Billy Bathgate

by E. L. Doctorow

  This all went on over an hour or more, and then, it must have been about eleven o’clock, I did hear the real gunshot, there is no question what it is when it is that, the report is definitive, it caroms through the chambers of the ear, and when its echoes died away I heard the silence of the sudden subtraction from the universe of a life, and this time in the quaking reality of what I knew I sat on the side of my bed too paralyzed even to stand up and lock my room door. I sat there with my Automatic fully loaded and held it under a pillow on my lap.

  What did I mean to have come with these men to their ferocious business in upstate hotels, was it to understand, only to understand? I had known nothing of their lives a few short months ago. I tried to believe they could have been doing all this without me. But it was too late, and they were so strange, they were all so strange. They all roiled up out of the same idea because they seemed to understand each other and make their measured responses accordingly, but I kept losing my fix on it, I was still to know what it was, this idea.

  I can’t say how many minutes passed. The door flew open and Lulu was standing there beckoning with his finger. I left my gun and hurried after him down the corridor into Mr. Schultz’s suite. The furnishings were awry, the chairs were pushed back, this Julie Martin lay in his bulk across the coffee table in the living room, he was not yet dead but lay gasping on his stomach with his head turned sideways and a rolled-up hotel towel under his cheek and another towel rolled up neatly behind his head to take the blood, and both towels were reddening quickly, and he was gasping, and blood was trickling out of his mouth and nose and his arms hanging over the table were trying to find something to hold on to and his knees were on the floor and he was pushing back, pushing the tips of his feet with their one shoe off and one shoe on against the floor as if he was trying to get up, as if he thought he could still get away, or swim away, it was kind of a slow-motion breaststroke he was doing, whereas he was only lifting his broad back in the air and then slumping down again under its weight, and Irving was bringing more towels from the bathroom to put beside the coffee table where blood was dripping to the floor and Mr. Schultz was standing there looking down at this immense tortoiselike body, with its waving arms and eyes glazed blind like eyes from the sea, and he said to me, very calmly, quietly, “Kid, you got good vision, we none of us can locate the shell, would you be so good as to find it for me?”

  I scrambled around on the floor and found under the couch the brass casing still warm of the thirty-eight-caliber round from his gun, which showed now under his belt with his jacket open, his tie was pulled down from his collar but somehow in this moment he glittered with a calm orderliness in all this mess of blood and unfinished death, he was still and thoughtful, and he thanked me courteously for the shell, which he dropped in his pants pocket.

  Dixie Davis was sitting in a corner holding his arms around himself, he was groaning as if he was the one who had been shot. There was a soft knock on the door and Lulu opened it to admit Mr. Berman. Jumping to his feet Dixie Davis said, “Otto! Look what he’s done, look what he’s done to me!”

  Mr. Schultz and Mr. Berman exchanged glances. “Dick,” Mr. Schultz said to the lawyer, “I am very very sorry.”

  “To subject me to this!” Dixie Davis said, wringing his hands. He was pale and trembling.

  “I am sorry, Counselor,” Mr. Schultz said. “The son of a bitch stole fifty thousand of my dollars.”

  “A member of the bar!” Dixie Davis said to Mr. Berman, who was looking now at the agonized aimlessly repetitious movements of the sprawled body. “And he does this thing with me standing there? Takes out his gun in the middle of a sentence and shoots into the man’s mouth?”

  “Just calm down. Counselor,” Mr. Berman said. “Just calm down. Nobody heard a thing. Everyone is asleep. They go to bed early in Onondaga. We will take care of this. All you have to do is go to your room and close the door and forget about it.”

  “I was seen at dinner with him!”

  “He left right after dinner,” Mr. Berman said looking at the dying man. “He went away. Mickey drove him. Mickey won’t be back till tomorrow. We have witnesses.”

  Mr. Berman went to the window, looked out from behind the curtain, and pulled the shade down. He went to the other window and did the same thing.

  “Arthur,” Dixie Davis said, “do you realize in a matter of hours there will be federal lawyers from New York checking into this hotel? Do you realize in two days your trial starts? In two days?”

  Mr. Schultz poured himself a drink from a decanter on the sideboard. “Kid, take Mr. Davis to his room. Put him to bed. Give him a glass of warm milk or something.”

  Dixie Davis’s room was at the far end of the hall, near the window. I had to physically help him, he shook so badly, I had to hold his arm as if he were an old man who could not walk by himself. He was gray with fear. “Migod, migod,” he kept muttering. His pompadour haircomb had collapsed over his forehead. He was soaking with perspiration, he emitted an unpleasant smell of onions. I sat him down in the armchair by his bed. Stacks of legal papers in folders were piled on the room desk. He looked at them and started to chew on his fingernails. “I, a member of the bar of New York State,” he muttered. “An officer of the court. In front of my very eyes. In front of my very eyes.”

