by Monica Ali
‘Keeping busy?’ said Gabriel.
‘What team you support?’ said Victor.
‘What?’
‘Team. Team. Football.’
Victor wore cologne and plucked between his eyebrows. The boy was clearly in love with himself. ‘Rovers,’ said Gabriel. ‘Blackburn Rovers.’
Victor made a hand gesture which indicated that Rovers were, in his view, only a so-so team. ‘My team – Arsenal. Back home – Agro.’
‘Makes sense,’ said Gabriel. ‘Excuse me for saying this, but isn’t there something you should be doing right now?’
‘No,’ said Victor. ‘What?’
‘Work,’ said Gabriel. ‘That’s what we come here to do. Remember? That’s what they pay us for.’
‘Be cool, man,’ said the Moldovan in a stupid American accent. ‘Look,’ he said, with a sweep of the hand, ‘everything ready.’
Gabriel checked over the salad tubs and garnishes. He pulled open the fridge doors and did a quick count of the cold starters: aubergine and mozzarella towers and fanned melons with Parma ham. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘Well.’ On a whim he stuck a spoon in the gremolata and tasted it. ‘No. I don’t think so. Something’s missing here.’ He tasted again. ‘What about the anchovy fillet?’
‘Chef,’ said Victor, folding his arms, ‘there is no anchovy fillet. You want, I’ll make the order.’
‘Check the dry store downstairs.’
Victor looked at the floor.
‘Haven’t got all day,’ said Gabe. ‘The gremolata goes on the osso buco.’
‘Chef,’ said Victor. He held his palms in the air and grinned, labouring under the misconception that he could charm his way out of anything.
‘Right now,’ said Gabriel, keeping his voice low. He decided – it was a tactical decision – that if the bullshit continued he would ‘put it on’. He never, hardly ever, lost his temper. But sometimes he put it on.
‘No way I’m going down there,’ said Victor. ‘It spooks me, man. So he fell on some handle, right? Was it sticking in the back of his head?’
‘Victor …’
But Victor couldn’t stop talking. ‘Shit,’ he said. It sounded like sheet. ‘You gotta have respect for the dead, see? Respect, see what I’m saying?’ He spent a lot of time watching American movies. Pirated DVDs, no doubt.
‘I’m giving you an order,’ Gabriel barked. ‘Do as you are told.’ He set his mouth. His father used to fly off on one. Nought to sixty in three seconds flat. He’d come home from a bad day at Rileys and sit by the gas fire shuffling the local paper and his feet. ‘Tea on the table at six. Is it too much to ask?’ Mum usually smoothed it over. Sometimes she yelled, ‘Yes.’ Then he’d go ballistic, shouting down the house and trembling, actually trembling, with rage. His ears turned crimson nearly up to the top where, it seemed, they went white hot. Gabriel waited out the storm with Jenny, sitting at the top of the stairs, and though his stomach felt funny, like he had a bout of diarrhoea coming on, he knew it was Dad who was pathetic because he couldn’t control himself.
A cloud settled on Victor’s face and he screwed up his features as though he’d been sprayed with disinfectant. ‘Yes, Chef.’ He spat.
‘Never mind,’ said Gabe, suddenly sick of everything. ‘I’ll go down there myself.’
The catacomb walls, white paint over brick, were studded with beads of water, as if pricked by tears here and there. Naked light bulbs hung in the corridor, casting Halloween shadows against doors. It was the kind of place you expected footsteps to clang and echo but Gabriel’s polyurethane clogs made barely a sound on the concrete floor. He passed by the locker rooms, one for the boys and one for the girls. Someone had drilled a spyhole between the two and Gleeson fired the Italian waiter, despite a dearth of evidence, for possession, perhaps, of hot Latin blood. Gabe glanced into the old fish room, the paint on the door so flaky that it appeared to have grown scales of its own. Most of the fish came ready-prepped these days and only the frozen fillets (permitted in the fisherman’s pie) made the journey underground. The air still smelt like low tide, of sand and browned-out seaweed. He walked and the air grew steadily clearer, and then began to smell of bleach. Overhead, somewhere, a trolley rumbled by. The pipes and ducts and fearsome screeds of wiring that coated the ceiling sounded a continuous muted distress. Turning the first corner, Gabe wondered how long the catacombs would be if you laid them end-to-end. They would be difficult to unravel; laid out in epileptic fits and starts, twists and dead ends.
