits to be had in selling cotton bought at artificially low rates to global buyers. The government's dependence on gold as an export commodity and source of hard currency has frequently led to clashes with international mining companies which have braved the country's dismal investment climate, with Uzbekistan involved in more international arbitrations (most of them involving the gold sector) than any other Central Asian state.\n\nAs with Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, millions of Uzbeks now live and work overseas as labour migrants, even while Tashkent maintains strict capital controls and trade restrictions. According to the World Bank, in 2011 typical times for the import or export of goods across its borders were over 100 days, higher than even the excessive regional average in Central Asia, while since the 2000s Uzbek customs and security services have moved to restrict border access to neighbours, effectively militarising the country's borders.\n\nIn terms of its foreign policy, Uzbekistan has aggressively championed its sovereignty and autonomy. Karimov was intensely distrustful of cooperating with his neighbours, especially upstream Tajikistan which controls access to water sources vital to Uzbekistan's agricultural system. Karimov also mastered the art of pursuing a multi-vector foreign policy, while aggressively playing the region's external powers off against one another in an effort to secure military assistance, preserve his autonomy, and fend off criticism of his repressive practices. Always in the name of privileging the country's sovereignty and autonomy, the Uzbek president balked at deepening regional economic or security cooperation through Russian-led bodies such as the CSTO or the Eurasian Economic Union.\n\nFrom 2001 to 2005, Tashkent developed very close security relations with the United States, which established a military base known as K2 near the southern city of Khanabad to supply its operations in neighbouring Afghanistan. In return, the United States provided hundreds of millions of dollars in military assistance (both in equipment and training) as a tacit quid pro quo for acquiring basing rights, maintained close intelligence ties, and, according to accounts, regularly cooperated with Uzbek security services in the rendition and even torture of 'terror suspects'. But after the events in Andijan, when Western countries criticised Tashkent's repressive crackdown, Karimov, fearing another 'colour revolution' or challenge to his authority, evicted US forces from their base in K2 and tilted back towards Russia's orbit by joining the CSTO. Beginning in the mid-2000s, the government has closed down the activities of Western NGOs and foundations that it deemed threatening to the regime, as Tashkent has grown increasingly hostile to criticism of its human rights practices by the West.\n\nIn the late 2000s, after Western sanctions were imposed following the events in Andijan, the US resumed cooperation with Tashkent to open and maintain the Northern Distribution Network to supply materials to Afghanistan. As the United States began its large-scale withdrawal from Afghanistan, US officials confirmed that they would be transferring 330 military vehicles to Uzbekistan under the Excess Defense Articles programme (EDA), once again igniting debate about the role of US military assistance in the country. But for the United States and certain European countries, especially Germany, the tension between pursuing security cooperation and not condoning the regime's repressive conduct has been acute and difficult to manage in practice.\n\nUzbekistan's hidden global and extraterritorial connections\n\nThis much is familiar to long-time observers of the region and also helps to perpetuate a broader perception among Western policymakers and even scholars that Uzbekistan remains disconnected and closed, impervious to the influence of Western norms, values and media. The lessons of Andijan, in particular, seemed to entrench in the minds of US and European policymakers the assumption that Uzbekistan's isolation makes it impervious to external pressure, even if the West would prioritise the question of political reform above its strategic and security agendas. But these assumptions and the frame of 'closure' have been shaken by a series of international media stories detailing allegations of bribe-taking, offshore schemes and overseas bank accounts involving members of the president's family.\n\n_The rise of the president's daughter: global citizen, local monopolist_\n\nPerhaps the most well-known member of Central Asia's elite 'transnational uncivil society' is Gulnara Karimova, former president Karimov's eldest daughter, who played a prominent political role domestically as well as serving in a number of high-profile diplomatic posts overseas (see Chapter 1). From an early age, Karimova has lived a cosmopolitan and turbulent life. She was married at nineteen to the Afghan-American businessman Mansur Maqsudi, whom she acrimoniously divorced thirteen years later, in 2001, after a bitter custody row. Karimova took her two children back to Uzbekistan, while the Uzbek government placed Maqsudi's name on an Interpol warrant list for 'import-export fraud', expropriated his Coca-Cola bottling plant in Uzbekistan, and deported twenty-four of his relatives from Uzbekistan. While in the United States, Karimova earned a higher degree at Harvard University's prestigious Kennedy School and styled herself as a pop star, an international fashion designer and head of a flagship charitable organisation. She dabbled in all these pastimes while officially in the service of the Uzbek Ministry of Foreign Affairs, first as counsellor to the United Nations in New York (2000\u201303), then as counsellor in Moscow (2003\u201305), then as Uzbekistan's permanent ambassador to the United Nations and international organisations in Geneva (2008\u201310) and as ambassador to Spain (in 2010).\n\nBut it has been Karimova's business dealings that have earned her the reputation of a ruthless predator in the country's relations with overseas investors. For many years, she ran a juggernaut of a business empire and was widely believed by external observers to have controlled the Swiss-registered conglomerate Zeromax, a giant company that seemingly rose out of nowhere in 2001 to control large portions of Uzbekistan's gold (through a stake in Oxus Gold), cotton, textile, oil and gas industries. US officials characterised the company as the 'middleman' for Uzbekistan's oil and gas contracts and estimated that it siphoned off 80 per cent of the country's natural exports to Russia. Zeromax and Karimova were also reportedly beneficiaries of the logistics contracts that the Pentagon signed with Uzbekistan to transport equipment and supplies as part of the Northern Distribution Network. The company folded in 2010, reportedly owing over $500 million in tax, with Karimova reported to have lost interest in further directing its operations after its overexpansion. A creditors' meeting in Switzerland under the bankruptcy proceeding revealed an outstanding debt of more than $4.6 billion and a number of unfinished large-scale construction projects.\n\nUS embassy cables that discussed Karimova's business activities referred to her as a 'robber baron', who gained a slice of almost every lucrative business in a spectacular rise during the 2000s. One now infamous cable observed: 'Most Uzbeks see Karimova as a greedy, power-hungry individual who uses her father to crush businesspeople or anyone else who stands in her way . . . She remains the single most hated person in the country.'\n\nBut it was Karimova's suspected involvement, through roles played by her associates, in a number of deals involving foreign telecommunications companies trying to access the rapidly expanding and lucrative Uzbek market, that precipitated the multiple international investigations into alleged money laundering and corruption; these same scandals also appear to have resulted in her fall from grace as the favoured successor to her father. As of summer 2016, Karimova remained under house arrest in Tashkent and did not even attend her father's funeral in Samarkand in September 2016.\n\nThus, unlike Kazakhstan, home to dozens of oligarchs who have globalised both their individual lifestyles and their economic activities, Karimova's saga reveals a narrower circle of elites in Uzbekistan whom the regime permits to operate in these same transnational circles. Yet, this smaller size, in turn, may have given more political significance to Karimova's exploits within the power circles of Uzbekistan.\n\nThe anatomy of a globalised scandal: foreign telecoms and business in Uzbekistan\n\nBy reputation, Uzbekistan is known as a tough place for international companies to do business. Perceptions of widespread corruption, insecure property rights and active involvement by state officials in investment decisions should give pause to any prospective international investor. It is also a technological laggard: according to the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), Uzbekistan does not even meet the thresholds for a developing country for its telecommunications equipment and has the lowest level of mobile penetration among the ten CIS countries surveyed in the ITU's 2014 'Measuring the Information Society' report. Thus, from the perspective of international telecoms companies, it is exactly Uzbekistan's relative closure, large population and old technological standards that have made it a potentially lucrative opportunity for international expansion and investment; conversely, from the perspective of Uzbek officials and regulators, the allocation of licences for new standards and spectrums make the modern telecommunications a tempting target for elite predation, especially as technical standards in the industry are regularly upgraded.\n\nIn July 2015, US Justice Department officials revealed that they were investigating three foreign telecommunications companies \u2013 VimpelCom Ltd (Dutch-registered, Russian-based), Mobile TeleSystems (MTS) (based in Russia) and TeliaSonera (based in Sweden) \u2013 for corruption and money-laundering activities in Uzbekistan. These three companies had been the major new international entrants and players since the mid-2000s as the Uzbek market was opened up to international investors. According to a letter written by US Justice Department officials to their Swedish counterparts, the US investigation 'has revealed that VimpelCom, MTS and TeliaSonera paid bribes to Uzbek officials to obtain mobile telecommunications business in Uzbekistan'. In one of the largest enforcement actions ever taken against foreign companies accused of corrupt activities abroad, US officials pressed European counterparts to freeze over $1 billion worth of assets tied to unnamed Uzbek government officials.\n\nOn 13 July 2015, the Justice Department won a related hearing when a New York City federal district judge ruled that US authorities could impound $300 million of assets held by Bank of New York Mellon Corp. in Ireland, Luxembourg and Belgium. At the hearing, US officials had argued that the two Russian-based firms \u2013 both publicly traded on the US stock market \u2013 had used a web of offshore-registered shell companies to funnel more than $500 million in payments to 'a government official and relative of the President of Uzbekistan', identified as 'Government Official A'.\n\n_The price of access: all in the family_\n\nAccording to a summary overview of the telecoms scandal undertaken by the Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), Karimova and her associates were involved as gatekeepers in the telecommunications sector and employed three main techniques to extort payments from investors. The first was to require a percentage (26 per cent appears to have been preferred) of the target company or to conceal the payoff as a ghost investment in a local partner or newly formed subsidiary. The outside companies would then be asked to sign agreements to buy back the shares at a later date for a significantly higher price, with the beneficial owner pocketing the difference. Second, Karimova seems to have demanded a premium for her services and lobbying for the allocation of licences, especially new communications standards such as 3G and 4G licences. Third, in cases where executives were reluctant to partake in these payoff schemes, Karimova appears to have directly bullied and threatened companies with expropriation and closure.\n\nMany of the telecoms payments were structured or routed through a company named Takilant, an opaque offshore firm registered in Gibraltar. According to company registry records, it was founded in 2003, originally with three directors, one of whom was 23-year-old Gayane Avakyan; the other two directors, from St Kitts and Nevis, were most likely 'nominee directors' and formally resigned the following year. At the time of the alleged payments, Avakyan was the company's sole registered director, while she was also identified by a BBC report as 'sitting next to Ms Karimova' at a Paris fashion show. A former employee interviewed by the _Financial Times_ noted that 'Ms Avakyan worked closely with the first daughter'. The Gibraltar company, according to the OCCRP, has also 'served as a holding company for other Karimova deals including those involving duty-free shops, clothing businesses, and pharmaceuticals'.\n\nOverall, according to an OCCRP table, foreign telecoms companies made a total of $684 million in payments to Takilant, while the offshore company made one $50 million payment to TeliaSonera on 28 December 2007 to purchase its 26 per cent holding of TeliaSonera Uzbek Telecom Holding BV. Figure 4.1, rendered from OCCRP data and the report into the TeliaSonera deals by Swedish law firm Mannheimer Swartling, provides a visualisation of Takilant's transactional role and holdings.\n\n_The TeliaSonera case_\n\nThe unfolding of the TeliaSonera scandal appears to have done the most legal and political damage to Karimova and her associates. The company at the time was a joint Swedish\u2013Finnish venture, 37 per cent owned by the Swedish state, whose leadership team had decided to aggressively expand operations into emerging Eurasian markets including Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Georgia and Azerbaijan. In 2012, Swedish television news programme _Uppdrag Granskning_ and a local newspaper alleged that, contrary to initial denials by TeliaSonera, the company had paid a total of $320 million in bribes to the Uzbek regime for licences and access to the Uzbek market, including an initial $250 million deal over licences in spring 2007 which included direct negotiations with the ruling regime and their agents.\n\nThe investigation revealed that an initial plan was hatched between TeliaSonera and Bezkhod Akhmedov, at the time CEO of Uzdunrobita (oddly a market competitor), who was widely perceived as head of 'Karimova's Investment Group'. In an interview for a Swedish news programme, one of the two executives from the company confirmed that 'To reach a deal with Gulnara was a prerequisite to the whole deal. And the negotiations with her started in earnest around February\u2013March 2007.' The executive identified Bekhzod Akhmedov as Karimova's negotiating agent, a point that was corroborated by leaked US embassy cables that commented on a related telecommunications sector negotiation.\n\nFigure 4.1 Structure of TeliaSonera payments and role of Takilant\n\nTeliaSonera and Akhmedov signed an agreement that detailed a multi-stage sequence of payments, acquisitions and the establishment of new joint ventures over the next few years that would funnel payments to a network of companies and offshore entities: Swedish prosecutors believe that Karimova beneficially owned these ventures. The source quoted by Sweden's public service broadcaster SVT explained that they were 'then informed that Gulnara would receive shares in the new company that TeliaSonera would form . . . And that she through a local company would receive around 20 per cent. And that TeliaSonera would buy back the shares two to three years later \u2013 at a preset price.' Overall, the OCCRP estimates that over the next three years TeliaSonera paid $456.24 million of documented funds to Takilant and received $50 million in a complex sequence of buybacks and ownership transfers.\n\nLars Nyberg, then CEO of TeliaSonera, denied all allegations of corruption or improper behaviour. However, as details of the various schemes emerged, including interviews with whistleblowing company executives, the CEO's denials became more difficult to credibly maintain. The company commissioned an external investigative report by the legal firm Mannheimer Swartling that found no direct evidence of corruption or money laundering, but strongly criticised the company for not investigating the legal origins and beneficial owners of its local partners, Teleson and Takilant, and for not looking into how these companies had acquired the licences that they subsequently transferred to TeliaSonera.\n\nUnder pressure from the board and intense media scrutiny after the report's release, Nyberg tendered his resignation on the same day, 31 January 2013, stating that: 'Even if this transaction was legal, we should not have gone ahead without learning more about the identity of our counterparty. This is something I regret.' Board chairman Anders Narvinger told a news conference that, 'In hindsight, you can say that we should have scrutinized operations closer', while Swedish financial markets minister Peter Norman stated that the company had failed in the areas of 'general housekeeping, ethics and adhering to its own guidelines'.\n\nThe TeliaSonera scandal triggered a wave of international investigations into related allegations of money laundering and corruption, both as part of the TeliaSonera case and in relation to other deals involving MTS and VimpelCom. In summer 2012, Swiss authorities froze the bank accounts of four Uzbek nationals with close ties to Karimova, reportedly worth hundreds of millions of Swiss francs, and a spokeswoman for the Swiss attorney general's office noted that the 'Alleged illegal acts taking place in the telecommunications market in Uzbekistan are considered as the initial money-laundering offenses'. In a statement released in March 2014, Swiss authorities stated that the probe had been expanded in the autumn of 2013 to include Karimova. In addition to the investigations in Sweden and Switzerland, in 2013 the Rue89 website reported that French authorities had opened an investigation 'targeting Gulnara Karimova' which was linked to a money-laundering case involving her associates, while Karimova and her associate Alisher Ergashev, one of the Uzbeks probed for money laundering by Swiss authorities, were found to have signed as owner and director of two companies that were used to purchase luxury properties in France.\n\nCooperation between Swiss and US authorities appears to have provided a basis for the announcements in summer 2015 by the US Department of Justice and the SEC that it was conducting a global investigation into accusations of money laundering and corruption in the three telecom companies. In September 2016, reports indicated that US and Dutch authorities had proposed a $1.4 billion settlement with Telia (formerly TeliaSonera) to resolve corruption violations relating to its transactions in Uzbekistan.\n\n_The VimpelCom case_\n\nThough the TeliaSonera case has drawn the most media headlines, the dramatic settlement of the VimpelCom case with US authorities in February 2016 provides even deeper insights into how members of Uzbekistan's ruling elites constructed elaborate 'pay-to-play schemes' in collusion with international telecoms companies. VimpelCom, based in the Netherlands and the sixth largest telecoms company in the world, entered the Uzbek market, like its international competitors, by forming the wholly owned Uzbek subsidiary LLC Unitel or Unitel.\n\nOn 16 February 2016, the US Securities and Exchange Commission announced, in coordination with the Public Prosecution Service of the Netherlands (PPS), a global settlement in which the telecoms provider would pay $798 million to 'resolve its violations of the Foreign Corrupt Services Act (FCPA) to win business in Uzbekistan'. Unitel admitted to one count of violating the FCPA. The announced fine constituted the third largest ever imposed on a company for FCPA violations, making this one of the most significant enforcement actions to date. On 20 July 2016 a Dutch court found Takilant guilty of complicity to bribery and forgery, finding that the firm accepted bribes from VimpelCom Ltd and Telia AB in exchange for mobile spectrum licences in Uzbekistan.\n\nThe SEC alleges that VimpelCom bribed an official of the government of Uzbekistan who was related to the president in order to gain access to the Uzbek market and obtain licences, frequencies and channels. Enforcement officials estimate that at least $114 million was funnelled to an entity affiliated with the Uzbek official, while other bribes were 'disguised as charitable donations' and made to charities affiliated with the Uzbek official. According to Andrew Ceresney, director of the SEC Enforcement Division, 'VimpelCom made massive revenues in Uzbekistan by paying over $100 million to an official with significant influence over top leaders of the Uzbek government . . . These old-fashioned bribes, hidden through sham contracts and charitable contributions, left the company's books and records riddled with inaccuracies.' US attorney Preet Bharara of the Southern District of New York further explained: 'Those payments, falsely recorded in the company's books and records, were then laundered through bank accounts and assets around the world, including through accounts in New York.' A member of the attorney general's office noted that 'These cases combine a landmark FCPA resolution for corporate bribery with one of the largest forfeiture actions we have ever brought to recover bribe proceeds from a corrupt government official.' As with TeliaSonera, the case was truly global in scope, involving a coordinated investigation with authorities in Switzerland, the Netherlands, Latvia and Norway, while the shell companies involved in structuring and concealing the transactions were registered in the BVI and the Cayman Islands, with accounts for laundered proceeds held in Switzerland, Latvia, the UK, Hong Kong, Belgium and Luxembourg.\n\nAs was the case with TeliaSonera, the VimpelCom bribery scheme involved the sequenced acquisition of a number of different entities, masked as licence purchases and business transactions. Between 2006 and 2012, representatives of VimpelCom paid bribes 'on multiple occasions over a period of approximately seven years so that VimpelCom could enter the Uzbek market and Unitel could gain valuable telecoms assets and continue operating in Uzbekistan'. Furthermore, the payments were structured through a Gibraltar-based shell company that 'certain VimpelCom and Unitel management knew was beneficially owned by the foreign official'. According to the settlement's 'Statement of Facts', accepted by both US authorities and VimpelCom, VimpelCom and Unitel conspired to provide over $114 million in bribes in exchange for the foreign official's influence on UzACI (the Uzbek Agency for Communications and Information, Uzbekistan's main state regulator of telecommunications) and the use of radio spectrum in the country. These corruption schemes included shell company purchases, a fraudulent buyout, bribes paid for 3G licences, fake consulting contracts, and fake reseller agreements.\n\nOutside-inside politics? Scandal, freezes and house arrest\n\nThe fallout of these corruption scandals not only made international headlines, but appeared to set in motion an acute domestic political power struggle and ruling family feud within Uzbekistan itself. Signs of a new concerted campaign targeting Karimova became apparent in autumn 2013 when Karimova was removed from her ambassadorial post in Spain, stripping her of her diplomatic immunity and ability to travel overseas, and returned to Tashkent. In October 2013, Uzbek regulators shut down several television channels controlled by Karimova under the Terra Group holding company, the assets of which were subsequently frozen. The following month, an additional five channels owned by Karimova's associate Firdavs Abdukhalikov were closed, while Karimova tweeted that Terra Group was being investigated for bribe-taking. The week following the Terra Group probe, prosecutors, tax police and police reportedly opened an investigation into possible financial crimes involving Karimova's Fund Forum charity and the organisation ceased operations the following month. And in November 2013, a group of Karimova-owned businesses including record stores, ten boutiques and a cinema complex were also closed down.\n\nIn the most dramatic turn of events, on 17 February 2014 Karimova and her teenage daughter were placed under house arrest by Uzbek prosecutors; the search of their home was reportedly supervised by a high-level security official. In a statement later in the year, Uzbek prosecutors asserted that 'Karimova . . . may have used administrative levers and provided the \"corruption element\" for members of an organized [criminal] group'. Karimova's close associates and business partners were also targeted. On 6 February 2014, Uzbek police raided an apartment in Tashkent and detained a group who included Rustam Madumarov, her reported long-term boyfriend, and Takilant-owner Gayane Avakyan; in July 2014 they were sentenced to six and a half and six years, respectively, for economic crimes including tax evasion.\n\n_Power struggles with the SNB?_\n\nThe most dramatic political rift appeared to open up between Karimova and Rustam Inoyatov, the head of the country's powerful National Security Service (SNB). Inoyatov was described in a leaked US embassy cable as a 'key gatekeeper to President Karimov' and 'clearly one of two or three top power brokers in Uzbekistan'. According to one opposition website, Inoyatov allegedly presented Karimov with a dossier detailing Karimova's activities, including the corruption investigations abroad, of which Karimov reportedly had no knowledge. Apparently shocked, the Uzbek president authorised the SNB chief's crackdown on his daughter, though some political analysts in Uzbekistan have speculated that the so-called Khaknazarov Report was publicly leaked in order to bolster the Uzbek president's standing and credibility, and to absolve him of any knowledge or responsibility in his daughter's scandals.\n\nIn her public statements and social media accounts, Karimova was quick to point to the domestic political motivations surrounding her detention. In a public comment on her Twitter feed she accused Inoyatov of harbouring aspirations to the presidency and remarked that he was 'scared' of her 'popularity'. Karimova also slammed the accusations of tax evasion levelled at Terra Group, claiming they had been 'pulled out of thin air'. Karimova's Twitter account appears to have been closed down on 6 February 2014, the date of the raid on her associates. But in a letter reportedly authored by Karimova and smuggled to BBC correspondent Natalia Antelava, which was attributed to Karimova with 75 per cent confidence by a handwriting analysis, Karimova wrote that she was 'trying to restore justice'. She lamented 'How na\u00efve I was to think that the rule of law exists in the country', and rued that 'I never thought this could happen in a civilised, developing nation that Uzbekistan portrays itself as'. A few weeks later, another alleged audio recording smuggled out of the country featured Karimova remarking that she and her teenage daughter were being treated 'worse than dogs'.\n\nOne of the more bizarre repercussions of the affair was the public spat between Gulnara and her younger sister Lola. In an interview conducted with the BBC, Lola claimed that she had not spoken with Gulnara for twelve years and did not rate her chances of succeeding her father, while Gulnara, according to local media accounts, accused Lola of practising sorcery and using it against their mother. In an interview with a Turkish newspaper in December 2013, Gulnara accused Lola and her husband of being part of the political campaign instigated by the SNB. Whilst the infighting of Tajikistan's presidential family stayed largely under wraps (see Chapter 3), Uzbekistan's court politics had gone public in spectacular fashion.\n\nThe problem of recovered assets and political transition\n\nThe result of these mounting international investigations and judgments surrounding the telecoms cases has been a worldwide series of asset freezes targeting Uzbek officials implicated in them. In the United States, the most important of these include $300 million worth of assets held in Bank of New York Mellon accounts in Belgium, Luxembourg and Ireland that were frozen by US federal courts as a consequence of the anti-bribery investigations. As part of its action against VimpelCom, the Department of Justice also filed a civil complaint seeking forfeiture of an additional $550 million held in Swiss bank accounts by the Uzbek official involved in the corruption scheme, which it argued represented proceeds of illegal bribes paid or property involved in the laundering of payments. In a letter sent to a US federal court on 21 April 2016, US prosecutors from the Justice Department's Asset Forfeiture asked the court to declare Gulnara Karimova (reportedly named for the first time in US public documents), along with Avakyan and Madumarov, in default of the February forfeiture order.\n\nIn Switzerland, a money-laundering investigation was launched against Gulnara Karimova in 2013, just weeks after her diplomatic immunity, from which she had benefited as Uzbekistan's UN representative, had been lifted. The following year, a Swiss federal police report noted that 'the Office of the Attorney General and the Federal Criminal Police continued their investigations on Gulnara Karimova, one of the Uzbek president's two daughters, and on other Uzbek citizens from her entourage who are suspected of laundering illegal profits from the telecommunications sector through Swiss institutions. Since the criminal investigation began, assets worth more than CHF800 million have been confiscated.'\n\nWith such global investigations and judgments against international telecoms companies appearing to have impacted upon Uzbekistan's domestic politics and the presidential family, these scattered overseas assets became targets for state reclamation and a priority for Uzbek authorities. In December 2015, Uzbekistan's justice minister, Muzraf Ikramov, reportedly sent a letter to the New York court presiding over the Uzbek telecoms case. The letter reportedly describes how an organised criminal group accepted bribes from telecommunications companies and then transferred these funds to overseas back accounts; Ikramov reportedly notified the court that the Uzbek government intends to retrieve the funds frozen by the US court associated with the government official. According to the same report, the government of Uzbekistan has retained the services of New York lawyers Holwell Shuster & Goldberg to advocate for the return of the funds. On 4 January 2016 these representatives sent a follow-up letter to the court stating that Uzbekistan 'clearly is an injured party because its officials were the subject of the bribes at issue'.\n\nAccording to Uzbek and Western media outlets, one of the topics of discussion in the January 2016 annual US\u2013Uzbekistan consultations between Uzbek Minister of Foreign Affairs Abdulaziz Kamilov and Nisha Desai Biswal, US assistant secretary of state for South and Central Asian affairs, was the possible recovery of $300 million in frozen assets from the Bank of Mellon. Just as targeting Mukhtar Ablyazov and his associates appears to be a major, yet unacknowledged, foreign policy priority for the Kazakh government, these displaced sums of money, as well as the underlying international investigations, now appear to be a major target for Uzbekistan's Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Indeed, in April 2016, a court order confirmed that the forfeiture case had moved into settlement negotiations between American and Uzbek authorities, stating that the 'United States of America and the Republic of Uzbekistan . . . wish to discuss a possible out-of-court resolution and believe that a stay of the litigation would support those discussions while preserving party and court resources'.\n\nUzbekistan's request gives a new twist to what is an emerging area of global governance: the recovery of overseas assets associated with grand corruption and kleptocracy by a country's nationals. In practice, successful recovery is hampered by different legal standards and burdens of proof in the countries hosting these assets, which often mandate that the requesting party must prove that the assets themselves were the direct fruits of criminal acts. There is some precedent for the tricky policy issue in Central Asia: in 2008, the government of Kazakhstan, as a result of a trilateral agreement with the United States and Switzerland, and in cooperation with the World Bank, established the independent Bota Foundation to dispense about $84 million in funds, which were discovered in Swiss bank accounts in connection with the Kazakhgate investigation, to support social services community groups. Bota could perhaps serve as a model for the return of frozen funds to Uzbekistan, but uncertainty surrounding Uzbekistan's political transition post Karimov, coupled with a growing economic crisis in the country, further complicate the issue politically.\n\nThe case also suggests that the issue of asset recovery is itself likely to become a central matter, both in Uzbekistan's foreign relations and internally within the country, as factions compete over these pots of money stranded overseas. Future regime transitions in Uzbekistan may even involve a new government in Tashkent framing asset recovery as an issue of democratisation or 'transitional justice', claiming that these assets, the ill-gotten gains of corrupt activities by members of a previous government, should be reclaimed to redress past political abuses.\n\nIlliberal transnationalism and the autocrat's daughter\n\nGulnara Karimova's spectacular rise \u2013 as international socialite, businesswoman and domestic power broker \u2013 and fall challenges many of our assumptions about Uzbekistan's alleged isolation, impenetrability and elite politics. The telecommunications scandals reveal how even an authoritarian and relatively closed society like that of Uzbekistan is enmeshed in transnational networks and global processes. On one level, then, this case echoes other repressive states whose elites and family members have led cosmopolitan lives abroad, while their predatory governments and patrimonial networks extracted rents and personal income streams from their societies at home. What perhaps makes the Uzbek case more unique and intriguing, though, is how the dynamics of political competition and informal alliances within the country's tightly controlled authoritarian system appear to have been shaken to the core by the high-profile overseas Karimova scandal.\n\nThe Karimova corruption allegations can be instructively compared with the dynamics explored in the case of Mukhtar Ablyazov in Kazakhstan. In both cases we see glimpses of how high-placed elites, while residing abroad, leveraged their domestic political control, influence and access to enrich themselves. In both cases, the dealings involved were skilfully camouflaged through the use of offshore vehicles, brokers and intermediaries, and in both cases the principals were accused of money laundering via a series of overseas bank accounts and luxury real estate acquisitions. Finally, in both cases, the global and transnational nature of their alleged crimes appears to have strongly impacted politics at home, even in these authoritarian settings with their tightly controlled media environments. In the next chapter we will consider another case of a former insider turned enemy of the state: Kyrgyzstan's Maxim Bakiyev.\n5\n\n**KYRGYZSTAN'S PRINCE MAXIM AND THE SWITZERLAND OF THE EAST**\n\nYou're hosting a guy who robbed us . . . I didn't know that behind the beautiful words of democracy are very dirty lies. That's terrible. Britain is one of the founders of democracy and it's impossible to understand its actions against us. I am ashamed for Great Britain and didn't expect politics to be this cynical and corrupt.\n\nAlmazbek Atambayev, president of Kyrgyzstan, July 2013\n\nIn June 2010, a private jet landed in Hampshire, England. Its passenger, Maxim Bakiyev, was immediately detained, but released after claiming political asylum. Known as 'the Prince' in his home country, Maxim was the son of Kurmanbek Bakiyev, the ousted president of Kyrgyzstan, whose reign lasted less than five years \u2013 a period of time sufficient for his family to squeeze the economic life and freedoms out of one of the poorest yet most open countries in the region. Dozens had been killed in Kyrgyzstan by the Bakiyev regime and the organised crime groups linked to it during its increasingly repressive rule. Many died in its violent attempt to hold on to power on 7 April 2010 when the security services were ordered to fire on demonstrating civilians. Hundreds more perished in the chaotic and brutal aftermath as struggles between pro- and anti-Bakiyev factions triggered horrific ethnic violence in the south of the country between Kyrgyz and Uzbeks.\n\nBut this was no mere distant local conflict driven by 'ancient ethnic hatreds' and supposedly traditional patterns of nepotism and corruption. The underlying factors were and are global, political and financial. Rather than looking on helplessly as bystanders to a far-off story of corruption and conflict, Western authorities and businesses effectively fuelled this scandal through the weakly regulated global financial system and the ranks of bankers willing to deal with foreign kleptocrats. A bewildering array of companies and service providers became entwined in Kyrgyzstan's offshore banking experiment under the Bakiyevs, led by the upstart Asia Universal Bank (AUB), managed by a small coterie of businesspeople close to the ruling family and particularly the princeling Maxim. In a now infamous leaked cable, the US ambassador herself described Maxim as 'smart, corrupt and a good ally to have'.\n\n'It is so easy to set up a company with hidden ownership in Britain that even a dead man can do it.' So begins Global Witness's 2013 report _Grave Secrecy_ , referring to the case of a Russian nominee director who formally 'owned' a company, Velcona Ltd, that sent and received $700 million through AUB. The deceased even travelled to the shareholders' meeting despite having died three years before. Maxim Bakiyev, AUB's chair Mikhail Nadel and their associates exploited loose Western regulations and deployed hidden offshore vehicles to quietly channel many hundreds of millions of dollars, of unknown provenance, through the bank and on to shell companies. Having fled Kyrgyzstan in 2010 via Latvia, Maxim, according to Global Witness, now resides in a \u00a33.5 million Surrey mansion bought via one of the offshore companies set up by AUB. In violation of the principle that an applicant must seek asylum in the first EU country they reach, and despite repeated requests for his extradition by Kyrgyzstan, Prince Maxim became eligible for UK citizenship in June 2016.\n\nRather than face an international court, or summary justice in Kyrgyzstan, Maxim continues to manage his business interests in secrecy from the comfort of London's hinterland. The UK provided free transit for his riches and safe harbour for him and his family, despite multiple allegations of corruption and his later conviction in Kyrgyzstan for the attempted murder of a UK citizen. Charges of insider trading on the New York stock market were brought and then suddenly withdrawn without public comment by US Attorney General Loretta Lynch. Other Western banks and companies also enabled his financial dealings. Citibank in New York, the UK's Standard Chartered and Austria's Raiffeisen Bank were all major correspondent banks of AUB which failed to ask enough questions about the source and legitimacy of the money and companies. Meanwhile, AUB retained a veneer of legitimacy through the presence of three former US senators \u2013 including former presidential candidate Bob Dole \u2013 on its board. Maxim continues to operate beyond borders and through respected Western financial institutions and law firms.\n\nIn this chapter we show how the rapid rise of Maxim Bakiyev to become the most powerful businessman in Kyrgyzstan was a product of authoritarian politics, liberal banking laws and global financial connections. Britain, its City of London and its overseas territories are at the centre of this story. To build and maintain these connections, the Bakiyevs' opponents were silenced or eliminated and the state itself was looted while a British businessman, Sean Daley, was shot on the streets of the capital Bishkek and subsequently sued Maxim Bakiyev in the London high court. Much of the wealth Bakiyev accrued has been retained, enabling him to fund his defence from his English mansion. However, although he used the global financial system while in power, the new and apparently less corrupt Kyrgyz government has been unable, unlike the Kazakh and Uzbek regimes, to deploy the global criminal justice system to successfully track him down. The impression remains that, for the wealthy, global finance enables corruption via secretive Western jurisdictions whilst the law simply cannot catch up.\n\nLiberal reform and its illiberal consequences\n\nIn the 1990s the academic John Anderson asked whether Kyrgyzstan was both an 'Island of Democracy' and the 'Switzerland of the East'. But unlike Switzerland, Kyrgyzstan lacks the institutions to protect its national political life from being infected by the money laundering that its combination of openness and secrecy enable. It was the free flow of money from onshore to offshore that was instrumental in making Kyrgyzstan's politics a dirty, violent and repressive business. Anderson lamented that 'the capitalist experiment has brought with it both the technical difficulties that arise in trying to impose Western models of development on a state with very little tradition of capitalism or free market economics, and corruption and criminality on a hitherto unseen scale'. Well-meaning attempts at liberal reform produced the economic conditions for the evisceration of infant hopes for democratisation. The AUB case should not be seen as a surprise, but as a direct consequence of the liberalisation of finance promoted by Western government, donor agencies, banks and consultants.\n\nKyrgyz politicians and Western officials disagreed on many things in the aftermath of the Bakiyev regime and its scandals, meeting each other with mutual incomprehension. However, they largely agree that Maxim Bakiyev, his father and uncles were the principal architects of the 'dark years' from 2007 to 2010 when the state was thoroughly criminalised and its assets were stolen by its leaders. But to truly understand Maxim's astonishing rise one needs to recognise the combination of corrupt family politics (a feature common to all states in the region), economic and political liberalisation (to a much greater degree than found among its neighbours) and enduring donor dependency that marks out Kyrgyzstan's specific place in Central Asia.\n\n_The rise and fall of a post-Soviet reformer_\n\nKyrgyzstan is the exceptional state of Central Asia. In the 1990s, it carried the hope for political reform in the region and, even today, remains more open to international cooperation, more free in its financial regulations, and more competitive in its politics than any other country in the region. It has hosted an American university since 1997 and a US air base during NATO operations in Afghanistan from 2001 to 2014. Authoritarian regimes elsewhere in the region quickly consolidated power after the early 1990s. Kyrgyzstan alone was able to proceed with some political liberalisation, while its constitution is, on paper and in practice, the most democratic in Central Asia \u2013 although this is a very low bar indeed.\n\nKyrgyzstan's first president, Askar Akayev, was the only one of the Central Asian Soviet leaders to speak out against the August 1991 coup against Mikhail Gorbachev. An accomplished physicist at the Academy of Sciences, Akayev was part of the nuclear scientist Andrei Sakharov's group of reformers in the 1989 Congress of People's Deputies. Returning to Kyrgyzstan, he was elected first secretary in 1990 and later president \u2013 the only successful case of a reformer from outside the governing elite making it to power in a Central Asian state. In January 1992, following Russia's model, Akayev's government removed price controls from the vast majority of goods and began the privatisation of state enterprises and the downsizing of their staff. Inflation was at 900 per cent in 1992 and 1,300 per cent in 1993. Undeterred by these price rises, which were deemed inevitable by international experts, Akayev introduced the national currency, the Kyrgyz som, in May 1993, and allowed it to float freely in international markets with a minimum of currency manipulation. The new and independent National Bank's goal was doctrinally monetarist: 'to achieve and maintain price stability through the pursuit of the appropriate monetary policy'.\n\nForeign direct investment was also championed, particularly in mining. Akayev's first act of emulating Switzerland came in 1992 with a $14 million line of credit from a Swiss bank in return for a 1.6-ton Kyrgyz-gold collateral. This deal was arranged by the \u00e9migr\u00e9 businessman Boris Birshtein \u2013 who acquired an office in the White House, Kyrgyzstan's executive building \u2013 and his Swiss-based company Seabeco. Akayev later conceded that $4 million was left unaccounted for in a deal which had been struck before any system of accountability and oversight had been established. By 1996 a new agency for FDI was in place and Canada's mining giant Cameco had entered a long-term joint venture with the state gold company Kyrgyzaltyn to develop the large Kumtor deposit. As a trailblazer in the region, Kyrgyzstan was enthusiastically supported by the IMF, EBRD and Asian Development Bank (ADB), which provided credits and grants to fund this rapid marketisation. It was these loans and grants that were crucial to Kyrgyzstan's capitalist development. Over the period from 1994 to 2005, Kyrgyzstan received far more development assistance per capita than any other Central Asian state and quickly became aid-dependent. Much of this was granted to achieve political and economic reform. But it was financial deregulation (including with regard to foreign aid, credits and loans) that had sped ahead of political and economic liberalisation.\n\nBy the mid-2000s, Kyrgyzstan retained a high regulatory burden (with an average of 168.8 procedures required to open a business in the period from 2004 to 2010 reported by the World Bank's 'Doing Business' reports) but had attained relatively low inflation and comparatively few controls on the movement of capital in and out of the country. The country has accurately been described as 'crony capitalist' \u2013 a form of market-based economy that is more widespread than reformers assume.\n\nThe state became, in the words of Swedish academic Johan Engvall, 'an investment market'. Families with connections bought positions in the state via payments to senior incumbents who enabled them to generate personal income from the state's regulatory functions: permits, inspections, licences, etc. Akayev family members, including Askar's son Aidar Akayev and son-in-law Adil Toiganbayev, were at the head of this structure. They controlled a huge range of businesses by the end of Askar's tenure \u2013 from a ski resort to a mobile telephone provider \u2013 but few of them were purely domestic. Many of these businesses benefited from foreign financing or joint ventures with companies from the West, Asia or the post-Soviet region. Others were subcontractors to foreign donor agencies. Most infamously, three Akayev-linked companies were contractors to the Americans' Manas air base, netting the family an average of $40 million per annum between 2002 and 2005. These revenues were embezzled through a network of offshore and US accounts (see Chapter 6).\n\nBut relative political freedom and aid dependency in Kyrgyzstan meant that, unlike in the other countries of Central Asia, the system was never fully controlled by the Akayev family. The considerable power bases and business interests still held by those who had left government meant that Akayev's regime could not last. In short, Akayev was caught between two stools. On the one hand, his family stole too much and shared too little to maintain their standing among the several hundred families who wanted a share of the pie. On the other hand, Akayev was simply not harsh enough in dispossessing and imprisoning his erstwhile allies and new opponents to establish an efficient and effective authoritarian regime.\n\nThe impoverished masses in the regions were the foot soldiers of the new rebels. In the period after 2002, elite-led protests emerged as a form of mobilisation strong enough to challenge and remove central government. When the Akayev regime used guns to silence the protests in the southern district of Aksy in 2002, subsequent protests remained largely localised. But the cat was out of the bag and, following successful popular uprisings in Georgia's Rose Revolution of 2003 and Ukraine's Orange Revolution of 2004, the Kyrgyz opposition began planning its own 'colour revolution'.\n\n_The Tulip Revolution of 2005_\n\nFollowing fraudulent parliamentary election results in March 2005, mass political upheaval forced Akayev to flee the country. The 'Tulip Revolution' was so named and planned by a coalition of oppositional elites and announced in advance by former foreign minister Roza Otunbayeva in a speech to the Carnegie Center in Moscow on 11 February 2005. Her scheme identified her fellow opposition leaders who would take down the government. Apparently according to plan, the Akayev regime fell on 23 March, six weeks after Otunbayeva's speech. However, while Otunbayeva and colleagues anticipated and instigated the uprising, they were never in control of a process which was only ever partially organised. Like one of the authors, who was then a professor at the American University of Central Asia in Bishkek, anyone who witnessed the chaos across the country in March 2005 \u2013 the bickering and barracking between the leaders, and the looting and disorder which followed the fall of Akayev \u2013 can bear witness to the delusion that the uprising was ever properly controlled or managed.\n\nThe Tulip Revolution revealed the instability that may occur in semi-authoritarian capitalist regimes where coalitions of politician-businessmen are allowed the space to challenge an increasingly kleptocratic elite. As the political scientist Scott Radnitz argues in his book _Weapons of the Wealthy_ , the events of March 2005, 'ushered in a new phase of Kyrgyz politics in which intimidation trumped negotiation as a means of resolving conflict'. Civil society, as funded and supported by foreign donor organisations, played a minimal role in these events. Corrupt political leaders and the global financial services industry played ever-increasing roles.\n\nIt was not supposed to be this way. Edil Baisalov, the charismatic leader of the Coalition for Civil Society who, courtesy of international donors, had been in Kiev for the December 2004 Orange Revolution, had expected long-term occupation of Bishkek's Ala-Too ('Heavenly Mountains') square. Here, he imagined, the revolutionaries would spend days discussing the new constitution and the nation's future. Following Akayev's dramatic flight from power on 23 March, some of Heathershaw's national colleagues at the university stood guard in a vain hope of protecting the presidential White House from looters as teenagers ran amok inside. The youth movement, KelKel, composed of students and young professionals, stood back when youths stormed the seat of government; its members organised the monitoring of government buildings to try and protect state property.\n\nBut these activists and students, who themselves actually grasped the value of democratic politics and an open society, did not lead the Tulip Revolution and had no authority in the eyes of those whose anger had fuelled the uprising. It was thus of little surprise that some of the first targets after the White House fell were the private businesses of foreign and local investors who had benefited most from the Akayev period. Just hours after the revolution, the large and iconic Turkish-owned Beta Stores supermarket was looted and set alight by persons of all backgrounds and ethnicities. Finally, and briefly, business in Kyrgyzstan was open to all.