Billy Bathgate (39 page)

I glanced around the table. Everyone, even Mr. Berman, was looking down. Their hands were folded on the table, all three of them like children at their school desks. None of them besides Mr. Schultz had said a word since I had walked in.

“I guess.”

“You guess! Is that the attitude I come to expect from you, I
guess
? You been talking to these guys?” he said pointing his thumb to the table.

“Me? No.”

“Because I was hoping someone in this organization still had guts. I could still rely on somebody.”

“Aw boss,” Lulu Rosenkrantz said.

“Shut the fuck up, Lulu. You’re ugly and you’re dumb. That is the truth of you, Lulu.”

“Arthur, this is not right,” Mr. Berman said.

“Fuck you, Otto. I am being punched out and you are telling me what is not right? Is it right my getting my ass handed to me?”

“This was not the understanding.”

“How do you know? How can you tell?”

“The decision was to take it under advisement, they’re looking into it.”

“I’m looking into it. I’m looking into it because I’m gonna do it.”

“We have a compact with these people.”

“Fuck compacts.”

“You don’t remember he came hundreds of miles to stand for you in church?”

“Oh I remember. He came up showing me this attitude like he and the pope together was doing me this big fucking favor. Then he sits and eats my food and drinks my wine and says nothing. Nothing! I remember all right.”

“Maybe not nothing,” Mr. Berman said. “Maybe just the fact of his being there.”

“You can’t hear him half the time, like he has no voice box. You gotta lean over and put your face in that garlic mouth and then it still doesn’t matter because you don’t know what anything means, he likes something he don’t like something, it’s all the same, you don’t know what he’s thinking, you don’t know where you stand with him. He’s taking what under advisement! How do you know? Can you tell me what anything means with the son of a bitch? Me, if I like something I tell you, I don’t like something I tell you that, I don’t like someone he fucking well knows it, that’s the way I am and that’s the way it should be, not this secrecy of feelings each and every moment that keeps you guessing what the truth is.”

Mr. Berman lit a cigarette and cupped it in his palm with his thumb and forefinger. “These are matters of style, Arthur. You got to look past these things into the philosophy. The philosophy
is that their organization is intact. It is available to us. We have the use of it, the protection of it. We combine with it and together we make a board and we sit on the board with our vote. That is the philosophy.”

“Yeah, it’s a great philosophy all right, but have you noticed? I’m the one this dog-fucker Dewey is after. Who do you think sicced the Feds on me! It’s my leg he has in his teeth.”

“You have to understand they have an interest in our problem. It is their problem too. They know he knocks down the Dutchman it’s their turn next. Please, Arthur, give them a little credit. They are businessmen. Maybe you’re right, maybe this is the way. He said they would study it to see how it could be done but in the meantime they want to think about it a little while. Because you know as well as they do even when it’s a lousy cop on the beat who is hit the city goes wild. And this is a major prosecutor in the newspapers every day. A hero of the people. You could win the battle and lose the war.”

Mr. Berman kept talking, he wanted to calm Mr. Schultz down. As he went on to make each point of his argument, Lulu kept nodding and furrowing his brow as if he had been just about to say the same thing. Irving sat with his arms folded and his eyes lowered, whatever decision was made he would go along with it, as he always had, as he would to the day he died. “The modern businessman looks to combination for strength and for streamlining,” Mr. Berman said. “He joins a trade association. Because he is part of something bigger he achieves strength. Practices are agreed upon, prices, territories, the markets are controlled. He achieves streamlining. And lo and behold the numbers rise. Nobody is fighting anybody. And what he has a share of now is more profitable than the whole kit and caboodle of yore.”

I could see Mr. Schultz gradually relaxing, he had been leaning forward and holding the edge of the table as if he was about to turn it over, but after a while he sagged back in his chair and then he put his hand on top of his head, as if it hurt, a peculiar gesture of irresolution that as much as anything compelled me to pipe up as I did: “Excuse me. This man you mentioned, the
one who came to the church. Mrs. Preston told me something about him.”

I will talk about this moment, what I thought I was doing, or what I think now I thought I was doing, because it is the moment the determination was made, I think about all their deaths and the manners of dying, but more about this moment of the determination, where it came from, not the heart or the head, but the mouth, the wordmaker, the linguist of grunts and moans and whimpers and shrieks.

“She knew him. Well not that she knew him but that she’d met him. Well not that she entirely remembered meeting him,” I said, “or she would have mentioned it herself. But she drank,” I said looking a moment at Irving, “she herself told me that and when you drink you don’t remember that much, do you? But what she felt on the street in front of St. Barnabas,” I said to Mr. Schultz, “is that when you introduced them, she thought he looked at her as if he recognized her. She thought perhaps she must have met him before.”

It was so still now in the Palace Chophouse and Tavern that I heard Mr. Schultz’s breathing, the magnitude of his respiration was as familiar to me as his voice, his thought, his character, it came in slowly and went out quickly in a kind of one two rhythm that left a silence between breaths that seemed like a consideration of whether to breathe at all.

“Where did she meet him?” he said, very calm.

“She thought it must have been with Bo.”

He swiveled in his chair and faced Mr. Berman and sat back and stuck his thumbs in his vest pockets and a big broad smile came over his face. “Otto, you hear this? You grope around and you grope around and all the time the child is there to lead you.”

The next moment he had jumped out of his chair and smashed me on the side of the head, I think he must have used his forearm, I didn’t know what had happened, the room wheeled, I was suddenly confused, I thought there had been an explosion, that the room was falling in on me, I saw the ceiling lift and the floor jump toward me, I was flying backward over the chair, going down backward in the chair I’d been sitting in and
when I hit the floor I lay there stunned, I wanted to hold on to the floor because I thought it was moving. Then I felt terrible pounding pains in the side, one after another, and as it turned out he was kicking me, I tried to roll away, I was crying out and I heard chairs scraping, everyone talking at once, and they pulled him off me, Irving and Lulu actually pulled him away from me, I realized that later when I began to hear in my mind what they had been saying,
it’s the kid for christsake, oh Christ, leave off, boss, leave off
, all that urgent straining talk in the pinioning of violence.

