Uptown Local and Other Interventions (27 page)

Ms. Cruzeiros nodded, somehow looking more tired than pleased at the compliment. “Thanks. Unfortunately I’ve lost my chocolatier at short notice. I need to find another.”

Ken nodded, opening up the in-house jobseeker database to see if they had anybody suitable on it. “Is this going to be a long-term placement,” he said, “or are you just looking for someone to hold the space until your employee returns?”

For a moment there was no answer. Ken looked up from his typing and saw that Ms. Cruzeiros was blushing furiously. And fury did indeed seem to be the cause: her face had gone both grim and strangely tragic in the space of about a second. It looked to Ken as if she was struggling with some uncomfortable decision. Finally she said, “Long-term.”

“All right,” Ken said, turning his attention back to his typing, and thinking,
Oh boy, here we go: there was personal stuff going on…
A screenful of names came up—a mixed bag of bakers, patissiers and other allied trades. “There are some possibilities here,” he said. “People who’ve done chocolate work as well as general patisserie. How does that sound?”

“I don’t know,” Ms. Cruzeiros said, and now looked more tragic than furious. “I never really assumed I’d be in this kind of situation: I didn’t think I’d ever have to replace R—my chocolatier. He was so perfect for the job that I’d completely let the issue go out of my mind…”

“Maybe,” Ken said, “if you’d let me come down to your establishment and have a look around, I’ll be able to get a better handle on what’s actually needed.”

Ms. Cruzeiros looked surprised by that. “Would you do that? I mean, I appreciate it, it’s very kind of you if you have the time, but I mean, isn’t it a little unusual—?“

“Not at all,” Ken said. “If it helps us get the placement right for you, it’s time well spent.” He looked up as Malesha came out from the back room with yet another pile of files, which she handed to Tik. “Boss,” he said, knowing perfectly well what the answer was going to be, “can I be spared for an assessment run?”

“Sure,” Malesha said, “no problem. Tikram will hold the fort till you’re free again. Call in when you’re done.”

Ken nodded and got up.
I think something’s missing in her kitchen
,  Malesha had said.
Meaning something besides the chocolatier—  So what
else
is missing…?

He pulled his the courier bag he used as a briefcase out of the bottom desk drawer and ushered Ms. Cruzeiros out. There was an empty yellow cab just coming down the street toward them as they stepped up onto the sidewalk—that was Tik’s doing: of the three of them, Tik had the best relationship with the wizardries that affected the mechanical world, and empty taxis would hunt him down in blizzards or the pouring rain. Ken pulled the cab’s door open, saw Ms. Cruzeiros comfortably seated, then went around to the other side and got in.

“Eighth and Jane,” she said to the cabbie, as Ken pulled his door closed. The cab took off with a lurch. “We’re a very small business,” Ms. Cruzeiros said, putting her own bag down between her feet as she belted herself in. “And though we have a loyal following, in this market we don’t dare do anything that’s going to endanger that.” She ran one hand through her hair, looking fretful. “Even if I had a new chocolatier on site this afternoon, it’d still take him or her days to get broken in. And in this weather…”

“Is the weather a problem?” Ken said.

“For chocolate?” She laughed, sounding rueful. “Weather’s nearly always a problem if you’re not careful. If it’s too hot the chocolate won’t temper correctly: if it’s too cold, it seizes: if it’s too humid, it blooms… There are a hundred things that can go wrong. And making chocolate in Manhattan is like trying to do organic chemistry in a subway tunnel. We’re the only ones still doing it here. Everybody else is out in Queens or up in Westchester somewhere, in big climate-controlled factories…”

Ken got out his PDA and started scribbling hastily at the handwriting-recognition part of its screen. It would have taken much closer observation than Ms. Cruzeiros was giving him at the moment for her to see that he was writing, not in one of the PDA-proprietary shorthand styles, but in the device-friendly form of the wizardly Speech.   Most of what he was going to need to know about this situation he wouldn’t find out until he got down to where the trouble was: but in the meantime the notes he took would all feed into whatever wizardry he found himself having to do.
Something missing,
 Ken thought, while she talked on about cramped quarters and brownouts and landlord troubles: and on all of these he made notes. Then,
Make me a list,
  he wrote in the Speech, 
of everything you need for a successful chocolate shop.

