by Al Roker
“Our own Simon Cowell,” I said.
Chapter
TWO
Lily left at eight to attend an experimental video show in SoHo. Having had enough experimental video in my own studio, I called it quits a half-hour later. I was standing by the glass doors at the building’s entrance, waiting for my driver, when I heard my name being called.
Gretchen Di Voss had just exited the elevator. She was in her brisk, all-business mode, wearing a black suit with gray stripes and a taupe silk blouse. She was carrying a gray cashmere coat and a black leather briefcase.
“Gretch, you’re looking even more beautiful than usual,” I said.
“I do my best,” she said. “I’m glad I bumped into you, Billy. Saves me a phone call.”
“A last-minute invitation to an intimate dinner tonight?”
“Our intimate dinners are over, Billy. But, as a matter of fact, I am headed to your restaurant.”
“I’m not surprised. Your fiancé is a big fan of the Bistro.”
“Really? Well, unfortunately, Rudy won’t be enjoying it tonight. He had a last-minute conflict.”
I thought I knew what, or rather who, the conflict might be.
“What’s the problem with Food School 101?” she said. “Rudy tells me you canceled the pilot.”
“Not canceled. Just postponed. It wasn’t working. Lily and I spent the last couple of hours putting it back on track.”
“I hope you didn’t treat Rudy to your usual sarcasm and rudeness?”
“Gretch, this evening, I actually bumped it up a notch.”
“You should give him the respect he deserves.”
I was tempted to tell her that her weasel fiancé was, at the moment, probably clinking wineglasses with a bimbette young enough to be her daughter, but there was no percentage in that. Instead I said, “I do give him the respect he deserves.”
She studied me closely for signs of sarcasm or rudeness. “Billy, I hope our … former relationship isn’t causing any animosity …”
“Gretch, I swear, if you and I had never met, I’d still feel the way I do about Rudy.”
She gave me another suspicious look, but I was too good a poker player to let her see how I really felt about her fiancé.
“It wouldn’t have worked with us,” she said.
“I know. But we had a pretty good time finding that out.”
“I guess we did,” she said, relaxing. She held out her coat. “Help me with this?”
It was a familiar feeling, standing close to her as she slid into the coat. We paused for a few seconds, my arm around her. Then she pulled away. “Want to share a cab to the Bistro?” she asked.
“Thanks, but Joe should be here any minute with the car,” I said. “We can give you a lift.”
“I’m already late,” she said. “Billy, you’d be doing yourself a favor if you keep on Rudy’s good side.”
“We’re okay, Rudy and I.” I sang, “Eb-ony and i-vory—”
She gave me a wan smile. “I hope that’s true,” she said.
I watched her exit the building and glide down the front steps, her long, dark hair swaying against the gray cashmere coat. She hailed a passing cab, and I continued watching until it carried her out of view down Ninth Avenue.
Chapter
THREE
My driver is a diminutive Asian named Joe Yeung. I like to think of him as “Mighty” Joe Yeung, a reference amusing only to those of a certain age, but, hey, we take the grins where we can get them. “Front door or rear, Billy?” Joe asked as we neared the Bistro.
It had been a long, difficult day, and tomorrow would start very early. I wanted with all my heart to say “rear,” which would have meant ignoring the restaurant and using the hidden entrance and the stairwell that led directly to my office and living quarters on the second floor. But it’s good business to put in at least a brief appearance each night. And Cassandra Shaw, the Bistro’s manager, hostess, and, on occasion, bouncer, had text-messaged me earlier, “ned to tlk.” Since Cassandra is as self-sufficient as a wilderness survivor, this was like a cri de coeur.
Joe braked the dust-crusted dark-blue Volvo about ten feet from the Bistro’s front door. “That all for tonight, Billy?” he asked. “Miz Joe on my ass to see the new Richard Gere movie. He tight with the Dalai Lama, and she like his tiny eyes.”
“Take off. But don’t forget to be here early tomorrow.”
“I know, I know,” Joe said. “Take you to Glass Tower. Or as they say in my country, Grass Towah.” The reference was to the skyscraper that housed the Worldwide Broadcasting Company.
