"You had a way of knowing there was a reservation," Victoria said. "You chose not to use it." She paused, then asked the question that had been waiting since the first insult. "Would you have checked it if I had arrived with a driver and two assistants?"
Robert looked toward the seated guests for an escape route. He found only attentive faces, including several people who seemed almost embarrassed by how intently they had been listening. "Of course we would have checked any reservation," he said.
"But you didn't check mine."
"Because your attitude was threatening."
Victoria did not move. Anthony looked from Robert to the space where she had stood quietly for the past several minutes. There had been no raised hand or threat, no movement toward another guest, nothing in the incident Anthony could honestly call dangerous. He cleared his throat. "She hasn't threatened anyone, Robert," he said.
The manager stared at him. For a moment Victoria believed Robert might order Anthony out of the room too. Instead he looked toward the host stand and said, "If everyone wants to undermine the manager, I suppose we should all start taking orders from the customers."
"You should start listening to them," Victoria replied.
She asked Marcus to connect her with the company's legal and human resources leads, and she stepped a few feet away from the guests so they could hear one another without broadcasting confidential details. Within minutes she learned the broad outline of something that should have reached her desk months earlier. Robert had failed to complete the required anti-discrimination training despite repeated notices. His personnel file also showed three warnings concerning inappropriate remarks to female colleagues and two earlier guest complaints that had not been independently reviewed. Madison had completed the coursework but failed two assessment attempts, and the formal retraining recommendation had been marked resolved without a verified pass. Anthony's training was current and his performance reviews were strong, though an investigation would still have to examine whether he had acted appropriately once summoned.
Victoria looked toward Madison, who was standing behind the host stand with her hands folded in front of her, suddenly much younger than she had appeared when the evening began. "How many shifts have you worked since you failed the assessment?" Victoria asked. Madison blinked.
"I don't know. A lot." She had memorized the menu prices, learned to divide a room between the preferences of the kitchen and the habits of regular diners, and come to think of the training module as an annoying formality. Nobody had told her that failing it might mean she was missing something essential about her job.
"And who approved you to remain in the role without another assessment?" Victoria asked. Madison glanced toward Robert again. The answer was clear before she spoke. "He said I was good with the guests who mattered," she murmured.
Robert attempted a laugh. "You're twisting what I meant."
"No," Victoria said. "I'm listening to what you said."
Marcus called back with the first verified performance figures. The flagship's guest-satisfaction score had fallen twenty-three percent over six months, while complaints about staff treatment had risen eighty-nine percent. The restaurant had lost approximately three hundred forty thousand dollars in projected repeat business, a figure that had been described in monthly reports as the combined effect of competition and changing consumer preferences. A review of complaint descriptions showed that about sixty-seven percent involved guests who said they had been made to feel unwelcome, judged, or treated differently from other diners.