Take-Out Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Also by Rob Hart

  Dedication

  Take Out and Other Tales of Culinary Crime

  Quote

  INTRODUCTION

  HOW TO MAKE THE PERFECT NEW YORK BAGEL

  FOODIES

  THE GAS CHAMBER

  CREAMPUFF

  BHUT JOLOKIA

  KNOCK-OFF

  LAKE PARADOX

  LEARNING EXPERIENCE

  CONFESSIONS OF A TACO TRUCK OWNER

  LAST REQUEST

  TAKE-OUT

  SWIPE LEFT

  THE GIFT OF THE WISEGUY

  DRONE

  BUTCHER’S BLOCK

  HAVE YOU EATEN?

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Copyright Notice

  New Yorked

  City of Rose

  South Village

  The Woman from Prague

  Potter’s Field

  The Last Safe Place: A Zombie Novella

  “HOW TO MAKE THE PERFECT NEW YORK BAGEL”:THUGLIT, 2014

  “FOODIES”:SHOTGUN HONEY, 2014

  “THE GAS CHAMBER”:HARD SENTENCES, BROKEN RIVER, 2017

  “CREAMPUFF”:UNLOADED, DOWN & OUT BOOKS, 2016

  “BHUT JOLOKIA”:MEDIUM SHORT, 2016

  “KNOCK-OFF”:NEEDLE, 2014

  “LAKE PARADOX”:MYSTERY TRIBUNE, 2018

  “LEARNING EXPERIENCE”:NEEDLE, 2012

  “CONFESSIONS OF A TACO TRUCK OWNER”:THUGLIT, 2014

  “LAST REQUEST”:THUGLIT, 2016

  “TAKE-OUT”:MYSTERY TRIBUNE, 2017

  “SWIPE LEFT”:UNPUBLISHED

  “THE GIFT OF THE WISEGUY”:THE MYSTERIOUS BOOKSHOP, 2016

  “DRONE”:THUGLIT, 2015

  “BUTCHER’S BLOCK”:UNPUBLISHED

  “HAVE YOU EATEN?”:UNPUBLISHED

  To my grandmother

  “I’ve long believed that good food, good eating, is all about risk. Whether we’re talking about unpasteurized Stilton, raw oysters, or working for organized crime associates, food, for me, has always been an adventure.”

  —Anthony Bourdain

  Someone else noticed before I did.

  Over the course of several months, I wrote and published short stories involving a bagel maker, warring food trucks, and a restaurant scam. So a friend asked when my collection of food noir stories was coming out. At which point, I was working on a story about a bouncer at a pastry shop.

  It’s not surprising I’d fall into a theme with writing about food. I like to eat.

  But it’s more than that, too.

  I was born and raised in New York City, which is a pretty good food town, and a place where people will spend hours arguing over where to find the best slice of pizza.

  I was raised by a grandmother who demonstrated her love for her family every night around the dinner table, sharply at 6 p.m. She instilled that in me. When she passed away, I took over Christmas dinner. It’s something I look forward to with a great deal of pride and nostalgia. And a bit of sadness, because my lasagna will never be as good as hers.

  Also, my dad is a New York City firefighter, and if you know firefighters, you know they can cook. Eat dinner at a firehouse in New York and you’ll count it among the best meals of your life, and not just for the camaraderie. I asked him, once, about why that was. He said it was because you never knew when you were having your last meal.

  That, to my mind, speaks better than anything else could to the gravity of a good meal.

  Food is the thing that binds all of us, across continents and cultures. No matter where you go, there are signature dishes and traditions of hospitality. Sharing a meal is as much about emotional sustenance as it is about the physical.

  We build childhood memories around food.

  We plan trips and events around eating.

  Which makes food a fantastic storytelling device, especially within the confines of crime and noir fiction. They’re intersections where passions collide. And not all of these stories are strictly fiction. Those warring food trucks? Inspired by a story in the New York Times. The bakery bouncer? I got the idea walking past the velvet rope at Big Gay Ice Cream in the East Village.

