Текст книги "Richard C. Morais - The Hundred-Foot Journey"

Автор книги: Richard C. Morais

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Текущая страница: 13 (всего у книги 17 страниц)

I had no patience for Serge’s antics at that moment, so I backed out of the kitchen and headed to the spiral staircase, to my office and the accounting department up on the second floor.

Maxine, one of my accountants, her hair in a twist atop her head, smiled warmly as I clunked up the stairs, and I think she was going to say something sweet and coquettish from behind her computer terminal, but at that moment Mehtab, sitting at the desk in the back of the room, said, “Have you not finished with last month’s accounts? My God, Maxine, hurry up.”

Maxine turned toward my sister and snapped, “You gave it to me two days ago, Mehtab. Don’t hand me the data late and then get like that. It’s not fair. I am finishing them as fast as I can.”

I ducked my head down and waved vaguely at the two of them as I quickly crossed the room to my office and shut the door.

Finally alone, I collapsed on the swivel chair behind my desk.

For some minutes I took in Madame Mallory’s floor-to-ceiling collection of antique cookbooks, the valuable archive she had bequeathed to me and which occupied half my office. I took in Auguste Escoffier’s notes, the great chef’s rough ideas for an 1893 Savoy dinner that I had purchased at Christie’s, neatly framed on my desk. I looked at the amusing handwritten note of thanks from President Sarkozy, hanging by the door, cheek by jowl with my honorary degree from the École hôtelière de Lausanne. I looked at all these precious artifacts, always a source of great personal joy, and still I could not avoid the facts.

My hands were shaking.

I was not well.

Chapter Fifteen

I am furious. Just furious.”

Madame Verdun, shocked by her own vehemence, quickly turned her attention back to the coffee table to pour us a smoky tea from china that had once belonged to her grandmother. She sat at the edge of the white silk couch exquisitely embroidered with birds-of-paradise, and the image I have now is of an angry woman sitting stiff-backed and erect in a cloud of black chiffon, her hair an intricate cocoon of finely spun strands, translucent in the light, as if a chef had taken a blowtorch to sugar and woven threads of the candied filaments through her hair.

Through the French doors behind the widow, the garden was a riot of color—camellias and wood sage and flowering bilberry—and I tried not to let my attention drift over her shoulder to this enchanting scene outside. But I most confess I was unsuccessful, as finches and squirrels darted back and forth from a bird feeder, as a team of monarch butterflies fluttered drunk through the purple haze of a butterfly bush. It was all so much more attractive than the gloom of Madame Verdun’s private parlor, where Paul’s death hung heavy in the air, where the stone floor was cold and the lights dimmed for a house in mourning.

“I will never forgive him, and when Our Lord calls me home, I will make Paul pay for what he has done. I promise you, that impossible husband of mine, he will get an earful. Or worse.”

Her bony white fingers gripped the swoop of the teapot’s handle. “One lump or two?”

“Two lumps, and milk, please.”

The widow handed me my cup, poured her own, and for several awkward moments we sat in silence, the only sound in the room the grating of our silver spoons as we both wordlessly stirred our tea.

“They are still unclear as to what happened? He didn’t leave a note? One didn’t show up later?”

“No,” Madame Verdun said bitterly. “A will, yes, executed a few years ago, but no suicide note. Maybe he took his life. Maybe he didn’t. We will probably never know for certain.”

I pursed my lips. Madame Verdun’s old-fashioned way of talking always sounded to me like a deliberate attempt to let Paul’s friends know that she was of “better” stock than her self-made husband.

“But I think I know why Paul died.”

“Oh. Really?”

“Yes. The inspectors of Gault Millau and Le Guide Michelin killed him. They have blood on their hands. . . . If the police rule Paul’s death a suicide, and I am denied the payment of his life insurance policy, then I will sue the guides for every penny. I am consulting with my lawyer now.”

“I am sorry. I don’t understand.”

Madame Verdun stared at me—blankly—before placing her cup and saucer atop a coaster, next to a coffee table book on Etruscan gardens. She leaned forward and rubbed the coffee table with the palm of her hand, as if she had just located a wet spot.

