“You better button it up, Vinnie,” Butch Pagozzi shouted, running halfway down the basement stairs. Over sixty years old, he was small, lightweight, and felt every bit as spry as forty years before, when he’d fought Tiny Alvarez for the bantamweight title. Butch lost. “We got a customer. A broad!”
“You gotta be kiddin’. What kinda broad would wanna eat in a joint like this?” Vinnie Freiman stood his pickax against the cement wall right beside the sledgehammer, picked up his cigar, and chewed the end as smoke billowed around his balding head. A Coleman lantern lit the area beside him. When he glanced up at Butch, the light created shadows on the layers of bags under his eyes, giving him even more of a basset hound look than usual.
“I don’t know,” Butch muttered. “What am I gonna do?”
“Get ridda her.”
“I cooked somethin’ up just in case somebody wanted to eat. But what if she don’t like it?”
Vinnie, a short, stocky man, pulled a huge, rumpled handkerchief out of the back pocket of his baggy brown trousers and mopped his brow and the back of his neck. “Who the hell cares? We don’t want her here anyway, remember?”
“You’re right. Who cares? But you never know—she might like it.” Butch wrung his hands. “I mean, nobody ever complained about my cookin’ before.”
Vinnie took the cigar out of his mouth. “That’s ’cause they was too busy barfin’.”
“Jesus! What am I doin’ here?” Butch grumbled. He sat down on the steps. “How’d I get into this mess?”
“Get up there and get ridda the broad,” Vinnie ordered. “I got work to do. Or maybe you think doin’ this is better than standin’ over a stove? You want we should change places?”
“But you don’t cook,” Butch said.
“Not a lick.”
“I’ll take care of the customer.”
“I thought so.”
Butch ran back up to the kitchen of what had once been a small but thriving restaurant. The kitchen was fully equipped and clean. After some of the places he’d cooked, Butch still marveled every time he stepped into his new quarters.
Still, the thought of a paying customer in the dining room made his eye twitch so badly, he could barely keep it open. He checked the seasoning in his spaghetti sauce. He guessed it was okay. It seemed okay. Sort of.
“ ’Ey Butch,” Earl White yelled, pushing through the swinging doors from the dining room. Earl, the third member of the trio, had the assignment of working the dining room since he was the only one with experience in dealing with customers. He’d once worked as a bouncer in Vegas. The job didn’t last too long, though. Tough as he was, he found that five-foot-five bouncers sometimes got bounced themselves. “Da broad ain’t leavin’. What am I s’posed to do?”
“Give her a menu.”
“A menu? But you only cooked spaghetti an’ meatballs.”
“So?”
“But I t’ought I was s’posed to get ridda her,” Earl said quietly, not wanting to press the obvious. He didn’t want Butch to get mad at him.
Butch eyed the door to the basement. Vinnie’s cracks about his cooking still smarted. “Well, maybe she wants to eat somethin’ first. This is a restaurant, you know.”
Heaving a sigh, Earl searched for a menu.
Angie glanced over her shoulder at the sign in the window. It definitely said “OPEN.” Too bad no one connected with the restaurant knew it. When she walked in, the waiter had stared at her without a word and then run into the kitchen.
As she waited at the entrance, she looked over the empty dining area, a small, cozy room, with wood-stained walls and big, round, white lighting fixtures. It might have had some charm except that the tables were topped with gray Formica, had aluminum legs, and were surrounded by aluminum chairs with padded gray vinyl seats. Glass salt and pepper shakers completed the decor. This was hardly the accoutrement she expected in a restaurant with the ethereal, whimsical name of The Wings Of An Angel.
Then it struck her. This had to be one of those fifties nostalgia places. That’s why it looked so tacky. It was supposed to. She felt a little slow, but then, she was a nineties kind of gal.
The chubby little man who’d run away earlier peered at her from the kitchen and then stepped through the swinging doors into the dining room. He wore a yellow shirt and brown polyester slacks—the sartorial equivalent of gray Formica and vinyl, she guessed.
“You wanna eat?” he asked. His thick, curly brown toupee looked almost shellacked, reminding her of those fifties dolls with plugs of shiny vinyl hair stuck into their scalps. She was impressed. This place really went all out for authenticity.
“The restaurant is open, isn’t it?” she asked, still staring at his hair.
“I guess.” He didn’t move. When she didn’t move either, he waved an arm toward the empty tables and said, “Have a seat.”
“Thanks.” She was growing more dubious about staying. But maybe the waiter had a weird sense of humor. He certainly had a weird accent. He had to be from either San Francisco’s North Beach or Mission districts—or Brooklyn. The accents were amazingly similar.
She chose a spot by the window overlooking Columbus Avenue. This part of the avenue was fairly quiet. A drugstore, card shop, jewelers, locksmith, and small corner grocery served the people who lived and worked nearby.
The waiter dropped an old, greasy menu on the table in front of her. The name across the top, Columbus Avenue Café, had been lined through with a ballpoint pen. The new name hadn’t been written in.
“I understand this restaurant just opened,” she said.
