It was interesting how slummy, run-down, and squalid his neighborhood was at the foot of Morningside Heights, with overflowing garbage cans and Negro men standing around on the corners and pitching pennies, but how grand and finely kept his apartment house, as if it was on Park Avenue. A doorman in a uniform politely answered my inquiries and a shiny brass modern self-service elevator took me to the third floor. But the squalid life had preceded me: I found myself at the end of a corridor of waiting men, they were standing in the dim light as if on a breadline. Men on a breadline stand close upon one another with their feet spread somewhat apart and their attention directed to the head of the line, as if only absolute concentration could move it along. But the line moved very slowly and when someone, having concluded his business, made his exit everyone stared at him as if to see in his face the success or failure he had had. It took me thirty or forty minutes to reach the open door of the great man’s apartment. In that time I imagined myself living my whole life in destitution. Year after year, standing on lines and looking for a handout, shrinking in my clothes, my mind slowly polishing itself into the mind of a beggar. I carried money for the man, I was there to give him something, yet I had to stand there in that sweltering hallway and wait my beggar’s turn.
Then I was in a foyer, or anteroom, where a few disconsolate men sat with their hats in their hands like patients in a doctor’s office and I joined them, moving along chair by chair as I got closer to the inner sanctum, until finally I was admitted through double doors to a hallway where a man at a desk and another man standing behind him looked me over, I recognized them as of the same ilk I had been living among for some months, the kind you can hear thinking. Mr. Berman had felt no need to instruct me. I was not old enough to be a voter looking for a job, I was not a familiar of the neighborhood, I was a scrubbed boy trying to look his threadbare best. “I am the son of Mary Kathryn Behan,” I said truthfully. “Since my father deserted us we have fallen on hard times. My mother works in the laundry but she is too ill to hold her job much longer. She says I must tell Mr. Hines she has always voted the Democratic ticket.” The gorgons exchanged a glance and the standing one went off down a hallway. Maybe a minute went by and he came back and escorted me the same way, past a dining room with glass-doored china cabinets, and a living room filled with massive furniture, and some sort of game room with framed citations and a billiards table, and then I was shown into a carpeted heavily draped bedroom that smelled of apples and wine and shaving lotion, a very atmospheric habitat that did not appear to include any open windows. And there propped atop the covers on a grand bank of pillows, in a dark red silk robe, with the hairless legs of an old man protruding, was James J. Hines himself, the Tammany district leader.
“Good morning, lad,” he said, looking up from his morning paper. He covered the whole length of the bed. His feet were large and knobbed and had thick callus on the bottoms, but other than that he was a handsome man, with silver hair combed down flat, a ruddy squarish face set with small features, and very clear light blue eyes, which looked at me amiably enough, as if he was reasonably disposed to hear whatever story I was about to tell, considering the stories he had already heard this morning and the stories still waiting in the corridor all the way to the elevator. I said nothing. He waited, and then grew puzzled. “Do you want to speak your piece?” he said.
“Yes sir,” I said, “but I can’t with this gentleman breathing down my neck. He reminds me of my truant officer.”
That drew a smile until he saw the deadly serious expression on my face. He was not a stupid man. He dismissed the henchman with a wave and I heard the door close behind me. I stepped boldly to the side of his bed and removing the envelope from my pocket placed it on the coverlet beside his large meaty hand. His blue eyes fixed on me with alarm. I stepped back and watched the hand. First the index finger tapped in thought. Then the whole hand slid into the envelope, which was not sealed, and the fingers, spatulate though they were, deftly withdrew the crisp bills and fanned them out like cards, in what was, all in all, an impressive exhibition of an old man’s dexterity of joints.
When I looked up, Mr. Hines leaned back on his pillow and sighed as if the burden of his life was suddenly too much to be borne. “So he has such cunning, still, as to use a lad to get through to me, the dirty bastard?”
“Yes sir.”
“Where would he find such a trustworthy child?”
I shrugged.
“Then there is no Mary Behan after all?”
“Oh yes, she is my mother.”
“I am relieved to hear that. Years and years ago I placed a fine young Irish woman in service who came to America by that name. She was the ageof my youngest daughter. Where do youlive?”
