Billy Bathgate Part 5

"Just a little," I said. "On the other hand n.o.body outside the gang knows you do so that's a slightly better position than, say, if the D.A. knew you were on that boat and wanted to know what had happened on it. Then you might be in serious danger."

She was thoughtful. "You don't talk as if you're one of them," she said.

"Well I'm not. Not yet. I'm trying to catch on," I said.

"He has a high regard for you, he says only good things about you."

"What things?"

"Oh, that you're very smart. And that you have guts. That is not an expression I'm particularly fond of. He could have said you're bold, or feisty or fearless, he could have said you're stouthearted. Would you mind my asking how old you are?"

"Sixteen," I said exaggerating only slightly.

"Oh my. Oh my," she said as she glanced at me and lowered her eyes. She was silent for a moment. She removed her hand from mine, which was a great relief although I longed for her to put it back. She said, "Well you must have done something for them to have heard about you and chosen you above all the others."

"What others? It's not like getting into Harvard University, Mrs. Preston. I happened to catch their attention, that's all. I connected. This gang, they make things up as they go along. They use what's to hand."

"I see."

"I'm here the same way you are."

"I didn't understand. I thought you were even related in some way."

We went down the hill to the river and walked to the middle of the bridge and stood at the wood rail and looked down at the water coming down the wide shallows and breaking with rus.h.i.+ng intent around all the rocks and boulders.

"If I have something on them," Mrs. Preston said, finally, "don't you?"

"If I don't catch on," I said, "yes, I will have something on them. If for some reason they decide against me. Yes. n.o.body can tell what Mr. Schultz will do," I said. "I'll be a danger to them if he decides I am."

She turned to look at me. Her expression was troubled, there might even have been a glimmering fear in her though I could not be sure in this light that pa.s.sed like waves of summer heat through those pale green eyes. If she was frightened for me I didn't want that, it was undermining, I thought if she had the reckless a.s.surance of her own charmed life she should grant me mine. This may have been the dangerous moment of our alliance, when it was clear in its extent, that we actually cared for each other, I could not bear to be contemplated as overmatched, as a lamb among wolves, I wanted equality with her. I pretended to think she was in fear for herself.

"I don't really think you have to worry," I said, with a harsh peremptory edge to my voice. "So far as I can judge Mr. Schultz has every reason to believe you're trustworthy. And even if he didn't I think you can probably rely on the fact that he would do as little as he could to convince himself that you are."

"He would? Why?"

"Why, Miss Lola, I mean Miss Drew, I mean Mrs. Preston? Why?" I thought now I had hurt her and I felt bad. I was showing her I was a man with a man's crude judgments. But then I backed away from her on the wood bridge and she knew what I was up to and she was smiling again and I started to laugh, and now she lunged forward to grab my hand and as I tried to pull away she said, "Why, why, no tell me, tell me," like a little girl in her entreaties and she pulled me to her.

We stood there. I said feeling the heat of her on my face: "Because as everyone except you seems to know, Mr. Schultz is a pushover for blondes."

"How do they know?"

"Everyone knows," I said. "It was even in the papers."

"I don't read the papers," she whispered.

My throat had gone dry. "How can you know everything you need to know if you don't read the papers?" I said.

"What is it I need to know?" she said gazing into my eyes.

"Well maybe if you don't work for a living you don't need to know anything," I said. "But some of us trying to learn a trade have to be up on the developments."

I felt weak in the knees, overwhelmed, a little sick in the heat, I felt as if I was disappearing into her eyes. I wanted her in such totality of desire that it was diffuse, aching all through me, like my own blood heat, I wanted her in my fingertips and my knees and my brain and my face and in the little bones of my feet. Only the c.o.c.k was not at this moment affected. I wanted her behind the palate, where tears begin, in the throat, where words crumble on the breaking voice.

"Here's the latest development," she said. And she kissed me on the mouth.

On Sunday morning everyone was standing all turned out clean and s.h.i.+ning in front of the Church of St. Barnabas, even Lulu, who wore a dark blue double-breasted suit that was tailored to make as discreet as possible the bulge of the shoulder holster and piece under his left arm. This would have to have been the last week in August, a new weather was creeping up on the days, like a different kind of light, on the hillside behind my room some of the leafy trees had turned pale with little yellowing patches, and here in front of the church a wind was blowing along the street from the river so that as women of the parish climbed the steps the hems of their Sunday dresses furled around their legs. My own summer suit felt air-cooled and as we stood waiting my careful haircomb ruffled up and began to break the crust given it by my Vitalis.

