On the Waterfront

by Budd Schulberg

Just the same, he told Charley, as he went to work on his second pig-knuckle, have somebody case the meeting. Get the names. Maybe frighten ’em a little as they come out. But leave the church alone. “I don’t want to get in bad with my mother.”

  It had been left to Charley to decide how to once-over the church meeting. On the way down to the docks he had settled for Terry. It would do the kid good, he figured. Rein him in a little closer to the organization. Put some cabbage in his pocket. Give him a sense of responsibility. Charley had made it because he was an organization man, loyal as well as cute. But Terry was a loner without ambition, believing in nothing and nobody. He had some abilities, like being handy with his fists. He could dance, and make a good appearance when he tried. The boys liked him around because of his brief fame in the ring. But he never seemed to care about cashing in on any of his talents. Even when it had seemed for a short time as if he might have a chance of breaking into the big time, he had acted as if none of that mattered. Charley didn’t know why. He just knew that Terry was a moody, go-it-alone, don’t-give-a-damn kid who could watch Charley take a grand a week off the docks without ever thinking he could or should have some of the same.

  So Charley, wanting to help his kid brother, had begun to throw a few things his way. The Doyle job the night before. Charley never liked it as rough as that, but if Joey had to go, he figured Terry might as well get what benefit there might be in it. Johnny liked the kid from the boxing days, but he wasn’t giving anything away for nothing. He had a principle about paying off only for services rendered. It was the only way, Johnny knew, to run an organization.

  So the next assignment for Terry, Charley saw, was the church job. Double-o it for Johnny. Actually, Terry was a good choice. Despite the blood relationship, he was known to be outside the mob. And so independent-peculiar that no one would be too surprised what he did. There were even those who thought he was just a touch punchy. It was imperceptible, but maybe it was there at that. A fellow like that could wander into a church and pretend he didn’t know exactly what he was doing. And furthermore, Charley felt he could trust Terry. Even if the kid believed in nothing, not even money, and expressed enthusiasm for nothing except his pigeons and his poon, he had a son-father respect that amounted to awe for Charley. When their old man had staggered out on them and the Children’s Aid had taken them to some strange barrack-like shelter there had been only Charley to say, “Don’t worry, kid. We’ll handle it.”

  The atmosphere of the pier loft was leisurely compared to the activity in the hold and on the deck. The closed-in upper floor was piled high with coffee bags, neatly stacked, and cases of olive oil, rolls of hemp, cylinders of crude oil set on pallets to be efficiently moved by the stubby, versatile hi-low trucks. Drivers, checkers, loft handlers worked quietly, expertly; most of them had been here a long time. These were the gravy jobs and every one on this top floor was a solid Friendly man. Johnny was Number One in their book, a square shooter, a guy who never let you down unless you crossed him. “Johnny Friendly’s done a lot of good around here,” you’d hear them say in the loft.

  Here pilferage was thought of not as a crime but as a way of life. The loft was a gathering point for cargo from which ten-thousand-dollar hauls could be made simply by falsifying a single invoice. But a lot of expert handling went on here too. Even the stacking of coffee bags called for skill. A trained man could heist a one-hundred-and-sixty-five-pound bag bulging with coffee beans as if it were a child’s colored beanbag.

  Charley Malloy had hopped a hi-low truck cruising down the aisles between the hillocks of cargo. He stepped off when he came to the neatly stacked six-foot mound of coffee bags on which Terry was reclining, absorbed in the latest issue of Confidential. Charley raised himself on the outer edge of the bags, enabling him to look over Terry’s shoulder.

  “Working hard?” he asked.

  Terry shrugged and answered without looking around. “It’s a living.” He wriggled his backside even more luxuriously into the space between the coffee bags, and turned the page to admire another beguiling torso. “Wooo-oof,” he barked.

  “You don’t mind working once in a while?” Charley persisted.

  “I finished the work. I counted all them bags.”

  “Excellent,” Charley said. “But we’ve got an extra little detail for you. That is, if you don’t mind being disturbed or anything.”

