Natasha lay on the couch in Achille’s office. Max kneeled at her side as Achille and Miss Beauchamp stood by. “Nat. It’s me, Millie.” She stirred. “Get her some water.”
“Perrier,” Natasha corrected before opening her eyes. “Did I die?”
“You fainted,” Max said.
“In the elevator,” she recalled. Miss Beauchamp brought the Perrier. Natasha sat up and clutched the glass. “I pushed my hand against the latch and imagined Louis was trying to open the oven door.”
Achille broke the silence. “Beauchamp, bring the poor thing some halvah.” Natasha smiled. “It’s nothing,” he said briskly. “We have our own halvah tree.”
Natasha put her hand on Max’s arm. “Hi, handsome. Long time no see.”
“Two hundred and eleven days,” he said.
Miss Beauchamp brought a tray with three more glasses of Perrier. “Downstairs does not drink with Upstairs,” Achille said to her. “Smash the glass when you’re finished.”
Natasha stood up. She walked past Achille and stared out the window. “I keep thinking of Louis.” She held on to herself to control the trembling. “I keep hearing him scream for help inside that oven.”
“Dearest kumquat, there is no point in dwelling upon what has happened. Let’s simply remember that Louis’ Pigeonneaux last night was his own best epitaph.”
“Is that the sum total of a man’s life?” Natasha asked, turning to face Achille. “A goddamn hors d’oeuvre? Is that what you thought of Louis?”
“Indeed not, puss. I thought of Louis as a thoroughly dislikable beast. It was to his culinary credit, and to my unfailing good taste, that I overcame my abhorrence of his rancid Prussian temperament and gave him a pot in which to petits pots.”
“You were his friend, Achille,” she reminded him. “You always helped him.”
“As I would have helped Hitler had he been able to poach a decent quenelle.”
“Thank God I won’t be around to hear what you say about me when I die.”
“Ah, but that is quite a different story,” Achille said. “When you die, my darling, I will no doubt be shattered. Possibly I shall even cancel my dinner plans. In memoriam to you, I shall have a spunsugar tooth, the size of the Arc de Triomphe, implanted next to the grave of Shakespeare.”
“And when I die?” Max asked.
“I shall have you embalmed under contract to Fortes. You shall be scrubbed and dressed in a suit the color of foreskin. Then I will have you wrapped in see-through plastic, hermetically sealed, and dropped into the Thames as the largest used prophylactic in the world.”
Miss Beauchamp began coughing. “And when you die,” Achille continued, “I shall simply cable Rudolf Hess.”
“If you don’t mind,” Miss Beauchamp said, “I must excuse myself.”
“An appropriate, but impossible, goal,” Achille shouted after her.
“I keep wondering,” Natasha began, “what kind of person could have done such a thing.”
“Someone with flair, I should think,” Achille said. “Or at least someone who hated the Savoy. Talk about infamy, do you know they had to run across the street begging crumpets from the Strand Palace? It’s a scandale in the great tradition. As I understand it, the Savoy must replace its most venerable oven, to say nothing of replacing its most venerable cook.”
“Louis left the flat at about a quarter past six,” Natasha said. “He was off to shop at Covent Garden, and then to the Savoy.”
“Then, after the Royal Health Service recertifies the kitchen, then, mon Dieu, the Savoy must recertify its own reputation.”
“He usually arrived at the Savoy by seven-thirty. But this morning—my God”—she stopped for a moment—“was it only this morning? For some reason he never got to the market.”
“Ah,” Achille said, smiling, “the custards of Carême are curdling today.”
Max ignored him. “Then, the first thing we need to know is why Louis went directly to the Savoy.”
“Alimentary, my dear Ogden,” Achille said. “He went directly to the Savoy because either he was unable to go to the market or he never intended going.”
“Or, he was talked out of going,” Max said.
“That would be like talking the pip from an avocado,” Achille said.
“He’s right,” Natasha said to Max. “No one could have talked Louis out of going to the market.”
“Then perhaps he was knocked out as he left the flat,” Max said.
“And a little girl rolled him downhill to the Savoy?” Achille asked.
“They could have had a car,” Natasha said.
“But why take him to the Savoy to kill him?” Max asked. “Maybe someone did knock him on the head as he left the flat. But if they just wanted to rob him or even kill him, they would have done it right then and there.”
“You think someone intended to kill him that way … the way they did?” Natasha asked.
“May we adjourn this meeting of Cretins Against Crime?” Achille asked. “Surely all this did he, didn’t he, could he, would he is becoming tiresome.”
“Tiresome?” Natasha yelled. “Achille, someone murdered my father.”
“Your stepfather,” Max corrected.
“Your lover,” Achille gloated.
“I?” Achille asked. “I who have seen to every detail? Indeed, I who planned a most tasteful memorial service for what’s-his-name? I who even arranged for burial at St. Timothy’s, which is more difficult to get into than Claridge’s? I am even preparing a commemorative volume of Louis’ recipes to be published for all his friends.”
“A very, limited edition,” Max said.
“Too true. Perhaps we should distribute them among the sobbing throngs at his funeral.”
“That’ll shoot five copies,” Max said.
“What time is the service?” Natasha asked angrily.
“That is of no concern to you. You will not be here. I have you booked on a flight to Rome this evening. There is a suite reserved at the Grand. Nutti writes that the leftists have been agitating for a national shutdown of the pasta factories. I knew you would want to do a story for one of your dreary radical feminist rags. Moreover, I promised Nutti I would someday devote a feature to his superb lobster mousse. Stay in Rome until you’re due back here for the demonstration at Harrods.”
