Billy Bathgate

Part Three
FIFTEEN

The trial was almost upon us. I pulled my pistol practice and ran errands for Dixie Davis, who was by now in residence on the sixth floor. One morning when I had to deliver a letter for him to the courthouse clerk I stopped afterward to look through the little porthole windows of the doors to the courtrooms. None were occupied. Nobody said not to so I went into Part One and sat down. It was an open uncluttered kind of place, as opposed, say, to a precinct station: wood-paneled walls and big windows that were raised for the breeze and light globes hanging by chains from the ceiling. All the furniture in place for judge, jury, prosecution, defense, and audience. It was very quiet. I heard the ticking of the wall clock behind the bench. The courtroom sat there waiting was the impression I had. I had the impression that behind the waiting was a limitless patience. I understood the law had a prophetic utility.
I found myself entertaining a guilty conviction. I pictured Mr. Schultz being led off by the guards with the gang of all of us standing by not doing anything. I imagined him led away in an apoplectic rage, my last glimpse of his murderous being segmented by the diamond crisscross chain link welded across the rear windows of the Black Maria. I felt very bad.
Here I will say about Dutch Schultz that wherever he went he created betrayals of himself, he produced them perpetually from the seasons of his life, he brought betrayers forth from his nature, each in our own manner shape and size but having the common face of betrayal, and then he went murdering after us. Not that I didn’t know, not that I didn’t know. I took the elevator each night to the Schultz family dinner table and sat there aching in love or terror, it was hard to tell which.
A couple of nights before the trial a man named Julie Martin appeared who everyone in the gang knew except me. He was a stout man with jowls that shook as he talked, he was very much taller than Mr. Schultz or Dixie Davis, but he walked with a cane and wore a slipper on one foot. His eyes were very tiny and of indeterminate color and he needed a shave, he was gruff, with a voice even deeper than the Dutchman’s, and he was not at all well groomed, dark hairs curled off the back of his neck and his enormous hands had blackened fingernails as if he spent his time working on automobiles.
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 f*ck 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.”
I was puzzled and somewhat alarmed, my mind struggled to understand what it knew only as something so enigmatic that it could not be good for me. Everyone else in the room was now deadly casual. Mr. Schultz stood looking out the window for several minutes and just as I heard the sputter of a car coming down the street he turned back to the room and told me to stand over by the coffee table. Mr. Berman sat down and lit a new cigarette from the old one, and then Lulu came over to me as if to adjust my position, because it was apparently not quite right, he positioned me and continued to hold my shoulders and just at the moment of my revelation but a moment too late I thought I saw him grin with a flash of one gold tooth, although maybe the slowness of my mind on this occasion was a blessing because actually as he swung I did not have the opportunity to reveal anything less than total sacrificial loyalty, it would not have done in this hierarchy of men to say why me why me, a blinding pain struck me dumb, my knees buckled, and a starlike flash exploded in my eyes, just the way prizefighters say it does, and an instant later I was crouched over, groaning and dribbling in my shock, holding both my hands over my poor nose, my best feature, bleeding profusely now through my fingers to the stained rug, and so I contributed the final detail of the Schultz gang’s brilliant representations in matters of applied death, mixing my blood with the dead gangster’s and suffering my rage of injustice as I heard the businesslike rap of our country doctor knocking on the door.
I remember what that whack across the face did to the passage of time, in the instant I felt it, it became an old injury and the rage it engendered in me was an ancient resolve to somehow pay them back, to get even—all this in the space of a moment’s obliterating pain. While I had thought when I heard the gunshot that it could have been meant as appropriately for me, I thought the broken nose was uncalled-for. I was really upset and felt badly used, my courage flowed back with my anger and I was renewed in the heedless righteousness of my appetites. All night I kept an ice bag on my face so that the swelling would not disfigure me and make Drew Preston think I was no longer pretty. In the morning it was not as bad as I had expected, a certain puffiness, and a blueness under the eyes that might be attributed as well to debauchery as to a good sock.
