Read Night Watch for Free Online Page A

me.”
    “Have you picked another place? Another chef?” He slapped his hand across his chest and feigned disappointment. “How many stars?”
    I laughed. “Do you remember my first time here? The first dinner we had together? Because that was my very favorite.”
    “Of course I remember it. I brought out all the stars in the heavens for you. Well, I shall do that again, if the weather gods cooperate.”
    On my first trip, I had taken the direct flight to Nice, arriving in mid-morning. We drove to Luc’s home in Mougins, spent a day reacquainting ourselves with each other, and at nine that evening, fully refreshed and lovingly restored, I came downstairs to find a lavish table set for two on the terrace. The pool had been surrounded with votive candles, Smokey Robinson serenaded me from within the house, and two waiters from the restaurant ferried backand forth with silver-domed servers holding one delicacy after another. The sky had never seemed so star-filled.
    “That’s what I’d like it to be—just the two of us.”
    “Then it’s settled.”
    I kissed my fingertip and placed it against his lips. “And you’ll be in New York just ten days after I go back, right?”
    “Everything’s in place, yes. The decorating is practically done and the equipment has arrived. Almost all the hires are complete.”
    “An opening date?”
    “Not so fast. We’ll have a month of tastings first. Dinners to which we invite friends, sort of try out the whole deal on them. The spring and summer months will be a sampling, a transition, while we’re going full bore over here. Then I’ll be ready for a real launch in the fall,” Luc said. “I hope you’ve been collecting names for me. I’ll need plenty of gourmand guinea pigs.”
    Luc was attempting a very bold move in a difficult financial market. With silent partners backing him, he had purchased a building on the east side of Manhattan and planned to re-create the elegant restaurant his father had started so many decades ago, the one that almost every critic on both sides of the Atlantic had for years and years declared the finest dining in the city: Lutèce.
    I had a loyal group of friends in the district attorney’s office who would be only too happy to submit themselves to the haute cuisine of the new Lutèce kitchen. Luc was a restaurateur, an executive chef who owned and managed the restaurant here and would do the same in New York. He had his father’s sense of style and creativity, but wasn’t the guy in the kitchen, holding the food to the flame.
    The waiter was back to refill our glasses and offer an amuse-bouche—something to excite our palate—in this case a medley of seafood, courtesy of the chef. Luc sat up and put his feet in the sand, readying himself for the delicious meal to follow.
    “I thought the catacombs had been closed,” I said. “I didn’t realize you could still go down there and root around.”
    Luc groaned. “Get this all out of your system—bones and bodies and burial vaults—before the langouste is set in front of me, darling; I’d like to enjoy eating it, if you don’t mind. Have you ever been inside the catacombs?”
    “I made the mistake of accepting the invitation of a friend who’s a medical examiner in Paris, five years or so ago. A tour was his idea of an excursion, I guess, but it’s one of the creepiest places I’ve ever been.”
    We had entered through a narrow spiral staircase to the dark chamber way below the street surface that led to miles of tunnels beneath the city. The only sound breaking the silence was the gurgle of a hidden aqueduct coursing through an adjacent cavern wall. There was hall after hall of carefully arranged remains, floor to ceiling—centuries of dead Parisians who had been moved here in mass burials after widespread contamination of the city’s cemeteries. Rusty gates barred visitors from reaching areas that were too unsafe—or perhaps too gruesome—to be part of the tour.
    “They were