Everything on the Line by Bob Mitchell Page A

unsuspectingly discovering his first embedded, priceless nugget of treasure within the flaky pâte feuilletée , that glorious hunk of dark mocha pay dirt, which he allows to melt slowly between his tongue and the roof of his mouth, then washes down with a gulp of his steaming hot chocolate.
    Mom and coach wash down their crêpes with their cafés au lait .
    “Sono il migliore!” Giglio says, reading the headline in the sports page of La Repubblica. “I am the greatest !” he translates into English, mimicking with modest success Muhammad Ali’s high-pitched, blustery Louisvillian voice.
    Giglio reads to Ugo and Gioconda from an interview with Jack Spade, who is spewing the words fed to him by Ira Spade and cooked up by Odi Mondheim.
    Ugo laughs his little laugh, as if to say that these words come as no surprise to him, and anyway, they are basically meaningless.
    “Words are cheap,” he signs from across the table, a second blob of chocolate doing its melting thing in his mouth. “But actions are treasures.”
    Ugo Bellezza has learned his lessons well and looks tenderly at his two breakfast companions.
    To put an exclamation point on the subject, Giglio recites by heart one of his favorite quotes about sprezzatura from his beloved Castiglione:
    How much more pleasing and how much more praised is a gentleman whose profession is arms, and who is modest, speaking little and boasting little, than another who is forever praising himself, swearing and blustering about as if to defy the whole world…
    * * *
    “I am the greatest !” Ira Spade blurts, reading a quote from the sports page of the International Herald Tribune . “And you are, you sonuvabitch!” he says to fifteen-year-old Jack, sitting across the table from him and Odi Mondheim in the newly renovated Louis II breakfast room of the swish Hotel de la Trémoille, located in the heart of the chic eighth arrondissement and tucked among swanky streets whose names reek of privilege, royalty, and luxury—Avenue Marceau, Avenue George V, Avenue Montaigne, Rue François Ier, Avenue des Champs Élysées—and whose residents represent the upper crust of the Parisian baguette.
    Odi stuffs one end of a foot-long ham-and-Gruyère-on-baguette into his gaping maw, spicy Dijon mustard dripping from the corner of his lips. He washes it down with a demi, a half-liter of embarrassingly putrid French beer.
    “Doesn’t even come close to TooJays,” he mumbles. “And how the hell can they make such great beer and ale next door in Belgium, and these goddam Frenchies don’t know their ass from their elbow when it comes to suds?”
    The comment is answered by dirty looks from the bilingual neighboring table.
    Odi is on the verge of flipping them the bird but thinks better of it.
    “Yeah, you got that right,” Ira agrees, ripping a hunk of his ham-and-cheese from its hull and drowning it with his own Kronenbourg.
    Jack Spade smiles weakly and still hasn’t touched either his croissant or his Coke.
    Time to play “Winner/Loser.”
    This is a little game Ira has devised that consists of looking out the window of the breakfast room at passersby and categorizing each one as either a winner or a loser in life.
    “ Loser! ” Ira barks as a glum Parisian passes by the vitrine. “See the look on this guy’s puss? Full of fear. Who knows why? Maybe afraid of his boss. Or his wife. Or his shadow. Look at the way his head is pointed down toward the ground. The bad posture. Plus, he’s walking slow, which means he’s not in a hurry to get where he’s going, so he’s got zero ambition.”
    Ira rips off another hunk of his sandwich and swills down another mouthful of his headless and bodiless flat French brew.
    Outside the window, a man nattily dressed in a tidy double-breasted blue blazer, impeccably laundered lilac dress shirt, paisley ascot, pleated tan corduroys, and brown leather Italian shoes strides purposefully down the Rue de la Trémoille toward François Ier. He is