His writing vanished.
Going to be a long list…
said the PDA, the characters scrawling themselves across the little screen.

Better get started then,
 Ken wrote.

The screen blanked: Ken tucked the PDA away. “I’m sorry,” Ms. Cruzeiros said as the cab turned onto Fifth Avenue and headed downtown. “I’m kind of in ear-bending mode today…”

“Ms. Cruzeiros, please don’t worry about it,” Ken said; “it sounds like you’ve got reason to be.”

“Ana, please,” she said then.

“Ana. I’m Ken. I take it this vacancy came up rather suddenly.”

“It did,” she said. For a moment her mouth set into that unhappy, grim look again. Then she sighed. “I suppose I really should have seen it coming,” Ana said. “But sometimes you just get taken by surprise—”

She went quiet again. Ken went back to “making notes”. “How many square feet in your production area?” he said.

She told him. It was small for any kind of business:
close quarters,
Ken thought.
Probably the kind of place where tempers have no trouble flaring when you’re caught between commerce and art, with sugar on top.

“Well,” he said, “I’ll look around, take some measurements, do some imaging of the workspace: the images can go up on our website if you like—it always helps with recruitment. Then make some calls. We could possibly have some people down here to talk to you this afternoon—”

“That would be great,” Ana said as the cab pulled over on one side of Eighth Avenue, just shy of Jane Street. But as she got out and looked over at her premises, Ken got the feeling that it wasn’t ‘great’ at all: that this suddenly-empty position was the last thing Ana wanted to fill.

She looked around her strangely, like someone trying to avoid having to make a damaging admission. Then she gave up. “I hate to say it,” she said, “but we really do need to get someone in here in a hurry, because though I’ve been working with my chocolatier for maybe four years now, I haven’t been able to get
anything
right in here since he left. Local conditions have been perfect for chocolate, these past couple of days. I thought I could manage. But—” She shook her head. “It seizes, it blooms, it burns, it melts at the wrong speed: everything that can go wrong with chocolate has been going wrong. I find that, far from being able to cope, I’m actually completely incompetent.”

And I thought she looked angry before,
 Ken thought.
I was mistaken…
  This was one of those people who was harder on herself than on anyone around her. “Let’s have a look around,” he said.

The sign over the shopfront said THEOBROMA, in black on white, in a spidery font of the century before: and the sign was that old, too. Ancient green shades were pulled down over the windows on either side of the door, and inside the door itself. Ana unlocked the door and went in, not lifting the shade or flipping the CLOSED sign over. Ken went in behind her, gazing around at the beautiful old nineteenth-century tiles on the walls and the floor, all black and white, and the hammered-tin ceiling. The left side of the store was one long glass case full of beautiful chocolates, light, dark, shiny, cocoa’d, all in their little paper nests. The aroma was ravishing. “This was the last batch Rodrigo made before he left,” she said. “The last decent batch we’ve got…”

The anxiety in her voice was painful. “Would whoever you hired be doing counter work as well?” Ken said.

“Absolutely,” Ana said. “I’d love to be able to afford separate counter staff as well, but our profit margins are a little too close to the break-even line…”

She went toward the back of the store area, and Ken followed her. Through a bead-curtained door was more white tile, this time less decorative: the walls and floor gleamed with them, and around the edges of the room were huge slabs of white marble and many bizarre-looking machines. Ken wandered over to one of them, like a huge pot with a water jacket around it, and some kind of stirring mechanism inside.

“Tempering vat,” Ana said. “The fountain wrap keeps the chocolate at a steady temperature after it’s melted. The one over there with the big rollers in the drum, that’s a conching machine. It rolls the melted chocolate around until the edges are worn off the cocoa crystals: that’s how you get that really smooth mouthfeel on the best chocolate….”

The description joined with the pervasive fragrance of the place to make his stomach growl. “This is a terrible place to be before lunch,” Ken muttered, holding the PDA up to each wall in turn, ostensibly to take wireless measurements of the space.

