Hotel

Half-rising in his chair, Peter caught sight of the head waiter across the dining room and beckoned him over. "Max, is Chef Hebrand on duty?"

"No, Mr. McDermott, I understand he's Ul. Sous-chef Lemieux is in charge." The head waiter said anxiously, "If it's about the fried chicken, I assure you everything is taken care of. We've stopped serving that dish and where there have been complaints the entire meal has been replaced." His glance went to the table. "We'll do the same thing here at once."

"At the moment," Peter said, "I'm more concerned about finding out what happened. Would you ask Chef Lemieux if he'd care to join us?"

With the kitchen door so close, Peter thought, it was a temptation to stride through and inquire directly what had gone so amiss with the luncheon special. But to do so would be unwise.

In dealing with their senior chefs, hotel executives followed a protocol as proscribed and traditional as that of any royal household. Within the kitchen the chef de cuisine - or, in the chef's absence, the sous-chef - was undisputed king. For a hotel manager to enter the kitchen without invitation was unthinkable.

Chefs might be fired, and sometimes were. But unless and until that happened, their kingdoms were inviolate.

To invite a chef outside the kitchen - in this case to a table in the dining room - was in order. In fact, it was close to a command since, in Warren Trent's absence, Peter McDermott was the hotel's senior officer.

It would also have been permissible for Peter to stand in the kitchen doorway and wait to be asked in. But in the circumstance - with an obvious crisis in the kitchen - Peter knew that the first course was the more correct.

"If you ask me," Sam Jakubiec observed as they waited, "it's long past bedtime for old Chef Hebrand."

Royall Edwards asked, "If he did retire, would anyone notice the difference?" It was a reference, as they all knew, to the chef de cuisine's frequent absences from duty, another of which had apparently occurred today.

"The end comes soon enough for all of us," the chief engineer growled.

"It's natural no one wants to hurry it himself." It was no great secret that the comptroller's cool astringency grated at times on the normally good-natured chief.

"I haven't met our new sous-chef," Jakubiec: said. "I guess he's been keeping his nose in the kitchen."

Royall Edwards' eyes went down to his barely touched plate. "If he has, it must be a remarkably insensitive organ.

As the comptroller spoke, the kitchen door swung open once more. A busboy, about to pass through, stood back deferentially as Max the head waiter emerged. He preceded, by several measured paces, a tall slim figure in starched whites, with high chef's hat and, beneath it, a facial expression of abject misery.

"Gentlemen," Peter announced to the executives' table, "in case you haven't met, this is Chef Andre Lemieux."

"Messieurs!" The young Frenchman halted, spreading his hands in a gesture of helplessness. "To 'ave this happen ... I am desolate." His voice was choked.

Peter McDermott had encountered the new sous-chef several times since the latter's arrival at the St. Gregory six weeks earlier. At each meeting Peter found himself liking the newcomer more.

Andre Lemieux's appointment had followed the abrupt departure of his predecessor. The former sous-chef, after months of frustrations and inward seething, had erupted in an angry outburst against his superior, the aging M. Hebrand. In the ordinary way nothing might have happened after the scene, since emotional outbursts among chefs and cooks occurred - as in any large kitchen - with predictable frequency. What marked the occasion as different was the late sous-chef's action in hurling a tureen of soup at the chef de cuisine. Fortunately the soup was Vichyssoise, or consequences might have been even more serious. In a memorable scene the chef de cuisine, shrouded in liquid white and dripping messily, escorted his late assistant to the street staff door and there - with surprising energy for an old man - had thrown him through it. A week later Andre Lemieux was hired.

His qualifications were excellent. He had trained in Paris, worked in London - at Prunier's and the Savoy then briefly at New York's Le Pavillon before attaining the more senior post in New Orleans. But already in his short time at the St. Gregory, Peter suspected, the young sous-chef had encountered the same frustration which demented his predecessor. This was the adamant refusal of M. Hebrand to allow procedural changes in the kitchen, despite the chef de cuisine's own frequent absences from duty, leaving his sous-chef in charge. In many ways, Peter thought sympathetically, the situation paralleled his own relationship with Warren Trent.

Peter indicated a vacant seat at the executives' table. "Won't you join us?"

"Thank you, monsieur." The young Frenchman seated himself gravely as the head waiter held out a chair.