The Fall of the Palace

Chapter One — Some Kind of Queen of a River Town

The doorbell rang at the back entrance to the restaurant. A well-dressed couple stood under the sun damaged green awning that covered the back basement door. It rained hard as city meteorologists predicted and the couple seemed uncomfortable and flustered by it. It was just after ten and the lights of Kansas City shone into the alleyway making shadows. The muscly young man at the entryway, clad in a cheap sport coat a little too small for him, reached into the drop box to grab the couple’s identification cards, causing his blazer to constrict to the point it seemed like it might rip in two.

The bulky young man checked the couple’s invitations, compared names to city identification cards, and logged their arrival in a leatherbound guestbook. He unbolted the door and welcomed them in. “Good evening Mr. and Mrs. Claremore,” he said, “welcome to the Palace.” Smiling an all-business smile (one he had been working on for quite some time), the young man offered a quick orientation and pointed down the hallway to the base of the steps where Elize stood. She would take it from here.

In the dull basement light, which shone through stained antique lamp globes, Walker Claremore’s white-haired temples took on a strange olive color, and the rain pounded the sides of the building as a mean wind slammed the downpour to the wall.

Elize, petite and just over five feet, clad in a slick brown leather jacket, tight-fitting jeans, and a gray beret, welcomed the Claremore couple to the dining area. She epitomized the upscale rebellion of the Palace’s steak night, signaling a sense of organization in chaos. Elize seemed like one who would have it together in a real shit storm, which was comforting considering how close the Palace always got to inviting that kind of weather.

As Elize and the Claremore duo walked upstairs, a blend of mid-twentieth century jazz and hip hop rose steadily in volume. A rhythm and blues undercurrent made its way back to the chorus after an extended improvisation. As the trio reached the top of the stairs, the song seemed to come to an end, but then it resurged. The front man, Mr. France, shouted (almost belligerently): “I am the egg man/they are the egg man/I am the walrus.” Elize seated the Claremores halfway down the narrow corridor that once defined the dining experience at the Palace. “Bon Appetite,” she said.

The Palace’s Italianate windows, boasting original 1857 ornamentation, had been boarded up for years. A certain bleakness characterized it now. Jeanine, the forty-four-year-old owner and general manager, considered restoring them, but it would have only caught the attention of the city and that was the last thing she wanted. So, the front of the place took on an impoverished look and there was nothing Jeanine could do about it.

The black lettering of the original “Temporarily Closed” sign had nearly completely faded and was now accompanied by unthought-out graffiti and general community news. The elaborate and ornate, “Temporary Like Permanence” seemed to come from the nearby Art Institute. A few feet above the six aluminum panels stuck to the Palace’s front windows, someone scrawled, “Cora, Will You Merry Me.” Two years later, Cora had not yet answered.

To the side of this junkyard proposal was an advertisement for a theater production on one of the new River Market Boats, a bill for a band called Uncle Army’s Possessions, and a weather torn picture of a sad cocker spaniel reported to be lost.

Jeanine worked hard to convince herself that the Palace’s façade did not matter. “If the body is just a vessel for the soul,” Jeanine’s priest told her, “Then it must be the same for restaurants.”

The Palace had soul for sure and the music wailed after Maestro Z rebuilt the dining room by creating five feet of dead air space between the original walls and the new plaster he installed. The way the reverb hit the plaster, he said, could heat the building — like literally.

The always immaculate food reached new heights in this new place. It must have been the electricity of the event; the anxiety mixing with ecstatic expression and the terror of getting arrested in a very public way. Whatever it was, it created a real eye-closed moaner of a ribeye.

Nobody — nobody — could know that the Palace was operating on the weekends. So, the goal was to do whatever had to be done to erase the building from the city’s memory. It was as simple as that. As much as Jeanine hated it, the outside façade helped. The place looked dead as pile of bones. It was impossible to hear anything from inside too. If a death metal band happened to be playing on the Palace’s mid-dining room stage while someone had their ear to one of places outside bricks, they wouldn’t have heard a single note. That’s how good Maestro Z proved to be.