I went out for breakfast as usual, I found that the act of chewing was painful, my lip was a little sore too, but I swore I would be as hardened and casual about the awful night that had just passed as anyone else. I put the image of that rising and slumping dead man out of my head. When I got back Mr. Berman’s office door was open across the hall and I caught his eye and he motioned me to come in and close the door. He was on the phone, holding it under his chin with a raised shoulder and going over some adding-machine tapes with the person on the other end. When he had hung up he indicated a chair beside the desk, and I sat down like a client in his office.
“We are moving shop,” he said. “We’re moving out tonight and only Mr. Schultz and the lawyers will be in residence. The day after tomorrow begins the jury selection. It would not look good for the boys to be hanging around during a trial what with the press descended.”
“The press will be here?”
“What do you think? It’s gonna be like a hive of hornets has got loose in Onondaga. They’ll crawl all over everything.”
“The Mirror too?”
“What do you mean, of course, all of them. Newspapermen are the creeps of the earth, they have no sense of honor or decency and they are totally lacking in the ethics of behavior. If he was just Arthur Flegenheimer do you think they would find him worth the attention? But Dutch Schultz is a name that fits in the headline.”
Mr. Berman shook his head and made a gesture, lifting his hand and letting it fall into his lap. I had never seen him so disconcerted. He was not his usual dapper self this morning, he was in working trousers and shirtsleeves and suspenders and bedroom slippers and he hadn’t yet shaved that pointed chin. “Where was I?” he said.
“We are moving out.”
He studied my face. “It’s not too bad,” he said. “A bump adds character. Does it hurt?”
I shook my head.
“Lulu got carried away. He was supposed to bloody your nose, not break it. Everyone is under a strain.”
“It’s okay,” I said.
“Needless to say the whole thing was unfortunate.” He looked around on his desk for his cigarettes, found a pack with one cigarette left, lit it, and leaned back in his swivel chair crossing his legs and holding the cigarette up around his ear. “It sometimes happens that there is more life than you can keep book on, and that is certainly true of up here, this is an unnatural existence, and why we got to get through this trial as quickly as possible and get back home where we belong. Which brings me to what I want to say. Mr. Schultz will be very busy from now on, he’ll be in the spotlight, in court and out of it, and we don’t want him to have anything on his mind except the problem to hand. Does that make good sense to you?”
I nodded.
“Well then why can’t she understand that? This is a serious business, we can’t afford any more mistakes, we’ve got to keep our wits about us. All I want is for her to take a powder for a few days. Go to Saratoga, see the races, is that too much to ask?”
“You mean Mrs. Preston?”
“She wants to see the trial. You know what will happen if she walks into that courtroom. I mean won’t it bother her to have her picture taken as a mystery woman or some other goddamn cockamamie thing that they will cook up? That her husband will know? To say nothing of Mr. Schultz is a married man.”
“Mr. Schultz is married?”
“To a lovely lady waiting for him and worrying about him in New York City. Yes. What do you keep asking all these questions for? We are all married men, kid, we got mouths to feed, families to support. Onondaga has been a tough son of a bitch for every one of us and it will all be for naught if love conquers all.”
He was looking at me very intently now, not being sly in his study of my reactions or the thoughts that might be visible on my face. He said: “I know you been spending more time with Mrs. Preston than I or the boys, even from that first night when you walked her back to her apartment and kept an eye on her. Is that fair to say?”
“Yes,” I said, my throat going dry. I could not swallow or he would see the rise and fall of my Adam’s apple.
“I want you to talk to her, explain to her why laying low for a while is in the Dutchman’s interests. Will you do that?”
“Does Mr. Schultz want her to go?”
“He does and he doesn’t. He’s leaving it up to her. You know, there are women,” he said almost as if to himself. He paused. “There always is. But in all our years I have never seen him like this. What is it, he won’t let himself admit he knows better, that she takes men down like bowling pins, what is it?”
