Billy Bathgate

by E. L. Doctorow

  The deckhouse was shaped like an oval. A railed hatch where the girl had been put below was in the center of the deck at the rear. Toward the front was a bolted metal ladder leading straight up through a hatch to the wheelhouse where I assumed the captain or whatever he was called was duly attending to his business. I had never been on anything bigger than a rowboat so all of this, at least, was good news, that something like a boat could be so much of a construction, all according to the rules of the sea, and that there was a means of making your tenuous way across this world that clearly reflected a long history of thought. Because the swells got higher and longer, and everyone had to anchor himself, Mr. Schultz taking the side bench directly opposite where I sat and Irving gripping the ladder leading upstairs to the wheelhouse as if it were a pole on a subway train. And there was a silence for some time inside the sounds of the running engine and the waves, like the solemnity of people listening to organ music. And now Bo Weinberg was coming to life and beginning to look around him, to see what he could see, and who was here and what could be done; I received the merest glance of his dark eyes, one short segment of arc in their scan, for which I was incredibly relieved, not bearing any responsibility, nor wanting any, for these wheezing shifting seas or for the unbreathable nature of water, or its coldness, or its dark and bottomless craw.

  Now there was such intimacy among all of us in this black cabin shining in the almost-green shards of one work light that when anyone moved everyone else noticed, and at this time my eyes were riveted by Mr. Schultz’s small action of dropping his gun in his ample coat pocket and removing then from his inside jacket pocket the silver case that held his cigars and extracting a cigar and replacing the case and then biting off the tip of his cigar and spitting it out. Irving came over to him with a cigarette lighter, which he got going with one press of his thumb just a moment before he held it to the tip. And Mr. Schultz leaned slightly forward rotating the cigar to light it evenly, and over the sound of the sea and the grinding engine I heard the sip sip of his pull on the cigar and watched the flame flare up on his cheeks and brow, so that the imposition of him was all the more enlarged in the special light of one of his appetites. Then the light went out and Irving retreated and Mr. Schultz sat back on the bench, the cigar glowing in the corner of his mouth and filling the cabin with smoke, which was not really a great thing to be smelling in a boat cabin on the high seas.

  “You can crack a window, kid,” he said. I did this with alacrity, turning and kneeling on the bench and sticking my hand through the curtains and unlatching the porthole and pushing it open. I could feel the night on my hand and drew it in wet.

  “Isn’t it a black night though?” Mr. Schultz said. He rose and moved around to Bo, who was sitting facing astern, and hunkered down in front of him like a doctor in front of a patient. “Look at that, the man is shivering. Hey Irving,” he said. “How long till it hardens up? Bo is cold.”

  “Not long,” Irving said. “A little while.”

  “Only a little while longer,” Mr. Schultz said, as if Bo needed a translation. He smiled apologetically and stood and put a companionable hand on Bo’s shoulder.

  At this Bo Weinberg spoke and what he said was genuinely surprising to me. It was not what any apprentice or ordinary person in his situation could have said and more than any remark of Mr. Schultz’s to this moment gave me to understand the realm of high audacity these men moved in, like another dimension. Perhaps he was only admitting to his despair or perhaps this was his dangerous way of getting Mr. Schultz’s sincere attention; I would not have thought of the possibility that a man in his circumstances would feel he had a measure of control over how and when his death would occur. “You’re a cocksucker, Dutch” is what he said.

  I held my breath but Mr. Schultz only shook his head and sighed. “First you beg me and now you go calling me names.”

  “I didn’t beg you, I told you to let the girl go. I spoke to you as if you were still human. But all you are is a cocksucker. And when you can’t find a cock to suck you pick up scumbags off the floor and suck them. That’s what I think of you, Dutch.”

  As long as he was not looking at me I could look at Bo Weinberg. He certainly had spirit. He was a handsome man, with smooth shiny black hair combed back without a part from a widow’s peak, and a swarthy Indian sort of face with high cheekbones, and a full well-shaped mouth and a strong chin, all set on the kind of long neck that a tie and collar dresses very nicely. Even hunched over in the shame of his helplessness, with his black tie askew on his wing collar and his satiny black tuxedo jacket bunched up above his shoulders, so that his posture was subservient and his gaze necessarily furtive, he suggested to me the glamour and class of a big-time racketeer.

