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When I wasn't conducting clandestine meetings in the parking lots of restaurants and smoky Irish bars with potential job applicants, or helping out Gianni at Le Madri, or sorting through truckloads of incoming equipment, I was meeting with Pino and his executive chef of Toscorp: the warm and wise Marta Pulini, a tiny, talented, fiftyish one-time contessa. We would meet in the kitchen of Mad 61 or in the offices of Toscorp on 59th Street, fine-tuning the menu, taste-testing, poring over menu copy and haggling over prices. Originally, the idea was that the Coco Pazzo Teatro menu would be 'fun' and 'theatrical', and described in defiant English on the menu, regardless of its country of origin. Center stations had been constructed in the dining room at Teatro where food from the kitchen would be 'finished' on futuristic induction burners, carved or taken off the bone if necessary, and presented tableside by rigorously trained and designer-outfitted waitrons.

Every week, before and after Coco finally opened, there would be a regular chefs' meeting in a conference room at the Toscorp offices. If I was the last to arrive at a meeting, the conversation would frequently change suddenly from Italian to English. The Coco opening was still a few days away when, in the middle of a chefs' meeting - probably a conversation about whose dry aged #109 rib was better, De Bragga or Master Purveyors, or whether we could all agree on a single olive oil so we could get a better price (we couldn't) - Pino suddenly stuck his head round the door and said ominously, 'Anthony, could I see you a minute?'

The mood in the room was one of tangible relief. Beads of sweat had sprouted on many a forehead as the other chefs realized what a close call it had been, that it might have been them summoned without warning to the inner sanctum, for a private and serious discussion with the ultimate leader. I stood up, puzzled, and left the room to meet in camera with Pino.

He led me to his office, closed the door, sat back on his comfortable-looking couch and threw one leg over the other.

'Anthony, do you have any . . . enemies?' he asked.

'Huh?' I stammered unintelligently, not having any idea what he could be talking about.

'I received a call,' he began slowly. 'Someone . . . someone who . . . doesn't like you, who saw the Times notice . . . Have you been stealing sous-chefs?'

'I . . . I . . . no! . . . I don't know.' I managed to squeak, my voice constricting with terror.

'They say . . . this person says you are stealing sous-chefs. That you are . . . a pothead. Who,' he mused, inquisitively, 'who could hate you that much?'

I was completely thrown. I denied, flat out, stealing any sous-chefs - though, of course I'd been stealing every goddamn cook and dishwasher I could lay my hands on. Later, much later, I recalled, during one of the cattle calls, hearing an applicant for a floor job mention her boyfriend was a sous-chef, and at a restaurant I knew. The chef there was someone I thought to be an utter prick, and I might have said something about why don't you have him give me a call. There might have been some inappropriate ex parte communications between my representative(Steven) and this person. And I later found out that the sous-chef in question had simply used our presumed interest in his services to jack up his current chef for a fat and not easily afforded raise. But at the time, all I was thinking in Pino's dimly lit private office was that my Great Opportunity was slipping away fast - and before I'd even gotten started.

I was completely flummoxed, but I did manage to assure Pino, truthfully, that as far as pot or drugs were concerned, that would never be an issue, we would never have to have that conversation. He waved the matter off, boring in more on who could hate me so much as to find out his private number, take the time and energy to call him up and badmouth me, hoping to torpedo my Great Opportunity. I couldn't think of anyone.