Billy Bathgate (10 page)

O
f course as happy as I was to be catching on with them, things were not going well at that time for the Dutch Schultz gang and they wouldn’t until Dixie Davis, that was the name of the lawyer Mr. Schultz shouted at all the time, was able to work out a plan for Mr. Schultz’s surrender to the U.S. District Attorney’s Office. If you did not know the arcane nature of these matters it would not make sense that Mr. Schultz was hoping to turn himself in for arraignment but he paced up and down dreaming of nothing but that, once actually trying to tear the hair from his head in a fury of frustration that he couldn’t yet do that, for the truth of the matter was until he was booked and out on bail he wasn’t free to attend to business. But he couldn’t turn himself in until he had some legal guarantees that would improve his chances in a trial, as for instance that it should be held out of New York City, where, because of certain unfortunate publicity having to do with his activities, the public from which any jury would be composed tended not to see him in a good light. And that was at the core of the endless negotiations between his lawyer and the D.A.’s office, he wanted some guarantees before he turned himself in and until he had them he could not be arrested and therefore free.

He told me the crime business like any other needs the constant
attention of the owner to keep it going, because nobody cares about the business like the owner and it’s his burden to keep the profits flowing, to keep everyone on their toes, and most of all to keep the business growing, because as he explained it to me an enterprise can’t maintain itself today just by repeating what it did yesterday, if it doesn’t grow it dries up, it is like something living, when it stops growing it starts dying, to say nothing of the special nature of his particular enterprise, a very complex enterprise not only of supply and demand but of subtle executive details and diplomatic skills, the payoffs alone deserved a special department of controllers, the people you needed to rely on were vampires, they needed their blood money, and if you weren’t there to give it to them they folded up on you, went numb, faded into the mist, you had to be a public presence in criminal enterprise or it would get away from you, and whatever you built up could be taken away from you, in fact the better you were, the more successful you were, the surer the fuckers would try to take it away from you, and by that he didn’t only mean the law he meant the competition, this was a highly competitive field that did not attract gentlemen, and if they found a weakness in the armor, they went after it, and even if you had one pissant sentry sleeping on his post say, or some gonfalong foot soldier who could be lured off guard duty, not to speak of your own absence from the command post not even to speak of that, why then you were finished because they drove their tanks in through that opening whatever it was and that was the end of you, they had no fear of you, and without their fear of you, you were a dead man in no-man’s-land, and there would not be enough recognizably left of you to put in a coffin.

I took these concerns for my own, as how could I not, sitting on the screened back porch of the two-story red brick house on City Island with the great man confiding his thoughts his worries to orphan Billy, the good-luck kid, the amazed beneficiary of this sudden and unpredictable intimacy. He had gone from not recognizing me to remembering the first moment he saw me across the street capably juggling, how could I not take on the dark troubles of his heart and feel them inside myself as a matter
that would not go away, the nagging fear of loss, the dry inner sob of unjust circumstance, and the heroic satisfaction of enduring, of seeing things through? So this was the secret place where he stayed when he was not temporarily present in his protected precincts, this red brick private house just like the flat-roofed private houses you saw all over the borough except way out here it was the only one on a short street of bungalows, on this island that was still in the Bronx, and now I was one of the few people who knew, Irving knew of course because it was his mother’s house, and his elderly mother knew because she cooked and kept things going normally—a woman who walked around with her hands always wet—on this quiet side street with a few hardy ailanthus trees like the ones planted in all the city parks, and Mr. Berman knew it because it was he who one day allowed me to come for the ride that he took each afternoon to bring Mr. Schultz the receipts and go over the figures. And as I sat out in the fenced backyard while they were doing this I reasoned that all the neighbors on the street and perhaps for a few blocks around must know it too because how can you not know when a famous visitor is on your street, and a dark car with two men in it sits outside at the curb night and day, this was a small place, a waterfront town really, if of a New York style, but having not really that much in common with the endless paved hills and valleys of Bronx tenements and stores and elevated trains and trolleys and peddlers’ carts, it was an island that got sun, and the people on it must feel special, apart from everything, as I did now, relishing my connection with the good life of space, of this view of the Sound, which looked to me like an ocean, a deep horizon of gray sea sliding and shifting about in a leisurely way, the way slate and stone would shift if not fixed to the land, with the stateliness of a monumental body too big to have enemies. Right next door on the other side of the chain-link fence was a boatyard, with sailboats and motorboats of all kinds propped up on blocks or tilting over in the sand, and there were a few sailboats moored in the water off the boatyard wharves. But the boat I had my eye on was tied up at the wharf looking sleek and ready to go, a varnished mahogany speedboat with grooved tan
leather seats built in and bright brass trim on the windshield and a steering wheel like a car’s and a little American flag flying from the stern. And I saw a gap in the chain-link fence between the house and the boatyard just at the waterline, and then a path to the wharf where thatboat waited, and Iknew thishadto be thecraft of Mr. Schultz’s getaway, if it ever came to that. How I admired the life of taking pains, of living in defiance of a government that did not like you and did not want you and wanted to destroy you so that you had to build out protections for yourself with money and men, deploying armament, buying alliances, patrolling borders, as in a state of secession, by your will and wit and warrior spirit living smack in the eye of the monster, his very eye.