  I wished now in some momentary confusion of loyalties, or perhaps thinking only as a secret judge that the case had not yet been made to my satisfaction, that Mr. Schultz could have some of this quality of elegance of the man in the tub. The truth was that even in the finest clothes Mr. Schultz seemed badly dressed, he suffered a sartorial inadequacy, as some people had weak eyes or rickets, and he must have known this because whatever else he was up to he would also be hiking up his trousers with his forearms, or lifting his chin while he pulled at his collar, or brushing cigar ashes from his vest, or taking off his hat and blocking the crown with the side of his hand. Without even thinking about it he tried constantly to correct his relationship to his clothes, as if he had some sort of palsy of dissatisfaction, to the point where you thought everything would settle on him neatly enough if he would stop picking at it.

  The trouble may have been in part his build, which was short-necked and stolid. I think now that the key to grace or elegance in any body, male or female, is the length of the neck, that when the neck is long several conclusions follow, such as a proper proportion of weight to height, a natural pride of posture, a gift for eye contact, a certain nimbleness of the spine and length of stride, all in all a kind of physical gladness in movement leading to athletic competence or a love for dancing. Whereas the short neck predicts a host of metaphysical afflictions, any one of which brings about the ineptitude for life that creates art, invention, great fortunes, and the murderous rages of the disordered spirit. I am not suggesting this as an absolute law or even a hypothesis that can be proved or disproved; it is not a notion from the scientific world but more like an inkling of a folk truth of the kind that seemed reasonable enough before radio. Maybe it was something that Mr. Schultz himself perceived in the unconscious genius of his judgments because up to now I knew of two murders he had personally committed, both in the region of the neck, the throttling of that Fire Department inspector, and the more viciously expedient destruction of a West Side numbers boss who was unfortunate enough to be tilted back in a chair and having himself shaved in the barbershop of the Maxwell Hotel on West Forty-seventh Street when Mr. Schultz found him.

  So I suppose the answer to his regrettable lack of elegance was that he had other ways of impressing you. And after all there was a certain fluent linkage of mind and body, both were rather powerfully blunt and tended not to recognize obstacles that required going around rather than through or over. In fact it was just this quality of Mr. Schultz’s that Bo Weinberg now remarked upon. “Think of it,” he said, addressing the cabin, “he makes this cheap dago move on Bo Weinberg, can you believe it? Only the guy who took out Vince Coll for him and held Jack Diamond by the ears so he could put the gun in his mouth. Only the guy who did Maranzano and bought him a million dollars of respect from the Unione. Who made the big hits for him and covered his ass for him, and found the Harlem policy he was too dumb to find for himself, who handed him his fortune, made him a goddamn millionaire, made him look like something else than the fucking lowdown gonif he is—this shmuck from the gutter. This bullethead. Listen, what did I expect, pulls me out of a restaurant in front of my fiancée? Women and children, anything, he doesn’t care, he doesn’t know any better did you see those waiters cringing, Irving, you wer
en’t there you should have seen those waiters trying not to watch him shovel it in sitting there in his Delancey Street suit that he bought from the signboard.”

  I thought whatever was going to happen now I didn’t want to witness; I had scrunched up my eyes and instinctively pressed back into the cold cabin wall. But Mr. Schultz hardly seemed to react, his face was impassive. “Don’t talk to Irving,” he said by way of reply. “Talk to me.”

  “Men talk. When there are differences men talk. If there is a misunderstanding they hear each other out. That’s what men do. I don’t know what you came out of. I don’t know what stinking womb of pus and shit and ape scum you came out of. ’Cause you’re an ape, Dutch. Hunker down and scratch your ass, Dutch. Swing from a tree. Hoo hoo, Dutch. Hoo hoo.”

  Mr. Schultz said very quietly: “Bo, you should understand I am past the madness part. I am past the anger. Don’t waste your breath.” And like a man who has lost interest he returned to his seat along the bulkhead across from me.

