Billy Bathgate (19 page)

And now the scope of Mr. Schultz’s strategy became apparent to me. I had wondered how anyone could be fooled, because what he was doing was so obvious, but he wasn’t trying to fool anybody, he didn’t have to, it didn’t matter that these people knew he was a big-time New York gangster, nobody here had any love for New York anyway and what he did down there was his business if up here he showed his good faith, it didn’t even matter that they knew why he was doing what he was doing as long as he did it on a scale equal to his reputation. Of course he was obvious, but that’s what you had to be when the fix was in with the masses, everything had to be done large, like skywriting, so that it could be seen for miles around.

He said at dinner in the hotel one night, “You know, Otto, I was paying the Chairman of the Board as much a week as all this is costing. There’s no middleman up here to jack up the price on you,” he said enjoying the thought. “Am I right, Otto? We’re dealing direct, eggs fresh from the farm.” He laughed, everything seemed to be going off in Onondaga just as he hoped it would.

But I could tell Abbadabba Berman was feeling less sanguine. “Chairman of the Board” was the code name for Mr. Hines, the Tammany man. Until the Feds had messed things up Mr. Hines got cops who were too smart for their own good assigned to Staten Island and magistrates who didn’t understand their job retired from the bench and, for icing on the cake, bought the election of the gentlest and most peaceable district attorney in the history of the City of New York. It had been a wonderful way to do business. Here, the reality was that they were trying to extricate themselves from a grave situation. Also, the gang was out of its element, they lacked experience in legitimacy and could not be counted upon always to do what was right. And the other thing was Miss Drew. Mr. Berman had never been consulted about Miss Drew. There was no denying she was classing-up the act and thinking of things which her background had
taught her, how to work charity, the forms it took, the dos and don’ts of it. And she seemed to be good at giving the Dutchman a little touch of style, so that it was harder for the people up here to think of him as without the shadow of a doubt a man of the rackets. But she was an X. In mathematics, Mr. Berman had told me, when you don’t know what something is worth, not even if it is plus or minus, you call it X. Instead of a number you assign a letter. Mr. Berman had no great regard for letters. He was looking at her now as with a dead pan Miss Drew picked at her salad with her right hand and with her left out of sight under the table touched Mr. Schultz’s privates which couldn’t have been more apparent because Mr. Schultz started up from his seat and knocked over his wine and coughing into his napkin and turning red told her as he started to laugh that she was a crazy fucking broad.

Sitting at the far end of the dining room, in a corner by themselves, were Irving, Lulu, and Mickey the driver. They were not happy men. When Mr. Schultz cried out Lulu had not been looking in that direction and was so taken aback he rose to his feet and reached into his jacket staring around wildly before Irving put a hand on his arm. Miss Drew had split the gang, there was a hierarchy now, the four of us sat at one table each night and Lulu, Irving, and Mickey sat at another. Given the demands of life in Onondaga Mr. Schultz spent much of his time with Miss Drew and me but mostly Miss Drew, and I know I felt ill-used and muscled out so I could imagine how the men felt. Mr. Berman had to have understood all of this.

Of course once the New York press got wind of what Dutch Schultz was doing here, our situation would change rapidly, like a fever breaking, but I couldn’t know that, everything seemed very weird and dizzying to me, as for instance that Miss Drew could be my mother and Mr. Schultz my father, a thought that came to me, no not even a thought worse than a thought, a feeling, when we attended a mass at the St. Barnabas Catholic Church one Sunday nice and early so I wouldn’t miss Protestant Sunday school at the Church of the Holy Spirit. And he took off
his hat and she pulled a white lace shawl over her head and we sat all solemn and shining in our rear pew listening to the organ, an instrument I hate and detest, the way it blurs the ears with intimidating chordblasts of righteousness, or worms inside the ear canal with little pipey slynesses of piety, and that father in silken robes swinging a smokepot up there under a poor painted plaster bleeding Christ on a golden cross, oh I tell you this was not my idea of the life of crime, but that there were things even worse than I knew, because afterward in this church at a table near the door Mr. Schultz lit a candle in a little glass for Bo Weinberg, saying what the hell, and then on the sidewalk the father came after us, I hadn’t thought priests on the pulpit in their colored silks saw who was in the audience, but they do, they see everything, and his name was Father Montaine, he spoke with an accent, he said he was hoppee to see us and shook my hand vigorously, and then he and Miss Lola Miss Drew spoke French, he was a French Canadian with a limited amount of wiry black hair which he combed sideways over his head so that he wouldn’t look bald, which of course he did. I felt dumb, thick-tongued, I was getting fat eating pancake breakfasts on the expense account and ham steak and applesauce dinners, I wore my fake glasses and went calling on churches and combed my hair and kept clean and neat in outfits Miss Lola Miss Drew had found for me, and that was another thing, she had taken to ordering clothes in my size from Boston, I was becoming a project of hers, as if she really was responsible for me, it was weird, when she turned her intense gaze in my direction I saw no depth of assignable character, she seemed incapable of distinguishing pretense from reality, or perhaps she was rich enough to think everything she pretended was true, but me, I didn’t know what it was to flat-out run anymore, I felt I was not reliably myself, I was smiling too much and talking like a sissy and I was reduced to devious practices, doing things I would never have imagined myself doing in my Shadows jacket, like eavesdropping, listening in to conversations like some cop on a wiretap just to try to get some intelligence of what was going on.

For instance one night in my room I smelled cigar smoke and heard voices, so I went into the corridor and stood in the hall just outside the slightly open door of Mr. Berman’s room that he had turned into an office and I peeked in. Mr. Schultz was in there in his bathrobe and slippers, it was very late and they were talking softly, if he’d caught me there was no telling what he would do but I didn’t care, I was one of the gang now, I was running with them, I told myself what was the point of living on the same hotel floor with Dutch Schultz if I didn’t take advantage of it. At least my senses were still sharp, and that was something, I stepped back out of sight and I listened.