The kitchen was hardly the ideal layout either. When he had his own place he would insist on starting from scratch. Refit from top to bottom, he would absolutely insist.
Charlie wanted to start a family. ‘I’m not getting any younger,’ she said. She was only thirty-eight. When she looked in the mirror her gaze was sceptical, as if the plump-skinned, green-eyed, red-headed siren in the glass wasn’t fooling anybody, Charlie least of all. Working as a singer didn’t help. There were plenty of younger girls around. ‘You and your stupid plan,’ she’d say, stirring her martini. ‘Don’t plan on me hanging around.’ Gabe thought he would pop the question on the day the contract was signed. Do you want to move in together? He knew the answer, of course. They’d find a new flat, maybe on the river, where he could watch the silty banks and unmoving flow of the Thames. After a year, when they were sure, they could try for a child.
A child. He touched the bald spot at his crown and wondered if it was getting bigger. He was, he realized, standing by the yellow and black tape that marked off the place where Yuri had lived and died. He was puzzled, unable to remember what he had come here for. There had to be a reason. He supposed that he meant to spend a moment or two, simply to pay his respects.
‘We could run away to Tobago,’ Charlie had said, when she came off the stage. ‘You dish up the surf’n’turf, I’ll be pouring the drinks.’
Gabriel stared at the floor, the steel trapdoor that marked some long-forgotten coal hole, the treacherously bladed handle, flecked with Yuri’s blood. The door to the old facilities office stood open, the light still burned inside. The police had left the mattress and sleeping bags. Everything else had been taken – two black bin liners containing Yuri’s worldly goods. Gabe ducked under the tape and went into the office. He picked a sweet wrapper off the floor and put it in his pocket. The room was the size of a double bedroom with two shelved alcoves on facing walls. They had found a gas burner, a couple of pans, empty jars and spirit bottles, shaving foam and a razor, a change of clothes, a pill box with a lock of hair inside, and an old photograph – of a woman with a cleft chin and two little girls in big coats.
When she had sung her last set, Charlie’s back always ached from standing so long in her heels. Her eyes ached from the smoke in the club. ‘What about a cruise ship? I’ll sing, you cook. Or the other way round if you like.’
A few more months and they’d move in together. She wanted to dock, not sail.
He looked around. He didn’t know what to do. He had come to pay his respects to Yuri but had hardly given him a thought. He should have sent someone out for flowers. He would lay a bouquet on the spot. There was mould growing in the corner and one of the shelves looked charred, an accident with the gas burner perhaps. Thank God it was only himself that Yuri had managed to kill.
Yesterday morning Gabe had walked up to the body, stopped a couple of paces off and stood with his hands in his pockets, waiting a few blank moments before walking away again. Yuri was lying on his back, with thick, black blood like a hood cast up round his head. He had white hair on his chest, in short, singed-looking tufts. His stocky legs were skewed in different directions as though attempting to perform the splits or some kind of Cossack dance. The towel which he had been clutching had wrapped itself round a foot. He had a wise face, had Yuri: easy to miss when he was a man in a green boiler suit, shifting grease. But somehow, as he lay there splayed and naked, it wasn’t hard to notice and his blue and kindly lips had parted, as if ready to dispense
good advice.
‘Don’t know,’ Ivan had said when the inspector asked what he knew about Yuri’s family.
‘No, no, nothing,’ Victor said when asked what he knew about Yuri himself.
‘I don’t have any information concerning,’ said Suleiman.
‘Please,’ said Benny, ‘I don’t know.’
Gabe didn’t do much better. He handed over details of the agency through which Yuri had been employed.
Yuri was lying somewhere, unattended, on a mortuary slab. It was loneliness, certainly, that killed Yuri. For an instant Gabriel was desolate. He kicked at the mattress and tapped the wall, as though checking for damp or loose plaster, searching for an immediate job to be done. He swept his hand across a shelf and dislodged a soft roll of fabric that had caught between shelf and wall. A pair of sheer black tights, in a shrunken ball.