  And from the slump of Bo Weinberg’s shoulders, and the droop of his head, I thought it might be true of a man of rank that he would be naturally defiant, and it might furthermore be true that he would exhibit the brazen courage of a killer of the realm for whom death was such a common daily circumstance of business, like paying bills or making bank deposits, that his own was not that much different from anyone else’s, as if they were all a kind of advanced race, these gangsters, trained by their chosen life into some supernatural warrior spirit; but what I had heard had been a song of despair; Bo would know better than anyone there were no appeals; his only hope would be for a death as quick and painless as possible; and my throat went dry from the certainty that came over me that this was exactly what he had been trying to do, effect it, invoke Mr. Schultz’s hair-trigger temper to dictate the means and time of his own death.

  So I understood of the uncharacteristic controlled response that it was so potent as to be merciless; Mr. Schultz had made his very nature disappear, becoming the silent author of the tugboat, a faceless professional, because he had let Bo’s words erase him and had become still and thoughtful and objective in the approved classical manner of his henchman Bo Weinberg, as Bo, swearing and ranting and raving, had seemed to become him.

  In my mind it was the first inkling of how a ritual death tampers with the universe, that inversions occur, everything flashes into your eyes backward or inside out, there is some kind of implosive glimpse of the other side, and you smell it too, like crossed wires.

  “Men talk, if they are men,” Bo Weinberg said now in an entirely different tone of voice. I could barely hear him. “They honor the past, if they are men. They pay their debts. You never paid your debts, your deepest debts, your deepest debts of honor. The more I done for you, the more like a brother I been, the less I have counted to you. I should have known you would do this, and for no more reason than you are a welsher who never paid me what I was worth, who never paid anybody what they are worth. I protected you, I saved your life a dozen times, I did your work and did it like a professional. I should have known this was the way you would make good on your debt, this is the way Dutch Schultz keeps the books, trumping up the wildest cockamamie lie just to chisel, a cheap chiseler chiseling every way he can.”

  “You always had the words, Bo,” Mr. Schultz said. He puffed on his cigar and took his hat off and reblocked it with the side of his hand. “You got more words than me, being having been to high school. On the other hand I got a good head for numbers, so I guess it all evens out.”

  And then he told Irving to bring up the girl.

  And up she came, her marcelled blond head, and then her white neck and shoulders, as if she was rising from the ocean. I had not before in the darkness of the car gotten a really good look at her, she was very slender in her cream white evening gown hanging by two thin straps, and in this dark and oily boat, totally alarming, white with captivity, staring about her in some frightened confusion so that prophecies of an awful evil despoil-age filled my chest, not just of sex but of class, and a groan like a confirmation of my feeling strangled in the throat of Bo Weinberg, who had been cursing a stream of vile oaths at Mr. Schultz and who now strained at his ropes and shook his chair from side to side until Mr. Schultz reached in his coat pocket and brought the grip of his pistol smartly down on Bo’s shoulder and the girl’s green eyes went wide as Bo howled and lifted his head in pain and then said from his squeezed face of pain that she shouldn’t look, that she should turn away and not look at him.

  Irving coming up the stairs behind her caught her as she began to fold and set her down in the corner on a cushion of piled tarpaulins and leaned her back against cylinders of coiled line, and she sat on her side with her knees drawn and her head averted, a beautiful girl, I was able to see now, with a fine profile, as in the aristocracy of my imagination, with a thin nose and under it a lovely dimpled crescent curving out downward to a mouth which from the side was full-lipped in the middle and carved back to no more than a thin line at the corner, and a firm jawline and a neck that curved like a waterbird’s, and—I dared to let my eyes go down—a thin fragile chest, with her breasts unencumbered as far as I could determine by any undergarment, being slight, although apparent at the same time under the shining white satin of her décolletage. Irving had brought her fur wrap along and draped it now over her shoulders. And all of a sudden it was very close in here with all of us, and I noticed a stain on the lower part of her gown, with some matter stuck to it.

  “Threw up all over the place,” Irving said.

