"Ti-Jacques! Two more caribou steaks. And someone wants to try your ptarmigan parmigiana."
The swinging door flapped back into place as the waiter withdrew again. Ti-Jacques grunted a wordless reply. The kitchen of La Framboise was bustling, as it was every evening now save Monday: pots steaming and bubbling like cauldrons; blasts of heat as oven doors were flung open and then hurriedly shut again; a heady aroma of frying onions, tomato sauce, fennel and dill and basil, all blending in the warm moist air. Ti-Jacques wove his way through a throng of white-coated cooks, swerved to avoid a sous-chef carrying a platter laden with maple-glazed salmon, tossed a handful of oregano into one pot, stirred another, and yelled above the hubbub: "Two reindeer for the grill, and someone get me the Parmesan!"
Out of the corner of one eye he saw movement. Two figures, not clad in customary white kitchen garb but all in black. He turned to look. Men in suits. Not waiters––the La Framboise staff wore vests over white shirts, no jackets. Who were these two? No one should be in the kitchen except for employees. Customers relayed requests or compliments to the chef through the wait staff.
"Can I help you?" he asked in his most unhelpful tone. The sous-chef and the other apprentices were staring
The two men shook their heads. "Jacques Thibodeau?" one asked.
"That's right," he replied warily.
"Come with us, please."
Definitely not customers. Cabale flunkies, no doubt: they were advancing on him. "All right, just let me take this off the heat first." He turned back to the stove and picked up the big bubbling pot of shrimp gumbo.
Then he flung the sizzling contents straight in their faces.
They bellowed in pain and fury. One man lunged at him, swinging a massive fist. Ti-Jacques blocked the attack using the pot's lid like a shield. The attacker reeled back, slipped on the puddle of spilled gumbo and fell heavily to the floor. As his partner yelled and stumbled about in the midst of the milling cooks, Ti-Jacques grabbed a meat cleaver off the wall and made for the back door.
Nice job while it lasted, he lamented to himself.
Ti-Jacques was halfway down the back alley when he suddenly realized how he must appear: meat cleaver in one hand, white clothing splattered with red – it was gumbo sauce, but... he recalled his remarks about tomato sauce and blood. He'd be taken for a rampaging psycho, maybe even shot on sight. He tossed the cleaver aside and ran out of the alley. His eyes went to the ambulance parked next to the police cars. The two men in paramedics' uniforms waiting beside it looked at him in alarm.
"You're injured, sir!" one of them said, approaching him.
Ti-Jacques looked down at his clothes. "It's — " he started to say tomato sauce, then checked himself: "—not my blood, it's someone else's actually."
"We were called here for a shooting victim," the other man said. "That's not you, then?"
"A shooting..." Ti-Jacques realized he was, indeed, supposed to be the victim. They had guns, those two. They just didn't get a chance to use them... They were supposed to shoot him, perhaps fatally. The Cabale had already planned for this outcome before it happened. By fighting back right away he'd thwarted their plan. "Yeah," he said, slowly. "There was a shooter in the kitchen–– blood everywhere, it's really bad in there––"
"So that's why they won't let us in yet," the first man said to the other.
"It's okay now though," said Ti-Jacques quickly. "There was a shooter, yeah, but he's down and the cops are in control. You can go in now. There're people in there who need you. Shot, bleeding out... You'd better hurry!"
