Billy Bathgate Part 6

"You mean Mrs. Preston?"

"She wants to see the trial. You know what will happen if she walks into that courtroom. I mean won't it bother her to have her picture taken as a mystery woman or some other G.o.dd.a.m.n c.o.c.kamamie thing that they will cook up? That her husband will know? To say nothing of Mr. Schultz is a married man."

"Mr. Schultz is married?"

"To a lovely lady waiting for him and worrying about him in New York City. Yes. What do you keep asking all these questions for? We are all married men, kid, we got mouths to feed, families to support. Onondaga has been a tough son of a b.i.t.c.h for every one of us and it will all be for naught if love conquers all."

He was looking at me very intently now, not being sly in his study of my reactions or the thoughts that might be visible on my face. He said: "I know you been spending more time with Mrs. Preston than I or the boys, even from that first night when you walked her back to her apartment and kept an eye on her. Is that fair to say?"

"Yes," I said, my throat going dry. I could not swallow or he would see the rise and fall of my Adam's apple.

"I want you to talk to her, explain to her why laying low for a while is in the Dutchman's interests. Will you do that?"

"Does Mr. Schultz want her to go?"

"He does and he doesn't. He's leaving it up to her. You know, there are women," he said almost as if to himself. He paused. "There always is. But in all our years I have never seen him like this. What is it, he won't let himself admit he knows better, that she takes men down like bowling pins, what is it?"

At that moment the phone rang. "You haven't failed me so far," he said, turning in his chair and leaning forward to pick up the receiver. He gave me his look over the tops of his eyegla.s.ses. "Don't f.u.c.k up now."

I went in my room to think. It couldn't have been more perfect, like an affirmation of my wish for release from the life and task I had chosen for myself, and I knew exactly what I would do from the moment he told me to talk to her. Not that I didn't appreciate the danger. Were these my own thoughts of freedom or was I acting under his influence? This was really dangerous, they were all married people, willful and unpredictable mad pa.s.sionate adults with G.o.d knows what depths of depravity, they lived hard and struck suddenly. And Mr. Berman hadn't told me everything, regardless of what he said, I didn't know if he was speaking for himself only or for Mr. Schultz as well. I didn't know if I was supposed to be working for Mr. Schultz in this matter, or conspiring to do what was in Mr. Schultz's best interests.

If Mr. Berman was shooting straight with me I could be gratified that he appreciated my utility as a superior brain in the outfit, he was handing me an a.s.signment n.o.body else could handle as well, including himself. But if he knew what was going on between Mrs. Preston and me he could be telling me just the same things he had told me. If we were going to be murdered would it not be somewhere else than Onondaga? If Mr. Schultz could not afford her anymore? If he found me expendable? He murdered people who acted on his behalf at a distance from him. I knew for a possibility that if I left I was going away to die because either he knew my heart's secret in which case he would kill me, or my being gone from his sight would create the betrayal in his imagination that would amount to the same thing.

Yet what was any of this speculation but the symptom of my own state of mind? I would think of nothing like this if my conscience was clear and I was intent only to advance myself. I found myself starting to pack. I had a lot of clothes now and a fine soft leather suitcase with bra.s.s snaps and two cinch belts, I folded my things neatly, a new habit, and tried to think of the first moment when I would have the chance to talk to Drew Preston. I was feeling the first yawning intimations of the nausea I recognized as pure dread, but there was no question that I was going to make the best of the opportunity Mr. Berman had presented me. I knew what Drew would say. She would say she hadn't wanted to leave me. She would say she had big plans for her darling devil. She would say I was to tell Mr. Berman she was ready to go to Saratoga but wanted me to go with her.

That night, while Drew accompanied Mr. Schultz to the district school gymnasium, where he was throwing his big end-of-summer party for everyone in Onondaga, I moved out of the hotel with the rest of the gang, I didn't even know where we were going, only that we were going there, bag and baggage, in two cars, with an open truck following with Lulu Rosenkrantz sitting in the back with the steel safe and a stack of mattresses. The whole time in the country I had never gotten used to the night because it was so black, I didn't even like to look out of my window because the night was so implacably black, in Onondaga the streetlights made the stores and buildings into shapes of night, and out past the edges of town the endless night was like a vast and terrible loss of knowledge, you couldn't see into it, it did not have volume and transparency like the nights of New York, it did not suggest day was coming if you waited and were patient, and even when the moon was full it only showed you the black shapes of the mountains and the milky black absences of the fields. The worst part was that country nights were the real ones, once you rolled across the Onondaga Bridge and your headlights picked up the white line of the country road, you knew what a thin glimmering trail we make in that unmappable blackness, how the heat of your heart and your motor is as sufficient in all that dimensionless darkness as someone still not quite dead in his grave for whom it makes no difference if his eyes are opened or closed.

I was frightened to belong so devoutly to Mr. Schultz. I was made bleak in my mind by his rule. You can live in other peopie's decisions and make a seemingly reasonable life for yourself, until the first light of rebellion shows you the character of all of them, which is their tyranny. I didn't like for Drew to be back there with him while I was driven like the baggage. The distance would not be that great, only twelve miles or so as I was surprised to see from a surrept.i.tious check of the mileage when we arrived, but I felt each mile attenuated my connection with Drew Preston, I was not confident her feelings could endure.

