Billy Bathgate

EIGHT

What woke me was the chill of empty air on my skin, and the degree of ashen gray light that represented morning in the basement of the Max and Dora Diamond Home for Children. A mound of black and rose lace lay on the floor beside the couch as if the witch had disembodied: My lover had gone back upstairs to her childhood. Institutional orphans know with a basic workaday cunning how not to get caught, and it occurred to me that that was not bad training for a gangster’s girl. I wondered what age people had to be before they could marry. I reflected as I lay there that my life was changing more quickly and in more ways than I could keep up with. Or was it all just one thing, as if everything had the same charge to it, so that if I was remade to Mr. Schultz’s touch, Becky was remade to mine, and there was only one infinitely extending flash of conformation. She had never come before, with me anyway, and I felt pretty sure with nobody else either. Her cunt barely had hair. She was growing herself up to match me.
Oh my God what I felt right then for this mysterious parent-less little girl, this Mediterranean olive, this nimble nipply witch-ling, with her arching backbone, her downy ass, as hard-living dumb as a female could be. She liked me! I wanted to race her, I knew she could run, I would give her a head start because I was older, and I bet she could make a good race of it. I had seen her jump rope, inexhaustibly, with lots of tricks, on one foot, or with a quick two-step, or skipping through the snapping arcs, hip-hopping through a double rope, the left and right coming from opposite directions, and do it faster and longer than anyone else. She could walk on her hands too, totally careless of her falling inversion of skirt and her white panties for all the boys to see, her swarthy legs waving in the air, as she paraded the street upside down. She was an athlete, a gymnast: I would teach her to juggle, I would teach her and myself at the same time to throw-juggle till we had six bowling pins flying in the air between us.
But first I wanted to buy her something. I tried to think of what it should be. I listened. I knew the orphans’ home as well as I knew my own, I could lie there, and even hung over, and with every signal sense refracted in an atmosphere fetid with stale beer, I could tell by the degree of vibration of the building what time of day it was: they were barely beginning to get going in the kitchen. It was just dawn. I roused myself, grabbed my clothes, and sneaking up a back stairs I made it to the Boys Showers and ten minutes later was out in the new morning, the hair of my recent haircut wet and shining, my Shadows jacket turned out in satin white, and the breakfast to hand a fresh bagel lifted from the big bread bag left before light on the delivery platform by the Pechter’s Bakery truck.
It was so early nobody was up yet, not even my mother. The streets were empty, the lamppost lights were still on under the white sky. I had the idea, going to Third Avenue, that I would look in the pawnshop windows for something and just wait around for the day to begin to buy it. I wanted to buy Becky a piece of jewelry, maybe even a ring.
At this hour not even the newsstand at the foot of the El station had opened. The morning papers lay baled in twine where they’d been tossed from the trucks. I knew the headline in the Mirror was meant for me before I looked at it, I felt the attraction of the words before I read them: GRISLY GANG MURDER. Underneath was a murky photo of a dead man in a barber chair who I thought was headless until I read the caption explaining that his head was swathed in bloodied barbers’ hot towels. Some West Side numbers boss. I was so distracted, I actually put my three cents on the ground by the stack of papers before I pulled one out to get the story.
I read with a proprietary interest, I read first in the shadow of the El and then not sure I’d gotten it all I stepped into a stripe of light cast by the space between the overhead tracks, I held my arms out and I read again in the pacific glare of the morning the Mirror gang murder of the day, while nothing moved on any of the levels, neither train nor trolley, except the pattern of darkness striped with light up and down the cobbled avenue like a jail guard running his stick along the bars of the cells, my head beginning to hurt through the eyes, and the recognition of darkness alternating with light in the black print on the white paper as the personal message for me in this news.