At that moment the phone rang. “You haven’t failed me so far,” he said, turning in his chair and leaning forward to pick up the receiver. He gave me his look over the tops of his eyeglasses. “Don’t f*ck up now.”
I went in my room to think. It couldn’t have been more perfect, like an affirmation of my wish for release from the life and task I had chosen for myself, and I knew exactly what I would do from the moment he told me to talk to her. Not that I didn’t appreciate the danger. Were these my own thoughts of freedom or was I acting under his influence? This was really dangerous, they were all married people, willful and unpredictable mad passionate adults with God knows what depths of depravity, they lived hard and struck suddenly. And Mr. Berman hadn’t told me everything, regardless of what he said, I didn’t know if he was speaking for himself only or for Mr. Schultz as well. I didn’t know if I was supposed to be working for Mr. Schultz in this matter, or conspiring to do what was in Mr. Schultz’s best interests.
If Mr. Berman was shooting straight with me I could be gratified that he appreciated my utility as a superior brain in the outfit, he was handing me an assignment nobody else could handle as well, including himself. But if he knew what was going on between Mrs. Preston and me he could be telling me just the same things he had told me. If we were going to be murdered would it not be somewhere else than Onondaga? If Mr. Schultz could not afford her anymore? If he found me expendable? He murdered people who acted on his behalf at a distance from him. I knew for a possibility that if I left I was going away to die because either he knew my heart’s secret in which case he would kill me, or my being gone from his sight would create the betrayal in his imagination that would amount to the same thing.
Yet what was any of this speculation but the symptom of my own state of mind? I would think of nothing like this if my conscience was clear and I was intent only to advance myself. I found myself starting to pack. I had a lot of clothes now and a fine soft leather suitcase with brass snaps and two cinch belts, I folded my things neatly, a new habit, and tried to think of the first moment when I would have the chance to talk to Drew Preston. I was feeling the first yawning intimations of the nausea I recognized as pure dread, but there was no question that I was going to make the best of the opportunity Mr. Berman had presented me. I knew what Drew would say. She would say she hadn’t wanted to leave me. She would say she had big plans for her darling devil. She would say I was to tell Mr. Berman she was ready to go to Saratoga but wanted me to go with her.
That night, while Drew accompanied Mr. Schultz to the district school gymnasium, where he was throwing his big end-of-summer party for everyone in Onondaga, I moved out of the hotel with the rest of the gang, I didn’t even know where we were going, only that we were going there, bag and baggage, in two cars, with an open truck following with Lulu Rosenkrantz sitting in the back with the steel safe and a stack of mattresses. The whole time in the country I had never gotten used to the night because it was so black, I didn’t even like to look out of my window because the night was so implacably black, in Onondaga the streetlights made the stores and buildings into shapes of night, and out past the edges of town the endless night was like a vast and terrible loss of knowledge, you couldn’t see into it, it did not have volume and transparency like the nights of New York, it did not suggest day was coming if you waited and were patient, and even when the moon was full it only showed you the black shapes of the mountains and the milky black absences of the fields. The worst part was that country nights were the real ones, once you rolled across the Onondaga Bridge and your headlights picked up the white line of the country road, you knew what a thin glimmering trail we make in that unmappable blackness, how the heat of your heart and your motor is as sufficient in all that dimensionless darkness as someone still not quite dead in his grave for whom it makes no difference if his eyes are opened or closed.
I was frightened to belong so devoutly to Mr. Schultz. I was made bleak in my mind by his rule. You can live in other peopie’s decisions and make a seemingly reasonable life for yourself, until the first light of rebellion shows you the character of all of them, which is their tyranny. I didn’t like for Drew to be back there with him while I was driven like the baggage. The distance would not be that great, only twelve miles or so as I was surprised to see from a surreptitious check of the mileage when we arrived, but I felt each mile attenuated my connection with Drew Preston, I was not confident her feelings could endure.
