“Nice job on the roast,” Matt said between long, contemplative sips.

“Thanks. I kept it light to preserve the nuances-a no-brainer on the Esmeralda.”

“Aren’t you having any?”

“I cupped it earlier with Dante-” I tipped my head toward my newest barista, a tattooed, shaved-headed, fine arts painter with a penchant for space and ambient music. (He had some of it playing now: a hypnotic, rhythmic electronic pulsing that would have sent me to dreamland if it weren’t for the double espresso I’d consumed before Matt sat down.)

Hearing his name, Dante Silva glanced up from his conversation with the pretty young mochaccino orderer.

“Need anything, boss?” he called.

“No, it’s okay.”

I wasn’t thrilled with Dante calling me “boss,” but it was better than “Ms. Cosi,” which is how he’d repeatedly addressed me when I’d first hired him. Sure, I’d asked him to call me Clare, but despite Dante’s outlaw appearance, the guy had scrupulous manners-no doubt from the same sort of traditional Italian upbringing I’d gotten from my own grandmother. Luckily, our resident slam poetess, Esther Best, held virtually no respect for authority, and her routine, semisarcastic address of me as “boss” had finally loosened up Dante enough to break him of his “Ms. Cosi” habit.

Matt knocked the counter with his knuckles. I glanced back to him.

“You off soon?” he asked.

“Why?”

“I thought you’d like to come with me to the White Horse. Koa Waipuna just got into town, and I’m meeting him for a drink.”

“Sure. I’m sorry I missed him the last time he was here. We can go as soon as Gardner gets here to relieve me.”

Five minutes later, the front door bell jingled, and a long-limbed African American jazz musician with a freshly trimmed goatee strode purposefully across the wood-plank floor.

“Okay, Dante,” called Gardner, waving a hand-labeled CD case. “Enough with your Sominex playlist! I just cut a new fusion mix with my group. Let’s wake things up in here!”

WALK down almost any of my neighborhood’s narrow, tree-lined streets, and you’ll see three centuries of architectural history, from Federal, Greek Revival, and Italianate town houses to early twentieth-century apartment buildings. Almost everyone I know has applauded the saving of these landmarks and cried over the treasures that were lost before the historic district was sanctioned. But no one cried hard enough, it seemed to me, over losing the guts of these places.

While the buildings around the Village Blend were now preserved by law, the businesses inside them weren’t, and every year that ticked by, more of my neighborhood’s legendary establishments folded, their storefronts replaced with the sort of trade you’d find in upscale suburban malls. What made Greenwich Village Greenwich Village was drifting away faster than Al Gore’s ice caps.

That’s the main reason I valued the White Horse. Like my Village Blend, the landmark tavern stubbornly refused to let go of its moorings. Since Welsh poet Dylan Thomas tossed back eighteen fatal shots in its paneled back room fifty years ago, the White Horse has been hyped as the watering hole of literary legends.

True, Norman Mailer used the joint as a second living room, mainly because, as he so graciously put it, “If you invited people to your house, it was not that easy to get rid of them…” But I’d also been impressed with the building itself, which was one of the few wood-frame constructions remaining in Manhattan. The ground-level storefront originally housed a bookshop. Then the James Dean Oyster Bar took over the space, and in 1880, the White Horse opened its doors.

For the next five decades or so, the tavern poured whiskey for longshoremen working the nearby West Side docks. Then the Village became a magnet for struggling writers and artists, and bohemians began to gather there. Today’s clientele lived a lot farther up the socioeconomic ladder.

With NYU now owning half the real estate in my picturesque Village, the college crowd was constantly ringing the bar’s register. Pub-crawling tourists frequented the place, too, along with well-paid or well-subsidized neighborhood regulars who craved good burgers, great onion rings, and ice-cold beers. (Local real estate being what it was, authentically bohemian writers had long ago retrenched in other neighborhoods, but sometimes even they returned to the tavern, drawn by the legends as much as the tourists.)

This evening, the century-old tavern looked as casually inviting as ever with its upper stories painted summer-sky blue and its stately white horse chess-piece emblems stenciled above the tall front windows.

The manager had gamely put out the café umbrellas, but April was still early in the season for sidewalk seating, and only one of the wooden picnic tables was occupied, despite the mild spring weather.

After an easy stroll under Hudson ’s glowing streetlamps, Matt and I entered the softly lit front room to find Koa Waipuna sitting at the magnificent mirror-backed mahogany bar (the original one, circa the nineteenth century). I hadn’t seen Koa in years, but there was no way to miss the man. He was big. And exotic didn’t begin to describe him.

Along with his name, Koa had inherited his deep olive complexion and black, expressive eyes from his native Hawaiian father. His frame was heavily muscled, yet he had the delicate facial structure of his Japanese mother. Fluent in Japanese as well as his native Hawaiian, he still wore his long black hair in a samurai-style topknot, an offbeat crowning to preppie khakis, an aquamarine Izod, and polished loafers.

Koa spotted Matt first and grinned. Then he shifted his gaze to me.

“Clare!” He stood and wrapped his beefy arms around me in an enthusiastic hug only slightly less forceful than a boa constrictor’s. “I wasn’t expecting to see you tonight!”

I’d visited the Waipunas’ farm only once in my life, years earlier, when Matteo converted a Kona buying trip into our hastily planned but spectacularly romantic Hawaiian honeymoon. Back then, Koa had been a wild young teenager who refused to wear a shirt, bristled at farm work, and was constantly surrounded by his five giggling sisters. Today he was in his thirties, married with children, and responsible for the coffee farm’s day-to-day operations. He was serious as a heart attack, according to Matt, until he set foot off the estate. Then his wild streak returned with a vengeance.

“Come with me,” Koa said. Grinning wide, he led us toward the bar’s back room. “The gang’s all here.”

Matt shot Koa a confused look. “The gang? What gang?”

“Oh, uh… I just meant that I brought Mr. Koto and Mr. Takahashi along. I hope you don’t mind.”

“Of course not,” Matt said. “I haven’t seen Junro since my trip to Malaysia last year.”

Matt had mentioned that Koa was working on a business deal with a Japanese company-a plan to host special tours of his estate since Kona-drinking had become pretty popular in Japan.

I was about to ask Koa about it, but I never got the chance. He opened a thin wooden door, and a dozen male voices shouted Matt’s name. That’s when I saw the hanging banner:

BON VOYAGE BACHELORHOOD!

Clipped to the banner was the poster of a blown-up photo, obviously doctored. Matt was on all fours with a ball and chain on his foot and a rope around his neck; his beautiful bride-to-be was dressed to the nines in a floor-length burgundy gown, dripping in diamonds, holding one end of Matt’s rope like a pet leash.

“Surprised?” Koa yelled over the din.

“Am I ever,” Matt replied.

Oh, God. I could see the muscles in Matt’s face had frozen. He’d gone slightly pale, and sweat was starting to bead his upper lip. He glanced at me and then behind him, clearly in a panic about Randall Knox’s stalking gossip column photographer.