Читать книгу White Vespa - Kevin Oderman - Страница 15

Seven

12 June

The job Anne found was delivering drinks in a swank bar up in Chorió. Finding it had been easier than she expected. There were very few locals to choose from, and the flashier restaurants and bars made liberal use of foreigners to carry the dishes and glassware. EC nationals were favored, as plausibly legal, but plausibility was not always possible. Two Stories occupied a two-story building that stood flush on the main stair from Yialós. When the place was closed it looked like a house except for the hand-painted sign over a fading blue door. Open, Two Stories started in the street, a row of tables and chairs lining the ocher walls. Inside, there was a bar on the left with bottles on shelves reaching toward the ceiling. The ceiling itself was very high and white, with ornate moldings and a raised design in the plaster around the hanging lights and two great fans. The second story wasn’t up but down, as the ground broke steeply away from the street, making another room with a view downstairs. Though the windows were small, the view was good, houses on the hills, small, neoclassical places, and in the distance, the blue Aegean. Outside, four tables crowded a stone terrace, and it was there customers interested in the view sat with their drinks, gazing outward.

By the second night Anne recognized some of the regulars and had mastered the system well enough that she hardly needed to think. It was another job in another bar; even on the first night she wouldn’t have been picked out as new. Soon, she understood, there would be regulars who came just to sit in her section, men who tipped well and wanted to flirt a little. There would be some camaraderie with the staff, customers looked down on and the owner, probably, despised. That’s the way it was, but Anne held herself back a little from all that. The distance in her kept all but the rudest drunk from trying to get too close. In a bar, this made her efficient, and when the tips were counted at night’s end she did as well as anybody.