  These stories represent five years of writing and, I say, with humility, some of my best work. Two of these stories were shortlisted for Best American Mystery Stories, and one made the final cut. Another was nominated for a Derringer Award. Still another, the first time I read it in public, was accepted for publication on the spot by a magazine editor.

  I hope you’ll indulge me: while many of these stories are very specifically about food, I did play a little fast and loose with the rules. Some of these stories take place in restaurants or bars—sharing drinks counts as a tradition of hospitality—or the food element is secondary to the narrative. One story is about hunger. In another story, the food reference is a punch line.

  Many of these stories have been changed a bit from their original publication, but I remain deeply indebted to the editors who first put them out. Two of these stories are brand new. One of them is my favorite thing I’ve written, but I’m not going to say which.

  And for the record, the best pizza in New York is at Denino’s on Staten Island.

  The metal bowl is cold when I remove it from the back of the refrigerator. Plastic wrap clings to the surface like skin. It peels back easy, the dough cratered underneath. There’s a subtle sour smell coming off it. I put the bowl on the counter, give it a tap on the side. It wobbles but doesn’t fall.

  A perfectly fermented sponge is the best part of this process. Nailing that first step, it never loses its shine.

  I scrape the sticky wad of starter dough into the industrial mixer, measure out the rest of the ingredients: high-gluten flour, yeast, salt, didactic malt. Not even eyeballing it because I can feel the exact moment the correct amount has sifted out of the old plastic jug my father used for this step.

  The bell over the door of the shop dings. I set the mixer to its lowest speed, the whirring sound of the motor bouncing off the green tile in the small kitchen. A voice simmered for years in the restaurants of South Brooklyn calls out, “Mikey Bagels. What’s on the menu today?”

  “Same as always,” I call back. “Plain or salt.”

  Paulie shifts his not-insignificant girth onto the worn stool in the corner, nestled between the dead ATM machine and the cooler that’s barely keeping bottles of soda and water at room temperature. He says, “You know what I like? Those everything bagels. When are you going to start making me some everything bagels?”

  “I make the bagels my father made. Plain and salt. Putting anything but salt on a bagel, it’s like a sin. How many times do we have to do this?”

  Paulie pulls a mostly-smoked cigar from his pocket, jams the chewed end in his mouth. “Mikey Bagels, Mikey Bagels. What am I going to do with you?”

  “You’re the only person calls me that, you know?”

  “What, Mikey Bagels? Your name is Mikey, you make the bagels. What else am I supposed to call you?”

  “It’s a funny nickname for a Polish Jew, isn’t it?”

  Paulie laughs, the cigar nearly tumbling from his mouth. He holds it between two stubby fingers and points it at me. “We’re practically blood. How much do the Italians and the Jews have in common, huh?” He ticks off on his fingers. “Secret family recipes. Devotion to our religion. Guilt related to our religion. Rhetorical questions. I could go on.”

  “You’re funny, Paulie.”

  “How long until we get some bagels, huh?”

  “Got some almost ready.”

  Paulie nods, fans open a copy of the New York Post and disappears behind the thin pages of newsprint. I head to the back, stop the mixer, put the dough onto a tray, and cover
it with plastic wrap so it can proof. Then I pull the finished batch of bagels from the oven.

  Warm and crisp and deep, deep brown. True, hand-rolled bagels that make your jaw hurt to eat. Not those semi-raw pillows turned out by machines that pass for bagels today.

  The hot bagels go on the rack to cool and I cut a long strip of dough to roll into a new batch. It’s dark in the kitchen, most of the bulbs blown, but it’s not worth the money to replace them: I could do this with my eyes closed and half-asleep.

  Wrap the dough around my fist, tear it off with my thumb, seal it on the cutting board by rolling it with the heel of my palm. My father’s voice whispers in my ears, walking me through the process, even now.

  The bones in my hand creak against each other, the pain jolting through my thumb and up my arm like mild electric shocks. Carpal tunnel or arthritis or the march of time. Whatever it is, not pleasant.

  But it’s all about the hand roll. You don’t roll a bagel by hand, it’s not a bagel.