For of course I knew whose work this was, there wasn’t much more to the story than there was in the headline and the picture, but I read with intense concentration, not merely as one who was in the same trade, but of the same shop, I was reading of my mentor, and the proof was I didn’t need any proof, I knew to the point of looking for Mr. Schultz’s name in the story, and wondering why it wasn’t there, numb and not thinking properly after my first night on earth of love, as if everybody in the world would know something because I did, as if I didn’t know anything nobody else knew, especially the papers. I went back and pulled out a News, which had almost the same picture and no more information, and then I took a Herald Tribune, one of those hifalutin rags, and they didn’t know anything more than the others, although they used more words. None of them knew. Gangsters were killed every day in the week and why and by whom was a matter of public confusion. Lines of power crossed in secret, allies became enemies, partnerships split up, any one man could be killed by just about anybody else in the business on any given day, and the press, the cops, they needed eyewitnesses, testimony, documentation, to make their tracings and figure things out. They might have their theories but it took them a while to get up an authoritative version, as with all historians going through the wreckage after the silence has set in. By contrast I immediately knew, as if I had been there. He had used whatever was to hand. He had improvised something from his rage, I mean you don’t sit someone down in a barber chair to murder him, you find him there and you grab a razor. He had gone totally out of his mind the way he did with the fire inspector, I had caught on with the great Dutch Schultz in his decline of empire, he was losing control, it was a bloody maniac’s portrait there on the front page, and now what the f*ck was I going to do? I had this sense of being implicated in a way that wasn’t fair to me, as if he had broken a trust and there was nothing after all to learn from him except self-destruction.
I broke into a clammy sweat and that most dreaded and unendurable of feelings, nausea, rose in me. At such times you just want to fling yourself on the ground and clutch it, nothing else is possible. I looked around and dropped the papers in an ashcan, as if I could be arrested for holding them, as if they were evidence of my complicity.
I sat in a doorway and put my head between my knees and waited for the awful nausea to go away. After a few minutes I felt better, the sweat turns to a chill and you’re all right, you can breathe again. Perhaps this was the moment when I germinated my secret conviction that I could always get out, that they could come looking but they’d never find me, that I knew more escapes than they dreamed of. But consciously all I could think was that Mr. Schultz was a greater danger to me when I was not in his presence than when I was. He’d do another one of these things that I wouldn’t know about and I’d be picked up. All of them, Mr. Berman too, the less I saw of them the more vulnerable I became. It was a most contrary proposition but as a feeling it was indisputable. If I didn’t have him where I could see him, how could I get away if I didn’t know when to run? Then and there I knew I had to be back with the gang, it was my empowerment, my protection. I felt, sitting there under the El, that not being with them was a luxury I couldn’t afford. It wasn’t safe not to be around them.
I told myself I wasn’t thinking clearly. To calm down I started walking. I walked and walked, and by and by like some assurance to me that the world could take whatever happened to it, the El came along thundering overhead, cars and trucks appeared in the streets, the people who had jobs were going to them, the streetcars rang their gongs, shopkeepers opened their doors, and I found a diner and went in and sat at the counter shoulder-to-shoulder with my fellow citizens of the world and drank tomato juice and coffee and feeling somewhat better ordered two eggs sunny-side up and toast and bacon and a doughnut and more coffee, and topped everything off with a reflective cigarette, and by then the outlook wasn’t so bad. He had said to Mr. Berman in my presence: There are one or two essential things it appears we must do. The window washers falling twelve stories down the side of a building was one of these things and this was another. This was a planned business murder as concise and to the point as a Western Union telegram. The victim after all had been in the business. He was the competition. Therefore his murder was symbolically meaningful for the few people with whom Mr. Schultz wanted to communicate. But at the same time because it was done with a razor it would more probably suggest to the D.A.’s office and to every crime reporter certainly, and to the cops in the know and to the top Tammany people, and in fact to everybody in the industry except the competition, that it must be someone else’s work because it didn’t have the Dutchman’s signature—it was a Negro’s type of murder, or a Sicilian’s in its vindictiveness, but in any event there was enough of everything in it to be anyone’s work.
So all of this was very consoling except now I began to resent that I had been sent away when all these important matters were being adjudicated. I worried that my position had been changed without my knowing it, or worse, that I had overestimated it to begin with. So I walked back up Third Avenue beginning to feel as uneasy as I had originally and with the identical need to be back with Mr. Schultz. I was in a very strange state. I had looked green after the morning murder in the Embassy Club. Maybe I shouldn’t have looked so green. Maybe they thought I didn’t have what it took. Soon I was running. I was running home in shadow and light. I ran up the stairs two at a time in case a message had come for me while I was gone.
