Arturo jumped up, toppling his freshly poured espresso in the process, as something splattered against the plate-glass window behind him. He turned just in time to catch a trio of hooded figures darting up the glorified alley to his left, a street with no name, a street he privately thought of as Limbo Road. It was a no man’s land Arturo hadn’t the slightest temptation to venture down, which was surprising to this born-and-bred city kid who at one time had ventured down just about every street South Philly had to offer. He surveyed the window and found a mess of familiar goop oozing down the glass. Not bullets, thank god, but eggs. Was he expecting bullets? Well, on some level Arturo was always expecting bullets. You didn’t get as high up on the hospitality industry food chain as he’d gotten—especially in a city as cutthroat as Philly—and expect bouquets of roses, heart-shaped boxes of chocolates, or strippers dressed like sexy FedEx employees, every time someone rang your delivery bell. Arturo wasn’t as underhanded as some—he knew a few guys so underhanded they’d put a champion softball pitcher to shame—but he wasn’t what you’d call a culinary boy scout either. Regrets, he had a few. Enemies too, a couple in some very high places. No matter that his wife was a cop. In some instances it was even worse—far worse—that he shared his bed with a badge. So, yeah, when the window of his as-yet-unopened tapas restaurant was riddled with projectiles late at night, when he was all alone and half asleep despite his daily dose of caffeine, the paranoid wiseguy in him was inclined to think it might be paybacks, no matter how meager, culinary karma coming full circle.
But not this time. This time it was just a gang of neighborhood kids taking full advantage of Mischief Night, drawn like moths to the flame of Arturo’s temptingly lit window. He cursed the senseless mess he had to clean up, and soon, before the embryonic gunk had time to congeal, even as the twitchy-fingered twelve-year-old urchin in him envied his attackers’ chutzpah. He wasn’t so old that he couldn’t remember what it was like, roaming near-identical streets not far from these, getting revenge on a year’s worth of grumpy neighbors and asshole classmates, bombarding cars with egg grenades, scrawling mocking windshield graffiti—WASH ME; JUST MARRIED; 4 SALE: $19.99— with bar soap and shaving cream. Harmless acts of pseudo-vandalism. Not so much destroying as making a magnificent boyhood mess. Arturo wasn’t so old, but he was far from being a kid. Chelsea often called him Grandpa Artie, halfheartedly getting on his nerves. When first they’d met, she’d asked him how old he was and he’d told her. What was the point of lying? A multitude of wrinkles and gray hairs would’ve called him out on any number he might’ve lowballed her with anyway.
“How old are you?” he, in turn, asked her.
“Older than you think,” she said slyly, “but younger than I look.”
“You look about thirty,” he told her point-blank, “which is exactly how old I think you are.”
She eyed him appreciatively but neither confirmed nor denied his claim. “I know who you are,” she said.
“You do?”
She nodded, the thirty-year-old chased away by the flirty teenager who suddenly inhabited her burnt-caramel brown eyes. “I like your restaurant,” she said, looking around. “And I like Italians,” she added, toying with him, lifting the line wholesale from A Bronx Tale.
Well, give the woman credit for knowing her audience. Give the woman credit for most things, putting up with a greedy egomaniac like Arturo Simon not least among them.
The attraction had been instantaneous, even if their marriage was far from a foregone conclusion. It took some convincing, on both sides of their respective families. It was like something out of a primetime soap opera, the brash, young African-American cop and the brash, older Italian-American restaurateur. She’d walked into Organic Platter that fateful night looking like somebody with something to prove, dressed like her mama hadn’t taught her better, and Arturo had felt as gutted as the pan-fried rainbow trout they served with pickled Cipollini onion and horseradish crème. So they’d drifted apart over time, their insanely demanding careers mostly to blame for the sinister fault line that had opened, then slowly, almost imperceptibly, widened between them. Chelsea had begged him to not open yet another restaurant, which for a long time he’d seen as selfish, mean-spirited, patently unfair. Was anybody begging Stephen Starr to not open another restaurant? Was anybody begging Walter Ego to not cut another album or Stephen King to not write another book? She may as well have begged him to not open his eyes in the morning and get out of bed. “Hey, Commissioner Gorgeous,” came his uninspired reply, leading with a longstanding pet name she wasn’t fond of, “why don’t you stop fighting crime?”
Predictably, Arturo found the eternally unamused detective version of his wife glaring at him with those devastatingly dark eyes of hers, heavy lids at half-mast, as if somebody or something had died, or was dying.
Fuck, another restaurant. She was right, of course. Who, besides Arturo, needed it? Tapas had been done to death, everybody said so. But this time around it was less about the restaurant than about the man for whom the restaurant was named, which, Arturo already suspected, was his first and possibly fatal mistake.
