Billy Bathgate

by E. L. Doctorow

  He sat up in the tub, bubbles of soapy water caught in the black hairs of his shoulders and chest. “When you think who I have outlasted, what I have had to contend with. Every day in the week. The thieves, the rats. Everything you build up, everything you work for, they try to steal it from you. Big Julie. My dear Bo, my dear dear Bo. And like Coll, who I have mentioned. You know what loyalty is worth? You know what a loyal man is worth these days? His weight in gold. I was good to Vincent Coll. And he goes and skips bail I put up for him. Did you know that? I never start these things. I’m just this good-natured slob people think they can walk all over. And before you know it, I’m in a fucking war with this madman and having to hide out in a whorehouse. To tell you the truth I felt very bad about that, it was not the manly thing to do. But I had to bide my time. One day in the middle of everything Vincent is picked up and detained, he goes into temporary detention on some rap, and I figure this is my chance, so we lay in wait for him when he comes out except he knows we’re there so he gets his sister to meet him and walks out holding his sister’s kid in his arms. You see what I’m saying? We back off, we are not barbarians, he has us and we go away to fight another day. Just to show you. But the Mick he doesn’t play by any rules of civilization, not a week later he comes rolling around the corner of Bathgate Avenue looking for me with the windows down as I happen to be in the neighborhood to visit my old mother and bring her some nice flowers. When I go see Mama I go alone, maybe that is stupid, I mean I know it is, but it is another life she leads and I don’t want to offend it, so I am by myself with a nice bouquet of flowers I have just bought and I am on this crowded street nodding to this one or that who happens to know me, and I have that sixth sense, you know? or maybe I see something in the eyes of someone walking toward me, that he would look past me? I dive behind a fruit stall, the slugs fly and the oranges go up in the air and the peaches and watermelon busting like skulls spraying, and I am lying there under falling crates of grapefruits and plums and pears and all this juice, so I think I’ve been hit, it feels wet, it would be funny, I’m lying there with all this fruit juice leaking over me, except the screaming of the women and children, it is a family street for christsake, you know with all the pushcarts and the balabustas out doing their marketing, and then the car is gone and I get up and I see over the top of the stall people running the mother screaming in Italian and there is a baby carriage on its side with a baby spilled out, the baby nightie soaked in blood, blood all over his bonnet, the fuckers have killed the kid in its carriage, God help us all. And then someone starts pointing at me, cursing me, you know? like I have shot the kid! and I have to run for it with people shouting after me! Well when that happened I knew I would kill Vincent Coll if it was the last thing I did, I felt honor bound, I made a sacred vow. But the press gives me the rap, me, the Dutchman, because I am at war with this maniac madman, that is the joke of it, I am getting the blame for Vincent Coll, as if I didn’t warn everyone, as if I didn’t try to tell everyone to watch out for him, I get the blame for being the missing target, for not being shot instead of that murdered infant when the fact it was the Mick who did wrong from the beginning, jumping the bail of ten grand I put up for him, ten grand! and then hitting on my trucks and drops, it was a remorseful error of judgment I ever hired him in the first place, I had to get him, I swore to myself I would take him down, it was a matter of restoring the moral world in its rightful position. You know how I did it?”

  There was a knock on the door and the little madam came in with a tray with two bottles of beer and a couple of tall glasses and set it down on the stool. “I’m telling about Vince,” he said to her. “It was very simple, a simple idea, like the simple things are always the best. I remembered he and Owney Madden talked a lot, that was all.”

  “A gentleman, Owney,” the madam said, lighting herself a cigarette.

