Bone in the Throat (3 page)

Five

S
O, HOW IS YOUR DENTIST FRIEND
?" asked United States Attorney Raymond Sullivan.

"Whining," said Al. "As usual."

"What's his problem?" asked Sullivan, a fiftyish, athletic-looking man with a full head of snow white hair and a ruddy complexion.

"He got a boo-boo on his nose today. I had to kiss it and make it better. Sally Wig is unhappy with him."

"What's he unhappy about?"

"Harvey's behind with the money," sighed Al.

"Our money. What's he doing with it?"

"Fuck if I know. He says he's paying bills," said Al. "I think the guy's maybe taking things a little too seriously."

"Like what is he taking seriously?" asked Sullivan, annoyed.

"He's got delusions of grandeur. The guy thinks he's really going to make a go of the restaurant. You should hear him talk about it. He thinks he wants to be a success at it. I have to say, I was hesitant to disabuse him of the notion."

"And why is that?" said Sullivan, one bushy white eyebrow raised.

"Listen . . . We all know how Harvey got in the restaurant business. We put up his end, for Chrissakes. He knows that. We kept him out of the pen, made his problem go away and all. He's a snitch. He knows he's a snitch and he knows he's our snitch. It's just, I think he's beginning to think that if he makes some good cases for us he's gonna somehow get to keep the restaurant. I don't want to rub his nose in it."

Sullivan leaned over his government-issue desk and clasped his hands together. "I really don't see why we should give a shit one way or the other what he thinks. I mean, handling an informant is all about control. You know that. It seems to me, the way I read it, the tighter control we have, and the more he knows it, the better. We own him. He knows it . . . So what? He's hardly in a position to haggle."

Al settled back in his chair and smiled. "We want some indictments, right? We want a lot of indictments. More the merrier . . . This guy, given a little care and feeding, can give us some. But, I want everything to smell right. He's supposed to be a frightened, desperate little scumbag restaurateur, right? Well, that's exactly what he is right now. I want him to try and make a go of it. Can't blame the guy for trying. He's sure not gonna be practicing dentistry anymore—"

"I certainly hope not," interjected Sullivan.

"Sure, he's fucking us a little bit," continued Al. "He's fucking the wise guys. He's fucking his ex-wife and his girlfriend, and everybody else for all I know. Sounds like an amazingly lifelike re-creation of a frightened, desperate scumbag restaurateur to me. So the guy screws us for a little money. Good. He gets in a little deeper with the Wig. Maybe Sally gets mad and is kind enough to commit a few more felonies for us. Maybe on tape. I'm even wondering, maybe Harvey can get a knock-down loan from the Brooklyn people. They've been coming around, I understand. Acting real friendly, offering their services."

"They haul his garbage now, right?"

"Yeah. Maybe he borrows a little money from outside Sally's crew. That should send Sally right up the wall. I mean, they want to help, maybe we should let them help. You got anything against prosecuting people from Brooklyn?"

Sullivan smiled. "Okay, okay. . . We'll let this go one time with the money. But you're gonna have to get him on a tighter leash in the future. He can fuck everybody else for their money, but I don't want him playing around with ours. I've personnel and automobiles and technical assets diverted full-time on this. I've got two observation posts sucking up overtime and rent and resources, I've got the clock running on the Title Threes . . . Sooner or later, I'm gonna get a phone call asking me what the fuck I've got to show for it."

"Right this minute, we've got enough for bribery and extortion. We've got probable cause for some more Title Threes . . . We've got people on tape making usurious loans, arranging kickbacks. Things are progressing."

"I'm looking for more than that. . . Racketeering. That's what this office is interested in, goddammit. I want some of that good ol' 'continuing criminal enterprise' on tape. I want more than Sally Fucking Pitera . . . I want his whole crew. I want Charlie Wagons. I want Danny Testa and all their little helpers. The whole bunch. I don't want them for some diddly-shit loansharking. At the end of all this, I want to be able to seize assets and salt the ground so nothing grows there ever again."

"How about the Brooklyn thing?" asked Al. "They're offering."

