The Rise and Fall of Magic Wolf, page 10
But any worrying along these lines proved to be foolish. What I failed to factor in was that Frankie was still Frankie, still the man at the centre of attention, still the one to whom the room’s gaze would pivot when he raised his voice. Frankie whirring up and down the lines at Le Dauphin, whisking a sauce, poking a bavette on the grill with his finger; Frankie in Pigalle raising a glass and making a speech. Frankie didn’t need the world quite as much as the world needed him. Or at least, that was an important part of the role that Frankie played for the world. So no way was Frankie going to act jealous even if he felt it. And if I didn’t show up for Sunday dinner in Belleville as regularly as I used to, no way Frankie was going to mention it because he just wouldn’t.
During the rest of that year and the following, if anything, he rewarded me with more serious attention in the kitchen, and increasing trust. He began to treat me as a colleague, as a peer. By the time I’d been there four years, I’d apprenticed and had been commis all over the kitchen. I’d done well. Les patrons seemed to notice in their suspicious way. Now Frankie started to really place me, giving me control of different stations for a few days at a time, a week, even a month. I did time on grill and fry. I worked with the butcher breaking down beef sides and whole pigs, ran charcuterie for a stretch, making rillettes, and logs of pâté de foie, boudin noir, tête de veau, and pickled lamb’s tongue. I ran the bakery for several months. And eventually, getting on toward the middle of my fifth year, I was promoted to chef tournant. This was a special role in a big place like Le Dauphin. The tournant was an all-stations chef, expected to step in and cover virtually any role in the kitchen as needed outside pastry. The tournant reported directly to the sous, rising to a special place in the hierarchy, above even the various chefs de parti. There was one other tournant at Le Dauphin. His name was Bozonnet and he looked to me to be about seventy. I’d always assumed he’d been given that role as a reward for years of service, a last pre-retirement posting because sometimes there really wasn’t anything urgent for the tournant to do. Maybe for Bozonnet that was the arrangement. Frankie made sure I knew my assignment was different. He’d promoted me past the chefs de parti to make me his second-in-command. On occasion, he would himself now even step out of the kitchen on business, leaving me as the deputy sous. I’d be busy but I loved it, the evidence of progress, sure, but maybe even more the way it showed how Frankie had seen and acknowledged my work.
“Attention! Attention!” I remember him shouting at the bar, the evening that he gave me the promotion. Here he climbed up on a chair, pulling me up to stand next to him on another, the conversation that roared in the room at that hour slowly fading, heads turning toward us.
After Frankie had the room’s attention, he continued, one hand placed in comradely fashion on my shoulder. “You all know this guy,” he continued in French. “Matthew to some. Mateo to others. To me, always Teo Tranquille.”
The was a smattering of applause. And I heard someone begin a chant: Tranquille, Tranquille. But Frankie raised both his hands now and the room grew quiet again. Even the bartender set down a glass that he’d been polishing.
“But one thing nobody here knows better than I do,” Frankie went on, “is that Teo is also a great person, and a great friend. A true friend.”
Murmurs in the crowd. Frankie stood silent, unsmiling. Then, hand up. “My best friend,” he said. He wasn’t done. He spoke for several more minutes about the cook that I’d become. The chef. How I’d worked my way through every part of his kitchen, how important I’d become to the Le Dauphin family. Not bad given how terrible I’d been at the beginning.
People laughed. Frankie was having fun now. “It’s true,” Frankie said. “He was truly horrible. Les patrons … oh man … they do not want to hire him when he come.”
Much laughter here.
“But I have another friend,” Frankie said, growing more serious.
“Hey Frankie, it’s all good,” I whispered. “I appreciate it …”
“And that friend, she is special. She has all my respect, you know? We go to culinary in the U.S. together. Some of us graduate and we’re good. Some are very good. Some are even excellent. But this friend, she is superbe.”
“Stephanie!” someone yelled.
“And she said I had to hire him!” Frankie said, as the crowd, sensing the end of this toast, began to cheer and chant. “So of course, I did! Because she say so! And here we are! Please welcome Le Dauphin’s new Tournant Tranquille!”
