Billy Bathgate (35 page)

As I waited for the news I tried to see the good in either verdict as it might be handed down so as to try to prepare myself whatever happened. If Mr. Schultz went to jail we would all be safe from him for as long as he was put away. That was an undeniable good. Oh to think of being freed of him! But at the
same time my faith in the quietly working clockwork of my given destiny would be shattered. If something as ordinary and mundane as government justice could tilt my life awry, then my secret oiled connections to the real justice of a sanctified universe were nonexistent. If Mr. Schultz’s crimes were only earthly crimes with earthly punishments, then there was nothing else in the world but what I could see, and whereas I had been humming in the conviction of invisible empowerments, it was my own mind only making them up. That was unendurable. But if he beat the rap, if he beat the rap, I was back in my lines of danger and trusting with a boy’s pure and shaking trust I would get through to the just conclusion of my chosen perils. So which did I want? Which verdict, which future?

In the way I waited I realized my answer, I looked every morning in the back of the
Times
at the passenger ship sailings, I just wanted to know which ships they were and where they were going and that there were lots of them to choose from. I trusted Harvey Preston had worked things out, I was beginning to like him, he’d certainly come through in Saratoga and I saw no reason why he wouldn’t now. In my mind I watched her leaning on the railing with the moon out and staring at the silvery ocean and thinking of me. I imagined her in shorts and halter playing shuffleboard on the rear deck in the sun just the way the kids played it on the roof of the orphan home. If I had been wrong, if Mr. Berman and Irving and Mickey had only come to Saratoga to take her back or to talk to her on behalf of Mr. Schultz, well then what, after all, had been lost except Drew to me, except my Drew to me?

In the Wednesday evening papers, the lawyers presented their summations, and on Thursday the judge gave his instructions to the jury, by Thursday evening the jury was still out and late Thursday night I went to Third Avenue and Mr. Schultz was the headline in Extras put out by both the evening and the morning papers: He was innocent of all charges.

I whooped and hollered and jumped up and down and danced around the kiosk while a train rumbled overhead. You wouldn’t
know from looking at me that I believed this was the man who just a week before had been intending to kill me. He was shown close up, broadly smiling at the camera in the
Mirror
, kissing his rosary in the
Amencan
, and holding Dixie Davis’s head in the crook of his arm and planting a big kiss on the top of it in the
Evening Post
. The
News
and the
Telegram
showed him with his arm around the foreman of the jury, a man in overalls. And all of the papers carried the remarks of the judge on hearing the jury’s verdict: “Ladies and gentlemen, in all my years on the bench I have never witnessed such disdain of truth and evidence as you have manifested this day. That you could on hearing the meticulous case presented by the United States Government find the defendant not guilty on all charges so staggers my faith in the judicial process that I can only wonder about the future of this Republic. You are dismissed with no thanks from the court for your service. You are a disgrace.”

My mother saved the front page of the
Mirror
with Mr. Schultz’s smiling face and folded it so that just the picture showed, she laid it down in the carriage and brought a threadbare blanket up to its chin.

And now I will tell of the revels that went on for three nights and two days in the brothel on West Seventy-sixth Street between Columbus and Amsterdam avenues. Not that I knew at any given time whether it was night or day because the red velour drapes were pulled across every window and the lights were always on, the lamps with their tasseled shades, the cut-glass chandeliers, and the particular hour was not something very important after a while. It was a brownstone and one of the sights I remember is of a trembling slightly aged whore’s puckered behind as she ran up the stairs shrieking in mock fear while this hood tried to catch her but fell on his face instead and slid down the flight of stairs face down and feet first and arms up. Most of the women were young and pretty and slender, and some of them got tired and left and were replaced by others. Also there were a lot of men I didn’t recognize, this was supposed
to be for the top gang members but word had gotten around and the unshaven faces kept changing, and on the second night or day I even saw a cop in his undershirt with his suspenders holding his blue pants up and a whore with his braid cap set awry on the back of her head kissing his bare feet, toe by toe.

Women were laughing and getting playfully pinched and tickled by fearsome men, but showing no fear and in fact going off with them up the stairs, like multiples of Drew in their fearlessness of taking killers into themselves. I was stunned by this transformation of the value of feeling into numbers, in a corner of a room I saw Mr. Berman’s sly laughing face appearing through his cigarette smoke, and in the big downstairs parlor three or four women were draped all over Mr. Schultz, on the arms of his chair, in his lap, nibbling on his ears, begging him to dance, he laughed and fondled them and pinched them and handled them, there was a profusion of flesh and as I looked it didn’t seem to be organized according to individual persons but was all jumbled together, profusions of breasts and constellations of nipples, cornucopie bellies and asses and tangles of long legs. Mr. Schultz saw me looking and appointed a woman to take me to bed, she reluctantly disentangled herself and led me upstairs, and there was a good deal of attendant merriment on the part of my colleagues, which turned the occasion into something unpleasant for me and for the woman too, who was seething with anger because she felt demeaned by my age and unimportance. Both of us could hardly wait to be finished, this was not the party, the party was elsewhere, it was appalling to me how unsexy sex could be humped up with such scorn and impatiently delivered, I had an actual Manhattan to drink afterward, it at least was sweet with a crunchy cherry at the bottom of it.