  I thought perhaps Mr. Berman was right, there wasn’t a sound from anywhere in the hotel as there would have been by now if the shot had been heard beyond our floor. I looked out of the corridor window and the street was empty, the streetlamps shone on stillness. I heard a door open and when I turned, there down the hall with the light behind her stood Drew Preston barefooted in her night shift of white silk, she was scratching her head and had a half-dopey smile on her lips, I will not speak here of the derangement of my senses, I pushed her back in her room and closed the door behind us and told her in urgent whispers to be quiet and go back to sleep, and I led her into her bedroom. In her bare feet she was about my height. “What happened, has something happened?” she said in her smoked-up voice full of sleep. I told her nothing and not to ask Mr. Schultz or anyone about it in the morning, just to forget it, forget it, and sealed my instruction with a kiss on her swollen mouth of sleep, and laid her down, smelling the lovely essence of her being gathered on her sheets and pillow like the meadows we had walked through, and put my hand on her small high breasts as she stretched and smiled in her moment, as always in her moment, and then I was gone and out the door, closing it quietly just as the elevator door opened at the other end of the corridor.

  Mickey backed out of the elevator pulling a heavy wood-and-pipe-metal dolly, he did this as quietly as it could be done, I thought about the elevator boy and ducked behind the window drapes but Mickey had run it up himself and when he had maneuvered the dolly into the hall he turned out the light in the elevator and closed the brass gate not quite all the way.

  The gang was in its element, the thing is when you’re mob you move in the presence of violent death quickly and efficiently as a normal ordinary human being could not, even I, an apprentice, half-ill with dread and distraction, was able to follow orders and think and move in constructive response to the emergency. I don’t know what they did to the body to make it still but it lay now quite dead across the coffee table and Irving was spreading editions of the New York dailies and the Onondaga Signal on the dolly, someone said one two three and the men rolled the immense cadaver of Julie Martin off the coffee table onto the newspapers, death is dirt, death is garbage, and that is the attitude they had toward it, Lulu wrinkling his nose and Mickey even averting his head as they handled this sack of human offal. Mr. Schultz sat in an armchair with his arms on the armrests like Napoleon and he didn’t even bother looking, he was thinking ahead, planning what? convinced in his instinctive genius that however abrupt and sudden his murderous act had been, it had chosen the moment well, which is why the great gangsters don’t get caught except by numbers and tally sheets and tax laws and bankbooks and other such amoral abs
tractions whereas the murders rarely stick to them. It was Abbadabba Berman who supervised the cleanup, pacing up and down in that sideways scuttle of his, his hat pushed back on his head, the cigarette in his mouth, it was Mr. Berman who thought to retrieve the cane and put it beside the body. He said to me, “Kid, go to the lobby and cover it so nobody notices the arrow.”

  I ran down the fire stairs three at a time, flight after flight, swinging around the landing posts, and got to the lobby, where the elevator boy sat dozing on the side chair next to the big snake plant with his arms folded across his tunic and his head on his chest. The clerk was similarly occupied behind his desk under the mailboxes. The lobby was empty and the street as well. I watched the indicator and in a minute the arrow began to swing around the circle, it came down around the one and kept going, to stop at the basement.

  Out behind the hotel I knew they would have the car and that details I couldn’t even anticipate would have already been thought through, there was a kind of comfort in that, I was an accessory after the fact, among my other problems, and when the elevator came back up to the lobby and the door opened Mickey put his finger to his lips and left the elevator as he had found it, lit, but with the brass folding gate pulled across, and he sneaked right back out to the fire stairs and after a minute I coughed loudly and woke the elevator boy, who was a Negro man with gray hair, and he took me up to the sixth floor and bid me goodnight. I might have congratulated myself for my essay in coldblood cunning except for what happened next. In Mr. Schultz’s suite, Lulu had remained to put the furniture back in position and Mr. Berman came in the door with a set of keys and a pile of fresh white towels from the chambermaids’ closet, I admired all the details of their professionalism, I thought of the crime as committed on one of those writing tablets for kids where the drawing disappears when you lift the page. Finally roused, as if from a slumber, Mr. Schultz stood and walked around the room to see that everything looked as it should, and then he stared at the carpet near the coffee table where there soaked in a dark black stain, with several drops beside like moons around a planet, the blood of the former president of the Metropolitan Restaurant and Cafeteria Owners Association, and then he went to the phone and woke up the desk clerk and said, “This is Mr. Schultz. We have an accident here and I need a doctor. Yes,” he said. “As soon as you can. Thank you.”

  I was puzzled and somewhat alarmed, my mind struggled to understand what it knew only as something so enigmatic that it could not be good for me. Everyone else in the room was now deadly casual. Mr. Schultz stood looking out the window for several minutes and just as I heard the sputter of a car coming down the street he turned back to the room and told me to stand over by the coffee table. Mr. Berman sat down and lit a new cigarette from the old one, and then Lulu came over to me as if to adjust my position, because it was apparently not quite right, he positioned me and continued to hold my shoulders and just at the moment of my revelation but a moment too late I thought I saw him grin with a flash of one gold tooth, although maybe the slowness of my mind on this occasion was a blessing because actually as he swung I did not have the opportunity to reveal anything less than total sacrificial loyalty, it would not have done in this hierarchy of men to say why me why me, a blinding pain struck me dumb, my knees buckled, and a starlike flash exploded in my eyes, just the way prizefighters say it does, and an instant later I was crouched over, groaning and dribbling in my shock, holding both my hands over my poor nose, my best feature, bleeding profusely now through my fingers to the stained rug, and so I contributed the final detail of the Schultz gang’s brilliant representations in matters of applied death, mixing my blood with the dead gangster’s and suffering my rage of injustice as I heard the businesslike rap of our country doctor knocking on the door.

