“How’s business?” I asked.
The tailor studied me, nodded, and said, “Business is good. Every year it gets better. The future is bright for us.”
That surprised me. “Even with the laws on wearing the hijab and veil?”
His wife heard that and started clucking in amusement this time.
“She says those laws will be repealed eventually,” Farad interpreted.
“What makes her think that?” Louis asked.
Her husband said, “The population of old France is aging and dying, while the immigrant population is young and growing. The birthrate in old France is less than two children per marriage. The birthrate among immigrants is in the fours. We have five children. Sooner than later, we will simply outnumber the old French, and then the law will fall, just as I will grow rich.”
His wife added, “It is simple mathematics. Like Allah’s wilclass="underline" indisputable and inevitable.”
I couldn’t argue with the tailor’s logic. The numbers were the numbers.
“How long until you see it happening?” I asked Farad and Louis once we were back out on the sidewalk.
“It already is happening,” Louis said. “You can see it in places like Les Bosquets. There they are, bulging at the seams.”
“Twenty years?” Farad said. “Twenty-five until the law changes?”
“Something like that,” Louis agreed. “But by then I shall be too old to care.”
“But by then, won’t the immigrants have assimilated more into French culture?” I asked.
“Not if we isolate them,” Louis said. His cell phone rang and he answered.
“What do you think?” I asked Farad.
He shrugged. “I am not much interested in politics.”
“Pincus?” Louis gasped. “Yes, of course. We’ll be right there.”
Shaken, Louis shut his phone, looked at me, and said, “That was Sharen Hoskins. She has been ordered to accept your offer of a forensics team. La Crim’s criminalists are backlogged and AB-16 has struck again.”
“Jesus,” I said. “Who’s the victim?”
“René Pincus. Arguably the greatest chef in all of France.”
Part Three
Les Immortels
Chapter 35
9th Arrondissement
1:20 p.m.
THE GREATEST CHEF in all of France hung upside down from a rope tied to his ankles and lashed to a steel beam that ran down the center of the kitchen ceiling. René Pincus’s swollen head hovered a few feet over the stovetops, and his arms were spread to the sides, tied with cooking twine.
“Same general position as Henri Richard,” Sharen Hoskins observed. “But the graffiti is much more visible this time. We won’t be able to contain it.”
The tag was painted three times inside the restaurant: once on the stovetop below Pincus, once on the dining room wall, and a third time across the front window. Word of the great chef’s death had leaked and a mob of media types gathered out front, training their cameras on the tag on the front window.
“Was he strangled?” I asked.
“No,” the investigateur said. “Drowned in his own chicken stock.”
“So the method of killing is different, almost ironic,” I said.
Hoskins nodded. “And it changes things, don’t you think? With those pictures you discovered, Henri Richard’s murder was easily attributed to revenge. Now I think we must look for a link between Henri Richard and René Pincus, some reason they were targeted for death.”
“There is one link,” Louis said.
“What’s that?”
“Henri Richard ate dinner here several times in the last six weeks.”
Hoskins squinted, crossed her arms, and said, “And how do you know that?”
Louis realized he’d set a trap for himself, but he smiled and said, “Private Paris never reveals its confidential sources, but I can assure you it’s true.”
“Louis,” she began.
“Chéri,” he said. “Are we here to follow every nuance of the law? Or are we here to catch a killer who grows more prolific?”
Hoskins stuck out her jaw. “Don’t call me chéri.”
“Ah,” Louis said, acting chagrined. “A slip of the tongue, no? I promise never to address you this way again.”
Claudia Vans, Private Paris’s chief forensics tech, came up to Louis. She showed him several plastic evidence bags containing cigarette butts and said, “What’s the chance the staff has a habit of flicking cigarette butts around this place?”
“Seems unlikely, but we’ll ask,” Hoskins said.
Out in the dining area, other Private Paris forensics techs were photographing and taking samples from the AB-16 graffiti on the wall. Hoskins went to speak with them. When she was satisfied that they were covering every angle, she went to the front door and started letting in the staff to be questioned.
Louis provided a running translation.
The maître d’, a plump, nervous man named Remy Fontaine, said, “Is it true? He is dead?”
“I’m afraid so,” the investigateur said.
Fontaine and the other four employees broke down crying and hugged each other. The sommelier, a stocky blonde named Adelaide St. Michel, stopped crying long enough to say, “Does it have to do with the Bocuse d’Or?”
“What makes you say that?” Louis asked.
“The other chefs in France hated Chef Pincus,” she said. “Three times he wins the Bocuse d’Or, and every time you hear the vicious rumors right away, the terrible things they said about him. It was all envy, and I think it was strong enough for people to want him dead. How did he die?”
Hoskins hesitated.
“How did he die?” asked Fontaine, the maître d’.
“He was drowned in his chicken stock,” I said.
The sommelier snapped her fingers at me, and then at Hoskins, who was glaring my way. “There you go, then,” Adelaide St. Michel said. “Chef Pincus was world famous for his stock. This is a statement.”
I had to agree. Killing him in his own soup was designed to send a message. But what, exactly?
Chapter 36
IT CERTAINLY DIDN’T appear to me that any of the staff were involved. All of them appeared genuinely heartbroken. To a person they seemed to have loved René Pincus. He was demanding. He was precise. He could be a withering critic of their work. But he was also extraordinarily generous.
“It was a side of René that no one outside of us knew, really,” said the maître d’. “To the staff, he was like a demanding uncle. In public, he was the French chef of iron.”
He’d said this last in English, so I corrected him. “Iron chef.”
“Yes?” Fontaine said. “René was the iron chef of the world, and now he is no more.” The grief-stricken man broke down sobbing again. “What is to become of us? Who will carry on with the restaurant?”
“Who would be the natural person to step forward?” I asked. “There must be a senior chef working beneath Chef Pincus.”
“That would be me,” said Peter Bonaventure. He looked about forty but had the build of a marathoner. “But I can’t even think this way. I did not want his throne. I loved my job. René was a genius who made our work a passion. And he paid us well, gave us profit shares that were equal to his own.”
“Equal?” I asked.
They nodded. With every one of them making the same amount of euros as Pincus, the idea of financial gain as motive seemed to be diminishing rapidly.
“How many of you smoke?” Louis asked.
Four of the staff members, including the maître d’, raised their hands.
“How many of you would discard a cigarette on the kitchen floor or in the wine cellar?”
All four hands dropped. To a person they looked horrified.
“That would be grounds for termination,” the sommelier said. “No smoking in the restaurant. René would have a fit.”