‘So, he was naked, old Yuri. I think he was waiting for his girlfriend. You think so, Chef, eh, do you think?’
Gabriel sensed someone behind him, another beating heart. He stuffed the tights in his trouser pocket and turned and saw her. That girl, Lena, standing in the doorway in the jumble of shadow and light, let him look at her and she looked back at him. Her face was thin and rigid and her hands, which she held twisted together at her chest, were fleshless claws. This morning he had told Oona to fire her. It astonished him that he had never looked at her before. Gabriel breathed deeper, to breathe the air she had breathed.
He opened his mouth, without knowing what he would say.
Lena smiled, or he imagined it, and then she ran away, into the maze.
CHAPTER TWO
THE IMPERIAL HOTEL, AS MR MADDOX WAS FOND OF POINTING out, had a history. Built in 1878 by industrialist and champion mutton-chop grower Sir Edward Beavis, on the site once occupied by Dr Culverwell’s Bathing Establishment in Yew Street, Piccadilly, the hotel shouldered as many previous incarnations as it did flying buttresses and gargoyles on its Gothic Revival exterior. Following the respectability and ‘discreet luxury’ of the Victorian era when the smoking and billiards rooms kept the ladies out of harm’s way, the Imperial enjoyed a roaring twenties reputation for dance, decadence and statutory rape. Charles Chaplin’s 1921 visit (escorted through the fans by no fewer than forty policemen) had made the Imperial de rigueur with the stars and starlets of the British silent screen. In 1922, in a case widely reported, Tyrone Banks (best-known picture Heave Ho!) was caught with his pants down and three under-age flappers beneath the shot-silk sheets. The escapade remained curiously omitted from the hotel brochure but Mr Maddox had enjoyed relating it to Gabe when he interviewed him for the job.
After that he had appeared to lose interest and swivelled his chair round to look out of the window, so that Gabe was left staring at the column of iron filings that ran down the back of his neck. ‘Noël Coward,’ Mr Maddox had said, ‘composed songs here. Big deal. The Aga Khan had a permanent suite. Theodore Roosevelt “gave his name” to the drawing room. Generous, would you say? Who else? Haile Selassie. That’s in the brochure. Bunch of marketing geniuses I got downstairs.
‘I need five years from you,’ he continued, coming round and sitting on the edge of the mahogany desk. A big man in an expensive suit. Careless with authority, as though he had much to spare. ‘Be coming up to sixty then, Gabriel. Where do the years go? Been promised my last five somewhere more suitable. For a man my age, I mean. Bahamas, I fancy. British Virgin Islands. Take a gimp, I mean deputy manager, of my choosing. Ease off a bit, wind down.’ He stretched his arms and clasped his hands behind his head.
Gabe noted the discoloured patch on his inside wrist where a tattoo had been removed.
‘They’re not expecting miracles. We’re not talking Michelin and all that crap. Just some food you can eat without gagging. They spent a few bob on this place, you know.’
‘They’ were the PanContinental Hotel Co., which had purchased the Imperial from Halcyon Leisure Group a couple of years ago, marking, it was hoped, rebirth and renewal after the hotel’s long half-century of decline.
In the war it had been requisitioned by the government, providing sickbays for convalescing officers and a transit point for soldiers on leave. Afterwards it went back into business but by the early fifties the doormen were fighting over the guests and the hotel was forced to close its doors. Somebody saw the potential for office space. A tobacco firm moved in, followed by an American pharmaceuticals outfit that put a cycle track in the roof space that was only for senior executives and a volleyball court in the ballroom for those from the lower floors and corporate rungs. In the seventies there was an attempt to restore the Imperial’s former glory but by the mid-eighties it was hosting ‘value breaks’ and salesmen who packed samples and Alka-Seltzers and dutifully filled in the service questionnaires.
‘Back when,’ Mr Maddox had said, ‘Monsieur Jacques … well, you know the story.’ The restaurant still bore his name. ‘Escoffier did a quick stint, not many people realize, before he buggered off to the Savoy. Think you measure up to Escoffier, eh?’ He winked and laughed, with little pretence at mirth. His brow was low and heavy, a ridged escarpment above the potholes of his eyes.
‘I give you five years, then what?’ said Gabe. In his head he added £10K to the starting salary. Another friendly joke and he’d go up another five.
