Stanley Park (54 page)

Dante stood at the rail afterwards and wondered for the first time in the long, episodic chess relationship whether the Professor had thrown the game. He sipped his wine. They talked about work. About being busy, about finishing long projects. The Professor acknowledged that a book was in the works.

Dante turned to lean on the rail, showing interest. “Well, let’s have it, then.”

Stanley Park. Homeless people. Many more of them than you might think.

“You know, I never really understood what the hell you did for a living,” Dante said, giving his head a quick shake.

The Professor laughed. “They say if you can’t explain your work to a six-year-old, you need a new line.”

Dante didn’t think the Professor needed a new line, exactly. He thought the Professor probably lived among the homeless more ably than most people could. Showed more empathy, cared more. “Blessed are the poor and all that, I suppose?” Dante said.

The Professor sighed. When he seemed unwilling to answer,
Dante scratched his chin and looked at him closely. There was another question waiting to be asked. The Professor sensed it.

“Jeremy,” Dante said, finally. He had phoned. Out of service. He had written letters. Not at this address. He didn’t want to pester the Professor if the boy didn’t want to be found. Was that it?

“Not to be petulant,” the Professor said, “but you fired him.”

“True,” Dante said. “But after the opening things were not tranquil.”

“So I hear,” the Professor said, although Dante now repeated the whole story anyway. The rumours. The Health Department. A phone call from the very nervous executive director of the Canadian SPCA. (That was new, the Professor thought.) Picketers, law suits, graffiti, injunctions, public statements, stories in the local press, accusations, retractions, rephrased accusations, denials. “Inferno Victimized by Urban Myth?”—the question mark in this headline the subject of a heated debate between
The Province
editorial staff and Inferno’s lawyers. A debate that Inferno lost, releasing the rumour to public domain.

Jeremy disappeared off the map, Dante said. Yes, it was possible he had been harsh, even unduly harsh. “But if some sort of riddle had been asked in all of it,” he said, reasonably, “only Jeremy could have provided the answer.”

As it was, nobody could confirm what had happened or had not happened. And meanwhile, carrying on throughout all of it, there was that crazed British journalist running around telling everybody it was performance art.

“Like gasoline on a fire,” Dante said, shaking his head. “Not everybody likes performance art. And most people assumed that if it
was
performance art, something disgusting must have happened.”

Sure, the
Gud Tayste
article had turned out to be a boon when it finally came out. They got an injunction against the protestors in return for a placating statement about the
opening. And in less than a month they were bursting at the seams. Gerriamo’s, as it ultimately played, had tremendous crossover appeal. Foodie-scenesters. The monied, urban, young. The hip of every stripe.

So what was the problem in that case? the Professor wondered.

Dante looked out over the water. He gripped the wooden rail.

“I just came back from a little vacation,” he said.

There had been a restaurant in France of which Jeremy had often spoken. It had been in a small town near Dijon. Dante had gone to Paris for some downtime, on his own, but he took one side trip. He was curious what he’d find. Who he might find. Dante told of the TGV ride out from Paris, flashing through the fields of yellow. He told of how the small town was reached by rented car, driving out a trunk road that wound and dove between the hills. About the town itself. Impossible streets. An abbey. The restaurant was tiny. He wondered how the French made a go of it. Simple food. Good food, but not much to it. He had a piece of duck breast with a sauce made of pears. A salad with chopped up hard-boiled egg and some cheese.

“Good value, I suppose,” Dante said.

“You were thinking of buying the place?” the Professor said.

Touché. Before it became clear that Jeremy wasn’t hiding out there, hiding in the kitchen behind the protection of his pass-through, Dante was fleetingly inspired to do exactly that. Produce a cheque book, buy the place outright. Offer them so much their provincial French heads would commence spinning. Then take this preciously simple place, this place with nothing to it, and turn it into something that took advantage of the trunk-road traffic flowing through this backwoods on its way from Dijon to Paris.

