Billy Bathgate

EIGHTEEN

Of course I would be lying if I said I didn’t think about that ten thousand dollars in my pocket, and what I could do if I just went away with it, packed our bags and took my mother to the train station and got us on a train to go somewhere far away, migod, ten thousand dollars! I remembered the Business Opportunities section of the Onondaga Signal, how you could buy farms of hundreds of acres for a third of that, surely what was true of one part of the country would be true everywhere. Or we could buy a store, a little tea shop, something reliable, where we could work and keep ourselves decently and in my off hours I could scheme for the future. Ten thousand dollars was a fortune. Even if you just left it in a savings bank you made money.
At the same time I knew I would do nothing of the kind, I didn’t know what I would do but I sensed that the nature of my own business opportunity was still to make itself known, life held no grandeur for a simple thief, I had not gotten this far and whoever had hung this charm over my life had not chosen me because I was a cowardly double-crosser. I tried to imagine what Drew Preston would think. She wouldn’t even understand such small-mindedness, and it would have nothing to do with morality, she would just not understand backing off to the furtive edges of life like that because it was going in the wrong direction. What was the right direction? Toward trouble. To the agony of circumstance. It was the same direction I had been traveling since that first ride on the back of the trolley car to Mr. Schultz’s policy business on 149th Street.
So while I had my larcenous thoughts I did not seriously consider them, my real problem was to keep this incredible amount of money safe, I had stashed my truly earned six hundred dollars in my suitcase on the top shelf of the bedroom closet, but that clearly wouldn’t do, so I got down on the floor and stuck my hand up into the hole under the couch where the stuffing was falling out, and made a little cottony shelf in there and rolled the bills into a tube and wrapped a rubber band around them and shoved them in. Then for three days I hardly left the apartment, I thought that I might unwittingly betray my secret by the expression on my face, that people could read money in my eyes, but mostly I didn’t want to leave the house unattended, I bought our groceries and ran home, if I wanted air I sat on the fire escape, and in the evening after my mother cooked dinner, I watched her very carefully when she lit one of her memory glasses because since my return she had taken to doing that again, one each evening, she was getting her lights going so she could understand what there was to understand.
On the second day I went to the candy store and bought a white business envelope for a penny, and early the next morning, bathed and combed and wearing a clean shirt, but not willing to risk a trip to Manhattan looking like a swell with money in his pocket, I wore only the trousers of my linen suit and topped everything with the black side of my Shadows jacket, and I took the Third Avenue El downtown. I would have given whatever odds you asked that nobody else on the train was carrying ten thousand dollars in his pants, not the stolid working men bobbing in unison on the cane seats, not the conductor opening the doors, nor the motorman in the front cab, or for that matter the people in the windows of the tenements we passed. I would have given odds that unless there was some smartass school kid in one of the cars nobody on the train would even know whose face was on a thousand-dollar bill. If I got up and announced that I was carrying that amount of money people would move away from me as from a crazy man. But these callow reflections finally had the effect of making me nervous, and rather than continue by train, I got out at the 116th Street station and invested my own money in a cab crosstown to Eighth Avenue and 116th, where the Chairman, James J. Hines, maintained an apartment.
It was interesting how slummy, run-down, and squalid his neighborhood was at the foot of Morningside Heights, with overflowing garbage cans and Negro men standing around on the corners and pitching pennies, but how grand and finely kept his apartment house, as if it was on Park Avenue. A doorman in a uniform politely answered my inquiries and a shiny brass modern self-service elevator took me to the third floor. But the squalid life had preceded me: I found myself at the end of a corridor of waiting men, they were standing in the dim light as if on a breadline. Men on a breadline stand close upon one another with their feet spread somewhat apart and their attention directed to the head of the line, as if only absolute concentration could move it along. But the line moved very slowly and when someone, having concluded his business, made his exit everyone stared at him as if to see in his face the success or failure he had had. It took me thirty or forty minutes to reach the open door of the great man’s apartment. In that time I imagined myself living my whole life in destitution. Year after year, standing on lines and looking for a handout, shrinking in my clothes, my mind slowly polishing itself into the mind of a beggar. I carried money for the man, I was there to give him something, yet I had to stand there in that sweltering hallway and wait my beggar’s turn.