\n\nMaxim and the new regime set up shop\n\nDespite this unpromising start, some in the disunited coalition that pushed Akayev from power held genuine hopes of reform. Otunbayeva saw the revolution as a second chance following the disappointment of the post-1991 transition under Akayev. Her colleagues in the new regime had been specifically mentioned in her February Moscow speech. Like her, they were all former Soviet and post-Soviet apparatchiks, including Felix Kulov (a former Soviet security official and vice-president to Akayev imprisoned in 1999 and released from jail in the early hours of the Tulip Revolution), Kurmanbek Bakiyev (a former prime minister from southern Kyrgyzstan), Azimbek Beknazarov (a southern MP whose arrest had triggered protests that were violently suppressed in 2002) and Almazbek Atambayev (a former presidential candidate and head of the Social Democratic Party).\n\n_The rise of the Bakiyevs_\n\nBakiyev, Beknazarov and Atambayev had all been crucial in mobilising their local supporters in the protests; all had independent wealth to fund their political campaigns and business interests that needed political protection. After weeks of internal wrangling, Bakiyev, from the southern region of Jalal-Abad, emerged as the figurehead of the 'revolutionary' movement and was easily and peacefully elected president just three months after the March 2005 uprising. Kulov, from the capital Bishkek, was to serve as his PM in a so-called tandem of the north and south of the country. With remarkable speed, quiet was restored to the capital.\n\nBut it was the calm before the storm to come. It was not long before the revolutionaries' unity and national agenda for reform disappeared from view. Between 2005 and 2007, Bakiyev's former allies were gradually sidelined. Otunbayeva was the first to go. Lacking a regional power base, her nomination for foreign minister did not pass the divided parliament in summer 2005. Kulov was PM from 2005 until December 2006 before finally jumping before he was shoved. Beknazarov was appointed prosecutor general from which post he continued to wage war against his archenemy Akayev and family before leaving government. Atambayev served brief periods as minister of industry, trade and tourism and then as prime minister in 2005 and 2007 before returning to opposition and beginning to plan the next 'revolution'. Just as Akayev, the northerner, had faced southern and northern opposition, so Bakiyev, the southerner, would, eventually, be targeted by opponents from all regions of the country.\n\nFrom 2007 to 2010, however, Bakiyev realised a period of domestic repression far greater than that of his predecessor. As he usurped his former allies at home, the regime dismissed the directives of Kyrgyzstan's donors and allies in the West. In 2007, Bakiyev rejected the option of joining the World Bank's Heavily Indebted Poor Countries Initiative, which would have written off some debts in return for greater deregulation. In so doing, he signalled that his government was no longer willing to dance to the tune of economic reform as Akayev's had done during the period of 'transition'. Moreover, Bakiyev and his many close male relatives, including six brothers and two sons, began to take total control of the economy. Janish, a brother, became a key security official who was deemed responsible for violence against protestors when the regime collapsed. Several other brothers held lucrative roles. Marat, an elder son by Bakiyev's Russian wife, became ambassador to Germany. But it was Maxim, the younger son, who was the heir apparent. In a few years, he had sufficient political control and financial freedom to run the state's economic affairs for his family and associates despite only holding an official post for the last few months before the regime's demise.\n\nDespite Kyrgyzstan's refusal to the World Bank, the country had already undertaken significant financial deregulation which provided fertile ground for the entrepreneurial young Bakiyev. Maxim was in his late twenties when his father won the presidency. Up until that point he had been unknown in Kyrgyz politics and business. Maxim graduated from the Kyrgyz-Russian Slavic University with a degree in law in 1999 and is understood to have begun his career at the Russian Interpravo law firm, but he quickly developed associations with Western institutions. He became a member of the advisory council of the UK-based consulting firm BCB Solutions Ltd and developed its portfolio in the Middle East. Later, he became a member of the board of the Latvian company Maval Aktivi, where he was purportedly in charge of strategic development, and began his association with the Latvian banker Valeri Belokon \u2013 a man who would become a key figure in the AUB affair and Maxim's most direct link to the UK. Maxim also bought a stake in Blackpool FC, the English football club of which Belokon was president.\n\nMaxim's own rapid rise as an international businessman was mirrored by Kyrgyzstan's rise to become, for a brief period, a key node in the offshore financial system, an unlikely 'Switzerland of the East'. Maxim's power base, of course, lay in his father's regime and provides a study of the ease with which new predatory regimes can emerge in the contemporary global economy. This process involved three phases, none of which was purely local or domestic. They included, first, muscling out rivals and seizing companies; second, centralising control in the state; and third, laundering the proceeds of Maxim's seizures through an internationally recognised bank. These steps, engineered through offshore vehicles and the international financial system, were taken under the passive oversight of the international community, its diplomats and financial regulators.\n\nStep one: Maxim gets the gold\n\nNot long after arriving in power, the Bakiyev family began to muscle its way into controlling most of the country's businesses and key assets. The mobile phone provider Magacom, owned by a British-based, offshore-registered firm, representing Russian investors, was allowed to continue to operate only by selling a 49 per cent stake to a Hong Kong-registered company that acted as a front for Maxim, according to a Kyrgyz investigation. Later, Maxim and allies pushed the Russians out via a Bishkek court judgment which awarded them 100 per cent of Megacom. Companies linked to Maxim's associates also took over the lucrative contracts to refuel NATO planes operating out of Kyrgyzstan \u2013 a deal done via offshore vehicles nominally but legally located in Western jurisdictions and havens (see Chapter 6). Soon enough, the list of businesses that had changed hands in favour of the Bakiyev family was almost equal to the list of the most prominent companies in Kyrgyzstan.\n\nThis seizure of control was both financial and physical. A Kyrgyz state commission credibly claimed in November 2011 that there was a total of thirty contracted killings during Bakiyev's five-year tenure in power. An independent journalist, Gennady Pavlyuk, was apparently thrown from a building in Kazakhstan. President Bakiyev's former chief of staff, Medet Sadyrkulov, was killed in suspicious circumstances in a remote mountainous region, having broken from the Bakiyev family and entered opposition politics. But it was not just the locals that suffered. Instability and violence around the commodities sector grew in the Bakiyev period with foreign investors targeted by aggrieved local residents on the one side and predatory elites on the other. Western investors in Kyrgyz mining \u2013 including Oxus and Aurum Mining \u2013 report meeting with Maxim and facing demands of many millions of dollars to retain their licences and avoid trouble. On refusing to pay, trouble duly followed.\n\nIn Oxus's case the alleged attempt at extortion came after the company had spent five years building a gold mine which was soon to become operational. In late 2005, according to witness testimony heard in both Kyrgyzstan and the UK, President Kurmanbek and his son Maxim had offered to help Oxus retain its position in the country over the interests of a new investor, Global Gold, allegedly financed by the now-deceased Russian oligarch Boris Berezovsky and supported by the regime, if the company paid a sizeable bribe. Following a meeting with the president in New York, the company's CEO Bill Trew went to Bishkek to meet with Maxim and discuss the return of the licence to mine to Oxus. More than ten years later he recalled the conversation in the London court:\n\nI was told Boris [Berezovsky] had actually paid Maxim USD 5 Million. He said to me, he said, 'There's absolutely no way we can return the licence without paying Boris his USD 5 million back, plus something else, all right?' So he said, 'Are you prepared to pay me USD 15 Million?' and I said, 'Look, we're a public company, we're not prepared to pay any.'\n\nFollowing this reported act of corruption, Oxus lost its multi-million dollar investment in Kyrgyzstan once and for all, and without compensation. More seriously, its chief in Kyrgyzstan was the victim of an apparent assassination attempt.\n\n_Muscling out Oxus Gold_\n\nOn 7 July 2006, Sean Daley, Oxus's representative in Bishkek, was shot and wounded by gunmen near his home in the capital following a visit by the British MP Sir Tony Baldry to lobby on behalf of Oxus. Four shots were fired, with one bullet hitting Daley and damaging his internal organs. He received life-saving treatment in Bishkek but continues to suffer from the psychiatric and physical effects of the attack. The story remains shrouded in a great deal of mystery. However, certain facts are apparent.\n\nIn the first half of 2006, Oxus had launched a concerted campaign to retain their stake in the mine. On 10 January 2006, British Prime Minister Tony Blair wrote to President Bakiyev 'expressing his hope that there would be restitution of the licence to Oxus Gold'. The president flatly refused to consider Blair's request and, on 16 March 2006, instructed Prime Minister Kulov to proceed with 'unconditional refusal from further co-operation with Oxus Gold'. Informally, however, the lobbying of Daley and Baldry seemed to be having an effect on the media and parliamentary opinion, and on some voices within the government at a time when the Bakiyev regime had yet to achieve complete control of the state. When Baldry left Kyrgyzstan on 6 July it was in expectation that a deal to return the licence to Oxus would soon be completed. As he later told the London court:\n\nI had two or three days of perfectly constructive, sensible negotiations, culminating in some perfectly sensible bilateral meetings with the President's adviser, and, as I say, when I got on the plane at Bishkek to come back to the UK, I certainly anticipated returning to Kyrgyz[stan] within a comparatively short period of time to finalise an agreement with the President.\n\nIt was not to be. Were the Oxus executives deluded or had their progress merely created powerful enemies? After having invested approximately $55 million for exploration purposes, Oxus was finally and irrevocably pushed out of Kyrgyzstan following the attack on Daley. This has been described as an 'effective expropriation of the Oxus Gold stake in the Jerooy gold mine'. The suspension of its licence by the Bakiyev regime was quickly challenged in Kyrgyzstan's courts by Daley, Oxus's general manager. The prominent commodities reporter Mineweb notes that Oxus's alleged failure to meet its production schedule, which has apparently caused a loss of around $145 million in taxes to the Kyrgyz government, was nothing other than an 'excuse the Kyrgyz government used for the termination of the company's licence'.\n\nCourt documents from Bishkek link Maxim to Daley's shooting and were the basis for a subsequent civil action against Maxim in the London court. The key figure is a man called 'Ivanov', a long-standing business associate of the Bakiyevs, who knew Daley and is now living in a third country. 'Ivanov' was later revealed to be Mr Bertii Sin Beti (known to the Bakiyevs as 'Benny'). Sin Beti's testimony before the court in Bishkek, which he would withdraw from the later London hearing, was the vital evidence used to demonstrate Maxim's guilt. The Kyrgyz court records describe a meeting between Maxim and Sin Beti, following the assassination attempt on Daley, which was interrupted by his brother Marat and uncle Janish, in which the three Bakiyevs began to argue:\n\nThe quarrel proceeded for about 10 minutes, during which Sin Beti had heard the name of Sean Daley . . . Maxim was telling them off for not sorting out Sean Daley. When they left, Sin Beti asked Maxim Bakiev what happened with Sean Daley, to which M. Bakiev answered that 'these idiots have shot only 2 times, instead of 10 to kill him'. To his [Sin Beti's] question, 'what was Sean Daley to be killed for?', Maxim Bakiev replied 'Sean Daley is a representative of Oxus that bypassed [me] on the matter of Jerooy, addressed parliament and resolved the matter in favour of Oxus'. He also added that Sean Daley was hospitalised and would never leave Kyrgyzstan.\n\nAccording to Sin Beti, at this point he decided to step in to save Daley's life and requested a meeting with President Bakiyev in which he suggested there would be an 'international scandal' if Daley did die. Convinced, President Bakiyev ordered his family to allow Daley to recover and leave Kyrgyzstan. But the immediate objective of Maxim and partners was achieved. Twelve days later, the State Geological Agency of the Kyrgyz Republic granted the licences previously held by Oxus to the Austrian-registered company Global Gold Holding (hereafter Global Gold).\n\nBy October 2006, Oxus was expelled from the site and its involvement in Kyrgyzstan effectively ended. The company itself defined the incident as 'the government-sponsored illegal occupation last Thursday [19 October 2006] of premises owned by Talas Gold Mining Company, Oxus' joint venture company at Jerooy'. The official website of state company Kyrgyzaltyn opaquely noted that Global Gold was represented by a 'certain Russian business' without naming investors. Others were much more open about Global Gold's origins. Mineweb, for example, states that Global Gold was 'put in place in late 2005 to deal with the Kyrgyz government over the effective expropriation of the Oxus stake in the Jerooy gold mining'. As a Western investor was pushed out, a well-connected Russian investor moved in to take control of their state-of-the-art facility, despite lacking a track record in gold mining and without payment to Oxus.\n\nIn addition to revealing something about onshore politics in Kyrgyzstan, the Jerooy case highlights that these actors used complex financial schemes to hide final beneficiaries via the structuring of their shareholding companies. Caution is advised, however, as there are very few public resources to shed light on Global Gold's finances and the evidence presented to the London court was partial due in part to the secrecy afforded to companies registered in offshore jurisdictions. Moreover, according to Oxus CEO Trew's testimony in London, not only did lawyers representing Berezovsky block attempts to access offshore company documents in BVI, but the British intelligence service MI5 encouraged the company to back off in its investigations. However, according to the Russian website Compromat.ru, whose findings seem to concur with those of Oxus's investigation, Global Gold was registered on 17 March 2006, in Austria, just months before it was awarded the licence in Kyrgyzstan. From Austria, one can follow a long list of offshore jurisdictions that effectively conceal the share-holding beneficiaries. Compromat.ru states that the company was wholly owned by another company, Vitiano Holding Ltd, registered in Cyprus, formally owned by investment manager Alexander Turkot, and beneficially owned by Berezovsky. Further detail on the company's ownership came from a _Forbes_ investigation. According to this information, Global Gold was registered in Austria in the name of Rafael Filinov, president of Triumph Fund and representative of Berezovsky and his partner Badri Patarkatsishvili. Rafael Filinov arrived and stayed in the Kyrgyz Republic for one and a half years with the objective of arranging the Jerooy deal. In an interview with _Forbes_ , Filinov observed, 'I made it nice, invested $12 million for it. Found good buyers and since I did it all \"in white\" [clean], they gave a good price. In 2007, the stake in Jerooy was sold \u2013 and $130 million was transferred on Patarkatsishvili's account, as Berezovsky's manager.'\n\nThe Kyrgyz opposition also criticised the Bakiyev regime for alleged connections with Berezovsky. According to Kyrgyz opposition MPs, on 26 July 2006 Berezovsky paid an unofficial visit to Kyrgyzstan and was introduced to President Bakiyev via Maxim. The opposition claimed at that time that Berezovsky's visit was specifically linked to Kyrgyz gold-mining. Later, during a raid of Berezovsky's offices, Russian police alleged they had found documents that contained information about preparations for a forceful capture of the Ak-Tuz gold deposit and the funds allocation necessary for that capture. After Berezovsky's death, the _Forbes_ investigation into his business further claimed that he supported the Tulip Revolution, after being involved in the Orange Revolution, for which the Bakiyevs 'rewarded' him with the Jerooy project.\n\nWhether or not Berezovsky was directly involved in the deal, Global Gold proved not to have invested for the long term, but apparently for the money they could make from a quick sale. In 2007, Jerooy changed hands again, as reported by Filinov (above), and Maxim was once again instrumental. Aidan Karibzhanov of the Kazakh private equity company Visor Holding made a deal in 2007 'through a relationship with' President Bakiyev. Maxim, Karibzhanov told Bloomberg News, 'pitched the deal'. In May 2008, Visor paid Oxus to compensate them for their losses in an out-of-court deal. Eight years later, the Jerooy mine was still not fully operational.\n\nThere is now a great deal of evidence that the Jerooy deals were made via Maxim Bakiyev. The case of Oxus's exit and Global Gold's entry shows how transnational networks connect the states of the former Soviet region to one another _and also_ to offshore jurisdictions beyond. This chain of offshore connections is illustrative of a complex multilayered and multi-structured scheme; yet that is typical of transnational business networks. These chains also demonstrate that simply muscling control of business interests is ineffective in Central Asia without _both_ the organising control of the state _and_ the international connections provided by offshore vehicles, correspondent banks and financial ingenuity. These arrangements are depicted graphically in Figure 5.1. This brings us to steps two and three of the Bakiyevs' expropriation of the Kyrgyz economy.\n\nStep two: centralising control\n\nAfter using state power and financial connections to muscle in on businesses like Oxus in the lucrative gold sector, the second step in the Bakiyevs' money laundering was to centralise control through the state. By 2008, it was clear that a pattern of control with Maxim at the centre of affairs was emerging. Foreign investors were just as much subject to these informal rules as local business, as a revealing summary of the visit to Kyrgyzstan by a real prince revealed. In a leaked US embassy cable, Tatiana Gfoeller, US ambassador to the Kyrgyz Republic, describes assisting UK business representatives and diplomats in briefing Prince Andrew, the Duke of York, brother of Charles and second son of Her Majesty the Queen, on his October 2008 mission as UK trade emissary:\n\nWhile claiming that all of them never participated in it and never gave out bribes, one representative of a middle-sized company stated that 'It is sometimes an awful temptation.' In an astonishing display of candor in a public hotel where the brunch was taking place, all of the businessmen then chorused that nothing gets done in Kyrgyzstan if President Bakiyev's son Maxim does not get 'his cut.' Prince Andrew took up the topic with gusto, saying that he keeps hearing Maxim's name 'over and over again' whenever he discusses doing business in this country. Emboldened, one businessman said that doing business here is 'like doing business in the Yukon' in the nineteenth century, i.e. only those willing to participate in local corrupt practices are able to make any money. His colleagues all heartily agreed, with one pointing out that 'nothing ever changes here. Before all you heard was Akayev's son's name. Now it's Bakiyev's son's name.' At this point the Duke of York laughed uproariously, saying that: 'All of this sounds exactly like France.'\n\nFigure 5.1 The organisation of Kyrgyzstan's gold sector\n\nThe sheer normality of this corruption, and British business's implied connivance in it, is as striking here as the imperial manner of Prince Andrew's own prejudices.\n\n_The Prince and TsARS_\n\nAs the Bakiyevs' power grew, they decided to formalise the gatekeeping aspect of 'Prince' Maxim's informal system. On 29 October 2009, President Bakiyev made his son head of the new Central Agency on Development, Investments and Innovations (CADII, known as TsARS, its Russian acronym). With the National Development Fund (NDF) handed over to the agency, the disposal of all foreign credits, including Russia's $300 million, as well as the state's share in the biggest state-owned companies, was passed to TsARS. Maxim claimed that the Russian loan would be used for a low-interest credit system to alleviate poverty. With his connections to the West and evident financial and business acumen, the jury was still out on Maxim in the Western diplomatic community while anger was building in Kyrgyzstan itself. As one US diplomat commented following the creation of TsARS, 'now that he is officially in charge of the Kyrgyz government's economic development policies and programs, it may become clear whether he will use his position for the good of Kyrgyzstan, for the enrichment of himself and his friends and associates, or for a little of each'. The 'little of each' would prove an elusive balance to strike.\n\nBy 2009, Maxim had arrived at the height of his powers, courted by everyone from ministers to senior apparatchiks, and increasingly coming to the attention of the United States. The US charg\u00e9 d'affaires Lee Litzenberger described the effect of Maxim's combination of ruthless politics and financial acumen in an entertaining diplomatic telegram from the summer of 2009 describing the opening party of a new resort hotel, owned by Maxim, at Issyk-Kul, Kyrgyzstan's beautiful mountain lake. Maxim arrived at a nearby airport in his private plane, travelled to the hotel in a large motorcade with police escort, and moved around the party itself with eight bodyguards. He mingled among the guests with his official wife Aijana (he was well known to keep a mistress) on one side and Prime Minister Igor Chudinov on the other. Neither Aijana nor Chudinov looked happy to be there but each demurred to the man of the moment who, by that time, was perhaps even more powerful than his father. Although holding no government position at this time, he was courted by all of Kyrgyzstan's business and political community.\n\nDespite this same lack of official status, it was Maxim who worked behind the scenes to get a new agreement for the United States air transit centre in Bishkek to be renewed over Russian objections. On 13 July 2009, less than two weeks after unexpectedly being invited to Maxim's party at Issyk-Kul, Litzenberger had dinner with Maxim at one of his Bishkek restaurants. The US charg\u00e9 d'affaires heard Maxim's claims to have arranged the deal over the base and his obvious attempts to ingratiate himself with the US government. The base politics of Afghanistan, when President Obama was considering a reinforcement of US forces there, appear to have encouraged American diplomats to reciprocate Maxim's overtures at a time when the warning signs of the corruption, brutality and ultimate fragility of the regime were becoming apparent. Litzenberger concludes in his summary of dinner, 'in the wake of the new Transit Center agreements, Maxim's favourable disposition towards the United States could be of benefit to our interests'.\n\nThe telegram alluded to the fact that Maxim had already been deeply involved in discussions over the future of the air base with the Department of Defense. Maxim had a stake in the continuation of the refuelling facility through his relationship with its main fuel subcontractor, Mina Corp. In June 2009, Kyrgyzstan publicly announced that it had reversed its decision regarding the closure of the air transit centre. In the preceding months, Erkin Bekbolotov, the CEO of Mina, played the role of intermediary between Maxim and the US Department of Defense for back-channel negotiations, as revealed in a US congressional report, _Mystery at Manas_. But the report, lacking direct evidence of inducements being offered to Maxim, pulls its punches. 'While Mina had a huge financial incentive to save the base,' it notes, 'it is unknown what motivated Maxim Bakiyev to intervene.'\n\nStep three: banking the profits\n\nMaxim's standing, and that of the regime, was dependent on a third element which was crucial for the Bakiyevs' corruption. Seizing assets and centralising control mean little without being able to bank them in a reputable institution, thus laundering your monies and moving them offshore. All this dirty money was all very well but without a sophisticated cleaning service it would be stuck denominated in Kyrgyz som. Corruption, at the grand scale, never exists without money laundering, and therefore only exists through the international financial system headquartered in London and New York. So for the regime, the most important thing was not making money (an easy thing for a ruling family in Central Asia) but transferring it offshore in order to clean it up and keep it safe. Tellingly, the next most important person at Maxim's summer 2009 party was a man who was central to his business operations: Mikhail Nadel, head of Asia Universal Bank (AUB). According to Litzenberger's account, Nadel 'acted like the second host of the party, loudly toasting with the men and making advances at the women'.\n\n_Asia Universal Bank_\n\nAsia Universal Bank was registered on 22 August 1997 in Kyrgyzstan as the subsidiary company of International Business Bank, Western Samoa. Nadel owned 66 per cent of the shares and saw the value of the bank increase sharply after 2005, following his partnership with Maxim. On 7 April 2010, the bank's assets totalled 24 billion som ($533.3 million). The genius of Maxim, Nadel and their financial magician, the Moscow-born US citizen Eugene Gourevitch, was that they used the opportunity of Kyrgyzstan's open financial system and the Bakiyev family's control of its politics to set up a vast offshore network flowing through Bishkek. That network was centred on AUB. At the same time, many of the country's assets, including TsARS itself, were managed by the new MGN Group, under Eugene Gourevitch.\n\nIt was not just Kyrgyzstan's major businesses and government that banked with AUB, but organisations from all over the world that demanded safety and secrecy. Temir Sariyev, the finance minister who later investigated AUB's operations, describes its business as such:\n\nA lot of money came in from companies overseas, money that needed to be sterilised, several billion dollars every month. There were all sorts of suspicious transactions. AUB was off-limits to regulators; in fact, the bank told its clients, 'We control the state so no-one can interfere with us.' The clients needed guarantees that their cash wouldn't be seized or arrested. So their money would arrive in AUB, spend the night, and then get transferred out via six or seven shell companies overseas. AUB earned commissions on these transactions, hundreds of millions of dollars.\n\nAs Sariyev describes, AUB's remit was by no means limited to companies in Kyrgyzstan, but extended across and beyond the post-Soviet space. It was an integrated part of the global financial system.\n\nIt is in these terms \u2013 the sheer normality of AUB \u2013 that its owners and operators have defended the bank. Mikhail Nadel argues that the new government of Kyrgyzstan 'savagely looted and destroyed' AUB in May 2010 while defending AUB's extensive use of offshore shell companies:\n\nOffshore companies aren't a carte blanche for stealing. These companies are used worldwide to minimise the taxation of [beneficial owners]. Look at the ownership structure of the ten largest banks in the world: their principal owners are offshore funds. Opening an account of an offshore company, a bank should check the client's business. Offshore is not a business itself. The geographical location of Kyrgyzstan and its liberal banking laws allowed AUB to attract international business into the country.\n\nTo this extent, Nadel is correct to point to the quite routine nature of the use of offshore companies. When the Swiss arm of the UK's largest bank, HSBC, is fined more than a billion dollars for laundering the money of Mexican drug cartels in the United States, cases like AUB should not surprise us.\n\nBut the specific use of international frameworks and Western institutions to enable and enrich AUB's international transactions, and the means by which this is covered up, ought nevertheless to cause us some concern. The scale of AUB's operations was vast. Kyrgyz investigators claimed that a staggering $1 trillion flowed through Kyrgyzstan during the Bakiyev years \u2013 around 200 times the GDP of this small country. After 7 April 2010, all this came tumbling down. In the days prior to the fall of the Bakiyev regime, the bank had transferred hundreds of millions of dollars in assets offshore and out of reach of any future investigation. It was able to do this because of AUB's business model of being a conduit for the rapid, safe and secret transfer of assets from one jurisdiction to another. In February 2011, an audit by the accountancy firm BDO commissioned by the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development noted that AUB was used for money laundering and that its computer system was designed to conceal its payments, more than 80 per cent of which were not validated by SWIFT, the international financial transfer system. In the Kyrgyz prosecutor's words, 'the maintenance of accounts of suspicious companies and the manipulation of the bank's balance sheet involving large sums served as an instrument for the illegal extraction of revenue'.\n\n_Kyrgyzstan goes offshore_\n\nThree ingredients are required to maintain such a system: anonymous companies, major international correspondent banks and a veneer of respectability.\n\nFirst, shell companies are the vehicles for the transfer of funds. Anonymous shell companies are either unlisted, having no more than an address in an offshore jurisdiction, or listed under a nominee shareholder or director, a person who signs a paper to represent and conceal the company's real beneficial owners. The UK, particularly at that time, offered little oversight of company registration and the use of nominees. Global Witness, which has campaigned for the declaration of beneficial ownership for many years, uncovered in the AUB case that:\n\nthe shareholder of one UK company was a Russian man who had actually died some years before the company was registered. His identity had been used to hide the real owner of a company that appeared to have $700 million flowing through its account at AUB while doing no business in the UK and failing to file accounts with the UK corporate registry as required.\n\nMost of AUB's clients were such shell companies. _Grave Secrecy_ details many of their cases. Most were registered in the UK, New Zealand and Belize \u2013 some of the world's safest and most secretive jurisdictions. They were inactive in the real economy. All were registered after President Bakiyev came to power in 2005, were set up by a small group of company service providers, and many were linked to Maxim. Some of these uses of shell companies may simply be to avoid tax. But, as Global Witness researcher Tom Mayne argues, the secrecy of the shell companies and lack of regulation means that more nefarious purposes are both possible and undetectable.\n\nSecond, AUB's required correspondent relationships with some of the world's biggest banks were established. The Swiss bank UBS was eventually suspicious enough about AUB to close its account. But Citibank, Raiffeisen and Standard Chartered all kept their accounts with AUB open and refused to answer questions about their anti-money-laundering checks when asked by Global Witness researchers.\n\nThird, these hidden transactions also needed a respectable international public face. This was provided by a board which included former US senators Bob Dole, the 1996 Republican presidential candidate, and J. Bennett Johnston, a Democrat from Louisiana. For this service, the two American statesmen were paid $175,000 each. Given this relatively small sum, it seems implausible \u2013 'absurd' in Johnston's words \u2013 that such wealthy and influential individuals would have taken on the risk of being found out had they any reason to doubt that Nadel's bank was anything less than legitimate. They were by no means the only respected Western individuals and institutions to, wilfully or na\u00efvely, withhold judgement. Many regulators, correspondent banks and company service providers were also left with egg on their faces.\n\nThe aftermath\n\nOn 7 April 2010, this cronyist political and financial system, based in Kyrgyzstan but extending across the world, came crashing down. Hundreds of lives were lost in the 7 April 'revolution' and the violence that followed in the south of the country. Stability has slowly re-emerged in Kyrgyzstan, but the aftermath of the Bakiyev reign and the financial operations of AUB are ongoing in Kyrgyzstan and across the global financial system. Maxim was on his way to the United States on the day the regime fell and diverted to Latvia before arrival in the UK, never to return to Kyrgyzstan. Onshore and offshore jurisdictions tell two quite different tales. The new interim government of the Kyrgyz Republic rapidly pressed charges against the Bakiyevs and their allies. In March 2011, the Leninski district court sentenced Gourevitch, _in absentia_ , to fifteen years in a reinforced penal colony on corruption charges. Two years later, Maxim was sentenced _in absentia_ to a twenty-five-year prison sentence for corruption. A Bishkek court found him guilty of signing deals that lost Kyrgyzstan hundreds of millions of dollars via illegal privatisation of state assets. Specifically, he was convicted for the illicit sale of state energy firms and public land near a popular tourist resort.\n\nBut the new government under Roza Otunbayeva and, later, Almazbek Atambayev, has been as unsuccessful in processing these cases abroad as they have been successful at home. An Interpol arrest warrant has remained outstanding against Maxim since 2010, with little prospect of delivering his return to Kyrgyzstan to face trial on corruption charges. Two months after his sentencing in Bishkek in 2013, a federal court in New York dropped an extradition case against Maxim, days before a scheduled 13 May hearing in London which would have brought him to the United States to face charges of securities fraud on the New York Stock Exchange (see below). Foreign minister Erlan Abdyldayev expressed profound disappointment with the American justice system. 'US authorities at all levels have noted the severity of the crimes committed by Bakiyev. But, unfortunately, one of the main principles of democracy \u2013 the rule of law and the certainty of punishment \u2013 has failed.'\n\nWhy justice has been swift and severe in Kyrgyzstan and non-existent in the Western world where Maxim now resides cannot simply be explained by the lower burden of proof required by the court system in the country of Maxim's political enemies. There simply is not the system in place or support offered by foreign governments and international institutions to governments like that of Kyrgyzstan that seek to investigate money laundering. International regulators do not look into transnational laundering and do not fund initiatives to tackle _this kind_ of corruption. Whilst the World Bank has demanded audits of state assets across Central Asia, and donors have funded anti-corruption agencies in more than one state, they seemingly ignore the international banks and corporate practices that allow money laundering to happen, to be covered up, and make it incredibly hard to investigate. Moreover, by 2015, the government of Kyrgyzstan faced a total of eleven international arbitrations arising from the business dealings of the Bakiyev regime and its aftermath, with claims against the state totalling around $1 billion. Lacking the resources and experience to pursue these cases, it was yet to secure victory in a single one of them, losing the Manas Bank arbitration to Belokon and his company for about $16 million. Kyrgyzstan, if it loses each of these arbitrations, faces a bill equivalent to 15 per cent of its GDP.\n\nAt the heart of this story is a failure in the international financial system to effectively identify money laundering when it occurs \u2013 therefore, ineffectively implementing anti-money-laundering rules. It is not that there is a lack of knowledge of money laundering but that well-founded suspicions lead not to legal investigation but, at best, to withdrawal and neglect. In 2006, the Central Bank of Russia, of all places, led the way and was the first national bank to cancel correspondent relations with AUB. Around forty Russian banks were affected. In 2008, the US embassy in Bishkek advised against extending $10 million of America's Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC) support to AUB due to its 'troubled past and limited AML track record' and reputation for 'tax evasion and other questionable activities'. But despite these warning signs other audits passed AUB with no concerns.\n\nWhen we met Baktygul Jeenbaeva, deputy director of the National Bank of Kyrgyzstan, she was visibly frustrated by the government's lack of progress and the limited support they have received. She noted that all the international regulatory entities signed off on AUB's books \u2013 including the IMF and Deloitte. These clean bills of health granted by international regulators are shocking given that an estimated $1 trillion flowed through the bank during this time with little or no checking. Just as auditors failed to uncover misdeeds, foreign courts have insisted they provide proof of criminality in specific cases. Jeenbaeva expressed frustration about overseas legal requirements for having to prove that money was acquired due to criminal activities, a prerequisite for asset recovery in most jurisdictions. She noted that they have received no cooperation from New Zealand, Switzerland and Latvia on inquires. Very little assistance has been forthcoming with the exception of the US Department of Justice and the pro bono advice offered by US law firm Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld. 'There was great disappointment for us that, for a long time, no one was able to help', she remarked. 'On the international level they have created the infrastructure for money laundering and expect us at a national level to investigate it!'\n\nMaxim in Londongrad\n\nIn the summer of 2010, after the violent but unsuccessful attempt of the Bakiyev regime to retain power, Maxim was in London and Blackpool FC, in the north of England, was preparing for its first season in the Premier League. The starry life of a UK-based oligarch-businessman apparently beckoned for the fallen prince. But Maxim faced multiple international struggles to re-establish his business after the sudden ousting of his family from Kyrgyzstan. The London that Maxim has made home has been called 'Londongrad', a name pointing to the cosy confines offered to Russian and post-Soviet oligarchs, their assets and families. It is also arguably one of the most significant sources of instability in Central Asia. 'You're hosting a guy who robbed us', complained Kyrgyzstan's new president Almazbek Atambayev to the _Guardian_ newspaper in 2013. 'I didn't know that behind the beautiful words of democracy are very dirty lies.'\n\nThe London(grad) hosting affords Maxim and other former elites individual legal protections and secrecy that they routinely violated when ruling back home. When asked in July 2010 about whether Maxim would be given the right to remain in the UK, Damian Green, the minister of state for immigration, replied that 'it is not Home Office policy to comment on individual cases'. This policy has remained in place. Whilst such discretion is a matter of responsible data protection for the UK government, it is effectively assured for the wealthy by UK lawyers, accountants and reputation managers. Therefore, what we know about Maxim since his arrival in the UK comes from criminal investigations, court cases and investigative reporting which have teased some of the details out from under the cloak of secrecy.\n\n_Insider trading on the New York Stock Exchange_\n\nPhilip Shishkin's investigations have revealed that Maxim did not rest on his laurels but tried to recreate his financial dealings from London with the help of Eugene Gourevitch, the Bakiyevs' financial adviser. 'Through a shell company registered in New Zealand,' Shishkin writes based on court documents that he has seen, '[Maxim] set up a Latvian bank account stuffed with $45 million worth of securities.' Gourevitch, a New Zealand shell company and a Latvian bank are three elements also present in the AUB system. Maxim and Gourevitch began using the bank account for trading deals on the stock exchanges of the US, the UK and elsewhere, making several million dollars investing in a Louisiana oil services company.\n\nUnfortunately for Maxim, Gourevitch, under the pressure of being wanted in three countries, was cooperating with the FBI and feeding them information on his boss's activities. Taiyyib Ali Munir, the London broker supplying Maxim with information, was charged and pleaded guilty in 2012. On 12 October 2012, Maxim was arrested in Belgravia, the London district beloved of Londongrad's residents. The US Department of Justice had brought charges against the 34-year-old for 'conspiracy to commit securities fraud and obstruction of justice'. Maxim faced 'two counts of conspiracy to defraud and conspiracy to pervert the course of justice in the USA between April 2010 and April 2012'. Whilst the extradition request was dropped in May 2013, and the charges dismissed, there is no indication from the US authorities as to whether the file on Maxim has been closed.\n\nOne possible explanation for why the insider-trading case against Maxim broke down in 2013 is apparently related to the corruption of evidence by the key informant. Shishkin argues that Gourevitch, the unprincipled dealer-turned-informant, had apparently compromised the evidence against Maxim. While facing charges in the US, Italy and Kyrgyzstan, Gourevitch's Twitter profile smacked of a juvenile bravado: 'Former banker. Trader. Atheist. Family man. Born to spread misery vicariously and viscerally. Kyrgyzstan's Most Wanted. Not even remotely gangsta.'\n\nIn June 2014 Gourevitch was sentenced to more than five years in prison on charges of fraud against Maxim \u2013 a fraud which was carried out while Gourevitch was cooperating with US litigators in the insider-trading case against Maxim. Gourevitch's lawyer, Marc Agnifilo, argued that 'this case [against him] is essentially about him screwing up as a cooperator', but asked for leniency on the grounds of the 'bizarre' series of events which since 2010 had led Gourevitch to fear for his life. While working for Maxim Bakiyev, Gourevitch had access to 'real, juicy, immediate, tangible' insider information, Agnifilo argued in court. Maxim escaped prosecution, it seems, due to the greed and incompetence of his one-time adviser.\n\n_Maxim faces the High Court_\n\nOther skeletons also refused to remain in the closet. Sean Daley, the British businessman and representative of Oxus Gold who had almost been killed in the street in Bishkek in 2006, visited Kyrgyzstan after the 2010 ousting of the Bakiyev regime to enquire of the prosecutor's office whether they would re-open the case into his attempted murder. Four years later, on 4 April 2014, a district court in the capital sentenced Maxim to lifelong imprisonment _in absentia_ for his part in organising the assassination attempt. The irony of this judgment was that Maxim was absent from Kyrgyzstan but present in Daley's home country, the UK, and living little more than 50 miles from the businessman, given that the UK Home Office, then under Secretary of State Theresa May, had already refused a Kyrgyz request for Bakiyev's extradition to face trial. Such was the Kyrgyz government's anger that senior Home Office lawyer Busola Johnson visited Kyrgyzstan in 2014 in an effort to assuage the Kyrgyz sense of injustice. As the British embassy in Bishkek reported, she described her visit thus:\n\nMy aims in coming to Kyrgyzstan were two-fold. First to gain a deeper understanding of the Kyrgyz perspective and second, to offer Kyrgyz legal colleagues a clear account of the UK Mutual Legal Assistance regime, and the legal framework in which we work.\n\nDespite little help from the UK authorities, Maxim was not out of the woods \u2013 Daley brought a personal injury claim against him based on the evidence presented to the Bishkek court. If an English court would confirm the Bishkek court's evidence, it appeared that there was a chance that the UK would be forced to approve the extradition of Maxim back to Kyrgyzstan to serve his sentence, despite the lack of an extradition treaty between the UK and Kyrgyzstan. Once again \u2013 as was the case in Tajikistan's battles over its aluminium industry \u2013 the dictators and former dictators of Central Asia play out their power struggles both at home and abroad.\n\nOn 22 June 2016, the trial began at the High Court in London. Maxim was defended by the solicitors Hickman & Rose, a law firm which describes itself as 'renowned for the work we do in holding governments and their police forces to account'. In a tiny but packed courtroom there was barely enough room for Maxim's considerable legal team, up to seven of whom appeared to be in attendance. For the seven days of proceedings Maxim sat just feet away from the man whose killing he was alleged to have ordered ten years before. Witnesses included the executives of Oxus and Global Gold, former president Kurmanbek Bakiyev (via video link from Belarus), former PM Felix Kulov (from Kyrgyzstan) and the defendant himself. Under questioning by Joel Donovan QC, Maxim denied everything, including the attempted murder of Daley, involvement in the Jerooy mine's licensing, and even the allegation that he had gained any advantage at all from his father's time as president.\n\n_Donovan:_ By the time your father was forced from office in 2010, you were a very rich man, weren't you?\n\n_Maxim, with a smirk:_ Well, depends what you consider as a rich man.\n\n_Donovan:_ Well, rich enough to fly your private plane into Britain when your father was deposed?\n\n_Maxim:_ Yes, I've had money to pay for this.\n\nMaxim had good reason to feel confident in his position. The star witness in support of the claim \u2013 former family friend 'Benny' Sin Beti \u2013 had not only refused to turn up in court but had written to the defence asking to withdraw his testimony, alleging he had been pressured by Daley to give evidence against Maxim.\n\nThe judgment handed down on 29 July 2016 was categorical. Mr Justice Supperstone, the presiding judge, agreed with the defence that Maxim's conviction in Kyrgyzstan was inadmissible and that Sin Beti's original evidence constituted mere 'hearsay'. 'For many reasons', Justice Supperstone concluded, 'I do not find that evidence [of the involvement of the defendant in the shooting of Daley] to be reliable'. However, the judge was far less certain regarding Maxim's denials of involvement in the Jerooy mine, his erstwhile association with Boris Berezovsky, and the struggle over the licence. Whilst he concluded that there was 'no hard evidence' regarding Berezovsky's involvement, Justice Supperstone remarked that 'I do not accept the Defendant's evidence that he had no dealings in relation to the Jerooy gold mine'. Maxim walked away from a trial that had found in his favour but which had concluded that he had effectively deceived the court under oath.\n\nMaxim continues to deny any involvement in both the shooting of Sean Daley and the struggle over the Jerooy mine in Kyrgyzstan. The Bakiyev family insist that theirs was a progressive government for Kyrgyzstan which was ousted due to the ambitions of their rivals and with the support of Russia. Maxim Bakiyev's trial and conviction in the Bishkek court was, he insists, entirely politically motivated. But another conclusion can also be drawn. The judgment in London demonstrates that the law, either at home or abroad, has once again been proven ineffective in uncovering the whole truth of the shady events of business in Central Asia and bringing justice for the people of Kyrgyzstan. The wider reality of the brutal control of Kyrgyzstan by the Bakiyev family and their regime remained out of view. One exchange between Maxim's counsel Angus McCullough QC and Oxus's Bill Trew hinted at both the difficulty of finding the truth and the political reality of life in Kyrgyzstan during the Bakiyev era:\n\n_McCullough:_ The reality of the position is that the shooting of Mr Daley was not going to have any impact at all on Global Gold's securing of the licence, was it?\n\n_Trew:_ I don't think it was. I just think it was total spite from the kind of corrupt, nasty people that you're defending, sir.\n\nMaxim \u2013 who has gained the right to remain in the UK \u2013 has, thus far, navigated British financial, legal and asylum systems successfully. He may now be eligible to apply for full British citizenship.\n\nSovereign power and its offshore links\n\nFor a few years, under the regency of Maxim Bakiyev, Kyrgyzstan finally achieved the status of 'Switzerland of the East'. But rather than being a source of pride for the country's elite it is a great source of embarrassment that Kyrgyzstan is being cast as a pariah by the elite banks and lawyers of the global financial system in which AUB had thrived. Whilst the AUB scandal has tarnished the reputation of Kyrgyzstan's banking sector, it is the international system itself that lacks the oversight and regulation to prevent further spates of money laundering and extortion from and through Central Asia. The country, through which billions of dollars once secretly flowed, now faces $1 billion in international arbitration claims from major multinational corporations who had their contracts cancelled and their assets dispossessed under the Bakiyevs' reign and in the chaos of its aftermath.\n\nThe case of Maxim Bakiyev is a remarkable example of how local control and brute force are not enough for dictators without borders. Contemporary authoritarian governance works through the sovereign power to act as gatekeeper to the multinational corporations and foreign states that want to do business. It also requires global connections to bank the profits of rule in offshore accounts far from rival factions at home and hapless regulators abroad. Whilst the Bakiyev regime lost power its members have stayed one step ahead of the new government that seeks to bring them to justice. None of the owners and directors of AUB have been convicted or even faced the legal pressure which forced the cooperation of Eugene Gourevitch with US prosecutors. The new government of Kyrgyzstan has found that pro bono support is not enough to successfully track down those who stole from the state and took full advantage of the rights and protections of a new adopted home.\n\nBut the Bakiyev regime did not merely seek to use the offshore financial system. It briefly but lucratively became part of it. AUB's success was based on Kyrgyzstan becoming a new offshore jurisdiction \u2013 free from regulation, free from public disclosure. How rapidly and relatively easily this could be done is a salutatory lesson for those who maintain that self-regulation is adequate for the offshore world. Financial jurisdictions are never independent of the political systems that enable them. State legislatures in Delaware and Nevada, and British governors of the overseas territories such as BVI, have taken decisions to allow tax avoidance and financial secrecy. Just as the absence of effective global governance has enabled dictators without borders, so too can those same dictators assure their relatives and clients that they remain out of the reach of regulatory power.\n6\n\n**THE NEW OFFSHORE SILK ROADS**\n\nAt an international ministerial meeting in New York in September 2011, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced: 'Let's set our sights on a new Silk Road \u2013 a web of economic and transit connections that will bind together a region too long torn apart by conflict and division.' The following day, Clinton explained that 'An Afghanistan firmly embedded in the economic life of a thriving South and Central Asia would be better able to attract new sources of foreign investment, connect to markets abroad and provide people with credible alternatives to insurgency', stressing that regional trade could also 'open up new sources of raw material, energy and agriculture products for every nation in the region'. The New Silk Road (NSR) strategy continues to be a centrepiece of US policy in Central Asia and Afghanistan, building directly on a fifteen-year legacy of Central Asia serving as a logistics hub to supply the war effort in Afghanistan.