"Think about it, Lulu," Mr. Schultz said. "Going for the dough the one place it's under lock and key. You gotta be stupid. That outlaw s.h.i.t ain't in the economic mainstream," he said patting the briefcase on his lap. "Okay, ladies and gents," he said, and he got out of the car and held the door for Miss Drew and me.

I didn't know what I was supposed to do. When I got out of the car Miss Drew said, "Wait a minute," and straightened my clip-on tie. I instinctively drew back.

"Just be a nice boy," Mr. Schultz said. "I know it's hard."

I could tell my black wing-tips were already raising a blister on my heel, and the wire hooks of my plain gla.s.s steel-rim gla.s.ses were pinching me behind the ears. I had of course forgotten to buy a book as Mr. Berman had told me and so as a last resort carried the Bible from my room in my left hand. My right hand was held by Miss Drew, which she squeezed as we crossed the street behind Mr. Schultz. "You look handsome," she said. I resented it that even when I wore my Elevator Shoes she was the taller of us. "That's a compliment," she said, "it doesn't call for a scowl." She was very gay.

We were shown right past the tellers' barred cages to the back office, where the president came from behind his desk and shook Mr. Schultz's hand heartily, though his eyes flicked over us all with cool appraisal. He was a portly man with a fleshy tubular underchin that looked like a hydraulic pump under his jaw when his mouth moved. Behind him was this open door and steel gate, and an inner room that was really a big safe with its thick door open and lots of drawers inside the room like mailboxes in a post office. "Well, well," he said after the introductions were made, Mr. Schultz having described me as his prodigy; and Miss Drew as my governess, "please sit down, everyone, we don't often have famous people in our little town. I hope you're finding it to your liking."

"Oh yes," Mr. Schultz said, beginning to undo the straps on his briefcase. "This is a summer in the country for us."

"Well, country is what we can offer. Swimming holes, trout streams, virgin forest," at this his eyes darted for a moment to Miss Drew's crossed legs. "Some pretty fair vistas from up the top of the hills, if you like hiking. Good fresh air, all you can breathe," he said, laughing as if he'd said something funny, and he went on with this mindless booster small talk his eyes coming back again and again to the briefcase which Mr. Schultz now leaned forward to place on his desk, the top flap folded back, so that when it was given a quick shove and then pulled back, packs of greenbacks slid out on the big green blotter. And with that, words abruptly ceased to come from the banker's mouth although the hydraulic pump didn't lift it shut for another moment or two.

It was a lot of money, more than I had ever seen, but I showed more restraint than the banker, giving no indication that I saw anything out of the ordinary. Mr. Schultz said he wanted to open a checking account for five thousand and put the balance in a safe deposit box. A moment later the banker's old secretary was summoned in and in a fl.u.s.ter of attentions she and the banker went off to count the haul while Mr. Schultz sat back and lit a cigar fresh from the humidor on the banker's desk.

"Kid," he said, "you notice how many tellers' cages are open for business?"

"One?"

"Yeah. One teller with gray hair sitting there reading the paper. Lulu's friends walk in they won't even find a bank d.i.c.k at the door. You know what this guy's reserves must be? Holding a lot of dirt-farm mortgages? Spends his days foreclosing and selling off the county of Onondaga for ten cents on the dollar. I'm telling you. He'll lay awake at night thinking of all that cash in my safe deposit box. What it represents. Give him a week, ten days. I will get a call."

"And you will go in on whatever it is," Miss Drew said.

"G.o.dd.a.m.n right. You're looking at the patron sweetheart of the boondocks." He b.u.t.toned the jacket of his dark suit, and brushed imaginary dust off the sleeves. He put the cigar in his mouth and leaned over and pulled up his socks. "Get through here I could run for Congress."

"I would like to mention something on a different subject but not if you're going to get all pouty and sulk," Miss Drew said.

"What. No. My words again?"

"Protege, like proto-jay."

"What did I say?"

"You said prodigy. That's something else, like a child genius." At this moment the banker returned all happy and hand-rubbing and put out some forms for Mr. Schultz to sign and took the cap off his fountain pen and slipped it on the end and handed the pen across the desk chattering all the meanwhile. But upon the scratching of the signature he went quiet and the doc.u.ments were duly executed in a hush, as if a state treaty were coming into effect. Then the old lady secretary came in with her receipts and a book of blank checks and there was more fussing and heartiness, and in a few moments we were standing for the goodbyes and thank-yous and let-me-know-if-there's-anything-I-can-dos, it is a fact that money exhilarates people, it puts them in hysterias of good cheer, they suddenly care about you and want the best for you. The banker had hardly taken notice of anyone but Mr. Schultz but now he said, "Hey, young fellow, what's the younger generation reading these days?" as if it was really important to him. He turned the book up in my hand so he could read the t.i.tle, I don't know what he had expected, a French novel maybe, but he was genuinely surprised. "Well good for you, son," he said. He gripped my shoulder and looking at my governess said, "My respects, Miss Drew, I'm a scoutmaster myself, we don't really have to worry about the future of the country, do we, with youngsters like this?"

He walked us to the front entrance, all our heels ringing on the marble floor, it was like a procession, with the single teller standing up in his cage as we pa.s.sed. "Goodbye, bless you," the banker said, waving at us from the steps.

Lulu held the car door open and we settled into the back and after he took his seat up front, Mickey started the engine and put it in gear, and we drove off. Only then did Mr. Schultz say, "What the f.u.c.k was that all about?" and reach over Miss Drew to grab the Onondaga Hotel's Holy Bible out of my hands.

There was absolute silence in the car except for the flipping of pages. I stared out the window. We were going slowly downhill now along the nearly deserted main street. Here in the country they had things like feed stores. I was sitting in a new suit with long pants and my Elevator Shoes and my thigh touching the thigh of the beautiful Miss Drew right in the back seat of the luxurious personal car of the man who had existed for me only as an awesome dream a few weeks before and I couldn't have been more unhappy. I rolled the window all the way down to let out the cigar smoke. There was no question in my mind that something unimaginably terrible was about to happen.

