“Once you hung up, I realized that I might be able to do this from home, thereby saving my paroled ass in the process. Is the school networked?”
“I don’t know.”
“You can’t see me, but I’m giving you several looks laden with scorn.”
“I don’t ask you to make a meringue, so don’t diss me because I’m computer stupid.”
“Our entire interaction over the last two years has been characterized by mutual scorn. I really see no reason to stop now. Why spoil a good thing? What’s your email address at the school?”
“[email protected].”
I could hear the faint clicking of computer keys.
“I’m in the system. For your information, yes, you are networked. Don’t you check your email at home?”
“I can check my email from home?”
“Hopeless, you are utterly hopeless. Yes, you can, and you have thirty new emails. What’s the name of the controller?”
“Uh? Brian something.”
“That’s very helpful. Don’t quit your day job.” A couple of minutes of silence, then, “Is that Brian Williamson, Brian Dresslar, Brian Hampton, or Brian Keeley?”
“Brian Williamson. What are you—”
“Quiet,” he demanded. I cooled my heels for a couple of minutes, hearing over the phone line the clicks as his fingers moved fast and furious. Gee, my hands looked dry and, yuck, old.
“You basically only have permission to access your email and the files available to the public. You are a no-one in the hierarchy.”
“In computer moron, please.”
“I can’t hack into the system from a remote location, i.e., my living room. I might be able to do it from there. Which means, in short, good thing I’m free this evening. Did you include the aitch in ‘Thom’”?
“We are about to commit several felonies and your primary worry is whether you have an aitch in your alias? You know, you might want to see someone about your aitch complex.”
“I might have expected that sort of reaction from you. Do you even wear matching socks? What’s on tonight’s menu?” he asked.
God give me patience.
“Green eggs and ham. It doesn’t matter what’s on the menu. You just need to show up, and study the menu and the wine list. I want you to get a handle on what our food costs might be. The lunch menu isn’t much different. A little less posh. Lollygag over your meal, and then I stash you somewhere until the place closes down.”
“Won’t it look odd that I’m dining by myself?”
Good point. I turned on the flashlight and prayed, prayed that it didn’t need new batteries…Score! I turned it off. I’d smuggle it upstairs, hidden under my apron.
“Tell the waiter that you’re a wine buyer and that you’re checking out what we’ve got stocked in the cellar. Hint that you can undercut whatever we’re currently paying. You’ll probably get a few nice glasses of wine out it. There’s a janitor’s closet around the corner from the elevator. If I can, I’ll get rid of as much of the janitorial stuff as I can. Duck in there. We need to wait until the janitors finish up with the dishes and then mop the floors. Sometime around eleven, I’m guessing. I’ll come get you when the coast is clear.”
“I think it’s high time to cut out the goody two shoes act. You think like a criminal.”
“I’ll tell that to my ex-husband. The cop. I got you a table in the second seating so spin out your meal. Try to be the last one to leave the dining room so that I can make sure the classroom is shut down.”
“Yes, Bonnie,” he smirked.
“Shut-up, Clyde.”
***
The day was endless. The only bright spot was that O’Connor didn’t show up for class. People were on edge, snapping at each other and barely managing to be civil. Curt barked at the student waiters to such an extent that several of them threatened to walk out. At some point I snuck down to my locker to grab some Motrin from my purse to muffle the exhaustion headache drumbeat. While gulping them down dry, I heard through a closed door Marc and Étienne screaming at each other in French. Marc’s laconic southern drawl sounded bizarre wrapped around the precise and delicate cadence of the French, but it sounded like he was giving tit for tat well enough.
The students dealt with all this tension among the staff by making unbelievably stupid mistakes. Like overturning an entire rack of cakes in the walk-in. Like a senior cutting herself so badly while deboning a salmon that someone had to take her to St. Francis for stitches. But she had company because another student slipped in the walk-in (the floor was wet and slippery from cleaning up all those smashed cakes), and from the angle of his hand and the instant swelling, most likely he’d broken his wrist. Another kid to the ER. It was a miracle we had enough dessert to serve. It was too late to whip up more cakes, so we tried to compensate for this disaster by having several different ice cream sundaes on the menu that day. Which considering it was the end of January, didn’t have much appeal.
I managed to take a small cat nap in the afternoon on the flour sacks in that dead hour between when the morning classes ended and the evening classes began. If I was going to play Bonnie to Thom’s Clyde, I’d better steal as much sleep as possible. Of course, we know what happened to them.
My cell phone kept beeping, alerting me that I’d missed a call, but whenever I went to check it, the display said restricted number. It could have been anyone, but I suspected it was O’Connor, so I turned it off all together. I wasn’t in any emotional shape to lock horns with him so I didn’t call him back. If he wanted to talk to me, he knew where I worked.
Despite the lack of sleep, by nine that night I was so hyped I was zipping around the classroom as if possessed. The students kept their distance, obviously wondering if I was going to snap and start stabbing people. In between bouts of barking out mania-fueled instructions, I kept making excuses to go to the bathroom so that I could see how far along Thom was in his meal, and how quickly the dining room was emptying out. The students probably put down my irrational behavior to a fever due to a raging bladder infection. Wednesday nights weren’t exactly hopping, and my initial guess that the second seating would probably wrap up around ten seemed pretty accurate.
