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Authors: Alexander Campion

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“The odd person out?” Alexandre asked. “Surely that can't be the host?”
With dismay Capucine saw the direction Alexandre was attempting to take. He never seemed to accept the impossibility of defeating her cousin at his own game.
“Hardly.”
“Does that mean this may be the evening we are finally to be introduced to a significant other? Should the family prepare itself for a blessed announcement?”
“My dear cousin-in-law, when I told you the four sexes would be represented, I was simplifying for a general audience. As I'm sure you know, there are now really eight. Possibly ten, if you count fastidiously. It's the principal progress our civilization has achieved since Sagan's day. Don't you think?”
Despite himself, Alexandre struggled with the mental gymnastics of identifying ten different sexes. Capucine bit her lip once again to keep from giggling.
Jacques put his hand affectionately on Alexandre's upper arm. “When the dinner is over, why don't you tell who you think my putative consort is and to which of the ten groups ‘he' or ‘she' belongs?”
Alexandre glared at him.
“If you guess right, and give me your blessing, I might even be tempted to bring ‘him' or ‘her' to the
Dîner en Blanc.
Or perhaps not,” Jacques said with the smarmiest variant on his Cheshire grin.
“The
Dîner en Blanc,”
Alexandre said with the relief of a drowning man clutching a life ring. “I'd forgotten that it was next week. I know it's a little passé, but I still think it's great fun to dress up in white and descend en masse for a picnic in some part of Paris like some sort of culinary flash mob.”
Capucine wondered if his emotion was elation at the upcoming dinner or relief that the subject of multiple sexes had been abandoned.
“Pardon, monsieur,” Madame de Sansavour said, peeking timidly through the door. “I think your guests are here.” From behind her a wave of bourgeois phonemes rolled into the room.
Jacques's dinner was an undeniable success. It turned out the novelist and the sculptor were women and the poet and and the dancer were men. They had all whetted their epigrams well and the conversation tintinnabulated like rapiers ringing against each other at a duel. Alexandre's eye bounced back and forth across the table continually, as he vainly attempted to discern the slightest attachment between Jacques and one of the guests. It was only when the quail stuffed with foie gras arrived—it really was superb—that he gave up his futile quest.
Well after midnight, just as the conversation was coasting comfortably toward its perigee, someone raised the topic of Gaël Tanguy in the context of being the darkest possible horse in history to have ever received the coveted Goncourt. Tanguy was a source of acute frustration for Capucine as he was one of the suspects who remained tantalizingly beyond her reach. The conversation flared. The novelist and the poet launched into an argument of fulminating violence. The poet decried Tanguy as a charlatan who had nothing to say and who was revolting merely to be the focus of the press. The novelist hotly compared him to Baudelaire and accused the poet of being incapable of comprehending a work easily equal to
Les Fleurs du Mal
. The dancer and the sculptor joined the fray. It wasn't until Jacques adopted his Sixteenth Arrondissement drawl and said, “Say what you will, but Tanguy has awakened my erotic interest in my coffeemaker. He's added a whole new dimension to my life,” and followed it up with an earsplitting rendition of his braying laugh, that the table was brought to order and calm restored.
The dinner ended in the warm, embracing, multihued cloud of good fellowship that is the ultimate object of every Parisian
dîner mondain.
Only Capucine remained on edge as the worm of frustration tunneled inexorably through her innards.
CHAPTER 17
A
tten the next morning Capucine was deeply immersed in the bitter waters of one of her brigade's case files. An SDF—police jargon for
sans domicile fixe,
a homeless person—had been savaged viciously by a dog at four in the morning as he was sleeping in the doorway of a Carrefour supermarket. The lieutenant in charge of the case suspected it was the work of a gang of youths notorious for breeding and arranging fights for illegal pit bulls. He had a few good leads. He needed more support to run them to ground.
The phone rang. Immersed in the lengthy and grisly description of the victim's wounds, Capucine picked up the receiver mechanically.
“Commissaire? Hi! It's Béatrice. From the restaurant.”
“Béatrice.
Ca va?
How are things?”
There was a short pause.
“
Pas mal
—just fine. I was calling because, well, I hadn't spoken to you in over a week and was wondering if you had any news on that killing in my restaurant.”
“We're making satisfactory progress on the case.”
Béatrice snorted a polite guffaw. “Capucine, it's me, Béatrice, your favorite chef, not the press. You don't have to feed me a line.”
“Sorry.” Capucine laughed. “But it's not really a line. Police work is mostly slogging and even when you've been at it for weeks there's often not all that much to talk about.”
“Poor you. That must be really frustrating sometimes. Listen. I was also calling because I want to ask you to do me a favor. Will you do something for me?”
“A favor? What's up?”
“I want you to be my guinea pig.”
