“What are you doing here?” hissed the chef, taking a seat and leaning forward conspiratorially. “You are no longer welcome here!”
“You told me that this was one of your favorite restaurants,” teased my charming companion, sipping the Chianti through a smile.
“It is!” I protested. “Marco, tell the lady how much I love the menu here.”
Marco shook his head at me and appeared to be on the verge of tears. Marco was the chef and owner of Dino’s, the restaurant he had inherited from his father, who was named Gabe. As far as I could tell, the restaurant never even had a busboy named Dino let alone an owner.
“You promised me that you would never again come back here,” whispered Marco, his eyes darting from table to table trying to identify the source of the icy shivers that made their way up his spine. Like any Ristorante worth its pasta, it was Saturday evening, and the place was filling up faster than a crooked charity Santa’s pockets during the holiday shopping season. “You promised!”
“I did no such thing!” I corrected the sad little chef. “You made that assumption after you had me thrown out the last time I was here.”
“Why would anyone do such a thing?” cooed my companion.
“Because,” hissed the diminutive chef, “the last time he was here, three of my customers died.”
“That’s less than the time before that” I added to my friend. “Now that time was an event!”
Marco attempted speech, but the only thing that escaped him was a slight gurgling sound. Shifting his pleading gaze away from my less-than-sympathetic visage, he turned a desperate eye to my dinner guest, silently attempting to convince her to either charm me from his restaurant, or preferably, to bash me with the bottle of cheap Chianti on the table. I imagine that there was a small moment of hope when she picked up the bottle of wine.
“This is actually a quite decent bottle of Classico,” my guest told him, eliciting yet another gurgle from the cook.
“This is the best pizza in the entire city,” I told my friend. She waved a glass in Marco’s direction in salute.
“Not true!” the chef protested. “Philippe’s is better by far!”
“Nonsense,” I corrected him. “Philippe’s is strictly second fiddle to yours, my dear Marco.” I looked back at my friend. “Marco does this thing with the crust that gives it a slight nutty flavor. Brilliance! Sheer Brilliance!”
“I can hardly wait,” my companion said, shooting the chef a smile that would kill lesser mortals.
“Please,” Marco beseeched us. “When you come here, it’s only a matter of time till someone gets killed! I would prefer that it were not me!”
I took a sip of the Chianti and waited, watching the chef contort like a Wallenda. After a long ten count, I lowered my glass and looked the little man squarely in his beady little eyes.
“You know what I want,” I said. He was shaking his head before I even finished my sentence.
“Forget it,” he shot back at me. “I will never surrender that information to you!”
“In that case,” I told Marco, picking up the small jug of wine and refilling my glass. “My friend and I will be forced to make dining here a habit.” We raised our glasses and clicked them together. “What are your plans for tomorrow night?”
“Why I believe I am free,” she answered, taking a lady-like slug of Chianti to seal the deal.
“Enough!” screamed Marco. He jumped from the table and stormed over to the bar where he grabbed a pad of paper from Luigi, who was busy pretending to stand upright. He picked up a pencil and scribbled furiously on the paper before tearing off the sheet and marching back to our table.
“Here!” Marco said, taking my hand and thrusting the wadded up paper into it. “Take this and may the devil take you as well! Now, a deal is a deal! Leave and never, ever return!”
I took a look at the paper and saw that it indeed held my prize. Folding the document carefully, I placed it into my breast pocket next to the breath mints, and stood up, pulling the chair out for my guest.
“Let’s blow,” I told her. “A deal is a deal.”
“And what about diner?” she asked.
“Well,” I said, taking her by the arm and leading her out amid the cowering glances of the wait staff. “I guess it’s leftover meatloaf and mashed potatoes for us.”
She sighed as we walked out the door and hailed a cab. I was fortunate. My companion had sampled my meatloaf and decided to come with me. I opened the cab door and we got in. She leaned over and whispered into my ear.
“What’s on the paper?”
“It’s Marco’s recipe for pizza dough,” I told her. “The recipe’s been in the family for generations. At one time, the younger generation had to pay for the recipe in blood.”
