Billy Bathgate (27 page)

Drew Preston excused herself from dinner almost immediately and I was relieved she did. The fellow was trouble. Mr. Schultz treated him with a sardonic respect and addressed him as Mr. President. I didn’t know why until I remembered Mr. Schultz’s restaurant shakedown business in Manhattan, the Metropolitan Restaurant and Cafeteria Owners Association. Julie Martin had to be the man who ran it, that’s what he was president of, and because most of the fashionable restaurants in the midtown area had joined the association, including Lindy’s and the Brass Rail, Steuben’s Tavern and even Jack Dempsey’s, he was a pretty important man about town. He wouldn’t be the one who actually threw the stink bomb through the window when the owner was reluctant to join the association, so I didn’t understand why his fingernails were dirty or why he needed a haircut or why generally he didn’t exude the confidence of a successful man of the rackets.

Apart from the occasional stink bomb, restaurant extortion was an invisible business, even more invisible than policy and almost as profitable. While diners were dining in the fine Broadway steakhouses, or while the old men were sitting in the cafeterias
over their cups of coffee or sliding their trays past the hot table with its perpetual steam rising from the cooked carrots and cauliflower, the business went invisibly and brilliantly forward on the discreet conversation of men who were not ever, at the moment of their visits to any establishment, hungry.

Mr. Schultz was tellingjulie Martin about his day of entry into the Catholic Church and bragging about who it was who had sponsored him. Julie Martin was not terribly impressed. He was a rude man and acted as if he had more important matters to attend to elsewhere. A bottle of whiskey was on the table, as there was now every night, and he kept pouring himself half tumblers of rye and drinking them down like table water. At one point he dropped his fork on the floor and called to the waitress, “Hey you!” as she was going past carrying a tray full of dirty dishes. She nearly dropped them. Mr. Schultz was by now fond of this girl, she was the one whom no generosity of tip or bantering small talk could persuade that she was not each night at dinner in danger of losing her life. Mr. Schultz had told me it was his ambition to lure her to New York to work in the Embassy Club, a great joke considering her all-consuming dread of him. “For shame, Mr. President,” he said now. “This
ain’t
one of your union help. You’re in the country now, watch your manners.”

“Yeah, I’m in the country all right,” the big man said in his basso. Then he delivered himself of a prodigious belch. I knew boys who had this ability, I had never trained in it myself, it was a weapon of the boor and implied a similar aptitude at the opposite end of the digestive system. “And if I can get through this lousy dinner and you can get around to telling me what’s on your mind that’s so important I had to come all the way up here I’ll be able to get the fuck out of your goddamn country and not too soon to suit me.”

Dixie Davis sent a fearful glance in Mr. Schultz’s direction. “Julie’s a true New Yorker,” he said with his down-at-the-mouth smile. “Take them out of Manhattan they go bananas.”

“You’ve got a big mouth, you know that, Mr. President?” said Dutch Schultz looking at the man over his wineglass.

I didn’t wait for dessert, even though it was apple cobbler, but went up to my room and locked the door and turned on the radio. Eventually I heard them all come out of the elevator and go into Mr. Schultz’s suite. For a moment all their voices were talking at the same time in a kind of part song of diverse intent. Then the door slammed. In my peculiar state of mind I had an idea that seemed to me quite rational, that somehow I had invoked the argument, that my secret transgression had fired the metaphysical Dutchmanic rage, and that it happened only for the moment to be directed inaccurately at another of his men, and a valuable one too, as Bo was valuable. Not that I had any sympathy for the huge boor with the bad foot. I didn’t know exactly what the fight was about except that it was serious enough and loud enough for me to hear the sound of it, if not the exact words, when I sneaked down the corridor and stood in front of the door. The exchange of angers terrified me because it was so close, like the loud close thunderclap of a lightning storm still some distance away, and I kept going back and forth from my room to the corridor to see if Drew’s door was closed, to make sure she was not involved, and whenever the radio static crackled with extra snap I imagined I had heard a gunshot and ran out again.

This all went on over an hour or more, and then, it must have been about eleven o’clock, I did hear the real gunshot, there is no question what it is when it is that, the report is definitive, it caroms through the chambers of the ear, and when its echoes died away I heard the silence of the sudden subtraction from the universe of a life, and this time in the quaking reality of what I knew I sat on the side of my bed too paralyzed even to stand up and lock my room door. I sat there with my Automatic fully loaded and held it under a pillow on my lap.

