Billy Bathgate Part 10

"You have to understand they have an interest in our problem. It is their problem too. They know he knocks down the Dutchman it's their turn next. Please, Arthur, give them a little credit. They are businessmen. Maybe you're right, maybe this is the way. He said they would study it to see how it could be done but in the meantime they want to think about it a little while. Because you know as well as they do even when it's a lousy cop on the beat who is. .h.i.t the city goes wild. And this is a major prosecutor in the newspapers every day. A hero of the people. You could win the battle and lose the war."

Mr. Berman kept talking, he wanted to calm Mr. Schultz down. As he went on to make each point of his argument, Lulu kept nodding and furrowing his brow as if he had been just about to say the same thing. Irving sat with his arms folded and his eyes lowered, whatever decision was made he would go along with it, as he always had, as he would to the day he died. "The modern businessman looks to combination for strength and for streamlining," Mr. Berman said. "He joins a trade a.s.sociation. Because he is part of something bigger he achieves strength. Practices are agreed upon, prices, territories, the markets are controlled. He achieves streamlining. And lo and behold the numbers rise. n.o.body is fighting anybody. And what he has a share of now is more profitable than the whole kit and caboodle of yore."

I could see Mr. Schultz gradually relaxing, he had been leaning forward and holding the edge of the table as if he was about to turn it over, but after a while he sagged back in his chair and then he put his hand on top of his head, as if it hurt, a peculiar gesture of irresolution that as much as anything compelled me to pipe up as I did: "Excuse me. This man you mentioned, the one who came to the church. Mrs. Preston told me something about him."

I will talk about this moment, what I thought I was doing, or what I think now I thought I was doing, because it is the moment the determination was made, I think about all their deaths and the manners of dying, but more about this moment of the determination, where it came from, not the heart or the head, but the mouth, the wordmaker, the linguist of grunts and moans and whimpers and shrieks.

"She knew him. Well not that she knew him but that she'd met him. Well not that she entirely remembered meeting him," I said, "or she would have mentioned it herself. But she drank," I said looking a moment at Irving, "she herself told me that and when you drink you don't remember that much, do you? But what she felt on the street in front of St. Barnabas," I said to Mr. Schultz, "is that when you introduced them, she thought he looked at her as if he recognized her. She thought perhaps she must have met him before."

It was so still now in the Palace Chophouse and Tavern that I heard Mr. Schultz's breathing, the magnitude of his respiration was as familiar to me as his voice, his thought, his character, it came in slowly and went out quickly in a kind of one two rhythm that left a silence between breaths that seemed like a consideration of whether to breathe at all.

"Where did she meet him?" he said, very calm.

"She thought it must have been with Bo."

He swiveled in his chair and faced Mr. Berman and sat back and stuck his thumbs in his vest pockets and a big broad smile came over his face. "Otto, you hear this? You grope around and you grope around and all the time the child is there to lead you."

The next moment he had jumped out of his chair and smashed me on the side of the head, I think he must have used his forearm, I didn't know what had happened, the room wheeled, I was suddenly confused, I thought there had been an explosion, that the room was falling in on me, I saw the ceiling lift and the floor jump toward me, I was flying backward over the chair, going down backward in the chair I'd been sitting in and when I hit the floor I lay there stunned, I wanted to hold on to the floor because I thought it was moving. Then I felt terrible pounding pains in the side, one after another, and as it turned out he was kicking me, I tried to roll away, I was crying out and I heard chairs sc.r.a.ping, everyone talking at once, and they pulled him off me, Irving and Lulu actually pulled him away from me, I realized that later when I began to hear in my mind what they had been saying, it's the kid for christsake, oh Christ, leave off, boss, leave off it's the kid for christsake, oh Christ, leave off, boss, leave off, all that urgent straining talk in the pinioning of violence.

Then as I rolled on my back I saw him shrug loose of them and hold his hands in the air. "It's all right," he said. "It's okay. I am all right."

He yanked on his collar and pulled at his vest and sat back down in his chair. Irving and Lulu took me under the arms and put me instantaneously on my feet. I felt ill. They righted my chair and sat me in it and Mr. Berman pushed a gla.s.s of wine toward me and I took it with both hands and managed to swallow some of it. My ears were ringing and I felt a sharp pain on the left side every time I took a breath. I sat up straight, in that way your body instantly accepts what has happened to it, though your mind does not, I knew that if I sat straight and took only shallow breaths through the nose the pain was relieved somewhat.

Mr. Schultz said: "Now kid, that was for not telling me before. You heard what she said, that c.u.n.t, you should have come to me right away."

I started to cough, little hacking coughs that were excruciatingly painful. I swallowed more wine. "This was the first chance," I said, lying, I had to clear my throat to get my voice back, I didn't want to sound like I was sniveling, I wanted to sound offended. "I been busy doing everything you asked me, is all."

"Let me finish, please. How much of that ten grand is left that you been holding."

With trembling hands I took five thousand dollars out of my wallet and put it on the white tablecloth. "All right," he said. He took up all the bills but one. "That is for you," he said pus.h.i.+ng it toward me. "A month's advance. You are now on the payroll at two hundred and fifty a week. This is what justice is, you see? The same thing you deserved a licking for you deserve this." He looked around the table. "I didn't hear n.o.body else give me the word on our downtown comparey."

n.o.body said anything. Mr. Schultz poured wine in all the gla.s.ses and drank his own with a loud smacking of the lips. "I feel better now. It didn't feel right in that meeting, I knew it didn't feel right. I don't know how to combine. I wouldn't know how to begin. I was never a joiner, Otto. I never asked anybody for anything. Everything I got I got for myself. I have worked hard. And how I got where I got is I do what I want, not what other people want. You put me with those goombahs and suddenly I have to worry about their interests? Their interests? I don't give a s.h.i.+t for their interests. So what is all this c.r.a.p. I'm not about to give it away, I don't care how many D.A.s come after me. That is what I was trying to tell you. I didn't have the words. Now I got them."