“Well, Chef,” she finally said, “you seem to be the only one of Paul’s friends who doesn’t know the next edition of Le Guide was going to reduce Paul to two stars. The day before he died he received a call from a reporter at Le Figaro, asking for comment. There were rumors, of course, but the reporter confirmed our worst fears: Monsieur Barthot, the Michelin guide’s directeur général, personally approved his inspectors’ decision. So it was this completely unwarranted and capricious act by Barthot and his committee that directly or indirectly led to Paul’s death. Of this I am sure. He was powerless to fight their judgment, of course, and you should have seen him these last few weeks, since Gault Millau reduced him to fifteen points. He was gutted. Utterly without hope. And you know, the restaurant’s occupancy rate immediately fell when the new Gault Millau rating became public. . . . When I think about it, I just become so angry. But just you watch. I will teach Gault Millau and that Barthot fellow a lesson or two. I hold them personally responsible for Paul’s death.”

“I did not know. I am so very sorry.”

The room was again filled with our silence.

But Madame Verdun’s arched, finely penciled eyebrows, and the plaintive look on her face, suggested she wanted me to say something more, so I nervously added, “Of course, the critics were entirely wrong. No question. If I can be of help in this matter, please let me know. You know how much I admired Paul. . . .”

“Oh, how kind of you. Yes. Let me think. . . . We are assembling testimonials from his peers. Part of the complaint’s preamble.”

But it was clear, in the curvature of her lips, that my two-star status was not quite of sufficient elevation for such an important task, and that she really had in mind some other assignment. “But I am not sure that would be the best use of your talents,” she finally said.

I looked at my watch. If I left within the next ten minutes, I would hit rush hour but could still be back at the restaurant for the evening’s sitting.

“Madame Verdun, I believe you asked me here for a specific reason, no? Please speak freely. We are friends and you must know I want to be of service to Paul in any way that I can.”

“I did ask you here for a reason, Chef. How insightful of you.”

“Please ask.”

“We are going to have a memorial service for my late husband.”

“Of course.”

“It is Paul’s wish. He left specific instructions in his will, which states he wants a hundred friends for dinner after his passing. He even had the funds set aside in a special account for this memorial meal. You must know Paul was always a little odd, and ‘friends,’ well, we must interpret this word liberally. The list of guests attached to his will is really just a Who’s Who of French haute cuisine, with all the top-rated chefs, gourmand clients, and critics invited to send him off, even though he couldn’t stand most of them. . . . Honestly, such an odd request.”

The mask slipped and Anna Verdun was suddenly overcome by the tragedy of her husband’s death. She had to stop talking altogether for a few moments.

“Tell me, Chef, would you invite all your enemies to your memorial service? I simply don’t understand it. It must be a kind of showing off from beyond the grave, but I don’t know. I just don’t know. Truth be told, I never really understood my husband. Not in life. Not in death.”

It was the first and only time I caught a glimpse of what lay behind the woman’s frigid veneer, and the perplexed look on her face, the pain of her incomprehension, touched me deeply, and I instinctively reached over the coffee table to pat her hand.

She did not like this, not at all, for she promptly pulled her hand back, startled by the physical contact, and then covered up her embarrassment by looking for a tissue up her sleeve.

“But these were Paul’s final wishes, so I will honor them.”

She dabbed at the corners of her eyes, blew her nose, and then reinserted the tissue back up her chiffon sleeve. “Now, in all these specific instructions for the memorial, Paul wants, I quote, ‘the most talented chef in all France to send me home.’ ”

She looked at me. I looked at her.

“Yes?”

“Well, apparently he thought that was you. I am, if I may be frank, not quite sure why he was so taken by you—you have only two stars, no? But he did once say to me that you and he were the only genuine articles in all France. When I asked him what he meant, he said something to the effect that you two were the only chefs in France who really understood food, and only you two could possibly save French cooking from itself.”

A much-overblown and ridiculous remark, of course, so typical of Paul, but his widow smiled tremulously, and this time, against her better judgment, reached across the table to touch my hand.

“Hassan—may I call you that?—would you oversee Paul’s memorial dinner? Would you do this for me? It would be such a relief to know the dinner is in your capable hands. Of course, you mustn’t be in the kitchen yourself—you must be out front with the rest of us—but it would be merveilleux if you could oversee the menu, as Paul would have wanted. Is this too much to ask?”

“Not at all. I would be honored, Anna. Consider it done.”

“How kind of you. I am so relieved. Imagine, dinner for one hundred gourmands. What a burden to impose on a widow. I am simply in no state to organize such a thing.”

We stood and hugged each other stiffly, and I again expressed my condolences before moving, as quickly as I could without appearing rude, toward the front door.

“I will let you know the date of the memorial,” she called out.

I scuttled across the gravel to my battered Peugeot, but she kept on talking from the doorstep as I searched for my keys.