But beyond that, contriving a life from its property of danger, putting it together in the constant contemplation of death, that was what thrilled me, that was why the people on this island street would never rat, his presence honored them and allowed them to live in their consciousness of him as in a kind of light of life and death, with the moments of superior awareness or illumination the best of them might get in church or in the first moments of romantic love.

“Christ, I had to earn everything I got, nobody gave me a thing, I came out of nowhere and everything I done I done by myself,” Mr. Schultz said. He sat in reflection upon this truth and pulled on his cigar. “Sure I made mistakes, that’s the way you learn, the only time I ever served was when I was seventeen, I got sent to Blackwell’s Island for heisting, I didn’t have a lawyer and they gave me an indeterminate, meaning when I got out depended on how I acted, and that was fair enough. I tell you if I had some of these hotshot lawyers I have now probably I’d have gotten life. Hey Otto?” he said laughing, but Mr. Berman had fallen asleep in his chair with his panama over his face, I suppose he had heard Mr. Schultz complain once or twice before about how hard his life was.

“Anyways I was damned if I’d kiss ass just to be let out of there, I raised hell instead, and I was such a tough son of a bitch they couldn’t take me and sent me upstate to reform school, a
work farm with cows and all that shit. You ever been in reform school?”

“No sir.”

“Well it wasn’t no picnic. I wasn’t a big guy, I was about your size, a skinny little punk, and there was a lot of bad boys there. I knew you gotta make your reputation early, where it matters, where the word can get around. So I was mean enough for ten. I didn’t take any shit. I looked for fights. I took on the biggest guys I could find. God help the fucker who messed with me, as one or two did to their regret. I even escaped from the goddamn place, it wasn’t hard, I went over the wire, and I was out in the bushes a day and a night before they caught me, and they added a couple of months for that, and I got poison ivy all the hell over me for good measure, and I was walking around all that time in calamine lotion like a mad zombie. When I finally got out they were glad to see me go, let me tell you. You in a gang?”

“No sir.”

“Well how you expect to get anywhere, how you expect to learn anything? I hire from gangs. That’s the training ground. You ever hear of the Frog Hollow gang?”

“No sir.”

“Jesus. That was the most famous of all the old Bronx gangs. What’s the matter with this generation? That was the gang of the first Dutch Schultz, don’t you know that? The toughest street fighter who ever lived. He’d bite your nose off. He’d pull your balls out by the root. My gang named me after him I got back from the reform. It was a honorary thing. It showed I’d done my time and gone through it, and come out of my training a son of a bitch in spades. So ever since that’s why I’m called the Dutchman.”

I cleared my throat and looked out through the screen over the privet hedges to the water, where a small boat with a triangular white sail seemed to be sailing the shimmering mesh. “There are some gangs now,” I said, “but they are dumb fucking kids, mostly. I don’t want to pay for no one’s mistakes but my own. I think these days for the real training you got to go right to the top.”

I held my breath. I didn’t dare look at him, I looked at my feet. I could feel his gaze on me. I could smell his cigar.

“Hey Otto,” he said, “wake the hell up, you’re really missing something.”

“Oh? That’s what you think,” Mr. Berman said from under his hat.

