Billy Bathgate

by E. L. Doctorow

  At that moment the phone rang. “You haven’t failed me so far,” he said, turning in his chair and leaning forward to pick up the receiver. He gave me his look over the tops of his eyeglasses. “Don’t fuck up now.”

  I went in my room to think. It couldn’t have been more perfect, like an affirmation of my wish for release from the life and task I had chosen for myself, and I knew exactly what I would do from the moment he told me to talk to her. Not that I didn’t appreciate the danger. Were these my own thoughts of freedom or was I acting under his influence? This was really dangerous, they were all married people, willful and unpredictable mad passionate adults with God knows what depths of depravity, they lived hard and struck suddenly. And Mr. Berman hadn’t told me everything, regardless of what he said, I didn’t know if he was speaking for himself only or for Mr. Schultz as well. I didn’t know if I was supposed to be working for Mr. Schultz in this matter, or conspiring to do what was in Mr. Schultz’s best interests.

  If Mr. Berman was shooting straight with me I could be gratified that he appreciated my utility as a superior brain in the outfit, he was handing me an assignment nobody else could handle as well, including himself. But if he knew what was going on between Mrs. Preston and me he could be telling me just the same things he had told me. If we were going to be murdered would it not be somewhere else than Onondaga? If Mr. Schultz could not afford her anymore? If he found me expendable? He murdered people who acted on his behalf at a distance from him. I knew for a possibility that if I left I was going away to die because either he knew my heart’s secret in which case he would kill me, or my being gone from his sight would create the betrayal in his imagination that would amount to the same thing.

  Yet what was any of this speculation but the symptom of my own state of mind? I would think of nothing like this if my conscience was clear and I was intent only to advance myself. I found myself starting to pack. I had a lot of clothes now and a fine soft leather suitcase with brass snaps and two cinch belts, I folded my things neatly, a new habit, and tried to think of the first moment when I would have the chance to talk to Drew Preston. I was feeling the first yawning intimations of the nausea I recognized as pure dread, but there was no question that I was going to make the best of the opportunity Mr. Berman had presented me. I knew what Drew would say. She would say she hadn’t wanted to leave me. She would say she had big plans for her darling devil. She would say I was to tell Mr. Berman she was ready to go to Saratoga but wanted me to go with her.

  That night, while Drew accompanied Mr. Schultz to the district school gymnasium, where he was throwing his big end-of-summer party for everyone in Onondaga, I moved out of the hotel with the rest of the gang, I didn’t even know where we were going, only that we were going there, bag and baggage, in two cars, with an open truck following with Lulu Rosenkrantz sitting in the back with the steel safe and a stack of mattresses. The whole time in the country I had never gotten used to the night because it was so black, I didn’t even like to look out of my window because the night was so implacably black, in Onondaga the streetlights made the stores and buildings into shapes of night, and out past the edges of town the endless night was like a vast and terrible loss of knowledge, you couldn’t see into it, it did not have volume and transparency like the nights of New York, it did not suggest day was coming if you waited and were patient, and even when the moon was full it only showed you the black shapes of the mountains and the milky black absences of the fields. The worst part was that country nights were the real ones, once you rolled across the Onondaga Bridge and your headlights picked up the white line of the country road, you knew what a thin glimmering trail we make in that unmappable blackness, how the heat of your heart and your motor is as sufficient in all that dimensionless darkness as someone still not quite dead in his grave for whom it makes no difference if his eyes are opened or closed.

  I was frightened to belong so devoutly to Mr. Schultz. I was made bleak in my mind by his rule. You can live in other peopie’s decisions and make a seemingly reasonable life for yourself, until the first light of rebellion shows you the character of all of them, which is their tyranny. I didn’t like for Drew to be back there with him while I was driven like the baggage. The distance would not be that great, only twelve miles or so as I was surprised to see from a surreptitious check of the mileage when we arrived, but I felt each mile attenuated my connection with Drew Preston, I was not confident her feelings could endure.