"It doesn't have to mean anything, Arthur. Bo liked a good time. It could have been at the track. It could have been in a club. It don't have to mean anything."

Mr. Schultz shook his head and smiled. "My Abbadabba. I never knew the numbers were for dreaming. A man gives me his word and it's not his word, a man works for me all those years and the minute I turn my back he conspires against me, I don't know, who has gotten to him? Who in Cleveland gets such an idea?"

Mr. Berman was very agitated. "Arthur, he's not stupid, he's a businessman, he looks at the choices and he takes the path of least resistance, that is the whole philosophy of the combination. He didn't have to see the girl to know where Bo was. He showed you a mark of respect."

Mr. Schultz pushed back from the table. He took his rosary out of his pocket and began to twirl it, around went the rosary in a tightening circle, it dangled for a pendulous moment and then spun the other way, looping out before snapping up tight again. "So who turned Bo? I see your precious combination, Otto. I see the whole f.u.c.king world ganging up on me. I see the man who takes me into his church, the man who makes me his brother and embraces me and kisses me on the cheek. Is this love? These people have no more love for me than I have for them. Is this the Sicilian death kiss? You tell me."

NINETEEN.

And that's how I came to shadow Thomas E. Dewey, the special public prosecutor appointed to clean up the rackets, and future district attorney, governor of New York, and Republican candidate for president of the United States. He lived in one of those limestone-cliff Fifth Avenue apartment buildings that look over Central Park, it wasn't that far north of the Savoy-Plaza, in one week I became very familiar with the neighborhood, I idled lurked and strolled usually on the park side, across the street, along the park wall in the shade of the plane trees, sometimes diverting myself by trying not to step on the lines of the hexagonal paving blocks. In the early morning the sun came up through the side streets filling them from the east with light and shooting out like Buck Rogers ray guns across the intersections, I kept thinking of shots, I heard them in the backfirings of trucks, I saw them in the rays, I read them in the chalk lines made by the kids on the sidewalks, everything was shots in my mind as I shadowed the public prosecutor with a view toward setting him up for a.s.sa.s.sination. In the evening the sun went down over the West Side and the limestone buildings of Fifth Avenue glowed gold in their windows and white on their faces, and all up and down the stories maids in their uniforms pulled the drapes closed or let down the awnings.

In these days I felt very close to Mr. Schultz, I was the only one cooperating in the deepest spirit with him, his most trusted adviser deplored his intentions, his two most loyal personal attendants and bodyguards suffered grave misgivings, I was alone with the man in his heart, was what I felt, and I have to confess I was excited to be there alone with him in his cavernous transgression, he had slugged me and kicked my ribs in and now I felt a real love for him, I forgave him, I wanted him to love me, I realized he was able to get away with something no other person could get away with, for example I still did not forgive Lulu Rosenkrantz my broken nose, and in fact when I thought about it I didn't like the way Mr. Berman had lifted twenty-seven cents from me with one of his cheap math tricks that time in the policy office on 149th Street when I had barely caught on with the organization, Mr. Berman had been my mentor ever since, generously bringing me along, nurturing me, and yet I still did not forgive him that loss of a boy's few pennies.

You can't expect to shadow someone effectively unless you are an unremarkable figure appropriate to the landscape. I bought a scooter and wore my good pants and a polo s.h.i.+rt and I did that for a day or so, then I got a puppy from a pet shop and walked him along on a leash except people who were out early walking their own dogs kept stopping to say how cute he was while their dogs sniffed his wagging little a.s.s, and that was no good, so I gave him back, it was only when I borrowed the wicker carriage from my mother for a couple of days and took it downtown by taxicab to stroll along with it like an older child watching his mother's new baby that I felt I had the right camouflage. I bought a doll from Arnold Garbage for two bits with a cotton bonnet to keep its face in shadow, people liked to get their babies out in the early morning, sometimes nurses in white stockings and blue capes pushed these elaborate heavily sprung lacquered perambulators along with netting to keep the bugs off of the little darlings, so I bought netting and draped it over the carriage so that even if some old lady got really nosey she couldn't see inside, and sometimes I walked and sometimes I sat on the bench just across the street from where he lived and pushed the carriage out and pulled it back and bounced it gently on its broken-down springs and in this manner learned that the early morning was the time with the fewest people and the most inflexible routine, without a doubt the morning appearance of Mr. Dewey was the preferred time to dispatch him.

And my mother liked that doll, she was pleased to have me enter her imagination with her, she rummaged through her old cedar chest to find the baby clothes there, my baby clothes, and to dress the doll in the musty little gowns and scalp caps she had dressed me in fifteen years before. But all this you see was the innocence of murder, I loved my mother for being innocent of the murders around her, as worried prophets are, I loved her very much for the stately madness she had chosen to suffer the murders in her life of love, and if I had any qualms for the work I was doing I had only to think of her to know that I was on the nerve of my innate resolve and so I could trust that it was all going to work out, that everything would end as I dreamed it would.

In fact I will declare right now that I knew while I held something of these events in my hands, I would not have them bloodied. I realize this a.s.surance sounds self-serving and I hereby apologize to all of Mr. Dewey's relatives, heirs, and a.s.signees for the revulsion they may feel, but these are confessions of a wild and desolate boyhood and I would have no reason to lie about any one of them.