At which point the cheers overwhelmed everything and we finally stepped off those chairs and raised our glasses. I saw familiar faces all around. Friends from La Rotonde and Polidor, Closerie and La Coupole. Ines was there too. She smiled at me, a little shyly, put her arm around my waist and leaned her head on my shoulder.
“Frankie,” I said.
And he turned to me with a half smile, an odd smile. He was, I noticed, not a quarter as drunk as he typically was by those dwindling moments in the Pigalle evening. Frankie looked at me with a mix of sadness and pride, not that I saw it in the moment. But I see it so clearly now. Standing there with Ines on my shoulder, I see Frankie controlling the room as always. But I see him also as full of sorrow. And with that thought, he reached out a hand and put it to my cheek. He said: “And now, my fine friend, I’m going to borrow your sister for a drink. Or three!”
And he twirled Ines away into the crowd, a hand to her hip. She was smiling, proud. Ines with the chef and his new second-in-command. Ines from Le Havre out on the town.
I was on my Vespa already before thinking any other thoughts. Pushing the Ostrich down over the paving stones. I didn’t actually know where I was going. Stephanie would be long asleep. Maybe I’d wake her. Maybe I’d throw pebbles at her window, no matter that it was two storeys up. Maybe I’d bang on the drainpipe or I’d rattle the front gate. I needed her more than anything in that moment. And that need just swelled and swelled as spring unfolded and the summer advanced. I needed my Stephanie awake and with me. I was learning that intensely as my time in Paris slowly reached its peak.
* * *
I hadn’t been sure what to expect from Gauthier with my promotion. I’d pretty much accepted by that point that our garde manger really didn’t like Frankie, maybe even hated him. But I’d assumed that was about Frankie soaring past him in the kitchen hierarchy when he arrived despite Gauthier’s own decades of service. So I worried that same resentment might extend to me.
Stephanie thought I worried too much. And she was, of course, entirely right. I needn’t have. If anything, my ascendency seemed to amuse and please Gauthier. When Frankie made the announcement at afternoon briefing at Le Dauphin, Gauthier merely turned his head in my direction and nodded with mock gravity. And a week or so after the announcement, some days after Frankie’s toast in Pigalle, I walked the long way home instead of going to the bar after service and found Gauthier in his regular late-night spot at Le Mouton Noir. He didn’t even beckon me over. I just saw him reach for the bottle on the table, and by the time I was inside and my jacket off, there was a nice glass of cold Auxerrois already poured and waiting. When I sat, Gauthier raised his glass and I did the same.
It certainly didn’t change anything in the kitchen between us. Gauthier was always going to be the hard man to me. Legio Patria Nostra. His homeland lay elsewhere. And at Le Dauphin, unlike most of the rest of us, Gauthier was implacable, immune, impossibly tough.
I thought this all the more as June unwound and July began. It had grown very hot in Paris. Thirty-five degrees Celsius by noon outside and many more in the kitchen at Le Dauphin. With the roaring grill flames and glowing ovens, I was soaking with sweat in my whites before dinner service even began. Gauthier himself would glisten and grow red-faced but never complain.
“Visitez le Liban,” he would say to Ricky, if the young man would sigh or indicate discomfort in any way.
During those weeks Stephanie and I would sleep at my place, which was cramped and had low ceilings, but was cooler than her place at night for being half underground. We’d lie and smoke in the darkness, waiting for temperatures to fall below thirty. Families would be the topic, often, because they always somehow cycled back into view.
She spoke of her father’s struggle after the war. The first marriage that dissolved. The second that he left and which she didn’t know anything about for many years. Then Tess.
“Which was love,” I said.
Stephanie smoked and looked straight up to the ceiling. “Mostly,” she said.
“How’d they die?” I asked. “You know, you never told me.”
Well, not great stories, Stephanie said. For Tess it was probably addiction. Alcohol, painkillers, eventually cardiac arrest. That was back when Stephanie was only ten. Her father quit drinking and lived a quiet life after Tess was gone. Then he drove off the road on an overnight trip to Austin. Missed a turn and went into a ravine fifty feet deep.
“I was in France at that point,” Stephanie said. “I’d just arrived here.”
“Holy shit,” I said.
She said, “Tell me something you’ve never told me about your mother.”