  Charley climbed up another rung of bags until he was almost on a level with Terry. His voice lowered to its familiar tone, habitually conspiratorial. “Listen, this priest who took a hinge at the shape this morning, he and this Doyle girl are getting up a meeting over at the church tonight. St. Tim’s. We want a run-down on it. You know, the names and numbers of all the players.”

  Terry was studying a spectacular Latin type in a lascivious pose. “Chiquita,” he read the caption longingly.

  “Yeah,” said Charley. “That means small. There’s nothing small about that tomato.” He looked more closely over Terry’s shoulder. Then he remembered his mission. “Put that damn thing down a minute. Only one thing on your mind. Now listen to me. We need someone to cover this church meeting. You’re nominated.”

  Terry lowered the magazine reluctantly and raised himself on one elbow. This was the trouble with letting someone do you favors. You had to do favors back.

  “Why me, Charley? I don’t wanna go down in no church. I’d feel funny goin’ in there.”

  “You’ve got a nice little job here,” Charley said. “I want Johnny to know you appreciate it. Now all you’ve got to do is plant your can in the back pew and keep your ears open. What’s so hard?”

  Terry frowned. How could he explain? To someone who had drive and ambition and wanted a million bucks in a deposit box it couldn’t be explained.

  “It’s stoolin’, Charley. Don’t you see? I’d just be stoolin’ for you.”

  Charley started to light a cigarette in exasperation.

  “No smoking,” Terry said, thumbing toward the sign.

  “Yeah, I know,” Charley said, and continued to draw until he was sure he had a good light. Rules were made for the other guys, for suckers. Smart guys made their own as they went along. “Let me explain you something about stooling,” Charley said. “Stooling is when you rat on your friends, the guys you’re with.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” Terry grunted his impatience.

  Charley decided to drop the theorizing. “When Johnny needs a favor, don’t try to figure it out, just do it.”

  Terry had picked up his magazine, and now he flipped a page and pretended not to listen.

  “What right has this priest got poking his nose in our business?” Charley said, thinking this might be the pitch. It had always been a persuasive argument on the waterfront. He nudged Terry’s elbow gently. “Now go on—join the congregation.”

  Terry’s sigh was exaggerated. “Okay, okay. Only this is the last thing I do for ya, Charley. I don’t want nuthin’ from Johnny except enough work t’ keep me in coffee and doughnut money, an’ I figure he owes me that much even if I don’t run all these goddamn errands for ’im. He already made enough outa me to …”

  “What’s so hard?” Charley said again. “You go in a church and you sit down. It’s open to the public, free of charge. We don’t want trouble. We just want to know what they’re saying about us. That’s only reasonable.”

  “Charley,” Terry said, almost tenderly, “you are the most reasonable son of a bitch I know. Now go away and leave me to my work.” He turned another page and gave himself up to an undraped, drooping-eyed blonde who beckoned.

  Charley rode another hi-low back to the spiral staircase leading to the main floor of the pier. Terry was a broody, stubborn, hard-to-figure kid, he was thinking, but when the temperamental smoke blew away he usually did what Charley wanted.

  Twelve

  WHEN HE STRODE INTO the overflow chapel in the church basement and found only a scattered handful of longshoremen on hand for the meeting, Father Barry felt a twinge of
disappointment. There weren’t more than a dozen, and with many sitting alone and leaving seats gaping between them as if not wanting the others to know they were there, the group looked even smaller. Father Barry recognized Runty, who made his presence felt in a chesty, defiant, yet sceptical way; and Moose and Jimmy and Luke. Sitting alone behind them was Katie, cool and reserved on the outside, but watching everything with a smoldering intensity that could be felt in the room, embarrassingly, insistently.

  Father Barry had scrapped and scrambled all day not only to prepare himself for this meeting, but to inveigle permission to hold it at all. At first the Pastor, Father Donoghue, had been annoyed with his curate for leaping in with an invitation to longshoremen without first consulting him.