\n\nJust two years later, in a speech given at Nazarbayev University in Astana in September 2013, Chinese premier Xi Jinping announced that China would promote a 'Silk Road Economic Belt' across neighbouring Eurasian states. Over the next months, Chinese policymakers and analysts further outlined ambitious plans to promote regional cooperation, economic integration and new transit corridors by funding large-scale infrastructure and development projects designed to connect East Asia with Asia, Europe and the Middle East. The proposals consisted of both the land-based Silk Road Economic Belt \u2013 which includes building transportation (high-speed rail, airports and roads) and energy infrastructure (power generation and energy pipelines) \u2013 and an accompanying '21st Century Maritime Silk Road' belt, supported by upgrades to ports and logistics hubs, intended to link China to the Indian Ocean, Persian Gulf and Mediterranean Sea. Collectively these two belts have been termed One Belt, One Road (OBOR). According to the _South China Morning Post_ , OBOR represents the 'most significant and far-reaching project the nation has ever put forward'.\n\nThe contemporary US and Chinese visions of New Silk Roads as networks promoting regional 'connectivity' are just the latest in a long-standing set of attempts to unlock, transform and integrate the Central Asian heartland with the rest of the world. Empires that originated in the wider Central Asian region and spread to the world include the ancient Turks and the Persians, the more recent Mongols and their successor khanates. The famed original Silk Road \u2013 actually a complex network of routes and centres of trade which spread from China to Europe and the Middle East \u2013 is usually viewed as one of the first examples of 'globalisation', of which Central Asia was front and centre. More recently, at the turn of the twentieth century, Halford Mackinder himself warned that Russia's construction of new railways in Eurasia, building on the Trans-Siberian Railway, could tip the balance from oceanic power to land power, unleash regional economic development, and extend Moscow's influence across a 'clear run of 6,000 miles'. From this perspective, the seventy years of Soviet rule and its experimentation in economic autarky seem like an interlude in these various efforts to connect Central Asia economically and politically to the rest of the globe, an imperative that once again is on the agendas of the great powers.\n\nYet, if we dig more deeply, the almost obsessive emphasis of US and Chinese officials on the virtues of 'connectivity' both misdiagnoses the origins of Central Asia's developmental problems and dangerously obscures the actual networks of local, regional and offshore actors that have already allowed Central Asia's crony capitalism to flourish in this new era of globalisation. Contra Mackinder, US and Chinese officials publicly go out of their way to tone down the political implications of advocating for greater regional 'connectivity', claiming that geopolitics should remain a less pressing priority than addressing the region's development and transport needs.\n\nHowever, the current US and Chinese Silk Road visions both have their origins in their respective strategic policies and security concerns in the region as they were formulated in the 2000s. For the United States, the current agenda of promoting connections between Afghanistan and Central Asia was born out of the post-2001 effort to supply the American military campaign in Afghanistan. For China, the 2000s saw the intensification of Chinese security and economic engagement in Central Asia, with the driving priority of modernising and stabilising the restive western province of Xinjiang and the surrounding Central Asian region. Thus, the most current New Silk Road plans have their origins in the strategic priorities and domestic actors that have emphasised the importance of regional 'connectivity' for their own purposes.\n\nAs this chapter will show, the transnational networks that link outside private and security actors, local elites and offshore centres have been as critical for both US and Chinese regional actors and interests. In the US case, Washington's enormous logistical effort to support and supply its military campaign in Afghanistan encouraged elite rent-seeking and moneymaking schemes designed to profit from the large logistical contracts that the Pentagon doled out in the region. Similarly, the acquisition of Central Asian energy assets by Chinese state-owned energy companies in the 2000s, while on the surface readily explained by rapidly growing Chinese domestic energy demand, was undergirded by a series of political and legal arrangements founded on similar elaborate transnational schemes and offshore networks.\n\nIn both cases, the Pentagon and Chinese energy companies evoked their respective national interests to justify these arrangements, encouraging opaque deals conducted through shell company intermediaries. These cases serve as a cautionary tale: the large inflow of infrastructure spending, development projects and transportation corridors promised by the New Silk Roads may in fact further exacerbate the region's severe governance problems and informal networks, rather than promote sustained growth, development and new enduring global connections. The New Silk Road may actually terminate not at new flourishing trading or transit hubs across Eurasia, but in offshore bank accounts and holding companies controlled by regional elites and their international brokers and global intermediaries.\n\nWashington's Central Asian bases and logistical networks: the business of supplying the Afghan War\n\nFor the United States, the NSR is a direct legacy and outgrowth of the Central Asia-hosted logistical hubs and resupply routes that supported US and ISAF military operations in Afghanistan. Following 9\/11, the issue of 'connectivity' emerged with the challenge of supplying US and ISAF forces in landlocked Afghanistan for Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF). The United States established military bases in southern Uzbekistan (Karshi-Khanabad, or K2) and at the Manas airport, near Bishkek, in Kyrgyzstan. Washington also concluded a series of overflight agreements with the other Central Asian states and refuelling agreements with Turkmenistan and Tajikistan. From resting on the margins of the former Soviet Union, the region, almost overnight, had transformed into this critical beachhead in the new American-led Global War on Terrorism.\n\nThroughout the 2000s, then, Central Asia played a critical logistical role in the Afghanistan campaign. At the same time, however, these facilities and supply lines became the subject of scrutiny and contentious politics and bargaining, as US policymakers tangled with questions of politically and financially supporting their Central Asian hosts' authoritarian politics, security agendas and opaque prone companies. In the cases of the bases in Uzbekistan, US concern about placating the regime to maintain basing rights and access led to Washington's acquiescence to the repressive crackdown by Uzbek authorities on political opponents, while US security assistance to Uzbekistan was widely viewed as a tacit quid pro quo for securing Tashkent's consent. After the Uzbek government's crackdown in Andijan in May 2005, US officials were divided between backing an international condemnation of the government's actions, including calling for an international investigation, and toning down criticism in order to preserve base access. In late July 2005, the US was formally evicted from K2, though the two countries would resume security cooperation a few years later on the Northern Distribution Network. In Kyrgyzstan, similarly, the US presence at Manas was associated with US support for the corrupt rule of two Kyrgyz presidents, while their overthrow by organised protests made the status of the base the overriding political issue on the agenda.\n\nThen, in 2007 and 2008, following attacks by insurgents on supply lines in southern Afghanistan and disputes with Pakistan, US defence planners launched the Northern Distribution Network (NDN), a set of logistical supply routes designed to bring supplies into Afghanistan from the north. Traversing the Eurasian heartland, NDN routes, operated by large commercial logistics companies, originated in the ports of the Baltic states before crossing Russia, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan by rail, with most containers entering Afghanistan via the Uzbek border city of Termez. A related but less used route, the NDN South, originated in the Georgian port of Poti and traversed Azerbaijan by rail, with cargo then being ferried over the Caspian Sea and brought down through Kazakhstan by truck. Despite the enormous distances, cost and complexity of negotiations involving commercial cargo companies and state-owned railway and trucking carriers, by 2010\u201311 the NDN carried about 75 per cent of non-lethal ground sustainment cargo to US forces in Afghanistan.\n\nA number of investigative stories on the underlying logistical arrangements themselves revealed how Central Asian elites were systematically profiting from the US-led war effort \u2013 from the government of Turkmenistan depositing landing and access fees collected from US operations at the Ashgabat airport into a personal presidential overseas bank account, to widespread allegations that the NDN had emboldened state-owned companies and contractors in Uzbekistan to raise transit fees and levy informal payments in order to squeeze out maximum profit from the US resupply effort. Even after the post-K2 rapprochement with the United States, according to leaked US embassy cables, President Karimov of Uzbekistan threatened to cut off access to NDN supply lines if the United States persisted in criticising the country's domestic affairs, including its dismal governance and human rights record. Reports of similar systematic corruption along supply routes in Afghanistan, including the institutionalisation of extensive pay-offs to warlords, seemed to emphasise that the Afghanistan resupply effort had generated rental income for a wide variety of local actors. Despite these political and governance challenges, policymakers and defence planners mostly viewed the NDN as a success, having delivered goods and materiel, in difficult circumstances, to Afghanistan.\n\nFor a group of US analysts and policymakers, the NDN itself also presented a potential opportunity to expand the US strategic footprint in the region and permanently connect Central Asia to Afghanistan. At around the time of the NDN's ramp-up, US defence planners and their allies in Washington's policy community publicly floated the idea that the NDN itself could serve as a basis to promote trade, regional cooperation and economic development in the region. Ideas for a 'New Silk Road' had already been floated as part of the US strategy to reorient Central Asia away from Russia, but the NDN's establishment gave the NSR new momentum. The influential Washington-based think tank the Center for Strategic and International Studies even published a series of public reports that examined the potential transformative economic benefits of NDN and framed 'connectivity' as the main challenge confronting the region after the US drawdown.\n\nThese accounts not only dramatically overestimated the potential customs revenues to Afghanistan from such trade, but \u2013 crucially \u2013 failed to acknowledge that the NDN itself was not based on private entrepreneurship or independent local companies vying for new markets, but rather enriched a small group of state-owned transportation monopolists who benefited from the steady hard-currency payments made by a dedicated and captive client \u2013 the US military.\n\nThis analytical conflation was also criticised in a hard-hitting report by investigative journalist Graham Lee, who set out to evaluate whether NDN-related truck routes and shipments were indeed facilitating greater commerce and efficiency; instead he found that regional cross-border economic cooperation had significantly deteriorated during the period of the NDN. Lee's research revealed that road and rail freights had been hiked several times by Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan and that many of these ad hoc hikes appeared to specifically target cargo bound for ISAF forces in Afghanistan. Overall, Lee calculated that 93 per cent of revenues \u2013 $905.41 million of the $977.75 million in annual NDN transit fees in Central Asia \u2013 actually went to the coffers of regional governments, as opposed to private or market entities. In his own research, academic Alexander Diener similarly found that border officials continued to exact unofficial fees from NDN operators and refused to adopt, or even wilfully sabotaged, new cargo-tracking technologies designed to expedite cross-border shipments.\n\nIn political-economy terms, the NDN promoted and sustained local rent-seeking, not local private entrepreneurship. Without US troops at the end of the supply chain, the 'private' demand for such services and goods was very low indeed, while the informal barriers to trade within the Central Asian region remained among the highest in the world.\n\n_Fuelling the Afghan War through offshore companies and informal networks: the case of the Manas air base_\n\nThe procurement of fuel to support operations at the Manas air base, near Bishkek in Kyrgyzstan, illustrates how the war effort spawned complex transnational networks linking fuel suppliers, predatory elites, subcontractors and mysterious offshore companies.\n\nAcross two successive Kyrgyz presidencies \u2013 those of Askar Akayev (2001\u201305) and Kurmanbek Bakiyev (2005\u201310) \u2013 base-related fuel contracts were implicated in accusations of insider deals and corruption, while both presidents themselves were overthrown by popular protests amid broad perceptions of corruption and nepotism. Soon after the 9\/11 attacks, US defence planners secured approval from the regime of President Askar Akayev to use the civilian international airport in Kyrgyzstan as a key air base for operations in Afghanistan. The airport's runway had just been repaved and the facility could accommodate heavy aircraft such as cargo planes and refuellers. Soon after securing final approvals in December 2001, Manas became a critical logistical hub, first (from 2001 to 2002) as a base for a wide array of multinational coalition forces and then, after 2002, as a staging area for almost all US personnel going in and out of Afghanistan, and as a hub for refuelling operations carried out by KC-135 refuelling aircraft. The base operated until June 2014, when the Kyrgyz government chose not to extend the five-year lease agreement from 2009.\n\nAll of these operations required the consumption of vast quantities of military-grade jet fuel \u2013 3.6 million gallons of fuel (the equivalent of about five Olympic swimming pools) per day. Kyrgyzstan itself is landlocked and with no natural local supplier, so from the very outset finding a reliable source of fuel was an urgent priority for the Pentagon. In fact, its first refuelling contract was signed in November 2001, preceding even the formal agreement with the Kyrgyz government over use of the base. The Pentagon's Defense Logistics Agency (DLA) awarded the sole-source contract to Avcard, a Maryland-based logistics company, which was subsequently extended without competitive bids. In 2003, a new company, Red Star, registered in Gibraltar with opaque beneficiaries, took over the main fuel contract.\n\nBoth Avcard and Red Star were principally supplied by two main local subcontractors, each owned by a member of the president's family. The first, Manas International Services Ltd (MIS), was owned and controlled by Aidar Akayev, the president's son. The second, Aalam Services Ltd, was owned by Adil Toiganbayev, President Akayev's son-in-law. According to a _New York Times_ investigative report, from 2003 to 2005, MIS received $87 million and Aalam $32 million in subcontracts, out of a total of $207 million spent by the US Department of Defense on fuel. Further, a subsequent FBI investigation, now classified, found that Akayev and his associates had embezzled hundreds of millions of dollars from base-related schemes through a vast network of thousands of offshore companies and US-based accounts. After the ousting of Akayev in the 2005 Tulip Revolution, internal Kyrgyz investigations revealed that both MIS and Aalam were among a list of forty-two Kyrgyz companies affiliated with Akayev, while investigators also found that the tender for the Manas refuelling complex was only published after the deal had already been agreed.\n\nFollowing Akayev's fall, the fuel complexes would once again stir up controversy under the presidency of Kurmanbek Bakiyev. In 2007, after the Pentagon had awarded eight consecutive contracts (including five no-bid extensions) to Red Star, a mysterious new entity, Mina Corp., took over the main jet fuel contract. Even though their managements insisted that they were distinct corporate entities, Mina and Red Star shared some remarkable similarities: both were registered at the same overseas address in Gibraltar, both maintained offices in the same complex in London, and both shared local offices in Kyrgyzstan in the Bishkek Hyatt. A _Washington Post_ investigative story on Red Star and Mina stated that 'the companies themselves . . . are largely invisible. In dealings with the Pentagon they have used addresses in Toronto, London and Gibraltar, each apparently little more than a mail drop.' The three beneficial owners of Mina were subsequently revealed as Douglas Edelman, a Californian businessman who had opened a popular American-style restaurant in Bishkek, Erkin Bekbolotov, a Kyrgyz businessman, and a retired US lieutenant colonel, Chuck Squires, who had actually served as US defence attach\u00e9 to Kyrgyzstan until 2000 and ended his career as an adviser to US Central Command. Over the next four years, Mina would receive about $1.29 billion in fuel contracts, including four separate no-bid extensions. The DLA invoked reasons of national security to waive 'full and open competition' procedures, while potential competitors complained that their lower bids were ignored due to Pentagon favouritism and secrecy.\n\nMina's fuel deals were scrutinised following the fall of Bakiyev in April 2010. Edil Baisalov, the chief of staff to Acting Interim Premier Roza Otunbayeva, characterised the fuel companies as an 'indirect way for the Pentagon to bribe the ruling families of Kyrgyzstan'. After the company could not secure a meeting with Otunbayeva herself, its representatives arranged a meeting with her 28-year-old son in Istanbul in July 2010 in order 'to explain the business'. A subsequent investigation by the US House of Representatives found no smoking gun of corruption or direct financial payments made by Mina to the Bakiyevs. However, the report admonished DLA-Energy, observing that 'When red flags of potentially corrupt or anti-competitive behaviour did arise, the agency took no steps to address them', and that 'DLA-Energy conducted only superficial due diligence on Mina and Red Star, and turned a blind eye to allegations of corruption'.\n\nThe _Mystery at Manas_ report also uncovered a complex web of Mina subcontractors and airport-related businesses and agencies, with indirect ties to the Bakiyevs, which appear to have been designated as preferred contractors by Kyrgyz authorities. One letter, written by the Joint Stock Company Manas International Airport, the airport's governing authority, to DLA-Energy and dated 17 April 2006, warned Pentagon officials that any companies participating in the main fuel contract tender would require a pre-approval letter from the Kyrgyz authorities. The letter then listed a detailed number of criteria that any contracting party would have to fulfil, including using only three officially licensed Kyrgyz jet fuel operators and demonstrating a 'Past history and track record of jet fuel supplies into the Kyrgyz Republic in the quantities required'. These criteria, according to the report, 'distinctly favored the incumbent contractor, Red Star Enterprises'.\n\nThe report's most revealing finding was uncovering an informal transnational fuel-smuggling network. Mina had sourced fuel from Siberian refineries that, in turn, was designated for 'civilian-use only', thereby circumventing Russian export controls. Both Russian and Kyrgyz officials sent false certificates describing these fuel exports\/imports as intended for civilian use, even though the quantity and destination of these shipments should clearly have alerted authorities in the Russian Federation and the Kyrgyz Republic of the fuel's actual military purpose. Thus, the collusion of this transnational fuel-smuggling network \u2013 which involved a Gibraltar-registered fuel vendor to the Pentagon and its local suppliers, a Russian refinery, and Russian and Kyrgyz bureaucrats \u2013 can be contrasted with the public story of intense geopolitical competition between Washington and Moscow over the future of the Kyrgyz base.\n\nPerhaps most tellingly, US Defence Secretary Robert Gates refers in his memoir to Bakiyev's 'amazingly corrupt' government, which 'saw our continued need for the airfield as a rich source of revenue or, as I called it, extortion'. Considered over its thirteen years of operations, the fuel contracts at Manas also serve as a warning of the type of insider arrangements, opaque networks and offshore structures that can come to link private and government interests under a geopolitical imperative. Rather than promote economic development and private sector competition, the DLA contracting process fed into the rent-seeking, politically run monopolies and patronage structures of consecutive governments, while the clever use of shell companies and foreign bank accounts helped to conceal the actual beneficiaries of these schemes. Far from lacking 'connectivity', such schemes point to the very complex configurations of local, regional and global actors that were established in the region to supply the US-led war effort in Afghanistan.\n\nChina's response: 'One Belt, One Road' and the 'March West'\n\nChina's 'One Belt, One Road' initiative is considerably more ambitious than the American New Silk Road project, involving potentially unprecedented sums of overseas investment and the establishment of new regional institutions and international financial vehicles. The total value of OBOR-related projects, estimated by _The Economist_ to be worth $1 trillion 'in government money', will be funded by China's existing sovereign wealth fund, Import-Export Bank, Chinese Development Bank and the New Silk Road Fund (controlled by the People's Bank), as well as by newly created Chinese-led regional financial institutions, including the BRICS-led New Development Bank (NDB) and the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB). The Silk Road Fund, NDB and AIIB were created as recently as 2014, with the purpose of providing new vehicles for funding overseas infrastructure projects.\n\nChinese officials themselves now openly suggest that OBOR, supported by these new regional economic architectures, will encourage 'new models of international cooperation and global governance' that will align development priorities and foster deeper all-round integration. The contrasts with the US-backed NSR here are striking, for the US version offers no new regional institutions and very little financial support; instead it repackages existing projects such as the proposed Turkmenistan\u2013Afghanistan\u2013Pakistan\u2013India (TAPI) natural gas pipeline into what is already a thin project portfolio. Indeed, while the NSR appears to be intended to signal that US withdrawal from Afghanistan is leaving behind some sort of blueprint for economic development, OBOR signals China's arrival as an alternative source of international development finance and even Chinese-led international order.\n\nInternationally, Chinese officials see OBOR as a way of expanding China's economic engagement and political ties with its neighbouring states and shaping a political community that is increasingly responsive, if not completely friendly, to China's foreign policy interests and domestic priorities. For some, this is a blueprint that has emerged from the influential 'March West' doctrine articulated by noted analyst Wang Jisi. In a much-cited series of policy papers, Wang advocated that China expand its westward footprint in order to stabilise its restive regions, strengthen its political community and find ways to cooperate with the United States, in contrast to the competitive relations Beijing and Washington were experiencing in the East Asian theatre at the time. At the same time, investing in these new regional banks and development initiatives offers a potentially more productive use for accumulated foreign exchange reserves than maintaining them in US treasuries, while these new projects could also potentially be used as part of the broader effort to internationalise the use of the yuan. Given the Eurasian corridors of OBOR, China must also try and deal with a Russia that is already wary of Chinese economic inroads and which has launched a competing, and fundamentally different, alternative regional architecture \u2013 the Eurasian Economic Union (EEU), comprised of Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Armenia and Kyrgyzstan, and which is designed as an economic protection block, dominated by Russia, to codify a sphere of economic and political influence.\n\nBut, as with the US case, geopolitics is only one driver of the aggressive 'connectivity' quest. Domestically, the development and stabilisation of the restive western province of Xinjiang continues to inform discussion and justification of the OBOR; indeed, the cities of \u00dcr\u00fcmqi, Korgas and Kashgar remain at the centre of various proposed OBOR routes (west, north and south). In addition, slowing growth rates within China (from 10\u201312 per cent to 5\u20137 per cent in 2015) mean that domestic suppliers of the decades-long Chinese construction boom now require new overseas outlets to continue their operations. Without new external markets and large-scale projects, Chinese cement and steel manufacturers \u2013 the latter of which currently account for over 50 per cent of global overcapacity \u2013 will face huge adjustment costs: they view Central Asia as a desperately needed new market. For example, the giant machine-building company XCMG announced plans to invest $490 million in Xinjiang to create a base to produce cranes, bulldozers and excavators to target Central Asia. Financial services also have a stake, with companies like UnionPay, issuer of China's largest domestic payment card, strongly supporting OBOR in order to expand its circulation and broader use at Central Asian ATMs and point-of-sale machines. Thus, OBOR is partly strategic and partly an umbrella framework for accommodating the regional agendas of a number of Chinese companies, regions and local actors, many of which lack effective oversight from Beijing and\/or pursue their own narrow interests.\n\n_Roadblocks to Chinese connectivity_\n\nBeijing also faces a number of regional political and economic impediments to its connectivity vision. Not least, the underlying Chinese (and US) assumption that building transportation infrastructure will necessarily spur economic development and formal trade is publicly appealing, but remains analytically questionable. Certainly, the work itself will support Chinese construction companies and materials manufacturers. However, merely building infrastructure (the hardware) within an environment as prone to rent-seeking and poor governance as Central Asia is unlikely to reform entrenched crony capitalism \u2013 quite the opposite in fact, as these upgraded networks may provide additional opportunities for cronyism and the distribution of informal payments. For example, comparative research on road-building and development in sub-Saharan Africa has underscored that new roads tend to exacerbate local governance problems and can generate unforeseen costs in the form of maintenance obligations that states already ill-equipped to build infrastructure are not in a position to meet.\n\nIn fact, there is evidence to suggest that despite recent upgrades to the Central Asian transport corridors, in terms of both rail and road, regional transit times and informal barriers are actually getting worse, not better. According to the Asian Development Bank CAREC's annual survey of transit times and trade barriers, from 2013 to 2014, the time required for cargo (which is overwhelmingly from China) to cross a border point significantly increased: from 5.6\/4.2 days to 9.9\/4.8 days (average\/median) by road and from 29.9\/24.0 days to 32.6\/24.0 by rail. The report made note of the cumbersome procedures on the Central Asian side of the border, such as at the Korgas\u2013Altyn-Kol crossing where the Kazakh side lacks the same reloading capacity as its Chinese counterpart and thus takes significantly longer to inspect and clear shipments. Reloading and processing times in the border warehouses appear to be a major cause of rail-related delays (compared with customs clearance on roads). On the roads, customs procedures and clearances are the most cumbersome, including unofficial payments for technical issues and larger 'rent-seeking' bribes from customs officials.\n\nConsistent with our account of how global structures actually feed local interests and corruption, major externally funded infrastructure projects also risk being diverted for private benefit, especially when, as in the case of Chinese assistance, external disbursements lack monitoring and conditionality. A recent case of the Chinese funding of a major highway project in Tajikistan offers a cautionary tale. Shortly after the Dushanbe\u2013Chanak highway was opened in 2010, built with about 80 per cent Chinese funding, tollbooths appeared on the road. The company operating the toll was identified as Innovative Road Solutions, registered in the BVI, with no previous corporate history or record of bidding on or operating highway projects. Subsequent local investigative stories tied the offshore company to associates of the ruling family, estimating that it was opaquely funnelling a private annual revenue stream of between $25 million and $30 million to the government's inner circle.\n\nIn this way, much as in the case of the Manas fuel contracts, legal and financial globalisation allows Central Asian elites to create layers of hidden networks and informal arrangements that may actually obscure the exact contracting parties that have pioneered these new routes of 'connectivity'.\n\n_'Go West \u2013 and offshore!' Chinese energy companies in Central Asia_\n\nChina's new energy pipelines in Central Asia have transformed the region's export infrastructure. They include an oil pipeline that traverses Kazakhstan and a network of gas connectors, known as the Central Asia\u2013China pipeline, that originates in Turkmenistan's gas fields and runs through Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan before crossing into Xinjiang to flow into the Chinese east\u2013west pipeline. This new energy infrastructure has been accompanied by a set of major loans-for-energy deals that have made China an important regional investor and creditor. The gas pipeline, in particular, has turned Turkmenistan into a critical exporter for Beijing and has vaulted the state-owned oil company CNPC over the Russian giant Gazprom, formerly the regional monopolist, as Central Asia's main gas producer and distributor.\n\nBut much like the Manas fuel schemes involving the Pentagon, China's state-sponsored energy deals in Central Asia have woven together a number of local, corporate and private interests through complicated offshore schemes and intermediaries in the name of official bilateral energy cooperation. These networks constitute an equally powerful, yet hidden, form of 'connectivity' that undergirds the more visible markers of pipelines and refineries.\n\nSince 2013, allegations of corruption have dominated domestic headlines and rattled China's energy sector. Chinese authorities launched an unprecedented crackdown and investigation of corruption in CNPC, the country's largest energy company (with revenues totalling $432 billion in 2013), whose subsidiary PetroChina is the world's fourth largest oil producer. Investigators examined a host of overseas transactions involving the company's groups, including offshore spending accounts, equipment supply deals, oil service contracts and oilfield acquisition. The investigation had touched upon the company's overseas activities in Turkmenistan (among other overseas locations), and had implicated two major executives who had previously headed major subsidiaries in Central Asia. These allegations and subsequent investigations also revealed complex webs of offshore vehicles involved in acquisition deals, as well as shell companies associated with individual executives working for the energy giant.\n\nInternationally, state committee investigations have revealed lax oversight and uncovered a number of corruption-related scandals. Between 2002 and 2012, Chinese oil companies went on a spending spree overseas, making more than 150 deals and over $120 billion worth of investments to acquire a variety of overseas holdings. The great financial crisis of 2008\u201309 was an important marker, as it ushered in a raft of new overseas purchases, mergers and acquisitions, and loans-for-energy agreements between China and cash-strapped Eurasian and Latin American governments. On the Chinese side, these deals were structured and financed by the Chinese Development Bank (CDB), which funnelled state development funds to assist in the acquisition of overseas energy assets. Loans from the CDB were used to structure deals worth $8 billion and $10 billion (to become $13 billion in 2013, when CNPC also acquired a stake in the large Kashagan international consortium) in Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan, respectively, guaranteeing Chinese oil companies access to Turkmen gas supplies and shares in Kazakh energy companies in return.\n\nBut the oversight of these deals was poor. A report issued by the Chinese government's Central Commission for Discipline Inspection in 2014 found that the overseas investment projects of CNPC were at risk of corruption given that they 'did not go through standardized decision-making processes'. During this time China lacked a Ministry of Energy to comprehensively oversee or regulate these overseas activities carried out by the new networks of government officials, oil companies, diplomatic actors and the trading sector. Though formally state-owned, these companies behaved competitively with each other and also appeared to have facilitated interpersonal networks of access and influence.\n\nThe use of offshore vehicles figured prominently in these efforts, by both the energy companies themselves and a host of officials involved in the deals. An international investigation into offshore documents surrounding Chinese energy dealings conducted by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists found that these 'oil companies and their executives set up dozens of companies in the British Virgin Islands (BVI), Cook Islands and other offshore jurisdictions between 1995 and 2008'. The report stated that 'there was no evidence that oil companies or their executives were engaged in illegal conduct', but noted that it was 'unclear in some cases whether the overseas entities controlled by oil executives were established on behalf of their employers or as personal holdings'. All three major Chinese energy companies had set up offshore subsidiaries in the BVI, while BVI officials themselves reported that 40 per cent of their business had come from China and other Asian countries. As the report further noted:\n\nSome of the offshore companies have been disclosed in the annual reports of the listed arms of the three oil giants. But many do not appear to have been publicly reported. It's not clear whether they were reported internally to the Chinese government, a requirement for state-owned firms.\n\nFor example, the report discovered a number of BVI-registered shell companies of which China National Offshore Oil Corporation (CNOOC) and CNPC senior officials were the sole directors and shareholders.\n\n_CNPC's Central Asian dealings_\n\nNot surprisingly, Chinese oil operations in Central Asian countries have been connected to accusations of corruption and the use of shell companies to camouflage ownership structures and underhanded deals made with Central Asian elites. Perhaps the most well known of these scandals surrounded a CNPC deal to acquire one of Kazakhstan's largest energy companies, Aktobe MunaiGas. A _Wall Street Journal_ investigation, based on the allegations and materials originally supplied by exiled political dissident Mukhtar Ablyazov (see Chapter 2) and published in Kazakh independent newspapers, found that the 2003 acquisition of Aktobe by CNPC had been mediated by a mysterious BVI-registered holding company, CNPC International Caspian Ltd (CICL). CICL's start-up capital was reportedly just $100, and it proceeded to sell at a later date a 49 per cent stake (for $49) to yet another BVI-registered company, Darley Investment Services. Over the next two years, CNPC bought back Darley's stakes in the company for $165.90 million, netting the beneficial owners of the company an enormous profit from their initial $49 outlay. According to the report, the structured deal yielded a $150 million payoff to a business partner of presidential son-in-law Timur Kulibayev.\n\nIn Turkmenistan, the terms of the very strong energy cooperation between CNPC and Turkmen authorities is shrouded in secrecy. Whatever the long-term benefits of sustained piped gas from Turkmenistan, energy analysts estimate that, in the short term, CNPC as a company appears to have suffered significant losses in the deal, mainly due to domestic gas prices not being able to cover the high costs of importing through Turkmenistan. Yet unofficial payments appear to have been a key part of the deal. One CNPC official working in Turkmenistan, when interviewed by journalists, explained that 'We plan these payments into our budgets. We know about it here in Ashgabat and they know about it in Beijing. They know that's how things work here, and so we include the bribes in our balance sheets. We don't have any other choice.' The same study, after surveying Russian, Western and Turkish firms operating in the country, found that foreign companies working in energy or construction typically had to inflate project budgets by 20 to 30 per cent to cover the costs of these domestic 'commissions'.\n\nReports from Chinese authorities identified the Turkmenistan deals among those being investigated for corrupt schemes, while Zhang Benquan, who headed CNPC's subsidiary in Turkmenistan before becoming CNPC's subsidiary manager in Iran, was among those subsequently detained in 2014. Perhaps the most colourful report detailing CNPC's global efforts to maintain access in Turkmenistan, as recounted in a _Wall Street Journal_ story, involved the Chinese energy giant paying for the US pop star Jennifer Lopez to hold a concert in Ashgabat in 2013. According to Lopez's publicist, the energy company 'made a last-minute \"birthday greeting\" request prior to Jennifer taking the stage' for her to sing 'Happy Birthday, Mr President' to Turkmenistan's premier.\n\nThus, offshore and personal networks appear to have been integral to the development of this new energy infrastructure connecting Central Asia to China: as more information emerges about these scandals and networks of influence, we are observing how some of these Chinese state companies can also be arenas for personal profit and political gain. As one academic analysis observed, China's increasing use of offshore vehicles to structure and mediate outward and inward investments 'suggests that Chinese actors will emulate the practices of developed state multinational corporations and high-net-worth individuals'.\n\nCentral Asian connectivity revisited\n\nIn Washington and Beijing policy circles, the buzzword of 'connectivity' is regularly posited as the key to promoting economic development in Central Asia. Both US and Chinese policymakers even go out of their way to deny that promoting transportation and energy infrastructure is in any way geopolitical or tied to regional strategic agendas. But a closer look at the recent networks of outside economic actors, local elites, offshore entities and transnational intermediaries reveals a complex web of regional collusion across the supposedly 'disconnected' regions of Central Asia that now lie at the very core of China's OBOR strategy and the US New Silk Road concept.\n\nSimilarly, as the Pentagon serviced and supported its military efforts in Afghanistan, US officials oversaw, or at the very least acquiesced to, a number of transnational rent-seeking schemes, smuggling networks and murky contracting arrangements involving opaque contractors and shell companies. The red flags and corruption discovered in the Manas fuel contracts suggests that the Northern Distribution Network could provide a very different precursor to the New Silk Road than its proponents advocate or even envisage. Connected Central Asian elites, their intermediaries and subcontractors constructed elaborate schemes for allowing external actors to build infrastructure and manage logistics across the region. Consistent with this book's theme, these connections built upon official bilateral deals and foreign policy objectives, but beneath the surface actually benefited a range of private interests through opaque transnational schemes and global shell companies. Accordingly, the phrase often used by US officials \u2013 that the United States is interested in 'great gains', not geopolitical 'great games' \u2013 reveals an unintended yet important twist: in Central Asia, the plans of Beijing and Washington to build New Silk Roads are likely to continue to involve playing many offshore games, whilst the touted gains will be afforded to the region's kleptocrats, not their impoverished citizens.\n7\n\n**POLITICAL EXILES AND EXTRATERRITORIAL  \nREPRESSION**\n\nOn 16 June 2014, Alexander Sodiqov, a Tajikistani researcher ordinarily based in Canada, was arrested while conducting an interview with a member of a political party in the Pamir Mountains region of eastern Tajikistan. Sodiqov, a colleague working with one of us on a UK-funded research project on conflict management in Central Asia, was charged with espionage and held for thirty-six days in a high security detention facility where he was interrogated and maltreated by officers of Tajikistan's national security services. After a global campaign by academics, international media coverage and concerted diplomatic pressure, Sodiqov was eventually released to return to his family in Canada.\n\nIt was unprecedented for an academic researcher in Tajikistan to be identified as a threat and treated in this way. However, Sodiqov's case showed that Central Asian autocrats operate beyond boundaries, in all senses. Those who challenge their reputation and control of information risk being treated like former regime insiders \u2013 as a genuine threat to the regime. Opposition figures and security officials alike wrongly associated Sodiqov with exiled activists and politicians. Dictators without borders treat all of their diaspora \u2013 from human rights activists to former regime insiders \u2013 as dangerous, and such suspicions are infectious.\n\nAs we have seen, Central Asia's dictators have successfully integrated themselves into the global financial system to achieve an economic and political presence beyond their borders. This final chapter explores how they have employed legal and illegal means to practise security overseas and export their repression abroad. Building on our work on Kazakhstan (Chapter 2), we have constructed an original database \u2013 the Central Asian Political Exiles (CAPE) database \u2013 in collaboration with colleagues and student researchers at the University of Exeter, detailing the pursuit of political exiles by Central Asian governments. As of 2016, it includes 126 entries of exiles (comprising 163 persons) who have been subject to measures of repression overseas. All but two of them have been targeted since the year 2000. We look here at the two countries \u2013 Tajikistan (with forty-seven entries) and Uzbekistan (with forty-eight) \u2013 who are the keenest employers of extraterritorial security practices against their exiles. Kyrgyzstan (with ten entries) pursued exiles under the Bakiyev regime or in association with the ethnic violence of 2010. Kazakhstan (with ten entries) and Turkmenistan (with eleven) have tended to target former regime insiders. However, these figures probably represent the tip of the iceberg.\n\nOur research suggests that there are patterns of extraterritorial repression whether practised against human rights activists or Islamists. While dictators are often without scruples, they pursue their opponents with an eye to efficiency across three phases, from warning and intimidation (stage one), to arrest and confiscation of property (stage two), to rendition, disappearance and attack, including assassination (stage three). Remarkably, all this takes place, as outlined in Chapter 1, with the assistance of international institutions and cooperative arrangements \u2013 not just within the former Soviet region, but beyond. While Central Asians subject to politically motivated charges in the West will usually escape extradition, they may find their lives blighted by fear of arrest and the inability to travel for years. The long arm of Central Asian dictators has even led to the coercive extradition of the wife and daughter of a Kazakh oligarch from Italy (see Chapter 2) and suspicious deaths in Austria, Sweden and Turkey.\n\nMigrants, exiles and the export of repression\n\nCentral Asian states have generated diaspora communities since their birth. While the region's governments have obsessed about _national_ ideologies, histories and development strategies, their peoples have, by choice or by force, adopted _transnational_ lives in ever-increasing numbers. To Central Asian presidents this is an aberration. 'I call \"lazy\" those who go to Moscow and sweep its streets', remarked Uzbekistan's autocrat Islam Karimov in June 2013. 'One feels disgusted with the fact that Uzbeks have to travel there for a piece of bread. Nobody is starving to death in Uzbekistan.'\n\nHowever, labour migration is indeed a lifeline for many ordinary Central Asians. These people sit at the opposite end of the social scale to the likes of Ablyazov, Bakiyev, Karimova and others who have appeared in the preceding chapters. But their lives are indirectly connected in that the corruption these elites practise while in power is one of the biggest reasons for the lack of economic opportunity for their poorer countrymen. Beginning in the 1990s, economic stagnation in Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan generated a dramatically increasing outflow of labour migrants, mostly to Russia and Kazakhstan. By World Bank estimates, the remittances of these migrants account for around 40 per cent and 25 per cent of Tajikistan's and Kyrgyzstan's GDPs respectively, making these countries officially the two most migration-dependent economies in the world.\n\nAround a million people each from Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan are working in Russia at any one time. In absolute terms, however, Uzbeks are the largest Central Asian diaspora population in Russia. Recent figures from Russia's Federal Migration Service (dissolved in April 2016) suggest there are 2.3 million Uzbek migrants in Russia, but the real number is thought to be higher. This inflow of hard-currency remittances has helped to offset domestic capital flight and to shield communities in these countries from the worst of the global financial crisis, even as it has plunged millions of migrants into a chronic state of personal and legal uncertainty, exploited by middlemen and corrupt local officials in their host countries.\n\nGiven the vital role migration plays in tackling poverty in Central Asia, and the safety valve it apparently provides by mitigating resentment towards corrupt governments, one wonders why migrants are so pilloried by their home governments. Of course, large flows of migrants do indeed lay bare poor governance and weak economies back home, embarrassing Central Asia's dictators. But there is also a more immediate concern for these autocrats. The very limited political space that exists throughout the region has prompted political opponents to seek refuge and political asylum abroad. They often do so in the same countries where ordinary Central Asian labour migrants are found: firstly Russia, and secondly elsewhere in the former Soviet Union, Turkey and the Gulf countries. Inevitably, paranoid officials fear political exiles will organise labour migrants to rebel against their homeland. Whilst sustained diaspora mobilisation by Central Asian groups remains uncommon, there are examples of online campaigns and external funding of independent media and opposition movements in states such as Kazakhstan, as we have seen. In short, as politics moves beyond borders, so too does repression.\n\nThese exile communities are now quite well established, although constantly under threat. Three main centres for political exiles have emerged in Moscow, Istanbul and Dubai \u2013 but all of these states have cooperative relations to a greater or lesser degree with the Central Asian states. Beyond these centres there are peripheries in the West, with notable refugee communities in Europe and North America. In our CAPE database, we have identified four main categories of exile. First, and of the greatest concern for Central Asian governments, are former regime insiders (such as those covered in Chapters 2\u2013 of this book). Second, and overlapping with the first category, we have secular opposition movements, often founded by former MPs and senior officials. A third and distinct category is that of banned clerics and alleged religious extremists, often accused of belonging to forbidden groups such as Hizb ut-Tahrir, the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan or others listed as terrorist organisations. Finally, and often overlapping with the second and sometimes the third categories, are independent journalists and rights activists who are a threat to the extent that they continue to work on investigations into state corruption, repression and malpractice.\n\nIn response, the Central Asian states have adopted a number of aggressive extraterritorial tactics to target dissidents residing abroad. Extraterritorial security can be understood as _the practice of internal security within the territory of a foreign state_. Such measures are nothing new in the region, with the Russian tsar's secret police chasing opponents overseas in the nineteenth century and the well-known foreign assassinations by Stalin's NKVD security operatives, including the killing of Trotsky in Mexico in 1940. More recently, former KGB officer Alexander Litvinenko was assassinated in London in 2006, poisoned with radioactive polonium-210, 'probably', an official British report concluded, under the orders of President Putin. These acts typically target political rivals of regime members. In Central Asia, too, extraterritorial security takes the form of acts overseas to protect the security of the regime at home. Apparently an oxymoron, extraterritorial _internal_ security pertains to the protection of regimes of power from their political opponents in exile \u2013 be they former regime members, secular opposition movements, religious groups or independent activists and journalists.\n\nSuch repression beyond borders requires elaborate networks between states, as well as ties between state security services and organised criminal groups. The region's national security services have maintained professional ties with their former Soviet counterparts, demanded extradition of political opponents under new regional security frameworks, and even kidnapped and assassinated political opponents and dissidents both within the wider region and abroad. For example, the 'Uzbek File', written by Litvinenko, alleges that Uzbek and Russian security services conspired to provide protection for mafia groups for a price. Indeed, many security services across the region have maintained links with one another and organised criminals operating across the region. This evidence leads some to talk of the nexus between the state and crime. As David Lewis argues, these policies 'produce the sense of an extraterritorial state, reproducing its repressive mechanisms in a range of foreign jurisdictions'.