On one manufactured trip to the john, I had managed to scrawl a sign and slipped it underneath my chef’s jacket. After ascertaining that no one could see me, I detoured to the janitor’s closet. There was nothing I could do about the vacuum cleaner stashed there, but I grabbed the bucket and mop used to wipe down the foyer in the morning. At least we’d have somewhere to sit. I wheeled them down to the locker room—if anyone asked me later what I’d been doing, I’d growl that the toilets had overflowed yet again—stashed them in one of the stalls, made a quick prayer to the Nancy Drew gods that no one would need the extra mop that night, attached my Out of Order sign on the stall door, and then collapsed on the bench outside the john, hyperventilating for five minutes from stress.
Thom had taken my advice and lied through his teeth about being a wine buyer. By the end of his meal the table was covered in wine glasses. I saw him sipping a glass that was dead-on the color of one of the most expensive sauternes on the wine list.
Right about the time when I suspected my blood pressure was hovering around two hundred and forty from sheer anxiety, a four-top of extremely drunk older women finally heaved themselves up from their table and staggered out of the room. He was the last. I couldn’t very well slip into the dining room unnoticed, but I pulled one of the student waiters aside and told him to tell Thom that Chef Mary sends her regards. I stood just inside the glassed-in wall that housed the main kitchen. Thom caught my eye and raised his sauterne to me in salute. I made a quick look around, didn’t see anyone looking, and made a cutting motion across my throat. He could interpret that any way he liked.
By the time I’d returned to the pastry kitchen, the students had rolled their knives up into their knife rolls, ready to call it a night. I sent them on the
ir merry way, made a beeline for the public restroom, changed into an all black cat burglar outfit that I’d stashed in my desk, hung up my chef’s jacket and pants on a hook in the stall, (I’d get them in the morning), and sat in the public john to wait for an hour.
As I discovered last fall, once you start actually thinking about breaking the law, it’s shocking how easy it is. At the morning coffee break, I’d scoped out all the hallways, elevators, and classrooms for cameras. There were surveillance cameras in the lobby, elevators, the hallway to the garage, and the garage itself, but no where else. As in not in the offices and not in the stairwells. Which seemed pretty shabby security to me, and I’d write an anonymous letter to that fact once this was all over.
Computers? You are so our bitch.
Of course that meant spending the night in a janitorial closet, unfortunately. But no matter which way I cut it, there was no way that I could get out of the building without the security cameras capturing us on tape. I’d have to smuggle him out in the morning when all the students were in the elevator. He could escape out the lobby relatively unnoticed in the hustle and bustle of arriving students. I’d flip my uniform over to the clean side and put on the previous day’s chef’s uniform, no one the wiser.
All that mania was bound to burn itself out, and sure enough, after thirty minutes of cooling my heels while I sat on a commode, I started to fall asleep. Setting the alarm on my cell phone for vibrate thirty minutes hence, I leaned against the wall of bathroom stall to catch some zees. The janitors should have finished mopping the floors and have punched out by then.
Memo to self: falling sleeping on a toilet is one of the most stupid ideas in the world.
When my cell phone started tickling my hand, I woke up with a jerk. As is often the case with short naps, I felt a hundred times worse than before. My body was one gigantic ache. And I had a new and improved headache to go with all those muscle aches. I stumbled out of the stall, hitting my forehead against the edge of a sink. The flashlight, which had been resting on my lap, clattered to the floor. Biting back a groan, I fell to my knees, cursing silently, as I felt along the floor for the flashlight with one hand, pressing the burgeoning knot on my forehead with the other. I found it and turned it on. Light.
I straightened up and reached for the doorknob. Before easing the door open, I turned off the flashlight. Poking my head out, I tilted my head in the direction of the dish room. Silence. The hallways were dim, just the emergency lights on, casting shadows right and left. I didn’t want to waste the batteries on my flashlight, so I made my way cautiously down the hallway to the janitor’s closet, listening for footfalls. I didn’t think I’d have the nerve to go through this all again and sent another prayer to the Nancy Drew gods that Thom had managed to get to the closet unseen.
I opened the door slowly. And was greeted by the sounds of snoring and the sweet overwhelming smell of sauterne.
Closing the door behind me, I eased into the closet and accidentally stepped on Thom’s hand. He woke with a squeal and pushed at my leg. Simultaneously, I brought my foot off of his hand and tried to find another foothold that didn’t have a hand underneath it (although the closet wasn’t really big enough for one person, never mind two), started to fall over (because I couldn’t see and I was on one foot), reached for something to hold on to, and wiped out a bunch of cleaning supplies in the process. Which fell on Thom’s head. Which caused him to squeal again. At which point I yelled at him to shut up.
At least we knew that no one was in the school, because short of a ticker tape parade and a herd of elephants, we’d done a pretty decent job of broadcasting that we were hiding in that closet.
“You’ve ruined a fifty-dollar manicure with those hooves of yours and probably broken my—”
“Shhhhhssssh!” I hissed. “I’m going to break every bone in your body if you don’t shut up.”
