As I drew nearer, I realized you only had to queue if you wanted a tour or to go up and see the bells and things. If you just wanted to peek in, you could wander up. Even though my feet were killing me and I hadn’t eaten a thing for hours and I just wanted to lie down and rest, I found myself mounting the steps.
Inside it was huge. It smelled faintly of flowers and floor polish and something else that I supposed was that incense-y stuff my gran says Catholics use. They were playing organ music gently through speakers, which was a bit confusing. The scale of it was massive. If I thought it was massive now, living in the days of skyscrapers and jumbo jets and cruise ships, I can’t imagine what it must have felt like hundreds of years ago. The huge friezes of the Stations of the Cross covered the walls in intricate details, like the huge rose stained-glass window. It must have been like watching television.
Dotted on the pews, looking tiny as ants, were people, mostly singly, just sitting, contemplating. I couldn’t join them without paying the entrance fee, and I didn’t have a God I could talk to, and even if I did I couldn’t imagine any kind of God taking time off from massacres and famines to help out an aging, very, very fat man I barely knew. But even so. My heart formed a silent plea—please—said over and over again. Please. Just, please.
I felt better.
- - -
The shop had a sign on it—fermé cause de maladie—and some concerned people milling around outside, who’d obviously made the trip specially and everything. I knocked heavily on the roll door. The workshop around the back technically had a fire exit, but I had no idea where it went out, so I kept banging till I heard Frédéric.
“We’re shut! Go away!” he shouted.
“It’s me!” I yelled.
Immediately the shutters were raised.
“Why didn’t you call? Where have you been?” he shouted at me.
“Because my phone is dead,” I explained. “And you can’t use the phones in the hospital.”
“Well, that’s not very helpful,” he grumbled. “We’ve been waiting. Any change?”
“No,” I said. “I don’t think so. But no change is good at this point.”
Frédéric snorted. “I don’t know about that.”
I noticed something. There was no noise in the shop.
“Why are the churns switched off?” I asked.
Frédéric shrugged. “Oh, of course we cannot continue without the chef, cherie. It’s not possible.”
“What do you mean, it’s not possible? Are you going on strike?”
“No. But without him…”
“You’re telling me you’ve worked here all these years and you don’t know what he’s doing?”
Frédéric’s little face grew cross.
“Of course we see what he is doing. But what he is doing and what an artisan would do…for the conch, it is not precisely the same, madame. It is the difference between daubs on a wall and an artist’s canvas. It could not be.”
I was used to working in a factory, where our industrial processes basically meant that a monkey could turn out the same chocolate day after day as long as he could remember what sequence of buttons to push. It might mean a lot of banana flavor though.
“Of course you can,” I prodded. “Benoît has been here man and boy. Surely we can honor Thierry and continue making chocolate.”
“It is impossible,” he said, looking at me as if he was explaining something very simple to a particularly stupid child. “It cannot be the same.”
“Well, I hope it can,” I said. “Because I think Alice wants us all to stay open. If you want to say no to her, though, go ahead, be my guest.”
Frédéric visibly paled.
“She cannot say that,” he said.
“She did,” I said. “I heard her at the hospital.”
He shook his head. “She does not understand.”
I was kind of on Alice’s side over this. Wages had to be paid, I assumed, hopefully including mine. People would still come. Thierry was mostly all about the sizzle and the salesmanship at the front of the shop, I was sure of it; Frédéric and Benoît could carry out all the workshop duties. And I could help, I thought to myself. I’d watched them all over the weeks, hadn’t I? I had a good nose for this kind of thing.
Frédéric called on Benoît, and in a low, deep-seated, 100 mile per hour growl that reminded me once again how much people were modifying the way they spoke when they spoke to me so I could understand it, started to explain how crazy everyone was being. Benoît as usual did little more than grunt in response, but in a way that seemed to indicate more displeasure than usual.
“Les anglais,” was the only remark he made eventually, which made me indignant, as he’d obviously lumped me in with Alice’s side of everything.
“It’s nothing to do with me,” I said eventually, backing away. “Speak to Alice, okay? Do we need cleaning up?”
Benoît shook his head.
“It’s done,” he said ominously. And then in English: “It’s over.”
I could hardly climb the stairs. All I wanted was to get back in, to be home, to get some sleep. Oh God, and I would have to phone Claire, of course I would. I hadn’t even thought about that. Well, I would need to charge the phone first, then I could think about it. Maybe after a bath.
Of course, Sami was there. Today he was wearing a peacock-blue fringed shawl over his tanned torso, and bright blue eyeliner. He was obviously waiting for me.
“Darling!” he exclaimed. “I heard the horrible, horrible news. Look, I have cognac. It’s good for shock.”
At that point in time, cognac didn’t seem like a bad idea, even though I had only the haziest idea what it actually was. Sami just liked to be in on the good gossip.
“It is the talk of Paris! Where will we get our hot chocolate now? You know, the tenor, Istoban Emerenovitz, will only sing here if he has a constant supply! Now we shall lose him to the New York Met and the world will mourn.”
I wasn’t exactly sure that the world would mourn something like that, but I gave a half-smile and said not to worry, everything was going to be all right. It was odd how, in the space of a few hours, suddenly I had become the center of information.