After arriving on the small Greek island I took a taxi to the hotel where Mr. Tracy’s assistant had booked me a room. I must admit that I was surprised when the front desk clerk announced that they had upgraded me to a studio. I wondered if they had originally put me in a broom closet. But I soon found out that over here they call it a studio when it has a sitting room and a separate bedroom.

The hotel was quite comfortable and the people working there very friendly. It was surrounded by beautifully-lush gardens, which was a feat considering the hot and dry climate. The hottest and driest it had been in years, as the gardener told me in his almost non-existent English. We could communicate about the plants and shrubs by using their Latin names though, and for the rest we used hand and body language.

The one thing not pleasant about the hotel was a very noisy and rude group of people also staying there. The woman was young and beautiful, a work of art created by a very skilled cosmetic surgeon, and covered in jewelry that she changed even more often than her clothes. The man was much older, heavier and considerably less attractive; the two younger men wore sunglasses even at night and their sport coats showed a bulge under their left armpits. Judging by their accents, I wouldn’t have been surprised to find out that the man was a Russian mobster. They behaved as if they owned the place, treating the personnel badly and ignoring all other guests. After one experience of having breakfast in the same room as them, and having them take my coffee pot from my table since they didn’t want to wait for their own coffee, I decided it would be wiser to withdraw from the scene. I went out to find a taverna that served breakfast, and I found the “Platanista Fish and Craps Caffee”. And its owner, Mr. Demetrios, who cooked better than he wrote English, fortunately. It soon became my favorite watering hole, as the Tracys would have called it, for my lunch and dinner too.

Over the days Mr. Demetrios and I developed a ritual in which he poured me a liqueur before lunch, and if I could guess the four foremost ingredients, it was on the house. As an added handicap, he always served it as soon as the noon ferry appeared from behind the rocks on the western side of the bay and I had to give the answer before the ship disappeared from view on the eastern side.

On this particular afternoon I moved my chair a little into the shadow as the ferry came into view and picked up the glass of liqueur. Mmm, today it was a dark orange-red liquid that clung to the side of the glass, and the scent of cinnamon and nutmeg was clear from the first smell and sip. The ferry had reached nearly the halfway point when I decided that assorted citrus fruits were the third ingredient. How was I to know that this time I would fail the contest? But then, Mr. Demetrios didn’t win it, either.

But what was I doing here in the first place? Well, it had all started six months ago…

I think that most people hearing about life on an island in the South Pacific Ocean only think of palm trees, white sandy beaches, blue seas, and fruit hanging around waiting to be picked. You have to live there to find out how quickly that can all become tedious. And then there’s the rainy season…

Rain pours down, day in, day out. Everything becomes moldy and then starts to rot. Even indoors, everything becomes damp and clammy. I ask you, how do you bake bread with soggy flour? And on top of that the weather is depressing, making people seek comfort with each other – even the Tracys. Although most of them would have said that it was a coincidence that they always got together during the evenings, when the work was done.

As it was on this particular evening…

Mrs. Tracy read a newspaper, a real one; she had once told me she couldn’t get used to reading them electronically no matter how many reading devices her son and grandsons gave her. Mr. Tracy and Mr. Gordon played chess. Mr. Virgil sat behind his father’s desk writing out some musical scores. Mr. John was playing some Scrabble-like word game on his iPad. Mr. Brains sat reading a book, as did Mr. Scott on their readers. And I sat waiting for my daughter Tin-Tin to find a DVD she wanted me to see.

Even the cat had come indoors. Black and sleek, he’d found his way to the island in one of Thunderbird Two’s pods. As the animal had no collar and was not chipped, we didn’t know where to return him. So, we let him stay. Only my daughter called him by the name she’d given him: Snookie. All the others called him ‘’the cat’’ and pretended to ignore him. Just as the animal pretended to ignore us.

