unhealthy appetite for celebrity prattle, had warned me already about the guy’s rep:
“Knox is wired into this town, Clare. They say he has tentacles running around every New York inside track. And when those slithery limbs retract, look out!”
“Look out?” I said. “For what?”
“Bombshells, sweetie. Usually scandalous, always readable!”
“Damn the man,” Matt muttered. “Did you know Breanne has some sort of history with him?”
“History?” I said. “What do you mean, history? Were they lovers?”
“No. Bree says their relationship was professional. That’s all I know. That’s all she’ll
“Or you,” I noted.
Matt shook his head. “You don’t know the half of it…”
“What do you mean? Are you talking about that snarky item Knox published on Joy?”
Our daughter had been arrested for a terrible crime a few months back. When the news broke, there was enough dirt to fill ten pages, let alone a single gossip feature. Strangely, however, Randall Knox spent some of those precious column inches pretzeling his report so he could embarrass Breanne, and even Matt, whom he described not as an international coffee broker but as “Breanne Summour’s flavor of the month.”
“It has nothing to do with that item on Joy,” Matt assured me. Then he sighed and ran a hand through his short, dark Caesar. “I don’t want to alarm you or anything-”
Few things alarmed me more than my ex saying, “I don’t want to alarm you.”
“-but Knox has got some photographer trailing me around the city, waiting for me to do something embarrassing. Breanne saw the man stalking me one night. She knows he works for Knox.”
“What?!”
Matt lowered his voice. “It’s one of the reasons I’m bunking with you, if you want to know the truth. This is my place of business, so my being here is nothing unusual. All I have to do at the end of the night is take the back stairs up to the apartment, and I’ll have my privacy.”
“And I thought you were ducking a fat hotel bill.”
“Well, that, too, honestly.”
“So what does this photographer of Knox’s think he’s going to get by following you around?”
Matt sighed. “He snapped me just the other day, picking up a magazine from a newsstand.”
“So?”
“So, it was
I rolled my eyes. “Big deal.”
“I know. It’s ridiculous, right?”
“Your picking up a lads’ magazine is not scandalous behavior. Thousands of men do the same thing every day!”
“I know, but you see my problem, don’t you? I could stay in a hotel, but then some pretty young thing might ask me for directions or the time of day near my room door or the elevators that go up to my room, and
I frowned. “Matt, if you’re really on solid ground with Breanne, one stupid photo in a tabloid shouldn’t change it.”
“Forget it, Clare. You just don’t understand.”
“Apparently not.”
I turned my attention back to pulling Matt’s shot-something I
Within twenty-five seconds, the potable perfume was nearly finished oozing out of the machine’s spout, a fine-looking crema topping it off like a perfectly pulled dark beer. I stopped the pull, placed the Village Blend demitasse on its matching saucer, and slid the single shot across the blueberry marble counter.
Matt regarded his shot. “Where’s my lemon twist?”
I smiled. “You won’t need it.”
The espresso method actually wasn’t the best way to serve these particular beans. A French pressed or brewed method would have been better at bringing out the amazing flavor characteristics in the single-origin cherries. (And since we’d finally invested in two $11,000 Clover machines for the shop, I could have perfectly brewed Matt a single cup.) But I couldn’t resist the surprise factor.
Matt gave me a skeptical look until he sniffed his drink. Then one dark eyebrow rose. “This isn’t our house espresso roast.”
“No.”
He sipped once, and his eyes smiled. “You gave me the Esmeralda?”
“Yep.” For the past week, I’d been in the Blend’s basement, test-roasting the green beans that we’d acquired for Saturday’s wedding. Tonight’s test was the champagne of the coffee world, aka Esmeralda Especial.
I was stunned when Matt was able to secure the auction-lot Esmeralda beans. Although the Peterson family was still selling the most recent crop from their world- famous heirloom geisha trees, the celebrated first-place Panamanian Cup of Excellence microlot was as scarce as a sack of Hope diamonds.