Then there was the issue of the flame fired steak smoke, which the Palace had always pumped into the streets with pride and intention. In meat city, the Palace sought to be king, and the flame grilled drift got it closer to royalty than any marketing strategy. Jeanine now had the unfortunate task that none of the men she followed ever had to think about — how did one go about getting rid of that beautiful smell? She hired a contractor, one court documents later proved to be intimately connected to the East Texas Mafia. Jay, or the man court documents would later prove to be Isiah Walker, fashioned a suction tube that directed the smell of a busy kitchen to an abandoned underground sewer system.

Locking out sound and diverting the sensuous fragrance of flaming ribeye to the old sewer system did not mean Jeanine was safe and she knew this. She still had to get eighty to a hundred people in and out of the restaurant without drawing attention. That’s where the valet team came in. The crew was made up of a dozen or so men and women who had either worked for the Kansas City Police Department before the purge, served in the military, or once oversaw largescale security operations.

On steak nights, they posed as Ryde drivers, picked diners up from random locations throughout the city and dropped them near the restaurant. The drops were coordinated with valet team members on the ground, who kept tabs on the Missouri State Marine Unit, a new agency that monitored boat traffic in those sections of the River Market that had permanently flooded. A former Captain for the Kansas City Police Department used his paid sources on the inside to monitor officers and redirect attention from the 1200 block of Broadway on steak nights. Diners were then returned to their pick-up locations using the same intelligence.

Jeanine’s father, Steele Brambilla, Jr., a tall and imposing figure, once asked from his old chair now situated in the corner of an office that used to be his, “was Jimmy Bond not available?”

Sound, smell, and transportation was the only part of the steak night phenomenon that could be totally controlled. Phones were confiscated, sure, and social media monitored for illicit content. Valet staff met a single social media post about the Palace with the swiftness of an online SWAT team. It had happened a couple of times before, both in the early days of the experiment, and was addressed in such a way that the user voluntarily removed the material and abided by the terms of the lifetime ban. It was impossible to plug all the potential holes and Jeanine was sure word-of-mouth had reached city hall at some point — but how much the city knew and what they were going to do about remained a mystery.

Jeanine not only had to worry about city hall and the KCPD, but also the FBI and the Bureau of Restaurant Compliance, which built one of its six offices in Kansas City. The latter two organizations were notorious raiders. They liked to methodically surveil, creep and crawl, and take surprisingly good pictures of allegedly illegal meetings. Their ambushes were impossible to predict and that was mostly because they couldn’t be bought off. Those Federal guys saw more incentive in making big busts than they did in helping the targets of the big busts get away.

“At some point you just have to say fuck it,” Jeanine told her priest as she smoked a cigarillo like her father used to, “and just let the thing play out.”

“What if you get caught?” he asked with his feet propped on the old church office desk.

“I’ll become an example of something to those looking to make an example out of stuff.”

She kept the letter from the Bureau of Restaurant Compliance in the safe at the church down in the East River District to remind her of why she did this.

Dear Janine Brambilla and Palace Family,

We are delighted to inform you that you have been accepted into the federal restaurant compliance mitigation program. We understand that these are difficult and extraordinary times for former purveyors of animal-based foodstuffs. The National Bureau of Restaurant Compliance would like to assure you that we have the administrative resources to aid in your transition into the modern economy and look forward to collaborating in the creation of a new vision for your establishment — one that aligns with the changed values of our progressing social and political climate. Our first goal, JEANINE, is to introduce you to one of our financial advisors to help you develop a strategy that is right for you, your treasured restaurant, and the new city you will serve.

It was her dad, at first, who kept saying the city could go fuck itself. Jeanine wanted to sell off the building and the equipment and reopen on the Plaza or the East Central District as the city’s premier vegan restaurant. Steele wanted to double-down where he was. She told her dad they would beat the old competitors to the new market just like they did a thousand years ago and finally win the game for sure. He bristled, raged, and sometimes seemed like he might faint. She moved forward anyway, untouched. They’ve won, dad, and all that’s left to do is accept it. He nodded, smoked more than usual, and went through old books and articles left behind over the decades.

After a grieving period and some time to say goodbye, Steele said to Jeanine one night in her kitchen, “I’m very proud of you. I would have lost the restaurant because I was thinking with my heart. You saved it by thinking the way I used to be able to.”

When she opened the letter from the BRC it said what she thought it would. That the Palace had been accepted into the federal mitigation plan, which offered governmental tools to help iconic meat-based restaurants like the Palace rebrand. There were tax incentives, money to reopen in struggling economic corridors, monthly stipends, and discounted equipment from the military. Jeanine had been in survival mode so long she hadn’t thought much about the politics of it all. It was just another thing that had to be endured, baked into the cake, and spun in a way that benefited the restaurant and the family — just like everything else.

