Billy Bathgate

SIX

Of course as happy as I was to be catching on with them, things were not going well at that time for the Dutch Schultz gang and they wouldn’t until Dixie Davis, that was the name of the lawyer Mr. Schultz shouted at all the time, was able to work out a plan for Mr. Schultz’s surrender to the U.S. District Attorney’s Office. If you did not know the arcane nature of these matters it would not make sense that Mr. Schultz was hoping to turn himself in for arraignment but he paced up and down dreaming of nothing but that, once actually trying to tear the hair from his head in a fury of frustration that he couldn’t yet do that, for the truth of the matter was until he was booked and out on bail he wasn’t free to attend to business. But he couldn’t turn himself in until he had some legal guarantees that would improve his chances in a trial, as for instance that it should be held out of New York City, where, because of certain unfortunate publicity having to do with his activities, the public from which any jury would be composed tended not to see him in a good light. And that was at the core of the endless negotiations between his lawyer and the D.A.’s office, he wanted some guarantees before he turned himself in and until he had them he could not be arrested and therefore free.
He told me the crime business like any other needs the constant attention of the owner to keep it going, because nobody cares about the business like the owner and it’s his burden to keep the profits flowing, to keep everyone on their toes, and most of all to keep the business growing, because as he explained it to me an enterprise can’t maintain itself today just by repeating what it did yesterday, if it doesn’t grow it dries up, it is like something living, when it stops growing it starts dying, to say nothing of the special nature of his particular enterprise, a very complex enterprise not only of supply and demand but of subtle executive details and diplomatic skills, the payoffs alone deserved a special department of controllers, the people you needed to rely on were vampires, they needed their blood money, and if you weren’t there to give it to them they folded up on you, went numb, faded into the mist, you had to be a public presence in criminal enterprise or it would get away from you, and whatever you built up could be taken away from you, in fact the better you were, the more successful you were, the surer the f*ckers would try to take it away from you, and by that he didn’t only mean the law he meant the competition, this was a highly competitive field that did not attract gentlemen, and if they found a weakness in the armor, they went after it, and even if you had one pissant sentry sleeping on his post say, or some gonfalong foot soldier who could be lured off guard duty, not to speak of your own absence from the command post not even to speak of that, why then you were finished because they drove their tanks in through that opening whatever it was and that was the end of you, they had no fear of you, and without their fear of you, you were a dead man in no-man’s-land, and there would not be enough recognizably left of you to put in a coffin.
I took these concerns for my own, as how could I not, sitting on the screened back porch of the two-story red brick house on City Island with the great man confiding his thoughts his worries to orphan Billy, the good-luck kid, the amazed beneficiary of this sudden and unpredictable intimacy. He had gone from not recognizing me to remembering the first moment he saw me across the street capably juggling, how could I not take on the dark troubles of his heart and feel them inside myself as a matter that would not go away, the nagging fear of loss, the dry inner sob of unjust circumstance, and the heroic satisfaction of enduring, of seeing things through? So this was the secret place where he stayed when he was not temporarily present in his protected precincts, this red brick private house just like the flat-roofed private houses you saw all over the borough except way out here it was the only one on a short street of bungalows, on this island that was still in the Bronx, and now I was one of the few people who knew, Irving knew of course because it was his mother’s house, and his elderly mother knew because she cooked and kept things going normally—a woman who walked around with her hands always wet—on this quiet side street with a few hardy ailanthus trees like the ones planted in all the city parks, and Mr. Berman knew it because it was he who one day allowed me to come for the ride that he took each afternoon to bring Mr. Schultz the receipts and go over the figures. And as I sat out in the fenced backyard while they were doing this I reasoned that all the neighbors on the street and perhaps for a few blocks around must know it too because how can you not know when a famous visitor is on your street, and a dark car with two men in it sits outside at the curb night and day, this was a small place, a waterfront town really, if of a New York style, but having not really that much in common with the endless paved hills and valleys of Bronx tenements and stores and elevated trains and trolleys and peddlers’ carts, it was an island that got sun, and the people on it must feel special, apart from everything, as I did now, relishing my connection with the good life of space, of this view of the Sound, which looked to me like an ocean, a deep horizon of gray sea sliding and shifting about in a leisurely way, the way slate and stone would shift if not fixed to the land, with the stateliness of a monumental body too big to have enemies. Right next door on the other side of the chain-link fence was a boatyard, with sailboats and motorboats of all kinds propped up on blocks or tilting over in the sand, and there were a few sailboats moored in the water off the boatyard wharves. But the boat I had my eye on was tied up at the wharf looking sleek and ready to go, a varnished mahogany speedboat with grooved tan leather seats built in and bright brass trim on the windshield and a steering wheel like a car’s and a little American flag flying from the stern. And I saw a gap in the chain-link fence between the house and the boatyard just at the waterline, and then a path to the wharf where thatboat waited, and Iknew thishadto be thecraft of Mr. Schultz’s getaway, if it ever came to that. How I admired the life of taking pains, of living in defiance of a government that did not like you and did not want you and wanted to destroy you so that you had to build out protections for yourself with money and men, deploying armament, buying alliances, patrolling borders, as in a state of secession, by your will and wit and warrior spirit living smack in the eye of the monster, his very eye.
