of Paris. I offered to accompany him, but he mumbled some quick excuses and rushed off alone. I’m not sure if I buy his excuses—it’s so strange that he would run off like this. Why would he flee the match just as his chief competitor entered the ring?
In the evening, Richie insisted on inviting everyone to “the most exclusive restaurant in Paris. You’ve practically got to kill someone to get a reservation,” he said. The restaurant was inexplicably decorated like a corporate boardroom, and Richie arranged for all of us to have the chef’s tasting menu—the “Amusements and Tantalizations in Sixteen Movements.” Despite how unappetizing this sounded, the food turned out to be quite spectacular and inventive, especially the artichoke-and-white-truffle soup and the razor clams in a sweet garlic sabayon, but I could see that Mrs. Bing and the aunties weren’t half as thrilled. Colette’s grandmother looked especially puzzled by the seafood “raw-cooked in cold steam,” the startlingly colored foams, and the artfully composed dwarf vegetables, and kept asking her daughter, “Why are they giving us all the vegetable scraps? Is it because we’re Chinese?” Mrs. Bing replied, “No, everyone gets the same dishes. Look how many French people are eating here—this place must be very authentic.”
After the meal, the elders headed back to the hotel while Pied Piper Richie announced that he was taking us to some ultra-exclusive club started by the director David Lynch. “I’ve been a member since day one,” he boasted. Nick and I begged off and took a lovely evening stroll along the Seine. Arriving back at the hotel, we passed Mrs. Bing, who was standing at the door of her suite talking furtively to a Chinese maid from housekeeping. Catching my eye, she beckoned us over excitedly. “Rachel, Rachel, look what this nice maid gave me!” In her hand was a white plastic trash bag filled with dozens of bottles of the hotel’s Bulgari bath gel, shampoo, and conditioner. “Do you want some? She can get more!” I told her that Nick and I used our own shampoos and didn’t touch the hotel toiletries. “Can I have yours, then? And the shower caps too?” Mrs. Bing asked eagerly. We gathered up all our toiletries and headed back to her suite. She came to the door and acted like a junkie who had just been handed free premium-grade heroin. “Aiyah! I should have been asking you to collect these bottles for me all week long! Wait a minute, don’t go away!” She returned with a bag containing five plastic bottles of water. “Here, take some water! We boil it fresh every day in the electric kettle so we don’t have to pay for the hotel’s bottled water!” Nick was desperately trying to maintain a straight face when Grandma Bing came to the door and said, “Lai Di, why don’t you invite them in?”
We entered her massive suite and discovered Auntie Pan Di, Mrs. Shi, and Mrs. Wen huddled over a large portable hot pot in the dining room. On the floor was a huge Louis Vuitton trunk filled with packets of ramen in all kinds of flavors. “Shrimp and pork ramen?” Auntie Pan Di asked, stirring a big batch of noodles with a pair of chopsticks. Mrs. Bing whispered conspiratorially, “Don’t tell Colette, but we do this every night! We’re so much happier eating ramen than all this fancy French food!” Mrs. Wen said, “Aiyah, I’ve had constipation every single day from all this cheese we’ve been forced to eat.” I asked them why they didn’t just go downstairs to Shang Palace, the hotel’s Michelin-starred Chinese restaurant, for dinner. Mrs. Shi, who earlier today bought an antique clock*2 for €4.2 million at the Kraemer Gallery after looking at it for less than three minutes, exclaimed, “We tried going there after that awful French dinner, but all the dishes were so expensive we walked out! Twenty-five euros for fried rice? Tai leiren le!”*3
Saturday, June 22
Colette knocked on our door at the crack of dawn and woke us up. Had we seen Carlton? Had he called? Apparently he didn’t return to the hotel last night, and he wasn’t answering his phone. Colette seemed worried, but Nick didn’t think there was anything to worry about. “He’ll turn up. Sometimes it takes a while to negotiate with these car collectors—he’s probably still in the middle of doing his deal.” In the meantime, Richie invited everyone over to his penthouse suite for sunset cocktails on the roof terrace. “A little