“I guess it is, if you’re not used to it,” Ana said. “It’s been a long time since I noticed…” She smiled, a sad smile, shaking her head. “When I first started helping my mom, ten years ago, before she died, I couldn’t stay out of the stock. Afterwards I didn’t have the time or the inclination to indulge myself. It’s easy when you’re working under someone who’s known the ropes for half their life…harder when you don’t have them around any more and you’re trying to find your own way. There were a lot of stumbles before Rodrigo came along and helped me get a handle on things. It’s going to be strange working without him…”

Ken lowered the PDA and scribbled on it.
Got what you need?

Working, boss.

The screen went blank except for the familiar little turning-hourglass icon as the Manual went to work on an analysis of the surrounding space. “What kind of hours are you looking for from whoever applies for the position?” Ken said. “Full time? Part time?”

“Officially, all the hours God sends,” Ana said, “but I guess it wouldn’t be smart to put that in the ad.” She went over to the conching machine, looked down into it. “That’s the trouble with this work. It takes… commitment—”

She broke off again, and Ken hardly needed to be a wizard to hear that she wasn’t talking about chocolate-making right then. He glanced down at the PDA’s screen: as he did, it started to fill up with the graceful curving characters of the Speech, showing him the list that the PDA had been compiling for him. Ken tapped at it, bringing up for comparison the list of needful things that it had compiled on the way down in the cab. And the two lists tallied very closely together indeed…

...with one exception.

The missing object was indicated by a long string of characters in the Speech. Ken nearly whistled out loud as he read the description and started to understand its ramification.
…positive interventional effects usually relationship-based—affinity and effectiveness increases with duration of relationship and location, but is easily deranged by local physical or emotional disruption…
  He nodded to himself.
I get it now, 
Ken thought.
Wow, she really
does
have a problem.

Ana had drifted up behind him and was looking curiously at the PDA. “Your handwriting’s worse than mine,” she said, seeing nothing but the indecipherable scribble the PDA showed any non-wizard who looked at it while it was in Manual mode. “Didn’t think that was possible. You get WiFi on that?”

“Uh, yeah, when the conditions are right,” Ken said.
Which is always…
  “Just checking the home database here…”

But Ken was doing more than that. Every wizard has a specialty, whether it’s the one that seems to come naturally when first practicing the Art as a child, or one taken up later in life to better match their outlook as an  adult. Ken was now beginning to exercise his own specialty, listening hard to everything around him, listening to life: and he was hearing plenty of it. But the one kind of life he was listening for was not in his immediate range.

Not here. We’re going to have to do a longer-range search. At least it won’t have gone too far—

“All right,” Ken said at last. “Ana, can I make a suggestion?”

“Sure.”

“I don’t think it’s another chocolatier you need. What you need is to get your old one back.”

That grim look attached itself to her face again. “I think that’s going to be impossible,” she said.

“I wouldn’t bet on that just yet,” Ken said.

The grimness started to go angry now. “Oh, really! And how would you know—”

“Just bear with me for a few moments while I explain,” Ken said. “How long has the business been running now? I mean, including your parents, and theirs…from the very beginning?”

“A hundred and ten years,” she said. “They came over from Spain.”

Ken nodded. “Correct me if I’m wrong,” he said, bending over to look under one of the cupboards, “but some of them were in chocolate even earlier than that? I think that was on the flyer that came with the cream eggs.”

“That’s true,” Ana said. “The family was in confectionery right back into the 1600’s.”

“Around the time the Spanish brought chocolate back with them from the New World,” Ken said. “Along with, I strongly suspect, some things that went with chocolate.”

She looked at him a little strangely. “Chilies? For those you want the Mexican place down the street.”

Ken shook his head. “Something a little different,” he said. He bent over to look under the big conching machine.

“What are you looking for, roaches?” Ana sounded indignant. “We’re very careful here. We don’t have roaches!”

“On the contrary,” Ken said. “You
are
very careful, and as a result, you have very careful roaches.
Guys?”
he said in the Speech, and whistled.

Ana went ashen and stood absolutely still as about a hundred roaches came flowing out from under the baseboards, all together, gathered into a little group, and looked up at her and Ken.