“In the Claremont section of the Bronx.”
“That’s right. I wonder if it’s not the same person. She was a tall girl with a lovely carriage, and a quiet and modest way about her, the kind of girl the Sisters adore, I knew she would find a husband in no time at all, Mary Behan. And who is the scoundrel who would desert a woman like that?”
I didn’t answer.
“What is your father’s name, lad.”
“I don’t know, sir.”
“Oh, I see. I see. I am sorry.” He nodded several times and pressed his lips together. Then his expression lightened. “But she has you, has she not. She has raised a capable son with a bold spirit and a clear inclination to live dangerously.”
“She has indeed,” I said, slipping right into a mimicry of his lilting rhythms, it was hard not to, his speech was powerfully a part of him, he was a politician, the first I’d ever met, but I could tell by the way he made you translate yourself into his language that he was a good one.
“I was an adept fellow too, at your age. Perhaps a bit bigger in the bones, coming of a line of smiths. But with the same little man’s gift for trouble.” He paused. “You do not need my assistance, do you, to take your mother out of that laundry and see to her ease and comfort in the sadness of her life?”
“No sir.”
“I thought as much but I wanted to be sure. You’re a clever boy. Maybe you have some black Irish in you. Or Jew. Maybe that accounts for the company you keep.” He grew silent and stared at me.
“Well if that is all, sir,” I said, “I know you have people waiting.”
As if he had not heard, he indicated a chair next to the bed where I should sit. I watched the big hand snap closed the fan of bills and insert them in the envelope. “Nothing makes me sadder I assure you than to turn back such a generous warrant of heartfelt feeling,” he said. He pushed the envelope toward me. “They are fine crisp bills in the noblest of denominations. You understand I could accept them and he would be none the wiser. You understand? But I won’t do that. Will you explain that to him? Will you explain that James J. Hines does not perform miracles? It’s all too far along, Master Behan. There is that little Republican with the mustache. And he with not a touch of the poet in him.”
The blue eyes regarded me until I realized I was to pick up the envelope. I did and slipped it into my pocket. “Where did he discover the son of Mary Behan, on the street?”
“Yes.”
“Well you tell him for me I am impressed, at least, with that. And as for you personally you know I wish you only a long and prosperous life. But I’m through with him. To hell with him. I thought he understood after that unpleasantness upstate. I thought I had made myself clear. You don’t know what I’m referring to, do you?”
“No sir.”
“Never mind, I don’t have to give him chapter and verse. Just tell him I can have nothing to do with him. The business between us is over. Will you tell him that for me?”
“I will.”
I rose and went to the door. “It is a momentous thing when the money won’t flow,” Mr. Hines said. “I had hoped never to see the day.” He picked up his newspaper. “Not that our friend is a man given to introspection, but he had a highly regarded associate in Mr. Weinb
erg. Who knows if that was the beginning. Who knows, perhaps the day he found you was the beginning.”
“The beginning of what?”
He lifted his hand. “Give my fondest regards to your dear mother and tell her I asked after her,” he said, and he had resumed his reading by the time I shut the door.
When I got back to the Bronx I went into the cigar store on Third Avenue under the El and bought a pack of Wings and got a handful of nickels for the pay phone and put in a long-distance call to the Soundview Hotel in Bridgeport Connecticut. There was no Mr. Schultz registered, no Mr. Flegenheimer, no Mr. Berman. I went home and when I got upstairs the door was open and a man from the telephone company was there with that belt they wear with all the tools hanging from it, he was considerately installing a telephone just beside the couch in the living room. I looked out the window and, just as I had thought, there was no green phone company truck anywhere on the street, I hadn’t remembered seeing one. He left as considerately as he had worked, without a word, and the front door ajar only slightly. The white hub of the dial where the number was supposed to be printed was blank.
I put the envelope with the Hines money back up inside the couch stuffing and sat over it and waited. It seemed to me that ever since catching on with Mr. Schultz I had been assailed by these advanced beings who were there before I was and knew more than I knew, they’d invented telephones and taxicabs and elevated trains and nightclubs and churches, and courtrooms and newspapers and banks, it was all quite dazzling to be inserted by birth into their world, to slide out raw through the birth canal to be christened with a great clop, as if from a champagne bottle upside the head, so that life was forever after dazzling, with nothing quite making sense. What was I now supposed to do with them all and their arcane dealings, what was I supposed to do?
