Manning the grill during the wintertime didn’t normally faze Seattle’s former chief engineer in the least. He actually enjoyed standing in the cold with a brew in one hand, tongs in the other. The smoky flavour of brats, burgers and (every so often) strip steak seemed that much more intense in the brisk cold air. Unfortunately, this evening, the blizzard conditions outside meant he was restricted to using a little hibachi unit on the kitchen bench, rather than being able to work the tongs on the big, honking eight-burner beast that sat, forlorn and neglected now, under a huge loaf of snow.

Not to worry. His thick boneless pork chops had been marinated to within an inch of their lives in a generous measure of Arthur Bryant’s special KC barbecue rub. During his last visit to Kansas City, he’d managed to slip away long enough to visit the site of the famous restaurant, at 1727 Brooklyn, near the city’s old Jazz District. The meat in the pit had long since turned to dust, yet the smell – that delicious, greasy smell of well-prepared pork, burnt rinds, ham and turkey – it was still there.

Although it was getting harder and harder to find these days, the wonder-rub had survived the years of neglect well enough. The sauce, that special vinegary creation that old Arthur himself used to mix up in five-gallon glass bottles, not so well. A small clique comprising expatriate KC folk and other barbecue aficionados from the South and the Midwest had been trying to reformulate the sauce. The President had a bottle of their concoction in the cabinet, but it never tasted quite right. On the other hand, it didn’t taste like curry either, and for that he was grateful.

Someone’s gonna get that sauce right someday, he thought. Maybe after I get out of this job, it’ll be me.

Barbara once accused him of resettling Kansas City simply so he could get production restarted on this old favourite, which he’d first discovered during an engineering convention back in the pre-Wave years. Not that she didn’t have her own personal indulgences – such as raiding the stocks of Williams-Sonoma and the Pottery Barn to refurbish Dearborn House.

Looking around the well-equipped, painfully clean and modern kitchen, Kip marvelled at the tongs in his hands. They cost enough to buy a whole set of utensils from Walmart back in his college days. He was still getting used to the amount of space here, since he only used the kitchen on Sundays. It smelled of coffee, baked sweet potato and, now, slow-cooking pork.