R
IGHT IN THE MIDDLE of the dinner-hour rush, two cops came to haul Larry in for wifebeating. He didn't go quietly. In fact, he threw a pot of hot soup at them and then pulled out a boning knife and chased them out of the kitchen. By the time they got him into cuffs and dragged him out the front door, all our customers had left. Mr. Skyropolous and I cleaned up the mess and closed for the night.
Mr. Skyropolous took over the cooking the next day, and our customers started to come back. Things got pretty hectic, because Mrs. Skyropolous was having trouble with the new cash register. Mr. S. shuttled back and forth from the kitchen to the register, and his face was red and it seemed like flames were shooting out of his ears. He had put a "Cook Wanted" sign in the window, but nobody took the bait until we were about to close. Then this skinny old guy walked in, picked up the sign, and announced, "You need a cook? I'm here."
"Well, what brought you to the great metropolis of Bergstadt, South Dakota?"
Mr. S. came running out of the kitchen. "You, you with the sign. Who are you, and tell me, how am I to know you can cook?"
"My name is Scotty, and you better believe I can cook! I'll be here to set up at ten tomorrow morning. Good night." He did a 180 and slouched on out.
Mr. S. and I looked at each other. He shook his head. "He is, how you say, a weirdo?"
"Definitely, Mr. S., but what have we got to lose?"
Scotty showed up at ten the next morning, moved into the kitchen and took over like he'd been born there, got everything organized without working up a sweat. The lunch menu called for moussaka, and Mr. Skyropolous was delighted with the result. "Scotty, you make moussaka better yet than mine!"
Scotty didn't blink at the compliment. "I learned Greek cooking in Athens, Mr. Skyropolous."
This was my second year working part-time at the Elite, and I'd just been promoted from dishwasher to waiter. In the last eighteen months, we\'d run through three different cooks, including Larry. None of them knew how to broil a steak, and Mr. Skyropolous said their moussaka tasted like Army beef stew, only not as much flavor. They were all a little weird one way or another, so Scotty wasn't too much of a surprise. I guess he was about fifty. He was tall and stooped, with a pale freckled face, watery blue eyes, and sandy hair combed across his bald spot. Nobody knew his real name. He had shown up one day at the Commercial Hotel, rented a room under the name of Scott Scott, put his car into storage, and now worked seven days a week at the Elite. The hotel maid said that he made his own bed and that his clothes and other stuff were arranged like for inspection. He cut off any attempt at polite conversation, paid his bills in cash, and was hardly ever seen outside his room or the Elite, except for periodic trips to the liquor store.
I asked Mr S., "Doesn't it bother you that we don't know anything about this guy?"
Mr. S. snorted. "What's to know? His food is from heaven, and the customers are multitude." Scotty's anonymity was no problem to Mr. S., who operated on a strictly cash basis. He had the theory that what the IRS didn't know wouldn't hurt them. What books he did keep were in Greek, and they showed that all his employees were immediate family members.
Scotty never talked much to anybody, but he took a liking to me. Mr. Skyropolous  usually went home early when things were slow, leaving Scotty and me to close up. After the front door was locked, we'd sit at a table in the back of the kitchen, and Scotty would bring out a bottle of Jack Daniels and pour a small drink for me and a big drink for himself.
One night, he felt like talking more than usual. He told me how he had worked all over the world. "I learned to cook at the Cordon Bleu in Paris. Then I decided there was a lot more territory to see, and I moved on. Hong Kong, Cairo, Athens, Istanbul, London. Two years, I was on the Queen Elizabeth, head pastry chef. A few years in New Orleans at Arnaud's, New York at Momma Leone's, San Francisco at Don the Beachcomber. And a lot of places in between, most of them I can't remember."
"Well, what brought you to the great metropolis of Bergstadt, South Dakota?"
Scotty raised his glass and stared into it for a minute or so. Finally, he set the glass down. "I was driving across the country, and when I hit this town, I just thought to hell with the running. I came from a small town in Saskatchewan, and I always had the notion of getting back to a place like this, where the people are friendly. Friendly! Hah!" He banged his fist on the table and his drink sloshed over. He wiped it up and added another slug from the bottle.
