Hotel Pastis Read Online Free PDF Page A

away … liaise with Susan … all meetings in here, I think.”
    Now there, thought Simon, is a happy man. He spent the rest of the day on the phone.
    He was in Paris late the following afternoon, and found a message waiting for him at the Lancaster: Monsieur Murat would meet him at Chez L’Ami Louis at eighto’clock. A good start to the holiday. It was Simon’s favourite restaurant in Paris, and he wouldn’t have to wear a tie. He showered and changed and decided to walk over to Saint-Germain for a drink at the Deux Magots.
    He’d forgotten what a beautiful city Paris was. It seemed very clean after London, no garbage bags on the pavements, no For Sale signs on the houses. He stopped on the Pont-Neuf and looked back across the river towards the Louvre. The dusk was tinged with blue, dotted with light from windows and street lamps, and he had a moment’s regret about dinner. As much as he liked Murat, an evening like this should be spent with a pretty girl.
    The Deux Magots was as crowded as ever, the waiters as supercilious as ever, the poses of the clientele as world-weary as ever. The girls were in black yet again this autumn, with carefully tangled long hair and pale faces, oversized leather jackets, and the heavy flat shoes that Simon hated—brothel-creepers that made even the best pair of legs look clumsy. Why did they all want to look the same?
    Simon lit a cigar and ordered a kir. It was good to be in France again, good to hear French spoken. He was surprised how much he could understand. It had been a long time, more than twenty years, since he had spent six months working as a waiter in Nice. He’d been fluent then, or fluent enough to make a living, and he was pleased that some of it had stuck.
    He watched a Japanese couple in the corner trying to order from a waiter who was playing the popular Parisian game of blank incomprehension in the face of the foreigner.
    “Scosh.” The Japanese man held up two fingers. “Scosh.”
    “Comment?”
    “Scosh.”
    The waiter shrugged. The Japanese picked up the small menu card and held it open, pointing halfway down the page. “Scosh.”
    The waiter condescended to look, and sighed.
“Non,”
he said. “Whisky.”
    “
Hai, hai
. Scosh whisky.”
    “Deux?”
    The Japanese grinned and bobbed his head, and the waiter, satisfied that his superiority had been established, snaked away through the tables to the bar.
    The kir had made Simon hungry, and he wondered if it was too early in the year for the wild
cèpes
that made a brief annual appearance on the menu at L’Ami Louis. He realised that he hadn’t thought about the office all afternoon, hadn’t even called Liz to tell her he’d arrived. France was already doing him good. He paid his bill and crossed boulevard Saint-Germain to the taxi stand.
    The taxi dropped him off in the narrow rue du Vertbois, and he stood for a moment outside the restaurant. Thank God it hadn’t been tarted up and sanitized. He pushed open the door and stepped into the bustling warmth of one of the last great bistros in Paris.
    The decorative style was early-twentieth-century shabby, with cracked paint the colour of a good dark brown stew and floor tiles that had worn through to the bare concrete. Apart from a photograph of the old patron, the grey-whiskered Antoine, and one or two mirrors stained with age, the walls were bare beneath the coat rack that ran the length of the room. Nothing much had changed here for more than half a century, and Simon felt, as he did each time he came, that he was in the ramshackle dining room of an old friend.
    Murat had reserved a table behind the ancient wood-burningstove, and Simon settled back to wait and to speculate about the people round him. There was usually an interesting mixture of fame, wealth, and notoriety—movie stars and directors, politicians hoping to be recognised and statesmen trying to be incognito, young men from rich Parisian families, actresses with their admirers,