"Sure, sure," said Sullivan. "The Brooklyn thing interests me. Sure. Why not? Tell your friend to borrow some money from them. A few thousand. He shouldn't go overboard. Let's see what happens."

"It'll make Sally angry," said Al. "And his people."

"Good, good," said Sullivan. "Tell him not to tell them right away. It'll give us something to tickle the wires with later. Maybe we'll get some interesting conversations for a change."

"We don't want to start a war," said Al.

"Who's talking about starting a war? Hopefully, by the time they find out, they'll be well on their way to a meeting with the grand jury."

"Harvey will have to testify," said Al.

"So, he testifies. We get him into the program and he can go off to East Buttfuck somewhere and write his memoirs."

Six

T
OMMY SIPPED HIS COFFEE
in the empty kitchen. The night porters, Big Mohammed and Little Mohammed, had finished their work; he could hear them arguing in Arabic in the changing room. Otherwise, the kitchen was quiet.

This was his favorite part of the day. The cutting boards were rubbed clean and white; the stainless steel work tables and reach-in refrigerators gleamed. There were no other cooks due in until two-thirty. A dishwasher would be in at noon to help him with the scut work and to catch up on the pots. Tommy would be undisturbed until then, free to cook at his own pace and in his own way. He went over the prep list taped to the reach-in door by the sauté station.

"TOMMY!" it said, in the chef's jagged, block lettering. (The chef loved exclamation points.)

Veal stock not reduced enuf. . . FIX! Also: Roast Chix . . .
25# culls coming . . . Cook and shuck for pasta Tonite.
Need Sauce for Sword . . . Any Ideas??
Also: Gaufrette Potatoes and Pommes Annas (sorry)

Tommy hated to make Pommes Annas.
There was more:

Fill bottles with red pepper vin. and Cilantro Sauce.
Cut Fish—One Sword Puppy (make sure it's a puppy!) and one
Salmon coming in. Sword cut 7 oz. Salmon usual.
SOUP!! 86 the old shit. Use squid from walk-in, any odds and ends in reach-ins. DO NOT USE SCALLOPS!
Mushie Sauce: Use portobellos, black trumpets, dried cepes. Step on it with regular mushies. Use demi after reduced. And PORT WINE!
Use any scraggly veg trimmings in veal stock . . .
Have DW pick over mussels when he comes in. Also shellfish.
One Pine Island Oyster and One Cherry coming in . . .
There's Veg cut already in walk-in . . . DO NOT MAKE!
When Ricky and Mel come in, have them clean out boxes, throw out Mystery Items. I'll be in around 2:30.

Tommy looked at the last line. When the chef said he'd be in around two-thirty, he meant maybe three-thirty, or even four o'clock. "Mel" was the name given to any new, inexperienced cook. It was taken from the Italian term
mal carne,
meaning
bad meat.
The latest Mel was the new garde-manger, real name Ted, or something like that. Like all the other Mels, he was an extern from the Culinary Institute, spending a semester working in the real world for school credit. He was having what was sarcastically referred to as a Learning Experience, meaning he worked his ass off and the restaurant got some motivated labor dirt cheap. He'd shown up, like the others, freshly scrubbed, in his own new uniform, with the standard-issue black-vinyl knife roll-up under one arm and a copy of
The Professional Chef
under the other. But he worked like a Trojan, didn't bitch if somebody asked him to peel garlic or make hollandaise in bulk for brunch. Tommy considered asking Mel to shuck the lobsters but thought better of it.

The bell at the delivery entrance rang. Tommy walked down the narrow hallway and pushed open the heavy trap doors to the street. It was the fish delivery. A short, unshaven driver wearing a leather truss, work gloves, and rubber boots came in with a long cardboard box heaped with crushed ice. He dropped the box at Tommy's feet, a thin stream of water from the melting ice running out onto the floor. Tommy reached inside, first removing a wheel of swordfish, then an Atlantic salmon. He weighed both on the digital scale atop an ancient chest freezer, gave the salmon a perfunctory press with his fingers, checked the
eyes
and gills, and signed the invoice. He gave the driver the white copy and spiked the yellow on a nail on the wall next to a stack of shellfish tags. Then he returned to the kitchen.

