Billy Bathgate

by E. L. Doctorow

  Then as I rolled on my back I saw him shrug loose of them and hold his hands in the air. “It’s all right,” he said. “It’s okay. I am all right.”

  He yanked on his collar and pulled at his vest and sat back down in his chair. Irving and Lulu took me under the arms and put me instantaneously on my feet. I felt ill. They righted my chair and sat me in it and Mr. Berman pushed a glass of wine toward me and I took it with both hands and managed to swallow some of it. My ears were ringing and I felt a sharp pain on the left side every time I took a breath. I sat up straight, in that way your body instantly accepts what has happened to it, though your mind does not, I knew that if I sat straight and took only shallow breaths through the nose the pain was relieved somewhat.

  Mr. Schultz said: “Now kid, that was for not telling me before. You heard what she said, that cunt, you should have come to me right away.”

  I started to cough, little hacking coughs that were excruciatingly painful. I swallowed more wine. “This was the first chance,” I said, lying, I had to clear my throat to get my voice back, I didn’t want to sound like I was sniveling, I wanted to sound offended. “I been busy doing everything you asked me, is all.”

  “Let me finish, please. How much of that ten grand is left that you been holding.”

  With trembling hands I took five thousand dollars out of my wallet and put it on the white tablecloth. “All right,” he said. He took up all the bills but one. “That is for you,” he said pushing it toward me. “A month’s advance. You are now on the payroll at two hundred and fifty a week. This is what justice is, you see? The same thing you deserved a licking for you deserve this.” He looked around the table. “I didn’t hear nobody else give me the word on our downtown comparey.”

  Nobody said anything. Mr. Schultz poured wine in all the glasses and drank his own with a loud smacking of the lips. “I feel better now. It didn’t feel right in that meeting, I knew it didn’t feel right. I don’t know how to combine. I wouldn’t know how to begin. I was never a joiner, Otto. I never asked anybody for anything. Everything I got I got for myself. I have worked hard. And how I got where I got is I do what I want, not what other people want. You put me with those goombahs and suddenly I have to worry about their interests? Their interests? I don’t give a shit for their interests. So what is all this crap. I’m not about to give it away, I don’t care how many D.A.s come after me. That is what I was trying to tell you. I didn’t have the words. Now I got them.”

  “It doesn’t have to mean anything, Arthur. Bo liked a good time. It could have been at the track. It could have been in a club. It don’t have to mean anything.”

  Mr. Schultz shook his head and smiled. “My Abbadabba. I never knew the numbers were for dreaming. A man gives me his word and it’s not his word, a man works for me all those years and the minute I turn my back he conspires against me, I don’t know, who has gotten to him? Who in Cleveland gets such an idea?”

  Mr. Berman was very agitated. “Arthur, he’s not stupid, he’s a businessman, he looks at the choices and he takes the path of least resistance, that is the whole philosophy of the combination. He didn’t have to see the girl to know where Bo was. He showed you a mark of respect.”

  Mr. Schultz pushed back from the table. He took his rosary out of his pocket and began to twirl it, around went the rosary in a tightening circle, it dangled for a pendulous moment and then spun the other way, looping out before snapping up tight again. “So who turned Bo? I see your precious combination, Otto. I see the whole fucking world ganging up on me. I see the man who takes me into his church, the man who makes me his brother and embraces me and kisses me on the cheek. Is this love? These people have no more love for me than I have for them. Is this the Sicilian death kiss? You tell me.”

  NINETEEN

  And that’s how I came to shadow Thomas E. Dewey, the special public prosecutor appointed to clean up the rackets, and future district attorney, governor of New York, and Republican candidate for president of the United States. He lived in one of those limestone-cliff Fifth Avenue apartment buildings that look over Central Park, it wasn’t that far north of the Savoy-Plaza, in one week I became very familiar with the neighborhood, I idled lurked and strolled usually on the park side, across the street, along the park wall in the shade of the plane trees, sometimes diverting myself by trying not to step on the lines of the hexagonal paving blocks. In the early morning the sun came up through the side streets filling them from the east with light and shooting out like Buck Rogers ray guns across the intersections, I kept thinking of shots, I heard them in the backfirings of trucks, I saw them in the rays, I read them in the chalk lines made by the kids on the sidewalks, everything was shots in my mind as I shadowed the public prosecutor with a view toward setting him up for assassination. In the evening the sun went down over the West Side and the limestone buildings of Fifth Avenue glowed gold in their windows and white on their faces, and all up and down the stories maids in their uniforms pulled the drapes closed or let down the awnings.

