special table that looked like something out of an episode of
“I smelled a unique story there, and dredged up every piece of information I could about it. I tracked it down and tried to get in. No luck, private club, membership card only, that sort of story. No record of it with the health department, no advertising. So I started watching the clientele going in and out, always in late at night, always out again well before dawn or leaving in a well-tinted limo the next day from a lightless garage. I managed to meet the owner and talked him into letting me work there.”
He nudged some cold embers back into one of the fire pits with a polished dress shoe. The skull pin broke into the dwarf “Whistle While You Work,” but quietly.
“I met my first translife there. From then on, I was hooked. So many legends, so much human history, quietly filling forgotten corners, unrecognized.”
“We like it that way,” I said.
“At first, I thought I had a food exposé that would win me a Pulitzer, but I found the customers were more interesting than the story—and the money! The money, my dear Woolsley. I learned everything I could about the business and found this place. Sunk my life savings into it, but the game hasn’t gone my way. Hoped you’d tell me where I’ve gone wrong, dear fellow.”
“Let’s take a look inside,” I suggested.
Third, décor. An easyish fix most of the time. We walked in through the front door. If Mastiff’s own eyes couldn’t tell him where he’d gone wrong, nothing short of a burning bush on a Sinai mountaintop could.
As soon as I saw his interior I decided this would be an easy job. All I needed was to find a couple of crowbars and a flamethrower.
The barn’s interior was architecturally interesting, inspiring even, with the high, thick-timbered ceiling and small loft at one end, currently occupied by the bar. Big, airy, yet intimate in the way all those beams ate up the sound. Most translife don’t care for noise and clamor. The tall windows facing the Mississippi gave a beautiful show of a green-and-blue river valley, vaster than the Grand Canyon and very nearly as deep, with the Minnesota bluffs a blue smear on the horizon.
There were definite possibilities in the way you looked down into the kitchen. He’d opened up the barn floor so you could see into a bit of the cooking line setup in the old pigpens. He’d set up sort of an open-air dumbwaiter. Above the big kitchen hatch hung what I first thought was an art piece. Some chains and a big platform featuring a surgeon’s table not unlike the one used to animate Dr. Frankenstein’s go at creation gave me all kinds of ideas for culinary showmanship.
However, as we toured the inside, I felt like putting on welding goggles to keep out the ugly. All that sturdy beauty to work with, and Mastiff decided to cover it up with garish flourishes.
Mastiff had ruined with décor what should have been won with space and view. Ghastly brass and fern fixtures that managed to combine the worst excesses of the late seventies and early eighties clustered here and there on the barn floor like scattered dog turds. Pointless plaster mini-Greek columns stood next to vintage washtubs and gas-station Coca-Cola machines, and a Tesla coil buzzing here and there. Imagine Castle of Dr. Frankenstein meets bricky urban loft meets postindustrial rave.
Curtains and linens in purple and black and pink with flecks of red with billowing gauzy cotton hung in festoons from the ceiling, trying to look ethereal but succeeding only in adding to the tatty feel and hiding the interesting details in the ceiling. Pointing out his acquisitions with one arm while the other remained anchored across the small of his back in a ducal pose, Mastiff prattled on, gassing about where he’d obtained the fabric and how much time it had taken to get the draping just right.
Small spotlights on conduit riggings suspended ten meters below that lovely wooden ceiling lit fabric, floor, and tables haphazardly, ruining the rustic effect.
He led me up the stairs to the loft-bar. There, old polymer countertops in dreadful puddle shapes, everything rounded and looking like tongues, lapped around too-thin high-backed chairs with pointed, stamped metal moons crowning the backrest. The chairs seemed eager to do someone an injury.
He led me to the railing overlooking the dining floor.
“We put musical guests on the rising platform,” Mastiff said, pointing to the central Dr. Frankenstein rig on its chains. He gripped the rail like an admiral surveying his battleship from the bridge in a storm. “Or go-go dancers on singles’ night. I know an absolutely brilliant troupe from the Twin Cities, two succubi and a harpy —”
“In short there’s simply not, a more congenial spot . . .” sang the golden stickpin. Clearly the spirit inside was blind, deaf, and mad.
I only half-listened as it sang on. Singles’ night! Arse-over, I was trapped in an eighties grease-and-grind meat market. All that was missing was a backlit sign featuring two Regency silhouettes and a name like
The crowning insult to the eye was the centerpieces on every table in the bar: lolling skulls with bloodred wax candles atop, dribbling down on both skull and tabletop. I leaned over to get a better look.
“Tee-hee, dearie,” Mastiff said, losing a little of his lordship’s air.
This sort of excess had been popular for about ten minutes in some London and New York and L.A. clubs two decades back, a mixture of an old Universal horror set and furniture shaped like various pieces of the human digestive system. It lingered now only in Tokyo, where the Japanese translife put their own twist on it by adding enough neon to represent the Human Genome Project and pumping up the technopop.
It stuck out in the rolling hills of the Mississippi River Valley like high heels on a cow.
He’d sent me his numbers. Unless his accountant was as cluelessly skeevy as his decorator, a few customers were still braving the fugly to eat here every week. Perhaps the service staff and food would be the Skyline’s salvation.
“I’ll want to watch a service tonight,” I said. “And we’ll still need to see the kitchens.”
Last, food. It can be an easy fix, or it can be like tunneling in wet sand. All depends on the staff and owner. Mastiff took me downstairs into the old pigpens. His kitchen crew was already at work.
A golem ran the kitchen with the help of two zombies.
My heart sank.
If there’s anywhere you don’t want a golem, it’s managing a kitchen. As for zombies, they have their uses, but not where food’s being prepared. You don’t want earlobes sloughing off into the mustard.
Mason Mastiff was inordinately proud of his golem and the great expense a Jewish Kabbalist in Marseilles had charged to create it. To his mind, with a golem all the cost was up front. It worked for free from then on, often for decades, without needing much more wizardry, barring accidents. I suppose it looked impressive enough, this mountain of copper and tin, ladles, skewers, pans, and tongs. A pair of blue butane lights serving as eyes regarded me across a slab of stainless steel.
“Let’s see it make me an omelet,” I said.
Mastiff stuck his tongue in his cheek in thought. “You’re serious?”
“It’s supposed to cook. I didn’t ask it to fart out the ‘Stars and Stripes Forever.’ ”
“Chef Cuivre, an omelet if you please.”
The golem clanked into motion. A nine-inch pan clicked out of its forearm and the mountain of cookware and utensils turned to the stove.
“Butter. Eggs,” it said. It took me a moment to realize it was talking to the zombies.
They stood there in their hairnets, stupidly, faces even more green when contrasted with the kitchen whites. They wore baseball caps advertising what were local radio stations, I assumed.
“Buck! Tooth! You heard the chef,” Mastiff said. “Sorry, everyone is used to orders being printed out on a ticket.”
“Is that the problem?” I said.
Thanks to dropped eggs and butterfingers, my two-egg omelet took five from the fridge. Why do Americans insist on refrigerated eggs?
The golem extruded a silicone spatula and went to work on the beaten eggs. It worked well enough, but
