Billy Bathgate

Praise for
Billy Bathgate

“Wonderful, a rarity: the grand entertainment that is art.”

—The Washington Post Book World

“Hugely entertaining … It’s been a long time since we had a novel as fine as this.”

—
Newsweek

“Simply marvelous. His best novel.”

—
Chicago Sun-Times

“Enthralling.”

—
Los Angeles Times

“Spellbinding.”

—Boston Herald

“Brilliant.”

—
The Seattle Times

“A masterwork.”

—
The Nation

“His best in years.”

—Vanity Fair

“Mesmerizing reading that soars from the shocking first scene of a gangland execution through episodes of horror, hilarity, and sudden, deepening insights. A stunning, lyrical, masterful novel.”

—Publishers Weekly

“Billy’s vital, intimate engagement with the world around him gives history the lifeblood of emotion. It’s a choreography only Doctorow could have achieved.”

—
The Boston Globe

“A living novel. Blood pumps through it.”

—New York
magazine

“Most urgently and tightly structured … a climax at the center of the novel will stay in the reader’s mind a long, long time.
Billy Bathgate
may be Doctorow’s Book of Kings, a genealogy of how power is acquired, exercised, and transmitted in this country.”

—Chicago Tribune Book World

“A wonderful, entertaining book.”

—
Hartford Courant

“A serious entertainment, a novel with admirable narrative energy, prose that is as lucid as it is pleasurable to read.”

—USA Today

“Billy’s account glitters with an unsurpassed clarity that will linger as a remarkable combination of fact and fiction.”

—Richmond Times-Dispatch

“Compelling … remarkable … brilliant.”

—The Dallas Morning News

“A magnificent adventure story.”

—
Playboy

“Doctorow writes like a runner hitting his stride…. Every character he has created comes alive.”

—Milwaukee
Journal

“The next best thing to finding a suitcase full of unmarked bills. You won’t want to give it up.”

—
Glamour

“Formed by the magical skill of Doctorow’s past-painting hands, the book simply pulls and pulls and pulls.”

—
Kirkus Reviews

Also by E. L. Doctorow

Welcome to Hard Times

Big as Life

The Book of Daniel

Ragtime

Drinks Before Dinner
(play)

Loon Lake

Lives of the Poets

World’s Fair

Jack London, Hemingway, and the Constitution
(essays)

The Waterworks

City of God

Reporting the Universe
(lectures)

Sweet Land Stories

The March

Creationists: Selected Essays, 1993–2006

Homer & Langley

Contents

Other Books by This Author

Dedication

Part One

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Part Two

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Part Three

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Part Four

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

About the Author

Copyright

To Jason Epstein

PART

ONE

ONE

H
e had to have planned it because when we drove onto the dock the boat was there and the engine was running and you could see the water churning up phosphorescence in the river, which was the only light there was because there was no moon, nor no electric light either in the shack where the dockmaster should have been sitting, nor on the boat itself, and certainly not from the car, yet everyone knew where everything was, and when the big Packard came down the ramp Mickey the driver braked it so that the wheels hardly rattled the boards, and when he pulled up alongside the gangway the doors were already open and they hustled Bo and the girl upside before they even made a shadow in all that darkness. And there was no resistance, I saw a movement of black bulk, that was all, and all I heard was maybe the sound someone makes who is frightened and has a hand not his own over his mouth, the doors slammed and the car was humming and gone and the boat was already opening up water between itself and the slip before a thin minute had passed. Nobody said not to so I jumped aboard and stood at the rail, frightened as you might expect, but a capable boy, he had said that himself, a capable boy capable of learning, and I see now capable of adoring worshiping that rudeness of power of which he was a greater student than anybody, oh and that menace
of him where it might all be over for anyone in his sight from one instant to the next, that was what it all turned on, it was why I was there, it was why I was thrilled to be judged so by him as a capable boy, the danger he was really a maniac.

Besides, I had that self-assurance of the very young, which was in this case the simple presumption I could get away when I would, anytime I wanted, I could outrun him, outrun his rage or the range of his understanding and the reach of his domain, because I could climb fences and hustle down alleys and jump fire escapes and dance along the roof parapets of all the tenements of the world if it came to that. I was capable, I knew it before he did, although he gave me more than confirmation when he said it, he made me his. But anyway I wasn’t thinking of any of this at the time, it was just something I had in me I could use if I had to, not even an idea but an instinct waiting in my brain in case I ever needed it, or else why would I have leapt lightly over the rail as the phosphorescent water widened under me, to stand and watch from the deck as the land withdrew and a wind from the black night of water blew across my eyes and the island of lights rose up before me as if it were a giant ocean liner sailing past and leaving me stranded with the big murdering gangsters of my life and times?

My instructions were simple, when I was not doing something I was specifically told to do, to pay attention, to miss nothing, and though he wouldn’t have put it in so many words, to become the person who would always be watching and always be listening no matter what state I was in, love or danger or humiliation or deathly misery—to lose nothing of any fraction of a moment even if it happened to be my last.

So I knew this had to have been planned, though smeared with his characteristic rage that made you think it was just something that he had thought of the moment before he did it as for instance the time he throttled and then for good measure stove in the skull of the fire safety inspector a moment after smiling at him in appreciation for his entrepreneurial flair. I had never seen anything like that, and I suppose there are ways more deft, but however you do it, it is a difficult thing to do: his technique
was to have none, he sort of jumped forward screaming with his arms raised and brought his whole weight of assault on the poor fuck, and carried him down in a kind of smothering tackle, landing on top of him with a crash that probably broke his back, who knows? and then with his knees pinning down the outstretched arms, simply grabbing the throat and pressing the balls of his thumbs down on the windpipe, and when the tongue came out and eyes rolled up walloping the head two three times on the floor like it was a coconut he wanted to crack open.

And they were all in dinner clothes too, I had to remember that, black tie and black coat with the persian lamb collar, white silk scarf and his pearl gray homburg blocked down the center of the crown just like the president’s, in Mr. Schultz’s case. Bo’s hat and coat were still in the hatcheck in his case. There had been an anniversary dinner at the Embassy Club, five years of their association in the beer business, so it was all planned, even the menu, but the only thing was Bo had misunderstood the sentiment of the occasion and brought along his latest pretty girl, and I had felt, without even knowing what was going on when the two of them were hustled into the big Packard, that she was not part of the plan. Now she was here on the tugboat and it was entirely dark from the outside, they had curtains over the portholes and I couldn’t see what was going on but I could hear the sound of Mr. Schultz’s voice and although I couldn’t make out the words I could tell he was not happy, and I supposed they would rather not have her witness what was going to happen to a man she might possibly have come to be fond of, and then I heard or felt the sounds of steps on a steel ladder, and I turned my back to the cabin and leaned over the railing just in time to see a lighted pucker of green angry water and then a curtain must have been drawn across a porthole because the water disappeared. A few moments later I heard one returning set of footsteps.