But beyond that, contriving a life from its property of danger, putting it together in the constant contemplation of death, that was what thrilled me, that was why the people on this island street would never rat, his presence honored them and allowed them to live in their consciousness of him as in a kind of light of life and death, with the moments of superior awareness or illumination the best of them might get in church or in the first moments of romantic love.
“Christ, I had to earn everything I got, nobody gave me a thing, I came out of nowhere and everything I done I done by myself,” Mr. Schultz said. He sat in reflection upon this truth and pulled on his cigar. “Sure I made mistakes, that’s the way you learn, the only time I ever served was when I was seventeen, I got sent to Blackwell’s Island for heisting, I didn’t have a lawyer and they gave me an indeterminate, meaning when I got out depended on how I acted, and that was fair enough. I tell you if I had some of these hotshot lawyers I have now probably I’d have gotten life. Hey Otto?” he said laughing, but Mr. Berman had fallen asleep in his chair with his panama over his face, I suppose he had heard Mr. Schultz complain once or twice before about how hard his life was.
“Anyways I was damned if I’d kiss ass just to be let out of there, I raised hell instead, and I was such a tough son of a bitch they couldn’t take me and sent me upstate to reform school, a work farm with cows and all that shit. You ever been in reform school?”
“No sir.”
“Well it wasn’t no picnic. I wasn’t a big guy, I was about your size, a skinny little punk, and there was a lot of bad boys there. I knew you gotta make your reputation early, where it matters, where the word can get around. So I was mean enough for ten. I didn’t take any shit. I looked for fights. I took on the biggest guys I could find. God help the f*cker who messed with me, as one or two did to their regret. I even escaped from the goddamn place, it wasn’t hard, I went over the wire, and I was out in the bushes a day and a night before they caught me, and they added a couple of months for that, and I got poison ivy all the hell over me for good measure, and I was walking around all that time in calamine lotion like a mad zombie. When I finally got out they were glad to see me go, let me tell you. You in a gang?”
“No sir.”
“Well how you expect to get anywhere, how you expect to learn anything? I hire from gangs. That’s the training ground. You ever hear of the Frog Hollow gang?”
“No sir.”
“Jesus. That was the most famous of all the old Bronx gangs. What’s the matter with this generation? That was the gang of the first Dutch Schultz, don’t you know that? The toughest street fighter who ever lived. He’d bite your nose off. He’d pull your balls out by the root. My gang named me after him I got back from the reform. It was a honorary thing. It showed I’d done my time and gone through it, and come out of my training a son of a bitch in spades. So ever since that’s why I’m called the Dutchman.”
I cleared my throat and looked out through the screen over the privet hedges to the water, where a small boat with a triangular white sail seemed to be sailing the shimmering mesh. “There are some gangs now,” I said, “but they are dumb f*cking kids, mostly. I don’t want to pay for no one’s mistakes but my own. I think these days for the real training you got to go right to the top.”
I held my breath. I didn’t dare look at him, I looked at my feet. I could feel his gaze on me. I could smell his cigar.
“Hey Otto,” he said, “wake the hell up, you’re really missing something.”
“Oh? That’s what you think,” Mr. Berman said from under his hat.
