'How come?' Dover persisted. 'Not for my sake, I hope. He could do the job.' Sally looked daggers at him. He went right on pretending not to see.
'Didn't have anything to do with that,' Broxton said. Jerry Dover waited. The restaurant owner coughed. 'Can you keep this quiet? I don't want to hurt his chances somewhere else.'
'C'mon, Mr. Broxton. How many years have you known me? Do I blab?' Dover said.
'Well, no.' Charlemagne Broxton coughed again. 'We caught him taking rakeoffs from suppliers. Big rakeoffs. And so…'
If some food disappeared from the restaurant, well, that was part of the overhead. The manager and the cooks and the waiters and the busboys all stole a little. Skimming cash was something else again. If you got caught, you got canned. The one might not cost more than the other, but it went over the line. Dover wondered why Sloan needed to do it. Was he a gambler? Was he paying somebody else off? (Dover knew too much about that.) Or did he just get greedy? If he did, he was pretty dumb. And so? People were dumb, all the goddamn time.
'If you need me back, you know I'll be there,' Dover said.
'Good. I hoped you'd say that.' Charlemagne Broxton coughed one more time. 'Ah…There is the question of your pay.' He named a figure just over half of what Dover had been making before he went into uniform.
'You can do better than that, Mr. Broxton,' Dover said. 'I happen to know you were paying Willard Sloan more than that.' Sally gave him a Freedom Party salute. He scowled at her; that was dangerous even in private. And if you did it in private you might slip and do it in public. His wife stuck out her tongue at him.
Broxton sighed. 'Business isn't what it used to be. But all right. I'll give you what I was giving Sloan.' He named another figure, which did indeed just about match what Jerry Dover had heard. Then he said, 'Don't try fooling around to bump it up, the way Sloan did.'
'If you think I will, you better not hire me,' Dover replied.
'If I thought you would, I wouldn't have called,' Broxton said. 'But I didn't think Sloan would, either, dammit.'
'When do you want me to start?' Dover asked.
'Fast as you can get over to the restaurant,' the owner answered. 'I've got Luis tending to it now, and I want him to go back to boss cook fast as he can. A greaser in that spot'd steal me blind faster'n Sloan did.'
From what Jerry Dover had seen, honesty and its flip side had little to do with color. He didn't argue with Charlemagne Broxton, though. 'Be there in half an hour,' he promised, and hung up.
Sally flew into his arms and kissed him. 'They want you back!' she said. He nodded. Her smile was bright as the sun. She'd worked in a munitions plant during the war, but times had been lean since. Money coming in was a good thing.
After Dover detached himself from her, he put on a tie and a jacket and hustled off to the Huntsman's Lodge. He didn't want to be late, even by a minute. As he hurried along Augusta's battered streets, he contemplated ways and means. He didn't want the head cook pissed off at him. That was trouble with a capital T. He'd have to find a way to keep Luis sweet, or else get him out of the restaurant.
To his relief, the Mexican didn't seem angry. 'I'd rather cook,' he said. 'The suppliers, all they do is try to screw you. You want to take it, Seсor Dover, you welcome to it.'
Dover's grin was pure predator. 'I don't take it, man. I give it.' Luis blinked. Then he grinned, too.
Before Dover could give it, he had to find out what was there. He checked the refrigerators and the produce bins. The menu had changed a little since he went into the Army. Part of that was because some things were unavailable. Part of it was because the damnyankees who made up such a big part of the clientele these days had different tastes from the regulars who'd filled the place before the war.
A glance at the list of telephone numbers in the manager's office said a good many suppliers had changed, too. Some of the old bunch were probably dead. Some were more likely out of business. And some of the new ones had been giving Sloan kickbacks.
'Damned if you don't sound like Jerry Dover,' said a butcher Jerry'd known for a long time.
'Yeah, it's me all right, Phil,' Dover agreed. 'So your days of fucking the Huntsman's Lodge are over, through, finished. Got it?'
'I wouldn't do that!' Phil the butcher sounded painfully pure of heart.
