opening. It was approaching midnight and Gordon was alone, the carpenters and painters and electricians gone, having finished their finishing touches, the lingering odor of paint and varnish the only remaining sign that the restaurant was not yet a going concern. Gordon sat in shirt-sleeves and loosened tie and paint-stained slacks, hands folded before him almost prayerfully, wearing a small, satisfied, but not quite smug smile.
It had all gone well. There had been minor hitches, primarily the petty shakedowns of Big Jim Caldwell and Little Jim McFate; but putting up a restaurant in a city of any size required a certain number of payoffs. Gordon expected that; it had been worse in New York and Detroit, actually. At least here in Cleveland-since Ness became public safety director, anyway-there was little graft on the city level. They hadn't even been approached for the usual building-inspector palm greasing. That made it almost a trade-off: less city graft, more union shakedowns. Business expenses. You had to learn to live with it.
Gordon sat and looked out the window at the glittering Playhouse Square night, streaked with neon, alive with moving marquees, slashed by automobile headlights, a sparkling darkness that blurred into something abstractly beautiful.
The street was hopping, but Gordon was not. He was bone tired. He didn't mind, though; in fact, he liked it. He liked sitting alone in his new creation with its smell of newness, from the disinfectant of the kitchen to the leather of this booth; it was like sitting in a brand-new car you'd bought-and paid cash for.
He knew he'd been blessed-the only son of a successful farmer-but he also knew he'd never had it easy. His pop had made him work side by side with the hired hands, and, while he liked to work outside and didn't mind physical labor, he'd had no real affinity for farming. The business end of it had interested him, true, but he could not picture himself taking over the reins of the farm.
In 1922 Gordon, still in college (at Case Western, studying business), encouraged his father to cut out the middleman and open a buttermilk stand. The stand, a small, standup affair under a stairway in the Old Arcade, served as an outlet for the farm's daily products and for Ma's Dutch apple pies.
Two years later, when Gordon graduated, he was handed the buttermilk stand by his father to run as he saw fit; shortly thereafter, using profits from the unexpected killing the stand had made thus far, Gordon opened a second outlet. He picked up the lease on the stall for peanuts-the last tenant had gone out of business, running a tiny coffee shop within the office building; but Gordon punched out a door and window on Eighth, the narrow street across from the Hippodrome, a popular movie palace. He offered a limited menu (two sandwiches-toasted cheese and bacon-lettuce-and-tomato; and two varieties of pie-Dutch apple and lemon meringue) and kept the place open fourteen hours a day, to get the theater crowd and the usual luncheon set.
His father was proud of Gordon's success, but had no real interest in getting involved with the restaurants, other than as an outlet for his dairy farm's products; he completely gave Gordon his head. And in that head Gordon had an idea for a new kind of restaurant.
Good, simple food, served in nicely decorated but not ritzy surroundings. Designed to suit the common man's taste (utilizing Ma's recipes) while at the same time making him-and his family-feel they were out for a night on the town. Gordon envisioned a chain of such restaurants, from the very start; if hamburger stands and automats could go national, why not this? Buying foods in bulk, various other supplies in quantity, uniform layout and design…
The Playhouse Square restaurant would take the place of the Eighth Street location, which had closed its doors that very day. The hole-in-the-wall lunchroom would be replaced by this study in mahogany paneling and clear crystal lighting. Flashier than the New York, Detroit, and Pittsburgh locations, this would truly be the highlight of the growing Gordon's chain. Which was fitting, as this was their Cleveland crown jewel, the Gordon family's home-base showcase.
Vernon Gordon did not remember falling asleep. He had been sitting in that booth, relaxing, reflecting, enjoying the smells of the new, savoring the exhaustion of this long final workday, knowing that his wife and two kids were already in bed asleep in their Shaker Heights home, that a few quiet moments here, alone, with his new pride and joy, wouldn't hurt a thing. Would, in fact, give him a good measure of simple pleasure.
But, at some point, he put his head on his folded arms and sleep sneaked up on him, subtly.
Less subtle was the gunfire that awoke him.
'Christ!' he yelled to nobody as glass shattered, and he ducked under the booth as it was showered with shards, while the thunder of machine-gun fire ate up the night and the plate-glass windows that looked out on the square.
He'd caught a glimpse, just a glimpse, out that shattered, shattering window, of the black snout of a machine gun sticking out the window of a black car stopped out in the street; a black snout spitting flame and smoke and. 45 slugs.
And still they came, raking the restaurant, a lead rain falling, making plaster clouds, splintering woodwork, knocking over chairs, tearing tablecloths, cutting grooves in counters and tabletops, puckering the metal of coffee urns and counter trim and cash register, tearing the leather of the booths, turning dishes, glasses, table settings, light fixtures to rubble, as the low-throated chattering of tommy-gun fire accompanied the dissonant music of breaking glass.
Gordon Vernon was no coward, but he cowered beneath the booth nonetheless, as any man would, while the table above him was served a noisy meal of glass and debris.
And when, finally, the gunfire stopped, all sound in the universe seemed to stop as well-other than the beating of Gordon's heart, which was pushing at his chest. Even with the havoc that had been visited upon the restaurant, no sounds broke the lull. Somewhere in his rattled mind Gordon noted that at least no water pipes had been burst, or he'd hear them spraying.
Then an angry squeal of tires announced the departure of the gunman-or gunmen, Gordon couldn't know- and he was alone with the wreckage that had been his restaurant.
And when he crawled out from under the tabletop, he did two things he hadn't done in a very long time: he screamed in pain, like a child who'd badly scraped both knees; and then, like that same child, he began to weep uncontrollably.
The tears weren't tears of pain, however, but of loss, and not monetary loss, not entirely. Something precious had been destroyed. Something Vernon Gordon had made, something he took pride in, something he had come to love, had been ruined.
The only light was filtering in from the neon and marquees and streetlamps outside, but Gordon could see plainly just how much damage had been done. He himself was the only unscathed item in the place. Thousands upon thousands of dollars, and many days of work, would have to be invested to put this bullet-torn Humpty Dumpty back together. And now the anger pushed away the tears. He wasn't thinking about the money. He was thinking about the greedy bastards who did this.
Glass crunching under his shoes, he walked to the phone, at the counter, but the phone was among much else that had been shot apart.
He found his way outside-the double glass front doors were a ruptured metal framework now-into a warm night, where a few people were gathering, but not many. He looked at his watch: after three A.M. He'd slept a long time before his machine-gun wake-up call. He was wondering where he could find a phone at this time of night, and if he could whether he should call the police or not, when the sirens cut the air almost as dramatically as the machine-gun fire had before it.
He felt calm now; strangely calm. He found a package of cigarettes in his breast pocket and some matches, too. He lit up a smoke.
The two uniformed policemen seemed young-two of those rookies Eliot Ness had brought onto the force, with much fanfare not so long ago, he supposed-and he told them everything that had happened. No, he hadn't gotten a look at the car or the driver; it was a dark sedan of some kind, that was all he made out in the short time before he ducked under the table. No, he didn't think it was a murder attempt-he didn't think whoever did it realized he, Gordon, was even on the premises.
'How do you read it, then, Mr. Gordon?' the slightly older of the two cops asked.
'Simple vandalism,' he said, shrugging, smoking.
'Do you have any idea who might have done this?' the other cop asked.
'Any idea at all why you were singled out for this?' the first cop added.
And here was where his cooperation had to stop.
'No,' Gordon said, and smiled meaninglessly. 'None.'
And he had asked to be excused. His wife would be worried about him, he said.
