Billy Bathgate

by E. L. Doctorow

  There was nothing in the papers to help me with that one, only the feeling that it all went together, all the sweating exertions of the killer spirit.

  Another thousand goes to a bail bondsman at magistrates court where Dixie Davis got his start, he is a little bald guy with a cigar stub that works its way from one side of his mouth to the other as he watches me remove the bill from my wallet. I reflect that John D. Rockefeller only gave away dimes. On Broadway and Forty-ninth at the august offices of Local 3 of the Window Washers and Building Maintenance Workers, a man who is to take another of the one-thousand-dollar bills does not happen at the moment to be in, and so I wait, sitting in a wooden chair by a railing across the desk from a woman with a black mole over her lip, and she is frowning about something, perhaps her loss of privacy, because I might see how little she has to do, the window behind her is tall and wide and entirely unwashed and stepping down through its plane of dirt are the legs of the monocled top-hatted Johnny Walker whiskey sign on the roof of the building across the street, these enormous rising and falling black boots walking in air over Broadway.

  To tell the truth I loved this time, I sensed my time was coming, and it had to do with the autumn, the city in its final serious turn toward the winter, the light was different, brilliant, hard, it tensed the air, burnished the top deck of the Number Six double-decker bus with a cold brilliant light, I made a stately ride in anticipation of death, crowds welled at the corners under the bronze streetlamps with the little Mercuries, police whistles blew, horns blew, the tall bus lurched from gear to gear, flags flew from the stores and hotels, and it was all for me, my triumphal procession, I reveled in the city he couldn’t enter, for a minute or two it was mine to do with what I would.

  I wondered how long he could resist, how long he could control himself and not test their resolve, because they knew his haunts, they knew where his wife lived, they knew his cars and his men, and now without Hines there was no fix, not in the precincts, not in the courts, he could board the Weehawken ferry, he could come through the Holland Tunnel, he could cross the George Washington Bridge, there were a lot of things he could do, but they knew by now where he was and would know when he left, and that made New York a fortress, a walled city with locked gates.

  After a week or so I had dispensed half of the ten one-thousand-dollar bills. As far as I could understand these were not payoffs I was making, for the most part they were warrants of continuity, little organizational stanchings because Thomas E. Dewey was drawing blood, he had found some Dutch Schultz bank deposits under false names and had had them frozen, he had subpoenaed records of the brewery the Dutchman owned, his assistants were interviewing police officers and others whose names they would not divulge to the press. But if there was money for this aspect of things, there had to be money to rebuild from the bottom, payoff by payoff, someone had to be doing it, there were ways after all, you’re telling me Mickey couldn’t shake a tail? Irving couldn’t turn invisible? There were twenty, twenty-five men at the morning meeting in the whorehouse parlor, not all of them were in Jersey, the organization was functioning, twenty-five was not a hundred or two hundred but business was going on, stripped down, on hard times, its reach diminished, but mean and murderous and with plenty of money for lawyers.

  So that’s how I figured it to be, or how it would be if I was running things, I would be patient and bide my time and take no chances, and for a couple of weeks, maybe even into early October, that’s the way it was. But I was not Mr. Schultz, he surprised you, he surprised himself, I mean why suddenly do I read that an entire floor in the Savoy-Plaza has been wrecked, that an unknown thief or thieves have broken into one of the residential apartments and done tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of damage, cut up paintings, ripped down tapestries, smashed pottery, defaced books, and presumably stolen property of a value not known because the residents of the apartment, Mr. and Mrs. Harvey Preston—he is the heir to the railroad fortune—are abroad and cannot be reached?

  Then one night, following my instructions, I took the Third Avenue El to Manhattan, and the streetcar all the way crosstown to the West Twenty-third Street ferry slip, and then I stood on the deck of the beamiest bargiest boat in the world, a boat that carried thousands of people every day in such unnautical stability as to suggest a floating building, a piece of the island of New York separated for the convenience of its citizens and let out on a line across the river, I stood on this boat that smelled like a bus or a subway car with chewing-gum wads pressed into its decks and candy wrappers under the cane seats and looped straps for standees to hang on to, and the same wire trash baskets you found on street corners, and I felt under my feet the tremors of the dark harbor, the lappings of the alive and hungry ocean, I looked back on New York and watched it drift away and I thought I was going for a dead man’s ride.

  I will say here too, at the risk of offending, that my arrival at the industrial landing on the Jersey shore, with ranks of coal barges lying at anchor and brick factories spewing smoke and the whole western horizon filled with the pipes and tanks and catwalks of hellish refineries, did not give me the assurances I sought from having land under my feet. A yellow cab was waiting outside the terminal and the cabby waved and as I approached he reached back and opened the passenger door, and when I got in it was Mickey who greeted me with an uncharacteristically effusive nod and a smart takeoff that threw me against the back of the seat.