Oddly enough the person I felt bad about was Mr. Berman, the moment I had chosen at the Palace Chophouse to reveal what Drew Preston had told me he must have perceived as an act of treachery, the moment of his ruination, it was the end of all his plans, when his man would not finally be brought along into the new realm he foresaw, where the numbers ruled, where they became the language and rewrote the book. He said to me once, apropos of this idea, this dapper little humpbacked man with the clawlike fingers: "What the book says, well let me put it this way, you can take all the numbers and stir them around and toss them up in the air and let them fall where they may and remake them back into letters and you have a whole new book, new words, new ideas, a new language you've got to understand with new meanings and new things happening, a new book entirely." Well that was a dangerous proposition, if you thought about it, was the proposition of X X, the value he couldn't abide, the number not known.

But in his last glance for me over his gla.s.ses, the brown eyes widening to their blue rims, he saw everything instantly, with a kind of despairing reproach. What a tidy little thing the mind is, how affronted by the outlying chaos, he was game, this little guy, he'd made a brilliant life out of one faculty, and he'd always been kind to me, if deviously instructive. I ask myself now if my small word to the wise made that much difference, if it wasn't better for Mr. Schultz to go down knowing what his situation was, as Bo Weinberg had, if that honor wasn't due him; whereas he might never have known what hit him. And anyway I think now he knew all along, it was why perhaps he publicized his desire to a.s.sa.s.sinate the prosecutor, a suicidal act in any event, real or proposed, and it was as he said, I had just given him the words he was looking for all along for the feeling he had, that at the age of what, thirty-three? thirty-five? he'd run out of reprieves, the moment had long since pa.s.sed when all the elements for his destruction had combined, and his life was attenuated, in the manner of a fuse.

But what I thought I was doing was delivering a message between intimates, a necessary message that could not be left undelivered, though I had tried, and he had understood that I had tried and so had thrashed me. I knew them both so well. She made me a boy again in the humming s.p.a.ce between them: You tell him, would you? she had said, and lifted her binoculars so that I could see the parade of small horses curving around the lens.

And then it is time for my report, and it is late one night in the same back room of the Palace, with the pale green walls and the regularly s.p.a.ced tarnished mirrors in frames suggesting with a few lines of hollowed-up tin the streamlined modernity of the skysc.r.a.per, their hierarchy of arches like a platformed chorus of pretty girls with raised knees, and we all sit sallow at the same back table with the impeccably clean cloth and it is so late by the time I get there, dinner is over, they have before them now not the thick plates and cups and saucers but the thinnest of adding-machine tapes, their eternal fascination, the time is midnight, I saw that on the neon-blue clock over the bar as I walked in, midnight, the moment of justice cleaved to the moment of mercy, Midnight, the best name for G.o.d.

And this is the moment I am finally with them, one of them, their confidant, their colleague. There is first of all the sense of craft that suffuses me, the sweetness of knowing one thing well. There is second of all the malign pleasure of conspiracy, the power you feel from just planning to kill someone who may at that moment be kissing his wife or brus.h.i.+ng his teeth or reading himself to sleep. You are the raised fist in his darkness, you will fell him from his ignorance, it will cost him his life to know what you know.

Every morning he comes out exactly the same time.

What time?

Ten minutes to eight. There is a car there, but the two plainclothes get out of the car to meet him at the door and they walk with him while the car follows. They walk together to Seventy-second, where he goes into the Claridge Drugstore and makes a call from the phone booth.

Every day?

Every day. There are two phone booths to the left just inside the door. The car follows and it waits by the curb and the bodyguards stand outside while he makes his call.

They wait outside? Mr. Schultz wants to know.

Yes.

What's inside?

On the right as you walk in is the fountain. You can get breakfast at the counter. Every day is a different special.

Is it crowded?

I never saw more than one or two people at that hour.

And then what does he do?

He comes out of the booth and waves to the counterman and he leaves.

And how long is he in there altogether?

Never more than three or four minutes. He makes that one phone call to his office.

How do you know to his office?

I've heard. I went in to look at magazines. He tells them what to do. Things he's thought of during the night. He has a little pad and he reads from his notes. He asks questions.

Why would he leave his house to make a phone call? Mr. Berman says. And then on the way to work where he's going to see them in fifteen twenty minutes anyway?

I don't know. To get more done.

Maybe he's afraid of a tap? Lulu Rosenkrantz says.

The D.A.?

I know, but he knows from taps, maybe he just don't want to take the chance calling from his own house.

He's seeing witnesses all the time, Mr. Schultz says. He is very secretive, he gets them in there the back way or something so n.o.body knows who's squealing. I know that about the son of a b.i.t.c.h. Lulu's right. He doesn't miss a trick.

What about the return journey? says Mr. Berman.

He works late. It could be anytime, sometimes as late as ten. The car pulls up, he gets out and he's in the lobby in a second.

No, the kid's got it figured, Mr. Schultz says, the morning is when. You put two guys with silencers at the counter with their coffee. Is there a way out of there?

There's a back door leading into the lobby of the building. You can go down to the bas.e.m.e.nt and come out on Seventy-third Street.

Well then, he says, putting his hand on my shoulder. Well then. And I feel the warmth of the hand, and the weight of it, like a father's hand, familiar, burdensome in its pride, and he is beaming his appreciation in my face, I see the mouth open in laughter, the large teeth. We will show them what is not allowed, won't we, we will show them how far you can't go. And I will be in Jersey all the time and will pull a long face and say I had no personal grief against the man. Am I right? He squeezes my shoulder and rises. They will thank me, he says to Mr. Berman, they will end up thanking the Dutchman for the caution I have instilled, you mark my words. This is what streamlining means, Otto. This.

