Billy Bathgate

NINETEEN

And 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.
You can’t expect to shadow someone effectively unless you are an unremarkable figure appropriate to the landscape. I bought a scooter and wore my good pants and a polo shirt and I did that for a day or so, then I got a puppy from a pet shop and walked him along on a leash except people who were out early walking their own dogs kept stopping to say how cute he was while their dogs sniffed his wagging little ass, and that was no good, so I gave him back, it was only when I borrowed the wicker carriage from my mother for a couple of days and took it downtown by taxicab to stroll along with it like an older child watching his mother’s new baby that I felt I had the right camouflage. I bought a doll from Arnold Garbage for two bits with a cotton bonnet to keep its face in shadow, people liked to get their babies out in the early morning, sometimes nurses in white stockings and blue capes pushed these elaborate heavily sprung lacquered perambulators along with netting to keep the bugs off of the little darlings, so I bought netting and draped it over the carriage so that even if some old lady got really nosey she couldn’t see inside, and sometimes I walked and sometimes I sat on the bench just across the street from where he lived and pushed the carriage out and pulled it back and bounced it gently on its broken-down springs and in this manner learned that the early morning was the time with the fewest people and the most inflexible routine, without a doubt the morning appearance of Mr. Dewey was the preferred time to dispatch him.
And my mother liked that doll, she was pleased to have me enter her imagination with her, she rummaged through her old cedar chest to find the baby clothes there, my baby clothes, and to dress the doll in the musty little gowns and scalp caps she had dressed me in fifteen years before. But all this you see was the innocence of murder, I loved my mother for being innocent of the murders around her, as worried prophets are, I loved her very much for the stately madness she had chosen to suffer the murders in her life of love, and if I had any qualms for the work I was doing I had only to think of her to know that I was on the nerve of my innate resolve and so I could trust that it was all going to work out, that everything would end as I dreamed it would.
In fact I will declare right now that I knew while I held something of these events in my hands, I would not have them bloodied. I realize this assurance sounds self-serving and I hereby apologize to all of Mr. Dewey’s relatives, heirs, and assignees for the revulsion they may feel, but these are confessions of a wild and desolate boyhood and I would have no reason to lie about any one of them.
Oddly enough the person I felt bad about was Mr. Berman, the moment I had chosen at the Palace Chophouse to reveal what Drew Preston had told me he must have perceived as an act of treachery, the moment of his ruination, it was the end of all his plans, when his man would not finally be brought along into the new realm he foresaw, where the numbers ruled, where they became the language and rewrote the book. He said to me once, apropos of this idea, this dapper little humpbacked man with the clawlike fingers: “What the book says, well let me put it this way, you can take all the numbers and stir them around and toss them up in the air and let them fall where they may and remake them back into letters and you have a whole new book, new words, new ideas, a new language you’ve got to understand with new meanings and new things happening, a new book entirely.” Well that was a dangerous proposition, if you thought about it, was the proposition of X, the value he couldn’t abide, the number not known.
But in his last glance for me over his glasses, the brown eyes widening to their blue rims, he saw everything instantly, with a kind of despairing reproach. What a tidy little thing the mind is, how affronted by the outlying chaos, he was game, this little guy, he’d made a brilliant life out of one faculty, and he’d always been kind to me, if deviously instructive. I ask myself now if my small word to the wise made that much difference, if it wasn’t better for Mr. Schultz to go down knowing what his situation was, as Bo Weinberg had, if that honor wasn’t due him; whereas he might never have known what hit him. And anyway I think now he knew all along, it was why perhaps he publicized his desire to assassinate the prosecutor, a suicidal act in any event, real or proposed, and it was as he said, I had just given him the words he was looking for all along for the feeling he had, that at the age of what, thirty-three? thirty-five? he’d run out of reprieves, the moment had long since passed when all the elements for his destruction had combined, and his life was attenuated, in the manner of a fuse.