  You had to go through Jersey City to get to Newark, there was apparently some governmental distinction to be made between them, but I could see no difference, both cities together being just a continuous dreary afterthought of New York, a kind of shadow on the wrong side of the river, you could tell they thought they were the Bronx or Brooklyn, and they had the bars and the streetcars and the machine shops and warehouses, but the air stank in a different way, and the stores were old-fashioned and the width of the streets was wrong and the people all had that look of being noplace, they looked at up at the signs on the corners to remember where they were, it was a most depressing flatland, a monument to displacement, and I could tell Mr. Schultz would go out of his mind here trying to get comfortable prowling from Union City to Jersey City to Newark to find the best window where he could look out and see the Empire State Building.

  It was a cemetery, no question about that, it was too ugly to live in. Mickey pulled up in front of this bar on a street paved not with asphalt but in whitish cement and with the telephone and streetcar wires hanging like a loose net over everything and let me off and drove away. The name of the place was the Palace Chophouse and Tavern. Now I will admit I had come to a tentative conclusion—that if Mr. Schultz was to all intents and purposes locked out of doing business in New York, and none of the trusted associates could take a chance either on going in for any prolonged length of time, I mean as the only one who had free rein, my value to the gang was increased and I thought I should be made a full-fledged member. I was doing more and more responsible work and I wondered why I had to depend on the odd handout that was thrown my way, no matter how munificent it happened to be. They were making advanced assumptions about me, counting on me in a really brazen fashion when you thought that I was not even being paid. I wanted a real wage and I thought if Mr. Schultz didn’t happen to murder me I might be in a position to ask for it. But when I walked down the bar, turned a corner, and passed through a short corridor into the windowless back room where Mr. Schultz and Mr. Berman and Irving and Lulu Rosenkrantz were sitting at a table by the wall, the only diners, I knew I would not bring up the matter, it was peculiar, it was not a question of fear, which I was recklessly prepared to deal with, but of a loss of faith, I don’t know why but I looked at them and I felt it was too late to ask for anything.

  The room they were in had pale green walls, with decorative mirrors of tarnished metal, and the overhead light made them all look sallow. They were eating steaks and there were bottles of red wine on the table that looked black in this light. “Pull up a chair, kid,�
�� Mr. Schultz said. “Are you hungry or anything?”

  I said I wasn’t. He looked thin, peaked, his mouth was primed to its most undulant pout, he was sorely oppressed, and I noticed the collar of his shirt was curled at the corners, and he needed a shave.

  He pushed his plate away with his dinner hardly eaten and he lit a cigarette, which was another thing because when he was feeling in control of things he smoked cigars. The others went on eating till it became apparent he had not the patience to wait for them to finish. One by one they put their knives and forks down. “Hey, Sam,” Mr. Schultz called, and a Chinese man came out of the kitchen and took the plates away and brought cups of coffee and a pint bottle of cream. Mr. Schultz turned and watched him go back to the kitchen. Then he said, “Kid, there is a son of a bitch named Thomas Dewey, you know that, don’t you?”

  “Yes sir.”

  “You seen his picture,” Mr. Schultz said, and he removed from his wallet a photo that had been torn out of a newspaper. He slapped it down on the table. The special prosecutor, Dewey, had nice black hair parted in the middle, a turned-up nose, and the mustache to which Mr. Hines had alluded, a little brush-style mustache. Mr. Dewey’s dark and intelligent eyes gazed at me with a resolute conviction of the way the world ought to be run.

  “All right?” Mr. Schultz said.

  I nodded.

  “Mr. Dewey lives on Fifth Avenue, one of those buildings that face the park?”

  I nodded.

  “I will give you the number. I want you to be there when he comes out in the morning and I want you to watch where he goes, and who is with him, and I want to know what time that is, and I want to know when he comes home from work and what time that is and who is with him then. He runs his show from the Woolworth Building on Broadway. You don’t have to worry about that. It is only the comings and the goings from home to office and back. The comings and the goings is what interests me. You think you can handle it?”

  I glanced around the table. Everyone, even Mr. Berman, was looking down. Their hands were folded on the table, all three of them like children at their school desks. None of them besides Mr. Schultz had said a word since I had walked in.

  “I guess.”

  “You guess! Is that the attitude I come to expect from you, I guess? You been talking to these guys?” he said pointing his thumb to the table.

  “Me? No.”

  “Because I was hoping someone in this organization still had guts. I could still rely on somebody.”

  “Aw boss,” Lulu Rosenkrantz said.

  “Shut the fuck up, Lulu. You’re ugly and you’re dumb. That is the truth of you, Lulu.”

  “Arthur, this is not right,” Mr. Berman said.

  “Fuck you, Otto. I am being punched out and you are telling me what is not right? Is it right my getting my ass handed to me?”

  “This was not the understanding.”

  “How do you know? How can you tell?”

  “The decision was to take it under advisement, they’re looking into it.”

  “I’m looking into it. I’m looking into it because I’m gonna do it.”

  “We have a compact with these people.”

  “Fuck compacts.”

  “You don’t remember he came hundreds of miles to stand for you in church?”