  After, each one goes on a cutting board dusted with a yellow field of semolina. I pause occasionally to look at them and that makes the pain worth it. Nobody makes them like this anymore. Nobody.

  Paulie shuffles into the kitchen and pulls a salt bagel from the rack, passes it from hand to hand because it’s still too hot to handle. He asks, “Where’s my schmeer?”

  “Go schmeer yourself, Paulie.”

  “You lazy bastard…”

  He disappears to the front. I make it to the final bagel when Paulie appears behind me.

  “Don’t be mad,” he says.

  “Paulie, how could I ever be mad at you?”

  “I wasn’t spying, just…” He holds a piece of paper in his hand, staring down at it like it’s in a foreign language he’s trying to decipher.

  The water in the dented kettle is at a boil. I turn the knob down a little. “I wasn’t trying to hide it.”

  “What does this mean?”

  “It means someone took a truck, filled it with money, and backed it up to the house of the guy who owns this building.”

  “You’ve been here forever. Aren’t you, like, grandfathered in or something?”

  “Not if I can’t pay my rent. All they have to do is triple it. Which they did. I can barely afford it where it is right now.”

  “You make the best bagels on the Lower East Side. Probably in the whole damn city anymore.” Paulie shakes his head, looks at the floor like he lost a member of his family.

  I dunk a rolled bagel into the water, let it disappear halfway below the surface before dropping it the rest of the way. It bounces around, buoyed by the roiling water. I count off in my head, thirty seconds on each side.

  “There’s got to be a way to fight this,” Paulie says. “Talk to the community board or something. Get the people involved, you know what I mean?”

  I pluck bagels from the boiling water with a wired ladle, fashioned by my father from who knows what, dip them into the pot of ice water next to the stove. “You know how many bagels I throw out at the end of the night now? The community would rather go to Starbucks. Get a pastry and a fancy coffee.”

  “There’s gotta be a way. There’s gotta. We can’t abide this, Mikey. What about those two knuckleheads who come in here sometimes? Billy and Richie. Word is they’re hooked up. Maybe they can go knock some heads in…”

  I transfer the last of the bagels, fish them out of the ice water one by one, and place them facedown in a tray full of sea salt. When they’re all in place, I turn to Paulie. “Whose head are they going to knock in? It’s a bank doing this. Who do you fight? Go find the guy who runs the bank. Where does he live? Some castle in the sky? Who even knows. I’m seventy-three years old and my hands hurt.”

  Paulie’s face goes dark. “You remember how we met?”

  “Of course I remember.”

  “After what you pulled you should have been dead and gone. But you were a fighter, and we respected that. The balls you had.” He shakes his head. “What happened, huh?”

  He doesn’t wait for me to answer, just turns and leaves. The bell dings over the doorway, the sound of it echoing off the kitchen tile.

  I pull the bagel boards from where they’re submerged in the sink—more artifacts of my father, redwood planks a little shorter than a baseball bat, with a burlap runner to keep the bagels from sticking. Soaked until saturated so they won’t catch fire in the oven. I place the bagels on the burlap, spacing them an inch apart.

  The whole time, I’m glancing over my shoulder, at the letter that Paulie left on the counter. The letter had been folded in threes to fit in the envelope, and the two ends stick into the air like an accusation.

  THE FIRST TIME the door dinged and Paulie came through it, he was forty years younger and a hundred pounds lighter and wearing a suit, the crease in his pants sharp as a razor. This is back when the made men wore proper suits, not track suits.

  Back when my hands didn’t hurt so bad.

  He was with another guy, the two of them preening like they owned the block. Which they didn’t. Their boss did.

  I was behind the counter, placing bagels behind the display case. Paulie came up and put his hand on the top of it, the thick gold ring on his pinkie clicking against the glass. The two of them radiating menace like heat, trying to hide it behind the veneer of their smiles.

  Paulie said, “A dozen of your finest, if you will.” As I piled them into a paper bag, he asked, “What’s your name?”

  “Michał.”

  “Your pops used to own this place?”

  “Died last month. It’s mine now.”