Then I was in a foyer, or anteroom, where a few disconsolate men sat with their hats in their hands like patients in a doctor’s office and I joined them, moving along chair by chair as I got closer to the inner sanctum, until finally I was admitted through double doors to a hallway where a man at a desk and another man standing behind him looked me over, I recognized them as of the same ilk I had been living among for some months, the kind you can hear thinking. Mr. Berman had felt no need to instruct me. I was not old enough to be a voter looking for a job, I was not a familiar of the neighborhood, I was a scrubbed boy trying to look his threadbare best. “I am the son of Mary Kathryn Behan,” I said truthfully. “Since my father deserted us we have fallen on hard times. My mother works in the laundry but she is too ill to hold her job much longer. She says I must tell Mr. Hines she has always voted the Democratic ticket.” The gorgons exchanged a glance and the standing one went off down a hallway. Maybe a minute went by and he came back and escorted me the same way, past a dining room with glass-doored china cabinets, and a living room filled with massive furniture, and some sort of game room with framed citations and a billiards table, and then I was shown into a carpeted heavily draped bedroom that smelled of apples and wine and shaving lotion, a very atmospheric habitat that did not appear to include any open windows. And there propped atop the covers on a grand bank of pillows, in a dark red silk robe, with the hairless legs of an old man protruding, was James J. Hines himself, the Tammany district leader.
“Good morning, lad,” he said, looking up from his morning paper. He covered the whole length of the bed. His feet were large and knobbed and had thick callus on the bottoms, but other than that he was a handsome man, with silver hair combed down flat, a ruddy squarish face set with small features, and very clear light blue eyes, which looked at me amiably enough, as if he was reasonably disposed to hear whatever story I was about to tell, considering the stories he had already heard this morning and the stories still waiting in the corridor all the way to the elevator. I said nothing. He waited, and then grew puzzled. “Do you want to speak your piece?” he said.
“Yes sir,” I said, “but I can’t with this gentleman breathing down my neck. He reminds me of my truant officer.”
That drew a smile until he saw the deadly serious expression on my face. He was not a stupid man. He dismissed the henchman with a wave and I heard the door close behind me. I stepped boldly to the side of his bed and removing the envelope from my pocket placed it on the coverlet beside his large meaty hand. His blue eyes fixed on me with alarm. I stepped back and watched the hand. First the index finger tapped in thought. Then the whole hand slid into the envelope, which was not sealed, and the fingers, spatulate though they were, deftly withdrew the crisp bills and fanned them out like cards, in what was, all in all, an impressive exhibition of an old man’s dexterity of joints.
When I looked up, Mr. Hines leaned back on his pillow and sighed as if the burden of his life was suddenly too much to be borne. “So he has such cunning, still, as to use a lad to get through to me, the dirty bastard?”
“Yes sir.”
“Where would he find such a trustworthy child?”
I shrugged.
“Then there is no Mary Behan after all?”
“Oh yes, she is my mother.”
“I am relieved to hear that. Years and years ago I placed a fine young Irish woman in service who came to America by that name. She was the ageof my youngest daughter. Where do youlive?”
“In the Claremont section of the Bronx.”
“That’s right. I wonder if it’s not the same person. She was a tall girl with a lovely carriage, and a quiet and modest way about her, the kind of girl the Sisters adore, I knew she would find a husband in no time at all, Mary Behan. And who is the scoundrel who would desert a woman like that?”
I didn’t answer.
“What is your father’s name, lad.”
“I don’t know, sir.”
“Oh, I see. I see. I am sorry.” He nodded several times and pressed his lips together. Then his expression lightened. “But she has you, has she not. She has raised a capable son with a bold spirit and a clear inclination to live dangerously.”
“She has indeed,” I said, slipping right into a mimicry of his lilting rhythms, it was hard not to, his speech was powerfully a part of him, he was a politician, the first I’d ever met, but I could tell by the way he made you translate yourself into his language that he was a good one.