“I don't understand.”
“I'm trying out something new in the restaurant, and I want you to tell me if it works or not. See, a lot of restaurants put a table for two right in the kitchen. The guests get to sit in the middle of the action. No barrier at all between chef and diner. I'm dying to do that, but my maître d' tells me I'm too foulmouthed.”
“And you want to try it out on me? Is that it?”
“If you could. I'm going to clear out my office and put a table in there just to see how it works. See, you'd be the distinguished guest, but since you're really a pal, it would be okay if the experiment doesn't work out.”
“Count on me. I'm game. Just tell me when.”
“Tomorrow night, if you're free. And I'm also going to try out a new dish on you. I've been working on it for months. It's a big departure from what I usually do, but it's totally fabulous and I want it to be my signature piece. You'll be the first person outside of my kitchen who's tasted it.”
“I wouldn't miss this for the world.”
 
With great formality Capucine was shown into Béatrice's tiny office by the black-suited maître d'. The desk piled with papers and notebooks had been replaced by a small two-person table covered with an immaculate white tablecloth set with stemmed glasses, the restaurant's gold-rimmed plates, and monogrammed silver flatware. As the maître d' eased her into the chair, a waiter arrived with a flute of champagne.
“Before we start,” the maître d' said with the gravity of a croupier, “Chef would like to show you the preparation of your appetizer. I think she'll be ready in a minute.”
Béatrice stood at the corner of a table surrounded by four cooks in brilliantly white T-shirts set off by black aprons. The cooks were bent over intently, brows furrowed, staring at something on the stainless-steel table as Béatrice lectured them, wagging a finger in the air. In the contrasting light and shadow from the overhead lamp, the tableau looked like a scene from an eighteenth-century medical dissection.
Béatrice looked up and pointed at the maître d'.
“I believe Chef is ready for you now,” he said.
Béatrice beamed and kissed Capucine on both cheeks. “We're about to assemble our little masterpiece. If you don't tell me it's the best thing you've ever put in your mouth, I'll ... I don't know ... cry, probably.”
The center of attention was a shiny, solid-looking sepia tube that appeared to be made of industrial plastic, possibly a component of some mechanical apparatus. A one-inch hole had been bored through the center and was filled with a gelatinous sludge the color of crankcase oil. It was anything but appetizing.
As Béatrice extracted a long-bladed chef's knife from a stainless-steel beaker filled with water, there was a collective intake of breath. With great care she cut a sliver from the end of the tube. The knife slid through the substance as if it was warm butter. One of the chefs scooped up the initial slice and removed it. The tension around the table increased a notch.
Béatrice dipped the knife back in the beaker of water and cut a second slice—this one a good inch thick—and placed it reverently on one of the restaurant's plates. An acolyte produced a plastic squeeze bottle and—with great concentration—made an artistic squiggle of black sludge around the supine disk.
A waiter appeared and, under the hawkeyed gaze of the maître d', took the plate to Capucine's table. Capucine followed, trailed by a procession of white-clad cooks, who hovered, almost farcically nervous, when she sat.
A waiter ceremoniously placed a small silver bucket on the table containing points of brioche toast peeking coquettishly out of a napkin.
“What am I supposed to do here?” Capucine asked. “Eat it like foie gras?”
“Of course. It
is
foie gras,” Béatrice said.
It certainly didn't look like any foie gras Capucine had ever seen. She cut a small section and put it on a piece of the toast.
“Put some of the sauce on it. That's very important,” Béatrice said.
As Capucine put the morsel in her mouth, the four chefs stared at her intently, waiting for the verdict. The scene reminded her of that coffee advertisement where the entire village waits breathlessly for the decision as the gringo taster samples their beans. She suppressed a giggle, and then the taste hit her. It was a lobe of foie gras, no doubt at all about that, but as she held it in her mouth, the flavor continued to grow and grow and grow in a crescendo that culminated with far more intensity than any foie gras she had ever eaten. As the detonation subsided, she recognized a delicate fruity sweetness. Fig? Yes. The sludge was some sort of fabulous fig sauce.
“It
is
the best thing I've ever eaten. Without any doubt at all. But what on earth is it?”
The four chefs beamed. A mariachi band played loudly. The gringo would buy the coffee. The village was saved.
“The magic of the laboratory,” Béatrice said. “Molecular cuisine. Food is deconstructed and then reconstructed so that it tastes even more like itself. Like sorbet, but carried to new heights.”
“But how did you make this?”
“The lobe is first put in a bag, which goes into a vacuum machine that sucks out all the air. Then it sits in a precisely controlled water bath the precise temperate the inside would reach if it was grilled on a pan. That way the entire lobe reaches the ideal temperature. If it's cooked in a pan, the outside is overcooked so the middle comes out right.”