\n\nWhat is relatively new in this extraterritorial security system is the use and abuse of international legal and policing agreements, including Interpol, to pursue political opponents abroad. Just as international financial liberalisation and the 'offshore system' enable dictators to operate beyond borders, so too do international and regional agreements on law enforcement cooperation. Once again, the liberal order is subverted by authoritarian regimes while its supposed guardians in major Western states stand by or are complicit themselves in these systems of extraterritorial security.\n\nThe infrastructure of extraterritorial internal security\n\nAs Chapter 1 discussed, the first and foremost context of extraterritorial security in Central Asia is the existence of a common and enduring cultural, economic and political post-Soviet region, a full twenty-five years after the collapse of the USSR. The boundaries of the 'region' here are ambiguous. Russia and Belarus are arguably part of a common space with Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, something formally recognised in their membership of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), the international arrangement that succeeded the Soviet Union. This arrangement allows for extensive international cooperation on criminal justice and intelligence, and provides the visa-free travel that enables very high levels of migration between the countries. By contrast, Afghanistan, a territorial neighbour of three Central Asian states, is arguably not part of the region due to its lack of a recent shared history, political culture, economic space and security environment.\n\nThe evident and ongoing tensions between former Soviet states on matters of high-level security and geopolitics sometimes cause analysts to underestimate the continued importance of shared laws, norms and practices. The Minsk Convention ensures that members assume each other's domestic legal systems are robust and effective guarantors of the rights of their citizens. Arrests and extradition requests can therefore be routine processes, with little more than diplomatic assurances that the case is not political and the subject will not be subject to torture. The CIS Customs Union and Eurasian Economic Union promise further cooperation between members on these matters. More important, perhaps, than these formal instruments are the customary ties between security professionals in the former Soviet states, with evidence that targets may be arrested even before a formal international warrant is issued.\n\nRather than this common space shrinking for extraterritorial security in the face of the rise of nationalism, the transnational space has widened alongside increasing attention to national sovereignty. A 'league of authoritarian gentleman' \u2013 and they are almost all men \u2013 is emerging, extending from Eurasia into East and South Asia, and to the Middle East and North Africa. The rise of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) is a case in point. The SCO presents itself as a new-style international organisation that champions the principle of non-interference in the sovereign affairs of its member states \u2013 a not-too-subtle jibe at the political and economic conditions imposed by other Western-led groups. It includes a further five observer states (Mongolia, Iran, Afghanistan, India and Pakistan) and three dialogue partners (Sri Lanka, Turkey and Belarus), bringing together established autocracies and fragile democracies, whose relationships with the SCO bear witness to the new impetus of 'emerging markets' and 'rising powers'.\n\nOriginally, the SCO's precursor, the Shanghai Five, resolved lingering Soviet-era border disputes among its members, but the group has now expanded its activities to include security, economic initiatives, infrastructure development and education. In 2001 it agreed to a new Shanghai Convention on Combatting Terrorism, Separatism and Extremism. Though the organisation's formal headquarters is in Beijing, cooperation among the SCO's internal security services is conducted through the poetically named Regional Anti-Terrorist Structure (RATS), located in Tashkent. Under the mantra of combating the 'three evils' of terrorism, extremism and separatism, RATS maintains a consolidated watchlist of regional 'extremist' individuals and organisations. The list has expanded dramatically, initially from 15 organisations and individuals in 2006 to 42 organisations and over 1,100 individuals in 2010. Human rights groups fear that this expansion is the result of authoritarian 'logrolling', as each country lists its own regime threats in exchange for agreeing to other countries' designations, which may include political opponents in addition to bona fide terrorists.\n\nThe United Nations special rapporteur on counter-terrorism and human rights has expressed 'serious concerns' about SCO data-sharing and listing procedures, noting that they are 'not subject to any meaningful form of oversight and there are no human rights safeguards attached to data and information sharing'. RATS may even be sharing surveillance technologies under new cybersecurity initiatives launched in response to the political mobilisation facilitated by social networks during the Arab Spring. In 2009, SCO member states signed a new Anti-Terrorism Treaty that allows for suspects to be transferred among member states with minimal evidence of their crimes, and even permits member states to 'dispatch their agents to the territory' of another SCO member state when conducting a criminal investigation.\n\nOf course, many exiles live beyond the territories of SCO members, knowing full well that they are at risk within these borders. Unfortunately for these exiles, it is now clear that Central Asian states are able to employ extraterritorial security powers well beyond this regional treaty area, and even on a global scale. The tracking of Mukhtar Ablyazov and associates (see Chapter 2) was done via the combination of Interpol arrest warrants, high-level lawyers and private investigators who traced the assets and members of the Ablyazov group across Western Europe, from the UK to Spain, France and Italy. The issuing of Interpol Red Notices has been an increasingly important tactic in the armoury of extraterritorial security for Central Asian regimes. Whilst the pursuit of political opponents through Interpol is expressly forbidden, it is now well documented that the region's dictators have circumvented these restrictions via diplomatic assurances and the restriction of the warrants to economic crimes (which are falsely portrayed as being 'nonpolitical'). Moreover, some evidence suggests that Interpol is not able to adequately oversee the many thousands of warrants submitted to it every year.\n\nThis infrastructure of extraterritorial security works not simply via these institutions and legal provisions, but by the interplay of legal, extralegal and flat-out criminal practices. The legal and illegal dimensions are arguably dependent on one another and effectively work together to overcome any international legal and political barriers to extraterritorial internal security measures. The intertwining of legal and extralegal with internal and external, in David Lewis's words, 'force us to reconsider the spatial nature of the authoritarian state, which at once asserts hard boundaries and closed borders against external influence, while attempting to reproduce its own repressive discourses and practices in external jurisdictions'.\n\nHere we identify a three-stage extraterritorial security process. Individuals are, first, put on notice; second, arrested and\/or detained; and third, rendered, disappeared, attacked and\/or assassinated. This three-stage process is identified from the extraterritorial measures deployed against political exiles as detailed in the CAPE database. Each stage contains both legal and extralegal practices and both internal and external measures. Within territories governed by the Minsk Convention the three stages appear to follow in order \u2013 an extraterritorial process that has become habitual and institutionalised. In certain cases there can be a fairly rapid acceleration through the stages to extradition, where in other cases the process can take years or be halted at stage one or two. Outside the Minsk area, this process can take much longer, may not get past stage one, or, in the most troubling cases, passes rapidly to an assassination attempt (stage three). Our research with human rights organisations and exiles suggests that there is a high level of awareness of these stages by both sides \u2013 the state security agents and the targets \u2013 with both recognising that they are part of a brutal, high-stakes game.\n\n_Stage one: on notice \u2013 warnings, threats and defamation_\n\nThe first stage of the extraterritorial security process is being placed 'on notice'. In an informal sense, being on notice is a permanent state of affairs for all political exiles. Having left their home countries, almost all have relatives, associates or business interests remaining there. It is routine for these to be visited by security officials, asked for information about the exile, told to pass on a message, and be subject to direct or indirect threats about what will happen to them, their jobs or their business if the exile does not return to face whatever punishment the state wishes to administer. In the mildest cases this can simply involve moral pressure and muckraking. In one case known to the authors, an exile's in-laws were convinced by security services that he had abandoned his wife and children too quickly and was an irresponsible father. Under pressure from the family he returned home, was questioned frequently and struggled to find a job. In another low-profile case, the exile's father-in-law lost his job as a middle-ranking bureaucrat and his mother was also placed under pressure in her position working for a state agency, constantly being reminded that the situation with her son made her situation tenuous.\n\nMore serious cases of being 'on notice' often involve public defamation and often move on to actual violence against associates and dispossession of property. Muhiddin Kabiri, the leader of the Islamic Revival Party of Tajikistan, left the country in March 2015 after his party lost its seats in parliament in the elections of that month and state clerics called for it to be banned. In exile, he was subject to a public campaign against him in the official press. The state-owned newspaper _Jumhuriyat_ accused him of corruption and announced that a criminal investigation was being prepared against him for an allegedly illegal privatisation: in 1999 he had purchased a hospital and transferred it to a fellow party member at the request of Said Abdullo Nuri, then the party's leader. Kabiri reported that, by June 2015, when he was residing temporarily in Moscow, 'the majority of facilities and buildings my family owns have been either seized or pressured in such a way that speaking of business in its true meaning is simply impossible'.\n\nThese informal threats are often accompanied or succeeded by the formal laying of charges in national courts followed rapidly by an international arrest warrant being issued. This is a very straightforward process within the Minsk area, where cooperation between security services is so institutionalised and unquestioning that, in some cases, warrants are issued in Russia or another foreign jurisdiction before they have even been heard by the particular Central Asian state's court. The issuing of Interpol Red Notices is a little more bureaucratic and, theoretically, involves thorough checking to ensure the person is not a political target. However, such controls are routinely circumvented. Dozens of Red Notices can be found on the Interpol website against persons who were once regime insiders or representatives of opposition parties and movements. While the requesting nation's security services may possess evidence that such persons have committed crimes, there is no guarantee of its veracity. The choice to pursue prosecution is typically political and therefore in violation of Articles 2 and 3 of Interpol's constitution, which presents it as a body that respects human rights and forbids it to enable state actions of a 'political, military, religious or racial character'.\n\nIn a report published in November 2013, Fair Trials International, a British legal reform group, documented multiple cases of a political character. Moreover, they demonstrated that even where political requests are denied, two other means are available to foreign security services seeking arrest and extradition. They identify 'draft Red Notices' to denote the temporary record stored on Interpol's database prior to approval by the secretariat. Although such notices are supposed to be approved or removed within twenty-four hours, they often stay on for much longer and are downloaded onto the national security databases of police and port authorities all over the world. A second common practice is that of diffusion, where national agencies contact other national agencies directly to issue 'a request for international cooperation, including the arrest, detention or restriction of movement of a convicted or accused person'. Foreign countries are not required to treat any of these requests, even approved Red Notices, as international arrest warrants. However, many members, including Western European countries, do consider them de facto arrest warrants.\n\n_Stage two: arrest, detention, dispossession_\n\nThe formal issuing of an arrest warrant overseas, sometimes following an Interpol Red Notice, effectively initiates stage two of the extraterritorial security process: arrest and detention. As the arrested exiles are by definition foreign citizens, often in a precarious state of residence (awaiting asylum requests or notification of a temporary right-to-remain), they are typically detained, often for a considerable period of time, following arrest. As we have seen, several Kazakh former officials have found themselves in this position.\n\nSuch formal measures of arrest and detention are often accompanied by intensified physical pressure and targeting of relatives. Alnur Musayev was a former senior Kazakh official and head of the national security services whose old staff were turned against him by the Kazakh government. As an ally of the erstwhile son-in-law of President Nazarbayev, Rakhat Aliyev, Musayev rapidly fell out of favour after Aliyev's own fall from grace and fled into exile. He was declared wanted in August 2007 for alleged participation in the so-called Nurbank murders (believed to be kidnappings at the time) and convicted _in absentia_ in 2008 alongside Aliyev for charges including running a criminal racket, plotting a coup, kidnapping and theft of state property. In September 2008 in Vienna he survived an attack by four armed Russian speakers who alleged they were sent by Nazarbayev to kidnap him. Later, in February 2014, he was found guilty in Kazakhstan of orchestrating the 2006 murder of opposition leader Altynbek Sarsenbayev, after the men who were originally convicted in 2006 were given a retrial and blamed Musayev and Aliyev for plotting the murder. One of the original convicts was released on bail months later in November 2014. Such internal moves against Musayev were accompanied by increased pressure against him in exile, where he lived alongside Aliyev in Austria. He was arrested by Austrian authorities and charged in June 2014 but was acquitted by a court in Vienna in July 2015.\n\nCases such as that of Musayev are fascinating for what they tell us about the regime of which he was once a central part. At that time, he might have murdered and racketeered with impunity, as his former commander-in-chief now, conveniently, alleges. The fact that he has been targeted for political reasons does not mean that he did not commit crimes. However, in other cases there is not nearly enough evidence to support charges against the accused, even in a flawed legal jurisdiction such as Russia. Many other exiles subject to stage two of the extraterritorial security process therefore find themselves in a prolonged state of legal limbo. One aspect of this limbo is the uncertain legal status which sees applicants refused asylum despite receiving recognition from the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and non-extradition orders from the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR).\n\nThis limbo has been endured by a number of members of political religious movements. Rustam Zokhidov, for example, was arrested in St Petersburg on 14 July 2010, accused of being a member of Hizb ut-Tahrir, an organisation banned in Uzbekistan but legal and active in many democratic states. His arrest record of the same date stated that he had been arrested in accordance with the Minsk Convention as a person who was on an international wanted list. The initial detention order did 'not set any time-limits for the detention and referred only to the Minsk Convention'. On 19 November 2010, the president of the First Section of the ECHR indicated to the respondent government that the applicant should not be extradited to Uzbekistan until further notice. But Zokhidov had his request for asylum and refugee status dismissed in March 2011. This was challenged by his lawyers and dismissed once again by Russia's Federal Migration Service (FMS) in July 2011. The FMS cited the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs judgement that the human rights situation in Uzbekistan was 'ambiguous'. Moreover, it argued,\n\nwith a view to securing internal stability, the leadership of Uzbekistan is conducting a strict policy of control over attitudes and mind frames in all segments of Uzbek society, and of suppression of all terrorist and fundamentalist religious threats, backed up by the security forces and the judicial system.\n\n_Stage three: rendition, disappearance, attack and assassination_\n\nSuch states of uncertainty hamper exiles in their fight against moving on to stage three of the extraterritorial security process, that of extradition or deportation, often to face torture and conviction at home, or extralegal measures to assassinate, disappear or unlawfully render the person back to their home country. We use 'rendition' to refer to all modes of illegal transfer to a home or third country and summary extraditions which violate due process and\/or transfer the person to a country in which they are likely to face torture and\/or politically motivated prosecution. Such stage-three actions are significant in number with respect to Tajik and Uzbek exiles.\n\nRustam Zokhidov, already detained, provides one such case. Court documents from the ECHR describe what happened next:\n\nAt 7 a.m. on 21 December 2011 several individuals who introduced themselves as police officers and officials of the St Petersburg branch of the FMS burst into the flat occupied by the applicant and his family on the pretext of an identity check. The applicant immediately called his lawyer, K., and switched his mobile to conference call mode so as to enable her to participate in the conversation. The applicant and K. informed the intruders that proceedings concerning his application for refugee status were pending before the appellate court and the applicant showed them a stamped copy of his appeal statement. They also informed them that he could not be returned to Uzbekistan because the Court had applied Rule 39 in his case, which was pending before it. The applicant showed the officers a copy of the Court's letter. The applicant's lawyer also informed the officers that she was on her way to the flat, but at that moment the connection was cut. Despite these explanations, the applicant was handcuffed, placed in a car and taken to an unknown destination.\n\nHis relatives were not allowed to follow him. Zokhidov made two anguished phone calls to family members later that day from an FMS holding centre. He was deported to Uzbekistan on an evening flight without being checked in or registered for the flight, in a practice which bears the hallmarks of an illegal rendition. However, the subsequent justification for this measure by the Russian FMS was framed in the legal terms of Zokhidov not being qualified to stay, having violated the terms of Russia's Refugees Act.\n\nOn arrival in Uzbekistan, Zokhidov was taken from Samarkand to Tashkent by officers of the national security services. He was held in detention and in April 2012 the Samarkand city court convicted him of the offences for which his extradition had been sought, and sentenced him to eight years' imprisonment. Zokhidov was represented by a court-appointed lawyer, having been 'advised' to tell his relatives to discontinue their communication with his lawyer in Russia 'in order to avoid any problems'. During a brief meeting with him in the presence of the prison escort officers, Zokhidov's wife noticed signs of exhaustion and ill treatment on his face. Neither he nor his relatives were provided with copies of the trial judgment. Defence lawyers in Uzbekistan refused to take on the case, saying that it 'was political and that becoming involved in the case could lead to their losing their lawyers' licences'.\n\nOur database and the judgments of ECHR record a growing number of incidents like that of Zokhidov. These are examples of the use of national legal means of deportation and extradition to return a political exile despite this being expressly forbidden under an ECHR Rule 39 judgment and disallowed under international law. Despite claiming they are upholding the rule of law, both Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan have deported or extradited Uzbek citizens en masse. Often this is done purely on the basis of diplomatic assurances, despite a long track record of torture and lack of due process. It is in this third stage where the overlap between legal and extralegal measures is most obvious. In fact, all returns to home countries where a reasonable chance of torture is present counts as 'refoulement', forbidden under treaties signed by all states in question, both the places of exile and places of torture. It should therefore be of no surprise to find that the endgame of the extraterritorial security process includes not only formal legal measures of extradition and deportation, but also illegal rendition (kidnapping by security personnel), disappearance and even assassination. If exiles reach this third stage, they live in constant fear of such an attack and have little or no opportunity to negotiate a solution short of their killing or return to long-term imprisonment.\n\nUzbekistan: hunting the Andijan exiles\n\nOne situation where such extreme measures have been used to their fullest extent is in the case of the exiles from the Andijan uprising of 13 May 2005. The Tashkent government was itself shocked by these events and sought to shift the blame wholly onto the alleged terrorists. Accused by human rights groups, the European Union and the United States of having used excessive force, it reacted with recalcitrance, asking the US to leave its air base in the country and withdrawing cooperation on development. The Uzbek activist and scholar Alisher Ilkhamov, exiled in London since 2004, counts some 245 demonstrators who were arrested and sentenced to long prison terms, and says at least eleven died as a result of torture. The leader of the Association for Human Rights in Central Asia, Nadejda Atayeva, another Uzbek exile and a refugee in France, estimates that in the ten years between 2005 and 2015, 1,000 refugees from Uzbekistan applied to her for assistance. Many of these Andijan exiles were accused by Tashkent of being religious extremists and were often identified as being part of a group known as Akramiya, a term used to refer to the supposed followers of Akram Yuldashev, an Andijan native and cleric, who had been jailed in 1999 by the Uzbek authorities on grounds of extremism. The state-employed Uzbek scholar Bakhtiyar Babadjanov presented 'evidence' to his colleagues at the Carnegie Endowment of a Quranic commentary supposedly written by Yuldashev in which he apparently justifies violent jihad against secular governments, alongside video footage of demonstrators in Andijan shouting _Allahu Akbar_ ('God is greater'). But whether Akramiya exists at all as an organisation is disputed by other experts on Uzbekistan.\n\nFigure 7.1 The extraterritorial security process\n\nAs it has sought, unsuccessfully, to control the international discourse on Andijan, the Karimov regime has been more successful in harassing the exiles who escaped to Russia or further afield. Human Rights Watch found that the majority of persons who fled Uzbekistan after Andijan had relatives back home who had subsequently been harassed, threatened or imprisoned; often such people were required to merely pay a bribe to avoid the matter being taken further. Of the large group of refugees that crossed into Kyrgyzstan, many were granted asylum in third countries while others were returned to Uzbekistan under a great deal of international protest. A little over a month after the uprising and massacre in Andijan, on 18 June 2005, Russian police arrested on international warrant twelve Uzbek men in the town of Ivanovo. These men were charged in Uzbekistan over the period 17\u201319 June 2005 for offences including membership of Akramiya, Hizb ut-Tahrir and the Islamic Movement of Turkestan, financing terrorist activities, attempting a violent overthrow of the constitutional order of Uzbekistan, aggravated murder and organising mass disorder on 13 May 2005 in Andijan. In an indication of the close level of cooperation between Russian and Uzbek security services, some of these men were arrested in Russia _before_ charges were even filed in Uzbekistan.\n\nThe twelve defendants included a man named Ismoilov, in whose name a case would be brought against Russia in the ECHR. The defendants were not informed of the reasons for their arrest and were puzzled by their apparent connection to the Andijan events, given that only one of them had been in the region at the time and most of them had been living in Russia for several months or years. On 20 June 2005 they were questioned by security agents from Uzbekistan who beat them, threatened them with torture in Uzbekistan and told them they would be forced to confess to various crimes and be sentenced to long prison terms or death. They were held for a year and their extradition was approved in 2006. However, on 5 March 2007, after repeated appeals to the ECHR and Russian courts, the applicants were released. The case of _Ismoilov and Others v the Russian Federation_ appeared to have set a precedent against extradition and was a victory for the Uzbek and Russian human rights communities. Unfortunately, it only upped the stakes for the Uzbek security services, which would now move to extralegal measures to return or eradicate its Andijan-linked exiles.\n\n_The rendition of Azamat Ermakov_\n\nThe case of Azamat Ermakov is one which demonstrates the effective collusion between Russian and Uzbek security services for the rendering of Andijan exiles back to their home country. Ermakov believes he came to the attention of the Andijan authorities due to his performance of _salat_ (the ritualised daily prayers undertaken by Muslims across the world). He fled the country in March 2009 when he heard his neighbour had been arrested for praying and feared his own arrest and torture during detention. The Tashkent regime sees things differently. In September 2009, following his departure, the regional prosecutor's office brought charges against Ermakov for setting up a criminal group to overthrow the constitutional order of the state. The statement of charges refers to the events as an armed attempt by Akramiya to seize power with the assistance of international terrorist forces and, it comments darkly, 'under the influence of certain States acting on the basis of double standards and seeking to achieve their own geopolitical aims'. Ermakov was placed on the Interpol Red Notice list. He was arrested in November 2009, held for a period, and ordered for extradition in April 2010. However, he was released on 22 September 2010 following the application of Rule 39 by the ECHR. On 4 October 2010 the government of Russia submitted that it had taken steps to ensure that the applicant would not be extradited to Uzbekistan until further notice.\n\nIf Azamat Ermakov thought he was now safe from harm, he was wrong. He remained on the cusp of stage three of the extraterritorial security process, under house arrest in Russia. He was arrested again in July 2011 on charges of possession of a hand grenade, which he claims was planted by police, and sentenced to sixteen months in a high-security prison. As of the beginning of 2012, Ermakov was one of twenty-five named persons detained in Russia under threat of extradition or rendition to former Soviet states. Such was the ECHR's concern about these cases that it wrote to the Russian government in January 2012, in connection with another case, expressing 'profound concern at the repeated allegations concerning the secret transfer of applicants from Russia', transfers which took place 'in breach of interim measures applied under Rule 39'. Ermakov was also anxious. His lawyer reports that he expressed concerns that he would be transferred to Uzbekistan on his release from prison. In a meeting on 26 October 2012, one week before his release, he repeated these concerns and agreed to telephone his lawyer on leaving prison.\n\nOn 2 November 2012 at 6 a.m. \u2013 an unusually early time \u2013 Ermakov was released from prison in the Russian city of Nizhny Novgorod. His lawyer visited at 8 a.m. but was not told of his client's release. According to court documents, 'the applicant never contacted his representatives after his release, and they have not seen him and have been unable to contact him ever since'. That night, apparently at 11.45 p.m., the applicant departed Moscow's Domodedovo Airport for Tashkent aboard Uzbek Airlines flight HY602 using a ticket issued in Tashkent. The distance between Nizhny Novgorod and Domodedovo is approximately 420 kilometres. Ermakov had no money or documents in his possession other than his passport, making it rather difficult for him to have made this journey of his own accord. His transit to Domodedovo has not been explained by the Russian authorities, who have refused three official requests to mount an investigation into his disappearance. On 18 December 2012, Ermakov's lawyers submitted, with reference to a 'confidential source whose identity has not been disclosed because of fears for his security', that the applicant was being held in detention in Andijan, Uzbekistan, but stressed that no official confirmation of that information was available. Amnesty International issued an Urgent Action in March 2013 expressing concern about Ermakov's abduction and likely torture in Uzbekistan. In June 2013, Ermakov's lawyer submitted a letter dated 4 April 2013 from the Ministry of the Interior of the Republic of Uzbekistan, in reply to a request by an unspecified person, confirming that their client was being held in pre-trial detention in Andijan.\n\nThe court, in its judgment of 7 November 2013 which awarded the applicant the maximum amount in damages, was scathing of the culpability of the Russian government in Ermakov's rendition and its complete failure to abide by its treaty obligations. 'It was clear,' the judges argued, 'that the applicant could not have crossed the State border freely and unaccompanied. He had been on the Interpol wanted list, and the search for him in Russia had not been discontinued; furthermore, he was a foreign national against whom criminal proceedings were pending in Russia. Any of these factors, taken alone, would prompt the authorities to arrest the applicant or at least to stop him for a further check in the normal course of events.' The Russian government's account was found to include contradictions and falsehoods. ECHR concluded that:\n\nthe Court finds it established that (a) the applicant did not travel from Russia to Uzbekistan of his own free will but was forcibly transferred to Uzbekistan by an unknown person or persons following his release from SIZO-1 in Nizhniy Novgorod on 2 November 2012, and (b) his transfer through the Russian State border at Domodedovo Airport took place with the authorisation, or at least acquiescence, of the State agents in charge of the airport.\n\nIt is rare for the ECHR to directly accuse one of its member states of participation in an illegal rendition, an act of refoulement, a return to torture. The life of Azamat Ermakov, aged 40 at the time of his return to Uzbekistan, has effectively been ended by this act. He has now become a statistic. As the journalist Murat Sadykov (a pseudonym) describes, he is 'one of dozens of Uzbek citizens accused by Tashkent of religious extremism or terrorism, then kidnapped or otherwise forcibly returned to Uzbekistan from Russia and other post-Soviet states'.\n\n_The attempted assassination of Obidkhon qori Nazarov_\n\nA pattern has emerged of the enforced return of Andijan exiles to face torture, by formal legal extradition or by extralegal rendition, from their exile in other post-Soviet states adhering to the Minsk Convention. But what happens when such exiles have found asylum in Western countries which lie beyond this established infrastructure of extraterritorial security? Andijan exiles have for many years reported informal intimidation and formal measures to restrict their peace and safe haven abroad. For example, Lutfullo Shamsutdinov, an activist who reported on Andijan and was granted asylum in the United States, had to wait five years for a green card that would give him permission to travel abroad after the Uzbek authorities successfully lodged an Interpol Red Notice against him. It is not just freedom of travel that is restricted, however, but peace of mind and body. Rumours abound of Uzbek security services' informants entering refugee communities in Scandinavia and North America, either via online communication or in person. Cynicism and fear \u2013 modes of being which are typical of dissidents within authoritarian states \u2013 are also commonplace in exile. In her article 'Digital Distrust', the Uzbek-speaking American scholar and journalist Sarah Kendzior discusses the boundaries to _solidarno\u015b\u010d_ (solidarity) in exile communities such as that in St. Louis, Missouri, where her research was undertaken. 'There is no _solidarno\u015b\u010d_ of Uzbek dissidents,' she explains, 'only a scattered body of disparate individuals connected by their enmity toward the Karimov regime \u2013 and by the internet where they engage in intense and insular debate with each other.'\n\nIt is the case of the attempted assassination of Obidkhon qori Nazarov, a peaceful but conservative Salafi cleric, which most dramatically illustrates the ways in which the Uzbek security services have made inroads into their exile communities. From 1990 to 1996, Nazarov was the imam of Tukhtaboi, a Friday mosque in Tashkent. In 1995 he spoke out about the disappearance of a cleric, Abduvali qori Mirzayev, and was met with calls for his dismissal from his position as imam and, subsequently, criminal charges. In 1998, Nazarov was placed on a national wanted list and went into hiding in Uzbekistan. In 2000, he was able to leave Uzbekistan, relocating to Kazakhstan, where he received political refugee status from the UNHCR. In 2006, he gained political asylum in Sweden and was joined by many of his followers. The community settled in Str\u00f6msund, in the north of Sweden, where it was able to practise its conservative faith.\n\nHowever, as more Uzbek refugees came to Sweden after Andijan, the Uzbek state began to pay more attention to Nazarov and started to portray him in public forums as a violent extremist linked to the banned Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, an exile organisation which was militarily active throughout the 2000s alongside other violent extremists in northern Pakistan. He was thought to have tens of thousands of followers and, after his move to Sweden, became more visible in the public sphere. In 2006 he gave an interview where he spoke out against violent methods and an Islamist theocracy, but strongly criticised the Karimov regime. 'Allah wants people to live freely and have lots of opportunities', he commented. But Uzbek officials, he argued, 'wanted to rule using communist methods. I told them that times are different and I didn't want to carry out their orders.' In the light of such comments, the Uzbek authorities viewed Nazarov as a security threat and sought his extradition, but without success. In a 2010 Uzbek television documentary laced with conspiracy theories it was alleged that foreign intelligence agencies \u2013 not the UNHCR \u2013 had enabled Nazarov's transfer to Sweden from where 'he is still trying to set up his jihad group'. His supposed terrorist group was identified by the government as being behind attacks in Uzbekistan in 2004 and 2009.\n\nOn 22 February 2012, Nazarov was shot in the head outside his apartment. He survived but went into a coma. The Swedish prosecutor, who suspected a politically motivated contract killing, arrested two Uzbek citizens resident in Sweden, Bakhodyr Pulatov and Nodira Aminova, and charged them with aiding the alleged killer who had rapidly fled the country. The prosecution's case failed due to lack of evidence, but not before the judge confirmed several 'strange' episodes prior to the attack: the suspects tried to trace Nazarov's whereabouts, one of them tried to conceal their real name, they deleted data from their personal computers, and they discarded the killer's clothes. Pulatov and Aminova, meanwhile, claim they only knew the killer as a creditor attempting to collect his money from Nazarov. Some think the case speaks not only to Uzbek state complicity but also to tensions in the Uzbek refugee community between more secular and more conservative Muslims, and distrust between persons still subject to threats against their relatives at home and demands that they inform on their fellow exiles.\n\nIn December 2015, a Swedish court sentenced an Uzbek man, Yuri Zhukovsky, to eighteen years in prison for the attempted murder of Nazarov. It noted that the would-be assassin 'acted on behalf of someone in Russia' whilst concluding that there was insufficient evidence to say that the attack was ordered by the government of Uzbekistan. Although evidence to link the Karimov regime to the attack was insufficient for prosecution in a Swedish court, Uzbek exiles and supporters are convinced that the assassination was commissioned by the government of Uzbekistan as a contract killing. Indeed, the judge himself concluded that this was the likely explanation. 'It is obvious that this was an attempted assassination that has been ordered by the Uzbekistan security services', the Nazarov family's lawyer reported to the BBC. 'I'm absolutely convinced that that is the case.' According to the president of the Association for Human Rights in Central Asia, Nadejda Atayeva, herself an exile who is despised by the Uzbek security services and defamed on national television in Uzbekistan, the attack on Nazarov 'should be qualified as an attempted political assassination. These actions of the Uzbek security services could and should be characterised as an act of international terrorism and as their modus operandi for suppressing dissent in the country.'\n\nTogether with the assassination of Fuad Rustamkhojayev in 2011 and the disappearance of Lutpiddin Mukhitdinov in 2014, both in Russia, the Nazarov attack is consistent with a pattern of using all necessary measures against imams and supposed 'radicals' exiled overseas. Figure 7.2 maps fifteen cases of attacks, deaths in custody, disappearances and renditions of Uzbek exiles, most of which have taken place since 2010. The sheer number of cases of collusion between the Russian and Kyrgyz authorities speaks to the existence of informal institutions in the realm of security between former Soviet states, even those with troubled diplomatic relations.\n\nTajikistan: eradicating the secular opposition\n\nWhile Central Asian regimes are quick to associate banned clerics with extremism and accuse them of terrorism, they are no less severe in their attempts to track down their secular opponents. The equal treatment meted out to former regime insiders and non-religious opposition activists suggests that the targets are selected according to their opposition to the regime, not to the actual harm they may cause to national or international security. This claim is borne out in our second case study of how a nascent, weak and disparate Tajik opposition movement, Group 24, has been decimated by the arrests of its members, attacks on its associates and the assassination of its leader in the street in Istanbul. But to put this into context we need to understand how the 'opposition' in Tajikistan has been progressively weakened at home and aggressively targeted overseas since the country's peace agreement normalised political affairs in the country after 1997.\n\nFigure 7.2 Map of citizens of Uzbekistan extradited to face torture, rendered, disappeared and\/or assassinated\n\n_The opposition goes into exile_\n\nNo sooner did the government declare national reconciliation with the United Tajik Opposition to have been fully implemented in 2000 than the Tajik opposition found itself under attack. The peace agreement's provision to award 30 per cent of state posts to UTO representatives was never fully implemented. One by one, senior opposition figures were dismissed from their positions. For example, Mahmadruzi Iskandarov, head of the Democratic Party of Tajikistan (DPT), had been in exile in Kazakhstan during the war but returned to a potentially lucrative post as the head of Tajikgaz. He came under pressure after he made statements critical of the president. On 25 November 2004 he was charged with 'terrorism, gangsterism, unlawful possession of firearms and embezzlement' and soon after fled to Russia. Tajikistan's application for extradition was refused by a Russian court, but in evidence presented to and affirmed by the ECHR, Iskandarov gives a vivid account of how he was detained while walking his dog by persons wearing the uniform of the Russian State Inspectorate for Road Safety, and within forty-eight hours extralegally rendered to Tajikistan with the assistance of Russian security officers. Later that year, Iskandarov was tried, convicted and sentenced to twenty-five years. Iskandarov's party was effectively split that same year with Masud Sobirov taking over as the state-recognised head of a newly quietist DPT. A similar fate met the Socialist Party of Tajikistan (SPT), which after its leader was assassinated in the late 1990s was split into two factions in 2004, as well as the Social Democrat Party (SDPT), led by the lawyer Rahmatullo Zoirov, whose members were jailed after it became more oppositional before the 2005 elections.\n\nWhat looked like a multiparty system in 2000 had been weakened severely by 2005, partly as a result of extraterritorial measures. The Islamic party was the only remaining opposition party in the system with two seats in parliament until 2015. The non-religious democratic opposition was wiped out. It was therefore quite a news story when Zayd Saidov, a secular former minister and businessman, announced the formation of a new political movement in early 2013. Zhani Tojikiston ('New Tajikistan') would not contest the 2013 presidential elections but was preparing, Saidov said, to field candidates in the parliamentary elections of 2015. Saidov \u2013 an opponent who was also a former regime insider \u2013 was, from the perspective of the inner circle around President Rahmon, the most dangerous kind of politician: he took with him into opposition various secrets about how the business of government really works in the country. He had apparently visited Moscow shortly prior to announcing the new group, a move made by Central Asian opposition movements that seek Russia's seal of approval, as much to give an appearance of credibility as to receive any concrete support. His standing made his party a rallying point for a dwindling group of non-religious activists. It therefore took little time for the state to move against Saidov. On 25 December 2013, he was tried and sentenced to twenty-six years' imprisonment after being convicted of financial fraud, polygamy and sexual relations with a minor.\n\n_The extraterritorial struggle with Group 24_\n\nSaidov failed because he remained in Tajikistan and overestimated the latitude he might be allowed as a former insider who had good relations with the president. But some of those who allied themselves with New Tajikistan after its formation were already in exile and sought to avoid Saidov's fate. One of these individuals was Umarali Kuvvatov. Until 2012 Kuvvatov had been in business with Shamsullo Sokhibov, a son-in-law of the president, supplying fuel to the NATO base in Afghanistan. Kuvvatov claimed that his share in these businesses was taken by force by Sokhibov, and made his conversation with a person who he claims is Sokhibov available on YouTube. In summer 2012 Kuvvatov fled from what he claimed was imminent arrest by the Tajik authorities to Russia, living in Moscow for about four months. During this period, he founded Group 24, an alliance of some of Rahmon's most vocal opponents, and announced his intention to take part in presidential elections. Kuvvatov proved an effective exponent of online communication from exile with video messages and communication through _Platforma_ , the largest Tajik-language political page on Facebook. It is at this time he began to work with Saidov and his associates.\n\nFacing the formation of an opposition movement with 'onshore' and 'offshore' dimensions, the Tajik government moved quickly both inside and outside the country. Around the time they were mobilising against Saidov they increased pressure on his and Kuvvatov's associates in Moscow. Bakhtiyor Sattori, who had previously worked for the Tajik embassy in Moscow and been the representative of the Tajik Migration Service before his sacking in 2012, was one of the first to be targeted. He had become very critical on the web after being dismissed, and made contact with Kuvvatov's Group 24. On 19 February 2013 he was badly wounded in a stabbing in Moscow which was interpreted by the Tajik opposition as a warning to dissenters.\n\nKuvvatov, aware of the threat to his own person, was on the move at this time. He travelled to Dubai, another favoured bolthole of Central Asian opposition activists due to its visa-free entry. In December 2012 he was detained at the request of the Tajik government on charges of fraud and was expected to be extradited in early 2013. To the surprise of many, Kuvvatov's lawyers prevented his extradition and he was released. His freedom from detention apparently did not come with an invitation to remain. After a brief sojourn in Bishkek, where he applied to the UNHCR for international protection, he moved to Istanbul. In July 2014 he entered Turkey on a passport in someone else's name, explaining that it was the only way to avoid arrest on his departure from Bishkek. This was the first of a number of administrative violations that placed Kuvvatov in jeopardy. He immediately registered with the UNHCR Office in Istanbul but did not register with the Turkish police, which led to a further violation of administrative law in Turkey.\n\nDespite being under considerable pressure, Kuvvatov decided to up the stakes. Prior to this point, Group 24 had been exclusively extraterritorial, with its political activity limited to berating the Rahmon regime in online media. At the beginning of October 2014, however, Kuvvatov publicly called on Tajikis to gather for a political protest at Dusti ('Friendship') Square in the capital Dushanbe on the tenth of that month. His ally in Moscow, Maksud Ibragimov, a member of the council of Saidov's New Tajikistan, founded Youth for the Revival of Tajikistan, a new movement, and joined the call for protests. What happened next was both a colossal overreaction and a publicity coup for an extraterritorial movement wanting to show its relevance to the country. The Tajik authorities blocked websites and deployed armoured cars outside public buildings. On 9 October, the supreme court in an emergency measure declared Group 24 to be a terrorist movement, banned in the country. Unsurprisingly, given the movement's lack of support inside the country, no one showed up on the 10th. The day before the no-show, _Eurasianet_ 's David Trilling described the hysteria surrounding the announcement of protests in a country which simply does not allow demonstrations:\n\nA band of treacherous radicals will swoop into Tajikistan's capital and seize power tomorrow at 3 p.m. \u2013 at least that's what senior government officials seem to fear. To thwart their nefarious plans, prosecutors are visiting schools, telling children to avoid provocations; someone in government has shut down a bunch of Internet sites; and with a straight face the nation's highest court has branded the hazy, little-known Facebook group terrorists.\n\nAfter elevating Group 24 \u2013 hitherto a band of online rabble-rousers led by a man who happened to know something of the inner workings of the family state (see Chapter 3) \u2013 to the status of terrorists, the security services acted accordingly by tracking Kuvvatov and his allies with renewed urgency (see Figure 7.3).\n\nFigure 7.3 The tracking of Umarali Kuvvatov, 2012\u201315\n\n_The demise of Ibragimov and Kuvvatov_\n\nIbragimov was quickly targeted in Moscow. Tajikistan pronounced Youth for the Revival of Tajikistan illegal on 7 October and requested the extradition of Ibragimov from Russia. Complying with the request, Russia's authorities arrested Ibragimov on 9 October but the Russian court denied the extradition and freed Ibragimov two days later. However, Ibragimov had been fast-tracked through the extraterritorial security process and, in accordance with the pattern of previous cases, remained a target for return or eradication. On 26 November 2014, Ibragimov was stabbed in Moscow but survived the attack. His assailants disappeared. Soon, he found himself effectively stateless. He was a citizen of Russia, having renounced his Tajikistan citizenship after arriving in Moscow in 2004, but in December 2014 the Russian Federation stripped him of his Russian citizenship. He was now without protection. Before his lawyers could appeal to the ECHR on his behalf, Ibragimov was arrested again by the Russian authorities on 20 January 2015 and immediately extradited to Tajikistan. Seven of his associates were arrested in Russia and three more in Tajikistan. In July 2015 he was convicted of extremism charges and sentenced to seventeen years in prison.\n\nKuvvatov's fate came more quickly and was more final. On 19 December 2014 he was arrested by Turkish police following an anonymous call. His earlier administrative violations came back to haunt him as they became the ostensible reasons for this detention. In the meantime, Western human rights groups battled to protect him from politically motivated extradition. On 21 January 2015, the US group Freedom House reported that they were 'deeply concerned for the safety of Umarali Kuvvatov if he is sent to Tajikistan or to another country where he could be subject to torture'. Such statements may have helped bring about his release on 3 February 2015. But freedom from detention came on condition that he leave Turkey within a month, due to his previous administrative violations. When at the end of February he was granted temporary permission to stay in Turkey legally and received a letter from the UNHCR informing him that his refugee status was confirmed, Kuvvatov's position appeared to have improved considerably.\n\nThis proved to be a false dawn. On 5 March 2015, Kuvvatov, his wife and two children were invited to dinner at the house of Sulaimon Qayumov, a 30-year-old Tajik citizen who had been in Istanbul for several months and expressed sympathy for Group 24. Kuvvatov's wife told Radio Ozodi that she, her husband and their sons 'felt sick after consuming food offered by Qayumov and rushed out for fresh air. An ambulance eventually arrived at around 10.30 p.m. When they were outside, Hafizova said, an unidentified man approached Kuvvatov from behind and fired a single shot to his head before fleeing. Kuvvatov died at the scene.' A few days later, Qayumov and two other Tajik citizens were arrested in connection with the murder. At Kuvvatov's funeral on 9 March, mourners unfurled a banner that claimed: 'The killer of Tajik opposition leader, martyr Umarali Kuvvatov, is dictator Emomali Rahmon.' In Dushanbe, pro-government experts suggested that he might have been killed by business rivals. But, as the Tajik security services had tracked Kuvvatov for almost three years, few doubted their hand in the assassination. In February 2016, Qayumov was sentenced in Turkey to life imprisonment for Kuvvatov's murder.\n\nKuvvatov's assassination occurred within days of Tajikistan's fraudulent parliamentary election, the assassination of Russian opposition activist Boris Nemtsov in Moscow, and the suspicious death in Austria of Rakhat Aliyev, the former son-in-law and now opponent of President Nazarbayev. It all seemed to add up to the further darkening of politics in and beyond the post-Soviet world. Figure 7.4 illustrates fourteen cases of Tajik exiles subjected to rendition, disappearance and attacks. Most of these have occurred since 2014, indicating the hardening of the regime's stance against its exiles as it seeks to close down political space both at home _and_ abroad.