Drew Preston held on to a big holiday hat that hid her eyes from me. She had white lace gloves on her hands that just barely came up to the wrist. She wore a dark conservative dress and hose with the seams proper and straight down her calves and low-heeled black pumps, which made her almost invisible in this setting. At her side Mr. Schultz was nervous and kept picking at the little carnation pinned to his lapel, he unb.u.t.toned the jacket of his gray pinstripe to yank up his trousers, and then he discovered the b.u.t.tons of the vest were not in the right holes and tore open the vest and reb.u.t.toned it, and then he reset his jacket on his shoulders and then brushed imaginary lint from the sleeves, and then he discovered his shoelace was untied and was about to bend down when Mr. Berman tapped him on the shoulder and pointed to a car that had just come around the corner and pulled up to the curb and sat there with its motor running. "He's here," Mr. Schultz said and a moment later another car, a coupe, came around the corner and drove past us and pulled up at the end of the block, and then a third car appeared and it moved very slowly along the street and came to a stop where we were, a black Chrysler with the wheels hidden by the fenders, I think it must have been a custom-made model, I had never seen one like it. Mr. Schultz moved forward and we all stood in rank behind him as two unsmiling men got out and looked at all of us in that way that only cops and mob men consider people, with an officious but expertly quick a.s.sessment, and they gave curt nods to Mr. Schultz and Lulu and Irving, and one of them went up the steps and peered into the church and the other looked up and down the street with his hand on the rear car door and then the first one nodded from the top of the steps and the second opened the car door and a thin dapper man, quite short, got out and Mr. Schultz who had been standing by patiently, almost humbly, embraced him with joy, and he was someone whose name I will not give even here and now these many years later, a man I recognized immediately from his pictures in the Mirror Mirror, the scar under his jaw, the one droopy eyelid, the wavy hair, in the instant I saw him I found myself instinctively moving behind someone just out of his line of sight. He had a dusky sallow coloring that was almost lavender, he was shorter and slighter than I had imagined, he wore a well-tailored pearl gray single-breasted suit, and he politely shook hands with Abbadabba Berman and Lulu and Mickey and warmly embraced Irving and then was introduced to Drew Preston and he said in a whispery voice he was pleased to meet her and he said looking up at the blue sky, "What a nice day this is, Dutch, I think you must already have an in with II Papa," and everyone laughed, especially Mr. Schultz, he was so happy, so honored that a man of this position would agree to come all the way up from New York to speak for him as his G.o.dparent and present him formally to the priest for admission to the Church.

That's the way it works, a Catholic in good standing has to testify as a kind of character witness, I had thought it would be someone from inside the gang, like John c.o.o.ney or even Mickey if n.o.body else was convenient, because the gang was self-sufficient and whatever it needed it always arranged from its own resources, and I had no reason to believe it would not do the same in this circ.u.mstance. But I looked at Lulu Rosenkrantz, who stood behind Mr. Schultz with a beaming content, all of the gang were at peace in this moment, everything made sense now, they had worried about this conversion as they had worried about the girl, as if the Dutchman was going off half-c.o.c.ked in every direction, but he had surprised them again, of course it figured that he would want the most eminent of men to get him in, not only so that that way there would be no hitch but because it was a political honor, it signified a certain recognition. I saw it was an obeisance on his part, perhaps, but also a degree of acknowledgment from a peer, I was gratified, I thought this is what Mr. Berman must have meant when he talked about the time coming when everyone would read the numbers, they were working on it already with this ritual of amity. In fact it was an imprimatur of a kind, in the stately morning shadow of the church, good faith was arraying itself in procession, these were the first representations of the new world coming, the guys had thought it was religion he was doing but it was the rackets after all, and all in all I thought it was a cunning move by Mr. Schultz, although probably not without Mr. Berman's help, to make such use of his own blind impulses, a man no more sophisticated than superst.i.tious, and who had been using his unaccustomed time in the country learning to ride horseback from a blue blood with that same all-around three-hundred-and-sixty-degree enterprise.

I wanted very badly on this morning to believe in Mr. Schultz's powers. I wanted order in his sway, I wanted everything in its place where it belonged, it was a working tyranny he ran and I wanted him to run it well, without wavering. I didn't want him to make an error just as I didn't want myself to lose the harmonies of gang life, if a distortion of his vision was dangerous to the ruling order, so was my brazen sin of thought, my madness of usurpation stirring at the root. In my mind as I stood there I checked myself for weaknesses, unconscious revelations, errors of demeanor, losses of circ.u.mspection, and I found none. My patrolling mind found only the quiet, the peace of the unsuspecting.