What did I mean to have come with these men to their ferocious business in upstate hotels, was it to understand, only to understand? I had known nothing of their lives a few short months ago. I tried to believe they could have been doing all this without me. But it was too late, and they were so strange, they were all so strange. They all roiled up out of the same idea
because they seemed to understand each other and make their measured responses accordingly, but I kept losing my fix on it, I was still to know what it was, this idea.

I can’t say how many minutes passed. The door flew open and Lulu was standing there beckoning with his finger. I left my gun and hurried after him down the corridor into Mr. Schultz’s suite. The furnishings were awry, the chairs were pushed back, this Julie Martin lay in his bulk across the coffee table in the living room, he was not yet dead but lay gasping on his stomach with his head turned sideways and a rolled-up hotel towel under his cheek and another towel rolled up neatly behind his head to take the blood, and both towels were reddening quickly, and he was gasping, and blood was trickling out of his mouth and nose and his arms hanging over the table were trying to find something to hold on to and his knees were on the floor and he was pushing back, pushing the tips of his feet with their one shoe off and one shoe on against the floor as if he was trying to get up, as if he thought he could still get away, or swim away, it was kind of a slow-motion breaststroke he was doing, whereas he was only lifting his broad back in the air and then slumping down again under its weight, and Irving was bringing more towels from the bathroom to put beside the coffee table where blood was dripping to the floor and Mr. Schultz was standing there looking down at this immense tortoiselike body, with its waving arms and eyes glazed blind like eyes from the sea, and he said to me, very calmly, quietly, “Kid, you got good vision, we none of us can locate the shell, would you be so good as to find it for me?”

I scrambled around on the floor and found under the couch the brass casing still warm of the thirty-eight-caliber round from his gun, which showed now under his belt with his jacket open, his tie was pulled down from his collar but somehow in this moment he glittered with a calm orderliness in all this mess of blood and unfinished death, he was still and thoughtful, and he thanked me courteously for the shell, which he dropped in his pants pocket.

Dixie Davis was sitting in a corner holding his arms around himself, he was groaning as if he was the one who had been shot.
There was a soft knock on the door and Lulu opened it to admit Mr. Berman. Jumping to his feet Dixie Davis said, “Otto! Look what he’s done, look what he’s done to me!”

Mr. Schultz and Mr. Berman exchanged glances. “Dick,” Mr. Schultz said to the lawyer, “I am very very sorry.”

“To subject me to this!” Dixie Davis said, wringing his hands. He was pale and trembling.

“I am sorry, Counselor,” Mr. Schultz said. “The son of a bitch stole fifty thousand of my dollars.”

“A member of the bar!” Dixie Davis said to Mr. Berman, who was looking now at the agonized aimlessly repetitious movements of the sprawled body. “And he does this thing with me standing there? Takes out his gun in the middle of a sentence and shoots into the man’s mouth?”

“Just calm down. Counselor,” Mr. Berman said. “Just calm down. Nobody heard a thing. Everyone is asleep. They go to bed early in Onondaga. We will take care of this. All you have to do is go to your room and close the door and forget about it.”

“I was seen at dinner with him!”

“He left right after dinner,” Mr. Berman said looking at the dying man. “He went away. Mickey drove him. Mickey won’t be back till tomorrow. We have witnesses.”

Mr. Berman went to the window, looked out from behind the curtain, and pulled the shade down. He went to the other window and did the same thing.

“Arthur,” Dixie Davis said, “do you realize in a matter of hours there will be federal lawyers from New York checking into this hotel? Do you realize in two days your trial starts? In two days?”

Mr. Schultz poured himself a drink from a decanter on the sideboard. “Kid, take Mr. Davis to his room. Put him to bed. Give him a glass of warm milk or something.”

Dixie Davis’s room was at the far end of the hall, near the window. I had to physically help him, he shook so badly, I had to hold his arm as if he were an old man who could not walk by himself. He was gray with fear. “Migod, migod,” he kept muttering. His pompadour haircomb had collapsed over his forehead.
He was soaking with perspiration, he emitted an unpleasant smell of onions. I sat him down in the armchair by his bed. Stacks of legal papers in folders were piled on the room desk. He looked at them and started to chew on his fingernails. “I, a member of the bar of New York State,” he muttered. “An officer of the court. In front of my very eyes. In front of my very eyes.”