He tugs on the points of his vest and goes off to the bathroom. Our table is in the corner in a right angle of pale green walls. I am facing the walls with my back to the doorway leading to the bar, but I have an advantage because the tarnished mirror allows me to see farther down the transverse corridor into the bar than someone sitting under the mirror and looking straight out. It is the peculiar power of mirrors to show you what is not otherwise there. I see the blue neon cast of the clock tube above the bar as it encroaches on the floor of the pa.s.sageway to the dark tavern. It is like a kind of moonlight on black water. And then the water seems to ripple. At the same time I hear the bartender's rag suspended in its swipe over the zinc bar beneath the draft beer taps. I hear now that I heard the front doors to the street open and close with unnatural tact.

How did I know? How did I know? With the first wisp rising from the crossed wires of murderous intent? Had I believed of our conspiring that we had invoked images too powerful for the moment, as in some black prayer, so that they had inverted, and were flas.h.i.+ng back on us to blow us sky-high? There is that earliest notion of leaning forward in the chair, the body getting ready from the base of the spine up.

Silencers, Lulu says, thinking of his life to come. Mr. Berman is just twisting around to look to the entrance and Irving's eyes rise with me as I rise to my feet. I notice how well-combed Irving's thin hairs are, how neatly in place. Then I am in the short pa.s.sage leading to the kitchen at the rear. I find the men's room door. I am hit by the salt stink of a public bathroom. Mr. Schultz stands at the urinal with his legs apart and his hands on his hips so that the back of his jacket wings out, and his water arcs from him directly into the urinal drain, thus making the rich foaming sound of a proud man at his micturation. I try to tell him how, as an action, this is terribly obsolete. And when I hear the guns I think he has been electrocuted through the p.e.n.i.s, that he made the mistake I have read about in the novelty books, of urinating in a thunderstorm when the lightning can hiss up from the ground in an instantaneous golden rainbow and flash you out like a bomb.

But he is not electrocuted, he is jammed with me in the small stall, I am standing on the toilet seat and his shoulder bangs into me as he fumblingly removes the pistol from his belt, I don't even know if he knows I'm there, he holds the gun c.o.c.ked, pointed at the ceiling, and with his other hand he is doing an amazing thing, he is trying to b.u.t.ton his fly, we don't listen to the explosions, we are rocked by them, they ring in the ears, they become a continuous erupting disaster in the ears, and I dig in the pocket of my Shadows jacket for my Automatic and it is twisted in the material of the lining, and I have to struggle with it, I am as graceless as Mr. Schultz, and now I smell the powder, the bitter sulfurous aftermath coming under the door like a poison gas, and at this moment Mr. Schultz must realize that he has no real protection in here, he will be killed in a toilet stall, he slams the door open with the heel of his hand and pulls open the bathroom door and I understand he is shouting, a great wordless scream of rage issues from him as he springs out and raises his arms to shoot, and through the two doors as they are held open by the wind of fire I see the black ovoid stain of sweat under his arm, I see him stumble forward and disappear, I see the pale green corridor wall, and I hear the deeper roar of the new caliber even as he spins back into view, and totters out again leaving sensational maps of the holes in him on the wall of the pa.s.sageway as the doors slowly swing closed.

You don't know urgent life if you haven't heard a gun in your ears, it is the state of being able to do anything, defy all laws, a small window, like a transom, is at the back of the stall, just under the ceiling, I use the chain of the holding tank to haul myself to where I can reach it, it opens down into the room on a pair of elbow hinges, the window is much too small to get through, so I do it feet first, swinging them up and hooking them one at a time, and then twisting sideways and getting my legs through and then my hips then my painful ribs, and then I let go with my arms over my head like Bo going into the drink, I give myself a good crack as I slide out and fall to the ground, it is a ground of crushed cinders, like the bed of a railroad track, and it compacts my legs, I feel sharp pain, I have twisted my ankle, cinders are imbedded in my palms. And my heart seems to have gone awry, it pounds in furious broken rhythms as if it has gone off its shocks, it's sliding around my chest, lodging in my throat. It is the only thing I hear. I limp I scurry down the alley, holding my gun in my jacket pocket just like a real gangster in action, I peek around the corner of the Palace Chophouse and Tavern into the street and a speeding car without lights a half a block away fishtails and wavers a moment and in another moment it is lost in the shadows of the street, and I watch and wait but I don't see it anymore. I didn't see it turn, I step off the curb and stand in the gutter and the long back street is empty under its streetcar wires as far as I can see.

And what I hear now are my own streaming sobs. I open the door to the bar and look in. The smoke lingers in the blue light and bottles.h.i.+ne. The bartender's head rises above the bar, sees me and appears to decapitate itself, and that is funny, fear is funny, I gimp my way to the back, turn, come down the short corridor of the visitation, and before I look into the room oh the air is bad burned air and humid with blood, I don't want to see this vealy disaster, I don't want to be contaminated by this terrible sudden attack of the plague. And I am so disappointed in them, I peek in, I almost trip on Irving, face down, a gun still in his hand, one leg drawn up as if he is still in the act of chasing them, and I step over him and Lulu Rosenkrantz sits blasted back against the wall, he never got out of his chair, it is tilted precipitously, like a barber's chair, and held fast against the wall by his head, Lulu's hair sticks up ready for the haircut and his forty-five caliber is in his open hand on his lap as if it was his p.e.n.i.s and he stares at the ceiling as in the intense sightless effort of masturbation, my disappointment is acute, I do not feel grief but that they have died so easily, as if their lives were so carelessly held, this is what disappoints me, and Mr. Berman slumps forward on the table, his pointed back stressing the material of his plaid jacket in a widening hole of blood, his arms are flung forward and his cheek rests against the table and his gla.s.ses are pressed under his cheek on one leg the other standing away from his temple, Mr. Berman has failed me too, I am resentful, I feel fatherless again, a whole new wave of fatherlessness, that they have gone so suddenly, as if there was no history of our life together in the gang, as if discourse is an illusion, and the sequence of this happened and then that happened and I said and he said was only Death's momentary incredulity, Death staying his hand a moment in incredulity of our arrogance, that we actually believed ourselves to consequentially exist, as if we were something that did not snuff out from one instant to the next, leaving nothing of ourselves as considerable as a thread of smoke, or the resolved silence at the end of a song.

