Billy Bathgate

by E. L. Doctorow

  When Mr. Schultz was not present the life was tiresome, the runners came by in the mornings with their paper bags and by noon they had all delivered, and the first race of the day’s card went off at one p.m. and the numbers went up on the blackboard every hour and a half or so, and the magical numeric construction was completed by five o’clock, and by six the shop was closed and everyone had gone home. When crime was working as it was supposed to it was very dull. Very lucrative and very dull. Mr. Berman was usually the last to leave and he carried a leather briefcase that I assumed held the day’s take, and just as he came scuttling out of the office building a sedan pulled up and he got in and was gone, usually glancing at me sitting there across the street and giving me a knowing nod through the window, and I wouldn’t count my day over until he had, I tried to learn something from every small sign and infinitesimal clue, and that face in the small triangle of rear window, sometimes obscured further by a cloud of cigarette smoke, was my cryptic instruction for the night. Mr. Berman was like the other side of Mr. Schultz, the two poles of my world, and the one’s rage of power was the other’s calm administration of numbers, they couldn’t be more unlike as men, for instance Mr. Berman never raised his voice but spoke out of the corner of his mouth that was not employed with his perpetual cigarette, and the smoke smoked up his voice and made it hoarse, so that it came fragmented, as a line broken into dots, and I found I had to listen closely to hear what he said, because not only did he not shout, he never repeated himself. And he had the aura of mild deformity about him, his hunch, his stiff-kneed walk, that suggested a frailness, a physical grayness that he painted over with his neat and color-matching clothing style, whereas Mr. Schultz was all brute health, moving about in a disorder of moods and excessive feelings that nothing like clothing could really fit on or augment.

  One day I found some slips on the floor near Mr. Berman’s desk that looked different and when I was sure no one was looking I picked them up and shoved them in my pocket. In the evening back on my block I looked at them, there were three scraps of paper and each was drawn with a square divided into sixteen boxes, and all the sixteen boxes of each square were filled with different numbers, and I looked at them for a while and began to see something, the numbers added up to the same sum no matter which line you added, the horizontal line or the vertical or the diagonal. And each square was totally different, he had figured out sets of numbers in each case that worked that way and he hadn’t repeated himself. The next day when I had the chance I observed him and saw that what I had assumed was his work was a kind of doodling idleness, he sat there all day and did calculations at his desk, and I had assumed they had to do with the business, but really the business didn’t demand that much of him, there was nothing to it, the numbers that interested him were the puzzling kind. Mr. Schultz was never idle that I was able to tell, he did not have that quality of thinking about anything but business, but I saw that Abbadabba Berman lived and dreamed numbers, and that he couldn’t help himself, he was as helpless with his numbers and everything they could do for him as Mr. Schultz was in the grip of his ambitions.

  Not once in that first week of my hanging around did Mr. Berman ask my name or where I lived or how old I was, or anything like that. I was prepared to lie in any case but it never came up. If he spoke to me he called me kid. He said one afternoon, “Hey, kid, how many months in the year?” I answered twelve. “Okay, now suppose you give each month its number, like January is the first month and so on, you got it?” I said I did. “Okay, now you don’t tell me your birthday but take the number of the month, and then add the number of the month following, you got it?” I had it, I was thrilled he was talking to me. “Okay, now product that sum by five, you got it?” I thought a moment and then said I had it. “Okay, now you product by ten and add the number of your birthday to the result, you got it?” All right, yes, I had it. “Now give me the number you come up with.” I did—nine hundred and fifty-nine. “Okay,” he said, “thanks for telling me, your birthday is September nine.”

  This was of course correct and I grinned with appreciation. But he pressed on. “I’m gonna tell you how much change you got in your pocket. If I do that and I’m right, I win it, okay? If I’m wrong, I’ll match the sum and you will have double what you had before, okay? Turn around and count it, but don’t let me see.” I told him I didn’t have to count it, I knew how much I had. “Okay, double the sum in your mind, you got it?” I had: the amount was twenty-seven cents and I doubled it, fifty-four. “Okay, add three, you got it?” Fifty-seven. “Okay, now product it by five, you got it?” Two eighty-five. “Okay, subtract the number six, you got it? Now tell me the result.” I told him, two hundred seventy-nine. “Okay, you’ve just lost twenty-seven cents, am I right?” He was right.

  I shook my head in admiration and smiled though I was smarting, and the smile felt false on my face. I handed over my twenty-seven cents. Maybe I had the sneaking hope he would give it back, but he pocketed it and turned back to his desk and left me to my broom. It occurred to me then that with his sort of mind if he needed to know my birthday, or the amount of money I had, this is the way he would go about it. What if he wanted my street address. Or the number of my public school. Everything could be translated into numbers, even names if you assigned a number to each letter as in code. What I thought was idleness was a system of understanding, and it made me uneasy. They both knew how to get what they wanted. Even a stranger who knew nothing about him, neither his name nor his reputation, would perceive in a flash Mr. Schultz’s willingness to maim or kill anyone who stood in his way. But Abbadabba Berman calculated everything, he figured the odds, he couldn’t walk that well but he was lightning quick, so that all events and outcomes, all desires and means of satisfying them, were translated as numerical values in his mind, which meant he never did anything unless he knew how it was going to turn out. I wondered which of them was more of a dangerous study to a simple boy just trying to get ahead and make something of himself. There was an implacable adult will in both of them. “And see if you can work out one a those number squares for yourself, it ain’t so hard once you get the ruling idea,” Mr. Berman said giving a dry little hack through the cigarette smoke.