  “I’m sorry for your loss.” He paused, letting the platitude sink in. “You like it? Keeping up the family business?”

  “I like it fine, sure.”

  Paulie nodded, clicking his ring against the glass, looking around the place like he was interested in the décor. I counted out a dozen bagels, tossed in a thirteenth, and placed the bag down like it might burst. Paulie slid a few bucks across the counter and accepted his change.

  “Thanks, Mikey,” he said. “Mikey Bagels, I think I’ll call you. What do you think about that?”

  I shrugged. “It’s not my name, but it’s fine.”

  Paulie pursed his lips, handed the bag to his partner. “Look, something else. Does the name Manny Calabrese mean anything to you?” He didn’t wait for me to answer. “Manny, he’s the guy runs things around here, you know what I mean? He’s a good guy to be friends with. You know how it is. Dangerous neighborhood. But if Manny is looking out for you, no one’s going to touch you.”

  “Are you shaking me down?”

  Paulie’s face split into a smile that showed off every single one of his teeth, put his hands in the air. “Nothing like that, no. Think of it like a partnership. We work together.”

  The other guy was rooting around in the bag of bagels. Paulie reached over and pulled one out, took a bite. His eyes went wide. With a stuffed mouth he said, “This is great. Perfect New York fuckin’ bagel right here.”

  “Same recipe my father used. He was a founding member of the Bagel Bakers Local 338.”

  Paulie huffed. “What’s that?”

  “The bagel-makers, when they emigrated here from Poland, they founded the union. Used to be you couldn’t make bagels if you weren’t a member. The meetings were held in Yiddish so no one would know the recipes. You know what they used to do when they found out someone was making bagels who wasn’t a member?”

  Paulie swallowed the portion in his mouth, shrugged.

  “Same thing you guys are thinking of doing to me if I don’t get in on your little protection racket.”

  The two of them froze, like they’d never heard a threat in their life. And I’d never made one, either. My heart was racing so fast I was worried I’d pass out. Then Paulie said, “Sounds like quite the racket they had there. Quite the racket. But I never heard of this union. What happened to it?”

  “Bagels get rolled by machine now. Nothing is
sacred.”

  “So they’re not around anymore. That’s a good thing to know.” Paulie shook his head. “Mikey Bagels, Mikey Bagels. I like you. You seem like a smart guy. I’ll tell you what. I’m going to tell Manny Calabrese you were too busy to talk, but that you seemed like a friendly guy and I wasn’t worried. So I’ll come back in a few days and we’ll talk again. Get this all straightened out. Give you a little time to consider…how things could go.”

  He raised his hand up like he was offering a handshake, then turned it into a fist, brought it down hard, the pinkie ring smacking against the glass, spider-webbing it. He used his elbow to finish the job, sending shards of glass to rain down on the fresh bagels, and I was more worried about them than the case.

  Paulie brushed off his elbow, said, “I know you’ll make the right call here.”

  The two of them stepped to the door. I felt a surge of fear like bile coming up my throat, choked it down. I called after them, “I’m not afraid of you or your boss.” The door closed behind them and I raised my voice, hoping they would hear. “So do what you have to and I’m not going anywhere.”

  I stood there a long time after they left.

  TWO DOZEN BAGELS go in the trash at the end of the day. They sound like rocks hitting the bottom of the can. The fatal flaw of authentic bagels: in a few hours they turn into concrete. The homeless shelter around the corner won’t even take them.

  I prep some more sponges to go into the refrigerator and proof overnight, dumping the ingredients into metal bowls, mixing them with my fingers until they hit the right consistency. A little sticky, a little tacky. I cover the bowls in plastic wrap and place them in the back, where the cool air circulates better, wipe down the kitchen, the semolina and high-gluten flour disappearing into a wet dishrag.

  Once the stainless steel sparkles, I turn off the lights and stand in the dark. Try to remember the first job my father gave me. Official Bagel Inspector, I think he called it. I would stand on my tiptoes, peering over the lip of the table, watching my father roll the bagels with thick-muscled hands and place them on the cutting board.