\n\nFigure 7.4 Map of citizens of Tajikistan extradited to face torture, rendered, disappeared and\/or assassinated\n\nOpposition politics abroad and extraterritorial security\n\nAt the time of writing, political opposition to the Uzbek and Tajik regimes exists in little more than name. Both states, fearing political instability and the loss of power, criminalised political parties in the early 1990s. In the case of Tajikistan this took place in the midst of a brutal civil war. The peace agreement of 1997 opened up new but limited space for a loyal opposition. But in the last decade, even nominal opponents within the territory of the state have been driven out \u2013 a process confirmed by the removal of all opposition from parliament after the March 2015 parliamentary elections, the harassment and flight of Muhiddin Kabiri, the leader of the Islamic Revival Party of Tajikistan, and the rounding up of the party's remaining leadership on spurious terrorism charges in September 2015. In Uzbekistan, the opposition has been wiped from the country long ago. These states once hosted credible opposition parties; they now terrorise their barely credible remnants overseas.\n\nMaking exiles out of political opponents was not enough. As the opposition moved offshore so did the strategies and practices of political control and security. In facilitating these practices and spaces of extraterritorial security within its own territory, Russia has consistently violated its commitments as a member of the Council of Europe.\n\nHowever, these practices extend beyond the post-Soviet region and its institutions right into the Western world. The abuse of Interpol Red Notices has restricted the movement of exiles who have been granted asylum in democracies including the United States. In France and Spain, Ablyazov's associates have been arrested and detained. In Italy, Ablyazov's family were secretly rendered to Kazakhstan in an extraordinary case of connivance by a major Western state. In Austria, Kazakh exiles have been beaten and died in suspicious circumstances. The image-conscious emerging economies of UAE and Turkey have also become centres of these extraterritorial security measures \u2013 as Kuvvatov's killing in Istanbul vividly illustrates.\n\nIncreasing rates of migration, the stalling and even reversal of democratisation in Central Asia, and growing hostility towards asylum seekers across the world, suggests that genuinely safe havens will become harder to find. More accurately, such havens depend on the ability to pay for the lawyers and security protection necessary to access them. As Chapter 1 showed, the UK's Tier 1 investment visas offer a convenient route for former regime insiders like Maxim Bakiyev, willing to invest in government bonds and launder their ill-gotten gains. Inflows of wealthy former regime insiders into London and other prime destinations have brought these uses of extraterritorial security measures to light, most prominently in the cases of Russian exiles (the assassination of Alexander Litvinenko and the suspicious death of Boris Berezovsky).\n\nExtraterritorial security is not unfamiliar to Western states. The United States' use of extraordinary rendition and secret detention centres, assisted by a number of Western states including the UK, surrendered any moral high ground they might previously have claimed. In the words of Amnesty International:\n\nThe US led renditions programme was, at least briefly, secret. Its exposure did much to reverse it. Something less centralized, and less coordinated, but no less widespread is taking place across the former Soviet Union \u2013 and there is nothing secret about it . . . It is going on today, right now, right under the nose of the international community and no one is saying anything about it.\n\nThis powerful statement, made in 2013, needs only a little revision today. In the three years since, more reports have been released and some moves have been made by Interpol to tighten their system. However, across the former Soviet states, the system of the unquestioned extradition of suspects continues unabated and suggests a high degree of coordination between national security agencies in the transnational space of extraterritorial security. Western states cannot reverse their own unfortunate recent history of torture and rendition but, as we shall discuss in the following Conclusion, they can make sure they are no longer complicit in such acts by refusing to support the security services of states engaged in these practices.\nCONCLUSION\n\n**CONFRONTING THE CHALLENGE OF GLOBAL  \nAUTHORITARIANISM**\n\nCentral Asian security services and their agents roaming with impunity in Europe, US federal judges freezing the assets of Central Asian presidential relatives, and a mounting docket of court cases \u2013 from London to California to Geneva \u2013 determining the future of political dissidents and the ownership of key state assets: we are not accustomed to thinking of these as matters of Central Asian political contestation, yet with each passing month it becomes clear that, in fact, these extraterritorial places are the primary sites for the battle between regime power and regional opposition. At the same time, autocratic elites and their allies routinely use the professional services and institutions of the West to elevate their status, play up their cosmopolitanism, relocate personal funds and camouflage their identities, all the while retaining the legal protections for transacting in the West that are usually denied to their political opponents back home. The traditional academic distinctions between democratic and authoritarian spaces, clean and corrupt polities, political dissidents and international fugitives \u2013 in short, the defined political spheres of 'here' and 'there' \u2013 are rapidly dissolving into a global patchwork of autocratic zones and enabling practices and institutions.\n\nIn recent years we have witnessed the intensification of both authoritarianism in and outside the region, but also an increased scrutiny of many of these same dynamics in the West. Just as the colour revolutions led to a renewed crackdown on civil society organisations and media outlets throughout the region, the toppling of Middle Eastern governments during the Arab Spring has further intensified regime paranoia about the power of street protests, social media and even the conducting of basic research and advocacy within their countries.\n\nThe 2014 crisis in Ukraine, during which President Viktor Yanukovych fled in response to the Euromaidan street protests against his corrupt administration, and which triggered Russia's annexation of Crimea and support for separatists in the Donbas, has further fuelled regime anxiety and closed political space. Certainly, Central Asian autocrats fear the possibility that Russia will find a pretext to intervene in their domestic affairs, perhaps using forces from the overseas military or defence facilities in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. Statements such as that uttered by President Putin in July 2014 questioning the historical statehood of Kazakhstan sent alarm bells ringing throughout the region. Tellingly, during the April 2014 UN General Assembly vote affirming Ukraine's sovereignty over Crimea, Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan abstained, while representatives of Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Turkmenistan failed to show up for the historical vote altogether.\n\nBut whatever fears Central Asian rulers harbour about Russia, their anxiety about future destabilising waves of Maidan-like street protests is a greater cause of regime insecurity. A growing regional economic crisis, compounded by falling oil and commodity prices, the devaluation of the ruble and other local currencies, declining remittances and slowing regional trade \u2013 in part the result of Ukraine-related sanctions and counter-sanctions \u2013 has added to a mounting sense of deep uncertainty. Not surprisingly, it is precisely in these times of uncertainty that the autocratic discourse of 'preserving stability' is most effective: small wonder, then, that, according to public opinion surveys, the Central Asian publics are among the most approving in the world of the strongman leadership of Vladimir Putin. A wave of insecurity has swept the region that has not been seen since late Soviet times.\n\nAt the same time, only recently have we seen renewed scrutiny in the West of the transnational and global activities of the Central Asian elite, whether in a growing collection of stories about Central Asians buying luxury real estate, the unfolding of international corruption investigations and court proceedings, or the widespread fallout of the Panama Papers, which revealed the industrial scale on which shell companies are manufactured and routinely used by the global elite to move money and hide assets. Moreover, the perennial concern about the succession issue across the region now has a new twist: what will become of frozen and stranded assets, associated with the corrupt activities of Central Asian regimes, when these countries undergo a political transition? The issue has assumed renewed importance in the post-Karimov era as Uzbek authorities campaign to reclaim overseas assets frozen by international courts, but this is the latest example of how these global developments and court proceedings feed back into the local.\n\nPolicy recommendations: how to confront dictators without borders\n\nWhat then is to be done from a policy perspective? Over twenty-five years since gaining independence, the political systems of the Central Asian states continue to be closed or closing, even as Central Asian elites show an ever-greater appreciation for navigating global spaces, strengthening their transnational networks and defining themselves as global citizens.\n\nThe most pressing recommendation that emerges from our study is that the landscape for policy intervention needs to be significantly broadened. In both academia and the policy world, we have been trained to think of democracy and governance as purely internal characteristics of states; indeed, over the last two decades the practice of rating and ranking states on the quality of their performance has further entrenched this methodologically nationalist move. And, whilst several authors have offered constructive critiques of how the Western democracy-promotion industry needs to evolve and adapt, we are still hesitant to acknowledge the integral role that Western institutions, intermediaries, regulations and practices play in aiding the transnational reach and practices of supposedly distant authoritarians. Promoting civil society, open dialogue, transparency and the rule of law are all vital to democratic governance; our book suggests that important deficits in these areas actually have emerged in the West and within transnational spaces that are vital to the so-called 'democracy and governance' agenda.\n\n_Training civil society to confront new extraterritorial legal practices_\n\nA favourite practice among democratic practitioners is to train local civil society organisations and representatives in litigation and the promotion of their rights within their countries. Civil society training has traditionally involved gathering committed activists and organisations, instructing them in advocacy techniques and protections, and networking them with peer groups from the same region or around the world. Our study suggests that activists and groups now are in urgent need of similar levels of training and competence about international and transnational legal practices. In particular, regional activists need both to be aware of and campaign for greater clarity in how regional anti-terror laws and frameworks, such as the SCO anti-terror treaty, operate in practice. Second, on the international front, activists need to be better equipped to understand and document how the Red Notice system at Interpol is subject to abuse, and be made aware of the technical criteria involved when home countries initiate international anti-money-laundering investigations and accusations. In short, rule-of-law training, for decades a core practice of democracy-promotion efforts, needs to be made both more regional and more global in its scope.\n\n_Pressure universities and think tanks to be open about reporting international funding sources_\n\nAnother critical area concerns Western centres of knowledge production. As authoritarians have gone global, their activities, agendas and regime character have often been ignored or whitewashed by institutions that have received funds from these regimes or their agents. Expos\u00e9s such as 'Caviar Diplomacy', which documented how European parliamentarians were wooed with free luxury trips to Azerbaijan, have been important in raising awareness about the growing influence of authoritarians and their outreach in formal corridors of power.\n\nLess attention has been given to how international donations from these same autocratic countries affect or compromise Western coverage and programming in think tanks and universities about non-democratic trends and corruption in the region. In the United States, the disclosure rules governing the formal practices of lobbyists differ from those covering more informal efforts at 'image-crafting' and influencing the academy and policy institutes. Under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA), any lobbyist or organisation hired by a foreign government must register as such with the Department of Justice and describe its activities in considerable detail. However, these same standards of disclosure do not apply when foreign governments give funds to knowledge-making institutions, especially think tanks and universities. As one prominent report on international funding for think tanks exposed, foreign governments, including those of Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan, have paid tens of millions of dollars to prominent public policy institutes in recent years, but the exact amount of this funding and its purpose are not usually reported.\n\nUniversities suffer from a similar lack of transparency. Most established universities have committees tasked with vetting and scrutinising foreign donations, but in practice the allure of international income often seems to trump public perception that for institutions to accept funds from authoritarian countries might taint their academic autonomy. For example, an inquiry into a donation to the London School of Economics from Saif al-Islam Gaddafi, the son of then Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi, found that the funds contributed to LSE's 'global governance' programme may have been originally paid as bribes and that the 'Libyan gift proceeded to Council [LSE's governing body] when due diligence remained, at best, embryonic'.\n\nThink tanks and universities should acknowledge the origin of international and project-specific donations in their annual reporting. If a particular project, initiative or report has been supported by an international contribution, this should be disclosed in the publication itself or in the public announcement of the initiative.\n\n_Support the establishment of beneficial ownership registries worldwide_\n\nMore broadly, our chapters give additional impetus to the global campaign to disclose the beneficial owners of anonymous companies. Our study has shown how Central Asian elites routinely use anonymous shell companies to structure private pay-offs from international transactions or to hide their acquisition of foreign assets such as luxury real estate. The leak of the Panama Papers has brought even greater urgency to the problem of providers establishing shell companies on an industrial scale. But as Jason Sharman has pointed out, the 200,000 companies established by provider Mossack Fonseca are dwarfed by the 15 million registered in the United States alone, and this is especially worrying given that US-based incorporation firms were just as likely to do business with high-risk clients as low-risk clients and violate international 'know thy client' procedure more than their non-OECD or 'tax haven' counterparts.\n\nThe central role played by OECD jurisdictions in shell company formation underscores the need for the West to ascertain and make public information about the beneficial owners of all companies in a public registry. This needs to happen both at a national and global level and needs to be made completely public so that citizens, journalists and civil society have access to such information. Nationally, regulators should ascertain the beneficial owners of all companies registered by in-country providers \u2013 while the UK has made some progress here, a number of exceptions (such as trusts) have limited the effectiveness of these measures. New rules announced in the wake of the Panama Papers by the US Treasury in May 2016 proposing that all financial institutions ascertain the identity of the individual who controls and manages the business may be positive, but their efficacy will depend on the definition of beneficial ownership and their broad enforcement. A related policy proposal gaining support among transparency activists is the adoption of a similar global, searchable registry of companies. In turn, completely public registries of beneficial owners have the potential to dramatically improve companies' due diligence by eventually making even the appearance of an anonymous corporation in and of itself a red flag, rather than the norm, in the international financial architecture.\n\n_Increase transparency in Western luxury real estate markets_\n\nAnother related recommendation concerns the role of real estate in the West. As we have seen, luxury real estate is a source of great prestige for autocrats and their families and also potentially a way for kleptocrats to launder funds into legitimate purchases. One recommendation is that countries, similar to company registries, should publish national registries of the beneficial owners of all real estate and property transactions. But another is to target the role of real estate brokers across Western markets who actively guard the privacy of their clients and fail to follow established rules of disclosure and transparency. The right to privacy needs to be weighed against the public interest in countering money laundering and corruption. Consequently, all cash transactions above a certain threshold should be subject to mandatory reporting and the ascertaining of the purchaser's identity.\n\n_Develop dedicated international institutions for asset recovery and disbursal in authoritarian countries_\n\nThe emergent international regime on asset recovery and return assumes that assets that prove to be the results of criminal activities should be returned to their countries of origin. As our chapter on Uzbekistan revealed, returning these assets to their originating countries, when they are generally characterised by authoritarian and closed patrimonial rule, risks simply returning funds to the networks that spawned them. On the other hand, civil society and legal advocates remain weak and embattled, and often lack the necessary expertise to advocate for a responsive institutional structure to disburse funds.\n\nOne solution might be for the international community, under the auspices of an international organisation or an international financial institution like the World Bank, to hold the fund in escrow and develop a repatriation plan intended to rectify or compensate populations that were harmed by criminal and corrupt activities. For example, if the proceeds were linked to the payments of bribes in the telecoms industry, they could be used to subsidise consumer tariffs from that company for a selected period of time.\n\n_Really enforce anti-corruption laws and require the publication of due diligence studies_\n\nWe also draw attention to the role of Western financial services actors in greasing the wheels of the business dealings of Central Asian autocrats. We have touched upon the role of such 'intermediaries' \u2013 due diligence consultants, financial services lawyers and other company services providers \u2013 throughout this book. More often their activities are hidden from view, but they are absolutely essential to the functioning of the system. By law, very little foreign direct investment by the private sector, either from OECD states or so-called emerging economies, can take place without adherence to international anti-corruption standards. In particular, the extraterritorial reach of the US Foreign Corrupt Practices Act means that, to take a hypothetical case, a Chinese company investing in a Tajik gold mine which raised finance from a bank listed on the New York Stock Exchange must conduct a due diligence exercise to demonstrate that it is compliant with the FCPA. In such a case, any credible analysis ought to conclude that a significant proportion of that Chinese investment is highly likely to find its way into the pockets of Dushanbe's cronies, perhaps via offshore accounts that may be built into the structure of the deal. The apparent heightening of anti-corruption standards in recent years, at least in the rhetoric of Obama and Cameron, among others, is all the more reason for such a high standard of due diligence work. Such studies are often carried out by immensely talented and well-compensated people, but there will never be enough evidence available for these analysts to _prove_ corrupt links in the vast majority of cases. Rather, they can only say instead that corruption is highly _probable_.\n\nOur research and experiences have led us to believe that the reason why many such deals go ahead is that due diligence reports are _deliberately_ written to maintain ambiguity on the question of the likelihood of corruption. It is very difficult to see how any investment into a major commodities business in any of the five Central Asian states could be deemed FCPA-compliant if the due diligence work draws unambiguous conclusions about the high probability of corruption. Given the neo-patrimonial political economies of these countries, how can they be deemed low risk?\n\nBut there's the rub: maintaining ambiguity is a multi-billion-dollar business. It allows the client the freedom of choice as to whether to go ahead with the deal or not. All this points to the fact that international financial services intermediaries are directly complicit in the emergence of Central Asia's crony capitalism and its consolidated dictatorships. If there was a huge reduction in such investment, it is a matter of interpretation as to whether this would lead to the destabilisation of Central Asian states or the gradual raising of transparency and accountability standards. A little of both may occur. But if Western leaders are actually serious about reducing corruption in developing countries they must demand transparency and accountability in their own financial services industries, perhaps including the publication of due diligence studies, as well as in business and politics within Central Asia and other regions where corruption is high. It may be time to make firms legally liable for the performance of their intermediaries. Otherwise, all the anti-corruption announcements and conferences are just talk.\n\n_Ensure Interpol is not abused; make security assistance conditional_\n\nWe have documented several cases where the Interpol Red Notice system has been abused by requesting states, or implemented without appropriate review by arresting states. As several studies have now shown, there is inadequate implementation of Interpol's human rights obligations and a lack of an effective avenue of redress for individuals wishing to challenge misuse of Interpol's systems. The organisation claims to have embarked on a comprehensive process of reform which must be seen through to completion. It has reasserted control over the data published on its databases and, since March 2015, committed not to publish Red Notices on individuals with refugee status. It has also begun working with the UN in an attempt to reduce the risk of refoulement and reliance on torture evidence. It has also tasked an internal working group with reviewing its data-processing methods and the procedures of its complaints commission (the CCF) \u2013 the only form of redress to victims of abuse. At present, the CCF meets just three times a year and it can take several years to get an improper Red Notice removed.\n\nSuch cases continue to occur. Shortly before we went to press, Interpol agreed to a Tajik request to put out a Red Notice for the arrest of opposition leader Muhiddin Kabiri. A genial man who for years maintained a persistently moderate stance in opposition, Kabiri is now wanted globally on preposterous charges of terrorism. Tajikistan's brutal crackdown on the opposition has been well documented by human rights groups and condemned by the US and EU among others. This is as clear a case of a politically motivated request for a Red Notice as one is likely to see.\n\nThe reform proposals for Interpol were out for consultation with member states as we finished this book, with a decision to be made at the General Assembly of Interpol in November 2016. Groups such as Foreign Policy Centre, Fair Trials International and the International Committee of Jurists are lobbying the organisation and member states to ensure Interpol's activities uphold human rights standards.\n\nBut whilst Western states will affirm the nonpolitical role of Interpol, they continue to train and supply equipment and funding to the security services of states such as Tajikistan and Uzbekistan which extrajudicially kill, disappear and render their exiles overseas. While Tajikistan arrested the leaders of its moderate Islamic political party on terrorism charges in September 2015, US Central Command launched the counter-terrorism exercise Regional Cooperation 2015 in Tajikistan with 400 military personnel involved. Such support must surely be made conditional on not-quite-so-bad standards of governance. If not, the United States may find that its 'counter-terrorism' activities are supporting regimes that are one of the major causes of instability in their countries.\n\n_Self-reflection about the West's role and shortcomings_\n\nLast but not least, taking seriously the West's role in supporting the political and financial dealings of authoritarians should also become a routine part of Western public diplomacy when discussing the promotion of democracy and good governance. Across the world, but in Eurasia in particular, Western credibility on so-called 'values issues' is at an all-time low and has been badly damaged by accusations of double standards, scandals that highlight hypocrisy \u2013 such as NSA wiretapping and Guantanamo Bay \u2013 and the growing role of non-Western media outlets in highlighting Western shortcomings. As focus groups suggest, values such as democracy and human rights are not in and of themselves unpopular \u2013 but the West as a messenger has lost a great deal of moral authority.\n\nAcknowledging our own struggles with issues like striking the right balance between guarding civil liberties and security, as well as pointing to our own institutional shortcomings in areas such as identifying beneficial ownership, would make us a part of the conversation and move towards more collective and transnational solutions.\n\nThe no-longer-hidden connections of a global world\n\nAutocrats operate in two spaces: on the one hand, they are vigorous self-proclaimed defenders of their countries' sovereignty, tradition and security. They crack down on political opposition, restrict civil society organisations and dominate the media. But even as they control their political and social spaces, they actively seek to target political opponents and dissidents overseas through a variety of global practices and foreign policy tools. Autocrats and their families regularly travel, holiday and purchase luxury residences across the world; they employ international consultants and public relations firms to craft their images; and they eagerly consort with celebrities, politicians and high-profile socialites to underscore their global status. It is this constant navigation between defending their authoritarianism in terms of promoting 'national interest' and safeguarding their activities as global individuals that is the hallmark of autocrats in the twenty-first century. In this regard, the dealings of Central Asian elites are little different from the similar dynamics that characterise authoritarians of the Middle East and Gulf states, sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia.\n\nThe pressing issue at hand, both analytically and in terms of policy actions, is not one of achieving greater 'connectivity', but rather honestly assessing and exposing the myriad actual connections and networks forged by authoritarians on a global scale. Only now, shamed by massive leaks and public expos\u00e9s, are we beginning to appreciate the scale by which authoritarian actions and networks are systematically embedded in Western institutions, legal spaces and professional practices. Our book is but a small step towards catching up with a phenomenon well underway. All of us must do better.\n**APPENDIX 1: MAJOR REPORTED FOREIGN REAL ESTATE HOLDINGS OF CENTRAL ASIAN ELITES**\n\nName | Location | Price, date | Shell company?\n\n---|---|---|---\n\nMukhtar Ablyazov | Oaklands Park Estate, Surrey | \u00a318.15m, 2006; sold for \u00a325m in April 2015 | Yes: Seychelles-based Lafe Technology Ltd1\n\nMukhtar Ablyazov | Carlton House, Bishop's Avenue, London | \u00a315.5m, 26 April 2006 | Yes: BVI-based Mount Properties Ltd2\n\nMukhtar Ablyazov | Apartment at 79 Elizabeth Court, London3 | \u00a3650,000, January 2002 | Yes: BVI-based Rocklane Properties Ltd4\n\nMukhtar Ablyazov | Apartment at 17 Albert's Court, London | \u00a3965,000, 27 June 2008 | Yes: BVI-based Bensborough Trading Inc.5\n\nRakhat Aliyev (or close associate)* | Various properties between 215 and 237 Baker Street, London | Valued at approximately \u00a3137m, bought between April 2009 and March 2010 | Yes: BVI-registered; bought through two UK companies6\n\nRakhat Aliyev (or close associate)* | Two properties near Hyde Park, London | One valued at \u00a31m, the other unknown; bought between 2008 and 2010 | Yes: BVI-registered; bought through UK companies7\n\nRakhat Aliyev (or close associate)* | Mansion in Highgate, London | \u00a39.3m, April 2008 | Yes: BVI-registered but also using a UK shell. Transferred in 2013 to Panamanian Villa Magna Foundation8\n\nMaxim Bakiyev9 | Mansion in Reigate and Banstead, Surrey | \u00a33.5m, August 2010 | Yes: Belize-registered Limium Partners Ltd10\n\nGulnara Karimova | Geneva | 18m Swiss francs, 2009 | Unknown12\n\nGulnara Karimova | 80th-floor penthouse in The Arch, Hong Kong | $14m, February 2009 | Yes: location unclear13\n\nGulnara Karimova | Villa at 32 All\u00e9e de la Cheneraie near St Tropez, France | Undisclosed amount, 2009; seized by French authorities, September 2014 | Unknown14\n\nGulnara Karimova | Paris apartment | Undisclosed amount, 2009; seized by French authorities, September 2014 | Unknown15\n\nLola Karimova | 904 N. Crescent Drive, Beverly Hills, California | $32.75m, 13 June 2013 (reportedly) | Reportedly through company based in Culver City, CA11\n\nLola Karimova | Vandoeuvres, Geneva | 43.4m Swiss francs, 2010 (reportedly) | Unknown16\n\nViktor Khrapunov | Mansion on Lake Geneva | 32m Swiss francs, year unclear | Unknown17\n\nTimur Kulibayev | Sunninghill Park, Berkshire | \u00a315m, September 2007 | Yes: BVI-registered Unity Assets Corporation18\n\nTimur Kulibayev | Four adjoining houses in Mayfair, London (41 and 42 Upper Grosvenor Street, 41 and 42 Reeves Mews) | \u00a344.4m combined, 2007 | Yes: three shell companies: Merix International Ventures is BVI-registered19\n\nDinara Kulibayeva-Nazarbayeva | Mansion in Ani\u00e8res, Geneva | 74.7m Swiss francs, 23 December 2009 | Unknown20\n\nRustam Madumarov (Gulnara Karimova associate) | French properties: chateau de Groussay, \u00cele-de-France; villa in Gassin; and apartment in the 6th arrondissement, Paris | \u20ac50m, 2009\u201311 | Yes: three shell companies: Invest Studio, Invest Service Group and Ruby International21\n\n* These shell companies have denied that Aliyev was their owner but Global Witness traces close links between him and them.\n\n1 High Court of Justice, _BTA v Ablyazov: Judgment_ , EWHC 237 (16 February 2012), point 148, available at: <http:\/\/www.bailii.org\/ew\/cases\/EWHC\/Comm\/2012\/237.html>\n\n2 Ibid., point 128.\n\n3 The judge found that although various pieces of evidence 'strongly support' the case that Ablyazov owned it, they were not 'sufficiently cogent to expel all reasonable doubt that it is correct, though it may well be'.\n\n4 High Court of Justice, _BTA v Ablyazov: Judgment_ , point 159.\n\n5 Ibid., point 165.\n\n6 Global Witness, _Mystery on Baker Street_ (July 2015), p. 6\u20137, available at: <https:\/\/www.globalwitness.org\/en-gb\/campaigns\/corruption-and-money-laundering\/mystery-baker-street\/>\n\n7 Ibid.\n\n8 Ibid.\n\n9 Bakiyev's direct ownership of the shell company has not been conclusively proven, but it was established days after his arrival in the UK, while he lives in the property itself and listed it as his address in a 2012 US court case.\n\n10 Global Witness, _Blood Red Carpet_ (March 2015), p. 2, available at: <https:\/\/www.globalwitness.org\/en\/reports\/surrey-mansion-used-hide-suspect-funds\/>\n\n11 'The 10 Most Expensive Luxury Real Estate Sales in Los Angeles for 2013', _Pinnacle List_ (13 February 2014), available at: <http:\/\/www.thepinnaclelist.com\/2014\/02\/13\/13463\/the-10-most-expensive-luxury-real-estate-sales-in-los-angeles-for-2013\/>; 'Your Mama Hears . . .', _Variety_ (2 July 2013), available at: <http:\/\/variety.com\/2013\/dirt\/real-estalker\/your-mama-hears-21-1201236007\/>; 'UPDATE: Le Palais', _Variety_ (24 July 2013), available at: <http:\/\/variety.com\/2013\/dirt\/real-estalker\/update-le-palais-429\/>\n\n12 'Uzbek president's daughter faces Swiss money-laundering investigation', _Guardian_ (12 March 2014), available at: <http:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/world\/2014\/mar\/12\/uzbek-president-daughter-money-laundering-investigation-switzerland>\n\n13 OCCRP, 'Following Gulnara's Money' (21 March 2015), available at: <https:\/\/www.occrp.org\/en\/corruptistan\/uzbekistan\/gulnarakarimova\/following-gulnaras-money>\n\n14 Ibid.\n\n15 Ibid.\n\n16 'Uzbekistan's Lola Karimova-Tillyaeva Reveals Rift in First Family', _BBC_ (27 September 2013), available at: <http:\/\/www.bbc.co.uk\/news\/world-asia-24179949>; 'In Switzerland, No Bubble Yet as Real Estate Prices Soar', _Wall Street Journal_ (20 July 2012), available at: <http:\/\/www.wsj.com\/articles\/SB10000872396390444330904577538803160170434>\n\n17 'La Suisse, eldorado des dynasties de l'Asie centrale', _Le Monde_ (15 January 2010), available at: <http:\/\/www.lemonde.fr\/europe\/article\/2010\/01\/15\/la-suisse-eldorado-des-dynasties-de-l-asie-centrale_1292121_3214.html>; 'Amiti\u00e9s kazakhes', _Le Monde_ (11 February 2013), available at: <http:\/\/www.lemonde.fr\/international\/article\/2013\/02\/11\/amities-kazakhes_1830157_3210.html>\n\n18 D. Foggo and Jack Grimston, '\"Andrew should not look as if he is for sale or rent\": A Kazakh Tycoon used a web of firms to hide his dealing with the prince', _The Sunday Times_ (14 February 2010), p. 12.\n\n19 Ibid.\n\n20 'La Suisse, eldorado des dynasties de l'Asie centrale'; 'Le clan des Kazakhs riposte et critique la justice suisse', _Tribune de Geneve_ (9 March 2012), available at: <http:\/\/www.tdg.ch\/geneve\/actu-genevoise\/Le-clan-des-Kazakhs-riposte-et-critique-la-justice-suisse\/story\/10833778>\n\n21 OCCRP, 'Following Gulnara's Money'; 'France: saisie de biens appartenant \u00e0 la fille du pr\u00e9sident ouzb\u00e8ke', _AFP_ (10 February 2015), available at: <http:\/\/www.lexpress.fr\/actualites\/1\/societe\/france-saisie-de-biens-appartenant-a-la-fille-du-president-ouzbeke_1650122.html>\n\n**APPENDIX 2: UZBEKISTAN'S 'STAGE 3' EXILES**\n\nName | Year | Country of exile | Category of exile | Description of fate\n\n---|---|---|---|---\n\nKhayrullo Tursunov | 2015 | Russia | Alleged religious extremist | Disappearance: Tursunov was detained in Russia in November 2009 under charges of extremism, though this has been used to silence critics of the Andijan massacre (2005). Tursunov spent the following years in and out of prison, though in 2015 he disappeared. His current whereabouts are unknown.1\n\nShaykh Abdullah Bukhoroy | 2014 | Turkey | Radical cleric | Attack: Bukhoroy, a prominent imam who left Uzbekistan in around 2004 and moved to Istanbul in Turkey, was considered a radical Islamist by the Uzbek authorities. He was shot near his house in Istanbul and later died from his injuries.2\n\nLutpiddin Mukhitdinov | 2014 | Russia | Alleged religious extremist (Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan) | Disappearance: in 2013, Mukhitdinov was arrested in Russia \u2013 where he had lived since 1997 \u2013 charged with involvement with the IMU. The ECHR warned against extradition. In July 2014 Mukhitdinov was taken from his home by the Federal Migration Service, yet when his family reached the local office, they were informed that he had been released. Mukhitdinov's current whereabouts are unknown.3\n\nUmid Yakubov | 2014 | Russia | Alleged religious extremist (Hizb ut-Tahrir) | Rendition: between 1999 and 2008, after coming under police surveillance, Yakubov was repeatedly detained by Uzbek authorities for various periods of time. On 29 April 2014, Yakubov was abducted in Moscow, despite being recognised as a refugee by the UN.4\n\nIkromzhon Mamazhonov | 2013 | Russia | Alleged religious extremist (Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan) | Disappearance: Mamazhonov fled to Russia in 2008 on a forged Kyrgyz passport, fearing religious persecution. An international arrest warrant was issued against him in 2009; later he was held in a pre-trial detention facility, SIZO-3 in Orenburg. Mamazhonov was released in June 2013, but has since disappeared with no ongoing investigation into his whereabouts.5\n\nShukhrat Musin | 2013 | Kyrgyzstan | Alleged religious extremist | Disappearance: Musin fled to Kyrgyzstan with his family in 2008, fearing religious persecution. He was detained by Kyrgyz authorities in October 2010 following an Uzbek extradition request, but was released in February 2011 after Kyrgyz courts refused to extradite as he had been awarded UNHCR status. Musin was reported missing in February 2013.6\n\nYusup Kasymakhunov | 2012 | Russia | Alleged religious extremist (Hizb ut-Tahrir) | Disappearance: after Kasymakhunov left Uzbekistan in 1995, the Uzbek authorities opened criminal proceedings against him in 1999 on suspicion of involvement with Hizb ut-Tahrir. Kasymakhunov was arrested in Russia in 2004, and served seven years in prison. After a further detention period, Kasymakhunov was released in December 2012, but disappeared shortly after.7\n\nAbdusamat Fazletidinov | 2012 | Russia | Alleged religious extremist (Hizb ut-Tahrir) | Death in custody: Fazletidinov moved to Russia between 2010 and 2012 in search of work, though the Uzbek authorities later claimed he left to escape prosecution. He was detained in November 2012 at Vnukovo airport, Moscow, while trying to fly to Uzbekistan. After Uzbek security services visited Fazletidinov in a Russian detention centre and openly threatened torture, Fazletidinov committed suicide in his cell on 9 December 2012.8\n\nAzamat Ermakov | 2012 | Russia | Alleged religious extremist ('Akramiya') | Rendition: Ermakov lived in the Andijan region of Uzbekistan but fled in 2009 after learning of the arrest of his neighbour, with whom he had practised _salat_. In November 2009, Ermakov was arrested by Russian police on an Uzbek extradition request, though this was rejected by the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation. Ermakov was later arrested for the possession of a hand grenade and was held in SIZO detention facility until his disappearance on 2 November 2012. He was later confirmed to be in prison in Uzbekistan.9\n\nObid qori Nazarov | 2012 | Sweden | Alleged religious extremist (Salafi) | Attack: as the imam of a Tashkent Friday mosque, Nazarov made several critical statements about the Uzbek authorities, who called for his dismissal. In 2000, Nazarov relocated to Kyrgyzstan and later received political asylum in Sweden. In Stockholm, February 2012, Nazarov was shot in the head and remains in a coma.10\n\nFuad Rustamkhojayev | 2011 | Russia | Secular opposition activist (People's Movement of Uzbekistan) | Attack: Rustamkhojayev, the founder of the People's Movement of Uzbekistan, had been threatened by the authorities if he continued his political activities. He was shot dead outside his home in Ivanovo, Russia, on 24 September 2011.11\n\nMurodzhon Abdulkhakov | 2011 | Russia\/Tajikistan | Alleged religious extremist (Wahhabism) | Rendition: after a series of arrests and torture in Andijan, Abdulkhakov fled in August 2009. Abdulkhakov was arrested on arrival in Moscow on 9 December 2009, though was released in June 2011 after his detention period had expired. On 23 August 2011, he was abducted and taken to Tajikistan, where he is thought to be in exile.12\n\nUsmanzhan Khalmirzayev | 2011 | Kyrgyzstan | Other | Death in custody: on 7 August 2011, Khalmirzayev was detained in the village of Bazar-Korgon, Kyrgyzstan, in unclear circumstances. The police threatened that if he did not pay them $6,000 they would charge him with violent crimes relating to the June 2010 violence. Khalmirzayev died as a result of injuries sustained during the incident and subsequent detention.13\n\nAlisher Saipov | 2007 | Kyrgyzstan | Independent journalist | Attack: Saipov was editor of the region's only Uzbek-language publication, which frequently challenged the government. While living in Kyrgyzstan, Saipov had told friends that he feared he was being followed by the Uzbek authorities. He was shot dead in October 2007.14\n\nIsroil Haldarov | 2007 | Kyrgyzstan | Journalist and political activist | Rendition: Haldarov, an activist from Andijan, fled to Kyrgyzstan after the Andijan massacre of 2005 before disappearing in July 2006. It is thought he was abducted by the Uzbek security services. Haldarov was arrested in September 2006 for crossing the Kyrgyzstan\u2013Uzbekistan border and was sentenced to six years' imprisonment.15\n\nValidjon Babadjanov | 2006 | Kyrgyzstan | Political activist | Disappearance: Babadjanov escaped to Kyrgyzstan after the Andijan massacre of 2005. In August 2006, he was abducted by the Uzbek security services and transferred to Uzbekistan. His current whereabouts are unknown.16\n\n1 Murat Sadykov, 'Uzbekistan: No Former Soviet State a Safe Place for Uzbek Refugees', _Eurasianet_ (24 April 2013), available at: <http:\/\/www.eurasianet.org\/node\/66873>\n\n2 'Radical Uzbek Imam Shot Dead In Istanbul', _RFE\/RL_ (10 December 2014), available at: <http:\/\/www.rferl.org\/content\/uzbekistan-imam-shot-dead-istanbul\/26736111.html>\n\n3 European Court of Human Rights, _Press Release: Judgments and Decisions on Mukhitdinov v Russia_ (21 May 2015), available at: hudoc.echr.coe.int\/webservices\/content\/pdf\/003-5086646-6265270\n\n4 Amnesty International, _Urgent Action: Refugee Abducted by Police in Broad Daylight_ (2 May 2014), available at: <https:\/\/www.amnestyusa.org\/sites\/default\/files\/uaa10714.pdf>\n\n5 European Court of Human Rights, _Case of Mamazhonov v Russia: Judgment_ (23 October 2014), available at: <http:\/\/hudoc.echr.coe.int\/eng?i=001-147333>\n\n6 Human Rights Watch, _Kyrgyzstan: Locate Missing Uzbek Refugee_ (25 February 2013), available at: <https:\/\/www.hrw.org\/news\/2013\/02\/25\/kyrgyzstan-locate-missing-uzbek-refugee>\n\n7 European Court of Human Rights, _Case of Kasymakhunov v Russia: Judgment_ (14 November 2013), available at: <http:\/\/hudoc.echr.coe.int\/eng?i=001-119416>\n\n8 Vitaly Ponomarev, '\u0413\u0440\u0430\u0436\u0434\u0430\u043d\u0438\u043d \u0423\u0437\u0431\u0435\u043a\u0438\u0441\u0442\u0430\u043d\u0430 \u0441\u043e\u0432\u0435\u0440\u0448\u0438\u043b \u0441\u0430\u043c\u043e\u0443\u0431\u0438\u0439\u0441\u0442\u0432\u043e \u0432 \u043c\u043e\u0441\u043a\u043e\u0432\u0441\u043a\u043e\u043c \u0421\u0418\u0417\u041e \u043f\u043e\u0441\u043b\u0435 \u0443\u0433\u0440\u043e\u0437 \u0441\u043e\u0442\u0440\u0443\u0434\u043d\u0438\u043a\u043e\u0432 \u0443\u0437\u0431\u0435\u043a\u0441\u043a\u0438\u0445 \u0441\u043f\u0435\u0446\u0441\u043b\u0443\u0436\u0431 [A Citizen of Uzbekistan Committed Suicide in a Moscow SIZO after Threats from Uzbek Special Services Officials]' (10 December 2012), available at: <http:\/\/www.memo.ru\/d\/139176.html>\n\n9 European Court of Human Rights, _Case of Ermakov v Russia: Judgment_ (7 November 2013), available at: <http:\/\/hudoc.echr.coe.int\/eng?i=001-127816>\n\n10 Nadejda Atayeva, 'The Karimov Regime is Accused of Terrorist Activities: An Attempt on the Life of Political \u00c9migr\u00e9 Obidkhon Nazarov' (29 February 2012), available at: <http:\/\/nadejda-atayeva-en.blogspot.co.uk\/2012\/02\/karimov-regime-is-accused-of-terrorist.html>\n\n11 'Exiled Uzbek Political Activist Shot Dead In Russia', _RFE\/RL_ (26 September 2011), available at: <http:\/\/www.rferl.org\/content\/exiled_uzbek_political_activist_shot_dead_in_russia\/24340471.html>\n\n12 European Court of Human Rights, _Case of Abdulkhakov v Russia: Judgment_ (2 October 2012), available at: <http:\/\/hudoc.echr.coe.int\/eng?i=001-113287>\n\n13 Amnesty International, _Return to Torture: Extradition, Forcible Returns and Removals to Central Asia_ (London: Amnesty International, 2013), pp. 5\u201368, extract at 49\u201350.\n\n14 Natalia Antelava, 'Outspoken Uzbek Reporter Killed', BBC News (27 October 2007), available at: <http:\/\/news.bbc.co.uk\/1\/hi\/world\/asia-pacific\/7061171.stm>\n\n15 Human Rights Watch, 'Uzbekistan: Events of 2007', available at: <https:\/\/www.hrw.org\/world-report\/2008\/country-chapters-0>\n\n16 Atayeva, 'The Karimov Regime is Accused of Terrorist Activities'.\n\n**APPENDIX 3: TAJIKISTAN'S 'STAGE 3' EXILES**\n\nName | Year | Country of exile | Category of exile | Description of fate\n\n---|---|---|---|---\n\nNasim Khushvakhtov | 2016 | Russia\/Turkey | Alleged religious extremist (Islamic State) | Rendition: in March 2015, Khushvakhtov left Tajikistan to work in Russia, where he communicated with members of Islamic State using the Telegram app. Khushvakhtov flew to Istanbul in February 2016, where he was detained on arrival by the Russian security services. He was subsequently abducted and transferred to Tajikistan, where he is believed to be serving six years in prison for attempting to join IS.1\n\nEhson Odinayev | 2015 | Russia | Secular opposition activist (Group 24) | Disappearance: Odinayev \u2013 an opposition blogger associated with Group 24 \u2013 was sought by the Tajikistan authorities for extradition on charges of 'cyber-crime'. Odinayev disappeared from Moscow in May 2015: his whereabouts remain unknown. After his disappearance, his apartment was discovered by his brother to have been bugged.\n\nUmarali Kuvvatov | 2015 | Russia\/Turkey | Secular opposition activist (Group 24) | Attack: Kuvvatov had worked alongside Shamsullo Sokhibov \u2013 son-in-law of President Rahmon \u2013 but fled to Moscow in 2012 fearing arrest on politically motivated charges. In Russia, Kuvvatov founded Group 24; the organisation was declared illegal by the Tajik authorities in October 2014. Although Kuvvatov was detained in Dubai in December 2012, he was pardoned and travelled to Turkey \u2013 on someone else's passport \u2013 in July 2014. He was shot dead in Istanbul on 6 March 2015, after he and his family had been poisoned \u2013 his family survived.2\n\nShahnoza Bozorzoda | 2015 | Turkey | Alleged religious extremist (Islamic State) | Rendition: Bozorzoda, a medical student, travelled to Turkey in February 2015 and called a friend in Tajikistan to inform them of her plans to join IS. Bozorzoda was detained in Istanbul shortly afterwards; her deportation appears to have been conducted unilaterally by the Tajik government.3\n\nR. Yu | 2014 | Russia | Alleged religious extremist (Jamaat Ansarullah) | Rendition: originally from the city of Istaravshan in Sughd Province, Tajikistan, Yu was detained in St Petersburg in June 2014. Yu was alleged to have promoted the ideas of Jamaat Ansarullah, an organisation funded by Al-Qaeda. He was subsequently sentenced to nine years in prison.4\n\nIsmon Azimov | 2013 | Russia | Alleged religious extremist (Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan) | Disappearance: Azimov was charged with involvement in plotting an attack on police headquarters in the northern city of Khujand, which killed four people in March 2010. After his arrest in Russia on 3 November 2010, interim measures were issued by the European Court of Human Rights to prevent Azimov's extradition. However he was abducted from a detention centre in Tver in December 2013: his current whereabouts remain unknown.5\n\nBakhtiyor Sattori | 2013 | Russia | Secular opposition activist (Group 24) | Attack: Sattori lived in Moscow and worked as a journalist in cooperation with Tajik opposition activists, most notably Group 24 leader Umarali Kuvvatov. Sattori was attacked by an unknown assailant near his apartment on 19 February 2013: stabbed in the stomach, he survived.6\n\nAbdulvosi Latipov | 2012 | Russia | Secular opposition activist (United Tajik Opposition) | Rendition: Latipov had been an active member of the UTO during the Tajik civil war of 1992\u201397. In November 2010 he was detained in Russia, but Tajikistan's extradition requests were blocked by the European Court of Human Rights, due to the potential harm facing Latipov on return. Latipov was released on 15 October 2012 but was forcibly removed from his flat just days later and transported back to Tajikistan.7\n\nNizomkhon Jurayev | 2012 | Russia | Former CEO of the Kimie chemical plant | Rendition: Jurayev left Tajikistan in 2007 after falling out of favour with President Rahmon's family; he was arrested in Moscow in August 2010. Jurayev's detention ended in February 2012, after which he was held on new charges. Jurayev's lawyer was 'unofficially' informed that her client had been released on 29 March 2012 and that he had returned to Tajikistan to face charges; however, his passport was in his lawyer's possession. He is currently serving twenty-six years in prison.8\n\nDodojon Atuvulloyev | 2012 | Germany\/Russia | Former publisher of _Charogi Ruz_ ('Daylight') | Attack: Atuvulloyev fled Tajikistan in 2001 after being accused of insulting the president; in 2011 an extradition request was rejected by Russian authorities. Atuvulloyev was stabbed by two unidentified assailants on a visit to Moscow in 2012, but survived the attack. Atuvulloyev currently resides in Germany as a political refugee.9\n\nSavriddin Jurayev | 2011 | Russia | Alleged religious extremist (Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan) | Rendition: Jurayev fled Tajikistan in 2006 after being accused of associating with banned Islamist organisations. He was arrested in Moscow in 2009. Jurayev received temporary asylum status from the European Court of Human Rights to prevent his extradition and was released in May 2011. However, on 31 October 2011 Jurayev was transferred to Tajikistan, without his passport, where he was sentenced to twenty-six years in prison.10\n\nSukhrob Koziyev | 2011 | Russia | Alleged religious extremist (Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan) | Rendition: Koziyev was accused of being an accomplice of Savriddin Jurayev. He was arrested in Russia in November 2009 and his extradition was approved in June 2010. Interim measures against the extradition were issued by the European Court of Human Rights in October 2010. Koziyev was released on 23 August 2011 but was kidnapped by plainclothes security officers and returned to Tajikistan, where is he serving a twenty-eight-year prison sentence.11\n\nMuhammad Akhadov | 2008 | Russia | Secular opposition activist (United Tajik Opposition) | Rendition: Akhadov, a Tajik national, fled to Russia due to fear of persecution over his involvement with the UTO. He was arrested in 2007 before being handed over to the Tajik Ministry of Internal Affairs at Moscow's Vnukovo airport in September 2008. Akhadov was given a nine-year prison sentence for 'unlawful intrusion'.12\n\nMahmadruzi Iskandarov | 2005 | Russia | Secular opposition activist (Democratic Party of Tajikistan) | Rendition: Iskandarov, the former leader of the UTO and a presidential hopeful, moved to Russia in August 2004 after a dispute with President Rahmon. The government implicated Iskandarov in an attack on two government offices in Tojikobod in August 2004, resulting in his arrest in Russia in December 2004, though he was soon released. In 2005, Iskandarov was arrested on a warrant requested by the Tajik authorities, rendered to Tajikistan and sentenced to twenty-three years in prison.13\n\n1 '\u0428\u0435\u0441\u0442\u044c \u043b\u0435\u0442 \u0442\u044e\u0440\u044c\u043c\u044b \"\u0437\u0430 \u043d\u0430\u043c\u0435\u0440\u0435\u043d\u0438\u0435\" \u0443\u0447\u0430\u0441\u0442\u0432\u043e\u0432\u0430\u0442\u044c \u0432 \u0432\u043e\u0439\u043d\u0435 \u0432 \u0421\u0438\u0440\u0438\u0438 [Six Years in Prison 'For the Intention' of Participating in the War in Syria]', _RFE\/RL_ (23 April 2016), available at: <http:\/\/rus.ozodi.org\/content\/article\/27692517.html>\n\n2 Global Voices, _Tajik Dissident's Murder Rattles Opposition_ (16 March 2015), available at: <https:\/\/iwpr.net\/global-voices\/tajik-dissidents-murder-rattles-opposition>\n\n3 'Tajikistan Says Detained Woman Who Planned to Join IS in Syria' (11 March 2015), _RFE\/RL_ , available at: <http:\/\/www.rferl.org\/content\/tajikistan-says-detained-woman-who-planned-to-join-is-in-syria\/26893638.html>\n\n4 Mavlouda Rafiyeva, 'One More Activist of Jamaat Ansarullah Jailed in Sughd Province', _Asia Plus_ (4 March 2015), available at: <http:\/\/news.tj\/en\/news\/one-more-activist-jamaat-ansarullah-jailed-sughd-province>\n\n5 Amnesty International, _Russia: Urgent Action: Fear for Safety of Tajikistani Asylum Seeker: Ismon Azimov_ (6 December 2013), available at: <http:\/\/www.refworld.org\/docid\/52a7238f4.html>\n\n6 'Bakhtiyor Sattori Gives His First Interview after Stab Attack', _Asia Plus_ (21 February 2013), available at: <http:\/\/www.news.tj\/en\/news\/bakhtiyor-sattori-gives-his-first-interview-after-stab-attack>\n\n7 Amnesty International, _Public Statement: Tajikistan Urged to Disclose Whereabouts of Suspect Held Incommunicado_ (5 November 2012).