The Pot Thief Who Studied Escoffier (20 page)

I called Susannah and asked her to rustle up some help. She doesn’t work the evening shift, and school was out for the Christmas break, so I knew she would be available. I was hoping a few of her co-workers would come along for some extra pay.

But the only co-workers she was able to bring were Kaylee and Arturo. She also roped in Tristan. Arturo took the bartending assignment off my hands. Susannah became the hostess, and Kaylee, Tristan and I became the wait staff. Because of Tristan’s personality, he took to it naturally and raked in so many big tips that I felt guilty about the fact that tips were part of the shared revenue pool. Then I remembered I was working for free.

I figured being a waiter in a prix fixe restaurant would be easy. I mean, how hard is it to take the order, enter the order, go to the line when it is ready and take it to the table?

Turns out there is a bit more to it. Kaylee had been promoted from the pot scrubbing crew to the wait staff at La Placita, so she knew what she was doing. The same could not be said of Tristan and me. Susannah gave us a crash course before we opened. I can summarize it as serve from the left, clear from the right, put the main item of the entrée in the five o’clock position, bread and butter plates above the main meal plate, appetizer fork to the outside left, then the salad fork, the dinner fork, knife and spoon to the right, knife blade facing inward toward the dinner plate.

Simple, right? But I couldn’t get the hang of it because everything happened so fast. The crowd was even larger than the first night, and I decided getting them their food was more important than the meat on the plate being at the right spot on an imaginary clock face.

When the diners had left and clean-up was over, Susannah held a review session.

“Two customers complained that your thumb was in their salad,” she said to me rather sternly.

I held up my hands. “Impossible. Neither of my thumbs ever left my hands.”

She did not laugh. “There is nothing worse than a thumb in the salad.”

I resisted telling the joke about the waiter’s finger in the soup. “Rafael puts too much salad on the plate,” I said. “He needs to leave some space at the edge of the plate so you can hold it.”

“You hold it from the bottom, Hubie.” She handed a salad plate to Tristan, and he demonstrated with the plate resting on the tips of his fingers and thumb, all pointed upwards. I didn’t appreciate my own nephew siding with my suddenly bossy friend.

“I didn’t have time to carry one dish at a time,” I said.

“Huh?”

“If I have one hand turned up like that, I can’t pick up a second dish without using my thumb,” I pointed out quite reasonably.

“You only hold the dish for the time it takes to move it from the tray to the table. Doing it one at a time doesn’t slow you down.”

“I didn’t use a tray.”

“Why not?”

“Because when I sat the tray down on its stand, it collapsed. So I decided just to carry the plates from the line to the tables, one in each hand.”

“Good grief. It’s just like a TV tray. You fold the legs open and then put the tray on it.”

“I don’t own a TV tray, so I don’t know how to work them.”

She stared at me. Then she gave me a big smile. “You’re fired.”

“Good,” I said.

She turned to Tristan. “You are promoted to head waiter.”

“Does that carry an increase in pay?”

“No,” I chimed in. “We are on the Marxist system. Everyone gets two hundred a night.”

“Except you,” said Susannah.

“Except me,” I agreed, but I couldn’t remember why I had decided not to be paid. Probably because I didn’t think I would be working. But being garçon and then bartender and now waiter was hard work.

“In that case,” said Tristan, “I decline the promotion.”

“But you’re still willing to wait tables for us if our crew doesn’t show up?” I asked him.

“Sure. The two hundred a night is good. But someone will have to provide transportation.”

“You can ride with me,” Susannah said, “but not tonight. I have a date with Ice.” She looked at me. “You can take him home, right?”

“Sure. But first I need to talk to you alone.”

“I’ll go see how the pot-washing is going,” said Tristan.

After he left, I sat there for a moment as my palms dampened and my pulse elevated. My conscience told me I had to say something. I was trying out different wordings, searching for one that would put her on alert but not level any accusations.

“Jeez, Hubie, you look nervous. What is it?”

“I hope I’m doing the right thing by telling you this. I think Wallace Voile has been hitting on Rafael.”

