Billy Bathgate (26 page)

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 Cooney or even Mickey if nobody 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 circumstance. 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-cocked 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 superstitious, 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 circumspection, 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 mass fucking 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 glass and suggested for me the more appropriate and ennobling role as her boy protector. But I wanted to fuck 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
.

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 godparent, 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 lusty 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 sanctity 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 God, 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

T
he 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. Nobody 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.