by Con Lehane
“Well, Sam, it’s good to see you. I didn’t recognize you when I came in, it being so dark in here and—” Realizing he’d put his foot in his mouth, he stopped and moved on to something else. “You know me, Sam. I like to stop by and see how my members are doing. Wish I could do it more often.”
“One of them isn’t doing so well,” I said. Knowing Sam had stepped in to keep me from doing something foolish with Eliot, I tried to keep myself under control. I was shaking.
Eliot feigned surprise. “Oh? What’s the matter?”
“Barney Saunders.”
“The Irish fellow? He met with an accident, didn’t he?”
I wanted to strangle the smarmy bastard till his smiling eyes popped out of his fat face. “There was no fucking accident. Someone cut off his fingers.”
Eliot registered this information with a melodramatic expression of shock and sadness. “That’s too bad, too bad. I’m very sorry,” he said. “I hear the Irishman made a lot of enemies. The hotel wants to let him go, but you and Sam are the barmen, so I told MacAlister it wasn’t that easy because I’d have to ask you. If you want me to put in a word with the manager to hold open a job for him until he gets back on his feet, I’ll see what I can do.”
“That would be good,” said Sam quickly. “We’d appreciate your putting a word in for him, Mr. Eliot. We certainly would.”
Eliot watched for my reaction. I glared at him. “What you need to know is that you don’t scare us.”
Eliot stopped smiling. “You’re McNulty, right?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “Don’t make no insinuations about me. You got something to say, say it. I ain’t scared of you neither. I could have you bounced out of here on your ass in nothin’ flat, so don’t give me any shit.” His voice rose as he spoke; his face reddened; his chest puffed out like a rooster getting ready for a fight. “Come out here from behind the bar and talk that shit,” he shouted.
I started to come out. The thought flashed through my brain that getting into a fight with the gangster-connected union business manager in my own bar might not be the best course of action. I was coming out from behind the bar anyway. At least I was, until I ran into Ntango as I entered the first turn. At the other end, Sam got an arm around Eliot’s throat, and since Sam had arms like bridge cables, Eliot wasn’t going anywhere, either. I didn’t struggle against Ntango, who simply put his hand on my chest. It didn’t make any difference whether Eliot struggled or not; he wasn’t going to get out of Sam’s grip.
“Now, Mr. Eliot,” Sam said, turning his baritone up a notch. “That’s enough of this foolishness. Time for you to take a walk. Tempers get too hot, and there’s a nice December breeze out there to cool them down.”
Eliot’s color was returning to its normal pallor and his breathing was slowing down. “I don’t need this shit,” he said. “Let go of me.”
“I certainly will, Mr. Eliot. Certainly will.” Sam half-led, half-pushed him to the door, keeping up his chatter, handing him his hat and coat. “Let me just walk you to the door here. And don’t you worry, Mr. Eliot. I been in the union a long time. I’ll talk to Brian here for you and set him straight. Don’t you worry; I’ll set McNulty here straight. You won’t have nothin’ to worry about from us, Mr. Eliot.”
“You better set that son of a bitch straight,” said Eliot as Sam closed the door behind him.
When he was gone, Sam came back to the bar. I went back behind it, and Ntango sat down with Sam. I poured both of them and myself shots of Powers and refilled their beer glasses.
“Sorry,” I said, when I’d downed the shot.
Neither man said anything for a couple of minutes. Then Sam said, “Think you could have taken him, McNulty?”
He and Ntango sized me up over the rims of their schooners and began chuckling. Then they looked at each other, put their glasses down on the bar, and began laughing out loud. After a few seconds, the laughter so contagious and good-natured, and filled with meaning, I couldn’t help but join in.
Before he left with Ntango, Sam called me over. In the meanwhile, a few regulars had wandered in, as well as a couple of hotel guests, and business picked up in the dining room, so the waitresses were sliding up to the bar. It wasn’t enough activity to have me hopping but enough for me to keep my eyes open. Talking to Sam wasn’t a problem, because if I happened to be facing him, he’d be clocking the bar behind me and raise an eyebrow if something needed my attention.