At this moment the St. Barnabas Church bells began to ring as if confirming me in my hopes. My heart lifted and I experienced a rush of fierce well-being. While it is true I detest church organs I have always liked the bells that peal out over the streets, they are never quite on key but that may be why they suggest the ancestry of music, they have that bold and happy ginggonging that makes me think of a convocation of peasants for some primitive festivity such as ma.s.s f.u.c.king in the haystacks. Anyway not many emotions can be sustained, but self-satisfaction is one of them, and as I stood there with the air ringing I could review my overall position and feel confident that it was stronger now at this point of the summer than it had been at the beginning, that I was in the gang more firmly and seemed to have secured myself with varying degrees of respect from the others, or if not respect, acquiescence. I had a gift for handling myself with grown-ups, I knew which ones to talk to, and which ones to be clever with, and which ones to shut up in front of, and I almost astonished myself that I did it all with such ease, without knowing in advance what I was doing, and having it come out right most of the time. I could be a Bible student, and I could shoot a gun. Whatever they had asked me to do I had done it. But more than that, I knew now I could discern Mr. Schultz's inarticulate genius and give it language, which is to say avoid its wrath. Abbadabba Berman was uncannily perceptive, he had surprised me with my Automatic in that same manner of advanced thinking that allowed him to know exactly where I lived when he used the Bronx precinct cop to summon me. But I was no longer awed. Besides, he was so clearly given over to my education, how could I have gotten this far if he knew everything about me and could scan my mind, awake or dreaming, and know what inherited empowerment was looped in there, like my fate? Even if he knew about me exactly what I feared most, and I was still here, and not only here but growing and filling out to his hopes, then he had his own purposes for me, and my secret was good anyway. But I didn't really believe that he knew, I believe that in the most important knowledge I was now ahead of him, and that his inadequacy, finally, was that he would know everything except the crucial thing.

So I felt that things couldn't be better, I was elated just to be in the company I was in, there seemed to me no limit to the heights of which I was capable, Drew was right, I was a pretty little devil, as the eminent guest went up the steps and into the church with Mr. Schultz I even wished that someone had introduced me, or that I might have at least been noticed, though I had made a point not to be, but I was not put out, I knew that in the excitement of historic moments the niceties are sometimes scanted, I was directly behind these great men looking up at their haircuts, I was in a line of ascension with these famous gangsters of my yearnings, I was feeling generous and eager to give everyone the benefit of every doubt, even at the back of the line, at the bottom of the front steps, and the last in the procession that stopped now in the church entrance and waited while the regular service went on until it was time for Father Montaine to come off the altar and greet Mr. Schultz end usher him in to the church building as a symbol of his entrance to Catholicism.

As it happened this would take longer than anyone expected. Abbadabba Berman came back down the stairs to have himself a smoke on the sidewalk, I cupped the match for him against the wind, and then Irving came out to join us, and the three of us leaned with our backs against the visitors' glamorous streamlined Chrysler parked at the curb, and ignoring the other cars at each end of the block, we faced the edifice of St. Barnabas with its clapboard siding and wooden steeple. The bells now ceased with a little sequence of tapping afterthoughts, softer and softer, and I could hear faintly the different sound from inside the church of its organ. At this moment Irving came as close to a criticism of Dutch Schultz as I was ever to hear him utter.

"Of course," he said, as if he was continuing a conversation, "the Dutchman is wrong about one thing, he has no idea why the old Jews pray that way. Maybe if he knew he wouldn't say those things. Kid, you know the explanation of that?"

"I'm not big on religion," I said.

"I am not a religious man myself," Irving said, "but the way they nod and bow and don't keep still a minute, there's a very reasonable explanation for that. It's the way it is with candles, the old men praying in the synagogue are the flames of candles that sway back and forth leaning one way and another way, every one of them nodding and bowing like a little candle flame. That's the little light of the soul, which of course is always in danger of blowing out. So that's what that is all about," Irving said.

"That's very interesting, Irving," Mr. Berman said.

"But Dutch wouldn't know that. All he knows is it bothers him," Irving said in his quiet voice.

Mr. Berman held his elbow so that the hand holding the cigarette was up around his ear, which was his favorite position for thinking: "But when he says the Christians do everything in unison, he's right about that. They got a central authority. They sing together and they chant and they sit down and they stand up and they kneel and they do things in an orderly manner, everything under control. So he's right about that," Mr. Berman said.

