Billy Bathgate (6 page)

She was a nimble little girl with black hair and dark eyes and a delicate thin black down above her pronounced upper lip. The orphans were inside now, the lights blazing in the windows of diamond-mesh translucence, and I stood outside and heard the din, louder on the boys’ side, and then one of the signal bells, and I went down the alley to the small backyard and waited there in the corner of their broken-down little ball yard with my back against their chain-link fence, and in about an hour most of the upper-story lights were out, and I rose and stood under the fire escape ladder and leapt up, catching the bottom rung, and hoisted myself onto the ladder and so, hand over hand and foot over foot, rose on the black ladder of my love and at the top, swung out to a window ledge without a net below me and entered the open hallway window on the top floor, where the oldest girls slept, eleven to fourteen, and found there in her bed my witchy little friend, whose dark eyes were open when I looked into them, and absolutely unsurprised to see me. Nor did her wardmates find anything remarkable enough to speak of. I led her through the aisle of their eyes to the door that led up a half flight of stairs to the roof, a kind of games park with ruled lines of skelly and shuffleboard glowing darkly in the summer night, and in the nook made by the roof screen and the kiosk of the stair door, stood and kissed Rebecca ardently, and stuck my hand in the neck of her nightdress to brush her breastbuds with the backs of my fingers and then held in my hands her hard little ass that gave its contours to my touch under the rub of her white cotton shift, and then, before I became too far gone beside myself, when I knew her bargaining position was at its strongest, I negotiated a fair price and peeled a one-dollar bill off my depleted fold, which she took and crumpled in her fist as she first hunkered and then sat on the ground, totally without ceremony, and waited, while I stood on one leg and then the other, to remove my sneakers and everything to the waist, with some trembling awkwardness for a wizard, reflecting how odd it was that whereas men like Mr. Schultz and me folded our money
neatly, no matter if our wad was thin or thick, women like my mother and little Rebecca squeezed theirs in a ball and held it, forgetting to let go, whether they sat in a distraction of candled grief with a shawl over their heads or lay on the ground and were fucked two times for a dollar.

THREE

W
hen the boat came into the slip there were two cars waiting in the rain with their motors running. I would have liked instruction, but Mr. Schultz bundled the girl whose name wasn’t Lola into the back of the first car and got in beside her and slammed the door, and not knowing what to do I followed Irving to the second car and climbed in after him. I was fortunate there was a jump seat. On the other hand I found myself riding backward facing three of the gang sitting shoulder-to-shoulder in their bulk, Irving now in an overcoat and fedora like the others, while they sat and stared forward, looking through the front window at the lead car over the shoulders of the driver and the man next to him. It was not a good feeling riding sandwiched in all of this serious armed intent. I really wanted either to be where Mr. Schultz could see me or off by myself, maybe on the Third Avenue El, alone in a railcar and reading the ads in the flicker of the bulbs while it rocked its way over the streets to the far ends of the Bronx. Mr. Schultz did impulsive and unwise things, and I worried that I was one of them. I had been more readily accepted by the executives of the organization than by the rank and file. I liked to think of myself as a kind of associate gang member, and if it was true, I was the only one, it might have been because the position had been created just for me, which
should have said something to these deadheads though it didn’t. I wondered if it all had to do with age. Mr. Schultz was in his thirties and Mr. Berman even older than that, but with the exception of Irving most of the men were in their twenties, and for someone with a good job and the possibility for advancement who was only twenty-one, say, a fifteen-year-old was a punk, whose presence in business situations was inappropriate to say the least, and if not unwise, certainly an affront to everyone’s dignity. One of the bouncers at the Embassy Club was Jimmy Joio, who came from Weeks Avenue just around the corner from my house and whose kid brother was in fifth grade with me although it was true he was taking it for the third year when I came along; but the couple of times I’d seen Jimmy he looked right through me although he had to know who I was. With all these gunmen I could be made to feel from one moment to the next some kind of brash freak, not even a boy but a midget, or some small jester of deformity just agile enough to get out of the way of the king’s big dogs. What Mr. Schultz liked lived by his protection, but I knew I needed to improve my standing with them all, although when or how that would be possible I had no idea. Sitting on a jump seat trying to keep my knees from bumping into theirs was not the circumstance I was looking for. Nobody said anything but I knew in the practical common sense of such things that I was witness to yet another of Mr. Schultz’s murders, and the most intimate of them, certainly the most carefully planned, and whether it added to my credit as a trustworthy associate or put me in serious jeopardy, I was thinking now riding backward up First Avenue at two o’clock in the morning, I didn’t like it and could have done without it and was a fucking dope to have exposed myself to it. I had caught on by Mr. Schultz’s whim. My God. I felt weak in the legs, queasy, as if I was still on the boat. I thought of Bo perhaps even now continuing his descent with his eyes open and his arms over his head. To the extent that I could think rationally I wanted to know what was going to happen to this Miss Lola because she had been a witness too, and killers were not supposed to like outside witnesses, and I felt peculiarly of her status in this, and
I needed intelligence of her. On the other hand I mustn’t panic. She was still alive, wasn’t she?

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.