"Hey Mickey," Mr. Schultz said.

Mickey the driver's pale blue eyes appeared in the rearview mirror.

"Stop at the church up the hill there where you see the spire," Mr. Schultz said. He began to chuckle. "The one thing we didn't think of," he said. He put his hand on Miss Drew's knee. "May I add my respects to the guy's back there?"

"Don't look at me, boss," she said, "I didn't have anything to do with it."

Mr. Schultz leaned forward so he could see me on the other side of Miss Drew. He was smiling broadly, with enormous teeth, a very big mouth of them. "Is that right? This was your brainstorm?"

I didn't have the chance to explain. "You see," he said to Miss Drew, "I know what words I'm talking about when I pick my words. The kid's my f.u.c.king prodigy."

And that was how I came to be enrolled in the Sunday Bible study cla.s.s of the Church of the Holy Spirit, in Onondaga New York the interminable summer of the year 1935. To undergo orations on the subject of the desert gangs, their troubles with the law, their hustles and scams, the ways they worked each other over, and the grandiose claims they made for themselves-that was my sacred fate in the church bas.e.m.e.nt with sweat dripping from the stone walls and the snivels of summer colds dripping from the noses of my fellow students in their overalls or their faded flowered dresses, always a size too big, and their feet swinging under the benches, shoed or bare, every G.o.dd.a.m.n Sunday. For all I had accomplished and as far as I had come, I might just as well have been back in the orphans' home.

But Sunday was only the worst of the days, all week we went at it, there was nothing to do but good. We made visits to the hospital and brought magazines and candy to the wards. Wherever there was a store open with something to sell, as long as it wasn't tractor parts, we went in and bought whatever it was selling. A mile out of town was a broken-down miniature golf course, I drove out there with Mickey and Lulu on several occasions and the three of us putted the ball through little wooden chutes and barrels and pipes and I got pretty good at it and took a few dollars from them but decided not to go out there anymore the day Lulu in a fit of bad sportsmanship broke his club over his knee. In town a small crowd of little hick kids collected whenever I set foot out of doors, they followed me down the street and I bought them candy and whirligigs and ice cream while Mr. Schultz was having receptions for their fathers and mothers under the auspices of the American Legion, or taking over the church socials, buying up all the homemade cakes and then throwing a party for everyone to come have cake and coffee. Of all of us, he was the one who seemed actually to enjoy these long boring days. Miss Drew found a stable with riding horses and she took Mr. Schultz out horseback riding every morning and I could see them from the sixth-floor corridor window trotting down the country roads to the fallow fields where she was giving him instruction. The post office delivered things she had ordered by phone from a fancy store in Boston, riding outfits for both of them with tweed coats with leather patches on the elbows and silk neck scarves and dark green felt hats with little feathers stuck in the brim and sleek soft leather boots and jodhpurs, those peculiar lavender pants that bloomed out at the hips, which was fine in her case since she tended in her long-waisted way to be a bit flat back there, but not really suited to the stolid build of Mr. Schultz, who appeared unathletic in them, to say the least, not that any of us, even Mr. Berman, wanted to bring this to his attention.

The only time I enjoyed was the very early morning. I was always the first one up and I took to buying the Onondaga Signal Onondaga Signal from the news store so that I could read it with my breakfast at a little tea shop kind of luncheonette I had found down a side street. The woman there did her own baking and made very good breakfasts but I kept this intelligence to myself. I think I was the only one of us who read the from the news store so that I could read it with my breakfast at a little tea shop kind of luncheonette I had found down a side street. The woman there did her own baking and made very good breakfasts but I kept this intelligence to myself. I think I was the only one of us who read the Signal Signal, it was undeniably dull with farm news and almanac wisdom and home canning advice and so on, but they carried The Phantom The Phantom comic strip and comic strip and Abbie and Slats Abbie and Slats, and that gave me some small connection to real life. One morning the front page had a story about Mr. Schultz buying a local farm from the bank and giving it back to the family that had lost it. When I got back to the hotel there were more old cars parked with their wheels against the curb than usual, and sitting and hunkering all over the little lobby were men in overalls and women in housedresses. And from then on, there was a constant watch at the hotel, inside or outside, one or two farmers and farmers' wives or as many as a dozen, depending on the time of day. I noticed about these people that when they were skinny they were very skinny and when they were fat they were very fat. Mr. Schultz was always courteous when he came through and would take a couple of them to a corner table in the hotel dining room as if it was his office, and listen to them for a few minutes and ask a few questions. I don't know how many foreclosed mortgages he recovered, probably none, more likely he gave them the monthly payment money or a few dollars to keep the wolf from the door, as he put it. The way it worked, for the sake of their feelings, he would maintain a businesslike pretense, take their names and tell them to come back the next day, and then it would be Abbadabba Berman who issued the actual cash in a little brown envelope from his office room on the sixth floor. Mr. Schultz didn't want to be lordish about it, he showed great tact that way.