“I was an adept fellow too, at your age. Perhaps a bit bigger in the bones, coming of a line of smiths. But with the same little man’s gift for trouble.” He paused. “You do not need my assistance, do you, to take your mother out of that laundry and see to her ease and comfort in the sadness of her life?”
“No sir.”
“I thought as much but I wanted to be sure. You’re a clever boy. Maybe you have some black Irish in you. Or Jew. Maybe that accounts for the company you keep.” He grew silent and stared at me.
“Well if that is all, sir,” I said, “I know you have people waiting.”
As if he had not heard, he indicated a chair next to the bed where I should sit. I watched the big hand snap closed the fan of bills and insert them in the envelope. “Nothing makes me sadder I assure you than to turn back such a generous warrant of heartfelt feeling,” he said. He pushed the envelope toward me. “They are fine crisp bills in the noblest of denominations. You understand I could accept them and he would be none the wiser. You understand? But I won’t do that. Will you explain that to him? Will you explain that James J. Hines does not perform miracles? It’s all too far along, Master Behan. There is that little Republican with the mustache. And he with not a touch of the poet in him.”
The blue eyes regarded me until I realized I was to pick up the envelope. I did and slipped it into my pocket. “Where did he discover the son of Mary Behan, on the street?”
“Yes.”
“Well you tell him for me I am impressed, at least, with that. And as for you personally you know I wish you only a long and prosperous life. But I’m through with him. To hell with him. I thought he understood after that unpleasantness upstate. I thought I had made myself clear. You don’t know what I’m referring to, do you?”
“No sir.”
“Never mind, I don’t have to give him chapter and verse. Just tell him I can have nothing to do with him. The business between us is over. Will you tell him that for me?”
“I will.”
I rose and went to the door. “It is a momentous thing when the money won’t flow,” Mr. Hines said. “I had hoped never to see the day.” He picked up his newspaper. “Not that our friend is a man given to introspection, but he had a highly regarded associate in Mr. Weinberg. Who knows if that was the beginning. Who knows, perhaps the day he found you was the beginning.”
“The beginning of what?”
He lifted his hand. “Give my fondest regards to your dear mother and tell her I asked after her,” he said, and he had resumed his reading by the time I shut the door.
When I got back to the Bronx I went into the cigar store on Third Avenue under the El and bought a pack of Wings and got a handful of nickels for the pay phone and put in a long-distance call to the Soundview Hotel in Bridgeport Connecticut. There was no Mr. Schultz registered, no Mr. Flegenheimer, no Mr. Berman. I went home and when I got upstairs the door was open and a man from the telephone company was there with that belt they wear with all the tools hanging from it, he was considerately installing a telephone just beside the couch in the living room. I looked out the window and, just as I had thought, there was no green phone company truck anywhere on the street, I hadn’t remembered seeing one. He left as considerately as he had worked, without a word, and the front door ajar only slightly. The white hub of the dial where the number was supposed to be printed was blank.
I put the envelope with the Hines money back up inside the couch stuffing and sat over it and waited. It seemed to me that ever since catching on with Mr. Schultz I had been assailed by these advanced beings who were there before I was and knew more than I knew, they’d invented telephones and taxicabs and elevated trains and nightclubs and churches, and courtrooms and newspapers and banks, it was all quite dazzling to be inserted by birth into their world, to slide out raw through the birth canal to be christened with a great clop, as if from a champagne bottle upside the head, so that life was forever after dazzling, with nothing quite making sense. What was I now supposed to do with them all and their arcane dealings, what was I supposed to do?
Not more than fifteen minutes passed before the phone rang. It was a strange sound in our little apartment, it was loud as a school bell, I could hear it ringing up and down the hall stairs. “You got a pencil?” Mr. Berman said. “I’ll give you your number. You can call your mama now from anywhere in the United States.”
“Thank you.”
He gave me the number. He sounded almost jovial. “Of course you can’t call out, but on the other hand you won’t get a bill neither. So? How did it go?”
I told him the result of my interview with Mr. Hines. “I tried to reach you,” I said. “They said you weren’t there.”
“We’re in Union City New Jersey, just across the river,” he said. “I can see the Empire State Building. Tell it again with the details this time.”
