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  And so the party proceeded largely peacefully until a noise or a movement or a communal sixth sense drew the attention of the wait staff and Honor to an almost invisible door next to the bar and partially concealed by another curtain of royal blue iron. Like the walls the door was a stained oak blackness but it housed a portal window through which shone the shiny, curious faces of the kitchen staff. Slowly the door pushed open and the sauciers and sous-chefs and dishwashers crept into the dining room. At any rate they may have sauciers and sous-chefs and dishwashers but Honor didn’t know what sauciers and sous-chefs were. To her they were men in white outfits not unlike that of the formidable Milo, with the important distinction that where Milo had been armed with a cleaver these men had fruit, an enormous stainless steel bowl of tomatoes and cucumbers, a bag of flour and an entire cooked leg of lamb, carried like a baseball bat.

  The objective of the kitchen staff was identical to that of the wait staff, although they were appreciably better prepared for the task of impressing a date. They pushed the waiters aside and their bread-baskets from her table and lay their treasures before her. In addition to a greater quality and variety of wares the kitchen staff, possibly from careful observation of the failure of the wait staff to secure Honor’s favor, appeared to have a greater facility for hospitality. The sous-chef tore strips from his leg of lamb and demonstrated eating it before offering a generous handful to Honor. The salad chef gingerly placed tomatoes in Honor’s lap and the bag-of-flour chef entertained her by creating clouds of white dust.

  “Any chance of a glance at the wine list?” asked Honor as she assembled a sloppy and unwieldy sandwich from a bit of just about everything on the table. They understood only that she wanted something else and as Honor dined the staff rallied around the restaurant and into the kitchen and behind the bar returning with all manner of thing that they thought she might like to eat, including flowers and candles and a fur stole from the cloak room. None of them seemed to be exactly what this beautiful and desirable and clearly finicky creature needed next. Finally a busboy presented her with a bottle of mineral water and the staff froze into a concrete trance as she accepted it, opened it, and drank deeply, igniting a run on the bar.

  It was then that the factions formed into militant groups delimited by shared interests and similar clothes. The sous-chef or, at any rate, biggest chef, took a leadership role in assaulting the bar which had been occupied by the floor staff, led by the maitre d’. The wait staff, doubtless selected from the more presentable and lithe struggling actors who offered themselves for employment at Milo’s restaurant, were little match for the kitchen staff, all of whom appeared to have learned their trade in the nation’s prisons.

  The battle grew violent and then fierce and finally bloody and very soon ceased altogether to be entertaining. The kitchen staff overwhelmed the bar and either developed or remembered an uncanny natural capacity for tenderizing meat. The waiters that didn’t abandon their station and run off in all directions were beaten against the bar’s floor of polished California granite. This left five stout and tattooed kitchen workers bloody and victorious and newly confident of their claim on Honor so when they rose from behind the bar they were varying degrees of enraged to discover that she had left during an entertainment that had been largely for her benefit.

  At that moment Honor was touring the back halls of the hotel. The only light was standard blue emergency lighting and the halls and walls and floor had a cloned character to them that gave the staff area of the hotel a labyrinthine quality. She was lost. But she had her sandwich and sense of adventure and there were treasures, it seemed, behind every door. An oversized linen closet — more of a linen hall — yielded a plush robe with the insignia of the hotel over the left breast. Another equally cavernous room appeared to be the liquor store and was lined with shelves of every variation on the theme of hard liquor, from Bourbon and Scotch to grappa and rice wine. The treasures were stacked to the ceiling — about the height of two average sized Honors — and the only uncovered spot was a high window leading to the outside and secured with two-inch bars of exactly the sort, in Honor’s expert opinion, used in zoo enclosures.

  The next room was actually two rooms and had two doors and no theme to speak of — it was stacks and shelves and boxes and baggage of everything that the most twisted and imaginative guest can ever contrive to forget in a hotel. It was a predictable lost-and-found of clothes and jewellery and junk but it was also an Aladdin’s cave of fishing rods and bicycles and punching bags and an astonishingly large number of stuffed and mounted domestic animals, accepting that anything more than one taxidermied Dachshund is astonishing.

  Honor was browsing this storeroom of wonder when the kitchen staff caught up with her. They were tired and snorting from their battle and from running the length and breadth of the labyrinth looking for the guest who in their primitive view had run out without paying for her meal. Once the entire complement of kitchen workers were in the storage room Honor put down the remains of her sandwich and open her arms and smiled “come on over here, you”. The sous-chef cautiously but confidently approached his prize and as he entered her swing zone Honor selected from behind her back a 1-wood from a bag of golf clubs and pitched a perfect drive into the left side of his head. The club bent and the sous-chef stared immobile and disappointed at Honor, who dropped the club and dashed out the remaining door.

