Death of a Chef (Capucine Culinary Mystery) (4 page)

CHAPTER 7

T
he nineteen-century hulk of the Church of Saint François Xavier was far more colossal than Capucine remembered, larger even than most provincial cathedrals. Drab and grimy on the outside, the cavernous interior was bright with turn-of-the-century frescoes and dripping with gold trim.

Capucine sat next to Alexandre on a hard oak bench, her Sig Sauer biting into her lower back. She squirmed. Three hundred feet away, a huge gold tabernacle rose like a miniature vault over the gilt and marble altar. On a raised dais four black-clad priests droned out the mass.

Capucine nudged Alexandre. “I thought they were supposed to wear purple.”

Alexandre groaned. “They’re doing a full requiem mass. It’s going to take forever. They wear black for that. That priest with the dried-prune face goes from one extreme to another. I hope you’re comfortable. We’ll be here for a while.”

So far the high point of the ceremony had been Chef Labrousse’s reading. Pale and drawn from his overnight flight from New York, he had moved many to tears with his delivery of Isaiah’s “On this mountain the Lord of hosts will make for all peoples a feast of rich food, a feast of well-aged wine, of rich food full of marrow, of aged wine well refined.” From his gilt throne, the pastor, whose face really did resemble a dried prune—resplendent in a ponderous black silk, gold threaded chasuble—had stared daggers at Labrousse, furious at having been upstaged.

Clearly delighted to be back at center stage, the pastor in his finery raised an enormous wafer on extended arms and pirouetted, almost on tiptoe, to display it to the entire congregation. He then repeated the dance step with a jewel-encrusted gold chalice. In both gestures, the priest’s self-admiration drowned any notion of the worship of the Deity. Capucine felt the temperature of the congregation drop by a few degrees. No wonder the Church in France was losing its constituency so quickly.

When the interminable mass was finally over, Paul Bocuse slowly mounted the steps to the lectern and delivered a eulogy moving both in its content and brevity: the bright light of French haute cuisine had dimmed, darkening each of our lives. Next, Jean Troisgros ratcheted his arthritic bulk painfully up the steps. He spoke at greater length than Bocuse about an intense young man, a boy, really, who had promised greatness even as an intern. He told stories so dense with kitchen jargon, they must have been comprehensible only to the culinary professionals. At one point his eyes became liquid and his voice broke. He shook his head, explaining that he was unable to go on, and lumbered down the steps. There was a leaden silence in the church, largely at the sight of both of the two living grand masters of French cuisine so moved.

To the resonance of an enormous brass organ playing Fauré’s Requiem, the congregation shuffled out of the church. The black-draped coffin was wheeled out and carried down the steps by uniformed pallbearers. Outside, two news vans disgorged camera crews. Capucine recognized Lucien Folon scuttling down the sidewalk. She wondered if he had been at the back of the church or if he had simply stood outside during the service.

The body was placed in a waiting mortuary van, and a hundred or so mourners squeezed into cars to follow it the short distance to the Montparnasse cemetery, where the same priest vaingloriously sprinkled holy water on the coffin with an elaborate silver ciborium. He grandiloquently proclaimed a few words, and what was left of Jean-Louis Brault was returned to the earth in the brilliant sunshine of a crisp autumn morning.

After, a group of fifteen, mainly critics and chefs, gathered in nearby Diapason, a restaurant that had been demoted to two stars after Jean-Basile Labrousse sold it to a consortium of investors and exiled himself to New York. The new chef, Bruno Gautier, greeted them nervously at the door. It was the first time Labrousse had been back to his old restaurant, and Gautier was visibly intimidated.

Even though Labrousse had never met Gautier, they hugged and patted backs as if they had been classmates at the
école hôtelière.
Labrousse smiled at the sight of the lustrous, undecorated African hardwood paneling, the chrome-legged tables and chairs, the gleaming white linen tablecloths, the enormously long-stemmed wine glasses.

“You haven’t changed a thing,” Labrousse said.

“The menu is completely different,” Gautier said. “And I’ve added one or two touches to the dining room. I don’t have your depth of understanding of vegetables, so meat is more important in my cuisine.” With his head he indicated an almost black ham held by the bone in a silver clamp attached to a walnut base.