It was one Mischief Night a lifetime ago that he’d spied his Uncle Bull—born Arturo, his namesake—crouched behind a lovingly kept Caddy idling outside Val’s corner variety store over on McClellan. Uncle Bull was a big, Lurch-like guy, six-four, six-five, a head like a prize-winning pumpkin, hands the size of NHL goalie’s gloves. He was hard to miss, even squatting behind a parked car wearing a navy turtleneck under black serge suit, an outfit Arturo associated with b-movie beatniks, not neighborhood muscle who couldn’t tell a bongo from a bon mot. But then Uncle Bull had a reputation as being significantly smarter than the average bear, and a hit with the ladies. Family members referred to him as Arturo, but out on the street, where his seemingly homeless cronies dispensed with such formalities and displayed unmitigated disdain for multi-syllables, his name had been cropped to simply ’Turo, which every near-stranger within earshot misheard as “Toro.” The bull.
“Hey Unc, what are you doing?” Arturo asked, even though he knew exactly what his uncle was up to. You’d have to be a drooling idiot not to see the bright yellow smoke bomb in one hand and the just-struck match in the other, and not put two and two together.
“This guy owes me fifty bucks,” whispered his uncle, flicking his head at the car and grinning from ear to jug-handle ear. “He’s got money to play the numbers but no money for me. So I’ve got a little something for him.”
Uncle Bull winked at him, lit the little bomb, reminiscent of a cartoon slot-machine fruit, and tossed it into the open driver’s side window. Seconds later the pristine still-running car—the Stones’ “Miss You” playing on the radio—was filled with billows of putrid cream-colored smoke.
“Run, Artie!” his uncle admonished him, and practically had to tow his giggling, wonderstruck nephew all the way down McClellan Street.
Fittingly enough, to hear Arturo’s father tell it, as a boy Uncle Bull was forever crashing into things; the proverbial bull in a china shop, he routinely knocked over floor lamps and step ladders and all manner of department store display. One part Paul Bunyan, two parts Babe the Blue Ox, even the occasional Christmas tree came tumbling down. Once, on the Boardwalk, while his father, the older of the Simonella boys (Arturo had wisely opted to shorten his surname; you couldn’t even work the line at Arby’s! with a name that constantly reminded people of food poisoning) had been busy picking out the perfect hermit crab, Uncle Bull had gotten into a tussle with a spinning postcard rack, scattering various glossy wish-you-were-here images of Wildwood to the restorative ocean wind. As the inherently clumsy boy got older, and grew exponentially in size, often the things he crashed into were living, breathing human beings, like the degenerate gamblers and speed freaks who couldn’t or wouldn’t repay the loans granted them by Uncle Bull’s unforgiving boss, a prodigiously mustachioed neighborhood character who went by the sole name Victor. That’s it, as far as Arturo could recall, just Victor. As in, To the victor go the spoils. As in, I’m the victor, which makes unlucky you the loser.
But Uncle Bull’s brawn wasn’t the only character trait that seemed appropriate to his bovine nickname. A born storyteller—Nona Valente would say liar—the man could spin a yarn as deftly as any bespectacled hipster chick wielding a set of sewing needles. Like the time North Wildwood streets flooded after being hit with the tail-end of a hurricane and he paddled a canoe up Delaware Avenue rescuing stray dogs and cats. Or the time he stumbled upon David Brenner exiting the Bellevue-Stratford Hotel with “heart-stopping” Lola Falana on his arm and “chaos ensued.” Or the time John Paul II came to visit and, seemingly intrigued by a placard that read HONK IF YOU HAVE DOUBTS, offered Uncle Bull a brief, inadvisable ride in his Popemobile.
“What did you talk about?” then-teenage Arturo had questioned his silver-tongued uncle. “Oh, you know, a little of this, a little of that.”
“Don’t you even remember?”
“Sure I remember,” Uncle Bull said, feigning mild offense. “How could I not remember? But The Man with the Pointy Hat asked that the conversation be kept confidential. Top-secret, like a confession. Only between me, him and the Big Guy upstairs.”
“Wow, really?” Arturo thought this over. “Why?”
“Why? How should I know why? The man is basically God on earth. Would you go around blabbing about your conversation if God asked you to keep it secret?”
Arturo just looked at him. “No,” he finally admitted.
“Of course no! Otherwise,” his uncle, mimed being struck with a divine lightning bolt, “Zap! Pow! Lights out for good. Still, I don’t think the Holy Paterfamilias would mind if I shared the information with a close relative, say, my only brother’s only son, on the condition that he promise to keep his adolescent yapper shut.”
“I promise.”
Uncle Bull eyed him suspiciously. “Promise on Mike Schmidt’s grave?”
“Schmidtty ain’t dead.”
“Nevertheless.”
“Okay, okay, I promise.”