So I told her about the one and only time I’d seen her cry. We were passing Pacific National Exhibition at night, returning from a visit with family friends in Burnaby, coming westbound down Hastings Street. And when we saw the searchlights painting the clouds above the midway, white pencil beams criss-crossing, my mother suddenly covered her eyes and began sobbing quietly.
“Remembering the war?” Stephanie asked.
“I guess,” I told her. “She didn’t ever talk about it. The Holocaust and the war and what all that meant. You just didn’t back then. But I guess she’d seen searchlights from the ground in Münster when the bombs were falling every second night.”
My father with his hand on her back between the shoulder blades. We kids suddenly frozen in the backseat of that Volvo wagon. A five-year-old doesn’t know why a parent is in distress. They know only that distress is present, and they feel it as a shortness of their own breath.
“I’ve been thinking,” Stephanie said, after a moment.
The summer break was coming. Le Dauphin would close on the Saturday night of the last week of July, which also happened to be the thirty-first of the month. Three weeks off. Stephanie had the same schedule. We’d talked already about going to the South. Nice for the beaches. Cassis maybe, to sip rosé and look at the fishing boats. We didn’t have much money so I’d been looking into renting a camper van. But there in the darkness that night, two or three in the morning on a Saturday night, early July, I could read in those shadowed eyes that another thought was blooming.
“Maybe we just go home,” she said.
We, she said. Home. And I knew she wasn’t talking about returning to be with family. She meant an end to this, to Paris. She meant finding somewhere for ourselves back in the Pacific Northwest, somewhere among the deep green trees, the salty breeze, warm sun, lichened rocks, gulls and eagles wheeling.
“Did you hear about Ines?” I asked Stephanie, suddenly thinking of it.
She looked over sharply.
“She went home.”
“Back to Le Havre? Why?”
I didn’t know. She hadn’t said a word to me. She hadn’t said a word to anyone as far as I knew. Frankie said he had no idea.
“That’s odd,” Stephanie said. “She loved being in Paris.”
“I know. I thought she’d tell me if something were wrong.”
Which was true. I was confused by her leaving without a word. But I also felt guilty. Whatever reason had driven her back to the confines of Le Havre must have been a good one. I might have liked the chance to offer support. But I hadn’t. And worse, I hadn’t even noticed when she left. A week passed. Maybe ten days. Ines not in the dining room. Ines not in Pigalle. I was distracted, of course. Stephanie, new growth, new shoots. How useless was I as a friend, as a so-called brother? Frankie knew nothing and seemed himself confused by the sudden departure. And I got nothing from asking around either, shrugs and glances away. She left and it seemed as if Ines was suddenly not supposed to be remembered.
* * *
At Le Dauphin, meanwhile, the summer heat was taking its toll on everyone. Gauthier would never talk smack to Frankie in the kitchen in front of the others, but he’d slam down his knife after taking an order or wait a passive aggressive three seconds before saying Oui, Chef. Frankie noticed and asked me about it after work. I could only shrug.
“You know him, yes?”
I didn’t really know Gauthier. We have a drink together once in a while.
“That’s knowing him!” Frankie said. “So talk to him!”
“It’s the heat,” I said to Frankie. “Let’s just get to August, take a break. Then we start again in September.”
But Frankie didn’t think it was the heat. Something else, though he wouldn’t say. “He’s violent,” Frankie said.
“Gauthier? Come on.”
“He’s dangerous. You hear about this fight?”
The scooter and the pool cue. Yes, I had heard.
“Not that,” Frankie said. “I mean Clémente.”
So now Gauthier was somehow responsible for the death of the last executive chef. I laughed at Frankie, sitting there in the bar. He was red-faced, ranting, ordering more beer and brandy.
“You weren’t even in Paris when it happened,” I pointed out.
“I hear,” Frankie said. “They say accident. Ha.”
I changed the subject because the brandy arriving just then was at least his seventh. I’d been trying to cut down after my conversation with Stephanie, who never said a word, who hung out at bars on occasion, but who I knew did not like me drunk or hungover. That didn’t stop Frankie, who’d just lap me on rounds, then lap me again as necessary. His drinking was up, if anything. And maybe that, too, was heat. The tension in the air. Ines gone and Gauthier and Frankie seeming to be at one another. So it was with brutally imperfect timing — second last week of July, just over a week until we closed for the much-needed August break, daytime temperatures sneaking up over forty — that Pique 22 decided it was the moment to walk in the door.
