Billy Bathgate

  I didn’t like the state of my mind and stared out the window to bring into myself the structure of the city, the solidity of the dark buildings, and the colors of traffic lights reflected in the black shining street. The city has always given me assurances, whenever I have asked for them. I recalled to myself my own imperial intentions. If I could not trust my own impulses to direct me, I was not in Mr. Schultz’s class. He operated without sufficient thought and so must I. We were directed beings, and to the extent that I trusted myself I should trust him. What I was in was a thrilling state of three-dimensional danger, I was in danger of myself, and in danger of my mentor, and in danger of what he was in danger of, which was a business life of murdering danger; and out beyond all that were the cops. Four dimensions. I cracked a window and smelled the fresh night air and relaxed.

  The cars were heading uptown. We went along Fourth Avenue, and then through the tunnel which brought us up on the ramp that curved around Grand Central Terminal and then we rolled onto Park Avenue, the real Park Avenue, going past the new Waldorf-Astoria Towers, with its famous Peacock Alley and its equally famous host the irrepressible Oscar, as I knew from my reading of the Mirror, an invaluable source of information; and then we turned left on Fifty-ninth Street and bumped along behind a streetcar whose bell sounded in my ears like the gong at a prizefight, and then we swerved and pulled up to the curb at the corner of Central Park in the shadow of General Tecumseh Sherman on his horse slogging up there through the rain, which fell also from the fountain of tiered basins across the plaza into the shallow pool he would have to have the horse step through if he was going to get the woman with the basket of fruit standing up there on top of everything, assuming it was a piece of fruit he wanted. I have never liked public monuments, they are ghostly foreign things in the city of New York, quite beside the point, if not actually stupid lies, and for all you can say about the Bronx you won’t find generals on rearing horses or dames carrying baskets of fruit or soldiers standing in aesthetic hills of dying comrades and lifting their arms and holding their rifles up to the sky. To my astonishment the door opened and Mr. Schultz was standing there. “Okay, kid,” he said and in he reached and yanked me by the arm and all at once I was standing there in Grand Army Plaza being rained on and thinking, in this world of water, that that was it for the phantom wizard juggler of the rackets, I would be found face down in a mud puddle under a bush in Central Park, and if dying depth was a measure of achievement I was worth whatever was of value to some dog snout rooting me up from an inch of water and licking the mud off my dead eyes. But he said walking me quickly to the first car: “Take the lady to her apartment. She is not to make any phone calls under no circumstances, although I don’t think she will try. She will pack some things. You are to wait with her until I get back. Not long. Just stay with her and someone will call you on the house phone to bring her down. You got it?”

  I nodded I did. We came up to his car, and though water was dripping off his hat brim, he only now reached in to the back seat and withdrew a black umbrella and after he opened it he bent into the car and brought her out and handed me the girl and the umbrella; it was a lovely moment, the three of us under the one umbrella, and she was looking at him with some slight and cryptic smile and he was gently stroking her cheek and smiling at her; then he dove into the car and was still pulling the door closed as it gunned away from the sidewalk with a screech of tires, the second car close behind.