“Spanish
jamón Serrano?
” Capucine asked, proud of her knowledge.

Labrousse smiled at her and then at Gautier. “
Pas du tout,
ma chérie. This is
jamón ibérico de bellota,
the king of all hams. It comes from the Dehesa oak forests between Spain and Portugal. Cerdo pigs, a breed unique to the region, gorge themselves on the acorns. Then the ham is cured for three years. It’s one of the things I miss most in America. The USDA has only allowed imports for a year or two, and the prices are beyond belief. Ham at three times the price of foie gras. Can you imagine!”

Capucine looked abashed. Alexandre rubbed her back and kissed her ear.

“Gautier,” Labrousse said, “you don’t know how lucky you are to have so much produce. I’ve had to add more meat to my menu, as well. The Americans are a nation of beef eaters.” Both chefs laughed heartily. “But I’ve just bought a small farm in Pennsylvania and started plowing with a horse. Next year we’ll see what we’ll see.”

As the maître d’hôtel showed the group to its table, Gautier whispered earnestly to Alexandre, “I was at the church, but I skipped out on the burial. I know it was a grave faux pas, but I just had to be in my kitchen. Was it a terrible gaffe?”

Alexandre shook his head. “Not at all. Brault would have done exactly the same thing. In fact, he wouldn’t even have gone to the church. He’s up there right now smiling at you.”

Gautier wasn’t sure he wasn’t being kidded, and scuttled off to the kitchen where he would remain for the rest of the meal, with one eye on his ovens and the other at the judas in the kitchen door.

They sat; the inevitable flutes of champagne arrived. The mood was glum.

A fifty-year-old man announced to the table at large, “I lost my second star five years ago. If my wife hadn’t been so supportive, I would have thrown myself into the Seine.”

A sveltely elegant woman with patrician features nodded vigorously in agreement. “I lost my second star last year, too. That reptilian Folon gloated. He said that my restaurant had never been at the two-star level, and that with only one star, I would relax, fit better into my skin, and become a happy woman.
Quelle connerie!
If I don’t get my second star back in a year or two, I really will throw myself in the Seine. Thank God I don’t have a husband who’ll try to stop me
.
”

As the conversation progressed to the alternative response to a lost star of refusing to be listed in the Guide—something both Maxim’s and the Tour d’Argent had done—Gautier’s tasting menu was unfolded like a hand of gilt-edged tarot cards laid out to tell a fortune. They started with spoonfuls of beluga caviar on halves of baked potato and smoked eel surrounded by dots of creamy horseradish sauce. That was followed by creamy asparagus velouté with nuggets of sorrel sprouts. Next came medallions of warm duck foie gras decorated with a sauce of cherry and fresh almond. Then soft-boiled eggs served in their own shells with a creamy sauce of girolle mushrooms. Once the appetizers were over, the meal shifted up a gear with sliced fillets of sole served with a creamy violet sauce. The next gear shift brought two main dishes, sweetbreads studded with little nails of fresh bay on a bed of romaine lettuce, followed by a quail stuffed with foie gras and accompanied by a caramelized apple and summer truffle sauce.

The mood of the group remained somber even when the food arrived. Normally, the professionals of
haute gastronomie
felt it was as insulting to talk while eating as it was to check one’s BlackBerry while kissing a beautiful girl. Even though a hint of cheer eventually bubbled up through the semi-silence, gloom had jelled over the meal. The few exchanges were sorrowful ones of the sort that reposing in noble dignity at the bottom of the Seine was infinitely preferable to drifting ghostlike in the limbo of unlisted restaurants, to be noticed only by tourists. Gautier fretted at his judas window, wringing his hands in his apron and upbraiding his line chefs mercilessly.

It wasn’t until the dessert was reached—a small scoop of cacao ice cream on a bed of creamy chocolate ganache made with Venezuelan Araguani chocolate—that the traditional ebullience of a pack of gastronomes at a renowned watering hole returned and the topics of abusive critics and suicides over lost stars were finally abandoned.

Capucine was amazed that the police’s announcement that Brault had been murdered had had no effect whatsoever on the conventional wisdom that Brault had committed suicide as a result of Folon’s insinuations that he was about to lose a star.