\n\n8 Amnesty International, _Urgent Action: Tajik Refused Asylum Seeker Disappeared_ (3 April 2012); 'Nizomkhon Juraev Faces Trial', _Asia_ Plus (22 May 2015), available at: <http:\/\/news.tj\/en\/news\/nizomkhon-juraev-faces-trial>\n\n9 Reporters Without Borders, _Tajik Opposition Journalist Stabbed in Moscow_ (13 January 2012), available at: <http:\/\/en.rsf.org\/russia-tajik-opposition-journalist-13-01-2012,41676.html>; 'Russia Denies Entry To Tajik Opposition Journalist', _RFE\/RL_ (15 July 2013), available at: <http:\/\/www.rferl.org\/content\/tajikistan-journalist-russia-entry\/25047058.html>\n\n10 Amnesty International, _Return to Torture: Extradition, Forcible Returns and Removals to Central Asia_ (London: Amnesty International, 2013), p. 28.\n\n11 Ibid., pp. 28\u20139.\n\n12 Amnesty International, _Shattered Lives: Torture and Ill-Treatment in Tajikistan_ (London: Amnesty International, 2012), p. 56.\n\n13 Human Rights Watch, _Tajikistan Events of 2005_ (2005), available at: <http:\/\/www.hrw.org\/world-report\/2006\/country-chapters\/tajikistan>\n**ENDNOTES**\n\nPreface\n\n1.'Revealed: The London Skyscraper that is a Stark Symbol of the Housing Crisis', _Guardian_ (25 May 2015).\n\n2.Global Witness, _Mystery on Baker Street_ (July 2015), available at: <https:\/\/www.globalwitness.org\/en\/campaigns\/corruption-and-money-laundering\/mystery-baker-street\/>\n\n3.In fact, Central Asia has only experienced one major armed conflict since independence and saw 0.1 per cent of the world's terrorist attacks in the period 2001\u201313. See <https:\/\/www.start.umd.edu\/gtd\/>\n\n4.See <https:\/\/www.therenditionproject.org.uk\/>\n\n5.Ewan MacAskill, 'Drone killing of British citizens in Syria marks major departure for UK', _Guardian_ (7 September 2015), available at: <https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/world\/2015\/sep\/07\/drone-british-citizens-syria-uk-david-cameron>; Adam Taylor, 'The U.S. keeps killing Americans in drone strikes, mostly by accident', _Washington Post_ (23 May 2015), available at: <https:\/\/www.washingtonpost.com\/news\/worldviews\/wp\/2015\/04\/23\/the-u-s-keeps-killing-americans-in-drone-strikes-mostly-by-accident\/>\n\nAcknowledgements\n\n1.Alexander Cooley and J.C. Sharman, 'Blurring the Line between Licit and Illicit: Transnational Corruption Networks in Central Asia and Beyond', _Central Asian Survey_ 34:1 (2015), pp. 11\u201328.\n\n2.Asel Doolotkeldieva and John Heathershaw, 'State as Resource, Mediator and Performer: Understanding the Local and Global Politics of Gold Mining in Kyrgyzstan', _Central Asian Survey_ 34:1 (2015), pp. 93\u2013109.\n\n3.John Heathershaw and Nick Megoran, 'Contesting Danger: A New Agenda for Central Asian Studies', _International Affairs_ 87:3 (2011), pp. 589\u2013612.\n\n4.Global Witness, _Mystery on Baker Street_.\n\nIntroduction: Central Asia Beyond Borders\n\n1.Global Witness, _It's a Gas_ (2007). With thanks to Tom Mayne, formerly of Global Witness, for sharing his own research on this case, which has informed the example. See also US Embassy Ashgabat, 'Unsettled Times but no Revolution in Sight', 08ASHGABAT652_a (21 May 2008), available at: <https:\/\/wikileaks.org\/plusd\/cables\/08ASHGABAT652_a.html>\n\n2.US Embassy Ashgabat, 'SCA DCA Feigenbaum Meets Ashgabat Businessmen on Post-Niyazov Scenarios', 07ASHGABAT56_a (27 January 2007), available at: <https:\/\/wikileaks.org\/plusd\/cables\/07ASHGABAT56_a.html>\n\n3.Freedom House, _World's Worst Regimes Unveiled_ (2003\u201305), available at: <https:\/\/freedomhouse.org\/article\/worlds-worst-regimes-unveiled-0#.VW43-M9Viko>, <https:\/\/freedomhouse.org\/article\/worlds-worst-regimes-unveiled#.VW44O89Viko>, and <https:\/\/freedomhouse.org\/article\/worlds-worst-regimes-revealed#.VW438c9Viko>\n\n4.Freedom House, _Turkmenistan_ (2014), available at: <https:\/\/freedomhouse.org\/report\/freedom-world\/2014\/turkmenistan#.VXCtF89Viko>.\n\n5.TAPI is the Turkmenistan\u2013Afghanistan\u2013Pakistan\u2013India pipeline that is a key part of the US-proposed New Silk Road, but which is beset by security concerns about the infrastructure through Afghanistan and Pakistan.\n\n6.US Embassy Ashgabat, 'German Business in Turkmenistan', 09ASHGABAT859_a (9 July 2009), available at: <https:\/\/wikileaks.org\/plusd\/cables\/09ASHGABAT859_a.html>.\n\n7.Iranian, Turkish and Pakistani banks also operate but lack this status. US Embassy Ashgabat, 'The Few Foreign Banks in Turkmenistan', 09ASHGABAT1428_a (6 November 2009), available at: <https:\/\/wikileaks.org\/plusd\/cables\/09ASHGABAT1428_a.html>.\n\n8.US Embassy Ashgabat, 'German Business in Turkmenistan'.\n\n9.The other being Liechtenstein.\n\n10.Heathershaw and Megoran, 'Contesting Danger'.\n\n11.Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan eventually became a greater priority for donors when their poverty began to be understood in the late 1990s, and they became target countries under the UN's Millennium Development Goals.\n\n12.Alexander Cooley, _Great Games, Local Rules: The New Great Power Contest in Central Asia_ (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), Chapter 3.\n\n13.See e.g. Colin Thubron's excellent travelogue of the region, _The Lost Heart of Asia_ (London: Vintage, 1994).\n\n14.See Nick Megoran and Sevara Sharipova, _Central Asia in International Relations: The Legacies of Halford Mackinder_ (London: Hurst & Co., 2013).\n\n15.For an argument for the importance of these factors in explaining the divergence between Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet states, see Steven Levitsky and Lucan A. Way, _Competitive Authoritarianism: Hybrid Regimes after the Cold War_ (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010).\n\n16.David C. Kang, _Crony Capitalism: Corruption and Development in South Korea and the Philippines_ (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 3\n\n17.Anders \u00c5slund, _Building Capitalism: The Transformation of the Former Soviet Bloc_ (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002).\n\n18.Thomas Carothers, 'The End of the Transition Paradigm?', _Journal of Democracy_ 13:1 (2002), pp. 5\u201321.\n\n19.Roberto Roccu, 'Gramsci in Cairo: Neoliberal Authoritarianism, Passive Revolution and Failed Hegemony in Egypt under Mubarak, 1991\u20132010' (PhD dissertation, London School of Economics and Political Science, 2012); Catherine Owen ' _Obshchestvennyi Kontrol_ (\"Public Scrutiny\") from Discourse to Action in Contemporary Russia: The Emergence of Authoritarian Neoliberal Governance' (PhD dissertation, University of Exeter, 2014).\n\n20.\u00c5slund, _Building Capitalism_.\n\n21.Cooley and Sharman, 'Blurring the Line'.\n\n22.For a similar argument, see Sarah Chayes's account of how the Karzai regime in Afghanistan used financial sector openness to facilitate the laundering of foreign assistance. Sarah Chayes, _Thieves of State: How Global Corruption Threatens Global Security_ (New York: W.W. Norton, 2013).\n\n23.Alexander Cooley, 'Countering Democratic Norms', _Journal of Democracy_ 26.3 (2015), pp. 49\u201363.\n\n24.Ahmed Rashid, _Descent into Chaos: The U.S. and the Disaster in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Central Asia_ (New York: Penguin, 2009).\n\n25.Adeeb Khalid, _Islam after Communism: Religion and Politics in Central Asia_ (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007).\n\n26.The last major armed conflict in Central Asia was Tajikistan's civil war, the main fighting in which ended in 1996. See the Uppsala Conflict Database Project, available at: <http:\/\/ucdp.uu.se\/>\n\n27.University of Maryland, 'Global Terrorism Database' (2012), available at: <http:\/\/www.start.umd.edu\/gtd>\n\n28.Thomas Barnett, _The Pentagon's New Map: War and Peace in the Twenty-First Century_ (New York: Berkeley Books, 2004).\n\n29.Chris Seiple, 'Uzbekistan: Civil Society in the Heartland', _Orbis_ 49:2 (2005), pp. 245\u201359.\n\n30.Donald Rumsfeld, _Annual Report to the President and to Congress_ (Washington, DC: Department of Defense, 2002), p. 11, available at: <http:\/\/www.nti.org\/e_research\/official_docs\/dod\/2002\/81502DOD.pdf>\n\n31.See Heathershaw and Megoran, 'Contesting Danger'.\n\n32.Edward Schatz, _Modern Clan Politics: The Power of 'Blood' in Kazakhstan and Beyond_ (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2004); Kathleen Collins, _Clan Politics and Regime Transition in Central Asia_ (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006).\n\n33.Olivier Roy, _The New Central Asia: The Creation of Nations_ (London: I.B. Tauris, 1998).\n\n34.Scott Radnitz, _Weapons of the Wealthy_ (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2010); Jesse Driscoll, _Warlords and Coalition Politics in Post-Soviet States_ (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015); Madeleine Reeves, _Border Work: Spatial Lives of the State in Rural Central Asia_ (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2014).\n\n35.Doolotkeldieva and Heathershaw, 'State as Resource, Mediator and Performer'.\n\n36.Nicholas Shaxson, _Treasure Islands: Tax Havens and the Men Who Stole the World_ (London: Random House, 2011), p. 70.\n\n37.Ibid., p. 8; Ronen Palan, Richard Murphy and Christian Chavagneux, _Tax Havens: How Globalization Really Works_ (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009), p.51.\n\n38.Steve LeVine, _The Oil and the Glory: The Pursuit of Empire and Fortune on the Caspian Sea_ (New York: Random House, 2007); Global Witness, _Risky Business: Kazakhstan, Kazakhmys Plc and the London Stock Exchange_ (July 2010).\n\n39.Global Witness, _Grave Secrecy: How a Dead Man Can Own a UK Company and Other Hidden Stories about Hidden Company Ownership from Kyrgyzstan and Beyond_ (June 2012); Cooley, _Great Games, Local Rules_ , pp. 120\u201330.\n\n40.Sumie Nakaya, 'Aid and Transition from a War Economy to an Oligarchy in Post-War Tajikistan', _Central Asian Survey_ 28:3 (2009), pp. 259\u201373; John Heathershaw, 'Tajikistan amidst Globalization: State Failure or State Transformation?', _Central Asian Survey_ 30:1 (2011), pp. 147\u201368; John Helmer, 'The Tajik Arm Wrestle \u2013 Rusal Squeezes, Oleg Deripaska Threatens, but President Rahmon Gets the Upper Hand', _Dances with Bears_ (21 November 2007), available at: <http:\/\/johnhelmer.net\/?p=9864>; John Helmer, 'Tajik Aluminium Court Case Ends in London Defeat for President Rahmon', _Dances with Bears_ (23 November 2008), available at: <http:\/\/johnhelmer.net\/?p=632>\n\n41.Global Witness, _All that Gas? Five Reasons Why the European Union is Wrong to Bow to the Dictatorship of Turkmenistan_ (November 2009).\n\n42.OCCRP, 'Corruptistan' (21 March 2015), available at: <https:\/\/www.occrp.org\/en\/corruptistan\/uzbekistan\/>\n\n43.Seymour Hersh, 'The Price of Oil: What Was Mobil up to in Kazakhstan and Russia?', _New Yorker_ (9 July 2001), p. 51.\n\n44.Ibid.; LeVine, _The Oil and the Glory_.\n\n45.<http:\/\/www.bloomberg.com\/news\/articles\/2010-12-16\/cold-war-patriot-defense-helps-kazakh-go-between-beat-u-s-bribe-charges>\n\n46.In Kazakhstan foreign law firms include Baker & McKenzie (Chicago), Bracewell & Giuliani (Houston), Cadbourne & Parke (New York), Curtis, Mallet-Prevost, Colt & Mosle (New York), Denton Wilde Sapte (London), Dewey & LeBoeuf (New York), MacLeod Dixon (Calgary), McGuire Woods (Richmond, VA), Salans (Paris) and White & Case (New York), as well as the big four accounting firms.\n\n47.United States Senate, _Tax Haven Abuses: The Enablers, the Tools and Secrecy_ (Washington, DC: Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, 2006); United States Senate, _Keeping Foreign Corruption out of the U.S.: Four Case Histories_ (Washington, DC: Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, 2010); World Bank and United Nations Office for Drugs and Crime, _Stolen Asset Recovery (StAR) Initiative: Challenges, Opportunities and Action Plan_ (Washington, DC, 2007).\n\n48.Palan, Murphy and Chavagneux, _Tax Havens_ , p. ix.\n\n49.Peter Andreas, 'The Politics of Measuring Illicit Flows and Policy Effectiveness', in P. Andreas and K. Greenhill (eds.), _Sex, Drugs, and Body Counts: The Politics of Numbers in Global Crime and Punishment_ (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2010).\n\n50.Cooley and Sharman, 'Blurring the Line'.\n\n51.John F. Tierney, _Mystery at Manas: Strategic Blind Spots in the Department of Defense's Fuel Contracts in Kyrgyzstan \u2013 Report of the Majority Staff_ (Washington, DC: United States Congress, House of Representatives, Committee on Oversight and Government Reform: Subcommittee on National Security and Foreign Affairs, December 2010).\n\n52.Nakaya, 'Aid as Transition'; Heathershaw, 'Tajikistan amidst Globalization'.\n\n53.J.C. Sharman, _Havens in a Storm: The Struggle for Global Tax Regulation_ (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006), p. 6.\n\n54.Ibid.\n\n55.Ronen Palan, _The Offshore World: Sovereign Markets, Virtual Places, and Nomad Millionaires_ (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006); J.C. Sharman, 'Offshore and the New International Political Economy', _Review of International Political Economy_ 17:1 (2010), pp. 1\u201319.\n\n56.M.G. Findley, D.L. Nielson and J.C. Sharman, _Global Shell Games: Experiments in Transnational Relations_ (Cambridge University Press, 2014).\n\n57. _From Russia With Cash_ (8 July 2015), available at: <http:\/\/www.channel4.com\/programmes\/from-russia-with-cash>\n\nChapter 1: Inside-Outside, Onshore-Offshore: How Central Asia Went Global\n\n1.Claus Offe and Pierre Adler, 'Capitalism by Democratic Design? Democratic Theory Facing the Triple Transition in East Central Europe', _Social Research_ 58:4 (1991), pp. 865\u201392.\n\n2.Freedom House, _Nations in Transit 2016: Europe and Eurasia Brace for Impact_ , available at: <https:\/\/freedomhouse.org\/report\/nations-transit\/nations-transit-2016>\n\n3.In 2015, all five Central Asian states ranked in the bottom 15 per cent of the 168 states in Transparency International's 'Corruption Perceptions Index'; see <https:\/\/www.transparency.org\/country\/>\n\n4.See especially Adam Przeworski's warning, drawing upon the Latin American experience, that undertaking disruptive market reforms would lead to bouts of political backlash and instability: _Democracy and the Market: Political and Economic Reforms in Eastern Europe and Latin America_ (Cambridge University Press, 1991).\n\n5.Martha Brill Olcott, _Central Asia's Second Chance_ (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment, 2005).\n\n6.Eric McGlinchey, _Chaos, Violence, Dynasty: Politics and Islam in Central Asia_ (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2011).\n\n7.Schatz, _Modern Clan Politics_.\n\n8.Milada Anna Vachudova, _Europe Undivided: Democracy, Leverage, and Integration after Communism_ (Oxford University Press, 2005); Anna Grzymala-Busse and Abby Innes, 'Great Expectations: The EU and Domestic Political Competition in East Central Europe', _East European Politics and Societies_ 17.1 (2003), pp. 64\u201373.\n\n9.Alan A. Bevan and Saul Estrin, 'The Determinants of Foreign Direct Investment into European Transition Economies', _Journal of Comparative Economics_ 32.4 (2004), pp. 775\u201387.\n\n10.On values and the influence of OSCE and Council of Europe, see Rick Fawn, _International Organizations and Internal Conditionality: Making Norms Matter_ (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). On insincere human rights treaty ratifications, see Beth Simmons, _Mobilizing for Human Rights: International Law in Domestic Politics_ (Cambridge University Press, 2009).\n\n11.Marl\u00e8ne Laruelle and Sebastien Peyrouse, _Globalizing Central Asia: Geopolitics and the Challenges of Economic Development_ (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 2013).\n\n12.Cooley, _Great Games, Local Rules._\n\n13.David Lewis, 'Who's Socialising Whom? Regional Organisations and Contested Norms in Central Asia', _Europe-Asia Studies_ 64:7 (2012), pp. 1219\u201337.\n\n14.As Marl\u00e8ne Laruelle and Sebastien Peyrouse have argued, Central Asia's exposure to economic globalisation has been largely mediated by its economic relations and networks with China. Marl\u00e8ne Laruelle and S\u00e9bastien Peyrouse, _The Chinese Question in Central Asia: Domestic Order, Social Change, and the Chinese Factor_ (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012).\n\n15.Rawi Abdelal, _Capital Rules: The Construction of Global Finance_ (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007).\n\n16.However, scholars disagreed on whether it was EU material incentives or European norms that pushed this transformation. On the importance of incentives, see Frank Schimmelfennig and Ulrich Sedelmeier, 'Governance by Conditionality: EU Rule Transfer to the Candidate Countries of Central and Eastern Europe', _Journal of European Public Policy_ 11:4 (2004), pp. 661\u201379; Judith Kelley, 'International Actors on the Domestic Scene: Membership Conditionality and Socialization by International Institutions', _International Organization_ 58:3 (2004), pp. 425\u201357. On norms, see Alexandra Gheciu, 'Security Institutions as Agents of Socialization? NATO and the \"New Europe\"', _International Organization_ 59:4 (2005), pp. 973\u20131012; and Frank Schimmelfennig, 'International Socialization in the New Europe: Rational Action in an Institutional Environment', _European Journal of International Relations_ 6:1 (2000), pp. 109\u201339.\n\n17.Cooley, _Great Games, Local Rules_. pp. 31\u20132.\n\n18.On military assistance as quid pro quo for cooperation on Afghanistan, see Joshua Kucera, 'US Military Aid to Central Asia: Who Benefits?' (New York: Open Society Foundations, 2012).\n\n19.Cooley, _Great Games, Local Rules_ , Appendix 1.\n\n20.Rick Fawn, 'Battle Over the Box: International Election Observation Missions, Political Competition and Retrenchment in the Post-Soviet Space', _International Affairs_ 82:6 (2006), pp. 1133\u201353.\n\n21.Katharina Pistor and Igor Logvinenko, 'Legal Globalization and Transitions' (memo prepared for the Legal Globalization and Transitions Workshop, Columbia University, New York, 20 October 2015).\n\n22.See especially Kristian Wilson, 'The Role of Offshore Jurisdictions in Russia', _Russian Law Journal_ 3:2 (2015), pp. 119\u201336. Nougayr\u00e8de considers the 'weak property' rights explanation in the Russian and Central Asian context, but also offers important critiques emphasising the agency shown by post-Soviet elites; also Delphine Nougayr\u00e8de, 'Outsourcing Law in Post-Soviet Russia', _Journal of Eurasian Law_ 3:6 (2013), pp. 383\u2013449.\n\n23.'Russian Foreign Direct Investment and Tax Havens', Global Financial Integrity, 24 May 2014. On Russia and Cyprus, see <http:\/\/www.gfintegrity.org\/report\/country-case-study-russia>\n\n24.Svetlana Ledyaeva, P\u00e4ivi Karhunen, Riitta Kosonen and John Whalley, 'Offshore Foreign Direct Investment, Capital Round-Tripping, and Corruption: Empirical Analysis of Russian Regions', _Economic Geography_ 91:3 (2015), pp. 305\u201341.\n\n25.International Monetary Fund, as cited in Alexander Cooley and J. C. Sharman, 'Blurring the Line', p. 20. The Kazakh tax commissioner in 2012 publicly announced that 700 Kazakh companies had been registered in the BVI, noting that 'The money is being siphoned off, that's for sure.' Cited in 'Over 700 Kazakhstan companies are registered at British Virgin Islands', Tengrinews.kz (29 October 2012), originally accessed 2 November 2012, at: <http:\/\/en.tengrinews.kz\/companies\/Over-700-Kazakhstan-companies-are-registered-at-British-Virgin-Islands-14088\/>\n\n26.Global Witness, _It's a Gas_ , p. 5.\n\n27.International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), 'The Panama Papers: Politicians, Criminals and the Rogue Industry that Hides their Cash', available at: <https:\/\/panamapapers.icij.org>\n\n28.ICIJ, 'The Panama Papers: The Power Players', available at: <https:\/\/panamapapers.icij.org\/the_power_players\/>\n\n29.OCCRP, 'Kazakhstan: President's Grandson Hid Assets Offshore', available at: <https:\/\/www.occrp.org\/en\/panamapapers\/kazakh-presidents-grandson-offshores\/>\n\n30.Ibid.\n\n31.'Kazakhstan Refuses to Investigate Panama Paper Links to President's Family', _Newsweek_ (24 April 2016).\n\n32.Mansur Miroval, 'Uzbekistan: President's Daughter and the Panama Papers', _Al Jazeera_ (12 May 2016), available at: <http:\/\/www.aljazeera.com\/news\/2016\/05\/uzbekistan-president-daughter-panama-papers-160512081956459.html>\n\n33.Paolo Sorbello and Bradley Jardine, 'Central Asia, the Panama Papers, and the Myth of the Periphery', _OpenDemocracy_ (20 May 2016), available at: <https:\/\/www.opendemocracy.net\/od-russia\/paolo-sorbello-bradley-jardine\/central-asia-panama-papers-and-myth-of-periphery>\n\n34.The following discussion draws on the findings in Michael G. Findley, Daniel L. Nielson and Jason Campbell Sharman, _Global Shell Games: Experiments in Transnational Relations, Crime, and Terrorism_ (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014).\n\n35.'Haven Hypocrisy', _The_ _Economist_ (26 March 2009).\n\n36.Findley, Nielson and Sharman, _Global Shell Games_. The Central Asia-related findings are reproduced and summarised in Cooley and Sharman, 'Blurring the Line'.\n\n37.Jun Tang and Lishan Ai, 'Combating Money Laundering in Transition Countries: The Inherent Limitations and Practical Issues', _Journal of Money Laundering Control_ 13:3 (2010), p. 219.\n\n38.ICNL, 'A Mapping of Existing Initiatives to Address Legal Constraints on Foreign Funding of Civil Society' (1 July 2014), available at: <http:\/\/www.icnl.org\/research\/resources\/foreignfund\/A%20Mapping%20of%20Existing%20Initiatives%20to%20Address%20Legal%20Constraints%20on%20Foreign%20Funding%20of%20Civil%20Society,%20July%202014.pdf>\n\n39.Nougayr\u00e8de, 'Outsourcing Law in Post-Soviet Russia', p. 59, observes:\n\nThe poor state of the legal system in the former Soviet countries, combined with the preference of local elites to keep their assets abroad and engage in dispute resolution in Europe, provided very significant work opportunities for foreign lawyers, litigators, and courts. These disputes represented significant proceedings, even at the preliminary or interlocutory stages, which could last for years. By expanding party autonomy and reducing judicial discretion in connection with _forum non conveniens_ , at least in Europe, international jurisdictional machinery contributed to the outflow of post-Soviet disputes, but this outsourcing to foreign judges and tribunals of commercial dispute resolution was primarily led by the litigants themselves.\n\n40.'Russians in London: Super-Rich in Court', _Financial Times_ (7 October 2011).\n\n41.See 'No End in Sight to London Courtrooms' Oligarch Litigation Boom', _Financial Times_ (1 October 2013).\n\n42.Nougayr\u00e8de, 'Outsourcing Law in Post-Soviet Russia', pp. 46\u20138.\n\n43.Ibid., pp. 48\u20139.\n\n44.On the patchwork nature of international arbitration, see Gus Van Harten, _International Treaty Arbitration and Public Law_ (Oxford University Press, 2008).\n\n45.B. Sabahi and D.M. Ziyaeva, 'Investor State Arbitration in Central Asia', _Transnational Dispute Management_ 10:4 (2013), Appendix 1.\n\n46.'Kyrgyzstan: Arbitration Suits Weighing Kyrgyzstan Down', _Eurasianet_ (11 September 2014).\n\n47. _Valeri Belokon v Kyrgyz Republic_ , UNCITRAL Tribunal (24 October 2014), available at: <http:\/\/www.italaw.com\/sites\/default\/files\/case-documents\/ITA%20LAW%207008_0.pdf>\n\n48.'Canadian Court Freezes Kyrgyz Gold Mine Shares', _Eurasianet_ (15 October 2014), available at: <http:\/\/www.eurasianet.org\/node\/70446>\n\n49.Kahlitov Vikotorovich, 'Settlement of Investment Disputes with Kyrgyz Republic: Expropriation of Investments on the Example of Kyrgyz Commercial Banks' (senior thesis, American University of Central Asia, Bishkek, 2013), p. 28.\n\n50.Sabahi and Ziyaeva, 'Investor State Arbitration in Central Asia'.\n\n51.See, for instance, the Turkmenistan\u2013Turkey dispute over which language version of their 1992 BIT was the agreement's controlling text. 'Heavy Blow to Turkish Investor's Claims against Turkmenistan', _CIS Arbitration Forum_ (12 May 2012), available at: <http:\/\/www.cisarbitration.com\/2012\/05\/30\/heavy-blow-to-the-turkish-investors-claims-against-turkmenistan\/>\n\n52.Michael A. Losco, 'Charting a New Course: Metal-Tech v. Uzbekistan and the Treatment of Corruption in Arbitration', _Duke Law Journal Online_ 64 (2014), pp. 37\u201352.\n\n53.Ibid.\n\n54.In one influential social science experiment that examined parking ticket violations among UN staff members enjoying diplomatic immunity in New York City, Fisman and Migel found high correlations between parking violations and home country corruption measures, suggesting that 'cultural or social norms related to corruption are quite persistent: even when stationed thousands of miles away, diplomats behave in a manner highly reminiscent of government officials in the home country'. Raymond Fisman and Edward Miguel, 'Corruption, Norms, and Legal Enforcement: Evidence from Diplomatic Parking Tickets', _Journal of Political Economy_ 115:6 (2007), p. 1045.\n\n55.'Like Father, Like Daughter', _RFE\/RL_ (30 September 2009), available at: <http:\/\/www.rferl.org\/content\/Like_Father_Like_Daughter\/1839891.html>\n\n56.See 'Turkmen Gas is a Family Business', _Chronicles of Turkmenistan_ (3 February 2010), available at: <http:\/\/archive.chrono-tm.org\/en\/?id=1276>; and 'Wikileaks: The Turkmenistan Fallout Begins?', _Eurasianet_ (22 December 2010), available at: <http:\/\/www.eurasianet.org\/node\/62625>\n\n57.US Embassy Ashgabat, 'Turkmenistan: Former Deputy Chairman for Oil and Gas Tachberdi Tagoyev Arrested', 09ASHGABAT1288 (13 October 2009), available at: <https:\/\/www.wikileaks.ch\/cable\/2009\/10\/09ASHGABAT1288.html>\n\n58.Alexander Cooley and J.C. Sharman, 'Transnational Corruption and the Globalised Individual' (paper presented to the 2016 International Studies Association, Annual Convention Atlanta); 'This Swiss Lawyer Is Helping Governments Get Rich off Selling Passports', _Bloomberg_ (11 March 2015), available at: <http:\/\/www.bloombergcom\/news\/articles\/2015-03-11\/passport-king-christian-kalin-helps-nations-sell-citizenship>\n\n59.Cooley and Sharman, 'Transnational Corruption and the Globalised Individual'.\n\n60.Two prominent examples include: Maksat Arip, part-owner of the Kazakh paper firm Kagazy plc, whose assets were frozen by the UK High Court on accusations of fraud and tax evasion. He was found in possession of both Cypriot and St Kitts and Nevis passports. See 'London-Listed Firm Raided by Police in Almaty', _Reuters_ (11 December 2013). Also see the case involving Rustem Tursunbayev, a Kazakh businessman living in Canada, which he entered with his St Kitts and Nevis passport. Kazakhstan has requested his extradition on the grounds of embezzlement and asset-stripping from a state-owned nuclear company. 'Kazakhstan Asks Canada to Extradite Millionaire Accused of Stealing from State-Owned Nuclear Agency', _National Post_ (4 May 2012).\n\n61.Cooley and Sharman, 'Transnational Corruption and the Globalised Individual'.\n\n62.See Ayelete Shachar and Rainer Baubock, 'Should Citizenship be for Sale?', Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies Research Paper 2014\/01 (2014).\n\n63.'Children of Uzbekistan's Elite Find a Playground in Latvia', _RFE\/RL_ (14 May 2016), available at: <http:\/\/www.rferl.org\/content\/children-of-uzbekistan-elite-playground-latvia-golden-visa-program\/27734370.html>\n\n64.On the role of such firms, see Cooley and Sharman, 'Transnational Corruption and the Globalised Individual'. One citizenship programme provider notes: 'Kazakhstan, part of CIS and former Soviet Union, is another country from where the high-net-worth individuals have shown significant interest in making overseas investment. This is done by some to secure their investment and by some to get a residence status or even citizenship of another country which could then secure future for the investors and their family. Europe has been one of the attractive destinations for these high-net-worth individuals. European financial institutions and real-estate have observed significant investment from the investors of Russia and Kazakhstan.' 'Alternate Residence and Citizenship Options for Russian and CIS investors', HF Corporation, available at: <http:\/\/www.hfcorporation.co\/2010\/10\/11\/alternate-residence-in-an-eu-country-for-russian-and-cis-investors\/>\n\n65.Migration Advisory Committee, _Tier 1 (Investor) Route: Economic Benefits and Thresholds_ (London: February 2014), p 22.\n\n66.Home Office, _Tier 1 (Investor)_ (12 April 2016), available at: <https:\/\/www.gov.uk\/government\/uploads\/system\/uploads\/attachment_data\/file\/516302\/Tier-1-investor-v8.pdf>\n\n67.Global Witness, _Blood Red Carpet_ (March 2015), available at: <https:\/\/www.globalwitness.org\/en\/reports\/surrey-mansion-used-hide-suspect-funds\/>\n\n68.Ibid.\n\n69.'Rakhat Aliyev: Businessman and Diplomat who Exploited his Connections to Make a Fortune but was Due to Stand Trial for Murder', _Independent_ (26 February 2015).\n\n70.'The 10 Most Expensive Luxury Real Estate Sales in Los Angeles for 2013', _Pinnacle List_ (13 February 2014), available at: <http:\/\/www.thepinnaclelist.com\/2014\/02\/13\/13463\/the-10-most-expensive-luxury-real-estate-sales-in-los-angeles-for-2013\/>\n\n71.'Prince Andrew and the Kazakh Billionaire', _Guardian_ (29 November 2010).\n\n72.Global Witness, _Mystery on Baker Street._\n\n73.See Stephen Kotkin, _Uncivil Society: 1989 and the Implosion of the Communist Establishment_ (New York: Random House, 2009). Kotkin's provocative argument is that the term 'civil society' is hardly appropriate for describing the relatively small number of political dissidents and protestors, with little history of meaningful organisation, who were mythologised by the 1989 anti-Communist mass protests. By contrast, Kotkin argues that the Communist Party members, especially the apparatchiks, could aptly be termed an actual 'uncivil society', numbering in the millions, positioning themselves within their respective agencies and bureaucracies, gaining access to international perks, and trading support and political favours with each other.\n\n74.The claim that NGOs are part of greater principled transnational networks that disrupt state sovereignty is most forcefully made in Margaret Keck and Kathryn Sikkink, _Activists Beyond Borders: Advocacy Networks in International Politics_ (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997).\n\n75.See Cooley, _Great Games, Local Rules_ , Appendix 1 for a list of NGO restrictions by country.\n\n76.See Human Rights in China (HRIC), 'Counter-Terrorism and Human Rights: The Impact of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization' (March 2011), available at: <http:\/\/www.hrichina.org\/sites\/default\/files\/publication_pdfs\/2011-hric-sco-whitepaper-full.pdf>; and International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH), 'Shanghai Cooperation Organisation: A Vehicle for Human Rights Violations' (Paris: September 2012), available at: <https:\/\/www.fidh.org\/IMG\/pdf\/sco_report.pdf>\n\n77.HRIC, 'Counter-Terrorism and Human Rights'; FIDH, 'Shanghai Cooperation Organisation'.\n\n78.Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan, _The New Nobility: The Restoration of Russia's Security State and the Enduring Legacy of the KGB_ (New York: Public Affairs, 2011).\n\n79.Interpol, 'Fact Sheet: Red Notice System', available at: <http:\/\/www.interpol.int\/en\/News-and-media\/Publications2\/Fact-sheets\/International-Notices-system>\n\n80.Fair Trials International, _Strengthening Respect for Human Rights_ , _Strengthening INTERPOL_ (November 2013), available at: <https:\/\/www.fairtrials.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/Strengthening-respect-for-human-rights-strengthening-INTERPOL5.pdf>; see also the account of outspoken Kremlin critic Bill Browder, who adopts 'Red Notice' as the title of his account of corruption in Russia: William Browder, _Red Notice: A True Story of High Finance, Murder and One Man's Fight for Justice_ (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014).\n\n81.Keith A. Darden, 'Blackmail as a Tool of State Domination: Ukraine under Kuchma', _East European Constitutional Review_ 10 (Spring\/Summer 2001), pp. 67\u201371.\n\n82.'French Court Rules against Libel Claim from Uzbekistan 'Dictator's Daughter', _Telegraph_ (1 July 2011).\n\n83.'Uzbekistan: Karimova Libel Trial Delivers More Scandals; MPs Demand EU Probe', _Eurasianet_ (10 June 2011), available at: <http:\/\/www.eurasianet.org\/node\/63664>\n\n84.Casey Michel, 'Kazakhstan Goes After Opposition Media in New York Federal Court', _Diplomat_ (7 August 2015), available at: <http:\/\/thediplomat.com\/2015\/08\/kazakhstan-goes-after-opposition-media-in-new-york-federal-court\/>\n\n85.Edward Lemon and Daniel Rosset, 'Offshore Central Asia: Switzerland as a Site for Political Struggles between Kazakh Elites', _Perspectives on Central Asia_ (7 May 2015), pp. 9\u201313.\n\n86.Casey Michel, 'Dismissing Disclosure and Free Agent Diplomacy' (MA thesis, Harriman Institute, Columbia University, 2015).\n\n87.David Trilling, 'Tajikistan Using DC Proxies to Build Support for Rogun Dam', _Eurasianet_ (13 February 2014), available at: <http:\/\/www.eurasianet.org\/node\/68042>\n\n88.Ibid.\n\n89.See 'Kazakhstan: Conflict-of-Interest Debate Flares in Washington', _Eurasianet_ (2 June 2009), available at: <http:\/\/www.eurasianet.org\/departments\/insightb\/articles\/eav060309b.shtml>; and 'Chuck Hagel's Think Tank, Its Donors, and Intellectual Independence', _New Republic_ (12 February 2013), available at: <https:\/\/newrepublic.com\/article\/112398\/chuck-hagels-atlantic-council-foreign-donors-and-independence>.\n\n90.'Jack Straw Criticised for Accepting Part-Time Job Paid for by Kazakhstan', _Independent_ (15 February 2015), available at: <http:\/\/www.independent.co.uk\/news\/world\/politics\/jack-straw-criticised-for-accepting-part-time-job-paid-for-by-kazakhstan-10057426.html>\n\n91.See Adrien Fauve, 'Global Astana: Nation Branding as a Legitimization Tool for Authoritarian Regimes', _Central Asian Survey_ 34:1 (2015), pp. 110\u201324.\n\n92.Cooley, _Great Games, Local Rules_ , Chapter 6.\n\n93.This is an extension of the argument found in Heathershaw, 'Tajikistan amidst Globalization'.\n\nChapter 2: Kazakhstan's Most Wanted: Economic Fugitive or Democratic Champion? The Case of Mukhtar Ablyazov\n\n1.See Sally Cummings, _Kazakhstan: Power and the Elite_ (London: I.B. Tauris, 2002); and Martha Brill Olcott, _Kazakhstan: Unfulfilled Promise_ (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment, 2010).\n\n2.See the favourable portrayal in Jonathan Aitken, _Nazarbayev and the Making of Kazakhstan: From Communism to Capitalism_ (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2009).\n\n3.For critical expos\u00e9s authored by exiled members of the regime's inner circle, see the books published by the president's late former son-in-law, Rakhat Aliyev, _The Godfather-in-Law: The Real Documentation_ (Berlin: Trafo, 2009); and the former mayor of Almaty and energy minister, Viktor Khrapunov, _Nazarbayev \u2013 Our Friend the Dictator: Kazakhstan's Difficult Path to Democracy_ (Stuttgart: ibidem-Verlag, 2015).\n\n4.Edward Schatz and Elena Maltseva, 'Kazakhstan's Authoritarian Persuasion', _Post-Soviet Affairs_ 28:1 (2012), pp. 45\u201365; Edward Schatz, 'Transnational Image Making and Soft Authoritarian Kazakhstan', _Slavic Review_ 67:1 (2008), pp. 50\u201362.\n\n5.See especially Schatz, _Modern Clan Politics_ ; and Sebastien Peyrouse, 'The Kazakh Neopatrimonial Regime: Balancing Uncertainties Among the \"Family\", Oligarchs and Technocrats', _Demokratizatsiya_ 20:4 (2012), pp. 301\u201324.\n\n6.See, for instance, Nariman Gizitdinov and Jason Corcoran, 'The $5 Billion Heist', _Bloomberg Markets_ (September 2012), pp. 71\u20138.\n\n7.See 'How Far will Nazarbayev go to Take Down Ablyazov?', _RFE\/RL_ (7 June 2013), available at: <http:\/\/www.rferl.org\/content\/kazakhstan-nazarbaev-ablyazov\/25010488.html>\n\n8.International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID), _KT Asia Investment Group (Claimant) v Republic of Kazakhstan (Defendant)_ , ICSID Case No. ARB\/09\/8 (17 October 2013), paragraph 15.\n\n9. _KT Asia Investment Group v Republic of Kazakhstan_ , paragraph 15.\n\n10.See Philip Alexander, 'One Bank, Two Stories', _The Banker_ (August 2010); and Gizitdinov and Corcoran, 'The $5 Billion Heist'.\n\n11.Alexander, 'One Bank, Two Stories'.\n\n12.'Kazakh Bank Lost Billions in Western Investments', _New York Times_ (27 November 2009).\n\n13.Ibid.\n\n14.Ibid.\n\n15.Gizitdinov and Corcoran, 'The $5 Billion Heist', p. 73.\n\n16.US Embassy Astana, 'Kazakhstan: The Ablyazov Factor', 09ASTANA1762_a (2 October 2009), available at: <https:\/\/wikileaks.org\/plusd\/cables\/09ASTANA1762_a.html>\n\n17.Marchenko estimates that these actions constitute the origins of the embezzlement allegations. US Embassy Astana, 'Kazakhstan: The Ablyazov Factor'.\n\n18.'Kazakh Bank Lost Billions in Western Investments'.\n\n19.'Billions Vanish in Kazakh Banking Scandal', _Wall Street Journal_ (1 January 2014).\n\n20.Ibid.\n\n21.Ibid.\n\n22. _KT Asia Investment Group v Republic of Kazakhstan_.\n\n23.'Mr. Ablyazov testified that he wished to protect his 75% interest in BTA from expropriation by President Nazarbayev by holding it through different companies situated outside of Kazakhstan.' _KT Asia Investment Group v Republic of Kazakhstan_ , paragraph 13.\n\n24.Ibid., paragraph 14. Further, according to the transcript: 'Given the position of trust between Mr. Ablyazov and his associates, the latter would implement any decision of the former by way of instructions to the nominee director of the relevant company.'\n\n25.Ibid., paragraph 13.\n\n26.Ibid., paragraph 179.\n\n27.Ibid., paragraph 182.\n\n28.Ibid., paragraph 90. Interestingly enough, in the tribunal itself, the panel found that though Ablyazov maintained the right to bring the case against BAT under the Dutch\u2013Kazakh BIT, given KT Asia's registry in the Netherlands, KT Asia was not entitled to protections from BTA under the BIT because the company had made no 'investment', implying a 'transborder flux of capital', nor any contribution nor 'intention of future contribution' that could qualify as investment in BTA.\n\n29.As recounted in ibid., paragraph 26.\n\n30.Ibid.\n\n31.In an interview with the _Guardian_ , Ablyazov claimed 'For a long time the president was asking me to transfer 50% of the bank to him, free of charge. Requests were followed by threats that if I did not do it I would be imprisoned and they would take away my business. This situation dragged on for years. Finally, using the excuse of the financial crisis, the president took over. He kept telling me directly he was afraid of me and that I would seize power. \"If I control your business, I control you,\" he said.' See 'Court Documents Allege \"corrupt\" Kazakhstan Regime's Link to FTSE Firms', _Guardian_ (2 December 2010).\n\n32.International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, 'Secrecy for Sale: Inside the Global Offshore Money Maze' (Center for Public Integrity, 2013), p. 11, available at: <http:\/\/cloudfront-files-1.publicintegrity.org\/documents\/pdfs\/ICIJ%20Secrecy%20for%20Sale.pdf>\n\n33.Philip, 'One Bank, Two Stories'.\n\n34.'Sleuths Hunt for Kazakh Bank's Missing $6 Billion', _Bloomberg_ (9 January 2014).\n\n35.As reported in 'Kazakh Banks: Crippled by Bad Debts', _Financial Times_ (1 August 2013).\n\n36.'Sleuths Hunt for Kazakh Bank's Missing $6 Billion'.\n\n37.Elliot Wilson, 'The Hunt for Mukhtar Ablyazov: Banker, Criminal, Fugitive, Victim?', _Euromoney_ (January 2014).\n\n38.Ibid. The article further notes that: 'Receivers say it's the most complex case they've worked on in decades. More new law has been written as a result of five years of almost constant written and verbal testimony, rebuttal witnesses, and cloak-and-dagger surveillance than any case in living memory.'\n\n39.See Jean Pierre Brun et al., _Public Wrongs, Private Actions: Civil Lawsuits to Recover Stolen Assets_ (World Bank Publications, 2014), Box 5.4, p. 75. Ablyazov's court judgments are showcased in the World Bank's Stolen Asset Recovery report.\n\n40.High Court of Justice, _JSC BTA Bank v Mukhtar Ablyazov & Ors_, EWHC 2833 (QB) (2009), paragraph 5, available at: <http:\/\/www.bailii.org\/ew\/cases\/EWHC\/QB\/2009\/2833.html>\n\n41.Brun et al., _Public Wrongs_ , Box 9.2, p. 113.\n\n42.High Court of Justice, _JSC BTA Bank v Mukhtar Ablyazov and others,_ EWHC 27883 (Comm) (2014), paragraphs 19 and 21, available at: <http:\/\/www.bailii.org\/ew\/cases\/EWHC\/Comm\/2014\/2788.html>\n\n43.'Arrest Warrant for Kazakh Billionaire Accused of One of the World's Biggest Frauds', _Guardian_ (16 February 2012).\n\n44.'Banker Mukhtar Ablyazov \"Fled to France on coach\"', _Telegraph_ (24 February 2012).\n\n45.Quoted in 'Court Rules Against Ablyazov in $2bn Suit', _Financial Times_ (23 November 2012).\n\n46.'Billions Vanish in Kazakh Banking Scandal'.\n\n47.Gizitdinov and Corcoran, 'The $5 Billion Heist'.\n\n48.Ibid.\n\n49.'Fugitive Oligarch's \u00a325m Mansion Sold to Pay Creditors', _Telegraph_ (29 April 2015).\n\n50.Barbara Junisbai and Azamat Junisbai, 'The Democratic Choice of Kazakhstan: A Case Study in Economic Liberalization, Intraelite Cleavage, and Political Opposition', _Demokratizatsiya_ 13:3 (2005), pp. 373\u201392.\n\n51.Ibid. Also see Barbara Junisbai and Azamat Junisbai, 'A Tale of Two Kazakhstans: Sources of Political Cleavage and Conflict in the Post-Soviet Period', _Europe-Asia Studies_ 62:2 (2010), pp. 235\u201369.\n\n52.Junisbai and Junisbai, 'Democratic Choice of Kazakhstan', p. 374.\n\n53.'Political Turmoil Hits Kazakhstan as Nazarbayev Sacks Top Officials', _Eurasianet_ (26 November 2001), available at: <http:\/\/www.eurasianet.org\/departments\/insight\/articles\/eav112701.shtml>\n\n54.A European Parliament resolution on Kazakhstan in 2003 characterised the sentencing of Ablyazov and Zhakiyanov 'on politically motivated charges relating to so-called \"abuse of office\" and \"misappropriation of state funds\"'. European Parliament, 'Resolution on Kazakhstan' (13 February 2003), available at: http:\/\/www.europarl.europa.eu\/sides\/getDoc.do?pubRef=-\/\/EP\/\/TEXT+TA+P5-TA-2003-0064+0+DOC+XML+V0\/\/EN&language=CS\n\n55.In an interview with _RFE\/RL_ , Yevgeny Zhovtis, the head of the Kazakhstan International Bureau for Human Rights and Rule of Law, commented: 'Nazarbaev to a certain extent felt betrayed . . . Because he thinks that he provided them the space to become wealthy, to become well-known, to make a career in state service or in business, and they challenged him. When he pardoned Ablyazov in 2003 and allowed him to return to business in exchange for a promise not to be involved in politics and then found out that he was again involved in politics, of course Nazarbayev felt betrayed twice.' See 'How Far will Nazarbayev go to Take Down Ablyazov?'.\n\n56.US Embassy London, '(C) Kazakhstan: Ousted BTA Bank Head Ablyazov Seeks Regime Change from London', 09LONDON712 (23 March 2009), reprinted at: <http:\/\/www.telegraph.co.uk\/news\/wikileaks-files\/london-wikileaks\/8305198\/C-KAZAKHSTAN-OUSTED-BTA-BANK-HEAD-ABLYAZOV-SEEKS-REGIME-CHANGE-FROM-LONDON.html>\n\n57.'How Far will Nazarbayev go to Take Down Ablyazov?'.\n\n58.US Embassy Astana, 'Alga Leader Discusses Ablyazov, Two New Administrative Cases Against His Unregistered Party', 09ASTANA870 (21 May 2009), available at: <https:\/\/wikileaks.org\/plusd\/cables\/09ASTANA870_a.html>\n\n59.US Embassy London, 'Ousted BTA Bank Head Ablyazov Seeks Regime Change from London'.\n\n60.Ibid.\n\n61.'Billions Vanish in Kazakh Banking Scandal'.\n\n62.'Court Documents Allege \"Corrupt\" Kazakhstan Regime's Link to FTSE Firms'.\n\n63.Detailed in 'Kazakh Spat Casts Light on China Deals: Exiled Banker Alleges Chinese Oil Firm Routed $166 Million to Associate of Top Oil Executive, as Part of 2003 State Sale', _Wall Street Journal_ (26 March 2010).\n\n64.These denials are quoted in the article: 'In a statement, Magwells, a London-based law firm representing Mr. Kulibayev, said its client is not, and has never been, a shareholder in Darley, and wasn't involved in the Aktobe Munaigaz transaction.' London lawyer David Price, the representative of Mr Arvind Tiku, the business associate named in the story, said Mr Ablyazov's account of the deal 'does not provide a true reflection of the transaction', and the facts as stated in it were 'incomplete and inaccurate'. Price's response (quoted in ibid.) continues:\n\nIn part . . . the account does not reflect economic conditions which played an important part in the outcome of the Aktobe Munaigas transaction, including oil prices he says trebled between 2003 and 2005. Mr. Tiku said he had made full and open disclosure to the Kazakh investigating authorities, but said that 'due to confidentiality obligations' he was unable to provide further comment.\n\n65.'CNPC said Mr. Ablyazov's claims were \"groundless and libelous.\" In a statement, the company's Hong Kong- and New York-listed subsidiary PetroChina said it \"conducts its international business according to best business practice, with high integrity and in full compliance with regulations.\"' Quoted in ibid.\n\n66.Quoted in ibid.\n\n67.Ibid.\n\n68.See 'Freedom of the Press in Kazakhstan', _BBC Kyrgyz.com_ (22 February 2010), available at: <http:\/\/www.bbc.com\/kyrgyz\/news\/story\/2010\/02\/100222_pressfreedom.shtml>\n\n69.See 'Kazakhstan: The News Weekly that Won't be Silenced', _Eurasianet_ (29 March 2011), available at: <http:\/\/www.eurasianet.org\/node\/63176>\n\n70.For background, see Human Rights Watch, _Striking Oil, Striking Workers: Violations of Labor Rights in Kazakhstan's Oil Sector_ (2012).\n\n71.Myles Smith, 'Zhanaozen Trials Set to Leave Many Unanswered Questions', _CACI Analyst_ (30 May 2012).\n\n72.Ibid.\n\n73.See Freedom House, _Kozlov Case File: Final Monitoring Report on the Trial of Vladimir Kozlov, Akzhanat Aminov, and Serik Sapargali_ (December 2012); and Human Rights Watch, _Striking Oil_.\n\n74.Freedom House, _Kozlov Case File_ , p. 2.\n\n75.Ibid., pp. 7\u20138.\n\n76.As quoted in ibid., p. 9.\n\n77.For the transcript, see ibid., Appendix 7.\n\n78.In one passage (ibid., pp. 43\u20134), Ablyazov reportedly says:\n\nIn general, I mean, here I've been fighting constantly against the authorities for ten years. But within myself, I am convinced that no earlier and no later than by the end of the next year, the government must fall. And that's it. In principle, this is real. We just have to work on this. I was especially convinced at the beginning of this year, when we all started together to stir things up, and the authorities started to come loose, they were incapable. They were incapable last year. And right now it's very important [to build] on these dissatisfactions, the huge quantity, not to get scared and then our ranks will increase. And that's why I'm sure that by the end of the next year, if we continue, we will be able to break the government. That's why just yesterday I said, from here I can see that the regime will fall. _I'm also convinced that by the end of next year we can topple this government_ [italics in original]. That's why I think that we have to find the weak spots in the government: oil workers, miners, debtors and everyone in order to merge them all into one, into one place, and that will have enormous force. And set the government aside. And from there \u2013 the most important is that we will integrate ourselves into this government.\n\n79.'Kazakhstan in Legal Move to Ban Opposition Parties and Media', _Reuters_ (21 November 2012).\n\n80.Dossym Satpayev and Tolgany Umbetaliyeva, 'The Protests in Zhanaozen and the Kazakh Oil Sector: Conflicting Interests in a Rentier State', _Journal of Eurasian Studies_ 6 (2015), p. 127.\n\n81.'Main Opposition Media Silenced in Space of a Month', _Reporters Without Borders_ (28 December 2012), available at: <http:\/\/en.rsf.org\/kazakhstan-main-opposition-media-silenced-in-28-12-2012,43751.html>\n\n82.Quoted in 'Foreign Minister Reveals the Ugly Truth on Exile Banker Mukhtar Ablyazov', _Tengrinews_ (1 February 2013), available at: <http:\/\/en.tengrinews.kz\/politics_sub\/Foreign-Minister-reveals-ugly-truth-on-exile-banker-Mukhtar-16549\/>\n\n83.'\"Trojan Horse\" Raid Ends 18-Month Hunt for Kazakh Banker Mukhtar Ablyazov', _Independent_ (4 August 2013).\n\n84.See Adam Hug (ed.), _Shelter from the Storm? The Asylum, Refuge and Extradition Situation Facing Activists from the Former Soviet Union in the CIS and Europe_ (London: Foreign Policy Centre, 2014). Moreover, the security services of these countries have conducted several operations and renditions on each other's territory even without legal justification (see Chapter 2).\n\n85.'French Court Cancels Kazakh Tycoon Ablyazov's Extradition to Russia', _Reuters_ (9 December 2016), available at: <http:\/\/www.reuters.com\/article\/us-bta-ablyazov-extradition-idUSKBN13Y2FC>\n\n86.On Kazakhstan's use of the Red Notice system for political ends, see Mario Savino, 'Global Administrative Law Meets Soft Powers: The Uncomfortable Case of Interpol Red Notices', _NYU Journal of International Law and Politics_ 43 (2010), pp. 263\u2013336.\n\n87.European Parliament, Subcommittee on Human Rights, 'Question to the EEAS\/Commission' (Brussels, 10\u201311 July 2013), p. 1.\n\n88.See Human Rights Watch, _Italy's 'Extraordinary Rendition to Kazakhstan'_ (22 July 2013), available at: <https:\/\/www.hrw.org\/news\/2013\/07\/22\/dispatches-italys-extraordinary-rendition-kazakhstan>; and Amnesty International, _Italian Government Must Ensure Accountability for Illegal Expulsion to Kazakhstan_ (16 July 2013), available at: <https:\/\/www.amnesty.org\/en\/latest\/news\/2013\/07\/italian-government-must-ensure-accountability-illegal-expulsion-kazakhstan\/>\n\n89.'UN Human Rights Experts Urge Italy to Seek Return of Illegally Deported Kazakh Mother and Daughter', United Nations Human Rights, Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (18 July 2013), available at: http:\/\/www.ohchr.org\/FR\/NewsEvents\/Pages\/DisplayNews.aspx?NewsID=13559&LangID=E\n\n90.Cooley, _Great Games, Local Rules_ , pp. 103\u20138.\n\n91.'Deportation of Kazakhs Frays Italy's Government', _New York Times_ (18 July 2013).\n\n92.'Silvio Berlusconi's Ally \"Rendered Dissident's Family to Kazakhstan\"', _Independent_ (9 July 2013).\n\n93.Riccardo Bellandi, 'Who Decides Foreign and Defense Policy in Italy?', _Italian Politics_ 29 (2014), pp. 201\u20133.\n\n94.'Kazakh Dissident Ablyazov's Family Allowed Back in Italy', _BBC News_ (28 December 2013).\n\n95.'Kazakh Envoys in Rome Accused of Kidnap', _Financial Times_ (24 September 2013).\n\n96.Amnesty International, _Spain Set to Extradite Man to Kazakhstan Despite Torture Risk_ (8 November 2013), available at: <https:\/\/www.amnesty.org\/en\/latest\/news\/2013\/11\/aleksandr-pavlov-extradition\/>\n\n97.'Isabel Santos in Madrid to Discuss the Extradition Case of Aleksandr Pavlov', _OSCE Newsroom_ (18 October 2013), available at: <http:\/\/www.osce.org\/pa\/111151>\n\n98.As mentioned in 'Kazakh Fugitive's Associate Freed From Czech Jail', _RFE\/RL_ (20 March 2014), available at: <http:\/\/www.rferl.org\/content\/kazakhstan-czech-release-paraskevich-ablyazov-case\/25304021.html>; for the story, see 'Hay un avi\u00f3n esperando para llevarse a Pavlov', _El Pa\u00eds_ (1 March 2014), available at: <http:\/\/politica.elpais.com\/politica\/2014\/03\/01\/actualidad\/1393692630_197617.html>\n\n99.'Ablyazov's Former Head of Security Seeks Political Asylum in Spain', _TengriNews_ (13 August 2014), available at: <http:\/\/en.tengrinews.kz\/politics_sub\/Ablyazovs-former-head-of-security-seeks-political-asylum-in-Spain-255354\/>\n\n100.'As Clock Ticks, Ablyazov Associate Waits For Czech Asylum Ruling', _RFE\/RL_ (15 October 2013), available at: <http:\/\/www.rferl.org\/content\/kazakhstan-ablyazov-pareskevich-czech-extradition\/25137599.html>\n\n101.'Kazakh Fugitive's Associate Freed From Czech Jail'.