‘Six exec chefs in two years.’ Mr Maddox shook his head in a regal fashion, as though his crown might slip. ‘Bunch of tossers. Tell you what, give me the five I’ll give you my dick on a plate. Sit down, for God’s sake. Relax. How about a cigar?’
‘About the salary,’ said Gabe through his teeth.
Mr Maddox stopped him with a flick of the hand. ‘Sort it out with my deputy. I’ll tell him not to disappoint you.’ He banged the hand down and a stack of papers took flight. ‘Loyalty,’ he barked. ‘That a word you understand? Where do you come from, Chef? … What? Where the fuck is that? Do they know about loyalty up there?’
* * *
Gabriel passed through the revolving doors and stood at the kerb looking up at the dark stone walls of the hotel. Midnight. Sixteen hours he’d worked today and the one time he’d tried to take a break he’d been dragged into a meeting with an environmental health officer who, despite finding no reason to close the kitchen, had found plenty of excuses to waste Gabe’s time.
He spent a moment regarding the mullioned windows and the carved grotesques sulking beneath the parapets. The stone looked cold. The door released a guest and a blast of hot air that carried the vanilla scent of the lobby. Gabe looked in at the sleek black reception bar, the high perspex stools sprinkled among the distressed leather armchairs, the purple and chrome ‘sculpture’ suspended from the ceiling, the ‘architectural’ flowers that could take out an eye. Viewed like that, outside and in, the effect was somewhat schizophrenic. The Imperial would never be truly great again. Jacques would never live up to its name. Great restaurants, like great hotels, delivered coherent design and consistent standards. Gleeson’s ‘silk, please’ flowers gave the game away. If the Imperial were a person, thought Gabe, you would say here is someone who does not know who she is.
By the time he’d walked up to Piccadilly Circus a soft rain had set in, caught in the headlights of the cars that edged fractiously around, crinkling the air and shining the pavement. The electronic billboards flashed the golden arches, Samsung, Sanyo, Nescafé. Above the fountain, the Eros statue looked glum, usurped by the monumental LED displays. Car horns sounded; a pair of young women tottered towards Haymarket screeching and cackling and holding each other up. On the fountain steps more drinkers, professionals who would dedicate their short lives to the cause. A hot-dog van let off steam and an oily onion smell. A businessman, officious overcoat and moustache, wanted to cross the road and struck the railings that blocked him with his sturdy umbrella. A middle-aged woman, a chihuahua tucked under her arm, hesitated beneath the foggy halo of a streetlamp, judging if it was better to ask directions or to remain a little lost. The rain,
the smells, the billboards, the rumble of cars – Gabe walked and took it all in although his mind was engaged elsewhere.
He had seen Mr Maddox in action many times. With the hotel guests, the important ones, he was charming. He remembered their children’s names. He was humble without being fawning. He knew what it was they wanted before they knew it themselves. With the staff he insisted that he was just one of the crew. He had come up the hard way, from the kitchen to the top floor. He walked the halls and corridors and spoke to everyone from PR chief to chambermaid, though he was more likely to be rude to the former than the latter, a fact which nudged Gabriel into grudging admiration. If someone was not working properly he’d jump right in and tackle it. ‘Never ask someone to do a job you wouldn’t do yourself.’ He would clamp a chambermaid’s shoulders and move her gently aside. ‘Now look how it’s done. Bit of elbow grease, yes? You get me. I know you do.’ He was cheerful and direct and always made sure to reiterate his point. He praised and punished openly like a good and honest man. In pursuit of managerial goals he deployed humour, incentives and a keen grasp of psychological matters. In short, he was a first-class bully. And he induced in his underlings a fear that they often confused with respect.
Gabe knew it on that first meeting.
‘Private client work,’ Mr Maddox had said, ‘it’s the dog’s bollocks. I know a lot of people. Month on a yacht round the Riviera, six weeks in a mansion in LA, couple of weeks in Aspen, London penthouse for a break, whatever the boss and the trophy wife are doing. You cook macrobiotic crud for her, steak for him, dinner party once a fortnight and you’re done. How hard can it be? You’re looking at filthy money. I mean a right filthy pile.’