“Actually, you don’t have any friggin’ rights at all on my watch. You wanna help us, you talk. You want the body count to climb and the Health Department to put a PLAGUE sign over your about-to-be-brand-new front door, stay mum,” Mike said. “Mercer and me—we got a thing about Coop. Personally, most of the time she makes decisions with her head up her ass. Professionally, both of us would rather work our cases with than without her.”
“Could I just—?”
Mike put his hand on my arm to tell me he wasn’t finished. “She says Luc’s the real deal, that’s all I need to know. You in? Tell me something about yourselves, then about where this business operation stands. Ladies first.”
Gina Varona had no shortage of self-confidence. She leaned forward and clasped her hands together on the tabletop. She wore no rings of any kind, but her diamond studs matched the large, round diamond necklace that showed off her décolletage. She looked Mike directly in the eye and began to speak.
“I assume you’ve done enough homework to know who I am,” she said. “I live downtown, when I’m not traveling, in SoHo. Two dogs, Detective, which I find much easier to keep than my men. I was the CEO of a company called the American Fragrance Design for the last twelve years.”
“Was?”
“That’s right. There was a buyout by a larger European conglomerate. I stepped down at the end of last year.”
“Fired?” Mike asked.
“Hardly, Mr. Chapman,” Gina said, sneering ever so slightly. “An irresistible golden parachute. It’s still airborne.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means all my benefits and a fifteen-million-dollar bonus for moving on,” she said, flipping her hair off her shoulders. “I was restless, ready to try something new. Luc was looking for backers and it sounded interesting to me.”
“Why’s that? Can you cook?”
“Kibbles ’n Bits, Detective. That’s my entire repertoire.”
“How long have you known Luc?” I asked.
She turned her head to look at him. “My goodness, what would you say? Almost twenty years?”
I resisted the temptation to ask if they had ever been intimate, and whether that was why he hadn’t ever mentioned her name.
“Twenty years? Really? How did—?”
Now Gina was talking directly to me. “I met Luc through Brigitte, originally. When I first worked in the cosmetics business, she’d done some modeling for my company. She and I hit it off, got along well. So we spent a lot of time together hanging out in France on some shoots and business trips. Got to be very good friends.”
Of course, Brigitte would have been the perfect model—elegant, serene, almost anorexically thin, and beautiful. La Belle Brigitte—an aperitif that Luc had named in her honor—was still on the menu in Mougins, though his ex-wife was no longer around.
“See, if you knew Coop a little better, you’d realize she’s probably stuck on whether or not you and Luc ever hooked up,” Mike said, like he had been reading my mind.
“That’s ridiculous. That’s not even—” I tried to protest, but Luc talked over me.
“Alex, darling, you should have just asked me. I’d have told you all about Gina.”
Gina Varona leaned back, tilted her head, and looked down at me as though I were a child. Perhaps I’d been acting like one.
“Ask what? I’d never heard of Gina until last night. Now I find out you’ve been having dinner with her right here in New York. What was I supposed to ask?”
“Business meetings. Certainly dinners. But you knew that. You knew I was lining up partners and trying to get backers for Lutèce, Alex. I would have told you their names if you’d asked me. What difference would that have made?”
I shrugged my shoulders. The waiter reappeared with several large bottles of sparkling water and poured a glass for each of us.
Mike waited until he left the room. “You gotta excuse her, Ms. Varona. Coop would go nine rounds in the ring with Muhammad Ali if something dear to her was at stake. She’d come out bloody and bruised with her tail whipped, but she’d never walk away from a good fight.”
I waved Mike off. “Back to you,” I said.
“So, how’d you get together with Luc on this plan?” he asked.
“I’m in the South of France quite often, actually.”
“Visiting Brigitte?”
“I do that, too. I’m the godmother of their older son, so I see her and the boys as often as I can. But also, Detective, there’s a small town called Grasse. It’s the perfume capital of the world. I’m there on business several times a year. And it’s just a few kilometers from Luc’s restaurant.”