“Is that what they call
sous vide?
”
“Exactly,” Béatrice said in a tone halfway between an older sister and a schoolmarm. “After four hours it's ready. Then it goes into a special high-speed blender that transforms it into an unctuous cream. We inject that under pressure into a steel cylinder, which is flash frozen with liquid nitrogen. When it's rock hard, it's released and kept frozen for a day until it's allowed to thaw very, very slowly. The freezing process further accentuates the taste.”
“And the sauce?” Capucine asked.
“Now that's a little tricky,” Béatrice said.
Her four chefs laughed politely in adulatory agreement.
“It's made with fresh Persian figs with a number of Indian spices and a hint of ginger. It's cooked only just enough to marry the components but not to reduce it. The trick is that instead of boiling it down, which would sully the flavors, I reduce it in a chemist's centrifuge, which separates the liquid from the solids. That's why it tastes more figgy then figs do. It's harder to pull off than to describe.”
“I'm beyond impressed,” Capucine said.
Béatrice laughed. “So are we. We had some exciting moments with that liquid nitrogen. I'm amazed we all still have ten fingers left.”
The chefs continued to beam.
“All right,” Béatrice said. “You just sit and enjoy your molecular treat while I get these guys off their high and sorted out for the dinner service. Then I'll be back and we can catch up.”
As Capucine drifted beatifically with her foie gras and the glass of Sauternes that had appeared unnoticed, the kitchen began to pick up momentum as the restaurant filled slowly for the dinner service. The noise level escalated, and the air filled with steam, pungent odors, and urgent, coarse invective.
Once the kitchen choreography stabilized and the noise level dimmed, Béatrice arrived with the main course, the quail stuffed with foie gras Capucine had been served at Jacques' dinner.
“Normally, I'd never serve foie gras on top of foie gras, but you're like family and I wanted you to taste this. It's my signature dish, the staple of the restaurant.”
Even though it appeared identical, and had presumably been made following an identical recipe, the quail was so superior to Madame de Sansavour's, it seemed like an entirely different dish. Capucine decided Alexandre was going to have to explain how that was possible.
“So, still no breakthroughs on the killing in my restaurant?” Béatrice asked.
Capucine shook her head, relishing her quail. “This is really unbelievably good.”
“Yup. The problem is that we cook it so often, the chefs do it by rote now. That invites mediocrity. I'm going to have to take it off the menu. And what about the murder in that blind restaurant? Do you think it was the same guy?”
“Might have been,” Capucine said. “The MO was almost identical.”
“It was?”
“The victim was stabbed fatally with a basting needle but he was also injected with a concentrate of castor beans.”
“It's totally lethal, right?”
“No. That's an old wives' tale. To extract the poison from castor beans, you need a complicated chemistry lab.”
“Well, I convinced my mother it was poisonous and got her to stop making me take that awful castor oil. It was the only time I ever convinced her of anything.”
Both women laughed.
“And how do you go about solving these cases? Is it like television, where very somber and intense men determine the identity of the killer from a single microfiber found in the victim's nose?”
“We have those somber, intense guys, all right. But they haven't found anything. So it's going to be good old flat-footed police work, pounding the pavement, looking for a motive.”
“Motive?”
“Ninety-five percent of all police work is so-called motive-driven. Find out who would benefit from the crime and you're three quarters of the way to finding the culprit.”
“Motive. I never would have thought of that. I thought it was all about clues—”
Béatrice jumped up.
“Bordel de merde, Jean, qu'est-ce que tu me fous la!”
She dashed over to one of the chefs and pushed him away from his station with her hip. Peering down into a copper pot he had been whisking, she shook her head in disgust.
“
Putain de merde
,” she shouted.
“C'est dégelasse. Dé ... gueu ... lasse!
—Vomit! Start over!” The cook stood abashed, trying to hide under the stove.
As the loud, heavily spiced, remonstration continued, the maître d' appeared at Capucine's table, his croupier's veneer cracked, his brow wrinkled by lines of concern.
“
Ça vous convient
,
Madame?
Is everything all right? Is Madame enjoying her experience of eating in the kitchen? Madame doesn't find it too troubling?” He looked nervously at Béatrice, who continued ranting, red-faced, at the cook. When it was finally over and she started to return, the maître d' intercepted her and whispered urgently in her ear.
Béatrice arrived at the table, blowing exasperated puffs of irritation.
“He's telling me that I won't be able to talk to my chefs like that if I'm going to have patrons eating in the kitchen. How the fuck does that smart-ass think this stuff gets cooked? This isn't some fucking TV show where sweet, fat old ladies make coq au vin while they prattle on about their stupid grandchildren.
Merde!”
Béatrice kicked the table leg. Capucine's empty plate jumped, and she grabbed her glasses before they toppled over.

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