He sent his personal assistant, a young man who came into the restaurant midday on the twenty-third. Not by the front door, naturally. He came in through the alley, through the staff entrance, so that Frankie personally had to fetch the chefs patrons, that they might assist in this reservation for two dozen people that Pique 22 wanted for the following Saturday, our final night of the season.
This was all notable for playing out in the kitchen itself and not at the front desk. So the whole brigade could see the bowing and scraping that the owners did in front of this tanned elf with his turquoise framed glasses and trim Brioni suit. It was also unusual for the very fact of a reservation, something Pique 22 had never made at Le Dauphin previously as far as I was aware. But so, too, was the size of the party. Certainly, the favoured banquette would not accommodate, so it was agreed that we would empty the entire upstairs dining room and set up a long table where Pique 22 and his group could dine in privacy.
But not even these features of the transaction were as notable as the PA’s last inquiry, which was about the menu.
Was there some way to make it very special that night? Very French. Very … white tablecloth?
Frankie was livid when the young man had secured agreement for all of this and left the kitchen the way he’d come in. “Oh, so now our whole menu isn’t French enough?” he raged. “And white tablecloth? Was does that even mean? We’re a Bib Gourmand bistro!”
“Frankie, Frankie,” said Chef Marcel, who was now clearly sweating the prospect that his sous wouldn’t play along. “L’ensemble du menu est à toi. It is for you to be … créatif.”
“Like I’m not creative every day?” he fumed after the chefs patrons had pulled back to the bar in the dining room.
Gauthier, I observed, had been watching all this with a sour look on his face. I wondered briefly if this might be the odd occasion when Frankie and Gauthier were truly allied in their scorn. The garde manger had no reason to love Pique 22 or any of his crew, who’d never scorched off a fingerprint on a pan handle just out of the oven much less fought in the Battle of Kolwezi or been shot at in the streets of Beirut. Nevertheless, Gauthier warmed immediately to the upcoming special occasion as if to deliberately remain opposed to his sous. Gauthier even asked if he could help create the menu.
“What an honour!” he said, with elaborate courtesy, which made Ricky snort and snicker and cover his mouth.
“Don’t you have anything to do?” Frankie barked at the boy, in a rare show of anger toward anyone in the brigade.
But Frankie wasn’t letting this whole assignment go to his garde manger. He put me and Bozonnet on it, allowing that Gauthier could have input. But then he was all over us at the kitchen whiteboard as we mapped out the meal, questioning every idea.
“Pheasant?” he said over my shoulder. “Pheasant is so 1980s.”
“Mais Chef,” Bozonnet said patiently, “it is a Pique 22 favourite.”
“Fuck his favourites. He wants white tablecloth I’m not serving pheasant chasseur.”
“What about a roulade?” Gauthier said. “Stuff with truffle and foie.”
Frankie scowled. “I’m thinking offal.”
Bozonnet looked away and sighed. Gauthier shook his head.
“Calf’s head ravigote,” Frankie said.
Bozonnet was sweating now. “Mais Chef, s’il vous plaît …”
“Why be a prick about it?” Gauthier said to Frankie. “Give the guy his pheasant with mushrooms, his frisée-lardon and steak frites.”
I’d never seen Gauthier speak as directly to Frankie before. But Frankie just stood looking at the whiteboard, hand on his chin as if he hadn’t heard. Of course, both Bozonnet and Gauthier knew very well why Frankie was proposing the calf’s head. It was a lavish, old-world preparation they all knew was from a Burgundian one-star called Chez Madelaine. I had to look this up later, at which point I learned that the dish involved slow simmering a whole calf’s head, then serving the entire thing on a platter — snout and ears intact — arranged next to the cubed meat, the tongue, and the brain, which had itself been simmered more briefly in vinegared water. The picture I found showed a Chez Madelaine chef hefting this all on a silver platter, the calf’s death-grey forehead crowned with a pleated garland of parsley.