But I knew better. Amazingly enough Cat Snookie left the island animal population alone, but was a ferocious killer of the rats that also had found their way to the island. Often I found his nightly kills lined up at the kitchen door. But as Mr. Scott was more often than not awake before me, it was he who had to dispose of victims and reward their killer. Mr. Scott would never forgive me if I ever let on that I, on several occasions, saw him pouring warm milk over broken up rusks and having a conversation with the animal that couldn’t wait for the bowl be put on the floor.

But I digress. We were all sitting in the lounge occupied in our own way; however the Tracys were always aware of each other and also of Mr. Brains and my daughter and me. So some conversations were going on all the time.

“What are you reading, Brains?” asked Mr. Gordon.

“Fermat’s theorem on sums of two squares,” said Mr. Brains.

“And that’s for relaxation?” wondered Mr. Scott, while Mr. Gordon snorted and said: “Funny name. Imagine calling your kid ‘Fermat.’”

“No,” said Mr. Brains.

“No, it’s not a funny name?”

“No, it’s not for relaxation. If it was for relaxation I would be translating it into Klingon.”

That made us all laugh.

“And what does this format of two squires mean?” said Mr. Gordon, grinning.

“It’s about a passive gravimetric replication capacitor,” said Mr. Brains with dignity, winking to Mr. Virgil, who said: “Star Trek technobabble.”

“Is opaquest an existing word?” asked Mr. John, looking up from his iPad. “It would be worth 211 points, but she,” he stabbed his finger at the screen, “will not accept it.”

“She?” asked Mrs. Tracy. “Does this girl have a name?”

“No, I mean, yes, I’m sure she has a name, but I only know her by her username.”

“Fermat’s Lady?” muttered Gordon.

“Tell her to Google it,” said Mr. Tracy as he went to the kitchen. Raising his voice so he could be heard, he added; “And I would think that I paid enough for your education that you would know what it meant.”

Mr. Virgil looked up. From where he sat he could see into the kitchen if he just leaned over a bit, and I saw him watching for a moment. Then he grinned. “Grandma, how much did you pay for Dad’s education?”

“It’s the superlative form of opaque,” came the Mr. Tracy’s voice from the kitchen at the same moment as Mrs. Tracy said: “Why do you ask, dear?”

At that moment Mr. Tracy returned and Mr. Virgil asked him: “Found the chess moves you were looking for, Dad? I mean, that is what you were looking up on your phone just now, right?”

Mr. John laughed and shook his head.

Mr. Tracy was saved from further embarrassment by the arrival of my daughter, who came into the room and started the movie.

Now, I am a chef. That is, I was a chef. And yes, I did once work in an upscale Paris restaurant. But that doesn’t mean I was the Chef de Cuisine, the manager, the boss, the leader. I couldn’t have done that. And I wouldn’t have wanted to do that. Chefs de Cuisine rarely cook, you know. They are managers, bookkeepers. No, back then I was then the pâtissier, the pastry chef. I made the pastries, cakes, biscuits, macaroons, chocolates, breads and desserts. And it wasn’t until I went to work for my friend Jeff Tracy, that I became interested in all other foodstuff. Simple, wholesome, healthy and tasty food, made with the best ingredients and in the best combinations.

Working at the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew, in Southwest London, taught me about herbs and spices. During my short stint with NASA I learned all about the preservation of food. And living with the Tracys had taught me that a) all the males in the family had hollow legs and b) those who had been in the military or had been liaised or had been on detachment to another government institution, such as NASA, were very vocal about their dislike of pre-packaged food rations. If I remember correctly the official military term is MREs – Meals Ready to Eat. Mr. Gordon always insisted it meant Materials Resembling Edibles, though.

So far I haven’t received any complaints about my rations, but I firmly believe it can always be better. The movie, A Touch of Spice, made a lasting impression on me. The back story was interesting: people of Greek heritage living in Istanbul, or Constantinople as they called it, mingling their original cuisine with that of the Turks, and then being deported to Greece, a country where most of them had never been and had no roots. But it was the cooking and the use of spices that made me want to know more.