“Couple days ago.”
“How’s business?”
He shrugged. “Okay.”
Why didn’t she believe him?
“Good,” she said, eyeing the menu again. She’d always thought preparing a menu and seeing the restaurant’s name printed on it would be one of the biggest thrills a new owner could have. For the owner to still be using the former café’s menu made no sense to her at all.
As the waiter walked away, she turned her attention to the dinner entrees. Pasta Primavera. Ravioli. Veal Parmigiana. All the regulars. It was a surprisingly complete menu, and the smells coming from the kitchen were inviting.
This place had been closed for months, ever since the Columbus Avenue Café, a well-respected but unprofitable establishment, had gone under. The building’s owners had been desperate, she’d heard, and willing to rent out the restaurant space for a song. The problem was the location. A little too far north of fashionable North Beach restaurants to pick up the trendy crowd, yet too far south of Fisherman’s Wharf to get its trade. The location ended up serving only people who unknowingly wandered away from the other restaurants and grew desperate. A tough way to make a living.
She beckoned the waiter over.
“I’ll try your manicotti. With it, I’d like a small salad with Italian dressing served with the main course, not before, and the house red.”
He squinted as if in pain. She noticed that his face was heavily lined under the toupee. “Uh, we don’t have no manicotti today.”
“Oh. That’s too bad. How’s the lasagna?”
“Same as da manicotti.”
She wasn’t sure she’d heard right. “Veal Parmigiana?”
He shook his head.
She shut the menu. “What do you have?”
“Spaghetti an’ meatballs.”
She handed him back the menu. “Fine.”
He half waddled, half ran back to the kitchen. Maybe she’d be smart just to leave without waiting for dinner. But she was hungry, and this was a new restaurant in town. Leaning back wearily, she ran her fingers through her hair, brushing it back off her forehead. Being a freelance restaurant reviewer meant she had to be adventurous, despite the occasional disastrous meal. On the other hand, if the food here was especially good, this would be regarded as her personal find. A feather in her cap.
Right now, though, she had the sinking feeling her cap would soon resemble a plucked turkey.
Somehow, she was going to have to come up with a job that paid a decent salary. She lived in a beautiful apartment in a building owned by her parents, and her Ferrari had been a gift from them. But it was time to become independent, self-sufficient—especially if she planned to give serious thought to marriage.
She was a person used to knowing her own mind and acting on that knowledge with conviction. Great conviction, in fact. Marriage, though, had her baffled. The thought of it was scary.
The sight of Curly-locks heading her way juggling a heaping plate of spaghetti and meatballs, plus a basket of French bread and butter, broke her out of her reverie. As he placed it on the table, he stared at her forehead.
“Thank you,” she said, trying unsuccessfully to make eye contact. “It looks wonderful.”
“Yeah.” He continued to stare.
“This restaurant has a beautiful name,” she said uneasily. Was there such a thing as a forehead fetish? “The Wings Of An Angel. I was expecting gossamer curtains on the windows and warm wooden furnishings.”
“Yeah? Well, dis ain’t so classy. Maybe you wanna leave now?”
“Leave? I haven’t eaten yet.”
“You got some doit.”
“Doit?”
“On your forehead. Doit.”
She tugged at her bangs, pulling a few strands of hair back onto her forehead. “Not dirt, it’s ash. Today’s Ash Wednesday. I was at Ss. Peter and Paul’s Church up the street. That’s how I found you.”
“We was wonderin’ how you found us.”
“I guess that makes me God’s gift to you,” she said, and then grinned. “Not only that, your restaurant has the word Angel in its name, and my name’s Angelina. Sounds like fate to me.”
The waiter blanched and started to back away. He couldn’t possibly think she was being serious, could he? “Just leave da money on da table,” he said.
“I’m joking,” she called, but he didn’t stop. “How much is it?”
Over his shoulder he shouted, “Two bucks.”
Two bucks? Nothing cost two dollars anymore, except maybe a cup of espresso. Caffe latte and cappuccino were usually more. This place was too strange. She twisted some spaghetti around her fork and took a bite. Hmm…
She took another bite, shut her eyes, and chewed. The sauce was delicious. Different, she had to admit. A little odd. But still, delicious. She tasted the meatballs. They’d been cooked in the red sauce, and the combination of flavors had merged in a mysteriously heavenly way. There were all the regular meatball and spaghetti sauce flavors—ground beef, tomato paste, garlic, onion, basil, Oregano, fennel, a touch of ground pork…and something else as well. What? It was a trifle salty, whatever it was, but quite good.
She kept eating, trying to figure out the mix of ingredients, but couldn’t. “Waiter!” she called. “Waiter!”
He stuck his head out between the swinging doors. “You ain’t chokin’, are you?” he asked.
“No. I was wondering if I could have a word with your cook.”
“He don’t talk to nobody.” His head disappeared.
She listened to the sound of hammering coming from the kitchen. Maybe they were still doing some construction, and that’s why things were so out of kilter here. She took another bite. Delicious.
That did it. She was going to find out what was in those meatballs if it killed her.