Godfather of Service

...a rival for Agnes' devotion, in the person of a nun who befriends her in prison...

...Here murkiness descends, because the exact motive for spying on potentates, starting with the emir of Djabbadieh, is never entirely made clear...

...Monsieur René himself is a retired waiter in Geneva who takes his solitude as a matter of course...

...In his 70s he has hung up his apron and been honored with the permanent presidency of the International Brotherhood of Concierges and Hall Porters...

...What dexterity, what mastery after all...

...a romp about amateur spying with a body count that lends it an illusion of high stakes...

...Because the devil makes work for idle hands, Monsieur René is itching to get back into action by recruiting his fellow waiters, porters and concierges into a little espionage ring to keep tabs on the high-rolling muck-a-mucks who come and go in Geneva...

...Unfortunately, Ustinov hasn't a clue about how to sustain emotion—does it embarrass him?—and he throws it away by having Agnes leap out of Monsieur Rene's bed at sunrise...

...The mother left Agnes only a purse, containing a note revealing the names of the three Swiss off icials who had betrayed her...

...In Hollywood, it all comes down to a hearty fireball blasting some hapless mannequin through the roof of a car, and when a bomb indeed goes off and blows a conspirator all the way back to Sarajevo, we neither know nor care who it is...

...It is the sort of life that makes the rest of us feel anxious about our bland existences...

...But then maybe we are just not seeing Peter Ustinov's abundant talents in their fullest light...

...This is the book's one bright moment: Monsieur Rene's awakening to passion is handled with genuine warmth and tenderness, as though Ustinov has found his subject at last after a hundred pages of fumbling...

...If all this sounds disturbingly like a "treatment," a concept in search of a story, it is...

...We have a waiter to serve it up...

...In it Ustinov, now 78 but still in full gear on all fronts, shows the other side of effortless genius: impatience...

...a rival for Monsieur Rene's love in the cleaning lady...

...While the poor victim of afterglow is happily making them both breakfast, she silently makes her getaway and hurls herself into the arms of the police, claiming guilt for the crime of having poisoned three men in the years just after the War...

...We can see the holes...

...In addition to the staggering stage, television and screen credits, there is a full-sized literary career, consisting of screenplays (remember Romanoff and Juliet...

...Ustinov first tries a counterspy plot featuring waiters and domestics...

...Not to worry: The rules are Hollywood rules, and such novelistic touches as plausible motivation can be dispensed with so long as the action is brisk and the scenes hum along like gears in a Swiss watch...

...There emerge rumors of deals involving Kazakhstan mafia, or maybe it is the Panamanian Minister of Public Health, or possibly a Nobel Prize winner from Zimbabwe, or one Sheik Awabi bin Talubi bin Talaat, or possibly the head of the Croatian Bosnian delegation to something or other, whom the Serbs and the Muslims have conspired to blow up in a booby-trapped car...

...a romance of senior flowering backshadowed by Holocaust memories...

...Moreover, What the Concierge Saw sells for Hollywood megabucks and will be made into a movie, and Monsieur René sets out to prove Agnes' innocence, despite her confession to being a triple murderess...

...Louis' girlfriend, Kuki, is a generic hot number whom even Louis does not love...

...Well, we neednot look farther than Monsieur Ren...

...Ustinov then decides to cashier his listless hugger-mugger and get on with the redemption of his hero by other means: a Holocaust-poisoning-love story...

...There is a housekeeper, one Madame Radibois, who adores Monsieur René sullenly from behind her Hoover...

...Spoiling the plot, in other words, is not really a reviewer's option...

...So Agnes, in later years, plotted revenge and finally poisoned them all...

...the writer has beaten him to the punch...

...Or so she believes...

...The hills may be alive with the sound of gossip, but we never quite figure out what motivates our hero through much of the story, except a certain bottoming out on boredom, or the appearance of nephew Louis and his Kuki, whose open sexual displays touch nerves that René never knew he had...

...But then too he is a waiter among waiters, a Godfather of service kicking back in his golden years...

...Well, a gal's gotta do what a gal's gotta do, and Madame Schanderbach's ripping of this austere fellow's pajama button does shatter his reserve and cause him to fall in love...

...It isa light comedy withjust enough dark smudges to keep it from ballooning off into farce...

...Our Monsieur René finds himself an unlikely love object when one of his agents, Agnes Schanderbach, forces herself upon him after dinner at his digs in what is surely the first geriatric girl-boy date rape in literature or film...

...Golden Globe Award winner, Doctor of Law, recipient of the Polish Order of the Smile, the Order of the Yugoslav Flag and, get this, the Order of Istiglal of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan—has talent in reserve...

...You see, Agnes is Jewish, and her mother was denounced to the Nazis by local officials who handed her over at the border, while young Agnes was sheltered in a convent...

...And Monsieur René is having his memoirs, What the Concierge Saw, ghost-written by a literary packager who just makes it up as he goes along...

...and assorted escapades involving nephew Louis, girlfriend Kuki, and a motorcycle salesman...

...Shades of Kazuo Ishiguro's Remains of the Day, a novel of a serving man who has extinguished all signs of passion in himself...

...What in the world have we been doing...

...One can believe in this resurrection, despite its being casually thrown at us...

...stories (Life Is an Operetta and Other Short Stories), memoirs (My Russia), collected articles (Ustinov at Large), and a handful of novels, of which Monsieur René is the latest...

...A man of frigid emotions and meticulous routines, he sets his inner clock by the passing trains...

...He has revealed himself in this endeavor in yet another role: manufacturer of Swiss cheese...

...State University of New York, Buffalo There is no quarreling with the proposition that Peter Ustinov—actor, novelist, playwright, storyteller, musician, opera director, illustrator, raconteur, bonvivant, Emmy winner, Grammy winner...

...Honors, of course, are only honors, and he is admittedly footloose...

...At this point, one doesn't want to spoil the plot, but it needs adding that there is a rival for Agnes' love in a retired chief of police...

...His late wife—with whom he shared neither passion nor a bed—is long since dead and his only family is nephew Louis, a scoundrel who rides around on a stolen motorcycle...

...We can smell the cheese...

...At least the pretense of humility is called for, and it is only normal that we might go looking for flaws in the armor...

...One is inclined to be a bit uncharitable toward all this achievement, especially when the subject at hand has titled his autobiography Dear Me...

...He had never expected anything else...

...Monsieur René is charming enough, bright and agile in its phrasing, but it is also hectic and unfocused...