It was very mysterious to me how a countryside could be so beautiful and yet so invisibly in trouble. I wandered down to the river and across the bridge and out on the country roads every now and then, a little farther each time as I got used to it and discovered no harm would come to me from an empty sky, from hills of wildflowers, from the occasional appearance back from the road of a house and a barn and an animal or two standing around. It was clear here upstate that every city came to an end and an empty road began that required faith to travel. Encouraging were the evenly s.p.a.ced telegraph poles with electricity wires dipping from pole to pole, I was happy to see also the painted white line going a.s.siduously down the middle of the road over every little rise and fall of the land. I got used to the strawy smell of the fields and the occasional inexplicable whiff of dung coming up out of a roadside patch of heat, and what I first heard as silence turned out to be an air of natural sounds, winds and breezes, startled whirrs, slitherings through brush, pipey yelps, bugbuzz, clops, kerplunks, and croaks, none of which seemed to have any visible origin. So that it occurred to me as I made more of these excursions how you hear the life and smell it before you learn to see it, as if sight is the clumsiest of perceptions in the natural world. There was a lot to learn from the mysteriously unfolding landscape, it offered no intervening comfort between unadorned earth and a large and potent sky, so the last thing I would have expected of it was that it would suffer the same ordinary rat shames of tenements and slums. But I had by now taken to venturing off the paved roads and down this or that dirt lane and one day I was kicking along a wide rocky path when I heard an uncountrylike sound with an alarming breadth to it, and as I walked it became identifiable as a continuous rumble, like a motorized army, and I came over a rise to see a cloud of earthen dust rising from the distant fields and then saw in front of me, parked by the roadside, the black cars and trucks of the country poor, what must have been a good part of the population of Onondaga was walking out across the land in the plumes of dust made by a battery of tractors and harvest machines and trucks taking up acres and acres of potato plants, the machines pouring the potatoes down these moving belts into the truck beds, and the people following, bending down to cull the potatoes missed by the machines and putting them in burlap sacks they dragged along behind them, some even hurrying on all fours through the furrows in the urgency of dest.i.tution, men women and children, one or two of whom I recognized from Sunday school at the Church of the Holy Spirit.

And now the scope of Mr. Schultz's strategy became apparent to me. I had wondered how anyone could be fooled, because what he was doing was so obvious, but he wasn't trying to fool anybody, he didn't have to, it didn't matter that these people knew he was a big-time New York gangster, n.o.body here had any love for New York anyway and what he did down there was his business if up here he showed his good faith, it didn't even matter that they knew why he was doing what he was doing as long as he did it on a scale equal to his reputation. Of course he was obvious, but that's what you had to be when the fix was in with the ma.s.ses, everything had to be done large, like skywriting, so that it could be seen for miles around.

He said at dinner in the hotel one night, "You know, Otto, I was paying the Chairman of the Board as much a week as all this is costing. There's no middleman up here to jack up the price on you," he said enjoying the thought. "Am I right, Otto? We're dealing direct, eggs fresh from the farm." He laughed, everything seemed to be going off in Onondaga just as he hoped it would.

But I could tell Abbadabba Berman was feeling less sanguine. "Chairman of the Board" was the code name for Mr. Hines, the Tammany man. Until the Feds had messed things up Mr. Hines got cops who were too smart for their own good a.s.signed to Staten Island and magistrates who didn't understand their job retired from the bench and, for icing on the cake, bought the election of the gentlest and most peaceable district attorney in the history of the City of New York. It had been a wonderful way to do business. Here, the reality was that they were trying to extricate themselves from a grave situation. Also, the gang was out of its element, they lacked experience in legitimacy and could not be counted upon always to do what was right. And the other thing was Miss Drew. Mr. Berman had never been consulted about Miss Drew. There was no denying she was cla.s.sing-up the act and thinking of things which her background had taught her, how to work charity, the forms it took, the dos and don'ts of it. And she seemed to be good at giving the Dutchman a little touch of style, so that it was harder for the people up here to think of him as without the shadow of a doubt a man of the rackets. But she was an X. In mathematics, Mr. Berman had told me, when you don't know what something is worth, not even if it is plus or minus, you call it X. Instead of a number you a.s.sign a letter. Mr. Berman had no great regard for letters. He was looking at her now as with a dead pan Miss Drew picked at her salad with her right hand and with her left out of sight under the table touched Mr. Schultz's privates which couldn't have been more apparent because Mr. Schultz started up from his seat and knocked over his wine and coughing into his napkin and turning red told her as he started to laugh that she was a crazy f.u.c.king broad.

Sitting at the far end of the dining room, in a corner by themselves, were Irving, Lulu, and Mickey the driver. They were not happy men. When Mr. Schultz cried out Lulu had not been looking in that direction and was so taken aback he rose to his feet and reached into his jacket staring around wildly before Irving put a hand on his arm. Miss Drew had split the gang, there was a hierarchy now, the four of us sat at one table each night and Lulu, Irving, and Mickey sat at another. Given the demands of life in Onondaga Mr. Schultz spent much of his time with Miss Drew and me but mostly Miss Drew, and I know I felt ill-used and muscled out so I could imagine how the men felt. Mr. Berman had to have understood all of this.

Of course once the New York press got wind of what Dutch Schultz was doing here, our situation would change rapidly, like a fever breaking, but I couldn't know that, everything seemed very weird and dizzying to me, as for instance that Miss Drew could be my mother and Mr. Schultz my father, a thought that came to me, no not even a thought worse than a thought, a feeling, when we attended a ma.s.s at the St. Barnabas Catholic Church one Sunday nice and early so I wouldn't miss Protestant Sunday school at the Church of the Holy Spirit. And he took off his hat and she pulled a white lace shawl over her head and we sat all solemn and shining in our rear pew listening to the organ, an instrument I hate and detest, the way it blurs the ears with intimidating chordblasts of righteousness, or worms inside the ear ca.n.a.l with little pipey slynesses of piety, and that father in silken robes swinging a smokepot up there under a poor painted plaster bleeding Christ on a golden cross, oh I tell you this was not my idea of the life of crime, but that there were things even worse than I knew, because afterward in this church at a table near the door Mr. Schultz lit a candle in a little gla.s.s for Bo Weinberg, saying what the h.e.l.l, and then on the sidewalk the father came after us, I hadn't thought priests on the pulpit in their colored silks saw who was in the audience, but they do, they see everything, and his name was Father Montaine, he spoke with an accent, he said he was hoppee to see us and shook my hand vigorously, and then he and Miss Lola Miss Drew spoke French, he was a French Canadian with a limited amount of wiry black hair which he combed sideways over his head so that he wouldn't look bald, which of course he did. I felt dumb, thick-tongued, I was getting fat eating pancake breakfasts on the expense account and ham steak and applesauce dinners, I wore my fake gla.s.ses and went calling on churches and combed my hair and kept clean and neat in outfits Miss Lola Miss Drew had found for me, and that was another thing, she had taken to ordering clothes in my size from Boston, I was becoming a project of hers, as if she really was responsible for me, it was weird, when she turned her intense gaze in my direction I saw no depth of a.s.signable character, she seemed incapable of distinguishing pretense from reality, or perhaps she was rich enough to think everything she pretended was true, but me, I didn't know what it was to flat-out run anymore, I felt I was not reliably myself, I was smiling too much and talking like a sissy and I was reduced to devious practices, doing things I would never have imagined myself doing in my Shadows jacket, like eavesdropping, listening in to conversations like some cop on a wiretap just to try to get some intelligence of what was going on.