His uncle looked around the room and loudly cleared his throat as if about to begin a wedding toast. He then leaned in close and, putting a conspiratorial hand up to his mouth, stage-whispered, “He told me when the world is going to end.”
“Holy crap, you’re kidding!”
“Ssshhh, keep it down!” He grinned knowingly. “So, do you want to know the day?”
“Father Carlucci says no human being can know the day.”
“Carlucci’s a crackpot.”
“He says not even the angels in heaven know the day.”
“Well, I know it.”
Arturo thought it over for a few moments. “No, I don’t want to know,” he finally decided. “I’d never be able to not tell somebody. And then God would strike me dead.”
“Good point,” conceded his uncle, noticeably relieved. “But I’ll tell you this, it’s a long way off yet.” He grinned again, a smile that lit up his misleadingly dopey features like a jack-o’-lantern. “Just in case you’re worried about not getting a chance to bust a nut beforehand.”
“I’m not worried,” Arturo muttered, his ears burning in the face of this legendary nut-buster.
“Unless of course the Big Guy changes His mind,” Uncle Bull rambled on, “and changes the date without telling anybody, including the Supreme Pontiff of the Universal Church, His right-hand man.”
“What? Would he do that?”
Uncle Bull’s laugh, not unlike a peal of summer thunder, seemed to sway a pair of bo-bo’s slung over a nearby telephone wire and scatter a small flock of pigeons feasting on the knot of a once-soft pretzel. “Well I sure as shit wouldn’t put it past Him. Look, I don’t know what screwy Father Carlucci’s take is on all this, but the God I was taught to both love and fear and maybe even hate a little, seems to get off on keeping us sinners guessing.”
He’d been right on that score, Uncle Bull. After all, what kind of god would allow people to off each other with poisoned cheesesteaks? What kind of god would silently sit by and let a young detective with a bright future and a flawless reputation and—God help him for even thinking it at a time like this—a very large, very firm hand, leave this world seemingly due to the twisted shenanigans of some demented villain out of Batman?
And yet, if he was being honest with himself—Arturo prided himself on his bluntness with other people, but he could tell himself fantastical stories rife with self-serving falsehoods when it suited his needs—he’d have to admit that this recent tarnishing of the reputation of the famous Philly cheesesteak wasn’t the worst news he’d ever heard. In fact it was the sort of kamikaze anti-marketing campaign he’d dreamt about for years. He’d devoted his life to elevating Philly’s dietary preferences, to refining the city’s collective palate—he’d even named a restaurant Palate, because sometimes it took a brick wall—but his efforts were constantly and consistently undermined by the media’s pigheaded insistence that “native” Philadelphians craved nothing but greasy meat sandwiches slathered with iridescent processed cheese. So, Philadelphians had come to believe it. As did the rest of the country, if not the world. It turned his stomach. Literally. Of course Arturo had been weaned on cheesesteaks just like every other local kid of a certain generation: cheesesteaks, hoagies, pulled pork sandwiches. Meat may’ve been murder in some circles, but around here, it was a unanimously accepted form of self-defense. Yo, look, if it’s between me and some cow, me and some pig? Babe’s goin’ down, bruh. Was it any wonder the city was consistently cited among the top ten most obese? Talk about an epidemic. And although Arturo didn’t wish anybody dead, least of all innocent college students with their whole lives ahead of them—lives potentially spent patronizing his (largely) heart-friendly stable of restaurants—he wasn’t the least bit sorry to see the iconic Philly Cheesesteak knocked off its ludicrous, illegitimate pedestal.
What Arturo was sorry about—truly, deeply sorry—was Olive. The fluke few inches of snow had melted, the touching, highly ceremonial cop-funeral come and gone, but he was still reeling from the news that his wife’s co-worker and his sometime-mistress was suddenly dead, killed in the line of duty, more or less. Of course Chelsea was a mess. But not half the mess she would’ve been had she ever found out that he and Olive had had a fling—affair was too lofty a word for the handful of times she’d shown up at Fondue Me in something other than her sober, unwittingly arousing uniform, some neutral, unnoticeable Ann Taylor suit or reams-long wrap dress that gallantly sought, yet failed, touchingly so, to feminize her inescapably genderless frame. It was like trying to festoon something as municipal as the Ben Franklin Parkway with streamers for a parade. (If Olive was the Parkway, Chelsea was Lincoln Drive, a poorly-lit tarmac of hairpin turns.) Olive towered over Arturo, which he enjoyed. More than enjoyed; her sheer height made the backs of his knees sweat. She entered a room—his restaurant; her tiny bedroom in Bridesburg; the fusty New Hope B&B they’d occasionally commandeered—and within seconds Arturo’s calves would be drenched, and this long before his dick had even begun to get hard. He may’ve been ruler of a culinary kingdom second only to Stephen Starr’s—what was that lead-in sentence the Inquirer ran not so very long ago: Rome wasn’t built in a day but Arturo Simon’s restaurant empire seems to have been—but between the sheets he much preferred subservience, in essence getting to bark Yes, chef! at someone for a change. And who better to subvert him than a square-jawed, steely-eyed Amazon of at least partially Slavic descent, a buff, brutish woman who wouldn’t have seemed out of place stationed in Siberia, toting an automatic weapon and sporting a fur hat not unlike that worn by the chanting Witch’s guards in The Wizard of Oz.
