Дэймон Найт - Orbit 8

“We got back into the bar,” said Harry, “and I was setting them up for the house—the fishermen and about five others—when he introduced himself. ‘I’m Joe Nucci,’ he said, and I told him who I was. He nodded and said, ‘Uh-huh. Glad to meet you.’ Then he told me who the other guys were.” Harry looked at Roseboom again. “All out-of-towners, except Christmas Angel.”

“Yeah,” said Roseboom.

“Well, we all socked ‘em down with both hands for about two hours, and a couple of guys all covered with dust, T-shirts, work pants, you know, came in, and they looked at Joe and he lifted his eyebrows and they just nodded and sat down at the other end of the bar. I just served them two triples and they said ‘Thank you,’ and ‘Thank you.’

“I guess it was that ‘Italian food’ business that got Joe and I talking about...business. ‘Goddamn it, Harry old buddy,’ he kept saying, ‘a guy who runs such a hell of a bar has got to have a kitchen, too! And what could it be with a name like that but a guinea kitchen?’ And I explained how I was going to get the kitchen running early next year, with help and all, and hire a pianist, and have a free lunch in the bar, and he kept pounding on the bar and hissing, ‘Yeah! Right! Great!’ Hell, I told it to him just like it is now—you saw it. And he nodded, and grinned, and kept punching me in the shoulder, and I never had a chance to think about closing time, so they stayed till four thirty. But somebody thought to shut off the sign.” Harry stared off at the sea, remembering. “We were telling each other our life stories all night. Then he waved from the front porch, wiggled his fingers, he still had a drink in each hand, and he yelled, ‘Don’t forget what I said, Harry, boy!’ and he said, ‘Don’t worry any more about that dentist shit! You’re a community service now!’ “ Harry turned around. “And you know, I’m as good a restaurateur as I ever was an orthodontist?”

“What then?” asked Roseboom.

“Well, I started to get phone calls. This designer. That manufacturer. Beautiful terms. If I sounded reluctant, why, they’d come down a few thousand! I couldn’t afford not to get that goddamn kitchen all outfitted and working! Then, when the stuff was all installed, and painted, and the drawers full of knives and like that, and we had lots of flour and all around, this fat guy comes walking in one day. ‘I am Ercole Barone,’ he says. ‘Where is my kitchen?’ “ Harry paused. “You don’t know who Ercole Barone is.”

“No,” said Roseboom. “Should I?”

Harry sighed. “Vulgarian,” he said. “I shouldn’t say that, because I didn’t know myself. All I knew was that this huge guy who looked like Oliver Hardy, if Oliver Hardy had been born in Rome, had come in and started to turn out these unbelievable meals. There was one sent to me on the third floor, every day, nine a.m., three thirty, and nine p.m., unless I sent word to hold it. My God,” said Harry, remembering.

He recovered himself. “Ercole Barone is the master chef of a well-known restaurant in New York whose name I dare not divulge. He plans the menus for a shipping line and four airlines on the side. He works in town nine months out of the year.” Harry looked at Roseboom, saw he was not impressed, and scowled. “The other three, he works for me. The Italian legation and the Italian Mission to the UN drives here once a week, summers, in DPL-licensed cars, to eat Barone’s cooking. I have seen a silver-haired diplomat weeping into a plate of scampi Fra Diavolo, and there is hardly a man among them who is not in tears when he has to leave.

“Then there is the little old lady who comes in every day to make the pasta dough and pizza crusts. She does not speak a word of English. She arrives in a rented limousine. She turns out more starch than the farms of Idaho, finishes at four p.m., walks to the back door, and Barone gives her two twenty-dollar bills I have given him for this purpose. I ask why only forty bucks? Why two twenties? And I always get the same reply: ‘Twenty for pay, twenty for carfare.’ She comes in by private plane from somewhere , is met by a limousine, driven to my doorstep, and then every day at four, driven back to meet her plane at the local airport.

“Then there’s the clientele. And the entertainment. The old days of serving gin and tonics to the beach bums are long gone. Sure, we let the suntanned, windblown crowd in afternoons, but at night, it’s different. If we ever had a fire like poor Telredy’s, the bill for the furs in the checkroom would be bigger than the cost of the whole building, burned flat. We don’t just get the gold-plate trade from the trotting track, and the wanderers from the city! There were plates from nineteen states in that parking lot one night!”

Harry caught himself and lowered his voice. “The entertainment. Yeah. We don’t have any. It’s taxed. But what do we do when a truck rolls up one afternoon, delivers us a very special concert piano, and at nine that night, a certain blind jazz pianist shows up for dinner and then kids on the keys for a few hours afterward? Or when a British rock group comes for fettucine Alredo and gigs until five the next morning? Now, this is not every day. The everyday stuff is Joe the Nuts singing Verdi, or his buddies singing...what they sing. What he sings.”

Roseboom started to speak, and Harry put up his hand wearily. “I’m not naming any names.” He scratched his chest reflectively. “One night he even had his daughter with him. Nobody even thought to turn out the sign that night.

“And then there’s Joe. He’s really pretty good. And he puts his heart into it, it’s as much fun to watch as to listen. You know how he worked as a singing waiter when he was a kid. Do you know one thing that preys on Joe’s mind? That he’s never been able to get Franco Corelli to come in for a few days. Corelli is his idol.”

“A capo don of the Mafia,” said Roseboom, “working as a singing waiter. Dear God, no!”

“We don’t say ‘Mafia,’ “ said Harry. “ ‘Mafia’ is a bad word. Old hat. It’s usually ‘the Family,’ or ‘the Honored Society,’ or—this is Joe talking—’We the People.’ “

Roseboom gave him a hard look. “When were the firm financial arrangements made?”

“Weren’t,” said Harry.

“You keep no records? I think, just speaking off the top of my head, that you people are all in trouble.”

“Records? My taxes are in order. I’m not a vital industry, subject to audits by state or federal governments. As somebody or other once said, as long as the law can’t require me to be a literate, it can’t make me keep records. They tell me I’ve got a pretty good tax lawyer.”

“Don’t you know for sure?”

“I’m in pretty good shape,” said Harry, quietly. “I’m rich, and I’m not in jail. I’m enjoying life for the first time ... in a long time.”

Roseboom was silent for a while. Then he said, “I was going to ask you—I do ask you to testify at some future date, to a grand jury soon to be constituted, against your Mafia connections.”

“Why?” said Harry.

“Why?” yelled Roseboom. “They’ve taken over your business, they’ve put you under their thumb—”

“How’s that? I run my business. And I do a good job. What they’re doing is throwing business my way and helping me keep on top. And, mister, it’s pure cream.” He paused reflectively. “Now, it is true that Joe put a safe in my office that only he and Christmas Angel know the combination to, and that the Angel handles the receipts. But the Angel is Joe’s employee, and Joe is my friend. My own take has gone up every year, and I can’t see anything significant being drained off.”