That was the kind of thing he could do now. Two years ago he could not have done it. Two years ago he had still been on the grill station, and before that the fry station, and before that, for nineteen months, in the dish pit where Fausto was now, with his hands in the water, because when he had come to Fort Wayne in 2017 with his wife and his son and two suitcases and a cooking knife wrapped in a dish towel, nobody in Indiana cared that he had cooked for twenty-four men on a Panamax bulk carrier for eleven years, on a stove with rails around it so the pans wouldn't slide, in weather that threw the soup out of the pot. They wanted to see American kitchen experience, and he had none, so he had taken the dish job at Baird's because it was nine blocks from the apartment and Dorrit Baird had looked him in the eye when she shook his hand.
Nineteen months in the pit. Then one Saturday the fry cook didn't show up and the grill cook was drowning and Dorrit, who was sixty-five then and still worked the line herself on Saturdays, had turned around and looked at him and said, "Can you work a fryer?" and he had said, "Ma'am, I can work anything that gets hot," and she had pointed at it with her tongs and that was that.
He finished the flat-top and wiped it with the oil rag until it shone like a black lake. He turned off the hood fans, and the silence came down over the kitchen all at once, the way it always did, a silence so sudden you could hear the walk-in compressor cycling and the ice machine dropping a batch and Fausto's song, without the fans to bury it, sounding suddenly very loud and very sad. Fausto heard it too and stopped singing and laughed at himself.
"Okay, chef," Kiet called from the front. "I'm ready when you are."
Lorenz washed his hands, dried them, untied his apron and dropped it in the linen bag, and went out through the swinging door into the dining room.
The dining room at night, with the chairs up on the tables and only the bar lights on, was a different country. Kiet had the cash drawer out of the register and set on the bar on a white towel, and the printed Z report from the POS beside it, a long curl of thermal paper, and the zippered blue cash bag from the office, and two pens, and the calculator with the paper tape that Dorrit insisted on even though everybody's phone had a calculator in it, because, she said, a phone doesn't leave a record and a tape does.
Dorrit had been in the restaurant business for forty-four years, and she had rules about money. The rules were typed on an index card and taped to the inside of the office safe door, where nobody could open the safe without reading them, and Lorenz could have recited them in his sleep:
Two people count. Always two.
Count it twice. Write it once.
Bank stays at $300. Never touch the bank.
Every bag gets logged. Bag number, amount, two signatures.