An ivory-skinned half-Tahitian in his late teens looked up with doelike eyes from a cutting board where he was dicing sheets of glittering brown aspic. “Just... just what you told me to do, Monsieur le patron,” he stammered. His already noticeably rosy cheeks flushed even redder.
“Mince alors!” LaRochelle lurched forward in sudden fury. “I told you to—” He stumbled against an enormously fat yellow dog that had waddled into the kitchen with bushy tail awaggle. “Bordel de Dieu!” screamed the Frenchman, unleashing a vicious kick against the dog’s flanks. “Martine, get this beast of yours out of the kitchen before I feed it to the geese!” Yelping piteously, the dog fled into a corner. “Now then, you, Cherry Cheeks! What I told you was...”
With a disgusted shake of his head, Tama pulled his companion toward the swinging doors. “I’d like to have that... that fellow in my little jail for a day or two,” he muttered in lightly accented English. “I’d teach him some manners.”
“Aren’t all French chefs supposed to be temperamental?” asked Colonel Yashimoto with a faint grin as they moved into the inn’s wood-beamed dining room.
“Temperamental, not vicious. I’d stuff him down the throats of his own geese! Except, of course, that would ruin the foie gras, and he’s the only one on the island who’s tried to make any in thirty years.” Tama’s angry black eyes moved about the room.
Two Tahitian waitresses in bright red dresses decorated with white hibiscuses were lighting candles on linen-topped tables. In the flickering yellow light, crystal wine glasses began to glitter enticingly. On the far side of the room, in a massive fieldstone fireplace, a waiter was fanning the flames that licked tentatively at three enormous logs. Here in the island’s mountains, far from the warm coastal plains, it was always chilly at night, especially in the midst of their frequent cloudbursts.
Next to the fireplace, the restaurateur’s wife was arranging enormous sprays of gaudy hibiscus and creamy gardenia blooms along the table on which the foie gras for the tasting would be presented. Tama nodded reluctantly. It wasn’t a bad idea of the cloddish innkeeper: a competition between his own homemade foie gras and the finest that Perigord and Alsace could offer, with a panel of distinguished local bon vivants as judges. Just the thing to drum up a little free publicity for Tahiti’s newest, and most inaccessible, restaurant.
Madame la patronne made a final adjustment to the yellow and orange hibiscus in her own jet-black hair and stepped back to admire the table’s floral arrangements while, in turn, Alexandre Tama let his eyes come to rest admiringly upon her.
Martine LaRochelle was a tall but delicate, almost fragile-looking demi-Chinoise in her early thirties with a lovely oval face, large almond eyes, and glossy black hair that fell ruler-straight to the small of her back. Like many demi-Chinoises, she enjoyed the best of both worlds: the golden-brown skin of the Polynesian and the dainty features of the Chinese. Wearing a shiny green silk dress embroidered with golden dragons that fit her boyish figure like an exotic skin, she was, Tama thought, as beautiful a half-Chinese girl as he had ever seen — no matter what the size of her breasts. How this lovely creature put up with so brutish a husband was hard to fathom...
“A glass of champagne, messieurs?” A smiling waitress proffered a laden tray. “The buses with most of the other guests are just beginning to arrive.”
A few minutes later, in spite of the thunderous rain that occasionally made conversation difficult, the dining room of the small inn was nearly filled with loudly chattering guests. “Hrmph,” rumbled Tama to his companion, “it looks like le tout Papeete is here, the same old faces, never anyone new. I guess LaRochelle brought them out in a couple of special buses. I hope they don’t fall in the ditch on the way home. If they do, they’ll never get out in this deluge.”
“And where’s your charming wife?” demanded an enormous Tahitian lady whose girth was nearly as great as Tama’s and who was the Minister of Social Affairs for this island group that spread across an area of the Pacific as large as Europe or the United States. “I knew you’d be here — anywhere there’s a free meal and drinks you’ll find Alexandre Tama!”
The Commissaire de Police smiled tolerantly. “Home — she can’t stand foie gras. So I brought our house guest from Hawaii instead. This is Colonel Yashimoto, chief of the state police on Big Island. The two of us were in school together in Honolulu years ago, where he was known as Mad Dog — though I can’t now remember why.”
“Big Island! I adore Big Island! Do you know Kona, Colonel Yashimoto?”
“Monsieur le Commissaire?” It was the ethereal Martine LaRochelle tapping shyly on Tama’s arm. “If you could come along? The other judges are here; we’re about to begin the tasting.”
An hour later Tama and Mad Dog Yashimoto sat by themselves at their own candle-lit table while Madame LaRochelle directed the serving of enormous pieces of foie gras onto sparkling beds of diced aspic and aspic rounds. To accompany the goose liver, the handsome half-Tahitian youth LaRochelle had disdainfully called Cherry Cheeks glided from table to table pouring golden Sauterne into crystal glasses.
“How can you eat any more of that pâté?” marveled the Hawaiian as he watched Tama slather butter that, as LaRochelle had promised, was the perfect consistency, upon a triangle of toast and then add a thick wedge of foie gras. “I must have seen you put away at least two pounds of the stuff already.”
The Commissaire de Police winced. “Foie gras, Mad Dog, foie gras! Pâté is to foie gras as... as a McDonald’s hamburger is to a perfectly marbled ribeye steak with Béarnaise sauce!”
Colonel Yashimoto pushed away his own largely uneaten piece of foie gras and nibbled gingerly at a rubbery piece of aspic. “You mean there’s a difference? Up on Big Island, even in the fanciest hotels, we peasants always call it pâté de foie gras.”
“An enormous difference, like the difference between my opu here and Inspector Opuu.” Tama chuckled appreciatively as he tapped his gargantuan stomach, for opu means belly in Tahitian, while the faithful Inspector Opuu was one of the skinniest men in the islands. “Real foie gras, the stuff we have here before us and that the charming Mr. LaRochelle makes out back, is nothing but the entire liver from a specially fattened goose and a little seasoning. Sometimes it’s two or three livers pressed gently together, then cooked very, very slowly in a very low oven. Or sometimes they just wrap a hot towel around it and leave it to cook by itself overnight. That’s foie gras. Pâté is anything that’s ground up. Those cans of deviled ham we used to eat on picnics — that’s pâté!”
“It is? Deviled ham?”
“And canned dog food — that’s pâté too.” The Commissaire de Police chewed his foie gras appreciatively. “Where people get confused, even Frenchmen, is that sometimes leftover bits and pieces of genuine foie gras are ground up with pork fat and veal and God knows what else and that’s what’s called pâté de foie gras. It can be pretty good sometimes, especially if you put in a truffle or two, but foie gras it’s not.”
“Live and learn.” Colonel Yashimoto pushed his plate away. “And this guy’s foie gras is good? Did it win the tasting?”
“Yes, it really is good. And it really did win the tasting. Against canned foie gras, it’s true, but still, I’m amazed: foie gras as good as this, made in Tahiti! If he can keep it up, he’s going to make a fortune.”