She fidgeted with her hair. “Has he responded?”

“Not that I know of.”

“Do you think that has anything to do with why she didn’t come to work?”

“I don’t know. My guess would be no. Her colleagues didn’t come to work either, so it must be something that involves all four of them.”

She removed the elastic thing holding her hair, re-gathered it, and replaced the band. “You’re not telling me this just because I criticized your waiter skills, are you?”

We both laughed. Then she gave me a hug and left.

321 diners had spent $11,521.06 in charges and tips. The proceeds from the first night would clear in the morning. I could repay myself the five thousand dollar advance, pay the staff, and have money left for supplies. What I could not do was continue making daily round-trips to Santa Fe to serve as the unpaid manager for Chile Schnitzel.

The job was not going to get easier. Deductions for federal and state income tax had to be taken from the employee’s earnings. Their share of Social Security had to be deducted. The employer’s share had to be calculated and remitted. Ditto for payments into the state’s unemployment and workers compensation funds. A record had to be kept of income and expenses. Thus far all I had was a pocketful of receipts and a few scribbled notes. These were exactly the chores which had driven me from the accounting profession back in the eighties. Now I was in danger of becoming Barnaby the scrivener.

I wanted my life back. I wanted to awake in the morning with no place to go. I wanted to sit behind my counter and read, uninterrupted by anyone other than the occasional customer. I wanted to watch the stars from my patio in the evening. But most of all, I wanted the routine of the cocktail hour with Susannah.

If Chile Schnitzel succeeds, I thought to myself, they can hire a manager. If they fail, they won’t need one. But what about the time between now and whenever it is that the place either sinks or swims? I thought about it driving back to Albuquerque. Unlike Douglas MacArthur, I vowed not to return.

“You want to be manager of Chile Schnitzel?” I asked Tristan.

I took his guffaw as a no.

48

The next morning was bitterly cold. I figured hell must have frozen over because that was the only circumstance under which I would be returning to Chile Schnitzel.

And I was in the Bronco doing just that. With five thousand dollars in a plastic bag. I had taken ten thousand out of my account and put half of it in my secret hiding place to repay myself for the money I had advanced to the restaurant. As long as I was getting out, I figured my money would want to tag along.

I had tried to stuff the other five thousand for Chile Schnitzel in my wallet, but I couldn’t fold it like that, so I’d opted to be a bag man. I figured the label was apt since I was delivering money that had been laundered through my bank account.

It was well past eleven when I arrived, and a queue of those wishing to be paid formed quickly. Wallace and her crew were nowhere to be found.

“Same as yesterday,” I said to Alain as I handed him the money. “After paying everyone, you have eight hundred left over for supplies.”

“That will do for now,” he said, “but we are taught in the école de cuisine that the food is normally twenty-five percent of revenue. We are bringing in over ten thousand dollars each night, so will need to spend at least twenty-five hundred a day, no?”

“But you spent only eight hundred yesterday, and there was enough food.”

“Oui. But you forget that we are using food we had already on the hand. We cannot continue in this way.”

“On hand,” I corrected, “not ‘on the hand’.”

“And,” he continued, “we have the eight hundred only because Ms. Voile and her associates were not here to be paid. We will have to pay them if they return. Or others if they do not.”

I started to explain about the delayed cash flow from credit cards and strategies for building up cash reserves. Then I remembered my resolve not to get sucked in.

“Alain, I cannot continue to work here. I am happy the place is succeeding. I have high hopes that it will continue. But I have my own business to run.”

He placed an arm around my shoulder.

“Oui, I understand. You have been our garçon, waiter, and bartender. You were in those jobs – how should I say – pas le meilleur. But you were also our inspiration, and in that job you were supérieur.”

He agreed to serve as manager. I agreed to be on call for any questions. We agreed that he would dispatch someone to pick up the money they would continue to deposit in my account until they set up their own bank account. If the Israelis and Palestinians agreed as much as we did, peace would descend upon the Middle East.

“What about Molinero?” I asked.