“This MacAlister,” he said. “He says he do the inventory this month. The bar cost been too high.”
“I heard. Barney told me.”
Sam looked at me significantly, nodding his head, before he spoke again. “Somethin’ about him … Know what I’m sayin’?”
Sam was the head bartender and usually did the inventory. This meant he could do a juggling act to make the numbers come out and cover a variety of indiscretions for all the bartenders. I didn’t know what it meant that MacAlister wanted to do the inventory, but I said I’d keep my eyes open. Sam seemed satisfied with that.
chapter five
Later that night, when the bar traffic slowed after the supper rush, the devil himself, as my mother used to say, showed up at the bar. James MacAlister wanted to go over the drink dupes the waitresses had turned in to get their drinks.
“Mr. McNulty, do you check these dupes before giving the waitresses drinks?” Pissing off Barney wasn’t enough for this guy; now he was starting on me. I didn’t like bosses to begin with, and I especially didn’t like bosses that hovered over me, but I was still in my probationary period, so I needed to be careful.
“I check them.”
“Some of them are unreadable. How do you know they’re accurate?”
“I ask.”
MacAlister was worried that a waitress might have slipped a drink containing forty cents’ worth of liquor to a good tipper at one of her tables. If she did, I’d know about it. Smart waitresses didn’t try to get over on their bartenders.
“Mr. McNulty, the barman is responsible for the liquor that goes out over the bar. If you’re not vigilant, you’ll be taken advantage of.”
It always amazed me that when someone becomes a boss, he begins to think he’s smarter than everyone else, as if infused knowledge came with the job. MacAlister was the know-it-all type. He was bigger than me, with broad shoulders and a deep chest. His movements were quick, his eyes alert. His air of self-confidence bordered on recklessness. Some bosses are respectful in dealing with their workers; they understand we’re all part of the same species. Others think they’re better than those who work for them. MacAlister was one of those. I’m the boss, says he, so I must be the best man in the room—and he let that attitude hang in his words and in his expression, as if he hoped someone would challenge him. He’d already summarily fired a couple of the kitchen workers, and Francois was ready to kill him.
For the moment, though, I was using the “discretion is the better part of valor” approach. “With all due respect, Mr. MacAlister,” I said politely, “I’ve been a bartender for twenty years—”
“Perhaps, Mr. McNulty. But when you work for me, you do things my way. This means reading each dupe the waitress puts on the bar.”
As fate would have it, a waitress appeared at the service bar as he spoke. To make my point, I examined the dupe she handed me. It had S/W written on it. I pulled the well scotch with my right hand and lifted it toward the glass as if I’d free-pour, but at the last second snapped up a shot glass with my left hand and held it over the iced glass the waitress placed on the bar. I poured into the shot glass and dumped the scotch into the highball glass in the same motion. MacAlister kept his eyes glued on my hands. I could pour the same amount with or without the shot glass. If he was any sort of manager, he’d know that. I could also pour long or short with or without the shot glass.
“I’m glad to see you using the shot glass, Mr. McNulty. Prevents waste.”
This was bullshit. Probably he knew that. There were managers who t
rusted their bartenders and those who didn’t. He was one who didn’t. If he didn’t trust me, I didn’t trust him.
When he left me, he began prowling around the service area of the bar, making the waitresses jittery—the way the fox in the children’s books prowling in the hill beyond the barns makes the chickens nervous. The waitress he zeroed in on was Mary Donohue, a nervous wreck anyway because she was such a conscientious waitress. You got used to her antsiness and fidgeting pretty quickly because you saw she was high-strung and that was how she got her job done. The important thing was she was fast, didn’t make mistakes, and was watching out for her customers because she really believed she should do a good job for them. What she didn’t need was someone hovering over her when she was fluttering around the bar, mumbling to herself, setting up her drinks, and getting her checks in order.
