It was make-work, and I knew it. The Shadow called to let me know that
he wanted me to create a brunch menu and a happy-hour buffet. This was
an easy enough assignment, as there were only about three bar customers
who spent their evening chatting with the manager; and brunch, such as
it was, consisted of about five tables of Sunday tourists who'd wandered
into the empty dining room by mistake while window shopping and been
too embarrassed to leave after realizing their mistake. The place had
been open only a few months and already gave off the distinct odor of
doom. Large-scale doom. There were twelve cooks, all new equipment, a
bake shop, a pasta-making department. The Silver Shadow had spent
millions on this colossal monument to hubris and cocaine. And you
could see, in the cooks' faces, that they knew—as sure as they knew that
they lived in a second-class city—that they'd be out of work soon. The
body was dying; only the brain had yet to receive the message.
I worked fast, spending a lot of time shuttling back and forth to New
York to score in bombed-out shooting galleries on the Lower East Side.
My pay had never been arranged properly; when I needed money, I
simply asked the GM to give me a few hundred, which he seemed happy
to do, as money bled quickly out of Gino's every orifice. There was no
business at the restaurant, so there was soon nothing to do. When I
couldn't make it back to the real city, I'd drink at the Club Charles, an
atmospherically crappy dive with a vaguely punk-rock clientele, or
watch TV in my lonely room with a view.
I passed the Baltimore job to Dimitri as soon as I could. Maybe it wasn't
the nicest thing I ever did, but it was a chef's job, and the money was
good—and hey, room and board was free! Once again, I called the
Shadow, told him there was nothing for me to do, and was told in
response, "They need you in New York! Get right back! They're really
looking forward to meeting you!"
Which is how I found myself in a bathroom full of machine-guns.