Giacomo Bistrot Robbed

Giacomo Bistrot Robbed

Giacomo Bistrot was an up scale Italian restaurant in town. My mother was friends with the owners. They were a nice Italian family running a nice family restaurant. 

I was fifteen years old and walked passed the old movie theatre in town one winter night when I spotted a black kid named Squirrel. Squirrel was a little older than I but I'm not sure how much older because nobody knew how old Squirrel really was because he didn't go to one of the schools in town any more. He went to another school in another town. I don’t know how he got his nickname but he was a character and a person that people feared. He was always nice to me for some reason. He never singled me out or picked on me the way he did others. I don’t know why. It was the same on this night. Squirrel was nice as can be. 

-Eh, Whitaker- you thirsty for some good beer?

-Sure, why, do you have some? 

-No, but I know where to get some. . . for free. Follow me. 

I followed Squirrel up the road that runs along the train line and down behind some shops. We came to the back of Giacomo Bistrot. They were having an extension done out the back. I followed Squirrel down into the basement area, which had some fencing surrounding the work. We pulled back the fence and squeezed our bodies through. Easy. We were in. We could hear people talking above us in the restaurant. My mother could have been up there for all I knew. We made our way into the basement area, which seemed to be the storage area for the alcohol. Stacked in front of us were cases and cases of bottles of beer- Becks, Heineken, etc and expensive champagne- Veuve Cliquot, Moet et Chandon. We didn’t want to be too greedy and conspicuous so we only grabbed a case of Beck's Dark. We took it back to an alley behind the movie theatre and cracked open a beer each and toasted. When we finished the beer I took my half of the case and Squirrel took his and we went our separate ways. I took mine back to the shed and shared them with my friends. 

The next weekend I was with a friend. We were bored and thirsty. I told him about Giacomo Bistrot. 

-What do you think?

-Let’s do it. 

This time we were a little greedier, we took a couple of cases and some champagne. We took it all back to the shed. It was so easy we got greedier. We enlisted some new recruits to help us lug the stuff across town and back to the shed. It did look a little dodgy- a group of fifteen year olds smuggling cases of alcohol across town. We managed to do it successfully. 

Some weeks later I happened to pass the local newspaper sitting on the kitchen counter. The headline read:

Giacomo Bistrot Robbed

Oh, boy. I read the story. No suspects, just that they’d been robbed of lots of alcohol, beer and champagne. My mother talked about it at the dinner table. 

-Those poor people, just trying to run a business and someone is robbing them blind. Why would someone do such a thing?

A couple of weeks later my older brother had a party with all his friends over. They were in their mid twenties and inside the house being raucous. My older brother had no idea we were up to no good out back by the shed drinking our beer. The champage was for when the beer ran out. One of my older brother’s drunken friends decided to take a walk around the yard in a drunken stupor and he heard us back by the shed and decided to pay a visit. He sat on a case of champagne as we drank by candlelight in the night-time cold. We didn't think anything of it. We offered him a beer. He slurred a bunch of words about how we had wonderful taste in champagne, then made his way back into the house with a bottle of our Heineken. 

We went off for a walk in the neighbourhood to find some action as you do when you're young and drunk. When I came back into the house later that night I discovered a bunch of familiar champagne and beer bottles on the table- Veuve Cliquot, Moet et Chandon, Becks, Heineken, all the same brands we had in the shed. I went out to the shed to have a look. Older brother and his friends had helped themselves. I ran back into the house and found him. He was with his friends drinking our beer and champagne- still slurring his words, only now worse. 

-I know where it came from. I’m not stupid. ... Where would you little kids get the money to buy this good stuff? It won’t take much to tell Ma....... and that is what I will do tomorrow. 

-Tell her then. You’re drinking it too. You shouldn’t be drinking it either. 

My mother figured it out the next day when she came down to all the empty bottles. It was the champagne that gave it away really. My mother saw the bottles of champagne lying all about and they weren’t the cheap variety, so she did a little bit of detective work and discovered to her horror that her own children had robbed Giacomo Bistrot. My mother watched a lot of Columbo and Miss Marple so she put two and two together. Obviously she wasn’t going to turn her own children in to the police.  

She called her friends, the owners, and explained. Luckily they were good friends and understanding and did not make it a police matter. The remaining cases in the shed were returned to Giacomo Bistrot and my mother paid the restaurant back the cost of the alcohol we drank.