The voice answering spoke low and quickly.
“Allo?”
“Laurent?” I said. “It’s me, it’s Anna.”
He exhaled slowly. “Anna, I’m at the hospital. I can’t really talk. This isn’t a good time.”
“I know, I know, I’m sorry…how is he doing?”
Laurent sighed. “Still no change. These bloody machines are making my ears hurt. And I have to get back to work. I mean, I really have to. They can’t run service without me.”
This was the worst news I could hear. I needed him, really badly.
I told him so.
“Please,” I said. “I need you. To help me out with the shop. I can’t do it by myself.”
“But I thought you worked in chocolate?”
“Well, I do, but I’m hardly going to be as good as your father, am I?”
“No,” he said, a little quickly for my liking.
“I need help. It’s all going wrong. Frédéric and Alice are fighting.”
“Alice would fight with a dead dog in a town hall,” said Laurent. I presumed this was some unusual French saying I wasn’t familiar with. He sighed and sat quietly for a long time. I could hear the beep beep and the swishy-swashy sound of the respirator behind him.
“Okay,” he said finally. “I’m going to leave and do my shift, then come back to the hospital. Can you meet me at work? A few pointers, that’s all, okay?”
I nodded. “Where do you work?”
“The Pritzer,” he said. I’d never heard of it, but he said it like I ought to.
“Come in the back entrance. I’ll see you at three.”
“What will I tell Alice?”
“Tell Alice you’re going to save the shop, and also that she can go pee on scissors.”
My French had a long way to go.
- - -
Alice looked down her long nose at me.
“Well, Thierry won’t hear of it. He would never let Laurent’s concoctions”—she pronounced the word concoctions as if it were poisonous—“near his customers.”
“I realize that,” I said. “But I think it might be better…”
“What we are making here is chalk,” burst out Frédéric provocatively. He’d stopped shouting, briefly, when I made my way over to them, but his ears were bright red. Benoît was nowhere to be found. “It is a travesty! It is a sin!”
“Uhm, can we not go quite that far,” I said. “It’s not that bad.”
“Not that bad is as good as terrible,” he said. “In this shop.”
Alice bit her lip and thought about it for a moment.
“The shop must go on,” she said. “It must. We have bills and commitments. It is impossible that we close now; it is our busiest season…Can you sell the rest of this morning’s stock?” she asked Frédéric.
He drew himself up to his full height—about five foot six—and said, “I can, but I will not, madame.”
Alice rolled her eyes.
“All right,” she said to me. “Go. And when you come back, do it right or you’ll find French laws protecting jobs don’t cover yours.”
The Pritzer, I found out, was a very, very posh hotel, on the Place de la Concorde, near the Crillon. It was a beautiful yellow stone and looked like a castle, with small balconies and canopies over every window. Outside were two porters dressed in livery with top hats on, each standing next to a large topiary cock. A spotless red carpet descended the steps onto the pavement. Outside, a large man wearing sunglasses and a very tiny woman who looked like she was made out of icing sugar were descending from a huge black car. They were completely ignoring each other. The woman was holding a tiny dog like a baby. The porters leaped to help them.
“Excuse me,” I said when they’d finished. “Where’s the kitchen entrance?”
Around the back of the hotel, all was very different. The back entrance was off an alleyway filled with dustbins. The other side of the hotel was old white brick, not sandstone, and a grubby fire door was propped open at the bottom with several staff in white aprons and tall hats crowded around it, smoking furiously. I felt nervous but walked up. Just inside the entrance was an old man wearing a peaked hat and a green blazer, sitting at a desk next to a huge row of time stamp cards. That made me feel a bit more at home; it reminded me of the factory. I told him who I was looking for and he made a call.
A long hall stretched out in front of me, on one side lined with huge carts of linen and women in black dresses with white pinafores. On the other were great swinging doors with round panes of glass set in them, obviously leading to the kitchens, and it was from here that Laurent emerged. In his whites, he looked commanding and rather impressive, firing a list of instructions behind me as he came, looking none too pleased to see me, for which I couldn’t really blame him. I’d caused him nothing but trouble since I’d arrived.
“Hello,” I said in a small voice.
“Yes, follow me,” he said. “Can’t you tie your hair back?”
I retightened the loop of my ponytail, hoping that would be enough. He grunted, thanked the commissionaire, and pointed me in the direction of the hand sanitizer mounted on the wall outside the large swinging doors.
I’d never been in such a huge kitchen before. I stopped to goggle for a second; I couldn’t help it. It was an utter hive of activity, men (and they were nearly all men) marching everywhere to and fro; not running, but marching very, very quickly. Everyone was wearing white with blue checked trousers and clogs, except some of the men wore white trousers and had their names embroidered on their jackets, including Laurent. I assumed this meant something important.
The noise levels were unbelievable; people were shouting in a variety of different languages; pots and pans were clanked and hurled across the room. In the corner, four younger men in T-shirts were frantically packing and unpacking industrial-sized dishwashers and two had their hands deep inside pots. On my right, a boy who looked to be around sixteen was furiously chopping vegetables. I had never seen anyone chop anything so quickly; his hand was a blur.
To my right was a long line of perfect salads laid out, onto which a man was slicing pieces of perfectly cooked pink duck, all exactly the same, at absolutely precise thicknesses. Another, older man came up to him at one point and told him off furiously for not making them all thin enough and the man, instead of arguing back, stood with his head down until the rant was over and then recommenced, apologizing.