Billy Bathgate Read online

  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 fucker. 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 fucker’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 fuck 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.”

  PART

  TWO

  NINE

  We stood the first morning on the courthouse steps and looked over the town past a bridged mountain stream to the fields and pastures and hills around us, everything green and lilac on the hillsides and the field crops a darker green, the sun was shining in a deeply blue sky, and there was a lowing cow at some distance that sounded to me like a song of the great unconscious gladness of nature, and Lulu Rosenkrantz muttered, “I don’t know about this, what do you do when you wanna go for a walk?”

  I had never been in the country before except if you counted Van Cortlandt Park, but I liked the smell of it and the light, I liked the peace of all that sky. Also I was instructed in the purposefulness of human settlement. Out there in the distance they grew what was needed, they farmed and kept dairy herds, and this town, Onondaga, the county seat, was their market. It was built onto the side of the hills overlooking the farmland and the stream came down from the mountains right through it. Nobody told me not to so I made an excursion to the old rattly wooden bridge and watched the water flowing fast and shallow over the rocks. It was wider when you were right on top of it, more like a river than a stream. Then a few blocks up along the river I found an abandoned lumber mill, the sheds leaning over like a good wind would flatten them, the place was long since closed but showed clearly someone’s past ambition and an enterprise with natural resources that I had read about in school geographies but never fully appreciated. I mean you don’t really appreciate a phrase like natural resources, you have to see the trees on the mountains, and the stream, and the lumberyard beside the stream to begin to get the idea, to see the sense everything made. Not that I would want such a life for myself.

  A lot of people had lived and died in Onondaga and what they left behind was their houses, I could tell immediately the houses had been around for a long time, they were of wood, people in the country lived in wooden houses, one next to another, big boxy things stained dark brown or peeling gray paint and with pitched roofs and gables and porches loaded up with firewood, and there was an occasional weird house with a corner tower topped with a kind of dunce cap roof and with curved windows and shingles nailed on in different patterns and iron grillwork decorating the roof edges, as if they had a pigeon problem. Anyway this was America too I said to Lulu Rosenkrantz, though he was dubious. At least the public buildings were of stone, the courthouse was made of blocks of red stone with granite trim that reminded me of the Max and Dora Diamond Home except it was bigger and had arched windows and doors and was rounded at the corners as justice sometimes is, and the four-story Onondaga District School, the same ugly red stone as the courthouse, and also the Onondaga Public Library, a tiny one-room affair faced over in stone blocks to make it look as if people took their reading matter more seriously than they really did. Then the gray stone gothic church, modestly named the Church of the Holy Spirit, and so far the only thing in town I had found not named after this Onondaga, this Indian, who had apparently made quite an impression. There was a statue of him on the lawn in front of the courthouse shading his eyes and looking west. When Miss Lola Miss Drew came outside for the first time and saw that statue she seemed quite taken with it, she stared at it till Mr. Schultz grew irritated and pulled her away.

  The grandest structure in town was the hotel, The Onondaga, of course, six stories of red brick, right in the heart of the commercial district if it could be called that, because many of the stores were closed with FOR LET signs in the windows, and the few cars parked front wheels into the curb were old black tin lizzies, Model A’s and T’s or farm trucks with chain drives and no doors, there was not much going on in Onondaga, in fact with our arrival we were what was going on, which came home to me when the old colored man who was the bellboy carried my bag with genuine delight to my very own private room on the top floor and didn’t even wait for the tip I was figuring out to give him. This was where we were all to stay, on the sixth floor, which Mr. Schultz rented in its entirety. Each person had at least one room to himself, otherwise it wouldn’t look right, Mr. Schultz said glancing at Miss Lola Miss Drew, so she had her own suite, and he had his own suite, and the rest of us had single rooms except that Mr. Berman had a second room for which he ordered a special direct phone line not using the hotel switchboard.

  The morning of our arrival I bounced on my bed. I opened a door and lo! there was a bathroom with an enormous tub and several thin white towels hanging on the bar and a full-length mirror on the inside of the door. The bathroom was as big as our kitchen at home. The floor was small white octagonal tiles, just like our halls in the Bronx, except a lot cleaner. My bed was soft and wide and the headboard was like half of a big sp
oked wheel of maple wood. There was a reading chair with a lamp sticking out of a table right beside it, and a bureau with a mirror, and in the top drawer were little concave sections for pocket change and small items that might otherwise get lost. There were gauzy white curtains that could be drawn with a string and behind them black shades, the same as at my school, where you pulled them tight to watch slide shows or movies, with a little pulley wheel attached to the sill. Next to the bed was a table radio which crackled a bit but didn’t seem to bring in any stations.

  I loved this luxury. I lay back on my bed, which had two pillows and a white bedspread with a pattern of tufts, rows of little cotton nipples, each one under my fingertip making me think of Becky. I lay with my hands behind my head and poked my pelvis into the air a few times imagining she was there on top of me. Private hotel rooms were sexy places. I had noticed in the lobby downstairs a writing table with hotel stationery free for the taking and I thought in a day or two I would write her a letter. I started to think what I would say, whether to apologize or not for leaving her without saying goodbye, and so on, but was interrupted by the stillness. I sat up. Everything was very hushed, unnaturally quiet, which at first felt like part of the luxury, but then seemed to me like another presence which was making itself known. I don’t mean that I felt I was being watched, nothing like that, more like there were certain expectations of the society that were trying to represent themselves to me, in the pattern of the wallpaper, for example, endless rows of little corsages of buttercups, or the pieces of maple furniture standing there so silently like elements of a mysterious rite waiting for me to perform it correctly. I sat up. I found a Bible in the drawer of the bedside table and thought someone had left it there by accident. Then I realized from the resolute neatness and orderliness of the room that it must be there as a furnishing. I looked out the window, my room was at the rear, I had a good view of the flat roofs of stores and warehouses. Nothing was moving in Onondaga. Up behind the hotel was a hillside of pine trees that managed to block out the sky.