It didn’t all happen at once but it happened night and day, there seemed to be no rule of time, no plan except the possible moment and whatever it was we drove to it in a car, and when you look out the window at the life you’re going through to get to this moment it takes on an odd cast, so that if the sun is shining it’s shining too brightly, or if it is night it is too black, all the organization of the world seems part of the conspiracy of your attention, and whatever is naturally around you becomes unnatural by the peculiarly absolute moral demand of what you are doing. This was my wish, I was training at the top. I remember for instance being dropped off at the corner of Broadway and Forty-ninth Street and told to hang around and keep my eyes open. That was all that was said, but it was momentous. One of the cars sped off and I didn’t see it again, the other, the one with Mr. Berman, kept coming around the block every few minutes, a single black squarish Chevrolet sedan inconspicuous in the traffic of black cars and the yellow checker cabs cruising for fares and the double-decker buses and streetcars, relatively empty, and neither Mickey the driver nor Mr. Berman looked at me as they passed, and I derived from that not to look particularly at them. I stood in the doorway of Jack Dempsey’s restaurant that had not yet opened for the day, it must have been nine or nine-thirty in the morning, and Broadway was fairly fresh, the newsstands and coconut-drink and hotdog stands were open and a couple of the stores that sold little lead Statues of Liberty but not much else. There was a second-floor dance studio across Forty-ninth Street and the big window was tilted open and someone was playing “Bye, Bye, Blackbird” on the piano. There is a local Broadway, a community of Broadway that you see in the morning before the penny arcades and bars open for the
day, the people who live upstairs in the tenements above the movie marquees, who come out with their dogs on the leash to get the
Racing Form
and the
Mirror
and buy a bottle of milk. And the bakery delivery men who pull up and carry the racks of breads and big bags of rolls into the groceries, or the butcher trucks with the guys loading big raw sides of beef on their shoulders and dumping them on the roller chutes leading down to the basements underneath the restaurants. I kept watching and saw the street sweeper with his big broom and his summer white with the khaki-and-orange trim on his hat load up the horse manure and paper and crap and trash of a Broadway night on his wide-blade shovel and dump it all into the big ashcan on his two-wheel cart as if he was a housewife tidying up her kitchen. A while later the tanked water wagon came along Spraying the street so that it looked shining and fresh and almost simultaneously I saw the string of electric lights go on around the Loew’s State Theatre a few blocks below where Broadway ran into Seventh Avenue. In the sun it was not entirely possible to read the headlines riding in lights around the Times Building on Times Square. The black Chevrolet came around again and this time Mr. Berman glanced at me and I began to feel anxious, I wanted to see whatever it was I was supposed to see but the traffic was ordinary, not particularly heavy, and the people on the sidewalk were going about their business with no great urgency, a man in a suit and tie came along with a crate of apples on his shoulder and set it up on the corner with his
APPLES
5¢ sign, the morning was warming up and I wondered if what I needed was in the window behind me where Jack Dempsey was shown in a big blowup photo of the ring in Manila with thousands watching, and there were other photos of the great man shaking hands with famous people, show people like Jimmy Durante and Fanny Brice and Rudy Vallee, but then in the reflection of the restaurant glass I saw the office building across the street, and I turned around to look, up on the fifth or sixth floor a man climbed out on a ledge with a pail and sponge and affixed his safety belt to the hooks imbedded in the brick and leaned back against the belt and began to make wide arcs with
his soapy sponge on the window, and then I saw another man on another window ledge on the floor above him coming out to do the same thing. I watched these men washing the windows and then for some reason I knew this was what I was supposed to see, these window washers doing the morning’s work high above the street. And on the sidewalk below them was a sign, the kind that supports itself like an
A
, advising passersby that work was going on overhead and to take care, and it was the sign the window washers had set up in the name of their union. I had by now crossed Broadway and stood on the southwest corner of Forty-ninth Street and Seventh Avenue and I watched these guys working up there, two of them were on a scaffold hanging from the roof parapet maybe fifteen stories above the street and I saw this was the expedient for the extra large windows at the top that were too wide for a safety belt to span. And it was this scaffold with the two men and their sponges and pails and rags which suddenly lurched, the rope on one side snapping up into the air like a whip, and the two men flinging their arms back and spilling down the scaffold. One of them came down the side of the building wheeling. I don’t know if I shouted, or who else saw it happen or heard it, but while he was still several stories up, some seconds above his death, the whole street knew. The traffic was stopped as if every vehicle had been pulled up taut on the same string. There was a collective screech, a total apprehension of disaster on the part of every pedestrian for blocks around, as if we had all been aware all along of what was going on above our heads in the sky, so that the moment the composition was disturbed everyone knew instantly. Then the body at a point of flat and horizontal extension hit the roof of a car parked in front of the building and the sound it made was as a cannon going off, a terrible explosion of the force of bone and flesh, and what made me gasp was that he moved, the guy moved in that concavity of metal he had made, a sinuosity of bone-smashed inching, as if it was a worm there curling for a moment on the hot metal before even that degree of incredible life trembled out through the fingers.