Billy Bathgate

by E. L. Doctorow

  Simultaneous with the shootings in the Palace Chophouse there had been attacks on known Schultz gang members in Manhattan and the Bronx, two were dead, including Mickey the driver, whose real name was Michael O’Hanley, three were seriously wounded, and the rest of the gang was presumed scattered. I had read about it in the morning papers while waiting for a train to Manhattan in the Newark station of the Pennsylvania Railroad. I was not mentioned in any of the accounts, the bartender’s statement had not included reference to a kid in a Shadows jacket, which was good, but I put the valise in a pay locker and rolled up my jacket and disposed of it in a trash basket on the theory that not everything the bartender told the police might have found its way into the newspapers, and then I went out and got a taxicab to take me to Newark Hospital, having persuaded myself that Mr. Schultz’s room was at that moment the safest place to be.

  But now that he was dead, I was on my own. I looked at his face, it was the deep red color of a plum, the mouth was slightly open and the eyes staring up as if he had something else to say. For a moment I was fooled into thinking he did. Then I realized my own mouth was open as if I had something to say too, so that my mind flashed with an entire normal conversation between us, the one it was too late for, his confession and my forgiveness, or perhaps the other way around, but in either case the conversation you only have with the dead.

  I limped away before the nurses came in and discovered him. I reclaimed my suitcase at the station and rode the train into Manhattan. It was a chilly night for a boy having no jacket. I took the crosstown trolley to the El, and I got back to the Bronx by about nine at night and did not go home directly but came around through the backyard of the Diamond Home for Children, and made my way into the basement where Arnold Garbage was listening to “The Make-Believe Ballroom” on the radio while looking through old Collier’s magazines. Without going into details I told him I had to stash something and he found me a small space in the back of his deepest darkest bin. I gave him a dollar. Then I went back the way I had come, circled around to Third Avenue, and walked home the front way.

  For weeks afterward I sat in the apartment, I couldn’t seem to move, it was not that I was sore and aching, I could take aspirins for that, I felt as if I weighed a thousand pounds, everything was an enormous effort, even sitting in a chair, even breathing. I found myself looking at that black phone, waiting for it to ring, I even picked it up from time to time to see if anyone was on the other end. I sat with my Automatic stuck inside my belt, it was just the way Mr. Schultz had carried his gun. I was fearful that when I went to bed I would have nightmares but I slept the sleep of the innocent. Meanwhile the autumn began flying through the Bronx, winds rattled the windows and the leaves from God knows what distant trees came wheeling down our street on their crisp edges. And he was still dead, they were all still dead.

  I kept thinking about Mr. Berman’s last words to me and whether they meant anything more than the numbers of a combination lock. They were words to keep going, I could say that much, he was preserving something, he was passing it on. So they were trustful words. But trust could mean either of two things, not knowing any better or knowing full well, knowing all the time and never having let on, with those little looks over the tops of his glasses, the teacher, every act a teaching.

  It was a strong powerful ghost they made in me, my dead gang. What happened to the skills of a man when he died, that he knew how to play the piano, for instance, or in Irving’s case to tie knots, to roll up pant legs, to walk easily over a heaving sea? What had happened to Irving’s great gift of precision, his just competence in everything, that I so admired? Where did that go, that abstraction?

  My mother didn’t seem to notice my state but she began to cook things for me that I liked, and she began to really clean the apartment. She snuffed the candles and threw out all her tumblers of lights, it was almost funny—now with someone really dead she was no longer in mourning. But I was only half aware of all of this. I was trying to figure out what to do with myself. I thought about going back to school and sitting in a classroom and learning whatever it was you learned in classrooms. Then I took it as a commentary on my sad state of mind that I would even consider such a thing.

  I would from time to time take my transcript out of my pocket and unfold the pages and read again what Mr. Schultz had said. It was a disheartening babble. There was no truth of history in it, no message for me.

