The Assault on Tony's

by John O'Brien

  And it was with laughter running about their faces that they all noticed, almost as one, the busboy, straining against his white shirt and tie, carry Tony’s old nineteen-inch RCA television out to its occasional, Super Bowl-type resting place on the flat area above and behind the liquor bottles on the back of the bar.

  “You’re fucking kidding me,” whined Rudd as the kid plugged in the set.

  “Big news day,” said the bartender, turning it on.

  “What the hell does that mean?” demanded Osmond. “‘Big new day’?”

  “News, not new,” said Miles, strikingly annoyed, eyes glued to the broadcast now shaping up with the swiftness of solid-state.

  “What do you say to that, Rudd?” said Osmond, trying hard to laugh but clearly in need of a little reassurance.

  Rudd noticed the busboy staring right at him, rather brazenly, he thought, from the back of the room. The kid disappeared behind the corner. “These local guys are so afraid of being scooped that they’d cover the mayor’s morning fart if they could get in his bathroom.”

  Everybody laughed, and Rudd regretted he hadn’t been funnier.

  Shot here was from SkyCam3, hovering over the action, presumably where it had begun, though it seemed to have spread as far as the video could see. Rudd saw the busboy again, this time watching not him but the television from around the corner. The aerial shot took in the river, which seemed to be providing a border of sorts to the activity though small plumes of smoke could be seen rising from scattered areas on the other side, even from the historical district, which Rudd thought was pretty fucked, it being their history as much as his (not that he’d want to have to make that argument to Fenton). Rudd wondered if this would be happening in winter. Fires in snow, harder to start but harder to put out as well. So it is a riot, he thought. Then he realized what he’d just thought, and he thought it again to be sure, to get a real good taste. So it is a riot. RYE-OTT.

  Nobody was laughing now. They were silently watching a remote unit capturing live video of a firefighter being shot in the back as he ascended a ladder. His yellow-slickered body tumbled down and the video went dead. Unit chasing ass out of there, Rudd imagined. “Jesus,” he said, and the silence was broken.

  Miles turned to Rudd with an I-told-you-so expression, and the latter waited to see if this guy was enough of a jerk to follow through. Neither of them was ever to know, for at that moment Langston, another regular, pushed through the door, carrying with him a breeze that overturned the top two or three napkins from a stack on the corner of the bar.

  Langston, a tall man with red hair, stood at the door and looked earnestly at the men, eyes pausing only a moment on Fenton, whom he likely was able to deduce the identity of. He opened his jacket and revealed his Beretta 92F for the whole bar to see. Then he looked directly at Rudd. “There’s a crowd formed on the corner of Whitewood and Palmer, not a mile from here,” he said. “Some son of a bitch tossed a brick through my windshield and I had to plow right through them. I might have hit somebody; I don’t know for sure, but I almost hope so. I don’t know what would have happened if I’d had the top down. No bullshit now. The day is upon us.”

  At this Osmond, gagging and heaving, bolted from his stool to the restroom. Langston’s eye followed him for a second but returned quickly to Fenton.

  “Fenton?” he asked, crisply, militarily.

  “That’s right,” asserted Rudd, standing. This was going to be his show-he could feel that now-and it would go easier all around if that were made clear right from the start. “This is Langston,” he said to his friend. “I’ve told him as much about you as I have you about him. Have a seat, Langston.” He snapped back down on his stool without any further look at Langston, who did indeed sit down, on his left in fact.

  “Drink!” barked Langston at the bartender.

  The bartender paused a beat, wrapped up in the television as he was and beginning to wonder whether fetching a Glenlivet for Langston was the best use of his time right now, in light of the events unfolding on screen and, evidently, in street. But he got the drink. Brought the bottle, too, set it on the bar next to Langston’s drink. The Glenlivet, it said on the label, unblended—twelve years old.

  “What the heck is this for,” said Langston though he already knew the answer.

  “Whitewood and Palmer?” said Rudd.

  “We were just there,” said Fenton.