For instance one night in my room I smelled cigar smoke and heard voices, so I went into the corridor and stood in the hall just outside the slightly open door of Mr. Berman's room that he had turned into an office and I peeked in. Mr. Schultz was in there in his bathrobe and slippers, it was very late and they were talking softly, if he'd caught me there was no telling what he would do but I didn't care, I was one of the gang now, I was running with them, I told myself what was the point of living on the same hotel floor with Dutch Schultz if I didn't take advantage of it. At least my senses were still sharp, and that was something, I stepped back out of sight and I listened.

"Arthur," Mr. Berman was saying, "you know these boys would go to the wall for you."

"They don't have to go to the wall. They don't have to do nothing but keep their eyes open tip their hats to the ladies and don't goose the chambermaid. Is that too much to ask? I'm paying them, ain't I? It's a G.o.dd.a.m.n paid vacation, so what are they complaining about."

"No one has said a word. But I'm telling you what I know. It's hard to explain. All these table-manners kinds of things are getting to their self-respect. There's a madhouse about twenty miles north of here. Maybe you should let them blow off steam once in a while."

"Are you out of your mind? All this work, what do you think happens they get into a G.o.dd.a.m.n bar fight over some wh.o.r.e? That's all we need, a run-in with the state troopers."

"Irving wouldn't let that happen."

"No, I'm sorry, we're talking about my future, Otto."

"That is correct."

There was silence for a few moments. Mr. Schultz said, "You mean Drew Preston."

"Until now I had not been introduced to the lady's full name."

"I'll tell you what, call c.o.o.ney, tell him to get hold of some stag films and a projector and he can drive them up."

"Arthur, how shall I say this. These are serious grown men, they are not deep thinkers but they can think and they can worry about their futures no less than you worry about yours."

I heard Mr. Schultz pacing. Then he stopped. "Jesus Christ," he said.

"Nevertheless," Mr. Berman said.

"I'm telling you, Otto, it doesn't even take money she's got more money than I'll ever have, this one is different, I'll grant you she's a bit spoiled, those kind always are, but when the time comes I'll slap her around a little and that is all it will take, I promise you."

"They remember Bo."

"What does that mean? I remember too, I am upset too, I am more upset than anyone. Because I don't go around talking about it?"

"Just don't fall in love, Arthur," Mr. Berman said.

I went very quietly back to my room and got into bed. Drew Preston was in fact very beautiful, slender and with a clearly unconscious loveliness of movement when she was thoughtless of herself as she would be when we went out into the countryside, like the drawn young women in the children's books in the Diamond Home broken-down library of books no newer than from the previous century, kind and in communication with the little animals of the forest, I mean you'd see that on her exquisite face in moments of her reflection when she forgot where she was and who she was with, and that raised generous mouth curved back like the prow of a boat, and the clear large green eyes that could be so rude with intense curiosity or wickedly impertinent lowered under a profound modesty of lashes. All of us were subject to her even the philosophical Mr. Berman, a man older than the rest of us and with a physical impairment that he would have long since learned to live with and forgotten except in the presence of such fine-boned beauty. But all of this made her very dangerous, she was unstable, she took on the coloration of the moment, slipping into the role suggested to her by her surroundings. And as I thought about this I thought too that we were all of us very lax with our names, when the pastor had asked my name to enroll me in Sunday school I gave it as Billy Bathgate and watched him write it that way in the book, hardly realizing at the time I was baptizing myself into the gang because then I had an extra name too to use when I felt like it, like Arthur Flegenheimer could change himself into Dutch Schultz and Otto Berman was in some circles Abbadabba, so insofar as names went they could be like license plates you could switch on cars, not welded into their construction but only tagged on for the temporary purposes of identification. And then who I thought was Miss Lola on the tugboat and then Miss Drew in the hotel was now Mrs. Preston in Onondaga, so she was one up on everyone, although I had to admit I had probably gotten the wrong impression when I took her back to the Savoy-Plaza and the lobby clerk had greeted her as Miss Drew not necessarily because that was her maiden name, although for all I know in that walk of life the married women keep their maiden names, but because as an older man in professional service he might have known her since her childhood and though she was now too grown-up to be called simply by her first name, she was too fondly known for too long a time to be called by her last. Perhaps it wasn't necessary to get anything straight, not even monickers, maybe that was my trouble that I needed to know things definitely and expected them not to change. I myself was changing, look where I was, look what I was doing, every morning I put on gla.s.ses that magnified nothing and every night I took them off at bedtime like someone who couldn't do without them except to sleep. I was apprenticed to a gangster and so was being educated in Bible studies. I was a street kid from the Bronx living in the country like Little Lord Fauntleroy. None of these things made sense except as I was contingent to a situation. And when the situation changed, would I change with it? Yes, the answer was yes. And that gave me the idea that maybe all identification is temporary because you went through a life of changing situations. I found this a very satisfying idea to consider. I decided it was my license-plate theory of identification. As a theory it would apply to everyone, mad or sane, not just me. And now that I had it I found myself less worried about Lola Miss Drew Mrs. Preston than Mr. Otto Abbadabba Berman appeared to be. I had a new bathrobe, maybe I should put it on and after Mr. Arthur Flegenheimer Schultz went back to bed I would go knock on the Abbadabba's door and tell him what X X meant. All I had to remember was what had gotten me to this point in the first place, the innermost resolve of my secret endowment. That must never change. meant. All I had to remember was what had gotten me to this point in the first place, the innermost resolve of my secret endowment. That must never change.

