by Elaine Fox
Something about P.B. appealed to Roxanne. Not his looks, despite being classic and clean-cut, or his personality, which was like a TV car salesman’s. It was more because he was such a caricature. At some point in his life he’d adopted the role of playboy, clearly from some seventies role model, perhaps appearing on Love, American Style, and he’d mastered every stereotype of the character. It was impossible not to be entertained by him.
“Yes.” She turned to him. “As a housewarming gift.”
P.B. snaked a smile to Steve. “Well, isn’t that neighborly? You’re just a stand-up guy, aren’t you, Stevie?”
“That I am, my friend. That I am.” He grinned and looked down the bar, checking the other customers. Nobody flagged him so he looked back at Roxanne. “I hope you liked the wine.”
“I haven’t opened it yet.”
P.B. swooped in. “Looking for someone to share it with? I love a good French wine, myself.”
“You wouldn’t know a good French wine if it slapped you across the face,” Steve said. “And it might.”
“Sure I would.”
“Name one vineyard. Hell, name one varietal.”
P.B. turned to Roxanne. “Did you know that in addition to being a pompous ass about wine, Steve here is also a pompous ass about history? He’s bored the pants off more women than I can count with that stuff.”
Roxanne looked at Steve. “Seems like a handy skill for a single guy.”
Steve laughed. “Unfortunately, P.B. didn’t mean that literally.”
“But you are a history buff?” she persisted. Roxanne considered it important to find out details about people that surprised her. Especially people who worked for her. And anything scholarly about Steve Serrano would definitely surprise her.
Steve shrugged. “A little.”
“Oh come on.” P.B. needled. “He’s got his head in a book more often than anybody I’ve ever seen. It’s about all he does, other than work here.”
“That’s me. Mr. Excitement.” Steve moved off toward the other end of the bar, where the ladies finally looked ready for another round.
P.B. sat forward on his stool, closer to Roxanne. “I’ll tell you, though, Roxanne. That’s a beautiful name, Roxanne, you know that?”
He looked as if he wanted to take her by the hand, so she picked up her water glass. “Thank you.”
“Were you named after the character from Cyrano?” he asked. “That’s always been one of my favorite stories.”
This surprised her. P.B., a reader? “As a matter of fact, I was, in a way. My mother never liked that story, but she did like the name.” She grinned. “Personally, I liked the Steve Martin movie best.”
P.B. put his chin on his hand. “There was a movie?”
“Don’t tell me you read the play? By Rostand?”
“It was years ago.” P.B. waved a hand nonchalantly. “Hey, I’m glad you decided to keep Steve on.” He glanced toward the other end of the bar where Steve was pouring a scotch and chatting with a white-haired man. “He’s a really good guy. And he needs this job.”
She too glanced at Steve. “You think so? There are a lot of other bars in town and he’s a very good bartender.” It was true. If last night was any indication, he was one of the better ones she’d seen.
“Well, sure. But you know, you had it right about the creature-of-habit thing. Old Steve’s been here for years. It’d take a lot out of him to start over doing something different.”
Roxanne looked at P.B. Was he trying criticize his friend or did the truth just come out that way?
Steve returned to the conversation and P.B. changed the subject.
“As I was saying,” P.B. sat up straighter. “Stevie does find some interesting historical stuff every once in a while in all that reading. He started out by researching this house we’re in right now. And you’ll never guess who used to live here.”
He looked expectantly at Roxanne. She raised her brows and looked from him to Steve. “I can’t imagine.”
But she was pretty sure if it was somebody famous the previous owners would have used it to get more money out of her.
“None other than Thomas Jefferson!” P.B. crowed. “It was after he was president, but—”
“Hang on a minute.” Steve shook his head and gave his friend a look of exasperation. “I can see the years since high school haven’t honed your skills as a student any.”
Roxanne had to admit, she loved the interplay between these two. They were so antagonistic it was hard to believe they were really friends. And yet they had been for years. One of those kinds of friendships only men seemed to have.
Steve fixed P.B. with the eye of an unhappy schoolteacher. “Thomas Jefferson did not live here. If he had, you can bet we wouldn’t be sitting in a restaurant in this building. Or if we were, it would be run by the Park Service and we’d all be eating hot dogs.”
P.B. looked scandalized. “But you told me—”
“I told you a cousin of Thomas Jefferson’s lived here. Portner Jefferson Curtis. A little-known and rather morally impoverished cousin, as a matter of fact.”
“And I told all those guys down at the station…” P.B. muttered.
“’Little-known’?” Roxanne looked to Steve, concerned. It would be just her luck for this guy to dig up something the Historical Society would be interested in. Something that could get in the way of her business plan. “I would think anyone related to Jefferson would have been somewhat known. Especially one who was doing well enough to have lived in a house this size. Surely this was considered an expensive house, even back then.”
“That’s actually a really good point.”
She could swear he looked impressed and she wasn’t sure whether that gratified or annoyed her.