  We pulled up to this house, who had found it, rented it or bought it, I was never to know, it was a farmhouse but there was no farm, just this run-down clapboard house with the leaning porch situated atop a dirt ramp rising suddenly up from the road, so that the porch looked over the road east and west from this bluff that was really not set back from the road but more like on top of it. Behind the house was a steeper hill of woods blacker than the night, if that was possible.

  This was the new headquarters, which we were to see first by flashlight. Inside smelled very bad, the polite word is “close,” which is the smell of an old unlived-in wood house, and the windows were rotted shut, and animals had lived here and left their droppings now dried to dust, and there was a narrow stairs going up from the entryway and what I supposed was a living room through a door on one side of the entryway, and a short hall going straight back under the stairs to a kitchen with an astonishing thing in the sink, a hand pump for water, which came up in a trickle and then a loud crashing rush of rust and muck that brought Lulu running. “Stop fucking around and pull your weight,” he told me. I went outside to the truck and helped bring in mattresses and cardboard cartons filled with groceries and utensils. We were doing everything by flashlight until Irving got a fire going in the living-room fireplace, which improved matters not that much, there was a stiff dead bird on the floor who must have come in through the chimney, oh this was terrific, no question about it, I asked myself who would choose the carpeted life of hotels when he could have this historic mansion of the American Founding Fathers.

  Late that night Mr. Schultz appeared, in his arms were two big brown bags full of containers of chow mein and chop suey that someone had brought up from Albany, and while it was not the same thing as good Chinese food from the Bronx it was much appreciated by all of us. Irving found some pots to warm the stuff up and I got a fair share of everything, the chicken chow mein over a mound of steaming rice and crisp roasted noodles, the chop suey for the second course, litchi nuts for dessert, the paper plates got a bit soggy but that was all right, it was a good satisfying meal, except that it lacked tea, all I had to drink with it was well water, while Mr. Schultz and the others washed it down with whiskey, which they did not seem to mind at all. A fire was going in the front room and Mr. Schultz lit a cigar and loosened his tie, I could tell he was feeling better, and might even be feeling good here in this hideout where he was not on display as he had been for many weeks in Onondaga and would be as soon again as the morning, I think there was something bitterly comforting to him about being holed up again because it matched his sense of his situation as someone surrounded on all sides.

  “You boys don’t have to worry about the Dutchman,” he said as we all sat around against the walls, “the Dutchman takes care of his own. Don’t think twice about Big Julie, he wasn’t anyone you should concern yourselves. Or Bo. They were no better than Vincent Coll. They were the bad apples. You guys I love. You guys I would do anything for. What I said long ago, my policy still stands. You get hurt, you get sent up, or God forbid you lose it all, you never have to worry, your families will be taken care of as if you was still on the payroll. You know that. All the way down to the kid here. My word is my bond. It’s better with the Dutchman than with the Prudential Life Assurance. Now this trial, in a few days we will be clear. While the Feds have been fucking away the summer on the beach we been up here sowing our oats. Public opinion is on our side. You shoulda seen that party tonight. I mean it wasn’t your or my idea of a party, when we get back to town that wi
ll be a party, but this, the rubes loved it. In the high school gymnasium with the crepe paper and the balloons. I had one of them back-hill fiddle-and-banjo bands playing their doughsee doughs and all the hands right. Hell I danced myself. I danced with my babe in all that crowd of washed and laundered hardship. I have become very attached to them. Not a wiseass will you find in the countryside, just hardworking slobs, work till they keel over. But they got one or two cards in their hand. The law is not majestic. The law is what public opinion says it is. I could tell you a lot about the law. Mr. Hines could tell you more. When we had the important precincts, when we had the magistrates court, when we had the Manhattan D.A.? Wasn’t that the law? We got a man to argue for me tomorrow who wouldn’t have me to dinner in his house. He talks on the phone with the president. But I have paid his price and he will be at my side for as long as it takes. So that’s what I mean. The law is the vigorish I pay, the law is my overhead. The hondlers, they make this legal, they make that illegal, judges, lawyers, politicians, who are they but guys who have their own angle into the rackets except they like to do it without getting their hands dirty? You gonna respect that? Respect will kill you. Save your respect for yourselves.”