“Give Mrs. Joe and Mr. Gere my best,” I said, and headed into the Bistro.
The restaurant’s second seating had just started and the main room appeared to be at full capacity, which, considering the economic climate, filled my heart with joy.
Cassandra was in her Gwen Stefani mode, heavy on the eye makeup and bright red lipstick, her blonde hair pulled back in a bun so tight her cheekbones looked like they could cut glass. She was wearing a short black knit dress that showed off her splendid legs and hugged her equally splendid figure like a second skin. If that weren’t intimidating enough, her spike heels lifted her an inch or two above my five-eleven.
“Time you showed up,” she said, exhibiting her constant ill humor. For some strange reason, our customers seemed to love her snarky personality. Maybe they thought she was kidding. Maybe they were too awed by her physical presence to notice her attitude.
“What’s the problem?” I asked.
“Problems. Better if we discussed them in your office, Billy,” she replied. “After you’ve put in your face time.”
I began my slow trek through the main room, nodding to some diners, shaking the hands of others, and leaving still others with a quick quip. A British actress, an Academy Award winner, reminded me of a dinner I’d prepared for her ten years ago when I was a working chef at a private club in Aspen. At another table, a former Yankees second baseman, so sloshed I could almost see the scotch-and-waterline in his bleary eyes, told me a pointless story about a pizza he’d had at St. Barth’s that included fish tongues.
A large, bullet-headed black man in his sixties wearing a midnight-blue suit and dark horn-rimmed glasses waved to me from a table in a corner of the room. He was dining with his wife, a thin, fashionably dressed woman with a steel-gray close-cropped Afro, and three preteen children, two girls and a boy, who squirmed on their chairs and looked like they were more than ready to get back to their Nintendos, or whatever the hell kids got back to these days.
His name was Henry Julian, and a generation ago he had controlled most of the major crime that took place in Brooklyn. His two sons, Jayson and Adam, ran the family business now, which, prior to the recent downturn in the economy, had been focusing on several slightly more legitimate enterprises, like real estate and banking.
Henry had grown up in the same apartment building on 127th Street as my foster father and mentor, Paul Lamont, and theirs was a friendship that had lasted long past boyhood. I’d discovered that fact over a decade ago, at Paul’s funeral, when Henry introduced himself and, in a quiet room at the rear of the church, talked me out of going vigilante on those responsible for Paul’s death. A few years later, I found out that Henry had taken care of them himself.
A week after I’d opened the Bistro, he came in and reintroduced himself, and we spent the evening drinking and reminiscing about Paul. After that, he dropped by every few months, sometimes alone, sometimes not.
He started to get up, but I waved him down.
“You know my wife, Sarina, don’t you, Billy?” he said.
“Of course,” I said.
“And these are my grandkids. Little Jason, Rasheeda, and Adama. Kids, I want you to meet the man who owns this palace of fine food—Mr. Blessing.”
Little Jason and Adama gave me bored-kid looks, but Rasheeda fixed me with her alert brown eyes and said, “I’ve seen you on Wake Up, America! You smile too
much.”
“Ra, be polite,” her grandmother said.
Rasheeda cocked her head and said, “You’re more handsome when you don’t smile.”
“Tell that to my producer,” I said.
Henry Julian chuckled. “She’s the one, ain’t she, Billy?”
I told him I thought she was. In fact, I was wondering how long it would be before she put her father and uncle out to pasture with her grandfather.
Henry asked his wife to take the children to the powder rooms and suggested I sit for a moment beside him. Naturally, Rasheeda wanted to stay, but her grandmother dragged her away.
“You’re a man about town, Billy, and you’re in the news business at Worldwide Broadcasting,” Henry said when they’d departed. “What do you hear about Felix the Cat?”
“Not much,” I said. “But I do try to keep up with Bugs Bunny.”
“Ain’t talkin’ ’bout any cartoon character,” he growled. “This Felix ain’t all that funny, know what I mean?”
I gave him my blankest look.