I knew that was true. Exotic, expensive perfumes and the home of Papa Mo, Gil-Darsin’s father.
“Luc told me that he was going to try to open Lutèce here in New York. I didn’t know the restaurant in his father’s day, but I was a regular when the great Soltner ran it. I already had word that I’d be transitioning out of my job with this big financial windfall, so what better than to shift gears and back my friend in his venture?”
“He’s a lucky man,” Mike said. “Do most restaurant owners have backers?”
“If you’re not talking about a mom-and-pop operation or a corner pizzeria,” Luc said, “the model these days is to have help on the business side. It’s prohibitively expensive to start up a serious place like ours. It’s a total crapshoot.”
“How much cash are we talking about, to get something like Lutèce going?” Mercer asked.
Peter Danton and Gina Varona both looked at Luc. He thought for a minute before answering. “For us?” He cleared his throat with a cough. “The real estate alone was four million dollars. The build-out has cost another three million. That’s before we talk about staffing and salaries and all the licensing.”
Mike and Mercer were dumbfounded. “Eight to ten million, at least? And I’m happy with a hot dog at PJ Bernstein,” Mike said. “Are you kidding me?”
“But you don’t have that kind of money, Luc,” I said. “I’m staggered.”
He rested his glasses on the table in front of him and stared at me like he was seeing me for the first time. “That’s right, Alexandra. I don’t have anything like the amount of money I need. That’s why I’m relying on Gina and Peter. Do you understand that this has been my dream—for, for most of my life? Do you understand what this project means to me, in my heart?”
I was trying to discern whether it was passion that was driving Luc’s speech, or disappointment in my business naïveté.
“When my father opened Lutèce more than fifty years ago, Mike, he had this idea to make it the best restaurant in New York—more likely, in the world. He had a great imagination and spirit to go with his style. The first thing he did was buy a town house. Do you know how many restaurant owners in New York own their buildings, too?”
“No idea,” Mike said.
“Fewer than one percent. One percent, do you see? A brilliant investment. Most places go broke having to pay rent to a landlord, raising it lease after lease. There are only a handful of great places today whose owners had the good sense to buy the real estate. Ken Aretsky at Patroon, the Kriendlers at the ‘21’ Club, the Massons at La Grenouille, the Pellegrinos and Stracis at Rao’s. So at the same time, my older siblings and I—we all lived above the shop,” Luc said, smiling briefly when he recalled one incident. “Mother had to take my roller skates away because I was tearing up the hallway in the apartment and diners complained that the chandelier was shaking so violently they feared it would fall.”
“I’m sure—”
“Let me finish, Detective. My father insisted on the most elegant appointments. He was the first restaurateur to serve on bone china, to use Christofle silverware and crystal wineglasses. No frozen food, nothing canned. He flew in fresh Dover sole from England and Scotch salmon every single day. It was he who discovered a twenty-seven-year-old chef—the great Soltner—working in a Parisian restaurant and the
very next day, offered him the big job in New York.
“I think the reason I never got sick as a child is that our apartment was kept at sixteen degrees Celsius—the ideal temperature for wine—which was stored in our closets. It took him five years to get the restaurant going—selling off everything he and my mother owned—stocks, bonds, paintings by Degas and Rouault. A guy named James Beard was giving his first cooking lessons in our kitchen upstairs. Opening week, lunch was price-fixed at eight fifty—and the public screamed so loudly about it that my father had to cut it down to six dollars. But he did all the work and he paid for every bit of it by himself, and it paved the way for all the great restaurants that followed Lutèce.”
“None of that would be possible today,” Mike said. “I get your point.”
Luc took a deep breath and a long drink of water.
“So the way it gets done now is with backers,” Mercer said, trying to take the conversation down a notch.
“That’s the only possibility,” Luc said, ticking off names of the hottest places in the city. “Danny Meyer has Stephen Ross, Jean-Georges Vongerichten has Phil Suarez, Daniel Boulud has Lili Lynton.”