“It’s something of a mystery,” Steve said, leaning against the bar and warming to his topic, “who actually bought this place. Some say Jefferson did, for Portner to live in. But Jefferson himself wrote shortly after Portner moved into the house to ask how he was faring and whether he might divulge the nature of the business he was engaged in. That makes some historians question whether Portner bought the place with some kind of ill-gotten gains.”
“And did he?” Roxanne asked. “Surely by now everything there is to be known about this guy is known.”
Steve shrugged. “Actually, no. We’re not sure. Not only did Portner not divulge what business he was in when he wrote back, but he essentially told Jefferson to mind his own damn business.”
Roxanne laughed. If the exchange was public enough for this bartender to know about it, it certainly wouldn’t take the Historical Society by surprise. “How rude.”
Steve smiled with her. “You bet. So rude it marked the end of their correspondence, as far as we can tell. And especially rude considering that in his earlier days, just after Jefferson moved back home from Washington in 1809, Portner was unemployed and pretty bad off, so Jefferson let him stay at Monticello. It was Jefferson who got him back on his feet and enabled him, one way or another, to move here, in 1810.”
“That kind of makes you wonder…” Roxanne began, then stopped. She was never very good at history, truth be told, and she had no desire to reveal her ignorance to these two overconfident guys. Especially not when she was trying so hard to exude competence. Not that P.B. would care one way or the other. Roxanne was sure that as long as she “smiled pretty,” he’d say she was just as smart as could be.
“It does make you wonder,” P.B. said. “Makes me wonder, too. Mostly about having another beer, eh, Steve?” He laughed.
“Makes you wonder what?” Steve directed this to Roxanne, ignoring P.B.
Roxanne was about to answer when two big guys—construction workers?—came in and sat down on the other side of P.B., who instantly straightened on the bar stool to his full height and stretched in such a way that his chest expanded impressively.
If he up and peed on the bar he couldn’t have looked any more territorial, Roxanne thought.
Steve held up his index finger to Roxanne. “Hold that thought.”
She watched him go, appreciating his professionalism. Yes, he’d be a good hire. She just needed to know a little bit more about him, a little bit more about Steve Serrano, career bartender, who seemed to have hidden depths.
“Pretty interesting stuff, huh?” P.B. asked. “Maybe you can use some of that history in marketing this place. Spread a rumor that it’s haunted.” P.B. made a low, spooky noise and fluttered his hands out by his sides.
Roxanne considered this. “You might be right. Though it would have been better if it had been a cousin of Lafayette’s who lived here.”
P.B. gave her a blank look.
“Because he was French?” she prompted.
Steve was back before P.B. could reply.
“Now, what were you saying?” Steve asked.
Roxanne regretted saying anything, her thought had been such a silly one. “Well, it just made me wonder. The fact that…uh…Portner…?”
Steve nodded.
“The fact that Portner was living at Monticello when Jefferson might have gone out of his way to get this place for him makes me think Portner was rude early on and Jefferson just wanted him out of his house. I mean, first of all, we’re miles from Monticello, and second, since Portner was so disrespectful later it would make sense that he had been pretty ungrateful all along.”
Steve looked at her with a contemplative smile.
“What?” she said, laughing uncomfortably. “Was that stupid? I guess I like to make things into soap operas.”
“No.” Steve rubbed the side of his face with a palm. “No, not at all. I’d had the very same thought. The fact is…” He looked from Roxanne to P.B. and back again.
“The fact is…?” P.B. prompted.
Steve chuckled lightly. “Well, it makes perfect sense when coupled with something else I read recently. I had this idea that…” He stopped himself and took a step back from the bar. “But you’re probably not interested in my boring theories.”
Roxanne couldn’t help being apprehensive. If he really was some kind of amateur historian bent on making this house famous—or at least historically interesting, even if just to others of his ilk—she needed to know. The Alexandria Historical Society took things like this very seriously—so seriously they could hold up entire building projects for archeological purposes. Postponing a little remodeling in a place where a famous person had resided would be far from out of the question.
“I’m definitely not bored,” she said. “Come on, you can’t leave us hanging here.”
“Yeah, come on,” P.B. said, with a look of utter insincerity.
“Okay.” He leaned forward, his arms on the bar. “There was something in Jefferson’s letter to the land agent who arranged for Portner to move into this house. Something about Portner being ‘prone to mischief,’ he believed. And for years, in historical circles, there’ve been rumors that Portner stole something from Jefferson that caused the rift between them.”
Roxanne was filled with dread. “What was it?”
Steve grinned like he held the punch line to a scary story. “A draft of the Declaration of Independence.”
“No way,” P.B. said. “Are you shitting me?” Then, remembering Roxanne, he leaned toward her abjectly. “I’m so sorry.”
She gave him a blank look. What was he sorry for? Could he be thinking what she was? That this would interest more than just the amateur historians? She couldn’t afford to hold up the opening to her restaurant so a team of archeologists could climb all over it.
But P.B. merely turned back to Steve with an amended version of his question. “Are you kidding me?”
Steve shook his head, smiling like the cat that swallowed the canary. “Furthermore, speculation is that the draft was hidden here in this very house for his heirs. But he never had any children and no one else was very intent on searching the place for something that might or might not exist. It was pretty well established that Portner could be less than honest, at times.”