  We stood in a huge blowing rainstorm. It occurred to me I had no idea where Miss Lola maintained her apartment. For some reason I assumed everything was up to me, and that she would lack all volition and simply wait to be led. But she took my arm with both her hands, and huddling close to me under this great black umbrella rattling like a snare drum, she pulled me along at a half-walk half-run across Fifth Avenue so shining with rain that the rain splashed up at us after it came down. She seemed to be heading for the Savoy-Plaza Hotel. Sure enough, a doorman came out of the swinging doors with his own umbrella and rushed toward us uselessly except as he demonstrated solicitousness, and a moment later we whooshed into the carpeted, brightly lit but intimate lobby where some fellow in tails and striped pants relieved us of ours. And a flush of excitement was on Miss Lola’s beautiful face, and she laughed looking down at the damp wreckage of her costume and ran her hand fetchingly through her wet hair and then shook her wrists at the carpet and received the greetings of the reception clerk as her just due—Good evening, Miss Drew, Good evening, Charles—as well as the polite salute of the policeman standing there with his hotel-staff friends as he liked to do in the warmth of the friendly lobby on inclement nights of his beat, while I, not daring to look at him, waited with a dry throat for what her explanation would be for me, a clear punk in any cop’s eyes, and tried not to look back at the revolving door which was no good anyway and deciding on the curving staircase beyond the elevators which even though it led up could find me a way down. I prayed Mr. Schultz knew what he was doing, I prayed for understanding if not resourcefulness from Miss Lola, Miss Drew, whoever she was and whatever she had been through this night of the death of a man of whom she was presumably fond enough to be going to dinner and to bed with. But she made no explanations as she took her key, as if every night of the year she came in like this with strange boys in cheap scuffed imitation suede jackets and army-navy workpants and Bronx pompadour haircuts, and took my arm and walked with me into the elevator as if I was the normal companion of her nights, whereupon the doors closed, and the man took us up without having to inquire as to the floor, and I rose simultaneously in my thought to the truth that explanations are required of everyone but the people at the top, and to the terrible shadow of a revelation that for this Miss Drew glancing at me now with her cruel green eyes it had been one hell of an exciting ride on a tugboat.

  Here is the kind of hotel this was: When the elevator door opened we were already in the apartment. The floor was bare and very highly shellacked and there was a rug or tapestry hanging on the opposite wall, something going on with ranks of armored knights with lances on rearing horses, each horse standing on its hind legs at the same angle as the others, like the Rockettes, and the reason there was no furniture in this room is that it was the entrance foyer, except if you wanted to sink down into either of the two waist-high urns in the corners and put yourself in the middle of a circle of walking Greek philosophers holding wrapped sheets around themselves, or shrouds, given the mood I was in. But I preferred to follow the new Miss Drew grandly throwing open the double ceiling-high doors on our left and striding forward down a short hall hung with brownish oil paintings with fine cracks in them. And hoving up on the left was an open door from which, as she passed, a man’s voice called out “Drew?”

  “I have to pee, Harvey,” she said in a quite matter-of-fact voice, and kept going around a corner and I heard another door open and close. And I was left standing in this doorway looking into a room that was a private library with glass-enclosed bookcases and a tall leaning ladder that rolled on rails and an immense globe in its own polished wood framework, and light that came from two brass table lamps with green shades at either end of a soft sofa, on which were sitting two men side by side, one somewhat older than the other. What I found remarkable, the older was holding the younger’s erect cock in his hand.

  I’m afraid I stared at them. “I thought you were out for the evening!” the older man called out, looking at me but listening somewhere else. He released his hold, rose from the sofa, and straightened his bow tie. He was a tall handsome man, this Harvey, very well groomed in a tweed suit with a vest into the pocket of which he inserted his hand as if he had some sort of pain under the cloth, except that as he came toward me he didn’t appear to be in pain, and in fact looked quite healthy and like a man who took care of himself. Not only that but he commanded respect, because without thinking I stepped out of his way. As he went by me he said, “Are you all right?” loudly in my ear, and I noticed the tracks of the comb in his hair
as it came back from his temples, this Harvey.

  It made things so much easier, living on an explanationless planet. The air was somewhat rarefied, a bit thinner than I was used to, but then there didn’t seem to be any need for exertion. With thumb and forefinger the fellow on the couch removed an antimacassar from the sofa and dropped it over himself. He looked up and laughed in a way that suggested we were complicitors, and I realized he was working-class, like me. I had not at first glance understood this. He appeared to be wearing mascara on his eyes, they were certainly bold and black eyes, and his black hair was slicked down flat without a part, and his bony wide shoulders were draped with the tied sleeves of a collegiate sweater with an argyle pattern of light maroon and gray.

  Mr. Schultz was responsible for all this stunning experience so I thought I’d better attend to his business. I wandered down the hall and around some corners and found Harvey in a big padded gray-and-white bedroom, bigger than three Bronx bedrooms put together, and a mirrored bathroom door was open on a field of white tile, and Drew was in there with bathwater running and this caused him to speak loudly over the sound of it while he sat on a corner of an enormous double bed with his legs crossed and held a cigarette in his hand.

