Boldt by Ted Lewis Page B

good enough to wash away even the taste of this city.
    Gardenias’s is a long narrow diner that looks like any other diner except that Gardenias’s is spotless, not a speck of dirt anywhere—not a mark on the tablecloth, not a rim inside of a cup, not a splash on the counter. But it’s not only the hygiene that attracts Gardenias’s out-of-the-ordinary clientele; it’s the food which is no different from the kind of food served in any other diner in the country except that it’s the best. There is no coffee better than the coffee served in Gardenias’s, the doughnuts are like you never tasted, the soup is homemade and makes you think of something you may or may not have had years ago, the sandwiches are works of art. These are some of the reasons why Gardenias’s has the kind of clientele it’s got because many of this city’s beautiful people and trendsetters or whatever they like to call themselves have discovered the place—they like telling the uninitiated how clever they’ve been to find the joint and what a character Gardenias is.
    As I go through the door, it occurs to me that however much of a character Gardenias might be, he could never compare with the three characters who are taking up the space at the far end of the counter those characters being Leo Florian and the two guys who always walk behind him, Charlie Bancroft and Earl Connors. Florian himself is an extremely good-looking guy in his late fifties, beautifully barbered hair, silvery and curly; the suit he’s wearing was, of course, tailored by angels, the shoes made by somebody who is probably now a millionaire. Florian is sitting at the counter, a coffee pot in front of him, a napkin stuck in his shirt collar, and he’s drinking his coffee very carefully holding the saucer high. He’s looking very serious,as if all his concentration is going into appreciating his coffee and nothing else must interfere with that concentration. The other two, Bancroft and Connors, are not sitting down; they’re standing behind and slightly to the right of Florian, holding cups and saucers. No bookmaker would take bets as to who out of Bancroft and Connors was the ugliest or the meanest.
    Bancroft is the younger of the two, going slightly thin on top, but compensating for that with the length it is at the back. One of his eyes is made of glass and the other may as well be for all the loving light that shines out of it. Like the cuffs of his pants, his nostrils are flared wide, and the distance between his nostrils and his top lip gives his face the look of an orangutan.
    Connors is ugly in a different kind of way. His ugliness is in his creepiness, in the physical manifestation of his character; you feel that if you touched him, you’d come away with a grey oily film on the tips of your fingers. He’s tall and carries himself well and he always has a faint grin on his mouth. If he was ever to allow it to break into a smile, you’d expect to see a couple of fangs at either side of his mouth. Unlike Florian, Bancroft and Connors have their eyes on me the minute I walk through the door; they keep them there while I walk across to the counter and sit down. I wait for Gardenias to appear and Bancroft and Connors keep on looking at me and Florian keeps on drinking his coffee. When Gardenias comes out from the back and sees it’s me, he shoots a glance at Florian and Co., then back at me.
    â€œHello, Mr. Boldt,” he says, edging over to where I am. “What can I get for you?”
    â€œCoffee,” I tell him. “And liverwurst on rye.”
    â€œFine,” he says, pouring me some coffee from a pot and fetching cream and sugar before he goes to work on his bleached wood board and starts assembling the sandwich.
    While he’s working he says to me, “I seen your partner in here, maybe Tuesday. Eats here a lot these days.”
    â€œYeah,” I say. “That’s right.