Tommy could hear Barry, the manager, in the upstairs waiter station steaming milk for cappuccino. He finished his coffee and shouted "SALAAM" to the two Mohammeds as they passed through the kitchen on their way out the door. He filled up the steam table with water and, his knees resting on the clean rubber floor mats behind the line, reached under and lit the burners. He switched on the range hoods and fired up the Frialator, the ovens, and one side of the grill. In a nonstick pan, he sauteed some chorizo and chopped scallions left over from the night before, then quickly beat in some eggs with a rubber spatula. He added a little fresh cracked pepper with a few turns of a steel peppermill, slid the eggs onto a salad plate and, standing there at his workstation, ate quickly. When he was finished, he put the empty plate and the fork down on the prewash area of the dishwasher.

Moving on to his
mise-en-place,
he collected the pots he would need from the overhead racks and neatly arranged the house knives next to his cutting board. He filled a stainless steel crock with hot water and dropped a handful of male and female spoons, a pair of tongs, and a spatula in it. He got a stack of clean kitchen towels from the changing room and lay them down on a shelf over his workstation.

He went in the walk-in and hauled out a tall plastic bucket filled with veal stock, then poured the stock into a double-weight Crusader-Wear stockpot and started reducing it. He then went back to the walk-in and returned with a buspan of wriggling, one-clawed lobsters. He poured two quarts of white wine into a stockpot and added some bay leaves, some peppercorns, a bit of crushed red pepper, whole cloves, a sprig of raggedy fresh thyme. He found some vegetable trimmings in the sauté box, a drying half-onion, a few wrinkled carrots, some limp celery. He threw them in along with some leek tops and a head of garlic. He put a sheet pan over the pot and waited for the wine to cook down a bit and suck up the flavor from the spices and vegetables. He went back to the walk-in, wondering how much mileage he put in every day on his trips back and forth, then returned with a bucket of fish fumet and a bucket of peeled potatoes. The food-spattered radio cassette player was blaring an old Modern Lovers tune, "She Cracked," and Tommy bounced around in time to the music unembarrassed, as he was alone in the kitchen. "She cracked . . . I'm sad . . . But I won't. . ." he sang along. He rubbed a few red peppers with olive oil and put them on the grill for red pepper vinaigrette.

Tommy turned back to the frantic lobsters. He emptied them out of the buspan and into the boiling white wine. "Sorry guys," he said. "It'll all be over in a minute." He listened to them scraping their claws against the metal. After a few moments, the noise died down.

When the lobsters were cooked, he poured them into a colander in the pot sink and ran cold water over them.

He reduced some port wine for the mushroom sauce. Reaching into a cold bucket of shallots, he found there were dangerously few. His hand still wet, he started a night prep list on a piece of notepaper from the chef's clipboard, writing "Chop Shallots!!" He put some dried cepes in warm water to soak and, with a paring knife, trimmed away the gills and stems from a few handfuls of portobellos.

The old surf instrumental "Pipeline" by the Chantays came on the radio. Tommy smiled and decided it was an auspicious moment to begin the soup. He found his favorite pot in a corner under a work table where he had hidden it the day before and put it on the range. He poured some olive oil into the pot, minced some garlic and simmered it until transparent. He wanted to play air guitar along with the music, since no one was looking, but instead peeled the onions and chopped them into a fine dice. Remembering the red peppers on the grill, he spun around, grabbed them with the tongs, put them in a stainless steel bowl, and covered them with plastic wrap to free the skin. He tossed the diced onions into the soup pot with the garlic and sprinkled in some thyme and some bay leaves. He seeded some red and green peppers, cut them into a medium dice, and added them to the pot. He poured a healthy hit of ground cumin in after. Soon the kitchen began to fill with the smell of garlic, onions, and cumin. He added the cut squid, chasing it around with a large steel paddle. He rooted around in the grillman's reach-in for a few minutes, coming up with some swordfish trimmings, a little lobster meat, and, wonder of wonders, a full crock of cherrystone clams, already shucked. He strained the clam juice in with the fish fumet that was already heating on a back burner and added the clams to the squid, along with the lobster and swordfish. When the fumet was hot, he poured it into the soup pot, added two cans of crushed tomato, a couple spoons of paste, and a gallon of red wine. He cut ten of the peeled potatoes into large dice and threw them in the pot, too. He finished the whole dark, wonderful mess with some crushed red pepper and a little tabasco sauce, and left the pot to simmer.