When things finally got going I found myself sitting in a pew up front next to Drew Preston, which is where I wanted to be. I reminded myself that it was all right, that nothing had happened yet except that I had been admitted into the secret mysterious realm of her afflictions. That was all. She did not acknowledge me, which I both appreciated and agonized over at the same time. I blindly turned the pages of the missal. Her face in the church under her hat glowed in the soft colors of stained gla.s.s and suggested for me the more appropriate and enn.o.bling role as her boy protector. But I wanted to f.u.c.k her so badly I could hardly stand. I didn't know if I would survive the service. Mr. Schultz had called this the short form and that made me wonder what the long form was like, in fact I understood for the first time the meaning of the word eternal eternal.

I remember just a few things from the entire excruciatingly eternal service. The first was that Mr. Schultz went through it all, he was nominated, baptized, confirmed, and partook of the Eucharist, with his shoelace untied. The second was that when his honored G.o.dparent, standing just behind him, was directed by Father Montaine to place his hand on his shoulder, Mr. Schultz nearly jumped out of his skin. Maybe I fixed on these odd things because most everything else was going on in Latin and only when something actually happened did I really pay attention. I think Father Montaine was the only man in the world who would be allowed to pour a pitcher of water over Dutch Schultz's head not once but three times without suffering the consequences. He did this in a way I thought was l.u.s.ty and full of liturgical enthusiasm as Mr. Schultz each time came up sputtering, with his eyes red and glaring while he tried to smooth his hair back without seeming to.

But the last thing I remember about that morning was the enigmatic presence at my side of my beautiful and amazing Drew, who became more innocent in my view the more devilishly I thought about her. She seemed to drink up the church music and become enameled in sanct.i.ty like one of the nun saints up in a niche on the wall. In the way my spinning world revolved now like some fiendishly juggled ball of G.o.d, her failure to acknowledge my presence beside her confirmed our conspiracy in my heart. I knew I could no longer deceive myself that I didn't adore her, and wouldn't destroy myself in submission to her, the moment, with the organ blasting away and the congregation singing at its most sacred pitch, she raised her white-gloved fingers to her lips and yawned.

PART THREE.

FIFTEEN.

The trial was almost upon us. I pulled my pistol practice and ran errands for Dixie Davis, who was by now in residence on the sixth floor. One morning when I had to deliver a letter for him to the courthouse clerk I stopped afterward to look through the little porthole windows of the doors to the courtrooms. None were occupied. n.o.body said not to so I went into Part One and sat down. It was an open uncluttered kind of place, as opposed, say, to a precinct station: wood-paneled walls and big windows that were raised for the breeze and light globes hanging by chains from the ceiling. All the furniture in place for judge, jury, prosecution, defense, and audience. It was very quiet. I heard the ticking of the wall clock behind the bench. The courtroom sat there waiting was the impression I had. I had the impression that behind the waiting was a limitless patience. I understood the law had a prophetic utility.

I found myself entertaining a guilty conviction. I pictured Mr. Schultz being led off by the guards with the gang of all of us standing by not doing anything. I imagined him led away in an apoplectic rage, my last glimpse of his murderous being segmented by the diamond crisscross chain link welded across the rear windows of the Black Maria. I felt very bad.

Here I will say about Dutch Schultz that wherever he went he created betrayals of himself, he produced them perpetually from the seasons of his life, he brought betrayers forth from his nature, each in our own manner shape and size but having the common face of betrayal, and then he went murdering after us. Not that I didn't know, not that I didn't know. I took the elevator each night to the Schultz family dinner table and sat there aching in love or terror, it was hard to tell which.

A couple of nights before the trial a man named Julie Martin appeared who everyone in the gang knew except me. He was a stout man with jowls that shook as he talked, he was very much taller than Mr. Schultz or Dixie Davis, but he walked with a cane and wore a slipper on one foot. His eyes were very tiny and of indeterminate color and he needed a shave, he was gruff, with a voice even deeper than the Dutchman's, and he was not at all well groomed, dark hairs curled off the back of his neck and his enormous hands had blackened fingernails as if he spent his time working on automobiles.

Drew Preston excused herself from dinner almost immediately and I was relieved she did. The fellow was trouble. Mr. Schultz treated him with a sardonic respect and addressed him as Mr. President. I didn't know why until I remembered Mr. Schultz's restaurant shakedown business in Manhattan, the Metropolitan Restaurant and Cafeteria Owners a.s.sociation. Julie Martin had to be the man who ran it, that's what he was president of, and because most of the fas.h.i.+onable restaurants in the midtown area had joined the a.s.sociation, including Lindy's and the Bra.s.s Rail, Steuben's Tavern and even Jack Dempsey's, he was a pretty important man about town. He wouldn't be the one who actually threw the stink bomb through the window when the owner was reluctant to join the a.s.sociation, so I didn't understand why his fingernails were dirty or why he needed a haircut or why generally he didn't exude the confidence of a successful man of the rackets.