\n\n102.'Kazakhstan Accuses Russian Nationalist Of Inciting Hatred', _RFE\/RL_ (18 November 2014), available at: <http:\/\/www.rferl.org\/content\/kazakh-belov-potkin-ablyazov-arrests-extradition-france-russia-ukraine\/26697449.html>\n\n103.'Police Say He Helped Steal $5 Billion, But Russia's Opposition Wants to Save Alexander Belov', _Global Voices_ (11 November 2014), available at: <https:\/\/globalvoicesonline.org\/2014\/11\/11\/police-say-he-helped-steal-5-billion-dollars-but-the-russian-opposition-wants-tosave-alexander-belov\/>\n\n104.See 'Nichevo natsionalistichnovo prosto biznes [Nothing to Do with Nationalism, Just Business]', _Kommersant_ (15 October 2014), available at: <http:\/\/www.kommersant.ru\/doc\/2590480>\n\n105.'For Exiled Activist, Kazakhstan Is Out Of Sight, But Never Out Of Mind', _RFE\/RL_ (22 June 2014), available at: <http:\/\/www.rferl.org\/content\/kazakhstan-ketebaev-exiled-activist\/25431090.html>\n\n106.See 'Spanish Court Approves Arrest of Kazakh Opposition Figure', _RFE\/RL_ (29 December 2014), available at: <http:\/\/www.rferl.org\/content\/kazakhstan-opposition-spain\/26767375.html>\n\n107.See 'Muratbek Ketebayev Left Spain and Went Back to Poland. Spain Rejected the Kazakh Request for Extradition', _Open Dialogue Foundation_ (3 March 2015), available at: <http:\/\/en.odfoundation.eu\/a\/6074,muratbek-ketebayev-left-spain-and-went-back-to-poland-spain-rejected-the-kazakh-request-for-extradition>\n\n108.For a timeline, see <http:\/\/www.rferl.org\/content\/kazakhstan-rakhat-aliev-timeline\/26867151.html>\n\n109.'Interpol Drops Arrest Warrant against Kazakhstani Opposition Leader', _Eurasianet_ (25 June 2002), available at: <http:\/\/www.eurasianet.org\/departments\/insight\/articles\/eav062602a.shtml>\n\n110.'Kazakhstan City Sues Former Mayor with U.S. Ties Alleging $300 Million Fraud, International Money Laundering Scheme Including Beverly Hills Mansions, Luxury Cars', _Business Wire_ (14 May 2014).\n\n111.'Kazakh City Claims Mayor Looted It', _Courthouse News Service_ (14 May 2014), available at: <http:\/\/www.courthousenews.com\/2014\/05\/14\/67858.htm>\n\n112.'Kazakhstan: Is US Lawsuit Against Ex-Mayor Selective Justice?' _Eurasianet_ (15 May 2014), available at: <http:\/\/www.eurasianet.org\/node\/68373>\n\n113.'Oil, Cash and Corruption', _New York Times_ (5 November 2006). On the emergence of the scandal and discovery of the bank accounts, see details in 'Kazakhstan is Suspected of Oil Bribes in the Millions', _New York Times_ (28 July 2000).\n\n114.See 'A Banished Member of Kazakhstan Royalty Has Died by Apparent Suicide', _qz.com_ (24 February 2015), available at: <http:\/\/qz.com\/349695\/a-banished-member-of-kazakhstan-royalty-has-died-by-apparent-suicide\/>\n\n115.'After Seven Years, \"Kazakhgate\" Scandal Ends with Minor Indictment', _RFE\/RL_ (10 August 2010), available at: <http:\/\/www.rferl.org\/content\/After_Seven_Years_Kazakhgate_Scandal_Ends_With_Minor_Indictment_\/2123800.html>\n\n116.The comments of Judge William Pauly III are quoted in Matthew G. Yeager, 'The CIA Made Me Do It: Understanding the Political Economy of Corruption in Kazakhstan', _Crime, Law and Social Change_ 57:4 (2012), pp. 441\u201357, at 454.\n\n117.'Kazakh Officials Investigating \"Godfather-In-Law\" Book', _RFE\/RL_ (21 May 2009), available at: <http:\/\/www.rferl.org\/content\/Aliev_Welcomes_Efforts_To_Ban_Book_On_Nazarbaev\/1736354.html>; a spokesman from the office of the prosecutor general further warned that: 'If we find out that any one of our citizens is involved in possessing, buying, or reproducing this book, they will be prosecuted for collaborating with this criminal, Rakhat Aliev, who is now running from justice. Apart from that, the book contains state secrets. If individuals are not [officially] allowed access to these secrets, they don't have the right to know the contents of the book.' Quoted in 'Former Kazakh Presidential Son-in-Law Publishes Tell-All Book', _RFE\/RL_ (22 May 2009), available at: <http:\/\/www.rferl.org\/content\/Former_Kazakh_Presidential_SoninLaw_Publishes_TellAll_Book\/1737423.html>\n\n118.See <http:\/\/www.viktor-khrapunov.com>\n\n119.'Amities Kazakh', _Le Monde_ (2 November 2013).\n\n120.See Khrapunov, _Nazarbayev \u2013 Our Friend the Dictator_ , pp. 138\u20139.\n\n121.Igor Savchenko, 'The Report: The Interpol System is in Need of Reform', _Open Dialogue_ (14 February 2015), available at: <http:\/\/en.odfoundation.eu\/a\/5947,the-report-the-interpol-system-is-in-need-of-reform>\n\n122.Lemon and Rosset, 'Offshore Central Asia', pp. 10\u201311.\n\n123.Fauve, 'Global Astana'.\n\n124.'Kazakhstan: Conflict-of-Interest Debate Flares in Washington', _Eurasianet_ (2 June 2009), available at: <http:\/\/www.eurasianet.org\/departments\/insightb\/articles\/eav060309b.shtml>\n\n125.Michel, 'Dismissing Disclosure and Free Agent Diplomacy'.\n\n126.Lemon and Rosset, 'Offshore Central Asia'.\n\n127.See Human Rights Watch, _Blair's Kazakhstan Odyssey, Two Years On_ (30 October 2013), available at: <https:\/\/www.hrw.org\/news\/2013\/10\/30\/blairs-kazakhstan-odyssey-two-years>; see also 'Tony Blair Gives Kazakhstan's Autocratic President Tips on How to Defend a Massacre', _Telegraph_ (24 August 2014).\n\nChapter 3: Tajikistan: The President of the Warlords and his Offshore State\n\n1.US Embassy Dushanbe, 'Back in the USSR at TALCO', 08DUSHANBE516_a (14 April 2008), paragraphs 10\u201311, available at: <https:\/\/wikileaks.org\/plusd\/cables\/08DUSHANBE516_a.html>\n\n2.In reality, these figures of the formal economy are highly unreliable and fail to capture the majority of informal economic activity linked to transnational labour migration and shuttle-trading. See ibid.\n\n3.Talco paid $.01\/kilowatt hour in 2008 when the market rate was around $.045\/kilowatt hour. A USAID study estimates that Tajikistan could make much more from exporting this electricity than using it to fuel the aluminium smelter. Ibid., paragraph 3.\n\n4.High Court of Justice, _Tajik Aluminium Plant v Ermatov & Ors_, EWHC 2241 (21 October 2005), paragraphs 22\u20133, available at: http:\/\/www.bailii.org\/cgi-bin\/format.cgi?doc=\/ew\/cases\/EWHC\/Ch\/2005\/2241.html&query=(EWHC)+AND+(2241)+AND+\\(2241\\))\n\n5.John Helmer, 'Cover off Tajikistan's Missing Millions', _Asia Times Online_ (11 January 2008), available at: <http:\/\/www.atimes.com\/atimes\/Global_Economy\/JA11Dj03.html>\n\n6.High Court of Justice, _Tajik Aluminium Plant v Ermatov & Ors_, paragraph 59.\n\n7.Ibid., paragraphs 28, 60.\n\n8.Driscoll, _Warlords_ , especially pp. 89\u201390.\n\n9.Kirill Nourzhanov, 'Saviours of the Nation or Robber Barons? Warlord Politics in Tajikistan', _Central Asian Survey_ 24:2 (2005), p. 117.\n\n10.'Tajikistan passes law designating Rahmon the \"leader of the nation\"', _Asia Plus_ (9 December 2015), available at: <http:\/\/news.tj\/en\/news\/tajikistan-passes-law-designating-rahmon-leader-nation>\n\n11.High Court of Justice, _Tajik Aluminium Plant v Ermatov & Ors_, paragraph 61.\n\n12.International Court of Arbitration, _Hamer Final Award, In The Matter Of An Arbitration Pursuant To The Swiss Rules Of International Arbitration_ , case no. 600097-20079 (October 2013), paragraph 188.\n\n13.High Court of Justice, _Tajik Aluminium Plant v Ermatov & Ors_, paragraphs 81\u20135.\n\n14.In fact the barter agreements of 2000 and 2003 were made under the jurisdiction of English law in the form of the London Court of International Arbitration. Ibid., paragraph 23.\n\n15.In particular, the judgment of Justice Blackburne of 21 October 2005, High Court of Justice, _Tajik Aluminium Plant v Ermatov & Ors_, and the subsequent _Settlement Agreement between Hydro Aluminium and Tajik Aluminium Company_ (20 December 2006), available at: <http:\/\/johnhelmer.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2008\/12\/taj-trial-hydro-Talco-agreement-of-dec-20-2006.pdf>\n\n16.John Helmer, 'Tajik Aluminium Case Gets Nearer Judgment', _Dances with Bears_ (2 August 2008), available at: <http:\/\/johnhelmer.net\/?p=479>; it seems that these moves began in at least 2003 as Ermatov, by his subsequent testimony, was pressured by Sadullayev to transfer Talco accounts to Orienbank. High Court of Justice, _Tajik Aluminium Plant v Ermatov & Ors_, paragraph 63.\n\n17.Ibid.\n\n18.High Court of Justice, 'Witness Statement of Khasan Asadullozoda' (13 April 2008), paragraph 38.\n\n19.Arbitration in the Stockholm Chamber of Commerce, _CDH v Albaco_ , case no. 145\/2007 (2007). High Court of Justice, 'Witness Statement of Sherali Olimovich Kabirov', paragraph 103.\n\n20.Ibid., paragraphs 74, 191.\n\n21.Ibid., paragraphs 75, 76.\n\n22.Although the Talco case did not involve extraterritorial rendition or assassination, this happened in other instances around this time. Mahmadruzi Iskandarov, a former opposition leader and head of the state oil and gas servicing company Tajikkommunservis, was abducted from Russia on 15 April 2005 and rendered to Tajikistan where on 5 October 2005 he was sentenced to thirty-two years in prison on terrorism charges. The European Court of Human Rights concluded in 2010 that 'the applicant was arrested by Russian State agents and that he remained under their control until his transfer to the Tajik authorities'. European Court of Human Rights, _Case Of Iskandarov v Russia_ , application no. 17185\/05, judgment (23 September 2010), available at: <http:\/\/hudoc.echr.coe.int\/sites\/eng\/pages\/search.aspx?i=001-100485>. See also Chapter 7.\n\n23.CDH, for example, was formerly owned by a nominee director, Mr Marinov, resident in Cyprus. However, according to the testimonies of Sadullayev and his subordinate Sherali Kabirov, CDH was managed by Kabirov under the instruction of Sadullayev. Arbitration in the Stockholm Chamber of Commerce, _CDH v Albaco_.\n\n24.This 'breach of contract' action referred to a 2003 barter agreement between the two parties: Talco subsequently failed to deliver $128 million in aluminium shipments.\n\n25.Justice Blackburne states: 'TadAz [Talco] claims that CDH is ultimately owned by Orienbank. The evidence lends support to the view that Orienbank is controlled by close members and\/or associates of President Rahmon's family.' High Court of Justice, _Tajik Aluminium Plant v Ermatov & Ors_, paragraph 180.\n\n26.Ibid., paragraph 182.\n\n27.Justice Blackburne states: 'It is difficult to see why Talco should have wished to enter into an agreement of this kind with an off-shore shell company, as CDH was, which had no track record in alumina, aluminium or any other kind of dealings.' Ibid., paragraphs 181, 183\u20134.\n\n28.'Witness Statement of Sherali Olimovich Kabirov', paragraph 103.\n\n29.US Embassy Dushanbe, 'A Minor Miracle? Tajik Settlement with Norsk Hydro Could Be Major Victory for Potential Investors', 06DUSHANBE2243_a (22 December 2006), paragraph 4, available at: <https:\/\/wikileaks.org\/plusd\/cables\/06DUSHANBE2243_a.html>\n\n30.Ibid.\n\n31.Ibid.\n\n32.Ibid.\n\n33.The agreement also includes 'settlement sums' totalling $94 million made in instalments from 31 December 2006 to 31 December 2010. High Court of Justice, _Settlement Agreement between Hydro Aluminium and Tajik Aluminium Company_ , pp. 5, 21\u20135. See also Helmer, 'Tajik Aluminium Court Case ends in London defeat for President Rahmon'.\n\n34.US Embassy Dushanbe, 'A Minor Miracle?' (2006), paragraph 5.\n\n35.US Embassy Dushanbe, 'Will Rogun Ever Get Built? Tajikistan and Rusal Engage in War of Words', 06DUSHANBE1545_a (11 August 2006), paragraph 8, available at: <https:\/\/wikileaks.org\/plusd\/cables\/06DUSHANBE1545_a.html>\n\n36.High Court of Justice, _Tajik Aluminium Plant v Ermatov & Ors_, paragraphs 29, 99. Martha Brill Olcott, _Tajikistan's Difficult Development Path_ (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment, 2012), pp. 183\u2013214 has a thorough discussion of the Talco\u2013Hydro relationship.\n\n37.US Embassy Dushanbe, 'Ambassador's Farewell Call on President Rahmon', 06DUSHANBE1420_a (24 July 2006), paragraph 14, available at: <https:\/\/wikileaks.org\/plusd\/cables\/06DUSHANBE1420_a.html>\n\n38.Hydro, 'Report Regarding Hydro's Trade in Tajikistan' (statement to the Norwegian Ministry of Trade, Industry and Fisheries, 2 March 2016), p. 7.\n\n39.Ibid.\n\n40.Ibid., paragraph 14.\n\n41.US Embassy Dushanbe, 'A Minor Miracle', paragraph 2.\n\n42.Herbert Smith LLP, 'Hydro Aluminium AS and Tajik Aluminium Plant: Settlement Agreement', paragraph 9.6, pp. 12\u201313, available at: <http:\/\/johnhelmer.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2008\/11\/taj-trial-hydro-tadaz.pdf>\n\n43.Transparency International, 'Corruption Perception Index', available at: <http:\/\/www.transparency.org\/research\/cpi\/cpi_2006\/0\/>\n\n44.'Witness Statement of Khasan Asadullozoda' (13 April 2008), paragraph 48.\n\n45.High Court of Justice, 'Third Witness Statement of Sherali Olimovitch Kabirov', _Tajik Aluminium Company v Ansol Ltd_ (14 April 2008), paragraph 232.\n\n46.US Embassy Dushanbe, 'Back in the USSR at TALCO', paragraph 10.\n\n47.The other two individuals were Ismatullo Hayoyev and Jamshed Abdulov \u2013 each owning 10 per cent.\n\n48.US Embassy Dushanbe, 'The Orima Defence Team Speaks; But what are they saying?', 08DUSHANBE515_a (14 April 2008), available at: <https:\/\/wikileaks.org\/plusd\/cables\/08DUSHANBE515_a.html>\n\n49.US Embassy Dushanbe, 'Tajikistan \u2013 Conviction of Prominent Entrepreneur Reminds Business Community of Who is the Boss', 08DUSHANBE512_a (10 April 2008), available at: <https:\/\/wikileaks.org\/plusd\/cables\/08DUSHANBE512_a.html>\n\n50.John Helmer, 'Hydro Aluminium in Trouble over Tajikistan Corruption Concerns', _MineWeb_ (12 November 2007), available at: <http:\/\/www.mineweb.com\/archive\/hydro-aluminium-in-trouble-over-tajikistan-corruption-concerns\/>\n\n51.Brill Olcott, _Tajikistan's Difficult Development Path_ , p. 192.\n\n52.John Helmer, 'Other Side of the TALCO Saga', _Dances with Bears_ (19 September 2008), available at: <http:\/\/johnhelmer.net\/?p=518>\n\n53.Emomali Rahmon to Dominique Strauss-Khan, 'Tajikistan: Letter of Intent', 19 April 2011, p. 2.\n\n54.Justice Blackburne states that 'a \"near irresistible\" inference of all of this is that, in the period between 1996 to the end of 2000, there was a fraudulent scheme similar to the scheme between Talco and Ansol after that time'. High Court of Justice, _Tajik Aluminium Plant v Ermatov & Ors_, paragraph 35.\n\n55.Ibid., paragraphs 175, 177.\n\n56.John Helmer, 'IMF Blows Whistle on Tajik Corruption', _Asia Times Online_ (26 March 2008), available at: <http:\/\/www.atimes.com\/atimes\/Central_Asia\/JC26Ag01.html>; similar arrangements are described with respect to the 1996\u20132004 partnership with Ansol in the 2005 judgment: High Court of Justice, _Tajik Aluminium Plant v Ermatov & Ors_, paragraph 163.\n\n57.'Tajikistan: Suit Settlement Brings No Resolution', _Eurasianet_ (1 December 2008), available at: <http:\/\/www.eurasianet.org\/departments\/insightb\/articles\/eav120208a.shtml>\n\n58.John Helmer, 'IMF attacks Tajikistan Aluminium Co \u2013 Orders International Audit', _MineWeb_ (11 September 2008); IMF, _Republic of Tajikistan: Staff-Monitored Program: Letter of Intent, Memorandum of Economic and Financial Policies, and Technical Memorandum of Understanding_ (10 June 2008), available at: <http:\/\/www.imf.org\/external\/np\/loi\/2008\/tjk\/061008.pdf>\n\n59.Kabirov claims that since 2007 the new agreement with TML has 'produced (over time) a substantial improvement in the fee paid' to Talco. 'Witness Statement of Sherali Olimovich Kabirov', paragraph 234.\n\n60.Nazarov's lawyer, John Doctor QC, estimated Talco's losses to be $450 million from 2005 to 2007 while the profits of CDH\/TML were around $500 million, all of which were transferred directly to CDH\/TML's unknown owners. John Helmer, 'President Rahmon Forced to End Tajik Aluminium Court Case in London', _Dances with Bears_ (27 November 2008), available at: <http:\/\/johnhelmer.net\/?p=626>\n\n61.Farangis Najibullah, 'Tajikistan: \"Disappearance\" of President's Brother-In-Law Sparks Rumors', _RFE\/RL_ (15 May 2008); 'Tadzhikistan: Po nepodtverzhdennym dannym, ubit vliyatelnyi banker Kh. Sadullayev [Tajikistan: Unconfirmed Reports that Influential Banker H. Sadullayev is Dead]', _Ferghana News_ (9 May 2008), available at: <http:\/\/www.fergananews.com\/news.php?id=9117>\n\n62.Wild conspiracy theories included claims that Hasan had a non-identical twin, Hussein Sadullayev, who underwent plastic surgery in Germany so he could impersonate his brother. Why he (or the German government, which would have had to issue a visa for this purpose) would want to enable this plot is unclear. However, the very existence of such conspiracy theories tells us about the effects on political society of the secret state.\n\n63.John Helmer, 'Tajik Aluminium Witness \"Must Appear\"', _Asia Times_ (5 August 2008), available at: <http:\/\/atimes.com\/atimes\/Central_Asia\/JH05Ag01.html>\n\n64.Rukhshona Ibragimova, 'IMU continues to threaten Central Asia', _Central Asia Online_ (18 February 2010), available at: <http:\/\/www.centralasiaonline.com\/cocoon\/caii\/xhtml\/en_GB\/features\/caii\/features\/main\/2010\/02\/18\/feature-02>\n\n65.Talco, 'Press-reliz po auditu' (3 August 2010), available at: http:\/\/www.talco.com.tj\/index.php?l=2&action=newslist&id=153&page=1\n\n66.Ibid.\n\n67.Thanks once again go to the incomparable David Trilling.\n\n68.Grant Thornton JSC (Yerevan), _Consolidated Financial Statements and Independent Auditor's Report, Talco Management Limited JSC_ (31 December 2011).\n\n69.This had risen to $363 million by May 2014. ICC International Court Of Arbitration, _Alumina & Bauxite Company Ltd. (British Virgin Islands) v Cdh Investments Corp. (British Virgin Islands)_, 15002\/Cco\/Jrf\/Ca\/Mhm, final award (29 May 2013); International Court of Arbitration, _Hamer Final Award_ ; see also David Trilling, 'Russian Aluminum Giant Pries Open Books at Tajikistan's Largest Factor', _Eurasianet_ (9 June 2014), available at: <http:\/\/www.eurasianet.org\/node\/68466>\n\n70.'Folie de Grandeur: A President with an Edifice Complex is Screwing the Motherland', _The Economist_ (27 July 2013), available at: <http:\/\/www.economist.com\/news\/asia\/21582325-president-edifice-complex-screwing-motherland-folie-de-grandeur>\n\n71.CA-News (TJ), 'MinFin Tadzhikistana obvinil v sokriytie dokhoda v $1.1 Mlrd krupneishii alyuminiya zavod v Tsentralnoi Azii TALCO [Ministry of Finance of Tajikistan Accuses the Leading Aluminium Factory in Central Asia of Hiding $1.1 billion]', 28 October 2016, available at: <http:\/\/ca-news.org\/news:1340167>\n\n72.Talco, 'Tomorrow', available at: <http:\/\/www.talco.com.tj\/en\/aboutus\/tomorrow>\n\n73.International Court of Arbitration, _Hamer Final Award_ , paragraphs 286\u2013324.\n\n74.Ibid., paragraph 276.\n\n75.These were reported in 2006 hearings before Justice Cresswell and are summarised in Brill Olcott, _Tajikistan's Difficult Development Path_ , p. 199.\n\n76.Ibid., p. 277.\n\n77.International Court of Arbitration, _Hamer Final Award_ , paragraph 316.\n\n78.Ibid., paragraph 317.\n\n79.Ibid., paragraph 194.\n\n80.Ibid., paragraph 199.\n\n81.Ibid., paragraph 8.\n\n82.Trilling also provided these documents to the authors.\n\n83.US Embassy Dushanbe, 'Tajikistan \u2013 Boeing makes a deal with Somon Air', 09DUSHANBE1112_a (30 September 2009), available at: <https:\/\/wikileaks.org\/plusd\/cables\/09DUSHANBE1112_a.html>; Trilling, 'Russian Aluminum Giant Pries Open Books at Tajikistan's Largest Factory'.\n\n84.David Trilling, 'Tajikistan's Cash Cow: Enough Milk to Go Around?', _Eurasianet_ (10 June 2014), available at: <http:\/\/www.eurasianet.org\/node\/68491>\n\n85.Fabiani & Company, 'Short Form Registration Statement' (US Department of Justice, 19 July 2013), available at: <http:\/\/www.fara.gov\/docs\/6045-Short-Form-20130719-28.pdf>\n\n86.David Trilling, 'Tajikistan Using DC Proxies to Build Support for Rogun Dam'.\n\n87.Fabiani & Company, 'Amendment to Registration Statement' (US Department of Justice, 30 January 2014), available at: <http:\/\/www.fara.gov\/docs\/6045-Amendment-20140130-3.pdf>\n\n88.Alexander Botting admitted as much on the telephone in three separate conversations with Helmer, Trilling and Heathershaw in January and February 2014.\n\n89.John Helmer, 'Camelflage \u2013 Tajik President Emomali Rahmon and James Fabiani Hide Expensive Washington Lobbying Secrets', _Dances with Bears_ (26 February 2014), available at: <http:\/\/johnhelmer.net\/?p=10302>\n\n90.Alessandra Colarizi, 'A \"China Town\" in Northern Tajikistan', _Diplomat_ (20 October 2015), available at: <http:\/\/thediplomat.com\/2015\/10\/a-china-town-in-northern-tajikistan\/>\n\n91.Catherine Putz, 'Tajik Leader in China, Building Roads', _Diplomat_ (3 September 2015), available at: <http:\/\/thediplomat.com\/2015\/09\/tajik-leader-in-china-building-roads\/>\n\n92.Freedom House, _Tajikistan: Nations in Transit_ (2016), available at: <https:\/\/freedomhouse.org\/report\/nations-transit\/2016\/tajikistan>\n\n93.See the _Dagens N\u01e3ringsliv_ newspaper's website, available at: <http:\/\/www.dn.no\/>\n\n94.Hydro, 'Report regarding Hydro's trade in Tajikistan'.\n\n95.Ibid., p. 2.\n\n96.Ibid., p. 8.\n\n97.Ibid., p. 10.\n\n98.Ibid.\n\n99.Ibid., p. 7.\n\n100.Ibid.\n\n101.International Court of Arbitration, _Hamer Final Award_ , paragraph 255.\n\n102.Zayd Saidov was arrested and convicted of corruption and various other offences in 2014 following his announcement of a new political party that would contest the 2015 presidential election. Umarali Kuvvatov was killed and his wife and children poisoned in Istanbul in March 2015 following several unsuccessful attempts to extradite him back to Tajikistan (see Chapter 7).\n\n103.International Court of Arbitration, _Hamer Final Award_ , paragraph 285.\n\nChapter 4: Uzbekistan's Closed Polity and Global Scandal\n\n1.Donald S. Carlisle, 'Power and Politics in Soviet Uzbekistan: From Stalin to Gorbachev' in W. Fierman (ed.), _Soviet Central Asia: The Failed Transformation_ (Oxford: Westview Press, 1991), pp. 93\u2013129.\n\n2.See Nancy Lubin, _Labour and Nationality in Soviet Central Asia_ (London: Macmillan, 1984).\n\n3.James Critchlow, '\"Corruption\", Nationalism, and the Native Elites in Soviet Central Asia', _Journal of Communist Studies and Transition Politics_ 4:2 (1988), pp. 142\u201361.\n\n4.See James Critchlow, _Nationalism in Uzbekistan: A Soviet Republic's Road to Sovereignty_ (Boulder: Westview Press, 1991), pp. 39\u201352; and Gregory Gleason, 'Nationalism or Organized Crime? The Case of the \"Cotton Scandal\" in the USSR', _Corruption and Reform_ 5:2 (1990), pp. 87\u2013108.\n\n5.Neil Melvin, _Uzbekistan: Transition to Authoritarianism on the Silk Road_ (Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers, 2000).\n\n6.McGlinchey, _Chaos, Violence, Dynasty_.\n\n7.Laura Adams, _The Spectacular State: Culture and National Identity in Uzbekistan_ (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010).\n\n8.Lawrence P. Markowitz, _State Erosion: Unlootable Resources and Unruly Elites in Central Asia_ (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2013).\n\n9.Alisher Ilkhamov, 'Neopatrimonialism, Interest Groups and Patronage Networks: The Impasses of the Governance System in Uzbekistan', _Central Asian Survey_ 26:1 (2007), pp. 65\u201384.\n\n10.Deniz Kandiyoti (ed.), _The Cotton Sector in Central Asia: Economic Policy and Development Challenges: Proceedings of a Conference Held at SOAS University of London, 3\u20134 November 2005_ (School of Oriental & African Studies, University of London, 2007).\n\n11.Bakhodyr Muradov and Alisher Ilkhamov, 'Uzbekistan's Cotton Sector: Financial Flows and Distribution of Resources', working paper (New York: Open Society Foundations, October 2014).\n\n12.Sabahi and Ziyaeva, 'Investor State Arbitration in Central Asia'.\n\n13.World Bank, 'Doing Business', data for Uzbekistan, available at: <http:\/\/www.doingbusiness.org\/data\/exploreeconomies\/uzbekistan>\n\n14.George Gavrilis, _The Dynamics of Interstate Boundaries_ (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008).\n\n15.Cooley, _Great Games, Local Rules_ ; David Lewis, _The Temptations of Tyranny in Central Asia_ (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008).\n\n16.Luca Anceschi, 'Integrating Domestic Politics and Foreign Policy Making: The Cases of Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan', _Central Asian Survey_ 29:2 (2010), pp. 143\u201358.\n\n17.See Cooley, _Great Games, Local Rules_ ; and Stephen Grey, _Ghost Plane: The True Story of the CIA Torture Program_ (New York: Macmillan, 2006).\n\n18.Matteo Fumagalli, 'Alignments and Realignments in Central Asia: The Rationale and Implications of Uzbekistan's Rapprochement with Russia', _International Political Science Review_ 28:3 (2007), pp. 253\u201371.\n\n19.'U.S Gives Uzbekistan Military Equipment Boost', _Voice of America_ (22 January 2015).\n\n20.The Andijan crackdown, in particular, posed severe dilemmas for Washington and Brussels. The US government was split over whether to criticise the Uzbek government, with the Pentagon fearing that Tashkent would curtail its basing rights (which proved correct when US troops were evicted from the country in July 2005). The European Union imposed sanctions and a travel ban on upper-level officials, but almost immediately softened its position after a more conciliatory bloc, led by Germany, moved for their lifting and proposed continuing 'engagement'. In doing so, the whole question of cooperating with the Uzbek regime ignited larger questions within the EU over whether Brussels should be a strategic or normative actor in the region. See Alexander Cooley, 'Principles in the Pipeline: Managing Transatlantic Values and Interests in Central Asia', _International Affairs_ 84:6 (2008), pp. 1173\u201388.\n\n21.'Bitter Divorce Threatens Unlikely Alliance at the Heart of War on Terror', _Telegraph_ (18 April 2004); see also 'Life Tasted Good for Coke Bottler in Tashkent Until He Separated from President's Daughter', _Wall Street Journal_ (21 August 2001).\n\n22.See US Embassy Tashkent, 'Uzbekistan: From A to Zeromax', 10TASHKENT27_a (20 January 2010), available at: <https:\/\/wikileaks.org\/plusd\/cables\/10TASHKENT27_a.html>; and Farangis Najibullah, 'The Demise of Uzbekistan's Cash Cow Zeromax', _RFE\/RL_ (16 June 2010), available at: <http:\/\/www.rferl.org\/content\/Zeroing_In_On_The_Demise_Of_Uzbekistans_Cash_Cow\/2073867.html>\n\n23.US Embassy Tashkent, 'Resource Nationalism: Grab What You Can', 07TASHKENT2029_a (26 November 2007), available at: <https:\/\/wikileaks.org\/plusd\/cables\/07TASHKENT2029_a.html>\n\n24.'NDN Operator: We Have No Connection to Gulnara Karimova', _Eurasianet_ (7 December 2010), available at: <http:\/\/www.eurasianet.org\/node\/62519>; 'Setting the Record Straight, Again, on the NDN and the Karimovs', _Eurasianet_ (16 December 2010), available at: <http:\/\/www.eurasianet.org\/node\/62582>\n\n25.'Zeromax's Woes in Tashkent: GooGoosha's Swan Song from Politics?', _Eurasianet_ (20 November 2010), available at: <http:\/\/www.eurasianet.org\/node\/61110>\n\n26.'Zeromax GmbH Creditors to Meet in Switzerland', _Uznews.net_ (8 August 2011).\n\n27.See 'WikiLeaks Cables: US keeps Uzbekistan President Onside to Protect Supply Line', _Guardian_ (12 December 2010).\n\n28.US Embassy Tashkent, 'Gulnora Karimova Looks to Improve Her Image', 05TASHKENT2473_a (5 September 2005), available at: <https:\/\/wikileaks.org\/plusd\/cables\/05TASHKENT2473_a.html>\n\n29.As of 2015, Uzbekistan ranks outside the 100 leading countries in the World Bank's 'Doing Business Survey'. The country also consistently appears near the bottom of Transparency International's 2015 'Corruption Perceptions Index', ranking 153 out of 168 countries. Available at: <https:\/\/www.transparency.org\/country\/#UZB>\n\n30.ITU, 'Measuring the Information Society Report' (2014), available at: <http:\/\/www.itu.int\/en\/ITU-D\/Statistics\/Pages\/publications\/mis2014.aspx>\n\n31.'U.S. Seeks to Seize $1 Billion in Telecom Probe', _Wall Street Journal_ (13 August 2015).\n\n32.Ibid.\n\n33.'U.S. Can Seize $300 Million Allegedly Linked To Russian-Uzbek Bribery Scandal', _RFE\/RL_ (13 July 2015), available at: <http:\/\/www.rferl.org\/content\/uzbekistan-karimova-justice-department-bribery-scandal\/27124827.html>.\n\n34.US Department of Justice, 'Letter to Honorable Judge Andrew Carter, Re: _United States v Any and All Assets Held in Account Numbers 102162418400, 102162418260, and 102162419780 at Bank of New York Mellon SA\/NV, et al._ , 15 Civ. 05063' (1 July 2015), available at: <http:\/\/star.worldbank.org\/corruption-cases\/sites\/corruptioncases\/files\/Uzbek_Telecom_SDNY_DOJ_Letter_Request_Arrest%20in%20Rem_Jul1_2015.pdf>. The letter states:\n\nAs alleged in the Complaint, from 2004 until in or around 2011, two international telecommunications companies paid more than $500 million to shell companies beneficially owned by Government Official A. The telecom companies made these payments to induce Government Official A to use his or her influence, including Government Official A's influence over other Uzbek government officials, to assist the telecom companies in entering and operating in the Uzbek telecommunications market.\n\n35.OCCRP, 'Uzbekistan: How the President's Daughter Controlled the Telecom Industry' (21 March 2015), available at: <https:\/\/www.occrp.org\/corruptistan\/uzbekistan\/gulnara_karimova\/the-prodigal-daughter\/how-the-presidents-daughter-controlled-the-telecom-industry.php>\n\n36.Ibid.\n\n37.OCCRP, 'Articles of Association' document, Registrar of Companies Gibraltar (22 December 2003), available at: <https:\/\/cdn.occrp.org\/projects\/corruptistan\/documents\/uzbekistan\/Takilant_01.pdf>; a 2005 filing, listing the additional two directors from St Kitts and Nevis who resigned on 2 November 2005, is available here: <https:\/\/cdn.occrp.org\/projects\/corruptistan\/documents\/uzbekistan\/Takilant_07.pdf>; all source documents available at: <https:\/\/www.occrp.org\/en\/corruptistan\/uzbekistan\/gulnarakarimova\/documents.html>\n\n38.'Uzbekistan's Gulnara Karimova Linked to Telecoms Scandal', _BBC News_ (27 November 2012).\n\n39.Ms Akayan could not be reached for comment. See 'Uzbekistan: The Leading Lady', _Financial Times_ (7 March 2013).\n\n40.OCCRP, 'Uzbekistan: How the President's Daughter Controlled the Telecom Industry'.\n\n41.OCCRP, 'The Billion Dollar Payoff', available at: <https:\/\/www.occrp.org\/en\/corruptistan\/uzbekistan\/gulnarakarimova\/payoff.html>\n\n42.'TeliaSonera CEO Quits Amid Criticism', _Wall Street Journal Blog_ (1 February 2013), available at: <http:\/\/blogs.wsj.com\/corruption-currents\/2013\/02\/01\/teliasonera-ceo-quits-amid-criticism\/>\n\n43.'TeliaSonera Negotiated Directly with the Karimov-Regime', _svt.se_ (12 December 2012), available at: <http:\/\/www.svt.se\/ug\/teliasonera-negotiated-directly-with-the-karimov-regime>\n\n44.Ibid.\n\n45.US Embassy Tashkent, 'Scandinavian-Turkish Firm May Buy Coscom and Sister Companies in Central Asia', 07TASHKENT769_a (13 April 2007), available at: <https:\/\/wikileaks.org\/plusd\/cables\/07TASHKENT769_a.html>\n\n46.'Fresh Allegations Link Gulnara Karimova to Shady Telecoms Deal', _Eurasianet_ (13 December 2012).\n\n47.In September 2007 the Scandinavian company paid an initial $30 million sum to Teleson Mobile, a local Uzbek company which had been formed only seventeen days earlier, to acquire a 3G licence. Teleson was also owned by Avakyan, who was the registered director of Takilant. In December 2007, TeliaSonera AB paid Takilant $80 million through Parex Bank in Latvia, ostensibly to purchase 1800 MHz\/UMTS frequencies and numbering block, while later that same day Takilant transferred TeliaSonera's subsidiary $50 million for a 26 per cent share of TeliaSonera Uzbek Holding. In 2010, TeliaSonera bought back 20 per cent of Takilant shares via a trust account and a Hong Kong bank for the princely sum of $220 million. Later that year, TeliaSonera Uzbek Holding B.V. paid $55 million to Takilant for additional frequency licences. See <https:\/\/www.occrp.org\/en\/corruptistan\/uzbekistan\/gulnarakarimova\/payoff.html>\n\n48.'TeliaSonera under Fire over Uzbek Bribe Claims', _Local_ (20 September 2012), available at: <http:\/\/www.thelocal.se\/20120920\/43344>\n\n49.'TeliaSonera Negotiated Directly with the Karimov-Regime'.\n\n50.Mannheimer Swartling, 'Rapport till styrelsen i TeliaSonera AB' (Stockholm, 31 January 2013), available at: <http:\/\/www.dn.se\/Images\/Utredning%20slutlig.pdf>; see English-language summary of findings in Mannheaimer Swartling, 'Reviewer Criticizes Teliasonera', press release (1 February 2013), available at: <http:\/\/www.mannheimerswartling.se\/en\/news\/news\/reviewer-criticises-teliasonera\/>\n\n51.'TeliaSonera CEO Quits Amid Criticism'.\n\n52.Ibid.\n\n53.Quoted in 'Swiss Announce Karimova Money-Laundering Probe', _RFE\/RL_ (12 March 2014), available at: <http:\/\/www.rferl.org\/content\/switzerland-karimova-investigation-uzbekistan-money-laundering\/25294326.html>\n\n54.Swiss Federal Council, 'La fille du pr\u00e9sident ouzbek dans la ligne de mire de la justice suisse' (12 March 2014), available at: <https:\/\/www.admin.ch\/gov\/fr\/start\/dokumentation\/medienmitteilungen.msg-id-52278.html>\n\n55.'La justice fran\u00e7aise s'int\u00e9resse \u00e0 la fille du dictateur ouzbek' _Rue89_ (31 July 2013), available at: <http:\/\/rue89.nouvelobs.com\/2013\/07\/31\/justice-francaise-sinteresse-a-fille-dictateur-ouzbek-244641>; 'Uzbekistan: Pressure Mounts in Europe's Gulnara-Linked Corruption Probes', _Eurasianet_ (31 July 2013), available at: <http:\/\/www.eurasianet.org\/node\/67325>\n\n56.'Documents Link Uzbekistan's Karimova To Money-Laundering Suspect', _RFE\/RL_ (12 October 2012), available at: <http:\/\/www.rferl.org\/content\/uzbekistan-karimova-linked-to-money-laundering\/24736143.html>\n\n57.'Telia Faces $1.4 billion Fine for Corruption in Uzbekistan', _Compliance Weekly_ (19 September 2016), available at: <https:\/\/www.complianceweek.com\/blogs\/enforcement-action\/telia-faces-14-billion-fine-for-corruption-in-uzbekistan#.V-kjFFfjKS0>\n\n58.US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), 'VimpelCom to Pay $795 Million in Global Settlement for FCPA Violations' (18 February 2016), available at: <https:\/\/www.sec.gov\/news\/pressrelease\/2016-34.html>\n\n59.Under the terms of the settlement, the company was required to pay $167.5 million to the SEC, $230.1 million to the US Department of Justice and $397.5 million to Dutch regulators, and it was required to retain an independent corporate monitor for three years.\n\n60.'Takilant Found Guilty of Taking Bribes From Telia, VimpelCom', _Bloomberg_ (20 July 2016).\n\n61.SEC, 'VimpelCom to Pay $795 Million in Global Settlement for FCPA Violations'.\n\n62.Ibid.\n\n63.US Department of Justice, Southern District of New York, 'Global Telecommunications Company and Its Subsidiary Charged in Massive Bribery Scheme Involving Uzbek Official; Company to Pay $795 Million in Penalties', press release (18 February 2016), available at: <https:\/\/www.justice.gov\/usao-sdny\/pr\/global-telecommunications-company-and-its-subsidiary-charged-massive-bribery-scheme>\n\n64.Ibid.\n\n65.Ibid.\n\n66.Ibid.\n\n67.As identified by the statement, the major players in the corruption scheme were 'Foreign Official', who was 'an Uzbek government official and a close relative of a high-ranking Uzbek government official', along with 'Associate A', a 'close associate' of 'Foreign Official', and 'Associate B', 'chief executive of one of Unitel's primary executives in Uzbekistan', who nevertheless 'represented Shell Company and Foreign Official in their business dealings with VIMPELCOM and Unitel'. US Attorney's Office (USAO), Southern District of New York, 'Attachment A: Statement of Fact' (18 February 2016), p. A-3, lines 7\u201310, available at: <https:\/\/www.justice.gov\/usao-sdny\/file\/826456\/download>\n\n68.The schemes included: 1) Shell company purchase: an individual payment of $60 million to acquire Burtzel, a company in which VimpelCom officials knew that Foreign Official had an indirect stake via the shell company; 2) Fraudulent buyout: a 2006 agreement to allow Foreign Official an indirect ownership in Unitel that would later be repurchased by VimpelCom at a guaranteed profit, thereby paying a $37.5 million bribe to Foreign Official; 3) 3G licensing bribes: a 2007 bribe payment via a shell company to Foreign Official, 'purportedly to obtain 3G frequencies'; 4) Fake consulting contracts: in 2008 and 2011 knowingly entering into fake consulting contracts with the shell company in order to provide $32 million to Foreign Official 'in exchange for valuable telecommunications assets and to allow Unitel to continue to conduct business in Uzbekistan'; 5) Fake reseller agreements: in 2011 and 2012 bribe payments to Foreign Official through 'purposefully non-transparent transactions with purported \"reseller companies\"'. Ibid., pp. A-3, A-4 and A-5, lines 11\u201313, available at: <https:\/\/www.justice.gov\/usao-sdny\/file\/826456\/download>\n\n69.Alexei Malashenko, _Exploring Uzbekistan's Potential Political Transition_ (Moscow: Carnegie Center, 2014), p. 8.\n\n70.'Uzbek TV Channels Controlled by Karimova Stop Broadcasting', _RFE\/RL_ (22 October 2013), available at: <http:\/\/www.rferl.org\/content\/uzbekistan-karimova-tv-channels-broadcasts-stop\/25144301.html>; 'Bank Accounts Of Holding Group Linked To Karimova Frozen', _RFE\/RL_ (30 October 2013), available at: <http:\/\/www.rferl.org\/content\/uzbekistan-karimova-bank-accounts-frozen\/25152801.html>\n\n71.'More Uzbek TV Channels Cease Broadcasting', _RFE\/RL_ (12 November 2013), available at: <http:\/\/www.rferl.org\/content\/uzbekistan-karimova-more-tv-channels-closed\/25165546.html>\n\n72.'First Daughter's Charity Network Reportedly Under Fire', _Eurasianet_ (27 October 2013), available at: <http:\/\/www.eurasianet.org\/node\/67684>\n\n73.'V kvartire docheri prezidenta Uzbekistana proshyol obysk [Uzbek President's Daughter's flat was searched]' (18 February 2014), available at: <http:\/\/russian.rt.com\/article\/22407>\n\n74.'Uzbek Authorities Acknowledge Karimova Under House Arrest', _RFE\/RL_ (24 September 2014), available at: <http:\/\/www.rferl.org\/content\/uzbekistan-gulnara\/26601995.html>\n\n75.'Associates of Uzbekistan's Gulnara Karimova Reportedly Sentenced', _RFE\/RL_ (14 July 2014), available at: <http:\/\/www.rferl.org\/content\/karimova-avakian-uzbekistan-madumarov-trial-sentence-reportedly\/25455961.html>\n\n76.US Embassy Tashkent, 'Ambassador's May 28 Meeting with Uzbek Intelligence Chief', 08TASHKENT610_a (30 May 2008), available at: <https:\/\/www.wikileaks.org\/plusd\/cables\/08TASHKENT610_a.html>\n\n77.Reported in 'New Woes for Gulnara', _Eurasianet_ (8 November 2013), available at: <http:\/\/www.eurasianet.org\/node\/67741>\n\n78.Ibid.\n\n79.As quoted in 'Karimova Mocks National Security Chief', _RFE\/RL_ (1 November 2013), available at: <http:\/\/www.rferl.org\/content\/uzbekistan-karimova-mocks-security-chief\/25154821.html>\n\n80.Natalia Antelava, 'Suspected Gulnara Karimova Letter Smuggled to BBC', _BBC News Magazine_ (24 March 2014), available at: <http:\/\/www.bbc.com\/news\/magazine-26713383>\n\n81.Ibid.\n\n82.'Uzbekistan's First Family; Too Sexy for the Catwalk', _The_ _Economist_ (29 August 2014).\n\n83.'Amid Rumors Of Her Demise, A Question: Does Gulnara Matter?', _RFE\/RL_ (2 November 2013), available at: <http:\/\/www.rferl.org\/content\/does-gulnara-karimova-matter\/25155794.html>.\n\n84.'Uzbekistan's Feuding Family Elite', _Global Voices, Central Asia_ (31 January 2014), available at: <https:\/\/iwpr.net\/global-voices\/uzbekistans-feuding-family-elite>\n\n85.'Uzbekistan: US Court Seizes Millions in Karimov Family-Linked Case' (10 July 2015), available at: <http:\/\/www.eurasianet.org\/node\/74186>\n\n86.US Department of Justice, Office of Public Affairs, 'VimpelCom Limited and Unitel LLC Enter into Global Foreign Bribery Resolution of More Than $795 Million; United States Seeks $850 Million Forfeiture in Corrupt Proceeds of Bribery Scheme', press release (18 February 2016), available at: <https:\/\/www.justice.gov\/opa\/pr\/vimpelcom-limited-and-unitel-llc-enter-global-foreign-bribery-resolution-more-795-million>\n\n87.'U.S. Demands Uzbek Leader's Daughter Turn Over $550 Million', _RFE\/RL_ (23 April 2016), available at: <http:\/\/www.rferl.org\/a\/us-prosecutors-demand-karimova-turn-over-550-million\/27692833.html>\n\n88.Swiss Federal Council, 'La fille du pr\u00e9sident ouzbek'.\n\n89.Swiss Federal Police, 'Annual Report' (2014), available at: <http:\/\/star.worldbank.org\/corruption-cases\/sites\/corruption-cases\/files\/Swiss%20Federal%20Police%20Annual%20Report%202014_Pub%20May%202015_0.pdf>\n\n90.'Uzbekistan: Frozen Millions on Agenda as Minister Holds Talks in U.S.?' _Eurasianet_ (20 January 2016), available at: <http:\/\/www.eurasianet.org\/node\/76896>\n\n91.Ibid.\n\n92.Ibid.\n\n93.Ibid.\n\n94.'Telecoms Forfeiture Case Moved into U.S.-Uzbekistan Negotiations', _Wall Street Journal_ (28 April 2016), available at: <http:\/\/blogs.wsj.com\/riskandcompliance\/2016\/04\/28\/telecoms-forfeiture-case-moved-into-u-s-uzbekistan-negotiations\/>\n\n95.Emile van der Does de Willebois et al., _The Puppet Masters: How the Corrupt Use Legal Structures to Hide Stolen Assets and What to Do About It_ (World Bank Publications, 2011).\n\n96.See I.M. Jimu, 'Managing Proceeds of Asset Recovery: The Case of Nigeria, Peru, the Philippines and Kazakhstan', Basel Institute on Governance Working Paper Series 6 (2009).\n\nChapter 5: Kyrgyzstan's Prince Maxim and the Switzerland of the East\n\n1.'Kyrgyz President Attacks UK for \"Hosting a Guy who Robbed Us\"', _Guardian_ (14 July 2013).\n\n2.US Embassy Bishkek, 'Lunch with Max: Soup to Nuts', 09BISHKEK1065_a (22 September 2009), available at: <https:\/\/wikileaks.org\/plusd\/cables\/09BISHKEK1065_a.html>\n\n3.Global Witness, _Grave Secrecy_ (June 2012), available at: <https:\/\/www.globalwitness.org\/en\/campaigns\/corruption-and-money-laundering\/anonymous-company-owners\/grave-secrecy\/>\n\n4.'Kyrgyzstan Demands Extradition of Deposed President's Son', _Telegraph_ (11 May 2010).\n\n5.Global Witness, 'Former Kyrgyz President's Son Lives in \u00a33.5m Surrey Mansion Despite Convictions for Attempted Murder of UK Citizen and Grand Corruption at Home' (24 March 2015), available at: <https:\/\/www.globalwitness.org\/en\/archive\/former-kyrgyz-presidents-son-lives-35m-surrey-mansion-despite-convictions-attempted-murder\/>\n\n6.'U.S. Ends Case Against Ex-Kyrgyz Leader Bakiev's Son', _Bloomberg_ (9 May 2013), available at: <http:\/\/www.bloomberg.com\/news\/articles\/2013-05-09\/u-s-case-ends-against-ex-kyrgyz-leader-Bakiev-s-son>\n\n7.John Anderson _, Kyrgyzstan: Central Asia's Island of Democracy?_ (Amsterdam: Harwood Academic, 1999).\n\n8.Ibid., p. 65.\n\n9.Ulan Sarbanov, board member, National Bank of the Kyrgyz Republic, discussant at 'Challenges to Economies in Transition: Stabilization, Growth, and Governance: International Conference in Honor of the Kyrgyz Som', Bishkek (27\u201328 May 1998), p. 2, available at: <https:\/\/www.imf.org\/external\/np\/eu2\/kyrgyz\/pdf\/sarbanov.pdf>\n\n10.McGlinchey, _Chaos, Violence, Dynasty_ , pp. 84\u20135.\n\n11.See Dinissa Duvanova, _Building Business in Post-Communist Russia, Eastern Europe and Eurasia_ (Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 52.\n\n12.See Kang, _Crony Capitalism_ ; see also Radnitz, _Weapons of the Wealthy_.\n\n13.Johan Engvall, 'The State as Investment Market: An Analytical Framework for Interpreting Politics and Bureaucracy in Kyrgyzstan' (PhD dissertation, University of Uppsala, 2010).\n\n14.For a long list see Rina Prizhivoit, 'Prezident izdal ukaz vsekh otmyt' v poslednyi raz', _Moya Stolitsa Novosti_ (8 February 2005).\n\n15.For more detail see Cooley, _Great Games, Local Rules_ ; McGlinchey, _Chaos, Violence, Dynasty_ ; and Kemel Toktomushev, 'Regime Security, Base Politics and Rent-Seeking: The Local and Global Political Economies of the American Air Base in Kyrgyzstan, 2001\u20132010', _Central Asian Survey_ 34:1 (2015), pp. 57\u201377.\n\n16.The main cause for the protest was the arrest of Azimbek Beknazarov, the prominent figure from the south. The protest in support of his release in Aksy in 2002 left six people dead. For more, see Cornelius Graubner and Alexander Wolters, 'Kirgisischer Feldversuch Demokratie: Zwischen Schattenstaat and Tulpen Revolution', in Manfred Sapper, Volker Weichsel and Andrea Huterer (eds.), _Machtmosaik Zentralasien: Traditionen, Restriktionen, Aspirationen_ (Bonn: Bundeszentrale f\u00fcr politische Bildung, 2007), p. 200.\n\n17.McGlinchy, _Chaos, Violence, Dynasty_ , pp. 99\u2013100.\n\n18.Radnitz, _Weapons of the Wealthy_ , p. 204.\n\n19.Private communication to authors, 2006.\n\n20.US Embassy Bishkek, 'Maxim Bakiev's Influence Becomes Official', 09BISHKEK1199_a (13 November 2009), available at: <https:\/\/wikileaks.org\/plusd\/cables\/09BISHKEK1199_a.html>. Blackpool FC made major investments in players under the Belokon\/Bakiyev partnership and were promoted to the English Premier League, the most lucrative football league in the world. Belokon is reputedly a friend of the heir to the British throne, Prince Charles, and sits on the board of The Prince's Foundation. See 'Pool President Belokon: \"I'm Innocent\"', _Blackpool Gazette_ (14 January 2013).\n\n21.For the summary of the findings of the investigation, see 'V Kyrgyzstane budut pasprodani aktsii natsionalizirorovannikh kompanii [In Kyrgyzstan There Will be a Sale of Shares in a Nationalised Company]', InoZpress.kg, _Business New Europe_ ; for analysis of this structure may have worked see Global Witness, _Grave Secrecy_ , p. 57.\n\n22.'Kyrgyz Commission: 30 Contract Killings During Bakiev Presidency', _RFE\/RL_ (12 April 2011), available at: <http:\/\/www.rferl.org\/content\/kyrgyz_commission_report_30_contract_killings_under_bakiev\/3555238.html>.\n\n23.See Philip Shishkin, _Restless Valley: Revolution, Murder, and Intrigue in the Heart of Central Asia_ (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 2013).\n\n24.The Kyrgyz court reported this as \u00a34 million in cash and 4 million shares in the company while Oxus's CEO Bill Trew claimed under oath in the London Court that he was asked to pay $15 million to the Bakiyevs, a request he refused. Pervomaisky District Court, Case No. UD-352\/14 B3, Sentence (Bishkek, Kyrgyz Republic, 4 April 2014), p. 7; Royal Courts of Justice, London, Case No. HQ14P04904, transcript, Day 6, p. 38.\n\n25.Royal Courts of Justice, London, Case No. HQ14P04904, transcript, Day 6, p. 38.\n\n26.'Gold Miner Oxus Stops Glittering in Central Asia', _The Sunday Times_ (27 August 2006).\n\n27.High Court, London, Case No. HQ14P04904, Before the Honourable Mr Justice Supperstone, Judgment Approved, paragraph 18.\n\n28.Ibid., paragraph 19.\n\n29.High Court, London, Case No. HQ14P04904, transcript, Day 3, p. 116.\n\n30.'Global Gold in Deal with Kazakh Investment Group over Jerooy', _MineWeb_ (21 August 2007).\n\n31.Ibid.; the well-researched William Hogan and Federico Sturzenegger (eds.), _The Natural Resources Trap: Private Investment Without Public Commitment_ (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010), p. 18, includes Oxus's experience in Kyrgyzstan as one of the 'expropriation cases' among others that took place around the world in the years of 2006\u201307.\n\n32.Pervomaisky District Court, Case No. UD-352\/14 B3, Sentence, p. 7.\n\n33.Ibid.\n\n34.Ibid., p. 2.\n\n35.Later, Oxus Resource Corporation received compensation from a succeeding investor, Visor Holding, and the dispute between Oxus and the Kyrgyz government was settled by an amicable agreement. See 'Claims Against the Kyrgyz Government', _Oxus_ (11 September 2006).\n\n36.'Jerooy Project', _Kyrgyzaltyn.kg_ (2011), available at: <http:\/\/www.kyrgyzaltyn.kg\/en\/invest-proekti\/47-proekt-djerui>\n\n37.'Global Gold in Deal'.\n\n38.Royal Courts of Justice, London, Case No. HQ14P04904, transcript, Day 6, pp. 28\u201330.\n\n39.In turn, this company is 50 per cent owned by Lagun Investment and Iman Financial, both registered in the British Virgin Islands. _Compromat.ru_ claims that the owner of these two companies is Alexander Turkot of the company Salford Capital Partners. Turkot is known as a manager of two other investment funds, New World Value Fund and Bary Discovered Partners, which operate various interests across the post-Soviet space. Finally, _Compromat.ru_ alleges, both funds belonged to Berezovsky. See 'Kak Berezovsky sunul palku v muraveinik [How Berezovsky Put a Stick into an Anthill]', _Compromat.ru_ (25 August 2006).\n\n40.'Kto razoril Borisa Berezovskogo? [Who Ruined Boris Berezovsky?]', _Forbes.ru_ (8 May 2013).\n\n41.'Kirgizskaia oppozicia: Berezovsky taino posetil Bishkek [Kyrgyz Opposition: Berezovsky's Secret Visit to Bishkek]', _NEWSru_ (12 September 2006). A recent report on the death of Boris Berezovsky by Russia-24, a large media outlet, also makes allegations about Berezovksy's interests in the Kyrgyz gold-mining sector; see 'Russia States There are Links between Ex-President of Kyrgyzstan Bakiev and Boris Berezovsky', _News-Asia_ (25 March 2013).\n\n42.'Berezovsky planiroval napravit $7,4 mln na reidersky zahvat zolotogo mestorojdenia Jerooy v Kyrgyzstane [Berezovksy Planned to Direct $7.4 million to a Raid Occupation of the Jerooy Gold Deposit in Kyrgyzstan]', _News Fiber_.\n\n43.'Kto razoril Borisa Berezovskogo?'\n\n44.Visor acquired 60 per cent of a joint venture with the Kyrgyz state under the Bakiyev government. After Bakiyev was deposed, the government annulled the licence, leading Visor to press its case against Kyrgyzstan in the International Court of Arbitration. See Nariman Gizitdinov, 'Kazakh Dealmaker Finds Profit, Peril in Central Asian Stans', _Bloomberg Markets_ (12 August 2015), available at: <http:\/\/www.bloomberg.com\/news\/articles\/2015-08-11\/kazakh-dealmaker-karibzhanov-finds-riches-peril-in-central-asia>\n\n45.High Court, London, Case No. HQ14P04904, transcript, Day 3, pp. 156\u20138.\n\n46.In Azerbaijan, for example, partial adoption of and weaknesses in the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative have enabled such corruption. See Global Witness, _Azerbaijan Anonymous: Azerbaijan's State Oil Company and Why the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative Needs to Go Further_ (December 2013), p. 8; and Jonathan E. Turner, _Money Laundering Prevention: Deterring, Detecting, and Resolving Financial Fraud_ (Hoboken: John Wiley, 2011).\n\n47.US Embassy Bishkek, 'Candid Discussion with Prince Andrew on the Kyrgyz Economy and the \"Great Game\"', 08BISHKEK1095_a (29 October 2008), available at: <https:\/\/wikileaks.org\/plusd\/cables\/08BISHKEK1095_a.html>\n\n48.US Embassy Bishkek, 'Maxim Bakiev's Influence becomes Official'.\n\n49.US Embassy Bishkek, 'Kyrgyz Elite Fawn Over President's Son', 09BISHKEK700_a, (20 June 2009), available at: <https:\/\/wikileaks.org\/plusd\/cables\/09BISHKEK700_a.html>\n\n50.US Embassy Bishkek, 'Kyrgyzstan: Dinner at Maxim's', 09BISHKEK744 (15 July 2009), available at: <http:\/\/cables.mrkva.eu\/cable.php?id=216680>\n\n51.Tierney, _Mystery at Manas_ , p. 3.\n\n52.Ibid.\n\n53.'Kyrgyz Elite Fawn Over President's Son'.\n\n54.Cited in Shishkin, _Restless Valley,_ p. 120.\n\n55.Asel Otorbayeva, 'Mikhail Nadel: National Bank of Kyrgyzstan Tries to Justify its Actions by Deliberately False Accusations against AUB', _24.kg_ (8 June 2011).\n\n56.See Global Witness, _Drug Cartels, Terrorist Financing Risk and Sanctioned Regimes also on HSBC's Books Under Lord Green_ (11 February 2015).\n\n57.Global Witness, _Grave Secrecy_ , p. 12.\n\n58.Ibid.\n\n59.Ibid., p. 4.\n\n60.Ibid., pp. 17\u201318.\n\n61.Personal communication with authors, 2013.\n\n62.Shishkin, _Restless Valley,_ p. 126.\n\n63.'US Freezes Assets of Kyrgyz Fugitive Maxim Bakiev', _bne IntelliNews_ (18 July 2013).\n\n64.'Bakiev, Maksim Kurmanbekovitch', Interpol Red Notice (2010), available at: <http:\/\/www.interpol.int\/notice\/search\/wanted\/2010-20244>\n\n65.'Kyrgyzstan: Former \"Prince\" Dodges US Prosecution', _Eurasianet_ (15 May 2013).\n\n66.Ibid.\n\n67.Central Bank of Russia, 'O provedenii somnitelnikh operatsii po schetam Aktsionernogo kommercheskogobanka \"Aziya Universal Bank\" [On The Conducting of Doubtful Operations with Regard to the Share Auction of Private Bank \"Asia Universal Bank\"]', 10 February 2006?, available at: <http:\/\/www.cbr.ru\/Press\/Archive_get_blob.aspx?doc_id=060213_1014031.htm>\n\n68.US Embassy Bishkek, 'Embassy Cautions Against OPIC Role in Kyrgyzstan', 08BISHKEK386_a (18 April 2008), available at: <https:\/\/wikileaks.org\/plusd\/cables\/08BISHKEK386_a.html>\n\n69.Interview with Baktygul Jeenbaeva, National Bank of the Kyrgyz Republic, Bishkek (4 June 2015).\n\n70.Blackpool FC would join fourteen of twenty English Premier League clubs in being owned by opaque offshore companies in 2010, according to the report by Christian Aid, _Blowing the Whistle: Time's Up for Financial Secrecy_ (May 2010).\n\n71.'Kyrgyz President Attacks UK'.\n\n72.House of Commons debate, c634W (13 July 2010).\n\n73.Philip Shishkin, 'Kyrgyzstan's Most Wanted: The Curious Case of Eugene Gourevitch', _Foreign Affairs_ (31 October 2013).\n\n74.Global Witness, _Grave Secrecy._\n\n75.Shishkin, 'Kyrgyszstan's Most Wanted'.\n\n76.'Fallen Tsars', _The_ _Economist_ (15 October 2012).\n\n77.'Kyrgyz Ex-Leader Bakiev's Son Held in UK for Fraud', _BBC News_ (13 October 2012).\n\n78.Shishkin, 'Kyrgyszstan's Most Wanted'.\n\n79.Ibid.\n\n80.Christie Smythe, 'Ex-Kyrgyz Regime Adviser Gets Five Years for Wire Fraud', _Bloomberg_ (16 June 2014).