“He says it’s more than he can handle. He says you can blame the man with the mustache. He says not to contact him anymore.”
“What mustache?” It was Mr. Schultz’s voice. He had been listening on an extension.
“A Republican mustache.”
“Dewey? The prosecutor?”
“I guess that’s who.”
“That son of a bitch!” he said. It was amazing, most people’s voices are skinned down by the phone, but I could hear Mr. Schultz’s in all its rich tonality. “Do I need him to tell us Thomas E. f*cking Dewey is on my back? The son of a bitch. The goddamn shiteating son of a bitch. Won’t take the money? Suddenly after all these years my money’s not good enough? Oh, I’m going after that cocksucker, I’ll take that money and shove it in his teeth, I’ll make him eat it, he’ll choke on it, I’ll cut him open and paper his insides with it, he’ll shit money I get through with him.”
“Please, Arthur. Just a moment.”
Mr. Schultz slammed his receiver and my ear rang all the way to New Jersey and back.
“Are you there, kid?” Mr. Berman said.
“Mr. Berman, meanwhile I’m holding this envelope and it makes me nervous.”
“Just put it in a safe place for the time being,” he said.
I could hear Mr. Schultz yelling in the background.
“We’ll have things organized in a couple of days,” Mr. Berman said. “Don’t go anywhere. We need you I don’t want to have to start looking.”
So that was my situation for those hot Bronx days of Indian summer and the Diamond Home sprinkler fixing a rainbow every morning like a halo over the wet street and the children running under it and shrieking. I was mournful. My mother every day got up and went calmly enough off to work, and there was a wobbly balance to our lives, but she didn’t like the phone on the end table next to the couch and dealt with it by putting the framed photograph of her and my defaced father in front of it. I bought us an electric fan that swiveled back and forth through a hundred-and-eighty-degree arc, flaring up the candles in their tumblers in the kitchen, but bringing a cool blow periodically to my shirtless back as I sat and read the papers in the living room. I had a lot of time to think about what Mr. Hines had said. He was a very wise man, it truly was a momentous thing when the money wouldn’t flow. I had counted off my time with Mr. Schultz by the killings, the gunshots and sobs and cracking skulls resounded in my memory like tolling bells, but something else had been going on all that while, which was the movement of money, it had come in and it had gone out all that time, as uninterrupted as a tide in its incoming and outgoing, as steady and unceasing as the quiet celestial system of the turning earth. I had naturally fixed on the coming in, it had always been the matter of most vociferous concern as Mr. Schultz struggled to maintain his control despite his being on the lam and his legal problems, despite the difficulties of running his business interests at a distance, and the thievery of lieutenants and the treachery of trusted associates, but the money that went out was just as important, it bought arms and food, it bought lawyers and cops and the goodwill of poor people, it paid for properties, it paid for salaries and the good times that assured the men he depended upon that he was of the magnitude of incandescence they expected of a bright burning star. As far as I knew Mr. Schultz didn’t use the fortune he had undoubtedly made over the years, he surely had amassed it but there was no sign of it in his life, I supposed he must have a house or fancy apartment somewhere where his wife lived, I knew they must have nice things, but none of it sat on him like the mantle of their wealth on those people in the boxes at Saratoga. He did not live rich, he did not look it or act it or, from any evidence I had, feel it, up in the country he had an entourage whose daily living expenses he took care of, he went for the occasional horseback ride and flung his money about like he was expected to, but it was all for survival, there was no relaxed indolence of his right to it, ever since I had first seen him he had been on the run, he was a vagabond, he lived in hotel rooms and hideouts, he spent his money to make more of it, he had to make it in order to keep making it, because only if he kept making it would he live to make more of it.
So that was why Mr. Hines’s refusal to take the ten thousand was such a monumental reverse: It didn’t matter how the money stopped flowing, in or out, the result was equally disastrous, the whole system was in jeopardy, just as, if the earth stopped turning, according to what a teacher explained to us once in the planetarium, it would shake itself to pieces.
