Who? Vincent?”
“No (disdainfully), Jean-Baptiste. I just told you. The one who uses Japanese knives.”
“Ohh, right, Jibé (scornfully). He doesn’t work here anymore.”
And all of a sudden Mathilde wasn’t beautiful anymore.
Or rich, or sexy, or proud. Or anything at all.
She closed her eyes and waited for someone to throw her out. A big, tough-looking guy was already coming toward her, wiping his hands.
“Miss? Are you lost?”
She said yes, and he showed her the exit.
But there must have been something in the sadness of her expression that told him she was truly crushed, and ugly, and miserable, because he added:
“Do you know him? Be careful . . . I thought I knew him too, and then . . . I got taken for a ride anyway. It was a while ago, though. I told him, by the way, I told him . . . but I don’t know what’s gotten into him, because he’s not very accommodating, is he? Nope, not accommodating at all. He didn’t show up to work for weeks. He fed me line after line of bullshit, and then he left.”
“Do you know where I can find him?”
“No, I have no idea. And I don’t want to know, to tell you the truth. He really left us in the shit, too, in the middle of high season like that. Oh yeah, I remember . . . one morning he showed up and he just wasn’t the same anymore. Nothing interested him. He couldn’t tell the difference between a watermelon and a whelk anymore, the pigheaded fool. First he had to take some time off work because he burned himself, and then it happened again and we had to send him to the emergency room, and when he came back he wasn’t even the same person. He couldn’t concentrate. ‘I just don’t like it anymore,’ was all he could tell me. He emptied out his locker and settled his accounts and left, and you can go out the same door. And if you ever see him, tell him to give me back my Grimod. He’ll know what it means.”
Making her way back past the kitchen staff, Mathilde sensed that she was disturbing them, that she should hurry up. Access here, she remembered, was forbidden to salespeople and vendors and people looking for other people and all other intruders foreign to the world of the hash slingers.
Ousted.
She was walking toward her beautiful Aston Martin with the broken dynamo when the first guy she had spoken to touched her elbow.
“Is it you?”
“Excuse me?”
“Are you the girl from the Arc de Triomphe?”
It hurt when she smiled and she realized she had bitten her lip until it bled.
“I wasn’t sure. He’s in the country. He went back to work for his uncle. In Périgueux.”
Sweet Jesus. Périgueux. It might as well be Australia.
“Does he have a phone number?”
“I don’t know it. Do you have something to write with? I’ll give you the name of the restaurant. It’s not like here, you know. It’ll be easier to find him.”
She carefully wrote down what he told her, and then looked up to thank him:
“Why are you looking at me like that?” she asked, startled.
“No reason.”
He turned around and walked a few steps away before changing his mind. “Hey!”
“Yeah?”
“What was in your bag, exactly?”
“An atlas.”
“Oh, really?”
He seemed disappointed.