It didn’t all happen at once but it happened night and day, there seemed to be no rule of time, no plan except the possible moment and whatever it was we drove to it in a car, and when you look out the window at the life you’re going through to get to this moment it takes on an odd cast, so that if the sun is shining it’s shining too brightly, or if it is night it is too black, all the organization of the world seems part of the conspiracy of your attention, and whatever is naturally around you becomes unnatural by the peculiarly absolute moral demand of what you are doing. This was my wish, I was training at the top. I remember for instance being dropped off at the corner of Broadway and Forty-ninth Street and told to hang around and keep my eyes open. That was all that was said, but it was momentous. One of the cars sped off and I didn’t see it again, the other, the one with Mr. Berman, kept coming around the block every few minutes, a single black squarish Chevrolet sedan inconspicuous in the traffic of black cars and the yellow checker cabs cruising for fares and the double-decker buses and streetcars, relatively empty, and neither Mickey the driver nor Mr. Berman looked at me as they passed, and I derived from that not to look particularly at them. I stood in the doorway of Jack Dempsey’s restaurant that had not yet opened for the day, it must have been nine or nine-thirty in the morning, and Broadway was fairly fresh, the newsstands and coconut-drink and hotdog stands were open and a couple of the stores that sold little lead Statues of Liberty but not much else. There was a second-floor dance studio across Forty-ninth Street and the big window was tilted open and someone was playing “Bye, Bye, Blackbird” on the piano. There is a local Broadway, a community of Broadway that you see in the morning before the penny arcades and bars open for the day, the people who live upstairs in the tenements above the movie marquees, who come out with their dogs on the leash to get the Racing Form and the Mirror and buy a bottle of milk. And the bakery delivery men who pull up and carry the racks of breads and big bags of rolls into the groceries, or the butcher trucks with the guys loading big raw sides of beef on their shoulders and dumping them on the roller chutes leading down to the basements underneath the restaurants. I kept watching and saw the street sweeper with his big broom and his summer white with the khaki-and-orange trim on his hat load up the horse manure and paper and crap and trash of a Broadway night on his wide-blade shovel and dump it all into the big ashcan on his two-wheel cart as if he was a housewife tidying up her kitchen. A while later the tanked water wagon came along Spraying the street so that it looked shining and fresh and almost simultaneously I saw the string of electric lights go on around the Loew’s State Theatre a few blocks below where Broadway ran into Seventh Avenue. In the sun it was not entirely possible to read the headlines riding in lights around the Times Building on Times Square. The black Chevrolet came around again and this time Mr. Berman glanced at me and I began to feel anxious, I wanted to see whatever it was I was supposed to see but the traffic was ordinary, not particularly heavy, and the people on the sidewalk were going about their business with no great urgency, a man in a suit and tie came along with a crate of apples on his shoulder and set it up on the corner with his APPLES 5￠ sign, the morning was warming up and I wondered if what I needed was in the window behind me where Jack Dempsey was shown in a big blowup photo of the ring in Manila with thousands watching, and there were other photos of the great man shaking hands with famous people, show people like Jimmy Durante and Fanny Brice and Rudy Vallee, but then in the reflection of the restaurant glass I saw the office building across the street, and I turned around to look, up on the fifth or sixth floor a man climbed out on a ledge with a pail and sponge and affixed his safety belt to the hooks imbedded in the brick and leaned back against the belt and began to make wide arcs with his soapy sponge on the window, and then I saw another man on another window ledge on the floor above him coming out to do the same thing. I watched these men washing the windows and then for some reason I knew this was what I was supposed to see, these window washers doing the morning’s work high above the street. And on the sidewalk below them was a sign, the kind that supports itself like an A, advising passersby that work was going on overhead and to take care, and it was the sign the window washers had set up in the name of their union. I had by now crossed Broadway and stood on the southwest corner of Forty-ninth Street and Seventh Avenue and I watched these guys working up there, two of them were on a scaffold hanging from the roof parapet maybe fifteen stories above the street and I saw this was the expedient for the extra large windows at the top that were too wide for a safety belt to span. And it was this scaffold with the two men and their sponges and pails and rags which suddenly lurched, the rope on one side snapping up into the air like a whip, and the two men flinging their arms back and spilling down the scaffold. One of them came down the side of the building wheeling. I don’t know if I shouted, or who else saw it happen or heard it, but while he was still several stories up, some seconds above his death, the whole street knew. The traffic was stopped as if every vehicle had been pulled up taut on the same string. There was a collective screech, a total apprehension of disaster on the part of every pedestrian for blocks around, as if we had all been aware all along of what was going on above our heads in the sky, so that the moment the composition was disturbed everyone knew instantly. Then the body at a point of flat and horizontal extension hit the roof of a car parked in front of the building and the sound it made was as a cannon going off, a terrible explosion of the force of bone and flesh, and what made me gasp was that he moved, the guy moved in that concavity of metal he had made, a sinuosity of bone-smashed inching, as if it was a worm there curling for a moment on the hot metal before even that degree of incredible life trembled out through the fingers.
A cop on a horse was now galloping past me on Forty-ninth Street. The other window washer was still up there hanging from the unhinged end of the vertical scaffold and kicking his legs to find purchase where there was none, screaming up there as the platform swayed from side to side in the way least calculated to ensure his survival. What does a man have in his arms eight ten stories above the ground, what does he have in his fingers, in the muscles of his fingertips, what do we hold to in this world of unholy depth which presents for us its bottomless possibilities in air in water in the paved soil that opens up under us, cracking like a thunderstorm of the most specific density? Green-and-white police cars were converging from all directions. Up at Fifty-seventh Street a hook-and-ladder fire engine was turning into Broadway. I was breathless with the fascination of disaster.
“Hey kid!”
Behind me on Broadway was Mr. Berman’s Chevrolet, which was pulled up to the curb. The door opened. I ran back the short block and got in and slammed the door behind me and Mickey the driver took off. “Don’t gawk, kid, you leave that to hicks,” Mr. Berman said. He was put out with me. “You are not in the sightseeing business. You’re told to stay somewhere you stay there.”