Mr. Schultz lying flat on his back on the floor was still alive, his feet were turned slightly outward he looked at me quite calmly as I stood over him. His expression was solemn and his face was s.h.i.+ning with sweat, he had his hand inside his bloodied vest like Napoleon standing for his portrait and he seemed to be in such imperial control of the moment that I hunkered down and spoke to him in the a.s.sumption that he was quite rationally aware of his situation, which he was not. I asked him what I should do, should I call the cops, should I get him to a hospital, I was ready for his orders, not mistaking the seriousness of his condition, but half expecting him to ask me to help him up, or to get him out of here, but in any event to be the one who decided what should be done and how. He gazed at me as calmly as before but simply did not answer, he was so extendedly suffering the shock of what had happened to him that he wasn't even in pain.

But there was a voice in the room, I heard it now like the wording of the acrid smoke, a whispering it was, too faint to understand, yet Mr. Schultz's lips did not move but he only stared at me as if, given the character of my feeling, his impa.s.sive gaze was commanding me to listen, and I tried to locate the sound, it was terrifying, fragmentary, where it came from, I thought for a moment it was my own breathy intake of stringed snot, I wiped my nose on my sleeve, I dried my eyes with the heels of my hands, I held my breath, but I heard it again and terror made my knees buckle as I realized, swiveling on my heels, that it was Abbadabba talking from his grimace alongside the tabletop, I cried out I didn't think he was alive I thought he was giving utterance from his death.

And then it seemed to me quite natural that their division would be expressed at this moment too, between the brain and the body, and that as long as Mr. Schultz was still alive, Mr. Berman would still be thinking for him and saying what Mr. Schultz wanted said, however corporeally dead Mr. Berman might be. Of course Mr. Berman was still himself alive, however faintly, but it was this other idea that presented itself as the logical explanation to my mind. It was perhaps some comfort for the thought that I had myself sundered them. I laid my head on the table alongside his and I will say here now what he said though I cannot suggest the time it took his voice to round itself for each word, with long rests between them as he sought for additional breath like a man searching his pockets for the money he cannot find. While waiting I stared at the blurred columns of numbers on his adding machine tapes that were strewn on the table. There were lots of numbers. Then, to make sure I was hearing correctly, I watched the words form in his teeth before I heard them. It is difficult for me to suggest the sense of ultimate innocence conveyed by his statement. Before he got through it I was hearing the distant sound of police sirens, and it was so arduous for him to speak it that he died of the effort: "Right," he said. "Three three. Left twice. Two seven. Right twice. Three three."

When I realized Mr. Berman was dead, or again dead, I went over to Mr. Schultz. His eyes were closed now, and he moaned, it was as if he was regaining consciousness of what had happened, I didn't want to touch him, he was wet, he was too alive to touch, but I put my fingers in his vest pocket and felt a key and I removed it, and wiped the blood on his jacket, and then I found his rosary in his pants pocket and I put it in his hand, and then, since the police cars were pulling up to a stop outside, I went back into the bathroom and went through the window again, again torturing my ribs and my ankle, and at the head of the alley the street was filling in with lights and people running and cars pulling to a stop, I waited a minute or two and slipped out quite easily into the crowd and stood for a while across the street in the doorway of a radio store and watched them bring out the bodies on stretchers covered with sheets, the bartender came out talking with police detectives and then they brought Mr. Schultz out strapped in a stretcher and with a blood plasma bottle held alongside by the ambulance attendant, and the Speed-Graphics flashed, and when the photographers dropped their used bulbs in the street they went off like gunshots, which made the neighborhood people jump back nervously who had come out to watch in their bathrobes and housecoats, and everyone laughed, and the ambulance with Mr. Schultz moved off slowly, its siren wailing, and men ran alongside a few steps to look in the rear window, murders are exciting and lift people into a heart-beating awe as religion is supposed to do, after seeing one in the street young couples will go back to bed and make love, people will cross themselves and thank G.o.d for the gift of their stuporous lives, old folks will talk to each other over cups of hot water with lemon because murders are enlivened sermons to be a.n.a.lyzed and considered and relished, they speak to the timid of the dangers of rebellion, murders are perceived as momentary descents of G.o.d and so provide joy and hope and righteous satisfaction to paris.h.i.+oners, who will talk about them for years afterward to anyone who will listen. I drifted to the corner, and then walked quickly down a side street away from the scene, and then made a two-block-wide circuit of the Palace Chophouse and Tavern, and when that yielded nothing, I went out two more blocks and made a bigger square, and by this means found the Robert Adams on Trenton Street, a four-story hotel of pale brick hung with rusted fire escapes. I sneaked easily past the clerk sleeping behind his reception desk and hobbled up the stairs to the fourth floor, and after reading the number on the key I had taken from Mr. Schultz's pocket I let myself into his room.

