The Chef Read Online Free PDF Page A

wanted to know what the customers had thought
of his ‘Glazed langoustines with rice croquant on curried gelée’. It was the first surprise of the evening.
    The plates were empty apart from the heads of the langoustines and most of the curried gelée.
    Maravan pretended he had not noticed. But Andrea looked at the plates with a disbelieving shake of her head, offered Fink a pitying smile, turned to Maravan and said, ‘Is seven
o’clock OK on Monday? Oh, and write your address down for me.’
    The following morning Maravan was the first customer in the Batticaloa Bazaar. It was his second visit in a few days. The first time he had given the owner 800 francs for
Nangay’s medicine.
    The shop was not well stocked, only tinned foods and rice, no fruit, hardly any vegetables. There were, however, posters and flyers for organizations and events in the Tamil community and a few
LTTE stickers: the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam. The Batticaloa Bazaar was less a grocer’s than a liaison office and contact point for the Tamils in exile, and the first port of call for
unofficial money transfers to the north of Sri Lanka.
    Maravan went to work in a cheerful mood and kept up his good spirits in spite of all his team’s efforts to ruin them. His rendezvous with Andrea had of course become common knowledge
– Monday evening, seven o’clock, at his place! – and it was as if they had all sworn to make his life as difficult as possible before then: Maravan, fetch this. Maravan, fetch
that. Maravan, do this. Maravan!
    Kandan, the other Tamil kitchen help, was on duty. He was powerfully built, all brawn, slow on the uptake and without the slightest talent for cooking. And like many Tamil men in exile, he had
an alcohol problem which he was able to disguise skilfully, although not from Maravan’s sensitive nose. Today he was assigned all the more demanding tasks, while Maravan rinsed, scoured,
cleaned, scrubbed and lugged stuff around.
    An edgy atmosphere prevailed in the kitchen. There were few customers in the restaurant and a birthday party of twelve had cancelled their booking for the following evening. Huwyler was getting
in the way, venting his bad mood on his chefs. And they passed it on to the
demis chefs
, who gave hell to the
commis
, who in turn laid into the kitchen helps.
    But Maravan was on top form. The moment Andrea started her shift he had discreetly slipped her his address. She had smiled and said – loudly enough so that Bertrand, who happened to be
standing nearby, could hear – ‘I’m looking forward to it.’
    Maravan knew what he was going to cook, apart from the odd detail which he would attend to the following day. And he also had a cunning plan for his technique of preparing the dinner.
    Maravan was sitting in front of the computer with headphones on. Nangay’s voice sounded weak, even though the connection was surprisingly good. He ought to have kept his
money and let her die, she said reproachfully. She was tired.
    Nangay was over eighty, and ever since Maravan could remember she had wanted to die in peace.
    To begin with she was mistrustful and did not want to answer his questions. But when he said that it would allow him to earn more money, she listed ingredients and recipes, and freely explained
everything to him in detail.
    It was a long conversation. And by the time it had finished Maravan’s notebook was almost full.

4
    Happily, there had been a good number of covers at the Huwyler the following Sunday afternoon. The evening was quiet, the last diners left early, as ever on a Sunday.
    Maravan was the last member of staff left in the kitchen. He was at the pan-cleaning sink, busy with the more intricate kitchen appliances: thermostats, jet smokers and rotary evaporators.
    He waited until the cleaners had come into the kitchen, took the gadgets to the equipment store, then went into the changing room.
    He deftly removed the glass elements of the rotary evaporator, rolled them up in