At this I forbore to look back out the window, which I would otherwise have done even knowing that the progress of the car down Broadway would have blocked the scene from my sight. But I felt the will in myself in not moving but sitting back silently and staring ahead.
Mickey the driver had both hands on the wheel when he didn’t reach down to shift. If the wheel was a clock he held it at ten and two. He drove moderately but not slowly, he did not contend with the traffic but used it to his advantage without ever seeming to speed or cut anyone off. He did not try to make a changing light, or upon a light’s turning green to speed off with it. Mickey was the driver and that’s all he was, but that was everything; you knew watching him and feeling the movement of the car under you that there was a difference between driving a car and running it with the authority of a professional. I myself did not know how to drive, how could I, but I knew that Mickey would drive a car as calmly and safely at a hundred miles an hour as at thirty, that whatever he called upon a car to do it would do, and now with the vision in my mind of the helpless window washer falling to his death, Mickey’s competence stood in my mind as a silent rebuke in confirmation of Mr. Berman’s remark.
I don’t think in all the time I knew him while he was alive I ever exchanged a word with Mickey. I think he was ashamed of his speech. His intelligence was all in his meaty hands and in his eyes, which you sometimes saw flick back for a professional second in the rearview mirror. They were light blue. He was totally hairless, with fat ridges at the back of his neck which I got to know well. His ears bulbed out in back. He had been a prizefighter who never got further than the preliminaries in club fights. His greatest distinction was having been TKO’d by Kid Chocolate in one of his earliest fights when the Kid was coming up, one night in the Jerome Arena just across the street from Yankee Stadium. Or so I had heard. I don’t know why but I wanted to cry for us all. Mickey drove us over to the West Side into some truck garage, and while Mr. Berman and I went across the street to a diner for coffee, the Chevrolet was exchanged for another car, which appeared with Mickey at the wheel maybe twenty minutes later. It was a Nash with totally different black-and-orange license plates. “Nobody dies who doesn’t sin,” Mr. Berman had said to me in the diner. “And since that covers everybody, it’s something we can all look forward to.” Then he tossed one of those little number-square games on the table for me to amuse myself with: the one with sixteen squares and fifteen little numbered tiles which you have to put in order by shoving them around until they’re in sequence. The point is you have only that one space to use to get everything around where it belongs; one space usually in the wrong place to put everything in the order in which it belongs.
But as I say it was a kind of enlistment, I had walked in and signed up. And the first thing you learn is there are no ordinary rules of the night and day, there are just different kinds of light, granules of degree, and so no reason to have more or less to do in one than in another. The blackest quietest hour was only a kind of light.
There was no attempt on anyone’s part to provide explanations for why things were being done and no one sought to justify anything. I knew better than to ask questions. What I did understand is that a strong ethic prevailed, all the normal umbrages and hurts were in operation, all the outraged sensibilities of justice, all the convictions of right and wrong, once you accepted the first pure inverted premise. But it was the premise I had to work on. I found it was easiest when Mr. Schultz talked to me; at these times for a few moments things were clear. I decided I had so far the idea of it but not the feeling, it was the feeling that made for the genius of the idea as anyone could tell just being in Mr. Schultz’s presence.
In the meantime I could figure out things were being done at a level of intensity that perhaps had been anticipated in the quiet afternoons on the back porch of the City Island house. I will tell here about Mr. Schultz’s Embassy Club. It was a place he owned, one of his properties, and it was quite publicly visible with a fancy canopy with its name in scripted letters on East Fifty-sixth Street between Park and Lexington avenues. I knew all about nightclubs from the gossip columns, and the customers who went there and the fancy names some of them had, from high society, and how they all seemed to know each other, movie stars and actors and actresses coming in after work, and ball players and writers and senators, I knew there were sometimes floor shows with bands and chorus girls or black women who sang the blues, and I knew each place had bouncers for the unruly and the girls selling cigarettes on trays while they walked around in net stockings and cute little pillbox hats, I knew all that though I had never seen it.