“Arthur,” Mr. Berman was saying, “you know these boys would go to the wall for you.”

“They don’t have to go to the wall. They don’t have to do nothing but keep their eyes open tip their hats to the ladies and don’t goose the chambermaid. Is that too much to ask? I’m paying them, ain’t I? It’s a goddamn paid vacation, so what are they complaining about.”

“No one has said a word. But I’m telling you what I know. It’s hard to explain. All these table-manners kinds of things are getting to their self-respect. There’s a madhouse about twenty miles north of here. Maybe you should let them blow off steam once in a while.”

“Are you out of your mind? All this work, what do you think happens they get into a goddamn bar fight over some whore? That’s all we need, a run-in with the state troopers.”

“Irving wouldn’t let that happen.”

“No, I’m sorry, we’re talking about my future, Otto.”

“That is correct.”

There was silence for a few moments. Mr. Schultz said, “You mean Drew Preston.”

“Until now I had not been introduced to the lady’s full name.”

“I’ll tell you what, call Cooney, tell him to get hold of some stag films and a projector and he can drive them up.”

“Arthur, how shall I say this. These are serious grown men, they are not deep thinkers but they can think and they can worry about their futures no less than you worry about yours.”

I heard Mr. Schultz pacing. Then he stopped. “Jesus Christ,” he said.

“Nevertheless,” Mr. Berman said.

“I’m telling you, Otto, it doesn’t even take money she’s got more money than I’ll ever have, this one is different, I’ll grant you she’s a bit spoiled, those kind always are, but when the time comes I’ll slap her around a little and that is all it will take, I promise you.”

“They remember Bo.”

“What does that mean? I remember too, I am upset too, I am more upset than anyone. Because I don’t go around talking about it?”

“Just don’t fall in love, Arthur,” Mr. Berman said.

I went very quietly back to my room and got into bed. Drew Preston was in fact very beautiful, slender and with a clearly unconscious loveliness of movement when she was thoughtless of herself as she would be when we went out into the countryside, like the drawn young women in the children’s books in the Diamond Home broken-down library of books no newer than from the previous century, kind and in communication with the little animals of the forest, I mean you’d see that on her exquisite face in moments of her reflection when she forgot where she was and who she was with, and that raised generous mouth curved back like the prow of a boat, and the clear large green eyes that could be so rude with intense curiosity or wickedly impertinent lowered under a profound modesty of lashes. All of us were subject to her even the philosophical Mr. Berman, a man older than the rest of us and with a physical impairment that he would have long since learned to live with and forgotten except in the presence of such fine-boned beauty. But all of this made her very dangerous, she was unstable, she took on the coloration of the moment, slipping into the role suggested to her by her surroundings. And as I thought about this I thought too that we were all of us very lax with our names, when the pastor had asked my name to enroll me in Sunday school I gave it as Billy Bathgate and watched him write it that way in the book, hardly realizing at the time I was baptizing myself into the gang because
then I had an extra name too to use when I felt like it, like Arthur Flegenheimer could change himself into Dutch Schultz and Otto Berman was in some circles Abbadabba, so insofar as names went they could be like license plates you could switch on cars, not welded into their construction but only tagged on for the temporary purposes of identification. And then who I thought was Miss Lola on the tugboat and then Miss Drew in the hotel was now Mrs. Preston in Onondaga, so she was one up on everyone, although I had to admit I had probably gotten the wrong impression when I took her back to the Savoy-Plaza and the lobby clerk had greeted her as Miss Drew not necessarily because that was her maiden name, although for all I know in that walk of life the married women keep their maiden names, but because as an older man in professional service he might have known her since her childhood and though she was now too grown-up to be called simply by her first name, she was too fondly known for too long a time to be called by her last. Perhaps it wasn’t necessary to get anything straight, not even monickers, maybe that was my trouble that I needed to know things definitely and expected them not to change. I myself was changing, look where I was, look what I was doing, every morning I put on glasses that magnified nothing and every night I took them off at bedtime like someone who couldn’t do without them except to sleep. I was apprenticed to a gangster and so was being educated in Bible studies. I was a street kid from the Bronx living in the country like Little Lord Fauntleroy. None of these things made sense except as I was contingent to a situation. And when the situation changed, would I change with it? Yes, the answer was yes. And that gave me the idea that maybe all identification is temporary because you went through a life of changing situations. I found this a very satisfying idea to consider. I decided it was my license-plate theory of identification. As a theory it would apply to everyone, mad or sane, not just me. And now that I had it I found myself less worried about Lola Miss Drew Mrs. Preston than Mr. Otto Abbadabba Berman appeared to be. I had a new bathrobe, maybe I should put it on and after
Mr. Arthur Flegenheimer Schultz went back to bed I would go knock on the Abbadabba’s door and tell him what
X
meant. All I had to remember was what had gotten me to this point in the first place, the innermost resolve of my secret endowment. That must never change.

TEN

I
slept to an unaccustomed late hour, which I realized at once when I woke and saw the room filled with light and the white curtains on the windows like movie screens with the picture about to start. The chambermaid was running a vacuum cleaner in the corridor and I heard a chain-drive truck coming around the back of the hotel to make a delivery. I got out of bed and felt very heavy in the limbs, but I did my ablutions and dressed, and inside of ten minutes I was on my way to breakfast. When I got back to the hotel Abbadabba Berman was out front with the Buick Roadmaster at the curb, he was waiting for me. “Hey kid,” he said, “come on we’ll go for a ride.”