  But it was an emergency, Father Barry had insisted, the sort of thing a waterfront church should be ready to jump into with both feet. Father Donoghue hadn’t been so sure. President Willie Givens was known to be a good friend of Monsignor O’Hare. Might this meeting not offend Givens, and therefore the Monsignor? And if the Monsignor went to the Bishop? The Pastor stood in pretty well with the Bishop, Father Barry reminded him. Yes, Father Donoghue said, and I’d like to remain so. We have a serious concern with these men’s souls as individuals, he pointed out. But is it our function to call them together as a social body? Aren’t we overstepping our boundaries?

  Father Donoghue asked his questions mildly enough. He was a pious, kindly man, sympathetic to the poor who made up so much of his parish, although not unmindful of the practicalities.

  In answer, Father Barry quoted a statement of Pope Pius about the error of thinking the authority of the church is limited to religious matters. “Social problems are of concern to the conscience and salvation of man,” Father Barry had roughly translated the Holy Father. “It looks to me as if one of our parishioners was murdered for trying to establish a more human and moral social order on the docks. Does his own parish church say ‘it’s none of our business’? Isn’t that exactly what the Pope is talking about, brought right down here to the docks of Bohegan?”

  Father Donoghue sucked on his lips, said he would take the matter under, consideration and let his eager, hot-tempered curate know by mid-afternoon. At three-thirty, with a daring that surprised even himself, he gave Father Barry a green light without first consulting the Bishop. His only qualification was that Father Barry make it clear that the dockworkers were simply using the church’s facilities, but that St. Tim’s would not be responsible for any decisions or actions issuing from the meeting.

  “Any way you say,” Father Barry grabbed it. The main thing was, the meeting would not be canceled, as he had feared when he first looked at Fatheh Donoghue’s undecided face. From that point on, Father Barry figured, he could play it by ear. Eventually he might have to angle some way he could get a favorable nod from the Bishop.

  Once the meeting was set, Father Barry called Frank Doyle, the old cop, to drop in for a little chat. Doyle was on the fence the first half hour. He wanted that pension and he was afraid he had already unburdened himself too freely to Katie. It wasn’t until Father Barry promised him professional secrecy that Frank Doyle let go. After he got talking he found it a relief. Doyle told the priest it was on ice from the start that Donnelly’s detectives would close the books on the Doyle case without a coroner’s verdict of murder. Donnelly had no other choice. The whole Bohegan administration was so deeply involved with the waterfront rackets that you could say the Mayor, the Police Commissioner and the union dock bosses were partners.

  Frank Doyle talked to Father Barry for over an hour. The priest took notes but filed it as the story of Mike X. Doyle told him of some earlier Bohegan murders, and of police blackout of clues and evidence. He agreed that pressing the case of his nephew was an ideal opening wedge for a better deal on the docks. But he had seen too much to believe that the priest, for all his good intentions, could get anywhere. The line-up against him, from the mob, through the stevedore companies, to City Hall had headed off tougher competition. Just the same, it took a load off his mind and his conscience to open up to the priest, almost like confession.

  Father Barry thanked the aging Sergeant for leading him deeper into the jungle of the Bohegan waterfront.

  Frank Doyle shrugged. A lot of people knew the story. But that’s as far as it went. “As to getting much help from longshoremen themselves, I have me doubts. You take your dock worker, Father, he’s a funny fellow. He’s as tough as they come personally, but he seems to accept things as he finds them on the waterfront. Like me own brother. He’s suspicious of any outsider and especially if they come in and try to help him. You better remember that, if you don’t want your feelings hurt. Or your heart broken. Your dock worker, he knows how intrenched the union bosses are, and how they got the shippers and the police behind ’em. So he figures why jeopardize what little I got to point out some abuses that aren’t going to be changed anyway. He knows there are too many ready to take his job if he bucks the dictatorship in the union. Or testifies. That’s why this waterfront investigation is having such tough sledding. Sure it’s lovely to swear on a Bible and get up and tell the truth, but who’s going to look out for you once you step down? You’ve put your head in a noose. That’s how the boys on the docks look at this new investigation. And you can hardly blame them. Why, there was a waterfront investigation in New York a couple of years ago, where it turned out in six Brooklyn locals every office was held by a member of the Genotta family, stooges for Benasio, and that’s a fact. The investigation winds up with a demand for a new honest election. So what happens? You guessed it, Father. All the Genottas won the same offices all over again. See what I mean, Father?”