  “Darling?” he shouted. “Tell me what you’ve gone and done. You didn’t ditch him.”

  “I didn’t, my dearest. But he’s no longer a presence in my life.”

  “And what did he do! I mean you were so gaga about him,” Harvey said with a wry and rueful smile to himself.

  “Well if you must know, he died.”

  Harvey’s back straightened and he lifted his head as if wondering if he’d heard correctly. But he said nothing. And then he turned and looked at me sitting in the far corner on a side chair that had gray napped upholstery, a boy as out-of-place here as in the library, but now visible, in this new intelligence, and I sort of straightened my own back for his benefit and stared just as rudely at him.

  He immediately rose and went into the bathroom and closed the door. I picked up the phone at the bedside table and listened for a moment until the hotel operator came on the line and said Yes, please, and then I hung up. It was a white phone. I had never seen a white phone before. Even the cord was wound in white fabric. The big bed had a white upholstered headboard and big fluffy pillows, about a half dozen of them, with little lace skirts, and all the furniture was gray and the thick carpet was gray and the lights were hidden and shone out of a cornice onto the walls and ceiling. Two people used this room because there were books and magazines on both end tables, and two immense cabinets with white doors and curving white legs that were closets inside, his and hers, and two matching dressers with his shirts and her underwear, and until now I only knew about wealth what I read in the tabloids, and I had thought I could imagine, but the detailed wealth in this room was amazing, to think what people really needed when they were wealthy, like long sticks with shoehorns at the end of them, and sweaters of every color of the rainbow, and dozens of shoes of every style and purpose, and sets of combs and brushes, and carved boxes with handfuls of rings and bracelets, and gold table clocks with pendulum balls that spun one way, paused, and then spun the other way.

  The bathroom door opened and Harvey came out holding Miss Drew’s dress and underwear and hose and shoes all in a bundle in his two hands out in front of him, and he dropped the whole shebang into a wastebasket and then brushed his hands off, you could see he was not happy. He went to some far corner of the room and opened another door and disappeared there and a light went on, it was a walk-in closet and he came out with a piece of luggage which he threw on the bed. And then he sat down beside it and crossed his legs again and then crossed his arms over his knee and waited. And I waited back in my chair. And then the lady came out of the bathroom with a big towel around her and tucked in under the clavicle, and another towel wrapped around her head like a turban.

  The argument was about her behavior. He said it was becoming erratic and disruptive. She herself had insisted they accept that dinner invitation for tomorrow evening. To say nothing of the regatta weekend. Did she want to lose every friend they had? He was entirely reasonable but he was losing me, because Miss Lola Miss Drew conducted her side of the argument while getting dressed. She stood at the armoire and let the big towel fall, and she was altogether taller and longer-waisted and maybe her ass was a little softer and flatter, but there was the prominent spinal column of tender girl bones of my dirty little Rebecca, and all the parts were as Rebecca’s parts and the sum was the familiar body of a woman, I don’t know what I’d been expecting but she was a mortal being with flesh pinkened by the hot bathwater, she hooked on her garter belt and stood on each thin white leg while she gently but efficiently raised the other to receive its sheer stocking, which she pulled and smoothed upward taking care to keep the seam straight till she could lower her toe-wiggling foot and sling her hip and attach the stocking to the metal clips hanging from the garter belt, and then she raised one foot and stepped in her white satin step-ins and then the other, and yanked them up and snapped the waistband, and it was the practiced efficiency of the race of women dressing, from that assumption they had always made that a G-string was their armor in the world, and that it would do against wars, riots, famines, floods, droughts, and the flames of the arctic night. As I watched, more and more of her was covered, a skirt was dropped over the hips and zipped along the side, two high-heeled shoes were wiggled into, and then, dressed only from the waist down and with the towel still on her head, she commenced to pack, going from drawers and armoire to valise and back, making her decisions quickly and acting on them energetically, all the while saying that she didn’t give a hoot in hell what her friends thought, what had that to do with anything, she was going to see whomever she damned pleased surely he knew that and so what was the point of making a fuss, all this whining of his was beginning to bore her. And then she brought the lid down on her leather valise and snapped shut the two brass locks. I had I thought heard just about everything that went on between Miss Lola and Mr. Schultz in the hold of that tugboat but clearly I hadn’t, there was some pact between them she was determined to honor.