  “Well?” demanded Langston anyway. He looked up, chase, try to meet the eyes, that bartender.

  They all looked at the bartender. A circle of red, formed on his chest, was growing in the white cotton of his shirt. They saw it, then they remembered hearing the sharp crack-not a shatter, more a click-of a pane of glass being pierced. The bartender’s knees folded, and he crumpled dead to the floor.

  Jill screamed for the first and last time of her adult life. It was the next sound to follow the glass, or would be in the record of Rudd’s memory. He looked at her. She was looking at him and she stopped as if embarrassed, which she wasn’t. “Back here,” she said to him.

  To him she said it, and for that reason he never thought about not going to her. He left his stool, passed Langston and Fenton, both already risen and on their way around the bar to assist the bartender though everybody knew beyond doubt that he was dead, like the riot had supercharged things, turning the very air into a medium of communication. He noticed Osmond, frozen, staring from the corridor that led to the restrooms. Rudd wanted to slap him into some kind of activity, and he wondered at the sudden proliferation of such thoughts in his head, when and why exactly it began. It had begun, not long ago but it had. There was a duty here. Impossible to perceive the world except through one’s own senses. Make your best guess. Day of instinct, higher motivations maybe. Osmond was Osmond. Osmond was not Rudd. That later. Now Jill.

  “Here,” she said when he approached her.

  She led him around the corner, back to where the kitchen lay. As far as Rudd could tell there was only one person there, a young black with two enormous cans cradled in his arm. He was reaching into the freezer, working a way to carry a box of beef without dropping the cans. Just as he managed it he caught sight of Rudd and Jill and immediately fled out the open back door. This prompted Rudd to notice how bare the place looked-though he’d never been here before. Things were missing, knives, pots, food, as well as the staff. Rudd heard a gunshot in the distance beyond the open door.

  “Close that,” he said to Jill. “Lock it.”

  He walked quickly across the room, throwing open doors, inspecting closets and nooks, small rooms beyond the kitchen where the business of the restaurant was conducted. What he was looking for was, well, the enemy, though this word had not yet presented itself in his mind. He was merely looking, urgently. He knew he had to, that it was the appropriate thing to do. When he was finished and had confirmed the place empty he returned to Jill, now standing where they had entered the room. The back door, he noticed, was not only closed and locked but the three large horizontal bars that made it virtually impenetrable had been dropped into place.

  “What’s that for?” Jill asked him, indicating his hand.

  He followed her eyes. He was holding his Walther, and when he saw it he remembered drawing it, but when he drew it, during his check of the back, he didn’t realize what he was doing. Again, the right move, but would these people have been armed? Would he have shot somebody, say some dishwasher cowering behind the sink with a chef’s knife? Would anybody who felt the need to hide really be so dangerous, so much of a threat?

  “Door was open,” he said simple and plain. “Anybody could have gotten in.” But he was ready for another drink, and given that, he would be ready for anything. He put the gun away. “Up front,” he said.

  When they returned to the bar they found the men back on their stools. The bartender, now covered with a tablecloth, lay where he fell with one foot peeking from under the white. Jill peeled away from Rudd, sat at a table, and began folding napkins. This
was the situation. Napkins should be folded, Rudd guessed. He thought about helping her as a way to comfort her, but she seemed okay and the men needed him too and he needed a drink. Without thinking too much about it he took the same stool he had been sitting on before, as if the others had been saving it for him. There were bottles on the bar-someone had even thought to put up a fifth of J&B, probably Fenton-but otherwise it felt so natural that Rudd had to glance down at the tablecloth to confirm the nightmare. The exposed shoe confirmed it. Sporadic gunfire continued outside in the not-so-distance.

  He filled his glass from the bottle of J&B. Right away it warmed him, too fast to be trusted but he was grateful nonetheless. Fenton, he noticed, was drinking too. No bottle but his drink was the same color as Rudd’s. That would explain the J&B bottle; still, he had moved it in front of Rudd’s stool when he was done. A modicum of loyalty, more in the choice of drink itself, that a victory of sorts.