  “Exactly so,” Mr. Schultz said. “Exactly the point, so I don’t know, he must have had something on Owney because why else would a class guy like Owney have anything to do with him? So it wasn’t that difficult. I send Abe Landau to Owney’s office and he sits there with him all night in his office till the phone rings and Abe puts the gun in Owney’s side, and he says just keep talking, Mr. Madden, keep him on the line, and we got this cop outside who gets the call traced, and the Mick is in a phone booth in the Excelsior drugstore on Twenty-third Street and Eighth Avenue. In five minutes I have a car there and he’s got two guys sitting at the fountain to watch out for him but they look at the Thompson and out they go, running up the street as fast as their legs can carry them, no one has seen them since, and my guy, he stitches the rounds up one side of the phone booth and down the other, and Vincent he couldn’t even get the doors open, he falls out only when they come off the hinges, and back in Owney’s office Abe listens on the phone and hears it all and then there is silence on the line and he hangs up and says, Thank you, Mr. Madden, sorry to have been of inconvenience, and that was how we did in the Mick, may his gizzards boil in hell till the end of time.”

  Mr. Schultz fell silent and I heard him breathing hard in the exertion of his memory. He took a beer from the tray and guzzled it down. It gave me some comfort to see from his example that people can sustain any loss as long as they can go on being themselves.

  The next morning I came down the stairs and it was immediately clear to me something had happened. There were no women in sight, the doors to the rooms were open. I heard a vacuum cleaner, I found Irving in the kitchen pouring mugs of coffee and I followed him to the front parlor and before he closed the door on me I saw that a meeting was going on, maybe a dozen or more men sitting around all dressed and every one of them sober.

  I had been told to take a walk, which I did, I walked back and forth on the side streets of the Seventies from Columbus to Broadway, the town houses of brownstone and limestone, with their high stoops and basement doorways under the stairs, all stuck to one another from one end of the block to the other, not an alley in sight, no spaces, no views or vistas, no empty lots, just this continuous wall of residence. I felt closed out by these stone façades and shaded windows, and it was chilly too, I had not been out of doors for two days and three nights and it seemed to me true autumn had come in, a brisk breeze scuttled up the litter in the street, and the plane trees in their little fenced-in sidewalk plots were turning yellow, as if a tree blight of the north country had followed me, as if the cold was coming down after me no matter where I went. I felt at this moment as if I should never have left the city, I didn’t feel at home in it anymore, from every crack in the sidewalk a weed grew, every corner had its cluster of puttering pigeons, squirrels ran the wires between the telephone poles like portents of lurking Nature, little spies of the encroachment.

  Of course I was hurt to be shut out of what was clearly a serious business council, I wanted to know what I had to do to have my worth recognized, no matter what I did and how well, there were always these setbacks. I said fuck it and went back and I found that the meeting was over, the visitors were gone, and it was just Mr. Schultz and Mr. Berman in the front room, they were dressed for business in shirts and ties. Mr. Schultz paced while he twirled his rosary around his hand, not a good sign. When the phone in the front hall rang he ran out himself and took the call, and a moment later he was putting on his suit jacket and setting his fedora on his head and he stood in the hall inside the front door absolutely pale in his fury. I was standing in the doorway to the parlor. “What does a man have to do?” he said to me. “Tell me. To be deserving of a break, to be able to begin to reap the fruits of his labor. When does that happen?” Mr. Berman at the window in the parlor called “Okay” and Mr. Schultz opened the front door and closed it behind him. I ran to the window and parted the drapes and saw him ducking into a car, Lulu Rosenkrantz was on the running board on the street side, and he looked up and down the street before he swung in next to the driver, and the car moved off smartly and was gone, leaving only the exhaust rising in the air.

&
nbsp; The little madam, Mugsy, came in and she had under her arm a shoebox which she placed on the coffee table. It held all her receipts and invoices, and she and Mr. Berman went over them together like a stunty little couple in a fairy tale, an old woodcutter and his ancient wife puffing their magic white weeds of smoke and child mystification and having a conversation in their language of numbers. I picked some newspapers off the floor: Mayor La Guardia had warned Dutch Schultz that if he was seen anywhere in the five boroughs of New York he would be arrested, and Special Prosecuting Attorney Thomas Dewey had announced he was preparing an indictment of Dutch Schultz for state income tax evasion. So that’s what it was. It all had to do with that verdict upstate, the editorial writers were outraged, I never read editorials but Mr. Schultz’s name was all over them, everyone was calling for his scalp, and every politician who could be found and quoted was likewise outraged, borough presidents were outraged, controllers, members of the Board of Estimate, attorney generals, police commissioners, deputy commissioners, even a lieutenant in the Department of Sanitation was outraged, even the man in the street in the News’s Man in the Street feature. It was interesting, in the context of all this outrage, how Mr. Schultz’s happy smiling face of exoneration looked so brazen and sneering and sinister.