He’d been stewing over this exact thought, eating cheese, when a huge grey dog wandered out of the kitchen. A male Great Dane, thirty-five to forty inches at the shoulder, massive gear swinging between its hind legs. The dog made its way
through the entire restaurant and finally to Dante’s table, where it put its chin on the cloth not six inches from his plate. The beast regarded Dante with ageless, yellow eyes.

“And that dissuaded you?” the Professor asked.

Strangely.

The men stared at one another in silence for a moment.

“You can’t protect him,” Dante said.

“Wouldn’t dream of it,” the Professor answered. “The Food Caboose.”

Dante had to have it repeated a number of times. “What kind of name is that?” he asked finally.

The Professor smiled.

“You’re not really going to make me look it up in the phone book, are you?” But apparently that was precisely his intent, and Dante got up and walked into the Professor’s house, letting go an involuntary chuckle at the games they inevitably played.

He found a phone book on the kitchen counter. “Food Caboose?” he called back out the patio door, leafing through the pages. And after a whole lot of leafing, he stopped. The Professor was still smiling.

“He’s moved out of town,” Dante said. He did not even care to conceal his disappointment.

“He hasn’t moved out of town,” the Professor answered.

Dante looked back down to the book with a frown. “Well he’s not bloody here.”

Over the top of the house came the first rays of dawn. They lit the Professor’s face and all of the vista behind him in brilliant relief, and from the middle of a shining expanse of colour came the Professor’s voice. It said: “Oh, he’s here all right.”

It wasn’t inspiring from the outside. A ramshackle, barnred house at the dead southern edge of Chinatown. The house itself was missing shakes, and some of the thin-slat cedar siding had fallen off.

It had been a grocery store for a while, the owner informed. Back in the early years when a vibrant Chinatown had sprawled this far south on Abbott Street. In more recent years the colourful community of vegetable stalls and butchers, spice vendors and the sellers of ancient cures had contracted into a few square blocks around Main Street to the northeast. The beachhead of condo development to the southwest had stalled in its advance this direction. Buildings had been torn down and not replaced. The area stopped being part of any neighbourhood at all. A quilt of denuded lots collecting rainwater, a grid of vainly hopeful streets. A place stranded between other places.

The red house was one of the last structures, virtually unrentable. Three months before, the owner had visited the premises and found the front room strewn with hypodermic needles. He broomed them into a pile, pulled on work gloves and counted them. Over 250, a busy shooting gallery. He was out of patience waiting for the redemption of development, out of cash. He was motivated.

Olli hired an engineer. The foundation was hanging in there, the hot and cold water worked and the wiring would not spontaneously combust, at least not in the immediate future. Olli wanted his money out in two years. “Three tops,” he said. “Although barring some kind of total economic meltdown I expect to be ahead in one.”

“Barring The Big One,” Jeremy joked.

“Bring it on. For this price I’m buying land.”

Which was not bad considering that the house had the basics. Medium-sized kitchen with a gas range top, the oldest and quirkiest Jeremy had ever seen but functional. There was an open front room with wood planks, a bathroom in the rear. A narrow spiral of stairs corkscrewed up through a hole in the high ceiling and into a sleeping loft at the back of the house. Jeremy’s personal quarters.

His for two hundred dollars a month, Olli said. Enough to cover property taxes.

Everything needed work, but Jules helped visualize the finished product, made decorating suggestions. She also produced a drum sander from somewhere and helped him refinish the planks in the front room. He stained the planks mahogany. He finished the front room dark brown to the wainscotting and cream above. He spent almost a week with a box of steel wool and three quarts of Pinesol, cleaning the kitchen, every surface, every corner.

The Professor asked first before contributing anything.

“Pots,” Jeremy suggested, and his father came through with Calphalon.

He scraped together everything else on his own. He found a cut-rate set of counters at Charmin’s, racks of shelving and an aluminum cold-storage unit, both salvaged off a minesweeper scrapped by the Canadian navy. He tracked down the tables and chairs at flea markets, a case of homemade candles at a craft fair. A box of red-check linen and plain steel cutlery came from Ikea. With half a dozen garage-sale Braque prints—plus Heckle, Jeckle and Hide—Jeremy thought the room had become a pleasantly dark and comfortable place. A place somebody might like to be all alone over the fifteen-dollar prix fixe dinner and a magazine. A place someone else might like to take a special date on a night they wanted to be just a little unpredictable. A place where other people might like to pull two tables together and drink bottles of whichever of the four available wines they liked the most, talk late into the night until the chef had to go to bed.

