O-Town: Chapter 3
Chapter 3: A Treacherous Journey
The Orange Club was the most exclusive dinner club in Ottawa. It was on the fifth floor of the Royal Canadian Mint—this in itself was a closely guarded secret—with a magnificent view of the Ottawa River and Museum of History.
There were never sleek, black Rolls-Royces letting their passengers out in front of the Mint. As part of a Crown Corporation, the Mint and its employees were supposed to be strictly non-partisan, unbiased and objective, making the dealings at the Orange Club a breach of public service ethics on more than one front. The Club, however, had found a workaround. When looking for a suitably exclusive and inaccessible location for his enterprise, Mr. Duncan McColl, good friends with several Ottawa dynasties, purchased the air rights above the Mint and subsequently built a little jewel-box atop it, with the exterior appearance of an industrial air conditioner and the interior appearance of a British peer’s wet dream. Diners were conveyed to the Orange Club via a series of underground train lines carved out below the city’s cultural landmarks: The National Arts Centre, the Chateau Laurier, the National Gallery and the Lord Elgin hotel.
chefs, waiters and various other kitchen staff were required to hold a membership at the Ottawa Rowing Club in order to park at the Andy Binda Boathouse and then make their way to the backside of the Mint, whereupon they would use a passkey door hidden underneath unruly rosebushes and wild grape, and ride up an elevator to the Club’s ample kitchen.
When Renata had gotten the job three months ago, she had signed an NDA regarding the location and clientele of the Orange Club. Ordinarily, this would have ended things between her and the restaurant. Instead, she signed with a resigned sigh and asked for a photocopy for her records, which she did not receive.
Dinners at the Orange Club took over the entire restaurant and started at promptly eight o’clock. Kitchen and wait staff were expected to get there by six o’clock at the latest.
It was now six-fifteen.
Rain lashed the skyscrapers of Ottawa’s downtown with the angry vitality of any self-respecting summer thunderstorm. Cars honked and rumbled along Bank Street. Renata weaved through them in practiced loops and skews of her shoulders, narrowly avoiding newly emerging sinkholes and the ever-present front grills of oncoming traffic.
Ottawa’s downtown core was sinking. Seeing a new sinkhole or noting the Pisa tower-esque tilt of a high-rise always made Renata think of Sandra and the basement café. A twinge of guilt skittered across her face. She could have done the accounts, why hadn’t she done them? Her excuses sounded hollow now. Too much commitment, too much risk and responsibility, too much on her shoulders. Pathetic! What was wrong with her?
This train of thought was derailed by the blaring squawk of a fourteen-wheeler who’s driver refused to accept the basic principles of time and space and determinedly groaned across the intersection at Laurier and Bank, blocking it off completely as the lights changed.
Renata swerved and turned onto Laurier, riding daintily between the parked cars on her right, hiding the bike lane lines of years ago, and the standstill traffic on her left.
An alert trumpeted on her phone.
TORNADO ALERT
A chorus of identical alerts flooded the street. But tornadoes liked big open spaces, not skyscrapers. She would be fine.
It began to hail.
“What is with this day!” Renata screamed.
Brushing rain out of her eyes and wincing at the pinging shards of ice whipping her skin, Renata urged her bicycle to Elgin, past the cenotaph, past the U.S. Embassy, which hadn’t been occupied in three years and down towards the National Art Gallery. It was now six-thirty. A gust of wind coming off the river nearly toppled her over.
Renata managed to get herself to the back of the Mint, soaking wet, shivering and dodging storm surges as the river gave itself over to the thrusting power of the tornado. If she squinted, Renata could almost see it in the distance, a malevolent, conical shadow on the horizon.
She tossed her bike into the rose brambles that climbed the rocky walls below the Mint and pressed the elevator button.
The elevator doors opened at the exact moment another wind burst tossed her bike up and away, nearly tackling Renata in its frame.
An Interlude: The staff of The Orange Club
The desire for sycophancy was so often the downfall of the wealthy. It kept them in a bathtub of increasingly dirty water, so to speak. No new circulation. The same fish in the same turgid water, eating their own shit. Suddenly a former innovative genius proposes to build AI girlfriends for AI chatbots in a Bride of Frankenstein-type endeavour. Whole universes will mock them. All because they didn’t add a little fresh water to their now-sewage filled tub of consultants, lawyers and economists.