“This Felix supposedly lives in Par-ee, though nobody knows for sure, and when he shows up in any other city, the population decreases. It worries me he might be coming to town.”
“What makes you think so?”
Henry shifted his shoulders, moving his neck around in his shirt, turtle-style, like the late Rodney Dangerfield. “I may be retired, Billy, but I still got my sources. This guy Felix plays it pretty close—nobody still alive even knows what he looks like. But as quietly as he moves, he makes some waves. There’s this dude the really high rollers use to keep track of trends and the shifting moods of people worldwide. I pay him to be my danger spotter. He swears Felix is on his way to the Big Apple.”
“To see you?”
“I don’t think so,” Henry said. “I wouldn’t be sittin’ here jawin’ with you without a couple uglies watching my back, that be the case. But between us, not that long ago I had a very minor business arrangement in Nigeria that was, ah, protected by the late General Santomacha. Know who he was?”
“Another in a long line of brutal dictators,” I said.
“Well, this Felix put an end to the general’s reign in a very nasty way. Ever since, I been keepin’ track of the man. So if he’s in my town, even if he’s here on business got nothing to do with me, I like to know about it. Which is my point in askin’ you what you’ve heard.”
“Why would I have heard anything?”
“My spotter says Felix’s target got something to do with the media. Couldn’t get any more specific than that. But you a member of the media in good standing.”
This really wasn’t a conversation I wanted to be having. In spite of the things the old man had done, I liked Henry, and he’d stopped me from making a terrible mistake. But talking about a mysterious hit man flying in from Paris to take out somebody in the media? Murdered dictators? Much too complicated for my simple life. “I’m sorry I can’t help you, Henry,” I said, getting to my feet. “I’ve never heard of this Felix guy.”
“Yeah, well, I figured I’d ask. If you do hear of anything …”
“You know it,” I promised, shaking his callused hand.
Cassandra was waiting at the rear of the room, near the exit. “Finally,” she said.
Moving down the hall to the stairwell, we passed the open door to a private dining room. I made the mistake of looking in and catching the eye of Gretchen Di Voss.
She was seated at a table with two other women and one man. She waved me in.
“Billy, come say hello to my friends,” she called out.
I looked at Cassandra, who sighed in exasperation.
“I think you know everybody,” Gretchen said as I entered the room.
I knew them. The gamine, red-haired Gin McCauley was a comrade-in-arms, a coanchor on Wake Up, America! She was flanked by her short, plump manager, Hildegard Fonsica, and Frederick Spence, her agent. Hildy’s ruthlessness in fighting for her clients had earned her a certain infamy, but as far as I knew she played it straight, and I found her lack of bullshit admirable. I hadn’t made up my mind about Spence. He seemed affable enough but was a little shy in the sincerity department.
“Any menu suggestions, Billy?” Gretchen asked.
I spent a few minutes plotting their meals, then excused myself to join the impatient Cassandra, who was hovering just outside the door. As we headed for the stairs to my office, she said, “I’m surprised the TV princess didn’t ask you to toss the salad for them.”
“That reminds me,” I said. “Send them a bottle of Dom ’98 with my compliments.”
“I thought it was all over between you and Miz Di Voss,” Cassandra said.
“If I was still in love, I’d have sent the Cristal ’99.”
Chapter
FOUR
Finally in my office with the door closed, Cassandra said, “Do you want the bad news, the badder news, or the baddest news?”
“Isn’t that supposed to be the bad news or the good news?”
“Not tonight,” she said.
“Start with the bad and build up.”
“Okay. Mr. Politano informed me this afternoon that he was doubling the price of corn. He gave me some bullshit about crops being depleted because they’re being used for ethanol.”
“That may be true,” I said. “But doubling is a little much.”
“I told him he could stick his corn up his ass,” she said.
“It might be more practical to make ethanol with it,” I said. “How much corn do we use, anyway?”
“That’s beside the point,” she said. “May I continue?”
“If I said no, would you stop?”
“When Mr. Politano got tired of shouting Sicilian curses at me, he said he wouldn’t sell us any more produce at any price. So I was forced to phone an acquaintance, Mr. Tamonia.”
