cooking up freebase in a bathroom, it was a good thing. Expediting was
done by whoever happened to be in the kitchen at the time. Food for
Baltimore was trucked into our walk-ins, rotated into our stocks, and
then shipped out—such as it was—the next day. We made our own pasta
. . . sometimes. We also bought pasta from our other stores, we bought
pasta from outside, often all three at once. Gigantic steam kettles
simmered with Gorgonzola and garlic cream for our very popular garlic
bread. (Eight bucks for a baguette and some goo.) And herds of
sightseers, tourists, businessmen, gawkers, rubes and hungry fanny-
packers poured through the doors.
The food was not bad. God knows we had enough cooks, plenty of
equipment, and room to put it. Somehow, things got done, though I have
no idea how; the place had its own momentum, like some rudderless
ocean liner, captain and crew long gone—it just kept going, plowing
through ice fields. Someone with a brain had designed the line: a
sensible trough of water for pasta, with cute fitted baskets, ran the length
of the range-tops, for easy dunking. Nice refrigerated bains held
garnishes and mise-en-place, so that each cook had an artist's palette of
easy-access ingredients at hand. Downstairs, a long bar curled around the
dining room, serving a lighter menu of trattoria items, sandwiches,
quick-grilled foods, cheese, shellfish. Outside, when it was warm, a long
barbecue grill serviced the café.
I fine-tuned the menu, meeting with the Shadow for a few minutes a day,
satisfying him by simply responding to his culinary whims. "Bagna
cauda? I can do that. No problem! Clams oreganata? Why not?" I had no
delusions of chefly integrity or personal agenda where Italian menu
items were concerned, so I was relatively responsive compared to my
mysterious predecessor—and the Shadow seemed happy with me. In
fact, after people started asking me, in hushed voices, what the Shadow
thinks of this, and what the Shadow thinks of that, I realized that the
three or four minutes a day I spent talking to him made me, in the eyes
of everyone else in the organization, his closest associate—though I