  In these days I felt very close to Mr. Schultz, I was the only one cooperating in the deepest spirit with him, his most trusted adviser deplored his intentions, his two most loyal personal attendants and bodyguards suffered grave misgivings, I was alone with the man in his heart, was what I felt, and I have to confess I was excited to be there alone with him in his cavernous transgression, he had slugged me and kicked my ribs in and now I felt a real love for him, I forgave him, I wanted him to love me, I realized he was able to get away with something no other person could get away with, for example I still did not forgive Lulu Rosenkrantz my broken nose, and in fact when I thought about it I didn’t like the way Mr. Berman had lifted twenty-seven cents from me with one of his cheap math tricks that time in the policy office on 149th Street when I had barely caught on with the organization, Mr. Berman had been my mentor ever since, generously bringing me along, nurturing me, and yet I still did not forgive him that loss of a boy’s few pennies.

  You can’t expect to shadow someone effectively unless you are an unremarkable figure appropriate to the landscape. I bought a scooter and wore my good pants and a polo shirt and I did that for a day or so, then I got a puppy from a pet shop and walked him along on a leash except people who were out early walking their own dogs kept stopping to say how cute he was while their dogs sniffed his wagging little ass, and that was no good, so I gave him back, it was only when I borrowed the wicker carriage from my mother for a couple of days and took it downtown by taxicab to stroll along with it like an older child watching his mother’s new baby that I felt I had the right camouflage. I bought a doll from Arnold Garbage for two bits with a cotton bonnet to keep its face in shadow, people liked to get their babies out in the early morning, sometimes nurses in white stockings and blue capes pushed these elaborate heavily sprung lacquered perambulators along with netting to keep the bugs off of the little darlings, so I bought netting and draped it over the carriage so that even if some old lady got really nosey she couldn’t see inside, and sometimes I walked and sometimes I sat on the bench just across the street from where he lived and pushed the carriage out and pulled it back and bounced it gently on its broken-down springs and in this manner learned that the early morning was the time with the fewest people and the most inflexible routine, without a doubt the morning appearance of Mr. Dewey was the preferred time to dispatch him.

  And my mother liked that doll, she was pleased to have me enter her imagination with her, she rummaged through her old cedar chest to find the baby clothes there, my baby clothes, and to dress the doll in the musty little gowns and scalp caps she had dressed me in fifteen years before. But all this you see was the innocence of murder, I loved my mother for being innocent of the murders around her, as worried prophets are, I loved her very much for the stately madness she had chosen to suffer the murders in her life of love, and if I had any qualms for the work I was doing I had only to think of her to know that I was on the nerve of my innate resolve and so I could
trust that it was all going to work out, that everything would end as I dreamed it would.

  In fact I will declare right now that I knew while I held something of these events in my hands, I would not have them bloodied. I realize this assurance sounds self-serving and I hereby apologize to all of Mr. Dewey’s relatives, heirs, and assignees for the revulsion they may feel, but these are confessions of a wild and desolate boyhood and I would have no reason to lie about any one of them.

  Oddly enough the person I felt bad about was Mr. Berman, the moment I had chosen at the Palace Chophouse to reveal what Drew Preston had told me he must have perceived as an act of treachery, the moment of his ruination, it was the end of all his plans, when his man would not finally be brought along into the new realm he foresaw, where the numbers ruled, where they became the language and rewrote the book. He said to me once, apropos of this idea, this dapper little humpbacked man with the clawlike fingers: “What the book says, well let me put it this way, you can take all the numbers and stir them around and toss them up in the air and let them fall where they may and remake them back into letters and you have a whole new book, new words, new ideas, a new language you’ve got to understand with new meanings and new things happening, a new book entirely.” Well that was a dangerous proposition, if you thought about it, was the proposition of X, the value he couldn’t abide, the number not known.