  My mother found a store on Bathgate Avenue that sold sea-shells, and she brought home a brown paper bag full of these tiny ridged shells, some were no bigger than a pinky nail, and she began another one of her mad projects, which was to paste them to the phone using airplane cement she had found from an old balsa model I had never finished constructing. She dipped a toothpick in the bottle of dope and spread a glistening drop around the rim of the tiny shell and glued it to the phone. Eventually the entire phone, receiver and base, was covered in shells. It was rather beautiful, generally white and pink and tan, and rippled and gnarled, as if it was losing its form, as if the form of all things is lost in our attentions. She even attached shells to the cord, so that it seemed like a string of underwater lights. I found myself crying for my crazy mother when I thought of her as James J. Hines recalled her, a young and stately and thoughtful and brave young immigrant. I thought she must for a time have ennobled my father and that he had enlightened her in their undeniable love for each other before he had taken a powder. I had the money now never to have to send her away. I swore she would stay with me and I would take care of her for as long as she lived. But I couldn’t seem to get going on anything, not even to the point of persuading her to quit her job. I suppose it was not a very gladdening prospect I saw before us. I was made very lonely by her strange use of objects, candles or pictures or remnants of clothing, broken dolls, and shells. One evening she came home with a fish tank, it was very heavy and she had trouble carrying it up the stairs, but her face was flushed and her expression happy as she put it on the end table beside the couch and filled it with water and then gently submerged the phone. How I loved my mad mother, how beautiful she was, I felt so bad, I felt I had failed her, I thought she had not changed because I had not gotten the final justice for us. The money in the valise across the street in the basement wasn’t enough, I couldn’t believe all the efforts of my intuitive scheming were fulfilled by it, of course, though I didn’t know how much there was, even one month’s weakened earnings of Schultz enterprises was enough to live on for several years, good God if I just drew from it twice my mother’s salary from the laundry we would have everything we could possibly need, but I was terribly worried by it, we wouldn’t be able to take it to a bank, I would have to think about it how to protect it all the time and use it in such dribs and drabs that it wouldn’t draw attention to us and this seemed to me part of its skimpy insufficiency. I thought if it was going to change anything then it should have already, just the possession of it. But it hadn’t. Then I realized that even though he was dead I felt about the money that it was still Mr. Schultz’s. I had picked it up on instructions from Mr. Berman and now I found myself waiting for further instructions. I did not feel the calm I knew should come to me from the resolution of all my dreaming. I had nobody to talk to, nobody to know, in any event, to tell me I had done well. In fact only the dead men of my gang could ever appreciate as much as I had done.

  And then late one night I was buying the papers at the kiosk on Third Avenue under the El when a De Soto pulled up and the door opened, and I was surrounded by men, two had come out of the cigar store at the same time as two came out of the car, and they had the impassive expressions on their faces of the criminal trades. All one of them had to do was nod toward the open door of the car and I folded my papers under my arm and got right in. They drove me all the way downtown to the Lower East Side. I knew it was important not to panic, or to imagine what might be happening to me. I thought back to all my movements of the past year and couldn’t understand how he could know about
me, I hadn’t even let him get a good look at me in front of the church steps. I saw now that I had made one terrible mistake in not writing a letter to my mother with instructions to her only to open it if I didn’t come home and didn’t come home and died of not coming home to my mother.

  They pulled up in a narrow tenement street, though naturally they didn’t give me a clear look at it. I felt across my face the barred shadows of fire escapes in the dimly lit street. We climbed a stoop. We walked up five flights.

  All at once I was in a kitchen under a bare ceiling-bulb and facing, as he sat at a little table covered with oilcloth like a rich visiting relative, the man who had won the gang wars. Here is what I saw: two mildly inquisitive eyes of no great intelligence and one of them drooped under a heavy hanging eyelid. And he really did have bad skin, I saw that now, and the scar under his jaw was whiter than everywhere else. All told he had a kind of lizardy look. His best feature was a good head of slicked-back wavy black hair. He was wearing a well-tailored topcoat over his businessman’s ensemble. His hat was on the table. His nails were manicured. I smelled an eau de cologne. His was altogether a different style of malignity from Mr. Schultz’s. I felt as you feel when you walk a few blocks into another neighborhood though it is not that far from your own. He gestured with an open hand very politely so that I would sit down opposite him.