Now I found myself pacing the floor the way he did, I was truly excited, I knew now what Hines meant by the beginning, he meant the end, the fact of the matter was that I had never seen Mr. Schultz at the height of his powers, I didn’t know him when he had a handle on things and everything was as he wanted it to be, I had come into his life when it had begun not to function in his interest, all I had ever seen him do was defend himself, I didn’t remember a time when he wasn’t embattled, everything we did, any of us, came of his concern to survive, everything he’d asked me to do that I had done was in the interest of his survival, collecting policy, going to Sunday school, even having my nose busted, even sleeping with Drew Preston and taking her to Saratoga and getting her out of his clutches was finally in the interest of his survival.
I couldn’t have understood it that day on the cobblestones in front of the beer drop, when the third of the three silent cars pulled up to the curb, and all the boys came in awe to their feet and I juggled two Spaldeens, an orange, an egg, and a stone in adoration of our great gangster of the Bronx: He had risen and he was falling. And the Dutchman’s life with me was his downfall.
After a silence of a day or two the phone began to ring regularly. Sometimes Mr. Berman was my dispatcher, sometimes Mr. Schultz, and I went off to do errands the nature of which I didn’t usually understand. The press was following the story, so every day going downtown on the subway I found myself trying to figure out what I was doing by reading in the newspapers what the Special Prosecutor’s Office was doing. One morning I went to the Embassy Club, which looked in the daytime down on its luck with its faded canopy and tarnished brasswork, and a man I didn’t know opened the door and shoved a Dewar’s White Label box into my arms and told me to get moving. In the box were ledgers and loose adding-machine tapes and business letters and invoices and so on. As I had been instructed I went to Pennsylvania Station and put the box in a coin-operated locker and I mailed the key to a Mr. Andrew Feigen at a hotel in Newark New Jersey. Then I read in the Mirror that the special prosecutor had subpoenaed the records of the Metropolitan Restaurant and Cafeteria Owners Association upon the mysterious death of its late president, Julius Mogolowsky, alias Julie Martin.
On another day I ran up a dank creaking stairs off Eighth Avenue to seek out the boxing trades of Stillman’s at their work. This is the famous gymnasium, and I am thrilled to pay my admission, but I don’t know what I’m supposed to do here except to give one of the thousand-dollar bills to someone I don’t know the name of or what he looks like. I notice in the ring a shining black man with beautiful muscles and wearing leather armor about the head, punching punching while five or six men stand around shouting out advice, the same proportion as in the WPA pothole crews. Trow der right, Nate, dat’s it, one two, give it toom. This is the race of men Mickey the driver comes from, the race of the raised ear, the flattened nose, the blind eye, they hulk about and skip and nod and spit in pails, and oh the whop-pering bags and the resined sneakers squeaking, I understand the sweetness of this life, it is held in a small space, like a religion, it is all suspended in the thick smell of men’s sweat, sweat is the medium of existence, like righteousness, they breathe one another’s faith, it is in the old leather, it is in the walls, I can’t resist, I grab a jump rope and give it a half a hundred turns. And as it happens I don’t have to look for my man, it is very simple, he is the one who notices I am here. One of the men instructing the boxer in the ring, he comes over in his sweatshirt that doesn’t quite cover all of his hairy white belly and gives me the big long-time-no-see greeting, putting one stinking arm around my shoulder, which brings me in tight to the open palm he holds in front of me as he walks me to the exit.
There was nothing in the papers to help me with that one, only the feeling that it all went together, all the sweating exertions of the killer spirit.
Another thousand goes to a bail bondsman at magistrates court where Dixie Davis got his start, he is a little bald guy with a cigar stub that works its way from one side of his mouth to the other as he watches me remove the bill from my wallet. I reflect that John D. Rockefeller only gave away dimes. On Broadway and Forty-ninth at the august offices of Local 3 of the Window Washers and Building Maintenance Workers, a man who is to take another of the one-thousand-dollar bills does not happen at the moment to be in, and so I wait, sitting in a wooden chair by a railing across the desk from a woman with a black mole over her lip, and she is frowning about something, perhaps her loss of privacy, because I might see how little she has to do, the window behind her is tall and wide and entirely unwashed and stepping down through its plane of dirt are the legs of the monocled top-hatted Johnny Walker whiskey sign on the roof of the building across the street, these enormous rising and falling black boots walking in air over Broadway.
