In the Kitchen

CHAPTER ONE

WHEN HE LOOKED BACK, HE FELT THAT THE DEATH OF THE UKRAINIAN was the point at which things began to fall apart. He could not say that it was the cause, could not say, even, that it was a cause, because the events which followed seemed to be both inevitable and entirely random, and although he could piece together a narrative sequence and take a kind of comfort in that, he had changed sufficiently by then to realize that it was only a story he could tell, and that stories were not, on the whole, to be trusted. Nevertheless, he fixed the beginning at the day of the Ukrainian's death, when it was the following day on which, if a life can be said to have a turning point, his own began to spin.

On that morning in late October, Gleeson, the restaurant manager, sat down with Gabriel for their regular meeting. He had mislaid, so it seemed, his oily professional charm.

'You do realize it's on your patch,' said Gleeson. 'You realize that, yes?'

It was the first time that Gabe had seen him slip out of character. And the night porter certainly was on Gabe's 'patch'. What, in that case, was worrying Gleeson? In this business, until you could see all the angles, it was better to keep your mouth shut. Gabe tapped the neck of the crystal vase that sat on the table between them. 'Plastic flowers,' he said, 'are for Happy Eaters and funeral parlours.'

Gleeson scratched his scalp and fleetingly examined his fingernails. 'Yes or no, Chef ? Yes or no?' His eyes were pale blue and disreputably alert. His hair, by contrast, he wore with a sharp side parting and a fervid rectitude, as if all his phoney honour depended on it.

Gabe looked across the empty restaurant, over the pink-tinged table linen and leather-backed chairs, the silver that here and there glinted in the shreds of autumn sun, the chandelier, ugly as a bejewelled dowager, the polished oak bar that, without a single elbow propped upon it, was too dark and infected with loneliness to look at for very long. In the circumstances, he decided, it was unwise to concede anything at all. 'The food and beverage meeting, three months ago at least. You agreed, no more plastic flowers.'

'They're silk,' said Gleeson smartly. 'Silk, please. I have never had plastic in my restaurant.'

'Now I think about it,' said Gabe, 'there were some other things ...'

'Chef.' Gleeson laced his fingers together. 'You are a straight talker. I am a straight talker. Let's not beat about the bush.' He tilted his head and sieved the words through a smile. It was how he greeted diners, gliding in with hands clasped and head cocked. 'A dead body on the premises. This is hardly the time to be discussing pepper pots.' His tone was both ingratiating and contemptuous, the one reserved for the pretheatre crowd, tourists and anyone –

easily identified by the way they kept looking around – who had been saving up.

'For God's sake, Stanley. They took him away.'

'Really?' said Gleeson. 'Really? They took him away? Well. That settles everything. How stupid of me to waste your time.' He got up. 'I'm telling you, Chef ... listen ...' He stared at Gabe and then shook his head. 'Shit.' He adjusted his cufflinks and stalked off, muttering, quivering like a cat's tail.

Gabe went back to his office and pulled out the banqueting file. He shuffled the papers, and found the sheet he wanted. Sirovsky Product Launch. Under the 'Menu' heading, Oona had written 'Canapés: spring rolls, smoked salmon, quiche squares, guacamole, vol-au-vents (prawn), mini choc mousses.' Her handwriting was maddeningly childish. To look at it made you think of her sucking the end of her pencil. He put a thick black line through the list. He checked the per-head budget, staff resource and comments sections. 'Let's put out all the flags on this one.' Mr Maddox was taking a special interest. Put out all the flags. What did that mean? Caviar and truffle oil? Stuff the profit and loss?

Gabe sighed. Whatever it meant, it wasn't quiche squares and prawn vol-au-vents.

The office was a white stud-walled cubicle in the corner of the kitchen, with a surfeit of air-conditioning ducts and a window over the battlefield. Apart from Gabe's desk and chair, the filing cabinet and a stand for the printer, there was room for one other plastic seat, squeezed in between desk and door.

Sometimes, if he was busy completing order forms or logging timesheets, Gabe let his phone ring until it beeped and played the message. You have reached the office of Gabriel Lightfoot, executive chef of the Imperial Hotel, London.

Please leave your name and number after the tone and he will call you back as soon as possible. To listen to it you'd think the office was something else, that he was someone else, altogether.

Looking up, he saw Suleiman working steadily at his mise-en-place, chopping shallots and, with a clean sweep of the broad knife blade, loading them into a plastic box. Victor came round from the larder section carrying a baguette. He stood behind Suleiman, clamped the bread between his thighs and, holding on to Suleiman's shoulders, aimed the baguette at his buttocks. In every kitchen there had to be one. There had to be a clown. Suleiman put down his knife. He grabbed the baguette and tried to stuff it down Victor's throat.