  But in his last glance for me over his glasses, the brown eyes widening to their blue rims, he saw everything instantly, with a kind of despairing reproach. What a tidy little thing the mind is, how affronted by the outlying chaos, he was game, this little guy, he’d made a brilliant life out of one faculty, and he’d always been kind to me, if deviously instructive. I ask myself now if my small word to the wise made that much difference, if it wasn’t better for Mr. Schultz to go down knowing what his situation was, as Bo Weinberg had, if that honor wasn’t due him; whereas he might never have known what hit him. And anyway I think now he knew all along, it was why perhaps he publicized his desire to assassinate the prosecutor, a suicidal act in any event, real or proposed, and it was as he said, I had just given him the words he was looking for all along for the feeling he had, that at the age of what, thirty-three? thirty-five? he’d run out of reprieves, the moment had long since passed when all the elements for his destruction had combined, and his life was attenuated, in the manner of a fuse.

  But what I thought I was doing was delivering a message between intimates, a necessary message that could not be left undelivered, though I had tried, and he had understood that I had tried and so had thrashed me. I knew them both so well. She made me a boy again in the humming space between them: You tell him, would you? she had said, and lifted her binoculars so that I could see the parade of small horses curving around the lens.

  And then it is time for my report, and it is late one night in the same back room of the Palace, with the pale green walls and the regularly spaced tarnished mirrors in frames suggesting with a few lines of hollowed-up tin the streamlined modernity of the skyscraper, their hierarchy of arches like a platformed chorus of pretty girls with raised knees, and we all sit sallow at the same back table with the impeccably clean cloth and it is so late by the time I get there, dinner is over, they have before them now not the thick plates and cups and saucers but the thinnest of adding-machine tapes, their eternal fascination, the time is midnight, I saw that on the neon-blue clock over the bar as I walked in, midnight, the moment of justice cleaved to the moment of mercy, Midnight, the best name for God.

  And this is the moment I am finally with them, one of them, their confidant, their colleague. There is first of all the sense of craft that suffuses me, the sweetness of knowing one thing well. There is second of all the malign pleasure of conspiracy, the power you feel from just planning to kill someone who may at that moment be kissing his wife or brushing his teeth or reading himself to sleep. You are the raised fist in his darkness, you will fell him from his ignorance, it will cost him his life to know what you know.

  Every morning he comes out exactly the same time.

  What time?

  Ten minutes to eight. There is a car there, but the two plainclothes get out of the car to meet him at the door and they walk with him while the car follows. They walk together to Seventy-second, where he goes into the Claridge Drugstore and makes a call from the phone booth.

  Every day?

  Every day. There are two phone booths to the left just inside the door. The car follows and it waits by the curb and the bodyguards stand outside while he makes his call.

  They wait outside? Mr. Schultz wants to know.

  Yes.

  What’s inside?

  On the right as you walk in is the fountain. You can get breakfast at the counter. Every day is a different special.

  Is it crowded?

  I never saw more than one or two people at that hour.

  And then what does he do?

  He comes out of the booth and waves to the counterman and he leaves.

  And how long is he in there altogether?

  Never more than three or four minutes. He makes that one phone call to his office.

  How do you know to his office?

  I’ve heard. I went in to look at magazines. He tells them what to do. Things he’s thought of during the night. He has a little pad and he reads from his notes. He asks questions.

  Why would he leave his house to make a phone call? Mr. Berman says. And then on the way to work where he’s going to see them in fifteen twenty minutes anyway?

  I don’t know. To get more done.

  Maybe he’s afraid of a tap? Lulu Rosenkrantz says.

  The D.A.?

  I know, but he knows from taps, maybe he just don’t want to take the chance calling from his own house.

  He’s seeing witnesses all the time, Mr. Schultz says. He is very secretive, he gets them in there the back way or something so nobody knows who’s squealing. I know that about the son of a bitch. Lulu’s right. He doesn’t miss a trick.

  What about the return journey? says Mr. Berman.

