The Fat Innkeeper (19 page)

“Did you enjoy the talk tonight, Clara?”

She offered Am a slight, regretful smile, and shook her head. “I am afraid I did not, Am.”

That surprised him. Clara invariably expressed delight at all the gatherings she attended. It didn’t really matter what the
event was. Clara had sat through more presentations than most figurehead royalty, had listened and happily mingled with gatherings
of butchers, and bakers, and candlestick makers.

“Why didn’t you like it?”

“I didn’t care,” she said, with patrician dignity, “for Brother Howard.”

Am nodded agreeably. Brother Howard certainly didn’t offer old-time religion. “His message was a little bit different,” he
said.

“His words didn’t bother me,” said Clara firmly. “It was the man himself.”

Her vehemence was unusual. Clara’s conversations always tended toward the pleasant. She was invariably polite (even on the
one occasion when the police had handcuffed her and led her off the Hotel grounds for trespassing, vagrancy, and violating
a restraining order, as well as a few other charges that Melvin Carrelis had insisted upon).

“He’s definitely not your usual man of the cloth,” said Am, fishing for more.

Clara didn’t respond. They continued walking, were almost to the lobby when she spoke again. “Not long after I separated from
my husband,” she said, “I went to visit my mother, who was very sick at the time. She had emphysema. She was not very accepting
of her… situation.

“Perhaps,” Clara said with a small smile, “it runs in the family.”

Crazy, thought Am, like a fox.

“My mother,” she continued, “started doing things very unlike her. She had always prided herself on being very proper, but
her illness changed that. She started looking desperately for a magic cure, made a point of visiting everyone who claimed
they were a healer. Brother Howard belonged to that unsavory ilk, even if he didn’t go by that name at the time.

“I accompanied her to his… spectacles. The sessions were called ‘The Healing Within.’ He offered a very slick snake-oil show.
God had given him the power to teach others how to heal themselves, he said. He strutted around holding the Bible like he
was the author. Apparently, he was on some healing circuit, went around the country offering his courses. That was smart of
him. By being a rolling stone, he never stayed long enough for the funerals. My mother signed up for his three weeks of lessons.
Some took to his healing very well. The deaf heard, and the crippled walked, that is if seeing is believing. But what I witnessed
most was Reverend Gardenia doing very well by himself.”

“Gardenia?”

“Not a name easy to forget. Sometimes he was even referred to as the ‘Gardenia of Eden.’“

That, thought Am, was reason enough to distrust him.

“At the end of the course the Reverend Mr. Gardenia pronounced my mother on the road to recovery. That good news cost her
around five thousand dollars. She was dead within a month of paying that out.”

Clara thought for a moment, then offered another of her soft smiles. “I prefer his current racket,” she said. “Now he preys
on the dead. Better them than the dying.”

Michael the doorman opened one of the lobby doors for them. With his deep bass he wished them a good evening. Clara didn’t
usually exit or enter through the central portals of the Hotel. She knew the Hotel grounds better than most employees, was
well-acquainted with all the back doors.

“Thank you for seeing me out, Am,” she said.

“I’m sorry I had to get in the way of your dinner plans, Clara.” He reached for his wallet, pulled out a ten-dollar bill,
and tried to give it to her.

“Don’t be silly,” she said, her pride preventing her from accepting the money.

Am tried to think of some words that would make the money acceptable to her, but couldn’t come up with any. Next banquet,
he decided, he’d make sure the staff turned a blind eye to her presence. Clara always seemed to know which functions offered
prime rib, apparently her favorite meal. He’d make sure she got a heaping portion.

“What the hell is the matter with this place?”

Cleo had not bothered to respond to Bradford’s first dozen pronouncements, but she was getting tired of hearing the same rhetorical
question over and over. “A watched pot never boils,” she said.

“Watch me boil,” muttered Bradford.

He was waiting for some, any, satisfaction. That funny-looking Japanese manager Toyota had told him everything would be “okay,”
but not a damn thing had changed. He and Cleo had waited around for an hour now. Most of that time they’d had to listen to
Missy’s lovemaking. The woman put a steam whistle to shame. You’d think she would have been worn out, but no sooner was her
screaming done when a party started up in her room, a party, by the sound of it, that was loads of fun.

