“How old was she when she was killed?”
“She wasn’t. She’s not the one. You asked me where the trouble started, and it started with her.”
He guided her along the shoreline. “Let’s walk out to the rock. There’s a long spit of land that leads out there, and you can tell me while we walk.”
“All right.”
“So place me in time and space. You and Eric were about twenty-three when you started the restaurant.”
“Twenty-five. Olivia was twenty-one. I remember because when she applied for the job, she came in with recommendations from her last two jobs, two years and one year at restaurants in Cleveland when she was in college. Twenty-one meant she could serve alcohol, which was essential.”
“Okay. You and Eric were twenty-five, and she was twenty-one.”
“Yes. The whole staff was young. Eric had become a very good chef by then. He was precocious. Nobody gets to be a three-star chef after working in kitchens for seven years, half of it part-time. You can’t get enough hours in the kitchen, enough instruction, enough years of tasting and screwing up and redoing. But he was very good. He had worked up a menu of twelve entrées with a few variations, all of them superb, and six appetizers that relied on small dabs of expensive ingredients arranged beautifully on a plate. That way, after a helper had assisted him a few times, he could make one himself. Even I could do it after a while if we were rushed.”
“You said everybody was young. What were the rest of them like?”
“Like us. The waitstaff were all women, my age or younger. There were six of them to start, all with some experience. I picked the ones I did because I understood them, and they seemed to understand me. Until six months before we opened, I had been a waitress, and I still had the blisters, the burns, and the aching wrists to prove it. I didn’t notice at first that they were so similar. But now I realize that I was so inexperienced that I could only evaluate people who were like me.”
“You were still a waitress until six months before you opened Banque?”
“It was one of my jobs. I worked as a stockbroker during the day, starting at five A.M. before the New York markets open. I got home at three, then worked at Bernard’s in the Biltmore from five until ten. Eric had lots of jobs, too. He was head chef at Désirée, and he also wrote food articles for a few gourmet magazines, and catered.”
“Catered what?”
“People would come to Désirée and ask him to cook for private parties—mostly studio people. It helped him to build a clientele. If those people had a party, they wanted everybody there to know that they hadn’t just had it catered, they’d hired the head chef from Désirée. Getting to know people was a big part of getting started. I think almost everybody we hired was somebody we met in the restaurants where we worked, and most of the customers at first were people who knew us from jobs. The big thing was money, of course. We saved everything—my tips, Eric’s magazine checks and extra pay, even money people sent him from home as birthday presents. We spent nothing. The only time either of us was in a restaurant was for a paycheck. On Fridays I would deposit our checks at lunch, and I’d have most of the money invested by four, so we wouldn’t be tempted to touch it. Then the weekend would come and we’d work all day and late in the evening, so there would have been no time to spend it anyway.”
“All that was for the restaurant?”
“When you start up, you have to be prepared to lose money for a couple of years.” She smiled. “I figured everything out in advance. We would run out of money and credit on April 26. For a while, we were all calling the place Le Vingt-six Avril.”
“How did you get past April?”
“Dumb luck and lots of help. All of the people who worked for us took a cut in pay from their last jobs. They shared tips, and we were lucky with the waitresses. They were all young and shameless about coaxing big tips out of the customers. Whenever we had some windfall profit—we did a few wedding receptions, a few after-hours parties—the money would help us stagger through another week or two.”
“When did Banque catch on?”
“We started pretty well and grew steadily. The big factor was that Eric had a following. There were some articles and reviews, and then we had to hold on tight.”
“But you did, obviously.”
“It was hard work for everybody. You have to maintain the quality of the food when you can barely cook it fast enough, preserving friendliness and efficiency when the staff are practically sprinting in and out of the kitchen for a whole shift. Every restaurant in history started with owners asking employees to kill themselves to get it going, and then never sharing the wealth. If you’re smart, you start sharing after your first good week. We did that.”
“So you managed to keep everybody friendly.”
“That’s a laugh.” She shook her head as she walked along. “Banque was way too friendly. We had this great place where all these friends of ours were regulars, and at least a couple of times a night some celebrity would arrive. It felt glamorous, and the money started coming in. The bartenders and waitresses and all the kitchen staff were young and unattached, and worked long hours. They didn’t just get along. The restaurant started to be a scene, and it took over their personal lives. After a couple of months, there was no way to keep up with who was with whom, and there were friends of both sexes from outside who would get drawn into the mix.”
“So the employees were all very social. What about you?”
“I was the one who had her eye on the bottom line—the only one who did. It was what I studied to do in college, and managing the place was my only contribution. I tried to keep everybody paying attention.”
“What about Eric?”
“I don’t know if you’ve ever seen a great chef at work, but it’s hard to describe. He was tuned in. He had his eyes on everything that went on behind the kitchen door, cooking with seven or eight timers going in his mind at once. If a new molecule had entered the kitchen, he would have known it. He was always sweating, moving from burner to burner to plating table to mixing bowl. We talked about all the pairing off, but the social dynamics of the restaurant were my problem, not his. He said, ‘Who’s not doing his job?’ I said, ‘Everybody is.’ He said, ‘Then what’s there to worry about?’”
“So you both felt like outsiders?”
“Eric and I were in the center of it, but not part of it. We had hired people we found pleasant, and the consequence was that we ended up with young people who found each other pleasant. The atmosphere was charged. If there had been such a thing as a pheromone detector, it would have burned up.”
“I think you made a good decision. You stay out of people’s personal lives until somebody asks for your advice.”
“Well, anyway.” She looked away for a second. “That was the place, the atmosphere. We were there seven days a week, and working hard. People came in and out when the restaurant was closed, making deliveries or fixing stuff, cleaning and restocking. It was always active, always alive. We were surrounded with people. The business was charmed. We were making so much money that I paid off our start-up loans in a year. When I renegotiated the lease to buy the building, the landlord wanted to carry the mortgage himself. In the third year, we were making enough so that Eric and I bought a house with a big down payment. Around that time, he asked me to marry him. That was the beginning of the end.”
“Because you said no?”
“I said yes. It was a surprise, but not in the way you might think. When he asked, it reminded me that we weren’t already married. It was, ‘Oh. That’s right. We’re not officially related, are we?’ That kind of detail had been my job, usually—to keep us on the right side of the laws and solvent and secure. I knew that marriage was a necessary part of that, like liability insurance and fire coverage and a business permit. It was just a chore I had neglected.”