“Merde. Merde,” was all the shaking boy could say for some time.

The riot on the bridge slowly retreated in the distance, and I recall the smooth sense of movement, of travel, of breeze. The couple had gray frizzy hair and soft voices and they made us sit on the deck under heavy horse blankets, the sun on our faces, while handing us shots of eaux de vie, for the shock, they said.

And I remember how we glided, glided silkily down the Seine, past the Eiffel Tower, past the Maison de Radio France, under Pont d’Issy, until at long last we reached the Île Billancourtout in the suburbs of Paris. And there, at long last, the couple docked their barge and let us out on the local pier, where we thanked them profusely and took their names and where I called Mehtab to come pick us up.

While we were waiting for my sister, Jean-Luc and I sat on a low wall and dangled our legs over the ledge that ran alongside a dusty park. Shards of broken wine bottles littered the parking lot. A few feet down below our ledge, to the left, an Algerian immigrant family was spit-roasting lamb on a park grill fashioned from an old oil drum. The father was off praying on a rug in the shade of a linden tree, while the women cooked and the children played soccer. The smell of searing lamb’s flesh and cumin and bubbling fat came to us in the wind, and the simplicity of it all—the roasting meat, the mint tea, the cheerful familial chatter—it took my breath away.

And it was then, when I gazed back out across the quicksilver Seine, that I caught sight of the elderly woman on the promenade on the far bank. She wore a shawl and seemed to be calling me, waving, urging me forward.

She was the spitting image of Madame Mallory, I tell you.

But perhaps I imagined it.

Chapter Sixteen

Chef ?”

“Oui, Jean-Luc.”

The apprentice licked his lips nervously.

“Monsieur Serge asked me to tell you the ptarmigan have arrived.”

I looked over at the wall clock, next to the Ndebele wall hanging picked up in Zimbabwe, depicting village women roasting a quartered buffalo. There was just an hour and forty minutes before the restaurant opened for lunch.

I had been reading one of Madame Mallory’s favorite cookbooks—Margaridou: The Journal of an Auvergne Cook—but at Jean-Luc’s beckoning, I gently closed the old book shut, its simple recipes from a bygone era, and stood to put it safely away on the bookshelf.

It was, as I turned, the sight of the Credit Suisse “tombstone” in Plexiglas, the advertisement announcing the initial public offering of Recipe.com, an Internet start-up selling recipes and of which I was an outside director, that made me pause. My office, in that mote-filled light pouring in from the window, suddenly looked ridiculous to me. Wooden-and-brass plaques and awards littered every available surface in the office, the strangest of which was a gold-plated soup ladle from the Brussels-based International Soup Society. My long-cherished treasures suddenly looked like worthless bric-a-brac.

Something undeniable had happened since Paul’s death. It was as if his spiritual malaise had jumped bodies and entered me, like some flesh-eating parasite from a Hollywood horror film. I was restless, irritable, had trouble sleeping. I did not know what was going on, only that a feeling of doom was bearing down on me. And I hated it, this unfamiliar sensation, for this was not me at all. I have always been quite a sunny fellow.

But Jean-Luc was still studying me from the door frame of my office, unsure whether some other prank was about to befall him. So it was ultimately the look on the boy’s face—painful insecurity—that finally brought me out of myself.

I stood up and said, “Bien. Let us go to work, then.”

Jean-Luc led the way down the spiral staircase, and we returned to the clatter and scrape and whoosh of Le Chien Méchant’s kitchen gearing up for action; to waiters slamming through the swinging doors, polishing silver and filling cigar boxes and folding linen rosettes, their jackets off as they dashed between kitchen and dining room and back.

Chef de Cuisine Serge was on the far side of the kitchen with two sous chefs, standing over open flames. Suzanne, my pastry chef, was bent over a tray of tarts. There was excited palaver about soccer match this and that, but Jean-Luc and I made our single-minded way to the wooden crate standing in the cold kitchen, found on the counter every day in season, between late September and December, and flown in daily by game wholesalers in Moscow.

The boy forced open the wooden box with a crowbar, and together we carefully unpacked the braces of ptarmigan wrapped in tissue paper. Two other apprentices were hard at work, and I discreetly kept an eye on them as we unwrapped the birds. The girl on the far side of the sink was carefully sponging a string of red mullet with a wet cloth. I insist on this method; wash mullet under a tap and its subtle taste and color disappears down the drain. The senior apprentice brandishing a sharp knife on the meat counter—soon to don his own toque as a commis, now that we had Jean-Luc—was removing the nerves from the spine of the Charolais, the breed of French cattle that I prefer to Scottish Angus.

I took a plump ptarmigan in my hand. The arctic grouse’s white-feathered head and black eyes lolled lifelessly backward, a downy weight in my palm. With a satisfying whack of the cleaver I took off the grotesquely overdeveloped claws, and the bird’s legs disappeared into the vat of stock bubbling away on the burner to my side. I signaled to Jean-Luc that he should clean and pluck the rest.

I had to pluck forty game birds at a time when I started at Le Saule Pleureur, but happily for modern apprentices, automated plucking machines do the job quite nicely today, and I interrupted Jean-Luc to run my bird through the machine. The ptarmigan’s white feathers—still ruffled and blood-speckled from the hunter’s shot—were peeled off by the rotating rollers and then shot off on an airstream into a disposable bag to the side.

I took the plucked carcass over to the stove’s open flame to singe off the bird’s remaining quill stubble. A slice opened its crop and I took a few generous pinches of the bitter tundra herbs and berries that were still in the bird’s throat pouch. I washed the herbs at the sink, so similar in appearance to thyme, and set them aside in a ceramic bowl.

This was my trademark dish of late fall: Siberian ptarmigan, roasted with the tundra herbs taken from the bird’s own crop, and served with caramelized pears in an Armagnac sauce.

“I am not good with words, Jean-Luc. I talk best through my hands. So just watch how I do it.”

The boy nodded. I gutted the bird, washed it, and carefully blotted away all moisture with paper towels. There was some shuffling of feet but otherwise the kitchen staff was mostly silent as they concentrated on their own work or watched my demonstration. The only real noise came from the lids of copper pots rattling atop the stove, and the white-noise whir of washing machines and refrigerators and ventilating ducts in the background.

The bird’s meaty breasts came off with two clean swipes of the knife, and I seared the crimson pads of flesh in a hot pan.

A few minutes later I turned off the flame and looked up at the clock.

Just thirty minutes until we opened. The staff was watching me, waiting for the traditional presitting instructions.

I opened my mouth, but the usual platitudes, they choked.

They would not come anymore.

Because my head was flooded with torrid images, of Paul at the point of mangled death, surrounded by platters of his ornate dishes, loaded with goose fat and foie gras and rivers of his own congealing blood. I saw boarded shop fronts in the streets of Paris, the riot and bloodied heads and screaming on the Pont de la Concorde. And through these unsettling images loomed the supranaturally tanned face of Chef Mafitte, his bizarrely antiseptic lab-kitchen pumping out with great industriousness the most extravagant and decadently deconstructed meals.