  He was speaking softly, modulating his resonant rasp even here twelve miles out of Onondaga in this house that could barely be noticed from the road in the daytime. Maybe it was the darkness of firelight that did it, the expression of the private mind in the intimacy of a fire, when you hear only your own thoughts in the night and see only shadows.

  “But you know, it’s a kind of honor, isn’t it,” he said. “After all, people have been counting out the Dutchman for quite a while now. And yet the whole world has followed me here, it’s almost like Onondaga is another borough. Starting the other day with my new best friend from the downtown mobs. So I must be all right. See? I got my rosary. I carry it all the time. I will take it into court with me. This is a nice evening, this is good booze. I feel good now. I feel at peace.”

  Upstairs were two small bedrooms and after Mr. Schultz drove back to town I went to sleep in one of them in my clothes on a mattress on the floor with my head in the gable where I tried to believe I could see through the opaque windowpane to stars in the night sky. I did not question why with only two small bedrooms one was mine, perhaps I assumed it was my due as a boy with a governess. In the morning when I awoke two other guests whom I didn’t recognize were asleep on their mattresses in their clothes except that they had hung their guns in their shoulder holsters from hooks on the wood door. I stood up, stiff and cold, and went downstairs and outside, it was barely dawn, there was some question in this moment as to whether the world would actually come back, it seemed in some sort of wet wavering drift as if it was not up to the task, but from this whitish blackness something detached itself, twenty yards down the road and at my eye level a man I recognized as Irving was at the top of a telephone pole and splicing a wire which was the same black wire that came up the dirt ramp and went past my feet into the front door. And then I looked across the road and saw down there a white house with green trim and an American flag hanging from a big pole in the front yard, and in a pine grove behind the house sprinkled among the trees were several tiny cabins of the same white with green trim and beside one of them the black Packard was parked pointed to the road with its windshield covered with frost.

  I went around to the back of our hillside manse and found an ideal spot for a lengthy and meditative urination. I imagined that if I had to live here I could create a gorge as monumentally geographical as the one Drew Preston had found on our walk. Mr. Schultz seemed to have beefed up the firepower, if I understood correctly the two snoring strangers upstairs. I noted too of this ramshackle house on its bluff that it provided a good prospect of the road in both directions. And someone sticking a tommy gun out the window of his car couldn’t just tear on past and shoot it up. All this was of technical interest to me.

  But in a matter of hours I was leaving, although I didn’t know for how long and to what end. My life was estranged from me, whatever my resolve I no longer was childish enough to feel it was commanding. Last night as we had sat in the firelight I had felt I was one of them in a way not just my own, not just of my own thinking, but in the common assumption of our meal shared in the empty hideout house, disguised by the bad light as a grown-up, a man in the rackets, once in never out, and perhaps this more than church bells ringing was the true quiet signal of the end of my provisional determination, the snuffing-out of my unconscious conviction that I could escape Mr. Schultz anytime I wished. Now I thought this layout was more truly theirs, more like the real habitat of their lives, than any other place I had seen. I was impatient for people to get up. I wandered about, I was hungry. I missed my tea shop breakfast and I missed my Onondaga Signal, which I liked to read over breakfast, and I missed my big white bathroom with the hot water shower. You would think I’d lived in fine hotels all my life. I stood on the porch and looked in the living-room window. On a wood table was Mr. Berman’s adding machine and the hot phone Irving was in the process of hooking up, there was an old kitchen chair with a tall back, and prominently in the middle of the floor, the Schultz company safe. The safe seemed to glow for me as the indisputable center of the upheaval of the past twenty-four hours. I thought of it not only as the repository of Mr. Schultz’s cash deposits but as the strongbox for Abbadabba’s world of numbers.