Now she was reading things differently. The Palace had a philosophy? Oh, okay. If it had been anything other than trying to be the best restaurant in Kansas City, then she wasn’t aware of such a philosophy. So now it was thought of as a relic from some unimaginably horrible place by the city it served for so long? Something that needed to be fundamentally rethought and changed? Jeanine stayed up all night that night, drinking vodka, wine, herbal tea, coffee, and vodka in the coffee. One of her moods had taken hold. She waited until she knew Steele was awake and then called. “I can’t do it,” she told him.

“Do what?”

“I can’t sell the place.”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake. What is this? There’s no other choice now.”

“Well, there is though.”

“Don’t do this on my account, goddammit, I’m an old man living in memories, it’s all I got.”

“Believe it or not everything isn’t all about you.”

“Give me one good reason why — one that I can start to believe — or else I’m hanging up on you.”

“Because they want a confession of wrongdoing, and I just can’t give it to them. They don’t deserve it.”

***

Jacqueline Jewel Jones’ black SUV pulled into the alley behind the Palace and sped to the back of the building. The rain pounded the windshield like an enemy force. Jacqueline, a stylish fifty-two-year-old woman, tall and thin, brown leather boots prominent, black jeans, and a brown cowboy shirt with mother-of-pearl snap buttons, looked up from her papers. Her long black hair, characterized by a thin wisp of gray down the side, fell straight. Elize ran from the back entrance, opened her umbrella, and invited Jacqueline to duck under it. “Mrs. Jones, it’s a pleasure to meet you finally. We are so happy to have you here tonight,” Eliza said.

Jacqueline nodded and smiled as they moved quickly through the basement entrance, down the hallway, and up to the middle-level dining room. Elize stopped her at the base. The music was significantly louder now than when the Claremore’s arrived. The band had a funky jazz back beat firmly under control, and Mr. France hit a groove: “My thoughts come like shooting stars/if they had bars/floating across the universe and then back into your arms.”

The drummer lightened her touch, the rhythm guitar turned towards a simple and standard riff, almost blues, but with an unidentified touch. Mr. France abandoned his rapping to sing with soul, “and it don’t matter how far they go/not on my show/in here we all glow.”

The band drove hard, veering into cacophonous glory, as Mr. French called it. Ready to introduce Jacqueline Jewel Jones, Independent candidate for Missouri’s upcoming governor’s race, Jeanine moved towards the stage, but turned back and smiled to the crowd as Mr. France, eyes clinched shut, danced around her. He sang with heart, “we own the time we spent in composing these rhyming trends/and we are coming to get the just ends.” Percussion crash, upright bass strutting wild, lead guitar digging into what sounded like a 1970s riff. Mr. France danced wildly.

Jeanine now felt awkward and stepped to the side, avoiding being hit by the front man’s gyrations. Elize, his girlfriend, ran to the stage and put her hand on his shoulder. His eyes opened, he seemed stunned she was there, and then promptly waved his hand to call off the music.

“I’m sorry to disturb your worship ceremony,” Jeanine said to a sweating Mr. France. The crowd laughed. “How incredible is the music tonight?” The crowd roared. “It’s time now for me to introduce a very special guest. She has a very limited amount of time so I’m not going to steal any of it away with introductions,” Jeanine said. “She helped her father build the Tech Sect that brought Kansas City into the future and made it a laboratory for new ideas and a beacon for originality. She is the embodiment of that originality. Crazy innovative, fearless, irrepressible. She’s a Kansas City girl at heart, one of those classic rough and tumble Missourians you can’t keep down, and our favored candidate to become the next governor of the state of Missouri. Please welcome Ms. Jaqueline Jewel Jones!”

Jacqueline hugged Jeanine and said to the diners, “you know you’re all criminals I shouldn’t be consorting with.” The crowd laughed. “And that’s what I’m here to talk about. This is not your typical campaign, we come to the Palace with relatively little fear to say to you — fellow outlaws, heathens, worshipers of false idols — that you need me.