TEN.

I slept to an unaccustomed late hour, which I realized at once when I woke and saw the room filled with light and the white curtains on the windows like movie screens with the picture about to start. The chambermaid was running a vacuum cleaner in the corridor and I heard a chain-drive truck coming around the back of the hotel to make a delivery. I got out of bed and felt very heavy in the limbs, but I did my ablutions and dressed, and inside of ten minutes I was on my way to breakfast. When I got back to the hotel Abbadabba Berman was out front with the Buick Roadmaster at the curb, he was waiting for me. "Hey kid," he said, "come on we'll go for a ride." slept to an unaccustomed late hour, which I realized at once when I woke and saw the room filled with light and the white curtains on the windows like movie screens with the picture about to start. The chambermaid was running a vacuum cleaner in the corridor and I heard a chain-drive truck coming around the back of the hotel to make a delivery. I got out of bed and felt very heavy in the limbs, but I did my ablutions and dressed, and inside of ten minutes I was on my way to breakfast. When I got back to the hotel Abbadabba Berman was out front with the Buick Roadmaster at the curb, he was waiting for me. "Hey kid," he said, "come on we'll go for a ride."

I got in the back and found the only available seat was in the middle, between Irving and Lulu Rosenkrantz. It was not a comfortable place to be, after Mr. Berman got in the front and Mickey started the engine, Lulu leaned forward and I could feel the tension in him as he said, "Why does this little s.h.i.t have to go with us?" Mr. Berman didn't bother to answer but looked straight ahead and Lulu banged back into the seat beside me, giving me a murderous look but clearly talking to everyone else as he said, "I'm fed up with all this c.r.a.p, I don't give a pig's f.u.c.k for any of this."

Mr. Berman knew that, he understood, he did not have to be told. We drove past the county courthouse and as we did an Onondaga police car backed away from the curb and swung out behind us. I glanced back to make sure and was about to say something when my instinct told me not to. Mickey's pale blue eyes appeared regularly in the rearview mirror. Mr. Berman's shoulders barely rose above the front seat, his panama hat was horizontally forward of where it should have been because of his humpback, but to me this was the deportment of canniness and wisdom, I knew somehow the police car behind us was something else he knew and didn't have to be told.

Mickey drove across the rattly boards of the Onondaga bridge and out into the country. Everything looked baked and bleached in the high noon and it was hot in the car. After ten or fifteen minutes, he turned off the paved road into a farmyard and nudged through a protesting squawking flutter of chickens and past a gamboling goat or two and around a barn and a silo and then picked up speed down a long b.u.mpy dirt road, with rocks making a popping against the tires and a big plume of dust billowing out behind us. He pulled up in front of a hut fenced in with chain link. A moment later I heard the brakes of the police car and a slamming door, and a policeman walked past us and unlocked the fence gate with its sign that said KEEP OUT KEEP OUT and swung it open and we drove in. and swung it open and we drove in.

What I'd thought was a hut was in fact a long barracks sort of structure where the Onondaga police took their pistol practice, the floor was dirt and at the far end the wall was earth, a big pile of it having been shoveled up into a sort of hill or berm, and there were overhead wires attached to pulleys at either end of the building like clotheslines. The cop pulled some paper targets out of a bin and clipped them to the lines and ran them to the berm and then he sat by the door leaning his chair back on two legs and rolling himself a cigarette, and Lulu Rosenkrantz stepped up to the railing without ceremony, unpacked his forty-five and began blasting away. I felt as if my head had burst, I looked around and saw that everyone else was wearing leather earm.u.f.fs, and only then noticed a clump of them on a table and quickly availed myself of them, clutching my hands over them for good measure while crazy Lulu shot that target into smithereens and left a smell of burning powder in the air and the echo of high-caliber concussions that seemed to press the sides of the building outward and suck them back in.

Lulu hauled the target back and didn't bother to study it but pulled it off and clipped on a new one and yanked it back down to the end and proceeded to load his pistol hurriedly, even dropping cartridges in his haste, he was so eager to go at it again, and again he shot off his rounds one after another like he was in an argument and jabbing his pointed finger for emphasis, so that a continuous roar filled the shed, it was all too much for me, I went out the door and stood in the sun leaning against the car fender and listened to my head ringing, it rang in several different notes simultaneously, like the horn of Mr. Schultz's Packard.

The firing stopped for a few minutes and when it began again I heard the discreet shots of careful aim, a shot and a pause and another shot. After this had gone on for a while Mr. Berman came outside holding up two of the white target sheets and he came over and laid them out side by side on the hood of the Buick.

The targets were printed in black ink in the shape of a man's head and torso, and one of them was peppered with holes both inside and outside the target area with the biggest a kind of jagged sh.e.l.l hole in the middle of the chest, so that I could see the sun reflected in the car hood underneath. The other target had small precise holes arranged almost like a design, one in the middle of the forehead, one where each eye would be, one in each shoulder, one in the middle of the chest and two in the stomach region just above the waistline. None of the shots had missed the target area.

"Who is the better shooter?" Mr. Berman asked me.

I replied without hesitation, pointing to the second target with its unerring carefully placed holes: "Irving."

"You know that's Irving?"

"He does everything this way, very neat, and with nothing wasted."

"Irving has never killed a man," Mr. Berman said.

"I wouldn't like to have to kill a man," I said, "but if I did I would want to know how like that," I said, pointing to Irving's target.

Mr. Berman leaned back against the fender and shook an Old Gold out of his pack and put it in his mouth. He shook out another one and offered it to me and I took it and he gave me his matchbook and I lit both cigarettes.

"If you were in a tight situation you would want Lulu standing up for you and emptying his barrel at everything in sight," he said. "You would know that in such a circ.u.mstance it is all decided in a matter of seconds." He flipped out his hand with one finger pointing, then flipped it again with two fingers pointing, and so on, till the whole claw was extended: "Boom boom boom boom boom, it's over," he said. "Like that. You couldn't dial a phone number in that time. You couldn't pick up your change from the Automat."