  “First of all, Billy,” he said in a very soft voice, as if all conversation was regrettable, “you know how bad we feel what happened to the Dutchman.”

  “Yes sir,” I said. I was appalled that he knew my name, I didn’t want to be in his registry of names.

  “I had the greatest respect. For all of them. I knew them how many years? A man like Irving, you don’t find his quality.”

  “No sir.”

  “We are trying to find out the cause of this thing. We are trying to get his boys back and put something together, you know, for the widows and children.”

  “Yes sir.”

  “But it is turning out to have difficulties.”

  The tiny room was crowded with the men standing behind me and behind him. Only now did I see, off to the side, Dixie Davis, the mouthpiece, slumped in a wooden chair with his knees pressed together and holding his hands locked between them to keep them from shaking. The underarms of Mr. Davis’s expensive pinstripe suit had big dark sweat stains and his face was covered by a film of sweat. I knew these as signs of the extreme unction. I acknowledged him with the briefest of glances because I understood now who had identified me, which meant all I was giving away was the truth they already knew and I thought it might suggest I wasn’t smart or devious enough to try to hide anything.

  Then I turned back to my interrogator. It seemed important to me to sit straight and look at him clear-eyed. He would learn as much from my attitude as from anything I said.

  “You were coming along nicely in their eyes is my understanding.”

  “Yes sir.”

  “We might have a job for a bright kid. Did you get out of it at least with something to show?” he said as casually as if my life wasn’t in the balance.

  “Well,” I said, “I was just catching on. I was put on salary the week before and he gave me a month’s advance because my mother’s been sick. Two hundred dollars. I don’t have it with me, but I can get it from the savings bank first thing in the morning.”

  He smiled, the corners of his mouth turned up for an instant, and he raised his hand. “We don’t want your wages, kid. I’m talking about business affairs. They managed their business not always in a business way. I was asking if you could help us figure out about assets.”

  “Gee whiz,” I said, scratching my head, “that is more in Mr. Davis’s department. All I did was run out for coffee or if someone needed a pack of cigarettes. They never let me in meetings or where anything was going on.”

  He sat there nodding. I could feel Dixie Davis’s eyes on me, I could feel the intensity of his stare.

  “You never saw any money?”

  I thought a moment. “Yes, once, on a Hundred Forty-ninth Street,” I said. “I saw them counting the day’s collection while I was sweeping. I was impressed.”

  “You were impressed?”

  “Yes. It was something to dream about.”

  “Have you dreamed?”

  “Every night,” I said looking him in the drooped eye. “Mr. Berman told me the business is changing. That they will need smart quiet people with good manners who have been to school. I am going back into school and then I’m going to go to City College. And then we’ll see.”

  He nodded, and grew very still and gazed into my eyes for a moment as he made up his mind. “School is a good idea,” he said. “We may look in on you from time to time, see how you’re doing.” He lifted his hand, palm up, and I rose with it. Dixie Davis had put his hand over his face.

  “Thank you, sir,” I said to the man who had ordered the killings of Mr. Schultz, Mr. Berman, Irving, and Lulu. “It is an honor to meet you.”

  I was returned safely to Third Avenue, driven right back and dropped off in front of the cigar store. Only then did I become terrified. I sat down on the curb. My hands were black where they had moistly picked up the newsprint of the papers I had been holding. I read fragments of headlines in my palms, pieces of words. I had no idea what might be going to happen to me. Either I was free or my days were numbered. I just didn’t know. I jumped up and began to walk the streets. I found myself shaking, but not with fear, with anger at myself for my fear. I thought: Let them kill me. I waited for the sound of the engine of the specific killing car screeching around the corner with the windows rolling down. And then I tried to figure out what they would think I had done to make them kill me. They wouldn’t kill me, they would watch me. That’s what I would do if I didn’t know where the money was.