  “Oh Miss Lola, I am so sorry,” Mr. Schultz said. “There is never enough air on a boat. Irving, perhaps a drink.” From his coat pocket he withdrew a flask encased in leather. “Pour Miss Lola out a bit of this.”

  Irving stood with his legs planted against the rock of the boat and unscrewed from the flask a metal cap and precisely poured into it a shot of neat and held it out to the woman. “Go ahead, missy,” Mr. Schultz said. “It’s good malt whiskey. It will settle your stomach.”

  I couldn’t understand why they didn’t see she had fainted but they knew more than I did, the head stirred, the eyes opened and all at once in their struggle to come to focus betrayed my boy’s romance: She reached out for the drink and held it and studied it and raised it and tossed it back.

  “Bravo, sweetheart,” Mr. Schultz said. “You know what you’re doing, don’t you? I bet you know how to do just about everything, don’t you. What? Did you say something, Bo?”

  “For God’s sake, Dutch,” Bo whispered. “It’s over, it’s done.”

  “No, no, don’t worry, Bo. No harm will come to the lady. I give you my word. Now Miss Lola,” he said, “you can see the trouble Bo is in. You been together how long?”

  She would not look at him or say a word. The hand in her lap went slack. The metal screw cap rolled off her knee and lodged in a crack of the decking. Immediately Irving picked it up.

  “I had not the pleasure of meeting you before this evening, he never brought you around, though it was clear Bo had fallen in love, my bachelor Bo, my lady-killer, it was clear he had gone head over heels. And I see why, I do most certainly see why. But he calls you Lola and I am sure that is not your name. I know all the girls named Lola.”

  Irving passed forward, handing the flask to Mr. Schultz, and continuing, and it was at this moment an uphill walk, the boat riding a run of wave prow up, and he reached the forward ladder and turned to wait with all of us, watching the girl, who would not answer as the boat dropped under us, but sat now with two streams of tears silently coursing down her cheeks, and all the world was water, inside and out, while she didn’t speak.

  “But be that as it may,” Mr. Schultz went on, “whoever you are you can see the trouble your Bo is in. Right, Bo? Show her how you can’t do certain things anymore in your life, Bo. Show her how the simplest thing, crossing your legs, scratching your nose, it can’t be done anymore by you. Oh yeah, he can scream, he can shout. But he can’t
lift his foot, he can’t open his fly or unbuckle his belt, he can’t do much of anything, Miss Lola. Little by little he is taking leave of his life. So answer me now, sweetheart. I’m just curious. Where did you two meet? How long you been lovebirds?”

  “Don’t answer him!” Bo shouted. “It’s nothing to do with her! Hey Dutch, you’re looking for reasons? I can give you all the reasons in the world and they all add up to you’re an asshole.”

  “Aah that is such bad talk,” Mr. Schultz said. “In front of this woman. And this boy. There are women and children here, Bo.”

  “You know what they call him? Shortpail. Shortpail Schultz.” Bo cackled with laughter. “Everyone has a name and that’s his. Shortpail. Deals in this brewed catpiss he calls beer and doesn’t even pay for it. Chintzes on payoffs, has more money than he knows what to do with and still nickels-and-dimes his associates. An operation this size, beer, unions, policy, runs it like some fucking candy store. Am I right, Shortpail?”

  Mr. Schultz nodded thoughtfully. “But look, Bo,” he said. “I’m standing here and you’re sitting there and you’re all finished, and who would you rather be at this moment, Mr. class-act Bo Weinberg? Moves on the man he works for? That’s class?”

  “May you fuck your mother flying through the air,” Bo said. “May your father lick the shit of horses off the street. May your baby be served to you boiled on a platter with an apple in its mouth.”

  “Oh Bo.” Mr. Schultz rolled his eyes upward. He lifted his arms out and his palms up and made mute appeal to the heavens. Then he looked back at Bo and let his arms fall to his sides with a slap. “I give up,” he muttered. “All bets off. Irving, is there another cabin down there that has not been occupied?”

  “Cabin aft,” Irving said. “The back end,” he said in explanation.