  He works late. It could be anytime, sometimes as late as ten. The car pulls up, he gets out and he’s in the lobby in a second.

  No, the kid’s got it figured, Mr. Schultz says, the morning is when. You put two guys with silencers at the counter with their coffee. Is there a way out of there?

  There’s a back door leading into the lobby of the building. You can go down to the basement and come out on Seventy-third Street.

  Well then, he says, putting his hand on my shoulder. Well then. And I feel the warmth of the hand, and the weight of it, like a father’s hand, familiar, burdensome in its pride, and he is beaming his appreciation in my face, I see the mouth open in laughter, the large teeth. We will show them what is not allowed, won’t we, we will show them how far you can’t go. And I will be in Jersey all the time and will pull a long face and say I had no personal grief against the man. Am I right? He squeezes my shoulder and rises. They will thank me, he says to Mr. Berman, they will end up thanking the Dutchman for the caution I have instilled, you mark my words. This is what streamlining means, Otto. This.

  He tugs on the points of his vest and goes off to the bathroom. Our table is in the corner in a right angle of pale green walls. I am facing the walls with my back to the doorway leading to the bar, but I have an advantage because the tarnished mirror allows me to see farther down the transverse corridor into the bar than someone sitting under the mirror and looking straight out. It is the peculiar power of mirrors to show you what is not otherwise there. I see the blue neon cast of the clock tube above the bar as it encroaches on the floor of the passageway to the dark tavern. It is like a kind of moonlight on black water. And then the water seems to ripple. At the same time I hear the bartender’s rag suspended in its swipe over the zinc bar beneath the draft beer taps. I hear now that I heard the front doors to the street open and close with unnatural tact.

  How did I know? How did I know? With the fir
st wisp rising from the crossed wires of murderous intent? Had I believed of our conspiring that we had invoked images too powerful for the moment, as in some black prayer, so that they had inverted, and were flashing back on us to blow us sky-high? There is that earliest notion of leaning forward in the chair, the body getting ready from the base of the spine up.

  Silencers, Lulu says, thinking of his life to come. Mr. Berman is just twisting around to look to the entrance and Irving’s eyes rise with me as I rise to my feet. I notice how well-combed Irving’s thin hairs are, how neatly in place. Then I am in the short passage leading to the kitchen at the rear. I find the men’s room door. I am hit by the salt stink of a public bathroom. Mr. Schultz stands at the urinal with his legs apart and his hands on his hips so that the back of his jacket wings out, and his water arcs from him directly into the urinal drain, thus making the rich foaming sound of a proud man at his micturation. I try to tell him how, as an action, this is terribly obsolete. And when I hear the guns I think he has been electrocuted through the penis, that he made the mistake I have read about in the novelty books, of urinating in a thunderstorm when the lightning can hiss up from the ground in an instantaneous golden rainbow and flash you out like a bomb.

  But he is not electrocuted, he is jammed with me in the small stall, I am standing on the toilet seat and his shoulder bangs into me as he fumblingly removes the pistol from his belt, I don’t even know if he knows I’m there, he holds the gun cocked, pointed at the ceiling, and with his other hand he is doing an amazing thing, he is trying to button his fly, we don’t listen to the explosions, we are rocked by them, they ring in the ears, they become a continuous erupting disaster in the ears, and I dig in the pocket of my Shadows jacket for my Automatic and it is twisted in the material of the lining, and I have to struggle with it, I am as graceless as Mr. Schultz, and now I smell the powder, the bitter sulfurous aftermath coming under the door like a poison gas, and at this moment Mr. Schultz must realize that he has no real protection in here, he will be killed in a toilet stall, he slams the door open with the heel of his hand and pulls open the bathroom door and I understand he is shouting, a great wordless scream of rage issues from him as he springs out and raises his arms to shoot, and through the two doors as they are held open by the wind of fire I see the black ovoid stain of sweat under his arm, I see him stumble forward and disappear, I see the pale green corridor wall, and I hear the deeper roar of the new caliber even as he spins back into view, and totters out again leaving sensational maps of the holes in him on the wall of the passageway as the doors slowly swing closed.