We pulled up to this house, who had found it, rented it or bought it, I was never to know, it was a farmhouse but there was no farm, just this run-down clapboard house with the leaning porch situated atop a dirt ramp rising suddenly up from the road, so that the porch looked over the road east and west from this bluff that was really not set back from the road but more like on top of it. Behind the house was a steeper hill of woods blacker than the night, if that was possible.

This was the new headquarters, which we were to see first by flashlight. Inside smelled very bad, the polite word is "close," which is the smell of an old unlived-in wood house, and the windows were rotted shut, and animals had lived here and left their droppings now dried to dust, and there was a narrow stairs going up from the entryway and what I supposed was a living room through a door on one side of the entryway, and a short hall going straight back under the stairs to a kitchen with an astonis.h.i.+ng thing in the sink, a hand pump for water, which came up in a trickle and then a loud cras.h.i.+ng rush of rust and muck that brought Lulu running. "Stop f.u.c.king around and pull your weight," he told me. I went outside to the truck and helped bring in mattresses and cardboard cartons filled with groceries and utensils. We were doing everything by flashlight until Irving got a fire going in the living-room fireplace, which improved matters not that much, there was a stiff dead bird on the floor who must have come in through the chimney, oh this was terrific, no question about it, I asked myself who would choose the carpeted life of hotels when he could have this historic mansion of the American Founding Fathers.

Late that night Mr. Schultz appeared, in his arms were two big brown bags full of containers of chow mein and chop suey that someone had brought up from Albany, and while it was not the same thing as good Chinese food from the Bronx it was much appreciated by all of us. Irving found some pots to warm the stuff up and I got a fair share of everything, the chicken chow mein over a mound of steaming rice and crisp roasted noodles, the chop suey for the second course, litchi nuts for dessert, the paper plates got a bit soggy but that was all right, it was a good satisfying meal, except that it lacked tea, all I had to drink with it was well water, while Mr. Schultz and the others washed it down with whiskey, which they did not seem to mind at all. A fire was going in the front room and Mr. Schultz lit a cigar and loosened his tie, I could tell he was feeling better, and might even be feeling good here in this hideout where he was not on display as he had been for many weeks in Onondaga and would be as soon again as the morning, I think there was something bitterly comforting to him about being holed up again because it matched his sense of his situation as someone surrounded on all sides.

"You boys don't have to worry about the Dutchman," he said as we all sat around against the walls, "the Dutchman takes care of his own. Don't think twice about Big Julie, he wasn't anyone you should concern yourselves. Or Bo. They were no better than Vincent Coll. They were the bad apples. You guys I love. You guys I would do anything for. What I said long ago, my policy still stands. You get hurt, you get sent up, or G.o.d forbid you lose it all, you never have to worry, your families will be taken care of as if you was still on the payroll. You know that. All the way down to the kid here. My word is my bond. It's better with the Dutchman than with the Prudential Life a.s.surance. Now this trial, in a few days we will be clear. While the Feds have been f.u.c.king away the summer on the beach we been up here sowing our oats. Public opinion is on our side. You shoulda seen that party tonight. I mean it wasn't your or my idea of a party, when we get back to town that will be a party, but this, the rubes loved it. In the high school gymnasium with the crepe paper and the balloons. I had one of them back-hill fiddle-and-banjo bands playing their doughsee doughs and all the hands right. h.e.l.l I danced myself. I danced with my babe in all that crowd of washed and laundered hards.h.i.+p. I have become very attached to them. Not a wisea.s.s will you find in the countryside, just hardworking slobs, work till they keel over. But they got one or two cards in their hand. The law is not majestic. The law is what public opinion says it is. I could tell you a lot about the law. Mr. Hines could tell you more. When we had the important precincts, when we had the magistrates court, when we had the Manhattan D.A.? Wasn't that the law? We got a man to argue for me tomorrow who wouldn't have me to dinner in his house. He talks on the phone with the president. But I have paid his price and he will be at my side for as long as it takes. So that's what I mean. The law is the vigorish I pay, the law is my overhead. The hondlers, they make this legal, they make that illegal, judges, lawyers, politicians, who are they but guys who have their own angle into the rackets except they like to do it without getting their hands dirty? You gonna respect that? Respect will kill you. Save your respect for yourselves."

He was speaking softly, modulating his resonant rasp even here twelve miles out of Onondaga in this house that could barely be noticed from the road in the daytime. Maybe it was the darkness of firelight that did it, the expression of the private mind in the intimacy of a fire, when you hear only your own thoughts in the night and see only shadows.

"But you know, it's a kind of honor, isn't it," he said. "After all, people have been counting out the Dutchman for quite a while now. And yet the whole world has followed me here, it's almost like Onondaga is another borough. Starting the other day with my new best friend from the downtown mobs. So I must be all right. See? I got my rosary. I carry it all the time. I will take it into court with me. This is a nice evening, this is good booze. I feel good now. I feel at peace."

Upstairs were two small bedrooms and after Mr. Schultz drove back to town I went to sleep in one of them in my clothes on a mattress on the floor with my head in the gable where I tried to believe I could see through the opaque windowpane to stars in the night sky. I did not question why with only two small bedrooms one was mine, perhaps I a.s.sumed it was my due as a boy with a governess. In the morning when I awoke two other guests whom I didn't recognize were asleep on their mattresses in their clothes except that they had hung their guns in their shoulder holsters from hooks on the wood door. I stood up, stiff and cold, and went downstairs and outside, it was barely dawn, there was some question in this moment as to whether the world would actually come back, it seemed in some sort of wet wavering drift as if it was not up to the task, but from this whitish blackness something detached itself, twenty yards down the road and at my eye level a man I recognized as Irving was at the top of a telephone pole and splicing a wire which was the same black wire that came up the dirt ramp and went past my feet into the front door. And then I looked across the road and saw down there a white house with green trim and an American flag hanging from a big pole in the front yard, and in a pine grove behind the house sprinkled among the trees were several tiny cabins of the same white with green trim and beside one of them the black Packard was parked pointed to the road with its winds.h.i.+eld covered with frost.

