I smiled and said, “My pleasure.”
She walked up the stoop, used her keys to open the front door, stepped inside, and turned to me with that impish expression on her face.
“You have nice eyes, Jack Morgan,” Michele said, and shut the door.
Walking away, I’d rarely been happier.
Chapter 30
9th Arrondissement
April 8, 1 a.m.
WEARING SOILED CLOTHES, his face smeared with grime, Émile Sauvage acted the drunken bum and lay sprawled in an alleyway upwind of a Dumpster and downwind of some of the most amazing odors he’d ever smelled. The scents boiled out of a steel door that was ajar about fifty feet away, and made the major realize he should have eaten more. Then the breeze stilled and he could smell the beer he’d poured on his pant legs.
Sauvage glanced around, saw no one, and pressed his hand to the tiny transceiver in his ear. “How many left?” he murmured, knowing that the throat microphone would pick it up loud and clear.
“Two,” Epée said. “Maître d’ and the sommelier.”
“Stay patient,” Sauvage cautioned. “You know his rep. Every day the same way. Like clock-”
The steel door pushed open. The maître d’, a plump, intense-looking man in his late thirties, exited and immediately lit a cigarette. The sommelier, a younger woman, came after him, turned, and called back inside, “À demain, René.”
Then she closed the door, locked it, and followed the maître d’ toward Sauvage’s position.
“He works too hard,” the wine steward was saying.
“It’s his passion,” the maître d’ said.
“His heart will just break one of these days.”
Glancing in disgust at Sauvage lying in the filth, the maître d’ replied, “The price of greatness.”
“I just wish he’d pause to look around, relax, enjoy what he’s built.”
The man said something Sauvage did not catch, and then they were gone.
“Fifteen minutes,” the major said, and rolled to his feet, putting on gloves.
Down the alley, Captain Mfune was already up and moving toward the door. The captain picked the lock and they were quickly inside a small entry area with work clogs on the floor and white jackets in a large hamper.
The major took two careful steps and peeked around the corner of a doorway, seeing a large, softly lit commercial kitchen with a high ceiling. A cluster of red enamel ovens and stovetops dominated the room, with gleaming copper pots of all sizes hanging from an overhead beam.
Sauvage knew at a glance that the kitchen was immaculate. This was a restaurant run with discipline. The major admired it, and almost changed his mind about the target. But when it came to impact, this was the man they wanted.
They padded through the kitchen. Sauvage glanced through the porthole into the dining area. Pitch-dark. Near the refrigerators and a freezer, they reached a door that Mfune opened, revealing a steep wooden staircase and an exposed stone wall. Light glowed in the cellar below them.
Keeping their feet to the outside of each step, right above the riser support, they made it to the basement with nary a creak. The light came through an open oak door down a narrow hallway.
The major led the way, quiet as possible, until they’d reached the doorway. Sauvage drew a pistol and stepped around and through the passage.
Wine bottles filled floor-to-ceiling racks on all sides of a room about forty feet long and fifteen feet wide. A silver-haired, barrel-shaped man in a white blouse and apron sat at a table with an open bottle of red wine, an almost empty glass, and a plate holding a baguette, cheese, chocolate, and fruit.
“Chef Pincus,” Sauvage said as Mfune came in behind him.
The chef startled, saw the gun, and jumped up, knocking the table. The bottle fell over. Wine spilled across the tabletop, dripped on the floor.
“Who the hell are you?” Pincus demanded.
“The future,” the major said. “We need you to help us set things right.”
“Right about what?” the chef asked, stepping back, looking around, seeing that he was cornered. “Is this about the Bocuse d’Or?”
“We’re about so much more than the quality of French food,” Mfune said.
“What do you want, then? If it’s money, I’ll take you upstairs, give you tonight’s till.”
“That’s a start,” Sauvage said, and waved the gun. “You first.”
Chef Pincus hesitated, rubbed his hands on his apron, and walked by them. Sauvage and Mfune stayed close to the chef as they navigated the hall and climbed the narrow stairs back to the kitchen.
When Pincus tried to exit out into the dining area, the major stopped him and said, “I read in Bon Appétit that you make chicken stock once a week.”
Pincus stiffened, nodded. “It’s the last thing I do on Saturdays before having my wine and going home.”
“Can we see it?” the captain asked, joining them.
“That is what this is about, isn’t it? The Bocuse? Stealing my secrets?”
“Believe what you want to believe. Just show us the soup.”
Sullenly, Pincus jerked his chin at one of the refrigerators. Mfune opened it. On the middle shelf stood a forty-quart stockpot with a lid. The captain grabbed the handles, lifted the pot with a grunt, and carried it to one of the prep tables.
“Go over there,” Sauvage said to the chef. “Stand right in front of it.”
Reluctantly, Pincus followed his orders and stood before the stockpot, with Mfune at his left. The captain lifted the lid, set it aside. The major came around to the chef’s right and looked in at fat starting to congeal on top of the liquid.
“Smells good,” Mfune said.
“Of course it does,” Pincus snapped.
“Take a smell. Lean right in there and sniff your masterpiece.”
The chef frowned and glanced at Sauvage, who said, “Do it.”
Pincus looked uncertain but stepped closer, and brought his nose over the top of ten gallons of cooling gourmet chicken stock. He sniffed, started to raise his chin, and then squealed with fear and alarm when the officers grabbed the back of his skull and plunged his face into the cooling liquid.
Terrified screams bubbled up out of the broth.
Then the chef started to fight, squirming side to side against their grip and throwing his fists wildly. Sauvage took a blow to the ribs and another to his hip before he flipped the pistol in his hand and chopped below the collar of Pincus’s white blouse.
The flailing stopped. The squirming subsided and then halted altogether when the major hit the chef a second time.
“There,” Sauvage said, his breathing shallow, rapid. “Not a bad recipe, really.”
Chapter 31
8th Arrondissement
6 a.m.
MY DREAMS WHIRLED with visions of the blood blooming on the waiter’s shirt, Louis blown off his feet, and the pale gunman tracking the pistol muzzle over me.
In every vision, in every dream, I kept catching glimpses of Michele Herbert standing at the periphery of the action, and watching it all unfold as if through a glass, darkly. But when I awoke in my bed at the Plaza, my first thoughts were of the art professor laughing at the café the night before, and then climbing her stoop, smiling as if we were already sharing secrets, and telling me I had nice eyes.
Had any woman ever told me that?
If they had, I didn’t remember.
Who cared? Michele thought my eyes were nice and that was all that counted. My God, she was beyond-belief good-looking and off-the-charts smart and creative. And yet she didn’t seem to take herself too seriously.
She seemed relaxed, good in her own skin, free of issues, someone you wanted to spend time with. In the darkness of my room at the Plaza Athénée, I grinned like a fool, sat up in bed, and turned on the lights.
There was no chance I’d sleep any more, and given my embarrassing teenage giddiness, I knew I’d just sit there thinking about her unless I gave myself a task that could be taken care of at this early hour. Nothing came to mind until I realized it was only 9 p.m. back home.