We pulled up to this house, who had found it, rented it or bought it, I was never to know, it was a farmhouse but there was no farm, just this run-down clapboard house with the leaning porch situated atop a dirt ramp rising suddenly up from the road, so that the porch looked over the road east and west from this bluff that was really not set back from the road but more like on top of it. Behind the house was a steeper hill of woods blacker than the night, if that was possible.
This was the new headquarters, which we were to see first by flashlight. Inside smelled very bad, the polite word is “close,” which is the smell of an old unlived-in wood house, and the windows were rotted shut, and animals had lived here and left their droppings now dried to dust, and there was a narrow stairs going up from the entryway and what I supposed was a living room through a door on one side of the entryway, and a short hall going straight back under the stairs to a kitchen with an astonishing thing in the sink, a hand pump for water, which came up in a trickle and then a loud crashing rush of rust and muck that brought Lulu running. “Stop f*cking around and pull your weight,” he told me. I went outside to the truck and helped bring in mattresses and cardboard cartons filled with groceries and utensils. We were doing everything by flashlight until Irving got a fire going in the living-room fireplace, which improved matters not that much, there was a stiff dead bird on the floor who must have come in through the chimney, oh this was terrific, no question about it, I asked myself who would choose the carpeted life of hotels when he could have this historic mansion of the American Founding Fathers.
Late that night Mr. Schultz appeared, in his arms were two big brown bags full of containers of chow mein and chop suey that someone had brought up from Albany, and while it was not the same thing as good Chinese food from the Bronx it was much appreciated by all of us. Irving found some pots to warm the stuff up and I got a fair share of everything, the chicken chow mein over a mound of steaming rice and crisp roasted noodles, the chop suey for the second course, litchi nuts for dessert, the paper plates got a bit soggy but that was all right, it was a good satisfying meal, except that it lacked tea, all I had to drink with it was well water, while Mr. Schultz and the others washed it down with whiskey, which they did not seem to mind at all. A fire was going in the front room and Mr. Schultz lit a cigar and loosened his tie, I could tell he was feeling better, and might even be feeling good here in this hideout where he was not on display as he had been for many weeks in Onondaga and would be as soon again as the morning, I think there was something bitterly comforting to him about being holed up again because it matched his sense of his situation as someone surrounded on all sides.
“You boys don’t have to worry about the Dutchman,” he said as we all sat around against the walls, “the Dutchman takes care of his own. Don’t think twice about Big Julie, he wasn’t anyone you should concern yourselves. Or Bo. They were no better than Vincent Coll. They were the bad apples. You guys I love. You guys I would do anything for. What I said long ago, my policy still stands. You get hurt, you get sent up, or God forbid you lose it all, you never have to worry, your families will be taken care of as if you was still on the payroll. You know that. All the way down to the kid here. My word is my bond. It’s better with the Dutchman than with the Prudential Life Assurance. Now this trial, in a few days we will be clear. While the Feds have been f*cking away the summer on the beach we been up here sowing our oats. Public opinion is on our side. You shoulda seen that party tonight. I mean it wasn’t your or my idea of a party, when we get back to town that will be a party, but this, the rubes loved it. In the high school gymnasium with the crepe paper and the balloons. I had one of them back-hill fiddle-and-banjo bands playing their doughsee doughs and all the hands right. Hell I danced myself. I danced with my babe in all that crowd of washed and laundered hardship. I have become very attached to them. Not a wiseass will you find in the countryside, just hardworking slobs, work till they keel over. But they got one or two cards in their hand. The law is not majestic. The law is what public opinion says it is. I could tell you a lot about the law. Mr. Hines could tell you more. When we had the important precincts, when we had the magistrates court, when we had the Manhattan D.A.? Wasn’t that the law? We got a man to argue for me tomorrow who wouldn’t have me to dinner in his house. He talks on the phone with the president. But I have paid his price and he will be at my side for as long as it takes. So that’s what I mean. The law is the vigorish I pay, the law is my overhead. The hondlers, they make this legal, they make that illegal, judges, lawyers, politicians, who are they but guys who have their own angle into the rackets except they like to do it without getting their hands dirty? You gonna respect that? Respect will kill you. Save your respect for yourselves.”