So I was excited when they sent me to work there as a busboy. Imagine me, a kid, working downtown in a nightclub! But in the week I worked there it was nothing like I expected. There was first of all not one single famous person I saw while I was there. There were people who came and ate and drank and listened to the little orchestra and danced, but they were unimportant. I knew that because they kept looking around for the important people they had come to see. Most nights the place was half empty except toward eleven o’clock when the floor show went on. The whole place was lit in blue light with banquettes around the walls and tables with blue tablecloths around a small dance floor, and a small stage with no curtain where the band played, not a great band, two saxophones and a trumpet and a piano and guitar and drums, and there was a hatcheck girl but no cigarette girls and no midnight reporters come to get dirt from the famous, no Walter Winchell or Damon Runyon, the place was dead, and it was dead because Mr. Schultz couldn’t show up there. He was the attraction. People liked to be where things happened or could happen. They liked power. The bartender stood behind the bar with his arms folded and yawned. At the worst possible table, by the door where it was drafty, every night two assistant United States attorneys sat with lime rickeys they did not touch and filled the ashtrays which I emptied conscientiously. They did not look at me. Nobody looked at me in my short maroon jacket and bow tie, I was so low-down as to be supposed legitimate. I was making good in the nightclub world and took a sort of scintillating pride in the fact that as a busboy I was beneath even the notice of the old-time waiters. That made me valuable. Because I had been put there by Mr. Berman with the usual admonition to keep my eyes open. And I did, and I learned what idiots people could make of themselves who came to nightclubs, and how they loved it if a bottle of champagne cost them twenty-five dollars, and the headwaiter gave them a table when they pressed a twenty-dollar bill in his hand though there were so many empty tables they could have asked for the one they wanted and he would have led them to it for nothing. It was a narrow room, an empty scene, and between sets the band stood out in the alley and every one of them was a viper, even the girl singer, and on the third or fourth night she turned her hand upside down to me and handed me a roach and I sucked on it like I had seen them doing and sipped it in, that harsh bitter tea, like a scatter of embers going down my throat, and of course I coughed and they laughed, but the laughter was kindly; except for the singer they were white musicians not much older than I was and I don’t know what they took me for, maybe someone working his way through college, and I let them think it, whatever it was, all I needed was a pair of Harold Lloyd horn-rim glasses and the act would have been perfect. In the kitchen though that was a different story, the chef there was a Negro who was in charge, he smoked cigarettes, the ashes of which dropped onto the steaks he was frying, and he had a cleaver with which he threatened waiters or underlings who offended him. He was a perpetually angry man who blew into flares of rage like the flames that flew up in the fat drippings. The only one who wasn’t afraid of him was the dishwasher, an old gray-haired Negro man with a limp who seemed to be able to stick his bare arms in tubs of scalding soapy water with no feeling. We were close because I brought him the dishes. He appreciated the way I scraped them. We were professionals together. You had to be careful in the kitchen because the floor was as greasy as a garage’s. Cockroaches were in leisurely residence on the wall almost as if they were stuck there, and the flypaper that hung from the light-bulb strings was black, and sometimes on the counters themselves a mouse or two scurried from one food bin to another. This was all behind the padded swinging doors with the oval windows of the blue-lit Embassy Club.
Yet I stopped to listen to the girl singer when I could. She had a sweet thin voice and seemed to look far away when she sang. They would always get up to dance when she sang because the women liked her songs of loss and loneliness and loving men who didn’t love them back. The one I love belongs to somebody else. He means his tender songs for somebody else. She stood in front of the microphone and sang with very little gesture, perhaps because of all the tea she smoked, and every once in a while, at really inappropriate moments of the lyrics, she hiked up her strapless satin gown as if she was afraid even her listless gestures would expose her breasts.
Then every morning at about four or four-thirty Mr. Berman arrived looking as fresh as the morning in some artful combination of pastel colors. At this point everyone would have left, the U.S. District Attorney’s men, the waiters, the band, the place was only ostensibly open, with maybe the beat cop with his hat on the bar having one on the house. And it was my job to go pull all the tablecloths off the tables, and stack the chairs on them so that the two cleaning women who came in in the morning would be able to vacuum the carpet under the tables and mop and wax the dance floor. After this I was summoned to the basement, where a small paneled office was maintained just down the hall from a fire door leading to a kind of culvert that led up a flight of iron stairs to an alley. And in this office Mr. Berman would go over the night’s receipts and ask me what I had seen. I would of course have seen nothing except what for me was the new life of Manhattan, a life of the night, where in one short week everything was inverted and I finished work at dawn and went to sleep in the daytime. What I had seen was the life of the big time and a certain fluency of money not as it was earned and collected, as on 149th Street, but as it was spent and as it was turned into blue light and fancy clothes and indifferently delivered love songs. I had seen that the hatcheck girl paid Mr. Berman for her job, rather than the other way around, but that this seemed to be profitable to her as she went off duty each night with a different man waiting under the canopy outside. But this was not what he meant when he asked the question. I had seen my witchy little friend Rebecca in my mind dressed in high heels and some kind of black lacy gown dancing with me there to the songs of the girl singer. I thought she would even be impressed with me in my waistcoat busboy jacket. I slept in that same office after Mr. Berman left, and there I dreamed of making love to Rebecca and not having to pay for it. In my dream I was in the rackets and this made her love me enough to enjoy what I was doing to her. But certainly this was not what Mr. Berman had in mind. Half the time I awoke in the morning all gummed up in my sleep, which created laundry problems, and I solved these too like a denizen of Broadway, finding a Chinese laundry on Lexington Avenue, but also buying myself socks and underwear and shirts and pants over on Third Avenue under the El. It was like my Third Avenue. I was not unhappy this week. I found I was really comfortable in the city, it was no different from the Bronx, it was only what the Bronx wanted to be, it was streets and they could be learned and I had a job which paid twelve dollars a week now, dispensed from Mr. Berman’s pockets just for me to haul dishes around and keep my eyes open though I did not know for what. And after the third or fourth day of this I rarely saw in my mind the cartwheeling body of the window washer in the sun coming down alongside the office building on Seventh Avenue. It was almost as if the East Side was a different behavior even for the rackets. I slept below ground in that office on a fold-out cot and, along about noon, came up the iron stairs into the alley and walked around the corner and a few blocks down and found a cafeteria on Lexington Avenue where the cab drivers had their lunch while I had my breakfast. I ate big breakfasts. I bought rolls and buns for old men the cafeteria owner was trying to kick out the revolving door. I reflected on my competence for life and could find nothing to criticize except perhaps not going uptown to see my mother. I called her once to the phone at the candy store on the corner of our block and told her I would be away for a while but I didn’t know if she would remember. It had taken fifteen minutes on an open line for someone to find her and bring her downstairs.
