Billy Bathgate Page 6

  And that is how it happened one summer day the boy Billy came to be clinging to the back of a Webster Avenue trolley as it hummed its way south toward 149th Street. It was not easy traveling this way, your fingers had only the narrowest purchase on the outer sill of the rear window, which was of course the front window when the trolley was going in the other direction, which meant it was a big window and that therefore you had to crouch while you clung so that your head didn’t appear in it: when the motorman spotted you in his rearview mirror he could make the car buck, throw it into some sort of electrical braking stutter so that you had to drop off, whether there was traffic behind you or not, which was a real son of a bitch. Not only that, but your feet had only the narrowest fender to toe, so that really you attached yourself for passage more by whole-body adhesion than anything else. And therefore when the trolley made a stop the correct procedure was to drop off until it started up again, not only because you were really vulnerable clinging to a trolley car at rest when any cop could come along and whap you across the ass with his billy club, but so that you would have the strength to hang there till the next stop. You didn’t want to fall off while the damn thing was moving along at a clip, especially on Webster which is an industrial street of warehouses and garages and machine shops and lumberyards all of which make for long blocks and a fast-moving trolley enjoying its run between distant stops, going fast enough to rock along side to side on its wheel carriages, banging the hell out of them and sending up sparks up there where the pole scrapes the power from the wire. It is a fact that more than one boy has died riding the back of a streetcar. Nevertheless this was my preferred mode of travel even when, as now, I had two dollars in my pocket and could easily afford the nickel fare.

  I hugged the great machine and got there and jumped off, running, just shy of my stop. But I didn’t have the address of the East 149th Street headquarters so for a couple of wearying hours I trudged up and down over the hills, going as far west as the Concourse and then doubling back east, and never knowing what I was looking for in that simmering heat, but coming into luck when I saw two cars, a LaSalle coupé and a Buick sedan, sitting side by side in the lot of a closed-down White Castle hamburger joint not far from the junction with Southern Boulevard. By themselves neither car would have caught my eye but together they looked familiar. Next to the White Castle was a narrow four-story office building of indiscriminate color and large dirt-encrusted windows. When I went in the place smelled of piss and wood rot. Had there been a business directory on the wall you couldn’t have seen it. I was elated. I removed myself and crossed the street and sat down on the curb between two parked trucks and waited to see what I would see.

  And it was very interesting. It was about noon I’d say, the sunlight flashing down the power lines, the smoke of truck exhausts puffing up white as flowers, heat shimmering over the asphalt, and the street surface giving way to my sneaker heel and leaving an indentation like a crescent moon, so that a good detective could point out This is where he sat, right here where he banged his heel down, and from the depth of the indentation I’d say it was probably noon. And every once in a while someone would come along, some guy in shirtsleeves mostly, and he’d duck into that building. And one got off the corner bus, and one came out of a car that waited at the curb with its motor running, and one pulled up in a yellow cab, but all them were in a hurry, they were urgent, and with anxious expressions on their faces, white or black, and some of them strode and some of them scurried and one of them limped, but the thing was they all carried brown paper bags going in and when they came out they had nothing.

  Now you would think it was easy to find a paper bag lying around on the sidewalk or down an alley or in a trash can, but for some reason this was not so on 149th Street, to get my hands on one I actually had to locate a grocery store and go in and spend money to buy something. And then I curled the mouth of the bag closed just like they did, folded it over a couple of times so that it looked wrinkled, and then I took a deep breath and though I was a block away, just to get into the mood of it I loped along like all those guys and got up a good sweat and pushed my way through the doors of the building into the dark urinal of a lobby and bounded up wooden stairs that you could hear a cockroach walk on, and I knew they would be at the very top, it was what made sense, and the higher I got the lighter it got, and at the top floor was a skylight covered by a rusty grating, and at the end of the landing was a plain steel door that had a number of peculiar gashes and dents in it, and the knob had been chopped off so I just nudged it with my finger and it swung open and in I went.