  I remember what that whack across the face did to the passage of time, in the instant I felt it, it became an old injury and the rage it engendered in me was an ancient resolve to somehow pay them back, to get even—all this in the space of a moment’s obliterating pain. While I had thought when I heard the gunshot that it could have been meant as appropriately for me, I thought the broken nose was uncalled-for. I was really upset and felt badly used, my courage flowed back with my anger and I was renewed in the heedless righteousness of my appetites. All night I kept an ice bag on my face so that the swelling would not disfigure me and make Drew Preston think I was no longer pretty. In the morning it was not as bad as I had expected, a certain puffiness, and a blueness under the eyes that might be attributed as well to debauchery as to a good sock.

  I went out for breakfast as usual, I found that the act of chewing was painful, my lip was a little sore too, but I swore I would be as hardened and casual about the awful night that had just passed as anyone else. I put the image of that rising and slumping dead man out of my head. When I got back Mr. Berman’s office door was open across the hall and I caught his eye and he motioned me to come in and close the door. He was on the phone, holding it under his chin with a raised shoulder and going over some adding-machine tapes with the person on the other end. When he had hung up he indicated a chair beside the desk, and I sat down like a client in his office.

  “We are moving shop,” he said. “We’re moving out tonight and only Mr. Schultz and the lawyers will be in residence. The day after tomorrow begins the jury selection. It would not look good for the boys to be hanging around during a trial what with the press descended.”

  “The press will be here?”

  “What do you think? It’s gonna be like a hive of hornets has got loose in Onondaga. They’ll crawl all over everything.”

  “The Mirror too?”

  “What do you mean, of course, all of them. Newspapermen are the creeps of the earth, they have no sense of honor or decency and they are totally lacking in the ethics of behavior. If he was just Arthur Flegenheimer do you think they would find him worth the attention? But Dutch Schultz is a name that fits in the headline.”

  Mr. Berman shook his head and made a gesture, lifting his hand and letting it fall into his lap. I had never seen him so disconcerted. He was not his usual dapper self this morning, he was in working trousers and shirtsleeves and suspenders and bedroom slippers and he hadn’t yet shaved that pointed chin. “Where was I?” he said.

  “We are moving out.”

  He studied my face. “It’s not too bad,” he said. “A bump adds character. Does it hurt?”

  I shook my head.

  “Lulu got carried away. He was supposed to bloody your nose, not break it. Everyone is under a strain.”

  “It’s okay,” I said.

  “Needless to say the whole thing was unfortunate.” He looked around on his desk for his cigarettes, found a pack with one cigarette left, lit it, and leaned back in his swivel chair crossing his legs and holding the cigarette up around his ear. “It sometimes happens that there is more life than you can keep book on, and that is certainly true of up here, this is an unnatural existence, and why we got to get through this trial as quickly as possible and get back home where we belong. Which brings me to what I want to say. Mr. Schultz will be very busy from now on, he’ll be in the spotlight, in court and out of it, and we don’t want him to have anything on his mind except the problem to hand. Does that make good sense to you?”

  I nodded.

  “Well then why can’t she understand that? This is a serious business, we can’t afford any more mistakes, we’ve got to keep our wits about us. All I want is for her to take a powder for a few days. Go to Saratoga, see the races, is that too much to ask?”

  “You mean Mrs. Preston?”

  “She wants to see the trial. You know what will happen if she walks into that courtroom. I mean won’t it bother her to have her picture taken as a mystery woman or some other goddamn cockamamie thing that they will cook up? That her husband will know? To say nothing of Mr. Schultz is a married man.”

  “Mr. Schultz is married?”

  “To a lovely lady waiting for him and worrying about
him in New York City. Yes. What do you keep asking all these questions for? We are all married men, kid, we got mouths to feed, families to support. Onondaga has been a tough son of a bitch for every one of us and it will all be for naught if love conquers all.”

  He was looking at me very intently now, not being sly in his study of my reactions or the thoughts that might be visible on my face. He said: “I know you been spending more time with Mrs. Preston than I or the boys, even from that first night when you walked her back to her apartment and kept an eye on her. Is that fair to say?”

  “Yes,” I said, my throat going dry. I could not swallow or he would see the rise and fall of my Adam’s apple.

  “I want you to talk to her, explain to her why laying low for a while is in the Dutchman’s interests. Will you do that?”

  “Does Mr. Schultz want her to go?”

  “He does and he doesn’t. He’s leaving it up to her. You know, there are women,” he said almost as if to himself. He paused. “There always is. But in all our years I have never seen him like this. What is it, he won’t let himself admit he knows better, that she takes men down like bowling pins, what is it?”