He was speaking softly, modulating his resonant rasp even here twelve miles out of Onondaga in this house that could barely be noticed from the road in the daytime. Maybe it was the darkness of firelight that did it, the expression of the private mind in the intimacy of a fire, when you hear only your own thoughts in the night and see only shadows.
“But you know, it’s a kind of honor, isn’t it,” he said. “After all, people have been counting out the Dutchman for quite a while now. And yet the whole world has followed me here, it’s almost like Onondaga is another borough. Starting the other day with my new best friend from the downtown mobs. So I must be all right. See? I got my rosary. I carry it all the time. I will take it into court with me. This is a nice evening, this is good booze. I feel good now. I feel at peace.”
Upstairs were two small bedrooms and after Mr. Schultz drove back to town I went to sleep in one of them in my clothes on a mattress on the floor with my head in the gable where I tried to believe I could see through the opaque windowpane to stars in the night sky. I did not question why with only two small bedrooms one was mine, perhaps I assumed it was my due as a boy with a governess. In the morning when I awoke two other guests whom I didn’t recognize were asleep on their mattresses in their clothes except that they had hung their guns in their shoulder holsters from hooks on the wood door. I stood up, stiff and cold, and went downstairs and outside, it was barely dawn, there was some question in this moment as to whether the world would actually come back, it seemed in some sort of wet wavering drift as if it was not up to the task, but from this whitish blackness something detached itself, twenty yards down the road and at my eye level a man I recognized as Irving was at the top of a telephone pole and splicing a wire which was the same black wire that came up the dirt ramp and went past my feet into the front door. And then I looked across the road and saw down there a white house with green trim and an American flag hanging from a big pole in the front yard, and in a pine grove behind the house sprinkled among the trees were several tiny cabins of the same white with green trim and beside one of them the black Packard was parked pointed to the road with its windshield covered with frost.
I went around to the back of our hillside manse and found an ideal spot for a lengthy and meditative urination. I imagined that if I had to live here I could create a gorge as monumentally geographical as the one Drew Preston had found on our walk. Mr. Schultz seemed to have beefed up the firepower, if I understood correctly the two snoring strangers upstairs. I noted too of this ramshackle house on its bluff that it provided a good prospect of the road in both directions. And someone sticking a tommy gun out the window of his car couldn’t just tear on past and shoot it up. All this was of technical interest to me.
But in a matter of hours I was leaving, although I didn’t know for how long and to what end. My life was estranged from me, whatever my resolve I no longer was childish enough to feel it was commanding. Last night as we had sat in the firelight I had felt I was one of them in a way not just my own, not just of my own thinking, but in the common assumption of our meal shared in the empty hideout house, disguised by the bad light as a grown-up, a man in the rackets, once in never out, and perhaps this more than church bells ringing was the true quiet signal of the end of my provisional determination, the snuffing-out of my unconscious conviction that I could escape Mr. Schultz anytime I wished. Now I thought this layout was more truly theirs, more like the real habitat of their lives, than any other place I had seen. I was impatient for people to get up. I wandered about, I was hungry. I missed my tea shop breakfast and I missed my Onondaga Signal, which I liked to read over breakfast, and I missed my big white bathroom with the hot water shower. You would think I’d lived in fine hotels all my life. I stood on the porch and looked in the living-room window. On a wood table was Mr. Berman’s adding machine and the hot phone Irving was in the process of hooking up, there was an old kitchen chair with a tall back, and prominently in the middle of the floor, the Schultz company safe. The safe seemed to glow for me as the indisputable center of the upheaval of the past twenty-four hours. I thought of it not only as the repository of Mr. Schultz’s cash deposits but as the strongbox for Abbadabba’s world of numbers.