  The fact was I had learned something very interesting: The newspapers had estimated Mr. Schultz’s fortune as anywhere between six and nine million dollars. Very little of it had been put in banks. The Combination hadn’t found it, they were looking for it, they had the business but they wanted the money too, they wanted the business from its beginnings.

  And it was odd but from one moment to the next I was exhilarated by the attentions of another great man, dangerous as they were, I thought it was indeed possible my days were numbered but my competitive spirit was reawakened, I realized I had been sharing the defeat of the gang in a morbid way, I had been dwelling on their deaths. But nothing was over, it was all still going on, the money was deathless, the money was eternal and the love of it was infinite. I waited a few days and then went down to Arnold Garbage’s basement while he was out foraging, and I made a private space for myself in case anyone came in, and in the ashen air, with the footfalls of children over my head, I counted the cash in the alligator suitcase. I was a long time counting, it was far more than I had thought, I will mention the precise amount, it took me several hours to count it, it was three hundred and sixty-two thousand and one hundred and twelve dollars I had taken for my portion and stashed there under carriage parts and old newspapers and broken toys and bed slats and stovepipes, and paper bags of shoes, and clothing in bales, and pots and pans and panes of glass and machine gears and acetylene torches and screwdrivers without handles and hammers and saws without teeth and shoeboxes of bubble-gum cards, and bottles and jars and baby bottles and cigar boxes of rubber nipples and typewriters and parts of saxophones and the bells of trumpets and the torn skins of drums and bent kazoos and broken ocarinas, and baseball bats and ships in cracked bottles and bathing caps and Boy Scout hats and badges and campaign buttons and piggy banks and bent tricycles and molding stamp collections and tiny flags on toothpicks from all the nations of the world.

  And then of course I went back to my handwritten statements of what he had said and studied them and found there my vision of living in flowering reward, I had been too impatient, a great charmed fate unfolds, unfolds, unfurls in waves, and floops out to the sun like the planet in flo
wer, I heard Mr. Schultz’s voice say a capable boy, a capable boy and oh I was! because I found stashes of money in his sentences, the money of his delirious passion locked away there like an insane man’s riddle, I studied that transcript in my own handwriting and I learned from it what he had told me, he told me there would be money for Mrs. Schultz and his children somewhere they would know about, but the meaning of his life and his genius, why he would salt it about as his years went on so that you could find it in the periods of his criminal career as in his neighborhoods. And to test this proposition I went one night with Arnold Garbage after I had sat for weeks in schoolrooms to prove myself not worth watching, and we broke open a lock in the old abandoned beer drop on Park Avenue where I used to stand around and juggle, and in the shudder of a passing train we went down into a darkness black as if the fires had gone out in hell, and with rats brushing against our ankles and in the dankness of the history of the old beer runs, found there in the shit and refuse of Arnold’s dreams, by his faint flashlight, an unbunged barrel stuffed to the coops with the currency of the United States, and Arnold lugged it and rolled it home on a pushcart over the cobblestones while I went ahead of him and stood in the shadows of doorways, and from that midnight hour we became partners in a corporate enterprise that goes on to this very day.

  But I don’t mean to suggest I was satisfied that was all there was, the more he was beset the more he would gather it to himself, didn’t I know him? I studied that transcript of his ghost’s voice and I learned from it what he had told me, he had told me that as the world closed in he would pull his fortune to him, that the worse things got the more he would gather himself unto himself, he would call it in, like stocks like bonds like chips from the gambling table, keep more and more of it near him from day to day as he made the ever more perilous journey. And at the end he would stash it where no one ever dreamed he had been and if he never got back to it it would die with him if no one was smart enough to find it.