I went around to the back of our hillside manse and found an ideal spot for a lengthy and meditative urination. I imagined that if I had to live here I could create a gorge as monumentally geographical as the one Drew Preston had found on our walk. Mr. Schultz seemed to have beefed up the firepower, if I understood correctly the two snoring strangers upstairs. I noted too of this ramshackle house on its bluff that it provided a good prospect of the road in both directions. And someone sticking a tommy gun out the window of his car couldn't just tear on past and shoot it up. All this was of technical interest to me.

But in a matter of hours I was leaving, although I didn't know for how long and to what end. My life was estranged from me, whatever my resolve I no longer was childish enough to feel it was commanding. Last night as we had sat in the firelight I had felt I was one of them in a way not just my own, not just of my own thinking, but in the common a.s.sumption of our meal shared in the empty hideout house, disguised by the bad light as a grown-up, a man in the rackets, once in never out, and perhaps this more than church bells ringing was the true quiet signal of the end of my provisional determination, the snuffing-out of my unconscious conviction that I could escape Mr. Schultz anytime I wished. Now I thought this layout was more truly theirs, more like the real habitat of their lives, than any other place I had seen. I was impatient for people to get up. I wandered about, I was hungry. I missed my tea shop breakfast and I missed my Onondaga Signal Onondaga Signal, which I liked to read over breakfast, and I missed my big white bathroom with the hot water shower. You would think I'd lived in fine hotels all my life. I stood on the porch and looked in the living-room window. On a wood table was Mr. Berman's adding machine and the hot phone Irving was in the process of hooking up, there was an old kitchen chair with a tall back, and prominently in the middle of the floor, the Schultz company safe. The safe seemed to glow for me as the indisputable center of the upheaval of the past twenty-four hours. I thought of it not only as the repository of Mr. Schultz's cash deposits but as the strongbox for Abbadabba's world of numbers.

Irving saw me and put me to work, I had to sweep the floors and go around to all the windows and wipe them down so you could see out of them, I chopped wood by hand for the kitchen stove, which made my tender nose throb with pain, I hiked to a general store about a mile away and bought paper plates and bottles of Nehi for everyone's breakfast, I was as deep in nature as you could get, like a d.a.m.n Boy Scout at a jamboree. Irving left in the Packard with Mickey and so Lulu was in charge then and he put me to work out in back digging a latrine, there was an outhouse there that looked perfectly usable to me though it tilted a bit, but Lulu found it offended his sensibilities to use a strange outhouse and so I had to take a shovel and dig this hole in a clear and level place in the woods above the house going into the soft earth around and around deeper and deeper with my hands getting blistered and sore before one of the men took over, I had thought I had imagined all the possible dangers attached to a life in crime, but death by excrement had escaped me. Only when Irving came back and resolutely built a small throne of pine boards for the hole did I remember what dignity lay in labor that was done with style, whatever the purpose, he was a model for us all, Irving.

I got myself into as clean and presentable shape as I could manage under primitive conditions and at about nine that morning I drove with Mr. Berman and Mickey into Onondaga and sat in the parked car across the public square from the courthouse. Almost every parking s.p.a.ce was taken as the Model T's and A's and the chain-drive flatbeds came in from the countryside, and the farmers in their clean and pressed overalls and the farmers' wives in their unfas.h.i.+onable flowered dresses and sunbonnets climbed the steps and went through the doors for their impaneling. I saw the government lawyers with their briefcases walking up the hill from the hotel, I saw Dixie Davis looking very solemn beside the older portly lawyer with his rimless gla.s.ses dangling from their black ribbon, and then, slouching along in twos and threes, the fellows with the writing pads sticking out of their jacket pockets and the morning paper rolled under their arms and their little press cards like decorative feathers in the headbands of their fedoras. I studied the reporters very carefully, I wished I knew which of them was the Mirror Mirror, whether he was the one with horn-rim gla.s.ses who bounded up the steps two at a time or the one with his tie knot pulled down and his collar open at the neck, you could only guess about reporters, they never wrote about themselves, they were just these bodiless words of witness composing for you the sights you would see and the opinions you would have without giving themselves away, like magicians whose tricks were words.

Up at the top of the stairs news photographers with big Speed-Graphics in their hands stood around not taking pictures of the people going past them into the building.

"Where's Mr. Schultz?" I said.

"He snuck inside a half hour ago, while those jokers was still eating their breakfast."

"He's famous," I said.

"That's the tragedy in a nutsh.e.l.l," Mr. Berman said. He took out a wad of one-hundred-dollar bills and counted out ten of them. "When you're in Saratoga don't let her out of your sight. Whatever she wants, pay for it. This one has got a mind of her own, which could be inconvenient. There's a place called the Brook Club. It's ours. You have any problems you speak to the man there. You understand?"

"Yes," I said.

He handed me the bills. "Not for your personal betting," he said. "If you want to make a few bucks for yourself, you'll be calling me every morning anyway. I know something, I'll tell you. You understand?"