“Other women have done this?” Mercer asked.
“I may not be as brilliant as Lili, gentlemen—she was a financial analyst before she got into this crazy business—but I’m hungry enough to want to follow in her footsteps,” Gina said. “Boulud operates thirteen restaurants, eight of them in New York.”
“But that’s not your goal, Luc,” I said.
“ETB he calls it.” Gina Varona patted Luc’s shoulder and laughed. “Expansion to bankruptcy. I’ve got my eyes on the rest of the world, but Luc’s happy to keep what he’s got back home while replicating his father’s success here. It’s refreshing how sensible he is.”
“Just how much money are you willing to put into Luc’s dream, Ms. Varona?” Mike asked.
“I figure I’m good for five million.” Neither one of her false eyelashes blinked.
“And I’m impressed. That should score you a reservation any time you’d like,” Mike said.
“Vanity restaurant investments won’t make me a dime, Detective. I’m backing Luc because I’ve watched him run the classiest operation on the Riviera. He’s got the knowledge and style, and he’s always in his place—which customers count on. We’ve got Andre Rouget’s blueprint for a classic winner, and the three of us have figured out exactly what it’s going to cost to open Lutèce, to run it, and then for it to throw off some income. I plan on getting every nickel back—with interest.”
“How long do you figure that will take?” Mike asked, drumming his fingers on the table.
“Restaurants have a generally short life span,” Luc said. “Unless you really get lucky—like my father and some of the other greats.”
“Not that I don’t trust Luc to get it done for me,” Gina Varona said. “But I’d like to see the cash within the next five years.”
“Phew,” Mike said. “I guess the prices will be pretty steep.”
“As J. P. Morgan used to say, Detective, ‘If you have to ask how much it costs, I guess you can’t afford it.’”
“I’m a Shake Shack kinda guy myself.”
Peter Danton stood up, stretched, and started to walk around the end of the table to come behind us. As he moved, I saw him point to the floor with the forefinger of his good hand.
Mercer and I were watching him. Luc nodded in return.
“I’m getting to you in a minute, Mr. Danton,” Mike said. “What’s with the sign language?”
“It’s restaurant speak, Mike,” Luc said, laughing. He jiggled the knot in his geometrically patterned silk tie. “All dreamed up in the forties by the owner of the Stork Club. If he played with his necktie, it meant there’d be no check for the diners at that table. If he touched the tip of his nose, it meant the people being served weren’t important.”
“And Mr. Danton, here, pointing his finger at a spot on the floor?”
“All he’s trying to tell me, Mike, is that somebody ought to bring some cocktails to this table.”
“Point well taken. I’ll get the waiter. Just one more thing, Ms. Varona.”
“You must be smelling blood, Detective. Isn’t that what Columbo used to say when he was homing in on the killer? ‘Just one more thing’?”
“I’m light-years away from a killer at this point. Don’t get nervous yet.”
“I rarely get nervous. Just when my money’s on the line.”
“The girl who was killed in Mougins last weekend. Did you know her? Did you know Lisette Honfleur?”
Gina Varona put her hand on Luc’s forearm. “Lisette? Isn’t that the bitch who had the fight with Brigitte?”
Luc started to answer, but Mike spoke over him. “That’s right. You remember that fight?”
“I wasn’t there. I mean I wasn’t in town at the time. But Brigitte told me about it later. Or wait—maybe it was you, Luc, who mentioned it. Didn’t you tell me that they fought over—?”
Luc interrupted whatever Gina had been about to say. “Brigitte caught her stealing from us,” he said. “Don’t you remember? Lisette was stealing cash from my office.”
“Oh. Oh, I thought—” she said, stopping abruptly.
“What is it, Ms. Varona?” Mike asked. “What were you about to say?”
“Never mind, Detective. Luc’s memory about something like that would be much more accurate than mine. I really don’t know why Brigitte and Lisette had a fight.”
Mike looked annoyed. I could tell he thought she was holding something back, encouraged to do so by Luc. “But you do know why Luigi Calamari left his job at the Rifle Club, don’t you?”