I felt chastened, but stubborn in my opinion too. I looked at the ground at my feet. He said, "We are not speaking of ladies' embroidery, kid. It don't have to be neat."

We stood there and he didn't say anything for a while. It was hot. I saw way up a single bird circling, way up high in the whiteness of this hot sunless day, it dipped around like a model glider, and it had a red or rust tone to it, lazing about up there drifting one way and then another. I listened to the pop pop pop pop of the pistol fire. of the pistol fire.

"Of course," Mr. Berman said, "the times change and looking at you I see what's in the cards, you're the upcoming generation and it's possible what is required of you will be different, you would need different skills. It is possible everything will be smooth and streamlined, people will work things out quietly, with not so much fire in the streets. We will need fewer Lulus. And if that comes to pa.s.s you may not ever have to kill no one."

I glanced at him and he gave me a little smile with his V-shaped mouth. "You think that's possible?" he said.

"I don't know. From what I can see it don't seem too likely."

"At a certain point everyone looks at the books. The numbers don't lie. They read the numbers, they see what only makes sense. It's like numbers are language, like all the letters in the language are turned into numbers, and so it's something that everyone understands the same way. You lose the sounds of the letters and whether they click or pop or touch the palate, or go ooh or aah, and anything that can be misread or con you with its music or the pictures it puts in your mind, all of that is gone, along with the accent, and you have a new understanding entirely, a language of numbers, and everything becomes as clear to everyone as the writing on the wall. So as I say there comes a certain time for the reading of the numbers. Do you see what I'm getting at?"

"Cooperation," I said.

"Exactly. What happened in the railroad business is a perfect example, you look at the railroads, they used to be a hundred railroad companies cutting each other's throats. Now how many are there? One to each section of the country. And on top of that they got a trade a.s.sociation to smooth their way in Washington. Everything nice and quiet, everything streamlined."

I inhaled the cigarette smoke and there was an undeniable opening-out of excitement through my chest and into my throat like the looming of my own power. What I was hearing was prophecy but of an inevitable event or of a planned betrayal I wasn't sure. And why did it matter as long as I knew that I was valued?

"But anyway, whatever is going to happen you must learn the basics," Mr. Berman said. "Whatever happens you have to know how to handle yourself. I already told Irving he should show you. As soon as they're through you'll take your turn."

I said, "What, you mean shoot?"

He was holding out in his palm the Automatic I had bought from Arnold Garbage. It was all cleaned and oiled, not a speck of rust, and when I took it I saw the cartridge clip was locked into place and I knew from the heft it was loaded.

"If you're going to carry it, carry it," Mr. Berman said. "If not, put it somewhere else than the bureau drawer under the underwear. You're a smart kid but like all kids you do dumb things."

I will never forget how it felt to hold a loaded gun for the first time and lift it and fire it, the scare of its animate kick up the bone of your arm, you are empowered there is no question about it, it is an invest.i.ture, like knighthood, and even though you didn't invent it or design it or tool it the credit is yours because it is in your hand, you don't even have to know how it works, the credit is all yours, with the slightest squeeze of your finger a hole appears in a piece of paper sixty feet away, and how can you not be impressed with yourself, how can you not love this coiled and sprung causation, I was awed, I was thrilled, the thing is guns come alive when you fire them, they move, I hadn't realized that. I tried to remember my instruction, I tried to breathe properly and plant myself in the sidearm stance and sight down my arm, but it took all that day and in fact the rest of the week of daily practice and a lot of sprays of earthclots brittle as crockery before I brought it around and turned that piece into the familiar of my own hand's warmth and got it to hit where I looked, and my natural athletic genius of coordination, the spring of my juggler's arm and the strength of my legs and my keen eyesight a.s.serted themselves to their natural levels of achievement and I was. .h.i.tting the target to kill whoever it was with every little pressure of my index finger. In a few short afternoons I could take aim and place the shot in the center of the forehead, either eye, the shoulders, the heart, or the belly, as I chose, Irving would pull the target back and take it down and put it down measuredly on the table over the previous target and the holes would match up. He never praised me but never did he seem to get bored with instructing me. Lulu didn't deign to watch. He didn't know my plan, which was to have Irving's techniques of accuracy so governed by my skills that I could lose the form, drop my arm, snap point like Lulu in the punishment of his blasting rage, and make the same holes in the same places. I also knew what he would say if I did this, that shooting at paper targets didn't mean s.h.i.t, let me go out on a job with someone rising from his chair in the restaurant and people's guns coming round in my direction looking big as field eighty-eights, looking in their barrels as wide and deep as a big bertha on a railroad flatbed, let me see what I could do then.

Oddly enough, I detected this same att.i.tude in the cop who came every day to open the gate and sit back on the two rear legs of his tilted chair and roll his cigarettes, it was only after my second day shooting I realized he was the chief, he had this braid on his cap none of the others in town had, not even the sergeants, and the arms in his short-sleeved shirt were an older man's arms of former muscle, and his abdomen slumped, I had thought a police chief would have something better to do than personally unlock the gate of the firing range for the city folks who'd paid him off and hang around to enjoy the show, but in Onondaga he had all the time in the world and it had nothing to do with the responsibilities of his office, he was watching a boy, and even as I fired my clips, I thought of the chief behind me with the slight smile on his lips, another man imbedded in his inst.i.tutional job out in the country, like Father Montaine, with a very low visibility in the world but quite comfortable even so and satisfied with the rewards of his life, the smoke from his s.h.a.g cigarette keeping me in mind of his presence like some farmer's on his porch sitting for his amus.e.m.e.nt to watch the pa.s.sing parade.