"Yes."

He handed me a torn piece of paper with his secret phone number on it. "Horses or women alone is bad enough. Together they can kill you. You handle Saratoga, kid, I'll believe you can handle anything." He sat back in the seat and lit a cigarette. I got out of the car and took my suitcase from the trunk and waved goodbye. I thought in this moment I understood the limits of Mr. Berman, he was sitting in this car because it was the closest he could get to the courtroom, he couldn't go where he wanted to go and that made him plaintive, a little humpbacked man with over-colorful clothes and Old Gold cigarettes the two indulgences of his arithmetized life, I felt looking back at him watching me from the car window that he was someone who could not function without Dutch Schultz, as if he were only an aspect of him, reflected into brilliance by him, and as dependent as he was needed. I thought Mr. Berman was the curious governor of this amazing genius of force, who if he one moment lost his spin would lose it forever.

SIXTEEN.

A moment later a beautiful dark green four-door convertible came into the square, and it took me a moment to realize Drew was driving it, she didn't quite stop but drifted past me in low gear, I heaved my valise into the back, stepped on the running board, and as she put the car into second and picked up speed I vaulted over the door into the seat beside her and we were away. moment later a beautiful dark green four-door convertible came into the square, and it took me a moment to realize Drew was driving it, she didn't quite stop but drifted past me in low gear, I heaved my valise into the back, stepped on the running board, and as she put the car into second and picked up speed I vaulted over the door into the seat beside her and we were away.

I didn't look back. We went down the main street past the hotel, to which I said my secret goodbyes, and headed for the river. I had no idea where she had gotten this baby. She could do whatever she wanted to do. The seats were light brown leather. The tan canvas top was folded back on chrome stanchions so that most of it was recessed in a kind of well. The dashboard was made of burled wood. I sat with my arms on the door and the back of the seat and enjoyed the luxury of the sun s.h.i.+ning as she turned to me and smiled.

I will say here how Drew Preston drove, it was so girlish, when she s.h.i.+fted she sort of leaned forward with her white hand on the gears.h.i.+ft k.n.o.b, her slender leg draped in her dress rode down the clutch and she put her shoulders down and bit her lip in the concentration of her effort and shoved her arm straight ahead from the elbow. She wore a silk kerchief tied under her chin, she was happy to have me in her new car, we rattled across the wood bridge and came to the intersection where the road went east and west and she turned east and Onondaga was a church spire and some rooftops in a nest of trees, and then we went around a hill and it was gone.

We drove that morning down among the mountains and between lakes that lapped both sides of the road, we pa.s.sed under canopies of pine and through little white villages where the general store was also the post office, she drove hard, with both hands on the wheel, and it looked like such pleasure that I wanted very badly to take a turn driving, to feel this great eight-cylinder machine moving under my hands. But one thing I hadn't yet had in my gang training was auto-driving instruction and I preferred to act to myself as if I knew how to drive and didn't care to than actually have her broach the subject, I wanted equality, the last and most absurd wish of this affection, I think now what an outrageous boy I was, with what insatiable ambition, but I had to have known it on this morning on our drive through the beautiful state of our wilderness, I had to have realized how far I had come from the streets of the East Bronx where the natural world was visible only in globules of horse manure pressed flat by pa.s.sing tires, with dried seeds pecked at by the flittering flocks of street sparrows, I had to have known what it was to breathe the air of these sun-warmed mountains alive and well and well-fed with a thousand dollars in my pocket and the heinous murders of the modern world the inuring events of my brain. I was a tougher kid now, I had a real gun stuck in my belt, and I knew in my mind I must not be grateful but take what I was given as if it was my due, I felt there would be a price for all this and since the price would be in a currency too dear for life, I wanted to make it worth my while, I found myself angry at her, I kept looking at her imagining what I would do to her, I admit I entertained some mean and s.a.d.i.s.tic pictures born of my bitter boy's resignation.

Yet of course when we stopped it was because she stopped, she glanced at me and gave a bel canto sigh of capitulation and suddenly pulled off the road, bouncing along between trees and over tree roots, and jerked the car to a stop barely out of sight of any pa.s.sing cars in a grove of tall high trees through which the sun flashed dappling us in moments of heat, moments of shade, moments of brilliant light, moments of dark green darkness, as we sat there looking at each other in our isolation.

The thing about Drew was she was not genitally direct, she wanted to kiss my ribs and my white boyish chest, she held my legs and ran her hands up and down the backs of my thighs, she caressed my a.s.s and sucked my earlobes and my mouth, and she did all these things as if they were all that she wanted, she made small editorial sounds of approval or delectation, as a commentator to the action, little single high notes, whispers without words like remarks to herself, it was as if she was consuming me as an act of eating and drinking, and it wasn't designed to arouse me, what boy in that situation needed arousal? from the moment she stopped the car I was tumescent, and I waited for some acknowledgment from her that this was in fact part of me too but it didn't come and it didn't come and I flared through my need into an exquisite pain, I thought I would go mad, I became agitated and discovered only then her availability, that in all of this she was only waiting for me to find her absolute willingness to be still and listen to me for a change. This was so girlish of her, so surprisingly restrained and submissive, I was not artful but simply myself and this brought forth from her a conspiratorial laughter, it gave her the pleasure of generosity to have me in her, it was not an excitement but more like a happiness of having this boy in her, she wrapped her legs around my back and I rocked us up and down in the back seat of the car with my feet sticking out of the open door, and when I came she held her arms around me tight enough to stop my breath and she sobbed and kissed my face as if something terrible had happened to me, as if I had been wounded and she was, in an act of desperate compa.s.sion, trying to make it as if it had not happened.

