Nobody in the kitchen laughed. Drew Callahan, standing at the far end of the pass with a bus tub in his hands because he had taken to doing any work that would have him, set the tub down very carefully, like something that might ring.
"That book," Gus said, "is going back to the stand. Not as a souvenir. It's the senior document in this restaurant. The platform works for it, starting today — not the other way around. Every standing custom written in it gets re-entered as a hard block, the kind no seating can override and no report can flag. And the first one goes in this afternoon."
The re-entry took place at four o'clock, in the dead hour, with the dining room empty and the light coming in low off Prytania. Gus put the book on the stand — open, on the lectern, where it had lived for fifty years — and he put the tablet beside it, and he had Drew do the typing.
It had been Gus's idea and it was not a kindness. It was a penance with a practical core, and everyone in the room understood both halves of it. Drew stood at the tablet with his hands hovering over a keyboard he had used a thousand times to turn people away, and Mireille stood at the lectern with the book, and she read each standing custom aloud in the unhurried voice of a woman calling a roll she fully expected to be answered, and Drew entered them, one by one, as hard blocks — the highest class of instruction the platform possessed, the kind it used for fire codes and health closures, the kind no host could seat through and no report could count against anyone.
He began where Gus told him to begin.
"THIBODEAUX — Table 4 — November 1 — held until noon — do not release."
Drew typed it letter by letter. He had to override three defaults to do it — the platform argued with him in small gray dialog boxes, suggesting a courtesy hold, suggesting a ninety-minute cap — and he declined each suggestion and typed on, and when the block saved, the grid for next November first bloomed into view and Table 4 sat in it already spoken for, in a color the platform reserved for the unarguable.
"Read it again," Gus said to Mireille.
"'Table 4, November 1 — the Thibodeaux table. Held until noon whether booked or not. Some reservations are older than the book.'"
"Now it's both places," Gus said. "Paper and platform. Anybody asks why, the answer is: because the book says so, and the book is older than the software, and the book is right."
Then they worked through the rest of the standing customs, which were not many — that was their power; Odette had not been a woman for clutter, in rules or in sauces. The Barrows' corner table on the first Friday, held for the widow who still came alone and ordered two glasses of the house red and drank only one. The Devereaux christening lunch, whenever it came, at the long table, the date to be taken on faith and the deposit refused on principle — a custom that had survived three christenings and was holding its breath for a fourth. The rule, written in a later hand but the same spirit, that no musician who had played the room was ever to be charged for a meal eaten standing in the kitchen. Each one read aloud, each one typed by the hands of the waiter who had shouted at an eighty-four-year-old woman on Sunday because a screen had taught him that if it wasn't in the grid, it wasn't real.
When it was done, Drew stood back from the tablet and looked at his hands as if they belonged to a colleague.
"Chef," he said. "Sunday, I typed her name into this thing three times. It kept coming back empty." He swallowed. "It wasn't empty. It was just — not in this. And I believed this."
"Yes," Gus said. "That's the part we're fixing. Both parts."
Paul Sanderson asked for ten minutes on Thursday morning, and Gus gave him the office and closed the door and did not sit behind the desk. He stood, because what he had to say was not an ambush and he did not want the furniture making it into one.
Sanderson had come ready to be fired. You could see it in the way he held his folder — the numbers in it squared and tabbed, his own defense prepared in his own language. He was forty-four years old, and he had done what Gus had hired him to do, which Gus intended to say to his face before he said anything else.