Not that they hadn’t been invited. Doug and Missy had yelled for them to come on over, but Cleopatra was still sulking. Bradford
had tried to make it right for her, to smooth things over. He’d flagged down that damn leering bellman, asked him to get them
a bottle of bubbly. The bellman had returned with the champagne a short time later, had even set everything up nicely. Bradford
had thought their luck was changing. But then that bellman had asked that damnable question to Cleopatra. “How old are you?”
Bradford had told him she was twenty-six, but the bellman insisted upon seeing identification. You’d think Cleopatra would
have had the sense to have had a fake ID, but no. She was three months shy of being twenty-one, reason enough for that prick
bellman to take away the champagne. What galled Bradford most was that he had already paid for the champagne and given the
man his tip.

“I’m going to the bar,” said Bradford, “to get us another bottle of champagne.”

“Are you sure you’re not going to stop by the party?” asked Cleo.

“No, I’m not going to stop by the party.”

He tried to keep the edge out of his voice. Things were definitely not going as planned. By this time he had expected them
to be well on their way to making wedding plans—without any talk of a prenuptial agreement, of course.

“I want to make everything better,” he said, striking a note somewhere between ingratiating and wheedling. “I had this idea
of how everything was going to be, and I’m sorry it hasn’t happened that way. What I figure is that we can wet our whistles,
and then get something to eat. Maybe by the time we return, some magic elves will have transformed this room. If not, we can
check out and find somewhere else to go.”

Cleo’s face softened. He did care. “Hurry back,” she said.

Anyone working in the hospitality industry knows
the look.
It isn’t something that can be confused for anything else.
The look
is the picture of an employee who has the need to scream, but is restrained by circumstance or surroundings. When encountering
the look, Am
knew it was advisable to run the other way, because if you didn’t, the odds were you’d soon be wearing that exact same face.

Ted Fellows, the Hotel’s sous-chef, had
the look.
He was standing in the middle of the kitchen doing nothing. In any kitchen, the most conspicuous pose is immobility. All
meals for the Hotel’s four restaurants and fourteen meeting rooms came out of the same kitchen. No one ever just stood around
in the kitchen. Workers were shirking their duties if they weren’t doing three things at once.

“Am,” said Ted, waking up from his catatonic state.

“Have to run, Ted,” said Am without looking at him. “Security matter.”

“Am…”

Though he slowed down, Am still refused to look at the sous-chef directly. “Is it a safety or security matter, Ted?”

“It’s a matter I know you can help with, Am.”

That was the problem with Am’s having been the assistant general manager of the Hotel for so long. No one really took his
security position seriously. Was it right for him to intervene? The Japanese way was not to assign blame, but instead to fix
the problem. In that, he shared a kindred philosophy.

Am stared at Ted’s nose. That gave him the appearance of looking at him without having to endure
the look.
“Ted, you have a food-and-beverage director. You have an assistant food-and-beverage director. You have a catering manager.
You have a banquet director. And most of all, you have a chef.”

As if on cue, the chef appeared. Marcel Charvet considered himself the rightful heir to Escoffier. He had lived half of his
sixty years in America, and most of those in California, but he was as French as the guillotine. And about as friendly. Marcel’s
English wasn’t great, but his shouting was. Whenever he was short the word, he wasn’t short the volume—or the spit. Marcel
didn’t talk so much as spray.

“Ze catering give us ze wrong information,” he shouted, moving close to give Am a shower. “I am not Christ. I cannot feed
ze crowds with just a few fishes and breads.”

It was unusual for Marcel not to claim godhood. Am looked to Ted for an explanation.

“There’s a wedding dinner going on now,” said Ted. “Catering says they gave us a prospectus…”

“Zay lie,” said Marcel.

“But we could never find it. We knew from the master schedule that the dinner was for two hundred, so this morning Marcel
called over for details…”

“And zay tell me two hundred chicken cordon bleus.”

Marcel said it with all the certainty of the French. Ted quietly offered the other side: “Catering says they specified two
hundred chicken forestieres.”

“Zay lie,” repeated the infallible Marcel.

Finger-pointing between departments was a way of life. More politicking goes on in the average hotel than goes on in Cook
County. But wasn’t chicken chicken?

“What’s the difference?” asked Am.

“Most of the wedding party is Jewish,” said Ted.