Then I was following her stark naked through the brush into this noplace of such great green presence she had chosen arbitrarily or by happenstance, with her gift for centering the world around herself, so that it was all very beautifully central in my mind, the place to be, following her flas.h.i.+ng white form around trees, under tangles, avoiding the whip of branches, with a brilliant chatter of communities of unseen birds telling me how late I was to have found it. And then we were going generally downward, and the ground became swampy and the air close and I found myself slapping at stings in my skin, I had wanted to catch her, tackle her and f.u.c.k her again, and she was doing this to me, taking me into furies of mosquitoes. But I came upon her squatting and ladling handfuls of mud over herself and we applied this cold mud to each other and then we walked like children into the sinking darkness of forest, hand in hand like fairy-tale children in deep and terrible trouble, as indeed we were, and then we found ourselves at this still pond as black as I had ever seen water to be and of course she waded in and bid me to follow and my G.o.d it was fetid, it was warm and sc.u.mmy, my feet were in wet mats of pond weed, I treaded water to keep my feet from sinking and couldn't crawl back out fast enough, but she swam on her back a few yards and then came crawling out on all fours, and she was covered with this invisible slime, her body was slimed as mine was and we lay in this mud and I punched into her and held her blond head back in the mud and pumped slime up her and we lay there rutting in this foul fen and I came and held her down and wouldn't let her move, but lay in her with her breath loud in my ear, and when I lifted my head and looked into her alarmed green eyes in their panic of loss, I grew hard again right in her and she began to move, and this time we had the time, by the third time it takes its time, and I found the primeval voice in her, like a death rattle, a shrill s.e.xless bark, over and over again as I jammed into her, and it became tremulous a terrible crying despair, and then she screamed so shriekingly I thought something was wrong and reared to look at her, her lips were pulled back over her teeth and her green eyes dimmed as I looked in them, they had lost sight, gone flat, as if her mind had collapsed, as if time had turned in her and she had pa.s.sed back into infancy and reverted through birth into nothingness, and for an instant they were no longer eyes, for an instant they were about to be eyes, the eyes of soullessness.

Yet a few moments later she was smiling and kissing me and hugging me as if I had done something dear, brought her a flower or something.

When we staggered upright globs of mud fell from us, she laughed and turned to show me the back of her, absent in darkness, as if she had been cleaved in half, with the front of her s.h.i.+ny and swollen into sculpture. Even her golden head seemed halved. There was nothing for it but to go back into the pond, and then she swam further out and insisted I come after her, and the water grew cooler, it was deeper and it went on behind a bend, I swam with her stroke for stroke, giving her my best YMCA crawl, and we came out on the bank on the far side, washed clean of mud and somewhat less slick.

By the time we got back to the car we were dry, but putting clothes on was uncomfortable, as if we were covering extreme sunburns, we smelled of pond sc.u.m, we smelled like frogs, we drove off trying not to lean back in the seats and several miles down the road we came to this motor court and rented a cabin and we stood together in the shower and washed each other with a big cake of white soap and stood holding each other under the water, and then we lay on the top of the bed and she curled herself along my side with my arm around her, and perhaps created with that nuzzling gesture the moment of our truest intimacy, when by some shuddering retrenchment of her being she matched me in age and yearning for sophistication, like a boy's girlfriend, only two bodies between us and a long life ahead of terrible surprises. So I felt a kind of fearful pride. I knew I could never have the woman Mr. Schultz had had, just as he hadn't known the woman Bo Weinberg had known, because she covered her tracks, she trailed no history, suiting herself to the moment, getting her gangsters or her boys in transformative stunts of the spirit, she would never write her memoirs, this one, not even if she ever lived to an old age, she would never tell her life because she needed no one's admiration or sympathy or wonder, and because all judgments, including love, came of a language of complacency she had never wasted her time to master. So it all worked out, how protective I felt there in that cabin, I let her doze on my arm and studied a fly drifting into its caroming angles under the roof and understood that Drew Preston granted absolution, it was what you got instead of a future with her. Clearly she would not be interested in the enterprise of keeping us alive, so I would have to do that for both of us.

The rest of that day we drove down through the Adirondacks until the hills softened, the land took on a groomed look, and in the early evening we rolled into Saratoga Springs and came down a street that had the insolence to call itself Broadway. Yet as I looked there was something appropriate too, the place looked like old New York, or as I imagined it must have looked in the old days, there were very civilized shops with New York names and striped awnings lowered against the evening sun, the people strolling in the street didn't look like Onondagans at all, there was not one farmer among them, there were lots of fine cars in the traffic, some of them with uniformed chauffeurs, and people clearly of the monied cla.s.ses sat on the long porches of the hotels reading newspapers. I thought it odd at the height of the evening that n.o.body had anything better to do than read newspapers, until we checked into our own hotel, the Grand Union, the finest of them all with the longest broadest porch, a boy took our bags, another drove off to park the car, and I saw that the newspaper of choice was the Racing Form Racing Form, at the front desk there was a stack of them with the next day's date at the top and the next day's card for the handicappers to go to work on. And there was no news in it except horse news, in the month of August in Saratoga n.o.body was interested in anything but horses, and so even the newspapers conformed, giving only horse headlines and horse weather and horse horoscopes, as if the world was populated only by horses except for the scattered few numbers of eccentric humans who gathered to read about their important doings.