Duncan McColl had seen this for himself in the guise of his father, a disgraced investment banker with a penchant for benzos and an unwillingness to hear bad news. There were no yes-men working at The Orange Club. In fact, he prided himself on hiring intelligent, thoughtful and ethical employees with a skepticism of the upper echelons of corporate and government power.
He paid them well. Allowed them to mock the patrons. And in return provided him with valuable intel on the goings on at the Club.
There were no yes-men working at The Orange Club except Duncan McColl. What he learned from his father is that it is the sycophants who have the real power. They are the ones who squirrel information away, who keep their superiors in a comfy little bubble of wealth and privilege. And if one day, some oil executive opted not to help Duncan McColl out with some insider investment information, well then, that executive might find themselves on the wrong side of their boss, who just received recordings of a subordinate describing in graphic detail the sex they’d had with their boss’s wife.
Because believe it or not, some things remain sacred. Namely, men’s egos.
Duncan kept his staff happy and indifferent to the power they beheld every evening, and in return he never had to worry about a waiter undermining him in front of an Australian mining magnate.
The kitchen
Yves Arnaud: The head chef of The Orange Club was a Québécois anarcho-separatist who left the Saguenay in part because he could no longer stand the normie separatists of his hometown. Yves envisioned a future where Quebec was more of a diffuse collection of regional/nomadic outposts, which evangelized Québécois culture across Canada than a state bound by arbitrary borders. This did not sit well with other Francophone communities outside of Quebec, despite Yves earnest attempts to get them to see the light. His saving grace was that if you were an Anglo, he didn’t bother trying to convert you to his cause. He did, however, have a lot of opinions on the Bloc Québécois and was not afraid to share them with anyone who happened to pop by the kitchen when he was in one of his moods.
Blake Treppel: Sous-chef and avid birder, was never destined for the kitchen, but decided it was better than becoming an ornithologist and watching countless bird species die out thanks to climate-induced heat, storms and wildfires. His binocular-trained eyes were very well suited to catching even the tiniest mistakes of the prep cooks and other chefs, garnering him the unoriginal, if accurate nickname eagle-eyes.
Raul Morales: Pastry chef and autodidact, best known for receiving his French literature degree from the University of Ottawa entirely online, so as to avoid having to leave his Vanier South neighbourhood. Despite being proficient in six languages, a math wizard far outpacing Renata and an occasionally published poet, Raul had the spatial awareness of a concussed puppy. Yves hired him on the spot when Raul engaged him in a complex socio-political debate about the feasibility of self-organized socialist caravans in Central America, despite him having no experience in a kitchen. Yet within two weeks Raul was creating signature desserts that would make Julia Child weep with joy. To ensure he got to work on time, Raul was also the only employee escorted by an Orange Club security guard door-to-door. Even then, Raul had occasionally wandered off, leading to at least one guard getting fired for checking his phone while on escort.
Julie Kambudji: Sommelier. She didn’t share much about her life outside of The Orange Club, only that she enjoyed watercolours. She and Lucy, one of the servers, often debated the merits of their respective artistic practices—Lucy on the side of textiles and metallurgy, Julie up to bat for the miracles of pigment, water and impression.
The rest of the kitchen was more transient, but this crew had been at The Orange Club for over a year. Blake had been there the longest and was the hardest to impress. The rest were accepting so long as you showed up and did your best.
This presented an initial challenge for Renata.
She was one of only four regular servers. Jude, a carpenter who had calves of steel thanks to her cycling commute from Burritt’s Rapids, the result of which has led her to contemplate competing in national cycling trials; Lucy, Youth council member for the Inuit Ottawa Association, welder and weaver, who doesn’t really have time for this job but it pays better than all her other work; and Moe, the restaurant’s own in-house CPAC. A Doctor of Political Science, Moe stayed at The Orange Club solely to supplement his real passion, a gossip zine called The Shawinigan Handshake. Such was the Handshake’s reputation among the political elite of Ottawa that allegedly there was an award for whoever could uncover the editor’s identity. Moe’s scribblings would not have gone over well with Duncan, spilling secrets that were not used as blackmail being the limit of his tolerance for employee dissent, but Moe’s identity remained a secret, if only because those who knew were scared that should they tattle, their names would be the next ones splashed across the Handshake’s front page.
Moe also happened to be the head server, and was tapping his foot so hard on the marble floor that Renata could hear it before she came out of the elevator soaking wet.
“Get your uniform on. Dinner starts in twenty.”