But there was no message. My mother stood twirling up her hair. She glanced at me curiously with her arms raised and her hands behind her head and two of those long jeweled pins crosswise between her teeth. I could hardly wait for her to leave for work. She had an infuriating slowness about her, as if each of her minutes was longer than anyone else’s, it was a kind of stately time she moved in of her own weird invention. Finally the door closed behind her. I grabbed my new secondhand valise from the back of the closet, a leather number that folded in at the top like a very large doctor’s instrument bag, and I packed my I. Cohen suit and wing-tip shoes and shirt and tie, and my plain glass steel-rim spectacles that looked like Mr. Berman’s and some underwear and socks. I packed my toothbrush and hairbrush. I had still not bought a book from a bookstore but I could do that downtown. I had to wheel the terrible baby carriage of my mother’s affection out of the way in order to get under the bed where I had hidden my Automatic. I put that in at the bottom, underneath everything else, snapped the hasps, buckled the straps and put the valise by the front door, and I put myself on watch at the fire escape window. I was convinced they would come and get me this very morning. It was now a matter of great urgency to me that they should. It was not possible that they wouldn’t. Why would Mr. Berman insist that I get new clothes if they were just going to abandon me? Besides I knew too much. And I was smart, I knew what was going on. I knew more than what was going on, I knew what was going to happen next.
The only thing I didn’t know and couldn’t anticipate was how they would come and get me, how they would know where I was. Then I saw the precinct prowl car come slowly up the street and stop in front my house. I thought: That’s it, it’s too late, it’s all over, they’re rounding up everyone, he’s done it, he’s killed us all. And when the same wiseass cop who had looked me over a few nights before got out, I experienced the meaning of the law, the power of uniform, and a desperate sense of exclusion from the future. Adept wily and swift though you may be, if the moment stuns you with its terror you are made as helpless, as transfixed by the vision of disaster, as an animal caught in headlights. I didn’t know what to do. He disappeared below me into the building and came up the dark stairwell, I could hear his footsteps, but in the street when I looked the other cop was out of the car now and standing leaning against the driver’s door with his arms folded right under my fire escape. They had me. I stood behind the front door and heard the footsteps. Then I heard his breathing. Oh Jesus! Then he was knocking on my door with his fist, the f*cker. When I opened it he stood there filling the doorway in the darkness, a big fat cop mopping his gray hair with a handkerchief and then wiping the inside rim of his cap. “All right, punk,” he said, he was all blue and bulky, the way cops are with everything they hang on themselves under their tunics—pieces and nightsticks and ticket books and bullets—“don’t ask me why, but you’re wanted. Get a move on.”
And here I will summarize what Mr. Schultz told me about this murder, because I could not even begin to render it word for word, try to understand how it was to be in his presence and his confidence when he spoke of these most intimate matters, there is horrified elation, you sometimes don’t hear the details just looking at the face that speaks, you wonder at your own great recklessness to have put yourself in his line of vision, you hope he won’t see that it is your deepest desire to conform your mind to his, to speak in your own mind with his voice, which means that you cannot. But listening to these confidences, dumb with pride to be receiving them, and remembering my panic of that early morning, I did feel foolish and a bit disloyal ever to have doubted him or his regard for me, because, as he said, despite the honestly improvised nature of the barbershop occasion it had that feeling about it of being right, as right as if it had been planned, except that things planned so often go wrong that it was better than planned, and he knew immediately it was a genius hit because it did so many different things at the same time, all of them dovetailing with one another, so like any good piece of business it was part luck, part inspiration, but in any event an act of mastery that was both correct as business and poetically effective, in addition of course to being solidly grounded in the only sound motive, which is simple and just retribution. He was very proud of the job. I think it eased the embarrassment of his loss of control with the fire inspector. And there was no sadness to it, he said, no lingering hurt, nothing mournful as with Bo, it was nothing that personal, it just so happened Irving fingered the guy while Mr. Schultz was availing himself of the pleasures of a cathouse not two minutes from the Maxwell