Apart from the occasional stink bomb, restaurant extortion was an invisible business, even more invisible than policy and almost as profitable. While diners were dining in the fine Broadway steakhouses, or while the old men were sitting in the cafeterias over their cups of coffee or sliding their trays past the hot table with its perpetual steam rising from the cooked carrots and cauliflower, the business went invisibly and brilliantly forward on the discreet conversation of men who were not ever, at the moment of their visits to any establishment, hungry.

Mr. Schultz was tellingjulie Martin about his day of entry into the Catholic Church and bragging about who it was who had sponsored him. Julie Martin was not terribly impressed. He was a rude man and acted as if he had more important matters to attend to elsewhere. A bottle of whiskey was on the table, as there was now every night, and he kept pouring himself half tumblers of rye and drinking them down like table water. At one point he dropped his fork on the floor and called to the waitress, "Hey you!" as she was going past carrying a tray full of dirty dishes. She nearly dropped them. Mr. Schultz was by now fond of this girl, she was the one whom no generosity of tip or bantering small talk could persuade that she was not each night at dinner in danger of losing her life. Mr. Schultz had told me it was his ambition to lure her to New York to work in the Emba.s.sy Club, a great joke considering her all-consuming dread of him. "For shame, Mr. President," he said now. "This ain't ain't one of your union help. You're in the country now, watch your manners." one of your union help. You're in the country now, watch your manners."

"Yeah, I'm in the country all right," the big man said in his ba.s.so. Then he delivered himself of a prodigious belch. I knew boys who had this ability, I had never trained in it myself, it was a weapon of the boor and implied a similar apt.i.tude at the opposite end of the digestive system. "And if I can get through this lousy dinner and you can get around to telling me what's on your mind that's so important I had to come all the way up here I'll be able to get the f.u.c.k out of your G.o.dd.a.m.n country and not too soon to suit me."

Dixie Davis sent a fearful glance in Mr. Schultz's direction. "Julie's a true New Yorker," he said with his down-at-the-mouth smile. "Take them out of Manhattan they go bananas."

"You've got a big mouth, you know that, Mr. President?" said Dutch Schultz looking at the man over his winegla.s.s.

I didn't wait for dessert, even though it was apple cobbler, but went up to my room and locked the door and turned on the radio. Eventually I heard them all come out of the elevator and go into Mr. Schultz's suite. For a moment all their voices were talking at the same time in a kind of part song of diverse intent. Then the door slammed. In my peculiar state of mind I had an idea that seemed to me quite rational, that somehow I had invoked the argument, that my secret transgression had fired the metaphysical Dutchmanic rage, and that it happened only for the moment to be directed inaccurately at another of his men, and a valuable one too, as Bo was valuable. Not that I had any sympathy for the huge boor with the bad foot. I didn't know exactly what the fight was about except that it was serious enough and loud enough for me to hear the sound of it, if not the exact words, when I sneaked down the corridor and stood in front of the door. The exchange of angers terrified me because it was so close, like the loud close thunderclap of a lightning storm still some distance away, and I kept going back and forth from my room to the corridor to see if Drew's door was closed, to make sure she was not involved, and whenever the radio static crackled with extra snap I imagined I had heard a gunshot and ran out again.

This all went on over an hour or more, and then, it must have been about eleven o'clock, I did hear the real gunshot, there is no question what it is when it is that, the report is definitive, it caroms through the chambers of the ear, and when its echoes died away I heard the silence of the sudden subtraction from the universe of a life, and this time in the quaking reality of what I knew I sat on the side of my bed too paralyzed even to stand up and lock my room door. I sat there with my Automatic fully loaded and held it under a pillow on my lap.

What did I mean to have come with these men to their ferocious business in upstate hotels, was it to understand, only to understand? I had known nothing of their lives a few short months ago. I tried to believe they could have been doing all this without me. But it was too late, and they were so strange, they were all so strange. They all roiled up out of the same idea because they seemed to understand each other and make their measured responses accordingly, but I kept losing my fix on it, I was still to know what it was, this idea.