I mention all this as an interlude of peace and reflection.
Then one night I was able to tell Mr. Berman that Bo Weinberg had come in with a party and had dinner and paid the band to do a couple of numbers of his choice. Not that I had recognized him, but the waiters had all come alive. Mr. Berman did not seem surprised. “Bo will be in again,” he said. “Never mind who he sits with. See who sits at the bar near the door.” And so I did, a couple of nights later, when Bo reappeared with a pretty blond woman and another good-looking couple, a well-dressed man with a blond pompadour and a brunette. They took the best banquette, near the bandstand. And all those customers who had come there that evening looking for the peculiar excitement seemed now to believe it was their good fortune to have found it. It wasn’t merely that Bo looked good, although undeniably he did, a tall, rugged, swarthy man impeccably groomed and with teeth that seemed to shine, but that he seemed to drink up the available light, so that blue light turned red and everyone else in the room seemed dim and small by comparison. He and his party were wearing formal clothes as if they had come from someplace important, like the opera or a Broadway show. He greeted this one and that one, he acted as if he owned the joint. The musicians came out earlier than they might have and the dancing started. And soon the Embassy Club was what I had imagined a nightclub should be. From one minute to the next the place was packed, as if all of New York City had come running. People kept coming up to Bo’s table to introduce themselves. The man Bo was with was a famous golfer, but I didn’t recognize the name. Golf was not my sport. The women laughed and smoked a puff or two of a cigarette and as soon as it was mushed out I changed the ashtray. It was odd, the more people there were and the noisier the place got with music and laughter, the bigger the Embassy Club seemed to be, until it seemed the only place that there was, I mean with nothing outside, no street, no city, no country. My ears were ringing, I was a busboy but I felt it was my personal triumph when Walter Winchell himself appeared and sat for a few minutes at Bo’s table, although I hardly saw him, because I was working my ass off. Later Bo Weinberg actually addressed me, telling me to tell the waiter to refresh the drinks of the assistant U.S. attorneys who were sitting at the drafty table by the door. This caused great merriment. Well after midnight, when they decided to have something to eat, and I went up to the table to place the little hard rolls in their little plates with my silver tongs, as I by now knew how to do with aplomb, I had to restrain the urge to pick up three or four of the rolls and juggle them in time to the music, which at the moment happened to be “Limehouse Blues,” which the band did in a very stately and deliberate rhythm. Oh Limehouse kid, Oh Oh Limehouse kid, going the way that the rest of them did.
But for all of that I never forgot my instruction from Mr. Berman. The man who had come in just before Bo Weinberg and sat at the end of the bar was not Lulu Rosenkrantz with the ridged brow, and not Mickey with the floret ears, and it wasn’t anyone I had ever seen on any of the trucks or in the office on 149th Street, and in fact no one at all that I recognized from the organization. It was a small, pudgy man in a double-breasted pearl gray suit with big lapels and a green satin tie and a white-on-white shirt and he didn’t stay that long, smoking just a cigarette or two and drinking a mineral water. He seemed to enjoy the music in a quiet and private way. He didn’t talk to anyone and minded his own business and kept his porkpie hat on the bar beside him.
Later when the morning rose in the basement office in the culvert off the alley, Mr. Berman lifted his eyes from the stacks of cashier slips and said “So?” his brown eyes with the pale blue rims looking at me through his spectacles. I had noticed the man used his own matches and left the book in the ashtray and I picked it out of the trash behind the bar after he left. But this was not the moment to give my proof. It was necessary only to make the essential attribution. “An out-of-towner,” I said. “A goombah from Cleveland.”
