Protée

His first counter stood on an island — that’s the only point of agreement. Which one: a Greek island, says the postcard; a traffic island between two avenues, says the land registry; an island in the trade sense, a place you don’t leave, say the old-timers, looking into their glasses. The bar had no name and no closing time. Sailors came in for one drink and missed their boarding call; tourists lost their flight, then their home address; two licensing inspectors came to run a check and now rank among the most punctual regulars. The inspection report was never filed.

The school of the counter teaches memory and patience. Proteus added a department the curriculum never planned for: chemistry. Forty flasks, two copper alembics, and that amber vial he wears at his sternum, glowing softly, whose contents nobody — staff included — has ever known.

His magic has one property that makes him precious to the Houses: it aims at everyone. Not the VIPs, not the celebrities — the normal world. The passerby, the lost tourist, the partier running on fumes, the tired regular: one drink at Proteus’s, and the ordinary woman comes back the next day without remembering having decided to. By the third night she has her stool, by the tenth she brings a friend, the way you pass on a gentle disease. He has never run a single advertisement. His publicity is the relapse.

Three curtains have come down in his district; all three times he was drying a glass, and the glass was dry long before his hand stopped. That kind of calm can’t be taught, but the rest can: he trains counter guys in doses and silences, and his alumni now run bars in three districts, working from numbered recipes he hands out incomplete. Ingredient seven is always missing. ’Ingredient seven is me,’ he says when pressed. And he pours another.

What keeps him standing at four in the morning is that four in the morning is his rush hour: the counter is full, the regulars are in their places, and he takes inventory of faces the way others count the till. He already has almost everything he wants — people who come back. There remains the almost, which he confesses only to the alembics: a customer who would come back for him, and not for the philter. Some nights he serves someone a glass of plain tap water, without a word, and watches to see if she returns. Nobody knows how many have passed the test. Everybody knows he still runs it.