Elliot Allagash (7 page)

“I’ll have a watercress sandwich,” Elliot told him. “Seymour?”

I could feel my armpits prickling with perspiration. How could I order when they hadn’t even brought over menus?

“Just order whatever you want,” Elliot whispered.

“Anything?”

Elliot nodded casually.

“Okay,” I said. “I’ll have a cheeseburger with onion rings.”

The maître d’ laughed.

“We don’t serve
cheeseburgers,”
he said. “Or onion…
rings.”

He pronounced the words like they were bodily secretions.

“Oh,” I said. “Sorry.”

I could feel the blood rushing to my face. I started to stammer out an order for a watercress sandwich—I knew they had that—but Elliot waved his hand in the air.

“No,”
he said. “You wanted a cheeseburger.”

He turned to the maître d’.

“Are you telling me you won’t serve
my
associate the items he requested?”

The maître d’ sighed.

“This isn’t McDonald’s,” he said.

Elliot’s eyes took on a strange sparkle.

“So you’re denying him a cheeseburger?” he asked, his voice spookily soft. “And you’re denying him onion rings.”

“Jesus,” I whispered. “Elliot, it’s okay. I’ll order something else.”

“You will
not,”
he shouted.

People at other tables turned to face us; we were the youngest customers in the room, I noticed, by about forty years.

“I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you to leave,” the maître d’ said.

“Very well,” Elliot said. “We’ll leave your establishment. But first, I’ll take one of your business cards.”

He walked over to the maître d’s desk and removed a card from a small silver tray.

“And leave you one of mine,” he said.

Elliot didn’t hold a position at any of his father’s companies, beyond the informal title of “heir.” But he had a business card all the same, consisting of his name—
Elliot Allagash
—and nothing
else. He took one out of his pocket and laid it faceup on the reservation book. Then he grabbed my elbow and yanked me out into the street, into the back of his waiting limo.

“What the hell was that about?” I asked.

But Elliot wasn’t listening. He was cheerfully copying the maître d’s name and number into his little black book.

“Drive,”
he said.

And the car roared crazily down the avenue.

• • •

Elliot didn’t come to school for a while. The teachers told us he was hospitalized with tropical parasites, but I knew where he really was: at home, plotting his revenge on the Winchester. I didn’t see or hear from him until two weeks later, when his limousine pulled up to my bus stop after school. The other kids watched silently as James rolled down his tinted window and motioned for me to get inside. Elliot was waiting for me in the backseat. He was wearing a silk bathrobe, and he had an unusually serene expression on his face. I asked him how he was feeling, on the off chance that he was actually sick.

“Go to the Sun,” he told James, ignoring my question. “Let’s see about that late edition.”

James drove to the Sun Building, ran inside, and emerged seconds later with a crisp new copy of the paper. He handed it to Elliot, who plucked out the Food and Dining section and laid it in my lap. It was still warm from the presses.

“Page three,” Elliot said.

When I finally looked up from the paper, Elliot was sipping champagne from a tall glass.

“Would you like a drink?” he asked.

“No thanks,” I said. “I have math homework.”

Elliot drained the last of his champagne and immediately refilled his glass.

“Did you…do this?” I asked, gesturing vaguely at the newspaper.

Elliot closed his eyes and held the warm newspaper to his face, like it was a beloved puppy or kitten.

“Elliot, it really wasn’t that big a deal! I mean, you didn’t have to—”

He raised his index finger to silence me.

“Elliot?” I asked. “How did you do this?”

He pressed a button and the sunroof retracted, enveloping us in warm light.

“Have you ever heard of Alston Bertels?” he asked.

“No, who’s he?”

Elliot sighed.

“I’ll take it from the top,” he said. “No interruptions.”

• • •

I had never heard of Alston Bertels, but apparently most New Yorkers had. He was the reigning food critic for
The New York Times
and had been for more than thirty years. In eight hundred words Bertels could transform an obscure noodle house with empty tables and faded menus into the most coveted reservation in the city, with celebrity clients and lines around the block. And he routinely closed down restaurants with a single, cutting review. He always ate under an assumed name, to avoid preferential treatment. And in recent years he had begun to wear a disguise, just in case a clever maître d’ kept his photograph on hand.

On Tuesday, three days after Elliot’s expulsion from the Winchester, he had James call the restaurant. Speaking in a whisper, James told the maître d’ that he was an intern at
The New York Times
and that Alston Bertels would be coming to the Winchester in the near future. He had reviewed it favorably thirty years ago, James told the spellbound maître d’, and he wanted to see if its quality had remained consistent. In exchange for a complimentary meal, James said, he would tell the maître d’ which assumed name Bertels planned to use and the disguise he planned to wear. The maître d’ promptly agreed to the proposal.