  “That is for damage,” the madam was saying as Mr. Berman held up a slip of paper in query. “Your boys broke a dozen fine dinner plates, you didn’t hear that I suppose, when they was throwing my Wedgwood at each other.”

  “And this?” Mr. Berman said.

  “General overhead.”

  “I don’t like estimates. I like factual numbers.”

  “This overhead is factual wear and tear. Look, right there, the very couch you’re sitting on, you see the stains? That don’t come out, wine doesn’t come out, I’ll need new slipcovers, and that’s an example. How shall I say this, Otto, it is not a YMCA crowd you run through here.”

  “You wouldn’t perchance be taking advantage, Mugsy.”

  “I resent that remark. You know why Dutch comes to me? Because I am the best. This is a high-class establishment and it don’t come cheap. You like the girls? You should, they are show girls, they are not whores from the street. You like the service and the furnishings? How do you think I supply them, by chintzing on everything? I get what I pay for and so do you. It’ll take me a week to get this place to where I can reopen. That is time lost, but I still got to pay rent and the payoffs and the doctors’ fees and the electric company. I’ll tell you what, the black eye I give to you. On the house.”

  Mr. Berman took out a thick bankroll and removed the rubber band. He counted out hundred-dollar bills. “This and not a penny more,” he said, pushing the money across the coffee table.

  When we left the woman was sitting there on the couch holding her hand over her eyes and crying. A car was at the curb. Mr. Berman told me to get in and he got in after me. I didn’t recognize the driver. “Nice and easy,” Mr. Berman said to him. We drove down Broadway and then over to Eighth Avenue and down Eighth past Madison Square Garden and then west to the river and down past the docks, which frightened me for a moment until I realized what we were doing, we passed the landing of the Hudson River Day Line, where a paddle steamer was taking on passengers for an excursion, and then we headed east on Forty-second Street and then north up Eighth again, and so on, marking a big rectangle around the area known as Hell’s Kitchen uptown and down, east and west, three or four times, until we finally came to a stop on a block in the West Forties not far from the stockyards. I saw Mr. Schultz’s car parked maybe a half a block ahead of us on the south side of the street, right in front of a big brownstone church with an attached rectory and schoolyard.

  The driver did not turn off the engine. Mr. Berman lit a cigarette and he said to me the following: “We cannot call the Chairman on the telephone. Nor will he speak to any of us on sight, not even Dixie Davis, who anyway is in Utica testifying at an inquest having to do with the lamentable death of a dear colleague of ours. My judgment is you are the only one who can get in the door. But you must dress nice. Wash your face and wear a clean shirt. You are going to have to see him for us.”

  All at once I was consoled. The crisis included me. “Is that Mr. Hines?” I said.

  He took out a notepad and wrote down an address and tore off the page and handed it to me. “You will wait till Sunday. On Sunday he receives people in his home. You may tell him where we are in the event he has news for us.”

  “Where?”

  “If I am any judge we will be residing at the Soundview Hotel in the city of Bridgeport Connecticut.”

  “What do I say to him?”

  “You will find him charming and easy to talk to. But you don’t have to say anything.” Mr. Berman had removed his bankroll again. This time when he took off the rubber band, he unfolded the money the other way, where the thousand-dollar bills were, and he counted off ten and gave them to me. “Put these in a white envelope before you go. He loves clean white envelopes.”

  I folded the ten thousand dollars flat and shoved them deep in my breast pocket. But they felt very bulky, I kept pressing my side to make sure they were flat. We sat there in the car looking down the street at the black Packard.

  I said: “I don’t suppose this is a good time to bring up a personal problem.”