The madam who ran things stayed in the kitchen on the ground floor in the back, a very nervous woman whom I sat with and talked to for a while, I felt sorry for her because Mr. Schultz when drunk had slugged her for some imagined offense and had given her a black eye. Then he’d apologized and given her a new
hundred-dollar bill. She was a tiny woman he called Mugsy maybe because she so resembled the little Pekingese she held in her lap, she had a little pug-nosed button-eyed face with highly curled but very thin red hair and a small skinny body dressed in a black dress and stockings which drooped a little at the knees. She had a low voice, like a man’s. I talked to her while she held a slice of raw steak over her eye. In the oven of the stove were all the guns people had to turn over when they arrived. She would not leave the kitchen I think because she didn’t want anyone to come in and get a gun and start shooting up her house, although what she could have done to prevent it, this little tiny lady, I can’t say. She had a staff of Negro maids who kept things going, changing linens, emptying ashtrays, collecting empty bottles, and she had delivery boys, also colored, coming in the back door with cases of mixer and beer and booze, and cartons of cigarettes and hot dinners in metal containers from steakhouses and hot breakfasts in cardboard cartons from neighborhood diners, she was tense but had things very well organized, like a general who had planned well and deployed all his troops and had only to hear them report from time to time how the battle was going. I juggled some hard-boiled eggs in their shell and she was so sure I was going to drop them that she laughed with appreciation when I didn’t, she took a liking to me, she wanted to know all about me, what my name was, where I lived, and I said yes, and how had a nice boy like me come to this sordid profession, which made her laugh again. She pinched my cheek and offered me chocolates from a fancy painted metal box which she kept by her side, it showed scenes of men in knee britches and white wigs bowing to ladies in big hoop skirts.

But this Madam Mugsy understood my inclination to linger in the kitchen for what it was, and with great delicacy and tact she suggested that she had something special for me, that most desirable item, a fresh girl, by which she meant a young one fairly new to the trade, and she made a phone call and within an hour I was up in a small quiet bedroom on the top floor with what indeed was a young girl, light-haired round-faced highwaisted
and somewhat shy and rubbery to the touch, who lay with me through the night, or the quiet hours that passed for night, and fortunately needed as much sleep in her youth as I needed in mine.

I was too self-conscious and unsure of myself and sad to really enjoy these revels. Up in the Bronx as I’d waited for the trial to end I had the avid desire to reconnect with the gang, I felt love for every one of them, there was a kind of consistency to their behavior that made me feel grateful for their existence, but now that I was reunited with them the other side of that gratitude was guilt, I looked to the faces of Mr. Schultz and the others to see how I fared there, in a smile of gold teeth I read exoneration one moment, retribution the next.

But then, I suppose it was by the second night, I realized I wasn’t the only one in a less than ecstatic state, Mr. Berman had entrenched himself in the front parlor and sat reading the papers and smoking and sipping brandy, he went out a lot to use public pay phones, and while Lulu was still exercising his uncouth being upon a selection of ladies not one of whom failed to complain to the management, Irving absented himself rarely, and only gave way to the joy of the occasion by taking off his jacket, loosening his tie, and rolling up his sleeves and serving as bartender to all the close and casual freeloaders of the criminal trades. I finally realized that Mr. Schultz’s chief lieutenants were waiting, that is all they were doing, and that the celebration was by the second day not a joyful party of men who had been through something together but a sort of statement to the profession, a business announcement that the Dutchman had returned, and all the true merriment and joy and relief of victory had given way to the hollow gaiety of a public-relations event.

Even Mr. Schultz sought now the places in the house for the quieter pleasures of reflection, and I happened to pass one of the bathrooms where he was sitting in a hot soapy tub puffing a cigar into the steamy air and enjoying a back wash from the madam, Mugsy, who sat on a wooden stool beside the tub and
talked and joked with him as if he hadn’t slugged her the day before.

He glanced up and saw me. “Come in, kid, don’t be shy,” he said. I sat down on the lid of the toilet bowl. “Mugsy this here is my pro-to-jay, Billy, you two met yet?” We said we bad. “You know who Mugsy is, kid? You know how far we go back? I’ll tell you,” he said, “when Vince Coll was on the rampage, gunning for me all over the Bronx, and going crazy looking for me where do you think I was all the time?”

“Here?”

“Except then I had my house on Riverside Drive,” the madam said.

“Coll was so dumb,” Mr. Schultz said, “he wouldn’t know about the finer things of life, he didn’t know what a high-class whorehouse looked like, and while he’s going around shooting everything that moves, hitting bars and drops and clubhouses, the dumb fuck, I am snug like a bug in a rug at my Mugsy’s taking pleasure and biding my time. Sitting in the bathtub and getting my back washed.”

“That’s right,” the woman said.

“Mugsy’s as square as they come.”