I can't say how many minutes pa.s.sed. The door flew open and Lulu was standing there beckoning with his finger. I left my gun and hurried after him down the corridor into Mr. Schultz's suite. The furnis.h.i.+ngs were awry, the chairs were pushed back, this Julie Martin lay in his bulk across the coffee table in the living room, he was not yet dead but lay gasping on his stomach with his head turned sideways and a rolled-up hotel towel under his cheek and another towel rolled up neatly behind his head to take the blood, and both towels were reddening quickly, and he was gasping, and blood was trickling out of his mouth and nose and his arms hanging over the table were trying to find something to hold on to and his knees were on the floor and he was pus.h.i.+ng back, pus.h.i.+ng the tips of his feet with their one shoe off and one shoe on against the floor as if he was trying to get up, as if he thought he could still get away, or swim away, it was kind of a slow-motion b.r.e.a.s.t.stroke he was doing, whereas he was only lifting his broad back in the air and then slumping down again under its weight, and Irving was bringing more towels from the bathroom to put beside the coffee table where blood was dripping to the floor and Mr. Schultz was standing there looking down at this immense tortoiselike body, with its waving arms and eyes glazed blind like eyes from the sea, and he said to me, very calmly, quietly, "Kid, you got good vision, we none of us can locate the sh.e.l.l, would you be so good as to find it for me?"

I scrambled around on the floor and found under the couch the bra.s.s casing still warm of the thirty-eight-caliber round from his gun, which showed now under his belt with his jacket open, his tie was pulled down from his collar but somehow in this moment he glittered with a calm orderliness in all this mess of blood and unfinished death, he was still and thoughtful, and he thanked me courteously for the sh.e.l.l, which he dropped in his pants pocket.

Dixie Davis was sitting in a corner holding his arms around himself, he was groaning as if he was the one who had been shot. There was a soft knock on the door and Lulu opened it to admit Mr. Berman. Jumping to his feet Dixie Davis said, "Otto! Look what he's done, look what he's done to me!"

Mr. Schultz and Mr. Berman exchanged glances. "d.i.c.k," Mr. Schultz said to the lawyer, "I am very very sorry."

"To subject me to this!" Dixie Davis said, wringing his hands. He was pale and trembling.

"I am sorry, Counselor," Mr. Schultz said. "The son of a b.i.t.c.h stole fifty thousand of my dollars."

"A member of the bar!" Dixie Davis said to Mr. Berman, who was looking now at the agonized aimlessly repet.i.tious movements of the sprawled body. "And he does this thing with me standing there? Takes out his gun in the middle of a sentence and shoots into the man's mouth?"

"Just calm down. Counselor," Mr. Berman said. "Just calm down. n.o.body heard a thing. Everyone is asleep. They go to bed early in Onondaga. We will take care of this. All you have to do is go to your room and close the door and forget about it."

"I was seen at dinner with him!"

"He left right after dinner," Mr. Berman said looking at the dying man. "He went away. Mickey drove him. Mickey won't be back till tomorrow. We have witnesses."

Mr. Berman went to the window, looked out from behind the curtain, and pulled the shade down. He went to the other window and did the same thing.

"Arthur," Dixie Davis said, "do you realize in a matter of hours there will be federal lawyers from New York checking into this hotel? Do you realize in two days your trial starts? In two days?"

Mr. Schultz poured himself a drink from a decanter on the sideboard. "Kid, take Mr. Davis to his room. Put him to bed. Give him a gla.s.s of warm milk or something."

Dixie Davis's room was at the far end of the hall, near the window. I had to physically help him, he shook so badly, I had to hold his arm as if he were an old man who could not walk by himself. He was gray with fear. "MiG.o.d, miG.o.d," he kept muttering. His pompadour haircomb had collapsed over his forehead. He was soaking with perspiration, he emitted an unpleasant smell of onions. I sat him down in the armchair by his bed. Stacks of legal papers in folders were piled on the room desk. He looked at them and started to chew on his fingernails. "I, a member of the bar of New York State," he muttered. "An officer of the court. In front of my very eyes. In front of my very eyes."

I thought perhaps Mr. Berman was right, there wasn't a sound from anywhere in the hotel as there would have been by now if the shot had been heard beyond our floor. I looked out of the corridor window and the street was empty, the streetlamps shone on stillness. I heard a door open and when I turned, there down the hall with the light behind her stood Drew Preston barefooted in her night s.h.i.+ft of white silk, she was scratching her head and had a half-dopey smile on her lips, I will not speak here of the derangement of my senses, I pushed her back in her room and closed the door behind us and told her in urgent whispers to be quiet and go back to sleep, and I led her into her bedroom. In her bare feet she was about my height. "What happened, has something happened?" she said in her smoked-up voice full of sleep. I told her nothing and not to ask Mr. Schultz or anyone about it in the morning, just to forget it, forget it, and sealed my instruction with a kiss on her swollen mouth of sleep, and laid her down, smelling the lovely essence of her being gathered on her sheets and pillow like the meadows we had walked through, and put my hand on her small high b.r.e.a.s.t.s as she stretched and smiled in her moment, as always in her moment, and then I was gone and out the door, closing it quietly just as the elevator door opened at the other end of the corridor.

