Night Watch (29 page)

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.”

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 oysters 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.”

“And we hired him,” Luc said. “I told the detectives that, too, today.”

“Hired him for what?” I asked.

“To work at Lutèce. To help us put a waitstaff together.”

“You knew him?”

“I met him through Gina,” Luc said. “She took me to dinner at her club expressly for that purpose. Luigi was great at his job, really well connected to guys in the business, and he spoke French as well. He seemed perfect to me.”

Luigi Calamari—the second murder victim—was linked directly to Luc, just like Lisette Honfleur.

“Why would his brother tell the cops that Luigi was fired from his job?” Mike asked. “Why would he say his own brother had a drug habit?”

“The kid was clean as a hound’s tooth,” Gina said. “I assume they’ll autopsy him. The doctors will make that clear.”

I guess Mike hadn’t told Luc yet that there were several kilos of cocaine glued to the underside of Luigi’s houseboat. Or about the skull on the kitchen table.

“It was you who convinced him to leave the Rifle Club?” Mike asked.

Gina Varona smiled again. “I made him an offer he couldn’t refuse. That’s why he left, Detective. Plain and simple matter of economics.”

“So who hated him enough to slit his throat?” I asked, knowing full well there was another business—the lethal one of importing drugs—that had exposed Luigi to a violent death.

“If I think of anyone, I’ll give you a buzz,” Varona said.

What did Luc possibly see in this woman, except her deep pockets?

“What about you, Mr. Danton? Where do you come into all this?” Mike asked, stirring the rocks in his vodka with his finger.

“And I thought Gina was doing so well you’d forgotten about me,” he said. “Where would you like to begin?”

“Tell us about yourself,” Mike said, gnawing on a chicken wing.

Peter Danton was drinking a glass of red wine. “Let’s see. I’m married, with one daughter away at boarding school in Connecticut. My wife and I live on the Upper West Side. I’m forty-three years old.”

“How long have you known Luc?”

He turned his head to Luc. “What would you say, my friend? Maybe fifteen years or so.”

“About that.”

“You in the restaurant business, too?”