As I scanned the lobby I did detect one or two persons whose interest in horses might not be sincere, a couple of badly dressed men sitting in adjoining armchairs and only glancing at their papers when I noticed them. The clerk recognized Miss Drew and was pleased she had finally arrived, they were getting worried about her, he said, smiling, and I realized she had rooms for the whole month of racing whether she used them or not, it was a place she would come to at this time of year whether Mr. Schultz said to or not. We got upstairs into this grand suite of rooms that immediately made me realize what small and modest resources the Onondaga Hotel had offered, a great basket of fruit lay on a coffee table with a card from the hotel management, and there was a side bar with a tray of thin-stemmed gla.s.ses and decanters of white and red wine and a bucket with ice and a cut-gla.s.s square-cornered bottle with a little chain hanging over it with a nameplate that said BOURBON BOURBON, and another that said SCOTCH SCOTCH, and a big seltzer bottle of blue gla.s.s, and light streamed through these long paned windows that came practically down to the floor, and big slow-turning fans hanging from the ceiling kept the air cool and the beds were immense and the carpets thick and soft. Oddly enough all of this made me think not too highly of Mr. Schultz because none of it depended on him.

Drew took delight in my reactions to this luxury especially as I tested the bedsprings with a backward lateral body fling, and she fell on top of me and we rolled one way and then the other in a playful wrestle in the guise of which we really tested each other's strength. She was no slouch, though I pinned her by the arms soon enough so that she had to say, "Oh no, not now please. I've planned this evening, I want to take you to see something marvelous."

So we dressed for the evening in our summer whites, I in my slightly wrinkled linen double-breasted suit she had ordered for me from her store in Boston, and she in a smart blue linen blazer and white pleated skirt. I loved it that we dressed in our adjoining rooms with the doors opened between us, I loved the a.s.sumption of advanced relations.h.i.+p in our preparations to be seen together. We came down through the hotel lobby of evening idlers including my two shabby friends, and when we stepped outside the evening was warm with the heat rising from the pavement into the cool sky, so she suggested we walk.

We crossed the avenue and I noticed that the policeman directing traffic wore a white short-sleeved s.h.i.+rt. I couldn't take a police department seriously that dressed like that. I didn't know what it was, this marvelous place she wanted me to see, but I thought I had better stop drowsing in dreamland. It would have been lovely to be with her still in the deep woods, but we were going past stately lawns and in the shadows of big black shade trees with enormous homes behind them, this was a well-developed and serious resort, it was tempting not to look beyond her, so dazzled by her brilliant offering as to forget the circ.u.mstances, and not one person we pa.s.sed on the street failed to notice her and to react to her, which made me foolishly proud, but we were holding hands and the warmth of her hand alarmed me, it suggested her pumping blood, it created in my mind visions of terrible retribution.

"I don't mean to be coa.r.s.e," I said, "but I think we'd better remember what our situation is. I'm going to let go of your hand now."

"But I like to."

"We will again. Please let go. I'm trying to tell you something. My professional opinion is we are being shadowed."

"Whatever for? Are you sure? That's so dramatic," she said, looking behind us. "Where? I don't see anyone."

"Will you please not turn around? You won't see anything, just take my word for it. Where is this place we're going? The cops in this town, when the money comes up from New York, they can't be relied on."

"For what?"

"For the protection of law-abiding citizens, which you and I are pretending to be."

"What do we have to be protected from?"

"From the likes of us. From mob."

"Am I mob?" she said.

"Only in a manner of speaking. At the most you are a moll."

"I am your moll," she said, considering it.

"You are Mr. Schultz's moll," I said.

We strode through the quiet evening. "Mr. Schultz is a very ordinary man," she said.

"Did you know he owns the Brook Club? He's well connected in this town. You get the feeling he doesn't trust you out of his sight?"

"But that's why you're here. You're my shadow."

"You asked for me," I said. "That means they would watch both of us for good measure. He's married. Did you know that?"

After a moment she said: "Yes, I think I did."

"Well where does that leave you? Do you have any idea? I want to remind you he made a mortal mistake when he took Bo out of the restaurant with you there."

"Wait," she said. She touched my arm and we stood facing each other in the dark beside a tall hedge.

"You think he's ordinary? Everyone who's dead now thought he was ordinary. The night you came out of your room. Do you remember me putting you back to bed?"

"Yes?"

"They were getting rid of a body. That fat guy with the cane. He stole some money. Not exactly your salt of the earth. I mean I'm not suggesting it's a loss to the world. But it happened."

"You poor boy. So that's what that was all about."

"This nose: Mr. Schultz had Lulu slug me to explain the spots on the rug."

"You were protecting me." I felt her cool soft lips on my cheek. "Billy Bathgate. I love that name you chose for yourself. Do you know how much I love Billy Bathgate?"

"Mrs. Preston, I'm so nuts about you I can't see straight. But I'm not even talking about that, I'm not even beginning to think about that. It was not a good idea to come here. I think maybe we ought to get out of this town. The man kills regularly."

"We should talk about it," she said and she took my hand and we came around a corner past some tall shrubbery to a brilliantly lit pavilion with people streaming into it and cars pulling up as if to a concert.