Not more than fifteen minutes passed before the phone rang. It was a strange sound in our little apartment, it was loud as a school bell, I could hear it ringing up and down the hall stairs. “You got a pencil?” Mr. Berman said. “I’ll give you your number. You can call your mama now from anywhere in the United States.”
“Thank you.”
He gave me the number. He sounded almost jovial. “Of course you can’t call out, but on the other hand you won’t get a bill neither. So? How did it go?”
I told him the result of my interview with Mr. Hines. “I tried to reach you,” I said. “They said you weren’t there.”
“We’re in Union City New Jersey, just across the river,” he said. “I can see the Empire State Building. Tell it again with the details this time.”
“He says it’s more than he can handle. He says you can blame the man with the mustache. He says not to contact him anymore.”
“What mustache?” It was Mr. Schultz’s voice. He had been listening on an extension.
“A Republican mustache.”
“Dewey? The prosecutor?”
“I guess that’s who.”
“That son of a bitch!” he said. It was amazing, most people’s voices are skinned down by the phone, but I could hear Mr. Schultz’s in all its rich tonality. “Do I need him to tell us Thomas E. fucking Dewey is on my back? The son of a bitch. The goddamn shiteating son of a bitch. Won’t take the money? Suddenly after all these years my money’s not good enough? Oh, I’m going after that cocksucker, I’ll take that money and shove it in his teeth, I’ll make him eat it, he’ll choke on it, I’ll cut him open and paper his insides with it, he’ll shit money I get through with him.”
“Please, Arthur. Just a moment.”
Mr. Schultz slammed his receiver and my ear rang all the way to New Jersey and back.
“Are you there, kid?” Mr. Berman said.
“Mr. Berman, meanwhile I’m holding this envelope and it makes me nervous.”
“Just put it in a safe place for the time being,” he said.
I could hear Mr. Schultz yelling in the background.
“We’ll have things organized in a couple of days,” Mr. Berman said. “Don’t go anywhere. We need you I don’t want to have to start looking.”
So that was my situation for those hot Bronx days of Indian summer and the Diamond Home sprinkler fixing a rainbow every morning like a halo over the wet street and the children running under it and shrieking. I was mournful. My mother every day got up and went calmly enough off to work, and there was a wobbly balance to our lives, but she didn’t like the phone on the end table next to the couch and dealt with it by putting the framed photograph of her and my defaced father in front of it. I bought us an electric fan that swiveled back and forth through a hundred-and-eighty-degree arc, flaring up the candles in their tumblers in the kitchen, but bringing a cool blow periodically to my shirtless back as I sat and read the papers in the living room. I had a lot of time to think about what Mr. Hines had said. He was a very wise man, it truly was a momentous thing when the money wouldn’t flow. I had counted off my time with Mr. Schultz by the killings, the gunshots and sobs and cracking skulls resounded in my memory like tolling bells, but something else had been going on all that while, which was the movement of money, it had come in and it had gone out all that time, as uninterrupted as a tide in its incoming and outgoing, as steady and unceasing as the quiet celestial system of the turning earth. I had naturally fixed on the coming in, it had always been the matter of most vociferous concern as Mr. Schultz struggled to maintain his control despite his being on the lam and his legal problems, despite the difficulties of running his business interests at a distance, and the thievery of lieutenants and the treachery of trusted associates, but the money that went out was just as important, it bought arms and food, it bought lawyers and cops and the goodwill of poor people, it paid for properties, it paid for salaries and the good times that assured the men he depended upon that he was of the magnitude of incandescence they expected of a bright burning star. As far as I knew Mr. Schultz didn’t use the fortune he had undoubtedly made over the years, he surely had amassed it but there was no sign of it in his life, I supposed he must have a house or fancy apartment somewhere where his wife lived, I knew they must have nice things, but none of it sat on him like the mantle of their wealth on those people in the boxes at Saratoga. He did not live rich, he did not look it or act it or, from any evidence I had, feel it, up in the country he had an entourage whose daily living expenses he took care of, he went for the occasional horseback ride and flung his money about like he was expected to, but it was all for survival, there was no relaxed indolence of his right to it, ever since I had first seen him he had been on the run, he was a vagabond, he lived in hotel rooms and hideouts, he spent his money to make more of it, he had to make it in order to keep making it, because only if he kept making it would he live to make more of it.