Mickey backed out of the elevator pulling a heavy wood-and-pipe-metal dolly, he did this as quietly as it could be done, I thought about the elevator boy and ducked behind the window drapes but Mickey had run it up himself and when he had maneuvered the dolly into the hall he turned out the light in the elevator and closed the bra.s.s gate not quite all the way.

The gang was in its element, the thing is when you're mob you move in the presence of violent death quickly and efficiently as a normal ordinary human being could not, even I, an apprentice, half-ill with dread and distraction, was able to follow orders and think and move in constructive response to the emergency. I don't know what they did to the body to make it still but it lay now quite dead across the coffee table and Irving was spreading editions of the New York dailies and the Onondaga Signal Onondaga Signal on the dolly, someone said one two three and the men rolled the immense cadaver of Julie Martin off the coffee table onto the newspapers, death is dirt, death is garbage, and that is the att.i.tude they had toward it, Lulu wrinkling his nose and Mickey even averting his head as they handled this sack of human offal. Mr. Schultz sat in an armchair with his arms on the armrests like Napoleon and he didn't even bother looking, he was thinking ahead, planning what? convinced in his instinctive genius that however abrupt and sudden his murderous act had been, it had chosen the moment well, which is why the great gangsters don't get caught except by numbers and tally sheets and tax laws and bankbooks and other such amoral abstractions whereas the murders rarely stick to them. It was Abbadabba Berman who supervised the cleanup, pacing up and down in that sideways scuttle of his, his hat pushed back on his head, the cigarette in his mouth, it was Mr. Berman who thought to retrieve the cane and put it beside the body. He said to me, "Kid, go to the lobby and cover it so n.o.body notices the arrow." on the dolly, someone said one two three and the men rolled the immense cadaver of Julie Martin off the coffee table onto the newspapers, death is dirt, death is garbage, and that is the att.i.tude they had toward it, Lulu wrinkling his nose and Mickey even averting his head as they handled this sack of human offal. Mr. Schultz sat in an armchair with his arms on the armrests like Napoleon and he didn't even bother looking, he was thinking ahead, planning what? convinced in his instinctive genius that however abrupt and sudden his murderous act had been, it had chosen the moment well, which is why the great gangsters don't get caught except by numbers and tally sheets and tax laws and bankbooks and other such amoral abstractions whereas the murders rarely stick to them. It was Abbadabba Berman who supervised the cleanup, pacing up and down in that sideways scuttle of his, his hat pushed back on his head, the cigarette in his mouth, it was Mr. Berman who thought to retrieve the cane and put it beside the body. He said to me, "Kid, go to the lobby and cover it so n.o.body notices the arrow."

I ran down the fire stairs three at a time, flight after flight, swinging around the landing posts, and got to the lobby, where the elevator boy sat dozing on the side chair next to the big snake plant with his arms folded across his tunic and his head on his chest. The clerk was similarly occupied behind his desk under the mailboxes. The lobby was empty and the street as well. I watched the indicator and in a minute the arrow began to swing around the circle, it came down around the one and kept going, to stop at the bas.e.m.e.nt.

Out behind the hotel I knew they would have the car and that details I couldn't even antic.i.p.ate would have already been thought through, there was a kind of comfort in that, I was an accessory after the fact, among my other problems, and when the elevator came back up to the lobby and the door opened Mickey put his finger to his lips and left the elevator as he had found it, lit, but with the bra.s.s folding gate pulled across, and he sneaked right back out to the fire stairs and after a minute I coughed loudly and woke the elevator boy, who was a Negro man with gray hair, and he took me up to the sixth floor and bid me goodnight. I might have congratulated myself for my essay in coldblood cunning except for what happened next. In Mr. Schultz's suite, Lulu had remained to put the furniture back in position and Mr. Berman came in the door with a set of keys and a pile of fresh white towels from the chambermaids' closet, I admired all the details of their professionalism, I thought of the crime as committed on one of those writing tablets for kids where the drawing disappears when you lift the page. Finally roused, as if from a slumber, Mr. Schultz stood and walked around the room to see that everything looked as it should, and then he stared at the carpet near the coffee table where there soaked in a dark black stain, with several drops beside like moons around a planet, the blood of the former president of the Metropolitan Restaurant and Cafeteria Owners a.s.sociation, and then he went to the phone and woke up the desk clerk and said, "This is Mr. Schultz. We have an accident here and I need a doctor. Yes," he said. "As soon as you can. Thank you."