Then as I rolled on my back I saw him shrug loose of them and hold his hands in the air. “It’s all right,” he said. “It’s okay. I am all right.”

He yanked on his collar and pulled at his vest and sat back down in his chair. Irving and Lulu took me under the arms and put me instantaneously on my feet. I felt ill. They righted my chair and sat me in it and Mr. Berman pushed a glass of wine toward me and I took it with both hands and managed to swallow some of it. My ears were ringing and I felt a sharp pain on the left side every time I took a breath. I sat up straight, in that way your body instantly accepts what has happened to it, though your mind does not, I knew that if I sat straight and took only shallow breaths through the nose the pain was relieved somewhat.

Mr. Schultz said: “Now kid, that was for not telling me before. You heard what she said, that cunt, you should have come to me right away.”

I started to cough, little hacking coughs that were excruciatingly painful. I swallowed more wine. “This was the first chance,” I said, lying, I had to clear my throat to get my voice back, I didn’t want to sound like I was sniveling, I wanted to sound offended. “I been busy doing everything you asked me, is all.”

“Let me finish, please. How much of that ten grand is left that you been holding.”

With trembling hands I took five thousand dollars out of my wallet and put it on the white tablecloth. “All right,” he said. He
took up all the bills but one. “That is for you,” he said pushing it toward me. “A month’s advance. You are now on the payroll at two hundred and fifty a week. This is what justice is, you see? The same thing you deserved a licking for you deserve this.” He looked around the table. “I didn’t hear nobody else give me the word on our downtown comparey.”

Nobody said anything. Mr. Schultz poured wine in all the glasses and drank his own with a loud smacking of the lips. “I feel better now. It didn’t feel right in that meeting, I knew it didn’t feel right. I don’t know how to combine. I wouldn’t know how to begin. I was never a joiner, Otto. I never asked anybody for anything. Everything I got I got for myself. I have worked hard. And how I got where I got is I do what I want, not what other people want. You put me with those goombahs and suddenly I have to worry about their interests? Their interests? I don’t give a shit for their interests. So what is all this crap. I’m not about to give it away, I don’t care how many D.A.s come after me. That is what I was trying to tell you. I didn’t have the words. Now I got them.”

“It doesn’t have to mean anything, Arthur. Bo liked a good time. It could have been at the track. It could have been in a club. It don’t have to mean anything.”

Mr. Schultz shook his head and smiled. “My Abbadabba. I never knew the numbers were for dreaming. A man gives me his word and it’s not his word, a man works for me all those years and the minute I turn my back he conspires against me, I don’t know, who has gotten to him? Who in Cleveland gets such an idea?”

Mr. Berman was very agitated. “Arthur, he’s not stupid, he’s a businessman, he looks at the choices and he takes the path of least resistance, that is the whole philosophy of the combination. He didn’t have to see the girl to know where Bo was. He showed you a mark of respect.”

Mr. Schultz pushed back from the table. He took his rosary out of his pocket and began to twirl it, around went the rosary in a tightening circle, it dangled for a pendulous moment and then spun the other way, looping out before snapping up tight
again. “So who turned Bo? I see your precious combination, Otto. I see the whole fucking world ganging up on me. I see the man who takes me into his church, the man who makes me his brother and embraces me and kisses me on the cheek. Is this love? These people have no more love for me than I have for them. Is this the Sicilian death kiss? You tell me.”

NINETEEN

A
nd that’s how I came to shadow Thomas E. Dewey, the special public prosecutor appointed to clean up the rackets, and future district attorney, governor of New York, and Republican candidate for president of the United States. He lived in one of those limestone-cliff Fifth Avenue apartment buildings that look over Central Park, it wasn’t that far north of the Savoy-Plaza, in one week I became very familiar with the neighborhood, I idled lurked and strolled usually on the park side, across the street, along the park wall in the shade of the plane trees, sometimes diverting myself by trying not to step on the lines of the hexagonal paving blocks. In the early morning the sun came up through the side streets filling them from the east with light and shooting out like Buck Rogers ray guns across the intersections, I kept thinking of shots, I heard them in the backfirings of trucks, I saw them in the rays, I read them in the chalk lines made by the kids on the sidewalks, everything was shots in my mind as I shadowed the public prosecutor with a view toward setting him up for assassination. In the evening the sun went down over the West Side and the limestone buildings of Fifth Avenue glowed gold in their windows and white on their faces, and all up and down the stories maids in their uniforms pulled the drapes closed or let down the awnings.

In these days I felt very close to Mr. Schultz, I was the only one cooperating in the deepest spirit with him, his most trusted adviser deplored his intentions, his two most loyal personal attendants and bodyguards suffered grave misgivings, I was alone with the man in his heart, was what I felt, and I have to confess I was excited to be there alone with him in his cavernous transgression, he had slugged me and kicked my ribs in and now I felt a real love for him, I forgave him, I wanted him to love me, I realized he was able to get away with something no other person could get away with, for example I still did not forgive Lulu Rosenkrantz my broken nose, and in fact when I thought about it I didn’t like the way Mr. Berman had lifted twenty-seven cents from me with one of his cheap math tricks that time in the policy office on 149th Street when I had barely caught on with the organization, Mr. Berman had been my mentor ever since, generously bringing me along, nurturing me, and yet I still did not forgive him that loss of a boy’s few pennies.