Matt and I had explained this to Breanne, and we planned on purchasing other Esmeralda beans; the ones still available on the market. But the woman pitched a fit, absolutely insisting that we secure the famous, first-prize, $130-a-pound auction-lot beans for her high-profile wedding guests.
“They’ve read about the auction lot beans; they’ve seen the cable stories about it; and that’s what I want my guests drinking. The world-record auction lot. Not sloppy seconds!”
Sloppy seconds? I’d wanted to strangle her. The Esmeralda beans still available were among the highest quality on the planet. They were from the same damn geisha trees as the world-record auction lot, for goodness’ sake; grown on the same damn farm! But Breanne refused to “settle.”
Lucky for us all, Matt had some friends who owed him favors. He made a few calls, and voila! Two ten-pound bags of the scarce green beans appeared at my doorstep. (And since one pound of coffee yielded approximately forty cups, we now had enough for Breanne’s 350 VIP guests to sample.) Along with the Waipuna farm’s 100 percent Kona Peaberry, the small lot of Kopi Luwak, and our signature espresso drinks, the Village Blend was bound to make an impression, too.
“Nice job on the roast,” Matt said between long, contemplative sips.
“Thanks. I kept it light to preserve the nuances-a no-brainer on the Esmeralda.”
“Aren’t you having any?”
“I cupped it earlier with Dante-” I tipped my head toward my newest barista, a tattooed, shaved-headed, fine arts painter with a penchant for space and ambient music. (He had some of it playing now: a hypnotic, rhythmic electronic pulsing that would have sent me to dreamland if it weren’t for the double espresso I’d consumed before Matt sat down.)
Hearing his name, Dante Silva glanced up from his conversation with the pretty young mochaccino orderer.
“Need anything, boss?” he called.
“No, it’s okay.”
I wasn’t thrilled with Dante calling me “boss,” but it was better than “Ms. Cosi,” which is how he’d repeatedly addressed me when I’d first hired him. Sure, I’d asked him to call me Clare, but despite Dante’s outlaw appearance, the guy had scrupulous manners-no doubt from the same sort of traditional Italian upbringing I’d gotten from my own grandmother. Luckily, our resident slam poetess, Esther Best, held virtually no respect for authority, and her routine, semisarcastic address of me as “boss” had finally loosened up Dante enough to break him of his “Ms. Cosi” habit.
Matt knocked the counter with his knuckles. I glanced back to him.
“You off soon?” he asked.
“Why?”
“I thought you’d like to come with me to the White Horse. Koa Waipuna just got into town, and I’m meeting him for a drink.”
“Sure. I’m sorry I missed him the last time he was here. We can go as soon as Gardner gets here to relieve me.”
Five minutes later, the front door bell jingled, and a long-limbed African American jazz musician with a freshly trimmed goatee strode purposefully across the wood-plank floor.
“Okay, Dante,” called Gardner, waving a hand-labeled CD case. “Enough with your Sominex playlist! I just cut a new fusion mix with my group. Let’s wake things up in here!”
TWO
WALK down almost any of my neighborhood’s narrow, tree-lined streets, and you’ll see three centuries of architectural history, from Federal, Greek Revival, and Italianate town houses to early twentieth-century apartment buildings. Almost everyone I know has applauded the saving of these landmarks and cried over the treasures that were lost before the historic district was sanctioned. But no one cried hard enough, it seemed to me, over losing the guts of these places.
While the buildings around the Village Blend were now preserved by law, the businesses inside them weren’t, and every year that ticked by, more of my neighborhood’s legendary establishments folded, their storefronts replaced with the sort of trade you’d find in upscale suburban malls. What made Greenwich Village Greenwich Village was drifting away faster than Al Gore’s ice caps.
That’s the main reason I valued the White Horse. Like my Village Blend, the landmark tavern stubbornly refused to let go of its moorings. Since Welsh poet Dylan Thomas tossed back eighteen fatal shots in its paneled back room fifty years ago, the White Horse has been hyped as the watering hole of literary legends.
True, Norman Mailer used the joint as a second living room, mainly because, as he so graciously put it, “If you invited people to your house, it was not that easy to