To tell the truth I loved this time, I sensed my time was coming, and it had to do with the autumn, the city in its final serious turn toward the winter, the light was different, brilliant, hard, it tensed the air, burnished the top deck of the Number Six double-decker bus with a cold brilliant light, I made a stately ride in anticipation of death, crowds welled at the corners under the bronze streetlamps with the little Mercuries, police whistles blew, horns blew, the tall bus lurched from gear to gear, flags flew from the stores and hotels, and it was all for me, my triumphal procession, I reveled in the city he couldn’t enter, for a minute or two it was mine to do with what I would.
I wondered how long he could resist, how long he could control himself and not test their resolve, because they knew his haunts, they knew where his wife lived, they knew his cars and his men, and now without Hines there was no fix, not in the precincts, not in the courts, he could board the Weehawken ferry, he could come through the Holland Tunnel, he could cross the George Washington Bridge, there were a lot of things he could do, but they knew by now where he was and would know when he left, and that made New York a fortress, a walled city with locked gates.
After a week or so I had dispensed half of the ten one-thousand-dollar bills. As far as I could understand these were not payoffs I was making, for the most part they were warrants of continuity, little organizational stanchings because Thomas E. Dewey was drawing blood, he had found some Dutch Schultz bank deposits under false names and had had them frozen, he had subpoenaed records of the brewery the Dutchman owned, his assistants were interviewing police officers and others whose names they would not divulge to the press. But if there was money for this aspect of things, there had to be money to rebuild from the bottom, payoff by payoff, someone had to be doing it, there were ways after all, you’re telling me Mickey couldn’t shake a tail? Irving couldn’t turn invisible? There were twenty, twenty-five men at the morning meeting in the whorehouse parlor, not all of them were in Jersey, the organization was functioning, twenty-five was not a hundred or two hundred but business was going on, stripped down, on hard times, its reach diminished, but mean and murderous and with plenty of money for lawyers.
So that’s how I figured it to be, or how it would be if I was running things, I would be patient and bide my time and take no chances, and for a couple of weeks, maybe even into early October, that’s the way it was. But I was not Mr. Schultz, he surprised you, he surprised himself, I mean why suddenly do I read that an entire floor in the Savoy-Plaza has been wrecked, that an unknown thief or thieves have broken into one of the residential apartments and done tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of damage, cut up paintings, ripped down tapestries, smashed pottery, defaced books, and presumably stolen property of a value not known because the residents of the apartment, Mr. and Mrs. Harvey Preston—he is the heir to the railroad fortune—are abroad and cannot be reached?
Then one night, following my instructions, I took the Third Avenue El to Manhattan, and the streetcar all the way crosstown to the West Twenty-third Street ferry slip, and then I stood on the deck of the beamiest bargiest boat in the world, a boat that carried thousands of people every day in such unnautical stability as to suggest a floating building, a piece of the island of New York separated for the convenience of its citizens and let out on a line across the river, I stood on this boat that smelled like a bus or a subway car with chewing-gum wads pressed into its decks and candy wrappers under the cane seats and looped straps for standees to hang on to, and the same wire trash baskets you found on street corners, and I felt under my feet the tremors of the dark harbor, the lappings of the alive and hungry ocean, I looked back on New York and watched it drift away and I thought I was going for a dead man’s ride.
I will say here too, at the risk of offending, that my arrival at the industrial landing on the Jersey shore, with ranks of coal barges lying at anchor and brick factories spewing smoke and the whole western horizon filled with the pipes and tanks and catwalks of hellish refineries, did not give me the assurances I sought from having land under my feet. A yellow cab was waiting outside the terminal and the cabby waved and as I approached he reached back and opened the passenger door, and when I got in it was Mickey who greeted me with an uncharacteristically effusive nod and a smart takeoff that threw me against the back of the seat.
