“Lunch?” he said.
Apart from the chocolates, I’d had nothing to eat all morning and I’d been up for such a long time. Thierry offered me his arm—he wasn’t a very fast walker—and we crossed the Pont Louis-Philippe and vanished through a maze of streets, mostly filled with tourists, with the occasional local who recognized and nodded a head to Thierry. We passed wide roads with long chains of cafés and restaurants with picture menus outside and optimistic tables set in the street. He ignored these completely, and when we got to the far end of the Marais, he twisted quickly into a tiny alleyway between two large blocks of apartments with white shutters and washing hanging from the top windows. It was cobbled, and you wouldn’t have noticed it was there if you didn’t know exactly where you were headed. At the end of the tiny lane was a little wooden sign swaying in the breeze with a large pot on it. It looked like something out of Diagon Alley, and I looked at Thierry questioningly. He said nothing but winked at me.
It was, in fact, a restaurant, and when we opened the old brown door, a gust of noise and smells and warm air flooded out. Inside everything was brown and wooden; there were coppers on the wall and it was ferociously hot. Tiny brown wooden tables and benches, built for earlier, thinner generations I would have said, were crammed together higgledy-piggledy on different levels. Everyone appeared to be shouting, and I couldn’t see a vacant table anywhere. A large woman in a dirty white apron and glasses appeared and kissed Thierry rapidly on both cheeks, gabbling something I couldn’t recognize, then led us both to the back of the room, from where I could see, behind the bar, a huge brick oven roaring away.
We were jammed into two seats cheek by jowl with two men who appeared to be having a furious argument about something but who would abruptly stop every so often and burst out laughing. I had just squeezed in when the old lady returned, cocking an eyebrow. Thierry leaned over to me. “I will order you the duck,” he said, and then, when I agreed, simply nodded to the woman, who vanished and sent over a very small whippet-thin boy with water, bread, napkins, utensils, and a small carafe of deep, fruity-looking wine and two very small glasses, all of which he unfolded onto the table at lightning speed. Thierry poured a tiny glass of wine for me—I thought it was to taste it—and a rather larger one for himself. Then he dipped a piece of bread into a bowl of olive oil, started chewing it contemplatively, and sat back, happy. He seemed fairly content not to ask me too much about my life or even what I was doing there. I felt very nervous suddenly.
“So,” I said, “you’ve always had the shop?”
He shook his head. “Not always. I was a soldier too.”
“Really?” I couldn’t imagine Thierry as a lean, mean fighting machine.
“Well, I was an army cook. Yes.”
“What was that like?”
He shrugged. “Horrible. But then I came back to my shop. Then I was much happier.”
“Why is it called Le Chapeau Chocolat?”
He smiled at that, but before he could answer, our food appeared.
I had never eaten duck before, I hadn’t wanted to say, except with pancakes at the Chinese when Cath and I were flush. But I had thought duck was a small thing. This was a huge breast, like a monster Christmas turkey. On the top was a thick crispy skin, like crackling. There was a green salad and small roast potatoes on the side and a yellow sauce. I watched Thierry as he chopped into his duck right across the middle and dunked it in the sauce. I immediately did the same thing.
The juicy, crunchy skin of the duck exploded in my mouth. The taste was just incredible, hot and salty and tender all at once. I looked up at Thierry. “This is amazing,” I said.
He raised an eyebrow. “Oh yes, it is good.”
I looked around at the other tables. Almost everyone else was also eating duck. This was what the place sold: oven-roasted duck. Amazing. I smiled, then wiped away some grease that wanted to run down my chin. The potatoes were hot and salty, and the salad was peppery arugula. Everything complemented everything else. It was one of the best meals I had ever had. Everyone else was taking it completely in their stride, chatting, carrying on, pretending this was normal. Perhaps if you lived in Paris, I supposed, this was normal.
Thierry launched excitedly into explaining to me how they made sure the oven was exactly the right temperature and how they balanced out the flavors. He was fascinating on where they sourced the animals (who had to live happy lives—a stressed duck was a bad duck apparently). He was genuinely interesting and animated, completely and utterly obsessed with his food, and I stopped noticing his bulk and breathlessness and caught only his hearty laugh and obsession. Maybe I could see what Claire had seen, just a glimpse.
Finally, after waving his knife in the air claiming he thought he could smell his neighbor’s wine was corked, he caught himself and laughed.
“Ah, always I talk too much,” he said. “I get carried away, you know.”
“It’s good, I like it,” I said. He raised his eyebrows ruefully.
“No, no, I don’t pay enough attention…So tell me, you leave your boyfriend in England?”
“I don’t have a boyfriend,” I said shortly.
Thierry raised his eyes. “But a woman like you…”
I couldn’t work out what he meant, whether “a woman as nice as you” or “a woman as old as you.”
“Uh huh?” I said.
“You look like you should have a boyfriend,” he said.
“Well,” I said. Maybe he meant dumpy, as if I’d settled down and given up. “Well, I don’t.”
Thierry returned to his plate and, on finding it empty, looked sad.
“Well. Do not fall in love with Frédéric. He has nine girlfriends.”
Given that I could probably squash Frédéric in a strong breeze, I felt this to be unlikely. I finished off my meal and did as Thierry did, running bread around the plate to mop up the juices. Oh, it was so good.
“And what about our friend Claire?”
I realized I hadn’t been able to check my email since I’d gotten here and let her know how we were getting on. Surely Sami would know, although he seemed a bit too exotic for email, as if he would actually get everything delivered by carrier pigeons wearing bow ties.
I shrugged. “Was it glamorous, Paris in the ’70s?”