Even yesterday, after Benny had gone down to the catacombs to look for rat poison and returned with the news; after Gabe had seen Yuri for himself, after the police had arrived, after Mr Maddox had come down personally to announce that the restaurant would be closed and to speak to everyone about their responsibilities for the day; even after all that, Victor had to be the clown.

He sidled up to Gabe, smiling and winking, a red flush to his schoolboy cheeks, as if a death were a small and welcome distraction like catching an eyeful of cleavage or the flash of a stocking top. 'So, he was naked, old Yuri.'

Victor tittered and then made the sign of the cross. 'I think he was waiting for his girlfriend. You think so, Chef, eh, do you think?'

*

Naturally, the first thing Gabe had done was call the general manager, but he got through to Maddox's deputy instead. Mr James insisted on seeing for himself, arriving with a clipboard shielding his chest. He disappeared into the basement and Gabe thought, this could go on for ever. How many sightings of a dead body were required before it became an established fact? No one said it was the Loch Ness monster down there. He smiled to himself. The next moment he was swept by a watery surge of panic. What if Yuri was not dead? Benny had told him with a calm and unquestionable certainty that Yuri was dead. But what if he was still alive? There was a pool of blood around his head and he didn't look like a living thing because his legs, his chest, were blue, but who wouldn't be cold, stretched out naked and bleeding on the icy catacomb floor?

Gabe should have checked for a pulse, he should have put something soft beneath Yuri's head, at the very least he should have called for an ambulance.

I should have sent you a doctor, Yuri, not Mr James with his bloody Montblanc fountain pen and his executive leather pad.

The deputy manager was taking his time. Gabe stood in the kitchen with his chefs. The trainees, gathered round an open dustbin brimming with peelings, chewed their tongues, scratched their noses or fiddled with their pimples.

Damian, the youngest, a straggly seventeen, trailed his hand in the bin as though contemplating diving in and hiding his sorry carcass under the rotting mound. Stand up straight, thought Gabriel. At another time he might have said it out loud. It occurred to him that Damian was the only other English person who worked in the kitchen. Don't let the side down, lad. It was a ridiculous thought. The kind of thing his father might say. Gabriel looked at Damian until Damian could not help looking back at him. Gabe smiled and nodded, as though to provide some kind of stiffening for those rubbery seventeen-year-old bones. The boy began flapping his hand inside the bin and the tic in his right eye started up. Jesus Christ, thought Gabe, and walked round to the sauce section to get the boy out of his sight.

The chefs de partie, Benny, Suleiman and Victor, lined up against the worktop with their arms folded across their chests, as if staging a wildcat strike.

Beyond them, Ivan was still working, cooking off lamb shanks that would later be braised. Ivan was the grill man. His station, at the front of the kitchen, close to the pass, encompassed a huge salamander, a triple-burner char grill, four-ring hob and double griddle. He kept them at full blaze. Around his forehead he wore a bandanna that soaked up some, though by no means all, of the sweat. He took pride in the amount of blood he managed to wipe from his fingers on to his apron. He worked split shifts, lunch and dinner six days a week, and apart from the crew who came in at five in the morning to grill sausages and fry eggs for the buffet breakfast, no one was allowed to venture into Ivan's domain. Gabriel liked to rotate his chefs between the sections, Benny on cold starters and desserts one month, Suleiman the next, but Ivan was implacable. 'Nobody else knowing about steaks like me, Chef. Don't put me chopping rabbit leaves.' He had a cauliflower ear, sharp Slavic cheekbones and an even sharper accent, the consonants jangling together like loose change.

Gabe had decided straight away to move him but he had not done it yet.

Filling suddenly with impatience, Gabe walked towards the basement door. He slowed and finally halted by the chill cabinet of soft drinks and dairy desserts. If Yuri wasn't really dead then the deputy manager would be giving first aid and questioning him closely, doing all the things that Gabriel should have done, before going upstairs to report to Mr Maddox about all the things that Gabriel had failed to do. Gabe was aghast at the enormity of his managerial lapse. He was here not because he wanted to be, but only to prove himself. Show us, said the would-be backers for his own restaurant, manage a kitchen on that scale and we'll put up the money; work there for a year and turn that place around. They'd get word, of course. Everyone in this whole stinking business would know. And what would he say to Mr Maddox? How would he explain? To report, say, a side of salmon as missing, suspected stolen, only to have it turn up in the wrong storeroom, that would be bad enough, but to report the death of an employee and to have the employee turn up alive if not exactly well, that was ineptitude of an altogether different order. Damn that Benny and his idiotic certainty. What made him an expert on death? Gabe touched the crown of his head where a little wormhole of baldness had recently appeared. Damn that Yuri as well. He leaned against the chill cabinet, grimacing and swallowing, as if worry were something that had to be kept low down, somewhere in the intestinal tract.