“Paul really had affection only for you, Hassan. He once told me that you and he were ‘made from the same ingredients.’ I thought that a rather clever turn of phrase for a chef. I think, when he looked at you, he saw his younger self. . . .”

I slammed the car door shut, awkwardly held up a hand in a final farewell, and then sped off with such force I think I sprayed her with bits of gravel. But in the stop-go drive back to Paris—through the back roads of Normandy, through the banlieue suburbs of Paris, along the périphérique, and then down through the string of lights of the city center—I could only think about Paul, consciously or not, taking his own life.

“I am nothing like you, Paul. Nothing at all.”

Restaurateurs from all over France—twenty-five thousand estimated the press—came to the capital that fateful day of the demonstration, and we initially gathered at the Arc de Triomphe. The atmosphere was festive, even as media and police helicopters hovered overhead like gathering storm clouds. Young and handsome chefs in toques, oversized and towering above us on stilts, were the charming front line of our demonstration, and we aligned ourselves in orderly rows behind them.

Colorful banners—cartoons of piggish politicians and emaciated chefs, red slashes through the value-added tax rate of 19.6 percent, simple NON PLUS placards—they were hoisted here and there by the rapidly gathering crowd, while the organizers in red aprons, holding megaphones, barked orders at us from the sidelines.

We had good cause. McDonald’s meals were, for some twisted bit of political reasoning, entirely tax-free, but quality French restaurants like Le Chien Méchant had to add a 19.6 percent VAT to every customer’s bill. So in the end, dinner at my two-star restaurant, without wine but including the labor-intensive service haute cuisine is rightly famous for, cost an average 350 euros a head. The universe of customers prepared to pay that amount for a meal was, as you can imagine, rather limited and rapidly dwindling. Dropped for a few years, the VAT charge had been reinstated. So the VAT, on top of the recession, was killing our business, and already several well-known restaurants—such as the celebrated Mirabelle over in the 8th—had gone bust.

Enough. We had to fight back.

Le Chien Méchant was that day well represented throughout the twenty-five-thousand-strong column. Serge and Jacques, my right and left hands, both were near the front, arm in arm, ready to roll down the Champs-Élysées like a meaty tanker. But I was also touched to see my pastry chef, Suzanne, plus two sous chefs and four waiters, all ready to do their part. Mehtab refused to come—we were all Bolsheviks, according to her—but the accountant, Maxine, arm in arm with our waiter Abdul, was there, repeatedly looking over at me, through the crowd, with hungry eyes. Even the young apprentice Jean-Luc was willing to be counted on his day off, and, touched to see his earnest face, I went out of my way to shake the boy’s hand and thank him.

“Chef!” yelled Suzanne, waving over the protesters’ heads. “What fun!”

I was not entirely sure. Immigrants, by instinct, we like to keep our heads down. Not make waves. Furthermore, my unease was fanned that morning when I met Le Comte de Nancy Selière. The count and his West Highland white terrier were heading off to their daily rendezvous in the Jardin des Plantes when I bumped into them at the corner of Rue des Écoles, just as the dog finished his business in the gutter and was triumphantly burying imaginary dirt on his mess with aristocratic flicks of his hind legs.

The aged count was bent over and cooing—“C’est formidable, Alfie!”—when he removed the linen handkerchief from his breast pocket to dab and tidy up around his dog’s bottom. It was of course a rather awkward moment to engage the gourmet banker, but I thought it would be even ruder to pretend I had not seen him, so I cleared my throat and said, “Bonjour, Monsieur Le Comte.”

The aristocrat straightened himself and looked around.

“Aah, Chef, it is you . . . I suppose you are off to march with the proletariat.”

“Don’t put it like that, please, Monsieur Le Comte. We want lower taxes.”

“Well, I really can’t blame you,” said the count, patting his pockets, pretending to look for a plastic bag. “Perhaps we should all be doing the same. You know, it was my ancestor, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, the finance minister of Louis XIV, who once noted, very sensibly I should add, that taxation was the art of ‘plucking the most feathers with the least amount of hissing.’ Totally lost on this lot. They’ve proven themselves to be rough and greedy, like provincial butchers.”

The count ignored the dog’s mess, despite the fact that a sign ordering Parisians to clean up after their animals was directly before us, and added, rather thoughtfully, as we continued to stroll down the street, “Do be careful, Chef. This government will mismanage the demonstration. Be sure of it. Absolutely no feel for finesse.”