But what I thought I was doing was delivering a message between intimates, a necessary message that could not be left undelivered, though I had tried, and he had understood that I had tried and so had thrashed me. I knew them both so well. She made me a boy again in the humming space between them: You tell him, would you? she had said, and lifted her binoculars so that I could see the parade of small horses curving around the lens.
And then it is time for my report, and it is late one night in the same back room of the Palace, with the pale green walls and the regularly spaced tarnished mirrors in frames suggesting with a few lines of hollowed-up tin the streamlined modernity of the skyscraper, their hierarchy of arches like a platformed chorus of pretty girls with raised knees, and we all sit sallow at the same back table with the impeccably clean cloth and it is so late by the time I get there, dinner is over, they have before them now not the thick plates and cups and saucers but the thinnest of adding-machine tapes, their eternal fascination, the time is midnight, I saw that on the neon-blue clock over the bar as I walked in, midnight, the moment of justice cleaved to the moment of mercy, Midnight, the best name for God.
And this is the moment I am finally with them, one of them, their confidant, their colleague. There is first of all the sense of craft that suffuses me, the sweetness of knowing one thing well. There is second of all the malign pleasure of conspiracy, the power you feel from just planning to kill someone who may at that moment be kissing his wife or brushing his teeth or reading himself to sleep. You are the raised fist in his darkness, you will fell him from his ignorance, it will cost him his life to know what you know.
Every morning he comes out exactly the same time.
What time?
Ten minutes to eight. There is a car there, but the two plainclothes get out of the car to meet him at the door and they walk with him while the car follows. They walk together to Seventy-second, where he goes into the Claridge Drugstore and makes a call from the phone booth.
Every day?
Every day. There are two phone booths to the left just inside the door. The car follows and it waits by the curb and the bodyguards stand outside while he makes his call.
They wait outside? Mr. Schultz wants to know.
Yes.
What’s inside?
On the right as you walk in is the fountain. You can get breakfast at the counter. Every day is a different special.
Is it crowded?
I never saw more than one or two people at that hour.
And then what does he do?
He comes out of the booth and waves to the counterman and he leaves.
And how long is he in there altogether?
Never more than three or four minutes. He makes that one phone call to his office.
How do you know to his office?
I’ve heard. I went in to look at magazines. He tells them what to do. Things he’s thought of during the night. He has a little pad and he reads from his notes. He asks questions.
Why would he leave his house to make a phone call? Mr. Berman says. And then on the way to work where he’s going to see them in fifteen twenty minutes anyway?
I don’t know. To get more done.
Maybe he’s afraid of a tap? Lulu Rosenkrantz says.
The D.A.?
I know, but he knows from taps, maybe he just don’t want to take the chance calling from his own house.
He’s seeing witnesses all the time, Mr. Schultz says. He is very secretive, he gets them in there the back way or something so nobody knows who’s squealing. I know that about the son of a bitch. Lulu’s right. He doesn’t miss a trick.
What about the return journey? says Mr. Berman.
He works late. It could be anytime, sometimes as late as ten. The car pulls up, he gets out and he’s in the lobby in a second.
No, the kid’s got it figured, Mr. Schultz says, the morning is when. You put two guys with silencers at the counter with their coffee. Is there a way out of there?
There’s a back door leading into the lobby of the building. You can go down to the basement and come out on Seventy-third Street.
Well then, he says, putting his hand on my shoulder. Well then. And I feel the warmth of the hand, and the weight of it, like a father’s hand, familiar, burdensome in its pride, and he is beaming his appreciation in my face, I see the mouth open in laughter, the large teeth. We will show them what is not allowed, won’t we, we will show them how far you can’t go. And I will be in Jersey all the time and will pull a long face and say I had no personal grief against the man. Am I right? He squeezes my shoulder and rises. They will thank me, he says to Mr. Berman, they will end up thanking the Dutchman for the caution I have instilled, you mark my words. This is what streamlining means, Otto. This.
