Hurt machine

SIXTEEN

Nick was late, so I sipped at a glass of Brooklyn Lager and munched on olives at the bar. The Kythira Cafe on 5th Avenue in Park Slope, was, as Nick described it, the crown jewel of his family’s business. The menu featured updated and upscale versions of classic Mediterranean dishes. The interior decor was dark and moody and about as far away from the stereotypical white and blue stucco walls as you could get. There were no Ouzo or retsina bottles, no Greek flags, no bad murals of whitewashed houses on cliffs above the blue Mediterranean, no travel posters of Mykonos, Crete, or the Parthenon.

The bartender, a scruffy young hipster, was about as Greek as me and as invested in his work as a member of a prison road crew. His generation’s attitude toward their jobs was one of the things about the new world I had trouble getting adjusted to. I grew up believing in doing the best you could do at any job, even if you hated it. Aaron and I had several employees, including Klaus and Kosta, who had worked for us for over thirty years and prospered because of it. Now such dedication was considered old hat or worse, foolish. And when I thought about it, their attitude made sense. In today’s economy, job security and company loyalty were bullshit. Maybe they always had been.

I checked my watch-7:23-and surveyed the restaurant. For the second time that day, I was the lone patron at a restaurant bar. A guy could get a complex. There were about thirty tables and about eighty seats in the Kythira. Currently, the majority of them were as in demand as the barstools. In most places, this many empty seats at dinnertime would be cause for hanging a “Going Out Of Business” sign in the window or for the owner to hang himself in the window, but Park Slope was an alien part of Brooklyn, very different from the neighborhoods I grew up in and lived in. The Kythira probably had a late-arriving crowd and things got going when a man my age was going to bed. What did I know about Park Slope, anyway? Park Slope was a satellite of Manhattan, populated mostly by people who were transplanted Brooklynites, not natives. Funny, when I was growing up, people seemed as desperate to get out of Brooklyn as East Berlin. Now there was no East Berlin and this part of Brooklyn was the hot place to live. Go figure.

“Always this busy?” I asked the bartender to kill some time and to make sure he wasn’t actually in a coma.

“This time of night, yup.”

“Things pick up later?”

He opened his mouth to answer, but I saw his focus shift to over my right shoulder. “Hey, Mr. Roussis,” he said, giving a quick smile.

“Wyatt,” Nick said, clamping a hand on my shoulder, “this gentleman’s tab is comped. Have a bottle of ’97 Opus One sent over to table three and tell the chef to come out to see me.”

“Okay.” Wyatt headed for the kitchen.

I chucked a five onto the bar.

“Generous,” Nicky said.

“You can’t take it with you.”

“Wyatt’s a good boy. Come on.”

We sat at what I guessed was table three. I could see why the owner would want to sit here. It was the best vantage point in the place from which to watch the bar, the comings and goings from the kitchen, the waiter’s station, the hostess’ podium, and the rest of the dining room. What people don’t understand about owning a business is that when you’re there you can’t ever relax. There’s no such thing as being off duty when you’re in-house. The chef came out to us, introduced himself, shook our hands. Nicky spoke to him in Greek and the chef went away.

“I hope you don’t mind, but he does this thing with rib steak that I absolutely love. I ordered it for us. It’s not very Greek, but we don’t do strictly Greek here, anyways. That okay with you?”

“Fine. I hate that you’re going to waste a bottle of Opus One on me. I haven’t been feeling great lately and-”

“Don’t worry, Moe. It won’t go to waste. No one’s spilling the Opus One down the drain or watering the plants with it.”

Dinner, what I ate of it, was fantastic. We started out with a platter of dips and vegetable concoctions, only some of which I recognized, then salad, the marinated steak with lemon, garlic, and rosemary roasted potatoes, creamed spinach and feta tarts, and dessert of assorted pastries. I ate just enough of each to carry the wine. Nick was right about the wine, there would be no Opus One going to waste. I had way, way too much of it and by my third glass I didn’t really care about the physical price I was going to pay for indulging. The food aside, it was a lot of fun to tell the old stories about the Six-O. Enough time had passed for me to forgive and forget the betrayals so, at least for one night, I let myself feel about the guys the way I felt about them then. It was okay for me to laugh about what a ladies man Rico had been and to shake my head at what a practical joker Larry McDonald could be. I even laughed about the time Kenny Burton laid out a fireman during a pickup basketball game we played in Coney Island. Maybe it was the wine or maybe it was the dying that set me free of the baggage and the pain. Probably both.

When we weren’t talking old times, we talked about our families and business and where we’d come to in our lives. In a weak moment at the end of the meal and with my third glass of Grand Marnier in my hand, I told him the truth about why I’d come to the Gelato Grotto the other day. That I wasn’t working for the Tillman family at all, but that Alta Conseco was Carmella’s older sister and I felt obligated to look into things when she asked me to.

“I knew that story you told me at the Grotto was a crock a shit,” Nick said, but not angrily. “I figured you’d tell me. You always was big on the truth.”

I laughed. “Not as much as I used to be. Life has weaned me off it.”

He didn’t pursue it. “Look, I get why you told me what you did. You didn’t figure I would help otherwise. And I understand your helping out. You and Carmella was once family and her sister was her sister even if she did a terrible thing. You can’t abandon your family no matter what. That’s what a family does, it stands together when things get bad. Am I right?”

“Exactly. I couldn’t just say no to Carm.”

“But you should watch your back, Moe. Not everybody’s gonna be as understanding as me if they find out what you’re really up to. Defending those EMTs is kinda like defending Osama Bin Laden in this city, you know what I mean?”

“Thanks. I’m being careful.”

“So what you find out so far?”

I figured I owed it to him to tell him as much as I could. Here was a guy I hadn’t seen in fifteen years and the first thing I did was lie to his face. Plus, he’d been really cooperative based on that lie. He’d given me the surveillance video and sent me to Fuqua.

“So you think it’s somebody in the FDNY?” Nicky asked.

“I don’t know what to think, but it’s possible.”

“Okay, I’ll keep my eyes open. I hear things. People do a lotta loose talking in restaurants. You’d be surprised at the shit you hear when you’re not even trying.”

“Thanks, Nicky. I appreciate it. This was fun. Next time, dinner’s on me.”

We shook hands. “Let’s do it soon, Moe.”

“Soon. You have my word on that.”

Dinner with Nick would have to be soon, I thought, or it probably wouldn’t be at all.