He gave Dover a pain, all right. 'Yeah, and then you wake up,' he said sweetly.
He also enjoyed introducing himself to the new suppliers. If they gave him what they said they would and gave him decent prices, he didn't expect to have any trouble with them. If they tried to palm crap off on him…He chuckled in anticipation. They'd find out. Boy, would they ever!
For tonight, the place would run on what Luis had laid in. From what Dover had seen, the boss cook hadn't done badly. If he didn't want the job-well, that made things easier all the way around.
Most of the time, Jerry stayed behind the scenes. He would only come out and show himself to the customers if somebody wasn't happy and the waiters couldn't set things right by themselves. Tonight, though, he felt not just an urge but an obligation to look around and make sure things ran smoothly. He didn't want Charlemagne Broxton to regret hiring him back.
Everything seemed all right. The Mexican waiters and busboys sounded different from the Negroes who'd been here before, but they knew what to do. He'd started hiring Mexicans during the war. He'd already seen that they weren't allergic to work.
The customers seemed happy. Some of them were locals. One or two even recognized him, which left him surprised and pleased. More were U.S. officers. They didn't know him from a hole in the wall, which suited him fine. If the local women with them did know him, they didn't let on.
Then, around ten o'clock, a woman waved to him. She wasn't local, which didn't mean he didn't know her. He wished he'd stayed in his office. Melanie Leigh waved again, imperiously this time. He didn't want to go over to the table she shared with a U.S. colonel, but he feared he had no choice.
'Hello, Jerry,' she said, as brightly as if she hadn't been his blackmailing mistress and a likely Yankee spy. 'Don, this is Lieutenant-Colonel Jerry Dover. We've been friends a long time. Jerry, this is Don Gutteridge.'
'I'm very retired, Colonel Gutteridge,' Dover said, hesitantly offering his hand.
Gutteridge shook it. He was about fifty, in good hard shape for his age. 'You were in the Quartermaster Corps, isn't that right?' he said.
Dover nodded. 'Uh-huh. How did you know?' He looked at Melanie. Her blue eyes might have been innocence itself…or they might not have. Knowing her, they probably weren't.
'Let me buy you a drink, Dover, and I'll tell you about it,' Gutteridge said. 'War's over. We can talk about some things now that we couldn't before.'
At his wave, a waiter appeared. He ordered whiskey all around, asking Dover with his eyebrows if that was all right. Dover nodded. The waiter went away. Before the drinks came back, Dover asked, 'Were you Melanie's… handler? Isn't that what the spies call it?'
'Yeah, I was, and yeah, that's what we call it,' Gutteridge answered easily. 'You almost got her caught, you know.'
Jerry Dover shrugged, as impassively as he could. 'I gave it my best shot. I could afford the money-and I got value received for it, too,' he said. Melanie turned red; she was fair enough to make that obvious, even in the low light inside the Huntsman's Lodge. Dover went on, 'I could afford that, yeah, but I didn't want to pass on any secrets. And so I talked to some of our own Intelligence boys, and…'
'I didn't even wait for the answer to the letter I sent you,' Melanie said. 'Something didn't feel right, so I took a powder.'
The drinks arrived. Dover needed his. 'How'd you land on me, anyway?' he said.
'In the trade, it's called a honey trap,' Gutteridge answered for his former lover. 'We ran 'em all over the CSA, with people we might be able to squeeze if push ever came to shove again. It wasn't like your people didn't run 'em in the USA, either.'
'A honey trap. Oh, boy,' Jerry Dover said in a hollow voice. He looked at Melanie. 'I thought you meant it.'
'With you…I came a lot closer than I did with some others,' Melanie said.
'Great. Terrific.' He finished the drink in a gulp. What did they say? A fool and his money are soon parted. He'd parted with money, and he'd been a fool. He'd needed a while to realize how big a fool he'd been, but here it was in all its glory. He got to his feet. ''Scuse me. I have to go back to work.' Well, he wouldn't be that kind of fool