He tugs on the points of his vest and goes off to the bathroom. Our table is in the corner in a right angle of pale green walls. I am facing the walls with my back to the doorway leading to the bar, but I have an advantage because the tarnished mirror allows me to see farther down the transverse corridor into the bar than someone sitting under the mirror and looking straight out. It is the peculiar power of mirrors to show you what is not otherwise there. I see the blue neon cast of the clock tube above the bar as it encroaches on the floor of the passageway to the dark tavern. It is like a kind of moonlight on black water. And then the water seems to ripple. At the same time I hear the bartender’s rag suspended in its swipe over the zinc bar beneath the draft beer taps. I hear now that I heard the front doors to the street open and close with unnatural tact.
How did I know? How did I know? With the first wisp rising from the crossed wires of murderous intent? Had I believed of our conspiring that we had invoked images too powerful for the moment, as in some black prayer, so that they had inverted, and were flashing back on us to blow us sky-high? There is that earliest notion of leaning forward in the chair, the body getting ready from the base of the spine up.
Silencers, Lulu says, thinking of his life to come. Mr. Berman is just twisting around to look to the entrance and Irving’s eyes rise with me as I rise to my feet. I notice how well-combed Irving’s thin hairs are, how neatly in place. Then I am in the short passage leading to the kitchen at the rear. I find the men’s room door. I am hit by the salt stink of a public bathroom. Mr. Schultz stands at the urinal with his legs apart and his hands on his hips so that the back of his jacket wings out, and his water arcs from him directly into the urinal drain, thus making the rich foaming sound of a proud man at his micturation. I try to tell him how, as an action, this is terribly obsolete. And when I hear the guns I think he has been electrocuted through the penis, that he made the mistake I have read about in the novelty books, of urinating in a thunderstorm when the lightning can hiss up from the ground in an instantaneous golden rainbow and flash you out like a bomb.
But he is not electrocuted, he is jammed with me in the small stall, I am standing on the toilet seat and his shoulder bangs into me as he fumblingly removes the pistol from his belt, I don’t even know if he knows I’m there, he holds the gun cocked, pointed at the ceiling, and with his other hand he is doing an amazing thing, he is trying to button his fly, we don’t listen to the explosions, we are rocked by them, they ring in the ears, they become a continuous erupting disaster in the ears, and I dig in the pocket of my Shadows jacket for my Automatic and it is twisted in the material of the lining, and I have to struggle with it, I am as graceless as Mr. Schultz, and now I smell the powder, the bitter sulfurous aftermath coming under the door like a poison gas, and at this moment Mr. Schultz must realize that he has no real protection in here, he will be killed in a toilet stall, he slams the door open with the heel of his hand and pulls open the bathroom door and I understand he is shouting, a great wordless scream of rage issues from him as he springs out and raises his arms to shoot, and through the two doors as they are held open by the wind of fire I see the black ovoid stain of sweat under his arm, I see him stumble forward and disappear, I see the pale green corridor wall, and I hear the deeper roar of the new caliber even as he spins back into view, and totters out again leaving sensational maps of the holes in him on the wall of the passageway as the doors slowly swing closed.
You don’t know urgent life if you haven’t heard a gun in your ears, it is the state of being able to do anything, defy all laws, a small window, like a transom, is at the back of the stall, just under the ceiling, I use the chain of the holding tank to haul myself to where I can reach it, it opens down into the room on a pair of elbow hinges, the window is much too small to get through, so I do it feet first, swinging them up and hooking them one at a time, and then twisting sideways and getting my legs through and then my hips then my painful ribs, and then I let go with my arms over my head like Bo going into the drink, I give myself a good crack as I slide out and fall to the ground, it is a ground of crushed cinders, like the bed of a railroad track, and it compacts my legs, I feel sharp pain, I have twisted my ankle, cinders are imbedded in my palms. And my heart seems to have gone awry, it pounds in furious broken rhythms as if it has gone off its shocks, it’s sliding around my chest, lodging in my throat. It is the only thing I hear. I limp I scurry down the alley, holding my gun in my jacket pocket just like a real gangster in action, I peek around the corner of the Palace Chophouse and Tavern into the street and a speeding car without lights a half a block away fishtails and wavers a moment and in another moment it is lost in the shadows of the street, and I watch and wait but I don’t see it anymore. I didn’t see it turn, I step off the curb and stand in the gutter and the long back street is empty under its streetcar wires as far as I can see.