There was no sleep for me that morning. Mr. Berman sent me out to a phone booth and I dialed the number he gave me, let it ring three times and hung up. I brought back coffee and rolls. The cleaning women came in and did up the club. It was now nice and peaceful in there with all the lights out except one light over the bar and whatever silt of the morning sun managed to drift in through the curtains on the front doors. Part of what I was learning was when to be on hand and visible, as opposed to being on hand and invisible. The second was the expedient I chose now, perhaps from no more evidence than Mr. Berman’s disinclination at this time to talk to me. I sat upstairs at the bar all alone in the dusk of the morning tired as hell and not without pride in myself for having made what I knew was a useful identification. But then all of a sudden there was Irving, which meant Mr. Schultz was somewhere nearby. Irving stood behind the bar and put some ice in a glass, then he cut a lime in quarters and with his fingers squeezed lime juice into the glass, and then filled the glass with a spritz from the seltzer bottle. When all this was meticulously done, with not so much as a ring left on the bar surface, Irving drank off his lime soda in one draft. He then washed the glass and dried it with a bar towel and replaced it under the counter. At this moment it occurred to me that my self-satisfaction was inane. It consisted in believing I was the subject of my experience. And then when Irving went to the front door, where someone had been knocking on the glass for some minutes, and admitted the improvident city fire inspector who had picked just this time, and why, except that the words in the air of the great stone city go softly whispering in the lambent morning that this sachem is dead and that one is dying, as if we were some desert blooming in the smallest flowers with the prophecies of ancient tribes, I saw even before it happened what an error of thought could lead to, that presumption was dangerous, that the confidence of imperception was deadly, that this man had forgotten what a fire inspector was, his place in the theory of inspections, his lesser place in the system of fires. Irving was ready with money from his own pocket and would have had the guy out of there in another minute but that Mr. Schultz happened to come upstairs from the office with the morning’s news. At another time Mr. Schultz might have genuinely admired the man’s gall and peeled off a few dollars. Or he might have said you dumb f*ck you know better than to walk in here with this shit. He might have said you got a complaint you talk to your department. He might have said I’ll make one phone call and have your ass you stupid son of a bitch. But as it happened he gave this roar of rage, took him down and mashed his windpipe and used the dance floor to make an eggshell of his skull. A young man with a head of curly hair is what I saw of him alive in that light, maybe a few years older than me, a wife and kid in Queens, who knows? who like me had ambitions for his life. I had never seen anyone being killed close up like that. I can’t tell even now how long it took. It seemed like a long time. And what is most unnatural is the sounds. They are the sounds of ultimate emotion, as sexual sounds can sometimes seem to be, except they are shameful and degrading to the idea of life, that it can be so humiliated so eternally humiliated. Mr. Schultz arose from the floor and brushed his pants knees. There was not a spot of blood on him although it was webbed out in strings and matter all around the head on the floor. He hitched up his pants and smoothed his hair with his hands and straightened his tie. He was drawing great gasping breaths. He looked as if he was about to cry. “Get this load of shit out of here,” he said, including me in the instruction. Then he went back downstairs.
I couldn’t seem to move. Irving told me to bring an empty garbage can from the kitchen. When I got back he had folded the body and tied it head to ankles with the guy’s jacket. I think now he must have had to crack the guy’s spine to get him doubled so tight. The jacket was over the head. That was a great relief to me. The torso still had heat. We inserted the folded body ass-down in the galvanized-iron garbage can and stuffed the space around with wooden straw of the kind that protects French bottles of wine in their cases, hammered the lid on with our fists and put the can out with the night’s refuse just as the carter came along on Fifty-sixth Street. Irving had a word with the driver. They are private companies that take away commercial refuse, the city only does citizen garbage. Two guys stand on the sidewalk and heave the can up to the fellow standing in the truck on top of all the garbage. That fellow dumps out the contents and tosses the empty can back over the side to the guys in the street. All the cans came back except one, and if a crowd had been standing around, which there wasn’t, for who in the fresh world of the morning wants to watch the cleanup of the night before, the truck motors grinding, the ashcans hitting the sidewalk with that tympanic carelessness of the profession, nobody would have noticed that the truck drove away with one packed garbage can imbedded in all that odorous crap of the glamorous night, or dreamed that in an hour or two it would be shoveled by tractor deep below the anguished yearnings of the flights of seagulls wheeling over the Flushing Meadow landfill.
What depressed Irving, what depressed Abbadabba Berman, was that this had not been part of the plan. I saw it in their faces. It was not so much a fear that there could be unforeseen complications, that was not a professional worry. It was that such poor slobs who on their own get high-and-mighty ideas, which are in fact low ideas of what high-and-mighty is, are unnecessary to kill. Essentially the guy was not in the business. After a while even Mr. Schultz looked depressed. It was still morning and he had a couple of Cherry Heerings served to him by Irving at the bar. He looked glum, as if he understood he was getting to be a cross they all, himself included, had to bear. There was this interesting separation he made now from his own temperament. “I can’t deal with it when it’s all over the street,” he said. “Irving, you remember that Norma Floy, that gash who took me for thirty-five thousand dollars? She run out on me with that f*cking horseback-riding instructor? What did I do? What did I do? I laughed. More power to her. Of course I ever find her little blond head I’ll break every tooth in it. But maybe I won’t. And that’s the point. These guys are putting it out on the street. I mean the f*cking fire inspectors? What next, I mean the mailmen?”
