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Authors: Alexander Campion

BOOK: Killer Critique
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CHAPTER 38
T
here was no doubt that Chef Delmas had a flair for extravaganza, Alexandre told himself as he sauntered between two rows of mounted Garde Républicaine—resplendent in their plumed helmets and blue and red uniforms—toward the chrome yellow awning over the door to the restaurant's elevator. He could see a single white police van parked on the quai and told himself that anyone would think it normal for such a celebrity-packed guest list.
At the base of the steps to the elevator a covey of pretty hostesses in short black dresses circulated, bestowing guests waiting for the lift with authentic smiles and flutes of champagne.
Heedful of Capucine's instructions that he was not, under any circumstances, to enter the restaurant without Momo as a chaperone, Alexandre joined the exhilarated swarm, accepted a glass of champagne, and waited for his protector and new best friend. Within a few minutes he was so engrossed in trading smiles of escalating radiance with one of the hostesses that he was oblivious to a large, looming brown mass materializing at his side until it began to grumble. Absurdly, Momo had been decked out in the restaurant's waitstaff livery: Lanvin's adaptation of a Zouave uniform, a tight, brown, buttonless mess jacket over exaggeratedly baggy dark tan pants held at the ankle by leather spats.
“The boss knows I hate these costume gigs,” Momo growled in Alexandre's ear. “She also knows I hate tight collars,” he said, pulling at the neck of a white collarless shirt. “But still she makes me do this shit.”
“You're adorable in Lanvin, sweetie,” Alexandre said. “It brings out a whole new you.”
“You're not going to be finding it so goddamn funny when someone tries to get at you and I don't have my piece, because there's no place to stash it in this clown outfit.”
The door to the elevator slid open. Alexandre moved toward the elevator steps. Momo slid a hand big enough to strangle a sheep under his upper arm and held him back.
“We go in last.”
Just as the door began to close, Momo pushed Alexandre roughly into the elevator and sidled in after him. There were refined mumbles of outrage.
As the glass-walled elevator rose four hundred feet through a latticework of steel girders, Paris stretched itself out, a sea of zinc rooftops punctuated by islands of gilt domes. There was a collective buzz of admiration from the passengers.
When the door opened again with a satisfying whoosh, Alexandre found himself face-to-face with Isabelle, also dressed as a Zouave, holding a clipboard.
“May I see your invitation, please?” she asked crisply with a lame attempt at a smile. It was a far cry from the smiles of the hostesses at the elevator's entrance but at least her lips were upturned. Alexandre handed her his elaborately engraved pasteboard card with a grin, which was returned with a scowl.
“Is Capu ...
Commissaire
Le Tellier wearing one of these uniforms too?” Alexandre asked Momo. “I really wouldn't want to miss that.”
“Yeah, right. She's hanging out in the kitchen, palling with the chef, wearing her usual great clothes, looking like a million euros.”
The restaurant's revamped décor fully lived up to the expectations created at the ground level. The area had been divided into four intimate dining rooms, barely lit, placing the spectacular panorama of Paris in dramatic relief. The furnishings succeeded in evoking the Belle Epoque while remaining modern and self-effacing. The only distraction from the view came from the muted luminescence of the tabletops, washed in a delicate glow from small glass globes.
Aping the aplomb of a seasoned maître d'hôtel, Momo showed Alexandre to a four-top up against the glass window and retreated to a dim corner. Out of the corner of his eye Alexandre caught sight of David standing in the opposite corner of the room, also wearing the restaurant livery. Even at a distance it was obvious he was rejoicing in his new outfit. Every few seconds he snaked into a new pose, exploring the costume's possibilities. Alexandre grinned.
The first of Alexandre's dinner companions to arrive were the président–directeur général of the hotel chain that owned fifty percent of the restaurant, accompanied by his wife, a shrewish woman, leathery from excesses of Saint-Tropez sun, who dressed as if she was still nineteen. Her husband, a rotund, jovial bon vivant, was delighted to see Alexandre. “Excellent,” he said with a gurgling tobacco laugh as he sat heavily. “Delmas certainly knows how to do things. He's put France's most revered restaurant critic in my care. And who knows better how to show him a good time, right,
chérie?”
His wife frowned sourly.
The next to arrive was an Italian senator long famous for his right-wing populist politics and his fascination with barely pubescent models. He sat down in a flurry of Italian manners and attempted to kiss the hand of the president's wife, which she withdrew in a huff.
A sommelier arrived with the ubiquitous champagne, this time Perrier-Jouët Belle Epoque Blanc de Blancs 2000 in a magnum decorated with Art Deco anemones and eighteen nineties lettering. With an elegant gesture the sommelier poured, holding the bottle with his thumb in the recess at the base and his fingers splayed out on the side.
“We're off to a good start,” the hotel president said to Alexandre as the Italian senator craned, casing the room for pulchritude. “But I have to confess I have no idea what we're going to eat. No one tells me that sort of thing.”
“The PR firm sent a circular around to the press,” Alexandre said. “Apparently we're going to have a tasting menu of four dishes followed by cheese and dessert.” Alexandre warmed to the subject. “Their first course is a Brittany lobster with a salad of wild apples and a cold ré-moulade spicy sauce made with mayonnaise, gherkins, capers, and mixed herbs. Then there's a dish of country endive cooked with truffles, chicory, raw ham from Bayonne, and Comté cheese.”
The hotel president sat on the edge of his chair, his breath quickening, as if he was leaning at the bar of a strip joint. “Then what?” he asked, slightly bug-eyed.