The light was on. In the closet, behind his hanging clothes, was a smaller safe than the one I remembered from the hideout in the house outside Onondaga. I was not able to open it right away. I could smell his clothes, they smelled of him, of his cigars and his rages, and my hands were shaking, I was not well, I was in pain that made me sick to my stomach, and so it took me a few minutes to work the combination, right to thirty-three, twice around left to twenty-seven, and two twirls to the right back to thirty-three. Inside the little safe were packs of bills in rubber bands, the real actual facts of all those numbers on the tapes. I shoveled them out and stacked them in an elegant alligator valise chosen for Mr. Schultz by Drew Preston in the early days of their happiness in the north country. The bills filled it full, it was very satisfying to build this solid geometry of numbers. A great solemn joy filled my breast, in the nature of grat.i.tude to G.o.d, as I realized I had made no mistakes to offend Him. I snapped the hasps shut just as I heard the footsteps of several people running up the stairs of the old hotel. I relocked the safe, drew Mr. Schultz's clothes across the bar in front of it, let myself out the window and climbed up the fire escape, and I spent that night, it was October 23, 1935, on the roof of the Robert Adams hotel in Newark New Jersey, sobbing and sniffling like a wretched orphan, and falling asleep finally in the paling dawn, where to the east, I could see in the distance the rea.s.suring conformations of the Empire State Building.

TWENTY.

Mr. Schultz had been mortally wounded and he died at Newark City Hospital a little after six the next evening. Just before he died a nurse's aide brought his dinner tray into the room and left it there, having had no instructions to the contrary. I came out from behind the screen where I'd been hiding and I ate everything, consomme and roast pork and cooked carrots, a slice of white bread, tea, and a trembling cube of lime Jell-O for dessert. Afterward I held his hand. He was by then in a coma and lay quietly with his broad, bare and badly sewn chest rising and falling, but for hours, all afternoon, in fact, he'd been delirious and talked constantly, he shouted and wept and issued orders and sang songs, and because the police were trying to find out who shot him they sent in a stenographer to put his ravings on record.

I found to hand behind my screen a nurse's clipboard with some pages of medical record forms attached, and in the top drawer of a white metal table, which I slid out very slowly, the stub of a pencil. And I wrote down what he said as well. The police were interested to know who killed him. I knew that, so I listened for the wisdom of a lifetime. I thought at the end a man would make the best statement of which he was capable, delirious or not. I figured delirium was only a kind of code. My version doesn't always match the official transcript, it is more selective, being in longhand, there are words misheard, mistakes of my own emotion, I was also constrained not to be noticed by anyone who came at various times into the room, it was busy in there at times what with the stenographer, police officers, the doctor, the priest, and Mr. Schultz's real wife and family.

The stenographer's transcript made its way into the newspapers and so Dutch Schultz is remembered today for his protracted and highly verbal death, coming of a culture where it tends to happen abruptly to men who never had that much to say in the first place. But he was a monologist all his life, he was never as silent as he thought he was or as ill-equipped in speech. I think now, as one who linked my life to his, that whatever he did was of a piece, the murdering and the language for it, he was never at a loss for words, whatever he pretended. And while this monologue of his own murder is a cryptic pa.s.sion, it is not poetry, the fact is he lived as a gangster and spoke as a gangster, and when he died bleeding from the sutured holes in his chest he died of the gangsterdom of his mind as it flowed from him, he died dispensing himself in utterance, as if death is chattered-out being, or as if all we are made of is words and when we die the soul of speech decants itself into the universe.

No wonder I got hungry. He went on for over two hours. I sat there and got to know that screen well, I think the material was muslin and it was laced taut on a green metal frame that could be rolled about on four little rubber casters, and his words seemed to paint themselves there on the translucent light of the cloth, or perhaps it was on my own unwritten mind, and I wrote them down, interrupted only by the wearing-down of the lead of the pencil, which I then had to reexpose by picking at the wood with my fingernails. Anyway I'll enter this here as I heard it delivered between the hours of four and six P.M P.M. of October 24, until the moment before he finally but not for all time fell silent.