“Achille, are you crazy? What world are you in? I don’t want to go to Rome. Don’t you understand how I feel? It’s three o’clock in the afternoon. Yesterday at this time I was skinning oranges at Buckingham Palace. I don’t know any more who or what I am.”
“But I know precisely who and what you are. And what is best for you. Besides, I’ve gone to a great deal of trouble to have the BBC cover the Harrods demonstration on Wednesday. All of Britain is agog to see the beautiful Natasha O’Brien and her Bombe Richelieu on the telly. Now, come give me a kiss and go bye-bye on the big silver bird.”
“I hate to say it, Nat, but Achille is right. There’s nothing you can do here. You need some perspective.”
“Goddamn it, I don’t need perspective. I need time to cry. Why don’t you just tell me to go out, buy a new hat, and forget it all? Don’t you realize what I’ve been through? I was with Louis this morning. Only hours ago. Then the police station. Then I saw Hildegarde. And then, for the grand finale, I faint in the goddamn elevator and wake up in the arms of the man I divorced.”
“See,” Max said, “every cloud does have a silver lining.” He sat down next to her. “All crap aside, I know how you feel.”
Natasha began shaking her head, the tears falling freely. “No. No, you don’t. You don’t know anything about how I feel. You don’t know anything.” She looked up at him, the tears streaming down her face. “I never loved Louis.”
“Of course you didn’t,” Achille said. “How could you? He never loved you. Louis loved only his Frau. You both merely enacted, with consent of the law, your mutual Oedipal fantasies. You were very fortunate indeed to have the forbidden dream of every young girl come true.”
“Achille,” she whispered.
“Yes, my love?”
“Stop reading those penny dreadfuls.” Natasha blew her nose and then walked once around the room as Achille and Max watched her silently. “All these years I’ve dreaded the day I would meet Hildegarde. And I was right. If only she had let me …”
“Natasha, my darling,” Achille said, “the Pharaoh did not make blintzes for Moses.”
The telephone rang and Achille picked it up. “I told you no calls. Very well. Hello, darling doctor. And how is London’s leading necrophiliac today? Are you trying to sell me tickets to the proctologists’ ball? Well, then what? I? I have never been better. No, I haven’t forgotten. Of course, I’m certain. As a matter of fact, I began my diet this very morning.”
Natasha and Max left Achille’s office. They stood on Curzon Street in the low orange of a setting sun.
“Let’s at least have a cup of something,” Max said. “For old times?” She nodded. They crossed over to Shepherd’s Market and sat down at a table in front of a trattoria. Max ordered two espressos.
“How have you been?” she asked.
“You mean since dearth did us part? That’s a heavy question.”
“I mean, has it been very hard for you?”
“No.” He smiled. “It’s mainly been hard for you.”
“Well, what the hell do you want me to tell you? You wake up one morning, look me in the eye while we’re taking a shower, and tell me you want a divorce. I rub your back and ask you why. You rub my back and tell me you don’t know why. We get dressed. We have coffee. You go to your office and I go to mine. I come home, the place is cleaned out, and you’re gone.”
“I only took what was mine.”
“You didn’t take me.”
“I took what was my property,” she said.
“None of it was your property. It was ours. You can’t divide ours into yours and mine. Ours is ours is ours.”
“No. Things is things is things. That’s all they were, Millie. Just things that have no meaning.”
“No meaning?” he asked. “Do you know I cried over the silverware? That was our silverware in the drawer. And all of a sudden I had half a set. Service for six. We didn’t each own six settings. We each owned twelve settings.”
“Millie, we never owned each other.”
“You did. You owned me, babe.”
“Maybe that was the problem. But I don’t own you any more.”
“No, you liberated us both. You got what you wanted and I got corn flakes and bananas, Cokes, Yankee Doodles, frozen strawberries, powdered soups, canned peas, and whipped margarine.”
“Millie, it’s a real sickness with you.”
“You know, in the six months since we stopped rubbing each other’s backs, I’ve tripled my use of plastic garbage bags.”
“You’ve been eating those, too?”
“I think that was our problem. Insufficient garbage.”
“We had plenty of garbage,” she said defensively.
“We had terrible garbage. Anyone who looked through our garbage would have thought we were living in Warsaw. We never had really good American garbage, Nat. We never had cardboard boxes, or tin cans, or even little cartons from the Chinese restaurant. It’s a good thing the CIA never looked through our garbage.”
“Not that I haven’t thoroughly enjoyed reminiscing with you about our garbage,” she said, getting up, “but someone rather dear to me was murdered this morning and I’m fleeing the country, you see. I have a plane to catch.”
“Why were you sleeping with Louis again?”
“I’m sorry, Millie. But now’s not the time for that. I need a friend, not an ex-husband.”
“I don’t want to be an ex-husband.”
She smiled and put her hand on his. “The only alternative is friend.”
“All right, friend. But only because I feel sorry for you.”
“Me, too.”
“How can I help?” he asked.
“I don’t know. I really wish you could.”
“Let me take you to the airport.”
“No.”
“When will I see you again?”
“I don’t know. Catch the show at Harrods next week.”
“Nat, I’m really sorry.”
“Darling, haven’t you been reading your candy wrappers? Being in love means never having to say you’re sorry. Ciao, Big M.”