Bone in the Throat - Anthony Bourdain [43]
The chef rolled up a crumpled single, and snorted one of his bags in one long draft.
"You shouldn't waste it like that, bro'," said the little man.
Upstairs, in the dark, the chef could hear the workers returning to their cage behind the barrier. From the roof came voices: "Open!" "Green light!" "Open!"
Twenty
IT WAS FOUR o'clock in the morning, and it was raining outside Tommy's Morton Street apartment. Tommy stood, naked except for his bowling shirt, looking out at the empty street. He was thinking about the van.
On the bed, Cheryl was asleep. It was hot, in spite of the rain, and she was naked, sleeping on top of the sheets, head tucked under a crushed pillow, snoring gently. Tommy's cat slept also, curled up close to Cheryl's stomach.
Tommy was wide awake. It was that goddamn van. He was worried about that. He turned away from the window and looked at Cheryl on the bed. One delicate ankle extended over the side, toenails painted red, her ribs moving rhythmically in and out with her breathing.
He thought he was being followed. He was almost sure of it. When he left the Dreadnaught at the end of his shift, Tommy had seen a graffiti-covered delivery van pull out from a space directly across from the restaurant. A man, only a shape with eyes, really, had appeared to look right at him for a second. It had startled him.
He had put it out of his mind. But then there it was again when he turned up Sixth Avenue toward Morton Street; he had seen the van again, rolling slowly up Sixth, a block behind him. Even then, he had not been too concerned. Shit like that happened all the time, he told himself. He saw the same trucks—the fish guy, the produce, the meat company, the dry-goods truck—he saw them all the time, all over town. He could recognize many of the drivers by now; he'd wave and they'd sometimes wave back.
But this van . . . this van was unfamiliar. Tommy had never noticed it before. The way it was covered with graffiti, unlike the others . . . And it didn't look like it was delivering anything, sitting outside the Dreadnaught at eleven at night. Tommy knew most of the trucks that delivered to the other restaurants on Spring Street. He knew who got their fish from Rozzo, their meat from New York Beef, West-Conn, their tortillas from La Barbone . . . It was the sort of thing you noticed after a while. You even talked about it, chuckling over the fact that the Villa Nova used a fish company you knew to have been indicted for substituting skate for scallops. Tommy had remarked on such things, sitting out front with the chef, watching the trucks pull up in front of other restaurants on the block.
You remembered what the trucks looked like, like you remembered the companies that short-weighted you, arrived late, didn't arrive at all. You took note if you saw your fish company making a delivery down the street when you hadn't got your order yet.
No, he didn't know this van . . . There was nothing written, no sign anyway, on the side. Only the graffiti, layer upon layer of it, spray-painted front, back, and sides as if the van had been parked in one place for a very long time, so the kids put their tags on it.
Even after he saw the van on Sixth, he had been all right. No reason to freak out, he thought. No big thing. Maybe it was some independent, a jobber . . . Some guy from Queens or one of the boroughs, owned a truck and ran around town, shopping for bargains for a small group of customers. There were a lot of guys like that in the produce market, working on almost no capital, trying to hustle up a living, working odd hours. No big thing. Coincidence.
Tommy had walked over to Chumley's for a few pints, ended