"Oh mama, mama," he said. "Oh stop it stop it stop it. Please make it quick, fast and furious. Please, fast and furious. I am getting my wind back. You do all right with the dot dash system. Whose number is that in your pocketbook, Otto: 13780? Oh oh, dog biscuit. And when he is happy he doesn't get snappy. Please, you didn't even meet me. The glove will fit what I say. Oh Kay Oh Kaioh, oh cocoa, I know. Who shot me? The boss himself. Who shot me? No one. Please, Lulu, and then he clips me? I am not shouting, I am a pretty good pretzel. Ask Winifred in the department of justice. I don't know why they shot me, honestly I don't. Honestly. I am an honest man. I went to the toilet. I was in the toilet and when I reached-the boy came at me. Yes, he gave it to me. Come on, he cuts me off, the beneficiary of his will, is that right? A father's son? Please pull for me. Will you pull? How many good, how many bad? Please, I had nothing with him. He was a cowboy in one of the seven days a week fights. No business, no hangout, no friends, nothing, just what you pick up and what you need. Please give me a shot. It is from the factory. I don't want harmony. I want harmony. There is none so fair, beyond compare, they call Marie. I'll marry you in church, please, let me just put it in a little way. Let me into the district fire factory. No no, there are only ten of us, and there are ten million somewhere of you so get your onions up and we will throw in the truce towel. Oh please let me up, please s.h.i.+ft me, police, that is communistic strike baloney! I still don't want him in the path, it is no use to stage a riot. The sidewalk was in trouble and the bears were in trouble and I broke it up. Put me in control, I'll throw him out the window, I'll grate his eyes. My gilt edged stuff, and those dirty rats have tuned in! Please mother, don't tear, don't rip. That is something that shouldn't be spoken about. Please get me up, my friends. Look out, the shooting is a bit wild, and that kind of shooting saved a man's life. Pardon me I forgot I am plaintiff and not defendant. Why can't he just pull out and give me control? Please mother, pick me up now. Don't drop me. We'll have the blues on the run. They are Englishmen and they are a type I don't know who is best, they or us. Oh sir, get the doll a roofing. For G.o.d's sake! You can play jacks and girls do that with a soft ball and play tricks with it. She showed me, we were children. No no and it is no. It is confused and it says no. A boy has never wept nor dashed a thousand kim. And you hear me? Get some money in that treasury we need it. Look at the past performances, that is not what you have in the book. I love the boxes of fresh vegetables. Oh please warden, please put me up on my feet at once. Did you hear me? Please crack down on the Chinamen's friends and Hitler's commander. Mother is the best bet and don't let Satan draw you too fast. What did the big fellow shoot me for? Please get me up. If you do this you can go and jump right here in the lake. I know who they are they are Frenchy's people all right look out look out. Oh my memory is all gone. My fortunes have changed and come back and went back since that. I am wobbly. You ain't got nothing on him and we got it on his h.e.l.lo. I am dying. Come on Missy, pull me out I am half crazy about you. Where is she, where is she? They won't let me get up, they dyed my shoes. Open those shoes. I am so sick, give me some water. Open this up and break it so I can touch you. Mickey please get me in the car. I don't know who could have done it. Anybody. Kindly take my shoes off there is a handcuff on them. The pope says these things and I believe him. I know what I am doing here with my collection of papers. It isn't worth a nickel to two guys like you and me, but to a collector it is worth a fortune. It is priceless. Money is paper too and you stash it in the s.h.i.+thouse! Look, the dark woods. I am going to turn-turn your back to me please, Billy I am so sick. Look out for Jimmy Valentine for he's a pal of mine. Look out for your mama, look out for her. I tell you you can't beat him. Police, please take me out. I will settle the indictment. Come on, open the soap duckets. The chimney sweeps. You want to talk, talk to the sword. Here is French Canadian bean soup on the altar. I want to pay. I am ready. All my life I have been waiting. You hear me? Let them leave me alone."

Simultaneous with the shootings in the Palace Chophouse there had been attacks on known Schultz gang members in Manhattan and the Bronx, two were dead, including Mickey the driver, whose real name was Michael O'Hanley, three were seriously wounded, and the rest of the gang was presumed scattered. I had read about it in the morning papers while waiting for a train to Manhattan in the Newark station of the Pennsylvania Railroad. I was not mentioned in any of the accounts, the bartender's statement had not included reference to a kid in a Shadows jacket, which was good, but I put the valise in a pay locker and rolled up my jacket and disposed of it in a trash basket on the theory that not everything the bartender told the police might have found its way into the newspapers, and then I went out and got a taxicab to take me to Newark Hospital, having persuaded myself that Mr. Schultz's room was at that moment the safest place to be.

But now that he was dead, I was on my own. I looked at his face, it was the deep red color of a plum, the mouth was slightly open and the eyes staring up as if he had something else to say. For a moment I was fooled into thinking he did. Then I realized my own mouth was open as if I had something to say too, so that my mind flashed with an entire normal conversation between us, the one it was too late for, his confession and my forgiveness, or perhaps the other way around, but in either case the conversation you only have with the dead.

I limped away before the nurses came in and discovered him. I reclaimed my suitcase at the station and rode the train into Manhattan. It was a chilly night for a boy having no jacket. I took the crosstown trolley to the El, and I got back to the Bronx by about nine at night and did not go home directly but came around through the backyard of the Diamond Home for Children, and made my way into the bas.e.m.e.nt where Arnold Garbage was listening to "The Make-Believe Ballroom" on the radio while looking through old Collier's magazines. Without going into details I told him I had to stash something and he found me a small s.p.a.ce in the back of his deepest darkest bin. I gave him a dollar. Then I went back the way I had come, circled around to Third Avenue, and walked home the front way.

For weeks afterward I sat in the apartment, I couldn't seem to move, it was not that I was sore and aching, I could take aspirins for that, I felt as if I weighed a thousand pounds, everything was an enormous effort, even sitting in a chair, even breathing. I found myself looking at that black phone, waiting for it to ring, I even picked it up from time to time to see if anyone was on the other end. I sat with my Automatic stuck inside my belt, it was just the way Mr. Schultz had carried his gun. I was fearful that when I went to bed I would have nightmares but I slept the sleep of the innocent. Meanwhile the autumn began flying through the Bronx, winds rattled the windows and the leaves from G.o.d knows what distant trees came wheeling down our street on their crisp edges. And he was still dead, they were all still dead.

I kept thinking about Mr. Berman's last words to me and whether they meant anything more than the numbers of a combination lock. They were words to keep going, I could say that much, he was preserving something, he was pa.s.sing it on. So they were trustful words. But trust could mean either of two things, not knowing any better or knowing full well, knowing all the time and never having let on, with those little looks over the tops of his gla.s.ses, the teacher, every act a teaching.

It was a strong powerful ghost they made in me, my dead gang. What happened to the skills of a man when he died, that he knew how to play the piano, for instance, or in Irving's case to tie knots, to roll up pant legs, to walk easily over a heaving sea? What had happened to Irving's great gift of precision, his just competence in everything, that I so admired? Where did that go, that abstraction?