Mr. Tracy offered to pay for a learning vacation to Greece, and I jumped at that chance. As it turned out, we should have done a little more research on where those expelled Greeks had settled, as I wound up in the wrong part of Greece. ‘Never assume anything’ is the lesson here, I think. But as fate would have it, Mr. Demetrios had had a step-grandmother who had been born and lived in ‘Poli,’ and since he was in the restaurant trade he had learned all he could from her, her sisters and her cousins.

So there I sat trying to guess the ingredients in my liqueur and watching the ferry out at sea. It looked as if it was closer to the rocks than it had been on other occasions. And I noticed that the only other luncheon guests, a middle-aged American couple from the Pacific Northwest, were also looking at the ferry.

“That ferry,” the woman said to Mr. Demetrios as he brought them a plate of cheesy garlic bread, a beer and a glass of wine. “It looks as if it’s going the hit the rocks.”

“No, it looks that way, but it’s really far away,” he answered, and started to come over to my table. We all jumped at the sudden blaring of a ship’s horn, faint screams and the sound of metal being torn apart. Followed by a deadly silence, both out at sea and on the shore.

The ferry had run aground, and was already listing.

Shocked, we sat and stood and stared for what seemed to me a long time, but was probably only a few seconds in reality. Then all four of us started to talk simultaneously.

“What’s the emergency number in these parts?” asked the husband of the couple.

“Why don’t they lower the lifeboats?” asked his wife.

“They are probably out of service,” Mr. Demetrios said somewhat darkly.

“We must do something to help those people,” I said.

“Out of service? How can you have a ferry service with lifeboats out of service?” the American husband looked horrified.

But Mr. Demetrios, who had taken out his cell phone, now had a new worry. “The network must be down, I can’t get a signal. And they have not fixed the landlines yet!” He had been complaining about the phone system when I reached the taverna that morning; apparently it had not been working for a day and a half, which he had further explained to me was not uncommon. I was not surprised about the power failure, either… I’d learned even in the short time I’d been on the island that they happened regularly in Greece.

On the beach, the lifeguard, who only had a small rowboat, was having a heated discussion with the man who rented out various vehicles for watersports. Not that he had much to rent. Three canoes, two water bikes and a small motor boat for towing water skiers. The discussion ended with both men setting out to the stricken ferry in the motor boat.

Even I could have predicted what happened next. Panicking passengers jumped into the sea or lowered themselves over the side, quickly overwhelming the motor boat. Which then sank.

I tried to take stock of the situation: a small island with next to no rescue gear, and no way to alert the authorities. The ferry slowly listing more and more; two or three dozen people bobbing up and down in a fortunately calm and relatively warm sea. No attempt at all was being made to lower lifeboats, at least that I could see. It was time, I thought, to retreat to the men’s room and, for the first time in my life, use my watch to call International Rescue. Of course, I couldn’t tell the others I was going to do this. So when the others thought of International Rescue too, and Mr. Demetrios and the husband of the American couple – who had by now introduced themselves as Linda and Robert Williams – said they were going to find someone with a working radio to call. I couldn’t stop them. Instead I excused myself to Mrs. Williams and went to the restroom. There I quickly explained the situation to Mr. Alan, who then told me they would come as soon as possible and if one of them needed some extra information they would make my watch vibrate, after which I would have to discreetly retreat to the restroom again.

Returning to the terrace I found that the Russian mobster party had arrived. With Mr. Mobster loudly asking: “Why is nothing being done?” and Mrs. Mobster whining about the Greek barkeepers, who didn’t know how to make a decent Bentley Sidecar. I knew that was a cocktail, and an expensive one, too, but Mrs. Williams wondered, innocently and refreshingly, if a garage wasn’t the best place to find a Bentley.