\n\n81.Pervomaisky District Court, Case No. UD-352\/14 B3, Sentence.\n\n82.'The decision has been taken to refuse your request because it is likely that its execution would prejudice our order public [public policy]', according to a November 2013 letter written by senior lawyer Busola Johnson. 'Why Surrey is the Hardest Word . . .', _Private Eye_ 1418 (May 2016), available at: <http:\/\/www.private-eye.co.uk\/issue-1418\/news>\n\n83.British Embassy Bishkek, 'Criminal Justice Dialogue: Sharing Legal Expertise in Bishkek' (23 June 2014), available at: <https:\/\/www.gov.uk\/government\/world-location-news\/uk-home-office-lawyer-participated-in-star-seminar-in-bishkek>\n\n84.Hickman & Rose homepage, available at: <http:\/\/www.hickmanandrose.co.uk\/>\n\n85.High Court, London, Case No. HQ14P04904, transcript, Day 6, p. 78.\n\n86.High Court, London, Case No. HQ14P04904, Before the Honourable Mr Justice Supperstone, Judgment Approved, paragraph 178.\n\n87.Ibid., paragraphs 185 and 196.\n\n88.High Court, London, Case No. HQ14P04904, transcript, Day 6, p. 61.\n\n89.While no cases of money laundering through AUB have been proved in court, the US had apparently brought charges of extortion against Gourevitch related to his time as the broker and financial officer of the Bakiyev regime. See Shishkin, 'Kyrgyszstan's Most Wanted'.\n\nChapter 6: The New Offshore Silk Roads\n\n1.'Secretary of State Clinton at New Silk Road Ministerial Meeting', US Department of State (22 September 2011), available at: <http:\/\/iipdigital.usembassy.gov\/st\/english\/texttrans\/2011\/09\/20110923160643su0.3639272.html#axzz3yMiVUG68>\n\n2.'Clinton Says Building New Silk Road Is Critical for Afghanistan', US Department of State (23 September 2011), available at: <http:\/\/iipdigital.usembassy.gov\/st\/english\/article\/2011\/09\/20110923170112eiznekcam0.5790216.html#axzz3yMiVUG68>\n\n3.Cooley, _Great Games, Local Rules,_ Chapter 3.\n\n4.'President Xi Jinping Delivers Important Speech and Proposes to Build a Silk Road Economic Belt with Central Asian Countries', Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the People's Republic of China (7 September 2013), available at: <http:\/\/www.fmprc.gov.cn\/mfa_eng\/topics_665678\/xjpfwzysiesgjtfhshzzfh_665686\/t1076334.shtml>\n\n5.'\"One Belt, One Road\" will Define China's Role as a World Leader', _South China Morning Post_ (2 April 2015).\n\n6.Stephen Kotkin notes that the significance of these empires was to leave a regional legacy of 'imperial exchange', bequeathing practices of despotism and patrimonialism, in contrast to the centralised bureaucracies and national identities formed in the European state-building project. Stephen Kotkin, 'Mongol Commonwealth? Exchange and Governance Across the Post-Mongol Space', _Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History_ 8:3 (2007), pp. 487\u2013531.\n\n7.Halford John Mackinder, 'The Geographical Pivot of History', _Royal Geographical Society_ (1904), p. 434.\n\n8.Other NATO countries also reached deals to stage troops and transport supplies in the region, including Germany \u2013 which operated an air base from the Uzbek town of Termez on the Afghanistan border \u2013 and France, which used Dushanbe international airport in Tajikistan.\n\n9.See Kucera, _US Military Aid to Central Asia_ ; and Cooley, _Great Games, Local Rules_.\n\n10.Alexander Cooley, 'Base Politics', _Foreign Affairs_ 84:6 (2005), pp. 79\u201392.\n\n11.Shishkin, _Restless Valley_.\n\n12.Information on the routes is given in Andrew C. Kuchins, Thomas M. Sanderson and David A. Gordon, _The Northern Distribution Network and the Modern Silk Road: Planning for Afghanistan's Future: A Report of the CSIS Transnational Threats Project and the Russia and Eurasia Program_ (Washington, DC: CSIS, 2009).\n\n13.United States Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, 'Central Asia and the Transition in Afghanistan' (Washington, DC: Majority Staff Report Prepared for the Use of the Committee on Foreign Relations, 11 December 2011), p. 5.\n\n14.'Pentagon Paid Airport Fees to Turkmenistan, But Can't Say How Much', _Eurasianet_ (12 July 2010), available at: <http:\/\/www.eurasianet.org\/node\/61514>; 'Documents Highlight Problems with Uzbek Corridor of Afghan Supply Route', _Eurasianet_ (28 June 2010), available at: <http:\/\/www.eurasianet.org\/node\/61427>\n\n15.'Wikileaks Cables: US Keeps Uzbekistan President Onside to Protect Supply Line', _Guardian_ (12 December 2010).\n\n16.John F. Tierney, _Warlord, Inc.: Extortion and Corruption Along the U.S. Supply Chain in Afghanistan_ (Washington, DC: United States Congress, House of Representatives, Committee on Oversight and Government Reform: Subcommittee on National Security and Foreign Affairs, June 2010).\n\n17.On the various US-proposed New Silk Route concepts developed in the post-Cold War era, see Marlene Laruelle, 'The US Silk Road: Geopolitical Imaginary or the Repackaging of Strategic Interests?', _Eurasian Geography and Economics_ 56:4 (2015), pp. 360\u201375.\n\n18.Kuchins, Sanderson and Gordon, _The Northern Distribution Network and the Modern Silk Road_ ; Andrew C. Kuchins, Thomas M. Sanderson and David A. Gordon, 'Afghanistan: Building the Missing Link in the Modern Silk Road', _Washington Quarterly_ 33:2 (2010), pp. 33\u201347; Andrew C. Kuchins, et al., _The Northern Distribution Network and Afghanistan_ (Washington, DC: CSIS Report, January 2010).\n\n19.Graham Lee, 'The New Silk Road and the Northern Distribution Network: A Golden Road to Central Asian Trade Reform?', Open Society Foundations Central Eurasia Project Occasional Paper 8 (October 2012).\n\n20.Ibid., pp. 27\u201331.\n\n21.Ibid., p. 35.\n\n22.As quoted in ibid., p. 30.\n\n23.See the data on comparative regional import and export times in Cooley, _Great Games, Local Rules_ , p. 155.\n\n24.As reported in 'Kyrgyz Contracts Fly Under the Radar', _Washington Post_ (1 November 2010).\n\n25.Toktomushev, 'Regime Security, Base Politics and Rent-Seeking', p. 61.\n\n26.Tierney, _Mystery at Manas_ , p. 12.\n\n27.David Cloud, 'Pentagon's Fuel Deal Is Lesson in Risks of Graft-Prone Regions', _New York Times_ (5 November 2015).\n\n28.Aram Roston, 'A Crooked Alliance in the War on Terror?', _NBC News_ (30 October 2006), available at: <http:\/\/www.nbcnews.com\/id\/15448018\/print\/1\/displaymode\/1098\/40955459>\n\n29.Toktomushev, 'Regime Security, Base Politics and Rent-Seeking', p. 62.\n\n30.Deirdre Tynan, 'Deconstructing Manas Fuel Suppliers' Corporate Structures', _Eurasianet_ (3 May 2010), available at: <http:\/\/www.eurasianet.org\/departments\/business\/articles\/eav042010.shtml>\n\n31.'Kyrgyz Contracts Fly Under the Radar'.\n\n32.Tierney, _Mystery at Manas_.\n\n33.Ibid., p. 12.\n\n34.Representatives of the rival IOTC claimed that their bid for the contract, which they claim was lower, was not considered by DLA. 'Kyrgyzstan: Manas Fuel Supply Contract to be Re-Opened?', _Eurasianet_ (22 December 2010).\n\n35.Aram Roston, 'Fueling the Afghan War', _Nation_ (10 May 2010).\n\n36.'Kyrgyz Contracts Fly Under the Radar'.\n\n37.Tierney, _Mystery at Manas_.\n\n38.Ibid., p. 5.\n\n39.Reproduced in ibid., p. 38.\n\n40.Ibid., p. 37.\n\n41.Ibid., pp. 42\u201350.\n\n42.Robert M. Gates, _Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War_ (New York: Knopf Doubleday, 2014), p. 194.\n\n43.'The New Silk Road', _The Economist_ (12 September 2015).\n\n44.National Development and Reform Commission of the People's Republic of China (NDRC), _Vision and Actions on Jointly Building Silk Road Economic Belt and 21st-Century Maritime Silk Road_ (28 March 2015), available at: <http:\/\/en.ndrc.gov.cn\/newsrelease\/201503\/t20150330_669367.html>\n\n45.Wang Jisi, 'March West: China's Geopolitical Strategy of Rebalancing', _Global Times_ (17 October 2012).\n\n46.See Steven Liao and Daniel McDowell, 'Redback Rising: China's Bilateral Swap Agreements and Renminbi Internationalization', _International Studies Quarterly_ 59:3 (2015), pp. 401\u201322.\n\n47.Rilka Dragneva and Kataryna Wolczuk, 'Eurasian Economic Integration: Institutions, Promises and Faultlines', _The Geopolitics of Eurasian Economic Integration, Special Report_ 19 (2014), pp. 8\u201322.\n\n48.See Michael Clarke and Douglas Smith (eds.), _China's Frontier Regions: Ethnicity, Economic Integration and Foreign Relations_ (London: I.B. Tauris, 2016); and Michael Clarke, 'Beijing's March West: Opportunities and Challenges for China's Eurasian Pivot, _Orbis_ 60:2 (2016), pp. 296\u2013313.\n\n49.'Central Asia Powers Machinery Revival', _China Daily_ (5 September 2013).\n\n50.'China's UnionPay Prepares for Significant Move into Kazakhstan and Central Asia', _South China Morning Post_ (12 June 2015).\n\n51.See also Sebastien Peyrouse and Ga\u00ebl Raballand, 'Central Asia: The New Silk Road Initiative's Questionable Economic Rationality', _Eurasian Geography and Economics_ 56:4 (2015), pp. 405\u201320.\n\n52.Monica Beuran, Marie Castaing Gachassin and Gael Raballand, 'Are There Myths on Road Impact and Transport in Sub-Saharan Africa?', _Development Policy Review_ 33 (2015), pp. 673\u2013700.\n\n53.See Asian Development Bank (ADB), _CAREC CPMM Corridor Performance, Measurement & Monitoring Report_ (2014), p. 5. Available at: <http:\/\/cfcfa.net\/images\/downloads\/CPMM%20AR2014%20ENG.pdf>\n\n54.'A freight forwarder operating in Altynkol reports that container trains can be processed within two hours or can take as long as 7 days, depending on the incentives provided to expedite processing.': ibid., p. 9, fn. 4.\n\n55.Ibid., pp. 10\u201311.\n\n56.Crisis Group, _Central Asia: Decay and Decline_ (Brussels: Report No. 201, 3 February 2011), pp. 17\u201318.\n\n57.'Tajik President's Son-in-Law Denies Ties to Company', _RFE\/RL_ (12 July 2010), available at: <http:\/\/www.rferl.org\/content\/Tajik_Presidents_SonInLaw_Denies_Ties_To_Company\/2097815.html>\n\n58.Thomas Stephan Eder, _China-Russia Relations in Central Asia: Energy Policy, Beijing's New Assertiveness and 21st Century Geopolitics_ (Wiesbaden: Springer VS, 2014); Keun-Wook Paik, _Sino-Russian Oil and Gas Cooperation: The Reality and Implications_ (Oxford Institute for Energy Studies, 2012).\n\n59.Erica Strecker Downs, _Inside China, Inc.: China's Development Bank's Cross-Border Energy Deals_ (Washington, DC: John L. Thornton China Center at Brookings, 2011).\n\n60.'Special Report: Inside Xi Jinping's Purge of China's Oil Mandarins', _Reuters_ (25 July 2014).\n\n61.Ibid.; 'Powerful Oil Clique at Center of Chinese Probes', _Wall Street Journal_ (5 September 2013).\n\n62.Ibid.\n\n63.Downs, _Inside China, Inc_.\n\n64.Henry Sanderson and Michael Forsythe, _China's Superbank: Debt, Oil and Influence \u2013 How China Development Bank is Rewriting the Rules of Finance_ (New York: Bloomberg, 2012).\n\n65.Downs, _Inside China, Inc_.\n\n66.'China's State-Owned Firms Warned to Keep Closer Watch on Overseas Investments', _South China Morning Post_ (18 June 2015).\n\n67.Paik, _Sino-Russian Oil and Gas Cooperation_ , p. 282.\n\n68.ICIJ, 'China's Scandal-Torn Oil Industry Embraces Tax Havens' (22 January 2014), available at: <http:\/\/www.icij.org\/offshore\/chinas-scandal-torn-oil-industry-embraces-tax-havens>\n\n69.Ibid.\n\n70.Edward Wong, 'Investigative Stories Delve Into the Use of Offshore Companies by Chinese', _New York Times Sinophere_ (14 January 2014), available at: <http:\/\/sinosphere.blogs.nytimes.com\/2014\/01\/23\/investigative-stories-delve-into-the-use-of-offshore-companies-by-chinese\/?_r=0>\n\n71.ICIJ, 'China's Scandal-Torn Oil Industry Embraces Tax Havens'.\n\n72.Ibid.\n\n73.'Kazakh Spat Casts Light on China Deals', _Wall Street Journal_ (26 March 2010).\n\n74.Ibid. The same article notes that 'Magwells, a London-based law firm representing Mr. Kulibayev, said its client is not, and has never been, a shareholder in Darley, and wasn't involved in the Aktobe Munaigaz transaction'. The article further notes that Tiku's lawyer stated that 'Mr. Ablyazov's account of the Aktobe Munaigas deal \"does not provide a true reflection of the transaction\", and the facts as stated in it were \"incomplete and inaccurate\"', and 'CNPC said Mr. Ablyazov's claims were \"groundless and libelous\". In a statement, the company's Hong Kong- and New York-listed subsidiary Petrochina said it \"conducts its international business according to best business practice, with high integrity and in full compliance with regulations\".'\n\n75.Paik, _Sino-Russian Oil and Gas Cooperation_ , p. 308.\n\n76.Juan Pablo Cardenal and Heriberto Ara\u00fajo, _China's Silent Army: The Pioneers, Traders, Fixers and Workers Who Are Remaking the World in Beijing's Image_ (New York: Crown Archetype, 2013), p. 111.\n\n77.Ibid., p. 112.\n\n78.'Corruption Clampdown on CNPC Nets Two More Executives', _Caixin_ (17 May 2014), available at: <http:\/\/english.caixin.com\/2014-05-17\/100678740.html>\n\n79.'Jennifer Lopez Turkmenistan Gig Shines Light on Chinese Oil Firm', _Wall Street Journal_ (1 July 2013).\n\n80.Ibid.\n\n81.See Wong, 'Investigative Stories Delve Into the Use of Offshore Companies by Chinese'.\n\n82.William Vlcek, 'Byways and Highways of Direct Investment: China and the Offshore World', _Journal of Current Chinese Affairs_ 39:4 (2011), pp. 111\u201342.\n\nChapter 7: Political Exiles and Extraterritorial Repression\n\n1.The Central Asian Political Exiles (CAPE) database available at: <http:\/\/blogs.exeter.ac.uk\/excas\/exiles\/>\n\n2.David Trilling, 'Uzbekistan's President Attacks \"Lazy\" Labor Migrants', _Eurasianet_ (21 June 2013), available at: <http:\/\/www.eurasianet.org\/node\/67157>\n\n3.World Bank, migration and remittances data (2014), available at: <http:\/\/www.worldbank.org\/en\/topic\/migrationremittancesdiasporaissues\/brief\/migration-remittances-data>\n\n4.Statistics as of 2014 from the Russian Federal Migration Service. See <http:\/\/www.fms.gov.ru\/about\/activity\/stats\/Statistics>\n\n5.See Human Rights Watch, _'Are You Happy to Cheat Us?' Exploitation of Migrant Construction Workers in Russia_ (10 February 2009), available at: <https:\/\/www.hrw.org\/report\/2009\/02\/10\/are-you-happy-cheat-us\/exploitation-migrant-construction-workers-russia>\n\n6.Robert Owen, _The Litvinenko Inquiry: Report into the Death of Alexander Litvinenko_ (January 2016), available at: <https:\/\/www.litvinenkoinquiry.org\/files\/Litvinenko-Inquiry-Report-web-version.pdf>\n\n7.Alexander Litvinenko, _The Uzbek File_ , INQ017397 (undated), a document submitted to the Litvinenko Inquiry (2016), available at: <https:\/\/www.litvinenkoinquiry.org\/files\/2015\/04\/INQ017384wb.pdf>\n\n8.For a discussion of the relationship between governments and organised crime across the region see Alexander Kupatadze, _Organized Crime, Political Transitions and State Formation in Post-Soviet Eurasia_ (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).\n\n9.David Lewis, '\"Illiberal Spaces\": Uzbekistan's Extraterritorial Security Practices and the Spatial Politics of Contemporary Authoritarianism', _Nationalities Papers_ 43 (2015), p. 146.\n\n10.Alexander Cooley, 'The League of Authoritarian Gentlemen', _Foreign Policy_ (30 January 2013), available at: <http:\/\/foreignpolicy.com\/2013\/01\/30\/the-league-of-authoritarian-gentlemen\/>\n\n11.Both India and Pakistan were due to accede to the organisation in 2017 after signing a memorandum of understanding in June 2016.\n\n12.HRIC, 'Counter-Terrorism and Human Rights'.\n\n13.UN Human Rights Council, _Report of the Special Rapporteur on the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms While Countering Terrorism, Martin Scheinin_ , A\/HRC\/10\/3 (4 February 2009), available at: <http:\/\/www2.ohchr.org\/english\/issues\/terrorism\/rapporteur\/docs\/A.HRC.10.3.pdf>\n\n14.The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation, _The Convention Against Terrorism of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization_ (2001), Article 18, original available at: <http:\/\/www.mid.ru\/bdomp\/ns-rkonfl.nsf\/ac72b85191b0db0643256adc002905c1\/baf6836c773da9b2c325786400292549!OpenDocument>; unofficial translation, FIDH International Federation for Human Rights (15 February 2012), available at: <http:\/\/www.fidh.org\/The-Convention-Against-Terrorism>\n\n15.Fair Trials International, _Strengthening Respect for Human Rights, Strengthening INTERPOL._\n\n16.Lewis, '\"Illiberal Spaces\"', p. 142.\n\n17.In September 2015, the final move was made against Kabiri and the Islamic Revival Party with the arrest of the entire presidium of the party \u2013 except Kabiri, who remained in exile \u2013 on charges of terrorism following the apparent rebellion of a deputy defence minister with minimal links to the party who had fled after being targeted for arrest. The government of Tajikistan accused the IRPT of launching a coup d'\u00e9tat and applied to Interpol for a Red Notice for Kabiri's arrest.\n\n18.Constitution of the ICPO-INTERPOL adopted by the General Assembly at its twenty-fifth session (Vienna, 1956).\n\n19.Fair Trials International, _Strengthening Respect for Human Rights, Strengthening INTERPOL_.\n\n20.Ibid., p. 3.\n\n21.Ibid., p. 13\u201314.\n\n22.Joanna Lillis, 'Kazakhstan: Coup Trial May Have Government's Image', _Eurasianet_ (30 March 2008), available at: <http:\/\/www.eurasianet.org\/departments\/insight\/articles\/eav033108a.shtml>\n\n23.'Austria Investigates Bid to Kidnap Kazakh Exile', _Wall Street Journal_ (26 September 2008).\n\n24.Article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights, to which Russia and Turkey \u2013 two of one of the main destinations for Central Asian exiles \u2013 are signatories, forbids _refoulement_. The European Court introduced its Rule 39 to require members not to deport or extradite at-risk persons before a final judgment is made by the court on the likelihood of torture.\n\n25.European Court of Human Rights, _Case of Zokhidov v Russia_ , judgment (5 February 2013), available at: <http:\/\/hudoc.echr.coe.int\/eng?i=001-116330>\n\n26.Ibid.\n\n27.Ibid.\n\n28.Ibid.; see also Amnesty International, _Return to Torture: Extradition, Forcible Returns and Removals to Central Asia_ (London, 2013), pp. 38\u20139.\n\n29.In addition to the explicit violation of the European Convention on Human Rights, Russia is also often in violation of the UN's Refugee Convention which requires it to consult with UNHCR in cases of the deportation or extradition of a UNHCR-registered refugee. Amnesty International, _Return to Torture_ , p. 40.\n\n30.Murat Sadykov, 'Uzbekistan: No Former Soviet State a Safe Place for Uzbek Refugees', _Eurasianet_ (24 April 2013), available at: <http:\/\/www.eurasianet.org\/node\/66873>; Joanna Lillis, 'Kazakhstan: Last Ditch Appeal from Uzbek Asylum Seekers Facing Extradition', _Eurasianet_ (30 November 2010), availlable at: <http:\/\/www.eurasianet.org\/node\/62472>\n\n31.Alisher Ilkhamov, 'Ten Years after Uzbekistan's Massacre, the Tragedy Continues to Unfold', _Ferghana News_ (13 May 2015), available at: <http:\/\/enews.fergananews.com\/articles\/2920>\n\n32.Ibid.\n\n33.Martha Brill Olcott and Marina Barnett, _The Andijan Uprising, Akramiya and Akram Yuldashev_ (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment, 25 June 2006), available at: <http:\/\/carnegieendowment.org\/2006\/06\/22\/andijan-uprising-akramiya-and-akram-yuldashev>\n\n34.Ilkhamov, 'Ten Years After Uzbekistan's Massacre'; Sarah Kendzior, 'Inventing Akromiya: The Role of Uzbek Propagandists in the Andijon Massacre', _Demokratizatsiya_ 14:4 (2006), pp. 545\u201362.\n\n35.Human Rights Watch, _'Saving Its Secrets': Government Repression in Andijan_ (2008).\n\n36.European Court of Human Rights, _Case of Ismoilov and Others v Russia_ , judgment (24 April 2008), available at: <http:\/\/hudoc.echr.coe.int\/eng?i=001-86086>\n\n37.European Court of Human Rights, _Case of Ermakov v. Russia_ , judgment (7 November 2013), paragraph 14, available at: <http:\/\/hudoc.echr.coe.int\/eng?i=001-127816>\n\n38.Ibid., paragraph 79.\n\n39.Ibid., paragraph 81.\n\n40.Ibid., paragraph 88.\n\n41.Ibid., paragraph 98.\n\n42.Ibid., paragraphs 99\u2013100.\n\n43.Ibid., paragraph 155.\n\n44.Ibid., paragraph 182.\n\n45.Sadykov, 'Uzbekistan'.\n\n46.Ilkhamov, 'Ten Years After Uzbekistan's Massacre'.\n\n47.Sarah Kendzior, 'Digital Distrust: Cynicism and Solidarity in the Internet Age', _American Ethnologist_ 38 (2011), p. 561.\n\n48.Association for Human Rights in Central Asia, 'The Karimov Regime is Accused of Terrorist Activities: An Attempt on the Life of Political \u00c9migr\u00e9 Obidkhon Nazarov' (29 February 2012), available at: <http:\/\/www.ahrca.eu\/index.php\/uzbekistan\/refugees\/693-the-karimov-regime-is-accused-of-terrorist-activities-n-attempt-on-the-life-of-political-emigre-obidkhon-nazarov>\n\n49.'Prominent Uzbek Cleric In Critical Condition After Sweden Shooting', _RFE\/RL_ (22 February 2012), available at: <http:\/\/www.rferl.org\/content\/exiled_uzbek_cleric_survives_attack\/24493065.html>\n\n50.'Interview: Refugee Uzbek Imam Calls For Religious Freedom', _RFE\/RL_ (8 April 2006), available at: <http:\/\/www.rferl.org\/content\/article\/1067544.html>\n\n51.'Sweden Sheltering Terrorist Cleric: Uzbek TV', _Local_ (29 May 2010), available at: <http:\/\/www.thelocal.se\/20100529\/26918>\n\n52.Lewis, '\"Illiberal Spaces\"', p. 154.\n\n53.'Swedish Court Rules \"Innocent\" Suspects in Attempt on Uzbek Imam's Life', _Ferghana News_ (2 July 2013), available at: <http:\/\/enews.fergananews.com\/news.php?id=2651>\n\n54.'Man Jailed for Attempted Murder of Uzbek Dissident in Sweden', _BBC News_ (15 December 2015), available at: <http:\/\/www.bbc.co.uk\/news\/world-europe-35100353>\n\n55.'Swedish Court Rules \"Innocent\" Suspects'.\n\n56.Sirojiddin Tolibov and Johannes Dell, 'Uzbek Assassination Plot Rocks Quiet Swedish Town', _BBC News_ (26 July 2012), available at: <http:\/\/www.bbc.co.uk\/news\/world-europe-18998039>\n\n57.Association for Human Rights in Central Asia, 'The Karimov Regime is Accused of Terrorist Activities'.\n\n58.European Court of Human Rights, _Case of Mukhitdinov v Russia: Judgment_ (21 May 2015), available at: <http:\/\/hudoc.echr.coe.int\/>rus?i=001-155007#{%22itemid%22:[%22001-155007%22]}\n\n59.For more detail on each of these cases see Appendix 2 and the full Central Asian Political Exiles (CAPE) database, available at: <http:\/\/blogs.exeter.ac.uk\/excas\/exiles\/>\n\n60.European Court of Human Rights, _Case of Iskandarov v Russia_ , paragraph 13.\n\n61.Ibid., paragraphs 25\u201332.\n\n62.'Controversial Tajik Tycoon Falls From Grace', _RFE\/RL_ (25 December 2013), available at: <http:\/\/www.rferl.org\/content\/tajikistan-zayd-saidov-convicted\/25212375.html>\n\n63.'Tajikistan: Opposition Leader Kidnapped?', _Global Voices_ (26 March 2013), available at: <https:\/\/globalvoicesonline.org\/2013\/03\/26\/tajikistan-opposition-leader-kidnapped\/>\n\n64.Nargis Hamroboyeva, 'Umarali Quvvatov Expected to Be Extradited to Tajikistan Soon', _Tajikistan News_ (25 January 2013), available at: <http:\/\/news.tj\/en\/news\/umarali-quvvatov-expected-be-extradited-tajikistan-soon>\n\n65.Nadejda Atayeva, 'Turkey: The Leader of Group 24 Umarali Kuvatov is Detained' (20 December 2014), available at: <http:\/\/nadejda-atayeva-en.blogspot.fr\/2014\/12\/turkey-leader-of-goup-24-umarali.html>\n\n66.Mehrangez Tursunzoda, 'Verkhovnyii Sud Tadzhikistana obyavil Gruppu 24 ekstremistskoi [High Court of Tajikistan Declares Group 24 Extremist]', _Tajikistan News_ (9 October 2014), available at: <http:\/\/news.tj\/ru\/news\/verkhovnyi-sud-tadzhikistana-obyavil-gruppu-24-ekstremistskoi>\n\n67.David Trilling, 'Terrified Tajikistan Declares Obscure Facebook Critics \"Extremist\"', _Eurasianet_ (9 October 2014), available at: <http:\/\/www.eurasianet.org\/node\/70386>\n\n68.Edward Lemon, 'Tajikistan Extradites Opposition Leader, Arrests Sympathizers', _Eurasianet_ (2 February 2014), available at: <http:\/\/www.eurasianet.org\/node\/71916>\n\n69.'Opublikovani imena zaklyuchennikh chlenov OO Moldezh Tadzhikistana za Vozrozhdedniye [Published Names of Detained Members of Social Organisation Youth for the Revival of Tajikistan]', _Toj News_ (27 January 2015), available at: <http:\/\/tojnews.org\/ru\/news\/opublikovany-imena-zaklyuchennyh-chlenov-oo-molodezh-tadzhikistana-za-vozrozhdenie>\n\n70.'Tadzhikskii Sud utochnil prigovor oppozitsioneru Maksudu Ibragimovu: 17 let zaklyucheniya [Tajik Court Hands Downs Sentence of Oppositionist Maksud Ibragimov: 17 Years of Detention]', _Ferghana News_ (23 July 2015), available at: <http:\/\/www.fergananews.com\/news\/23671>\n\n71.Freedom House, _Tajikistan Opposition Leader Kuvvatov Facing New Dangers_ (21 January 2015), available at: <https:\/\/freedomhouse.org\/article\/tajikistan-opposition-leader-kuvvatov-facing-new-dangers#.VbC-oflVhBd>\n\n72.'Ubiistvo Umarali Kuvvatova v Stambule: Reakstiya iz Dushanbe [The Killing of Umarali Kuvvatov in Istanbul; Reactions from Dushnabe]', _RFE\/RL_ (6 March 2015), available at: <http:\/\/rus.ozodi.org\/content\/article\/26884830.html>\n\n73.'Three Arrested As Tajik Opposition Tycoon Buried In Istanbul', _RFE\/RL_ (9 March 2015), available at: <http:\/\/www.rferl.org\/content\/slain-tajik-opposition-tycoon-to-be-buried-in-istanbul\/26889471.html>\n\n74.'Sulaimon Kayumov baroi katli Umarali Kuvatov ba habsi abad mahkum shud [Sulaimon Kayumov Was Sentenced to Life Imprisonment for the Murder of Umarali Kuvvatov]', _Radio Ozodi_ (26 February 2016), available at: <http:\/\/www.ozodi.org\/a\/umarali-quvvatovs-killer-sentenced-to-life-term-prison\/27575897.html>\n\n75.For more detail on each of these cases, see Appendix 3 and the full Central Asian Political Exiles (CAPE) database, available at: <http:\/\/blogs.exeter.ac.uk\/excas\/exiles\/>\n\n76.Lewis, '\"Illiberal Spaces\"', p. 146.\n\n77.Amnesty International, _Return to Torture_ , p. 44.\n\nConclusion: Confronting the Challenge of Global Authoritarianism\n\n1.United Nations General Assembly, Resolution 68\/262 (adopted 27 March 2014), available at: <http:\/\/www.un.org\/en\/ga\/search\/view_doc.asp?symbol=A\/68\/PV.80>\n\n2.'Rating World Leaders: What People Worldwide Think of the U.S., China, Russia, the EU and Germany', _Gallup_ (July 2015), p. 11, available at: <http:\/\/www.gallup.com\/services\/182771\/rating-world-leaders-report-download.aspx>\n\n3.See e.g. Lincoln Mitchell, _The Democracy Promotion Paradox_ (Washington, DC: Brookings, 2016).\n\n4.European Stability Initiative, 'Caviar Diplomacy: How Azerbaijan Silenced the Council of Europe', _ESI Reports_ 24 (2012), available at: <http:\/\/www.esiweb.org\/pdf\/esi_document_id_131.pdf>\n\n5.'Foreign Powers Buy Influence at Think Tanks', _New York Times_ (4 September 2014).\n\n6.'Gaddafi Donation to LSE May Have Come from Bribes, Inquiry Finds', _Guardian_ (30 November 2011).\n\n7.Jason Sharman, 'For Research, We Pretended to Be Crooks and Terrorists and Tried to Buy Shell Companies. The Results Were Disturbing', _Washington Post_ (11 April 2014).\n\n8.'Treasury Announces Key Regulations and Legislation to Counter Money Laundering and Corruption, Combat Tax Evasion', US Department of the Treasury (5 May 2016), available at: <https:\/\/www.treasury.gov\/press-center\/press-releases\/Pages\/jl0451.aspx>\n\n9.Johann Graf Lambsdorff, 'Corrupt Intermediaries in International Business Transactions: Between Make, Buy and Reform', _European Journal of Economic Law_ 35 (2013), pp. 349\u201366.\n\n10.Adam Hug (ed.), _Institutionally Blind? International Organisations and Human Rights Abuses in the Former Soviet Union_ , Foreign Policy Centre report (February 2016); Hug (ed.), _Sheltering from the Storm?_ ; Amnesty International, _Return to Torture_ ; Fair Trials International, _Strengthening Respect for Human Rights, Strengthening Interpol_.\n\n11.Hug (ed.), _Institutionally Blind?_ , pp. 49\u201350.\n\n12.Interpol Red Notice, Kabiri, Mukhiddin, available at: <http:\/\/www.interpol.int\/notice\/search\/wanted\/2015-63685>\n\n13.Edward Schatz and Renan Levine, 'Framing, Public Diplomacy, and Anti-Americanism in Central Asia', _International Studies Quarterly_ 54:3 (2010), pp. 855\u201369.\n**INDEX**\n\n_Page numbers in italics indicate inclusion in figures and tables._\n\nAbdukhalikov, Firdavs (i)\n\nAbdulkhakov, Murodzhon _(i)_ , _(ii)_\n\nAbdulov, Jamshed (i)n47\n\nAbdyldayev, Erlan (i)\n\nAblyazov, Madina (i), _(ii)_ , (iii)\n\nAblyazov, Mukhtar (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v)n55\n\nassociates of (i), _(ii)_ , (iii)\n\nBTA Bank scandal of (i)\n\ninternational hunt for (i), _(ii)_ , (iii), (iv)\n\nas opposition leader (i), (ii)\n\nreported real estate investments of (i), (ii), _(iii)_\n\nAfghanistan (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v)n22\n\nneighbouring military bases to (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v)\n\nNew Silk Road strategy for (i), (ii)\n\nTAPI pipeline through (i), (ii)\n\nUS Northern Distribution Network for (i), (ii)\n\nAgnifilo, Marc (i)\n\nAkayev, Aidar (i), (ii)\n\nAkayev, Askar (i), (ii)\n\nAkhadov, Muhammad _(i)_ , _(ii)_\n\nAkhmedov, Bezhod (i)\n\nAkramiya organisation (i)\n\nAktobe MunaiGas (i), (ii), (iii)n64, (iv)n74\n\nAlaska Metals AG (Switzerland) (i)\n\nAlfano, Angelino (i)\n\nAlga! (Kazakh political party) (i), (ii)\n\nAliyev, Ilham (i)\n\nAliyev, Nurali (i)\n\nAliyev, Rakhat (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), _(v)_ , (vi)n117\n\nAmatola company (i), _(ii)_\n\nAminova, Nodira (i)\n\nAmnesty International (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)\n\nAnderson, John (i)\n\nAndijan (Uzbekistan) massacre (2005) (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)n33\n\nexiles from (i)\n\nworld reaction to (i), (ii)n20\n\nAndreas, Peter (i)\n\nAndrew, Duke of York (i)\n\nAnsol Company (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)\n\nAntelava, Natalia (i)\n\nArab Spring (2011) (i), (ii), (iii)\n\narbitration, legal outsourcing of (i), (ii), (iii)n46, (iv)n39\n\nArip, Maksat (i)n60\n\nAsadullozoda, Hasan _see_ Sadullayev, Hasan\n\nAsia Universal Bank (AUB) (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi)\n\ninsider trading allegations against (i)\n\nUS criticisms of (i)\n\nAsian Development Bank (ADB) (i), (ii)\n\nAsian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) (i)\n\n\u00c5slund, Anders (i), (ii)\n\nAstogold Corporation (i)\n\nAtabayev, Dovlet (i)\n\nAtambayev, Almazbek (i), (ii), (iii)\n\nAtayeva, Nadejda (i), (ii)\n\nAtuvulloyev, Dodojon _(i)_ , _(ii)_\n\nauthoritarianism\n\nconsolidated (i)\n\nforeign policies and (i)\n\nneoliberal (i), (ii), (iii)\n\nAvakyan, Gayane (i), _(ii)_ , (iii), (iv)\n\nAzerbaijan (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v)n46\n\nAzimov, Ismon _(i)_ , _(ii)_\n\nBabadjanov, Bakhtiyar (i)\n\nBabadjanov, Validjon _(i)_ , _(ii)_\n\nBaisalov, Edil (i), (ii)\n\nBakiyev, Janish (i)\n\nBakiyev, Kurmanbek (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi)\n\nBakiyev, Maxim (i), (ii), (iii), _(iv)_\n\nfall of (i)\n\ninsider trading allegations against (i), (ii)\n\nlegal actions involving (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)\n\nrise of (i), _(ii)_\n\nBaldry, Tony (i)\n\nBank TuranAlem _see_ BTA Bank\n\nBarclays bank (i)\n\nBarnett, Thomas (i)\n\nBary Discovered Partners _(i)_ , (ii)n39\n\nBekbolotov, Erkin (i), (ii)\n\nBeknazarov, Azimbek (i), (ii)n16\n\nBelokon, Valeri (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)n20\n\nBelove, Aleksandr _(i)_ , (ii)\n\nBerdimuhamedov, Gurbanguly (i), (ii)\n\nBerezovsky, Boris (i), (ii), _(iii)_ , (iv), (v)n39\n\nBerlusconi, Silvio (i)\n\nBharara, Preet (i)\n\nbilateral investment treaties (BITs) (i), (ii), (iii)n51, (iv)n28\n\nBirshtein, Boris (i)\n\nBiswal, Nisha Desai (i)\n\nBlackburne, Justice (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)nn25\u20137, (v)n54\n\nBlackpool Football Club (i), (ii), (iii)n20\n\nBlair, Tony (i), (ii)\n\nBorogan, Irina (i)\n\nBota Foundation (i)\n\nBotting, Alexander (i), (ii)n88\n\nBouygues construction company (i)\n\nBozorzoda, Shahnoza _(i)_ , _(ii)_\n\nBritish Virgin Islands (BVI) (i), (ii), _(iii)_\n\nBTA scandal and (i)\n\nChinese accounts in (i)\n\nKazakh accounts in (i), _(ii)_ , (iii), (iv), (v)n25\n\nKyrgyz accounts in (i), _(ii)_ , (iii)n39\n\nTajik accounts in (i), (ii), (iii), _(iv)_ , (v)\n\nVimpelCom and (i)\n\nBrowder, Bill (i)n80\n\nBrzezinski, Zbigniew (i)\n\nBTA Bank, scandal (i), (ii), (iii)n28\n\nBukhoroy, Shaykh Abdullah _(i)_ , _(ii)_\n\nBurtzel company (i)n68\n\nCameron, David (i)\n\nCanada (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)n60\n\nCarothers, Thomas (i)\n\nCarter, Andrew (i)n34\n\nCASA-1000 project (i), (ii)\n\nCayman Islands (i), (ii)\n\nCDH Investments Corporation (i), (ii), _(iii)_ , (iv), (v), (vi)n23\n\nCenter for Strategic and International Studies (Washington, DC) (i), (ii)\n\nCentral Agency on Development, Investments and Innovations (Kyrgyzstan) (i)\n\nCentral Asia (i), (ii)\n\nEastern Europe economic transition and (i), (ii)\n\nextraterritorial security tactics of (i), (ii)\n\nglobalisation and (i)\n\nlanguages of (i)\n\nlocalism of (i), (ii), (iii)\n\nmap of _(i)_\n\ntransnationalism of (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v)n64, (vi)n73\n\nCentral Asian Political Exiles (CAPE) database (i), (ii), (iii), _(iv)_ , (v)n1\n\nCeresney, Andrew (i)\n\nChina (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v)\n\nNew Silk Road strategy of (i), (ii)\n\nRussia and _(i)_ , (ii)\n\nTajikistan and (i), (ii), (iii)\n\nTurkmenistan and (i), (ii), (iii)\n\nChina National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC) (i), (ii), (iii)n65\n\nChinese Development Bank (CDB) (i), (ii)\n\nChubb insurance company (i)\n\nClinton, Hillary (i)\n\nCollective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) (i), (ii)\n\n'colour revolutions' (i), (ii), (iii)\n\nGeorgian (i)\n\nKyrgyz (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)\n\nUkrainian (i), (ii), (iii)\n\nCommonwealth of Independent States (CIS) (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)\n\nCommonwealth Trust Ltd (CTL) (i)\n\nCompromat.ru website (i), (ii)n39\n\ncrony capitalism (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)\n\nCyprus (i), (ii), (iii)\n\nCzech Republic (i)\n\nDaley, Sean (i), (ii), (iii)\n\nDarden, Keith (i)\n\nDarley Investment Services (i)\n\nDefense Logistics Agency (DLA) (i)\n\nDemocratic Choice of Kazakhstan (DCK) (i), (ii)\n\nDeripaska, Oleg (i)\n\nDeutsche Bank (i), (ii), (iii)\n\nDiener, Alexander (i)\n\nDole, Bob (i), (ii)\n\nDonovan, Joel (i)\n\nDubai (i), (ii), (iii)\n\nEdelman, Douglas (i)\n\nEmomali, Rustam (i), (ii)\n\nEnergy Charter Treaty (i), (ii)\n\nEngvall, Johan (i)\n\nErgashev, Alisher (i)\n\nErmakov, Azamat (i), _(ii)_ , _(iii)_\n\nErmatov, Abdukadir (i), (ii)\n\nEurasian Economic Union (EEU) (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v)\n\nEuropean Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v)\n\nEuropean Court of Human Rights (ECHR) (i), (ii)\n\nEuropean Union (EU) (i), (ii), (iii)\n\nCentral Asian air bases of (i), (ii)n8\n\nEastern European members of (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)n16\n\nExcess Defense Articles programme (EDA) (i)\n\nextraterritorial security tactics (i), _(ii)_ , (iii), (iv)\n\nof Tajikistan (i), _(ii)_ , _(iii)_ , (iv)\n\nof Uzbekistan (i), _(ii)_ , (iii), (iv)\n\nFabiani & Company (i), (ii)\n\nFair Trials International (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)n80\n\nFazletidinov, Abdusamat _(i)_ , _(ii)_\n\nFCPA _see_ Foreign Corrupt Practices Act\n\nFilinov, Rafael (i), _(ii)_\n\nFindley, Michael (i)\n\nForeign Agents Registration Act (US) (i), (ii)\n\nForeign Corrupt Practices Act (US) (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)\n\nforeign direct investment (FDI) (i), (ii), _(iii)_ , (iv), (v)n23\n\nFrance (i), (ii), (iii)\n\nAblyazov affair and (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)\n\nKazakhstan and _(i)_\n\nreal estate investments in (i), _(ii)_\n\nTajik air base of (i)n8\n\n'free agent diplomacy' (i)\n\nFreedom House (i), (ii), (iii)\n\nGaddafi, Saif al-Islam (i)\n\nGates, Robert (i)\n\nGazprom company (i)\n\nGeorgia (i), (ii)\n\nGerald Metals (i), (ii)\n\nGermany (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)n20, (v)n8\n\nGfoeller, Tatiana (i)\n\nGiffen, James (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)\n\nGlencore International (Switzerland) (i)\n\nGlobal Gold Holding company (i), (ii), _(iii)_ , (iv), (v)\n\nGlobal Witness (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v)\n\nglobalisation (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v)\n\nlocalism and (i), (ii), (iii)\n\noutsourced legal arbitration and (i), (ii), (iii)n39\n\nSilk Road and (i)\n\n'golden visa' programme (i)\n\nGorbachev, Mikhail (i)\n\nGourevitch, Eugene (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v)n89\n\nGrant Thornton company (i)\n\nGreen, Damian (i)\n\nGroup 24 (Tajikistan) (i), (ii), _(iii)_ , _(iv)_\n\nHaldarov, Isroil _(i)_ , _(ii)_\n\nHayoyev, Ismatullo (i)n47\n\nHelmer, John (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v)\n\nHizb ut-Tahrir religious group (i), (ii), (iii)\n\nHSBC bank (i), (ii)\n\nHuman Rights Watch (i), (ii), (iii)\n\nHydro Aluminium (Norway) _see_ Norsk Hydro\n\nIbragimov, Maksud (i)\n\nIdrissov, Erlan (i)\n\nIkramov, Muzraf (i)\n\nIlkhamov, Alisher (i)\n\nIman Financial company (i)n39\n\nIndia (i), (ii), (iii)\n\nInoyatov, Rustam (i)\n\ninsider privatisations (i), (ii), (iii)\n\nInstitute for Global Engagement (i)\n\nInternational Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID) (i), (ii)\n\nInternational Monetary Fund (IMF) (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)\n\nInternational Security Assistance Force (ISAF) (i), (ii), (iii)\n\nInterpol Red Notices (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)\n\nfor Ablyazov (i)\n\nfor Ermakov (i)\n\nfor Kabiri (i), (ii)n17\n\nfrom Kazakhstan (i), (ii), (iii)\n\nfor Kazhegeldin (i)\n\nfor Khrapunov (i)\n\nfor Maqsudi (i)\n\nreform of (i), (ii)\n\nfor Shamsutdinov (i)\n\nIskandarov, Mahmadruzi (i), _(ii)_ , _(iii)_ , (iv)n22\n\nIslamic Movement of Uzbekistan (i), (ii)\n\nIslamic Revival Party of Tajikistan (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)n17\n\nItaly (i), (ii), (iii)\n\nJacobson, Tracey Ann (i), (ii)\n\nJeenbaeva, Baktygul (i)\n\nJohnson, Busola (i), (ii)n82\n\nJohnston, J. Bennett (i)\n\nJurayev, Nizomkhon _(i)_ , _(ii)_\n\nJurayev, Savriddin _(i)_ , _(ii)_\n\nKabiri, Muhiddin (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)n17\n\nKabirov, Sherali (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v)n23\n\nTalco and (i), (ii), (iii)\n\nKamilov, Abdulaziz (i)\n\nKang, David (i)\n\nKaribzhanov, Aidan (i)\n\nKarimov, Islam (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v)\n\nauthoritarianism of (i), (ii)\n\nfuneral of (i)\n\non migrant labourers (i)\n\nNational Security Service of (i), (ii)\n\nUS negotiations with (i)\n\nKarimova, Gulnara (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)\n\nAblyazov and (i)\n\nallegations against (i), (ii), (iii)\n\nfall of (i)\n\noffices held by (i), (ii), (iii)\n\nreal estate investments of (i), _(ii)_\n\nrise of (i)\n\nTeliaSonera case and (i), _(ii)_\n\nKarimova-Tillyaeva, Lola (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), _(vi)_\n\nKarshi-Khanabad (K2) military base (i), (ii), (iii)n20 _see also_ Uzbekistan\n\nKarzai, Hamid (i)n22\n\nKasymakhunov, Yusup _(i)_ , _(ii)_\n\nKay, Maurice (i)\n\nKazakhgate (i), (ii), (iii)\n\nKazakhstan (i), _(ii)_ , (iii), (iv), (v), (vi)\n\nAfghanistan war and (i)\n\nalumina exports of (i)\n\nbilateral investment treaties of (i)\n\nBota Foundation and (i)\n\ncensorship in (i), (ii), (iii)n117\n\nChina and (i)\n\nEurasian Economic Union and (i)\n\nforeign direct investment in (i), _(ii)_\n\nmigrant labourers in (i)\n\noffshore politics of (i)\n\nPanama Papers and (i)\n\npolitical dissidents from (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)\n\npublic relations efforts of (i), (ii), (iii)\n\nPutin on (i)\n\nUK residency programme and (i)\n\nKazhegeldin, Akezhan (i), (ii), (iii)\n\nKendzior, Sarah (i)\n\nKetebayev, Muratbek _(i)_ , (ii)\n\nKhaknazarov Report (i)\n\nKhalmirzayev, Usmanzhan _(i)_\n\nKhrapunov, Ilyas (i)\n\nKhrapunov, Viktor (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), _(vi)_ , (vii)n3\n\nKhudoiberdiyev, Mahmud (i)\n\nKhushvakhtov, Nasim _(i)_ , _(ii)_\n\n_kompromat_ (i), (ii)\n\nKotkin, Stephen (i), (ii)n73, (iii)n6\n\nKoziyev, Sukhrob _(i)_ , _(ii)_\n\nKozlov, Vladimir (i), (ii)\n\nKramer, Hillary (i)\n\n_KT Asia v BTA_ (i), (ii)n28\n\nKulibayev, Timur (i), (ii), (iii), _(iv)_ , (v)n64\n\nKulibayev-Nazarbayeva, Dinara _(i)_\n\nKulov, Felix (i), (ii), (iii)\n\nKuvvatov, Umarali (i), (ii), _(iii)_ , _(iv)_ , _(v)_ , (vi)n102\n\nKyrgyzstan (i), (ii), (iii)\n\nbilateral investment treaties of (i)\n\ndevelopment agency of (i)\n\nEurasian Economic Union and (i)\n\nas kleptocracy (i), (ii)\n\nliberalisation in (i)\n\nmigrant labourers from (i), (ii)\n\nRussia and (i), (ii)\n\nTierney report on (i)\n\nTulip Revolution of (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)\n\nUS military base in (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi)\n\nLaruelle, Marl\u00e8ne (i)n14\n\nLatipov, Abdulvosi _(i)_ , _(ii)_\n\nLatvia (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v)\n\nLee, Graham (i)\n\nlegal outsourcing (i), (ii), (iii)n46, (iv)n39\n\nLemon, Edward (i)\n\nLeVine, Steve (i)\n\nLewis, David (i), (ii)\n\nlocalism (i), (ii), (iii) _see also_ globalisation\n\nLondon School of Economics (i)\n\nLopez, Jennifer (i)\n\nLynch, Loretta (i)\n\nMackinder, Halford (i), (ii)\n\nMadumarov, Rustam (i), (ii), (iii)\n\nMalta (i), (ii)\n\nMamazhonov, Ikromzhon _(i)_ , _(ii)_\n\nManas air base (Kyrgyzstan) (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v)\n\nManas Bank (i), (ii)\n\nMaqsudi, Mansur (i)\n\nMarchenko, Grigori (i)\n\nMay, Theresa (i)\n\nMayne, Tom (i), (ii)n1\n\nMcCullough, Angus (i)\n\nMcGlinchey, Eric (i)\n\nMercedes corporation (i)\n\n_Metal Tech v Uzbekistan_ (i)\n\nMichel, Casey (i)\n\nmigrant labourers (i), (ii)n3\n\nKyrgyz (i), (ii)\n\nTajik (i), (ii), (iii)\n\nUzbek (i), (ii), (iii)\n\nMina Corp. (i), (ii)\n\nMinsk Convention on Legal Aid (1993) (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi)\n\nMirzayev, Abduvali qori (i)\n\nMirzoyev, Ghaffor (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)\n\nMobile TeleSystems (MTS) (i), (ii)\n\nmoney laundering (i), (ii), (iii), _(iv)_\n\nby Bakiyev family (i), _(ii)_ , (iii)\n\nby Karimova (i), (ii)\n\nby Karzai (i)n22\n\nregulations against (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)\n\nMoscow Convention for the Protection of Investment Rights (i)\n\nMossack Fonseca law firm (i), (ii)\n\nMudumarov, Rustam _(i)_\n\nMukhitdinov, Lutpiddin (i), _(ii)_ , _(iii)_\n\nMunir, Taiyyib Ali (i)\n\nMusayev, Alnur (i)\n\nMusin, Shukhrat _(i)_ , _(ii)_\n\nNabiyev, Rahmon (i)\n\nNadel, Mikhail (i), (ii)\n\nNapolitano, Giorgio (i)\n\nNarvinger, Anders (i)\n\nNational Crime Agency (UK) (i), (ii)\n\nNavalny, Alexei (i)\n\nNazarbayev, Nursultan (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v)n55\n\nRakhat Aliyev and (i), (ii)\n\nSilvio Berlusconi and (i)\n\nNazarov, Avaz (i), (ii)\n\nNazarov, Obidkhon qori (i), _(ii)_ , _(iii)_\n\nNemtsov, Boris (i)\n\nNetherlands (i), _(ii)_\n\nVimpelCom case and (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)n68\n\nNevada (US) (i), (ii)\n\nNew Development Bank (NDB) (i)\n\nNew Silk Road strategy\n\nof China (i), (ii)\n\nof United States (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)n5\n\nNew World Value Fund _(i)_ , (ii)n39\n\nNew York Stock Exchange insider trading (i), (ii)\n\nNielsen, Daniel (i)\n\nNiyazov, Saparmurad (i)\n\nNoble Resources Ltd (Hong Kong) (i)\n\nNorman, Peter (i)\n\nNorsk Hydro (i), (ii), _(iii)_ , (iv), (v)\n\nNorthern Distribution Network (US) (i), (ii)\n\nNougayr\u00e8de, Delphine (i)n22, (ii)n39\n\nNurbank murders (i)\n\nNuri, Said Abdullo (i)\n\nNyberg, Lars (i)\n\nObama, Barack (i)\n\nOdinayev, Ehson _(i)_ , _(ii)_\n\nOffe, Claus (i)\n\noffshore accounts (i), (ii), (iii)\n\nAfghanistan war and (i)\n\nforeign direct investment from (i)\n\nof multinational enterprises (i)\n\nownership registries of (i)\n\npolitics of (i)\n\nOlcott, Martha Brill (i)\n\nOne Belt, One Road _see_ New Silk Road strategy\n\nOperation Enduring Freedom (i)\n\nOrange Revolution (Ukraine) (i), (ii), (iii)\n\nOrganisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v)\n\norganised crime (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)\n\nOrganised Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) (i), (ii), (iii)\n\nOrganization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)\n\nOrienbank (Tajikistan) (i), _(ii)_ , (iii), (iv), (v)\n\nOrifov, Maruf (i), (ii)\n\nOtunbayeva, Roza (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)\n\nOxus Gold (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)n35\n\nPakistan (i), (ii), (iii)\n\nPalan, Ronen (i)\n\nPanama Papers (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi)n28\n\nParaskevich, Tatiana _(i)_ , (ii)\n\nPatarkatsishvili, Badri (i)\n\nPavlov, Aleksandr (i), _(ii)_\n\nPavlyuk, Gennady (i)\n\nPetroChina company (i), (ii)n74\n\nPeyrouse, Sebastien (i)n14\n\nPoland (i)\n\nPortugal (i)\n\nPotkin, Aleksandr _(i)_\n\nPrice, David (i)n64\n\nprivatisation (i)\n\ninsider (i), (ii), (iii)\n\nPrzeworski, Adam (i)n4\n\nPulatov, Bakhodyr (i)\n\nPutin, Vladimir (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi)\n\nQayumov, Sulaimon (i)\n\nRadnitz, Scott (i)\n\nRahmon, Emomali (i), (ii)\n\nfamily disputes of (i)\n\nrise of (i), (ii), (iii)\n\nRussified name of (i)\n\nslush fund of (i)\n\nsuppression of political opponents by (i), (ii), (iii)\n\nRahmonova, Ozoda (i)\n\nRed Star Enterprises (i)\n\nRefgen Technologies Inc. (i)\n\nrefoulement (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v)n24\n\nRegional Anti-Terrorist Structure (RATS) (i)\n\nrendition (i), (ii), (iii)n84\n\nAmnesty International on (i), (ii), (iii)\n\nFreedom House on (i)\n\nHuman Rights Watch on (i)\n\nfrom Italy (i), (ii)\n\nOSCE on (i)\n\n_see also_ refoulement\n\nReporters Without Borders (i)\n\nresearch methodology (i)\n\nRosset, Daniel (i)\n\nround-tripping _see_ tolling agreements\n\nRoyal Bank of Scotland (i)\n\nrule of law (i), (ii), (iii)\n\noutsourced legal arbitration and (i), (ii), (iii)n39\n\nRumsfeld, Donald (i)\n\nRusal company _see_ United Company Rusal\n\nRussia (i), (ii), (iii), _(iv)_ , (v)\n\nannexation of Crimea by (i)\n\nChina and _(i)_ , (ii)\n\ndeportation practices of (i), (ii)n24, (iii)n29\n\nforeign direct investment and (i), (ii)n23\n\nKyrgyzstan and (i), (ii)\n\nmigrant labourers in (i), (ii)\n\norganised crime in (i)\n\nrailways of (i)\n\nTajikistan and (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi)n22\n\nTalco and (i), (ii), (iii)\n\nTurkmenistan and (i), (ii)\n\nUzbekistan and (i), (ii), (iii), _(iv)_\n\n_see also_ Commonwealth of Independent States\n\nRustamkhojayev, Fuad (i), _(ii)_ , _(iii)_\n\nSadullayev, Hasan (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii)\n\nSadykov, Murat (i)\n\nSadyrkulov, Medet (i)\n\nSafarov, Sangak (i)\n\nSaidov, Faizali (i)\n\nSaidov, Zayd (i), (ii), (iii)n102\n\nSaipov, Alisher _(i)_ , _(ii)_\n\nSakharov, Andrei (i)\n\nSalford Capital Partners (i)n39\n\nSamiyev, Rustam (i)\n\nSamruk-Kazyna fund (i), (ii)\n\nSariyev, Temir (i)\n\nSarsenbayev, Altynbek (i)\n\nSattori, Bakhtiyor (i), _(ii)_ , _(iii)_\n\nSeipel, Chris (i)\n\nShalabayeva, Alma (i), _(ii)_\n\nShamsutdinov, Lutfullo (i)\n\nShanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v)\n\nSharipov, Sadriddin (i)\n\nSharman, Jason (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)\n\nShaxson, Nicholas (i)\n\nShishkin, Philip (i)\n\nSiemens Corporation (i)\n\nSilk Road (i) _see also_ New Silk Road strategy\n\nSin Beti, Bertii 'Ivanov' (i), (ii)\n\nSobirov, Masud (i)\n\nSodiqov, Alexander (i)\n\nSokhibov, Shamsullo (i)\n\nSoldatov, Andrei (i)\n\nSomon Air company (i), (ii)\n\nSpain (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)\n\nSquires, Chuck (i)\n\nSt Kitts and Nevis (i), (ii)\n\nStalin, Joseph (i)\n\nSupperstone, Justice (i)\n\nSweden (i), (ii), (iii)\n\nNazarov and (i)\n\nTeliaSonera company of (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)n47\n\nTajikistan (i), (ii)\n\nbilateral investment treaties of (i)\n\ncapital flight from (i), (ii)n26\n\nChina and (i), (ii), (iii)\n\ncivil war of (i), (ii), (iii)\n\nextraterritorial security tactics of (i), _(ii), (iii)_, (iv)\n\nFrench air base in (i)n8\n\nIslamic Revival Party of (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)n17\n\nas kleptocracy (i), (ii)\n\nmigrant labourers from (i), (ii), (iii)\n\npublic relations efforts of (i), (ii)\n\nRogun Dam project in (i), (ii)\n\nRussia and (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi)n22\n\nUS agreements with (i), (ii)\n\nTajikistan Aluminium Company (Talco) (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v)\n\nTakilant company (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)n47\n\nTalco Management Ltd (TML) (i), (ii), (iii), _(iv)_ , (v)\n\nUS lobbying by (i)\n\nTatishev, Yerzhan (i)\n\nTax Justice Network (i)\n\nTeare, Nigel (i), (ii)\n\nTeleson Mobile company (i)n47\n\nTeliaSonera company (i), (ii), (iii), _(iv)_ , (v)n47\n\nTerra Group (i), (ii)\n\nterrorism (i), (ii)\n\ndatabase on (i)n27\n\ntreaties on (i), (ii), (iii)\n\nTerrorism, Global War on (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)\n\nThubron, Colin (i)n13\n\nTierney report on Kyrgyzstan (i)\n\nTiku, Arvid (i)n64\n\nTML _see_ Talco Management Ltd\n\nToiganbayev, Adil (i), (ii)\n\nTokayev, Kassym-Jomart (i)\n\ntolling agreements _(i)_ , (ii), (iii)\n\ndefinition of (i)\n\nof Talco (i), (ii), (iii), _(iv)_\n\nTortland Productions Inc. (i)\n\ntransnationalism (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v)n64, (vi)n73\n\nTransparency International (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)n3\n\nTrew, Bill (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)n24\n\nTrilling, David (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v)\n\nTrotsky, Leon (i)\n\nTsARS (Central Agency on Development, Investments and innovations) (i)\n\nTulip Revolution (Kyrgyzstan) (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)\n\nTurkey (i), (ii), (iii)n51, (iv)n101\n\nasylum seekers in (i), (ii), (iii), _(iv)_\n\ndeportation practices of (i)n24\n\nTurkmenistan (i), (ii), (iii)\n\nbilateral investment treaties of (i), (ii)n51\n\nChina and (i), (ii), (iii)\n\ncorruption in (i)\n\nenergy trading companies in (i)\n\nhuman rights abuses in (i)\n\nRussia and (i)\n\nUS refuelling agreement with (i), (ii)\n\nTurkmenistan\u2013Afghanistan\u2013Pakistan\u2013India (TAPI) pipeline (i), (ii)\n\nTurkot, Alexander (i), _(ii)_ , (iii)n38\n\nTursunbayev, Rustem (i)n60\n\nTursunov, Khayrullo _(i)_ , _(ii)_\n\nTyshchenko, Olena (i)\n\nUkraine (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v)\n\nUmarov, Sanjar (i)\n\nUN Millennium Development Goals (i)n11\n\nUN Refugee Convention (i)n29\n\nUnited Company Rusal (Russia) (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi)\n\nUnited Kingdom (i), _(ii)_ , (iii), (iv)\n\nCommercial Court of (i)\n\nresidency programmes of (i), (ii), (iii)\n\nUnited States _(i)_ , (ii), (iii)\n\nAfghanistan and (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi)\n\nForeign Aliens and Registration Act of (i), (ii)\n\nForeign Corrupt Practices Act of (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)\n\nKyrgyzstan military base of (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi)\n\nNew Silk Road strategy of (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)n5\n\nNorthern Distribution Network of (i), (ii)\n\nTajikistan and (i), (ii)\n\nTurkmenistan and (i), (ii)\n\nUzbekistan military base of (i), (ii), (iii)n20\n\nUnitel company (i)\n\nUppsala Conflict Database Project (i)n26\n\nUyghur separatists (i)\n\nUzbek Agency for Communications and Information (UzACI) (i)\n\nUzbekistan (i), (ii)\n\nanti-bribery laws of (i)\n\nbilateral investment treaties with (i)\n\nChina and (i)\n\ncotton production of (i)\n\nextraterritorial security tactics of (i), _(ii)_ , (iii), (iv)\n\nGerman air base in (i)n8\n\nglobal connections of (i)\n\nIslamic Movement of (i), (ii)\n\nMetal Tech case against (i)\n\nmigrant labourers from (i), (ii), (iii)\n\nNational Security Service of (i)\n\norganised crime in (i)\n\nPanama Papers and (i)\n\nRegional Anti-Terrorist Structure in (i)\n\nRussia and (i), (ii), (iii)\n\nUS military base in (i), (ii), (iii)n20\n\n_see also_ Andijan massacre\n\nValls, Manuel (i)\n\nVelcona Ltd (i)\n\nVimpelCom Ltd (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)n68\n\nVinyavsky, Igor (i)\n\nVisor Holdings company (i), (ii)n34, (iii)n43\n\nVitiano Holding Ltd (i)\n\nWang Jisi (i)\n\nWorld Bank (i), (ii)\n\nasset recovery by (i)\n\non Tajik economy (i)\n\nTalco and (i), (ii), (iii)\n\non Uzbek economy (i)\n\nXCMG company (i)\n\nXi Jinping (i)\n\nYakubov, Umid _(i)_ , _(ii)_\n\nYanukovych, Viktor (i)\n\nYelemessov, Andrian (i)\n\nYu, R. _(i)_\n\nYuldashev, Akram (i)\n\nZeromax company (i)\n\nZhakiyanov, Galymzhan (i), (ii)\n\nZhanaozen oil strike (2011) (i), (ii)\n\nZhang Benquan (i)\n\nZhovtis, Yevgeny (i), (ii)n55\n\nZhukovsky, Yuri (i)\n\nZoirov, Rahmatullo (i)\n\nZokhidov, Rustam (i)\n**ILLUSTRATION CREDITS**\n\n1 Reuters\/Vladimir Tretyakov. 2 Astana Economic Forum. 3 and 6 U.S. Department of State [Public Domain]. 5 Sulton1987. 7 World Economic Forum, Nader Daoud. 8 Ellgaard Holger. 9 DoD photo by Tech. Sgt. Kevin J. Gruenwald, U.S. Air Force. 10 Kyrgyz Presidential Website [Official Source]. 11 turkistanlilar.org. 12 Ola Westerberg\/TT\/TT News Agency\/Press Association Images.\n","meta":{"redpajama_set_name":"RedPajamaBook"}}