MacAlister, for reasons he alone knew, picked her. At the moment it was happening, I thought back to what Barney had said about him lording it over the Irish. I was pouring a drink at the service bar and watched over the shoulder of the waitress at the bar as MacAlister went up to Mary in the small waitress-station area next to the service bar where she was icing glasses and arranging them on her tray. He said something to her, but she was concentrating on what she was doing and waved him away. This was a characteristic of Mary’s that anyone might find dismissive and irritating, especially a boss. But when you got to know her, you realized she was as kind as a saint and only did this because she was afraid of losing her concentration and having everything she was juggling collapse into chaos. MacAlister either didn’t know this about her or, if he knew, didn’t care. He was on his high horse, looking for an act of insubordination he could crush. That this was an Irish woman probably made it all the better.
He spoke. Mary waved him away. He came back at her, saying something else. Good old Mary, refusing to give up her concentration, waved him away again. This time, when he came back at her, I did hear him. “You’ll bloody well listen—” said he, reaching for Mary’s tray. He was trying to pick up her checks, I guess, but so shocked and unnerved her that she jumped and in doing so almost dropped the tray, tipping it sideways. What happened next depended on who you talked to. What I saw was MacAlister lunge for a glass falling from the tray, and in doing so catch Mary Donohue’s not insubstantial breast with his right hand. If they were playing football and it was a face mask instead of a boob, it would have been only a five-yard penalty because he let go right away—but not quickly enough for Mary, who, still holding the tray after the glasses fell, wheeled and smacked him with it—hard—right alongside his left ear.
MacAlister’s face exploded into shock and rage. I’ve seen lots of angry people, and I’ve even shocked a few people in my time, but this was a sight to behold. I wouldn’t have been surprised to see his head erupt and spew out molten anger. I got over the bar and to him before he could get to Mary, if he was going to, and both busboys were there to back me up. He took a couple of deep breaths and stomped away toward the kitchen. Everyone who saw what happened, mostly we of the hired help, stood in shocked silence, until Mary unfroze and burst into tears. A couple of waitresses comforted her; the busboys cleaned up the mess; the rest of the crew went back about their business. By the time I got back behind the bar and made Mary’s drinks, she’d pulled herself back together and was ready to haul them off into the dining room.
We didn’t have much time to speculate on what would happen next before MacAlister was back in the service area, this time with the dining room hostess and the night front desk manager. Everyone knew what was coming. Well, not quite. Everyone knew the first thing that was coming: He fired Mary for insubordination. She who’d been an exemplary employee for more than a decade, fired in the blink of an eye by an arrogant bully.
Since I’d taken over for Barney on the rank-and-file committee and since Mary was one of our folks, I thought it my duty to intervene. Diplomacy not being my strong suit, and doubting MacAlister would be having any of it anyway, I gave it a try nonetheless. I told him there was a union contract and Mary was entitled to a just-cause hearing and couldn’t be fired on the spot. This is by and large true in a union house, except when the employer has the union in his pocket, as in our case. Already Eliot had let MacAlister get away with firing the kitchen workers. Now he had the bit between his teeth.
“Take it to your union, Mr. McNulty. Have the business manager speak to me. I doubt he cares any more about what you think of the situation than I do.”
I didn’t have a reputation throughout the city’s hotel industry as a hotheaded malcontent for nothing. But I wasn’t about to let myself be baited into one of my famous throw-the-baby-out-with-the-bath-water responses. Instead, I spoke calmly, first about unfortunate situations and tempers needing to cool, then about loyal workers and company morale.
“Come, Mr. McNulty. The woman struck her superior—”
“Supervisor,” I corrected him.
He caught my drift. Raising his eyebrows and lowering his head, he actually looked down his nose at me. “The woman is terminated, McNulty. I’m her superior enough to do that. If you’d like to join her, I’ll provide you your termination papers also.”
