Part 2 Who Made This Pecan Pie?” the Mafia Boss Asked — Then He Looked at the Maid No One Thanked
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Nell looked at the plate that had just been pushed in front of her.
In three years, she had never tasted anything in this house except the staff meal served downstairs in the kitchen at eleven in the morning.
She picked up the fork. She cut off a very small corner, ate it, and set the fork down.
She didn’t say the pie was good. She didn’t say it was bad either.
“The filling is a little too sweet,” she said. “Because I had to use the brown sugar we had in the pantry instead of the kind I wanted.”
Carmine looked at her.
“You think it’s a little too sweet?”
“Yes.”
“No one else at this table thinks so.”
“Because they’re eating it after dinner with wine, sir. If they ate it in the morning with black coffee, it would taste different.”
The woman sitting midway down the table set down her glass. No one said anything.
Carmine asked how she made the filling.
Nell answered briefly, in order, with the voice of someone reciting something she knew by heart rather than someone trying to impress anyone.
The butter was heated until it browned, not merely until it melted. The eggs were beaten only until blended, not until they foamed. And the pecans had to be toasted first over low heat in the oven, not in a pan, because in a pan the outside would burn while the inside remained raw, leaving a floury taste when you ate them. After toasting, they had to cool completely before being mixed in.
“And the syrup?” Carmine asked.
“Once it’s cooked, you take it off the heat and let it cool for exactly seven minutes before pouring it into the eggs,” Nell said. “Any sooner and the eggs start to cook and turn grainy. Any later and the sugar begins to thicken at the bottom and it won’t spread evenly when you pour it into the crust.”
She said it quickly—the way people speak about something that has been in their hands for so long they no longer remember having to learn it.
Then she stopped abruptly.
Carmine said nothing for long enough that someone at the far end of the table quietly set a knife down on a plate.
He placed one hand on the table, palm flat against the white cloth, all five fingers spread, and kept it there.
It was a gesture Benny Serantino, standing in the corner near the main door, had seen exactly three times in the four years he had worked for Carmine. All three times it had led to something significant.
“Miss Briscoe,” Carmine said.
“Yes.”
“Seven minutes.”
“Yes.”
“Not five. Not ten.”
“No, sir.”
“Where did you learn to cook?”
Nothing in the room changed. The lights were the same. The guests remained seated. The servers still stood along the walls.
But something had just happened across the face of the girl sitting at the master’s right hand, and it happened so quickly that thirteen people in the room missed it.
The fourteenth saw it.
Nell lowered both hands into her lap. She could hear her own heartbeat pounding in her ears.
For three years, she had lived by one rule: never let anyone ask her more than two questions in a row about anything. She had left two previous jobs for no reason other than someone asking a third.
“My mother taught me, sir,” she said.
Carmine didn’t take his eyes off her.
“Your mother taught you to count seven minutes.”
Nell stood.
She did it calmly, without haste, without shoving the chair back—exactly the way a servant stood when her shift wasn’t finished yet. She picked up the silver tray with both hands.
“If you’ll excuse me, sir, I still have to clean the third floor before ten,” she said. “If you would like more pie, there’s another one in the kitchen. I’ll have someone bring it up.”
She bowed to the table—a quick dip of her head—then turned away.
She didn’t leave through the main door where Benny was standing. She went around behind the row of chairs on the left, reached the side door used by the staff, opened it, and stepped through.
The door closed behind her with almost no sound at all.
Carmine’s hand remained on the table.
At the far end of the room, the graying man laughed and said servants were all so particular these days, that things had been different in his time. A few people laughed with him. Dinner continued. More wine was poured. The conversation returned to where it had been before: warehouse rental prices and the weather at the end of the year.
Carmine didn’t join in.
It wasn’t until the guests began rising from their chairs that he finally looked up, found Benny with his eyes, and motioned for him to come closer.
Benny leaned down.
“That girl from earlier,” Carmine said, his voice no louder than it had been when he asked about the pie. “Bring me her personnel file tomorrow morning.”
At seven the next morning, Carmine Orsini was already at the port warehouse office, and two men had been waiting there for him before he arrived.
The Orsini family controlled the docks, transportation, and a chain of restaurants in the old quarter. For the past three months, these two men had been fighting over a row of warehouses that each believed belonged to him. They had argued by phone, through lawyers, through intermediaries, and finally they had brought the dispute here.
The first man spoke for fifteen minutes—long enough to mention three separate times that his father had once done business with Carmine’s father. The second spoke for ten minutes: shorter, but louder.
Carmine listened to all of it. He took no notes.
When both men had finished, he said three things.
First: warehouses four through nine would go to the second man, because for the past four years he was the only one who had paid for their maintenance.
Second: the first man would keep every river freight contract bound for Baton Rouge, and the second man wasn’t to touch them.
Third: if either one of them brought the matter up with anyone again, both would lose what they had just been given.
No one interrupted him. No one asked him to repeat himself.
The first man opened his mouth as though he meant to say something, then looked down at Carmine’s hand resting flat on the desk and stopped.
The two men shook hands—the handshake of people who had just lost half of what they wanted, but still managed to keep the other half—and they left.
The entire matter took less than half an hour to settle after three months of dispute.
On the way out toward the yard, Benny told him there had been trouble at warehouse number two. A dock worker had suffered a broken leg the week before when a shipment fell on him. The shift manager had agreed to eight hundred dollars in compensation. The paperwork had been signed, and the dock worker had already accepted it.
Carmine asked how old the man was.
Benny said fifty-nine.
Carmine asked whether he had called asking for more, whether he had asked anyone to speak for him, whether he had come to the office even once.
Benny said no. The man had signed, gone home, and yesterday had sent word asking whether he could come back as a warehouse watchman once his leg healed.
Carmine stood still for a moment.
Then he told Benny to pay the man twenty-four hundred dollars in one payment and keep the watchman position open for him.
Benny wrote it down, then looked up.
“Boss, he already signed for eight hundred.”
“I know.”
“Then why?”
Carmine looked out toward the line of warehouses.
“Because he didn’t ask,” he said.
Benny closed his notebook and asked nothing more.
In four years of working for this man, he had learned that Carmine Orsini’s shortest answers were usually the only answers he was ever going to give.
At nine, a visitor arrived.
The man who entered the port office carried a leather briefcase and the pleasant manner of someone accustomed to having doors opened everywhere he went. Conrad Bellaros was forty-nine years old, owner of the largest restaurant group on the east side of the city, with his name on the donor plaques of three churches and a seat on the city council.
He shook Carmine’s hand with both of his, asked after Mrs. Palmira, said the old lady still looked healthier than every man in this room put together, and laughed.
Carmine invited him to sit.
Bellaros opened the briefcase and placed a bound set of documents on the desk. Eleven of his restaurants. A three-year exclusive contract for wine and food distribution, signed with the Orsini family. He named the figure. It was a large one. He added that he had turned down two other partners to come here, that he wanted to do business with a man who kept his word, that Carmine’s father had been that kind of man.
“Did you know my father?” Carmine asked.
“I met him a few times,” Bellaros said. “A stern man. He never smiled.”
“He smiled,” Carmine said. “Just not at outsiders.”
Bellaros laughed—the laugh of a man who had just been lightly struck, but chose to take it as a joke.
Carmine placed one hand on the documents without opening them. He said he would review everything within two weeks.
Bellaros said there was no hurry, stood, shook his hand again with both hands, and left.
When the door closed, Benny asked what he thought of the man.
Carmine looked at the documents on the desk for a long time.
“I don’t think anything yet,” he said. “Where’s the personnel file I told you to get this morning?”
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*End of Part 2*