So that was why Mr. Hines’s refusal to take the ten thousand was such a monumental reverse: It didn’t matter how the money stopped flowing, in or out, the result was equally disastrous, the whole system was in jeopardy, just as, if the earth stopped turning, according to what a teacher explained to us once in the planetarium, it would shake itself to pieces.
Now I found myself pacing the floor the way he did, I was truly excited, I knew now what Hines meant by the beginning, he meant the end, the fact of the matter was that I had never seen Mr. Schultz at the height of his powers, I didn’t know him when he had a handle on things and everything was as he wanted it to be, I had come into his life when it had begun not to function in his interest, all I had ever seen him do was defend himself, I didn’t remember a time when he wasn’t embattled, everything we did, any of us, came of his concern to survive, everything he’d asked me to do that I had done was in the interest of his survival, collecting policy, going to Sunday school, even having my nose busted, even sleeping with Drew Preston and taking her to Saratoga and getting her out of his clutches was finally in the interest of his survival.
I couldn’t have understood it that day on the cobblestones in front of the beer drop, when the third of the three silent cars pu
lled up to the curb, and all the boys came in awe to their feet and I juggled two Spaldeens, an orange, an egg, and a stone in adoration of our great gangster of the Bronx: He had risen and he was falling. And the Dutchman’s life with me was his downfall.
After a silence of a day or two the phone began to ring regularly. Sometimes Mr. Berman was my dispatcher, sometimes Mr. Schultz, and I went off to do errands the nature of which I didn’t usually understand. The press was following the story, so every day going downtown on the subway I found myself trying to figure out what I was doing by reading in the newspapers what the Special Prosecutor’s Office was doing. One morning I went to the Embassy Club, which looked in the daytime down on its luck with its faded canopy and tarnished brasswork, and a man I didn’t know opened the door and shoved a Dewar’s White Label box into my arms and told me to get moving. In the box were ledgers and loose adding-machine tapes and business letters and invoices and so on. As I had been instructed I went to Pennsylvania Station and put the box in a coin-operated locker and I mailed the key to a Mr. Andrew Feigen at a hotel in Newark New Jersey. Then I read in the Mirror that the special prosecutor had subpoenaed the records of the Metropolitan Restaurant and Cafeteria Owners Association upon the mysterious death of its late president, Julius Mogolowsky, alias Julie Martin.
On another day I ran up a dank creaking stairs off Eighth Avenue to seek out the boxing trades of Stillman’s at their work. This is the famous gymnasium, and I am thrilled to pay my admission, but I don’t know what I’m supposed to do here except to give one of the thousand-dollar bills to someone I don’t know the name of or what he looks like. I notice in the ring a shining black man with beautiful muscles and wearing leather armor about the head, punching punching while five or six men stand around shouting out advice, the same proportion as in the WPA pothole crews. Trow der right, Nate, dat’s it, one two, give it toom. This is the race of men Mickey the driver comes from, the race of the raised ear, the flattened nose, the blind eye, they hulk about and skip and nod and spit in pails, and oh the whop-pering bags and the resined sneakers squeaking, I understand the sweetness of this life, it is held in a small space, like a religion, it is all suspended in the thick smell of men’s sweat, sweat is the medium of existence, like righteousness, they breathe one another’s faith, it is in the old leather, it is in the walls, I can’t resist, I grab a jump rope and give it a half a hundred turns. And as it happens I don’t have to look for my man, it is very simple, he is the one who notices I am here. One of the men instructing the boxer in the ring, he comes over in his sweatshirt that doesn’t quite cover all of his hairy white belly and gives me the big long-time-no-see greeting, putting one stinking arm around my shoulder, which brings me in tight to the open palm he holds in front of me as he walks me to the exit.
Billy Bathgate Page 29