I know what you’re thinking, no lady, we don’t need you. But you do. You know why? Because this office is irrelevant to me and the only thing I want from it is the power it has. But here’s the thing — I don’t want that power because I’m power hungry. I want that power so that I can make sure nobody uses it for four goddamn years for a change.” She paused, looked down at her boots, “can someone get me a beer up here?”

The crowd cheered as Elize walked to the bar, retrieved a glass from the bartender and delivered it. “I don’t even think of what I’m doing as a campaign, really. It’s more of a rebellion, one waged through established channels, against those forces transforming this city’s history of revolutionary vision into a laboratory for do-gooders.” She surged ahead with unusual vigor, “or that kind of stuff brought to you by career graduate students, spiritual nutritionists, and other so-called thinkers beholden to trends cooked up by coastal weirdos.” The crowd clapped, but not thunderously. She didn’t really know why because this stuff usually killed.

Jacqueline paused, quieted the room down, and sat on the stool near Mr. France’s mic stand. “I’m not doing this to be part of a political prom. We are not waging this fight so that I can enjoy the perks of being some kind of Queen of a river town for four years.

We are doing this because we don’t want to live in the kind of city this city keeps telling us is the city we have to live in. We have to stop these people from tearing up the place my father and grandfather built — that Jeanine’s family built. Do you even want to live in a city that doesn’t shed a tear over the fact that the Palace closed? I mean, they don’t know about tonight — hopefully.” She crossed her fingers and made a strange face, “they think it’s closed, but they don’t care! Imagine feeling satisfied that you closed the Palace. It’s considered a victory for them.” The crowd booed and jeered. She took a long drink of the beer and said, “Fuck that!”

Jacqueline knew the power of using expletives in political speeches and utilized them the best she could: with charm and a sense of decency. She also knew you couldn’t fake it and that it had to be shot at a topic that inspired genuine frustration or it would fall flat and make you seem like a foul-mouthed phony. Her team had discussed all this the previous week and, since she was down by nearly double-digits in her race against a St. Louis sparkling water baron, it had been suggested she go edgier, double-down on appealing to the seriously discontented and that’s where the idea of visiting her childhood friend Jeanine at the Palace in the middle of the night came from.

Jacqueline, in a balanced and effective combination of realness and political swagger, roared on, “I hate to act like this, but you know, it’s after midnight and I have to say it kind of sums up my approach to this. Fuck that. I’m not doing it anymore! I’m not giving it space anymore! We are done with it! And though we may not prevail in our attempt to take it out, we will go down trying to.” The crowd cheered as intermittent whistles flew towards the stage. Her new strategy seemed to be working.

“I have to get going,” she said to supportive booing, “but I want to say this: closing down the Palace, a place that exists in my childhood memories so vividly; a place that, for centuries, served as a wellspring of good memories for generations of Kansas Citians; if you view killing that place as anything less than a declaration of war by a clear enemy, then — as Bob Dylan once said — ‘I ain’t the one.’” Jacqueline Jewel Jones exited stage left, descended the stairs to the basement, shot through the back door, hopped in the black SUV, and left.

The diners were driven away, the band went on break, the staff rested, and Jeanine retreated to her office. She peaked through the blinds from the third floor. The flooded Missouri River lapped closer and closer to the Palace’s gates. If that river would finally just flood it out, she would be free, Jeanine thought. The shackles of that place would rust and break and she would finally float to the top of some other calling from some other God than hers.

Jeanine looked up at her great-great-great grandfather’s framed obituary hanging on the office wall, a layer of dust settled on top of the frame. It was from June 11th, 1947. The Kansas City Star wrote, “Steele Brambilla died working a job he loved. None of us will likely know the magic an experience like that must bring to life. He was at the table of Charles and Alice Teal, a young couple on a date at the Palace — an activity that so many Kansas City residents can relate to. In the middle of blessing their night, as he had done thousands of nights before at thousands of different tables over his fifty-year tenure, Mr. Brambilla succumbed to heart failure.”

Jeanine’s father always said Steele the First stayed too long. “How embarrassing is it to die in the fucking dining room on a Saturday night?” he asked nine-year-old Jeanine. She thought of the time her father asked that at least once a week, imagining this man she only knew from pictures, clutching his heart like 1970s Redd Foxx, collapsing backwards as his knees buckled, horrified diners screaming and running for help. Don’t fucking die in the fucking dining room on a Saturday night. Jeanine wanted it added to the employee handbook and etched into the wall as a Palace quote.