I counted to one hundred, put my ear to the door, listened, didn’t hear anything, counted to one hundred again, and still didn’t hear anything. Then and only then did I turn on my flashlight.
With a motion to keep his lips zipped, I pointed at the bottles of industrial cleaners and solvents. He began handing them to me one by one. Once we’d finished putting them back on the shelves, I whispered, “Move.”
“Can’t,” he whispered back. “It’s not exactly Buckingham Palace in here. You’re going to have to scooch up against me if you want to sit down. Don’t worry; I’m a perfect case of arrested development. I thought girls had cooties in the third grade and nothing in the subsequent twenty-five years has changed my mind. Here.” He offered his hand.
I hesitated for only a moment before grabbing hold. I then twisted myself a dozen different ways trying to find a way to sit down without knocking his teeth out.
Once I’d nestled against him, I asked him in a whisper, “Does Amos know you’re doing this?”
“Are you out of your mind?” he whispered back. “I’d sooner tell him than kiss you. Which is not so much a reflection on you, you clean up adequately, not quite an act of God, but close. It’s that female thing you have going on. He’d kill me if he knew I was jeopardizing my parole. Which is the point in this conversation when you get down on your metaphorical knees and thank me for my stupidity. That’s how much it means to me to have you two make up. I hear him mention your name one more time and I’m going to hang myself. Talking in whispers is exhausting. How long do you plan to make us sit here in Hotel du Dustmop?” he complained in a soft murmur.
“Just another few minutes. Enough to sober you up. How much wine did you actually go through?” I chastised in an equally soft voice. “You’ve been burping sauterne in your sleep.”
“I haven’t had that much,” he protested. “Besides, General Patton, wasn’t it you who ordered me to pretend to be a wine buyer. That waiter was practically force feeding me booze.”
“Poor you. I noticed that you sent for all the really expensive stuff.”
“I did?” he mocked. “It’s a decent wine list but nothing to brag to Wine Spectator about. Plebian in a fashionable sort of way. All the trendy vineyards you expect to see, with a healthy stocking of the big wineries that will be familiar to tourists. No real surprises. Who buys the wine?”
I shrugged against him.
“Curt, the maitre d’ I think. I’ve been keeping my head down, keeping a low profile.”
That got a snort of derision.
“Where’s Mary Ryan and what have you done with her?”
“Shut up. There’s been all this political shit going down. I won’t bore you with the details. So, yeah, low profile. All I care about is stocking the shelves with Valrhona chocolate and butter with a decent fat percentage. Did you study the menu?”
“I want to know who handles your PR, honey, because they do a bang-up job promoting the dining room. I’ve wanted to eat here for years based on the buzz, but the verdict? Schizophrenic. I didn’t know if I was at eating in 1965 Paris or 1995 Mission Street or 2007 Bangkok. It’s like people playing pick up sticks with knives. You throw it all up in the air and hope someone doesn’t get stabbed or lose an eye. Were you the brain child behind some of the gems on that stunning dessert menu? The black pepper ice cream with chives sundae?”
“You worked with me for two years. Give me a break. I’d sooner bite off a toe than serve that shit. The chef who was killed. That was her style. Pushing the boundaries between savory and sweet.” I tried not to sound condescending out of respect.
“I might hate you, but your desserts were universally delicious. You know what you’re doing.”
I didn’t know how to respond to that without sounding extremely snide. I was aching to reply, “Gee, Thom, I wish I could say the same about your green card scam; but those pesky immigration officials just had to put a crimp in your criminal empire,” but figured that was a one-way ticket to losing my computer hacker.
I left it at, “The feeling’s mutual.” Which I’d hoped wa
s ambiguous.
Apparently not ambiguous enough because he said into my ear, “Bitch,” but there was a laugh behind his voice.
We sat there for a few more minutes until he started to snore in my ear, and I realized that if we didn’t get started, it would be seven a.m. before we knew it. Sober enough or not, we had to move it.
“Thom,” I said in a forceful whisper and shook him awake.
Chapter Twenty-nine
To avoid the cameras in the elevators, we used the stairs instead: the flashlight was a godsend as the emergency lights didn’t seem to be activated here. Another item to add to my anonymous letter to building maintenance detailing major deficiencies.
“Do you have any idea what I’m supposed to be looking for?” Thom asked as we made our way up the stairs.
I whipped around, shined the flashlight in my face, glared at him, and brought a cautionary finger up to my mouth.
He stuck his tongue out at me, but didn’t say another word until we’d reached in the school’s offices. I shut the door behind us and turned off the flashlight.
“You are the worst burglar! Why not start screaming out our names and social security numbers so when they book us for breaking and entering, the paperwork will go that much faster and we can get to our cells in record time.”
“I might be a piss poor burglar, but I happen to know a lot about computers, so I suggest that the next one hundred sentences you utter sing nothing but my praises.”
Point.
I counted to five.
Memo to self: the next time you need a partner in crime…
What am I saying?
Memo to self: there will not be a next time, so the issue of a partner in crime and their particular skills set will not be an issue.
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