“Shut up!” P.B. shouted, catching the attention of everyone at the bar. “You mean to tell me there could be an original copy of the Declaration of Frickin’ Independence hidden in this building right here right now as we speak?”
Silence throughout the room greeted this outburst.
The construction workers looked at them with great interest, and even Rita and George stared in from the dining room.
Roxanne frowned, dread growing within her. “Surely not, after more than two hundred years.”
Steve let his eyes scan the room. “I doubt it, too. For one thing, this place has to have been remodeled dozens of times over nearly two centuries. And for another, historians have been talking about this for decades and in the few documented searches that were made, nobody found anything. So, I’m sure there’s something somewhere that refutes the possibility. But I spent most of the last month looking for evidence that the draft turned up and haven’t found anything yet.”
She heaved a sigh of relief. Historians have been talking about this for decades. So it wasn’t news.
“Where do you look for this stuff?” she asked. “I’ve always wondered how people still discover things now that happened hundreds of years ago.”
“Mostly I go to the Library of Congress. Have you ever been there?”
Roxanne shook her head.
P.B., coming out of a reverie, said, “What? Where?”
“The Library of Congress,” Steve said with a conspiratorial smile at Roxanne. It was obvious to both of them P.B. was losing interest. “It’s just across the river and one of the most incredible places I’ve ever been. You can actually look at old letters and documents and books, sometimes things that haven’t been touched in years. Once you’ve been there, it’s easy to see how not everything has been discovered yet. And maybe never will be.”
“I should go,” Roxanne mused.
“I’ll take you sometime.” Steve’s eyes met hers and she caught her breath.
“Oh you don’t need to do that,” she said quickly, to cover a sudden and inexplicable blush.
“So,” P.B. said, “how much you think a draft of the Declaration of Independence would be worth now? I mean, if it were found.”
Steve blew air out of his cheeks and thought a moment. “Hell, I don’t know. It would probably be sold at auction and those things can either skyrocket or tank. But I would think maybe millions, at any rate.”
“Millions,” P.B. marveled, looking as if he might just go out and buy himself one of those Declaration of Independence lottery tickets.
4
Bar Special
Tom and Jerry—for those who like to play cat and mouse
White rum, brandy, maple sugar, allspice, nutmeg, 1 egg, boiling water
Roxanne wrestled with taking the wine, then decided she was making too big a deal of it. She’d just take the bottle with her to Steve’s apartment to ask him about the staff. It would serve as a kind of olive branch after she’d been so obnoxious the first time they met.
Her one other concern was that he would think she was asking his opinion because she didn’t know what she was doing. But all she wanted was some confirmation, or denial, of the reliability of some of the servers. Like George, for example. And getting the opinion of someone who’d worked with them for years was just good business. Getting that opinion with honey—or in this case wine—instead of vinegar was also good business.
So, in the name of competent management, Roxanne closed her door firmly behind her and, with the neck of the wine bottle grasped in one sweaty hand, she proceeded up the stairs to Steve’s apartment.
The moment she reached the top step his door opened. With a mental curse she stopped in her tracks. She thought she’d have a moment to compose herself outside the door and figure out what to say. Now he was leaving and she was stuck on the stairs, directly in the path of rejection.
Without noticing her, he pulled the door shut and turned his key
in the deadbolt lock. A duffle bag was looped over his shoulder, out of which the handle of some sort of tool protruded.
For a split second, she contemplated fleeing. If she could have turned around and disappeared without his noticing she would have. But there was no way he wouldn’t at least hear her clomping down the wooden steps and then she’d look an even bigger fool than she already did, standing silently on the top step with a bottle of wine in her hands.
Instead, she took the initiative.
“Going out?” she asked.
Startled, he turned swiftly. “Jesus. You scared the crap out of me.”
He took a step forward and his eyes raked her from head to hands, landing squarely on the bottle of wine.
“Sorry.” She raised the bottle with a wan smile. “Guess you don’t want any of this, then.”
He quirked a brow, his expression going from wary to surprised. “You bringing it back?”
She opened her mouth to reply.
“Wait, don’t tell me,” he said with a cock of his head. “As my boss, you can’t accept gifts. Favoritism and all that.”
“No, of course not.” She forced a smile. “Feel free to give me as many gifts as you want. This isn’t the army.”
He grinned. “Oh, right. It was the boot camp that threw me.”
Maybe it was being a couple steps below him but she felt at a disadvantage in more ways than she was comfortable with. She stepped up to the landing.
“It’s called training, Mr. Serrano. But you can think of it as gourmet boot camp, if that’ll make your martyrdom any more satisfying.”
“Actually yeah, that’ll help.” He looked from the bottle to her face again and frowned. “So…what’s up with the wine?”
She took a deep breath. In for a penny, in for a pound. “I just had a couple questions. Not about the wine. I was hoping you’d have time to talk about the restaurant with me.” She looked down at her own hands and gave a light laugh. “And I was bringing the wine as a bribe.”
He hefted the duffle bag higher on his shoulder. His expression was almost one of confusion, though what he had to be confused about was, well, confusing.