We glared at each other, as I choked back the bile rising in my throat. One of the reasons I could never quite get myself quit of Pop’s workers-of-the-world philosophy was the overabundance of assholes like MacAlister, who saw the squashing of the human spirit as part of their bossly rights. I swallowed my anger because I needed the job. There were larger issues: my child support payments for my son Kevin, for one; what happened to Mary Donohue, for another.
I gathered myself together. “Look, Mr. MacAlister. The night’s pretty much over. Why not put the discussion off until tomorrow morning? We’ll get Eliot in and resolve this. Maybe you’ll fire her. Maybe you’re right and I’m wrong. But maybe, just maybe, it’ll turn out that I’m right. You don’t want to be in a position of having fired her and then having to take her back.”
MacAlister looked me over with pity born of contempt. “She’s fired, and I’m not taking her back.” He waited with a smirk for my reaction.
The waitresses and the busboys were listening. They didn’t gather around, but the busboys slowed on their way to a table or took longer filling the water pitcher; the waitresses took longer adding up a check or paused pulling a glass from the shelf or the ice bin at the service bar. It was unusual for the entire waitstaff to be within earshot of the bar at the same time, but they all were for this. This wasn’t a case of throwing my apron on the bar and taking a hike, as I’d done many times. What I did here would affect all of these folks and many others. There was responsibility to be taken, and I hated responsibility. I wanted someone else to take charge. I knew what to do, but I was afraid to do it. Afraid to do it and afraid not to. Frozen with indecision. Damned if I did and damned if I didn’t.
Fortunately, Francois burst out of the kitchen at that moment to put an end to my Hamlet impersonation. He went straight for MacAlister—and he did throw his apron onto the bar. “Dictateur! Who the hell do you think you are? Fire everyone, numbskull!! You cook the dinners!”
Francois returned to the kitchen and hollered something in French and then in Spanish. A few minutes later, he came back through the bar, the entire kitchen crew marching in formation behind him. I called the waitresses and busboys together at the bar while Betsy went for the banquet crew. MacAlister blustered about for a while, threatening to fire everyone if we didn’t get back to work, but he was too late. Our defiance had already taken on a life of its own.
Pretty soon, MacAlister had his hands full with a rowdy banquet in the function room and a dining room half full of patrons who wanted their dinners or their drinks or their checks. He came back to the bar once, flushed and harried, and bellowed a few more threats, but we were in heated discussion about what to do next, so no one paid any attention. In the end, he went back into the dining room to try to put his finger back in the dike. By then most of
the diners had caught on to what was happening and screwed, so he made a short speech to the stragglers finishing up dinner about difficulties in the kitchen and circumstances beyond his control. The patrons who hadn’t been served got up and left. Those who had dinners sitting in front of them finished up and beat it themselves in front of the trouble they saw brewing. The banquet was a different matter. The cacophony of shouts and boos and catcalls was something to behold. It turned out to be an operating engineers’ Christmas dinner, and MacAlister made the mistake of telling them the problem was a work stoppage. I expected to see him come out of the banquet hall tarred and feathered riding on a rail.
By then, we actually were on strike, so when MacAlister tried to give us one minute to get back on the job, his threats fell on deaf ears. One of the waitresses grabbed the waiter/waitress phone number list from the hostess stand and the two busboys did an “I’ll distract the guard and you grab the list” act on the front desk clerk and got the phone numbers for maintenance, engineering, and housekeeping. We divided up the lists and the jobs, and walked out as the squad cars were pulling up in front of the hotel.
chapter six
“Oh, Jesus,” said Barney, pronouncing the e in “Jesus” as “ay” in “hay” so it sounded like “Jaysus,” the Irish pronunciation he favored when a calamity presented itself. I’d snuck into the hospital, using an approach I’d learned long ago from Pop: quick and decisive movement, head up, no eye contact, following a few steps behind someone who looked like he belonged there. Security guards don’t bother people they think might be more powerful than they are, according to Pop. Like most people in authority, they prefer to step on someone who’s already had a fall rather than take on the hale and hearty.