An anxious Gautier came out bearing a crystal decanter of
alcool de framboise
—raspberry liqueur. Four
aide-serveurs
followed him with tiny stemmed glasses and coffee, which they placed before each guest as Gautier searched their eyes, trolling for approval.

He asked Labrousse, “
C’était?
Was it?”

Labrousse rose, beamed at him, and said, “
Rien à dire.
Nothing to say.” It was the highest possible praise in the restaurant code. It had been so good, no criticism of any kind was possible.

Labrousse gave Gautier a hug. “It fills me with pride to see cuisine of this excellence made in what used to be my restaurant. I used to feel in New York I had to live up to my Paris standards. Now I have even higher standards to live up to.”

The entire table lit up with smiles. Still, as far as Capucine could tell, the group’s conviction was that while the only true criticism came from a peer, the only significant criticism came in print from a professional critic.

Capucine and Alexandre did not get home until four in the afternoon. Alexandre closeted himself in his study to write a short piece on the funeral for the last edition of
Le Monde,
while Capucine sat in the living room, on the phone to her brigade, reviewing the incidents of the day.

When Alexandre appeared an hour later with two flutes of champagne, Capucine grimaced and said, “I can’t face the thought of another meal. I’m stuffed with lunch and drained by the funeral. I feel like a sagging party balloon.”

Alexandre smiled at her. “A little massage and you’ll be as good as new.”

As was the way with connubial massages, one thing led to another, and the living room sofa led to the bedroom four-poster.

Much later, Capucine shook Alexandre awake.

“You know, I believe I actually am becoming a little peckish.”

“Good,” Alexandre said into his pillow. And then, rising like a whale bursting through sea foam, he added, “I’m always hungry when it comes to you.”

“No, no, I mean
really
hungry. Let’s eat something.”

Alexandre pouted. “I suppose I could make us a light
souper
.”

He paused for a moment, deep in thought.

“Actually, there is a new recipe I’d like to try. I think it would be perfect.”

He jumped up, shrugged into a red and gold kimono Capucine had given him for Christmas, and made off energetically for the kitchen as Capucine disappeared into the bathroom.

A few minutes later, Capucine found a flute of champagne waiting for her on the long table in the kitchen and Alexandre chopping furiously with a long kitchen knife. It looked like salmon.

“I’m making you a Japanese delicacy. Actually, it’s not Japanese at all, just a clever recipe by a Japanese chef, Aiko Kikuchi. She’s apprenticed in two three-star restaurants and is now looking for a place of her own.” He paused. “There, that’s the salmon,” he said, scraping the pink cubes off the cutting board onto a dish. “Now for the onion,” he said, attacking a large red onion. Next came a cucumber and finally an apple, all cubed identically.

He placed the cubes in a big glass bowl, poured in a healthy dose of soy sauce, and topped it with sections of chives snipped with a pair of kitchen scissors. He cut a lime in half, squeezed the contents over the mixture, then mixed it all vigorously with a wooden spoon.

“Voilà,” he said. “Salmon tartare à l’oriental.”

“When do we get to eat it? I’m famished.”

“It needs to chill for an hour, and I’m exhausted after all that chopping.” He mimed a sad, drooping Pierrot. “Please, oh, please, help me to my bed before I collapse right here.”

An hour later they were back in the kitchen. The tartare was delicious, cold, salmony, crunchy from the apples, onions, and cucumbers, tangy with chives and soy and lime. More than enough to fill the palate with taste, but not bulk.

When they finished the tartare, they took their thimble-sized glasses of Armagnac into the living room, collapsed onto the sofa, and turned on the eleven o’clock TV news, wondering if the funeral would be covered. Alexandre nibbled Capucine’s ear. Capucine kissed Alexandre’s nose. He kissed her neck at the sensitive spot where it joined her shoulder. Capucine reached for the remote to switch off the TV. As she looked up, she was astounded to see her face. She turned the volume up.

A very pretty young lady was reading from the next morning’s press. The screen would flash the headline and then cut to the face of the young woman, who was smiling with provocative cynicism, making knowing comments.

“And so, the burning question earlier today at three-star Chef Jean-Louis Brault’s funeral was . . .” The talking head paused to pout coquettishly at the camera. “Whether über–restaurant critic Lucien Folon really drove Brault to suicide with his merciless attacks in the press.”