  The pursuit that followed had something of the air of a French farce as Honor took a series of deliberately random turns through thickening clouds of flour dust only to come face-to-face with a dishwasher. She evaded capture by blocking the hall with the door to the pump room, turned, and found herself looking into the ghostly white face of the flour chef. Honor reluctantly but quickly threw her terry cloth robe over his head and again got lost in the maze of hallways somewhere between the restaurant and the hotel foyer. When she finally found herself briefly alone she took the opportunity to hide behind one of the seemingly countless identical doors. She was trapped in the liquor closet.

  She heard the entire kitchen staff grunting and regrouping in the hall and was adjusting to the prospect of a long and well-stocked silence when she saw with a sort of resigned horror that she’d tracked clearly defined floury footsteps into the room. The door swung wildly open.

  The massive sous-chef seemed somewhat bigger now and infinitely less romantic, having lost any inclination of mating with Honor and wishing now only to reassert his authority. In a moment he was on her like an angry chef on a weedy maitre d’.

  The dead weight on her chest and the powerful hands around her neck competed in a lumbering marathon to compress the life out of Honor. This was just nature unfolding as it will, the strong dominating the weak, the large eating the small, the great and nicotine-stained crushing the life out of the civilized but slightly too adventurous. Honor mused again on this unwelcome concept of consequences and again found them not to her taste.

  This unexpected and, in Honor’s view, unwarranted demotion in the food chain grew more real and possible and lucid until it was the only thing in existence and she raised her arms above her head in surrender, stretching until the neck of a bottle nestled firmly in each hand. The smooth angles of Jack Daniels in the right, a classic baseball bat of Wild Turkey in the left. Honor brought them together on each of the chef’s temples with the precision and force of a clash cymbal player in his one solo moment of a Russian symphony with his judgmental mother in the audience.

  The Jack Daniels exploded in a cloud of glass and Tennessee cask-ripened sour-mash. The Wild Turkey held strong, still hoping to hit one out of the park. The chef was softened and bewildered and fell away to position himself helpfully on his knees with his head at roughly the level of a tee-ball. Honor couldn’t resist manifesting the metaphor and she treated herself to a brief wind-up before again testing the surprising strength of the bottle of Wild Turkey, which again held as the chef’s head bounced improbably off his shoulder and rebounded in a rubbery wobble like
a porcelain bulldog rear dash ornament. The chef stared intently into the middle-field as though he saw there something that had scared him as a child. Then he fell the rest of the way to the floor in the way that only 225 lbs of lifeless meat can fall to a floor.

  Honor rewarded herself with a deep intake of air and turned to some crates of Mouton Cadet for richly needed support. She was enjoying the recovered liberty to breath and promising to never again take it for granted when the otherwise jolly tinkling sound of glass addressing glass drew her attention. The remaining kitchen workers were arming themselves with a bottle in each hand.

  Honor chapter 4

  Facing the four leaderless kitchen staff and their eight bottles of vodka, whiskey and, in one case, Benedictine, Honor had one extraordinarily durable bottle of Wild Turkey. She was most decidedly outgunned and the kitchen staff now knew everything she could teach them about weaponizing liquor bottles. But she hadn’t yet taught them everything she knew about liquor bottles.

  With a touch of magician’s flare Honor presented her loyal Wild Turkey Kentucky Spirit on the tips of the fingers of her right hand and elaborately and carefully uncapped it with her left. Her audience looked on, duly curious but not yet sufficiently impressed to copy her. Bringing the bottle to her nose, she made a show of appreciating the noxious bouquet of a freshly opened bottle of 101 proof bourbon. She smiled broadly, licked her lips like a pantomime child-snatcher, and drank deeply.

  With a few false starts, particularly when confronted with corks, the kitchen staff of Milo’s restaurant took to spontaneous binge drinking with an enthusiasm well beyond anything for which Honor could have hoped. They opened and sampled and in some cases emptied at least one of everything. Soon the atmosphere was a dangerous mix of shared curiosity and aggressive evangelism as the kitchen staff forced new taste sensations on one another but from Honor’s perspective the chief development was an overarching lack of focus. They had completely forgotten about her.

  Honor sashéd between the indifferent drinkers like a hostess excusing herself momentarily to see to a doorbell and left Milo’s staff cocktail soirée in the store room. Immediately she found the door she wished she’d found about a quart of bourbon earlier — the door marked “lobby”. In fact the door led to a little office, the very office that had been Darryl’s entire world for most of his short life, and from there Honor found her way back to the foyer. Apart from Darryl who, sadly, no longer registered on the census, the foyer remained empty and that suited Honor to a nicety because she had lost her taste for adventure and, more particularly, for the consequences which seemed so often to fall hard on the heels of adventure. She no longer wanted fast cars or caviar. She wanted to be home and safe and, ideally, armed.

  Crossing the lobby Honor was captured by the mirror behind the bank of phones and had in that moment the sort of epiphany that rarely comes in adult life — she realized that she wasn’t Chinese. The photograph on her license had been of a dark and mysterious oriental girl but the face in the mirror was heavily influenced by generations of breeding beneath the sunless skies of Ireland and reflected back mainly inarguably red hair and a round and robust face, generously freckled under a neon sunburn.