  Sergeant Doyle laughed, in a special way the Irish have of laughing at the things that hurt them most.

  By the end of the day, after Father Barry had been gathering facts from as many sources as possible, he was increasingly interested in the forthcoming investigation. A rank-and-file trade-union revolt seemed impossible until public opinion was aroused and the evils spotlighted in the press in a way that would make it difficult for Johnny Friendly and his respectable supporters to continue running the show with medieval contempt for opposition. As the picture sharpened into focus through the busy afternoon, Father Barry began to plot the course of his usefulness.

  Entering the basement chapel, Father Barry felt as keyed up as a boxer going down the aisle to his first main event. Father Vincent, a portly man of thirty-five, followed him in. Harry Vincent admired Father Barry, but he thought he was inviting ruin to a promising career by offending the Catholic lay powers in Bohegan and around the harbor.

  “Pete, you’ve got a lot on the ball,” Father Vincent said, trying to be helpful when he heard about the meeting. “Why throw your chances away on a wild-goose chase? Social justice is fine, but if I were you I’d wait until I had a little more rank. Pete, you’re looking for trouble.”

  Pete Barry’s answer had been quick and impatient. “That’s right. And it’s about time.”

  Harry Vincent was a good priest and a good fellow, Father Barry thought, but he had carried into the priesthood some of his father’s conception of material success-if-you-play-your-cards-right. Vincent senior had been a nominal Catholic who had been rather shocked at his son’s decision to attach himself to the hierarchy of Rome rather than to that of H. J. Vincent & Sons, chain grocery-store merchants. Harry, Jr., was determined to prove to his father the Tightness of his choice by eventually becoming a bishop. That was something H. J., Sr. could understand. Young Vincent had recognized that his colleague Pete Barry had the brains and the drive to wind up at the top, perhaps at the Chancellery—familiarly known to the younger priests as “the powerhouse”—and it disturbed him to see his associate throw away his chance on an unprecedented longshoremen’s meeting in the church. So it was with quizzical aloofness that he followed Father Barry into the sparsely attended meeting.

  When Father Barry faced these men in their windbreakers and coarse
wool shirts, some of them with their faces still grimy from moving cargo, he realized there was no sense of welcome, of gratitude for his effort, or even trust. Instead, he felt them looking at him through a silent, invisible wall of suspicion. He stood in front of the simple altar and looked out into the long, bare basement room which had only the most basic adornments of a place of worship. The walls were of plaster, and the lighting was dim, as though the meeting did not want to call undue attention to itself.

  He began in his rapid-fire, slightly nasal, East Bohegan way: “Well, uh, I thought there’d be more of you here, but we, uh, the Romans found out what a handful could do—if it’s the right handful.”

  He paused for some response, for some sign that he was on the target, but the men just looked up at him and waited. Go on, Father, play your hand, the poker faces seemed to be saying. Father Barry looked across them to Katie, in one of the rear pews. Even she seemed to be waiting, as if no longer sure what she had gotten him into.

  So he plunged: “Uh, I’m just a potato eater, but isn’t it simple as one-two-three? One—the working conditions are bad. You got 40,000 men competing for less than 20,000 jobs. You’ve got a union that works against you instead of for you. Two—conditions are bad because the union is run by a mob—am I right?—and the mob does the hiring. Two-thirds of your hiring bosses have got criminal records. And three—the only way you can break the mob is to stop letting them get away with murder. When they knock off one of you they keep the rest of you in line. You’ve been letting them get away with murder.”

  He looked at each one of them and saw in their faces only sullen resentment. They had come for help and his neck was way out to help them, but the waterfront silence was fathomless. Even a product of Bohegan who seemed to talk their language began to feel lost in the depths of their reticence.

  “Now listen, boys,” the priest sounded angry, “if one of you will just answer one question we’d have a start. And, uh, that question is: Who killed Joey Doyle?”