You had to go through Jersey City to get to Newark, there was apparently some governmental distinction to be made between them, but I could see no difference, both cities together being just a continuous dreary afterthought of New York, a kind of shadow on the wrong side of the river, you could tell they thought they were the Bronx or Brooklyn, and they had the bars and the streetcars and the machine shops and warehouses, but the air stank in a different way, and the stores were old-fashioned and the width of the streets was wrong and the people all had that look of being noplace, they looked at up at the signs on the corners to remember where they were, it was a most depressing flatland, a monument to displacement, and I could tell Mr. Schultz would go out of his mind here trying to get comfortable prowling from Union City to Jersey City to Newark to find the best window where he could look out and see the Empire State Building.
It was a cemetery, no question about that, it was too ugly to live in. Mickey pulled up in front of this bar on a street paved not with asphalt but in whitish cement and with the telephone and streetcar wires hanging like a loose net over everything and let me off and drove away. The name of the place was the Palace Chophouse and Tavern. Now I will admit I had come to a tentative conclusion—that if Mr. Schultz was to all intents and purposes locked out of doing business in New York, and none of the trusted associates could take a chance either on going in for any prolonged length of time, I mean as the only one who had free rein, my value to the gang was increased and I thought I should be made a full-fledged member. I was doing more and more responsible work and I wondered why I had to depend on the odd handout that was thrown my way, no matter how munificent it happened to be. They were making advanced assumptions about me, counting on me in a really brazen fashion when you thought that I was not even being paid. I wanted a real wage and I thought if Mr. Schultz didn’t happen to murder me I might be in a position to ask for it. But when I walked down the bar, turned a corner, and passed through a short corridor into the windowless back room where Mr. Schultz and Mr. Berman and Irving and Lulu Rosenkrantz were sitting at a table by the wall, the only diners, I knew I would not bring up the matter, it was peculiar, it was not a question of fear, which I was recklessly prepared to deal with, but of a loss of faith, I don’t know why but I looked at them and I felt it was too late to ask for anything.
The room they were in had pale green walls, with decorative mirrors of tarnished metal, and the overhead light made them all look sallow. They were eating steaks and there were bottles of red wine on the table that looked black in this light. “Pull up a chair, kid,” Mr. Schultz said. “Are you hungry or anything?”
I said I wasn’t. He looked thin, peaked, his mouth was primed to its most undulant pout, he was sorely oppressed, and I noticed the collar of his shirt was curled at the corners, and he needed a shave.
He pushed his plate away with his dinner hardly eaten and he lit a cigarette, which was another thing because when he was feeling in control of things he smoked cigars. The others went on eating till it became apparent he had not the patience to wait for them to finish. One by one they put their knives and forks down. “Hey, Sam,” Mr. Schultz called, and a Chinese man came out of the kitchen and took the plates away and brought cups of coffee and a pint bottle of cream. Mr. Schultz turned and watched him go back to the kitchen. Then he said, “Kid, there is a son of a bitch named Thomas Dewey, you know that, don’t you?”
“Yes sir.”
“You seen his picture,” Mr. Schultz said, and he removed from his wallet a photo that had been torn out of a newspaper. He slapped it down on the table. The special prosecutor, Dewey, had nice black hair parted in the middle, a turned-up nose, and the mustache to which Mr. Hines had alluded, a little brush-style mustache. Mr. Dewey’s dark and intelligent eyes gazed at me with a resolute conviction of the way the world ought to be run.
“All right?” Mr. Schultz said.
I nodded.
“Mr. Dewey lives on Fifth Avenue, one of those buildings that face the park?”
I nodded.
“I will give you the number. I want you to be there when he comes out in the morning and I want you to watch where he goes, and who is with him, and I want to know what time that is, and I want to know when he comes home from work and what time that is and who is with him then. He runs his show from the Woolworth Building on Broadway. You don’t have to worry about that. It is only the comings and the goings from home to office and back. The comings and the goings is what interests me. You think you can handle it?”
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 f*ck up, Lulu. You’re ugly and you’re dumb. That is the truth of you, Lulu.”
“Arthur, this is not right,” Mr. Berman said.
“F*ck 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.”
“F*ck 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 f*cking 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 f*cking 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-f*cker 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 f*cking 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.”