“We still got time,” Mr. Berman said.
“Sure, sure. But anything is better than this. I can’t take this no more. I’m finished with this. I’ve been listening to too many lawyers. Otto, you know the Feds are not going to let me pay the taxes I owe them.”
“That is correct.”
“I want one more meeting with Dixie. And I want to make things really clear to Hines. After that we will confront what we must confront.”
“We are not without resources,” Mr. Berman said.
“That’s right. We will do the one or two essential things it appears now we must do. And then it’s on to Shangri-la. I’ll show those f*ckhead sons of bitches. All of them. I’m still the Dutchman.”
Mr. Berman told me to come outside and we stood beside the empty garbage cans by the curb. He said the following: “Supposing you have numbers to the number one hundred, how much is each number worth? It is true that one number might be the value one, and another number the value ninety-nine, which is ninety-nine ones, but each of them in the row of one hundred is only worth a hundredth of the hundred, you get it?” I said I got it. “All right,” he said, “now knock off ninety of those numbers and say all you got left is ten of them, it doesn’t matter which ten, say the first five and the last five, how much is each number worth? It doesn’t matter what it says its number is, it’s its share in the total that matters, you get it?” I said I got it. “So the fewer the numbers the more each one is worth, am I right? And it doesn’t matter what it says it is as a number, it’s worth its weight in gold is what it’s worth compared to what it was surrounded by all the other numbers. You unnerstan the point?” I said I did. “Good, good, you think about these things then. How a number can look like one thing but mean another. How a number can look like one thing, but have the worth of another. After all, you’d think a number was a number and that’s all it was. But here is a simple example how that is not so. Come take a walk with me. You look terrible. You look green. You need some fresh air.”
We turned east, came to Lexington, crossed, and headed for Third. We walked slowly as you had to do with Mr. Berman. He walked slightly sideways. He said, “I’ll tell you my favorite number, but I want you to guess what it might be.” I said, “I don’t know, Mr. Berman. I can’t guess. Maybe the number that you can make all the other numbers from.” “That is not bad,” he said, “except that you can do that with any number. No, my favorite number is ten, you know why? It has an equal number of odd and even numbers in it. It has the unit number, and the absence of the unit number which is mistakenly called zero. It has the first odd number and the first even number and the first square. And it has the first four numbers which when you add them up add up to itself. Ten is my lucky number. You have a lucky number?”
I shook my head. “You might consider ten,” he said. “I want you to go home.” He took out a wad of bills from his pocket. “Here’s your salary for the busing job, twelve dollars, plus eight dollars severance pay, you are hereby fired.”
Before I could react he said, “And here’s twenty dollars just for the hell of it because you can read the names of Italian restaurants on matchbooks. And that’s your money.”
I took the money and folded it and put it in my pocket. “Thank you.”
“Now,” he said, “here’s fifty dollars I’m giving to you, five tens, but this is my money. You unnerstan how I can give it to you but it is still mine?”
“You want me to buy you something?”
“That is correct. My directions for it are I want you to buy me yourself a new pair of pants or two and a nice jacket, and a shirt and a tie and a pair of shoes with laces. You see those sneakers you’re wearing? It was a personal embarrassment to me to come in the morning and to see that a busboy at the elegant Embassy Club was walking around all night in his Nat Holman basketball sneakers with the laces so far gone the tongue hanging out of the mouth, and a big toe showing for the final insult. You are lucky few people look at feet. I happen to notice such things. I want you to burn those sneakers. I want you to get a haircut so you don’t look like Ish Kabibble on a rainy night. I want you to buy a valise and into the valise put some nice new underwear and socks and a book to read. I want you to buy a real book from a bookstore, not a magazine, not a comic book, a real book, and put that in the valise too. I want you to buy a pair of glasses to read the book if it comes to that. See? Glasses, like I wear.”
“I don’t use glasses,” I said. “I got perfect eyesight.”
“You go to the pawnshop and you’ll find they have glasses with plain glass. Just do what I say, all right? And do this. Take a few days. Take it easy, try to enjoy yourself. There’s time. When we need you we’ll send for you.”
We were by now standing at the foot of the stairs to the Third Avenue Elevated. It was going to be another hot summer day. I had mentally counted the money in my pocket, ninety dollars. At this moment Mr. Berman unpeeled another ten. “And buy something nice for your mother,” he said, the one remark that rang in my head all the way home on the train.