“He’s coming on the twenty-second,” James whispered. “He’ll be wearing a full beard. And he’ll make the reservation under the name Dan Lubecki.”

The maître d’ hesitated.

“Like…the Nazi? Who’s getting out of prison?”

“Yes,” James said. “Alston has an unusual sense of humor.”

The maître d’ asked James to repeat the information to make
sure he had heard it all correctly. Then he asked him for his name so he could arrange his complimentary meal.

“I can’t tell you that,” James said. “If anyone finds out I leaked this, I’ll get fired.”

“Well, I’ll need to put
something
in the reservations book.”

“I understand,” James said, reading the final line of Elliot’s script. “Just call me ‘Hal Sagal.’”

• • •

“Hal Sagal? Who’s that?”

Elliot wrote it down on a cocktail napkin, with large spaces between the letters. It took me a while, but eventually I was able to rearrange them.

“Oh,” I said.
“Allagash!”

“I know, I know,” he said. “Anagrams are trite. But you want to know something?
You have to know your audience
. I swear to God—anything more subtle would have been lost on him.”

• • •

James, posing as a disgruntled Winchester waiter, called every gossip columnist in town. He told them that his bosses were Nazis, and that they had invited Dan Lubecki to spend his first night of freedom in twenty years at their restaurant. Most of the columnists were unable to get reservations in time to witness the event, but a few of the more prominent ones were able to finagle tables. After the columnists had been contacted, the only person left to call was Lubecki himself. The Nazi was skeptical at first, but by speaking in an Alsatian accent and quoting Hitler several times,
James was able to convince Lubecki that he
was
in fact the maître d’ of the Winchester and he
did
in fact want him as his guest. Unsurprisingly, Lubecki had no other social plans for the evening and happily agreed to attend.

James called the Winchester once more time, using a British accent this time, to make a reservation on behalf of a “Mr. Lubecki.” The maître d’ did his best to act natural, but his excitement was obvious. He sounded, James reported, like a first-time gambler calling a large bet with aces in his hand.

• • •

“We’ll hit the
Daily News
next,” Elliot said, “then the
Observer
, the
Post
, and the
Times.”

We made the rounds in silence. I was too shocked too speak, and Elliot was too exhausted from his efforts. Every few minutes, James stopped the car, fetched a tabloid, and laid it on top of the stack that was rapidly accumulating in the backseat. But Elliot didn’t bother to read them. He only moved once on the ride home: to take out his black book and silver pen and make a little check mark with his tiny, pale hand.

• • •

As far as I knew, the ninth-grade class president didn’t have any official duties beyond posing for a picture in the yearbook. But it was a prestigious position, something colleges “looked at,” and several weeks at the end of eighth grade were devoted to campaigning.

For the past three years, class president had been a two-person
race between Lance and a girl named Ashley. It was usually pretty lopsided. Ashley always won the support of the math club, and one year she had convinced the foreign-exchange student to campaign for her, but everyone else tended to pull for Lance.

“Tell me more about your opponents,” Elliot demanded. “Who are their enemies? What are their weaknesses?”

I glanced across the cafeteria. Lance was leaning back in his chair, but he still towered over all the other boys at his table. He’d recently begun to gel up the front of his hair. It resembled a shark’s fin and made him look even taller than he was already. He was shouting out catchphrases from a movie he had seen recently and everyone around him was laughing hysterically.

“Well, Lance is pretty funny,” I said. “And he’s also really cool.”

I looked at Ashley. She was at the edge of the second table eating apple slices and studying for a French vocabulary test with color-coded flash cards. Whenever somebody made a joke, she looked up from her flash cards, and her halting, nervous laugh invariably silenced the table. People rarely made fun of Ashley, but they tried their best to ignore her. Whenever she said anything, her hands started shaking and her eyes grew wide with panic. It was stressful just to watch.

She wore her auburn hair in a single braid that was so painfully taut it resembled a length of rope. Lance occasionally yanked on it, causing her eyes to well up with tears. It was a doubly cruel gesture, since it also landed her in detention for “being involved in an altercation.” I always felt terrible when Ashley shuffled into Ms. Pearl’s classroom, her eyes downcast to avoid Lance’s smirk. My
detentions never bothered me. Even if I wasn’t responsible for any of my fights, I was sure I had done
something
over the course of the week to merit punishment. Ashley was completely innocent, though, and her sentence was an outrage. I never told her I felt this way, but once I gave her half a Laffy Taffy, and I think she grasped the import of the gesture.

“Ashley’s not so popular,” I said. “But she’s probably the smartest girl in the grade. I thought she had a chance last year, because Lance didn’t put up any posters or write a speech. But then at the last minute Lance promised a new scoreboard, with a Glendale lion on it, and everyone voted for him. He never got us one, but it was still an awesome idea. West Side Prep has one with a tiger on it and they’re always bragging about it at games.”