“Seriously?”
I raised an eyebrow. “No, not about the blood thing,” she dismissed. “You really brought me all the way down here for a recipe?”
I was about to tell her that a family recipe was better than gold. It was like magic. If you had one as good as Marco’s, you never, ever let the audience see what was behind the curtain. You simply let them experience the magic and take your bow. I could have offered Marco money for the recipe, but he never would have gone for it. That crust was the stuff that dreams were made of, so in order to get a slice I had to apply what leverage I had. I would have told her all that, but she cut me off.
“Why don’t we go to your place and you can whip up some pizza for us?”
It didn’t work that way. In order for the magic trick to work right, you had to set it up. Like all the good things in life, anticipation was the key.
The cab pulled away and all conversation died as a giant blast erupted, tearing through the night and sending the cab spinning out of control. A hail of glass and pebbles rained down on the auto, and it skidded to a stop on the curb across the street from Dino’s Ristorante Italiano.
Or what used to be Dino’s Ristorante Italiano.
“What was that?” my lady friend gasped. She struggled to right herself in back as the cabbie shook off the effects of the blast.
“From the sound of it, I’d say about eight sticks of dynamite.” I pinched my nose and blew, trying in vain to chase away the ringing in my ears. Whoever put the dynamite in Dino’s was a rookie. It was an old building. Eight sticks were probably overkill. So to speak.
“Marco was right,” gasped my friend. “People do die around you.”
“Nonsense,” I told her. “People die because there is a certain subspecies that do things like lie, cheat, bomb buildings and shoot their fellow human beings. They are the reason that things fall over and people die. I’m just the guy who is trying to make some pizza.”
I told the cabbie to take us to my apartment, but my companion begged off, mumbling something about self-preservation as she did. I sighed and took notice of the dark plume of smoke coming from the ruins behind us. I had my prize, but a good crust was only part of the magic trick. It seemed if I wanted the whole act, I’d have to come up with a sauce recipe of my own.
MARCO’S MAGIC PIZZA CRUST
2 ½ cups whole flour (separated)
1 cup lukewarm water
2 ¼ teaspoons instant yeast
1 teaspoon salt
2 teaspoons olive oil
That’s right. A day or two.
THE CASE OF THE UNHAPPY CHICKPEA
When life deals you falafels, make a pita.
In my line of work, it helps if you can keep your eyes open and your ear to the ground, or something like that. You make friends, or what passes for friends, with everyone from mob men to choir boys, hoping that they’ll feed you whatever scraps of info you need to get by. I do my best to keep ahead of the comings and the goings around this burg, hoping that when things break my way it results in a payday. The first rule of business is that if you stand in line waiting for clients to come to you, more often than not you go hungry. Today I was in pursuit of both knowledge and lunch, and Lady Luck was my dining partner.
“The McDermott’s were in court this morning,” Manny told me as he handed me a steaming hot falafel pita wrapped up in yesterday’s newsprint. Manny runs the falafel wagon outside of the city courthouse, and was as permanent a fixture there as a hotdog cart at a Saturday baseball game or a gang boss at Sunday service. Everyone from Superior Court Justices to the court stenographers made at least one meal a week from Manny’s cart, and because of that Manny was a fixture at the court. He knew every case that was open in every courtroom in the building, and every Joe that set foot inside. Manny was so much an everyday part of courthouse life that the only way you would notice him would be when he wasn’t there.
Manny was never not there.
“The McDermotts,” I mumbled through a mouthful of deep-fried heaven. Manny, to his credit, was fluent in the language of gluttony and had no problem keeping up. “I hear that they’re pretty big money.”
“The biggest,” Manny said, handing me a much needed napkin. I took it because I figured I would end up wearing more of the falafel than eating it, and noticed that Manny kept his hand stretched out. Forgetting to collect payment for a sandwich is not how a guy like Manny kept his spot front-and-center at the courthouse since Moses was in diapers. I fished into my anemic-looking wallet and handed the street gourmand a sawbuck. He slipped the dirty, wrinkled bill into his pocket and didn’t bother coming back to me with any change.