The waitstaff, valet, and cooks, cleaned the dining tables and reset them for themselves. They filled their own drinks at the bar, smoked pre-rolled joints provided by Jeanine, and began dancing here and there in the back of the room.

Jeanine entered the room from upstairs, her staff clapped, and she waved it off. Another magnificent night at the Palace, they liked to say to her, repeating one of the framed newspaper articles from yesteryears.

The chef, a short and rotund young man named Alexander Sharp, burst from the kitchen, the door swinging behind somewhat violently. “First out — Bulgogi Cheese Steaks. This is good for the drunk among you. Tonight’s Ribeye, lovingly laid upon a simple hoagie, a secret and sexy Korean downtown flair, happily ended with melted American cheese.” The crowd of employees cheered, clapped, and howled in exaggerated comradery. Alexander bowed like royalty as the waitstaff brought plates from the kitchen to tables.

Jeanine, one-fourth of a joint and a half bottle of Syrah into this late-early-morning-night, took the microphone. “I don’t usually talk at these things because,” she paused and shrugged, “because what is there to say?” She was more about doing, something she learned from Steele. “I learned that from my dad and thought to myself if you’re always doing it instead of talking about doing it, you’re doing it right. In fact, I can’t remember if I’ve ever spoken to you all like this, but please give me a second” Jeanine sighed like she was fighting off tears.

“I grew up in this place and it was always about family. That’s one thing that got hammered into me more than anything else. Family is everything. My dad got a lot of inspiration from those pictures in the hallway you all see all the time. He honored those guys and looked to them for guidance, his grandpa, his great-grandpa, his great-great grandpa. I do that a little bit, but I was thinking earlier tonight — those guys had their run. But we’re here now and we’re in the trenches like those guys never were.

So, what we’re going to do is this, I’m going to take all pictures of dead old Italian guys down this week and I’m going to replace them with pictures of you guys because you make this place run despite the odds, you are my family, and you are the Palace’s family.” She wiped a bubbling of tears from her eyes and said, “Mr. France could you do something please.”

Mr. France smiled and took the microphone. “I think what Ms. Jeanine is saying is that love isn’t in the past and it ain’t in the future either, it’s here right now in the present and it doesn’t have to ever end.”

It was five in the morning. Mr. France sat at the bar, his face close to Elize’s, talking about something. The mixologist had fallen asleep behind the bar. Jeanine drank coffee in the back, the calamitous anxiety these nights brought finally easing into some normalized pressure that might be reasonably processed. She had survived. Jacqueline Jewel Jones made it out of town and was on her way to Springfield, the valet team confirmed all diners had been safely delivered home, and the receipts for the night came in well above where she expected them to. At these moments she almost allowed herself to think it was all worthwhile, maybe even sustainable.

Then, as if shaken from a dream, she saw valet man Dixon, whose last name she could not recall walking towards her wearing a grim look on his face. She stood up, understanding his vibe could only be construed as bad news. “Ms. Brambilla,” he said, pausing and looking down, “we have a thing outside that I think you need to know about.” She took a deep breath, did not speak, and made a gesture indicating he should tell her everything she needed to know as quickly as he could. He stammered, “a body floated up from the river and is pretty close to the front door now.”

Chapter Two — Big Karma

The Mississippi Kite spent most of its time in the air unlike the other birds on the ranch. They liked to sail on top of the prairie wind and snag insects in flight. They also had a habit of flying high almost to the point no one could see them anymore before suddenly reappearing again at eye level.

It was just after sunrise and Isan narrowed his binocular lenses on a flock of the birds. He leaned forward in his chair so he could better see them, smiling when a dozen or so flew across the tree line in playful frolic. After nearly dying of a recent heart attack, Isan had learned to love again the peace of summer mornings on the ranch — one disturbed this AM by the soft clap of cowboy boots on tile floor. He knew immediately who it was.

Billy Anderson, one of his top lieutenants, had a distinct walk. It was impossible to misjudge it as someone else’s footsteps. The uniqueness started with the exotic caiman tail cowboy boots he bought recently in Laredo. They hit the floor with a smooth uptown thud rather than that clip-clopping of cheaper boots. He was also bowlegged and walked with a limp he got from a rodeo accident. Billy wasn’t sure which rodeo he got injured in, but he most often cited Amarillo in 2028. Something got broke, he told people, and didn’t heal right.