Am remembered what Mark Twain had once written: “The difference between the right word and the nearly right word is the same
as that between lightning and the lightning bug.” For some reason Twain seemed to be reverberating in his subconscious. There
was another quote that was somehow appropriate, but Am couldn’t come up with it.

“I guess the chicken cordon bleu wouldn’t work then,” said Am.

The dish was made with ham and cheese, which was not in keeping with Jewish dietary laws. Ted shook his head.

“What explanation have we given?”

“I told them that the cordon bleu was meant for another party, and that we would be getting their chicken up to them shortly.”

“We zhould have just zed zat catering screwed up.”

Am ignored Marcel, save to wipe his face a little. Ted had offered a good lie, one that could be worked upon and gilded. Some
complimentary wine while they waited, and another round of bread. But that didn’t explain the standstill in the kitchen. Everyone
should have been double-humping it to get the revised chicken out.

“Why?…” started Am.

“I am not Christ,” said Marcel, in a second rare confession. “I cannot feed ze crowds—”

Am waved him to silence. He had already heard the fishes-and-loaves analogy.

“We don’t have nearly enough chicken, Am. What we have could take care of fifty or sixty.”

“And…”

The long “And” was Marcel. “Catering has not apologized,” the chef said. “Zay make ze mistake and zay expect us to make everyzing
right. If zay want to get us more chicken, thatz fine by me.”

“Can we recycle the chicken cordon bleu,” asked Am, “and make it into chicken forestiêre?”

Ted shot another glance at Marcel. “I threw all ze chicken away,” said Marcel. He looked rather proud of what he had done.
“To try and serve ze food again is against ze health codes, no?”

Marcel always thought his culinary laws exceeded any state or federal mandates, and had the same respect for health inspectors
that he did for week-old fish. He would have thrown the chicken into the trash out of pique, nothing else.

“It’s too late for our purveyors to bring us more chicken,” said Ted, “which leaves the option of the local supermarkets,
but I imagine a lot of those birds are going to be frozen. We can defrost them in the microwaves, but still, I’d say it would
be the better part of two hours before we could get the entrees out.”

Appetizers, Am thought. On the house. But then more bad news.

“Mr. Kaufman is the bride’s father,” said Ted. “He’s already furious. He’s ready to challenge Vesuvius now. I’d hate to see
him in two hours.”

“And what am I supposed to do about that?” Am snapped.

Ted shook his head. He didn’t know. He just hoped that Am had some answer, some miracle. Even the best-run restaurants run
out of selections. Most kitchens use large blackboards to keep a running score of unavailable items. The universal restaurant
distress code is employed, the out-of-stock ingredient identified by the telling numerical identification of 86.

Am looked over to the blackboard. Sure enough: “86 Chicken” was now chalked in, the barn doors firmly closed after the animals
escaped. Or at least the chickens.

Though he knew he should be uttering a prayer to Saint Julian, all Am could think about was the origins of “86.” The terminology
came out of taverns, the end result of those who had swilled too much eighty-six-proof rum. The drunks were eighty-sixed.
Funny how terms evolve, thought Am, even when mankind doesn’t.

“The Colonel,” he announced.

“The Colonel?” asked Ted.

“Have your crew make the biggest and best batch of forestiêre sauce they’ve ever created. Ladle it on the Colonel’s birds,
bathe the chicken enough to obscure its origins.”

Ted was nodding. There were two fast-food chicken outlets nearby that were about to do a great business.

“I am going to promise Mr. Kaufman his chicken very shortly,” Am said. “Don’t make me a liar.”

Ted yelled some order, then ran out. Marcel went around spitting, “Who is zis Colonel?” His idea of fast food was a three-course
dinner.

Am straightened his tie. Early in their careers hotel managers learn how to march smiling into the Valley of Death. Am was
grateful for having learned the art of mollifying guests by tutoring under one of the great practitioners. Gary Tolliver had
been a GM who always approached unhappy guests with a concerned face, always heard them out with a constant assortment of
clucks and sympathetic noises. His overt distress was so great and touching that guests always went away happy. Am never knew
anyone else who approached Gary’s knack. Guests always remembered him for his caring ways. They didn’t respond to Gary because
he gave them the world, because in most cases he never even brought up the subject of an adjustment. And it wasn’t that Gary
readily resolved their complaint. Often, he did nothing. It was just that Gary listened, and sympathized, so well.