  “Oh I remember. He came up showing me this attitude like he and the pope together was doing me this big fucking favor. Then he sits and eats my food and drinks my wine and says nothing. Nothing! I remember all right.”

  “Maybe not nothing,” Mr. Berman said. “Maybe just the fact of his being there.”

  “You can’t hear him half the time, like he has no voice box. You gotta lean over and put your face in that garlic mouth and then it still doesn’t matter because you don’t know what anything means, he likes something he don’t like something, it’s all the same, you don’t know what he’s thinking, you don’t know where you stand with him. He’s taking what under advisement! How do you know? Can you tell me what anything means with the son of a bitch? Me, if I like something I tell you, I don’t like something I tell you that, I don’t like someone he fucking well knows it, that’s the way I am and that’s the way it should be, not this secrecy of feelings each and every moment that keeps you guessing what the truth is.”

  Mr. Berman lit a cigarette and cupped it in his palm with his thumb and forefinger. “These are matters of style, Arthur. You got to look past these things into the philosophy. The philosophy is that their organization is intact. It is available to us. We have the use of it, the protection of it. We combine with it and together we make a board and we sit on the board with our vote. That is the philosophy.”

  “Yeah, it’s a great philosophy all right, but have you noticed? I’m the one this dog-fucker Dewey is after. Who do you think sicced the Feds on me! It’s my leg he has in his teeth.”

  “You have to understand they have an interest in our problem. It is their problem too. They know he knocks down the Dutchman it’s their turn next. Please, Arthur, give them a little credit. They are businessmen. Maybe you’re right, maybe this is the way. He said they would study it to see how it could be done but in the meantime they want to think about it a little while. Because you know as well as they do even when it’s a lousy cop on the beat who is hit the city goes wild. And this is a major prosecutor in the newspapers every day. A hero of the people. You could win the battle and lose the war.”

  Mr. Berman kept talking, he wanted to calm Mr. Schultz down. As he went on to make each point of his argument, Lulu kept nodding and furrowing his brow as if he had been just about to say the same thing. Irving sat with his arms folded and his eyes lowered, whatever decision was made he would go along with it, as he always had, as he would to the day he died. “The modern businessman looks to combination for strength and for streamlining,” Mr. Berman said. “He joins a trade association. Because he is part of something bigger he achieves strength. Practices are agreed upon, prices, territories, the markets are controlled. He achieves streamlining. And lo and behold the numbers rise. Nobody is fighting anybody. And what he has a share of now is more profitable than the whole kit and caboodle of yore.”

  I could see Mr. Schultz gradually relaxing, he had been leaning forward and holding the edge of the table as if he was about to turn it over, but after a while he sagged back in his chair and then he put his hand on top of his head, as if it hurt, a peculiar gesture of irresolution that as much as anything compelled me to pipe up as I did: “Excuse me. This man you mentioned, the one who came to the church. Mrs. Preston told me something about him.”

  I will talk about this moment, what I thought I was doing, or what I think now I thought I was doing, because it is the moment the determination was made, I think about all their deaths and the manners of dying, but more about this moment of the determination, where it came from, not the heart or the head, but the mouth, the wordmaker, the linguist of grunts and moans and whimpers and shrieks.

  “She knew him. Well not that she knew him but that she’d met him. Well not that she entirely remembered meeting him,” I said, “or she would have mentioned it herself. But she drank,” I said looking a moment at Irving, “she herself told me that and when you drink you don’t remember that much, do you? But what she felt on the street in front of St. Barnabas,” I said to Mr. Schultz, “is that when you introduced them, she thought he looked at her as if he recognized her. She thought perhaps she must have met him before.”

  It was so still now in the Palace Chophouse and Tavern that I heard Mr. Schultz’s breathing, the magnitude of his respiration was as familiar to me as his voice, his thought, his character, it came in slowly and went out quickly in a kind of one two rhythm that left a silence between breaths that seemed like a consideration of whether to breathe at all.

  “Where did she meet him?” he said, very calm.

  “She thought it must have been with Bo.”

  He swiveled in his chair and faced Mr. Berman and sat back and stuck his thumb
s in his vest pockets and a big broad smile came over his face. “Otto, you hear this? You grope around and you grope around and all the time the child is there to lead you.”

  The next moment he had jumped out of his chair and smashed me on the side of the head, I think he must have used his forearm, I didn’t know what had happened, the room wheeled, I was suddenly confused, I thought there had been an explosion, that the room was falling in on me, I saw the ceiling lift and the floor jump toward me, I was flying backward over the chair, going down backward in the chair I’d been sitting in and when I hit the floor I lay there stunned, I wanted to hold on to the floor because I thought it was moving. Then I felt terrible pounding pains in the side, one after another, and as it turned out he was kicking me, I tried to roll away, I was crying out and I heard chairs scraping, everyone talking at once, and they pulled him off me, Irving and Lulu actually pulled him away from me, I realized that later when I began to hear in my mind what they had been saying, it’s the kid for christsake, oh Christ, leave off, boss, leave off, all that urgent straining talk in the pinioning of violence.