We stood under a tent lit by bare bulbs and watched these horses being walked around a dirt ring, each horse had a small velvet blanket across his back with a number on it, and people standing with printed programs in their hands were able to read about its lines and specifications. They were young horses, they had never been raced, and they were up for sale. Drew explained things in a soft voice, as if we were in church. I was extremely agitated and almost hated her for bringing us here. She couldn't concentrate on what was important. Her mind didn't work properly. I noticed of the horses their coats were glossy, their tails combed, and some of them lifted their heads up against the leash or halter or whatever it was their handlers held them by, and others walked with their heads looking at the ground, but they were all incredibly thin-legged and rhythmically beautiful. They got led around by the nose, and were bred for business and trained and raced, their lives weren't their own but they had a natural grace that was like wisdom and I found myself respecting them. They produced a nice strawy tang in the air, the smell of them amplified their great animal being. Drew gazed at them with a kind of stunned attention, she didn't say anything but merely pointed when a particular horse attracted her as even more powerfully breathtaking than the others. For some weird reason this made me jealous.

I noticed of the people examining the horses that they were very nattily got up in horse-theme sporting wear, the men with silk cravats, more than one with a long cigarette holder like President Roosevelt's, and they all had a certain nose-in-the-air carriage that made me square my shoulders. No one was as beautiful as Drew but they were her long-necked people, all very straight and thin, with an a.s.surance bred into them, and I thought it would be nice to have a program showing their lines and specifications. At any rate I began to relax somewhat. I calmed down. This was an impregnable kingdom of the privileged. If anyone from the rackets was here he would be highly visible. I felt from the one or two discreet glances given me that though I wore clothes of Drew's rich good taste and had taken the trouble to put my studious fake eyegla.s.ses on, I just about pushed them to the limits of their sniffing tolerance. The thought pa.s.sed my mind that Drew knew what she was doing in her own way of making the world, just as Mr. Schultz did, without sufficient thought.

After a turn or two around the ring, the horses were led out through a pa.s.sageway into what appeared to be an amphitheater, as far as I could see from my angle of vision, with an audience in tiered seats and an announcer. Drew motioned to me and we went outside and around to the lighted front entrance, where the chauffeurs stood beside their cars, and came into the amphitheater and saw the same horses from a height under the stagey lights of the auction ring while the announcer or auctioneer proclaimed their virtues. And then they were held by the bridle in front of his podium while he directed the bidding, which came not as far as I could see from any of the people in their tiered seats but from employees like himself stationed here and there in the crowd who communicated the bids offered invisibly and in silence by the patrons on whose behalf they acted. It was all very mysterious and the sums were astonis.h.i.+ng, going up in leaps and bounds to thirty, forty, fifty thousand dollars. These numbers frightened even the horses, many of whom saw fit to drop manure behind them as they were walked into the ring. When this happened a Negro man in a tuxedo appeared with a rake and shovel and quickly removed the offense from sight.

That was the whole show. I saw as much as I wanted to see in about three minutes but Drew couldn't get enough of it. Up behind the stands where we were, there was a constant traffic of people wandering around and looking each other over in a kind of unconscious imitation of the horses circling the ring below. Drew met a couple she knew. Then a man came over and soon she was in a small group of chatting friends and she made no reference to me whatsoever. This put me in the frame of mind of the shadow I was supposed to be. I was full of scorn, the women greeting one another appeared to kiss cheeks but in fact laid them together for a moment side by side and kissed the air beside each other's ear. People were glad to see Drew. I had a sense of an adenoidal group resonance. There was some giggling I imagined was directed at me, an entirely unreasonable a.s.sumption, which I also realized, but it made me turn away and lean on a railing and look down at the horses. I didn't know what I was doing here. I felt all alone. Mr. Schultz had held Drew for some weeks, clearly I was a strong enough novelty only for a couple of days or so. I had made a mistake to reveal my fears. Fears did not hold her interest. I had told her about Julie Martin's death and it was as if I had said I had stubbed my toe.

Then she appeared at my side and gave me a sideways hug and we looked together down at a new horse being led into the ring and in thirty seconds I was back in abject love. All my resentment dissolved and I reproached myself for questioning her constancy. She said we ought to have some supper and suggested we go to the Brook Club.

"You think that's smart?" I said.

"We will be what we're supposed to be," she said. "The moll and her shadow. I'm starving, aren't you?"

So we took a cab to the Brook Club and it was really an elegant place, with an awning all the way to the curb and beveled-gla.s.s doors and leather-padded walls, a horsey kind of place in dark green with little shaded lamps on the tables and prints of famous racehorses on the walls. It was somewhat larger than the Emba.s.sy. The host looked at Drew and wasted no time in showing us to a table right up front near a small dance floor. This was the man I was supposed to contact if I had to but he looked right through me and Drew did all the ordering. We had shrimp c.o.c.ktails and aged sirloin steaks and hash browns, and chopped salad with anchovies, I hadn't realized how hungry I was. She ordered a bottle of red French wine, which I shared with her, though she had most of it. It was so dark in the club that even if friends of hers from her horsey set were there they couldn't have seen far enough in that low and heavily shadowed light to recognize her. I began to feel good again. There she was across the table from me, we were coc.o.o.ned in our own light, and I had to remind myself I had had intercourse with her, that I had had carnal knowledge of her, that I had made her come, because I wanted to do this all over again, but with the same yearning as if it had never happened, with the same questions about her, and wonderings and imaginings of her physical quality, as if I was looking at an actress in a movie. This was the moment I began to understand that you can't remember s.e.x. You can remember the fact of it, and recall the setting, and even the details, but the s.e.x of the s.e.x cannot be remembered, the substantive truth of it, it is by nature self-erasing, you can remember its anatomy and be left with a judgment as to the degree of your liking of it, but whatever it is as a splurge of being, as a loss, as a charge of the conviction of love stopping your heart like your execution, there is no memory of it in the brain, only the deduction that it happened and that time pa.s.sed, leaving you with a silhouette that you want to fill in again.