I thought perhaps Mr. Berman was right, there wasn’t a sound from anywhere in the hotel as there would have been by now if the shot had been heard beyond our floor. I looked out of the corridor window and the street was empty, the streetlamps shone on stillness. I heard a door open and when I turned, there down the hall with the light behind her stood Drew Preston barefooted in her night shift of white silk, she was scratching her head and had a half-dopey smile on her lips, I will not speak here of the derangement of my senses, I pushed her back in her room and closed the door behind us and told her in urgent whispers to be quiet and go back to sleep, and I led her into her bedroom. In her bare feet she was about my height. “What happened, has something happened?” she said in her smoked-up voice full of sleep. I told her nothing and not to ask Mr. Schultz or anyone about it in the morning, just to forget it, forget it, and sealed my instruction with a kiss on her swollen mouth of sleep, and laid her down, smelling the lovely essence of her being gathered on her sheets and pillow like the meadows we had walked through, and put my hand on her small high breasts as she stretched and smiled in her moment, as always in her moment, and then I was gone and out the door, closing it quietly just as the elevator door opened at the other end of the corridor.

Mickey backed out of the elevator pulling a heavy wood-and-pipe-metal dolly, he did this as quietly as it could be done, I thought about the elevator boy and ducked behind the window drapes but Mickey had run it up himself and when he had maneuvered the dolly into the hall he turned out the light in the elevator and closed the brass gate not quite all the way.

The gang was in its element, the thing is when you’re mob you move in the presence of violent death quickly and efficiently as a normal ordinary human being could not, even I, an apprentice,
half-ill with dread and distraction, was able to follow orders and think and move in constructive response to the emergency. I don’t know what they did to the body to make it still but it lay now quite dead across the coffee table and Irving was spreading editions of the New York dailies and the
Onondaga Signal
on the dolly, someone said one two three and the men rolled the immense cadaver of Julie Martin off the coffee table onto the newspapers, death is dirt, death is garbage, and that is the attitude they had toward it, Lulu wrinkling his nose and Mickey even averting his head as they handled this sack of human offal. Mr. Schultz sat in an armchair with his arms on the armrests like Napoleon and he didn’t even bother looking, he was thinking ahead, planning what? convinced in his instinctive genius that however abrupt and sudden his murderous act had been, it had chosen the moment well, which is why the great gangsters don’t get caught except by numbers and tally sheets and tax laws and bankbooks and other such amoral abstractions whereas the murders rarely stick to them. It was Abbadabba Berman who supervised the cleanup, pacing up and down in that sideways scuttle of his, his hat pushed back on his head, the cigarette in his mouth, it was Mr. Berman who thought to retrieve the cane and put it beside the body. He said to me, “Kid, go to the lobby and cover it so nobody notices the arrow.”

I ran down the fire stairs three at a time, flight after flight, swinging around the landing posts, and got to the lobby, where the elevator boy sat dozing on the side chair next to the big snake plant with his arms folded across his tunic and his head on his chest. The clerk was similarly occupied behind his desk under the mailboxes. The lobby was empty and the street as well. I watched the indicator and in a minute the arrow began to swing around the circle, it came down around the one and kept going, to stop at the basement.

Out behind the hotel I knew they would have the car and that details I couldn’t even anticipate would have already been thought through, there was a kind of comfort in that, I was an accessory after the fact, among my other problems, and when the elevator came back up to the lobby and the door opened
Mickey put his finger to his lips and left the elevator as he had found it, lit, but with the brass folding gate pulled across, and he sneaked right back out to the fire stairs and after a minute I coughed loudly and woke the elevator boy, who was a Negro man with gray hair, and he took me up to the sixth floor and bid me goodnight. I might have congratulated myself for my essay in coldblood cunning except for what happened next. In Mr. Schultz’s suite, Lulu had remained to put the furniture back in position and Mr. Berman came in the door with a set of keys and a pile of fresh white towels from the chambermaids’ closet, I admired all the details of their professionalism, I thought of the crime as committed on one of those writing tablets for kids where the drawing disappears when you lift the page. Finally roused, as if from a slumber, Mr. Schultz stood and walked around the room to see that everything looked as it should, and then he stared at the carpet near the coffee table where there soaked in a dark black stain, with several drops beside like moons around a planet, the blood of the former president of the Metropolitan Restaurant and Cafeteria Owners Association, and then he went to the phone and woke up the desk clerk and said, “This is Mr. Schultz. We have an accident here and I need a doctor. Yes,” he said. “As soon as you can. Thank you.”