  “Like that scotch?” Rudd wanted to know.

  “It’s working,” said Fenton.

  “It always does,” Rudd told him, now feeling damn near drunk, what with this drink and all he had earlier. “Hell of a thing,” he added, “you starting to drink five minutes after our only bartender gets shot.” Miles’s shoulders began to rise and fall. At first in his peripheral vision Rudd thought he was crying, but by the time he turned to look Miles had progressed from giggle to guffaw. Osmond took the cue. They all laughed. They laughed hard and they drank and they filled their glasses and laughed some more. Jill folded napkins.

  Day2

  Rudd awoke smiling, still drunk from the late night before. The smell of coffee hung about the room. As always it struck him as some impossible ideal, that coffee smell, some go-getter bullshit that only served to remind him of how important it was to get a Bloody Mary into him ASAP. Outside a lone gunshot came muffled to his ears, and he remembered how he and Langston had gotten drunk enough to go outside in the middle of the night and secure the external security shutters. It had been relatively quiet and was as good a time as any, but when they got outside the sky glowed orange over the burning city and the crackle of flames carried hoots and hollers down and up the streets and blocks. Once the shutters were locked they had to walk around long to the rear door. Rudd had provided cover while Langston dipped into his car for his pocket cellular phone and several boxes of nine-mm hollow points he always kept under the seat; then they scurried back into Tony’s like kids playing fort, walkie-talkies. Big deal: Langston never got much of a signal inside Tony’s which is why he left the phone in his glove compartment in the first place. Besides, Tony’s phone still worked and the network was now completely down to boot.

  Rudd lifted his head. He had passed out on one of the benches up front where waiting-list diners waited for their tables. He was the first one up-second: Jill stood behind the coffee warmer at the far end of the bar, glaring at him as if daring him not to make a dent in the still-full pot.

  “What are you going to do about him?” she demanded, pointing at the bartender.

  Bartender, he thought. His smile deepened that she had put this in his lap, assumed it was his problem, his decision, his charge. What are you going to do. “Put him out the back door, I guess,” he said.

  “You can’t do that. I’ve been awake for hours and they’re out there. I’ve been hearing noises all night. I think some bullets even hit the door. We can’t open that door anymore. Please.” She bit her lip, then poured a cup of coffee for him without asking, added cream roughly but no sugar. A guess and it was right. “Besides, I don’t want him out there.”

  So he’d have some coffee, if for no other reason than to calm her down. “The freezer,” he asked. Said.

  “Good idea,” she said, walking across the room with his coffee.

  He felt taken. “I’ll need some Irish whiskey for that.”

  She stopped short, put the coffee down on the bar abruptly, and walked back around for the bottle. Evidently she’d stepped through this response already, something to think about during the deep and scary night. He felt chastised but amused nonetheless. This was so typical, one of several tacks they take when faced with an indefatigable drunk.

  “Pour it yourself,” she said, setting the bottle down next to his coffee but not moving, just standing there behind the bar.

  Not far from the stiff, he thought. Nineteen seventies TV bad guy talk. So she couldn’t go through with it. Well, it was a start. He sat up, grunting inadvertently.

  “Oh here.”

  He watched her splash some whiskey into the mug, too much as a better choice than being accused of adding too little. She walked back around. That wasn’t hard, he thought, but he knew she probably was looking for a way to distance herself from El Stiffo. Rudd laughed and some snot came out of his nose and that was unacceptable. Time to clean up the act, have some coffee.

  “Coffee. My dad drank coffee,” he told her when she handed him the mug. Drink it down now, boy. That’s hot. Best drink it down. Hurt. No hurt. Not Jill hurt. Drink it down, boy. White boy drinkin’ down his coffee. Truck stop boy drinkin’ down his joe. Rudd was eleven when he saw a man in the men’s room (of a truck stop) pee from five-call it six-feet away from the urinal and make it. Call that an education. Thing to do now is put the stiff in the freezer.