And what I hear now are my own streaming sobs. I open the door to the bar and look in. The smoke lingers in the blue light and bottleshine. The bartender’s head rises above the bar, sees me and appears to decapitate itself, and that is funny, fear is funny, I gimp my way to the back, turn, come down the short corridor of the visitation, and before I look into the room oh the air is bad burned air and humid with blood, I don’t want to see this vealy disaster, I don’t want to be contaminated by this terrible sudden attack of the plague. And I am so disappointed in them, I peek in, I almost trip on Irving, face down, a gun still in his hand, one leg drawn up as if he is still in the act of chasing them, and I step over him and Lulu Rosenkrantz sits blasted back against the wall, he never got out of his chair, it is tilted precipitously, like a barber’s chair, and held fast against the wall by his head, Lulu’s hair sticks up ready for the haircut and his forty-five caliber is in his open hand on his lap as if it was his penis and he stares at the ceiling as in the intense sightless effort of masturbation, my disappointment is acute, I do not feel grief but that they have died so easily, as if their lives were so carelessly held, this is what disappoints me, and Mr. Berman slumps forward on the table, his pointed back stressing the material of his plaid jacket in a widening hole of blood, his arms are flung forward and his cheek rests against the table and his glasses are pressed under his cheek on one leg the other standing away from his temple, Mr. Berman has failed me too, I am resentful, I feel fatherless again, a whole new wave of fatherlessness, that they have gone so suddenly, as if there was no history of our life together in the gang, as if discourse is an illusion, and the sequence of this happened and then that happened and I said and he said was only Death’s momentary incredulity, Death staying his hand a moment in incredulity of our arrogance, that we actually believed ourselves to consequentially exist, as if we were something that did not snuff out from one instant to the next, leaving nothing of ourselves as considerable as a thread of smoke, or the resolved silence at the end of a song.
Mr. Schultz lying flat on his back on the floor was still alive, his feet were turned slightly outward he looked at me quite calmly as I stood over him. His expression was solemn and his face was shining with sweat, he had his hand inside his bloodied vest like Napoleon standing for his portrait and he seemed to be in such imperial control of the moment that I hunkered down and spoke to him in the assumption that he was quite rationally aware of his situation, which he was not. I asked him what I should do, should I call the cops, should I get him to a hospital, I was ready for his orders, not mistaking the seriousness of his condition, but half expecting him to ask me to help him up, or to get him out of here, but in any event to be the one who decided what should be done and how. He gazed at me as calmly as before but simply did not answer, he was so extendedly suffering the shock of what had happened to him that he wasn’t even in pain.
But there was a voice in the room, I heard it now like the wording of the acrid smoke, a whispering it was, too faint to understand, yet Mr. Schultz’s lips did not move but he only stared at me as if, given the character of my feeling, his impassive gaze was commanding me to listen, and I tried to locate the sound, it was terrifying, fragmentary, where it came from, I thought for a moment it was my own breathy intake of stringed snot, I wiped my nose on my sleeve, I dried my eyes with the heels of my hands, I held my breath, but I heard it again and terror made my knees buckle as I realized, swiveling on my heels, that it was Abbadabba talking from his grimace alongside the tabletop, I cried out I didn’t think he was alive I thought he was giving utterance from his death.
And then it seemed to me quite natural that their division would be expressed at this moment too, between the brain and the body, and that as long as Mr. Schultz was still alive, Mr. Berman would still be thinking for him and saying what Mr. Schultz wanted said, however corporeally dead Mr. Berman might be. Of course Mr. Berman was still himself alive, however faintly, but it was this other idea that presented itself as the logical explanation to my mind. It was perhaps some comfort for the thought that I had myself sundered them. I laid my head on the table alongside his and I will say here now what he said though I cannot suggest the time it took his voice to round itself for each word, with long rests between them as he sought for additional breath like a man searching his pockets for the money he cannot find. While waiting I stared at the blurred columns of numbers on his adding machine tapes that were strewn on the table. There were lots of numbers. Then, to make sure I was hearing correctly, I watched the words form in his teeth before I heard them. It is difficult for me to suggest the sense of ultimate innocence conveyed by his statement. Before he got through it I was hearing the distant sound of police sirens, and it was so arduous for him to speak it that he died of the effort: “Right,” he said. “Three three. Left twice. Two seven. Right twice. Three three.”