  “I speak of order, of the need for some order,” the fellow Harvey said, although clearly without hope of prevailing. “You’re going to destroy us all,” he muttered. “I mean a bit of scandal is not the point, is it? You’re a very clever, very naughty little hellion, but there are limits, my darling, there really are. You’re going to get in over your head and then what will you do? Wait for me to come to the rescue?”

  “That is a laugh and a half.”

  And then she sat nude to the waist at her dressing-table mirror and unwrapped the towel on her head and ran a comb a few times through her short helmet of hair, and painted on some lipstick, then found a camisole and shrugged it over her torso and pulled a blouse on over that, and tucked it in, and then a jacket over the blouse, and a bracelet or two, a necklace, and she stood and looked at me for the first time, a new woman, Miss Lola Miss Drew, a formidable intention in her eyes, and when had I seen a woman dress herself so, all in cream and aqua, to run away with the killer of her dreams?

  So there we are, three o’clock in the morning and tearing up Route 22 out of the city, miles into the mountains where I have never been before, I am sitting up front next to Mickey the driver, and Mr. Schultz and the lady are in the back with glasses of champagne in their hands. He is telling her the story of his life. A steady hundred yards behind is a car with Irving and Lulu Rosenkrantz, and Mr. Abbadabba Berman. It has been a long night in my education, but there is more to come, I am going into mountains, Mr. Schultz is showing me the world, he is like a subscription to the National Geographic Magazine except the only tits I’ve seen are white, I’ve seen the contours of the ocean bed and the contours of the white Miss Drew and now I see the contours of the black mountains. I understand for the first time the place of the city in the world, it should have been obvious but I had never realized it, I had
never been out of it before, never had the distance, it is a station on the amphibian journey, it is where we come out sliming, it is where we bask and feed and make our tracks and do our dances and leave our coprolitic spires, before moving on into the black mountains of high winds and no rain. And what I hear as my eyes begin to droop is the soft whistle of the wind in the half window I’ve left open a crack with a turn of the knob, not a whistle entirely but the kind of almost-whistle a person makes who is whistling to himself; and the soundplow of the eight-cylinder car in its bassoing, and the resonant rasp of Mr. Schultz telling how he robbed crap games as a lad, and the tires’ humslick on the damp highway, all of it really the protesting circuitry of my brain as I wrap my arms around myself and let my chin drop to my chest, I hear one last laugh but I can’t help it, it is three o’clock in the morning of the awesome morning of my life and I haven’t even been to sleep yet.

  FOUR

  I knew from Walter Winchell’s column Mr. Schultz was a lammister: the federal government was looking for him because he had not paid taxes on all the money he had earned. The police one day had raided his headquarters on East 149th Street with axes and found there incriminating records from his beer business. Yet I had seen him with my own eyes and felt his hand on my face. It is spectacular enough to see someone in the flesh whom you’ve only known in the newspapers, but to see someone the newspapers have said is on the lam definitely has a touch of magic to it. If the papers said Mr. Schultz was on the lam then it was true; but “the lam” suggested to most people someone running by night and hiding by day when really what it is is the state of being invisible; if you don’t run and you don’t hide and you are on the lam then you are there all the time, you are simply controlling people’s ability to see you and that is a very potent magic. Of course you do it by waving dollars over the air, you wave a dollar and you are invisible. But it is still a difficult and dangerous trick that may not always work when you want it to. It would not work in Manhattan, I decided, because that’s where the federal attorneys were who were planning to try Mr. Schultz for tax evasion. It would work better in the Bronx, as for instance in the Bronx neighborhood of a beer drop. It might work best of all, I decided, in the very gang headquarters that had been raided and cleaned out by the police at the insistence of the federal attorneys.