“A pan-sautéed turbot cooked in a flour sauce with shallot, white wine, tomatoes, and parsley. And finally a
grenadin de veau,
pan-seared veal with lightly creamed baby spinach leaves and the veal's
jus
.”
“Doesn't that sound wonderful?” the hotel president asked his wife.
She blew air through her lips and gave an exasperated shake of her head.
The three men chatted, while the president's wife stared moodily out the window. A waiter arrived and removed what looked like porcelain impressionist sculptures of a compressed Eiffel Tower, which had been placed before each diner. Alexandre knew from the press kit that, inverted, they would be the restaurant's dinner dishes. Two other waiters served the lobster with flourishes while a sommelier poured more champagne.
The meal, like the décor, fully lived up to the hype, right down to the cheeses, which came from a famous
affineur
known for aging his wards in a sixteenth-century
cave
as fastidiously as if he was a nanny pampering the children of aristocrats.
But the pièce de résistance was dessert. When all the tables were cleared, the dim background lights were extinguished completely. The diners, ghostly in the up-light from the table lamps, quieted in an expectant hush. Alexandre felt, or imagined he felt, Momo and David stiffen. Six waiters entered, bearing silver platters of beautifully crafted spun-sugar Eiffel Towers in beds of blue, white, and red sorbet, topped with sputtering sparklers and fluttering French flags. The room broke into enthusiastic applause. Momo edged closer, looming at Alexandre's side, darting glances into the room. Alexandre chuckled.
“Are you amused at the scolding Chef will have tomorrow when the management of the tower learns its precious fire regulations were flaunted?” the hotel president asked.
“Hardly. No true gentleman worries about morning-after recriminations,”
The Italian senator smiled broadly and said,
“Questo è certo! ”
The president's wife gave them both a dirty look.
“No, I was thinking of my wife who will be delighted to learn that the dinner has gone off so well,” Alexandre said. As he thought of Capucine, no doubt on tenterhooks, peering out through the judas window of the kitchen, his heart went out to her.
“So be perfectly frank with me, my dear Alexandre, if I may be permitted to call you that.” Alexandre tuned in to what the president was saying. “If you were sitting on the Michelin committee, what rating would you give this restaurant?”
A hard and fast rule among critics was never to make value judgments, particularly to restaurant owners and staff, before they had written their reviews. But Alexandre was tempted, possibly because of his unaccustomed role that night, to be expansive.
“One star. Unquestionably, one star. The service is perfect, the view obviously without equal, the décor lives up to the view, but the food does not quite have the majesty of two stars.” Alexandre paused, waiting for a disappointed frown. “Does that disappoint you?”
The president broke into a broad, toothy smile. “That's exactly what I wanted to hear. You see, dear,” he said to his wife. “Delmas is a genius, an absolute genius, just like I told you. I asked him for one star and that's exactly what he produces. No more, no less.”
He said to Alexandre, “We undertook very extensive market research before committing our investment. I think we got our product-market segmentation down pat. No stars would have been bad. Two or three would have been equally bad. We want this place to be the big night out on the well-heeled tourist's Paris trip. Too many stars would attract a crowd that would intimidate him. No stars and our target market wouldn't be willing to pay the prices we need to cover our investment.” He was genuinely overjoyed. “I sincerely hope you reflect that point of view in your review tomorrow.”
“Oh, you can count on that, and, with any luck, I think I can promise you that it will be the best-read restaurant review of the year.”
“Really! Do you hear that, dear?”
The president's wife was distracting herself by smashing her spun-sugar Eiffel Tower with a spoon and did not reply.
In the kitchen, which Chef Delmas had left to receive his accolades from the guests as the coffee service was in progress, Isabelle hissed at Capucine, “See, it's not going to happen tonight. It's because the security is too tight. We overdid it.”
“Shuuuuush! We'll talk later.”
“And also the access is too limited. It's too dangerous for the killer. We needed a more open location for it to work.”
Capucine put her index finger over her lips and breathed, “The evening's not even half over yet. The dangerous part is coming up.”
The next phase of the event was the display of fireworks, to be viewed from the roof over the dining room, an area not normally open to the public, which could be reached only by a tight circular iron stairway that exited through a small circular metal hatch that could well have been on a submarine. The PR firm was convinced it would complete the Jules Verne experience by creating a link to the
Nautilus
in
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea
.
The hundred and twenty guests who had been invited to the dinner would go up first and once they were at their ease sipping champagne, the horde of three hundred B-list guests would be admitted. By then it would be fully dark and the show of fireworks would begin.
Next to the threat of poison, Capucine had been most concerned with the ascension of the tight stairwell. She had ordered Momo to lead the guests up the stairs with Alexandre immediately behind. Isabelle remained on the level below, closely examining the procession of guests, while David had already taken up a position on the roof. Capucine surveyed the scene from the kitchen door judas. The last thing she wanted was to be greeted loudly by one of the guests.
Capucine breathed a deep sigh of relief when the hotel president stepped behind Alexandre to climb the staircase. He was, in turn, followed by his wife, with the Italian senator behind. Capucine darted out from the kitchen and slipped in after the senator, who broke into a fulsome smile and insisted that she precede him up the stairs. Normally, she would have rewarded his courtesy with a little uplift of her gluteals, but she was far too overwrought for
gamineries.
At the top, Capucine melted into the clutch of waitstaff ready to distribute flutes of champagne.

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