He lit a cigarette and felt around under the station for the chef's ashtray from the night before. He couldn't find it at first. He looked through the tilted speed rack, pushing aside the greasy bottles of Tabasco, olive oil, white wine, brandy, Worcestershire, rice wine vinegar, and lemon juice. He finally found the ashtray on an overhead shelf, tucked behind the chefs $450 custom-made Japanese knife in its rosewood scabbard. There was a small glassine envelope peeking out of the scabbard, and Tommy slipped it carefully out from next to the knife. The envelope had a colorful, rubber-stamped image of a toilet on it. He quickly rolled up a bill from his wallet, peeled back the tape on the envelope, and after a quick look in both directions, took a short, measured sniff of the bitter contents.

"Oooohhhh, baby" he said out loud.

A
S ALWAYS
the chef showed up late: around three-thirty. He went straight for his knife, disappearing back into the changing room for a good five minutes before he reappeared in his whites, looking noticeably refreshed. Tommy didn't say anything. The chef tuned the radio to a classic-rock station, lit a cigarette, and drifted upstairs to the bar, returning a few moments later with a shaker glass of CocaCola and ice.

"What's the soup?" he asked Tommy.

"Check it out," said Tommy, proudly, "Portugee Seafood Chowder."

The chef lifted the lid off the still-simmering chowder. "That smells fuckin' great. If I think I can hold anything down, I might have a bowl for breakfast. You get the lobster squared away?"

Tommy nodded. "Yeah. And I hated every minute of it. We should get the dishwasher to do that shit."

"The dishwasher'll throw half the fuckin' lobster meat in the trash. They don't get the knuckles. And he gets upset. He's not too crazy about getting involved with shellfish. I think it's a religious thing."

"I got a fish sauce together," said Tommy. "Mustard tarragon vinaigrette with crispy leek garnish. That okay?"

"Yeah, that's fine," said the chef. "An oldie but goodie."

"I haven't cut the leeks yet," said Tommy "I wondered if you'd let me use your knife. The house knives just mash them to shit."

"Looks like you were at my knife already. Half the fuckin' bag is gone," said the chef.

"It was half empty when I found it. I just did a tiny poke," said Tommy.

"That was my wake-up, man," whispered the chef. "You don't need the shit. I need it."

"Sorry I tapped it," said Tommy. "Spur of the moment. Mea culpa. Sorry."

"Now I gotta go east," said the chef, jerking his head to the east.

"They got nothing uptown, it's too hot in the forties. I was gonna go over later, but now I gotta go sooner. I don't want to turn into a fuckin' pumpkin halfway through dinner."

"Really, I didn't do a lot," said Tommy.

"Now I gotta go over there," said the chef.

"Why don't you just send a busboy later. Hector's coming in in an hour," suggested Tommy.

"I thought about that," said the chef, "I don't like doing that anymore. It's not too cool. What if he gets popped? They'll probably deport the guy. On top a that, you know Hector. I sent him over there a few times, now he thinks he can shake me down for a steak dinner for his shaft meal. Can't you see Hector, the fuckin' busboy, sittin' up there, munchin' on a twenty-ounce sirloin and all the waitrons and the manager are trying to choke down their shepherd's pie? Doesn't look too good. On top of that, the son of a bitch eats his steak well done. I got principles."

"So you're going over now?" asked Tommy.

"Yeah, can you set up my station?"

"Yeah, sure." He hesitated. "Well, since you're going, can you pick me up a couple?"

"You have any money?" asked the chef.

"Enough for two bags."

"You got twenty extra till next week? I'm short."

"Alright," said Tommy, reaching for his wallet. "But I gotta have it back."

"No problem," said the chef. Though Tommy knew it would be a problem.

"So, you're gonna get four?" Tommy asked.

"Two for me, two for you," said the chef. He turned and headed for the door.