  Irving saw me and put me to work, I had to sweep the floors and go around to all the windows and wipe them down so you could see out of them, I chopped wood by hand for the kitchen stove, which made my tender nose throb with pain, I hiked to a general store about a mile away and bought paper plates and bottles of Nehi for everyone’s breakfast, I was as deep in nature as you could get, like a damn Boy Scout at a jamboree. Irving left in the Packard with Mickey and so Lulu was in charge then and he put me to work out in back digging a latrine, there was an outhouse there that looked perfectly usable to me though it tilted a bit, but Lulu found it offended his sensibilities to use a strange outhouse and so I had to take a shovel and dig this hole in a clear and level place in the woods above the house going into the soft earth around and around deeper and deeper with my hands getting blistered and sore before one of the men took over, I had thought I had imagined all the possible dangers attached to a life in crime, but death by excrement had escaped me. Only when Irving came back and resolutely built a small throne of pine boards for the hole did I remember what dignity lay in labor that was done with style, whatever the purpose, he was a model for us all, Irving.

  I got myself into as clean and presentable shape as I could manage under primitive conditions and at about nine that morning I drove with Mr. Berman and Mickey into Onondaga and sat in the parked car across the public square from the courthouse. Almost every parking space was taken as the Model T’s and A’s and the chain-drive flatbeds came in from the countryside, and the farmers in their clean and pressed overalls and the farmers’ wives in their unfashionable flowered dresses and sunbonnets climbed the steps and went through the doors for their impaneling. I saw the government lawyers with their briefcases walking up the hill from the hotel, I saw Dixie Davis looking very solemn beside the older portly lawyer with his rimless glasses dangling from their black ribbon, and then, slouching along in twos and threes, the fellows with the writing pads sticking out of their jacket pockets and the morning paper rolled under their arms and their little press cards like decorative feathers in the headbands of their fedoras. I studied the reporters very carefully, I wished I knew which of them was the Mirror, whether he was the one with horn-rim glasses who bounded up the steps two at a time or the one with his tie knot pulled down and his collar open at the neck, you could only guess about reporters, they never wrote about themselves, they were just these bodiless words of witness composing for you the sights you would see and the opinions you would have without giving themselves away, like magicians whose tricks were words.

  Up at the top of the stairs news
photographers with big Speed-Graphics in their hands stood around not taking pictures of the people going past them into the building.

  “Where’s Mr. Schultz?” I said.

  “He snuck inside a half hour ago, while those jokers was still eating their breakfast.”

  “He’s famous,” I said.

  “That’s the tragedy in a nutshell,” Mr. Berman said. He took out a wad of one-hundred-dollar bills and counted out ten of them. “When you’re in Saratoga don’t let her out of your sight. Whatever she wants, pay for it. This one has got a mind of her own, which could be inconvenient. There’s a place called the Brook Club. It’s ours. You have any problems you speak to the man there. You understand?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  He handed me the bills. “Not for your personal betting,” he said. “If you want to make a few bucks for yourself, you’ll be calling me every morning anyway. I know something, I’ll tell you. You understand?”

  “Yes.”

  He handed me a torn piece of paper with his secret phone number on it. “Horses or women alone is bad enough. Together they can kill you. You handle Saratoga, kid, I’ll believe you can handle anything.” He sat back in the seat and lit a cigarette. I got out of the car and took my suitcase from the trunk and waved goodbye. I thought in this moment I understood the limits of Mr. Berman, he was sitting in this car because it was the closest he could get to the courtroom, he couldn’t go where he wanted to go and that made him plaintive, a little humpbacked man with over-colorful clothes and Old Gold cigarettes the two indulgences of his arithmetized life, I felt looking back at him watching me from the car window that he was someone who could not function without Dutch Schultz, as if he were only an aspect of him, reflected into brilliance by him, and as dependent as he was needed. I thought Mr. Berman was the curious governor of this amazing genius of force, who if he one moment lost his spin would lose it forever.