  It had been Honor’s plan to get back on her Harley and go to the Beverly Hills address that she remembered from her driver’s license. But the license wasn’t hers and the address wasn’t home and, issues of identity aside, the street had become a primitive war zone. In the time that Honor had spent on the worst group date in history the sun had begun to set and the nascent communities of police officers and golfers and religious nuts had become militantly partisan and were beating each other to death.

  The policemen, unaware that they were wearing sidearms, were hitting the Hare Krishnas with garbage can lids and newspaper vending machines and the cultists were fighting back with whatever was at hand, mainly tambourines. A substantial platoon of businessmen in shiny suits was trying in vain to force its way into the many occupied cars trapped on the street and a pair of store mascots — a caterpillar and a butterfly — had managed to set themselves on fire. Across the street the cinema and stores and offices had been invaded in spite of the previous impenetrability of picture windows and, most disturbingly, revolving doors.

  There were no women among the warriors and so all that remained to fight over was food and anything that resembled food but the fighting was never-the-less fierce and ominously well-organized. Honor mused briefly on the effect of introducing a female into the melée and decided, for the moment, to hold her ground in the hotel. There were cars everywhere and her motorcycle was only yards from the hotel entrance but the frenzy stood between them and Honor like an acid storm. She needed another exit and she needed a vehicle. With these fundamental truths she returned to the labyrinth behind the reception desk.

  The kitchen staff had spilled into the hall and begun the vomiting phase of the binge drinking process and posed no serious threat. Honor found what she needed in the lost property room and returned to the restaurant and then the kitchen. The kitchen was windowless and dark and the emergency lighting had burned itself out but Honor could see the only thing she needed to see — the outline of the inevitable receiving door which all professional kitchens use primarily for smoke breaks. She could only guess what lay beyond the door. It sounded like unsuitably skilled workers dismantling a greenhouse but was likely yet more running street battles. But very soon there’d be mindlessly wild and dangerously sober cavemen invading the hotel and in any event Honor had a target and a plan and a BMX bike from the hotel’s lost and found.

  Honor and her bike burst from the door not so much prepared for anything but unconcerned what anything might be and so when she found herself jetting off a six-foot concrete loading bay as though off the side of a cliff she maintained control of the bike and hit the ground with the wobbly confidence of a natural cyclist on a pint of bourbon. She quickly recovered her balance and peddled with the strength and speed so often consequential of being instantly pursued by a high-density mob of mindless neanderthals with a paleolithic sense of the romantic.

  Just as she’d recognized the zoo and the interior of a Ferrari with no memory of ever having seen either, Honor knew exactly where she was going and what she was going to do when and if she got there. She was going to the police station, and she was going to get a gun.

  As keenly as Honor was recollecting the path back to the LAPD headquarters she’d passed on her way onto Broadway, the actual measure in distance was proving elusive. Partially because she was quite drunk but mostly because she was backtracking on a bicycle a route previously charted from the luxury of a Harley Davidson. She could see the revolutionarily ugly glass triangle jutting from its cinder block housing like a gargantuan broken widget and knew that she must be approaching police headquarters from the rear, which was roughly the plan, but it seemed to get no closer.

  Of appreciably greater concern was the growing density of the street-fighting which Honor was having more and more difficulty dodging as her lungs and legs began to submit to the stress and heat. So long as she was able to keep to a pace just a notch above a breathless sprint then even those who noticed her and gave chase soon abandoned the pursuit but the factions were sweeping the streets in shoals now.

  Suburban dads were the main occupying force, holding store fronts and upper floors and exploring the military applications of fire and throwing heavy things out of windows. A crack team of road workers was maneuvering against the small but select collection of women being archived by the staff of a condominium showroom. A regiment of confederate soldiers — almost certainly movie extras — were entrenching their positions in a pitched battle with a leathery corp of farm workers for control of a truckload of tomatoes.

  As she soldiered on Honor noticed the high ratio of policemen among the rioters and reflected on the brutality they’d brought down on the heads of the Hare Krishna. She realized that her plan of riding a bicycle into the city’s highest concentration of policeme
n was exactly the sort of strategy conceived by people who’d just pounded a pint of Bourbon.

  She estimated, probably optimistically, that she could keep her diminished pace for another mile and began to look for shelter. The closest option that didn’t require riding up stairs or through a fountain was an open underground parking garage and she steered toward the ramp and disappeared into the darkness.

  She bore deep into the back of the garage. No one followed and as near as could be determined in the darkness she was alone. And there were cars everywhere, she needed only choose one. She cast a discerning eye for something that had the firepower she’d need to get through the immobile traffic and found herself harboring sentimental thoughts of the bulldozer she’d abandoned at the zoo. But all the cars were exactly alike. They were almost all Chevrolet Caprices and they were all black and white. Honor had accidentally broken into the headquarters of the LAPD.