I was puzzled and somewhat alarmed, my mind struggled to understand what it knew only as something so enigmatic that it could not be good for me. Everyone else in the room was now deadly casual. Mr. Schultz stood looking out the window for several minutes and just as I heard the sputter of a car coming down the street he turned back to the room and told me to stand over by the coffee table. Mr. Berman sat down and lit a new cigarette from the old one, and then Lulu came over to me as if to adjust my position, because it was apparently not quite right, he positioned me and continued to hold my shoulders and just at the moment of my revelation but a moment too late I thought I saw him grin with a flash of one gold tooth, although maybe the slowness of my mind on this occasion was a blessing because actually as he swung I did not have the opportunity to reveal anything less than total sacrificial loyalty, it would not have done in this hierarchy of men to say why me why me, a blinding pain struck me dumb, my knees buckled, and a starlike flash exploded in my eyes, just the way prizefighters say it does, and an instant later I was crouched over, groaning and dribbling in my shock, holding both my hands over my poor nose, my best feature, bleeding profusely now through my fingers to the stained rug, and so I contributed the final detail of the Schultz gang's brilliant representations in matters of applied death, mixing my blood with the dead gangster's and suffering my rage of injustice as I heard the businesslike rap of our country doctor knocking on the door.

I remember what that whack across the face did to the pa.s.sage of time, in the instant I felt it, it became an old injury and the rage it engendered in me was an ancient resolve to somehow pay them back, to get even-all this in the s.p.a.ce of a moment's obliterating pain. While I had thought when I heard the gunshot that it could have been meant as appropriately for me, I thought the broken nose was uncalled-for. I was really upset and felt badly used, my courage flowed back with my anger and I was renewed in the heedless righteousness of my appet.i.tes. All night I kept an ice bag on my face so that the swelling would not disfigure me and make Drew Preston think I was no longer pretty. In the morning it was not as bad as I had expected, a certain puffiness, and a blueness under the eyes that might be attributed as well to debauchery as to a good sock.

I went out for breakfast as usual, I found that the act of chewing was painful, my lip was a little sore too, but I swore I would be as hardened and casual about the awful night that had just pa.s.sed as anyone else. I put the image of that rising and slumping dead man out of my head. When I got back Mr. Berman's office door was open across the hall and I caught his eye and he motioned me to come in and close the door. He was on the phone, holding it under his chin with a raised shoulder and going over some adding-machine tapes with the person on the other end. When he had hung up he indicated a chair beside the desk, and I sat down like a client in his office.

"We are moving shop," he said. "We're moving out tonight and only Mr. Schultz and the lawyers will be in residence. The day after tomorrow begins the jury selection. It would not look good for the boys to be hanging around during a trial what with the press descended."

"The press will be here?"

"What do you you think? It's gonna be like a hive of hornets has got loose in Onondaga. They'll crawl all over everything." think? It's gonna be like a hive of hornets has got loose in Onondaga. They'll crawl all over everything."

"The Mirror Mirror too?" too?"

"What do you mean, of course, all of them. Newspapermen are the creeps of the earth, they have no sense of honor or decency and they are totally lacking in the ethics of behavior. If he was just Arthur Flegenheimer do you think they would find him worth the attention? But Dutch Schultz is a name that fits in the headline."

Mr. Berman shook his head and made a gesture, lifting his hand and letting it fall into his lap. I had never seen him so disconcerted. He was not his usual dapper self this morning, he was in working trousers and s.h.i.+rtsleeves and suspenders and bedroom slippers and he hadn't yet shaved that pointed chin. "Where was I?" he said.

"We are moving out."

He studied my face. "It's not too bad," he said. "A b.u.mp adds character. Does it hurt?"

I shook my head.

"Lulu got carried away. He was supposed to b.l.o.o.d.y your nose, not break it. Everyone is under a strain."

"It's okay," I said.

"Needless to say the whole thing was unfortunate." He looked around on his desk for his cigarettes, found a pack with one cigarette left, lit it, and leaned back in his swivel chair crossing his legs and holding the cigarette up around his ear. "It sometimes happens that there is more life than you can keep book on, and that is certainly true of up here, this is an unnatural existence, and why we got to get through this trial as quickly as possible and get back home where we belong. Which brings me to what I want to say. Mr. Schultz will be very busy from now on, he'll be in the spotlight, in court and out of it, and we don't want him to have anything on his mind except the problem to hand. Does that make good sense to you?"

I nodded.

"Well then why can't she understand that? This is a serious business, we can't afford any more mistakes, we've got to keep our wits about us. All I want is for her to take a powder for a few days. Go to Saratoga, see the races, is that too much to ask?"