Billy Bathgate Page 9

  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 fuck 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 fucking 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 fucking 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 fuckhead 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.”