When I realized Mr. Berman was dead, or again dead, I went over to Mr. Schultz. His eyes were closed now, and he moaned, it was as if he was regaining consciousness of what had happened, I didn’t want to touch him, he was wet, he was too alive to touch, but I put my fingers in his vest pocket and felt a key and I removed it, and wiped the blood on his jacket, and then I found his rosary in his pants pocket and I put it in his hand, and then, since the police cars were pulling up to a stop outside, I went back into the bathroom and went through the window again, again torturing my ribs and my ankle, and at the head of the alley the street was filling in with lights and people running and cars pulling to a stop, I waited a minute or two and slipped out quite easily into the crowd and stood for a while across the street in the doorway of a radio store and watched them bring out the bodies on stretchers covered with sheets, the bartender came out talking with police detectives and then they brought Mr. Schultz out strapped in a stretcher and with a blood plasma bottle held alongside by the ambulance attendant, and the Speed-Graphics flashed, and when the photographers dropped their used bulbs in the street they went off like gunshots, which made the neighborhood people jump back nervously who had come out to watch in their bathrobes and housecoats, and everyone laughed, and the ambulance with Mr. Schultz moved off slowly, its siren wailing, and men ran alongside a few steps to look in the rear window, murders are exciting and lift people into a heart-beating awe as religion is supposed to do, after seeing one in the street young couples will go back to bed and make love, people will cross themselves and thank God for the gift of their stuporous lives, old folks will talk to each other over cups of hot water with lemon because murders are enlivened sermons to be analyzed and considered and relished, they speak to the timid of the dangers of rebellion, murders are perceived as momentary descents of God and so provide joy and hope and righteous satisfaction to parishioners, who will talk about them for years afterward to anyone who will listen. I drifted to the corner, and then walked quickly down a side street away from the scene, and then made a two-block-wide circuit of the Palace Chophouse and Tavern, and when that yielded nothing, I went out two more blocks and made a bigger square, and by this means found the Robert Adams on Trenton Street, a four-story hotel of pale brick hung with rusted fire escapes. I sneaked easily past the clerk sleeping behind his reception desk and hobbled up the stairs to the fourth floor, and after reading the number on the key I had taken from Mr. Schultz’s pocket I let myself into his room.
The light was on. In the closet, behind his hanging clothes, was a smaller safe than the one I remembered from the hideout in the house outside Onondaga. I was not able to open it right away. I could smell his clothes, they smelled of him, of his cigars and his rages, and my hands were shaking, I was not well, I was in pain that made me sick to my stomach, and so it took me a few minutes to work the combination, right to thirty-three, twice around left to twenty-seven, and two twirls to the right back to thirty-three. Inside the little safe were packs of bills in rubber bands, the real actual facts of all those numbers on the tapes. I shoveled them out and stacked them in an elegant alligator valise chosen for Mr. Schultz by Drew Preston in the early days of their happiness in the north country. The bills filled it full, it was very satisfying to build this solid geometry of numbers. A great solemn joy filled my breast, in the nature of gratitude to God, as I realized I had made no mistakes to offend Him. I snapped the hasps shut just as I heard the footsteps of several people running up the stairs of the old hotel. I relocked the safe, drew Mr. Schultz’s clothes across the bar in front of it, let myself out the window and climbed up the fire escape, and I spent that night, it was October 23, 1935, on the roof of the Robert Adams hotel in Newark New Jersey, sobbing and sniffling like a wretched orphan, and falling asleep finally in the paling dawn, where to the east, I could see in the distance the reassuring conformations of the Empire State Building.