  “We’ll drag him in as soon as some of the guys get up. I’ll get Fenton to give me a hand.”

  “Fenton. That the guy you brought in yesterday? You seem pretty chummy; how come you don’t bring him in more often?”

  Conversational stuff now, distraction. “Actually yesterday was the first time.” He lifted his head to confirm that they were out of earshot from the other men. “Some of these guys, they’re fine to drink with, but not quite the class of men that Fenton normally associates with.” Maybe not so conversational.

  “But you are.”

  “Yeah.” Dammit. Yeah.

  “But Langston’s not.”

  Rudd stood up, with difficulty yet unwilling to give that away. Not that he was fooling anybody, he knew from experience, and experience was something that this woman Jill evidently had her share of. “I get my own whiskey for now. You can answer your own questions.”

  She saw that she had offended him and regretted it. She needed him; her instincts told her, he was her best shot at getting out of Tony’s alive, getting to somewhere safe-though where that might be she’d have a hard time saying. The television was painting a pretty gloomy picture. Yet there were still cities in which the violence had been kept to a minimum. It would still be at the spreading stage this early on. Certainly a slowing stage would follow, a time for people to catch their breath and realize exactly what they were doing to each other. But there were no guarantees, not even among the men in here, and this Rudd, Jill knew, would be the one to be next to if things really fell apart. He wasn’t there yet. He was a long way from it. But like herself, he would be able to do what had to be done. She merely had to place herself in that category, something that he would find had to be done.

  He nudged himself onto a stool, her watching and him knowing she watched, in front of the bottle, where she had left it and him moving clumsily, backward and confused yet getting the point across with the overkill effort of one who moves to make a point overkilledly. Yet she also noted a basic grace to the action, a practice. One of the men—Jill didn’t know who—issued a single snore from the booths, and it served to make her realize how quiet things had become outside. She thought about a shower, worried that she smelled, inanely wondered if her bra was dirty. Should have worn a black one. Of course they show through a white shirt, and how was she to know she’d be stuck here for who knows how long without a shower. Something she’d heard as a little girl about men hating dirty bras. Those dirty white training bras and her mom getting on her about something no doubt unrelated like keeping her room clean, getting on her with some stupid unrelated offhand remark and her now twenty-seven. Dirty white bra, have to wash it sooner or later with something from t
he cleaning supply closet, napkin service no doubt having been canceled with yesterday’s firemen murders.

  Rudd heard that snore. He thought about how he was being a jerk and how quiet it was outside and how-as much as he’d like to sit here and drink all day-this woman was depending on him to move the bartender’s body into the freezer. He wanted to turn and look at her, make nice and steal another glance at what must be magnificent breasts and at the very least exactly the size he preferred. But he wasn’t being depended on to think about breasts anymore than he was being depended on to drink. He looked at his Rolex; that snore occurred at 10:17 A.M.

  Downing his coffee, he stood. Jill was watching him, but rather than say something he merely snapped his countenance to determination and spun about to carpe the fucking diem, acting having the earmarks of being a sounder bet. The dark restaurant lay before him like a mausoleum. Men strewn about, place sealed shut. Creepy.

  “Why’s it so dark in here?” he asked her, turning back around and taking a half step.

  “The shutters are down. A little light gets in through the cracks, but not much.”

  “Jill, I know. What I’m asking is why the lights are off.”

  “I didn’t want to wake everybody up.”

  “Well I do. Why don’t you show me where all the switches are.” That went well, he thought.

  She nodded, evidently pleased with the request, and walked past his follow. As they walked he caught a glimpse of Langston tucked away in one of the booths. He remembered being in Rome as a kid, on a tour of the Catacombs. All those corridors and coves, bare light bulbs suspended from the ceiling. He had thought, Okay, if I get lost down here the thing to do is start breaking light bulbs and follow the remaining light out to the exit. He had thought that was a pretty clever plan at the time. Later he realized how fucked he’d be with that plan if he ended up in a dead end, dark and alone. And clever.