Hotel. He was celebrating his return from Syracuse, where he had surrendered to the law, put up bail and walked out of the courtroom a lammister no longer, he was celebrating part one of the new plan and was having a preliminary glass of wine with the fancy girls and, I was to tell him, could anything in life be greater than that? as if I would know, to reappear and retake your old life, to be the Dutchman of old from your unshined shoes to your slightly dirty pearlgray fedora, and so, this was true luck, a good sign, he was able to get over there and work things out while the regular barber was still trimming the f*cker’s hair. And he was all ready by the time the chair was tilted back for the shave. The numbers boss held his piece on his lap under the striped barber sheet, as lots of guys tend to do, and two of his henchmen sat in the lobby reading the evening papers by the potted palms just outside the glass barbershop door. Those were the conditions. One henchman happening to glance over the top edge of his paper, and seeing there Lulu Rosenkrantz standing and smiling at him with his broken-toothed smile under that protuberant and bushy brow, and next to him Irving holding up his index finger to his lips, he quietly cleared his throat to capture his colleague’s attention and together, with the briefest of glances between them, they folded their papers and stood, in hopes that their immediate and unanimous decision to f*ck loyalty would find favor with these two well-known and formidable personages. Which it did, they were allowed to disappear through the revolving door of the hotel with no hard feelings, but only after surrendering their newspapers, which Irving and Lulu sat down to read in the vacated chairs beside the potted palms, although if the truth be known, Mr. Schultz said, Lulu couldn’t read. At the same time the regular barber, who took only very special people after hours, having seen and understood the meaning of the ceremony outside his shop while applying the hot towel to his customer’s face, wrapping it the way they do like a custard swirl, so that only the tip of the nose is visible, quietly excused himself forever from the profession by means of a mirrored side door leading to a supply room and to an alley leading to the street, passing with murmured apologies another barber in a white short-sleeve tunic who was just entering, Mr. Schultz himself with his thick but not muscular arms showing black hair, and a thick short neck and a blue-black shadow on his own tormentedly twice daily shaven cheeks. The Dutchman came up to the recumbent customer and applied additional hot towels in mimicry of the attentive ministrations of a barber, dripping on them especially about the nostrils a potion from a small unlabeled bottle he had had the foresight but not the detailed reasoning to borrow from the cathouse madam. And hovering about the chair and making small administrative sounds until he was satisfied that all was well, he felt under the sheet, took the piece from the slack fingers, daintily put it aside, lifted the towels where they draped over the chin, carefully folded them back from the throat, and choosing an already opened straight razor from the shelf under the mirror and satisfying himself that it was impeccably sharpened, he drew it with no hesitation across the exposed neck just below thejawline. And as the thread-thin lip of blood slowly widened into a smile and the victim made a small half-questioning movement in his chair, a slight rise of the shoulders and lift of the knees, more inquisitive than accusatory, he held him down with his elbow on his mummied mouth and wrapped layer after layer of wet hot toweling that was to hand in the chromed steamer behind the chair over his chest and throat and head, until only a seeping pinkness, the color of a slow and tentative sunset, suffused the wadding, so that he was able with unhurried insolence to wipe clean the twelve-inch razor, fold it, and drop it in his breast pocket next to the comb, and after a glance of vindication to the lobby as if there was there, watching, an audience of numbers-industry bankers, controllers, collectors, and runners, rubbed the grip of the Smith & Wesson with the striped sheet, and placed it back in the victim’s hand, and placed the hand back in the lap, and smoothed the striped sheet over the body, and withdrew through the mirrored door, which closed on the scene with a click, leaving two barber chairs, two bodies, and two trickles of blood spattering the tile floor.
“There wasn’t nothing grisly about it,” Mr. Schultz told me, referring to the very headline that had caught my attention. “That was newspaper bullshit. You never get a break from those guys, it was as beautiful and professional as could be. Anyway, probably the knockout drops was what killed the son of a bitch. I mean he moved but so does a chicken after you cut its throat. Chickens run around after they’re dead did you know that, kid? I seen that in the country.”