  I don’t know what I was expecting but I found a short empty corridor with splintery floor and another door, a brand-new unpainted steel door this time with a little peephole and it did not give way to the touch so I knocked and stood back a foot or so so the guy could see my bag and I waited. Could they hear my heart banging to be let in, louder than a sledgehammer, louder than an ax on steel, louder than a dozen cops rushing up four flights of wooden stairs?

  And then the door unclicked and swung open an inch or two so what the hell, I found myself in a pleasant large room with several old beat-up desks and a man at each desk counting slips of paper, or stacks of bills, and they all lick their thumbs when they do this, and a phone was ringing, and I stood at a counter that came up to my chest looking in at all of this with my bag proffered and tried not to mind the guy who had opened the door standing behind me six feet tall and noisy of breath, the kind of person who snore-breathes, and I could smell the garlic, and I didn’t yet know his name but it was Lulu Rosenkrantz, and he had this oversized head with unkempt black hair in need of a cutting, and little eyes practically hidden by his shaggy brows and a nose broken into blossom and blue cheeks all sunken in on their pockmarks, and each wave of garlic he exhaled I imagined as fire coming out of his throat. I didn’t see Mr. Schultz anywhere, the fellow who came over to the counter was a bald man with rubber bands billowing his shirtsleeves above the elbow and he looked at me for a second curiously and took the bag and turned it over and emptied it out. I remember the look on his face when a dozen or so packages of cellophane-wrapped Dugan’s cupcakes, two to a package, poured out on the counter: suddenly pale and alarmed in the eyes he was, and stupid with the effort to comprehend, all in the second before he held the bag upside down and shook it to see if anything would flutter out and then for good measure looked up inside it to see the trick hidden there. “What the fuck is this?” he shouted. “What the fuck are you bringing me!”

  People stopped working and grew quiet and one or two rose and came over to look. Lulu Rosenkrantz moved up behind me. We all stood there in silence looking at these cupcakes. And it was nothing I had intended, I wouldn’t have bought them if I’d found a bag in the street, I’d have blown up the bag with air, so that it looked as if I was carrying something, and then when you do that to paper bags you know you can pop them, hit them like a guy playing the cymbals, you hold the neck with one hand and punch out the bottom, and supposing I had done that, exploded the bag in front of this guy, I mean with a wild boy you can’t tell what he might do, and that would have been the end of me, a dozen guys would have hit the floor and Lulu Rosenkrantz would have clubbed me on the top of my head with his fist and then when I was down on the floor he would have put his foot in my back to hold me still and executed me with one shot in the base of the skull, I know that now, you don’t ever want to make sudden loud sounds when you’re with these people. But because I’d had to buy something to get the bag I’d chosen cupcakes, chocolate with vanilla icing, which I happen to like, maybe I figured they would heft like packs of policy slips and stacks of bills in rubber bands, but I had just swept them off the bakery rack with my two arms and dumped them on the grocery man’s counter, I didn’t think about it, I had paid my money and come down the street and up the stairs and run cupcakes through a steel door and under the eyes of one of the deadliest gunmen in New York right into the heart of Mr. Schultz’s policy racket. An
d it was unerring, like my juggling had been when with aplomb I’d tossed the navel orange, the stone, the two rubber balls, and the egg into a kind of pulsing fountain over the fence behind me to the tracks of the New York Central, at this time everything I was doing was working, I could do no wrong, it was really mysterious to me, I had known without knowing that whatever my life was going to be in this world it would have something to do with Mr. Schultz, but I was beginning to suspect it now, and with the faintest intimation that I might be empowered. That is the feeling you get, that your life is charmed, which means among other things that it is out of your hands.

  At this precise moment while these heavyweight brains stood in their contemplation of the Idea of the Cupcake, Mr. Schultz came out of a back office preceded by the sound of his voice and then by a man in a gray pinstripe suit walking backward while trying to stuff some papers into his briefcase. “Goddammit counselor what do I pay you for!” Mr. Schultz shouted. “All you have to do is make the deal, it’s very simple isn’t it, a simple deal, all this legal bullshit you’re giving me, why can’t you just do what you’re supposed to do and stop dicking me, I’m dying here, I could go to law school myself and pass the bar in every state of the union waiting for you to move your ass.”