  A week or two later there was some sort of emergency, Mr. Berman was dispatching people in the office and over the phone, and then he must have run out of people, he beckoned to me and wrote something on a piece of paper and it was an address on 125th Street, and also a name, George. I understood immediately this was a break for me. I asked no questions, not even how to get there, although I had never been to Harlem. I decided to go in a yellow taxi and let the driver find the way, I had built up a stake of four dollars from my tips from sweeping and running errands and I figured a cab ride was a good investment also because it would allow me to show how fast and reliable I was. But I had never flagged a taxicab before and I was half surprised when one stopped. I read out the address as if I’d been riding in cabs all my life and hopped in and slammed the door, I knew the proper deportment of dealing with cabs from the movies, I showed nothing on my face of the excitement I felt, but we hadn’t gone a block with me sitting in the middle of the back seat with all the room in the world on the cracked red leather before I decided this was my new preferred mode of travel.

  We proceeded down the Grand Concourse and across the 138th Street Bridge. The address I had was a candy store near the corner of 125th Street and Lenox Avenue. I told the driver to wait, like people in the movies did, but he said he would wait only if I paid him as much of the fare as was on the meter. This I did. When I walked in the store I knew it was George standing there behind the counter with a big puffy eye and a red bruise on the side of his face, he was holding a piece of ice under his eye and the melting ice was running through his fingers like tears, he was a light-complected Negro man with gray hair and a trim gray mustache, and he was shaken, ashen actually, two or three other men who looked not so much like customers as friends of his were there sitting at the
counter, and they were black too and wore their wool working caps though it was the hot summer, they were not joyful to see me. I stayed calm and tried to act like a true business representative. I looked through the window at the black passersby on the street looking in at me as they passed, and I saw then the plate-glass window was cracked diagonally in half, and there were shards of glass on the worn linoleum floor near the newspapers, and the taxi at the curb looked as if it wasn’t joined properly in the middle, nothing was joined, nothing went together, this dark little candy store had broken off from Mr. Schultz like a piece of the continent into the sea, George reached down into one of the ice-cream containers under the fountain and came up with a brown paper bag rolled tight at the top the way they did it and he dropped it on the Belgian marble counter. “Ain’t nothing I can do, I work for them now,” he said holding the ice cake up to his face. “You tell him that, hear? You see what happen I try to do right. You tell him. All go to hell far as I concern, you tell him that too. All the white mens together.”

  And back to the Bronx I went, the paper bag clutched in my two hands, and I didn’t even look inside, I knew there were hundreds of dollars there but I wouldn’t look, I was happy enough to have this official standing as a runner, I wondered what had happened to George’s man but didn’t really care that much, I felt too good about handling the thing without a hitch, and without feeling afraid, and that this George did not question my credentials or make a personal remark about me, as angry as he was, but simply treated me as another of Mr. Schultz’s men, a professional, one whose face showed no emotion in the presence of pain or misfortune but who had come for the money and gone with it, period, and who was now bumping over the bridge over the Harlem River, his heart pumping with happy gratitude for the beauty and excitement of his existence, and the river flowing with industrial muck, and the welding torches of riverside machine shops like sparklers in the July morning.

  SIX

  Of course as happy as I was to be catching on with them, things were not going well at that time for the Dutch Schultz gang and they wouldn’t until Dixie Davis, that was the name of the lawyer Mr. Schultz shouted at all the time, was able to work out a plan for Mr. Schultz’s surrender to the U.S. District Attorney’s Office. If you did not know the arcane nature of these matters it would not make sense that Mr. Schultz was hoping to turn himself in for arraignment but he paced up and down dreaming of nothing but that, once actually trying to tear the hair from his head in a fury of frustration that he couldn’t yet do that, for the truth of the matter was until he was booked and out on bail he wasn’t free to attend to business. But he couldn’t turn himself in until he had some legal guarantees that would improve his chances in a trial, as for instance that it should be held out of New York City, where, because of certain unfortunate publicity having to do with his activities, the public from which any jury would be composed tended not to see him in a good light. And that was at the core of the endless negotiations between his lawyer and the D.A.’s office, he wanted some guarantees before he turned himself in and until he had them he could not be arrested and therefore free.

