Before Joy could reply, the doors pushed inward, bumping my behind. I leapt aside as Chef Tommy Keitel himself swept in.
“Chef,” Joy said, nodding. “You remember—”
“Clare Cosi!” Tommy exclaimed. “The coffee lady. Hey, good to see you again!”
He extended his hand, but the doors opened once more, and a member of the waitstaff entered, a tray of dishes on his shoulder. After an awkward moment, Keitel’s large, strong hand clasped mine.
“I’ve got to clean up my station,” Joy said, quietly excusing herself.
Keitel looked exactly as I remembered him. He was a tall, fit man in his fifties with arresting blue eyes, salt- and-pepper hair, a slightly crooked nose, and what looked to me like a perpetual smirk of confidence.
He released my hand then slipped off his coat and hung it on a peg. He wore a black silk shirt underneath, opened enough at the collar to show off his curling gray chest hairs, wiry muscles, and a silver chain. He grinned at me as he rolled up his sleeves, revealing the heavily developed forearms of a man who’d probably mixed and whisked and turned dough for thousands of hours in his lifetime.
“So, Clare, how do you like my kitchen?” Tommy asked with undisguised pride.
“Interesting,” I said, tightly folding my arms.
Tommy nodded, then cocked his head, shouting at a waiter who’d just pushed through the double doors. “Hey, René! Where the hell is Nappy?”
The Haitian man who’d waited on my table stopped and blinked, as if he was uncertain how to reply. “I, uh, just saw him, Chef,” he finally said. “I’m sure he’s around…”
I cleared my throat. “The last time I saw your maître d’, he was chasing your executive sous-chef into your back alley.”
Tommy winced. “Again?”
“Yes.” I nodded. “And I really think you should speak with—”
“René!” he barked again. “Did Dornier take any calls for me?”
“Your wife,” the waiter called as he moved toward the back staircase. “She rang three times during service, looking for you.”
Tommy scowled at that.
“And Mr. Wright stopped by. He needed to speak with you about something. Since you weren’t here, he spoke with Brigitte.”
Tommy’s scowl deepened.
“Chef Keitel,” I tried again. “Speaking of Brigitte, I witnessed quite a scene with her here earlier—”
“Tommy?” a new voice called from behind me. The voice was deep and male, almost guttural.
Tommy’s face instantly brightened as the stranger stepped into the kitchen through the dining room doors. “Hey, there he is!” Tommy cried. “Have any problem parking the SUV?”
The newcomer silently shook his head. He was clad in black from his pointy boots and chinos to his shiny black leather blazer. His sunglasses were black, too—so dark I thought for a second that he might be blind.
“Clare Cosi, this is Nick, a buddy of mine from Brighton Beach.”
I extended my hand. “Nice to meet you, Nick.”
The man drew his narrow hand out of his pocket and shook mine. His flesh was ice-cold, but then he’d just come in from outside, and it
“Well, it was great to see you, Clare!” Tommy said with a dismissive wave. “Nick and I have some work to do.”
“But I wanted to tell you—”
“Good night now!” Grabbing Nick’s arm, he turned his back to me and swiftly led the man toward the walk-in refrigerator.
Like pale, timid monks, the line cooks watched their larger-than-life boss and his strange friend wend their way to the back of the kitchen. Joy glanced in my direction and flashed a tiny wave.
“Don’t worry,” she mouthed to me. “I’ll speak to him.”
I waved back, realizing there was nothing more to do but trust my daughter. I wasn’t through butting in. I promised myself that. For now, however, Joy said she could handle explaining things to Tommy, and I had to trust that she would.
With clenched fists, I forced myself to walk away. Though I was sad to say good night to my daughter, I was far from broken up about leaving Tommy Keitel’s restaurant. More than anything, I wanted to get back downtown to my Village Blend, where at least I could get a decent cup of coffee.
Three
The Village Blend occupied a four-story Federal-style town house in New York’s historic West Village. To my customers, however, the Blend was more than just a java joint. It was a dependable oasis of calm in a crowded, expensive, stress-inducing city that routinely stripped its occupants of their dignity.
The place was my oasis, too. Behind my espresso bar, I felt capable and in control. After that knife-wielding episode in Solange’s cutthroat kitchen, I was relieved to get back to some comfortable, familiar,
As I stepped off the chilly Hudson Street sidewalk and pushed through the beveled glass door, however, I wondered whose coffeehouse I’d just entered.
Oh, it looked the same. Twenty coral-colored café tables sat on a restored wood-plank floor. There was a working fireplace, a colorful collection of antique grinding mills and tin coffee signs, a wrought-iron spiral staircase leading to a second-floor lounge, a line of French doors (which we threw open in warmer weather for sidewalk seating), and a blueberry marble counter fronting a pastry case and state-of-the-art espresso bar. What threw me, however, was the discordant noise reverberating off the exposed brick walls.
The pounding instruments mixed with the barking chant of an angry male voice had all the musicality of construction equipment. And then there were the enchanting lyrics:
It couldn’t have been my assistant manager. When he wasn’t scribbling one acts or landing small parts in locally filmed TV dramas, Tucker Burton was pulling shots for me to upbeat pop and retro eighties.
There was no way Gardner Evans would be playing rap, either. Gardner was a serious jazz musician who regularly decried “gangstas” making millions on selling “crack music to little crackers whose idea of slumming was going to the fringes of their suburbs for a 7-Eleven Slurpee” (his words, not mine).
The rap fan couldn’t have been fine arts painter Dante Silva. His preferences ran to Moby, Philip Glass, New Age, ambient, and space music. And if Joy’s father had been pulling shots of espresso tonight (which he did on occasion, when he wasn’t traveling the globe brokering deals for the planet’s finest micro-lots), opera or classical would have been playing right now. Unless Matt was feeling manic, in which case he’d be blasting the sort of