Irving saw me and put me to work, I had to sweep the floors and go around to all the windows and wipe them down so you could see out of them, I chopped wood by hand for the kitchen stove, which made my tender nose throb with pain, I hiked to a general store about a mile away and bought paper plates and bottles of Nehi for everyone’s breakfast, I was as deep in nature as you could get, like a damn Boy Scout at a jamboree. Irving left in the Packard with Mickey and so Lulu was in charge then and he put me to work out in back digging a latrine, there was an outhouse there that looked perfectly usable to me though it tilted a bit, but Lulu found it offended his sensibilities to use a strange outhouse and so I had to take a shovel and dig this hole in a clear and level place in the woods above the house going into the soft earth around and around deeper and deeper with my hands getting blistered and sore before one of the men took over, I had thought I had imagined all the possible dangers attached to a life in crime, but death by excrement had escaped me. Only when Irving came back and resolutely built a small throne of pine boards for the hole did I remember what dignity lay in labor that was done with style, whatever the purpose, he was a model for us all, Irving.
I got myself into as clean and presentable shape as I could manage under primitive conditions and at about nine that morning I drove with Mr. Berman and Mickey into Onondaga and sat in the parked car across the public square from the courthouse. Almost every parking space was taken as the Model T’s and A’s and the chain-drive flatbeds came in from the countryside, and the farmers in their clean and pressed overalls and the farmers’ wives in their unfashionable flowered dresses and sunbonnets climbed the steps and went through the doors for their impaneling. I saw the government lawyers with their briefcases walking up the hill from the hotel, I saw Dixie Davis looking very solemn beside the older portly lawyer with his rimless glasses dangling from their black ribbon, and then, slouching along in twos and threes, the fellows with the writing pads sticking out of their jacket pockets and the morning paper rolled under their arms and their little press cards like decorative feathers in the headbands of their fedoras. I studied the reporters very carefully, I wished I knew which of them was the Mirror, whether he was the one with horn-rim glasses who bounded up the steps two at a time or the one with his tie knot pulled down and his collar open at the neck, you could only guess about reporters, they never wrote about themselves, they were just these bodiless words of witness composing for you the sights you would see and the opinions you would have without giving themselves away, like magicians whose tricks were words.
Up at the top of the stairs news photographers with big Speed-Graphics in their hands stood around not taking pictures of the people going past them into the building.
“Where’s Mr. Schultz?” I said.
“He snuck inside a half hour ago, while those jokers was still eating their breakfast.”
“He’s famous,” I said.
“That’s the tragedy in a nutshell,” Mr. Berman said. He took out a wad of one-hundred-dollar bills and counted out ten of them. “When you’re in Saratoga don’t let her out of your sight. Whatever she wants, pay for it. This one has got a mind of her own, which could be inconvenient. There’s a place called the Brook Club. It’s ours. You have any problems you speak to the man there. You understand?”
“Yes,” I said.
He handed me the bills. “Not for your personal betting,” he said. “If you want to make a few bucks for yourself, you’ll be calling me every morning anyway. I know something, I’ll tell you. You understand?”
“Yes.”
He handed me a torn piece of paper with his secret phone number on it. “Horses or women alone is bad enough. Together they can kill you. You handle Saratoga, kid, I’ll believe you can handle anything.” He sat back in the seat and lit a cigarette. I got out of the car and took my suitcase from the trunk and waved goodbye. I thought in this moment I understood the limits of Mr. Berman, he was sitting in this car because it was the closest he could get to the courtroom, he couldn’t go where he wanted to go and that made him plaintive, a little humpbacked man with over-colorful clothes and Old Gold cigarettes the two indulgences of his arithmetized life, I felt looking back at him watching me from the car window that he was someone who could not function without Dutch Schultz, as if he were only an aspect of him, reflected into brilliance by him, and as dependent as he was needed. I thought Mr. Berman was the curious governor of this amazing genius of force, who if he one moment lost his spin would lose it forever.