  He told me the crime business like any other needs the constant attention of the owner to keep it going, because nobody cares about the business like the owner and it’s his burden to keep the profits flowing, to keep everyone on their toes, and most of all to keep the business growing, because as he explained it to me an enterprise can’t maintain itself today just by repeating what it did yesterday, if it doesn’t grow it dries up, it is like something living, when it stops growing it starts dying, to say nothing of the special nature of his particular enterprise, a very complex enterprise not only of supply and demand but of subtle executive details and diplomatic skills, the payoffs alone deserved a special department of controllers, the people you needed to rely on were vampires, they needed their blood money, and if you weren’t there to give it to them they folded up on you, went numb, faded into the mist, you had to be a public presence in criminal enterprise or it would get away from you, and whatever you built up could be taken away from you, in fact the better you were, the more successful you were, the surer the fuckers would try to take it away from you, and by that he didn’t only mean the law he meant the competition, this was a highly competitive field that did not attract gentlemen, and if they found a weakness in the armor, they went after it, and even if you had one pissant sentry sleeping on his post say, or some gonfalong foot soldier who could be lured off guard duty, not to speak of your own absence from the command post not even to speak of that, why then you were finished because they drove their tanks in through that opening whatever it was and that was the end of you, they had no fear of you, and without their fear of you, you were a dead man in no-man’s-land, and there would not be enough recognizably left of you to put in a coffin.

  I took these concerns for my own, as how could I not, sitting on the screened back porch of the two-story red brick house on City Island with the great man confiding his thoughts his worries to orphan Billy, the good-luck kid, the amazed beneficiary of this sudden and unpredictable intimacy. He had gone from not recognizing me to remembering the first moment he saw me across the street capably juggling, how could I not take on the dark troubles of his heart and feel them inside myself as a matter that would not go away, the nagging fear of loss, the dry inner sob of unjust circumstance, and the heroic satisfaction of enduring, of seeing things through? So this was the secret place where he stayed when he was not temporarily present in his protected precincts, this red brick private house just like the flat-roofed private houses you saw all over the borough except way out here it was the only one on a short street of bungalows, on this island that was still in the Bronx, and now I was one of the few people who knew, Irving knew of course because it was his mother’s house, and his elderly mother knew because she cooked and kept things going normally—a woman who walked around with her hands always wet—on this quiet side street with a few hardy ailanthus trees like the ones planted in all the city parks, and Mr. Berman knew it because it was he who one day allowed me to come for the ride that he took each afternoon to bring Mr. Schultz the receipts and go over the figures. And as I sat out in the fenced backyard while they were doing this I reasoned that all the neighbors on the street and perhaps for a few blocks around must know it too because how can you not know when a famous visitor is on your street, and a dark car with two men in it sits outside at the curb night and day, this was a small place, a waterfront town really, if of a New York style, but having not really that much in common with the endless paved hills and valleys of Bronx tenements and stores and elevated trains and trolleys and peddlers’ carts, it was an island that got sun, and the people on it must feel special, apart from everything, as I did now, relishing my connection with the good life of space, of this view of the Sound, which looked to me like an ocean, a deep horizon of gray sea sliding and shifting about in a leisurely way, the way slate and stone would shift if not fixed to the land, with the stateliness of a monumental body too big to have enemies. Right next door on the other side of the chain-link fence was a boatyard, with sailboats and motorboats of all kinds propped up on blocks or tilting over in the sand, and there were a few sailboats moored in the water off the boatyard wharves. But the boat I had my eye on was tied up at the wharf looking sleek and ready to go, a varnished mahogany speedboat with grooved tan leather seats built in and bright brass trim on the windshield and a steering wheel like a car’s and a little American flag flying from the stern. And I saw a gap in the chain-link fence between the house and the boatyard just at the waterline, and then a path to the wharf where thatboat waited, and Iknew thishadto be thecraft of Mr. Schultz’s getaway, if it ever came to that. How I admired the life of taking pains, of living in defiance of a government that did not like you and did not want you and wanted to destroy you so that you had to build out protections for yourself with money and men, deploying armament, buying alliances, patrolling borders, as in a state of secession, by your w
ill and wit and warrior spirit living smack in the eye of the monster, his very eye.

  But beyond that, contriving a life from its property of danger, putting it together in the constant contemplation of death, that was what thrilled me, that was why the people on this island street would never rat, his presence honored them and allowed them to live in their consciousness of him as in a kind of light of life and death, with the moments of superior awareness or illumination the best of them might get in church or in the first moments of romantic love.

  “Christ, I had to earn everything I got, nobody gave me a thing, I came out of nowhere and everything I done I done by myself,” Mr. Schultz said. He sat in reflection upon this truth and pulled on his cigar. “Sure I made mistakes, that’s the way you learn, the only time I ever served was when I was seventeen, I got sent to Blackwell’s Island for heisting, I didn’t have a lawyer and they gave me an indeterminate, meaning when I got out depended on how I acted, and that was fair enough. I tell you if I had some of these hotshot lawyers I have now probably I’d have gotten life. Hey Otto?” he said laughing, but Mr. Berman had fallen asleep in his chair with his panama over his face, I suppose he had heard Mr. Schultz complain once or twice before about how hard his life was.