But for the first time since coming to Onondaga County I felt I was doing proper work, those few days of squeezing off rounds, I could hardly wait to get out there, and in the evenings I came to dinner hungry, with my ears still ringing and memorial pungencies of burned gunpowder sputtering in my brain. Clearly they were bringing me along, and I could reflect how organized everything really was in the apparent chaos of Mr. Schultz's life, how patiently they were dealing with everything, from the present exigencies of the law to the antic.i.p.ated needs of the future, they were managing their business interests from a distance, establishing a presence in this county seat of the north country, adjudicating their own internal problems in their own way, and also he had brought along someone pretty for the ride. It was a kind of juggling, wasn't it, keeping everything in the air. I really liked pistol-shooting, I thought I was probably the youngest expert marksman in the history of the rackets, I'm not sure I went so far as to swagger, but at night in bed I thought of neighborhood louts chasing me down Washington Avenue, how if that happened now I would stop in my tracks and turn with my gun in my hand and my arm pointed and watch them skid, brake, and tumble all over themselves even crawling under cars to get out of my sights, and the picture of that made me smile in the dark.

But nothing else I could think of doing with that gun was anything to smile about.

I should say here that there were things going on behind the life I am describing, business things that I wasn't directly involved in. Mr. Schultz was still collecting on policy, he was still selling beer and running the window washers' and the waiters' unions, once or twice he disappeared for a day or two and went down to New York but by and large he ran things long-distance, which couldn't have been a terribly comfortable way to do business if you happened to be by nature suspicious as he was and distrustful of all but your closest a.s.sociates, and of them too when they were not where you could keep your eye on them. A lot of time I could hear him screaming on Mr. Berman's special phone, the walls were too thick for the words to be heard but the pitch and timbre and intonation came through clearly and like the man who woke up when the train didn't go past his window I would have been startled if one day pa.s.sed not carrying his raised voice.

Mickey was gone a lot making the long drive to New York and back in a night and a day, and sometimes other men in other cars appeared whom everyone seemed to know but me, they would take their dinner with Irving and Lulu at the other table, I would say I saw two or three new faces a week. From all of this I began to appreciate the size of the operation, that the weekly payroll alone must be considerable, and from my vantage point Mr. Schultz would have to be now holding his own after the losses he had suffered as a lammister. It was difficult to judge these things because he portrayed himself so consistently as someone wronged, or double-crossed, or taken for a chump. Mr. Berman pored over the books constantly, and sometimes Mr. Schultz joined him, they really put in the time, usually late at night, and on one occasion I pa.s.sed the open door of Mr. Berman's office and saw there for the first time a safe, and some deflated canvas mail bags lying on the floor beside it, and it came to me that all the money was ending up right here across the hall from me, a reality that I found unsettling. Apart from the token sums he had deposited that day for political purposes, Mr. Schultz did not keep a bank account, because bank records could be subpoenaed and a.s.sets confiscated and tax cases made against him, it was a simple precaution, the case the Feds had now was based on adding-machine slips and policy records taken in a raid on the 149th Street office, which was bad enough. So it was essential accounting practice that everything was done in cash, cash for the payouts, cash for the payoffs, cash for the payroll, it was a cash business and the profits to Mr. Schultz were in pure cash and I dreamed one night of a great tide of cash coming in and going out and what was left on the beach Mr. Schultz ran along and scooped up in packets, which he stuffed into a burlap bag like potatoes, knowing it was a dream as I dreamed it because it put the country at the seash.o.r.e but realizing in the dream, which is to say reading it for the truth of the matter, that he had been doing this for some time and he had to have acc.u.mulated many many burlap bags of culled cash, or cold cash, and then it turned into a gold cache, but I didn't know in the dream where it was hidden, any more than I knew when I awakened.

Around this time, Mr. Schultz's lawyer, Dixie Davis, whom I had seen that time in the numbers office, came up from New York and arrived at the Hotel Onondaga in a Nash sedan driven by a member of the gang I didn't know. Dixie Davis was my model for a good dresser, I had gotten my wing-tip shoes from seeing his and now I noticed his country summer shoes, which had a kind of mesh on top, they were brown with this cream-colored mesh going from the laces to the tip and I was not crazy about them although they were probably cool on the feet. He was wearing a double-breasted very light tan suit, which I liked, and a striped tie of cotton colored pale shades of blue and gray and pink, which I thought was smart, but best of all was the straw skimmer on his head, which he put on as he emerged in a crouch from the car. I happened to have been coming downstairs and so I saw Mr. Berman, himself no slouch at color combinations, greet him just outside the revolving door. Dixie Davis had his briefcase with him and it looked fat with the mysterious problems of legal life. He was somehow different from what I remembered, perhaps in antic.i.p.ation of meeting Mr. Schultz he seemed to lose his self-a.s.surance the moment he pushed into the lobby, he took off his straw hat and looked around somewhat nervously and held his briefcase in both arms, and though he was smiling and being jolly I saw that he was city pale, not handsome as I remembered under that pompadour haircomb, but somewhat toothy, and unctuous in his deportment, he had one of those smiles that went down at the corners of his mouth, what we in the Bronx called a s.h.i.t-eating smile, and it was on his face as he pa.s.sed with Mr. Berman into the elevator.

Mr. Schultz was going to be tied up for the afternoon so he told Drew Preston to put in the time acting like my governess. She and I had a conference standing outside the little Indian museum that they had in the red stone courthouse around the back down some bas.e.m.e.nt steps. "Look," she said, "it's just a few headdresses and spears and such and there's no one there anyway to see what a good governess I am. Let's go for a picnic instead, is that all right with you?"

I said anything was all right with me as long as it didn't involve education. I took her down the side street to where my secret tea shop lady made up such good things, and we bought chicken salad sandwiches and fruit and napoleons, and then she bought a bottle of wine at the liquor store, and we set out uphill through the east side of the town into the mountains. This was a longer hike than I expected, I had done most of my exploring north and west into the farmlands, but hills always look closer than they are, and we were well beyond the end of the paved streets and still going up in wide spirals on a dirt road with the big hill behind the Onondaga Hotel looking just the way it did from my window, close enough to touch but just as far away, even when I turned around and looked down at the roofs of the city and saw what progress we had made.