“I better be,” she said.

“Get me a beer, would you, doll?” Mr. Schultz said lying back in the tub.

“I’ll be back,” she said and dried her hands on a towel and left the room, closing the door.

“You having a good time, kid?”

“Yes, sir.”

“It’s important to get that clean country air out of your lungs,” he said grinning. He closed his eyes. “Also to get your heart back in your balls, where it belongs. Where it’s safe. Did she say anything?”

“Who?”

“Who, who,” he said.

“Mrs. Preston?”

“I think that was the lady’s name.”

“Well she did tell me she liked you very much.”

“She said that?”

“That you have class.”

“Yeah? Comin’ from her,” he said and a pleased smile came over his face. He kept his eyes closed. “In a better world,” he said. “If this were a better world.” He paused. “I like the idea of women, I like that you can pick them up like shells on the beach, they are all over the place, little pink ones and ones with whorls you can hear the ocean. The trouble is, the trouble is …” He shook his head.

The steamy water and the tile did something to his voice, so that even as he spoke softly it hollowed out as if we were in a cavern. He was now staring at the ceiling. “I think you only fall for someone, what I mean is the only time it’s possible is when you’re a kid, like you, when you don’t know the world is a whorehouse. You get the idea in your mind and that’s it. And for the rest of your life you’re stuck on her, and you think every time you turn around she’s this one or that one who comes along and smiles like her and fills her in. We have that first one when we’re stupid and don’t know any better. And we walk away, and she becomes the one we look for for the rest of your life, you know?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Hell, she was a dignified girl, Drew. Not ordinary ginch at all, nothing cheap about her. She had this lovely mouth,” he said pulling on his cigar. “But you know the expression ‘summer romance’? Sad to say it was no more than that. We both have our lives we had to go back to.” He glanced at me to see my response. “I have a business to run,” he said. “And I have survived in this business because of my attention to business.”

He sat up in the tub, bubbles of soapy water caught in the black hairs of his shoulders and chest. “When you think who I have outlasted, what I have had to contend with. Every day in the week. The thieves, the rats. Everything you build up, everything you work for, they try to steal it from you. Big Julie. My dear Bo, my dear dear Bo. And like Coll, who I have mentioned. You know what loyalty is worth? You know what a loyal man is
worth these days? His weight in gold. I was good to Vincent Coll. And he goes and skips bail I put up for him. Did you know that? I never start these things. I’m just this good-natured slob people think they can walk all over. And before you know it, I’m in a fucking war with this madman and having to hide out in a whorehouse. To tell you the truth I felt very bad about that, it was not the manly thing to do. But I had to bide my time. One day in the middle of everything Vincent is picked up and detained, he goes into temporary detention on some rap, and I figure this is my chance, so we lay in wait for him when he comes out except he knows we’re there so he gets his sister to meet him and walks out holding his sister’s kid in his arms. You see what I’m saying? We back off, we are not barbarians, he has us and we go away to fight another day. Just to show you. But the Mick he doesn’t play by any rules of civilization, not a week later he comes rolling around the corner of Bathgate Avenue looking for me with the windows down as I happen to be in the neighborhood to visit my old mother and bring her some nice flowers. When I go see Mama I go alone, maybe that is stupid, I mean I know it is, but it is another life she leads and I don’t want to offend it, so I am by myself with a nice bouquet of flowers I have just bought and I am on this crowded street nodding to this one or that who happens to know me, and I have that sixth sense, you know? or maybe I see something in the eyes of someone walking toward me, that he would look past me? I dive behind a fruit stall, the slugs fly and the oranges go up in the air and the peaches and watermelon busting like skulls spraying, and I am lying there under falling crates of grapefruits and plums and pears and all this juice, so I think I’ve been hit, it feels wet, it would be funny, I’m lying there with all this fruit juice leaking over me, except the screaming of the women and children, it is a family street for christsake, you know with all the pushcarts and the balabustas out doing their marketing, and then the car is gone and I get up and I see over the top of the stall people running the mother screaming in Italian and there is a baby carriage on its side with a baby spilled out, the baby nightie soaked in blood, blood all over his bonnet, the fuckers have
killed the kid in its carriage, God help us all. And then someone starts pointing at me, cursing me, you know? like I have shot the kid! and I have to run for it with people shouting after me! Well when that happened I knew I would kill Vincent Coll if it was the last thing I did, I felt honor bound, I made a sacred vow. But the press gives me the rap, me, the Dutchman, because I am at war with this maniac madman, that is the joke of it, I am getting the blame for Vincent Coll, as if I didn’t warn everyone, as if I didn’t try to tell everyone to watch out for him, I get the blame for being the missing target, for not being shot instead of that murdered infant when the fact it was the Mick who did wrong from the beginning, jumping the bail of ten grand I put up for him, ten grand! and then hitting on my trucks and drops, it was a remorseful error of judgment I ever hired him in the first place, I had to get him, I swore to myself I would take him down, it was a matter of restoring the moral world in its rightful position. You know how I did it?”