“The one who runs the book on Forty-fourth and breaks kneecaps?”
“Exactly. I got him to convince Mr. Politano to continue providing us with produce, including corn. The corn would be at a forty percent hike, from which, I presume, Mr. Tamonia will take his cut. It’s still less than we’d be paying if I’d just bent over and spread for Mr. Politano. I hope all of this is okay with you.”
“Sounds fine,” I said. “Is Mr. Tamonia the badder news?
“No. It’s that dickwad Philip Rodell. …”
“The dickwad who happens to be the number-one hotshot in the district attorney’s office. The dickwad who put the Calibrio Family in the jug.”
“Whatever. He threw a hissy out front tonight.”
“Because …?”
“He waltzes in with his crew a little after eight. Three couples. No reservation. Just, ‘Seat us in a private room, sugar tits.’ Classy, huh? I tell him the private rooms are occupied, as is the main room, and, though it galls the crap out of me, I offer to set something up in the lounge for him. He tells me he doesn’t eat in lounges. He orders me to move one of our private-room parties to the lounge and give him that room.”
“I hope you didn’t suggest he shove anything up his ass.”
“Of course not. I told him to fuck off.”
“How’d that work out?”
She blinked her sky-blue eyes. “He called me a few names and demanded to talk with you. I told him you weren’t around and suggested he move on. He, in turn, threatened to keep sending health and fire inspectors until they find some reason to close us down.”
“That could be a problem.”
“I … don’t think so. I showed him the security camera we have over the front door. I asked if he thought his wife might like a copy of his entrance with his crew.”
“He wasn’t with his wife,” I said.
“Not unless he’s married to a thousand-dollar-a-night hooker.”
“What is it with these fighting lawmen, can’t keep it zipped? Well, you seem to have things in hand, Cassandra. Why’d you text me?”
“Because of the baddest news,” she
said. “Juan hit Bridget.”
Juan Lorinda had spent two tours in Iraq with the other members of his National Guard unit. During the second, he’d lost his right leg to a suicide bomber. He’d been working behind the bar for five months. Bridget Innes had been waitressing at the Bistro for more than a year. She was not a bad server, but she regularly ignored a rule I’d established about not dating customers.
“She okay?” I asked.
“Just a slap,” Cassandra said. “But enough to leave a red splotch on her cheek. She cried and tried to hit him with her tray, but I intervened.”
“This happen in the bar, in front of customers?”
“It was early. Just a couple of martini drinkers. They seemed to like the show. I told Bridget she could take the night off, but she preferred to stay. So I sent Juan home and put Josef on bar detail. Didn’t want whatever it was to start up again.”
“Juan go quietly?”
“Like a lamb. He tried to apologize to her, but Bridget wasn’t in a forgiving mood. Some temper on that girl.”
“Lovers’ quarrel?” I asked.
Cassandra held up a hand. “When you hired me, Billy, I told you I’d take care of every aspect of the Bistro except for one. I do not get involved in HR matters.”
“Forget human relations. Were they sleeping together? Or was it something else?”
“I don’t know. I don’t care. I have presented you with the problem, which is as far as I go.”
“Well, hell … I guess you’d better send her up,” I said. “And while you’re at it, have her bring me a roast beef on rye and a glass of merlot. The Altadon 2002.”
“Sure you wouldn’t rather the Cristal ’99?” she asked.
I stuck my tongue out at her departing back.
Fearless, that’s me.
Chapter
FIVE
I was perusing Bridget’s file when there was a tentative knock on the door.
Assuming it was she with my supper, I placed the file in a desk drawer and said, “Come on in.”
The tiny woman with a mop of red hair and an uncharacteristically sheepish grin was definitely not Bridget. “Hope you don’t mind my droppin’ in like this, Billy,” Gin McCauley, the morning-show coanchor, said. “Hildy and Spence suggested I get lost while they have a little chat with Gretchen about mah contract.” Her Greenville, Mississippi, accent, usually subdued except in moments of stress, was in full bloom.
