But it was working toward something that he loved. By the time he was thirty, if everything worked out, he’d be working in a kitchen; at forty he’d have his own place. Maybe a small one, but his own.

It was a timeline he could live with.

His class began at the stroke of eight o’clock, and if you were late, you weren’t admitted. No excuses tolerated, even if you’d paid your entire tuition up front, even if you couldn’t find a parking place, your uncle died, all of the above. Marc Bollet, the maître, locked the front door at showtime sharp, and didn’t unlock it again for five hours. “You want the experience of working in a professional kitchen?” Marc said more than once in his still-pronounced French accent. “You must learn never, ever to be late. Never to be sick. Don’t plan on too many days off, or vacations. La cuisine is not a career. It is a vocation, a sacred thing. Never be less than at your very best. Or you will find yourself without a job. Because there is always, always, someone who wants your chance.”

Now Mickey, a full twenty- five minutes before class was to begin, courtesy of the best parking spot he’d ever found, got to the stoop with his cup of Starbucks and was somewhat surprised to see that, even this early, he wasn’t the first of his classmates to arrive. Ian Thorpe looked up with an easy, crinkling, blue-eyed smile under a wispy blond mustache. He wore chef’s clogs, a pair of stained khaki shorts, and a blue fisherman’s sweater with white horizontal stripes. “Hey,” he said. “I was hoping I’d catch you before class.”

“Me? You caught me. What’s up?”

“I saw you on the tube last night.”

Mickey broke a small smile. “Me too,” he said. “But only four times. After that it got boring.”

“They identified you as a private investigator.”