  Mr. Schultz was in his shirtsleeves and he wore suspenders and no tie, and he had a handkerchief crumpled up in his hand, and he was mopping his neck and ears as he advanced on the lawyer. It was my first clear look at him when the sun wasn’t in my eyes: thinning black hair slicked back, a lot of forehead, heavy eyelids with pink rims, a reddened nose, as if he had a cold or suffered from some allergy, a bowl of a jaw, and a wide and disturbingly undulant mouth for a voice so much like a horn in timbre: “Stop with the papers a minute and listen to me,” he said and leapt forward and with a swinging backhand knocked the briefcase flying. “You see what I got here? I got twenty desks. You see the men sitting at these desks, I got ten men. Doesn’t empty desks mean anything to you? They are niching me, you stupid fuckingass lawyer, every week I’m under cover I lose bets, I lose banks, I lose my men to those motherfucking dago scungili. I’ve been out of it for eighteen goddamn months you Ivy League dickhead, and while you are having your afternoon teatime with the D.A. they’re taking everything I got!”

  The lawyer was flustered but also he was red in the face with anger about that briefcase, and pursued it now and the papers as well, hunkering down and shoveling everything back in. He was one of those fair-skinned people who flush up with their dignity. I noticed his shoes, shiny black wing-tips with rows of tiny decorative holes. “Dutch,” he said, “you don’t seem to appreciate you do not hold the cards in this situation. I went to our friend in the state senate and you see what he accomplished. I’ve gone through three of the best lawyers in Washington, I have a top man working on it now, a very important and respected litigator, knows everybody, and even he’s hedging. This is a tough one, these are Feds and they are impervious, and it’s unfortunate but it takes time and you’re just going to have to live with it.”

  “Live with it!” Mr. Schultz shouted. “Live with it?” I thought if he was going to kill he would do it now. He let go a string of curses that was in his voice almost a kind of litany, he strode back and forth ranting and raving, and this was really my first experience of his temper and I was transfixed, I watched the raised veins of his neck and wondered why the lawyer was not cowering in front of him, I had nothing to compare this to, the vehemence seemed to me ultimate, I could not understand as the others did that this was not new anger, but one worn down somewhat by usage, as in a family argument, which is to say running, and therefore with a necessarily ceremonial aspect to it. So I was astonished to see Mr. Schultz drift over to the counter right in front of me, where he noticed all these cupcakes, and in the midst of his harangue grab one of the packages and break it open and peel off the browned pleated paper they bake each one in and drift back into the argument while consuming a chocolate cupcake with vanilla icing, but without quite being aware of it, as if eating was a distracted form of rage, and both were the function of a generic appetite that was nameless. And this was good enough for the guy holding the empty paper bag, the Riddle of the Sphinx was cracked, he went back to his work and the others turned away and went back to their desks, and Lulu Rosenkrantz returned to his place by the door and sat down and leaned his bent-cane chair against the wall, and shook an Old Gold out of his pack and lit himself a cigarette.

