Small spotlights on conduit riggings suspended ten meters below that lovely wooden ceiling lit fabric, floor, and tables haphazardly, ruining the rustic effect.
He led me up the stairs to the loft-bar. There, old polymer countertops in dreadful puddle shapes, everything rounded and looking like tongues, lapped around too-thin high-backed chairs with pointed, stamped metal moons crowning the backrest. The chairs seemed eager to do someone an injury.
He led me to the railing overlooking the dining floor.
“We put musical guests on the rising platform,” Mastiff said, pointing to the central Dr. Frankenstein rig on its chains. He gripped the rail like an admiral surveying his battleship from the bridge in a storm. “Or go-go dancers on singles’ night. I know an absolutely brilliant troupe from the Twin Cities, two succubi and a harpy—”
“In short there’s simply not, a more congenial spot . . .” sang the golden stickpin. Clearly the spirit inside was blind, deaf, and mad.
I only half-listened as it sang on. Singles’ night! Arse-over, I was trapped in an eighties grease-and-grind meat market. All that was missing was a backlit sign featuring two Regency silhouettes and a name like Snugglers .
The crowning insult to the eye was the centerpieces on every table in the bar: lolling skulls with bloodred wax candles atop, dribbling down on both skull and tabletop. I leaned over to get a better look.
Arse-over. “Is someone filming a metal video tonight?” I asked.
“Tee-hee, dearie,” Mastiff said, losing a little of his lordship’s air.
This sort of excess had been popular for about ten minutes in some London and New York and L.A. clubs two decades back, a mixture of an old Universal horror set and furniture shaped like various pieces of the human digestive system. It lingered now only in Tokyo, where the Japanese translife put their own twist on it by adding enough neon to represent the Human Genome Project and pumping up the technopop.
It stuck out in the rolling hills of the Mississippi River Valley like high heels on a cow.
He’d sent me his numbers. Unless his accountant was as cluelessly skeevy as his decorator, a few customers were still braving the fugly to eat here every week. Perhaps the service staff and food would be the Skyline’s salvation.
“I’ll want to watch a service tonight,” I said. “And we’ll still need to see the kitchens.”
Last, food. It can be an easy fix, or it can be like tunneling in wet sand. All depends on the staff and owner. Mastiff took me downstairs into the old pigpens. His kitchen crew was already at work.
A golem ran the kitchen with the help of two zombies.
My heart sank.
If there’s anywhere you don’t want a golem, it’s managing a kitchen. As for zombies, they have their uses, but not where food’s being prepared. You don’t want earlobes sloughing off into the mustard.
Mason Mastiff was inordinately proud of his golem and the great expense a Jewish Kabbalist in Marseilles had charged to create it. To his mind, with a golem all the cost was up front. It worked for free from then on, often for decades, without needing much more wizardry, barring accidents. I suppose it looked impressive enough, this mountain of copper and tin, ladles, skewers, pans, and tongs. A pair of blue butane lights serving as eyes regarded me across a slab of stainless steel.
Look on the bright side, Woolsley, I told myself. At least there wasn’t the usual suspicion when I was introduced to the chef of a troubled kitchen.
“Let’s see it make me an omelet,” I said.
Mastiff stuck his tongue in his cheek in thought. “You’re serious?”
“It’s supposed to cook. I didn’t ask it to fart out the ‘Stars and Stripes Forever.’ ”
“Chef Cuivre, an omelet if you please.”
The golem clanked into motion. A nine-inch pan clicked out of its forearm and the mountain of cookware and utensils turned to the stove.
“Butter. Eggs,” it said. It took me a moment to realize it was talking to the zombies.
They stood there in their hairnets, stupidly, faces even more green when contrasted with the kitchen whites. They wore baseball caps advertising what were local radio stations, I assumed.
“Buck! Tooth! You heard the chef,” Mastiff said. “Sorry, everyone is used to orders being printed out on a ticket.”
“Is that the problem?” I said.
Thanks to dropped eggs and butterfingers, my two-egg omelet took five from the fridge. Why do Americans insist on refrigerated eggs?
The golem extruded a silicone spatula and went to work on the beaten eggs. It worked well enough, but moved with such deliberate, noisy concentration I wondered what would have happened if I’d asked for bacon, fried tomatoes, and toast to go with it.
It did cook the omelet perfectly, going by my eye and nose. Taste would tell . . .
Then one of the zombies picked it up with a black-nailed finger and set it on a plate.
“Bollocks,” I said, and Mastiff fled back upstairs.
The sight of that put me off eating. I watched the kitchen activity for as long as I could stand it. After seeing his kitchen staff doing their prep work, I was afraid to use the toilets for fear of what I might find floating in the bog. I returned upstairs.
“What did you think of the kitchen, then?” Mastiff asked, resetting a dripping candle atop a skull.
Maybe meeting some of the front staff would lift the growing sense of doom. “I’m trying not to. Do you have a hostess?”
“I take care of that, dear Woolsley,” he said, his hand disappearing behind his back again. An operatic gesture toward the little stand by the door next to a case of cuisine trophies (I later examined them and found out they were all antiques from other restaurants) showed a little lectern on a podium so he could greet his guests from an intimidating height. “I like to attend each customer and tell them about the specials. One should treat each customer as an individual, no? Noblesse oblige.”
Maybe that was the source of his mania for this place. He ran on fear. By serving translife, he was empowering himself over them.
The rest of the staff arrived. A bent, aged vampire named Ravelston served as the headwaiter. And the only waiter, considering how slow business was at the moment. He worked with the aid of two polished, animated skeletons. That I approved of. They looked clean and worked quickly, sounding like rolling dice as they worked.
I took a liking to Ravelston. He had grandfatherly wrinkles all about the eyes and smelled of lime talcum powder and extra-strength breath mints. “How ARE you, sir?” he said in a deep Southern accent upon being introduced. He had an interesting habit of both emphasizing and drawing out his verbs. “I HAVE heard about you. We ARE so PLEASED you made the trip. IS that an Irish accent I detect?”
We chatted a bit about my home county. He knew Dublin and Cork but didn’t lecture. He did make one feel special, as though you made his day by simply walking through the door.
Still, he seemed willing to talk until the restaurant opened, leaving the skeletons idling like waiting cabs. I broke away from him and found Mastiff in his office, checking an Internet news site.
“Why in God’s country are you using zombies, Mastiff?” I asked, though I knew the answer.
“Well, they’re reliable, my dear. They never leave the premises, as a matter of fact. So they work as a security system as well, if you think about it.”
“And they’re cheap,” I said.
“Well, yes. I am running a business.”
“Into the ground. Look, I see the strategy, but sometimes, with zombies and animated skeletons and all that, it hurts you in day-to-day tactics. You lose all ability to have staff that thinks on its feet. Reacts to new situations.”
“You haven’t met my bartender yet. She’s sharp as a spinning slicer, my dear. She doesn’t come in until just before opening. Besides, now you’re here. You’ll get things put right, won’t you? I’m entirely at your disposal, my dear.”