Billy Bathgate by E. L. Doctorow Read Free Book Online Page B

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, whichshould 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, andI needed intelligence of her. On the other hand I mustn’t panic. She was still