“Now that, Detective, would be in the category of two more things you wanted from me, and I only promised you one. Let’s see how I feel about that subject after I’ve had a drink.”
THIRTY-TWO
Mike summoned the waiter to take an order from us. While he went around the table, Mercer tried to lighten things up with some general conversation.
“So where did people eat before there were restaurants in this city?” he asked Luc. “I mean, folks who were working in offices or foreign travelers.”
He had hit on one of Luc’s favorite subjects, something he had made a study of for his entire life. “Pretty grim fare, actually, served at boardinghouses and taverns and English-style chophouses scattered about. The first actual restaurant was created in a French pastry shop on William Street in 1827. It was called Delmonico’s—the only place in town to have an à la carte menu and an actual wine list. The Delmonico brothers introduced a whiff of elegant European dining into the rough-and-tumble of this city. The restaurant moved uptown from time to time, as the population did, but it remained the gold standard in the business for almost a century.”
“And the food came from—?”
“This city was blessed by nature, Mercer. My chefs today are envious of what this environment—forests and wetlands and rivers and ocean—provided every day. Venison from the plains of Long Island, fruits and vegetables from New Jersey, and the most amazing array of fish that filled the Fulton and Washington Markets every morning.
“Bear meat was plentiful, woodcocks covered the land that later became Central Park, and the thing that New York was best known for—like Boston for lobster and Baltimore for crab—was oysters.”
“No kidding,” Mike said. I knew exactly what had caught his attention.
Luc held up his hands and spread them apart. “Oysters grew as large as dinner plates in these waters. The inlets of New York Harbor, Long Island Sound, the Raritan River—they produced the largest and sweetest oysters in the world. I’ve told Alex there were oyster saloons all along Canal Street, just north of your courthouse, in the 1830s—all the oysters you could eat for six cents. They were as abundant and fresh as the waters at that time, until the harbor became polluted and the supply depleted.”
“And today?” Mike asked. “Where do you get oyster
s from? I don’t mean for France, but when you open here.”
“Any place but New York,” Luc said, giving that idea the back of his hand. “Hog Island oysters from Point Reyes Peninsula, Island Creeks from Duxbury, Alex’s favorites from the Tisbury Great Pond—nature’s perfect food, naked and delicious.”
“How about from the Gowanus Canal?”
“Once upon a time, Mike.”
“Do you know it?”
“Like I told the Brooklyn detectives today, I know the history. Used to be, you could get the best oysters in the world from that water. Such a specialty they were pickled and shipped to France. But that, Mike, was four centuries ago. And no, I’ve never been to your—may I say?—stinking canal.”
“What’s that mob expression?” Gina Varona asked. “Sleeping—?”
“With the fishes,” Mike said.
“And there was my poor friend Luigi,” she said, interlocking her fingers together and staring at the ceiling of the wine cellar, as though she were in church, “sleeping with the oysters.”
“You don’t sound too broken up about it.”
“Devastated, my dear detective. I just don’t wear my emotions on my sleeve, like your friend, Alexandra. But I know once we Italians get into the mix, you cops are bound to think the mob had something to do with it. Ethnic profiling and all that.”
This time two waiters appeared. One placed a cocktail in front of each of us, while the other set down on the table an array of appetizers, traditional fare from the fabled bar upstairs—‘21’ Club mini-burgers, crispy chicken wings, jumbo shrimp cocktail, and a large charcuterie.
“Nobody’s mentioned the mob,” Mike said, dredging a shrimp in the sauce and moving it to his mouth without a single drip. “You know something we don’t?”
“I liked Luigi. He was a good kid. He was hardworking and smart.” Varona was pulling hard on her Knob Creek bourbon. “I guess you learned from your visit last night that I knew him from Tiro a Segno. Sergio called to tell me you were there. Luigi didn’t have any ties to the mob. He wouldn’t have lasted a day at Tiro if he had.”
Night Watch Page 23