  “No, not too good,” Mr. Berman agreed. “Maybe it’s something you can take it up with the padre after he’s through with Mr. Schultz. Maybe you will have better luck.”

  “What is Mr. Schultz doing in there?”

  “He’s asking for a safe harbor. He wants to be left in peace. But if I am any judge, although I’m not a religious man myself, they will give him confession and communion and all the things they give, but providing a hideout is not one of their sacraments.”

  We stared through the windshield at the empty street. “What is your problem?” he said.

  “My mother is sick and I don’t know what to do,” I said.

  “What’s wrong with her?”

  “Her mind is wrong, she acts crazy.”

  “What does she do?”

  “She does crazy things.”

  “Does she comb her hair?”

  “What?”

  “I said does she comb her hair? As long a woman combs her hair you don’t have to worry.”

  “Since I have come home she combs her hair,” I said.

  “Well then maybe it’s not so bad,” he said.

  EIGHTEEN

  Of course I would be lying if I said I didn’t think about that ten thousand dollars in my pocket, and what I could do if I just went away with it, packed our bags and took my mother to the train station and got us on a train to go somewhere far away, migod, ten thousand dollars! I remembered the Business Opportunities section of the Onondaga Signal, how you could buy farms of hundreds of acres for a third of that, surely what was true of one part of the country would be true everywhere. Or we could buy a store, a little tea shop, something reliable, where we could work and keep ourselves decently and in my off hours I could scheme for the future. Ten thousand dollars was a fortune. Even if you just left it in a savings bank you made money.

  At the same time I knew I would do nothing of the kind, I didn’t know what I would do but I sensed that the nature of my own business opportunity was still to make itself known, life held no grandeur for a simple thief, I had not gotten this far and whoever had hung this charm over my life had not chosen me because I was a cowardly double-crosser. I tried to imagine what Drew Preston would think. She wouldn’t even understand such small-mindedness, and it would have nothing to do with morality, she would just not understand backing off to the furtive edges of life like that because it was going in the wrong direction. What was the right direction? Toward trouble. To the agony of circumstance. It was the same direction I had been traveling since that first ride on the back of the trolley car to Mr. Schultz’s policy business on 149th Street.

  So while I had my larcenous thoughts I did
not seriously consider them, my real problem was to keep this incredible amount of money safe, I had stashed my truly earned six hundred dollars in my suitcase on the top shelf of the bedroom closet, but that clearly wouldn’t do, so I got down on the floor and stuck my hand up into the hole under the couch where the stuffing was falling out, and made a little cottony shelf in there and rolled the bills into a tube and wrapped a rubber band around them and shoved them in. Then for three days I hardly left the apartment, I thought that I might unwittingly betray my secret by the expression on my face, that people could read money in my eyes, but mostly I didn’t want to leave the house unattended, I bought our groceries and ran home, if I wanted air I sat on the fire escape, and in the evening after my mother cooked dinner, I watched her very carefully when she lit one of her memory glasses because since my return she had taken to doing that again, one each evening, she was getting her lights going so she could understand what there was to understand.

  On the second day I went to the candy store and bought a white business envelope for a penny, and early the next morning, bathed and combed and wearing a clean shirt, but not willing to risk a trip to Manhattan looking like a swell with money in his pocket, I wore only the trousers of my linen suit and topped everything with the black side of my Shadows jacket, and I took the Third Avenue El downtown. I would have given whatever odds you asked that nobody else on the train was carrying ten thousand dollars in his pants, not the stolid working men bobbing in unison on the cane seats, not the conductor opening the doors, nor the motorman in the front cab, or for that matter the people in the windows of the tenements we passed. I would have given odds that unless there was some smartass school kid in one of the cars nobody on the train would even know whose face was on a thousand-dollar bill. If I got up and announced that I was carrying that amount of money people would move away from me as from a crazy man. But these callow reflections finally had the effect of making me nervous, and rather than continue by train, I got out at the 116th Street station and invested my own money in a cab crosstown to Eighth Avenue and 116th, where the Chairman, James J. Hines, maintained an apartment.