It was part of the reason he’d married a cop: for as long as Arturo could remember visions of handcuffs and billy clubs had danced in his head. Mischief Night hijinks aside, he’d been a well-behaved kid. Maybe too well-behaved. Yet he’d always had a thing for policewomen. Though few real-life female law-enforcers resembled Sgt. Pepper Anderson, he blamed Angie Dickinson, his first real crush, for the fetish. That mouth. Those legs. That hair. The policewoman he’d eventually married was the furthest thing from a 1970’s blonde bombshell, though Chelsea’s own bodacious physical charms were combustible enough to level an apartment building. Early on the sex had been atomic, world-rocking—later, merely mind-blowing. It was still some of the best sex Arturo had ever had, once they’d penciled each other in and erased each other out and finally found the time to have it. But time, as the song goes, wouldn’t give them time. And these days after a long day of cracking heads and booking bad guys, Chelsea was in no mood to throw the book at one more. If anything, she was more prone to throwing actual books she’d grown bored by or impatient with, the latest being a wildly popular if oddly titled satiric mystery novel by a bunch of local authors she couldn’t wrap her head around. Which over time had led Arturo to occasionally seek out much more stern if not downright sadistic bedmates—a sales rep from Foodstuffs; the postwoman who’d once delivered mail to Liberty Kabob; the encyclopedically inked Ruby Rose clone he had seating tables at Organic Platter—the latest (and by far most effective) being a grim-faced taskmaster who had a blissfully difficult time distinguishing between work and play.
Olive. An odd name, considering her size, and her complexion. Try as he might, Arturo couldn’t help picturing the wispy comic book character from his youth, the bendy beanpole with the outsized feet and long black skirt. They may’ve shared the same hair color—even worn it the same way, up in a bun—but that’s where the similarities ended. Detective Olive Norvell was sturdy, strong-limbed, a stately oak tree. She wasn’t as striking as Chelsea, or as conspicuously pretty as that twittering, bird-boned chica, Laurel. But she’d had something Arturo had needed, something not everyone was willing to acknowledge, let alone share. And now she was gone.
At least she hadn’t died in vain. Maybe. Apparently Olive’s death had provided Chelsea and what remained of her team with a potential breakthrough on the case, a handful of arrows pointing in the same direction for once. Which could only mean that the cheesesteak would soon be returned to its rightful place in the Holy Trinity of Philly delicacies, alongside Tastykakes and salt-laden soft pretzels. You can’t mess with tradition, although Arturo had tried (he didn’t need Craig LaBan to weigh in on his ill-fated Wagyu beef cheesesteak, he knew it was silly). Yes, the cheesesteak would live on, ad nauseam, as shamefully synonymous with Philadelphia as Rocky Balboa. Arturo’s efforts would be in vain, his beloved city, so underestimated, so misunderstood, so overfed, forever doomed to be typecast as a blue-collar palooka trying (and mostly failing) to make good.
Oh, well. Kay sara, sara, as Uncle Bull would say, as if reciting the names of a trio of old flames. Whatever will be, will be. The future’s not ours to see. And even if it were, the fickle Big Guy upstairs could always screw us over by changing His mind.
Arturo went to the dishwashing area and filled a big yellow roller bucket with pink soap and hot water. He took a mop down from one of its hooks along the wall and dunked it—once, twice, three times, relishing the sloshy sound—into the suds. A bubble bath would be nice, he thought with a sigh. A sudsy bubble bath with his bubblicious, dark-skinned bride. With any luck she’d be able to pencil him in sometime before Christmas. With any luck she’d crack this cheesesteak case wide open and they’d take a much-needed vacation. His and her tubs, like that ridiculous commercial for erectile dysfunction? No, one big claw-foot, a basin built for two.
He nabbed a squeegee as he exited the room.
Out on the sidewalk, Arturo saw more eggs splattered along the street, evidence of where in their chaotic haste to flee the scene these harmless teenage terrorists had fired wide. But one mischief maker had proven himself a keen shot: an egg grenade had hit dead-center in the second letter O of the crimson painted name TORO. “Swish, two points,” Arturo said aloud. “Right on target.”
Bull’s-eye.