My mother didn't seem to notice my state but she began to cook things for me that I liked, and she began to really clean the apartment. She snuffed the candles and threw out all her tumblers of lights, it was almost funny-now with someone really dead she was no longer in mourning. But I was only half aware of all of this. I was trying to figure out what to do with myself. I thought about going back to school and sitting in a cla.s.sroom and learning whatever it was you learned in cla.s.srooms. Then I took it as a commentary on my sad state of mind that I would even consider such a thing.

I would from time to time take my transcript out of my pocket and unfold the pages and read again what Mr. Schultz had said. It was a disheartening babble. There was no truth of history in it, no message for me.

My mother found a store on Bathgate Avenue that sold sea-sh.e.l.ls, and she brought home a brown paper bag full of these tiny ridged sh.e.l.ls, some were no bigger than a pinky nail, and she began another one of her mad projects, which was to paste them to the phone using airplane cement she had found from an old balsa model I had never finished constructing. She dipped a toothpick in the bottle of dope and spread a glistening drop around the rim of the tiny sh.e.l.l and glued it to the phone. Eventually the entire phone, receiver and base, was covered in sh.e.l.ls. It was rather beautiful, generally white and pink and tan, and rippled and gnarled, as if it was losing its form, as if the form of all things is lost in our attentions. She even attached sh.e.l.ls to the cord, so that it seemed like a string of underwater lights. I found myself crying for my crazy mother when I thought of her as James J. Hines recalled her, a young and stately and thoughtful and brave young immigrant. I thought she must for a time have enn.o.bled my father and that he had enlightened her in their undeniable love for each other before he had taken a powder. I had the money now never to have to send her away. I swore she would stay with me and I would take care of her for as long as she lived. But I couldn't seem to get going on anything, not even to the point of persuading her to quit her job. I suppose it was not a very gladdening prospect I saw before us. I was made very lonely by her strange use of objects, candles or pictures or remnants of clothing, broken dolls, and sh.e.l.ls. One evening she came home with a fish tank, it was very heavy and she had trouble carrying it up the stairs, but her face was flushed and her expression happy as she put it on the end table beside the couch and filled it with water and then gently submerged the phone. How I loved my mad mother, how beautiful she was, I felt so bad, I felt I had failed her, I thought she had not changed because I had not gotten the final justice for us. The money in the valise across the street in the bas.e.m.e.nt wasn't enough, I couldn't believe all the efforts of my intuitive scheming were fulfilled by it, of course, though I didn't know how much there was, even one month's weakened earnings of Schultz enterprises was enough to live on for several years, good G.o.d if I just drew from it twice my mother's salary from the laundry we would have everything we could possibly need, but I was terribly worried by it, we wouldn't be able to take it to a bank, I would have to think about it how to protect it all the time and use it in such dribs and drabs that it wouldn't draw attention to us and this seemed to me part of its skimpy insufficiency. I thought if it was going to change anything then it should have already, just the possession of it. But it hadn't. Then I realized that even though he was dead I felt about the money that it was still Mr. Schultz's. I had picked it up on instructions from Mr. Berman and now I found myself waiting for further instructions. I did not feel the calm I knew should come to me from the resolution of all my dreaming. I had n.o.body to talk to, n.o.body to know, in any event, to tell me I had done well. In fact only the dead men of my gang could ever appreciate as much as I had done.

And then late one night I was buying the papers at the kiosk on Third Avenue under the El when a De Soto pulled up and the door opened, and I was surrounded by men, two had come out of the cigar store at the same time as two came out of the car, and they had the impa.s.sive expressions on their faces of the criminal trades. All one of them had to do was nod toward the open door of the car and I folded my papers under my arm and got right in. They drove me all the way downtown to the Lower East Side. I knew it was important not to panic, or to imagine what might be happening to me. I thought back to all my movements of the past year and couldn't understand how he could know about me, I hadn't even let him get a good look at me in front of the church steps. I saw now that I had made one terrible mistake in not writing a letter to my mother with instructions to her only to open it if I didn't come home and didn't come home and died of not coming home to my mother.

They pulled up in a narrow tenement street, though naturally they didn't give me a clear look at it. I felt across my face the barred shadows of fire escapes in the dimly lit street. We climbed a stoop. We walked up five flights.

All at once I was in a kitchen under a bare ceiling-bulb and facing, as he sat at a little table covered with oilcloth like a rich visiting relative, the man who had won the gang wars. Here is what I saw: two mildly inquisitive eyes of no great intelligence and one of them drooped under a heavy hanging eyelid. And he really did have bad skin, I saw that now, and the scar under his jaw was whiter than everywhere else. All told he had a kind of lizardy look. His best feature was a good head of slicked-back wavy black hair. He was wearing a well-tailored topcoat over his businessman's ensemble. His hat was on the table. His nails were manicured. I smelled an eau de cologne. His was altogether a different style of malignity from Mr. Schultz's. I felt as you feel when you walk a few blocks into another neighborhood though it is not that far from your own. He gestured with an open hand very politely so that I would sit down opposite him.

"First of all, Billy," he said in a very soft voice, as if all conversation was regrettable, "you know how bad we feel what happened to the Dutchman."

"Yes sir," I said. I was appalled that he knew my name, I didn't want to be in his registry of names.

"I had the greatest respect. For all of them. I knew them how many years? A man like Irving, you don't find his quality."

"No sir."

"We are trying to find out the cause of this thing. We are trying to get his boys back and put something together, you know, for the widows and children."

"Yes sir."

"But it is turning out to have difficulties."