And then musicians came out on the bandstand and they were my friends from the Emba.s.sy Club, the same group, with the same skinny lackadaisical girl singer who pulled at the top of her strapless evening dress. She sat on a chair to the side and nodded in time to the first number, an instrumental, and I caught her eye and she smiled and gave me a little wave, bobbing her head in time to the music all the while, and I felt very proud to be recognized by her. Somehow she communicated my presence to the other members of the band, the saxophonist turned to me and dipped his horn and the drummer laughed to see the company I was keeping and he twirled his sticks at me and I felt right at home. "They're old friends," I said to Drew, over the music, I was happy to be able to reveal the dimension in me of Man About Town, I felt in my pocket to make sure I hadn't lost Mr. Berman's thousand dollars, I thought it would be appropriate to buy the band drinks when they finished the set.

Drew toward the end of the dinner was a little bit looped, she sat with her elbow on the table and her chin propped in her hand and gazed at me with an aimless smiling affection. I was very comfortable now, the darkness of a nightclub is sustaining, it is a kind of shelter of controlled darkness as opposed to the open darkness of the real night with the weight of the whole sky of unfathomable possibilities, the music seemed so clear and figurative, they were playing standards, one after another, and every lyric seemed meaningful and appropriate and every melodic line of the solos had the clarity of a sweet truth. And as it happened one of the songs was "Me and My Shadow," which made us laugh-Me and my shad-ow, strolling down the aven-ue was its sly lyric, and it came to me that a kind of message was being sent of the conspiracy we all made together, I half expected Abbadabba Berman to scuttledance into the room, it was the old thing, as usual I never felt safe from Mr. Schultz when I was separated from him, Drew's idea to come here was a good one, if we were being watched we were doing the right thing having dinner in his club, getting the money back to him as loyalists would, this was his realm and because it made me feel closer to him to be here I wasn't afraid anymore. was its sly lyric, and it came to me that a kind of message was being sent of the conspiracy we all made together, I half expected Abbadabba Berman to scuttledance into the room, it was the old thing, as usual I never felt safe from Mr. Schultz when I was separated from him, Drew's idea to come here was a good one, if we were being watched we were doing the right thing having dinner in his club, getting the money back to him as loyalists would, this was his realm and because it made me feel closer to him to be here I wasn't afraid anymore.

I decided to worry no longer and make no decisions but trust our fate to Drew's impulses, to put myself at her disposal like a real companion in Mr. Schultz's interest, she knew more than I did, she had to, and what I perceived as her impracticality had the power of her nature. She really did know her way around, and for all her recklessness she was still alive. She was, in fact, quite safe in Saratoga. I was, in fact, looking after her for Mr. Schultz. I didn't know whose idea it had been that she come here, but I felt now that she could as easily have initiated this trip by claiming not to want to leave Onondaga as Mr. Berman could have by insisting that she should.

But then people began dancing on the little dance floor in front of our table and when she wanted to dance with me I strongly suggested that it was time to go home. I paid the bill but got her advice on the tips, and on the way out I left money with the bartender for the band's drinks. We took a cab back to the Grand Union Hotel and went prominently to the separate doors of our adjoining rooms and, once inside, met giggling at the open door between them.

But we slept in our own beds and when I woke in the morning I found a note on my pillow: She had gone to have breakfast with some friends. She said I should buy a clubhouse admission and meet her for lunch at the track. She gave me her box number. I loved her handwriting, she wrote a very even line with round letters that were almost like printing and she dotted her i's with little circles.

I showered and dressed and ran downstairs. The two men were not there. I found real morning papers in the lobby newsstand and took them with me to the front porch and sat and read them all in a big wicker chair. The jury had been chosen. The defense had used none of its peremptory challenges. The actual trial would begin today, and the prosecutor was quoted as saying he thought it would take a week at the most. The Daily News Daily News had a picture of Mr. Schultz and Dixie Davis conferring with their heads together in a corridor outside the courtroom. The had a picture of Mr. Schultz and Dixie Davis conferring with their heads together in a corridor outside the courtroom. The Mirror Mirror showed Mr. Schultz coming down the courthouse steps with a big fake smile on his face. showed Mr. Schultz coming down the courthouse steps with a big fake smile on his face.

I left the hotel and went along Broadway till I found a drugstore with a phone booth. I got a handful of change and asked the operator for the number Mr. Berman had given me. To this day I don't know how he was able to secure a number for a phone the phone company didn't know anything about, but he answered on the first ring. I told him we had gotten into town as scheduled, gone to the yearling sales, and were going to have a day at the races. I told him Mrs. Preston had met some of her friends here, silly people with whom she had nothing but silly conversation. I said we had had dinner at the Brook Club but that I hadn't felt the need to identify myself to the man there because everything was going fine. I told him the truth about these things, knowing that he would know it already.

"Good for you, kid," he said. "You want to parlay some of your expense money?"

"Sure," I said.

"There is a horse who will be the number-three position in the seventh race. That will be a good bet with handsome odds."

"What's his name?"