She strode out ahead of me, which ordinarily would have brought out my compet.i.tive spirit, except I enjoyed watching the flex of the muscles in her long white calves. The minute we were out of the town limits, she had unwrapped and removed her governess's skirt and flung it over her shoulder, which stopped my heart beating for a moment, but she had a pair of walking shorts underneath, the hippy kind of shorts girls wear, and she was walking with a very attractive leggy stride, a smart practiced walk, head down, her free arm swinging, each b.u.t.tock of her shorts rising and falling in a way that very quickly became reliably familiar to me, she was making good time uphill, her long legs her little feet pointing in their low-heeled shoes and white anklets, and then the road leveled and we were out of the sun into the shade of pines, and here the road petered out into a path and we struck off into woods, an entirely new world, very soft underfoot with a thick cushion of dried brown pine needles, and dry twigs cracking in the stillness, a brownish world with the sun breaking up high above us in the high-topped evergreens so that only speckles of it or small patches managed to reach the forest floor. I had never been in woods of such extent before, I mean there were dirt lots in the Bronx with weeds growing like trees all twisted and jungly but there wasn't enough extension of them to get lost in them, not even the wilder parts of the Bronx Zoo gave me the sense I had now, of being inside something, as in a cavern or a cave, I had not realized that about forests that you would be walking down at the bottom of them.

Drew Preston seemed to know where she was going, she found what she said were old logging trails, so I followed her trustfully, and we pa.s.sed into small sun meadows that I thought might do for a picnic but still she didn't stop but kept going in a generally uphill direction, and then I knew we were really in the hills some miles from the town because I heard the sound of water, and we came to the Onondaga River, which here was shallow and not much wider than a brook so that you could walk across it on the rocks imbedded in it, which we did, and I thought then she would want to stop but she kept going away from the river steeply uphill in a dark woods and I was thinking of beginning to complain, the socks in my new sneakers rubbing up blisters and the gnats itching my bare legs, for I was in my new Little Lord Fauntleroy summer shorts of linen and my short-sleeved polo shirt of blue-and-white stripes that she had chosen for me, but we came to a large flat natural park of brown woods, and here the sound of water became louder, and she was some yards ahead of me standing still now finally and silhouetted in a corona of dazzling light, and when I came up to her I saw we were at the edge of a great sunlit gorge of falling water, falling so thick it was white and thunderous breaking on tumblings of boulders all the way down. This was where she chose to have the picnic, seated with our legs hanging over the root-tangled and mossy banks into thin air, as if she had known all along this place was here and exactly where to find it.

We unwrapped our sandwiches from the wax paper, and laid the picnic out behind us on her skirt, which she had spread on the ground, she unscrewed the cap from the bottle of New York State red wine and had the tact or carelessness to a.s.sume I would naturally take my turn drinking from the bottle as she did, and so I did, but only after removing my gla.s.ses, and we sat in silence eating and drinking and staring into this very amazingly beautiful roaring gorge of washed white boulders streaming with sun. At the very bottom there hovered a perpetually shimmering rainbow as if not water but light was pouring and shattering into its colors. This had to be the most secret of places. I had the feeling that if we just stayed here we would be free, Mr. Schultz would never find us because he couldn't imagine such a place existed. What new a.s.sumption was I making now in this romantic setting? What could I have been about to declare when I turned to her only to realize this was not a shared silence between us? She sat with her shoulders rounded in some clearly deepening meditative privacy and forgot me and forgot to eat and, holding the bottle in both hands between her knees, forgot to give me any more swigs of wine. The advantage to me in this was that I could stare at her without attracting her attention and first I looked at her thighs, you know the way thighs broaden in the sitting position especially when they are not overly muscular, and in this unsparing sun they were soft and very milk-white girl's thighs with the thinnest bluest veins of such tracing delicacy that it was with some shock I realized she was younger than I had taken her to be, I didn't know her age but the company she had kept and the fact that she was married had made me think of her as an older woman, it had never occurred to me she might be as precocious in her way as I was in mine, she was a girl, clearly older than I but still a girl, maybe twenty, maybe twenty-one, this Mrs. Preston with the gold band on her finger. You could see that just looking at her skin in the sun. Yet she lived a life so beyond mine in practiced knowledge that I was a child beside her. I don't mean just her free access as a great beauty to the most advanced realms of power and depravity, she had chosen this life for herself when, perhaps for her same reasons of staring meditation, she might have chosen life in a convent, say, or to be an actress on the stage. I mean rather how she knew this place would be here. How familiar woods were to her. She knew about horses. I remembered her invert husband, Harvey, had mumbled something about a regatta. So she probably knew about sailing and oceans too, and beaches to swim from with no crowds on them and skiing in the European mountains of the Alps and in fact all the pleasures of the planet, all the free rides of the planet that you could have if you knew where they were and had the training to take them. This was what wealth was, the practiced knowledge of these things so you could appropriate them for yourself. So looking at her now I had revelation of the great expanse of my ambitions, I felt the first acute pain of this same knowledge, which was an appreciative inkling of how much I had so far missed and my mother had missed and would forever miss and how much the little dark-eyed Becky was doomed to miss if I didn't love her and take her with me through all the chain-link fences I had to get through.

I now found myself painfully conscious of Drew Preston, I was impatient of the solitude she made for herself, it seemed to me a slight. I found myself waiting upon her, waiting for her attention, which I wanted very badly but would not abase myself to demand. I was at this point up to her profile. The heat of the hike had matted her hair off her forehead and I saw the whole line of it, a bone-white curve smooth as sculpture. The sun's rays coming up off the boulders allowed me to see through the transparency of her eye to the green oval iris with its golden lights which blurred into radiance, and the whole orb seemed to magnify and I realized she was crying. She cried silently, staring through her tears, and she licked the tears at the corner of her mouth. I turned away as you do in intimate and uninvited witness of a terrible emotion. And only then did I hear her sniff and drink it in, like a normal sniveling human being, and she asked me in a choked voice to tell her how Bo Weinberg died.