A place with a Byzantine reservation system, in the end. Jeremy wanted something more straightforward, but Fabrek was the acclaimed expert on all things underground. “No, no,” he said over Jeremy’s objection. “This is important. I’ve seen these go down before.”

“There are more?” Olli said, looking around the front room. He liked the smallness of it. He liked the idea of coming here regularly and never telling anyone about it. He walked up to the curtained front window and opened it a crack.

Not right here exactly, Fabrek said, but they were around. Alt.repreneurship, the punk economy. No business or liquor licences, no insurance, no regulation, no inspection. Risky but occasionally very good, mostly a lot of fun. Bars, nightclubs, and yes, restaurants.

“Even I’ve heard about speakeasies,” Olli said, in his own defence.

Fabrek told them about two other restaurants, just examples. There was a hip underground tapas bar out in Burnaby somewhere. The best anticucho and live flamenco in the city. There was a Russian place in the basement of an old West End mansion, where you could drink seventeen different kinds of flavoured vodka, quite possibly homemade. Two bucks a shot.

“I was not aware of that,” Olli said.

“That’s the point,” Fabrek explained. “Unless you know somebody who knows somebody, and those two people know each other pretty well, you’re never going to get a reference. Forget about the phone number or the address.”

“Reference?” Jeremy said.

Sure, that’s the glue that held the whole thing together, Fabrek explained. Say a person hears about the Food Caboose and they want to go. Well, in that case they need to find a reference.

Olli looked dubious.

“Like who?” Jeremy asked.

Someone who had reserved before. An insider. A friend of the Food Caboose. That made selecting your first guests all the more important. It was like seeding a stream with salmon fry. Those first guests were going to spawn all the ones that followed.

So (Fabrek went on) a person gets a reference. Now, since
the reference would have actually had a reservation before, they would have the restaurant’s unlisted phone number. The reference would phone that number during specified hours and leave contact information in a voice mailbox.

“Like,” Fabrek said, demonstrating. “Hey, Jay-Jay … yeah, it’s Fabrek. There’s this guy I know, he heard about the Caboose. Pretty good guy. Give him a call at whatever.”

Jeremy thought he understood. “So I call this person with the reservation date.”

Fabrek shook his head slowly. “You call him with his waiting list confirmation.”

“Waiting list?” Olli said.

Fabrek nodded, eyes closed. “Oh yeah,” he said. “Later, when you have room,
then
you call him up and give him a reservation date and a number to call and confirm.

Jeremy nodded. “Got it.”

It was a minor inconvenience, but by month six the waiting list was a month long. During the reservation call-back hour, which Jeremy established between 4:30 and 5:30 every night from Tuesday to Saturday, he was typically finishing up sauces at the stock stove he’d bought and set up near the low passageway into the dining room, arm’s reach from where the phone also happened to be. And on Sundays, when Jules sometimes came in to cook with Jeremy on her days off, she might answer the phone.

This past Sunday, for example, Jules had come in and brought a stack of new CDs. She was on a Dexter Gordon kick and so they were listening to “The Squirrel,” loud, the music hammering, driving away behind them as they prepped. Jeremy answered the phone while he was finishing brown stock. And later—when he was over on the far side of the kitchen reducing this stock to demi-glaze and Jules was roasting walnuts—she answered.

They got their last confirmation at 5:25. Their sixth and last table for their one seating at 7:00 p.m. Another packed house of twenty-four hungry people. Jules hung up and,
dipping her head instinctively under a low beam in the passageway, ducked back into the kitchen.

“Booked,” she said, taking out the walnuts to cool and turning to the beautiful red sockeye salmon that had arrived that afternoon. Jeremy nodded and continued prepping lamb roasts. Each boned piece of leg was being spread with a mixture of roasted garlic, mustard and ground rosemary before being tied.