“He has disappeared. Perhaps he and Voile have run away to the south of France,” he said with a smile on his face.

Eventually, Molinero had to be involved. Despite the fact that the ship was in the hands of the mutineers, it still belonged to the crown. Or in this case, the investors. We didn’t even know who they were. Then again, maybe Molinero had gone forward with the bankruptcy filing as planned. I thought it would be a sad irony if the gens d’armes seized the restaurant when it was at the height of its success. But these were things I had to stop thinking about. It was not my concern.

Susannah, along with Tristan and Kaylee, showed up at four. Arturo could not get time off from La Placita. The three of them began to ready the dining area. Shortly before six, I heard shouts and chants from outside and mused that we were perhaps going to attract a rowdy crowd, it being a Friday.

But when I opened the doors at six, I saw Wallace Voile and her crew carrying pickets that read “Unfair to workers.” Some diners ignored them and came in, but others were talking to them and hesitating.

I wanted to discuss it with Susannah, but she was too busy. So was Rafael, but he had the initial traunch of appetizers ready on the line, so I told him he had to talk to Voile and find out why they were picketing.

I watched their conversation from the door trying to read their body language since I was too distant to hear their verbal one. They appeared to be engaged in a lovers’ spat, although maybe I was reading that in based on what I had previously seen.

Rafael looked dejected as he returned, and it was obvious that what he told me was not the truth. Or at least not the whole truth.

“She says they are concerned they are not being paid.”

“But we are paying everyone. All they have to do is show up and collect.”

“I told her that, but she said a cash payment is not professional. They want a pay stub showing payments to Social Security, workers comp, things like that.”

“Why didn’t they discuss it with us before picketing? We plan to do those things as soon as possible.”

He shrugged. “I have to get back to work.”

Arliss and Barry making threats. M’Lanta and Arliss skulking around the premises. Wallace and Rafael fawning over each other and neither acknowledging the other in any other way. Kuchen and Molinero disappearing. Raoul Deschutes warning me to keep silent. Mure and Salazar fighting or flirting. Or both. The wait staff going on strike. Chile Schnitzel had more threats, jealousies, and intrigues than Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep. And neither one of them had a plot I could follow.

I went to the men’s room. There was a sign that read, “Employees must wash their hands prior to returning to work.” How about, “Employees must wash their hands of working here?” I said out loud.

That was what I vowed – again – to do. But since I was there and no one else was available to do it, I tended bar again. It was less hectic than being a waiter on Thursday, but more hectic than being a bartender on Wednesday because the diners were thanking God it was Friday.

I never use a corkscrew because wine tastes to me like champagne gone bad. But I had mastered the art the first night I served as bartender because I had to open some bottles when wine was ordered by the glass. You might suppose a professional bar would have one of those fancy corkscrews with levers and gears that practically pull the corks out by themselves. But the only one I could find was like a miniature auger, a wooden handle with a spiral-threaded piece attached. I couldn’t push it down hard enough to make it bite while I turned it. So I held the handle with my right hand and delivered a blow to the top with my left fist. With the point thusly driven in, turning the handle produced the desired effect.

It was a good thing I’d been able to practice that maneuver on Wednesday because on Friday we had a pinot grigio kind of crowd.

Then someone ordered an entire bottle of cheap chardonnay from South Africa. When I struck the corkscrew, it sank about an inch into the bottle. Must be the softest cork in history, I thought to myself. But despite turning the screw vigorously enough to conjure up the ghost of Henry James, nothing happened. I tried reversing to see if the screw would disengage. It just wobbled. Finally, I yanked it out in frustration and discovered the problem. There was no cork.

A wine bottle with a tin screw cap. Who knew? I screwed off the cap and had it ready for Kaylee when she returned. She gave it a funny look but took it away.

Susannah came to the bar a few minutes later to inform me that wine is always uncorked at the table, not by the bartender.

“Chateau Apartheid cannot be uncorked at the table because it has no cork,” I explained quite reasonably.

“It doesn’t matter whether it has a cork or a cap,” she responded. “Wine is always opened at the table.”