At ten thirty that morning the morphing mass of demonstrators around the Arc de Triomphe seemed to solidify and congeal, and with a few barks from the megaphones, and some African drumming and whistles, we were off, arm in arm and chanting. I looked around as our sea of banners made its way down the Champs-Élysées, and found both Alain Ducasse and Joël Robuchon in the lines around me. I was literally surrounded by France’s restaurant establishment, and the sense of bonhomie was palpable.

Le Comte de Nancy’s warning suddenly seemed excessively dark and theatrical and misplaced. The sun was shining and the police looked bored; with the gawking Parisians stood wealthy Saudi and Kuwaiti families, the women in burkas, scores of children at their feet, standing along the Champs-Élysées and waving.

Less than an hour later, the forward ranks of the demonstration reached the other side of the Seine, in front of the Assemblée Nationale. It was there a phalanx of helmeted riot police with shields blocked our progress, as expected, with a makeshift pen created from a crescent of steel grilles preventing our protest from actually climbing the steps of the Assemblée Nationale and disrupting Parliament. But a stage, podium, and microphone had been set up within the pen, and a series of speeches was the next stage of the planned event.

Those of us in the middle of the human colony were intent on moving into the center of the action, but as we passed the Place de la Concorde, about to cross the bridge, scores of anarchists emerged from the Jardin des Tuileries behind us, kerchiefs pulled up over their faces, slipping into our ranks.

I am not sure what precisely happened next, but rocks and Molotov cocktails and cherry bombs were suddenly whizzing through the air. The riot police, armed with batons and shields, instantly and defensively surged forward and pressed down at us from the other end of the bridge.

There was tear gas smoke and screaming, torched cars erupting in flames, and the horrible crunching sound of police bringing batons down hard on heads.

We were trapped by the police on one side, the anarchists on the other.

The battle didn’t last that long and none of my staff were hurt, nor, in fact, was anyone I knew personally; the press said, in the end, ninety demonstrators and eight police were taken to the hospital, out of a total of twenty-five thousand demonstrators, while eleven cars were torched and destroyed.

But the terror—the bloody heads and the blinding smoke and the high-pitched screaming—that was earthshaking and powerful and sobering right down to the very core. It awoke in me primordial fears from the past, of torchlit mobs bearing down on the Napean Sea Road. And when I saw the policemen on horses charge into the crowd, swinging their batons, this bubbling bile of animal panic rose in my throat and I grabbed the arm of my neighbor, the apprentice Jean-Luc, and forced him to turn with me, to run back against the crowd, toward the Place de la Concorde and the advancing anarchists.

Ultimately the anarchists pushing back forced us off to the side, down the steps leading toward the river, where, by chance, a barge was docked under the bridge. The elderly hippie couple on board were at that moment loosening their ropes to pull away as quickly as possible from the trouble overhead, eager to avoid the fiery debris that was falling from the bridge into the water below and onto their deck. But the couple saw our panic and yelled, “Ici, vite,” and somehow we jumped, Jean-Luc and I, with two or three other people, hitting the deck with a thud, just as the barge pushed off.

“Merde. Merde,” was all the shaking boy could say for some time.

The riot on the bridge slowly retreated in the distance, and I recall the smooth sense of movement, of travel, of breeze. The couple had gray frizzy hair and soft voices and they made us sit on the deck under heavy horse blankets, the sun on our faces, while handing us shots of eaux de vie, for the shock, they said.

And I remember how we glided, glided silkily down the Seine, past the Eiffel Tower, past the Maison de Radio France, under Pont d’Issy, until at long last we reached the Île Billancourt out in the suburbs of Paris. And there, at long last, the couple docked their barge and let us out on the local pier, where we thanked them profusely and took their names and where I called Mehtab to come pick us up.

While we were waiting for my sister, Jean-Luc and I sat on a low wall and dangled our legs over the ledge that ran alongside a dusty park. Shards of broken wine bottles littered the parking lot. A few feet down below our ledge, to the left, an Algerian immigrant family was spit-roasting lamb on a park grill fashioned from an old oil drum. The father was off praying on a rug in the shade of a linden tree, while the women cooked and the children played soccer. The smell of searing lamb’s flesh and cumin and bubbling fat came to us in the wind, and the simplicity of it all—the roasting meat, the mint tea, the cheerful familial chatter—it took my breath away.

And it was then, when I gazed back out across the quicksilver Seine, that I caught sight of the elderly woman on the promenade on the far bank. She wore a shawl and seemed to be calling me, waving, urging me forward.

She was the spitting image of Madame Mallory, I tell you.

But perhaps I imagined it.