Mr. Mobster was right, though, and it was time for us to try to initiate a rescue. And obnoxious as the man was, he was also the type to get things done. So I started by introducing Mrs. Williams and myself to him. His name was Vasily Pismenskov. His wife, who ignored our offered hands, was Olga Pismenskova and the two younger men were introduced as Boris and Evgeny.

Now, ever since I’d seen that motor boat sink I had been thinking of the traditional outrigger canoes I remembered from my youth. They were very stable and I had seen ones with a deck build on to them to transport many objects. If only we could build a few of those fast.

I tried to explain this to Mr. Pismenskov, who didn’t understand what I meant. In growing desperation I kept on trying, and then suddenly realized I had grabbed a bottle of ketchup and had started drawing diagrams on the tablecloth. Something Mr. Brains and the younger Tracy men often did during dinner when the conversation turned technical, although not usually with condiments. It had always made me shake my head when they did this and now I here I was doing the same thing. This was one detail I would be leaving out of my accounts of my trip when I got home.

Above all, it worked. Mr. Pismenskov understood what I meant.

“We could use those canoes,” he said, pointing at the watersports shop. “And that rowboat and the water bikes, to tow them to and from the ferry. But how can we…”

Mrs. Williams interrupted. “My husband and I saw this huge stack of bamboo poles lying around next to that go-karts place up the road. Could we use those?” She then got a writing pad out of her purse and began to make copies of my diagrams.

Mrs. Pismenskova whined again: “I’m hungry.”

“Shut up,” said her husband. “Boris, you and I are going to get that bamboo. Evgeny, you go and find us rope, hammers and nails.” He then pointed to Mrs. Williams and me: “And you are going to find people to help us. Now, go!”

I looked at him with new respect: it was as if I was listening to Mr. Tracy. Mr. Pismenskov may have looked like a mobster, he may indeed have been a mobster, but he did have a heart.

Half an hour later tourists and locals were frantically building outriggers and rafts and connecting them to the canoes. Mrs. Williams had gotten Mrs. Pismenskova to collect towels and blankets from the hotels nearby, a neat feat if I may say so, and she was busy making sandwiches and coffee for the rescuers and rescuees.

Everybody cheered when the first ‘rescue craft’ set out. Mr. Pismenskov, Boris and Evgeny were worth their weight in gold in preventing these crafts being overwhelmed. Although I am afraid they might have used some unnecessary force in the process… But they managed by the time International Rescue arrived to rescue everyone in the water and nearly an additional 200 passengers from the sinking ferry.

Then we all sat down to a meal cooked by Mrs. Williams, while watching the International Rescue craft rescuing the other passengers. I felt good. I had been instrumental in saving lives, I had made new friends, I had learned more about one of my favorite subjects, food: both the original Greek/Turkish dishes as well as the American versions of those dishes (I promised myself to get the recipe to the cheesy garlic bread we were having, because Mr. Scott would never forgive me if I didn’t!). Some probable criminals had done good deeds and a spoiled trophy wife had even been persuaded to join in.

And when Mr. Demetrios and Mr. Williams told us that by the time they’d found someone with a working radio and called International Rescue, the organization had told them that they’d already received a call and were on their way, I just smiled and said nothing at all.

And for those who wondered:

The movie Kyrano watched with his daughter is Politiki Kouzina, AKA A Touch of Spice. A beautiful Greek movie that tells with humor a story about family, love, friendship, missed chances, regrets, coming to terms and food. Lots of food. If you have a chance, go and see it. Even better, go and taste it.

The liqueur Demetrios poured is called Tentura and the fourth ingredient is cloves.

The island Kyrano went to in this story is an amalgam of Crete, Santorini and the islands of the Dodecanese, Greece.

‘Poli’ is the shortened name for Constantinople the Greek used/use.

Demetrios, you know who you are! Efharisto para poli.

Jaimi-Sam. Thank you so much. For everything.