Basilic

His bar is famous for two reasons, and the cocktail list is only one of them. The other is the terrace: a statue garden, stone figures frozen mid-gesture — one raising a toast, another looking for the exit, a third with her hand in her inside pocket, forever. ’Bought at auction,’ says Basilisk. The regulars note, however, that the collection grows without a delivery truck, and that one statue wears the watch — recognizable, engraved — of a customer who skipped out on her bill three springs ago. When someone points this out, he laughs. Laughter, everyone will concede, is not a denial.

The school of the counter issued him the regulation memory and patience: he remembers your order from two years ago and your unpaid tab from three. The viridian coils of his hair sometimes move on their own, insist the customers at the back. The customers at the back have usually had a great deal to drink, he replies. That’s true too.

His district is the best-watched in the city, and that’s an accounting fact: the tills balance, the scams wither, the cheats confess before they’ve cheated. The reason sits on his nose: two mirrored lenses, never removed, that hand everyone back their own reflection in duplicate. You watch yourself lying, and you give up. As for the rival squads that come hunting on his ground, the outcome is so consistent it’s in the Houses’ training manuals: the poach fails, turns around, and the squad leaves lighter than it arrived — when it leaves. The legend says petrified. The truth is worse for their Boss: they come back, and they talk.

The paradox is the atmosphere: at the basilisk’s place, people laugh enormously. He slips fake snakes into the ice bin, introduces the statues to new customers — ’I’ll leave you with Gérard, he’s a bit stony’ —, and his great gala-night number is still the lowering of the sunglasses: one inch, no more. The room goes silent at once, somebody drops a glass, and he pushes the frames back up, laughing that warm-stone laugh of his. Nothing shakes him: the tide, two curtains and a kitchen fire have all rolled over him without displacing a single coil. ’Stone runs in the family,’ he says.

At four in the morning he waters the statues — ’they get thirsty, well, I assume’ — and tidies his great ledger: every debt in it is settled, one way or another, left-hand column or right-hand terrace. He trains his guys to work with their backs to the mirrors, a house reflex, and keeps the district like a garden: pruned, watered, watched. What does he want? Gossips speak of an apology he’s owed by someone very old, with a shield polished far too well. He just shrugs: a bigger terrace. The collection, you see, grows all by itself.