  And I was still here and still alive and for all anyone knew I belonged here, at least for another moment or two. Mr. Schultz had not even seen me, but one pair of shrewd and amused eyes had seen and understood everything, including I suppose the brazen genius of my ambition, and their direct and unblinking gaze now made me aware of a man sitting at a desk near the window on the far wall, and he was talking on the phone as he looked at me, he was conducting what appeared to be an intimate and quiet conversation that did not seem at all inconvenienced by the shouting and screaming of Mr. Schultz. In a flash I knew for a certainty this was the great Abbadabba Berman, Mr. Schultz’s financial brain, perhaps because his slow smile at me through all the noise and over the heads of everyone else even as he spoke on the phone was the distributed concentration of a mind superior to its surroundings. He turned slightly and raised his arm and drew a figure in the air and immediately a man on the right side of the room got up and wrote the figure 6 on a blackboard. And all at once the men at the desks in unison began to strip pieces of paper off their stacks of policy pads and rain them on the floor as if a sort of abstract Lindbergh parade was passing by. As he was to tell me later, the six was the final digit before the decimal point of the total odds of the first three races of the day according to the pari-mutuel machines at the Tropical Park in Miami Florida. And it was the first element of what would be the day’s winning number. The second element of the number would come the same way from the second two races. And the last digit would most of the time come from the day’s final two races. I say most of the time because if the winning number happened to have been played heavily, if for instance it had been touted by the astrological dream books the players liked to consult, Mr. Berman put in a last-minute call to an associate who was an official at the track and placed a bet, thus making a minute change in the odds on the pari-mutuel machines, thus changing the last digit of the winning number to one not so heavily played, thus protecting Mr. Schultz’s overall profits for the day and bringing honor to the rackets. This legerdemain had been of Mr. Berman’s devising and was the sort of thing that caused him to be known as Abbadabba.

  I immediately granted him all the powers of his reputation because of the way he wrote a number in the air and it passed through all the noise and shouting to become visible on a blackboard. When he finished his call and arose from his desk, he rose only a short distance; he wore a summer yellow double-breasted suit and a panama hat, which was pushed back on his head, and the suit jacket was open and hanging down at an angle which suggested to me that he had something of a humpback. He walked with a rocking lurch from side to side. His shirt was a darker yellow silk, and a pale blue silk tie was clipped to it with a silver tiepin. It surprised me that someone that physically unfortunate would want to dress sharply. His trousers were pulled up so high by his suspenders that he seemed not to have any chest. When he came up to the counter not much more of him was showing from his side than was showing of me from mine. His brown eyes were encircled by steel-rim spectacles. I did not feel menaced by their gaze, which seemed to have originated in a realm of pure abstraction. Each brown pupil had a milky blue rim. His nose was sharp with little tufts of hair curling out of each nostril and his chin was pointed, and he had a sly V-shaped mouth in the corner of which the stub of a cigarette moved up and down as he spoke. He rested a clawlike hand over a package of cupcakes. “So kid, where’s the coffee?” he said squinting at me through smoke.

  FIVE

  Aminute later I was tearing down the stairs saying over in my mind how many
black, how many black with sugar, how many with cream, how many with cream and sugar, I ran down 149th Street in the direction of the Boulevard Diner, I ran faster than the cars were moving, and the horns of the buses and trucks, and the grinding gears, and the clop and rattle of horse-drawn wagons, the sound of all the traffic driving its way fiercely into the high hours of the business day, sounded like choir music in my breast. I did a cartwheel, I did two in-the-air somersaults, I did not know in that moment how otherwise to praise God for giving me my first assignment for the Dutch Schultz gang.

  Of course and as usual I was in advance of the actual facts. For several days I lived on the edge of everyone’s patience and was consigned for the most part to the same curbstone of my observation across the street where I had begun. Mr. Schultz had not even noticed me, and when he finally did, as I swept up policy slips from the floor, he didn’t remember the juggler, he asked Abbadabba Berman who the fuck I was and what I was doing there. “He’s just some kid,” Mr. Berman said. “He’s our good-luck kid.” For some reason that answer satisfied Mr. Schultz. “We could use some,” he muttered and disappeared into his office. And so I rode the Webster Avenue streetcar every morning like a fellow going to work, and if I was given a job to do, if I brought coffee, or swept up the floor, I counted the day a success. Most of the time Mr. Schultz was not present, it was Mr. Berman who seemed to run things. I had plenty of time to begin to appreciate that it was he who had made a decision. Mr. Schultz had made a judgment, but Abbadabba Berman had engaged me. And then, the day when he chose to describe the details of the numbers game to me, the concept of apprenticeship rose in my mind, and I found a dignity in myself here as a kid operator sitting on a curb that quieted me down and gave me patience.